13706	----	Proofreading Team. SOCIALISM AND AMERICAN IDEALS BY WILLIAM STARR MYERS, Ph.D. PROFESSOR OF POLITICS, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON LONDON HUMPHREY MILFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1919 1919, by PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS Published February, 1919 Printed in the United States of America TO THE MEMORY OF SAMUEL SELDEN LAMB IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF A MUTUAL PROMISE MADE AT "DEAR OLD CHAPEL HILL" PREFACE The following essays originally appeared in the form of articles contributed at various times to the (daily) New York _Journal of Commerce and Commercial Bulletin_. Numerous requests have been received for a reprinting of them in more permanent form, and this little volume is the result. I am deeply indebted to my friend Mr. John W. Dodsworth, of the _Journal of Commerce_, for his kind and generous permission to reprint these articles. Since numerous changes and modifications from the original form have been made the responsibility for these statements and the sentiments expressed rests entirely upon me. I hope it is not necessary for me to say that this is not intended as an exhaustive study of the more or less widespread movement to advance paternalism in Government. My object is to lay before the people, in order that they may carefully consider them, the reasons for thinking that Socialism is in theory and practice absolutely opposed and contrary to the principles of Americanism, of democracy, and even of the Christian-Jewish religion itself. WM. STARR MYERS. Princeton, N.J. November 28, 1918. CONTENTS Introduction--Materialism and Socialism 3 I. The Conflict with the Idea of Equality of Opportunity 13 II. Why Socialism Appeals to Our Foreign-Born Population 23 III. Its Conflict with the Basic Principles of Democracy and Religion 34 IV. Some Instances of its Practical Failure 54 V. The True Antidote Found in Co-operative Effort 74 INTRODUCTION MATERIALISM AND SOCIALISM It was about a decade ago that Professor E.R.A. Seligman of Columbia University published his valuable work on the "Economic Interpretation of History," which gave a great impetus to the study, by historians, of the economic influences upon political and social development. Professor Seligman showed conclusively that one of the most potent forces in the growth of civilization has been man's reaction upon his material environment. Since that time the pendulum has swung so far in this direction that many students of history and economics would seem to think that all of life can be summed up in terms of materialism, that environment after all is the only important element in the advance of society, and that mankind is a rather negligible quantity. This is just as great a mistake as the former practice of ignoring economic influence, and even so great an authority as Professor Seligman would seem to tend in that direction. On the other hand, Mr. George Louis Beer rightly claims that "the chief adherents of economic determinism are economists and Socialists, to whom the past is, for the most part, merely a mine for illustrative material. The latter, strangely enough, while explaining all past development by a theory that conceives man to be a mere self-regarding automaton, yet demand a reorganization of society that postulates a far less selfish average man than history has as yet evolved."[1] Most thoughtful people of to-day know that the political and economic elements were just as strong as the religious one in the Protestant Reformation in Germany, but that fact by no means would lessen the value of the gains for intellectual and religious freedom that were won by Martin Luther. Again, bad economic conditions had as much, or more, to do with the outbreak of the French Revolution as did political and philosophical unrest. Also taxation, trade and currency squabbles had more to do with causing an American Revolution than did the idealistic principles later enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. And there was a broad economic basis for the differences in crops, transportation and the organization of labor which expressed themselves in a sectionalism which finally assumed the political aspect that caused the Civil War. Yet the student who would forget the spiritual element in our life, who would overlook the fact that man is a human being and not a mere animal, will wander far astray into unreal bypaths of crass materialism. On the other hand, it would be hard to find an economic explanation for the emigration of the Pilgrim Fathers to Plymouth, for the Quaker agitation that supported John Woolman in his war upon slavery or for most of the Christian missionary enterprises of the present day. Also it would take a mental microscope to find the economic cause for the extermination of the Moriscos in Spain by Philip III. or the expulsion by Louis XIV. of the Huguenots from France. These two great crimes of history had important economic consequences, but the cause behind them was religious prejudice. Prof. James Franklin Jameson, of the Carnegie Institution at Washington, rightly has stressed a study of the religious denominations in the United States, of the Baptist, Methodist and other "circuit riders" of the old Middle West, as one of the most fruitful sources for a fuller knowledge and understanding of the history and development of the American nation. Neither George Whitefield, Peter Cartwright, nor Phillips Brooks of a later day, can be explained in terms of economic interpretation. This false and entirely materialistic conception of the development of society and civilization is a mistake not only of the learned, but of the pseudo-learned, of the men and women of more or less education whose mental development has not progressed beyond an appreciation of Bernard Shaw, Henrik Ibsen and H.G. Wells. Most of them are estimable people, but the difficulty is that they are so idealistic that, so to speak, they never have both feet upon the ground at the same time. This is especially true of our esteemed contemporaries, the Socialists. These cheerful servants of an idealistic mammon pride themselves upon completely ignoring human nature. A few years ago, at a London meeting of the "parlor Socialists" known as the Fabian Society which, by the way, was presided over by Bernard Shaw, an old man began to harangue the audience with the words, "Human nature being as it is--" At once his voice was drowned out by a chorus of jeers, cat-calls and laughter. He never made his address, for the audience was unwilling to hear anything about "human nature." No Socialists in general are willing to do so, for human nature, with the mental and spiritual sides of life, is just the element with which their fallacious creed cannot deal, and they know it. But the human element must enter into business and trade in the problems of direction, management, even in the form of competition itself, and cannot possibly be eradicated. It is amusing to note that these same Socialists are busily occupied with pointing out what they consider to be the failures of government, as well as of "business and capitalism." Yet they do not realize that they are thus condemning their own system, for if the governments of the world have failed to do the work at present laid upon them, how can they ever undertake the gigantic additional political and capitalistic burden that Socialism would impose? Thomas Jefferson, the patron saint of the party that President Wilson now leads, always expressed a fear of "too much government." It would appear that the present Administration and the Democratic members of Congress have wandered far from their old beliefs, and if recent legislation is the result of it, their Socialistic experiments have not been much of a success. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: _The English-Speaking Peoples_, p. 203.] SOCIALISM--IS IT AMERICAN? I ITS CONFLICT WITH THE IDEA OF EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY One of the main difficulties in discussing Socialism is to find a working definition; for this political or social movement is based upon a system of a priori reasoning which often is vague and lacking in deductions from practical experience. Socialism also is unreal in its assumptions and impractical in its conclusions, so that a person finds it almost impossible to give a definition that will include within its scope all the Socialistic vagaries and explain all the suppositions based upon nonexistent facts. Bearing this difficulty in mind, perhaps the following will serve as a working definition for the purposes of the present discussion. Socialism is the collective ownership (exerted through the government, or society politically organized) of the means of production and distribution of all forms of wealth. This means wealth not alone in mere terms of money but in the economic sense of everything that is of use for the support or enjoyment of mankind. Of course "production and distribution" means the manufacture and transportation of all forms of this economic wealth. Inevitably this system would imply the substitution of the judgment of the government, or of governmental officials, for individual judgment, and for individual emulation and competition in all forms of human endeavor. Dr. David Jayne Hill recently has remarked that "if the tendency to monopolize and direct for its own purposes all human energies in channels of its own [i.e., the government's] devising were unrestrained, we should eventually have an official art, an official science and an official literature that would be like iron shackles to the human mind."[2] The Socialist probably would object that this statement is extreme, but at least it is logical, and if Socialism be reasonable it must be logical, and it must be both reasonable and logical if it is to be popularly accepted. The above might be stated in another way by saying that Socialism means the substitution of governmental judgment for that of the individual and for individual ambition as well. This is one of the strongest arguments against Socialism. Individual ambition is not only justifiable but also an absolute necessity for the integrity and growth of the human mind. Like everything else, ambition may be wrongly used or directed. It only goes to prove that the greater the value of anything the greater is the wrong when it is abused and not rightly used. In fact, proper ambition is the desire for greater opportunity for service according to the dictates of individual conscience and it lies at the basis of all religion and morality. Without ambition the individual mind goes to seed, so to speak,--there is no further growth or progress. This desire for greater service is the thing that produces patriotism, that causes men and women to work at the expense of personal interest for Liberty Loans, the Red Cross, Y.M.C.A., etc. Professor Richard T. Ely well expresses the same thought by saying--"When we all come to make real genuine sacrifices for our country, sacrifices of which we are conscious, then we shall first begin to have the right kind of loyal love for our country. We shall never get that kind of love merely by pouring untold benefits upon the citizens."[3] Also, Edward Jenks, the brilliant British historian, says that--"A society which discourages individual competition, which only acts indirectly upon the bulk of its members, which refuses to recruit its ranks with new blood, contains within itself the seeds of decay."[4] The attempt by Socialism to substitute a governmental standard of happiness for individual desire and ambition is merely another attempt to legislate human mind and character. A government cannot make a man happy by law any more than it can make him moral or religious by the same means. All that law can do is to endeavor to place a man in such an environment that his moral or religious nature may be aroused and that his desire or ambition be encouraged. It was the inability to understand and realize this fact that caused the religious persecutions of past centuries when Catholics persecuted Protestants and Protestants persecuted Catholics, and both persecuted the Jews, and everybody thought that it was possible to legislate a man's belief and enforce it by the sanction of the law. Happiness, like religion, must have its impulse from within. Furthermore, it is along this identical line of reasoning that Socialism is essentially un-American. The primary object of the government of the United States, the whole theory upon which our nation was formed, is not to give happiness to the individual. The Fathers of our country were too wise to attempt any such ridiculous undertaking. The ideal or object of the United States is to give equality of opportunity for each individual to work out his or her own salvation in a political, a moral or an economic sense. In other words, to give equality of opportunity for each individual to work out or achieve his or her own happiness. That is the only possible way in which happiness can be gained. For this reason the American people believe in public schools and child labor laws and other forms of social, not Socialistic, legislation, in order to help less fortunate individuals to help themselves, and not to help them in spite of themselves. The former plan is in accordance with the needs of human nature and with American ideas and ideals; the latter is the essential basis of Socialism and inevitably pauperizes and atrophies human character. There is as much difference between social legislation and Socialism as there is between the common-sense advancement of the ideas of peace and the selfish or cowardly brand of treason that is known as pacifism. In both Socialism and pacifism the essential idea is that the individual should mentally "lie down" and "let George do it." In contrast with this, the common sense way to gain peace is actively to restrain wrong in order that right may triumph. The United States recently has been engaged in just this kind of an undertaking. Also, man is a social animal as well as an individual being, so social consciousness or social responsibility consists in the common responsibility of society to see that each individual gets a "square deal" in the form of equal opportunity for advancement by self effort. In fact, the American ideal is to restrain human initiative only to the extent that is necessary to give equality of opportunity to all, and that the government should act only on the principle of the greatest good of the greatest number. Hence Americans believe that Rousseau was right when he said that the individual gives up a small part of his personal liberty, or license, in order to receive back full civil liberty, which is much greater because it has a wider outlook and possibilities and is guaranteed through the support of society. Furthermore, they believe that real liberty is freedom of individual action within the law as the expressed will of the people. But everything depends upon the fact that the impulse to use this liberty must come from within, and not be commanded by a government from without. In the words of the Declaration of Independence, Americans believe "that all men are ... endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit [not the gift] of happiness." On this basis alone was this nation founded and has it prospered. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 2: _The Rebuilding of Europe_, p. 63.] [Footnote 3: _The World War and Leadership in a Democracy_, p. 111.] [Footnote 4: _Law and Politics in the Middle Ages_, p. 306.] II WHY IT APPEALS TO OUR FOREIGN-BORN POPULATION It is often remarked that a reading of the names of the members of the present Socialist party, or of those who advocate Socialism in the United States to-day, will disclose the fact that most of these names denote foreign or Continental European, as contrasted with American or British, origin. This can readily be understood when it is remembered that the governments of Continental Europe are theoretically on a different basis and of different origin from those of the United States and Great Britain or of those countries where the English Common Law prevails. Whether in democratic France, Italy, Belgium or Norway, or in autocratic Germany or Austria-Hungary, the government is considered as in a sense coming down from above. It is believed, and taught, that government exists by divine right and that it has per se its own position and rightful place of domination. That it exists for itself, and not as a means to an end. But in Great Britain, the United States, and also in the British self-governing colonies, as compared with this, the whole order of things is upside down, so to speak. We believe that all governments arise from the people, that they should derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that they are merely an instrumentality to help the people to help themselves--to protect them in their inherent, inborn right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Also the government should act upon the principle of the greatest good of the greatest number as a test when there is any conflict between individual and social rights. Of course it is now popularly understood that an autocracy like that of Germany until recently, was built up on the theory of the divine right of governments and of the princes who administered them. The constitutions of the German states and especially of the Empire of Germany, were the gift or gifts of the German princes to the people and not the expression of the will of the people, as in the United States, or of the people as represented in Parliament, as in Great Britain. Thus the King of Prussia, who was also Emperor of Germany, was God's representative on earth and responsible to God alone for the administration of his office. He, as well as the various princes in their respective states, were above all earthly law, were laws unto themselves, and they and their serving (or servile) officials were to be obeyed without question. Disobedience to the "princes'" laws was not only treasonable but sacrilegious as well. This fact goes far to explain the atrocities committed with the consent of German public opinion. William the Damned and his bureaucracy were believed to be above all moral or human law, and from the earthly standpoint were infallible and irresponsible. Their orders must be obeyed without question. As already stated, few people realize that while even the European democracies do not accept the bald theory of the divine right of kings but believe in the divine right of the people, yet somehow or other these divine rights come down to the people by the gift of the government, and are not inherent or inalienable, as our Declaration of Independence would say. This is well illustrated by the principle of the freedom of the press, which is usually considered one of the greater guarantees of individual liberty. An examination of the provisions of various continental constitutions shows that this freedom is given or guaranteed by the government or by these documents themselves. "The press shall be free," says the Constitution of Italy (Article 28). "No previous authorization shall be required in order that one may publish his thoughts or opinions through the press, except that every person shall be responsible according to law."--Cons. of The Netherlands (Art. 7). "There shall be liberty of the press."--Cons. of Norway (Art. 100). "Every third year the Riksdag (Parliament) ... shall ... appoint six persons of known intelligence and knowledge, who with the solicitor general as president shall watch over the liberty of the press ... If they decide that the [any] manuscript may be printed, both author and publisher shall be free from all responsibility, but the commissioners shall be responsible."--Cons. of Sweden (Art. 108). "The freedom of the press is guaranteed. Nevertheless, the cantons, by law, may enact measures necessary for the suppression of abuses.... The Confederation may also enact penalties for the suppression of press offenses as directed against it or its authorities."--Cons. of Switzerland (Art. 55). "The press is free; no censorship shall ever be established; no security shall be exacted of writers, publishers or printers. In case the writer is known and is a resident of Belgium, the publisher, printer, or distributor shall not be prosecuted."--Cons. of Belgium (Art. 18). But this same Constitution later on says quite pointedly (Art. 96, clause 2) when prescribing the administration of justice,--"In case of political offenses and offenses of the press closed doors shall be enforced only by a unanimous vote of the court." Also (in Art. 98) "The right of trial by jury shall be established in all criminal cases and for all political offenses of the press." A further reading of the provisions of these constitutions will show that the whole intention of the documents is to _grant_ various rights and privileges to the people. In contrast with these establishments of the freedom of the press by the constitutions and governments of the various European countries, the Constitution of the United States merely says in the First Amendment--"Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech or of the press." Stating this in other words, our Constitution merely protects an already existing, inalienable right. Its guarantee is in an entirely different sense from that of one of the above named European constitutions. In case of riot or disorder, the divinely constituted government of a country of Continental Europe need merely "suspend the constitution," usually by the method of executive decree, and it suspends the freedom of the press and all constitutional guarantees with it, as was done in Hamburg, Germany, recently. In the United States this would be impossible. Even though Germany or some other nation should invade this country and destroy the governments at Washington and Albany, let us say for extreme illustration, yet if any person were unjustly thrown into prison in any part of New York state and a judge of any duly constituted court happened to be nearby, he undoubtedly would issue a writ of habeas corpus and the person be brought into the court for substantiation of the charges in a legal manner according to the common law. It would not matter whether there were a government or not, the inalienable common law rights of an American citizen would continue to exist and the destruction of the government would only remove one of the means of protecting these rights and not destroy the rights themselves. In other words, the judge would merely act on the common law rights of the individual. Furthermore, in the United States no person, whether high or low, official or private citizen, is immune from the operation of the common law. All are finally subjected to it, and the temporary immunity of the President, a Governor, or any other official, only exists during the term of office for which that official has been elected. At the expiration of the term the obligations and penalties of the law immediately are again in operation. On the other hand, in the countries of Continental Europe the officials are not subject to the common law but to the _Droit Administratif_ or Administrative Law, which is an official law for the regulation or trial of officials. The average European would consider it almost an act of sacrilege to hale an official into court like any other private citizen. All the above goes to show why many of our foreign-born population look upon a government as "something from above." They are wont to be more subservient to it, or to look upon it as responsible for the welfare of its citizens. Therefore Socialism, which stands essentially for the dependence of the individual upon the State as well as for the governmental direction of the individual and the substitution of State for individual judgment, for this reason appeals to them, and it has made its greatest gains upon the Continent of Europe or among the foreign-born or descended citizens of the United States. The Socialists answer the charge that Socialism is not American by saying--"Neither is Christianity. It is a 'foreign importation.' Its founder was a 'foreigner,' and never set foot on American soil. Then there is the printing press. It isn't American, either, though somehow we manage to get along with it as well as the other 'foreign importations' mentioned." Of course this smart kind of argument gets nowhere. It is, in fact, intended to appeal to the half-baked type of mind which has only begun to think and has never progressed beyond the point of a consequent mental indigestion that would account for its Socialist nightmare. What the Socialists do know and are not honest enough to admit, is that this country was settled three centuries or more ago by a people who did not come hither to enjoy the fruits of other men's labor but who came here to carve out a new State in America literally by the sweat of their brows. Also they consciously founded it upon the basis of individual freedom and responsibility as proclaimed and enforced by the precepts of the Christian-Jewish religion and by the English Common Law. It is upon this foundation that they built their success. Upon this same basis their descendants and successors to-day weigh, measure and estimate that which is new in thought or invention whether "native" or "foreign-born." And they have weighed Socialism in this American balance and found it wanting. But they brought with them neither certain loathsome diseases nor Socialism. All of these are likewise the results of immorality--_moral_ and _political_--and of a type of decadent civilization still prevalent on the Continent of Europe and at that time threatening to gain a foothold even in England. It was this last-named threat from which the founders of the American nation were wise and energetic enough to escape, even though their escape meant going into the hardships of an unknown and almost uninhabited wilderness. Socialism is not only essentially un-American, but it is essentially undemocratic. A democracy means a government by public opinion, and this opinion is the result of the co-operative impulse or community feeling of the people of a free country--a people who are given the opportunity to think for themselves, and are not thought for by a divinely constituted government. As Thomas Jefferson maintained, liberty is not a privilege granted by a government, but government is a responsibility delegated to its officers by the people. "On this distinction hangs all the philosophy of democracy."[5] The people must decide questions for themselves and make their common will known through the representative organs of a government which is after all only the instrument intended to produce the best expression and administration of this public will. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 5: David Saville Muzzey, _Thomas Jefferson_, p. 311. "Generally speaking, one may say of the German soldier that he is normally good-natured and is not disposed to do injury to harmless people, so long as he finds no obstacles put in his prescribed way. But once disturbed, he becomes frightful, because he lacks any higher capacity of discrimination; because he merely does his duty and recognizes no such thing as individual conscience and, besides, when he is excited becomes at once blind and super-nervous." "The Germans are, indeed, a good-natured people, born to blind obedience and humble willingness to let others do their thinking for them." Wilhelm Mühlon, _The Vandal of Europe_, pages 172 and 251.] III ITS CONFLICT WITH THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF DEMOCRACY AND RELIGION In the course of a conversation during the past winter one of the members of the present city government of New York remarked that although he was not a Socialist, yet he failed to see how the election of Morris Hillquit on his un-American platform to be Mayor of New York would have had any result except as regards the national safety and the immediate influence upon our international relations. He added that the life of the city would have gone on just the same for a time at least; hence why the great fear of Socialism? What this man failed to see was that in fact the life of the city would go on for a time without change only on account of the impetus the former democratic government had given. That the policy of individual responsibility and judgment, which had always been the professed aim of American government in the past, had produced leadership and popular experience by the process of natural selection, and that this leadership would last only until the time that the deadening influence of Socialism had its true effect. Let us consider for a moment the result of Socialism as a permanent policy. It means the substitution, as already shown, of government or official judgment and initiative for that of the individual. The whole process would be one to deaden and atrophy the powers of the people in general, with the result that there would follow a leveling down to a plane of mediocrity rather than a leveling up according to individual capacities and ambitions, exercised through equality of opportunity. It should not be forgotten that the varying degrees of success in the different walks of life finally have caused so-called social differences. These differences result from the attempt on the part of mankind to meet "the inequality of men in their capacity for the work with which they are confronted in this life," said the New York _Journal of Commerce_, with great acuteness, in a recent editorial discussion of the phase of the question.[6] It continued by saying,-- "What we must strive for is intelligent understanding and sound reasoning on the question of rights, and a just application of principles for the common benefit. Everything should be done to develop and train intelligence and increase the capacity of the people for their various tasks and duties, and they should be stimulated by the rewards to which they are fairly entitled in the results; but that cannot be made to mean that they are all equal in contributing to results and entitled to equality in the returns. Nothing could be more inconsistent with a sound democracy than the distribution of the material results of productive activity applied to the resources of nature, regardless of the merits or just claims of those engaged in the work. To apply that so-called principle of equality of rights without regard to the part taken in producing results, would deaden the energies applied in achieving them, and greatly reduce the product. It would prevent material prosperity and defeat national progress." In a Socialistic State, inevitably there would be formed a bureaucracy of selfish office holders. Although, owing to the impetus of our previous free Democracy, the first Socialist officials might be men of ability who had gained their places through successful experience, yet a close corporation of officials would follow them and retain the exercise of power. The people gradually would sink to a level of servile conformity. We have a perfect illustration of this in the Germany of the past forty years. There is a good reason for the fact that Germany, in the hands of a selfish and conscienceless autocracy, made more successful use of practical Socialism than any other nation in history and even carried efficiency itself to a point of great success. Her close corporation of bureaucratic officials, playing upon the remains of feudal and aristocratic loyalty among the people that have survived the darkness of past centuries as nowhere else among civilized nations, successfully carried through Socialism in many practical ways, just as Morris Hillquit and his un-American followers probably would have succeeded in doing in New York for a short time. But the inevitable followed. The German people have been reduced to a very low level of political ability. The German is one of the poorest politicians in the world, as every student of political science knows. His lack of ability to run a government on constitutional principles has been found in the inane vaporings and factional maneuvering of the Reichstag, the supposedly "popular" House of the Parliament, which was merely a machine to register the will of the aristocratic autocracy. The individual citizen is the most servile and unthinking person in any civilized country of the world to-day. He has been trained to political incapacity. What has the success of German Socialism amounted to? We find that Germany, from the political standpoint, is nothing but an organized machine without soul. Professor Ely, in taking the Moral side of the matter into consideration, well says that "it may be added that truth, an attribute of the gentleman, is less valued in Germany than in English speaking countries. As long ago as 1874 Professor James Morgan Hart in his book _German Universities_ called attention to this weakness in the German character. A German mother will say to her child, 'O, you little liar,' and does not imply serious reprobation thereby, and Professor Hart said that if you called a German student a liar, he might take it calmly, but if you called him a blockhead, he would challenge you to fight a duel. All this has been amply exemplified during the present war. It was the German socialist Lassalle who said of the lie that it was one of the great European Powers! It was natural enough that he should have said it."[7] The public preparatory schools in Germany are so arranged that the pupils are trained to unthinking subservience to the labor policy and materialistic aims of a selfish, bureaucratic State. In fact, it is well to remember that this German illustration only proves that Socialism, instead of being democratic, is essentially undemocratic in its effects. It produces an autocracy of officials which is as unfair and selfish, because entirely materialistic, as any aristocracy of wealth or birth could be. Shrewd observers note the same tendency in the Commonwealth of Australia where the full fruition of its semi-Socialistic policy of recent years has been somewhat retarded by the individualistic influence of the English Common Law. When the Socialistic autocracy is once completely in power, with its professed policy of taking away human ambition and initiative, its position will be almost impregnable and become more and more secure as the average citizen becomes more and more servile, lazy and unambitious. Socialism is politically decadent and contains within itself the germ of self-destruction. During this process of self-destruction the people at large will offer a rich field for exploitation by the demagogue, the corrupt politician and the charlatan. Furthermore, Socialism is essentially unChristian. It also is opposed absolutely to the whole basis of the Jewish religion as well. The foundation of the Jewish-Christian religion, for they are essentially the same in basis, is the belief in the value of the individual soul in the sight of God, and the dependence upon its relation to something Divine. The impulse from within the human heart is the basis of all right living. Thus Christ taught the social responsibility of the individual for his neighbor. The appeal always was made to the individual and the responsibility was laid upon him. We read in the New Testament--"Remember the words of the Lord Jesus how he said, It is more blessed to give than to receive." (Acts, XX, 35.) Right giving, which results from an appreciation of the obligations of service, is an individualistic action; receiving, which means a benefit from the activity and initiative of someone else (and often irrespective of the real deserts of the recipient), is essentially Socialistic in tendency. The one causes a growth in individual character; the other tends to stunt or weaken it. St. Paul mentioned (1st Corinthians XIII, 3) as one of the greatest possible forms of service the bestowal of all one's goods to feed the poor. But he did not suggest as a better way that the individual should sit back, let the State take over his goods and attend to the feeding of the poor, and thus relieve him from responsibility. In fact, "love" itself, which is declared to be the greatest thing of all, is essentially an individual impulse and never could be called forth from the human heart, nor supplied to it either, by the fiat of a government. The same note runs through the Jewish Scriptures. At the beginning (Genesis, chap. IV), in the old story of Cain's murder of Abel, when Cain inquired of the Lord "Am I my brother's keeper?" the inference to be drawn most decidedly is that the Lord thought he was, and not the State, or the tribal government of that day, in his stead. Both the Christian and Jewish religions are essentially individualistic in appeal and social in responsibility, and so also is Democracy. May not the extreme brutality of the German soldier of to-day be the result not only of the ruthless command from the official higher up but also of the de-souling, materialistic influence of Socialism on the common people of Germany during the past twenty-five years? Is not the viciousness of Prussian militarism plus the demoralizing influence of Socialism a sufficient explanation? According to Mr. J. Dover Wilson, "the German nation, in fact, is suffering from some form of arrested development, and arrested development, as the criminologists tell us, is almost invariably accompanied by morbid psychology. That Germany at the present moment, and for some time past, has been the victim of a morbid state of mind, few impartial observers will deny. It has, however, not been so generally recognized that this disease--for it is nothing less--is due not to any national depravity but to constitutional and structural defects."[8] Many Socialists point to the housing, sanitary, insurance and other State activities of Germany as showing the care of the Government for the laboring man. My dogs are well fed, are kept clean, dry, healthy and amused, and are carefully looked after in every way. But they are still dogs. They have no soul or any right or power of self-determination. So recent events show beyond cavil that the German workingman, from the standpoint of the State and Government, was in reality a political dog. He existed only for the good of the divinely constituted State and its God-given princely proprietors, and as such was used and sacrificed for the imperial and national glory. The German laboring man was the most exploited, the most servile, the most unfairly treated worker on earth. He was given enough material comforts or even amusements (religious, theatrical, musical or otherwise) to keep him seemingly content, but politically he was not permitted to think--or economically either, when taken in the broad sense of the term. Therefore those who expect from the revolution or uprising against the Kaiser and his military henchmen the immediate establishment of a well-ordered and democratic republic, are reckoning without their host. People must be experienced in self-government before they can make a success of democracy as that term is understood in America, and experienced the German people are not. While the Socialists of the United States, "parlor" and otherwise, include in their number many sincere and thoughtful, as well as idealistic people, it is well to remember that a large part of them is composed of individuals who have nothing, and want to divide it all with everybody else. It is the old jealousy of the "have nots" for those who have, which usually means the "will nots" for those who have the ambition and will. Or if they are not of this kind, the best that can be said of them is that they are foreigners, who are in reality not Americans, who don't believe in democracy, but in autocracy, and probably don't even know what democracy means. Autocracy is the government of the many by and for the benefit of the selfish few. Real democracy is the government by and for the many, who express their will through their duly chosen representatives. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 6: Issue for November 12, 1918.] [Footnote 7: _Op. cit._ p. 172.] [Footnote 8: _The War and Democracy_, p. 58.] IV SOME INSTANCES OF ITS PRACTICAL FAILURE I have stated my conviction, and the reasons for it, that Socialism is essentially undemocratic and unChristian, as well as unAmerican. Yet after all it is in the practical realm of experience that it has proved to be most lacking and inefficient. To prove this, it is hardly necessary to point to the classic illustrations of the utter failure of Socialism when actually tried in France under the leadership of Louis Blanc and Albert during the days of the Second Republic in the year 1848, or again when tried under the form of the Commune in 1871. The horrors of the extreme form of Socialism known as Bolshevism, as seen in the Russia of 1918, are destined to implant a useful lesson, not soon to be forgotten, in the minds of intelligent people throughout the entire world. One of the best illustrations of the failure of a practical Socialistic State is that of the "Mayflower" settlement at Plymouth in 1620. In order to raise the money needed for the venture the Pilgrims borrowed seven thousand pounds from seventy London merchants. In order also to provide a species of sinking fund it was decided to accept the suggestion of the creditor merchants that the net earnings of the colonists should go into a common fund for the space of seven years and then should be divided among the shareholders. It should especially be remembered that the Pilgrims were a set of people small in number and as a consequence easy to govern; of a high type of industry and integrity; and that they were united by the strongest of all common and social interests,--that of deep religious conviction. Furthermore, the relative positions in life of the personnel of the entire Plymouth Colony showed a remarkable equality. Their method of living was primitive and most simple in form, without the usual complications of the life of even three hundred years ago, much less of that of today. And yet this communal or Socialistic system in Plymouth resulted in such a marked lack of interest among the inhabitants, the whole arrangement worked so badly, that the settlement verged on failure and destruction. The system virtually was abolished after only three years trial in the year 1623 and good results showed themselves immediately. "Individual effort returned with the prospect of individual gain." The cause of the failure is evident,--the system was opposed to the fundamental facts of human nature. But what is "human nature"? Let us take a definition from the Socialists themselves. "If the phrase means anything at all, it means man, with his loves and hates, his desire for pleasure and aversion to pain, his noble and ignoble traits, his interests, feelings, beliefs, prejudices, ignorance, knowledge, fears and hopes. All these motives, desires and emotions vary in each individual, some of them usually dominating over the rest, yet all more or less active. Some one or more of them may be cultivated by favorable environment or almost crushed by an unfavorable environment. A saint may be dragged down to hell by adverse conditions and a rake win eminence in the same environment. If the cultured educator ... was suddenly forced to earn his living in a vile mining center, his polish would soon wear off, and he would brood over a world that now strikes him as on the whole all right. If cast adrift at sea, within a week the wolf stare of hunger would make him and his associates seriously consider casting lots as to who should be eaten. Later the feast might actually begin and ... human nature find it easy enough to gnaw the shin bone of a fellow castaway. This thing we call human nature is a bundle of emotions and desires that will find expression in different ways, according to the environment in which it is located, as we have seen in the example given."[9] This is exactly true in thesis, though utterly false in detail. But it is the object of democracy to give equality of opportunity for human nature, starting from the essential point of individual impulse (which is the precise expression of character), to work out the best of which it is capable. On the other hand, it is the object of Socialism, acting through political and economic machinery, to crowd out these varying attributes of human nature and reduce the individual to the mental status of a dull, unthinking animal. Of course human nature always has rebelled against this repression and always will do so in the final analysis. It is impossible for Socialism or any other system of uniform and outward repression to fetter the human soul and it inevitably will fail to do so in the end. It is from an experience of the difficulties and dangers, the unhappiness and injustice that will accompany this process of failure, that the opponents of Socialism and the believers in Democracy wish to spare the people of the world to-day. This failure of Socialism especially is true as applied to Germany. The un-souling of the people has come as the direct result of the use of Socialism by the military autocracy for its own selfish purposes. Also its failure is repeatedly seen in its actual working, and in spite of the German boast of efficiency. The best illustration of this, because the one most used by the Socialists on the other side of the argument, is that of the railroads. Most of the railroad lines of importance in Continental Europe are owned and operated by the various governments. I can say from my own personal experience and observation that the only railroads that are really well run, so far as I have traveled, are those under private ownership and direction, as in Great Britain and the United States. I have tried the various trains de luxe and Blitzzüge of Continental Europe and their slow progress and often indifferent accommodations make one long for an English or American express train. And then to hold first-class tickets in Germany, and be refused admission to first-class compartments still empty "because some officials may want them," as was my experience in going from Nürnberg to Mainz, does not add to one's desire for governmental control. The best European trains do not for one moment compare with those of the privately owned British and American railroads. According to statistics published in 1913, the railroads of the United States were capitalized at $60,000 per mile under private ownership; the government-owned German roads at $109,000 per mile, and this in spite of the far cheaper costs of building. Railroad rates in the United States, both freight and passenger, under private ownership have been among the lowest in the world. The first thing that our government control has brought about is a raise in rates that exceeds by far what the private managements would have dared even to imagine, much less ask of the Interstate Commerce Commission. And this has been accompanied by a marked deterioration of service, all of which can by no means be blamed upon conditions resulting from the war. Poorer service at higher cost is the almost universal experience, in the long run, of government-owned public utilities both here and abroad. The Boston _Commercial_ in 1913 called attention to the fact that in France the year 1912 was marked by the largest increase in gross receipts on record, for both government and privately owned railroads, but the privately owned roads showed an improvement in net earnings almost three times as great as that of the nationalized railroads. These failings noted above are almost inevitably found wherever the government owns the railroads or other utilities, or else these utilities are run at a loss and the difference made up in the tax bills of the people. Government control never is as efficient and economical as private control, even though all questions of political power and influence be omitted from consideration.[10] The important testimony of Mr. W.M. Acworth, an English authority upon railroads, which he gave by invitation before the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce at Washington, has not been fully appreciated by American public opinion. The National City Bank of New York rightly stressed the importance of this testimony in one of its bulletins during the year 1918. Mr. Acworth was in this country during the early part of 1917 as a member of the special Canadian Commission on Railways, and he told the Senate Committee that "while American companies have revolutionized equipment and methods of operation, Prussia has clung to old equipment and old methods. This is typical. In all the history of railway development it has been the private companies that have led the way, the State systems that have brought up the rear. Railroading is a progressive science. New ideas lead to new inventions, to new plant and methods. This means the spending of much new capital. The State official mistrusts ideas, pours cold water on new inventions and grudges new expenditure. In practical operation German railway officials have taught the railway world nothing. It would be difficult to point to a single important invention or improvement, the introduction of which the world owes to a State railway." Is it not a rather significant fact that with all their boasted advance in science and learning, the Germans have failed utterly in the two realms of politics, as shown in the preceding pages, and of railroading? And these are the two most extensive fields of the influence of German Socialism. The American citizen has before him in clear outline the sure result from a continuation of governmental ownership or control as a permanent policy in the United States after the war. As regards railroad personnel, if the positions from top to bottom were filled with Mr. Bryan's "deserving Democrats," as was the case with our diplomatic and consular service in 1913, the results would be as striking, though perhaps in a different and even more serious way. Of course the Civil Service, which has been a solid measure of reform and one from which we dare depart only at our peril, would probably be called into use and be evaded in exactly the same way as it has been in the past. And even if it were not evaded, we must remember that the Civil Service examinations and rules are not a guarantee of efficiency or excellence. The best that can be said for them is that they are a protection against absolute incompetence and, to a certain extent, against political spoiling. But in a positive sense, the Civil Service is merely a guarantee of mediocrity. And mediocrity never yet made a success of a great transportation or productive system such as our railroads or industrial corporations. The political possibilities of a "railroad vote" of several million employees of the government need only be referred to, to be feared. Perhaps no one would suffer more from a policy of government ownership than the present force of railroad employees in the United States. They have won their present positions for the most part by individual achievement, but their future advancement would depend not upon the continued successful handling of their work, but upon either the injustice of political favoritism or the undiscriminating rules of the Civil Service. That some of the employees have not failed to grasp the political possibilities is shown by my own recent experience upon a train between Philadelphia and New York. I had a difference with one of the train crew who was collecting the tickets in my car, and which was caused by carelessness and indifference on his part. The employee finally answered my protests by remarking--"Oh well, we don't care so long as Woodrow Wilson is in the White House." The truth or untruth of this statement is not the important thing, but the fact that he made it. The personnel would tend steadily to deteriorate in efficiency. The successful government employee is the one who follows most closely the beaten track of precedent and past experience. If he departs from this track, he inevitably arouses the opposition of his fellow-employees or of the unthinking part of the public, who usually desire no change. He also takes all the risks of experiment and if he succeeds, the rewards are uncertain and small; if he fails, he personally bears all the consequences. This is the reason for the tendency toward steady deterioration on the part of all public service. Employees of the State must follow the path of absolute conformity to the past. This deadens individual initiative, ambition and inventiveness. At this point it would be well to repeat the penetrating question recently asked by Mr. Otto H. Kahn in the course of an address before the American Bankers Association in Chicago. Said Mr. Kahn--"Now, you and I, who are trained in business, have all we can do to conduct our respective concerns and personal affairs with a fair measure of success. On what grounds, then, can it be assumed that by becoming endowed with the dignity of a governmental appointment, men of average or even much more than average ability will develop the capacity to run successfully the huge and complex business undertakings which the devotees of paternalism would place in their charge?" Furthermore, the plant and its upkeep would be subject to political influence and objects. Just as we have needlessly expensive or even useless post office buildings, harbor improvements and other works of national cost built as the result of sectional log-rolling of Congressional politicians, so probably we would have railroad stations, tracks, subway crossings, and service in general offered not from the standpoint of efficiency and public service, but as indirect campaign contributions to needy Congressional candidates for re-election. It should be realized that the mistakes and delays in our shipping and airplane production during the first year of the war were probably not so much the fault of the government at Washington and the administration of affairs in these departments, as they were the inherent defects of the Government itself doing the work, and these effects were overcome only by the heroic efforts of Mr. Schwab, Mr. Ryan, and the other men whom President Wilson wisely chose to insure the success of these war measures as a patriotic necessity. Our present postal service, the most necessary, next to the public schools, of all the means for the formation of community feeling and public opinion essential to a democracy, has been under the charge of deterioration and inadequate service for the past ten years. Also it must be remembered that the government-controlled systems of telegraph and telephone in the various European countries are unspeakably bad, according to the standards of service to which we have become accustomed through long years of efficient private management. Therefore, in the light of this experience the taking over of our systems by the government has its justification only as a war necessity. As a matter of permanent policy, it would be an entirely different and very serious matter. The marked deterioration that almost immediately appeared in the telegraph service, is sufficient proof of this fact. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 9: Quoted from an editorial in the (daily) New York _Evening Call_, issue for August 29, 1918.] [Footnote 10: "The advantages which might be derived from a single united administration of all the railroads are doubtless somewhat analogous to those we derive from the post office, but in most other respects the analogy fails completely and fatally. Railway traffic cannot be managed by pure routine like that of the mails. It is fluctuating and uncertain, depending upon the seasons of the year, the demands of the locality, or events of an accidental character. Incessant watchfulness, alacrity, and freedom from official routine are required on the part of a traffic manager, who shall always be ready to meet the public wants." W.S. Jevons (reprinted in _Selected Readings in Public Finance_, by C.J. Bullock, p. 103).] V THE TRUE ANTIDOTE FOUND IN CO-OPERATIVE EFFORT There is one term, the use of which is anathema to the Socialist, and that term is "human nature." He never wishes to meet or discuss this in an argument, and with good reason, for it has been shown that it is only by ignoring human nature entirely, both in theory and in practice, that Socialism can make even the semblance of a reasonable showing. But another term, which the Socialist especially likes, is "co-operation," and that is one to which he has no manner of right. Cooperation is a social movement, the impulse for which comes from within the human heart, while Socialism as already stated, is essentially a working together only as the result of outward direction and dictation. The first is the act of a free man; the latter results from the obedience of a political and mental slave. We Americans have made one of the greatest successes of history along the line of political co-operation. Our whole democratic type of government is based upon this principle as a foundation. But we have done little toward the free and successful use of co-operation in business or production. It is here that our British cousins have far exceeded us even though we have outdistanced them, we think, along political lines of activity. It was shown in _The Journal of Commerce and Commercial Bulletin_ for January 25, 1918, that this co-operative movement in Great Britain has developed to such an extent that at the present time distributive societies there number some 3,500,000 members. The turnover of these societies last year amounted to $605,000,000, to which should be added $350,000,000 from the co-operative wholesale and the hundred distributive societies. As a contrast to this, the American people have been so filled with the individualism necessary to the spirit of the pioneers who in reality have been "subduing a continent" that they have failed to realize what a wonderful field for efficient, popular effort the commercial and industrial activities of the country offered if we only would adopt the principle of co-operative organization. Probably one of the greatest lines of development after the war will be this co-operation between producers and consumers. In no other way can those activities and profits of the middlemen, which are more or less unnecessary, be entirely eliminated. I have it on good authority from members of the American Federation of Labor that fully 95 per cent of its membership is opposed to Socialism, and that the Socialistic 5 per cent is largely among the laboring men of the Pacific Coast, with possibly a few in the Middle West, especially Kansas. This latter is probably an after effect of the old "Populistic" craze of the early 'nineties. On the other hand, American labor is feeling the need of cooperative action, not only as regards themselves, but also as regards capital as well, and Mr. Gompers has proved himself of the stature of real statesmanship in appreciating and advancing this idea in the most patriotic way since the war began. Individual laboring men with whom I have talked say they "like the working together" that Socialism advocates, but after explaining their position more fully, in nine cases out of ten it is found that they utterly repudiate the dictatorial, outwardly-directing theory upon which Socialism stands, and in reality desire the advance of this spirit of co-operation. Thus they look upon a bonus from profits as merely a partial gift on the part of corporate management. What they desire is profit-sharing, as standing for a recognition of the just right of labor to a larger part of the just proceeds of its work. Thus probably the greatest antidote and enemy of Socialism is profit-sharing, and after all it is only a recognition of the fact that production is the joint work of both capital and labor, that both are requisite and necessary, and that their whole success is based upon this spirit of co-operation. There is no doubt that there are men to-day who are in official positions of power and influence in our national, state and city administrations throughout the United States and who are more or less openly using the present crisis of unusual and war conditions in order to precipitate the country into a complete Socialistic organization. It may be that we shall come to Socialism as a final political and economic development. Personally, I for one do not believe that we will, or that even a small part of the real thinking American people, either native or foreign born, would desire this. Even if we did enter upon such a policy it would only be temporary in duration, and be followed by a terrible struggle of readjustment to the old conditions. But if we do undertake Socialism, let us at least do it with our eyes open. Let us realize that we are entering upon an entirely new and untried policy which is diametrically opposed to all the ideas and ideals, the history, the fundamental thought and theory upon which this country was founded and has prospered and developed so marvellously up to the present time. Those officials, no matter where placed as regards power and responsibility, who by underhand means would throw us into this entirely new method of life without due thought and consideration, are politically dishonest, no matter how sincere they may be, and are as traitorous to American life and thought as are the pro-German or the pacifist. The reaction against measures of government ownership and control which have been made necessary by the exigencies of a great war crisis already has appeared in Great Britain. The English papers contain open criticism of the government operation of the railways, of shipbuilding and of production in general. The London _Times_ said editorially last year: "The railways are certainly short of labor, but is it established that all the officials are putting their very best efforts into the solution of the present problems? The railways are now Government controlled institutions and competition has diminished where it has not vanished. It seems to be a question whether quite the same amount of thought and work is being put into the efficient management of the companies as in the days before the war when the lines were keenly competing against each other. This question which has been raised of a slackening of effort directly in consequence of the nationalization of the railways is a serious one and evidently deserves inquiry.... The public is entitled to know if the railways are now using what remains to them (of labor and capital) with the utmost efficiency." Also the best authorities, and even the government investigators themselves, are urging a speedy return to private ownership and operation at the earliest possible moment after the war. The same undercurrent of feeling, or rather conviction, is rapidly spreading among our own people in the United States. Mr. Hoover has expressed this same view in the most emphatic terms in the course of an address to the special conference of Federal Food Administrators held in Washington, D.C. on November 12, 1918. "It is my belief," said Mr. Hoover, "that the tendency of all such legislation except in war is to an over degree to strike at the roots of individual initiative. We have secured its execution during the war as to the willing co-operation of 95 per cent of the trades of the country, but under peace conditions it would degenerate into an harassing blue law." But the advocates of Socialism are especially active during the time of uncertainty and confusion that necessarily follows the close of a great world war. At such times, they always are. In the words of Mr. Kahn,--"They possess the fervor of the prophet allied often to the plausibility and cunning of the demagogue. They have the enviable and persuasive cocksureness which goes with lack of responsibility and of practical experience. They pour the vials of scorn and contempt upon those benighted ones who still tie their boat to the old moorings of the teachings of history and of common sense appraisal of human nature. And being vociferous and plausible they are unquestionably making converts." Recently I saw little "stickers" pasted on the walls of a railway station in a small New Jersey city which read as follows-- The Masters Fear Slaves That Think If you think right you will act right Study Socialism This is typical of the fallacious arguments so often encountered. First of all, it has the tone of darkest Hungary or Bolshevist Russia, and is absolutely contrary to the facts as regards conditions in the United States. The so-called "toasters" or "capitalistic class;" for suppose it is to them that this refers, have been in the forefront of the movement to educate the masses, and have given their time, money and sympathy to aid in its success. I heartily agree with the _non sequitur_ statement that "if you think right you will act right." I am perfectly willing to join in the demand that our people should "study Socialism," for if the American people will not only study it but also think their way through in regard to it, no sincere believer in democracy and in American ideals need have any doubt as to the final outcome. We Americans believe that our people, in the long run, will decide right upon any question to which they have given due thought and consideration. So in their hands we may safely leave the whole question of Socialism and government ownership or operation. All we ask is, that they be given due knowledge and instruction. Furthermore, if Socialism be true, it should not fear open and complete examination. If the truth is the truth, it must prevail in the end. Therefore the surreptitious and secret attempt to foist Socialism upon an unsuspecting people savors much of the lack of sincerity and of belief in its real truth on the part of its own advocates. At least they should stop making their appeal mainly to the uninstructed foreign-born and to the apostles of half-baked learning, and lay their case before the hard-headed laborer, the business and the professional man. INDEX Acworth, W.M., quoted, 64-66. Ambition, 15-16. American Federation of Labor, 77. American Revolution, 5. Australia, 46. Beer, George, Louis, quoted, 4. Belgium, Constitution of, quoted, 28-29. _Boston Commercial_, quoted, 63. Brooks, Phillips, 7. Cartwright, Peter, 7. Christ, individualistic teachings of, 47-48. Civil Service, 67-68. Civil War (American), 6. Common Law Rights, 31-32. Co-operation, 74-79. _Droit Administratif_, 32. Ely, Richard T., quoted 16-17, 44-45. Fabian Society, 8. French Revolution, 5. Germany, theory of government in, 25-26; labor in 51-52; failure of Socialism, 59 _et seq_.; railroads in, 60-66. Gompers, Samuel, 77-78. Hill, David J., quoted, 14-15. Hillquit, Morris, 38, 43. Hoover, Herbert, quoted, 82-83. Huguenots, 6. Human Nature, definition, 57-60. Ibsen, Henrik, 8. Italy, Constitution of, quoted, 27. Jameson, J.P., 7. Jefferson, Thomas, 10, 36-37. Jenks, Edward, 17. Jevons, W.S., quoted, 64 (note). Jewish Scriptures, and Socialism, 49. _Journal of Commerce_, quoted, 40-42, 75-76. Kahn, Otto H., quoted, 70-71, 83-84. Louis XIV., 6. Moriscos, 6. Mühlon, W., quoted, 37 (note). National City Bank (New York), 64. Netherlands, Constitution of, quoted, 27. Norway, Constitution of, quoted, 28. Object of Government, 19-20. Philip III (of Spain), 6. Plymouth Colony, 6, 55-57. Postal Service, 72-73. Press, freedom of, 27-30. Profit-sharing, 78-79. Railroads, 60-71, 81-82. Rousseau, 21. Seligman, E.R.A., 3. Shaw, G. Bernard, 8. Socialism, definition of, 14. Sweden, Constitution of, quoted, 28. Switzerland, Constitution of, quoted, 28. _Times_ (London), quoted, 81-82. United States, Constitution of, quoted, 30. Wells, H.G., 8. Whitefield, George, 7. William, ex-Emperor, 26. Wilson, J. Dover, quoted, 50-51. Wilson, Woodrow, 10, 69. Woolman, John, 6. 
14058	----	READINGS ON FASCISM AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM Selected by Members of the Department of Philosophy, University of Colorado ALAN SWALLOW Denver PREFATORY NOTE The ensuing readings are presented to encourage the student to clarify his thinking on social philosophy. He will accordingly need to determine whether the readings contain a more or less coherent body of ideas which constitutes a social philosophy. He will also need to raise the more far-reaching question whether the ideas are acceptable. To arrive at any satisfactory answer to this latter question, he will necessarily have to compare the ideas of fascism and their practical meanings with the alternatives, real and ideal, that are the substance of live philosophical issues. CONTENTS The Doctrine of Fascism by Benito Mussolini The Political Doctrine of Fascism by Alfredo Rocco The Philosophic Basis of Fascism by Giovanni Gentile National Socialism by Raymond E. Murphy, Francis B. Stevens, Howard Trivers, Joseph M. Roland National-Socialism and Medicine by Dr. F. Hamburger Selected Bibliography THE DOCTRINE OF FASCISM By BENITO MUSSOLINI From the ENCYCLOPEDIA ITALIANA. Vol. XIV The English translation of the "Fundamental Ideas" is by Mr. I.S. Munro, reprinted by his kind permission from "Fascism to World-Power" (Alexander Maclehose, London, 1933). FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS. 1. Philosophic Conception. Like every concrete political conception, Fascism is thought and action. It is action with an inherent doctrine which, arising out of a given system of historic forces, is inserted in it and works on it from within. It has therefore a form co-related to the contingencies of time and place; but it has at the same time an ideal content which elevates it into a formula of truth in the higher region of the history of thought. There is no way of exercising a spiritual influence on the things of the world by means of a human will-power commanding the wills of others, without first having a clear conception of the particular and transient reality on which the will-power must act, and without also having a clear conception of the universal and permanent reality in which the particular and transient reality has its life and being. To know men we must have a knowledge of man; and to have a knowledge of man we must know the reality of things and their laws. There can be no conception of a State which is not fundamentally a conception of Life. It is a philosophy or intuition, a system of ideas which evolves itself into a system of logical contraction, or which concentrates itself in a vision or in a faith, but which is always, at least virtually, an organic conception of the world. 2. Spiritualised Conception. Fascism would therefore not be understood in many of its manifestations (as, for example, in its organisations of the Party, its system of education, its discipline) were it not considered in the light of its general view of life. A spiritualised view. To Fascism the world is not this material world which appears on the surface, in which man is an individual separated from all other men, standing by himself and subject to a natural law which instinctively impels him to lead a life of momentary and egoistic pleasure. In Fascism man is an individual who is the nation and the country. He is this by a moral law which embraces and binds together individuals and generations in an established tradition and mission, a moral law which suppresses the instinct to lead a life confined to a brief cycle of pleasure in order, instead, to replace it within the orbit of duty in a superior conception of life, free from the limits of time and space a life in which the individual by self-abnegation and by the sacrifice of his particular interests, even by death, realises the entirely spiritual existence in which his value as a man consists. 3. Positive Conception of Life as a Struggle. It is therefore a spiritual conception, itself also a result of the general reaction of the Century against the languid and materialistic positivism of the Eighteenth Century. Anti-positivist, but positive: neither sceptical nor agnostic, neither pessimistic nor passively optimistic, as are in general the doctrines (all of them negative) which place the centre of life outside of man, who by his free will can and should create his own world for himself. Fascism wants a man to be active and to be absorbed in action with all his energies; it wants him to have a manly consciousness of the difficulties that exist and to be ready to face them. It conceives life as a struggle, thinking that it is the duty of man to conquer that life which is really worthy of him: creating in the first place within himself the (physical, moral, intellectual) instrument with which to build it. As for the individual, so for the nation, so for mankind. Hence the high value of culture in all its forms (art, religion, science) and the supreme importance of education. Hence also the essential value of labour, with which man conquers nature and creates the human world (economic, political, moral, intellectual). 4. Ethical Conception. This positive conception of life is evidently an ethical conception. And it comprises the whole reality as well as the human activity which domineers it. No action is to be removed from the moral sense; nothing is to be in the world that is divested of the importance which belongs to it in respect of moral aims. Life, therefore, as the Fascist conceives it, is serious, austere, religious; entirely balanced in a world sustained by the moral and responsible forces of the spirit. The Fascist disdains the "easy" life. 5. Religious Conception. Fascism is a religious conception in which man is considered to be in the powerful grip of a superior law, with an objective will which transcends the particular individual and elevates him into a fully conscious member of a spiritual society. Anyone who has stopped short at the mere consideration of opportunism in the religious policy of the Fascist Regime, has failed to understand that Fascism, besides being a system of government, is also a system of thought. 6. Historical and Realist Conception. Fascism is an historical conception in which man could not be what he is without being a factor in the spiritual process to which he contributes, either in the family sphere or in the social sphere, in the nation or in history in general to which all nations contribute. Hence is derived the great importance of tradition in the records, language, customs and rules of human society. Man without a part in history is nothing. For this reason Fascism is opposed to all the abstractions of an individualistic character based upon materialism typical of the Eighteenth Century; and it is opposed to all the Jacobin innovations and utopias. It does not believe in the possibility of "happiness" on earth as conceived by the literature of the economists of the Seventeenth Century; it therefore spurns all the teleological conceptions of final causes through which, at a given period of history, a final systematisation of the human race would take place. Such theories only mean placing oneself outside real history and life, which is a continual ebb and flow and process of realisations. Politically speaking, Fascism aims at being a realistic doctrine; in its practice it aspired to solve only the problems which present themselves of their own accord in the process of history, and which of themselves find or suggest their own solution. To have the effect of action among men, it is necessary to enter into the process of reality and to master the forces actually at work. 7. The Individual and Liberty. Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception is for the State; it is for the individual only in so far as he coincides with the State, universal consciousness and will of man in his historic existence. It is opposed to the classic Liberalism which arose out of the need of reaction against absolutism, and had accomplished its mission in history when the State itself had become transformed in the popular will and consciousness. Liberalism denied the State in the interests of the particular individual; Fascism reaffirms the State as the only true expression of the individual. And if liberty is to be the attribute of the real man, and not of the scarecrow invented by the individualistic Liberalism, then Fascism is for liberty. It is for the only kind of liberty that is serious--the liberty of the State and of the individual in the State. Because, for the Fascist, all is comprised in the State and nothing spiritual or human exists--much less has any value--outside the State. In this respect Fascism is a totalising concept, and the Fascist State--the unification and synthesis of every value--interprets, develops and potentiates the whole life of the people. 8. Conception of a Corporate State. No individuals nor groups (political parties, associations, labour unions, classes) outside the State. For this reason Fascism is opposed to Socialism, which clings rigidly to class war in the historic evolution and ignores the unity of the State which moulds the classes into a single, moral and economic reality. In the same way Fascism is opposed to the unions of the labouring classes. But within the orbit of the State with ordinative functions, the real needs, which give rise to the Socialist movement and to the forming of labour unions, are emphatically recognised by Fascism and are given their full expression in the Corporative System, which conciliates every interest in the unity of the State. 9. Democracy. Individuals form classes according to categories of interests. They are associated according to differentiated economical activities which have a common interest: but first and foremost they form the State. The State is not merely either the numbers or the sum of individuals forming the majority of a people. Fascism for this reason is opposed to the democracy which identifies peoples with the greatest number of individuals and reduces them to a majority level. But if people are conceived, as they should be, qualitatively and not quantitatively, then Fascism is democracy in its purest form. The qualitative conception is the most coherent and truest form and is therefore the most moral, because it sees a people realised in the consciousness and will of the few or even of one only; an ideal which moves to its realisation in the consciousness and will of all. By "all" is meant all who derive their justification as a nation, ethnically speaking, from their nature and history, and who follow the same line of spiritual formation and development as one single will and consciousness--not as a race nor as a geographically determined region, but as a progeny that is rather the outcome of a history which perpetuates itself; a multitude unified by an idea embodied in the will to have power and to exist, conscious of itself and of its personality. 10. Conception of the State. This higher personality is truly the nation, inasmuch as it is the State. The nation does not beget the State, according to the decrepit nationalistic concept which was used as a basis for the publicists of the national States in the Nineteenth Century. On the contrary, the nation is created by the State, which gives the people, conscious of their own moral unity, the will, and thereby an effective existence. The right of a nation to its independence is derived not from a literary and ideal consciousness of its own existence, much less from a _de facto_ situation more or less inert and unconscious, but from an active consciousness, from an active political will disposed to demonstrate in its right; that is to say, a kind of State already in its pride (_in fieri_). The State, in fact, as a universal ethical will, is the creator of right. 11. Dynamic Reality. The nation as a State is an ethical reality which exists and lives in measure as it develops. A standstill is its death. Therefore the State is not only the authority which governs and which gives the forms of law and the worth of the spiritual life to the individual wills, but it is also the power which gives effect to its will in foreign matters, causing it to be recognised and respected by demonstrating through facts the universality of all the manifestations necessary for its development. Hence it is organization as well as expansion, and it may be thereby considered, at least virtually, equal to the very nature of the human will, which in its evolution recognises no barriers, and which realises itself by proving its infinity. 12. The Rôle of the State. The Fascist State, the highest and the most powerful form of personality is a force, but a spiritual one. It reassumes all the forms of the moral and intellectual life of man. It cannot, therefore, be limited to a simple function of order and of safeguarding, as was contended by Liberalism. It is not a simple mechanism which limits the sphere of the presumed individual liberties. It is an internal form and rule, a discipline of the entire person: it penetrates the will as well as the intelligence. Its principle, a central inspiration of the living human personality in the civil community, descends into the depths and settles in the heart of the man of action as well as the thinker, of the artist as well as of the scientist; the soul of our soul. 13. Discipline and Authority. Fascism, in short, is not only a lawgiver and the founder of institutions, but an educator and a promoter of the spiritual life. It aims to rebuild not the forms of human life, but its content, the man, the character, the faith. And for this end it exacts discipline and an authority which descend into and dominates the interior of the spirit without opposition. Its emblem, therefore, is the lictorian _fasces_, symbol of unity, of force and of justice. POLITICAL AND SOCIAL DOCTRINE 1. Origins of the Doctrine. When, in the now distant March of 1919, I summoned a meeting at Milan, through the columns of the _Popolo d'Italia,_ of those who had supported and endured the war and who had followed me since the constitution of the _fasci_ or Revolutionary Action in January 1915, there was no specific doctrinal plan in my mind. I had the experience of one only doctrine--that of Socialism from 1903-04 to the winter of 1914 about a decade--but I made it first in the ranks and later as a leader and it was never an experience in theory. My doctrine, even during that period, was a doctrine of action. A universally accepted doctrine of Socialism had not existed since 1915 when the revisionist movement started in Germany, under the leadership of Bernstein. Against this, in the swing of tendencies, a left revolutionary movement began to take shape, but in Italy it never went further than the "field of phrases," whereas in Russian Socialistic circles it became the prelude of Bolscevism. "Reformism," "revolutionarism," "centrism," this is a terminology of which even the echoes are now spent--but in the great river of Fascism are currents which flowed from Sorel, from Peguy, from Lagardelle and the "Mouvement Socialiste," from Italian syndicalists which were legion between 1904 and 1914, and sounded a new note in Italian Socialist circles (weakened then by the betrayal of Giolitti) through Olivetti's _Pagine Libere_, Orano's _La Lupa_ and Enrico Leone's _Divenire Sociale_. After the War, in 1919, Socialism was already dead as a doctrine: it existed only as a grudge. In Italy especially, it had one only possibility of action: reprisals against those who had wanted the War and must now pay its penalty. The _Popolo d'Italia_ carried as sub-title "daily of ex-service men and producers," and the word producers was already then the expression of a turn of mind. Fascism was not the nursling of a doctrine previously worked out at a desk; it was born of the need for action and it was action. It was not a party, in fact during the first two years, it was an anti-party and a movement. The name I gave the organisation fixed its character. Yet whoever should read the now crumpled sheets with the minutes of the meeting at which the Italian "Fasci di Combattimento" were constituted, would fail to discover a doctrine, but would find a series of ideas, of anticipations, of hints which, liberated from the inevitable strangleholds of contingencies, were destined after some years to develop into doctrinal conceptions. Through them Fascism became a political doctrine to itself, different, by comparison, to all others whether contemporary or of the past. I said then, "If the bourgeoisie think we are ready to act as lightning-conductors, they are mistaken. We must go towards labour. We wish to train the working classes to directive functions. We wish to convince them that it is not easy to manage Industry or Trade: we shall fight the technique and the spirit of the rearguard. When the succession of the regime is open, we must not lack the fighting spirit. We must rush and if the present regime be overcome, it is we who must fill its place. The claim to succession belongs to us, because it was we who forced the country into War and we who led her to victory. The present political representation cannot suffice: we must have a direct representation of all interest. Against this programme one might say it is a return to corporations. But that does not matter. Therefore I should like this assembly to accept the claims put in by national syndicalism from an economic standpoint...." Is it not strange that the word corporations should have been uttered at the first meeting of Piazza San Sepolcro, when one considers that, in the course of the Revolution, it came to express one of the social and legislative creations at the very foundations of the regime? 2. Development. The years which preceded the March on Rome were years in which the necessity of action did not permit complete doctrinal investigations or elaborations. The battle was raging in the towns and villages. There were discussions, but what was more important and sacred--there was death. Men knew how to die. The doctrine--all complete and formed, with divisions into chapters, paragraphs, and accompanying elucubrations--might be missing; but there was something more decided to replace it, there was faith. Notwithstanding, whoever remembers with the aid of books and speeches, whoever could search through them and select, would find that the fundamental principles were laid down whilst the battle raged. It was really in those years that the Fascist idea armed itself, became refined and proceeded towards organisation: the problems of the individual and of the State, the problems of authority and of liberty, the political and social problems, especially national; the fight against the liberal, democratic, socialistic and popular doctrines, was carried out together with the "punitive expeditions." But as a "system" was lacking, our adversaries in bad faith, denied to Fascism any capacity to produce a doctrine, though that doctrine was growing tumultuously, at first under the aspect of violent and dogmatic negation, as happens to all newly-born ideas, and later under the positive aspect of construction which was successively realised, in the years 1926-27-28 through the laws and institutions of the regime. Fascism today stands clearly defined not only as a regime, but also as a doctrine. This word doctrine should be interpreted in the sense that Fascism, to-day, when passing criticism on itself and others, has its own point of view and its own point of reference, and therefore also its own orientation when facing those problems which beset the world in the spirit and in the matter. 3. Against Pacifism: War and Life as a Duty. As far as the general future and development of humanity is concerned, and apart from any mere consideration of current politics, Fascism above all does not believe either in the possibility or utility of universal peace. It therefore rejects the pacifism which masks surrender and cowardice. War alone brings all human energies to their highest tension and sets a seal of nobility on the peoples who have the virtue to face it. All other tests are but substitutes which never make a man face himself in the alternative of life or death. A doctrine which has its starting-point at the prejudicial postulate of peace is therefore extraneous to Fascism. In the same way all international creations (which, as history demonstrates, can be blown to the winds when sentimental, ideal and practical elements storm the heart of a people) are also extraneous to the spirit of Fascism--even if such international creations are accepted for whatever utility they may have in any determined political situation. Fascism also transports this anti-pacifist spirit into the life of individuals. The proud _squadrista_ motto "_me ne frego_" ("I don't give a damn") scrawled on the bandages of the wounded is an act of philosophy--not only stoic. It is a summary of a doctrine not only political: it is an education in strife and an acceptance of the risks which it carried: it is a new style of Italian life. It is thus that the Fascist loves and accepts life, ignores and disdains suicide; understands life as a duty, a lifting up, a conquest; something to be filled in and sustained on a high plane; a thing that has to be lived through for its own sake, but above all for the sake of others near and far, present and future. 4. The Demographic Policy and the "Neighbour." The "demographic" policy of the regime is the result of these premises. The Fascist also loves his neighbour, but "neighbour" is not for him a vague and undefinable word: love for his neighbour does not prevent necessary educational severities. Fascism rejects professions of universal affection and, though living in the community of civilised peoples, it watches them and looks at them diffidently. It follows them in their state of mind and in the transformation of their interests, but it does not allow itself to be deceived by fallacious and mutable appearances. 5. Against Historical Materialism and Class-Struggle. Through this conception of life Fascism becomes the emphatic negation of that doctrine which constituted the basis of the so-called scientific Socialism or Marxism: the doctrine of historical materialism, according to which the story of human civilisation is to be explained only by the conflict of interests between the various social groups and by the change of the means and instruments of production. That the economic vicissitudes--discovery of prime or raw materials, new methods of labour, scientific inventions--have their particular importance, is denied by none, but that they suffice to explain human history, excluding other factors from it, is absurd: Fascism still believes in sanctity and in heroism, that is to say in acts in which no economic motive, immediate or remote, operates. Fascism having denied historical materialism, by which men are only puppets in history, appearing and disappearing on the surface of the tides while in the depths the real directive forces act and labour, it also denies the immutable and irreparable class warfare, which is the natural filiation of such an economistic conception of history: and it denies above all that class warfare is the preponderating agent of social transformation. Being defeated on these two capital points of its doctrine, nothing remains of Socialism save the sentimental aspiration--as old as humanity--to achieve a community of social life in which the sufferings and hardships of the humblest classes are alleviated. But here Fascism repudiates the concept of an economic "happiness" which is to be--at a given moment in the evolution of economy--socialistically and almost automatically realised by assuring to all the maximum of well-being. Fascism denies the possibilities of the materialistic concept of "happiness"--it leaves that to the economists of the first half of the Seventeenth Century; that is, it denies the equation "well-being-happiness," which reduces man to the state of the animals, mindful of only one thing--that of being fed and fattened; reduced, in fact, to a pure and simple vegetative existence. 6. Against Democratic Ideologies. After disposing of Socialism, Fascism opens a breach on the whole complex of the democratic ideologies, and repudiates them in their theoretic premises as well as in their practical application or instrumentation. Fascism denies that numbers, by the mere fact of being numbers, can direct human society; it denies that these numbers can govern by means of periodical consultations; it affirms also the fertilising, beneficient and unassailable inequality of men, who cannot be levelled through an extrinsic and mechanical process such as universal suffrage. Regimes can be called democratic which, from time to time, give the people the illusion of being sovereign, whereas the real and effective sovereignty exists in other, and very often secret and irresponsible forces. Democracy is a regime without a king, but very often with many kings, far more exclusive, tyrannical and ruinous than a single king, even if he be a tyrant. This explains why Fascism which, for contingent reasons, had assumed a republican tendency before 1922, renounced it previous to the March on Rome, with the conviction that the political constitution of a State is not nowadays a supreme question; and that, if the examples of past and present monarchies and past and present republics are studied, the result is that neither monarchies nor republics are to be judged under the assumption of eternity, but that they merely represent forms in which the extrinsic political evolution takes shape as well as the history, the tradition and the psychology of a given country. Consequently, Fascism glides over the antithesis between monarchy and republic, on which democraticism wasted time, blaming the former for all social shortcomings and exalting the latter as a regime of perfection. We have now seen that there are republics which may be profoundly absolutist and reactionary, and monarchies which welcome the most venturesome social and political experiments. 7. Untruths of Democracy. "Reason and science" says Renan (who had certain pre-fascist enlightenments) in one of his philosophical meditations, "are products of mankind, but to seek reason directly for the people and through the people is a chimera. It is not necessary for the existence of reason that everybody should know it. In any case if this initiation were to be brought about it could not be through low-class democracy, which seems to lead rather to the extinction of every difficult culture and of every great discipline. The principle that society exists only for the welfare and liberty of individuals composing it, does not seem to conform with the plans of nature: plans in which the species only is taken into consideration and the individual appears sacrificed. It is strongly to be feared that the last word of democracy thus understood (I hasten to add that it can also be differently understood) would be a social state in which a degenerated mass would have no preoccupation other than that of enjoying the ignoble pleasures of the vulgar person." Thus Renan. In Democracy Fascism rejects the absurd conventional falsehood of political equality, the habit of collective responsibility and the myth of indefinite progress and happiness. But if there be a different understanding of Democracy if, in other words, Democracy can also signify to not push the people back as far as the margins of the State, then Fascism may well have been defined by the present writer as "an organised, centralised, authoritarian Democracy." 8. Against Liberal Doctrines. As regards the Liberal doctrines, the attitude of Fascism is one of absolute opposition both in the political and in the economical field. There is no need to exaggerate the importance of Liberalism in the last century--simply for the sake of present-day polemics--and to transform one of the numerous doctrines unfolded in that last century into a religion of humanity for all times, present and future. Liberalism did not flourish for more than a period of fifteen years. It was born in 1830 from the reaction to the Holy Alliance which attempted to set Europe back to the period which preceeded '89 and had its years of splendour in 1848, when also Pius IX was a Liberal. Its decadence began immediately afterwards. If 1848 was a year of light and poesy, 1849 was a year of weakness and tragedy. The Roman Republic was killed by another Republic, the French Republic. In the same year Marx issued his famous manifesto of Communism. In 1851 Napoleon III made his anti-Liberal _coup d'état_ and reigned over France until 1870. He was overthrown by a popular movement, following one of the greatest defeats registered in history. The victor was Bismarck, who always ignored the religion of liberty and its prophets. It is symptomatic that a people of high civilisation like the Germans completely ignored the religion of liberty throughout the whole Nineteenth Century--with but one parenthesis, represented by that which was called "the ridiculous parliament of Frankfurt" which lasted one season. Germany realised its national unity outside of Liberalism, against Liberalism--a doctrine which seemed alien to the German spirit essentially monarchical, since Liberalism is the historical and logical ante-chamber of anarchy. The three wars of 1864, 1866 and 1870 conducted by "Liberals" like Moltke and Bismarck mark the three stages of German unity. As for Italian unity, Liberalism played a very inferior part in the make-up of Mazzini and Garibaldi, who were not liberals. Without the intervention of the anti-Liberal Napoleon we would not have had Lombardy, and without the help of the anti-Liberal Bismarck at Sadowa and Sedan it is very likely that we would not have got Venice in 1866, or that we would have entered Rome in 1870. During the period of 1870-1915 the preachers of the new Credo themselves denounced the twilight of their religion; it was beaten in the breach by decadence in literature. It was beaten in the open by decadence in practice. Activism: that is to say, nationalism, futurism. Fascism. The "Liberal Century" after having accumulated an infinity of Gordian knots, sought to cut them in the hecatomb of the World War. Never did any religion impose such a terrible sacrifice. Have the gods of Liberalism slaked their blood-thirst? Liberalism is now on the point of closing the doors of its deserted temples because nations feel that its agnosticism in the economic field and its indifference in political and moral matters, causes, as it has already caused, the sure ruin of States. That is why all the political experiences of the contemporary world are anti-Liberal, and it is supremely silly to seek to classify them as things outside of history--as if history were a hunting ground reserved to Liberalism and its professors; as if Liberalism were the last and incomparable word of civilisation. 9. Fascism Does Not Turn Back. The Fascist negation of Socialism, of Democracy, of Liberalism, should not lead one to believe that Fascism wishes to push the world back to where it was before 1879, the date accepted as the opening year of the demo-Liberal century. One cannot turn back. The Fascist doctrine has not chosen De Maistre for its prophet. Monarchical absolutism is a thing of the past, and so is the worship of church power. Feudal privileges and divisions into impenetrable castes with no connection between them, are also "have beens." The conception of Fascist authority has nothing in common with the Police. A party that totally rules a nation is a new chapter in history. References and comparisons are not possible. From the ruins of the socialist, liberal and democratic doctrines, Fascism picks those elements that still have a living value; keeps those that might be termed "facts acquired by history," and rejects the rest: namely the conception of a doctrine good for all times and all people. Admitting that the Nineteenth Century was the Century of Socialism, Liberalism and Democracy, it is not said that the Twentieth century must also be the century of Socialism, of Liberalism, of Democracy. Political doctrines pass on, but peoples remain. One may now think that this will be the century of authority, the century of the "right wing" the century of Fascism. If the Nineteenth Century was the century of the individual (liberalism signifies individualism) one may think that this will be the century of "collectivism," the century of the State. It is perfectly logical that a new doctrine should utilise the vital elements of other doctrines. No doctrine was ever born entirely new and shining, never seen before. No doctrine can boast of absolute "originality." Each doctrine is bound historically to doctrines which went before, to doctrines yet to come. Thus the scientific Socialism of Marx is bound to the Utopian Socialism of Fourier, of Owen, of Saint-Simon; thus the Liberalism of 1800 is linked with the movement of 1700. Thus Democratic doctrines are bound to the Encyclopaedists. Each doctrine tends to direct human activity towards a definite object; but the activity of man reacts upon the doctrine, transforms it and adapts it to new requirements, or overcomes it. Doctrine therefore should be an act of life and not an academy of words. In this lie the pragmatic veins of Fascism, its will to power, its will to be, its position with regard to "violence" and its value. 10. The Value and Mission of the State. The capital point of the Fascist doctrine is the conception of the State, its essence, the work to be accomplished, its final aims. In the conception of Fascism, the State is an absolute before which individuals and groups are relative. Individuals and groups are "conceivable" inasmuch as they are in the State. The Liberal State does not direct the movement and the material and spiritual evolution of collectivity, but limits itself to recording the results; the Fascist State has its conscious conviction, a will of its own, and for this reason it is called an "ethical" State. In 1929 at the first quinquiennial assembly of the Regime, I said: "In Fascism the State is not a night-watchman, only occupied with the personal safety of the citizens, nor is it an organisation with purely material aims, such as that of assuring a certain well-being and a comparatively easy social cohabitation. A board of directors would be quite sufficient to deal with this. It is not a purely political creation, either, detached from the complex material realities of the life of individuals and of peoples. The State as conceived and enacted by Fascism, is a spiritual and moral fact since it gives concrete form to the political, juridical and economical organisation of the country. Furthermore this organisation as it rises and develops, is a manifestation of the spirit. The State is a safeguard of interior and exterior safety but it is also the keeper and the transmitter of the spirit of the people, as it was elaborated throughout the ages, in its language, customs and beliefs. The State is not only the present, but it is also the past and above all the future. The State, inasmuch as it transcends the short limits of individual lives, represents the immanent conscience of the nation. The forms in which the State expresses itself are subject to changes, but the necessity for the State remains. It is the State which educates the citizens in civic virtues, gives them a consciousness of their mission, presses them towards unity; the State harmonizes their interests through justice, transmits to prosperity the attainments of thoughts, in science, in art, in laws, in the solidarity of mankind. The State leads men from primitive tribal life to that highest expression of human power which is Empire; links up through the centuries the names of those who died to preserve its integrity or to obey its laws; holds up the memory of the leaders who increased its territory, and of the geniuses who cast the light of glory upon it, as an example for future generations to follow. When the conception of the State declines and disintegrating or centrifugal tendencies prevail, whether of individuals or groups, then the national society is about to set." 11. The Unity of the State and the Contradictions of Capitalism. From 1929 onwards to the present day, the universal, political and economical evolution has still further strengthened the doctrinal positions. The giant who rules is the State. The one who can resolve the dramatic contradictions of capital is the State. What is called the crisis cannot be resolved except by the State and in the State. Where are the ghosts of Jules Simon who, at the dawn of Liberalism, proclaimed that "the State must set to work to make itself useless and prepare its resignation?" Of MacCulloch who, in the second half of the past century, proclaimed that the State must abstain from ruling? What would the Englishman Bentham say today to the continual and inevitably-invoked intervention of the State in the sphere of economics, while, according to his theories, industry should ask no more of the State than to be left in peace? Or the German Humboldt according to whom an "idle" State was the best kind of State? It is true that the second wave of Liberal economists were less extreme than the first, and Adam Smith himself opened the door--if only very cautiously--to let State intervention into the economic field. If Liberalism signifies the individual--then Fascism signifies the State. But the Fascist State is unique of its kind and is an original creation. It is not reactionary but revolutionary, inasmuch as it anticipates the solution of certain universal problems such as those which are treated elsewhere: 1) in the political sphere, by the subdivisions of parties, in the preponderance of parliamentarism and in the irresponsibilities of assemblies; 2) in the economic sphere, by the functions of trade unions which are becoming constantly more numerous and powerful, whether in the labour or industrial fields, in their conflicts and combinations, and 3) in the moral sphere by the necessity of order, discipline, obedience to those who are the moral dictators of the country. Fascism wants the State to be strong, organic and at the same time supported on a wide popular basis. As part of its task the Fascist State has penetrated the economic field: through the corporative, social and educational institutions which it has created. The presence of the State is felt in the remotest ramifications of the country. And in the State also, all the political, economic and spiritual forces of the nation circulate, mustered in their respective organisations. A State which stands on the support of millions of individuals who recognise it, who believe in it, who are ready to serve it, is not the tyrannical State of the mediaeval lord. It has nothing in common with the absolutist States before or after '89. The individual in the Fascist State is not annulled but rather multiplied, just as in a regiment a soldier is not diminished, but multiplied by the number of his comrades. The Fascist State organises the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin afterward to the individual; it has limited the useless or harmful liberties and has preserved the essential ones. The one to judge in this respect is not the individual but the State. 12. The Fascist State and Religion. The Fascist State is not indifferent to the presence or the fact of religion in general nor to the presence of that particular established religion, which is Italian Catholicism. The State has no theology, but it has morality. In the Fascist State religion is considered as one of the most profound manifestations of the spirit; it is therefore not only respected, but defended and protected. The Fascist State does not create its own "God," as Robespierre wanted to do at a certain moment in the frenzies of the Convention; nor does it vainly endeavour to cancel the idea of God from the mind as Bolschevism tries to do. Fascism respects the God of the ascetics, of the saints and of the heroes. It also respects God as he is conceived and prayed to in the ingenuous and primitive heart of the people. 13. Empire and Discipline. The Fascist State is a will expressing power and empire. The Roman tradition here becomes an idea of force. In the Fascist doctrine, empire is not only a territorial or a military, or a commercial expression: it is a moral and a spiritual one. An empire can be thought of, for instance, as a nation which directly or indirectly guides other nations--without the need of conquering a single mile of territory. For Fascism, the tendency to empire, that is to say the expansion of nations, is a manifestation of vitality, its contrary (the stay-at-home attitude) is a sign of decadence. Peoples who rise, or who suddenly flourish again, are imperialistic; peoples who die are peoples who abdicate. Fascism is a doctrine which most adequately represents the tendencies, the state of mind of a people like the Italian people, which is rising again after many centuries of abandonment and of foreign servitude. But empire requires discipline, the coordination of forces, duty and sacrifice. This explains many phases of the practical action of the regime. It explains the aims of many of the forces of the State and the necessary severity against those who would oppose themselves to this spontaneous and irresistible movement of the Italy of the Twentieth century by trying to appeal to the discredited ideologies of the Nineteenth century, which have been repudiated wherever great experiments of political and social transformation have been daringly undertaken. Never more than at the present moment have the nations felt such a thirst for an authority, for a direction, for order. If every century has its own peculiar doctrine, there are a thousand indications that Fascism is that of the present century. That it is a doctrine of life is shown by the fact that it has created a faith; that the faith has taken possession of the mind is demonstrated by the fact that Fascism has had its Fallen and its martyrs. Fascism has now attained in the world an universality over all doctrines. Being realised, it represents an epoch in the history of the human mind. THE POLITICAL DOCTRINE OF FASCISM[1] BY HIS EXCELLENCY ALFREDO ROCCO PREMIER MUSSOLINI'S ENDORSEMENT OF SIGNOR ROCCO'S SPEECH The following message was sent by Benito Mussolini, the Premier of Italy, to Signor Rocco after he had delivered his speech at Perugia. Dear Rocco, I have just read your magnificent address which I endorse throughout. You have presented in a masterful way the doctrine of Fascism. For Fascism has a doctrine, or, if you will, a particular philosophy with regard to all the questions which beset the human mind today. All Italian Fascists should read your discourse and derive from it both the clear formulation of the basic principles of our program as well as the reasons why Fascism must be systematically, firmly, and rationally inflexible in its uncompromising attitude towards other parties. Thus and only thus can the word become flesh and the ideas be turned into deeds. Cordial greetings, MUSSOLINI. Fascism As Action, As Feeling, and As Thought Much has been said, and is now being said for or against this complex political and social phenomenon which in the brief period of six years has taken complete hold of Italian life and, spreading beyond the borders of the Kingdom, has made itself felt in varying degrees of intensity throughout the world. But people have been much more eager to extol or to deplore than to understand--which is natural enough in a period of tumultuous fervor and of political passion. The time has not yet arrived for a dispassionate judgment. For even I, who noticed the very first manifestations of this great development, saw its significance from the start and participated directly in its first doings, carefully watching all its early uncertain and changing developments, even I do not feel competent to pass definite judgment. Fascism is so large a part of myself that it would be both arbitrary and absurd for me to try to dissociate my personality from it, to submit it to impartial scrutiny in order to evaluate it coldly and accurately. What can be done, however, and it seldom is attempted, is to make inquiry into the phenomenon which shall not merely consider its fragmentary and adventitious aspects, but strive to get at its inner essence. The undertaking may not be easy, but it is necessary, and no occasion for attempting it is more suitable than the present one afforded me by my friends of Perugia. Suitable it is in time because, at the inauguration of a course of lectures and lessons principally intended to illustrate that old and glorious trend of the life and history of Italy which takes its name from the humble saint of Assisi, it seemed natural to connect it with the greatest achievement of modern Italy, different in so many ways from the Franciscan movement, but united with it by the mighty common current of Italian History. It is suitable as well in place because at Perugia, which witnessed the growth of our religious ideas, of our political doctrines and of our legal science in the course of the most glorious centuries of our cultural history, the mind is properly disposed and almost oriented towards an investigation of this nature. First of all let us ask ourselves if there is a political doctrine of Fascism; if there is any ideal content in the Fascist state. For in order to link Fascism, both as concept and system, with the history of Italian thought and find therein a place for it, we must first show that it is thought; that it is a doctrine. Many persons are not quite convinced that it is either the one or the other; and I am not referring solely to those men, cultured or uncultured, as the case may be and very numerous everywhere, who can discern in this political innovation nothing except its local and personal aspects, and who know Fascism only as the particular manner of behavior of this or that well-known Fascist, of this or that group of a certain town; who therefore like or dislike the movement on the basis of their likes and dislikes for the individuals who represent it. Nor do I refer to those intelligent, and cultivated persons, very intelligent indeed and very cultivated, who because of their direct or indirect allegiance to the parties that have been dispossessed by the advent of Fascism, have a natural cause of resentment against it and are therefore unable to see, in the blindness of hatred, anything good in it. I am referring rather to those--and there are many in our ranks too--who know Fascism as action and feeling but not yet as thought, who therefore have an intuition but no comprehension of it. It is true that Fascism is, above all, action and sentiment and that such it must continue to be. Were it otherwise, it could not keep up that immense driving force, that renovating power which it now possesses and would merely be the solitary meditation of a chosen few. Only because it is feeling and sentiment, only because it is the unconscious reawakening of our profound racial instinct, has it the force to stir the soul of the people, and to set free an irresistible current of national will. Only because it is action, and as such actualizes itself in a vast organization and in a huge movement, has it the conditions for determining the historical course of contemporary Italy. But Fascism is thought as well and it has a theory, which is an essential part of this historical phenomenon, and which is responsible in a great measure for the successes that have been achieved. To the existence of this ideal content of Fascism, to the truth of this Fascist logic we ascribe the fact that though we commit many errors of detail, we very seldom go astray on fundamentals, whereas all the parties of the opposition, deprived as they are of an informing, animating principle, of a unique directing concept, do very often wage their war faultlessly in minor tactics, better trained as they are in parliamentary and journalistic manoeuvres, but they constantly break down on the important issues. Fascism, moreover, considered as action, is a typically Italian phenomenon and acquires a universal validity because of the existence of this coherent and organic doctrine. The originality of Fascism is due in great part to the autonomy of its theoretical principles. For even when, in its external behavior and in its conclusions, it seems identical with other political creeds, in reality it possesses an inner originality due to the new spirit which animates it and to an entirely different theoretical approach. Common Origins and Common Background of Modern Political Doctrines: From Liberalism to Socialism Modern political thought remained, until recently, both in Italy and outside of Italy under the absolute control of those doctrines which, proceeding from the Protestant Reformation and developed by the adepts of natural law in the XVII and XVIII centuries, were firmly grounded in the institutions and customs of the English, of the American, and of the French Revolutions. Under different and sometimes clashing forms these doctrines have left a determining imprint upon all theories and actions both social and political, of the XIX and XX centuries down to the rise of Fascism. The common basis of all these doctrines, which stretch from Longuet, from Buchanan, and from Althusen down to Karl Marx, to Wilson and to Lenin is a social and state concept which I shall call mechanical or atomistic. Society according to this concept is merely a sum total of individuals, a plurality which breaks up into its single components. Therefore the ends of a society, so considered, are nothing more than the ends of the individuals which compose it and for whose sake it exists. An atomistic view of this kind is also necessarily anti-historical, inasmuch as it considers society in its spatial attributes and not in its temporal ones; and because it reduces social life to the existence of a single generation. Society becomes thus a sum of determined individuals, viz., the generation living at a given moment. This doctrine which I call atomistic and which appears to be anti-historical, reveals from under a concealing cloak a strongly materialistic nature. For in its endeavors to isolate the present from the past and the future, it rejects the spiritual inheritance of ideas and sentiments which each generation receives from those preceding and hands down to the following generation thus destroying the unity and the spiritual life itself of human society. This common basis shows the close logical connection existing between all political doctrines; the substantial solidarity, which unites all the political movements, from Liberalism to Socialism, that until recently have dominated Europe. For these political schools differ from one another in their methods, but all agree as to the ends to be achieved. All of them consider the welfare and happiness of individuals to be the goal of society, itself considered as composed of individuals of the present generation. All of them see in society and in its juridical organization, the state, the mere instrument and means whereby individuals can attain their ends. They differ only in that the methods pursued for the attainment of these ends vary considerably one from the other. Thus the Liberals insist that the best manner to secure the welfare of the citizens as individuals is to interfere as little as possible with the free development of their activities and that therefore the essential task of the state is merely to coordinate these several liberties in such a way as to guarantee their coexistence. Kant, who was without doubt the most powerful and thorough philosopher of liberalism, said, "man, who is the end, cannot be assumed to have the value of an instrument." And again, "justice, of which the state is the specific organ, is the condition whereby the freedom of each is conditioned upon the freedom of others, according to the general law of liberty." Having thus defined the task of the state, Liberalism confines itself to the demand of certain guarantees which are to keep the state from overstepping its functions as general coordinator of liberties and from sacrificing the freedom of individuals more than is absolutely necessary for the accomplishment of its purpose. All the efforts are therefore directed to see to it that the ruler, mandatory of all and entrusted with the realization, through and by liberty, of the harmonious happiness of everybody, should never be clothed with undue power. Hence the creation of a system of checks and limitations designed to keep the rulers within bounds; and among these, first and foremost, the principle of the division of powers, contrived as a means for weakening the state in its relation to the individual, by making it impossible for the state ever to appear, in its dealings with citizens, in the full plenitude of sovereign powers; also the principle of the participation of citizens in the lawmaking power, as a means for securing, in behalf of the individual, a direct check on this, the strongest branch, and an indirect check on the entire government of the state. This system of checks and limitations, which goes by the name of constitutional government resulted in a moderate and measured liberalism. The checking power was exercised only by those citizens who were deemed worthy and capable, with the result that a small élite was made to represent legally the entire body politic for whose benefit this régime was instituted. It was evident, however, that this moderate system, being fundamentally illogical and in contradiction with the very principles from which it proceeded, would soon become the object of serious criticism. For if the object of society and of the state is the welfare of individuals, severally considered, how is it possible to admit that this welfare can be secured by the individuals themselves only through the possibilities of such a liberal régime? The inequalities brought about both by nature and by social organizations are so numerous and so serious, that, for the greater part, individuals abandoned to themselves not only would fail to attain happiness, but would also contribute to the perpetuation of their condition of misery and dejection. The state therefore cannot limit itself to the merely negative function of the defense of liberty. It must become active, in behalf of everybody, for the welfare of the people. It must intervene, when necessary, in order to improve the material, intellectual, and moral conditions of the masses; it must find work for the unemployed, instruct and educate the people, and care for health and hygiene. For if the purpose of society and of the state is the welfare of individuals, and if it is just that these individuals themselves control the attainment of their ends, it becomes difficult to understand why Liberalism should not go the whole distance, why it should see fit to distinguish certain individuals from the rest of the mass, and why the functions of the people should be restricted to the exercise of a mere check. Therefore the state, if it exists for all, must be governed by all, and not by a small minority: if the state is for the people, sovereignty must reside in the people: if all individuals have the right to govern the state, liberty is no longer sufficient; equality must be added: and if sovereignty is vested in the people, the people must wield all sovereignty and not merely a part of it. The power to check and curb the government is not sufficient. The people must be the government. Thus, logically developed, Liberalism leads to Democracy, for Democracy contains the promises of Liberalism but oversteps its limitations in that it makes the action of the state positive, proclaims the equality of all citizens through the dogma of popular sovereignty. Democracy therefore necessarily implies a republican form of government even though at times, for reasons of expediency, it temporarily adjusts itself to a monarchical régime. Once started on this downward grade of logical deductions it was inevitable that this atomistic theory of state and society should pass on to a more advanced position. Great industrial developments and the existence of a huge mass of working men, as yet badly treated and in a condition of semi-servitude, possibly endurable in a régime of domestic industry, became intolerable after the industrial revolution. Hence a state of affairs which towards the middle of the last century appeared to be both cruel and threatening. It was therefore natural that the following question be raised: "If the state is created for the welfare of its citizens, severally considered, how can it tolerate an economic system which divides the population into a small minority of exploiters, the capitalists, on one side, and an immense multitude of exploited, the working people, on the other?" No! The state must again intervene and give rise to a different and less iniquitous economic organization, by abolishing private property, by assuming direct control of all production, and by organizing it in such a way that the products of labor be distributed solely among those who create them, viz., the working classes. Hence we find Socialism, with its new economic organization of society, abolishing private ownership of capital and of the instruments and means of production, socializing the product, suppressing the extra profit of capital, and turning over to the working class the entire output of the productive processes. It is evident that Socialism contains and surpasses Democracy in the same way that Democracy comprises and surpasses Liberalism, being a more advanced development of the same fundamental concept. Socialism in its turn generates the still more extreme doctrine of Bolshevism which demands the violent suppression of the holders of capital, the dictatorship of the proletariat, as means for a fairer economic organization of society and for the rescue of the laboring classes from capitalistic exploitation. Thus Liberalism, Democracy, and Socialism, appear to be, as they are in reality, not only the offspring of one and the same theory of government, but also logical derivations one of the other. Logically developed Liberalism leads to Democracy; the logical development of Democracy issues into Socialism. It is true that for many years, and with some justification, Socialism was looked upon as antithetical to Liberalism. But the antithesis is purely relative and breaks down as we approach the common origin and foundation of the two doctrines, for we find that the opposition is one of method, not of purpose. The end is the same for both, viz., the welfare of the individual members of society. The difference lies in the fact that Liberalism would be guided to its goal by liberty, whereas Socialism strives to attain it by the collective organization of production. There is therefore no antithesis nor even a divergence as to the nature and scope of the state and the relation of individuals to society. There is only a difference of evaluation of the means for bringing about these ends and establishing these relations, which difference depends entirely on the different economic conditions which prevailed at the time when the various doctrines were formulated. Liberalism arose and began to thrive in the period of small industry; Socialism grew with the rise of industrialism and of world-wide capitalism. The dissension therefore between these two points of view, or the antithesis, if we wish so to call it, is limited to the economic field. Socialism is at odds with Liberalism only on the question of the organization of production and of the division of wealth. In religious, intellectual, and moral matters it is liberal, as it is liberal and democratic in its politics. Even the anti-liberalism and anti-democracy of Bolshevism are in themselves purely contingent. For Bolshevism is opposed to Liberalism only in so far as the former is revolutionary, not in its socialistic aspect. For if the opposition of the Bolsheviki to liberal and democratic doctrines were to continue, as now seems more and more probable, the result might be a complete break between Bolshevism and Socialism notwithstanding the fact that the ultimate aims of both are identical. Fascism as an Integral Doctrine of Sociality Antithetical to the Atomism of Liberal, Democratic, and Socialistic Theories The true antithesis, not to this or that manifestation of the liberal-democratic-socialistic conception of the state but to the concept itself, is to be found in the doctrine of Fascism. For while the disagreement between Liberalism and Democracy, and between Liberalism and Socialism lies in a difference of method, as we have said, the rift between Socialism, Democracy, and Liberalism on one side and Fascism on the other is caused by a difference in concept. As a matter of fact, Fascism never raises the question of methods, using in its political praxis now liberal ways, now democratic means and at times even socialistic devices. This indifference to method often exposes Fascism to the charge of incoherence on the part of superficial observers, who do not see that what counts with us is the end and that therefore even when we employ the same means we act with a radically different spiritual attitude and strive for entirely different results. The Fascist concept then of the nation, of the scope of the state, and of the relations obtaining between society and its individual components, rejects entirely the doctrine which I said proceeded from the theories of natural law developed in the course of the XVI, XVII, and XVIII centuries and which form the basis of the liberal, democratic, and socialistic ideology. I shall not try here to expound this doctrine but shall limit myself to a brief résumé of its fundamental concepts. Man--the political animal--according to the definition of Aristotle, lives and must live in society. A human being outside the pale of society is an inconceivable thing--a non-man. Humankind in its entirety lives in social groups that are still, today, very numerous and diverse, varying in importance and organization from the tribes of Central Africa to the great Western Empires. These various societies are fractions of the human species each one of them endowed with a unified organization. And as there is no unique organization of the human species, there is not "one" but there are "several" human societies. Humanity therefore exists solely as a biological concept not as a social one. Each society on the other hand exists in the unity of both its biological and its social contents. Socially considered it is a fraction of the human species endowed with unity of organization for the attainment of the peculiar ends of the species. This definition brings out all the elements of the social phenomenon and not merely those relating to the preservation and perpetuation of the species. For man is not solely matter; and the ends of the human species, far from being the materialistic ones we have in common with other animals, are, rather, and predominantly, the spiritual finalities which are peculiar to man and which every form of society strives to attain as well as its stage of social development allows. Thus the organization of every social group is more or less pervaded by the spiritual influxes of: unity of language, of culture, of religion, of tradition, of customs, and in general of feeling and of volition, which are as essential as the material elements: unity of economic interests, of living conditions, and of territory. The definition given above demonstrates another truth, which has been ignored by the political doctrines that for the last four centuries have been the foundations of political systems, viz., that the social concept has a biological aspect, because social groups are fractions of the human species, each one possessing a peculiar organization, a particular rank in the development of civilization with certain needs and appropriate ends, in short, a life which is really its own. If social groups are then fractions of the human species, they must possess the same fundamental traits of the human species, which means that they must be considered as a succession of generations and not as a collection of individuals. It is evident therefore that as the human species is not the total of the living human beings of the world, so the various social groups which compose it are not the sum of the several individuals which at a given moment belong to it, but rather the infinite series of the past, present, and future generations constituting it. And as the ends of the human species are not those of the several individuals living at a certain moment, being occasionally in direct opposition to them, so the ends of the various social groups are not necessarily those of the individuals that belong to the groups but may even possibly be in conflict with such ends, as one sees clearly whenever the preservation and the development of the species demand the sacrifice of the individual, to wit, in times of war. Fascism replaces therefore the old atomistic and mechanical state theory which was at the basis of the liberal and democratic doctrines with an organic and historic concept. When I say organic I do not wish to convey the impression that I consider society as an organism after the manner of the so-called "organic theories of the state"; but rather to indicate that the social groups as fractions of the species receive thereby a life and scope which transcend the scope and life of the individuals identifying themselves with the history and finalities of the uninterrupted series of generations. It is irrelevant in this connection to determine whether social groups, considered as fractions of the species, constitute organisms. The important thing is to ascertain that this organic concept of the state gives to society a continuous life over and beyond the existence of the several individuals. The relations therefore between state and citizens are completely reversed by the Fascist doctrine. Instead of the liberal-democratic formula, "society for the individual," we have, "individuals for society" with this difference however: that while the liberal doctrines eliminated society, Fascism does not submerge the individual in the social group. It subordinates him, but does not eliminate him; the individual as a part of his generation ever remaining an element of society however transient and insignificant he may be. Moreover the development of individuals in each generation, when coordinated and harmonized, conditions the development and prosperity of the entire social unit. At this juncture the antithesis between the two theories must appear complete and absolute. Liberalism, Democracy, and Socialism look upon social groups as aggregates of living individuals; for Fascism they are the recapitulating unity of the indefinite series of generations. For Liberalism, society has no purposes other than those of the members living at a given moment. For Fascism, society has historical and immanent ends of preservation, expansion, improvement, quite distinct from those of the individuals which at a given moment compose it; so distinct in fact that they may even be in opposition. Hence the necessity, for which the older doctrines make little allowance, of sacrifice, even up to the total immolation of individuals, in behalf of society; hence the true explanation of war, eternal law of mankind, interpreted by the liberal-democratic doctrines as a degenerate absurdity or as a maddened monstrosity. For Liberalism, society has no life distinct from the life of the individuals, or as the phrase goes: solvitur in singularitates. For Fascism, the life of society overlaps the existence of individuals and projects itself into the succeeding generations through centuries and millennia. Individuals come into being, grow, and die, followed by others, unceasingly; social unity remains always identical to itself. For Liberalism, the individual is the end and society the means; nor is it conceivable that the individual, considered in the dignity of an ultimate finality, be lowered to mere instrumentality. For Fascism, society is the end, individuals the means, and its whole life consists in using individuals as instruments for its social ends. The state therefore guards and protects the welfare and development of individuals not for their exclusive interest, but because of the identity of the needs of individuals with those of society as a whole. We can thus accept and explain institutions and practices, which like the death penalty, are condemned by Liberalism in the name of the preeminence of individualism. The fundamental problem of society in the old doctrines is the question of the rights of individuals. It may be the right to freedom as the Liberals would have it; or the right to the government of the commonwealth as the Democrats claim it, or the right to economic justice as the Socialists contend; but in every case it is the right of individuals, or groups of individuals (classes). Fascism on the other hand faces squarely the problem of the right of the state and of the duty of individuals. Individual rights are only recognized in so far as they are implied in the rights of the state. In this preeminence of duty we find the highest ethical value of Fascism. The Problems of Liberty, of Government, and of Social Justice in the Political Doctrine of Fascism This, however, does not mean that the problems raised by the other schools are ignored by Fascism. It means simply that it faces them and solves them differently, as, for example, the problem of liberty. There is a Liberal theory of freedom, and there is a Fascist concept of liberty. For we, too, maintain the necessity of safeguarding the conditions that make for the free development of the individual; we, too, believe that the oppression of individual personality can find no place in the modern state. We do not, however, accept a bill of rights which tends to make the individual superior to the state and to empower him to act in opposition to society. Our concept of liberty is that the individual must be allowed to develop his personality in behalf of the state, for these ephemeral and infinitesimal elements of the complex and permanent life of society determine by their normal growth the development of the state. But this individual growth must be normal. A huge and disproportionate development of the individual of classes, would prove as fatal to society as abnormal growths are to living organisms. Freedom therefore is due to the citizen and to classes on condition that they exercise it in the interest of society as a whole and within the limits set by social exigencies, liberty being, like any other individual right, a concession of the state. What I say concerning civil liberties applies to economic freedom as well. Fascism does not look upon the doctrine of economic liberty as an absolute dogma. It does not refer economic problems to individual needs, to individual interest, to individual solutions. On the contrary it considers the economic development, and especially the production of wealth, as an eminently social concern, wealth being for society an essential element of power and prosperity. But Fascism maintains that in the ordinary run of events economic liberty serves the social purposes best; that it is profitable to entrust to individual initiative the task of economic development both as to production and as to distribution; that in the economic world individual ambition is the most effective means for obtaining the best social results with the least effort. Therefore, on the question also of economic liberty the Fascists differ fundamentally from the Liberals; the latter see in liberty a principle, the the Fascists accept it as a method. By the Liberals, freedom is recognized in the interest of the citizens; the Fascists grant it in the interest of society. In other terms, Fascists make of the individual an economic instrument for the advancement of society, an instrument which they use so long as it functions and which they subordinate when no longer serviceable. In this guise Fascism solves the eternal problem of economic freedom and of state interference, considering both as mere methods which may or may not be employed in accordance with the social needs of the moment. What I have said concerning political and economic Liberalism applies also to Democracy. The latter envisages fundamentally the problem of sovereignty; Fascism does also, but in an entirely different manner. Democracy vests sovereignty in the people, that is to say, in the mass of human beings. Fascism discovers sovereignty to be inherent in society when it is juridically organized as a state. Democracy therefore turns over the government of the state to the multitude of living men that they may use it to further their own interests; Fascism insists that the government be entrusted to men capable of rising above their own private interests and of realizing the aspirations of the social collectivity, considered in its unity and in its relation to the past and future. Fascism therefore not only rejects the dogma of popular sovereignty and substitutes for it that of state sovereignty, but it also proclaims that the great mass of citizens is not a suitable advocate of social interests for the reason that the capacity to ignore individual private interests in favor of the higher demands of society and of history is a very rare gift and the privilege of the chosen few. Natural intelligence and cultural preparation are of great service in such tasks. Still more valuable perhaps is the intuitiveness of rare great minds, their traditionalism and their inherited qualities. This must not however be construed to mean that the masses are not to be allowed to exercise any influence on the life of the state. On the contrary, among peoples with a great history and with noble traditions, even the lowest elements of society possess an instinctive discernment of what is necessary for the welfare of the race, which in moments of great historical crises reveals itself to be almost infallible. It is therefore as wise to afford to this instinct the means of declaring itself as it is judicious to entrust the normal control of the commonwealth to a selected élite. As for Socialism, the Fascist doctrine frankly recognizes that the problem raised by it as to the relations between capital and labor is a very serious one, perhaps the central one of modern life. What Fascism does not countenance is the collectivistic solution proposed by the Socialists. The chief defect of the socialistic method has been clearly demonstrated by the experience of the last few years. It does not take into account human nature, it is therefore outside of reality, in that it will not recognize that the most powerful spring of human activities lies in individual self-interest and that therefore the elimination from the economic field of this interest results in complete paralysis. The suppression of private ownership of capital carries with it the suppression of capital itself, for capital is formed by savings and no one will want to save, but will rather consume all he makes if he knows he cannot keep and hand down to his heirs the results of his labors. The dispersion of capital means the end of production since capital, no matter who owns it, is always an indispensable tool of production. Collective organization of production is followed therefore by the paralysis of production since, by eliminating from the productive mechanism the incentive of individual interest, the product becomes rarer and more costly. Socialism then, as experience has shown, leads to increase in consumption, to the dispersion of capital and therefore to poverty. Of what avail is it, then, to build a social machine which will more justly distribute wealth if this very wealth is destroyed by the construction of this machine? Socialism committed an irreparable error when it made of private property a matter of justice while in truth it is a problem of social utility. The recognition of individual property rights, then, is a part of the Fascist doctrine not because of its individual bearing but because of its social utility. We must reject, therefore, the socialistic solution but we cannot allow the problem raised by the Socialists to remain unsolved, not only because justice demands a solution but also because the persistence of this problem in liberal and democratic régimes has been a menace to public order and to the authority of the state. Unlimited and unrestrained class self-defense, evinced by strikes and lockouts, by boycotts and sabotage, leads inevitably to anarchy. The Fascist doctrine, enacting justice among the classes in compliance with a fundamental necessity of modern life, does away with class self-defense, which, like individual self-defense in the days of barbarism, is a source of disorder and of civil war. Having reduced the problem of these terms, only one solution is possible, the realization of justice among the classes by and through the state. Centuries ago the state, as the specific organ of justice, abolished personal self-defense in individual controversies and substituted for it state justice. The time has now come when class self-defense also must be replaced by state justice. To facilitate the change Fascism has created its own syndicalism. The suppression of class self-defense does not mean the suppression of class defense which is an inalienable necessity of modern economic life. Class organization is a fact which cannot be ignored but it must be controlled, disciplined, and subordinated by the state. The syndicate, instead of being, as formerly, an organ of extra-legal defense, must be turned into an organ of legal defense which will become judicial defense as soon as labor conflicts become a matter of judicial settlement. Fascism therefore has transformed the syndicate, that old revolutionary instrument of syndicalistic socialists, into an instrument of legal defense of the classes both within and without the law courts. This solution may encounter obstacles in its development; the obstacles of malevolence, of suspicion of the untried, of erroneous calculation, etc., but it is destined to triumph even though it must advance through progressive stages. Historical Value of the Doctrine of Fascism I might carry this analysis farther but what I have already said is sufficient to show that the rise of a Fascist ideology already gives evidence of an upheaval in the intellectual field as powerful as the change that was brought about in the XVII and XVIII centuries by the rise and diffusion of those doctrines of _ius naturale_ which go under the name of "Philosophy of the French Revolution." The philosophy of the French Revolution formulated certain principles, the authority of which, unquestioned for a century and a half, seemed so final that they were given the attribute of immortality. The influence of these principles was so great that they determined the formation of a new culture, of a new civilization. Likewise the fervor of the ideas that go to make up the Fascist doctrine, now in its inception but destined to spread rapidly, will determine the course of a new culture and of a new conception of civil life. The deliverance of the individual from the state carried out in the XVIII century will be followed in the XX century by the rescue of the state from the individual. The period of authority, of social obligations, of "hierarchical" subordination will succeed the period of individualism, of state feebleness, of insubordination. This innovating trend is not and cannot be a return to the Middle Ages. It is a common but an erroneous belief that the movement, started by the Reformation and heightened by the French Revolution, was directed against mediaeval ideas and institutions. Rather than as a negation, this movement should be looked upon as the development and fulfillment of the doctrines and practices of the Middle Ages. Socially and politically considered the Middle Ages wrought disintegration and anarchy; they were characterized by the gradual weakening and ultimate extinction of the state, embodied in the Roman Empire, driven first to the East, then back to France, thence to Germany, a shadow of its former self; they were marked by the steady advance of the forces of usurpation, destructive of the state and reciprocally obnoxious; they bore the imprints of a triumphant particularism. Therefore the individualistic and anti-social movement of the XVII and XVIII centuries was not directed against the Middle Ages, but rather against the restoration of the state by great national monarchies. If this movement destroyed mediaeval institutions that had survived the Middle Ages and had been grafted upon the new states, it was in consequence of the struggle primarily waged against the state. The spirit of the movement was decidedly mediaeval. The novelty consisted in the social surroundings in which it operated and in its relation to new economic developments. The individualism of the feudal lords, the particularism of the cities and of the corporations had been replaced by the individualism and the particularism of the bourgeoisie and of the popular classes. The Fascist ideology cannot therefore look back to the Middle Ages, of which it is a complete negation. The Middle Ages spell disintegration; Fascism is nothing if not sociality. It is if anything the beginning of the end of the Middle Ages prolonged four centuries beyond the end ordinarily set for them and revived by the social democratic anarchy of the past thirty years. If Fascism can be said to look back at all it is rather in the direction of ancient Rome whose social and political traditions at the distance of fifteen centuries are being revived by Fascist Italy. I am fully aware that the value of Fascism, as an intellectual movement, baffles the minds of many of its followers and supporters and is denied outright by its enemies. There is no malice in this denial, as I see it, but rather an incapacity to comprehend. The liberal-democratic-socialistic ideology has so completely and for so long a time dominated Italian culture that in the minds of the majority of people trained by it, it has assumed the value of an absolute truth, almost the authority of a natural law. Every faculty of self-criticism is suppressed in the minds and this suppression entails an incapacity for understanding that time alone can change. It will be advisable therefore to rely mainly upon the new generations and in general upon persons whose culture is not already fixed. This difficulty to comprehend on the part of those who have been thoroughly grounded by a different preparation in the political and social sciences explains in part why Fascism has not been wholly successful with the intellectual classes and with mature minds, and why on the other hand it has been very successful with young people, with women, in rural districts, and among men of action unencumbered by a fixed and set social and political education. Fascism moreover, as a cultural movement, is just now taking its first steps. As in the case with all great movements, action regularly outstrips thought. It was thus at the time of the Protestant Reformation and of the individualistic reaction of the XVII and XVIII centuries. The English revolution occurred when the doctrines of natural law were coming into being and the theoretical development of the liberal and democratic theories followed the French Revolution. At this point it will not be very difficult to assign a fitting place in history to this great trend of thought which is called Fascism and which, in spite of the initial difficulties, already gives clear indication of the magnitude of its developments. The liberal-democratic speculation both in its origin and in the manner of its development appears to be essentially a non-Italian formation. Its connection with the Middle Ages already shows it to be foreign to the Latin mind, the mediaeval disintegration being the result of the triumph of Germanic individualism over the political mentality of the Romans. The barbarians, boring from within and hacking from without, pulled down the great political structure raised by Latin genius and put nothing in its place. Anarchy lasted eight centuries during which time only one institution survived and that a Roman one--the Catholic Church. But, as soon as the laborious process of reconstruction was started with the constitution of the great national states backed by the Roman Church the Protestant Reformation set in followed by the individualistic currents of the XVII and XVIII centuries, and the process of disintegration was started anew. This anti-state tendency was the expression of the Germanic spirit and it therefore became predominant among the Germanic peoples and wherever Germanism had left a deep imprint even if afterward superficially covered by a veneer of Latin culture. It is true that Marsilius from Padua is an Italian writing for Ludwig the Bavarian, but the other writers who in the XIV century appear as forerunners of the liberal doctrines are not Italians: Occam and Wycliff are English; Oresme is French. Among the advocates of individualism in the XVI century who prepared the way for the triumph of the doctrines of natural law in the subsequent centuries, Hotman and Languet are French, Buchanan is Scotch. Of the great authorities of natural law, Grotius and Spinosa are Dutch; Locke is English; l'Abbé de St. Pierre, Montesquieu, d'Argenson, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and the encyclopaedists are French; Althusius, Pufendorf, Kant, Fichte are German. Italy took no part in the rise and development of the doctrines of natural law. Only in the XIX century did she evince a tardy interest in these doctrines, just as she tardily contributed to them at the dose of the XVIII century through the works of Beccaria and Filangeri. While therefore in other countries such as France, England, Germany, and Holland, the general tradition in the social and political sciences worked in behalf of anti-state individualism, and therefore of liberal and democratic doctrines, Italy, on the other hand, clung to the powerful legacy of its past in virtue of which she proclaims the rights of the state, the preeminence of its authority, and the superiority of its ends. The very fact that the Italian political doctrine in the Middle Ages linked itself with the great political writers of antiquity, Plato and Aristotle, who in a different manner but with an equal firmness advocated a strong state and the subordination of individuals to it, is a sufficient index of the orientation of political philosophy in Italy. We all know how thorough and crushing the authority of Aristotle was in the Middle Ages. But for Aristotle the spiritual cement of the state is "virtue" not absolute virtue but political virtue, which is social devotion. His state is made up solely of its citizens, the citizens being either those who defend it with their arms or who govern it as magistrates. All others who provide it with the materials and services it needs are not citizens. They become such only in the corrupt forms of certain democracies. Society is therefore divided into two classes, the free men or citizens who give their time to noble and virtuous occupations and who profess their subjection to the state, and the laborers and slaves who work for the maintenance of the former. No man in this scheme is his own master. The slaves belong to the freemen, and the freemen belong to the state. It was therefore natural that St. Thomas Aquinas the greatest political writer of the Middle Ages should emphasize the necessity of unity in the political field, the harm of plurality of rulers, the dangers and damaging effects of demagogy. The good of the state, says St. Thomas Aquinas, is unity. And who can procure unity more fittingly than he who is himself one? Moreover the government must follow, as far as possible, the course of nature and in nature power is always one. In the physical body only one organ is dominant--the heart; in the spirit only one faculty has sway--reason. Bees have one sole ruler; and the entire universe one sole sovereign--God. Experience shows that the countries, which are ruled by many, perish because of discord while those that are ruled over by one enjoy peace, justice, and plenty. The States which are not ruled by one are troubled by dissensions, and toil unceasingly. On the contrary the states which are ruled over by one king enjoy peace, thrive in justice and are gladdened by affluence.[2] The rule of the multitudes can not be sanctioned, for where the crowd rules it oppresses the rich as would a tyrant.[3] Italy in the Middle Ages presented a curious phenomenon: while in practice the authority of the state was being dissolved into a multiplicity of competing sovereignties, the theory of state unity and authority was kept alive in the minds of thinkers by the memories of the Roman Imperial tradition. It was this memory that supported for centuries the fiction of the universal Roman Empire when in reality it existed no longer. Dante's _De Monarchia_ deduced the theory of this empire conceived as the unity of a strong state. "Quod potest fieri per unum melius est per unum fieri quam plura," he says in the XIV chapter of the first book, and further on, considering the citizen as an instrument for the attainment of the ends of the state, he concludes that the individual must sacrifice himself for his country. "Si pars debet se exponere pro salute totius, cum homo siti pars quaedam civitatis ... homo pro patria debet exponere se ipsum." (lib. II. 8). The Roman tradition, which was one of practice but not of theories--for Rome constructed the most solid state known to history with extraordinary statesmanship but with hardly any political writings--influenced considerably the founder of modern political science, Nicolo Machiavelli, who was himself in truth not a creator of doctrines but a keen observer of human nature who derived from the study of history practical maxims of political import. He freed the science of politics from the formalism of the scholastics and brought it close to concrete reality. His writings, an inexhaustible mine of practical remarks and precious observations, reveal dominant in him the state idea, no longer abstract but in the full historical concreteness of the national unity of Italy. Machiavelli therefore is not only the greatest of modern political writers, he is also the greatest of our countrymen in full possession of a national Italian consciousness. To liberate Italy, which was in his day "enslaved, torn and pillaged," and to make her more powerful, he would use any means, for to his mind the holiness of the end justified them completely. In this he was sharply rebuked by foreigners who were not as hostile to his means as they were fearful of the end which he propounded. He advocated therefore the constitution of a strong Italian state, supported by the sacrifices and by the blood of the citizens, not defended by mercenary troops; well-ordered internally, aggressive and bent on expansion. "Weak republics," he said, "have no determination and can never reach a decision." (Disc. I. c. 38). "Weak states were ever dubious in choosing their course, and slow deliberations are always harmful." (Disc. I. c. 10). And again: "Whoso undertakes to govern a multitude either in a régime of liberty or in a monarchy, without previously making sure of those who are hostile to the new order of things builds a short-lived state." (Disc. I. c. 16). And further on "the dictatorial authority helped and did not harm the Roman republic" (Disc. I. c. 34), and "Kings and republics lacking in national troops both for offense and defense should be ashamed of their existence." (Disc. I. c. 21). And again: "Money not only does not protect you but rather it exposes you to plundering assaults. Nor can there be a more false opinion than that which says that money is the sinews of war. Not money but good soldiers win battles." (Disc. I. II. c. 10). "The country must be defended with ignominy or with glory and in either way it is nobly defended." (Disc. III. c. 41). "And with dash and boldness people often capture what they never would have obtained by ordinary means." (Disc. III. c. 44). Machiavelli was not only a great political authority, he taught the mastery of energy and will. Fascism learns from him not only its doctrines but its action as well. Different from Machiavelli's, in mental attitude, in cultural preparation, and in manner of presentation, G.B. Vico must yet be connected with the great Florentine from whom in a certain way he seems to proceed. In the heyday of "natural law" Vico is decidedly opposed to _ius naturale_ and in his attacks against its advocates, Grotius, Seldenus and Pufendorf, he systematically assails the abstract, rationalistic, and utilitarian principles of the XVIII century. As Montemayor justly says:[4] "While the 'natural jurists', basing justice and state on utility and interest and grounding human certitude on reason, were striving to draft permanent codes and construct the perfect state, Vico strongly asserted the social nature of man, the ethical character of the juridical consciousness and its growth through the history of humanity rather than in sacred history. Vico therefore maintains that doctrines must begin with those subjects which take up and explain the entire course of civilization. Experience and not ratiocination, history and not reason must help human wisdom to understand the civil and political regimes which were the result not of reason or philosophy, but rather of common sense, or if you will of the social consciousness of man" and farther on (pages 373-374), "to Vico we owe the conception of history in its fullest sense as magistra vitae, the search after the humanity of history, the principle which makes the truth progress with time, the discovery of the political 'course' of nations. It is Vico who uttered the eulogy of the patrician 'heroic hearts' of the 'patres patriae' first founders of states, magnanimous defenders of the commonwealth and wise counsellors of politics. To Vico we owe the criticism of democracies, the affirmation of their brief existence, of their rapid disintegration at the hands of factions and demagogues, of their lapse first into anarchy, then into monarchy, when their degradation does not make them a prey of foreign oppressors. Vico conceived of civil liberty as subjection to law, as just subordination, of the private to the public interests, to the sway of the state. It was Vico who sketched modern society as a world of nations each one guarding its own imperium, fighting just and not inhuman wars. In Vico therefore we find the condemnation of pacifism, the assertion that right is actualized by bodily force, that without force, right is of no avail, and that therefore 'qui ab iniuriis se tueri non potest servus est.'" It is not difficult to discern the analogies between these affirmations and the fundamental views and the spirit of Fascism. Nor should we marvel at this similarity. Fascism, a strictly Italian phenomenon, has its roots in the Risorgimento and the Risorgimento was influenced undoubtedly by Vico. It would be inexact to affirm that the philosophy of Vico dominated the Risorgimento. Too many elements of German, French, and English civilizations had been added to our culture during the first half of the XIX century to make this possible, so much so that perhaps Vico might have remained unknown to the makers of Italian unity if another powerful mind from Southern Italy, Vincenzo Cuoco, had not taken it upon himself to expound the philosophy of Vico in those very days in which the intellectual preparation of the Risorgimento was being carried on. An adequate account of Cuoco's doctrines would carry me too far. Montemayor, in the article quoted above, gives them considerable attention. He quotes among other things Cuoco's arraignment of Democracy: "Italy has fared badly at the hand of Democracy which has withered to their roots the three sacred plants of liberty, unity, and independence. If we wish to see these trees flourish again let us protect them in the future from Democracy." The influence of Cuoco, an exile at Milan, exerted through his writings, his newspaper articles, and Vichian propaganda, on the Italian patriots is universally recognized. Among the regular readers of his _Giornale Italiano_ we find Monti and Foscolo. Clippings of his articles were treasured by Mazzini and Manzoni, who often acted as his secretary, called him his "master in politics."[5] The influence of the Italian tradition summed up and handed down by Cuoco was felt by Mazzini whose interpretation of the function of the citizen as duty and mission is to be connected with Vico's doctrine rather than with the philosophic and political doctrines of the French Revolution. "Training for social duty," said Mazzini, "is essentially and logically unitarian. Life for it is but a duty, a mission. The norm and definition of such mission can only be found in a collective term superior to all the individuals of the country--in the people, in the nation. If there is a collective mission, a communion of duty ... it can only be represented in the national unity."[6] And farther on: "The declaration of rights, which all constitutions insist in copying slavishly from the French, express only those of the period ... which considered the individual as the end and pointed out only one half of the problem" and again, "assume the existence of one of those crises that threaten the life of the nation, and demand the active sacrifice of all its sons ... will you ask the citizens to face martyrdom in virtue of their rights? You have taught men that society was solely constituted to guarantee their rights and now you ask them to sacrifice one and all, to suffer and die for the safety of the 'nation?'"[7] In Mazzini's conception of the citizen as instrument for the attainment of the nation's ends and therefore submissive to a higher mission, to the duty of supreme sacrifice, we see the anticipation of one of the fundamental points of the Fascist doctrine. Unfortunately, the autonomy of the political thought of Italy, vigorously established in the works of Vico, nobly reclaimed by Vincenzo Cuoco, kept up during the struggles of the Risorgimento in spite of the many foreign influences of that period, seemed to exhaust itself immediately after the unification. Italian political thought which had been original in times of servitude, became enslaved in the days of freedom. A powerful innovating movement, issuing from the war and of which Fascism is the purest expression, was to restore Italian thought in the sphere of political doctrine to its own traditions which are the traditions of Rome. This task of intellectual liberation, now slowly being accomplished, is no less important than the political deliverance brought about by the Fascist Revolution. It is a great task which continues and integrates the Risorgimento; it is now bringing to an end, after the cessation of our political servitude, the intellectual dependence of Italy. Thanks to it, Italy again speaks to the world and the world listens to Italy. It is a great task and a great deed and it demands great efforts. To carry it through, we must, each one of us, free ourselves of the dross of ideas and mental habits which two centuries of foreign intellectualistic tradition have heaped upon us; we must not only take on a new culture but create for ourselves a new soul. We must methodically and patiently contribute something towards the organic and complete elaboration of our doctrine, at the same time supporting it both at home and abroad with untiring devotion. We ask this effort of renovation and collaboration of all Fascists, as well as of all who feel themselves to be Italians. After the hour of sacrifice comes the hour of unyielding efforts. To our work, then, fellow countrymen, for the glory of Italy! * * * * * FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: Translated from the Italian.] [Footnote 2: "civitates quae non reguntur ab uno dissenionibus laborant et absque pace fluctuant. E contrario civitates quae sub uno rege reguntur pace gaudent, iustitia florent et affluentia rerum laetantur." (De reg. princ. I. c. 2).] [Footnote 3: "ideo manifustum est, quod multitudo est sicut tyrannuus, quare operationes multitudinis sunt iniustae. ergo non expedit multitudinem dominari." (Comm. In Polit. L. III. lectio VIII).] [Footnote 4: Rivista internazionale di filosofia del diritto V. 351.] [Footnote 5: Montemayor. Riv. Int. etc. p. 370.] [Footnote 6: della unità italiana. Scritti, Vol. III.] [Footnote 7: I sistemi e la democrazia. Scritti, Vol. VII.] * * * * * THE PHILOSOPHIC BASIS OF FASCISM BY GIOVANNI GENTILE For the Italian nation the World War was the solution of a deep spiritual crisis. They willed and fought it long before they felt and evaluated it. But they willed, fought, felt and evaluated it in a certain spirit which Italy's generals and statesmen exploited, but which also worked on them, conditioning their policies and their action. The spirit in question was not altogether clear and self-consistent. That it lacked unanimity was particularly apparent just before and again just after the war when feelings were not subject to war discipline. It was as though the Italian character were crossed by two different currents which divided it into two irreconcilable sections. One need think only of the days of Italian neutrality and of the debates that raged between Interventionists and Neutralists. The ease with which the most inconsistent ideas were pressed into service by both parties showed that the issue was not between two opposing political opinions, two conflicting concepts of history, but actually between two different temperaments, two different souls. For one kind of person the important point was to fight the war, either on the side of Germany or against Germany: but in either event to fight the war, without regard to specific advantages--to fight the war in order that at last the Italian nation, created rather by favoring conditions than by the will of its people to be a nation, might receive its test in blood, such a test as only war can bring by uniting all citizens in a single thought, a single passion, a single hope, emphasizing to each individual that all have something in common, something transcending private interests. This was the very thing that frightened the other kind of person, the prudent man, the realist, who had a clear view of the mortal risks a young, inexperienced, badly prepared nation would be running in such a war, and who also saw--a most significant point--that, all things considered, a bargaining neutrality would surely win the country tangible rewards, as great as victorious participation itself. The point at issue was just that: the Italian Neutralists stood for material advantages, advantages tangible, ponderable, palpable; the Interventionists stood for moral advantages, intangible, impalpable, imponderable--imponderable at least on the scales used by their antagonists. On the eve of the war these two Italian characters stood facing each other, scowling and irreconcilable--the one on the aggressive, asserting itself ever more forcefully through the various organs of public opinion; the other on the defensive, offering resistance through the Parliament which in those days still seemed to be the basic repository of State sovereignty. Civil conflict seemed inevitable in Italy, and civil war was in fact averted only because the King took advantage of one of his prerogatives and declared war against the Central Powers. This act of the King was the first decisive step toward the solution of the crisis. II The crisis had ancient origins. Its roots sank deep into the inner spirit of the Italian people. What were the creative forces of the _Risorgimento_? The "Italian people," to which some historians are now tending to attribute an important if not a decisive role in our struggle for national unity and independence, was hardly on the scene at all. The active agency was always an idea become a person--it was one or several determined wills which were fixed on determined goals. There can be no question that the birth of modern Italy was the work of the few. And it could not be otherwise. It is always the few who represent the self-consciousness and the will of an epoch and determine what its history shall be; for it is they who see the forces at their disposal and through those forces actuate the one truly active and productive force--their own will. That will we find in the song of the poets and the ideas of the political writers, who know how to use a language harmonious with a universal sentiment or with a sentiment capable of becoming universal. In the case of Italy, in all our bards, philosophers and leaders, from Alfieri to Foscolo, from Leopardi to Manzoni, from Mazzini to Gioberti, we are able to pick up the threads of a new fabric, which is a new kind of thought, a new kind of soul, a new kind of Italy. This new Italy differed from the old Italy in something that was very simple but yet was of the greatest importance: this new Italy took life seriously, while the old one did not. People in every age had dreamed of an Italy and talked of an Italy. The notion of Italy had been sung in all kinds of music, propounded in all kinds of philosophy. But it was always an Italy that existed in the brain of some scholar whose learning was more or less divorced from reality. Now reality demands that convictions be taken seriously, that ideas become actions. Accordingly it was necessary that this Italy, which was an affair of brains only, become also an affair of hearts, become, that is, something serious, something alive. This, and no other, was the meaning of Mazzini's great slogan: "Thought and Action." It was the essence of the great revolution which he preached and which he accomplished by instilling his doctrine into the hearts of others. Not many others--a small minority! But they were numerous enough and powerful enough to raise the question where it could be answered--in Italian public opinion (taken in conjunction with the political situation prevailing in the rest of Europe). They were able to establish the doctrine that life is not a game, but a mission; that, therefore, the individual has a law and a purpose in obedience to which and in fulfillment of which he alone attains his true value; that, accordingly, he must make sacrifices, now of personal comfort, now of private interest, now of life itself. No revolution ever possessed more markedly than did the Italian _Risorgimento_ this characteristic of ideality, of thought preceding action. Our revolt was not concerned with the material needs of life, nor did it spring from elementary and widely diffused sentiments breaking out in popular uprisings and mass disturbances. The movements of 1847 and 1848 were demonstrations, as we would say today, of "intellectuals"; they were efforts toward a goal on the part of a minority of patriots who were standard bearers of an ideal and were driving governments and peoples toward its attainment. Idealism--understood as faith in the advent of an ideal reality, as a manner of conceiving life not as fixed within the limits of existing fact, but as incessant progress and transformation toward the level of a higher law which controls men with the very force of the idea--was the sum and substance of Mazzini's teaching; and it supplied the most conspicuous characteristic of our great Italian revolution. In this sense all the patriots who worked for the foundation of the new kingdom were Mazzinians--Gioberti, Cavour, Victor Emmanuel, Garibaldi. To be sure, our writers of the first rank, such as Manzoni and Rosmini, had no historical connection with Mazzini; but they had the same general tendency as Mazzini. Working along diverging lines, they all came together on the essential point: that true life is not the life which is, but also the life which ought to be. It was a conviction essentially religious in character, essentially anti-materialistic. III This religious and idealistic manner of looking at life, so characteristic of the _Risorgimento_, prevails even beyond the heroic age of the revolution and the establishment of the Kingdom. It survives down through Ricasoli, Lanza, Sella and Minghetti, down, that is, to the occupation of Rome and the systemization of our national finances. The parliamentary overturn of 1876, indeed, marks not the end, but rather an interruption, on the road that Italy had been following since the beginning of the century. The outlook then changed, and not by the capriciousness or weakness of men, but by a necessity of history which it would be idiotic in our day to deplore. At that time the fall of the Right, which had ruled continuously between 1861 and 1876, seemed to most people the real conquest of freedom. To be sure the Right cannot be accused of too great scruple in respecting the liberties guaranteed by our Constitution; but the real truth was that the Right conceived liberty in a sense directly opposite to the notions of the Left. The Left moved from the individual to the State: the Right moved from the State to the individual. The men of the left thought of "the people" as merely the agglomerate of the citizens composing it. They therefore made the individual the center and the point of departure of all the rights and prerogatives which a régime of freedom was bound to respect. The men of the Right, on the contrary, were firmly set in the notion that no freedom can be conceived except within the State, that freedom can have no important content apart from a solid régime of law indisputably sovereign over the activities and the interests of individuals. For the Right there could be no individual freedom not reconcilable with the authority of the State. In their eyes the general interest was always paramount over private interests. The law, therefore, should have absolute efficacy and embrace the whole life of the people. This conception of the Right was evidently sound; but it involved great dangers when applied without regard to the motives which provoked it. Unless we are careful, too much law leads to stasis and therefore to the annihilation of the life which it is the State's function to regulate but which the State cannot suppress. The State may easily become a form indifferent to its content--something extraneous to the substance it would regulate. If the law comes upon the individual from without, if the individual is not absorbed in the life of the State, the individual feels the law and the State as limitations on his activity, as chains which will eventually strangle him unless he can break them down. This was just the feeling of the men of '76. The country needed a breath of air. Its moral, economic, and social forces demanded the right to develop without interference from a law which took no account of them. This was the historical reason for the overturn of that year; and with the transference of power from Right to Left begins the period of growth and development in our nation: economic growth in industry, commerce, railroads, agriculture; intellectual growth in science, education. The nation had received its form from above. It had now to struggle to its new level, giving to a State which already had its constitution, its administrative and political organization, its army and its finance, a living content of forces springing from individual initiative prompted by interests which the _Risorgimento_, absorbed in its great ideals, had either neglected or altogether disregarded. The accomplishment of this constitutes the credit side of the balance sheet of King Humbert I. It was the error of King Humbert's greatest minister, Francesco Crispi, not to have understood his age. Crispi strove vigorously to restore the authority and the prestige of the State as against an individualism gone rampant, to reassert religious ideals as against triumphant materialism. He fell, therefore, before the assaults of so-called democracy. Crispi was wrong. That was not the moment for re-hoisting the time-honored banner of idealism. At that time there could be no talk of wars, of national dignity, of competition with the Great Powers; no talk of setting limits to personal liberties in the interests of the abstract entity called "State." The word "God," which Crispi sometimes used, was singularly out of place. It was a question rather of bringing the popular classes to prosperity, self-consciousness, participation in political life. Campaigns against illiteracy, all kinds of social legislation, the elimination of the clergy from the public schools, which must be secular and anti-clerical! During this period Freemasonry became solidly established in the bureaucracy, the army, the judiciary. The central power of the State was weakened and made subservient to the fleeting variations of popular will as reflected in a suffrage absolved from all control from above. The growth of big industry favored the rise of a socialism of Marxian stamp as a new kind of moral and political education for our proletariat. The conception of humanity was not indeed lost from view: but such moral restraints as were placed on the free individual were all based on the feeling that each man must instinctively seek his own well-being and defend it. This was the very conception which Mazzini had fought in socialism, though he rightly saw that it was not peculiar to socialism alone, but belonged to any political theory, whether liberal, democratic, or anti-socialistic, which urges men toward the exaction of rights rather than to the fulfillment of duties. From 1876 till the Great War, accordingly, we had an Italy that was materialistic and anti-Mazzinian, though an Italy far superior to the Italy of and before Mazzini's time. All our culture, whether in the natural or the moral sciences, in letters or in the arts, was dominated by a crude positivism, which conceived of the reality in which we live as something given, something ready-made, and which therefore limits and conditions human activity quite apart from so-called arbitrary and illusory demands of morality. Everybody wanted "facts," "positive facts." Everybody laughed at "metaphysical dreams," at impalpable realities. The truth was there before the eyes of men. They had only to open their eyes to see it. The Beautiful itself could only be the mirror of the Truth present before us in Nature. Patriotism, like all the other virtues based on a religious attitude of mind, and which can be mentioned only when people have the courage to talk in earnest, became a rhetorical theme on which it was rather bad taste to touch. This period, which anyone born during the last half of the past century can well remember, might be called the demo-socialistic phase of the modern Italian State. It was the period which elaborated the characteristically democratic attitude of mind on a basis of personal freedom, and which resulted in the establishment of socialism as the primary and controlling force in the State. It was a period of growth and of prosperity during which the moral forces developed during the _Risorgimento_ were crowded into the background or off the stage. IV But toward the end of the Nineteenth Century and in the first years of the Twentieth a vigorous spirit of reaction began to manifest itself in the young men of Italy against the preceding generation's ideas in politics, literature, science and philosophy. It was as though they were weary of the prosaic bourgeois life which they had inherited from their fathers and were eager to return to the lofty moral enthusiasms of their grandfathers. Rosmini and Gioberti had been long forgotten. They were now exhumed, read, discussed. As for Mazzini, an edition of his writings was financed by the State itself. Vico, the great Vico, a formidable preacher of idealistic philosophy and a great anti-Cartesian and anti-rationalist, became the object of a new cult. Positivism began forthwith to be attacked by neo-idealism. Materialistic approaches to the study of literature and art were refuted and discredited. Within the Church itself modernism came to rouse the Italian clergy to the need of a deeper and more modern culture. Even socialism was brought under the philosophical probe and criticized like other doctrines for its weaknesses and errors; and when, in France, George Sorel went beyond the fallacies of the materialistic theories of the Marxist social-democracy to his theory of syndicalism, our young Italian socialists turned to him. In Sorel's ideas they saw two things: first, the end of a hypocritical "collaborationism" which betrayed both proletariat and nation; and second, faith in a moral and ideal reality for which it was the individual's duty to sacrifice himself, and to defend which, even violence was justified. The anti-parliamentarian spirit and the moral spirit of syndicalism brought Italian socialists back within the Mazzinian orbit. Of great importance, too, was nationalism, a new movement then just coming to the fore. Our Italian nationalism was less literary and more political in character than the similar movement in France, because with us it was attached to the old historic Right which had a long political tradition. The new nationalism differed from the old Right in the stress it laid on the idea of "nation"; but it was at one with the Right in regarding the State as the necessary premise to the individual rights and values. It was the special achievement of nationalism to rekindle faith in the nation in Italian hearts, to arouse the country against parliamentary socialism, and to lead an open attack on Freemasonry, before which the Italian bourgeoisie was terrifiedly prostrating itself. Syndicalists, nationalists, idealists succeeded, between them, in bringing the great majority of Italian youth back to the spirit of Mazzini. Official, legal, parliamentary Italy, the Italy that was anti-Mazzinian and anti-idealistic, stood against all this, finding its leader in a man of unfailing political intuition, and master as well of the political mechanism of the country, a man sceptical of all high-sounding words, impatient of complicated concepts, ironical, cold, hard-headed, practical--what Mazzini would have called a "shrewd materialist." In the persons, indeed, of Mazzini and Giolitti, we may find a picture of the two aspects of pre-war Italy, of that irreconcilable duality which paralyzed the vitality of the country and which the Great War was to solve. V The effect of the war seemed at first to be quite in an opposite sense--to mark the beginning of a general _débâcle_ of the Italian State and of the moral forces that must underlie any State. If entrance into the war had been a triumph of ideal Italy over materialistic Italy, the advent of peace seemed to give ample justification to the Neutralists who had represented the latter. After the Armistice our Allies turned their backs upon us. Our victory assumed all the aspects of a defeat. A defeatist psychology, as they say, took possession of the Italian people and expressed itself in hatred of the war, of those responsible for the war, even of our army which had won our war. An anarchical spirit of dissolution rose against all authority. The ganglia of our economic life seemed struck with mortal disease. Labor ran riot in strike after strike. The very bureaucracy seemed to align itself against the State. The measure of our spiritual dispersion was the return to power of Giolitti--the execrated Neutralist--who for five years had been held up as the exponent of an Italy which had died with the war. But, curiously enough, it was under Giolitti that things suddenly changed in aspect, that against the Giolittian State a new State arose. Our soldiers, our genuine soldiers, men who had willed our war and fought it in full consciousness of what they were doing, had the good fortune to find as their leaders a man who could express in words things that were in all their hearts and who could make those words audible above the tumult. Mussolini had left Italian socialism in 1915 in order to be a more faithful interpreter of "the Italian People" (the name he chose for his new paper). He was one of those who saw the necessity of our war, one of those mainly responsible for our entering the war. Already as a socialist he had fought Freemasonry; and, drawing his inspiration from Sorel's syndicalism, he had assailed the parliamentary corruption of Reformist Socialism with the idealistic postulates of revolution and violence. Then, later, on leaving the party and in defending the cause of intervention, he had come to oppose the illusory fancies of proletarian internationalism with an assertion of the infrangible integrity, not only moral but economic as well, of the national organism, affirming therefore the sanctity of country for the working classes as for other classes. Mussolini was a Mazzinian of that pure-blooded breed which Mazzini seemed somehow always to find in the province of Romagna. First by instinct, later by reflection, Mussolini had come to despise the futility of the socialists who kept preaching a revolution which they had neither the power nor the will to bring to pass even under the most favorable circumstances. More keenly than anyone else he had come to feel the necessity of a State which would be a State, of a law which would be respected as law, of an authority capable of exacting obedience but at the same time able to give indisputable evidence of its worthiness so to act. It seemed incredible to Mussolini that a country capable of fighting and winning such a war as Italy had fought and won should be thrown into disorder and held at the mercy of a handful of faithless politicians. When Mussolini founded his Fasci in Milan in March, 1919, the movement toward dissolution and negation that featured the post-war period in Italy had virtually ceased. The Fasci made their appeal to Italians who, in spite of the disappointments of the peace, continued to believe in the war, and who, in order to validate the victory which was the proof of the war's value, were bent on recovering for Italy that control over her own destinies which could come only through a restoration of discipline and a reorganization of social and political forces. From the first, the Fascist Party was not one of believers but of action. What it needed was not a platform of principles, but an idea which would indicate a goal and a road by which the goal could be reached. The four years between 1919 and 1923 inclusive were characterized by the development of the Fascist revolution through the action of "the squads." The Fascist "squads" were really the force of a State not yet born but on the way to being. In its first period, Fascist "squadrism" transgressed the law of the old régime because it was determined to suppress that régime as incompatible with the national State to which Fascism was aspiring. The March on Rome was not the beginning, it was the end of that phase of the revolution; because, with Mussolini's advent to power, Fascism entered the sphere of legality. After October 28, 1922, Fascism was no longer at war with the State; it _was_ the State, looking about for the organization which would realize Fascism as a concept of State. Fascism already had control of all the instruments necessary for the upbuilding of a new State. The Italy of Giolitti had been superceded, at least so far as militant politics were concerned. Between Giolitti's Italy and the new Italy there flowed, as an imaginative orator once said in the Chamber, "a torrent of blood" that would prevent any return to the past. The century-old crisis had been solved. The war at last had begun to bear fruit for Italy. VI Now to understand the distinctive essence of Fascism, nothing is more instructive than a comparison of it with the point of view of Mazzini to which I have so often referred. Mazzini did have a political conception, but his politic was a sort of integral politic, which cannot be so sharply distinguished from morals, religion, and ideas of life as a whole, as to be considered apart from these other fundamental interests of the human spirit. If one tries to separate what is purely political from his religious beliefs, his ethical consciousness and his metaphysical concepts, it becomes impossible to understand the vast influence which his credo and his propaganda exerted. Unless we assume the unity of the whole man, we arrive not at the clarification but at the destruction of those ideas of his which proved so powerful. In the definition of Fascism, the first point to grasp is the comprehensive, or as Fascists say, the "totalitarian" scope of its doctrine, which concerns itself not only with political organization and political tendency, but with the whole will and thought and feeling of the nation. There is a second and equally important point. Fascism is not a philosophy. Much less is it a religion. It is not even a political theory which may be stated in a series of formulae. The significance of Fascism is not to be grasped in the special theses which it from time to time assumes. When on occasion it has announced a program, a goal, a concept to be realized in action, Fascism has not hesitated to abandon them when in practice these were found to be inadequate or inconsistent with the principle of Fascism. Fascism has never been willing to compromise its future. Mussolini has boasted that he is a _tempista_, that his real pride is in "good timing." He makes decisions and acts on them at the precise moment when all the conditions and considerations which make them feasible and opportune are properly matured. This is a way of saying that Fascism returns to the most rigorous meaning of Mazzini's "Thought and Action," whereby the two terms are so perfectly coincident that no thought has value which is not already expressed in action. The real "views" of the _Duce_ are those which he formulates and executes at one and the same time. Is Fascism therefore "anti-intellectual," as has been so often charged? It is eminently anti-intellectual, eminently Mazzinian, that is, if by intellectualism we mean the divorce of thought from action, of knowledge from life, of brain from heart, of theory from practice. Fascism is hostile to all Utopian systems which are destined never to face the test of reality. It is hostile to all science and all philosophy which remain matters of mere fancy or intelligence. It is not that Fascism denies value to culture, to the higher intellectual pursuits by which thought is invigorated as a source of action. Fascist anti-intellectualism holds in scorn a product peculiarly typical of the educated classes in Italy: the _leterato_--the man who plays with knowledge and with thought without any sense of responsibility for the practical world. It is hostile not so much to culture as to bad culture, the culture which does not educate, which does not make men, but rather creates pedants and aesthetes, egotists in a word, men morally and politically indifferent. It has no use, for instance, for the man who is "above the conflict" when his country or its important interests are at stake. By virtue of its repugnance for "intellectualism," Fascism prefers not to waste time constructing abstract theories about itself. But when we say that it is not a system or a doctrine we must not conclude that it is a blind praxis or a purely instinctive method. If by system or philosophy we mean a living thought, a principle of universal character daily revealing its inner fertility and significance, then Fascism is a perfect system, with a solidly established foundation and with a rigorous logic in its development; and all who feel the truth and the vitality of the principle work day by day for its development, now doing, now undoing, now going forward, now retracing their steps, according as the things they do prove to be in harmony with the principle or to deviate from it. And we come finally to a third point. The Fascist system is not a political system, but it has its center of gravity in politics. Fascism came into being to meet serious problems of politics in post-war Italy. And it presents itself as a political method. But in confronting and solving political problems it is carried by its very nature, that is to say by its method, to consider moral, religious, and philosophical questions and to unfold and demonstrate the comprehensive totalitarian character peculiar to it. It is only after we have grasped the political character of the Fascist principle that we are able adequately to appreciate the deeper concept of life which underlies that principle and from which the principle springs. The political doctrine of Fascism is not the whole of Fascism. It is rather its more prominent aspect and in general its most interesting one. VII The politic of Fascism revolves wholly about the concept of the national State; and accordingly it has points of contact with nationalist doctrines, along with distinctions from the latter which it is important to bear in mind. Both Fascism and nationalism regard the State as the foundation of all rights and the source of all values in the individuals composing it. For the one as for the other the State is not a consequence--it is a principle. But in the case of nationalism, the relation which individualistic liberalism, and for that matter socialism also, assumed between individual and State is inverted. Since the State is a principle, the individual becomes a consequence--he is something which finds an antecedent in the State: the State limits him and determines his manner of existence, restricting his freedom, binding him to a piece of ground whereon he was born, whereon he must live and will die. In the case of Fascism, State and individual are one and the same things, or rather, they are inseparable terms of a necessary synthesis. Nationalism, in fact, founds the State on the concept of nation, the nation being an entity which transcends the will and the life of the individual because it is conceived as objectively existing apart from the consciousness of individuals, existing even if the individual does nothing to bring it into being. For the nationalist, the nation exists not by virtue of the citizen's will, but as datum, a fact, of nature. For Fascism, on the contrary, the State is a wholly spiritual creation. It is a national State, because, from the Fascist point of view, the nation itself is a creation of the mind and is not a material presupposition, is not a datum of nature. The nation, says the Fascist, is never really made; neither, therefore, can the State attain an absolute form, since it is merely the nation in the latter's concrete, political manifestation. For the Fascist, the State is always _in fieri_. It is in our hands, wholly; whence our very serious responsibility towards it. But this State of the Fascists which is created by the consciousness and the will of the citizen, and is not a force descending on the citizen from above or from without, cannot have toward the mass of the population the relationship which was presumed by nationalism. Nationalism identified State with Nation, and made of the nation an entity preëxisting, which needed not to be created but merely to be recognized or known. The nationalists, therefore, required a ruling class of an intellectual character, which was conscious of the nation and could understand, appreciate and exalt it. The authority of the State, furthermore, was not a product but a presupposition. It could not depend on the people--rather the people depended on the State and on the State's authority as the source of the life which they lived and apart from which they could not live. The nationalistic State was, therefore, an aristocratic State, enforcing itself upon the masses through the power conferred upon it by its origins. The Fascist State, on the contrary, is a people's state, and, as such, the democratic State _par excellence_. The relationship between State and citizen (not this or that citizen, but all citizens) is accordingly so intimate that the State exists only as, and in so far as, the citizen causes it to exist. Its formation therefore is the formation of a consciousness of it in individuals, in the masses. Hence the need of the Party, and of all the instruments of propaganda and education which Fascism uses to make the thought and will of the _Duce_ the thought and will of the masses. Hence the enormous task which Fascism sets itself in trying to bring the whole mass of the people, beginning with the little children, inside the fold of the Party. On the popular character of the Fascist State likewise depends its greatest social and constitutional reform--the foundation of the Corporations of Syndicates. In this reform Fascism took over from syndicalism the notion of the moral and educational function of the syndicate. But the Corporations of Syndicates were necessary in order to reduce the syndicates to State discipline and make them an expression of the State's organism from within. The Corporation of Syndicates are a device through which the Fascist State goes looking for the individual in order to create itself through the individual's will. But the individual it seeks is not the abstract political individual whom the old liberalism took for granted. He is the only individual who can ever be found, the individual who exists as a specialized productive force, and who, by the fact of his specialization, is brought to unite with other individuals of his same category and comes to belong with them to the one great economic unit which is none other than the nation. This great reform is already well under way. Toward it nationalism, syndicalism, and even liberalism itself, were already tending in the past. For even liberalism was beginning to criticize the older forms of political representation, seeking some system of organic representation which would correspond to the structural reality of the State. The Fascist conception of liberty merits passing notice. The _Duce_ of Fascism once chose to discuss the theme of "Force or consent?"; and he concluded that the two terms are inseparable, that the one implies the other and cannot exist apart from the other; that, in other words, the authority of the State and the freedom of the citizen constitute a continuous circle wherein authority presupposes liberty and liberty authority. For freedom can exist only within the State, and the State means authority. But the State is not an entity hovering in the air over the heads of its citizens. It is one with the personality of the citizen. Fascism, indeed, envisages the contrast not as between liberty and authority, but as between a true, a concrete liberty which exists, and an abstract, illusory liberty which cannot exist. Liberalism broke the circle above referred to, setting the individual against the State and liberty against authority. What the liberal desired was liberty as against the State, a liberty which was a limitation of the State; though the liberal had to resign himself, as the lesser of the evils, to a State which was a limitation on liberty. The absurdities inherent in the liberal concept of freedom were apparent to liberals themselves early in the Nineteenth Century. It is no merit of Fascism to have again indicated them. Fascism has its own solution of the paradox of liberty and authority. The authority of the State is absolute. It does not compromise, it does not bargain, it does not surrender any portion of its field to other moral or religious principles which may interfere with the individual conscience. But on the other hand, the State becomes a reality only in the consciousness of its individuals. And the Fascist corporative State supplies a representative system more sincere and more in touch with realities than any other previously devised and is therefore freer than the old liberal State. NATIONAL SOCIALISM BASIC PRINCIPLES, THEIR APPLICATION BY THE NAZI PARTY'S FOREIGN ORGANIZATION, AND THE USE OF GERMANS ABROAD FOR NAZI AIMS Prepared in the Special Unit Of the Division of European Affairs By RAYMOND E. MURPHY FRANCIS B. STEVENS HOWARD TRIVERS JOSEPH M. ROLAND ELEMENTS OF NAZI IDEOLOGY The line of thought which we have traced from Herder to the immediate forerunners of the Nazi movement embodies an antidemocratic tradition which National Socialism has utilized, reduced to simple but relentless terms, and exploited in what is known as the National Socialist _Weltanschauung_ for the greater aggrandizement of Nazi Germany. The complete agreement between the Nazi ideology and the previously described political concepts of the past is revealed in the forthcoming exposition of the main tenets of Naziism. The Volk Ernst Rudolf Huber, in his basic work _Verfassungsrecht des grossdeutschen Reiches (Constitutional Law of the Greater German Reich_) (document 1, _post_ p. 155), published in 1939, states: The new constitution of the German Reich ... is not a constitution in the formal sense such as was typical of the nineteenth century. The new Reich has no written constitutional declaration, but its constitution exists in the unwritten basic political order of the Reich. One recognizes it in the spiritual powers which fill our people, in the real authority in which our political life is grounded, and in the basic laws regarding the structure of the state which have been proclaimed so far. The advantage of such an unwritten constitution over the formal constitution is that the basic principles do not become rigid but remain in a constant, living movement. Not dead institutions but living principles determine the nature of the new constitutional order.[8] In developing his thesis Huber points out that the National Socialist state rests on three basic concepts, the _Volk_ or people, the Führer, and the movement or party. With reference to the first element, the _Volk_, he argues that the democracies develop their concept of the people from the wrong approach: They start with the concept of the state and its functions and consider the people as being made up of all the elements which fall within the borders or under the jurisdiction of the state. National Socialism, on the other hand, starts with the concept of the people, which forms a political unity, and builds the state upon this foundation. There is no people without an objective unity, but there is also none without a common consciousness of unity. A people is determined by a number of different factors: by racial derivation and by the character of its land, by language and other forms of life, by religion and history, but also by the common consciousness of its solidarity and by its common will to unity. For the concrete concept of a people, as represented by the various peoples of the earth, it is of decisive significance which of these various factors they regard as determinants for the nature of the people. The new German Reich proceeds from the concept of the political people, determined by the natural characteristics and by the historical idea of a closed community. The political people is formed through the uniformity of its natural characteristics. Race is the natural basis of the people ... As a political people the natural community becomes conscious of its solidarity and strives to form itself, to develop itself, to defend itself, to realize itself. "Nationalism" is essentially this striving of a people which has become conscious of itself toward self-direction and self-realization, toward a deepening and renewing of its natural qualities. This consciousness of self, springing from the consciousness of a historical idea, awakens in a people its will to historical formation: the will to action. The political people is no passive, sluggish mass, no mere object for the efforts of the state at government or protective welfare work ... The great misconception of the democracies is that they can see the active participation of the people only in the form of plebiscites according to the principle of majority. In a democracy the people does not act as a unit but as a complex of unrelated individuals who form themselves into parties ... The new Reich is based on the principle that real action of a self-determining people is only possible according to the principle of leadership and following.[9] According to Huber, geographical considerations play a large part in the shaping of a people: The people stands in a double relation, to its lands; it settles and develops the land, but the land also stamps and determines the people ... That a certain territory belongs to a certain people is not justified by state authority alone but it is also determined objectively by its historical, political position. Territory is not merely a field for the exercise of state control but it determines the nature of a people and thereby the historical purpose of the state's activity. England's island position, Italy's Mediterranean position, and Germany's central position between east and west are such historical conditions, which unchangeably form the character of the people.[10] But the new Germany is based upon a "unity and entirety of the people"[11] which does not stop at geographical boundaries: The German people forms a closed community which recognizes no national borders. It is evident that a people has not exhausted its possibilities simply in the formation of a national state but that it represents an independent community which reaches beyond such limits.[12] The State justifies itself only so far as is helps the people to develop itself more fully. In the words of Hitler, quoted by Huber from _Mein Kampf_, "It is a basic principle, therefore, that the state represents not an end but a means. It is a condition for advanced human culture, but not the cause of it ... Its purpose is in the maintenance and advancement of a community of human beings with common physical and spiritual characteristics."[13] Huber continues: In the theory of the folk-Reich _[völkisches Reich_], people and state are conceived as an inseparable unity. The people is the prerequisite for the entire political order; the state does not form the people but the people moulds the state out of itself as the form in which it achieves historical permanence....[14] The State is a function of the people, but it is not therefore a subordinate, secondary machine which can be used or laid aside at will. It is the form in which the people attains to historical reality. It is the bearer of the historical continuity of the people, which remains the same in the center of its being in spite of all changes, revolutions, and transformations.[15] A similar interpretation of the role of the _Volk_ is expounded by Gottfried Neesse in his _Die Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei--Versuch einer Rechtsdeutung_ (_The National Socialist German Workers Party--An Attempt at Legal Interpretation_), published in 1935. From the National Socialist viewpoint, according to Neesse, the state is regarded not as an organism superior to the people but as an organization of the people: "In contrast to an organism, an organization has no inherent legality; it is dependent upon human will and has no definite mission of its own. It is a form in which a living mass shapes itself into unity, but it has no life of its own."[16] The people is the living organism which uses the organization of the state as the form in which it can best fulfil its mission. The law which is inherent in the people must be realized through the state. But the central and basic concept of National Socialist political theory is the concept of the people: In contrast to the state, the people form a true organism--a being which leads its own life and follows its own laws, which possesses powers peculiar to itself, and which develops its own nature independent of all state forms.... This living unity of the people has its cells in its individual members, and just as in every body there are certain cells to perform certain tasks, this is likewise the case in the body of the people. The individual is bound to his people not only physically but mentally and spiritually and he is influenced by these ties in all his manifestations.[17] The elements which go to make up a people are beyond human comprehension, but the most important of them is a uniformity of blood, resulting in "a similarity of nature which manifests itself in a common language and a feeling of community and is further moulded by land and by history."[18] "The unity of the people is increased by its common destiny and its consciousness of a common mission."[19] Liberalism gave rise to the concept of a "society-people" (_Gesellschaftsvolk_) which consisted of a sum of individuals, each of whom was supposed to have an inherent significance and to play his own independent part in the political life of the nation. National Socialism, on the other hand, has developed, the concept of the "community-people" (_Gemeinschaftsvolk_) which functions as a uniform whole.[20] The people, however, is never politically active as a whole, but only through those who embody its will. The true will of a people can never be determined by a majority vote. It can only display itself in men and in movements, and history will decide whether these men or movements could rightly claim to be the representatives of the people's will.[21] Every identification of the state with the people is false from a legal and untenable from a political standpoint ... The state is the law-forming organization and the law serves the inner order of the community; the people is the politically active organism and politics serve the outward maintenance of the community ... But law receives its character from the people and politics must reckon with the state as the first and most important factor.[22] The "nation" is the product of this interplay and balance between the state and the people. The original and vital force of the people, through the organization of the state, realizes itself fully in the unified communal life of the nation: The nation is the complete agreement between organism and organization, the perfect formation of a naturally grown being. ... _Nationalism_ is nothing more than the outwardly directed striving to maintain this inner unity of people and state, and _socialism_ is the inwardly directed striving for the same end.[23] Dr. Herbert Scurla, Government Councilor and Reich's Minister for Science, Education, and Folk Culture, in a pamphlet entitled _Die Grundgedanken des Nationalsozialismus und das Ausland (Basic Principles of National Socialism With Special Reference to Foreign Countries_), also emphasizes the importance of the _Volk_ in the National Socialist state. Dr. Scurla points out that National Socialism does not view the nation in the domocratic sense of a community to which the individual may voluntarily adhere. The central field of force of the National Socialist consciousness is rather the folk, and this folk is in no case mere individual aggregation, i.e., collectivity as sum of the individuals, but as a unity with a peculiar two-sidedness, at the same time "essential totality" (M.H. Boehm). The folk is both a living creature and a spiritual configuration, in which the individuals are included through common racial conditioning, in blood and spirit. It is that force which works on the individual directly "from within or from the side like a common degree of temperature" (Kjellén) and which collects into the folk whatever according to blood and spirit belongs to it. This folk, point of departure and goal at the same time, is, in the National Socialist world-view, not only the field of force for political order, but as well the central factor of the entire world-picture. Neither individuals, as the epoch of enlightenment envisaged, nor states, as in the system of the dynastic and national state absolutism, nor classes, as conceived by Marxism, are the ultimate realities of the political order, but the peoples, who stand over against one another with the unqualifiable right to a separate existence as natural entities, each with its own essential nature and form. [24] Dr. Scurla claims that National Socialism and Fascism are the strivings of the German and Italian people for final national unification along essentially different national lines natural to each of them. "What took place in Germany," he asserts, "was a political revolution of a total nature."[25] "Under revolution," he states, "we understand rather the penetration of the collective folk-mind [_gesamtvölkischen Bewusstseins_] into all regions of German life."[26] And, he concludes: National Socialism is no invented system of rules for the political game, but the world-view of the German people, which experiences itself as a national and social community, and concedes neither to the state nor the class nor the individual any privileges which endanger the security of the community's right to live.[27] Some of the most striking expressions of the race concept are found in _Die Erziehung im dritten Reich_ (_Education in the Third Reich_), by Friedrich Alfred Beck, which was published in 1936. It is worthy of note that the tendency which may be observed in Huber (document I, _post_ p. 155) and Neesse to associate the ideas of _Volk_ and race is very marked with Beck. "All life, whether natural or spiritual, all historical progress, all state forms, and all cultivation by education are in the last analysis based upon the racial make-up of the people in question."[28] _Race_ finds its expression in human life through the phenomenon of the _people_: _Race_ and _people_ belong together. National Socialism has restored the concept of the people from its modern shallowness and sees in the people something different from and appreciably greater than a chance social community of men, a grouping of men who have the same external interests. By _people_ we understand an entire living body which is racially uniform and which is held together by common history, common fate, a common mission, and common tasks. Through such an interpretation the people takes on a significance which is only attributed to it in times of great historical importance and which makes it the center, the content, and the goal of all human work. Only that race still possesses vital energy which can still bring its unity to expression in the totality of the people. The people is the space in which race can develop its strength. Race is the vital law of arrangement which gives the people its distinctive form. In the course of time the people undergoes historical transformations, but race prevents the loss of the people's own nature in the course of these transformations. Without the people the race has no life; without race the people has no permanence ... Education, from the standpoint of race and people, is the creation of a form of life in which the racial unity will be preserved through the totality of the people.[29] Beck describes the politically spiritual National Socialist personality which National Socialist education seeks to develop, in the following terms: Socialism is the direction of personal life through dependence on the community, consciousness of the community, feeling for the community, and action in the community; nationalism is the elevation of individual life to a unique (microcosmic) expression of the community in the unity of the personality.[30] National Socialist education must stress the heroic life and teach German youth the importance of fulfilling their duty to the _Volk_. Heroism is that force and that conviction which consecrates its whole life to the service of an idea, a faith, a task, or a duty even when it knows that the destruction of its own life is certain ... German life, according to the laws of its ideology, is heroic life ... All German life, every person belonging to the community of Germans must bear heroic character within himself. Heroic life fulfils itself in the daily work of the miner, the farmer, the clerk, the statesman, and the serving self-sacrifice of the mother. Wherever a life is devoted with an all-embracing faith and with its full powers to the service of some value, there is true heroism ... Education to the heroic life is education to the fulfilment of duty ... One must have experienced it repeatedly that the inner fruition of a work in one's own life has nothing to do with material or economic considerations, that man keeps all of his faculties alive through his obligation to his work and his devotion to his duty, and that he uses them in the service of an idea without any regard for practical considerations, before one recognizes the difference between this world of heroic self-sacrifice and the liberalistic world of barter. Because the younger generation has been brought up in this heroic spirit it is no longer understood by the representatives of the former era who judge the values of life according to material advantage ... German life is heroic life. Germany is not a mere community of existence and of interests whose only function is to insure the material and cultural needs of its members, but it also represents an elemental obligation on the part of the members. The eternal Germany cannot be drawn in on the map; it does not consist of the constitution or the laws of the state. This Germany is the community of those who are solemnly bound together and who experience and realize these eternal national values. This Germany is our eternal mission, our most sacred law ... The developing personality must be submerged in the living reality of the people and the nation from earliest youth on, must take an active and a suffering part in it. Furthermore the heroic life demands a recognition and experiencing of the highest value of life which man must serve with all his powers. This value can perhaps be recognized and presented theoretically in the schools but it can only be directly comprehended and personally experienced in the community of the people. Therefore all education must preserve this _direct connection with the community of the people_ and school education must derive from it the form and substance of its instruction.[31] This nationalism, which is based upon the laws of life, has nothing in common with the weak and presumptuous patriotism of the liberalistic world; it is not a gift or a favor, not a possession or a privilege, but it is the form of national life which we have won in hard battle and which suits our Nordic-German racial and spiritual heritage. In the nationalistic personality the powers and values which have been established in the socialistic personality will be purposefully exerted for the perfection of the temporal and eternal idea of life.[32] The National Socialist idea of totality, therefore, and its manifestation in life of the national community form the principal substance of education in the Third Reich: This idea of totality must be radically distinguished from the liberalistic conception of the mass. According to the liberalistic interpretation the whole consists of a summation of its parts. According to the National Socialist organic conception the whole comes before the parts; it does not arise from the parts but it is already contained in the parts themselves; all parts are microcosmic forms of the whole. This organic conception of the whole is the deepest natural justification of the basic political character of all organic life.[33] Education, Beck continues, must present this total unity as it is manifested in the racial character of the people. Race is the most essential factor in the natural and spiritual unity of a people, and it is also the main factor which separates one people from another. The racial character of the people must determine the substance of education; this substance must be derived primarily from the life of the people. Even in the specialized field of political science, Nazi education is concerned not with the structure of the state but with the role of the individual in the life of the people: National Socialist political science concerns itself not with education to citizenship but with preparation for membership in the German people.... Not the structure of the state but the strength of a people determines the value and the strength of an individual life. The state must be an organization which corresponds to the laws of the people's life and assists in their realization.[34] Such indeed is the supreme goal of all National Socialist education: to make each individual an expression of "the eternal German": Whoever wishes fully to realize himself, whoever wishes to experience and embody the eternal German ideal within himself must lift his eyes from everyday life and must listen to the beat of his blood and his conscience ... He must be capable of that superhuman greatness which is ready to cast aside all temporal bonds in the battle for German eternity ... National Socialist education raises the eternal German character into the light of our consciousness ... National Socialism is the eternal law of our German life; the development of the eternal German is the transcendental task of National Socialist education.[35] Racial Supremacy The theory of the racial supremacy of the Nordic, i.e., the German, which was developed by Wagner and Stewart Chamberlain reaches its culmination in the writings of Alfred Rosenberg, the high priest of Nazi racial theory and herald of the _Herrenvolk_ (master race). Rosenberg developed his ideas in the obscure phraseology of _Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts_ (_The Myth of the Twentieth Century_) (document 3, _post_ p. 174). "The 'meaning of world history'," he wrote, "has radiated out from the north over the whole world, borne by a blue-eyed blond race which in several great waves determined the spiritual face of the world ... These wander-periods were the legendary migration of the Atlantides across north Africa, the migration of the Aryans into India and Persia; the migration of the Dorians, Macedonians, Latins; the migration of the Germanic tribes; the colonization of the world by the Germanic Occident."[36] He discusses at length Indian, Persian, Greek, Roman, and European cultures; in each case, he concludes, the culture is created by the ruling Nordic element and declines through the racial decay of the Nordics resulting from their intermixture with inferior races. It has long been accepted, Rosenberg claims, that all the states of the west and their creative values have been generated by Germans; and it follows that if the Germanic blood were to vanish away completely in Europe all western culture would also fall to ruin. Rosenberg acclaims the new faith of the blood which is to replace the non-German religion of Christianity. "A _new_ faith is arising today: the myth of the blood, the faith to defend with the blood the divine essence of man. The faith, embodied in clearest knowledge, that the Nordic blood represents that _mysterium_ which has replaced and overcome the old sacraments."[37] Rosenberg accepts the classic German view of the _Volk_, which he relates closely to the concept of race. "The state is nowadays no longer an independent idol, before which everything must bow down; the state is not even an end but is only a means for the preservation of the folk ... Forms of the state change, and laws of the state pass away; the folk remains. From this alone follows that the nation is the first and _last_, that to which everything else has to be subordinated."[38] "The new thought puts folk and race higher than the state and its forms. It declares protection of the folk more important than protection of a religious denomination, a class, the monarchy, or the republic; it sees in treason against the folk a greater crime than high treason against the state."[39] The essence of Rosenberg's racial ideas was incorporated in point 4 of the program of the Nazi Party, which reads as follows: "None but members of the nation [_Volk_] may be citizens of the State. None but those of German blood, whatever their creed, may be members of the nation. No Jew, therefore, may be a member of the nation."[40] After the Nazis came to power, this concept was made the basis of the German citizenship law of September 15, 1935. Commenting upon point 4 of the Nazi program in his pamphlet, _Nature, Principles, and Aims of the NSDAP_, Rosenberg wrote: An indispensable differentiation must be made sometime in the German _Volk_ consciousness: The right of nationality should not represent something which is received in the cradle as a gift, but should be regarded as a good which must be earned. Although every German is a subject of the state, the rights of nationality should only be received when at the age of twenty or twenty-two he has completed his education or his military service or has finished the labor service which he owes to the state and after having given evidence of honorable conduct. The right to nationality, which must be earned, must become an opportunity for every German to strive for complete humanity and achievement in the service of the _Volk_. This consciousness, which must always be kept alive, will cause him to regard this earned good quite differently from the way it was regarded in the past and today more than ever. The prevailing concept of state nationality completely ignores the idea of race. According to it whoever has a German passport is a German, whoever has Czech documents is a Czech, although he may have not a single drop of Czech blood in his veins ... National Socialism also sees in the nature of the structure and leadership of the state an outflowing of a definite character in the _Volk_. If one permits a wholly foreign race--subject to other impulses--to participate therein, the purity of the organic expression is falsified and the existence of the _Volk_ is crippled.... This whole concept of the state [parliamentary democracy] is replaced by National Socialism with a basically different concept. National Socialism recognizes that, although the individual racial strains in German-speaking territory differ, they nevertheless belong to closely related races, and that many mixtures among the members of these different branches have produced new and vital strains, among them the complex but still _German_ man, but that a mixture with the Jewish enemy race, which in its whole spiritual and physical structure is basically different and antagonistic and has strong resemblances to the peoples of the Near East, can only result in bastardization.[41] True to the tradition of German imperialism, Rosenberg does not confine his ideas of racial supremacy to the Germans in the Reich alone. He even extends them to the United States, where he envisages the day when the awakening German element will realize its destiny in this country. In _Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts_, for example, he writes, "After throwing off the worn-out idea upon which it was founded ... i.e., after the destruction of the idea represented by New York, the United States of North America has the great task ... of setting out with youthful energy to put into force the new racial-state idea which a few awakened Americans have already foreseen."[42] This idea was developed at length by the German geopolitician, Colin Ross. In his book _Unser Amerika_ (_Our America_) (document 4, _post_ p. 178), published in 1936, Ross develops the thesis that the German element in the United States has contributed all that is best in American life and civilization and urges it to become conscious of its racial heritage and to prepare for the day when it may take over complete control of the country. Reference was made in the preceding section to Beck's _Education in the Third Reich_. On the subject of racial supremacy Beck points out that certain new branches of learning have been introduced into the National Socialist schools and certain old ones have been given a new emphasis. The most important of these are the science of race and the cultivation of race (_Rassenkunde und Rassenpflege_), which teach the pupil to recognize and develop those racial powers which alone make possible the fullest self-realization in the national community. An awakening of a true racial consciousness in the people should lead to a "qualitative and quantitative" racial refinement of the German people by inducing a procreative process of selection which would reduce the strains of foreign blood in the national body. "German racial consciousness must have pride in the Nordic race as its first condition. It must be a feeling of the highest personal pride to belong to the Nordic race and to have the possibility and the obligation to work within the German community for the advancement of the Nordic race."[43] Beck points out that pupils must be made to realize "that the downfall of the Nordic race would mean the collapse of the national tradition, the disintegration of the living community and the destruction of the individual."[44] Under the influence of war developments, which have given the Nazis a chance to apply their racial theories in occupied territories, their spokesmen have become increasingly open with regard to the political implications of the folk concept. In an article on "The Structure and Order of the Reich," published late in 1941, Ernst Rudolf Huber wrote, "this folk principle has found its full confirmation for the first time in the events of this war, in which the unity of the folk has been realized to an extent undreamed of through the return to the homeland of territories which had been torn from it and the resettlement of German folk-groups. Thus the awakening of Germandom to become a political folk has had a twofold result: the unity of the folk-community has risen superior to differences of birth or wealth, of class, rank, or denomination; and the unity of Germandom above all state boundaries has been consciously experienced in the European living-space [_Siedlungsraum_]."[45] The Führer Principle The second pillar of the Nazi state is the Führer, the infallible leader, to whom his followers owe absolute obedience. The Führer principle envisages government of the state by a hierarchy of leaders, each of whom owes unconditional allegiance to his immediate superior and at the same time is the absolute leader in his own particular sphere of jurisdiction. One of the best expositions of the Nazi concept of the Führer principle is given by Huber in his _Constitutional Law of the Greater German Reich_ (document 1, _post_ p. 155): The Führer-Reich of the [German] people is founded on the recognition that the true will of the people cannot be disclosed through parliamentary votes and plebiscites but that the will of the people in its pure and uncorrupted form can only be expressed through the Führer. Thus a distinction must be drawn between the supposed will of the people in a parliamentary democracy, which merely reflects the conflict of the various social interests, and the true will of the people in the Führer-state, in which the collective will of the real political unit is manifested ... The Führer is the bearer of the people's will; he is independent of all groups, associations, and interests, but he is bound by laws which are inherent in the nature of his people. In this twofold condition: independence of all factional interests but unconditional dependence on the people, is reflected the true nature of the Führer principle. Thus the Führer has nothing in common with the functionary, the agent, or the exponent who exercises a mandate delegated to him and who is bound to the will of those who appoint him. The Führer is no "representative" of a particular group whose wishes he must carry out. He is no "organ" of the state in the sense of a mere executive agent. He is rather himself the bearer of the collective will of the people. In his will the will of the people is realized. He transforms the mere feelings of the people into a conscious will ... Thus it is possible for him, in the name of the true will of the people which he serves, to go against the subjective opinions and convictions of single individuals within the people if these are not in accord with the objective destiny of the people ... He shapes the collective will of the people within himself and he embodies the political unity and entirety of the people in opposition to individual interests ... But the Führer, even as the bearer of the people's will, is not arbitrary and free of all responsibility. His will is not the subjective, individual will of a single man, but the collective national will is embodied within him in all its objective, historical greatness ... Such a collective will is not a fiction, as is the collective will of the democracies, but it is a political reality which finds its expression in the Führer. The people's collective will has its foundation in the political idea which is given to a people. It is present in the people, but the Führer raises it to consciousness and discloses it ... In the Führer are manifested also the natural laws inherent in the people: It is he who makes them into a code governing all national activity. In disclosing these natural laws he sets up the great ends which are to be attained and draws up the plans for the utilization of all national powers in the achievement of the common goals. Through his planning and directing he gives the national life its true purpose and value. This directing and planning activity is especially manifested in the lawgiving power which lies in the Führer's hand. The great change in significance which the law has undergone is characterized therein that it no longer sets up the limits of social life, as in liberalistic times, but that it drafts the plans and the aims of the nation's actions ... The Führer principle rests upon unlimited authority but not upon mere outward force. It has often been said, but it must constantly be repeated, that the Führer principle has nothing in common with arbitrary bureaucracy and represents no system of brutal force, but that it can only be maintained by mutual loyalty which must find its expression in a free relation. The Führer-order depends upon the responsibility of the following, just as it counts on the responsibility and loyalty of the Führer to his mission and to his following ... There is no greater responsibility than that upon which the Führer principle is grounded.[46] The nature of the plebiscites which are held from time to time in a National Socialist state, Huber points out, cannot be understood from a democratic standpoint. Their purpose is not to give the people an opportunity to decide some issue but rather to express their unity behind a decision which the Führer, in his capacity as the bearer of the people's will, has already made: That the will of the people is embodied in the Führer does not exclude the possibility that the Führer can summon all members of the people to a plebiscite on a certain question. In this "asking of the people" the Führer does not, of course, surrender his decisive power to the voters. The purpose of the plebiscite is not to let the people act in the Führer's place or to replace the Führer's decision with the result of the plebiscite. Its purpose is rather to give the whole people an opportunity to demonstrate and proclaim its support of an aim announced by the Führer. It is intended to solidify the unity and agreement between the objective people's will embodied in the Führer and the living, subjective conviction of the people as it exists in the individual members ... This approval of the Führer's decision is even more clear and effective if the plebiscite is concerned with an aim which has already been realized rather than with a mere intention.[47] Huber states that the Reichstag elections in the Third Reich have the same character as the plebiscites. The list of delegates is made up by the Führer and its approval by the people represents an expression of renewed and continued faith in him. The Reichstag no longer has any governing or lawgiving powers but acts merely as a sounding board for the Führer: It would be impossible for a law to be introduced and acted upon in the Reichstag which had not originated with the Führer or, at least, received his approval. The procedure is similar to that of the plebiscite: The lawgiving power does not rest in the Reichstag; it merely proclaims through its decision its agreement with the will of the Führer, who is the lawgiver of the German people.[48] Huber also shows how the position of the Führer developed from the Nazi Party movement: The office of the Führer developed out of the National Socialist movement. It was originally not a state office; this fact can never be disregarded if one is to understand the present legal and political position of the Führer. The office of the Führer first took root in the structure of the Reich when the Führer took over the powers of the Chancelor, and then when he assumed the position of the Chief of State. But his primary significance is always as leader of the movement; he has absorbed within himself the two highest offices of the political leadership of the Reich and has created thereby the new office of "Führer of the people and the Reich." That is not a superficial grouping together of various offices, functions, and powers ... It is not a union of offices but a unity of office. The Führer does not unite the old offices of Chancelor and President side by side within himself, but he fills a new, unified office.[49] The Führer unites in himself all the sovereign authority of the Reich; all public authority in the state as well as in the movement is derived from the authority of the Führer. We must speak not of the state's authority but of the Führer's authority if we wish to designate the character of the political authority within the Reich correctly. The state does not hold political authority as an impersonal unit but receives it from the Führer as the executor of the national will. The authority of the Führer is complete and all-embracing; it unites in itself all the means of political direction; it extends into all fields of national life; it embraces the entire people, which is bound to the Führer in loyalty and obedience. The authority of the Führer is not limited by checks and controls, by special autonomous bodies or individual rights, but it is free and independent, all-inclusive and unlimited. It is not, however, self-seeking or arbitrary and its ties are within itself. It is derived from the people; that is, it is entrusted to the Führer by the people. It exists for the people and has its justification in the people; it is free of all outward ties because it is in its innermost nature firmly bound up with the fate, the welfare, the mission, and the honor of the people.[50] Neesse, in his _The National Socialist German Workers Party--An Attempt at Legal Interpretation_, emphasizes the importance of complete control by the party leadership over all branches of the government. He says there must be no division of power in the Nazi state to interfere with the leader's freedom of action. Thus the Führer becomes the administrative head, the lawgiver, and the highest authority of justice in one person. This does not mean that he stands above the law. "The Führer may be outwardly independent, but inwardly he obeys the same laws as those he leads."[51] The _leadership_ (_Führung_) in the Nazi state is not to be compared with the _government_ or _administration_ in a democracy: _Führung_ is not, like government, the highest organ of the state, which has grown out of the order of the state, but it receives its legitimation, its call, and its mission from the people ...[52] The people cannot as a rule announce its will by means of majority votes but only through its embodiment in one man, or in a few men. The principle of the _identity_ of the ruler and those who are ruled, of the government and those who are governed has been very forcibly represented as the principle of democracy. But this identity ... becomes mechanistic and superficial if one seeks to establish it in the theory that the people are at once the governors and the governed ... A true organic identity is only possible when the great mass of the people recognizes its embodiment in one man and feels itself to be one nature with him ... Most of the people will never exercise their governing powers but only wish to be governed justly and well ... National Socialist _Führung_ sees no value in trying to please a majority of the people, but its every action is dictated by service to the welfare of the people, even though a majority would not approve it. The mission of the _Führung_ is received from the people, but the fulfilment of this mission and the exercise of power are free and must be free, for however surely and forcefully a healthy people may be able to make decisions in the larger issues of its destiny, its decisions in all smaller matters are confused and uncertain. For this reason, _Führung_ must be free in the performance of its task ... The Führer does not stand for himself alone and can be understood not of himself, but only from the idea of a work to be accomplished ... Both the Führer and his following are subject to the idea which they serve; both are of the same substance, the same spirit, and the same blood. The despot knows only subjects whom he uses or, at best, for whom he cares. But the first consideration of the Führer is not his own advantage nor even, at bottom, the welfare of the people, but only service to the mission, the idea, and the purpose to which Führer and following alike are consecrated.[53] The supreme position of Adolf Hitler as Führer of the Reich, which Huber and Neesse emphasize in the preceding quotations, is also stressed in the statements of high Nazi officials. For example, Dr. Frick, the German Minister of the Interior, in an article entitled "Germany as a Unitary State," which is included in a book called _Germany Speaks_, published in London in 1938, states: The unity of the party and the state finds its highest realization in the person of the Leader and Chancelor who ... combines the offices of President and Chancelor. He is the leader of the National Socialist Party, the political head of the state and the supreme commander of the defense forces.[54] It is interesting to note that, notwithstanding the generally recognized view as expressed in the preceding citations that the authority of the Führer is supreme, Hitler found it necessary in April 1942 to ask the Reichstag to confirm his power to be able at any time, if necessary, to urge any German to fulfil his obligations by all means which appear to the Führer appropriate in the interests of the successful prosecution of the war.[55] (The text of the resolution adopted by the Reichstag is included as document 5, _post_ p. 183.) Great emphasis is placed by the Nazi leaders on the infallibility of the Führer and the duty of obedience of the German people. In a speech on June 12, 1935, for instance, Robert Ley, director of the party organization, said, "Germany must obey like a well-trained soldier: the Führer, Adolf Hitler, is always right." Developing the same idea, Ley wrote in an article in the _Angriff_ on April 9, 1942 (document 6, _post_ p. 184): "Right is what serves my people; wrong is what damages it. I am born a German and have, therefore, only one holy mission: work for my people and take care of it." And with reference to the position of Hitler, Ley wrote: The National Socialist Party is Hitler, and Hitler is the party. The National Socialists believe in Hitler, who embodies their will. Therefore our conscience is clearly and exactly defined. Only what Adolf Hitler, our Führer, commands, allows, or does not allow is our conscience. _We have no understanding for him who hides behind an anonymous conscience, behind God, whom everybody conceives according to his own wishes._ These ideas of the Führer's infallibility and the duty of obedience are so fundamental in fact that they are incorporated as the first two commandments for party members. These are set forth in the _Organisationsbuch der NSDAP_ (_Nazi Party Organization Book_) for 1940, page 7 (document 7, _post_ p. 186). The first commandment is "The Führer is always right!" and the second is "Never go against discipline!" In view of the importance attached to the Führer principle by the Nazis, it is only natural that youth should be intensively indoctrinated with this idea. Neesse points out that one of the most important tasks of the party is the formation of a "select group" or elite which will form the leaders of the future: A party such as the NSDAP, which is responsible to history for the future of the German Reich, cannot content itself with the hope for future leaders but must create a strain of strong and true personalities which should offer the constantly renewed possibility of replacing leaders whenever it is necessary.[56] Beck, in his work _Education in the Third Reich_, also insists that a respect for the Führer principle be inculcated in youth: The educational value of the Hitler Youth is to be found in this community spirit which cannot be taught but can only be experienced ... But this cultivation of the community spirit through the experience of the community must, in order to avoid any conception of individual equality which is inconsistent with the German view of life, be based upon inward and outward recognition of the Führer principle ... In the Hitler Youth, the young German should learn by experience that there are no theoretical equal rights of the individual but only a natural and unconditional subordination to leadership.[57] German writers often pretend that the Führer principle does not necessarily result in the establishment of a dictatorship but that it permits the embodiment of the will of the people in its leaders and the realization of the popular will much more efficiently than is possible in democratic states. Such an argument, for example, is presented by Dr. Paul Ritterbusch in _Demokratie und Diktatur_ (_Democracy and Dictatorship_), published in 1939. Professor Ritterbusch claims that Communism leads to a dictatorial system but that the Nazi movement is much closer to the ideals of true democracy. The real nature of National Socialism, however, cannot be understood from the standpoint of the "pluralistic-party state." It does not represent a dictatorship of one party and a suppression of all others but rather an expression of the will and the character of the whole national community in and through one great party which has resolved all internal discords and oppositions within itself. The Führer of this great movement is at once the leader and the expression of the national will. Freed from the enervating effects of internal strife, the movement under the guiding hand of the Führer can bring the whole of the national community to its fullest expression and highest development. The highest authority, however, Hitler himself, has left no doubt as to the nature of Nazi Party leaders. In a speech delivered at the Sportpalast in Berlin on April 8, 1933, he said: When our opponents say: "It is easy for you: you are a dictator"--We answer them, "No, gentlemen, you are wrong; there is no single dictator, but ten thousand, each in his own place." And even the highest authority in the hierarchy has itself only one wish, never to transgress against the supreme authority to which it, too, is responsible. We have in our movement developed this loyalty in following the leader, this blind obedience of which all the others know nothing and which gave to us the power to surmount everything.[58] As has been indicated above, the Führer principle applies not only to the Führer of the Reich, Adolf Hitler, but to all the subordinate leaders of the party and the government apparatus. With respect to this aspect of the Führer principle, Huber (document 1, _post_ p. 155), says: The ranks of the public services are regarded as forces organized on the living principle of leadership and following: The authority of command exercised in the labor service, the military service, and the civil service is Führer-authority ... It has been said of the military and civil services that true leadership is not represented in their organization on the principles of command and obedience. In reality there can be no political leadership which does not have recourse to command and force as the means for the accomplishment of its ends. Command and force do not, of course, constitute the true nature of leadership, but as a means they are indispensable elements of every fully developed Führer-order.[59] The Führer principle is officially recognized by the party, and the party interpretation thereof is set forth in the _Party Organization Book_ (document 7 and charts 1 and 1-A, _post_ pp. 186, 488, 489). There are also included herein, as charts 2 and 2-A and 3 and 3-A (_post_ pp. 490, 491, 492, 493), photostatic copies and translations of two charts from _Der nationalsozialistische Staat_ (_The National Socialist State_) by Dr. Walther Gehl, published in 1935. These charts clearly show the concentration of authority in the Führer and the subordinate relation of the minor leaders in both the state and the party. The Party: Leadership by an Elite Class _1. Functions of the Party_ The third pillar of the Nazi state, the link between _Volk_ and Führer, is the Nazi Party. According to Nazi ideology, all authority within the nation is derived ultimately from the people, but it is the party through which the people expresses itself. In _Rechtseinrichtungen und Rechtsaufgaben der Bewegung_ (_Legal Organization and Legal Functions of the Movement_) (document 8, _post_ p. 204), published in 1939, Otto Gauweiler states: The will of the German people finds its expression in the party as the political organization of the people. It represents the political conception, the political conscience, and the political will. It is the expression and the organ of the people's creative will to life. It comprises a select part of the German people for "only the best Germans should be party members" ... The inner organization of the party must therefore bring the national life which is concentrated within itself to manifestation and development in all the fields of national endeavor in which the party is represented.[60] Gauweiler defines the relationship of the party to the state in the following terms: The party stands above and beside the state as the wielder of an authority derived from the people with its own sovereign powers and its own sphere of sovereignty ... The legal position of the party is therefore that of a completely sovereign authority whose legal supremacy and self-sufficiency rest upon the original independent political authority which the Führer and the movement have attained as a result of their historical achievements.[61] Neesse states that "It will be the task of National Socialism to lead back the German people to an organic structure which proceeds from a recognition of the differences in the characters and possibilities of human beings without permitting this recognition to lead to a cleavage of the people into two camps."[62] This task is the responsibility of the party. Although it has become the only political party in Germany, the party does not desire to identify itself with the state. It does not wish to dominate the state or to serve it. It works beside it and cooperates with it. In this respect, Nazi Germany is distinguished from the other one-party states of Europe: "In the one-party state of Russia, the party rules over the state; in the one-party state of Italy, the party serves the state; but in the one-party state of Germany, the party neither serves the state nor rules over it directly but works and struggles together with it for the community of the people."[63] Neesse contends that the party derives its legal basis from the law inherent in the living organism of the German _Volk_: The inner law of the NSDAP is none other than the inner law of the German people. The party arises from the people; it has formed an organization which crystallizes about itself the feelings of the people, which seemed buried, and the strength of the people, which seemed lost.[64] Neesse states that the party has two great tasks--to insure the continuity of national leadership and to preserve the unity of the _Volk_: The first main task of the party, which is in keeping with its organic nature, is to protect the National Socialist idea and to constantly renew it by drawing from the depths of the German soul, to keep it pure and clear, and to pass it on thus to coming generations: this is predominantly a matter of education of the people. The second great task, which is in keeping with its organizational nature, is to form the people and the state into the unity of the nation and to create for the German national community forms which are ever new and suited to its vital development: this is predominantly a matter of state formation. These two tasks, one of which deals with substance and the other with function, belong together. It is as impossible to separate them as it is to split up the party into organism and organization, form and content.[65] Huber (document 1, _post_ p. 155) describes the tasks of the party in similar terms. He states that the party is charged with the "education of the people to a political people" through the awakening of the political consciousness of each individual; the inculcation of a "uniform political philosophy," that is, the teaching of Nazi principles; "the selection of leaders," including the choice and training of especially promising boys to be the Führers of the future; and the shaping of the "political will of the people" in accordance with the Führer's aims.[66] The educational tasks of the party are stressed by Beck, who develops the idea that the _Volk_ can be divided into three main groups, "a supporting, a leading, and a creative class."[67] It is the duty of the leading class, that is, the party, from which the creative class of leaders is drawn, to provide for the education of the supporting class. Every member of the body of the people must belong to the politically supporting class, that is, each one who bears within himself the basic racial, spiritual, and mental values of the people ... Here no sort of leading or creative activity is demanded but only a recognition of the leading and creative will ... Only those are called to leadership in political life who have recognized the community-bound law of all human life in purest clarity and in the all-embracing extent of its validity and who will place all the powers of their personal lives with the help of a politically moral character in the service of the formation of community life ... From the politically leading class arise the politically creative personalities. These are the mysterious elemental forces which are beyond all explanation by human reason and which through their action and by means of the living idea within them give to the community of the people an expression which is fresh, young, and eternal. Here is the fulfilment of the highest and purest political humanity ... The education of the socialist personality is essentially the forming of the politically supporting class within the German people and the encouragement of those political tendencies which make a man a political leader. To educate to political creativeness is just as impossible as to educate to genius. Education can only furnish the spiritual atmosphere, can only prepare the spiritual living-space for the politically creative personality by forming a uniform political consciousness in the socialistic personality, and in the development of politically creative personalities it can at the most give special attention to those values of character and spirit which are of decisive importance for the development of this personality.[68] Goebbels in _The Nature and Form of National Socialism_ (document 2, _post_ p. 170) emphasizes the responsibility of the party for the leadership of the state: The party must always continue to represent the hierarchy of National Socialist leadership. This minority must always insist upon its prerogative to control the state. It must keep the way open for the German youth which wishes to take its place in this hierarchy. In reality the hierarchy has fewer rights than duties! It is responsible for the leadership of the state and it solemnly relieves the people of this responsibility. It has the duty to control the state in the best interests and to the general welfare of the nation.[69] Dr. Frick, German Minister of the Interior, in his chapter in _Germany Speaks_ indicates the exclusive position of the party in the Third Reich: National Socialist Germany, however, is not merely a unitary state: it is also a unitary nation and its governance is based on the principle of leadership ... In National Socialist Germany, leadership is in the hands of an organized community, the National Socialist Party; and as the latter represents the will of the nation, the policy adopted by it in harmony with the vital interests of the nation is at the same time the policy adopted by the country ... The National Socialist Party is the only political party in Germany and therefore the true representative of the people ...[70] To Dr. Ley, the party is identical with the Führer. As he wrote in the _Angriff_ on April 9, 1942 (document 6, _post_ p. 184), "The National Socialist Party is Hitler, and Hitler is the party." The role of the party in legislation, in political matters, and in the appointment of Government officials is indicated by the Führer's decree of May 29, 1941,[71] as amplified by the order of January 16, 1942, concerning its execution.[72] (Document 9, _post_ p. 212). This order provides that all legislative proposals and proposed laws and decrees, as well as any proposed changes therein, must pass through and receive the approval of the Party Chancelry. _2. Party Membership_ Details concerning the qualifications and duties of party members are contained in the _Party Organization Book_ for 1940 (document 7, _post_ p. 186). Membership is finally confirmed by the issuance of a membership card or a membership book. Anyone who becomes a party member does not merely join an organization but he becomes a soldier in the German freedom movement and that means much more than just paying his dues and attending the members' meetings. He obligates himself to subordinate his own ego and to place everything he has in the service of the people's cause. Only he who is capable of doing this should become a party member. A selection must be made in accordance with this idea. Readiness to fight, readiness to sacrifice, and strength of character are the requirements for a good National Socialist. Small blemishes, such as a false step which someone has made in his youth, should be overlooked; the contribution in the struggle for Germany should alone be decisive. The healthy will naturally prevail over the bad if the will to health finds sufficient support in leadership and achievement. Admission to the party should not be controlled by the old bourgeois point of view. The party must always represent the elite of the people.[73] German blood is one of the prerequisites for party membership. The _Party Organization Book_ for 1940 (document 7, _post_ p. 186) also states, "Only those racial comrades who possess German citizenship are eligible for admission."[74] Party members shall not exceed ten per cent of the German population of the region. "The ideal proportion of the number of party members to the number of racial comrades is set at ten per cent. This proportion is to apply also to the individual Province [Gau]."[75] _3. Pledges and Symbols of Allegiance_ Party members take an oath of loyalty to the Führer in the following terms: "I pledge allegiance to my Führer, Adolf Hitler. I promise at all times to respect and obey him and the leaders whom he appoints over me."[76] (a) The Hitler Salute A pledge of allegiance to the Führer is also implied in the Nazi salute, which is usually accompanied by the greeting, "Heil Hitler." The phrase _mit deutschen Gruss_, which is commonly used as a closing salutation in letters, is another form of the Hitler greeting. _Knaurs Konversations-Lexikon_ (_Knaur's Conversational Dictionary_), published in Berlin in 1934, contains the following definition: _German greeting_, Hitler greeting: by raising the right arm; used by the old Germans with the spear as a greeting of arms _[Waffengruss]._ Communal greeting of the National Socialists; introduced into general use in 1933. That this greeting was used by the Nazis as early as 1923 is demonstrated by a photograph which appeared in _Das Buch der NSDAP, Werden, Kampf and Ziel der NSDAP_ (_The Book of the NSDAP, Growth, Struggle, and Goal of the NSDAP_) by Walter M. Espe (Berlin, 1934), illustration 34 (document 10, _post_ p. 214). In the same book (page 23 in the supplement entitled "_Die NSDAP_") the following distinction is made between the usual Nazi greeting and the Storm Troopers' salute: While the German greeting consists merely in raising the right hand in any desired manner and represents rather a general comradely greeting, the SA salute is executed, in accordance with the specifications of the SA service regulations, by placing the left hand on the belt and raising the extended right arm. The SA salute is to be given to all higher ranking leaders of the SA and the SS and of the veterans' organization which has been incorporated into the SA, as well as to the Army and the national and security police forces. The comradely German greeting is to be exchanged between all equally ranking members of the SA and the SS and members of a corresponding rank in the Army, the police, the veterans' organization, the German air-sport league, the Hitler Youth, the railway guards, and the whole membership of the party so far as they are distinguishable by regulation uniforms. (b) The Swastika Early in its history the Nazi Party adopted the swastika banner as its official emblem.[77] It was designed by Hitler himself, who wrote in _Mein Kampf_: I myself after countless attempts had laid down a final form: a flag with a background of red cloth, having a white circle, and, in its center, a black swastika.... As National Socialists we see our program in our flag. In the _red_ we see the social idea of the movement, in the _white_ the nationalistic idea, and in the _swastika_ the fight for the victory of Aryan man and at the same time for the victory of the idea of creative work, which in itself always was and always will be anti-Semitic.[78] The swastika banner came into general use after January 30, 1933 as a symbol of allegiance to the Hitler regime, but not until two years later was it made the German national flag by the Reich flag law of September 15, 1935.[79] Another law, decreed on April 7, 1937,[80] specified that: The insignia which the NSDAP, its formations, and associated organizations use for their officers, their structure, their organization, and their symbols may not be used by other associations either alone or with embellishments. It is interesting to note that party regulations forbid members to use passport photographs in which they appear in party uniform or wearing party insignia and that party members are forbidden to discuss foreign policy with foreigners unless they are officially designated by the Führer to do so. The pertinent regulations read: _Pass Photos on Identification Cards_ Members of the NSDAP must not use pass photos which show the holder of any identification card in a uniform of the party or of any of its formations. It is also forbidden to use as pass photos pictures which show the person wearing a party button. * * * * * _Conversations With Foreigners_ It is forbidden to all party members to engage in discussions of foreign policy with foreigners. Only such persons as have been designated by the Führer are entitled to do so.[81] The Totalitarian State The Weimar Constitution, although never formally abrogated by the Nazis, was rendered totally ineffectual by two basic laws, promulgated within two months after the seizure of power by the party. The first of these was the "Decree of the Reich's President for the Protection of the People and State" (document 11-I, _post_ p. 215), issued February 28, 1933, the day after the Reichstag was burned down. It suspended "until further notice"[82] articles of the Weimar Constitution guaranteeing essential democratic rights of the individual. Thus, according to article I of this decree, "restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press, on the right of assembly and the right of association, and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic, and telephonic communications, and warrants for house-searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed."[83] The abrogation by the Nazis of these fundamental rights of democracy has never been repealed or amended. In fact, this decree represents the presupposition and confirmation of the police sway established throughout Germany by the Nazis.[84] The second basic law, known as the "Enabling Act," the "Law To Remove the Distress of People and State," of March 24, 1933 (document 11-II, _post_ p. 217), swept away parliamentary government entirely. By abrogating the pertinent articles of the Weimar Constitution, it enabled the Nazi Cabinet under Hitler's chancelorship to appropriate money and legislate without any responsibility to the Reichstag or any obligation to respect the Constitution. The dissolution of democracy in Germany was sealed by the unification of the authoritarian Nazi Party with the German state. Soon after the party came to power in 1933, steps were taken to effect and secure this unity. The process is described by Huber (document 1, _post_ p. 155) as follows: On July 14, 1933 was issued the law against the formation of new parties which raised the NSDAP to the only political party in Germany [document 11-III] ... The overthrow of the old party-state was accompanied by the construction of the new movement-state [_Bewegungsstaat_]. Out of a political fighting organization the NSDAP grew to a community capable of carrying the state and the nation. This process was accomplished step by step in the first months after the National Socialist seizure of power. The assumption of the office of Chancelor by the Führer of the movement formed the basis for this development. Various party leaders were appointed as _Reichsminister_; the governors of the provinces were national leaders or _Gauleiter_ of the party, such as General von Epp; the Prussian government officials are as a rule _Gauleiter_ of the party; the Prussian police chiefs are mostly high-ranking SA leaders. By this system of a union of the personnel of the party and state offices the unity of party and state was achieved.[85] The culmination of this development was reached in the "Law To Safeguard the Unity of Party and State," of December 1, 1933 (document 11-IV, _post_ p. 221), which proclaimed the NSDAP "the bearer of the German state-idea and indissolubly joined to the state." In order to guarantee the complete cooperation of the party and SA with the public officials, the Führer's Deputy and the Chief of Staff of the SA were made members of the Cabinet. With regard to the relation between the party and the state, Neesse writes: The NSDAP is not a structure which stands under direct state control, to which single tasks of public administration are entrusted by the state, but it holds and maintains is claim to totality as the "bearer of the German state-idea" in all fields relating to the community--regardless of how various single functions are divided between the organization of the party and the organization of the state.[86] To maintain cooperation between the party and state organizations, the highest state offices are given to the men holding the corresponding party offices. Gauweiler (document 8, _post_ p. 204) attributes to the party supreme leadership in all phases of national life. Thus the state becomes merely an administrative machine which the party has set up in accordance with and for the accomplishment of its aims: As the responsible bearer and shaper of the destiny of the whole German nation the party has created an entirely new state, for that which sought to foist itself upon her as a state was simply the product of a deep human confusion. The state of the past and its political ideal had never satisfied the longing of the German people. The National Socialist movement already carried its state within itself at the time of its early struggles. It was able to place the completely formed body of its own state at the disposal of the state which it had taken over.[87] The official party interpretation of the relation between party and state, as set forth in the _Party Organization Book_ for 1940, appears in the Appendix as document 7 (_post_ p. 186). Goebbels in his lecture on _The Nature and Form of National Socialism_ (document 2, _post_ p. 170) stressed the importance of _Gleichschaltung_ or the penetration of Nazi ideology into all fields of national life. This to his mind must be the result of the National Socialist revolution. The same aims, ideals, and standards must be applied to economics and to politics, to cultural and social development, to education and religion, and to foreign and domestic relations. The result of this concept of the totalitarian state has been the compulsory regimentation of all phases of German life to conform to the pattern established by the party. The totalitarian state does not recognize personal liberties for the individual. The legal position of the individual citizen in the Third Reich is clearly set forth by Huber (document 1, _post_ p. 155): Not until the nationalistic political philosophy had become dominant could the liberalistic idea of basic rights be really overcome. The concept of personal liberties of the individual as opposed to the authority of the state had to disappear; it is not to be reconciled with the principle of the nationalistic Reich. There are no personal liberties of the individual which fall outside of the realm of the state and which must be respected by the state. The member of the people, organically connected with the whole community, has replaced the isolated individual; he is included in the totality of the political people and is drawn into the collective action. There can no longer be any question of a private sphere, free of state influence, which is sacred and untouchable before the political unity. The constitution of the nationalistic Reich is therefore not based upon a system of inborn and inalienable rights of the individual.[88] In place of these rights the constitution of the Third Reich guarantees to the individual his place in the community of the people: The legal position of the individual member of the people forms an entirely new concept which is indispensable for the construction of a nationalistic order. The legal position of the individual is always related to the community and conditioned by duty. It is developed not for the sake of the individual but for the community, which can only be filled with life, power, and purpose when a suitable field of action is insured for the individual member. Without a concrete determination of the individual's legal position there can be no real community. This legal position represents the organic fixation of the individual in the living order. Rights and obligations arise from the application of this legal position to specific individual relationships ... But all rights must be regarded as duty-bound rights. Their exercise is always dependent upon the fulfilment by the individual of those duties to which all rights are subordinate ...[89] The concept of private property in the totalitarian state is also at variance with the democratic concept of private property. In the Third Reich the holder of property is considered merely as a manager responsible to the _Volk_ for the use of the property in the common interest. Huber sets forth the Nazi view in the following words: "Private property" as conceived under the liberalistic economic order was a reversal of the true concept of property. This "private property" represented the right of the individual to manage and to speculate with inherited or acquired property as he pleased, without regard for the general interests ... German socialism had to overcome this "private," that is, unrestrained and irresponsible view of property. All property is common property. The owner is bound by the people and the Reich to the responsible management of his goods. His legal position is only justified when he satisfies this responsibility to the community.[90] Pursuant to this view of the nature of ownership, property may be confiscated whenever the state decides that public management would be in the interests of the community, or if the owner is found guilty of irresponsible management, in which case no compensation is paid him. Reference has been made to the appointment of party members to important state offices. Gauweiler (document 8, _post_ p. 204) points out that the party insured the infusion of the entire structure of the state with its ideology through the civil-service law (_Beamtengesetz_) of January 26, 1937,[91] which provides that a person appointed to a civil-service position must be "filled with National Socialist views, since only thus can he be an executor of the will of the state which is carried by the NSDAP. It demands of him that he be ready at all times to exert himself unreservedly in behalf of the National Socialist state and that he be aware of the fact that the NSDAP, as the mouthpiece of the people's will, is the vital force behind the concept of the German state."[92] The infiltration of party members into the civil service has now proceeded to such a point that early in 1942 Pfundtner, the Secretary of State in the German Ministry of the Interior, could write in the periodical _Akademie für deutsches Recht_: The German civil servant must furthermore be a National Socialist to the marrow of his bones and must be a member of the party or of one of its formations. The state will primarily see to it that the Young Guard of the movement is directed toward a civil-service career and also that the civil servant takes an active part in the party so that the political idea and service of the state become closely welded.[93] * * * * * FOOTNOTES TO FIRST SECTION [Footnote 8: Huber, _Verfassungsrecht des grossdeutschen Reiches_ (Hamburg, 1939), pp. 54-55.] [Footnote 9: _Ibid._, pp. 153-155.] [Footnote 10: _Ibid._, pp. 156-157.] [Footnote 11: _Ibid._, p. 157.] [Footnote 12: _Ibid._, p. 158.] [Footnote 13: _Ibid._, p. 163.] [Footnote 14: _Ibid._, p. 164.] [Footnote 15: _Ibid._, pp. 165-166.] [Footnote 16: Neesse, _Die Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei--Versuch einer Rechtsdeutung_ (Stuttgart, 1935), p. 44.] [Footnote 17: _Ibid._, p. 51.] [Footnote 18: _Ibid._, p. 54.] [Footnote 19: _Ibid._, p. 58.] [Footnote 20: _Ibid._, pp. 54-56.] [Footnote 21: _Ibid._, p. 59.] [Footnote 22: _Ibid._, pp. 60-61.] [Footnote 23: _Ibid._, pp. 65-66.] [Footnote 24: Scurla, _Die Grundgedanken des Nationalsozialismus und das Ausland_ (Berlin, 1938), pp. 10-11.] [Footnote 25: _Ibid._, p. 9.] [Footnote 26: _Ibid._] [Footnote 27: _Ibid._, p. 13.] [Footnote 28: Beck, _Die Erziehung im dritten Reich_ (Dortmund and Breslau, 1936), p. 20.] [Footnote 29: _Ibid._, pp. 20-21.] [Footnote 30: _Ibid._, p. 35.] [Footnote 31: _Ibid._, pp. 52-55.] [Footnote 32: _Ibid._, p. 46.] [Footnote 33: _Ibid._, p. 57.] [Footnote 34: _Ibid._, p. 118.] [Footnote 35: _Ibid._, p. 140.] [Footnote 36: Rosenberg, _Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts_ (Munich, 1935), p. 28 (1st ed. 1930).] [Footnote 37: _Ibid._, p. 114.] [Footnote 38: _Ibid._, p. 479.] [Footnote 39: _Ibid._, p. 542.] [Footnote 40: Gottfried Feder, _The Programme of the Party of Hitler_ (translated by E.T.S. Dugdale: Munich, 1932), p. 18.] [Footnote 41: Rosenberg, _Wesen, Grundsätze und Ziele der NSDAP_ (Munich, 1933), pp. 16-18 (1st ed. 1922).] [Footnote 42: Rosenberg, _Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts_, p. 673.] [Footnote 43: Beck, _op. cit._, p. 110.] [Footnote 44: _Ibid._, p. 110.] [Footnote 45: Huber, "_Aufbau und Gefüge des Reiches_," published in the book _Idee und Ordnung des Reiches_ (ed. by Huber: Hamburg, Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1941), p. 12.] [Footnote 46: Huber, _Verfassungsrecht des grossdeutschen Reiches_ (Hamburg, 1939), pp. 194-198.] [Footnote 47: _Ibid._, pp. 199-200.] [Footnote 48: _Ibid._, pp. 207-208.] [Footnote 49: _Ibid._, pp. 213-214.] [Footnote 50: _Ibid._, p. 230.] [Footnote 51: Neesse, _op. cit._, p. 146.] [Footnote 52: _Ibid._, p. 143.] [Footnote 53: _Ibid._, pp. 144-147.] [Footnote 54: _Germany Speaks_ (containing articles by twenty-one leading members of the Nazi Party and the German Government: London, 1938), p. 31.] [Footnote 55: _Reichsgesetzblatt_ (1942), p. 247. (All citations to the _Reichsgesetzblatt_ refer to part I thereof.)] [Footnote 56: Neesse, _op. cit._, p. 150.] [Footnote 57: Beck, _op. cit._, p. 131.] [Footnote 58: _My New Order_, p. 159.] [Footnote 59: Huber, _Verfassungsrecht des grossdeutschen Reiches_ (Hamburg, 1939), p. 410.] [Footnote 60: Gauweiler, _Rechtseinrichtungen und Rechtsaufgaben der Bewegung_ (Munich, 1939), p. 2.] [Footnote 61: _Ibid._, p. 9.] [Footnote 62: Neesse, _op. cit,_, p. 71.] [Footnote 63: _Ibid._, p. 119.] [Footnote 64: _Ibid._, p. 126.] [Footnote 65: _Ibid._, pp. 139-140.] [Footnote 66: Huber, _Verfassungsrecht des grossdeutschen Reiches_ (Hamburg, 1939), pp. 293-296.] [Footnote 67: Beck, _op. cit._, p. 37.] [Footnote 68: _Ibid._, pp. 37-38.] [Footnote 69: Goebbels, _op. cit._, p. 19.] [Footnote 70: _Germany Speaks_, pp. 30-31.] [Footnote 71: _Reichsgesetzblatt_ (1941), p. 295.] [Footnote 72: _Ibid._, (1942), p. 35.] [Footnote 73: _Organisationsbuch der NSDAP_ (ed. by the National Organizational Director of the NSDAP: Munich, 1940), p. 5.] [Footnote 74: _Ibid._, p. 6b.] [Footnote 75: _Ibid._, p. 6d.] [Footnote 76: _Ibid._] [Footnote 77: The German pocket reference book for current events (_Taschen-Brockhaus zum Zeitgeschehen_: Leipzig, 1942) states that the swastika banner was designed by Hitler for the NSDAP in 1919.] [Footnote 78: Adolf Hitler, _Mein Kampf_ (Munich, Verlag Frank Eher, G.m.b.H., 1933 [copyright 1925]), pp. 556-557.] [Footnote 79: _Reichsgesetzblatt_ (1935), p. 1145.] [Footnote 80: _Ibid._ (1937), p. 442.] [Footnote 81: _Organisationsbuch der NSDAP_ (Munich, 1940), p. 8.] [Footnote 82: _Reichsgesetzblatt_ (1933), p. 83.] [Footnote 83: _Ibid._] [Footnote 84: In his book _Die deutsche Polizei_ (_The German Police_) (_Darmstadt_, L.C. Wittich Verlag, 1941), p. 24, the prominent Nazi police official, Dr. Werner Best, wrote that this law "is to be regarded not as a 'police law'--that is, as the regulation of police functions and activities--but as the expression of the new conception of the state as it has been transformed by the National Socialist revolution, from which the new 'police' concept is derived." Also, this law was for the police "the confirmation that the work already begun was in agreement with the law giving will of the Supreme Leadership of the Reich."] [Footnote 85: Huber, _Verfassungsrecht des grossdeutschen Reiches_ (Hamburg, 1939) p. 288.] [Footnote 86: Neesse, _op. cit._, p. 131.] [Footnote 87: Gauweiler, _op. cit._, p. 3.] [Footnote 88: Huber, _Verfassungsrecht des grossdeutschen Reiches_ (Hamburg, 1939), p. 361.] [Footnote 89: _Ibid._, pp. 365-366.] [Footnote 90: _Ibid._, pp. 372-373.] [Footnote 91: _Reichsgesetzblatt_ (1937), pp. 39-70.] [Footnote 92: Gauweiler, _op. cit._, p. 156.] [Footnote 93: Reported in a bulletin of the official German news agency, DNB, Apr. 14, 1942.] NAZI AIMS AND METHODS Political Aims The political aims of National Socialism have been written so clearly in history in the past 10 years that it does not appear necessary to discuss them at length here. The detailed program of the Nazi Party consists of the 25 points which were adopted on February 24, 1920 at a party mass meeting in Munich. (The 25-point program appears in the Appendix as document 12, _post_ p. 222.) The points of particular interest in this study are the first four, which are set forth below: 1. We demand the union of all Germans to form a Great Germany on the basis of the right of the self-determination enjoyed by nations. 2. We demand equality of rights for the German People in its dealings with other nations, and abolition of the Peace Treaties of Versailles and St. Germain. 3. We demand land and territory (colonies) for the nourishment of our people and for settling our superfluous population. 4. None but members of the nation may be citizens of the State. None but those of German blood, whatever their creed, may be members of the nation. No Jew, therefore, may be a member of the nation.[94] _1. Internal Objectives_ A statement of the internal objectives of National Socialism is made by Gauweiler in his _Legal Organization and Legal Functions of the Movement_ (document 8, _post_ p. 204). The laws of the Reich must seek to establish and promote the five basic values recognized by Nazi ideology: 1. Race: The legal protection of the race, which has created a new concept of nationality [_Volkszugehörigkeit_], is consciously put in first place, for the most significant historical principle which has been established by the victory of National Socialism is that of the necessity for keeping race and blood pure. All human mistakes and errors can be corrected except one: "the error regarding the importance of maintaining the basic values of a nation." The purpose of this legal protection of the basic value of _race_ must be the prevention for all time of a further mixture of German blood with foreign blood, as well as the prevention of continued procreation of racially unworthy and undesirable members of the people. 2. Soil [_Boden_]: The living-space and the basis for the food supply of the German people are its territory and soil. The farmer is the first and deepest representative of the people since he nourishes the people from the fertility of the earth and he maintains the nation through the fertility of his own family. Here National Socialism had to accomplish two great legal ends: the reestablishment and the protection of the farmer class and the securing of its land for the farmer family. 3. Work: The nation's work as a basic national value is grounded on the leading concept of "work of the hands and of the head" within and for the community of the people and the elevation of work to the only criterion for the value of an individual within the community. In place of the idea of class warfare, National Socialism had to establish the national community legally; in place of the defamation of work and its degradation to an object of barter, National Socialism had to raise it to an ethical duty and the right to work had to become the most clearly defined personal right of the individual. The concept of the honor of work had to be established as the basic concept of the national honor. 4. The Reich: With the securing of the three basic values of race, soil, and work arises the National Socialist Reich. The infusion of foreign cultural and legal influences in Germany was a consequence of the weakening of the central authority of the German Reich since the Middle Ages. The creation and insuring of a strong central authority in contrast to the disorganized, federalistic system of the Weimar Republic became one of the principal lines of National Socialist legal policy. In consequence of the National Socialist revolution, the Reich took on the legal form of a totalitarian state and received a supreme and completely authoritative lawgiver in the person of the Führer. The principle of a division of power could no longer maintain itself: The formulation, the interpretation, and the execution of the law are all performed by the Führer himself or under his authority. 5. Honor: The fifth great value of the nation is its honor. The honor of the people, the Reich, the party, the Führer, and the individual citizen are all regarded as goods to be protected by law. The basis of national honor is loyalty. National Socialist criminal law is therefore essentially organized as a system of punishment for breaches of faith. Every crime and offense against the community is a breach of faith which must result in loss of honor.[95] _2. Foreign Policy_ The close connection between the internal political program of the National Socialist movement, as expressed in the foregoing paragraphs, and its foreign policy was indicated by Hitler when he wrote in _Mein Kampf_ (document 13-I, _post_ p. 226): As National Socialists we can further set forth the following principle with regard to the nature of the foreign policy of a folk-state: _It is the task of the foreign policy of a folk-state to secure the existence on this planet of the race which is encompassed by the state and at the same time to establish a healthy, viable, natural relation between the number and growth of the folk on the one hand and the size and quality of its soil and territory on the other hand._[96] And in the same work he states: Yes, we can only learn from the past that we must undertake the setting of aims for our political activity in two directions: _Soil and territory as the goal of our foreign policy, and a new, philosophically firm and uniform foundation as the goal of our domestic political activity._[97] The political objectives of National Socialism, then, by definition of Hitler himself, are the internal unification of the German people and external expansion. While the Nazis have never concealed the first of these objectives, the second was the subject for a great deal of dissimulation up to the outbreak of the present war. Typical of the false front which the Nazis presented to the outside world with reference to their foreign policy objectives are the statements made by Dr. Scurla in _Basic Principles of National Socialism With Special Reference to Foreign Countries_. Dr. Scurla quotes Hitler's speech of May 17, 1933 in which he said, "We see the European nations around us as given facts. French, Poles, etc., are our neighbor peoples, and we know that no conceivable historic occurrence could change this reality,"[98] and comments: This folk principle, which has grown out of the National Socialist ideology, implies the recognition of the independence and the equal rights of each people. We do not see how anyone can discern in this a "pan-Germanic" and imperialistic threat against our neighbors. This principle does not admit the difference between "great powers" and "minor states," between majority peoples and minorities. It means at the same time a clear rejection of any imperialism which aims at the subjugation of foreign peoples or the denationalization of alien populations. It demands the unqualified acknowledgment of the right to live of every folk, and of every folk-group, which is forced to live as a foreign group in another state. The western European national state together with its parliamentary democracy was not able to do justice to the natural and living entities, the peoples, in their struggle for existence.[99] Farther on in the same work Scurla states: Out of its fundamental ideologic view, however, Germany rejects every form of imperialism, even that of peaceful penetration. It is unable to concede to any people the authority to develop ideas and ways of living, to which then another people has to subordinate itself, even if some other order is suited to its essential nature ... It does not at all, however, consider the German order obligatory for other peoples. National Socialism, as has been said a hundred times, is exclusively the sum total of the German world-view.[100] Similar assurances by Nazi leaders were frequently made in order to induce a sense of security in neighboring countries. Hitler, for example, in a proclamation opening the party congress at Nuremberg on September 11, 1935 said: National Socialism has no aggressive intentions against any European nation. On the contrary, we are convinced that the nations of Europe must continue their characteristic national existence, as created by tradition, history and economy; if not, Europe as a whole will be destroyed.[101] But such assurances, which were intended exclusively for foreign consumption, were refuted by the basic policy laid down in _Mein Kampf_, which has been persistently pursued throughout the 10 years of the Nazi regime and has been realized to the extent that Germany now dominates and is in control of most of the European continent. In _Mein Kampf_ (document 13-I, _post_ p. 226) Hitler wrote: _Our task, the mission of the National Socialist movement, however, is to lead our folk to such political insight that it will see its future goal fulfilled not in the intoxicating impression of a new Alexandrian campaign but rather in the industrious work of the German plow, which waits only to be given land by the sword._[102] Hitler suggests a future foreign policy for Germany which would assure _Lebensraum_ and domination of the European continent. In _Mein Kampf_ he states: But the political testament of the German nation for its outwardly directed activity should and must always have the following import: _Never tolerate the establishment of two continental powers in Europe. See an attack against Germany in every attempt to organize a second military power on the German borders, even if it is only in the form of the establishment of a state which is a potential military power, and see therein not only the right but also the duty to prevent the formation of such a state with all means, even to the use of force, or if it has already been established, to destroy it again. See to it that the strength of our folk has its foundations not in colonies but in the soil of the European homeland. Never regard the foundations of the Reich as secure, if it is not able to give every off-shoot of our folk its own bit of soil and territory for centuries to come. Never forget that the most sacred right in the world is the right to the soil which a man wishes to till himself, and the most sacred sacrifice is the blood which he spills for this soil_.[103] It is impossible to adduce from the writings of Hitler, or other Nazi leaders direct statements indicating that they aspire to the domination of the entire world. Such expressions, however, may be inferred not only from the direction of German foreign policy and the effusions of the geopoliticians but also from the following statement made by Hitler in _Mein Kampf_ (document 13-I, _post_ p. 226): ... If the German folk, in its historical development, had possessed that herdlike unity which other peoples have enjoyed, the German Reich would today be mistress of the globe. World history would have taken another course, and no one can tell whether in this way that might not have been attained which so many deluded pacifists are hoping today to wheedle by moaning and whining: a peace supported not by the palm branches of tearful pacifistic female mourners but founded by the victorious sword of a master race [_Herrenvolk_] which places the world in the service of a higher culture.[104] Like Hitler, Rosenberg envisaged the extension of Nazi power far beyond the borders of Germany. In his _Nature, Principles, and Aims of the NSDAP_ he stated, "But National Socialism also believes that, far beyond Germany's borders, its principles and its ideology ... will lead the way in the unavoidable struggles for power in the other countries of Europe and America."[105] Propaganda _1. Professed Peaceful Intentions as a Cloak for Imperialistic Designs_ The falsity of Nazi propaganda has been demonstrated repeatedly during the past decade. That its keynote was set by Hitler himself becomes evident upon an examination of his statements on foreign policy over a period of years. Not only has his policy been marked by a series of shifts and turns, so that the policy of one year was frequently canceled by the policy of the next, but a comparison of his words with his subsequent deeds makes it evident that he deliberately sought to lull other countries into a feeling of security until he was ready to move against them. On May 17, 1933 he asserted: _No fresh European war is capable of putting something better in the place of unsatisfactory conditions which exist to-day ..._ The outbreak of such madness without end would lead to the collapse of existing social order in Europe ... The German Government are convinced that to-day there can be only one great task, and that is to assure the peace of the world ... _The German Government wish to settle all difficult questions with other Governments by peaceful methods._ They know that any military action in Europe, even if completely successful, would, in view of the sacrifice, bear no relation to the profit to be obtained ... Germany will tread no other path than that laid down by the Treaties. The German Government will discuss all political and economic questions only within the framework of, and through, the Treaties. _The German people have no thought of invading any country._[106] (Document 14, _post_ pp. 282-233.) And on March 7, 1936 he stated: After three years I believe that I can regard the struggle for German equality as concluded to-day. I believe, moreover, that thereby the first and foremost reason for our withdrawal from European collective collaboration has ceased to exist. _We have no territorial demands to make in Europe._[107] (Document 14, _post_ p. 237.) Moreover, he did not shrink from giving specific assurances of Germany's peaceful intentions toward his subsequent victims: There are Germans and Poles in Europe, and they ought to live together in agreement. The Poles cannot think, of Europe without the Germans and the Germans cannot think of Europe without the Poles. (Oct. 24, 1933) _Germans and Poles must reconcile themselves as to the fact of each others' existence._ It has seemed to me necessary to demonstrate by an example that it is possible for two nations to talk over their differences without giving the task to a third or a fourth ... _The assertion that the German Reich plans to coerce the Austrian State is absurd and cannot be substantiated or proved_ ... The assertion of the Austrian Government that from the side of the Reich an attack would be undertaken or planned I must emphatically reject ... The German Reich is always ready to hold out a hand for a real understanding, with full respect for the free will of Austrian Germans ... (Jan. 13, 1934) _The lie goes forth again that Germany to-morrow or the day after will fall upon Austria or Czecho-Slovakia_. I ask myself always: Who can these elements be who will have no peace, who incite continually, who must so distrust, and want no understanding? Who are they? I know they are not the millions who, if these inciters had their way, would have to take up arms. (May 1, 1936) Germany and Poland are two nations, and these nations will live, and neither of them will be able to do away with the other. I recognized all of this, and we all must recognize that a people of 33,000,000 will always strive for an outlet to the sea ... _We have assured all our immediate neighbors of the integrity of their territory as far as Germany is concerned. That is no hollow phrase; it is our sacred will_ ... (Sept. 26, 1938)[108] (Document 14, _post_ pp. 233, 234, 238, 240-241.) Yugoslavia is a State that has increasingly attracted the attention of our people since the war. The high regard that the German soldiers then felt for this brave people has since been deepened and developed into genuine friendship. Our economic relations with this country are undergoing constant development and expansion, just as is the case with the friendly countries of Bulgaria, Greece, Rumania, Turkey, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Baltic States. (Jan. 30, 1939)[109] In Hitler's Reichstag speech of April 28, 1939, in which he replied to President Roosevelt's telegraphic message inviting him and Mussolini to pledge themselves not to attack 31 countries mentioned by name, he stated: _... All states bordering on Germany have received much more binding assurances, and above all suggestions, than Mr. Roosevelt asked from me in his curious telegram ..._ The German Government is nevertheless prepared to give each of the States named an assurance of the kind desired by Mr. Roosevelt on the condition of absolute reciprocity, provided that the State wishes it and itself addresses to Germany a request for such an assurance together with appropriate proposals.[110] And on September 1, 1939, with reference to the recently concluded pact between Germany and Russia, he said: You know that Russia and Germany are governed by two different doctrines. There was only one question that had to be cleared up. Germany has no intention of exporting its doctrine. Given the fact that Soviet Russia has no intention of exporting its doctrine to Germany, I no longer see any reason why we should still oppose one another. On both sides we are clear on that. Any struggle between our people would only be of advantage to others. We have, therefore, resolved to conclude a pact which rules out forever any use of violence between us.[111] Additional assurances of this nature are quoted in a series of extracts from Hitler's speeches, dating from February 10, 1933 to September 1, 1939, which was printed in the _London Times_ of September 26, 1939 (document 14, _post_ p. 232). _2. Internal Propaganda_ Within Germany the notorious propaganda machine of Dr. Goebbels, together with a systematic terrorization of oppositionist elements, has been the principle support of the rise and triumph of the Nazi movement. In his _Legal Organization and Legal Functions of the Movement_ (document 8, _post_ p. 204), Gauweiler gives an idea of the permeation of all phases of national life with a propaganda designed to make Nazi "legal principles" acceptable to the masses. He makes it clear that all of the Nazi propaganda machinery is in the service of this program; political lecturers, the press, the radio, and the films all play a part in helping the people to understand and appreciate the new legal code. The schools and Hitler Youth groups provide instruction for all young people in the fundamentals of National Socialist law, and pupils in those schools which train the carefully selected future leaders are given an especially strong dose of Nazi legal theory and practice. In order to appeal to the broadest audience, Nazi propaganda has always sought to present all questions in the simplest possible terms. Goebbels himself, in his _Nature and Form of National Socialism_ (document 2, _post_ p. 170), wrote as follows: National Socialism has simplified the thinking of the German people and led it back to its original primitive formulas. It has presented the complicated processes of political and economic life in their simplest terms. This was done with the well-considered intention of leading the broad masses of the people once again to take part in political life. In order to find understanding among the masses, we consciously practiced a popular [_volksgebundene_] propaganda. We have taken complexes of facts which were formerly accessible only to a few specialists and experts, carried them to the streets, and hammered them into the brain of the little man. All things were presented so simply that even the most primitive mind could grasp them. We refused to work with unclear or insubstantial concepts but we gave all things a clearly defined sense. Here lay the secret of our success.[112] The character and quality of Nazi propaganda was fully presaged in _Mein Kampf_. Here Hitler paid a striking tribute to the power of lies, commenting on-- the very correct principle that the size of the lie always involves a certain factor of credibility, since the great mass of a people will be more spoiled in the innermost depths of its heart, rather than consciously and deliberately bad. Consequently, in view of the primitive simplicity of its mind it is more readily captivated by a big lie than by a small one, since it itself often uses small lies but would be, nevertheless, too ashamed to make use of big lies. Such an untruth will not even occur to it, and it will not even believe that others are capable of the enormous insolence of the most vile distortions. Why, even when enlightened, it will still vacillate and be in doubt about the matter and will nevertheless accept as true at least some cause or other. Consequently, even from the most impudent lie something will always stick ...[113] A number of other passages display Hitler's low opinion of the intellectual capacities and critical faculties of the masses: All propaganda has to appeal to the people and its intellectual level has to be set in accordance with the receptive capacities of the most-limited persons among those to whom it intends to address itself. The larger the mass of men to be reached, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be set.[114] The receptive capacity of the great masses is very restricted, its understanding small. On the other hand, however, its forgetfulness is great. On account of these facts all effective propaganda must restrict itself to very few points and impress these by slogans, until even the last person is able to bring to mind what is meant by such a word.[115] The task of propaganda is, for instance, not to evaluate diverse rights but to emphasize exclusively the single right of that which it is representing. It does not have to investigate objectively the truth, so far as this is favorable to the others, in order then to present it to the masses in strict honesty, but rather to serve its own side ceaselessly.[116] If one's own propaganda even once accords just the shimmer of right to the other side, then the basis is therewith laid for doubt regarding one's own cause. The masses are not able to distinguish where the error of the other side ends and the error of one's own side begins.[117] But all talent in presentation of propaganda will lead to no success if a fundamental principle is not always strictly followed. Propaganda has to restrict itself to a few matters and to repeat these eternally. Persistence is here, as with so many other things in the world, the first and most important presupposition for success.[118] In view of their slowness of mind, they [the masses] require always, however, a certain period before they are ready even to take cognizance of a matter, and only after a thousandfold repetition of the most simple concept will they finally retain it.[119] _In all cases in which there is a question of the fulfilment of apparently impossible demands or tasks, the entire attention of a people must be concentrated only on this one question, in such a way as if being or non-being actually depends on its solution_ ... ...The great mass of the people can never see the entire way before them, without tiring and doubting the task.[120] In general the art of all truly great popular leaders at all times consists primarily in not scattering the attention of a people but rather in concentrating it always on one single opponent. The more unified this use of the fighting will of a people, the greater will be the magnetic attractive force of a movement and the more powerful the force of its push. It is a part of the genius of a great leader to make even quite different opponents appear as if they belonged only to one category, because the recognition of different enemies leads weak and unsure persons only too readily to begin doubting their own cause. When the vacillating masses see themselves fighting against too many enemies, objectivity at once sets in and raises the question whether really all the others are wrong and only one's own people or one's own movement is right.[121] (Document 13-II, _post_ pp. 229-231.) It has been the aim of Nazi propaganda, then, to unite the masses of the people in hatred of certain enemies, designated by such conveniently broad and simple terms as "Jews," "democrats," "plutocrats," "bolshevists," or "Anglo-Saxons," which so far as possible were to be identified with one another in the public mind. The Germans were represented to themselves, on the other hand, as a racial folk of industrious workers. It then became possible to plunge the people into a war on a wave of emotional hatred against those nations which were pictured as combining to keep Germany from attaining her rightful place in the sun. The important role which propaganda would have to play in the coming war was fully recognized by Ewald Banse, an ardent Nazi military theorist of the geopolitical school and professor of military science at Brunswick Military College. In his book _Raum und Volk im Weltkrieg_ (_Space and People in the World War_) which appeared in 1932 (an English translation by Alan Harris was published under the title _Germany Prepares for War_ (New York, Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1934)), he stated: Preparation for future wars must not stop at the creation, equipment and training of an efficient army, but must go on to train the minds of the whole people for the war and must employ all the resources of science to master the conditions governing the war itself and the possibility of endurance. In 1914 we had a first-class army, but our scientific mobilization was bad, and the mobilization of men's minds a thing undreamed of. The unveiling of war memorials, parades of war veterans, flag-waggings, fiery speeches and guard-mounting are not of themselves enough to prepare a nation's mind for the dangers that threaten. Conviction is always more lasting than enthusiasm. ... Such teaching is necessary at a time and in a world in which countries are no longer represented by monarchs or a small aristocracy or by a specialist army, but in which the whole nation, from the commander-in-chief to the man in the ranks, from the loftiest thought to the simplest wish, from corn to coal, from the treasury vaults to the last trouser-button, must be permeated through and through with the idea of national defense, if it is to preserve its national identity and political independence. The science of national defense is not the same as military science; it does not teach generals how to win battles or company commanders how to train recruits. Its lessons are addressed first and foremost to the whole people. It seeks to train the popular mind to heroism and war and to implant in it an understanding of the nature and prerequisite conditions of modern warfare. It teaches us about countries and peoples, especially our own country and its neighbors, their territories and economic capacity, their communications and their mentality--all for the purpose of creating the best possible conditions for waging future wars in defense of the national existence.[122] Infiltration Tactics The Nazis, while entirely without scruple in the pursuit of their objectives, endeavor whenever possible to give their actions the cloak of legality. This procedure was followed in Germany to enable them to gain control of the Government of the Reich and in their foreign policy up to September 1, 1939. It has been a cardinal principle of the Nazis to avoid the use of force whenever their objectives may be attained in another manner and they have assiduously studied their enemies in an effort to discover the weak points in their structure which will enable the Nazis to accomplish their downfall. The preceding pages have demonstrated that the Nazis have contributed practically nothing that is original to German political thought. By the use of unscrupulous, deceitful, and uninhibited tactics, however, they have been able to realize many of the objectives which had previously existed only in theory. The Weimar Constitution provided the Nazis with a convenient basis for the establishment of the totalitarian state. They made no effort to conceal their intention of taking advantage of the weaknesses of the Weimar Republic in order to attain power. On April 30, 1928 Dr. Goebbels wrote in his paper _Der Angriff_: We enter Parliament in order to supply ourselves, in the arsenal of democracy, with its own weapons. We become members of the Reichstag in order to paralyze the Weimar sentiment with its own assistance. If democracy is so stupid as to give us free tickets and salaries for this bear's work, that is its affair ...[123] And later in the same article: We do not come as friends, nor even as neutrals. We come as enemies. As the wolf bursts into the flock, so we come.[124] Hitler expressed the same idea on September 1, 1933, when, looking back upon the struggle for political power in Germany, he wrote: This watchword of democratic freedom led only to insecurity, indiscipline, and at length to the downfall and destruction of all authority. _Our opponents' objection that we, too, once made use of these rights, will not hold water; for we made use of an unreasonable right, which was part and parcel of an unreasonable system, in order to overthrow the unreason of this system._[125] Discussing the rise to power of the Nazis, Huber (document 1, _post_ p. 155) wrote in 1939: The parliamentary battle of the NSDAP had the single purpose of destroying the parliamentary system from within through its own methods. It was necessary above all to make formal use of the possibilities of the party-state system but to refuse real cooperation and thereby to render the parliamentary system, which is by nature dependent upon the responsible cooperation of the opposition, incapable of action.[126] As its parliamentary strength increased, the party was able to achieve these aims: It was in a position to make the formation of any positive majority in the Reichstag impossible.... Thus the NSDAP was able through its strong position to make the Reichstag powerless as a lawgiving and government-forming body.[127] The same principle was followed by Germany in weakening and undermining the governments of countries which it had chosen for its victims. While it was Hitler's policy to concentrate on only one objective at a time, German agents were busy throughout the world in ferreting out the natural political, social, and economic cleavages in various countries and in broadening them in order to create internal confusion and uncertainty. Foreign political leaders of Fascist or authoritarian persuasion were encouraged and often liberally subsidized from Nazi funds. Control was covertly obtained over influential newspapers and periodicals and their editorial policies shaped in such a way as to further Nazi ends. In the countries Germany sought to overpower, all the highly developed organs of Nazi propaganda were utilized to confuse and divide public opinion, to discredit national leaders and institutions, and to induce an unjustified feeling of confidence in the false assertions of Nazi leaders disclaiming any aggressive intentions. One of the most important features introduced by the Nazis into German foreign policy was the appreciation of the value of Germans living abroad and their organization as implements of the Reich for the attainment of objectives in the field of foreign policy. This idea was applied by the Nazis to all the large colonies of Germans which are scattered throughout the world. The potential usefulness of these colonies was early recognized by the men in Hitler's immediate entourage, several of whom were so-called _Auslandsdeutsche_ who had spent many years of their life abroad and were familiar with foreign conditions and with the position and influence of German groups in foreign countries. Of particular importance in this group were Rudolf Hess, the Führer's Deputy, who was primarily responsible for elaborating the policy which utilized the services of Germans abroad, and Ernst Wilhelm Bohle, the leader of the Foreign Organization, who was responsible for winning over these Germans to Naziism and for their organization in groups which would serve the purposes of the Third Reich. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 94: Feder, _op. cit._, p. 18.] [Footnote 95: Gauweiler, _op. cit._, pp. 149-151.] [Footnote 96: _Mein Kampf_, pp. 727-728.] [Footnote 97: _Ibid._, pp. 735-736.] [Footnote 98: Scurla, _op. cit._, p. 21.] [Footnote 99: _Ibid._, pp. 21-22.] [Footnote 100: _Ibid._, p. 23.] [Footnote 101: _Der Parteitag der Freiheit_ (official record of the 1935 party congress at Nuremberg: Munich, 1935), p. 27.] [Footnote 102: _Mein Kampf_, p. 743.] [Footnote 103: _Ibid._, pp. 754-755.] [Footnote 104: _Ibid._, pp. 437-438.] [Footnote 105: Rosenberg, _Wesen, Grundsätze und Ziele der NSDAP_, p. 48.] [Footnote 106: _London Times_, Sept. 26, 1939, p. 9.] [Footnote 107: _Ibid._] [Footnote 108: _Ibid._] [Footnote 109: _My New Order_, p. 592.] [Footnote 110: _Ibid._, pp. 669-671.] [Footnote 111: _Ibid._, p. 687.] [Footnote 112: Goebbels, _op. cit._, p. 6.] [Footnote 113: _Mein Kampf_, p. 252.] [Footnote 114: _Ibid._, p. 197.] [Footnote 115: _Ibid_., p. 198.] [Footnote 116: _Ibid._, p. 200.] [Footnote 117: _Ibid._, pp. 200-201.] [Footnote 118: _Ibid._, p. 202.] [Footnote 119: _Ibid._, p. 203.] [Footnote 120: _Ibid._, p. 273.] [Footnote 121: _Ibid._, p. 129.] [Footnote 122: Banse, _Germany Prepares for War_ (New York, 1934), pp. 348-349.] [Footnote 123: Goebbels, _Der Angriff: Aufsätze aus der Kampfzeit_ (Munich, 1936), p. 71.] [Footnote 124: _Ibid._, p. 73.] [Footnote 125: _My New Order_, pp. 195-196.] [Footnote 126: Huber, _Verfassungsrecht des grossdeutschen Reiches_ (Hamburg, 1939), p. 31.] [Footnote 127: _Ibid._, p. 32.] NATIONAL-SOCIALISM AND MEDICINE Address by Dr. F. Hamburger to German Medical Profession. Translated (in part) from _Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift_, 1939, No. 6. Medical men must beware of pride, a pride which is certainly wide-spread and which leads to the disparagement of the practical doctor and medical layman, and then further to the disparagement of the craft of nature healers. The practical doctor and the nature healer on the one hand tend towards an understandable disparagement of medical science and analysis and, on the other hand, tend towards superficiality. The superficiality of the opponents of science is, however, as unhappy an affair as the pride of the so-called scientists, but the one group should not demean the other. This would lead to successful cooperation to the advantage of the sick and health of the community. Academic medicine and nature healers generally have one thing in common, that they underestimate the significance of automatism and suggestion. In this regard there is an absence in both camps of the necessary criticism and clarity. Successes are noted with specific methods without any confirmation as to whether or not suggestion and faith alone have not produced the improvement in the patient. National-Socialism is the true instrument for the achievement of the health of our people. National-Socialism is concerned with the great significance of inherited traits and with the insight into the working of spiritual forces upon the body, with the study of the power of custom and, along with this, of the significance of education and nurture. (Hamburger here complains about the luxurious arrangement for dealing with the mentally ill in contradistinction to the neglect of Folk-health. This he attributes to the era of liberalism with its stress upon the single individual. He here also attacks the Socialism of Social Democracy and its conception of a Community of Equal Men. This is a false Socialism.) So we scientists and doctors simply and soberly affirm the principle of strength of faith and the nationalist socialist principle of Positive Christianity which does not prevent us from the inspired consideration of natural and divinely willed phenomena. We doctors must never forget the fact that the soul rules the body. Soul forces are the most important. The spirit builds the body. Strength springs from joy. Efficiency is achieved despite care, fear, and uncertainty--We speak here of thymogenetic automatism or the automatism of harmony ("thymogenetische automatismus oder stimmungsautomatismus"). The autonomous nervous system achieves, under the influence of joy, the expansion of the blood vessels in skin and muscle.... The muscular activity incited by joy means the use of calories and stimulation of appetite. Muscular contraction pulls and draws at the bones, ligaments are tensed, breathing deepend, appetite increased ... A child influenced by the daily exercise of joy develops physically strong and powerful. ... The Soul care (Seele Sorge) of the practical doctor is his most significant daily task alongside of prescriptions and manipulative dexterity. Soul-care in the medical sense is a concern for the wishes, hopes and fears of the patient, the considered participation in his fate. Such a relationship leads to the all-important and generally recognized trust in the doctor. This faith, in all cases, leads to the improvement, often even to the elimination of symptoms, of the disease. Here we have clearly before us the great significance of thymogenetic automatism. Academic physicians should not dismiss this because we do not know its biochemical aspects. (We must beware of regarding something as unacceptable because it is not measurable in exact terms, he warns.) We see its practical results, and, therefore, thymogenetic automatism must stand in the first rank as of overwhelming significance. Thus, also, the principle, strength through joy (Kraft durch Freude) stands firmly as an inescapable natural law. We see the practical country doctor spreading courage and confidence. For years too few doctors have seen clearly that gymnastic tourism and sport do more for health than all doctors taken together. And now we face the fact that a single man, a non-medical man (Hitler) through his great qualities, has opened up new avenues of health for the eighty million folk of Germany. In the majority of cases things so happen that the doctor must act before making a diagnosis, since only the mis-educated patients, the one-sided intellectual patient, wishes in the very first place to know the diagnosis. But the unspoilt and properly ordered type of person wishes only to be relieved of his pain. For him the diagnosis is an interesting side issue but not the principle thing. We can thus also understand why we always meet the desire for a diagnosis placed first by the over-intellectualized Jewish patient. But that is not the case with most Aryan patients. They, from the first, come to meet the doctor with more trust. They do not entertain as many after-thoughts. And I cannot help but remark that after-thoughts are hardly conducive to right results. (After a discussion of the sterilization of the unfit and of inheritable diseases he turns to the subject of child bearing.) It has been estimated that every couple should have four children if the nation's population is to be maintained. But we meet already the facile and complacent expression of young married people, "Now we have our four children and so have fulfilled our obligations"--What superficiality! Today we must demand a much higher moral attitude from the wife than previously. Earlier it was taken for granted that a woman would bear a child every one or two years. But today in this time of manifold amenities of life, at a time when women is not denied access to these joys it is understandable that she is eager to participate in them. Add to this that the knowledge of birth control is general today. Despite all this women must be encouraged to give birth during twenty years of married life to eight or ten and even more children, and to renounce the above-mentioned joys of life. She must decide as a mother of children to lead a life full of sacrifices, devotion, and unselfishness. It is only when these ethical demands are fulfilled by a large number of worthy wives of good stock that the future of the German nation will be assured. Doctors are leaders of the Folk more than they know ... They are now quite officially fuehrer of the people, called to the leadership of its health. To fulfill this task they must be free of the profit motive. They must be quite free from that attitude of spirit which is rightly designated as Jewish, the concern for business and self-provision. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Arendt, Hannah--_The Origins of Totalitarianism_, N.Y., 1951. Pt. III is especially directed to a discussion of the principles and consequences of fascism. The author gives an effective account of what "total domination" signifies in a reign of terror. Detailed bibliography. Bodrero, Emilio--"Fascism" in _Dictatorship on Its Trial_, ed. by Otto Forst de Battaglia, London, 1930. A brief, but significant, statement by a former Rector of the University of Padua and a Secretary of State to Mussolini. Borgese, G.A.--_Goliath, The March of Fascism_, N.Y., 1938. Well written from the point of view of an Italian humanist. Brady, Robert A.--_The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism_, London, 1937. An extremely thorough and documented discussion of the economy of National Socialist Germany, its institutions and its business practices. See also: Brady's _Business as a System of Power_; chapters on Germany, Italy and Japan. N.Y., 1943. Childs, H.L. and Dodd, W.E.--_The Nazi Primer_, N.Y., 1938. A translation of the "Official Handbook for Schooling the Hitler Youth." In simple form including illustrations, it is an excellent indication of the guiding principles of the German educational system. Dennis, Lawrence--_The Coming American Fascism_, N.Y., 1936. _The Dynamics of War and Revolution_, N.Y., 1940. Two books by the only fascist theorist in America. Fraenkel, Ernest--_The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship,_ N.Y., 1941. By distinguishing between the "Prerogative State" and the "Normative State," the author gives an effective account of the attempt of the Nazis to acknowledge an indispensable, if minimal, legal order, which was, comparatively speaking, independent of the extra-legal realm of violence. Hartshorne, E.Y.--_The German Universities and National Socialism_, Cambridge, 1937. A carefully documented account of what happened in the various branches and departments of German universities under the Nazis. Hitler, Adolph--_My Battle_, N.Y., 1939. Hitler's own vitriolic account of his attempt to rise to power. Lasswell, Harold D.--"The Garrison State," _American Journal of Sociology_, Chicago, Vol. XLVI, 1940-41, pp. 455-468. A brief but incisive discussion of the structure of fascism. Lilge, Frederic--_The Abuse of Learning: The Failure of the German University,_ N.Y., 1948. A philosophical history of higher education in Germany, concluding with its fascist evolution. Matteotti, Giacomo--_The Fascist Exposed: A Year of Fascist Domination_, London, 1924. A factual account by a liberal, who, until murdered, was a member of the Italian Senate. Minio-Paluello, L.--_Education in Fascist Italy_, N.Y., 1946. A detailed discussion of fascist education, including an historical introduction to pre-fascist education. Neumann, Franz--_Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism_, N.Y., 1942. Probably the most comprehensive and definitive statement in English of the functioning of National Socialism. It concentrates especially on the political and economic aspects of Nazism. Pinthus, Kurt--"Culture Under Nazi Germany," _The American Scholar_, Vol. IX, N.Y., 1940, pp. 483-498. A valuable treatment of the inner character of the arts and letters and of what happened to their publics under the Nazis. Sabine, G.H.--_A History of Political Theory_, N.Y., 1950. A brief chapter on "Fascism" gives an excellent balanced account of its fundamentals. Salvemini, Gaetano--_The Fascist Dictatorship in Italy_, N.Y., 1927. _Under the Axe of Fascism_, N.Y., 1936. An eminent Italian historian writes vividly and perceptively on Italian Fascism. Schneider, Herbert W.--_Making the Fascist State_, N.Y., 1928. An early, but well considered, account of the rise of Italian fascism. Silone, Ignazio--_Fontamara_, Verona, 1951. The best novel on Italian fascism. Spender, Stephen--_European Witness_, N.Y., 1946. Note especially the analysis of Goebbel's novel, _Michael_. Trevor-Roper, H.R.--_The Last Days of Hitler_, N.Y., 1946. An intimate portrayal of Hitler and his entourage from the time of the beginning of the collapse of the Nazi armies. Especially good on the rift between the politicians and the military. READINGS ON FASCISM AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM The catastrophe and holocaust brought about by the two powerful movements of fascism and national socialism will mark human life always. Now, as we feel our hatred for them, we find it difficult to understand how they could have been so powerful, how they could have appealed so strongly to millions of people of a modern age. And the documents whereby we could understand these philosophies have been lost--except as they are now gathered here in one convenient volume. To understand our own times, it is necessary to understand these movements. And to understand them, we must read the basic philosophical and political documents which show the force of the ideas which moved a world to the brink of disaster. THE FIRST SWALLOW PAPERBOOKS: 1. A FIELD OF BROKEN STONES by Lowell Naeve. A profound book written in a prison. $1.65. 2. THE WIFE OF MARTIN GUERRE by Janet Lewis. One of the fine short novels of all time. $1.25. 3. READINGS ON FASCISM AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM. A grouping together of authoritative readings. $1.35. 4. THE TEACHER OF ENGLISH by James E. Warren, Jr. The Materials and Opportunities of the teacher. $1.35. 5. MORNING RED by Frederick Manfred. The most ambitious novel by a powerful writer. $1.95. ALAN SWALLOW 2679 So. York St., Denver 10, Colo. Cover design by Lowell Naeve 
1187	----	Transcribed from the 1912 Macmillan edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org WAR OF THE CLASSES BY JACK LONDON AUTHOR OF "THE SEA-WOLF," "CALL OF THE WILD," ETC. THE REGENT PRESS NEW YORK Copyright, 1905, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published April, 1905. Reprinted June, October, November, 1905; January, 1906; May, 1907; April, 1908; March, 19010; April, 1912. Printed and Bound by J. J. Little & Ives Company New York Contents: Preface The Class Struggle The Tramp The Scab The Question of the Maximum A Review Wanted: A New Land of Development How I Became a Socialist PREFACE When I was a youngster I was looked upon as a weird sort of creature, because, forsooth, I was a socialist. Reporters from local papers interviewed me, and the interviews, when published, were pathological studies of a strange and abnormal specimen of man. At that time (nine or ten years ago), because I made a stand in my native town for municipal ownership of public utilities, I was branded a "red-shirt," a "dynamiter," and an "anarchist"; and really decent fellows, who liked me very well, drew the line at my appearing in public with their sisters. But the times changed. There came a day when I heard, in my native town, a Republican mayor publicly proclaim that "municipal ownership was a fixed American policy." And in that day I found myself picking up in the world. No longer did the pathologist study me, while the really decent fellows did not mind in the least the propinquity of myself and their sisters in the public eye. My political and sociological ideas were ascribed to the vagaries of youth, and good-natured elderly men patronized me and told me that I would grow up some day and become an unusually intelligent member of the community. Also they told me that my views were biassed by my empty pockets, and that some day, when I had gathered to me a few dollars, my views would be wholly different,--in short, that my views would be their views. And then came the day when my socialism grew respectable,--still a vagary of youth, it was held, but romantically respectable. Romance, to the bourgeois mind, was respectable because it was not dangerous. As a "red-shirt," with bombs in all his pockets, I was dangerous. As a youth with nothing more menacing than a few philosophical ideas, Germanic in their origin, I was an interesting and pleasing personality. Through all this experience I noted one thing. It was not I that changed, but the community. In fact, my socialistic views grew solider and more pronounced. I repeat, it was the community that changed, and to my chagrin I discovered that the community changed to such purpose that it was not above stealing my thunder. The community branded me a "red-shirt" because I stood for municipal ownership; a little later it applauded its mayor when he proclaimed municipal ownership to be a fixed American policy. He stole my thunder, and the community applauded the theft. And today the community is able to come around and give me points on municipal ownership. What happened to me has been in no wise different from what has happened to the socialist movement as a whole in the United States. In the bourgeois mind socialism has changed from a terrible disease to a youthful vagary, and later on had its thunder stolen by the two old parties,--socialism, like a meek and thrifty workingman, being exploited became respectable. Only dangerous things are abhorrent. The thing that is not dangerous is always respectable. And so with socialism in the United States. For several years it has been very respectable,--a sweet and beautiful Utopian dream, in the bourgeois mind, yet a dream, only a dream. During this period, which has just ended, socialism was tolerated because it was impossible and non-menacing. Much of its thunder had been stolen, and the workingmen had been made happy with full dinner-pails. There was nothing to fear. The kind old world spun on, coupons were clipped, and larger profits than ever were extracted from the toilers. Coupon-clipping and profit-extracting would continue to the end of time. These were functions divine in origin and held by divine right. The newspapers, the preachers, and the college presidents said so, and what they say, of course, is so--to the bourgeois mind. Then came the presidential election of 1904. Like a bolt out of a clear sky was the socialist vote of 435,000,--an increase of nearly 400 per cent in four years, the largest third-party vote, with one exception, since the Civil War. Socialism had shown that it was a very live and growing revolutionary force, and all its old menace revived. I am afraid that neither it nor I are any longer respectable. The capitalist press of the country confirms me in my opinion, and herewith I give a few post-election utterances of the capitalist press:-- "The Democratic party of the constitution is dead. The Social-Democratic party of continental Europe, preaching discontent and class hatred, assailing law, property, and personal rights, and insinuating confiscation and plunder, is here."--Chicago Chronicle. "That over forty thousand votes should have been cast in this city to make such a person as Eugene V. Debs the President of the United States is about the worst kind of advertising that Chicago could receive."--Chicago Inter-Ocean. "We cannot blink the fact that socialism is making rapid growth in this country, where, of all others, there would seem to be less inspiration for it."--Brooklyn Daily Eagle. "Upon the hands of the Republican party an awful responsibility was placed last Tuesday. . . It knows that reforms--great, far-sweeping reforms--are necessary, and it has the power to make them. God help our civilization if it does not! . . . It must repress the trusts or stand before the world responsible for our system of government being changed into a social republic. The arbitrary cutting down of wages must cease, or socialism will seize another lever to lift itself into power."--The Chicago New World. "Scarcely any phase of the election is more sinisterly interesting than the increase in the socialist vote. Before election we said that we could not afford to give aid and comfort to the socialists in any manner. . . It (socialism) must be fought in all its phases, in its every manifestation."--San Francisco Argonaut. And far be it from me to deny that socialism is a menace. It is its purpose to wipe out, root and branch, all capitalistic institutions of present-day society. It is distinctly revolutionary, and in scope and depth is vastly more tremendous than any revolution that has ever occurred in the history of the world. It presents a new spectacle to the astonished world,--that of an _organized_, _international_, _revolutionary movement_. In the bourgeois mind a class struggle is a terrible and hateful thing, and yet that is precisely what socialism is,--a world-wide class struggle between the propertyless workers and the propertied masters of workers. It is the prime preachment of socialism that the struggle is a class struggle. The working class, in the process of social evolution, (in the very nature of things), is bound to revolt from the sway of the capitalist class and to overthrow the capitalist class. This is the menace of socialism, and in affirming it and in tallying myself an adherent of it, I accept my own consequent unrespectability. As yet, to the average bourgeois mind, socialism is merely a menace, vague and formless. The average member of the capitalist class, when he discusses socialism, is condemned an ignoramus out of his own mouth. He does not know the literature of socialism, its philosophy, nor its politics. He wags his head sagely and rattles the dry bones of dead and buried ideas. His lips mumble mouldy phrases, such as, "Men are not born equal and never can be;" "It is Utopian and impossible;" "Abstinence should be rewarded;" "Man will first have to be born again;" "Cooperative colonies have always failed;" and "What if we do divide up? in ten years there would be rich and poor men such as there are today." It surely is time that the capitalists knew something about this socialism that they feel menaces them. And it is the hope of the writer that the socialistic studies in this volume may in some slight degree enlighten a few capitalistic minds. The capitalist must learn, first and for always, that socialism is based, not upon the equality, but upon the inequality, of men. Next, he must learn that no new birth into spiritual purity is necessary before socialism becomes possible. He must learn that socialism deals with what is, not with what ought to be; and that the material with which it deals is the "clay of the common road," the warm human, fallible and frail, sordid and petty, absurd and contradictory, even grotesque, and yet, withal, shot through with flashes and glimmerings of something finer and God-like, with here and there sweetnesses of service and unselfishness, desires for goodness, for renunciation and sacrifice, and with conscience, stern and awful, at times blazingly imperious, demanding the right,--the right, nothing more nor less than the right. JACK LONDON. OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA. January 12, 1905. THE CLASS STRUGGLE Unfortunately or otherwise, people are prone to believe in the reality of the things they think ought to be so. This comes of the cheery optimism which is innate with life itself; and, while it may sometimes be deplored, it must never be censured, for, as a rule, it is productive of more good than harm, and of about all the achievement there is in the world. There are cases where this optimism has been disastrous, as with the people who lived in Pompeii during its last quivering days; or with the aristocrats of the time of Louis XVI, who confidently expected the Deluge to overwhelm their children, or their children's children, but never themselves. But there is small likelihood that the case of perverse optimism here to be considered will end in such disaster, while there is every reason to believe that the great change now manifesting itself in society will be as peaceful and orderly in its culmination as it is in its present development. Out of their constitutional optimism, and because a class struggle is an abhorred and dangerous thing, the great American people are unanimous in asserting that there is no class struggle. And by "American people" is meant the recognized and authoritative mouth-pieces of the American people, which are the press, the pulpit, and the university. The journalists, the preachers, and the professors are practically of one voice in declaring that there is no such thing as a class struggle now going on, much less that a class struggle will ever go on, in the United States. And this declaration they continually make in the face of a multitude of facts which impeach, not so much their sincerity, as affirm, rather, their optimism. There are two ways of approaching the subject of the class struggle. The existence of this struggle can be shown theoretically, and it can be shown actually. For a class struggle to exist in society there must be, first, a class inequality, a superior class and an inferior class (as measured by power); and, second, the outlets must be closed whereby the strength and ferment of the inferior class have been permitted to escape. That there are even classes in the United States is vigorously denied by many; but it is incontrovertible, when a group of individuals is formed, wherein the members are bound together by common interests which are peculiarly their interests and not the interests of individuals outside the group, that such a group is a class. The owners of capital, with their dependents, form a class of this nature in the United States; the working people form a similar class. The interest of the capitalist class, say, in the matter of income tax, is quite contrary to the interest of the laboring class; and, _vice versa_, in the matter of poll-tax. If between these two classes there be a clear and vital conflict of interest, all the factors are present which make a class struggle; but this struggle will lie dormant if the strong and capable members of the inferior class be permitted to leave that class and join the ranks of the superior class. The capitalist class and the working class have existed side by side and for a long time in the United States; but hitherto all the strong, energetic members of the working class have been able to rise out of their class and become owners of capital. They were enabled to do this because an undeveloped country with an expanding frontier gave equality of opportunity to all. In the almost lottery-like scramble for the ownership of vast unowned natural resources, and in the exploitation of which there was little or no competition of capital, (the capital itself rising out of the exploitation), the capable, intelligent member of the working class found a field in which to use his brains to his own advancement. Instead of being discontented in direct ratio with his intelligence and ambitions, and of radiating amongst his fellows a spirit of revolt as capable as he was capable, he left them to their fate and carved his own way to a place in the superior class. But the day of an expanding frontier, of a lottery-like scramble for the ownership of natural resources, and of the upbuilding of new industries, is past. Farthest West has been reached, and an immense volume of surplus capital roams for investment and nips in the bud the patient efforts of the embryo capitalist to rise through slow increment from small beginnings. The gateway of opportunity after opportunity has been closed, and closed for all time. Rockefeller has shut the door on oil, the American Tobacco Company on tobacco, and Carnegie on steel. After Carnegie came Morgan, who triple-locked the door. These doors will not open again, and before them pause thousands of ambitious young men to read the placard: NO THOROUGH-FARE. And day by day more doors are shut, while the ambitious young men continue to be born. It is they, denied the opportunity to rise from the working class, who preach revolt to the working class. Had he been born fifty years later, Andrew Carnegie, the poor Scotch boy, might have risen to be president of his union, or of a federation of unions; but that he would never have become the builder of Homestead and the founder of multitudinous libraries, is as certain as it is certain that some other man would have developed the steel industry had Andrew Carnegie never been born. Theoretically, then, there exist in the United States all the factors which go to make a class struggle. There are the capitalists and working classes, the interests of which conflict, while the working class is no longer being emasculated to the extent it was in the past by having drawn off from it its best blood and brains. Its more capable members are no longer able to rise out of it and leave the great mass leaderless and helpless. They remain to be its leaders. But the optimistic mouthpieces of the great American people, who are themselves deft theoreticians, are not to be convinced by mere theoretics. So it remains to demonstrate the existence of the class struggle by a marshalling of the facts. When nearly two millions of men, finding themselves knit together by certain interests peculiarly their own, band together in a strong organization for the aggressive pursuit of those interests, it is evident that society has within it a hostile and warring class. But when the interests which this class aggressively pursues conflict sharply and vitally with the interests of another class, class antagonism arises and a class struggle is the inevitable result. One great organization of labor alone has a membership of 1,700,000 in the United States. This is the American Federation of Labor, and outside of it are many other large organizations. All these men are banded together for the frank purpose of bettering their condition, regardless of the harm worked thereby upon all other classes. They are in open antagonism with the capitalist class, while the manifestos of their leaders state that the struggle is one which can never end until the capitalist class is exterminated. Their leaders will largely deny this last statement, but an examination of their utterances, their actions, and the situation will forestall such denial. In the first place, the conflict between labor and capital is over the division of the join product. Capital and labor apply themselves to raw material and make it into a finished product. The difference between the value of the raw material and the value of the finished product is the value they have added to it by their joint effort. This added value is, therefore, their joint product, and it is over the division of this joint product that the struggle between labor and capital takes place. Labor takes its share in wages; capital takes its share in profits. It is patent, if capital took in profits the whole joint product, that labor would perish. And it is equally patent, if labor took in wages the whole joint product, that capital would perish. Yet this last is the very thing labor aspires to do, and that it will never be content with anything less than the whole joint product is evidenced by the words of its leaders. Mr. Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, has said: "The workers want more wages; more of the comforts of life; more leisure; more chance for self-improvement as men, as trade-unionists, as citizens. _These were the wants of yesterday_; _they are the wants of today_; _they will be the wants of tomorrow_, _and of tomorrow's morrow_. The struggle may assume new forms, but the issue is the immemorial one,--an effort of the producers to obtain an increasing measure of the wealth that flows from their production." Mr. Henry White, secretary of the United Garment Workers of America and a member of the Industrial Committee of the National Civic Federation, speaking of the National Civic Federation soon after its inception, said: "To fall into one another's arms, to avow friendship, to express regret at the injury which has been done, would not alter the facts of the situation. Workingmen will continue to demand more pay, and the employer will naturally oppose them. The readiness and ability of the workmen to fight will, as usual, largely determine the amount of their wages or their share in the product. . . But when it comes to dividing the proceeds, there is the rub. We can also agree that the larger the product through the employment of labor-saving methods the better, as there will be more to be divided, but again the question of the division. . . . A Conciliation Committee, having the confidence of the community, and composed of men possessing practical knowledge of industrial affairs, can therefore aid in mitigating this antagonism, in preventing avoidable conflicts, in bringing about a _truce_; I use the word 'truce' because understandings can only be temporary." Here is a man who might have owned cattle on a thousand hills, been a lumber baron or a railroad king, had he been born a few years sooner. As it is, he remains in his class, is secretary of the United Garment Workers of America, and is so thoroughly saturated with the class struggle that he speaks of the dispute between capital and labor in terms of war,--workmen _fight_ with employers; it is possible to avoid some _conflicts_; in certain cases _truces_ may be, for the time being, effected. Man being man and a great deal short of the angels, the quarrel over the division of the joint product is irreconcilable. For the last twenty years in the United States, there has been an average of over a thousand strikes per year; and year by year these strikes increase in magnitude, and the front of the labor army grows more imposing. And it is a class struggle, pure and simple. Labor as a class is fighting with capital as a class. Workingmen will continue to demand more pay, and employers will continue to oppose them. This is the key-note to _laissez faire_,--everybody for himself and devil take the hindmost. It is upon this that the rampant individualist bases his individualism. It is the let-alone policy, the struggle for existence, which strengthens the strong, destroys the weak, and makes a finer and more capable breed of men. But the individual has passed away and the group has come, for better or worse, and the struggle has become, not a struggle between individuals, but a struggle between groups. So the query rises: Has the individualist never speculated upon the labor group becoming strong enough to destroy the capitalist group, and take to itself and run for itself the machinery of industry? And, further, has the individualist never speculated upon this being still a triumphant expression of individualism,--of group individualism,--if the confusion of terms may be permitted? But the facts of the class struggle are deeper and more significant than have so far been presented. A million or so of workmen may organize for the pursuit of interests which engender class antagonism and strife, and at the same time be unconscious of what is engendered. But when a million or so of workmen show unmistakable signs of being conscious of their class,--of being, in short, class conscious,--then the situation grows serious. The uncompromising and terrible hatred of the trade-unionist for a scab is the hatred of a class for a traitor to that class,--while the hatred of a trade-unionist for the militia is the hatred of a class for a weapon wielded by the class with which it is fighting. No workman can be true to his class and at the same time be a member of the militia: this is the dictum of the labor leaders. In the town of the writer, the good citizens, when they get up a Fourth of July parade and invite the labor unions to participate, are informed by the unions that they will not march in the parade if the militia marches. Article 8 of the constitution of the Painters' and Decorators' Union of Schenectady provides that a member must not be a "militiaman, special police officer, or deputy marshal in the employ of corporations or individuals during strikes, lockouts, or other labor difficulties, and any member occupying any of the above positions will be debarred from membership." Mr. William Potter was a member of this union and a member of the National Guard. As a result, because he obeyed the order of the Governor when his company was ordered out to suppress rioting, he was expelled from his union. Also his union demanded his employers, Shafer & Barry, to discharge him from their service. This they complied with, rather than face the threatened strike. Mr. Robert L. Walker, first lieutenant of the Light Guards, a New Haven militia company, recently resigned. His reason was, that he was a member of the Car Builders' Union, and that the two organizations were antagonistic to each other. During a New Orleans street-car strike not long ago, a whole company of militia, called out to protect non-union men, resigned in a body. Mr. John Mulholland, president of the International Association of Allied Metal Mechanics, has stated that he does not want the members to join the militia. The Local Trades' Assembly of Syracuse, New York, has passed a resolution, by unanimous vote, requiring union men who are members of the National Guard to resign, under pain of expulsion, from the unions. The Amalgamated Sheet Metal Workers' Association has incorporated in its constitution an amendment excluding from membership in its organization "any person a member of the regular army, or of the State militia or naval reserve." The Illinois State Federation of Labor, at a recent convention, passed without a dissenting vote a resolution declaring that membership in military organizations is a violation of labor union obligations, and requesting all union men to withdraw from the militia. The president of the Federation, Mr. Albert Young, declared that the militia was a menace not only to unions, but to all workers throughout the country. These instances may be multiplied a thousand fold. The union workmen are becoming conscious of their class, and of the struggle their class is waging with the capitalist class. To be a member of the militia is to be a traitor to the union, for the militia is a weapon wielded by the employers to crush the workers in the struggle between the warring groups. Another interesting, and even more pregnant, phase of the class struggle is the political aspect of it as displayed by the socialists. Five men, standing together, may perform prodigies; 500 men, marching as marched the historic Five Hundred of Marseilles, may sack a palace and destroy a king; while 500,000 men, passionately preaching the propaganda of a class struggle, waging a class struggle along political lines, and backed by the moral and intellectual support of 10,000,000 more men of like convictions throughout the world, may come pretty close to realizing a class struggle in these United States of ours. In 1900 these men cast 150,000 votes; two years later, in 1902, they cast 300,000 votes; and in 1904 they cast 450,000. They have behind them a most imposing philosophic and scientific literature; they own illustrated magazines and reviews, high in quality, dignity, and restraint; they possess countless daily and weekly papers which circulate throughout the land, and single papers which have subscribers by the hundreds of thousands; and they literally swamp the working classes in a vast sea of tracts and pamphlets. No political party in the United States, no church organization nor mission effort, has as indefatigable workers as has the socialist party. They multiply themselves, know of no effort nor sacrifice too great to make for the Cause; and "Cause," with them, is spelled out in capitals. They work for it with a religious zeal, and would die for it with a willingness similar to that of the Christian martyrs. These men are preaching an uncompromising and deadly class struggle. In fact, they are organized upon the basis of a class struggle. "The history of society," they say, "is a history of class struggles. Patrician struggled with plebeian in early Rome; the king and the burghers, with the nobles in the Middle Ages; later on, the king and the nobles with the bourgeoisie; and today the struggle is on between the triumphant bourgeoisie and the rising proletariat. By 'proletariat' is meant the class of people without capital which sells its labor for a living. "That the proletariat shall conquer," (mark the note of fatalism), "is as certain as the rising sun. Just as the bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century wanted democracy applied to politics, so the proletariat of the twentieth century wants democracy applied to industry. As the bourgeoisie complained against the government being run by and for the nobles, so the proletariat complains against the government and industry being run by and for the bourgeoisie; and so, following in the footsteps of its predecessor, the proletariat will possess itself of the government, apply democracy to industry, abolish wages, which are merely legalized robbery, and run the business of the country in its own interest." "Their aim," they say, "is to organize the working class, and those in sympathy with it, into a political party, with the object of conquering the powers of government and of using them for the purpose of transforming the present system of private ownership of the means of production and distribution into collective ownership by the entire people." Briefly stated, this is the battle plan of these 450,000 men who call themselves "socialists." And, in the face of the existence of such an aggressive group of men, a class struggle cannot very well be denied by the optimistic Americans who say: "A class struggle is monstrous. Sir, there is no class struggle." The class struggle is here, and the optimistic American had better gird himself for the fray and put a stop to it, rather than sit idly declaiming that what ought not to be is not, and never will be. But the socialists, fanatics and dreamers though they may well be, betray a foresight and insight, and a genius for organization, which put to shame the class with which they are openly at war. Failing of rapid success in waging a sheer political propaganda, and finding that they were alienating the most intelligent and most easily organized portion of the voters, the socialists lessoned from the experience and turned their energies upon the trade-union movement. To win the trade unions was well-nigh to win the war, and recent events show that they have done far more winning in this direction than have the capitalists. Instead of antagonizing the unions, which had been their previous policy, the socialists proceeded to conciliate the unions. "Let every good socialist join the union of his trade," the edict went forth. "Bore from within and capture the trade-union movement." And this policy, only several years old, has reaped fruits far beyond their fondest expectations. Today the great labor unions are honeycombed with socialists, "boring from within," as they picturesquely term their undermining labor. At work and at play, at business meeting and council, their insidious propaganda goes on. At the shoulder of the trade-unionist is the socialist, sympathizing with him, aiding him with head and hand, suggesting--perpetually suggesting--the necessity for political action. As the _Journal_, of Lansing, Michigan, a republican paper, has remarked: "The socialists in the labor unions are tireless workers. They are sincere, energetic, and self-sacrificing. . . . They stick to the union and work all the while, thus making a showing which, reckoned by ordinary standards, is out of all proportion to their numbers. Their cause is growing among union laborers, and their long fight, intended to turn the Federation into a political organization, is likely to win." They miss no opportunity of driving home the necessity for political action, the necessity for capturing the political machinery of society whereby they may master society. As an instance of this is the avidity with which the American socialists seized upon the famous Taft-Vale Decision in England, which was to the effect that an unincorporated union could be sued and its treasury rifled by process of law. Throughout the United States, the socialists pointed the moral in similar fashion to the way it was pointed by the Social-Democratic Herald, which advised the trade-unionists, in view of the decision, to stop trying to fight capital with money, which they lacked, and to begin fighting with the ballot, which was their strongest weapon. Night and day, tireless and unrelenting, they labor at their self-imposed task of undermining society. Mr. M. G. Cunniff, who lately made an intimate study of trade-unionism, says: "All through the unions socialism filters. Almost every other man is a socialist, preaching that unionism is but a makeshift." "Malthus be damned," they told him, "for the good time was coming when every man should be able to rear his family in comfort." In one union, with two thousand members, Mr. Cunniff found every man a socialist, and from his experiences Mr. Cunniff was forced to confess, "I lived in a world that showed our industrial life a-tremble from beneath with a never-ceasing ferment." The socialists have already captured the Western Federation of Miners, the Western Hotel and Restaurant Employees' Union, and the Patternmakers' National Association. The Western Federation of Miners, at a recent convention, declared: "The strike has failed to secure to the working classes their liberty; we therefore call upon the workers to strike as one man for their liberties at the ballot box. . . . We put ourselves on record as committed to the programme of independent political action. . . . We indorse the platform of the socialist party, and accept it as the declaration of principles of our organization. We call upon our members as individuals to commence immediately the organization of the socialist movement in their respective towns and states, and to cooperate in every way for the furtherance of the principles of socialism and of the socialist party. In states where the socialist party has not perfected its organization, we advise that every assistance be given by our members to that end. . . . We therefore call for organizers, capable and well-versed in the whole programme of the labor movement, to be sent into each state to preach the necessity of organization on the political as well as on the economic field." The capitalist class has a glimmering consciousness of the class struggle which is shaping itself in the midst of society; but the capitalists, as a class, seem to lack the ability for organizing, for coming together, such as is possessed by the working class. No American capitalist ever aids an English capitalist in the common fight, while workmen have formed international unions, the socialists a world-wide international organization, and on all sides space and race are bridged in the effort to achieve solidarity. Resolutions of sympathy, and, fully as important, donations of money, pass back and forth across the sea to wherever labor is fighting its pitched battles. For divers reasons, the capitalist class lacks this cohesion or solidarity, chief among which is the optimism bred of past success. And, again, the capitalist class is divided; it has within itself a class struggle of no mean proportions, which tends to irritate and harass it and to confuse the situation. The small capitalist and the large capitalist are grappled with each other, struggling over what Achille Loria calls the "bi-partition of the revenues." Such a struggle, though not precisely analogous, was waged between the landlords and manufacturers of England when the one brought about the passage of the Factory Acts and the other the abolition of the Corn Laws. Here and there, however, certain members of the capitalist class see clearly the cleavage in society along which the struggle is beginning to show itself, while the press and magazines are beginning to raise an occasional and troubled voice. Two leagues of class-conscious capitalists have been formed for the purpose of carrying on their side of the struggle. Like the socialists, they do not mince matters, but state boldly and plainly that they are fighting to subjugate the opposing class. It is the barons against the commons. One of these leagues, the National Association of Manufacturers, is stopping short of nothing in what it conceives to be a life-and-death struggle. Mr. D. M. Parry, who is the president of the league, as well as president of the National Metal Trades' Association, is leaving no stone unturned in what he feels to be a desperate effort to organize his class. He has issued the call to arms in terms everything but ambiguous: "_There is still time in the United States to head off the socialistic programme_, _which_, _unrestrained_, _is sure to wreck our country_." As he says, the work is for "federating employers in order that we may meet with a united front all issues that affect us. We must come to this sooner or later. . . . The work immediately before the National Association of Manufacturers is, first, _keep the vicious eight-hour Bill off the books_; second, to _destroy the Anti-injunction Bill_, which wrests your business from you and places it in the hands of your employees; third, to secure the _passage of the Department of Commerce and Industry Bill_; the latter would go through with a rush were it not for the hectoring opposition of Organized Labor." By this department, he further says, "business interests would have direct and sympathetic representation at Washington." In a later letter, issued broadcast to the capitalists outside the League, President Parry points out the success which is already beginning to attend the efforts of the League at Washington. "We have contributed more than any other influence to the quick passage of the new Department of Commerce Bill. It is said that the activities of this office are numerous and satisfactory; but of that I must not say too much--or anything. . . . At Washington the Association is not represented too much, either directly or indirectly. Sometimes it is known in a most powerful way that it is represented vigorously and unitedly. Sometimes it is not known that it is represented at all." The second class-conscious capitalist organization is called the National Economic League. It likewise manifests the frankness of men who do not dilly-dally with terms, but who say what they mean, and who mean to settle down to a long, hard fight. Their letter of invitation to prospective members opens boldly. "We beg to inform you that the National Economic League will render its services in an impartial educational movement _to oppose socialism and class hatred_." Among its class-conscious members, men who recognize that the opening guns of the class struggle have been fired, may be instanced the following names: Hon. Lyman J. Gage, Ex-Secretary U. S. Treasury; Hon. Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, Ex-Minister to France; Rev. Henry C. Potter, Bishop New York Diocese; Hon. John D. Long, Ex-Secretary U. S. Navy; Hon. Levi P. Morton, Ex-Vice President United States; Henry Clews; John F. Dryden, President Prudential Life Insurance Co.; John A. McCall, President New York Life Insurance Co.; J. L. Greatsinger, President Brooklyn Rapid Transit Co.; the shipbuilding firm of William Cramp & Sons, the Southern Railway system, and the Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe Railway Company. Instances of the troubled editorial voice have not been rare during the last several years. There were many cries from the press during the last days of the anthracite coal strike that the mine owners, by their stubbornness, were sowing the regrettable seeds of socialism. The World's Work for December, 1902, said: "The next significant fact is the recommendation by the Illinois State Federation of Labor that all members of labor unions who are also members of the state militia shall resign from the militia. This proposition has been favorably regarded by some other labor organizations. It has done more than any other single recent declaration or action to cause a public distrust of such unions as favor it. _It hints of a class separation that in turn hints of anarchy_." The _Outlook_, February 14, 1903, in reference to the rioting at Waterbury, remarks, "That all this disorder should have occurred in a city of the character and intelligence of Waterbury indicates that the industrial war spirit is by no means confined to the immigrant or ignorant working classes." That President Roosevelt has smelt the smoke from the firing line of the class struggle is evidenced by his words, "Above all we need to remember that any kind of _class animosity in the political world_ is, if possible, even more destructive to national welfare than sectional, race, or religious animosity." The chief thing to be noted here is President Roosevelt's tacit recognition of class animosity in the industrial world, and his fear, which language cannot portray stronger, that this class animosity may spread to the political world. Yet this is the very policy which the socialists have announced in their declaration of war against present-day society--to capture the political machinery of society and by that machinery destroy present-day society. The New York Independent for February 12, 1903, recognized without qualification the class struggle. "It is impossible fairly to pass upon the methods of labor unions, or to devise plans for remedying their abuses, until it is recognized, to begin with, that unions are based upon class antagonism and that their policies are dictated by the necessities of social warfare. A strike is a rebellion against the owners of property. The rights of property are protected by government. And a strike, under certain provocation, may extend as far as did the general strike in Belgium a few years since, when practically the entire wage-earning population stopped work in order to force political concessions from the property-owning classes. This is an extreme case, but it brings out vividly the real nature of labor organization as a species of warfare whose object is the coercion of one class by another class." It has been shown, theoretically and actually, that there is a class struggle in the United States. The quarrel over the division of the joint product is irreconcilable. The working class is no longer losing its strongest and most capable members. These men, denied room for their ambition in the capitalist ranks, remain to be the leaders of the workers, to spur them to discontent, to make them conscious of their class, to lead them to revolt. This revolt, appearing spontaneously all over the industrial field in the form of demands for an increased share of the joint product, is being carefully and shrewdly shaped for a political assault upon society. The leaders, with the carelessness of fatalists, do not hesitate for an instant to publish their intentions to the world. They intend to direct the labor revolt to the capture of the political machinery of society. With the political machinery once in their hands, which will also give them the control of the police, the army, the navy, and the courts, they will confiscate, with or without remuneration, all the possessions of the capitalist class which are used in the production and distribution of the necessaries and luxuries of life. By this, they mean to apply the law of eminent domain to the land, and to extend the law of eminent domain till it embraces the mines, the factories, the railroads, and the ocean carriers. In short, they intend to destroy present-day society, which they contend is run in the interest of another class, and from the materials to construct a new society, which will be run in their interest. On the other hand, the capitalist class is beginning to grow conscious of itself and of the struggle which is being waged. It is already forming offensive and defensive leagues, while some of the most prominent figures in the nation are preparing to lead it in the attack upon socialism. The question to be solved is not one of Malthusianism, "projected efficiency," nor ethics. It is a question of might. Whichever class is to win, will win by virtue of superior strength; for the workers are beginning to say, as they said to Mr. Cunniff, "Malthus be damned." In their own minds they find no sanction for continuing the individual struggle for the survival of the fittest. As Mr. Gompers has said, they want more, and more, and more. The ethical import of Mr. Kidd's plan of the present generation putting up with less in order that race efficiency may be projected into a remote future, has no bearing upon their actions. They refuse to be the "glad perishers" so glowingly described by Nietzsche. It remains to be seen how promptly the capitalist class will respond to the call to arms. Upon its promptness rests its existence, for if it sits idly by, soothfully proclaiming that what ought not to be cannot be, it will find the roof beams crashing about its head. The capitalist class is in the numerical minority, and bids fair to be outvoted if it does not put a stop to the vast propaganda being waged by its enemy. It is no longer a question of whether or not there is a class struggle. The question now is, what will be the outcome of the class struggle? THE TRAMP Mr. Francis O'Neil, General Superintendent of Police, Chicago, speaking of the tramp, says: "Despite the most stringent police regulations, a great city will have a certain number of homeless vagrants to shelter through the winter." "Despite,"--mark the word, a confession of organized helplessness as against unorganized necessity. If police regulations are stringent and yet fail, then that which makes them fail, namely, the tramp, must have still more stringent reasons for succeeding. This being so, it should be of interest to inquire into these reasons, to attempt to discover why the nameless and homeless vagrant sets at naught the right arm of the corporate power of our great cities, why all that is weak and worthless is stronger than all that is strong and of value. Mr. O'Neil is a man of wide experience on the subject of tramps. He may be called a specialist. As he says of himself: "As an old-time desk sergeant and police captain, I have had almost unlimited opportunity to study and analyze this class of floating population, which seeks the city in winter and scatters abroad through the country in the spring." He then continues: "This experience reiterated the lesson that the vast majority of these wanderers are of the class with whom a life of vagrancy is a chosen means of living without work." Not only is it to be inferred from this that there is a large class in society which lives without work, for Mr. O'Neil's testimony further shows that this class is forced to live without work. He says: "I have been astonished at the multitude of those who have unfortunately engaged in occupations which practically force them to become loafers for at least a third of the year. And it is from this class that the tramps are largely recruited. I recall a certain winter when it seemed to me that a large portion of the inhabitants of Chicago belonged to this army of unfortunates. I was stationed at a police station not far from where an ice harvest was ready for the cutters. The ice company advertised for helpers, and the very night this call appeared in the newspapers our station was packed with homeless men, who asked shelter in order to be at hand for the morning's work. Every foot of floor space was given over to these lodgers and scores were still unaccommodated." And again: "And it must be confessed that the man who is willing to do honest labor for food and shelter is a rare specimen in this vast army of shabby and tattered wanderers who seek the warmth of the city with the coming of the first snow." Taking into consideration the crowd of honest laborers that swamped Mr. O'Neil's station-house on the way to the ice-cutting, it is patent, if all tramps were looking for honest labor instead of a small minority, that the honest laborers would have a far harder task finding something honest to do for food and shelter. If the opinion of the honest laborers who swamped Mr. O'Neil's station-house were asked, one could rest confident that each and every man would express a preference for fewer honest laborers on the morrow when he asked the ice foreman for a job. And, finally, Mr. O'Neil says: "The humane and generous treatment which this city has accorded the great army of homeless unfortunates has made it the victim of wholesale imposition, and this well-intended policy of kindness has resulted in making Chicago the winter Mecca of a vast and undesirable floating population." That is to say, because of her kindness, Chicago had more than her fair share of tramps; because she was humane and generous she suffered whole-sale imposition. From this we must conclude that it does not do to be _humane_ and _generous_ to our fellow-men--when they are tramps. Mr. O'Neil is right, and that this is no sophism it is the intention of this article, among other things, to show. In a general way we may draw the following inferences from the remarks of Mr. O'Neil: (1) The tramp is stronger than organized society and cannot be put down; (2) The tramp is "shabby," "tattered," "homeless," "unfortunate"; (3) There is a "vast" number of tramps; (4) Very few tramps are willing to do honest work; (5) Those tramps who are willing to do honest work have to hunt very hard to find it; (6) The tramp is undesirable. To this last let the contention be appended that the tramp is only _personally_ undesirable; that he is _negatively_ desirable; that the function he performs in society is a negative function; and that he is the by-product of economic necessity. It is very easy to demonstrate that there are more men than there is work for men to do. For instance, what would happen tomorrow if one hundred thousand tramps should become suddenly inspired with an overmastering desire for work? It is a fair question. "Go to work" is preached to the tramp every day of his life. The judge on the bench, the pedestrian in the street, the housewife at the kitchen door, all unite in advising him to go to work. So what would happen tomorrow if one hundred thousand tramps acted upon this advice and strenuously and indomitably sought work? Why, by the end of the week one hundred thousand workers, their places taken by the tramps, would receive their time and be "hitting the road" for a job. Ella Wheeler Wilcox unwittingly and uncomfortably demonstrated the disparity between men and work. {1} She made a casual reference, in a newspaper column she conducts, to the difficulty two business men found in obtaining good employees. The first morning mail brought her seventy-five applications for the position, and at the end of two weeks over two hundred people had applied. Still more strikingly was the same proposition recently demonstrated in San Francisco. A sympathetic strike called out a whole federation of trades' unions. Thousands of men, in many branches of trade, quit work,--draymen, sand teamsters, porters and packers, longshoremen, stevedores, warehousemen, stationary engineers, sailors, marine firemen, stewards, sea-cooks, and so forth,--an interminable list. It was a strike of large proportions. Every Pacific coast shipping city was involved, and the entire coasting service, from San Diego to Puget Sound, was virtually tied up. The time was considered auspicious. The Philippines and Alaska had drained the Pacific coast of surplus labor. It was summer-time, when the agricultural demand for laborers was at its height, and when the cities were bare of their floating populations. And yet there remained a body of surplus labor sufficient to take the places of the strikers. No matter what occupation, sea-cook or stationary engineer, sand teamster or warehouseman, in every case there was an idle worker ready to do the work. And not only ready but anxious. They fought for a chance to work. Men were killed, hundreds of heads were broken, the hospitals were filled with injured men, and thousands of assaults were committed. And still surplus laborers, "scabs," came forward to replace the strikers. The question arises: _Whence came this second army of workers to replace the first army_? One thing is certain: the trades' unions did not scab on one another. Another thing is certain: no industry on the Pacific slope was crippled in the slightest degree by its workers being drawn away to fill the places of the strikers. A third thing is certain: the agricultural workers did not flock to the cities to replace the strikers. In this last instance it is worth while to note that the agricultural laborers wailed to High Heaven when a few of the strikers went into the country to compete with them in unskilled employments. So there is no accounting for this second army of workers. It simply was. It was there all this time, a surplus labor army in the year of our Lord 1901, a year adjudged most prosperous in the annals of the United States. {2} The existence of the surplus labor army being established, there remains to be established the economic necessity for the surplus labor army. The simplest and most obvious need is that brought about by the fluctuation of production. If, when production is at low ebb, all men are at work, it necessarily follows that when production increases there will be no men to do the increased work. This may seem almost childish, and, if not childish, at least easily remedied. At low ebb let the men work shorter time; at high flood let them work overtime. The main objection to this is, that it is not done, and that we are considering what is, not what might be or should be. Then there are great irregular and periodical demands for labor which must be met. Under the first head come all the big building and engineering enterprises. When a canal is to be dug or a railroad put through, requiring thousands of laborers, it would be hurtful to withdraw these laborers from the constant industries. And whether it is a canal to be dug or a cellar, whether five thousand men are required or five, it is well, in society as at present organized, that they be taken from the surplus labor army. The surplus labor army is the reserve fund of social energy, and this is one of the reasons for its existence. Under the second head, periodical demands, come the harvests. Throughout the year, huge labor tides sweep back and forth across the United States. That which is sown and tended by few men, comes to sudden ripeness and must be gathered by many men; and it is inevitable that these many men form floating populations. In the late spring the berries must be picked, in the summer the grain garnered, in the fall, the hops gathered, in the winter the ice harvested. In California a man may pick berries in Siskiyou, peaches in Santa Clara, grapes in the San Joaquin, and oranges in Los Angeles, going from job to job as the season advances, and travelling a thousand miles ere the season is done. But the great demand for agricultural labor is in the summer. In the winter, work is slack, and these floating populations eddy into the cities to eke out a precarious existence and harrow the souls of the police officers until the return of warm weather and work. If there were constant work at good wages for every man, who would harvest the crops? But the last and most significant need for the surplus labor army remains to be stated. This surplus labor acts as a check upon all employed labor. It is the lash by which the masters hold the workers to their tasks, or drive them back to their tasks when they have revolted. It is the goad which forces the workers into the compulsory "free contracts" against which they now and again rebel. There is only one reason under the sun that strikes fail, and that is because there are always plenty of men to take the strikers' places. The strength of the union today, other things remaining equal, is proportionate to the skill of the trade, or, in other words, proportionate to the pressure the surplus labor army can put upon it. If a thousand ditch-diggers strike, it is easy to replace them, wherefore the ditch-diggers have little or no organized strength. But a thousand highly skilled machinists are somewhat harder to replace, and in consequence the machinist unions are strong. The ditch-diggers are wholly at the mercy of the surplus labor army, the machinists only partly. To be invincible, a union must be a monopoly. It must control every man in its particular trade, and regulate apprentices so that the supply of skilled workmen may remain constant; this is the dream of the "Labor Trust" on the part of the captains of labor. Once, in England, after the Great Plague, labor awoke to find there was more work for men than there were men to work. Instead of workers competing for favors from employers, employers were competing for favors from the workers. Wages went up and up, and continued to go up, until the workers demanded the full product of their toil. Now it is clear that, when labor receives its full product capital must perish. And so the pygmy capitalists of that post-Plague day found their existence threatened by this untoward condition of affairs. To save themselves, they set a maximum wage, restrained the workers from moving about from place to place, smashed incipient organization, refused to tolerate idlers, and by most barbarous legal penalties punished those who disobeyed. After that, things went on as before. The point of this, of course, is to demonstrate the need of the surplus labor army. Without such an army, our present capitalist society would be powerless. Labor would organize as it never organized before, and the last least worker would be gathered into the unions. The full product of toil would be demanded, and capitalist society would crumble away. Nor could capitalist society save itself as did the post-Plague capitalist society. The time is past when a handful of masters, by imprisonment and barbarous punishment, can drive the legions of the workers to their tasks. Without a surplus labor army, the courts, police, and military are impotent. In such matters the function of the courts, police, and military is to preserve order, and to fill the places of strikers with surplus labor. If there be no surplus labor to instate, there is no function to perform; for disorder arises only during the process of instatement, when the striking labor army and the surplus labor army clash together. That is to say, that which maintains the integrity of the present industrial society more potently than the courts, police, and military is the surplus labor army. * * * * * It has been shown that there are more men than there is work for men, and that the surplus labor army is an economic necessity. To show how the tramp is a by-product of this economic necessity, it is necessary to inquire into the composition of the surplus labor army. What men form it? Why are they there? What do they do? In the first place, since the workers must compete for employment, it inevitably follows that it is the fit and efficient who find employment. The skilled worker holds his place by virtue of his skill and efficiency. Were he less skilled, or were he unreliable or erratic, he would be swiftly replaced by a stronger competitor. The skilled and steady employments are not cumbered with clowns and idiots. A man finds his place according to his ability and the needs of the system, and those without ability, or incapable of satisfying the needs of the system, have no place. Thus, the poor telegrapher may develop into an excellent wood-chopper. But if the poor telegrapher cherishes the delusion that he is a good telegrapher, and at the same time disdains all other employments, he will have no employment at all, or he will be so poor at all other employments that he will work only now and again in lieu of better men. He will be among the first let off when times are dull, and among the last taken on when times are good. Or, to the point, he will be a member of the surplus labor army. So the conclusion is reached that the less fit and less efficient, or the unfit and inefficient, compose the surplus labor army. Here are to be found the men who have tried and failed, the men who cannot hold jobs,--the plumber apprentice who could not become a journeyman, and the plumber journeyman too clumsy and dull to retain employment; switchmen who wreck trains; clerks who cannot balance books; blacksmiths who lame horses; lawyers who cannot plead; in short, the failures of every trade and profession, and failures, many of them, in divers trades and professions. Failure is writ large, and in their wretchedness they bear the stamp of social disapprobation. Common work, any kind of work, wherever or however they can obtain it, is their portion. But these hereditary inefficients do not alone compose the surplus labor army. There are the skilled but unsteady and unreliable men; and the old men, once skilled, but, with dwindling powers, no longer skilled. {3} And there are good men, too, splendidly skilled and efficient, but thrust out of the employment of dying or disaster-smitten industries. In this connection it is not out of place to note the misfortune of the workers in the British iron trades, who are suffering because of American inroads. And, last of all, are the unskilled laborers, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, the ditch-diggers, the men of pick and shovel, the helpers, lumpers, roustabouts. If trade is slack on a seacoast of two thousand miles, or the harvests are light in a great interior valley, myriads of these laborers lie idle, or make life miserable for their fellows in kindred unskilled employments. A constant filtration goes on in the working world, and good material is continually drawn from the surplus labor army. Strikes and industrial dislocations shake up the workers, bring good men to the surface and sink men as good or not so good. The hope of the skilled striker is in that the scabs are less skilled, or less capable of becoming skilled; yet each strike attests to the efficiency that lurks beneath. After the Pullman strike, a few thousand railroad men were chagrined to find the work they had flung down taken up by men as good as themselves. But one thing must be considered here. Under the present system, if the weakest and least fit were as strong and fit as the best, and the best were correspondingly stronger and fitter, the same condition would obtain. There would be the same army of employed labor, the same army of surplus labor. The whole thing is relative. There is no absolute standard of efficiency. * * * * * Comes now the tramp. And all conclusions may be anticipated by saying at once that he is a tramp because some one has to be a tramp. If he left the "road" and became a _very_ efficient common laborer, some _ordinarily efficient_ common laborer would have to take to the "road." The nooks and crannies are crowded by the surplus laborers; and when the first snow flies, and the tramps are driven into the cities, things become overcrowded and stringent police regulations are necessary. The tramp is one of two kinds of men: he is either a discouraged worker or a discouraged criminal. Now a discouraged criminal, on investigation, proves to be a discouraged worker, or the descendant of discouraged workers; so that, in the last analysis, the tramp is a discouraged worker. Since there is not work for all, discouragement for some is unavoidable. How, then, does this process of discouragement operate? The lower the employment in the industrial scale, the harder the conditions. The finer, the more delicate, the more skilled the trade, the higher is it lifted above the struggle. There is less pressure, less sordidness, less savagery. There are fewer glass-blowers proportionate to the needs of the glass-blowing industry than there are ditch-diggers proportionate to the needs of the ditch-digging industry. And not only this, for it requires a glass-blower to take the place of a striking glass-blower, while any kind of a striker or out-of-work can take the place of a ditch-digger. So the skilled trades are more independent, have more individuality and latitude. They may confer with their masters, make demands, assert themselves. The unskilled laborers, on the other hand, have no voice in their affairs. The settlement of terms is none of their business. "Free contract" is all that remains to them. They may take what is offered, or leave it. There are plenty more of their kind. They do not count. They are members of the surplus labor army, and must be content with a hand-to-mouth existence. The reward is likewise proportioned. The strong, fit worker in a skilled trade, where there is little labor pressure, is well compensated. He is a king compared with his less fortunate brothers in the unskilled occupations where the labor pressure is great. The mediocre worker not only is forced to be idle a large portion of the time, but when employed is forced to accept a pittance. A dollar a day on some days and nothing on other days will hardly support a man and wife and send children to school. And not only do the masters bear heavily upon him, and his own kind struggle for the morsel at his mouth, but all skilled and organized labor adds to his woe. Union men do not scab on one another, but in strikes, or when work is slack, it is considered "fair" for them to descend and take away the work of the common laborers. And take it away they do; for, as a matter of fact, a well-fed, ambitious machinist or a core-maker will transiently shovel coal better than an ill-fed, spiritless laborer. Thus there is no encouragement for the unfit, inefficient, and mediocre. Their very inefficiency and mediocrity make them helpless as cattle and add to their misery. And the whole tendency for such is downward, until, at the bottom of the social pit, they are wretched, inarticulate beasts, living like beasts, breeding like beasts, dying like beasts. And how do they fare, these creatures born mediocre, whose heritage is neither brains nor brawn nor endurance? They are sweated in the slums in an atmosphere of discouragement and despair. There is no strength in weakness, no encouragement in foul air, vile food, and dank dens. They are there because they are so made that they are not fit to be higher up; but filth and obscenity do not strengthen the neck, nor does chronic emptiness of belly stiffen the back. For the mediocre there is no hope. Mediocrity is a sin. Poverty is the penalty of failure,--poverty, from whose loins spring the criminal and the tramp, both failures, both discouraged workers. Poverty is the inferno where ignorance festers and vice corrodes, and where the physical, mental, and moral parts of nature are aborted and denied. That the charge of rashness in splashing the picture be not incurred, let the following authoritative evidence be considered: first, the work and wages of mediocrity and inefficiency, and, second, the habitat: The New York Sun of February 28, 1901, describes the opening of a factory in New York City by the American Tobacco Company. Cheroots were to be made in this factory in competition with other factories which refused to be absorbed by the trust. The trust advertised for girls. The crowd of men and boys who wanted work was so great in front of the building that the police were forced with their clubs to clear them away. The wage paid the girls was $2.50 per week, sixty cents of which went for car fare. {4} Miss Nellie Mason Auten, a graduate student of the department of sociology at the University of Chicago, recently made a thorough investigation of the garment trades of Chicago. Her figures were published in the American Journal of Sociology, and commented upon by the Literary Digest. She found women working ten hours a day, six days a week, for forty cents per week (a rate of two-thirds of a cent an hour). Many women earned less than a dollar a week, and none of them worked every week. The following table will best summarize Miss Auten's investigations among a portion of the garment-workers: INDUSTRY AVERAGE AVERAGE NUMBER AVERAGE YEARLY INDIVIDUAL OF WEEKS EARNINGS WEEKLY WAGES EMPLOYED Dressmakers $.90 42. $37.00 Pants-Finishers 1.31 27.58 42.41 Housewives and 1.58 30.21 47.49 Pants-Finishers Seamstresses 2.03 32.78 64.10 Pants-makers 2.13 30.77 75.61 Miscellaneous 2.77 29. 81.80 Tailors 6.22 31.96 211.92 General 2.48 31.18 76.74 Averages Walter A. Wyckoff, who is as great an authority upon the worker as Josiah Flynt is on the tramp, furnishes the following Chicago experience: "Many of the men were so weakened by the want and hardship of the winter that they were no longer in condition for effective labor. Some of the bosses who were in need of added hands were obliged to turn men away because of physical incapacity. One instance of this I shall not soon forget. It was when I overheard, early one morning at a factory gate, an interview between a would-be laborer and the boss. I knew the applicant for a Russian Jew, who had at home an old mother and a wife and two young children to support. He had had intermittent employment throughout the winter in a sweater's den, {5} barely enough to keep them all alive, and, after the hardships of the cold season, he was again in desperate straits for work. "The boss had all but agreed to take him on for some sort of unskilled labor, when, struck by the cadaverous look of the man, he told him to bare his arm. Up went the sleeve of his coat and his ragged flannel shirt, exposing a naked arm with the muscles nearly gone, and the blue-white transparent skin stretched over sinews and the outlines of the bones. Pitiful beyond words was his effort to give a semblance of strength to the biceps which rose faintly to the upward movement of the forearm. But the boss sent him off with an oath and a contemptuous laugh; and I watched the fellow as he turned down the street, facing the fact of his starving family with a despair at his heart which only mortal man can feel and no mortal tongue can speak." Concerning habitat, Mr. Jacob Riis has stated that in New York City, in the block bounded by Stanton, Houston, Attorney, and Ridge streets, the size of which is 200 by 300, there is a warren of 2244 human beings. In the block bounded by Sixty-first and Sixty-second streets, and Amsterdam and West End avenues, are over four thousand human creatures,--quite a comfortable New England village to crowd into one city block. The Rev. Dr. Behrends, speaking of the block bounded by Canal, Hester, Eldridge, and Forsyth streets, says: "In a room 12 by 8 and 5.5 feet high, it was found that nine persons slept and prepared their food. . . . In another room, located in a dark cellar, without screens or partitions, were together two men with their wives and a girl of fourteen, two single men and a boy of seventeen, two women and four boys,--nine, ten, eleven, and fifteen years old,--fourteen persons in all." Here humanity rots. Its victims, with grim humor, call it "tenant-house rot." Or, as a legislative report puts it: "Here infantile life unfolds its bud, but perishes before its first anniversary. Here youth is ugly with loathsome disease, and the deformities which follow physical degeneration." These are the men and women who are what they are because they were not better born, or because they happened to be unluckily born in time and space. Gauged by the needs of the system, they are weak and worthless. The hospital and the pauper's grave await them, and they offer no encouragement to the mediocre worker who has failed higher up in the industrial structure. Such a worker, conscious that he has failed, conscious from the hard fact that he cannot obtain work in the higher employments, finds several courses open to him. He may come down and be a beast in the social pit, for instance; but if he be of a certain caliber, the effect of the social pit will be to discourage him from work. In his blood a rebellion will quicken, and he will elect to become either a felon or a tramp. If he have fought the hard fight he is not unacquainted with the lure of the "road." When out of work and still undiscouraged, he has been forced to "hit the road" between large cities in his quest for a job. He has loafed, seen the country and green things, laughed in joy, lain on his back and listened to the birds singing overhead, unannoyed by factory whistles and bosses' harsh commands; and, most significant of all, _he has lived_! That is the point! He has not starved to death. Not only has he been care-free and happy, but he has lived! And from the knowledge that he has idled and is still alive, he achieves a new outlook on life; and the more he experiences the unenviable lot of the poor worker, the more the blandishments of the "road" take hold of him. And finally he flings his challenge in the face of society, imposes a valorous boycott on all work, and joins the far-wanderers of Hoboland, the gypsy folk of this latter day. But the tramp does not usually come from the slums. His place of birth is ordinarily a bit above, and sometimes a very great bit above. A confessed failure, he yet refuses to accept the punishment, and swerves aside from the slum to vagabondage. The average beast in the social pit is either too much of a beast, or too much of a slave to the bourgeois ethics and ideals of his masters, to manifest this flicker of rebellion. But the social pit, out of its discouragement and viciousness, breeds criminals, men who prefer being beasts of prey to being beasts of work. And the mediocre criminal, in turn, the unfit and inefficient criminal, is discouraged by the strong arm of the law and goes over to trampdom. These men, the discouraged worker and the discouraged criminal, voluntarily withdraw themselves from the struggle for work. Industry does not need them. There are no factories shut down through lack of labor, no projected railroads unbuilt for want of pick-and-shovel men. Women are still glad to toil for a dollar a week, and men and boys to clamor and fight for work at the factory gates. No one misses these discouraged men, and in going away they have made it somewhat easier for those that remain. * * * * * So the case stands thus: There being more men than there is work for men to do, a surplus labor army inevitably results. The surplus labor army is an economic necessity; without it, present society would fall to pieces. Into the surplus labor army are herded the mediocre, the inefficient, the unfit, and those incapable of satisfying the industrial needs of the system. The struggle for work between the members of the surplus labor army is sordid and savage, and at the bottom of the social pit the struggle is vicious and beastly. This struggle tends to discouragement, and the victims of this discouragement are the criminal and the tramp. The tramp is not an economic necessity such as the surplus labor army, but he is the by-product of an economic necessity. The "road" is one of the safety-valves through which the waste of the social organism is given off. And _being given off_ constitutes the negative function of the tramp. Society, as at present organized, makes much waste of human life. This waste must be eliminated. Chloroform or electrocution would be a simple, merciful solution of this problem of elimination; but the ruling ethics, while permitting the human waste, will not permit a humane elimination of that waste. This paradox demonstrates the irreconcilability of theoretical ethics and industrial need. And so the tramp becomes self-eliminating. And not only self! Since he is manifestly unfit for things as they are, and since kind is prone to beget kind, it is necessary that his kind cease with him, that his progeny shall not be, that he play the eunuch's part in this twentieth century after Christ. And he plays it. He does not breed. Sterility is his portion, as it is the portion of the woman on the street. They might have been mates, but society has decreed otherwise. And, while it is not nice that these men should die, it is ordained that they must die, and we should not quarrel with them if they cumber our highways and kitchen stoops with their perambulating carcasses. This is a form of elimination we not only countenance but compel. Therefore let us be cheerful and honest about it. Let us be as stringent as we please with our police regulations, but for goodness' sake let us refrain from telling the tramp to go to work. Not only is it unkind, but it is untrue and hypocritical. We know there is no work for him. As the scapegoat to our economic and industrial sinning, or to the plan of things, if you will, we should give him credit. Let us be just. He is so made. Society made him. He did not make himself. THE SCAB In a competitive society, where men struggle with one another for food and shelter, what is more natural than that generosity, when it diminishes the food and shelter of men other than he who is generous, should be held an accursed thing? Wise old saws to the contrary, he who takes from a man's purse takes from his existence. To strike at a man's food and shelter is to strike at his life; and in a society organized on a tooth-and-nail basis, such an act, performed though it may be under the guise of generosity, is none the less menacing and terrible. It is for this reason that a laborer is so fiercely hostile to another laborer who offers to work for less pay or longer hours. To hold his place, (which is to live), he must offset this offer by another equally liberal, which is equivalent to giving away somewhat from the food and shelter he enjoys. To sell his day's work for $2, instead of $2.50, means that he, his wife, and his children will not have so good a roof over their heads, so warm clothes on their backs, so substantial food in their stomachs. Meat will be bought less frequently and it will be tougher and less nutritious, stout new shoes will go less often on the children's feet, and disease and death will be more imminent in a cheaper house and neighborhood. Thus the generous laborer, giving more of a day's work for less return, (measured in terms of food and shelter), threatens the life of his less generous brother laborer, and at the best, if he does not destroy that life, he diminishes it. Whereupon the less generous laborer looks upon him as an enemy, and, as men are inclined to do in a tooth-and-nail society, he tries to kill the man who is trying to kill him. When a striker kills with a brick the man who has taken his place, he has no sense of wrong-doing. In the deepest holds of his being, though he does not reason the impulse, he has an ethical sanction. He feels dimly that he has justification, just as the home-defending Boer felt, though more sharply, with each bullet he fired at the invading English. Behind every brick thrown by a striker is the selfish will "to live" of himself, and the slightly altruistic will "to live" of his family. The family group came into the world before the State group, and society, being still on the primitive basis of tooth and nail, the will "to live" of the State is not so compelling to the striker as is the will "to live" of his family and himself. In addition to the use of bricks, clubs, and bullets, the selfish laborer finds it necessary to express his feelings in speech. Just as the peaceful country-dweller calls the sea-rover a "pirate," and the stout burgher calls the man who breaks into his strong-box a "robber," so the selfish laborer applies the opprobrious epithet a "scab" to the laborer who takes from him food and shelter by being more generous in the disposal of his labor power. The sentimental connotation of "scab" is as terrific as that of "traitor" or "Judas," and a sentimental definition would be as deep and varied as the human heart. It is far easier to arrive at what may be called a technical definition, worded in commercial terms, as, for instance, that _a scab is one who gives more value for the same price than another_. The laborer who gives more time or strength or skill for the same wage than another, or equal time or strength or skill for a less wage, is a scab. This generousness on his part is hurtful to his fellow-laborers, for it compels them to an equal generousness which is not to their liking, and which gives them less of food and shelter. But a word may be said for the scab. Just as his act makes his rivals compulsorily generous, so do they, by fortune of birth and training, make compulsory his act of generousness. He does not scab because he wants to scab. No whim of the spirit, no burgeoning of the heart, leads him to give more of his labor power than they for a certain sum. It is because he cannot get work on the same terms as they that he is a scab. There is less work than there are men to do work. This is patent, else the scab would not loom so large on the labor-market horizon. Because they are stronger than he, or more skilled, or more energetic, it is impossible for him to take their places at the same wage. To take their places he must give more value, must work longer hours or receive a smaller wage. He does so, and he cannot help it, for his will "to live" is driving him on as well as they are being driven on by their will "to live"; and to live he must win food and shelter, which he can do only by receiving permission to work from some man who owns a bit of land or a piece of machinery. And to receive permission from this man, he must make the transaction profitable for him. Viewed in this light, the scab, who gives more labor power for a certain price than his fellows, is not so generous after all. He is no more generous with his energy than the chattel slave and the convict laborer, who, by the way, are the almost perfect scabs. They give their labor power for about the minimum possible price. But, within limits, they may loaf and malinger, and, as scabs, are exceeded by the machine, which never loafs and malingers and which is the ideally perfect scab. It is not nice to be a scab. Not only is it not in good social taste and comradeship, but, from the standpoint of food and shelter, it is bad business policy. Nobody desires to scab, to give most for least. The ambition of every individual is quite the opposite, to give least for most; and, as a result, living in a tooth-and-nail society, battle royal is waged by the ambitious individuals. But in its most salient aspect, that of the struggle over the division of the joint product, it is no longer a battle between individuals, but between groups of individuals. Capital and labor apply themselves to raw material, make something useful out of it, add to its value, and then proceed to quarrel over the division of the added value. Neither cares to give most for least. Each is intent on giving less than the other and on receiving more. Labor combines into its unions, capital into partnerships, associations, corporations, and trusts. A group-struggle is the result, in which the individuals, as individuals, play no part. The Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, for instance, serves notice on the Master Builders' Association that it demands an increase of the wage of its members from $3.50 a day to $4, and a Saturday half-holiday without pay. This means that the carpenters are trying to give less for more. Where they received $21 for six full days, they are endeavoring to get $22 for five days and a half,--that is, they will work half a day less each week and receive a dollar more. Also, they expect the Saturday half-holiday to give work to one additional man for each eleven previously employed. This last affords a splendid example of the development of the group idea. In this particular struggle the individual has no chance at all for life. The individual carpenter would be crushed like a mote by the Master Builders' Association, and like a mote the individual master builder would be crushed by the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. In the group-struggle over the division of the joint product, labor utilizes the union with its two great weapons, the strike and the boycott; while capital utilizes the trust and the association, the weapons of which are the black-list, the lockout, and the scab. The scab is by far the most formidable weapon of the three. He is the man who breaks strikes and causes all the trouble. Without him there would be no trouble, for the strikers are willing to remain out peacefully and indefinitely so long as other men are not in their places, and so long as the particular aggregation of capital with which they are fighting is eating its head off in enforced idleness. But both warring groups have reserve weapons. Were it not for the scab, these weapons would not be brought into play. But the scab takes the place of the striker, who begins at once to wield a most powerful weapon, terrorism. The will "to live" of the scab recoils from the menace of broken bones and violent death. With all due respect to the labor leaders, who are not to be blamed for volubly asseverating otherwise, terrorism is a well-defined and eminently successful policy of the labor unions. It has probably won them more strikes than all the rest of the weapons in their arsenal. This terrorism, however, must be clearly understood. It is directed solely against the scab, placing him in such fear for life and limb as to drive him out of the contest. But when terrorism gets out of hand and inoffensive non-combatants are injured, law and order threatened, and property destroyed, it becomes an edged tool that cuts both ways. This sort of terrorism is sincerely deplored by the labor leaders, for it has probably lost them as many strikes as have been lost by any other single cause. The scab is powerless under terrorism. As a rule, he is not so good nor gritty a man as the men he is displacing, and he lacks their fighting organization. He stands in dire need of stiffening and backing. His employers, the capitalists, draw their two remaining weapons, the ownership of which is debatable, but which they for the time being happen to control. These two weapons may be called the political and judicial machinery of society. When the scab crumples up and is ready to go down before the fists, bricks, and bullets of the labor group, the capitalist group puts the police and soldiers into the field, and begins a general bombardment of injunctions. Victory usually follows, for the labor group cannot withstand the combined assault of gatling guns and injunctions. But it has been noted that the ownership of the political and judicial machinery of society is debatable. In the Titanic struggle over the division of the joint product, each group reaches out for every available weapon. Nor are they blinded by the smoke of conflict. They fight their battles as coolly and collectedly as ever battles were fought on paper. The capitalist group has long since realized the immense importance of controlling the political and judicial machinery of society. Taught by gatlings and injunctions, which have smashed many an otherwise successful strike, the labor group is beginning to realize that it all depends upon who is behind and who is before the gatlings and the injunctions. And he who knows the labor movement knows that there is slowly growing up and being formulated a clear and definite policy for the capture of the political and judicial machinery. This is the terrible spectre which Mr. John Graham Brooks sees looming portentously over the twentieth century world. No man may boast a more intimate knowledge of the labor movement than he; and he reiterates again and again the dangerous likelihood of the whole labor group capturing the political machinery of society. As he says in his recent book: {6} "It is not probable that employers can destroy unionism in the United States. Adroit and desperate attempts will, however, be made, if we mean by unionism the undisciplined and aggressive fact of vigorous and determined organizations. If capital should prove too strong in this struggle, the result is easy to predict. The employers have only to convince organized labor that it cannot hold its own against the capitalist manager, and the whole energy that now goes to the union will turn to an aggressive political socialism. It will not be the harmless sympathy with increased city and state functions which trade unions already feel; it will become a turbulent political force bent upon using every weapon of taxation against the rich." This struggle not to be a scab, to avoid giving more for less and to succeed in giving less for more, is more vital than it would appear on the surface. The capitalist and labor groups are locked together in desperate battle, and neither side is swayed by moral considerations more than skin-deep. The labor group hires business agents, lawyers, and organizers, and is beginning to intimidate legislators by the strength of its solid vote; and more directly, in the near future, it will attempt to control legislation by capturing it bodily through the ballot-box. On the other hand, the capitalist group, numerically weaker, hires newspapers, universities, and legislatures, and strives to bend to its need all the forces which go to mould public opinion. The only honest morality displayed by either side is white-hot indignation at the iniquities of the other side. The striking teamster complacently takes a scab driver into an alley, and with an iron bar breaks his arms, so that he can drive no more, but cries out to high Heaven for justice when the capitalist breaks his skull by means of a club in the hands of a policeman. Nay, the members of a union will declaim in impassioned rhetoric for the God-given right of an eight-hour day, and at the time be working their own business agent seventeen hours out of the twenty-four. A capitalist such as Collis P. Huntington, and his name is Legion, after a long life spent in buying the aid of countless legislatures, will wax virtuously wrathful, and condemn in unmeasured terms "the dangerous tendency of crying out to the Government for aid" in the way of labor legislation. Without a quiver, a member of the capitalist group will run tens of thousands of pitiful child-laborers through his life-destroying cotton factories, and weep maudlin and constitutional tears over one scab hit in the back with a brick. He will drive a "compulsory" free contract with an unorganized laborer on the basis of a starvation wage, saying, "Take it or leave it," knowing that to leave it means to die of hunger, and in the next breath, when the organizer entices that laborer into a union, will storm patriotically about the inalienable right of all men to work. In short, the chief moral concern of either side is with the morals of the other side. They are not in the business for their moral welfare, but to achieve the enviable position of the non-scab who gets more than he gives. But there is more to the question than has yet been discussed. The labor scab is no more detestable to his brother laborers than is the capitalist scab to his brother capitalists. A capitalist may get most for least in dealing with his laborers, and in so far be a non-scab; but at the same time, in his dealings with his fellow-capitalists, he may give most for least and be the very worst kind of scab. The most heinous crime an employer of labor can commit is to scab on his fellow-employers of labor. Just as the individual laborers have organized into groups to protect themselves from the peril of the scab laborer, so have the employers organized into groups to protect themselves from the peril of the scab employer. The employers' federations, associations, and trusts are nothing more nor less than unions. They are organized to destroy scabbing amongst themselves and to encourage scabbing amongst others. For this reason they pool interests, determine prices, and present an unbroken and aggressive front to the labor group. As has been said before, nobody likes to play the compulsorily generous role of scab. It is a bad business proposition on the face of it. And it is patent that there would be no capitalist scabs if there were not more capital than there is work for capital to do. When there are enough factories in existence to supply, with occasional stoppages, a certain commodity, the building of new factories by a rival concern, for the production of that commodity, is plain advertisement that that capital is out of a job. The first act of this new aggregation of capital will be to cut prices, to give more for less,--in short to scab, to strike at the very existence of the less generous aggregation of capital the work of which it is trying to do. No scab capitalist strives to give more for less for any other reason than that he hopes, by undercutting a competitor and driving that competitor out of the market, to get that market and its profits for himself. His ambition is to achieve the day when he shall stand alone in the field both as buyer and seller,--when he will be the royal non-scab, buying most for least, selling least for most, and reducing all about him, the small buyers and sellers, (the consumers and the laborers), to a general condition of scabdom. This, for example, has been the history of Mr. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Company. Through all the sordid villanies of scabdom he has passed, until today he is a most regal non-scab. However, to continue in this enviable position, he must be prepared at a moment's notice to go scabbing again. And he is prepared. Whenever a competitor arises, Mr. Rockefeller changes about from giving least for most and gives most for least with such a vengeance as to drive the competitor out of existence. The banded capitalists discriminate against a scab capitalist by refusing him trade advantages, and by combining against him in most relentless fashion. The banded laborers, discriminating against a scab laborer in more primitive fashion, with a club, are no more merciless than the banded capitalists. Mr. Casson tells of a New York capitalist who withdrew from the Sugar Union several years ago and became a scab. He was worth something like twenty millions of dollars. But the Sugar Union, standing shoulder to shoulder with the Railroad Union and several other unions, beat him to his knees till he cried, "Enough." So frightfully did they beat him that he was obliged to turn over to his creditors his home, his chickens, and his gold watch. In point of fact, he was as thoroughly bludgeoned by the Federation of Capitalist Unions as ever scab workman was bludgeoned by a labor union. The intent in either case is the same,--to destroy the scab's producing power. The labor scab with concussion of the brain is put out of business, and so is the capitalist scab who has lost all his dollars down to his chickens and his watch. But the role of scab passes beyond the individual. Just as individuals scab on other individuals, so do groups scab on other groups. And the principle involved is precisely the same as in the case of the simple labor scab. A group, in the nature of its organization, is often compelled to give most for least, and, so doing, to strike at the life of another group. At the present moment all Europe is appalled by that colossal scab, the United States. And Europe is clamorous with agitation for a Federation of National Unions to protect her from the United States. It may be remarked, in passing, that in its prime essentials this agitation in no wise differs from the trade-union agitation among workmen in any industry. The trouble is caused by the scab who is giving most for least. The result of the American scab's nefarious actions will be to strike at the food and shelter of Europe. The way for Europe to protect herself is to quit bickering among her parts and to form a union against the scab. And if the union is formed, armies and navies may be expected to be brought into play in fashion similar to the bricks and clubs in ordinary labor struggles. In this connection, and as one of many walking delegates for the nations, M. Leroy-Beaulieu, the noted French economist, may well be quoted. In a letter to the Vienna Tageblatt, he advocates an economic alliance among the Continental nations for the purpose of barring out American goods, an economic alliance, in his own language, "_which may possibly and desirably develop into a political alliance_." It will be noted, in the utterances of the Continental walking delegates, that, one and all, they leave England out of the proposed union. And in England herself the feeling is growing that her days are numbered if she cannot unite for offence and defence with the great American scab. As Andrew Carnegie said some time ago, "The only course for Great Britain seems to be reunion with her grandchild or sure decline to a secondary place, and then to comparative insignificance in the future annals of the English-speaking race." Cecil Rhodes, speaking of what would have obtained but for the pig-headedness of George III, and of what will obtain when England and the United States are united, said, "_No cannon would. . . be fired on either hemisphere but by permission of The English race_." It would seem that England, fronted by the hostile Continental Union and flanked by the great American scab, has nothing left but to join with the scab and play the historic labor role of armed Pinkerton. Granting the words of Cecil Rhodes, the United States would be enabled to scab without let or hindrance on Europe, while England, as professional strike-breaker and policeman, destroyed the unions and kept order. All this may appear fantastic and erroneous, but there is in it a soul of truth vastly more significant than it may seem. Civilization may be expressed today in terms of trade-unionism. Individual struggles have largely passed away, but group-struggles increase prodigiously. And the things for which the groups struggle are the same as of old. Shorn of all subtleties and complexities, the chief struggle of men, and of groups of men, is for food and shelter. And, as of old they struggled with tooth and nail, so today they struggle with teeth and nails elongated into armies and navies, machines, and economic advantages. Under the definition that a scab is _one who gives more value for the same price than another_, it would seem that society can be generally divided into the two classes of the scabs and the non-scabs. But on closer investigation, however, it will be seen that the non-scab is a vanishing quantity. In the social jungle, everybody is preying upon everybody else. As in the case of Mr. Rockefeller, he who was a scab yesterday is a non-scab today, and tomorrow may be a scab again. The woman stenographer or book-keeper who receives forty dollars per month where a man was receiving seventy-five is a scab. So is the woman who does a man's work at a weaving-machine, and the child who goes into the mill or factory. And the father, who is scabbed out of work by the wives and children of other men, sends his own wife and children to scab in order to save himself. When a publisher offers an author better royalties than other publishers have been paying him, he is scabbing on those other publishers. The reporter on a newspaper, who feels he should be receiving a larger salary for his work, says so, and is shown the door, is replaced by a reporter who is a scab; whereupon, when the belly-need presses, the displaced reporter goes to another paper and scabs himself. The minister who hardens his heart to a call, and waits for a certain congregation to offer him say $500 a year more, often finds himself scabbed upon by another and more impecunious minister; and the next time it is _his_ turn to scab while a brother minister is hardening his heart to a call. The scab is everywhere. The professional strike-breakers, who as a class receive large wages, will scab on one another, while scab unions are even formed to prevent scabbing upon scabs. There are non-scabs, but they are usually born so, and are protected by the whole might of society in the possession of their food and shelter. King Edward is such a type, as are all individuals who receive hereditary food-and-shelter privileges,--such as the present Duke of Bedford, for instance, who yearly receives $75,000 from the good people of London because some former king gave some former ancestor of his the market privileges of Covent Garden. The irresponsible rich are likewise non-scabs,--and by them is meant that coupon-clipping class which hires its managers and brains to invest the money usually left it by its ancestors. Outside these lucky creatures, all the rest, at one time or another in their lives, are scabs, at one time or another are engaged in giving more for a certain price than any one else. The meek professor in some endowed institution, by his meek suppression of his convictions, is giving more for his salary than gave the other and more outspoken professor whose chair he occupies. And when a political party dangles a full dinner-pail in the eyes of the toiling masses, it is offering more for a vote than the dubious dollar of the opposing party. Even a money-lender is not above taking a slightly lower rate of interest and saying nothing about it. Such is the tangle of conflicting interests in a tooth-and-nail society that people cannot avoid being scabs, are often made so against their desires, and are often unconsciously made so. When several trades in a certain locality demand and receive an advance in wages, they are unwittingly making scabs of their fellow-laborers in that district who have received no advance in wages. In San Francisco the barbers, laundry-workers, and milk-wagon drivers received such an advance in wages. Their employers promptly added the amount of this advance to the selling price of their wares. The price of shaves, of washing, and of milk went up. This reduced the purchasing power of the unorganized laborers, and, in point of fact, reduced their wages and made them greater scabs. Because the British laborer is disinclined to scab,--that is, because he restricts his output in order to give less for the wage he receives,--it is to a certain extent made possible for the American capitalist, who receives a less restricted output from his laborers, to play the scab on the English capitalist. As a result of this, (of course combined with other causes), the American capitalist and the American laborer are striking at the food and shelter of the English capitalist and laborer. The English laborer is starving today because, among other things, he is not a scab. He practises the policy of "ca' canny," which may be defined as "go easy." In order to get most for least, in many trades he performs but from one-fourth to one-sixth of the labor he is well able to perform. An instance of this is found in the building of the Westinghouse Electric Works at Manchester. The British limit per man was 400 bricks per day. The Westinghouse Company imported a "driving" American contractor, aided by half a dozen "driving" American foremen, and the British bricklayer swiftly attained an average of 1800 bricks per day, with a maximum of 2500 bricks for the plainest work. But, the British laborer's policy of "ca' canny," which is the very honorable one of giving least for most, and which is likewise the policy of the English capitalist, is nevertheless frowned upon by the English capitalist, whose business existence is threatened by the great American scab. From the rise of the factory system, the English capitalist gladly embraced the opportunity, wherever he found it, of giving least for most. He did it all over the world whenever he enjoyed a market monopoly, and he did it at home with the laborers employed in his mills, destroying them like flies till prevented, within limits, by the passage of the Factory Acts. Some of the proudest fortunes of England today may trace their origin to the giving of least for most to the miserable slaves of the factory towns. But at the present time the English capitalist is outraged because his laborers are employing against him precisely the same policy he employed against them, and which he would employ again did the chance present itself. Yet "ca' canny" is a disastrous thing to the British laborer. It has driven ship-building from England to Scotland, bottle-making from Scotland to Belgium, flint-glass-making from England to Germany, and today is steadily driving industry after industry to other countries. A correspondent from Northampton wrote not long ago: "Factories are working half and third time. . . . There is no strike, there is no real labor trouble, but the masters and men are alike suffering from sheer lack of employment. Markets which were once theirs are now American." It would seem that the unfortunate British laborer is 'twixt the devil and the deep sea. If he gives most for least, he faces a frightful slavery such as marked the beginning of the factory system. If he gives least for most, he drives industry away to other countries and has no work at all. But the union laborers of the United States have nothing of which to boast, while, according to their trade-union ethics, they have a great deal of which to be ashamed. They passionately preach short hours and big wages, the shorter the hours and the bigger the wages the better. Their hatred for a scab is as terrible as the hatred of a patriot for a traitor, of a Christian for a Judas. And in the face of all this, they are as colossal scabs as the United States is a colossal scab. For all of their boasted unions and high labor ideals, they are about the most thoroughgoing scabs on the planet. Receiving $4.50 per day, because of his proficiency and immense working power, the American laborer has been known to scab upon scabs (so called) who took his place and received only $0.90 per day for a longer day. In this particular instance, five Chinese coolies, working longer hours, gave less value for the price received from their employer than did one American laborer. It is upon his brother laborers overseas that the American laborer most outrageously scabs. As Mr. Casson has shown, an English nail-maker gets $3 per week, while an American nail-maker gets $30. But the English worker turns out 200 pounds of nails per week, while the American turns out 5500 pounds. If he were as "fair" as his English brother, other things being equal, he would be receiving, at the English worker's rate of pay, $82.50. As it is, he is scabbing upon his English brother to the tune of $79.50 per week. Dr. Schultze-Gaevernitz has shown that a German weaver produces 466 yards of cotton a week at a cost of .303 per yard, while an American weaver produces 1200 yards at a cost of .02 per yard. But, it may be objected, a great part of this is due to the more improved American machinery. Very true, but none the less a great part is still due to the superior energy, skill, and willingness of the American laborer. The English laborer is faithful to the policy of "ca' canny." He refuses point-blank to get the work out of a machine that the New World scab gets out of a machine. Mr. Maxim, observing a wasteful hand-labor process in his English factory, invented a machine which he proved capable of displacing several men. But workman after workman was put at the machine, and without exception they turned out neither more nor less than a workman turned out by hand. They obeyed the mandate of the union and went easy, while Mr. Maxim gave up in despair. Nor will the British workman run machines at as high speed as the American, nor will he run so many. An American workman will "give equal attention simultaneously to three, four, or six machines or tools, while the British workman is compelled by his trade union to limit his attention to one, so that employment may be given to half a dozen men." But for scabbing, no blame attaches itself anywhere. With rare exceptions, all the people in the world are scabs. The strong, capable workman gets a job and holds it because of his strength and capacity. And he holds it because out of his strength and capacity he gives a better value for his wage than does the weaker and less capable workman. Therefore he is scabbing upon his weaker and less capable brother workman. He is giving more value for the price paid by the employer. The superior workman scabs upon the inferior workman because he is so constituted and cannot help it. The one, by fortune of birth and upbringing, is strong and capable; the other, by fortune of birth and upbringing, is not so strong nor capable. It is for the same reason that one country scabs upon another. That country which has the good fortune to possess great natural resources, a finer sun and soil, unhampering institutions, and a deft and intelligent labor class and capitalist class is bound to scab upon a country less fortunately situated. It is the good fortune of the United States that is making her the colossal scab, just as it is the good fortune of one man to be born with a straight back while his brother is born with a hump. It is not good to give most for least, not good to be a scab. The word has gained universal opprobrium. On the other hand, to be a non-scab, to give least for most, is universally branded as stingy, selfish, and unchristian-like. So all the world, like the British workman, is 'twixt the devil and the deep sea. It is treason to one's fellows to scab, it is unchristian-like not to scab. Since to give least for most, and to give most for least, are universally bad, what remains? Equity remains, which is to give like for like, the same for the same, neither more nor less. But this equity, society, as at present constituted, cannot give. It is not in the nature of present-day society for men to give like for like, the same for the same. And so long as men continue to live in this competitive society, struggling tooth and nail with one another for food and shelter, (which is to struggle tooth and nail with one another for life), that long will the scab continue to exist. His will "to live" will force him to exist. He may be flouted and jeered by his brothers, he may be beaten with bricks and clubs by the men who by superior strength and capacity scab upon him as he scabs upon them by longer hours and smaller wages, but through it all he will persist, giving a bit more of most for least than they are giving. THE QUESTION OF THE MAXIMUM For any social movement or development there must be a maximum limit beyond which it cannot proceed. That civilization which does not advance must decline, and so, when the maximum of development has been reached in any given direction, society must either retrograde or change the direction of its advance. There are many families of men that have failed, in the critical period of their economic evolution, to effect a change in direction, and were forced to fall back. Vanquished at the moment of their maximum, they have dropped out of the whirl of the world. There was no room for them. Stronger competitors have taken their places, and they have either rotted into oblivion or remain to be crushed under the iron heel of the dominant races in as remorseless a struggle as the world has yet witnessed. But in this struggle fair women and chivalrous men will play no part. Types and ideals have changed. Helens and Launcelots are anachronisms. Blows will be given and taken, and men fight and die, but not for faiths and altars. Shrines will be desecrated, but they will be the shrines, not of temples, but market-places. Prophets will arise, but they will be the prophets of prices and products. Battles will be waged, not for honor and glory, nor for thrones and sceptres, but for dollars and cents and for marts and exchanges. Brain and not brawn will endure, and the captains of war will be commanded by the captains of industry. In short, it will be a contest for the mastery of the world's commerce and for industrial supremacy. It is more significant, this struggle into which we have plunged, for the fact that it is the first struggle to involve the globe. No general movement of man has been so wide-spreading, so far-reaching. Quite local was the supremacy of any ancient people; likewise the rise to empire of Macedonia and Rome, the waves of Arabian valor and fanaticism, and the mediaeval crusades to the Holy Sepulchre. But since those times the planet has undergone a unique shrinkage. The world of Homer, limited by the coast-lines of the Mediterranean and Black seas, was a far vaster world than ours of today, which we weigh, measure, and compute as accurately and as easily as if it were a child's play-ball. Steam has made its parts accessible and drawn them closer together. The telegraph annihilates space and time. Each morning, every part knows what every other part is thinking, contemplating, or doing. A discovery in a German laboratory is being demonstrated in San Francisco within twenty-four hours. A book written in South Africa is published by simultaneous copyright in every English-speaking country, and on the day following is in the hands of the translators. The death of an obscure missionary in China, or of a whiskey-smuggler in the South Seas, is served, the world over, with the morning toast. The wheat output of Argentine or the gold of Klondike are known wherever men meet and trade. Shrinkage, or centralization, has become such that the humblest clerk in any metropolis may place his hand on the pulse of the world. The planet has indeed grown very small; and because of this, no vital movement can remain in the clime or country where it takes its rise. And so today the economic and industrial impulse is world-wide. It is a matter of import to every people. None may be careless of it. To do so is to perish. It is become a battle, the fruits of which are to the strong, and to none but the strongest of the strong. As the movement approaches its maximum, centralization accelerates and competition grows keener and closer. The competitor nations cannot all succeed. So long as the movement continues its present direction, not only will there not be room for all, but the room that is will become less and less; and when the moment of the maximum is at hand, there will be no room at all. Capitalistic production will have overreached itself, and a change of direction will then be inevitable. Divers queries arise: What is the maximum of commercial development the world can sustain? How far can it be exploited? How much capital is necessary? Can sufficient capital be accumulated? A brief resume of the industrial history of the last one hundred years or so will be relevant at this stage of the discussion. Capitalistic production, in its modern significance, was born of the industrial revolution in England in the latter half of the eighteenth century. The great inventions of that period were both its father and its mother, while, as Mr. Brooks Adams has shown, the looted treasure of India was the potent midwife. Had there not been an unwonted increase of capital, the impetus would not have been given to invention, while even steam might have languished for generations instead of at once becoming, as it did, the most prominent factor in the new method of production. The improved application of these inventions in the first decades of the nineteenth century mark the transition from the domestic to the factory system of manufacture and inaugurated the era of capitalism. The magnitude of this revolution is manifested by the fact that England alone had invented the means and equipped herself with the machinery whereby she could overstock the world's markets. The home market could not consume a tithe of the home product. To manufacture this home product she had sacrificed her agriculture. She must buy her food from abroad, and to do so she must sell her goods abroad. But the struggle for commercial supremacy had not yet really begun. England was without a rival. Her navies controlled the sea. Her armies and her insular position gave her peace at home. The world was hers to exploit. For nearly fifty years she dominated the European, American, and Indian trade, while the great wars then convulsing society were destroying possible competitive capital and straining consumption to its utmost. The pioneer of the industrial nations, she thus received such a start in the new race for wealth that it is only today the other nations have succeeded in overtaking her. In 1820 the volume of her trade (imports and exports) was 68,000,000 pounds. In 1899 it had increased to 815,000,000 pounds,--an increase of 1200 per cent in the volume of trade. For nearly one hundred years England has been producing surplus value. She has been producing far more than she consumes, and this excess has swelled the volume of her capital. This capital has been invested in her enterprises at home and abroad, and in her shipping. In 1898 the Stock Exchange estimated British capital invested abroad at 1,900,000,000 pounds. But hand in hand with her foreign investments have grown her adverse balances of trade. For the ten years ending with 1868, her average yearly adverse balance was 52,000,000 pounds; ending with 1878, 81,000,000 pounds; ending with 1888, 101,000,000 pounds; and ending with 1898, 133,000,000 pounds. In the single year of 1897 it reached the portentous sum of 157,000,000 pounds. But England's adverse balances of trade in themselves are nothing at which to be frightened. Hitherto they have been paid from out the earnings of her shipping and the interest on her foreign investments. But what does cause anxiety, however, is that, relative to the trade development of other countries, her export trade is falling off, without a corresponding diminution of her imports, and that her securities and foreign holdings do not seem able to stand the added strain. These she is being forced to sell in order to pull even. As the London Times gloomily remarks, "We are entering the twentieth century on the down grade, after a prolonged period of business activity, high wages, high profits, and overflowing revenue." In other words, the mighty grasp England held over the resources and capital of the world is being relaxed. The control of its commerce and banking is slipping through her fingers. The sale of her foreign holdings advertises the fact that other nations are capable of buying them, and, further, that these other nations are busily producing surplus value. The movement has become general. Today, passing from country to country, an ever-increasing tide of capital is welling up. Production is doubling and quadrupling upon itself. It used to be that the impoverished or undeveloped nations turned to England when it came to borrowing, but now Germany is competing keenly with her in this matter. France is not averse to lending great sums to Russia, and Austria-Hungary has capital and to spare for foreign holdings. Nor has the United States failed to pass from the side of the debtor to that of the creditor nations. She, too, has become wise in the way of producing surplus value. She has been successful in her efforts to secure economic emancipation. Possessing but 5 per cent of the world's population and producing 32 per cent of the world's food supply, she has been looked upon as the world's farmer; but now, amidst general consternation, she comes forward as the world's manufacturer. In 1888 her manufactured exports amounted to $130,300,087; in 1896, to $253,681,541; in 1897, to $279,652,721; in 1898, to $307,924,994; in 1899, to $338,667,794; and in 1900, to $432,000,000. Regarding her growing favorable balances of trade, it may be noted that not only are her imports not increasing, but they are actually falling off, while her exports in the last decade have increased 72.4 per cent. In ten years her imports from Europe have been reduced from $474,000,000 to $439,000,000; while in the same time her exports have increased from $682,000,000 to $1,111,000,000. Her balance of trade in her favor in 1895 was $75,000,000; in 1896, over $100,000,000; in 1897, nearly $300,000,000; in 1898, $615,000,000; in 1899, $530,000,000; and in 1900, $648,000,000. In the matter of iron, the United States, which in 1840 had not dreamed of entering the field of international competition, in 1897, as much to her own surprise as any one else's, undersold the English in their own London market. In 1899 there was but one American locomotive in Great Britain; but, of the five hundred locomotives sold abroad by the United States in 1902, England bought more than any other country. Russia is operating a thousand of them on her own roads today. In one instance the American manufacturers contracted to deliver a locomotive in four and one-half months for $9250, the English manufacturers requiring twenty-four months for delivery at $14,000. The Clyde shipbuilders recently placed orders for 150,000 tons of plates at a saving of $250,000, and the American steel going into the making of the new London subway is taken as a matter of course. American tools stand above competition the world over. Ready-made boots and shoes are beginning to flood Europe,--the same with machinery, bicycles, agricultural implements, and all kinds of manufactured goods. A correspondent from Hamburg, speaking of the invasion of American trade, says: "Incidentally, it may be remarked that the typewriting machine with which this article is written, as well as the thousands--nay, hundreds of thousands--of others that are in use throughout the world, were made in America; that it stands on an American table, in an office furnished with American desks, bookcases, and chairs, which cannot be made in Europe of equal quality, so practical and convenient, for a similar price." In 1893 and 1894, because of the distrust of foreign capital, the United States was forced to buy back American securities held abroad; but in 1897 and 1898 she bought back American securities held abroad, not because she had to, but because she chose to. And not only has she bought back her own securities, but in the last eight years she has become a buyer of the securities of other countries. In the money markets of London, Paris, and Berlin she is a lender of money. Carrying the largest stock of gold in the world, the world, in moments of danger, when crises of international finance loom large, looks to her vast lending ability for safety. Thus, in a few swift years, has the United States drawn up to the van where the great industrial nations are fighting for commercial and financial empire. The figures of the race, in which she passed England, are interesting: Year United States Exports United Kingdom Exports 1875 $497,263,737 $1,087,497,000 1885 673,593,506 1,037,124,000 1895 807,742,415 1,100,452,000 1896 986,830,080 1,168,671,000 1897 1,079,834,296 1,139,882,000 1898 1,233,564,828 1,135,642,000 1899 1,253,466,000 1,287,971,000 1900 1,453,013,659 1,418,348,000 As Mr. Henry Demarest Lloyd has noted, "When the news reached Germany of the new steel trust in America, the stocks of the iron and steel mills listed on the Berlin Bourse fell." While Europe has been talking and dreaming of the greatness which was, the United States has been thinking and planning and doing for the greatness to be. Her captains of industry and kings of finance have toiled and sweated at organizing and consolidating production and transportation. But this has been merely the developmental stage, the tuning-up of the orchestra. With the twentieth century rises the curtain on the play,--a play which shall have much in it of comedy and a vast deal of tragedy, and which has been well named The Capitalistic Conquest of Europe by America. Nations do not die easily, and one of the first moves of Europe will be the erection of tariff walls. America, however, will fittingly reply, for already her manufacturers are establishing works in France and Germany. And when the German trade journals refused to accept American advertisements, they found their country flamingly bill-boarded in buccaneer American fashion. M. Leroy-Beaulieu, the French economist, is passionately preaching a commercial combination of the whole Continent against the United States,--a commercial alliance which, he boldly declares, should become a political alliance. And in this he is not alone, finding ready sympathy and ardent support in Austria, Italy, and Germany. Lord Rosebery said, in a recent speech before the Wolverhampton Chamber of Commerce: "The Americans, with their vast and almost incalculable resources, their acuteness and enterprise, and their huge population, which will probably be 100,000,000 in twenty years, together with the plan they have adopted for putting accumulated wealth into great cooperative syndicates or trusts for the purpose of carrying on this great commercial warfare, are the most formidable . . . rivals to be feared." The London Times says: "It is useless to disguise the fact that Great Britain is being outdistanced. The competition does not come from the glut caused by miscalculation as to the home demand. Our own steel-makers know better and are alarmed. The threatened competition in markets hitherto our own comes from efficiency in production such as never before has been seen." Even the British naval supremacy is in danger, continues the same paper, "for, if we lose our engineering supremacy, our naval supremacy will follow, unless held on sufferance by our successful rivals." And the Edinburgh Evening News says, with editorial gloom: "The iron and steel trades have gone from us. When the fictitious prosperity caused by the expenditure of our own Government and that of European nations on armaments ceases, half of the men employed in these industries will be turned into the streets. The outlook is appalling. What suffering will have to be endured before the workers realize that there is nothing left for them but emigration!" * * * * * That there must be a limit to the accumulation of capital is obvious. The downward course of the rate of interest, notwithstanding that many new employments have been made possible for capital, indicates how large is the increase of surplus value. This decline of the interest rate is in accord with Bohm-Bawerk's law of "diminishing returns." That is, when capital, like anything else, has become over-plentiful, less lucrative use can only be found for the excess. This excess, not being able to earn so much as when capital was less plentiful, competes for safe investments and forces down the interest rate on all capital. Mr. Charles A. Conant has well described the keenness of the scramble for safe investments, even at the prevailing low rates of interest. At the close of the war with Turkey, the Greek loan, guaranteed by Great Britain, France, and Russia, was floated with striking ease. Regardless of the small return, the amount offered at Paris, (41,000,000 francs), was subscribed for twenty-three times over. Great Britain, France, Germany, Holland, and the Scandinavian States, of recent years, have all engaged in converting their securities from 5 per cents to 4 per cents, from 4.5 per cents to 3.5 per cents, and the 3.5 per cents into 3 per cents. Great Britain, France, Germany, and Austria-Hungary, according to the calculation taken in 1895 by the International Statistical Institute, hold forty-six billions of capital invested in negotiable securities alone. Yet Paris subscribed for her portion of the Greek loan twenty-three times over! In short, money is cheap. Andrew Carnegie and his brother bourgeois kings give away millions annually, but still the tide wells up. These vast accumulations have made possible "wild-catting," fraudulent combinations, fake enterprises, Hooleyism; but such stealings, great though they be, have little or no effect in reducing the volume. The time is past when startling inventions, or revolutions in the method of production, can break up the growing congestion; yet this saved capital demands an outlet, somewhere, somehow. When a great nation has equipped itself to produce far more than it can, under the present division of the product, consume, it seeks other markets for its surplus products. When a second nation finds itself similarly circumstanced, competition for these other markets naturally follows. With the advent of a third, a fourth, a fifth, and of divers other nations, the question of the disposal of surplus products grows serious. And with each of these nations possessing, over and beyond its active capital, great and growing masses of idle capital, and when the very foreign markets for which they are competing are beginning to produce similar wares for themselves, the question passes the serious stage and becomes critical. Never has the struggle for foreign markets been sharper than at the present. They are the one great outlet for congested accumulations. Predatory capital wanders the world over, seeking where it may establish itself. This urgent need for foreign markets is forcing upon the world-stage an era of great colonial empire. But this does not stand, as in the past, for the subjugation of peoples and countries for the sake of gaining their products, but for the privilege of selling them products. The theory once was, that the colony owed its existence and prosperity to the mother country; but today it is the mother country that owes its existence and prosperity to the colony. And in the future, when that supporting colony becomes wise in the way of producing surplus value and sends its goods back to sell to the mother country, what then? Then the world will have been exploited, and capitalistic production will have attained its maximum development. Foreign markets and undeveloped countries largely retard that moment. The favored portions of the earth's surface are already occupied, though the resources of many are yet virgin. That they have not long since been wrested from the hands of the barbarous and decadent peoples who possess them is due, not to the military prowess of such peoples, but to the jealous vigilance of the industrial nations. The powers hold one another back. The Turk lives because the way is not yet clear to an amicable division of him among the powers. And the United States, supreme though she is, opposes the partition of China, and intervenes her huge bulk between the hungry nations and the mongrel Spanish republics. Capital stands in its own way, welling up and welling up against the inevitable moment when it shall burst all bonds and sweep resistlessly across such vast stretches as China and South America. And then there will be no more worlds to exploit, and capitalism will either fall back, crushed under its own weight, or a change of direction will take place which will mark a new era in history. The Far East affords an illuminating spectacle. While the Western nations are crowding hungrily in, while the Partition of China is commingled with the clamor for the Spheres of Influence and the Open Door, other forces are none the less potently at work. Not only are the young Western peoples pressing the older ones to the wall, but the East itself is beginning to awake. American trade is advancing, and British trade is losing ground, while Japan, China, and India are taking a hand in the game themselves. In 1893, 100,000 pieces of American drills were imported into China; in 1897, 349,000. In 1893, 252,000 pieces of American sheetings were imported against 71,000 British; but in 1897, 566,000 pieces of American sheetings were imported against only 10,000 British. The cotton goods and yarn trade (which forms 40 per cent of the whole trade with China) shows a remarkable advance on the part of the United States. During the last ten years America has increased her importation of plain goods by 121 per cent in quantity and 59.5 per cent in value, while that of England and India combined has decreased 13.75 per cent in quantity and 8 per cent in value. Lord Charles Beresford, from whose "Break-up of China" these figures are taken, states that English yarn has receded and Indian yarn advanced to the front. In 1897, 140,000 piculs of Indian yarn were imported, 18,000 of Japanese, 4500 of Shanghai-manufactured, and 700 of English. Japan, who but yesterday emerged from the mediaeval rule of the Shogunate and seized in one fell swoop the scientific knowledge and culture of the Occident, is already today showing what wisdom she has acquired in the production of surplus value, and is preparing herself that she may tomorrow play the part to Asia that England did to Europe one hundred years ago. That the difference in the world's affairs wrought by those one hundred years will prevent her succeeding is manifest; but it is equally manifest that they cannot prevent her playing a leading part in the industrial drama which has commenced on the Eastern stage. Her imports into the port of Newchang in 1891 amounted to but 22,000 taels; but in 1897 they had increased to 280,000 taels. In manufactured goods, from matches, watches, and clocks to the rolling stock of railways, she has already given stiff shocks to her competitors in the Asiatic markets; and this while she is virtually yet in the equipment stage of production. Erelong she, too, will be furnishing her share to the growing mass of the world's capital. As regards Great Britain, the giant trader who has so long overshadowed Asiatic commerce, Lord Charles Beresford says: "But competition is telling adversely; the energy of the British merchant is being equalled by other nationals. . . The competition of the Chinese and the introduction of steam into the country are also combining to produce changed conditions in China." But far more ominous is the plaintive note he sounds when he says: "New industries must be opened up, and I would especially direct the attention of the Chambers of Commerce (British) to . . . the fact that the more the native competes with the British manufacturer in certain classes of trade, the more machinery he will need, and the orders for such machinery will come to this country if our machinery manufacturers are enterprising enough." The Orient is beginning to show what an important factor it will become, under Western supervision, in the creation of surplus value. Even before the barriers which restrain Western capital are removed, the East will be in a fair way toward being exploited. An analysis of Lord Beresford's message to the Chambers of Commerce discloses, first, that the East is beginning to manufacture for itself; and, second, that there is a promise of keen competition in the West for the privilege of selling the required machinery. The inexorable query arises: _What is the West to do when it has furnished this machinery_? And when not only the East, but all the now undeveloped countries, confront, with surplus products in their hands, the old industrial nations, capitalistic production will have attained its maximum development. But before that time must intervene a period which bids one pause for breath. A new romance, like unto none in all the past, the economic romance, will be born. For the dazzling prize of world-empire will the nations of the earth go up in harness. Powers will rise and fall, and mighty coalitions shape and dissolve in the swift whirl of events. Vassal nations and subject territories will be bandied back and forth like so many articles of trade. And with the inevitable displacement of economic centres, it is fair to presume that populations will shift to and fro, as they once did from the South to the North of England on the rise of the factory towns, or from the Old World to the New. Colossal enterprises will be projected and carried through, and combinations of capital and federations of labor be effected on a cyclopean scale. Concentration and organization will be perfected in ways hitherto undreamed. The nation which would keep its head above the tide must accurately adjust supply to demand, and eliminate waste to the last least particle. Standards of living will most likely descend for millions of people. With the increase of capital, the competition for safe investments, and the consequent fall of the interest rate, the principal which today earns a comfortable income would not then support a bare existence. Saving toward old age would cease among the working classes. And as the merchant cities of Italy crashed when trade slipped from their hands on the discovery of the new route to the Indies by way of the Cape of Good Hope, so will there come times of trembling for such nations as have failed to grasp the prize of world-empire. In that given direction they will have attained their maximum development, before the whole world, in the same direction, has attained its. There will no longer be room for them. But if they can survive the shock of being flung out of the world's industrial orbit, a change in direction may then be easily effected. That the decadent and barbarous peoples will be crushed is a fair presumption; likewise that the stronger breeds will survive, entering upon the transition stage to which all the world must ultimately come. This change of direction must be either toward industrial oligarchies or socialism. Either the functions of private corporations will increase till they absorb the central government, or the functions of government will increase till it absorbs the corporations. Much may be said on the chance of the oligarchy. Should an old manufacturing nation lose its foreign trade, it is safe to predict that a strong effort would be made to build a socialistic government, but it does not follow that this effort would be successful. With the moneyed class controlling the State and its revenues and all the means of subsistence, and guarding its own interests with jealous care, it is not at all impossible that a strong curb could be put upon the masses till the crisis were past. It has been done before. There is no reason why it should not be done again. At the close of the last century, such a movement was crushed by its own folly and immaturity. In 1871 the soldiers of the economic rulers stamped out, root and branch, a whole generation of militant socialists. Once the crisis were past, the ruling class, still holding the curb in order to make itself more secure, would proceed to readjust things and to balance consumption with production. Having a monopoly of the safe investments, the great masses of unremunerative capital would be directed, not to the production of more surplus value, but to the making of permanent improvements, which would give employment to the people, and make them content with the new order of things. Highways, parks, public buildings, monuments, could be builded; nor would it be out of place to give better factories and homes to the workers. Such in itself would be socialistic, save that it would be done by the oligarchs, a class apart. With the interest rate down to zero, and no field for the investment of sporadic capital, savings among the people would utterly cease, and old-age pensions be granted as a matter of course. It is also a logical necessity of such a system that, when the population began to press against the means of subsistence, (expansion being impossible), the birth rate of the lower classes would be lessened. Whether by their own initiative, or by the interference of the rulers, it would have to be done, and it would be done. In other words, the oligarchy would mean the capitalization of labor and the enslavement of the whole population. But it would be a fairer, juster form of slavery than any the world has yet seen. The per capita wage and consumption would be increased, and, with a stringent control of the birth rate, there is no reason why such a country should not be so ruled through many generations. On the other hand, as the capitalistic exploitation of the planet approaches its maximum, and countries are crowded out of the field of foreign exchanges, there is a large likelihood that their change in direction will be toward socialism. Were the theory of collective ownership and operation then to arise for the first time, such a movement would stand small chance of success. But such is not the case. The doctrine of socialism has flourished and grown throughout the nineteenth century; its tenets have been preached wherever the interests of labor and capital have clashed; and it has received exemplification time and again by the State's assumption of functions which had always belonged solely to the individual. When capitalistic production has attained its maximum development, it must confront a dividing of the ways; and the strength of capital on the one hand, and the education and wisdom of the workers on the other, will determine which path society is to travel. It is possible, considering the inertia of the masses, that the whole world might in time come to be dominated by a group of industrial oligarchies, or by one great oligarchy, but it is not probable. That sporadic oligarchies may flourish for definite periods of time is highly possible; that they may continue to do so is as highly improbable. The procession of the ages has marked not only the rise of man, but the rise of the common man. From the chattel slave, or the serf chained to the soil, to the highest seats in modern society, he has risen, rung by rung, amid the crumbling of the divine right of kings and the crash of falling sceptres. That he has done this, only in the end to pass into the perpetual slavery of the industrial oligarch, is something at which his whole past cries in protest. The common man is worthy of a better future, or else he is not worthy of his past. * * * * * NOTE.--The above article was written as long ago as 1898. The only alteration has been the bringing up to 1900 of a few of its statistics. As a commercial venture of an author, it has an interesting history. It was promptly accepted by one of the leading magazines and paid for. The editor confessed that it was "one of those articles one could not possibly let go of after it was once in his possession." Publication was voluntarily promised to be immediate. Then the editor became afraid of its too radical nature, forfeited the sum paid for it, and did not publish it. Nor, offered far and wide, could any other editor of bourgeois periodicals be found who was rash enough to publish it. Thus, for the first time, after seven years, it appears in print. A REVIEW Two remarkable books are Ghent's "Our Benevolent Feudalism" {7} and Brooks's "The Social Unrest." {8} In these two books the opposite sides of the labor problem are expounded, each writer devoting himself with apprehension to the side he fears and views with disfavor. It would appear that they have set themselves the task of collating, as a warning, the phenomena of two counter social forces. Mr. Ghent, who is sympathetic with the socialist movement, follows with cynic fear every aggressive act of the capitalist class. Mr. Brooks, who yearns for the perpetuation of the capitalist system as long as possible, follows with grave dismay each aggressive act of the labor and socialist organizations. Mr. Ghent traces the emasculation of labor by capital, and Mr. Brooks traces the emasculation of independent competing capital by labor. In short, each marshals the facts of a side in the two sides which go to make a struggle so great that even the French Revolution is insignificant beside it; for this later struggle, for the first time in the history of struggles, is not confined to any particular portion of the globe, but involves the whole of it. Starting on the assumption that society is at present in a state of flux, Mr. Ghent sees it rapidly crystallizing into a status which can best be described as something in the nature of a benevolent feudalism. He laughs to scorn any immediate realization of the Marxian dream, while Tolstoyan utopias and Kropotkinian communistic unions of shop and farm are too wild to merit consideration. The coming status which Mr. Ghent depicts is a class domination by the capitalists. Labor will take its definite place as a dependent class, living in a condition of machine servitude fairly analogous to the land servitude of the Middle Ages. That is to say, labor will be bound to the machine, though less harshly, in fashion somewhat similar to that in which the earlier serf was bound to the soil. As he says, "Bondage to the land was the basis of villeinage in the old regime; bondage to the job will be the basis of villeinage in the new." At the top of the new society will tower the magnate, the new feudal baron; at the bottom will be found the wastrels and the inefficients. The new society he grades as follows: "I. The barons, graded on the basis of possessions. "II. The court agents and retainers. (This class will include the editors of 'respectable' and 'safe' newspapers, the pastors of 'conservative' and 'wealthy' churches, the professors and teachers in endowed colleges and schools, lawyers generally, and most judges and politicians). "III. The workers in pure and applied science, artists, and physicians. "IV. The entrepreneurs, the managers of the great industries, transformed into a salaried class. "V. The foremen and superintendents. This class has heretofore been recruited largely from the skilled workers, but with the growth of technical education in schools and colleges, and the development of fixed caste, it is likely to become entirely differentiated. "VI. The villeins of the cities and towns, more or less regularly employed, who do skilled work and are partially protected by organization. "VII. The villeins of the cities and towns who do unskilled work and are unprotected by organization. They will comprise the laborers, domestics, and clerks. "VIII. The villeins of the manorial estates, of the great farms, the mines, and the forests. "IX. The small-unit farmers (land-owning), the petty tradesmen, and manufacturers. "X. The subtenants of the manorial estates and great farms (corresponding to the class of 'free tenants' in the old Feudalism). "XI. The cotters. "XII. The tramps, the occasionally employed, the unemployed--the wastrels of the city and country." "The new Feudalism, like most autocracies, will foster not only the arts, but also certain kinds of learning--particularly the kinds which are unlikely to disturb the minds of the multitude. A future Marsh, or Cope, or Le Comte will be liberally patronized and left free to discover what he will; and so, too, an Edison or a Marconi. Only they must not meddle with anything relating to social science." It must be confessed that Mr. Ghent's arguments are cunningly contrived and arrayed. They must be read to be appreciated. As an example of his style, which at the same time generalizes a portion of his argument, the following may well be given: "The new Feudalism will be but an orderly outgrowth of present tendencies and conditions. All societies evolve naturally out of their predecessors. In sociology, as in biology, there is no cell without a parent cell. The society of each generation develops a multitude of spontaneous and acquired variations, and out of these, by a blending process of natural and conscious selection, the succeeding society is evolved. The new order will differ in no important respects from the present, except in the completer development of its more salient features. The visitor from another planet who had known the old and should see the new would note but few changes. Alter et Idem--another yet the same--he would say. From magnate to baron, from workman to villein, from publicist to court agent and retainer, will be changes of state and function so slight as to elude all but the keenest eyes." And in conclusion, to show how benevolent and beautiful this new feudalism of ours will be, Mr. Ghent says: "Peace and stability it will maintain at all hazards; and the mass, remembering the chaos, the turmoil, the insecurity of the past, will bless its reign. . . . Efficiency--the faculty of getting things--is at last rewarded as it should be, for the efficient have inherited the earth and its fulness. The lowly, whose happiness is greater and whose welfare is more thoroughly conserved when governed than when governing, as a twentieth-century philosopher said of them, are settled and happy in the state which reason and experience teach is their God-appointed lot. They are comfortable too; and if the patriarchal ideal of a vine and fig tree for each is not yet attained, at least each has his rented patch in the country or his rented cell in a city building. Bread and the circus are freely given to the deserving, and as for the undeserving, they are merely reaping the rewards of their contumacy and pride. Order reigns, each has his justly appointed share, and the state rests, in security, 'lapt in universal law.'" Mr. Brooks, on the other hand, sees rising and dissolving and rising again in the social flux the ominous forms of a new society which is the direct antithesis of a benevolent feudalism. He trembles at the rash intrepidity of the capitalists who fight the labor unions, for by such rashness he greatly fears that labor will be driven to express its aims and strength in political terms, which terms will inevitably be socialistic terms. To keep down the rising tide of socialism, he preaches greater meekness and benevolence to the capitalists. No longer may they claim the right to run their own business, to beat down the laborer's standard of living for the sake of increased profits, to dictate terms of employment to individual workers, to wax righteously indignant when organized labor takes a hand in their business. No longer may the capitalist say "my" business, or even think "my" business; he must say "our" business, and think "our" business as well, accepting labor as a partner whose voice must be heard. And if the capitalists do not become more meek and benevolent in their dealings with labor, labor will be antagonized and will proceed to wreak terrible political vengeance, and the present social flux will harden into a status of socialism. Mr. Brooks dreams of a society at which Mr. Ghent sneers as "a slightly modified individualism, wherein each unit secures the just reward of his capacity and service." To attain this happy state, Mr. Brooks imposes circumspection upon the capitalists in their relations with labor. "If the socialistic spirit is to be held in abeyance in this country, businesses of this character (anthracite coal mining) must be handled with extraordinary caution." Which is to say, that to withstand the advance of socialism, a great and greater measure of Mr. Ghent's _benevolence_ will be required. Again and again, Mr. Brooks reiterates the danger he sees in harshly treating labor. "It is not probable that employers can destroy unionism in the United States. Adroit and desperate attempts will, however, be made, if we mean by unionism the undisciplined and aggressive fact of vigorous and determined organizations. If capital should prove too strong in this struggle, the result is easy to predict. The employers have only to convince organized labor that it cannot hold its own against the capitalist manager, and the whole energy that now goes to the union will turn to an aggressive political socialism. It will not be the harmless sympathy with increased city and state functions which trade unions already feel; it will become a turbulent political force bent upon using every weapon of taxation against the rich." "The most concrete impulse that now favors socialism in this country is the insane purpose to deprive labor organizations of the full and complete rights that go with federated unionism." "That which teaches a union that it cannot succeed as a union turns it toward socialism. In long strikes in towns like Marlboro and Brookfield strong unions are defeated. Hundreds of men leave these towns for shoe-centres like Brockton, where they are now voting the socialist ticket. The socialist mayor of this city tells me, 'The men who come to us now from towns where they have been thoroughly whipped in a strike are among our most active working socialists.' The bitterness engendered by this sense of defeat is turned to politics, as it will throughout the whole country, if organization of labor is deprived of its rights." "This enmity of capital to the trade union is watched with glee by every intelligent socialist in our midst. Every union that is beaten or discouraged in its struggle is ripening fruit for socialism." "The real peril which we now face is the threat of a class conflict. If capitalism insists upon the policy of outraging the saving aspiration of the American workman to raise his standard of comfort and leisure, every element of class conflict will strengthen among us." "We have only to humiliate what is best in the trade union, and then every worst feature of socialism is fastened upon us." This strong tendency in the ranks of the workers toward socialism is what Mr. Brooks characterizes the "social unrest"; and he hopes to see the Republican, the Cleveland Democrat, and the conservative and large property interests "band together against this common foe," which is socialism. And he is not above feeling grave and well-contained satisfaction wherever the socialist doctrinaire has been contradicted by men attempting to practise cooperation in the midst of the competitive system, as in Belgium. Nevertheless, he catches fleeting glimpses of an extreme and tyrannically benevolent feudalism very like to Mr. Ghent's, as witness the following: "I asked one of the largest employers of labor in the South if he feared the coming of the trade union. 'No,' he said, 'it is one good result of race prejudice, that the negro will enable us in the long run to weaken the trade union so that it cannot harm us. We can keep wages down with the negro and we can prevent too much organization.' "It is in this spirit that the lower standards are to be used. If this purpose should succeed, it has but one issue,--the immense strengthening of a plutocratic administration at the top, served by an army of high-salaried helpers, with an elite of skilled and well-paid workmen, but all resting on what would essentially be a serf class of low-paid labor and this mass kept in order by an increased use of military force." In brief summary of these two notable books, it may be said that Mr. Ghent is alarmed, (though he does not flatly say so), at the too great social restfulness in the community, which is permitting the capitalists to form the new society to their liking; and that Mr. Brooks is alarmed, (and he flatly says so), at the social unrest which threatens the modified individualism into which he would like to see society evolve. Mr. Ghent beholds the capitalist class rising to dominate the state and the working class; Mr. Brooks beholds the working class rising to dominate the state and the capitalist class. One fears the paternalism of a class; the other, the tyranny of the mass. WANTED: A NEW LAW OF DEVELOPMENT Evolution is no longer a mere tentative hypothesis. One by one, step by step, each division and subdivision of science has contributed its evidence, until now the case is complete and the verdict rendered. While there is still discussion as to the method of evolution, none the less, as a process sufficient to explain all biological phenomena, all differentiations of life into widely diverse species, families, and even kingdoms, evolution is flatly accepted. Likewise has been accepted its law of development: _That_, _in the struggle for existence_, _the strong and fit and the progeny of the strong and fit have a better opportunity for survival than the weak and less fit and the progeny of the weak and less fit_. It is in the struggle of the species with other species and against all other hostile forces in the environment, that this law operates; also in the struggle between the individuals of the same species. In this struggle, which is for food and shelter, the weak individuals must obviously win less food and shelter than the strong. Because of this, their hold on life relaxes and they are eliminated. And for the same reason that they may not win for themselves adequate food and shelter, the weak cannot give to their progeny the chance for survival that the strong give. And thus, since the weak are prone to beget weakness, the species is constantly purged of its inefficient members. Because of this, a premium is placed upon strength, and so long as the struggle for food and shelter obtains, just so long will the average strength of each generation increase. On the other hand, should conditions so change that all, and the progeny of all, the weak as well as the strong, have an equal chance for survival, then, at once, the average strength of each generation will begin to diminish. Never yet, however, in animal life, has there been such a state of affairs. Natural selection has always obtained. The strong and their progeny, at the expense of the weak, have always survived. This law of development has operated down all the past upon all life; it so operates today, and it is not rash to say that it will continue to operate in the future--at least upon all life existing in a state of nature. Man, preeminent though he is in the animal kingdom, capable of reacting upon and making suitable an unsuitable environment, nevertheless remains the creature of this same law of development. The social selection to which he is subject is merely another form of natural selection. True, within certain narrow limits he modifies the struggle for existence and renders less precarious the tenure of life for the weak. The extremely weak, diseased, and inefficient are housed in hospitals and asylums. The strength of the viciously strong, when inimical to society, is tempered by penal institutions and by the gallows. The short-sighted are provided with spectacles, and the sickly (when they can pay for it) with sanitariums. Pestilential marshes are drained, plagues are checked, and disasters averted. Yet, for all that, the strong and the progeny of the strong survive, and the weak are crushed out. The men strong of brain are masters as of yore. They dominate society and gather to themselves the wealth of society. With this wealth they maintain themselves and equip their progeny for the struggle. They build their homes in healthful places, purchase the best fruits, meats, and vegetables the market affords, and buy themselves the ministrations of the most brilliant and learned of the professional classes. The weak man, as of yore, is the servant, the doer of things at the master's call. The weaker and less efficient he is, the poorer is his reward. The weakest work for a living wage, (when they can get work), live in unsanitary slums, on vile and insufficient food, at the lowest depths of human degradation. Their grasp on life is indeed precarious, their mortality excessive, their infant death-rate appalling. That some should be born to preferment and others to ignominy in order that the race may progress, is cruel and sad; but none the less they are so born. The weeding out of human souls, some for fatness and smiles, some for leanness and tears, is surely a heartless selective process--as heartless as it is natural. And the human family, for all its wonderful record of adventure and achievement, has not yet succeeded in avoiding this process. That it is incapable of doing this is not to be hazarded. Not only is it capable, but the whole trend of society is in that direction. All the social forces are driving man on to a time when the old selective law will be annulled. There is no escaping it, save by the intervention of catastrophes and cataclysms quite unthinkable. It is inexorable. It is inexorable because the common man demands it. The twentieth century, the common man says, is his day; the common man's day, or, rather, the dawning of the common man's day. Nor can it be denied. The evidence is with him. The previous centuries, and more notably the nineteenth, have marked the rise of the common man. From chattel slavery to serfdom, and from serfdom to what he bitterly terms "wage slavery," he has risen. Never was he so strong as he is today, and never so menacing. He does the work of the world, and he is beginning to know it. The world cannot get along without him, and this also he is beginning to know. All the human knowledge of the past, all the scientific discovery, governmental experiment, and invention of machinery, have tended to his advancement. His standard of living is higher. His common school education would shame princes ten centuries past. His civil and religious liberty makes him a free man, and his ballot the peer of his betters. And all this has tended to make him conscious, conscious of himself, conscious of his class. He looks about him and questions that ancient law of development. It is cruel and wrong, he is beginning to declare. It is an anachronism. Let it be abolished. Why should there be one empty belly in all the world, when the work of ten men can feed a hundred? What if my brother be not so strong as I? He has not sinned. Wherefore should he hunger--he and his sinless little ones? Away with the old law. There is food and shelter for all, therefore let all receive food and shelter. As fast as labor has become conscious it has organized. The ambition of these class-conscious men is that the movement shall become general, that all labor shall become conscious of itself and its class interests. And the day that witnesses the solidarity of labor, they triumphantly affirm, will be a day when labor dominates the world. This growing consciousness has led to the organization of two movements, both separate and distinct, but both converging toward a common goal--one, the labor movement, known as Trade Unionism; the other, the political movement, known as Socialism. Both are grim and silent forces, unheralded and virtually unknown to the general public save in moments of stress. The sleeping labor giant receives little notice from the capitalistic press, and when he stirs uneasily, a column of surprise, indignation, and horror suffices. It is only now and then, after long periods of silence, that the labor movement puts in its claim for notice. All is quiet. The kind old world spins on, and the bourgeois masters clip their coupons in smug complacency. But the grim and silent forces are at work. Suddenly, like a clap of thunder from a clear sky, comes a disruption of industry. From ocean to ocean the wheels of a great chain of railroads cease to run. A quarter of a million miners throw down pick and shovel and outrage the sun with their pale, bleached faces. The street railways of a swarming metropolis stand idle, or the rumble of machinery in vast manufactories dies away to silence. There is alarm and panic. Arson and homicide stalk forth. There is a cry in the night, and quick anger and sudden death. Peaceful cities are affrighted by the crack of rifles and the snarl of machine-guns, and the hearts of the shuddering are shaken by the roar of dynamite. There is hurrying and skurrying. The wires are kept hot between the centre of government and the seat of trouble. The chiefs of state ponder gravely and advise, and governors of states implore. There is assembling of militia and massing of troops, and the streets resound to the tramp of armed men. There are separate and joint conferences between the captains of industry and the captains of labor. And then, finally, all is quiet again, and the memory of it is like the memory of a bad dream. But these strikes become olympiads, things to date from; and common on the lips of men become such phrases as "The Great Dock Strike," "The Great Coal Strike," "The Great Railroad Strike." Never before did labor do these things. After the Great Plague in England, labor, finding itself in demand and innocently obeying the economic law, asked higher wages. But the masters set a maximum wage, restrained workingmen from moving about from place to place, refused to tolerate idlers, and by most barbarous legal methods punished those who disobeyed. But labor is accorded greater respect today. Such a policy, put into effect in this the first decade of the twentieth century, would sweep the masters from their seats in one mighty crash. And the masters know it and are respectful. A fair instance of the growing solidarity of labor is afforded by an unimportant recent strike in San Francisco. The restaurant cooks and waiters were completely unorganized, working at any and all hours for whatever wages they could get. A representative of the American Federation of Labor went among them and organized them. Within a few weeks nearly two thousand men were enrolled, and they had five thousand dollars on deposit. Then they put in their demand for increased wages and shorter hours. Forthwith their employers organized. The demand was denied, and the Cooks' and Waiters' Union walked out. All organized employers stood back of the restaurant owners, in sympathy with them and willing to aid them if they dared. And at the back of the Cooks' and Waiters' Union stood the organized labor of the city, 40,000 strong. If a business man was caught patronizing an "unfair" restaurant, he was boycotted; if a union man was caught, he was fined heavily by his union or expelled. The oyster companies and the slaughter houses made an attempt to refuse to sell oysters and meat to union restaurants. The Butchers and Meat Cutters, and the Teamsters, in retaliation, refused to work for or to deliver to non-union restaurants. Upon this the oyster companies and slaughter houses acknowledged themselves beaten and peace reigned. But the Restaurant Bakers in non-union places were ordered out, and the Bakery Wagon Drivers declined to deliver to unfair houses. Every American Federation of Labor union in the city was prepared to strike, and waited only the word. And behind all, a handful of men, known as the Labor Council, directed the fight. One by one, blow upon blow, they were able if they deemed it necessary to call out the unions--the Laundry Workers, who do the washing; the Hackmen, who haul men to and from restaurants; the Butchers, Meat Cutters, and Teamsters; and the Milkers, Milk Drivers, and Chicken Pickers; and after that, in pure sympathy, the Retail Clerks, the Horse Shoers, the Gas and Electrical Fixture Hangers, the Metal Roofers, the Blacksmiths, the Blacksmiths' Helpers, the Stablemen, the Machinists, the Brewers, the Coast Seamen, the Varnishers and Polishers, the Confectioners, the Upholsterers, the Paper Hangers and Fresco Painters, the Drug Clerks, the Fitters and Helpers, the Metal Workers, the Boiler Makers and Iron Ship Builders, the Assistant Undertakers, the Carriage and Wagon Workers, and so on down the lengthy list of organizations. For, over all these trades, over all these thousands of men, is the Labor Council. When it speaks its voice is heard, and when it orders it is obeyed. But it, in turn, is dominated by the National Labor Council, with which it is constantly in touch. In this wholly unimportant little local strike it is of interest to note the stands taken by the different sides. The legal representative and official mouthpiece of the Employers' Association said: "This organization is formed for defensive purposes, and it may be driven to take offensive steps, and if so, will be strong enough to follow them up. Labor cannot be allowed to dictate to capital and say how business shall be conducted. There is no objection to the formation of unions and trades councils, but membership must not be compulsory. It is repugnant to the American idea of liberty and cannot be tolerated." On the other hand, the president of the Team Drivers' Union said: "The employers of labor in this city are generally against the trade-union movement and there seems to be a concerted effort on their part to check the progress of organized labor. Such action as has been taken by them in sympathy with the present labor troubles may, if continued, lead to a serious conflict, the outcome of which might be most calamitous for the business and industrial interests of San Francisco." And the secretary of the United Brewery Workmen: "I regard a sympathetic strike as the last weapon which organized labor should use in its defence. When, however, associations of employers band together to defeat organized labor, or one of its branches, then we should not and will not hesitate ourselves to employ the same instrument in retaliation." Thus, in a little corner of the world, is exemplified the growing solidarity of labor. The organization of labor has not only kept pace with the organization of industry, but it has gained upon it. In one winter, in the anthracite coal region, $160,000,000 in mines and $600,000,000 in transportation and distribution consolidated its ownership and control. And at once, arrayed as solidly on the other side, were the 150,000 anthracite miners. The bituminous mines, however, were not consolidated; yet the 250,000 men employed therein were already combined. And not only that, but they were also combined with the anthracite miners, these 400,000 men being under the control and direction of one supreme labor council. And in this and the other great councils are to be found captains of labor of splendid abilities, who, in understanding of economic and industrial conditions, are undeniably the equals of their opponents, the captains of industry. The United States is honeycombed with labor organizations. And the big federations which these go to compose aggregate millions of members, and in their various branches handle millions of dollars yearly. And not only this; for the international brotherhoods and unions are forming, and moneys for the aid of strikers pass back and forth across the seas. The Machinists, in their demand for a nine-hour day, affected 500,000 men in the United States, Mexico, and Canada. In England the membership of working-class organizations is approximated by Keir Hardie at 2,500,000, with reserve funds of $18,000,000. There the cooperative movement has a membership of 1,500,000, and every year turns over in distribution more than $100,000,000. In France, one-eighth of the whole working class is unionized. In Belgium the unions are very rich and powerful, and so able to defy the masters that many of the smaller manufacturers, unable to resist, "are removing their works to other countries where the workmen's organizations are not so potential." And in all other countries, according to the stage of their economic and political development, like figures obtain. And Europe, today, confesses that her greatest social problem is the labor problem, and that it is the one most closely engrossing the attention of her statesmen. The organization of labor is one of the chief acknowledged factors in the retrogression of British trade. The workers have become class conscious as never before. The wrong of one is the wrong of all. They have come to realize, in a short-sighted way, that their masters' interests are not their interests. The harder they work, they believe, the more wealth they create for their masters. Further, the more work they do in one day, the fewer men will be needed to do the work. So the unions place a day's stint upon their members, beyond which they are not permitted to go. In "A Study of Trade Unionism," by Benjamin Taylor in the "Nineteenth Century" of April, 1898, are furnished some interesting corroborations. The facts here set forth were collected by the Executive Board of the Employers' Federation, the documentary proofs of which are in the hands of the secretaries. In a certain firm the union workmen made eight ammunition boxes a day. Nor could they be persuaded into making more. A young Swiss, who could not speak English, was set to work, and in the first day he made fifty boxes. In the same firm the skilled union hands filed up the outside handles of one machine-gun a day. That was their stint. No one was known ever to do more. A non-union filer came into the shop and did twelve a day. A Manchester firm found that to plane a large bed-casting took union workmen one hundred and ninety hours, and non-union workmen one hundred and thirty-five hours. In another instance a man, resigning from his union, day by day did double the amount of work he had done formerly. And to cap it all, an English gentleman, going out to look at a wall being put up for him by union bricklayers, found one of their number with his right arm strapped to his body, doing all the work with his left arm--forsooth, because he was such an energetic fellow that otherwise he would involuntarily lay more bricks than his union permitted. All England resounds to the cry, "Wake up, England!" But the sulky giant is not stirred. "Let England's trade go to pot," he says; "what have I to lose?" And England is powerless. The capacity of her workmen is represented by 1, in comparison with the 2.25 capacity of the American workman. And because of the solidarity of labor and the destructiveness of strikes, British capitalists dare not even strive to emulate the enterprise of American capitalists. So England watches trade slipping through her fingers and wails unavailingly. As a correspondent writes: "The enormous power of the trade unions hangs, a sullen cloud, over the whole industrial world here, affecting men and masters alike." The political movement known as Socialism is, perhaps, even less realized by the general public. The great strides it has taken and the portentous front it today exhibits are not comprehended; and, fastened though it is in every land, it is given little space by the capitalistic press. For all its plea and passion and warmth, it wells upward like a great, cold tidal wave, irresistible, inexorable, ingulfing present-day society level by level. By its own preachment it is inexorable. Just as societies have sprung into existence, fulfilled their function, and passed away, it claims, just as surely is present society hastening on to its dissolution. This is a transition period--and destined to be a very short one. Barely a century old, capitalism is ripening so rapidly that it can never live to see a second birthday. There is no hope for it, the Socialists say. It is doomed. The cardinal tenet of Socialism is that forbidding doctrine, the materialistic conception of history. Men are not the masters of their souls. They are the puppets of great, blind forces. The lives they live and the deaths they die are compulsory. All social codes are but the reflexes of existing economic conditions, plus certain survivals of past economic conditions. The institutions men build they are compelled to build. Economic laws determine at any given time what these institutions shall be, how long they shall operate, and by what they shall be replaced. And so, through the economic process, the Socialist preaches the ripening of the capitalistic society and the coming of the new cooperative society. The second great tenet of Socialism, itself a phase of the materialistic conception of history, is the class struggle. In the social struggle for existence, men are forced into classes. "The history of all society thus far is the history of class strife." In existing society the capitalist class exploits the working class, the proletariat. The interests of the exploiter are not the interests of the exploited. "Profits are legitimate," says the one. "Profits are unpaid wages," replies the other, when he has become conscious of his class, "therefore profits are robbery." The capitalist enforces his profits because he is the legal owner of all the means of production. He is the legal owner because he controls the political machinery of society. The Socialist sets to work to capture the political machinery, so that he may make illegal the capitalist's ownership of the means of production, and make legal his own ownership of the means of production. And it is this struggle, between these two classes, upon which the world has at last entered. Scientific Socialism is very young. Only yesterday it was in swaddling clothes. But today it is a vigorous young giant, well braced to battle for what it wants, and knowing precisely what it wants. It holds its international conventions, where world-policies are formulated by the representatives of millions of Socialists. In little Belgium there are three-quarters of a million of men who work for the cause; in Germany, 3,000,000; Austria, between 1895 and 1897, raised her socialist vote from 90,000 to 750,000. France in 1871 had a whole generation of Socialists wiped out; yet in 1885 there were 30,000, and in 1898, 1,000,000. Ere the last Spaniard had evacuated Cuba, Socialist groups were forming. And from far Japan, in these first days of the twentieth century, writes one Tomoyoshi Murai: "The interest of our people on Socialism has been greatly awakened these days, especially among our laboring people on one hand and young students' circle on the other, as much as we can draw an earnest and enthusiastic audience and fill our hall, which holds two thousand. . . . It is gratifying to say that we have a number of fine and well-trained public orators among our leaders of Socialism in Japan. The first speaker tonight is Mr. Kiyoshi Kawakami, editor of one of our city (Tokyo) dailies, a strong, independent, and decidedly socialistic paper, circulated far and wide. Mr. Kawakami is a scholar as well as a popular writer. He is going to speak tonight on the subject, 'The Essence of Socialism--the Fundamental Principles.' The next speaker is Professor Iso Abe, president of our association, whose subject of address is, 'Socialism and the Existing Social System.' The third speaker is Mr. Naoe Kinosita, the editor of another strong journal of the city. He speaks on the subject, 'How to Realize the Socialist Ideals and Plans.' Next is Mr. Shigeyoshi Sugiyama, a graduate of Hartford Theological Seminary and an advocate of Social Christianity, who is to speak on 'Socialism and Municipal Problems.' And the last speaker is the editor of the 'Labor World,' the foremost leader of the labor-union movement in our country, Mr. Sen Katayama, who speaks on the subject, 'The Outlook of Socialism in Europe and America.' These addresses are going to be published in book form and to be distributed among our people to enlighten their minds on the subject." And in the struggle for the political machinery of society, Socialism is no longer confined to mere propaganda. Italy, Austria, Belgium, England, have Socialist members in their national bodies. Out of the one hundred and thirty-two members of the London County Council, ninety-one are denounced by the conservative element as Socialists. The Emperor of Germany grows anxious and angry at the increasing numbers which are returned to the Reichstag. In France, many of the large cities, such as Marseilles, are in the hands of the Socialists. A large body of them is in the Chamber of Deputies, and Millerand, Socialist, sits in the cabinet. Of him M. Leroy-Beaulieu says with horror: "M. Millerand is the open enemy of private property, private capital, the resolute advocate of the socialization of production . . . a constant incitement to violence . . . a collectivist, avowed and militant, taking part in the government, dominating the departments of commerce and industry, preparing all the laws and presiding at the passage of all measures which should be submitted to merchants and tradesmen." In the United States there are already Socialist mayors of towns and members of State legislatures, a vast literature, and single Socialist papers with subscription lists running up into the hundreds of thousands. In 1896, 36,000 votes were cast for the Socialist candidate for President; in 1900, nearly 200,000; in 1904, 450,000. And the United States, young as it is, is ripening rapidly, and the Socialists claim, according to the materialistic conception of history, that the United States will be the first country in the world wherein the toilers will capture the political machinery and expropriate the bourgeoisie. * * * * * But the Socialist and labor movements have recently entered upon a new phase. There has been a remarkable change in attitude on both sides. For a long time the labor unions refrained from going in for political action. On the other hand, the Socialists claimed that without political action labor was powerless. And because of this there was much ill feeling between them, even open hostilities, and no concerted action. But now the Socialists grant that the labor movement has held up wages and decreased the hours of labor, and the labor unions find that political action is necessary. Today both parties have drawn closely together in the common fight. In the United States this friendly feeling grows. The Socialist papers espouse the cause of labor, and the unions have opened their ears once more to the wiles of the Socialists. They are all leavened with Socialist workmen, "boring from within," and many of their leaders have already succumbed. In England, where class consciousness is more developed, the name "Unionism" has been replaced by "The New Unionism," the main object of which is "to capture existing social structures in the interests of the wage-earners." There the Socialist, the trade-union, and other working-class organizations are beginning to cooperate in securing the return of representatives to the House of Commons. And in France, where the city councils and mayors of Marseilles and Monteaules-Mines are Socialistic, thousands of francs of municipal money were voted for the aid of the unions in the recent great strikes. For centuries the world has been preparing for the coming of the common man. And the period of preparation virtually past, labor, conscious of itself and its desires, has begun a definite movement toward solidarity. It believes the time is not far distant when the historian will speak not only of the dark ages of feudalism, but of the dark ages of capitalism. And labor sincerely believes itself justified in this by the terrible indictment it brings against capitalistic society. In the face of its enormous wealth, capitalistic society forfeits its right to existence when it permits widespread, bestial poverty. The philosophy of the survival of the fittest does not soothe the class-conscious worker when he learns through his class literature that among the Italian pants-finishers of Chicago {9} the average weekly wage is $1.31, and the average number of weeks employed in the year is 27.85. Likewise when he reads: {10} "Every room in these reeking tenements houses a family or two. In one room a missionary found a man ill with small-pox, his wife just recovering from her confinement, and the children running about half naked and covered with dirt. Here are seven people living in one underground kitchen, and a little dead child lying in the same room. Here live a widow and her six children, two of whom are ill with scarlet fever. In another, nine brothers and sisters, from twenty-nine years of age downward, live, eat, and sleep together." And likewise, when he reads: {11} "When one man, fifty years old, who has worked all his life, is compelled to beg a little money to bury his dead baby, and another man, fifty years old, can give ten million dollars to enable his daughter to live in luxury and bolster up a decaying foreign aristocracy, do you see nothing amiss?" And on the other hand, the class-conscious worker reads the statistics of the wealthy classes, knows what their incomes are, and how they get them. True, down all the past he has known his own material misery and the material comfort of the dominant classes, and often has this knowledge led him to intemperate acts and unwise rebellion. But today, and for the first time, because both society and he have evolved, he is beginning to see a possible way out. His ears are opening to the propaganda of Socialism, the passionate gospel of the dispossessed. But it does not inculcate a turning back. The way through is the way out, he understands, and with this in mind he draws up the programme. It is quite simple, this programme. Everything is moving in his direction, toward the day when he will take charge. The trust? Ah, no. Unlike the trembling middle-class man and the small capitalist, he sees nothing at which to be frightened. He likes the trust. He exults in the trust, for it is largely doing the task for him. It socializes production; this done, there remains nothing for him to do but socialize distribution, and all is accomplished. The trust? "It organizes industry on an enormous, labor-saving scale, and abolishes childish, wasteful competition." It is a gigantic object lesson, and it preaches his political economy far more potently than he can preach it. He points to the trust, laughing scornfully in the face of the orthodox economists. "You told me this thing could not be," {12} he thunders. "Behold, the thing is!" He sees competition in the realm of production passing away. When the captains of industry have thoroughly organized production, and got everything running smoothly, it will be very easy for him to eliminate the profits by stepping in and having the thing run for himself. And the captain of industry, if he be good, may be given the privilege of continuing the management on a fair salary. The sixty millions of dividends which the Standard Oil Company annually declares will be distributed among the workers. The same with the great United States Steel Corporation. The president of that corporation knows his business. Very good. Let him become Secretary of the Department of Iron and Steel of the United States. But, since the chief executive of a nation of seventy-odd millions works for $50,000 a year, the Secretary of the Department of Iron and Steel must expect to have his salary cut accordingly. And not only will the workers take to themselves the profits of national and municipal monopolies, but also the immense revenues which the dominant classes today draw from rents, and mines, and factories, and all manner of enterprises. * * * * * All this would seem very like a dream, even to the worker, if it were not for the fact that like things have been done before. He points triumphantly to the aristocrat of the eighteenth century, who fought, legislated, governed, and dominated society, but who was shorn of power and displaced by the rising bourgeoisie. Ay, the thing was done, he holds. And it shall be done again, but this time it is the proletariat who does the shearing. Sociology has taught him that m-i-g-h-t spells "right." Every society has been ruled by classes, and the classes have ruled by sheer strength, and have been overthrown by sheer strength. The bourgeoisie, because it was the stronger, dragged down the nobility of the sword; and the proletariat, because it is the strongest of all, can and will drag down the bourgeoisie. And in that day, for better or worse, the common man becomes the master--for better, he believes. It is his intention to make the sum of human happiness far greater. No man shall work for a bare living wage, which is degradation. Every man shall have work to do, and shall be paid exceedingly well for doing it. There shall be no slum classes, no beggars. Nor shall there be hundreds of thousands of men and women condemned, for economic reasons, to lives of celibacy or sexual infertility. Every man shall be able to marry, to live in healthy, comfortable quarters, and to have all he wants to eat as many times a day as he wishes. There shall no longer be a life-and-death struggle for food and shelter. The old heartless law of development shall be annulled. All of which is very good and very fine. And when these things have come to pass, what then? Of old, by virtue of their weakness and inefficiency in the struggle for food and shelter, the race was purged of its weak and inefficient members. But this will no longer obtain. Under the new order the weak and the progeny of the weak will have a chance for survival equal to that of the strong and the progeny of the strong. This being so, the premium upon strength will have been withdrawn, and on the face of it the average strength of each generation, instead of continuing to rise, will begin to decline. When the common man's day shall have arrived, the new social institutions of that day will prevent the weeding out of weakness and inefficiency. All, the weak and the strong, will have an equal chance for procreation. And the progeny of all, of the weak as well as the strong, will have an equal chance for survival. This being so, and if no new effective law of development be put into operation, then progress must cease. And not only progress, for deterioration would at once set in. It is a pregnant problem. What will be the nature of this new and most necessary law of development? Can the common man pause long enough from his undermining labors to answer? Since he is bent upon dragging down the bourgeoisie and reconstructing society, can he so reconstruct that a premium, in some unguessed way or other, will still be laid upon the strong and efficient so that the human type will continue to develop? Can the common man, or the uncommon men who are allied with him, devise such a law? Or have they already devised one? And if so, what is it? HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST It is quite fair to say that I became a Socialist in a fashion somewhat similar to the way in which the Teutonic pagans became Christians--it was hammered into me. Not only was I not looking for Socialism at the time of my conversion, but I was fighting it. I was very young and callow, did not know much of anything, and though I had never even heard of a school called "Individualism," I sang the paean of the strong with all my heart. This was because I was strong myself. By strong I mean that I had good health and hard muscles, both of which possessions are easily accounted for. I had lived my childhood on California ranches, my boyhood hustling newspapers on the streets of a healthy Western city, and my youth on the ozone-laden waters of San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean. I loved life in the open, and I toiled in the open, at the hardest kinds of work. Learning no trade, but drifting along from job to job, I looked on the world and called it good, every bit of it. Let me repeat, this optimism was because I was healthy and strong, bothered with neither aches nor weaknesses, never turned down by the boss because I did not look fit, able always to get a job at shovelling coal, sailorizing, or manual labor of some sort. And because of all this, exulting in my young life, able to hold my own at work or fight, I was a rampant individualist. It was very natural. I was a winner. Wherefore I called the game, as I saw it played, or thought I saw it played, a very proper game for MEN. To be a MAN was to write man in large capitals on my heart. To adventure like a man, and fight like a man, and do a man's work (even for a boy's pay)--these were things that reached right in and gripped hold of me as no other thing could. And I looked ahead into long vistas of a hazy and interminable future, into which, playing what I conceived to be MAN'S game, I should continue to travel with unfailing health, without accidents, and with muscles ever vigorous. As I say, this future was interminable. I could see myself only raging through life without end like one of Nietzsche's _blond-beasts_, lustfully roving and conquering by sheer superiority and strength. As for the unfortunates, the sick, and ailing, and old, and maimed, I must confess I hardly thought of them at all, save that I vaguely felt that they, barring accidents, could be as good as I if they wanted to real hard, and could work just as well. Accidents? Well, they represented FATE, also spelled out in capitals, and there was no getting around FATE. Napoleon had had an accident at Waterloo, but that did not dampen my desire to be another and later Napoleon. Further, the optimism bred of a stomach which could digest scrap iron and a body which flourished on hardships did not permit me to consider accidents as even remotely related to my glorious personality. I hope I have made it clear that I was proud to be one of Nature's strong-armed noblemen. The dignity of labor was to me the most impressive thing in the world. Without having read Carlyle, or Kipling, I formulated a gospel of work which put theirs in the shade. Work was everything. It was sanctification and salvation. The pride I took in a hard day's work well done would be inconceivable to you. It is almost inconceivable to me as I look back upon it. I was as faithful a wage slave as ever capitalist exploited. To shirk or malinger on the man who paid me my wages was a sin, first, against myself, and second, against him. I considered it a crime second only to treason and just about as bad. In short, my joyous individualism was dominated by the orthodox bourgeois ethics. I read the bourgeois papers, listened to the bourgeois preachers, and shouted at the sonorous platitudes of the bourgeois politicians. And I doubt not, if other events had not changed my career, that I should have evolved into a professional strike-breaker, (one of President Eliot's American heroes), and had my head and my earning power irrevocably smashed by a club in the hands of some militant trades-unionist. Just about this time, returning from a seven months' voyage before the mast, and just turned eighteen, I took it into my head to go tramping. On rods and blind baggages I fought my way from the open West where men bucked big and the job hunted the man, to the congested labor centres of the East, where men were small potatoes and hunted the job for all they were worth. And on this new _blond-beast_ adventure I found myself looking upon life from a new and totally different angle. I had dropped down from the proletariat into what sociologists love to call the "submerged tenth," and I was startled to discover the way in which that submerged tenth was recruited. I found there all sorts of men, many of whom had once been as good as myself and just as _blond-beast_; sailor-men, soldier-men, labor-men, all wrenched and distorted and twisted out of shape by toil and hardship and accident, and cast adrift by their masters like so many old horses. I battered on the drag and slammed back gates with them, or shivered with them in box cars and city parks, listening the while to life-histories which began under auspices as fair as mine, with digestions and bodies equal to and better than mine, and which ended there before my eyes in the shambles at the bottom of the Social Pit. And as I listened my brain began to work. The woman of the streets and the man of the gutter drew very close to me. I saw the picture of the Social Pit as vividly as though it were a concrete thing, and at the bottom of the Pit I saw them, myself above them, not far, and hanging on to the slippery wall by main strength and sweat. And I confess a terror seized me. What when my strength failed? when I should be unable to work shoulder to shoulder with the strong men who were as yet babes unborn? And there and then I swore a great oath. It ran something like this: _All my days I have worked hard with my body_, _and according to the number of days I have worked_, _by just that much am I nearer the bottom of the Pit_. _I shall climb out of the Pit_, _but not by the muscles of my body shall I climb out_. _I shall do no more hard work_, _and may God strike me dead if I do another day's hard work with my body more than I absolutely have to do_. And I have been busy ever since running away from hard work. Incidentally, while tramping some ten thousand miles through the United States and Canada, I strayed into Niagara Falls, was nabbed by a fee-hunting constable, denied the right to plead guilty or not guilty, sentenced out of hand to thirty days' imprisonment for having no fixed abode and no visible means of support, handcuffed and chained to a bunch of men similarly circumstanced, carted down country to Buffalo, registered at the Erie County Penitentiary, had my head clipped and my budding mustache shaved, was dressed in convict stripes, compulsorily vaccinated by a medical student who practised on such as we, made to march the lock-step, and put to work under the eyes of guards armed with Winchester rifles--all for adventuring in _blond-beastly_ fashion. Concerning further details deponent sayeth not, though he may hint that some of his plethoric national patriotism simmered down and leaked out of the bottom of his soul somewhere--at least, since that experience he finds that he cares more for men and women and little children than for imaginary geographical lines. * * * * * To return to my conversion. I think it is apparent that my rampant individualism was pretty effectively hammered out of me, and something else as effectively hammered in. But, just as I had been an individualist without knowing it, I was now a Socialist without knowing it, withal, an unscientific one. I had been reborn, but not renamed, and I was running around to find out what manner of thing I was. I ran back to California and opened the books. I do not remember which ones I opened first. It is an unimportant detail anyway. I was already It, whatever It was, and by aid of the books I discovered that It was a Socialist. Since that day I have opened many books, but no economic argument, no lucid demonstration of the logic and inevitableness of Socialism affects me as profoundly and convincingly as I was affected on the day when I first saw the walls of the Social Pit rise around me and felt myself slipping down, down, into the shambles at the bottom. FOOTNOTES: {1} "From 43 to 52 per cent of all applicants need work rather than relief."--Report of the Charity Organization Society of New York City. {2} Mr. Leiter, who owns a coal mine at the town of Zeigler, Illinois, in an interview printed in the Chicago Record-Herald of December 6, 1904, said: "When I go into the market to purchase labor, I propose to retain just as much freedom as does a purchaser in any other kind of a market. . . . There is no difficulty whatever in obtaining labor, _for the country is full of unemployed men_." {3} "Despondent and weary with vain attempts to struggle against an unsympathetic world, two old men were brought before Police Judge McHugh this afternoon to see whether some means could not be provided for their support, at least until springtime. "George Westlake was the first one to receive the consideration of the court. Westlake is seventy-two years old. A charge of habitual drunkenness was placed against him, and he was sentenced to a term in the county jail, though it is more than probable that he was never under the influence of intoxicating liquor in his life. The act on the part of the authorities was one of kindness for him, as in the county jail he will be provided with a good place to sleep and plenty to eat. "Joe Coat, aged sixty-nine years, will serve ninety days in the county jail for much the same reason as Westlake. He states that, if given a chance to do so, he will go out to a wood-camp and cut timber during the winter, but the police authorities realize that he could not long survive such a task."--From the Butte (Montana) Miner, December 7th, 1904. "'I end my life because I have reached the age limit, and there is no place for me in this world. Please notify my wife, No. 222 West 129th Street, New York.' Having summed up the cause of his despondency in this final message, James Hollander, fifty-six years old, shot himself through the left temple, in his room at the Stafford Hotel today."--New York Herald. {4} In the San Francisco Examiner of November 16, 1904, there is an account of the use of fire-hose to drive away three hundred men who wanted work at unloading a vessel in the harbor. So anxious were the men to get the two or three hours' job that they made a veritable mob and had to be driven off. {5} "It was no uncommon thing in these sweatshops for men to sit bent over a sewing-machine continuously from eleven to fifteen hours a day in July weather, operating a sewing-machine by foot-power, and often so driven that they could not stop for lunch. The seasonal character of the work meant demoralizing toil for a few months in the year, and a not less demoralizing idleness for the remainder of the time. Consumption, the plague of the tenements and the especial plague of the garment industry, carried off many of these workers; poor nutrition and exhaustion, many more."--From McClure's Magazine. {6} The Social Unrest. Macmillan Company. {7} "Our Benevolent Feudalism." By W. J. Ghent. The Macmillan Company. {8} "The Social Unrest." By John Graham Brooks. The Macmillan Company. {9} From figures presented by Miss Nellie Mason Auten in the American Journal of Sociology, and copied extensively by the trade-union and Socialist press. {10} "The Bitter Cry of Outcast London." {11} An item from the Social Democratic Herald. Hundreds of these items, culled from current happenings, are published weekly in the papers of the workers. {12} Karl Marx, the great Socialist, worked out the trust development forty years ago, for which he was laughed at by the orthodox economists. 
16897	----	Transcribed from the 1887 Office of "The Commonweal" edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk THE TABLES TURNED; or, Nupkins Awakened [Title page: title.jpg] A Socialist Interlude BY WILLIAM MORRIS AUTHOR OF 'THE EARTHLY PARADISE.' _As for the first time played at the Hall of the Socialist League on Saturday October 15, 1887_ LONDON: OFFICE OF "THE COMMONWEAL" 13 FARRINGDON ROAD, E.C. 1887 _All Rights Reserved_. ORIGINAL CAST. _DRAMATIS PERSONAE--PART I_. Mr. La-di-da (_found guilty of swindling_) . . . H. BARTLETT. Mr. Justice Nupkins . . . W. BLUNDELL. Mr. Hungary, Q.C. (_Counsel for the Prosecution_) . . . W. H. UTLEY. Sergeant Sticktoit (_Witness for Prosecution_) . . . JAMES ALLMAN. Constable Potlegoff (_Witness for Prosecution_) . . . H. B. TARLETON. Constable Strongithoath (_Witness for Prosecution_) . . . J. FLOCKTON. Mary Pinch (_a labourer's wife, accused of theft_) . . . MAY MORRIS. Foreman of Jury . . . T. CANTWELL. Jack Freeman (_a Socialist, accused of conspiracy, sedition, and obstruction of the highway_) . . . H. H. SPARLING. Archbishop of Canterbury (_Witness for Defence_) . . . W. MORRIS. Lord Tennyson (_Witness for Defence_) . . . A. BROOKES. Professor Tyndall (_Witness for Defence_) . . . H. BARTLETT. William Joyce (_a Socialist Ensign_) . . . H. A. BARKER. Usher . . . J. LANE. Clerk of the Court . . . J. TURNER. Jurymen, Interrupters, Revolutionists, etc., etc. * * * * * _DRAMATIS PERSONAE.--PART II_. Citizen Nupkins (_late Justice_) . . . W. BLUNDELL, Mary Pinch . . . MAY MORRIS. William Joyce (_late Socialist Ensign_) . . . H. A. BARKER. Jack Freeman . . . H. H. SPARLING. 1st Neighbour . . . H. B. TARLETON. 2nd Neighbour . . . J. LANE. 3rd Neighbour . . . H. GRAHAM. Robert Pinch, and other Neighbours, Men and Women. PART I. SCENE.--_A Court of Justice_. USHER, CLERK OF THE COURT, MR. HUNGARY, Q.C., _and others_. MR. LA-DI- DA, _the prisoner, not in the dock, but seated in a chair before it_. [_Enter_ MR. JUSTICE NUPKINS. _Usher_. Silence!--silence! _Mr. Justice Nupkins_. Prisoner at the bar, you have been found guilty by a jury, after a very long and careful consideration of your remarkable and strange case, of a very serious offence; an offence which squeamish moralists are apt to call robbing the widow and orphan; a cant phrase also, with which I hesitate to soil my lips, designates this offence as swindling. You will permit me to remark that the very fact that such nauseous and improper words can be used about the conduct of a _gentleman_ shows how far you have been led astray from the path traced out for the feet of a respectable member of society. Mr. La-di-da, if you were less self-restrained, less respectful, less refined, less of a gentleman, in short, I might point out to you with more or less severity the disastrous consequences of your conduct; but I cannot doubt, from the manner in which you have borne yourself during the whole of this trial, that you are fully impressed with the seriousness of the occasion. I shall say no more then, but perform the painful duty which devolves on me of passing sentence on you. I am compelled in doing so to award you a term of imprisonment; but I shall take care that you shall not be degraded by contamination with thieves and rioters, and other coarse persons, or share the diet and treatment which is no punishment to persons used to hard living: that would be to inflict a punishment on you not intended by the law, and would cast a stain on your character not easily wiped away. I wish you to return to that society of which you have up to this untoward event formed an ornament without any such stain. You will, therefore, be imprisoned as a first-class misdemeanant for the space of one calendar month; and I trust that during the retirement thus enforced upon you, which to a person of your resources should not be very irksome, you will reflect on the rashness, the incaution, the impropriety, in one word, of your conduct, and that you will never be discovered again appropriating to your personal use money which has been entrusted to your care by your friends and relatives. _Mr. La-di-da_. I thank you, my lord, for your kindness and consideration. May I be allowed to ask you to add to your kindness by permitting me to return to my home and make some necessary arrangements before submitting myself to the well-merited chastisement which my imprudence has brought upon me? _Mr. J. N_. Certainly. I repeat I do not wish to make your sentence any heavier by forcing a hard construction upon it. I give you a week to make all arrangements necessary for your peace of mind and your bodily comfort. _Mr. L_. I thank your lordship. [_Exit_. [_The case of_ MARY PINCH _called_.] _Mr. Hungary, Q.C_. I am for the prosecution, my lord, instructed by the Secretary of State for the Home Department. (JUDGE _bites his pen and nods_.) My lord, and gentlemen of the Jury, although this case may seem to some ill-judging persons a trivial one, I think you will be able to see before it is over that it is really important in its bearing on the welfare of society, the welfare of the public; that is, of the respectable public,--of the respectable public, gentlemen. For in these days, when the spirit of discontent is so widespread, all illegal actions have, so to say, a political bearing, my lord, and all illegal actions are wicked, gentlemen of the Jury, since they tend towards the insecurity of society, or in other words, are definitely aimed at the very basis of all morality and religion. Therefore, my lord, I have received instructions from the Home Secretary to prosecute this woman, who, as I shall be able to prove to you, gentlemen of the Jury, by the testimony of three witnesses occupying responsible official positions, has been guilty of a breach at once of the laws of the country and the dictates of morality, and has thereby seriously inconvenienced a very respectable tradesman, nay (_looking at his brief_) three respectable tradesmen. I shall be able to show, gentlemen, that this woman has stolen three loaves of bread: (_impressively_) not one, gentlemen, but three. _A Voice_. She's got three children, you palavering blackguard! [_Confusion_. _Mr. Justice N_. (_who has made an elaborate show of composing himself to slumber since the counsel began, here wakes up and cries out_) Arrest that man, officer; I will commit him, and give him the heaviest punishment that the law allows of. [_The_ USHER _dives among the audience amidst great confusion, but comes back empty-handed_. _J. N_. A most dangerous disturbance! A most dangerous disturbance! _Mr. H_. Gentlemen of the Jury, in confirmation of my remarks on the spirit that is abroad, I call your attention to the riot which has just taken place, endangering, I doubt not, the life of his lordship, and your own lives, gentlemen, so valuable to--to--to--in short, to yourselves. Need I point out to you at any length, then, the danger of allowing criminals, offenders against the sacred rights of property, to go at large? This incident speaks for me, and I have now nothing to do but let the witnesses speak for themselves. Gentlemen of the Jury, I do not ask you to convict on insufficient evidence; but I _do_ ask you not to be swayed by any false sentiment bearing reference to the so-called smallness of the offence, or the poverty of the offender. The law is made for the poor as well as for the rich, for the rich as well as for the poor. The poor man has no more right to shelter himself behind his poverty, than the rich man behind his riches. In short, gentlemen of the Jury, what I ask you in all confidence to do, is to do justice and fear not.--I call Sergeant Sticktoit. [SERGEANT STICKTOIT _sworn_. _Mr. H_. Well, sergeant, you saw this woman steal the loaves? _Sticktoit_. Yes, sir. _Mr. H_. All of them? _St_. Yes, all. _Mr. H_. From different shops, or from one? _St_. From three different shops. _Mr. H_. Yes, just so. (_Aside_: Then why the devil did he say from one shop when his evidence was taken before?) (_To_ ST.) You were an eye- witness of that? You noticed her take all three loaves? _St_. (_Aside_: He wants me to say from three different shops; I'm sure I don't know why. Anyhow, I'll say it--and swear it.) (_To the Court_) Yes, I was an eye-witness of the deed; (_pompously_) I followed her, and then I took her. _Mr. H_. Yes, then you took her. Please tell the Court how. _St_. (_Aside_: Let's see, what did we agree was the likeliest way?) (_To Court_) I saw her take the first loaf and hide it in her shawl; and then the second one; and the second one tumbled down into the mud; and she picked it up again and wiped it with her shawl; and then she took the third; and when she tried to put that with the two others they all three tumbled down; and as she stooped down to pick them up it seemed the best time to take her, as the two constables had come up; so I took her. _Mr. N_. Yes; you took her. _St_. And she cried. _Mr. H_. Ah, she cried. Well, sergeant, that will do; you may go. (_Aside_: The sooner he goes the better. Wouldn't I like to have the cross-examining of him if he was called on the other side!) Constable Potlegoff. [POTLEGOFF _sworn_. _Mr. H_. Well, constable, did you see the woman take the loaves? _Potlegoff_. Yes, sir. _Mr. H_. How did she take them? _Pot_. Off the counter, sir. _Mr. H_. Did she go into the shop to take them? _Pot_. Yes, sir. (_Aside_: I thought I was to say into three shops.) _Mr. H_. One after another? _Pot_. Yes, out of one shop one after another. (_Aside_: Now it's right, I hope.) _Mr. H_. (_Aside_: Confound him, he's contradicting the other!) (_To_ POT.) Yes, just so; one after the other. And did you see the second loaf tumble down? _Pot_. Yes, sir. _Mr. H_. When was that? _Pot_. As she took it off the counter. _Mr. H_. Yes, _after_ she took it off the counter, in the street? _Pot_. No, sir. (_Catching the_ SERGEANT'S _eye_.) I mean yes, sir, and she wiped the mud off them; the sergeant saw her--and I saw her. _A Voice_. Off IT, you liar! 'twas the second loaf, the single loaf, the other liar said! [_Confusion. The judge wakes up and splutters, and tries to say something; the_ USHER _goes through the audience, but finds no one_; HUNGARY _spreads out his hands to the Jury, appealingly_. _Mr. H_. Yes, so it was in the street that you saw the loaves fall down? _Pot_. Yes, sir; it was in the street that I saw it tumble down. _A Voice_. You mean _them_, you fool! You haven't got the story right yet! [_Confusion again. The_ JUDGE _sits up and stares like a man awaked from a nightmare, then calls out_ Officer! Officer! _very loud. The_ USHER _goes his errand again, and comes back bootless_. _Mr. H_. (_very blandly_). It was in the street that you saw the three loaves fall down? _Pot_. Yes, it was in the street that I saw the loaf fall down. _Mr. H_. Yes, in the street; just so, in the street. You may go (_Aside_: for a damned fool!). Constable Strongithoath. [CONSTABLE STRONGITHOATH _sworn_, _Mr. H_. Constable, did you see this robbery? _Strong_. I saw it. _Mr. H_. Tell us what you saw. _Strong_, (_very slowly and stolidly, and as if repeating a lesson_). I saw her steal them all--all--all from one shop--from three shops--I followed her--I took her. When she took it up--she let it drop--in the shop--and wiped the street mud off it. Then she dropped them all three in the shop--and came out--and I took her--with the help--of the two constables--and she cried. _Mr. H_. You may go (_Aside_: for a new-caught joskin and a fool!). I won't ask him any questions. _J. N_. (_waking up, and languid_). Do you call any other witnesses, Mr. Hungary? _Mr. H_. No, my lord. (_Aside_: Not if I know it, considering the quality of the evidence. Not that it much matters; the Judge is going to get a conviction; the Jury will do as he tells them--always do.) (_To the Court_): My lord and gentlemen of the Jury, that's my case. _J. N_. Well, my good woman, what have you to say to this? _Mary Pinch_. Say to it! What's the use of _saying_ anything to it? I'd _do_ to it, if I could. _J. N_. Woman! what do you mean? Violence will not do here. Have you witnesses to call? _M. P_. Witnesses! how can I call witnesses to swear that I didn't steal the loaves? _J. N_. Well, do you wish to question the witnesses? You have a right to. _M. P_. Much good that would be! Would you listen to me if I did? I didn't steal the loaves; but I wanted them, I can tell you that. But it's all one; you are going to have it so, and I might as well have stolen a diamond necklace for all the justice I shall get here. What's the odds? It's of a piece with the rest of my life for the last three years. My husband was a handsome young countryman once, God help us! He could live on ten shillings a-week before he married me; let alone that he could pick up things here and there. Rabbits and hares some of them, as why should he not? And I could earn a little too; it was not so bad there. And then and for long the place was a pretty place, the little grey cottage among the trees, if the cupboard hadn't been so bare; one can't live on flowers and nightingale's songs. Then the children came brisk, and the wages came slack; and the farmer got the new reaping-machine, and my binding came to an end; and topping turnips for a few days in the foggy November mornings don't bring you in much, even when you havn't just had a baby. And the skim milk was long ago gone, and the leasing, and the sack of tail-wheat, and the cheap cheeses almost for nothing, and the hedge-clippings, and it was just the bare ten shillings a-week. So at last, when we had heard enough of eighteen shillings a-week up in London, and we scarce knew what London meant, though we knew well enough what ten shillings a-week in the country meant, we said we'd go to London and try it there; and it had been a good harvest, quickly saved, which made it bad for us poor folk, as there was the less for us to do; and winter was creeping in on us. So up to London we came; for says Robert: "They'll let us starve here, for aught I can see: they'll do naught for us; let us do something for ourselves." So up we came; and when all's said, we had better have lain down and died in the grey cottage clean and empty. I dream of it yet at whiles: clean, but no longer empty; the crockery on the dresser, the flitch hanging from the rafters, the pot on the fire, the smell of new bread about; and the children fat and ruddy tumbling about in the sun; and my lad coming in at the door stooping his head a little; for our door is low, and he was a tall handsome chap in those days.--But what's the use of talking? I've said enough: I didn't steal the loaves--and if I had a done, where was the harm? _J. N_. Enough, woman? Yes, and far more than enough. You are an undefended prisoner. You have not the advantage of counsel, or I would not have allowed you to go on so long. You would have done yourself more good by trying to refute the very serious accusation brought against you, than by rambling into a long statement of your wrongs against society. We all have our troubles to bear, and you must bear your share of them without offending against the laws of your country--the equal laws that are made for rich and poor alike. _A Voice_. _You_ can bear _her_ troubles well enough, can't you, old fat guts? _J. N_. (_scarcely articulate with rage_). Officer! officer! arrest that man, or I will arrest you! [USHER _again makes a vain attempt to get hold of some one_. _J. N_. (_puffing and blowing with offended dignity_). Woman, woman, have you anything more to say? _M. P_. Not a word. Do what you will with me. I don't care. _J. N_. (_impressively_). Gentlemen of Jury, simple as this case seems, it is a most important one under the present condition of discontent which afflicts this country, and of which we have had such grievous manifestations in this Court to-day. This is not a common theft, gentlemen--if indeed a theft has been committed--it is a revolutionary theft, based on the claim on the part of those who happen unfortunately to be starving, to help themselves at the expense of their more fortunate, and probably--I may say certainly--more meritorious countrymen. I do not indeed go so far as to say that this woman is in collusion with those ferocious ruffians who have made these sacred precincts of justice ring with their ribald and threatening scoff's. But the persistence of these riotous interruptions, and the ease with which their perpetrators have evaded arrest, have produced a strange impression in my mind. (_Very impressively_.) However, gentlemen, that impression I do not ask you to share; on the contrary, I warn you against it, just as I warn you against being moved by the false sentiment uttered by this woman, tinged as it was by the most revolutionary--nay, the most bloodthirsty feeling. Dismiss all these non-essentials from your minds, gentlemen, and consider the evidence only; and show this mistaken woman the true majesty of English Law by acquitting her--if you are not satisfied with the abundant, clear, and obviously unbiassed evidence, put before you with that terseness and simplicity of diction which distinguishes our noble civil force. The case is so free from intricacy, gentlemen, that I need not call your attention to any of the details of that evidence. You must either accept it as a whole and bring in a verdict of guilty, or your verdict must be one which would be tantamount to accusing the sergeant and constables of wilful and corrupt perjury; and I may add, wanton perjury; as there could be no possible reason for these officers departing from the strict line of truth. Gentlemen I leave you to your deliberations. _Foreman of Jury_. My lord, we have already made up our minds. Your lordship need not leave the Court: we find the woman guilty. _J. N_. (_gravely nodding his head_). It now remains for me to give sentence. Prisoner at the bar, you have been convicted by a jury of your countrymen-- _A Voice_. That's a lie! You convicted her: you were judge and jury both. _J. N_. (_in a fury_). Officer, you are a disgrace to your coat! Arrest that man, I say. I would have had the Court cleared long ago, but that I hoped that you would have arrested the ruffian if I gave him a chance of repeating his--his crime. [_The_ USHER _makes his usual promenade_. _J. N_. You have been convicted by a jury of your countrymen of stealing three loaves of bread; and I do not see how in the face of the evidence they could have come to any other verdict. Convicted of such a serious offence, this is not the time and place to reproach you with other misconduct; and yet I could almost regret that it is not possible to put you once more in the dock, and try you for conspiracy and incitement to riot; as in my own mind I have no doubt that you are in collusion with the ruffianly revolutionists, who, judging from their accent, are foreigners of a low type, and who, while this case has been proceeding, have been stimulating their bloodstained souls to further horrors by the most indecent verbal violence. And I must here take the opportunity of remarking that such occurrences could not now be occurring, but for the ill-judged leniency of even a Tory Government in permitting that pest of society the unrespectable foreigner to congregate in this metropolis. _A Voice_. What do they do with you, you blooming old idiot, when you goes abroad and waddles through the Loover? _J. N_. Another of them! another of those scarcely articulate foreigners! This is a most dangerous plot! Officer, arrest everybody present except the officials. I will make an example of everybody: I will commit them all. _Mr. H_. (_leaning over to_ JUDGE). I don't see how it can be done, my lord. Let it alone: there's a Socialist prisoner coming next; you can make him pay for all. _J. N_. Oh! there is, is there? All right--all right. I'll go and get a bit of lunch (_offering to rise_). _Clerk_. Beg pardon, my lord, but you haven't sentenced the prisoner. _J. N_. Oh, ah! Yes. Oh, eighteen months' hard labour. _M. P_. Six months for each loaf that I didn't steal! Well, God help the poor in a free country! Won't you save all further trouble by hanging me, my lord? Or if you won't hang me, at least hang my children: they'll live to be a nuisance to you else. _J. N_. Remove the woman. Call the next case. (_Aside_: And look sharp: I want to get away.) [_Case of_ JOHN _or_ JACK FREEMAN _called_.] _Mr. H_. I am for the prosecution, my lord. _J. N_. Is the prisoner defended? _Jack Freeman_. Not I. _J. N_. Hold your tongue, sir! I did not ask you. Now, brother Hungary. _Mr. H_. Once more, my lord and gentlemen of the Jury, I rise to address you; and, gentlemen, I must congratulate you on having the honour of assisting on two State trials on one day; for again I am instructed by the Secretary of State for the Home Department to prosecute the prisoner. He is charged with sedition and incitement to riot and murder, and also with obstructing the Queen's Highway. I shall bring forward overwhelming evidence to prove the latter offence--which is, indeed, the easiest of all offences to be proved, since the wisdom of the law has ordained that it can be committed without obstructing anything or anybody. As for the other, and what we may excusably consider the more serious offence, the evidence will, I feel sure, leave no doubt in your minds concerning the guilt of the prisoner. I must now give you a few facts in explanation of this case. You may not know, gentlemen of the Jury, that in the midst of the profound peace which this glorious empire now enjoys; in spite of the liberty which is the proud possession of every Briton, whatever his rank or fortune; in spite of the eager competition and steadily and swiftly rising wages for the services of the workmen of all grades, so that such a thing as want of employment is unheard of amongst us; in spite of the fact that the sick, the infirm, the old, the unfortunate, are well clothed and generously fed and housed in noble buildings, miscalled, I am free to confess, _work_houses, since the affectionate assiduity of our noble Poor Law takes every care that if the inmates are of no use to themselves they shall at least be of no use to any one else,--in spite of all these and many kindred blessings of civilisation, there are, as you may not know, a set of wicked persons in the country, mostly, it is true, belonging to that class of non-respectable foreigners of whom my lord spoke with such feeling, taste, and judgment, who are plotting, rather with insolent effrontery than crawling secrecy, to overturn the sacred edifice of property, the foundation of our hearths, our homes, and our altars. Gentlemen of the Jury, it might be thought that such madmen might well be left to themselves, that no one would listen to their ravings, and that the glorious machinery of Justice need no more be used against them than a crusader's glittering battle-axe need be brought forward to exterminate the nocturnal pest of our couches. This indeed has been, I must say unfortunately, the view taken by our rulers till quite recently. But times have changed, gentlemen; for need I tell you, who in your character of shrewd and successful men of business understand human nature so well, that in this imperfect world we must not reckon on the wisdom, the good sense of those around us. Therefore you will scarcely be surprised to hear that these monstrous, wicked, and disreputable doctrines are becoming popular; that murder and rapine are eagerly looked forward to under such names as Socialism, revolution, co- operation, profit-sharing, and the like; and that the leaders of the sect are dangerous to the last degree. Such a leader you now see before you. Now I must tell you that these Socialist or Co-operationist incendiaries are banded together into three principal societies, and that the prisoner at the bar belongs to one if not two of these, and is striving, hitherto in vain, for admittance into the third and most dangerous. The Federationist League and the International Federation, to one or both of which this man belongs, are dangerous and malevolent associations; but they do not apply so strict a test of membership as the third body, the Fabian Democratic Parliamentary League, which exacts from every applicant a proof of some special deed of ferocity before admission, the most guilty of their champions veiling their crimes under the specious pretexts of vegetarianism, the scientific investigation of supernatural phenomena, vulgarly called ghost-catching, political economy, and other occult and dull studies. But though not yet admitted a neophyte of this body, the prisoner has taken one necessary step towards initiation, in learning the special language spoken at all the meetings of these incendiaries: for this body differs from the other two in using a sort of cant language or thieves' Latin, so as to prevent their deliberations from becoming known outside their unholy brotherhood. Examples of this will be given you by the witnesses, which I will ask you to note carefully as indications of the dangerous and widespread nature of the conspiracy. I call Constable Potlegoff. [CONSTABLE POTLEGOFF _sworn_. _Mr. H_. Have you seen the prisoner before? _Pot_. Yes. _Mr. H_. Where? _Pot_. At Beadon Road, Hammersmith. _Mr. H_. What was he doing there? _Pot_. He was standing on a stool surrounded by a dense crowd. _Mr. H_. What else? _Pot_. He was speaking to them in a loud tone of voice. _Mr. H_. You say it was a dense crowd: how dense? Would it have been easy for any one to pass through the crowd? _Pot_. It would have been impossible. I could not have got anywhere near him without using my truncheon--which I have a right to do. _Mr. H_. Is Beadon Road a frequented thoroughfare? _Pot_. Very much so, especially on a Sunday morning. _Mr. H_. Could you hear what he said? _Pot_. I could and I did. I made notes of what he said. _Mr. H_. Can you repeat anything he said? _Pot_. I can. He urged the crowd to disembowel all the inhabitants of London. (_Sensation_.) _Mr. H_. Can you remember the exact words he used? _Pot_. I can. He said, "Those of this capital should have no bowels. You workers must see to having this done." _J. N_. Stop a little; it is important that I should get an accurate note of this (_writing_). Those who live in this metropolis must have their bowels drawn out--is that right? _Pot_. This capital, he said, my lord. _J. N_. (_writing_). This capital. Well, well, well! I cannot guess why the prisoner should be so infuriated against this metropolis. Go on, Mr. Hungary. _Mr. H_. (_to witness_). Can you remember any other words he said? _Pot_. Yes; later on he said, "I hope to see the last Londoner hung in the guts of the last member of Parliament." _J. N_. Londoner, eh? _Pot_. Yes, my lord; that is, he meant Londoner. _J. N_. You mustn't say what he meant, you must say what you heard him say. _Pot_. Capital, my lord. _J. N_. I see; (_writing_). The last dweller in the metropolis. _Pot_. Capital, my lord. _J. N_. Yes, exactly; that's just what I've written--this metropolis. _Pot_. He said capital, my lord. _Mr. H_. Capital, the witness says, my lord. _J. N_. Well, doesn't that mean the same thing? I tell you I've got it down accurately. _J. F_. (_who has been looking from one to the other with an amused_ _smile, now says as if he were thinking aloud_:) Well, I _am_ damned! what a set of fools! _J. N_. What is that you said, sir? Have you no sense of decency, sir? Are you pleading, or are you not pleading? I have a great mind to have you removed. _J. F_. (_laughing_). Oh, by all means remove me! I didn't ask to be here. Only look here, I could set you right in three minutes if you only let me. _J. N_. Do you want to ask the witness anything? If not, sir, hold your tongue, sir. No, sir; don't speak, sir. I can see that you are meditating bullying me; let me advise you, sir, not to try it. _Mr. H_. (_to_ POT.) Was that the only occasion on which you heard him speaking? _Pot_. No; I have heard him speaking in Hyde Park and saying much the same thing, and calling Mr. Justice Nupkins a damned old fool! _J. N_. (_writing_). "A damned old fool!" Anything else? _Pot_. A blasted old cheat! _J. N_. (_writing_). "A blasted old cheat!" (_Cheerfully_) Go on. _Pot_. Another time he was talking in a public-house with two men whom I understood to be members of the Fabian League. He was having words with them, and one of them said, "Ah, but you forget the rent of ability"; and he said, "Damn the rent of ability, I will smash their rents of abilities." _Mr. H_. Did you know what that meant? _Pot_. No; not then. _Mr. H_. But you do now? _Pot_. Yes; for I got into conversation with one of them, who told me that it meant the brain, the skull. _J. N_. (_writing_). "The rent of ability is a cant phrase in use among these people signifying the head." _Mr. H_. Well? _Pot_. Well, then they laughed and said, Well, as far as he is concerned, smash it when you can catch it. _Mr. H_. Did you gather whose head it was that they were speaking of? _Pot_. Yes; his lordship's. _Mr. H_. (_impressively and plaintively_). And _why_? _Pot_. Because they said he had jugged their comrades like a damned old smoutch! _J. N_. _Jugged_? _Pot_. Put them in prison, my lord. _J. N_. (_Aside_: That Norwich affair.) Wait! I must write my self down a smoutch--smoutch? no doubt a foreign word. _Mr. H_. What else have you heard the prisoner say. _Pot_. I have heard him threaten to make her Majesty the Queen take in washing. _J. N_. Plain washing? _Pot_. Yes, my lord. _J. N_. Not fancy work? _Pot_. No, my lord. _A Juryman_. Have you heard him suggest any means of doing all this? _Pot_. Yes, sir; for I have attended meetings of his association in disguise, when they were plotting means of exciting the populace. _Mr. H_. In which he took part? _Pot_. In which he took part. _Mr. H_. You heard him arranging with others for a rising of the lower orders? _Pot_. Yes, sir; and on the occasion, when I met him in the public house, I got into conversation with him, and he told me that his society numbered upwards of two millions. (J. F. _grins_.) _The Juryman_ (_anxiously_). Armed? _Pot_. He said there were arms in readiness for them. _Mr. H_. Did you find out where? _Pot_. Yes; at the premises of the Federationist League, 13 Farringdon Road. _Mr. H_. Did you search for them there? _Pot_. Yes. _Mr. H_. Did you find them? _Pot_. No; we found nothing but printing-stock and some very shabby furniture, and the office-boy, and three compositors. _Mr. H_. Did you arrest them? _Pot_. No; we thought it better not to do so. _Mr. H_. Did they oppose your search? _Pot_. No. _Mr. H_. What did they do? _Pot_. Well, they took grinders at me and said, "Sold!" _Mr. H_. Meaning, doubtless, that they had had an inkling of your search and had sold the arms? _Pot_. So we gathered. _J. N_. (_writing_). "They did not find the arms because they had been sold." _Mr. H_. Well, Constable, that will do. _J. N_. Prisoner, do you wish to ask the Constable any questions? _J. F_. Well, I don't know. I strongly suspect that you have made up your mind which way the jury shall make up their minds, so it isn't much use. However, I will ask him three questions. Constable Potlegoff, at how many do you estimate the dense crowd at Beadon Road, when I obstructed? _Pot_. Upwards of a thousand. _J. F_. H'm; a good meeting! How many were present at that meeting of the Socialist League where we were plotting to make the Queen take in washing? _Pot_. Upwards of two hundred. _J. F_. Lastly, when I told you in the public-house that we were two millions strong, were you drunk or sober? _Pot_. Sober. _J. F_. H'm! It's a matter of opinion perhaps as to when a man _is_ drunk. Was I sober? _Pot_. No; drunk. _J. F_. H'm! So I should think. That'll do, Mr. Potlegoff; I won't muddle your "Rent-of-Ability" any more. Good bye. [SERGEANT STICKTOIT _called_. _Mr. H_. Have you heard the prisoner speaking? _St_. Yes. _Mr. H_. Where? _St_. At Beadon Road amongst other places: that's where I took him. _Mr. H_. What was he doing? _St_. Standing on a stool, speaking _Mr. H_. Yes; speaking: to how many people? _St_. About a thousand. _Mr. H_. Could you get near him? _St_. Nowhere near. _Mr. H_. Well, can you tell me what he was saying? _St_. Well, he said that all the rich people and all the shopkeepers (_glancing at the Jury_) should be disemboweled and flayed alive, and that all arrangements had been made for doing it, if only the workingmen would combine. He then went into details as to where various detachments were to meet in order to take the Bank of England and capture the Queen. He also threatened to smash Mr. Justice Nupkins' "Rent-of-Ability," by which I understood him to mean his skull. _J. N_. His--my brains, you mean! _St_. No, my lord; for he said that you--that he--hadn't any brains. _Mr. H_. Did you find any documents or papers on him when he was arrested? _St_. Yes; he had a bundle of papers with him. _Mr. H_. Like this? (_showing a number of_ "_Commonweal_") _St_. Yes. _J. F_. (_Aside_: Two quires that I couldn't sell, damn it!) _Mr. H_. We put this paper in, my lord. Your lordship will notice the vileness of the incendiarism contained in it. I specially draw your attention to this article by one Bax, who as you will see, is familiar with the use of dynamite to a fearful extent. (J. N. _reads, muttering_ "_Curse of Civilisation_.") Gentlemen of the Jury that is our case. _J. N_. (_looking up from_ "_Commonweal_"). Prisoner at the bar, what have you to say? Do you call witnesses? _J. F_. Yes, I call witnesses, but I haven't much to say. I am accused of obstruction, but I shan't argue that point, as I know that I should do myself no good by proving that I had not obstructed. I am accused of being a Socialist and a revolutionist. Well, if you, my lord, and you, gentlemen of the Jury, and the classes to which you belong, knew what Socialism means--and I fear you take some pains not to--you would also know what the condition of things is now, and how necessary revolution is. So if it is a crime to be a Socialist and a revolutionist, I have committed that crime; but the charge against me is that I am a criminal fool, which I am not. And my witnesses will show you, gentlemen of the Jury, that the evidence brought against me is a mass of lies of the silliest concoction. That is, they will show it you if you are sensible men and understand your position as jurymen, which I almost fear you do not. Well, it will not be the first time that the judge has usurped the function of the jury, and I would go to prison cheerfully enough if I could hope it would be the last. [_He pauses as if to listen. Confused noises and the sound of the_ "_Marseillaise_" _a long way off_. (_Aside_: What is it, I wonder?--No; it's nothing.) _J. N_. Prisoner, what is the matter with you? You seem to be intoxicated; and indeed I hope you are, for nothing else could excuse the brutality of your language. _J. F_. Oh, don't put yourself out, my lord. You've got the whip-hand of me, you know. I thought I heard an echo; that's all. Well, I will say no more, but call the Archbishop of Canterbury. [_Enter the_ ARCHBISHOP, _who is received with much reverence and attention. He is sworn_. _J. F_. Your Grace, were you present at the meeting at Beadon Road where I was arrested? _Arch_. Yes--yes, I _was_ there. Strange to say, it was on a Sunday morning. I needed some little refreshment from the toils of ecclesiastical office. So I took a cab, I admit under the pretext of paying a visit to my brother of London; and having heard the fame of these Socialist meetings, I betook me to one of them for my instruction and profit: for I hold that in these days even those that are highest in the Church should interest themselves in social matters. _J. F_. Well, my lord, were you pleased with what you saw and heard? _Arch_. I confess, sir, that I was disappointed. _J. F_. Why, my lord? _Arch_. Because of the extreme paucity of the audience. _J. F_. Were there a thousand persons present? _Arch_. (_severely_). I must ask you not to jest with me in the sacredly respectable precincts of a Court of Justice. To the best of my remembrance, there were present at the commencement of your discourse but three persons exclusive of yourself. That fact is impressed on my mind from the rude and coarse words which you said when you mounted your stool or rostrum to the friend who accompanied you and had under his arm a bundle of a very reprehensible and ribald print called the _Commonweal_, one of which he, I may say, forced me to purchase. _J. F_. Well, what did I say? _Arch_. You said, "I say, Bill! damned hard lines to have to speak to a lamp-post, a kid, and an old buffer"--by the latter vulgarity indicating myself, as I understand. _J. F_. Yes, my lord, so it is. Now let me ask you, if that matters, is Beadon Road a thronged thoroughfare? _Arch_. On the contrary; at least on the morning on which I was there, there was a kind of Sabbath rest about it, scarcely broken by the harangue of yourself, sir. _J. F_. You heard what I said, my lord? _Arch_. I did, and was much shocked at it. _J. F_. Well, did I say anything about bowels? _Arch_. I regret to say that you did. _J. F_. Do you remember the words I used? _Arch_. Only too well. You said, but at great length, and with much embroidery of language more than questionable, that capital had no bowels for the worker, nor owners of capital either; and that since no one else would be kind to them, the workers must be kind to themselves and take the matter into their own hands. _J. N_. (_making notes_). Owners of _the capital_; workman must take the matter--take the matter--into their own hands. _J. F_. Well, I have no more questions to ask your Grace. _Mr. H_. With many excuses, your Grace, _I_ will ask you a question. _Arch_. Certainly, Mr Hungary. _Mr. H_. You say that the audience was very small; that was at first; but did it not increase as time went on? _Arch_. Yes; an itinerant vendor of ices drew up his stall there, and two policemen--these gentlemen--strolled in, and some ten or more others stood round us before the orator had finished. _Mr. H_. (_Aside_: H'm! old beggar will be so very specific. Let's try him as to the sedition.) (_To_ ARCH.) My lord, you said that you were shocked at what the prisoner said: what was the nature of his discourse? _Arch_. I regret to have to say that it was a mass of the most frightful incendiarism, delivered with an occasional air of jocularity and dry humour that made my flesh creep. Amidst the persistent attacks on property he did not spare other sacred things. He even made an attack on my position, stating (wrongly) the amount of my moderate stipend. Indeed, I think he recognised me, although I was partially disguised. _J. F_. (_Aside_: True for you, old Benson, or else how could I have subpoenaed you?) _Mr. H_. I thank your Grace: that will do. _J. F_. I now call Lord Tennyson. [LORD TENNYSON _sworn_. _J. F_. My lord, have you been present, in disguise, at a meeting of the Socialist League in 13 Farringdon Road? _Lord T_. What's that to you? What do you want to know for? Yes, I have, if it comes to that. _J. F_. Who brought you there? _Lord T_. A policeman: one Potlegoff. I thought he was a Russian by his name, but it seems he is an Englishman--and a liar. He said it would be exciting: so I went. _J. F_. And was it exciting? _Lord T_. NO: it was _dull_. _J. F_. How many were present? _Lord T_. Seventeen: I counted them, because I hadn't got anything else to do. _J. F_. Did they plot anything dreadful? _Lord T_. Not that I could hear. They sat and smoked; and one fool was in the chair, and another fool read letters; and then they worried till I was sick of it as to where such and such fools should go to spout folly the next week; and now and then an old bald-headed fool and a stumpy little fool in blue made jokes, at which they laughed a good deal; but I couldn't understand the jokes--and I came away. _J. F_. Thank you, my lord. _Mr. H_. My lord Tennyson, I wish to ask you a question. You say that you couldn't understand their jokes: but could you understand them when they were in earnest? _Lord T_. No, I couldn't: I can't say I tried. I don't want to understand Socialism: it doesn't belong to my time. [_Exit_. _J. F_. I call Professor Tyndall. [PROFESSOR TYNDALL _sworn_. _J. F_. Professor Tyndall, have you seen me before? _Pro. T_. Yes; I have seen you in a public-house, where I went to collect the opinions of the lower orders against Mr. Gladstone. _J. F_. Who was I with? _Pro. T_. You were with a man whom I was told was a policeman in plain clothes, and with some others that I assume to have been friends of yours, as you winked at them and you and they were laughing together as you talked to the policeman. _J. F_. Do you see the policeman in Court? _Pro. T_. Yes; there he is. _J. F_. Was he drunk or sober? _Pro. T_. What, now? _J. F_. No--then. _Pro. T_. (_with decision_). Drunk. _J. F_. Was I drunk? _Pro. T_. What, now? _J. F_. No--then; though you may tell me whether I'm drunk or not now, if you like, and define drunkenness scientifically. _Pro. T_. Well, you were so, so. _J. F_. Thank you, Professor. _Mr. H_. One question, Professor Tyndall. Did you hear what the prisoner was saying to the policeman--who, by the way, was, I suspect, only shamming drunkenness? _J. F_. (_Aside_: He could carry a good deal, then.) _Pro. T_. Yes, I heard him. He was boasting of the extent and power of the Socialist organisation. _Mr. H_. And did you believe it? did it surprise you? _Pro. T_. It did not in the least surprise me: it seemed to me the natural consequences of Gladstone's Home Rule Bill. As to believing it, I knew he was jesting; but I thought that his jesting concealed very serious earnest. He seemed to me a determined, cunning, and most dangerous person. _Mr. H_. I thank you, professor. [_Exit_ PRO. T. _J. N_. Prisoner, do you want to re-examine the witnesses? What's that noise outside? They ought to be arrested. ["_Marseillaise_" _again without, and tumult nearer_. FREEMAN _listens intently, without heeding the_ JUDGE. _J. N_. Prisoner, why don't you answer? Your insolence won't serve you here, I can tell you. _J. F_. I was listening, Judge; I thought I heard that echo again. _J. N_. Echo again! What does the fellow mean? It's my belief you're drunk, sir: that you have stimulated your courage by liquor. _A Voice_. Look out for _your_ courage, old cockywax; you may have something to try it presently! _J. N_. Officer, arrest that pernicious foreigner. [USHER _promenades once more_. _J. N_. (_Aside_: I don't like it: I'm afraid there is something going to happen.) (_To Court_) Mr. Hungary. _Mr. H_. My lord and gentlemen of the Jury, the prisoner's mingled levity and bitterness leaves me little to answer to. I can only say, gentlemen of the Jury, that I am convinced that you will do your duty. As to the evidence, I need make no lengthened comments on it, because I am sure his lordship will save me the trouble. (_Aside_: Trust him!) It is his habit--his laudable habit--to lead juries through the intricacies which beset unprofessional minds in dealing with evidence. For the rest, there is little need to point out the weight of the irrefragible testimony of the sergeant and constable,--men trained to bring forward those portions of the facts which come under their notice which _are_ weighty. I will not insult you, my lord, by pointing out to intelligent gentlemen in your presence how the evidence of the distinguished and illustrious personages so vexatiously called by the prisoner, so far from shaking the official evidence, really confirms it. (_Aside_: I wonder what all that row is about? I wish I were out of this and at home.) Gentlemen of the Jury, I repeat that I expect you to do your duty and defend yourselves from the bloodthirsty designs of the dangerous revolutionist now before you. (_Aside_: Well, now I'm off, and the sooner the better; there's a row on somewhere.) [_Exit_. _J. N_. Gentlemen of the Jury, I need not expatiate to you on the importance of the case before you. There are two charges brought against the prisoner, but one so transcends the other in importance--nay, I may say swallows it up--that I imagine your attention will be almost wholly fixed on that--the charge of conspiring and inciting to riot. Besides, on the lesser charge the evidence is so simple and crystal-clear that I need but allude to it. I will only remark on the law of the case, that committing an obstruction is a peculiar offence, since it is committed by everyone who, being in a public thoroughfare, does not walk briskly through the streets from his starting-place to his goal. There is no need to show that some other person is hindered by him in his loitering, since obviously that _might_ be the case; and besides, his loitering might hinder another from forming in his mind a legitimate wish to be there, and so might do him a very special and peculiar injury. In fact, gentlemen, it has been doubted whether this grave offence of obstruction is not always being committed by everybody, as a corollary to the well- known axiom in physics that two bodies cannot occupy the same space at one and the same time. So much, gentlemen, for the lesser accusation. As to the far more serious one, I scarcely know in what words to impress upon you the gravity of the accusation. The crime is an attack on the public safety, gentlemen; if it has been committed, gentlemen--if it has been committed. On that point you are bound by your oaths to decide according to the evidence; and I must tell you that the learned counsel was in error when he told you that I should direct your views as to that evidence. It is for you to say whether you believe that the witnesses were speaking what was consonant with truth. But I am bound to point out to you that whereas the evidence for the prosecution was clear, definite, and consecutive, that for the defence had no such pretensions. Indeed, gentlemen, I am at a loss to discover why the prisoner put those illustrious and respectable personages to so much trouble and inconvenience merely to confirm in a remarkable way the evidence of the sergeant and the constable. His Grace the Archbishop said that there were but three persons present when the prisoner _began_ speaking; but he has told us very clearly that before the end of the discourse there were ten, or more. You must look at those latter words, _or more_, as a key to reconcile the apparent discrepancy between his Grace's evidence and that of constable Potlegoff. This, however, is a matter of little importance, after what I have told you about the law in the case of obstruction. His Grace's clear remembrance of the horrible language of the prisoner, and the shuddering disgust that it produced on him, is a very different matter. Although his remembrance of the _ipsissima verba_ does not quite tally with that of the constable, it is clear that both the Archbishop and the policeman have noted the real significance of what was said: The owners of this capital, said the prisoner-- _J. F_. I said nothing of the kind. _J. N_. Yes you did, sir. Those were the very words you said: I have got it down in my notes of his Grace's evidence. What is the use of your denying it, when your own witness gives evidence of it? Hold your tongue, sir.--And the workingmen, says the prisoner, must take the matter into their own hands. Take it into _their own hands_, gentlemen, and take _the matter_ into their hands. What matter are they to take into their hands? Are we justified in thinking that the prisoner was speaking metaphorically? Gentlemen, I must tell you that the maxim that in weighing evidence you need not go beyond the most direct explanation guides us here; forbids us to think that the prisoner was speaking metaphorically, and compels us to suppose that the _matter_ which is to be in the _hands_ of the workmen, their very _hands_, gentlemen, is--what? Why, (_in an awe-struck whisper_) the bowels of the owners of the capital, that is of this metropolis--London! Nor, gentlemen, are the means whereby those respectable persons, the owners of house property in London, to be disembowelled left doubtful: the raising of armed men by the million, concealed weapons, and an organisation capable of frustrating the search for them. Nay, an article in the paper which impudently calls itself (_reading the_ "_Commonweal_") the official journal of the Socialist League, written by one Bax, who ought to be standing in the same dock with the prisoner--an article in which he attacks the sacredness of civilisation--is murky with the word dynamic or dynamite. And you must not forget, gentlemen, that the prisoner accepts his responsibility for all these words and deeds. With the utmost effrontery having pleaded "Not Guilty," he says, "I am a Socialist and a Revolutionist"!--Thus much, gentlemen, my duty compels me to lay before you as to the legal character of the evidence. But you must clearly understand that it rests with you and not with me to decide as to whether the evidence shows this man to be guilty. It is you, gentlemen of the Jury, who are responsible for the verdict, whatever it may be; and I must be permitted to add that letting this man loose upon society will be a very heavy responsibility for you to accept. [_The Jury consult: the noise outside increases_. _J. F_. (_Aside_; Hilloa! what _is_ going on? I begin to think there's a row up!) _Foreman of the Jury_. My lord, we are agreed upon our verdict. _J. N_. Do you find the prisoner at the bar "Guilty" or "Not Guilty"? _F. of J_. Guilty, my lord. _J. F_. Just _so_. _J. N_. Prisoner at the bar, you have been fairly tried and found guilty by a jury of your fellow-countrymen of two most serious offences--crimes, I should say. If I had not to pronounce sentence upon one whose conscience is seared and case-hardened to an unexampled degree, I might have some words to say to you. (_Aside_: And also if I didn't want to get out of this as quick as I can; for I'm sure there is some row going on.) As it is, I will add no words to my sentence. (_Aside_: I wish I were _off_, but let's give it him hot and heavy!) I sentence you to six years' penal servitude and to pay a fine of 100 pounds. _J. F_. Well, its pretty much what I expected of _you_. As to the 100 pounds, don't you wish you may get it; and as to the six years-- [_Great noise_; "_Marseillaise_" _sung quite close_; _hammering on the doors_. _J. F_. Hark! what's that? _J. N_. (_in a quavering voice_). Remove the prisoner! [_Enter a_ SOCIALIST ensign _with a red flag in his hand_. _S. E_. Remove the prisoner! Yes, that's just what I've come to do, my lord. The Tables are Turned now! _J. N_. (_rising and prepared to go_). Arrest that man! _S. E_. Yes, do--if you can. _J. F_. What does it all mean, Bill? _S. E_. The very beginning of it, Jack. It seems we have not been sanguine enough. The Revolution we were all looking forward to had been going on all along, and now the last act has begun. The reactionists are fighting, and pretty badly too, for the soldiers are beginning to remember that they too belong to the "lower classes"--the lower classes--hurrah! You must come along at once, Freeman; we shall want you in our quarter. Don't waste another minute with these fools. _J. N_. (_screaming_). Help, help! Murder, murder! _S. E_. Murder!--murder a louse! Who's hurting you, old gentleman? Don't make such a noise. We'll try and make some use of you when we have time, but we must bustle now. Come on, Jack. Stop a bit, though; where's the Clerk of the Court? Oh, there! Clerk, we shall want this Court-house almost directly to use for a free market for this district. There have been too many people starving and half-starving this long time; and the first thing that we've got to see to is that every one has enough to eat, drink, and wear, and a proper roof over his head. _J. N_. Murder! thieves! fire! _S. E_. There, there! Don't make such a row, old fellow! Get out of this, and bellow in the fields with the horned cattle, if you must bellow. Perhaps they'll want Courts of Justice now, as we don't. And as for you, good fellows, all give a cheer for the Social Revolution which has Turned the Tables; and so--to work--to work! [JUDGE _screams and faints, and Curtain falls_. PART II. SCENE.--_The Fields near a Country Village; a Copse close by. Time--After the Revolution_. [_Enter_ CITIZEN (_late_ JUSTICE) NUPKINS. _He looks cautiously about to right and left, then sits down on the ground_.] _C. N_. Now I think I may safely take a little rest: all is quiet here. Yet there are houses in the distance, and wherever there are houses now, there are enemies of law and order. Well, at least, here is a good thick copse for me to hide in in case anybody comes. What am I to do? I shall be hunted down at last. It's true that those last people gave me a good belly-full, and asked me no questions; but they looked at me very hard. One of these times they will bring me before a magistrate, and then it will be all over with me. I shall be charged as a rogue and a vagabond, and made to give an account of myself; and then they will find out who I am, and then I shall be hanged--I shall be hanged--I, Justice Nupkins! Ah, the happy days when _I_ used to sentence people to be hanged! How easy life was then, and now how hard! [_Hides his face in his hands and weeps_. [_Enter_ MARY PINCH, _prettily dressed_.] _M. P_. How pleasant it is this morning! These hot late summer mornings, when the first pears are ripening, and the wheat is nearly ready for cutting, and the river is low and weedy, remind me most of the times when I was a little freckle-faced child, when I was happy in spite of everything, though it was hard lines enough sometimes. Well, well, I can think of those times with pleasure now; it's like living the best of the early days over again, now we are so happy, and the children like to grow up straight and comely, and not having their poor little faces all creased into anxious lines. Yes, I am my old self come to life again; it's all like a pretty picture of the past days. They were brave men. and good fellows who helped to bring it about: I feel almost like saying my prayers to them. And yet there were people--yes, and poor people too--who couldn't bear the idea of it. I wonder what they think of it now. I wish, sometimes, I could make people understand how I felt when they came to me in prison, where all things were so miserable that, heaven be praised! I can't remember its misery now, and they brought Robert to me, and he hugged me and kissed me, and said, when he stood away from me a little, "Come, Mary, we are going home, and we're going to be happy; for the rich people are gone, and there's no more starving or stealing." And I didn't know what he meant, but I saw such a look in his eyes and in the eyes of those who were with him, that my feet seemed scarcely on the ground; as if I were going to fly. And how tired out I was with happiness before the day was done! Just to think that my last- born child will not know what to be poor meant; and nobody will ever be able to make him understand it. [NUPKINS _groans_.] Hilloa! What's the matter? Why, there's a man ill or in trouble; an oldish man, too. Poor old fellow! Citizen, what's the matter? How can I help you? _C. N_. (_jumping up with a howl_). Ah, they are upon me! That dreadful word "citizen"! (_Looks at_ M. P. _and staggers back_). Oh, Lord! is it? Yes, it _is_--the woman that I sentenced on that horrible morning, the last morning I adorned the judicial bench. _M. P_. What _is_ the matter? And how badly you're dressed; and you seem afraid. What _can_ you be afraid of? If I am not afraid of the cows, I am sure you needn't be--with your great thick stick, too. (_She looks at him and laughs, and says aside_, Why to be sure, if it isn't that silly, spiteful old man that sentenced me on the last of the bad days before we all got so happy together!) (_To_ N.) Why, Mr. Nupkins--citizen--I remember you; you are an old acquaintance: I'll go and call my husband. _C. N_. Oh, no! no! don't! _please_ don't!--(_Aside_: There, there, I'm done for--can I run away?--No use--perhaps I might soften her. I used to be called eloquent--by the penny-a-liners. I've made a jury cry--I think--let me try it. Gentlemen of the Jury, remember the sad change in my client's position! remember.--Oh, I'm going mad, I think--she remembers me) (_Kneels before her_) Oh, woman, woman, spare me! Let me crawl into the copse and die quietly there! _M. P_. Spare you, citizen? Well, I could have spared you once, well enough, and so could many another poor devil have done. But as to dying in the copse, no, I really can't let you do that. You must come home to our house, and we'll see what can be done with you. It's our old house, but really nice enough, now; all that pretty picture of plenty that I told you about on that day when you were so hard upon me has come to pass, and more. _C. N_. Oh, no! I can't come! _M. P_. Oh, yes; you can get as far as that, and we'll give you something to eat and drink, and then you'll be stronger. It will really please me, if you'll come; I'm like a child with a new toy, these days, and want to show new-comers all that's going on. Come along, and I'll show you the pretty new hall they are building for our parish; it's such a pleasure to stand and watch the lads at work there, as merry as grigs. Hark! you may hear their trowels clinking from here. And, Mr. Nupkins, you mustn't think I stole those loaves; I really didn't. _C. N_. Oh, dear me! Oh, dear me! She wants to get me away and murder me! I won't go. _M. P_. How _can_ you talk such nonsense? Why, on earth, should I murder you? _C. N_. (_sobbing_). Judicially, judicially! _M. P_. How silly you are! I really don't know what you mean. Well, if you won't come with me, I'm off; but you know where to go when you want your dinner. But if you still owe me a grudge, which would be very silly of you, any of the people in the houses yonder will give you your food. [_Exit_. _C. N_. There! She's going to fetch some ferocious revolutionaries to make an end of me. It's no use trying to stop her now. I will flee in another direction; perhaps I shan't always meet people I've sentenced. [_As he is going he runs up against_ WILLIAM JOYCE, _once_ SOCIALIST ENSIGN, _entering from the other side_. _William Joyce_. Hilloa, citizen! look out! (_looking at him_) But I say, what's the matter with you? You are queerly rigged. Why, I haven't seen a man in such a condition for many a long day. You're like an ancient ruin, a dream of past times. No, really I don't mean to hurt your feelings. Can I do anything to help you? [C. N. _covers his face with his hands and moans_. _W. J_. Hilloa! Why, I'm blessed if it isn't the old bird who was on the bench that morning, sentencing comrade Jack! What's _he_ been doing, I wonder? I say, don't you remember me, citizen? I'm the character who came in with the red flag that morning when you were playing the last of your queer games up yonder. Cheer up, man! we'll find something for you to do, though you have been so badly educated. _C. N_. Spare me, I entreat you! Don't let it be known who I am, pray don't, or I shall certainly be hanged. Don't hang me; give me hard labour for life, but don't hang me! Yes, I confess I was Judge Nupkins; but don't give me up! I'll be your servant, your slave all my life; only don't bring me before a magistrate. They are so unfair, and so hard! _W. J_. Well, what do you think of a judge, old fellow? _C. N_. That's nearly as bad, but not quite; because sometimes there's a cantankerous blackguard on the jury who won't convict, and insists on letting a man off. But, please, pray think better of it, and let it be a private matter, if you must needs punish me. I won't bring an action against you, whatever you do. Don't make it a judicial matter! Look here, I'll sign a bond to be your servant for ever without wages if you will but feed me. I suffer so from not having my meals regularly. If you only knew how bad it is to be hungry and not to be sure of getting a meal. _W. J_. Yes, Nupkins; but you see, I _do_ know only too well--but that's all gone by. Yet, if you had only known that some time ago, or let's say, guessed at it, it might have been the better for you now. _C. N_. (_aside_; Oh, how jeering and hard he looks!) Oh, spare me, and don't send me to the workhouse! You've no idea how they bully people there. I didn't mean to be a bad or hard man; I didn't indeed. _W. J_. Well, I must say if you meant to be anything else, you botched the job! But I suppose, in fact, you didn't mean anything at all.--So much the worse for you. (_Aside_: I must do a little cat and mouse with him). _C. N_. Oh, spare me, spare me! I'll work so hard for you. Keep it dark as to who I am. It will be such an advantage you're having me all to yourself. _W. J_. Would it, indeed? Well, I doubt that. _C. N_. Oh, I think so. I really am a good lawyer. _W. J_. H'm, that would be rather less useful than a dead jackass--unless one came to the conclusion of making cat's meat of you. _C. N_. (_aside_, Oh, I'm sick at heart at his hinted threats). Mr. Socialist, don't you see I could put you up to all sorts of dodges by which you could get hold of odds and ends of property--as I suppose you have some sort of property still--and the titles of the land must be very shaky just after a revolution? I tell you I could put you up to things which would make you a person of great importance; as good as what a lord used to be. _W. J_. (_aside_, Oh, you old blackguard! What's bred in the bone won't come out of the flesh. I really must frighten the old coward a little; besides, the council _has_ got to settle what's to be done with him, or the old idiot will put us to shame by dying on our hands of fright and stupidity.) (_To_ N.) Nupkins, I really don't know what to do with you as a slave; I'm afraid that you would corrupt the morals of my children; that you would set them quarrelling and tell them lies. There's nothing for it but you must come before the Council of our Commune: they'll meet presently under yonder tree this fine day. _C. N_. No, no, don't! Pray let me go and drag out the remainder of a miserable existence without being brought before a magistrate and sent to prison! You don't know what a dreadful thing it is. _W. J_. You're wrong again, Nupkins. I know all about it. The stupid red tape that hinders the Court from getting at the truth; the impossibility of making your stupid judge understand the real state of the case, because he is not thinking of you and your life as a man, but of a set of rules drawn up to allow men to make money of other people's misfortunes; and then to prison with you; and your miserable helplessness in the narrow cell, and the feeling as if you must be stifled; and not even a pencil to write with, or knife to whittle with, or even a pocket to put anything in. I don't say anything about the starvation diet, because other people besides prisoners were starved or half-starved. Oh, Nupkins, Nupkins! it's a pity you couldn't have thought of all this before. _C. N_. (_aside_: Oh, what terrible revenge is he devising for me?) (_to_ W. J.) Sir, sir, let me slip away before the Court meets. (_Aside_: A pretty Court, out in the open-air! Much they'll know about law!) _W. J_. Citizen Nupkins, don't you stir from here! You'll see another old acquaintance presently--Jack Freeman, whom you were sending off to six years of it when the red flag came in that day.--And in good time here he is. [_Enter_ JACK FREEMAN, _sauntering in dressed in a blouse, smoking, a billycock on his head, and his hands in his pockets_. _W. J_. There's your judge, Citizen Nupkins! No, Jack, you needn't take your hands out of your pockets to shake hands with me; I know your ways and your manners. But look here! (_pointing to_ NUPKINS). _J. F_. Why, what next? There's no mistaking him, it's my old acquaintance Mr. Justice Nupkins. Why you seem down on your luck, neighbour. What can I do to help you? [NUPKINS _moans_. _W. J_. (_winking at_ FREEMAN). You've got to try him, Jack. _J. F_. Why, what has he been doing? (_Aside_, I say, old fellow, what game are you up to now?) _W. J_. Doing? why nothing. That's just it; something must be done with him. He must come before the council: but I'm afraid he's not of much use to anyone. (_Aside_, I say, Jack, he is a mere jelly of fear: thinks that we are going to kill him and eat him, I believe. I must carry it on a little longer; don't spoil all my fun.) _J. F_. (_Aside_, _to_ W. J.) Well, certainly he deserves it, but take care that he doesn't die of fear on your hands, Bill. (_Aloud_) Well, the council will meet in a minute or two, and then we will take his case. _C. N_. (_to_ J. F.) Oh, sir, sir, spare me and don't judge me! I'll be servant to you all my life! _W. J_. Why Nupkins, what's this? You promised to be a servant to _me_! _J. F_. Citizen Nupkins, I really must say thank-you for nothing. What the deuce could I do with a servant? Now don't you trouble yourself; the council will see to your affairs. And in good time here come the neighbours. [_Enter the Neighbours_, ROBERT PINCH, MART PINCH, _and others_. _W. J_. Now for it, Nupkins! Bear your own troubles as well as you used to bear other peoples', and then you'll do very well. JACK FREEMAN _takes his seat on the ground under the tree, the others standing and sitting about him_: WILLIAM JOYCE _makes a show of guarding_ NUPKINS, _at which the neighbours look rather astonished; but he nods and winks to them, and they see there is some joke toward and say nothing_. _J. F_. Well, neighbours, what's the business to-day? _1st Neighbour_. I have to report that three loads of that oak for the hall-roof have come to hand; it's well-seasoned good timber, so there need be no hitch in the building now. _2nd Neighbour_. Well, chairman, we sent off the wool to the north-country communes last week, and they are quite satisfied with it. Their cloth has come to hand rather better than worse than the old sample. _3rd Neighbour_. I have to report that the new wheel at the silk mill is going now, and makes a very great improvement. It gives us quite enough power even when the water is small; so we shan't want a steam-engine after all. _J. F_. When do we begin wheat harvest? _3rd Neighbour_. Next Thursday in the ten-acre; the crop is heavy and the weather looks quite settled; so we shall have a jolly time of it. _J. F_. Well, I'm glad I know in good time; for I never like to miss seeing the first row of reapers going into the corn. Is there anything else? _W. J_. Well, there's one troublesome business, chairman (_looks_ _at_ C. N., _who trembles and moans_). There's that dog we caught, that thief, that useless beast. What is to be done with him? _C. N_. (_Aside_, That's me! that's me! To think that a justice should be spoken of in such language! What am I to do? What am I to do?) _2nd Neighbour_. Well, chairman, I think we must shoot him. Once a thief always a thief, you see, with that kind of brute. I'm sorry, because he has been so badly brought up; and though he is an ugly dog, he is big and burly; but I must say that I think it must be done, and as soon as possible. He'll be after the girls if we don't do it at once! _C. N_. (_Aside_: What! have they got hold of that story, then?) _J. F_. Well, neighbours, what's to be said? anybody against it? Is this unpleasant business agreed to? _All_. Agreed, agreed. _J. F_. Well, then, let the dog be shot. Bill, it's your turn for an ugly job this time: you must do it. _W. J_. Well, if it must be, it must. I'll go and get a gun in a minute. _C. N_. Oh, God! to think of their disposing of a fellow-man's life with so little ceremony! And probably they will go and eat their dinners afterwards and think nothing of it. (_Throwing himself on his knees before_ JACK FREEMAN.) Oh, your Socialist worship! Oh, citizen my lord! spare me, spare me! Send me to prison, load me with chains, but spare my life! _J. F_. Why, what ails the man? Chains! we don't use chains for that sort of thing. They're good to fasten up boats with, and for carts, and such like; so why should we waste them by ornamenting you with them? And as to prison, we can't send you to prison, because we haven't got one. How could we have one? who would be the jailer? No, no; we can't be bothered with you in prison. You must learn to behave decently. _C. N_. What! have you no punishment but death, then? O! what am I to do? what am I to do? _1st Neighbour_. Do? Why, behave decently. _C. N_. But how can I behave decently when I'm dead? (_Moans_.) _2nd Neighbour_. But, neighbour, you must die some time or another, you know. Make the most of your time while you are alive. _C. N_. Have you the heart to say such things to a man whom you are going to shoot in a few minutes? How horrible! Oh, look here! if you haven't got a prison, build one for me! or make one out of a cellar, and lock me up in it; but don't shoot me--don't! _W. J_. Well, old acquaintance, to want a prison all to your own cheek! This is individualism, with a vengeance! It beats Auberon Herbert. But who is going to shoot you? _C. N_. Why, you. He said shoot the dog (_weeping_). _W. J_. Well, citizen, I must say that either your estimate of yourself is modest, or your conscience is bad, that you must take that title to yourself! No; it _is_ a bad business, but not so bad as that. It's not you that we're going to shoot, but a poor devil of a dog--a real dog, with a tail, you know--who has taken to killing sheep. And I'm sorry to say that social ethics have given me the job of shooting him. But come, now, you shall do it for me: you used to be a great upholder of capital punishment. _C. N_. But what are you going to do with me, then? How are you going to punish me? _J. F_. Punish you? how can we punish you? who do you think is going to do such work as that! People punish others because they like to; and we don't like to. Once more, learn to live decently. _G. N_. But how _am_ I to live? _J. F_. You must work a little. _C. N_. But what at, since you object to lawyers? _J. F_. Look round you, friend, at the fields all yellowing for harvest,--we will find you work to do. _C. N_. (_Aside_: Ah, I see. This means hard labour for life, after all. Well, I must submit. Unhappy Nupkins! _To_ FREEMAN) But who is to employ me? You will have to find me a master; and perhaps he won't like to employ me. _J. F_. My friend, we no more have masters than we have prisons: the first make the second. You must employ yourself: and you must also employ something else. _C. N_. What? I don't understand. _J. F_. Mother Earth, and the traditions and devices of all the generations of men whom she has nourished. All that is for you, Nupkins, if you only knew it. _C. N_. I still do not comprehend your apologue. _J. F_. No? Well, we must put aside abstractions and get to the concrete. What's this, citizen? (_showing a spade_.) _C. N_. That is an instrument for effodiation. _J. F_. Otherwise called a spade. Well, to use your old jargon, citizen, the sentence of this court is that you do take this instrument of effodiation, commonly called a spade, and that you do effodiate your livelihood therewith; in other words, that you do dig potatoes and other roots and worts during the pleasure of this court. And, to drop jargon, since you are so badly educated our friend Robert Pinch--Mary's husband--will show you how to do it. Is that agreed to, neighbours? _All_. Agreed, agreed. _W. J_. (_rather surlily_). I don't think he will get on well. Now he knows we are not going to serve him out, he is beginning to look sour on us for being happy. You see, he will be trying some of his old lawyers' tricks again. _J. F_. Well, Bill, it won't much matter. He can't hurt us; so we will hope the best for him. _M. P_. Should we hurt his feelings by being a little merry in his presence now? _J. F_. Well, I think we may risk it. Let those of you who are not too lazy to dance, as I am, do so to the tune that sprang up at the dawn of freedom in the days of our great-grandfathers. [_They dance round_ CITIZEN NUPKINS, _singing the following words to the tune of the_ "_Carmagnole_": _What's this that the days and the days have done_? _Man's lordship over man hath gone_. _How fares it, then, with high and low_? _Equal on earth, they thrive and grow_. _Bright is the sun for everyone_; _Dance we, dance we the Carmagnole_. _How deal ye, then, with pleasure and pain_? _Alike we share and bear the twain_. _And what's the craft whereby ye live_? _Earth and man's work to all men give_. _How crown ye excellence of worth_? _With leave to serve all men on earth_. _What gain that lordship's past and done_? _World's wealth for all and every one_. [FREEMAN _and_ NUPKINS _come to the front_. * * * * * _J. F_. Well, Nupkins, you see you have got the better of us damned Socialists after all. For in times past you used to bully us and send us to prison and hang us, and we had to put up with it; and now you and yours are no longer masters, there _are_ no masters, and there is nobody to bully you. How do you like it, old fellow? (_clapping him on the shoulder_.) _C. N_. (_bursting into tears_). A world without lawyers!--oh, dear! oh, dear! To think that I should have to dig potatoes and see everybody happy! _J. F_. Well, Nupkins, you must bear it. And for my part, I can't be very sorry that you feel it so keenly. When scoundrels lament that they can no longer be scoundrels for lack of opportunity, it is certain that THE TABLES ARE TURNED. THE END. Printed and Published at the COMMONWEAL Office, 13 Farrington Road, London, E.C. WORKS BY WILLIAM MORRIS. _Library Edition_, 4 _vols, cr. 8vo_, 2 pounds. THE EARTHLY PARADISE: A Poem in four parts. _The Vols. separately as below_. Vols I. and II., SPRING and SUMMER, _ninth edition_, 16_s_. 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19468	----	http://www.archive.org/details/mediaevalsocial00jarruoft MEDIAEVAL SOCIALISM by BEDE JARRETT, O.P., M.A. [Illustration: Logo] London: T. C. & E. C. Jack 67 Long Acre, W.C., and Edinburgh New York: Dodge Publishing Co. CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE I. INTRODUCTION 5 II. SOCIAL CONDITIONS 17 III. THE COMMUNISTS 29 IV. THE SCHOOLMEN 41 V. THE LAWYERS 55 VI. THE SOCIAL REFORMERS 68 VII. THE THEORY OF ALMS-GIVING 80 BIBLIOGRAPHY 91 INDEX 93 MEDIAEVAL SOCIALISM CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION The title of this book may not unnaturally provoke suspicion. After all, howsoever we define it, socialism is a modern thing, and dependent almost wholly on modern conditions. It is an economic theory which has been evolved under pressure of circumstances which are admittedly of no very long standing. How then, it may be asked, is it possible to find any real correspondence between theories of old time and those which have grown out of present-day conditions of life? Surely whatever analogy may be drawn between them must be based on likenesses which cannot be more than superficial. The point of view implied in this question is being increasingly adopted by all scientific students of social and political opinions, and is most certainly correct. Speculation that is purely philosophic may indeed turn round upon itself. The views of Grecian metaphysicians may continue for ever to find enthusiastic adherents; though even here, in the realm of purely abstract reasoning, the progressive development of science, of psychology, and kindred branches of knowledge cannot fail by its influence to modify the form and arrangement of thought. But in those purely positive sciences (if indeed sciences they can properly be called) which deal with the life of man and its organisation, the very principles and postulates will be found to need continual readjustment. For with man's life, social, political, economic, we are in contact with forces which are of necessity always in a state of flux. For example, the predominance of agriculture, or of manufacture, or of commerce in the life of the social group must materially alter the attitude of the statesman who is responsible for its fortunes; and the progress of the nation from one to another stage of her development often entails (by altering from one class to another the dominant position of power) the complete reversal of her traditional maxims of government. Human life is not static, but dynamic. Hence the theories weaved round it must themselves be subject to the law of continuous development. It is obvious that this argument cannot be gainsaid; and yet at the same time we may not be in any way illogical in venturing on an inquiry as to whether, in centuries not wholly dissimilar from our own, the mind of man worked itself out along lines parallel in some degree to contemporary systems of thought. Man's life differs, yet are the categories which mould his ideas eternally the same. But before we go on to consider some early aspects of socialism, we must first ascertain what socialism itself essentially implies. Already within the lifetime of the present generation the word has greatly enlarged the scope of its significance. Many who ten years ago would have objected to it as a name of ill-omen see in it now nothing which may not be harmonised with the most ordinary of political and social doctrines. It is hardly any longer the badge of a school. Yet it does retain at any rate the bias of a tendency. It suggests chiefly the transference of ownership in land and capital from private hands into their possession in some form or other by the society. The means of this transference, and the manner in which this social possession is to be maintained, are very widely debated, and need not here be determined; it is sufficient for the matter of this book to have it granted that in this lies the germ of the socialistic theory of the State. Once more it must be admitted that the meaning of "private ownership" and "social possession" will vary exceedingly in each age. When private dominion has become exceedingly individual and practically absolute, the opposition between the two terms will necessarily be very sharp. But in those earlier stages of national and social evolution, when the community was still regarded as composed, not of persons, but of groups, the antagonism might be, in point of theory, extremely limited; and in concrete cases it might possibly be difficult to determine where one ended and the other began. Yet it is undeniable that socialism in itself need mean no more than the central principle of State-ownership of capital and land. Such a conception is consistent with much private property in other forms than land and capital, and will be worked out in detail differently by different minds. But it is the principle, the essence of it, which justifies any claims made to the use of the name. We may therefore fairly call those theories socialistic which are covered by this central doctrine, and disregard, as irrelevant to the nature of the term, all added peculiarities contributed by individuals who have joined their forces to the movement. By socialistic theories of the Middle Ages, therefore, we mean no more than those theories which from time to time came to the surface of political and social speculation in the form of communism, or of some other way of bringing about the transference which we have just indicated. But before plunging into the tanglement of these rather complicated problems, it will make for clearness if we consider quite briefly the philosophic heritage of social teaching to which the Middle Ages succeeded. The Fathers of the Church had found themselves confronted with difficulties of no mean subtlety. On the one hand, the teaching of the Scriptures forced upon them the religious truth of the essential equality of all human nature. Christianity was a standing protest against the exclusiveness of the Jewish faith, and demanded through the attendance at one altar the recognition of an absolute oneness of all its members. The Epistles of St. Paul, which were the most scientific defence of Christian doctrine, were continually insisting on the fact that for the new faith there was no real division between Greek or barbarian, bond or free. Yet, on the other hand, there were equally unequivocal expressions concerning the reverence and respect due to authority and governance. St. Peter had taught that honour should be paid to Caesar, when Caesar was no other than Nero. St. Paul had as clearly preached subjection to the higher powers. Yet at the same time we know that the Christian truth of the essential equality of the whole human race was by some so construed as to be incompatible with the notion of civil authority. How, then, was this paradox to be explained? If all were equal, what justification would there be for civil authority? If civil authority was to be upheld, wherein lay the meaning of St. Paul's many boasts of the new levelling spirit of the Christian religion? The paradox was further complicated by two other problems. The question of the authority of the Imperial Government was found to be cognate with the questions of the institution of slavery and of private property. Here were three concrete facts on which the Empire seemed to be based. What was to be the Christian attitude towards them? After many attempted explanations, which were largely personal, and, therefore, may be neglected here, a general agreement was come to by the leading Christian teachers of East and West. This was based on a theological distinction between human nature as it existed on its first creation, and then as it became in the state to which it was reduced after the fall of Adam. Created in original justice, as the phrase ran, the powers of man's soul were in perfect harmony. His sensitive nature, _i.e._ his passions, were in subjection to his will, his will to his reason, his reason to God. Had man continued in this state of innocence, government, slavery, and private property would never have been required. But Adam fell, and in his fall, said these Christian doctors, the whole conditions of his being were disturbed. The passions broke loose, and by their violence not unfrequently subjected the will to their dictatorship; together with the will they obscured and prejudiced the reason, which under their compulsion was no longer content to follow the Divine Reason or the Eternal Law of God. In a word, where order had previously reigned, a state of lawlessness now set in. Greed, lust for power, the spirit of insubordination, weakness of will, feebleness of mind, ignorance, all swarmed into the soul of man, and disturbed not merely the internal economy of his being, but his relations also to his fellows. The sin of Cain is the social result of this personal upheaval. Society then felt the evils which attended this new condition of things, and it was driven, according to this patristic idea, to search about for remedies in order to restrain the anarchy which threatened to overwhelm the very existence of the race. Hence was introduced first of all the notion of a civil authority. It was found that without it, to use a phrase which Hobbes indeed has immortalised, but which can be easily paralleled from the writings of St. Ambrose or St. Augustine, "life was nasty, brutish, and short." To this idea of authority, there was quickly added the kindred ideas of private property and slavery. These two were found equally necessary for the well-being of human society. For the family became a determined group in which the patriarch wielded absolute power; his authority could be effective only when it could be employed not only over his own household, but also against other households, and thus in defence of his own. Hence the family must have the exclusive right to certain things. If others objected, the sole arbitrament was an appeal to force, and then the vanquished not only relinquished their claims to the objects in dispute, but became the slaves of those to whom they had previously stood in the position of equality and rivalry. Thus do the Fathers of the Church justify these three institutions. They are all the result of the Fall, and result from sin. Incidentally it may be added that much of the language in which Hildebrand and others spoke of the civil power as "from the devil" is traceable to this theological concept of the history of its origin, and much of their hard language means no more than this. Private property, therefore, is due to the Fall, and becomes a necessity because of the presence of sin in the world. But it is not only from the Fathers of the Church that the mediaeval tradition drew its force. For parallel with this patristic explanation came another, which was inherited from the imperial legalists. It was based upon a curious fact in the evolution of Roman law, which must now be shortly described. For the administration of justice in Rome two officials were chosen, who between them disposed of all the cases in dispute. One, the _Praetor Urbanus_, concerned himself in all litigation between Roman citizens; the other, the _Praetor Peregrinus_, had his power limited to those matters only in which foreigners were involved; for the growth of the Roman _Imperium_ had meant the inclusion of many under its suzerainty who could not boast technical citizenship. The _Praetor Urbanus_ was guided in his decisions by the codified law of Rome; but the _Praetor Peregrinus_ was in a very different position. He was left almost entirely to his own resources. Hence it was customary for him, on his assumption of office, to publish a list of the principles by which he intended to settle all the disputes between foreigners that were brought to his court. But on what foundation could his declaratory act be based? He was supposed to have previously consulted the particular laws of as many foreign nations as was possible, and to have selected from among them those which were found to be held in common by a number of tribes. The fact of this consensus to certain laws on the part of different races was supposed to imply that these were fragments of some larger whole, which came eventually to be called indifferently the Law of Nature, or the Law of Nations. For at almost the very date when this Law of Nations was beginning thus to be built up, the Greek notion of one supreme law, which governed the whole race and dated from the lost Golden Age, came to the knowledge of the lawyers of Rome. They proceeded to identify the two really different concepts, and evolved for themselves the final notion of a fundamental rule, essential to all moral action. In time, therefore, this supposed Natural Law, from its venerable antiquity and universal acceptance, acquired an added sanction and actually began to be held in greater respect than even the declared law of Rome. The very name of Nature seemed to bring with it greater dignity. But at the same time it was carefully explained that this _Lex Naturae_ was not absolutely inviolable, for its more accurate description was _Lex_ or _Jus Gentium_. That is to say, it was not to be considered as a primitive law which lay embedded like first principles in human nature; but that it was what the nations had derived from primitive principles, not by any force of logic, but by the simple evolution of life. The human race had found by experience that the observance of the natural law entailed as a direct consequence the establishment of certain institutions. The authority, therefore, which these could boast was due to nothing more than the simple struggle for existence. Among these institutions were those same three (civil authority, slavery, private property), which the Fathers had come to justify by so different a method of argument. Thus, by the late Roman lawyers private property was upheld on the grounds that it had been found necessary by the human race in its advance along the road of life. To our modern ways of thinking it seems as though they had almost stumbled upon the theory of evolution, the gradual unfolding of social and moral perfection due to the constant pressure of circumstances, and the ultimate survival of what was most fit to survive. It was almost by a principle of natural selection that mankind was supposed to have determined the necessity of civil authority, slavery, private property, and the rest. The pragmatic test of life had been applied and had proved their need. A third powerful influence in the development of Christian social teaching must be added to the others in order the better to grasp the mental attitude of the mediaeval thinkers. This was the rise and growth of monasticism. Its early history has been obscured by much legendary detail; but there is sufficient evidence to trace it back far into the beginnings of Christianity. Later there had come the stampede into the Thebaid, where both hermit life and the gathering together of many into a community seem to have been equally allowed as methods of asceticism. But by the fifth century, in the East and the West the movement had been effectively organised. First there was the canonical theory of life, introduced by St. Augustine. Then St. Basil and St. Benedict composed their Rules of Life, though St. Benedict disclaimed any idea of being original or of having begun something new. Yet, as a matter of fact, he, even more efficiently than St. Basil, had really introduced a new force into Christendom, and thereby became the undoubted father of Western monasticism. Now this monasticism had for its primary intention the contemplation of God. In order to attain this object more perfectly, certain subsidiary observances were considered necessary. Their declared purpose was only to make contemplation easier; and they were never looked upon as essential to the monastic profession, but only as helps to its better working. Among these safeguards of monastic peace was included the removal of all anxieties concerning material well-being. Personal poverty--that is, the surrender of all personal claim to things the care of which might break in upon the fixed contemplation of God--was regarded as equally important for this purpose as obedience, chastity, and the continued residence in a certain spot. It had indeed been preached as a counsel of perfection by Christ Himself in His advice to the rich young man, and its significance was now very powerfully set forth by the Benedictine and other monastic establishments. It is obvious that the existence of institutions of this kind was bound to exercise an influence upon Christian thought. It could not but be noticed that certain individual characters, many of whom claimed the respect of their generation, treated material possessions as hindrances to spiritual perfection. Through their example private property was forsworn, and community of possession became prominently put forward as being more in accordance with the spirit of Christ, who had lived with His Apostles, it was declared, out of the proceeds of a common purse. The result, from the point of view of the social theorists of the day, was to confirm the impression that private property was not a thing of much sanctity. Already, as we have seen, the Fathers had been brought to look at it as something sinful in its origin, in that the need of it was due entirely to the fall of our first parents. Then the legalists of Rome had brought to this the further consideration that mere expedience, universal indeed, but of no moral sanction, had dictated its institution as the only way to avoid continual strife among neighbours. And now the whole force of the religious ideals of the time was thrown in the same balance. Eastern and Western monasticism seemed to teach the same lesson, that private property was not in any sense a sacred thing. Rather it seemed to be an obstacle to the perfect devotion of man's being to God; and community of possession and life began to boast itself to be the more excellent following of Christ. Finally it may be asserted that the social concept of feudalism lent itself to the teaching of the same lesson. For by it society was organised upon a system of land tenure whereby each held what was his of one higher than he, and was himself responsible for those beneath him in the social scale. Landowners, therefore, in the modern sense of the term, had no existence--there were only landholders. The idea of absolute dominion without condition and without definite duties could have occurred to none. Each lord held his estate in feud, and with a definite arrangement for participating in the administration of justice, in the deliberative assembly, and in the war bands of his chief, who in turn owed the same duties to the lord above him. Even the king, who stood at the apex of this pyramid, was supposed to be merely holding his power and his territorial domain as representing the nation. At his coronation he bound himself to observe certain duties as the condition of his royalty, and he had to proclaim his own acceptance of these conditions before he could be anointed and crowned as king. Did he break through his coronation-oath, then the pledge of loyalty made by the people was considered to be in consequence without any binding force, and his subjects were released from their obedience. In this way, then, also private property was not likely to be deemed equivalent to absolute possession. It was held conditionally, and was not unfrequently forfeited for offences against the feudal code. It carried with it burdens which made its holding irksome, especially for all those who stood at the bottom of the scale, and found that the terms of their possession were rigorously enforced against them. The death of the tenant and the inheriting of his effects by his eldest son was made the occasion for exactions by the superior lord; for to him belonged certain of the dead man's military accoutrements as pledges, open and manifest, of the continued supremacy to be exercised over the successor. Thus the extremely individual ideas as regards the holding of land which are to-day so prevalent would then have been hardly understood. Every external authority, the whole trend of public opinion, the teaching of the Christian Fathers, the example of religious bodies, the inherited views that had come down to the later legalists from the digests of the imperial era, the basis of social order, all deflected the scale against the predominance of any view of land tenure or holding which made it an absolute and unrestricted possession. Yet at the same time, and for the same cause, the modern revolt against all individual possession would have been for the mediaeval theorists equally hard to understand. Absolute communism, or the idea of a State which under the magic of that abstract title could interfere with the whole social order, was too utterly foreign to their ways of thinking to have found a defender. The king they knew, and the people, and the Church; but the State (which the modern socialist invokes) would have been an unimaginable thing. In that age, therefore, we must not expect to find any fully-fledged Socialism. We must be content to notice theories which are socialistic rather than socialist. CHAPTER II SOCIAL CONDITIONS So long as a man is in perfect health, the movements of his life-organs are hardly perceptible to him. He becomes conscious of their existence only when something has happened to obstruct their free play. So, again, is it with the body politic, for just so long as things move easily and without friction, hardly are anyone's thoughts stimulated in the direction of social reform. But directly distress or disturbance begin to be felt, public attention is awakened, and directed to the consideration of actual conditions. Schemes are suggested, new ideas broached. Hence, that there were at all in the Middle Ages men with remedies to be applied to "the open sores of the world," makes us realise that there must have been in mediaeval life much matter for discontent. Perhaps not altogether unfortunately, the seeds of unrest never need much care in sowing, for the human heart would else advance but little towards "the perfect day." The rebels of history have been as necessary as the theorists and the statesmen; indeed, but for the rebels, the statesmen would probably have remained mere politicians. Upon the ruins of the late Empire the Germanic races built up their State. Out of the fragments of the older _villa_ they erected the _manor_. No doubt this new social unit contained the strata of many civilisations; but it will suffice here to recognise that, while it is perhaps impossible to apportion out to each its own particular contribution to the whole result, the manor must have been affected quite considerably by Roman, Celt, and Teuton. The chief difference which we notice between this older system and the conditions of modern agricultural life--for the manor was pre-eminently a rural organism--lies in the enormous part then played in the organisation of society by the idea of Tenure. For, through all Western civilisation, from the seventh century to the fourteenth, the personal equation was largely merged in the territorial. One and all, master and man, lord and tenant, were "tied to the soil." Within the manor there was first the land held in demesne, the "in-land"--this was the perquisite of the lord himself; it was farmed by him directly. Only when modern methods began to push out the old feudal concepts do we find this portion of the estate regularly let out to tenants, though there are evidences of its occasionally having been done even in the twelfth century. But besides what belonged thus exclusively to the lord of the manor, there was a great deal more that was legally described as held in villeinage. That is to say, it was in the hands of others, who had conditional use of it. In England these tenants were chiefly of three kinds--the villeins, the cottiers, the serfs. The first held a house and yard in the village street, and had in the great arable fields that surrounded them strips of land amounting sometimes to thirty acres. To their lord they owed work for three days each week; they also provided oxen for the plough. But more than half of their time could be devoted to the farming of their property. Then next in order came the cottiers, whose holding probably ran to not more than five acres. They had no plough-work, and did more of the manual labour of the farm, such as hedging, nut-collecting, &c. A much greater portion of their time than was the case with the villeins was at the disposal of their master, nor indeed, owing to the lesser extent of their property, did they need so much opportunity for working their own land. Lowest in the scale of all (according to the Domesday Book of William I, the first great land-value survey of all England, they numbered not more than sixteen per cent. of the whole population) came the slaves or serfs. These had almost exclusively the live stock to look after, being engaged as foresters, shepherds, swineherds, and servants of the household. They either lived under the lord's own roof, or might even have their cottage in the village with its strip of land about it, sufficient, with the provisions and cloth provided them, to eke out a scanty livelihood. Distinct from these three classes and their officials (bailiffs, seneschals, reeves, &c.) were the free tenants, who did no regular work for the manor, but could not leave or part with their land. Their services were requisitioned at certain periods like harvest-time, when there came a demand for more than the ordinary number of hands. This sort of labour was known as boon-work. It is clear at once that, theoretically at least, there was no room in such a community for the modern landless labourer. Where all the workers were paid by their tenancy of land, where, in other words, fixity and stability of possession were the very basis of social life, the fluidity of labour was impossible. Men could not wander from place to place offering to employers the hire of their toil. Yet we feel sure that, in actual fact, wherever the population increased, there must have grown up in the process of time a number of persons who could find neither work nor maintenance on their father's property. Younger sons, or more remote descendants, must gradually have found that there was no scope for them, unless, like an artisan class, they worked for wages. Exactly at what date began the rise of this agricultural and industrial class of fee labourers we cannot very clearly tell. But in England--and probably the same holds good elsewhere--between 1200 and 1350 there are traces of its great development. There is evidence, which each year becomes more ample and more definite, that during that period there was an increasingly large number of people pressing on the means of subsistence. Though the land itself might be capable of supporting a far greater number of inhabitants, the part under cultivation could only just have been enough to keep the actually existing population from the margin of destitution. The statutes in English law which protest against a wholesale occupation of the common-land by individuals were not directed merely against the practices of a landlord class, for the makers of the law were themselves landlords. It is far more likely that this invasion of village rights was due to the action of these "landless men," who could not otherwise be accommodated. The superfluous population was endeavouring to find for itself local maintenance. Precisely at this time, too, in England--where the steps in the evolution from mediaeval to modern conditions have been more clearly worked out than elsewhere--increase of trade helped to further the same development. Money, species, in greater abundance was coming into circulation. The traders were beginning to take their place in the national life. The Guilds were springing into power, and endeavouring to capture the machinery of municipal government. As a result of all this commercial activity money payments became more frequent. The villein was able to pay his lord instead of working for him, and by the sale of the produce from his own yard-land was put in a position to hire helpers for himself, and to develop his own agricultural resources. Nor was it the tenant alone who stood to gain by this arrangement. The lord, too, was glad of being possessed of money. He, too, needed it as a substitute for his duty of military service to the king, for scutage (the payment of a tax graduated according to the number of knights, which each baron had to lead personally in time of war as a condition of holding land at all) had taken the place of the old feudal levy. Moreover, he was probably glad to obtain hired labour in exchange for the forced labour which the system of tenure made general; just as later the abolition of slavery was due largely to the fact that, in the long run, it did not pay to have the plantations worked by men whose every advantage it was to shirk as much toil as possible. But in most cases, as far as can be judged now, the lord was methodical in releasing services due to him. The week-work was first and freely commuted, for regular hired labour was easy to obtain; but the boon-work--the work, that is, which was required for unusual circumstances of a purely temporary character (such as harvesting, &c.)--was, owing to the obvious difficulty of its being otherwise supplied, only arranged for in the last resort. Thus, by one of the many paradoxes of history, the freest of all tenants were the last to achieve freedom. When the serfs had been set at liberty by manumission, the socage-tenants or free-tenants, as they were called, were still bound by their fixed agreements of tenure. It is evident, however, that such emancipation as did take place was conditioned by the supply of free labour, primarily, that is, by the rising surplus of population. Not until he was certain of being able to hire other labourers would a landholder let his own tenants slip off the burdens of their service. But this process, by which labour was rendered less stationary, was immeasurably hastened by the advent of a terrible catastrophe. In 1347 the Black Death arrived from the East. Across Europe it moved, striking fear by the inevitableness of its coming. It travelled at a steady rate, so that its arrival could be easily foretold. Then, too, the unmistakable nature of its symptoms and the suddenness of the death it caused also added to the horror of its approach. On August 15, 1349, it got to Bristol, and by Michaelmas had reached London. For a year or more it ravaged the countryside, so that whole villages were left without inhabitants. Seeing England so stunned by the blow, the Scots prepared to attack, thinking the moment propitious for paying off old scores; but their army, too, was smitten by the pestilence, and their forces broke up. Into every glen of Wales it worked its havoc; in Ireland only the English were affected--the "wild Irish" were immune. But in 1357 even these began to suffer. Curiously enough, Geoffrey Baker in his Chronicle (which, written in his own hand, after six hundred years yet remains in the Bodleian at Oxford) tells us that none fell till they were afraid of it. Still more curiously, Chaucer, Langland, and Wycliff, who all witnessed it, hardly mention it at all. There could not be any more eloquent tribute to the nameless horror that it caused than this hushed silence on the part of three of England's greatest writers. Henry Knighton of Leicester Abbey, canon and chronicler, tells us some of the consequences following on the plague, and shows us very clearly the social upheaval it effected. The population had now so much diminished that prices of live stock went down, an ox costing 4_s._, a cow 12_d._, and a sheep 3_d._ But for the same reason wages went up, for labour had suddenly grown scarce. For want of hands to bring in the harvest, whole crops rotted in the fields. Many a manor had lost a third of its inhabitants, and it was difficult, under the fixed services of land tenure, to see what remedy could be applied. In despair the feudal system was set aside, and lord competed with lord to obtain landless labourers, or to entice within their jurisdiction those whose own masters ill-treated them in any way. The villeins themselves sought to procure enfranchisement, and the right to hire themselves out to their lords, or to any master they might choose. Commutation was not particularly in evidence as the legal method of redress; though it too was no doubt here and there arranged for. But for the most part the villein took the law into his own hands, left his manor, and openly sold his labour to the highest bidder. But at once the governing class took fright. In their eyes it seemed as though their tenants were taking an unfair advantage of the disorganisation of the national life. Even before Parliament could meet, in 1349 an ordnance was issued by the King (Edward III), which compelled all servants, whether bond or free, to take up again the customary services, and forced work on all who had no income in land, or were not otherwise engaged. The lord on whose manor the tenant had heretofore dwelt had preferential claim to his labour, and could threaten with imprisonment every refractory villein. Within two years a statute had been enacted by Parliament which was far more detailed in its operation, fixing wages at the rate they had been in the twentieth year of the King's reign (_i.e._ at a period before the plague, when labour was plentiful), and also with all appearance of justice determining the prices of agricultural produce. It was the first of a very long series of Acts of Parliament that, with every right intention, but with a really obvious futility, endeavoured to reduce everything to what it had been in the past, to put back the hands of the clock, and keep them back. But one strange fact is noticeable. Whether unconsciously or not, the framers of these statutes were themselves striking the hardest blow at the old system of tenure. From 1351 the masters' preferential claim to the villeins of their own manor disappears, or is greatly limited. Henceforth the labourers are to appear in the market place with their tools, and (reminiscent of scriptural conditions) wait till some man hired them. The State, not the lord, is now regulating labour. Labour itself has passed from being "tied to the soil," and has become fluid. It is no longer a personal obligation, but a commodity. Even Parliament recognised that in many respects at least the old order had passed away. The statute of 1351 allows "men of the counties of Stafford, Lancaster, Derby, the borders of Wales and Scotland, &c., to come in August time to labour in other counties, and to return in safety, as they were heretofore wont to do." It is the legalisation of what had been looked at, up till then, askance. The long, silent revolution had become conscious. But the lords were, as we have said, not altogether sorry for the turn things had taken. Groaning under pressure from the King's heavy war taxation, and under the demands which the advance of new standards of comfort (especially between 1370 and 1400) entailed, they let off on lease even the demesne land, and became to a very great extent mere rent-collectors. Commutation proceeded steadily, with much haggling so as to obtain the highest price from the eager tenant. Wages rose slowly, it is true, but rose all the same; and rent, though still high, was becoming, on the whole, less intolerable. But the drain of the French war, and the peculation in public funds brought about the final upheaval which completed what the Black Death had begun. The capricious and unfairly graduated poll-tax of 1381 came as a climax, and roused the Great Revolt of that year, a revolt carefully engineered and cleverly organised, which yet for the demands it made is a striking testimony to the moderation, the good sense, and also the oppressed state of the English peasant. The fourfold petition presented to the King by the rebels was: (1) The abolition of serfdom. (2) The reduction of rent to 4_d._ per acre. (3) The liberty to buy and sell in market. (4) A free pardon. Compare the studiously restrained tone of these articles with the terrible atrocities and vengeance wreaked by the Jacquerie in France, and the no less awful mob violence perpetrated in Florence by the Ciompi. While it shows no doubt in a kindly light the more equitable rule of the English landholder, it remains a monument, also, of the fair-mindedness of the English worker. In the towns much the same sort of struggle had been going on; for the towns themselves, more often than not, sprang up on the demesne of some lord, whether king, Church, or baron. But here the difficulties were complicated still further by the interference of the Guilds, which in the various trades regulated the hours of labour, the quality of the work, and the rate of remuneration. Yet, on the other hand, it is undoubted that, once the squalor of the earlier stages of urban life had been removed or at least improved, the social condition of the poor, from the fourteenth century onwards, was immeasurably superior in the towns to what it was in the country districts. The quickening influence of trade was making itself felt everywhere. In 1331 the cloth trade was introduced at Bristol, and settled down then definitely in the west of England. In the north we notice the beginnings of the coal trade. Licence was given to the burgesses of Newcastle to dig for coal in 1351; and in 1368 two merchants of the same city had applied for and obtained royal permission to send that precious commodity "to any part of the kingdom, either by land or water." Even vast speculations were opening up for English commercial enterprise, when, by cornering the wool and bribing the King, a ring of merchants were able to break the Italian banking houses, and disorganise the European money market, for on the Continent all this energy in trade was already old. The house of Anjou, for example, had made the kingdom of Naples a great trading centre. Its corn and cattle were famous the world over. But in Naples it was the sovereigns (like Edward III and Edward IV in England) who patronised the commercial instincts of their people. By the indefatigable genius of the royal house, industry was stimulated, and private enterprise encouraged. By wise legislation the interests of the merchants were safeguarded; and by the personal supervision of Government, fiscal duties were moderated, the currency kept pure and stable, weights and measures reduced to uniformity, the ease and security of communications secured. No doubt trade not seldom, even in that age, led to much evil. Parliament in England raised its voice against the trickery and deceit practised by the greater merchants towards the small shopkeepers, and complained bitterly of the growing custom of the King to farm out to the wealthier among them the subsidies and port-duties of the kingdom. For the whole force of the break-up of feudal conditions was to turn the direction of power into the hands of a small, but moneyed class. Under Edward III there is a distinct appearance of a set of _nouveaux riches_, who rise to great prominence and take their places beside the old landed nobility. De la Pole, the man who did most to establish the prosperity of Hull, is an excellent example of what is often thought to be a decidedly modern type. He introduced bricks from the Low Countries, and apparently by this means and some curious banking speculations of very doubtful honesty achieved a great fortune. The King paid a visit to his country house, and made him Chief Baron of the Exchequer, in which office he was strongly suspected of not always passing to the right quarter some of the royal moneys. His son became Earl of Suffolk and Lord Chancellor; and a marriage with royalty made descendants of the family on more than one occasion heirs-at-law of the Crown. Even the peasant was beginning to feel the amelioration of his lot, found life easy, and work something to be shirked. In his food, he was starting to be delicate. Says Langland in his "Vision of Piers Plowman": "Then labourers landless that lived by their hands, Would deign not to dine upon worts a day old. No penny-ale pleased them, no piece of good bacon, Only fresh flesh or fish, well-fried or well-baked, Ever hot and still hotter to heat well their maw." And he speaks elsewhere of their laziness: "Bewailing his lot as a workman to live, He grumbles against God and grieves without reason, And curses the king and his council after Who licence the laws that the labourers grieve." That the poor could thus become fastidious was a good sign of the rising standard of comfort. But for all that life was hard, and much at the mercy of the weather, and of the assaults of man's own fellows. The houses of the better folk were of brick and stone, and glass windows were just becoming known, whereas the substitute of oiled paper had been neither cheerful nor of very much protection. But the huts of the poor were of plastered mud; and even the walls of a quite respectable man's abode, we know from one court summons to have been pierced by arrows shot at him by a pugnacious neighbour. The plaintiff offered to take judge and jury then and there and show them these "horrid weapons" still sticking to the exterior. In the larger houses the hall had branched off, by the fourteenth century, into withdrawing-rooms, and parlours, and bedrooms, such as the Paston Letters describe with much curious wealth of detail. Lady Milicent Falstolf, we are told, was the only one in her father's household who had a ewer and washing-basin. Yet with all the lack of the modern necessities of life, human nature was still much the same. The antagonism between rich and poor, which the collapse of feudal relations had strained to breaking-point, was not perhaps normally so intense as it is to-day; yet there was certainly much oppression and unnecessary hardships to be suffered by the weak, even in that age. The Ancren Riwle, that quaint form of life for ankeresses drawn up by a Dominican in the thirteenth century, shows that even then, despite the distance of years and the passing of so many generations, the manners and ways and mental attitudes of people depended very much as to whether they were among those who had, or who had not; the pious author in one passage of homely wit compares certain of the sisters to "those artful children of rich parents who purposely tear their clothes that they may have new ones." There have always been wanton waste and destitution side by side; and on the prophecy of the One to whom all things were revealed, we know that the poor shall be always with us. Yet we must honour those who, like their Master, strive to smooth away the anxious wrinkles of the world. CHAPTER III THE COMMUNISTS There have always been religious teachers for whom all material creation was a thing of evil. Through the whole of the Middle Ages, under the various names of Manicheans, Albigensians, Vaudois, &c., they became exceedingly vigorous, though their importance was only fitful. For them property was essentially unclean, something to be avoided as carrying with it the in-dwelling of the spirit of evil. Etienne de Bourbon, a Dominican preacher of the thirteenth century, who got into communication with one of these strange religionists, has left us a record, exceedingly unprejudiced, of their beliefs. And amongst their other tenets, he mentions this, that they condemned all who held landed property. It will be here noticed that as regards these Vaudois (or Poor Men of Lyons, as he informs us they were called), there could have been no question of communism at all, for a common holding of property would have been as objectionable as private property. To hold material things either in community or severalty was in either case to bind oneself to the evil principle. Yet Etienne tells us that there was a sect among them which did sanction communism; they were called, in fact, the _Communati_ (_Tractatus de Diversis Materiis Predicabilibus_, Paris, 1877, p. 281). How they were able to reconcile this social state with their beliefs it is quite impossible to say; but the presumption is that the example of the early Christians was cited as of sufficient authority by some of these teachers. Certain it is that a sect still lingered on into the thirteenth century, called the _Apostolici_, who clung to the system which had been in vogue among the Apostles. St. Thomas Aquinas (_Summa Theologica_, 2_a_, 2_ae_, 66, 2) mentions them, and quotes St. Augustine as one who had already refuted them. But these were seemingly a Christian body, whereas the Albigensians could hardly make any such claim, since they repudiated any belief in Christ's humanity, for it conflicted with their most central dogma. Still it is clear that there were in existence certain obscure bodies which clung to communism. The published records of the Inquisition refer incessantly to preachers of this kind who denied private property, asserted that no rich man could get to heaven, and attacked the practice of almsgiving as something utterly immoral. The relation between these teachers and the Orders of friars has never been adequately investigated. We know that the Dominicans and Franciscans were from their earliest institution sent against them, and must therefore have been well acquainted with their errors. And, as a fact, we find rising among the friars a party which seemed no little infected with the "spiritual" tendency of these very Vaudois. The Franciscan reverence for poverty, which the Poor Man of Assisi had so strenuously advocated, had in fact become almost a superstition. Instead of being, as the saint had intended it to be, merely a means to an end, it had in process of time become looked upon as the essential of religion. When, therefore, the excessive adoption of it made religious life an almost impossible thing, an influential party among the Franciscans endeavoured to have certain modifications made which should limit it within reasonable bounds. But opposed to them was a determined, resolute minority, which vigorously refused to have any part in such "relaxations." The dispute between these two branches of the Order became at last so tempestuous that it was carried to the Pope, who appointed a commission of cardinals and theologians to adjudicate on the rival theories. Their award was naturally in favour of those who, by their reasonable interpretation of the meaning of poverty, were fighting for the efficiency of their Order. But this drove the extreme party into still further extremes. They rejected at once all papal right to interfere with the constitutions of the friars, and declared that only St. Francis could undo what St. Francis himself had bound up. Nor was this all, for in the pursuance of their zeal for poverty they passed quickly from denunciations of the Pope and the wealthy clergy (in which their rhetoric found very effective matter for argument) into abstract reasoning on the whole question of the private possession of property. The treatises which they have left in crabbed Latin and involved methods of argument make wearisome and irritating reading. Most are exceedingly prolix. After pages of profound disquisitions, the conclusions reached seem to have advanced the problem no further. Yet the gist of the whole is certainly an attempt to deny to any Christian the right to temporal possessions. Michael of Cesena, the most logical and most effective of the whole group, who eventually became the Minister-General of this portion of the Order, does not hesitate to affirm the incompatibility of Christianity and private property. From being a question as to the teaching of St. Francis, the matter had grown to one as to the teaching of Christ; and in order to prove satisfactorily that the practice of poverty as inculcated by St. Francis was absolute and inviolable, it was found necessary to hold that it was equally the declared doctrine of Christ. Even Ockham, a brilliant Oxford Franciscan, who, together with Michael, defended the Emperor, Louis of Bavaria, in his struggle against Pope John XXII, let fall in the heat of controversy some sayings which must have puzzled his august patron; for Louis would have been the very last person for whom communism had any charms. Closely allied in spirit with these "Spiritual Franciscans," as they were called, or Fraticelli, were those curious mediaeval bodies of Beguins and Beghards. Hopelessly pantheistic in their notion of the Divine Being, and following most peculiar methods of reaching on earth the Beatific Vision, they took up with the same doctrine of the religious duty of the communistic life. They declared the practice of holding private property to be contrary to the Divine Law. Another preacher of communism, and one whose name is well known for the active propaganda of his opinions, and for his share in the English Peasant Revolt of 1381, was John Ball, known to history as "The Mad Priest of Kent." There is some difficulty in finding out what his real theories were, for his chroniclers were his enemies, who took no very elaborate steps to ascertain the exact truth about him. Of course there is the famous couplet which is said to have been the text of all his sermons: "Whaune Adam dalf and Eve span, Who was thane a gentilman?"[1] at least, so it is reported of him in the _Chronicon Angliae_, the work of an unknown monk of St. Albans (Roll Series, 1874, London, p. 321). Froissart, that picturesque journalist, who naturally, as a friend of the Court, detested the levelling doctrines of this political rebel, gives what he calls one of John Ball's customary sermons. He is evidently not attempting to report any actual sermon, but rather to give a general summary of what was supposed to be Ball's opinions. As such, it is worth quoting in full. "My good friends, things cannot go on well in England, nor ever will until everything shall be in common; when there shall be neither vassal nor lord, and all distinctions levelled; when lords shall be no more masters than ourselves. How ill have they used us! and for what reason do they thus hold us in bondage? Are we not all descended from the same parents--Adam and Eve? And what can they show, and what reason give, why they should be more the masters than ourselves? Except, perhaps, in making us labour and work for them to spend." Froissart goes on to say that for speeches of this nature the Archbishop of Canterbury put Ball in prison, and adds that for himself he considers that "it would have been better if he had been confined there all his life, or had been put to death." However, the Archbishop "set him at liberty, for he could not for conscience sake have put him to death" (Froissart's _Chronicle_, 1848, London, book ii. cap. 73, pp. 652-653). From this extract all that can be gathered with certainty is the popular idea of the opinions John Ball held; and it is instructive to find that in the Primate's eyes there was nothing in the doctrine to warrant the extreme penalty of the law. But in reality we have no certainty as to what Ball actually taught, for in another account we find that, preaching on Corpus Christi Day, June 13, 1381, during the last days of the revolt, far fiercer words are ascribed to him. He is made to appeal to the people to destroy the evil lords and unjust judges, who lurked like tares among the wheat. "For when the great ones have been rooted up and cast away, all will enjoy equal freedom--all will have common nobility, rank, and power." Of course it may be that the war-fever of the revolt had affected his language; but the sudden change of tone imputed in the later speeches makes the reader somewhat suspicious of the authenticity. The same difficulty which is experienced in discovering the real mind of Ball is encountered when dealing with Wat Tyler and Jack Straw, who were, with him, the leaders of the revolt. The confession of Jack Straw quoted in the _Chronicon Angliae_, like nearly all mediaeval "confessions," cannot be taken seriously. His accusers and judges readily supplied what they considered he should have himself admitted. Without any better evidence we cannot with safety say along what lines he pushed his theories, or whether, indeed, he had any theories at all. Again, Wat Tyler is reported to have spoken threateningly to the King on the morning of his murder by Lord Mayor Walworth; but the evidence is once more entirely one-sided, contributed by those who were only too anxious to produce information which should blacken the rebels in the minds of the educated classes. As a matter of fact, the purely official documents, in which we can probably put much more reliance (such as the petitions that poured in from all parts of the country on behalf of the peasants, and the proclamations issued by Richard II, in which all their demands were granted on condition of their immediate withdrawal from the capital), do not leave the impression that the people really advocated any communistic doctrines; oppression is complained of, the lawyers execrated, the labour laws are denounced, and that is practically all. It may be, indeed, that the traditional view of Ball and his followers, which makes them one with the contemporaneous revolts of the Jacquerie in France, the Ciompi in Florence, &c., has some basis in fact. But at present we have no means of gauging the precise amount of truth it contains. But even better known than John Ball is one who is commonly connected with the Peasant Revolt, and whose social opinions are often grouped under the same heading as that of the "Mad Priest of Kent,"--John Wycliff, Master of Balliol, and parson of Lutterworth. This Oxford professor has left us a number of works from which to quarry materials to build up afresh the edifice he intended to erect. His chief contribution is contained in his _De Civili Dominio_, but its composition extended over a long period of years, during which time his views were evidently changing; so that the precise meaning of his famous theory on the Dominion of Grace is therefore difficult to ascertain. But in the opening of his treatise he lays down the two main "truths" upon which his whole system rests: I. No one in mortal sin has any right to the gifts of God; II. Whoever is in a state of grace has a right, not indeed to possess the good things of God, but to use them. He seems to look upon the whole question from a feudal point of view. Sin is treason, involving therefore the forfeiture of all that is held of God. Grace, on the other hand, makes us the liegemen of God, and gives us the only possible right to all His good gifts. But, he would seem to argue, it is incontestable that property and power are from God, for so Scripture plainly assures us. Therefore, he concludes, by grace, and grace alone, are we put in dominion over all things; once we are in loyal subjection to God, we own all things, and hold them by the only sure title. "Dominion by grace" is thus made to lead direct to communism. His conclusion is quite clear: _Omnia debent esse communia_. In one of his sermons (Oxford, 1869, vol. i. p. 260), when he has proved this point with much complacent argumentation, he poses himself with the obvious difficulty that in point of fact this is not true; for many who are apparently in mortal sin do possess property and have dominion. What, then, is to be done, for "they be commonly mighty, and no man dare take from them"? His answer is not very cheerful, for he has to console his questioner with the barren scholastic comfort that "nevertheless, he hath them not, but occupieth things that be not his." Emboldened by the virtue of this dry logic, he breaks out into his gospel of plain assertion that "the saints have now all things that they would have." His whole argument, accordingly, does not get very far, for he is still speaking really (though he does not at times very clearly distinguish between the two) much more about the right to a thing than its actual possession. He does not really defend the despoiling of the evil rich at all--in his own graphic phrase, "God must serve the Devil"; and all that the blameless poor can do is to say to themselves that though the rich "possess" or "occupy," the poor "have." It seems a strange sort of "having"; but he is careful to note that, "as philosophers say, 'having is in many manners.'" Wycliff himself, perhaps, had not definitely made up his mind as to the real significance of his teaching; for the system which he sketches does not seem to have been clearly thought out. His words certainly appear to bear a communistic sense; but it is quite plain that this was not the intention of the writer. He defends Plato at some length against the criticism of Aristotle, but only on the ground that the disciple misunderstood the master: "for I do not think Socrates to have so intended, but only to have had the true catholic idea that each should have the use of what belongs to his brother" (_De Civili Dominio_, London, 1884-1904, vol. i. p. 99). And just a few lines farther on he adds, "But whether Socrates understood this or not, I shall not further question. This only I know, that by the law of charity every Christian ought to have the just use of what belongs to his neighbour." What else is this really but the teaching of Aristotle that there should be "private property and common use"? It is, in fact, the very antithesis of communism. Some have thought that he was fettered in his language by his academic position; but no Oxford don has ever said such hard things about his Alma Mater as did this master of Balliol. "Universities," says he, "houses of study, colleges, as well as degrees and masterships in them, are vanities introduced by the heathen, and profit the Church as little and as much as does Satan himself." Surely it were impossible to accuse such a man of economy of language, and of being cowed by any University fetish. His words, we have noted above, certainly can bear the interpretation of a very levelling philosophy. Even in his own generation he was accused through his followers of having had a hand in instigating the revolt. His reply was an angry expostulation (Trevelyan's _England in the Age of Wycliff_, 1909, London, p. 201). Indeed, considering that John of Gaunt was his best friend and protector, it would be foolish to connect Wycliff with the Peasant Rising. The insurgents, in their hatred of Gaunt, whom they looked upon as the cause of their oppression, made all whom they met swear to have no king named John (_Chronicon Angliae_, p. 286). And John Ball, whom the author of the _Fasciculi Zizaniorum_ (p. 273, Roll Series, 1856, London) calls the "darling follower" of Wycliff, can only be considered as such in his doctrinal teaching on the dogma of the Real Presence. It must be remembered that to contemporary England Wycliff's fame came from two of his opinions, viz. his denial of a real objective Presence in the Mass (for Christ was there only by "ghostly wit"), and his advice to King and Parliament to confiscate Church lands. But whenever Ball or anyone else is accused of being a follower of Wycliff, nothing else is probably referred to than the professor's well-known opinion on the sacrament of the Eucharist. Hence it is that the _Chronicon Angliae_ speaks of John Ball as having been imprisoned earlier in life for his Wycliffite errors, which it calls simply _perversa dogmata_. The "Morning Star of the Reformation" being therefore declared innocent of complicity with the Peasant Revolt, it is interesting to note to whom it is that he ascribes the whole force of the rebellion. For him the head and front of all offending was the hated friars. Against this imputation the four Orders of friars (the Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustinians, and Carmelites) issued a protest. Fortunately in their spirited reply they give the reasons on account of which they are supposed to have shared in the rising. These were principally negative. Thus it was stated that their influence with the people was so great that had they ventured to oppose the spirit of revolt their words would have been listened to (_Fasciculi Zizaniorum_, p. 293). The chronicler of St. Albans is equally convinced of their weakness in not preventing it, and declares that the flattery which they used alike on rich and poor had also no mean share in producing the social unrest (_Chronicon Angliae_, p. 312). Langland also, in his "Vision of Piers Plowman," goes out of his way to denounce them for their levelling doctrines: "Envy heard this and bade friars go to school, And learn logic and law and eke contemplation, And preach men of Plato and prove it by Seneca That all things under Heaven ought to be in common, And yet he lieth, as I live, and to the lewd so preacheth For God made to men a law and Moses it taught-- _Non concupisces rem proximi tui_" (Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's goods). Here then it is distinctly asserted that the spread of communistic doctrines was due to the friars. Moreover, the same popular opinion is reflected in the fabricated confession of Jack Straw, for he is made to declare that had the rebels been successful, all the monastic orders, as well as the secular clergy, would have been put to death, and only the friars would have been allowed to continue. Their numbers would have sufficed for the spiritual needs of the whole kingdom (_Chronicon Angliae_, p. 309). Moreover, it has been noticed that not a few of them actually took part in the revolt, heading some of the bands of countrymen who marched on London. It will have been seen, therefore, that Communism was a favourite rallying-cry throughout the Middle Ages for all those on whom the oppression of the feudal yoke bore heavily. It was partly also a religious ideal for some of the strange gnostic sects which flourished at that era. Moreover, it was an efficient weapon when used as an accusation, for Wycliff and the friars alike both dreaded its imputation. Perhaps of all that period, John Ball alone held it consistently and without shame. Eloquent in the way of popular appeal, he manifestly endeavoured to force it as a social reform on the peasantry, who were suffering under the intolerable grievance of the Statutes of Labourers. But though he roused the countryside to his following, and made the people for the first time a thing of dread to nobles and King, it does not appear that his ideas spread much beyond his immediate lieutenants. Just as in their petitions the rebels made no doctrinal statements against Church teaching, nor any capital out of heretical attacks (except, singularly enough, to accuse the Primate, whom they subsequently put to death, of overmuch leniency to Lollards), so, too, they made no reference to the central idea of Ball's social theories. In fact, little abstract matter could well have appealed to them. Concrete oppression was all they knew, and were this done away with, it is evident that they would have been well content. The case of the friars is curious. For though their superiors made many attempts to prove their hostility to the rebels, it is evident that their actual teaching was suspected by those in high places. It is the exact reversal of the case of Wycliff. His views, which sounded so favourable to communism, are found on examination to be really nothing but a plea to leave things alone, "for the saints have now all they would have"; while on the other hand the theories of the friars, in themselves so logical and consistent, and in appearance obviously conservative to the fullest extent, turn out to contain the germ of revolution. Said Lord Acton with his sober wit: "Not the devil, but St. Thomas Aquinas, was the first Whig." FOOTNOTE: [1] This rhyme is of course much older than John Ball; _cf._ Richard Rolle (1300-1349), i. 73, London, 1895. CHAPTER IV THE SCHOOLMEN The schoolmen in their adventurous quest after a complete harmony of all philosophic learning could not neglect the great outstanding problems of social and economic life. They flourished at the very period of European history when commerce and manufacture were coming back to the West, and their rise synchronises with the origin of the great houses of the Italian and Jewish bankers. Yet there was very little in the past learning of Christian teachers to guide them in these matters, for the patristic theories, which we have already described, and a few isolated passages cited in the Decretals of Gratian, formed as yet almost the only contribution to the study of these sciences. However, this absence of any organised body of knowledge was for them but one more stimulus towards the elaboration of a thorough synthesis of the moral aspect of wealth. A few of the earlier masters made reference, detached and personal, to the subject of dispute, but it was rather in the form of a disorderly comment than the definite statement of a theory. Then came the translation of Aristotle's _Politics_, with the keen criticism they contain of the views Plato had advocated. Here at once the intellect of Europe found an exact exposition of principles, and began immediately to debate their excellence and their defect. St. Thomas Aquinas set to work on a literal commentary, and at his express desire an accurate translation was made direct from the Greek by his fellow-Dominican, William of Moerbeke. Later on, when all this had had time to settle and find its place, St. Thomas worked out his own theory of private property in two short articles in his famous _Summa Theologica_. In his treatise on Justice, which occupies a large proportion of the _Secund Secundae_ of the _Summa_, he found himself forced to discuss the moral evil of theft; and to do this adequately he had first to explain what he meant by private possessions. Without these, of course, there could be no theft at all. He began, therefore, by a preliminary article on the actual state of created things--that is, the material, so to say, out of which private property is evolved. Here he notes that the nature of things, their constituent essence, is in the hands of God, not man. The worker can change the form, and, in consequence, the value of a thing, but the substance which lies beneath all the outward show is too subtle for him to affect it in any way. To the Supreme Being alone can belong the power of creation, annihilation, and absolute mutation. But besides this tremendous force which God holds incommunicably, there is another which He has given to man, namely, the use of created things. For when man was made, he was endowed with the lordship of the earth. This lordship is obviously one without which he could not live. The air, and the forces of nature, the beasts of the field, the birds and fishes, the vegetation in fruit and root, and the stretches of corn are necessary for man's continued existence on the earth. Over them, therefore, he has this limited dominion. Moreover, St. Thomas goes on, man has not merely the present moment to consider. He is a being possessed of intelligence and will, powers which demand and necessitate their own constant activity. Instinct, the gift of brute creation, ensures the preservation of life by its blind preparation for the morrow. Man has no such ready-made and spontaneous faculty. His powers depend for their effectiveness on their deliberative and strenuous exertions. And because life is a sacred thing, a lamp of which the once extinguished light cannot be here re-enkindled, it carries with it, when it is intelligent and volitional, the duty of self-preservation. Accordingly the human animal is bound by the law of his own being to provide against the necessities of the future. He has, therefore, the right to acquire not merely what will suffice for the instant, but to look forward and arrange against the time when his power of work shall have lessened, or the objects which suffice for his personal needs become scarcer or more difficult of attainment. Property, therefore, of some kind or other, says Aquinas, is required by the very nature of man. Individual possessions are not a mere adventitious luxury which time has accustomed him to imagine as something he can hardly do without, nor are they the result of civilised culture, which by the law of its own development creates fresh needs for each fresh demand supplied; but in some form or other they are an absolute and dire necessity, without which life could not be lived at all. Not simply for his "well-being," but for his very existence, man finds them to be a sacred need. Thus as they follow directly from the nature of creation, we can term them "natural." St. Thomas then proceeds in his second article to enter into the question of the rights of private property. The logical result of his previous argument is only to affirm the need man has of some property; the practice of actually dividing goods among individuals requires further elaboration if it is to be reasonably defended. Man must have the use of the fruits of the earth, but why these rather than those should belong to him is an entirely different problem. It is the problem of Socialism. For every socialist must demand for each member of the human race the right to some possessions, food and other such necessities. But why he should have this particular thing, and why that other thing should belong to someone else, is the question which lies at the basis of all attempts to preserve or destroy the present fabric of society. Now, the argument which we have so far cited from St. Thomas is simply based on the indefeasible right of the individual to the maintenance of his life. Personality implies the right of the individual to whatever is needful to him in achieving his earthly purpose, but does not in itself justify the right to private property. "Two offices pertain to man with regard to exterior things" (thus he continues). "The first is the power of procuring and dispensing, and in respect to this, it is lawful for man to hold things as his own." Here it is well to note that St. Thomas in this single sentence teaches that private property, or the individual occupation of actual land or capital or instruments of wealth, is not contrary to the moral law. Consequently he would repudiate the famous epigram, "_La Propriété c'est le vol_." Man may hold and dispose of what belongs to him, may have private property, and in no way offend against the principles of justice, whether natural or divine. But in the rest of the article St. Thomas goes farther still. Not merely does he hold the moral proposition that private property is lawful, but he adds to it the social proposition that private property is necessary. "It is even necessary," says he, "for human life, and that for three reasons. Firstly, because everyone is more solicitous about procuring what belongs to himself alone than that which is common to all or many, since each shunning labour leaves to another what is the common burden of all, as happens with a multitude of servants. Secondly, because human affairs are conducted in a more orderly fashion if each has his own duty of procuring a certain thing, while there would be confusion if each should procure things haphazard. Thirdly, because in this way the peace of men is better preserved, for each is content with his own. Whence we see that strife more frequently arises among those who hold a thing in common and individually. The other office which is man's concerning exterior things, is the use of them; and with regard to this a man ought not to hold exterior things as his own, but as common to all, that he may portion them out to others readily in time of need." (The translation is taken from _New Things and Old_, by H. C. O'Neill, 1909, London, pp. 253-4.) The wording and argument of this will bear, and is well worth, careful analysis. For St. Thomas was a man, as Huxley witnesses, of unique intellectual power, and, moreover, his theories on private property were immediately accepted by all the schoolmen. Each succeeding writer did little else than make more clear and defined the outlines of the reasoning here elaborated. We shall, therefore, make no further apology for an attempt to set out the lines of thought sketched by Aquinas. It will be noticed at once that the principles on which private property are here based are of an entirely different nature from those by which the need of property itself was defended. For the latter we were led back to the very nature of man himself and confronted with his right and duty to preserve his own life. From this necessity of procuring supply against the needs of the morrow, and the needs of the actual hour, was deduced immediately the conclusion that property of some kind (_i.e._ the possession of some material things) was demanded by the law of man's nature. It was intended as an absolute justification of a sacred right. But in this second article a completely different process is observed. We are no longer considering man's essential nature in the abstract, but are becoming involved in arguments of concrete experience. The first was declared to be a sacred right, as it followed from a law of nature; the second is merely conditioned by the reasons brought forward to support it. To repeat the whole problem as it is put in the _Summa_, we can epitomise the reasoning of St. Thomas in this easier way. The question of property implies two main propositions: (_a_) the right to property, _i.e._ to the use of material creation; (_b_) the right to private property, _i.e._ to the actual division of material things among the determined individuals of a social group. The former is a sacred, inalienable right, which can never be destroyed, for it springs from the roots of man's nature. If man exists, and is responsible for his existence, then he must necessarily have the right to the means without which his existence is made impossible. But the second proposition must be determined quite differently. The kind of property here spoken of is simply a matter not of right, but of experienced necessity, and is to be argued for on the distinct grounds that without it worse things would follow: "it is even necessary for human life, and that for three reasons." This is a purely conditional necessity, and depends entirely on the practical effect of the three reasons cited. Were a state of society to exist in which the three reasons could no longer be urged seriously, then the necessity which they occasioned would also cease to hold. In point of fact, St. Thomas was perfectly familiar with a social group in which these conditions did not exist, and the law of individual possession did not therefore hold, namely, the religious orders. As a Dominican, he had defended his own Order against the attacks of those who would have suppressed it altogether; and in his reply to William of St. Amour he had been driven to uphold the right to common life, and consequently to deny that private property was inalienable. Of course it was perfectly obvious that for St. Thomas himself the idea of the Commune or the State owning all the land and capital, and allowing to the individual citizens simply the use of these common commodities, was no doubt impracticable; and the three reasons which he gives are his sincere justification of the need of individual ownership. Without this division of property, he considered that national life would become even more full of contention than it was already. Accordingly, it was for its effectiveness in preventing a great number of quarrels that he defended the individual ownership of property. Besides this article, there are many other expressions and broken phrases in which Aquinas uses the same phrase, asserting that the actual division of property was due to human nature. "Each field considered in itself cannot be looked upon as naturally belonging to one rather than to another" (2, 2, 57, 3); "distinction of property is not inculcated by nature" (1_a_, 2_ae_, 94, 5); but again he is equally clear in insisting on the other proposition, that there is no moral law which forbids the possession of land in severalty. "The common claim upon things is traceable to the natural law, not because the natural law dictates that all things should be held in common, and nothing as belonging to any individual person, but because according to the natural law there is no distinction of possessions which comes by human convention" (2_a_, 2_ae_, 66, 2_ad_ 1_m_.). To apprehend the full significance of this last remark, reference must be made to the theories of the Roman legal writers, which have been already explained. The law of nature was looked upon as some primitive determination of universal acceptance, and of venerable sanction, which sprang from the roots of man's being. This in its absolute form could never be altered or changed; but there was besides another law which had no such compelling power, but which rested simply on the experience of the human race. This was reversible, for it depended on specific conditions and stages of development. Thus nature dictated no division of property, though it implied the necessity of some property; the need of the division was only discovered when men set to work to live in social intercourse. Then it was found that unless divisions were made, existence was intolerable; and so by human convention, as St. Thomas sometimes says, or by the law of nature, as he elsewhere expresses it, the division into private property was agreed upon and took place. This elaborate statement of St. Thomas was widely accepted through all the Middle Ages. Wycliff alone, and a few like him, ventured to oppose it; but otherwise this extremely logical and moderate defence of existing institutions received general adhesion. Even Scotus, like Ockham, a brilliant Oxford scholar whose hidden tomb at Cologne finds such few pilgrims kneeling in its shade, so hardy in his thought and so eager to find a flaw in the arguments of Aquinas, has no alternative to offer. Franciscan though he was, and therefore, perhaps, more likely to favour communistic teaching, his own theory is but a repetition of what his rival had already propounded. Thus, for example, he writes in a typical passage: "Even supposing it as a principle of positive law that 'life must be lived peaceably in a state of polity,' it does not straightway follow 'Therefore everyone must have separate possessions.' For peace could be observed even if all things were in common. Nor even if we presuppose the wickedness of those who live together is it a necessary consequence. Still a distinction of property is decidedly in accord with a peaceful social life. For the wicked rather take care of their private possessions, and rather seek to appropriate to themselves than to the community common goods. Whence come strife and contention. Hence we find it (division of property) admitted in almost every positive law. And although there is a fundamental principle from which all other laws and rights spring, still from that fundamental principle positive human laws do not follow absolutely or immediately. Rather it is as declarations or explanations in detail of that general principle that they come into being, and must be considered as evidently in accord with the universal law of nature." (_Super Sententias Quaestiones_, Bk. 4, Dist. 15, q. 2. Venice, 1580.) Here again, then, are the same salient points we have already noticed in the _Summa_. There is the idea clearly insisted on that the division of property is not a first principle nor an immediate deduction from a first principle, that in itself it is not dictated by the natural law which leaves all things in common, that it is, however, not contrary to natural law, but evidently in accord with it, that its necessity and its introduction were due entirely to the actual experience of the race. Again, to follow the theory chronologically still farther forward, St. Antonino, whose charitable institutions in Florence have stamped deeply with his personality that scene of his life's labours, does little more than repeat the words of St. Thomas, though the actual phrase in which he here compresses many pages of argument is reproduced from a work by the famous Franciscan moralist John de Ripa. "It is by no means right that here upon earth fallen humanity should have all things in common, for the world would be turned into a desert, the way to fraud and all manner of evils would be opened, and the good would have always the worse, and the bad always the better, and the most effective means of destroying all peace would be established" (_Summa Moralis_, 3, 3, 2, 1). Hence he concludes that "such a community of goods never could benefit the State." These are none other arguments than those already advanced by St. Thomas. His articles, already quoted, are indeed the _Locus Classicus_ for all mediaeval theorists, and, though references in every mediaeval work on social and economic questions are freely made to Aristotle's _Politics_, it is evident that it is really Aquinas who is intended. Distinction of property, therefore, though declared so necessary for peaceable social life, does not, for these thinkers, rest on natural law, nor a divine law, but on positive human law under the guidance of prudence and authority. Communism is not something evil, but rather an ideal too lofty to be ever here realised. It implied so much generosity, and such a vigour of public spirit, as to be utterly beyond the reach of fallen nature. The Apostles alone could venture to live so high a life, "for their state transcended that of every other mode of living" (Ptolomeo of Lucca, _De Regimine Principio_, book iv., cap. 4, Parma, 1864, p. 273). However, that form of communism which entailed an absolutely even division of all wealth among all members of the group, though it had come to them on the authority of Phileas and Lycurgus, was indeed to be reprobated, for it contradicted the prime feature of all creation. God made all things in their proper number, weight, and measure. Yet in spite of all this it must be insisted on at the risk of repetition that the socialist theory of State ownership is never considered unjust, never in itself contrary to the moral law. Albertus Magnus, the master of Aquinas, and the leader in commenting on Aristotle's _Politics_, freely asserts that community of goods "is not impossible, especially among those who are well disciplined by the virtue of philanthropy--that is, the common love of all; for love, of its own nature, is generous." But to arrange it, the power of the State must be called into play; it cannot rest on any private authority. "This is the proper task of the legislator, for it is the duty of the legislator to arrange everything for the best advantage of the citizens" (_In Politicis_, ii. 2, p. 70, Lyons, 1651). Such, too, is the teaching of St. Antonino, who even goes so far as to assert that "just as the division of property at the beginning of historic time was made by the authority of the State, it is evident that the same authority is equally competent to reverse its decision and return to its earlier social organisation" (_Summa Moralis_, ii. 3, 2, Verona, 1740, p. 182). He lays down, indeed, a principle so broad that it is difficult to understand where it could well end: "That can be justly determined by the prince which is necessary for the peaceful intercourse of the citizens." And in defence he points triumphantly to the fact that the prince can set aside a just claim to property, and transfer it to another who happens to hold it by prescription, on the ground of the numerous disputes which might otherwise be occasioned. That is to say, that the law of his time already admitted that in certain circumstances the State could take what belonged to one and give it to another, without there being any fault on the part of the previous owner to justify its forfeiture; and he defends this proceeding on the axiom just cited (_ibid._, pp. 182-3), namely, its necessity "for the peaceful intercourse of the citizens." The Schoolmen can therefore be regarded as a consistent and logical school. They had an extreme dislike to any broad generalisation, and preferred rather, whenever the occasion could be discovered, to distinguish rather than to concede or deny. Hence, confronted by the communistic theory of State ownership which had been advanced by Plato, and by a curious group of strange, heterodox teachers, and which had, moreover, the actual support of many patristic sayings, and the strong bias of monastic life, they set out joyfully to resolve it into the simplest and most unassailable series of propositions. They began, therefore, by admitting that nature made no division of property, and in that sense held all things in common; that in the early stages of human history, when man, as yet unfallen, was conceived as living in the Garden of Eden in perfect innocency, common property amply satisfied his sinless and unselfish moral character; that by the Fall lust and greed overthrew this idyllic state, and led to a continued condition of internecine strife, and the supremacy of might; that experience gradually brought men to realise that their only hope towards peaceful intercourse lay in the actual division of property, and the establishment of a system of private ownership; that this could only be set aside by men who were themselves perfect, or had vowed themselves to pursue perfection, namely, Our Lord, His Apostles, and the members of religious orders. To this list of what they held to be historic events they added another which contained the moral deductions to be made from these facts. This began by the assertion that private property in itself was not in any sense contrary to the virtue of justice; that it was entirely lawful; that it was even necessary on account of certain evil conditions which otherwise would prevail; that the State, however, had the right in extreme cases and for a just cause to transfer private property from one to another; that it could, when the needs of its citizens so demanded, reverse its primitive decision, and re-establish its earlier form of common ownership; that this last system, however possible, and however much it might be regretted as a vanished and lost ideal, was decidedly now a violent and impracticable proceeding. These theories, it is evident, though they furnish the only arguments which are still in use among us to support the present social organisation, are also patent of an interpretation which might equally lead to the very opposite conclusion. In his fear of any general contradiction to communism which should be open to dispute, and in his ever-constant memory of his own religious life as a Dominican friar, Aquinas had to mark with precision to what extent and in what sense private property could be justified. But at the same time he was forced by the honesty of his logical training to concede what he could in favour of the other side. He took up in this question, as in every other, a middle course, in which neither extreme was admitted, but both declared to contain an element of truth. It is clear, too, that his scholastic followers, even to our own date, in their elaborate commentaries can find no escape from the relentless logic of his conclusions. Down the channel that he dug flowed the whole torrent of mediaeval and modern scholasticism.[2] But for those whose minds were practical rather than abstract, one or other proposition he advanced, isolated from the context of his thought, could be quoted as of moment, and backed by the greatness of his name. His assertion of the absolute impracticable nature of socialistic organisation, as he knew it in his own age, was too good a weapon to be neglected by those who sought about for means of defence for their own individualistic theories; whereas others, like the friars of whom Wycliff and Langland spoke, and who headed bands of luckless peasants in the revolt of 1381 against the oppression of an over-legalised feudalism, were blind to this remarkable expression of Aquinas' opinion, and quoted him only when he declared that "by nature all things were in common," and when he protested that the socialist theory of itself contained nothing contrary to the teaching of the gospel or the doctrines of the Church. Truth is blinding in its brilliance. Half-truths are easy to see, and still easier to explain. Hence the full and detailed theory elaborated by the Schoolmen has been tortured to fit first one and then another scheme of political reform. Yet all the while its perfect adjustment of every step in the argument remains a wonderful monument of the intellectual delicacy and hardihood of the Schoolmen. FOOTNOTE: [2] _Cf._ Coutenson, _Theologia Mentis et Cordis_, iii. 388-389, Paris, 1875; and Billnart, _De Justitia_, i. 123-124, Liège, 1746. CHAPTER V THE LAWYERS Besides the Schoolmen, by whom the problems of life were viewed in the refracted light of theology and philosophy, there was another important class in mediaeval times which exercised itself over the same social questions, but visaged them from an entirely different angle. This was the great brotherhood of the law, which, whether as civil or canonical, had its own theories of the rights of private ownership. It must be remembered, too, that just as the theologians supported their views by an appeal to what were considered historic facts in the origin of property, so, too, the legalists depended for the material of their judgment on circumstances which the common opinion of the time admitted as authentic. When the West drifted out from the clouds of barbaric invasion, and had come into calm waters, society was found to be organised on a basis of what has been called feudalism. That is to say, the natural and universal result of an era of conquest by a wandering people is that the new settlers hold their possessions from the conqueror on terms essentially contractual. The actual agreements have varied constantly in detail, but the main principle has always been one of reciprocal rights and duties. So at the early dawn of the Middle Ages, after the period picturesquely styled the Wanderings of the Nations, we find the subjugating races have encamped in Europe, and hold it by a series of fiefs. The action, for example, of William the Norman, as plainly shown in Domesday Book, is typical of what had for some three or four centuries been happening here and on the Continent. Large tracts of land were parcelled out among the invading host, and handed over to individual barons to hold from the King on definite terms of furnishing him with men in times of war, of administering justice within their domains, and of assisting at his Council Board when he should stand in need of their advice. The barons, to suit their own convenience, divided up these territories among their own retainers on terms similar to those by which they held their own. And thus the whole organisation of the country was graduated from the King through the greater barons to tenants who held their possessions, whether a castle, or a farm, or a single hut, from another to whom they owed suit and service. This roughly (constantly varying, and never actually quite so absolutely carried out) is the leading principle of feudalism. It is clearly based upon a contract between each man and his immediate lord; but, and this is of importance in the consideration of the feudal theory of private property, whatever rights and duties held good were not public, but private. There was not at the first, and in the days of what we may call "pure feudalism," any concept of a national law or natural right, but only a bundle of individual rights. Appeal from injustice was not made at a supreme law-court, but only to the courts of the barons to whom both litigants owed allegiance. The action of the King was quite naturally always directed towards breaking open this enclosed sphere of influence, and endeavouring to multiply the occasions on which his officials might interfere in the courts of his subjects. Thus the idea gradually grew up (and its growth is perhaps the most important matter of remark in mediaeval history), by which the King's law and the King's rights were looked upon as dominating those of individuals or groups. The courts baron and customary, and the sokes of privileged townships were steadily emptied of their more serious cases, and shorn of their primitive powers. This, too, was undoubtedly the reason for the royal interference in the courts Christian (the feudal name for the clerical criminal court). The King looked on the Church, as he looked on his barons and his exempted townships, as outside his royal supremacy, and, in consequence, quarrelled over investiture and criminous clerks, and every other point in which he had not as yet secured that his writs and judgments should prevail. There was a whole series of courts of law which were absolutely independent of his officers and his decision. His restless energy throughout this period had, therefore, no other aim than to bring all these into a line with his own, and either to capture them for himself, or to reduce them to sheer impotence. But at the beginning there was little notion of a royal judge who should have power to determine cases in which barons not immediately holding their fiefs of the King were implicated. The concern of each was only with the lord next above him. And the whole conception of legal rights was, therefore, considered simply as private rights. The growth of royal power consequently acted most curiously on contemporary thinkers. It meant centralisation, the setting up of a definite force which should control the whole kingdom. It resulted in absolutism increasing, with an ever-widening sphere of royal control. It culminated in the Reformation, which added religion to the other departments of State in which royal interference held predominance. Till then the Papacy, as in some sort "a foreign power," world-wide and many-weaponed, could treat on more than equal terms with any European monarch, and secure independence for the clergy. With the lopping off of the national churches from the parent stem, this energising force from a distant centre of life ceased. Each separate clerical organisation could now depend only on its own intrinsic efficiency. For most this meant absolute surrender. The civil law therefore which supplanted feudalism entailed two seemingly contradicting principles which are of importance in considering the ownership of land. On the one hand, the supremacy of the King was assured. The people became more and more heavily taxed, their lands were subjected to closer inspection, their criminal actions were viewed less as offences against individuals than as against the peace of the King. It is an era in which, therefore, as we have already stated, the power of the individual sinks gradually more and more into insignificance in comparison with the rising force of the King's dominion. Private rights are superseded by public rights. Yet, on the other hand, and by the development of identically the same principles, the individual gains. His tenure of land becomes far less a matter of contract. He himself escapes from his feudal chief, and his inferior tenants slip also from his control. He is no longer one in a pyramid of grouped social organisation, but stands now as an individual answerable only to the head of the State. He has duties still; but no longer a personal relationship to his lord. It is the King and that vague abstraction called the State which now claim him as a subject; and by so doing are obliged to recognise his individual status. This new and startling prominence of the individual disturbed the whole concept of ownership. Originally under the influence of that pure feudalism which nowhere existed in its absolute form, the two great forces in the life of each member of the social group were his own and that of his immediate lord. These fitted together into an almost indissoluble union; and therefore absolute ownership of the soil was theoretically impossible. Now, however, the individual was emancipated from his lord. He was still, it is true, subject to the King, whose power might be a great deal more oppressive than the barons' had been. But the King was far off, whereas the baron had been near, and nearly always in full evidence. Hence the result was the emphasis of the individual's absolute dominion. Not, indeed, as though it excluded the dominion of the King, but precisely because the royal predominance could only be recognised by the effective shutting out of the interference of the lord. To exclude the "middle-man," the King was driven to recognise the absolute dominion of the individual over his own possessions. This is brought out in English law by Bracton and his school. Favourers as they were of the royal prerogative, they were driven to take up the paradoxical ground that the King was not the sole owner of property. To defend the King they were obliged to dispossess him. To put his control on its most effective basis, they had no other alternative left them than to admit the fullest rights of the individual against the King. For only if the individual had complete ownership, could there be no interference on the part of the lord; only if the possessions of the tenants were his own, were they prevented from falling under the baronial jurisdiction. Therefore by apparently denying the royal prerogative the civil lawyers were in effect, as they perfectly well recognised, really extending it and enabling it to find its way into cases and courts where it could not else well have entered. Seemingly, therefore, all idea of socialism or nationalisation of land (at that date the great means of production) was now excluded. The individualistic theory of property had suddenly appeared; and simultaneously the old group forms, which implied collectivism in some shape or other, ceased any longer to be recognised as systems of tenure. Yet, at the same time, by a paradox as evident as that by which the civilians exalted the royal prerogative apparently at its own expense, or as that by which Wycliff's communism is found to be in reality a justification of the policy of leaving things as they are, while St. Thomas's theory of property is discovered as far less oppressive and more adaptable to progressive developments of national wealth, it is noticed that, from the point of view of the socialist, monarchical absolutism is the most favourable form of a State's constitution. For wherever a very strictly centralised system of government exists, it is clear that a machinery, which needs little to turn it to the advantage of the absolute rule of a rebellious minority, has been already constructed. In a country where, on the other hand, local government has been enormously encouraged, it is obviously far more difficult for socialism to force an entrance into each little group. There are all sorts of local conditions to be squared, vagaries of law and administration to be reduced to order, connecting bridges to be thrown from one portion of the nation to the next, so as to form of it one single whole. Were the socialists of to-day to seize on the machinery of government in Germany and Russia, they could attain their purposes easily and smoothly, and little difference in constitutional forms would be observed in these countries, for already the theory of State ownership and State interference actually obtains. They would only have to substitute a _bloc_ for a man. But in France and England, where the centralisation is far less complete, the success of the socialistic party and its achievement of supreme power would mean an almost entire subversal of all established methods of administration, for all the threads would have first to be gathered into a single hand. Consequently feudalism, which turned the landowners into petty sovereigns and insisted on local courts, &c., though seemingly communistic or socialistic, was really, from its intense local colouring, far less easy of capture by those who favoured State interference. It was individualistic, based on private rights. But the new royal prerogative led the way to the consideration of the evident ease by which, once the machine was possessed, the rest of the system could without difficulty be brought into harmony with the new theories. To make use of comparison, it was Cardinal Wolsey's assumption of full legatine power by permission of the Pope which first suggested to Henry VIII that he could dispense with His Holiness altogether. He saw that the Cardinal wielded both spiritual and temporal jurisdiction. He coveted his minister's position, and eventually achieved it by ousting both Clement and Wolsey, who had unwittingly shown him in which way more power lay. So, similarly, the royal despotism itself, by centralising all power into the hands of a single prince, accustomed men to the idea of the absolute supremacy of national law, drove out of the field every defender of the rights of minorities, and thus paved the way for the substitution of the people for itself. The French Revolution was the logical conclusion to be drawn from the theories of Louis XIV. It needed only the fire of Rousseau to burn out the adventitious ornamentation which in the shape of that monarch's personal glorification still prevented the naked structure from being seen in all its clearness. _L'Etat c'est moi_ can be as aptly the watchword of a despotic oligarchy, or a levelling socialism, as of a kingly tyranny, according as it passes from the lips of the one to the few or the many. It is true that the last phase was not completed till long after the Middle Ages had closed, but the tendency towards it is evident in the teachings of the civil lawyers. Thus, for example, State absolutism is visible in the various suggestions made by men like Pierre du Bois and Wycliff (who, in the expression of their thoughts, are both rather lawyers than schoolmen) to dispossess the clergy of their temporalities. The principles urged, for instance, by these two in justification of this spoliation could be applied equally well to the estates of laymen. For the same principles put into the King's hand the undetermined power of doing what was necessary for the well-being of the State. It is true that Pierre du Bois (_De Recuperatione Terre Sancte_, pp. 39-41, 115-8) asserted that the royal authority was limited to deal in this way with Church lands, and could not touch what belonged to others. But this proviso was obviously inserted so arbitrarily that its logical force could not have had any effect. Political necessity alone prevented it from being used against the nobility and gentry. Ockham, however, the clever Oxford Franciscan, who formed one of the group of pamphleteers that defended Louis of Bavaria against Pope John XXII, quite clearly enlarged the grounds for Church disendowment so as to include the taking over by the State of all individual property. He was a thinker whose theories were strangely compounded of absolutism and democracy. The Emperor was to be supported because his autocracy came from the people. Hence, when Ockham is arguing about ecclesiastical wealth, and the way in which it could be quite fairly confiscated by the Government, he enters into a discussion about the origin of the imperial dignity. This, he declares, was deliberately handed over by the people to the Emperor. To escape making the Pope the original donor of the imperial title, Ockham concedes that privilege to the people. It was they, the people, who had handed over to the Caesars of the Holy Roman Empire all their own rights and powers. Hence Louis was a monarch whose absolutism rested on a popular basis. Then he proceeds in his argument to say that the human positive law by which private property was introduced was made by the people themselves, and that the right or power by which this was done was transferred by them to the Emperor along with the imperial dignity. Louis, therefore, had the same right to undo what they had done, for in him all their powers now resided. This, of course, formed an excellent principle from which to argue to his right to dispossess the Church of its superfluous wealth--indeed of all its wealth. But it could prove equally effectual against the holding by the individual of any property whatever. It made, in effect, private ownership rest on the will of the prince. Curiously, too, in quite another direction the same form of argument had been already worked out by Nicole Oresme, a famous Bishop of Lisieux, who first translated into French the _Politics_ of Aristotle, and who helped so largely in the reforms of Charles V of France. His great work was in connection with the revision of the coinage, on which he composed a celebrated treatise. He held that the change of the value of money, either by its deliberate depreciation, or by its being brought back to its earlier standard of face value, carried such widespread consequences that the people should most certainly be consulted on it. It was not fair to them to take such a step without their willing co-operation. Yet he admits fully that, though this is the wiser and juster way of acting, there was no absolute need for so doing, since all possession and all property sprang from the King. And this last conclusion was advocated by his rival, Philip de Meziers, whose advice Charles ultimately followed. Philip taught that the king was sole judge of whatever was for public use. But there was a further point in the same question which afforded matter for an interesting discussion among the lawyers. Pope Innocent IV, who had first been famous as a canonist, and retained as Pontiff his old love for disputations of this kind, developed a theory of his own on the relation between the right of the individual to possess and the right of the State over that possession. He distinguished carefully between two entirely different concepts, namely, the right and its exercise. The first he admitted to be sacred and inviolable, because it sprang from the very nature of man. It could not be disturbed or in any way molested; the State had therefore no power to interfere with the right. But he suggested that the exercise of that right, or, to use his actual phrase, the "actions in accord with that right," rested on the basis of civil, positive law, and could therefore be controlled by legal decisions. The right was sacred, its exercise was purely conventional. Thus every man has a right to property; he can never by any possible means divest himself of it, for it is rooted in the depths of his being, and supported by his human nature. But this right appears especially to be something internal, intrinsic. For him to exercise it--that is to say, to hold this land or that, or indeed any land at all--the State's intervention must be secured. At least the State can control his action in buying, selling, or otherwise obtaining it. His right cannot be denied, but for reasons of social importance its exercise well may be. Nor did this then appear as a merely unmeaning distinction; he would not admit that a right which could not be exercised was hardly worth consideration. And, in point of fact, the Pope's private theory found very many supporters. There were others, however, who judged it altogether too fantastical. The most interesting of his opponents was a certain Antonio Roselli, a very judiciously-minded civil lawyer, who goes very thoroughly into the point at issue. He gives Innocent's views, and quotes what authority he can find for them in the Digest and Decretals. But for himself he would prefer to admit that the right to private property is not at all sacred or natural in the sense of being inviolable. He willingly concedes to the State the right to judge all claims of possession. This is the more startling since ordinarily his views are extremely moderate, and throughout the controversy between Pope and Emperor he succeeded in steering a very careful, delicate course. To him, however, all rights to property were purely civil and arguable only on principles of positive law. There was no need, therefore, to discriminate between the right and its exercise, for both equally could be controlled by the State. There are evidences to show that he admitted the right of each man to the support of his own life, and, therefore, to private property in the form of actual food, &c., necessary for the immediate moment; but he distinctly asserts as his own personal idea that "the prince could take away my right to a thing, and any exercise of that right," adding only that for this there must be some cause. The prince cannot arbitrarily confiscate property; he must have some reasonable motive of sufficient gravity to outweigh the social inconveniences which confiscation would necessarily produce. Not every cause is a sufficient one, but those only which concern "public liberty or utility." Hence he decides that the Pope cannot alienate Church lands without some justifying reason, nor hand them over to the prince unless there happens to be an urgent need, springing from national circumstances. It does not follow, however, that he wishes to make over to the State absolute right to individual property under normal conditions. The individual has the sole dominion over his own possessions; that dominion reverts to the State only in some extreme instance. His treatise, therefore (Goldast, _De Monarchia_, 1611-1614, Hanover, p. 462, &c.), may be looked upon as summing up the controversy as it then stood. The legal distinction suggested by Innocent IV had been given up by the lawyers as insufficient. The theories of Du Bois, Wycliff, Ockham, and the others had ceased to have much significance, because they gave the royal power far too absolute a jurisdiction over the possessions of its subjects. The feudal contractual system, which these suggested reforms had intended to drive out, had failed for entirely different reasons, and could evidently be brought back only at the price of a complete and probably unsuccessful disturbance of the social and economic organisation. The centralisation which had risen on the ruins of the older local sovereignties and immunities, had brought with it an emphasised recognition of the public rights and duties of all subjects, and had at the same time confirmed the individual in the ownership of his little property, and given him at the last not a conditional, but an absolute possession. To safeguard this, and to prevent it from becoming a block in public life, a factor of discontent, the lawyers were engaged in framing an additional clause which should give to the State an ultimate jurisdiction, and would enable it to overrule any objections on the part of the individual to a national policy or law. The suggested distinction that the word "right" should be emptied of its deeper meaning, by refusing it the further significance of "exercise," was too subtle and too legal to obtain much public support. So that the lawyers were driven to admit that for a just cause the very right itself could be set aside, and every private possession (when public utility and liberty demanded it) confiscated or transferred to another. Even the right to compensation for such confiscation was with equal cleverness explained away. For it was held that, when an individual had lost his property through State action, and without his having done anything to deserve it as a punishment, compensation could be claimed. But whenever a whole people or nation was dispossessed by the State, there was no such right at all to any indemnity. Thus was the wholesale adoption of land-nationalism to be justified. Thus could the State capture all private possessions without any fear of being guilty of robbery. It was considered that it was only the oppression of the individual and class spoliation which really contravened the moral law. The legal theories, therefore, which supplanted the old feudal concepts were based on the extension of royal authority, and the establishment of public rights. Individualistic possession was emphasised; yet the simultaneous setting up of the absolute monarchies of the sixteenth century really made their ultimate capture by the Socialist party more possible. CHAPTER VI THE SOCIAL REFORMERS It may seem strange to class social reforms under the wider heading of Socialistic Theories, and the only justification for doing so is that which we have already put forward in defence of the whole book; namely, that the term "socialistic" has come to bear so broad an interpretation as to include a great deal that does not strictly belong to it. And it is only on the ground of their advocating State interference in the furtherance of their reforms that the reformers here mentioned can be spoken of as socialistic. Of course there have been reformers in every age who came to bring to society their own personal measures of relief. But in the Middle Ages hardly a writer took pen in hand who did not note in the body politic some illness, and suggest some remedy. Howsoever abstruse might be the subject of the volume, there was almost sure to be a reference to economic or social life. It was not an epoch of specialists such as is ours. Each author composed treatises in almost every branch of learning. The same professor, according to mediaeval notions, might lecture to-day on Scripture, to-morrow on theology or philosophy, and the day after on natural science. For them a university was a place where each student learnt, and each professor taught, universal knowledge. Still from time to time men came to the front with some definite social message to be delivered to their own generation. Some were poets like Langland, some strike-leaders like John Ball, some religious enthusiasts like John Wycliff, some royal officials like Pierre du Bois. This latter in his famous work addressed to King Edward I of England (_De Recuperatione Sancte Terre_), has several most interesting and refreshing chapters on the education of women. His bias is always against religious orders, and, consequently, he favours the suppression of almost every conventual establishment. Still, as these were at his own date the only places where education could be considered to exist at all, he had to elaborate for himself a plan for the proper instruction of girls. First, of course, the nunneries must be confiscated by Government. For him this was no act of injustice, since he regarded the possessions of the whole clerical body as something outside the ordinary laws of property. But having in this way cleared the ground of all rivals, and captured some magnificent buildings, he can now go forward in his scheme of education. He insists on having only lay-mistresses, and prescribes the course of study which these are to teach. There should be, he held, many lectures on literature, and music, and poetry, and the arts and crafts of home life. Embroidery and home-management are necessities for the woman's work in after years, so they must be acquired in these schools. But education cannot limit itself to these branches of useful knowledge. It must take the woman's intelligence and develop that as skilfully as it does the man's. She is not inferior to him in power of reason, but only in her want of its right cultivation. Hence the new schools are to train her to equal man in all the arts of peace. Such is the main point in his programme, which even now sounds too progressive for the majority of our educational critics. He appeals for State interference that the colleges may be endowed out of the revenues of the religious houses, and that they may be supported in such a fashion as would always keep them abreast of the growing science of the times. And when, after a schooling of such a kind as this, the girls go out into their life-work as wives and mothers, he would wish them a more complete equality with their men-folk than custom then allowed. The spirit of freedom which is felt working through all his papers makes him the apostle of what would now be called the "new woman." After him, there comes a lull in reforming ideas. But half a century later occurs a very curious and sudden outburst of rebellion all over Europe. From about the middle of the fourteenth century to the early fifteenth there seemed to be an epidemic of severe social unrest. There were at Paris, which has always been the nursery of revolutions, four separate risings. Etienne Marcel, who, however, was rather a tribune of the people than a revolutionary leader, came into prominence in 1355; he was followed by the Jacquerie in 1358, by the Maillotins in 1382, and the Cabochiens in 1411. In Rome we know of Rienzi in 1347, who eventually became hardly more than a popular demagogue; in Florence there was the outbreak of Ciompi in 1378; in Bohemia the excesses of Taborites in 1409; in England the Peasant Revolt of 1381. It is perfectly obvious that a series of social disturbances of this nature could not leave the economic literature of the succeeding period quite as placid as it had found it. We notice now that, putting away questions of mere academic character, the thinkers and writers concern themselves with the actual state of the people. Parliament has its answer to the problem in a long list of statutes intended to muzzle the turbulent and restless revolutionaries. But this could not satisfy men who set their thought to study the lives and circumstances of their fellow-citizens. Consequently, as a result, we can notice the rise of a school of writers who interest themselves above all things in the economic conditions of labour. Of this school the easiest exponent to describe is Antonino of Florence, Archbishop and canonised saint. His four great volumes on the exposition of the moral law are fascinating as much for the quotations of other moralists which they contain, as for the actual theories of the saint himself. For the Archbishop cites on almost every page contemporary after contemporary who had had his say on the same problems. He openly asserts that he has read widely, taken notes of all his reading, has deliberately formed his opinions on the judgments, reasoned or merely expressed, of his authors. To read his books, then, is to realise that Antonino is summing up the whole experience of his generation. Indeed he was particularly well placed for one who wished for information. Florence, then at the height of its renown under the brilliant despotism of Cosimo dei Medici, was the scene where the great events of the life of Antonino took place. There he had seen within the city walls, three Popes, a Patriarch of Constantinople, the Emperors of East and West, and the most eminent men of both civilisations. He had taken part in a General Council of the Church, and knew thinkers as widely divergent as Giovanni Dominici and �neas Sylvius Piccolomini. He was, therefore, more likely than most to have heard whatever theories were proposed by the various great political statesmen of Europe, whether they were churchmen or lawyers. Consequently, his schemes, as we might well expect, are startlingly advanced. He begins by attacking the growing spirit of usury, and the resulting idleness. Men were finding out that under the new conditions which governed the money market it was possible to make a fortune without having done a day's work. The sons of the aristocracy of Florence, which was built up of merchant princes, and which had amassed its own fortunes in honest trading, had been tempted by the bankers to put their wealth out to interest, and to live on the surplus profit. The ease and security with which this could be done made it a popular investment, especially among the young men of fashion who came in, simply by inheritance, for large sums of money. As a consequence Florence found itself, for the first time in its history, beginning to possess a wealthy class of men who had never themselves engaged in any profession. The old reverence, therefore, which had always existed in the city for the man who laboured in his art or guild, began to slacken. No longer was there the same eagerness noticeable which used to boast openly that its rewards consisted in the consciousness of work well done. Instead, idleness became the badge of gentility, and trade a slur upon a man's reputation. No city can long survive so listless and languid an ideal. The Archbishop, therefore, denounced this new method of usurious traffic, and hinted further that to it was due the fierce rebellion which had for a while plunged Florence into the horrors of the Jacquerie. Wealth, he taught, should not of itself breed wealth, but only through the toil of honest labour, and that labour should be the labour of oneself, not of another. Then he proceeded to argue that as upon the husband lies the labour of trade, the greater portion of his day must necessarily be passed outside the circle of family life. The breadwinner can attend neither to works of piety nor of charity in the way he should, and, consequently, to his wife it must be left to supply for his defects. She must take his place in the church, and amid the slums of the poor; she must for him and his lift her hands in prayer, and dispense his superfluous wealth in succouring the poverty-stricken. For the Archbishop will have none of the soothing doctrine which the millionaire preaches to the mob. He asserts that poverty is not a good thing; in itself it is an evil, and can be considered to lead only accidentally to any good. When, therefore, it assumes the form of destitution, every effort must be made to banish it from the State. For if it were to become at all prevalent in a nation, then would that people be on the pathway to its ruin. The politicians should therefore make it the end of their endeavours--though this, it may be, is an ideal which can never be fully brought to realisation--to leave each man in a state of sufficiency. No one, for whatever reason, should be allowed to become destitute. Even should it be by his own fault that he were brought low, he must be provided for by the State, which has, however, in these circumstances, at the same time, the duty of punishing him. But he remarks that the cause of poverty is more often the unjust rate of wages. The competition even of those days made men beat each other down in clamouring for work to be given them, and afforded to the employers an opportunity of taking workers who willingly accepted an inadequate scale of remuneration. This state of things he considered to be unjustifiable and unjust. No one had any right to make profit out of the wretchedness of the poor. Each human being had the duty of supporting his own life, and this he could not do except by the hiring of his own labour to another. That other, therefore, by the immutable laws of justice, when he used the powers of his fellow-man, was obliged in conscience to see that those powers could be fittingly sustained by the commodity which he exchanged for them. That is, the employer was bound to take note that his employees received such return for their labour as should compensate them for his use of it. The payment promised and given should be, in other words, what we would now speak of as a "living wage." But further, above this mere margin, additional rewards should be added according to the skill of the workman, or the dangerous nature of his employment, or the number of his children. The wages also should be paid promptly, without delay. But it may sometimes happen that the labour which a man can contribute is not of such a kind as will enable him to receive the fair remuneration that should suffice for his bodily comfort. The saint is thinking of boy-labour, and the case of those too enfeebled by age or illness to work adequately, or perhaps at all. What is to be done for them? Let the State look to it, is his reply. The community must, by the law of its own existence, support all its members, and out of its superfluous wealth must provide for its weaker citizens. Those, therefore, who can labour harder than they need, or who already possess more riches than suffice for them, are obliged by the natural law of charity to give to those less favourably circumstanced than themselves. St. Antonino does not, therefore, pretend to advocate any system of rigid equality among men. There is bound to be, in his opinion, variety among them, and from this variety comes indeed the harmony of the universe. For some are born to rule, and others, by the feebleness of their understanding or of their will, are fitted only to obey. The workman and servant must faithfully discharge the duties of their trade or service, be quick to receive a command, and reverent in their obedience. And the masters, in their turn, must be forbearing in their language, generous in their remuneration, and temperate in their commands. It is their business to study the powers of each of those whom they employ, and to measure out the work to each one according to the capacity which is discoverable in him. When a faithful labourer has become ill, the employer must himself tend and care for him, and be in no hurry to send him to a hospital. About the hospitals themselves he has his own ideas, or at least he has picked out the sanest that he can find in the books and conversation of people whom he has come across. He insists strongly that women should, as matrons and nurses, manage those institutions which are solely for the benefit of women; and even in those where men also are received, he can see no incompatibility in their being administered by these same capable directors. He much commends the custom of chemists in Florence on Sundays, feast-days, and holidays of opening their dispensaries in turn. So that even should all the other shops be closed, there would always be one place open where medicines and drugs could be obtained in an emergency. The education of the citizens, too, is another work which the State must consider. It is not something merely optional which is to be left to the judgment of the parent. The Archbishop holds that its proper organisation is the duty of the prince. Education, in his eyes, means that the children must be taught the knowledge of God, of letters, and of the arts and crafts they are to pursue in after life. Again, he has thought out the theory of taxation. He admits its necessity. The State is obliged to perform certain duties for the community. It is obliged, for example, to make its roads fit for travelling, and so render them passable for the transfer of merchandise. It is bound to clear away all brigandage, highway robbery, and the like, for were this not done, no merchant would venture out through that State's territory, and its people would accordingly suffer. Hence, again, he deduces the need for some sort of army, so that the goods of the citizens may be secured against the invader, for without this security there would be no stimulus to trade. Bridges must be built, and fords kept in repair. Since, therefore, the State is obliged to incur expenses in order to attain these objects, the State has the right, and indeed the duty, to order it so that the community shall pay for the benefits which it is to receive. Hence follows taxation. But he sees at once that this power of demanding forced contributions from wealthy members of society needs safeguarding against abuse. Thus he is careful to insist that taxation can be valid only when it is levied by public authority, else it becomes sheer brigandage. No less is it to be reprobated when ordered indeed by public authority, but not used for public benefit. Thus, should it happen that a prince or other ruler of a State extorted money from his subjects on pretence of keeping the roads in good order, or similar works for the advantage of the community, and yet neglected to put the contributions of his people to this use, he would be defrauding the public, and guilty of treason against his country. So, too, to lay heavier burdens on his subjects than they could bear, or to graduate the scale in such a fashion as to weigh more heavily on one class than another, would be, in the ruler, an aggravated form of theft. Taxation must therefore be decreed by public authority, and be arranged according to some reasonable measure, and rest on the motive of benefiting the social organisation. The citizens therefore who are elected to settle the incidence of taxation must be careful to take account of the income of each man, and so manage that on no one should the burden be too oppressive. He suggests himself the percentage of one pound per hundred. Nor, again, must there be any deliberate attempt to penalise political opponents, or to make use of taxation in order to avenge class-oppression. Were this to be done, the citizens so acting would be bound to make restitution to the persons whom they had thus injured. Then St. Antonino takes the case of those who make a false declaration of their income. These, too, he convicts of injustice, and requires of them that they also should make restitution, but to the State. An exception to this, however, he allows. For if it happens to be the custom for each to make a declaration of income which is obviously below the real amount, then simply because all do it and all are known to do it, there is no obligation for the individual to act differently from his neighbours. It is not injustice, for the law evidently recognises the practice. And were he, on the other hand, to announce his full yearly wage of earnings, he would allow himself to be taxed beyond the proper measure of value. But to refuse to pay, or to elude by some subterfuge the just contribution which a man owes of his wealth to the easing of the public burdens, is in the eyes of the Archbishop a crime against the State. It would be an act of injustice, of theft, all the more heinous in that, as he declares with a flash of the energy of Rousseau, the "common good is something almost divine." We have dwelt rather at length on the schemes of this one economist, and may seem, therefore, to have overlooked the writings of others equally full of interest. But the reason has been because this Florentine moralist does stand so perfectly for a whole school. He has read omnivorously, and has but selected most of his thoughts. He compares himself, indeed, in one passage of these volumes, to the laborious ant, "that tiny insect which wanders here and there, and gathers together what it thinks to be of use to its community." He represents a whole school, and represents it at its best, for there is no extreme dogmatism in him, no arguing from grounds that are purely arbitrary, or from _a priori_ principles. It is his knowledge of the people among whom he had laboured so long which fits him to speak of the real sufferings of the poor. But experience requires for its being effectually put to the best advantage, that it should be wielded by one whose judgment is sober and careful. Now, St. Antonino was known in his own day as Antonino the Counsellor; and his justly-balanced decision, his delicately-poised advice, the straightness of his insight, are noticeable in the masterly way in which he sums up all the best that earlier and contemporary writers had devised in the domain of social economics. There is, just at the close of the period with which this book deals, a rising school of reformers who can be grouped round More's _Utopia_. Some foreshadowed him, and others continued his speculations. Men like Harrington in his _Oceana_, and Milton in his _Areopagitica_, really belong to the same band; but life for them had changed very greatly, and already become something far more complex than the earlier writers had had to consider. There seemed no possibility of reforming it by the simple justice which St. Antonino and his fellows judged to be sufficient to set things back again as they had been in the Golden Age. The new writers are rather political than social. For them, as for the Greeks, it is the constitution which must be repaired. Whereas the mediaeval socialists thought, as St. Thomas indeed never wearied of repeating, that unrest and discontent would continue under any form of government whatever. The more each city changed its constitution, the more it remained the same. Florence, whether under a republic or a despotism, was equally happy and equally sad. For it was the spirit of government alone which, in the eyes of the scholastic social writers, made the State what it happened to be. In this the modern sociologist of to-day finds himself more akin with the mediaeval thinkers than with the idealists of the parliamentary era in England, or of the Revolution in France. These fixed their hopes on definite organisations of government, and on the exact balance of executive and legislative powers. But for Scotus, and Wycliff, and St. Antonino, the cause of the evil is far deeper and more personal. Not in any form of the constitution, nor in any division of ruling authority, nor in its union under a firm despot, nor in the divine right of kings, or nobles, or people, was security to be found, or the well-ordering of the nation. But peace and rest from faction could be achieved with certainty only on the conditions of strict justice between man and man, on the observance of God's commandments. CHAPTER VII THE THEORY OF ALMSGIVING Any description of mediaeval socialistic ideals which contained no reference to mediaeval notions of almsgiving would not be complete. Almsgiving was for them a necessary corollary to their theories of private possession. In the passage already quoted from St. Thomas Aquinas (p. 45), wherein he sets forth the theological aspect of property, he makes use of a broad distinction between what he calls "the power of procuring and dispensing" exterior things and "the use of them." We have already at some length tried to show what economists then meant by this first "power." Now we must establish the significance of what they intended by the second. And to do this the more clearly it will be as well to repeat the words in which St. Thomas briefly notes it: "The other office which is man's concerning exterior things is the use of them; and with regard to this a man ought not to hold exterior things as his own, but as common to all, that he may portion them out readily to others in time of need." In this sentence is summed up the whole mediaeval concept of the law of almsdeeds. Private property is allowed--is, in fact, necessary for human life--but on certain conditions. These imply that the possession of property belongs to the individual, but also that the use of it is not limited to him. The property is private, the use should be common. Indeed, it is only this common enjoyment which at all justifies private possession. It was as obvious then as now that there were inequalities in life, that one man was born to ease or wealth, or a great name, whereas another came into existence without any of these advantages, perhaps even hampered by positive disadvantages. Henry of Langenstein (1325-1397) in his famous _Tractatus de Contractibus_ (published among the works of Gerson at Cologne, 1484, tom. iv. fol. 188), draws out this variety of fortune and misfortune in a very detailed fashion, and puts before his reader example after example of what they were then likely to have seen. But all the while he has his reason for so doing. He acknowledges the fact, and proceeds from it to build up his own explanation of it. The world is filled with all these men in their differing circumstances. Now, to make life possible for them, he asserts that private property is necessary. He is very energetic in his insistence upon that point. Without private property he thinks that there will be continual strife in which might, and not right, will have the greater probability of success. But simultaneously, and as a corrective to the evils which private property of itself would cause there should be added to it the condition of common use. That is to say, that although I own what is mine, yet I should put no obstacle in the way of its reasonable use by others. This is, of course, really the ideal of Aristotle in his book of _Politics_, when he makes his reply to Plato's communism. In Plato's judgment, the republic should be governed in the reverse way, _Common property and private use_; he would really make this, which is a feature of monastic life, compulsory on all. But Aristotle, looking out on the world, an observer of human nature, a student of the human heart, sets up as more feasible, more practical, the phrase which the Middle Ages repeat, _Private property and common use_. The economics of a religious house are hardly of such a kind, thought the mediaevalists, as to suit the ways and fancies of this workaday world. But the Middle Ages do not simply repeat, they Christianise Aristotle. They are dominated by his categories of thought, but they perfect them in the light of the New Dispensation. Faith is added to politics, love of the brotherhood is made to extend the mere brutality of the economists' teaching. In "common use" they find the philosophic name for "almsdeeds." "A man ought not to hold exterior things as his own, but as common to all, that he may portion them out readily to others in time of need." This sentence, an almost literal translation from the _Book of Politics_, takes on a fuller meaning and is softened by the unselfishness of Christ when it is found in the _Summa Theologica_ of Aquinas. Let us take boldly the passage from St. Thomas in which he lays down the law of almsgiving. (2_a_, 2_ae_, 32, 5.) "Since love of one's neighbour is commanded us, it follows that everything without which that love cannot be preserved, is also commanded us. But it is essential to the love of one's neighbour, not merely to wish him well, but to act well towards him; as says St. John (1 Ep. 3), 'Let us not love in word nor in tongue, but in deed and in truth.' But to wish and to act well towards anyone implies that we should succour him when he is in need, and this is done by almsgiving. Hence almsgiving is a matter of precept. But because precepts are given in things that concern virtuous living, the almsgiving here referred to must be of such a kind as shall promote virtuous living. That is to say, it must be consonant with right reason; and this in turn implies a twofold consideration, namely, from the point of view of the giver, and from that of the receiver. As regards the giver, it must be noted that what is given should not be necessary to him, as says St. Luke 'That which is superfluous, give in alms.' And by 'not necessary' I mean not only to himself (_i.e._ what is over and above his individual needs), but to those who depend on him. For a man must first provide for himself and those of whom he has the care, and can then succour such of the rest as are necessitous--that is, such as are without what their personal needs entail. For so, too, nature provides that nutrition should be communicated first to the body, and only secondly to that which is to be begotten of it. As regards the receiver, it is required that he should really be in need, else there is no reason for alms being given him. But since it is impossible for one man to succour all who are in need, he is only under obligation to help such as cannot otherwise be provided for. For in this case the words of Ambrose become applicable: 'Feed them that are dying of starvation, else shall you be held their murderer.' Hence it is a matter of precept to give alms to whosoever is in extreme necessity. But in other cases (namely, where the necessity is not extreme) almsgiving is simply a counsel, and not a command." (_Ad_ 2_m._) "Temporal goods which are given a man by God are his as regards their possession, but as regards their use, if they should be superfluous to him, they belong also to others who may be provided for out of them. Hence St. Basil says: 'If you admit that God gave these temporal goods to you, is God unjust in thus unequally distributing His favours? Why should you abound, and another be forced to beg, unless it is intended thereby that you should merit by your generosity, and he by his patience? For it is the bread of the starving that you cling to; it is the clothes of the naked that hang locked in your wardrobe; it is the shoes of the barefooted that are ranged in your room; it is the silver of the needy that you hoard. For you are injuring whoever is in want.' And Ambrose repeats the same thing." Here it will be noticed that we find the real meaning of those words about a man's duty of portioning out readily to another's use what belongs to himself. It is the correlative to the right to private property. But a second quotation must be made from another passage closely following on the preceding: "There is a time when to withhold alms is to commit mortal sin. Namely, when on the part of the receiver there is evident and urgent necessity, and he does not seem likely to be provided for otherwise, and when on the part of the giver he has superfluities of which he has not any probable immediate need. Nor should the future be in question, for this would be looking to the morrow, which the Master has forbidden (Matt. 6)." (_Ibid._, 32, 6.) "But 'superfluous' and 'necessity' are to be interpreted according to their most probable and generally accepted meaning. 'Necessary' has two meanings. First, it implies something without which a thing cannot exist. Interpreted in this sense, a man has no business to give alms out of what is necessary to him; for example, if a man has only enough wherewith to feed himself and his sons or others dependent on him. For to give alms out of this would be to deprive himself and his of very life, unless it were indeed for the sake of prolonging the life of someone of extreme importance to Church and State. In that case it might be praiseworthy to expose his life and the lives of others to grave risk, for the common good is to be preferred to our own private interests. Secondly, 'necessary' may mean that without which a person cannot be considered to uphold becomingly his proper station, and that of those dependent on him. The exact measure of this necessity cannot be very precisely determined, as to how far things added may be beyond the necessity of his station, or things taken away be below it. To give alms, therefore, out of these is a matter not of precept, but of counsel. For it would not be right to give alms out of these, so as to help others, and thereby be rendered unable to fulfil the obligations of his state of life. For no one should live unbecomingly. Three exceptions, however, should be made. First, when a man wishes to change his state of life. Thus it would be an act of perfect virtue if a man, for the purpose of entering a religious order, distributed to the poor for Christ's sake all that he possessed. Secondly, when a man gives alms out of what is necessary for his state of life, and yet does so knowing that they can very easily be supplied to him again without much personal inconvenience. Thirdly, when some private person, still more when the State itself, is in the gravest need. In these cases it would be most praiseworthy for a man to give what seemingly was required for the upkeep of his station in life in order to provide against some far greater need." From these passages it will be possible to construct the theory in vogue during the whole of the Middle Ages. The landholder was considered to possess his property on a system of feudal tenure, and to be obliged thereby to certain acts of suit and service to his immediate lord, or eventually to the King. But besides these burdens which the responsibility of possession entailed, there were others incumbent on him, because of his brotherhood with all Christian folk. He owed a debt, not merely to his superiors, but also to his equals. Such was the interpretation of Christ's commandment which the mediaeval theologians adopted. With one voice they declare that to give away to the needy what is superfluous is no act of charity, but of justice. St. Jerome's words were often quoted: "If thou hast more than is necessary for thy food and clothing, give that away, and consider that in thus acting thou art but paying a debt" (Epist. 50 ad Edilia q. i.); and those others of St. Augustine, "When superfluities are retained, it is the property of others which is retained" (in Psalm 147). These and like sayings of the Fathers constitute the texts on which the moral economic doctrine of what is called the Scholastic School is based. Albertus Magnus (vol. iv. in Sent. 4, 14, p. 277, Lyons, 1651) puts to himself the question whether to give alms is a matter of justice or of charity, and the answer which he makes is compressed finally into this sentence: "For a man to give out of his superfluities is a mere act of justice, because he is rather the steward of them for the poor than the owner." St. Thomas Aquinas is equally explicit, as another short sentence shall show (2_a_, 2_ae_, 66, 2, _ad_ 3_m_): "When Ambrose says 'Let no one call his own that which is common property,' he is referring to the use of property. Hence he adds: 'Whatever a man possesses above what is necessary for his sufficient comfort, he holds by violence.'" And the same view could be backed by quotations from Henry of Ghent, Duns Scotus, St. Bonaventure, the sermons of Wycliff, and almost every writer of any consequence in that age. Perhaps to us this decided tone may appear remarkable, and even ill-considered. But it is evident that the whole trouble lies in the precise meaning to be attached to the expressions "superfluous" and "needy." And here, where we feel most of all the need of guidance, it must be confessed that few authors venture to speak with much definiteness. The instance, indeed, of a man placed in extreme necessity, all quote and explain in nearly identical language. Should anyone be reduced to these last circumstances, so as to be without means of subsistence or sufficient wealth to acquire them, he may, in fact must, take from anywhere whatever suffices for his immediate requirements. If he begs for the necessities of life, they cannot be withheld from him. Nor is the expression "necessities of life" to be interpreted too nicely. Says Albertus Magnus: "I mean by necessary not that without which he cannot live, but that also without which he cannot maintain his household, or exercise the duties proper to his condition" (_loc. cit._, art. 16, p. 280). This is a very generous interpretation of the phrase, but it is the one pretty generally given by all the chief writers of that period. Of course they saw at once that there were practical difficulties in the way of such a manner of acting. How was it possible to determine whether such a one was in real need or not? And the only answer given was that, if it was evident that a man was so placed, there could be no option about giving; almsdeeds then became of precept. But that, if there were no convincing signs of absolute need, then the obligation ceased, and almsgiving, from a command, became a counsel. In an instance of this extreme nature it is not difficult to decide, but the matter becomes perilously complicated when an attempt is made to gauge the relative importance of "need" and "superfluity" in concrete cases. How much "need" must first be endured before a man has a just claim on another's superfluity? By what standard are "superfluities" themselves to be judged? For it is obvious that when the need among a whole population is general, things possessed by the richer classes, which in normal circumstances might not have been considered luxuries, instantly become such. However then the words are taken, however strictly or laxly interpreted, it must always be remembered that the terms used by the Scholastics do not really solve the problem. They suggest standards, but do not define them, give names, but cannot tell us their precise meaning. Should we say, then, that in this way they had failed? It is not in place in a book of this kind to sit in judgment on the various theories quoted, and test them to see how far they hold good, or to what extent they should be disregarded, for it is the bare recital of mere historic views which can be here considered. The object has been simply to tell what systems were thought out and held, without attempting to apprize them or measure their value, or point out how far they are applicable to modern times. But in this affair of almsdeeds it is perhaps well to note that the Scholastics could make this much defence of their vagueness. In cases of this kind, they might say, we are face to face with human nature, not as an abstract thing, but in its concrete personal existence. The circumstances must therefore differ in each single instance. General laws can be laid down, but only on the distinct understanding that they are mere principles of direction--in other words, that they are nothing more than general laws. The Scholastics, the mediaeval writers of every school, except a few of that Manichean brood of sects, admitted the necessity of almsgiving. They looked on it from a moral point of view as a high virtue, and from an economic standpoint as a correlative to their individualistic ideas on private property. The one without the other would be unjust. Alone, they would be unworkable; together, mutually independent, they would make the State a fair and perfect thing. But to fix the exact proportion between the two terms, they held to be the duty of the individual in each case that came to his notice. To give out of a man's superfluities to the needy was, they held, undoubtedly a bounden duty. But they could make no attempt to apprize in definite language what in the receiver was meant by need, and in the giver by superfluity. They made no pretence to do this, and thereby showed their wisdom, for obviously the thing cannot be done. Yet we must note, last of all, that they drew up a list of principles which shall here be set down, because they sum up in a few sentences the wit of mediaeval economists, their spirit of orderly arrangement, and their unanimous opinion on man's moral obligations. (I) A man is obliged to help another in his extreme need, even at the risk of grave inconvenience to himself. (II) A man is obliged to help another who, though not in extreme need, is yet in considerable distress, but not at the risk of grave inconvenience to himself. (III) A man is not obliged to help another whose necessity is slight, even though the risk to himself should be quite trifling. In other words, the need of his fellow must be adjusted against the inconvenience to himself. Where the need of the one is great, the inconvenience to the other must at least be as great, if it is to excuse him from the just debt of his alms. His possession of superfluities does not compel him to part with them unless there is some real want which they can be expected to supply. In fine, the mediaevalists would contend that almsgiving, to be necessary, implies two conditions, both concomitant:-- (_a_) That the giver should possess superfluities. (_b_) That the receiver should be in need. Where both these suppositions are fulfilled, the duty of almsgiving becomes a matter not of charity, but of justice. BIBLIOGRAPHY Among the original works by mediaeval writers on economic subjects, which can be found in most of the greater libraries in England, we would place the following: _De Recuperatione Terre Sancte_, by Pierre du Bois. Edited by C. V. Langlois in Paris. 1891. _Commentarium in Politicos Aristotelis_, by Albertus Magnus. Vol. iv. Lyons. 1651. _Summa Theologica_, of St. Thomas Aquinas. This is being translated by the English Dominicans, published by Washborne. London. 1911. But the parts that deal with Aquinas' theories of property, &c., have not yet been published. _De Regimine Principio_, probably by Ptolomeo de Lucca. It will be found printed among the works of St. Thomas Aquinas, who wrote the first chapters. The portion here to be consulted is in book iv. _Tractatus de Civili Dominio_, by Wycliff, published in four vols. in London. 1885-1904. _Unprinted Works of John Wycliff_, edited at Oxford in three vols. 1869-1871. _Fasciculus Zizaniorum_ and the _Chronicon Angliae_, both edited in the Roll Series, help in elucidating the exact meaning of Wycliff, and his relation to the insurgents of 1381. _Monarchia_, edited by Goldast of Hanover in 1611, gives a collection of fifteenth-century writers, including Ockham, Cesena, Roselli, &c. _Summa Moralis_, by St. Antonino of Florence, contains a great deal of economic moralising. But the whole four volumes (Verona, 1740) must be searched for it. Among modern books which can be consulted with profit are:-- _Illustrations of the Mediaeval Thought_, by Reginald Lane Poole. 1884. London. _Political Theories of the Middle Ages_, by F. W. Maitland. 1900. Cambridge. _History of Mediaeval Political Thought_, by A. J. Carlyle. 1903. &c. Oxford (unfinished). _History of English Law_, by Pollock and Maitland. 1898. Cambridge. _Introduction to English Economic History_, by W. J. Ashley. 1892. London. _Economie Politique au Moyen Age_, by V. Brandts. 1895. Louvain. _La Propriété après St. Thomas_, by Mgr. Deploige, Revue Neo-Scholastique. 1895, 1896. Louvain. _History of Socialism_, by Thomas Kirkup. 1909. London. _Great Revolt of 1381_, by C. W. C. Oman. 1906. Oxford. _Lollardy and the Reformation_, by Gairdner. 1908-1911 (three vols.) London. _England in the Age of Wycliff_, by G. M. Trevelyan. 1909. London. _Leaders of the People_, by J. Clayton. 1910. London. A sympathetic account of Ball, Cade, &c. _Social Organisation_, by G. Unwin. 1906. Oxford. _Outlines of Economic History of England_, by H. O. Meredith. 1908. London. _Mutual Aid in a Mediaeval City_, by Prince Kropotkin (Nineteenth Century Review. Vol. xxxvi. p. 198). INDEX Albertus Magnus, 51, 86, 87 Albigensians, 29 Almsgiving, 80 Ambrose, St., 10, 87 Antonino, St., 50, 52, 71, 80 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 30, 42, 51, 60, 79, 80, 83 Aristotle, 35, 42, 51, 64, 82 Augustine, St., 10, 86 Authority, 8, 10 Ball, John, 32, 38 Bavaria, Louis of, 32, 63 Beghards, 32 Beguins, 32 Benedict, St., 13 Black Death, 22 Bois, Pierre du, 62, 69 Bonaventure, St., 87 Bourbon, Etienne de, 29 Bracton, 59 Cabochiens, 71 Cesena, Michael de, 32 Ciompi, 25, 71 Communism, 29 Destitution, 71 Dominicans, 30, 39, 47 Education, 76 Fall, 9 Fathers of Church, 8 Feudalism, 15, 56 Francis, St., 31 Franciscans, 30, 31, 39 Friars, 39 Froissart, 33 Ghent, Henry of, 87 Harrington, 79 Hildebrand, 10 Hospitals, 75 Innocent IV, 64 Jacquerie, 25, 71 Jerome, St., 86 John XXII, 32, 63 King, 15, 56 Labourers, landless, 19, 27 Langenstein, Henry of, 81 Langland, 27, 39 Law of Nations, 11 Law of Nature, 11 Lawyers, 55 Legalists, 11 Lucca, Ptolomeo de, 51 Maillotins, 71 Manicheans, 29 Manor, 71 Marcel, Etienne, 71 Meziers, Philip de, 64 Milton, 79 Moerbeke, 42 Monasticism, 13 More, Sir Thomas, 79 Necessities, 83 Ockham, 32, 49, 63 Oresme, Nichole, 64 Parliament, 43 Peasant Revolt, 25, 32, 71 Plato, 35, 52, 82 _Praetor Peregrinus_, 11 _Praetor Urbanus_, 11 Property, 10, 12, 29, 41, 80 Rienzi, 71 Ripa, John de, 50 Roselli, Antonio, 65 Schoolmen, 41, 88 Scotus, Duns, 49, 80, 87 Slavery, 10 Socialism, 6, 16, 60 Straw, Jack, 34, 39 Superfluities, 83 Taborites, 71 Taxation, 76 Tyler, Wat, 34 Vaudois, 29 Wages, 23, 25, 74 Women, 70, 73 Wycliff, 35, 49, 60, 62, 80, 87 Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO. 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Cardinal Newman By Wilfrid Meynell. *72. The Church of England By Rev. Canon Masterman. 73. Anglo-Catholicism By A. E. Manning Foster. *74. The Free Churches By Rev. Edward Shillito, M.A. *75. Judaism By Ephraim Levine, B.A. *76. Theosophy By Annie Besant. HISTORY *36. The Growth of Freedom By H. W. Nevinson. 37. Bismarck By Prof. F. M. Powicke, M.A. *38. Oliver Cromwell By Hilda Johnstone, M.A. *39. Mary Queen of Scots By E. O'Neill, M.A. *40. Cecil Rhodes By Ian Colvin. *41. Julius Cæsar By Hilary Hardinge. History of England-- 42. England in the Making By Prof. F. J. C. Hearnshaw, LL.D. *43. England in the Middle Ages By E. O'Neill, M.A. 44. The Monarchy and the People By W. T. Waugh, M.A. 45. The Industrial Revolution By A. Jones, M.A. 46. Empire and Democracy By G. S. Veitch, M.A. *61. Home Rule By L. G. Redmond Howard. 77. Nelson By H. W. Wilson. *78. Wellington and Waterloo By Major G. W. Redway. 100. A History of Greece By E. Fearenside, B.A. 101. Luther and the Reformation By L. D. Agate, M.A. 102. The Discovery of the By F. B. Kirkman, B.A. New World *103. Turkey and the Eastern By John Macdonald. Question 104. A History of Architecture By Mrs. Arthur Bell. SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC *47. Women's Suffrage By M. G. Fawcett, LL.D. 48. The Working of the British By Prof. Ramsay Muir, M.A. System of Government to-day 49. An Introduction to Economic By Prof. H. O. Meredith, M.A. Science 50. Socialism By F. B. Kirkman, B.A. *79. Mediaeval Socialism By Rev. B. Jarrett, O.P., M.A. *80. Syndicalism By J. H. Harley, M.A. 81. Labour and Wages By H. M. Hallsworth, M.A., B.Sc. *82. Co-operation By Joseph Clayton. *83. Insurance as Investment By W. A. Robertson, F.F.A. *92. The Training of the Child By G. Spiller. *105. Trade Unions By Joseph Clayton. *106. Everyday Law By J. J. Adams. LETTERS *51. Shakespeare By Prof. C. H. Herford, Litt.D. *52. Wordsworth By Rosaline Masson. *53. Pure Gold--A Choice of By H. C. O'Neill. Lyrics and Sonnets *54. Francis Bacon By Prof. A. R. Skemp, M.A. *55. The Brontës By Flora Masson. *56. Carlyle By the Rev. L. MacLean Watt. *57. Dante By A. G. Ferrers Howell. 58. Ruskin By A. Blyth Webster, M.A. 59. Common Faults in Writing By Prof. A. R. Skemp, M.A. English *60. A Dictionary of Synonyms. By Austin K. Gray, B.A. 84. Classical Dictionary By A. E. Stirling. *85. History of English By A. Compton-Rickett. Literature 86. Browning By Prof. A. R. Skemp, M.A. *87. Charles Lamb By Flora Masson. 88. Goethe By Prof. C. H. Herford, Litt.D. 89. Balzac By Frank Harris. 90. Rousseau By H. Sacher. 91. Ibsen By Hilary Hardinge. *93. Tennyson By Aaron Watson. 107. R. L. Stevenson By Rosaline Masson. *108. Shelley By Sydney Waterlow, M.A. 109. William Morris By A. Blyth Webster, M.A. London and Edinburgh: T. C. & E. C. Jack New York: Dodge Publishing Co. 
20936	----	file made using scans of public domain works at the University of Georgia.) THE NEW SOCIETY BY WALTHER RATHENAU AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION BY ARTHUR WINDHAM NEW YORK HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY 1921 PREFACE Walther Rathenau, author of _Die neue Gesellschaft_ and other studies of economic and social conditions in modern Germany, was born in 1867. His father, Emil Rathenau, was one of the most distinguished figures in the great era of German industrial development, and his son was brought up in the atmosphere of hard work, of enterprise, and of public affairs. After his school days at a _Gymnasium_, or classical school, he studied mathematics, physics and chemistry at the Universities of Berlin and of Strassburg, taking his degree at the age of twenty-two. Certain discoveries made by him in chemistry and electrolysis led to the establishment of independent manufacturing works, which he controlled with success, and eventually to his connexion with the world-famous A.E.G.--_Allgemeine Electrizitätsgesellschaft_--at the head of which he now stands. During the war he scored a very remarkable and exceptional success as controller of the organization for the supply of raw materials. He is thus not merely a scholar and thinker, but one who has lived and more than held his own in the thick of commercial and industrial life, and who knows by actual experience the subject-matter with which he deals. The present study, with its wide outlook and its resolute determination to see facts as they are, should have much value for all students of latter-day politics and economics in Europe; for though Rathenau is mainly concerned with conditions in his own land the same conditions affect all countries to a greater or less degree, and he deals with general principles of human psychology and of economic law which prevail everywhere in the world. It is not too much to say that "The New Society" constitutes a landmark in the history of economic and social thought, and contains matter for discussion, for sifting, for experiment and for propaganda which should occupy serious thinkers and reformers for many a day to come. His suggestions and conclusions may not be all accepted, or all acceptable, but few will deny that they constitute a distinct advance in the effort to bring serious and disinterested thought to the solution of our social problems, and in this conviction we offer the present complete and authorized translation to English readers. THE NEW SOCIETY I Is there any sign or criterion by which we can tell that a human society has been completely socialized? There is one and one only: it is when no one can have an income without working for it. That is the sign of Socialism; but it is not the goal. In itself it is not decisive. If every one had enough to live on, it would not matter for what he received money or goods, or even whether he got them for nothing. And relics of the system of income which is not worked for will always remain--for instance, provision for old age. The goal is not any kind of division of income or allotment of property. Nor is it equality, reduction of toil, or increase of the enjoyment of life. It is the abolition of the proletarian condition; abolition of the lifelong hereditary serfage, the nameless hereditary servitude, of one of the two peoples who are called by the same name; the annulment of the hereditary twofold stratification of society, the abolition of the scandalous enslavement of brother by brother, of that Western abuse which is the basis of our civilization as slavery was of the antique, and which vitiates all our deeds, all our creations, all our joys. Nor is even this the final goal--no economy, no society can talk of a final goal--the only full and final object of all endeavour upon earth is the development of the human soul. A final goal, however, points out the direction, though not the path, of politics. The political object which I have described as the abolition of the proletarian condition may, as I have shown in _Things that are to Come_,[1] be closely approached by a suitable policy in regard to property and education; above all, by a limitation of the right of inheritance. Of socialization in the strict sense there is, for this purpose, no need. Yet a far-reaching policy of socialization--and I do not here refer to a mere mechanical nationalization of the means of production but to a radical economic and social resettlement--is necessary and urgent, because it awakens and trains responsibilities, and because it withdraws from the sluggish hands of the governing classes the determination of time and of method, and places it in the hands that have a better title, those of the whole commonalty, which, at present, stands helpless through sheer democracy. For only in the hands of a political people does democracy mean the rule of the people; in those of an untrained and unpolitical people it becomes merely an affair of debating societies and philistine chatter at the inn ordinary. The symbol of German bourgeois democracy is the tavern; thence enlightenment is spread and there judgments are formed; it is the meeting place of political associations, the forum of their orators, the polling-booth for elections. But the sign that this far-reaching socialization has been actually carried out is the cessation of all income without work. I say the sign, but not the sole postulate; for we must postulate a complete and genuine democratization of the State and public economy, and a system of education equally accessible to all: only then can we say that the monopoly of class and culture has been smashed. But the cessation of the workless income will show the downfall of the last of class-monopolies, that of the Plutocracy. It is not very easy to imagine what society will be like when these objects have been realised, at least if we are thinking not of a brief period like the present Russian régime, or a passing phase as in Hungary, but an enduring and stationary condition. A dictatorial oligarchy, like that of the Bolshevists, does not come into consideration here, and the well-meaning Utopias of social romances crumble to nothing. They rest, one and all, on the blissfully ignorant assumption of a state of popular well-being exaggerated tenfold beyond all possibility. The knowledge of the sort of social condition towards which at present we Germans, and then Europe, and finally the other nations are tending in this vertical Migration of the Peoples, will not only decide for each of us his attitude towards the great social question, but our whole political position as well. It is quite in keeping with German traditions that in fixing our aims and forming our resolves we should be guided not by positive but by negative impulses--not by the effort to get something but to get away from it. To this effort, which is really a flight, we give the positive name of Socialism, without troubling ourselves in the least how things will look--not in the sense of popular watchwords but in actual fact--when we have got what we are seeking. This is not merely a case of lack of imagination; it is that we Germans have, properly speaking, no understanding of political tendencies. We are more or less educated in business, in science, in thought, but in politics we are about on the same level as the East Slavonic peasantry. At best we know--and even that not always--what oppresses, vexes and tortures us; we know our grievances, and think we have conceived an aim when we simply turn them upside down. Such processes of thought as "the police are to blame, the war-conditions are to blame, the Prussians are to blame, the Jews are to blame, the English are to blame, the priests are to blame, the capitalists are to blame"--all these we quite understand. Just as with the Slavs, if our good-nature and two centuries of the love of order did not forbid it, our primitive political instincts would find expression in a pogrom in the shape of a peasant-war, of a religious war, of witch-trials, or Jew-baiting. Our blatant patriotism bore the plainest signs of such a temper; half nationalism, half aggression against some bugbear or other; never a proud calm, an earnest self-dedication, a struggle for a political ideal. We have now a Republic in Germany: no one seriously desired it. We have at last established Parliamentarianism: no one wanted it. We have set up a kind of Socialism: no one believed in it. We used to say: "The people will live and die for their princes; our last drop of blood for the Hohenzollerns"--no one denied it. "The people mean to be ruled by their hereditary lords; they will go through fire for their officers; rather death than yield a foot of German soil to the foe." Was all this a delusion? By no means; it was sincere enough, only it did not go deep. It was the kind of sincerity which depends on not knowing enough of the alternative possibilities. When the alternatives revealed themselves as possible and actual, then we all turned republican, even to the cottagers in Pomerania. When the military strike had broken down discipline, the officers were mishandled; when the war was lost, the fleet disgraced, and the homeland defiled, then we began to play and dance. But was this frivolity? Not at all; it was a childish want of political imagination. The Poles, a people not remotely comparable to the German in depth of soul and the capacity for training talent, have for a century cherished no other thought than that of national unity, while we passively resign our territories. No Englishman or Japanese or American will ever understand us when we tell him that this military discipline of ours, this war-lust, did not represent a passion for dominion and aggression, but was merely the docility of a childish people which wants nothing, and can imagine nothing, but that things should go on as they happen, at the moment, to be. We Germans know but little of the laws which govern the formation of national character. The capacity of a people for profundity is not profundity, either of the individual or of the community. It may express itself in the masses as mere plasticity and softness of spirit. The capacity for collective sagacity and strength of will demands from the individual merely a dry intelligence in human affairs, and egoism. It would be too much to say that our political weakness may be merely the expression of spiritual power, for the latter has not proved an obstacle to success in business. Indolence and belief in authority have their share in it. But have we not been the classic land of social democracy, and have we not become that of Radicalism? Well, we have been, indeed, and are, with our submissiveness to authority and our capacity for discipline, the classic land of organized grumbling; and the classic land, too, of anti-semitism which deprived us of the very forces we stood most in need of--productive scepticism and the imagination for concrete things. Organized grumbling is not the same thing as political creation. A Socialism and Radicalism poorer in ideas than the post-Marxian German Socialism has never existed. Half of it was merely clerical work, and the other half was agitators' Utopianism of the cheapest variety. Nothing was more significant than the fact that the mighty event of the German Revolution was not the result of affection but of disaffection. It is not we who liberated ourselves, it was the enemy; it was our destruction that set us free. On the day before we asked for the armistice, perhaps even on the day before the flight of the Kaiser, a plébiscite would have yielded an overwhelming majority for the monarchy and against Socialism. What I so often said before the war came true: "He who trains his children with the rod learns only through the rod." And to-day, when everything is seething and fermenting--no thanks to Socialism for that--all intellectual work has to be done outside of the ranks of social-democracy, which stumbles along on its two crutches of "Socialization" and "Soviets."[2] Orthodox Socialism is still a case of the "lesser evil," what the French call a _pis aller_. "Things are so bad that any change must be for the better." What is to make them better we are told in the socialist catechism; but _how_ it is to do so, how and what anything is to become, this, the only question that matters, is regarded as irrelevant. It is answered by some halting and insincere stammer about "surplus value" which is to make everybody well off--and which would yield all round, as I have elsewhere shown, just twenty-five marks a head. Fifteen millions of grown men are pressing forward into a Promised Land revealed through the fog of political assemblies and in the thunder of parrot-phrases--a land from which no one will ever bring back a bunch of grapes. If one would interrogate not the agitators, but their hearers, and find out what they instinctively conceive this land to look like, we should get the answer, timid and naïve but at the same time the deepest and shrewdest that it is possible to give--that it is a land where there are no longer any rich. A most true and truthful reply! And yet a profound error silently lurks in it. You imagine, do you not, that in a land where there are no more rich people there will also be no more poor? "Why, of course not! How can there be poor people when there are no more rich?" And yet there will be. In the land where there are no more rich there will be _only_ poor, only very poor, people. Whoever does not know this and is a Socialist, that man is merely one of the herd or he is a dupe. He who knows it and conceals it is a deceiver. He who knows it, and in spite of that, nay, on account of that, is a Socialist, is a man of the future. Though the crowd be satisfied with some dim feeling that this, anyhow, is the tendency of the times and that with this stream one must swim; though the more thoughtful contemplate the evils of the time and decide to put up with the _pis aller_; the responsible thinker is under the obligation of investigating the land into which the people are being led. We must know what it looks like, where there are no rich people and where no one can have an income without working for it, we must understand what we call the "new society" so as to be able to shape it aright. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: _Von Kommenden Dingen_, by Walther Rathenau. Berlin. S. Fischer.] [Footnote 2: Workers' and Soldiers' Councils.] II The question is not very urgent. As surely as the hundred years' course of the social World-Revolution cannot be arrested, so surely can we prophesy that the process cannot maintain all along the line the rapid movement of its beginning. The victorious and the defeated countries will have to work out to the end the changes and interchanges of their various phases, for in the historical developments which we witness to-day, we find mingled together the phenomena of organic growth and of disease; already we see that the Socialism of the healthy nations is different from that of the sick ones. It is in vain that those who are sick with the Bolshevist disease dream that they can infect the world. The small daily and yearly movements in our realm of Central Europe cannot be determined beforehand, because they depend upon small, accidental, local, and external forces. The great and necessary issues of events can be predicted, but it would be folly to discuss their accidental flux and reflux. When an unguarded house is filled with explosives from the cellar to the roof, then we know that it will one day be blown up; but whether this will happen on a Sunday or a Monday, in the morning or in the evening, or whether the left door post will be left standing or no, it would be idle to inquire. From the historical point of view it is of no consequence whether Radicalism may make an inroad here and there, or whether here and there the forces of reaction and restoration may collect themselves for a transitory triumph. The great movement of history, as we always find when a catastrophe has worked itself out, grows slower, and this retardation in itself looks like reaction. We, who are not accustomed to catastrophes, and who did not produce this first one, but rather suffered it, we, who easily get sea-sick after every rapid movement--think, for instance, of the former Reichstag--we shall certainly experience, as the first deep wave of the Revolution sinks into us, an aristocratic, dynastic, and plutocratic Romanticism, a yearning for the colour and glitter of the time of glory, a revolt against the spiritless, mechanical philanthrophy of unemployed orators of about fourth-form standard intellectually; against the monotonous and insincere tirades of paid agitators and their restless disciples; against laziness; ignorance, greed, and exaggeration masquerading as popular scientific economy; and against the brutal and extortionate upthrust from below. And so we shall arrive at the reverse kind of folly, an admiration and bad imitation of foreign pride and pomp, an arrogant individualism and a hardening of our human feeling. The intellectual war profiteers, who are all for radicalism to-day, will soon be wearing cornflowers[3] in their button-holes. For the third time we shall see an illustration of the naïve shamelessness of the turn-coat. The spiritual process of conversion is worth noticing; Paul was converted to be a converter. But the scurrying of the intellectual speculator from the position which has failed into the position which has won, with the full intention of scurrying back again if necessary, and always with the claim to instruct other people, is an expression of the alarming fact that life has become not an affair of inward conviction, but of getting the right tip. The turn-coat movement began when a shortsighted crowd, incapable of judgment, and with their minds clouded with a few cheap phrases, expected from a quick and victorious war the strengthening of all the elements of Force, and feared to be left stranded. Even the most threadbare kind of liberalism appeared to be compromising, they clamoured for "shining armour." The most wretched victims in soul and body, who were obliged to flee forwards because they could not flee in any other direction, were called heroes, and the manliest word in our language, a word of which only the freest and the greatest are worthy, was degraded. One who has experienced the hate and fury of the turn-coats who poured contempt upon every word against the war and the "great days," is unable to understand how a whole people can throw its errors overboard without shame and sorrow--or he understands it only too well. At this day we are being mocked and preached at by the turn-coats of the second transformation, and to-morrow we shall be smiled at by those of the third. But it does not matter. The moving forces of our epoch do not come from business offices nor from the street, the rostrum, the pulpit, or the professorial chair. The noisy rush of yesterday, to-day and to-morrow is only the furious motion of the outermost circle, the centre moves upon its way, quietly as the stars. We have in our survey to leap over several periods of forward and backward movement and we shall earn the thanks of none of them. What is too conservative for one will be too revolutionary for another, and the æsthete will scornfully tell us that we have no fibre. When we show that what awaits us is no fools' paradise, but the danger of a temporary reverse of humanity and culture, then the facile Utopianist will shout us down with his two parrot-phrases,[4] and when we, out of a sense of duty, of harmony with the course of the world and confidence in justice at the soul of things, tread the path of danger, precipitous though it be, then we shall be scorned by all the worshippers of Force and despisers of mankind. But we for our part shall not pander either to the force-worshippers or to the masses. We serve no powers that be. Our love goes out to the People; but the People are not a crowd at a meeting, nor a sum-total of interests, nor are they the newspapers or debating-clubs. The People are the waking or sleeping, the leaking, frozen, choked, or gushing well of the German spirit. It is with that spirit, in the present and in the future, as it runs its course into the sea of humanity, that we have here to do. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 3: The emblem of the Hohenzollerns.] [Footnote 4: The reference, apparently, is to the argument that any change must be for the better, and to the reliance on surplus value. See pp. 13, 14.] III The criterion which we have indicated for the socialized society of the future is a material one. But is the spiritual condition of an epoch to be determined by material arrangements? Is this not a confession of faith in materialism? We are speaking of a criterion, not of a prime moving force. I have no desire, however, to avoid going into the material, or rather we should say mechanical, interpretation of history. I have done it more than once in my larger works, and for the sake of coherence I may repeat it in outline here. The laws which determine individual destinies are reproduced in the history of collective movements. A man's career is not prescribed by his bodily form, his expression, or his environment; but there is in these things a certain connexion and parallelism, for the same laws which determine the course of his intellectual and spiritual life reflect themselves in bodily and practical shape. Every instant of our experience, all circumstances in which we find ourselves, every limb that we grow, every accident that happens to us, is an expression or product of our character. We are indeed subject to human limitations; we are not at liberty to live under water or in another planet; but within these wide boundaries each of us can shape his own life. To observe a man, his work, his fate, his body and expression, his connexions and his marriage, his belongings and his associations, is to know the man. From this point of view all social, economic and political schemes become futile, for if man is so sovereign a being there is no need to look after him. But these schemes re-acquire a relative importance when we consider the average level of man's will-power, as we meet it in human experience--a power which, as a rule, shows itself unable to make head against a certain maximum of pressure from external circumstances. And again, these schemes are really a part of the expression of human will, for through them collective humanity battles with its surroundings, its contemporary world, and freely shapes its own destinies. The inner laws of the community harmonize with those of the individuals who compose it. The fact that certain national traits of will and character are conditioned or even enforced by poverty or wealth, soil and climate, an inland or maritime position, tends to obscure the fact that these external conditions are not really laid on the people but have been willed by themselves. A people _wills_ to have a nomadic life, or wills to have a sea-coast, or wills agriculture, or war; and has the power, if its will be strong enough, to obtain its desire, or failing that to break up and perish. It is the same will and character which decides for well-being and culture, or indolence and dependence, or labour and spiritual development. The Venetians did not have architecture and painting bestowed upon them because they happened to have become rich, nor the English sea-power because they happened to live on an island: no, the Venetians willed freedom, power and art, and the Anglo-Saxons willed the sea. There is a grain of truth in the popular political belief that war embodies a judgment of God. At any rate character is judged by it; not indeed in the sense of popular politics, that one can "hold out" in a hopeless position, but because all the history that went before the war, the capacity or incapacity of politics and leadership is a question of character--and with us it was a question of indolence, of political apathy, of class-rule, philistinish conceit and greed of gain. Nowhere was this conception of the judgment of God so blasphemously exaggerated as with us Germans, when the lord of our armed hosts, at the demand of the barracks greedy for power, of the tavern-benches, the state-bureaus and the debating societies was summoned, and charged with the duty, forsooth, of chastising England--England, which they only knew out of newspaper reports! To-day this exaggeration is being paid for in humiliation, for God did not prove controllable, and His naïve blasphemers must silently and with grinding teeth admit that their foes are in the right when they, in their turn, appeal to the same judgment to justify, without limit, everything they desire to do. After these brief observations on the psycho-physical complex, Spirit and Destiny, we hope we shall not be misunderstood when for the sake of brevity we speak as if the spirit of the new order were determined by its material construction, while in reality it incorporates itself therein. The structure is the easier to survey, and we therefore make it the starting-point of our discussion. IV All civilisations known to us have sprung from peoples which were numerous, wealthy and divided into two social strata. They reached their climax at the moment when the two strata began to melt into one. It is not enough, therefore, that a people should be numerous and wealthy; it must, with all its wealth and its power, contain a large proportion of poor and even oppressed and enslaved subjects. If it has not got these, it must master and make use of other foreign cultures as a substitute. That is what Rome did; it is what America is doing. It is terrible, but comprehensible. For up to this point the unconscious processes of Nature, the law of mutual strife, has prevailed. So far, collective organizations have been beasts of prey; only now are they about to cross the boundaries of the human order. Comprehensible and explicable. For all creations of culture hold together; one cannot pursue the cheaper varieties while renouncing the more costly. There is no cheap culture. In their totality they demand outlay, the most tremendous outlay known to history, the only outlay by which human toil is recompensed, over and above the supply of absolute necessaries. The creations of civilisation, like all things living and dead, follow on each other--plants, men, beasts and utensils have their sequence generation after generation. Men must paint and look at pictures for ten thousand years before a new picture comes into existence. Our poetry and our research are the fruit of thousands of years. This is no disparagement to genius in work and thought, genius is at once new, ancient and eternal, even as the blossom is a new thing on the old stem, and belongs to an eternal type. When we hear that a native in Central Africa or New Zealand has produced an oil-painting we know that somehow or other he must have got to Paris. When a European artist writes or paints in Tahiti, what he produces is not a work of Tahitian culture. When civilisation has withered away on some sterilized soil, it can only be revived by new soil and foreign seed. The continuity of culture, even in civilized times, can only, however, be maintained by constant outlay, just as in arid districts a luxuriant vegetation needs continuous irrigation. The flood of Oriental wealth had to pour itself into Italy in order to bring forth the bloom of Renaissance art. Thousands of patricians, hundreds of temporal and spiritual princes, had to found and to adorn temples and palaces, gardens, monuments, pageants, games and household goods in order that art and science, schooling, mastership, discipleship and tradition might grow up. The worship of foreign culture which characterized Germany in the seventeenth and half of the eighteenth centuries only meant that our soil was grown too poor to yield a crop of its own. The culture of the Middle Ages remained international only so long as the population of Europe was too sparse and the opportunities of work too scanty to occupy local energies; even in the thinly populated, Homeric middle-ages of Greece, the builder and the poet were not settled in one place, they were wandering artists. If to-day the Republic of Guatemala or Honduras should want a senate-house or a railway-station they will probably send to London or Paris for an architect. Even technique in handicraft and industry, that typical art of civilization, cannot dispense with a great and continuous outlay on training, commissioning and marketing in order to maintain itself. Although it has not happened yet, there is no reason why a Serb or a Slovak should not make some important discovery if he has been trained at a European University and learnt the technical tradition. That will not, however, give rise to an independent and enduring Serbian or Slovakian technique, even though the costliest Universities and laboratories should be established in the country and foreign teachers called to teach in them. After all that, one must have a market in the country itself; expert purchasers, manufacturers, middle-men, a trained army of engineers, craftsmen, masters, workmen and a foreign market as well--in short, the technical atmosphere--in order to keep up the standard of manufacture and production. A poor country cannot turn out products of high value for a rich one; it has not had the education arising from demand. In products relating to sport and to comfort, for instance, England was a model, but in France these products were ridiculously misunderstood and imitated with silly adornments, while on the other hand French products of luxury and art-industry were sought for by all countries. German wares were considered to be cheap and nasty, until the land grew rich, and brought about the co-operation of its forces of science and technique, production and marketing, auxiliary industries and remote profits, finance and commerce, education and training, judgment and criticism, habits of life and a sense of comparative values. But human forces need the same nurture, the same outlay and the same high training, as institutions and material products. Delicate work demands sensitive hands and a sheltered way of life; discovery and invention demand leisure and freedom; taste demands training and tradition, scientific thinking and artistic conception demand an environment with an unbroken continuity of cultivation, thought and intelligence. A dying civilisation can live for a while on the existing humus of culture, on the existing atmosphere of thought, but to create anew these elements of life is beyond its powers. Do not let us deceive ourselves, but look the facts in the face! All these excellent Canadians, with or without an academic degree, who innocently pride themselves on a proletarian absence of prejudice, are adoptive children of a plutocratic and aristocratic cultivation. It is all the same even if they lay aside their stiff collars and eye-glasses; their every word and argument, their forms of thought, their range of knowledge, their strongly emphasized intellectuality and taste for art and science, their whole handiwork and industry, are an inheritance from what they supposed they had cast off and a tribute to what they pretend to despise. Genuine radicalism is only to be respected when it understands the connexion of things and is not afraid of consequences. It must understand--and I shall make it clear--that its rapid advance will kill culture; and the proper conclusion is that it ought to despise culture, not to sponge on it. The early Christians abolished all the heathen rubbish and abominations, the early Radicals would have hurried, in the first instance, to pick out the plums. Culture and civilization, as we see, demand a continuous and enormous outlay; an outlay in leisure, an outlay in working power, an outlay in wealth. They need patronage and a market, they need the school, they need models, tradition, comparison, judgment, intelligence, cultivation, disposition, the right kind of nursery--an atmosphere. One who stands outside it can serve it, often more powerfully with his virgin strength than one who is accustomed to it--but he must be carried along and animated by the breath of the same atmosphere. Culture and civilization require a rich soil. But the richness of the soil is not sufficient; culture must be based upon, and increased by, contrast. Wealth must have at its disposal great numbers of men who are poor and dependent. How otherwise shall the outlay of culture be met? One man must have many at his disposal; but how can he, if they are all his equals? The outlay will be large, but it must be feasible; how can it, if the labour of thousands is not cheap? The few, the exalted, must develop power and splendour, they must offer types for imitation: how can they do that without a retinue, without spectators, without the herd? A land of well-being, that is to say, of equally distributed well-being, remains petty and provincial. When a State and its authorities, councils of solid and thrifty members of societies for this or that, take over the office of a Mæcenas or a Medici, with their proposals, their calculations, their objections, their control, then we get things that look like war-memorials, waiting-rooms, newspaper-kiosks and drinking-saloons. It was not always so? No; but even in the most penurious times it was kings who were the patrons. But if culture is such a poison-flower, if it flourishes only in the swamp of poverty and under the sun of riches, it must and ought to be destroyed. Our sentiment will no longer endure the happiness and brilliance of the few growing out of the misery of the many; the days of the senses are over, and the day of conscience is beginning to dawn. And now a timid and troubled puritanism makes itself heard: Is there no middle way? Will not half-measures suffice? No, it will not do; let this be said once for all as plainly as possible, you champions of the supply of "bare necessities" who talk about "daily bread" and want to butter it with the "noblest pleasures of art." It will not do! No, half-measures will not do, nor quarter-measures. They might, if the whole world, the sick, the healthy and the bloated all together were of the same mind as ourselves. In Moscow it is said that people are expecting the world-revolution every hour, but the world declines to oblige. Therefore, if culture and civilization are to remain what they were, is there nothing for it but with one wrench to tear the poisoned garment from our body? Or--is there then an "or"? Let us see. We have a long way before us. First of all we must know how rich or how poor we and the world are going to be, on the day when there will be no income without working for it and no rich people any more. If our economic system made us self-supporting we might arrange matters on the model of the Boer Republic which had all it needed, and now and then traded a load of ostrich feathers for coffee and hymn books. But we, alas! in order to find nourishment for twenty millions[5] have to export blood and brains. And if, in order to buy phosphates, we offer cotton stockings and night-caps as the highest products of our artistic energies, and declare that they are all the soundest hand-work--for in our "daily bread" economy we shall have long forgotten how to work such devil's tools as the modern knitting-machine--then people will reply to us: in the first place we don't want night-caps, and if we did we can supply them for one-tenth of the cost; and our cotton goods will be sent back to us as unsaleable. A world-trade, even of modest dimensions, can only be carried on upon the basis of high technical accomplishment, but this height of accomplishment cannot be attained on the basis of any penny-wise economy. Whoever wills the part must also will the whole, but to this whole belongs not merely the conception of a technique, but of a civilization, and indeed of a culture. One might as well demand of a music-hall orchestra which plays ragtime all the year round that once in the year, and once only, on Good Friday, it should pull itself together to give an adequate performance of the Passion Music of Bach. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 5: By this figure the author seems to be referring to the population of the impoverished Germany of the future if the course of Socialism proceeds on wrong lines.] V For some decades Germany will be one of the poorest of countries. How poor she will be does not depend on herself alone, but on the power and the will for mischief of others--who hate us. However, poverty and wealth are relative terms; Germans are still richer on the average than their forefathers; richer than the Romans or Greeks. The standard of well-being is set by the best-off of the competitors, for he it is who determines the current standard of technique and industry, the methods of production, the minimum of labour and skill. We cannot, as we have already seen, keep aloof from world-competition, for Germany needs cheap goods. We must therefore try to keep step so far as we can. Even if we shut our eyes and take no more account of our debt to foreign lands than we do of the war-tribute, we must admit that the average standard of well-being in America far surpasses the German. Goods are not so dear as with us, and the wages of the skilled worker amounts to between seven and ten dollars a day--more than 100 marks in our money; and many artisans drive to their workshops in their own automobiles. If, now, we ask our Radicals how they envisage the problem of competition with such a country, which in one generation will be twenty-or thirty-fold as rich as we are, they will blurt out a few sentences in which we shall catch the word "Soviet system," "surplus value,"[6] "world revolution." But in truth the question will never occur to them--it is not ventilated at public meetings. Among themselves they talk, albeit without much conviction, about "surplus value"--which has nothing whatever to do with the present question, and in regard to which it has been proved to them often enough that so far as it can be made use of at all, it only means about a pound of butter extra per head of the population. The economic superiority of the Western powers, however, goes on growing, inasmuch as to all appearance they are getting to work seriously to establish the new economy (which we have buried) in the form of State Socialism. A healthy, or what is to-day the same thing, a victorious economy, does not leap over any of its stages; it will work gradually through the apparently longer, but constant, movement from Capitalism to State Socialism and thence to full Socialism; while we, it seems, want to take a shortcut, and to miss out the intervening stage. And we lose so much time and energy in restless fluctuations forward and backward, hither and thither, that this leap in advance may fall short. If anything could be more stupid and calamitous than the war itself it was the time when it broke out. There was one thing which the big capitalism of the world was formed to supply, which it was able to supply, and, in fact, was supplying: the thing which not only justified capitalism, but showed it to be an absolutely necessary stage in the development of a denser population. This was the enrichment of the peoples, the rapid, and even anticipatory restoration of equilibrium between the growing population and the indispensable increase in the means of production; in other words, general well-being. The unbroken progress of America, and the almost unbroken progress of England will demonstrate that in one, or at most two, generations the power of work and the output of mechanism would have risen to such a pitch that we could have done anything we liked in the direction of lightening human labour and reconciling social antagonisms. Alas, it was in vain! The rapid advance to prosperity of the people of Central Europe, who had been accustomed to thrift and economy, went to their heads; they fell victims to the poison of capitalism and of mechanism; they were unable, like America in its youthful strength, to make their new circumstances deepen their sense of responsibility; in their greedy desire to store as much as possible of the heavenly manna in their private barns they abandoned their destinies to a superannuated, outworn feudal class and to aspiring magnates of the bourgeoisie; they would not be taught by political catastrophes, and at last, in the catastrophe of the war, they lost at once their imaginary hopes, their traditional power and the economic basis of their existence. Those who are now pursuing a policy of desperation are unconsciously building their hopes on the breakdown which brought them to the top: they are avowedly making the hoped-for revolution in the West the central point of their system. If the West holds out, they will be false prophets; but it will not only hold out, it will in the beginning at all events, witness a great and passionate uprising of imperialistic and capitalistic tendencies. If there is any one who did not understand that a policy based on hopes of other peoples' bankruptcy is the most flimsy and frivolous of all policies, he might well have learned it from the war. Germany must forge her own destinies for herself, without side-glances at the good or ill fortune of others. Had time only been given us to pass naturally from the stage of a prolonged and corrupted childhood into that of a manly responsibility, our ultimate recovery would be assured. But we have to accomplish in months what ought to be the evolution of decades; our national training has left us without convictions, we have no eye for the true boundaries of rights, claims and responsibilities, and we hesitate as to how far we must or ought to go. Unprepared, weakened, impoverished and sick, we are required, at the most unlucky moment, to work out a new and unprecedented order of life. Before even the educated classes are capable of forming a judgment on the question, the most incapable masses of the rawest youth, of the lowest classes of society, are let loose, and sit upon the judgment-seat. It is not only that we have been rich and have become very poor, but we were always politically immature, and are so still. If the order of Society is to be that of root-and-branch Socialism, it will mean the proletarian condition for all of us, and for a long time to come. There is no use in flattering ourselves and painting the future better than it is; the truth must be spoken with all plainness. If we work hard, and under capable guidance, each of us will at most have an effective income of 500 marks in pre-war values, or, say, 2000 marks for the family. This average will be higher if we proceed on the principles of the New Economy,[7] but again will be reduced by the necessity for allowing extra pay for work of higher value. If to-day the average income available is markedly higher than the above, the reason is that we are living on our capital; we are living on the products of work which ought to be reserved for the maintenance and renewal of the means of production; in other words we are exhausting the soil and slaughtering our stock. We are also consuming what foreign countries give us on credit; in other words, we are living on borrowed money. It is childish lying and deception to act on the tacit assumption that thoroughgoing Socialism means something like a garden-city idyll, with play-houses, open-air theatres, excursions, picturesque raiment and fire-side art. This in itself quite decent ideal of the average architect, art-craftsman and art-reformer if expressed in dry figures would, "at the lowest estimate" as they say, demand about fivefold the capacity for production attainable by the utmost exertions and with a ten hours' day _before the war_--before the downfall of our economy and our exploitation by the enemy. To place one-third of our working-class in decent, freehold dwellings would alone, if the material and means of production sufficed, require the whole working-capacity of the country for two years. Even after the last manufacturer's villa-residence, the last palace-hotel, have long been turned into tenements, the solution of the most urgent part of the housing-question will still be an affair of decades. For the sake of the last remnant of our self-respect we must finally tear asunder that web of economic falsehood, woven out of ignorance, mental lethargy, concealment and illusion, which has taken the place of the political. Let us see any one attempt to prove that Germany can carry on, I do not say a well-off, but even a petty tradesman's kind of existence, unless our means of production can by some stroke of magic be multiplied tenfold--on paper it can be done with ease--or unless the production value (not turnover), which an adult working-man can with the utmost exertion bring into being in the course of a year does not many times exceed the average value of 2000 marks. No doubt the young folk of our big cities promise themselves a merry time for six weeks when they have got power, the shops, the wardrobes and the wine-cellars into their hands. For the leaders, it may last a little longer than for the rank-and-file. And then, for those of the former who have any sense of honesty, will come a question of conscience, which may be delayed by printing paper-money, but cannot be solved by any appeal to the people. If Bolshevism were the contrary to what it is--if it were a success, a thing not absolutely impossible in a peasant-State, we might understand the self-assurance of those who, in opposition to our forecast, expect everything from the will of the people, the Soviet system and the inspirations of the future. We do understand it in the case of the drawing-room communists, and the profiteer-extremists who are out not for the cause, but for power, and perhaps only for material objects. I know that by these observations I am favouring the cause of those sorry dignitaries of a day, the Majority Socialists, but I cannot help that. The truth is not false because it favours one party, nor is falsehood truth because it harms the other. The Socialism now in power is doing the right thing, although it is doing it out of ignorance and helplessness--it is waiting, and getting steam up. It is better to do the right thing out of error than to do the wrong thing out of wisdom. Out of error: for besides omitting to do what ought not to be done it also omits the things it ought to do--among others, the introduction of the New Economy.[8] It is like mankind before the Fall; it does not know good from evil, what is useful and what is noxious, what can be done and what cannot. Well--let it take its time; it shall have time enough. This time must be turned to good account. When we have come to the end of these observations we shall understand what a huge task lies between us and the realization of the new social order. In this case the longest way round is the shortest way home. And even if Germany should choose the mountain road with its broad loops and windings, we shall stray often enough, and go backward now and then; while if, in impatient revolt, we try to climb straight up, we shall slip down lower than where we started. Let us never forget how mysteriously our social and political immaturity seems to be bound up with our once lofty and even now remarkable intellectuality and morality.[9] We have not won our liberties, they have fallen into our laps; it was by the general breakdown, by a strike, by a flight, that Germany and her former rulers have parted company. These liberties, social and political, are not rooted in the soil, they can hardly be said to be prized among the treasures of life, it is not their ideal, but their material side which attracts us. Those who used to shout Hurrah! now cry "All power to the Soviets!" and the day will come when they will again shout Hurrah! Then we shall witness a real sundering of our different visions of the world, visions now buried under a mass of interests and speculations. In any case, whether the change is to be catastrophic or evolutionary, the journey will be a long one, and every attempt to hurry it will only prolong it further; it will throw us back for years, or it may be decades. Above all things, we must know whither we are going. In order to adapt ourselves to a new form of society we must know what it _may_ look like, what it _ought_ to look like, and what it _will_ look like. We shall find that Germany is not going to be landed in an earthly Paradise, but in a world of toil, and one which for a long period will be a world of poverty, of a penurious civilization and of a deeply-endangered culture. The unproved, parrot-phrases of a cheap Utopianism will grow dumb--those phrases which offer us entrance into the usual Garden of Eden with its square-cut, machine-made culture and gaudy, standardized enjoyments--phrases which assure us that when we have introduced the six-hours' working day and abolished private property, the cinema horrors will be replaced by classical concerts, the gin-shops by popular reading-rooms, the gaming-hells by edifying lectures, highway robberies by gymnastic exercises, detective novels by Gottfried Keller, bazaar-trifles and comic vulgarities by works of refined handicraft; and that out of boxing contests, racecourse betting, bomb exercises, and profiteering in butter, we shall see the rise of an era of humility and philanthropy. In the Promised Land as we conceive it, the classes which are now the bearers of German culture will lose almost everything, while the gain of the proletariat will be scarcely visible. And yet for the sake of this scarcely visible gain we must tread the stony path that lies before us. Willingly and joyfully shall we tread it; for out of this, at first, dubious conquest of equal rights for all men will grow the might of justice, of human dignity, of human solidarity and unity. That is truly work for a century, and yet for that very reason the hard path will lead to its reward. We must learn to know it, and to understand that it is a path of sacrifice. We must not accept the invitation of fools to a Christmas party--fools who will make the welkin ring with their outcries when they find out their self-deception. Let us tread our path of suffering with a pride which disdains to be consoled by illusions. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 6: By surplus-value (_Mehrwert_) the author means all that is produced above and beyond the bare necessities of life.] [Footnote 7: _Die Neue Wirtschaft_, by Walther Rathenau (S. Fischer). In this brief study, Rathenau urges (1) the unification and standardization of the whole of German industry and commerce in one great Trust, working under a State charter, and armed with very extensive powers; and (2) a great intensification of the application of science and mechanism to production.] [Footnote 8: See p. 37, _note_.] [Footnote 9: Morality, _Sittlichkeit_, a word of broader meaning than "morality," for it comprehends not only matters of ethical right and wrong, but the general temper and habit of mind of a people as expressed in social life.] VI In order to throw some light into the obscurity of that social dreamland which no one seriously discusses because no one honestly believes in it, let us, as it were, cut out and examine a section from the fully socialized Germany of the future. Let us suppose that certain economic and social conditions have lasted for a generation or so, and have therefore become more or less stabilized. At a normal rate of progress this state of things should be reached about the end of this century. To begin with, let us make two very optimistic assumptions--first, that technical progress in Germany shall have developed to a point at which we are no longer impossibly outclassed and distanced by foreign nations, and, secondly, that by a timely and far-reaching reform of education and culture (the lowest cost of which must be set down at about three milliards of marks) the complete breakdown of civilisation may be averted. This reform is one which must be taken in hand very early, for _after_ the event its adoption is improbable. A third, less optimistic but on that account more probable assumption may be added to this--namely, that the Western countries shall have progressed towards Socialism more steadily and therefore more slowly, and that at the period of our comparison America shall find itself at the stage of State-Socialism, not of full socialization. We know that in making this assumption we are smoothing the way for attack to our professional opponents, uncritical and self-interested, who with one blast of the fanfare of world-revolution can scatter our further observations to the winds. Full Socialism is characterized, as we have seen, by the abolition of all incomes that are not worked for, and the fact that there are no more rich. But this criterion must be limited in its application, for it can never be fully realized. According to the theory and the laws every one must hold some appointment and be paid for his work, or for not working. What he is paid, however, he can at will utilize, or waste, or hoard up, or give, or gamble away, or destroy. He cannot invest it, or get interest on it or turn into capital, because these private undertakings or means of production will no longer exist. Now each of these assumptions is so shaky that not only must trifling divergences and shortcomings be winked at, but the meshes of the system are so wide that only a rough approximation to the ideal is possible. It is true that every one can be made to hold some appointment and be paid for some minimum of work, but no one can be prevented from devoting his leisure hours to some work of rare quality and turning it into value for his own purposes. He can make himself useful by subsidiary employment of an artistic, scientific or technical character, by rendering services or assistance of various kinds, by advising, or entertaining, or acting as a guide to strangers, or going on employment abroad, and no law can prevent him from turning his services into income even if he was merely paid in kind. Gaming and betting will flourish and many will grow rich by them. A man who has lost his money and who has exhausted his rights to an advance from the public institutions for that object will have recourse to lenders who will supply him with bread and meat and clothes, and who will make money by it. Similarly with people who are tempted to make acquisitions beyond their standard remuneration. On every side we shall see private stores of goods of all kinds, which will take the place of property as formerly understood. There will be an enormous temptation to smuggling and profiteering which will reach a height far surpassing all scandals of the war and revolution periods. Foreigners and their agents, who look after the export trade "from Government to Government," will help hoarders and savers to turn their goods to account. Suppose citizens are attacked because their senseless expenditure is a mockery of their legal remuneration, they will say: I got this from friends--that I got by exchange--this came from abroad--my relatives in America sent me that. Law, control, terrorism, are effective just so long as there is not a blade of grass in the land--once remove the fear of hunger and they are useless. Great properties will arise, drawing interest both abroad and at home, and they will grow by evasions and bribery. The profiteer, the true child of the "great days," will not perish from the land, on the contrary, he will grow tougher the more he is persecuted, he will be the rich man of the future, and he will form a constant political danger if he and his fellows combine. So long as we have not acquired an entirely new mentality, one which detaches men from possessions, which points them towards the Law, which binds the passions, and sharpens the conscience, so long will the principle of "No rich people and no workless income" have to be contracted into the formula, "There ought to be none." Without this profound alteration of mentality, even the legally prescribed incomes will exhibit quite grotesque variations, and will adapt themselves to the rarity-value of special gifts, to indispensable qualities, to favouritism, with a crudity quite unknown to-day. A scarcity of Ministers, a Professor's nourishment, and soldiers' supplies, will then as now be met according to the law of supply and demand. Consider what ten years' practice in the war for wages and strike-management, with the public in it as partisans, will bring with it in the way of favouritisms, celebrities, and indispensabilities. Popular jockeys, successful surgeons, managers of sports' clubs, tenors, demimondaines, farce-writers and champion athletes could, even to-day, if they were class-conscious and joined together to exploit their opportunities, demand any income they liked. Even as a matter of practical political economy, the cinema-star (or whatever may succeed her) will be able to prescribe to the Government what amount of adornments, drawn from Nature or Art, are necessary for her calling, and what standard of life she must maintain in order to keep herself in the proper mood. Organizers, popular leaders, authors and artists will announce and enforce their demands to the full limit of their rarity-value. At a considerable distance below these come the acquired and more or less transferable powers and talents. The Russians for the first few months believed in a three-fold order of allowances, rising within a limit of about one to two. If the ideas now prevailing have not undergone a radical change, then we may, in the society of the future, look for divergences of income in the limit of one to a thousand. Therefore the principle that there shall be no more rich people must again be substantially limited. We must say, "There will be people receiving extraordinary incomes in kind to which must be added the claims to personal service which these favoured persons will lay down as conditions of their work." In its external, arithmetical structure, the fabric of life and its requirements in the new order will resemble that of to-day far more closely than most of us imagine--on the other hand, the inward and personal constitution of man will be far more different. Already we can observe the direction of the movement. Extravagance and luxury will continue to exist, and those who practise it will be, as they are to-day, and more than to-day, the profiteers, the lucky ones, and the adventurers. Excessive wealth will be more repulsive than it is now; whether it will be less valued depends upon the state of public ethics, a topic which we shall have to consider later. It is probable that in defiance of all legislation wealth will turn itself into expenditure and enjoyment more rapidly and more recklessly than to-day. But the relics of middle-class well-being will by that time have been consumed; the families which for generations have visibly incorporated the German spirit will less than others contrive to secure special advantages by profiteering and evading the laws; as soon as their modest possessions are taxed away or consumed they will melt into the general mass of needy people who will form the economic average of the future. The luxury which will exhibit itself in streets and houses will have a dubious air; every one will know that there is something wrong with it, people will spy and denounce, and find to their disgust that nothing can be proved; the well-off will be partly despised, partly envied; the question how to suppress evasions of the law will take up a good half of all public discussions, just as that of capitalism does now. The hateful sight of others' prosperity cannot, even at home, not to mention foreign countries, be withdrawn from the eyes of the needy masses; capitalism will have merely acquired another name and other representatives. The fact that the average of more or less cultivated and responsible folk are plunged in poverty will not be accepted as the consequence of an unalterable natural law, nor as a case of personal misfortune; it will be set down to bad government, and the rising revolutionary forces of the fifth, sixth and seventh classes will nourish the prevailing discontent in favour of a new revolt. For the greater uniformity of the average way of life and its general neediness will not in itself abolish the division of classes. I have already often enough pointed out that no mechanical arrangements can avail us here. At first there will be three, or more probably four classes who, in spite of poverty, will not dissolve in the masses, and who, through their coherence and their intellectual heritage are by no means without power. The Bolshevist plan of simply killing them out will not be possible in Germany, they are relatively too numerous; persecution will weld them closer together, and their traditional experiences, habits of mind, and capacity, will make it necessary to have recourse to them and employ them again and again. The first of these classes is that of the feudal nobility. Their ancient names cannot be rooted out of the history of Germany, and even in their poverty the bearers of these names will be respected--all the more if, as we may certainly assume, they maintain the effects of their bodily discipline, and the visible tradition of certain forms of life and thought. They will be strengthened by their mutual association, their relationship with foreign nobility will give them important functions in diplomacy; these are two elements which they have in common with Catholicism and Judaism. They will retain their inclination and aptitude for the calling of arms and for administration; their reactionary sentiments will lead now to success, now to failure, and by both the inner coherence of the class will be fortified. Finally, the inevitable reversion to an appreciation of the romantic values of life will make a connexion with names of ancient lineage desirable to the leading classes, and especially to the aristocracy of officialism. This aristocracy of officialism forms the second of the new strata which will come to light. The first office-bearers of the new era, be their achievements great or small, are not to be forgotten. Their descendants are respected as the bearers of well-known names; in their families the practice of politics, the knowledge of persons and connexions are perpetuated; fathers, in their lifetime, look after the interests of sons and daughters and launch them on the same path. From these, and from the first stratum, the representatives of Germany in foreign lands are chosen, and in this way a certain familiarity with international life and society will be maintained. They will have the provision necessary for their position abroad, and will also find ways and means to keep up a higher standard of life at home. Persons in possession of irregular means of well-being will offer a great deal to establish connexions with these circles, which control so many levers in the machine of State. The third group consists of the descendants of what was once the leading class in culture and in economics. Here we find a spirit similar to that of the refugees, _émigrés_ and Huguenots of the past. The lower they sink in external power, the more tenaciously they hold to their memories. Every family knows every other and cherishes the lustre of its name, a lustre augmented by legendary recollections, all the more when the achievements of their class are ostentatiously ignored in the new social order. People spare and save to the last extremity in order to preserve and hand down some heirloom--a musical instrument, a library, a manuscript, a picture or two. A puritanical thrift is exercised in order, as far as possible, to maintain education, culture and intellectuality on the old level; to this class culture, refinement of life as an end in itself, the practice of religion, classical music, and artistic feeling will fly for refuge. No other class understands this one; it holds itself aloof, it looks different from the rest in its occupations, its habits, its garb and its forms of life. It supplies the new order with its scholars, its clergy, its higher teaching power, its representatives of the most disinterested and intellectual callings. Like the monasteries of the Middle Ages, it forms an island of the past. Its influence rises and falls periodically, according to the current ideas of the time, but its position is assured by its voluntary sacrifices, by its knowledge and by the purity of its motives. A fourth inexpugnable and influential stratum will in all probability be formed by the middle-class landowners and the substantial peasants. Even though the socialization of the land should be radically carried through--which is not likely to be the case--it will remain on paper. A class of what may be called State-tenants, estate-managers, or leaders of co-operative organizations will very much resemble a landowning class. Its traditional experience and the ties that bind it to the soil make it a closed and well-defined body, self-conscious and masterful through the importance of its calling, its indispensability and its individualism. It suffers no dictation as regards its manner of life. Here we shall see the conservative traditions of the country strongly mustered for defence, incapable of being eliminated as a political force, and forming a counterpoise to the radical democracy of the towns. Everywhere we find a state of strain and of cleavage. The single-stratum condition of society cannot be reached without a profound inward change; politics are still stirred and shaken by conflicts, and society by the strife of classes. A very different picture from the promised Utopian Paradise of a common feeding-ground for lions and sheep! We are all aggrieved by the illegal opulence of the profiteers, but we are all liable to the infection. The feudalistic Fronde awaits its opportunity. The aristocracy of office endeavours to monopolize the State-machine. The _émigrés_ of culture find themselves looked askance at, on suspicion of intellectual arrogance, and they insist that the country cannot get on without them. The agriculturalists are feared, when they show a tendency to revolt against the towns. The ruling class, that is to say the more or less educated masses of the city-democracy, looks in impatient discontent for the state of general well-being which refuses to be realized, lays the blame alternately on the four powerful strata and on the profiteers, and fights now this group now that, for better conditions of living. But the conditions of living do not improve--they get worse. The level of the nation's output has been sinking from the first day of the Revolution onwards. The absolute productivity of work, the relative efficacy and the quality of the product, have all deteriorated. With a smaller turnover we have witnessed a falling-off in the excellence of the goods, in research-work, and in finish. Industrial plant has been worked to death and has not yet recovered. Auxiliary industries, accessories and raw materials have fallen back. High-quality workmanship has suffered from defective schooling, youthful indiscipline and the loss of manual dexterity. The new social order has lost a generation of leaders in technique, scholarship and economics. Universities, with all institutions of research and education, have suffered from this blank. Technical leadership is gone, and the deterioration in quality has reacted detrimentally on output. We can now turn out nothing except what is cheap and easy, and what can be produced without traditional skill of hand, without serious calculation and research. For all innovations, all work of superior quality, Germany is dependent on the foreigner. The atmosphere of technique has vanished, and the stamp of cheap hireling labour is on the whole output of the country. In the weeks of the Revolution street orators used to tell us that five hundred Russian professors had signed a statement that the level of culture had never been so high as under Bolshevism. And Berlin believed them! To educate Russia it would take, to begin with, a million elementary schools with a yearly budget of several dozen milliards of roubles, and a corresponding number of higher schools and universities: if every educated Russian for the next twenty years were to become a teacher, there would not be enough of them--not to speak of the requirements of transport, of raw materials and of agriculture. The fabric of a civilization and a culture cannot be annihilated at one blow, nor can it grow up save in decades and centuries. The maintenance of the structure demands unceasing toil and unbroken tradition; the breach that has been made in it in Germany can only be healed by the application in manifold forms of work, intellect and will; and this hope we cannot entertain.[10] But we have not yet done with the question of social strata and inward cleavage. Revolutionary threats are causing strife every day. Revolution against revolution--how is this possible? We are not speaking of a reactionary revolution but of the "activist." In an earlier work I discussed the theory of continuous revolution.[11] Behind every successful revolutionary movement there stands another, representing one negation more than its predecessor. Behind the revolt of the aristocracy stood that of the bourgeoisie, behind that of the bourgeoisie stood Socialism. Behind the now ruling fourth class[12] rises the fifth, and a sixth is coming into sight. If a ninth should represent pure Anarchism, we may see an eleventh proclaiming a dictatorship, and a twelfth standing for absolute monarchy. To-day the Majority Socialists are in power, that is to say the Right section of the fourth class. This is composed of the older, trained and work-willing Trade Unionists, who are amazed at the Revolution, who do not regard it as quite legitimate, but who are determined to defend the _status quo_ in so far as a certain degree of self-determination and elbow-room in the material conditions of life still remain to them. The Left section consists of youths and of persons disgusted with militarism, ignorant of affairs but cherishing a certain independence of judgment; still ready for work but equally so for politics. To these, as a "forward" party, the doctrinaire theorists have allied themselves. The designation of the party "The Independents" is characteristic; its goal, "All power to the Soviets," is a catchword from Russia. A fifth class is now emerging--the work-shy. The others call them the tramp-proletariat, the disgruntled, the declassed, who set their hopes on disorder. Their goal is still undetermined--their favourite expression is "bloodhound," when those in power, or Government troops, are referred to. Then comes the sixth class, still partly identified with the Left of the fourth and embryonically attached to the fifth. These are the indomitable loafers and shirkers, physically and mentally unsound, aliens in the social order, excluded by their sufferings, their punishments, their vices and passions; self-excluded, repudiators of law and morality, born of the cruelty of the city, pitiable beings, not so much cast out of society as cast up against it, as a living reproach to its mechanical organization. If these ever come into the light in politics, they will demand a kind of syndicalistic communism. That is as far as we can see at present into the as yet unopened germs of continuous revolutionary movement. In these are contained the infinite series of all principles that can conceivably be supported; and it would be wholly false to see in this series merely so many successive steps in moral degeneration, even though the earlier stages should proceed on a flat denial of ethical principles. Later on will come revivals and restorations, political, ethical and religious, and each time we shall see the rising stratum attaching to itself strays and converts, above all, the disappointed and ambitious, from those that went before. But the number of revolutions will grow till we lose count of them, and each, however strenuously it may profess its horror of bloodshed, will have only one hope and possibility: that of defending itself by armed force against its successor. The game is a grotesquely dishonest one, because every aspirant movement will cast against its forerunner the charge of ruling by bloodshed, while it itself is already preparing its armed forces for the conflict. It is therefore wholly vain to hope that an advanced social organization implies stability, that a brotherhood mechanically decreed will exclude further revolutions, and will establish eternally an empire of righteousness and justice according to any preconceived pattern. The fiercest hatred will prevail amongst those who are most closely associated--for instance, between handworkers and brainworkers, between leaders and followers; and this hate will be all the more inappeasable when it is open to every one to rise in the world, and none can cherish the excuse that he is the victim of a social system of overwhelming power. To-day this hatred is masked by the general class-hatred--hatred of the monopolists of culture, of position and of capital. At the bottom of it, however, lies even to-day the more universal hatred of the defeated for the victor, and when those three monopolies have fallen, it will emerge in its original Cain-like form. It cannot be appeased by any mechanical device. Human inequality can never be abolished, human accomplishment and work will always vary, and the human passion for success will always assert itself. We have discussed the material foundation and the stratification of the German people when full socialization has been realized. Let us now forecast the manner of their existence. The future community is poor; the individual is poor. The average standard of well-being corresponds, at best, to what in peace-time one would expect from an income of 3000 marks.[13] But the requirements of the population are not mediævally simplified--they could not be, in view of the density of the population and the complexity of industrial and professional vocations. They are manifold and diverse, and they are moreover intensified by the spectacle of extravagance offered by the profiteering class and the licence of social life. The traditional garden-city idyll of architects and art-craftsmen is a Utopia about as much like reality as the pastoral Arcadianism of Marie Antoinette. All things of common use are standardized into typical forms. It must not be supposed, however, that they are based on pure designs and models. The taste of the artist will clash with that of the crowd, and since the former has no authority to back him he will have to compromise. The compromise, however, consists in cheap imitation of foreign models, for in foreign countries art-industry will exist, and no legislation can prevent its products from finding their way (in reproductions or actual examples) into Germany and being admired there. Our half or wholly imitative products are turned out as cheaply as possible, in substitute-materials, and are made as well or as ill as the relics of our craftsmanship permit, or as our existing machinery for the purpose is capable of. Cheapness and ease of manufacture are the principles aimed at, for even with narrow means no one will want to do without certain things; fashions still prevail, and will have to be satisfied with things that do not last, but can be constantly changed. How far will a new system of education tend to simplify the needs of men and women and to purify their taste? Probably very little, for good models will be lacking, poverty is not fastidious, and the taste of the populace is the sovereign arbiter. But on this taste it depends whether vulgar ornaments and gewgaws, frivolities and bazaar-horrors, are to satisfy the desires of the soul. Objects of earlier art and industry have been alienated through need of money or destroyed by negligence. Here and there one may find an old cup or an engraving, as we do to-day in plundered territories, but these things are disconnected specimens; all they can do is occasionally to interest an artist. Whoever wants to procure some object or to get something done which has not been standardized in the common range of approved requirements must gain it by a tedious course of pinching and saving. Personal possessions in the way of books, musical instruments, works of art, as well as travel outside the prescribed routes are rarities; a tree of one's own, a horse of one's own are legendary things. Thus luxury in its better aspect has gone to ruin quicker than in the bad. All outlay devoted to culture, to beauty, to invigoration has dried up; all that survives is what stimulates, what depraves and befouls; frivolities, substitutes and swindles. What we have arrived at is not the four-square simplicity of the peasant-homestead, but a ramshackle city suburb. To some of us it is not easy, and to many it is not agreeable to picture to themselves the aspect of a thoroughly proletarianized country, and the difficulty lies in the fact that the popular mind has, as it were by universal agreement, resolved to conceive the future on a basis of domestic prosperity about tenfold as great as it can possibly be. The leaders and office-holders of the proletariat have an easy task in convincing themselves and others that what they approve and are struggling for is the so-called middle-class existence with all the refinement and claims of historic culture. Tacitly, as a matter of course, they accept what plutocracy has to give them, and imagine that the loans they take up from the civilization and culture of the past can be redeemed from the social gains of the future. The stages at which a nation arrives year by year, can be estimated by its building. In the new order, little is being built. Apart from certain perfunctory garden-cities, which are being erected for the principle of the thing, to meet the needs of a few thousand favoured households, and which perhaps will never be finished, we will for decades have to content ourselves with new subdivisions and exploitation of the old buildings; old palaces packed to the roof with families, will stand in the midst of vegetable gardens and will alternate with empty warehouses in the midst of decayed cities. In the streets of the suburbs the avenues of trees will be felled, and in the cities grass will grow through the cracks of the pavement. For a long time it used to be believed that the passion of the landscape painters of the seventeenth century for introducing ruins with hovels nestling among them arose from a feeling for romance. This is not so--they only painted what they saw around them after the ravages of the Thirty Years' War. It must not be supposed, however, that the forecast in these pages is based on the consequences of the war; these no doubt must darken our picture of the future; but the shadows, which I have put in as sparingly as I could, are essentially the expression of a greatly reduced economic efficiency, combined with the uniformity produced by the general proletarianization of life with the absence of any correcting factor in individual effort of a rational character and of the influence of higher types. A brighter trait in the material conditions of life will be formed by effort of a collective character, such as even the most penurious community may be able to undertake. The more severely the domestic household has to pinch, and the more unattractive it thereby becomes, the more completely will life be forced into publicity. Private claims and aspirations, which cannot be satisfied, will be turned over to the public. Men will gather in the streets and places of public resort, and have more mutual intercourse than before, since every transaction of life, even the most insignificant, will have to be a subject of discussion, agreement and understanding. In all the arrangements of social life, _e.g._ for news, communications, supplies, discussion and entertainment, and demands will be made and complied with for greater convenience and comprehensiveness, for popular æsthetics and popular representation. In these arrangements and in these alone Art will have to find its functions and its home. Public buildings, gardens, sanatoriums, means of transit and exhibitions will be established at great cost. All the demands of the spirit and of the senses will seek their satisfaction in public. There will be no lack of popular performances, excursions, tours and conducted visits to collections; of clubs, libraries, athletic meetings and displays. The aspect of this tendency from the point of view of culture and ethics we have still to consider; in its social aspect (apart from the fact that it causes a vacuum in the home and forces young people to the surface of life, and in spite of its mechanical effect) it will act as a comforting reminiscence of the civic commonalty and solidarity of mediæval times. In considering the spiritual and cultural life of a fully socialized society, we have to start with the assumption that any one man's opinion and decision are as good as another's. Authority, even in matters of the highest intellectual or spiritual character, only exists in so far as it is established, acknowledged and confirmed either by direct action of the people's will, or indirectly through their representatives. Every one's education and way of life are much the same; there are no secrecies, no vague authority attaching to special vocations; no one permits himself to feel impressed by any person or thing. Every one votes, whether it be for an office, a memorial, a law, or a drama, or does it through delegates or the delegates of delegates. Every one is determined to know the how and where and why of everything--just as to-day in America--and demands a plausible reason for it. The reply, "This is a matter you don't understand," is impossible. Everything is referred to one's own conscience, one's own intelligence, one's own taste, and no one admits any innate or acquired superiority in others. In debate, the boundaries between the ideal and the practicable are obliterated; for on the one hand every one is too much preoccupied with material needs, and on the other, too confident, too unaccustomed to submit himself to what in former days was called a deeper insight, too loosely brought up to let himself be taught. We never, therefore, hear such judgments as: This, although it is difficult, is a book to be read; this drama ought to have been produced although it is not sensational; I don't myself care for this memorial, but it must remain because a great artist made it; this is a necessary branch of study, although it has no practical application; I will vote for this man on account of his character and ability, although he has made no election-promises. On the other hand, the following kind of argument will have weight: This historic building must be demolished, for it interferes with traffic; this collection must be sold, for we need money; we need no chair of philosophy, but we do need one for cinema-technique; these ornamental grounds are the very place for a merry-go-round; tragedies are depressing, they must not be performed in the State theatres. Let us recall certain oversea legislation--carried out, be it noted in countries still swayed by the traditional influence of culture--and these examples will not seem exaggerated. Where there is no appeal to authority, where none need fear disapproval or ridicule, where convenience is prized and thrift rules supreme, there thought and decision will be short-breathed, and will never look beyond the needs of the day. Who will then care for far-off deductions, for wide arcs of thought? Calculation comes to the front, everything unpractical is despised; opinions are formed by discussion, everyday reading and propaganda. Men demand proofs, success, visible returns. The fewer the aims, the stronger will be their attraction. People are tolerant, for they are used to hearing the most varied opinions, and all opinions have followers, from the water-cure to Tâoism; but the only opinion of any influence is that whose followers are many. Public opinion settles everything. The champions of absolute values have to accommodate themselves to the law of competition. Religious teaching has to seek the favour of the times by the same methods as a new system of physical culture. A work of art must compete for votes. Only by popularity-hunting can anything come to life; there will be no doing without much talking. As in the later days of Greece, rhetoric and dialectic are the most powerful of the arts. And since manual labour cherishes silently or openly a bitter grudge against intellectual labour, the latter has to protect itself by a pretence of sturdy simplicity; when two teachers are competing for the head-mastership of a classical school each tries to prove that he has the hornier hand. Most things in this new order are decided by weight of numbers. Advertisement and propaganda are banished from socialized industry and commerce; instead, they compete in the service of personal and ideal aims--in elections, theatres, systems of medicine, superstitions, arts, appointments, professorships, churches. Art has for the third time changed its master--after the princes, Mæcenas, the middle-class market; after Mæcenas, the plebs, and export trade. Whether by means of representation through gilds, by compulsion, by patronage, or by favour, Art has become dependent; it must explain, exhort, contend; it can no longer rest proudly on itself. It must aim at getting a majority on its side, and this it can only do by sensationalism. Like all other features of intellectual life, it must march with the times. Like all technique, research, learning and handicraft it suffers through the loss, for several generations, of tradition and hereditary skill, but together with this drop there is also a drop in the character of the demand; quality has given way to actuality.[14] Certain reactions based on practical experience are not excluded; the constant comparison with the past and with foreign countries will show the value of the cultivation of a science, of an art which has no fixed prepossessions and serves no immediate aims. Measures are taken, though without much conviction, by free Academies or the like, to win back something of this; but the atmosphere is not favourable to such attempts, and an artificial and sterile discipline is all that can result. The general tone is that of an excitable, loquacious generation, bent on actualities and matters of practical calculation, fonder of debate than of work, not impressed by any authority, prizing success, watching all that goes on abroad, taking refuge in public from the sordidness of private life, and passionately hostile to all superiority. Through the constant secession of elements to which this tone is antipathetic a kind of natural selection is constantly taking place, and the political defencelessness of the transition period favours disintegrating tendencies of foreign origin. The carving away of ancient German territories works in the same direction. Apart from the varying influence of the four strata already referred to, the general tone will be set by the half-Slavonic lower classes of Middle and North Germany, who have brought about and who control the existing conditions, and by the other elements which have been assimilated to these. In place of German culture and German intellectuality we have a state of things of which a foretaste already exists in parts of America and of Eastern Europe. The fully socialized order, repelling all tutelage through those strata which possess a special tradition, outlook and mentality, has created its own form of civilization. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 10: Rathenau means that it cannot be entertained except on the hypothesis of the profound _inward_ change, which is to be discussed later on.] [Footnote 11: _Kritik der dreifachen Revolution._ S. Fischer.] [Footnote 12: The classes referred to are (1) the old aristocracy, (2) the aristocracy of officialism, (3) that of traditional middle-class culture; (4) the mass of what is called Socialism.] [Footnote 13: £150 in pre-war values. By thrift, by co-operation, and by the cheapness of the public services generally, a surprisingly high standard of life could be maintained on this kind of income in pre-war Germany.] [Footnote 14: Aktualität; as, for instance, reference to current topics.] VII Thoughtful and competent judges to whom I have submitted the foregoing section of my work have said to me: This is Hell. That is perhaps going too far, since those who will live in that generation and who have themselves helped it into being will have become more or less adapted to their circumstances. A large part of the proletariat of to-day will certainly not be daunted by the prospect, but will regard it as a distinct improvement on their present situation. That is the terrible fact, a fact for which we are responsible and for which we must atone, with what ruin to German culture remains to be seen. Who, in this Age of Mechanism, who on the side of the bourgeoisie, who of our statesmen, our professors, our captains of industry, above all who of our clergy, has pitied the lot of the working-man? The statesmen, for peace' sake, worked out the Insurance Laws; the professors, with their emphatic dislike to the world of finance and their unemphasized devotion to the monopoly of their own stipends, preached a doctrinaire socialism; the clergy lauded the divinely-appointed principle of subordination; the great industrialists, wallowing in their own greed for power, money, favour, titles and connexions, scolded the workers for wanting anything. The silent subjugation of our brothers was assured through the laws of inheritance, our leaders put the socialistic legislation in fetters, freedom of combination was thwarted, electoral reform in Prussia was scornfully denied, demands for better conditions of living, conditions which to-day we think ridiculously low, were suppressed by force. And all the time, the cost of a single year of war, a tiny fraction of the war-reparations, would have sufficed to banish want for ever from the land. At last the millions of the defenceless and disappointed were driven into that war of the dynasties and the bourgeois, which was unloosed by the folly of years, the dazzlement of weeks, the helplessness of hours. If the state of things I have foreseen is hell, then we have earned hell. And it ill becomes us to wrap ourselves in the superiority of our culture, to rebuke the masses for their want of intellect, their want of character, their greed, and to keep insisting on the unchangeability of human character, on the virtues of rulership and leadership, on the spiritual unselfishness and intellectual priesthood of the classes born to freedom. Where was this heaven-nurtured priestly virtue sleeping when Wrong straddled the land and the great crime was wrought? It was composing feeble anthologies and pompous theories, cooking its culture-soup, confusing, with true professorial want of instinct, 1913 with 1813[15]--and putting itself at the disposition of the Press Bureau. _That_ was the hour in which to fight for the supremacy of the spirit. Now romance comes, as it always does, too late. What is romance in history? It is sterility. It is incapacity to imagine, still less to shape, the yet unknown. It is an inordinate capacity for flinging oneself with feminine adaptability into anything that is historically presented and accomplished--from Michael Angelo to working samplers. Fearing the ugly present and the anxious future, the romantic takes refuge with the dear good dead people, and spins out further what it has learned from them. But every big man was a shaper of his own time, a respecter of antiquity and conscious of his inheritance as a grown and capable man may be; not a youth in sheltered tutelage, but a master of the living world, and a herald of the future. "Modernity" is foolish, but antiquarianism is rubbish; life in its vigour is neither new nor antique, but young. True it is indeed that we love the old, many-coloured, concrete, pre-mechanistic world; we cannot take an antique thing in our hands or read an antique word without feeling its enchantment. It is a joy to the heart, and one prohibited to no man, to dream at times romantic dreams, to live in the past, and to forget, as we do it, that this very dreaming, this very life, owes its charm to the fact that we are of another age. It is a magic like that of childhood--but to want to go back to it is not only childish, but a deliberate fraud and self-deception. We should realize, as I have shown years ago, that the difference of our age from that age is the ever-present fact of the density of our population. Any one who wants to go back, really wants that forty million Germans should die, while he survives. It is ignorant, it is insincere, to put on a frown of offended virtue and to say: For shame, what are you thronging into the towns for? Go back to the land; plough, spin, weave, ply the blacksmith's hammer, as did our forefathers, who were the proper sort of people. And leave the people like us, who think and write poetry and brood and dream for you, a house embowered in vines--there will be room enough for that!--Ah, you thinkers and brooders, what would you say if men answered you: No! Go yourself and spin in a factory, for you have shown clearly enough that your thinking and brooding are futile. All your fine phrases amount to nothing but the one dread monosyllable--Die! Are you so wicked as that, and know it? or so stupid, and know it not? Thought is the most responsible of all functions. He who thinks for others must look after them, and if they live he may not slay them. It is therefore a mischievous piece of romantic folly to point us to the past. We must all pass through the dark gateway, and the sage has no right to growl: Leave me out--I am the salt of the earth! The first thing we have to do is to save humanity; not a selected pair in the Ark but the whole race, criminals and harlots, fools, beggars and cripples. We ourselves have cast down Authority, and there will be a crush, and many things will look very different from what the sages would wish and what the romantics dream. And if it is going to be hell for people like you and me, we must only accept it in the name of justice, and think of Dante's terrible inscription: "I was made by the Might of God, by the supreme Wisdom and by the primal Love."[16] But is it hell? That depends on ourselves. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 15: In 1913 all Germany was celebrating with great pomp and warlike display the centenary of the liberation of the country from Napoleon, and also paying a huge property tax for the coming war.] [Footnote 16: _Fecemi la divina Potestate La somma Sapienza e il primo Amore._ This is part of the inscription over the gates of Hell in the _Inferno_, Canto III.] VIII Our description of the future order of society was tacitly based on the assumption that our mentality, our ethics, our spiritual outlook, would remain as they are at present. This assumption is a probable one, but it is not irrevocably certain. What we have endeavoured to demonstrate is simply the obvious fact--the fact which our once so rigid but, since November, 1918, uprooted and flaccid intellectualism has forgotten--that our salvation is not to be found in any kind of mechanical apparatus or institutions. Institutions do not mean evolution. If institutions run too far ahead of evolution there will be reaction. When evolution runs too far, there is revolution. At this point both groups of our opponents will start up against us. The Radicals cry: Ha! only give us food, give "all power to the Soviets," let us have free-thought lectures, and mentality, insight, experience and culture will come of themselves. The Reactionaries smile: Ho! this man has never learned that there is no such thing as evolution; that human character never changes. I shall not answer either of these. They know, both of them, that they are saying what is not true. Something of unprecedented greatness can and must take place; something that in the life of a people corresponds to the awakening of manhood in the individual. In every conscious existence there comes a moment when the living being is no longer determined but begins to determine himself; when he takes over responsibility from the surrounding Powers, in order to shoulder it for himself; when he no longer accepts the forces that guide him, but creates them; when he no longer receives but freely chooses the values, ideals, aims and authorities whose validity he will admit; when he begets out of his own being the relations with the divine which he means to serve. For the German people this moment, this opportunity, has now arrived--or is for ever lost. We have made a clear sweep of all authorities. The inherited influences which we accepted unconsciously have dropped away from us--persons, classes, dogmas. The persons are done with for the present. The classes, even though they may still keep up the struggle, are broken to pieces together with all the best that they contained: mentality, sense of honour, devotion, training, tradition. We can never reanimate them and never supply their place. Ideas and dogmas have long ago lost their cogency; the power they wielded through police and school, the power which we tried to prop up by a blasphemous degradation of religion and by developing the church as a kind of factory, is gone, and it would be a piece of mechanical presumption to suppose that we can breed them again for the sake of the objects they fulfilled. If we live and thrive, ideas and faiths will grow up of themselves. We must of our own free choice lay upon ourselves a certain life-potency or faculty which we shall freely obey, and which shall be so broad and so buoyant that thought and creation can grow out of it. A deed without precedent only in its voluntary, conscious self-determination: for other peoples in earlier days also accepted these faculties, not indeed out of conscious choice, but from the hands of prophets, rulers and classes. Thus theocracy was laid upon Israel; the caste-system on the Indians; the idea of the city on the Greeks; empire on the Romans; the Church on the Middle Ages; commerce, plutocracy, colonial dominion, on the modern world; militarism on Germany. For these imposed forces men lived and died; they had only a mythical conception of where they came from, and they believed and some still believe them to be everlasting. A thunder-stroke of destiny has at once stripped us bare and has opened our eyes. The tremendous choice is before us. Are we to reject it, and, blinded anew, to resign ourselves to the casual and mechanical laws of action and reaction, of needs and interests, and the competition of forces? Are we to recover ourselves, and enter into the intellectual arena of the nations, to begin a new and enduring life with no other guiding thought than that of self-preservation and the division of property? In the harbour of the nations is our ship to drift aimlessly while every other knows its course, whether to a near or distant port? Is that penurious Paradise which we have described, the goal of Germany's hopes and struggles? Compared with us, the French movement of the eighteenth century had an easy task. All it had to do was to deny and demolish. When it had cleared away the wreckage of feudalism, at once a strong new class, the bourgeoisie, sprang up from the soil, more vigorous than its aristocratic forerunner, and it was able to take care of itself. And the bourgeoisie was also a class of defined boundaries, and already trained for its task; it had long ago taken over French culture, it alone had for a century been the champion of French ideas, it had acquired enthusiasm for the nation, for freedom, for militarism and for money; the aspirations for equality and fraternity were not indeed fulfilled, but the first mechanized and plutocratic state of the Continent came into being. Germany, as we have seen, is not in the same position. When we are stripped we find no new stratum of culture growing up below the surface; society is simply dissolved, and in its place we find the masses, of which the most hopeful thing we can say is that they are an ordered body. Tradition has been torn in two. No--we have to build from the foundations up. But whether we shall build according to the changing needs of the seasons, according to the casual balance of forces, or according to an idea and a symbol--that is the question! Our current Socialism has no qualms about bringing new nations to birth with the aid of a few simple apparatus and radical eliminations; it believes that the right spirit will soon enter in if only institutions are provided for it. It would be too severe to describe this way of thinking solely as contempt for or want of understanding of a spiritual mission. Socialism in its prevailing form arises indeed simply from material or so-called "scientific" conceptions (as if there could be a science of ideal aims and values): but it has, though only as a secondary object, annexed to itself the values of a spiritual faith--the latter are, as the language of the market has it, "thrown in." We have seen to what the material domination of institutions and apparatus is leading us. To national dignity, or to any mission for humanity, it does not lead. What is unprecedented in our problem is not, as we have said, that a people should beget out of itself its own idea and mission. From the Jewish theocracy to the French rationalism, from the Chinese ancestor-worship to the pioneer-freedom of America, all the cultured peoples have brought this creative act to pass, although in formative epochs leading classes and leading men have born the responsibility and made it easy for their countrymen to become aware of their own unconscious spirit, and through this awareness and consciousness to isolate and intensify it. What is unprecedented is just this: that the process should take place as a deliberate act of will, in democratic freedom, without pressure and compulsion of authority, in the consciousness of its necessity, on our own responsibility. Germany is not at present growing leaders and prophets, we are not in a formative stage, all authority has been scattered to the winds. It is true that we have one stratum of society which is capable of understanding the meaning of the task, but it is deeply cloven, the hatreds and interests of its parties make them more each other's enemies than the people's. And yet it is this very class--not as possessor of means but as possessor of the tradition, which is capable, which is indispensable, and which is summoned to take in hand the transformation of the German spirit, to free it from the bonds of mechanism, of capitalism, of militarism, and to lead it to its true destinies. It cannot do this for itself alone, amid the blind bitterness of the war of classes; it cannot do it as a sovran leader relying on its deeper insight, for its and every other prestige has gone by the board; it can only do it by the way of service and sacrifice--it can only do it if the service and the sacrifice are approved and accepted. The masses will not understand this sacrifice of service; but the more responsible of their leaders will. Not to-day, indeed, nor to-morrow; but on the day when experience has shown them that I am telling the truth. At first they will do as in Russia; when want becomes acute, they will seek to buy experience and tradition at a high price from individuals. But mentality and spirit cannot be bought--only labour and dexterity. Then gradually men will come to understand that the highest things are not marketable commodities, they are only given away. And at last the responsible leaders, those who rule in order to serve, will separate themselves from those of the Cataline type, who serve in order to rule. So long has the narrow, parsonical, cynical contempt for the understanding of the lower classes prevailed--through our fault--a reversal to blind worship of the masses, of the immature and the unsuccessful, is not inexcusable. We are here to love mankind--all mankind, the outcast as well as the weak--every man and all men. But the masses are not quite the same thing as mankind. The masses who congregate in the streets and at public meetings are not communities consisting of whole men, but assemblages in which each man takes a part and is present, indeed, with his whole body, but by no means with his whole being. The masses are absent-minded; and presence of mind only comes to them when through the lips of some true prophet the Spirit descends upon them. But when that happens, they take no decisions; they do not get beside themselves; rather, they sink into themselves. Before the distortions of a mob orator, with his extravagant promises, the masses become merely a driven crowd eager for gain, not human souls. They are the concave reflector of passions and greeds that rage in the focal point of the speaker's rostrum; they return in concentrated form the rays that dazzle them. He who puts the masses in the judgment-seat, who looks for counsel and decision at their hands, has neither reverence nor love for man. Sooner or later the truth of this will be realized by all honourable men among their leaders. The day is also far when the upper classes will come to their senses. They have never understood what the world is, nor what Germany is, nor what has happened to themselves. They see houses and fields, streets and trees very much as they were; they think, if they only play the game a little craftily at the beginning, everything will remain as it used to be, and they will come out all right in the end. It is just as when some merchant goes bankrupt for a million; for the first fortnight the servants wait at table as usual and the family eat off silver plate; the ruin is still on paper. But in a year's time everything is dispersed to the winds, and men have changed along with their utensils. When one sees for what trivialities people are fighting to-day one begins to understand how callously and shamelessly they gave up a thousand times over that which they had sworn to defend with the last drop of their blood; then none of them know what has really happened. In a few years' time they will know; and then they will fight no more for things that no longer exist; they will be meditating a general sacrifice to save what can still be saved, and what is worth saving. IX Germany is a land without power, without poise, with its prosperity shattered, its authorities and its external aims annihilated, its intellect and its ethics at a low ebb. In such a condition, if we wish to understand the only kind of life-faculty which can save us from intellectual and spiritual death, give us force and inspiration to shape for ourselves and for the world the new social order of freedom, spirituality[17] and justice, and in the true sense to "save" us, we must look ourselves and the German character in the face--this unknown, problematic character, which for a century in contradiction to its own inmost being, has been flattering and lulling itself with hackneyed and complacent phrases and unproved judgments. For we can undertake nothing and claim nothing which has not its prototype in our own soul and is not founded in our own past, our own traditions. There is no people, not even the French, which in recent decades has administered to itself and digested so much praise as we have. We never discussed ourselves but at once the stereotyped toasts began. The more German culture declined, the more disgusting became our babble about it. The persons through whose mouths we let ourselves be lauded were school-teachers without comparative knowledge, professional banquet-orators, nationalists who praised in the service of some interested hatred, and scholars with appointments who were simply commissioned to demonstrate that the Hohenzollern system was the last word of creation. No one dreamed of distinguishing this glorification of the German people from the apotheosis of the dynasties--to which we had vowed our heart's blood--and the profound insincerity of these declamations was shown by the indifference with which the dynasties, the main feature in the programme, were afterwards got rid of, and the affair of the heart's blood shelved. We know the stereotyped phrases. German faith, French knavery. The world is to find healing in the German soul. We are the heroes--the others are hucksters.[18] To be German means to do a thing for its own sake. We are a "race of thinkers and poets." We have Culture, the others merely Civilization.[19] We alone are free--the others are merely undisciplined (or, as the case may be, enslaved). All this we owe to the favour of God and our education under the (here fill in Prussian, Bavarian or Saxon) reigning House, which all the world envies us. Clearly therefore we are destined for world-dominion; we have only to fall-to. In one of these phrases, about doing things for their own sake,[20] there is truth. All the more was it for us in particular a vice and a sign of degradation to let ourselves be dazzled by the shadowless transparency-picture of glorification that was offered to us. There were interests concealed in the game, and much lack of moral fibre, all of which we passed over in silence; it was out of place in our festal oratory. It would be an equal or even a greater vice, only reversed, if we were now to despair of ourselves. Moderation was what we needed then; what we need now is vigorous and conscious self-possession. To-day it is no easy and attractive business to bring our strong qualities to the surface; it implies an amount of conviction which it is hard to attain, and self-depreciation means a pitiful faint-heartedness. But all sham goods offered by babblers, by selfish interests, prophets of hate and commercial travellers must go overboard. We have never been a "race of thinkers and poets," any more than the Jews were a race of prophets, the French and Dutch a race of painters, or Königsberg a city of Pure Reason.[21] The old German upper classes have, in three well-defined epochs, had force enough to throw up individuals of mighty endowments for music, poetry and philosophy; the former lower-classes, whose blood runs in nine-tenths of our present population, have scarcely contributed anything to these glories. They have in recent years shown themselves thoroughly industrious, plastic, apt for discipline, order-loving, intelligent, practical, honourable, trustworthy, warm-hearted, prudent and helpful, and adapted beyond all expectation to the mechanization of life and industry; of their power to produce talent we know little, except perhaps in the domain of research and technique, which are less a test of creative energy than of applied knowledge and methodical assiduity. The important question as to what relations exist between the number, quality and greatness of individual endowments and genius on the one side, and the character of a people on the other, is still unexplored and very obscure, although we possess a science which calls itself by the quite unjustified name of national psychology. While on one side we have rarely made any serious study of national characteristics, but have confused them with achievements of culture and habits of life that mostly proceeded from a thin upper stratum alone, on the other we have as a rule tacitly set down individual endowment (with a strong emphasis on our own) as illustrations of national character. In this respect, too, we showed that laxity in proving what we wanted to prove which abounds everywhere from the point where calculation with things weighable and measurable leaves off, and judgment begins. We think it an established fact--in accordance with just this arbitrary test of genius--that genius belongs _par excellence_ to the so-called blonde blue-eyed races of the earth. The fact that among the score or two of geniuses of all ages who have been determining forces in the world it is hardly possible to find a single example of this blue-blonde race, but they can be proved to have been almost all dark, did not affect the question. On the other hand the English, whose influence on culture has been surpassed by none, had their genius-forming power, in which they are actually deficient, seriously over-estimated. It was the reverse with the Jews. The fact that in spite of their small numbers they have produced more of world-moving genius than all other nations put together, and that from them has proceeded the whole transcendental ethics of the Western world, has not prevented their being pronounced wholly incapable of creative endowment. We shall put aside all this rubbish and for the present decline to go into theoretic questions. Great individual endowments are related to national character--to the character of the mind, not that of the will, which must be considered apart--as the blossom to the plant or the crystal to the mother-solution; to determine the one from the other needs something more than a mechanical generalization. There is no such thing as a "race of thinkers and poets." This, however, we can say: that a people which begets great musicians, poets and philosophers is one which devotes itself to moods and to visions, while another, as for instance the Latin group, which creates forms and standards, is one that at the cost of mood and vision, incarnates its sense of will. Devotion, receptivity, the feeling for Nature, comprehension, the passion for truth, meditative depth, spiritual love, are the fairest gifts that can be granted to any people, and to us they have been granted. But they exclude other gifts, which stand to-day in high repute, and which we affect in vain. They exclude the capacity for shaping forms and standards, the aptitude for rule, if not even for self-government; in any case the qualities which go to the creation of nationalities and civilizations. It is no mere accident that in not one of the hundredfold provinces of life, from art to military organization, from State-craft to jointstock-companies, from saintliness to table-utensils, have we Germans discovered a single essential and enduring form. And again, there is scarcely one of these forms which we have not filled with a richer and more living content than those who first discovered it. For whoever bears the All within himself can be satisfied with no form; he finds in himself at once vision and reality, thesis and antithesis. He seeks for a synthesis, but all form is one-sided. He conceives, chooses, comprehends, fulfils, breaks in pieces and throws away. He remains a unity in constant change, like the year as it proceeds day by day, hour by hour, and no two of them alike. He does not force things--out of respect for creation. But he who makes forms must use force. He makes himself the standard and comprehends himself only. Everything else, everything that is extra-normal, unconformable, unintelligible and not understood remains for him something alien, trivial, inferior, or negligible. The maker of forms can rule, even by compulsion, without being a tyrant, for he is convinced of the value of what he brings and knows no doubts. He is ruthless, yet only up to a certain limit, which is determined by his sense of the inferiority of the other. The man who rejects forms, however, cannot rule; the very penetration into the domain of another seems to him a wrong to his own, the basis of which is recognition and allowance. If he is forced to penetrate, he loses all balance, for in wrong-doing he understands no gradations. Similarly he is incapable of civilizing, for he cannot take forms seriously; he violates them himself--how can he impose them upon others? In his inmost soul he is naïve, for creation is seething in him; but in execution he is conscious, critical, eclectic and methodical, in order that he may be completely master of the one-sided element into which he has forced himself. The man of forms, however, is, in his soul, rigid and conscious, but in action naïve, because he does not know the meaning of doubt. Forms grow up like natural products in the course of centuries. They assume the existence of uniformity in individuals, fathers reproduced in sons with scarcely a variation. Egypt, Rome, and that modern land of antiquity, France, are examples. For generations France has been content with three architectural styles, which are really one and the same style. The changes in the language are hardly perceptible. The principal domestic utensils are almost the same as they were a hundred years ago, fashion is merely a vibration. Foreign living languages are little studied, their spirit is not understood, the pronunciation remains French. Foreign countries are looked on as a kind of menagerie; everything is measured by the native standard. Every one is a judge of everything, for he holds fast to the norm. Within the norm the French are keenly sensitive, their feeling for relations is very sure; the slightest deviation is observed. To doubt the validity of the norm is out of question; one might as well criticize the sun and moon as the style of Louis Quatorze. The final judgment of the British in the affairs of life is "this is English," "that is not English." Foreign lands are a subject of geographical and ethnological study. The whole mighty will of a nation is here concentrated in the form of civilizing political energy. Every private inclination is a fad, and even fads have their fixed forms. An offence against table-manners is banned like an attack on the Church. Nature is mastered with consideration and intelligence, whether the problem is the breeding of sheep or the ruling of India. The assurance, self-command and art of ruling which spring from forms are lacking in Germany. Our strongest spirits are formless; they are eclectic or titanic, whether they despise forms or choose forms or burst forms. We have three homes between which we hover--Germany, the earth, and heaven. We comprehend and honour everything--every land, every man, every art and every language; and we are fertilized by what is foreign; on the lower level we enjoy it and imitate it, on the higher it spurs us to creation. We are docile, and do not hate what rules and determines us, only what contracts us and makes us one-sided; an autocratic government may be tolerated, even venerated, if it knows how to be national and popular and does not interfere with our elbow-room. We have already touched on the volitional character[22] of the German people, a character which has been gravely altered by the subsidence of the ancient upper stratum of society, and by long privations and miseries. The Germans of Tacitus were a freedom-loving and turbulent people; of this not a trace is left. Any one who did not recognize under the autocracy that we care little for self-determination and self-responsibility may do so under the revolution, which merely arises out of an alteration in external conditions. We are not even yet a nation, but an association of interests and oppositions; a German _Irredenta_, as it has been and unfortunately will be shown, is an impossible conception. And since we are not a nation and represent no national idea, but only an association of households, it follows that our influence abroad can only be commercial, and not civilizing or propagandist. From this side we are able to understand the German history of the past two centuries. Prussia, an extra-German Power, grown up in colonized territory, organized itself into a bureaucratic, feudal and military State. It succeeded in mastering half Germany and in loosely linking up the remainder. By rigid organization, by its federated Princes and by the strongest army in the world, it supplied the place of the national character and will which were wanting. Mechanism was pressed into the service, and bore the colossus into a period of blooming prosperity. The system looked like a nation; in reality it was an autocratic association of economic interests bristling with arms. It was incapable of developing national forces and ideas, not even in relation to its settlers in other lands; it was confined to commercial competition; weak alliances were relied on to secure the position externally; self-government was not granted, because the military organization was the pivot of the whole system; the drill-sergeant tone at home had its counterpart in the brusqueness of our foreign policy; enmities grew and organized themselves, and the catastrophe came. For character of will we had substituted discipline. But discipline is not nationality; it is an external instrument, and when it breaks it leaves--nothing. Now since the Prussian system which called itself by the mediæval title of the German Empire was, in spite of the professors, no popular, national fabric, but a dynastic, military and compulsory association, with a constitutional façade, the interested nationalist elements took on the repulsive and dishonourable forms that we all know. The most deeply interested parties, cool and conscious of their strength, the Prussian representatives of the military and official nobility, avoided all declamation and only interfered when their interests were endangered. The greater industrialists sold themselves. A higher stratum of the middle-classes composed of certain circles of higher teachers and subaltern officials took the business seriously, and in order to escape from their drab existence created that atmosphere of hatred of Socialists, telegrams of homage, and megalomania, which made us intellectually and morally impossible before the world. Instead of the Germany of thought and spirit one saw suddenly a brutal, stupid community of interested persons, greedy for power, who gave themselves out as that Germany whose very opposite they were; who, unable to point to any achievements, any thought of their own, prided themselves on an imaginary race-unity which their very appearance contradicted; who had no ideas beyond rancour; the slaverings of league-oratory and subordination, and who with these properties, which they were pleased to call _Kultur_, undertook to bring blessing to the world. It was no wonder; for our slavonicized association of interests, bent on subordination and on gain, does not produce ideas; its possessions were power, mechanism and money; whoever was impressed by these things believed they must impress others too, and so the conclusion was arrived at that all the great spirits of the past had lived only to make this triple combination supreme. Wagner had formed the bridge between the old Germany and the new--armoured cruisers and giant guns appeared as a free development from Kant and Hegel, and the word _Kultur_, a word which Germany ought to prohibit by law for thirty years to come, masked the confusion of thought. To discover now, after our downfall, that Germany ought never to have carried on a continental let alone a world policy, would be a pitiful example of _esprit d'escalier_. It is true that it was our right, and even our duty, by our intellect, our ethics and our greatness, to carry it on; but the weakness of our character on the side of Will was the cause of its failure. Bismarck, a born realist in politics, grown up in the Prussian tradition, trained in the diplomatic tradition by Gortschakov, made the calamitous choice. He made us safe for certain decades; but it was only an intuitive policy in the manner of Stein[23] that could have saved us for centuries. In the midst of self-administered and self-determining nations the German people, from lack of self-consciousness, indolence of will and innate servility remained under a patriarchal system of government, a minor under tutelage of divinely-appointed dynasties and ruling classes. In the childish movement of the educated bourgeoisie of 1848 Bismarck saw only the helpless and Utopian, but not the symbolic side, which Marx might have shown him. His practical spirit judged with a smile that a handful of peasantry and grenadiers would suffice to bring to reason this dynastically-minded people. It was only too true; although the bulk of this people had not for thirty years been formed by the peasant class, and although he himself had learned how to make use of the power of the modern industrial State in peasant disguise. And so he refused to allow his countrymen to come of age; broke, with the superiority of genius, and with the weapons of success and authority, the incompetent forces that resisted him; created, by the magical mechanism of his Constitution, the German Empire as a mere continuation of the Prussian bureaucratic State reinforced, by the self-glorifying dynasties, with the whole volume of the still existing and justly appreciated habit of obedience; and annihilated for a generation every aspiration for freedom by branding it with the stain of moral and social depravity. Our political worthlessness and immaturity came to its climax in the race of office-climbers in 1880, which in 1900 gave place to the battle-fleet patriotism of the great capitalists. A self-administered and a self-determining nation--such as the nations of the world, except ourselves, Austria and Russia, were, on the whole, at the turn of the century--would have been able to carry on a sound and steadfast policy in economics and public affairs, and to enjoy the confidence of the world, as little begrudged as America. On the other hand, a dangerous warship, armed upon an unexampled scale, given to backward movements and commanded by an uncontrollable sovran dilettante, could only expect sooner or later to be expelled from the harbour of the nations. History is apt to overdo it, especially when corruption has gone on too long; with every year that passed the doom became more certain; instead of being expelled, we were annihilated. That four years of hunger, a lost war and a military revolt at last set us free, does not betoken any change of character; and when to-day a servile and facile Press lauds our wretched and idealess Constitution as the finest in the world, that gives us no assurance of its power to endure. Understanding is no substitute for character, but it is at any rate a step towards the goal; and if it is once understood that other measures are possible, and if, out of this period, certain writings and thoughts shall survive--and survive they will--then at any rate we may still be weak, but we shall be no longer blind. It might be possible at the outset of our journey towards strength of will that we should grope our way slowly--very slowly--back to the old problems of power. It does not matter if we do. Before we get there, the world will be changed, and will be pregnant with new thoughts. Let us fulfil the duties for which Germany was made what it is. Let us go in quest of the idea and the faculty that are laid upon us; let us do this in order to live, to recover our health, to shape ourselves anew, to remain a People, to become a Nation, to create a future and to serve the world. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 17: Geistigkeit. This is a difficult word to translate. It sometimes means merely intellectuality, sometimes in addition (as here) all that is implied in the phrase, "Ye know not what manner of spirit ([Greek: oiou pneumatos]) ye are of."] [Footnote 18: Referring to Werner Sombart's war-book, _Händler und Helden_.] [Footnote 19: _Cf._ Thomas Mann's remarkable book on the real significance of the war: _Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen_ (1918).] [Footnote 20: Sachlichkeit. Rathenau seems to have in mind the German feeling for disinterested study and research as illustrated, for instance, by the fact that when the German Government heard of the genius of Einstein they brought him to Berlin with a salary of nearly £1000 a year and no duties except to think. Modern bigotry has expelled him.] [Footnote 21: Where Kant lived and taught, and published his _Kritik der reinen Vernunft_.] [Footnote 22: As opposed to the inward, intellectual and spiritual character.] [Footnote 23: Stein was the chief leader of Prussia from the Frederician into the modern era. His ministry of reform by which a peasant-proprietary was established, and municipal institutions created, lasted only from September 1807 to November 1808.] X On balance it seems that the endowments of the German people work out as follows:-- High qualities of intellect and heart. Ethics and mentality normal. Originative will-power and independent activity, weak. We give our devotion freely, and the heart rules in action. Our feelings are genuine and powerful. We have courage and endurance. Led by sentiment rather than by inspiration. We create no forms, are self-forgetful, seek no responsibility, obey rather than rule. In obedience we know no limit, and never question what is imposed upon us. Of its own accord the German people would never have adopted an ideal of force. It was imposed on us by the idolaters of the great war-machine and those who gained by it; even Bismarck did not share it. We are not competent to form an ideal of civilization, for the sense of unity, will to leadership, and formative energy are lacking to us. We have no political mission for the arrangement of other people's affairs, for we cannot arrange our own; we do not lead a full life, and are politically unripe. We are endowed as no other people is for a mission of the spirit. Such a mission was ours till a century ago; we renounced it, because through political slackness of will-power we fell out of step; we did not keep pace with the other nations in internal political development, and, instead, devoted ourselves to the most far-reaching developments of mechanism and to their counterpart in bids for power. It was Faust, lured away from his true path, cast off by the Earth-Spirit, astray among witches, brawlers and alchemists. But the Faust-soul of Germany is not dead. Of all peoples on the earth we alone have never ceased to struggle with ourselves. And not with ourselves alone, but with our dæmon, our God. We still hear within ourselves the All, we still expand in every breath of creation. We understand the language of things, of men and of peoples. We measure everything by itself, not by us; we do not seek our own will, but the truth. We are all alike and yet all different; each of us is a wanderer, a brooder, a seeker. Things of the spirit are taken seriously with us; we do not make them serve our lives, we serve them with ours. "And you dare to say this, in the face of all the brutalizing and bemiring that we experience--the profiteering and gormandizing, the abject submissiveness, the shameless desertions, the apathy, the insincerity, the heartlessness and mindlessness of our day?" Yes, I dare to say it, for I believe it and I know it. The soul of the German people lies still in the convulsions and hallucinations of its slow recovery. It is recovery not alone from the war, but from something worse, its hundred-years' alienation from itself. The much-ridiculed choice of our old romantic unheraldic colours, black, red and gold, instead of the bodiless and soulless colours under which we waged the war,[24] was, among the whirling follies of the time, a faint symbolic movement of our better mind. We must reunite ourselves with the days before we ceased to be Germans and became Berliners. What we need is Spirit. The whole world needs it, no more and no less than we do, but will never create it. History knows why it decided for Versailles and the Hall of Mirrors. Not mechanism alone, with its retinue of nationalism and imperialism, is now again and for the last time to be glorified; no, the whole Franco-British policy of acquisition mounts up even to the throne of the Sun-king, and it is seriously believed that it will govern the destinies of the world for centuries to come. An inconceivable, and, in its monstrous irony, unsurpassable drama, which is put forward as the introduction to the great era. The bourgeois conscience of the West has no inkling of what it means. To this conscience, the war was a huge violation of decency, contrived by bandits; its victory is the final triumph of a capitalist, rationalistic civilization; the torch lit in the East means murder and incendiarism, and the upward migration of the people from the depths is to it invisible. No; it is not here that the spirit of the future is being formed. One may discover further ingenious devices, lightning-conductors to mitigate the stroke; but gently or violently a natural force will have its way, and the new earth which it is preparing needs new seed. That we have been given the faculty to shape a new spirit does not imply that we are at liberty to choose whether we shall do it or not. Even if it were not for our life's sake--even if it were against our life--still we must obey. But it _is_ for our life's sake, as we have seen, and as it is indeed obvious, for every organism can live only by fulfilling the purpose of its being. And now we have got to a very dangerous place--a place where the usual moral peroration lies in wait for us--that German peroration which announces universal redemption, and immediately, on that lofty note, closes the discussion. Fatherland, Morality, Humanity, Labour, Courage, Confidence--we all know how it goes, the writer has written something fine, the reader has read something fine; emotion on both sides, little conviction on either. It appears, then, that I have just been writing something extremely suspect. Has the reader followed me through five-and-thirty of these difficult folios in order to arrive in the end at that very everyday term, Spirit?[25] Is there any term in commoner use, and what are we to think about it? Softly--there is worse to come! The next word is still more dubious, philistinishly so, in fact--the word Culture.[26] I cannot help it--we must pass on by way of these everyday conceptions. We must get through the crowd, where hack-phrases elbow us. Any journey you may take, though it were to Tibet, must begin at the Berlin Central Railway Station. What is wrong with these popular phrases is not that they start from an everyday conception, but that they remain content with it, and do not think it out to the end. Our task, therefore, stated in the most general terms, is to make actually spiritual a people which is capable of spirituality. And since spirituality cannot be propped up by any external thrust, by sermons, newspaper articles, leagues, or propaganda, but must be associated with life and developed out of life, so the organic process and the condition of life to which it leads is called Culture. It is only with deep reluctance and after long search that I have written down this beautiful word, a word now worn almost beyond recognition. Can we find our way back to its application and significance? Even when it is not drawn out with a futile prefix[27] one can hardly detect its pure meaning by reason of the many overtones. The school, if possible the university, some French and English, the rules about I and Me, visiting-cards, shirt-cuffs, foreign phrases, top-hats, table-manners: these are some of the overtones that make themselves heard when we talk of a cultured man, or rather as they have it a cultured gentleman. A hundred years ago, as the word implies, we understood by culture the unfolding and the full possession of innate bodily, spiritual and moral forces. In this sense Goethe showed us the two fraternal figures formed after his own image: Faust the richer, and the poorer Wilhelm Meister, striving for culture. The ideal which hovers before us is not one of education, not even one of knowledge, although both education and knowledge enter into it; it is an ideal of the Will. It will not be easy to convey the breadth and the boundless range which we are to attach to this conception. That it is not an airy figment is clear from the fact that for centuries the Greeks, with full consciousness, adopted as their highest law (though directed to a somewhat different end) that impulse of the will which they called _Kalokagathia_.[28] From one who has introduced the conception of mechanism into German thought, who has rescued the conception of the soul from the hands of the psychologists and brought it back to its primal meaning, who has written so much about soulless intellectualism, and has put forward the empire of the soul as the goal of humanity, it is not to be expected that he should preach any mechanical kind of culture, or indeed any that it is possible to acquire by learning. How culture is to be produced we shall see; the first thing necessary is that it should be willed. Willed it must be, in a sense and with a strength of purpose and a force of appreciation of which we to-day, when the ages of faith, of the Reformation, of the German classics, and the wars of liberation, lie so far behind us, have no idea at all. When the current conception of intellectual culture so much prized in family, society and business life, and tricked out with criticisms of style, with historical data and incidents of travel is justly ridiculed, then the will to complete cultivation of the body, the intellect and the soul of the people must be so strong that all questions of convenience, of enjoyment, of prestige and of material interests must sink far into the background. This word must sound so that all who hear it can look in each other's eyes with a full mutual understanding and without the slightest sense of ambiguity; just as they do in Japan when the name of the common head of all families, the Mikado, is named. There must be one thing in Germany and it must be this thing, which is altogether out of reach of the yawning, blinking and grinning scepticism of the coffee-house, and of the belching and growling of the tavern. Any man who puts this thing aside in favour of his class-ideas, or his speculations in lard, or his dividends, or the demands of his Union, must understand that he is doing something as offensive as if he went out in public without washing himself. The conception of Culture as our true and unique faculty must be so profoundly grasped that in public life and legislation it must have the first word and the last. Though we become as poor as church-mice we must stake our last penny on this, and tune up our education and instruction, our models and outlook, our motives and claims, our achievement and our atmosphere, to so high a point that any one coming into Germany shall feel that he is entering into a new age. Society must be penetrated by this conception. Those classes which already possess something resembling it--such as training, education, experience, tradition, outlook, good breeding--must pour out with both hands what they have to dispense; not in the way of endowments, conventicles, lectures and patronizing visits, but in quiet, self-sacrificing, personal service. All this, of course, cannot be done without the free response of the other side. The devoted attempts which have been made, especially in England, and for some years with us too, to win this response by long and unselfish solicitation were destined to remain merely the mission of individual lives, for they were not supported by the will of the community as a whole; it rather ran counter to them. A Peace of God must be proclaimed, not as between the Haves and the Have-nots, not between the proletariat and the capitalists, not between the so-called cultured classes and the uncultured, but between those who are ready for a mutual exchange of experience, a give-and-take of their tradition on both sides. Not an exchange on business principles, such as propaganda in satisfaction of demands, or curiosity on one side for a new pastime on the other, but a covenant. This, however, is only practicable if the class-war, as an end in itself, is put a stop to. The great change itself cannot be come by so cheaply; it demands other assumptions, of which we shall have something to say later. But the attitude and temper, the recognition of the task, could not be better introduced than through the mutual service of the two social strata. We have still at our disposal, handed on from the past, certain organized methods of investigation and administration. We now need chairs and institutes of research, not for the trivial business of popular enlightenment and lectures, but for the study and investigation of the needs of national culture, the idea which must now take the place of national defence. We shall have need of central authorities, not, like the late Ministries of Culture skimping the scanty endowment of the Board Schools, but doing the work of German education, progress, and interchange of labour.[29] FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 24: Black, red and gold were originally the colours of a students' Corps in Frankfort. They were adopted as the colours of the abortive German Federation of 1848, apparently under a mistaken idea that they represented the colours of the ancient Germanic Empire. The colours of the Empire of 1870 were the Prussian black and white, with the addition of red.] [Footnote 25: Geist.] [Footnote 26: Bildung. It is as difficult in English as it is in German to render in one word exactly what the author is thinking of. In its literal sense Bildung implies a shaping and formative action.] [Footnote 27: Ausbildung.] [Footnote 28: A harmony of character, compounded of beauty and goodness.] [Footnote 29: Arbeitsausgleich. The meaning of this will be apparent later.] XI Some decades ago the conscience of middle-class society in England was stirred. The result was Toynbee Hall and the Settlements-movement, which afterwards found praiseworthy counterparts in Germany. Society had begun to understand the wrong which it had done to its brothers, the proletariat, whom it had robbed of mind, and offered them instead soul-destroying, mechanical labour. Then choice spirits arose who dedicated their whole lives to the service of their brothers. This great and noble work did much to soften pain and hatred, and here and there many a soul was saved by it; but it could not act as it was intended to act, because it could not become what it imagined itself to be. It ought to have been, and believed itself to be, a simple and obvious piece of love-service, a pure interchange of spiritual possessions between class and class, no condescending pity or educative mission. It was a noble and a splendid error; the movement retained the form of sacrifice and benefaction. On both sides social feeling was indifferent to it, or even hostile. What one hand gave, a thousand others took back; what one hand received, a thousand others rejected. The collective conscience of a class had never been stirred, it was merely that the conscience of certain members of upper-class society had sent out envoys; it had not moved as a body. Individuals were ready to sacrifice themselves, but the conditions of labour remained unchanged. So long as a general wrong is allowed to stand, it gives the lie to every individual effort. The wrong becomes even more bitter because it loses its unconsciousness--men know it for wrong, and do not amend it. For this reason a second movement of importance, that of the People's High Schools, which has created in Denmark the most advanced peasant-class in existence, can achieve no social reform in lands cloven by proletarianism. If in addition to this the High School movement should depart from its original conception, that of a temporary community of life between the teachers and the taught, and should, instead of this, resolve itself into a lecture-institution, then the danger arises that what is offered will be disconnected matter, intended for entertainment, and without any basis of real knowledge, something commonly called half-culture which is worse than unculture, and is more properly described as misculture. No work of the charitable type can bring about the reconciliation of classes or be a substitute for popular education. The reconciliation of classes, however, even if it were attainable, is by no means our goal, but rather the abolition of classes, and our ultimate object is not popular education but popular culture. We do not intend to give with one hand and take back with the other, we shall not condemn a brother-people to dullness and quicken a few chosen individuals; no, we mean to go to the root of the evil, to break down the monopoly of culture, and to create a new people, united and cultured throughout. But the root of the trouble lies in the conditions of labour. It is an idle dream to imagine that out of that soulless subdivision of labour which governs our mechanical methods of production, the old handicrafts can ever be developed again. Short of some catastrophic depopulation which shall restore the mediæval relation between the area of the soil and the numbers that occupy it, the subdivision of labour will have to stand, and so long as it stands no man will complete his job from start to finish--he will only do a section of it; at best, and assuming the highest mechanical development, it will be a work of supervision. But mindless and soulless work no man can do with any joy. The terrible fact about the mechanization of industry is that productive work, the elementary condition of life, the very form of existence, which fills more than half of each man's waking day, is by it made hated and hateful. It degrades the industrious man, thrilling with energy, into a work-shy slacker--for what else does it mean that all social conflicts culminate in the demand for a shortening of the hours of work? For the peasant, the research-worker, the artist, the working day is never long enough; for the artisan, who calls himself _par excellence_ a "worker," it can never be too short. The advance of technical invention will make it possible in the end to transform all mechanical work into supervision. But the process will be long and partial, we cannot wait till it is completed, especially as times will come when technical knowledge will stand still, or even, it may be, go back. Any one who knows in his own flesh what mechanical work is like, who knows the feeling of hanging with one's whole soul on the creeping movement of the minute-hand, the horror that seizes him when a glance at the watch shows that the eternity which has passed has lasted only ten minutes, who has had to measure the day's task by the sound of a bell, who kills his lifetime, hour after hour, with the one longing that it might die more quickly--he knows how the shortening of the working day, whatever may be put in its place, has become for the factory artisan a goal of existence. But he knows something else as well. He knows the deadliest of all wearinesses--the weariness of the soul. Not the rest when one breathes again after wholesome bodily exertion, not the need for relaxation and distraction after a great effort of intellect, but an empty stupor of exhaustion, like the revulsion after unnatural excess. It is the shallowest kind of tea-table chatter to talk about good music, edifying and instructive lectures, a cheerful walk in God's free Nature, a quiet hour of reading by the lamp, and so on, as a remedy for this. Drink, cards, agitation, the cinemas, and dissipation can alone flog up the mishandled nerves and muscles, until they wilt again under the next day's toil. The worker has no means of comparison. He does not know what wholesome labour feels like. He will never find his way back to work on the land, for there he cannot get the counter-poisons which he thinks indispensable, and he lacks the organic, ordering mind which mechanical employment has destroyed. Even if some did get back, it would be in vain, for though agriculture is hungering for thousands of hands it cannot absorb millions. The worker has no means of comparison; hence his bottomless contempt for intellectual work, the results of which he recognizes, but which, in regard to the labour it costs, he puts on a level with the idling of the folk whom he sees strolling or driving about with their lapdogs in the fashionable streets. The middle-class conscience, and even that of the men of science, turns away its face in shameful cowardice from the horror of mechanized labour. Apart from the well-meaning æsthetes who live in rural elegance surrounded by all the appliances which mechanism can supply, who wrinkle their brows when the electric light goes out, and who write pamphlets asking with pained surprise why people cannot return to the old land-work and handicraft, most of us take mechanical labour as an unalterable condition of life, and merely congratulate ourselves that it is not we who have to do it. The Utopianist agitators who knowingly or unknowingly suppress the essential truth that their world of equality will be a world of the bitterest poverty, treat the situation just as lightly. Before them, in the future State, hovers the vision of some exceptional literary or political appointment. The others may console themselves with the thought that in spite of a still deeper degree of poverty, towards which they are sinking by their own inactivity, the hell of mechanical work, by no means abolished, will probably be a little reduced, so far as regards the time they spend in it. The notion that mechanical work will be made acceptable and reconciled with intellectual, if only it is short enough and properly paid, has never been thought out; it is a still-born child of mental lethargy, like all those visions of the future that are being held up to our eyes. Try notions like this on any other ill--toothache, for instance! All our rhetoric about mechanical work being no ill at all, is ignorant or fraudulent, and if nothing further be done than to reduce it to four hours, all our social struggles will immediately be concentrated on bringing it down to two. The goal of Socialism, so far as it relates to this _pons asinorum_ of shortening hours, is simply the right to loaf. Let us look facts in the face. Mechanical work is an evil in itself, and it is one which we never can get rid of by any conceivable economic or social transformation. Neither Karl Marx nor Lenin has succeeded here, and on this reef will be wrecked every future State that may be set up on the basis of current Socialistic ideas. In this point lies the central problem of Socialism; undisturbed, as was till lately that legendary conception of surplus-value, and bedded, like that conception, in a rats'-nest of rhetorical phrases, repeated from mouth to mouth and never tested by examination. The bringing of Mind into the masses, the cultured State,[30] which is the only possible foundation of a society worthy of humanity, must remain unattainable until everything conceivable has been thought out and done to alleviate the mischievous operation of this evil, which dulls and stupefies the human spirit and which, in itself, is ineradicable. No Soviet-policy, no socialization, no property-policy, no popular education, nor any other of the catchwords which form _ad nauseam_ the monotonous staple of our current discussion of affairs, can go to the heart of the problem. Instead we must establish and put into practice the principle which I have called that of the Interchange of Labour, and which I must now, in broad outline, endeavour to explain. The object of this principle is to bring mind into labour. It demands--since mind cannot be brought into mechanical work beyond a certain degree fixed by technical conditions--that the day's work as a whole shall have a share of it, by means of the exchange and association of mental and mechanical employment. Until this principle shall have been carried into effect, all true culture of the people remains impossible. So long as there is no culture of the people, so long must culture remain a monopoly of the classes, and of escapes from the masses; so long must society be wanting in equilibrium, a union open to breach from every side, and one which, however highly its social institutions may be developed, holds down the people to forced labour, and destroys culture. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 30: Bildungsstaat.] XII There is a way by which the day's work can be ennobled, and even have mind brought into it,[31] on capitalistic lines. Before the War we were just about to enter on this path--America is treading it now. Its fundamental condition is a huge increase in general well-being. The daily wages of the American working-man have risen, as we have already remarked, to seven or even ten dollars, corresponding to a purchasing power of over a hundred marks. This amounts to so radical a removal of all restrictions in domestic economy that one can no longer speak of the proletarian condition as existing in the United States. A man who drives to his work in his own automobile can satisfy all his reasonable needs in the way of recreation and of extending his education, he looks at his sectional job (as has not seldom been the case in America even in earlier days) with a critical eye, he forms his own judgment of its place in the whole, he improves the processes, and amuses himself by being both workman and engineer. (Consider in the light of this fact the value of the prophecy that America is standing on the brink of Bolshevism!) In a country whose wealth at this moment--in consequence of war-profits and depreciation of money--is almost equal to that of the rest of the world put together, the process of abolishing proletarianism can go forward on capitalistic lines. But we Germans, since it is decreed that we shall be among the poorest of the peoples, and must begin afresh, and live for the future--we shall renounce without envy the broad path of the old way of thought, the way of riches, in order to clear with hard work the new path on which, one day, all will have to follow us. The way of Culture is the way to which we are pointed, and we have described Interchange of Labour as the fundamental condition which enables us to travel it. It is now clear that the conception of popular culture is not, after all, represented by any of the five-and-twenty idealizing catchwords with which we are wont to console ourselves in our elegiac orations, but that by it is meant a clearly defined political procedure. By the principle of Interchange of Labour it is required that every employee engaged in mechanical work can claim to do a portion of his day's work in intellectual employment; and that every brainworker shall be obliged to devote a portion of his day to physical labour. There are, of course, fixed limits to the application of this principle, on the one side in intellectual, on the other in bodily incapacity, as well as in those rare cases where it is recognized that the interrupted hours of intellectual work cannot be made good. We would also establish a year of Labour-Service, to be devoted by the whole youth of Germany, of both sexes, to bodily training and work. The tests of capacity and of the claim to be reckoned as "cultured" is not to consist in examinations but in proof of work. Any one who can offer some show of claim can demand to be tested, and, if the result is favourable, to receive further culture. Thus we shall be taking seriously the question of the ascent to higher grades, which, so long as it depends on a particular age, or on school certificates, must remain on paper. Let no one say that this testing system is a mere mechanical method, that it degrades Culture from its intellectual dignity, and is equivalent to the Chinese literary tests for office. True culture is distinguished from mere sybaritic æstheticism in that in some sense or other it makes for production. Where there is no talent for art or for creative thought, then there remain to be developed the educational forces of judgment, or a faculty for the conduct of life, which must have their influence. Different categories of Culture will arise of themselves; not ranks or castes or classes, but grades of society, each of which may be attained by any one. No one must be able to say that any monopoly of culture has barred his way, or that training and testing have been denied him. If the culture be genuine it will never look down in intellectual arrogance on the stages below it; if it have duties associated with it, then he who has rejected the path of ascent, or has failed in it, cannot claim to fulfil those duties. Any one who has no faculty but that of a glib tongue will find in the multiplicity of callings some field for his activity; but the rule of the talker, backed by force or not, will at any rate be spared us. At this point we may hear a voice from the average heart of Socialism exclaim: "How is this? Do you call that having no castes? We have just begun to shake off the yoke of the capitalists and now are we expected to put the cultured in command? This is pure reaction!" Softly! If this is a case of misunderstanding, we shall clear it up. If any scruples still remain, we shall consider them further. Let us take the misunderstanding first. It is apparently forgotten that capitalism ruled by hereditary power. Any one who belonged to that circle ruled along with it, whether he were competent to rule or not. But culture is not a heritable possession; no one can win it save by virtue of a higher spirit and will. He who has this spirit and this will, can and will win it. He who wins it is fit for higher responsibilities. Is the voice from the average heart answered? No. It replies: "Heritable or not, what do we care? We are out for equality. Distinctions in culture are a kind of aristocracy." Now, good heart, you have revealed yourself. What was the meaning of your everlasting talk about the ladder for the rise of capacity? I shall tell you. The capable man is to toil, and to rise just so far as you permit him, namely, till you can possess yourselves of the fruits of his labour: then he is to be thrust down, and the loudest mouth is to rule. You are not pleased with this interpretation? Neither am I, so we are quits. For of the folly of imagining a society of equals I do not intend to speak. The average man, who cannot understand equality of human dignity, equality before God, thinks nothing of demanding equality in externals, equality in responsibility and vocation. But this sham equality is the enemy of the true, for it does not fit man's burden to his strength, it creates overburdened, misused natures, driving the one to scamped work and hypocrisy, and the other to cynicism. Every accidental and inherited advantage must indeed be done away with. But if there is any one who, among men equal in external conditions, in duties and in claims, demands that they should also be equal in mind, in will and in heart--let him begin by altering Nature! In remuneration also, that is to say, in the apportionment of conditions of work, a mechanical equality would be tantamount to an unjust and intolerable inequality in the actual distribution or remission of work. Work of the highest class, creative and intellectual work--the most self-sacrificing that is known to man because it draws to itself and swallows up a man's whole life, including his hours of leisure and recreation--this work demands extreme consideration, in the form of solitude, freedom from disturbance, from trivial and distracting cares or occupations, and contact with Nature. This kind of consideration is, from the economic point of view, an outlay which mechanical work does not require. If mechanical and intellectual work are to be placed under the same specific conditions, under which the highest standard of output is to be maintained and the producers are as far as possible to bear an equal burden, then the scale of remuneration must be different. Starting from a subsistence minimum it must for intellectual work be graded two stages upward, one for the output,[32] and one for the grade of culture implied. Women will also be subject to this system of grading whether they exercise any vocation outside their homes or not, for society has a deep interest in the culture of its mothers, and in external incentives to culture women must share equally with men. An intimate sense of association will grow up within each grade of culture. This, however, will not impair the general solidarity of the people, since no hereditary family egoism can arise. This sense of association, renewed with elements that vary from generation to generation, and corresponding very much to the relations between contemporary artists who spring from different classes or territories, will dissolve the relics of the old hereditary sentiment and absorb into itself whatever traditional values the latter may possess. Between the separate grades there will not only be the connexion afforded by the living possibilities of free ascent from one to the other, but the system of ever-renewed co-operation in rank-and-file at the same work will in itself promote culture, tradition, and the consciousness of union. We need only recall the old gilds and military associations in order to realize what a high degree of manly civic consciousness can arise from the visible community of duty and achievement. The mechanical worker will become the instructor of his temporary comrade and guest, and the latter will in turn widen the other's outlook, and emulate him in the development of the processes of production. The manual worker will bring to the desk and the board-room his freedom from prepossessions and the practical experience of his calling; he will learn how to deal with abstractions and general ideas; he will gain a respect for intellectual work, and will feel the impulse to win new knowledge and faculty, or to make good what he has neglected. * * * * * Two objections remain to be considered and confuted. First: there are far more places to be filled in mechanical than in intellectual employment. Is it possible so to organize the interchange of work that every one who desires intellectual employment can find it? The answer is: that, whether we like it or not, all work tends more and more to take on an administrative character. Just as in industry there is ever more talk and less production, so our economic life is working itself out through thousands upon thousands of new organizations. Industrial Councils, Councils of Workers, Gild-Councils, are forming themselves in among the existing agencies of administration; and the immediate consequence of this is a tremendous drop in production, to be followed later by a more highly articulated and more remunerative system of work. It is as if a marble statue came to life, and then had to be internally equipped with bones, muscles, veins and nerves. Or it resembles the transformation of a shabby piece of suburban building-ground: it has to be dug up, drained, paved, fenced; and until traffic has poured into it, it remains a comfortless and dismal waste. But the administrative side of our future economic and national life demands the creation of so many posts of intellectual work that at present there is not the trained _personnel_ to fill it. If the Year of Labour-Service is introduced, there will be still more defections and gaps to be filled. The rush for intellectual work is more likely to be too small than too great. Let us come to the second objection. Will not confusion be worse confounded if there are many who have to fill two jobs, if, in these jobs constant exchanges are taking place, if the periods of work are brief and subject to untimely interruptions, if time and work are lost through never-ending rearrangement? Assuredly. And any one who starts with the idea of the old high-strung work done, as it were, under military discipline, any one who cherishes the remotest idea that this system can ever return, in spite of the fact that its clamps and springs have been dashed to pieces, may well lament these unsettlements. One who starts from the fluctuating conditions of our present-day, make-believe labour will take organic unsettlements as part of the price to be paid, if they only lead in the end to systematic production. But one who weighs the fact that the make-believe life of our present economy has not even yet reached its final form, will discern in every new transition-form, however tedious, the final redemption; in so far, at least, as any equilibrium is capable of being restored at all. The essence of the interchange of labour will, therefore, consist in this, that while the distinction between physical and intellectual work will still exist, there will be no distinction between a physical and intellectual calling. Until advanced age may forbid, it will be open to every man not merely to acquire some ornamental branches of knowledge but seriously and with both feet to take his footing in the opposite calling to his own. The different callings will learn to know and respect each other, and to understand their respective difficulties. This applies particularly to those who call themselves the operative workers. As soon as hereditary idleness has come to an end and loafing has been trampled out, then many a one, who now thinks that mental work is mere chattering, will learn through his novitiate at the desk, that thinking hurts. If he does not feel himself equal to this kneading and rummaging of the brain, he will go back with relief to his workshop; he will neither envy nor despise those who are operative workers with the brain, and will understand, or at least unconsciously feel, the oppositions in human nature and the differences in conditions of life, and will know them to be just. He cannot and must not keep himself wholly aloof from the elements of mental training; his contact with brainworkers will not cease; and thus his complete and passive resignation to the domination of ignorant rhetoric will lose its charm. Any man will be respected who contents himself with the lowest prescribed measure of culture, who modestly renounces further study, and goes back to manual work. But there will be no excuse for those who know nothing and can do nothing, but pretend to set everybody right; for there will be no monopoly of culture to keep them down, and all genuine faculty must come to the test of action. * * * * * To-day there are three classes of social swindlers. First, those who live on the community without returning it any service. These are the people who live idly on inherited money, and the loafers. Against these social legislation must be framed. Secondly, those who deliberately practise "ca' canny," and therefore live on the surplus work of their fellows. These are the champions of the principle: Every one according to his need, no one according to his deed; the _saboteurs_ of labour. Against these the remedy lies in the spread of intelligence and a just system of remuneration. Thirdly, there are those who simulate thought and brain-work while they have nothing to give but hack phrases uttered with a glib tongue. Against these worst of all swindlers, these sinners against the Spirit, the remedy is culture. And this, in the new Order, is open to every one, young or old, who can maintain his foothold in the exercise of intellect, when the chance is offered him. He who in his test-exercise reaches a normal standard of accomplishment can demand that he shall not be sent back to manual work, but continue to be employed in the same occupation, and be further cultivated in whatever direction he desires. At every further stage of development a corresponding sphere of activity is to be opened to him, up to the point at which the limits of his capacity come into sight. Let no one object that the rush for intellectual work will become uncontrollable. Would that it might! For then the country would be so highly developed and its methods of work so perfected that there would be quite a new relation between the demand for head-work and for hand-work. For a long time to come this rush will be far smaller than we imagine; for the immediate future it will suffice if the rising forces are set free, and the laggard are tranquillized. But, the Radicals will cry, what an unsocial principle! Have we at last, with difficulty, brought it to the point that the accursed one-year examination[33] is abrogated, and now are we again to be condemned according to this so-called standard of culture? Stay! there is a fallacy here. In our transition period which is still quite dominated by the monopoly of culture, I have nothing to say against the abrogation of every educational test, even though in a few years we shall feel the deeply depressing effects which will arise from the domination of the uncultured. But the transition period will come to an end. Then every one who likes will be able to learn and to execute, and every one who is able will wish to do so. "But supposing one does not wish? May not he be the very one who is most capable of achievement? We don't want model pupils." Nor do I want model pupils. The boy who has learnt nothing may make his trial as a man when culture is open to all. But if, as a man, he does not care to rack his brains he will be thought none the less of; he will merely be offered ordinary work according to his choice. But those who wish to see responsibility and the destiny of the country placed in the hands of men who do not care to rack their brains, must not entrench themselves behind social principles, but plainly admit that they want for all time to establish the rule of demagogy and the vulgarization of intellect. It is not for such a one to pass judgment on the mission of Germany. The way to the German mission, to German culture, which is to be no more a culture of the classes but of the people, stands open to all by means of the Interchange of Labour. The whole land is as it were a single ship's crew; the issues are the same for all. The manual worker is no longer kept down by over-fatigue, and the brainworker is no longer cut off from the rest of the people. The manual worker no longer regards the territory of culture as a sort of inaccessible island, but rather as a district which he can visit every day and in which he is quite at home. Every one in future will start even in school training, and the degree to which his further culture may be carried will not be limited by want of money or of time, or, above all, of opportunity. He will continually have intercourse with men of culture, and in that intercourse he will at once give and receive; the habits of thought, the methods and the range of intellectual work which are now only the heritage of a few will be his own; and the twofold language of the country, the language of conceptions and the language of things, will for him be one. There will be no permanent system of stratification; the energies of the people, rising and falling, will be in constant movement and their elements will never lose touch. There may be self-tormenting and unhappily constituted natures who will hate their own dispositions and the destiny they have shaped for themselves--these aberrations will never cease so long as men are men--but there will be no more hatred of class for class, any more than there is in any voluntary association of artists or of athletes. And since culture is to be at once the recognized social aim of the country and the personal goal and standard of each individual, the struggle for possessions and enjoyments, doubly restrained by public opinion and by deeper insight, will sink into the background. But the spirit of the land will not resemble any that we know at present. As in the Middle Ages, a spiritual power will rule, but it will not be imposed from without or above, it will be a creation from within. The competition of all will be like that of the best in the time of the Renaissance, but it will not be a competition for conventional values but for the furthering of life. The country will become, as it was in former days, a generous giver, not, however, from the lofty eminence of a class set apart, but out of the whole strength of the people. Again, for the first time, the convinced and conscious will of a people will be seen to direct itself to a common and recognized goal. This is a fact of immeasurable significance, it implies the exercise of forces which we only discern on the rare mountain-peaks of history, and of which the last example was the French Revolution. But those dangers of which we have spoken, that hell of a mechanical socialism, of institutions and arrangements without sentiment or spirit, are done away with, for production has ceased to be merely material and formal, it has acquired absolute value and substance. Spirit is the only end that sanctifies all means; and it sanctifies not by justifying them but by purifying them. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 31: Vergeistigt werden. It is difficult to render this word in the sense in which Rathenau uses it; 'intellectualized' does not say enough, and 'spiritualized' says a little too much.] [Footnote 32: Assuming that the highest output is reached in the particular instance which of course will not be the case with every worker whether in the mechanical or intellectual sphere. The author appears to be referring to amount, not quality, of output, as the latter would be covered by the second clause, relating to grade of culture (Bildungsstufe).] [Footnote 33: Referring to the shortening of military service which used to be accorded to recruits of a certain educational standard.] XIII As the kinsfolk of a dying man comfort themselves in the death-chamber with every little droop in the curve of temperature, although they know in their hearts that the hour has come, so our critics flatter themselves with the idea that in the end all will come right, if not by itself at least with trifling exertion. But it is not so: except by the greatest exertion nothing will come right. Our lake-city of economics and social order is ripe for collapse, for the piles on which it is built are decayed. It is true that it still stands, and will be standing for an hour or so, and life goes on in it very much as in the days when it was sound. We can choose either to leave it alone, and await the downfall of the city, among whose ruins life will never bloom again, or we can begin the underpinning of the tottering edifice, a process which will last for decades, which will allow no peace to any of us, which will be toilsome and dangerous, and will end almost imperceptibly, when the ancient city has been transformed into the new. Let us have no doubt about it: something tremendous and unprecedented has to be accomplished here. Does any thinking man believe that when the social order of the world has collapsed, when a country of the importance of Germany has lost the very basis of its existence, when the development of centuries is broken off, its faculties and its traditions emptied of value and repudiated--does any man really believe that by means of certain clauses in a Constitution a few confiscations, socializations and rises in wages, a nation of sixty millions can be endowed with a new historical reason for existence? Why is not the negro republic of Liberia ahead of all of us? Our character is weak on the side of will, and our former lords say that we are good for nothing except under strict discipline administered by dynasts and hereditary nobles. If that is true, it is all over with us; unless some dictator shall take pity on us and give us a modest place among the nations with a great past and a small future. If we are worthy of our name we must be born again of the Spirit. Merely to conceive this is in itself an achievement for a people; to carry it out, to embody the conception in a new order of society, is at once a test and an achievement. Our social ethics must take up a new position. Hitherto--stripping off the usual rhetorical phrases--it has taken its stand on two effective and really driving principles, those of Duty and of Success; two side-views of Individualism. All else, including love of one's neighbour, sense of solidarity, faith, spiritual cultivation, feeling for Nature, was (apart from a few lofty spirits) merely subsidiary; means to an end, convention or falsehood. There were few whose careers were not influenced by these estimates; the majority of the upper classes was wholly under their dominion. The two goals of our wishes, to have something and to be something, were expressed by the whole outward aspect of society. The great object was not to be counted as a Tom, Dick or Harry, one who had less, or was less, than others. There were grades of being, grades of human being: it was possible to be something, to be much, to be little, or to be nothing at all. From the white collar to the pearl necklace, from the good nursery to the saloon car, from the watch-ribbon to the sword-belt, from the place at the ordinary to the title of Excellency, everything was a proof of what one had, or was, or believed oneself to be. If one did not know a man one must not speak to him; if one knew him, one might borrow a hundred marks from him, but one must not ask him for a penny. Whoever had wealth displayed it in order to be admired; whoever had a social position displayed his unapproachability and the weight of his dignity, as, for instance, when with an absent look and lost in the burden of his own existence he entered a dining-hall. From inferiors one demanded a degrading attitude and forms of speech, and presented to them a face of stone; towards those in higher position one came to life and displayed an attentive civility. It was--or shall we say is?--permissible to lavish in an hour the monthly income of a poor family. "One had it to spend" and "what business was it of theirs?" In the lower ranks there was much of genuine revolt against these abuses and also much envy and malice, much open imitation, and much of secret admiration. Every silly craze was cheapened in hideous imitations, the suburb and the village made a display which in quality, indeed, fell below the model, but in quantity not at all. It may be said that these were excrescences or city fashions; that one must not generalize. These are empty phrases. To understand the spirit of a society it is not hermits that one must study. And, moreover, let any one ask himself whether this society was really based on the idea of solidarity and human friendliness or upon unscrupulous personal interests and exploitation, on shows and shams, on the demand for service and the claim to command. If anything can explain the eagerness with which we Germans flung ourselves into a war whose origins we did not know and did not want to know, then besides the conscious objects, advantage, rehabilitation, and renown, we must also take into account the obscure impulse of the national conscience which in the midst of evil individualism and of personal and class egoism yearned for the sense of solidarity and fusion. Is it objected that all this lies deeply rooted in human nature, that it has been there from time immemorial, and it is impossible to alter it at one stroke? Pedantic drivel! Many things lie deep in human nature, and it depends on which of these the will chooses to develop. And who talked of altering things at one stroke? Our judgment of values is to be transformed, and if human nature never changed, much that now flaunts itself in the sunshine would be creeping in the shade. This transformation of judgment is a matter of recognizing things for what they are. When pomp, extravagance, exclusiveness, frivolity and fastness, greed, place-hunting and vulgar envy are looked on with the same eyes as aberrations in other provinces of life, then we shall not indeed have abolished all vice, but the atmosphere will be purified. Look at our sturdy Socialists of the November days[34] and proselytes of every description: you can see that the acquisition of a new judgment of values may be the affair of an hour! And for that reason one must not criticize them too closely--unless they try to make a profit out of their conversion. All social judgments presuppose a system of recognized values. The values of Christian ethics have never penetrated deeply into the collective judgment of mankind; even in the mediæval bloom of Christian, or rather of ecclesiastical, culture the moral conceptions of Christianity remained the possession of a few chosen spirits and communities; society in general accepted the mythical element, did homage to the hierarchy, and remained ethically pagan, the upper classes being guided by a code of honour resting on the worship of courage. The Churches never made any serious effort to shape an ethical code; they were preoccupied with the teaching of dogmas of faith which carried them ever farther and farther from the groundwork of the Gospels, and they devoted whatever surplus energies they had to politics, and to accommodations with the ruling powers of the world. The cult of courage imposed on and exercised by the ruling classes, and symbolically imaged in their code of honour, took an effective shape in the banning of cowardice and of cowardly crime. So far as positive values go, the ethics of nobility degenerated into smartness, the claim for "satisfaction" and the exclusiveness of rank; a Prussian and Kantian abstraction, the conception of duty, a conception at bottom unproved and incapable of generating conviction, became a rule of life, made effective by training and control. The ruling powers and their controls have given way, and their dry brittleness is revealed. We have not succeeded in finding a substitute for social ethics in an idealized type of national character. The imagination of the Western nations, like those of antiquity, has shaped ideal types which they believe or would wish themselves to resemble; they know what they mean by "esprit gaulois," or "English character," or "American Democracy," while, in accordance with the problematic character of our being, we Germans, except for the statuesque heroes of legendary times, or certain historic but inimitable figures, have conceived or poetically created no character of which we can say that it embodies the collective spirit of Germany. The super-ethical doctrine of the being, the growth and the empire of the soul has been laid down by us, but there are as yet few into whose consciousness it has penetrated; the transformation of thought and feeling which must proceed from it will not lay hold of the masses directly, but will filter continually from one social stratum to another. The recognized values of social judgment! It sounds so abstract, so remote from practice, that one might well believe we were landed again in the cloudland of festal oratory and the emotions of the leading article. The voluntary recognition of an invisible authority! And this after we have shattered the visible, and are living in the midst of intellectual anarchy and moral Nihilism! And yet moral valuations, simple, binding, and on the level of social judgment, are near enough to be within our grasp. Are not all the four quarters of the world to-day talking about Democracy? Have not we ourselves got tired of this word, forbidden till a year ago--tired, even in circles where the modest word "Liberal" was never pronounced without a frown? And what does Democracy mean? Do we take it in the merely negative sense, that one is no longer obliged to put up with things? Or in the meagre sense, that responsibility goes by favour, and that the majority must decide? Or the dubious sense, that we are yearning to make our way through a sham Socialism to the Dollar Republic? It is not the form of government, it is the form of society, that determines the spirit of a land. There is no democratic form of society, for democracy can be in league with capitalism, with socialism, or even with the class of clubs and castes. The unspoken fundamental conception which gives significance and stability both to the forms of a democratic constitution and to those of an organic society is called Solidarity--that is to say, cohesion and the sense of community. Solidarity means that each man does not come first in his own eyes, but before God and State and himself each man must stand and be answerable for all, and all for each. In this sense of solidarity the dominion of the majority over the minority is not an object to be striven for but an evil to be avoided; the true object of a solid democracy is the dominion of a people over itself, not by reckoning up the relative strength of its various interests, but by virtue of the spirit and of the will which it sets free. In this sense of solidarity no society can be based on hereditary monopolies either of capital or of cultivation; nor can it be delivered over to the terrorism of vocations and unions which, under the leaderships of shouters, claim the right whenever they please, to strangle indispensable industries; nor can it be based on demagogic flattery of excitable mobs. Every born man must from his cradle onwards have the same right to existence; he must be sheltered and fostered as he grows up, and be free to choose his lot. Every occupation must be open to him, except that he must not encroach on the sphere of another man's liberty. The standard of his activity is not to be fixed by birth or privilege or force or cunning or the glib tongue, but again, by spirit and by will. To-day, while cultivation of the spirit is still a class-monopoly, it cannot form any standard of creative capacity. And yet it has been demonstrated that so powerful is the passion for culture in a spirit which is in any degree qualified for it, that even to-day it is capable, by self-education, of surmounting some of the artificial barriers. There was not, to my knowledge, any illiterate among the Prussian or German Ministers of the new era, and the one of them who excused his deficiencies of language with the class-monopoly of education was in the wrong, for any man of normal capacity might in ten years' practice of popular oratory have learned the elements of syntax. When access to the cultivation of the German spirit has become a common right of the whole people, Culture will become, if not the sign at least the presupposition of creative activity. The proof of capacity will then cease to be settled either between agitators and the masses, or in the dimness of privileged chanceries, but in the productive competition of men of high intellectual endowment. Society will not be divided by classes and castes, it will not be graded according to pedigree or possessions, it will not be ruled by separate interests; by ideas or by the masses; it will be an ordered body--ordered by spirit, by will, by service and responsibility. Any one who does not accept this self-created and self-renewing order, and who at the same time rejects the old, is simply working for the dominion of force and chance. A society can no more remain permanently without order than the staff of a factory or the crew of a ship. Only instead of an organic order we may have an accidental and arbitrary, an order of the personal type, springing from the dexterity shown in some favourable moment, maintaining itself by force, and seeking to perpetuate itself in some form of hereditary oligarchy. An order of the priestly and hierarchical type is no longer thinkable to-day, nor can one of the peasant type come into question in a land of urban industry. Whoever wishes to see an organic self-determining and self-regenerating order of society, has therefore to choose between the military order, resting upon disciplined bodily capacity, or the mercantile and capitalist order which rests upon business-sense and egoistic alertness, or the demagogic order which rests upon the rhetorical domination of the masses, and does not last long as it soon turns to violence and oligarchy, or finally the order of culture, resting upon spirit, character, and education. This last is not merely the only suitable one for us and the only one which is worthy of our past; it will also in time become the general order of society prevailing over all the world. In the vision of this order we recognize the mission that Prussia neglected, though it lay within its grasp for a hundred years; what it neglected and the rock on which it foundered. The greatness of Prussian policy since 1713 lay in its premonition and appreciation of the principle of mechanism even before it became common to all the world. Organization and improvement, the war machine and money, science, practicality and conscientiousness--all this is clearly mechanization seen from the political side. The early application of these principles was a stroke of genius far in advance of the then condition of the world. Seen from this standpoint, all the rest of the continental world, not yet mechanized, and burdened with the relics of mediævalism, Cæsarism and clericalism, seemed torpid and lost in illusions: arbitrary, inaccurate and slovenly. With short interruptions this Prusso-central point of view was maintained until the middle of the World-War; and not quite unjustly, for Prussia remained in every respect ahead of other powers in the department of mechanization. For a hundred years the Prussian principles had a monopoly of success; elsewhere they were scarcely understood and much less imitated. Then came Napoleon. He took over the mechanistic principle and handled it as never a man had done before; he became the mechanizer of the world. At the same time he was something mightier than that: he was the heir of the French idea of spiritual and popular liberty. Prussia fell, and would have fallen, even if its mechanism had not grown rusty. Its leaders learnt their lessons from France and England, they set on foot a liberation of the people by departmental authority and a liberation of the spirit by the people; they put new life into the mechanism, and they conquered with the help of England as we have lately seen France conquer with the help of America. But here came a parting of the ways. It was possible to pursue either the way of mechanization or that of the liberation of the spirit. Prussia did neither; it stood still. In the place of the liberation of the spirit came the reaction; in the place of mechanization came the bureaucracy. On the rest of the Continent, too, the movement for political mechanization was stifled, the force that stifled it being the uprising economic movement. Bismarck was aware of the untried forces that lay in the system of political mechanization. The world, as we looked at it from our Prussian window, seemed as loose and slovenly as ever, and it was so. Once again, with a mighty effort, the Prussian mechanism was revived and the movement of the bourgeoisie towards liberty and the life of the spirit was repressed. This was called "realism" in politics, and the estimate was a just one. There was no progress to be made with professional Liberalism; but with Krupp and Roon one organized victories. As in Frederick's time the slovenly Continent had to give way, Prussia mounted to the climax of her fortunes, and won Germany. And again there was a parting of the ways; but this time there was no one to stand for civic and spiritual freedom. People believed they had all they wanted of it; democracy was discredited and broken, the professors were political realists, success followed the side of mechanization, which was rightly supposed to be linked with the dynasty, and mechanization in the economic sphere drew to its side the hope of gain. Bismarck died in the midst of anxieties, but to the end he had no scruples. The two systems of mechanization were at their zenith, and the other countries looked, in political affairs, as slovenly as ever. One was wearing itself out in parliamentary conflicts, another had no battle-cruisers, another was lacking in cannon, or in recruits, or in railways, or in finances; the trains never came in up to time, everywhere one found public opinion or the Press interfering in process of law or in the administration, everywhere there were scandals; in Prussian Germany alone was everything up to the mark. Only one thing was overlooked. The mechanization of economics had become a common possession for everybody. Starting from this and with the methods and experiences attached to it, it was possible also for other countries, if necessary, to mechanize their politics or, as we say now, to militarize them. And this could be done with even more life and vigour than in Prussia, whose organization was there believed to be inimitable and where the principle of mechanism was, as it were, stored up in tins and in some places was obviously getting mouldy. In the matter of Freedom, however, the other peoples were ahead of us, and to the political isolation of Prussia spiritual isolation was now added. In the encircling fog which prevailed on economic developments there was not a single statesman who recognized that Prussian principles had ceased to be a monopoly, or an advantage, not to mention a conception of genius. This lack of perception was the political cause of the war. Instead of renewing ourselves inwardly through freedom and the spirit, and carrying on a defensive policy as quietly, discreetly, and inconspicuously as possible, we took to arming and hurrahing. Worse than any playing of false notes was the mistake we made in key and in tempo: D major, _Allegro_, _Marcia_, _Fortissimo_, with cymbals and trumpets! To-day we have no longer a choice before us, only a decision. The period of mechanical Prussianization is over for us, the period of the mechanical policy of Force is over for all the world, although the heliographs of Versailles seem to reflect it high above the horizon. It is not a capitalistic Peace of God as imagined by the international police which has now begun; it is the social epoch. In this epoch the people will live and will range themselves according to the strength of the ideas which they stand for. It is not enough for us to become Germans instead of Prussians; not even if, as it were to be desired, we should succeed in rescuing from the collapse of Prussia her genuine virtues of practicality, order and duty. It is not enough to brew some soulless mixture out of the worn-out methods of the Western bourgeoisie and the unripe attempts of Eastern revolutionaries. It is not enough--no, it will lead us to destruction quicker than any one believes--to blunder along with the disgusting bickerings of interests and the complacent narrowness of officialism, talking one day of the rate of exchange, another of our debts, and the next of the food question, plugging one hole with the stopping of another and lying down at night with a sigh of relief: Well, something's got done; all will come right. No, unthinking creatures that you are; nothing will come right until you drop your insincere chatter, your haggling, your agitating and compromising, and begin to think. Here is a people that has lost the basis of its existence, because, in its blind faith in authority, it staked that existence on prosperity and power; and both are gone. Do you want to stake _our_ existence, on ships, soldiers, mines, trade-connexions, which we no longer possess, or upon the soil, of which we have not enough, or upon our broken will to work? Are we to be the labour-serfs and the serfage stud-farm of the world? Only on Thoughts and Ideals can our existence be staked. Where is your thought? Where is the thought of Germany? We can and must live only by becoming what we were designed to be, what we were about to be, what we failed to become: a people of the Spirit, the Spirit among the peoples of mankind. That is the thought of Germany. This thought is shaping the New Society--the society of the spirit and the cultivation of the spirit, the only one which can hold its ground in the new epoch, and which fulfils it. This is why we have been endowed with a character whose will is weak in external things and strong in inward responsibility; why depth and understanding, practicality and uprightness, many-sidedness and individuality, power of work and invention, imagination and aspiration have been bestowed upon us, in order that we may fulfil these things. For what do these qualities, as a whole, betoken? Not the conqueror, not the statesman, not the worldling, and not the man of business; it is a narrow and trivial misuse of all faculty for us to pretend to represent these types among the nations. They betoken the labourers of the spirit; and far as we are from being a nation of thinkers and poets, it is nevertheless our right and our high calling to be a thinking nation among the nations. But on what, you may ask with scorn, is this thinking nation to live? With all its wisdom, will it not be reduced to beggary and starvation? No--it will live. That people which amid a century of world-revolution is able to form for itself a stable, well-balanced, ordered and highly developed form of society will be one that works and produces. All around there will be quarrelling and conflict, there will be little work and little production. For the next decade the question will be, not where is the demand but where is the supply? The countries are laid waste, as Germany was after the Thirty Years' War; only we do not as yet recognize it, so long as the fever lasts we do not notice the decline. Production, thought-out and penetrated with spirit, on the part of a highly developed society, and combined with labour-fellowship, is more than valuable production or cheap production; it is something exemplary and essential. And this applies not only to production itself but to the methods of production, to the technique, the schooling, the organization, the manner of thinking. It is a petty thing to say that we were destroyed out of envy. Why did not envy destroy America and England? The world regarded us at once with admiration and with repulsion; with admiration for our systematic and laborious ways, with repulsion for our tradesman-like obtrusiveness, the brusque and dangerous character of our leadership and the ostentatious servility with which we endured it. If it had been possible anywhere outside of our naked, mercantile and national egoism to discover a German idea, it would have been respected. The German idea of cultivation of the spirit will win something for us which we have not known for a century, and the scope of which we cannot yet measure; people will freely appreciate us, they will further us and follow us on our way. We have no idea what it means for a people to have these sympathetic forces at its side, as France had in its creation of forms, England and America in civilization and democracy, Russia in Slavonic orthodoxy and the neutral States in their internationalism. There is no fear: we shall live, and more than live. For the first time for centuries we shall again be conscious of a mission, and around all our internal oppositions will be twined a bond which will be something more than a bond of interest. The goal of the world-revolution upon which we have now entered means in its material aspect the melting of all strata of society into one. In its transcendental aspect it means redemption: redemption of the lower strata to freedom and to the spirit. No one can redeem himself but every one can redeem another. Class for class, man for man: thus is a people redeemed. Yet in each case there must be readiness and in each there must be good-will. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 34: 1918, when the revolution in Germany broke out at Kiel.] THE END THE EUROPEAN LIBRARY Edited by J. E. SPINGARN This series is intended to introduce foreign authors whose works are not accessible in English, and in general to keep Americans in touch with the intellectual and spiritual ferment of the continent of Europe. No attempt will be made to give what Americans miscall "the best books," if by this is meant conformity to some high and illusory standard of past greatness; any twentieth-century book which displays creative power or a new outlook or more than ordinary interest or charm will be eligible for inclusion. Nor will the attempt be made to select books that merely confirm American standards of taste or morals, since the series is intended to serve as a mirror of European culture and not as a glass through which it may be seen darkly. Fiction will predominate, but belles lettres, poetry, philosophy, social and economic discussion, history, biography, and other fields will be represented. "The first organized effort to bring into English a series of the really significant figures in contemporary European literature.... An undertaking as creditable and as ambitious as any of its kind on the other side of the Atlantic."--_New York Evening Post._ THE WORLD'S ILLUSION. By J. WASSERMANN. Translated by Ludwig Lewisohn. Two volumes. (Second printing.) One of the most remarkable creative works of our time, revolving about the experiences of a man who sums up the wealth and culture of our age yet finds them wanting. The first volume depicts the life of the upper classes of European society, the second is a very Inferno of the Slums; and the whole mirrors, with extraordinary insight, the beauty and sorrow, the power and weakness of our social and spiritual world. "A human comedy in the great sense, which no modern can afford not to hear."--H. W. Boynton, in the _Weekly Review_. PEOPLE. By PIERRE HAMP. Translated by James Whitall. With an Introduction by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant. Introducing one of the most significant writers of France, himself a working man, who in these stories of the French underworld expresses the new self-consciousness of the worker's outlook. THE NEW SOCIETY. By WALTER RATHENAU. Translated by Arthur Windham. One of Germany's most influential thinkers and men of action presents his vision of the new society emerging out of the War. DECADENCE AND OTHER ESSAYS ON THE CULTURE OF IDEAS. By REMY DE GOURMONT. Translated by William Aspenwall Bradley. The first authorized version of the critical work of one of the great aesthetic thinkers of France. IN PREPARATION THE PATRIOT. By HEINRICH MANN. Translated by Ernest A. Boyd. The career of a typical product of militarism, in school, university, business, patriotism, and love, told with a biting incisiveness and irony. THE REFORM OF EDUCATION. By GIOVANNI GENTILE. With an Introduction by BENEDETTO CROCE. Translated by Dino Bigongiari. A new interpretation of the meaning of education, by one who shares with Croce the leadership of Italian thought to-day. A POET'S LOVES: FROM THE UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPTS OF VICTOR HUGO. By LOUIS BARTHOU. Translated by Daniel Créhange Rosenthal. A striking, not to say sensational, revelation of the intimate private life of a great poet, by an ex-Premier of France. HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY Publishers New York 
17416	----	A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF SOCIALISM by W.H. MALLOCK London John Murray, Albemarle Street, W. 1908 Printed by Hazell, Watson and Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury. PREFACE The Civic Federation of New York, an influential body which aims, in various ways, at harmonising apparently divergent industrial interests in America, having decided on supplementing its other activities by a campaign of political and economic education, invited me, at the beginning of the year 1907, to initiate a scientific discussion of socialism in a series of lectures or speeches, to be delivered under the auspices of certain of the great Universities in the United States. This invitation I accepted, but, the project being a new one, some difficulty arose as to the manner in which it might best be carried out--whether the speeches or lectures should in each case be new, dealing with some fresh aspect of the subject, or whether they should be arranged in a single series to be repeated without substantial alteration in each of the cities visited by me. The latter plan was ultimately adopted, as tending to render the discussion of the subject more generally comprehensible to each local audience. A series of five lectures, substantially the same, was accordingly delivered by me in New York, Cambridge, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. But whilst this plan secured continuity of treatment, it secured it at the expense of comprehensiveness. Certain important points had to be passed over. In the present volume the substance of the original lectures has been entirely rearranged and rewritten, and more than half the matter is new. Even in the present volume, however, it has been impossible to treat the subject otherwise than in a general way. At almost every point a really complete discussion would necessitate a much fuller analysis of facts than it has been practicable to give here. Arguments here necessarily confined to a few pages or to a chapter, would each, for their complete elucidation, require a separate monograph. Most readers, however, will be able to supply much of what is missing, by the light of their own common sense; and general arguments, in which, as in block plans of buildings, many details are suppressed, have for practical purposes the great advantage of being generally and easily intelligible, whereas, if stated in fuller and more complex form, they might confuse rather than enlighten a large number of readers. The fact that the fundamental arguments of this volume were disseminated throughout the United States, not only at the meetings addressed, but also in all the leading newspapers, has had the valuable result, by means of the mass of criticisms which they elicited, of illustrating the manner in which socialists attempt to meet them; and has enabled me to revise, with a view to farther clearness, certain passages which were intentionally or unintentionally misunderstood, and also to emphasise the curious confusions of thought into which various critics have been driven in their efforts to controvert or get round them. I may specially mention a small volume by Mr. G. Wilshire of New York--a leading publisher and disseminator of socialistic literature--which was devoted to examining my own arguments seriatim. To the principal criticisms of this writer allusions will be found in the following pages. Most of my socialistic opponents (though to this rule there were amusing exceptions) wrote, according to their varying degrees of intelligence and education, with remarkable candour, and also with great courtesy. Mr. Wilshire, in particular, whilst seeking to refute my arguments as a whole, admitted the force of many of them; and did his best, in his elaborate _résumé_ of them, to state them all fairly. The contentions, and even the phraseology of socialists are in all countries (with the possible exception of Russia) identical. All are vitiated by the same distinctive errors, and it is indifferent whether, for purposes of detail criticism, we go to speakers and writers in this country or America. Except for the correction of a few verbal errors which have escaped my notice in the American edition, and which obscure the meaning of perhaps four or five sentences, for the introduction of a few additional notes, and for the translation of dollars and cents into pounds and shillings, the English and the American editions are the same. W. H. M. _January, 1908._ CONTENTS CHAPTER I THE HISTORICAL BEGINNING OF SOCIALISM AS AN OSTENSIBLY SCIENTIFIC THEORY Socialism an unrealised theory. In order to discuss it, it must be defined. Being of no general interest except as a nucleus of some general movement, we must identify it as a theory which has united large numbers of men in a common demand for change. As the definite theoretical nucleus of a party or movement, socialism dates from the middle of the nineteenth century, when it was erected into a formal system by Karl Marx. We must begin our examination of it by taking it in this, its earliest, systematic form. CHAPTER II THE THEORY OF MARX AND THE EARLIER SOCIALISTS SUMMARISED The doctrine of Marx that all wealth is produced by labour. His recognition that the possibilities of distribution rest on the facts of production. His theory of labour as the sole producer of wealth avowedly derived from Ricardo's theory of value. His theory of capital as consisting of implements of production, which are embodiments of past labour, and his theory of modern capitalism as representing nothing but a gradual abstraction by a wholly unproductive class, of these implements from the men who made them, and who alone contribute anything to their present productive use. His theory that wages could never rise, but must, under capitalism, sink all over the world to the amount which would just keep the labourers from starvation, when, driven by necessity, they will rebel, and, repossessing themselves of their own implements, will be rich forever afterwards by using them for their own benefit. CHAPTER III THE ROOT ERROR OF THE MARXIAN THEORY. ITS OMISSION OF DIRECTIVE ABILITY. ABILITY AND LABOUR DEFINED The theory of Marx analysed. It is true as applied to primitive communities, where the amount of wealth produced is very small, but it utterly fails to account for the increased wealth of the modern world. Labour, as Marx conceived of it, can indeed increase in productivity in two ways, but to a small degree only, neither of which explains the vast increase of wealth during the past hundred and fifty years. The cause of this is the development of a class which, not labouring itself, concentrates exceptional knowledge and energy on the task of directing the labour of others, as an author does when, by means of his manuscript, he directs the labour of compositors. Formal definition of the parts played respectively by the faculties of the labouring and those of the directing classes. CHAPTER IV THE ERRORS OF MARX, CONTINUED. CAPITAL AS THE IMPLEMENT OF ABILITY Two kinds of human effort being thus involved in modern production, it is necessary for all purposes of intelligible discussion to distinguish them by different names. The word "labour" being appropriated by common custom to the manual task-work of the majority, some other technical word must be found to designate the directive faculties as applied to productive industry. The word here chosen, in default of a better, is "ability." Ability, then, being the faculty which directs labour, by what means does it give effect to its directions? It gives effect to its directions by means of its control of capital, in the form of wage-capital. Ability, using wage-capital as its implement of direction, gives rise to fixed capital, in the form of the elaborate implements of modern production, which are the material embodiments of the knowledge, ingenuity, and energy of the highest minds. CHAPTER V REPUDIATION OF MARX BY MODERN SOCIALISTS. THEIR RECOGNITION OF DIRECTIVE ABILITY The more educated socialists of to-day, when the matter is put plainly before them, admit that the argument of the preceding chapters is correct, and repudiate the doctrine of Marx that "labour" is the sole producer. Examples of this admission on the part of American socialists. The socialism of Marx, however, still remains the socialism of the more ignorant classes, and also of the popular agitator. It is, moreover, still used as an instrument of agitation by many who personally repudiate it. The case of Mr. Hillquit. The doctrine of Marx, therefore, still requires exposure. Further, it is necessary to understand this earlier form of socialistic theory in order to understand the later. CHAPTER VI REPUDIATION OF MARX BY MODERN SOCIALISTS, CONTINUED. THEIR RECOGNITION OF CAPITAL AS THE IMPLEMENT OF DIRECTIVE ABILITY. THEIR NEW POSITION, AND THEIR NEW THEORETICAL DIFFICULTIES The more educated socialists of to-day, besides virtually accepting the argument of the preceding chapters with regard to labour, virtually accept the argument set forth in them with regard to capital. Mr. Sidney Webb, for example, recognises it as an implement of direction, the only alternative to which is a system of legal coercion. Other socialists advocate the continued use of wage-capital as the implement of direction, but they imagine that the situation would be radically changed by making the "state" the sole capitalist. But the "state," as some of them are beginning to realise, would be merely the private men of ability--the existing employers--turned into state officials, and deprived of most of their present inducements to exert themselves. A socialistic state theoretically could always command labour, for labour can be exacted by force; but the exercise of ability must be voluntary, and can only be secured by a system of adequate rewards and inducements. Two problems with which modern socialism is confronted: How would it test its able men so as to select the best of them for places of power? What rewards could it offer them which would induce them systematically to develop, and be willing to exercise, their exceptional faculties? CHAPTER VII PROXIMATE DIFFICULTIES. ABLE MEN AS A CORPORATION OF STATE OFFICIALS How are the men fittest for posts of industrial power to be selected from the less fit? This problem solved automatically by the existing system of private and separate capitals. The fusion of all private capitals into a single state capital would make this solution impossible, and would provide no other. The only machinery by which the more efficient directors of labour could be discriminated from the less efficient would be broken. Case of the London County Council's steamboats. Two forms which the industrial state under socialism might conceivably take: The official directors of industry might be either an autocratic bureaucracy, or they might else be subject to elected politicians representing the knowledge and opinions prevalent among the majority. Estimate of the results which would arise in the former case. Illustrations from actual bureaucratic enterprise. Estimate of the results which would arise in the latter case. The state, as representing the average opinion of the masses, brought to bear on scientific industrial enterprise. Illustrations. The state as sole printer and publisher. State capitalism would destroy the machinery of industrial progress just as it would destroy the machinery by which thought and knowledge develop. But behind the question of whether socialism could provide ability with the conditions or the machinery requisite for its exercise is the question of whether it could provide it with any adequate stimulus. CHAPTER VIII THE ULTIMATE DIFFICULTY. SPECULATIVE ATTEMPTS TO MINIMISE IT Mr. Sidney Webb, and most modern socialists of the higher kind, recognise that this problem of motive underlies all others. They approach it indirectly by sociological arguments borrowed from other philosophers, and directly by a psychology peculiar to themselves. The sociological arguments by which socialists seek to minimise the claims of the able man. These founded on a specific confusion of thought, which vitiated the evolutionary sociology of that second half of the nineteenth century. Illustrations from Herbert Spencer, Macaulay, Mr. Kidd, and recent socialists. The confusion in question a confusion between speculative truth and practical. The individual importance of the able man, untouched by the speculative conclusions of the sociological evolutionists, as may be seen by the examples adduced in a contrary sense by Herbert Spencer. This is partially perceived by Spencer himself. Illustrations from his works. Ludicrous attempts, on the part of socialistic writers, to apply the speculative generalisations of sociology to the practical position of individual men. The climax of absurdity reached by Mr. Sidney Webb. CHAPTER IX THE ULTIMATE DIFFICULTY, CONTINUED. ABILITY AND INDIVIDUAL MOTIVE The individual motives of the able man as dealt with directly by modern socialists. They abandon their sociological ineptitudes altogether, and betake themselves to a psychology which they declare to be scientific, but which is based on no analysis of facts, and consists really of loose assumptions and false analogies. Their treatment of the motives of the artist, the thinker, the religious enthusiast, and the soldier. Their unscientific treatment of the soldier's motive, and their fantastic proposal based on it to transfer this motive from the domain of war to that of industry. The socialists as their own critics when they denounce the actual motives of the able man as he is and as they say he always has been. They attack the typically able man of all periods as a monster of congenital selfishness, and it is men of this special type whom they propose to transform suddenly into monsters of self-abnegation. Their want of faith in the efficacy of their own moral suasion and their proposal to supplement this by the ballot. CHAPTER X INDIVIDUAL MOTIVE AND DEMOCRACY Exaggerated powers ascribed to democracy by inaccurate thinkers. An example from an essay by a recent philosophic thinker, with special reference to the rewards of exceptional ability. This writer maintains that the money rewards of ability can be determined by the opinion of the majority expressing itself through votes and statutes. The writer's typical error. A governing body might enact any laws, but they would not be obeyed unless consonant with human nature. Laws are obliged to conform to the propensities of human nature which it is their office to regulate. Elaborate but unconscious admission of this fact by the writer here quoted himself. The power of democracy in the economic sphere, its magnitude and its limits. The demands of the minority a counterpart of those of the majority. The demand of the great wealth-producer mainly a demand for power. Testimony of a well-known socialist to the impossibility of altering the character of individual demand by outside influence. CHAPTER XI CHRISTIAN SOCIALISM AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR SECULAR DEMOCRACY The meaning of Christian socialism, as restated to-day by a typical writer. His just criticism of the fallacy underlying modern ideas of democracy. The impossibility of equalising unequal men by political means. Christian socialism teaches, he says, that the abler men should make themselves equal to ordinary men by surrendering to them the products of their own ability, or else by abstaining from its exercise. The author's ignorance of the nature of the modern industrial process. His idea of steel. He confuses the production of wealth on a great scale with the acquisition of wealth when produced. The only really productive ability which he distinctly recognises is that of the speculative inventor. He declares that inventors never wish to profit personally by their inventions. Let the great capitalists, he says, who merely monopolise inventions, imitate the self-abnegation of the inventors, and Christian socialism will become a fact. The confusion which reigns in the minds of sentimentalists like the author here quoted. Their inability to see complex facts and principles, in their connected integrity, as they are. Such persons herein similar to devisers of perpetual motions and systems for defeating the laws of chance at a roulette-table. All logical socialistic conclusions drawn from premises in which some vital truth or principle is omitted. Omission in the premises of the earlier socialists. Corresponding omission in the premises of the socialists of to-day. Origin of the confusion of thought characteristic of Christian as of all other socialists. Temperamental inability to understand the complexities of economic life. This inability further evidenced by the fact that, with few exceptions, socialists themselves are absolutely incompetent as producers. Certain popular contentions with regard to modern economic life, urged by socialists, but not peculiar to socialism, still remain to be considered in the following chapters. CHAPTER XII THE JUST REWARD OF LABOUR AS ESTIMATED BY ITS ACTUAL PRODUCTS Modern socialists admit that of the wealth produced to-day labour does not produce the whole, but that some part is produced by directive ability. But they contend that labour produces more than it gets. We can only ascertain if such an assertion is correct by discovering how to estimate with some precision the amount produced by labour and ability respectively. But since for the production of the total product labour and ability are both alike necessary, how can we say that any special proportion of it is produced by one or the other? J.S. Mill's answer to this question. The profound error of Mill's argument. Practically so much of any effect is due to any one of its causes as would be absent from this effect were the cause in question taken away. Illustrations. Labour itself produces as much as it would produce were there no ability to direct it. The argument which might be drawn from the case of a community in which there was no labour. Such an argument illusory; for a community in which there was no labour would be impossible; but the paralysis of ability, or its practical non-existence possible. Practical reasoning of all kinds always confines itself to the contemplation of possibilities. Illustrations. Restatement of proposition as to the amount of the product of labour. The product of ability only partially described by assimilating it to rent. Ability produces everything which would not be produced if its operation were hampered or suspended. Increased reward of labour in Great Britain since the year 1800. The reward now received by labour far in excess of what labour itself produces. In capitalistic countries generally labour gets, not less, but far more than its due, if its due is to be measured by its own products. It is necessary to remember this; but its due is not to be measured exclusively by its own products. As will be seen in the concluding chapter. CHAPTER XIII INTEREST AND ABSTRACT JUSTICE The proposal to confiscate interest for the public benefit, on the ground that it is income unconnected with any corresponding effort. Is the proposal practicable? Is it defensible on grounds of abstract justice? The abstract moral argument plays a large part in the discussion. It assumes that a man has a moral right to what he produces, interest being here contrasted with this, as a something which he does not produce. Defects of this argument. It ignores the element of time. Some forms of effort are productive long after the effort itself has ceased. For examples, royalties on an acted play. Such royalties herein typical of interest generally. Industrial interest as a product of the forces of organic nature. Henry George's defence of interest as having this origin. His argument true, but imperfect. His superficial criticism of Bastiat. Nature works through machine-capital just as truly as it does in agriculture. Machines are natural forces captured by men of genius, and set to work for the benefit of human beings. Interest on machine-capital is part of an extra product which nature is made to yield by those men who are exceptionally capable of controlling her. By capturing natural forces, one man of genius may add more to the wealth of the world in a year than an ordinary man could add to it in a hundred lifetimes. The claim of any such man on the products of his genius is limited by a variety of circumstances; but, as a mere matter of abstract justice, the whole of it belongs to him. Abstract justice, however, in a case like this, gives us no practical guidance, until we interpret it in connection with concrete facts, and translate the just into terms of the practicable. CHAPTER XIV THE SOCIALISTIC ATTACK ON INTEREST AND THE NATURE OF ITS SEVERAL ERRORS The practical outcome of the moral attack on interest is logically an attack on bequest. Modern socialism would logically allow a man to inherit accumulations, and to spend the principal, but not to receive interest on his money as an investment. What would be the result if all who inherited capital spent it as income, instead of living on the interest of it? Two typical illustrations of these ways of treating capital. The ultimate difference between the two results. What the treatment of capital as income would mean, if the practice were made universal. It would mean the gradual loss of all the added productive forces with which individual genius has enriched the world. Practical condemnation of proposed attack on interest. Another aspect of the matter. Those who attack interest, as distinct from other kinds of money-reward, admit that the possession of wealth is necessary as a stimulus to production. But the possession of wealth is desired mainly for its social results far more than for its purely individual results. Interest as connected with the sustentation of a certain mode of social life. Further consideration of the manner in which those who attack interest ignore the element of time, and contemplate the present moment only. The economic functions of a class which is not, at a given moment, economically productive. Systematic failure of those who attack interest to consider society as a whole, continually emerging from the past, and dependent for its various energies on the prospects of the future. Consequent futility of the general attack on interest, though interest in certain cases may be justly subjected to special but not exaggerated burdens. CHAPTER XV EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY Equality of opportunity, as an abstract demand, is in an abstract sense just; but it changes its character when applied to a world of unequal individuals. Equality of opportunity in the human race-course. To multiply competitors is to multiply failures. Educational opportunity. Unequal students soon make opportunities unequal. Opportunity in industrial life. Socialistic promises of equal industrial opportunities for all. Each "to paddle his own canoe." These absurd promises inconsistent with the arguments of socialists themselves. A socialist's attempt to defend these promises by reference to employés of the state post-office. Equality of industrial opportunity for those who believe themselves possessed of exceptional talent and aspire "to rise." Opportunities for such men involve costly experiment, and are necessarily limited. Claimants who would waste them indefinitely more numerous than those who could use them profitably. Such opportunities mean the granting to one man the control of other men by means of wage-capital. Disastrous effects of granting such opportunities to all or even most of those who would believe themselves entitled to them. True remedy for the difficulties besetting the problem of opportunity. Ruskin on human demands. Needs and "romantic wishes." The former not largely alterable. The latter depend mainly on education. The problem practically soluble by a wise moral education only, which will correlate demand and expectation with the personal capacities of the individual. Relative equality of opportunity, not absolute equality, the true formula. Equality of opportunity, though much talked about by socialists, is essentially a formula of competition, and opposed to the principles of socialism. CHAPTER XVI THE SOCIAL POLICY OF THE FUTURE THE MORAL OF THIS BOOK This book, though consisting of negative criticism and analysis of facts, and not trenching on the domain of practical policy and constructive suggestion, aims at facilitating a rational social policy by placing in their true perspective the main statical facts and dynamic forces of the modern economic world, which socialism merely confuses. In pointing out the limitations of labour as a productive agency, and the dependence of the labourers on a class other than their own, it does not seek to represent the aspirations of the former to participate in the benefits of progress as illusory, but rather to place such aspirations on a scientific basis, and so to remove what is at present the principal obstacle that stands in the way of a rational and scientific social policy. A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF SOCIALISM CHAPTER I THE HISTORICAL BEGINNING OF SOCIALISM AS AN OSTENSIBLY SCIENTIFIC THEORY Socialism, whatever may be its more exact definition, stands for an organisation of society, and more especially for an economic organisation, radically opposed to, and differing from, the organisation which prevails to-day. So much we may take for granted; but here, before going further, it is necessary to free ourselves from a very common confusion. When socialism, as thus defined, is spoken of as a thing that exists--as a thing that has risen and is spreading--two ideas are apt to suggest themselves to the minds of all parties equally, of which one coincides with facts, while the other does not, having, indeed, thus far at all events, no appreciable connection with them; and it is necessary to get rid of the false idea, and concern ourselves only with the true. The best way in which I can make my meaning clear will be by referring to a point with regard to which the earlier socialistic thinkers may be fairly regarded as accurate and original critics. The so-called orthodox economists of the school of Mill and Ricardo accepted the capitalistic system as part of the order of nature, and their object was mainly to analyse the peculiar operations incident to it. The abler among the socialists were foremost in pointing out, on the contrary, a fact which now would not be denied by anybody: that capitalism in its present form is a comparatively modern phenomenon, owing its origin historically to the dissolution of the feudal system, and not having entered on its adolescence, or even on its independent childhood, till a time which may be roughly indicated as the middle of the eighteenth century. The immediate causes of its then accelerated development were, as the socialists insist, the rapid invention of new kinds of machinery, and more especially that of steam as a motor power, which together inaugurated a revolution in the methods of production generally. Production on a small scale gave way to production on a large. The independent weavers, for example, each with his own loom, were wholly unable to compete with the mechanisms of the new factory; their looms, by being superseded, were virtually taken away from them; and these men, formerly their own masters, working with their own implements, and living by the sale of their own individual products, were compelled to pass under the sway of a novel class, the capitalists; to work with implements owned by the capitalists, not themselves; and to live by the wages of their labour, not by their sale of the products of it. Such, as the socialists insist, was the rise of the capitalistic system; and when once it had been adequately organised, as it first was, in England, it proceeded, they go on to observe, to spread itself with astonishing rapidity, all other methods disappearing before it, through their own comparative inefficiency. But when socialists or their opponents turn from capitalism to socialism, and speak of how socialism has risen and spread likewise, their language, as thus applied, has no meaning whatever unless it is interpreted in a totally new sense. For in the sense in which socialists speak of the rise and spread of capitalism, socialism has, up to the present time, if we except a number of small and unsuccessful experiments, never risen or spread or had any existence at all. Capitalism rose and spread as an actual working system, which multiplied and improved the material appliances of life in a manner beyond the reach of the older system displaced by it. It realised results of which previously mankind had hardly dreamed. Socialism, on the other hand, has risen and spread thus far, not as a system which is threatening to supersede capitalism by its actual success as an alternative system of production, but merely as a theory or belief that such an alternative is possible. Let us take any country or any city we please--for example, let us say Chicago, in which socialism is said to be achieving its most hopeful or most formidable triumphs--and we shall look in vain for a sign that the general productive process has been modified by socialistic principles in any particular whatsoever. Socialism has produced resolutions at endless public meetings; it has produced discontent and strikes; it has hampered production constantly. But socialism has never inaugurated an improved chemical process; it has never bridged an estuary or built an ocean liner; it has never produced or cheapened so much as a lamp or a frying-pan. It is a theory that such things could be accomplished by the practical application of its principles; but, except for the abortive experiments to which I have referred already, it is thus far a theory only, and it is as a theory only that we can examine it. What, then, as a theory, are the distinctive features of socialism? Here is a question which, if we address it indiscriminately to all the types of people who now call themselves socialists, seems daily more impossible to answer; for every day the number of those is increasing who claim for their own opinions the title of socialistic, but whose quarrel with the existing system is very far from apparent, while less apparent still is the manner in which they propose to alter it. The persons to whom I refer consist mainly of academic students, professors, clergymen, and also of emotional ladies, who enjoy the attention of footmen in faultless liveries, and say their prayers out of prayer-books with jewelled clasps. All these persons unite in the general assertion that, whatever may be amiss with the world, the capitalistic system is responsible for it, and that somehow or other this system ought to be altered. But when we ask them to specify the details as to which alteration is necessary--what precisely are the parts of it which they wish to abolish and what, if these were abolished, they would introduce as a substitute--one of them says one thing, another of them says another, and nobody says anything on which three of them could act in concert. Now, if socialism were confined to such persons as these, who are in America spoken of as the "parlour socialists," it would not only be impossible to tell what socialism actually was, but what it was or was not would be immaterial to any practical man. As a matter of fact, however, between socialism of this negligible kind--this sheet-lightning of sentiment reflected from a storm elsewhere--and the socialism which is really a factor to be reckoned with in the life of nations, we can start with drawing a line which, when once drawn, is unmistakable. Socialism being avowedly a theory which, in the first instance at all events, addresses itself to the many as distinct from and opposed to the few, it is only or mainly the fact of its adoption by the many which threatens to render it a practical force in politics. Its practical importance accordingly depends upon two things--firstly, on its possessing a form sufficiently definite to unite what would otherwise be a mass of heterogeneous units, by developing in all of them a common temper and purpose; and, secondly, on the number of those who can be taught to adopt and welcome it. The theory of socialism is, therefore, as a practical force, primarily that form of it which is operative among the mass of socialists; and when once we realise this, we shall have no further difficulty in discovering what the doctrines are with which, at all events, we must begin our examination. We are guided to our starting-point by the broad facts of history. The rights of the many as opposed to the actual position of the few--a society in which all should be equal, not only in political status, but also in social circumstances; ideas such as these are as old as the days of Plato, and they have, from time to time in the ancient and the modern world, resulted in isolated and abortive attempts to realise them. In Europe such ideas were rife during the sixty or seventy years which followed the great political revolution in France. Schemes of society were formulated which were to carry this revolution further, and concentrate effort on industrial rather than political change. Pictures were presented to the imagination, and the world was invited to realise them, of societies in which all were workers on equal terms, and groups of fraternal citizens, separated no longer by the egoisms of the private home, dwelt together in palaces called "phalansteries," which appear to have been imaginary anticipations of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Here lapped in luxury, they were to feast at common tables; and between meals the men were to work in the fields singing, while a lady accompanied their voices on a grand piano under a hedge. These pictures, however, agreeable as they were to the fancy, failed to produce any great effect on the multitudes; for the multitudes felt instinctively that they were too good to be true. That such was the case is admitted by socialistic historians themselves. Socialism during this period was, they say, in its "Utopian stage." It was not even sufficiently coherent to have acquired a distinctive name till the word "socialism" was coined in connection with the views of Owen, which suffered discredit from the failure of his attempts to put them into practice. Socialism in those days was a dream, but it was not science; and in a world which was rapidly coming to look upon science as supreme, nothing could convince men generally--not even the most ignorant--which had not, or was not supposed to have, the authority of science at the back of it. Such being the situation, as the socialists accurately describe it, an eminent thinker arose who at last supplied what was wanting. He provided the unorganised aspirations, which by this time were known as socialism, with a formula which was at once definite, intelligible, and comprehensive, and had all the air of being rigidly scientific also. By this means thoughts and feelings, previously vague and fluid, like salts held in solution, were crystallised into a clear-cut theory which was absolutely the same for all; which all who accepted it could accept with the same intellectual confidence; and which thus became a moral and mental nucleus around which the efforts and hopes of a coherent party could group themselves. Such was the feat accomplished by Karl Marx, through his celebrated treatise on Capital, which was published between fifty and sixty years ago, and which has, since then, throughout all Europe and America, been acclaimed as the Magna Charta, or the Bible, of "scientific socialism." Whatever may be the change which, as a theory, socialism has subsequently undergone--and changes there have been which will presently occupy our attention--it is with the theory of Marx, and the temper of mind resulting from it, that socialism, regarded as a practical force, begins; and among the majority of socialists this theory is predominant still. In view, therefore, of the requirements of logic, of history, and of contemporary facts, our own examination must begin with the theory of Marx likewise. CHAPTER II THE THEORY OF MARX AND THE EARLIER SOCIALISTS SUMMARISED All radical revolutions which are advocated in the interests of the people are commended to the people, and the people are invited to accomplish them, on the ground that majorities are, if they would only realise it, capable of moulding society in any manner they please. As applied to matters of legislation and government, this theory is sufficiently familiar to everybody. It has been elaborated in endless detail, and has expressed itself in the constitutions of all modern democracies. What Karl Marx did, and did for the first time, was to invest this theory of the all-efficiency of the majority with a definiteness, in respect of distribution of wealth, similar to that with which it had been invested already in respect of the making of laws and the dictation of national policies. The practical outcome of the scientific reasoning of Marx is summed up in the formula which has figured as the premise and conclusion of every congress of his followers, of every book or manifesto published by them, and of every propagandist oration uttered by them at street-corners, namely, "All wealth is produced by labour, therefore to the labourers all wealth is due"--a doctrine in itself not novel if taken as a pious generality, but presented by Marx as the outcome of an elaborate system of economics. The efficiency of this doctrine as an instrument of agitation is obvious. It appeals at once to two universal instincts: the instinct of cupidity and the instinct of universal justice. It stimulates the labourers to demand more than they receive already, and it stimulates to demand the more on the ground that they themselves have produced it. It teaches them that the wealth of every man who is not a manual labourer is something stolen from themselves which ought to be and which can be restored to them. Now, whatever may be the value of such teaching as a contribution to economic science, it illustrates by its success one cardinal truth, and by implication it bears witness to another. The first truth is that, no matter how desirable any object may be which is obtruded on the imagination of anybody, nobody will bestir himself in a practical way to demand it until he can be persuaded to believe that its attainment is practically possible. The other is this: that the possibilities of redistributing wealth depend on the causes by which wealth is produced. All wealth, says Marx, can practically be appropriated by the labourers. But why? Because the labourers themselves comprise in their own labour all the forces that produce it. If its production necessitated the activity of any persons other than themselves, these other persons would inevitably have some control over its distribution; since if it were distributed in a manner of which these other persons disapproved, it would be open to them to refuse to take part in its production any longer; and there would, in consequence, be no wealth, or less wealth, to distribute. Let us, then, examine the precise sense and manner in which this theory of labour as the sole producer of wealth is elaborated and defended by Marx in his Bible of Scientific Socialism. His argument, though the expression of it is very often pedantic and encumbered with superfluous mathematical formulæ, is ingenious and interesting, and is associated with historical criticism which, in spite of its defects, is valuable. Marx was, indeed, foremost among those thinkers already referred to who first insisted on the fact that the economic conditions of to-day are mainly a novel development of others which went before them, and that, having their roots in history, they must be studied by the historical method. He recognised, however, that for practical purposes each age must concern itself with its own environment; and his logical starting-point is an analysis of wealth-production as it exists to-day. He begins by insisting on the fact that labour in the modern world is divided with such a general and such an increasing minuteness that each labour produces one kind of product only, of which he himself can consume but a small fraction, and often consumes nothing. His own product, therefore, has for him the character of wealth only because he is able to exchange it for commodities of other kinds; and the amount of wealth represented by it depends upon what the quantity of other assorted commodities, which he can get in exchange for it, is. What, then, is the common measure, in accordance with which, as a fact, one kind of commodity will exchange for any other, or any others? For his answer to this question Marx goes to the orthodox economists of his time--the recognised exponents of the system against which his own arguments were directed--and notably, among these, to Ricardo; and, adopting Ricardo's conclusions, as though they were axiomatic, he asserts that the measure of exchange between one class of commodities and another--such, for example, as cigars, printed books, and chronometers--is the amount of manual labour, estimated in terms of time, which is on an average necessary to the production of each of them. His meaning in this respect is illustrated with pictorial vividness by his teaching with regard to the form in which the measure of exchange should embody itself. This, he said, ought not to be gold or silver, but "labour-certificates," which would indicate that whoever possessed them had laboured for so many hours in producing no matter what, and which would purchase anything else, or any quantity of anything else, representing an equal expenditure of labour of any other kind. Having thus settled, as it seemed to him beyond dispute, that manual labour, estimated in terms of time, is the sole source and measure of economic values or of wealth, Marx goes on to point out that, by the improvement of industrial methods, labour in the modern world has been growing more and more productive, so that each labour-hour results in an increased yield of commodities. Thus a man who a couple of centuries ago could have only just kept himself alive by the products of his entire labour-day, can now keep himself alive by the products of half or a quarter of it. The products of the remainder of his labour-day are what Marx called a "surplus value," meaning by this phrase all that output of wealth which is beyond what is practically necessary to keep the labourer alive. But what, he asks, becomes of this surplus? Does it go to the labourers who have produced it? No, he replies. On the contrary, as fast as it is produced, it is abstracted from the labourer in a manner, which he goes on to analyse, by the capitalist. Marx here advances to the second stage of his argument. Capital, as he conceives of it, is the tools or instruments of production; and modern capital for him means those vast aggregates of machinery by the use of which in most industries the earlier implements have been displaced. Now, here, says Marx, the capitalist is sure to interpose with the objection that the increased output of wealth is due, not to labour, but to the machinery, and that the labourer, as such, has consequently no claim on it. But to this objection Marx is ready with the following answer--that the machinery itself is nothing but past labour in disguise. It is past labour crystallised, or embodied in an external form, and used by present labour to assist itself in its own operations. Every wheel, crank, and connecting-rod, every rivet in every boiler, owes its shape and its place to labour, and labour only. Labour, therefore--the labour of the average multitude--remains the sole agent in the production of wealth, after all. Capital, however, as thus understood, has, he says, this peculiarity--that, being labour in an externalised and also in a permanent form, it is capable of being detached from the labourers and appropriated by other people; and the essence of modern capitalism is neither more nor less than this--the appropriation of the instruments of production by a minority who are not producers. So long as the implements of production were small and simple, and such that each could be used by one man or family, the divorce between the labourer and his implements was not easy to accomplish; but in proportion as these simple implements were developed into the aggregated mechanisms of the factory, each of which aggregates was used in common by hundreds and even by thousands of labourers, the link between the implement and the user was broken by an automatic process; for a single organised mechanism used by a thousand men could not, in the nature of things, be owned by each one of the thousand individually, and collective ownership by all of them was an idea as yet unborn. Under these circumstances, with the growth of modern machinery, the ownership of the implements of production passed, by what Marx looked upon as a kind of historical fatality, into the hands of a class whose activities were purely acquisitive, and had no true connection with the process of production at all; and this class, he said, constitutes the capitalists of the modern world. The results of this process have, according to him, been as follows: Society has become divided into two contrasted groups--an enormous group, and a small one. The enormous group--the great body of every nation--the people--the labouring mass--the one true producing power--has been left without any implements by means of which its labour can exert itself, and these implements have been monopolised by the small group alone. The people at large, in fact, have become like the employés of a single mill-owner, who have no choice but to work within the walls of that mill or starve; and the possessing class at large has become like the owner of such a single mill, who, holding the keys of life and death in his hands, is able to impose on the mill-workers almost any terms he pleases as the price of admission to his premises and to the privilege of using his machinery; and the price which such an owner, so situated, will exact (such was the contention of Marx) inevitably must come, and historically has come, to this--namely, the entire amount of goods which the labouring class produces, except such a minimum as will just enable its members to keep themselves in working order, and to reproduce their kind. Thus all capital, as at present owned, all profits, and all interest on capital, are neither more nor less than thefts from the labouring class of commodities which are produced by the labouring class alone. The argument of Marx is not, however, finished yet. There remains a third part of it which we still have to consider. Writing as he did, almost half a century ago, he said that the process of capitalistic appropriation had not--yet completed itself. A remnant of producers on a restricted scale survived, still forming a middle class, which was neither rich nor poor. But, he continued, in all capitalistic countries, a new movement, inevitable from the first, had set in, and its pace was daily accelerating. Just as the earlier capitalists swallowed up most of the small producers, so were the great capitalists swallowing up the smaller, and the middle class which survived was disappearing day by day. Wages, meanwhile, were regulated by an iron law. Under the system of capitalism it was an absolute impossibility that they could rise. As he put it, in language which has since become proverbial, "The rich are getting richer, the poor poorer, the middle class is being crushed out," and the time, he continued, was in sight already--it would arrive, according to him, before the end of the nineteenth century--when nothing would be left but a handful of idle and preposterous millionaires on the one hand, and a mass of miserable ragamuffins who provided all the millions on the other, having for themselves only enough food and clothing to enable them to move their muscles and protect their nakedness from the frost. Then, said Marx, when this contrast has completed itself, the situation will be no longer tolerable. "Then the knell of the capitalistic system will have sounded." The producers will assert themselves under the pressure of an irresistible impulse; they will repossess themselves of the implements of production of which they have been so long deprived. "The expropriators will in their turn be expropriated," and the labourers thenceforth owning the implements of production collectively, all the wealth of the world will forever afterwards be theirs. This concluding portion of the gospel of Marx--its prophecies--has been in many of its details so completely falsified by events that even his most ardent disciples no longer insist on it. I have only mentioned it here because of the further light which it throws on what alone, in this discussion, concerns us--namely, the Marxian theory of labour as the sole producer of wealth, and the absolute nullity, so far as production goes, of every form of activity associated with the possession of capital, or with any class but the labouring. This theory of production, then, which has been the foundation of socialism as a party--or, as Gronlünd, a disciple of Marx, calls it, "its _idée mère_"--and which is still its foundation for the great majority of socialists, we will now examine in detail, and, considering how complex are the processes of production in the modern world, ask how far it gives us, or fails to give us, even an approximately complete account of them. We shall find that, in spite of the plausibility with which the talent of Marx invested it, this basic doctrine of so-called scientific socialism is the greatest intellectual mare's-nest of the century which has just ended; and when once we have realised with precision on what, in the modern world, the actual efficiency of the productive process depends, we shall see that the analysis of Marx bears about the same relation to the economic facts of to-day that the child's analysis of matter into the four traditional elements, or the doctrine of Thales that everything is made of water, bears to the facts of chemistry as modern science has revealed them to us. CHAPTER III THE ROOT ERROR OF THE MARXIAN THEORY. ITS OMISSION OF DIRECTIVE ABILITY. ABILITY AND LABOUR DEFINED In approaching the opinions of another, from whom we are about to differ, we gain much in clearness if at starting we can find some point of agreement with him. In the case of Marx we can find this without difficulty, for the first observation which our subject will naturally suggest to us is an admission that, within limits, his theory of production is true. Whatever may be the agencies which are required to produce wealth, human effort is one of them; and into whatever kinds this necessary agency may divide itself, one kind must always be labour, in the sense in which Marx understood it--in other words, that use of the hands and muscles by which the majority of mankind have always gained their livelihood. It is, moreover, easy to point out actual cases in which all the wealth that is produced is produced by labour only. The simplest of such cases are supplied us by the lowest savages, who manage, by their utmost exertions, to provide themselves with the barest necessaries. Such cases show that labour, wherever it exists, produces at least a minimum of what men require; for if it were not so there would be no men to labour. Such cases show also another thing. The most primitive races possess rude implements of some kind, which any pair of hands can fashion, just as any pair of hands can use them. These rude implements are capital in its embryonic form; and so far as they go, they verify the Marxian theory that capital is nothing but past labour crystallised. But we need not, in order to see labour, past and present, operating and producing in a practically unalloyed condition, go to savage or even semi-civilised countries. The same thing may be seen among groups of peasant proprietors, which still survive here and there in the remoter parts of Europe. These men and their families, by their own unaided labour, produce nearly everything which they eat and wear and use. Mill, in his treatise on _Political Economy_, gives us an account of this condition of things, as prevailing among the peasants in certain districts of Germany. "They labour early and late," he says, quoting from a German eulogist. "They plod on from day to day and from year to year, the most untirable of human animals." The German writer admires them as men who are their own masters. Mill holds them up as a shining and instructive example of the magic effect of ownership in intensifying human labour. In any case such men are examples of two things--of labour operating as the sole productive agency, and also of such labour self-intensified to its utmost pitch. And what does the labour of these men produce? According to the authority from which Mill quotes, it produces just enough to keep them above the level of actual want. Here, then, we have an unexceptionable example of the wealth-producing power of labour pure and simple; and if we imagine an entire nation of men who, as their own masters, worked under liked conditions, we should have an example of the same thing on a larger and more instructive scale. We should have a whole nation which produced only just enough to keep it above the level of actual bodily want. And now let us turn from production in an imaginary nation such as this, and compare it with production at large among the civilised nations of to-day. Nobody could insist on the contrast between the efficiency of the two processes more strongly than do the socialists themselves. The aggregate wealth of the civilised nations to-day is, they say, so enormous--it consists of such a multitude of daily renewed goods and services--that luxuries undreamed of by the labourer of earlier times might easily be made as abundant for every household as water. In other words, if we take a million men, admittedly consisting of labourers pure and simple in the first place, and the same number of men exerting themselves under modern conditions in the second place, the industrial efforts of the second million are, hour for hour, infinitely more productive than the industrial efforts of the first. If, for example, we take the case of England, and compare the product produced per head of the industrial population towards the close of the seventeenth century, with the product produced less than two centuries afterwards, at the time when Marx was writing his work on _Capital_, the later product will, according to the estimate of statisticians, stand to the earlier in the proportion of thirty-three to seven. Now, if we adopt the scientific theory of Marx that labour pure and simple is the sole producer of wealth, and that labour is productive in proportion to the hours devoted to it, how has it happened--this is our crucial question--that the amount of labour which produced seven at one period should produce thirty-three at another? How are we to explain the presence of the additional twenty-six? The answer of Marx, and of those who reason like him, is that, owing to the development of knowledge, mechanical and chemical especially, and the consequent development of industrial methods and machinery, labour as a whole has itself become more productive. But to say this is merely begging the question. To what is this development of knowledge, of methods, and of machinery due? Is it due to such labour as that of the "untirable human animals," to which Mill refers as an example of labour in its intensest form? In a word, does ordinary labour, or the industrial effort of the majority, contain in itself any principle of advance at all? We must, in order to do justice to any theory, consider not only the points on which its exponents lay the greatest stress, but also those which they recognise as implied in it, or which we may see to be implied in it ourselves. And if we consider the theory of Marx in this way, we shall see that labour, in the sense in which he understands the word, does contain principles of advance which are of two distinguishable kinds. One of these is recognised by Marx himself. Just as, when he says that labour is the sole productive agency, he assumes the gifts of nature, which provide it with something to work upon, so, when he conceives of labour as the effort of hand and muscle, he assumes a human mind behind these by which hand and muscle are directed. Such being the case, he expressly admits also that mind is in some cases a more efficient director than in others, and is able to train the hands and muscles of the labourer, so that these acquire the quality which is commonly called skill. Ruskin, who asserted, like Marx, that labour is the sole producer, used in this respect a precisely similar argument. He defined skill as faculty which exceptional powers of mind impart to the hands of those by whom such powers are possessed, from the bricklayer who, in virtue of mere alertness and patience, can lay in an hour more bricks than his fellows, up to a Raphael, whose hands can paint a Madonna, while another man's could hardly be trusted to distemper a wall evenly. Now, in skill, as thus defined, we have doubtless a correct explanation of how mere labour--the manual effort of the individual--may produce, in the case of some men, goods whose value is great, and goods, in the case of other men, whose value is comparatively small; and since some epochs are more fertile in developed skill than others, an equal amount of labour on the part of the same community may produce, in one century, goods of greater aggregate value than it was able to produce in the century that went before it. But these goods, whose superior value is due to exceptional skill--or, as would commonly be said, to qualities of superior craftsmanship--though they form some of the most coveted articles of the wealth of the modern world, are not typical of it; and from the point of view of the majority, they are the part of it which is least important. The goods whose value is due to exceptional craftsmanship--such as an illuminated manuscript, for example, or a vase by Benvenuto Cellini--are always few in number, and can be possessed by the few only. The distinctive feature of wealth-production in the modern world, on the contrary, is the multiplication of goods relatively to the number of the producers of them, and the consequent cheapening of each article individually. The skill of the craftsman gives an exceptional value to the particular articles on which his own hands are engaged. It does not communicate itself to the labour of the ordinary men around him. The agency which causes the increasing and sustains the increased output of necessaries, comforts, and conveniences in the progressive nations of to-day must necessarily be an agency of some kind or other which raises the productivity of industrial exertion as a whole. Those, therefore, who, in spite of the fact that the productivity of modern communities has, relatively to their numbers, undergone an increase which is general, still maintain that the sole productive agency is labour, must seek for an explanation of this increase in some other fact than skill. And without transgressing the limits which the theory of Marx imposes on us, such a further fact is very easy to find. Adam Smith opens his _Wealth of Nations_ with a discussion of it. The chief cause, he says, which in all progressive countries increases the productive power of the individual labourer, is not the development among a few of potentialities which are above the average, but a more effective development of potentialities common to all, in consequence of labour being divided, so that each man devotes his life to the doing of some one thing. Thus if ten ordinary men were to engage in the business of pin-making, each making every part of every pin for himself, each man would probably complete but one pin in a day. But if each man makes one part, and nothing else but that, thus repeating incessantly a single series of motions, each will acquire the knack of working with such rapidity that the ten together will make daily, not ten pins, but some thousands. Here we have labour divided by its different applications, but not requiring different degrees of capacity. We have the average labour of the average man still. And here we have a fact which, unlike the fact of skill--a thing in its nature confined to the few only--affords a real explanation, up to a certain point, of how ordinary labour as a whole, without ceasing to be ordinary labour, may rise from a lower to a higher grade of efficiency. But such simple divisions of labour as those which are here in question fail, for a reason which will be specified in another moment, to carry us far in the history of industrial progress. They do but bring us to the starting-point of production as it exists to-day. The efficiency of productive effort has made all its most astounding advances since the precise time at which the _Wealth of Nations_ was written; and these advances we shall find that it is quite impossible to explain merely by a further division of average and equal labour. Such a further division has no doubt been an element of the process; but it is an explanation which itself requires explaining. Even in Adam Smith's time two other factors were at work, which have ever since been growing in magnitude and importance; and the secret of modern production lies, we shall find, in these. I call them two, but fundamentally there is only one, for that which is most obvious, and of which I shall speak first, is explainable only as the direct result of the second. This, the most obvious factor, is the modern development of machinery. The other is the growing application of exceptional mental powers, not to the _manual labour of the men by whom these powers are possessed_, but to the _process of directing and co-ordinating the divided labours of others_. Now, as to machinery, Marx and his followers, as we have seen, maintain that it represents nothing but the average labour of the past; and so long as it exists only in its smaller and simpler forms, the devising and constructing of which are not referable to any faculties which we are able to distinguish from those of the average labourer, we have further seen that the theory of Marx holds good. Labour produces alike both the finished goods and its implements. But in proportion as machines or other contrivances, such as vessels, grow in size or complexity, and embody, as they do in their more modern developments, ingenuity of the highest and knowledge of the most abstruse kinds, the situation changes; and we are able to identify certain faculties as essential to the ultimate result, which affect the work of the labourers, but which do not emanate from themselves. Any three men of average strength and intelligence might make a potter's wheel together, or build a small boat together, as they frequently do now, their several tasks being interchangeable, or assigned to each of them by easy mutual agreement. The business of directing labour has not separated itself from the actual business of labouring. Each man knows the object of what he does, and can co-ordinate that object with the object of what is done by his fellows. But when the ultimate result is something so vast and complicated that a thousand men instead of three have to co-operate in the production of it, when a million pieces of metal, some large and some minute, have to be cast, filed, turned, rolled, or bent, so that finally they may all coalesce into a single mechanical organism, no one labourer sees further than the task which he performs himself. He cannot adjust his work to that of another man, who is probably working a quarter of a mile away from him, and he has in most cases no idea whatever of how the two pieces of work are related to each other. Each labourer has simply to perform his work in accordance with directions which emanate from some mind other than his own, and the whole practical value of what the labourers do depends on the quality of the directions which are thus given to each. In other words, in proportion as the industrial process is enhanced in productivity by the concentration on it of the higher faculties of mankind, there is an increasing fission of this process as a whole into two kinds of activity represented by two different groups. We have no longer _merely_--although we have this _still_--an increasing division of labour; but we have the labourers of all kinds and grades separating themselves into one group on the one hand, and the men who direct their labour, as a separate group, on the other hand. The function of the directive faculties, as applied thus to the operations of modern labour, can perhaps be most easily illustrated by the case of a printed book. Let us take two editions of ten thousand copies each, similarly printed, and priced at six shillings a copy; the one being an edition of a book so dull that but twenty copies can be sold of it, the other of a book so interesting that the public buys the whole ten thousand. Now, apart from its negligible value as so many tons of waste paper, each pile of books represents economic wealth only in proportion to the quantity of it for which the vendors can find purchasers. Hence we have in the present case two piles of printed paper which, regarded as paper patterned with printer's ink, are similar, but one of which is wealth to the extent of three thousand pounds, while the other is wealth to the extent of no more than six pounds. And to what is the difference between these two values due? It obviously cannot be due to the manual labour of the compositors, for this, both in kind and quantity, is in each case the same. It is due to the special directions under which the labour of the compositors is performed. But these directions do not emanate from the men by whose hands the types are arranged in a given order. They come from the author, who conveys them to the compositors through his manuscript; which manuscript, considered under its economic aspect, is neither more nor less than a series of minute orders, which modify from second to second every movement of the compositors' hands, and determine the subsequent results of every impress of the type on paper; one mind thus, by directing the labour of others, imparting the quality of much wealth or of little or of none, to every one of the ten thousand copies of which the edition is composed. Similarly when a man invents, and brings into practical use, some new and successful apparatus such, let us say, as the telephone, the same situation repeats itself. The new apparatus is an addition to the world's wealth, not because so many scraps of wood, brass, nickel, vulcanite, and such and such lengths of wire are shaped, stretched, and connected with sufficient manual dexterity--for the highest dexterity is very often employed in the making of contrivances which turn out to be futile--but because each of its parts is fashioned in obedience to certain designs with which this dexterity, as such, has nothing at all to do. The apparatus is successful, and an addition to the world's wealth, because the designs of the inventor, just like the author's manuscript, constitute a multitude of injunctions proceeding from a master-mind, which is not the mind of those by whose hands they are carried into execution. And with the direction of labour generally, whether in the production of machinery or the use of the machinery in the production of goods for the public, the case is again the same. We have manual labour of a given kind and quality, which assists in producing what is wanted or not wanted--what is so much wealth or simply so much refuse, in accordance with the manner in which all this labour is directed by faculties specifically different from those exercised by the manual labourers themselves. And now we are in a position to sum up in a brief and decisive formula what the difference between the sets of faculties thus contrasted is. It is not essentially a difference between lower and higher, for some forms of labour, such as that of the great painter, may be morally higher than some forms of direction. The difference is one not of degree, but of kind, and includes two different psycho-physical processes. Labour, from the most ordinary up to the rarest kind, _is the mind or the brain of one man affecting that man's own hands_, and the single task on which his hands happen to be engaged. The directive faculties are _the mind or the brain of one man simultaneously affecting the hands of any number of other men_, and through their hands the simultaneous tasks of all of them, no matter how various these tasks may be. CHAPTER IV THE ERRORS OF MARX, CONTINUED. CAPITAL AS THE IMPLEMENT OF ABILITY The human activities and faculties, then, which are involved in the production of modern wealth, are not, as Marx says--and as the orthodox economists said, whom he rightly calls his masters, and as their followers still say--of one kind--namely, those embodied in the individual task-work of the individual, to which Marx, Ricardo, and Mill alike give the name of "labour"; they are of two kinds. And this, indeed, the earlier economists recognised, as we may see by Mill's casual admission that the progress of industrial effort depends before all things on thought and the advance of knowledge. But they recognised the fact in a general way only. How thought and knowledge affected the industrial process they made no attempt to explain, otherwise than by comprehending them on occasion under the common name of labour, which they assigned throughout most of their arguments to manual task-work only. Now, it is doubtless true that, as a mere matter of verbal propriety, this general sense may be given to the word "labour," if we please; but if in discussing the efforts which produce wealth we admit that these efforts are not of one kind but two, and if the word "labour" is, in nine cases out of ten, employed with the definite intention of designating only one of them, it is impossible to reason about the industrial process intelligibly, so long as we apply also the same name to the other. We might as well use the word "man"--as with reference to some problems we are perfectly right in doing--to designate both men and women, and then attempt to discuss the relations between the two sexes. For the directive faculties, so essentially distinct from those to which universal custom has allocated the name of labour, it is difficult to find a name equally convenient and satisfying. In default of a better, I have, on former occasions, applied to it the name of Ability; and this will serve our purpose here--especially as it is a name which has been, of recent years, applied by many of the more thoughtful socialists themselves to certain activities of a mental and moral kind, which their conception of labour cannot be made to include, but which they are beginning to recognise as playing some part in production. We must remember, however, that we are using it in a strictly technical sense, which will in some respects be narrower than the ordinary, and in some more comprehensive. It will exclude all kinds of cleverness unapplied to economic production; and will include many powers, in so far as such production is affected by them, to the expression of whose scope and character it may sometimes appear inadequate.[1] And now when we have come thus far, a quite new question arises. We have seen how ability is, by its direction of labour, the chief agency in that process which produces wealth to-day, and how it makes the amount produced, relatively to the number of the producers, so incomparably greater than it ever was under any previous system. We have now to consider the means by which this faculty of direction is exercised. In order to understand this, we must turn our attention again to capital, as something distinct and detached from the human efforts that have produced it; and we shall find that the conception of it which dominated the thought of Marx, and that which dominates the thought of the orthodox school of economists, either excludes altogether, or fails to reveal the nature of, that particular force and function of it which, in the modern world, are fundamental. Capital is divided traditionally into two kinds, technically called "fixed" and "circulating." By fixed capital, which is what Marx had mainly in view, is meant machinery, and the works and structures connected with it; and it is called "fixed" on account of its comparative permanence. By circulating capital is meant, as Adam Smith puts it, any stock of those consumable commodities which, produced by the aid of machinery, the merchant or the store-keeper buys in order to sell them at a profit; and it is called "circulating" because the commodities which are sold to-day are replaced by new ones of an equivalent kind to-morrow. Now, as to fixed capital, or the endlessly elaborated machinery of the modern world, we have seen already that this is, in its distinctive features, not, as Marx declared it to be, a crystallisation of labour, but a crystallisation of the ability by which labour has been directed; but this revised explanation tells us nothing of the means by which the direction is accomplished. Still less is any light thrown on the question by the nature of circulating capital, as Adam Smith understands it. The kind of capital which alone concerns us here is a kind which resembles circulating capital in respect of its material form, and is often indeed in this respect identical with it; but it differs from circulating capital in respect of the use made of it. Such capital we may call wage-capital. Wage-capital, although in practice it disguises itself under the form of money, is essentially a stock of goods which are the daily necessaries of life, but which, instead of being sold to the public, like the goods of the store-keeper, at a profit, are distributed by their possessor among a special group of labourers on conditions. The first of these is naturally that the labourers do work of some sort. The second condition, and the one that concerns us here, is that, besides doing work of some sort, each labourer shall do the work which the distributer of the goods prescribes to him. Here we have before us the means by which, in the modern world, the ability of the few directs the labour of the many; and, in proportion to the quality and intensity of the directive powers that are exercised, adds to the value of the results which this labour would have produced otherwise. Thus in wage-capital we have the capital of the modern world in what dynamically is its primary and parent form--a kind of capital which improved machinery is always tending to augment, but of whose use the machinery itself, its renewal, and its continued improvement, are the consequences. That such is the case might be illustrated by any number of familiar examples. A man invents a new machine having some useful purpose--let us say the production of some new kind of manure, which will double the fertility of every field in the country. In order to put this machine on the market, and make it a fact instead of a mere conception, the first thing necessary is, as every human being knows, that the inventor shall possess, or acquire, the control of capital. And what is the next step? When the capital is provided, how will it first be used? It will be used in the form of wages, or articles of daily consumption, which will be distributed among a certain number of mechanics and other labourers, on condition that they set about fashioning, in certain prescribed groups, so much metal into so many prescribed shapes--some of them shaping it into wheels, some into knives and rollers, some into sieves, rods, cranks, cams, and eccentrics, in accordance with patterns which have never been followed previously; and of all these individual operations the new machine, as a practical implement, is the result. The machine is new, and it is an addition to the wealth-producing powers of the world, not because it embodies so much labour, but because it embodies so much labour directed in a new way; and it is only by means of the conditions which the possession of wage-capital enables the inventor or his partners to impose upon every one of the labourers that the machine, as a practical implement, comes into existence at all. Hence we see that Marx was at once right and wrong when he said that modern capitalism is, in its essence, monopoly. It is monopoly; but it is not primarily, as Marx thought, a passive monopoly of improved instruments of production. It is primarily a monopoly of products which are essential to the life of the labourer; and it is a monopoly of these, not in the invidious sense that the monopolists retain them for their own personal consumption, as they do in the case of rare wines and fabrics, which can, from the nature of the case, be enjoyed by a few only. It is a monopoly of them in the sense that the monopolists have such a control over their distribution as enables them to control the purely technical actions of those persons who ultimately own and consume the whole of them.[2] Modern capital, then, I repeat, is primarily wage-capital, such capital as modern machinery being the direct result of its application; and wage-capital is productive, not in virtue of any quality inherent in itself, but merely because as a fact, under the modern system, it constitutes the reins by which the exceptional ability of a few guides the labour, skilled or unskilled, of the many. It is the means by which the commonest labourer, who hardly knows the rule of three, is made to work as though he were master of the abstruest branches of mathematics; by which the artisan who only has a smattering--if he has as much as that--of mechanics, metallurgy, chemistry, is made to work as though all the sciences had been assimilated by his single brain. Let any one consider, for example, one of the great steel bridges which now throw their single spans over waters such as the Firth of Forth. These structures are crystallised labour, doubtless, but they are, in their distinctive features, not crystallised labour as such. They are crystallised mechanics, crystallised chemistry, crystallised mathematics--in short, crystallised intellect, knowledge, imagination, and executive capacity, of kinds which hardly exist in a dozen minds out of a million; and labour conduces to the production of such astonishing structures only because it submits itself to the guidance of these intellectual leaders. And the same is the case with modern production generally. Though labour is essential to the production of wealth even in the smallest quantities, the distinguishing productivity of industry in the modern world depends not on the labour, but on the ability with which the labour is directed; and in the modern world the primary function of capital is that of providing ability with its necessary instrument of direction. No unprejudiced person, who is capable of coherent thought, can, when the matter is thus plainly stated, possibly deny this. That it cannot be denied will be shown in the two following chapters by recent admissions on the part of socialists themselves, the more thoughtful of whom have now virtually abandoned the earlier theoretical framework of socialism altogether, and are trying to substitute a new one, with which we will deal later, and which will indeed prove the main subject of our inquiry. FOOTNOTES: [1] When I insisted on this distinction between "labour" and "ability" in America, innumerable critics met me with two objections. One of these, as stated by a writer who confessed himself otherwise in entire agreement with me, was this: "It is impossible, as Mr. Mallock attempts to do, to draw a hard-and-fast line between mental effort and muscular." No such attempt is made. As I pointed out in one of my speeches, many kinds of "labour" (_e.g._ that of the great painter) exhibit higher mentality than do many kinds of ability. Further, I pointed out that, in a technical sense, the same effort may be either an effort of labour or ability, according to its application. Thus, if a singer sings to an audience, his effort is technically "labour," because it ends with the single task; but if he sings so as to produce a gramophone record, his effort is an act of "ability," for he influences the products of other men, by whom the records are multiplied. The second objection was expressed by one of my critics thus: "I say that all productive effort is labour.... I dare you to tell any one of these genii that they are not labourers." Another critic said: "Just as 'land' in economics means all the forces of nature, so does 'labour' mean all the forces of man. Why, then, speak of ability?" These criticisms are purely verbal. If we like to take "labour" as a collective name for all forms of human effort, we can of course do so; but in that case we must find other differential names for the different forces of effort individually. To give them all the same name is not to explain them. It is to tie them all up in a parcel. [2] If this fact requires any further exemplification, we can find one on a large scale in the pages of Marx himself. According to him the first appreciable capitalistic movement--the first leaping of the modern system in the womb--took place in the English cloth trade about four hundred years ago. Now, if capitalism were merely, as according to Marx it is, a passive monopoly by some men of implements which have been produced by others, the pioneers of capitalism in the reign of Henry VIII. would have got into their possession all the hand-looms then in use; they would have taken their toll in kind from all whom they allowed to use them; and there the matter would have ended. The looms of to-day would be the looms of four hundred years ago. The passive ownership of machines does nothing to improve their construction. If a gang of ignorant thieves could steal all the watches in America, and then let them out to the public at so much a month or year, this would not convert the three-dollar watches into chronometers. And how little mere labour, or the experience gained by labour, tends to improve the implements which the labourer uses is shown by the fact that the looms which wove Anne Boleyn's petticoats were practically the same as the looms which wove those of Semiramis. CHAPTER V REPUDIATION OF MARX BY MODERN SOCIALISTS. THEIR RECOGNITION OF DIRECTIVE ABILITY In saying that, up to the point which our argument has thus far reached, the more thoughtful among the socialists to-day concede and even assert its truth, I have evidence in view of a very opposite kind. When I delivered, as I did recently, a series of addresses on socialism to various meetings in America, I approached the subject in the manner in which I have approached it here. I began with the process of production pure and simple, and I showed how crude and childish, as applied to production in modern times, was the analysis of Marx and all the earlier socialists. I showed, as I have shown here, that, the amount of labour being given, the quantity and quality of wealth that will result from its exercise depend on the ability with which by means of wage-capital this labour is directed. The two addresses in which these points were elaborated had no sooner been delivered than, from all parts of the country, through newspapers and private letters, and sometimes by word of mouth, socialists of various types addressed themselves to the business of replying to me. These replies, whatever may have been their differences otherwise, all took the form of a declaration that I was only wasting my time in exposing the doctrine that labour is the sole producer of wealth, and in laying such stress on the part played by directive ability; for no serious socialist of the present day any longer believed the one, or failed to recognise the other. Thus one of my critics told me that what I ought to do was "to discuss the principles of socialism as understood and accepted by the intelligent disciples, and not the worn-out and discredited theories of Marx." Another was good enough to tell me that I had "cleverly accomplished the task of exposing the errors of Marx, both of premise and of logic"; but the leaders of socialistic thought "in its later developments" had, he proceeded to say, long ago outgrown these. A third wrote me a letter bristling with all kinds of challenges, and asked me if I thought, for example, that socialists were such fools as not to recognise that the talents of an inventor like Mr. Edison increased the productivity of labour by the new direction which they gave to it. I might multiply similar quotations, but one more will be enough here. It is taken from a long article directed against myself by Mr. Hillquit--a writer to whom my special attention was called as by far the most accomplished exponent, among the militant socialists of America, of socialism in its most logical and most highly developed form. "It requires," said Mr. Hillquit, "no special genius to demonstrate that all labour is not alike, nor equally productive. It is still more obvious that common manual labour is impotent to produce the wealth of modern nations--that organisation, direction, and control are essential to productive work in the field of modern production, and are just as much a factor in it as mere physical effort."[3] But we need not confine ourselves to my own late critics in America. The general history of socialism as a reasoned theory is practically the same in one country as in another. The intellectual socialists in England, among whom Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. Sidney Webb are prominent, express themselves in even plainer terms with regard to the part which directive ability, as opposed to labour, plays in the modern world. "Ability," says Mr. Shaw, employing the very word, is often the factor which determines whether a given industry shall make a loss of five per cent. or else a profit of twenty; and Mr. Webb, as we shall have occasion to see presently, carries the argument further, and states it in greater detail. Why, then, it may be asked, should a critic of contemporary socialism think it worth while to expose with so much minuteness a fallacy which intellectual socialists now all agree in repudiating, and to insist with such emphasis on facts which they profess to recognise as self-evident? To this question there are two answers. One of these I indicated at the close of our opening chapter; and this at the cost of what in logic is a mere digression, it will be desirable, for practical purposes, to state it with greater fulness. Admissions and assertions, such as those which I have just now quoted, do, no doubt, represent a definite intellectual advance which has taken place in the theory of socialism, among those who are its most thoughtful exponents, and in a certain sense its leaders. They represent what these leaders think and say among themselves, and what they put forward when disputing with opponents who are competent to criticise them. But what they do not represent is socialism as still preached to the populace, or the doctrine which is still vital for socialists as a popular party. This is still, just as it was originally, the socialism of Marx in an absolutely unamended form. It is the doctrine that the manual efforts of the vast multitude of labourers, directed only by the minds of the individual labourers themselves, produce all the wealth of the world; that the holding of any of this wealth by any other class whatever stands for nothing but a system of legalised plunder; and that the labourers need only inaugurate a legislation of a new kind in order to secure and enjoy what always was by rights their own. Let me illustrate this assertion by two examples, one supplied to us by England, the other by America. In England the body which calls itself the Social Democratic Federation, and represents at this moment socialism of the more popular kind, began its campaign with a manifesto which was headed with the familiar words, "All wealth is due to labour; therefore to the labourer all wealth is due." This text or motto was followed by certain figures, with regard to the total income of Great Britain, and the manner in which it is at present distributed. Labour was represented as getting less than one-fourth of the whole, and the labourers were informed that if they would but "educate themselves, agitate, and organise," the remaining three-fourths would automatically pass into their possession. This document, it is true, was issued some twenty years ago;[4] but that the form which socialism takes, when addressed to the masses of the population, has not appreciably altered from that day to this, will be made sufficiently clear by the following pertinent fact. Shortly after my arrival in America, in the winter of 1907, the most active disseminator of socialistic literature in New York sent me, by way of a challenge, a new and very spruce volume, which contained the most important of his previous leaflets and articles, collected and republished, and claiming renewed attention. The first of these--and it was signalised by an accompanying advertisement as fundamental--bore the impressive title of, "Why the Working Man should be a Socialist," and the answer to this question is given in the writer's opening words. "You know," he says, addressing any labourer and the street-worker, "or you ought to know, that you alone produce all the good things of life; and you know, or you ought to know, that by so simple a process as that of casting your ballot intelligently you will be able"--to do what? The writer explains himself in language which, except for a difference in his statistics, is almost a verbal repetition of that of his English predecessors. He specifies two sums, one representing the income which each working-man in America would receive were the entire wealth of the country divided equally among the manual labourers; the other representing the income which, on an average, he actually receives as wages; and the writer tells every working man that, by "merely casting his ballot intelligently," he can secure for himself the whole difference between the larger sum and the less.[5] But the fact that the Marxian doctrine of the all-productivity of labour, and the consequent economic nullity of all other forms of effort, still supplies the main ideas by which popular socialism is vitalised, is shown perhaps even more distinctly by the popular hopes and demands which result from this doctrine indirectly than it is by the direct reassertion of the formal doctrine itself. One of the members of the Parliamentary Labour party in England celebrated his success at the polls by a letter to the _Times_, proclaiming that socialism was a moral quite as much as an economic movement, and that an object which to socialists was dearer even than the seizure of the riches of the rich, was the achievement of "economic freedom," or, in other words, the "emancipation of labour," or, in other words again, the abolition of the system which he described as "wagedom." I merely mention the particular letter in question in order to remind the reader of these familiar phrases, which are current in every country where the theory of socialism has spread itself. Now, what does all this talk about the emancipation of labour mean? It can only mean one or other of two things: either that the economic prosperity of every nation in the future will depend on the emancipation of every average mind from the guidance of any minds that are in any way superior to itself, or are able to enhance the productivity of an average pair of hands--a proposition so ludicrous that nobody would consciously assent to it; or else it means a continued assent to the theory which fails to correlate labour with directive ability at all, and so never raises the question of whether the latter is necessary or no. What, then, becomes of that chorus of vehement protestations, with which my critics in America were all so eager to overwhelm me, to the effect that socialists to-day recognise as clearly as I do that "common manual labour," as Mr. Hillquit puts it, "is impotent to produce the wealth of modern nations," apart from the "organisation and control" of the minds most competent to direct it? That the more intellectual socialists of to-day do recognise this fact--some with greater and some with less distinctness--is the very point on which I am anxious to insist. We shall have abundant opportunities for considering it later on. For the moment, however, I pause to ask them the following question. Recognising, as they do, and eagerly proclaiming as they do, whenever they address themselves to those who are capable of serious dispute with them, that the original theory of socialism, which was the creed of such bodies as the International, is absolutely false in itself, and in many of the expectations which it stimulates, why do not they set themselves, whenever they address the multitude, to expose and repudiate a fallacy in which they no longer believe? Do they do this? Do they make an attempt to do this? On the contrary, as a rule, though there are doubtless many honourable exceptions, they endeavour to hide from the multitude their intellectual change of front altogether; and, instead of insisting that the undirected labour of the many is, in the modern world, impotent to produce anything, they continue to speak of it as though it produced everything, and as though no class other than the labouring fulfilled any economic function or had any right to exist.[6] Let me give the reader an example, which is curiously apt here. It is taken from Mr. Hillquit's own attack on myself, which filled the front sheet of a newspaper, and was distributed to the public at the door of one of the buildings in which I spoke. Of the short passages, amounting to some twenty lines out of six hundred, in which alone he condescended to detailed argument, the first is that in which, as we have already seen, he declares that all socialists know, without any instruction on my part, that common manual labour, unless it is directed by ability, is "impotent to produce the wealth of modern nations." But having made this admission with much blowing of trumpets, he immediately drops it, and instead of developing its consequences, he diverts the attention of his readers from it by a long series of irrelevancies; nor does he return to the question of directive ability at all till he is nearing the end of his discourse, when he suddenly takes it up again, declaring that he will meet and refute me on ground which I myself have chosen, and show that wealth--at all events in the commercial sense--is still produced by manual labour alone. He refers to my selection of the case of a printed book, as illustrating, in the manner explained in an earlier chapter, the part which directive ability plays in modern production. The economic value of an edition of a printed book, I said, as the reader will remember, depends in the most obvious way, not on the labour of compositors, but on the quality of the directions which the author imposes on this labour through his manuscript--the author's mind being typical of directive ability generally. And what has Mr. Hillquit--the intellectual Ajax of the socialists--got to say about this? "Whether a book," he says, "is a work of genius or mere rubbish will largely affect its literary or artistic value; but it will have very little bearing on its economic or commercial value." This, he goes on to argue, will, despite all my objections, be found to depend on ordinary manual labour, of which the labour of the hands of the compositors is that which concerns us most. Nothing, according to him, can be more evident than this. "For the market price," he says, "of a wretched detective story, of the same length as Hamlet, and printed in the same way, will be exactly the same as that of a copy of Hamlet itself." Now, if we consider Mr. Hillquit as a purely literary critic, we can but admire his subtlety in discovering that the literary value of a book is largely affected by the fact of the book's not being rubbish; but when he descends from pure criticism to economics, it is difficult, unless we suppose him to have taken leave of his senses, to imagine that he can himself believe in the medley of nonsense propounded by him. For what he is here doing--or more probably pretending to do--is to confuse the cost of producing an edition of a book with the commercial value of that edition when produced. The labour in question no doubt determines the price at which the printed paper can be sold at a profit, or without loss; but the number of copies which the public will be willing to buy, or, in other words, the value of the edition commercially, depends on qualities resident in the mind of the author, which render the book attractive to but few readers, or to many. Whether these qualities amount to genius in the higher sense of the word, or to nothing more than a knack of titillating the curiosity of the vulgar, does not affect the question. In either case--and this is the sole important fact--they are qualities of the author's mind, and of the author's mind alone; and the labour of the compositors conduces to the production of a pile of volumes which is of large, of little, or of no value commercially, not according to the dexterity with which this labour is performed, but according to the manner in which the author's mind directs it. Than any human being who is capable of perceiving that the literary quality of a book is largely affected by the fact of the book's not being rubbish, should seriously suppose that the saleable value of editions--whether they are editions of a popular novel, or of a treatise on the conchology of Kamchatka, is proportionate to the number of letters in them arranged in parallel lines--for Mr. Hillquit's argument means neither more nor less than this--is, let me repeat, incredible. What, then, is the explanation of his indulging in a performance of this degrading kind? The explanation is that he, like so many of his colleagues, though recognising personally that labour among "modern nations" depends for its higher productivity on the picked men who direct it, cannot bring himself to renounce, when he is making his appeal to the masses, the old doctrine that they are the sole producers; and accordingly having started with the ostentatious admission that directive ability is as essential to production as labour is, he endeavours by his verbal jugglery with the case of a printed book to convey the impression that labour produces all values after all; and he actually manages to wind up with a repetition of the old Marxian moral that the profits of ability mean nothing but labour which has not been paid for.[7] One of my reasons, then, for beginning the present examination of socialism with exposing the fallacy of principles which the intellectual socialists of to-day are so eager to proclaim that they have long since abandoned, is the fact that these principles are still the principles of the multitude; that for practical purposes they are those which most urgently require refutation; and that the intellectual socialists who have doubtless repudiated them personally, not only do not attempt to discredit them in the eyes of the ignorant, but themselves continue to appeal to them as instruments of popular agitation. My other reason for following the course in question is that the theory of socialism in its higher and more recent forms, which recognises directive intellect in addition to manual effort as one of the forces essential to the production of modern wealth, cannot be understood and estimated in any profitable way, without a previous examination of those earlier doctrines and ideas, some of which it still retains, while it modifies and rejects others. And now let us take up again the thread of our main argument. We laid this down early in the present chapter, having emphasised the fact that, the intellectual socialists of to-day agree, on their own admission, with one proposition at all events which has been elucidated in this volume--namely, that labour alone, as one of their spokesmen puts it, "is impotent to produce the wealth of modern nations," the faculties and the functions of the minority by whom labour is directed and organised being no less essential to the result than the labour of the majority itself. In the following chapter we shall see that this agreement extends yet further. FOOTNOTES: [3] Mr. Hillquit--a lawyer, who has adopted the business of propagating socialism in America--is unknown in England; but his name, not long ago, was to be found in the English papers, as that of one of the representatives sent from America to a recent Socialistic Congress in Europe. Amongst the socialists of the United States he holds a position analogous to that enjoyed by Mr. Shaw, Mr. Webb, and Mr. Ramsey Macdonald in England. [4] Whilst this work was in the press a "Catechism," lately published in England, for use of children, was sent me. It was proposed to use this Catechism on Sundays in the London County Council Schools. The first economic "lesson" in it begins thus: "Who creates all wealth? The working-class. Who are the workers? Men who work for wages." All who are not wage-workers are declared in this catechism to be absolutely idle and not productive. [5] The writer of this leaflet, Mr. Wilshire, has subsequently declared in his published criticisms of myself, that I impute to socialists what no socialists really say, and contends that, when he thus speaks of "working-men" and "labourers," he includes all men who contribute anything to the productive forces of a country--inventors like Mr. Edison, and millionaire captains of industry, in so far as they are active agents, and not mere recipients of interest. But that such is not the meaning which he conveys, or desires to convey, to those to whom his leaflet addresses itself, is plainly shown by his statistics, if by nothing else; for the share of the national income, which goes, as he asserts, to "labour," is avowedly the amount which, according to his estimate, is paid to-day in America, as weekly wages to the mass of manual labourers. To say that labour _in its more extended sense_ is the producer of all wealth, is a mere meaningless platitude. It is to say that there would be no wealth without effort of some kind. Does Mr. Wilshire seriously wish us to believe that he is telling Mr. Edison that "if he will only cast his ballot intelligently" he will be able to treble his income at the expense of richer men? [6] This applies to England no less than to America. Whenever any one of the more educated amongst the socialistic agitators is taxed with maintaining the popular doctrines of socialism with regard to labour, he at once repudiates them, and accuses his opponents of imputing to him and his fellows childish fallacies which no one in his senses would maintain; but the propagation of these fallacies amongst the more ignorant sections of the population continues just the same. [7] According to Mr. Hillquit, Dickens, for example, made his whole fortune by robbing his compositors. CHAPTER VI REPUDIATION OF MARX BY MODERN SOCIALISTS, CONTINUED. THEIR RECOGNITION OF CAPITAL AS THE IMPLEMENT OF DIRECTIVE ABILITY. THEIR NEW POSITION, AND THEIR NEW THEORETICAL DIFFICULTIES The reader will remember how, having first elucidated the part which exceptional mental faculties, concentrated on the direction of labour, and here called ability, play in modern production, I proceeded to the question of the means by which this direction is accomplished, and showed that these were supplied by the possession of wage-capital--capitalism thus representing no mere passive monopoly, but a system of reins which are attached to innumerable horses, and are useless except as vehicles of the skill with which the coachmen handle them. We shall find that by implication, if not always by direct admission, the intellectual socialists of to-day are in virtual but unacknowledged agreement with this further portion of the present argument also. In order to demonstrate that such is the case, let me briefly call attention to a point on which we shall have to dwell at much greater length presently--namely, that these socialists, though they reject the theory of production on which morally and intellectually the earlier socialism based itself, persist in making promises to the labourers precisely of the same kind as those with which the earlier socialism first whetted their appetites. In especial besides promising them indefinitely augmented wealth, they continue to promise them also some sort of _economic emancipation_; and many of these socialists, in explicit accord with their predecessors, declare that what they mean by emancipation is the entire abolition of the wage-system. Prominent among this number are Mr. Sidney Webb and his colleagues, who are certainly the best educated group of socialistic thinkers in England. Mr. Webb, in particular, is a man of conspicuous talent, and few writers can afford a more favourable illustration than he does of the lines along which the socialistic theory of society is compelled, by the exigencies of logical thought, to develop itself. Now, in proposing to abolish the wage-system, Mr. Webb and his fellow-theorists do not do so without specifying a definite substitute; and when we come to consider what their substitute is, we shall find that it implies, on their part, a full recognition of the function which wage-capital, as the instrument of ability, performs in modern production. Now, the reader must observe that, in indicating the nature of the function in question--namely, that of providing a means by which the process of direction may be accomplished--and in showing how under the existing system wage-capital is what actually performs it, I never for a moment implied that wage-capital was the only means by which the same result might be accomplished. Indeed, if we look back into the past history of mankind, we shall find that there are two systems other than that of wages, by which the conformity of labour to the requisite directions of ability, not only might be, but actually has been secured. One of these is the corvée system prevalent in the Middle Ages. The other system is that of slavery. Under the corvée system, peasants were the proprietors of the plots of ground on which they lived, and were thus able to maintain themselves by working at their own discretion; but they were compelled by their tenure to place a certain part of their time at the disposal of their feudal superior, and to work according to his orders. If only a number of otherwise independent peasants could be forced to give enough of their time to the proprietor of a factory to-day, the entire use of wage-capital would in his case be gone. The same thing is true of slavery. Like the peasant proprietor, who gives part of his time to his overlord, the slave is provided with the necessaries of life independently of his obedience to the detailed orders of his master. His master feeds him just as he would feed an animal; the industrial obedience is insured by the subsequent application of force. These two coercive systems are the only alternatives to the wage-system that have ever been found workable in the past history of the world. We will now consider the system which some of the most thoughtful socialists of to-day are proposing as a substitute for it in the hoped-for socialistic future. The school of English socialists, of which Mr. Webb is the best-known member, have given to the world a volume called _Fabian Essays_. This volume was republished in America, and to the American edition a special preface was prefixed with a view to emphasising the essentials of a socialistic conception of society, and bringing the details of the socialistic theory up to date. In this preface it is stated, with regard to the apportionment of material wealth generally, that "the only truly socialistic scheme" is one which "will absolutely abolish all economic distinctions, and prevent the possibility of their ever again arising." And how would it accomplish this end? "By making," says the writer, "an equal provision for all an indefeasible condition of citizenship, without any regard whatever to the relative specific services of the different citizens. The rendering of such services on the other hand," the writer goes on, "instead of being left to the option of the citizen, with the alternative of starvation (as is the case under the wage-system) would be secured under one uniform law of civic duty, precisely like other forms of taxation or military service." Such, then, is the system which is put forward by educated socialists to-day as the only means of escape from the existing system of wages. And an escape from the wage-system--and one not theoretically impracticable--it no doubt is; but an escape into what? It is an escape into one of those systems which I have just now mentioned. That is to say, it is an escape into economic slavery. For the very essence of the position of the slave, as contrasted with the wage-paid labourer, is, so far as the direction of his industrial actions is concerned, that he has not to work as he is bidden in order to gain a livelihood, but that, his livelihood being assured him no matter how he behaves himself, he is obliged to work as he is bidden in order to avoid the lash, or some other form of equally effective punishment.[8] Now, I am not attempting here to find any fault with socialism on the ground that it would, on the admission of some of its most thoughtful exponents, be obliged to re-establish slavery as the price of emancipation from "wagedom." I have commented on this fact solely with the view to showing that the nature of the alternative to the wage-system thus proposed indicates a full recognition, on the part of those proposing it, of the nature and necessity of the functions which the wage-system performs at present--namely, that of supplying the means by which the ablest minds in the community secure from the mass of the citizens the punctual performance of the industrial tasks required of them. I am not even insisting that such a slave-system as Mr. Webb contemplates is logically essential to the theory of intellectual socialism at all. On the contrary, as may be seen from a letter addressed to myself by a member of a socialistic body at Chicago, many socialists, as to this matter, are opposed to Mr. Webb altogether. Socialists, says my correspondent, speaking for himself and his associates, have no objection whatever to the system of "wagedom" as such; nor do they wish to see the direction of labour "enforced by the power of the law." They recognise, he says, quoting my own words, that production under socialism, just as under the present system, will be efficient in proportion as labour is directed by the best minds "which can enhance the productivity of an average pair of hands." They object to the wage-system only in so far as it is a means by "which the employing class can make a profit out of the labourers"; and the only change which in this respect socialists desire to introduce is to transfer the business of wage-paying from the private capitalist to the state--the state which will have no "private interests to serve," and consequently no temptation to appropriate any profits for itself. Socialists, he continues, subject to this proviso, would leave the wage-system just as it is now. The state would pay those who worked, and in accordance with the work they did; but the idle or refractory it would "leave to starve to death, if they so elected, unless somebody wished to keep them alive, as happens at the present time." The difference between socialists with regard to this question, however, does nothing in itself to discredit the socialistic theory as a whole. It has merely the effect of providing us with two sets of witnesses instead of one to the truth of a common principle, which is recognised by both equally. One set declares that the ability of the most competent men must direct the labours of the majority by means of an appeal to their fears; the other declares that the same result must be accomplished, as it is at the present time, by an appeal to their choice and prudence. In either case it is admitted that the separate manual tasks performed by the majority of the citizens must be directed and co-ordinated by the most competent minds somehow; and that the process of direction must have some system at the back of it, by means of which the orders issued to each labourer can be enforced--this system being either a continuation of that which is in existence now, or another which would to most people be in many ways more distasteful. The socialists of to-day, in admitting that such is the case, have at last placed themselves in a line with the sober realities of life, and in doing so have assimilated their own analysis of production to the analysis set forth in the beginning of the present volume. Apart from the fact that, according to their constructive programme, private capitalism would be abolished, and the sole capitalist would be the state, the socialistic system of production, as they have now come to conceive of it, would, in respect of the vital forces involved, be merely the existing system continued under another name, with a directing minority composed of exceptional men on the one hand, and a majority composed of directed men on the other. But in the minds of many socialistic thinkers the simplicity of the situation is obscured by the vagueness of the ideas which they associate with the phrase "the state." For them these ideas are like a fog, into which private capitalism disappears, and in which the forces represented by it lose all definite character. The state, however, is in reality nothing but a collection of individuals; and if the state, besides being a political body, is to become the sole industrial capitalist also, state capitalism, just like private capitalism, will succeed or fail in proportion to the talents of those to whom capital is intrusted as a means of directing the labourers. If, then, in any capitalistic country, such as Great Britain or America, the business of production could become socialised to-morrow, the best that could possibly happen would be the transformation of the present employers into so many state officials, who industrially would be the state itself. The only difference would be that they would have lost all personal interest in the pecuniary results of the talents which they would still be expected to exercise.[9] Now, if such a transformation of circumstances could be suddenly effected to-morrow, without any corresponding change in the dispositions of these men themselves, there is theoretically no reason for supposing that the process of production might not continue to be as efficient as it is now, so long as this precise situation lasted. But it could not last. It would be transitory in its very nature. The present generation of industrial directors would die, and in order that the efficiency of the state as the director of labour might be maintained, other men would have to be discovered who were possessed of equal ability in the first place, and who in the second could be trusted or compelled to use it unremittingly to the utmost, in the absence of the main motive which has actuated such men hitherto. Apart from the problems involved in these two requirements, neither the theory of production which is put forward, nor the productive system which is advocated, by the intellectual socialists of to-day, contains anything with which theoretically the most uncompromising of their opponents could quarrel. It is on these two problems that everything will be found to turn--one being the problem of how, under the conditions which socialism would introduce, the ablest men could be discovered, and invested according to their efficiency with the requisite industrial authority; the other being the problem of how, under the same conditions, it would be possible to secure from such men that full exertion of their talents, on which the material prosperity of the entire community would depend. For socialists these two problems may be said to be practically new. So long as socialism based itself on the Marxian theory of production, the selection, and the subsequent conduct of the men who would compose the industrial state presented no appreciable difficulties. For the state would, according to this theory, be in no sense the director of the labourers; it would merely be their humble servant. It would be like an old woman who sat all day long in a barn, counting, sorting, and making up into equal shares the different products brought in to her by her sons, who worked out of her sight in a dozen different fields; or, to quote the words of one of my late socialistic correspondents, the functions of the industrial state would be "simply industrial-clerical." The industrial state would consist of clerks and shop-boys, the former of whom added up accounts, while the latter weighed, sorted, and handed out goods over a counter. If the industrial state were to be nothing more than this, the selection of an adequate personnel would doubtless present no difficulties. But as soon as the socialistic theory recognises that the industrial state, instead of being the mere receiver and dispenser of products produced by labour, would represent the intellectual forces by which every process of labour is directed, the problems of how the individuals who compose the state are to be chosen, and of how the continuous exertion of their highest faculties is to be secured, become the fundamental problems which socialists are called upon to consider. If we assume that under the régime of socialism a nation could always secure, as the official directors of its labour, the men whose ability would enable them to direct it to the best advantage, and could force these men to exert their exceptional faculties to the utmost, the exaction of obedience to their orders from the common labouring citizens, let me say once more, would present no theoretical difficulty. But the task of securing the requisite ability itself is of a wholly different kind. Let us consider why. Any one armed with an adequate implement of authority, whether the control of the means of subsistence or the power of inflicting punishment, can secure, within limits, from any ordinary man the punctual performance of any ordinary manual task, and the performance of it in a prescribed way; but he is able to do this for the following reasons only: So far as ordinary labour is concerned, any one man, by simply observing another, can tell with approximate accuracy what the other man can do--whether he can trundle a wheel-barrow, hit a nail on the head, file a casting, or lay brick on brick. Further, the director of labour knows the precise nature of the result which he requires in each case that the individual labourer shall accomplish. Hence he can exact from each labourer conformity to the injunctions laid on him, in respect both of the general character and the particular application of his efforts. But in respect of the faculties distinctive of those exceptional men by whom alone ordinary labour can be directed to the best advantage, both these conditions are wanting. It is impossible to tell that any man of ability possesses any exceptional faculties for directing labour at all, unless he himself chooses to show them; and, indeed, until circumstances supply him with some motive for showing them, he may very well not be aware that he possesses such faculties himself. Moreover, even if he gives the world some reason to suspect their existence, the world at large will not know what he can do with them, and will consequently be unable to impose on him any definite task. A pressgang could have forced Columbus to labour as a common seaman; but not all the population of Europe could have forced him to discover a world beyond the Atlantic; for the mass of his contemporaries, until his enterprise proved successful, obstinately refused to believe that there was such a world to discover. The men, therefore, on the exercise of whose directive ability the productive efficiency of a modern nation depends, would occupy, with regard to any nation organised on socialistic principles, a position fundamentally different from that of the ordinary labourer. The exercise of their distinctive powers, unlike those of the labourer, could never be secured by coercion; because neither the nation at large, nor any body of representatives, could possibly know that these powers existed until the possessors of them chose to reveal the secret. They could not be made to reveal it. They could only be induced to do so; and they could only be induced to do so by a society which was so constituted as to offer for an exceptional performance some exceptional reward, just as a reward is offered for evidence against an unknown murderer. The reward at present offered them is the possession of some exceptional share of the wealth to the production of which their efforts have exceptionally contributed; and, hence, since it is the object of all socialistic schemes to render the achievement of such a reward impossible, we shall find that the ultimate problem for socialists of the modern school is how to discover another which in practice will be equally efficacious. But though this is the ultimate problem, it is very far from being the only one which the theory of socialism in its modern form raises. Directive ability, which is a compound of many faculties, varies greatly in degree and kind. Its value, if tested by the results of its actual application to labour, would in some cases be immense, in other cases very small, and in others it would be a minus quantity. Thus, even if we suppose that the exercise of it is so far its own reward that all who believe themselves to possess it--and these are a very large number--will, for the mere pleasure of exercising it, be eager to gain the positions which will make its exercise possible, the problem would remain of how to discriminate those who would, as industrial directors, achieve the greatest successes, from those who would bring about nothing but relative or absolute failure. This problem of how, under a régime of socialism, ability could be so tested that the practical means of direction could be granted to or withheld from it, according to its actual efficiency, is the problem which we will consider first; for though of secondary importance as compared with the problem of motive, it is in more immediate connection with the details of daily business. FOOTNOTES: [8] The economic condition of the great mass of the population, which this "up-to-date" socialist contemplates, is precisely analogous to that of the Helots in Sparta, whose subsistence was secured independently of their specific services, whilst their services to the directing class were wrung from them by a system of iron discipline. [9] While these pages were in the hands of the printers, a work was published by an American socialist, in which it is asserted that the socialisation of America would consist at first of this precise process--namely, the conversion of all the existing active employers and directors of labour into the salaried servants of some state department. CHAPTER VII PROXIMATE DIFFICULTIES. ABLE MEN AS A CORPORATION OF STATE OFFICIALS For the moment, then, we will waive the problem of motive altogether; we will assume that a society which denied to its able men any pecuniary reward proportionate to the magnitude of its products could provide them with a motive of some kind--we need not inquire what--which would prompt them still to exert themselves as eagerly as they do now; and we will merely consider how, a multitude of such men being given, the most efficient of them could be constantly selected as the official directors of labour, and the rest, in proportion to their inefficiency, be either dismissed or excluded. In order to realise the difficulties which, in this respect, socialism would have to face, let us consider the manner in which the problem is solved now. Under the system of private capitalism it solves itself by an automatic process. In order that any man may direct the labour of other men, he must, under that system, be the possessor or controller of so much wage-capital. Now this capital--this implement of direction--in proportion as it is employed, disappears, and is reproduced only by a subsequent sale of the products resulting from the labour in the direction of which it has been expended. Thus a man, we will say, invents a new engine for motor-cars, and devotes to the production of twenty engines of the kind all the capital which he possesses--namely, two thousand guineas. Apart from the raw material out of which the engines are to be constructed, his whole expenditure will consist in paying wages to certain labourers, on condition that they work up this metal in a manner which he prescribes to them. For the raw metal he pays, we will say, a hundred pounds, or the odd shillings of the guineas. He pays to twenty labourers a hundred pounds apiece as wages; and the result is twenty engines. If the engines are successful, and if the public will give him a hundred and fifty guineas for each of them, the man has got his entire capital back again, with a thousand guineas added to it, and can continue his direction of labour by means of wages, on the same lines, and on a much more extended scale. But if the engines, when tried, develop some inherent defect, and he consequently can sell none of them, he may still, perhaps, get back the price of the raw metal--a petty sum, insufficient for his own needs--but his whole wage-capital will be gone, and with it his power of directing any further labour in the future. In other words, under the system of private capitalism, if labour has been directed by any man in an unsuccessful way, the resulting products being such that nobody cares to buy them, or in exact proportion as this result is approached, the man's implement of direction passes out of his hands altogether; and the simple fact of his having directed labour ill deprives him of the means of directing or of misdirecting it again. But under a system of state socialism the situation would be wholly changed. Private capitalism is, in this respect, self-acting, and acts with absolute accuracy, because wage-capital being divided into a multitude of independent reservoirs, its waste at any one point brings about its own remedy. Each reservoir is like a mill-pond which automatically begins to dry up whenever its contents are employed in actuating a useless mill; and the man who has wasted his water is able to waste no more. But the moment the divisions between the reservoirs are broken down, and the separate capitals contained in them become, as would be the case under socialism, fused together like the waters of a single lake, the director of labour who so misused any portion of this fluid stock that the products of labour, as directed by him, failed to replace the wages, would not thereby be incapacitated from continuing his misdirections further; for the wage-capital dissipated by his incompetence could, under these conditions, always be replaced, and its loss more or less concealed, by fresh supplies which had a really different origin. It was only in consequence of conditions resembling these that the London County Council was enabled to continue for so long its service of Thames steamboats, in spite of the fact that the labour thus employed failed to reproduce, by the functions which it performed for the public, more than a fraction of capital which was necessarily consumed in its maintenance. Had labour been thus misdirected by any private capitalist, his misdirection of it would have soon been checked by his loss of the means of continuing it; but the County Council, with the purse of the community at its back, was able, by taxing the industrial successes of others, to refinance and prolong its own industrial failure. Socialists wholly overlook the importance of these considerations. Many of them, for example, in the case of the London County Council's steamboats, defended that enterprise in spite of its financial failure, on the ground that the steamboats were a convenience to certain travellers at all events, who in all probability were persons of modest means, while the loss would be made good out of the pockets of the ratepayers who were presumably rich. But even if this argument were plausible as applied to a state of society in which the incomes of some men were greater than those of others, it would be absolutely inapplicable to conditions such as those desired by socialists, under which the incomes of all would be fractions, approximately equal, of a common stock to the production of which all contributed. For it must surely be apparent to even the meanest intelligence that whatever diminished the aggregate amount to be divided would diminish the fraction of it which falls to the share of each; and it ought to be equally apparent, though to many people it is not, that the labour of any labourer which is directed in such a way that the men consume more articles of utility than they produce, or fail to produce as many as they would do if directed better, has this precise effect of diminishing the divisible total, by making it either less than it has been or less than it would be otherwise.[10] Thus, in cases such as that of the London County Council's steamboats, the efficiency of labour is so lessened by incompetent direction that the labourers employed can only perform for society one-half of the services which society must perform for them. For every hour which they spend in conveying ten men on the river, twenty men must work to provide them with food and clothing. So long as fortunes are unequal, and depend on individual effort and enterprise, such losses may be localised and obscured in a hundred different ways; but the moment all fortunes, as they would be under the régime of socialism, were reduced to specific fractions of the aggregate product of the community, any decline in the efficiency of the labour of any single group would result in a diminution of the income of every member of all the others. Wherever ten men were employed to do what might have been done by nine, the contribution to the general stock would be less by ten per cent. than it might have been. If ten men were employed in making chairs, which might have been made by nine had their labour been better directed, the community would lose the cushions which in that case would have been made by the tenth. And what holds good of labour in respect of its productive efficiency holds good of it also in respect of the character of the goods produced. If ten men were employed in producing forty loaves when all that could be eaten was twenty, not only would the remaining twenty be wasted, but the community would lose the butter which might have been made instead of them. The importance, therefore, to the community as a whole of having every branch of its labour directed by those men, and by those men only, whose ability would raise it to the highest pitch of efficiency, and cause it to produce only such goods and such quantities of them as would satisfy from moment to moment the needs and tastes of the population, would, under a régime of socialism, be even more general and immediate than it is at the present day; and yet at the same time, for reasons to which we will now return, the difficulty of securing the requisite ability would be increased. It is impossible to illustrate in detail the situation which would thus arise; for the state, as sole capitalist and sole director of labour, is an institution which imaginably might take various forms; and socialists, in this case exhibiting a commendable prudence, have refrained from committing themselves to any detailed programme. The socialistic state, however, having to perform a double function--namely, that of political governor and universal director of industry--would necessarily be divided into two distinct bodies. One of these, consisting of statesmen and legislators, would, we may assume, be elected by the votes of the people. But the other, consisting of industrial experts--the inventors, the chemists, the electricians, the naval engineers, the organisers of labour--might conceivably be in the first or the second of the two following positions: They might either be left free, as they are under the existing system, to do severally the best they can, according to their own lights, in estimating what goods or services the population wants, and in satisfying these wants with such increasing economy that new goods and services might be continually added to the old. They might be left free to promote or dismiss subordinates, to fill up vacancies, and take new men into partnership, very much as the heads of private firms do now. Or else they might be liable, in greater or less degree, to removal or supersession, and interference with their technical operations, on the part of the political body, whose members, while representing the general ideas of the community, would presumably not be experts in the direction of its particular industries. Now, let us suppose first that the official directors of labour are left practically free to follow their own devices. The situation which will arise may be illustrated by the following imaginary case: The nation, let us say, requires two sister ships. They are built in different yards, under two different directors, and a thousand labourers are employed in the construction of each; but while the labourers who work under one director take a year to complete their task, those who work under the other complete theirs within ten months. This would mean for the community that, through the inferiority of the former of these two officials, two months' labour of the national shipwrights had been lost; and the public interest would require that the industrial regiment commanded by him should as quickly as possible pass out of his control into that of an official who could render it more efficient than he. And under the existing system this, as we have seen already, is precisely what sooner or later would be brought about automatically. The inefficient director, in proportion to his relative inefficiency, loses his customers, and can direct labour no longer, or is obliged to direct it on a very much reduced scale. But if each director of labour owed, as he would do under socialism, his means of directing it, not to the results of his individual efficiency, but to a single common source--namely, to the collective capital of the country or the forcible authority of the law--there is nothing in the fact that one constructor of ships wastes labour in constructing them which another constructor would have saved, to prevent him from continuing in his post, or even to insure that he will vacate it in favour of an abler man, whether an official rival or otherwise, as soon as such a man is available. There is also this further fact to be noted. Although we are assuming that the socialistic directors of labour will exert their talents to the utmost without requiring the stimulus of a proportionate reward in money, we must necessarily assume that they will value their posts for some reason or other just as much as they would do were the largest emoluments attached to them. Consequently we may, condescending to vulgar language, say, as a certainty, that they will do their very best to stick to them. All these official persons, as contrasted with the labouring public, will occupy positions of similar and desirable privilege; and while their latent rivalry among themselves will be hampered in the manner just indicated, they will none of them be inclined to welcome any further rivalry from without. If the least efficient of our two naval constructors could not be forced by the fact of his relative inefficiency to hand over all or any portion of his authority to the other, and would certainly not be likely to do so of his own free will, it is still less likely that either would be willing to make such a sacrifice in favour of a man outside the privileged ranks, who desired an opportunity of demonstrating his practical superiority to both. Under a system, in short, like that which we are now contemplating, the ability of the ablest directors might, in each branch of industry, raise the efficiency of the labour directed by themselves to as high a pitch as that to which it could be raised by the competition of to-day. But the successes of the ablest men would have no tendency to self-extension. The ablest men would do better than the less able, but would have no tendency to displace them; and the ablest and the least able members of the industrial oligarchy alike would instinctively oppose, and would also be in a position to check, the practical development of any competition from without. That this is no fanciful estimate can be shown by an appeal to facts. We may take as an example the case of the British post-office. The inefficient transmission of letters some twenty years ago in London provoked an effort to supplement it by a service of private messengers. The post-office authorities were instantly up in arms, ready to nip this enterprise in the bud, and forcibly prevent any other human being from doing what they were still, to all appearance, determined not to do themselves.[11] Then, as a grudging concession, permission to transmit letters with a promptitude which the post-office still declined to emulate was accorded to a company on condition that for each letter carrier the post-office should be paid as it would have been had it carried the letter itself; and thus there was established at last the institution of the Boy Messengers. Similar examples are afforded by the conduct of the state in France, where the manufacture of tobacco and matches are both of them state monopolies. To say that the tobacco produced by the French state is unsmokable, and that the matches produced by it will not light a candle, would no doubt be an exaggeration; but they are both inferior to the products which private enterprise could, if left to itself, produce at the same price. And private enterprise is, indeed, not wholly suppressed. Excellent tobacco and matches, both of private manufacture, are allowed to be sold in France; but the producers of both are artificially handicapped by having to pay to the state, on every box or every pound sold, either the whole or part of the profit which the state itself would have made by selling an equal quantity of its own inferior articles. The very fact, indeed, that the state, as a producer, or a renderer of public services, such as letter-carrying, has thus to protect itself against the competition of private enterprise, is sufficient evidence of the difficulties which a state organisation encounters in securing industrial ability which shall be constantly of the highest kind, and also of its inevitable tendency to hamper, if not to stifle, the development and the practical activity of superior ability elsewhere. And if these difficulties and this tendency are appreciable in state-directed industries now, when the area of direction is small and strictly limited, the reader may easily imagine how incalculably more formidable they would become if extended, as socialism would extend them, to the activities of the entire community. We have thus far been considering the position of the directors of socialised industry on the assumption that they would be free to follow the dictates of their own several intelligences, without any technical interference from officials of any other kind. Let us now consider the alternative which, in any socialistic society, would most closely coincide with fact. This is the assumption that the official directors of labour would not be technical autocrats, but would be subject to the control of their brother officials, the statesmen, who represented the great mass of the people. Now, no doubt the intervention of a body of this kind might obviate some of the difficulties on which we have just been dwelling. It might lead to the removal of some directors of labour who were not only relatively inefficient, but were positively and notoriously mischievous; but it would introduce difficulties greater than those it obviated. For while the industrial officials would, in exact proportion to their efficiency, embody the special expertness peculiar to a gifted few, the political officials, in proportion as they represented their electorate, would embody the preponderating opinions and the general intelligence of the many. The political officials, therefore, could, from the very nature of the case, never represent any ideas or condition of knowledge which appreciably transcended or conflicted with those of the least intelligent; and the logical result would be that no industrial improvements could in a socialistic community be initiated by the highest intelligence, if they went beyond what could be apprehended and consciously approved of by the lowest. And here again, though our estimate is only general and speculative--for it deals with a state of things which at present has no existence--we can turn to historical facts for illustrations of its substantial truth. For example, if in the days of Columbus all the capital of Europe and the control of its entire labour had been vested in a government which represented the all but universal opinion of all the western nations, the discovery of America would have obviously been beyond the limits of possibility. It was rendered possible only because Columbus secured two patrons who, resembling in this respect far-seeing investors of to-day, dared to be original, and provided him with the necessary ships and control over the necessary labour. Or let us take the case of the iron industry of the modern world. This industry, in its vast modern developments, depends entirely on the discovery made in England of a method by which iron might be smelted with coal in place of wood. The completed discovery was due to a succession of solitary men, beginning with Dud Dudley in the reign of James I., and ending a century later with Darby of Coalbrookdale. Practically these heroic men had all their contemporaries against them. Public opinion attacked them through private persecution and violence. The apathy and vacillation of governments left them without defence; and had governments then represented public opinion completely, and had also controlled all labour and capital, the discovery in question, which was retarded for three generations, would in all probability have never been made at all. Arkwright's experience with regard to his spinning-frame was similar. His epoch-making invention was in danger of being altogether lost, because the general opinion of the capitalists of his day was against it; and if all capital had been vested in a representative state, to the exclusion of the far-seeing individuals who eventually came to his assistance, its loss would have been almost certain. The successful development of the automobile did not take place till yesterday--and why? A steam-driven vehicle ran in Cornwall before the end of the eighteenth century; but the state and public opinion both condemned it as dangerous; and all further progress in the matter was checked for more than twenty years. Then again private enterprise asserted itself, but only to suffer precisely the same fate. Steam-driven omnibuses plied between Paddington and Westminster. Steam-driven stage-coaches plied on the Bath road. But the state and public opinion were again in obstinate opposition; these vehicles were crushed out of existence by the imposition of monstrous tolls; and progress was checked a second time and for a longer period still. An instance yet more modern is that supplied by the electric lighting of London. The electric lighting of London was retarded for ten years solely by the attitude which the state assumed towards private enterprise. It is needless to multiply illustrations of this kind further; for my object is not to show that the state, as it exists at present, is necessarily inimical to private enterprise as a whole. It is not, for it has not the power to be. But the fact that even now, when its powers are so strictly limited and its points of direct contact with industrial enterprise are so few, tendencies of the kind develop themselves with such marked practical consequences is enough to show the reality and magnitude of the evils which would ensue if a body, which reflected on the one hand the opinions of the average many, and on the other the individual ability of a few, specially privileged and pledged to their own methods, were the sole controller of all manual labour whatsoever, the virtual owner of all the implements which exist at present, the sole determiner of the forms which such implements shall assume in the future, and also of the kinds and quantities of the consumable goods which the implements and the labourers together shall from day to day produce. But the nature and scope of the effects which would be incident to any general absorption, such as that contemplated by socialists, of productive enterprise by the state, will be yet more clearly seen if we turn to a kind of production on which I have dwelt already, as affording the simplest and most luminous example possible of the respective parts played in the modern world by ordinary manual labour and the exceptional ability which directs it. This is the case of books, or of other printed publications. Many years ago the English radical Charles Bradlaugh urged in a debate with a then prominent socialist that under socialism no literary expression of free thought would be practicable, and I cannot do more than accentuate his lucid and unanswerable arguments. The state, being controller of all the implements of production, a private press would be as illegal as the dies used by a forger. Nobody could issue a book, a newspaper, or even a leaflet, unless the use of a state press were allowed him by the state authorities, together with the disposal of the labour of the requisite number of compositors. Now, it is clear that the state could not bind itself to put presses and compositors at the service of every one of its citizens who was anxious to see himself in print. There would have to be selection and rejection of some drastic kind. The state would have to act as universal publisher's reader. What would happen under these circumstances to purely imaginative literature we need not here inquire; but when the question was one of expressing controversial opinions as to science, religion, morals, and especially social politics, what would happen is evident. The state would be able to refuse, and it could not do otherwise than refuse, to print anything which expressed opinions out of harmony with those which were predominant among its own members. In so far as these members reflected the opinions of the majority, they would never publish an attack on errors which they themselves accepted as vital truths. In so far as they owed their positions to certain real or supposed superiorities they would never publish any criticism of their own methods by men whom they would necessarily regard as mischievous and mistaken inferiors. In short, whether the state acted in this matter as the ultra-superior person, or as the ultra-popular person, the result would be just the same. The focalised prejudices of the majority, or the privileged self-confidence of a certain select minority, would deprive independent thought in any other quarter of any means of expressing itself either by book or journal, and by thus depriving it of its voice would place it at an artificial disadvantage more effectual as a means of repression than the dungeons of the Inquisition itself. It would be checked as completely as the higher criticism of the Bible would have been if the only printer in the whole world were the Pope and the only publishing business were managed by the College of Cardinals. And what, under a régime of socialism, would be true of human thought, a-seeking to embody itself in printed books or newspapers, would be equally true of it as applied to the methods of industry, and seeking to embody itself in multiplied or improved commodities. Such, then, are the disadvantages which socialism, as contrasted with the existing system, would introduce in connection with the problem of how to detect, and how, having detected it, to invest with suitable powers, the men whose ability is, at any given moment, calculated to raise labour to the highest pitch of productiveness--how to give power to these, and to take it away from others in exact proportion as their talents, as exhibited in its practical results, fall short of the maximum which is at the time obtainable. This problem, as we have seen already, the existing system solves by its machinery of private competition, and of independent capitals, which automatically increase the powers of the ablest directors of labour, and concurrently decrease or extinguish those of the less able. Socialism, with its collective capital, and its able men reduced or elevated to the rank of state officials, while not obviating, but on the contrary emphasising the necessity for placing labour under the highest directive ability, or, in other words, the necessity for competition among able men, would dislocate the only machinery by which such competition can be made effective; and, if it did not destroy the efficiency of the highest ability altogether, would reduce this to a minimum, and confine it within the narrowest limits. In this chapter, however, we have been dealing with the machinery only. We have been assuming the unabated activity of the powers by which the machinery is to be driven. That is to say, we have been assuming that every man who possesses, or imagines himself to possess, any exceptional gift for directing labour--whether as an inventor, a man of science, an organiser, or in any other capacity--would be no less eager, under the circumstances with which socialism would surround him, to develop and exert his faculties than he is at the present day. We will now pass on to the question of how far this assumption is correct. The question of machinery is secondary. It is a question of detail only; for if there is no power in the background by which the machinery may be driven, it will not make much difference in the result whether the machinery be bad or good. And here once more we shall find that the socialists of to-day agree with us; and in passing on to the question now before us, we shall be quitting a region of speculations which can be only of a general kind (for they refer to social arrangements whose details are not definitely specified), and we shall find ourselves confronted by a variety of ideas and principles which, however confused they may be in the minds of those who enunciate them, we shall have no difficulty ourselves in reducing to logical order. FOOTNOTES: [10] That such is the case can be seen easily enough by imagining a socialistic community consisting of twenty men, who require and consume only one article, bread. Each man, to keep him alive, requires one loaf daily; but to eat two would be a comfort to him, and to eat three would be luxury. The community is divided into two groups of ten men each, one man in each group directing the labour of the others. We will start with supposing that these two directors are men of equal and also of the highest ability, and that each of the groups, under these favourable conditions, is enabled to produce daily an output of thirty loaves. The total output of both in this case amounts to sixty, which equally divided yields to everybody the luxurious number of three. Let us next suppose that the director of one group dies, that his place is taken by a man of inferior powers, and that this group, as a consequence of his less efficient direction, instead of producing thirty loaves can produce no more than ten. Now, although this falling off in production has occurred in one group only, the loss which results from it is felt by the entire community. The total output has sunk from sixty loaves to forty; and the members of the group which retains its old efficiency, no less than those of the group which has lost so much of it, have to be content, with a dividend, not of three loaves, but two. Finally, let us suppose that, owing to a continued deterioration in management, the ten men of whom the first group is composed are able to produce daily, not ten loaves, but only five. That is to say, the number of loaves which they produce comes to no more than half of the minimum they are obliged to eat. Here it is obvious that, unless one-half of the population is to die, it can only be kept alive by being given a supply of loaves which, in consequence of its own inefficiency, must be taken out of the mouths of others. [11] A similar drama enacted itself in London more than two centuries ago. Private enterprise established a penny post. The state killed it, and deprived the metropolis of this service for a hundred and fifty years. CHAPTER VIII THE ULTIMATE DIFFICULTY. SPECULATIVE ATTEMPTS TO MINIMISE IT When socialism, says Mr. Sidney Webb, shall have abolished all other monopolies, there will still remain to be dealt with the most formidable monopoly of all--namely, "the natural monopoly of business ability," or "the special ability and energy with which some persons are born." The services of these monopolists, he sees and fully admits, would be as essential to a socialistic as they are to any other community which desires to prosper according to modern standards. He sees and admits also that these exceptional men will not continuously exert or even develop their talents unless society can supply them with some adequate motive or stimulus. Accordingly, since he maintains that no scheme of society would be socialistic in any practical sense which did not completely, or at least approximately, eliminate the motive mainly operative among such men at present--namely, that supplied by the possibility of exceptional economic gain--he fairly faces the fact that some motive of a different kind will have to be discovered by socialists which shall take the place of this. I mention Mr. Webb in particular merely because he represents the views which all intellectual socialists are coming to hold likewise. This specific problem of how to provide the natural monopolists of business ability with all adequate motive to develop and exercise their talents is engaging more and more the attention of the higher socialistic thinkers; and if we take together the passages in their writings which deal with it, it has by this time a voluminous literature of its own. We shall find that the arguments brought forward by them in this connection divide themselves broadly into two classes, one of which deals with the problem of motive directly, while the other class aims at preparing the way to its solution by showing in advance that its difficulties are far less formidable than they appear to be. Without insisting on the manner in which they are urged by individual writers, we will take these two classes of argument in the logical order which they assume when we consider their general character. These preparatory arguments, with which we will accordingly begin, while admitting that some men are undoubtedly more able than others, aim at showing that the superiority of such men to their fellows is not so great as it seems to be, and that any claims made by them to exceptional reward on account of it consequently tend to reduce themselves to very modest proportions. These arguments possess a peculiar interest owing to the fact that they have not originated with socialistic thinkers at all, but have been drawn by them from the evolutionary philosophy of the nineteenth century generally, in so far as it was applied to historical and sociological questions. The dominant idea which distinguished this school of thought was the insignificance of the individual as compared with society past and present. Thus Herbert Spencer, who was its most systematic exponent, opens his work on the _Study of Sociology_ with an elaborate attack on what he calls "The Great Man Theory," according to which the explanation of the main events of history is to be sought in the influence of exceptional or great men--the men who, in vulgar language, are spoken of as "historical characters." Such an explanation, said Spencer, is no explanation at all. Great men, however great, are not isolated phenomena. Whatever they may do as the "proximate initiators" of change, they themselves "have their chief cause in the generations they have descended from," and depend for the influence which is commonly attributed to their actions, on "the multitudinous conditions" of the generation to which they belong. Thus Laplace, he says, could not have got far with his calculations if it had not been for the line of mathematicians who went before him. Cæsar could not have got very far with his conquests if a great military organisation had not been ready to his hand; nor could Shakespeare have written his dramas if he had not lived in a country already enriched with traditions and a highly developed language. But though it was Herbert Spencer who invested these arguments with their most systematic form, and gave them their definite place in the theory of evolution as a whole, they were widely diffused already among his immediate predecessors, as we may see by the following passage taken from an unlikely quarter. "It is," says Macaulay, in his _Essay on Dryden_, anticipating the exact phraseology of Spencer, "the age that makes the man, not the man that makes the age.... The inequalities of the intellect, like the inequalities of the surface of the globe, bear so small a proportion to the mass, that in calculating its great revolutions they may safely be neglected." And Macaulay is merely expressing a doctrine distinctive of his time--a doctrine which, to take one further example, dominated in a notable way the entire thought of Buckle. This doctrine, which, to a greater or less degree, merges the organism in its environment, or the individual, however great, in society, has been seized on by the more recent socialists just as the theory of Ricardo, with regard to labour and value, was seized on by Karl Marx, and has been adapted by them to their own purposes. Thus Mr. Bellamy, whose book, _Looking Backward_, descriptive of a socialistic Utopia, achieved a circulation beyond that of the most popular novels, declares that "nine hundred and ninety-nine parts out of the thousand of the produce of every man are the result of his social inheritance and environment"; and Mr. Kidd, a socialist in sentiment if not in definite theory, urges that the comparative insignificance, the comparative commonness, and dependence for their efficiency on contemporary social circumstances, of the talents which we are accustomed to associate with the greatest inventions and discoveries, is proved by the fact that some of the most important of these have been made by persons who, "working quite independently, have arrived at like results almost simultaneously. Thus rival and independent claims," he proceeds, "have been made for the discovery of the differential calculus, the invention of the steam-engine, the methods of spectrum analysis, the telephone, the telegraph, as well as many other discoveries." Further, to these arguments a yet more definite point has been added by the contention that, as socialist writers put it, "inventions and discoveries, when once made, become common property," the mass of mankind being cut off from the use of them only by patents or other artificial restrictions. The aim of socialists in pursuing this line of reasoning is obvious. It is to demonstrate, or rather to suggest, that "the monopolists of business ability," in spite of their comparative rarity and the importance of the services performed by them, are far from being so rare or so superior to the mass of their contemporaries as they seem to be, that their achievements owe far more than appears on the surface to the co-operation of the average members of society, and that consequently a socialistic society could justly demand and practically secure their services on far easier terms than those which they command at present. And to such a conclusion the principles of modern evolutionary sociology, as unanimously interpreted by the philosophers of the nineteenth century, may be fairly said to lend the entire weight of their prestige. Let us, then, consider more carefully what these principles are, with a view to understanding the true scope of their significance. We shall find that, although undoubtedly true in themselves, the scope of their significance has been very imperfectly understood by the great thinkers to whose talents their elucidation has been due; that these thinkers, in their eagerness to establish a new truth, have at the same time introduced a new confusion; and that it is from the confusion of a truth with a falsehood, rather than from the truth itself, that the socialists of to-day have been here drawing their inspiration. The confusion in question arises from a failure to see that sociology is concerned with two distinct sets of phenomena, or with one set regarded from two absolutely distinct standpoints. Thus it is constantly said that man, in the course of ages, has developed civilised societies and the various arts of life--that, beginning as an animal only a little higher than the monkey, he gradually became a builder of cities, a master of the secrets of nature, a philosopher, a poet, a painter of divine pictures. And from a certain point of view this language is adequate. If what we desire to do is to estimate, as speculative philosophers, the significance of the human race in relation to the universe or its Author, by considering its origin on this planet, and its subsequent fortunes hitherto, what interests us is man in the mass, or societies, and not individuals. But if we are interested in any problem of practical life--such, for example, as how to cure cancer, or cut a navigable canal through a broad and mountainous isthmus, or decorate a public building with a series of great frescoes--the central point of interest is the individual and not society. How would a mother, whose child was hovering between life and death, be comforted by the information that man was a great physician? How would America be helped in the construction of the Panama Canal by learning from sociologists that man could remove mountains? How could great pictures be secured for a public building by information to the effect that the greatest of all great artists depended for their exceptional power on the aggregate of conditions surrounding them, when ten millions of men whose surrounding conditions were similar might be tried in succession without one being found who rose in art above the level of vulgar mediocrity? It is not that the generalisations of the evolutionary sociologists with regard to man in the mass, or societies, are untrue philosophically. Philosophically they are of the utmost moment. It is that they have no bearing on the problems of contemporary life, and that they miss out the one factor by which they are brought into connection with it. Let us take, for example, the way in which Herbert Spencer illustrates the general theorem of the evolutionary sociologists by the case of Shakespeare, and Shakespeare's debt to his times. "Given a Shakespeare," he says, "and what dramas could he have written without the multitudinous conditions of civilised life around him--without the various traditions which, descending to him from the past, gave wealth to his thought, and without the language which a hundred generations had developed and enriched by use?" The answer to this question is to be found in the counter-question that is provoked by it. Given the conditions of civilised life, and the traditions of England and its language, as they were under Queen Elizabeth, how could these have produced the Shakespearian dramas unless England had possessed an individual citizen whose psycho-physical organisation was equal to that of Shakespeare? Similarly, it is true that Turner could not have painted his sunsets if multitudinous atmospheric conditions had not given him sunsets to paint; but at the same time every one of Turner's contemporaries were surrounded by sunsets of precisely the same kind, and yet only Turner was capable of producing such masterpieces as his own. The case of the writer and the artist, indeed, illustrates with singular lucidity the fact which the philosophy of the evolutionary sociologists ignores that the great man does great things, not in virtue of conditions which he shares with the dullest and the feeblest of the men around him, but in virtue of the manner in which his exceptional genius assimilates the data of his environment, and gives them back to the world, recombined, refashioned, and reinterpreted. And with regard to practical matters, and more especially the modern production of wealth, the case is just the same. No one has illustrated more luminously than Herbert Spencer himself the multitudinous character of the knowledge which modern production necessitates; and no one has insisted with more emphasis than he that one of the rarest faculties to be met with among human beings is the faculty, as he expresses it, of "apprehending assembled propositions in their totality." It would be difficult to define better in equally brief language the intellectual aspect of that composite mental equipment which distinguishes from ordinary men the monopolists of business ability. It is precisely by apprehending a multitude of assembled propositions in their totality--mathematical, chemical, geological, geographical, and so forth--by combining them for a definite purpose, and translating them into a series of orders which organised labour can execute, that the intellect of the able man gives efficiency to the industrial processes of to-day. In addition, moreover, to his purely intellectual faculties, he requires others which, in their higher developments, are no less rare--namely, a quick discernment of popular wants as they arise or an imagination which enables him to anticipate them, an instinctive insight into character which enables him to choose best men as his subordinates, promptitude to seize on opportunities, courage which is the soul of promptitude, and finally a driving energy by which the whole of his moral and intellectual mechanism is actuated. As for "the aggregate of conditions out of which he has arisen," or the aggregate of conditions which surround him, these are common to him and to every one of his fellow-countrymen. They are a landscape which surrounds them all. But aggregates of conditions could no more produce the results of which, as Herbert Spencer admits, the able man is the proximate cause, unless the able man existed and could be induced to cause them, than a landscape could be photographed without a lens or a camera, or a great picture of it painted in the absence of a great artist. Herbert Spencer, indeed, partially perceives all this himself. That is to say, he realises from time to time that the causal importance of the great man varies according to the nature of the problems in connection with which we consider him and that while he is, for purposes of general speculation, merely a transmitter of forces beyond and greater than himself, he is for practical purposes an ultimate cause or fact. That such is the case is shown in a curiously vivid way by two references to two great men in particular, which occur not far from each other in Spencer's _Study of Sociology_. One is a reference to the last Napoleon, the other is a reference to the first. He refers to the former when he is emphasising his main proposition, that the importance of the ruler, considered as an individual, is small, and almost entirely merged in the conditions of society generally. "If you wish," he says, "to understand the phenomena of social evolution, you will not do it should you read yourself blind over the biographies of all the great rulers on record, down to Frederick the greedy and Louis Napoleon the treacherous." When he makes his reference to Louis Napoleon's ancestor, he is pausing for a moment in the course of his philosophical argument in order to indulge in a parenthetical denunciation of war. Of the insane folly of war, he says, we can have no better example than that provided by Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when hardly a country was free from "slaughter, suffering, and devastation." For what, he goes on to ask, was the cause of such wide-spread horrors? Simply, he answers, the presence of one abnormal individual, "in whom the instincts of the savage were scarcely at all qualified by what we call moral sentiments"; and "all this slaughter, suffering, and devastation" were, he says, "gone through because one man had a restless desire to be despot over all men." Here we see how Spencer, as a matter of common-sense, instinctively assigns to great men absolutely contrasted positions, according to the point of view from which he is himself regarding them--that of the speculative thinker and that of the practical politician, and of this fact we will take one example more. Of his doctrine that the great man is merely a "proximate initiator," and in no true sense the cause of what he seems to produce or do, he gives us an elaborate illustration taken from modern industry--that is to say, the invention of the _Times_ printing-press. This wonderful piece of mechanism would, he says, have been wholly impossible if it had not been for a series of discoveries and inventions that had gone before it; and having specified a multitude of these, winds up with a repetition of his moral that of each invention individually the true cause is not the so-called inventor, but "the aggregate of conditions out of which he has arisen." But when elsewhere, in his treatise on _Social Statics_, Spencer is dealing with the existing laws of England, he violently attacks these, in so far as they relate to patents, because they fail, he says, to recognise as absolute a man's "property in his own ideas," or, in other words, "his inventions, which he has wrought, as it were, out of the very substance of his own mind." Thus Spencer himself, at times, as these passages clearly show, sees that while great men, when considered philosophically, do little of what they appear to do, they must for practical purposes be dealt with as though they did all; though he nowhere recognises this distinction formally, or accords it a definite place in his general sociological system.[12] The absurdity of confounding speculative sociology with practical is shown with equal clearness by Macaulay in the passage that was just now quoted from him. "The inequalities of the intellect," he says, "like the inequalities of the surface of the globe, bear so small a proportion to the mass" that the sociologist may neglect the one just as safely as the astronomer neglects the other. Now, this may be quite true if our interest in human events is that of social astronomers who are watching them from another planet. But because the inequalities of the earth are nothing to the astronomer, it does not follow that they are nothing to the engineer and the geographer. The Alps for the astronomer may be an infinitesimal and negligible excrescence; but they were not this to Hannibal or the makers of the Mont Cenis tunnel. What to the astronomer are all the dykes of Holland? But they are everything to the Dutch between a dead nation and a living one. And the same thing holds good of the inequalities of the human intellect. For the social astronomer they are nothing. For the practical man they are everything. It is in the astonishing confusion between speculative and practical truth which characterised the evolutionary sociologists of the nineteenth century that the socialists of to-day are seeking for a new support to their system. And now let us consider the way in which they themselves have improved the occasion, and apply the moral which they have drawn from such a singularly deceptive source. The three points which they aim at emphasising are the smallness of the products which the able man can really claim as his own, the consequent diminution of his claims to any exceptional reward on account of them, and the fact that even the highest ability, however rare it may be, is very much commoner than it seems to be, and will, for this reason in addition to those just mentioned, be obtainable in the future at a very much reduced price. Of these three points the last is the most definite. Let us take it first; and let us take it as stated, not by a professed socialist, but by an independent and highly educated thinker such as Mr. Kidd. Mr. Kidd's argument is, as we have seen already, that the comparative commonness of ability of the highest kind is shown by the fact that, of the greatest inventions and discoveries, a number have been notoriously made at almost the same time by a number of thinkers who have all worked in isolation. This argument would not be worth discussing if it were not used so constantly by a variety of serious writers. The fact on which it bases itself is no doubt true enough; but what is the utmost that it proves? That more men than one should reach at the same time the same discovery independently is precisely what we should be led to expect, when we consider what the character of scientific discovery is. The facts of nature which form its subject-matter are in themselves as independent of the men who discover them as an Alpine peak is of the men who attempt to climb it. They are, indeed, precisely analogous to such a peak which all discoverers are attempting to scale at once; and the fact that three men make at once the same discovery does no more to show that it could have been made by the majority of their fellow-workers, and that it was in reality made not by themselves but by their generation, than the fact that three men of exceptional nerve and endurance meet at last on some previously virgin summit proves the feat to have been accomplished less by these men themselves than by the mass of tourists who thronged the hotel below and whose climbing exploits were limited to an ascent by the Rigi Railway. Other writers, however, try to reach Mr. Kidd's conclusion by a somewhat different route. Whether the great man is or is not a more common phenomenon than he seems to be, they maintain that his conquests in the realms of invention and discovery, when once made, really "become common property," of which all men could take advantage if it were not for artificial monopolies. All men, therefore, though not equal as discoverers, are practically equalised by whatever the discoverers accomplish. Now, of the simpler inventions and discoveries, such as that of fire for example, this is perfectly true; but it is true of these only. As inventions and discoveries grow more and more complex, they no more become common property, as soon as certain men have made them, than encyclopædic knowledge becomes the property of every one who buys or happens to inherit an edition of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_. It is perfectly true that the discovery of each new portion of knowledge enables men to acquire it who might never have acquired it otherwise; but as the acquisition of the details of knowledge becomes facilitated, the number of details to be acquired increases at the same time; and the increased ease of acquiring each is accompanied by an increased difficulty in assimilating even those which are connected most closely with each other. We may safely say that a knowledge of the simple rules of arithmetic is common to all the members of the English University of Cambridge; but out of some thousands of students only a few become great mathematicians. And the same thing holds good of scientific knowledge in general, and especially of such knowledge as applied to the purposes of practical industry. Knowledge and inventions, once made, are like a river which flows by everybody; but the water of the river becomes the property of individuals only in proportion to the quantity of it which their brains can, as it were, dip up; and the knowledge dipped up by the small brains is no more equal to that dipped up by the large than a tumbler of water is made equal to a hogshead by the fact that both vessels have been filled from the same stream. Let us now pass on to the argument which, differing essentially from the preceding in that it does not aim at proving that the great men are commoner than they seem to be, or their knowledge more diffused, insists that of what the great men seem to do very little is really their own--or that, as Mr. Bellamy puts it, in words which we have already quoted, "nine hundred and ninety-nine parts out of a thousand of their produce is really the result of their social inheritance and environment." Here, again, we have a statement, which from one point of view is true. It is merely a specialised expression of the far more general doctrine that the whole process of the universe, man included, is one, and that all individual causes are only partial and proximate. No man at any period could do the precise things that he does if the country in which he lives had had a different past or present, any more than he could do anything if it were not for his own previous life, for the fact that he had been born, that his mind and body had matured, and that he had acquired, as he went along, such and such knowledge and experience. How could a man do anything unless he had some environment? Unless he had some past, how could he exist at all? Mr. Bellamy and his friends, when considering matters in this light, are not too extreme in their conclusions. On the contrary, they are too modest. For men, if they were really isolated from their social inheritance and environment, could not only do but little; they could do absolutely nothing. The admission, therefore, that for practical purposes they must be held to do something at all events, is an admission wrung from our philosophers by the exigencies of common-sense. As such, then, let us accept it; and what will our conclusion be? It will be this: that whatever it may be which the ordinary man produces, and in whatever sense he produces it, the great man, in the same sense, produces a great deal more. The difference between them in efficiency will be no more lessened by the fact that both are standing on the pedestal of a common past, than the difference in stature will be lessened between a dwarf and a giant because they are both standing on the top of a New York skyscraper, or because they have both been nourished on the same species of food. But the practical absurdity of the whole set of arguments urged in a contrary sense by Herbert Spencer, Mr. Kidd, and the speculative sociologists generally, is brought to its climax by those modern exponents of socialism who attempt to invest them with a moral as well as an industrial significance. Thus Mr. Webb, who himself frankly recognises that the monopolists of business ability are industrially more efficient than the great mass of their fellows, and that man for man they produce incomparably more wealth, endeavours, by means of the arguments which we have been just considering, to show that though they produce it they have no moral right to keep it. The proposal, he says, that, though men are vastly unequal in productivity, they should all of them be awarded an equal share of the product--that if one man produces only one shilling, while another man produces ninety-nine, the resulting hundred should be halved and each of the men take fifty--this proposal "has," he says, "an abstract justification, as the special energy and ability with which some persons are born is an unearned increment due to the effect of the struggle for existence upon their ancestors, and consequently, having been produced by society, is as much due to society as the unearned increment of rent." Now, if this argument has any practical meaning at all, it can only mean that the men who have been born with such special powers will, as soon as they recognise what the origin of these powers is, realise that they have, as individuals, no special claims on the results of them, and will consequently become more willing than they are at the present time to continue to produce the results, though they will not be allowed to keep them. We will not insist, as we might do, on the curious want of knowledge of human nature which the argument thus put forward by Mr. Webb and other socialists betrays. It will be enough to point out that, if it applies to the monopolists of business ability, it applies with equal force to all other sorts of men whatever. If it is to society as a whole that the able man owes his energy, his talents, and the products of them, it is to society as a whole that the idle man owes his idleness, the stupid man his stupidity, and the dishonest man his dishonesty; and if the able man, who produces an exceptional amount of wealth, can with justice claim no more than the average man who produces little, the man who is so idle that he shirks producing anything may with equal justice claim as much wealth as either. His constitutional fault, and his constitutional disinclination to mend it, are both of them due to society, and society, not he, must suffer. If we attempted to organise a community in accordance with such a conclusion as this, we should be getting rid of all connection between conduct and the natural results of it, and divorcing action from motive altogether. Such is the conclusion to which Mr. Webb's argument would lead us; and the absurdity of the argument, as applied by him to moral claims and merits, though more self-evident, is not any more complete than the absurdity of similar arguments as applied to the individual generally in respect of his productive powers, and the amount of produce produced by them. The whole conception, in short, of the individual as merged in the aggregate has no relation to practical life whatever. For the practical man the individual is always a unit; and it is only as a unit that it is possible practically to deal with him. We may change him in some respects by changing his general conditions, as we hope to do by legislation which aims at the diminution of drunkenness; but a change in general conditions, if it diminished drunkenness generally, would do so only because it affected at the same time the isolated minds and organisms of a number of individual drunkards. And to do Mr. Webb and his brother socialists justice, they unconsciously admit all this themselves; for, as soon as they set themselves to discuss the motives of the able man in detail, they altogether abandon the irrelevancies of speculative sociology with which they manage at other times to bemuse themselves. That such is the case we shall see in the following chapter. I will, however, anticipate what we shall see there by mentioning that among the motives which are in the socialistic future to replace, among able men, the desire of economic gain, one of the chief is to be the desire of moral approbation. Unless a man's actions, whether industrial or moral, are to be treated as his own, instead of being attributed to his conditions, he would have as little right to the praise which it is proposed to give him as he would have to the dollars which it is proposed to take away. FOOTNOTES: [12] I first made this criticism of Spencer in my work _Aristocracy and Evolution_. On that occasion Mr. Spencer wrote to me, complaining with much vehemence that I had misrepresented him; and he repeated the substance of his letter in a subsequent published essay. My criticism dealt, and could have dealt only, not with what he meant, but what he said; and certainly in his language--and, as I think, in his own mind--there was a constant confusion between the two truths in question. Apart, however, from what he considered to be my own misrepresentation of himself, he declared that he entirely agreed with me; and that "great men" must, for practical purposes, be regarded as the true causes of such changes as they initiate. CHAPTER IX THE ULTIMATE DIFFICULTY, CONTINUED. ABILITY AND INDIVIDUAL MOTIVE The fact that the speculative arguments which we have just now been discussing are not only irrelevant to the problem of the able man and his motives, but are tacitly abandoned as being so by the very men who have urged them, when they come to deal specifically with that problem themselves, may suggest to some readers that so long a discussion of them was superfluous. But though the socialists abandon them at the very moment when, if ever, they ought to be susceptible of some definite application, they abandon them quite unconsciously, and still continue to attach to them some solemn importance. Such being the case, then, the more futile these arguments are the stronger is the light thrown by them on the peculiar intellectual weakness which distinguishes even the most capable of those who think it worth their while to employ them. For this reason, therefore, if for no other, our examination of them will have proved useful, for it will have prepared us to encounter a weakness of precisely the same kind in the reasonings of the socialists when they deal with motive directly. Let us once more state this direct problem of motive, as with perfect accuracy, stated by the socialists themselves. Under existing conditions the monopolists of business ability are mainly induced to add to the national store of wealth by the prospect, whose fulfilment existing conditions make possible, of retaining shares of it as their own which are proportionate to the amounts produced by them. The question is, therefore, whether, if this prospect is taken away from them, socialism could provide another which men of this special type would find equally stimulating. Is human nature in general, and the nature of the monopolists in particular, sufficiently adaptable to admit of such a change as this? The socialists answer that it is, and in making such an assertion they declare that they have all the facts of scientific sociology at the back of them. The unscientific thing is, they say, to assume the contrary; and here, they proceed, we have the fundamental error which renders most of the conclusions of the ordinary economists valueless. Economic science, in its generally accepted form, bases all its reasonings on the behaviour of the so-called "economic man"--that is to say, a being from whom those who reason about him exclude all operative desires except that of economic gain. But such a being, say the socialists, is a mere abstraction. He has no counterpart among living, loving, idealising, aspiring men. Real men are susceptible of the desire of gain, no doubt; but this provides them only with one motive out of many; and there are others which, as experience amply shows us, are, when they are given unimpeded play, far stronger. I do not know whether socialists have ever used the following parallel; but if they have not it expresses their position better than they have expressed it themselves. They argue virtually that, in respect of the desire for exceptional gain, able men are comparable to victims of the desire for alcohol. If alcohol is obtainable, such men will insist on obtaining it. They will constantly fix their thoughts on it; no other fluid will satisfy them. But if it is placed altogether beyond their reach, they will be compelled by the force of circumstances to drink lemonade, tea, or even plain water instead. In time they will come to drink them with the same avidity; and their health and their powers of enjoyment will be indefinitely improved in consequence. In the same way, it is argued, the monopolists of business ability, though, so long as it is possible for them to appropriate a considerable share of their products, they will insist on getting this share, and will not exert themselves otherwise, need only be placed under conditions which will render such gain impossible, and at once they will find out that there exist other inducements which will prove before long to be no less efficacious. Such is the general argument of the modern school of socialists; but they do not leave it in this indeterminate form. They have, to their own satisfaction, worked it out in detail, and claim that they are able to demonstrate from the actual facts of human nature precisely what the character of the new inducements will be. It may be looked upon as evidence of the methodical and quasi-scientific accuracy with which modern socialists have set themselves to discuss this question of motive that the thought of all of them has moved along the same lines, and that what all of them fix upon as a substitute for the desire of exceptional pecuniary gain is one or other, or all, of a few motives actually in operation, and notoriously effective in certain spheres of activity. These motives practically resolve themselves into four, which have been classified as follows by Mr. Webb or one of his coadjutors: "The mere pleasure of excelling," or the joy of the most powerful in exercising their powers to the utmost. "The joy in creative work," such as that which the artist feels in producing a great work of art. The satisfaction which ministering to others "brings to the instincts of benevolence," such as that which is felt by those who give themselves to the sick and helpless. And, lastly, the desire for approval, or the homage which is called "honour," the efficiency of which is shown by the conduct of the soldier--often a man of very ordinary education and character--who will risk death in order that he may be decorated with some intrinsically worthless medal, which merely proclaims his valour or his unselfish devotion to his country. Now, that the motives here in question are motives of extraordinary power, all history shows us. The most impressive things accomplished by human nature have been due to them. But let us consider what these things are. The first motive--namely, that supplied by the mere "pleasure in excelling"--we need hardly consider by itself, for, in so far as socialists can look upon its objects as legitimate, it is included in the struggle for approbation or honour. We will merely remark that the emphasis which the socialists lay on it is not very consonant with the principles of those persons who propose to abolish competition as the root of all social evils; and we will content ourselves with examining in detail the three other motives only, and the scope of their efficiency, as actual experience reveals it to us. We shall find that the activities which these three motives stimulate are confined, so far as experience is able to teach us anything, to the following well-marked kinds, which have been already indicated: those of the artist, of the speculative thinker, of the religious and philanthropic enthusiast, and, lastly, those of the soldier. This list, if understood in its full sense, is exhaustive. Such being the case, then, the argument of the socialists is as follows: Because a Fra Angelico will paint a Christ or a Virgin, because a Kant will immolate all his years to philosophy, because a monk and a sister of mercy will devote themselves to the victims of pestilence, because a soldier in action will eagerly face death--all without hope of any exceptional pecuniary reward--the monopolists of business ability, if only such rewards are made impossible for them, will at once become amenable to the motives of the soldier, the artist, the philosopher, the inspired philanthropist, and the saint. This is the assertion of the socialists when reduced to a precise form; and what we have to do is to inquire whether this assertion is true. Does human nature, as history, as psychology, and as physiology reveal it to us, give us any grounds, in fact, for taking such an assertion seriously? Any one who has studied human conduct historically, who has observed it in the life around him, and examined scientifically the diversities of temperament and motive that go with diversities of capacity, will dismiss such an assertion as at once groundless and ludicrous. Let us, to go into detail, take the case of the artist. What reason is there to suppose that the impassioned emotion which stimulates the adoring monk to lavish all his genius on an altar-piece will stimulate another man to devise, and to organise the production of, some new kind of liquid enamel for the decoration of cheap furniture?[13] Or let us turn to an impulse closely allied to the artistic--namely, the desire for speculative truth, as manifested in the lives of scientific and philosophic thinkers. These men--such as Kant and Hegel, for example--have been proverbially, and often ludicrously, indifferent to the material details of their existence. Who can suppose that the disinterested passion for truth, which had the effect of making these men forget their dinners, will stimulate others to devote themselves to the improvement of stoves and saucepans? Yet again, let us consider the area of the industrial influence of the motives originating in religious fervour or benevolence. The most important illustration of this is to be found in the monastic orders. The monastic orders constructed great buildings; they successfully practised agriculture and other industrial arts: and those of them who were faithful to their vows aimed at no personal luxuries. On the contrary, their superfluous possessions were applied by them to the relief of indigence. But this industrial asceticism was made possible only by its association with another asceticism--the renunciation of women, the private home, the family. Even so, in the days when Christian piety was at its highest, those who were capable of responding to the industrial motives of the cloister formed but a fraction of the general population of Christendom, while even among them these motives constantly ceased to operate; and, as St. Francis declared with regard to his own disciples, the desire for personal gain continually insisted on reasserting itself. What ground have we here for supposing that motives, whose action hitherto has always been strictly limited to passionate and seclusive idealists turning their backs on the world, will ever become general among the monopolists of that business ability, the object of whom is to fill the world with increasing comforts and luxuries. One might as well argue that, because the monastic orders were celibate, and formed at one time a very numerous body, all men will probably soon turn celibate also, and yet at the same time continue to reproduce their species. But the scientific quality of the psychological reasoning of the socialists is best illustrated by their treatment of another class of facts--that on which they themselves unanimously lay the greatest stress--namely, the heroisms of the soldier, and other men of a kindred type. The soldier, they say, is not only willing but eager to perform duties of the most painful and dangerous kind, without any thought of receiving any higher pay than his fellows. If, then, human nature is such, they continue, that we can get from it on these terms work such as that of the soldier's, which is work in its most terrifying form, it stands to reason that we can, on the same terms, get out of it work of a much easier kind, such as that of exceptional business ability applied to the safe and peaceful direction of labour. Nor is this argument urged by socialists only. Other thinkers who, though resembling them somewhat in sentiment, are wholly opposed to socialism as a formal creed, have likewise pitched upon the soldier's conduct in war as a signal illustration of the potentialities of human nature in peace. Thus Ruskin says that his whole scheme of political economy is based on the moral assimilation of industrial action to military. "Soldiers of the ploughshare," he exclaims in one of his works, "as well as soldiers of the sword! All my political economy is comprehended in that phrase." So, too, Mr. Frederic Harrison, the English prophet of Positivism, following out the same train of thought, has declared that the soldier's readiness to die in battle for his country is a realised example of a readiness, always latent in men, to spend themselves and be spent in the service of humanity generally. Again in the same sense, another writer observes, "The soldier's subsistence is certain. It does not depend on his exertions. At once he becomes susceptible to appeals to his patriotism, and he will value a bit of bronze, which is the reward of valour, far more than a hundred times its weight in gold"--a passage to which one of Mr. Sidney Webb's collaborators refers with special delight, exclaiming, "Let those take notice of this last fact who fancy we must wait till men are angels before socialism is practical." Now, the arguments thus drawn from the facts of military activity throw a special light on the methods and mental condition of those who so solemnly urge them; for the error by which these arguments are vitiated is of a peculiarly glaring kind. It consists of a failure to perceive that military activity is, in many respects, a thing altogether apart, and depends on psychological and physiological conditions which have no analogies in the domain of ordinary economic effort. That such must necessarily be the case can be very easily seen by following out the train of reasoning suggested by Mr. Frederic Harrison. Mr. Harrison correctly assumes that no man, in ordinary life, will run the risk of being killed or mutilated except for the sake of some object the achievement of which is profoundly desired by him. If a man, for instance, puts his hand into the fire in order to pick out something that has dropped among the burning coals, we naturally assume that this something is of the utmost value and importance to him. We measure the value which a man places on the object by the desperate character of the means which he will take to gain it; and Mr. Harrison jumps to the conclusion that what holds good in ordinary life will hold equally good on the field of battle also. Hence he argues--for this is his special point--that the willingness of the soldier to die fighting on behalf of his country shows how individuals of no unusual kind value their country's welfare more than their own lives, and how readily, such being the case, devotion to a particular country may be enlarged into a religious devotion to Humanity taken as a whole. Now, there are occasions, no doubt, in which, a country being in desperate straits, the soldier's valour is heightened by devotion to the cause he fights for; but that ideal devotion like this affords no sufficient explanation of the peculiar character of military activity generally; and that there must be some deeper and more general cause at the back of it, is shown by the fact that some of the most reckless soldiers known to us have been mercenaries who would fight as willingly for one country as for another. And this deeper and more general cause, when we look for it, is sufficiently obvious. It consists of the fact that, owing to the millions of years of struggle to which was due, in the first place, the evolution of man as a species, and, in the second place, the races of men in their existing stages of civilisation, the fighting instinct is, in the strongest of these races, inherent after a fashion in which the industrial instincts are not; and will always prompt numbers to do, for the smallest wage or none, what they could hardly, in its absence, be induced to do for the highest. This instinct, no doubt, is more controlled than formerly, and is not so often roused; but it is still there. It is ready to quicken at the mere sound of military music; and the sight of regiments marching stirs the most apathetic crowd. High-spirited boys will, for the mere pleasure of fighting, run the risk of having their noses broken, while they will wince at getting up in the cold for the sake of learning their lessons, and would certainly rebel against being set to work as wage-earners at a task which involved so much as a daily pricking of their fingers. Here we have the reason, embodied in the very organism of the human being, why military activity is something essentially distinct from industrial, and why any inference drawn from the one to the other is valueless. And to this primary fact it is necessary to add another. Not only is the fighting instinct an exceptional phenomenon in man, but the circumstances which call it into being are in these days exceptional also. Socialists frequently, when referring to the soldier's conduct, refer also to conduct of a closely allied kind, such as that of the members of fire-brigades and the crews of life-boats, and repeat their previous question of why, since men like these will, without demanding any exceptional reward, make such exceptional efforts to save the lives of others, the monopolists of business ability may not be reasonably expected to forgo all exceptional claims on their own exceptional products, and distribute among all the superfluous wealth produced by them just as freely as the fireman climbs his ladder, or as life-belts are distributed by the boatmen in their work of rescue. And if human life were nothing but a chronic conflagration or shipwreck, in which all alike were fighting for bare existence, all alike being menaced by some terrible and instant death, this argument of the socialists might doubtless have some truth in it. The men of exceptional ability, by a variety of ingenious devices, might seek to save others no less assiduously than themselves, without expecting anything like exceptional wealth as a reward; for there would, in a case like this, be no question of wealth for anybody. But as soon as the stress of such a situation was relaxed, and the abilities of the ablest, liberated from the task of contending with death, were left free to devote themselves to the superfluous decoration of life, the artificial tension of the moral motives would be relaxed. The swimmer who had plunged into the sea to save a woman from drowning would not take a second plunge to rescue her silk petticoat. The socialists, in short, when dealing with military and other cognate heroisms, ignore both of the causes which alone make such heroisms possible. They ignore the fact that the internal motive is essentially isolated and exceptional. They ignore the further fact that the circumstances which alone give this motive play are essentially exceptional also, and could never be reproduced in social life at large, except at the cost of making all human life intolerable. I have called special attention to this particular socialistic argument, partly because socialists, and other sentimental thinkers, like Ruskin, attach such extreme importance to it; but mainly because it affords us an exceptionally striking illustration of the manner in which they are accustomed to reason about matters with regard to which they ostentatiously profess themselves to be the pioneers of accurate science. One of the principal grounds--to repeat what has been said already--on which they attack what they call the Economics of Capitalism, is that it deals exclusively with the actions of "the economic man," or the man whose one motive is the appropriation of wealth. Such a man, they say, is an abstraction. He does not exist in reality; and if economics is to have any scientific value it must deal with man as a whole, in all his living complexity. As applied to the orthodox economists this criticism has an element of truth in it; but when the socialists attempt to act on their own loudly boasted principles, and deal with human nature as a whole instead of only one of its elements, they do nothing but travesty the error which they set out with denouncing. The one-motived economic man who cares only for personal gain is, no doubt, an abstraction, like the lines and points of Euclid. Still the motive ascribed to him is one which has a real existence and produces real effects. It has been defined with accuracy; and by studying its effects in isolation we reach many true conclusions. But the other motives, with which socialists declare that we must supplement this, are treated by them in a manner so crude, so childish, so incomplete, so deficient in the mere rudiments of scientific analysis, that they do not correspond to anything. Instead of forming any true addition to the data of economic science, they are like images belonging to the dream of a maudlin school-girl. They have only the effect of obscuring, not completing, the facts to which the orthodox economists too closely confined themselves, but which, though incomplete, are so far as they go actual. Now, however, without getting out of touch with the socialists, let us return to firmer ground, and having seen the futility of their attempts to indicate any motive calculated to operate on the monopolists of business ability, other than that supplied under the existing system by the prospect of possessing wealth proportionate to the amount produced by them, let us consider this motive in itself, as history and observation reveal it to us. And here in the presence of facts which no one seeks to deny, we shall find that the socialists themselves are among our most interesting witnesses, affording in what they assert a solitary and signal exception to that looseness of thought and observation which is otherwise their distinguishing characteristic. The motive here in question as ascribed to the exceptional wealth-producer, the director, the man of business ability--the motive which in his case the socialists propose to supersede, but which is at present in possession of the field--commonly receives from them the vituperative name of "greed." What they mean by greed is simply the desire of the great wealth-producer to retain for himself a share of wealth, not necessarily equal, but proportionate, to the amount produced by him. And what have the socialists got to tell us about greed, when they turn from their plans for superseding it in the socialistic future to consider its operations in the actual past and present? They tell us a great deal. For what is, and always has been, their stock moral indictment against the typical men of ability, the pioneers of commerce, the capitalistic directors of labour, the introducers of new inventions, the amplifiers of the world's wealth? Their chief indictment against such men has been this--that their exceptional ability, instead of being roused into action solely by the pleasure of benefiting their fellow-men, has been utterly dead and irresponsive to every stimulus but one; and that this has been personal greed, and personal greed alone. Its influence, they say, is as old as civilisation itself, and was as operative in the days when the prows of the Tyrian traders first ploughed their way beyond the pillars of Hercules, as it is to-day under the smoke-clouds of Manchester, of Pittsburg, and Chicago. Karl Marx for example, in a very interesting passage written in England about the time of the abolition of the Corn-laws, declared that the radical manufacturers, who professed to support that measure on the ground that it would secure cheap food for the people, were not moved in reality, and were not capable of being moved, by any desire but that of lowering the rate of wages, and thus increasing the surplus which they raked into their own pockets. In other words, the psychologists of socialism declare that, so far as the facts of human nature in the present and the past can teach us anything, the desire of exceptional wealth is just as inseparable from the temperament which, by some physiological law, accompanies the power of producing it, as "the joy in creation" is from the temperament of the great painter, or the love of a woman is from the lover's efforts to win her. We thus see that those thinkers who, when they are dealing with an imaginary future, base all their hopes on the possibility of a complete elimination of a certain motive from a certain special class of persons, are the very men who are most vehement in declaring that in this special class of persons the motive in question is something so ingrained and inveterate that in no age or country has it ever been so much as modified. Nor does the matter end here; for the amusing contradiction in which socialistic thought thus lauds itself, is emphasised by the fact that the socialists, when they turn from the few to the many, assume in the many, as an instinct of eternal justice, that precise desire for gain which, in the case of the few, they first denounce as a hideous and incurable disease, and then propose to cure as though it were the passing cough of a baby. For what is the bait with which, from its first beginnings till to-day, socialism has sought to secure the support of the general multitude? It is mainly, if not solely, the promise of increased personal gain, without any increased effort on the part of the happy recipients. With Marx and the earlier socialists, this promise took the form of declaring that every man has a sacred right to whatever he has himself produced, and that, all the wealth of the world being produced by manual labour, the labourers must never be satisfied until they have secured all of it. The more educated socialists of to-day, having gradually come to perceive that labour itself produces but a fraction of this wealth only, have had to alter the form of their promise, but they still adhere to its substance; and the altered form of the promise does but bring out more clearly the fact that they appeal to the desire of personal gain as the primary economic motive of the great majority of mankind. For, whereas the earlier socialists contented themselves with promising the labourer the whole of what he produced, and promising it on the ground that he had himself produced it, what the labourer is promised by the intellectual socialists of to-day is not only all that he has produced--which in most cases he gets already[14]--but a great deal more besides, which is admittedly produced by others. We thus see that, according to these theorists, the kind of moral conversion which is to make socialism practicable is to be rigidly confined to one particular class; for, on the part of the majority, no change at all is required in order to make the socialistic evangel welcome. So far as they are concerned, the Old Adam is quite sufficient. None of us need much converting in order to welcome the prospect of an indefinite addition to our incomes, which will cost us nothing but the trouble of stretching out our hands to take it. Socialists often complain that, under the existing dispensation, there is one law for the rich and another law for the poor. They propose themselves to introduce a difference which goes still deeper, and to provide the few and the many, not only with two laws, but with two different natures, and two antithetic moralities. The morality of the many is to remain, as it always has been, comfortably based on the familiar desire for dollars. The morality of the few is to be based on some hitherto unknown contempt for them; and the class which the socialists fix upon as the subjects of this moral transformation, is precisely the class which they denounce as being, and as always having been, in respect of its devotion to dollars, the most notorious, and the most notoriously incorrigible. That arguments such as these, culminating in an absurdity like this, and starting with the assumption that it is possible to animate a manufacturer's office with the spirit of soldiers facing an enemy's guns, should actually emanate from sane men would be unbelievable, if the arguments were not being repeated from day to day by men who, in some respects, are far from being incompetent reasoners. Indeed, many of them themselves would, it seems, be extremely doubtful with regard to the plasticity imputed by them to human nature, if it were not for a theory of society which is not peculiar to socialism. This is the theory that, in any community or nation in which each citizen is completely free to express his will by his vote, and realises the extent of the power which thus resides in him, the will of the majority has practically no limits to its efficiency, and will be able in the future to bring about moral changes, which are at present, perhaps, beyond the limits of possibility, but are only so because the means of effecting them have never yet been fully utilised. This theory of democracy we will consider in the following chapter. FOOTNOTES: [13] Mr. G. Wilshire, in criticising this argument as stated in one of my American addresses, declares that there would be nothing in socialism to prevent any great artist (such as a singer) from making an even larger fortune than he or she does now. But though a Melba, under the existing system, demands a large price for her services, under socialism all would be changed. Though she _could_ get it, she would no longer want it. She would then want no reward but the mere joy of using her voice. And he infers that this change which would take place in the bosoms of great singers would repeat itself under the breast-pocket of every leader and organiser of commercial enterprise. It would be hard to find a better illustration of the purely fanciful reasoning commented on in the text. [14] The question of how much labour, _as such_, produces in modern societies is discussed in a later chapter. CHAPTER X INDIVIDUAL MOTIVE AND DEMOCRACY The ascription of imaginary powers to the so-called "sovereign" democracy, which are really beyond the reach of any kind of government whatsoever, is, as I have said, a fallacy by no means peculiar to Socialists. Socialists merely push it to its full logical consequences; and I will begin with illustrating it by the arguments of a recent writer who, professedly as a social conservative, has dealt in detail with this precise question of the motives of the exceptional wealth-producer, which has just now been engaging us. I refer to the author of an essay in _The North American Review_, who hides his personality under the cryptic initial "X," but who is said to be one of the most cultivated and best-known thinkers now living in the United States. The subject of his essay is the growth, almost peculiar to that country, not of large, but of those colossal fortunes, which have certainly had no parallel in the past history of the world. The position of "X" is that the growth of such fortunes is deplorable, partly because they are possible instruments of judicial and political corruption, and partly because they excite antagonism against private wealth in general by exhibiting it to the gaze of the multitude in such monstrous and grotesque proportions. In any case, says "X," "it is to the true interest of the multimillionaires themselves to join those who are free from envy in trying to remove the rapidly growing dissatisfaction with their continued possession of these vast sums of money." Now, though "X" hints that some of the fortunes in question may be open to further reprehension, on the ground that they have been acquired dishonestly, he by no means maintains that this opprobrium attaches itself to the great majority of them. On the contrary, he admits that the typical huge fortunes of America are based on the productive activities of the remarkable men who have amassed them. The talents of such men, he says, are essential to the prosperity of the country, and it is necessary to stimulate such men to develop their talents to the utmost by allowing them to derive for themselves some special reward for their use of them; but he contends that the rewards which they are at present permitted to appropriate are needlessly and dangerously excessive, and ought therefore to be limited. But limited by what means? It is his answer to this question that here alone concerns us. The means, he says, by which these rewards may be limited are ready to hand, and can be applied with the utmost ease. They are provided by the democratic Constitution of the United States of America. "No one can doubt, for example," he goes on to observe, "that, if the majority of the voters of the State of New York chose to elect a governor of their own way of thinking, they could readily enact a progressive taxation of incomes which would limit every citizen of New York State to such income as the majority of voters considers sufficient for him. And it would be particularly easy," adds the writer, "to alienate the property of every man at death, for it is only necessary to repeal the statutes now authorising the descent of such property to the heirs and legatees of the decedent." Here, then, according to "X," is an obvious way out of the difficulty, the feasibility of which no one can doubt. A certain minority of the citizens render services essential to the majority; but these advantages are accompanied by a corresponding drawback. The majority, by the simple use of their sovereign power as legislators, can retain the former and get rid of the latter. The remedy is in their own hands. It would be difficult to imagine an illustration more vivid than this of the error to which I am now referring--the common error of ascribing to majorities in democratic communities powers which they do not possess, and which, as I said before, no kind of government possesses, whether it be that of a democracy or of an autocrat. That a majority of the voters in any democratic country can enact any laws they please at any given moment which happen to be in accordance with what "X" calls their then "way of thinking," and perhaps enforce them for a moment, is no doubt perfectly true. But life is not made up of isolated moments or periods. It is a continuous process, in which each moment is affected by the moments that have gone before, and by the prospective character of the moments that are to come after. If it were not for this fact, the majority of the voters of New York State, "by electing a governor of their own way of thinking," might not only put a limit to the income which any citizen might possess. It might do a great deal more besides. It might enact a law which limited the amount which any citizen might eat. It might limit everybody to two ounces a day. Besides enacting that no father should bequeath his wealth to his children, it might enact just as readily that no father should have the custody of his children. It might enact, in obedience to the persuasions of some plausible quack, that no one should take any medicines but a single all-curing pill. There is nothing in the principles so solemnly laid down by "X" which would render any of these enactments more impossible than those which he himself contemplates. But if such enactments were made by the so-called all-powerful majority, through a governor of their own way of thinking, what would be the result? If a law forbade the citizens to eat enough to keep themselves alive, it might perhaps be obeyed throughout Monday, but it would be broken by Tuesday morning. A law which deprived fathers of the care of their own children might just as well be a law which decreed that no children should be born. A law which decreed that no remedy but the same quack pill should be applied to any disease, whether cholera, appendicitis, or small-pox, would be either disregarded from the beginning, or would soon be repealed by a pestilence. In short, if any one of these ridiculous laws were enacted, the very voters who voted for it would disregard it as soon as they realised its consequences; and the work which they did as legislators they would tear to pieces as men. In other words, if we mean, by legislation, legislation which can be permanently obeyed, the legislative sovereignty of democracies, which is so commonly spoken of as supreme, is limited in every direction by another power greater than itself; and this is the double power of nature and of human nature. Just as all laws relating to the food which men are to eat, and the drugs by which their maladies are to be cured, must depend on the natural qualities of such and such physical substances, so do the constitution and propensities of the concrete human character limit legislation generally, and confine it within certain channels. This is what "X" and similar thinkers forget; and the nature of their error is very pertinently illustrated by an observation of the English jurist, Lord Coleridge, to which "X" solemnly refers, as corroborating him in his own wisdom. "The same power," says Lord Coleridge, "which prescribes rules for the possession of property can of course alter them"; this power being the legislative body of whatever country may be in question. It is easy to see the manner in which Lord Coleridge reasons. Because, in any country, the formulation and enforcement of laws have the will of the governing body as the proximate cause which determines them, it seems to Lord Coleridge that, in this contemporary will, the laws thus formulated and enforced have their ultimate cause also. For example, according to him, the entire institution of property in the State of New York is virtually a fresh creation of the voters from year to year, and has nothing else behind it. But, in reality, all this business of formulation and enforcement is a secondary process, not a primary process at all. Lord Coleridge is simply inverting the actual order of things. Half the existing "rules prescribed as to the possession of property" have, for their ultimate object, the protection of family life, the privacy of the private home, and the provision made by parents for their children. But family life is not primarily the creation of prescribed rules. It is the creation of instincts and affections which have developed themselves in the course of ages. Instead of the law creating family life, it is family life which has gradually called into being--which has created and dictated--the rules and sanctions protecting it. The same is the case with bequest, marriage, and so forth. The conduct of civilised men is bound to conform to laws, but the laws must first conform to general human practice. They merely give precision to conduct which has a deeper origin than legislation. Laws, in fact, may be compared to soldiers' uniforms. These, within certain limits, may be varied indefinitely by a war-office; but they all must be such as will adapt themselves to the human body and its movements. The will of a government may prescribe that the trousers shall be tight or loose, that they shall be black or brown or bright green or vermilion. But no government can prescribe that they shall be only three inches round the waist, or that the soldier's sleeves shall start, not from the shoulders, but from the pockets of the coat-tails. The human body is here a legislator which is supreme over all governments; and just the same thing is true with regard to the human character. Now, the curious thing with regard to "X" is that he is all along assuming this fundamental fact himself; though he utterly fails to put two and two together, and see how this fact conflicts with the omnipotence which he ascribes to legislation. Let us go back to the assertion, which embodies his whole practical argument, that the majority of the voters in New York State could, without interfering with the activity of any one of its citizens, limit incomes in any manner they pleased, and alienate with even greater ease the property of every man at his death; and let us see what he hastens to say as the sequel to this oracular utterance. These powers of the sovereign majority, which he is apparently so anxious to invoke, would, he says, be practically much less formidable in their action than timid persons might anticipate. And why should they be less formidable? "Because," says "X," "although each man, by reason of his manhood alone, has an equal voice with every other man in making the laws governing their common country, and regulating the distribution of the common property ... yet immense and incalculable differences exist in men's natural capacities for rendering honest service to society. Encouragement should, therefore, be given to every man to use all the gifts which he possesses to the fullest extent possible; and, accordingly, reasonable accumulations and the descent of these should be respected." They should, he says, be respected. Yes--but for what reason? Because they encourage exceptional men, whose services are essential to society, to develop and use their capacities to "the fullest extent possible"; and this is merely another way of saying that, without the motive provided by the possibility of accumulation and bequest, the exceptional faculties would not be developed or used at all. Moreover, the amounts which may be accumulated and bequeathed, although they will be strictly limited, must, "X" says, be considerable. He suggests that incomes should be allowed up to £8,000, and bequeathable property up to £200,000. And here we come to a question which is still more pertinent than the preceding. Why must the permissible amounts of income and of bequeathable property be of proportions such as those which he contemplates? Why does he not take his bill and write down quickly £200 of income instead of £8,000, and limit bequeathable property to £2,000 instead of £200,000? Because he evidently recognises that the men whose possible services to society are "immensely and incalculably greater" than those of the majority of their fellow citizens would not be tempted by a reward which, reduced to its smallest proportions, would not be very largely in excess of what was attainable by more ordinary exertions. In his formal statement of his case, he says that the amount of the reward would be entirely determined by what _ought_ to be sufficient for the purpose in the estimation of the voting majority; and he mentions the sums in question as those on which they would probably fix. And it is, of course, quite imaginable that the majority, in making either these or any other estimates, might be right. But what "X" fails altogether to see is that, if the majority of the citizens _were_ right, such sums would not be sufficient because the majority of citizens happened to think that they ought to be. They would be sufficient because they were felt to be sufficient by the minority who were invited to earn them, at whose feelings the majority would have made a shrewd or a lucky guess. A thousand men with fishing-rods might meet in an inn parlour and vote that such and such flies were sufficient to attract trout. But it lies with the trout to determine whether or no he will rise to them. It is a question, not of what the fishermen think, but of what the trout thinks; and the fishermen's thoughts are effective only when they coincide with the trout's. So long, then, as society desires to get the best work out of its citizens, and so long as some men are, in the words of "X," "immensely and incalculably" more efficient than the great mass of their fellows, and so long as their efficiency requires, as "X" admits that it does, some exceptional reward to induce these men to develop it, these men themselves, in virtue of their inherent characters, must primarily determine what the reward shall be; and not all the majorities in the world, however unanimous, could make a reward sufficient if the particular minority in question did not feel it to be so. The majority might, by making a sufficient reward unattainable, easily prevent the services from being rendered at all; but, unless they are to forgo the services, the majority can only obtain them on terms which will, in the last resort, depend on the men who are to render them. Now, in what I have been urging thus far--which practically comes to this, that the sovereignty popularly ascribed to democratic majorities is an illusion--not socialists only, but other advocates of popular government also, will alike be against me, as the promulgator of some blasphemous paradox. It will be easy, however, to show them that their objections are quite mistaken, and that the exceptional powers of dictation which have just been ascribed to a minority are so far from being inconsistent with the real powers of the majority that the latter, when properly understood, are seen to be their complement and their counterpart. For, though socialists and thinkers like "X" ascribe to majorities powers which they do _not_ possess, we shall find that majorities do actually possess others, in some ways very much greater, of which such thinkers have thus far taken no cognisance at all. I have said that minorities can dictate their own terms to majorities which desire to secure their services, the reason being that the former are alone competent to determine what treatment will supply them with a motive to exert themselves. What holds good of minorities as opposed to majorities holds good in essentials, though in a somewhat different form, of majorities as opposed to such minorities. Let us turn again to a matter to which I have referred already--namely, the family life of the citizens of any race or nation. This results from propensities in a vast number of human beings which, although they are similar, are in each case independent. These propensities give rise to legislation, the object of which is to prescribe rules by which their satisfaction may be made secure; but the propensities are so far from originating in legislation that no legislation which seriously interfered with them would be tolerated. Socialists themselves have continually admitted this very thing. The Italian socialist, Giovanni Rossi, for instance, who attempted about fifteen years ago to found a socialistic colony in Brazil--an attempt which completely failed--attributed its failure largely to this particular cause--namely, the impossibility of inducing the colonists to conform to any rules of the community by which family life was interfered with. Here we have an example of democracy in its genuine form, rendering powerless what affected to be democratic legislation. We have the cumulative power of similar human characters compelling legislation to limit itself to what these characters spontaneously demand. And now let us go a step--a very short step--further. The family propensities in question show their dictatorial power, not only in the limitations which they impose on positive laws, but also in the character which they impose on the material surroundings of existence, especially in the material structure of the dwellings of all classes except the lowest. All are constructed with a view to keeping the family group united, and each family group separate from all others. Further, if the natural family propensities thus affect the structure of the dwelling, other propensities, more various in detail, but in each case equally spontaneous, determine what commodities shall be put into it. And this fact brings us back to our own more immediate subject--namely, the power of the few and of the many in the sphere of economic production. The man of exceptional industrial capacity becomes rich in the modern world by producing goods, or by rendering services, which others consume or profit by, and for which they render him a return. But, in order that they may take, and render him this return for what he offers them, the goods and the services must be such that the many desire to have them. All the highest productive ability that has ever been devoted to the business of cheapening and multiplying commodities, or rendering social services, would be absolutely futile unless these commodities and services satisfied tastes or wants existing in various sections of the community. The eliciting of such wants or tastes depends very often, and in progressive communities usually, on a previous supply of the commodities or services that minister to them--as we see, for example, in the case of tobacco, of the telegraph, and of the bicycle; but, when once the demands have been elicited, they are essentially democratic in their nature. Each customer is like a voter who practically gives his vote for the kind of goods which he desires to have supplied to him. He gives his vote under no compulsion. He is under the manipulation of no party or wire-puller; and the men by whose ability the goods are cheapened and multiplied are bound to determine their character by the number of votes cast for them.[15] Thus, while--so long as the productivity of labour is intensified, as it is in the modern world, by the ability of the few who direct labour--the labouring majority can never be free in their technical capacity of producers, they are free, and must always remain free, in respect of their tastes as consumers. In other words, demand is essentially democratic, while supply, in proportion to its sustained and enhanced abundance, is essentially oligarchic. Now, that demand is essentially democratic, and depends on the tastes and characters of those by whom the demands are made, nobody will be inclined to deny. But if we turn our attention from society, taken as a whole, to the exceptionally able minority on whom the business of supply depends, we shall find that these men, in their turn, form similarly a small democracy in themselves, and make, as suppliers, their own demands also--a demand for an economic reward, or an amount of personal wealth, not, indeed, necessarily equal to the amount of wealth produced by them, but bearing a proportion to it which is, in their own estimation, sufficient. This demand made by the exceptional producer rests on exactly the same basis as does that of the average customer. It rests on the tastes and characters of the men who make it; and it is just as impossible for the many to decide by legislation that the few shall put forth the whole of their exceptional powers for the sake of one reward, when what they want is another, as it is for the few to make the many buy snuff when they want tobacco, or buy green coats when they want black.[16] That such is the case will, to those who may be inclined to doubt it, become more evident if they consider with more attention than they are generally accustomed to exercise what the main attraction of great wealth is for the men who in the modern world are the producers of it on the greatest scale. Socialists and similar reformers--the people who principally busy themselves with discussing what this attraction is--are the people who are least capable of forming any true opinion about it. They not only have, as a rule, no experience of wealth themselves, but they are further generically distinguished by a deficiency of those powers that create it. They are like men with no muscles, who reason about the temperament of a prize-fighter; and their conception of what wealth means for those who produce and possess it is apt, in consequence, to be of the most puerile kind. It is founded, apparently, on their conception of what a greedy boy, without pocket-money, feels when he stares at the tarts lying in a pastry-cook's window. To them it seems that the desire for great wealth means simply the desire for purely sensual self-indulgence--especially for the eating and drinking of expensive food and wine. Consequently, whenever they wish to caricature a capitalist they invariably represent him as a man with a huge, protuberant stomach. The folly of this conception is sufficiently shown by the fact that many of the greatest of fortune-makers have, in their personal habits, been abstemious and even niggardly to a degree which has made them proverbial; and that, even in the case of those who value personal luxury, the maximum of self-indulgence which any single human organism can appreciate, is obtainable by a hundredth part of the fortunes for the production of which such men work. The real secret of the attraction which wealth has for those who create it lies in the fact that wealth is simply a form of power. These men are made conscious by experience, as less gifted men are not, that they can, by the exercise of their own mental energies, add indefinitely to the wealth-producing forces of the community. They feel the machine respond to their own exceptional management of it; they see the output of wealth varied and multiplied at their will; and thus the results of their specialised power as producers are neither more nor less than this same internal power converted into an external, an indeterminate and universalised form; and the reason why they will never produce wealth merely in order to be deprived of it is that no one will exercise power merely in order to lose it, and allow it to pass into the hands of other people. These men, as experience, especially in America, shows us, are constantly willing to use this power for the benefit of their kind generally; but this is no more a sign that they would be willing to allow it to be forcibly taken from them than the fact that a man is willing to give a shilling to a beggar in the street is a sign that he would allow the beggar to steal it out of his waistcoat-pocket. So long as differences in personal power exist, especially in such power as affects the material circumstances of mankind, these differences in power, let governments take what form they please, will necessarily assert and embody themselves in the very structure of human society; and socialists are only able to obscure this fact from anybody either by a childish theory of modern production which they themselves are now repudiating, or else by a psychology even more laboriously childish, which would at once be exposed were it tested by so much as six months' experience. An interesting admission of the truth of this may be found in an unlikely place--namely, a work written some years ago by a socialist of considerable talent, which shows how the errors of at least a number of socialists are due, not to any defect in their reasoning powers, as such, but to a want of balanced knowledge of human nature in general, a want which in certain respects renders their reasoning futile. The work to which I refer is a work by a socialistic novelist, who was also an accomplished naturalist--the late Mr. Grant Allen. It is called _The Woman Who Did_. The immediate object of the writer was to exhibit the institution of marriage as the cause of what he was pleased to regard as woman's degradation and slavery; and his heroine is a young lady of highly respectable parentage, who proposes to regenerate womanhood by living with, and having children by, a man, without submitting to the humiliation of any legal bond. She accomplishes her purpose, and has a daughter, whose position, under our false civilisation, becomes so disagreeable in consequence of her illegitimate birth, that the mother at last commits suicide, in order to deliver her from the presence of such an embarrassing parent. In the author's view she is a martyr, and a model for immediate imitation. Ludicrous, however, as the book is in its main scheme and in its object, the author shows great acuteness in a number of his incidental observations. He is, for example, constantly insisting on the fact that the institution of private property, which socialism aims at revolutionising, is merely one embodiment of a general principle of individualism of which marriage and the family are another, and that the two stand and fall together. But an admission yet more important than this is as follows: So that nothing may be wanting to the bitterness of the heroine's sublime martyrdom, the author represents her daughter--and he does this with considerable skill--as developing from her earliest childhood all those tastes and prejudices (an instinctive sympathy with those ordinary motives and standards) against which the mother's whole life, and her education of her daughter, had been at war. "Herminia," says Mr. Allen, "had done her best" to indoctrinate the child with the pure milk of the emancipating social gospel; "but the child herself seemed to hark back, of internal congruity, to the lower and vulgarer moral plane of her remoter ancestry. There is," he proceeds, "no more silly and persistent error than the belief of parents that they can influence to any appreciable degree the moral ideas and impulses of their children. These things have their springs in the bases of character; they are the flower of individuality; and they cannot be altered after birth by the foolishness of preaching." Let us read this passage, with the alteration of only a word or two, and it forms an admirable criticism of the more recent speculations of the party to which Mr. Allen belonged. There is no more silly and persistent error on the part of socialists than the belief that they can influence to any appreciable degree the moral ideas and impulses of the citizens of any community, or that these things, which are the flower of congenital individuality, can be altered after birth by the foolishness of socialism. But the arguments at the service of socialism are not exhausted yet. Even if voting majorities should be unable to transform human nature, that men of power shall become willing to exert their power only in order that they may be deprived of it, there is a class of socialists who declare that what is impossible with mere human democracy, will be rendered possible by the divine influence of a rightly preached Christianity. To Christian socialists, as such, I have as yet made no special reference; nor will it be necessary now to be very prolix in our dealings with them; but in their attitude and their equipment for the task of effecting an economic revolution, they throw so strong a light on the character of contemporary socialism generally that a brief consideration of their gospel will be interesting and highly instructive, and will fitly lead us to the conclusion of this part of our argument. FOOTNOTES: [15] Mr. G. Wilshire, in his criticism of the argument, as stated by me in America, says that, under the existing system, the consumer is _not_ free to choose what goods he will buy, but has them thrust on him by the capitalist producer. Yet he, and socialists in general, complain at the same time of the competition between capitalists, which is simply a competition to supply what consumers most desire. Here and there, when no competition exists, one firm can force its goods, if they are of the nature of necessaries, on the local public. But under the existing system this is only an occasional incident. Under socialism it would be universal. When tobacco is a state monopoly, state tobacco is forced on the great mass of the people. [16] Mr. G. Wilshire admits, on behalf of socialists, that the argument of this chapter is so far correct that no democracy can make men of ability exercise their ability if they do not wish to do so; and that if they wish for exceptional rewards they will be able to demand them. A Melba, he says, under socialism, would be able, if she wished for it, to get probably even higher remuneration than she does to-day. But, he continues, under socialism, such men and women, though they could get such rewards, will be so changed that they will not wish for them. A Melba will then sing for the mere pleasure of singing. CHAPTER XI CHRISTIAN SOCIALISM AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR SECULAR DEMOCRACY. Christian socialism, as a doctrine which is preached to-day, might, for anything that its name can tell us to the contrary, be as different from ordinary socialism as is Christian Science from secular--as the science of Mrs. Eddy is from the science of Mr. Edison. We can judge of it only by examining the utterances of its leading exponents. For this reason, although I had long been familiar with the utterances of persons who call themselves Christian socialists in England, I felt bound to decline an invitation to discuss the subject in America, unless I could be furnished with some recent and formal version of the gospel as it is preached there. Accordingly there was sent to me the precise kind of document I desired. It formed the principal article in a journal called _The Christian Socialist_. Its author was a clergyman,[17] and it was entitled "The Gospel for To-day." It was what I expected that it would be. It reproduced in almost every particular the thoughts and moods distinctive of Christian socialists in England; and this article I will here take as a text. The writer, exhibiting a candour which many of his secular brethren would do well to imitate, starts with an attack on all existing forms of democracy, which are all, he says, based on a profound and fatal fallacy. This is the assumption that all men are born equal, from which assumption the practical conclusion is deduced that the best state of society is one which will allow each of these so-called equal beings to work out his own happiness as best he can for himself, with the minimum of interference from his fellow-citizens or from the law. Now if, says our author, men were born equal in reality, such an individualistic democracy might perhaps work well enough. But men are not born equal. The root of the difficulty lies here. In the economic sense, as in all others, some men are incomparably more able than the great majority of their fellows, and even among the exceptionally able some are much abler than the others. Consequently, if the principles of modern individualistic democracy and modern individualistic economics are right, according to which the main motive of each should be to do the best for himself with his own powers that he can--"if it is duty to compete if competition is the life of trade, then the battle for self must ever go grimly on. The strong must subdue the weak, the rich the poor, the able the unable. Upon this basis the millionaire and the multi-millionaire have a perfect right to roll up their untold millions, even as the working-man has a right to seek the highest wages that he can get. All in different ways are seeking their own; and the keenest competitors are the best men. The prizes must go to the strongest and the shrewdest. It is the survival of the fittest." Such being the case, then, asks the writer, what does Christian socialism aim at? It does not aim at making men equal in respect of their ability, for to do this would be quite impossible; but it aims at producing an equality of a practical kind, by inducing the men whose ability is most efficient to forgo all personal claims which are founded on their own exceptional powers, so that the wealth which is at present secured by these powers for themselves may in the future be divided among the mass of their less able brethren. Thus the crucial change which the Christian socialists would accomplish is identical with that contemplated by their secular allies or rivals. But the more completely it is invested with a definitely religious quality, the more lopsided, unstable, and self-stultifying is this change seen to be; the more obvious becomes the absurdity of proposing to reorganise the entire business of the world on the basis of a conversion _de luxe_ which is to be the privilege of the few only, while the many are not only debarred, from the very nature of the case, from practising the renunciation in which the few are to find eternal life, but are actually urged to cherish their existing economic concupiscence, and raise it to a pitch of intensity which it never has reached before. The competent, to whose energies the riches of the world are due, are to put these riches away from them as though they were food offered by the devil. The incompetent, with thankless but perpetually open mouths, are to swallow this same food as though it were the bread from heaven. In other words, according to our Christian socialist, the sin against the Holy Ghost, which is involved in the enjoyment of riches, is not the enjoyment of material superfluities itself, but only the enjoyment of them by men who have been at the trouble of producing them. That this is what the message of Christian socialism comes to, little as those who deliver it realise the fact themselves, is shown by an illustration obtruded on us by the author of "The Gospel for To-day." The evils of the existing situation, and its remoteness from the Kingdom of Christ, are, he says, exemplified in a very special way by the present position of the clergy. "If we churchmen," he says, "want money for our own purposes, we have to go to the trust magnates and kneel. We have to kneel to 'the steel kings and the oil kings,' merely because they are rich men." Now, how would Christian socialism alter a state of things like this? Let us consider precisely what it is that our Christian socialist complains about. He obviously does not mean that he and his brother clergymen have to approach the trust magnates on their knees. The utmost he can mean is that, if they want these men to give them money, they have to ask for it as a gift, and presumably make, when it is given, some acknowledgment to the donors. This it is which evidently sticks in the stomach of the humble follower of Christ whose self-portraiture we are now considering; for, if we confine ourselves to the Christian element in his teaching, he proposes to alter the existing situation only by kindling in the "trust magnates" such a fire of Christian philanthropy that they will have given him all he wants before he has had time to ask for it, thus exonerating him from the duty of saying "Thank you" for what he owes to another's goodness, and enabling him to offer to the Lord that which has cost him nothing. And what the author of "The Gospel for To-day" urges on behalf of himself and his clerical brethren is precisely what he urges on behalf of the less competent majority generally. Neither on them nor on the Christian clergy does the gospel of Christian socialism urge the duty of making any new sacrifice, or any new exertion, moral or physical, for themselves. Just as the clergy are to learn no more of business than they know now, but are to be relieved of the necessity for all prudence as to ways and means, so is the ordinary labourer to work no longer, no harder, and no better than he does now. On the contrary, his hours of labour are to become ever less and less, and at the same time he is to receive ever greater and greater wages. These are to be drawn from the products, not of himself but of his neighbour: and although he will owe them solely to the virtue which his neighbour exercises, he is, according to the Christian socialist programme, to demand them as though his own incompetence gave him a sacred right to them. Now, apart from the fact that this gospel does resemble the Christian in declaring that, while salvation can be achieved only by sacrifice, and that so far as the majority are concerned their sacrifice must be strictly vicarious, we might well pause to inquire how either of its two messages--that of economic asceticism for the few, and of economic concupiscence for the many--has any relation to the gospel of Christ at all. According to any reasonable interpretation of the words and spirit of Christ, a labourer's desire to enjoy the utmost that he himself produces is no less legitimate than natural; but it hardly ranks as one of the highest Christian virtues. How, we might ask, is it to acquire this latter character by being turned into a desire for what is produced by other people? Again, on the other hand, though according to most of the churches Christ did not condemn the possession of superfluous wealth as such, he certainly did not teach that the possession of it was generally necessary to salvation. It might therefore be justly urged, from the point of view of the few, that in proportion as Christ's valuation of this transitory life was accepted by them, the duty of melting down their own vases and candelabra in order that every workman's spoon might have a thin plating of silver on it, would constantly seem less and less, instead of more and more imperative. All this might be urged, and more to the same effect; but we will content ourselves with considering the matter under its purely practical aspect, and asking how any Christian clergymen--men presumably sane and educated--can propose, whether their programme be really Christian or no, to reorganise society on the basis of a moral conversion which is confined to the few only--which would exact from the able minority the maximum of effort and mortification, and secure the maximum of idleness and self-indulgence for the rest of the human race? To this question it may be said that there are two answers. Admirable in character as are multitudes of the Christian clergy, nobody will contend that all of them are beyond reproach; nor will any such claim be made for all those of them who profess socialism. And for some of this body it is hardly open to doubt that the preaching of socialism is nothing better than a species of ecclesiastical electioneering. In the language of the political wire-puller, it affords them a good "cry" with which to go to the people. Why, they say in effect, should you listen to the agitator in the street, when we can give you something just as good from the pulpit? What the message really means which they thus undertake to deliver, they make no effort to understand. It will attract, or at least they think so; and for the moment this is enough for them. Having probably emptied their churches by talking traditional nonsense, they are willing to fill them by talking nonsense that has not even the merit of being traditional. We will not linger, however, over the case of men like these. We will turn to that of others who are morally very much more respectable, and whose condition of mind, moreover, is very much more instructive. Of these we may take the author of "The Gospel for To-day" as a type. He, we may assume, advocates his socialistic programme, not because he thinks that to do so is a shrewd clerical manoeuvre, but because he honestly believes that his programme is at once Christian and practicable. How does it come about, then, that an educated man like himself can believe in, and devote himself to preaching, doctrines so visionary and preposterous? Let us examine his arguments more minutely, and we shall presently find our answer. By his vigorous denunciation of the doctrine that all men are born equal, he shows us that he is capable to a certain extent of seeing things as they are. But he sees them from a distance only, as though they were a range of distant mountains whose aspect is falsely simplified and constantly changed by clouds, and of whose actual configuration he has no idea whatever. Thus when he contemplates the inequalities of men's economic powers, these appear to him alternately in two different forms--as genuine powers of production and as powers of mere seizure--without his discerning where in actual life the operation of the one ends and the operation of the other begins: and, though for a certain special purpose he admits, as we shall see presently, that some able men are able in the sense of being exceptionally productive, his thoughts and his feelings alike through the larger part of his argument are dominated by the idea that ability is merely acquisitive. This is shown by the fact that the two great productive enterprises which he singles out as typical of modern wealth-getting generally are held up by him as examples of acquisition pure and simple. "The steel kings," he says, "did not invent steel. The oil kings did not invent oil." These are the gifts of nature, which nature offers to all; but the strong men abuse their strength by pushing forward and seizing them, and compelling their weaker brethren to pay them a tribute for their use. Steel and refined oil he evidently looks upon as two natural products. He has no suspicion that, as any school-boy could have told him, steel is an artificial metal which, as manufactured to-day, is one of the most elaborate triumphs of modern industrial genius. As to the oil by the light of which he doubtless writes his sermons, he apparently thinks of it as existing fit for use in a lake, and ready to be dipped up by everybody in nice little tin cans, if only the oil kings having got to the lake first, did not by their superior strength frighten other people away. Of the actual history of the production of usable oil, of the vast and marvellous system by which it is brought within reach of the consumers, of the by-products which reduce its price--all of them the results of concentrated economic ability, and requiring from week to week its constant and renewed application--the author of "The Gospel for To-day" apparently knows nothing. The oil kings and the steel kings, according to his conception of them, need merely refrain from the exercise of their only distinctive power--that is to say, an exceptional power of seizing; and every Christian socialist in New York and elsewhere will have the same oil in his lamps that he has now, and a constant supply of cutlery and all other forms of hardware, the sole difference being that he will get them at half-price or for nothing, and have the money thus saved to spend upon new enjoyments. And his conception of ability, as connected with the output of steel and oil, is his conception of ability as applied to the production of goods generally. He makes, however, one exception. There is, he admits, one form of ability which does actually add to the wealth of the modern world, and may possibly be credited with producing the largest part of it. This is the faculty of invention. Here, at last, we seem to be listening to the language of sober sense. But let us see what follows. Inventors, our author proceeds, being the types of exceptional ability which is really beneficent and productive, are precisely the men who afford us our surest grounds for believing in the possibility of that moral conversion which socialism proposes to effect among able men at large. For what, he says, as a fact do we find the inventors doing? They invent, he says, for the pure love of inventing, or else from a desire to do good to their fellow creatures. The thought of money for themselves never enters into their minds. The selfish desire for money makes its appearance only when the strong man whose ability is merely acquisitive thrusts himself on the scene, buys the inventors' inventions up, and then proceeds "to work them for all they are worth." These mere seizers of wealth, these appropriators of the inventions of others, need but to learn a lesson of abnegation which the inventors have learned already, or rather a lesson which is easier; for while these noble men, the inventors, have no wish to take what they produce, the majority of able men, such as the steel kings and the oil kings, need merely forbear to take. Competition, in short, as it actually exists to-day--the competition which Christian socialism will abolish--is simply a competition in taking; and in order to abolish it, the strong men, when they have taken a fair share, have but to stand aside, to become as though they were weak, and so give others a chance equal to their own. Here, indeed, we have a conception, or rather a vague picture, of the facts of modern industry, and of human nature as connected with it, which is worthy of a man from dreamland. Every detail mentioned is false. Every essential detail is omitted. In the first place, the disinterested inventor, from whose behaviour our author reasons, is purely a figment of his own clerical brain. Inventors in actual life, as every one knows who has had occasion to deal with them, are generally distinguished by an insane desire for money, by the wildest over-estimates of the wealth which their inventions will ultimately bring them, or by a greed which will sell them for a trifle, provided this be paid immediately. In the second place, inventions, even the greatest, so long as they represent the power of invention merely, are utterly deficient in all practical value. So long as they exist nowhere except in the author's brain, or drawings, or in descriptions, or even in the form of models, they might, so far as the world is concerned, have never existed at all. In the former cases they are dreams; in the last case they are toys. They are brought down into the arena of actual life only when, like souls provided with bodies, they cease to be ideas or toys, and become machines or contrivances manufactured on a commercial basis; and in order to effect successfully this practical transformation, countless processes and countless faculties are involved other than those comprised in intellectual invention itself. There are cases, no doubt, in which the practical talents necessary for realising an invention and the faculty of invention itself coexist in the same man; but the inventor, when this happens, is not an inventor only. He is not only a master of ideas; he is a master of things and men. Such a combination is, however, far from common. As a rule, if his inventions are to be of any use to the world, the inventor must ally himself with men of another type, and these are the very men whom the author of "The Gospel for To-day" conceives of as simply monopolising and "working for all they are worth" contrivances which would otherwise have been given to the world gratis. He does not see that, if men such as the steel kings and the oil kings did not work inventions for all they are worth, the inventions themselves would be practically worth nothing. Let the reader reflect on the astounding ignorance of the world, and especially of the world of industry, which is betrayed with so much naïveté by this socialist of the Christian pulpit. He knows so little of the commonest facts of history that he looks upon steel as a ready-made product of nature, and all the mills of the steel trust as merely a means of monopolising knives, bridges, rails, and locomotive-engines, which the citizens of America would otherwise be able to take at will, like a bevy of school-children helping themselves from a heap of apples. He imagines that inventions, as they form themselves in the head of the inventor, leap direct into use, without any intervening process; while the inventor himself is a being so superior to the world he works in, that the rapture of being allowed to work for it is the only reward he covets, that he has never dreamed of such selfish things as profits, and does not even know the meaning of a patent or a founder's share; and that the oil kings and the steel kings and all other able men, will save society by following in the footsteps of this chimera. Such are the wild, childish, and disconnected ideas entertained by our clerical author of the world which he proposes to reform; and he is in this respect not peculiar. On the contrary he is a most favourable type of Christian socialists generally; and Christian socialists, in respect of their mental and moral equipment, are simply secular socialists of the more modern and educated type, with their ignorances and credulities accentuated, but not otherwise altered, by the solemnities of religious language, and a vague religious sentiment which achieves a facile intensity because it is never restrained by fact. Socialists, in short, of all schools, are socialists because they are ignorant of, or fail to apprehend, certain facts or principles of nature and of human nature which are essential to the complicated process of modern productive industry; or it is perhaps a truer way of putting the case to say that they could not be socialists unless they were thus ignorant. In this they resemble the devisers of perpetual motions, or scientific and infallible systems for breaking the bank at a roulette-table. In so far as they are socialists--that is to say, in so far as they differ from other reformers--they are men aiming at something which is in its nature impracticable; and in order to represent it to themselves and others as practicable, they must necessarily ignore or fail to understand something which, in actual life, stands in the way of its being so. The perpetual-motionist believes that a perpetual motion is practicable, because he fails to see that out of no machine whatever is it possible to get more force than is put into it, and that one pound-weight will not wind up another. The system-monger sees that if a succession of similar stakes are placed on red or black, or any one of the thirty-six numbers, the bank always has zero in its favour; but by placing a number of stakes simultaneously in intricate combinations, or by graduating them according to results, he imagines that he can invert the situation, when all he can do is to disguise it. He often disguises it most effectually; but in the long run he does no more. Like a protuberance in an air cushion, which if pushed down in one place reappears in another, the original advantage of the bank infallibly ends in reasserting itself. The system-monger fails to see this for one reason only--that, having disguised, he thinks that he has eliminated, a fundamental fact of the situation. Socialists, in so far as they are socialists, reason in the same way. Though most of them now recognise, like the author of "The Gospel for To-day," that the economic efficiencies of men are in the highest degree unequal, they propose out of an inequality of functions to produce an equality of conditions. The details of the changes by which they propose to effect this result, or the grounds on which they seek to represent this result as possible, vary like the details of the systems of ingenious gamblers. But whatever these details may be, whether they are details of scheme or argument, the essential element of each is the omission of some fundamental fact--or, rather, of one protean fact--by which socialistic thinkers are often honestly confused, because it assumes, as they shift their positions, any number of different aspects. This is the fact that out of unequal men it is absolutely impossible to construct a society of equals. Two illustrations, taken from the history of socialistic thought, will show how socialists hide this fact from themselves, first by a fallacy of one kind, then by a fallacy of another kind; and how, wherever it is located, it is the essential factor in their argument. In their endeavour to prove the possibility of an equalisation, absolute or approximate, of economic conditions, Karl Marx and the earlier socialists started with two main doctrines. The one was a moral doctrine; the other was an economic. The moral doctrine was that, as a matter of eternal justice, every man has a right to the whole of what is produced by him. The economic doctrine was that, as a matter of fact, the only producers of wealth are the mass of manual labourers, and that, with certain unimportant exceptions, the economic values produced by all labourers are equal. Hence he argued that all wealth ought to go to the labourers, and that all labourers were entitled to approximately equal shares of it. The later socialists aim at reaching the same conclusion, and they start with two doctrines, a moral and an economic, likewise. Having arrived, however, at a truer theory of production--having recognised that labour is not the sole producer, and that some men produce incalculably more than others--they have, in order to support their demand for an equality of possession, been obliged to supplement their repudiation of the economic theory of their predecessors, by repudiating their theory of eternal justice also, and introducing another of a wholly opposite character. While Karl Marx contended that, in justice, production and possession were inseparable, the later socialists contend that there is no connection between them, and that it is perfectly easy to convert to this moral view every human being who is likely to suffer by its adoption. Thus the difference between the earlier and the later socialists is as follows: The earlier socialists started with a theory of justice which is in harmony with common-sense and the general instincts of mankind; and this theory was pressed into the service of socialism only by being associated with a false theory of production. The later socialists start with a truer theory of production; and they reconcile this with their own practical programme, only by associating it with a false moral psychology. In each case a fallacy is the basis of the socialistic conclusion; and without a fallacy somewhere--a fallacy which is pushed about, like a mouse under a table-cloth--no socialistic conclusion even tends to develop itself from the premises. And what is true of the main arguments of the later, as of the earlier socialists, is equally true of their subsidiary arguments also, from those which refer to the generalisations of the sociologists of the nineteenth century, and base themselves on the confusion between speculative truth and practical, down to those which are drawn from the absurd psychological supposition that all motives are interchangeable, and that those which actuate the artist, the anchorite, and the soldier can be made to replace by means of a vote or a sermon those which at present actuate the masters of industrial enterprise. On whatever argumentative point the socialists, as socialists, lay stress, there, under one form or another, their root-fallacy reappears. In short, their arguments are illusionary in proportion as they themselves value them. And in this there is nothing wonderful. The more logically and ingeniously men reason from premises, of which the one most essential to their conclusions is radically false to fact, the more punctually on every critical occasion is this fallacy bound to reassert itself as the logical basis of that which they desire to prove. The question, however, still remains to be answered of why a large body of men, like the educated apostles of socialism, who exhibit as a class no typical inferiority of intellect, unite in accepting, as though drawn to it by some chemical affinity, one particular error which dispassionate common-sense disdains, and which the actual history of the whole human race refutes? In the case of some preachers of socialism the answer lies on the surface. Socialism is of all creeds that which it is easiest to present to the ignorant; and in these days, like "patriotism" in the days of Dr. Johnson, it is often "the last refuge of a scoundrel," or of a desperate and ambitious fool. But I here put such cases altogether aside. What I here have in view are men who are morally and intellectually honest, and many of whom, indeed, are intellectually above the average. How is the affinity for one common error, and the passionate promulgation of it in forms, many of which are conflicting, to be accounted for in the case of men like these? The answer to this is to be found, not in their intellect, but in their temperament. It is a well-known fact that men, otherwise of high capacity, are incapable of mastering any but the humblest branches of mathematics. With the men who become socialists the case is closely similar. Just as certain men are incapable of dealing with the abstractions of mathematics, so are the socialists men who, in virtue of their constitutions or temperaments, are incapable of comprehending accurately the concrete facts of life, and are consequently as unable with any practical accuracy, to reason about them as a professor of mathematics would be to reason about the value of strawberries, if he knew only their weights or numbers, but had no expert judgment with regard to their condition or quality. To ascertain how the socialistic temperament thus debilitates the faculties, it will be enough to note certain characteristics distinctive of those possessing it. Such persons are all distinguished, though naturally in various degrees, by an undue preponderance of the emotional over the critical faculties, whence there arises in them what, to borrow a phrase of President Roosevelt's, we may aptly call an _inflammation_ of the social sympathies. This makes such persons magnify into intolerable wrongs all sorts of pains and inconveniences which most men accept as part of the "rough and tumble" of life; and it thus renders them abnormally impatient of the actual, and abnormally preoccupied with the ideal. The ideal vision which they see arising out of the actual is for them so illuminated, as though by a kind of limelight, that the details of the actual, thrown into comparative obscurity, either cannot be minutely distinguished by them, or, like the words of an unwelcome talker, cannot fix their attention. Without habitual concentration of the attention on the subject-matter with which reason deals, no reasoning can deal with it to any practical purpose; and men of that class from which socialists of the higher kind are recruited, are men who fail to understand the modern industrial process, because they are hindered by their temperament from giving a sufficient attention to its details. They derive from them vivid impressions, but no practical knowledge, like Turner when he painted a train swathed in its own vapour, and flushing the wet air with the fires of its lamps and furnace. From a study of Turner's picture of "Rain, Steam, and Speed," it would be impossible for any human being to conjecture how a locomotive was constructed. It would be still more impossible to form any judgment as to how its slide-valves, or its blast, or the tubes of its boiler might be improved. It is similarly impossible for men of the socialistic temperament to understand the general process of industry, or to judge how it can and how it can not be altered, from the purely spectacular impressions which its intricate parts produce on them. But the ingrained inability of such men to understand that which they would revolutionise does not reveal itself in their errors of theory only. It reveals itself still more strikingly in their own relations to life. If we allow for exceptional cases, such as that of Robert Owen, who was in his earlier days a competent man of business, we shall find that the theorists who desire to socialise wealth are generically deficient in the higher energies that produce it. Though they doubtless could, like most men who are not cripples or idiots, make a living by some form of manual labour, they have none of them done anything to enlarge the powers of industry, or even to sustain them at their present pitch of efficiency. They have never made two blades of grass grow where one blade grew before. They have never applied chemistry to the commercial manufacture of chemicals. They have never organised the systems or improved the ships and engines by which food finds its way from the prairies to the cities which would else be starving. If in some city or district an old industry declines they demand with tears that the thousands thus thrown out of employment shall be set by the state to do or produce something, even though this be a something which is not wanted by anybody. They never set themselves to devise, as was done in the English Midlands, some new commodity, such as the modern bicycle, which was not only a means of providing the labourers with a maintenance, but was also a notable addition to the wealth of the world at large. They fail to do these things for the simple reason that they cannot do them; and they cannot do them because they are deficient alike in the interest requisite for understanding how they are done, and in the concentrated practical energy which is no less requisite for the doing of them. At the end of an address in which I had been dealing with this subject at New York, a young man, one of my hearers, told me that I had been putting into words what had long been borne in on himself by his own studies and observations--the fact, namely, that the social leaders of men are divided into two classes, _those who dream about reforming the industrial business of the world, and those, an opposite type, who alone advance and accomplish it_. Here we have the conclusion of the whole matter. These two classes are contrasted, not because in mere intellect one is inferior to the other, but because when they are dealing with the industrial affairs of life these affairs appeal to them in two contrasted ways. One of these classes takes men and nature as they are. With the utmost minuteness it masters the secrets of the latter, with the utmost minuteness it directs the actions of the former; and in seeking wealth for itself it brings about those conditions which alone can make added wealth a practical possibility for all. The other class, occupied not with what is but what ought to be, fails to understand what can be, because it does not understand what is. The men of whom this class is composed--the men whose temperamental deficiency now finds its fullest expression in socialism, as it did formerly in theories of ultra-democratic individualism, are like amateur architects, and amateur sanitary engineers, who, thinking in pictures, and having no knowledge of structure, condemn existing houses and existing systems of drainage, and would replace them with palaces which no builder could build, with arches which would collapse from the weight of their own materials, and magnificent cloacæ the waters in which would have to run uphill. The theory, then, of socialism, let it take what form it will--the theory which represents as practicable by one device or another the social equalisation of economically unequal men--is a theory which, in minds which are intellectually honest, can develop itself only in proportion as these minds are incapable of grasping in their connected completeness the actual facts of life; and that such is the case has been illustrated in the preceding chapters by a systematic analysis of all the crucial arguments on which socialists have rested their case from the earliest day of socialistic thought to the latest. The reader, however, must observe the manner in which this statement is qualified. In speaking of the arguments of the socialists, I speak of those that are crucial only--that is to say, of those arguments used by socialistic thinkers in support of their programme in so far as that programme is peculiar. It is necessary to note this because, as a matter of fact, with such of their arguments as are proper to socialism only, the philosophers of socialism and their disciples frequently associate others which are not peculiar to the socialistic scheme at all, but which nevertheless multitudes of men who call themselves socialists regard as being at once the most important and practicable parts of it; and these I have in consequence reserved for separate treatment. They are three in number, and are as follows: The first relates to the remuneration of the ordinary manual labourer, and deals with the question of what his just remuneration is. According to Marx this question is easily settled. Of every thousand labourers associated in any given industry, each produces, with few and unimportant exceptions, a thousandth part of the whole exchangeable product; and his just remuneration is a thousandth part of the value of it. The intellectual socialists of to-day, while repudiating as we have seen the doctrine that the labourer's claim to remuneration is limited to the values produced by him, and contending that he has a further right to the product of the ability of others, constantly declare that, even according to the moral standard of Marx, he is usually defrauded at present of a large part of his due; or that, in most if not all industries, his wages represent but a part of the full value produced by him. Whether this is so or not is a question not of theory but of fact, and one which can only be answered by discovering some intelligible basis on which the values produced by labour in a general way may be estimated, as distinct from those produced by effort of other kinds. With this question I shall deal in the following chapter. The second relates to those forms of individual income which are covered by the word interest, when used in a comprehensive sense. It being admitted by the later socialists, in opposition to the earlier, that the directive ability of the few is, in the modern world, a productive agency no less truly than labour is, many of these socialists are now anxious to concede that the man of ability is entitled to such values, no matter how large, as are due to the active exercise of his own exceptional powers; but they contend that, as soon as his personal activity ceases, his claim to any influx of further wealth should therewith cease also. Let him spend his accumulations, they say, on his own gratifications as he will; but neither he nor his descendants can be suffered in moral justice to hold or apply them in such a manner that they will renew themselves, and yield an income to recipients who do nothing to make them fructify. To numbers of people who repudiate most of the socialistic programme, this doctrine as to interest appeals as at once just and practicable. If the state could appropriate all incomes due to interest, as distinct from those which represent the product of active ability, an enormous fund would, they think, be available for general distribution, and the ideals of socialism, in so far as they are practicable or desirable, might thus be realised by other than socialistic means. This argument, likewise, will have its own chapter--or rather two chapters--allotted to it. The third of these arguments or proposals which, though not in themselves socialistic, are popularly associated with socialism, relates to equality of opportunity. To this also I will devote a separate chapter. FOOTNOTES: [17] While these pages were being corrected for the press, a number of utterances have been made by English clerics--Episcopalian and Nonconformist--precisely similar in purpose and spirit to those of the author here quoted. CHAPTER XII THE JUST REWARD OF LABOUR AS ESTIMATED BY ITS ACTUAL PRODUCTS Since the educated socialists of to-day admit that in the modern world wealth is produced by two functionally different classes--a majority who labour and a minority by whom this labour is directed; or by two different faculties--namely, labour and directive ability--the question of how much of the total product or its value is produced by one class or agency, and how much by the other, is, for all social reformers, and not for socialists only, a question of the first importance; for in the minds of numbers, who care little about ideal transfigurations of society, the doctrines of socialism leave one vivid conviction, which is this--that, though the labourers in the modern world do not produce everything, though the ability of those directing them is a productive agent also, and though part of the wealth of modern nations is undoubtedly produced by this, yet the men of ability produce much less than they manage to keep, while the labourers produce much more than is represented by the wages which they get; that labour in this way, even if in no other, is suffering at present a general and intolerable wrong; and that socialism is simply a system by which this wrong will be righted.[18] Now, this alleged wrong is essentially an affair of quantity. If the products of any typical firm--one, let us say, which produces chemicals--are represented by the number a hundred, and if fifty represents the amount which at present is the share of labour, the rest being taken by men of directive ability--a picked body of organisers, chemists, and inventors--labour, it is contended, produces more than the fifty, which is all that it at present gets. Yes; but how much more? It is not contended that it produces the entire hundred. Does it produce, then, sixty, or sixty-five, or seventy, or eighty-three, or what? Unless such a wrong as this can have some extent assigned to it--unless it can be measured approximately by reference to some intelligible standard--it is not only difficult to deal with it; it is impossible to be sure that it exists. Of course we are here not contemplating individual cases. That some employés may, under existing conditions, get less than their work is worth, is possible and likely enough. It is equally likely or possible that others may get more. We must confine ourselves to what happens generally. We must take labour as a whole, on the one hand, and directive ability on the other, and ask how we may estimate, with rough but substantial accuracy, the proportion of the joint product respectively produced by each. At first sight it may seem that this problem is incapable of any definite solution; and some socialistic writers have done their best to obscure it. The efficiency of labour, they say, is in the modern world largely due, no doubt, to the action of directive ability; but ability could produce nothing unless it had labour to direct; whence it is inferred that the claim of labour on the product may in justice be almost anything short of the absolute total. To this abstract argument we will presently come back; but we will first examine another urged by a celebrated thinker, which, though less extreme in its implications, would, were it only sound, be even more fatal to our chances of arriving at the conclusion sought for. The thinker to whom I refer is Mill, who assigns to this argument a very prominent place in the opening chapter of his _Principles of Political Economy_. Certain economists have, so he says, debated "whether nature gives more assistance to labour in one kind of industry than in another"; and he endeavours to show that the question is in its very essence unanswerable. "When two conditions," he proceeds, "are equally necessary for producing the effect at all, it is unmeaning to say that so much is produced by one, and so much by the other. It is like attempting to decide which of the factors five and six contributes most to the production of thirty." And if this argument is true of nature and labour, it is equally true of labour and the ability by which labour is directed. Thus a great ocean liner which, in Mill's language, would be "the effect," could not be produced at all without the labour of several thousand labourers; and it is equally true that it could not be produced at all unless the masters of various sciences, designers, inventors, and organisers, directed the labour of the labourers in certain specific ways. Both conditions, then, being "necessary for producing the effect at all," the portions of it due to each would, according to Mill's argument, be indeterminable. Let us consider, therefore, if Mill's argument is sound. We shall find that it is vitiated by a fallacy which will, as soon as we have perceived it, show us the way to the truth of which we are now in search. Let us begin with taking the argument as he himself applies it. He brings it forward with special reference to agriculture, and aims it at the contention of a certain school of economists that nature in agriculture did more than in other industries. To urge this, says Mill, is nonsense, for the simple reason that though nature in agriculture does something, it is impossible to determine whether the something is relatively much or little. Let us, he says in effect, take the products of any farm, which we may for convenience' sake symbolise as so many loaves; and it is obviously absurd to inquire which produces most of them--the soil or the farm labourers. The soil without the labourers would produce no loaves at all. The labourers would produce no loaves if they had not the soil to work upon. Now, if there were only one farm in the world, and one grade of labour, and if every acre of this farm, when the same labour was applied to it, would always yield the same amount of produce--let us say one loaf--Mill's argument would be true. The actual state of the case is, however, very different. Acres vary very greatly in quality; and if we take four acres of varying degrees of fertility, to all of which is applied the same amount of labour, then, while from the worst of the acres this labour will elicit one loaf, it will elicit from the others, let us say, according to their degrees of fertility, two loaves, three loaves, and four loaves respectively. Here the labour being in each of the four cases the same, and the additional loaves resulting in three cases only, it is obvious that the difference between the larger products and the less is not due to the labour, but to certain additional qualities present, in the three superior acres and not present in the worst one. In other words, although in producing loaves--or, as Mill describes it, "the effect"--the parts played by labour and nature are indefinite and incommensurable so long as the land, the labour, and the effect remain all three the same, the parts become immediately measurable when the effect begins to vary, and one of the causes, and only one of them, at the same time varies also. This truth can be yet further elucidated by the very illustration which Mill cities in disproof of it. It is absurd to ask, he says, whether the number five or six does most, when they are multiplied together, to produce "the effect" thirty. This is true so long as "the effect" thirty is constant; but if on occasions the thirty is increased to forty, and if whenever this happens the six has increased to eight, we know that the extra ten which our multiplication yields us is not due to the five, the number which remains unchanged, but to an extra two now present in the number that was once six. Or again let us take as "the effect" the speed of a motor-car which is raced over a mile of road. Unless two conditions were present--the engine and some ground to run upon--the car could not run at all; and if there were only one road and one car in the world, it would be absurd to inquire how much of the speed was due to the merits of the engine, and how much to the character of the road's surface. But if, the car remaining unchanged, the surface of the road was improved, and a speed was thereupon developed of thirty miles an hour instead of twenty, we should, with regard to the increment, at once be able to say that it was due to the surface of the road, and was not due to the engine. Conversely, if the road were unchanged, but the car had a new engine, and the speed under these conditions increased in the same way, the increment would be evidently attributable to the engine and not the road. And the same observations apply to labour and directive ability, whenever the operations of both are essential to a given product. If the ability and the labour were always inevitably constant, and the product as to quality and amount were similarly constant also, we could not say that so much or so little of the effect was due to one cause, and so much or so little to the other. If there were in the world only a thousand shipwrights, and these men, working always under the same director, always produced in a year one ship of an unchanging kind, we could not say which of its parts or how much of its value were due to the man directing, and which or how much were due to the men directed. But if for one year this director were to retire and another was to take his place, and, the same labourers being directed by this new master, the result was the production not of one ship but of two; and if, when the year was ended, and the old master came back again, the annual product once more was not the two ships but one, we could then say, as a matter of common-sense with regard to the year during which the two vessels were built, that the second vessel, whatever might be the case with the first, was due wholly to the ability of the master, and not to the labour of the men. In other words, the ability of the director of labour produces so much of the product, or of that product's value as exceeds what was produced by the labourers before their labour was directed by him, and would cease to be produced any longer as soon as his direction was withdrawn. That in the case of any result which requires separable causes for its production, this method of allocating to these causes respectively so much of the result and so much of it only, is a method always adopted in all practical reasoning, may be seen by taking a result which is not beneficial but criminal. Twenty Russian labourers, all loyal to the Czar, are, let us say, employed to dig out a cellar under a certain street, and to fill it with cases which ostensibly contain wine. Subsequently, as the Czar is passing, he is killed by a huge explosion. It then becomes apparent that the so-called cellar was a mine, and the harmless-looking cases had really been filled with dynamite. Now, if all those concerned in the consummation of this catastrophe were tried, it is perfectly evident that the part played by the labourers would be sharply discriminated from that played by the man employing them; and, although they contributed something which was necessary to the production of the result, it would certainly have been admitted by General Trepoff himself that they had contributed nothing to its essential and criminal elements. It is equally evident that the increment of wealth which results from the obedience of labourers to injunctions which do not emanate from themselves, is produced by the man who gives the injunctions, and not by the men who obey them. But here we must return to the argument, already mentioned in passing, which may be restated thus: A thousand labourers, directed by their own intelligence only, produce a product whose amount we will call a thousand. The same labourers are directed by a man of ability, and the product rises from one thousand to two. But if the production of this second thousand is to be credited to the man of ability on the ground that, were the ability absent, no second thousand would be produced, we may reach by the same reasoning a conclusion precisely opposite, and credit not only the first, but both the thousands to labour, on the ground that, if the labour were absent, nothing would be produced at all. The argument is plausible; and in order to understand its fallacy we must give our attention to a fact, not generally realised, which is involved in all practical reasoning about all causes whatsoever. If we use the word "cause" in its strict speculative sense, the number of causes involved in the simplest effect is infinite. Let us take, for example, the speed of a horse which wins a race. Why does the speed of this horse exceed that of the others? We may in answer point to qualities of its individual organism. But these will carry us back to all its recorded ancestors--sires and dams for a large number of generations: and even so we shall have been taken but a small part of our way. The remotest of these ancestors--why were they horses at all? For our answer we must travel through the stages of organic evolution, till we reach the point at which animal and vegetable life were one. Had any of these antecedents been missing, the winning race-horse would not have won the race. Nor is this all. We have to include in our causes air, gravitation, and the fact that the earth is solid. No horse could win on turf which was based on vapour. But by all the thousands who witness a great race this whole mass of ulterior, though necessary, causes is ignored. The only causes which for them have any practical interest are those comprised in the organism of the winning horse itself. Who would contend that this horse had not won its own victory, on the ground that part of its own speed--a part which could not be calculated--was contributed by the crust of the earth, or the general constitution of the universe? Any one arguing thus would be howled down as a madman. Now, why is this? Why would the common-sense of mankind, in a practical matter like a race, instinctively exercise this kind of eclecticism, concentrating itself on certain causes and absolutely ignoring others? Such behaviour is not arbitrary. It depends on a principle inherent in all practical reasoning whatsoever. Let us see what this principle is. When, with any practical purpose in view, we insist that anything is the cause of anything else, or produces anything else, we are always selecting, out of an incalculable number of causes, one cause or agency which, under the circumstances in view, may or may not be present; which a careless person may neglect to introduce; which an ignorant person may be persuaded to take away; or a recognition of which will influence human conduct somehow; while all other causes, which no one proposes to take away, or which no one is able to take away, are assumed by all parties, but they are not considered by anybody. Why should they be considered? Not only are they so numerous that no intellect could deal with them, but they have, since with regard to them there is no difference of opinion, no place in any practical discussion at all. If a ton of stone is to be placed on a piece of framework, men may reasonably discuss whether the framework is strong enough to bear it, or whether material is not being wasted in making it stronger than necessary. What will happen without an additional girder? Or what will happen if we take two girders away? Will the stone fall or not? These questions belong to the domain of practical reasoning because to take a girder away, or else introduce fresh ones, lies within the power of the disputants. But no practical men would think of complicating the discussion by calculating what would happen if they suspended the action of gravitation, in which case the stone would need no support whatever; for to suspend the action of gravitation is within the power of nobody. If two men are debating in the middle of the night at midsummer whether there is enough oil in the lamp to keep it alight till sunrise, they are debating a question of a strictly practical kind: for it rests with them to put in more oil or not. What will happen if they do not? That is the point at issue. But they neither of them would debate what would happen if the movement of the earth were retarded, and the midsummer morning were delayed till the hour at which it dawns in winter. They do not discuss this contingency, for they rightly assume it to be impossible, and consequently the discussion of it would have no practical meaning. And now let us go back to the question of labour and ability; and we shall see, in the case of products to the production of which both are essential, that, while ability is the practical cause of all such amounts or values as exceed what would have been produced by labour if there were no ability to direct it, it cannot be claimed in any similar sense that all amounts and values are conversely produced by labour, which exceed what would have been produced by the action of directive ability, if no labour existed for such ability to direct. The reason why labour, in this respect, differs from ability is as follows: Whether directive ability shall or shall not exert itself depends upon human volitions which, according to circumstances, are alterable, just as it depends upon alterable human volitions whether a framework of steel be constructed in this way or in that; or whether a lamp be replenished with oil or no. But whether ordinary manual labour shall or shall not exert itself, is not similarly dependent on human volition at all. Let a nation be organised, no matter on what principles, the majority of the citizens will have to labour in any case. The supposition of their labouring is bound up with the supposition of their existence. To suppose that the labourers as a whole could permanently cease to labour, is like supposing that they could exist and yet permanently cease to breathe. They can cease to labour for moments, just as for moments a man can hold his breath, as they do on the occasion of a strike; but they can do so for moments only. Except in a region where climatic conditions are exceptional, what makes men labour is not an employing class, but nature. Directive ability does not _make_ them labour; it finds them labouring. It finds them like wheels which are driven by an eternal stream, and which must turn and turn for ever, until they fall to pieces. To inquire, then, what would happen if labour ceased to exert itself is like inquiring what would happen if the earth were to retard its diurnal motion, or if some natural force--for example, that of gravitation--were to strike work for the sake of intimidating the cause of all things. Such suppositions are for practical purposes meaningless. But with the directive ability of the few, as opposed to the directed labour of the many, the case is dramatically different. For while there never can be any question of the directive faculties of the few being left alone in a world where there is no labour--for in the case of the majority, nature, the eternal taskmaster, will always make labour compulsory, so long as stomachs want food and naked backs want clothing--there constantly has been, and there may be again, a question of whether this mass of ordinary human labour shall find any exceptional ability so developed and so organised as to direct it. In the earlier states of society no such ability was operative. In savage communities it is not operative now; and there is constantly a question, among modern civilised nations, whenever the security of social institutions is threatened, of the action of this faculty being temporarily suspended altogether, either because those persons possessing it are deprived of the motives without which they will not exert it, or else because the labourers individually, on one ground or another, are impatient of submitting themselves to the direction of any intelligences but their own. In other words, when we are seeking to measure the products due respectively to directive ability and to labour, by computing what would happen if either of these agencies were withdrawn, the withdrawal of one of them--that is to say, of ability--can alone be taken as possible by any practical reasoner. We have before us practically two alternatives only. One is a condition of things under which the exceptional ability of the few directs and co-ordinates the labour of the average many. The other is a condition of things under which the labour of the average many has to exert itself with the same severe continuity, but is guided, co-ordinated, and stimulated by none of those special faculties which raise a few men above the general level of efficiency. When these special faculties are applied to the direction of average labour, the output of wealth increases. When their application is interfered with or ceases, the output of wealth declines; and in the only practical sense of the words "cause" or "producer," these faculties of direction, or the exceptional persons who exercise them, are the true causes or producers of the whole of that portion of wealth which comes into being with their activity, and disappears or dwindles with their inaction. The practical validity of this method of computation has been formally recognised, though not completely understood, by some of the later socialists themselves. Mr. Webb, for example, and his associates, have admitted that, of the wealth of the modern world a considerable part consists of "the rent of business ability."[19] This way of expressing the matter is true so far as it goes. It expresses, however, one-half of the truth only. Mr. Webb and his friends mean that, if we take the world as it is, the products due to ability in any given industry consist of the quantity by which the products of one firm, because it is managed by a man of superior talent, exceed the products of another firm which differs from the first only in the fact that it is managed by another man whose talent is not so great. They assume as their starting-point, in every case, the presence of directive ability sufficient to organise the labourers in such a way that the products of the entire group shall provide the labourers with wages which are up to a certain standard, and a minimum of profit or of surplus values besides. This lowest grade of ability is one of the postulates of their argument, just as in calculating agricultural rent the first postulate of our argument is a lowest grade of land. Now, in connection with many questions of a more or less limited kind, this assimilation of the products of superior ability to rent, and of ability of a lower grade to land which is practically rentless, will serve our purpose well enough. Between the two cases, however, there is a vast and underlying difference; and when we consider our present problem under its widest and most vital aspect, it is the difference, not the likeness, between them, which constitutes our main concern. The nature of this difference has been pointed out already. When we are discussing rent and agriculture, land is a necessary assumption, for unless there were land, there could be no agriculture at all; but there can be, has been, and still is in the world, abundance of labour without directive ability; and while it would be meaningless to ask what would happen to rent if all land disappeared, the question of what would happen to labour if all ability were in abeyance is precisely the question raised by all schemes of economic revolution, and one which has been constantly illustrated by the facts of economic history. Of such facts we may take the following, picturesque example: In the eighteenth century the Jesuit Fathers in Uruguay succeeded in teaching the natives a variety of Western arts, among others that of watch-making, and so long as the Jesuits were on the spot to direct them the natives exhibited much manual skill. But when, owing to political causes, the Jesuits were driven from the country, the natives sank back into their previous industrial helplessness. The temporary efficiency of their labour had been due to the ability that directed it; and as soon as that ability was withdrawn, the labour, left to itself, shrank again to its old relative inefficiency. Now, here we have a case precisely analogous to that which we have to deal with when considering at the present day how much of the products of any civilised nation is produced by the labour of the average units of the population, and how much by the ability of the exceptional men directing them. It is not a question of how much this or that group of labourers, which is directed by a man of the highest grade of ability, produces in excess of the products of some similar group which is directed by another man whose ability is somewhat inferior; it is a question of how much the same nation would produce, if every director of other men's labour were withdrawn, and the present labouring units left to their own devices. These two questions, though not mutually exclusive, differ as much as the question of why one of two balloons rises above the earth to a height of three miles and a furlong, while a second balloon reaches the height of three miles only, differs from the question of why either of them rises in the air at all. Mr. Webb and his friends, with their theory of the rent of ability, confine themselves to the first of these--namely, the question of why one balloon rises a furlong higher than the other. The real question which we have to deal with here is why both balloons lift their aeronauts at least three miles into the clouds, while other men who have no balloon to lift them can get no higher than the top of the church steeple. Or to come back to literal fact, our problem must be expressed thus: Let us take the present population of Great Britain or America, and, having noted the wealth at present annually produced by it, ask ourselves what would happen if some duly qualified angel were to pick out and kill, or otherwise make away with, every man, who, in virtue of his assimilated scientific knowledge, his inventive gifts, his constructive and practical imagination, his energy, his initiative, and his natural powers of leadership, was better able to direct others than the other nine were to direct themselves? We cannot make this experiment in precisely the way described; but history will provide us with equivalents which are sufficiently accurate for our purpose. There are, for example, in the case of Great Britain, data which have enabled statisticians with a considerable degree of unanimity to estimate the values produced per head of the industrial population at various periods from the reign of Charles II. till to-day, and to reduce these values to comparable terms of money. Now, we need not insist too much on the accuracy of the figures in question; but one broad fact is unmistakably shown by them--that the product per head towards the close of the nineteenth century was, to say the least of it, from four to five times as great as it was towards the close of the sixteenth. To what, then, was this increase in industrial productivity due? It was not due to any change in the spontaneous workings of nature. It can only have been due to some change in the character of human effort--either in that of the effort of each separate manual labourer, or else in that of the men by whom the labour of others is directed. The average labourer, however, at the close of the nineteenth century did not differ, as an isolated labouring unit, from the average labourer as he was at the time of the fire of London. The increase in industrial productivity must therefore be necessarily due to a change in the ability of those by whom the labourers are organised and directed. And here _a priori_ reasoning is confirmed by actual facts, for the change which has taken place in the class which directs the labour of others has been, during the period in question, of the most notorious and astonishing kind. That class had been progressively absorbing into itself, and concentrating on the conduct of industry, ambitions, intelligences, and strong practical wills, which formerly found their outlets in very different channels--ecclesiastical, political, and more especially military. Man for man, then, industry became more productive, because to an increasing degree the ablest men of the nation concentrated their exceptional powers on directing the business of production; and any one who wished to push things to an extreme conclusion might contend that the entire amount--some four or five hundred per cent.--by which the product per head in the year 1880 exceeded the product per head some two hundred years before, was due to directive ability, and directive ability only; and that the labourers, in their capacity of labourers, had no claim whatsoever to it. We will, however, put the case in a much more moderate form. We will, for argument's sake, concede to self-directed labour all that increase in the values produced per head, which took place between the time of Charles II. and the general establishment in Great Britain of the modern industrial system, with its huge mills and factories, and its concomitant differentiation of the directing class from the directed--an event which had been securely accomplished at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In making this concession, we shall, indeed, be defying fact, and ignoring the improvements, alike in manufacture and agriculture, which had taken place during the hundred years preceding, especially during the last fifty of them, and which were solely due to a minority of exceptionally able men.[20] We shall thus be conceding to the labourer far more than his due. Certainly no one can contend that we concede too little. Let us take, then, the beginning of the nineteenth century as our standing-point; and, assuming that labour was the sole producer then, compare its productivity per head with the productivity of industrial effort--of labour and ability combined--some eight or nine decades later. The labourers of Great Britain as a body, to the exclusion of all other classes, actually divided among themselves, about the year 1880, more wealth per head--something like forty-five per cent.--than would have been theirs if they had lived in the days of their own grandfathers, and been able to appropriate as wages the income of the entire country. Let us, then, repeat the question which we asked just now. Where has this addition to the income of labour come from? That part of it is attributable to ability--the ability of the Watts, the Stephensons, the Arkwrights, the Bessemers, the Edisons, and so forth--nobody in his senses will deny. Can it be said that any of it is attributable to labour? The period now under consideration is so brief that this question is not hard to answer. It can easily be shown that man, as a labourer skilled or unskilled, has acquired individually no new efficiencies since--to say the least of it--the days of the Greeks and Romans. An ancient gem-engraver would to-day be eminent among modern craftsmen. The implements of the Roman surgeons, the proportional compasses used by the Roman architects, the force-pumps and taps used in the Roman houses--all things that could be produced by a man directing his own muscles--were produced in the Rome of Nero as perfectly as they could be produced to-day. To this fact our museums bear ample and minute witness; while the Colosseum and the Parthenon are quite enough to show that the masons of the ancient world were at least the equals of our own. If no advance, then, in the quality of manual labour as such has taken place in the course of two thousand years, it is idle to contend that its powers have increased in the course of eighty. But a still more remarkable proof that they actually have not done so, and that no such increase has contributed to the increase of modern wealth, is supplied by events belonging to these eighty years themselves. I refer to the policy pursued by the trade-unions of reducing the practical efficiency of all their members alike to the level which can be reached by those of them who are least active and dexterous. Bricklayers, for example, are forbidden by the English unions to lay, in a given time, more than a certain number of bricks, though by many of them this number could be doubled, and by some trebled, with ease. Now, although, from the point of view of those bodies who adopt it, such a policy has many advantages, and is perhaps a tactical necessity, this levelling down of labour to the minimum of individual efficiency is denounced by many critics as a prelude to industrial suicide, and the alarm which these persons feel is doubtless intelligible enough. It is, however, largely superfluous. The levelling process in question must of course involve a certain amount of waste; but its effect on production as a whole is under most circumstances inappreciable. Building as a whole is not checked by the fact that the best bricklayers may do no more than the worst. All kinds of commodities are multiplied, improved, and cheapened, while thousands of the operatives whose labour is involved in their production are allowed to attend to but one machine, when they might easily attend to three. In a word, while the unions have been doing their effective best to keep labour, as a productive agent, stationary, or even to diminish its efficiency, the product of industry as a whole exhibits an unchecked increase. And what is the explanation of this? Little as the trade-unions realise the fact themselves, their own policy is an object-lesson which supplies us with the simple answer. The answer is that the increase of modern wealth--certainly its increase during the past eighty years--has not been due to any change in the efficiency of labour at all; that labour is merely a unit which directive ability multiplies; that if in the year 1800 labour produced everything, and its total products then be expressed by the number five, the products of the industrial population would be five per head still, if ability, as a multiplying number, successively expressible by two and three and four, had not increased the quotient to ten, fifteen, and twenty; ability thus being the producer, not indeed of the five with which we start, but of all the increasing differences between this and the larger numbers. To return then to definite facts, since in the year 1800 an equal division of all the wealth of Great Britain would have yielded to each family an income of eighty pounds, and since eighty years later an equal division of the total which was actually appropriated as wages by wage-paid labour alone, would have yielded to each labourer's family some twenty-five pounds in addition, the labouring class as a whole in Great Britain to-day, instead of receiving less than its labour produces, receives on the lowest computation from thirty to thirty-three per cent. more. Or, to put the matter otherwise, more than a fourth of its present income is drawn from a fund which would cease to have any existence if it were not for the continued activity of a specially gifted class, by whose brains the data of science are being constantly remastered and re-assimilated, and by whose energy they are applied to the minds and muscles of the many from the earliest hour of each working day to the latest. And what is true labour, its products, and receipts in Great Britain, is broadly true of them in America and all other countries also, where modern capitalism has arrived at the same stage of development. We are, let me say once more, not here contemplating individual cases. Of the total wage-fund divided among the labourers in any given country, too much may be given to some men, and too little to others; but of every million pounds which a million of such men receive, some two hundred and fifty thousand are distributed well or ill, which have not been produced by the efforts of these men themselves, but are due to the efforts of a class which is definitely outside their own.[21] If, then, it is contended that the just reward of labour is that total of wealth which labour itself produces, the idea that labour, in respect of its pecuniary remuneration, is, under present conditions, the victim of any general wrong, is so far from having any justification in fact that it only touches fact at all by representing a direct inversion of it. Labour, as a whole, does not, under existing conditions, get less than it produces.[22] It gets a very great deal more. If, therefore, the claims of labour are based on, and limited to, the amount of wealth which is produced by labour itself--that is to say, the total which it would now produce were the faculties of the directing and organising minority paralysed--what labour, thus appropriating the entire product, would receive, would be far less, not more, than what it actually receives to-day. Instead of defrauding it of any part of its due, the existing system is treating it with an extreme and even wanton generosity. Is it, then, here contended, many readers will ask, that if matters are determined by ideal justice, or anything like practical wisdom, the remuneration of labour in general ought henceforth to be lessened, or at all events precluded from any possibility of increase? Is it contended that the employing and directing class should attempt or even desire to take back from those directed by it every increment of wealth possessed by them which is not produced by themselves? If any one thinks that such is the conclusion which is here suggested, let him suspend his opinion until, as we shall do in another chapter, we return to the subject and deal with it in a more comprehensive way. Our conclusion, as for the moment we must now be content to leave it, is not that the labourers have not a claim, practically valid, to the only portion of their income which has any tendency to grow, but merely that they should understand the source from which this portion is drawn--a source which consists of the efforts of other men, not of their own. And now, before we return to this particular question, we will go on to deal with another which to a certain extent overlaps it, but is narrower in its compass, and seems, for that very reason, to many minds of greater practical moment. I mean the question of interest, or the income which comes to its recipients without any necessary effort on their own part to correspond to it. FOOTNOTES: [18] I met an interesting embodiment of this mood of mind in America, in the person of a slim young man, well-dressed, well-educated, refined in his speech and manners, who worked as a clerk or accountant in some large financial house. To my great astonishment he introduced himself to me as a socialist. "I don't believe like Marx," he said, "that labour produces everything, but I maintain that the task-work of the employed and directed labourer, of whatever grade--whether he uses a pen or a chisel--is always worth more than the wages which the employers pay him for performing it. I feel this myself with regard to my own firm. Month by month I am worth to it more than the sums it gives me. This," he went on, with an odd gleam in his eyes, "is what I may not endure to think of--that others should be always appropriating values which I have produced myself; and nine out of ten of the men who become socialists, do so because they feel as I do about this particular point." [19] General Walker also seeks to assimilate the product of ability to rent; and my criticism of Mr. Webb in this respect applies to him also. General Walker's book was mentioned frequently in connection with my late addresses in America; and it was said by one or two critics that I had borrowed from, and ought to have acknowledged my debt to, him. As a matter of fact, I never saw his book till after my return to England, when I read it with interest and admiration. His doctrines with regard to the _entrepreneur_ is, so far as it goes, fundamentally identical with the main argument of this volume. My criticism of him would be that he does not give to this particular part of his doctrine the foremost place which logically belongs to it; and that though attributing to the _entrepreneur_ some special productive faculty distinct from labour, he starts his work with re-enumerating the old doctrine that labour, capital, and law are the only factors in production. [20] For example, the silk factory at Derby, erected by Lombe, in the reign of George II., the machinery of which comprised 26,000 wheels. [21] These figures represent less than the truth. They are merely given in order to indicate the general character of the situation to-day, as compared with that of an earlier, but still comparatively recent period. To go into details minutely would involve extensive and here needless discussion. [22] A letter was sent me by a friend in America, from a writer who, commenting on my late addresses in that country, said that in the main he entirely agreed with my arguments, as against socialism; but that he could not divest himself of the belief that labour as a whole got less than it produced, and was thus as a whole suffering a chronic wrong. He suggested, however, a method, fundamentally analogous to that set forth in the text, of computing what labour, as such, does produce in reality. He gave his own opinion as to actual facts, as an impression merely; but how misleading impressions may be can be seen from his statements "that all _very great_ fortunes, at all events, must be derived from the underpayment of labour." Had he only considered the case in detail, he would have seen that labour received the highest wages from some of the richest employers. According to his theory the wages of labour, in such cases, would touch the minimum. CHAPTER XIII INTEREST AND ABSTRACT JUSTICE The essential feature of interest, as distinct from the income due to active ability, is that while the latter ceases as soon as the able man ceases to exert himself, the former continues to replenish the recipient's pockets, though for his part he does nothing, or need do nothing, in return for it. Since, then, the possession of this particular form of income is admittedly unconnected with any concurrent exertion on the part of those possessing it (such is the argument of the objectors) the whole portion of the national wealth which, in the form of interest, is at present appropriated by the presumably or the possibly idle, might obviously be appropriated by the state, and applied to public purposes, without lessening in any way even the highest of those rewards which are due to, and are needed to stimulate any active ability whatsoever, and hence without lessening the efficiency of the wealth-producing process as a whole. If we adopt the programme which this argument suggests, it will be possible, so its advocates say, to satisfy the demands of labour by a shorter and more direct method than that of committing ourselves to an estimate of what labour actually produces, and endeavouring to secure that the total which is paid to labour shall accord with it. Now, this programme raises two separate questions. One question is whether the proposed confiscation of interest is in reality, as its advocates maintain it to be, practicable in the sense that the disturbances which it would necessarily cause would not interfere with the production of the fund which it is desired to distribute, and so perhaps leave all classes poorer and not richer than they are. The other question is whether such a confiscation would be just. To some people this second question will possibly seem superfluous. If it can be shown, they will say, that a policy, the avowed object of which is the enrichment of the many at the expense of the relatively few, could be really carried out successfully, and if the many had the power of insisting on it, an inquiry into its abstract justice is merely a waste of time; for whenever the wolf is face to face with the lamb, it will eat up the lamb first and justify its conduct afterwards. And in this argument there is a certain amount of truth; but those who take it for the whole truth allow their own cynicism to overreach them. The fact remains that even the wolves of the human world are obliged to assume, as a kind of necessary armour, and often as their principal weapon, a semblance of justice, however they may despise the reality. The brigand chief justifies his war on society by declaring that society has unjustly made war on him. The wildest demagogues, in their appeals to popular passion, as the history of the French Revolution and of all revolutions shows us, have always been obliged to exhibit the demands of mere self-interest as based on some general theory of what is morally just or right; and however much the theory may accommodate itself to the hope of private advantage, there are few demands made for any great social change which do not derive a large part of their force from persons with whom a belief in the justice of the demands stands first, while--so far at least as their own consciousness is concerned--the prospect of personal advantage stands second or nowhere. This is certainly so in the case which we are now considering. We will, therefore, begin with the question of abstract justice. Let us begin, then, with reminding ourselves that when interest is attacked as such, on the ground that its recipients have themselves done nothing to produce it, whereas other incomes, no matter how large, are presumably the equivalents of some personal effort which corresponds to them, it is assumed that every man has, in natural justice, a right to such wealth as he actually himself produces; and what he produces, as we saw in the last chapter, is that amount of wealth which would not have been produced at all had his efforts not been made, or been other or less intense than they have been. Thus far, then, for the purposes of the present discussion, all parties are agreed; but the moment the assailants of interest take the next step in their argument, we shall find that their errors begin--errors resulting, as we shall see, from an imperfect analysis of facts. For them the two types of correspondence between productive effort and product are, firstly, the manual labourer, who performs some daily task such as riveting plates or bricklaying, and receives an equivalent in wages at the end of each day or week; and, secondly, the manager of some great industrial enterprise, who spends each day so many hours in his office, issuing minute directions with regard to the conduct of his subordinates, and sending his receipts to the bank as they come in from his customers. But these types, though accurate so far as they go, do but cover a part of the actual field of fact. Practically, though of course not absolutely, they ignore the element of time. They represent effort and product as being always so nearly simultaneous that, although the former must literally precede the latter, yet, if we estimate life in terms of years, or even months, or weeks, a man has ceased to produce as soon as he has ceased to work. Now, of certain forms of effort this may be true enough. A bricklayer, for example, as soon as he ceases to lay bricks, ceases to produce anything. His wall-building closes its effects with the walls which he himself has built. It does nothing to facilitate the building of other walls in the future. Similarly such ability as consists in a gift for personal management often ends its effects, and leaves no trace behind it, as soon as the manager possessing these gifts retires. But with many forms of ability the case is precisely opposite. The products of their exercise do not even begin to appear till after--often till long after--the exercise of the ability itself has altogether come to an end. Let us, for example, take the case of a play; and since socialists are still included among the objectors whom we have in view, let us take one of the popular plays written by Mr. Bernard Shaw. Such a play, as Mr. Shaw has publicly boasted--for otherwise I should not mention, and should know nothing of his private affairs--brings to its author wealth in the form of amazing royalties; but until it is acted it brings him no royalties at all, and the actors begin with it only when his own efforts are ended. Moreover, not only do these royalties only begin then, but having once begun, they have no tendency to exhaust themselves. On the contrary the chances are that they will go on increasing till the time arrives, if it ever does, when Mr. Shaw is no longer appreciated. Mr. Shaw, in fact, if he had written one of his most successful plays at twenty, might, so far as that play is concerned, be idle for ever afterwards, even if he lived to the age of Methuselah, and still be enjoying in royalties the product of his own exertions, though he had not exerted himself productively for some seven or eight hundred years. There is no question here of whether, under these conditions, a person like Mr. Shaw might not feel himself constrained on some ground or other to surrender his copyright at some period prior to his own demise. The one point here insisted on is that he could not renounce it on the ground that the wealth protected by it was no longer produced by himself. If he is entitled to the royalties resulting from the performance of his play at any time, on the ground that every man has a right to the products of his own exertions, his right to the royalties resulting from its ten-thousandth performance is, on this ground, as good as his right to the royalties resulting from the first. The royalties on a play, in short, show how certain forms of effort, though not all, continue to yield a product for an indefinite period, though the original effort itself may be never again repeated; and herein these royalties are typical of modern interest generally. They do not, however, constitute in themselves more than a small part of it. We will therefore turn to interest of other kinds, the details of whose genesis are indeed widely different, but which consist similarly of a constant repetition of values, without any corresponding repetition of the effort in which the series originated. Those which we will consider first are the products of organic nature, which have been dwelt upon by a well-known writer as showing us the ultimate source of industrial interest generally, and also at the same time its natural and essential justice. It may be a surprise to some to learn who this writer is. He is Henry George, who is best known to the public as the advocate of a measure of confiscation so crude and so arbitrary, that even socialists have condemned it as impracticable without serious modifications. Henry George, however, although he outdid most socialists in his attack on private wealth of one particular kind--that is to say, the rent of land--was equally vehement in his defence of the interest of industrial capital. Socialists say--and the aphorism is constantly repeated--"A man can get an income only by working or stealing; there is no third way." In answer to this, it was pointed out by George that one kind of wealth, at all events--and we may add that here we have wealth in its oldest form--consists of possessions yielding a natural increase, which has been neither made by the possessors, nor yet stolen by them from anybody else. That is to say, it consists of flocks and herds. A shepherd or herdsman starts with a single pair of animals, from which parents there arises a large progeny. This living increment has not been produced by the man, but it is still more obvious that it has not been produced by his neighbours, and it therefore belongs in justice to the man who owns the parents. George pointed out also that whole classes of possessions besides are, for by far the larger part of their value, equally independent either of corresponding work or of theft. Among such possessions are wines, whose quality improves with time, and which, if sold to-day, may be worth tenpence a bottle, but which four years hence may be worth perhaps half-a-crown. In all such cases--this was George's contention--we have some possession originally small to start with, which year by year is increased in amount or at least in value, not by the efforts of the possessor, but by the secret operations of nature. Here, he argued, we have capital in its typical form; and interest is the gift of nature to the man by whom the capital is owned. George, however, is constrained to supplement this proposition by another. Though he assumes that of the products which are, in the modern world, actually paid as interest by the borrower of capital to the owners of it, the larger part consists of gifts of unaided nature, he admits that they are not the whole. He admits that a part of it is paid for the use of machinery. Now, such interest, he says, has a definitely different origin, and cannot intrinsically be justified in the same way; and if all wealth consisted of such commodities as are due to the efforts of man, and to the man-made machinery which assists him, all interest would be really, as it is said to be by some, indefensible. But, he continues, since interest on capital such as machinery is not the whole of the interest paid in the modern world, but is only a minor part of it, and since in the modern world all forms of capital are interchangeable, the laws which govern us in our dealings with the lesser quantity must necessarily be assimilated to those which govern us in our dealings with the greater. If a ram and a sheep are capital which yields just interest, because their wool and their progeny are increments due to nature, and if a ram and a sheep are exchangeable for some kind of machine, the possession of the one must be placed on a par with the possession of the other. The machine must be treated, though it is not so in strictness, as if it were prolific in the same sense as the beasts are; and a part of what it is used to produce must be paid by the user to the owner of it. Now, both these arguments--that which deals with the fact of natural increase, and that which deals with the assimilation of all such possessions as are interchangeable--are in principle sound. The first, indeed, touches the very root of the whole matter; but the first is exaggerated in his statement of it, and unduly limited in his application, and the second is wholly unnecessary for proving what he desires to prove. The first is exaggerated in his statement of it because, as a matter of fact, the kind of capital whose interest is described by him as the gift of nature is not the major, it is only a minor part of the capital yielding interest under the conditions which obtain to-day. A part far larger is capital in the form of machinery; and if the distinction which George draws between the two is a true one, the case of the flocks and herds should be assimilated to that of the machines, not the case of the machines to that of the flocks and herds. Interest should be denied to both kinds of capital because machines are not naturally prolific, instead of being conceded to both because flocks and herds are so. We shall find, however, that the distinction which George seeks to establish is illusory, that both kinds of capital yield interest in the same way, and that his justification of it in the one case is equally applicable to it in the other. His attempt to distinguish between the two takes the form of a criticism of Bastiat, according to whom the typical source of interest is the added productivity which a given amount of human effort acquires by the use of certain lendable implements. As a type of such implements or machines, Bastiat takes a plane. The maker of a plane lends this plane to another man, who is thus enabled to finish off in a week four more planks than he could have done had he used an adze. If, at the end of the week, the borrower does nothing more than return the plane in good repair to the lender, the borrower gains by the transaction; but the maker and lender not only gains nothing, he loses. For a week he loses his implement which he otherwise might have used himself, and the extra planks which, by the use of it, he could have produced just as easily as his fellow. Such an arrangement would be obviously and absurdly unjust. Justice demands--and practice here follows justice--that he get at the end of the week, not only his own plane back again, but two of the extra planks due to its use besides. A plane, in short--such is Bastiat's meaning, though he does not put it in this precise way--is a possession which is fruitful no less than a sheep and a ram are, or a wine which adds to its value by the mere process of being kept, and it, therefore, yields interest for a virtually similar reason. George, however, seeks to dispose of Bastiat's argument thus: If the maker of the plane lends it, he says, instead of himself using it, and the borrower borrows a plane, instead of himself making one, such an arrangement is simply due to the fact that both parties for the moment happen to find it convenient. For, George observes, it is no part of Bastiat's contention that the plane is due to the exertion of any faculties possessed by the maker only. Either man could make it, just as either man could use it. Why, then, should A pay a tribute to B for the use of something which, to-morrow, if not to-day, he could make for himself without paying anything to anybody? Now, if Bastiat's plane is to be taken as signifying a plane only, the criticism of George is just. But what George forgets is that, if the plane means a plane only--an implement which any man could make just as well as the lender--interest on planes, besides being morally indefensible, would as a matter of fact never be paid at all. Bastiat's plane, however, stands for a kind of capital, the borrowing of which and the paying of interest on which, form one of the most constant features of the modern industrial world; and he evidently assumes, even if he does not say so, that for all this borrowing and paying there is some constant and sufficient reason. Now, the only reason can be--and George's own criticism implies this--that in order to produce the machine-capital borrowed certain faculties are needed which are not possessed by the borrowers; and though this may not be true of a simple hand-plane itself, it is emphatically true of the elaborate modern machinery of which Bastiat merely uses his hand-plane as a symbol. In order to produce such implements of production as these, the exertion of faculties is required which are altogether exceptional, such as high scientific knowledge, invention, and many others. Let invention--the most obvious of these--here do duty for all, and let us consider, for example, the mechanism of a modern cotton mill, or of a boot factory, or a Hoe printing press, or a plant for electric lighting. All these would be impossible if it had not been for inventive faculties as rare in their way as those of a playwright like Mr. Shaw. No one will deny that when a play like "Man and Superman" first acquires a vogue which renders its performance profitable, the royalties paid to the author are values which he has himself created, not indeed by his faculties used directly, but by his faculties embodied in a work which he has accomplished once for all in the past, and which has thenceforward become a secondary and indefinitely enduring self; and if this is true of the royalties resulting from its first profitable performance, it would be equally true of those resulting from the last, even though this should take place on the eve of the Day of Judgment. With productive machinery the case is just the same. If Mr. Shaw, instead of writing "Man and Superman," had been the sole inventor of the steam-engine, and the only man capable of inventing it, every one will admit that he would, by this one inventive effort, have personally co-operated for a time with all users of steam-power, and been part-producer of the increment in which its use resulted. And if this would have been true of his invention when it was only two years old, it would be equally true now. He would still be co-operating with the users of every steam-engine in the world to-day, and adding to their products something which they could not have produced alone. Here, then, we see that in one respect at all events the two kinds of capital, which George attempts to contrast, yield interest for a precisely similar reason. Both consist of a productive power or agency which is external to the borrower himself; and it makes no difference to him whether the auxiliary power borrowed inheres in living tissue, or in a mechanism of brass or iron. But the resemblance between these two forms of capital, and the identity of the reasons why both of them bear interest, do not end here. I quoted in a former chapter an observation of Mr. Sidney Webb's, which he himself applies in a very foolish way, but which is obviously true in itself, and in the present connection is pertinent. Some men he admits are incomparably more productive than others, because they happen to be born with a special kind of ability. But what is this ability itself? It is simply the result, he says, of a process which lies behind them--namely, the natural process of animal and human evolution; and its special products are like those of exceptionally fertile land. That is to say, the ability which produces modern machines is in reality just as much a force of nature as that which makes live-stock fertile, and brings raw wine to maturity. But the same line of argument will carry us much farther than this. As Dr. Beattie Crozier has shown in his work, _The Wheel of Wealth_, the part which nature plays in productive machinery is not confined to the brains of the gifted inventors and their colleagues. It is incorporated in, and identified with, the actual machines themselves. The lever, the cam, the eccentric, the crank, the piston, the turbine, the boiler with the vapour imprisoned in it--devices which it has taxed the brains of the greatest men to elaborate and to co-ordinate--were all latent in nature before these men made them actual; and when once such devices are actualised it is nature that makes them go. There is not merely a transformation of so much human energy into the same amount of natural energy; but nature adds to the former a non-human energy of her own; as--to take a good illustration of Dr. Crozier's--obviously happens in the case of a charge of gunpowder, which, "when used for purposes of blasting, has," he observes, "in itself a thousand times the quantity of pure economic power that is bought in the work of the labourers who supply and mix the ingredients." That is to say, whenever human talent invents and produces a machine which adds to the productivity of any one who uses it with sufficient intelligence, the inventor has shut up in his machine some part of the forces of nature, as though it were an efreet whom a magician has shut up in a bottle, and whose services he can keep for himself, or hand over to others. The efreets shut up in machinery will not work for human beings at all, unless there are human magicians who manage thus to imprison them. They therefore belong to the men who, in virtue of their special capacities, are alone capable of the effort requisite to perform this feat; and it matters nothing to others, by whom the efreets' services are borrowed, whether the effort in question occupied a year or a day, or whether it took place yesterday or fifty years ago. The borrowed efreet produces the same surplus in either case, and interest is a part of this surplus which goes, not to the efreet himself (for this is not possible), but to his master, just as a cab-fare is paid to the cabman and not his horse. Machine-capital, then--or capital in its typical modern form--consists of productive forces which are usable by, and which indeed exist for, the human race at large, because, and only because, they have been captured and imprisoned in implements by the efforts of exceptional men, whose energy thus exercised is perpetuated, and can be lent to others; and what these men receive as interest from those by whom their energy is borrowed, is a something ultimately due to the energy of the lenders themselves--nor is this fact in any way altered by lapse of time. Thus, so far as these special men are concerned, the alleged difference between earned income and unearned altogether disappears; and if one man lives in luxury for sixty years on the interest of an invention which it took him but a month to perfect, while another man every day has to toil for his daily bread, the difference between the two consists not in the fact that the one man works for his bread and the other man does nothing for it, but in the fact that the work of one produces more in a day than that of the other would do in a hundred lifetimes. Here, however, we shall be met with two important objections. In the first place, it will no doubt have occurred to many readers that throughout the foregoing discussion we have assumed that the persons who receive interest on machinery are in all cases the persons by whom the machinery was invented and produced. To the actual inventors and producers it may, indeed, be conceded that the interest which they themselves receive has been earned by their own exertions; but no such concession, it will be said, can be made to these men's heirs. An Edison or a Bessemer may have produced whatever income has come to him in his latest years from the inventive efforts of his earliest; but if such a man has a son to whom this income descends--a half-witted degenerate who squanders it on wine and women, who will not work with his hands and who cannot work with his head--no one can pretend that, in any sense of the word, a fool like this produces any fraction of the thousands that he consumes. And though all of those who live on the interest of inherited capital are not foolish nor vicious, yet in this respect they are all of them in the same position--they have not produced their incomes, and so have no moral right to them. In the second place, the following argument, which was discussed in an earlier chapter, will also be brought forward, refurbished for the present occasion. Let us grant, it will be said, that the inventions which have enriched the world were originally due to the talents of exceptional men, and that without these exceptional men the world would never have possessed them; but when once they have been made, and their powers seen in operation, the human race at large can, if left to itself, take over these powers from the inventors just as the inventors took them over from nature. Indeed, this constantly happens. Any boy with a turning-lathe can to-day make a model steam-engine, and no one will contend that such a model was not made by himself, on the ground that it could not have been made either by him or by anybody unless Watt, with his exceptional genius, had invented steam as a motive-power. One might as well contend that a savage does not really light his own fire, on the ground that the art of kindling wood was found out by Prometheus, and that no one, except for him, would have had any fires at all. The truth is, it will be said, that in such cases as these the powers of the exceptional man, originally confined to himself, are, when his invention is once in practical operation, naturally shared by his fellows, who can only be restrained from using them by artificial devices such as patents--these devices being at best, from a moral point of view, devices by which one man who has given a cheque to another man steals back half the money as soon as the cheque is cashed. Now, both these arguments, so far as they go, are true; but neither has any bearing on the problem which is now before us. That problem arises--let me observe once more--out of the assumption that, as a matter of justice, every man has a right to the products of all such forces as are his own; whence it follows that nobody has a right to the products of any forces which are not definitely in himself. Let us take, then, the latter of the above arguments first. It would doubtless be absurd to contend, were Prometheus alive to-day, that because he invented the art of striking fire from flints he ought to be paid a tribute by every savage who boiled a kettle; for the savage can strike a flint as well as Prometheus himself could. But if fire could be kindled only by a particular sort of match which Prometheus alone could make, the fact that he was really the lighter of all fires would be obvious, and his claim to a payment in respect of the lighting of every one of them would be as sound as the claim of the lighter of street-lamps to his wages. If "Man and Superman" were not a play, but a hoot, which Mr. Shaw had invented in order to call attention to himself, and which any street boy could imitate with the same results, it would be idle for Mr. Shaw to claim a right to royalties from the street boys; but it would be idle only because it would not be possible to collect them. He is able to collect them on his play because, and only because, his play exists in a form which is susceptible of legal protection. If in justice he has a right to these, as he no doubt has, he would, if abstract justice were the sole determining factor, have an equal right to royalties on the use of his peculiar hoot. He fails to have any such right because, as a matter of fact, the principle of abstract justice with which we are here concerned--that every one has a right to everything that he himself produces--has, in common with all abstract moral principles whatsoever, no application to cases in which, from the nature of things, it is wholly impossible to enforce it. And the same criticism is applicable to the other argument before us, which admits that a man who invents a productive machine, or who writes a remunerative play, is, so long as he lives, entitled, because he is the true producer of them, to certain profits arising from the use of either; but adds that his rights to such profits end with his own life, and lose all sanction in justice the moment they are transferred to an heir. In the heir's hands, it is urged, they entirely change their character, and, instead of enabling a man to secure what is honestly his own, become means by which he is enabled to steal what morally belongs to others. Now, if it is seriously contended that nobody has a right to anything which at some time or other he has not personally produced, the interest on machinery, as soon as the inventor dies, not only ought not to belong to the inventor's heir, but it ought not to belong to anybody; for if this interest is not produced by the heir, it is certainly not produced by any of the heir's contemporaries. A contention like this is absurd; there must therefore be something amiss with the premises which lead up to it. Socialists who admit that an inventor during his lifetime has a right to the interest resulting from the use of his own inventions, endeavour to solve the difficulty by maintaining that after his death both invention and interest should pass into the hands of the state; but this doctrine, on whatever grounds it may be defended, cannot be defended as based on the principle now in question, that the sole valid title to possession is personal production. It must, if it is based on any abstract moral principle at all, be based on one of a much more general kind, according to which the ultimate standard of justice is not the deeds of the individual, but the general welfare of society. Here it is true that the appeal is still to abstract justice, but it is not an appeal to abstract justice only. In order to condemn interest on any such ground as this, it is necessary to assume or prove that to make interest illegal, or to confiscate it by taxation when it arises, or by any other means to render its enjoyment impossible, will as a matter of fact have the result desired--namely, a permanent rise in the general level of prosperity. It is only by means of an assumption of this purely practical kind that the abstract moral principle can be applied to the case at all; and thus let us approach the problem from whatever side we will, we are brought from the region of theory down into that of practice, not, indeed, by an abrupt leap, but by a gradual and necessary transition. We are not abandoning our considerations of what, in abstract justice, ought to be; but we are compelled to interpret what ought to be by considerations of what, as the result of such and such arrangements, will be. To sum up, then, the conclusions which we have reached thus far--if we confine our attention to those recipients of interest who have themselves produced the capital from which the interest is derived, and compare such incomes with those which renew themselves only as the result of continued effort, it is absolutely impossible, on any general theory of justice, to sanction the latter as earned, and condemn the former as unearned. If, on the other hand, we turn to those whose incomes consist of interest on capital produced by, and inherited from, their fathers, and if we argue that here at all events we come to a class of interest on which its living recipients can have no justifiable claim, since we start with admitting that it originates in the efforts of the dead, our argument, though plausible in its premises, is stultified by its logical consequence; since the same principle on which we are urged as a sacred duty to take the income in question away from its present possessors, would forbid our allowing it to pass into the possession of anybody else. In short, if continued daily labour, or else the exercise of invention, or some other form of ability, at some period of their lives by persons actually living, constitutes in justice the sole right to possession, the human race as a whole has no right to profit by any productive effort on the part of past generations; but each generation ought, so far as is practicable, to start afresh in the position of naked savages. The fact that nobody would maintain a fantastic proposition like this is sufficient to show that, on the tacit admission of everybody, it is impossible to attack interest by insisting on any abstract distinction between incomes that are earned and unearned, and treating the latter as felonious, while holding the former sacred. It is equally true, however, that on such grounds alone it is no less impossible to defend interest than to attack it; and here we arrive at what is the real truth of the matter--namely, that in cases like the present the principles of ideal justice do not, indeed, give us false guidance, but give us no guidance at all, unless we take them in connection with the concrete facts of society, and estimate social arrangements as being either right or wrong by reference to the practical consequences which do, or which would result from them. The practical aspects of the question we will discuss in the following chapter. CHAPTER XIV THE SOCIALISTIC ATTACK ON INTEREST AND THE NATURE OF ITS SEVERAL ERRORS If we reconsider what we have seen in the last chapter, we shall realise that the moral or theoretical attack on interest, as income which is unjustifiable because it has not been personally earned, is, when tested by the logic of those who make it, an attack, not on interest itself, but on bequest; and that such is the case will become even more evident when we see what the theory comes to, as translated into a practical programme. The majority of those who attack interest to-day, no matter whether in other respects they are advocates of socialism or opponents of it, agree in declaring that what a man has personally produced he has a perfect right to enjoy and spend as he pleases. The only right they deny to him is the right to any further products which, before the capital has been spent by him, may result from the productive use of it. Now, the practical object with which this restriction is advocated is to render impossible, not accumulations of wealth (for these are recognised as legitimate when the reward of personal talent), but merely their perpetuation in the hands of others who are economically idle. So far, therefore, as this practical object is concerned, it would matter little whether the man by whom the accumulation was made were allowed to receive interest on it during his own lifetime or no, provided that this right to interest were not transmissible to his heir; or even whether he were allowed or were not allowed to leave anything to an heir at all. For the heir at best would merely receive a sum which, since it could not be used by him so as to bring about its own renewal, would be bound soon to exhaust itself; and the general effect of permitting bequests of this sterilised kind would differ from the effect of prohibiting bequests altogether, not because it would tend to render accumulated fortunes permanent, but only because it would protract for a decade or two the process of their inevitable dissipation. We may, therefore, say that, for the purposes of the present discussion, the modern attack on interest, considered apart from any otherwise socialistic programme, practically translates itself into this--namely, the advocacy of a scheme which, as regards the actual producers of capital, leaves their existing rights both to principal and interest untouched, and would not even extinguish altogether their existing powers of bequest, but would limit the exercise of these to the principal sum only,[23] and prohibit the transmission to any private person of any right whatever to the usufruct of its productive employment. Here, then, at last, we have something definite to discuss--a single proposed alteration in certain existing arrangements; and by comparing the situation which actually exists to-day with that which the proposed alteration, if carried into effect, would produce, we shall see whether the alteration is workable and practically defensible or no. Let us begin with the situation which actually exists to-day, confining ourselves to those features of it which are vital to the present issue. Let us take two men of practically contrasted types, each of whom has inherited a capital of fifty thousand pounds. The ultimate object of each is, in one way or another, to make his capital provide him with the life that he most desires; but the first man is thoughtful, far-seeing, and shrewd, while the second cares for nothing but the gaiety and pleasure of the moment; and they deal with their capitals in accordance with their respective characters. The first meets, let us say, with the inventor of an agricultural machine, which will, if successfully manufactured, double the wheat crop of every acre to the cultivation of which it is applied. He places his capital, as a loan, in this inventor's hands. The machine is constructed, and used with the results desired; and the man who has lent the capital receives each year a proportion of the new loaves which are due to the machine's efficiency, and would not have existed otherwise. The second man invests his fortune in any kind of security which has the advantage of being turned easily into cash, and draws out month by month so many hundred pounds, without reference to anything but the pleasures he desires to purchase; and by the end of a few years both his capital and his income have disappeared. Now, any one judging these men by the current standards of common-sense would, while praising the first as a model of moral prudence, condemn the second as a fool who had brought his ruin upon himself, and curtly dismiss him, if a bachelor, as being nobody's enemy but his own. But before we indorse either of these judgments as adequate, let us consider more minutely what in each case has been really done. Let us start, then, with noting this. Whether a man invests his capital in any productive machine and then lives on the interest, or else spends it as income on his own personal pleasures, he is doing in one respect precisely the same thing. He is giving something to other men in order that they in return may make certain efforts for his benefit, of a kind which he himself prescribes. This is obviously true when, spending his capital as income, what he pays for is personal service, such as that of a butler or footman who polishes his silver plate. It is equally true when he pays for the plate itself. He is paying the silversmith so to exert his muscles that an ounce or a pound of silver may be wrought into a specific form. If he pays a toy-maker to make him a dancing-doll, he is virtually paying him to dance in his own person. He is paying him to go through a series of prescribed muscular movements. Similarly when he pays a large number of men to construct a productive machine instead of a doll or an ornament, he is paying for the muscular movements from which the machine results. Here we come back to one of the main economic truths to the elucidation of which our earlier chapters were devoted. It was there pointed out that the machinery of the modern world owes its existence to the fact that men of exceptional talent, by possessing the control of goods which a number of other men require, are able in return for the goods to make these other men exert themselves in a variety of minutely prescribed and elaborately co-ordinated ways. In short, all spending is, on the part of those who spend, a determination of the efforts of others in such ways as the spender pleases. Further, as was pointed out in an earlier chapter also, the only goods thus generally exchangeable for effort are those common necessaries of existence for which most men must always work, and which may here be represented by food, the first and the most important of them. Hence, whenever the question arises of how any given capital shall be treated--of whether it shall be invested or else spent as income--this capital must be regarded as existing in the indeterminate form of food, which is equally capable of being treated in one way or the other. And any man's capital represents for him, according to its amount, the power of feeding, and so determining the actions of a definite number of other men for some definite period. Since, therefore, the two capitalists whose conduct we have been taking as an illustration have been supposed by us to possess fifty thousand pounds apiece, we shall give precision to the situation if we say that each, at starting, has the power of feeding, and so determining the actions of, two hundred other men for a period of two years. So much, then, being settled, let us consider these further facts. Both the capitalists, as we set out with observing, have in employing their capital the same ultimate object--namely, that of securing through the purchased efforts of others a continuous supply of things which will render their lives agreeable. And now in connection with this fact let us go back to another, which has also been pointed out before, that all efforts, the sole object of which is to please from moment to moment the man who directs and pays for them, are, whether embodied in the form of commodities or no, really reducible to some kind of personal service, if a toy-maker, in return for food, makes a dancing-doll for another man, he might just as well have pirouetted for so many hours himself; and if the purchaser would be more amused by a man's antics than by a puppet's, this is precisely what the toy-maker would have been set to do. In short, if we consider only the economic side of the matter, without reference to the moral, whenever a man spends anything on his own personal pleasure, he is virtually paying some other man, or a number of other men to dance for him.[24] What, therefore, both our capitalists desire as their ultimate object, is to keep as many men as they are able to provide with food always dancing for their pleasure, or in readiness to do so when wanted; but in setting themselves to achieve this object in their two different ways, what happens is as follows. Both use their capital by dispensing it in the form of daily rations to two hundred other men, on condition that these men do something; but the first feeds the other men, not on condition that they dance for him, or do anything that ministers to his own immediate pleasure, but on condition that they construct a machine which will enable, as soon as it is finished, a given amount of human effort to double the amount of food which such effort would have produced otherwise. Thus, by the end of two years--the time which we suppose to be required for the machine's completion--though the original food-supply of the capitalist will all have been taken up and disappeared, its place will have been taken by a machine which will enable forever afterwards one-half of the two hundred men to produce food for the whole. A hundred men, therefore, are left for whom food can be permanently provided, without any effort to produce it being made by these men themselves; and since of this annual surplus a part--let us call it half--will be taken as interest on the machine by the man with whose capital it was constructed, he will now have the means of making fifty men dance for his pleasure in perpetuity; for as often as they have eaten up one supply of food, this, through the agency of the machine, will have been replaced by another. Our second capitalist, meanwhile, who deals with his capital as income, starts with setting the dancers to dance for his behoof at once; and he keeps the whole two hundred dancing and doing nothing else, so long as he has food with which to feed them. This life is charming so long as it lasts, but in two years' time it abruptly comes to an end. The capitalist's cupboard is bare. He has no means of refilling it. The dancers will dance no more for him, for he cannot keep them alive; and the efforts for two years of two hundred men, as directed by a man who treats his capital as income, will now have resulted in nothing but the destruction of that capital itself, and a memory of muscular movements which, so far as the future is concerned, might just as well have been those of monkeys before the deluge. Now, if we take the careers of our two capitalists as standing for the careers of two individuals only, and estimate them only as related to these men themselves, we might content ourselves with indorsing the judgment which conventional critics would pass on them, and say of the one that he had acted as his own best friend, and dismiss the other as nobody's enemy but his own. But we are, in our present inquiry, only concerned with individuals as illustrating kinds of conduct which are, or which might be, general; and the effects of their conduct, which we here desire to estimate, are its effects of it, not on themselves, but on society taken as a whole. If we look at the matter in this comprehensive way, we shall find that the facile judgments to which we have just alluded leave the deeper elements of our problem altogether untouched. The difference between the ultimate results of the two ways of treating capital will, to the conventional critic, seem to have been sufficiently explained, by saying that the energy stored up in a given accumulation of food reappears when employed in one way, in the efficiency of a permanent machine; and is, when employed in the other, so far as human purposes are concerned, as completely lost as it would have been had it never existed. But if we reconsider a fact which was dwelt upon in our last chapter, we shall see that the difference is really much greater than this. When the potential energy residing in so much food has been converted into the energy of so much human labour, and when this is so directed that a productive machine results from it, there is in the machine, as Dr. Crozier puts it, an indefinitely larger amount of "pure economic power," than that which has been expended in the work of the labourers' muscles. While the energy of the labourers has merely resulted in a bottle, or a cage, we may say, of sufficient strength, the genius of the man who directed them has captured and imprisoned an elemental slave in it, who, so long as the cage confines him, will supplement the efforts of human muscle with his own. But when the energy latent in food is converted into such efforts as dancing, the result produced is the equivalent of the human effort only. Thus in the modern world of scientific enterprise and invention, to invest capital in machinery and then live on the interest from it, means to press into the service of mankind an indefinite number of non-human auxiliaries, and year by year to live on a part of the products which these deathless captives are never tired of producing. To spend capital as income on securing immediate pleasures means either to forgo the chance of adding any new auxiliaries to those that we possess already, or else to let those who are at our service already, one after one, escape us--or, in other words, to make the productive force now at the disposal of any prosperous modern country decline towards that zero of efficiency from which industrial progress starts, and which marks off helpless savagery from the first beginnings of civilisation. It is no doubt inconceivable, in the case of any modern nation, that a climax of the kind just indicated could never reach its completion. If all the capitalists, for example, of Great Britain or America, were suddenly determined to live on their capital itself, they could do so only by continuing for a considerable time to employ a great deal of it precisely as it is employed at present. Indeed, so long as they continued to demand the luxuries which machines produce, it might seem that it was hardly possible for them to get rid of their capital at all. But what would really happen may be briefly explained thus:-- If we take the case of any modern country, the amount of its income at any given time depends for its sustentation on machines already in existence; and its increase is dependent on the gradual supersession of these by new ones yet more efficient. But the efficiency of the former would soon begin to decrease, and would ultimately disappear altogether, unless they were constantly repaired and their lost substance was renewed; while the latter would never exist unless there were men to make them. Hence, under modern conditions, in any prosperous and progressive country, a large portion of what is called the manufacturing class is always engaged, not in producing articles of consumption, comfort, or luxury, but in repairing and renewing the machines by which such articles are at present multiplied, or else in constructing new machines which shall supplement or replace the old. Thus, in Great Britain, towards the close of the nineteenth century, these makers and repairers of machinery were, with the exception of coal-miners, the industrial body whose proportional increase was greatest. In the modern world the spending of capital as income is a process which, in proportion as it became general, would accomplish itself by affecting the position of men like these. It would consist of a withdrawal of men who are at present occupied in maintaining existing machines, or else in constructing new ones from their anvils, hammers, files, lathes, and furnaces, and making them dance instead. This withdrawal would, in proportion as it became general, render the construction of new machines impossible, and would leave the efficiency of those now in use to exhaust itself. That such is the case is illustrated on a small scale by the conduct of individuals who live on their capital now. If a farmer, whose capital consists largely of an agricultural plant, desires to spend more than his proceeds of his farm are worth, he virtually takes the men who have been mending his barns and reapers, and sets them to build a buggy which will take him to the neighbouring races. The varnish on the buggy is bought with the rust on the reaper's blades; the smart, weather-proof apron with the barn's unmended roof. If the managing body of a railroad pays a higher dividend to the shareholders than can be got out of its net earnings, the results are presently seen in cars that are growing dirty, in engines that break down, in rotten sleepers, and in trains that run off the track. The men who were once fed out of a certain portion of the traffic receipts to keep these things in repair, are now fed to dance for the shareholders, thus supplying them with spurious dividends. A farm or a railroad which was managed on these principles would ultimately cease to produce or to do anything for anybody; and if all modern capital were managed in a similar way, all the multiplied luxuries distinctive of modern civilisation would, one by one, disappear like crops which were left to rot for lack of machines to reap them with, and train services which had ceased because the engines were all burned out. That such a climax should ever, in any modern country, complete itself cannot, let me say once more, be apprehended as a practical possibility; but it is practically impossible only because the earlier stages of the approach to it would lead to a situation that was intolerable long before it ceased to be irreparable. And here we reach the point to which the foregoing examination has been leading us. It is precisely this course of conduct, the end of which would be general ruin, that any attack on interest, by means of special taxation or otherwise, would, so long as it lasted, stimulate and render inevitable. Let me point out--though it ought in a general way to be self-evident--precisely how this is. We start with assuming--for, as we have seen already, so much is conceded by those who attack interest to-day--that the owners of capital, however their rights may be restricted, still have rights to it of some kind. But a man's rights to his capital will not be rights at all unless they empower him to use it in one way or another as a means of ministering to his own personal desires; and it is possible for him so to use it in one or other of two ways only--either by keeping it in the form of some productive machine or plant, and living on a part of the values which this produces, or by trenching on the substance of the machine or the plant itself in the manner, and with the results, which have just been explained and analysed. If, therefore, capitalists are to be virtually deprived of their interest, either by means of a special tax on "unearned incomes" or otherwise, but are yet permitted to enjoy their capital somehow, no course is open to them but to employ for their private pleasures the men by whom this capital, in such forms as machines or railroads, is at present maintained, renewed, and kept from lapsing into a state in which it would be unable to do or to produce anything. And if any one still thinks that, by such a course of conduct, if ever it became general, as it would do under these conditions, the owners of capital would be injuring themselves alone, he need only reflect a little longer on one of our suggested illustrations, and ask himself whether the gradual deterioration of railroads would have no effect on the world beyond that of impoverishing the shareholders. It would obviously affect the many as much as it affected the few, and the kind of catastrophe that would result from the deterioration of railroads is typical of that which would result from the deterioration of capital generally. It would, then, be a sufficient answer to those who attack interest, and propose to transfer it from its present recipients to the state, to elucidate, as has here been done, the two following points: firstly, that to interest as a means of enjoying wealth--the right to such enjoyment itself not being here disputed--the only alternative is a system which would thus prove fatal to everybody; and, further, that, conversely, the enjoyment of wealth through interest not only possesses this negative advantage, but is actively implicated in, and is the natural corollary of, that progressive accumulation of force in the form of productive machinery to which all the augmented wealth of the modern world is due. By the identification of the enjoyment of capital with the enjoyment of some portion of the products of it, the good of the individual capitalist is identified with the good of the community; for it will, in that case, be the object of all capitalists to raise the productivity of all capital to a maximum; while a system which would compel the possessor, if he is to enjoy his capital at all, to do so by diminishing its substance and allowing its powers to dwindle, would identify the only advantage he could possibly get for himself with the impoverishment of everybody else, and ultimately of himself also. But the crucial facts of the case have not been exhausted yet. There are few phenomena of any complex society which are not traceable to more causes than one, or at least to one cause which presents itself under different aspects. Such is the case with interest. Its origin, its functions, and its justification, in the modern world, must be considered under an aspect, at which hitherto we have only glanced. Throughout the present discussion we have been assuming that the questions at issue turn ultimately on the character of human motive. On both sides it has been assumed that men of exceptional powers will not produce exceptional amounts of wealth, unless they are allowed the right of enjoying some substantial proportion of it. This is a psychological truth which, together with its social consequences, has been dealt with elaborately in two of our earlier chapters. It was there shown that the production of exceptional wealth by those men whose peculiar powers alone enable them to produce it, involves efforts on their part which, unlike labour, cannot be exacted of them by any outside compulsion, but can only be educed by the prospect of a secured reward; and that this reward consists, as has just been said, of the enjoyment of a part of the product proportionate to the magnitude of the whole. But what the proportion should be, and in what manner it should be enjoyed, were questions which were then passed over. They were passed over in order that they might be discussed separately. It was pointed out, however, that the reward, in order to be operative, must be such as will be felt to be sufficient by these men themselves, and that its precise amount and quality can be determined by them alone--just as, if what we desire is to coax an invalid to eat, we can coax him only with food which he himself finds appetising. Let us now take these questions up again, and examine them more minutely, and we shall find that interest is justified from a practical point of view by the fact that the enjoyment of capital by this particular means is not only the sole manner of enjoying it which is consistent with the general welfare, but also constitutes the advantage which, in the eyes of most great producers, gives to capital the larger part of its value, and renders the desire of producing it efficient as a social motive. The reasons why the right to interest forms, in the eyes of the active producers of capital, the main object of their activity are to be found, firstly, in the facts of family affection, and, secondarily, in those of general social intercourse, which together form the medium of by far the larger part of our satisfactions. In spite of the selfishness which distinguishes so much of human action, a man's desire to secure for his family such wealth as he can is one of the strongest motives of human activity known; and the fact that it operates in the case of many who are notoriously selfish otherwise, shows how deeply it is ingrained in the human character. One of the first uses to which a man who has produced great wealth puts it is in most cases to build a house more or less proportionate to his means; and it is his pride and pleasure to see his wife and children acclimatise themselves to their new environment. But such a house would lose most of its charm and meaning for him if the fortune which enabled him to live in it were to dwindle with each day's expenditure, and his family after his death were to be turned into the street, beggars. If each individual were a unit whose interests ended with himself; if generations were like stratified rocks, superposed one on another but not interconnected; if--to quote a pithy phrase, I do not know from whom--"if all men were born orphans and died bachelors," then the right to draw income from the products of permanently productive capital would for most men lose much of what now makes it desirable. But since individuals and generations are not thus separated actually, but are, on the contrary, not merely as a scientific fact, but as a fact which is vivid to every one within the limits of his daily consciousness dovetailed into one another, and could not exist otherwise, a man's own fortune, with the kind of life that is dependent on it, is similarly dovetailed into fortunes of other people, and his present and theirs is dovetailed into a general future. We have seen how this is the case with regard to his own family; but the matter does not end there. Individual households do not live in isolation; and there are for this fact two closely allied reasons. If they did there could be no marriage; there could also be nothing like social intercourse. It is social intercourse of a more or less extended kind that alone makes possible, not only love and marriage, but most of the pleasures that give colour to life. We see this in all ranks and in all stages of civilisation. Savages meet together in numerous groups to dance, like civilised men and women in New York or in London. The feast, or the meal eaten by a large gathering, is one of the most universal of all human enjoyments. But in all such cases the enjoyment involves one thing--namely, a certain similarity, underlying individual differences, between those persons who take part in it. Intimate social intercourse is, as a rule, possible only between those who are similar in their tastes and ideas with regard to the minute details which for most of us make up the tesseræ of life's daily mosaic--similar in their manners, in their standards of beauty and comfort, in their memories, their prospects, or (to be brief) in what we may call their class habituations. This is true of all men, be their social position what it may. It is true, of course, that the quality of a man's life, as a whole, depends on other things also, of a wider kind than these. It depends not only on the fact, but also on his consciousness of the fact, that he is a citizen of a certain state or country, though with most of its inhabitants he will never exchange a word; or that he is a member of a certain church; or that, being a man and not a monkey, his destiny is identified with that of the human species. But, so far as his enjoyment of private wealth is concerned, each man as a rule, though to this there are individual exceptions, enjoys it mainly through the life of his own _de facto_ class--the people whose manners and habits are more or less similar to his own, because they result from the possession of more or less similar means. He is, therefore, not interested in the permanence of his own wealth only. He is equally interested in the permanence of the wealth of a body of men, the life of which must, like that of all corporations, be continuous. There is in this fact much more than at first appears. Let us go back to a point insisted on in the previous chapter. It was there shown, in connection with the question of abstract justice, that those who attack interest on the ground that it is essentially income for which its recipients give nothing in return, fall into the error of ignoring the element of time, without reference to which the whole process of life is unintelligible. It was shown, by various examples, that in a large number of cases the efforts which ultimately result in the production of great wealth do not produce it till after, often till long after, the original effort has come altogether to an end. Let us now take this point in connection, not with abstract theories, but with the concrete facts of conduct. Here again those who attack interest fall into the same error. For example, in answer to arguments used by me when speaking in America, one socialistic critic eagerly following another called my attention by name to persons notoriously wealthy, some of whom had never engaged in active business at all, while others had ceased to do so for many years; and demanded of me whether I contended that idlers such as these are doing anything whatever to produce the incomes which they are now enjoying. If they are, said the critics, let this wonderful fact be demonstrated. If they are not, then it must stand to reason that the community will gain, and cannot possibly suffer, by gradually taking the incomes of these persons away from them, and rendering it impossible that incomes of a similar kind shall in the future be ever enjoyed by anybody. The general nature of the error involved in this class of argument can be shown by a very simple illustration. In many countries the government year by year makes a large sum by state lotteries. This may be a vicious procedure, but let us assume for the moment that it is legitimate, and that everybody is interested in its perpetuation. The largest of the prizes drawn in such lotteries is considerable--often amounting to more than twenty thousand pounds. Now, as soon as the drawing on any one occasion had been accomplished, it might be argued with perfect truth, in respect of that occasion only, that, the man who had won such fortune having done nothing to produce it, the community would be so much richer if the government, having paid the money to him, were to take it all back again by a special tax on winnings. This would be true with respect to that one occasion; but if any government were to follow such a procedure systematically, no one would ever buy a lottery ticket again, and the whole lottery system would thenceforth come to an end. What is true of wealth won in lotteries is true of wealth in general. If the desire of possessing wealth is in any way a stimulus to the production of it, those who are motived to produce it by this desire to-day are motived by the desire of a something which they see to be desirable and attainable because they see it around them, embodied in the position of others, as the final result of the efforts of a long-past yesterday. If this result were never to be seen realised, no human being would make any effort to achieve it. Let us--to go into particulars--suppose that the sole desire which moves exceptional men to devote their capacities to the augmentation of their country's wealth is the desire to join a class which, whether idle or active otherwise--whether devoted to mere pleasure or to philanthropy, or an enlightened patronage of the arts, or to speculative thought and study--is itself in an economic sense altogether unproductive. In order to join such a class, and to work with a view of joining it, society must be so organised that such a class can exist; and the fact of its existence constitutes the main moral magnet which, on our present hypotheses, is permanently essential to the development of the highest economic activity. Such being the case, then, the following conclusion reveals itself, which, although it may seem paradoxical, will be found on reflection to be self-evident--the conclusion namely, that a class which, if considered by itself, is absolutely non-productive, may, when taken in connection with the social system as a whole, be an essential and cardinal factor in the working machinery of production, constituting, as it would do by the mere fact of its existence, the charged electric accumulator by which the machinery is kept in motion; just as the mere existence of men, seen to be secure in their possession of the prizes of past lotteries, is the magnet which alone can make other men buy tickets for the lotteries of the future. I have given this case as an assumption; but it is not an assumption only. The desire for wealth as a means of living in absolute idleness is probably confined, as a fact, in all countries to a few. In America especially it is a matter for surprise to strangers that men who have made fortune beyond the possibilities of pleasurable expenditure so rarely retire on them to cultivate the pursuits of leisure. But even in America, if they do not value leisure for themselves, they value it for their women, to whom, there as in all countries, four-fifths of the charm and excitement of private life are due; and the sustained possibility of leisure, even if not the enjoyment of it--a possibility which can rest only on a basis of sustained fortunes--is the main advantage which, in all civilised countries, gives wealth its meaning for those who already possess it, and its charm for those who are, in order to possess it, exerting at any given moment their energies and their intellect in producing it. The source of such sustained fortunes, in their distinctively modern form, is, as we have seen already, such and such forces of nature, which, captured and embodied in machines and other appliances by the masters of science and men of executive energy, and subsequently directed by other men of cognate talents, supplement the efficiency of ordinary human labour, thus yielding the surplus of which modern fortunes are a part, the remainder forming a fund which diffuses itself throughout the mass of the community. That part of the surplus which constitutes such fortunes is interest; and now let us sum up what in this and the previous chapter our examination of the criticisms directed against interest has shown us. In the first place, then, we saw that the theoretical attack on interest, on the ground that it is income which is not earned by the recipients, but is virtually taken by the few from the products of the labour of the many, is chimerical in its moral and false in its economic implications. We saw, in the second place, coming down to the practical aspects of the question, that interest is the only form in which the owners of capital can enjoy their wealth at all, without drying up the sources from which most modern wealth springs, thus bringing ruin to the community no less than to themselves. We saw, in the third place, that, quite apart from the welfare of the community, interest constitutes, for the owners of wealth themselves, the means of enjoying it which mainly makes it desirable, and the object for the sake of which, at any given moment, the master spirits of industry are engaged in producing and increasing it. The reader must observe, however, that this conclusion is here stated in general terms only. It has not been contended--for this question has not been touched upon--that interest may not, when received in certain amounts, be justifiably made the subject of some special taxation. Any such question must be decided by reference to special circumstances, and cannot be discussed apart from them. Nor has it been contended that, within certain limits, the power of bequest is not susceptible of modification without impairing the energies of the few or the general prosperity of the many. The sole point insisted on here is this: that any special tax on interest, or any tampering with the powers of bequest, begins to be disastrous to all classes alike, if it renders, and in proportion as it renders to any appreciable degree, the natural rewards of the great producers of wealth less desirable in their own eyes than they are and otherwise would be. FOOTNOTES: [23] Mr. G. Wilshire, in his detailed criticism of my American speeches, states twice over the modern socialistic doctrine as to this point. The maker or inheritor of capital, he says, could, under socialism, "buy all the automobiles he wanted, all the diamonds, all the champagne; or he could build a palace. In other words, he could spend his income in consumable goods, but he could not invest either in productive machinery or in land." [24] This is merely saying that all economic effort has, for its ultimate aim, a desirable state of consciousness, which might be contemptible if it really depended on looking on at dances, or refined if it depended on the cultivation of flowers, or listening to great singers, or witnessing the performance of great plays, or on the enlargement of the mind by travel. CHAPTER XV EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY Having now dealt with two of those three ideas or conceptions which, though not necessarily connected with the specific doctrines of socialism, owe much of their present diffusion to the activity of socialistic preachers--that is to say, the idea, purely statistical, that labour, as contrasted with the directive ability of it, actually produces much more than it gets, and the further idea that the many could ameliorate their own position by appropriating the interest now received by the few; having dealt with these two ideas, it remains for us to consider the third--namely, that which is generally suggested by the formula Equality of Opportunity, or, more particularly (for this is what concerns us here), equality of opportunity in the domain of economic production. We must start with recollecting that if the wealth of a country depends mainly, as we have here seen that it does, on the efforts of those of its citizens whose industrial talent is the greatest, the more effectively all such talent is provided with an opportunity of exerting itself the greater will the wealth and prosperity of that country be. In other words, if potential talent is to be actualised, opportunity is as needful for its exercise as is the stimulus of a proportionate reward. That economic opportunity ought, therefore, to be equalised, so far as possible, is, as an abstract principle, too obvious to need demonstration. But abstract principles are useless till we apply them to a concrete world; and when we apply our abstract doctrine of opportunity to the complex facts of society and human nature, a principle so simple in theory will undergo as many modifications as a film of level water will if we spill it over an uneven surface. The first fact which will confront us, when we come down from theory to facts, is one which could not be more forcibly emphasised than it has been by a socialistic writer,[25] whose utterances were quoted in one of our previous chapters. This is the fact that, in respect of their powers of production, just as of most others, human beings are in the highest degree unequal. They are unequal in intellect and imagination. More especially they are unequal in energy, alertness, executive capacity, initiative and in what we may describe generally as practical driving force. Such being the case, then, if it could actually be brought about that every individual at a given period of his life should start with economic opportunities identical with those of his contemporaries, each generation would be like horses chosen at haphazard, and started at the same instant to struggle over the same course in the direction of a common winning-post. And what would be the result? A few individuals would be out of sight in a moment; the mass at various distances would be struggling far behind them, and a large residuum would have been blown before it had advanced a furlong. Thus, by making men's adventitious opportunities equal, we should no more equalise the result for the sake of which the opportunities were demanded than we should give every cab-horse in London a chance of winning the Derby by allowing it on Derby Day to go plodding over the course at Epsom. On the contrary, by inducing all to contemplate the same kind of success, we should be multiplying the sense of failure and dooming the majority to a gratuitous discontent with positions in which they might have taken a pride had they not learned to look beyond them. And now, from this fact, to which we shall come back presently, let us turn to the question of how, and in what respects, equality of opportunity is in practical life attainable. The most obvious manner in which an approach to such equality can be made is by an equalisation of opportunities for education in early life, or, in other words, by a similar course of schooling, a similar access to books, and similar leisure for studying them. But even here, at this preliminary stage, we shall find that the equality of opportunity is to a large extent illusory. Let us suppose that there are two boys, equal in general intelligence, and unequal only in their powers of mental concentration, who start their study of German side by side in the same class-room. One boy, in the course of a year or so, will be able to read German books almost as easily as books in his own language, while the other will hardly be able to guess the drift of a sentence without laborious reference to his hated grammar and dictionary. Now, when once a situation such as this has arisen, the opportunities of the two boys have ceased to be equal any longer. The one has placed himself at an indefinite advantage over the other, which is quite distinct from the superiority originally inherent in himself. Among the educational opportunities which reformers desire to equalise, one of the chief is that of access to adequate libraries; and it is, they say, in this respect more perhaps than any other that the rich man has at present an unfair advantage over the poor. It is virtually this precise advantage that will now be in possession of the boy who has thus far outstripped his classmate. In his mastery of German he has a key to a vast literature--a key which the other has not. He is now like a rich man with an illimitable library of his own, while the other by comparison is like a poor man who can get at no books at all. Thus if opportunity, in its most fundamental form, were equalised for all boys, no matter how completely, the equality would be only momentary. It would begin to disappear by the end of the first few months, not because the boys would still, as they did at starting, be bringing to their tasks intrinsically unequal faculties, but because some of them would have already monopolised the aid of an adventitious knowledge by which the practical efficiency of their natural faculties would be multiplied. But education is merely a preliminary to the actual business of life. Let us pass on to the case of our equally educated youths when they enter on the practical business of making their own fortunes. What kind of equal opportunity can be possibly provided for them now? Since socialists are the reformers who, in dealing with objects aimed at, are least apt to be daunted by practical difficulties, let us see how equality of opportunity in business life is conceived of and described by them. The general contention of socialists in this respect is, says one of their best-known American spokesmen,[26] "that the fact that capital is now in the hands of private persons gives them an unfair advantage over those who own nothing," for capital consists of the implements of advantageous production; and socialists, he says, would secure an equality of industrial opportunity for all by "vesting the ownership of the means of production in the state"; the result of which procedure would, he goes on, be this: "that every one would have his own canoe, and it would be up to each to do his own paddling." Now, purists in thought and argument might make it a subject of complaint, perhaps, that the writer, as soon as he reaches a vital part of his argument, should lapse into the imagery of an old music-hall song. But such an objection would be very much misplaced, for the ideas entertained by socialists as to this particular point closely resemble those which make music-hall songs popular. They consist of familiar images which are accepted without being analysed; and the image of man seated in an industrial canoe of his own, and paddling it just as he pleases without reference to anybody else, very admirably represents the lot which socialists promise to everybody, and which dwells as a possibility in the imagination of even their serious thinkers. But let us take this dream in connection with facts of the modern world, which these men, in much of their reasoning, themselves recognise as unalterable, and we shall see it give place to realities of a very different aspect. To judge from our author's language, one would suppose that modern capital was made up entirely of separate little implements like sewing-machines, and that every one would, if the state were the sole capitalist, receive on application a machine of the same grade, which he might take away with him, and use or break in a corner. Now, if modern capital were really of this nature, the state no doubt might conceivably do something like what the writer suggests, in the way of dealing out similar industrial opportunities to everybody. But, as he himself is perfectly well aware, the distinctive feature of capital in the modern world is one which renders any such course impossible. Modern capital, as a whole, in so far as it consists of implements, consists not of implements which can be used by each user separately. It consists of enormous mechanisms, with the works and structures pertaining to them, which severally require to be used by thousands of men at once, and which no one of the number can use without reference to the operations of the others. If the state were to acquire the ownership of all the steel-mills at Pittsburg, how could it do more than is done by their present owners, to confer on each of the employés any kind of position analogous to that of a man "who has his own canoe"? The state could just as easily perform the literal feat of cutting up the _Lusitania_ into a hundred thousand dinghys, in each of which somebody would enjoy the equal opportunity of paddling a passenger from Sandy Hook to Southampton. But we will not tie our author too closely to the terms of his own metaphor. The work from which I have just quoted is a booklet[27] in which he devoted himself to the task of refuting in detail the arguments urged by myself in the course of my American speeches. We will, therefore, turn to his criticism of what, in one of my speeches, I said about the state post-office, and we shall there get further light with regard to his real meaning. I asked how any sorter or letter-carrier employed in the post-office by the state was any more his own master, or had any more opportunities of freedom, than a messenger or other person employed by a private firm. Our author's answer is this: "That the public can determine what the wages of a postman shall be--that is, they can, if they so choose (by their votes), double the wages now prevailing." Therefore, our author proceeds, "the postal employé, in a manner, may be considered as a man employing himself." Now, first let me observe that, as was shown in our seventh chapter, wages under socialism, just as under the present system, could be no more than a share of the total product of the community; and the claims advanced to a share of this by any one group of workers would be consequently limited by the claims of all the others. The question, therefore, of whether the postmen's wages should be doubled at any time, or whether they might not have to be halved, would not depend only on votes, but, also and primarily, on the extent of the funds available; and in so far as it depended on votes at all, the votes would not be those of the postmen. They would be the votes of the general public, and any special demand on the part of one body of workers would be neutralised by similar demands on the part of all the others. Further, if these "employers of themselves" could not determine their own wages, still less would they determine the details of the work required of them. A postman, like a private messenger, is bound to do certain things, not one of which he prescribes personally to himself. At stated hours he must daily be present at an office, receive a bundle of letters, and then set out to deliver them at private doors, in accordance with orders which he finds written on the envelopes. Such is the case at present, and socialism would do nothing to modify it. If our author thinks that a man, under these conditions, is his own employer, our author must be easily satisfied, and we will not quarrel with his opinion. It will be enough to point out that the moment he descends to details his promise that socialism would equalise economic opportunity for all reduces itself to the contention that the ordinary labourer or worker would, if the state employed him, have a better chance of promotion and increased wages than he has to-day, when employed by a private firm, and (we may add, though our author does not here say so) that some sort of useful work would be devised by the state for everybody. Now, although every item of this contention, and especially the last, is disputable, let us suppose, for argument's sake, that it is, on the whole, well founded. Even so, we have not touched the real crux of the question. We have dealt only with the case of the ordinary worker, who fulfils the ordinary functions which must always be those of nine men out of every ten, let society be constituted in what way we will. It remains for us to consider the case of those who are fitted, or believe themselves to be fitted, for work of a wider kind, and who aspire to gain, by performing this, an indefinitely ampler remuneration. This ambitious and exceptionally active class is the class for which the promise of equal opportunities possesses its main significance, and in its relation to which it mainly requires to be examined. Indeed, the writer from whom we are quoting recognises this himself; for he gives his special attention to the economic position of those who, in greater or less degree, are endowed with what he calls "genius"; and in order to illustrate how socialism would deal with these, he cites two cases from the annals of electrical engineering, in which opportunities, not forthcoming otherwise, were given by the state to inventors of realising successful inventions. Now, what our author and others who reason like him forget, is that the opportunities with which we are here concerned differ in one all-important particular from those which concern us in the case either of education or of ordinary employment. If one boy uses his educational opportunities ill, he does nothing to prejudice the opportunities of others who use them well. Should a sorter of letters, who, if he had been sharp and trustworthy, might have risen to the highest and best-paid post in his department, throw his opportunities away by inattention or otherwise, the loss resulting is confined to the man himself. The opportunities open to his fellows remain what they were before. But when we come to industrial activity of those higher and rarer kinds, on which the sustained and progressive welfare of the entire community depends, such as invention, or any form of far-reaching and original enterprise, the kind of opportunity which a man requires is not an opportunity of exerting his own faculties in isolation, like a sorter who is specially expert in deciphering illegible addresses. It is an opportunity of directing the efforts of a large number of other men. Apart from the case of craftsmanship and artistic production, all the higher industrial efforts are reducible to a control of others, and can be made only by men who have the means of controlling them. Since this is one of the principal truths that have been elucidated in the present volume, it is sufficient to reassert it here, without further comment. If, therefore, a man is to be given the opportunity of embodying and trying an invention in a really practical form, it will be necessary to put at his disposal, let us disguise the fact as we may, the services of a number of other men who will work in accordance with his orders. This, as we have seen already, is what is done by the ordinary investor whenever he lends capital to an inventor. He supplies him with the food by which the requisite subordinates must be fed; and the state, were the state the capitalist, would do virtually the same thing. It could give him his opportunity in no other way. Further, if the invention in question turns out to be successful--here is another point which has already been explained and emphasised--the wage-capital which has been consumed by the labourers is replaced by some productive implement, which is more than the equivalent of the labour force spent in constructing it. If, on the other hand, the invention turns out to be a failure, the wage-capital is wasted, and, so far as the general welfare is concerned, the state might just as well have thrown the whole of it into the sea. Since, then, the opportunities which the state would have at its disposal, would consist at any moment of a given amount of capital, and since any portion of this which was used unsuccessfully would be lost, the number of opportunities which the state could allocate to individuals would be limited, and each opportunity which was wasted by one man would diminish the number that could be placed at the disposal of others. Now, any one who knows anything of human nature and actual life knows this--that the number of men who firmly and passionately believe in the value of their own inventions, or other industrial projects, is far in excess of those whose ideas and projects have actually any value whatsoever. When the _Great Eastern_, the largest ship of its time, had been built on the Thames by the celebrated engineer Brunel, its launching was attended with unforeseen and what seemed to be insuperable difficulties. Mr. Brunel's descendants have, I believe, still in their possession, a collection of drawings, sent him by a variety of inventors, and representing all sorts of devices by which the launching might be accomplished. All were, as the draughtsmanship was enough to show, the work of men of high technical training; but the practical suggestions embodied in one and all of them could not have been more grotesque had they emanated from a home for madmen. To have given an equality of opportunity to all this tribe of inventors of putting their devices to the test would have probably cost more than the building of the ship itself, and the ship at the end would have been stranded in the dock still. This curious case is representative, and is sufficiently illustrative of the fact that opportunity of this costly kind could be conceded to a few only of those who would demand, and believe themselves to deserve it; and the state, as the trustee of the public, would have, unless it were prepared to ruin the nation, to be incomparably more cautious than any private investor.[28] Of the general doctrine, then, that the opportunities of all should be equal, we may repeat that, as an abstract proposition, it is one which could be contested by nobody; but we have seen that, when applied to societies of unequal men, and to the various tasks of life, its original simplicity is lost, and it does not become even intelligible until we divest it of a large part of its implications. Economic or industrial opportunity is, we have seen, of three kinds: firstly, educational opportunity; secondly, the opportunity of performing and receiving the full equivalent of an ordinary task or service, such as that of a postman, the value of which depends on its conformity to a prescribed pattern or schedule; and thirdly, opportunity of directing the work of others, thereby initiating new enterprises or realising new inventions--a kind of opportunity requiring the control of capital, which capital, whether provided by the state or otherwise, would be lost to the community unless it were used efficiently. With regard to educational opportunity--it has been seen that it is possible to equalise this, approximately if not entirely, at a given time in the early lives of all, but that it would be possible to maintain the equality for a short time only. With regard to opportunities of earning a livelihood subsequently by performing one or other of those ordinary and innumerable tasks which must always fall to the lot of four men out of every five, we may say that an equalisation of opportunities of this kind is the admitted object of every reformer and statesman who believes that the prosperity of a country is synonymous with the welfare of its inhabitants. In achieving this object there are, however, two difficulties--one being the difficulty, occasional and often frequent in any complex society, of devising work which has any practical value, and replaces its own cost, for all those who are able and willing to perform it; the other being the difficulty which arises from the existence of persons who are incapacitated, by some species of vice, from performing, or from performing adequately, any useful work whatever. We must here content ourselves with observing that the official directors of industry, who would constitute the state under socialism, would be no more competent to solve the first than are the private employers of to-day, while there is nothing in the scheme of society put forward by socialists, which even purports to supply any solution of the second, other than a more drastic application of the methods applied to-day. Thirdly, with regard to equality of opportunity for those whose main ambition is not to be provided with some task-work performable by their own hand, but to achieve some position which will enable them to prescribe tasks to others, and thus do justice to their real or supposed talents by the construction of great machines, or the organisation of great enterprises--in other words, with regard to those persons whose ambition is to obtain what are called the prizes of life, and who think themselves treated unjustly if they find themselves unable to gain them--we have seen that to provide equal opportunities for all or even for most of these, is in the very nature of things impossible. The fundamental reason of this, let me say once more, is the fact that the number of men possessing sufficient talent to conceive ambitious schemes of one kind or another far exceeds the number of those whose talents are capable of producing any useful results; and to give to this majority opportunities of testing their projects by experiment would be merely to deplete the resources of the entire nation for the sake of demonstrating to one particular class that abortive talents are worse than no talents at all. Here we are in the presence of a fact far wider than this special manifestation of it. In the animal and the vegetable world, no less than in the human, the successes of nature are the siftings of its partial failures; and in order to secure such services as are really productive it must always be necessary to squander opportunities to a certain extent in the testing of talents which ultimately turn out to be barren. But cases of this kind may, at all events, be reduced to a minimum; and the reduction of their number is possible, because they are largely an artificial product. In order to understand how this is, we must go back again to the question of equality of opportunity in education, and consider it under an aspect which has not yet engaged our attention. We started with supposing the establishment of a system of education which would offer to all the same books and teachers, and also--for this was part of our assumption--equal leisure to profit by them; and we noted how soon opportunities would cease to be equal on account of the different uses which would be made of them by different students. What must now be noted is that as matters have been conducted hitherto, attempts to make educational opportunities equal do tend to produce an equality of a certain kind. Though they have no tendency to equalise powers of achievement, they tend to produce an artificial equality of expectation. In order to elucidate the nature of this fact, and its significance, I cannot do better than quote a passage from Ruskin, admirable for its trenchant felicity, which, since it occurs in a book much admired by socialists, may be commended to their special attention.[29] Economic demand, Ruskin says, is the expression of economic desires; but the constitution of human nature is such that these desires are divisible into two distinct kinds--desires for the commodities which men "need," and desires for commodities which they "wish for." The former arise from those appetites and appetencies in respect of which all are equal. They are virtually a fixed quantity, and the economic commodities requisite for their healthy satisfaction constitute a minimum which is virtually the same for all men. The latter, instead of being fixed, are capable of indefinite variation, and in these--the desires for what men "wish for" but do not "need"--we have the origin "of three-fourths of the demands existing in the world." "These demands are," he proceeds, "romantic. They are founded on visions, idealisms, hopes, and affections, and the regulation of the purse is, in its essence, regulation of the imagination and the heart." With the demands which originate in men's equal needs we are not concerned here. It is impossible to modify them appreciably either by education or otherwise; but the desires or wishes which Ruskin so happily calls "romantic" vary in intensity and character to an almost indefinite degree, not only in different individuals, but also in the same individuals when submitted to different circumstances. Those of them, indeed, which are most generally felt are often, to speak strictly, not so much desires as fancies; and while the image of their fulfilment may please or amuse the imagination, their non-fulfilment produces no sense of want. So long as they are merely fancies, they raise no practical question. They raise a practical question only when their insistence is such that their non-fulfilment produces an active sense of privation; and whether in the case of any given individual they reach or do not reach this pitch of intensity depends upon two things. One of these is the individual's congenital temperament, his talents, his strength of will, and the vividness or vagueness of his imagination. Education, understood in its more general sense, is the other. Now, men varying as they do in respect of their congenital characters, the strength of their romantic wishes bears naturally some proportion to their own capacities for attempting to satisfy these wishes for themselves. Few men, for example, have naturally a strong wish for conditions which will enable them to exercise exceptional power, unless they are conscious of possessing exceptional powers to exercise. Hence, though this consciousness is in many cases deceptive, the struggle of men for power is confined within narrow limits, and the disappointments which embitter those who fail to attain it are naturally confined within narrow limits also. So long as matters stand thus, the majority of men are unaffected. But wishes which are naturally confined to exceptional men, who are more or less capable of realising them, are susceptible by education of indefinite extension to others who are not so qualified; and in the case of these last, the results which they produce are different. They multiply the number of those who demand preferential opportunities, in order that they may enter on a struggle in which they must ultimately fail. They multiply the number of those, to a still greater extent, who demand that positions or possessions shall be somehow provided for them by society, without reference to any struggle on their own part at all. The artificial diffusion of "wish" among these two distinguishable classes is thus accomplished by education in somewhat different ways; but the _modus operandi_ is in one respect the same in both. It consists of an artificial enlarging, in the case of all individuals alike, of the ideas entertained by them of their natural social rights; and an active craving is thus generalised for possessions and modes of life, which nine men out of ten would otherwise have never wasted a thought upon, and which not one out of ten can possibly make his own. How easily this idea of rights is susceptible of enlargement by teaching, and how efficient it is in creating a desire where none would have existed otherwise, is vividly illustrated by those not infrequent cases in which men, who for half their lives have considered themselves fortunate in the possession of moderate affluence, have suddenly been led to suppose themselves the heirs of peerages or great estates, and have died insane or bankrupt in consequence of their vain endeavours to secure rank or property which, had it not been for a purely adventitious idea, would have affected their hopes and wishes no more than the moon did. It is precisely in this manner that much of the education of to-day operates in consequence of current attempts to equalise it[30]; and since education is the cause of the evils here in question, it is in some reform of education that we must hope to find a cure. What the general nature of this reform would be can be indicated in a few words. It would not involve a reversal, it would involve a modification only, of the principle now in vogue, and can, indeed, best be expressed by means of the same formula, if we do but add to it a single qualifying word--that is to say, the word "relative" prefixed to the word "equality," when we speak of equality of opportunity as the end at which we ought to aim. Let me explain my meaning. The logical end of all action is happiness; and happiness, so far as it depends on economic conditions at all, is an equation between desire and attainment. The capacities of men being unequal, and the objects of desire which they could, under the most favourable circumstances, make their own, being unequal likewise, the ideal object of education, as a means to happiness, is twofold. It is, on the one hand, so to develop each man's congenital faculties as to raise them to their maximum power of providing him with what he desires; and on the other hand to limit his desires, by a due regulation of his expectations, to such objects as his faculties, when thus developed, render approximately if not completely attainable. Thus, relatively to the individual, the ideal object of education is in all cases the same; but since individuals are not equal to one another, education, if it is to perform an equal service for each, must be in its absolute character to an indefinite extent various; just as a tailor, if he is to give to all his customers equal opportunities of being well dressed, will not offer them coats of the same size and pattern. He will offer them coats which are equal only in this--namely, their equally successful adaptation to the figures of their respective wearers. Of course, so to graduate any actual course of education that in the case of each individual it is the best which it is possible to conceive for him--that it should at once enable him to make the most of his powers, and "regulate," as Ruskin says, "his imagination and his hopes" in accordance with them, would require a clairvoyance and prevision not given to man; but the end here specified--namely, an equality of opportunity which is relative--is the only kind of equality which is even theoretically possible; and it is one, moreover, to which a constant approximation can be made. The absolute equality which is contemplated by socialists, and by others who are more or less vaguely influenced by socialistic sentiment, is, on the contrary, an ideal which either could not be realised at all, or which, in proportion as it was realised, would be ruinous to the nation which provided it, and would bring nothing but disappointment to those who were most importunate in demanding it. The only conceivable means, indeed, by which it could be extended beyond the first few years of life, would be by a constant process of handicapping--that is to say, by applying to education the same policy that trade-unions apply to ordinary labour. If one bricklayer has laid more bricks than his fellows, he virtually has to wait until the others have caught him up. Similarly, if equality of opportunity, other than an equality that is relative, were to be maintained in the sphere of education, a clever boy who had learned to speak German in a year would have to be coerced into idleness until every dunce among his classmates could speak it as well as he; and a similar process would be repeated in after-life. This policy, as has been pointed out already, is, even if wasteful, not ruinous in the sphere of ordinary labour--a fact which shows how wide the difference is between the ordinary faculties, as applied to industry, and the exceptional; but no one in his senses, not even the most ardent apostle of equality, would dream of recommending its application to efforts of a higher kind, and demand that the clever boys should periodically be made to wait for the stupid, or that the best doctor in the presence of a great pestilence should not be allowed to cure more patients than the worst one. If, then, it is, as it must be, the ideal aim of social arrangements generally to enable each to raise his capacities to their practical maximum, and adjust his desires and his expectations to the practical possibilities of attainment, "relative equality of opportunity," firstly in education and secondly in practical life, is a formula which accurately expresses the means by which this end is to be secured; but the absolute equality which is contemplated by socialists and others is an ideal which, the moment we attempted to translate it into terms of the actual, would begin to fall to pieces, defeating its own purpose; and there is nothing in socialism, were socialism otherwise practicable, any more than there is the existing system, which would obviate this result. Indeed, it may be observed further that, though the idea of equality of opportunity in general is not inconsistent with a socialistic scheme of society, as socialists of the more thoughtful kind have now come to conceive of it, it belongs distinctively to the domain of the fiercest individual competition. For in so far as socialism differs from ordinary individualism, it differs from it in this--that, instead of encouraging each man to do his utmost because what he gets will be proportionate to what he does, it aims at establishing a greater equality in what men get by making this independent of whether they do much or little; in which case the main concern of the individual would be the certainty of getting what he wanted, not the opportunity of producing it. The three ideas or conceptions, then, which have engaged our attention in this and the three preceding chapters--namely, the idea that labour does, as a statistical fact, produce far more in values than it at present gets back in wages; the idea that the mass of the population could permanently augment its resources by confiscating all dividends as fast as they became due, and the idea that it is possible to provide for unequal men, for more than a moment of their lives, equal opportunities of experimenting with their real or imaginary powers, are ideas, indeed, which have all the vices characteristic of socialistic thought; but the first and the third have no necessary connection with socialism, and the second is not peculiar to it. We will now return to it as a system of exclusive and distinctive doctrines, and sum up, in general terms, the conclusions to which our examination of it is calculated to lead far-seeing and practical men, and more especially active politicians. FOOTNOTES: [25] The Christian Socialist author of _The Gospel for To-day_. See chapter on Christian Socialism. [26] Mr. Wilshire, in his volume of criticism on my American speeches. [27] _Socialism: the Mallock-Wilshire Argument._ By Gaylord Wilshire. New York, 1907. [28] While this work was in the press, one of the English Labour members, Mr. Curran, at a public meeting, gave his views, as a socialist, about this very question--equality of industrial opportunity--and as an example of such opportunity already in existence, he mentioned the cash-credit system, which prevails in banks in Scotland. He seemed unaware that such advances of capital made in this system are made to picked men only. These men, moreover, have the strongest stimulus to effect in the face that they will keep all their profits. If a socialistic state gave cash-credits to everybody, it would confiscate all the profits if the workers were successful, and have no remedy against them if they failed. [29] _Unto This Last._ [30] See note to previous chapter, referring to the recent _Red Catechism_ for socialist Sunday schools, in which children are taught, as the primary article of faith, that the wage-earners produce everything, that the productivity of all is practically equal, and that all are entitled to expect precisely the same kind of life. CHAPTER XVI THE SOCIAL POLICY OF THE FUTURE I was constantly asked by socialists in America whether I really believed that society, as it is, is perfect, and that there are no evils and defects in it which are crying aloud for remedy. Unless I believed this--and that I could do so was hardly credible--I ought, they said, if I endeavoured to discredit the remedy proposed by themselves, to suggest another, which would be better and equally general, of my own. Now, such an objection, as it stands, I might dismiss by curtly observing that I did not, and could not, suggest any remedy other than socialism, partly because the purport of my entire argument was that socialism, if realised, would not be a remedy at all; and partly because, for the evils that afflict society, no general remedy of any kind is possible. The diseases of society are various, and of various origin, and there is no one drug in the pharmacopoeia of social reform which will cure or even touch them all, just as there is no one drug in the pharmacopoeia of doctors which will cure appendicitis, mumps, sea-sickness, and pneumonia indifferently--which will stop a hollow tooth and allay the pains of childbirth. But though such an answer would be at once fair and sufficient, if we take the objection in the spirit in which my critics urged it, the objection has more significance than they themselves suspected, and it requires to be answered in a very different way. Socialism may be worthless as a scheme, but it is not meaningless as a symptom. Rousseau's theory of the origin of society, of the social contract, and of a cure for all social evils by a return to a state of nature, had, as we all know now, no more relation to fact than the dreams of an illiterate drunkard; but they were not without value as a vague and symbolical expression of certain evils from which the France of his day was suffering. As a child, I was told a story of an old woman in Devonshire who, describing what was apparently some form of dyspepsia, said that "her inside had been coming up for a fortnight," and still continued to do so, although during the last few days "she had swallowed a pint of shot in order to keep her liver down." The old woman's diagnosis of her own case was ridiculous; her treatment of it, if continued, would have killed her; but both were suggestive, as indications that something was really amiss. The reasoning of Rousseau, who contended that the evils of the modern world were due to a departure from primeval conditions which were perfect, and that a cure for them must be sought in a return to the manner of life which prevailed among the contemporaries of the mammoth, and the immediate descendants of the pithekanthropos, was identical in kind with the reasoning of the old woman. The reasoning of the socialists is identical in kind with both. It consists of a poisonous prescription founded on a false diagnosis. But just as the diagnosis, no matter how grotesque, which a patient makes of his or of her own sufferings, and even the remedies which his or her fancy suggests, often assist doctors to discover what the ailment really is, so does socialism, alike in its diagnosis and its proposed cure, call attention to the existence of ailments in the body politic, and may even afford some clue to the treatment which the case requires, though this will be widely different from what the sufferer fancies. Such being the case, then, in order that a true treatment may be adopted, the first thing to be done is to show the corporate patient precisely how and why the socialistic diagnosis is erroneous, and the proposed socialistic remedies incomparably worse than the disease. To this preparatory work the present volume has been devoted. Let us reconsider the outline of its general argument. As thoughtful socialists to-day are themselves coming to admit, the augmented wealth distinctive of the modern world is produced and sustained by the ability of the few, not by the labour of the many. The ability of the few is thus productive in the modern world in a manner in which it never was productive in any previous period, because, whereas in earlier ages the strongest wills and the keenest practical intellects were devoted to military conquest and the necessities of military defence, they have, in the modern world, to a constantly increasing degree, been deflected from the pursuits of war and concentrated on those of industry. But the old principle remains in operation still, of which military leadership was only one special exemplification. Nations now grow rich through industry as they once grew rich through conquest, because new commanders, with a precision unknown on battle-fields, direct the minutest operations of armies of a new kind; and the only terms on which any modern nation can maintain its present productivity, or hope to increase it in the future, consist in the technical submission of the majority of men to the guidance of an exceptional minority. As for the majority--the mass of average workers--they produce to-day just as much as, and no more than, they would produce if the angel of some industrial Passover were henceforward to kill, each year on a particular day, every human being who had risen above the level of his fellows, and, in virtue of his knowledge, ingenuity, genius, energy, and initiative, was capable of directing his fellows better than they could direct themselves. If such an annual decimation were inaugurated to-morrow in civilised countries such as Great Britain and America, the mass of the population would soon sink into a poverty deeper and more helpless than that which was their lot before the ability of the few, operating through modern capital, began to lend to the many an efficiency not their own. In other words, the entire "surplus values"--to adopt the phrase of Marx--which have been produced during the last hundred and fifty years, have been produced by the ability of the few, and the ability of the few only;[31] and every advance in wages, and every addition to the general conveniences of life, which the labourers now enjoy, is a something over and above what they produce by their own exertions. It is a gift to the many from the few, or, at all events, it has its origin in the sustentation and the multiplication of their efforts, and would shrink in proportion as these efforts were impeded. If, then, the claims which socialists put forward on behalf of labour are really to be based, as the earlier socialists based them, on the ground that production alone gives a valid right to possession, labour to-day, instead of getting less than its due, is, if we take it in the aggregate, getting incomparably more, and justice in that case would require that the vast majority of mankind should have its standards of living not raised but lowered. Is it, then, the reader will here ask, the object of the present volume to suggest that the true course of social reform in the future would be gradually to take away from the majority some portion of what they at present possess, and bind them down, in accordance with the teaching of socialists in the past, to the little maximum which they could produce by their own unaided efforts? The moral of the present volume is the precise reverse of this. Its object is not to suggest that they should possess no more than they produce. It is to place their claim to a certain surplus not produced by themselves on a true instead of a fantastic basis. Socialists seek to base the claim in question, alternately and sometimes simultaneously, on two grounds--one moral, the other practical--which are alike futile and fallacious, and are also incompatible with each other. The former consists of the _a priori_ moral doctrine that every one has a right to what he produces, and consequently to no more. The latter consists of an assumption that those who produce most will, in deference to a standard of right of a wholly different kind, surrender their own products to those who produce least. The practical assumption is childish; and the abstract moral doctrine can only lead to a conclusion the opposite of that which those who appeal to it desire. But the claim in question may, when reduced to reasonable proportions, be defended on grounds both moral and practical, nevertheless, and the present volume aims at rendering these intelligible. Let us return for a moment to Rousseau and his theory of the social contract. We know to-day that never in the entire history of mankind did any such conscious contract as Rousseau imagined take place; but it is nevertheless true that virtually, and by ultimate implication, something like a contract or bargain underlies the relation between classes in all states of society. When one man contracts to sell a horse for a certain price, and another man to pay that price for it, the price in question is agreed to because the buyer says to himself on the one hand, "If I do not consent to pay so much, I shall lose the horse, which is to me worth more than the money"; and the seller says to himself on the other hand, "If I do not consent to accept so little, I shall lose the money, which is to me worth more than the horse." Each bases his argument on a conscious or subconscious reference to the situation which will arise if the bargain is not concluded. Similarly, when any nation submits to a foreign rule, and forbears to revolt though it feels that rule distasteful, it forbears because, either consciously or subconsciously, it feels that the existing situation, whatever its drawbacks, is preferable to that which would arise from any violent attempt to change it. The same thing holds good of the labouring classes as a whole, as related to those classes who, in the modern world, direct them. By implication, if not consciously, they are partners to a certain bargain. They are not partners to a bargain because they consent to labour, for there is no bargaining with necessity; and they would have to labour in any case, if they wished to remain alive. They are partners to a bargain because they consent to labour under the direction of other people. It is true that, as regards the present and the near future, they are confronted by necessity even here. This is obviously true of countries such as Great Britain, in which, if the labour of the many were not elaborately organised by the few, three-fourths of the present population would be unable to obtain bread. Nevertheless, if we take a wider view of affairs, and consider what, without violating possibility, might conceivably take place in the course of a few disastrous centuries, the mass of modern labourers might gradually secede from the position which they at present occupy, and, spreading themselves in families or small industrial groups over the vast agricultural areas which still remain unoccupied, might keep themselves alive by labouring under their own direction, as men have done in earlier ages, and as savages do still. They would have, on the whole, to labour far harder than they do now, and to labour for a reward which, on the whole, would be incomparably less than that which is attainable to-day by all labour except the lowest. Moreover, their condition would have all the "instability" which, as Spencer rightly says, is inseparable from "the homogeneous." It could not last. Still, while it lasted, they could live; and, in theory, at all events, the mass of the human race must be recognised as capable of keeping themselves alive by the labour of pairs of hands which, in each case, are undirected by any intelligence superior to, or other than, the labourer's own. In theory, at all events, therefore, this self-supporting multitude would be capable of choosing whether they would continue in this condition of industrial autonomy, with all its hardships, its scant results, and its unceasing toil, or would submit their labour to the guidance of a minority more capable than themselves. Such being the case, then, if by submitting themselves to the guidance of others they were to get nothing more than they could produce when left to their own devices, they would, in surrendering their autonomy, be giving something for nothing--a transaction which could not be voluntary, and would be not the less unjust because, as all history shows us, they would be ultimately unable to resist it. Justice demands that a surrender of one kind, made by one party, should be paid for by a corresponding surrender of another kind, made by the other party; which last can only take the form of a concession to labour, as a right, of some portion of a product which labour does not produce. Labour can, on grounds of general moral justice, claim this as compensation for acquiescence, even though the acquiescence may, as a matter of fact, be involuntary. Human nature, however, being what it is, these purely moral considerations would probably have little significance if they were not reinforced by others of a more immediately practical kind. Let us now turn to these. The motive which prompts labour to demand more than it produces is itself primarily not moral, but practical, and is so obvious as to need no comment. What concerns us here is the practical, as distinct from any moral, motive, which must, when the situation is understood, make ability anxious to concede it. For argument's sake we must assume that the great producers of wealth are men who have no other motive ultimately than ambition for themselves and their families, and would allow nothing of what they produce to be taken from them by any other human being except under the pressure of some incidental necessity. There is one broad feature, however, which even men such as these understand--the fact, namely, that for successful wealth production one of the most essential conditions is a condition of social stability, or a general acquiescence, at all events, in the broad features of the industrial system, by means of which the production in question takes place. But if the labourers have no stake in the surplus for the production of which such a system is requisite, it may be perfectly true that by escaping from it they would on the whole be no better off than they are, yet there is no reason which can be brought home to their own minds why they should not seek to disturb it as often and as recklessly as they can. There is, at best, no structural connection, but only a fractional one, between their own welfare and the welfare of those who direct them; and a structural connection between the two--a dovetailing of the one into the other--is what ability, no matter how selfish, is in its own interests concerned before all things to secure. In other words, it is concerned in its own interests so to arrange matters that the share of its own products which is made over to the labourers shall be large enough, and obvious enough, and sufficiently free from accessory disadvantages, to be appreciated by the labourers themselves; and the ideal state of social equilibrium would be reached when this share was such that any further augmentation of it would enfeeble the action of ability by depriving it of its necessary stimulus, and, by thus diminishing the amount of the total product, would make the share of the labourers less than it was before. Though an ideal equilibrium of this kind may be never attainable absolutely, it is a condition to which practical wisdom may be always making approximations; but in order that it may be an equilibrium in fact as well as in theory, one thing further is necessary--namely, that both parties should understand clearly the fundamental character of the situation. And here labour has more to learn than ability; or perhaps it may be truer to say that socialism has given it more to unlearn. If any exchange takes place between two people, which by anybody who knew all the circumstances would be recognised as entirely just, but is not felt to be just by one of the contracting parties, he, though he may assent to the terms because he can get none better, will be as much dissatisfied as he would have been had he been actually overreached by the other. If, for example, he believed himself to be entitled to an estate of which the other was in reality not only the _de facto_, but also the true legal possessor, and if the other, out of kindness (let us say) towards a distant kinsman, agreed to pay him a pension, he would doubtless accept the pension as a something that was better than nothing; but he would not be satisfied with a part when he conceived himself to be entitled to the whole, and as soon as occasion offered would go to law to obtain it. In other words, if two persons are to make a bargain or contract which can possibly satisfy both, each must start with recognising that the other has some valid right, and what the nature of this right is, to the property or position which is held by him and which is the subject of the projected exchange. Unless this be the case, any exchange that may be effected will, for one of the parties at least, not be a true bargain or contract, but an enforced and temporary compromise. There will be no finality in it, and it will produce no content. Now, in the case of the bargain or contract between labour and ability, this last situation is precisely that which the teachings of socialism are at present tending to generalise. They are encouraging the representatives of labour to regard the representatives of ability as a class which possesses much, but has no valid right to anything, and with whom in consequence no true bargain is possible; since, whatever this class concedes short of its whole possessions will merely be accepted by labour as a surrender of stolen goods, which merits resentment rather than thanks, because it is only partial. The intellectual socialists of to-day, and many of their less educated followers, will strenuously deny this. They will declare that they, unlike their predecessors, recognise that directive ability is a true productive agent no less than ordinary labour is; and that able men, no less than the labourers, have rights which they may, if they choose, enforce with equal justice. And if we confine our attention to certain of their theoretical admissions, we need not go further than the pages of the present volume to remind ourselves that for this assertion there are ample, if disjointed, foundations. But the doctrine of modern socialism must be judged, not only by its separate parts, but also by the emphasis with which they are respectively enunciated, and by the mood of mind which, on the whole, it engenders among the majority of those who are affected by it; and, whatever its leading exponents may, on occasion, protest to the contrary, the main practical result which it has thus far produced among the masses has been to foment the impression, which is not the less efficacious because it is not explicitly formulated, that when labour and ability are disputing over their respective rights, ability comes into court with no genuine rights at all; and that, instead of representing (as it does) the knowledge, intellect, and energy to which the whole surplus values of the modern world are due, it represents merely a system of decently legalised theft from an output of wealth which would lose nothing of its amplitude, but would on the contrary still continue to increase were all exceptional energy, knowledge, and intellect deprived of all authority and starved out of existence to-morrow. So long as such an impression prevails, and indeed until it is definitely superseded by one more in consonance with facts, no satisfactory social policy is practicable. Labour, as opposed to ability, may be compared to a man who believes that his tailor has overcharged him for a coat, and who disputes the account in a law court with a view to its reasonable reduction. In such a case it will be possible for him to obtain justice. The tailor's claim for £12 may be reduced to a claim for £10, or £8 5_s._, or £6 15_s._ 6_d._ But if the customer's contention is that he ought to get the coat for nothing, and that he does not in justice owe the tailor anything at all, he is making a demand that no law court could satisfy, and by a gratuitous misconception of his rights is doing all he can to preclude himself from any chance of obtaining them. The mood which socialism foments among the labouring classes is precisely analogous to the mood of such a man as this, and its results are analogous likewise. Its origin, however, being artificial and also obvious in its minutest particulars, the remedy for it, however difficult to apply, is not obscure in its nature. The mood in question results from a definite, a systematic, and an artificially produced misconception of the structure and the main phenomena, good and evil, of society as it exists to-day, and the different parts played by the different classes composing it. It has been the object of the present volume to expose, one after another, the individual fallacies of which this general misconception is the result, not with a view to suggesting that in society as it exists to-day there are no grave evils which a true social policy may alleviate, but with a view to promoting between classes, who are at present in needless antagonism, that sane and sober understanding with regard to their respective positions which alone can form the basis of any sound social policy in the future. Of the individual demands or proposals now put forward by socialists, many point to objects which are individually desirable and are within limits practicable; but what hinders, more than anything else, any successful attempt to realise them is the fact that they are at present placed in a false setting. They resemble a demand for candles on the part of visitors at an hotel, who would have, if they did not get them, to go to bed in the dark--a demand which would be contested by nobody if it were not that those who made it demanded the candles only as a means of setting fire to the bed-curtains. The demands for old-age pensions, and for government action on behalf of the unemployed, for example, as now put forward in Great Britain, by labour Members who identify the interests of labour with socialism, are demands of this precise kind. The care of the aged, the care of the unwillingly and the discipline of the willingly idle, are among the most important objects to which social statesmanship can address itself; but the doctrines of socialism hinder instead of facilitate the accomplishment of them, because they identify the cure of certain diseased parts of the social organism with a treatment that would be ruinous to the health and ultimately to the life of the whole. We may, however, look forward to a time, and may do our best to hasten it, when, the fallacies of socialism being discredited and the mischief which they produce having exhausted itself, we may be able to recognise that they have done permanent good as well as temporary evil--partly because their very perverseness and their varying and accumulating absurdities will have compelled men to recognise, and accept as self-evident, the countervailing truths which to many of the sanest thinkers have hitherto remained obscure; and partly because socialism, no matter how false as a theory of society, and no matter how impracticable as a social programme, will have called attention to evils which might otherwise have escaped attention, or been relegated to the class of evils for which no alleviation is possible. Even to suggest the manner in which these evils would be treated by a sound and scientific statesmanship would be wholly beyond the scope of a volume such as the present, for this reason, if for no other, that, as has been said already, the evils in question are not one but many, each demanding special and separate treatment, just as ophthalmia demands a treatment other than that demanded by whooping-cough. But one general observation may be fitly made, in conclusion, which will apply to all of them. These remedies cannot be included under the heading of any mere general augmentation of the pecuniary reward of labour taken in the aggregate. The portion of the national dividend which goes to labour now, in progressive countries such as Great Britain, Germany, and America, is immensely greater than it was a hundred years ago, and unless industrial progress is arrested its tendency is to rise still further. The main evils to which a scientific statesmanship should address itself arise from the incidental conditions under which this dividend is spent--conditions, largely improvable, which at present deprive it of its full purchasing power. Of this I will give one example--the present structure of great industrial towns. It cannot be doubted that, if the sums now spent on the construction and maintenance of insanitary slums and alleys were employed in a scientific manner, a rent which has now to be paid for accommodation of the most degrading kind would suffice to command, on the strictest business principles, homes superior to those which, if its amount were doubled, would hardly be forthcoming for the labourer in most of our existing streets; while the purchasing power of the existing income of labour would be increased concurrently, and perhaps to a yet greater extent if much of the education, which now has no other effect than of generating impracticable ideas as to the abstract rights of man, were devoted to developing in men and women alike a greater mastery of the mere arts of household management. But in merely mentioning these subjects I am transgressing my proper limits. I mention them only with a view to reminding the reader once more that the object of this volume is not to suggest, or supply arguments for maintaining that existing conditions are perfect, or that socialists are visionaries in declaring that they are capable of improvement. Its object has been to expose that radical misconception of facts which renders demands visionary that would not be visionary otherwise, and to stimulate all sane and statesmanlike reformers by helping them to see, and also to explain to others, that the improved conditions which socialism blindly clamours for are practicable only in proportion as they are dissociated from the theories of socialism. FOOTNOTES: [31] Like all generalisation dealing with complex matters, this must be qualified by individual exceptions. For example, men who have made fortunes for themselves, and have added to the world's stock, by work in the gold-fields, have been in many cases _labourers_, directing their own efforts by their own intelligence. But some men have been exceptional in one or other of two ways--either in propinquity to the scene of action, or (and this is the more common case) in handihood, determination, and courage. It is not every one who has it in him to go in search of gold to Alaska. INDEX Ability, and labour defined, 19; labour as opposed to, 29; capital as the implement of, 32; a name for the directive faculties, 33; value of directive, 68; monopoly of business, 89, 93; and individual motive, 110; modern socialists' recognition of products due to, 191; rent of business, 191, 194 Abstract justice, interest and, 204, 206, 208, 210, 212, 214, 216, 218, 220, 222, 224, 226 Activity, two kinds represented by two groups of, 28; military distinct from industrial, 121 Agriculture, Mill on nature in, 181; and rent, 192 Allen, Grant, _The Woman Who Did_, 147 Arkwright, the inventor of the spinning-frame, 83, 197 Artist, the case of an, 115 Bastiat, his plane, 213, 214 Bellamy, _Looking Backward_, 92; his description of a socialistic Utopia, 92; his argument, 105 Bessemer, 197, 220 Boy messengers, 80 Bradlaugh, Charles, 85 Brazil, Rossi fails to found a socialistic colony in, 141 Brigand chief, his justification, 206 Capital, is labour in an externalised and permanent form, 14; is past labour crystallised, 14, 20; as the implement of ability, 32; fixed and circulating, 35; the primary function of, 40; its interest described by George as the gift of nature, 212 Capitalism (a comparatively modern phenomenon), causes of its accelerated development, 2; as a working system, 3; essence of modern, 14; and wages, 16; state and private, 62, 71; economics of: the "economic man" and economic science, 123, 124 Cause and effect, 185 Cellini, Benvenuto, 24 Christian socialism as a substitute for secular democracy, _see_ Democracy; the message of, 153; its view of the steel-kings and the oil-kings, 153, 158, 160; its preaching a species of ecclesiastical electioneering, 156; and the faculty of invention, 159; abolishes competition, 160; on the moral conversion of able men, 160 _Christian Socialist, The,_ 150 Christian socialists, are simply secular socialists of the more modern and educated type, 163; their temperamental deficiency finds its fullest expression in socialism, 172 Coleridge, Lord, 135 Colossal fortunes, growth of, 130, 131 Competition, 160 Corvée system, and slavery, 57, 58 Crozier, Dr. Beattie, _Wheel of Wealth_, 217, 218, 236 Darby of Coalbrookdale, 83 Demand and supply, 143 Democracy, 130, 132, 134, 136, 138, 140, 142, 144, 146, 148; Christian socialism as a substitute for secular, 150, 152, 154, 156, 158, 160, 162, 164, 166, 168, 170, 172, 174 Direction, wage-capital an implement of, 70 Directive ability, 191; its value, 68; and socialism, 87; and labour, 182, 187, 189-93 ---- faculties, 31; function of the, as applied to the operations of modern labour, 29; their function, illustrated by the case of a printed book, 29; name for the, 33 Dudley, 82 Eclecticism, 186 Economic distinction, abolished by the truly socialistic scheme, 58 Economic emancipation, is entire abolition of the wage-system, 56 ---- man, the, 111, 123 ---- motive, personal gain the primary, 127 ---- opportunity, 254 ---- science, capitalism and, 124; its reasonings, 177 ---- values, 166 Economics of capitalism, 123 Eddy, Mrs., her Christian science, 150 Edison, 47, 150, 197, 220 Education, its ideal object as a means of happiness, 273 Electric lighting of London, 84 Equality of opportunity, 253, 254, 256, 258, 260, 262, 264, 266, 268, 270, 272, 274, 276 Equilibrium an ideal, 288 Evolution, organic, 85 Evolutionary socialists, 102 ---- sociology, 94 _Fabian Essays_, 58 Family life, 135, 140, 141 Fighting instinct, the, 121 France, state monopolies in, 80 Frederick the Great, 99 French revolution, 206 George, Henry, 210, 211 "Gospel for To-day, The," 151, 153, 157, 159 _Great Eastern, The,_ 264 Greed, 125 Gronlünd, a disciple of Marx, 18 Happiness, an equation between desire and attainment, 273 Harrison, Frederic, the English prophet of Positivism, 118; on the soldier's willing service, 120 Helots in Sparta, 59 Heroism, socialists' view of, 118, 122 Hillquit, Mr., the American socialist, 42, 43, 50; and "common manual labour," 48, 50; his irrelevancies, 50; his argument, 51, 53; verbal jugglery of, 53 Ideal equilibrium, an, 288 Income, of labour, 197; earned and unearned, 226 Individual motive and democracy, 130, 132, 134, 136, 138, 140, 142, 144, 146, 148 Industrial effort, its progress depends on thought and the advance of knowledge, 32; productivity of, 157 ---- productivity, 195 ---- towns, present structure of great, 294 Industry, state-directed, 81; the iron, 82 Intellect, inequalities of the human, 102, 107 Interest, and abstract justice, 204, 206, 208, 210, 212, 214, 216, 218, 220, 222, 224, 226; socialistic attack on, 227, 228, 230, 232, 234, 236, 238, 240, 242, 244, 246, 248, 250, 252 Invention, Christian socialists on the faculty of, 159 Inventors, 160-62 Iron industry, the, 82 Jesuit Fathers in Uruguay, 193 Just reward of labour, 176, 178, 180, 182, 184, 186, 188, 190, 192, 194, 196, 198, 200, 202 Justice, interest and abstract, 204, 206, 208, 210, 212, 214, 216, 218, 220, 222, 224, 226 Kidd, on rival and independent claims, 93; his argument, 103, 106 Labour, as a wealth-producer, 11, 21, 42; definition of ability and, 19; two distinguishable kinds of, 23; a productive agent, 25, 199; directive, 31, 71, 75, 77, 78; emancipation of, 47; the Marxian doctrine of the all-productivity of, 47; by itself, impotent to produce the wealth of modern nations, 54; and the socialistic promise, 127; as estimated by its actual products--the just reward of, 176, 178, 180, 182, 184, 186, 188, 190, 192, 194, 196, 198, 200, 202; income of, 197, 295; as opposed to ability, 291 Labour-certificates, 12 Labourer, the ordinary manual, 66, 67, 174 Laplace, 91 Legislation, 134, 135; and the Government's will, 136 Lombe, the great silk-factory erected at Derby by, 197 L.C.C. steamboats, 73 Macaulay, _Essay on Dryden_, 92; on the absurdity of confounding speculative sociology with practical, 101 Machine-capital, 219 Machinery, a development of capitalism, 2; Marx on, 27; embodies labour directed in a new way, 38; the question of, 88 Majority, will of the, 129, 139, 140; powers of the "sovereign," 137 Marx, Karl, his formula, 7; his treatise on capital, 8; his theory summarised, 9, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20; his doctrine of scientific socialism, 11, 18; his falsified prophecies, 17; errors of, 19, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28, 30, 32, 34, 36, 38, 40; on machinery, 27; repudiated by modern socialists, 41, 42, 44, 46, 48, 50, 52, 54, 56, 58, 60, 62, 64, 66, 68 Melba, 116, 144 Military, distinct from industrial, activity, 121 Mill, J.S., 2, 32; _Political Economy_, 20, 21, 179; on nature in agriculture, 180, 181 Modern socialists, their repudiation of Marx, _q.v._; and the question of motive, 90, 111, 113; their assertion, 115 Monastic orders, 117 Monopolists, 93 Monopoly, modern capital is, 38; of business-ability, 89, 93 Motive, ability, and individual, 110 ---- individual, 130, 132, 134, 136, 138, 140, 142, 144, 146, 148 ---- practical as distinct from moral, 287 ---- socialists and, 90, 111, 113 Motives, discussion of various, 113-5 Multi-millionaires, 131-3; a suggested limit, 138 Napoleon III., 99 _North American Review,_ 130 Opportunity, equality of, 253, 254, 256, 258, 260, 262, 264, 266, 268, 270, 272, 274, 276 Orders, monastic, 117 Organic evolution, 185 ---- nature, products of, 210 Owen, Robert, 170; his views on socialism, 7 Peasant proprietors, 20, 57 Penny post, 79 Plane, Bastiat's, 213, 214 Positivism, Frederic Harrison, the English prophet of, 118-20 Post Office, British, 79 Postal employé, the, 260, 261 Press, a state, 85 Problems of practical life, 95 Product, correspondence between productive effort and, 207 Production, unequal powers of, 142, 254; labour, capital, and law the only factors in, 191 Productive agent, labour as a, 25, 199 ---- effort, the astounding advances of the efficiency of, 26 Productivity, industrial, 195 Rent, of business-ability, the, 191, 194; and agriculture, 192 Reward of labour, as estimated by its actual products, just, 176, 178, 180, 182, 184, 186, 188, 190, 192, 194, 196, 198, 200, 202 Ricardo, 2, 12, 32, 92 Roosevelt, President, 169 Rossi, Govanni, the Italian socialist, his failure to found a socialistic colony in Brazil, 141 Rousseau, his theory of the social contract, 283, 284 Ruskin, John, 23; his scheme of political economy, 118 Sentimental thinkers, 123 Shakespeare, 92, 96 Shaw, Bernard, 43, 208, 209; _Man and Superman_, 215, 216, 222 Slave, contrasted with wage-paid labourer, 59 Slavery, 57 Smith, Adam, _Wealth of Nations_, 25, 26, 36 Social Democratic Federation, its campaign and its catechism, 45 Social policy of the future, 278, 280, 282, 284, 286, 288, 290, 292, 294 Socialism, Christian. _See_ Christian socialism ---- historical beginning of, 1, _et seq._; two ideas of, 1; and capitalism, 3; a theory, 5; regarded as a practical force, 8; basic doctrine of so-called scientific, 18; a fallacy, 49, 167; proximate difficulties of, 69, 70, 72, 74, 76, 78, 80, 82, 84, 86, 88; its ultimate difficulty, 89, 90, 92, 94, 96, 98, 100, 102, 104, 106, 108, 110, 112, 114, 116, 118, 120, 122, 124, 126, 128; "the Great Man theory," 91 Socialistic attack on interest, and the nature of its error, 227, 228, 230, 232, 234, 236, 238, 240, 242, 244, 246, 248, 250, 252 Socialistic temperament, debilitates the faculties, 169 ---- theory of society, a, 56, 58 Socialists, on heroism, 118, 122; their two main doctrines, moral and economic, 165; their false and true theories of production, 166; their fallacy, 167 ---- evolutionary, 102 Society, two contrasted groups of, 15 Sociology, scientific, 111 ---- speculative, 109 Spencer, Herbert, 106; causal importance of the great man, 89-101; on modern production, 97, 98; _Study of Sociology_, 99; on the invention of the _Times_ printing-press, 100; _Social Statics_, _ibid._; criticised by Author's _Aristocracy and Evolution_, 101 State officials, 69 Steel and oil, 153, 158, 159, 160, 162 Supply and demand, 143 Utopia, Bellamy's description of a socialistic, 92 Value, surplus, 13 Wage-capital, 36, 37, 39, 41, 57, 58, 264; an implement of direction, 70; its waste brings about its own remedy, 71 Wagedom, socialists and, 59, 60 Wage-fund, division of total, 201 Wage-system, alternatives to, 57, 60; an escape from, 59 Watt, 221 Wealth, socialists' conception of, 145; a form of power, 146; superfluous, 155; produced by two functionally different classes, 176 ---- of modern nations, "common manual labour" impotent to produce the, 48, 50, 54 Wealth-producer, the greed of the, 125 Wealth-producing power, labour's, 11, 21, 42 Webb, Sidney, 43, 58-60, 89, 90, 119, 191, 194, 197; his argument, 107, 108 Wilshire, Gayford, his leaflet, 47, 143, 257 Printed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury. 
11217	----	THE VISIONING A NOVEL BY SUSAN GLASPELL 1911 CHAPTER I Miss Katherine Wayneworth Jones was bunkered. Having been bunkered many times in the past, and knowing that she would be bunkered upon many occasions in the future, Miss Jones was not disposed to take a tragic view of the situation. The little white ball was all too secure down there in the sand; as she had played her first nine, and at least paid her respects to the game, she could now scale the hazard and curl herself into a comfortable position. It was a seductively lazy spring day, the very day for making arm-chairs of one's hazards. And let it be set down in the beginning that Miss Jones was more given to a comfortable place than to a tragic view. Katherine Wayneworth Jones, affectionately known to many friends in many lands as Katie Jones, was an "army girl." And that not only for the obvious reasons: not because her people had been of the army, even unto the second and third generations, not because she had known the joys and jealousies of many posts, not even because bachelor officers were committed to the habit of proposing to her--those were but the trappings. She was an army girl because "Well, when you know her, you don't have to be told, and if you don't know her you can't be," a floundering friend had once concluded her exposition of why Katie was so "army." For her to marry outside the army would be regarded as little short of treason. To-day she was giving a little undisturbing consideration to that thing of her marrying. For it was her twenty-fifth birthday, and twenty-fifth birthdays are prone to knock at the door of matrimonial possibilities. Just then the knock seemed answered by Captain Prescott. Unblushingly Miss Jones considered that doubtless before the summer was over she would be engaged to him. And quite likely she would follow up the engagement with a wedding. It seemed time for her to be following up some of her engagements. She did not believe that she would at all mind marrying Harry Prescott. All his people liked all hers, which would facilitate things at the wedding; she would not be rudely plunged into a new set of friends, which would be trying at her time of life. Everything about him was quite all right: he played a good game of golf, not a maddening one of bridge, danced and rode in a sort of joy of living fashion. And she liked the way he showed his teeth when he laughed. She always thought when he laughed most unreservedly that he was going to show more of them; but he never did; it interested her. And it interested her the way people said: "Prescott? Oh yes--he was in Cuba, wasn't he?" and then smiled a little, perhaps shrugged a trifle, and added: "Great fellow--Prescott. Never made a mess of things, anyhow." To have vague association with the mysterious things of life, and yet not to have "made a mess of things"--what more could one ask? Of course, pounding irritably with her club, the only reason for not marrying him was that there were too many reasons for doing so. She could not think of a single person who would furnish the stimulus of an objection. Stupid to have every one so pleased! But there must always be something wrong, so let that be appeased in having everything just right. And then there was Cuba for one's adventurous sense. She looked about her with satisfaction. It frequently happened that the place where one was inspired keen sense of the attractions of some other place. But this time there was no place she would rather be than just where she found herself. For she was a little tired, after a long round of visits at gay places, and this quiet, beautiful island out in the Mississippi--large, apart, serene--seemed a great lap into which to sink. She liked the quarters: big old-fashioned houses in front of which the long stretch of green sloped down to the river. There was something peculiarly restful in the spaciousness and stability, a place which the disagreeable or distressing things of life could not invade. Most of the women were away, which was the real godsend, for the dreariness and desolation of pleasure would be eliminated. A quiet post was charming until it tried to be gay--so mused Miss Katherine Wayneworth Jones. And of various other things, mused she. Her brother, Captain Wayneworth Jones, was divorced from his wife and wedded to something he was hoping would in turn be wedded to a rifle; all the scientific cells of the family having been used for Wayne's brain, it was hard for Katie to get the nature of the attachment, but she trusted the ordnance department would in time solemnly legalize the affair--Wayne giving in marriage--destruction profiting happily by the union. Meanwhile Wayne was so consecrated to the work of making warfare more deadly that he scarcely knew his sister had arrived. But on the morrow, or at least the day after, would come young Wayneworth, called Worth, save when his Aunt Kate called him Wayne the Worthy. Wayne the Worthy was also engaged in perfecting a death-dealing instrument, the same being the interrogation point. Doubtless he would open fire on Aunt Kate with--Why didn't his mother and father live in the same place any more, and--Why did he have to live half the time with mama if he'd rather stay all the time with father? Poor Worth, he had only spent six years in a world of law and order, and had yet to learn about courts and incompatibilities and annoying things like that. It did not seem fair that the hardest part of the whole thing should fall to poor little Wayne the Worthy. He couldn't help it, certainly. But how Worthie would love those collie pups! They would evolve all sorts of games to play with them. Picturing herself romping with the boy and dogs, prowling about on the river in Wayne's new launch, lounging under those great oak trees reading good lazying books, doing everything because she wanted to and nothing because she had to, flirting just enough with Captain Prescott to keep a sense of the reality of life, she lay there gloating over the happy prospect. And then in that most irresponsible and unsuspecting of moments something whizzed into her consciousness like a bullet--something shot by her vision pierced the lazy, hazy, carelessly woven web of imagery--bullet-swift, bullet-true, bullet-terrible--striking the center clean and strong. The suddenness and completeness with which she sat up almost sent her from her place. For from the very instant that her eye rested upon the figure of the girl in pink organdie dress and big hat she knew something was wrong. And when, within a few feet of the river the girl stopped running, shrank back, covered her face with her hands, then staggered on, she knew that that girl was going to the river to kill herself. There was one frozen instant of powerlessness. Then--what to do? Call to her? She would only hurry on. Run after her? She could not get there. It was intuition--instinct--took the short cut a benumbed reason could not make; rolling headlong down the bunker, twisting her neck and mercilessly bumping her elbow, Katherine Wayneworth Jones emitted a shriek to raise the very dead themselves. And then three times a quick, wild "Help--Help--Help!" and a less audible prayer that no one else was near. It reached; the girl stopped, turned, saw the rumpled, lifeless-looking heap of blue linen, turned back toward the river, then once more to the motionless Miss Jones, lying face downward in the sand. And then the girl who thought life not worth living, delaying her own preference, with rather reluctant feet--feet clad in pink satin slippers--turned back to the girl who wanted to live badly enough to call for help. Through one-half of one eye Katie could see her; she was thinking that there was something fine about a girl who wanted to kill herself putting it off long enough to turn back and help some one who wanted to live. Miss Jones raised her head just a trifle, showed her face long enough to roll her eyes in a grewsome way she had learned at school, and with a "Help me!" buried her face in the sand and lay there quivering. The girl knelt down. "You sick?" she asked, and Katie had the fancy of her voice sounding as though she had not expected to use it any more. "So ill!" panted Kate, rolling over on her back and holding her heart. "Here! My heart!" The girl looked around uncertainly. It must be a jar, Katie conceded, being called back to life, expected to fight for the very thing one was running away from. Her rescuer was evidently considering going to the river for water--saving water (Katie missed none of those fine points)--but instead she pulled the patient to a sitting position, supporting her. "You can breathe better this way, can't you?" she asked solicitously. "Have you had them before? Will it go away? Shall I call some one?" Katie rolled her head about as she had seen people do who were dying on the stage. "Often--before. Go away--soon. But don't leave me!" she implored, clutching at the girl wildly. "I will not leave you," the stranger assured her. "I have plenty of time." Miss Jones made what the doctors would call a splendid recovery. Her breath began coming more naturally; her spine seemed to regain control of her head; her eyes rolled less wildly. "It's going," she panted; "but you'll have to help me to the house." "Why of course," replied the girl who was being delayed. "Do you think I'd leave a sick girl sitting out here all alone?" Kate felt like apologizing. It seemed rather small--that interrupting a death to save a life. "Where do you live?" her companion was asking. She pointed to the quarters. "In one of those?" "The second one," Katie told her. "And thank Heaven," she told herself, "the first one is closed!" "Lean on me," directed the girl in pink, with a touch of the gentle authority of strong to weak. "Don't be afraid to lean on me." Kate felt the quick warm tears against her eyelids. "You're very kind," she said, and the quiver in her voice was real. They walked slowly on, silently. Katie was trembling now, and in earnest. "My name is Katherine Jones," she said at last, looking timidly at the girl who was helping her. It wrought a change. The girl's mouth closed in a hard line. A hard, defending glitter seemed to seal her eyes. She did not respond. "May I ask to whom I am indebted for this kindness?" It was asked with gentleness. But for the moment it brought no response. "My name is Verna Woods," came at last with an unsteady defiance. They had reached the steps of the big, hospitable porch. With deep relief Katie saw that there was no one about. Nora had gone out with one of her adorers from the barracks. They turned, and were looking back to the river. It was May at May's loveliest: the grass and trees so tender a green, the river so gently buoyant, and a softly sympathetic sky over all. A soldier had appeared and was picking twigs from the putting green in front of them; another soldier was coming down the road with some eggs which he was evidently taking to Captain Prescott's quarters. He was whistling. Everything seemed to be going very smoothly. And a launch was coming down the river; a girl's laugh came musically across the water and the green; it inspired the joyful throat of a nearby robin. And into this had been shot--! Katie turned to the intruder. "It's lovely, isn't it?" she asked in a queer, hushed way. The girl looked at her, and at the fierce rush of things Kate took a frightened step backward. But quickly the other had turned away her face. Only her clenched hand and slightly moving shoulder told anything. There was another call to make, and instinct alone could not reach this time. For the moment thought of it left her mute. "You have been so kind to me," she began, her timidity serving well as helplessness, "so very kind. I wonder if I may ask one thing more? Am--am I keeping you from anything you should be doing?" There was no response at first, just a little convulsive clenching of the hand, an accentuated movement of the shoulder. Then, "I have time enough," was the low, curt answer, face still averted. "I am alone here, as you see. I am just a little afraid of a--a return attack. I wonder--would you be willing to come up to my room with me--help make a cup of tea for us and--stay with me a little while?" Again for the minute, no reply. Then the girl turned hotly upon her, suspicion, resentment--was it hatred, too?--in her eyes. But what she saw was as a child's face--wide eyes, beseeching mouth. Women who wondered "what in the world men saw in Katie Jones" might have wondered less had they seen her then. The girl did not seem to know what to say. Suddenly she was trembling from head to foot. Kate laid a hand upon the quivering arm. "I've frightened you," she said regretfully and tenderly. "You need the tea, too. You'll come?" The girl's eyes roved all around like the furtive eyes of a frightened animal. But they came back to Katie's steadying gaze. "Why yes--I'll come--if you want me to," she said in voice she was clearly making supreme effort to steady. "I do indeed," said Kate simply and led the way into the house. CHAPTER II And now that they were face to face across a tea-table Miss Jones was bunkered again. How get out of the sand? She did not know. She did not even know what club to use. For never had she drunk tea under similar circumstances. Life had brought her varied experiences, but sitting across the teacups from one whom she had interrupted on the brink of suicide did not chance to be among them. She was wholly without precedent, and it was trying for an army girl to be stripped of precedent. They were sitting at a window which overlooked the river; the river which was flowing on so serenely, which was so blue and lazy and lovely that May afternoon. She looked to the place where--then back to the girl across from her--the girl who but for her-- She shivered. "Is it coming back?" the girl asked. "N--o; I think not; but I hope you will not go." Then, desperately resolved to break through, she asked boldly: "Am I keeping you from anything important?" A strange gleam, compounded of things she did not understand, shot out at her. To be followed with: "Important? Oh I don't know. That depends on how you look at it. The only thing I have left to do is to kill myself. I guess it won't take long." Kate met it with a sharp, involuntary cry. For the sullen steadiness, dispassionateness, detachment with which it was said made it more real than it had been at the water's edge. "But--but you see it's such a lovely day. You know--you know it's such a beautiful place," was what the resourceful Miss Jones found herself stammering. "Yes," agreed her companion, "pleasant weather, isn't it?" She looked at Katie contemptuously. "You think _weather_ makes any difference? That's like a girl like you!" Katie laughed. Laughing seemed the only sand club she had just then. "I _am_ a fool," she agreed. "I've often thought so myself. But like most other fools I mean well, and this just didn't seem to me the sort of day when it would occur to one to kill one's self. Now if it were terribly hot, the kind of hot that takes your brains away, or so cold you were freezing, or even if it were raining, not a decent rain, but that insulting drizzle that makes you hate everything--why then, yes, I might understand. But to kill one's self in the sunshine!" As she was finishing she had a strange sensation. She saw that the girl was looking at her compassionately. Katherine Wayneworth Jones was not accustomed to being viewed with compassion. "It would be foolish to try to make you understand," said the girl simply, finality in her weariness. "It would be foolish to try to make a girl like you understand that nothing can be so bad as sunshine." Katie leaned across the table. This interested her. "Why I suppose that might be true. I suppose--" But the girl was not listening. She was leaning back in the great wicker chair. She seemed actually to be relaxing, resting. That seemed strange to Kate. How could she be resting in an hour which had just been tacked on to her life? And then it came to her that perhaps it was a long time since the girl had sat in a chair like that. If she had had a chance, when things were going badly, to sit in such a chair and rest, might the river have seemed a less desirable place? She had always supposed it was _big_ things--queer, abstract, unknowable things like forces and traits that made life and death. Did _chairs_ count? As the girl's eyes closed, surrenderingly, Katie was glad that no matter what she might decide to do about things she had had that hour in the big, tenderly cushioned wicker chair. It might be a kinder memory to take with her from life than anything she had known for a long time. Katherine had grown very still, still both outwardly and inwardly. People spoke of her enviously as having experienced so much; living in all parts of the world, knowing people of all nations and kinds. But it seemed all of that had been mere splashing around on the beach. She was out in the big waves now. She looked at the girl; looked with the eyes of one who would understand. And what she saw was that some one, something, had, as it were, struck a blow at the center, and the girl, the something that really _was_ her, had gone to pieces. Everything was scattered. Even her features scarcely seemed to belong to each other, so how must it not be with those other things, inner things, oh, things one did not know what to call? Was it because she could not get things together it seemed to her she must make them all stop? Was that it? Did people lose the power to hold themselves in the one that made you _you_? What could do that? Something that reached the center; not many things could; something, perhaps, that kept battering at it for a long time, and just shook it at first, and then-- It was too dreadful to think of it that way. She tried to make herself stop. The girl's face was turned to the out-of-doors; to a great tree in front of the window, a tree in which some robins had built their nests. Such a tired face! So many tear marks, and so much less reachable than tear stains. A beautiful face, too. If all were back which the blow at the center had struck away, if she had all of her--if lighted--it would be a rarely beautiful face. The girl was like a flower; a flower, it seemed to Kate, which had not been planted in the right place. The gardener had been unwise in his selection of a place for this flower; perhaps he had not used the right kind of soil, perhaps he had put it in the full heat of the sun when it was a flower to have more shade; perhaps too much wind or too much rain--Katie wondered just what the mistake had been. For the flower would have been so lovely had the gardener not made those mistakes. Even now, it was lovely: lovely with a saddening loveliness, for one saw at a glance how easily a breeze too rough could beat it down. And one knew there had been those breezes. Every petal drooped. A strange desire entered the heart of Katherine: a desire to see whether those petals could take their curves again, whether a color which blunders had faded could come back to its own. She was like the new gardener eager to see whether he can redeem the mistakes of the old. And the new gardener's zeal is not all for the flower; some of it is to show what he can do, and much of it the true gardener's passion for experiment. Katie Jones would have made a good gardener. And yet it was something less cold than the experimenting instinct tightened her throat as she looked at the frail figure of the girl for whom life had been too much. "I must go now," she was saying, with what seemed mighty effort to summon all of herself over which she could get command. "You are all right now. I must go." But she sank back in the chair, as if that one thing left at the center pulled her back, crying out that if it could but have a little more time there-- The girl in blue linen was sitting at the feet of the girl in pink organdie. She had hold of her hand, so slim a hand. Everything about the girl was slim, built for favoring breezes. "I have one thing more to ask." It was Kate's voice was not well controlled this time. "You may call it a whim, a notion, foolish notion; call it what you like, but I want you to stay here to-night." The girl was looking down at her, down into the upturned face, all light and strength and purpose as one standing apart and disinterested might view a spectacle. Slowly, comprehendingly, dispassionately she shook her head. "It would be--no use." "Perhaps," Katie acquiesced. "Some of the very nicest things in life are--no use. But I have something planned. May I tell you what it is I want to do?" Still she did not take her eyes from Katie's kindling face, looking at it as at something a long way off and foreign. "I am not a philanthropist, have no fears of that. But I have an idea, a theory, that what seem small things are perhaps the only things in life to help the big things. For instance, a hot bath. I can't think of any sorrow in the world that a hot bath wouldn't help, just a little bit." "Now we have such a beautiful bathroom. I loathe hot baths in tiny bathrooms, where the air gets all steamy and you can't get your breath. Perhaps one thing the matter with you is that all the bathrooms you've been in lately were too small. Of course, you didn't _know_ that was one thing the matter; like once at a dance I thought I was very sad about a man's dancing so much with another girl, a new girl--don't you loathe 'new girls'?--but when I got home I found that one of my dress stays was digging into me and when I got my dress off I didn't feel half so broken up about the man." An odd thing happened; one thing struck away came back. There was a light in the eyes telling that something human and understanding, something to link her to other things human, would like to come back. She looked and listened as to something nearer. Seeing it, Katie chattered on, against time, about nothing; foolish talk, heartless talk, it might even seem, to be pouring out to a girl who felt there was no place for her in life. But it was nonsense carried by tenderness. Nonsense which made for kinship. It reached. Several times the girl who thought she must kill herself was not far from a smile and at last there was a tear on the long lashes. "So I'm going to undress you," Katie unfolded her plan, encouraged by the tear, "and then let's just see what hot water can do about it. And maybe a little rub. I used to rub my mother's spine. She said life always seemed worth living after I had done that." She patted the hand she held ever so lightly as she said: "How happy I would be if I could make you feel that way about it, too. Then I've a dear room to take you into, all soft grays and greens, and oh, such a good bed! Why you know you're tired! That's what's the matter with you, and you're just too tired to know what's the matter." The girl nodded, tears upon her cheeks, looking like a child that has had a cruel time and needs to be comforted. Katie's voice was lower, different, as she went on: "Then after I've brushed your hair and done all those 'comfy' things I'm going to put you in a certain, a very special gown I have. It was made by the nuns in a convent in Southern France. As they worked upon it they sat in a garden on a hillside. They thought serene thoughts, those nuns. You see I know them, lived with them. I don't know, one has odd fancies sometimes, and it always seemed to me that something of the peace of things there was absorbed in that wonderful bit of linen. It seems far away from things that hurt and harm. Almost as if it might draw back things that had gone. I was going to keep it--" Katie's eyes deepened, there was a little catch in her voice. "Well, I was just keeping it. But because you are so tired--oh just because you need it so.--I want you to let me give it to you." And with a tender strength holding the sobbing girl Katie unfastened her collar and began taking off her dress. CHAPTER III "Kate," demanded Captain Jones, "what's that noise?" "How should I know?" airily queried Kate. "I heard a noise in the room above. This chimney carries every sound." "Nonsense," jeered his sister. "Wayne, you've lived alone so long that you're getting spooky." He turned to the other man. "Prescott, didn't you hear something?" "Believe I did. It sounded like a cough." "Well, what of it?" railed Kate. "Isn't poor Nora permitted to cough, if she is disposed to cough? She's in there doing the room for me. I'm going to try sleeping in there--isn't insomnia a fearful thing? But the fussiness of men!" They were in the library over their coffee. Kate was peculiarly charming that night in one of the thin white gowns she wore so much, and which it seemed so fitting she should wear. She had been her gayest. Prescott was thinking he had never known any one who seemed to sparkle and bubble that way; and so easily and naturally, as though it came from an inner fount of perpetual action, and could more easily rise than be held down. And he was wondering why a girl who had so many of the attributes of a boy should be so much more fascinating than any mere girl. "There are two kinds of girl," he had heard an older officer once say. "There are girls, and then there is Katie Jones." He had condemned that as distinctly maudlin at the time, but recalled it to-night with less condemnation. "Katie," exclaimed Wayne, after his sister had read aloud some one's engagement from the Army and Navy Register, and wondered vehemently how those two people ever expected to live together, "Nora's out on the side porch with Watts!" "Do you disapprove of this affair between Nora and Watts?" Katie wanted to know, critically inspecting the design on her coffee spoon. "I distinctly disapprove of having some one coughing in the room upstairs and not being satisfied who the some one is!" She leaned forward, pointing her spoon at him earnestly. "Wayne, they say there are some excellent nerve specialists in Chicago. I'd advise you to take the night train. Take the rifle along, Wayne, and find out just what it's done to you." "That's all very well! But if you'd been reading the papers lately you'd know that ideas of house-breaking are not necessarily neurasthenic." "Dear Wayne, lover of maps and charts, let me take this pencil and make a little sketch for you. _A_ is the chamber above. In that chamber is Nora. Nora coughs in parting. Then she parts. _B_ is the back hall through which Nora walks. _C_ is the back stairs which she treads. Watts being waiting, she treads--or is it kinder to say trips?--with good blithe speed. _D_ is the side door and _E_ the side porch. Now I ask you, oh master of engineering and weird mechanical and mathematical mysteries, what is to prevent Nora from getting from _A_ to _E_ in the interval of time between the coughing and the viewing?" Prescott laughed, but Wayne only grunted and ominously eyed the chimney place. "There!" he cried, triumphantly on his feet before his sister, as again came the faint but unmistakable little cough. "A little harder to make a map this time, isn't it? Talk about nerve specialists--!" He started for the door, but Katie slipped in in front of him, and closed it. "Don't go, Wayne," she said quietly; queerly, Prescott thought. "Don't _go?_ Kate, what's the matter with you? Now don't be foolish, Katie," he admonished with the maddening patronage of the older brother. "Open the door." "I wish you wouldn't go," she sighed plaintively, arms outstretched against the door. "I do hope you won't insist on going. You'll frighten Ann." "Frighten _who?_" "Ann," she repeated demurely. "Ann--_who?_ Ann--_what?_" "Ann _who!_ Ann _what!_ That's a nice way to speak of my friends! It's all very well to blow up the world, Wayne, but I think one should retain some of the civilities of life!" "But I don't understand," murmured poor Wayne. "No, of course not. Do you understand anything except things that nobody else wants to understand? Ann is not smokeless powder, so I presume you are not interested in her, but it seems to me you might tax your brain sufficiently to bear in mind that I told you she was coming!" "I'm sorry," said Wayne humbly. "I don't seem able to recall a word about her." "I scarcely expected you would," was the withering response. "Tell me about her," Captain Prescott asked sympathetically. "I like girls better than guns. Has Ann another name? Do I know her?" Katie was bending down inspecting a tear she had discovered at the bottom of her dress. "Oh yes, why yes, certainly, Ann has another name. Her name is Forrest. No, I think you do not know her. I don't know that Ann knows many army people. I knew her in Europe." Then, as they seemed waiting for more: "I am very fond of Ann." She had resumed her seat and the critical examination of her coffee spoon. The men were silent, respecting the moment of tender contemplation of her fondness for Ann. "Ann is a dear girl," she volunteered at last. "Having had it impressed upon me that I am such a duffer," Captain Jones began, a little haughtily, "I naturally hesitate to make many inquiries, but I cannot quite get it through my stupid and impossible head just why 'Ann' is hidden away in this mysterious manner." "There's nothing mysterious about it," said Kate sharply. "Ann was tired." "And why, if I may venture still another blundering question, was poor Nora held responsible for a cough she never coughed?" Once more Miss Jones surveyed the torn ruffle at the bottom of her skirt. She seemed to be giving it serious consideration. "I am glad that I do not live in the Mississippi Valley," was the remark she finally raised herself to make. "One of Kate's greatest charms," Wayne informed Prescott, "is the emphasis and assurance with which she unfailingly produces the irrelevant. Now when you ask her if she likes Benedictine, don't be at all surprised to have her dreamily murmur: 'But why should oranges always be yellow?'" "I am glad that I do not live in the Mississippi Valley," Kate went on, superiorly ignoring the observation, "because the joy of living seems to be at a very low ebb out here." "Honestly now, do you get that?" he demanded of his friend. "Ann and I had planned a beautiful surprise for you, Wayne." "Thanks," said Wayne drily. "To-night Ann was tired. She did not wish to come down to dinner. Of course, I might have told you: 'Ann is here.' To the orderly, West-Pointed mind, the well oiled, gun-constructing mind, I presume that would present itself as the thing to do. But Ann and I have a sense of the joy of living, a delight in the festive, in the--the bubbling wine of youth, you know. So we said, 'How beautiful to surprise dear Wayne.' In the morning Ann, refreshed by the long night's sleep, was to go out and gather roses. Wayne--" "The roses don't bloom until next month," brutally interrupted Wayne. "Of course, you would think of that! As we had planned it, Wayne, looking from his window was to see the beautiful girl--she is a beautiful girl--gathering dew-laden roses in the garden. Perhaps Captain Prescott, chancing at that very moment to look from his window, would see her too. It was to be a beautiful, a never-to-be-forgotten moment for you both." "We humbly apologize," laughed Prescott. "Hum!" grunted dear Wayne. CHAPTER IV She stepped out on the porch for a moment as Captain Prescott was saying good-night. The moonlight was falling weirdly through the big trees, stretching itself over the grass in shapes that seemed to spell unearthly things. And there were mystical lights on the water down there, flitting about with the movement of the stream as ghosts might flit. Because it looked so other-world-like she wondered if it knew what it had just missed. She had never thought anything about water save as something to look beautiful and have a good time on. It seemed now that perhaps it knew a great deal about things of which she knew nothing at all. "Oh, I say, jolly night, isn't it?" he exclaimed as they stood at the head of the steps. "Yes," said Kate grimly, "pleasant weather, isn't it?" and laughed oddly. "It's great about your friend coming; Miss--?" "Forrest." She spoke it decisively. "She arrived this afternoon?" "Yes, unexpectedly. I was never more surprised in my life than when I looked up and saw Ann standing there." Katie was not too impressed to resist toying a little with the situation. "Oh, is that so? I thought--" But he was too well-bred to press it. "Of course," she hastened to patch together her thread, "of course, as I told Wayne, I knew that Ann was coming. But I didn't really expect her until day after to-morrow. You see, there have been complications." "Oh, I see. Well, at any rate it's great that she's here. She will be with you for the summer?" "Ann's plans are a little uncertain," Kate informed him. "I hope she'll not find it dull. Does she care for golf?" "U--m, I--Ann has never played much, I believe. You see she has lived so much in Europe--on the Continent--places where they don't play golf! And then Ann is not very strong." "Then this is just the place for her. Great place for loafing, you know. I hope she is fond of the water?" Kate was leaning against one of the pillars, still looking down toward the river. It might have been the moonlight made her look so strange as she said, with a smile of the same quality as those shadows on the grass: "Why yes; in fact, Ann's fondness for the water was the first thing I ever noticed about her. I think I might even say it was the water drew us together." "Oh, well then, that is great. We can take the boat and do all sorts of jolly things. Now I wonder--about a horse for her. She rides?" "Perhaps you had better make no plans for Ann," she suddenly advised. "It really would not surprise me at all if she went away to-morrow. There is a great deal of uncertainty about the whole thing. In fact, Ann has had a great deal of trouble." "I'm sorry," he said with a simplicity she liked in him. "Yes, a great deal of trouble. Last year both her father and mother died, which was a great blow to her." "Well, rather!" "And now there are all sorts of business things to straighten out. It's really very hard for Ann." "Perhaps we can help her," he suggested. "Perhaps we can," agreed Kate. Her eyes left him to wander across the shadows down to the river again. But she came back to him to say, and this with the oddest smile of all, "Wouldn't it be a queer sensation for us? That thing of really 'helping' some one?" She could not go to sleep that night. For a long time she sat in her room in the same big chair in which Ann had sat that afternoon. Poor Ann, who had sat there before she knew she was Ann, who was sleeping now without knowing she was Ann. For Ann was indeed sleeping. From her door as Kate carefully opened it had come the deep breathing as of an exhausted child. Who was Ann? Where had she come from? How did she get there? What had happened? Why had she wanted to kill herself? She wanted to know. In truth, she was madly curious to know. And probably she never would know. And what would happen now? It suddenly occurred to her that Wayne might be rather annoyed at having Ann commit suicide. But there was a little catch in her laugh at the thought of Wayne's consternation. A long time she sat there wondering. Where _had_ Ann come from? She had just seemed whirled out of the nowhere into the there, as an unannounced comet in well-ordered heavens Ann had come. From what other world?--and why? Did she belong to anybody? Another pleasant prospect for poor Wayne! Was some one looking for Ann? Would there be things in the paper about her? Surely a girl could not step out of her life and leave no trail behind. Things could not close up like that, even about Ann. Every one had a place. Then how could one step from that place without leaving a conspicuous looking vacancy? Why had Ann been dressed that way? It seemed a strange costume in which to kill one's self. It seemed to Katie that one would prefer to meet the unknown in a smaller hat. She went to the closet and took out the organdie dress and satin slippers. From whence? and why thither? They opened long paths of wondering. The dress was bedraggled about the bottom, as though trailed through fields and over roads. And so strangely crumpled, and so strange the scent--a scent hauntingly familiar, yet baffling in its relation to gowns. A poorly made gown, Katie noted, but effective. She tried to read the story, but could not read beyond the fact that there was a story. The pink satin slippers had broken heels and were stained and soaked. They had traveled ground never meant for them. Something about Ann made one feel she was not the girl to be walking about in satin slippers. Something had happened. She had been dressed for one thing and then had done another thing. Could it be that ever since the night before she had been out of her place in the scheme of things?--loosened from the great human unit?--seeking destruction, perhaps, because she could not regain her place therein? "Where have you been?" Katie murmured to the ruined slippers. "What did it? What do you know? What did you want?" Many a pair of just such slippers she had danced to the verge of shabbiness. To her they were associated with hops, the gayest of music and lightest of laughter, brilliant crowds in flower-scented rooms, dancing and flirtation--the froth and bubble of life. But something sterner than waxed floors had wrought the havoc here. How much of life's ground all unknown to her had these poor little slippers trodden? Was it often like that?--that the things created for the fun and the joy found the paths of tragedy? She had put them away and was at last going to bed when she idly picked up the evening paper. What she saw was that the Daisey-Maisey Opera Company was playing at the city across the river. Something made her stand there very still. Could it be--? Might it not be--? She did not know. Would she ever know? It drew her back to the girl's room. She was sleeping serenely. With shaded candle Katie stood at the door watching her. Surely the hour was past! Sleep such as that must draw one back to life. Lying there in the sweet dignity of her braided hair, in that simple lovely gown, she might have been Ann indeed. There was tenderness just then in the heart of Katherine Wayneworth Jones. She was glad that this girl who was sleeping as though sleep had been a treasure long withheld, was knowing to-night the balm of a good bed, glad that she could sink so unquestioningly into the lap of protection. Protection!--it was that which one had in a place like this. Why was it given the Anns--and not the Vernas? The sleeping girl seemed to feel that all was well in the house which sheltered her that night. Suddenly Katie knew what it was had gone. Fear. It was terror had slipped back, leaving the weariness which can give itself over to sleep. Katie was thinking, striking deeper things than were wont to invade Katie's meditations. The protection of a Wayne, the chivalrous comradeship of a Captain Prescott--how different the life of an Ann from the life this girl might have had! She stood at the door for a long moment, looking at her with a searching tenderness. What had she been through? What was there left for her? Once, as a child, she had taken a turtle from its native mud and brought it home. Soon after that they moved into an apartment and her father said that she must give the turtle up. "But, father," she had cried, "you don't understand! I took it! Now how can I throw it away?" "You are right, Katherine," he had replied gravely--her dear, honorable, understanding father; "it is rather inconvenient to have a turtle in an apartment, but, as you say, responsibilities are greater than conveniences." She was thinking of that story as she finally went to bed. CHAPTER V "Nora," said Katie next morning, "Miss Forrest has had a great misfortune." Nora paused in her dusting, all ready with the emotion which Katie's tone invited. "She has lost all of her luggage!" "The poor young lady!" cried good Nora. "Yes, it is really terrible, isn't it? Everything lost; through the carelessness of the railroads, you know. And such beautiful gowns as they were. So--so unusual. Poor Miss Ann was forced to arrive in a dress most unsuited to traveling, and is now quite--oh quite--destitute." Nora held her head with both hands, speechless. "Didn't you tell me, Nora, that your cousin's wife was very clever at sewing--at fixing things over?" "Yes, yes, Miss Kate--yes'm." "I wonder, Nora, would she come and help us?" "She would be that glad, Miss Kate. She--" "You see, Miss Ann is not very well. She--poor Miss Ann, I hope you will be very kind to her. She is an orphan, like you, Nora." Nora wiped both eyes. "And just now it would be too dreadful for her to have to see about a lot of things. So I think, temporarily, we could arrange some of my things; let them down a little, and perhaps take them in--Miss Ann is a little taller and a little slimmer than I. Could you send for your cousin's wife to help us, Nora?" Profusely, o'erflowingly, Nora affirmed that this would be possible. When Captain Jones came in from the shops for luncheon it was to find his sister installed in the hall, one of those roomy halls adapted to all purposes of living, some white and pink and blue things strewn around her, doing something with a scissors. Just what she was doing seemed to concern him very little, for he sat down at a table near her, pulled out some blue prints, and began studying them. "Thank heaven for the saving qualities of firearms," mused Katherine, industriously letting out a tuck. But luncheon seemed to suggest the social side of life, for after they were seated he asked: "Oh yes, by the way, where's Miss--" "Ann is still sleeping," replied Kate easily. "She must be a good sleeper," ventured Wayne. "Ann is tired, Wayne," she said with reproving dignity, "and as I have already told you several times without seeming to reach through the bullets on your brain, not well. She is here for a rest. She may not come down for several days." "Not what one would call a hilarious guest," he commented. "No, less hilarious than Zelda Fraser." Katie spitefully mentioned a former guest whom Wayne had particularly detested. He laughed. "Well, who is she? What did you say her name was?" "Oh Wayne," she sighed long-sufferingly, "again--once again--let me tell you that her name is Forrest." "What Forrest?" "'Um, I don't believe you know Ann's people." "Not the Major Forrest family?" "No, not that family; not army people at all." "Well, what people? I can't seem to place her." "Ann is of--artistic people. Her father was a great artist. That is, he would have been a great artist had he not died when he was very young." "Rather an assumption, isn't it, that a man would have--" "Why not at all, if he has done enough during his brief lifetime to warrant the assumption." "Is her mother living?" "Oh no," said Katie irritably, "certainly not. Her mother has been dead--five years." Then, looking into the dreamy distance and drawing it out as though she loved it: "Her mother was a great musician." "I shan't like her," announced Wayne decisively; "she is probably exotic and self-conscious and supercilious, and not at all a comfortable person to have about. It's bad enough for her father to have been a great artist--without her mother needs having been a great musician." "She is simple and sweet and very shy," reproved Kate. "So shy that she will doubtless be painfully embarrassed at meeting you, and seem--well, really ill at ease." "That will be an odd spectacle--a young woman of to-day 'painfully embarrassed' at meeting a man. I never saw any of them very ill at ease, save when there were no men about." "Ann's experiences have not all been happy ones, Wayne," said Katie in the manner of the deeply understanding to one of lesser comprehension. "I hope she'll go on sleeping. A young woman of artistic people--painfully embarrassed--unhappy experiences--it doesn't sound at all comfortable to me." But a little later he said: "Prescott seems to think that Daisey-Maisey company not bad. If you girls would like to go we'll telephone for seats." Katie paused in the eating of a peach. "Thank you, Wayne, but I have an idea--just a vague sort of idea--that Ann would not care especially for that." "She's probably right," said Wayne, returning with relief to the blue prints. Katie's sporting blood was up. Ann was to be Ann. Never in her life had she been so fascinated with anything as with this creation of an Ann. "I have prepared a place for her," she mused, over the untucking of the softest of rose pink muslins. "I have prepared for her a family and a temperament and a sorrow and all that a young woman could most desire. From out the nothing a conscious something I have evoked. It would be most ungracious--ungrateful--of Ann to refuse to be what I made her. I invented her. By all laws of decency, she must be Ann. Indeed, she _is_ Ann." And Katie was truly beginning to think so. Katie's imagination coquetted successfully with conviction. Ann, or more accurately the idea of Ann, fascinated her. Never before had she known any one all unencumbered, unbound, by facts. Most people were rendered commonplace by the commonplace things one knew about them. But Ann was as interesting as one's brain could make her. Anything one choose to think--or say--about Ann could just as well as not be true. It swept one all unchained out into a virgin land of fancy. There was but one question. Could Ann keep within hailing distance of one's imagination? Did Ann have it in her to live up to the things one wished to believe about her? Was she capable of taking unto herself the past and temperament with which one would graciously endow her? Katie's sense of justice forced from her the admission that it was expecting a good deal of Ann. She could see that nothing would be more bootless than thrusting traditions upon people who would not know what to do with them. But something about Ann encouraged one to believe she could fit into a background prepared for her. And if she could--would--! The prospect lured--excited. It was as inexplicably intoxicating as a grimace at the preacher--a wink at the professor. It seemed to be saucily tweaking the ear of that insufferably solemn Things-as-They-Are goddess. There was in her eyes the light of battle when Nora finally came to tell her that Miss Forrest was awake. But it changed to another light at sight of the girl sitting up in bed so bewilderedly, turning upon her eyes which seemed to say--"And what are you going to do with me now?" Fighting down the lump in her throat Katie seized briskly upon that look of inquiry. "What she needs now," she decided, "is not tears, but a high hand." "Next thing on the program," she began, buoyantly raising the shades and throwing the windows wide, "is air. You're a good patient, for you do as you're told. It's been a fine sleep, hasn't it? And now I mean to get you into some clothes and take you out for a drive." The girl shrank down in the pillows, pulling the covers clear to her chin, as if to shut herself in. She did not speak, but shook her head. But Katie rode right over that look of pain and fear in her eyes, refusing to emphasize it by recognition. She left the room and returned after a moment with a white flannel suit which she spread out on the bed. "This is not a bad looking suit, is it? Your dress is scarcely warm enough for driving, so I want you to wear this. I told Nora that your luggage was lost. It may be just as well for you to know, from time to time, what I'm telling about you. I have an idea this suit will be very becoming to you. It came from Paris. I presume I'm rather foolish about things from Paris, but they always seem to me to have brought a little life and gayety along. There's a dear little white hat and stunning automobile veil goes with this suit. I can scarcely wait to see how pretty you're going to look in it all." For answer the girl turned to the wall, hid her face in the pillows, and sobbed. Kate laid a hand upon her hair--soft, fine brown hair with tempting little waves and gleams in it. There came to her a hideous vision of how that hair might have looked by this time had she not--by the merest chance-- It gave her a feeling of proprietary tenderness for the girl. It seemed indeed that this life was in her hands--for was it not her hands had kept it a life? "Please," she murmured gently, persuasively, as the sobs grew wilder. Suddenly the girl raised her head and turned upon Katie passionately. "What do you mean? What is this all about? I know well enough that people are not like this! This is not the way the world is!" "Not like what?" Kate asked quietly. "Doing things for people they don't have to do things for! Taking people into their houses and giving them things--their best things!--treating them as if there was some reason for treating them like that! I never heard of such a thing. What are you doing it for?" Katie sat there smiling at her calmly. "Do you want to know the honest truth?" The girl nodded, looking at her with anticipatory defiance, but that defiance which could so easily crumble to despair. "Very well then," she began lightly, "here goes. I don't know that it will sound very well, but it has the doubtful virtue of being true. The first reason is that it interests me; perhaps I should even say--amuses me. I always did like new things--queer things--surprises--things different. And the other reason is that I've taken a sure enough liking to you." She had drawn back at the first reason; but the bluntness of the first must have conveyed a sense of honesty in the second, for like the child who has been told something nice, a smile was faintly suggested beneath the tears. "Would you like to hear my favorite quotation from Scripture?" Kate wanted to know. At thought of Katie's having a favorite quotation the smile grew a little more defined. "My favorite quotation is this: 'Take no thought for the morrow.' Perhaps it ends in a way that spoils it; I would never read the rest of it, fearing it would ruin itself, but taking just so much and no more--and it certainly is your privilege to do that if you wish--if all of a thing is good for you, part of it must be somewhat good--it does make the most comfortable philosophy of life I know of. It's a great solace to me. Now when I am seventy, I don't doubt I will have lost my teeth. Losing one's teeth is such a distressing thing that I could sit here and weep bitterly for mine were it not for the sustaining power of my favorite quotation. Why don't you adopt it for your favorite, too? And, taking no thought for the morrow, is there any reason in the world why you shouldn't go out now and have a beautiful drive? Going for a drive doesn't commit one to any philosophy of life, or line of action, does it? And whatever you do, don't ever refuse nice things because you can't see the reason for people's doing them. I shudder to think how much--or better, how little fun I would have had in life had I first been compelled to satisfy myself I was entitled to it. We're entitled to nothing--most of us; that's all the more reason for taking all we can get. But come now! Here are some fresh things--yours seem a bit dusty." In such wise she rambled on as a bewildered but unresisting girl surrendered herself to her wiles and hands. When Katie returned from a call to the telephone it was to find Ann rubbing her hand over a pretty ankle adorned with the most silky of silken hose. "Likes them," Katie made of it, at sight of the down-turned face; "always wanted them--maybe never had them. Moral--If you want people to believe in you, give them something they don't need, but would like to have." She did her hair for her, chatting all the while about ways of doing hair, exclaiming about the beauty of Ann's and planning things she was going to do with it. "Were I as proud of all my works as I am of this, I might be a more self-respecting person," she said, finally passing Ann the hand mirror as if the girl's one concern in life was to see whether she approved of the plaiting of those soft glossy braids. And unmistakably she did approve. "It does look nice this way, doesn't it?" she agreed, looking up at Katie with a shy eagerness. When at last Ann had been made ready, when Katie had slipped on the long loosely fitted white coat, had adjusted the big veil with just the right touch of sophisticated carelessness, as she surveyed the work of her hands her excitement could with difficulty contain itself. "She _is_ Ann," she gloated. "Her father _was_ a great artist. Her mother simply couldn't _be_ anything but a great musician. And she's lived all her life in--Italy, I think it is. Oh--I know! She's from Florence. Why she couldn't be any place but from Florence--and she doesn't know anything about bridge and scandal and pay and promotion--but she knows all about dreaming dreams and seeing visions. She's lived a life apart--aloof--looking at great pictures and hearing great music. Of course, she's a little shy with us--she doesn't understand our roistering ways--that's part of her being Ann." But when she came back after getting her own things, Ann had gone. The girl in white was still sitting there in the chair, but she was not at all Ann. Things not from Florence, other things than dreams and visions and great pictures and music had taken hold of her. Frightened and disorganized again, she was huddled in the chair, and as Katie stood in the doorway she said not a word, but shook her head, and the eyes told all. Katie bent over the chair. "It's all 'up to me,'" she said quietly. "Don't you see that it is? You haven't a thing in the world to do but follow my lead. Won't you trust me enough to know that you will not be asked to do anything that would be too hard? Believe in me enough to feel I will put through anything I begin? Isn't it rather--oh, unthrifty, to let pasts and futures spoil presents? Some time soon we may want to talk of the future, but just now there's only the present. And not a very terrifying present. Nothing more fearful than winding in and out of the wooded roads of this beautiful place--listening to birds and--but come--" changing briskly to the practical and helping her rise as though dismissing the question--"I hear our horse." "I see Miss Jones has got some of her swell friends visitin' her," a soldier who was cutting grass remarked to a comrade newer to the service. "Great swell--they tell me Miss Jones is. They say she's it in Washington all right--way ahead of some that outranks her. Got outside money--their own money. Handy, ain't it?" he laughed. "Though it ain't just the money, either. Her mother was--well, somebody big--don't just recollect the name. Friendly, Miss Jones is. Not like some, afraid you're going to forget your place the minute she has a civil word with you. That one with her is some swell from Washington or New York. You can tell that by the looks of her, all right. Lord, don't they have it easy though?" CHAPTER VI It would indeed seem so. Men looking from the windows of the big shops--those great shops where army supplies were manufactured--noticed them with much the same thought, some of them admiringly, some resentfully, as they chanced to feel about things. They drove past building after building, buildings in which hundreds of men toiled on preparations for a possible war. The throb of those engines, sight of the perspiring faces, might suggest that rather large, a trifle extravagant, a bit cumbersome, was the price for peace. But these girls did not seem to be thinking of the possible war, or of the men who earned their bread thwarting it by preparation. One would suppose them to be just two beautifully cared for, careless-of-life girls, thinking of what some man had said at the dance the night before, or of the texture of the plume on some one's hat, or, to get down to the really serious issues of life, whether or not they could afford that love of a dinner gown. They left the main avenue and were winding in and out of the by-roads, roads which had all the care of a great park and all the charm of the deep woods. Here and there were soldiers doing nothing more warlike than raking grass or repairing roads. It seemed far removed from the stress and the struggle, place where the sense of protection but contributed to the sense of freedom. There would come occasional glimpses of the river, the beautiful homes and great factories of the busy, prosperous, middle-western city opposite. To the other side was a town, too, a little city of large enterprises; to either side seethed the questions of steel, and all those attendant questions of mind and heart whose pressure grew ever bigger and whose safety valves seemed tested to their uttermost. To either side the savage battles of peace, and there in between--an island--the peaceful preparations for war. And in such places, sheltered, detached, yet offered all she would have from without, had always lived Katie Jones, a favorite child of the favored men whom precautions against war offered so serene a life; surrounded by friends who were likewise removed from the battles of peace to the peace of possible war, knowing the social struggle only as it touched their own detached questions of pay and rank, pleasant and stupid posts, hospitable and inhospitable commandants. And into this had rushed a victim of the battles of peace! From the stony paths of peace there to the well-kept roads of war! The irony of it struck Katie anew: the incongruity of choosing so well-regulated a place for the performance of so disorderly an act as the taking of one's life. Choosing army headquarters as the place in which to desert from the army of life! Such an infringement of discipline as seeking self-destruction in that well-ordered spot where the machinery of destruction was so peacefully accumulated! She looked covertly at Ann; she could do it, for the girl seemed for the most part unconscious of her. She was leaning back in the comfortably rounded corner of the stanhope, her hands lax in her lap, her eyes often closed--a tired child of peace drinking in the peace furnished by the military, was Ann. It was plain that Ann was one who could drink things in, could draw beauty to her as something which was of her, something, too, it seemed, of which she had been long in need. Could it be that in the big outside world into which these new wonderings were sent, world which they seemed to penetrate but such a little way, there were many who did not find their own? Might it not be that some of the most genuine Florentines had never been to Florence? And because all this was _of_ Ann, it was banishing the things it could not assimilate. Those hurt looks, fretted looks, that hard look, already Kate had come to know them, would come, but always to go as Ann would swiftly raise her head to get the song of a bird, or yield her face to the caress of a soft spring breeze. Katie was grateful to the benign breezes, rich with the messages of opening buds, full, tender, restoring, which could blow away hard memories and bitter visions. Yet those same breezes had blown yesterday. Why could they not reach then? What was it had closed the door and shut in those things that were killing Ann? What were those things that had filled up and choked Ann's poor soul? From a hundred different paths she kept approaching it, could not keep away from it. One read of those things in the papers; they had always seemed to concern a people apart, to be pitied, but not understood, much less reached. Overwhelming that one who had wished to kill one's self should be enjoying anything! That a door so tragically shut should open to so simple a knock! Mere human voice reach that incomprehensible outermost brink! Were they not people different, but just people like one's self, who had simply fallen down in the struggle, and only needed some one to help them up, give them a cool drink and chance for a moment's rest? _Were_ the big and the little things so close? One's own kind and the other kind just one kind, after all? "I love winding roads," Katie was saying, after a long silence. "I suppose the thing so alluring about them is that one can never be sure just what is around the bend. When I was a little girl I used to pretend it was fairies waiting around the next curve, and I have never--" But she drew in her horse sharply, for the moment at a loss; for it was not fairies, but Captain Prescott, riding smilingly toward them, very handsome on his fine mount. "It's--one of our officers," she said sharply. "I--I'll have to present him." "Oh please--_please_!" was the girl's panic-stricken whisper. "Let me get out! I must! I can't!" "You _can_. You must!" commanded Katie. And then she had just time for just an imploring little: "For my sake." He had halted beside them and Katie was saying, with her usual cool gaiety: "You care for this day, too, do you? We're fairly steeped in it. Ann,"--not with the courage to look squarely at her--"at this moment I present your next-door neighbor. And a very good neighbor he is. We use his telephone when our telephone is discouraged. We borrow his books and bridles; we eat his bread and salt, drink his water and wine--especially his wine--we impose on him in every way known to good neighboring. Yes, to be sure, this is Miss Forrest of whom I told you last night." As the Captain was looking at Ann and not seeming overpowered with amazement, looking, on the other hand, as though seeing something rarely good to look at, Katie had the courage to look too. And at what she saw her heart swelled quite as the heart of the mother swells when the child speaks his piece unstutteringly. Ann was _doing_ it!--rising to the occasion--meeting the situation. Then she had other qualities no less valuable than looking Florentine. That thing of _doing_ it was a thing that had always commanded the affectionate admiration of Katie Jones. It was not what Ann did so much as her effective manner of doing nothing. One would not say she lacked assurance; one would put it the other way--that she seemed shy. It seemed to Katie she looked for all the world like a startled bird, and it also seemed that Captain Prescott particularly admired startled birds. He turned and rode a little way beside them, he and Katie assuming conversational responsibilities. But Ann's smile warmed her aloofness, and her very shyness seemed well adjusted to her fragility. "And just fits in with what I told him!" gloated Kate. And though she said so little, for some reason, perhaps because she looked so different, one got the impression of her having said something unusual. She had a way of listening which conveyed the impression she could say things worth listening to--if she chose. One took her on faith. He said to her at the last, with that direct boyish smile it seemed could not frighten even a startled bird: "You think you are going to like it here?" And Ann replied, slowly, a tremor in her voice, and a child's earnestness and sweetness in it too: "I think it the most beautiful place I ever saw in all my life." At the simple enough words his face softened strangely. It was with an odd gentleness he said he hoped they could all have some good times together. But, the moment conquered, things which it had called up swept in. The whole of it seemed to rush in upon her. She turned harshly upon Katie. "This is--ridiculous! I'm going away to-night!" "We will talk it over this evening," replied Kate quietly. "You will wait for that, won't you? I have something to suggest. And in the end you will be at liberty to do exactly as you think best. Certainly there can be no question as to that." On their way home they encountered the throng of men from the shops--dirty, greasy, alien. It was not pleasant--meeting the men when one was driving. And yet, though certainly distasteful, they interested Katie, perhaps just because they were so different. She wondered how they lived and what they talked about. Chancing to look at Ann, she saw that stranger than the men was the look with which Ann regarded them. She could not make it out. But one thing she did see--the soft spring breezes had much yet to do. CHAPTER VII Wayne had gone over to Colonel Leonard's for bridge. Kate was to have gone too, but had pleaded fatigue. The plea was not wholly hollow. The last thirty hours had not been restful ones. And now she was to go upstairs and do something which she did not know how to do, or why she was doing. Sitting there alone in the library she grew serious in the thought that a game was something more than a game when played with human beings. Not that seriousness robbed her of the charm that was her own. The distinctive thing about Katie was that there always seemed a certain light about her, upon her, coming from her. Usually it was as iridescent lights dancing upon the water; but to-night it was more as one light, a more steady, deeper light. It made her gray eyes almost black; made her clear-cut nose and chin seem more finely chiseled than they actually were, and brought out both the strength and the tenderness of her not very small mouth. Katie's friends, when pinned down to it, always admitted with some little surprise that she was not pretty; they made amends for that, however, in saying that she just missed being beautiful. "But that's not what you think of when you see her," they would tell you. "You think, 'What a good sort! She must be great fun!'" And there were some few who would add: "Katie is the kind you would expect to find doing splendid service in that last ditch." Yet even those few were not familiar with the Katie Jones of that moment, for it was a new Katie, less new when leaning forward, tense, puzzled, hand clenched, brow knitted, her whole well-knit, athletic body at attention than when leaning back--lax, open to new and awesome things. And as though she must come back where she felt acquainted with herself, she suddenly began to whistle. Katie found whistling a convenient and pleasant recepticle for excess emotion. She had enjoyed it when a little girl because she had been told it was unladylike; kept it up to find out if it were really true that it would spoil her mouth, and now liked doing it because she could do it so successfully. She was still whistling herself back to familiar things as she ran lightly up the stairs; had warmed to a long final trill as she stood in the doorway. The girl looked up in amazement. She had been sitting there, elbows on her knees, face in her hands. It was hard to see what might have been seen in her face because at that moment the chief thing seen was astonishment. Katie slipped down among the pillows of the couch, an arm curled about her head. "Didn't know I could do that, did you?" she laughed. "Oh yes, I have several accomplishments. Whistling is perhaps the chiefest thereof. Then next I think would come golf. My game's not bad. Then there are a few wizardy things I do with a chafing dish, and lastly, and after all lastly should be firstly, is my genius for getting everything and everybody into a most hopeless mess." The girl moved impatiently at first, as if determined not to be evaded by that light mood, but sight of Katie, lying there so much as a child would lie, seemed to suggest how truly Katie might have spoken and she was betrayed into the shadow of a smile. "I suppose there has never been a human being as gifted in balling things up as I am," meditatively boasted Kate. "Now here you are," she continued plaintively. "You want to go away. Well, of course, that's your affair. Why should you have to stay here--if you don't want to? But in the twenty-four hours you've been here I presume I've told twenty-four unnecessary lies to my brother. And if you do go away--as I admit you have a perfect right to do--it will put me in such a compromising position, because of those deathless lies that will trail me round through life that--oh, well," she concluded petulantly, "I suppose I'll just have to go away too." But the girl put it resolutely from her. A wave of sternness swept her face as she said, with a certain dignity that made Katie draw herself to a position more adapted to the contemplation of serious things: "That's all very well. Your pretending--trying to pretend--that I would be doing you a favor in staying. It is so--so clever. I mean so cleverly kind. But I can't help seeing through it, and I'm not going to accept hospitality I've no right to--stay here under false pretenses--pretend to be what I'm not--why what I couldn't even pretend to be!" she concluded with bitterness. Katie was leaning forward, all keen interest. "But do you know, I think you could. I honestly believe we could put it through! And don't you see that it would be the most fascinating--altogether jolliest sort of thing for us to try? It would be a game--a lark--the very best kind of sport!" She saw in an instant that she had wounded her. "I'm sorry; I would like very much to do something for you after all this. But I am afraid this is sport I cannot furnish you. I am not--I'm not feeling just like--a lark." "Now do you _see_?" Kate demanded with turbulent gesture. "Talk about balling things _up_! I like you; I want you to stay; and when I come in here and try and induce you to stay what do I do but muddle things so that you'll probably walk right out of the house! Why was I born like that?" she demanded in righteous resentment. "'Katherine,' a worldly-wise aunt of mine said to me once, 'you have two grave faults. One is telling the truth. The other is telling lies. I have never known you to fail in telling the one when it was a time to tell the other.' Can't you see what a curse it is to mix times that way?" As one too tired to resist the tide, not accepting, but going with it for the minute because the tide was kindly and the force to withstand it small, the girl, her arm upon the table, her head leaning wearily upon her hand, sat there looking at Katie, that combination of the non-accepting and the unresisting which weariness can breed. Kate seemed in profound thought. "Of course, you would naturally be suspicious of me," she broke in as if merely continuing the thinking aloud; Katie's fashion of doing that often made commonplace things seem very intimate--a statement to which considerable masculine testimony could be affixed. "I don't blame you in the least. I'd be suspicious, too, in your place. It's not unnatural that, not knowing me well, you should think I had some designs about 'doing good,' or helping you, and of course nothing makes self-respecting persons so furious as the thought that some one may be trying to do them good. Now if I could only prove to you, as could be proved, that I never did any good in my life, then perhaps you'd have more belief in me, or less suspicion of me. I wonder if you would do this? Could you bring yourself to stay just long enough to see that I am not trying to do you good? Fancy how I should feel to have you go away looking upon me as an officious philanthropist! Isn't it only square to give me a chance to demonstrate the honor of my worthlessness?" Still the girl just drifted, her eyes now revealing a certain half-amused, half-affectionate tenderness for the tide which would bear her so craftily. "And speaking of honor, moves me to my usual truth-telling blunder, and I can't resist telling you that in one respect I really have designs on you. But be at peace--it has nothing to do with your soul. Never having so much as discovered my own soul, I should scarcely presume to undertake the management of yours, but what I do want to do is to feed you eggs! "No--now don't take it that way. You're thinking of eggs one orders at a hotel, or--or a boarding-house, maybe. But did you ever eat the eggs that were triumphantly announced by the darlingest bantam--?" She paused--beaten back by the things gathering in the girl's face. "Tell me the truth!" it broke. "What are you doing this for? What have you to _gain_ by it?" "I hadn't thought just what I had to--gain by it," Katie stammered, at a loss before so fierce an intensity. "Does--must one always 'gain' something?" "If you knew the world," the girl threw out at her, "you'd know well enough one always expects to gain something! But you don't know the world--that's plain." Katie was humbly silent. She had thought she knew the world. She had lived in the Philippines and Japan and all over Europe and America. She would have said that the difference between her and this other girl was in just that thing of her knowing the world--being of it. But there seemed nothing to say when Ann told her so emphatically that she did not know the world. The girl seemed on fire. "No, of course not; you don't know the world--you don't know life--that's why you don't know what an unheard-of thing you're doing! What do you know about _me_?" she thrust at her fiercely. "What do you _think_ about me?" "I think you have had a hard time," Katie murmured, thinking to herself that one must have had hard time-- "And what's that to you? Why's that your affair?" "It's not exactly my affair, to be sure," Katie admitted; "except that we seem to have been--thrown together, and, as I said, there's something about you that I've--taken a fancy to." It drew her, but she beat it back. Resistance made her face the more stern as she went on: "Do you think I'm going to impose on you--just because you know so little? Why with all your cleverness, you're just a baby--when it comes to life! Shall I tell you what life is like?" Her gaze narrowed and grew hard. "Life is everybody fighting for something--and knocking down everybody in their way. Life is people who are strong kicking people who are weak out of their road--then going on with a laugh--a laugh loud enough to drown the groans. Life is lying and scheming to get what you want. Life is not caring--giving up--getting hardened--I know it. I _loathe_ it." Katie sat there quite still. She was frightened. "And you! Here in a place like this--what do you know about it? Why you're nothing but an--outsider!" An outsider, was she?--and she had thought that Ann-- The girl's passion seemed suddenly to flow into one long, cunning look. "What are you doing it for?" she asked quietly with a sort of insolently indifferent suspicion. "I don't know," Katie replied simply. "At least until a minute ago I didn't know, and now I wonder if perhaps, without knowing it, I was not trying to make up for some of those people--for I fear some of them were friends of mine--who have gone ahead by kicking other people out of their way. Perhaps their kicks provided my laughs. Perhaps, unconsciously, it--bothered me." Passion had burned to helplessness, the appealing helplessness of the weary child. She sat there, hands loosely clasped in her lap, looking at Katie with great solemn eyes, tired wistful mouth. And it seemed to Kate that she was looking, not at her, but at life, that life which had cast her out, looking, not with rage now, but with a hurt reproachfulness in which there was a heartbreaking longing. It drew Katie over to the table. She stretched her hand out across it, as if seeking to bridge something, and spoke with an earnest dignity. "You say I'm an outsider. Then won't you take me in? I don't want to be an outsider. You mustn't think too badly of me for it because you see I have just stayed where I was put. But I want to know life. I love it now, and yet, easy and pleasant though it is, I can't say that I find it very satisfying. I have more than once felt it was cheating me. I'm not getting enough--just because I don't know. Loving a thing because you don't know it isn't a very high way of loving it, is it? I believe I could know it and still love it--love it, indeed, the more truly. No, you don't think so; but I want to try." She paused, thinking; then saw it and spoke it strongly. "I've never done anything real. I've never done anything that counted. That's why I'm an outsider. If making a place for you here is going to make one for me there--on the inside, I mean--you're not going to refuse to take me in, are you?" Something seemed to leap up in the girl's eyes, but to crouch back, afraid. "What do you know about me?" she whispered. "Not much. Only that you've met things I never had to meet, met them much better, doubtless, than I should have met them. Only that you've fought in the real, while I've flitted around here on the playground." Katie's eyes contracted to keenness. "And I wonder if there isn't more dignity in fighting--yes, and losing--in the real, than just sitting around where you get nothing more unpleasant than the faint roar of the guns. To lose fighting--or not to fight! Why certainly there can be no question about it. What do I know about you?" she came back to it. "Only that you seemed just shot into my life, strangely disturbing it, ruffling it so queerly. It's too ruffled now to settle down without--more ruffling. So you're not going away leaving it in any such distressing state, are you?" she concluded with a smile which lighted her face with a fine seriousness. She made a last stand. "But you don't know. You don't understand." "No, I don't know. And don't think I ever need know, as a matter of obligation. But should there ever come a time when you feel I would understand, understand enough to help, then I should be glad and proud to know, for it would make me feel I was no longer an outsider. And let me tell you something. In whatever school you learned about life, there's one thing they taught you wrong. They've developed you too much in suspicion. They didn't give you a big enough course in trust. All the people in this world aren't designing and cruel. Why the old globe is just covered with beautiful people who are made happy in doing things for the people about them." "I haven't met them," were the words which came from the sob. "I see you haven't; that's why I want you to. Your education has been one-sided. So has mine. Perhaps we can strike a balance. What would you think of our trying to do that?" The wonder of it seemed stealing up upon the girl, growing upon her. "You mean," she asked, in slow, hushed voice, "that I should stay here--here?--as a friend of yours?" "Stay here as a friend--and become a friend," came the answer, quick and true. So true that it went straight to the girl's heart. Tears came, different tears, tears which were melting something. And yet, once again she whispered: "But I don't understand." "Try to understand. Stay here with me and learn to laugh and be foolish, that'll help you understand. And if you're ever in the least oppressed with a sense of obligation--horrid thing, isn't it?--just put it down with, 'But she likes it. It's fun for her.' For really now, Ann, I hope this is not going to hurt you, but I simply can't help getting fun out of things. I get fun out of everything. It's my great failing. Not a particularly unkind sort of fun, though. I don't believe you'll mind it as you get used to it. My friends all seem to accept the fact that I--enjoy them. And then my curiosity. Well, like the eggs. It's not entirely to make you stronger. It's to see whether the things I've always heard about milk and eggs are really so. See how it works--not altogether for the good of the works, you see? Oh, I don't know. Motives are slippery things, don't you think so? Mine seem particularly athletic. They hop from their pigeon holes and turn hand-springs and do all sorts of stunts the minute I turn my back. So I never know for sure why I want to do a thing. For that matter, I don't know why I named you Ann. I had to give you a name--I thought you might prefer my not using yours--so all in a flash I had to make one up--and Ann was what came. I love that name. It never would have come if something in you hadn't called it. The Ann in you has had a hard time." She was speaking uncertainly, timidly, as if on ground where words had broken no paths. "Oh, I'm not so much the outsider I can't see that. But the Ann in you has never died. That I see, too. Maybe it was to save Ann you were going to--give up Verna. And because I see Ann--like her--because I called her back, won't you let her stay here and--" Katie's voice broke, so to offset that she cocked her head and made a wry little face as she concluded, not succeeding in concealing the deep tenderness in her eyes, "just try--the eggs?" CHAPTER VIII Katie was writing to her uncle the Bishop. At least that was what she would have said she was doing. To be literal, she was nibbling at the end of her pen. Writing to her uncle had never been a solemn affair with Kate. She gossiped and jested with him quite as she would with a playfellow; it was playfellow, rather than spiritual adviser, he had always been to her, Kate's need seeming rather more for playfellows than for spiritual advisers. But the trouble that morning was that the things of which she was wont to gossip and jest seemed remote and uninteresting things. Finally she wrote: "My friend Ann Forrest is with us now. I am hoping to be able to keep her for some time. Poor dear, she has not been well and has had much sorrow--such a story!--and I think the peace of things here--peace you know, uncle, being poetic rendition of stupidity--is just what Ann needs." A robin on a lilac bush entered passionate protest against the word stupidity. "What will you have? What will you _have_?" trilled the robin in joyous frenzy. Wise robin! After all, what would one have? And when within the world of May that robins love one was finding a whole undiscovered country to explore? "No, I don't mean that about stupidity," she wrote after a wide look and a deep breath. "It does seem peace. Peace that makes some other things seem stupidity. I must be tired, for you will be saying, dear uncle, that a yearning for peace has never been one of the most conspicuous of my attributes." There she fell to nibbling again, looking over at the girl in the deep garden chair in the choice corner of the big porch. "My friend Ann Forrest!" Katie murmured, smiling strangely. Her friend Ann Forrest was turning the leaves of a book, "Days in Florence," which Kate had left carelessly upon the arm of the chair she commended to Ann. It was after watching her covertly for sometime that Katie set down, a little elf dancing in her eye, yet something of the seer in that very eye in which the elf danced: "Of course you have heard me tell of Ann, the girl to whom I was so devoted in Italy. I should think, uncle, that you of the cloth would find Ann a most interesting subject. Not that she's of your flock. Her mother was a passionate Catholic. Her father a relentless atheist. He wrote a famous attack on the church which Ann tells me hastened her mother's death. The conflict shows curiously in Ann. When we were together in Florence a restlessness would many times come upon her. She would say, 'You go on home, Katie, without me. I have things to attend to.' I came to know what it meant. Once I followed her and saw her go to the church and literally fling herself into its arms in a passion of surrender. And that night she sat up until daybreak reading her father's books. You see what I mean? A wealth of feeling--but always pulled two ways. It has left its mark upon her." She read it over, gloated over it, and destroyed it. "Uncle would be coming on the next train," she saw. "He'd hold Ann up for a copy of the attack! And why this mad passion of mine for destruction? Should a man walking on a tight-rope yield to every playful little desire to chase butterflies?" But as she looked again--Ann was deep in the illustrations of "Days in Florence" and could be surveyed with impunity--she wondered if she might not have written better than she knew. Her choice of facts doubtless was preposterous enough; what had been the conflicting elements--her fancy might wander far afield in finding that. But she was sure she saw truly in seeing marks of conflict. Life had pulled her now this way, now that, as if playing some sort of cruel game with her. And that game had left her very tired. Tired as some lovely creature of the woods is tired after pursuit, and fearful with that fear of the hunted from which safety cannot rescue. It was in Ann's eyes--that looking out from shadowy retreat, that pain of pain remembered, that fear which fear has left. Katie had seen it once in the eyes of an exhausted fawn, who, fleeing from the searchers for the stag, had come full upon the waiting hunt--in face of the frantic hounds in leash. The terror in those eyes that should have been so soft and gentle, the sick certitude of doom where there should have been the glad joy of life struck the death blow to Katie's ambitions to become the mighty huntress. She had never joined another hunt or wished to hear another story of the hunt, saying she flattered herself she could be resourceful enough to gain her pleasures in some other way than crazing gentle creatures with terror. Ann made her think of that quivering fawn, suggesting, as the fawn had suggested, what life might have been in a woods uninvaded. She had a vision of Ann as the creature of pure delight she had been fashioned to be, loving life and not knowing fear. From which musings she broke off with a hearty: "Good drive!" and Ann looked up inquiringly. She pointed to the teeing ground some men were just leaving--caddies straggling on behind, two girls driving in a runabout along the river road calling gaily over to the men. It all seemed sunny and unfettered as the morning. "I'll wager he feels good," she laughed. "I know no more exhilarating feeling than that thing of having just made a good drive. It makes life seem at your feet. You must play, Ann. I'm going to teach you." "Do all those people belong here?" Ann asked, still looking at the girls who were calling laughingly back and forth to the men. "On the Island? Oh, no; they belong over there." She nodded to the city which rose upon the hills across the river. "But they use these links." "Don't they--don't they have to--work?" Ann asked timidly. "Oh, yes," laughed Katie; "I fancy most of them work some. Though what's the good working a morning like this? I think they're very wise. But look now at the Hope of the Future! He's certainly working." The Hope of the Future was ascending the steps, heavily burdened. So heavily was he burdened that for the moment ascent looked impossible. Each arm was filled with a shapeless bundle of white and yellow fur which closer inspection revealed as the collie pups. With each step the hind legs of a wriggling puppy slipped a little farther through Worth's arms. When finally he stood before them only a big puppy head was visible underneath each shoulder. Approaching Ann, then backing around, he let one squirming pair of legs rest on her lap, freed his arm, and Ann had the puppy. "You can play with him a little while," he remarked graciously. "Worth," said Katie, "it is unto my friend Miss Forrest, known in the intimacies of the household as Miss Ann, that you have just made this tender offering." Worth took firm hold on his remaining puppy and stood there surveying Ann. "I came last night," he volunteered, after what seemed satisfactory inspection. Ann just smiled at him, rumpling the puppy's soft woolly coat. "How long you been here?" he asked cordially. "Just two days," she told him. "I'm going to stay all summer," he announced, hoisting his puppy a little higher. "That's nice," said Ann; her puppy was climbing too. "How long you goin' to stay?" he wanted to know. "Miss Ann is going to stay just as long as we are real nice to her, Worthie," said Katie, looking up from the magazine she was cutting. "She can play with the puppies every morning, Aunt Kate," he cried in a fervent burst of hospitality. "You got a dog at home?" he asked of Ann. At the silence, Katie looked up. The puppy was now cuddled upon Ann's breast, her two arms about it. As she shook her head her chin brushed the soft puppy fur--then buried itself in it. Her eyes deepened. "It must be just the dreadfulest thing there is not to have a dog," Worth condoled. There was no response. The puppy's head was on Ann's shoulder. He was ambitious to mount to her face. "Didn't you _never_ have a dog?" Worth asked, drawling it out tragically. The head nodded yes, but the eyes did not grow any more glad at thought of once having had a dog. Worth took a step nearer and lay an awed hand upon her arm. "Did he--_die_?" She nodded. Her face had grown less sorrowful than hard. It was the look of that first day. Worth shook his head slowly to express deep melancholy. "It's awful--to have 'em die. Mine died once. I cried and cried and cried. Then papa got me a bigger one." He waited for confidences which did not come. Ann was holding the puppy tight. "Didn't your papa get you 'nother one?" he asked, as one searching for the best. "Worth dear," called Katie, "let's talk about the live puppies. There are so many live puppies in the world. And just see how the puppy loves Miss Ann." "And Miss Ann loves the puppy. Mustn't squeeze him too tight," he admonished. "Watts says it's bad for 'em to squeeze 'em. Watts knows just everything 'bout puppies. He knows when they have got to eat and when they have got to sleep, and when they ought to have a bath. Do you suppose, Aunt Kate, we'll ever know as much as Watts?" "Probably not. Don't hitch your wagon to too far a star, Worthie. No use smashing the wagon." Suddenly Ann had squeezed her puppy very tight. "O--h," cried Worth, "_you mustn't_! I like to do it, too, but Watts says it squeezes the grows out of 'em. It's hard not to squeeze 'em though, ain't it?" he concluded with tolerance. Again Katie looked up. The girl, holding the puppy close, was looking at the little boy. Something long beaten back seemed rushing on; and in her eyes was the consciousness of its having been long beaten back. Something of which did not escape the astute Wayne the Worthy. "Aunt Kate," he called excitedly, "Aunt Kate--Miss Ann's eyes go such a long way down!" "Worth, I'm not at all sure that it is the best of form for a grown-up young gentleman of six summers to be audibly estimating the fathomless depths of a young woman's eyes. Note well the word audibly, Worthie." "They go farther down than yours, Aunt Kate." "'Um--yes; another remark better left with the inaudible." "It looks--it looks as if there was such a lot of cries in them! o--h--one's coming now!" "Worth," she called sharply, "come here. You mustn't talk to Miss Ann about cries, dear. When you talk about cries it brings the cries, and when you talk about laughs the laughs come, and Miss Ann is so pretty when she laughs." "Miss Ann is pretty all the time," announced gallant Worth. "She has a mouth like--a mouth like--She has a mouth like--" "Yes dear, I understand. When they say 'She has a mouth like--a mouth like--' I know just what kind of mouth they mean." "But how do you know, Aunt Kate? I didn't say what kind, did I?" "No; but as years and wisdom and guile descend upon you, you will learn that sometimes the surest way of making one's self clear is not to say what one means." "But I don't see--" "No, one doesn't--at six. Wait till you've added twenty thereto." "Aunt Kate?" "Yes?" "How old is Miss Ann?" "Worth, when this twenty I'm talking about has been added on, you will know that never, never, _never_ must one speak or think or dream of a lady's age." "Why not?" "Oh, because it brings the cries--lots of times." He had seated himself on the floor. The puppy was in spasms of excitement over the discovery of a considerable expanse of bare legs. "Are they sorry they're not as old as somebody else?" he asked, trying to get his legs out of the puppy's lurching reach. "No, they're usually able to endure the grief brought them by that thought." "Aunt Kate?" "Oh--_yes_?" It was a good story. "Would Miss Ann be sorry she's not as old as you?" "Hateful, ungrateful little wretch!" "Aunt Kate?" "I am all attention, Wayneworth," she said, with inflection which should not have been wasted on ears too young. "Do you know, Aunt Kate, sometimes I don't know just what you're talking about." "No? Really? And this from your sex to mine!" "Do you always say what you mean, Aunt Kate?" "Very seldom." "Why not?" "Somebody might find out what I thought." "Don't you want them to know what you think, Aunt Kate?" he pursued, making a complete revolution and for the instant evading the frisking puppy. "Certainly not." "But why not, Aunt Kate?"--squirming as the puppy placed a long warm lick right below the knee. "Oh, I don't know." The story was getting better. Then, looking up with Kate's queer smile: "It might hurt their feelings." "Why would it--?" "Oh, Wayneworth Jones! Why were you born with your brain cells screwed into question marks?--and _why_ do I have to go through life getting them unscrewed?" She actually read a paragraph; and as there she had to turn a page she looked over at Ann. Ann's puppy had joined Worth's on the floor and together they were indulging in bites of puppyish delight at the little boy's legs, at each other's tails, at so much of the earth's atmosphere as came within range of their newly created jaws craving the exercise of their function. Mad with the joy of living were those two collie pups on that essentially live and joyous morning. And Ann, if not mad with the joy of living, seemed sensible of the wonder of it. "Days in Florence" open on her lap, hands loose upon it, she was looking off at the river. From hard thoughts of other days Kate could see her drawn to that day--its softness and sunshine, its breath of the river and breath of the trees. Folded in the arms of that day was Ann just then. The breeze stirred a little wisp of hair on her temple--gently swayed the knot of ribbon at her throat. The spring was wooing Ann; her face softened as she listened. Was it something of that same force which bounded boisterously up in boy and dogs which was stealing over Ann--softening, healing, claiming? The next paragraph of the story on the printed page was less interesting. "Aunt Kate," said Worth, gathering both puppies into his arms as they were succeeding all too well in demonstrating that they were going to grow up and be real dogs, "Watts says it is the ungodliest thing he knows of that these puppies haven't got any names." "I am glad to learn," murmured Kate, "that Watts is a true son of the church. He yearns for a christening?" "He says that being as nobody else has thought up names for them, he calls the one that is most yellow, Mike; and the one that is most white, Pat. Do you think Mike and Pat are pretty names, Aunt Kate?" "Well, I can't say that my esthetic sense fairly swoons with delight at sound of Mike and Pat," she laughed. "I'll tell you, Worthie," she suggested, looking up with twinkling eye after her young nephew had been experimenting with various intonations of Mike--Pat, Pat--Mike, "why don't you call one of them _Pourquoi_?" He walked right into it with the never-failing "Why?" "Just so. Call one _Pourquoi_ and the other _N'est-ce-pas_. They do good team work in both the spirit and the letter. _Pourquoi_, Worth, is your favorite word in French. Need I add that it means 'why'? And _N'est-ce-pas_--well, Watts would say _N'est-ce-pas_ meant 'ain't it'? and more flexible translators find it to mean anything they are seeking to persuade you is true. Pourquoi is the inquirer and N'est-ce-pas the universalist. I trust Watts will give this his endorsement." "I'll ask him," gravely replied Worth, and sought to accustom the puppies to their new names with chanting--Poor Qua--Nessa Pa. The chant grew so melancholy that the puppies subsided; oppressed, overpowered, perhaps, with the sense of being anything as large and terrible as inquirer and universalist. But Worth was too true a son of the army to leave a brooding damsel long alone in the corner. "You seen the new cow?" was his friendly approach. "Why, I don't believe I have," she confessed. "I s'pose you've seen the chickens?" he asked, a trifle condescendingly. Ann shamefacedly confessed that she had not as yet seen the chickens. He took a step backward for the weighty, crushing: "Well, you've seen the _horses_, haven't you?" "Aunt Kate--Aunt Kate!" he called peremptorily, as Ann humbly shook her head, "Miss Ann's not seen the cow--or the, chickens--nor the horses!" "Isn't it scandalous?" agreed Kate. "It shows what sort of hostess I am, doesn't it? But you see, Worth, I thought as long as you were coming so soon you could do the honors of the stables. I think it's always a little more satisfactory to have a man do those things." "I'll take you now," announced Worth, in manner which brooked neither delay nor gratitude. And so the girl and the little boy and the two puppies, the joy of motion freeing them from the sad weight of inquirer and universalist, started across the lawn for the stables. Pourquoi caught at Ann's dress and she had to be manfully rescued by Worth. And no sooner had the inquirer been loosened from one side than the universalist was firmly fastened to the other and the rescue must be enacted all over again, amid considerable confusion and laughter. Ann's laugh was borne to Katie on a wave of the spring--just the laugh of a girl playing with a boy and his dogs. It was a whole hour later, and as Kate was starting out for golf she saw Ann and Worth sitting on the sandpile, a tired inquirer and very weary universalist asleep at their feet. Ann was picking sand up in her hands and letting it sift through. Worth was digging with masculine vigor. Kate passed close enough to hear Ann's, "Well, once upon a time--" Ann!--opening to a little child the door of that wondrous country of Once upon a Time! No mother had ever done it more sweetly, with more tender zeal, more loving understanding of the joys and necessities of Once upon a Time. Some once upon a time notions of Kate's were quite overturned by that "once upon a time" voice of Ann's. Then the once upon a time of the sandpile did not shut them out--they who had known another once upon a time? Did it perhaps love to take them in, knowing that upon the sands of this once upon a time the other could keep no foothold? "Once upon a Time--Once upon a Time"--it kept singing itself in her ears. For her, too, it opened a door. CHAPTER IX Having conquered the son, Katie that evening set vigorously about for the conquest of the father. "The trouble is," she turned it over in giving a few minutes to her own toilet for dinner, after having given many minutes to Ann's, "that there's simply no telling about Wayne. He is just the most provokingly uncertain man now living." And yet it was not a formidable looking man she found in the library a few minutes before the dinner hour. He was poring over some pictures of Panama in one of the weeklies, sufficiently deep in them to permit Katie to sit there for the moment pondering methods of attack. But instead of outlining her campaign she found herself concluding, what she had concluded many times before, that Wayne was very good-looking. "Not handsome, like Harry Prescott," she granted, "but Wayne seems the product of something--the result of things to be desired. He hasn't a new look." "Katherine is going to give us more trouble than Wayne ever will," their mother had sighed after one of those escapades which made life more colorful than restful during Katie's childhood. To which Major Jones replied that while Kate might give them more trouble, he thought it probable Wayne would give himself the more. Certain it had been from the first that if Wayne could help it no one would know what trouble he might be giving himself. Old-fashioned folk who expected brothers and sisters to be alike had, on the surface at least, a sorry time with Wayneworth and Katherine Jones. Katie was sunny. Katie had a genius for play. She laughed and danced up and down the highways and the byways of life and she had such a joyous time about it that it had not yet occurred to any one to expect her to help pay the fiddler. Just watching Katie dance would seem pay enough for any reasonable fiddler. Katie laughed a great deal, and was smiling most of the time; she seemed always to have things in her thoughts to make smiles. Wayne laughed little and some of his smiles made one understand how the cat felt about having its fur rubbed the wrong way. Their friend Major Darrett once said: "When I meet Katie I have a fancy she has just come from a jolly dip in the ocean; that she lay on the sands in the sun and kicked up her heels longer than she had any business to, and now she's flying along to keep the most enchanting engagement she ever had in all her life. She's smiling to herself to think how bad she was to lie in the sand so long, and she's not at all concerned, because she knows her friends will be so happy to see her that they'll forget to scold her for being late. Katie's spoiled," the Major concluded, "but we like her that way." Of Wayne this same friend remarked: "Wayne's a hard nut to crack." Many army people felt that way. In fact, Wayne was a nut the army itself had not quite cracked. Some army people maintained that Wayne was disagreeable. But that may have been because he was not just like all other army people. He did not seem to have grasped the idea that being "army" set him apart. Sometimes he made the mistake of judging army affairs by ordinary standards. That was when they got some idea of how the cat felt. And of all cats an army cat would most resent having its fur rubbed in any but the prescribed direction. Katie, continuing her ruminations about Wayne as the product of things, had come to see that with it all he was detached from those desirable things which had produced him. One knew that Wayne had traditions, yet he was not tradition fettered; he suggested ancestors without being ancestor conscious. Was it the gun--as Wayne the Worthy persisted in calling it--and the gun's predecessors--for Wayne always had something--made him so distinctly more than the mere result of things which had formed him? "It is the gun," Katie decided, taking him in with half shut eyes as a portrait painter might. "Had the same ancestors myself, and yet I'm both less and more of them than he is. What I need's a gun! Then I'd stand out of the background better, too." Then with one of Katie's queer twists of fancy--Ann! Might not Ann be her gun? Perhaps she had been wanting a gun for a long time without knowing what it was she was wanting when surely wanting something. Perhaps every one felt the gun need to make them less the product and more the person. Then there was another thing. The thing that had traced those lines about Wayne's mouth, and had whitened, a little, the brown hair of his temples. Wayne had cared for Clara. Heaven only knew how he could--Katie's thoughts ran on. Perhaps heaven did understand those things--certainly it was too much for mere earth. Why Wayne, about whom there had always seemed a certain brooding bigness, certainly a certain rare indifference, should have fallen so absurdly in love with the most vain and selfish and vapid girl that ever wrecked a post was more than Katie could make out. And it had been her painful experience to watch Wayne's disappointment develop, watch that happiness which had so mellowed him recede as day by day Clara fretted and pouted and showed plainly enough that to her love was just a convenient thing which might impel one's husband to get one a new set of furs. She remembered so well one evening she had been in Clara's room when Wayne came in after having been away since early morning. So eager and tender was Wayne's face as he approached Clara, who was looking over an advertising circular. There was a light in his eyes which it would seem would have made Clara forget all about advertising circulars. But before he had said a word, but stood there, loving her with that look--and it would have to be admitted Clara did look lovely, in one of the _neglige_ affairs she affected so much--she said, with a babyish little whine she evidently thought alluring: "I just don't see, Wayne, why we can't have a new rug for the reception room. We can certainly afford things as well as the Mitchells." And Wayne had just stood there, with a smile which closed the gates and said, with an irony not lost upon Katie, at least: "Why I fancy we can have a new rug, if that is the thing most essential to our happiness." Clara had cried: "Oh Wayne--you _dear_!" and twittered and fluttered around, but the twittering and fluttering did not bring that light back to Wayne's face. He went over to the far side of the room and began reading the paper, and that grim little understanding smile--a smile at himself--made Katie yearn to go over and wind her arms about his neck--dear strange Wayne who had believed there was so much, and found so little, and who was so alive to the bitter humor of being drawn to the heart of things only to be pushed back to the outer rim. But Katie knew it was not her arms could do any good, and so she had left the room, not clear-eyed, Clara still twittering about the kind of rug she would have. And day by day she had watched Wayne go back to the outer circle, that grim little smile as mile-stones in his progress. But he was folding his paper; it was growing too near the hour to speculate longer on Wayne and his past. "Wayne?" she began. He looked up, smiling at the beseeching tone. "Yes? What is it, Katie? Just what brand of boredom are you planning to inflict?" "You can be _so_ nice, Wayne--when you want to be." "'Um--hum. A none too subtle way of calling a man a brute." "I presume there are times when you can't help being a brute, Wayne; but I do hope to-night will not be one of them." "Why it must be something very horrible indeed, that you must approach with all this flaunting of diplomacy." "It is something a long way from horrible, I assure you," she replied with dignity. "Ann will be down for dinner to-night, Wayne." He leaned back and devoted himself to his cigarette with maddening deliberation. Then he smiled. "Through sleeping?" "Wayne--I'm in earnest. Please don't get yourself into a hateful mood!" He laughed in real amusement at sight of Katie's puckered face. "I am conscious that feminine wiles are being exercised upon me. I wonder--why?" "Because I am so anxious you should like Ann, Wayne, and--be nice to her." "Why?" Again it was that probing, provoking why. "Because of what she means to me, I suppose." Something in her voice made him look at her differently. "And what does she mean to you, Katie?" "Ann is different from all the other girls I've known. She means--something different." "Strange I've never heard you speak of her." "I think you have, and have forgotten. Though possibly not--just because of the way I feel about her." She paused, seeking to express how she felt about her. Unable to do so, she concluded simply: "I have a very tender feeling for Ann." "I see you have," he replied quietly. He looked at her meditatively, and then asked, humorously but gently: "Well Katie, what were you expecting me to do? Order her out of the house?" "But I want you to be more than civil, Wayne; I want you to be sympathetic." "I'll be civil and you can bring Prescott on for the sympathetic," he laughed. "You know I haven't great founts of sympathy gushing up in my heart for the _jeune fille_." "Ann's not the _jeune fille_, Wayne. She's something far more interesting and worth while than that." She paused, again trying to get it, but could do no better than: "I sometimes think of Ann as sitting a little apart, listening to beautiful music." He smiled. "I can only reply to that, Katie, that I trust she is more inviting than your pictures of her. A young woman who looked as though sitting apart listening to beautiful music should certainly be left sitting apart." "I'll bring her down," laughed Kate, rising; "then you can get your own picture." "I'll be decent, Katie," he called after her in laughing but reassuring voice. The meeting had been accomplished. Dinner had reached the salad, and all was well. Yes, and a little more than well. From the moment she stood in the doorway of Ann's room and the girl rose at her suggestion of dinner, Katie's courage had gone up. Ann's whole bearing told that she was on her mettle. And what Katie found most reassuring was less the results of the effort Ann was making than her unmistakable sense of the necessity for making it. There was hope in that. Not that she suggested anything so hopeless as effort. She suggested reserve feeling, and she was so beautiful--so rare--that the suggestion was of feeling more beautiful and rare than a determination to live up to the way she was gowned. Her timidity was of a quality which seemed related to things of the spirit rather than to social embarrassment. Jubilantly Kate saw that Ann meant to "put it over," and her depth of feeling on the subject suggested a depth which in itself dismissed the subject. She saw at a glance that Wayne related Ann to the things her appearance suggested rather than to the suggestions causing that appearance. As Katie said, "Ann, I am so glad that at last my brother is to know you," she was thinking that it seemed a friend to whom one might indeed be proud to present one's brother. She never lost the picture of the Ann whom Wayne advanced to meet. She loved her in that rose pink muslin, the skirt cascaded in old-fashioned way, an old-fashioned looking surplice about the shoulders, and on her long slim throat a lovely Florentine cameo swinging on the thinnest of old silver chains. She might have been a cameo herself. And she never forgot the way Ann said her first words to Wayne. They were two most commonplace words, merely the "Thank you" with which she responded to his hospitable greeting, but that "Thank you" seemed let out of a whole under sea of feeling for which it would try to speak. Before Wayne could carry out his unmistakable intention of saying more, Katie was airily off into a story about the cook, dragging it in with a thin hook about the late dinner, and the cook in the present case suggested a former cook in Washington whom Katie held, and sought to prove, nature had ordained for a great humorist. The ever faithful subject of cooks served stanchly until they had reached the safety of soup. Katie was in story-telling mood. She seemed to have an inexhaustible fund of them in reserve which she could deftly strap on as life-preserver at the first far sign of danger. And she would flash into her stories an "As you said, Ann," or "As you would put it, Ann," whenever she found anything to fit the Ann she would create. Several times, however, the rescuing party had to knock down good form and trample gentle breeding under foot to reach the spot in time. Wayne spoke of a friend in Vienna from whom he had heard that day and turned to Ann with an interrogation about the Viennese. Katie, contemplating the suppleness of Ann's neck, momentarily asleep at her post, missed the "Come over and help us" look, and Ann had begun upon a fatal, "I have never been in--" when Katie, with ringing laugh broke in: "Isn't it odd, Ann, that you should never have been in Vienna, when you lived all those years right there in Florence? I _do_ think it the oddest thing!" Ann agreed that it _was_ odd--Wayne concurring. But driven from Vienna, he sought Florence. "And Italy? I presume I go on record as the worst sort of bounder in asking if you really care greatly about living there?" Katie thought it time Ann try a stroke for herself. One would never develop strength on a life-preserver. Seeing that she had it to make, she paused before it an instant. Fear seemed to be feeling, and a possible sense of the absurdity of her situation made for a slightly tremulous dignity as she said: "I do love it. Love it so much it is hard to tell just how much--or why." And then it was as if she shrank back, having uncovered too much. She looked as though she might be dreaming of the Court of the Uffizi, or Santa Maria Novella, but Katie surmised that that dreamy look was not failing to find out what Wayne was going to do with his lettuce. But one who suggested dreams of Tuscany when taking observations on the use of the salad fork--was there not hope unbounded for such a one? Wayne was silent for the moment, as though getting the fact that the love of Italy, or perhaps its associations, was to this girl not a thing to be compressed within the thin vein of dinner talk. "Well," he laughed understanding, "to be sure I don't know it from the inside. I never was of it; I merely looked at it. And I thought the plumbing was abominable." "Wayne," scoffed Kate, "plumbing indeed! Have you no soul?" "Yes, I have; and bad plumbing is bad for it." Ann laughed quite blithely at that, and as though finding confidence in the sound of her own laugh, she boldly volunteered a stroke. "I don't know much about plumbing," Katie heard Ann saying. "I suppose perhaps it is bad. But do you care much about plumbing when looking at"--her pause before it might have been one of reverence--"The Madonna of the Chair?" Katie treated herself to a particularly tender bit of lettuce and secretly hugged herself, Ann, and "Days in Florence." The Madonna of the Chair furnished the frontispiece for that valuable work. Ann had receded, flushed, her lip trembling a little; Wayne was looking at her thoughtfully--and a little as one might look at the Madonna of the Chair. Katie heard the trump of duty call her to another story. CHAPTER X Feeling that first efforts, even on life-preservers, should not be long ones, it was soon after they returned to the library that Katie threw out: "Well, Ann, if that letter must be written--" Ann rose. "Yes, and it must." "But morning is the time for letter writing," urged Wayne. "Morning in this instance is the time for shopping," said Kate. She had left Ann at the foot of the stairs, murmuring something about having to see Nora. It was a half hour later that she looked in upon her. What she saw was too much for Katie. Had the whole of creation been wrecked by her laughing, Katie must needs have laughed just then. For Ann's two hands gripped "Days in Florence" with fierce resolution. Ann's head was bent over the book in a sort of stern frenzy. Ann, not even having waited to disrobe, was attacking Florence as the good old city had never been attacked before. She seemed to get the significance of Katie's laugh, however, for it was as to a confederate she whispered: "I'll get caught!" "Trust me," said Kate, and laughed from a new angle. Ann could laugh, too, and when Katie sat down to "talk it over" they were that most intimate of all things in the world, two girls with a secret, two girls set apart from all the world by that secret they held from all the world, hugging between them a beautiful, brilliant secret and laughing at the rest of the world because it couldn't get in. That secret, shared and recognized and laughed over and loved, did what no amount of sympathy or gratitude could have done. It was as if the whole situation heaved a sigh of relief and settled itself in more comfortable position. "Why no," sparkled Kate, in response to Ann's protestation, "the only thing you have to do is not to try. Lovers of Italy must take their Italy with a superior calm. And when you don't know what to say--just seem too full for utterance. That being too full for utterance throws such a safe and lovely cover over the lack of utterance. And if you fear you're mixed up just look as though you were going to cry. Wayne will be so terrified at that prospect that he'll turn the conversation to air-ships, and you'll always be safe with Wayne in an air-ship because he'll do all the talking himself." Ann grew thoughtful. She seemed to have turned back to something. Katie would have given much to know what it was Ann's deep brown eyes were surveying so somberly. "The strange part of it is," she said, "I used to dream of some such place." "Of course you did. That's why you belong there. A great deal more than some of us who've tramped miles through galleries." Then swiftly Katie changed her position, her expression and the conversation. "Elizabeth Barrett Browning is your favorite poet, isn't she, Ann?" "Why--why no," stammered Ann. "I'm afraid I haven't any favorite. You see--" "So much the better. Then you can take Elizabeth without being untrue to any one else. She loved Florence. You know she's buried there. I think you used to make pilgrimages to her tomb." Again Ann turned back, and at what she saw smiled a little, half bitterly, half wistfully. "I'd like to have made pilgrimages somewhere." "To be sure you would. That's why you did. The things we would like to have done, and would have done if we could, are lots more part of us than just the things we did do because we had to do them. Just consider that all those things you'd like to have done are things you did. It will make you feel at home with yourself. And to-morrow we'll go over the river and order Elizabeth Barrett Browning and a tailored suit." But with that the girl who would like to have done things receded, leaving baldly exposed the girl who had done the things she had had to do. "No," said Ann stubbornly and sullenly. "But blue gingham morning dress and rose-colored evening dress are scarcely sufficient unto one's needs," murmured Kate. Ann turned away her head. "I can't take things--not things like that." "But why not?" pursued Kate. "Why can't you take as well as I can take?" She turned upon her hotly, as if resentful of being toyed with. "How silly! It is yours." Katie had said it at random, but once expressed it interested her. "Why I don't know whether it is or not," she said, suddenly more interested in the idea itself than in its effect upon Ann. "Why is it? I didn't earn it." "There's no use talking _that_ way. It's yours because you've got it." That not seeming to bring ethical satisfaction she added: "It's yours because your family earned it." Katie was unfastening the muslin gown. "But as a matter of fact,"--getting more and more interested--"they didn't. They didn't earn it. They just got it. What they earned they had to use to live on. This that is left over is just something my grandfather fell upon through luck. Then why should it be mine now--any more than yours?" Ann deemed her intelligence insulted. "That's ridiculous." "Well now I don't know whether it is or not." She was silent for a moment, considering it. "But anyhow," she came back to the issue, "we have our hands on this money, so we'll get the suit. You're in the army now, Ann. You're enlisted under me, and I'll have no insubordination. You know--into the jaws of death!--Even so into the jaws of Elizabeth Barrett Browning--and a tailor-made suit!" So Katie laughed herself out of the room. And softly she whistled herself back into the library. The whistling did not seem to break through the smoke which surrounded Wayne. After several moments of ostentatious indifference, she threw out at him, with a conspicuous yawn: "Well, Wayne, what did you think of the terrifying jeune fille?" Wayne's reply was long in coming, simple, quiet, and queer: "She's a lady." Startled, peculiarly gratified, impishly delighted, she yet replied lightly: "A lady, is she? Um. Once at school one of the girls said she had a 'trade-last' for me, and after I had searched the closets of memory and dragged out that some one had said she had pretty eyes, dressed it up until this some one had called her ravishingly beautiful--after all that conscientious dishonesty what does she tell me but that some one had said I was so 'clean-looking.' One rather takes 'clean-looking' for granted! Even so with our friends being ladies. Quaint old word for you to resurrect, Wayne." "Yes," he laughed, "quite quaint. But she seems to me just that old-fashioned thing our forefathers called a lady. Now we have good fellows, and thoroughbreds, and belongers. Not many of this girl's type." Katie wanted to chuckle. But suddenly the unborn chuckle dissolved into a sea of awe. Thoughts and smoke seemed circling around Wayne together; and perhaps the blue rim of it all was dreams. His face was not what one would expect the face of a man engaged in making warfare more deadly to be as he murmured, not to Katie but to the thin outer rim, softly, as to rims barely material: "And more than that--a woman." He puzzled her. "Well, Wayne," she laughed, "aren't you getting a little--cryptic? I certainly told you--by implication--that she was both a lady and a woman. Then why this air of discovery?" But it did not get Katie into the smoke. He made no effort to get her in, but after a moment came back to her with a kindly: "I am glad you have such a friend, Katie. It will do you good." That inward chuckle showed no disposition to dissolve into anything; it fought hard to be just a live, healthy chuckle. Moved by an impulse half serious, half mischievous she asked: "You would say then, Wayne, that Ann seems to you more of a lady than Zelda Fraser?" Wayne's real answer lay in his look of disgust. He did condescend to put into words: "Oh, don't be absurd, Katie." "But Zelda has a splendid ancestry," she pressed. "And suggests a chorus girl." That stilled her. It left her things to think about. At last she asked: "And Wayne, which would you say I was?" He came back from a considerable distance. "Which of what?" "Lady or chorus girl?" He looked at her and smiled. Katie was all aglow with the daring of her adventure. "I should say, Katie dear, that you were a half-breed." "What a sounding thing to be! But Major Darrett in his last letter tells me I am his idea of a thoroughbred. How can I be a half-breed if I'm a thoroughbred?" "True, it makes you a biological freak. But you should be too original to complain of that." "But I do complain. It sounds like something with three legs. Not but what I'd rather be a biological freak than a grind--or a prude." "Be at peace," drily advised Wayne. "Ann was quiet to-night," mused Katie, feeling an irresistible desire to get back to her post of duty, not because there was any need for her being there, but merely because she liked the post. "She felt a little strange, I think. She has been much alone and with people of a different sort." "And I presume it never occurred to you, Katie, that neither Ann nor I was fairly surfeited with opportunities for conversational initiative? Just drop me a hint sometime when you are not going to be at home, will you? I should like a chance to get acquainted with your friend." Katie was straightway the hen with feathers ruffled over her brood. "You must be careful, Wayne," she clucked at him. "When you are alone with Ann please try to avoid all unpleasant subjects, or anything you see she would rather not talk about." "Thanks awfully for the hint," returned Wayne quietly. "I had been meaning to speak first of her father's funeral. I thought I would follow that with a searching inquiry into her mother's last illness. But of course if you think this not wise I am glad to be guided by your judgment, Katie." "Wayne!" she reproached laughingly. "Now you know well enough! I simply meant if you saw Ann wished to avoid a subject, not to pursue it." "Thanks again, dear Sister Kate, for these easy lessons in behavior. Rule 1--" But she waved it laughingly aside, rising to leave him. "Just the same," she maintained, from the doorway, "experience may make the familiar things--and dear things--the very things of which one wishes least to speak. Talk to Ann about the army, Wayne; talk about--" But as he was holding out note-book and pencil she beat grimacing retreat. That night Miss Jones dreamed. The world had been all shaken up and everything was confused and no one could put it to rights. All those dames whose ancestors had sailed unknown waters were in the front row of the chorus, and all the chorus girls were dancing a stately minuet at Old Point Comfort. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was trying to commit suicide by becoming a biological freak, and the Madonna of the Chair was wearing a smartly tailored brown rajah suit. CHAPTER XI Peacefully and pleasantly one day slipped after another. Some thirty of them had joined their unnumbered fellows and to-morrow bade fair to pass serenely as yesterday. "This, dear Queen," Katie confided to the dog stretched at her feet, "is what in vulgar parlance is known as 'nothing doing,' and in poetic language is termed the 'simple life.'" Thirty days of "nothing doing"--and yet there had been more "doing" in those days than in all the thousands of their predecessors gaily crowded to the brim. Those crowded days seemed days of a long sleep; these quiet ones, days of waking. Ann was out on the links that afternoon with Captain Prescott. From her place on the porch Katie had a glimpse of them at that moment. Ann's white dress with its big knot of red ribbon was a vivid and a pleasing spot. The olive of the Captain's uniform seemed part of the background of turf and trees--all of it for Ann, so live and so pretty in white and red. He was seeking to correct her stroke. Both were much in earnest about it. It would seem that the whole of Ann's life hung upon that thing of better form in her golf. Finally she made a fair drive and turned to him jubilantly. He was commending enthusiastically and Ann quite pranced under his enthusiasm. Seeing Katie, she waved her hand and pointed off to her ball that Katie, too, might mark the triumph. Then they came along, laughing and chatting. When the ball was reached they were in about the spot where Katie had first seen Ann, thirty days before. She knew how Ann felt. There was joy in the good stroke. In this other game she had been playing in the last thirty days--this more difficult and more alluring game--she had come to know anew the exhilaration of bunker cleared, the satisfaction of the long drive and the sure putt. And Katie had played a good game. It was not strange she should have convinced others, for there were times when her game was so good as to convince even herself. Though it had ever been so with Kate. The things in the world of "Let's play like" had always been persuasive things. Curious she was to know how often or how completely Ann was able to forget they were playing a game. She had come to think of Ann, not as a hard-and-fast, all-finished product, but as something fluid, certainly plastic. It was as if anything could be poured into Ann, making her. A dream could be woven round her, and Ann could grow into that dream. That was a new fancy to Kate; she had always thought of people more as made than as constantly in the making. It opened up long paths of wondering. To all sides those paths were opening in those days--it was that that made them such eventful days. Down this path strayed the fancy how much people were made by the things which surrounded them--the things expected of them. That path led to the vista that amazing responsibility might lie with the things surrounding--the things expected. It even made her wonder in what measure she would have been Katie Jones, differently surrounded, differently called upon. Her little trip down that path jostled both her approval of herself and her disapproval of others. It was only once or twice that the real girl had stirred in the dream. For the most part she had remained in the shadow of Katie's fancyings. She was as an actor on the stage, inarticulate save as regards her part. Katie had grown so absorbed in that part that there were times of forgetting there was a real girl behind it. Often she believed in her friend Ann Forrest, the dear girl she had known in Florence, the poor child who had gone through so many hard things and was so different from the Zelda Frasers of the world. She rejoiced with Wayne and Captain Prescott in seeing dear Ann grow a little more plump, a little rosier, a little more smiling. She could understand perfectly, as she had made them understand, why Ann did not talk more of Italy and the things of her own life. Life had crowded in too hard upon her, that setting of the other days made other days live again too acutely. Ann was taking a vacation from her life, she had laughingly put it to Wayne. That was why she played so much with Worth and the dogs and talked so little of grown-up things. Though one could never completely take a vacation from one's life; that was why Ann looked that way when she was sometimes sitting very still and did not know that any one was looking at her. Persuasion was the easier as fabrication was but a fanciful dress for truth. Imagination did not have it all to do; it only followed where Ann called--blazing its own trail. Yet there were times when the country of make-believe was swept down by a whirlwind, a whirlwind of realization which crashed through Katie's consciousness and knocked over the fancyings. Those whirlwinds would come all unannounced; when Ann seemed most Ann, playing with Worth, perhaps wearing one of the prettiest dresses and smilingly listening to something Wayne was telling her had happened over at the shops. And on the heels of the whirlwind knocking down the country of make-believe would come the girl from a vast unknown rushing wildly from--what? What had become of that girl? Would she hear from _her_ again? It was almost as if the girl made by reality had indeed gone down under the waters that day, and the things the years had made her had abdicated in favor of the things Katie would make her. And yet did the things the years had made one ever really abdicate? Was it because the girl of the years was too worn for assertiveness that the girl of fancy could seem the all? Was it only that she slumbered--and sometimes stirred a little in her sleep?--And when _she_ awoke? Even to each other they did not speak of that other girl, as if fearing a word might wake her. Sometimes they heard her stir; as one day soon after Ann's coming Katie had said: "Ann, just what is it is the matter with your vocal chords?" "Why I didn't know anything was," stammered Ann. "But you seem unable to pronounce my name." Ann colored. "It is spelled K-a-t-i-e," Kate went on, "and is pronounced K--T. Try it, Ann. See if you can say it." Ann looked at her. The look itself crossed the border country. "Katie--" she choked--and the country of make-believe fell palely away. But they did not speak of the things they had stirred. That thing of not saying it had been established the day Ann's bank account was opened. Katie had been "over the river," as she called going over to the city. Upon returning she found Ann up in her room. She stood there unpinning her hat, telling of an automobile accident on the bridge--Katie seldom came in without some stirring tale. As she was leaving she rummaged in her bag. "And oh yes, Ann," she said, carelessly, "here's your bank book. I presumed to draw twenty dollars for you, thinking you might need it before you could get over. Oh dear--that telephone! And I know it's Wayne for me." But she did not escape. Ann was waiting for her when she came back up stairs. She held out the book, shaking her head. Her face told that she had been pulled back. "Not money," she said unsteadily. "All the rest of it is bad enough--but not money. I'd have no--self-respect." "Self-respect!" jeered Kate. "I'd have no self-respect if I didn't take money. Nobody can be self-respecting when broke. None of the rest of us seem to be inquiring into our sources of revenue, so why should you?" As had happened that other time, in relation to the suit, the thing shot out at Ann turned back to her. It had more than once occurred that the thing thrown out sparingly persisted as thing to be considered genuinely. Her browbeating of Ann--for it was a sort of tender, protective browbeating--led her to reach out blindly for weapons, and once in her hand many of those weapons proved ideas. "We take everything we can get," she followed it up, forcing herself from interest in the weapon to the use of it, "from everybody we can get it from. We take this house from the government--and heaven only knows how many sons of toil the government takes it from. I take this money we're so stupidly quibbling about now from a company the papers say takes it from everybody in reach. Take or you will be taken from is the basis of modern finance. Please don't be fanatical, Ann." "I can't take it," repeated Ann. Katie looked worried. Then she took new ground. "Well, Ann, if you won't take the sane financial outlook, at least be a good sport. We're in this game; the money has got to be part of making it go. We'll never get anywhere at all if we're going to balk and fuss at every turn. There now, honey,"--as if to Worth--"put your book away. Don't lose it; it makes them cross to have you lose them. And another principle of modern finance with which I am heartily in sympathy is that money should be kept in circulation. It encourages embezzlement to leave it in banks too long." Then, seeing what was gathering, she said quietly but authoritatively: "Leave it unsaid, Ann. Can't we always just leave it unsaid? Nothing makes me so uncomfortable as to feel I'm constantly in danger of having something nice said to me." Perhaps Katie knew that countries of make-believe are sensitive things, that it does not do to admit you know them for that. There had been that one time when the hand of reality reached savagely into the dream, as if the things the girl had run away from had come to claim her. It seemed through that long night that they had claimed her, that Ann's "vacation" was over. Captain Prescott had been dining with them that night and after dinner they were sitting out on the porch. He was humming a snatch of something. Katie heard a chair scrape and saw that Ann had moved farther into the shadow. She was all in shadow save her hand; that Katie could see was gripping the arm of her chair. He turned to Ann. "Did you see 'Daisey-Maisey'?" "Ann wasn't here then," said Kate. "Did you see it, Katie?" "No." "It was a jolly, joyous sort of thing," he laughed. "Sort of thing to make you feel nothing matters. That was the name of that thing I was humming. No, not 'Nothing Matters,' but 'Don't You Care.' And there were the 'Don't You Care' girls--pink dresses and big black hats. They seemed to mean what they sang. They didn't care, certainly." It was Wayne who spoke. "Think not?" Ann came a little way out of the shadow. She had leaned toward Wayne. "Well you'd never know it if they did," laughed Prescott. He turned to Wayne. "What's your theory?" "Oh I have no theory. Just a wondering. Can't see how girls who have their living to earn could sing 'Don't You Care' with complete abandon." Ann leaned forward, looking at him tensely. Then, as if afraid, she sank back into shadow. Katie could still see her hand gripping the arm of her chair. "But they're not the caring sort," Prescott was holding. "Think not?" said Wayne again, in Wayne's queer way. There was a silence, and then Ann had murmured something and slipped away. Katie followed her; for hours she sat by her bed, holding her hand, trying to soothe her. It was almost morning before that other girl, that girl they were trying to get away from, would let Ann go to sleep. Sitting beside the tortured girl that night, hearing the heart-breaking little moans which as sleep finally drew near replaced the sobs, Katie Jones wondered whether many of the things people so serenely took for granted were as absurd--and perhaps as tragically absurd--as Captain Prescott's complacent conclusion that the "Don't You Care" girls were girls who didn't care. How she would love--turning it all over in her mind that afternoon--to talk some of those things over with "the man who mends the boats"! CHAPTER XII She had only known him for about twenty days--"The man who mends the boats"--but she had fallen into the way of referring all interesting questions to him. That was perhaps the more remarkable as her eyes had never rested upon him. One morning Worth had looked up from some comparative measurements of the tails of Pourquoi and N'est-ce-pas to demand: "Why, Aunt Kate, what do you think?" "There are times," replied Aunt Kate, looking over at the girl swaying in the hammock, humming gently to herself, "when I don't know just what to think." "Well sir, what do you think? The man that mends the boats knows more 'an Watts!" "Worthie," she admonished, "it's bad business for an army man to turn traitor." "But yes, he does. 'Cause I asked Watts why Pourquoi had more yellow than white, and why N'est-ce-pas was more white 'an yellow, and he said I sure had him there. He'd be blowed if he knew, and he guessed nobody did, 'less maybe the Almighty had some ideas about it; but yesterday I asked the man that mends the boats, and he explained it--oh a whole lot of long words, Aunt Kate. More long words 'an I ever heard before." "And the explanation? I trust it was satisfactory?" "I guess it was," replied Worth uncertainly. "'Twas an awful lot of long words." "My experience, too," laughed Aunt Kate. "With the man that mends the boats?" "No, with other sages. You see when they're afraid to stay down here on the ground with us any longer, afraid they'll be hit with a question that will knock them over, they get into little air-ships they have and hurl the long words down at our heads until we're too stunned to ask any more questions, and in such wise is learning disseminated." "I'll ask the man that mends the boats if he's got any air-ships. He's got most everything up there." "Up where?" "Oh, up there,"--with vague nod toward the head of the Island. "He says he'd like to get acquainted with you, Aunt Kate. He says he really believes you might be worth knowing." Thereupon Aunt Kate's book fell to the floor with a thud of amazement that reverberated indignation. "Well upon my word!" gasped she. Then, recovering her book--and more--"Why what a kindly gentleman he must be," she drawled. "Oh yes, he's kind. He's awful kind, I guess. He'll talk to you any time you want him to, Aunt Kate. He'll tell you just anything you want to know. He said you must be a--I forgot the word." "Oh no, you haven't," wheedled Aunt Kate. "Try to think of it, dearie." "Can't think of it now. Shall I ask him again?" "Certainly not! How preposterous! As if it made the slightest difference in the world!" But it made difference enough for Aunt Kate to ask a moment later: "And how did it happen, Worthie, that this kindly philosopher should have deemed me worth knowing?" "Oh, I don't know. 'Cause he liked the puppies' names, I guess. I told him how their mother was just Queen, but how they was Pourquoi and N'est-ce-pas--a 'quirer and 'versalist and so then he said: 'And which is Aunt Kate?'" "Which is Aunt _Kate? What_ did he mean?" "'Is she content to be just Queen,' he said, 'or is she'--there was a lot of long words, you wouldn't understand them, Aunt Kate--I didn't either--'does she show a puppyish tendon'--tendon something--'to butt into the universe?'" Suddenly Aunt Kate's face grew pink and she sat straight. "Worth, was this one of the men?" "Oh no, Aunt Kate. He's not one of the men. He's just a man. He's the man that mends the boats." "'The man that mends the boats!' He sounds like a creature in flowing robes out of a mythology book, or the being expressing the high and noble sentiments calling everybody down in a new-thoughtish play." From time to time Worth would bring word of him. What boats does he mend, Aunt Kate wanted to know, and what business has he landing them on our Island? To which came the answer that he mended boats sick unto death with speed mania and other social disease, and that he didn't land them on the Island, but on an island off the tip of the Island, a tiny island which the Lord had thoughtlessly left lying disrespectfully close to the Isle of Dignity. Katie was too true a romancer to inquire closely about the man who mended the boats, for she liked to think of him as an unreal being who only touched the earth off the tip of the Island, and only touched humanity through Worth. That wove something alluringly mysterious--and mysteriously alluring--about the man who made sick boats well, whereas had she given rein to the possibility of his belonging to the motorboat factory across the river, and scientifically testing gasoline engines it would be neither proper nor interesting that her young nephew should run back and forth with pearls of wit and wisdom. It developed that Worth visited this tip of the Island with the ever faithful Watts, and that one day the boat mender and Watts had--oh just the awfulest fight with words Worth had ever heard. It was about the Government, which the man who mended the boats said was running on one cylinder, drawing from patriotic Watts the profane defense that it had all the power it needed for blowing up just such fools as that! He further held that soldiers were first-class dishwashers and should be brave enough to demand first-class dishwashing pay. Katie had chuckled over that. But she had puzzled rather than chuckled over the statement that the first war the saddles manufactured on that Island would see would be the war over the manufacturing of them. Now what in the world had he meant by that? She had asked Wayne, but Wayne had seemed so seriously interested in the remark, and asked such direct questions as to who made it, that she had tried to cover her tracks, thinking perhaps the man who mended the boats could be thrown into the guard-house for saying such dark things about army saddles. On the way home from that talk Watts had branded the man who mended the boats as one of them low-down anarchists that ought to be shot at sunrise. Things was as they _was_, held Watts, and how could anybody but a fool expect them to be any way but the way they _was_? It showed what _he_ was--and after that Worth had had no more fireworks of thought for a week, Watts standing guard over the world as it was. But he slipped into an odd place in Katie's life of wonderings and fancyings, and that life of musing and questioning was so big and so real a life in those days. He was something to shoot things out at, to hang things to. She held imaginary conversations with him, demolished him in imaginary arguments only to stand him up and demolish him again. Sometimes she quite winked with him at the world as it was, and at other times she withdrew to lofty heights and said cutting things. In more friendly mood she asked him questions, sometimes questions he could not answer, and she could not answer them either, and then their thoughts would hover around together, brooding over a world of unanswerable things. All her life she had held those imaginary conversations, but heretofore it had been with her horse, her dog, the trees, a white cloud against the blue, something somewhere. None of the hundreds of nice people she knew had ever moved her to imaginary conversations. And so now it was stimulating--energizing--not to have to diffuse her thought into the unknown, but to direct it at, and through, the man who mended the boats and said strange things to Worth up at the tip of the Island. And he came at a time when she had great need of him. Never before had there been so many things to start one on imaginary conversations, conversations which ended usually in a limitless wondering. Since Ann had come the simplest thought had a way of opening a door into a vast country. Too many doors were opening that afternoon. She was making no headway with the letters she had told herself she would dispose of while Ann and Captain Prescott were out on the links. The letter from Harry Prescott's mother was the most imperative. She was returning from California and sent some inquiries as to the habitability of her son's house. Katie was thinking, as she re-read it, that it was a letter with a background. It expressed one whom dead days loved well. The writer of the letter seemed to be holding in life all those gentlewomen who had formed her. In a short time Mrs. Prescott would be at the Arsenal. That meant a more difficult game. Did it also mean an impossible one? Yet Katie would prefer showing her Ann to Mrs. Prescott than to Zelda Fraser. Zelda, the fashionable young woman, would pounce upon the absence of certain little tricks and get no glimmer of what Katie vaguely called the essence. Might not Mrs. Prescott find the reality in the possibilities? "It comes to this," Katie suddenly saw, "I'm not shamming, I'm revealing. I'm not vulgarly imitating; I'm restoring. The connoisseur should be the first to appreciate that." It turned her off into one of those long paths of wondering, paths which sometimes seemed to circle the whole of the globe. It was on those paths she frequently found the man who mended the boats waiting for her. Sometimes he was irritating, turning off into little by-paths, by-paths leading off to the dim source of things. Katie could not follow him there; she did not know her way; and often, as to-day, he turned off there just when she was most eager to ask him something. She would ask him what he thought about backgrounds. How much there was in that thing of having the background all prepared for one, in simply fitting into the place one was expected to fit into. How many people would create for themselves the background it was assumed they belonged in just because they had been put in it? Suddenly she laughed. She had a most absurd vision of Jove--Katie believed it would be Jove--standing over humanity with some kind of heroic feather duster and mightily calling "Shoo!--Shoo!--Move on!--Every fellow find his place for himself!" Such a scampering as there would be! And how many would be let stay in the places where they had been put? Who would get the nice corners it had been taken for granted certain people should have just because they had been fixed up for them in advance? How about the case of Miss Katherine Wayneworth Jones? Would she be ranked out of quarters? Certain it was that a very choice corner had been fitted up for said Katherine Wayneworth Jones. People said that she belonged in her corner; that no one else could fit it, that she could not as well fit anywhere else. But she was not at all sure that under the feather duster act that would give her the right of possession. People were so stupid. Just because they saw a person sitting in a place they held that was the place for that person to be sitting. Katie almost wished that mighty "Shoo!" would indeed reverberate 'round the world. It would be such fun to see them scamper and squirm. And would there not be the keenest of satisfaction in finding out what sort of place one would fit up for one's self if none had been fitted up for one in advance? Few people were called upon to prove themselves. Most people judged people as they judged pictures at an exhibition. They went around with a catalogue and when they saw a good name they held that they saw a good picture. And when they did not know the name, even though the picture pleased them, they waited around until they heard someone else saying good things, then they stood before it murmuring, "How lovely." She had put Ann in the catalogue; she had seen to it that she was properly hung, and she herself had stood before her proclaiming something rare and fine. That meant that Ann was taken for granted. And being taken for granted meant nine-tenths the battle. It would be fun to fool the catalogue folks. And she need have no compunctions about lowering the standard of art because the picture she had found out in the back room and surreptitiously hung in the night belonged in the gallery a great deal more than some of the pictures which had been solemnly carried in the front way. It was the catalogue folks, rather than the lovers of art, were being imposed upon. And Mrs. Prescott, though to be sure a maker of catalogues, was also a lover of art. There lay Katie's hope for her, and apology to her. Though she was apprehensive, a stronger light was to be turned on--that was indisputable. "You and I know, dear Queen," Katie confided to the member of her sex lying at her feet, "that men are not at all difficult. You can get them to swallow most anything--if the girl in the case is beautiful enough. And feminine enough! Masculine dotes on discovering feminine--but have you ever noticed what the rest of the feminine dote on doing to that discovery? Women can even look at wondrous soft brown eyes and lovely tender mouths through those 'Who was your father?' 'specs' they keep so well dusted. The manner of holding a teacup is more important than the heart's deep dreams. When it comes to passing inspection, the soul's not in it with the fork. We know 'em--don't we, old Queen?" Queen wagged concurrence, and Katie pulled herself sternly back to her letters. Mrs. Prescott spoke of the chance of her son's being ordered away. "I hope not," she wrote, "for I want the quiet summer for him. And for myself, too. The great trees and the river, and you there, dear Katie, it seems the thing I most desire. But we of the army learn often to relinquish the things we most desire. We, the homeless, for in the abiding sense we are homeless, make homes possible. Think of it with pride sometimes, Katie. Our girls think of it all too little now. I sometimes wonder how they can forego that just pride in their traditions. During this spring in the West my thoughts have many times turned to those other days, days when men like your father and my husband performed the frontier service which made the West of to-day possible. Recently at a dinner I heard a young woman, one of the 'advanced' type, and I am sorry to say of army people, speak laughingly to one of our men of the uselessness of the army. She was worthy nothing but scorn, or I might have spoken of some of the things your mother and I endured in those days of frontier posts. And now we have a California--serene--fruitful--and can speak of the uselessness of the army! Does the absurdity of it never strike them?" Katie pondered that; wondered if Mrs. Prescott's attitude and spirit were not passing with the frontier. Few of the army girls she knew thought of themselves as homeless, or gave much consideration to that thing of making other homes possible, save, to be sure, the homes they were hoping--and plotting--to make for themselves. And she could not see that the "young woman" was answered. The young woman had not been talking about traditions. Probably the young woman would say that yesterday having made to-day possible it was quite time to be quit of yesterday. "Though to be sure," Katie now answered her, "while we may not seem to be doing anything, we're keeping something from being done, and that perhaps is the greatest service of all. Were it not for us and our dear navy we should be sailed on from East and West, marched on from North and South. At least that's what we're told by our superiors, and are you the kind of young woman to question what you're told by your superiors? Because if you are!--I'd like to meet you." Her letter continued: "Harry writes glowingly of your charming friend. Strange that I am not able to recall her, though to be sure I knew little of you in those years abroad. Was she a school friend? I presume so. Harry speaks of her as 'the dear sort of girl,' not leaving a clear image in my mind. But soon my vision will be cleared." "Oh, will it?" mumbled Kate. "I don't know whether it will or not. 'The dear sort of girl!' And I presume the young goose thought he had given a vivid picture." She turned to Major Darrett's note: a charming note it was to turn to. He had the gift of making himself very real--and correspondingly attractive--in those notes. A few days before she had been telling Ann about Major Darrett. "He's a bachelor," she had said, "and a joy." Ann had looked vague, and Katie laughed now in seeing that her characterization was broad as "the dear sort of girl." It was probable Major Darrett would relieve one of the officers at the Arsenal. He touched it lightly. "Should fate--that part of it dwelling in Washington--waft me to your Island, Katie Jones, I foresee a summer to compensate me for all the hard, cruel, lonely years." Kate smiled knowingly; not that she actually knew much to be knowing about. She wondered why she did not disapprove of Major Darrett. Certain she was that some of the things which had kept his years from being hard, cruel, and lonely were in the category for disapproval. But he managed them so well; one could not but admire his deftness, and admiration was weakening to disapproval. One disapproved of things which offended one, and in this instance the results of the things one knew one should disapprove were so far from offensive that one let it go at smiling knowingly, mildly disapproving of one's self for not disapproving. Ann had not responded enthusiastically to Katie's drawing of Major Darrett. She had not seemed to grasp the idea that much was forgiven the very charming; that ordinary standards were not rigidly applied to the extraordinarily fascinating. When Katie was laughingly telling of one of the Major's most interesting flirtations Ann's eyes had seemed to crouch back in that queer way they had. Katie had had an odd sense of Ann's disapproving of her--disapproving of her for her not disapproving of him. More than once Ann had given her that sense of being disapproved of. As with all things in the universe just then, he was a new angle back to Ann. If he were to come there--? For Major Darrett would not at all disapprove of those eyes of Ann's. And yet his own eyes would see more than Wayne and Harry Prescott had seen. Major Darrett had been little on the frontier, but much in the drawing-room; he had never led up San Juan hill, but he had led many a cotillion. He had had that form of military training which makes society favorites. As to Ann, he would have the feminine "specs" and the masculine delight at one and the same time. What of that union? Katie's eyes began to dance. She hoped he would come. He would be a foe worthy her steel. She would have to fix up all her fortifications--look well to her ammunition. Whatever might be held against Major Darrett it could not be said he was not worthy one's cleverest fabrications. But the triumph of holding one's own with a veteran! Then of a sudden she wondered what the man who mended the boats would think of the Major. CHAPTER XIII Before she had finished her writing Wayne and Worth came up on the porch. The little boy had been over at the shops with his father. "Father," he was saying, imagination under the stimulus of things he had been seeing, "I suppose our gun will kill 'bout forty thousand million folks--won't it, father?" "Why no, son, I hope it's not going to be such a beastly gun as that," laughed Captain Jones. "Yes, but, father, isn't a good gun a gun that kills folks? What's the use making a gun at all if it isn't going to kill folks?" His father looked at him strangely. "Sonny," he said, "you're hitting home rather hard." "Your reasoning is poor, Worth," said Katie; "fact is we make guns to keep folks from getting killed. If we didn't have the guns everybody would get killed. Now don't say 'why.'" "'Cause you don't know why," calmly remarked Worth, adding: "I'll ask Watts, and if he don't know I'll ask the man that mends the boats." "Do," said Katie. Having, to his own satisfaction, exterminated some forty thousand million members of the human family, Worth opened attack on the puppies. He was an Indian and they were poor white settlers and he was going to kill them. No poor white settlers had ever received an Indian so joyously. But he seemed to have left those forty thousand million souls on his father's hands. Wayne was looking very serious. He did not respond to--did not appear to have heard--Katie's remark about Worth needing some new clothes. Katie wondered what he was thinking about; she supposed some new kind of barrel steel. She took it for granted that nothing short of steel could produce _that_ look. She was proud of the things that look had done, proud of the distinction her brother had already won in the army, proud, in advance, of the things she was confident he would do. Captain Jones was at the Arsenal on special detail. An invention of his pertaining to the rifle was being manufactured for tests. There was keen interest in it and its final adoption seemed assured. It was of sufficient importance to make his name one of those conspicuous in army affairs. He had already several lesser things--devices pertaining to equipment--to his credit and was looked upon as one of the most promising of the army's men of invention. And aside from her pride in him, Katie's affection for her brother was deep, intensified because of their being alone. Their father had died when Katie was sixteen, died as a result of wounds received long before in frontier skirmishes, where he had been one of those many brave men to serve fearlessly and faithfully, men who gave more to their country than their country perhaps understood. Their mother survived him only two years. Katie sometimes said that her mother, too, gave her life to her country. Her health had been undermined by hard living on the frontier--she who had been so tenderly reared in her southern home--and in the end she also died from a wound, that wound dealt the heart in the death of her husband. Katie revered her father's memory and adored her mother's, and while youth and Katie's indomitable spirit made it hard for one to think of her as sad, the memory of those two was the deepest, biggest thing in the girl's life. "Oh Katie," Wayne suddenly roused himself to say, "your cousin Fred Wayneworth is in town. I had luncheon with him over the river. He sent all sorts of messages to you." "Well--really! Messages! Why this haughty aloofness? Doesn't he mean to come over?" "Oh yes, of course; to-morrow--perhaps to-night. He's fearfully busy--stopped off on his way East. There's a row on in the forest service about some of Osborne's timber claims--mining claims, too, I believe--in Colorado. Those years in the West have developed Fred splendidly. He's gone from boy to man, and a fine specimen of man, at that." "He likes his work?" "Full of it." Wayne was silent for a moment, then added: "I envied him." It startled Katie. "Envied him? Why--why, Wayne? Surely you're lucky." He laughed: not the laugh of a man too pleased with his luck. "Oh, am I? Perhaps I am, but just the same I envy a fellow who can look that way when talking about his work." "But you have a work, Wayne." "No, I have a place." She grew more and more puzzled. "Why, Wayne, you've been all wrapped up in this thing you were doing." He threw his cigarette away impatiently. "Oh yes, just for the sake of doing it. I get a certain satisfaction in scheming things out. I must say, however, I'd like to scheme out something I'd get some satisfaction in having schemed out. A morsel of truth dropped from the mouth of a babe a minute ago. You may have observed, Katie, that his inquiry was more direct and reasonable than your reply. An improvement on a rifle. Not such a satisfying thing to leave to a rifle eliminating future." "But I didn't know the army admitted it was to be a rifle eliminating future." "I'm not saying that the army does," he laughed. He passed again to that look of almost passionate concentration which Katie had always supposed meant metallic fouling or some--to her--equally incomprehensible thing. He emerged from it to exclaim tensely: "Oh I get so sick of the spirit of the army!" Instinctively Katie looked around. He saw it, and laughed. "There you go! We've made a perfect fetich of loyalty. It's a different sort of loyalty those forestry fellows have--a more live, more constructive loyalty. The loyalty that comes, not through form, but through devotion to the work--a common interest in a common cause. Ours is built on dead things. Custom, and the caste--I know no other word--just the bull-headed, asinine, undemocratic caste that custom has built up." "And yet--there must be discipline," Katie murmured: it seemed dreadful Wayne should be tearing down their house in that rude fashion, house in which they had dwelt so long, and so comfortably. "Discipline is one thing. Bullying's another. I've never been satisfied discipline couldn't be enforced without snobbery. To-day Solesby--one year out of West Point!--walked through a shop I was in. He passed men working at their machines--skilled mechanics, many of them men of intelligence, ideas, character--as though he were passing so much cattle. I wanted to take him by the neck and throw him out!" "Oh well," protested Katie, "one year out of the Point! He's yet to learn men are not cattle." "Well, Leonard never learned it. His back gets some black looks, let me tell you." "Wayne dear," she laughed, "I'm afraid you're not talking like an officer and a gentleman." "I get tired talking like an officer and a gentleman. Sometimes I feel like talking like a man." "But couldn't you be court-martialed for doing that?" she laughed. "I think Leonard thinks I should be." "Why--why, Wayne?" "Because I talk to the men. There's a young mechanic who has been detailed to me, and he and I get on famously. All too famously, I take it Leonard thinks. He came in to-day when this young Ferguson was telling me some things about his union. He treated Ferguson like a dog and me like a suspicious character." "Dear me, Wayne," she murmured, "don't get in trouble." "Trouble!" he scoffed. "Well if I can get in trouble for talking with an intelligent man I'm working with about the things that man knows--then let me get in trouble! I'd rather talk to Ferguson than Solesby--we've more in common. Oh I'll get in no trouble," he added grimly. "Leonard knows it wouldn't sound well to say it. But he feels it, just the same. Right there's the difference between our service and this forest service. That's where they're democrats and we're fossils. Look at the difference in the spirit of the ranger and the spirit of the soldier! And it's not because they're whipped into line and bullied and snarled at. It's because they're treated like men--and made to feel they're a needed part of a big whole. You should hear Fred tell of the way men meet in this forest service--superintendent meeting ranger on a common ground. And why? Because they're doing something constructive. Because the work's the thing that counts. You'll see what it's done for Fred. The boy has a real dignity; not the stiff-necked kind he'd acquire around an army post, but the dignity that comes with the consciousness of being, not in the service, but of service." He fell silent there, and Katie watched him. He had never spoken to her that way before--she had not dreamed he felt like that; heretofore it had been only through laughing little jibes at the army she had had any inkling of his feeling toward it. That she had not taken seriously; half the people she knew in the service jibed at it to others in the service. This depth of feeling disturbed her, moved her to defense. After a moment's consideration she emerged triumphant with the Panama canal. He shook his head. "When you consider the percentage of the army so engaged, you can't feel as happy about it as you'd like to. We ought all to be digging Panama canals!" "Heavens, Wayne--we don't need them." "Plenty of things we do need." "Well I don't think you're fair to the army, Wayne. You're not looking into it--deeply enough. You're doing just as much as Fred, for in safeguarding the country you permit this constructive work to go on. As to our formalities--they have run off into absurdity at some points, but it was a real spirit created those very forms." "True. And now the spirit's dead and the form's left--and what's so absurd as a form that rattles dead bones?" "Father didn't feel as you do, Wayne." "He had no cause to. He was needed. But we don't need the army on the frontier now. That's _done_. And we do need the forest service--the thing to build up. There's no use harking back to traditions. The world moves on too fast for that. Question is--not what did you do yesterday--but what good are you to-day--what are you worth to-morrow? Oh, I'm not condemning the army half so much as I'm sympathizing with it," he laughed. "It's full of live men who want to be doing something--instead of being compelled to argue that they're some good. They get very tired saying they're useful. They'd like to make it self-evident." "Well, perhaps we'll have a war with Japan," said Katie consolingly. "Perhaps we will. Having an army that's spoiling for it, I don't see how we can very well miss it." "But if we had no army we certainly should have a war." His silence led Katie to gasp: "Wayne, are you becoming--anti-militarist?" He laughed. "Oh, I don't know what I'm becoming. But as to myself--I do know this. There would be more satisfaction in constructive work than in work that constructs only that it may be ready to destroy. I would find it more satisfying to help give my country itself--through natural and legitimate means--than stand ready to give it some corner of some other country." "But to keep the other country from getting a corner of it?" "Doesn't it occur to you, Katie, that as a matter of fact the other country might like a chance to develop its resources? We're like a crowd of boys with rocks in their hands and all afraid to throw down the rocks. If one did, the others might be immensely relieved. It seems rather absurd, standing there with rocks nobody wants to throw--especially when there are so many other things to be doing--and everybody saying, 'I've got to keep mine because he's got his.' Would you call that a very intelligent gang of kids? Ferguson says it's the workingmen of the world will bring about disarmament. That they're coming to feel their common cause as workers too keenly to be forced into war with each other." "That's what the man that mends the boats says," piped up Worth. "He says that when they're all socialists there won't be any wars--'cause nobody'll go. But Watts says that day'll never come, thank God." "Are you thanking God for yourself or for Watts, sonny?" laughed his father. "And who, pray, is the man that mends the boats?" "The man that mends the boats, father, is a man that's 'most as smart as you are." "It has been a long time," gravely remarked Wayne, "since any man has been brought to my attention so highly commended as that." But their talk had been sobering to them both, for they spoke seriously then of various things. It was probable that before long Wayne would be ordered to Washington. He wanted to know what Katie would do then. Why not spend next season in Washington with him? Just what were her plans? But Katie had no plans. And suddenly she realized how completely all things had been changed by the coming of Ann. She had spent much of her life in Washington. She loved it; loved its official life, in particular its army and diplomatic life; and loved, too, that rigidly guarded old Washington to which, as her mother's daughter, the door stood open to her. Her uncle, the Bishop, lived in a city close by. His home was the fixed spot which Katie called home. In Washington--and near it--she would find friends on all sides. Just thirty days before she would have gloated over that prospect of next season there. But she was not prepared to bombard Washington with Ann. The mere suggestion carried realization of how propitious things had been, how simple she had found it. The little game they were playing seemed to cut Katie off from her life, too, and without leaving the luxury of feeling sorry for herself. With it all, Washington did not greatly allure. Washington, as she knew it, was distinctly things as they were; just now nothing allured half so much as those long dim paths of wondering leading off into the unknown. Suddenly she had an odd sense of Washington--all that it represented to her--being the play, the game, the thing made to order and seeming very tame to her because she was dwelling with real things. It was as if her craft of make-believe was the thing which had been able to carry her toward the shore of reality. And so she told Wayne that she had no plans. Perhaps she would go back to Europe with Ann. He turned quickly at that. "She goes back?" "Oh yes--I suppose so." "But why? Where? To whom?" "Why? Why, why not? Why does one go anywhere? Florence is to Ann what Washington is to me--a sort of center." "Katie," he asked abruptly, "has she no people? No ties? Isn't she--moored any place?" "Am I 'moored' any place?" returned Kate. "Why, yes; to the things that have made you--to the things you're part of. By moored I don't mean necessarily a fixed spot. But I have a feeling--" He seemed either unable or unwilling to express it, and instead laughed: "I'd like to know how much her father made a month, and whether her mother was a good cook--a few little things like that to make her less a shadow. Do you really get _at_ her, Katie?" "Why--why, yes," stammered Katie; "though I told you, Wayne, that Ann was different. Quiet--and just now, sad." "I don't think of her as particularly quiet," he replied; "and sad isn't it, either. I think of her"--he paused and concluded uncertainly--"as a girl in a dream." "Her dream or your dream, Wayne?" laughed Katie, just to turn it. She was throwing sticks for the puppies and missed his startled look. But it was Katie who was startled when he said, still uncertainly, and more to himself than to Katie: "Though she's so real." Ann and Captain Prescott were coming toward them. She had never looked less like a girl in a dream. Laughing and jesting with her companion, she looked simply like an exceedingly pretty girl having a very good time. "But you like Ann, don't you, Wayne?" Katie asked anxiously. "Yes," said Wayne, "I like her." She came running up the steps to them, flushed, happy, as free from self-consciousness as Worth would have been. "Katie," she cried, "I played the last one in four. Didn't I?" turning proudly to the Captain for endorsement. Both men were looking at her with pleasure: cheeks flushed, eyes glowing, hair a little disheveled and a little damp about the forehead, panting a little, her lithe, beautiful body swaying gently, hands outstretched to show Wayne how she had hardened her palms, Ann had never seemed so lovely and so live. In that moment it mattered not whether one knew anything about the earning capacity of her father or the culinary abilities of her mother. _She_ was real. Real as sunshine and breezes and birds are real, as Worth and the puppies tumbling over each other on the grass were real, as all that is life-loving is real. And not detached, not mistily floating, but moored to that very love of life, capacity for life, to that look she had awakened in the faces of the men to whom she was talking. It seemed a paltry thing just then to wonder whether Ann was child of farmer, or clothing merchant, or great artist. She was Life's child. Love's child. Love's child--only she had not dwelt all her days in her father's house. But it was her father's house; that was why, once warmed and comforted, she could radiantly take her place. Watching her as she was going over her game for Wayne, demonstrating some of her strokes, and her slim, beautiful body made even the poor strokes wonderful things, Katie was not speculating on whether Ann had come from Chicago, or Florence, or Big Creek. She was thinking that Ann was product, expression, of the love of the world, that love which had brought the laughter and the tears, brought the hope and the radiance and the tragedy of life. And then, suddenly and inexplicably, Katie was afraid. Of just what, she did not know; of things--big, tempestuous things--which Katie did not very well understand, and which Ann--perhaps not understanding either--seemed to embody. "Come, Ann," she said, "we must make ready for dinner." Captain Prescott called after them that next he was going to teach Ann to ride. "Oh, we'll make an army girl of her yet," he laughed. Ann turned back. "Do you know," she said, "I don't understand the army very well. Just what is it the army does?" They laughed. "Ask the peace society in Boston," suggested Prescott. But Wayne said: "Some day soon you and I'll take a ride on the river and I'll deliver a little lecture on the army." "Oh, that will be nice," said Ann radiantly. CHAPTER XIV It was astonishing how Ann seemed to find herself in just that thing of being able to learn to play golf. They were gay at dinner that night, and Ann was as gay as any one. She continued to talk about her game, which they jestingly permitted her to do, and the men told some good golf stories which she entered into merrily. It was Katie who was rather quiet. While they still lingered around the table Fred Wayneworth joined them, and Katie, eager to talk with him of his people and his work, left Ann alone with Wayne and Captain Prescott, something which up to that time she had been reluctant to do. But to-night she did not feel Ann clinging to her, calling out to her, as she had felt her before. She seemed on surer ground; it was as if golf had given her a passport. From her place in the garden with her cousin, Ann's laugh came down to them from time to time--just a girl's happy laugh. "Who is your stunning friend, Katie?" Fred asked. "No, stunning doesn't fit her, but lovely. She is lovely, isn't she?" "Ann's very pretty," said Kate shortly. "Oh--pretty," he laughed, "that won't do at all. So many girls are pretty, and I never saw any girl just like her." Again she was vaguely uneasy, and the uneasiness irritated her, and then she was ashamed of the irritation. Didn't she want poor Ann to have a good time--and feel at home--and be admired? Did she care for her when she was somber and shy, and resent her when happy and confident? She told herself she was glad to hear Ann laughing; and yet each time the happy little laugh stirred that elusive foreboding in the not usually apprehensive soul of Katie Jones. "I want to tell you about my girl, Katie," her cousin was saying. "I've got the _only_ girl." He was off into the story of Helen: Helen, who was a clerk in the forest service and "put it all over" any girl he had ever known before, who was worth the whole bunch of girls he had known in the East--girls who had been brought up like doll-babies and had doll-baby brains. Didn't Katie agree that a girl who could make her own way distanced the girls who could do nothing but spend their fathers' money? In her heart, Katie did; had she been defending Fred to his father, the Bishop, or to his Bostonian mother, she would have grown eloquent for Helen. But listening to Fred, it seemed something was being attacked, and she, unreasonably enough, instead of throwing herself with the aggressor was in the stormed citadel with her aunt and uncle and the girls with the doll-baby brains. And she had been within the citadel that afternoon when Wayne was attacking the army. She gloried in attacks of her own, but let some one else begin one and she found herself running for cover--and to defense. She wondered if that were anything more meaningful than just natural perversity. The Bishop had wanted his son for the church; but Fred not taking amicably to the cloth, he had urged the navy. Fred had settled that by failing to pass the examinations for Annapolis. Failing purposely, his father stormily held; a theory supported by the good work he did subsequently at Yale. There he became interested in forestry, again to the disapproval of his parents, who looked upon forestry as an upstart institution, not hallowed by the mellowing traditions of church or navy. Now they would hold that Helen proved it. And Helen did prove something. Certain it was that from neither church nor navy would Fred have seen his Helen in just this way. Perhaps it was that democracy Wayne had been talking about. Perhaps this democracy was a thing not contented with any one section of a man's life. Perhaps once it _had_ him--it had its way with him. Katie thought of the last thirty days--of paths leading out from other paths. Once one started-- Fred's father had never started. Bishop Wayneworth was only democratic when delivering addresses on the signers of the Declaration of Independence. The democracy of the past was sanctified; the democracy of the present, pernicious and uncouth. Thought of her uncle put Katie on the outside, eyes dancing with the fun of the attack. "Who are her people, Fred?" "Oh, Western people--ranchers; best sort of people. They raised the best crop of potatoes in the valley this year." Katie yearned to commend the family of her daughter-in-law to her Aunt Elizabeth with the boast that they raised the best crop of potatoes in the valley! "They had hard sledding for a long time; but they're making a go of it now. They've worked--let me tell you. Helen wouldn't have to work now--but don't you say that to Helen! What do you think, Katie? She even wants to keep on working after we're married!" That planted Katie firmly within. "Oh, she can't do that, Fred." "Well, I wish you'd tell her she can't. That's where we are now. We stick on that point. I try to assert my manly authority, but manly authority doesn't faze Helen much. She has some kind of theory about the economic independence of woman. You know anything about it, Katie?" "You forget that I'm one of the doll-baby girls," she replied in a light voice which trailed a little bitterness on behind. "Not you! Just before I left I said to Helen: 'Well there's at least one relative of mine who will have sense enough to appreciate you, and that's my corking cousin Katie Jones!'" That lured feminine Kate outside again. "Fred," she asked, moved by her never slumbering impulse to find out about things, "just what is it you care for in Helen? Is she pretty? Funny? Sympathetic? Clever? What?" She watched his face as he tried to frame it. And watching, she decided that whatever kind of girl Helen was, she was a girl to be envied. Yes, and to be admired. "Well I fear it doesn't sound sufficiently romantic," he laughed, "but Helen's such a _sturdy_ little wretch. The first things I ever noticed about her was her horse sense. She's good on her job, too. She seems to me like the West. Though that's rather amusing, for she's such a little bit of a thing. She's afraid she'll get fat. But she won't. She's not that kind." "Why of course not," said Katie stoutly, and they laughed and seemed very near to Helen in thus scorning her fear of getting fat. He continued his confidences, laughter from the porch coming down to them all the while. Helen was so real--she was so square--so independent--so dauntless--and yet she had such dear little ways. He couldn't make her sound as nice as she was; Katie would have to come and see her. In fact they were counting on Katie's coming. She was to come and stay a long time with them and really get acquainted with the West. "I'll tell you what Helen's like," he summed it up. "She's very much what you would have been if you'd lived out there and had the advantages she has." Katie stared. No, he was not trying to be funny. They started toward the house. "Katie," he broke out, "if you have any cousinly love in your heart, and know anything about Walt Whitman, tell me something, so I can go back and spring it on Helen. She's mad over him." "He was one of the 'advantages' I didn't have," said Katie. "He didn't play a heavy part in the thing I had that passed for an education." "Isn't it the limit the way they 'do you' at those girls' schools?" agreed Fred sympathetically. "Helen says that in religion and education the more you pay the less you get." "I should like her," laughed Katie. But what would her Aunt Elizabeth think of a "sturdy little wretch," believing in the economic independence of woman--whatever that might be--with lots of horse sense, and good on her job! Katie was on the outside now, and for good. If nothing else, the fun was out there. And there was something else. That light on Fred's face when he was trying to tell about Helen. Captain Prescott had come down the steps to meet them. "I was just coming for you. Don't you think, Katie, it would be fun to look in on the dance up here at the club house?" On the alert for shielding Ann, Katie demurred. It was late, and Ann was tired from her golf. There was an eager little flutter, and Ann had stepped forward. "Oh, I'm not at all tired, Katie," she said. "Does she _look_ tired?" scoffed Wayne. "She's only tired of being made to play the invalid. Hurry along, Katie. If you girls aren't sufficiently befrocked, frock up at once." Katie hesitated, annoyed. She felt shorn of the function of her office. And she was dubious. The party was one which the younger set over the river were giving--at the golf club-house on the Island--for the returned college boys. She did not know who might be there--she was always meeting friends of her friends. She felt a trifle injured in thinking that just for the sake of Ann she had avoided the social life those people offered her, and now-- Ann was speaking again, her voice stripped of the happy eagerness. "Just as you say, Katie. It is late, and perhaps I am--too tired." That moved Katie. That a girl should not be privileged to be insistent about going to a dance--it seemed depriving her of her birthright. And more cruel than taking away a birthright was bringing the consciousness of having no birthright. Katie entered gayly into the plans. They decided that Ann was to wear the rose-colored muslin--the same gown she had worn that first night. As she was fastening it for her Katie saw that Ann was smiling at herself in the mirror, giving herself little pats of approval here and there. She had not done that the first time Katie helped her into that dress. But it was the Ann of the first days who turned strained face to her in the dressing-room at the club-house. All the girlish radiance--girlish vanity--was gone. "Katie," she whispered, "I think I'd better go home. I--I didn't know it would be like this. So many people--so many lights--and things." Gently Katie reassured her. Ann needing her was the Ann she knew how to care for, and would care for in the face of all the people--all the "lights--and things." "You needn't dance if you don't want to," she told her. "I'll tell Wayne to look out for you, that you're really not able to meet people. If I put him on guard he'll go through fire and water for you." "Yes--I know that," said Ann, and seemed to take heart. And for some time she did not dance. From the floor Katie Would get glimpses of Ann and Wayne sauntering on the veranda on which the ball-room opened. More than once she found Ann's eyes following her--Ann out in the shadow, looking in at the gay people in the light. But with the opening of a lively two-step Captain Prescott insisted Ann dance with him. "Oh come now," he urged. "Life's too short to sit on the side lines. This is a ripping two-step." The music, too, was urgent--and persuasive. As if without volition she fell into gliding little steps, moving toward the dancing floor. It was Katie who watched that time. She wanted to see Ann dancing. At first it puzzled her; she was too graceful not to dance well, but she danced as if differently trained, as if unaccustomed to their way of dancing. But as the two-step progressed she fell into the swing of it and seemed no different from the rest of the pretty, happy girls all about her. She was radiant when she came back to them. Like the golf, the dancing seemed to have given her confidence--and confidence, happiness. Though she still shrank from meeting people. Katie fell in with a whole troop of college boys who hovered around her, as both college boys and their elders were wont to hover around Katie. She wanted to bring some of them to Ann, but Ann demurred. "Oh no, Katie. I don't want to dance with any strange men, please. Just our own." Why, Katie wondered, should one not wish to dance with "strange men." It seemed so curious a thing to shrink from. Katie herself had never felt at all strange with "strange men." Nice fellows were nice fellows the world over, and she never felt farther from strange than when dancing with a nice man--strange or otherwise. Even in the swing of her gayety Katie wondered what it was could make one feel like that. And she wondered what Wayne must think of that plaintive little "Just our own" which she was sure he had overheard. Katie had come out at last to say she thought they should go. Ann must not get too tired. But just then the orchestra began dreaming out a waltz, one of those waltzes lovers love to remember having danced together. "Now there," said Wayne, "is a nice peaceful waltz. You'll have to wait, Katie," and his arm was about Ann and they had glided away together. Katie told her cousin she would rather not dance. "Let's stand here and watch," she said. Couple after couple passed by, not the crowd of the gay two-step of a few moments before. Few were talking; some were gently humming, many dreaming--with a veiled smile for the dream. It was one of those waltzes to find its way back to cherished moments, flood with lovely color the dear things held apart. Fred was saying he wished Helen were there. Katie turned from the vivid picture out to the subtle night--warm summer's night. The dreaming music carried her back to vanished things--other waltzes, other warm summer's nights, to the times when she had been, in her light-hearted fashion, in love, to those various flirtations for which she had more tenderness than regret just for the glimpses they brought. And suddenly the heart of things gone seemed to flow into a great longing for that never known tenderness and wildness of feeling that sobbed in the music. She was being borne out to the heart of the night, and at the heart of the night some one waited for her with arms held out. But as she was swept nearer the some one was the man who mended the boats! With a little catch of her breath for that sorry twist of her consciousness that must make lovely moments ludicrous ones, she turned back to the bright room--crowded, colorful, moving room which seemed set in the vast, soft night. Her brother was just passing--her brother and her friend Ann Forrest. They did not look out at her. They did not seem to know that Katie was near. She had never seen Ann's face so beautiful. It had that beauty she had all the while seen as possible for it, only more intense, more exalted than she had been able to foresee it. The music stopped on a sob. Every one was still for an instant--then they were applauding for more. Ann was not clapping. Katie had never seen anything as beautiful as that look of rapt loveliness on Ann's face as she stood there waiting. She might have been the very spirit of love waiting in the mists at the heart of the night. As softly the music began again and Wayne once more guided her in and out among those boys and girls--boys and girls for whom life had meant little more than laughing and dancing--Katie had a piercing vision of the girl with her hands over her face stumbling on toward the river. They were all very quiet on the way home. That night just as she was falling asleep Katie was startled. It seemed at first she was being awakened by a sharp dart, one of those darts of apprehension seemed shot into her approaching slumber. But it was nothing more than Wayne whistling out on the porch, whistling the dreaming waltz which would bear one to the love waiting at the heart of the night. But Katie was sleepy now. How did Wayne expect any one to go to sleep, she thought crossly, whistling at that time of night. But across the hall was another girl who listened. She had not been asleep. She had been lying there looking out into the night, very wide awake. And when she heard the whistling she too sat up in bed, swaying ever so gently to the rhythm of it, inarticulately following it under her breath and smiling a hushed, tender little smile. Something lovely seemed stealing over her. But in the wake of it was something else--something cold, blighting. Before he had finished she had covered her ears with her hands, and was sobbing. CHAPTER XV As she looked back afterward upon that span of days, searching them, translating, Katie saw that the day of the golf and the dancing marked the farthest advance. After that it was as if Ann, frightened at finding herself so far out in the open, shrank back into the shadows. But having gone a little way into the open she was not again the same girl of the shadows. Her response to life seeming thwarted, there came an incipient sullenness in her view of that life which she had reached over the bridge of make-believe. It did not show itself at once, but afterward it seemed to Katie that the next day marked the beginning of Ann's retreat on the bridge of make-believe. And she wondered whether the stray dog or the dangerous literature had most to do with that retreat. Ann was pale and quiet the day after the dance, and it was not merely the languor of the girl who has fatigued herself in having a good time. At luncheon Katie suddenly demanded: "Wayne, where do you get dangerous literature?" "I don't know what form of danger you're courting, Katie. I have a valuable work on high explosives, and I have a couple of volumes of De Maupassant." "Oh I weathered all that kind of danger long ago," said she airily. "I want the kind that is distressing editors of church papers. The man who edits this religious paper uncle sends me is a most unchristian gentleman. He devoted a whole page to talking about dangerous literature and then didn't tell you where to get it. Well, I'll try Walt Whitman. He's very popular in the West, I'm told, and as the West likes danger perhaps he's dangerous enough to begin on." "And you feel, do you, Katie, that the need of your life just now is for danger?" "Yes, dear brother. Danger I must have at any cost. What's the good living in a dangerous age if you don't get hold of any of the danger? This unchristian editor says that little do we realize what a dangerous age it is. And he says it's the literature that's making it so. Then find the literature. Only he--beast!--doesn't tell you where to." Worth there requested the privilege of whispering in his Aunt Kate's ear. The ear being proffered, he poured into it: "I guess the man that mends the boats has got some dangerous literature, Aunt Kate." "Tell him to endanger Aunt Kate," she whispered back. "Do you suppose there is any way, Wayne," she began, after a moment of seeming to have a very good time all to herself, "of getting back the money we spent for my so-called education?" "It would considerably enrich us," grimly observed Wayne. "When doctors or lawyers don't do things right can't you sue them and get your money back? Why can't you do the same thing with educators? I'm going to enter suit against Miss Sisson. This unchristian editor says modern education is dangerous; but there was no danger in the course at Miss Sisson's. I want my money back." "That you may invest it in dangerous literature?" laughed Wayne. After he had gone Ann was standing at the window, looking down toward the river. Suddenly she turned passionately upon Katie. "If you had ever had anything to _do_ with danger--you might not be so anxious to find it." She was trembling, and seemed close to tears. Katie felt it no time to explain herself. And when she spoke again the tears were in her voice. "I can't tell you--when I begin to talk about it--" The tears were in her eyes, too, then, and upon her cheeks. "You see--I can't--But, Katie--I want _you_ to be safe. I want you to be _safe_. You don't know what it means--to be safe." With that she passed swiftly from her room. Katie sat brooding over it for some time. "If you've been in danger," she concluded, "you think it beautiful to be 'safe.' But if you've never been anything but 'safe'--" Her smile finished that. But Katie was more in earnest than her manner of treating herself might indicate. To be safe seemed to mean being shielded from life. She had always been shielded from life. And now she was beginning to feel that that same shielding had kept her from knowledge of life, understanding of it. Katie was disturbingly conscious of a great deal going on around her that she knew nothing about. Ann wished her to be 'safe'; yet it was Ann who had brought a dissatisfaction with that very safety. It was Ann had stirred the vague feeling that perhaps the greatest danger of all was in being too safe. Katie felt an acute humiliation in the idea that she might be living in a dangerous age and knowing nothing of the danger. She would rather brave it than be ignorant of it. Indeed braving it was just what she was keen for. But she could not brave it until she found it. She would find it. But the next afternoon she went over to the city with Ann and found nothing more dangerous than a forlorn little stray dog. It was evident that he had never belonged to anybody. It was written all over his thin, squirming little yellow body that he was Nobody's dog--written just as plainly as the name of Somebody's dog would be written on a name-plate on a collar. And it was written in his wistful little watery eyes, told by his unconquerable tail, that with all his dog's heart he yearned to be Somebody's dog. So he thought he would try Miss Katherine Wayneworth Jones. She had a number of errands to do, and he followed her from place to place. She saw him first when she came out from the hair-dresser's. He seemed to have been waiting for her. His heart was too experienced in being broken for him to dance around her with barks of joy, but he stood a little way off and wigglingly tried to ingratiate himself, his eyes looking love, and the longing for love. Impulsively Katie stooped down to him. "Poor little doggie, does he want a pat?" He fairly crouched to the sidewalk in his thankfulness for the pat, his tail and eyes saying all they could. Then she saw that he was following her. "Don't come with me, doggie," she said; "please don't. You must go home. You'll get lost." But in her heart Katie knew he would not get lost, for to be so unfortunate as to be lost presupposed being so fortunate as to have a home. And she knew that he was of the homeless. But because that was so terrible a thing to face, between him and her she kept up that pretense of a home. When she came out from the confectioner's he was waiting for her again, a little braver this time, until Katie mildly stamped her foot and told him to "Go back!" At the third place she expostulated with him. "Please, doggie, you're making me feel so badly. Won't you run along and play?" The hypocrisy of that left a lump in her throat as she turned from him. When she found him waiting again she said nothing at all, but began talking to Ann about some flowers in a window across the street. Ann had seemed to dislike the dog. She would step away when Katie stopped to speak to him and be looking intently at something else, as if trying not to know that there were such things as homeless dogs. Watts was waiting for them with the station wagon when they had finished their shopping. After they had gone a little way Katie, in the manner of one doing what she was forced to do, turned around. He was coming after them. He had not yet fallen to the ranks of those human and other living creatures too drugged in wretchedness to make a fight for happiness. Nor was he finding it a sympathetic world in which to fight for happiness. At that very moment a man crossing the street was giving him a kick. He yelped and crouched away for an instant, but his eyes told that the real hurt was in the thought of losing sight of the carriage that held Katie Jones. As he dodged in and out, crouching always before the possible kick, she could read all too clearly how harassed he was with that fear. They were approaching the bridge. The guard on the bridge would foil that quest. He would not permit a forlorn little yellow dog to seek happiness by following members of an officer's family across the Government bridge. Probably in the name of law and order he would kick him, as the other man had done; the dog's bleared little eyes, eyes through which the love longing must look, would cast one last look after the unattainable, and then, another hope gone, another promise unrealized, he would return miserably back to his loveless world, but always-- "Watts," said Katie sharply, "stop a moment, please. I want to get something." Ann was sitting very straight, looking with great absorption up the river when Katie got back in the carriage with her dog. Her face was pale, and, it seemed to Katie, hard. She moved as far away from the dog as she could--her mouth set. He sat just where Katie put him on the floor, trembling, and looking up at her with those asking eyes. When they were almost home Ann spoke. "You can't take in all the homeless dogs of the world, Katie." "I don't know that that's any reason for not taking in this one," replied Katie shortly. "I hate to have you make yourself feel badly," Ann said tremulously. "Why shouldn't I let myself feel badly?" demanded Katie roughly. "In a world of homeless dogs, why shouldn't I feel badly?" They made a great deal of fun of Katie's dog. They named him "Pet." Captain Prescott wanted to know if she meant to exhibit him at a bench show and mention various points he was sure would excite attention. "What I hate, Katie," said Wayne, "is the way he cringes. None of that cringing about Queen." "And why not?" she demanded hotly. "Because Queen was never kicked. Because Queen was never chased down alleys by boys with rocks and tin cans. Because Queen never asked for a pat and got a cuff. Nor did Queen's mother. Queen hasn't a drop of kicked blood in her. This sorry little dog comes from a long line of the kicked and the cuffed. And then you blame _him_ for cringing. I'm ashamed of you, Wayne!" He was about to make laughing retort, but Katie's cheeks were so red, her eyes so bright, that he refrained and turned to Ann with: "Katie was always great for taking in all kinds of superfluous things." "Yes," said Ann, "I know." "And she always takes her outcasts so very seriously." "Yes," agreed Ann. "The trouble is, she can't hope to make them over." "No," admitted Ann, "she can't do that." "And then she breaks her heart over their forlorn condition." "Yes," said Ann. "These wretched things exist in the world, but Katie only makes her own life wretched in trying to do anything about them. She can't reach far enough to count, so why make herself unhappy?" "Katie doesn't look at it that way," replied Ann, and turned away. After the others had gone Katie committed her new dog to Worth. "Honey, will you play with him sometimes? I know he's not as nice to play with as the puppies, but maybe that's because nobody ever did play with him. The things that aren't nice about him aren't his fault, Worthie, so we mustn't be hard on him for them, must we? The reason he's so queer acting is just because he never had anybody to love him." Worth was so impressed that he not only accepted the dog himself but volunteered to say a good word for him to Watts. But a little later he brought back word that Watts said the newcomer was an ornery cur--that he was born an ornery cur--that he was meant to be an ornery cur, and never would be anything but an ornery cur. "Watts is what you might call a conservative," said Katie. And not being sure how a conservative member of the United States Army would treat a canine child of the alley, Katie went herself to the stable that night to see that the newcomer was fed and made to feel at home. He did not appear to be feeling at all at home. He was crouching in his comfortable corner just as dejectedly as he would crouch in the most miserable alley his native city afforded. He came, thankfully but cringingly, out to see Katie. "Doggie," said she, "don't be so apologetic. I don't like the apologetic temperament. You were born into this world. You have a right to live in it. Why don't you assert your right?" His answer was to look around for the possible tin can. Watts had approached. "Begging your pardon, Miss Jones, but he's the ungrateful kind. There's no use trying to do anything for that kind. He's deservin' no better than he gets. He snapped at one of our own pups to-night." "I suppose so," said Kate. "I suppose when you spend your life asking for pats and getting kicks you do get suspicious and learn to snap. It seems too bad that little dogs that want to be loved should have to learn to snarl. You see, Watts, he's had a hard life. He's wandered up and down a world where nobody wanted him. He's spent his days trying now this one, now that. 'Maybe they'll take me,' he thinks; his poor little heart warms at the thought that maybe they will. He opens it up anew every day--opens it for a new wound. And now that he's found somebody to say the kind word he's still expecting the surly one. His life's shut him out from life--even though he wants it. It seems to me rather sad, Watts." Watts was surveying him dubiously. "That kind is deserving what they get. They couldn't have been no other way. And beggin' your pardon, Miss Jones, but it's not us that's responsible for his life." "Isn't it?" said Katie. "I wonder." Watts not responding to the suggestion of the complexity of responsibility, she sought the personal. "As a favor to me, Watts, will you be good to the little dog?" "As a favor to _you_, Miss Jones," said Watts, making it clear that for his part-- "Watts," she asked, "how long have you been in the service?" "'Twill be five years in December, Miss Jones." "Re-enlistment must mean that you like it." "I've no complaint to offer, Miss Jones. Of course there are sometimes a few little things--" "Why did you enter the army, Watts?" "A man has to make a living some way, Miss Jones." Katie was thinking that she had not asked for an apology. "And yet I presume you could make more in some other way. Working in these shops, for instance." "There's nothin' sure about them," said Watts. "The army's certain. And I like things to move on decent and orderly like. For one that's willing to recognize his betters, the service is a good place, Miss Jones." "But I suppose there are some not willing to recognize their betters," ventured Kate. "There's all too many such," said Watts. "All too many nowadays thinks they're just as good as them that's above them." "But you never feel that way, so you are contented and like the service, Watts?" "Yes, Miss. It suits me well enough, Miss Jones. I'm not one to think I can make over the world. There's a fellow workin' up here at the point I sometimes have some conversation with. I was up there to-night at sundown--me and the little boy. Now there's a man, Miss, that don't know his place. He's a trouble-maker. He said to me tonight--" But as Watts was there joined by a fellow-soldier Katie said: "Thank you for looking out for the poor little dog, Watts," and turned reluctantly to the house. She would like to have remained; she would like to have talked with the other soldier and found out why he entered the service and what he thought of it. She was possessed of a great desire to ask people questions, find out why they had done what they did and what they thought about things other people were doing. Her mind was sending out little shoots in all directions and those little shoots were begging for food and drink. She wished she might have a long talk with the "trouble-maker." She would like to talk about dogs who had lived in alleys and dogs that had been reared in kennels, about soldiers who were willing to recognize their betters and soldiers who thought they were as good as some above them. She would like to talk about Watts. Watts was the son of an old English servant. It was in Watts' blood to "recognize his betters." Was that why he could be moved to no sense of responsibility about stray dogs? Was that why he was a good man for the service and had no ambitions as civilian? And Ann--she would like to talk to the boat-mending trouble-maker about Ann: Why Ann, whom one would expect to find sympathetic with the homeless, should be so hard and so queer about forlorn little stray dogs. Oh the world was just full of things that Katie Jones wanted to talk about that night! When she reached the house she found that she had just received a package by special messenger. She tore off the outer wrapper and on the inner was written in red ink: "Danger." Murmuring some inane thing about its being her shoes, she ran with the package to her room. For a young woman who had all her life received packages of all kinds she was inordinately excited. It held three books. One of them was about women who worked. There were pictures of girls working in factories and in different places. One was something about evolution, and one was on socialism. And there was a pamphlet about the United States Army, and another pamphlet about religion. She looked for a name in the books, but found none. The fly-leaves had been torn out. She was not sorry; she was just as glad to go on thinking of her trouble-maker as the man who mended the boats. There was something freeing about keeping him impersonal. But in the book about women she found an envelope addressed: "To one looking for trouble." This was what was type-written on the single sheet it contained: "Here are a couple of books warranted to disturb one's peace of mind. They are marked danger as both warning and commendation. It is absolutely guaranteed that one will not be so pleased with the world--and with one's self--after reading them. There is more--both books and danger--where they came from." It was signed: "One who loves to lead adventurous souls into dangerous paths." It was two o'clock when Katie turned off her light that night. CHAPTER XVI Perhaps after all it was neither the dog nor the literature, but the heat. For the heat of that next day was the kind to prey through countries of make-believe. It oppressed every one, but Ann it seemed to excite, as if it stirred memories in their sleep. "Don't fight heat, Ann," Katie finally admonished, puzzled and disturbed by the way Ann kept moving about. "The only way to get ahead of the heat is to give up to it." "Can you always do what you want to do?" Ann demanded with a touch of petulance. "Isn't there ever something makes you do things you know aren't the things to do?" "Oh, dear me, yes," laughed Kate. "But you're simply your own worst enemy when you try to get ahead of the heat." "I don't know how you're going to help being your own worst enemy," Ann murmured. She picked some leaves from the vines and threw them away, purposelessly; she made the cat get out of a chair and sat down in it herself, only to get up again and pile all the magazines in a different way, not facilitating anything by the change. Then, after walking the length of the veranda, she stood there looking at Katie: Katie in the coolest and coolest-looking of summer dresses, leaning back in a cool-looking chair--adjusting herself to things as they were, poised, victorious in her submission. Then Ann said a strange thing. "A hot day's just nothing but a hot day to you, is it?" The words themselves said less than the laugh which followed them--a laugh which carried both envy and resentment, which at once admired and accused, a laugh straight from the girl they were trying to ignore. And pray what was a hot day to her, Katie wondered. What _was_ a hot day--save a hot day? But as she watched Ann in the next few moments she seemed to be surveying a figure oppressed less by heat than by that to which the heat laid her open. It seemed that the hot day might stand for the friction and the fretting of the world, for things which closed in upon one as heat closed in, bore down as heat bore down. As Ann pushed back the hair from her forehead it seemed she would push back the weight of the years. It was at that moment that Caroline Osborne, richest and most prominent girl of the vicinity, stepped from her motor car. Katie had met her a few nights before at the dance. And Wayne knew her father--a man of many interests. It was his quarrel with the forest service that had brought her cousin Fred Wayneworth there. Fred was not one of his admirers. "Isn't this heat distressing?" was her greeting, though she had succeeded in keeping herself very fresh and sweet looking under the distress. As Katie turned to introduce the two girls she saw that Ann was pulling at her handkerchief nervously. Was it irritating to have people for whom hot days were but hot days call heat distressing? "Though one always has a breeze motoring," she took it up. "There are so many ways in which automobiles make life more bearable, don't you find it so, Miss Jones?" Katie replied, inanely--Ann was still pulling at her handkerchief--that they were indispensable, of course, though personally she was so fond of horses--. Yes, Miss Osborne loved horses too. Indeed it was army people had taught her to ride; once when she visited at Fort Riley--she had spent a month there with Mrs. Baxter. Katie knew her? Oh, yes, Katie knew her, and almost all the rest of the army people whom Miss Osborne told of adoring. Of a common world, they were not long strangers. They came together through a whole network of associations. Finally they reached South Carolina and concluded they must be related--something about Katie's grandmother and Miss Osborne's great-aunt--. Katie, in the midst of her interest turning instinctively to include Ann, was curiously arrested. Ann was sitting a little apart. And there seemed so poignant a significance in her sitting apart. It was an order of things from which she sat apart. The network went too far back, too deep down; it was too intricate for either sympathy or ingenuity to shape it at will. Though Katie tried. For Katie, enough that she was sitting apart, and consciously. Leaving grandmothers and great-aunts in a sadly unfinished state she was lightly off into a story of something which had once happened to her and Ann in Rome. But Ann was as an actor refusing to play her part. Perhaps she was too resentfully conscious of its being but a part--of her having no approach save through a part. For the first time she failed in that adaptability which had always made the stories plausible. In the midst of her tale Katie met Ann's eyes, and faltered. They were mocking eyes. As best she could she turned the conversation to local affairs, for Miss Osborne was looking curiously at Miss Jones' unresponsive friend. And as Ann for the first time seemed deliberately--yes, maliciously to fail--Katie for the first time felt out of patience, and injured. Perhaps the heat was enervating, but was that sufficient reason for embarrassing one's hostess? Perhaps it did make her think of hard things, but was that any reason for failing in the things that made all this possible? It was not appreciative, it was not kind, it did not show the right spirit, Katie told herself as she listened, with what she was pleased to consider both atoning and rebuking graciousness, to the plans for Miss Osborne's garden party. "It is for the working girls, especially the lower class of working girls, who are in the factories. For instance, the candy factory girls. I am especially interested in that as father owns the candy factory--it is a pet side issue of his. You can see it from here, across the river there on the little neck of land. You see? The girls are just beginning to come from work now." The three girls looked across the river, where groups of other girls were quitting a large building. They could be seen but dimly, but even at that distance something in the prevalent droop suggested that they, too, had found the day "distressingly warm." "I hadn't realized," said Katie, "that making candy was such serious business." "It couldn't have been very pleasant today," their guest granted, "but I believe it is regarded a very good place to work." The book Katie had been reading the night before had shown her the value of facts when it came to judging places where women worked, and she was moved to the blunt inquiry: "How much do those girls make?" "About six dollars a week, I believe," Miss Osborne replied. Katie watched them: the long dim line of girls engaged in preparation of the sweets of life. She was wondering what she would have thought it worth to go over there and work all day. "Then each of those girls made a dollar today?" she asked, and her inflection was curious. "Well--no," Miss Osborne confessed. "The experienced and the skillful made a dollar." "And how much," pressed Katie, "did the least experienced and skillful make?" "Fifty cents, I believe," replied Miss Osborne, seeming to have less enthusiasm when the scientific method was employed. There was a jarring sound. The girl "sitting apart" had pushed her chair still farther back. "You call that a good place to work?" She addressed it to Miss Osborne in voice that scraped as the chair had scraped. "Why yes, as places go, I believe so. Though that is why I am giving the garden party. They do need more pleasure in their lives. It is one of the under-lying principles of life--is it not?--that all must have their pleasures." Ann laughed recklessly. Miss Osborne looked puzzled; Katie worried. "And we are organizing this working girl's club. We think we can do a great deal through that." "Oh yes, help them get higher wages, I suppose?" Katie asked innocently. "N--o; that would scarcely be possible. But help them to get on better with what they have. Help them learn to manage better." Again Ann laughed, not only recklessly but rudely. "That is surely a splendid thing," she said, and the voice which said it was high-pitched and unsteady, "helping a girl to 'manage better' on fifty cents a day!" "You do not approve of these things?" Miss Osborne asked coldly. And with all the heat Katie felt herself growing suddenly cold as she heard Ann replying: "Oh, if they help you--pass the time, I don't suppose they do any harm." "You see," Katie hastened, "Miss Forrest and I were once associated with one of those things which wasn't very well conducted. I fear it--prejudiced us." "Evidently," was Miss Osborne's reply. "Though to be sure," Kate further propitiated, resentment at having to do so growing with the propitiation, "that is very narrow of us. I am sure your club will be quite different. We may come to the garden party?" Katie followed her guest to her car. "I am hoping it will be cooler soon," she said. "My friend is here to grow stronger, and this heat is quite unnerving her." Miss Osborne accepted it with polite, "I trust she will soon be much better. Yes, the heat is trying." Katie did not return to Ann, but sat at the head of the steps, looking across the river. She was genuinely offended. She knew nothing more unpardonable than to embarrass one's hostess. She grew hard in contemplation of it. Nothing justified it;--nothing. A few girls were still coming from the candy factory. Miss Osborne's car had crossed the bridge and was speeding toward her beautiful home up the river--just the home for a garden party. The last group of girls, going along very slowly, had to step back for the machine to rush by. Katie forgot her own grievance in wondering about those girls who had waited for the Osborne car to pass. She knew where Miss Osborne was going, where and how she lived; she was wondering where the girls not enjoying the breeze always to be found in motoring were going, what they would do when they got there, and what they thought of the efforts to help them "manage better" on their dollar or less a day. It made her rise and return to Ann. Ann, too, was looking across the river at the girls who had given Miss Osborne right of way. Two very red spots burned in Ann's cheeks and her eyes, also, were feverish. "I suppose I shouldn't have spoken that way to your friend," she began, but less contritely than defiantly. Katie flushed. She had been prepared to understand and be kind. But she was not equal to being scoffed at, she who had been so embarrassed--and betrayed. "It was certainly not very good form," she said coolly. "And of course that's all that matters," said Ann shrilly. "It's just good form that matters--not the truth." "Oh I don't see that you achieved any great thing for the truth, Ann. Anyhow, rudeness is no less rude when called truth." "Garden parties!" choked Ann. "I am not giving the garden party, Ann," said Katie long-sufferingly. "I was doing nothing more than being civil to a guest--against rather heavy odds." "You were pretending to think it was lovely. But of course that's good form!" Her perilously bright eyes had so much the look of an animal pushed into a corner that Katie changed. "Come, Ann dear, let's not quarrel with each other just because it has been a disagreeable day, or because Caroline Osborne may have a mistaken idea of doing good--and I a mistaken idea of being pleasant. I promised Worth a little spin on the river before dinner. You'll come? It will be cooling." "My head aches," said Ann, but the tension of her voice broke on a sob. "If you don't mind--I'll stay here." She looked up at her in a way which remotely suggested the look of that little dog the day before, "Katie, I don't mean you. When I say things like that--I don't mean _you_. I mean--I suppose I mean--the things back of you. All those things--" She stopped, but Katie did not speak. "You see," said Ann, "there are two worlds, and you and I are in different ones." "I don't believe in two worlds," said Katie promptly. "It's not a democratic view of things. It's all one world." "Your Miss Osborne and the fifty cents a day girls--all one world? I am afraid," laughed Ann tremulously, "that even the 'underlying principles of life' would have a hard time making _them_ one." CHAPTER XVII Even on the river it was not yet cool. Day had burned itself too deeply upon the earth for approaching night to hold messages for even its favorite messenger. Katie was herself at the steering wheel, and alone with Worth and Queen. She had learned to manage the boat, and much to the disappointment of Watts and the disapproval of Wayne sometimes went about on the river unattended. Katie contended that as a good swimmer and not a bad mechanic she was entitled to freedom in the matter. She held that to be taken about in a boat had no relation to taking a boat and going about in it; that when Watts went her soul stayed home. Tonight, especially, she would have the boat for what it meant to self; for to Katie, too, the sultry day had become more than sultry day. The thing which pressed upon her seemed less humidity than the consciousness of a world she did not know. It was not the heat which was fretting her so much as that growing sense of limitations in her thought and experience. She wondered what the man who mended the boats would say about Ann's two worlds. She suspected that he would agree with Ann, and then proceeded to work herself into a fine passion at his agreeing with Ann against her. "That silly thing of two worlds is fixed up by people who can't get along in the one world," said she. "And that childish idea of one world is clung to by people who don't know the real world," retorted the trouble-maker. To either side of the river were factories. Katie had never given much thought to factories beyond the thought that they disfigured the landscape. Now she wondered what the people who had spent that hot day in the unsightly buildings thought about the world in general--be it one world or two. Worth had come up to the front of the boat. The day had weighed upon him too, for he seemed a wistful little boy just then. She smiled at him lovingly. "What thinking about, Worthie dear?" "Oh, I wasn't thinking, Aunt Kate," he replied soberly. "I was just wondering." "You too?" she laughed. "And what would you say, Worthie," she asked after they had gone a little way in silence, "was the difference between thinking and wondering?" Worth maturely crossed his knees as a sign of the maturity of the subject. "Well, I don't know, 'cept when you think you know what you're thinking about, and when you wonder you just don't know anything." "Maybe you wonder when you don't know what to think," Katie suggested. "Yes, maybe so. There's more to wonder about than there is to think about, don't you think so, Aunt Kate?" "I wonder," she laughed. "You do wonder, don't you, Aunt Kate? You wonder more than you think." She flashed him a keen, queer look. "Worth," she asked, after another pause in which the mind of twenty-five and the mind of six were wondering in their respective fashions, "do you know anything about the underlying principles of life?" "The what, Aunt Kate?" "Underlying principles of life," she repeated grimly. "Why no," he acknowledged, "I guess I never heard of them." "I never did either, till just lately. I want to find out something about them. Do you know, Worthie dear, I'd go a long way to find out something about them." "Where would you have to go, Aunt Kate? Could you go in a boat?" "No, I fear you couldn't go in a boat. Trouble is," she murmured, more to herself than to him, "I don't know where you _would_ go." "Don't Papa know 'bout them?" "I sometimes think he would like to learn." "Papa knows all there is to know 'bout guns and powders," defended Worth loyally. "Yes, I know; but I don't believe guns and powders have any power to get you to these underlying principles of life." "Well, what _does_ get you there?" demanded her companion of the practical sex. She laughed. "I don't know, dear. I honestly don't know. And I'd like to know. Perhaps some time I will meet some one who is very wise, and then I'll ask whether it is experience, or wisdom, or sympathy. Whether some people are born to get there and other people not, or just how it is." "Watts says you have more sympathy than wisdom, Aunt Kate." "You mustn't talk about me to Watts," she admonished spiritedly. Then in the distance she heard a mocking voice insinuatingly inquiring: "But why not, if it's all one world?" "But he said," Worth added, "that it shouldn't be held against you, 'cause of course you never had half a chance. No, it wasn't Watts said that, either. It was the man that mends the boats. It was Watts said you was a yard wide." Katie's head had gone up; she was looking straight ahead, cheeks red. "Indeed! So it's the man that mends the boats says these hateful things about me, is it?" "Why no, Aunt Kate; not hateful things. He says he's sorry for you. Why, he says he don't know anybody more to be pitied than you are." "Well--_really!_ I must say that of all the insolent --impertinent--insufferable--" "He says you would have amounted to something if you'd had half a chance. But he's afraid you never will, Aunt Kate." "I do not wish to hear anything more about him," said Aunt Kate haughtily. "Now, or at any future time." But it was not five minutes later she asked, with studied indifference: "Pray what does this absurd being look like?" "What being, Aunt Kate?" innocently inquired the being who was very young. "Why this sympathetic gentleman!" "Oh, I don't know. He's just a man. Sometimes he wears boots. He's real nice, Aunt Kate." "Oh I'm sure he must be charming!" She turned toward home, more erect, attending to her duties with a dignified sense of responsibility. The glare of day had gone, but without bringing the cool of night. It made the world seem very worn. Little by little resentment slipped away and she had joined the man who mended the boats in pitying herself. She was disposed to agree with him that she might have amounted to something had she had half a chance. No one else had ever thought of her amounting to anything--amounting, or not amounting. They had merely thought of her as Katie Jones. And certainly no one else had ever pitied her. It made the man who mended the boats seem a wise and tender being. As against the whole world she felt drawn to his large and kindly understanding. Excitement had suddenly seized Worth. "Aunt Kate--Aunt Kate!" he cried peremptorily, pointing to a cove in one of the islands they were passing, "please land there!" "Why no, Worth, we can't land. It's too hard. And why should we?" "Oh Aunt Kate--please! Oh please!" She was puzzled. "But why, Worthie?" "Cause I want you to. Don't you love me 't all any more, Aunt Kate?" That was too much. He was suddenly just a baby who had been made to suffer for her grown-up disturbances. "But, dearie, what will you do when we land?" "I want to look for something. I've got to get something. I want to show you something. 'Twon't take but a minute." "What do you want to show me, dear?" "Why I can't tell you, Aunt Kate. It's a surprise. It's a beautifulest surprise. Something I want to show you just because I love you, Aunt Kate." Katie's eyes brooded over him. "Dear little chappie, and Aunt Kate's a cross mean old thing, isn't she?" "Not if she'll stop the boat," said crafty Worth. She laughed and surveyed the shore. It looked feasible. "I'm very 'easy,' Worth. Just don't get it into your head all the world is as easy as I am." The little boy and the dog were out before she had made her landing. They were running through the brush. "Worth," she called, "don't go far. Don't go out of sound." "No," he called back excitedly, "'tain't far." She was anxious, reproaching herself as absurd and rash, and was just attempting to ground the boat and follow when Queen came bounding back. Then came Worth's voice: "Here 'tis! Here's Aunt Kate--waiting for you!" Next there emerged from the brush a flushed and triumphant little boy, and after him came a somewhat less flushed and less obviously triumphant man. CHAPTER XVIII Her first emotion was fury at herself. She must be losing her mind not to have suspected! Then the fury overflowed on Worth and his companion. It reached high-water mark with the stranger's smile. And there dissolved; or rather, flowed into a savage interest, for the smile enticed her to mark what manner of man he was. And as she looked, the interest shed the savagery. His sleeves were rolled up; he had no hat, no coat. He had been working with something muddy. A young man, a large man, and strong. The first thing which she saw as distinctive was the way his smile lived on in his eyes after it had died on his lips, as if his thought was smiling at the smile. Even in that first outraged, panic-stricken moment Katie Jones knew she had never known a man like that. "Here he is, Aunt Kate!" cried her young nephew, dancing up and down. "This is him!" It was not a presentation calculated to set Katie at ease. She sought refuge in a frigid: "I beg pardon?" But that was quite lost on Worth. "Why, Aunt Kate, don't you know him? You said you'd rather see him than anybody now living! Don't you know, Aunt Kate--the man that mends the boats?" It seemed that in proclaiming their name for him Worth was shamelessly proclaiming it all: her conversations, the intimacy to which she had admitted him, her delight in him--yes, _need_ of him. "But I thought," she murmured, as if in justification, "that you had a long white beard!" And so she had--at times; then there had been other times when he had no beard at all--but just such a chin. "I am sorry to be disappointing," the stranger replied--with his voice. With his eyes--it became clear even in that early moment that his eyes were insurgents--he said: "I don't take any stock in that long white beard!" Then, as if fearing his eyes had overstepped: "Perhaps you have visions of the future. A long white beard is a gift the years may bring me." "You can just ask him anything you want to, Aunt Kate," Worth was brightly assuring her. "I told him you wanted to know about the under life--the under what it is of life. You needn't be 'fraid of him, Aunt Kate; you know he's the man's so sorry for you. He knows all about everything, and will tell you just everything he knows." "Quite a sweeping commendation," Katie found herself murmuring foolishly--and in the imaginary conversations she had talked so brilliantly! But when one could not be brilliant one could always find cover under dignity. "If you will get in the boat now, Worth," she said, "we will go home." But Worth, serene in the consciousness of having accomplished his mission, was sending Queen out after sticks and did not appear to have heard. And suddenly, perhaps because the hot day had come to mean so much more than mere hot day, the feeling of being in a ridiculous position, together with that bristling sense of the need of a protective dignity, fell away. It became one of those rare moments when real things matter more than things which supposedly should matter. She looked at him to find him looking intently at her. He was not at all slipshod as inspector. "Why are you sorry for me?" she asked. "What is there about me to pity?" He smiled as he surveyed her, considering it. Even people for whom smiling was difficult must have smiled at the idea of pitying Katie Jones--Katie, who looked so much as if the world existed that she might have the world. But he looked with a different premise and saw a deeper thing. The world might exist for her enjoyment, but it eluded her understanding. And that was beginning to encroach upon the enjoyment. She seemed to follow, and her divination stirred a singular emotion, possibly a more turbulent emotion than Katie Jones had ever known. "It's all very well to pity me, but it's not a genuine pity--it's a jeering one. If you're going to pity me, why don't you do it sincerely instead of scoffingly? Is it my fault that I don't know anything about life? What chance did I ever have to know anything real? I wasn't educated. I was 'accomplished.' Oh, of course, if I had been a big person, a person with a real mind--if I had had anything exceptional about me--I would have stepped out. But I'm nothing but the most ordinary sort of girl. I haven't any talents. Nobody--myself included--can see any reason for my being any different from the people I'm associated with. I was brought up in the army. Army life isn't real life. It's army life. To an army man a girl is a girl, and what they mean by a girl has nothing to do with being a thinking being. Then what business has a man like you--I don't know who you are or what you're doing, but I believe you have some ideas about the real things of life--tell me, please--what business have you jeering at me?" "I have no business jeering at you," he said quickly, simply and strongly. But Katie had changed. He had a fancy that she would always be changing; that she was not one to rest in outlived emotions, that one mood was always but the making and enriching of another mood, moment ever flowing into moment, taking with it the heart of the moment that had gone. "You are quite right to pity me," she said, and tears surged beneath both eyes and voice. "Whether scoffingly or genuinely--you were quite right. Feeling just enough to feel there _is_ something--but not a big enough feeling to go to that something, knowing just enough to know I'm being cheated, but without either the courage or the knowledge to do anything about it--I'm surely a pitiable and laughable object. Come, Worth," she said sharply, "we're going home." But Worth had begun upon the construction of a raft, and was not in a home-going mood. Thus encouraged by his young friend the man who mended the boats sat down on a log. "When did you begin to want to know about the 'underlying principles of life'?" His smile quoted it, though less mockingly than tenderly. Katie was silent. "Was it the day _she_ came?" he asked quietly. She gasped. Was he--a wizard? But looking at him and seeing he looked very much more like a man than like anything else, she met him as man should be met. "The day who came? I don't know what you mean." "The girl. Was it the day you took her in? Saved her by making her save you?" She was too startled by that for pretense. She could only stare at him. "I saw her before you did," he said. She looked around apprehensively. The man who mended the boats knowing about Ann? Was the whole world losing its mind just because it had been such a hot day? But the world looking natural enough, she turned back to him. "I don't understand. Tell me, please." As he summoned it, he changed. She had an impression of all but the central thing falling away, leaving his spirit exposed. And a thought or a vision gripped that spirit, and he tightened under it as a muscle would tighten. When he turned to her, taking her in, self-consciousness fell away. There was no place for it. "You want to hear about it?" he asked. She nodded. "As a matter of fact, it's nothing, as facts go. Only an impression. Yet an impression that swore to facts. Perhaps you know that she came on the Island from the south bridge?" Katie shook her head. "I know nothing, save that suddenly she was there." That held him. "And knowing nothing, you took her in?" She kept silence, and he looked at her, dwelling upon it. "And you," he said softly, "don't know anything about the 'underlying principles of life'? Perhaps you don't. But if we had more you we'd have no her." She disclaimed it. "It wasn't that way--an understanding way. I didn't do it because I thought it should be done; because I wanted to--do good. I--oh, I don't know. I did it because I wanted to do it. I did it because I couldn't help doing it." That called to him. He seemed one for whom ideas were as doors, ever opening into new places. And he did not shut those doors, or turn from them, until he had looked as far as he could see. "Perhaps," he saw now, "that is the way it must come. Doing it because you can't help doing it. It seems wonderful enough to work the wonder." "Work what wonder?" Katie asked timidly. "The wonder of saving the world." He spoke it quietly, but passion, the passion of the visioner, leaped to his eyes at sound of what he had said. Katie looked about at so much of the world as her vision afforded: Prosperous factories--beautiful homes--hundreds of other homes less beautiful, but comfortable looking--some other very humble homes which yet looked habitable, the beautifully kept Government island in between the two cities, seeming to stand for something stable and unifying--far away hills and a distant sky line--a steamboat going through the splendid Government bridge, automobiles and carriages and farm wagons passing over that bridge--this man who mended the boats, this young man so live that thoughts of life could change him as a sculptor can change his clay--dear little Worth who was happily building a raft, the beautiful dog lying there drawing restoration from the breath of the water--"But it doesn't look as though it needed 'saving,'" said Katie. He shook his head. "You're looking at the framework. Her eyes that day brought word from the inside. To one knowing--" He broke off, looking at her as though seeing her from a new angle. He thought it aloud. "You've walked sunny paths, haven't you? You never had your soul twisted. Life never tried to wring you out of shape. And yet--oh there's quite a yet," he finished more lightly. "But you were telling me of Ann," Katie felt she must say. "Yes, and when I've finished telling you, you'll go back to your sunny paths, won't you? Please don't hurry me. I can tell it better if I think I'm not being hurried." She smiled openly. "I am in no hurry." There was a sunny rim trying all the while to pierce the somber thing which drew them together. Little rays from the sunny paths would dart daringly in to the dark place from which Ann rose. It made him wonder how far she of the sunny paths could penetrate an unlighted country. He looked at her--peered at her, fairly--trying to decide. But he could not decide. Katie baffled him on that. "I wonder," he voiced it, "where it's going to lead you? I wonder if you're prepared to go where it may lead you? Have you thought of that? Perhaps it's going to take you into a country too dark for you of the sunny paths. She may be called back. You know we are called back to countries where we have--established a residence. You might have to go with her to settle a claim, or break a tie, or pull some one else out that she might not be pulled back in. Then what? Perhaps you might feel you needed a guide. If so,"--he went boldly to the edge of it, then halted, and concluded with a boyishly bashful humor--"will you keep my application on file?" Katie was not going to miss her chance of finding out something. "I should want a guide who knew the territory," she said. "I qualify," he replied shortly, with a short, unmirthful laugh. "That is one advantage of not having spent one's days on sunny paths." His voice on that was neither bashful nor boyish. "But you must have spent some of them on sunny paths," she urged, with more feeling than she would have been able to account for. "You don't look," Katie added almost shyly, "as if you had grown in the dark." He did not reply. He looked so much older when sternness set his face, leaving no hint of that teasing gleam in his eyes, that pleasing little humorous twist of his mouth. Gently her voice went into the dark country claiming him then. "But you were telling me of my friend." It brought him out, wondering anew. "Your friend! There you go again! How can you expect me to stick to a subject when paths open out on all sides of you like that? But I'll try to quit straying. It happened that on that day, just at that time, I was going under the south bridge. I chanced to look up. A face was bending down. Her face. Our eyes met--square. I _got_ it--flung to me in that one look. What the world had done to her--what she thought of it for doing it--what she meant to do about it. "I wish," he went on, with a slow, heavy calm, "that the 'good' men and women of the world--those 'good' men and women who eat good dinners and sleep in good beds--some of the 'God's in heaven all's well with the world' people--could have that look wake them up in the middle of the night. I'd like to think of them turning to the wall and trying to shut it out--and the harder they tried the nearer and clearer it grew. I'd like to think of them sitting up in bed praying God--the God of 'good' folks--to please make it stop. I'd like to have it haunt them--dog them--finally pierce their brains or souls or whatever it is they have, and begin to burrow. I'd like to have it right there on the job every time they mentioned the goodness of God or the justice of man, till finally they threw up their hands in crazed despair with, 'For God's sake, what do you want _me_ to do about it!'" He had scarcely raised his voice. He was smiling at her. It was the smile led her to gasp: "Why I believe you hate us!" "Why I really believe I do," he replied quietly, still smiling. Suddenly she flared. "That's not the thing! You're not going to set the world right by hating the world. You're not going to make it right for some people by hating other people. What good thing can come of hate?" "The greatest things have come of hate. Of a divine hate that transcends love." "Why no they haven't! The greatest things have come of love. What the world needs is more love. You can't bring love by hating." He seemed about to make heated reply, but smiled, or rather his smile became really a smile as he said: "What a lot of things you and I would find to talk about." "We must--" Katie began impetuously, but halted and flushed. "We must go on with our story," was what it came to. "I haven't any story, except just the story of that look. Though it holds the story of love and hate and a hundred other things you and I would disagree about. And I don't know that I can convey to you--you of the sunny paths--what the look conveyed to me. But imagine a crowd, a crazed crowd, all pushing to the center, and then in the center a face thrown back so you can see it for just an instant before it sinks to suffocation. If you can fancy that look--the last gasp for breath of one caught--squeezed--just going down--a hatred of the crowd that got her there, just to suffocate her--and perhaps one last wild look at the hills out beyond the crowd. If you can get _that_--that fear, suffocation, terror--and don't forget the hate--yet like the dog you've kicked that grieved--'How could you--when it was a pat I wanted!'--" "I know it in the dog language," said Katie quiveringly. "Then imagine the dog crazed with thirst tied just out of reach of a leaping, dancing brook--" "Oh--please. That's too plain." "It hurts when applied to dogs, does it?" he asked roughly. "But they're so helpless--and they love us so!" "And _they're_ so helpless--and they hate because they weren't let love." "But surely there aren't many--such looks. Not many who feel they're--going down. Why such things couldn't _be_--in this beautiful world." "Such," he said smilingly, "has ever been the philosophy of sunny paths." "You needn't talk to me like that!" she retorted angrily. "I guess I saw the look as well as you did--and did a little more to banish it than you did, too." "True. I was just coming to that thing of my not having done anything. Perhaps it was a case of fools rushing in where angels feared to tread. You mustn't mind being called a fool in any sentence so preposterous as to call me an angel. You see one who had never been in the crowd would say--'Why don't you get out?' It would be droll, wouldn't it, to have some one on a far hill call--'But why don't you come over here?' Don't you see how that must appeal to the sense of humor of the one about to go down?" She made no reply. The thing that hurt her was that he seemed to enjoy hurting her. "You see I've been in the crowd," he said more simply and less bitterly. "I don't suppose men who have been most burned to death ever say--'The fire can't hurt you.'" "And do they never try to rescue others from fires?" asked Katie scornfully. "Do they let them burn--just because they know fire for a dangerous thing?" "Rescue them for what? More fires? It's a question whether it's very sane, or so very humane, either, to rescue a man from one fire just to have him on hand for another." "I don't think I ever in my life heard anything more farfetched," pronounced Katie. "How do you know there'll be another?" "Because there are people for whom there's nothing else. If you can't offer a safe place, why rescue at all? Though it's true," he laughed, "that I hadn't the courage of my convictions in the matter. After that look--oh I haven't been able to make it live--burn--as it did--she passed on the Island, the guard evidently thinking she was with some people who had just got out of an automobile and gone on for a walk. And suddenly I was corrupted, driven by that impulse for saving life, that beautiful passion for keeping things alive to suffer which is so humorously grounded in the human race." He stopped with a little laugh. Watching him, Katie was thinking one need have small fear of his not always being "corrupted." There was a light in his eyes spoke for "corruption." "I saw her making straight across the Island," he went back to his story. "I _knew_. And I knew that on the other side she might find things very conveniently arranged for her purpose. I turned the boat and went at its best speed around the head of the Island. Hugged the shore on your side. Pulled into a little cove. Waited." He looked at Katie, comparing her with an _a priori_ idea of her. "I saw you sitting up there in the sun--on the bunker. Just having received the last will and testament, as it were, of this other human soul, can't you fancy how I hated you--sitting there so serenely in the sun?" "But why hate me?" she demanded passionately. "That's where you're small and unjust! I don't make the crazed crowds, do I?" "Yes; that's just what you do. There'd be no crowds if it weren't for you. You take up too much room." "I don't see why you want to--hurt me like that," she said unevenly. "Don't you want me to enjoy my place any more? Will it do any good for me to get in the crowd? What can I do about it?" Looking into her passionately earnest face it was perhaps the gulf between the girl and his _a priori_ idea of her brought the smile--a smile no kin to that hard smile of his. And looking with a different slant across the gulf there was a sort of affectionate roguery in his eyes as he asked: "Do you want to know what I honestly think about you?" She nodded. "I think you're in for it!" "In for what?" "I don't think you've the ghost of a chance to escape!" he gloated. "Escape--what?" "Seeing. And when you do--!" He laughed--that laugh one thinks of as the exclusive possession of an affectionate understanding. And when it died to a smile, something tenderly teasing flickered in that smile. She flushed under it. "You were telling me--we keep stopping." "Yes, don't we? I wonder if we always would." "We keep stopping to quarrel." "Yes--to quarrel. I wonder if we always would." "I haven't a doubt of it in the world," said Katie feelingly, and they laughed together as friends laugh together. "Well, where did I leave myself? Oh yes--waiting. Sitting there busily engaged in hating you. Then she came across the grass--making straight for the river--running. I saw that you saw, and the thing that mattered to me then was what you would do about it. Saved or not saved, she was gone--I thought. The crowd had squeezed it all out of her. The live thing to me was what you--the You of the world that you became to me--would do about her." He paused, smiling at that absurd and noble vision of Katie tumbling down the bunker. "And when you did what you did do--it was so treacherously disarming, the quick-witted humanity, the clever tenderness of it--I loved you so for it that I just couldn't go on hating. There's where you're a dangerous person. How dare you--standing for the You of the world--dampen the splendid ardor of my hate?" Katie did not let pass her chance. "Perhaps if the Me of the world were known a little more intimately it would be less hated." He shook his head. "They just happened to have you. They can't keep you." There was another one of those pauses which drew them so much closer than the words. She knew what he was wondering, and he knew that she knew. At length she colored a little and called him back to the greater reserve of words. "I saw how royally you put it through. I could see you standing there on the porch, looking back to the river. I've wanted several things rather badly in my life, but I doubt if I've ever wanted anything much worse than to know what you were saying. And then with my own two eyes I saw the miracle: Saw her--the girl who had just had all the concentrated passion of the Her of the world--turn and follow you into the house. It was a blow to me! Oh 'twas an awful blow." "Why a blow?" "In the first place that you should want to, and then that you should be able to. My philosophy gives you of the sunny paths no such desire nor power." "Showing," she deduced quickly and firmly, "that your philosophy is all wrong." "Oh no; showing that the much toasted Miss Katherine Jones is too big for mere sunny paths. Showing that she has a latent ambition to climb a mountain in a storm." Fleetingly she wondered how he should know her for the much toasted Miss Katherine Jones, but in the center of her consciousness rose that alluring picture of climbing a mountain in a storm. "Tell me how you did it." "Why--I don't know. I had no method. I told her I needed her." "_You_--needed _her_?" "And afterwards, in a different way, I told her that again. And I did. I do." "Why do you need her? How do you need her?" he urged gently. She hesitated. Her mouth--her splendid mouth shaped by stern or tender thinking to lines of exquisite fineness or firmness--trembled slightly, and the eyes which turned seriously upon him were wistful. "Perhaps," said Katie, "that even on sunny paths one guesses that there are such things as storms in the mountains." It was only his eyes which answered, but the fullness of the response ushered them into a silence in which they rested together understandingly. "I sat there watching the house," he went back to it after the moment. "I was sure the girl would come out again. 'She'll bungle it,' I said to myself. 'She'll never be able to put it through.' But time passed--and she did not come out!"--inconsistently enough that came with a ring of triumph. "And then the next day--after the wonder had grown and grown--I saw her driving with you. I was just off the head of the Island. She was turned toward me, looking up the river. Again I saw her eyes, and in them that time I read _you_. And I don't believe," he concluded with a little laugh, "that my stock of hate can ever be quite so secure again." They talked on, not conscious that it was growing late. Time and place, and the conventions of time and place, seemed outside. She let him in quite freely: to that edge of fun and excitement as well as to the strange and somber places. It was fun sharing fun with him; and something in his way of receiving it suggested that he had been in need of sharing some one's fun. He had a way of looking at her when she laughed that had vague suggestion of something not far from gratitude. But the fun light, and that other light which seemed wanting to thank her for something, went from his eyes, leaving a glimmer of something deeper as he asked: "But you've never asked for her story? You've demanded nothing?" "Why no," said Katie; "only that I should be proud if she ever felt I could help." He turned his face a little away. One looking into it then would not have given much for his stock of hate. Worth had approached. "Ain't you getting awful hungry, Aunt Kate?" It recalled her, and to embarrassment. "We must go at once," she said, confused. "Did you find out all you wanted to know from him, Aunt Kate?" he asked, getting in the boat. She transcended her embarrassment. "No, Worth. Only that there is a very great deal I would like to know." He was standing ready to push her boat away. She did not give the word. As she looked at him she had a fancy that she was leaving him in a lonely place--she who was going back to what he called the sunny paths. And not only did she feel that he was lonely, but she felt curiously lonely herself, sitting there waiting to tell him to push her away. She wanted to say, "Come and see me," but she was too bound by the things to which she was returning to put it in the language of those things. And so she said, and the new shyness brought its own sweetness: "You tell me to come to you if I need a guide. Thank you for that. I shall remember. And perhaps sunshine is a thing that soaks in and can be stored up, and given out again. If it ever seems I can be of any use--in any way--will you come where you know you can find me?" Her eyes fell before the things which had leaped to his. CHAPTER XIX Two hours later she found herself alone on the porch with Captain Prescott. A good deal had happened in the meantime. Mrs. Prescott had arrived during Katie's absence, a stop-over of two weeks having been shortened to two hours because of the illness of her friend. Her room at her son's quarters being uninhabitable because of fresh paint, Wayne had insisted she come to them, and she was even then resting up in Ann's room, or rather the room which had been put at her disposal, a bed having been arranged for Ann in Katie's room. Had Katie been at home she would have planned it some other way, for above all things she did not want it to occur to Ann that she was in the way. But Katie had been very busy talking to the man who mended the boats, and naturally it would not occur to Wayne that Ann would be at all sensitive about giving up her room for a few days to accommodate a dear old friend of theirs. And perhaps she was not sensitive about it, only this was no time, Katie felt, to make Ann feel she was crowding any one. And in Katie's absence "Pet" had been shot. Pet had not seemed to realize that alley methods of defense were not in good repute in the army. He could not believe that Pourquoi and N'est-ce-pas had no guile in their hearts when they pawed at him. Furthermore, he seemed to have a prejudice against enlisted men and showed his teeth at several of them. Katie began to explain that that was because--but Wayne had curtly cut her short with saying that he didn't care why it was, the fact that it was had made it impossible to have the dog around. If one of the men had been bitten by the contemptible cur Katie couldn't cauterize the wound with the story of the dog's hard life. The only bright spot she could find in it was that probably Watts had taken a great deal of pleasure in executing Wayne's orders--and Caroline Osborne said that all needed pleasure. She saw that Ann's hands were clenched, and so had not pursued the discussion. Katie was not in high favor with her brother that night. He said it was outrageous she should not have been there to receive Mrs. Prescott. When Katie demurred that she would have been less outrageous had she had the slightest notion Mrs. Prescott would be there to be received, it developed that Wayne was further irritated because he had come to take Ann out for a boat ride--and Katie had gone in the boat--heaven only knew where! Then when Katie sought to demolish that irritation with the suggestion that just then was the most beautiful time of day for the river--and she knew it would do Ann good to go--Wayne clung manfully to his grievance, this time labeling it worry. He forbade Katie's going any more by herself. It was preposterous she should have stayed so long. He would have been out looking for her had it not been that Watts had been able to get a glimpse of the boat pulled in on the upper island. Katie wondered what else Watts had been able to get a glimpse of. Wayne was so bent on being abused (hot days affected people differently) that the only way she could get him to relinquish a grievance for a pleasure was to put it in the form of a duty. Ann needed a ride on the river, Katie affirmed, and so they had gone, Wayne doing his best to cover his pleasure. "Men never really grow up," she mused to Wayne's back. "Every so often they have to act just like little boys. Only little boys aren't half so apt to do it." Though perhaps Wayne had been downright disappointed at not having the boat for Ann when he came home. Was he meaning to deliver that lecture on the army? She hoped that whatever he talked about it would bring Ann home without that strained, harassed look. And now Katie was talking to Captain Prescott and thinking of the man who mended the boats. Captain Prescott was a good one to be talking to when one wished to be thinking of some one else. He called one to no dim, receding distances. She was thinking that in everything save the things which counted most he was not unlike this other man--name unknown. Both were well-built, young, vigorous, attractive. But life had dealt differently with them, and they were dealing differently with life. That made a difference big as life itself. From the far country in which she was dreaming she heard Captain Prescott talking about girls. He was talking sentimentally, but even his sentiment opened no vistas. And suddenly she remembered how she had at one time thought it possible she would marry him. The remembrance appalled her; less in the idea of marrying him than in the consciousness of how far she had gone from the place where marrying him suggested itself to her at all. Life had become different. This showed her how vastly different. But as he talked on she began to feel that it had not become as different to him as to her. He had not been making little excursions up and down unknown paths. He had remained right in his place. That place seemed to him the place for Katie Jones. As he talked on--about what he called Life--sublimely unconscious of the fences all around him shutting out all view of what was really life--it became unmistakable that Captain Prescott was getting ready to propose to her. She had had too much experience with the symptoms not to recognize them. Katie did not want to be proposed to. She was in no mood for dealing with a proposal. She had too many other things to be thinking of, wondering about. But she reprimanded herself for selfishness. It meant something to him, whether it did to her or not. She must be kind--as kind as she could. The kindest thing she could think of was to keep him from proposing. To that end she answered every sentimental remark with a flippant one. It grieved, but did not restrain him. "I had thought you would understand better, Katie," he said. Something in his voice made her question the kindness of her method. Better decline a love than laugh at it. He talked on of how he had, at various times, cared--in a way, he said--for various girls, but had never found the thing he knew was fated to mean the real thing to him; Katie had heard it all before, and always told with that same freedom from suspicion of its ever having been said before. But perhaps it was the very fact that it was familiar made her listen with a certain tenderness. For she seemed to be listening, less to him than to the voice of by-gone days--all those merry, unthinking days which in truth had dealt very kindly and generously with her. She had a sense of leaving them behind. That alone was enough to make her feel tenderly toward them. Even a place within a high-board fence, intolerable if one thought one were to remain in it, became a kindly and a pleasant spot from the top of the fence. Once free to turn one's face to the wide sweep without, one was quite ready to cast loving looks back at the enclosure. And so she softened, prepared to deal tenderly with Captain Prescott, as he seemed then, less the individual than the incarnation of outlived days. It was into that mellowed, sweetly melancholy mood he sent the following: "And so, Katie, I wanted to talk to you about it. You're such a good pal--such a bully sort--I wanted to tell you that I care for Ann--and want to marry her." She dropped from the high-board fence with a jolt that well-nigh knocked her senseless. "I suppose," he said, "that you must have suspected." "Well, not exactly suspected," said Katie, feeling her bumps, as it were. Her first emotion was that it was pretty shabby treatment to accord one who was at such pains to be kind. It gave one a distinctly injured feeling--getting all sweet and mellow only to be dashed to the ground and let lie there in that foolish looking--certainly foolish feeling heap! But as soon as she had picked herself up--and Katie was too gamey to be long in picking herself up--she wondered what under heaven she was going to do about things! What had she let herself in for now! The pains of an injured dignity--throb of a pricked self love--were forgotten in this real problem, confronting her. She even grew too grave to think about how funny it was. For Katie saw this as genuinely serious. "Harry," she asked, "have you said anything to your mother?" "Well, not _said_ anything," he laughed. "But she knows?" "Mother's keen," he replied. "I once thought I was," was Katie's unspoken comment. "And have you--you are so good as to confide in me, so I presume to ask questions--have you said anything to Ann?" "No, not _said_ anything," he laughed again. "But _she_ knows?" "I don't know. I wondered if you did." "No," said Katie, "I don't. Truth is I've been so wrapped up in my own affairs--some things I've had on my mind--that I haven't been thinking about people around me falling in love." "People are always falling in love," he remarked sentimentally. "One should always be prepared for that." "So it seems," replied Katie. "And yet one is not always--entirely prepared." She had picked herself up from her fall, but she was not yet able to walk very well. Fortunately he was too absorbed in his own happy striding to mark her hobbling. A young man talking of his love does not need a brilliant conversationalist for companion. And he was a young man in love--that grew plain. Had Katie ever seen such eyes? And as for the mouth--though perhaps most remarkable of all was the voice. Just what did it make Katie think of? He enumerated various things it made him think of, only to express his dissatisfaction with them all as inadequate. Had Katie ever seen any one so beautiful? And with such an adorable shy little way? Had Katie ever heard her say anything about him? Did she think he had any chance? Was there any other fellow? Of course there must have been lots of other fellows in love with her--a girl like that--but had she cared for any of them? Would Katie tell him something about her? She had been reserved about herself--the kind of reserve a fellow wouldn't try to break through. Would Katie tell him of her life and her people? Not that it made any difference with him--oh, he wanted just her. But his mother would want to know--Katie knew how mothers were about things like that. And he did want his mother to like her. Surely she would. How could she help it? She wondered if Ann knew him for a young man in love. Katie's heart hardened against Ann at the possibility. That would not be playing a fair game. Ann was not in position to let Katie's friends fall in love with her. Katie had not counted on that. "Have you any reason," she asked, "to think Ann cares for you?" He laughed happily. "N--o; only I don't think it displeases her to have me say nice things to her." And again he laughed. Then Ann had encouraged him. A girl had no business to encourage a man to say nice things to her when she knew nothing could come of it. But Katie's memory there nudged Katie's primness; memory of all the men who had been encouraged to say nice things to Katie Jones, even when it was not desirable--or perhaps even possible--that anything could "come of it." But of course that was different. Ann was in no position to permit nice things being said to her. "Katie," he was asking, "where did you first meet her? How did you come to know her? Can't you tell me all about it?" There came a mad impulse to do so. To say: "I first met her right down there at the edge of the water. She was about to commit suicide. I don't know why. I think she was one of those 'Don't You Care' girls you admired in 'Daisey-Maisey.' But I'm not sure of even that. I didn't want her to kill herself, so I took her in and pretended she was a friend of mine. I made the whole thing up. I even made up her name. She said her name was Verna Woods, but I think that's a made-up name, too. I haven't the glimmering of an idea what her real name is, who her people are, where she came from, or why she wanted to kill herself." Then what? First, bitter reproaches for Katie. She would be painted as having violated all the canons. For the first time, watching her friend's face softened by his dreams, seeing him as his mother's son, she questioned her right to violate them. She did not know why she had not thought more about it before. It had seemed such a _joke_ on the people in the enclosure. But it was not going to be a joke to hurt them. Was that what came of violating the canons? Was the hurt to one's friends the punishment one got for it? "You can't cauterize the wounds with the story of the dog's hard life," Wayne had said of poor little unpetted--and because unpetted, unpettable--Pet. Was Watts the real philosopher when he said "things was as they was"? She was bewildered. She was in a country where she could not find her way. She needed a guide. Her throat grew tight, her eyes hot, at thought of how badly she needed her guide. Then, perhaps in self-defense, she saw her friend Captain Prescott, not as a victim of the violation of canons, but as a violator of them himself. She turned from Ann's past to his. "Harry," she asked, in rather metallic voice, "how about that affair of yours down in Cuba?" He flushed with surprise and resentment. "I must say, Katie," he said stiffly, "I don't see what it has to do with this." "Why, I should think it might have something to do with it. Isn't there a popular notion that our pasts have something to do with our futures?" "It's all over," he said shortly. "Then you would say, Harry, that when things are over they're over. That they needn't tie up the future." "Certainly not," said he, making it clear that he wanted that phase of the conversation "over." "It's my own theory," said Katie. "But I didn't know whether or not it was yours. Now if I had had a past, and it was, as you say yours is, all over, I shouldn't think it was any man's business to go poking around in it." "That," he said, "is a different matter." "What's a different matter?" she asked aggressively. "A woman's past. That would be a man's business." "Though a man's past is not a woman's business?" "Oh, we certainly needn't argue that old nonsense. You're too much the girl of the world to take any such absurd position, Katie." "Of course, being what you call a 'girl of the world' it's absurd I should question the man's point of view, but I can't quite get the logic of it. You wouldn't marry a woman with a past, and yet the woman who marries you is marrying a man with one." "I've lived a man's life," he said. And he said it with a certain pride. "And perhaps she's lived a woman's life," Katie was thinking. Only the woman was not entitled to the pride. For her it led toward self-destruction rather than self-approval. "It's this way, Katie," he explained to her. "This is the difference. A woman's past doesn't stay in the past. It marks her. Why I can tell a woman with a past every time," he concluded confidently. Katie sat there smiling at him. The smile puzzled him. "Now look here, Katie, surely you--a girl of the world--the good sort--aren't going to be so melodramatic as to dig up a 'past' for me, are you?" "No," said Katie, "I don't want to be melodramatic. I'll try to dig up no pasts." His talk ran on, and her thoughts. It seemed so cruel a thing that Ann's past--whatever it might be, and surely nothing short of a "past" could make a girl want to kill herself--should rise up and damn her now. To him she was a dear lovely girl--the sort of a girl a man would want to marry. Very well then, intrinsically, she _was_ that. Why not let people _be_ what they were? Why not let them be themselves, instead of what one thought they would be from what one knew of their lives? It was so easy to see marks when one knew of things which one's philosophy held would leave marks. It seemed a fairer and a saner thing to let human beings be what their experiences had actually made them rather than what one thought those experiences would make them. Captain Prescott had blighted a Cuban woman's life--for his own pleasure and vanity. With Ann it may have been the press of necessity, or it may have been--the call of life. Either one, being driven by life, or drawn to it, seemed less ignominious than trifling with life. Why would it be so much worse for Captain Prescott to marry Ann than it would be for Ann to marry Captain Prescott? The man who mended the boats would back her up in that! Through her somber perplexity there suddenly darted the sportive idea of getting Ann in the army! The audacious little imp of an idea peeped around corners in Katie's consciousness and tried to coquet with her. Banished, it came scampering back to whisper that Ann would not bring the army its first "past"--either masculine or feminine. Only in the army they managed things in such wise that there was no need of committing suicide. Ann had been a bad manager. But at that moment they were joined by Captain Prescott's mother and he retired for a solitary smoke. CHAPTER XX Mrs. Prescott made vivid and compelling those days, those things, which Katie had a little while before had the fancy of so easily slipping away from. She made them things which wove themselves around one, or rather, things of which one seemed an organic part, from which one could no more pull away than the tree's branch could pull away from the tree's trunk. In her presence Katie was claimed by those things out of which she had grown, claimed so subtly that it seemed a thing outside volition. Mrs. Prescott did not, in any form, say things were as they were; it was only that she breathed it. How could one combat with words, or in action, that rooted so much deeper than mere words or action? She was a slight and simple looking lady to be doing anything so large as stemming the tide of a revolutionary impulse. She had never lost the girlishness of her figure--or of her hands. So much had youth left her. Her face was thin and pale, and of the contour vaguely called aristocratic. It was perhaps the iron gray hair rolling back from the pale face held the suggestion of austerity. But that which best expressed her was the poise of her head. She carried it as if she had a right to carry it that way. It was of small things she talked: the people she had met, people they knew whom Katie knew. It was that net-work of small things she wove around Katie. One might meet a large thing in a large way. But that subtle tissue of the little things! They talked of Katie's mother, and as they talked it came to Katie that perhaps the most live things of all might be the dead things. Katie's mother had not been unlike Mrs. Prescott, save that to Katie, at least, she seemed softer and sweeter. They had been girls together in Charleston. They had lived on the same street, gone to the same school, come out at the same party, and Katie's mother had met Katie's father when he came to be best man at Mrs. Prescott's wedding. Then they had been stationed together at a frontier post in a time of danger. Wayne had been born at that post. They had been together in times of birth and times of death. Mrs. Prescott spoke of Worth, and of how happy she knew Katie was to have him with her. She talked of the responsibility it brought Katie, and as they talked it did seem responsibility, and responsibility was another thing which stole subtly up around her, chaining her with intangible--and because intangible, unbreakable--chains. Mrs. Prescott wanted to know about Wayne. Was he happy, or had the unhappiness of his marriage gone too deep? "Your dear mother grieved so about it, Katie," she said. "She saw how it was going. It hurt her." "Yes," said Katie, "I know. It made mother very sad." "I am glad that her death came before the separation." "Oh, I don't know," said Katie; "I think mother would have been glad." "She did not believe in divorce; your mother and I, Katie, were the old-fashioned kind of churchwomen." "Neither did mother believe in unhappiness," said Katie, and drew a longer breath for saying it, for it was as if the things claiming her had crowded up around her throat. Mrs. Prescott sighed. "We cannot understand those things. It is a strange age in which we are living, Katie. I sometimes think that our only hope is to trust God a little more." "Or help man a little more," said Katie. "Perhaps," said Mrs. Prescott gently, "that giving more trust to God would be giving more help to man." "I'm not sure I get the connecting link," said Katie, more sure of herself now that it had become articulate. Mrs. Prescott put one of her fine hands over upon Katie's. "Why, child, you can't mean that. That would have hurt your mother." For the moment Katie did not speak. "If mother had understood just what I meant--understood all about it--I don't believe it would." A second time she was silent, as it struggled. "And if it had"--she spoke it as a thing not to be lightly spoken--"I should be very deeply sorry, but I would not be able to help it." "Why, child!" murmured her mother's friend. "You're talking strangely. You--the devoted daughter you always were--not able to 'help' hurting your mother?" Katie's eyes filled. It had become so real: the things stealing around her, the thing in her which must push them back, that it was as if she were hurting her mother, and suffering in the consciousness of bringing suffering. Memory, the tenderest of memories, was another thing weaving itself around her, clinging to her heart, claiming her. But suddenly she leaned forward. "Would I be able to _help_ being myself?" she asked passionately. Mrs. Prescott seemed startled. "I fear," she said, perplexed by the tears in Katie's eyes and the stern line of her mouth, "that we are speaking of things I do not understand." Katie was silent, agreeing with her. Mrs. Prescott broke the silence. "The world is changing." And again agreeing, Katie saw that in those changes friends bound together by dear ties might be driven far apart. "Katie," she asked after a moment, "tell me of my boy and your friend." There was a wistful, almost tremulous note in her voice. "You have sympathy and intelligence, Katie. You must know what a time like this means to a mother." Katie could not speak. It seemed she could bear little more that night. And she longed for time to think it out, know where she stood, come to some terms with herself. But forced to face it, she tried to do so lightly. She thought it just a fancy of Harry's. Wasn't he quite given to falling in love with pretty girls? His mother shook her head. "He cares for her. I know. And do you not see, Katie, that that makes her about the biggest thing in life to me?" Katie's heart almost stood still. She was staggered. Through her wretchedness surged a momentary yearning to be one of those people--oh, one of those _safe_ people--who never found the peep-holes in their enclosure! "Tell me of her, Katie," urged her mother's friend. "Harry seems to think she means much to you. Just what is it she means to you?" For the moment she was desperate in her wondering how to tell it. And then it happened that from her frenzied wondering what to say of it she sank into the deeper wondering what it _was_. What it was--what in truth it had been all the time--Ann meant to her. Why had she done it? What was that thing less fleeting than fancy, more imperative than sympathy, made Ann mean more than things which had all her life meant most? Watching Katie, Mrs. Prescott wavered between gratification and apprehension: pleased that that light in Katie's eyes, a finer light than she had ever known there before, should come through thought of this girl for whom Harry cared; troubled by the strangeness and the sternness of Katie's face. It was Katie herself Mrs. Prescott wanted--had always wanted. She had always hoped it would be that way, not only because she loved Katie, but because it seemed so as it should be. She believed that summer would have brought it about had it not been for this other girl--this stranger. Katie's embarrassment had fallen from her, pushed away by feeling. She was scarcely conscious of Mrs. Prescott. She was thinking of those paths of wondering, every path leading into other paths--intricate, limitless. She had been asleep. Now she was awake. It was through Ann it had come. Perhaps more had come through Ann than was in Ann, but beneath all else, deeper even than that warm tenderness flowering from Ann's need of her, was that tenderness of the awakened spirit--a grateful song coming through an opening door. It had so claimed her that she was startled at sound of Mrs. Prescott's voice as she said, with a nervous little laugh: "Why, Katie, you alarm me. You make me feel she must be strange." "She is strange," said Katie. "Would you say, Katie," she asked anxiously, "that she is the sort of girl to make my boy a good wife?" Suddenly the idea of Ann's making Harry Prescott any kind of wife came upon Katie as preposterous. Not because she would be bringing him a "past," but because she would bring gifts he would not know what to do with. "I don't think of Ann as the making some man a good wife type. I think of Ann," she tried to formulate it, "as having gone upon a quest, as being ever upon a quest." "A--quest?" faltered Mrs. Prescott. "For what?" "Life," said Katie, peering off into the darkness. Mrs. Prescott was manifestly disturbed at the prospect of a daughter-in-law upon a quest. "She sounds--temperamental," she said critically. "Yes," said Katie, laughing a little grimly, "she's temperamental all right." They could not say more, as Ann and Wayne were coming toward them across the grass. And almost immediately afterward the Osborne car again stopped before the house. It was Mr. Osborne himself this time, bringing the Leonards, who had been dining with him. They had stopped to see Mrs. Prescott. Katie was not sorry, for it turned Mrs. Prescott from Ann. Like the football player who has lost his wind, she wanted a little time counted out. But she soon found that she was not playing anything so kindly as a game of hard and fast rules. It seemed at first that Ann's ride had done her good. She seemed to have relaxed and did not give Katie that sense of something smoldering within her. Katie sat beside her, an arm thrown lightly about Ann's shoulders--lightly but guardingly. Neither of them talked much. Mrs. Prescott and Mrs. Leonard were "visiting"; the men talking of some affairs of Mr. Osborne's. He was commending the army for minding its own business--not "butting in" and trying to ruin business the way some other departments of the Government did. The army seemed in high favor with Mr. Osborne. Suddenly Mrs. Leonard turned to Katie. She was a large woman, poised by the shallow serenity of self-approval. "I do feel so sorry for Miss Osborne," she said. "Such a shocking thing has occurred. One of the girls at the candy factory--you know she's trying so hard to help them--has committed suicide!" Mrs. Prescott uttered an exclamation of horror. Katie patted the shoulder beside her soothingly, understandingly, and as if begging for calm. Even under her light touch she seemed to feel the nerves leap up. Mr. Osborne turned to them. "Poor Cal, she'd better let things alone. What's the use? She can't do anything with people like that." "It's the cause of the suicide that's the disgusting thing," said Colonel Leonard. "Or rather," amended his wife, "the lack of cause." "But surely," protested Mrs. Prescott, "no girl would take her life without--what she thought was cause. Surely all human beings hold life and death too sacred for that." "Oh, do they?" scoffed Mrs. Leonard. "Not that class. I scarcely expect you to believe me--I had a hard time believing it myself--but she says she committed suicide--she left a note for her room-mate--because she was 'tired of not having any fun!'" The hand upon Ann's shoulder grew fairly eloquent. And Ann seemed trying. Her hands were tightly clasped in her lap. "Why, I don't know," said Wayne, "I think that's about one of the best reasons I can think of." "This is not a jesting matter, Captain Jones," said Mrs. Leonard severely. "Far from it," said Wayne. "Think what it means to a girl like Caroline Osborne! A girl who is trying to do something for humanity--to find the people she wants to uplift so trivial--so without souls!" "It is hard on Cal," agreed Cal's father. "Though perhaps just a trifle harder," ventured Wayne, "on the girl who did." "Well, what did she do it for?" he demanded. "Come now, Captain, you can't make out much of a case for her. Mrs. Leonard's word is just right--trivial. She said she was tired of things. Tired--tired--tired of things, she put it. Tired of walking down the same street. Tired of hanging her hat on the same kind of a peg! Now, Captain--if you can put up any defense for a girl who kills herself because she's tired of hanging her hat on a certain kind of peg! Well," he laughed, "if you can, all I've got to say is that you'd better leave the army and go in for criminal law." "Why didn't she walk down some other street," he resumed, as no one broke the pause. "If it's a matter of life and death--a person might walk down some other street!" "And I've no doubt," said Captain Prescott, "that if it were known her life, as well as her hat, hung upon it--she might have had a different kind of peg." They laughed. "Oh, of course, the secret of it is," pronounced the Colonel, "she was a neurotic." For the first time Katie spoke. "I think it's such a fine thing we got hold of that word. Since we've known about neurotics we can just throw all the emotion and suffering and tragedy of the world in the one heap and leave it to the scientists. It lets _us_ out so beautifully, doesn't it?" "Oh, but Katie!" admonished Mrs. Prescott. "Think of it! What is the world coming to? Going forth to meet one's God because one doesn't like the peg for one's hat!" Katie had a feeling of every nerve in Ann's body leaping up in frenzy. "_God_?" she laughed wildly. "Don't drag _Him_ into it! Do you think _He_ cares"--turning upon Mrs. Prescott as if she would spring at her--"do you think for a minute _He_ cares--_what kind of pegs our hats are on_!" CHAPTER XXI Katie's memory of what followed was blurred. She remembered how relieved she was when Ann's laugh--oh the memory of that laugh was clear enough!--gave way to sobbing. Sobbing was easier to deal with. She said something about her friend's being ill, and that they would have to excuse them. She almost wanted to laugh--or was it cry?--herself at the way Harry Prescott was looking from Ann to his mother. After she got Ann in the house she went back and begged somebody's pardon--she wasn't sure whose--and told Colonel Leonard that of course he could understand it on the score of Ann's being a neurotic. She was afraid she might have said that rather disagreeably. And she believed she told Mrs. Prescott--she had to tell Mrs. Prescott something, she looked so frightened and hurt and outraged--that Ann had a form of nervous trouble which made it impossible for her to hear the name of God. The hardest was Wayne. She came to him on the porch after the others had gone--they were not long in dispersing. "Wayne," she said, "I'm sorry to have embarrassed you." His short, curt laugh did not reveal his mood. It was scoffing--contemptuous--but she could not tell at what it scoffed. He had not turned toward her. "I'm sorry," she repeated. "Ann will be sorry. She's so--" He turned upon her hotly. "Katie, quit lying to _me_. I know there's something you're not telling. I've suspected it for some time. Now don't get off any of that 'nervous trouble' talk to me!" She stood there dumbly. It seemed to enrage him. "Why don't you go and look after her! What do you mean by leaving her all alone?" So she went to look after her. Ann looked like one who needed looking after. Her eyes were intolerably bright. It seemed the heat behind them must put them out. She was walking about the room, walking as if something were behind her with a lash. "You see, Katie," she began, not pausing in the walking--her voice, too, as though a whip were behind it--"it was just as I told you. It was just as I tried to tell you. There are two worlds. There's no use trying to put me in yours. See what I bring you! See what you get for it! See what--" She stood still, rocking back and forth as she stood there. "It was too much for me to hear her talking about _God!_ That was a little too much! _My_ father was a minister!" And Ann laughed. A minister was one thing Katie had not thought of. Even in that moment she was conscious of relief. Certainly the ministry was respectable. But why should it be "too much" for the daughter of a minister to hear anything about God? "Ann," she began quietly, "I don't want to force anything. If you want to be alone I'll even take my things and sleep somewhere else. But, Ann, dear, if you could tell me a little I wouldn't be so much in the dark; I could do better for us both." Ann did not seem to notice what she was saying. "She was tired of things! She was tired of things! Tired of hanging her hat on the same kind of peg! Why it's awful--it's awful, I tell you--to always be hanging your hat on the same kind of peg! "She was tired of not having any fun! Oh so tired of not having any fun! Why you don't care what you do when you get tired of not having any fun! "Then people laugh--the people who have all the fun. Oh they think it's so funny!--the people who don't have to hang their hats on any kind of peg. So trivial. So--what's that nervous word? Katie--you're not like the rest of them! Why, you seem to _know_--just know without knowing." "But it's hard for me," suggested Katie. "Trying to know--and not knowing." Ann was still walking about the room. "I was brought up in a little town in Indiana. You see I'm going to tell you. I've got to be doing something--and it may as well be talking. Now how did I start? Oh yes--I was brought up in a little town in Indiana. Until three years ago, that was where I lived. Were you ever in a little town in Indiana?" Katie replied in the negative. "Maybe there are little towns in Indiana that are different. I don't know. Maybe there are. But this one-in this one life was just one long stretch of hanging your hat on exactly the same kind of peg! "It was so square--so flat--so dingy--oh, so dreadful! It didn't have anything around it--as some towns do--a hill, or a river, or woods. Around it was something that was just nothing. It was just walled in by the nothingness all around it. "And the people in it were flat, and square, and dingy. And the things around them were just nothing. They were walled in, too, by the nothingness all around them." Then the most unexpected of all things happened. Ann smiled. "Katie, I'd like to have seen you in that town!" "I'm afraid," said Katie, "that I would have invented a new kind of peg." The smile seemed to have done Ann good. She sat down, grew more natural. "When I try to tell about my life in that town I suppose it sounds as though I were making a terrible fuss about things. When you think of children that haven't any homes-that are beaten by drunken fathers--starved--overworked-but it was the nothingness. If my father only had got drunk!" Katie smiled understandingly. "Katie, you've a lot of imagination. Just try to think what it would mean never to have what you could really call fun!" Katie took a sweep back over her own life--full to the brim of fun. Her imagination did not go far enough to get a real picture of life with the fun left out. "Oh, of course," said Ann, "there were pleasures! My father and the people of his church were like Miss Osborne--they believed it was one of the underlying principles of life--only they would call it 'God's will'--that all must have pleasure. But such God-fearing pleasure! I think I could have stood it if it hadn't been for the pleasures." "Pleasures with the fun left out," suggested Kate. "Yes, though fun isn't the word, for I don't mean just good times. I mean--I mean--" "You mean the joy of living," said Katie. "You mean the loveliness of life." "Yes; now your kind of religion--the kind of religion your kind of people have, doesn't seem to hurt them any." Katie laughed oddly. "True; it doesn't hurt us much." "My father's kind is something so different. The love of God seems to have dried him up. He's not a human being. He's a Christian." Katie thought of her uncle--a bishop, and all too human a human being. She was about to protest, then considered that she had never known the kind of Christian--or human being--Ann was talking about. "Everything at our church squeaked. The windows. The organ. The deacon's shoes. My father's voice. The religion squeaked. Life squeaked. "I'll tell you a story, Katie, that maybe will make you see how it was. It's about a dog, and it's easy for you to understand things about dogs. "Some one gave him to me. I suppose he was not a fine dog--not full-blooded. But that didn't matter. _You_ know that we don't love dogs for their blood. We love them for the way they look out of their eyes, and the way they wag their tails. I can't tell you what this dog meant to me--something to love--something that loved me--some one to play with--a companion--a friend--something that didn't have anything to do with my father's church! "He used to feel so sorry when I had to sit learning Bible verses. Sometimes he would put his two paws up on my lap and try to push the Bible away. I loved him for that. And when at last I could put it away he would dance round me with little yelps of joy. He warmed something in me. He kept something alive. "And then one day when I came home from a missionary meeting where I had read a paper telling how cruelly young girls were treated by their parents in India, and how there was no joy and love and beauty in their lives, I--" Ann hid her face and it was a drawn, grayish face she raised after a minute--"Tono was not there. I called and called him. My father was writing a sermon. He let me go on calling. I could not understand it. Tono always came running down the walk, wagging his tail and giving his little barks of joy when I came. It had made coming home seem different from what it had ever seemed before. But that day he was not there watching for me. My father let me go on calling for a long time. At last he came to the door and said--'Please stop that unseemly noise. The dog has been sent away.' 'Sent _away_?' I whispered. 'What do you mean?' 'I mean that I have seen fit to dispose of him,' he answered. I was trembling all over. 'What right had you to dispose of him?' I wanted to know. 'He wasn't your dog--' The answer was that I was to go up to my room and learn Bible verses until the Lord chastened my spirit. Then I said things. I would _not_ learn Bible verses. I _would_ have my dog. It ended"--Ann was trembling uncontrollably--"it ended with the rod being unspared. God's forgiveness was invoked with each stroke." She was digging her finger nails into her palms. Katie put her arms around her. "I wouldn't, Ann dear--it isn't worth while. It's all over now. Wouldn't it be better to forget?" "No, I want to tell you. Some day I may try to tell you other things. I want this to try to explain them. Loving dogs, you will understand this--better than you could some other things. "The dog had been given away to some one who lived in the country. It was because I had played with him the Sunday morning before and had been late to Sunday-school." Her voice was dry and hard; it was from Katie there came the exclamation of protest and contempt. "No one except one who loves dogs as you do would know what it meant. Even you can't quite know. For Tono was all I had. He--" Katie's arm about her tightened. "I could have stood it for myself. I could have stood my own lonesomeness. But what I couldn't stand was thinking about him. Nights I would wake up and think of him--out in the cold--homesick--maybe hungry--not understanding--watching and waiting--wondering why I didn't come. I couldn't keep from thinking about things that tortured me. This man was a deacon in my father's church. From the way he prayed, I knew he was not one to be good to dogs. "And then one afternoon I heard the little familiar scratch at the door. I rushed to it, and there he was--shivering--but oh so, so glad! He sprang right into my arms--we cried and cried together--sitting there on the floor. His heart had been almost broken--he had grieved--_suffered_. He wasn't willing to leave my arms; just whimpering the way one does when a dreadful thing is over--licking my face--you know how they do--you know how dear they are. "Now I will tell you what I did. Holding him in my arms, my face buried in his fur--I made up my mind. The family would be away for at least an hour. I would give him the happiest hour I knew how to give him. One hour--it was all I had the power to give him. Then--because I loved him so much--I would end his life." Katie's face whitened. "I carried out the plan," Ann went on. "I gave him the meat we were to have had for supper. I had him do all his little tricks. I loved him and loved him. I do not think any little dog ever had a happier hour. "And then--down at a house in the next block I saw my father--and the man he had given Tono to. The man was coming to our house for supper. Our time was up. "I can never explain to any one the way I did it--the way I felt as I did it. There was no crying. There was no faltering. It seemed that all at once I understood--understood the hardness of life--that things _are_ hard--that things have _got_ to be done. Then was when it came to me that you've got to harden yourself--that it's the only way. "I filled a tub with water--I didn't know any other way to do it. Tono stood there watching me. I took a bucket. I took up the dog. I hugged him. I let him lick my face. Though I live to be very old, Katie, and suffer very much, I can never forget the look in his eyes as I put him in the water and held him to put down the bucket. There are things a person goes through that make perfect happiness forever impossible. There are hours that stay." The face of the soldier's daughter was wet. "I love you for it, Ann," she whispered. "I love you for it. It was strong, Ann. It was fine." "I wasn't very strong and fine the minute it was over," sobbed Ann. "I fainted. They found me there. And then I screamed and laughed and said I was going to kill all the dogs in the world. I said--oh, dreadful things." "They should have understood," murmured Kate. "They didn't. They said I was wicked. They said the Evil One had entered into me. They said I must pray God to forgive me for having killed one of his creatures! Me--! "Of course it ended in Bible verses. Is it so strange I _loathed_ the Bible? And every morning I had to hear myself prayed for as a wicked girl who would harm one of God's creatures. The Almighty was implored not to send me to Hell. 'Send me there if you want to,' I'd say to myself on my knees, 'Tono's not in Hell, anyway.'" Ann laughed bitterly. "So that's why I'm a sacrilegious, blasphemous person who doesn't care much about hearing about God. I associate Him with thin lips that shut together tight-and people who make long prayers and break little dogs' hearts--and with boots--and souls--that squeak. I can't think of one single thing I ever heard about Him that made me like Him." "Oh, Ann dear!" protested Katie shudderingly. "Try not to think such things. Try not to feel that way. You haven't heard everything there is to hear about God. You haven't heard any of it in the right way." "Perhaps not. I only know what I have heard." And Ann's face was too white and hard for Katie to say more. "And your mother, dear? Where was she all this time? Didn't she love you--and help?" "She died when I was twelve. She'd like to have loved me. She did some on the sly--in a scared kind of way." Katie sat there contemplating the picture of Ann's father and mother and Ann--_Ann_, as child of that union. "I think she died because life frightened her so. In a year my father married again. _She_ isn't afraid of anything. She's a God-fearing, exemplary woman. And she always looks to see if you have any mud on your shoes." After a moment Ann said quietly: "I hate her." "So would I," said Katie, and it brought the ghost of a smile to Ann's lips, perhaps thinking of just how cordially Katie would hate her. "And then after a while you left this town?" Katie suggested as Ann seemed held there by something. "Yes, after a while I left." And that held her again. "I was fifteen when I--freed Tono from life," she emerged from it. "It was five years later that you--stopped me from freeing myself. Lots of things were crowded into those five years, Katie--or rather into the last three of them. I had to be treated worse than Tono was treated before it came to me that I had better be as kind to myself as I had been to my dog. Only I," Ann laughed, "didn't have anybody to give me a last hour!" "But you see it wasn't a last hour, after all," soothed Katie. "Only the last hour of the old hard things. Things that can never come back." "Can't they come back, Katie? Can't they?" Katie shook her head with decision. "Do you think I'd let them come back? Why I'd shut the door in their face!" "Sometimes," said Ann, "it seems to me they're lying in wait for me. That they're going to spring out. That this is a dream. That there isn't any Katie Jones. Some nights I've been afraid to go to sleep. Afraid of waking to find it a dream. There's an awful dream I dream sometimes! The dream is that this is a dream." "Poor dear," murmured Katie. "It will be more real now that we've talked." "I used to dream a dream, Katie, and I think it was about you. Only you weren't any one thing. You were all kinds of different things. Lovely things. You were Something Somewhere. You were the something that was way off beyond the nothingness of Centralia." "The something that didn't squeak," suggested Katie tremulously. "Something Somewhere. You were both a waking and a sleeping dream. I knew you were there. Isn't it queer how we do--know without knowing? My father used to talk about people being 'called.' Called to the ministry--called to the missionary field--called to heaven. Well maybe you're called to other things, too. Maybe," said Ann with a laugh which sobbed, "you're even 'called' to Chicago." The laugh died and the sob lingered. "Only when you get there--Chicago doesn't seem to know that it had called you. "My Something Somewhere was always something I never could catch up with. Sometimes it was a beautiful country--where a river wound through a woods. Sometimes it was beautiful people laughing and dancing. Sometimes it was a star. Sometimes it was a field of flowers--all blowing back and forth. Sometimes it was a voice--a wonderful far-away voice. Sometimes it was a lovely dress--oh a wonderful gauzy dress--or a hat that was like the blowing field of flowers. Sometimes--this was the loveliest of all--it was somebody who loved me. But whatever it was, it was something I couldn't overtake. "And you mustn't laugh, Katie, when I tell you that the thing that made me think I could catch up with it was a moving-picture show! "It came to Centralia--the first one that had ever been there. I heard the people next door talking about it. They said there were pictures of things that really happened in the great cities--oh of kings and queens and the president and millionaires and automobile races and grand weddings; that the pictures went on just like the happenings went on; that it was just as if the pictures were alive; that it was just like being there. "Oh, I was so excited about it! I was so excited I could hardly get ready. "You see ever since Tono had died--two years before, I had kept that idea that things were hard. That the thing to do was to be hard. I dreamed about things that were lovely--the Something Somewhere things--but as far as the real things went I never changed my mind about them. You mustn't let them into your heart. They just wanted to get in there to hurt you. "Now I forgot all about that. These pictures were dreams made real. They had caught up with the Something Somewhere. And I was going to see them. "But I didn't--not that day. I was so happy that my father suspected something. And he got it out of me and said I couldn't go. He said that the things that would be pictured would be the wickedness of the world. That I was not to see it. "But I made up my mind that I would see the wickedness of the world." Ann paused, and then said in lower voice: "And I have--and not just in pictures." She seemed to be meeting something, and she answered it. "But just the same," she made answer defiantly, "I'd rather see the wickedness of the world than stay in the nothingness of the world! "The pictures were to be there a week. I thought of nothing else but how I could see them. The last day there was a thimble-bee. I went to the thimble-bee--said I couldn't stay--and went to the pictures. "Katie, that moving-picture show was proof. Proof of the Something Somewhere. And in my heart I made a vow--it was a _solemn_ vow--that I would find the things that moved in the pictures. "And there was music--such music as I had never heard before, even though it came out of a box. They had the songs of the grand opera singers. And as I listened--I tell you I was called!--I don't care how silly it sounds--I was called by the voices that had sung into that box. For this was real--if the life hadn't been there it couldn't have been caught into the pictures and the box. It proved--I thought--that all the lovely things I had dreamed were true. I had only to go and find them. People were walking upon those streets. Then I could walk on those streets. And those people were laughing--and talking to each other. Everybody seemed to have friends. Everybody was happy! And all of that really _was_. The pictures were alive. Alive with the things that there were out beyond the nothingness of Centralia. "The man played something from an opera and showed pictures of beautiful people going into a beautiful place to listen to that very music. He said that the very next night in Chicago those people would be going into that place to listen to those very voices. "Katie, I don't believe you'll laugh at me when I tell you that my teeth fairly chattered when first it came to me that I must be one of those people! It was something all different from the longing for fun--oh it was something big--terrible--it _had_ to be. It was the same feeling of its having to be that I had about Tono. "Though probably that feeling would have passed away if it hadn't been for my father. He came there and found me, and--humiliated me. And after we got home--" Ann was holding herself tight, but after a moment she relaxed to say with an attempted laugh: "It wasn't all being 'called.' Part of it was being driven. "Then there was another thing. The treasurer of the missionary society came that night with some money--eighteen dollars--I was to send off the next day. It was that money started me out to find my Something Somewhere." "Oh _Ann_!" whispered Katie, drawing back. "But of course," she added, "you paid it back just as soon as you could?" "I _never_ paid it back! If I had eighteen _million_ dollars, I'd _never_ pay it back! I _like_ to think of not paying it back!" Katie's face hardened. "I can't understand that." "No," sobbed Ann, "you'd have to have lived a long time in nothingness to understand that--and some other things, too." She looked at her strangely. "There's more coming, Katie, that you won't be able to understand." Katie's face was averted, but something in Ann's voice made her turn to her. "I think it was wrong, Ann. There's no use in my pretending I don't. I _can't_ understand this. But maybe I can understand some of the other things better than you think." "I left at six o'clock the next morning," Ann went back to it when she was calmer. "And at the last minute I don't think I would have had the courage to go if my father hadn't been snoring so. How silly it all sounds! "And the only reason I got on the train was that it would have taken more courage to go back than to go on. "Katie, some time I'll tell you all about it. How I felt when I got to Chicago. How it seemed to shriek and roar. How I seemed just buried under the noise. How I walked around the streets that day--frightened almost to death--and yet, inside the fright, just crazy about it. And how green I was! "Nothing seemed to matter except going to grand opera. I didn't even have sense enough to find a place to stay. I thought about it, but didn't know how, and anyhow the most important thing was finding the things that moved in the pictures--and sang in the box. "I saw a woman go up to a policeman and ask him where something was and he told her, so I did that, too. Asked him where you went to hear grand opera. And he pointed. I was right there by it. "I heard some people talking about going in to get tickets. So I thought I had better get a ticket. "But they didn't have any. They were all gone. "When I came out I was almost crying. Then a smiling man outside stepped up to me and said he had tickets and he'd let me have one for ten dollars. I was so glad he had them! Ten dollars seemed a good deal--but I didn't think much about it. "Then I had my ticket and just two dollars left. "But that night at the opera I didn't know whether I had two dollars, or no dollars, or a thousand dollars. At first I was frightened because everybody but me had on such beautiful clothes. But soon I was too crazy about their clothes to care--and then after the music began-- "Oh, Katie! Suppose you'd always dreamed of something and never been able to catch up with it. Suppose you'd not even been able to really dream it, but just dream that it was, and then suppose it all came--No, I can't tell you. You'd have to have lived in Centralia--and been a minister's daughter. "My heart sang more beautifully than the singers sang. 'Now you have found it! Now you have found it!' my heart kept singing. "When all the other people left I left too--in a dream. For it had passed into a dream--into a beautiful dream that was going to shelter it for me forever. "I stood around watching the beautiful people getting into their carriages. And I couldn't make myself believe that it was in the same world with Centralia. "Then after a while it occurred to me that all those people were going home. Everybody was going home. "At first I wasn't frightened. Something inside me was singing over and over the songs of the opera. I was too far in my dream to be much frightened. "Then all at once I got--oh, so tired. And cold. And so frightened I did not know what to do. My dream seemed to have taken wings and flown away. All the beautiful laughing people had gone. It was just as if I woke up. And I was on the strange streets all alone. Only some noisy men who frightened me. "I hid in a doorway till those men got by. And then I saw a woman coming. She was all alone, too. She had on a dress that rustled and lovely white furs, and did not seem at all frightened. "I stepped out and asked her to please tell me where to go for the night. "Some time I'll tell you about her, too. Now I'll just tell you that it ended with her taking me home with her to stay all night. She made a lot of fun of me--and said things to me I didn't understand--and swore at me--and told me to 'cut it' and go back to the cornfields--but I was crying then, and she took me with her. "She kept up her queer kind of talk, but I was so tired that the minute I was in bed I went to sleep. "The next morning she told me I had got to go back to the woods. I said I would if there were any woods. But there weren't. She laughed and said more queer things. She asked me why I had come, and I told her. First she laughed. Then she sat there staring at me--blinking. And what she said was: 'Poor little fool. Poor little greenhorn.' "She asked me what I was going to do, and I said work, so I could stay there and go to the opera and see beautiful things. She asked me what kind of a job I was figuring on and told me there was only one kind would let me in for that. I asked her what it was and she said it was _her_ line. I asked her if she thought I was fitted for it, and she looked at me--a look I didn't understand at all--and said she guessed the men she worked for would think so. I asked her if she'd say a good word to them for me, and then she turned on me like a tiger and swore and said--No, she hadn't come to that! "It was a case of knowing without knowing. I was so green that I didn't know. And yet after a while I did. As I look back on it I appreciate things I couldn't appreciate then, thank her for things I didn't know enough to thank her for at the time. "She was leaving that day for San Francisco. She gave me ten dollars, and told me if I had any sense I'd take it and go back to prayer-meeting. She said I might do worse. But if I didn't have any sense--and she said of course I wouldn't--I was to be careful of it until I got a job. She told me how to manage. And I was to read 'ads' in the newspaper. She told me how to try and get in at the telephone office. She had been there once, she said, but it 'got on her nerves.' "She told me things about girls who worked in Chicago--awful things. But I supposed she was prejudiced. The last things she said to me was--'The opera! Oh you poor little green kid--I'm afraid I see your finish.' "But I thought she was queer acting because she led that queer kind of a life." Ann had paused. And suddenly she hid her face in her hands, as if it was more than she could face. Katie was smoothing her hair. "Katie, as the days went on it was just as hard to believe that the world of the opera was the same world I was working in--right there in the same city--as it had been the first night to believe it was the same world as Centralia. I learned two things. One was that the Something Somewhere was there. The other that it was not there for me. "The world was full of things I couldn't understand, but I could understand--a little better--the woman who wore the white furs. "Oh Katie, you get so tired--you get so dead--all day long putting suspenders in a box--or making daisies--or addressing envelopes--or trying to remember whether it was apple or custard pie-- "And you don't get tired just because your back aches--and your head aches--and your hands ache--and your feet ache--you get tired--that kind of tired--because the city doesn't care how tired you get! "I often wondered why I went on, why any of them went on. I used to think we must be crazy to be going on." She was pondering it--somberly wistful. "Though perhaps we're not crazy. Perhaps it's the--call. Katie, what is it? That call? That thing that makes us keep on even when our Something Somewhere won't have anything to do with us?" Katie did not reply. She had no reply. "At last I got in the telephone office. That's considered a fine place to work. They're like Miss Osborne; they believe it is one of the fundamental principles of life that all must have pleasures. But they were like the pleasures of Centralia--not God-fearing, exactly, but so dutiful. They didn't have anything to do with 'calls.' "The real pleasures were going over the wire. It was my business to make the connections that arrange those pleasures. A little red light would flash--sometimes it would flash straight into my brain--and I'd say 'Number, please?'--always with the rising inflection. Then I'd get the connection and Life would pass through the cords. That was the closest I came to it--operating the cords that it went through. There was a whole city full of it--beautiful, laughing, loving Life. But it was on the wire--just as in Centralia it had been in the pictures--and in the box. And oh I used to get so tired--so tight--operating the cords for Life. Sometimes when I left my chair the whole world was one big red light. And at night they danced dances for me--those little red lights." She brushed her hand before her eyes as if they were there again and she would push them away. "Katie," she suddenly burst forth, "if you ever do pray--if you believe in praying--pray sometimes for the girl who goes to Chicago to find what you call the 'joy of living.' Pray for the pilgrims who go to the cities to find their Something Somewhere. And whatever you do, Katie--whatever you do--don't ever laugh at the people who kill themselves because they're tired of not having any fun!" "But wasn't there _any_ fun, dear?" Katie asked after a moment. Ann did not speak, but looked at Katie strangely. "Yes," she said. "Afterwards. Differently." They were silent. Something seemed to be outlining itself between them. Something which was meaning to grow there between them. "There came a time," said Ann, "when all of life was not going over the wire." And still Katie did not speak, as if pushed back by that thing shaping itself between them. "Your Something Somewhere," said Ann, very low, "doesn't always come in just the way you were looking for it. But, Katie, if you get _very_ tired waiting for it--don't you believe you might take it--most any way it came?" It was a worn and wistful face she turned to Katie. Suddenly Katie brushed away the thing that would grow up between them and laid her cheek upon Ann's hair. "Poor child," she murmured, and the tears were upon Ann's soft brown hair. "Poor weary little pilgrim." CHAPTER XXII Ann remained in her room all of the next day. Katie encouraged her to do so, wishing to foster the idea of illness. It did not need much fostering. She had not gone back to those old days without leaving with them most of her newly accumulated vitality. But it was weakness rather than nervousness. Talking to Katie seemed to have relieved a pressure. It was Katie who was nervous. It was as if a battery within her had been charged to its uttermost. She was in some kind of electric communication with life. She was tingling with the things coming to her. So charged was she with new big things that it was hard to manage the affairs of her household as old things demanded they be managed that day. She told Mrs. Prescott again how sorry she and Ann were that Ann had given way. Mrs. Prescott received it with self-contained graciousness. Her one comment was that she trusted when her son decided to marry he would content himself with a wife who had not gone upon a quest. Katie smiled and agreed that it might get him a more comfortable wife. The son himself she tried to avoid. That thing which had tried to shape itself between her and Ann still remained there, a thing without body but vaguely outlined between Ann and all other things. They had not drawn any nearer to it. They let the story rest at the place where all of life had not been going over the wire. And Katie told herself that she understood. That Ann was to be judged by the Something Somewhere she had formed in her heart rather than by whatever it was life had tardily and ungenerously and unwisely brought her. That Ann might still cling to a Something Somewhere--a thing for which even yet she would keep the heart right--was suggested that afternoon when Katie told her of Captain Prescott. She had not meant to tell her. She tried to think she was doing it in order to know how to meet Harry, but had to admit finally that she did it for no nobler reason than to see how Ann would take it. She took it most unexpectedly. "I am sorry," she said simply, "but I do not care at all for Captain Prescott. I--" She paused, coloring slightly as she said with a little laugh: "We all like to be liked, don't we, Katie? And with me--well it meant something just to know I could be liked--in that nice kind of way. It helped. But that's all--so I hope he doesn't care very much for me. Though if he does," concluded Ann sagely, "he'll get over it. He's not the caring sort." The words had a familiar sound; after a moment she remembered them as what he had said that night of the "Don't You Care" girls. While she would have been panic-stricken at finding Ann interested, she was more discomfited than relieved at not finding her more impressed. "To marry into the army, Ann," she said, "is considered very advantageous." Ann was lying there with her face pillowed upon her hand. She turned her large eyes, about which just then there were large circles, seriously, it would even seem rebukingly, upon Katie. "If I ever should marry," she said, "it will be for some other reason than because it is 'advantageous.'" Katie felt both rebuked and startled. Most of the girls she knew--girls who had never worked in factories or restaurants or telephone offices, or had never thought of taking their own lives, had not scorned to look upon marriages as advantageous. Nor, for that matter, had Katie herself. Ann's superior attitude toward marriage turned Katie to religion. As the niece of a bishop she was moved to set Ann right on things within a bishop's domain. And underlying that was an impulse to set her right with herself. "Ann," she said, "if somebody said to you, 'I starve you in the name of Katie Jones,' wouldn't you say, 'Oh no you don't. Starve me if you want to, but don't tell me you do it in the name of Katie Jones. She doesn't want people starved!'" "I could say that," said Ann, "because I know you, and know you don't want people starved. But if I'd never heard anything about you except that I was to be starved in your name--" "I should think even so you might question. Didn't it ever occur to you that God had more to do with your Something Somewhere than He did with things done in His name in Centralia?" "Why, Katie, how strange you should think of that. For I thought of it--but I supposed it was the most wicked thought of all." "How strange it would be," said Katie, "if He had more to do with the 'call' than with the God-fearing things you were called from." For an instant Ann's face lighted up. But it hardened. "Well, if He had," she said, "it seems He might have stood by me a little better after I was 'called.'" Katie had no reply for that, so she turned to her uncle, the Bishop. "Well there's one place where you're wrong, Ann; and that is that religion is incompatible with the love of dogs. You know my uncle--my mother's brother--is a bishop. I don't know just how well uncle understands God, but if he understands Him as well as he does dogs then he must be well fitted for his office. I don't think in his heart uncle would have any respect for any person--no matter how religious--or even how much they subscribed--who wouldn't appreciate the tragedy of losing one's dog. Uncle has a splendid dog--a Great Dane; they're real chums. He often reads his sermons to Caesar. He says Caesar can stay awake under them longer than some of the congregation. I once shocked, but I think secretly delighted uncle, by saying that he rendered to Caesar the things that were Caesar's and to God what Caesar left. Well, one dreadful day someone stole Caesar. They took him out of town, but Caesar got away and made a return that has gone down into dog history. Poor uncle had been all broken up about it for three days. He was to preach that morning. My heart ached for him as he stood there at his study window looking down the street when it was time to go. I knew what he was hoping for--the way you go on hoping against hope when your dog's lost. And then after uncle had gone, and just as I was ready to start myself, I heard the great deep bark of mighty Caesar! You may know I was wild about it--and crazy to get the news to uncle. I hurried over to church, but service had begun. But because I was bursting to tell it, and because I appreciated something of what it would mean to talk about the goodness of God when you weren't feeling that way, I wrote a little note and sent it up. I suppose the people who saw it passed into the chancel in dignified fashion thought it was something of ecclesiastical weight. What it said was, 'Hallelujah--he's back--safe and sound. K--.' "It was great fun to watch uncle--he's very dignified in his official capacity. He frowned as it was handed him, as if not liking the intrusion into holy routine. He did not open it at once but sat there holding it rebukingly--me chuckling down in the family pew. Then he adjusted his glasses and opened it--ponderously. I wish you could have seen his face! One of our friends said he supposed it read, 'Will give fifty thousand.' He quickly recalled his robes and suppressed his grin, contenting himself with a beatific expression which must have been very uplifting to the congregation. I think I never saw uncle look so spiritual. And I know I never heard him preach as feelingly. When he came to the place about when sorrow has been upon the heart, and seemed more than the heart could bear, but when the weight is lifted, as the loving Father so often does mercifully lift it--oh I tell you there were tears in more eyes than uncle's. I had my suspicions, and that night I asked, 'Uncle, did you preach the sermon you meant to preach this morning?' And uncle--if he weren't a bishop I would say he winked at me--replied, 'No, dear little shark. I had meant to preach the one about man yearning for Heaven because earth is a vale of tears.' I'm just telling you this yarn, Ann, to make you see that religion doesn't necessarily rule out the love of dogs." "It's a nice story, and I'm glad you told me," replied Ann. "Only my father would say that your uncle had no religion." Katie laughed. "A remark which has not gone unremarked. Certainly he hasn't enough to let it harden his heart. As I am beginning to think about things now it seems to me uncle might stand for more vital things than he does, but for all that I believe he can love God the more for loving Caesar so well." They were quiet for a time, thinking of Ann's father and Katie's uncle; the love of God and the love of dogs and the love of man. Many things. Then Ann said: "Naturally you and I don't look at it the same way. I see you were brought up on a pleasant kind of religion. The kind that doesn't matter." That phrase started the electric batteries within Katie and the batteries got so active she had to go for a walk. In the course of the walk she stopped at the shops to see Wayne. She wanted to know if he would let Worth go into the country for a week with Ann. An old servant of theirs--a woman who had been friend as well as servant to Katie's mother--lived on a farm about ten miles up the river and it had been planned that Worth--and Katie, too, if she would--go up there for a week or more during the summer. It seemed just the thing for Ann. It would get her away from Captain Prescott and his mother, and from Major Darrett, who was coming in a few days. Katie believed Ann would like to be away from them all for about a week, and get her bearings anew. And Katie herself would like to be alone for a time and get her bearings, too, and make some plans. In one way or other she was going to help Ann find her real Something Somewhere. Perhaps she would take her to Europe. But until things settled down, as Katie vaguely put it, she thought it just the thing for Ann to have the little trip with Worth. Wayne listened gravely, but did not object. He was quiet, and, Katie thought, not well. She suggested that working so steadily during the hot weather was not good for him. He laughed shortly and pointed through the open door to the shops where long rows of men were working at forges--perspiration streaming down their faces. But instead of alluding to them he asked abruptly: "How is she today?" "Tired," said Katie. "She didn't sleep well last night." Something in the way he was looking at her brought to Katie acute realization of how much she cared for Wayne. He was her big brother. She had always been his little sister. They were not giving to thinking of it that way--certainly not speaking of it--but the tenderness of the relationship was there. Consciousness of it came now as she seemed to read in Wayne's look that she hurt him in withholding her confidence, in not having felt it possible to trust even him. She broke under that look. "Wayne dear," she said unevenly, "I don't deny there is something to tell. I'd like to tell you, if I could. If ever I can, I will." His reply was only to dismiss it with a curt little nod. But Katie knew that did not necessarily mean that he was feeling curt. She was drawn back to the open door from which she could see the long double line of men working steadily at the forges. "What are those men doing?" she asked. "Forging one of the parts of a rifle," he replied. It recalled what the man who mended the boats had said of the saddles: that the first war those saddles would see would be the war over the manufacture of them. Would he go so far as to say the first use for the rifles--? Surely not. He must have been speaking figuratively. But something in the might of the thing--the long lines of men at work on rifles to be used in a possible war--made the industrial side of it seem more vital and more interesting than the military phase. This was here. This was real. There was practically no military life at the Arsenal--not military life in the sense one found it at the cavalry post. That had made it seem, from a military standpoint, uninteresting. But here was the real life--over in what the women of the quarter vaguely called "the shops," and dismissed as disposed of by the term. Suddenly she wondered what all those men thought about God. Whether either the hard blighting religion of Ann's father, or the aesthetic comfortable religion of her uncle "mattered" much to them? Were the things which "mattered" forging a religion of their own? But just what were those things that mattered? A young man had entered and was speaking to Wayne. After a second's hesitation Wayne introduced him to Katie as Mr. Ferguson, who was helping him. He had an open, intelligent face--this young mechanic. He did not seem overwhelmed at being presented to Captain Jones' sister, but merely replied pleasantly to her greeting and was turning away. But Katie was not going to let him get away. If she could help it, Katie was not going to let any one get away who she thought could tell her anything about the things which were perplexing her--all those things pressing closer and closer upon her. "Do many of these men go to church?" she asked. He appeared startled. Katie's gown did not suggest a possible tract concealed about it. "Why yes, some of them," he laughed. "I don't think the majority of them do." Then she came right out with it. "What would you say they look upon as the most important thing in life?" He looked startled again, but in more interested way. "Higher wages and shorter hours," he said. "Are you a socialist?" she demanded. It came so unexpectedly and so bluntly that it confused him. "Why, Katie," laughed her brother, "what do you mean by coming over here and interviewing men on their politics?" "What made you think I was a socialist?" asked Ferguson. "Because you had such a quick answer to such a big question, and seemed so sure of yourself. I'm reading a book about socialists. They don't seem to think there is a particle of doubt they could put the world to rights, and things are so intricate--so confused--I don't see how they can be so sure they're saying the final word." "I don't know that they claim to be saying the final word, but they do know they could take away much of the confusion." Katie was thinking of the story she had heard the night before. "Do you think socialism's going to remove all the suffering from the world? Reach all the aches and fill all the empty places? Get right into the inner things that are the matter and bring peace and good will and loving kindness everywhere?" She had spoken impetuously, and paused with an embarrassed laugh. The young mechanic was looking at her gravely, but his look was less strange than Wayne's. "I don't think they'd go that far, Miss Jones. But they do know that there's a lot of needless misery they could wipe out." "They're out and out materialists, aren't they? Everything's economic--the economic basis for everything in creation. They seem very cocksure that getting that the way they want it would usher in the millennium. You said the most important thing in life to these men was higher wages and shorter hours. I don't blame them for wanting them--I hope they get them--but I don't know that I see it as very promising that they regard it as the most important thing in life. To do less and get more is not what you'd call a spiritual aspiration, is it?" she laughed. "This is what I mean--it's not the end, is it?" "Socialists wouldn't call it the end. But it's got to be the end until it can become the means." "Yes, but if you get in the habit of looking at it as an end, will there be anything left for it to be a means to?" "Why yes, those spiritual aspirations you mention." "Unless by that time the world's such an economic machine it doesn't want spiritual aspirations." "Well Heaven help the working man that's got them in the present economic machine," said Ferguson a little impatiently. She, too, moved impatiently. "Oh I don't know a thing about it. It's absurd for me to be talking about it." "Why I don't think it's at all absurd, only I don't think you see the thing clear to the end, and I wish you could talk to somebody who sees farther than I do. I'm new to it myself. Now there's a man doing a lot of boat repairing up here above the Island. I wish you could talk to him. He'd know just what you mean, and just how to meet you." "Oh, would he?" said Katie. "What's his name?" "Mann. Alan Mann." "Why, Katie," laughed Wayne, "it must be that he's that same mythical creature known as the man who mends the boats." "Yes," said Katie, "I fancy he's the very same mythical creature." "My little boy talks about him," Wayne explained. "Yes, he's the same one. I've seen him talking to your little boy and one of the soldiers. He's a queer genius." "In what way is he a queer genius?" asked Katie. "Why--I don't know. He's always got a way of looking at a thing that you hadn't seen yourself." He looked up with a little smile from the tool he was trying to adjust. "I'd like to have you tell him you were worrying about socialism hurting spiritual aspirations." "Would he annihilate me?" "No, he wouldn't want to annihilate you, if he thought you were trying to find out about things. He'd guide you." "Oh--so he's a guide, is he? Is he a spiritual or an economic guide?" she laughed. "I think he might combine them," he replied, laughing too. "He must be remarkable," said Kate. "He is remarkable, Miss Jones," gravely replied the admirer of the man who mended the boats. "I wish you could have heard him talking to a crowd of men last Sunday." "Dear me--is he a public speaker?" "Yes--in a way. And he writes things." Katie wanted to ask what things, but they were cut short by the entrance of Captain Prescott. It was curious how his entrance did cut them short. She smiled to herself, wondering what he would have thought of the conversation. He followed her to the door and inquired for Miss Forrest. His manner was constrained, but his eyes were begging for an explanation. He looked unhappy, and Katie hurried away from him. It seemed she could not bear to have any more unhappiness come pressing against her, even the unhappiness she was confident would pass away. In her mood of that day it seemed to Katie that the affairs of the world were too involved for any one to have a solution for them. Life surged in too fiercely--too uncontrollably--to be contained within a formula. As she continued her walk, winding in and out of the wooded paths, awe spread its great wings about her at thought of the complexity and the fathomlessness of the relationships of life. She had but a little peep into them, but that peep held the suggestion of limitlessness. Because a lonely girl in a barren little town in Indiana had dreamed dreams which life would not deliver to her, life now was beating in upon Katie Jones. Because Ann had been foiled in her quest for happiness, sobering shadows were falling across the sunny path along which Katie had tripped. Did life thwarted in one place take it out in another? Because Ann could not find joy was it to be that Katie could not have peace? Had Ann's yearning for love been the breath blowing to flame Katie's yearning for understanding? Because Ann could not dream her way to realities did it mean that Katie must fight her way to them? They were such big things--such resistless things--these wild new things which were sweeping in upon her. With the emotion of the world surging in and out like that how could any one claim to have a solution for the whole question of living? She seemed passing into a country too big and too dark for her of the sunny paths. She needed a guide. She grew lonely at thought of how badly she needed her guide. She turned for comfort to thought of the things she would do for Ann. She would pay it back in revealing to Ann the beauty of the world. She would assume the responsibility of the Something Somewhere. Perhaps in fulfilling a dream she would find a key to reality. She found pleasure in the vision of Ann in the old world cathedrals. How wisely they had builded--builders of those old cathedrals--in expressing religion through beauty. At peace in the beauty of form, might Ann not find an inner beauty? She believed Ann's nature to be an intensely religious one. How might Ann's soul not flower when she at last saw God as a God of beauty? Thus she soothed herself in building a future for Ann. Sought to appease those surgings of life with promise that Ann should at last find the loveliness of life. But in the end it led to a terrifying vision. A vision of thousands upon thousands of other dreamers of dreams whose soul stuff might be slowly ebbing away in long dreary days of putting suspenders in boxes. Of thousands of other girls who might be growing faint in operating the wires for life. Oh, she had power to fill Ann's life--but would that have power to still for her the mocking whispers from the dreams which had died slow deaths in all the other barren lives? Even though she took Ann from the crowd to a far green hill of happiness, would not Katie herself see from that far green hill all the other girls "called" to life, going forth as pilgrims with the lovely love-longing in their hearts only to find life waiting to seize them for the work of the woman who wore the white furs? A sob shook Katie. The woe of the world seemed surging just beneath her--rising so high that it threatened to suck her in. But because she was a fighter she mastered the sob and vowed that rather than be sucked in to the woe of the world she would find out about the world. Certainly she would sit apart no longer. She would study. She would see. She would live. Life had become a sterner and a bigger thing. She would meet it in a sterner and bigger way. To understand! That was the greatest thing in life. That passion to understand grew big within her. How could she hope to go laughing through a world which sobbed? How turn from life when she saw life suffering? Why she could not even turn from a little bird which she saw suffering! There was a noble wistfulness in her longing to talk again with the man who mended the boats. CHAPTER XXIII In temporary relaxation from the stress of that mood she was glad to see her friend Major Darrett. He did not suggest the woe of the world. Because the big new things had become--for the moment, at least--too much for her, there was rest in the shelter of the small familiar things. So much of the unknown had been beating against her that she was glad for a little laughing respite in the known. He stood for a world she knew how to deal with. In that he seemed to offer shelter; not that he would be able to do it for long. He always roused a particular imp in Katie which wanted to be flirtatious. She found now, with a certain relief, that the grave things of life had not exterminated that imp. She would scarcely have felt acquainted with herself had it perished. And because she was so pleased to find it alive she let it grow very live indeed. Ann and Worth had been gone for five days. Ann had seemed to like the idea of going. She said she would be glad to be alone for a time and "rest up," as she vaguely put it. Katie told her that when she came back they would make some plans; and she told her she was not to worry about things; that everything was going to be all right. Ann received it with childlike trust. She seemed to think that it was all in Katie's hands, to accept with a child's literalness that Katie would not let the old things come back, that she would "shut the door in their face." Other things were in Katie's hands that day: preparations for a big dinner they were giving that night. It was for some cavalry people who were stopping there. And in addition to the cavalry officers and their wives there was a staff officer from Washington who was valuable to Wayne just then. Katie was anxious that the dinner be a success. She was glad Major Darrett was there. He went a long way toward assuring its success. And Zelda Fraser was with the party. Katie had seen her for a moment that morning, and would see her again at night. She was stopping with Caroline Osborne, whom she had known at school. Zelda did not suggest the woe of the world. Neither did she suggest the dreams of the world. It was early in the afternoon and the Major and Katie were having a conference. He was acquainted with the palate of the visiting staff officer, and was assuring Katie that she was on the way to his good graces. They had gone into the library, where Katie was arranging flowers. He offered a suggestion there, too. He had an intuitive knowledge of such things, seemed to be guided by inner promptings as to which bowl should hold the lavender sweet peas and which the pink ones. Though Katie disputed his judgment, glad to be on ground where she could dispute with assurance. They argued it hotly, as if sweet peas were the most vital things in the world. It was good to be venting all one's feeling on things so tangible and knowable as sweet peas. Her dinner safe in the hands of experts, Katie made herself comfortable and told her friend the Major that she wished now to be put in a brilliant mood. That a brilliant mood was the one thing the skilled laborers in possession of her house could not furnish. He gallantly defied any laborer in the world to be so skilled as to get Katie out of a brilliant mood. She told him that was silly, that she had grown very stupid. He challenged her to prove it. Katie felt very much at home with him; not merely at home with him the individual, but comfortably at home with the things he represented. It gave her a nice homelike feeling to be flirting with him. And flirting with him herself, she grew interested in all those others who had flirted with him--she knew they were legion. She seemed to see them off there in the background--a lovely group of spoiled darlings. She did not suppose many of them were much the worse for having flirted with Major Darrett. Suddenly she laughed and told him she regarded him as one of the great educators of the age. He wanted to know in what way he was a great educator. Katie would not tell him. There ensued a gay discussion from which she emerged feeling as if she had had a cocktail. And looking that way; looking, at least so he seemed to think, from the manner in which he leaned forward regarding her--most attractive, her cheeks so pink, her eyes dancing a little dance of defiance at him, and on her lips a mocking little smile, more sophisticated than any smile he had ever seen before on Katie's lips. "Katie of the laughing eyes"--he had once called her. She was leaning back lazily, a suggestion of insolence in her assurance. As she leaned back that way he marked the lines of her figure as he had never marked them before. He had previously thought of Katie as a good build for golf. Now that did not seem to express the whole of it--and Katie seemed to know it would not express the whole of it. And in summarizing Katie as having a good build for golf he had not properly appraised Katie's foot. It was thrust out now from her very short skirt as if Katie were quite willing he should know it for a lovely foot. And her arm, which was hanging down from the side of the chair, seemed conscious of being something more than a good arm for golf. She looked so like a child, and yet so lurkingly like a woman. It gave him a new sense of Katie. It blew the warm breath of life over an idea he had had when he came there. He had just come from Zelda Fraser, having had luncheon at the Osbornes'. He had once thought Zelda stimulating. Now she did not seem at all stimulating in comparison with Katie. She was too obvious. That lurking something in Katie's eyes, that mysterious smile she had, made Katie seem subtle. If this were to be added to all her other charms-- Katie had always seemed delightfully daring in an innocent sort of way. It seemed now she might be capable of being subtle in a sophisticated way. He had always thought of Katie as romping. A distinguished and quite individual form of romping. She even had a romping imagination. He loved her for her merriness, for her open sunniness. That had been an impersonal love, not very different from the way he might have loved a sister. In fact he had more than once wished Katie were his little sister instead of Wayne's. He did not wish that now. She became too fascinating and too desirable in her mysterious new complexity. There was zest in discovering Katie after he had known her so long. And her eyes and her smile seemed jeering at him for having been such a long while in discovering her. He wanted to kiss her. That mocking little smile seemed daring him to kiss her. And yet he did not dare to. It seemed part of Katie's lovely new complexity that she could invite and forbid at one and the same time. Now Zelda could not have done more than the inviting--and so many could invite. He rose and stood near her. "Katie, you don't mean to marry Prescott, do you?" She clapped her hands above her head and laughed like a child immensely tickled about something. He laughed, too, and then asked to be informed what he was laughing at. "Oh, you're just laughing because I am," laughed Katie. "Then may I ask, mysterious one, what you're laughing at?" "Oh I'm laughing at a tumble I once took. 'Twas such a tumble." "I'd like to tumble to the tumble." "You would like it. You'd love it." "I hadn't thought," said the Major, "that when I asked if you meant to marry Prescott I was classifying with the great humorists of all time." "And I hadn't thought," she returned, "that when I thought Prescott meant to marry me I was classifying with the great tumblers of all time!" Suddenly she stopped laughing. "No, I don't mean to marry Harry, and I can further state with authority that Harry doesn't mean to marry me." The laughter went from even her eyes--thinking, perhaps, of whom Harry did mean to marry. But she was not going to let herself become grave. If she grew quiet she would know again about the woe of the world--surging right underneath. The only way not to know it was underneath was to keep merrily dancing away in one's place on top of it. She made a curious little gesture of flicking something from her hand and whistled a romping little tune. He stood there surveying her. "It wouldn't do at all for you to marry Prescott, Katie. He's a likeable enough fellow, but with it all something of a duffer." "Just what kind of man," asked Katie demurely, "would you say I had better marry?" He sat down in a chair nearer her. "Just what kind of man would you like to marry?" "How do you know," she asked, still demurely, "that I would like to marry any?" "Oh you must have a guide, Katie. You must be guided through this wicked world." She bit her lip and turned away when he told her she must have a guide. But she turned back, and seriously. "Is it a wicked world?" With that he ventured to pat the hand now lying on the arm of the chair so near him. "Well you'll never know it, if it is. We'll keep it all from you, Katie. You're safe." Katie pulled her hand away petulantly. "If there's anything I don't want to be," she said, "it's safe." That seemed to amuse him. "I only meant," he laughed, "safe from the great outer world." "Tell me," said Katie, "what's in the great outer world?" He sat there smiling at her as one would smile at a dear inquisitive child. "Have you made many excursions into the great outer world?" she asked boldly. "Oh yes," he replied lightly, "I've been something of an explorer. All men, you know, Katie, are born explorers. Though for the most part I must say I find our own little world the more attractive." Then he surprised her. "Katie, would you think a man a brute to propose to a girl on the day she was giving an important dinner?" But right there she pulled herself in. "No more tumbles!" thought Katie. "It would seem rather inconsiderate, wouldn't it? Such a man wouldn't seem to have a true sense of values." "Well, dinner or no dinner, the man I have in mind has a true sense of values. He has a true sense of values because he knows Katherine Wayneworth Jones for the most desirable thing in all the world." It did surprise her, and the surprise grew. None of them had thought of Major Darrett as what they called a marrying man. And on the heels of the surprise came a certain sense of triumph. Katie knew that any of the girls in what he called their little world would be looking upon it as a moment of triumph, and there was triumph in gaining what others would regard as triumph. "How old are you, Katie?" he asked. She told him. "Twenty-five. And I'm forty-one. Is that prohibitive?" She looked at him, thinking how lightly the years had touched him--how lightly, in all probability, they would touch him. He had distinctly the military bearing. He would have that same bearing at sixty. And that same charm. He was one to whom experience gave the gift of charm more insidiously than youth could give it. Life would be more possible with him than with any man she knew within the enclosure. If one were to go dancing and smiling and flirting through the world Major Darrett would be the best possible man to go with. As she looked at him, smiling at her half tenderly and half humorously, life with Major Darrett presented itself as such an attractive thing that there was almost pain in the thought of not being able to take it. For deep within her she never questioned not being able to take it. But for the moment-- "You see, Katie," he was saying, "I would be the best possible one for you to be married to, because you could go right on having flirtations. Of course I needn't tell you, Katie dear, that you're a flirt. The trouble with your marrying most fellows would be that they wouldn't like it." "And of course," she replied, "I would be a good one for you to marry because having my own flirtations I wouldn't be in a position to be critical about yours." He laughed quite frankly. Katie leaned back and sat there smiling at him, that new baffling smile he found so alluring. "But do you know, Katie, I think, for a long time, anyway, we could keep busy flirting with each other." "And we would keep all the busier," she said, "knowing that the minute we stopped flirting with each other one of us would get busy flirting with somebody else." He laughed delightedly. "Katie, where did you learn it was very fetching to say outrageous things so demurely?" "Tell me," said Katie, more seriously, "why do you want to marry?" "Until about an hour ago I wanted to marry--oh for the most bromidic of reasons. Just because, in the natural course of events, it seemed the next thing for me to do. I'll even be quite frank and confess I had thought of you in that bromidic version of it. Had thought of it as 'eminently suitable'--also, eminently desirable. We'd like to do the same things. We'd get on--be good fellows together. But now I want to marry--and I want to marry _you_--because I think you're quite the most fascinating thing in all the world!" Lightly and yet seriously he spoke of things--of his own prospects. She knew how good they were. Of where and how they would probably live;--a pleasant picture it was he could draw. It would mean life along the sunny paths. And very sunny indeed it seemed they would be--if possible at all. Certainly one would never have to explain any of one's jokes to Major Darrett. For just a moment she let herself drift into it. And knowing she was drifting, and not knowing it was for just the moment, he rose and bent over her chair. "Katie," he whispered, and there was passion in his voice, "I think I can make you fall in love with me." The little imp in Katie took possession. And something deeper than the little imp stirred vaguely at sound of that thing in his voice. She raised her face so that it was turned up to him. "You think you could? Now I wonder." "Oh you wonder, do you--you exasperating little wretch! Well just give me a chance--" But suddenly he was standing at attention, his face colorless. Katie jumped up guiltily, and there leaning against the door--all huddled down and terrible looking--was Ann. "Why, Katie," she whispered thickly--"_Katie_! But you told me--you _promised_ me--that you would _shut the door in his face_." CHAPTER XXIV It took her a number of seconds to get the fact that they must know each other. And even then she could get no grip on the situation. She was too shaken by having jumped--as though she were some vulgar housemaid! And why was Ann looking like that! She looked dreadful--huddled up that way as if some one was going to beat her! "Why you can't know each other," said Katie wildly. "How could you know each other? Where would you know each other? And if you _do_ know each other,"--turning upon him furiously--"need we all act like thieves?" He tried to speak, but seemed unable to. He had lost command of himself, save in so far as standing very straight was concerned. She wished Ann would stand up! It gave her such an awful sense of shame to see Ann huddled like that. "Katie," Ann whispered, "you told me--" "I never told you I'd shut the door in Major Darrett's face!" said Katie harshly. "And what are you talking about? What does this all mean?" He had recovered himself. "Why it merely means, Katie, that we--as you surmised--at one time--knew each other. The--the acquaintance terminated--not pleasantly. That's all. A slight surprise for the moment. No harm done." Then Ann did stand straight. "It means," she said shrilly, "that if I had never known him"--pointing at him--"you would never have found me there." She pointed down toward the river. "Oh no, no harm done, of course--No harm done--" "Please let us try and keep very quiet," said Katie coldly. "It is--it is vulgar enough at best. Let us be as quiet--as decent as we can." Ann crouched down again as though struck. Then Katie laughed, bitterly. "Why really, it's quite as good as a play, isn't it? It's quite a scene, I'm sure." "It needn't be," said he soothingly, and relaxing a little. "I own I was startled for the moment, and--discomfited. But you were quite right--we'll go into no hysterics. What I can't understand"--looking from one to the other--"is what she's doing _here_." Katie's head went up. "She's here, I'll have you know, as my friend. Just as you're here as my friend." She thought Ann was going to fall, and her heart softened a little. "Suppose you go up to my room, Ann. Lie down. Just--just lie down. Keep quiet. Why did you come home? Is something wrong?" Ann whispered that Worth had a sore throat. She had a chance to come down in an automobile. She thought she had better. She was sorry she had. "All right," said Katie. "It's all right. Just go lie down. I'll look after Worth--and you--in a minute." Ann left the room and Katie turned to the Major. "Well?" "You're so sensible, Katie," he said hurriedly, "in feeling the thing to do is make no fuss about things. Nothing is to be gained--But for God's sake, Katie, what is she doing here? Where did _you_ know her?" "Oh you tell first," said Katie, smiling a hard smile. "You tell where you found her, then I'll tell where I found her." "Really--really," he said stiffly, "I must refuse to discuss such a matter with _you_. I can only repeat--she has no business here." "Then pray why have you any business here?" He flushed angrily. But restrained himself and said persuasively: "Why, Katie, she's not one of us." "She's one of _me_," said Katie. "She's my friend." "I can only say again," he said shortly, "that she has no business to be." "As I am to be kept so safe from the wicked world," said Katie stingingly, "I presume it is not proper you discuss the matter with me. I take it, however, that she was one of those 'excursions' into the great outer world?" "Well," he said defiantly, "and what if she was? She was willing to be, I guess. She wasn't knocked down with a club." "Oh, no! Oh, my no! That wouldn't be your method. And when one is tired of exursions--I suppose one is at perfect liberty to abandon them--?" "Nonsense! You can't trump up anything of that sort. She wasn't 'abandoned.' She left in the night." He colored. "I beg your pardon. But as long as we're speaking frankly--" "Oh pray," said Katie, "let's not be overly delicate in this delicate little matter!" "Very well then. Her coming was her own choice. Her going away was her own choice. I can see that I have no great responsibility in the matter." "Why how clever you must be," said Katie, all the while smiling that hard smile, "to be able to argue it like that." He was standing there with folded arms. "I think I was very decent to her. All things considered--in view of the nature of the affair--I consider that I was very decent." Katie laughed. "Maybe you were. I found her in the very act of committing suicide." He paled, but quickly recovered himself. "That was not my affair. There must have been--something afterward." "Maybe. I'm sure I don't know. But you were the beginning, weren't you?" Suddenly she buried her face in her hands. "Oh I didn't think--I didn't think it could get in here! It's everywhere! It's everywhere! It's _getting_ me!" "Katie--dear Katie," he murmured, "don't. We'll get you out of this. You wanted to be kind. It was just a mistake of yours. We'll fix it up. Don't cry." And he put an arm about her. She stood before him with clenched hands, eyes blazing. "Don't touch me! Don't you touch me!" And she left him. In the hall Nora stopped her to say there were not enough champagne glasses. She made no reply. Champagne glasses--! She looked after Worth. Then she went to Ann. "Well, Ann," she began, her voice high pitched and unsteady, "this is about the limit, isn't it?" "Oh Katie," moaned Ann, "you told me--you told me--you understood. Why, Katie--you must have known there was some one." "Oh I knew there was some one, all right," said Katie, her voice getting higher and higher, her cheeks more and more red--"only I just hadn't figured, you see, on its being some one I knew! Why how under the sun," she asked, laughing wildly, "did you ever meet Major Darrett?" "I--I'll try to tell you," faltered Ann miserably. "I want to. I want to make you understand. Katie!--I'll die if you don't understand!" She looked so utterly wretched that Katie made heroic effort to get herself under control--curb that fearful desire to laugh. "I will try," she said quietly as she could. "I _will_ try." "Why, Katie," Ann began, "does it make so much difference--just because you know him?" "It makes all the difference! Can't you see--why it makes it so vulgar." Ann threw back her head. "Just the same--it wasn't vulgar. What I felt wasn't vulgar. Why, Katie," she cried appealingly, "it was my Something Somewhere! You didn't think that vulgar!" "Oh no," laughed Katie, "not before I knew it was Major Darrett! But tell me--I've got to know now. What is it? Where did you meet him? Just how bad is it, anyhow?" It must have been desperation led Ann to spare neither Katie nor herself. "I met him," she said baldly, "one night as I was standing on the corner waiting for a car. He had an automobile. He asked me to get in it--and I did. And that--began it." Katie stepped back from her in horror, the outrage she felt stamped all too plainly on her face. "And you call _that_ not vulgar? Why it was _common_. It was _low_." Then Ann turned. "Was it? Oh I don't know that you need talk. I wouldn't say much--if I were you. I guess I saw the look on his face when I came in. Don't think for a minute I don't know that look. _You got it there_. And let me tell you another thing. Just let me tell you another thing! Whatever I did--whatever I did--I know I never had the look you did when I came in! I never had that look of fooling with things!" Katie was white--powerless--with rage. "_You_ dare speak to _me_ like that!" she choked. "You--!" And all control gone she rushed blindly from the room. CHAPTER XXV She had no idea how long she had been walking. She was conscious of being glad that there was so big a place for walking, that walking was not a preposterous thing to be doing. She passed several groups of soldiers. They were reassuring; they looked so much in the natural order of things and gave no sign of her being out of that order. Though she knew she was out of it. It was dizzying--that feeling of having lost herself. She had never known it before. After she had walked very fast for what seemed a long time she seemed able to gather at least part of her forces back under control. That blinding sense of everything being scattered, of her being powerless, was passing. And the first thing sanity brought was the suggestion that Ann, too, might be like that. Once before Ann had been "scattered" that way--oh she understood it now as she had not been able to do then. And perhaps Ann would have less power to gather herself back-- She grew frightened. She turned toward home, walking fast as she could--worried to find herself so far away. Major Darrett stepped out from the library to speak to her, but she hurried past him up the stairs. Ann was not in the room where she had left her. She looked through the other rooms. She called to her. Then it must be--she told herself--all the while fear growing larger in her heart--that Ann, too, had gone out for a walk. "Worth," she asked, grotesquely overdoing unconcern, "where's Miss Ann? Has she gone for a walk?" "Why, Aunt Kate, she was called away." "Called _away_?" whispered Katie. "Called where?" "She said she was called away. She's gone." "But she's coming back? When did she say, dear," she pleaded, "that she would be back?" "I don't know, Aunt Kate. She felt awful bad because she had to go. She came and kissed me--she kissed me and kissed me--and said she hated to leave me--but that she had to go. She kept saying she had to." In the hall was Nora. "Nora," asked Katie, standing with her back to her, "what is it about Miss Forrest?" "She was called away, Miss Kate. A telegram. I didn't see no boy--" "They must have 'phoned it," said Katie sharply. "Yes'm. I didn't hear the 'phone. But I was busy. I'm so upset, Miss Kate, about them champagne glasses. We've telephoned over the river--" "Never mind the champagne glasses! What about Miss Forrest? How did she go? When did she go?" "She went in Mr. Osborne's automobile. Miss Osborne sent you some beautiful flowers, Miss Kate. Oh they're just lovely!" "Oh, I don't care anything about flowers! You say Ann went in the machine?" "Yes'm. She told the chauffeur--he brought the flowers--that big colored man, you know, Miss Kate--that she was called away, and would he take her to the station. And he said sure he would--and so they went. But, Miss Kate--it's most five o'clock--what will we do about those two champagne glasses!" "Merciful heavens, Nora! Stop talking about them! I don't care what you do about them!" She went down to the library. "Look here," she said to the Major, "what is this? What have you done? Where's Ann gone?" "I don't know a thing about it. I went over to the office--an appointment--and when I came back--hurried back because I was worried about you--I saw her going away in the Osborne car." "And never tried to stop her?" "See here, Katie. Why should I stop her? Best thing you can do is let her go." "Do you know--do you know," choked Katie--"that she may kill herself?" He laughed. "Oh I guess not. Calm down, Katie. She had her wits about her, all right. I heard her tell the man to drive her to the station. She had sense enough to take advantage of the car, you see. I guess she knows the ropes. Don't think she has much notion of killing herself." "Oh you don't. Much you know about it! You with your fine noble understanding of life!" She turned away, sobbing. "What shall I do? What _shall_ I do?" But in a moment she stopped. "The thing for me to do," she said, "is telephone the Osbornes' chauffeur." Which she did. Yes, he had taken the young lady to the station. He didn't know where she was going. He just pulled in to the station and then pulled right out again--she told him there was nothing more to do. He didn't believe she bought a ticket. He saw her walking out to get a train. No, he didn't know what train. There were two or three trains standing there. "What can I do?" Katie kept murmuring frantically. Suddenly her face lighted. She sat there thinking for a moment, then called her brother's office. Wayne, she was glad to find, was not there. She asked if she might speak to Mr. Ferguson. "Mr. Ferguson," she said, "this is--this is Captain Jones' sister. I want for a very particular--a very imperative reason--to speak at once to the--to your friend--that man--why the man that mends the boats, you know. Could you get word for him to come here--here, to my house--right away? Tell him it's very--oh _very_ important. Tell him Miss Jones says she--needs him." Ferguson said it was just quitting time. He'd go up there on his wheel. He thought he could find him. He would send him right down. She admired the way he controlled what must have been his astonishment. The man who mended the boats would come. He would know what to do. He would help her. She would keep as calm as she could until he got there. But surely--surely--Ann wouldn't go away and leave her without a word! Ann couldn't be so cruel as to let her worry like that. Why of course--Ann had left a note for her. So she looked for the note--tossed everything in the room topsy-turvey. Even looked in the closet. Again she heard Nora in the hall. "Nora," she said, and Katie's face was white and pleading, "didn't Miss Ann say anything about leaving me a note?" "Why yes, Miss Kate--yes--sure she did. I was so upset about them champagne glasses--" "Well, where is it? Oh, hurry, Nora. Tell me." "Why it's in the desk, Miss Kate. She said you was to look in the desk." She ran to it with a sob. "Nora, how could you let me--" Nora was saying again that she was so worried about the champagne glasses-- The desk, of course, would be the last place one would think of looking for a note! She found, and with trembling fingers smoothed out the note; it had been crumpled rather than folded. It was brief, and so written she could scarcely read it. "You see, Katie, you _can't_--you simply _can't_. So I'm going. When you come back, you won't want me to. That's why I've got to go now. I'd tell you--only I don't know. I'll get a train--just any train. I can't write. Because for one thing I haven't time--and for another if I began to say things I'd begin to cry--and then I wouldn't go. I've got to keep just this feeling--the one I told you about its _having_ to be-- "Katie, you're not like the rest of your world, but it is your world--and see what you get when you try to be any different from it! "Oh Katie--I didn't think I'd be leaving like _this_. I didn't think I'd ever say to you--" There it ended. "Miss Kate," Nora said, "Major Darrett wants to know if he may speak to you in the library." She went down mechanically. "Now, Katie," he began quietly and authoritatively, "there are several orders you must give, several things you must attend to, in relation to your dinner. Things seem a little disorganized, and it's getting late, and it won't do, you know, to get these people upset. Now Nora tells me that through some complication or other you're two champagne glasses short." Katie was staring at him. "And is _that_ all that matters? Two champagne glasses short! And here a life--Why what kind of people are we?" "Katie," he said, his voice well controlled, "we're just that kind of people. No matter what's at stake--no matter what we're thinking about things--or about each other--the thing we've got to do now--you know it--and you're going to do it--is go ahead with this affair." "I'm not going to have it! Why what do you think I'm made of? I won't. Telephone them. Call it off. I tell you I can't." "Katie, you think you can't, and yet you know you will. I know exactly what you're made of. I know what your father was made of. I know what your mother was made of. I know that no matter what it costs _you_--you'll go on as if nothing had occurred. Now will you telephone Prescott, or shall I? Ask him about the glasses. And if he can't do anything for you you'll have to call up Zelda at Miss Osborne's and tell the girls they can't come unless they each bring a glass. I'll do it if you want me to. They'll think it a great lark, you know, having to bring their own glasses or getting no champagne." "Yes," whispered Katie, "they'll think it a great lark. For that matter--everything's a great lark." She sank to a chair. Her tears were falling as she said again that everything was a great lark. He paid no attention to her but went to the telephone. But the tears were interrupted. "Miss Kate," said Nora, "can you come and look at the table a minute? They want to know--" She dried her eyes as best she could and went and looked at the table. She kept on looking at things--doing things--until she heard the bell. "If that's some one for me, Nora," she said, "show him in here, and don't interrupt me while he's here." She passed into a small room they used as a den. He came to her there. And when she saw that it was indeed he she broke down. "Something is the matter?" he asked gently. "You wanted me? You sent for me?" She raised her head. "Yes. I sent for you. I need you." It was evident she needed some one. He would scarcely have known her for Katie--so white, so shaken. "I'm glad you sent for me," he said simply. "Now won't you tell me what I can do?" "She's gone," whispered Katie. "Where?" "I don't know--I don't know where. Away. On a train. Some train. Any train. Somewhere. I don't know where. I thought--oh you'll find her for me--won't you? You _will_ find her--won't you?" She had stretched out her hands, and he took them, holding them strongly in both of his. "Don't you want to tell me what you know? I can't help you unless you tell me." Briefly she told him--wrenched the heart out of it in a few words. "You see, I failed," she concluded, looking up at him with swimming eyes. "The very first thing--the very first test--I failed. I wanted to do so much--thought I understood so well--oh I was so proud of the way I understood! And then just the minute it came up against _my_ life--" Her head went down to her hands, and because he was holding them it was upon his hands rather than hers it rested, Katie's head with its gold brown hair all disorderly. "Don't," he whispered, as she seemed breaking her heart with it. "Why don't you know all the world's like that? Don't you know we all can be fine and free until it comes up against _our_ lives?" "I was so _hard_!" she sobbed. "Yes--I know. We are hard--when it's our lives are touched. Don't cry, Katie." He spoke her name timidly and lingeringly. "Isn't that what life is? Just one long thing of trying and failing? But going on trying again! That's what you'll do." "If you can find her for me! But I never can hold up my head again--never believe in myself--never do anything--why I never can laugh again--not really laugh--if you don't find her for me." A curious look passed over his face with those last words. "Well if that's the case," he said, with a strange little laugh of his own, "I've got to find her." They talked of things. He would go to the station. He would do what he could. If he thought anything to be gained by it he would go on to Chicago. He had to go in a few days anyhow, he explained, to see about some work, and if it didn't seem a mere wild goose chase he would go that night. The change in Katie, the life which came back to her eyes, rewarded him. "I'd go with you to the station," she said, "only we're giving a big dinner to-night." She thought his face darkened. "Oh yes, I know. But that's the kind of person I am. We go on with the dinner--no matter what's happening. It's--our way." He seemed to be considering it as a curious phenomenon. "Yes, I know it is. And you can't help that either, can you? So you're going to be very festive in this house to-night?" "Oh _very_ festive in this house to-night. Some army people are here from Washington. We're going to have a gorgeous dinner, and I'm going to wear a gorgeous gown and drink champagne and try and smile myself into the good graces of a man who can do things for my brother and be--oh _so_ clever and festive." He looked at her as if by different route he had come again to that thing of pitying her; only along this other route the quality of the pity had changed and there was in it now a tender sadness. "It's not so simple a matter for you, is it--this 'being free'? You're of the bound, too, aren't you? And you've become conscious of your chains. There's all the hope and all the tragedy of it in that." He took an impulsive step toward her and smiled at her appealingly, a little mistily, as he said: "Only please don't tell me you're not going to laugh any more." CHAPTER XXVI As a matter of fact Katie did laugh a great deal that night. At least it passed for laughter, and the man who was worth cultivating for Wayne seemed to find it most attractive. It was evident to them all that Katie was getting on famously with him. It was well that she was, for Wayne himself seemed making little headway. Before dinner Katie had told him briefly that Ann had come down with Worth (whose sore throat didn't seem serious, after all) and then had been called away. She said she couldn't talk about it then; she would tell him later. But though they had a quiet host they had a vivid and a brilliant hostess. Those who knew Katie best, Mrs. Prescott in particular, kept watching her in wonderment. She had never known Katie to vie with Zelda Fraser in saying those daring things. Katie, though so merry, had seemed a different type. But to-night Katie and Zelda and Major Darrett kept things very lively. Katie was telling her distinguished guest the tale of the champagne glasses. "Just fancy," she said, "here was I, giving a dinner for you--and it looked as if somebody would have to turn teetotaler or drink out of the bottle! After I finally got it straightened out I told Zelda she must keep her hand as much as possible on the stem of her glass so it would not be noted she was drinking from gothic architecture and the rest of us from classic." "And you may have observed," blithely observed Zelda, "that keeping my hand on the stem of my glass is an order I am not loathe to obey--be it any old architecture." They laughed. Zelda was the daughter of a general, and could say very much what she pleased and be laughed at as amusing. It came to Katie in what large measure they all could do very much as they pleased. It was a game they played, and great liberty was accorded them in that game so long as they took their liberty in accordance with the prescribed rules of that game. But they guarded their own privileges with an intolerance for all those outside their game who would take privileges of their own. That--labeled a respect for good form--was in reality their method of self-defense. She looked at Zelda Fraser--Zelda with her bold black eyes, her red cheeks which she made still redder--and her _hair_--as long as people were "wearing" hair Zelda wore a little more than any one else. Nothing about her suggested anything so redeeming as a quest for Something Somewhere. No veiled splendor of a dream hovered tenderly over Zelda. Watching her as she bantered with Major Barrett it grew upon Katie as one of the grotesque things of the world that Zelda should be within and Ann without. Major Barrett had remained. It was Ann who had gone. Yet it was Ann had dreamed the dream. He who had made the "excursion" despoiling the dream. It was Ann had been "called." He who had preyed upon--cheated--that call. Yet she had not sent him away. She was too much in the game for that. She had not seemed to have the power. Certainly she had not had the wit nor the courage. He had remained and taken command. She had done as he told her. He was smiling approvingly upon her now, manifestly proud of the way Katie was playing the game. Seeing it as a thing to win his approval she could with difficulty continue it. She was thankful that the dinner itself had drawn to a close. Later, on the porch, Caroline Osborne asked for Ann. Zelda and Major Darrett and Harry Prescott were in the group at the time. "You mean she is not coming back?" she pursued in response to Katie's statement that Ann had been called away. "I don't know," said Katie. "I'm afraid not." "Who is she, Katie?" Zelda asked. "No one you know." Zelda turned to Prescott. "You know her?" "Yes," he said. His voice told Katie how hard he was finding it just then to play the game. "Like her?" "Yes," he replied. Zelda threw back her head in an impertinent way of hers that was called engaging. "Love her?" He stepped nearer Katie, as if for protection. His smile was a dead smile. "Really, Zelda," said Katie, in laughing protest. "I just wondered," said Zelda, "if she was going to marry into the army." Katie saw Major Darrett's smile. "If she did," she said, "the army would gain something that might do it good." Major Darrett was staring at her speechlessly. Harry gratefully. "You're very fond of her?" said Caroline Osborne in her sweet-toned way. "Very," said Kate in way less sweet. "Too bad we missed her," said Zelda, "especially if she would do us good. Now Cal here's going in for doing good, too. Only she's not trying to do it to the army. She's doing it to the working people." "Get the distinction," laughed the Major. "I must get hold of some stunt like that," said Zelda. "The world's getting stuntier and stuntier." She turned to Major Darrett. "Whom do you think I could do good to?" "Me," he said, and they strolled laughingly away together. A few minutes later Katie found herself alone with Captain Prescott. "Katie," he asked pleadingly, "where has Ann gone?" "She's been called away, Harry. She's--gone away." "But won't she be back?" Katie turned away. "I don't know. I'm afraid not." "Katie," he besought, "won't you help me? Won't you tell me where I can find her? I know--something's the matter. I know--something's strange. But I want to see her! I want to find her!" "I want to see her!--I want to find her!"--It invaded the chamber in Katie's heart she would keep inexorably shut. She dared not speak. But he was waiting, and she was forced to speak. "Harry, I'm afraid you'll have to forget Ann," she said unsteadily. "I'm afraid you'll have to--" Because she could not go on, sure if she did she would not be able to go on with the evening, she laughed. "I'll tell you what you do," she said briskly. "Marry Caroline Osborne. She's going to have heaps of money and will go in for philanthropy. 'Twill be quite stunty. Don't you see, even Zelda thinks it stunty?" He stepped back. "I had thought, Katie,"--and his voice pierced her armor--"that you were kind." She dared not let in anything so human as a hurt. "Well that's where you're wrong. I'm not kind," she said harshly. "So I see," he answered unsteadily. But of a sudden the fact that he had been drawn to Ann drew her irresistibly to him. He had been part of all those wonderful days--days of dream and play, or waking and wondering. She remembered that other night they had stood on the porch speaking of Ann--the very night she had become Ann. That fact that he had accepted her as Ann--cared for her--made it impossible to harden her heart against him. "Oh Harry," she said, voice shaking, "I'm sorry. So sorry. It's my fault--and I'm sorry. I didn't want you to be hurt. I didn't want--anybody to be hurt." Some one called to him and he had to turn away. She stepped into the shadow and had a moment to herself. What did it _mean_--she wondered. That one was indeed bound hand and foot and brain and heart and spirit? What had she done save prove that she could do nothing? Ann had been driven away. And in her house now were Zelda Fraser and Caroline Osborne and Major Darrett and all those others who were not dreamers of dreams. And the dream betrayed--she felt one with _them_. For she had turned the dream out of doors with Ann: the wonderful dream which sheltered the heart of reality, dream through which waking had come, from which all the long dim paths of wondering had opened--dream through which self had called. And what was there left? A house of hollow laughter was left--of pretense--"stunts"--of prescribed rules and intolerance with all breakers of rules even though the breakers of rules were dreamers of dreams. With a barely repressed sob she remembered what Ann had said in her story of her dog. "I could have stood my own lonesomeness. But what I couldn't stand was thinking about him.... I couldn't keep from thinking things that tortured me." It was that gnawed at the heart of it.... How go to bed that night without knowing that Ann had a bed? She had loved Ann because Ann needed her, been tender to her because Ann was her charge. She yearned for her now in fearing for her. More sickening than the pain of having failed was the pain of wondering where Ann would get her breakfast. Tears which she had been able to hold back even under the shame of her infidelity came uncontrollably with the simple thought that she might never do Ann's hair for her again. It seemed to Katie then that the one thing she could not do was go back to her guests. A boy was coming on a bicycle. He had a letter for Katie. She excused herself and went to the little room to read it--the same little room where they had been that afternoon. It was but a hurried note. He had found nothing at the station except that the Chicago train was probably there at the time. Doubtless she had taken it. He had taken a chance and wired the train asking her to wire Katie immediately. That was all he could think of to do. He was taking the night train for Chicago--not that he knew of anything to do there, but perhaps she would like to feel there was some one there. He would have to go soon anyhow--might as well be that night. He would be there three or four days. He told Katie where to address him. He would do anything she asked. He advised her, for the time, to remain where she was. Probably word would come to her there. She might be able to do more from there than elsewhere. It was not even certain Ann had gone to Chicago--by no means certain. And even if she had--how find her there if she did not wish to be found? At the last: "I suppose you're very gay at your dinner just now. That must be tough business--being gay. Don't let it harden your heart--as gayety like that could so easily do. And remember--you're _going on!_ You're not a quitter. And it's only the quitters stop when they fall down." Below, shyly off in one corner, written very lightly as if he scarcely dared write it, she found: "You don't know what a wonderful thing it is to me just to know that you are in the world." Katie went back to her guests with less gayety but more poise. Major Darrett had remained for a good-night drink with Wayne. He came out to Katie as she was going up stairs. "I was proud of you, Katie," he said. "I take no pride in your approval!" "You made a great hit, Katie." "Not with myself." "Katie," he suddenly demanded, "what were you up to? I can't get the run of it. For heaven's sake, what did you mean?" "You wouldn't understand," she murmured wearily, for she was indeed so very weary then. "Well, I'm afraid I wouldn't. I don't want to be harsh--when you've had such a hard day, but it looks to me as if you broke the rules." "What rules?" "Our rules. You didn't play the game fair, Katie--presenting her here. I never would have done that." "No," she said, "I know. You put what you call the rules of life so far above life itself." "And look here, Katie, what's this about Prescott? I'm not going to have him hurt. If he doesn't know the situation, and has any thought of marrying her--why I'm in honor bound to tell him." That fired her. "Oh you are, are you? Well if your honor moves you to that I'll have a few things to say about that same 'honor' of yours! To our distinguished guest of this evening, for instance," she laughed. He lost color, but quickly recovered himself. "Oh come now, Katie, you and I are not going to quarrel." "No, not if you can help it. That wouldn't be your way. But do you know what I think of the 'game' you play?" She had gone a little way up the stairs, and was standing looking back at him. Her eyes were shining feverishly. "I think it's a game for cheats." He did go colorless at that. "That's not the sort of thing you can say to a man, Katie," he said in shaking voice. "A game for cheats," she repeated. "The cheats who cheat with life--and then make rules around their cheating and boast about the 'honor' of keeping those rules. You'd scorn a man who cheated at cards. Oh you're very virtuous--all of you--in your scorn of lesser cheats. What's cards compared with the divinest thing in life!" "I tell you, I played fair," he insisted, his voice still unsteady. "Why to be sure you did--according to the rules laid down by the cheats!" Wayne came upon her upstairs a little later, sobbing. And sobbingly she told the story--her face buried too much of the time for her to see her brother's face, too shaken by her own sobs to mark how strange was his breathing. Wayne did not accuse her of not having played a fair game. He said almost nothing at all, save at the last, and that under his breath: "We'll move heaven and earth to get her back!" His one reproach was--"Oh Katie--you might have told _me_!" CHAPTER XXVII But they did not get her back. July had passed, and August, and most of September, and they had not found Ann. Heaven and earth were not so easily moved. Katie had tried, and the man who mended the boats had tried, and Wayne, but to no avail. There had come the one letter from her--letter seeking to save "Ann" for Katie. It was a key to Ann, but no key to her whereabouts save that it was postmarked Chicago. Those last three months had impressed Katie with the tragic indefiniteness of the Chicago postmark. She had spent the greater part of the summer there, at a quiet little hotel on the North Side, where she was nominally one of a party of army women. That was the olive branch to her Aunt Elizabeth on the chaperone question. For her own part, she had seen too many unchaperoned girls in Chicago that summer to care whether she was chaperoned or not. Her army friends thought Katie interested in some work which she did not care to talk about. They thought it interesting, though foolhardy to let it bring those lines. Katie was not a beauty, they said among themselves, and could not afford lines. Her charm had always been her freshness, her buoyancy and her blitheness. Now if she lost that-- Wayne had been there from time to time. It was but a few hours' ride from the Arsenal, and his detail to his individual work gave him considerable liberty. He, too, had more "lines" in September than he had had in June. That they attributed to his "strenuousness" in his work, and thought it to be deplored. After all, the department might throw him down--who knew what it might not do?--and then what would have been the use? For a man who did not have to live on his pay, Captain Jones was looked upon as unnecessarily serious. But Katie suspected that it was not alone devotion to military science had traced those lines. It surprised her a little that they should have come, but to Katie herself it was so vital and so tragic a thing that it was not difficult to accept the fact of its marking any one who came close to it. After that night at the dance there had several times stirred a vague uneasiness, calling out the thought that it was a good thing Wayne was, as she loosely thought it, immune. But even that uneasiness was lost now in sterner things. She had never gone into her reasons for looking upon her brother as "immune." It was an idea fixed in her mind by her association with his unhappiness with Clara. Knowing how much he had given, she thought of him as having given all. Her sense of the depth of his hurt had unanalyzed associations with finality, associations intrenched by Wayne's growing "queerness." It could not be said, however, that that queerness had stood in the way of his doing all he could. Some of the best suggestions had come from him. And Katie had reasons for suspecting he had done some searching of his own which he did not report to her. She knew that he was worried about her, though he understood too well to ask her to give up and turn back to her own life. Her gratitude to Wayne for that very understanding made her regret the more her inability to be frank with him about the man who mended the boats. She had had to tell him at first that he was helping, but Wayne had seemed to think it so strange, had appeared so little pleased with the idea, that she had not seen it as possible to make a clean breast of it. She told him that she had talked with him about Ann--that was because he had seen her, knew more about it than she did. And that she had talked with him again the day Ann left, thinking he might have seen her. That Wayne had not liked. "You should have sent for me," he said. "Never take outsiders into your confidence in intimate matters like that." And what she had not found it possible to try to make clear to him was that the man who mended the boats seemed to her anything but an outsider. And if he had not seemed so in those days of early summer, he seemed infinitely less so now. She talked with him of things of which she could not talk with anyone else. In those talks it was all the rest of the people of the world who were the outsiders. He had been there several times during the summer. Katie knew now that he did not mean to spend all his life mending boats. He was writing a play; it was things in relation to that brought him to Chicago. Katie wanted to know about the play, but when she asked he told her, rather shortly, that he did not believe she would like it. He qualified it with saying he did not know that anyone would like it. When he was there he went about with her as she looked for Ann. Every day she pursued her search, now in this way, now in that. That search brought her a vision of the city she would have had in no other way. It was that vision, revealed, interpreted, by her anxiety for Ann brought the sleepless nights and the ceaseless imagery and imaginings which caused her army friends to wish that dear Katie would marry before she, as they more feelingly than lucidly put it, lost out that way. She thought sometimes of Ann's moving picture show, showing her the things of which she had dreamed. All this, things seen in her search, had become to Katie as a moving picture show. It moved before her awake and asleep; "called" to her. She would stand outside the stores as the girls were coming out at night. Stores, factories, all places where girls worked she watched that way. By the hundreds, thousands, she saw them filling the city's streets as through the long summer one hot day after another drew to a close. Often she would crowd into the street cars they were crowding into, rush with them for the elevated trains, or follow them across the river and see them disappear into boarding-house and rooming-house, those hot, crowded places waiting to receive them after the hot, crowded day. Sometimes she would go for lunch to the places she saw them going to--always searching, and as she searched, wondering, and as she wondered, sorrowing. She came to know of many things: of "dates"--vulgar enough affairs many of them appeared to be. But she no longer dismissed them with that. She always wondered now if the sordid-looking adventure might not be at heart the divine adventure. Things which she would at one time have called "common" and turned from as such she brooded over now as sorry expression of a noble thing. And then she would go home to her friends at night and sometimes they would seem the moving-picture show--their pleasures and standards--the whole of their lives. And she sorrowed that where there was setting for loveliness the setting itself should so many times absorb it all, and that out on the city's streets that tender fluttering of life for life, divine yearning for joy that joy might give again to life, should find so many paths to that abyss where joy could be not and where the life of life must go. There were days which showed all too brutally that many were "called" and few were saved. Thus had she passed the summer, and thus it happened that she did not have in September all the freshness and the gladness that had been her charm in May. Though to the man waiting for her that afternoon she had another and a finer charm. Life had taken something from her, but she had wrested something from life. "I could have had a job," she said, and smiled. But the smile was soon engulfed. "And there was a girl who needed it, she told me how she was 'up against it,' and through some caprice she didn't get it. Needing it doesn't seem to make a bit of difference. If anything, it works the other way." She had read in the paper that morning that the chorus was to be "tried out" for a new musical comedy. Thinking that Ann, too, might have read that in the paper, she went. She had been seeing something of chorus girls as well as shop girls. She went to all the musical comedies and sat far front and kept her glasses on the chorus. More than once she had stood near stage doors as they were coming out. Seeing them so, they were not a group of chorus girls; they were a number of individuals, any one of whom might be Ann, more than one of whom might be fighting the things Ann had fought, seeking the things Ann had sought. It was that about the city that _got_ her. It was a city full of individuals, none of whom were to be dismissed as just this, or exactly that. She challenged all groupings, those groupings which seemed formed by the accidents of life and so often made for the tragedy of life. She was talking to him about chorus girls; announcing her discovery that they were just girls in the chorus. "I was once asked to define army people," she laughed, "and said that they were people who entered the army--either martially or maritally. Now I find that chorus girls are girls who enter the chorus. Even their vocabularies can't disguise them, and if that can't--what could? "Though there are different kinds of chorus girls," she reflected. "Some wanted to be somewhere else. Some hope to be somewhere else. And some swaggeringly make it plain that they wouldn't be anywhere else if they could. I'd hate to have to say which kind is the most sad." "Katie," he said--he never spoke her name save in that timid, lingering way--"don't you think you're rather over-emphasizing the sadness?" Two girls passed them, laughing boisterously. "Perhaps so. I suppose I am. And yet nothing seems to me sadder than some of the people who would be astonished at suggesting sadness." That afternoon they were going to the telephone office. Katie had been there early in the summer, to the central office and all the exchanges, but wanted to go again. And Mann said he would like to go with her and see what the thing looked like. The officials were cordial to them at the telephone office, seeming pleased to exhibit and explain. And it seemed that with their rest rooms and recreation rooms, their various things to contribute to comfort and pleasure, their pride was justified. But when they were in the immense room where several hundred girls were sitting before the boards, rest rooms and recreation rooms did not seem to _reach_. They walked behind a long row, their guide proudly calling attention to the fact that not one of those girls turned her head to look at them. He called it discipline--concentration. Katie, looking at the tense faces, was thinking of the price paid for that discipline. Many of the girls were very young, some not more than sixteen. They preferred taking them young, said the guide; they were easier to break in if they had never done anything else. There was not the shadow of a doubt that they were being "broken in." So clearly was that demonstrated that Katie wondered what there would be left for them to be broken in to after they had been thoroughly broken in to that. Walking slowly behind them, looking at every girl as a possible Ann, she wondered what they would have left for a Something Somewhere. She remembered the woman who wore the white furs saying it "got on her nerves" and wondered what kind of nerves they would be it wouldn't "get on." The thing itself seemed a mammoth nervous system, feeding on other nervous systems, lesser sacrificed to greater. Her fancy reached out to all the things that at that instant were going through those cords. Plans were being made for dinner, for motoring that evening, for many pleasant, restful things. Many little red lights, with many possible invitations, were insistently dancing before tired eyes just then. They seemed endless--those demands of life--demands of life before which other demands of life were slowly going down. She and Mann were alone for the minute. "And yet," she turned to him, after following his glance to a girl's tense, white face, "what can they do? The company, I mean. One must be fair. They pay better than most things pay, seem more interested in the girls. What more can we ask?" "Well, what would you think," he suggested, "of 'asking' for a system more interested in conserving nervous systems than in producing millionaires? "Why, yes," he added, "in view of the fact that it has to make a few men rich, perhaps they are doing all they can. I don't doubt that they think they are. But if this were a thing that didn't have to produce wealth--then it wouldn't need to endanger health. Don't you think that in this nerve-blighting work four or five hours, instead of eight, would be a pretty good day's work for girls just out of short clothes?" "It would seem so," sighed Katie, as she left the room filled with girls answering calls--girls looking too worn to respond to any "call" life might have for them. Though when, a little later, they stood in the doorway watching a long line of them passing out into the street it was amazing how ready and how eager they seemed for what life had to offer them. They all looked tired, but many appeared happy--determined that all of life should not be going over the wire. It seemed to Katie the most wonderful thing she knew of that girls from whom life exacted so much could remain so ready--so happily eager--for life. There was one thing to which she had made up her mind. Amid the confusion of her thinking and the sadness of her spirit one thing she saw as clear. There was something wrong with an arrangement of life which struck that hard at life. The very fact that the capacity for life persisted through so much was the more reason for its being a thing to be cherished rather than sacrificed. "Let's walk up this way," she was saying; "walk over the river. The bridge is a good place just now." Katie's face was white and tense as some of the faces they had left behind "No," he said impetuously. "Let's not. Let's do something jolly!" She shook her head "I have a feeling we're going to find her to-night." Katie was always having that feeling. But as she looked then he had not the heart to remind her of the many times it had played her false. Many girls passed them on the bridge, but not Ann. "I can never make up my mind to go," she said. "I always think I ought to wait till the next one comes round the corner." A girl who appeared to be thinking deeply passed them, turning weary eyes upon them in languid interest. "I wonder _what_," Katie exclaimed. "What she's thinking about," she explained. "Maybe she's come to the end of her string--and if she has, hundreds of thousands of people about her--oh I think it's terrible"--her voice broke--"the way people are crowded so close together--and held so far apart. Everybody's _alone_. Nobody _knows_." For a second his hand closed over hers as it rested on the railing of the bridge, as if he would bear some of the hurt for her, that hurt she was finding in everything. Despite the extreme simplicity of her dress she looked out of place standing on that bridge at that hour; he was thinking that she had not lost her distinction with her buoyancy. Her face was quivering. "Katie," it made him ask, "don't you think you'd better--quit?" She turned wet eyes upon him reproachfully. "From _you_?" "But is any--individual--worth it?" "Oh I suppose no 'individual' is worth much to you," she said a little bitterly. There was a touch of irony in the tender smile which was his only response. They stood there in silence watching men and women come and go--solitary and in groups--groups tired and groups laughing--groups respectable and groups questionable--humanity--worn humanity--as it crossed that bridge. She recalled that first night she had talked with him--that first time a hot day had seemed to her anything more than mere hot day, that night on the Mississippi--where distant hills were to be seen. She remembered how she had looked around the world that night to see if it needed "saving." It seemed a long time ago since she had not been able to see that the world needed saving. That was the night the man who mended the boats told her she had walked sunny paths. She looked up at him with a faint smile, smiling at the fancy of his being an outsider. It seemed, on the other hand, that all the hopes and fears in all the hearts that were passing them were drawing them together. There had been times when she had had a wonderful sense of their silences holding the sum of man's experiences. "You must go home," he was saying decisively. "Home? Where? To my uncle's? That's where I keep the trunks I'm not using." She laughed and brushed away a tear. "You know in the army we don't have homes." "Well you have temporary homes," he insisted, as each moment she seemed to become more worn. "You know what I mean. Go back to your brother's." "He'll be ordered from there very soon. There'll not be a place there for me much longer." He did not seem to have reckoned with that. His face changed. "Then where will you go, Katie?" he asked, very low. "What will you do?" She shook her head. "I don't know. I don't know where I'll go--and I don't know what I'll do." They stood there in silence, drawn close by thought of separation. "Shall we walk on?" she said at last. "I've lost the feeling that we're going to find Ann to-night." And so, still silently, they walked on. But when, after a moment, he looked at her, it was to see that she was making heroic effort to control the tears. "Katie!" he murmured, "what is it?" "We're giving up," she said, and could not say more. "Why no we're not! It's only the method we're giving up. This way of doing it. You've tried this long enough." "But what else is there? Just looking. Just keeping on looking--and hoping. Just the chance. What other method is there?" "We'll find some other," he insisted, not willing, when she looked like that, to speak his fears. "There'll be some other way. But you can't keep on this way--dear." There was another silence--a different one: silence which opened to receive them at the throb in his voice as he spoke that last word. He had to go back that night. "Well?" he asked gently, as they neared her hotel. "I'll be down in a couple of days," replied Katie, not steadily. "And you'll be there a little while, won't you," he asked wistfully, "before you go--you don't know where?" "Yes," she said, turning her eyes upon him for just an instant, "a little while--before I go--I don't know where." But though she was going--she didn't know where--though she was giving up--seemed conquered--through all the uncertainty and the sadness there surged a strange new joy in their hearts as, very slowly, they walked that final block. At the door, after a moment's full silence, she held out her hand. "And you'll be down there--mending boats?" He nodded, his eyes going where words had not ventured. "And you'll--come and see me?" she asked shyly. "You don't mean, do you,"--looking away, as if with scarcely the courage to say it--"that I'm to 'stop'--everything?" "No, Katie," he said, and his voice was shaking, "I think you must know I do not mean you are to--stop everything." As they lingered for a final moment, they were alone--far out in the sweet wild new places of the spirit; and all that man had ever yearned for, all joy that had been given and all joy denied seemed as a rich sea--fathomless sea--swelling just beneath that sweet wild new thing that had fluttered to consciousness in their hearts. CHAPTER XXVIII The new life in her heart gave her new courage that night to look out at life. She faced what before that she had evaded consciously facing. Perhaps they would not find Ann at all. Perhaps Ann had given up--as they were giving up. Perhaps Ann was not there to be found. It was her fight against that fear had kept her so much in the crowds. Ann was there. She had only to find her. Leaving the crowds seemed to be admitting that Ann was not in them; for if she really felt she was in them, surely she would not consent to leaving them. That idea of Ann's not being there was as a shadow which had from time to time crept beside her. In the crowds she lost it. There were so many in the crowds. Ann, too, was in the crowds. She had only to stay in them and she must find her. Now she was leaving them; and it was he who understood the crowds was telling her to leave them. Did _he_ think she was not there? Why had she not had the courage to press it? There was so much they should have been talking of in those last blocks--and they had talked of nothing. But the new warmth flooded Katie's heart at thought of having talked of nothing. What was there to talk about so important as talking of nothing? In a new way it drew her back to the crowds; the crowds that talked so loudly of many unlovely things in order to still in their hearts that call for the loveliness of talking of nothing. It gave her new understanding of Ann. Ann was one who must rest in the wonder of talking of nothing. It was for that she had gone down. The world had destroyed her for the very thing for which life loved her--Katie joining with the world. She would not have done that to-night. To-night, in the face of all the world, she must have joined with life. She wondered if all along it was not the thing for which she had most loved Ann. This shy new thing in her own heart seemed revealing Ann. It was kin to her, and to Katie's feeling for her. Many times she had wondered why she cared so terribly, would ask herself, as she could hear her friends asking if they knew: "But does it matter so much as all this?" She had never been able to make clear to herself why it mattered so much--mattered more than anything else mattered. None of the reasons presenting themselves on the surface were commensurate to the depth of the feeling. To-night she wondered if deep below all else might not lie that thing of Ann's representing life, her failure with Ann meaning infidelity to life. It turned her to Ann's letter;--she had not had the courage to read it for a number of days. "Katie," Ann had written, "I'm writing to try and show you that you were not all wrong. That there was something there. And I'm not doing it for myself, Katie. I'm doing it for you. "If I can just forget I'm writing about myself, feel instead that I'm writing about somebody you've cared for, believed in, somebody who has disappointed and hurt you, trying to show you--for _your_ sake--if I don't mind being either egotistical or terrible for the sake of showing you-- "It's not _me_ that matters, Katie--it's what you thought of me. That's why I'm writing. "I never could talk to you right. For a long time I couldn't talk at all, and then that night I talked most of the night I didn't tell the real things, after all. And at the last I told you something I knew would hurt you without telling you the things that might keep it from hurting, without saving for you the things you had thought you saw. I don't know why I did that--desperate, I suppose, because it was all spoiled, frantic because I was helpless to keep it from being spoiled. And then I said things to _you_--that must show--And yet, Katie, as long as I'm trying to be honest I've got to say again, though all differently, that I was surprised--shocked, I suppose, at something in the way you looked. It's just a part of your world that I don't understand. It's as I told you--we've lived in different worlds. Things--some things--that seem all right in yours--well, it's just surprising that you should think them all right. In your world the way you do things seems to matter so much more than what you do. "I've gone, Katie, and as far as I'm concerned it's what has to be. You see you couldn't fit me in. The only thing I can do for you now is to--stay gone. You'll feel badly--oh, I know that--but in the end it won't be as bad as trying to fit me in, trying to keep it up. And I can't have you doing things for me in another way--as you'd want to--because--it's hard to explain just what I mean, but after I've been Ann I couldn't be just somebody you were helping. It meant too much to me to be Ann to become just a girl you're good to. "What I'd rather do--want this letter to do--is keep for you that idea of Ann--memory of her. "So that's why I want to tell you about some things that really were Ann. I haven't any more right to you, but I want you to know you have some right to her. "I told you that I was standing on the corner, and that he asked me to get in the automobile, and that I did, and that that--began it. It was true. It was one way to put it. I'll try and put it another way. "It isn't even fair to him, putting it that way. You know, of course, that he's not in the habit of asking girls on corners to go with him. I think--there at the first--he was sorry for me. I think it was what you would call an impulse and that being sorry for me had more to do with it than anything else. "And I know I wasn't fair to myself when I put it that way; and you weren't fair to me when you called it common and low. That's what I want to try and show you--that it wasn't that. "It was in the warm weather. It had been a hot, hard day. Oh they were all hot, hard days. I didn't feel well. I made mistakes. I was scolded for it. I quarreled with one of the girls about washing my hands! She said she was there before I was and that I took the bowl. We said hateful things to each other, grew furious about it. We were both so tired--the day had been so hot-- "Out on the street I was so ashamed. It seemed _that_ was what life had come to. "That afternoon I got something that was going over the wire. You get so tired you don't care what's going over the wire--you aren't alive enough to care--but I just happened to be let in to this--a man's voice talking to the girl he loved. I don't remember what he was saying, but his voice told that there were such things in the world--and girls they were for. One glimpse of a beautiful country--to one in a desert. I don't know, perhaps that's why I talked that way to the other poor girl who was tired--perhaps that's why I went in the automobile. "I had to ride a long way on the street car to get where I boarded. I had to stand up--packed in among a lot of people who were hot and tired too--the smell so awful--everything so _ugly_. "I had to transfer. That's where I was when I first saw him--standing on the corner waiting for the other car. "Something was the matter--it was a long time coming. I was so tired, Katie, as I stood there waiting. Tired of having it all going over the wire. "He was doing something to his automobile. I didn't pay any attention at first--then I realized he was just fooling with the automobile--and was looking at me. "And then he took my breath away by stepping up to me and raising his hat. I had never had a man raise his hat to me in that way-- "And then he said--and his voice was low--and like the voices in your world are--I hadn't heard them before, except on the wire--'I beg pardon--I trust I'm not offensive. But you seem so tired. You're waiting for a car? It doesn't appear to be coming. Why not ride with me instead? I'll take you where you want to go. Though I wish'--it was like the voice on the wire--and for _me_--'that you'd let me take you for a ride.' "Katie, _you_ called him charming. You told about the women in your world being in love with him. If he's charming to them--to you--what do you suppose he seemed to me as he stood there smiling at me--looking so sorry for me--? "He went on talking. He drew a beautiful picture of what we would do. We would ride up along the lake. There would be a breeze from the lake, he said. And way up there he knew a place where we could sit out of doors under trees and eat our dinner and listen to beautiful music. Didn't I think that might be nice? "Didn't I think it might be--_nice?_ Oh Katie--you'd have to know what that day had been--what so many days--all days--had been. "I looked down the street. The car was coming at last--packed--men hanging on outside--everybody looking so hot--so dreadful. 'Oh you mustn't get in that car,' he said. "Beautiful things were beckoning to me--things I was to be taken to in an automobile--I had never been in an automobile. It seemed I was being rescued, carried away to a land of beautiful things, far away from crowded street cars, from the heat and the work that make you do things you hate yourself for doing. "_Was_ it so common, Katie? So low? What I felt wasn't--what I dreamed as we went along that beautiful drive beside the lake. "For I dreamed that the city of dreadful things was being left behind. The fairy prince had come for me. He was taking me to the things of dreams, things which lately had seemed to slip out beyond even dreams. "It was just as he had said--A little table under a tree--a breeze from the lake--music--the lovely things to eat and the beautiful happy people. Of course I wasn't dressed as much as they were, so we sat at a little table half hidden in one corner--Oh I thought it was so wonderful! "And he saw I thought it wonderful and that interested him, pleased him. Maybe it was new to him. I think he likes things that are new to him. Anyhow, he was very gentle and lovely to me that night. He told me I was beautiful--that nothing in the world had ever been so beautiful as my eyes. You know how he would say it, the different ways he would have of saying it beautifully. And I want to say again--if it seems beautiful to you--Why, Katie, I had never had anything. "Going home he kissed me-- "When I went home that night the world was all different. The world was too wonderful for even thoughts. Too beautiful to believe it could be the world. "I was in the arms of the wonderful new beauty of the world. Something in my heart which had been crouching down afraid and cold and sad grew warm and live and glad. Life grew so lovely; and as the days went on I think I grew lovely too. He said so; said love was making me radiant--that I was wonderful--that I was a child of love. "Those days when I was in the dream, folded in the dream, days before any of it fell away, they were golden days, singing days--days there are no words for. "We saw each other often. He said business kept him away from Chicago much of the time. I didn't know he was in the army; I suppose now he belonged in some place near there. And I think you told me he was not married. He said he was--but was going to be divorced some day. But I didn't seem to care--didn't think much about it. Nothing really mattered except the love. "Then there came a time when I knew I was trying to keep a door shut--keep the happiness in and the thoughts out. It wasn't that I came to think it was wrong. But the awful fear that wanted to get into my heart was that it was _not_ beautiful. "And it wasn't beautiful because to him it wasn't beautiful. It was only--what shall I say--would there be such a thing as usurping beauty? That was the thought--the fear--I tried and tried to push away. I see I can't tell it; no matter how much we may want to tell everything--no matter how willing we are--there are things can't be told, so I'll just have to say that things happened that forced the door open, and I had to know that what to me was--oh what shall I say, Katie?--was like the prayer at the heart of a dream--didn't, to him, have anything to do with dreams, or prayers, or beautiful, far-away things that speak to you from the stars. "And having nothing to do with them, he seemed to be pushing them away, crowding them out, hurting them. "I haven't told it at all. I can't. But, Katie, you're in the army, you must admire courage and I want you to take my word for it when I tell you I did what it took courage to do. I think you'd let me live on in your heart as Ann if you knew what I gave up--and just for something all dim and distant I had no assurance I'd ever come near to. For oh, Katie--when you love love--need it--it's not so easy to let go what's the closest you've come to it. Not so easy to turn from the most beautiful thing you've known--just because something _very far away_ whispers to you that you're hurting beauty. "I didn't go back. One night my Something Somewhere called me away--and I left the only real thing I had--and I didn't go back. I don't know--maybe I'm overestimating myself--perhaps I'm just measuring it by the suffering--but it seems to me, Katie, that you needn't despise yourself when loneliness can't take you back to the substitutes offered for your Something Somewhere. Something in you had been brave; something in you has been faithful--and what you've actually _done_ doesn't matter much in comparison with that. "I've been writing most of the day. It's evening now, and I'm tired. I was going to tell more. Tell you of things that happened afterward--tell you why you found me where you did find me. But now I don't believe I want to tell those things. They're too awful. They'd hurt you--haunt you. And that's not what I want to do. What I want is to make you understand, and if the part I've told hasn't done that-- "'I think it was to save Ann you were going to give up Verna,' you said. Oh Katie--how did you know? How _do_ you know? "And then you called to me. You weren't sick at all--were you, Katie? Oh I soon guessed that it was the wonderful goodness of your heart--not the disease of it--caused that 'attack.' "Then those beautiful days began. I wanted to talk about what those days meant--what you meant--what our play--our dream meant. Things I thought that I never said--how proud I was you should want to make up those stories about me--how I wanted to _be_ the things you said I was--and oh, Katie dear, the trouble you got me into by loving to tell those stories--telling one to one man and another to another! I'd never known any one full of _play_ like you--yet play that is so much more than just play. Sometimes a picture of Centralia would come to me when I'd hear you telling about my having lived in Florence. Sometimes when I was listening to stories of things you and I had done in Italy I'd see that old place where I used to put suspenders in boxes--! Katie, how strange it all was. How did it happen that things you made up were things I had dreamed about without really knowing what I was dreaming? How wonderful you were, Katie--how good--to put me in the things of my dreams rather than the things of my life. The world doesn't do that for us. "It seems a ridiculous thing to be mentioning, when I owe you so many things too wonderful to mention--but you know I do owe you some money. I took what was in my purse. I hope I can pay it back. I'm so tired just now it doesn't seem to me I ever can--but if I don't, don't associate it with my not paying back the missionary money! "Katie, do you know how I'd like to pay you back? I'd like to give you the most beautiful things I've ever dreamed. And I hope that some of them, at least, are waiting somewhere--and not very far off--for you. How I used to love to hear you laugh--watch you play your tricks on people--so funny and so dear-- "Now that's over. Katie, I don't believe it's all my fault, and I know it's not yours. It's our two worlds. You see you _couldn't_ fit me in. "I used to be afraid it must end like that. Yet most of the time I felt so secure--that was the wonder of you--that you could make me so beautifully secure. And your brother, Katie, have you told him? I don't care if you do, only if you tell him anything, won't you try and make him understand everything? I couldn't bear it to think he might think me--oh those things I don't believe you really think me. "If you don't see me any more, you won't think those things. It's easier to understand when things are all over. It's easier to forgive people who are not around. After what's happened I couldn't be Ann if I were with you. That's spoiled. But if _I_ go--I think maybe Ann can stay. For both our sakes, that's what I want. "'Twas a lovely dream, Katie. The house by the river--the big trees--the big flag that waved over us--the pretty dresses--the lovely way of living--the dogs--the men who were always so nice to us--Last night I dreamed you and Worth and I were going to a wedding. That is, it started out to be a wedding--then it seemed it was a funeral. But you were saying such funny things about the funeral, Katie. Then I woke up--" The letter broke off there. CHAPTER XXIX The next morning Katie did something which it had been in her mind to do for some time. She went to Centralia. It was not that she expected Centralia to furnish any information about Ann. It was hard to say just why she was so certain Ann had not gone back to Centralia. The conviction had something to do with her belief in Ann. Centralia, however, might be an avenue to something. Furthermore, she wanted to see Centralia. That was part of her passion for seeing the thing as a whole, realizing it. And she had a suspicion that if anything remained to forgive Ann it would be forgiven after seeing Centralia. And back of all that lurked the longing to tell Ann's father what she thought of him. Katie was in a strange mood that day. She had read Ann's letter many times, but had never finished it with that poignantly personal heartache of the night before. It was as if she were not worthy that new thing which kept warm in her own heart. For she had been hostile to the very thing from which the warmth in her own heart drew. The sadness deepened in the thought that the great hosts of the world's people sheltered joy in their own hearts and hardened those very hearts against all to whom love came less fortunately than it had come to them. How could there be 'hope for the world, no matter what it might do about its material affairs, while heart closed against heart like that, while men and women drew their own portions of joy and shut themselves in with them, refusing to see that they were one with all who drew, or would draw. It seemed the most cruel, the most wrong thing of all the world that men--and above all, women--should turn their most unloving face upon the face of love. Of which things she thought again as she passed various Centralias and wondered if there were Anns longing for love in all those unlovely places. She came at last, after crossing a long stretch of nothingness, to the town where Ann had lived, town from which she had gone forth to hear grand opera and find the loveliness of life. But as she stepped from the train and approached a group of men lounging at the station it came to her that "Ann's father," particularly as Ann had not been Ann in Centralia, was a somewhat indefinite person to be inquiring for. After a moment's consideration she approached the man who looked newest to his profession and asked how many churches there were in Centralia. Thereupon one man beat open retreat and all viewed her with suspicion. But the man of her choice was a brave man and ventured to guess that there were four. One of his comrades held that there were five. A discussion ensued closing with the consensus of opinion in favor of the greater number. Then Katie explained her predicament; she wanted to find a man who was a minister in Centralia and she didn't know his name. Reassured, they gathered round interestedly. Was he young or old? Katie cautiously placed him in the forties or fifties. Then they guessed and reckoned that it couldn't be either the Reverend Lewis or that new fellow at the Baptist. Was he--would she say he was one to be kind of easy on a fellow, or did she think he took his religion pretty hard? Katie was forced to admit that she feared he took it hard. With that they were agreed to a man that it must be the Reverend Saunders. She was thereupon directed to the residence of the Reverend Saunders. Right down there was a restaurant with a sign in the window "Don't Pass By." But she was to pass by. Then there was the church said "Welcome." No, that was not the Reverend Saunders' church. It was the church where she turned to the right. She could turn to the left, but, on the whole, it would be better to turn to the right--It would all have been quite simple had it not been for the fullness of the directions. She took it that the fullness of their directions was in proportion to the emptiness of their lives. As she walked slowly along she appreciated what Ann had said of the town's being walled in by nothingness--the people walled in by nothingness. Her two blocks on "Main Street" showed her Centralia as a place of petty righteousness and petty vice. There was nothing so large and flexible as the real joys of either righteousness or unrighteousness. Nor was Centralia picturesquely desolate. It had not that quality of hopelessness which lures to melancholy. New houses were going up. The last straw was that Centralia was "growing." And it was on those streets that a lonely little girl with deep brown eyes and soft brown hair had dreamed of a Something Somewhere. As she turned in at the residence of the Reverend Saunders Katie was newly certain that Ann had not come back to Centralia. It seemed the one disappointment in Ann she was not prepared to bear would be to find that she had returned to the home of her youth. Katie had been shown into the parlor. She was sitting in a rocking chair which "squeaked"--her smartly shod foot resting on a pale blue rose--the pale blue rose being in the carpet. The carpet also squeaked--or the papers underneath it did. On the table beside her was a large and ornate Bible, an equally splendid album, and something called "Stepping Heavenward." Oh no--Ann had not come back. She knew that before she asked. Ann's father was a tall, thin man with small gray eyes. "Thin lips that shut together tight"--she recalled that. And the kind of beard that is unalterably associated with self-righteousness. It was clear he did not know what to make of Katie. She was wearing a linen suit which had vague suggestions of the world, the flesh, and the devil. She had selected it that morning with considerable care. Likewise the shoes! And the angle of the quill in Katie's hat stirred in him the same suspicion and aggression which his beard stirred in her. Thus viewing each other across seas of prejudice, separated, as it were, by all the experiences of the human race, they began to speak of Ann and of life. "I am a friend of your daughter's," was Katie's opening. It startled him, stirring something on the borderland of the human. Then he surveyed Katie anew and shut his lips together more tightly. It was evidently just what he had expected his daughter to come to. "And I came," said Katie, "to ask if you had any idea where she was." That reached even farther into the border-country. He sat forward--his lips relaxed. "Don't _you_ know?" "No--I don't know. She was living with me, and she went away." That recalled his own injury. He sat back and folded his arms. "She was living with _me_--and she went away. No, I know nothing of her whereabouts. My daughter saw fit to leave her father's house--under circumstances that bowed his head in shame. She has not seen fit to return, or to give information of her whereabouts. I have tried to serve my God all my days," said the Reverend Saunders; "I do not know why this should have been visited upon me. But His ways are inscrutable. His purpose is not revealed." "No," said Katie crisply, "I should say not." He expressed his condemnation of the relation of manner to subject by a compression of both eyes and lips. That, Katie supposed, was the way he had looked when he told Ann her dog had been sent away. "Did you ever wonder," she asked, with real curiosity, "how in the world you happened to have such a daughter?" "I have many times taken it up in prayer," was his response. Katie sat there viewing him and looking above his head at the motto "God Is Love." She wondered if Ann had had to work it. It was the suggestion in the motto led her to ask: "Tell me, have you really no idea, have you never had so much as a suspicion of why Ann went away?" "Who?" he asked sharply. "Your daughter. Her friends call her Ann." "Her name," said he uncompromisingly, "is Maria." Katie smiled slightly. Maria, as he uttered it, squeaked distressingly. "Be that as it may. But have you really no notion of why she went away?" She was looking at him keenly. After a moment his eyes fell, or rather, lifted under the look. "She had a good home--a God-fearing home," he said. But Katie did not let go her look. He had to come back to it, and he shifted. Did he have it in him remotely, unavowedly, to suspect? It would seem so, for he continued his argument, as if meeting something. He repeated that she had a good home. He enumerated her blessings. But when he paused it was to find Katie looking at him in just the same way. It forced him to an unwilling, uneasy: "What more could a girl want?" "What she wanted," said Katie passionately, "was life." The word spoken as Katie spoke it had suggestion of unholy things. "But God is life," he said. Suddenly Katie's eyes blazed. "God! Well it's my opinion that you know just as little about _Him_ as you do about 'life.'" It was doubtless the most dumbfounded moment of the Reverend Saunders' life. His jaw dropped. But only to come together the tighter. "Young woman," said he, "I am a servant of God. I have served Him all my days." "Heaven pity Him!" said Katie, and rocked and her chair squeaked savagely. He rose. "I cannot permit such language to be used in my house." Katie gave no heed. "I'll tell you why your daughter left. She left because you _starved_ her. "Above your head is a motto. The motto says, 'God Is Love.' I could almost fancy somebody hung that in this house as a _joke_! "You see you don't know anything about love. That's why you don't know anything about God--or life--or Ann. "In this universe of mysterious things," Katie went on, "it so happened--as you have remarked, God's ways are indeed inscrutable--that unto you was born a child ordained for love." She paused, held herself by the mystery of that. And as she contemplated the mystery of it her wrath against him fell strangely away. Telling him what she thought of him suddenly ceased to be the satisfying thing she had anticipated. It was all too mysterious. It grew so large and so strange that it did not seem a matter the Reverend Saunders had much to do with it. Telling him what she thought of him was not the thing interesting her then. What interested her was wondering why he was as he was. How it had all happened. What it all meant. Her wondering almost drew her to him; certainly it gave her a new approach. "Oh isn't it a pity!" was what Katie said next. And there was pain and feeling and almost sympathy in her voice as she repeated, "Isn't it a pity!" He, too, spoke differently--more humanly. "Isn't--what a pity?" "That we bungle it so! That we don't seem to know anything about each other. "Why I suppose you _didn't_ know--you simply didn't have it _in_ you to know--that the way she needed to serve God was by laughing and dancing!" He was both outraged and drawn. He neither rebuked nor agreed. He waited. "You see it was this way. You were one thing; she was another thing. And neither of you had any way of getting at the thing that the other was. So you just grew more intolerant in the things _you_ were, and that, I suppose, is the way hearts are broken and lives are spoiled." Her eyes had filled. It had drawn her back to her mood of the morning. "Doesn't it seem to you," she asked gently of the Reverend Saunders, "that it's just an awful pity?" The Reverend Saunders did not reply. But he was not looking at Katie's quill or Katie's shoes. He was looking at Katie's wet eyes. And Katie, as they sat there for a moment in silence, was not seeing him alone as the Reverend Saunders. She was seeing him as product of something which had begun way back across the centuries, seeing far back of the Reverend Saunders that spirit of intolerance which had shaped him--wrung him dry--spirit which in the very beginning had lost the meaning of those words which hung above the Reverend Saunders' head. It seemed a childish thing to be blaming the Reverend Saunders for the things the centuries had made him. Indeed, she no longer felt like "blaming" any one. Sorrow which comes through seeing leaves small room for blame. Katie did not know as much about the history of mankind as she now wished she did--as she meant to know!--but there did open to her a glimpse of the havoc wrought by the forerunners of the Reverend Saunders--of all the children of love blighted in the name of a God of love. She had risen. And as she looked at him again she was sorry for him. Sterility of the heart seemed a thing for pity rather than scorn. "I'm sorry for you," she spoke it. "Oh I'm sorry for us all! We all bungle it! We're all in the grip of dead things, aren't we? Do you suppose it will ever be any different?" And still he looked, not at the quill or the shoes, but the eyes, eyes which seemed sorrowing with all the love sorrows of the centuries. "Young woman," he said uncertainly, "you puzzle me." "I puzzle myself," said Katie, and wiped her eyes and laughed a little, thinking of the scornful exit she had meant to make after telling him what she thought of him. She retraced her steps and waited for two hours at the station, reconstructing for herself Ann's girlhood in Centralia and thinking larger thoughts of the things which spoiled girlhoods, the pity of it all. And it seemed that even self-righteousness was not wholly to blame. Katie felt a little lonely in losing her scorn of "goodness." She had so enjoyed hating the godly. If even they were to be gently grouped with the wicked as more to be pitied than hated, then whom would one hate? Did knowing--seeing--spoil hating? And was all hating to go when all men saw? At the last minute she had a fight with herself to keep from going back and refunding the missionary money! The missionary money worried Katie. She wanted it paid back. But she saw that it was not her paying it back would satisfy her. She even felt that she had no right to pay it back. CHAPTER XXX She returned to Chicago to find that her uncle was in town. He had left a message asking her to join him for dinner over at his hotel. It was pleasant to be dining with her uncle that night. The best possible antidote she could think of for Ann's father was her dear uncle the Bishop. As she watched him ordering their excellent dinner she wondered what he would think of Ann's father. She could hear him calling Centralia a God-forsaken spot and Ann's father a benighted fossil. Doubtless he would speak of the Reverend Saunders as a type fast becoming obsolete. "And the quicker the better," she could hear him add. But she fancied that the Reverend Saunderses of the world had yet a long course to run in the Centralias of the world. She feared that many Anns had yet to go down before them. At any rate, her uncle was not that. To-night Katie loved him anew for his delightful worldliness. Though he was not in his best form that night. He was on his way out to Colorado for the marriage of his son. "There was no doing anything about it," he said with a sigh. "My office has made me enough the diplomat, Katherine, to know when to quit trying. So I'm going out there--fearful trip--why it's miles from Denver--to do all I can to respectablize the affair. It seemed to me a trifle inconsiderate--in view of the effort I'm making--that they could not have waited until next month; there are things calling me to Denver then. Now what shall I do there all that time?--though I may run on to California. But it seems my daughter-in-law would have her honeymoon in the mountains while the aspens are just a certain yellow she's fond of. So of course"--with his little shrug Katie loved--"what's my having a month on my hands?" "Well, uncle, dear uncle," she laughed, "hast forgotten the days when nothing mattered so much as having the leaves the right shade of yellow?" "I have not--and trust I never will," he replied, with a touch of asperity; "but I feel that Fred has shown very little consideration for his parents." "But why, uncle? I'm strong for her! She sounds to me like just what our family needs." He gave her a glance over his glasses--that delighted Katie, too; she had long ago learned that when her uncle felt occasion demand he look like a bishop he lowered his chin and looked over his glasses. "Well our family may need something; it's the first intimation I've had, Katherine, that it's in distress--but I don't see that a young woman who votes is the crying need of the family." "She's in great luck," returned Katie, "to live in a State where she can vote." He held up his hands. "_Katie? You_?" "Oh I haven't prowled around this town all summer, uncle, without seeing things that women ought to be voting about." He stared at her. "Well, Katie, you--you don't mean to take it up, do you?" He looked so unhappy that she laughed. "Oh I don't know, uncle, what I mean to 'take up,' but I herewith serve notice that I'm going to take something up--something besides bridge and army gossip." She looked at him reflectively. "Uncle, does it ever come home to you that life's a pretty serious business?" "Well I hadn't wanted it to come home to me tonight," he sighed plaintively. "I'm really most upset about this unfortunate affair. I had thought that you, Katie, would be pleasant." "Forgive me," she laughed. "I can see how it must disturb you, uncle, to hear me express a serious thought." He laughed at her delightedly. He loved Katie. "You've got the fidgets, Katie. Just the fidgets. That's what's the matter with the whole lot of you youngsters. It's becoming an epidemic--a sort of spiritual measles. Though I must say, I hadn't expected you to catch it. And just a word of warning, Katie. You've always been so unique as a trifler that one rather hates to see you swallowed up in the troop of serious-minded young women. I was talking to Darrett the other day--charming fellow, Darrett--and he held that your charm was in your brilliant smile. I told him I hadn't thought so much about the brilliant smile, but that I knew a good deal about a certain impish grin. Katie, you have a very disreputable grin. You have a way of directing it at me across ponderous drawing-rooms that I wish you'd stop. It gives me a sort of--'Oh I am on to you, uncle old boy' feeling that is most--" "Disconcerting?" "Unreverential." He looked at her, humorously and yet meditatively--fondly. "Katie, why do you think it's so funny? Why does it make you want to grin?" "You know. Else you wouldn't read the grin." "But I don't know. Nobody else grins at me." "Oh don't you think we're a good deal of a joke, uncle?" "Joke? Who?--Why?" "Us. The solemnity with which we take ourselves and the way the world lets us do it." He laughed. Then, as one coming back to his lines: "You have no reverence." "No, neither have you. That's why we get on." He made an unsuccessful attempt at frowning upon her and surveyed her a little more seriously. "Katie, do you know that the things you say sometimes puzzle me. They're queer. They burrow. They're so insultingly knowing, down at the root of their unknowingness. I'll think--'She didn't know how "pat" that was'--and then as I consider it I'll think--'Yes, she did, only she didn't know that she knew.' I remember telling your mother once when you were a little girl that if you were going to sit through service with your head cocked in that knowing fashion I wished she'd leave you at home." Katie laughed and cocked her head at him again, just to show she had not forgotten. Then she fell serious. "Uncle, for a long time I only smiled. I seemed to know enough to do that. Do you think you could bear it with Christian fortitude if I were to tell you I'm beginning now to try and figure out what I was smiling at?" He shook his head. "'Twould spoil it." He looked at his niece and smiled as he asked: "Katie dear, are you becoming world weary?" Katie, very smart that night in white gown and black hat, appealed to him as distinctly humorous in the role of world weariness. "No," returned Katie, "not world weary; just weary of not knowing the world." Afterward in his room they chatted cheerfully of many things: family affairs, army and church affairs. Katie strove to keep to them as merely personal matters. But there were no merely personal matters any more. All the little things were paths to the big things. There was no way of keeping herself detached. Even the seemingly isolated topic of the recent illness of the Bishop's wife led full upon the picture of other people she had been seeing that summer who looked ill. Her uncle was telling of a case he had recently disposed of, a rector of his diocese who was guilty of an atheistic book. He spoke feelingly of what he called the shallowness of rationalism, of the dangers of the age, beautifully of that splendid past which the church must conserve. He told of some lectures he himself was to deliver on the fallacies of socialism. "It's honeycombing our churches, Katherine--yes, and even the army. Darrett tells me they've found it's spreading among the men. Nice state of affairs were we to have any sort of industrial war!" It was hard for Katie to keep silence, but she felt so sadly the lack of assurance arising from lack of knowledge. Well, give her a little time, she would fix that! She contented herself with asking if he anticipated an industrial war. The Bishop made a large gesture and said he hoped not, but he felt it a time for the church to throw all her forces to safeguarding the great heritage of the country's institutions. He especially deplored that the church itself did not see it more clearly, more unitedly. He mentioned fellow bishops who seemed to be actually encouraging inroads upon tradition. Where did they expect it to lead?--he demanded. "Perhaps," meekly suggested Katie, "they expect it to lead to growth." "Growth!" snorted the Bishop. "Destruction!" They passed to the sunnier subject of raising money. As regards the budget, Bishop Wayneworth was the church's most valued servant. His manner of good-humored tolerance gave Mammon a soothing sense of being understood, moving the much maligned god to reach for its check book, just to bear the friendly bishop out in his lenient interpretation of a certain text about service rendered in two directions. He was telling of a fund he expected to raise at a given time. If he did, a certain capitalist would duplicate it. The Bishop became jubilant at the prospect. And as they talked, there passed before Katie, as in review, the things she had seen that summer--passed before her the worn faces of those girls who night after night during the hot summer had come from the stores and factories where the men of whom her uncle was so jubilantly speaking made the money which they were able to subscribe to the church. She thought of her uncle's church; she could not recall having seen many such faces in the pews of that church. She thought of Ann--wondered where Ann might be that night while she and her uncle chatted so cheerfully in his pleasant room at his luxurious hotel. She tried to think of anything for which her uncle stood which would give her confidence in saying to herself, "Ann will be saved." The large sum of money over which he was gloating was to be used for a new cathedral. She wondered if the Anns of her uncle's city would find the world a safer or a sweeter place after that cathedral had been erected. She thought of Ann's world of the opera and world of work. Was it true--as the man who mended the boats would hold--that the one made the other possible--only to be excluded from it? And all the while there swept before her faces--faces seen in the crowd, faces of those who were not finding what they wanted, faces of all those to whom life denied life. And then Katie thought of a man who had lived & long time before, a man of whom her uncle spoke lovingly in his sermons as Jesus the Christ, the Son of the living God. She thought of Ann's father--how far he had gone from a religion of love. Then came back to her lovable uncle. Well, what of him? Charm of personality, a sense of humor, a comfortable view of living (for himself and his kind) did not seem the final word. "Uncle," Katie asked quietly, "do you ever think much about Christ?" In his astonishment the Bishop dropped his cigar. "What a strange man he must have been," she murmured. "Kindly explain yourself," said he curtly. "He seemed to think so much about people. Just people. And chiefly people who were down on their luck. I don't believe he would have been much good at raising money. He had such a queer way of going around where people worked, talking with them about their work. If he were here now, and were to do that, I wonder if he'd help much in 'stemming the rising tide of socialism' What a blessing it is for our institutions," Katie concluded, "that he's not anywhere around." The Bishop's hand shook. "I had not expected," he said, "that my own niece, my favorite niece--indeed, the favorite member of my family--was here to--revile me." "Uncle--forgive me! But isn't it bigger than that thing of being members of the same family--hurting each other's feelings? Oh uncle!" she burst forth, no longer able to hold back, "as you stand sometimes at the altar don't you hear them moaning and sobbing down underneath?" He looked at her sharply, with some alarm. "Oh no," she laughed, "not going crazy. Just trying to think a little about things. But don't you ever hear them, uncle? I should think they might--bother you sometimes." "Really, Katherine," he said stiffly, "this is most--annoying. Hear whom moaning and sobbing?" "Those people! The worn out shop girls and broken down men and women and diseased children that your church is built right on top of!" Not the words but the sob behind them moved him to ask gently: "Katie dear, what is it? What's the trouble?" Her eyes were swimming. "Uncle--it's the misery of the world! It's the people who aren't where they belong! It's the lives ruined through blunders--it's the cruelty--the needless _cruelty_ of it all." She leaned forward, the tears upon her cheeks. "Uncle, how can you? You have a mind--a kind heart. But what good are they? If you believe the things you say you believe--oh you think you believe them--but you don't seem to connect them. Here to-night we've been talking about the forms of the church--finances of the church--and humanity is in _need_, uncle--bodily need--and oh the _heart_ need! Why don't you go and see? Why you've only to look! What are your puny little problems of the church compared with people's lives? And yet you--cut off--detached--save in so far as feeding on them goes--claim to be following in the footsteps of a man who followed in _their_ footsteps--a man who went about seeing how people lived--finding out what troubled them--trying--" She sank back with a sob. "I didn't mean to--but I simply _can't understand it._ Can't understand how you _can_." She hid her face. _Those faces_--they passed and passed. He had risen and was walking about the room. After a moment he stopped and cleared his throat. "If I didn't think, Katherine, that something had happened to almost derange you, I should not have permitted you to continue these ravings." She raised her head defiantly. "Truths people don't want to hear are usually disposed of as ravings!" "Now if I may be permitted a word. Your indictment is not at all new, though your heat in making it would indicate you believed yourself to be saying something never said before--" "I know it's been said before! I'm more interested in knowing how it's been answered." "You have never seemed sufficiently interested in the affairs of the church, Katherine, for one to think of seriously discussing our charities with you--" "Uncle, do you know what your charities make me think of?" He had resumed his chair--and cigar. "No," he said coldly, "I do not know what they make you 'think of.' I was attempting to tell you what they were." "I know what they are. The idea that comes to my mind has a rather vulgar--" "Oh, pray do not hesitate, Katherine. You have not been speaking what I would call delicately." "Your charities are like waving a scented handkerchief over the stock-yards. Or like handing out after-dinner mints to a mob of starving men." "You're quite the wrong end there--as is usual with you agitators," he replied comfortably. "We don't give them mints. We give them soup." "_Giving_ them soup--even if you did--is the mint end. Why don't you give them jobs?" He spread out his hands in gesture of despair. "What a bore a little learning can make of one! My dear niece, I deeply regret to be compelled to inform you that there aren't 'jobs' enough to go around." "Why aren't there?" "Why the obvious reason would seem, Katie," he replied patiently, "that there are too many of them wanting them." "And as usual, the obvious reason is not it. There are too many of you and me--that's the trouble. They don't have the soup because they must furnish us the mints." It was Katie who had risen now and was walking about the room. Her cheeks were blazing. "I tell you, uncle, I feel it's a disgrace the way we live--taking everything and doing nothing. I feel positively cheap about it. The army and the church and all the other useless things--" "I do not agree with you that the army is useless and I certainly cannot permit you to say the church is." "You'll not be able to stop other people from saying it!" He seemed about to make heated reply, but instead sank back with an amused smile. "Katie, your learning sounds very suspiciously as though it were put on last night. I feel like putting up a sign--'Fresh Paint--Keep Off.'" "Well at any rate it's not mouldy!" "At college I roomed with a chap who had a way of discovering things, getting in a fine glow of discovery over things everybody else had known. He would wake me out of a sound sleep to tell me something I had heard the week before." "And it's trying to be waked out of a sound sleep, isn't it, uncle?" she flashed back at him. It ended with his kindly assuring her that he was glad she had begun to think about the problems of the world; that no one knew better than he that there was a social problem--and a grave one; that men of the church had written some excellent things on the subject--he would send her some of them. Indeed, he would be glad to do all in his power to help her to a better understanding of things. He was convinced, he said soothingly, that when she had gone a little farther into them she would see them more sanely. CHAPTER XXXI Katie was back home; or, more accurately, she was back at Wayne's quarters, where they could perhaps remain for a month or two longer. And craving some simple, natural thing, something that could not make the heart ache, she went out that afternoon to play golf. The physical Kate, Katie of the sound body, was delighted to be back playing golf. Every little cell sang its song of rejoicing--rejoicing in emancipation from the ill-smelling crowds, return to the open air and the good green earth. It seemed a saving thing that they could so rejoice. Katie was reading the little book on man's evolution which the man who was having much to do with her evolution had--it seemed long ago--sent her in the package marked "Danger." She had finished the book about women and was just looking through the one on evolution on the day Caroline Osborne's car had stopped at her door. That began a swift series of events leaving small place for reading. But when, that last day they were together in Chicago, she asked him about something to read, he suggested a return to that book. There seemed wisdom and kindness in the suggestion. The story of evolution was to the mind what the game of golf was to the body. With the life about her pressing in too close there was something freeing and saving in that glimpse of herself as part of all the life there had ever been. Because the crowds had seemed the all--were suffocating her--something in that vastness of vision was as fresh air after a stifling room. It was not that it did away with the crowds--made her think they did not matter; they were, after all, the more vital--imperative--but she had more space in which to see them, was given a chance to understand them rather than be blindly smothered by them. For a number of years Katie had known that there was such a thing as evolution. It had something to do with an important man named Darwin. He got it up. It was the idea that we came from monkeys. The monkey was not Katie's favorite animal and she would have been none too pleased with the idea had it not been that there was something so delicious about solemn people like her Aunt Elizabeth and proper people like Clara having come from them. She was willing to stand it herself, just because if she came from them they did, too. She had assumed all along that she believed in Darwin and that people who did not believe in him were benighted. But the chief reason she had for believing in him was that the church had not believed in him. That was through neither malice nor conviction as regards the church, but merely because it was exciting to have some one disagreeing with it. It had thrilled her as "fearless," She had always meant to find out more about evolution, she had a hazy idea that there was a great deal more to it than just the fact of having come from monkeys, but she led such a busy life--bridge and things--that there was never time and so it remained a thing she believed in and was some day going to find out about. Now she was furious with herself and with everybody connected with her for having lived so much of her life shut out from the knowledge--vision--that made life so vast and so splendid. It was like having lived all one's life in sight of the sea and being so busy walking around a silly little lake in a park that there was no time to turn one's face seaward. She wondered what she would think of a person who said the little toy lake kept her so busy there was never a minute to turn around and take a good look at the sea! Katie had always loved the great world of living things--the fishes and birds--all animals--all things that grew. They had always called to her imagination--she used to make up stories about them. She saw now that their real story was a thousand-fold more wonderful--more the story--than anything she had been able to invent. She would give much to have known it long before. She felt that she had missed much. There was something humiliating in the thought of having lived one's life without knowing what life was. It made one seem such a dead thing. Now she was on fire to know all about it. She smiled as it suggested to her what her uncle had said a few days before of the fresh paint. She supposed there was some truth in it, that one who was conserving the past must find something raw and ludicrous in her state of mind. Her passion to fairly devour knowledge would probably bring to many of them the same amused smile it had brought to her uncle. But it was surprising how little she minded the smile. She was too intent on the things she would devour. Her glimpse into this actual story of life brought the first purely religious feeling she had ever known. It even brought the missionary fervor, which, as they sat down to rest, she exercised upon Worth, who had been proudly filling the office of caddy. She told him that she was going to tell him the most wonderful fairy story there had ever been in the world. And the thing that made it most wonderful of all was that, while it was just like a fairy story in being wonderful, it was every bit true. And then she told him a little of the great story of how one thing became another thing, how everything grew out of something else, how it had been doing that for millions of years, how he was what he was then because through all those years one thing had changed, grown, into something else. As she told it it seemed so noble a thing to be telling a child, so much purer and more dignified--to say nothing of more stimulating--than the evasive tales of life employed in the attempt to thwart her childish mind. Worth was upon her with a hundred questions. _How_ did a worm become something that wasn't a worm? Did it know it was going to do it? And why did one worm go one way and in a lot of million years be a little boy and another worm go another way and just never be anything but a worm? Did she think in another hundred million years that little bird up there would be something else? Would _they_ be anything else? And why--? She saw that she had let herself in for a whole new world of whys. One thing was certain: if she were to remain with Worth she would have to find out more about evolution. Her knowledge was pitifully incommensurate to his whys. But it was beautiful to her the way his mind reached out to it. He was lying on his stomach, head propped up on hands, in an almost prayerful attitude before an ant hill. Did she think those little ants knew that they were alive? Would they ever be anything else? He wanted to be told more stories about things becoming other things, seemed intoxicated with that idea of the constant becoming. "But, Aunt Kate," he cried, "mama told me that God made me!" "Why so He did, Worthie--that is, I suppose He did--but He didn't just make you out of nothing." He lay there on the grass in silence for a long time, looking at the world about him--thinking. After a while he was singing a little song. This was the song: "Once I was a little worm-- Long--long--ago." Katie smiled in thinking how scandalized Clara would be to have heard the story just told her son, story moving him to sing a vulgar song about having been a horrid little worm. It would be Clara's notion of propriety to tell Worth that the doctor brought him in his motor car and expect his mind, that wonderful, plastic little mind of his, to be proper enough to rest content with that lucid exposition of the wonder of life. The time was near for Clara's six months of Worth to begin. Katie had promised she would bring him to her wherever she was; and Clara was in Paris and meaning to remain there. It meant that Worth would spend the winter in Paris, away from them; from time to time--as the custom of the city dictated--he would be taken for perfunctory little walks in the _Bois_ and would be told to "run and play" if he asked indelicate questions concerning the things of life. In the light of this story of the ways of growth the arrangement about Worth seemed an unnatural and a brutal thing. She did not believe that, as a matter of fact, Clara wanted Worth. The maternal passion was less strong in Clara than the passion for _lingerie_. But she wanted Worth with her for six months because that kept him from Wayne and Katie for six months and she knew that they did want him. The poor little fellow's summer had not been what Katie had planned. Part of the time he had been with his father and part of the time with her--that thing of division again, and as neither of them had been happy any of the time Worth had had to suffer for it. He seemed to have to suffer so much through the fact that grown-up people did not know how to manage their lives. Suddenly he sat up. "Aunt Kate," he asked, "when's Miss Ann coming back?" "I don't know, dear." "Well where _is_ she?" "She's been--called away." "Well I wish she'd come back. I like Miss Ann, Aunt Kate." "Yes, dear; we all do." "She tells nice stories, too. Only they're about fairies that are just fairies--not worms and things that are really so. Do you suppose Miss Ann knows, Aunt Kate, that she used to be a frog?" Katie laughed and tried to elucidate her point about the frog. But she wondered what difference it might not have made had Ann known that, as Worth put it, she used to be a frog. With Ann, fairy stories would have to be about things not real. All Ann's life it had been so. It suddenly seemed that it might have made all the difference in the world had Ann known that the things most wonderful were the things that were. Or rather, had the world in which Ann lived cared to know real things for precious things, the desire for life as the most radiant thing that had ever been upon the earth. Ann would have found the world a different place had men known life for the majestic thing it was, seen that back of what her uncle called the "splendid heritage of the country's institutions" was the vastly more splendid heritage of the institution of life. Letting the former shut them from the latter was being too busy with the toy lake to look out at the sea. Seeing Ann as part of all the life that had ever been upon the earth she became, not infinitesimal, but newly significant. Widened outlook brought deepened feeling. Newly understanding, she sat there brooding over Ann anew, pain in the perfection of her understanding. But new courage. Life had persisted through so much, was so triumphant. The larger conception lent its glow to the paling belief that Ann would persist, triumph. "Aunt Kate," Worth burst forth, "let's take the boat and go up and find the man that mends the boats." Aunt Kate blushed. "Oh no, dearie, we couldn't do that." "Why we did do it once," argued Worth. "I know, but we can't do it now." "I don't see why not." No, Worth didn't see. "I just want to ask him, Aunt Kate, if he knows that he used to live in a tree." "Oh, he knows it," she laughed. "He knows everything," said Worth. "Worthie, is that why you like him? 'Cause he knows everything? Or do you like him--just because you like him?" "I like him because he knows everything--but mostly I like him just because I like him." "Same here," breathed Aunt Kate. The man who mended the boats was coming to see her that night. Perhaps golf and evolution should not grow arrogant, after all. He had been strange about coming; when she talked with him over the 'phone he had hesitated at the suggestion and finally said, with a defiance she could not see the situation called for, that he would like to come. In Chicago he had once said to her: "There's too much gloom around you now for me to contribute the story of my life. But please remember that that was why I didn't tell it." She wondered if the "story of his life" had anything to do with his hesitancy in coming to see her. Surely he would have no commonplace notions about "different spheres," though he had mentioned them, and with bitterness. He was especially hostile to the army, had more than once hurt her in his hostility. She would not have resented his attacking it as an institution, that she would expect from his philosophy, but it was a sort of personal contempt for the army and its people she had resented, almost as she would a contemptuous attitude toward her own family. She had contended that he was unjust; that a lack of sympathy with the ends of the army--basis of it--should not bring him to a prejudiced attitude toward its people. She maintained that officers of the army were a higher type than civilians of the same class. He had told her, almost roughly, that he didn't think she knew anything about it, and she had replied, heatedly, that she would like to know why she wouldn't know more about it than he! In the end he said he was sorry to have hurt her when there was so much else to hurt her, but had not retracted what he had said, or even admitted the possibility of mistake. It seemed that one of the worst things about "classes" was that they inevitably meant misunderstanding. They bred antagonism, and that prejudice. People didn't know each other. Considering it now, she wondered, though feeling traitorous to him in the wondering, if the man who mended the boats might shrink from anything so distinctly social as calling upon her. Their meetings theretofore had been on a bigger and a sterner basis; she had missed a few of the little niceties of consideration, a few of those perfunctory and yet curiously vital courtesies to which she had all her life been accustomed as a matter of course from her army men; but it had been as if they were merely leaving them behind for things larger and deeper, as if their background was the real world rather than world of perfunctory things. From him she had a consideration, not perfunctory, but in the mood of the things they were sharing. That sense of sharing big things, things real and rude, had swept them out of the world of artificial things. Now did he perhaps hold back in timidity from that world of the trivial things? She put it from her, disliking herself as of the trivial things in letting it suggest itself at all. Expecting him to be just like the men she had known would be expecting the sea to behave like that lake in the park. That night she put on her most attractive gown, a dress sometimes gray and sometimes cloudy blues and greens, itself like the sea, and finding in Katie a more mysterious quality than her openness would usually suggest. Feeling called upon to make some account to herself for dressing more than occasion would seem to demand, she told herself that she must get the poor old thing worn out and get something new. But it was not a poor old thing, and the last thing Katie really wanted was to succeed in getting it worn out. As she dressed she was thinking of Ann's pleasure in clothes. There were times when it had seemed a not altogether likeable vanity. It was understandable--lovable--after having been to Centralia, after knowing. So many things were understandable and lovable after knowing. She wished she might call across the hall and ask Ann to come in and fasten her dress. She would like to chat with her about the way she had done her hair--all those intimate little things they had countless times talked about so gayly. She walked over into Ann's room--room in which Ann had taken such pride and pleasure. Ann had loved the things on the dressing-table, she had more than once seen her fairly caressing those pretty ivory things. She wondered if Ann had anything resembling a dressing-table--what she wore--how she managed. Those were the little worries about Ann forever haunting her, as they would a mother who had a child away from home. New vision of the immensity of life could save her from giving destroying place to that sense of the woe of the world, but a conception of the wonders of the centuries could not keep out the gnawing fear that Ann might not be getting enough to eat. There was a complexity in her mood of that night--happiness and sadness so close as at times to be indistinguishable--the whole of it making for a sense of the depth of life. But their evening was constrained. Katie blamed the dress for part of it, vexed with herself for having put it on. She had wanted to be attractive--not suggest the unattainable. And that was what something seemed suggesting. He appeared less ill at ease than morose. Katie herself, after having been so happy in his coming, was, now that he was there, uncontrollably depressed. They talked of a variety of things--in the main, the things she had been reading--but something had happened to that wonderful thing which had grown warm in their hearts as they walked those last two blocks. Even the things of which they talked had lost their radiance. What did it matter whether the universe was wonderful or not if the wonderful thing in one's own heart was to be denied life? From the first, it had been as if the things of which they talked were things sweeping them together, they were in the grip of the power and the wonder of those things, wrung by the tragedy of them, exalted by the hope--in it all, by it all, united. It was as if the whole sea of experience and emotion, suffering and aspiration, was driving, holding, them together. So it had been all along. But not tonight. It was now--or at least so it seemed to Katie--as if those forces had let them go. What had been as a great sea surging around their hearts was now just things to talk about. It left her desolate. And as she grew unhappy, she forced her gaiety and that seemed to put him the farther away. The two different worlds had sent Ann away; was it, in a way she was unable to cope with, likewise to send him away? Watts passed through the hall. She saw him glance out at the soldier loweringly and after that he grew more morose, almost sullenly so. It seemed foolish to talk of one's being free when held by things one could not even see. It was just when she was feeling so lonely and miserable she wished he would go that the telephone rang and central told her that Chicago was trying to get her. It was in the manner of the old days that she turned to him and asked what he thought it could be. The suggestion--possibility--swept them back to the old basis, the old relationship. Katie grew excited, unnerved, and he talked to her soothingly while she waited for central to call again. They spoke of what it probably was; her brother was in Chicago, Katie told him, and of course it was he, and something about his own affairs. Perhaps he had news of when he would be ordered away. Yes, without doubt that was it. But there was a consciousness of dissembling. They were drawn together by the possibility they did not mention, drawn together in the very thing of not mentioning it. As in those tense moments they tried to talk of other things, they were keyed high in the consciousness of not talking of the real thing. And in that there was suggestion of the other thing of which they were not talking. It was all inexplicably related: the excitement, the tenseness, the waiting, the dissembling. Katie had never been more lovely than as she sat there with her hand on the telephone: flushed, stirred, expectant--something stealing back to her eyes, something both pleading and triumphant in Katie's eyes just then. The man sitting close beside her at the telephone desk scarcely took his eyes from her face. When the bell rang again and her hand shook as it took down the receiver he lay a steadying hand upon her arm. At first there was nothing more than a controversy as to who had the line. In her impatience, she rose; he rose, too, standing beside her. "Here's your party," said central at last. Her "party" was Wayne. But something was still the matter on the line; she could not get what Wayne was trying to tell her. As her excitement became more difficult to control the man at her side kept speaking to her--touching her--soothingly. At last she could hear Wayne. "You hear me, Katie?" "Oh yes--_yes_--what is it?" "I want to tell you--" It was swallowed up in a buzzing on the line. Then central's voice came clear and crisp. "Your party is trying to tell you that _Ann_ is found." "Oh--" gasped Katie, and lost all color--"Oh--" "Katie--?" That was Wayne again. "Oh _yes_, Wayne?" "I have found her. She is well--that is, will be well. She is all right--going to be all right. I'll write it all to-morrow. It's all over, Katie. You don't have to worry any more." The next instant the telephone was upside down on the table and Katie, sobbing, was in his arms. He was holding her close; and as her sobs grew more violent he kissed her hair, murmured loving things. Suddenly she raised her head--lifting her face to his. He kissed her; and all the splendor of those eons of life was Katie's then. CHAPTER XXXII Captain Jones had come down from Fort Sheridan late that afternoon. He had been in Chicago for several days, as a member of a board assembled up at Fort Sheridan. The work was over and he would return to the Arsenal that night. But he was not to go until midnight. He would have dinner and go to the theater with some of the friends with whom he had been in those last few days. He wished it were otherwise. He was in no mood for them. He would far rather have been alone. He had a little time alone in his room before dinner and sat there smoking, thinking, looking at the specks of men and women moving about in the streets way down there below. He was in no humor that night to keep to the everlasting talk about army affairs, army grievances and schemes, all those things of a world within a world treated as if larger than the whole of the world. The last few days had shown him anew how their hold on him was loosening. There seemed such a thing as the army habit of mind. Within their own domain was orderliness, discipline, efficiency, subservience to the collectivity, pride in it, devotion to it--many things of mind and character sadly needed in the chaotic world without. But army men lacked perspective; in isolation they had lost their sense of proportion, of relationships. They had not a true vision of themselves as part of a whole. They had, on the other hand, unconsciously fallen into the way of assuming the whole existed for the part, that they were larger than the thing they were meant to serve. Their whole scale was so proportioned; their whole sense of adjustment so perverted. They lacked flexibility--openness--all-sides-aroundness. Life in the army disciplined one in many things valuable in life. It failed in giving a true sense of the values of life. He could not have said why it was those inflated proportions irritated him so. They lent an unreality to everything. They made for false standards. And more and more the thing which mattered to him was reality. He tried to pull away from the things that thought would lure him into. He had not the courage to let himself think of her tonight. He feared he had not increased his popularity in the last few days. At a dinner the night before a colonel had put an end to a discussion on war, in which several of the younger officers showed dangerous symptoms of hospitality to the civilian point of view, with the pious pronouncement: "War was ordained by God." "But man pays the war tax," he had not been able to resist adding, and the Colonel had not joined in the laugh. He found it wearisome the way the army remained so smug in its assumption that God stood right behind it. When worsted on economic grounds--and perhaps driven also from "survival of the fittest" shelter--a pompous retreat could always be effected to divinity. It was that same colonel who, earlier in the evening, had thus ended a discussion on the unemployed. "The poor ye have always with you," said the Colonel, delicately smacking his lips over his champagne and gently turning the conversation to the safer topic of high explosives. He turned impatiently from thought of it to the men and women far down below. He was always looking now at crowds of men and women, always hoping for a familiar figure in those crowds. With all the baffling unreality there had been around her, she seemed to express reality. She made him want it. She made him want life. Made him feel what he was missing--realize what he had never had. It seemed that if he did not find her he would not find life. She, too, had wanted life. Her quest had been for life--that he knew. And he wanted to find her that he might tell her he understood, tell her--what he had never told any one--that all his life he, too, had dreamed of a something somewhere. And he was growing the farther apart from his army friends because he had come to think of them as standing between. During the summer he had seen. In the mornings when they were going to work, in the evenings when they were going home, he had many times been upon the streets with the people who worked. He could not any longer regard the enlargement of the army, its organization and problems as the most vital thing in the world. It did not seem to him that what the world wanted was a more deadly rifle. His lip curled a little as he looked down at the men and women below and considered how little difference it made to them whether rifles were improved or not. And so many things did make difference with them--they needed improvements on so many things--that to be giving one's life to perfecting instruments of destruction struck him as a sorry vocation. It made him feel very distinctly apart. He knew of no class of men more isolated from the real war of the world than were the men of the army. They were tied up in their own war of competition--competition in preparedness for war. They were frantically occupied in the creation of a Frankenstein. They would so perfect destruction as to destroy themselves. Meanwhile their blood had grown so hot in their war of competition that they were in prime condition for persuading themselves a real war awaited them. This hot blood found its way into much talk of hardihood and strenuousness, vigor, martial virtues, "the steeps of life," "the romance of history"--all calculated to raise the temperature of tax-paying blood. So successful was the self-delusion of the militarist that sanity appeared mollycoddelism. Their greatest fear was fear of the loss of fear. And now they were threatened by colorless economists who were mollycoddelistically making clear that the "stern reality" was the giant hallucination. It seemed rather close to farce. That night he was going back. Katie, too, had gone. For the first time that summer neither of them would be there. It seemed giving up. Loneliness reached out into places vast and barren in the thought that both in the things of the heart and the affairs of men he seemed destined to remain apart. He looked far more the dreamer than the man of warfare as he sat there, his face, which was so finely sensitive as sometimes to be called cold, saddened with the light of dreams which know themselves for dreams alone. That very first night, night when she had been so shy, he had felt in her that which he called the real thing, which he knew for the great thing, which had been, for him, the thing unattainable. And with all her timidity, aloofness, elusiveness, he had felt an inexplicable nearness to her. He had found out something about the conditions girls had to meet. His face hardened, then tightened with pain in the thought of those being the conditions Ann was meeting. He did not believe those conditions would go on many days longer if every man had to see them in relation to some one he cared for. "The poor ye have always with you" might then prove less authoritative--less satisfying--as the final word. And the other conditions--things his sort stood for--Darrett--the whole story--He had come to loathe the words chivalry and honor and all the rest of the empty terms that resounded so glibly against false standards. Something was wrong with the world and he could not see that improving a rifle was going to go very far toward setting it right. And there was springing up within him, even in his loneliness and gloom, a passion to be doing something that would help set it right. An older officer with whom he had been talking that day had spoken lovingly of his father, under whom he had served; spoken of his hardihood and integrity, his manliness and soldierliness. As he thought of it now it seemed to him that just because he _was_ his father's son--had in him the blood of the soldier--he should help fight the real battles of the day--the long stern battles of peace. His father had served, faithfully and well. He, too, would like to serve. But yesterday's needs were not to-day's needs, nor were the methods of yesterday desirable, even possible, for to-day. What could be farther from serving one's own day than rendering to it the dead forms of what had been the real service to a day gone by? There came a curious thought that to give up the things of war might be the only way to save the things that war had left him. That perhaps he could only transmit his heritage by recasting the form of giving. Looking out across the miles of the city's roofs, hearing the rumble of the city as it came faintly up to him, watching the people hurrying to and fro, there was something puerile in the argument that men any longer needed war to fill their lives, must have the war fear to keep them from softness and degeneration. Thinking of the problems of that very city, it seemed men need not worry greatly about having nothing to fight for, no stimulus to manhood. Men and women! Those men and women passing back and forth and all the millions of their kind, they were what counted. The things that mattered to them were the things that mattered. Their needs the things to fight for. So he reflected and drifted, brushing now this, now that, in thought and fancy. Weary--lonely--he dreamed a dream, dream such as the weary and the lonely have dreamed before, will dream again. Too utterly alone, he dreamed he was not alone. Heart-hungry, he dreamed of love. He dreamed of Ann. He had dreamed of her before, would dream of her again. Dream of her, if for nothing else, because he knew she had dreamed of love; because she made him know that it was there, because, unreasoningly, she made him hope. Her face that night at the dance--that night in the boat, when they had talked almost not at all, had seemed to feel no need for talking--things remembered blended with things desired until it seemed he could feel her hair brush his face, feel her breath upon his cheek, her arms about his neck--vivid as if given by memories instead of wooed from dreams. But the benign dream became torturing vision--vision of Ann with hands held out to him--going down--her wonderful eyes fearful with terror. It was that which dreaming held for him. And it seemed that he--he and his kind--all of those who stood for the things not real were the thing beating Ann down. Dreams gone and vision mercifully falling away there came a yearning, just a simple human yearning, to know where she was. He felt he could bear anything if only he knew that she was safe. The telephone rang. He supposed it was some of his friends--something about the hour for dining. He would not answer. Could not. Too sick of it all--too sore. But it kept ringing, and, habit in the ascendency, he took down the receiver. It was not a man's voice. It was a woman's. A faint voice--he could scarcely catch it. And could with difficulty reply. He did not know the voice, it was too faint, too far-away, but a suggestion in it made his own voice and hand unsteady as he said: "Yes? What is it?" "Is this--Captain Jones?" The voice was stronger, clearer. His hand grew more unsteady. "Yes," he replied in the best voice he could muster. "Yes--this is Captain Jones. Who is it, please?" There was a silence. "Tell me, please," he managed to say. "Is it--?" The voice came faintly back, "Why it's--Ann." The keenest joy he had ever known swept through him. To be followed by the most piercing fear. The voice was so faint--so unreal--what if it were to die away and he would have no way to get it back! It seemed he could not hold it. For an instant he was crazed with the sense of powerlessness. He felt it must even then be slipping back into the abyss from which it had emerged. Then he fought. Got himself under command; sent his own voice full and strong over the wire as if to give life to the voice it seemed must fade away. "Ann," he said firmly, authoritatively, "listen to me. No matter what happens--no matter what's the matter--I've got something you must hear. If we're cut off, call up again. Will you do that? Are you listening?" "Yes," came Ann's voice, more sure. "I've got to see you. You hear what I say? It's about Katie. You care a little something for Katie, don't you, Ann?" It was a sob rather than a voice came back to him. "Then tell me where I can find you." She hesitated. "Tell me where you're living--or where I can find you. Now tell me the truth, Ann. If you knew the condition Katie was in--" She gave him an address on a street he did not know. "Would you rather I came there? Or rather I meet you down town? Just as you say. Only I _must_ see you tonight." "I--I can't come down town. I'm sick." His hand on the receiver tightened. His voice, which had been almost harsh in its dominance, was different as he said: "Then I'll come there--right away." There was no reply, but he felt she was still there. "And, Ann," he said, very low, and far from harshly, "I want to see you, too." There was a little sob in which he faintly got "Good-bye." He sank to a chair. His face was buried in his hands. It was several minutes before he moved. CHAPTER XXXIII Children seemed to spring up from the sidewalk and descend from the roofs as his cab, after a long trip through crowded streets with which three months before he would have been totally unfamiliar, stopped at the number Ann had given. All the way over he had been seeing children: dirty children, pale-faced children, children munching at things and children looking as though they had never had anything to munch at--children playing and children crying--it seemed the children's part of town. The men and women of tomorrow were growing up in a part of the city too loathsome for the civilized man and woman of today to set foot in. He was too filled with thought of Ann--the horror of its being where she lived--to let the bigger thought of it brush him more than fleetingly, but it did occur to him that there was still a frontier--and that the men who could bring about smokeless cities--and odorless ones--would be greater public servants than the men who had achieved smokeless powder. Riding through that part of town it would scarcely suggest itself to any one that what the country needed was more battleships. The children still waited as he rang an inhospitable doorbell, as interested in life as if life had been treating them well. He had to ring again before a woman came to the door with a cup in her hand which she was wiping on a greasy towel. She looked very much as the bell had sounded. She let him in to a place which it seemed might not be a bad field for some of the army's boasted experts on sanitation. It was a place to make one define civilization as a thing that reduces smell. Several heads were stuck out of opening doors and with each opening door a wave stole out from an unlovely life. Captain Wayneworth Jones, U. S. Army, dressed for dining at a place where lives are better protected against lives, was a strange center for those waves from lives of struggle. "She the girl that's sick?" the woman demanded in response to his inquiry for Miss Forrest. He replied that he feared she was ill and was told to go to the third floor and turn to the right. It was the second door. He hesitated, coloring. "Would you be so kind as to tell her I am here? I think perhaps she may prefer to see me--down here." The woman stared, then laughed. She looked like an evil woman as she laughed, but perhaps a laughing saint would look evil with two front teeth gone. "Well we ain't got no _parlor_ for the young ladies to see their young men in," she said mockingly. "And if you climbed as many stairs as I did--" "I beg your pardon," said he, and started up the stairway. On the second floor were more waves from lives of struggle. The matter would be solemnly taken up in Congress if it were soldiers who were housed in the ill-smelling place. Evidently Congress did not take women and children and disabled civilians under the protecting wing of its indignation. Wet clothes were hanging down from the third floor. They fanned back and forth the fumes of cabbage and grease. He grew sick, not at the thing itself, but at thought of its being where he was to find Ann. Though the fact that he was to find her made all the rest of it--the fact that people lived that way--even the fact of her living that way--things that mattered but dimly. As he looked at the woman in greasy wrapper who was shaking out the wet clothes he had a sudden mocking picture of Ann as she had been that night at the dance. The woman's manner in staring at him as he knocked at Ann's door infuriated him. But when the door was opened--by Ann--he instantly forgot all outside. He closed the door and stood leaning against it, looking at her. For the moment that was all that mattered. And in that moment he knew how much it mattered--had mattered all along. Even how Ann looked was for the moment of small consequence in comparison with the fact that Ann was there. But he saw that she was indeed ill--worn--feverish. "You are not well," were his first words, gently spoken. She shook her head, her eyes brimming over. He looked about the room. It was evident she had been lying on the bed. "I want you to lie down," he said, his voice gentle as a woman's to a child. "You know you don't mind me. I come as one of the family." He helped her back to the bed; smoothed her pillow; covered her with the miserable spread. Ann hid her face in the pillow, sobbing. He pulled up the one chair the room afforded, laid his hand upon her hair, and waited. His face was white, his lips trembling. "It's all over now," he murmured at last. "It's all over now." She shook her head and sobbed afresh. His heart grew cold. What did she mean? A fear more awful than any which had ever presented itself shot through him. But she raised her head and as she looked at him he knew that whatever she meant it was not that. "What is it about Katie?" she whispered. "Why, Ann, can't you guess what it is about Katie? Didn't you know what Katie must suffer in your leaving like that?" "I left so she wouldn't have to suffer." "Well you were all wrong, Ann. You have caused us--" But as, looking into her face, he saw what she had suffered, he was silenced. She was feverish; her eyes were large and deep and perilously bright, her temples and cheeks cruelly thin. But what hurt him most were not the marks of illness and weakness. It was the harassed look. Fear. _Fear_--that thing so invaluable in building character. Thought of the needlessness of it wrung from him: "Ann--how could you!" "Why I thought I was doing right," she murmured. "I thought I was being kind." He smiled faintly, sadly, at the irony and the bitter pity of that. "But how could you think that?" he pressed. "Not that it matters now--but I don't see how you could." She looked at him strangely. "Do you--know?" He nodded. "Then don't you see? I left to make it easy for Katie." He thought of Katie's summer. "Well your success in that direction was not brilliant," he said with his old dryness. Her eyes looked so hurt that he stroked her hand reassuringly, as he would have stroked Worth's had he hurt him. And as he touched her--it was a hot hand he touched--it struck him as absurd to be quibbling about why she had gone. She was there. He had found her. That was all that mattered. He became more and more conscious of how much it mattered. He wanted to draw her to him and tell her how much it mattered. But he did not--dared not. "And how did you happen to be so unkind as to call me up, Ann?" he asked with a faint smile. "I wanted--I wanted to hear about Katie. And I wanted"--her eyes had filled, her chin was trembling--"I was lonesome. I wanted to hear your voice." His heart leaped. For the moment he was not able to keep the tenderness from his look. "And I knew you were there because I saw it in the paper. A woman brought back some false hair to be exchanged--I sell false hair," said Ann, with a wan little smile and unconsciously touching her own hair--"and what she wanted exchanged--though we don't exchange it--was wrapped up in a newspaper, and as I looked down at it I happened to see your name. Wasn't that funny?" "Very humorous," he replied, almost curtly. "I had been sick all day--oh, for lots of days. But I was trying to keep on. I had lost two other places by staying away for being sick--and I didn't dare--just didn't dare--lose this one. You don't know how _afraid_ you get--how frightened you are--when you're afraid you're going to be sick." The fear--sick fear that fear of sickness can bring--that was in her eyes as she talked of it suddenly infuriated him. He did not know what or whom he I was furious at--but it was on Ann it broke. He rose, overturning his unsteady chair as he did so, and, seeking command, looked from the window which looked down into a squalid court. The wretchedness of the court whipped his rage. "Well for God's sake," he burst forth, "what did you _do_ it for! Of all the unheard of--outrageous--unpardonable--What did you _mean_"--turning savagely upon her--"by selling false hair?" "Why I sold false hair," said Ann, a little sullenly, "so I could live." "Well, didn't you know," he demanded passionately, "that you could _live_ with _us_?" She shook her head. "I didn't think I had any right to--after--what happened." He came back to her. "Ann," he asked gently, "haven't you a 'right to'--if we want you to?" She looked at him again in that strange way. "Are you sure--you know?" "Very sure," he answered briefly. "And do you mean to say you would want me--anyhow?" she whispered. He turned away that she might not see how badly and in what sense he wanted her. His whole sense of fitness--his training--was against her seeing it then. The pause, the way she was looking at him when he turned back to her, made restraint more and more difficult. But suddenly she changed, her face darkening as she said, smolderingly: "No--I'm not _that_ weak. If I can't live--I'll _die_. Other people make a living! Other girls get along! Katie would. Katie could do it." She sat up; he could see the blood throbbing in her neck and at her temples. She was gripping her hands. She looked so frail--so helpless. "But Katie is strong, Ann," he said soothingly. "Yes--in every way. And I'm not." She turned away, her face twitching. "Why I seem to be just the kind of a person that has to be taken care of!" He did not deny it, filled with the longing to do it. "It's--it's humiliating." He would at one time have supposed that it would be, should be; would have held to the idea that every man and woman ought be able to make a living, that there was something wrong with them if they couldn't. But not after the things he had seen that summer. The something wrong was somewhere else. "And yet you don't know," Ann was saying brokenly, "how hard it is. You don't know--how many things there are." She turned to him impetuously. "I want to tell you! Then maybe it will go. I couldn't tell Katie. But I don't know--I don't know why--but I could tell you anything." He nodded, not clear-eyed, and took one of her hands and stroked it. Her cheeks grew more red; her eyes glitteringly bright. "You see--it's _men_--things like--that's what makes it hard for girls." He pressed her hand more firmly, though his own was shaking. "Katie told you--Katie must have told you about--the first of it--" She faltered. He drew in his breath sharply and held it for an instant. "And after that--" She turned upon him passionately. "_Do_ they know? _Does_ it make a difference?" He did not get her meaning for an instant and when he did it brought the color to his face; he had always been a man of great reserve. But Ann seemed unconscious. This was the reality that realities make. He shook his head. "No. You only imagine." "No, I don't imagine. They pretend. Pretend they know." He gritted his teeth. So those were the things she had had to meet! "They lie," he said briefly. "Bluff." And for an instant he covered his eyes with her hand. "You see after--after that," she went on, "I couldn't go back to the telephone office. I don't know that I can explain why--but it seemed the one thing I couldn't do, so--oh I did several things--was in a store--and then a girl got me on the stage--in the chorus of 'Daisey-Maisey.' I thought perhaps I could be an actress, and that being in the chorus would give me a chance." She laughed bitterly. "There are lots of silly people in the world, aren't there?" was her one comment on her mistake. "That night--the last night--" she told it in convulsive little jerks--"the manager said something to me. _He_ pretended. And when he saw how frightened I was--and how I loathed him--it made him furious--and he said things--vowed things--and he kissed me--and oh he was so _terrible_--his face--his lips--" She hid her face, rocking back and forth. He sat on the bed beside her, put his arm around her as he would around Katie or Worth, holding her tenderly, protectingly, soothingly, his own face white, biting his lips. "He vowed things--he claimed--I knew I couldn't stay with the company. I was even afraid to stay until it was over that night. I had a chance to run away--Oh I was so _frightened_." She kept repeating--"I was so _frightened_. "I can't explain it--you'd have to see him--his _lips_--his thick, loose awful lips!" "Ann," he whispered. "Please, dear--don't talk about it--don't think about it!" "But I want it to go away! I don't want to be alone with it. I want somebody to know. I want _you_ to know." "All right," he murmured. "All right. I want to hear." His whole body was set for pain he knew must come. Ann's eyes were full of terror, that terror that lives after terror, the anguish of terror remembered. "It's awful to be alone with awful thoughts," she whispered. "To be shut in with something you're afraid of." "I know--I know," he soothed her. "But you're going to tell me. Tell _me_. And then you'll never be alone with it again." "I've been afraid so much," she went on sobbingly. "Alone so much--with things that frightened me. That night I was alone. All alone. And afraid. You see I went and went and went. Just to be getting _away_. And at last I was out in the country. And then I was afraid of _that_. I went in something that seemed to be a barn. Hid in some hay--" He gripped her arm as if it were more than he could stand. His face was colorless. "I almost went crazy. Why I think I _did_ go crazy--with fear. Being alone. Being afraid." He looked away from her. It seemed unfair to her to let himself see her like that--her face distorted--unlovely--in the memory of it. "When it came daylight I went to sleep. And when I woke up--when I woke up--" She was laughing and sobbing together and it was some time before he could quiet her. "When I woke up another man was bending over me--an old man--so _old_--so-- "Oh, I suppose it was just that he was surprised at finding me there. But I thought--I hadn't got over the night before-- "So again I went. Just went. Just to get away. And that was when I saw it was life I'd have to get away from. That there wasn't any place in it for me. That it meant being alone. Afraid. That it was just _that_--those thick awful lips--that old man's eyes--Oh no--no--not that!" She was fighting it with her hands--trying to push it away. It took both tenderness and sternness to quiet her. "So I hurried on,"--she told it in hurried, desperate way, as if fearful she would not get it all told and would be left alone with it. "To find a way. A place. I just wanted to find the way--the place--before anything else could happen. I thought all the people who looked at me _knew_. I thought there was nothing else for me--I thought there was something wrong with me--and when I remembered what I had wanted--I hated--hated them. "I saw water--a bridge. On the bridge I looked down. I was going to--but I couldn't, because a man was looking up at me. I hated him, too." She paused. "Though I've thought of it since. It was a queer look. I believe that man _knew_. And wanted to help me. "But I didn't want to be helped. Nothing could help. I just wanted to get away--have it over. So I hurried on--across your Island--though I didn't know--just looking for a place--a way. Just to have it all over." She changed on that, relaxed. Her eyes closed. "To have it all over," she repeated in a whisper. She opened her eyes and looked up at him. "Doesn't that ever seem to you a beautiful thing?" His eyes were wet. "Not any more," he whispered. "Not now." "Then again I saw water--the other side of the Island." She went back to it with an effort, exhausted. "I ran. I wanted to get there. Have it all over--before anything else could happen. I couldn't _look_--but I kept saying to myself it would only be a minute--only a minute--then it would be all over--not so bad as having things happen--being alone--afraid--" She shuddered--drew back--living it--realizing it. Her visioning--realizing--had gone on beyond her words, beyond the events. She was shuddering as if the water were actually closing over her. But again she was called back by Katie's voice and that look he felt he should not be seeing went as a faint smile formed on her lips. "Then Katie. Katie calling to me. Dear Katie--pretending. "I didn't want to go. I thought it was just something else. And oh how I wanted to get it all over!" She sobbed. "But I saw it was a girl. Sick. I wasn't able to help going--and then--Well, you know. Katie. How she fooled me. And saved me." She looked up at him, again the suggestion of a smile on her colorless lips. "Was there ever anybody in the world so wonderful--so funny--as Katie? "But at first I couldn't believe in her. I thought it must be just something else." She stopped, looking at him. "Why I think it wasn't till after I met _you_ I felt sure it couldn't be--" His arm about her tightened. He drew her closer to him. He was shaken by a deep sob. And so she rested, lax, murmuring about things that had happened, sometimes smiling faintly as she recalled them. The terror had gone, as if, as she had known, telling it to him had freed her. That twisted, unlovely look which he had tried not to see, loving her too well to wish to see it, had gone. She was worn, but lovely. She was resting. At peace. And so many minutes passed when she would not speak--resting, rescued. And then she would whisper of little things that had happened and smile a little and seem to drift the farther into the harbor of security into which she had come. He saw that--exhausted, protected, comforted--she was going to fall asleep. His heart was all tenderness for her as he held her, adoring her, sorrowing over her, guarding her. "I haven't really slept all summer," she murmured at last, and after a few minutes her breathing told that sleep had come. But when, in trying to unfasten her collar--he longed to be doing some little thing for her comfort--he took his hand from hers, she started up in alarm and he had to put it back, reassuring her, telling her that she was not alone, that nothing could ever harm her again. An hour passed. And in that hour things which he would have believed fixed loosened and fell. It was all shaken--the whole of his thinking. It could never be the same again. Old things must go. New things come. Watching Ann, yearning over her, sorrowing, adoring, he saw life as what life had done to her. Saw it as the thing she had found. He watched the curve of her mouth. Her beautiful bosom rising and falling as she slept. The lovely line of her throat, the blood throbbing in her throat, her long lashes upon her cheek, that loveliness--beauty--that sweetness and tenderness--and _what it had met_. She, so exquisitely fashioned for love--needful of it--so perfect--so infinitely to be desired and cherished--and _what she had found_. He writhed under a picture of that old man bending over her--of that other man--bully, brute--thick awful lips snatching at her as a dog at meat. And then still another man. That first man. Darrett. _His_ friend. _His_ sort. The man who could so skillfully use the lure of love to rob life-- As he thought of him--his charm, cleverness--how that, too, had been pitted against her--starved, then offered what she would have no way of judging--close to her loveliness, conscious of her warmth, her breath, the superb curves of her lovely body--thinking of what Darrett had found--taken--what he had left her _to_--there were several minutes when his brain was unpiloted, a creaking ship churning a screaming sea. And now? Had it killed it in her? Taken it? If he were to kiss her in the way he hungered to kiss her would it wake nothing more than that sick terror in her wonderful eyes? That thought became as a band of hot steel round his throat. Was it _gone_? How could she be sleeping that way with her hand in his--his face so close to her--if there remained any of that life-longing that had been there for Darrett to find? Life grew too cold, too gray and misshapen in that thought to see it as life. It could not be. It was only that she was exhausted. And her trust in him. At least there was that. Then he would make her care for him by caring for her--caring for her protectingly, tenderly, surrounding her with that sea of tenderness that was in his heart for her. Life would come back. He would woo it back. And no matter how the flame in his own heart might rage he would wait upon the day when he could bring the love light to her eyes without even the shadow of remembering of fear. So he yearned over her--sorrowing, hoping. And life was to him two things. What life had done to Ann. What life would be with Ann. He wanted to let himself touch his lips lightly to her temple--so close to him. But he would not--fearing to wake the fear in her, vowing to wait till love could come through a trust that must cast fear forever from the heart. Passion melted to tenderness; the tenderness flooding him in thought of the love he would give her. That same night he had her taken to a hospital. It was the only way he could think of for caring for her, and she was far enough from well to permit it. He left her there, again asleep, and cared for. Then returned to his hotel and telephoned Katie. It was past daylight before sleep came to him. CHAPTER XXXIV Once again Katie was donning the dress which had the colors of the sea. She was wearing it this time, not because she must get the poor old thing worn out, but because she had been asked to wear it. "By Request" she was saying to herself, with a warm smile, as she shook out its folds. As Nora was fastening it for her she saw her own face in the mirror and tried to twist it about in some way. It seemed she would have to make some explanation to Nora for looking like that. It had been a day of golden October sunshine without, and within Katie's heart a day of such sunshine as all her years of sunshine had never brought. She had not felt like playing golf, or like reading about evolution; body and mind were filled with a gladness all their own and she had taken a long walk in and out among the wooded paths of her beautiful Island and had been filled with thoughts of many beautiful and wonderful things. Of the past she had thought, and of the future, and most of all of the living present: the night before, and that evening, when he was coming to see her again and would have things to tell her. He had wanted to tell them then--some of the things about himself which he said she must know and which he gave fair warning would hurt her, "Then not to-night," she had said. And now the happiness was too great, filled her too completely and radiantly for her to fear the pain of which she had been warned. She was fortified against all pain. Wayne's finding Ann seemed to throw the gate to happiness wide open to her, giving her, not only happiness, but the right to it. She smiled in thinking how, again, it was Ann who opened a door. If Ann had never come she would not--in this way which had made it all possible--have known her man who mended the boats. The experience with Ann was as a bridge upon which they met. It was because of Ann they could walk so far along that bridge. The adventure, and what had come to seem the tragedy of the adventure, was over. It turned her back to those first days of play--the pretending which had led to realizing, the fancies which had been paths to realities. They would not go on in just that way; some other way would shape itself; she and Wayne would talk of it, make some plan for Ann. She could plan it better after the letter she would have from Wayne the next day telling of finding Ann. It was a new adventure now. The great adventure. But it was because she had ventured at all that the great adventure was offered her. Her venturing had led her to the crowds. She was not forgetting the crowds. She would go back to them. It could not be otherwise. There was much she wanted to do, and so much she wanted to know. But she would go back to them happy, and because happy, wiser and stronger. In myriad ways life had beckoned to her, promised her, as with buoyant step and singing heart she walked sunny paths that golden October afternoon. Later she had stopped to see Mrs. Prescott, and she, as she so often did, talked of Katie's mother. Katie was glad to be talking of her mother, and, as they also did, of her father. It brought them very near, so close it was as if they could know of the beautiful happiness in their child's heart. They talked of things which had happened when Katie was a little girl, making herself as the little girl so real, visualizing her whole life, making real and dear those things in which her life had been lived. As she thought of it again that night, after she was dressed and was waiting, hurt did come in the thought of his feeling for the army. She must talk to him again about the army, make him see that thing in it which was dear to her. Though could she? She did not seem able to tell even herself just what there was in her feeling for the army. Instead of arguments, came pictures--pictures and sounds known from babyhood: Men in uniform--her father in uniform, upon his horse--dress parade--the flag--the band--from reveille to taps things familiar and dear swept before her. It would seem to be the picturesque in it which wove the spell; but would her throat have tightened, those tears be springing to her eyes at a thing no deeper than the picturesque? No, in what seemed that fantastic setting were things genuine and fine: simplicity, hospitality, friendship, comradeship, loyalty, courage in danger and good humor in petty annoyances. Those things--oh yes, together with things less admirable--she knew to be there. She got out her pictures of her father and mother; her father in uniform--that gentle little smile on her mother's face. She thought of what her mother had endured, of what hosts of army women had endured, going to outlandish spots of the earth, braving danger and doing without cooks! She was proud of them, proud to be of them. She lingered over her father's picture. A soldier. Perhaps he was of a vanishing order, but she hoped it would be long--very long--before the things to be read in his face vanished from the earth. Through memories of her father there many times sounded the notes of the bugle--now this call, now that, piercing, compelling, sounding as _motif_ of his life, thing before which all other things must fall away. She seemed to hear now the notes of retreat--to see the motionless regiment--then the evening gun and the band playing the Star Spangled Banner and the flag--never touching the ground--coming down for the night. She answered it in the things it woke in her heart: those ideals of service, courage, fidelity which it had left her. She would talk to him--to Alan (absurd she should think it so timidly--so close in the big things--so strange in some of the little ones)--about her father and mother. To make them real to him would make him see the army differently. It hurt her to think of his seeing it as he did, hurt her because she knew how it would have hurt them. To them, it had been the whole of their lives. They had not questioned; they had served. They had given it all they had. And that other thing there was to tell her--? Was that, too, something that would have hurt them? She hoped not. It seemed she could bear the actual hurt to herself better than thought of the hurt it would have been to them. But when the bell rang and she heard his voice asking for her a tumult of happiness crowded all else out. She was shyly radiant as she came to him. As he looked at her, it seemed to pass belief. But when he dared, and was newly convinced, as, his arms about her he looked down into her kindling face, his own grew purposeful as well as happy, more resolute than radiant. "We will make a life together," he said, as if answering something that had been in his thoughts. "We will beat it all down." An hour went by and he had not told the story of his life, life itself too mysterious, too luring, too beautiful. Whenever they came near to it they seemed to hold back, as if they would remain as they were then. Instead, they told each other little things about themselves, absurd little things, drawing near to each other by all those tender little paths of suddenly remembered things. And they lingered so, as if loving it so. It was when Katie spoke of her brother that he was swept again into the larger seriousness. Looking into her tender face, his own grew grave. "You know, Katie--what I told you--what I must tell you--" "Oh yes," said Katie, "there was something, wasn't there?" But she put out her hand as if to show there was nothing that could matter. He took the hand and held it; but he did not grow less grave. "Katie," he asked, "how much do you really care for the army?" It startled her, stirring a vague fear in her happy heart. "Why--I don't know; more than I realize, I presume." She was silent, then asked: "Why?" He did not reply; his face had become sober. "You are thinking," she ventured, "that your feeling for it is going to be--hard for me?" He nodded; he was still holding her hand tightly, as if to make sure of keeping it. "You see, Katie," he went on, with difficulty, "I have reason for that feeling." "What do you mean?" she asked sharply. "I have tried not to show you that I knew anything--in a personal way--about the army." Her breath was coming quickly; her face was strained. But after a moment she exclaimed: "Why--to be sure--you were in the Spanish War!" "No," said he with a hard laugh, "I am nothing so glorious as a veteran." He felt the hand in his grow cold. She drew it away and rose; turned away and was picking the leaves from a plant. But she found another thing to reach out to. "Well I suppose"--this she ventured tremulously, imploringly--"you went to West Point--and were-- didn't finish?" "No, Katie," he said, "I never went to West Point." "Well then what did you do?" she demanded sharply. He laughed harshly. "Oh I was just one of those fools roped in by a recruiting officer in a gallant-looking white suit!" "You were--?" she faltered. "In the ranks. One of the men." The fact that she should be looking like that drove him to add bitterly: "Like Watts, you know." She stood there in silence, held. The radiance had all fallen from her. She was looking at him with something of the woe and reproach of a child for a cherished thing hurt. "Why, Katie," he cried, "_does_ it matter so? I thought it was only when we were _in_ that we were so--impossible." But she did not take the hands he stretched out. She was held. It drove him desperate. "Well if _that's_ so--if to have been in the army at all is a thing to make you look like _that_--Heaven knows," he threw in, "I don't blame you for despising us for fools!--But I don't know what you'll say when I tell you--" "When you tell me--what?" she whispered. "That I have no honorable discharge to lay at your feet. That I left your precious army through the noble gates of a military prison!" She took a step backward, swaying. The anguish which mingled with the horror in her face made him cry: "Katie, let me tell you! Let me show you--" But Katie, white-faced, was standing erect, braced for facing it. "What for? What did you do?" Her voice was quick, sharp; tenseness made her seem arrogant. It roused something ugly in him. "I knocked down a cur of a lieutenant," he said, and laughed defiantly. "You _struck_--an officer?" "I knocked down a man who ought to have been knocked down!" "_Struck_--your superior officer?" "Katie," he cried, "that's your way of looking at it! But let me tell you--let me show you--" But she had turned from him, covered her face; and before Katie there swept again those pictures, sounds: her father's voice ringing out over parade ground--silent, motionless regiment; the notes of retreat--those bugle notes, piercing, compelling, thing before which all other things must fall away--evening gun and lowered flag-- She lifted colorless face, shaking her head. "_Katie_!" he cried. "Our life--_our_ love--_our_ life--" She raised her hand for silence, still shaking her head. "Won't you--_fight_ for it?" he whispered. "_Try_?" She kept shaking her head. "Anything else," she managed to articulate. "Anything else. Not this. You don't understand. Can't. Never would." Suddenly she cried: "Oh--_go away!_" For a moment he stood there. But her face was locked against appeal. Colorless, unsteady, he turned and left her. Katie put out her hand. Her father--her father in uniform, it had been so real, it seemed he must be there. But he was not there. Nothing was there. Nothing at all. As the front door closed she started forward, but there sounded for her again the notes of the bugle--piercing, compelling, thing before which all other things must fall away. "Taps," this time, as blown over her father's grave, soldiers' heads bowed and tears falling for a fine soldier who would respond to bugle calls no more. CHAPTER XXXV Paris was in one of her gray moods that January afternoon. Everything was gray except the humanity. Emotion never seemed to grow gray in Paris. From her place by the window in Clara's apartment Katie was looking down into the narrow street, the people passing to and fro. Two men were shaking hands. They would stop, then begin again. They had been doing that for the last five minutes. They seemed to find life a very live thing. So did the _femme de menage_ and her soldier, who also had been standing over there for the last five minutes. Katie did not want to look longer at the _femme de menage_ and her soldier, so she turned her chair a little about and looked more directly at Clara. Clara was in gray mood, too. Only Clara differed from the streets in that it was the emotion was gray; the _robe de chambre_ was red. So were Clara's eyes. "It's not pleasant, Katie," she was saying, "having to remain here in Paris for these foggy months--with all one's friends down on the Riviera." "No," said Katie grimly, "life's hard." Clara's tears flowed afresh. "I've often thought _you_ were hard, Katie. It's because you've never--_cared._ You've never--suffered." Katie smiled slightly, again looking out the window at the _femme_ and her soldier, who were as contented with the seclusion offered by a lamp-post as though it were seclusion indeed. As she watched them, "hard" did not seem the precise word for something in Katie's eyes. "You see, Katie," Clara had resumed, as if her woe gave her the right to rebuke Katie for the lack of woe, "you've always had everything just the way you wanted it." "Just exactly," said Katie, still looking at the _femme de menage._ "Your grandfather left you all that money, and when you want to do a thing all you have to do is do it. What can you know of the real sorrows and hardships of life?" "What indeed?" responded Katie briskly. "And your heart has never been touched--and I don't believe it ever will be," Clara continued spitefully--Katie seemed so complacent. "You have no real feeling. You're just like Wayne." Katie laughed at that and looked at Clara; then laughed again, and Clara flushed. "Speaking of Wayne," said Katie in off-hand fashion, "he's been made a major." She watched Clara as she said it. There were things Katie could be rather brutal about. "I'm sure that's very nice," said the woman who had divorced Wayne. "Yes, isn't it? And other things are going swimmingly. One of those things he used to be always puttering over--you may remember, Clara, mentioning, from time to time, those things he used to be puttering around with--has been adopted with a whoop. A great fuss is being made over it. It looks as though Wayne was confronted with something that might be called a future." "I'm sure I'm very glad," said Clara, "that somebody is to have something that might be called a future. Certainly a woman with barely enough to live on isn't in much danger of being confronted with one." Katie made no apology to herself for the pleasure she took in "rubbing it in." She remembered too many things too vividly. "It's pretty hard," said Clara, "when one has a--duty to society, and nothing to go on." Katie was thinking that society must be a very vigorous thing, persisting through all the "duties" people had to it. She smiled now in seeing that the thing which had brought her to Clara that day was in the nature of a "duty to society" and that in her case, too, a duty to society and a personal inclination moved happily together. Katie was there that afternoon to buy Worth. So she put it to herself in what Clara would have called her characteristically brutal fashion. She was sure Worth could be had for a price. She had that price and she believed the psychological moment was at hand for offering it. The reason for its being the psychological moment was that Clara wanted to join a party at Nice and did not have money enough to buy the clothes which would make her going worth while. For there was a man there--an American, a rich westerner--whom Clara's duty to society moved her to marry. That was Katie's indelicate deduction from Clara's delicate hints. And Katie wanted Worth. It wasn't wholly a matter of either affection or convenience. It had to do, and in almost passionate sense, with something which was at least in the category with such things as duties to society. Worth seemed to her too fine, too real, to be reared by a "truly feminine woman," as Clara had been known to call herself. Clara's great idea for Worth was that he be well brought up. That was Clara's idea of her duty to society. And it was Katie's notion of her duty to society to save him from being too well brought up. The things she had been seeing, and suffering, in the past year made her feel almost savagely on the subject. Katie had been there since October. Clara had magnanimously permitted Worth to remain with his Aunt Kate most of the time, with the provision that Katie bring him to her as often as she wanted him. This was unselfish of Clara, and cheaper. Clara's alimony was not small, but neither were her tastes. Indeed the latter rose to the proportions of duties to society. Katie knew it was as such she must treat them in the next half hour. She must save the "maternal instinct" Clara was always talking about--usually adding that it was a thing which Katie, of course, could not understand--by taking it under the sheltering wing of the "child's good." Katie knew just how to reach the emotions which Clara had, without outraging too much the emotions she persuaded herself she had. So she began speaking in a large way of life, how hard it was, how complicated. How they all loved Worth and wished to do the best thing for him, how she feared it must hurt the child's personality, living in that unsettled fashion, now under one influence, now under another. She spoke of Clara's own future, how she had _that_ to think of and how it was hard she be so--restricted. She drew a vivid picture of what life might be if Clara didn't "provide for the future"--she was careful to use no phrase so raw to truly feminine ears as "make a good marriage." And then, rather curtly when it came to it, tired of the ingratiating preamble, she asked Clara what she would think of relinquishing all claim on Worth and taking twenty thousand dollars. Clara tried to look more insulted by the proposition than invited by the sum. But Katie got a glimmer of that look of greed known to her of old. She went on talking. She was sure every one would think it beautiful of Clara to let Worth go to them just because they had a better way of caring for him, just because it was for the child's good. Every one would know how it must hurt her and admire her for the sacrifice. And then Katie mentioned the fact that the matter could be closed immediately and Clara start at once for Nice and perhaps that itself would "mean something to the future." From behind Clara's handkerchief--Clara's tears were in close relation to Clara's sense of the fitness of things--Katie made out that life seemed driving her to this, but that it hurt her to think so tragic a thing should be associated with so paltry a sum. "It's my limit," said Katie shortly. "Take it or leave it." Amid more sobs Katie got that all the Jones family were heartless, that life was cruel, but that she was willing to make any sacrifice for her child's good. "Then I'll go down and get him," said Katie, rising. Clara's sobs ceased instantly. "Get who?" "My lawyer. I left him down there talking to the _concierge_." "Katie Jones--how _could_ you!" "Oh she looks like a decent enough woman," said Katie. "I don't think it will hurt him any." "Katie, you have grown absolutely--_vulgar_. And so _hard_. You have no fineness--no intuition--nothing feminine about you. And how dared you bring your lawyer here to me? What right had you to assume I'd do this?" "Why I knew you well enough, Clara, to believe you would be willing to do it--for your child's good." Clara looked at her suspiciously and Katie hastened to add that she brought him because she wanted to pay ten thousand francs on account and she thought Clara might want to get the disagreeable business all settled up at once so she could hurry on to Nice before those friends of hers got over to Algiers, or some place where Clara might not be able to go after them. Clara again looked suspicious, but only said it was inconsiderate of Katie to expect her to receive a lawyer with her poor eyes in that condition. But when Katie returned with him Clara's eyes were a softer red and she managed to extract from the interview the pleasure of showing him that she was suffering. As she watched the transaction, Katie felt a little ashamed of herself. Not because she was doing it, but because she had known so well how to do it. But with a grimace she banished her compunctions in the thought of its being for the child's good, and hence a duty to society. Less easy to banish was the hideous thought that she might have been able to get him for less! By the time the attorney had gone Clara seemed to be looking upon herself as one hallowed by grief; she was in the high mood of one set apart by suffering. In her eyes was something which she evidently felt to be a look of resignation. In her hand something which she certainly felt to be an order for ten thousand francs. The combination first amused and then irritated Katie. It was exasperating to have Clara giving herself airs about the grief which was to make such a sorry cut in Katie's income. Clara, in her mellowed mood, spoke of the past, why it had all been as it had. She was even so purged by suffering as to speak gently of Wayne. "I hope, Katie--yes, actually hope--that Wayne will some time find it possible to care, and be happy." And when Katie thought of how much Wayne had cared, why he had not been happy, it grew more and more difficult to treat Clara as one sanctified by sorrow. It gave her a fierce new longing for the real, the real at all costs, a contempt for all that artifice and self-delusion which made for the things at war with the real. She had enough malice to entertain an impulse to strip Clara of her complacency, take away from her her pleasant cup of sorrow, make her take one good look at herself for the woman she was rather than the woman she was flaunting. But she had no zest for it. What would be the use? And, after all, self-deception seemed a thing one was entitled to practice, if one wished. What Katie wanted most was to get out into the air. CHAPTER XXXVI To get out into the air was the thing she was always wanting in those days, or at least for the last two months it had been so. At first she had been too wretched to be conscious of needing anything. But Katie was not built for wretchedness; everything in her was fighting now for air, what air meant to spirit and body. It was in the sense of the spirit that she most of all wanted to get out into the air, out into a more spacious country than the world Clara suggested, out where the air was clear and keen and where there were distances more vast than those which would shut her in. For she had looked into a larger country. Allegiance to the smaller one could not be whole-hearted. She wondered if it were true she was getting hard. Something in her did seem hardening. At any rate, something in her was wanting to fight, fight for air, fight, no matter who must be hurt in the struggle, for that bigger country into which she had looked, those greater distances, more spacious sweeps. Sometimes she had a sense of being in a close room, and nothing in the world was so dreadful to Katie as a close room, and felt that she had but to open a door and find herself out where the wind would blow upon her face. And the door was not bolted. It was hers to open, if she would. There were no real chains. There were only dead hands, hands which live hands had power to brush away. And the room was made close by all those things which they of the dead hands had loved, things which they had served, things which, for them, had been out in the open, not making the air unbearable in a close room. And when she wanted to tell them that she must get out of the room because it was too close for her, that she could no longer stay with things which shut out the air, it seemed they could not understand--for they were dead, but they could look at her with love and trust, those hands, which could have been so easily brushed away, as bolts on the door of the room holding the things they had left for her to guard. And they were proud, and their trusting eyes seemed to say they knew she would not make all their world sorry for them. She walked slowly across Pont du Carrousel, watching the people, the people going their many ways, meeting their many problems, wondering if many of them had well loved hands, either of life or death, as bolts upon the doors which held them from more spacious countries, holding them so securely because they could be so easily brushed away. It was people, people of the crowds, who saved her from a sense of isolation her own friends brought: for she was always certain that in the crowds was some one else who was wondering, longing, perhaps a courageous some one who was fighting. Paris itself had fought, was fighting all the time. She loved it anew in the new sense of its hurts and its hopes. And always it had laughed. She felt kinship to it in that. Seeming so little caring, yet so deeply understanding. The laughter-loving city had paid stern price that its children might laugh. It seemed to her sometimes that one could love and hate Paris for every known reason, but in the end always love for the full measure it gave. She stood for a moment looking at the spire of Sainte Chapelle, slender as a fancy, yet standing out like a conviction; watching the people on the busses, the gesticulating crowds--blockades of emotion, the men on the Quai rummaging among the book-stalls for possible treasures left by men who had loved it long before, looking at the thanks in stone for yesterday's vision of to-morrow, and everywhere cabs--as words carrying ideas--breathlessly bearing eager people from one vivid point to another in the hurrying, highly-pitched, articulate city. It interested her for a time, as things that were live always interested Katie. The city's streets had always been for her as waves which bore her joyously along. But after a time, perhaps just because she was so live, it made her unbearably lonely. The things they might do together in Paris! The things to see--to talk about. And still filled with her revolt against Clara's self-delusions, she asked of herself how much the demand of her spirit to soar was prompted by the hunger of her heart to love. She could not say. She wondered how many of the world's people would be able to say. How many of the spacious countries would have been gained had men been fighting only for their philosophies, pushed only by the beating of wings that would soar. But did that make the distances less vast? Less to be desired? Though visioning be child of desiring--was the vision less splendid, and was not the desire ennobled? Her speculations were of such nature as to make her hurry home to see whether there was American mail. A certain letter which sometimes came to her was called "American mail." All the rest of the American mail which reached Paris was privileged to be classed with that letter. Katie had come over in October with her Aunt Elizabeth, who felt the need of recuperation from the bitter blow of her son's marriage. Katie, too, felt the need of recuperation--she did not say from what, but from something that made her intolerant of her aunt's form of distress. Her aunt said that Katie was changing: growing unsympathetic, hard, unfeminine. She thought it was because she did not marry. It would soften her to care for some one, was the theory of her Aunt Elizabeth. She had remained in order to be with Worth; and, too, because there seemed nothing to go back to. Mrs. Prescott had come over to be for a time with a niece who was studying music, and she and Katie were together. Now the older woman was beginning to talk of wanting to go back; she was getting letters from Harry which made her want to see him. The letters sounded as though he were in love again. And Katie was getting letters herself, letters to make her want to see the writer thereof. They, too, sounded as if written by one in love. With things as regards Worth adjusted, Katie would be free to go with her friend, and she was homesick. At least that was the non-committal name she gave to something that was tugging at her heart. But--go home to what? For what? Her vision had not grown any clearer. It was only that the "homesickness" was growing more acute. And that night's mail did not fill her with a yearning to become an expatriate. In addition to the "American mail" there was a letter from Ann. That evening after Worth was asleep and Mrs. Prescott had gone to her room, Katie reread both letters, and a number of others, and thought about a number of things. Wayne had undertaken the supervision of Ann. In his first letter, that unsatisfactory letter in which he gave so few details about finding Ann, he had said quite high-handedly that he was going to look after things himself. "I think, Katie," he wrote, "that with the best of intentions, your method was at fault. I can see how it all came about, but it is not the way to go on. It was too unreal. The time of make-believe is over. Ann is a real person and should work out her life in a real way, her own way, not following your fancyings. She must be helped until she gets stronger and more prepared. You've had the thing come too tragically to you to see it just right, so I'm going to step in and I want you to leave things to me." So Wayne had "stepped in" and was lending Ann the money to study stenography. Katie had made a wry face over stenography, which did not have a dream-like or an Ann-like sound--but a very Wayne-like one!--but had entered no protest; at that time she had been too dumbly miserable to enter protest about anything. Wayne seemed to her curt and rather unfeeling about the whole thing, insisting, somewhat indelicately, she thought, on the point that Ann be prepared to earn her own living and that there be no more nonsense about her. She hoped he was kinder with Ann than he sounded in his letters about her. Ann was in New York. Wayne had said, and Katie agreed with him, that Chicago was not the place for her to start in anew. She had gone through too many hard things there. And Katie was glad for other reasons. With Wayne in Washington, she would have no more occasion to be in the middle-west and Ann would be too far away in Chicago. But Katie was looking desperately homesick at that thought of having no more occasion to be in the middle-west. The man who mended the boats was still out there, mending boats and finishing his play, which she knew now was to be about the army. One reason he had wanted to mend boats there was that he might know some of the men who worked in the shops at the Arsenal, interested in that relation of labor to militarism. For two months Katie had heard nothing from him. In those first months he, too, seemed helpless before it, seemed to understand that Katie's feeling was a thing he could not hope to understand--much less, change. Then there rose in him the impulse to fight, for her, against it all, stir her to fight. "Katie," he wrote in that first letter, letter she was re-reading that night, "we have seen two sides of the same thing. Our two visions, experiences, have roused in us two very different emotions. Does that mean it must kill for us what we have said is the biggest emotion--experience--the greatest joy and brightest hope life has brought us? "We're both bound by it. I by the hurt it's brought me, you by the happiness; I by the hate it roused, you by the love that lingers round it. Are we going to make no efforts to set ourselves free? Are we so much of the past that the institutions of the past and the experiences and prejudices of those institutions can shut us out from the future and from each other? "Katie, you have the rich gift of the open mind. I don't believe that, lastingly, there's anything you'll shut out as impossible to consider. Your eyes say it, Katie--say they'll look at everything, and just as fairly as they can. Oh they're such honest, fearless, just eyes--so wise and so tender. And it was I--I who love them so--brought that awful look of hurt to those wonderful eyes. Katie--I want to spend all of my life keeping that hurt look from those dear eyes! "You're asked to do a hard thing, dear Katie. It's cruel it should be _you_ so hard a thing is asked of. Asked to look at a thing you see through the feeling of a lifetime as though seeing it for the first time. To look at all you've got to push aside things you regarded as fixed. I suppose every one has something that to him seems the things unshakable, something he finds it terrifying to think of moving. All your traditions, all your love and loyalty cling round this thing which it seems to you you can't have touched. But Katie, as you read these pages won't you try to think of things, not as you've been told they were, but just as they seem to you from what you read? Think of them, not in the old grooves, but just as it comes in to you as the story of a life? "You'll try to do that for me, won't you, dear fair-minded, loving-spirited Katie? "I was a country boy; lived on a farm, got lonesome, thought about things I had nobody to talk to about, read things and wanted more things to read, part the dreamer and part the great husky fellow wanting life, adventure, wanting to see things and know things--most of all, experience things. I want to tell you a lot about it sometime. I can't let go the idea that there is going to be a sometime. Just because there's so much to tell, if nothing else. And, Katie, _isn't_ there something else? "No way to begin the story of one's life! "Then I went away from home. To see the world. Try my fortune. Experience. Adventure. That was the call. "And the very first thing I fell in with that recruiting officer in the white suit. I can see just how that fellow looked. Get every intonation as he drew the glowing picture of life in the army. "The army sounded good. The army was experience, adventure, with a vengeance. A life among men. A chance. He told me that an intelligent fellow like me would soon be an officer. Of course I agreed perfectly I was an intelligent fellow, impressed with army intelligence in picking me for one. Why I could see myself as commander-in-chief in no time! "There's the cruelty of it, Katie. The expectation they rouse to get you--the contemptuous treatment after they've got you. The difference between the army of the 'Men Wanted For the Army' posters and the army those men find after those posters have done their work. "Remember your telling me about visiting at Fort Riley when you were quite a youngster? The good time you had?--how gay it was? How charming your host was? As nearly as I can figure it out, I was there at the same time, filling the noble office of garbage man. Now, far be it from me, believing in the dignity of all labor, to despise the office of garbage man. I can think of conditions under which I would be quite happy to serve my country in that capacity. But having enlisted because of the noble figure of a soldier carrying a flag, I grew pretty sore at the 'Damn you, we've got you' manner in which I was ordered to carry things--well, not to be too indelicate let us merely say things less attractive than the flag. "It's not having to peel potatoes and wash dishes; it's seeming to be despised for doing it that stirs in men's hearts the awful soreness that makes them deserters. "In our regiment men were leaving right along. Our company had a particularly bad record on desertions. Our captain, a decent fellow, was away most of the time and the lieutenant in command was a cur. I'd find a more gentle word for him if I could, but I know none such. Army men talk a great deal about discipline. But there's a difference between discipline and bullying. This fellow couldn't issue an order without making you feel that difference. "He had a laugh that was a sneer. It wasn't a laugh, just a smile; a smile that sneered. He couldn't pass a crowd of men cutting grass without making their hearts sore. "I don't say he's the typical army man. I don't doubt that there are men high in the army who, if all were known, would despise him as much as the men in his company did. But I do say that if there were not a good many a good deal like him more than fifty thousand young men of America would not have deserted from the United States army in the past twelve years. "There was a fellow in our company I had been particularly sorry for. He wasn't a bad sort at all; he was more dazed than anything else; didn't understand the army manner; the army snobbishness. This lieutenant couldn't look at him without making him sullen. "One day he told him to do a loathsome thing, then stood there with that sneering smile watching him do it. Well, he did it, all right; that's what _gets_ you, that powerlessness under what you know for injustice. But that night he left. "I knew he was going. He wanted me to go with him. I don't know why I didn't. I don't blame men for deserting. But for my own part, it would only be two years more; I used to say to myself, 'You got into this. You'll see it through.' "They caught him, brought him back the next day. I happened to be there at the time. So did our spick and span lieutenant. The man who had been caught--or boy, rather, for he was but that--was anything but spick and span. His clothes were torn and muddy, his face dirty and bloody--it had been scratched by something. He knew what he was in for. Court martial and imprisonment for desertion. We knew what _that_ meant. "He was a sorry, unsoldierly sight. Gone to pieces. Unnerved. All in. His chin was quivering. And then the little lieutenant came along, starting out for golf. He stood in front of him and looked him up and down--this boy who had been caught. Boy who would be imprisoned. And as he looked at him he laughed; or smiled rather, that smile that was a sneer. "He stood there continuing to smile--torturing him with that smile he couldn't do a thing about--this boy who was down; this fellow who was all in. That was when I struck him in the face and knocked him down. "The penalty for that, as I presume I need not tell an army girl, is death. 'Or such other punishment as a court martial may direct.' "The thing directed in my case was imprisonment at Fort Leavenworth for five years. Most of the men in that prison would say, 'Give me death.' "I'd better not say much about it. Something gets hot in my head when I begin to talk about it. If you were with me--your cooling hand, your steadying eyes--I could tell you about it. 'If you were with me'! I find that a very arresting phrase, Katie. "Those were black years. Cruel years. Years to twist a man's soul. They took something from me that will not be mine again. I remember your telling how Ann said there were things to make perfect happiness forever impossible. She was right. There _are_ hours that stay. "I went into the army just an adventurous boy. I came from it an embittered man. My experience with it made me suspect all of life. I was more than unhappy. I was sullen. I _hated_--and I wanted to get even. Oh it was a lovely spirit in which I went forth a second time to meet the world. "I don't know what might not have happened, I think I was right in line to become a criminal, like so many of the rest of them who have served time at Leavenworth--I don't suppose the United States has any finer school anywhere than its academy for criminals at Fort Leavenworth--had it not been for a man I met. "I got a job in a garage. I had always been pretty good at mechanical things and knew a little about it. And there I met this man--and through him came salvation. "I don't know, Katie, maybe socialism will not save the world. I don't see how it can miss it--but be that as it may, I know it has saved many a man's soul. I know it saved mine. "This fellow--an older man with whom I worked--talked to me. He saw the state I was in, won my confidence and got my story. And then he began talking to me and gave me books. He got me to come to his house instead of the places I was going to, saying nothing against the other places, but just making his things so much more attractive. We used to talk and argue and gradually other things fell away just because there was no room for them. "You know I had loved books--read all I could get--but didn't seem to get the right ones. Well, after I had served time breaking clay I didn't care anything about books--too sore, too dogged, too full of hate. But the love for the books came back, and through the books, and through this friend, came the splendid saving vision. "Vision of what the world might be--world with the army left out, with all that the army represented to me vanished from the earth. With men not ruling and cursing other men; but working together--the world for all and all for the world. And the thing that saved me was that I saw there was something to work for--something to believe in--look at--think about--when old memories of the guard knocking me down with the butt of his gun would tear into my soul and bring me low with the hate they roused. "And so I began again, Katie dear, that sense of things as they might be--that vision--taking some of the sting from what I had suffered from things as they were. I stopped hating and cursing; I began thinking and dreaming. There came the desire to _know_. I tore into books like a madman. I couldn't go on hating my fellow-men because I was too busy trying to find out about them. And so it happened that there were things more interesting to think about than the things I had suffered in the army; I was carried out of myself--and saved. "I wish I could talk to some of those other fellows! Some of those boys who ran away from the army, not because they were criminals and cowards, but just because they didn't know what to make of things. I wish I could talk to some of those men who dug clay with me at Fort Leavenworth--men who went away cursing the government, loathing the flag, hating all men, and who have nothing to take them out of it. I wish I could take them up with me to the hill-top and say--'There! Don't look at the little pit down below! Look out! Look wide!' "Katie--you aren't going to save men by putting them at back-breaking work under brutalized guards. You aren't going to redeem men by belittling them. You're going to save them by making them _see_. And the crime of our whole system of punishments is that it does all in its power, not to make them see, but to shut them out from seeing...." In the letters which followed he told her other things, things he had done, the work he hoped to do, what he wanted to do with his life. Told it with the simplicity of sincerity, the fine seriousness untainted with the self-consciousness called modesty. He believed he could work with men; things he had already done made him believe he could do more, bigger things. He wanted to help fight the battles of the people who worked; not with any soldier of fortune notion, but because he was one of those people, because he had suffered as one of those people, and believed he saw their way more clearly than the mass of them were seeing it. And he wanted to write about men; had some reason for believing he could. He was hoping that his play would open the way to many other things; it looked as though it were going to be put on. He told of his feeling for it. "More than a showing up and a getting even, though there _is_ that. It will be no prancing steed and clanking saber picture of the army. More digging of clay than waving of the flag. I see significant things arising from that survival of autocracy in a democracy, an interesting study in the bitter things coming out of the relation of the forms and habits of a vanishing order to the aspirations and tendencies of a forming one. And in that bending of spirit to form, the army codes and standards making for the army habit of mind, the army snobbishness and narrowness. The things that shape men, until a given body of men have particular characteristics, particular limitations. You said that if you loved them for nothing else you would love army people for their hospitality. But in the higher sense of that beautiful word they are the least hospitable of people. Their latch string of the spirit is not out. Their minds are tight--fixed. They have not that openness of spirit and flexibility of mind that make for wider visioning. "And it's not that they haven't, but why they haven't, brings one to the vein. "Yes, I got the article you sent me, written by your army friend, eloquent over the splendid things war has done for the human race, the great things it has bred in us. Well if the 'war virtues' aren't killed by an armed peace, then I don't think we need worry much about ever losing them. It's the people at war for peace who are going to conserve and utilize for the future the strong and shining things which days of war have left us. Men who must base their great claim on what has been done in the past are not the men to shape the future--or even carry the heritage across the bridge. War is now a faithful servant of capitalism. Its glorious days are over. It's even a question whether it's longer valuable as a servant. It may lose its job before its master loses his. In any case, it goes with capitalism; and if the good old war virtues are to be saved out of the wreck it's the wreckers will save them! "Which is not what I started out to say. This play into which I'm seeking to get the heart of what I've lived and thought and dreamed is not the impersonal thing this harangue might make it sound. I trust it's nothing so bloodless as a study of economic forces or picture of the relationship of old things to new. It's that only as that touches a man's life, means something to that life. It's about the army because this man happens, for a time, to be in the army--it's what the army does to him that's the thing. "Though it seems to me a pretty dead thing in these days. Life itself is a dead thing with you gone from it." In the letter she received that night he wrote: "Katie, is it going to spoil it for us? Can it? _Need_ it? We who have come so close? Have so much? Are outlived things to push us apart? That seems _too_ bitter! "Oh don't think that I don't _see_. The things it would mean giving up. The wrench. And, for what?--your friends would say. At times I wonder how I _can_--ask it, hope for it. Then there lives for me again your wonderful face as it was when you lifted it to me that first time. _You_--and I grow bold again. "I don't say you wouldn't suffer. I don't say there wouldn't be hurts, big hurts brought by the little things arising from lives differently lived. I know there would be times of longing for things gone. For the sunny paths. For it couldn't be all sunny paths with me, Katie. Those years in the dark will always throw their shadow. "Then, how dare I? Loving you--laughing, splendid you--how can I? "Because I believe that you love me. Remembering that light in your eyes, knowing _you_, I dare believe that the hurts would be less than the hurt of being spared those hurts. "I can hear your friends denouncing me. Hear their withering arguments, and I'll own that at times they do wither. But, Katie, I just can't seem to _stay_ withered! "You're such an upsetting person, dear Katie. To both heart and philosophy. It's not possible to hate a world that Katie's in. World that didn't spoil Katie. And if there are many of the _you_--oh no other real you!--but many who, awakened, can fight as you can fight and love as you can love--wouldn't it be a joke on us revolutionists if we were cheated out of our revolution just by the love in the hearts of the Katies? "Well, nobody would be so happy in that joke as would the defrauded revolutionists! "You make me wonder, Katie, if perhaps it isn't less the vision than the visioning. Less the thing seen than that thing of striving to see. Make me feel the narrowness in scorning the trying to see just because not agreeing with the thing seen. Sometimes I have a new vision of the world. Vision of a world visioning. Of the vision counting less than the visioning. "Those moments of glow bear me to you. Persuade me that our visions must be visioned together. "Life's all empty without you. The radiance is not there. In these days light comes only through dreams, and so I dream dreams and see visions. "Dreams of _us_--visions of the years we'd meet together. And you are not bowed and broken in those visions, Katie. You're very strong and buoyant--and always eager for life--and always tender. No, not _always_ tender. Sometimes fighting! Telling me I don't know what I'm talking about. It's a splendid picture of Katie fighting--eyes shining, cheeks red. "And then at the very height of her scorn, Katie happens to think of something funny. And she says the something funny in her inimitable way. Then she laughs, and after her laugh she's tender again, and says she loves me, though still maintaining I didn't know what I was talking about! "And in the visions there are times when Katie is very quiet. So still. Hushed by the wonder of love. Then Katie's laughing eyes are deep with mystery, Katie's face seems melted to pure love, and from it shines the light that makes life noble. "In these days of a fathomless loneliness I dare not look long upon that vision. "Do you ever hear a call, dear heart? A call to a freer country than any country you have known? Call to a country where the things which bind you could bind no more? And if in fancy you sometimes let yourself drift into that other country, am I with you there? Do you ever have a picture of our venturing together into the unknown ways--daring--suffering--rejoicing--_growing_? Sometimes sunshine and sometimes storm--but always open country and everwidening sky-line. Oh Katie--how splendid it might be!" She read and re-read it, dreaming and picturing. And at length there settled upon her that stillness, that pause before life's wonder and mystery. Her eyes were deep. The light that makes life noble glorified her tender face. She broke from it at last to look for a card they had there giving dates of sailings. CHAPTER XXXVII They would get in late that afternoon. Off on the horizon was a hazy mass which held the United States of America, as sometimes the haze of a dream may hold a mighty truth. Katie and Mrs. Prescott were having a brisk walk on deck. They paused and peered off at that mist out of which New York must soon shape itself. "Just off yonder's your country, Katie," the older woman was saying. "Soon you'll see the flag flying over Governor's Island. Will it make you thrill?" "It always has," replied Katie. Mrs. Prescott stole a keen look at her, seeing that she was not answered. They had had some strange talks on that homeward trip, talks to stir in the older woman's mind vague apprehensions for the daughter of her old friend. It did not seem to Mrs. Prescott what she called "best" that a woman--and particularly an unmarried one--should be doing as much thinking as Katie seemed to be doing. She wished Katie would not read such strange books; she was sure Walt Whitman, for one, could not be a good influence. What would happen to the world if the women of Katie's class were to--let down the bars, she vaguely and uneasily thought it. And she was too fond of Katie to want her to venture out of shelter. "Well it ought to, Katie dear. I don't know who has the right to thrill to it, if you haven't. Doesn't it make you think of those sturdy forefathers of yours who came to it long ago, when it was an unknown land, and braved dangers for it? Your people have always fought for it, Katie. There would be no country had not such lives as theirs been given to it." Katie was peering off at the faint outlines which one moment seemed discernible in the mist and the next seemed but a phantom of the imagination, as the truth which is to stand out bold and incontestable may at first suggest itself so faintly through the dream as to be called a phantom of the imagination. "True," she said. "And fine. And equally true and fine that there's just as much to fight for now as there ever was." "Oh yes," murmured Mrs. Prescott, "we must still have the army, of course." "The fighting's not in the army," said Katie, to herself rather than to her friend. The older woman sighed. "I'm afraid I don't understand you, Katie." After a pause she added, sadly: "Something seems happening in the world that is driving older people and younger people apart." Katie turned to her affectionately. "Oh, no." But more affectionately than convincingly. Mrs. Prescott looked at her wistfully: so strong, so buoyant, so fearless and so fine; she felt an impulse to keep her, though for what--from what--she would not have been able to say. "Katie dear," she said gently, "I get a glimpse of what you mean in there still being things to fight for. You mean new ideas; new things. I know you're stirred by something. I feel your enthusiasm; it shines from your face. Enthusiasm is a splendid thing in the young, Katie. In any of us. New things there always are to fight for, of course. But, dear Katie--the old things? Those beautiful _old_ things which the generations have left us? Things fought for, tested, mellowed by our fathers and mothers, and their fathers and mothers? Aren't they a little too precious, too hardly won, too freighted with memories to be lightly cast aside?" Katie looked at her friend's face, itself so incontestably the gift of the generations. It made vivid her own mother's face, and that her own struggle. "I don't think," she said tremulously, "that you are justified in saying they are 'lightly' cast aside." They were silent, looking off at the land which was breaking through the mists, responding in their different ways to the different things it was saying to them. "It seems to me," Mrs. Prescott began uncertainly, "that it is not for women--particularly women to whom they have come as directly as to you and me--to cast them off at all. We seem to be in strange days. Days of change. To me, Katie, it seems that the work for the women--_our_ women--is in preserving those things, dear things left to us, holding them safe and unharmed through the destroying days of change." She had grown more sure of herself in speaking. The last came staunchly. "It seems," she added, "that it would be enough for us to do. And the thing for which we are best fitted." Katie was silent; she could not bear to say to her friend--her mother's friend--that it did not seem to her enough to do, or the thing for which she was best fitted. She was the less drawn to the idea because of a face she could see down in the steerage: face of an immigrant girl who was also turning eager face, not to the land for which her forefathers had fought, but to that which would be the land of her descendants. She had seen her there before, face set toward the land into which she was venturing. She had become interested in her. She seemed so eager. And thinking back to the things seen in her search for Ann, other things she had been reading of late, a fear for that girl--pity for her--more than that, sense of responsibility about her grew big in Katie. It made it seem that there was bigger and more tender work for women than preserving inviolate those things women had left. As she drew near the harbor of New York she was more interested in the United States of America as related to that girl than as associated with her own forefathers who had fought for it long before. And as it had been for them to fight in the new land, it seemed that it was for her, not merely to cherish the fact of their having fought, not holding that as something apart--something setting her apart, but to fight herself; not under the old standards because they had been their standards, but under whatsoever standards best served the fight. It even seemed that the one way to keep alive those things they had left her was to let them shape themselves in whatever form the new spirit--new demands--would shape them. Mrs. Prescott was troubled by her silence. "Katie dear," she said, "you come of a long line of fine and virtuous women. In these days when everything seems attacked--endangered--_that_, at least--that thing most dear to women--most indispensable--must be held inviolate. And by such as you. Wherever your ideas may carry you, don't let _that_ be touched. Remember that the safety of the world for women goes, if you do." It turned Katie to Ann. Safety _she_ had found. Then again she looked down at the immigrant girl--beautiful girl that she was. And wondered. And feared. She turned to Mrs. Prescott with a tear on her eyelashes and a smile a little hard about her lips. "Would you say that 'fine and virtuous women' have succeeded in keeping the world a perfectly safe place for women?" Mrs. Prescott was repelled, but Katie did not notice. She was looking with a passionate sternness off at New York. "Let _anything_ be touched," she spoke it with deep feeling. "I say _nothing's_ too precious to be touched--if touching it can make things better!" Mrs. Prescott had gone below. Katie feared that she had wounded her, and was sorry. She had not been able to help it. The face of that immigrant girl was too tragically eager. They were almost in now, close to Governor's Island, over which the flag was flying. It gripped her as it had never done before. "Boy," she said to Worth, perched on a coil of rope beside her, "there's your country. Country your people came to a long time ago, and fought for, and some of them died for. And you'll grow up, Worth, and _you'll_ fight for it. Not the way they fought; it won't need you to fight for it that way; _they_ did that--and now that's done. But there will be lots for you to fight for, too; harder fights to fight, I think, than any they fought. You'll fight to make it a better place for men and women and little children to live in. Not by firing guns at other men, Worth, but by being as wise and kind and as honest and fair as you know how to be." It was her voice moved him; it had been vibrant with real passion. But after a moment the face of the child of many soldiers clouded. "But won't I have _any_ gun 'tall, Aunt Kate?" he asked wistfully. She smiled at the stubborn persistence of militarism. "I'm afraid not, dear. I hope we're not going to have so many guns when you're a man. But, Worth, if you don't have the gun, other little boys will have more to eat. There are lots of little boys and girls in the world now haven't enough to eat just because there are so many guns. Wouldn't you rather do without the gun and know that nobody was going hungry?" "I--guess so," faltered Worth, striving to be magnanimous but looking wistful. "But, Aunt Kate," he pursued after another silence, "what's father making guns for--if there aren't going to be any?" Katie's smile was not one Worth would be likely to get much from. "Ask father," she said rather grimly. "I think he might find the question interesting." Worth continued solemn. "But, Aunt Kate--won't there be anybody 'tall to kill?" "Why, honey," she laughed, "does it really seem to you such a gloomy world--world in which there will be nobody to kill? Don't worry, dear. The world's getting so interesting we're going to find lots of things more fun than guns." "Maybe," said Worth, "if I don't have a gun you'll get me an air-ship, Aunt Kate." "Maybe so," she laughed. "The man that mends the boats says I'll have an air-ship before I die, Aunt Kate." She gave Worth a sudden little squeeze, curiously jubilant at the possibility of his having an air-ship before he died. And she viewed the city of sky-scrapers adoringly--tenderly--mistily. "Oh Worthie," she whispered, "isn't it _lovely_ to be getting home?" CHAPTER XXXVIII She found it difficult to adjust herself to the Ann who had luncheon with her the next day. The basis of their association had shifted and it had been too unique for it to be a simple matter to appear unconscious of the shifting. She had not seen Ann since the day they said the cruel things to each other. Wayne had thought it best that way, saying that Ann must have no more emotional excitement. She had acquiesced the more readily as at the time she was not courting emotional excitement for herself. And now the Ann sitting across the table from her was not the logical sequence of things experienced in last summer's search for Ann. She was not the sum of her thoughts about Ann--visioning through her, not the expression of the things Ann had opened up. It was hard, indeed, to think of her as in any sense related to them, at all suggestive of them. An Ann radiating life rather than sorrowing for it was an Ann she did not know just what to do with. And there was something disturbing in that rich glow of happiness. She did not believe that Ann's something somewhere could be stenography. Yet her radiance--the deep, warm quality of it--suggested nothing so much as a something somewhere attained. It seemed to Katie rather remarkable if the prospect of soon being able to earn her own living could make a girl's eyes as wonderful as that. There was no mistaking her delight in seeing Katie and Worth. And a sense of the old relationship was there--deep and tender sense of it; but something had gone from it, or been added to it. It was not the all in all. Truth was, Ann was more at home with her than she was with Ann. After luncheon they went up to Katie's room for a little chat. Katie talked about stenography and soon came to be conscious of that being a vapid thing to be talking about. "What pretty furs," she said, in the pause following the collapse of stenography. That seemed to mean more. "Yes, aren't they lovely?" responded Ann, with happy enthusiasm. "They were my Christmas present--from Wayne." The way Ann said Wayne--in the old days she had never said it at all--led instantly, though without her knowing by what path, to that strange fear of hers in finding Ann so free from fear. Ann was blushing a little: the "Wayne" had slipped out so easily, and so prettily. "He thought I needed them. It's often so cold here, you know." "Why certainly one needs furs," said Katie firmly, as if there could be no question as to _that_. Katie's great refuge was activity. She got up and began taking some dresses from her trunk. Then, just to show herself that she was not afraid, that there was nothing to be afraid about, she asked lightly: "What in the world brings Wayne up to New York so much?" Ann was affectionately stroking her muff. She looked up at Katie shyly, but with a warm little smile. There was a pause which seemed to hover over it before she said softly: "Why, Katie, I think perhaps I bring him up to New York." Everything in Katie seemed to tighten--close up. She gave her most cobwebby dress a perilous shake and said in flat voice: "Wayne's very kind, I'm sure." Ann did not reply; she was still stroking her muff; that smile which hovered tenderly over something had not died on her lips. It made her mouth, her whole face, softly lovely. It did something else. Made it difficult for Katie to go on pretending with herself. Though she made a last stand. It was a dreadful state of affairs, she told herself, if Ann had been so absurd as to fall in love with Wayne--_Wayne_--just because he had been kind in helping her get a start. She followed that desperately. "Oh yes, Wayne's really very kind at heart. And then of course he's always been especially interested in you, because of me." Ann looked up at her. The look kept deepening, sank far down beneath Katie's shallow pretense. "Well, Katie," Ann began, with the gentle dignity of one whom life has taken into the fold, "as long as we seem into this, I'd rather go on. Wayne said I was to do just as I liked about telling you. Just as it happened to come up. But I think you ought to know he is not interested in just the way you think." She paused before it, then said softly, with a tremulous pride: "He cares for me, Katie--and wants to marry me." "He can't do that! He _can't do that_!" It came quick and sharp. Quick and sharp as fire answering attack. She sat down. The sharpness had gone and her voice was shaking as she said: "You certainly must know, Ann, that he can't do that." So they faced each other--and the whole of it. It was all opened up now. "It's very strange to me," Katie added hotly, "that you wouldn't know that." It seemed impossible for Ann to speak; the attack had been too quick and too sharp; evidently, too unexpected. "I told him so," she finally whispered. "Told and told him so. That you would feel--this way. That it--couldn't be. He said no. That you felt--all differently--after last summer. And I thought so, too. Your letters sounded that way." Katie covered her eyes for a second. It was too much as if the things she was feeling differently about were the things she was losing. "And when you want to be happy," Ann went on, "it's not so hard to persuade yourself--be persuaded." She stopped with a sob. "I know that," was wrung wretchedly from Katie. "And since--since I _have_ been happy--let myself think it could be--it just hasn't seemed it _could_ be any other way. So I stopped thinking--hadn't been thinking--took it for granted--" Again it wrung from Katie the this time unexpressed admission that there was nothing much easier than coming to look upon one's happiness as the inevitable. "And Wayne kept saying," Ann went on, sobs back of her words, "that all human beings are entitled to work out their lives in their own way. You believed that, he said. And I--I thought you did, too. Your letters--" "No," said Katie bitterly, "what I believed was that _I_ was entitled to work out _my_ life in my own way. Wayne got his life mixed up with mine." The laugh which followed them was more bitter, more wretched than the words. She had persuaded herself the more easily that she was entitled to work out her life in her own way because she had assumed Wayne would be there to stand guard over the things left from other days. He was to stay there, fixed, leaving her free to go. She could not have explained why it was that the things she had been thinking did not seem to apply to Wayne. The thing grew to something monstrous. There whirled through her mind a frenzied idea as to what they would do about sending Major Barrett a wedding announcement. Other things whirled through her mind--as jeers, jibes, they came, a laugh behind them. A something somewhere was very commendable while it remained abstract! Having a fine large understanding about Ann had nothing to do with having Ann for a sister-in-law! "Calls" were less beautiful when responded to by one's brother! _This_ (and this tore an ugly wound) was what came of helping people in their quests for happiness. It was followed by a frantic longing to be with Mrs. Prescott--in the shelter of her philosophy, hugging tight those things left by the women of other days. Frightened, outraged, her impulse was to fly back to those well worn ways of yesterday. But that was running away. Ann was there. Ann with the radiance gone; though, for just that moment, less stricken than defiant. There was something of the cunning of the desperate thing cornered in the sullen flash with which she said: "You talked a good deal about wanting me to be happy. Used to think I had a right to be. When it was Captain Prescott--" It was unanswerable. The only answer Katie would be prepared to make to it was that she didn't believe, all things considered, it was a thing she would have said. But doubtless people lost nice shades of feeling when they became creatures at bay fighting for life. And seemingly one would leave nothing unused. "I want you to know, Katie, that I paid back that money. The missionary money. You made me feel that it wasn't right. That I--that I ought to pay it back. I earned the money myself--some work there was for me to do at school. I wanted to--to buy a white dress with it." Ann was sobbing. "But I didn't. I sent back the money." Katie was wildly disposed to laugh. She did not know why, after having worried about it so much, Ann's having paid back the missionary money should seem so irrelevant now. But she did not laugh, for Ann was looking at her as pleadingly, as appealingly, as Worth would have looked after he had been "bad" and was trying to redeem it by being "good." With a sob, Ann hid her face against her muff. Seeing her thus, Katie made cumbersome effort to drag things to less delicate, less difficult, ground. "Ann dear," she began, "I--oh I'm _so_ sorry about this. But truly, Ann, you wouldn't be at all happy with Wayne." Ann raised her face and looked at her with something that had a dull semblance to amusement. "You see," Katie staggered on, "Wayne hasn't a happy temperament. He's morose. Queer. It wouldn't do at all, Ann, because it would make you both wretchedly unhappy." She found Ann's faint smile irritating. "I ought to know," she added sharply, "for I've lived in the house with him most of my life." "You may have lived in the house with him, Katie," gently came Ann's overwhelming response. "You've never understood him." Katie openly gasped. But some of her anger passed swiftly into a wondering how much truth there might be in the preposterous statement. Wayne as "immune" was another idea jeering at her now. And that further assumption, which had been there all the while, though only now consciously recognized, that Wayne's knowing Ann's story, made Ann, to Wayne, impossible-- Living in the same house with people did not seem to have a great deal to do with knowing their hearts. "Wayne," Ann had resumed, in voice low and shaken with feeling, "has the sweetest nature of any one in this world. He's been unhappy just because he hadn't found happiness. If you could see him with me, Katie, I don't think you'd say he had an unhappy nature--or worry much about our not being happy." Katie was silent, driven back; vanquished, less by the words than by the light they had brought to Ann's face. And what she had been wanting--had thought she was ready to fight for--was happiness--for every one. "Of course I know," Ann said, "that that's not it." That light had all gone from her face. It was twisted, as by something cruel, blighting, as she said just above a whisper: "There's no use pretending we don't know what it is." She turned her face away, shielding it with her muff. It was all there--right there between them--opened, live, throbbing. All that it had always meant--all that generations of thinking and feeling had left around it. And to Katie, held hard, it was true, all too bitterly true, that she came of what Mrs. Prescott called a long line of fine and virtuous women. In her misery it seemed that the one thing one need have no fear about was losing the things they had left one. But other things had been left her. The war virtues! The braving and the fighting and the bearing. Hardihood. Unflinchingness. Unwhimperingness. Those things fought within her as she watched Ann shaken with the sobs she was trying to repress. Well at least she would not play the coward's part with it! She brought herself to look it straight in the face. And what she saw was that if she could be brave enough to go herself into a more spacious country, leaving hurts behind, she must not be so cowardly, so ignobly inconsistent as to refuse the hurts coming to her through others who would dare. Through the conflict of many emotions, out of much misery, she at last wrenched from a sore heart the admission that Wayne had as much right to be "free" as she had. That if Ann had a right to happiness at all--and she had always granted her that--she had a right to this. It was only that now it was she who must pay a price for it. And perhaps some one always paid a price. "Ann?" Ann looked up into Katie's colorless, twitching face. "I hope you and Wayne will be very happy." It came steadily, and with an attempted smile. The next instant she was sobbing, but trying at the same time to tell Ann that sisters always acted that way when told of their brothers' engagements. CHAPTER XXXIX She did not see her brother until evening. "Katie," he demanded sharply, "have you been disagreeable to Ann?" She shook her head. "I haven't meant to be, Wayne." Her face was so wretched that he grew contrite. "You're not pleased?" "Why, Wayne, you can scarcely expect me to be--wholly pleased, can you?" "But you always seemed to understand so well. I"--he paused in that constraint there so often was between them in things delicately intimate--"I've never told you, Katie, how fine I thought you were. So big about it." "It's not so difficult," said Kate, with a touch of her old smile, "to be 'big' about people who aren't marrying into the family." It seemed that he, too, was not above cornering her. "You know, Katie, it was your attitude in the beginning that--" "Just don't bother calling my attention to that, Wayne," she said sharply. "Please credit me with the intelligence to see it for myself." Then she went right to the heart of it. "Oh Wayne--think of Major Barrett's _knowing_." The dull red that came quickly to his face told how bitterly he had thought of it, though he only said quietly: "Damn Barrett." "But you can't damn him. Suppose you were to be stationed at the same place!" He laughed shortly. "Well that, at least, is something upon which I can set your fears at rest." She looked up quickly. "What do you mean?" "I mean, Katie, that my army days are over." She stared at him. "I don't understand you." "It shouldn't be so difficult to comprehend. I have resigned my commission." "Wayne," she asked slowly, "what do you mean?" "Just what I say. That I have resigned my commission. That I am out of the army." It made it seem that the whole world was whirling round and round and that there was nothing to take hold of. "But you can't do that. Why your whole life is there--friends--traditions--work--future." "Not my future," he said briefly. His calm manner made it the more bewildering. "Wayne, I don't see how you can--in such a light manner--give up such a big thing!" He turned upon her in manner less calm. "What right have you to say that it is done in a 'light manner'!" The words had a familiar sound and she recalled them as like something she had said to Mrs. Prescott the day before; just the day before, when she had been so sure of things, and of herself. "But where is your future then, Wayne?" she asked appealingly. "We know, don't we, how hard it is for army men to find futures as civilians?" "I'm going into the forest service." Katie never could tell why, for the moment, it should have antagonized, infuriated her that way. "So that's it. That's what got--a poetic notion! And I suppose," she laughed scornfully, "you're going into the ranks? What is it they call them? Rangers? Starting in at your age--with your training--to 'work from the bottom up'--is that it?" "No," he replied coldly, "that is not it. You have missed it about as far as you could. I have no such picturesque notion. I am doing no such quixotic thing. I value my training too highly for that. It should be worth too much to them. I don't even scorn personal ambition, or the use of personal pull, so you see I'm a long way from a heroic figure. I know I've a brain that can do a certain type of thing. I know I'm well equipped. Well, so far as the equipment goes, my country did it for me and I mean to give it back; only I've got to do it in my own way." "Why, Katie," he resumed after a pause, "I never was more surprised in my life than to find you so out of sympathy with this. I knew what most people would think of it, but I quite took it for granted that you would understand." "It seems a little hard," replied Katie with a tearful laugh, "to understand the fine things other people do. And, Wayne, I'm so afraid it will lead to disappointment! Aren't you idealizing this forest service? Remember Fred's tales of how it's almost strangled by politics. And you know what that means. Let us not forget Martha Matthews!" It was a relief to be laughing together over a familiar thing. Martha Matthews was the daughter of a congressman from somewhere--Katie never could remember whether it was Texas or Wyoming. She had been asked to "take her up" at one time when the army appropriation bill was pending and Martha's father did not seem to realize that the country needed additional defense. But when Martha discovered that army people were "perfectly fascinating--and _so_ hospitable" Martha's parent suddenly awakened to the grave dangers confronting his land. Katie had more than once observed a mysterious relationship between the fact of the army set being fashionable in Washington and the fact that the country must be amply protected, further remarking that army people were just clever enough to know when to be fascinating. "No," he came back to it in seriousness, "I don't think I have many illusions. I know it's far from the perfect thing, but I see it as set in the right direction. It seems to me that that, in itself, ought to mean considerable. It's the best thing I know of--for what I have to offer. Then I want to get out of cities for awhile--get Ann away from them." He paused over that and fell silent. "Osborne offered me a job," he came back to it with a laugh. "Seemed to think I was worth a very neat sum a year to his company--but that was scarcely my notion. In fact I doubt if I would have so much confidence in the forest service if it weren't for his hatred of it. You can judge a thing pretty well by the character of its enemies. Then I'm enough the creature of habit to want to go on in a service; I'm schooled to that thing of the collectivity. But I'll be happier in a service that--despite the weak spots in it--is in harmony with the big collectivity--rather than hopelessly discordant with it. And perhaps it needs some more or less disinterested fellows to help fight for it," he added with a touch of embarrassment, as if fearing to expose himself. He had come close enough to self-betrayal for Katie, despite her fear and confusion, to feel proud of him as he looked then. "Wayne," she asked, "have you felt this way a long time? Out of sympathy with the army?" He did not at once reply, thinking of the night he had sat beside Ann, night when the whole world was shaken and things he had regarded as fixed loosened and fell. Just how much had been loosening before that--some, he knew--just how much would have more or less insecurely held its place had it not been for that night, he was not prepared to say--even to himself. "Longer than I knew, I think," he came back to Katie. "One night last fall I went to a dinner and they drank our toast." He repeated it, very slowly. "'My country--may she always be right--but right or wrong--my country.' "I used to have the real thrill for that toast. That night it almost choked me. That 'right or wrong' is a spirit I can thrill to no longer. I'm more interested in getting it right. "Though I'll own it terrified me, just as it seems to you, to feel it slipping from me. Recently I had occasion to go up to West Point and I spent a whole day deliberately trying to get back my old feeling for things--the whole business that we know so well and that I used to love so much. "And, in a way, I could; but as for something gone. That day up at the Point was one of the saddest of my life. I still loved the trappings. They still called to me. But I knew that, for me, the spirit was dead. "Oh I have no sensational declarations to make about the army. I wouldn't even be prepared to say what I think about disarmament. It's more complex than most peace advocates seem to see. I only know that the army's not the thing for me. I can't go on in it, simply because my feeling for it is gone." He had been speaking slowly and seriously; his head was bent. Now he looked up at her. "It was at the close of that day--day up at West Point--that I resigned my commission. And if you had seen me that night, Katie, I doubt if you would reproach me with 'doing it lightly.'" The marks of struggle had come back to his face with the story of it. They told more than the words. "Forgive me," she said in her impetuous way. "No, I didn't know. How awful it is, Wayne, that we _don't_ know--about each other." She was forced to turn away; but after a moment controlled herself and turned back to add: "Wayne dear, I think you're right. I'm proud of you." "Oh, I'm entitled to no halo," he hastened to say. "It's the fellow who would do it without an income might be candidate for that." "But you _would_ do it without an income, Wayne," she insisted warmly. "I don't know. How can I tell whether I would or not? "And you'll be good to Ann?" he took advantage of her mood to press, as though that were the one thing she could do for him. "You know, how much she needs you, Katie." "I shall certainly want to be good to Ann," she murmured. "Though I don't think she needs me much--any more." Something about her went to his heart. "Why, Katie--we all need you." She shook her head; there were tears, but a smile with them. "Not much, Wayne. Not now. I'm not--indispensable. Though pray why should one wish to be anything so terrifying as indispensable?" "Will you take Worth?" she asked after a little while. "He goes--with you and Ann?" "We want him. And Katie, we want you. We're to go to Colorado and fight the water barons," he laughed. "Aren't you coming with us?" She shook her head. "Not just now. I want to flit round in the East a little first. Be gay--renew my youth," she laughed, choking a little. She drew him to talk of his hopes. "I'll fess up, Katie," he said, when warmed to it by her sympathy, "that I fear I do have rather a poetic notion about it. I want to _do_ something--something that will count, something set in the direction of the future. And I like the idea of going back to that old frontier--place where I was born--and where mother went through so much--and where father fought--and because of which he died. And serving out there now in a way that is just as live--just as vital--as the way he served then." He paused; they were both thinking of their father and mother, of how they might not have understood, of the sadness as well as the triumph there is in change, that tug at the heart that must so often come when the new generation sees a little farther down the road than older eyes can see, the ache in hearts left behind when children of a new day are called away from places endeared by habit into the incertitude and perhaps the danger of ways unworn. "Life seems too fine a thing, Katie, to spend it making instruments of destruction more deadly. It's not a very happy thought to think of their being used; and it's not a very stimulating one to think of their not being. In either case, it doesn't make one too pleased with one's vocation. And life seems a big enough thing," he added, a little diffidently, "to try pretty hard to get one's self right with it." He did not understand the way Katie was looking at him as she replied: "Yes, Wayne; I know that. I've been thinking that myself." Something moved her to ask: "Wayne, do you think you would have done it, if it had not been for Ann?" "I think," he replied quietly, "that possibly that is still another thing I have to thank her for." His face and voice gave Katie a sharp sense of loneliness, that loneliness which came in seeing how poorly she had understood him, how little people knew each other. They talked of a number of things before he suddenly exclaimed: "Oh Katie, I must tell you. That fellow--what's his name? Mann? The mythical being known as the man who mends the boats is a fellow you'll have to avoid, should you ever see him again--which of course is not likely." She had turned and was looking out at the lights in the street below. "Yes?" "Who do you suppose the scoundrel _is_?" "I'm sure I don't know," she faltered. "A military _convict_. Attacked an officer. Served time at Leavenworth." Katie was intent upon the lights down below. "And what do you suppose he was prying around the Island for?" "I'm sure I have no idea," she managed to say. "Going to write a _play_--a play about the _army_! Now what do you think of that? Darrett found out about it. Oh just the man, you see, to write a play about the army! And some sensationalists here are going to put it on. It's the most damnable insolence I ever heard of! They ought to stop it." "Oh, I don't know," said Katie, still absorbed in the cabs down below; "a man has a right to use his experiences--in a play." "Well a fine view he'll give of it! It's the most insufferable impertinence I ever knew of!" She turned around to ask oddly: "Why, Wayne, why all this heat? You're not in the army any more." "Well, don't you think I'm not _of_ it, when an upstart like that turns up to rail at it!" "But how do you know he'll rail?" "Oh he'll rail, all right. I know his type. But we'll see to it that it's pretty generally understood it's military life as presented by a military _convict_." "Perhaps you can trust him to make that point clear himself," said Katie rather dryly. "The _coward_. The _cur_." She turned upon him hotly. "Look here, Wayne, I don't know why you're so sure you have a right to say that!" "I'd like to know why I haven't! Attacked an officer without the slightest provocation whatsoever! Some kind of a hot-headed taking sides with a deserter, I believe it was. I suppose this remarkable play is to be a glorification of desertion," he laughed. "Well," said Katie with an unsteady laugh, "perhaps there are worse things to glorify than desertion." He stared at her. "Come now, Katie, you know better than that." But Katie was looking at him strangely. "Wayne," she said quietly, "you're a deserter, yourself." He flushed, but after an instant laughed. "Really, Katie, you have a positive genius for saying preposterous things." "In which there may occasionally lurk a little truth. You _are_ deserting. Why aren't you?" "I call that about as close to rot as an intelligent person could come," he replied hotly. "I'm resigning my commission. It's perfectly regular." "Yes; being an officer and a gentleman, you _can_ resign your commission, and have it perfectly regular. Being that same officer and gentleman, you never were mugged--treated as a prospective criminal; no four thousand posters bearing your picture will now be sent broadcast over the country; no fifty dollars is offered lean detectives for your capture; you're in no chance of being thrown into prison and have your government do all in its power to wring the manhood out of you! Oh no--an officer and a gentleman--you resign your commission and go ahead with your life. But you're leaving the army, aren't you? Deserting it. And why? Because you don't like the spirit of it. And yet--though you're too big for it--though it's _time_ for you to desert--you're enough bound by it not to let the light of your intelligence fall for one single second on the question of desertion!" She had held him. He made no reply, looking in bewilderment at her red cheeks and blazing eyes. Suddenly her face quivered. "Wayne," she said, "I don't use the term as a hard name. I'm not using it in just its technical sense, our army sense. But mayn't desertion be a brave thing? A fine thing? To desert a thing we've gone beyond--to have the courage to desert it and walk right off from the dead thing to the live thing--? Oh, don't mind my calling you a deserter, Wayne," she added, her eyes full of tears, "for the truth is I'd like to be a deserter myself. But perhaps one deserter is enough for a family--and you beat me to it." She laughed and turned back to the cabs. He wanted to go on with the argument; show her what it was in desertion that army men despised, make the distinction between deserting and resigning. But the truth was he was more interested in the things Katie had said than in the things which could be called in refutation. And Katie puzzled him; her heat, feeling, not only astonished but worried him a little. She was standing there now beating a tattoo on the window pane. He wondered what she was thinking about. The experience as to Ann revealed Katie to him as having thought about things he would not have dreamed she was thinking about. What in the world did she mean by saying she'd like to be a deserter herself? One of her preposterous sayings--but it was true that considerable truth had often lurked at the heart of Katie's absurd way of talking. Watching her, he was drawn to thought of her attractiveness and that made him wonder whom Katie would marry. He had always been secretly proud of his sister's popularity; it seemed she should make a brilliant marriage. Live brilliantly. It was the thing to which she was adapted. Katie was unique. Distinctive. Secretly, unadmittedly, he was very ambitious for her. And with a little smile he considered that seemingly Katie was just shrewd enough to be ambitious for herself. She had steered her little bark safely past the place where she would be likely to marry a lieutenant. Was she heading for a general? So he reflected with humor and affection, watching Katie beat the tattoo on the window. Thought of what some one had said of her as the army girl suggested something that changed his mood, bringing him suddenly to his feet. "Katie," he demanded, "how much did you ever talk to this fellow? You don't think, do you, that he was trying to get you for his 'army girl'--or some such rot? If I thought that--You don't think, do you, Katie, that that was what he was trying to work you for?" Katie suddenly raised her hands and pushed back her hair, for the minute covering her eyes. "No, Wayne," she said, "I don't think that was what he was trying to 'work me' for." And unable to bear more, she told him that she was very tired and asked him to go. CHAPTER XL Katie Jones was very gay that winter. She made her home at her uncle's, near Washington, though most of the time she was in Washington itself, with various cousins and friends; there were always people wanting Katie, especially that winter, when she had such unfailing zest for gayety. They wondered that she should not be more broken up at her brother's absurd move in quitting the army--just at the time the army offered him so much. She seemed to take it very easily; though Katie was not one to take things hard, too light of spirit for that. And they wondered about his marriage to a girl whom nobody but Katie knew anything about. Katie seemed devoted to her and happy in the marriage. "Why, naturally I am pleased," she said to a group of army people who were inquiring about Wayne's bride. "She is my best friend. The girl I care most about." Major Darrett was one of the group. Some one turned to him and asked if he had met her when she visited Katie at the Arsenal the summer before. He replied that he had had that pleasure and that she was indeed beautiful and very charming. Katie hated him the more for having to be grateful to him. She knew that he was sorry for her and grew more and more gay. She could not talk of it, so was left to disclaim tragedy in frivolity. It was royally disclaimed. There were a few serious talks with older army men, men who had known her father and who were outraged at Wayne's leaving the army when he was worth so much to it and it to him. In her efforts to make them see, she was forced to remember what the man who mended the boats said of their lack of hospitality. They were unable to entertain the idea of there being any reason for a man's leaving the army when he was being as well treated in it as Wayne was. Katie's explanations only led them to shake their heads and say: "Poor Wayne." It was impossible to bury certain things in her, for those were the things she must use in defending Wayne. And in defending him, especially to her uncle, she was forced to know how far those things were from being decently prepared for burial. She was never more gay than after one of her defenses of her brother. The winter had passed and it was late in April, not unlike that May day just the year before when she had first seen her sister-in-law. Try as she would she could not keep her thoughts from that day and all that it had opened up. She had received a letter from her sister-in-law that morning. It was hard to realize that the writer of that letter was the Ann of the year before. Her thoughts of Ann led seductively to the old wonderings which Ann had in the beginning opened up. She wondered how many of the people with whom things were all wrong, people whom good people called bad people, were simply people who had been held from their own. She wondered how many of those good people would have remained good people had life baffled them, as it had some of the bad people. The people whom circumstances had made good people were so sure of themselves. She had observed that it was from those who had never sailed stormy waters came the quickest and harshest judgments on bad seamanship in heavy seas. Ann had met Helen and did not seem to know just what to think about her. "She's nice, Katie," she wrote, "but I don't understand her very well. She has so many strange ideas about things. Wayne thinks you and she would get on famously. She doesn't seem afraid of anything and wants to do such a lot of things to the world. I'm afraid I'm selfish; I'm so happy in my own life--it's all so wonderful--that I can't get as excited about the world as Helen does." And yet Ann would not have found the world the place she had found it were it the place Helen would have it. But Ann had found joy and peace--safety--and was too happy in her own life to get excited about the world--and thought Helen a little queer! That was Ann's type--and that was why there were Anns. Ann was radiant about the mountains and their life in them. "Helen said it about right, Katie. They're hard on the hair and the skin--but good for the soul!" They would be for the summer in one of the most beautiful mountain towns of Colorado and wanted Katie to come and bring Worth. Wayne had consented to leave him for a time with Katie at their uncle's. That Katie knew for a concession received for staying in New York with Ann until after her marriage. She believed she would go. She was so tired of Zelda Fraser that she would like to meet Helen. And she would like the mountains. Perhaps they would do something for _her_ soul--if she had not danced it quite away. She was getting very wretched about having to be so happy all the time. She was on her way to Zelda's that afternoon, Zelda having asked her to come in for a cup of tea and a talk. A whiff of some new scandal, she supposed. That was the basis of most of Zelda's "talks." Though possibly she had some things to tell about Harry Prescott's approaching marriage to Caroline Osborne. Katie had been asked to be a bridesmaid at that wedding. "While we have known each other but a short time," Caroline had written in her too sweet way, "I feel close to you, Katie, because it was through you Harry and I came together. Then whom would we want as much as you! And as it is to be something of an army wedding, may I not have you, whom Harry calls the 'most bully army girl' he ever knew?" Mrs. Prescott had also written Katie the glad news, saying she was happy, believing Caroline would make Harry a good wife. Katie was disposed to believe that she would and was emphatically disposed to believe that Mr. Osborne would make Harry a good father-in-law. Katie's knowledge of army finances led her to appreciate the value of the right father-in-law for an officer and gentleman who must subsist upon his pay. But she had made an excuse about the wedding, in no mood to be a bridesmaid, especially to a bride who would enter the bonds of matrimony on the banks of the Mississippi, just opposite a certain place where boats were mended. She walked on very fast toward Zelda's, trying to occupy the whole of her mind with planning a new gown. But Zelda had more tender news to break that day than that of a new scandal. "Katie," she approached it, in Zelda's own delicate fashion, "what would you think of Major Darrett and me joy-riding through life together?" "I approve of it," said Katie, with curious heartiness. "Some joy-ride, don't you think?" "I can fancy," laughed Katie, "that it might be hard to beat. I think," she added, "that he's just the one for you to marry. And I further think, Zelda, that you're just the one for him to marry." Zelda looked at her keenly. "No slam on either party?" "On the contrary, a sort of double-acting approval," she turned it with a laugh. "Then as long as your approval has a back action, so to speak, I cop you out right now, Katie, for a bridesmaid." "Don't," said Katie quickly. "No, Zelda, I'm not--suitable." "Why not?" "Oh, too old and worn," she laughed. "Bridesmaids should be buds." "Showing up the full-blowness of the bride? Don't you think it!" "So you hastened to get me!" "Come now, Katie, you know very well why I want you. Why wouldn't I want you? Anyhow," she exposed it, "father wants you. Father thinks you're so nice and respectable, Katie." "And so, for that matter," she added, "does my chosen joy-rider." "I'm not so sure of his being particularly impressed with my respectability," replied Katie. "He's always been quite dippy about you, Katie. I don't know how _I_ ever got him." Zelda spoke feelingly of the approaching nuptials of her old school friend. "Cal's considerable of a prissy, but take it from me, Harry Prescott will see that all father's money doesn't pour into homes for the friendless--so there's something accomplished. Heaven help the poor fellow who must live on his pay," sighed Zelda piously. Major Darrett, too, was to be congratulated on his father-in-law. Just the father-in-law for a man ambitious to become military attache. It was nice, Katie told herself as she walked away, to know of so many weddings. She insisted upon asserting to herself that she was glad all her friends were getting on so famously. Though if Zelda persisted, she would have to go West earlier than she had planned. She could not regard Ann's sister-in-law as suitable person for attendant at Major Darrett's wedding. That would be a little _too_ much like playing the clown at a masked ball. The image was suggested by seeing one of those grotesque figures across the street. He was advertising some approaching festivity. With the clown was a monkey. He put the monkey down on the sidewalk and it danced obediently in just the place where it was put down. Suddenly it seemed to Katie that she was for all the world like that monkey--dancing obediently in the place where she was put down, not asking about the before or after, just dutifully being gay. That monkey did not know the great story about monkeys; doubtless he was even too degraded by clowns to yearn for a tree. He only danced at the end of the string the clown held--all else shut out. She--shutting out the before and after--was that pathetically festive little monkey; and society was the clown holding the string--the whole of it advertising the tawdry thing the clown called life. Only _she_ knew that there were trees. She had danced frantically in seeking to forget them, but the string pulled by the clown fretted her more and more. She could not make clear to herself why it had seemed that if Wayne were to be "free," she could not be; it was as if all the things she had worked out for herself had been appropriated by her brother. Everybody could not go into more spacious countries! There were some who must stay behind and make it right for the deserters. Wayne's marrying Ann had turned her back to familiar paths. It had terrified her. There seemed too much involved, too little certainty as to where one would find one's self if one left the well-known ways. She had been put in the position of the one hurt just when she had been steeled to bring the hurt. It gave her a new sense of the hurts--uncertainty as to the right to deal them. And probably no monkey would dance more obediently than the monkey who had run away and been frightened at a glimpse of the vastness of the forest. She would have to remain and explain Wayne, because she felt responsible about Wayne. It was her venturings had found what had led Wayne to venture--and, in the end, go. How could she outrage the army as long as Wayne had done so? So it had seemed to Katie in her hurt and bewilderment. And the bewilderment came chiefly because of the hurt. It appalled her to find it did hurt like that. But it was spring--and she knew that there were trees! She paused and watched a gardener removing some debris that had covered a flower bed. It was spring, and there were new shoots and this gardener was wise and tender in taking the old things away, that the new shoots might have air. Katie could see them there--and tender green of them, as he lifted the old things away that the growing things might come through. The gardener did not seem to feel he was cruel in taking the dead things away. As a good gardener, he would scout the idea of its being unkind to take them away just because they had been there so long. What did that matter, the wise gardener would scornfully demand, when there were growing things underneath pushing their way to the light? And if he were given to philosophizing he might say that the kindest thing even to the dead things was to let the new things come through. Thus life would be kept, and all the life that had ever been upon the earth perpetuated, vindicated, glorified. It seemed to Katie that what life needed was a saner gardener. Not a gardener who would smother new shoots with a lot of dead things telling how shoots should go. She drew a deep breath, lifted her face to the sky, and _knew_. Knew that she herself had power to push through the dead things seeking to smother her. Knew that if she but pushed on they must fall away because it was life was pushing them away. She walked on slowly, breathing deep. And swinging along in the April twilight she had a sense of having already set her face toward a more spacious country. And of knowing that it had been inevitable all the time that she should go. The delay had been but the moment's panic. Her life itself mattered more than what any group of people thought about her life. Spring!--and new life upon the earth. It was that life itself, not the philosophy men had formulated for or against it, was pushing the dead things away. It was not even arrested by the fear of displacing something. She had held herself back for so long that in the very admission that she longed to see him there was joy approaching the sweetness of seeing him. A long time she walked in the April twilight--knowing that it was spring--and that there was new life upon the earth. Harry Prescott would be married within two weeks. It seemed nothing was so important as that she witness that ceremony. Dear Harry Prescott, who would be married on the banks of the Mississippi, close by a certain place where boats were mended. CHAPTER XLI It was hard for Katie to contain her delight in Wayne's generosity when she found he had left his launch with Captain Prescott. "Now wasn't that just sweet of father?" she exulted to Worth as they walked together down to the little boat house. Worth was more dispassionate. "Y--es; but why wouldn't he, Aunt Kate? Where would he take it?" "Well, but it's just so nice, dearie, that it's here." "You going out in it?" he demanded. Katie looked around. Some soldiers and some golfers in the distance, but like the day Ann had come upon the Island, no one within immediate range. "Watts says she's running like a bird, Aunt Kate. Somebody was out this morning and somebody's going again this afternoon." "Maybe she won't be here for them to take!" "You going to take it, Aunt Kate?" he pressed excitedly. "Well, I don't just _know_, Worth." She looked up the river. She could see a part of the little island where she had once pulled in to ask about the underlying principles of life, but not being able to see the other side of it, how could she be sure whether a launch ride was what she wanted or not? "Father says we mustn't go in it alone, Aunt Kate. Shall I see if we can get Watts?" "N--o; that's not exactly the idea," said Aunt Kate, stepping into the launch. "Goin', Aunt Kate?" "Why--I don't know. I thought I'd just _sit_ in it a little while." So Worth joined her for the delightful pastime of just sitting in it for a little while. "I'd rather like to find out whether it's in good condition." She turned to Worth appealing. "It seems we ought to be able to tell father whether they're taking good care of it, doesn't it, Worth?" "I guess I'll go and get Watts." "I don't know why, but I don't seem able to get up a great deal of enthusiasm for that idea." Her fingers were upon the steering wheel, longingly. Eyes, too, were longing. Suddenly she started the engine. "We'll just run round the head of the Island," she said. So they started up the river--the river as blue and lovely as it had been that day a year before when she had cheated it, and had begun to see that life was cheating her. "Worth," she asked, "what is there on the _other_ side of that little island?" "Why, Aunt Kate--why on the other side of it is the man that mends the boats." "Oh, that so? Funny I never thought of that. "But I suppose," she began again, "he wouldn't be very likely to be there mending boats now?" "Why yes, Aunt Kate, he might be." "You heard anything about him, Worth?" "Yes sir; Watts says he has cut him _out_. He says he's _on_ to him." "That must be a bitter blow," said Aunt Kate. "Watts getting _on_ to one--and cutting one out. "Watts say anything about whether he was still mending boats?" she asked in the off-hand manner people adopt for vital things. "Why I guess he is, 'cause he made a speech last week--oh there was a whole _lot_ of men--and he just _sowed seeds of discontentment_." "Such a busy little sower!" murmured Aunt Kate lovingly. She knew that he was there, or at least had been there the week before, for just as she was leaving her uncle's she had received a note from him. They had not been writing to each other since the brief letter she had sent him the day after receiving the announcement of her brother's engagement. This note had been written to tell her no special thing; simply because, he said, after trying his best for a number of weeks, he was not longer able to keep from writing. He wrote because he couldn't help it. He had determined to love her too well to urge her to do what, knowing it all, she evidently felt could not hold happiness for her. But the utter desolation of life without her had crumbled the foundation of that determination. In the note he said that his boat-mending days were about over. They would not have lasted that long only he had had no heart for other things. But the letter gave Katie heart for other things! Its unmistakable wretchedness made her superbly radiant. "Why, Worthie," she exclaimed, "just see here! Here's the very place where we landed that other time." "Oh yes, Aunt Kate--it's still here." She smiled; he could not have done better had he been trying. "Now I wonder if I could make that landing again. I was proud of the way I did that before. I don't suppose I could do it again." That baited him. "Oh yes, I guess you could, Aunt Kate. You just try it." She demonstrated her skill and then they once more enjoyed the delightful pastime of just sitting in the launch. Katie's eyes were misty, her lips trembled to a tender smile as she finally turned to him. "Worth dear, will you do something for your Aunt Kate?" "Sure I will, Aunt Kate." Suddenly he guessed it. "Want me to get the man that mends the boats?" She nodded. "I'll _try_ and get him for you, Aunt Kate." "Try pretty hard, Worthie." He started, but turned back. "What'll I tell him, Aunt Kate?" The smile had lingered and the eyes were wonderfully soft just then. "Tell him I'm here again and want to find out some more about the underlying principles of life." "The--now what is it, Aunt Kate?" "Well just say life," she laughed tremulously. "Life'll do." She found it hard to keep from crying. There had been too much. It had been too long. It was not with clear vision she looked over at the big house where Harry Prescott's wedding feast would be served on the morrow. It seemed that about half of her life had passed before Worth came back--alone. Pretense fell away. "Didn't you get him?" "Why, Aunt Kate, there's another man there. But don't you feel so bad, Aunt Kate," he hastened. "We will get him, 'cause that other man is going to tell him." "Oh, he--then he is here?" "Oh yes, he's here. He's just over at the shop." "I see," said Aunt Kate, very much engaged with something she appeared to think was trying to get in her eye. "But, Worth," she asked, when she had blinked the gnat away, "what did you tell this other man?" "Why, I just told him. Told him you was here and wanted the _other_ man that mended the boats. The first man. The big man, I said. He knows who I mean." "I should hope so," she murmured. "But what did you tell him I wanted to see him _for_?" she asked, suddenly apprehensive. Worth had sat down and begun upon a raft. "Why, I just told him. Told him you had come to find out some more about life." "_Worth!_ Told that to a _strange_ man!" "But I guess he didn't know what I meant, Aunt Kate. He's one of those awful dumb folks that talk mostly in foreign languages. I think he's some kind of a French Pole--or _something_." She breathed deeper. "Oh, well perhaps one's confidences would be safe--with a French Pole." "So he knows you want him, Aunt Kate, but he don't know just what you want him for." "Yes; that's quite as well, I think," said Aunt Kate. The other half of her life had almost passed when again there were footsteps--very hurried footsteps, these were. It was not the French Pole, though some one who did not seem at home with the English tongue, some one who stood there looking at her as if he, too, wanted to cry. Worth was the self-possessed member of the party. "Hello there," he said; "it's been a long time since we saw you, ain't it?" "It seems to me to have been a--yes, a long time," replied the man who mended the boats, never taking his eyes from Katie. Saying nothing more, he pulled in her boat, secured it. Held out his hand to help her out--forgot to let go the hand when her feet were upon firm earth. Acted, Worth thought, as though he thought somebody was going to _hurt_ her. A steamboat was coming down the river. And Worth!--a much interested Worth. The man who mended the boats did not seem to find his surroundings all he could ask. "I want to show you this island," he began. "It's really quite a remarkable island. You know, I've been _wanting_ to show it to you. There's a stone over here--quite--quite an astonishing stone. And a flower. Queer. Really an astounding flower. I don't believe you ever saw one like it." "Pooh!" said Worth, starting on ahead. "I bet _I've_ seen one like it." "Say--I'll tell you what I'll bet _you_. I'll bet you two dollars and a quarter you can't get that raft done before we get back!" "Well I'll just bet _you_ two dollars and a _half_ that I _can_!" "It's a go!"--and Aunt Kate and the man who mended the boats were off to find the astonishing stone and the astounding flower, Worth calling after them: "Now you try to keep him, Aunt Kate. Keep him as long as you can." It was after she had succeeded in keeping him long enough for considerable headway to have been made in raft-construction that he exclaimed: "Katie, will you do something for me?" Her eyes were asking what there could be that she would not do for him. "Then _laugh,_ Katie. Oh if you could know how I've longed to hear you _laugh_ again." She did laugh, but a sob overtook the laugh. Then laughed again and ran away from the sob. But the laugh was sweeter for the sob. "You _will_ laugh, Katie, won't you?" he asked with an anxiety that touched deep things. "Why there'll be days and days when I shan't do anything else!" Then her laughing eyes grew serious. "Though just a little differently, I think. I've heard the world sobbing, you know." "But a world that is sobbing needs Katie's laughing." He drew her to him with something not unlike a sob. "I need it, I know." There was a wonderful sense of saving herself in knowing again that the world was sobbing. What she could have borne no longer was drowning the world's sobs in the world's hollow laughter. "Katie," he cried, after more time had elapsed without finding either the astonishing stone or the astounding flower, "here's a little sunny path! I want you to walk in it." Laughingly he pushed her over into the narrow strip of sunshine, where there was just room for Katie's feet. But Katie shook her head. "What do I care about sunny paths, if I must walk them alone?" And laughing, too, but with a deepening light in her eyes, she held out her hand to him. But it was such a narrow sunny path; there was not room for two. So Katie made room for him by stepping part way out of the sunshine herself. Smiling, but eyes speaking for the depth of the meaning, she said: "I'd rather be only half in the sunshine than be--" "Be what, Katie?" he whispered. "Be without you." "Katie," he asked passionately, "you mean that if walking together we can't always be all in the sunshine--?" "The thing that matters," said Katie, "is walking together." "Over roads where there might be no sunshine? Rough, steep roads, perhaps?" "Whatever kind, of roads they may be," said Katie, with the steadiness and the fervor of a devotee repeating a prayer. They stood there as shadows lengthened across sunny paths, thinking of the years behind and the years ahead, now speaking of what they would do, now folded in exquisite silences. And after the fashion of happy lovers who must hover around calamities averted, he exclaimed: "Suppose Ann had never come!" It sent her heart out in a great tenderness to Ann: Ann, out in her mountains, and happy. Nor was the tenderness less warm in the thought that Ann would join with Wayne and the others in deploring. Ann, who was within now, would, Katie knew, grieve over her going without. But that was only because Ann did not wholly understand. Everything the matter with everybody was just that they did not wholly understand. She grew tender toward all the world. There rose before her vision of a possible day when all would understand; when none would wish another ill or work another harm; when war and oppression and greed must cease, not because the laws forbade them, but because men's hearts gave them no place. "I see it!" she whispered unconsciously. Her face was touched with the fine light of visioning. "See what--dear Katie? Take _me_ in." "The world when love has saved it!" She remembered their old dispute and her arms went about his neck as she told him again: "Why 'tis _love_ must save the world!" He held her face in his two hands as if he could not look deeply enough. And as he looked into her eyes a nobler light was in his own. "As it has saved us," he whispered. They grew very still, hushed by the wonder of it. In their two hearts there seemed love enough to redeem the world. 
13715	----	The History of the Fabian Society By Edward R. Pease Secretary for Twenty-five Years With Twelve Illustrations NEW YORK E.P. DUTTON & COMPANY PUBLISHERS Preface The History of the Fabian Society will perhaps chiefly interest the members, present and past, of the Society. But in so far as this book describes the growth of Socialist theory in England, and the influence of Socialism on the political thought of the last thirty years, I hope it will appeal to a wider circle. I have described in my book the care with which the Fabian Tracts have been revised and edited by members of the Executive Committee. Two of my colleagues, Sidney Webb and Bernard Shaw, have been good enough to revise this volume in like manner, and I have to thank them for innumerable corrections in style, countless suggestions of better words and phrases, and a number of amplifications and additions, some of which I have accepted without specific acknowledgment, whilst others for one reason or another are to be found in notes; and I am particularly grateful to Bernard Shaw for two valuable memoranda on the history of Fabian Economics, and on Guild Socialism, which are printed as an appendix. The MS. or proofs have also been read by Mrs. Sidney Webb, Mrs. Bernard Shaw, Sir Sydney Olivier, Graham Wallas, W. Stephen Sanders, and R.C.K. Ensor, to each of whom my cordial thanks are due for suggestions, additions, and corrections. To Miss Bertha Newcombe I am obliged for permission to reproduce the interesting sketch which forms the frontispiece. E.R.P. THE PENDICLE, LIMPSFIELD, SURREY, _January_, 1916. Contents Chapter I The Sources of Fabian Socialism The ideas of the early eighties--The epoch of Evolution--Sources of Fabian ideas--Positivism--Henry George--John Stuart Mill--Robert Owen--Karl Marx--The Democratic Federation--"The Christian Socialist"--Thomas Davidson Chapter II The Foundations of the Society: 1883-4 Frank Podmore and Ghost-hunting--Thomas Davidson and his circle--The preliminary meetings--The Fellowship of the New Life--Formation of the Society--The career of the New Fellowship Chapter III The Early Days: 1884-6 The use of the word Socialism--Approval of the Democratic Federation--Tract No. I--The Fabian Motto--Bernard Shaw joins--His first Tract--The Industrial Remuneration Conference--Sidney Webb and Sydney Olivier become members--Mrs. Annie Besant--Shaw's second Tract--The Tory Gold controversy--"What Socialism Is"--The Fabian Conference of 1886--Sidney Webb's first contribution, "The Government Organisation of Unemployed Labour" Chapter IV The Formation of Fabian Policy: 1886-9 The factors of success; priority of date; the men who made it--The controversy over policy--The Fabian Parliamentary League--"Facts for Socialists"--The adoption of the Basis--The seven Essayists in command--Lord Haldane--The "Essays" as Lectures--How to train for Public Life--Fabians on the London School Board--"Facts for Londoners"--Municipal Socialism--"The Eight Hours Bill" Chapter V "Fabian Essays" and the Lancashire Campaign: 1890-3 "Fabian Essays" published--Astonishing success--A new presentation of Socialism--Reviewed after twenty-five years--Henry Hutchinson--The Lancashire Campaign--Mrs. Besant withdraws--"Fabian News" Chapter VI "To your tents, O Israel": 1894-1900 Progress of the Society--The Independent Labour Party--Local Fabian Societies--University Fabian Societies--London Groups and Samuel Butler--The first Fabian Conference--Tracts and Lectures--The 1892 Election Manifesto--The Newcastle Program--The Fair Wages Policy--The "Fortnightly" article--The Intercepted Letter of 1906 Chapter VII "Fabianism and the Empire": 1900-1 The Library and Book Boxes--Parish Councils--The Workmen's Compensation Act--The Hutchinson Trust--The London School of Economics--Educational Lectures--Electoral Policy--The controversy over the South African War--The publication of "Fabianism and the Empire" Chapter VIII Education: 1902-5, and the Labour Party: 1900-15 Housing--"The Education muddle and the way out"--Supporting the Conservatives--The Education Acts of 1902 and 1903--Feeding School Children--The Labour Representation Committee formed--The Fabian Election Fund--Will Crooks elected in 1910--A Fabian Cabinet Minister--Resignation of Graham Wallas--The younger generation: H.W. Macrosty, J.F. Oakeshott, John W. Martin--Municipal Drink Trade--Tariff Reform--The Decline of the Birth-rate Chapter IX The Episode of Mr. Wells: 1906-8 His lecture on administrative areas--"Faults of the Fabian"--The Enquiry Committee--The Report, and the Reply--The real issue, Wells _v_. Shaw--The women intervene--The Basis altered--The new Executive--Mr. Wells withdraws--His work for Socialism--The writing of Fabian Tracts Chapter X The Policy of Expansion: 1907-12 Statistics of growth--The psychology of the Recruit--Famous Fabians--The Arts Group--The Nursery--The Women's Group--Provincial Fabian Societies--University Fabian Societies--London Groups revived--Annual Conferences--The Summer School--The story of "Socialist Unity"--The Local Government Information Bureau--The Joint Standing Committee--Intervention of the International Socialist Bureau Chapter XI The Minority Report, Syndicalism and Research: 1909-15 The emergence of Mrs. Sidney Webb--The Poor Law Commission--The Minority Report--Unemployment--The National Committee for the Prevention of Destitution--"Vote against the House of Lords"--Bernard Shaw retires--Death of Hubert Bland--Opposition to the National Insurance Bill--The Fabian Reform Committee--The "New Statesman"--The Research Department--"The Rural Problem"--"The Control of Industry"--Syndicalism--The Guildsmen--Final Statistics--The War Chapter XII The Lessons of Thirty Years Breaking the spell of Marxism--A French verdict--Origin of Revisionism in Germany--The British School of Socialism--Mr. Ernest Barker's summary--Mill _versus_ Marx--The Fabian Method--Making Socialists or making Socialism--The life of propagandist societies--The prospects of Socialist Unity--The future of Fabian ideas--The test of Fabian success Appendix I A. On the History of Fabian Economics. By Bernard Shaw B. On Guild Socialism. By Bernard Shaw Appendix II The Basis of the Fabian Society Appendix III List of the names and the years of office of the ninety-six members of the Executive Committee, 1884-1915 Appendix IV Complete List of Fabian publications, 1884-1915, with names of authors Index Illustrations _Frontispiece, from a drawing by Miss Bertha Newcombe in 1895_ The Seven Essayists Mrs. Annie Besant, _From a photograph_ Hubert Bland, _From a photograph_ William Clarke _From a photograph_ (Sir) Sydney Olivier, _From a photograph_ G. Bernard Shaw, _From a photograph_ Graham Wallas, _From a photograph_ Sidney Webb, _From a drawing_ * * * * * Edward R. Pease, _From a photograph_ Frank Podmore, _From a photograph_ Mrs. Sidney Webb, _From a photograph_ H.G. Wells, _From a photograph_ The History of the Fabian Society Chapter I The Sources of Fabian Socialism The ideas of the early eighties--The epoch of Evolution--Sources of Fabian ideas--Positivism--Henry George--John Stuart Mill--Robert Owen--Karl Marx--The Democratic Federation--"The Christian Socialist"--Thomas Davidson. "Britain as a whole never was more tranquil and happy," said the "Spectator," then the organ of sedate Liberalism and enlightened Progress, in the summer of 1882. "No class is at war with society or the government: there is no disaffection anywhere, the Treasury is fairly full, the accumulations of capital are vast"; and then the writer goes on to compare Great Britain with Ireland, at that time under the iron heel of coercion, with Parnell and hundreds of his followers in jail, whilst outrages and murders, like those of Maamtrasma, were almost everyday occurrences. Some of the problems of the early eighties are with us yet. Ireland is still a bone of contention between political parties: the Channel tunnel is no nearer completion: and then as now, when other topics are exhausted, the "Spectator" can fill up its columns with Thought Transference and Psychical Research. But other problems which then were vital, are now almost forgotten. Electric lighting was a doubtful novelty: Mr. Bradlaugh's refusal to take the oath excited a controversy which now seems incredible. Robert Louis Stevenson can no longer be adequately described as an "accomplished writer," and the introduction of female clerks into the postal service by Mr. Fawcett has ceased to raise alarm lest the courteous practice of always allowing ladies to be victors in an argument should perforce be abandoned. But in September of the same year we find a cloud on the horizon, the prelude of a coming storm. The Trade Union Congress had just been held and the leaders of the working classes, with apparently but little discussion, had passed a resolution asking the Government to institute an enquiry with a view to relaxing the stringency of Poor Law administration. This, said the "Spectator," is beginning "to tamper with natural conditions," "There is no logical halting-place between the theory that it is the duty of the State to make the poor comfortable, and socialism." Another factor in the thought of those days attracted but little attention in the Press, though there is a long article in the "Spectator" at the beginning of 1882 on "the ever-increasing wonder" of that strange faith, "Positivism." It is difficult for the present generation to realise how large a space in the minds of the young men of the eighties was occupied by the religion invented by Auguste Comte. Of this however more must be said on a later page. But perhaps the most significant feature in the periodical literature of the time is what it omits. April, 1882, is memorable for the death of Charles Darwin, incomparably the greatest of nineteenth-century Englishmen, if greatness be measured by the effects of his work on the thought of the world. The "Spectator" printed a secondary article which showed some appreciation of the event. But in the monthly reviews it passed practically unnoticed. It is true that Darwin was buried in Westminster Abbey, but even in 1882, twenty-three years after the publication of the "Origin of Species," evolution was regarded as a somewhat dubious theorem which respectable people were wise to ignore. In the monthly reviews we find the same odd mixture of articles apposite to present problems, and articles utterly out of date. The organisation of agriculture is a perennial, and Lady Verney's "Peasant Proprietorship in France" ("Contemporary," January, 1882), Mr. John Rae's "Co-operative Agriculture in Germany" ("Contemporary," March, 1882), and Professor Sedley Taylor's "Profit-Sharing in Agriculture" ("Nineteenth Century," October, 1882) show that change in the methods of exploiting the soil is leaden-footed and lagging. Problems of another class, centring round "the Family," present much the same aspect now as they did thirty years ago. In his "Infant Mortality and Married Women in Factories," Professor Stanley Jevons ("Contemporary," January, 1882) proposes that mothers of children under three years of age should be excluded from factories, and we are at present perhaps even farther from general agreement whether any measure on these lines ought to be adopted. But when we read the articles on Socialism--more numerous than might be expected at that early date--we are in another world. Mr. Samuel Smith, M.P., writing on "Social Reform" in the "Nineteenth Century" for May, 1883, says that: "Our country is still comparatively free from Communism and Nihilism and similar destructive movements, but who can tell how long this will continue? We have a festering mass of human wretchedness in all our great towns, which is the natural hotbed of such anarchical movements: all the great continental countries are full of this explosive material. Can we depend on our country keeping free from the infection when we have far more poverty in our midst than the neighbouring European States?" Emigration and temperance reform, he thinks, may avert the danger. The Rev. Samuel (later Canon) Barnett in the same review a month earlier advocated Free Libraries and graduated taxation to pay for free education, under the title of "Practicable Socialism." In April, 1883, Emile de Lavelaye described with alarm the "Progress of Socialism." "On the Continent," he wrote, "Socialism is said to be everywhere." To it he attributed with remarkable inaccuracy, the agrarian movement in Ireland, and with it he connected the fact that Henry George's new book, "Progress and Poverty," was selling by thousands "in an ultra popular form" in the back streets and alleys of England. And then he goes on to allude to Prince Bismarck's "abominable proposition to create a fund for pensioning invalid workmen by a monopoly of tobacco"! Thirty years ago politics were only intermittently concerned with social problems. On the whole the view prevailed, at any rate amongst the leaders, that Government should interfere in such matters as little as possible. Pauperism was still to be stamped out by ruthless deterrence: education had been only recently and reluctantly taken in hand: factory inspection alone was an accepted State function. Lord Beaconsfield was dead and he had forgotten his zeal for social justice long before he attained power. Gladstone, then in the zenith of his fame, never took any real interest in social questions as we now understand them. Lord Salisbury was an aristocrat and thought as an aristocrat. John Bright viewed industrial life from the standpoint of a Lancashire mill-owner. William Edward Forster, the creator of national education, a Chartist in his youth, had become the gaoler of Parnell and the protagonist of coercion in Ireland. Joseph Chamberlain alone seemed to realise the significance of the social problem, and unhappily political events were soon to deflect his career from what then seemed to be its appointed course. The political parties therefore offered very little attraction to the young men of the early eighties, who, viewing our social system with the fresh eyes of youth, saw its cruelties and its absurdities and judged them, not as older men, by comparison with the worse cruelties and greater absurdities of earlier days, but by the standard of common fairness and common sense, as set out in the lessons they had learned in their schools, their universities, and their churches. It is nowadays not easy to recollect how wide was the intellectual gulf which separated the young generation of that period from their parents. "The Origin of Species," published in 1859, inaugurated an intellectual revolution such as the world had not known since Luther nailed his Theses to the door of All Saints' Church at Wittenberg. The older folk as a rule refused to accept or to consider the new doctrine. I recollect a botanical Fellow of the Royal Society who, in 1875, told me that he had no opinions on Darwin's hypothesis. The young men of the time I am describing grew up with the new ideas and accepted them as a matter of course. Herbert Spencer, then deemed the greatest of English thinkers, was pointing out in portentous phraseology the enormous significance of Evolution. Professor Huxley, in brilliant essays, was turning to ridicule the simple-minded credulity of Gladstone and his contemporaries. Our parents, who read neither Spencer nor Huxley, lived in an intellectual world which bore no relation to our own; and cut adrift as we were from the intellectual moorings of our upbringings, recognising, as we did, that the older men were useless as guides in religion, in science, in philosophy because they knew not evolution, we also felt instinctively that we could accept nothing on trust from those who still believed that the early chapters of Genesis accurately described the origin of the universe, and that we had to discover somewhere for ourselves what were the true principles of the then recently invented science of sociology. One man there was who professed to offer us an answer, Auguste Comte. He too was pre-Darwinian, but his philosophy accepted science, future as well as past. John Stuart Mill, whose word on his own subjects was then almost law, wrote of him with respectful admiration. His followers were known to number amongst them some of the ablest thinkers of the day. The "Religion of Humanity" offered solutions for all the problems that faced us. It suggested a new heaven, of a sort, and it proposed a new earth, free from all the inequalities of wealth, the preventable suffering, the reckless waste of effort, which we saw around us. At any rate, it was worth examination; and most of the free-thinking men of that period read the "Positive Polity" and the other writings of the founder, and spent some Sunday mornings at the little conventicle in Lamb's Conduit Street, or attended on Sunday evenings the Newton Hall lectures of Frederic Harrison. Few could long endure the absurdities of a made-up theology and a make-believe religion: and the Utopia designed by Comte was as impracticable and unattractive as Utopias generally are. But the critical and destructive part of the case was sound enough. Here was a man who challenged the existing order of society and pronounced it wrong. It was in his view based on conventions, on superstitions, on regulations which were all out of date; society should be reorganised in the light of pure reason; the anarchy of competition must be brought to an end; mankind should recognise that order, good sense, science, and, he added, religion freed from superstition, could turn the world into a place where all might live together in comfort and happiness. Positivism proposed to attain its Utopia by moralising the capitalists, and herein it showed no advance on Christianity, which for nineteen centuries had in vain preached social obligation to the rich. The new creed could not succeed where the old, with all its tremendous sanctions, had completely failed. We wanted something fresh, some new method of dealing with the inequalities of wealth. Emile de Lavelaye was quite correct in attributing significance to the publication of "Progress and Poverty," though the seed sown by Henry George took root, not in the slums and alleys of our cities--no intellectual seed of any sort can germinate in the sickly, sunless atmosphere of slums--but in the minds of people who had sufficient leisure and education to think of other things than breadwinning. Henry George proposed to abolish poverty by political action: that was the new gospel which came from San Francisco in the early eighties. "Progress and Poverty" was published in America in 1879, and its author visited England at the end of 1881. Socialism hardly existed at that time in English-speaking countries, but the early advocates of land taxation were not then, as they usually are now, uncompromising individualists. "Progress and Poverty" gave an extraordinary impetus to the political thought of the time. It proposed to redress the wrongs suffered by the working classes as a whole: the poverty it considered was the poverty of the wage workers as a class, not the destitution of the unfortunate and downtrodden individuals. It did not merely propose, like philanthropy and the Poor Law, to relieve the acute suffering of the outcasts of civilisation, those condemned to wretchedness by the incapacity, the vice, the folly, or the sheer misfortune of themselves or their relations. It suggested a method by which wealth would correspond approximately with worth; by which the reward of labour would go to those that laboured; the idleness alike of rich and poor would cease; the abundant wealth created by modern industry would be distributed with something like fairness and even equality, amongst those who contributed to its production. Above all, this tremendous revolution was to be accomplished by a political method, applicable by a majority of the voters, and capable of being drafted as an Act of Parliament by any competent lawyer. To George belongs the extraordinary merit of recognising the right way of social salvation. The Socialists of earlier days had proposed segregated communities; the Co-operators had tried voluntary associations; the Positivists advocated moral suasion; the Chartists favoured force, physical or political; the Marxists talked revolution and remembered the Paris Commune. George wrote in a land where the people ruled themselves, not only in fact but also in name. The United States in the seventies was not yet dominated by trusts and controlled by millionaires. Indeed even now that domination and control, dangerous and disastrous as it often is, could not withstand for a moment any widespread uprising of the popular will. Anyway, George recognised that in the Western States political institutions could be moulded to suit the will of the electorate; he believed that the majority desired to seek their own well-being and this could not fail to be also the well-being of the community as a whole. From Henry George I think it may be taken that the early Fabians learned to associate the new gospel with the old political method. But when we came to consider the plan proposed by George we quickly saw that it would not carry us far. Land may be the source of all wealth to the mind of a settler in a new country. To those whose working day was passed in Threadneedle Street and Lombard Street, on the floor of the Stock Exchange, and in the Bank of England, land appears to bear no relation at all to wealth, and the allegation that the whole surplus of production goes automatically to the landowners is obviously untrue. George's political economy was old-fashioned or absurd; and his solution of the problem of poverty could not withstand the simplest criticism. Taxation to extinction of the rent of English land would only affect a small fraction of England's wealth. There was another remedy in the field. Socialism was talked about in the reviews: some of us knew that an obscure Socialist movement was stirring into life in London. And above all John Stuart Mill had spoken very respectfully of Socialism in his "Political Economy," which then held unchallenged supremacy as an exposition of the science. If, he wrote, "the choice were to be made between Communism[1] with all its chances, and the present state of society with all its sufferings and injustices, if the institution of private property necessarily carried with it as a consequence that the produce of labour should be apportioned as we now see it almost in inverse proportion to labour, the largest portions to those who have never worked at all, the next largest to those whose work is almost nominal, and so in descending scale, the remuneration dwindling as the work grows harder and more disagreeable until the most fatiguing and exhausting bodily labour cannot count with certainty on being able to earn even the necessities of life; if this or Communism were the alternative, all the difficulties, great or small, of Communism would be but as dust in the balance."[2] And again in the next paragraph: "We are too ignorant, either of what individual agency in its best form or Socialism in its best form can accomplish, to be qualified to decide which of the two will be the ultimate form of human society." More than thirty years had passed since this had been written, and whilst the evils of private property, so vividly depicted by Mill, showed no signs of mitigation, the remedies he anticipated had made no substantial progress. The co-operation of the Rochdale Pioneers had proved a magnificent success, but its sphere of operations was now clearly seen to be confined within narrow limits. Profit-sharing then as now was a sickly plant barely kept alive by the laborious efforts of benevolent professors. Mill's indictment of the capitalist system, in regard to its effects on social life, was so powerful, his treatment of the primitive socialism and communism of his day so sympathetic, that it is surprising how little it prepared the way for the reception of the new ideas. But to some of his readers, at any rate, it suggested that there was an alternative to the capitalistic system, and that Socialism or Communism was worthy of examination.[3] The Socialism of Robert Owen had made a profound impression on the working people of England half a century earlier, but the tradition of it was confined to those who had heard its prophet. Owen, one of the greatest men of his age, had no sense of art; his innumerable writings are unreadable; and both his later excursions into spiritualism, and the failure of his communities and co-operative enterprises, had clouded his reputation amongst those outside the range of his personality. In later years we often came across old men who had sat at his feet, and who rejoiced to hear once more something resembling his teachings: but I do not think that, at the beginning, the Owenite tradition had any influence upon us. Karl Marx died in London on the 14th March, 1883, but nobody in England was then aware that the greatest figure in international politics had passed away. It is true that Marx had taken a prominent part in founding the International at that historic meeting in St. Martin's Town Hall on September 28th, 1864. The real significance of that episode was over-rated at the time, and when the International disappeared from European politics in 1872 the whole thing was forgotten. In Germany Marxian Socialism was already a force, and it was attracting attention in England, as we have seen. But the personality of Marx must have been antipathetic to the English workmen whom he knew, or else he failed to make them understand his ideas: at any rate, his socialism fell on deaf ears, and it may be said to have made no lasting impression on the leaders of English working-class thought. Though he was resident in England for thirty-four years, Marx remained a German to the last. His writings were not translated into English at this period, and Mr. Hyndman's "England for All," published in 1881, which was the first presentation of his ideas in English, did not even mention his name. This book was in fact an extremely moderate proposal to remedy "something seriously amiss in the conditions of our everyday life," and the immediate programme was no more than an eight hours working day, free and compulsory education, compulsory construction of working-class dwellings, and cheap "transport" for working-class passengers. It was the unauthorised programme of the Democratic Federation which had been founded by Mr. Hyndman in 1881. "Socialism Made Plain," the social and political Manifesto of the Democratic Federation (undated, but apparently issued in 1883), is a much stronger document. It deals with the distribution of the National Income, giving the workers' share as 300 out of 1300 millions sterling, and demands that the workers should "educate, agitate, organise" in order to get their own. Evidently it attracted some attention, since we find that the second edition of a pamphlet "Reply" by Samuel Smith, M.P., then a person of substantial importance, was issued in January, 1884. At the end of 1883 Mr. Hyndman published his "Historical Basis of Socialism in England," which for some time was the text-book of the Democratic Federation, but this, of course, was too late to influence the founders of the Fabian Society. We were however aware of Marx, and I find that my copy of the French edition of "Das Kapital" is dated 8th October, 1883; but I do not think that any of the original Fabians had read the book or had assimilated its ideas at the time the Society was founded. To some of those who joined the Society in its early days Christian Socialism opened the way of salvation. The "Christian Socialist"[4] was established by a band of persons some of whom were not Socialist and others not Christian. It claimed to be the spiritual child of the Christian Socialist movement of 1848-52, which again was Socialist only on its critical side, and constructively was merely Co-operative Production by voluntary associations of workmen. Under the guidance of the Rev. Stewart D. Headlam[5] its policy of the revived movement was Land Reform, particularly on the lines of the Single Tax. The introductory article boldly claims the name of Socialist, as used by Maurice and Kingsley: the July number contains a long article by Henry George. In September a formal report is given of the work of the Democratic Federation. In November Christianity and Socialism are said to be convertible terms, and in January, 1884, the clerical view of usury is set forth in an article on the morality of interest. In March Mr. H.H. Champion explains "surplus value," and in April we find a sympathetic review of the "Historic Basis of Socialism." In April, 1885, appears a long and full report of a lecture by Bernard Shaw to the Liberal and Social Union. The greater part of the paper is filled with Land Nationalisation, Irish affairs--the land agitation in Ireland was then at its height--and the propaganda of Henry George: whilst much space is devoted to the religious aspect of the social problem. Sydney Olivier, before he joined the Fabian Society, was one of the managing group, and amongst others concerned in it were the Rev. C.L. Marson and the Rev. W.E. Moll. At a later period a Christian Socialist Society was formed; but our concern here is with the factors which contributed to the Fabian Society at its start, and it is not necessary to touch on other periods of the movement. Thomas Davidson[6] was the occasion rather than the cause of the founding of the Fabian Society. His socialism was ethical and individual rather than economic and political. He was spiritually a descendant of the Utopians of Brook Farm and the Phalanstery, and what he yearned for was something in the nature of a community of superior people withdrawn from the world because of its wickedness, and showing by example how a higher life might be led. Probably his Scotch common sense recoiled from definitely taking the plunge: I am not aware that he ever actually proposed that his disciples should form a self-contained community. In a lecture to the New York Fellowship of the New Life, he said, "I shall set out with two assumptions, first, that human life does not consist in material possession; and second, that it does consist in free spiritual activity, of which in this life at least material possession is an essential condition." There is nothing new in this: it is the common basis of all religions and ethical systems. But it needs to be re-stated for each generation, and so stated as to suit each environment. At the time that I am describing Davidson's re-statement appealed to the small circle of his adherents, though the movement which he started had results that he neither expected nor approved. I have now indicated the currents of thought which contributed to the formation of the Fabian Society, so far as I can recover them from memory and a survey of the periodical literature of the period. I have not included the writings of Ruskin, Socialist in outlook as some of them undoubtedly are, because I think that the value of his social teachings was concealed from most of us at that time by reaction against his religious mediævalism, and indifference to his gospel of art. Books so eminently adapted for young ladies at mid-Victorian schools did not appeal to modernists educated by Comte and Spencer. FOOTNOTES: [1] The words Communism and Socialism were interchangeable at that period, e.g. the "Manifesto of the Communist Party," by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, 1848. [2] "Political Economy," Book II, Chap. i, Sec. 3. [3] William Morris attributed to Mill his conversion to Socialism. See J.W. Mackail's "Life," Vol. II, p. 79. [4] No. 1, June, 1883, monthly, 1d.; continued until 1891. [5] Born 1847. Founded the Guild of St. Matthew 1877 and edited its organ, the "Church Reformer," till 1895. Member of the English Land Restoration League, originally the Land Reform Union, from 1883. Member of the London School Board 1888-1904; of the London County Council since 1907. [6] See "Memorials of Thomas Davidson: the wandering scholar." Edited by William Knight. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1907. Thomas Davidson was born in Aberdeenshire in 1840 of a peasant family; after a brilliant career at Aberdeen University he settled in America, but travelled much in Europe. His magnetic personality inspired attachment and admiration in all he came across. He lectured and wrote incessantly, founded Ethical Societies and Schools, and published several volumes on philosophical subjects, but his achievements were scarcely commensurate with his abilities. He died in 1900. Chapter II The Foundations of the Society: 1883-4 Frank Podmore and Ghost-hunting--Thomas Davidson and his circle--The preliminary meetings--The Fellowship of the New Life--Formation of the Society--The career of the New Fellowship. In the autumn of 1883 Thomas Davidson paid a short visit to London and held several little meetings of young people, to whom he expounded his ideas of a Vita Nuova, a Fellowship of the New Life. I attended the last of these meetings held in a bare room somewhere in Chelsea, on the invitation of Frank Podmore,[7] whose acquaintance I had made a short time previously. We had become friends through a common interest first in Spiritualism and subsequently in Psychical Research, and it was whilst vainly watching for a ghost in a haunted house at Notting Hill--the house was unoccupied: we had obtained the key from the agent, left the door unlatched, and returned late at night in the foolish hope that we might perceive something abnormal--that he first discussed with me the teachings of Henry George in "Progress and Poverty," and we found a common interest in social as well as psychical progress. [Illustration: _From a copyright photograph by Fredk. Hollyer, W_. FRANK PODMORE, ABOUT 1895] The English organiser or secretary of the still unformed Davidsonian Fellowship was Percival Chubb, then a young clerk in the Local Government Board, and subsequently a lecturer and head of an Ethical Church in New York and St. Louis. Thomas Davidson was about to leave London; and the company he had gathered round him, desirous of further discussing his suggestions, decided to hold another meeting at my rooms. I was at that time a member of the Stock Exchange and lived in lodgings furnished by myself. Here then on October 24th, 1883, was held the first of the fortnightly meetings, which have been continued with scarcely a break, through nine months of every year, up to the present time. The company that assembled consisted in part of the Davidsonian circle and in part of friends of my own. The proceedings at this meeting, recorded in the first minute book of the Society in the handwriting of Percival Chubb, were as follows:-- "THE NEW LIFE" "The first general meeting of persons interested in this movement was held at Mr. Pease's rooms, 17 Osnaburgh Street, Regent's Park, on Wednesday the 24th October, 1883. There were present: Miss Ford, Miss Isabella Ford [of Leeds], Mrs. Hinton [widow of James Hinton], Miss Haddon [her sister], Mr., Mrs., and Miss Robins, Maurice Adams, H.H. Champion, Percival A. Chubb, H. Havelock Ellis, J.L. Joynes, Edward R. Pease, Frank Podmore, R.B.P. Frost, and Hamilton Pullen. "The proceedings were begun by the reading of Mr. Thomas Davidson's paper 'The New Life,' read by him at a former assemblage, and after it of the Draft of a proposed constitution (Sketch No. 2). [This has not been preserved.] "A general discussion followed on the question as to what was possible of achievement in the way of founding a communistic society whose members should lead the new higher life foreshadowed in the paper just read. The idea of founding a community abroad was generally discredited, and it was generally recognised that it would not be possible to establish here in England any independent community. What could be done perhaps would be for a number of persons in sympathy with the main idea to unite for the purpose of common living as far as possible on a communistic basis, realising amongst themselves the higher life and making it a primary care to provide a worthy education for the young. The members would pursue their present callings in the world, but they would always aim to make the community as far as practicable self-contained and self-supporting, combining perhaps to carry on some common business or businesses. "It was eventually arranged to further discuss the matter at another meeting which was fixed for a fortnight hence (Wednesday, 7th November). Mr. Podmore consented to ask Miss Owen [afterwards Mrs. Laurence Oliphant] to attend then and narrate the experiences of the New Harmony Community founded by [her grandfather] Robert Owen. "It was suggested--and the suggestion was approvingly received--that undoubtedly the first thing to be done was for those present to become thoroughly acquainted with each other. A general introduction of each person to the rest of the company was made and the business of the meeting being concluded conversation followed," On November 7th, the second meeting was held, when a number of new people attended, including Hubert Bland, who, I think, had been one of the original Davidson group. Miss Owen was unable to be present, and a draft constitution was discussed. "A question was then raised as to the method of conducting the proceedings. The appointment of a chairman was proposed, and Mr. Pease was appointed. It was suggested that resolutions should be passed constituting a society, and, as far as those present were concerned, designating its objects. Some exception was taken to this course as being an undesirable formality not in harmony with the free spirit of the undertaking, but meeting with general approval it was followed. "After some discussion ... the following resolution was proposed and agreed to:-- "That an association be formed whose ultimate aim shall be the reconstruction of Society in accordance with the highest moral possibilities" A Committee consisting of Messrs. Champion (who was not present), Ellis, Jupp, Podmore, and Chubb, and, failing Champion, Pease was appointed to draw up and submit proposals, and it was resolved for the future to meet on Fridays, a practice which the Society has maintained ever since. The meeting on November 23rd was attended by thirty-one people, and included Miss Dale Owen, William Clarke, and Frederick Keddell, the first Secretary of the Fabian Society. H.H. Champion[8] introduced the proposals of the Committee, including the following resolution, which was carried apparently with unanimity:-- "The members of the Society assert that the Competitive system assures the happiness and comfort of the few at the expense of the suffering of the many and that Society must be reconstituted in such a manner as to secure the general welfare and happiness," Then the minutes go on, indicating already a rift in the Society: "As the resolution referred rather to the material or economic aims of the Society and not to its primary spiritual aim, it was agreed that it should stand as No. 3, and that another resolution setting forth the spiritual basis of the Fellowship shall be passed which shall stand as No. 2." It proved impossible to formulate then and there the spiritual basis of the Society, and after several suggestions had been made a new committee was appointed. Resolution No. 1 had already been deferred. The next meeting was held on December 7th, when only fifteen were present. Hubert Bland occupied the chair, and Dr. Burns-Gibson introduced a definite plan as follows:-- "THE FELLOWSHIP OF NEW LIFE _Object_.--The cultivation of a perfect character in each and all. _Principle_.--The subordination of material things to spiritual. _Fellowship_.--The sole and essential condition of fellowship shall be a single-minded, sincere, and strenuous devotion to the object and principle." Further articles touched on the formation of a community, the supplanting of the spirit of competition, the highest education of the young, simplicity of living, the importance of manual labour and religious communion. Nine names were attached to this project, including those of Percival Chubb, Havelock Ellis, and William Clarke, and it was announced that a Fellowship would be formed on this basis, whether it was accepted or rejected by the majority. These propositions were discussed and no decision was arrived at. Up to this point the minutes are recorded in the writing of Percival Chubb. The next entry was made by Frank Podmore, and those after that by Frederick Keddell. We now arrive at the birthday of the Fabian Society, and the minutes of that meeting must be copied in full:-- "Meeting held at 17 Osnaburgh Street, on Friday, 4th January, 1884. "Present: Mrs. Robins, Miss Robins, Miss Haddon, Miss C. Haddon, Messrs. J. Hunter Watts, Hughes, Bland, Keddell, Pease, Stapleton, Chubb, Burns-Gibson, Swan, Podmore, Estcourt, etc. "Mr. Bland took the chair at 8.10 p.m. "After the minutes of the previous meeting had been read and confirmed Dr. Gibson moved the series of resolutions which had been read to the Society at the previous meeting. "Mr. Podmore moved as an amendment the series of resolutions, copies of which had been circulated amongst the members a few days previously. "The amendment was carried by 10 votes to 4. [Presumably the 4 included Burns-Gibson, Chubb, and Estcourt, who signed the defeated resolutions.] "Mr. Podmore's proposals were then put forward as substantive resolutions and considered seriatim. "Resolution I.--That the Society be called the Fabian Society (as Mr. Podmore explained in allusion to the victorious policy of Fabius Cunctator) was carried by 9 votes to 2. "Resolution II.--That the Society shall not at present pledge its members to any more definite basis of agreement than that contained in the resolution of 23rd November, 1883. "Carried unanimously. "Resolution III.--In place of Mr. Podmore's first proposal it was eventually decided to modify the resolution of 7th November, 1883, by inserting the words 'to help on' between the words 'shall be' and the words 'the reconstruction.' "Resolution IV with certain omissions was agreed to unanimously, viz.: That with the view of learning what practical measures to take in this direction the Society should: "_(a)_ Hold meetings for discussion, the reading of papers, hearing of reports, etc. "_(b)_ Delegate some of its members to attend meetings held on social subjects, debates at Workmen's Clubs, etc., in order that such members may in the first place report to the Society on the proceedings, and in the second place put forward, as occasion serves, the views of the Society. "_(c)_ Take measures in other ways, as, for example, by the collection of articles from current literature, to obtain information on all contemporary social movements and social needs. "Mr. Bland, Mr. Keddell, and Mr. Podmore were provisionally appointed as an Executive Committee, to serve for three months, on the motion of Mr. Pease. A collection was made to provide funds for past expenses: the sum collected amounting to 13s. 9d." It appears that Mr. Bland on this occasion acted as treasurer, though there is no record of the fact. He was annually re-elected treasurer and a member of the Executive Committee until he retired from both positions in 1911. Thus the Society was founded. Although it appeared to be the outcome of a division of opinion, this was scarcely in fact the case. All those present became members, and the relations between the Fabian Society and the Fellowship of the New Life were always of a friendly character, though in fact the two bodies had but little in common, and seldom came into contact. * * * * * A few words may be devoted to the Fellowship of the New Life, which continued to exist for fifteen years. Its chief achievement was the publication of a quarterly paper called "Seedtime,"[9] issued from July, 1889, to February, 1898. The paper contains articles on Ethical Socialism, the Simple Life, Humanitarianism, the Education of Children, and similar subjects. The Society was conducted much on the same lines as the Fabian Society: fortnightly lectures were given in London and reported in "Seedtime." In 1893 we find in "Seedtime" an Annual Report recording 12 public meetings, 4 social gatherings, a membership of 95, and receipts £73. During this year, 1892-3, J. Ramsay Macdonald, subsequently M.P. and Secretary and Chairman of the Labour Party, was Honorary Secretary, and for some years he was on the Executive. In 1896 the membership was 115 and the income £48. The most persistent of the organisers of the New Fellowship was J.F. Oakeshott, who was also for many years a member of the Fabian Executive. Corrie Grant, later a well-known Liberal M.P., H.S. Salt of the Humanitarian League, Edward Carpenter, and his brother Captain Carpenter, Herbert Rix, assistant secretary of the Royal Society, Havelock Ellis, and, both before and after her marriage, Mrs. Havelock Ellis (who was Honorary Secretary for some years), are amongst the names which appear in the pages of "Seedtime," Mild attempts were made to carry out the Community idea by means of associated colonies (e.g. the members residing near each other) and a co-operative residence at 49 Doughty Street, Bloomsbury; but close association, especially of persons with the strong and independent opinions of the average socialist, promotes discord, and against this the high ideals of the New Fellowship proved no protection. Indeed it is a common experience that the higher the ideal the fiercer the hostilities of the idealists. At Thornton Heath, near Croydon, the Fellowship conducted for some time a small printing business, and its concern for the right education for the young found expression in a Kindergarten. Later on an Ethical Church and a Boys' Guild were established at Croydon. Soon afterwards the Fellowship came to the conclusion that its work was done, the last number of "Seedtime" was published, and in 1898 the Society was dissolved. [Illustration: _From a photograph by G.C. Baresford, S.W._ HUBERT BLAND, IN 1902] FOOTNOTES: [7] Frank Podmore, M.A.--b. 1856, ed. Pembroke College, Oxford, 1st class in Science, 1st class clerk, G.P.O. Author of "Apparitions and Thought Transference," 1894, "Modern Spiritualism," 1902, "The Life of Robert Owen," 1906, etc. D. 1910. [8] Mr. Champion took no further part in the Fabian movement, so far as I am aware. His activities in connection with the Social Democratic Federation, the "Labour Elector," etc., are not germane to the present subject. He has for twenty years resided in Melbourne. [9] See complete set in the British Library of Political Science, London School of Economics. Chapter III The Early Days: 1884-6 The use of the word Socialism--Approval of the Democratic Federation--Tract No. 1--The Fabian Motto--Bernard Shaw joins--His first Tract--The Industrial Remuneration Conference--Sidney Webb and Sydney Olivier become members--Mrs. Annie Besant--Shaw's second Tract--The Tory Gold controversy--"What Socialism Is"--The Fabian Conference of 1886--Sidney Webb's first contribution, "The Government Organisation of Unemployed Labour." The Fabian Society was founded for the purpose of "reconstructing society," based on the competitive system, "in such manner as to secure the general welfare and happiness." It is worth noting that the word "Socialism" had not yet appeared in its records, and it is not until the sixth meeting, held on 21st March, 1884, that the word first appears in the minutes, as the title of a paper by Miss Caroline Haddon: "The Two Socialisms"; to which is appended a note in the handwriting of Sydney Olivier: "This paper is stated to have been devoted to a comparison between the Socialism of the Fabian Society and that of the S.D.F." The Society, in fact, began its career with that disregard of mere names which has always distinguished it. The resolutions already recorded, advocating the reconstruction of society on a non-competitive basis with the object of remedying the evils of poverty, embody the essence of Socialism, and our first publication, Tract No. 1, was so thorough-going a statement of Socialism that it has been kept in print ever since. But neither in Tract No. 1 nor in Tract No. 2 does the word Socialism occur, and it is not till Tract No. 3, published in June, 1885, that we find the words "the Fabian Society having in view the advance of Socialism in England." At this stage it is clear that the Society was socialist without recognising itself as part of a world-wide movement, and it was only subsequently that it adopted the word which alone adequately expressed its ideas. At the second meeting, on 25th January, 1884, reports were presented on a lecture by Henry George and a Conference of the Democratic Federation (later the Social Democratic Federation); the rules were adopted, and Mr. J.G. Stapleton read a paper on "Social conditions in England with a view to social reconstruction or development." This was the first of the long series of Fabian fortnightly lectures which have been continued ever since. On February 29th, after a paper on the Democratic Federation, Mr. Bland moved: "That whilst not entirely agreeing with the statements and phrases used in the pamphlets of the Democratic Federation, and in the speeches of Mr. Hyndman, this Society considers that the Democratic Federation is doing good and useful work and is worthy of sympathy and support." This was carried nem. con. On March 7th a pamphlet committee was nominated, and on March 21st the Executive was reappointed. On April 4th the Pamphlet Committee reported, and 2000 copies of "Fabian Tract No. 1" were ordered to be printed. This four-page leaflet has now remained in print for over thirty years, and there is no reason to suppose that the demand for it will soon cease. According to tradition, it was drafted by W.L. Phillips, a house-painter, at that time the only "genuine working man" in our ranks. He had been introduced to me by a Positivist friend, and was in his way a remarkable man, ready at any time to talk of his experiences of liberating slaves by the "Underground Railway" in the United States. He worked with us cordially for several years and then gradually dropped out. The original edition of "Why are the many poor?" differs very little from that now in circulation. It was revised some years later by Bernard Shaw, who cut down the rhetoric and sharpened the phraseology, but the substance has not been changed. It is remarkable as containing a sneer at Christianity, the only one to be found in the publications of the Society. Perhaps this was a rebound from excess of "subordination of material things to spiritual things" insisted on by the Fellowship of the New Life! The tract had on its title page two mottoes, the second of which has played some part in the Society's history. They were produced, again according to tradition, by Frank Podmore, and, though printed as quotations, are not to be discovered in any history:-- "Wherefore it may not be gainsaid that the fruit of this man's long taking of counsel--and (by the many so deemed) untimeous delays--was the safe-holding for all men, his fellow-citizens, of the Common Weal." "For the right moment you must wait, as Fabius did most patiently, when warring against Hannibal, though many censured his delays; but when the time comes you must strike hard, as Fabius did, or your waiting will be in vain, and fruitless." It has been pointed out by Mr. H.G. Wells, and by others before him, that Fabius never did strike hard; and many have enquired when the right time for the Fabians to strike would come. In fact, we recognised at that time that we did not know what were the remedies for the evils of society as we saw them and that the right time for striking would not come until we knew where to strike. Taken together as the two mottoes were first printed, this meaning is obvious. The delay was to be for the purpose of "taking counsel." Tract No. 1, excellent as it is, shows a sense of the evil, but gives no indication of the remedy. Its contents are commonplace, and in no sense characteristic of the Society. The men who were to make its reputation had not yet found it out, and at this stage our chief characteristic was a lack of self-confidence unusual amongst revolutionaries. We had with considerable courage set out to reconstruct society, and we frankly confessed that we did not know how to go about it. The next meeting to which we need refer took place on May 16th. The minutes merely record that Mr. Rowland Estcourt read a paper on "The Figures of Mr. Mallock," but a pencil note in the well-known handwriting of Bernard Shaw has been subsequently added: "This meeting was made memorable by the first appearance of Bernard Shaw." On September 5th Bernard Shaw was elected a member, and at the following meeting on September 19th his first contribution to the literature of the Society, Pamphlet No. 2, was read. The influence of his intellectual outlook was immediate, and already the era of "highest moral possibilities" seems remote. Tract No. 2 was never reprinted and the number of copies in existence outside public libraries is small: it is therefore worth reproducing in full. THE FABIAN SOCIETY 17 Osnaburgh Street, Regent's Park Fabian Tract No. 2 A MANIFESTO "For always in thine eyes, O liberty, Shines that high light whereby the world is saved; And though thou slay us, we will trust in thee." London: George Standring, 8 & 9 Finsbury Street, E.C. 1884. A MANIFESTO THE FABIANS are associated for spreading the following opinions held by them and discussing their practical consequences. That under existing circumstances wealth cannot be enjoyed without dishonour or foregone without misery. That it is the duty of each member of the State to provide for his or her wants by his or her own Labour. That a life interest in the Land and Capital of the nation is the birthright of every individual born within its confines and that access to this birthright should not depend upon the will of any private person other than the person seeking it. That the most striking result of our present system of farming out the national Land and Capital to private persons has been the division of Society into hostile classes, with large appetites and no dinners at one extreme and large dinners and no appetites at the other. That the practice of entrusting the Land of the nation to private persons in the hope that they will make the best of it has been discredited by the consistency with which they have made the worst of it; and that Nationalisation of the Land in some form is a public duty. That the pretensions of Capitalism to encourage Invention and to distribute its benefits in the fairest way attainable, have been discredited by the experience of the nineteenth century. That, under the existing system of leaving the National Industry to organise itself Competition has the effect of rendering adulteration, dishonest dealing and inhumanity compulsory. That since Competition amongst producers admittedly secures to the public the most satisfactory products, the State should compete with all its might in every department of production. That such restraints upon Free Competition as the penalties for infringing the Postal monopoly, and the withdrawal of workhouse and prison labour from the markets, should be abolished. That no branch of Industry should be carried on at a profit by the central administration. That the Public Revenue should be levied by a direct Tax; and that the central administration should have no legal power to hold back for the replenishment of the Public Treasury any portion of the proceeds of Industries administered by them. That the State should compete with private individuals--especially with parents--in providing happy homes for children, so that every child may have a refuge from the tyranny or neglect of its natural custodians. That Men no longer need special political privileges to protect them against Women, and that the sexes should henceforth enjoy equal political rights. That no individual should enjoy any Privilege in consideration of services rendered to the State by his or her parents or other relations. That the State should secure a liberal education and an equal share in the National Industry to each of its units. That the established Government has no more right to call itself the State than the smoke of London has to call itself the weather. That we had rather face a Civil War than such another century of suffering as the present one has been. It would be easy in the light of thirty years' experience to write at much length on these propositions. They are, of course, unqualified "Shaw." The minutes state that each was discussed and separately adopted. Three propositions, the nature of which is not recorded, were at a second meeting rejected, while the proposition on heredity was drafted and inserted by order of the meeting. I recollect demurring to the last proposition, and being assured by the author that it was all right since in fact no such alternative would ever be offered! The persistency of Mr. Shaw's social philosophy is remarkable. His latest volume[10] deals with parents and children, the theme he touched on in 1884; his social ideal is still a birthright life interest in national wealth, and "an equal share in national industry," the latter a phrase more suggestive than lucid. On the other hand, he, like the rest of us, was then by no means clear as to the distinction between Anarchism and Socialism. The old Radical prejudice in favour of direct taxation, so that the State may never handle a penny not wrung from the reluctant and acutely conscious taxpayer, the doctrinaire objection to State monopolies, and the modern view that municipal enterprises had better be carried on at cost price, are somewhat inconsistently commingled with the advocacy of universal State competition in industry. It may further be noticed that we were as yet unconscious of the claims and aims of the working people. Our Manifesto covered a wide field, but it nowhere touches Co-operation or Trade Unionism, wages or hours of labour. We were still playing with abstractions, Land and Capital, Industry and Competition, the Individual and the State. In connection with the first tracts another point may be mentioned. The Society has stuck to the format adopted in these early days, and with a few special exceptions all its publications have been issued in the same style, and with numbers running on consecutively. For all sorts of purposes the advantage of this continuity has been great. * * * * * On January 2nd, 1885, Bernard Shaw was elected to the Executive Committee, and about the same time references to the Industrial Remuneration Conference appear in the minutes. This remarkable gathering, made possible by a gift of £1000 from Mr. Miller of Edinburgh, was summoned to spend three days in discussing the question, "Has the increase of products of industry within the last hundred years tended most to the benefit of capitalists and employers or to that of the working classes, whether artisans, labourers or others? And in what relative proportions in any given period?" The second day was devoted to "Remedies," and the third to the question, "Would the more general distribution of capital or land or the State management of capital or land promote or impair the production of wealth and the welfare of the community?" The Fabian Society appointed two delegates, J.G. Stapleton and Hubert Bland, but Bernard Shaw apparently took the place of the latter. It met on January 28th, at the Prince's Hall, Piccadilly. Mr. Arthur J. Balfour read a paper in which he made an observation worth recording: "As will be readily believed, I am no Socialist, but to compare the work of such men as Mr. (Henry) George with that of such men, for instance, as Karl Marx, either in respect of its intellectual force, its consistency, its command of reasoning in general, or of economic reasoning in particular, seems to me absurd." The Conference was the first occasion in which the Fabian Society emerged from its drawing-room obscurity, and the speech of Bernard Shaw on the third day was probably the first he delivered before an audience of more than local importance. One passage made an impression on his friends and probably on the public. "It was," he said, "the desire of the President that nothing should be said that might give pain to particular classes. He was about to refer to a modern class, the burglars, but if there was a burglar present he begged him to believe that he cast no reflection upon his profession, and that he was not unmindful of his great skill and enterprise: his risks--so much greater than those of the most speculative capitalist, extending as they did to risk of liberty and life--his abstinence; or finally of the great number of people to whom he gave employment, including criminal attorneys, policemen, turnkeys, builders of gaols, and it might be the hangman. He did not wish to hurt the feelings of shareholders ... or of landlords ... any more than he wished to pain burglars. He would merely point out that all three inflicted on the community an injury of precisely the same nature."[11] It may be added that Mr. Shaw was patted on the back by a subsequent speaker, Mr. John Wilson, of the Durham Miners, for many years M.P. for Mid-Durham, and by no means an habitual supporter of Socialists. The stout volume in which the proceedings are published is now but seldom referred to, but it is a somewhat significant record of the intellectual unrest of the period, an indication that the governing classes even at this early date in the history of English Socialism, were prepared to consider its claims, and to give its proposals a respectful hearing. * * * * * The early debates in the Society were in the main on things abstract or Utopian. Social Reconstruction was a constant theme, Hubert Bland outlined "Revolutionary Prospects" in January, 1885, and Bernard Shaw in February combated "The proposed Abolition of the Currency." On March 6th a new departure began: a Committee was appointed to collect "facts concerning the working of the Poor Law," with special reference to alleged official attempts to disprove "great distress amongst the workers." It does not appear that the Report was ever completed. On March 20th Sidney Webb read a paper on "The Way Out," and on the 1st May he was elected a member along with his Colonial Office colleague Sydney Olivier. On May 15th is recorded the election of Harold Cox, subsequently M.P., and now editor of the "Edinburgh Review." The Society was now finding its feet. On April 17th it had been resolved to send a delegate "to examine into and report upon the South Yorkshire Miners"! And on the same day it was determined to get up a Soirée. This gathering, held in Gower Street, was memorable because it was attended by Mrs. Annie Besant, then notorious as an advocate of Atheism and Malthusianism, the heroine of several famous law cases, and a friend and colleague of Charles Bradlaugh. Mrs. Besant was elected a member a few weeks later, and she completed the list of the seven who subsequently wrote "Fabian Essays," with the exception of Graham Wallas, who did not join the Society until April, 1886.[12] But although Sidney Webb had become a Fabian the scientific spirit was not yet predominant. Bernard Shaw had, then as now, a strong objection to the peasant agriculture of his native land, and he submitted to the Society a characteristic leaflet addressed: "To provident Landlords and Capitalists, a suggestion and a warning." "The Fabian Society," it says, "having in view the advance of Socialism and the threatened subversion of the powers hitherto exercised by private proprietors of the national land and capital ventures plainly to warn all such proprietors that the establishment of Socialism in England means nothing less than the compulsion of all members of the upper class, without regard to sex or condition, to work for their own living." The tract, which is a very brief one, goes on to recommend the proprietary classes to "support all undertakings having for their object the parcelling out of waste or inferior lands amongst the labouring class" for sundry plausible reasons. At the foot of the title page, in the smallest of type, is the following: "Note.--Great care should be taken to keep this tract out of the hands of radical workmen, Socialist demagogues and the like, as they are but too apt to conclude that schemes favourable to landlords cannot be permanently advantageous to the working class." This elaborate joke was, except for one amendment, adopted as drafted on June 5th, 1885, and there is a tradition that it was favourably reviewed by a Conservative newspaper! The Society still met as a rule at 17 Osnaburgh Street, or in the rooms of Frank Podmore at 14 Dean's Yard, Westminster, but it was steadily growing and new members were elected at every meeting. Although most of the members were young men of university education, the Society included people of various ages. To us at any rate Mrs. James Hinton, widow of Dr. Hinton, and her sisters, Miss Haddon and Miss Caroline Haddon, seemed to be at least elderly. Mrs. Robins, her husband (a successful architect), and her daughter, who acted as "assistant" honorary secretary for the first eighteen months, lent an air of prosperous respectability to our earliest meetings. Mr. and Mrs. J. Glode Stapleton, who were prominent members for some years, were remarkable amongst us because they drove to our meetings in their own brougham! The working classes, as before mentioned, had but a single representative. Another prominent member at this period was Mrs. Charlotte M. Wilson, wife of a stock-broker living in Hampstead, who a short time later "simplified" into a cottage at the end of the Heath, called Wildwood Farm, now a part of the Garden Suburb Estate, where Fabians for many years held the most delightful of their social gatherings. Mrs. Wilson was elected to the Executive of five in December, 1884 (Mrs. Wilson, H. Bland, E.R. Pease, G. Bernard Shaw and F. Keddell), but after some time devoted herself entirely to the Anarchist movement, led by Prince Kropotkin, and for some years edited their paper, "Freedom." But she remained throughout a member of the Fabian Society, and twenty years later she resumed her Fabian activity, as will be related in a later chapter. All this time the Socialist movement in England was coming into public notice with startling rapidity. In January, 1884, "Justice, the organ of the Democratic Federation," was founded, and in August of that year the Federation made the first of its many changes of name, and became the Social Democratic Federation or S.D.F. The public then believed, as the Socialists also necessarily believed, that Socialism would be so attractive to working-class electors that they would follow its banner as soon as it was raised, and the candidatures undertaken by the S.D.F. at the General Election in November, 1885, produced widespread alarm amongst politicians of both parties. The following account of this episode from Fabian Tract 41, "The Early History of the Fabian Society," was written by Bernard Shaw in 1892, and describes the events and our attitude at the time far more freshly and graphically than anything I can write nearly thirty years later. After explaining why he preferred joining the Fabian Society rather than the S.D.F., Mr. Shaw goes on (pp. 4-7):-- "However, as I have said, in 1885 our differences [from other Socialists] were latent or instinctive; and we denounced the capitalists as thieves at the Industrial Remuneration Conference, and, among ourselves, talked revolution, anarchism, labour notes _versus_ pass-books, and all the rest of it, on the tacit assumption that the object of our campaign, with its watchwords, 'EDUCATE, AGITATE, ORGANIZE,' was to bring about a tremendous smash-up of existing society, to be succeeded by complete Socialism. And this meant that we had no true practical understanding either of existing society or Socialism. Without being quite definitely aware of this, we yet felt it to a certain extent all along; for it was at this period that we contracted the invaluable habit of freely laughing at ourselves which has always distinguished us, and which has saved us from becoming hampered by the gushing enthusiasts who mistake their own emotions for public movements. From the first, such people fled after one glance at us, declaring that we were not serious. Our preference for practical suggestions and criticisms, and our impatience of all general expressions of sympathy with working-class aspirations, not to mention our way of chaffing our opponents in preference to denouncing them as enemies of the human race, repelled from us some warm-hearted and eloquent Socialists, to whom it seemed callous and cynical to be even commonly self-possessed in the presence of the sufferings upon which Socialists make war. But there was far too much equality and personal intimacy among the Fabians to allow of any member presuming to get up and preach at the rest in the fashion which the working-classes still tolerate submissively from their leaders. We knew that a certain sort of oratory was useful for 'stoking up' public meetings; but we needed no stoking up, and, when any orator tried the process on us, soon made him understand that he was wasting his time and ours. I, for one, should be very sorry to lower the intellectual standard of the Fabian by making the atmosphere of its public discussions the least bit more congenial to stale declamation than it is at present. If our debates are to be kept wholesome, they cannot be too irreverent or too critical. And the irreverence, which has become traditional with us, comes down from those early days when we often talked such nonsense that we could not help laughing at ourselves. "TORY GOLD AT THE 1885 ELECTION. "When I add that in 1885 we had only 40 members, you will be able to form a sufficient notion of the Fabian Society in its nonage. In that year there occurred an event which developed the latent differences between ourselves and the Social-Democratic Federation. The Federation said then, as it still says, that its policy is founded on a recognition of the existence of a Class War. How far the fact of the working classes being at war with the proprietary classes justifies them in suspending the observance of the ordinary social obligations in dealing with them was never settled; but at that time we were decidedly less scrupulous than we are now in our ideas on the subject; and we all said freely that as gunpowder destroyed the feudal system, so the capitalist system could not long survive the invention of dynamite. Not that we are dynamitards: indeed the absurdity of the inference shows how innocent we were of any practical acquaintance with explosives; but we thought that the statement about gunpowder and feudalism was historically true, and that it would do the capitalists good to remind them of it. Suddenly, however, the Federation made a very startling practical application of the Class War doctrine. They did not blow anybody up; but in the general election of 1885 they ran two candidates in London--Mr. Williams, in Hampstead, who got 27 votes, and Mr. Fielding, in Kennington, who got 32 votes. And they made no secret of the fact that the expenses of these elections had been paid by one of the established political parties in order to split the vote of the other. From the point of view of the abstract moralist there was nothing to be said against the transaction; since it was evident that Socialist statesmanship must for a long time to come consist largely of taking advantage of the party dissensions between the Unsocialists. It may easily happen to-morrow that the Liberal party may offer to contribute to the expenses of a Fabian candidate in a hopelessly Tory stronghold, in order to substantiate its pretensions to encourage Labour representation. Under such circumstances it is quite possible that we may say to the Fabian in question, Accept by all means; and deliver propagandist addresses all over the place. Suppose that the Liberal party offers to bear part of Mr. Sidney Webb's expenses at the forthcoming County Council election at Deptford, as they undoubtedly will, by means of the usual National Liberal Club subscription, in the case of the poorer Labour candidates. Mr. Webb, as a matter of personal preference for an independence which he is fortunately able to afford, will refuse. But suppose Mr. Webb were not in that fortunate position, as some Labour candidates will not be! It is quite certain that not the smallest odium would attach to the acceptance of a Liberal grant-in-aid. Now the idea that taking Tory money is worse than taking Liberal money is clearly a Liberal party idea and not a Social-Democratic one. In 1885 there was not the slightest excuse for regarding the Tory party as any more hostile to Socialism than the Liberal party; and Mr. Hyndman's classical quotation, _'Non olet'_--'It does not smell,' meaning that there is no difference in the flavour of Tory and Whig gold once it comes into the Socialist treasury, was a sufficient retort to the accusations of moral corruption which were levelled at him. But the Tory money job, as it was called, was none the less a huge mistake in tactics. Before it took place, the Federation loomed large in the imagination of the public and the political parties. This is conclusively proved by the fact that the Tories thought that the Socialists could take enough votes from the Liberals to make it worth while to pay the expenses of two Socialist candidates in London. The day after the election everyone knew that the Socialists were an absolutely negligeable quantity there as far as voting power was concerned. They had presented the Tory party with 57 votes, at a cost of about £8 apiece. What was worse, they had shocked London Radicalism, to which Tory money was an utter abomination. It is hard to say which cut the more foolish figure, the Tories who had spent their money for nothing, or the Socialists who had sacrificed their reputation for worse than nothing. "The disaster was so obvious that there was an immediate falling off from the Federation, on the one hand of the sane tacticians of the movement, and on the other of those out-and-out Insurrectionists who repudiated political action altogether, and were only too glad to be able to point to a discreditable instance of it. Two resolutions were passed, one by the Socialist League and the other by the Fabian Society. Here is the Fabian resolution: "'That the conduct of the Council of the Social-Democratic Federation in accepting money from the Tory party in payment of the election expenses of Socialist candidates is calculated to disgrace the Socialist movement in England,'--4th Dec., 1885." The result of this resolution, passed by 15 votes to 4, was the first of the very few splits which are recorded in the history of the Society. Frederick Keddell, the first honorary secretary, resigned and I took his place, whilst a few weeks later Sidney Webb was elected to the vacancy on the Executive. In 1886 Socialism was prominently before the public. Unemployment reached a height which has never since been touched. Messrs. Hyndman, Champion, Burns, and Williams were actually tried for sedition, but happily acquitted; and public opinion was justified in regarding Socialism rather as destructive and disorderly than as constructive, and, as is now often said, even too favourable to repressive legislation. In these commotions the Society as a whole took no part, and its public activities were limited to a meeting at South Place Chapel, on December 18th, 1885, addressed by Mrs. Besant. In March, 1886, the Executive Committee was increased to seven by the addition of Mrs. Besant and Frank Podmore, and in April Tract No. 4, "What Socialism Is," was approved for publication. It begins with a historical preface, touching on the Wars of the Roses, Tudor confiscation of land, the enclosure of commons, the Industrial Revolution, and so on. Surplus value and the tendency of wages to a minimum are mentioned, and the valuable work of Trade Unionism--sometimes regarded by Guild Socialists and others nowadays as a recent discovery--is alluded to: indeed the modern syndicalist doctrine was anticipated: the workman, it is said, "has been forced to sell himself for a mess of pottage and is consequently deprived of the guidance of his own life and the direction of his own labour." Socialist opinion abroad, it says, "has taken shape in two distinct schools, Collectivist and Anarchist. English Socialism is not yet Anarchist or Collectivist, not yet definite enough in point of policy to be classified. There is a mass of Socialist feeling not yet conscious of itself as Socialism. But when the conscious Socialists of England discover their position they also will probably fall into two parties: a Collectivist party supporting a strong central administration, and a counterbalancing Anarchist party defending individual initiative against that administration. In some such fashion progress and stability will probably be secured under Socialism by the conflict of the uneradicable Tory and Whig instincts in human nature." It will be noticed that even in this period of turmoil the Society was altogether constitutional in its outlook; political parties of Socialists and Anarchists combining progress with stability were the features of the future we foresaw. By this time the Society was thoroughly aware of its relation to international socialism, and the remaining six pages of the tract are occupied by expositions of the alternatives above alluded to. "Collectivism" is summarised from Bebel's "Woman in the Past, Present, and Future," and is a somewhat mechanical scheme of executive committees in each local commune or district representing each branch of industry, elected by universal suffrage for brief periods of office and paid at the rate of ordinary workmen; and of a central Executive Committee chosen in like manner or else directly appointed by the local Communal Councils. The second part consists of "Anarchism, drawn up by C.M. Wilson on behalf of the London Anarchists." This is a statement of abstract principles which frankly admits that "Anarchists have no fears that in discarding the Collectivist dream of the scientific regulation of industry and inventing no formulas for social conditions as yet unrealised, they are neglecting the essential for the visionary," This tract was never reprinted, and, of course, it attracted no attention. It was however the first of the long series of Fabian tracts that aimed at supplying information and thus carrying out the original object of the Society, the education of its members and the systematic study of the reconstruction of the social system. The spring of 1886 was occupied with arrangements for the Conference, which was held at South Place Chapel on June 9th, 10th, and 11th. Here again a quotation from Bernard Shaw's "Early History of the Fabian Society" is the best description available:-- "THE FABIAN CONFERENCE OF 1886. "You will now ask to be told what the Fabians had been doing all this time. Well, I think it must be admitted that we were overlooked in the excitements of the unemployed agitation, which had, moreover, caused the Tory money affair to be forgotten. The Fabians were disgracefully backward in open-air speaking. Up to quite a recent date, Graham Wallas, myself, and Mrs. Besant were the only representative open-air speakers in the Society, whereas the Federation speakers, Burns, Hyndman, Andrew Hall, Tom Mann, Champion, Burrows, with the Socialist Leaguers, were at it constantly. On the whole, the Church Parades and the rest were not in our line; and we were not wanted by the men who were organizing them. Our only contribution to the agitation was a report which we printed in 1886, which recommended experiments in tobacco culture, and even hinted at compulsory military service, as means of absorbing some of the unskilled unemployed, but which went carefully into the practical conditions of relief works. Indeed, we are at present trying to produce a new tract on the subject without finding ourselves able to improve very materially on the old one in this respect. It was drawn up by Bland, Hughes, Podmore, Stapleton, and Webb, and was the first of our publications that contained any solid information. Its tone, however, was moderate and its style somewhat conventional; and the Society was still in so hot a temper on the social question that we refused to adopt it as a regular Fabian tract, and only issued it as a report printed for the information of members. Nevertheless we were coming to our senses rapidly by this time. We signalized our repudiation of political sectarianism in June, 1886, by inviting the Radicals, the Secularists, and anyone else who would come, to a great conference, modelled upon the Industrial Remuneration Conference, and dealing with the Nationalization of Land and Capital. It fully established the fact that we had nothing immediately practical to impart to the Radicals and that they had nothing to impart to us. The proceedings were fully reported for us; but we never had the courage even to read the shorthand writer's report, which still remains in MS. Before I refreshed my memory on the subject the other day, I had a vague notion that the Conference cost a great deal of money; that it did no good whatever; that Mr. Bradlaugh made a speech; that Mrs. Fenwick Miller, who had nothing on earth to do with us, was in the chair during part of the proceedings; and that the most successful paper was by a strange gentleman whom we had taken on trust as a Socialist, but who turned out to be an enthusiast on the subject of building more harbours. I find, however, on looking up the facts, that no less than fifty-three societies sent delegates; that the guarantee fund for expenses was £100; and that the discussions were kept going for three afternoons and three evenings. The Federation boycotted us; but the 'Times' reported us.[13] Eighteen papers were read, two of them by members of Parliament, and most of the rest by well-known people. William Morris and Dr. Aveling read papers as delegates from the Socialist League; the National Secular Society sent Mr. Foote and Mr. [John M.] Robertson,[14] the latter contributing a 'Scheme of Taxation' in which he anticipated much of what was subsequently adopted as the Fabian program; Wordsworth Donisthorpe took the field for Anarchism of the type advocated by the authors of 'A Plea for Liberty'; Stewart Headlam spoke for Christian Socialism and the Guild of St. Matthew; Dr. Pankhurst dealt with the situation from the earlier Radical point of view; and various Socialist papers were read by Mrs. Besant, Sidney Webb, and Edward Carpenter, besides one by Stuart Glennie, who subsequently left us because we fought shy of the Marriage Question when revising our 'Basis.' I mention all this in order to show you how much more important this abortive Conference looked than the present one. Yet all that can be said for it is that it made us known to the Radical clubs and proved that we were able to manage a conference in a businesslike way. It also, by the way, showed off our pretty prospectus with the design by Crane at the top, our stylish-looking blood-red invitation cards, and the other little smartnesses on which we then prided ourselves. We used to be plentifully sneered at as fops and arm-chair Socialists for our attention to these details; but I think it was by no means the least of our merits that we always, as far as our means permitted, tried to make our printed documents as handsome as possible, and did our best to destroy the association between revolutionary literature and slovenly printing on paper that is nasty without being cheap. One effect of this was that we were supposed to be much richer than we really were, because we generally got better value and a finer show for our money than the other Socialist societies."[15] Three members of Parliament, Charles Bradlaugh, William Saunders, and Dr. G.B. Clark, took part. The Dr. Pankhurst mentioned was the husband of Mrs. Pankhurst, later the leader of the Women's Social and Political Union. The reference in the foregoing passage to the report on "The Government Organisation of Unemployed Labour," prepared concurrently with the organisation of the Conference, is by no means adequate. The Report attracted but little attention at the time, even in the Society itself, but it is in fact the first typically Fabian publication, and the first in which Sidney Webb took part. Much subsequent experience has convinced me that whenever Webb is on a committee it may be assumed in default of positive evidence to the contrary that its report is his work. Webb however maintains that to the best of his recollection the work was shared between Podmore and himself, the simple arrangement being that Podmore wrote the first half and Webb the second. The tract is an attempt to deal with a pressing social problem on constructive lines. It surveys the field, analyses the phenomena presented, and suggests practicable remedies. It is however a very cautious document. Webb was then old as an economist, and very young as a Socialist; none of the rest of the Committee had the knowledge, if they had the will, to stand up to him. Therefore we find snippets from the theory of economic "balance" which was universally regarded as valid in those days. "In practice the government obtains its technical skill by attracting men from other employers, and its capital in a mobile form by attracting it from other possessors. It gets loans on the money market, which is thereby rendered more stringent; the rate of interest rises and the loans made to other borrowers are diminished," But the particular interest of the Report at the present day is the fact that it contains the germs of many ideas which more than twenty years later formed the leading features of the Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission. At that time it was universally believed that the slum dwellers of London were mainly recruited by rural immigrants, and this error--disproved several years later by the painstaking statistical investigations of Mr. (now Sir) H. Llewelyn Smith--vitiates much of the reasoning of the Report. After analysing the causes of unemployment on lines now familiar to all, and denouncing private charity with vehemence worthy of the Charity Organisation Society, it recommends the revival of social life in our villages in order to keep the country people from crowding into the slums. The Dock Companies are urged to organise their casual labour into permanently employed brigades: and it is suggested, as in the "Minority Report," that "the most really 'remunerative' form of 'relief' works for the unemployed would often be a course of instruction in some new trade or handicraft" Technical education is strongly recommended; Labour Bureaux are advocated; State cultivation of tobacco is suggested as a means of employing labour on the land (private cultivation of tobacco was until recently prohibited by law), as well as municipal drink supply, State railways, and "universal military (home) service" as a means of promoting "the growth of social consciousness," The Report is unequal. An eloquent but irrelevant passage on the social effects of bringing the railway contractor's navvies to a rural village was possibly contributed by Hubert Bland, whilst the conclusion, a magniloquent eulogy of the moral value of Government service, written, according to Webb's recollection, by Frank Podmore, is evidently the work of a civil servant who has not got over the untamed enthusiasms of youth! The Report shows immature judgment, but also in parts remarkable foresight, and a complete realisation of the right scientific method. With State tobacco farms and the public organisation of a corps of peripatetic State navvies, the childhood stage of the Fabian Society may be said to conclude. My own connection with the Society also changed. In the spring of 1886 I gave up my business on the Stock Exchange and in the summer went to Newcastle-on-Tyne, where I lived till the autumn of 1890. My account of the Society for the next three years is therefore in the main derived from its records. Sydney Olivier succeeded me as "Acting Secretary," but for some months I was still nominally the secretary, a fact of much significance to my future, since it enabled me if I liked to deal with correspondence, and it was through a letter to the secretary of the Society, answered by me from Newcastle, that I made the acquaintance of the lady who three years later became my wife. FOOTNOTES: [10] "Misalliance: with a treatise on parents and children," 1914. [11] Industrial Remuneration Conference. The Report, etc. Cassell, 1885, p. 400. [12] William Clarke had attended some early meetings but dropped out and was actually elected to the Society in February, 1886. [13] Presumably a "Times" reporter was present; but his report was not published. [14] Later M.P. for Tyneside and a member of Mr. Asquith's Government. [15] Contemporary accounts of the conference can be found in the July numbers of "To-day" and "The Republican," the former by Mrs. Besant, and the latter, a descriptive criticism, by the Editor and Printer, George Standring. Chapter IV The Formation of Fabian Policy: 1886-9 The factors of success; priority of date; the men who made it--The controversy over policy--The Fabian Parliamentary League--"Facts for Socialists"--The adoption of the Basis--The seven Essayists in command--Lord Haldane--The "Essays" as lectures--How to train for Public Life--Fabians on the London School Board--"Facts for Londoners"--Municipal Socialism--"The Eight Hours Bill" The Society was now fully constituted, and for the next three years its destiny was controlled by the seven who subsequently wrote "Fabian Essays." But it was still a very small and quite obscure body. Mrs. Besant, alone of its leaders, was known beyond its circle, and at that period few outside the working classes regarded her with respect. The Society still met, as a rule, at the house of one or other of the members, and to the founders, who numbered about 20, only about 67 members had been added by June, 1886. The receipts for the year to March, 1886, were no More than £35 19s., but as the expenditure only amounted to £27 6s. 6d., the Society had already adopted its lifelong habit of paying its way punctually, though it must be confessed that a complaisant printer and a series of lucky windfalls have contributed to that result. [Illustration: _From a photograph by Elliott and Fry, W._ SYDNEY OLIVIER, IN 1903] The future success of the Society was dependent in the main on two factors then already in existence. The first was its foundation before there was any other definitely Socialist body in England. The Social Democratic Federation did not adopt that name until August, 1884; the Fabian Society can therefore claim technical priority, and consequently it has never had to seek acceptance by the rest of the Socialist movement. At any later date it would have been impossible for a relatively small middle-class society to obtain recognition as an acknowledged member of the Socialist confraternity. We were thus in a position to welcome the formation of working-class Socialist societies, but it is certain that in the early days they would never have welcomed us. Regret has been sometimes expressed, chiefly by foreign observers, that the Society has maintained its separate identity. Why, it has been asked, did not the middle-class leaders of the Society devote their abilities directly to aiding the popular organisations, instead of "keeping themselves to themselves" like ultra-respectable suburbans? If this had been possible I am convinced that the loss would have exceeded the gain, but in the early years it was not possible. The Social Democrats of those days asserted that unquestioning belief in every dogma attributed to Marx was essential to social salvation, and that its only way was revolution, by which they meant, not the complete transformation of society, but its transformation by means of rifles and barricades; they were convinced that a successful repetition of the Commune of Paris was the only method by which their policy could prevail. The Fabians realised from the first that no such revolution was likely to take place, and that constant talk about it was the worst possible way to commend Socialism to the British working class. And indeed a few years later it was necessary to establish a new working-class Socialist Society, the Independent Labour Party, in order to get clear both of the tradition of revolutionary violence and of the vain repetition of Marxian formulas. If the smaller society had merged itself in the popular movement, its criticism, necessary, as it proved to be, to the success of Socialism in England, would have been voted down, and its critics either silenced or expelled. Of this criticism I shall have more to say in another place.[16] But there was another reason why this course would have been impracticable. The Fabians were not suited either by ability, temperament, or conditions to be leaders of a popular revolutionary party. Mrs. Besant with her gift of splendid oratory and her long experience of agitation was an exception, but her connection with the movement lasted no more than five years. Of the others Shaw did not and does not now possess that unquestioning faith in recognised principles which is the stock-in-trade of political leadership:[17] and whilst Webb might have been a first-class minister at the head of a department, his abilities would have been wasted as a leader in a minority. But there was a more practical bar. The Fabians were mostly civil servants or clerks in private employ. The methods of agitation congenial to them were compatible with their occupations: those of the Social Democrats were not. Indeed in those days no question of amalgamation was ever mooted. But it must be remembered by critics that so far as concerns the Fabian Society, the absence of identity in organisation has never led to such hostility as has been common amongst Continental Socialists. Since the vote of censure in relation to the "Tory Gold," the Fabian Society has never interfered with the doings of its friendly rivals. The two Societies have occasionally co-operated, but as a rule they have severally carried on their own work, each recognising the value of many of the activities of the other, and on the whole confining mutual criticism within reasonable limits. The second and chief reason for the success of the Society was its good fortune in attaching to its service a group of young men, then altogether unknown, whose reputation has gradually spread, in two or three cases, all over the world, and who have always been in the main identified with Fabianism. Very rarely in the history of voluntary organisations has a group of such exceptional people come together almost accidentally and worked unitedly together for so many years for the furtherance of the principles in which they believed. Others have assisted according to their abilities and opportunities, but to the Fabian Essayists belongs the credit of creating the Fabian Society. For several years, and those perhaps the most important in the history of the Society, the period, in fact, of adolescence, the Society was governed by the seven Essayists, and chiefly by four or five of them. Mrs. Besant had made her reputation in other fields, and belonged, in a sense, to an earlier generation; she was unrivalled as an expositor and an agitator, and naturally preferred the work that she did best. William Clarke, also, was just a little of an outsider: he attended committees irregularly, and although he did what he was persuaded to do with remarkable force--he was an admirable lecturer and an efficient journalist--he had no initiative. He was solitary in his habits, and in his latter years, overshadowed by ill-health, he became almost morose. Hubert Bland, again, was always something of a critic. He was a Tory by instinct wherever he was not a Socialist, and whilst thoroughly united with the others for all purposes of the Society, he lived the rest of his life apart. But the other four Essayists, Sidney Webb, Bernard Shaw, Graham Wallas, and Sydney Olivier, then and for many years afterwards may be said to have worked and thought together in an intellectual partnership.[18] Webb and Olivier were colleagues in the Colonial Office, and it is said that for some time the Fabian records--they were not very bulky--were stored on a table in Downing Street. For many years there were probably few evenings of the week and few holidays which two or more of them did not spend together. In 1885 or early in 1886 a group which included those four and many others formed a reading society for the discussion of Marx's "Capital." The meetings--I attended them until I left London--were held in Hampstead, sometimes at the house of Mrs. Gilchrist, widow of the biographer of Blake, sometimes at that of Mrs. C.M. Wilson, and finally at the Hampstead Public Library. Later on the Society was called "The Hampstead Historic," and its discussions, which continued for several years, had much to do with settling the Fabian attitude towards Marxian economics and historical theory.[19] It was this exceptional group of leaders, all intimate friends, all loyal to each other, and to the cause they were associated to advocate, and all far above the average in vigour and ability, that in a few years turned an obscure drawing-room society into a factor in national politics. * * * * * At the meeting on June 19th, 1886, at 94 Cornwall Gardens, Sydney Olivier assumed the duties of Secretary, and the minutes began to be written with less formality than before. It is recorded that "Graham Wallas read a paper on Personal Duty under the present system. A number of questions from Fabians more or less in trouble about their souls were answered _ex cathedra_ by Mr. Wallas, after which the Society was given to understand by G.B. Shaw that Joseph the Fifth Monarchy Man could show them a more excellent way. Joseph addressed the meeting for five minutes, on the subject of a community about to be established in British North America under the presidency of the Son of God. Sidney Webb, G. Bernard Shaw, Annie Besant, [the Rev.] C.L. Marson and Adolph Smith discussed the subject of the paper with especial reference to the question of buying cheap goods and of the employment of the surplus income of pensioners, after which Graham Wallas replied and the meeting dispersed," William Morris lectured on "The Aims of Art" on July 2nd, at a public meeting at South Place Chapel, with Walter Crane in the chair; and Belfort Bax was the lecturer on July 17th. The first meeting after the holidays was a memorable one, and a few words of introduction are necessary. In normal times it may be taken for granted that in addition to the Government and the Opposition there is at least one party of Rebels. Generally there are more, since each section has its own rebels, down to the tiniest. In the eighties the rebels were Communist Anarchists, and to us at any rate they seemed more portentous than the mixed crowd of suffragettes and gentlemen from Oxford who before the war seemed to be leading the syndicalist rebels. Anarchist Communism was at any rate a consistent and almost sublime doctrine. Its leaders, such as Prince Kropotkin and Nicholas Tchaykovsky, were men of outstanding ability and unimpeachable character, and the rank and file, mostly refugees from European oppression, had direct relations with similar parties abroad, the exact extent and significance of which we could not calculate. The Socialist League, founded in 1885 by William Morris, Dr. Edward Aveling, and others, as the result of a quarrel, mainly personal, with the leaders of the Social Democrats, soon developed its own doctrine, and whilst never until near its dissolution definitely anarchist, it was always dominated by the artistic and anti-political temperament of Morris. Politically the Fabians were closer to the Social Democrats, but their hard dogmatism was repellent, whilst Morris had perhaps the most sympathetic and attractive personality of his day. The crisis of the Society's policy is described in the following passage from Shaw's "Early History,":-- "By 1886 we had already found that we were of one mind as to the advisability of setting to work by the ordinary political methods and having done with Anarchism and vague exhortations to Emancipate the Workers. We had several hot debates on the subject with a section of the Socialist League which called itself Anti-State Communist, a name invented by Mr. Joseph Lane of that body. William Morris, who was really a free democrat of the Kropotkin type, backed up Lane, and went for us tooth and nail. Records of our warfare may be found in the volumes of the extinct magazine called 'To-day,' which was then edited by Hubert Bland; and they are by no means bad reading. We soon began to see that at the debates the opposition to us came from members of the Socialist League, who were present only as visitors. The question was, how many followers had our one ascertained Anarchist, Mrs. Wilson, among the silent Fabians. Bland and Mrs. Besant brought this question to an issue on the 17th September, 1886, at a meeting in Anderton's Hotel, by respectively seconding and moving the following resolution: "'That it is advisable that Socialists should organize themselves as a political party for the purpose of transferring into the hands of the whole working community full control over the soil and the means of production, as well as over the production and distribution of wealth.' "To this a rider was moved by William Morris as follows: "'But whereas the first duty of Socialists is to educate the people to understand what their present position is and what their future might be, and to keep the principle of Socialism steadily before them; and whereas no Parliamentary party can exist without compromise and concession, which would hinder that education and obscure those principles, it would be a false step for Socialists to attempt to take part in the Parliamentary contest.' "I shall not attempt to describe the debate, in which Morris, Mrs. Wilson, Davis, and Tochatti did battle with Burns, Mrs. Besant, Bland, Shaw, Donald, and Rossiter: that is, with Fabian and S.D.F. combined. Suffice it to say that the minutes of the meeting close with the following significant note by the secretary: "'Subsequently to the meeting, the secretary received notice from the manager of Anderton's Hotel that the Society could not be accommodated there for any further meetings.' Everybody voted, whether Fabian or not; and Mrs. Besant and Bland carried their resolution by 47 to 19, Morris's rider being subsequently rejected by 40 to 27." A short contemporary report written by Mrs. Besant was published in "To-day" for October, 1886, from which it appears that "Invitations were sent out to all Socialist bodies in London," and that the irregularity of the proceedings alluded to by Shaw was intentional. The minutes of the proceedings treat the meeting as in ordinary course, but it is plain from Mrs. Besant's report that it was an informal attempt to clear the air in the Socialist movement as well as in the Society itself. In order to avoid a breach with Mrs. Wilson and her Fabian sympathisers, it was resolved to form a Fabian Parliamentary League, which Fabians could join or not as they pleased; its constitution, dated February, 1887, is given in full in Tract No. 41; here it is only necessary to quote one passage which describes the policy of the League and of the Society, a policy of deliberate possibilism:-- "The League will take active part in all general and local elections. Until a fitting opportunity arises for putting forward Socialist candidates to form the nucleus of a Socialist party in Parliament, it will confine itself to supporting those candidates who will go furthest in the direction of Socialism. It will not ally itself absolutely with any political party; it will jealously avoid being made use of for party purposes; and it will be guided in its action by the character, record, and pledges of the candidates before the constituencies. In Municipal, School Board, Vestry, and other local elections, the League will, as it finds itself strong enough, run candidates of its own, and by placing trustworthy Socialists on local representative bodies it will endeavour to secure the recognition of the Socialist principle in all the details of local government." Its history is narrated in the same Tract:-- "Here you have the first sketch of the Fabian policy of to-day. The Parliamentary League, however, was a short-lived affair. Mrs. Wilson's followers faded away, either by getting converted or leaving us. Indeed, it is a question with us to this day whether they did not owe their existence solely to our own imaginations. Anyhow, it soon became plain that the Society was solidly with the Executive on the subject of political action, and that there was no need for any separate organization at all. The League first faded into a Political Committee of the Society, and then merged silently and painlessly into the general body." Amongst the lecturers of the autumn of 1886 were H.H. Champion on the Unemployed, Mrs. Besant on the Economic Position of Women, Percival Chubb, Bernard Shaw on "Socialism and the Family"--a pencil note in the minute book in the lecturer's handwriting says, "This was one of Shaw's most outrageous performances"--and, in the absence of the Rev. Stopford Brooke, another by Shaw on "Why we do not act up to our principles," A new Tract was adopted in January, 1887. No. 5, "Facts for Socialists," perhaps the most effective Socialist tract ever published in England. It has sold steadily ever since it was issued: every few years it has been revised and the figures brought up to date; the edition now on sale, published in 1915, is the eleventh. The idea was not new. Statistics of the distribution of our national income had been given, as previously mentioned, in one of the earliest manifestoes of the Democratic Federation. But in Tract 5 the exact facts were rubbed in with copious quotations from recognised authorities and illustrated by simple diagrams. The full title of the tract was "Facts for Socialists from the Political Economists and Statisticians," and the theme of it was to prove that every charge made by Socialism against the capitalist system could be justified by the writings of the foremost professors of economic science. It embodied another Fabian characteristic of considerable importance. Other Socialists then, and many Socialists now, endeavoured by all means to accentuate their differences from other people. Not content with forming societies to advocate their policy, they insisted that it was based on a science peculiar to themselves, the Marxian analysis of value, and the economic interpretation of history: they strove too to dissociate themselves from others by the adoption of peculiar modes of address--such as the use of the words "comrade" and "fraternal"--and they were so convinced that no good thing could come out of the Galilee of capitalism that any countenance of capitalist parties or of the capitalist press was deemed an act of treachery. The Fabians, on the other hand, tended to the view that "we are all Socialists now." They held that the pronouncements of economic science must be either right or wrong, and in any case science was not a matter of party; they endeavoured to show that on their opponents' own principles they were logically compelled to be Socialists and must necessarily adopt Fabian solutions of social problems. "Facts for Socialists" was the work of Sidney Webb. No other member possessed anything like his knowledge of economics and statistics. It is, as its title implies, simply a mass of quotations from standard works on Political Economy, strung together in order to prove that the bulk of the wealth annually produced goes to a small fraction of the community in return either for small services or for none at all, and that the poverty of the masses results, not as the individualists argue, from deficiencies of individual character, but, as John Stuart Mill had declared, from the excessive share of the national dividend that falls to the owners of land and capital. * * * * * After the settlement, by a compromise in structure, of the conflict between the anarchists and the collectivists, the Society entered a period of calm, and the Executive issued a circular complaining of the apathy of the members. Probably this is the first of the innumerable occasions on which it has been said that the Society had passed its prime. Moreover, the Executive Committee were blamed for "some habits" which had "a discouraging effect" on the rest of the Society, and it was resolved, for the first, but not the last time, to appoint a Committee to revise the Basis. The Committee consisted of the Executive and eight added members, amongst whom may be mentioned Walter Crane, the Rev. S.D. Headlam, and Graham Wallas. It is said that after many hours of discussion they arrived by compromise at an unanimous report, and that their draft was accepted by the Society without amendment. The report was presented to a meeting on June 3rd, 1887, of which I, on a visit to London, was chairman. It is unfortunate that the record of this meeting, at which the existing Basis of the Society was adopted, is the only one, in the whole history of the Society, which is incomplete. Possibly the colonial policy of the empire was disturbed, and the secretary occupied with exceptional official duties. Anyway the minutes were left unfinished in June, were continued in October, and were never completed or recorded as confirmed. The proceedings relating to the Basis were apparently never written. There is no doubt, however, that the Basis was adopted on this occasion, it is said, at an adjourned meeting, and in spite of many projects of revision it has with one addition--the phrase about "equal citizenship of women"--remained the Basis of the Society to the present time.[20] The purpose of the Basis has been often misunderstood. It is not a confession of faith, or a statement of the whole content and meaning of Socialism. It is merely a test of admission, a minimum basis of agreement, acceptance of which is required from those who aspire to share in the control of a Society which had set out to reconstruct our social system. The most memorable part of the discussion was the proposal of Mr. Stuart Glennie to add a clause relating to marriage and the family. This was opposed by Mrs. Besant, then regarded as an extremist on that subject, and was defeated. In view of the large amount of business transacted before the discussion of the Basis began, the debate cannot have been prolonged. It is easy enough, nearly thirty years later, to criticise this document, to point out that it is purely economic, and unnecessarily rigid: that the phrase about compensation, which has been more discussed than any other, is badly worded, and for practical purposes always disregarded in the constructive proposals of the Society.[21] The best testimony to the merits of the Basis is its survival--its acceptance by the continuous stream of new members who have joined the Society--and it has survived not because its upholders deemed it perfect, but because it has always been found impracticable to put on paper any alternative on which even a few could agree. In fact, proposals to re-write the Basis have on several occasions been referred to Committees, but none of the Committees has ever succeeded in presenting a report. * * * * * At the end of the year the sole fruit of the Parliamentary League was published. It is Tract No. 6, entitled "The True Radical Programme" and consists of a declamatory criticism of the official Liberal-Radical Programme announced at Nottingham in October, 1887, and a demand to replace it by the True Radical Programme, namely, adult (in place of manhood) suffrage, payment of Members of Parliament and election expenses, taxation of unearned incomes, nationalisation of railways, the eight hours day, and a few other items. "The above programme," it says, "is sufficient for the present to fill the hands of the True Radical Party--the New Labour Party--in a word, the Practical Socialist Party," It is by no means so able and careful a production as the Report on the Government Organisation of Unemployed Labour. In April, 1888, the seven Essayists were elected as the Executive Committee, Graham Wallas and William Clarke taking the places of Frank Podmore and W.L. Phillips, who retired, and at the same meeting the Parliamentary League was turned into the Political Committee of the Society; and Tract 7, "Capital and Land," was approved. This tract, the work of Sydney Olivier, is a reasoned attack on Single Tax as a panacea, and in addition contains an estimate of the total realised wealth of the country, just as "Facts for Socialists" does of its income. This, too, has been regularly revised and reprinted ever since and commands a steady sale. It is now in its seventh edition. Meanwhile the series of meetings, variously described as Public, Ordinary, and Private, was kept on regularly twice a month, with a break only of two months from the middle of July. Most of the meetings were still held in the houses of members, but as early as November, 1886, an ordinary meeting was held at Willis's Rooms, King Street, St. James's, at that time an ultra-respectable rendezvous for societies of the most select character, keeping up an old-fashioned ceremonial of crimson tablecloths, elaborate silver candlesticks, and impressively liveried footmen. Having been turned out of Anderton's Hotel, the Society, on the application of Olivier, was accepted solemnly at Willis's, probably because the managers regarded the mere fact of our venturing to approach them as a certificate of high rank in the world of learned societies. One meeting of this period is perhaps worthy of record. On 16th March, 1888, Mr. R.B. Haldane, M.P., subsequently Secretary of State for War and Lord Chancellor, addressed the Society on "Radical Remedies for Economic Evils." In the pages of the "Radical," Vol. II, No. 8, for March, 1888, can be found a vivid contemporary account of the proceedings from the pen of Mr. George Standring, entitled "Butchered to Make a Fabian Holiday." After describing the criticism of the lecture by Sidney Webb, Mrs. Besant, and Bernard Shaw the report proceeds:-- "The massacre was concluded by two other members of the Society and then the chairman called on Mr. Haldane to reply. Hideous mockery! The chairman knew that Haldane was _dead_! He had seen him torn and tossed and trampled under foot. Perhaps he expected the ghost of the M.P. to rise and conclude the debate with frightful jabberings of fleshless jaws and gestures of bony hands. Indeed I heard a rustling of papers as if one gathered his notes for a speech; but I felt unable to face the grisly horror of a phantom replying to his assassins; so I fled." It should be added that Mr. Standring did net become a member of the Society until five years later. By the summer of 1888 the leaders of the Society realised that they had a message for the world, and they decided that the autumn should be devoted to a connected series of lectures on the "Basis and Prospects of Socialism" which should subsequently be published. There is no evidence, however, that the Essayists supposed that they were about to make an epoch in the history of Socialism. The meetings in the summer had been occupied with lectures by Professor D.G. Ritchie on the "Evolution of Society," subsequently published as his well-known volume "Darwinism and Politics." Walter Crane on "The Prospects of Art under Socialism," Graham Wallas on "The Co-operative Movement," and Miss Clementina Black on "Female Labour." At the last-named meeting, on June 15th, a resolution was moved by H.H. Champion and seconded by Herbert Burrows (neither of them members) calling on the public to boycott Bryant and May's matches on account of the low wages paid. This marks the beginning of the period of Labour Unrest, which culminated in the Dock Strike of the following year. The first meeting of the autumn was held at Willis's Rooms on September 21st, with the Rev. S.D. Headlam in the chair. The Secretary read a statement indicating the scope of the course of the seven lectures arranged for the Society's meetings during the autumn, after which the first paper, written by Sidney Webb on "The Historical Aspect of the Basis of Socialism," was read by Hubert Bland. Webb had at that time started for a three months' visit to the United States, in which I accompanied him. Mr. Headlam was the chairman throughout the course, except on one occasion, and the lectures continued fortnightly to the 21st December. It does not appear that any special effort was made to advertise them. Each lecture was discussed by members of the Society and of the S.D.F., and with the exception of the Rev. Philip Wicksteed there is no evidence of the presence of any persons outside the movement then or subsequently known to fame. * * * * * The preparation of "Fabian Essays" for publication occupied nearly a year, and before dealing with it we must follow the history of the Society during that period. The first lecture in 1889 was by Edward Carpenter, whose paper, "Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure," gives the title to perhaps his best known volume of essays. Another interesting lecture was by William Morris, entitled "How Shall We Live Then?" and at the Annual Meeting in April Sydney Olivier became the first historian of the Society with an address on "The Origin and Early History of the Fabian Society," for which he made the pencil notes on the minute book already mentioned. The seven Essayists were re-elected to the Executive, and in the record of proceedings at the meeting there is no mention of the proposed volume of essays. It is, however, possible to give some account of the organisation and activities for the year ending in March, 1889, since the first printed Annual Report covers that period. It is a four-page quarto document, only a few copies of which are preserved. Of the Society itself but little is recorded--a list of lectures and the bare statement that the autumn series were to be published: the fact that 6500 Fabian Tracts had been distributed and a second edition of 5000 "Facts for Socialists" printed: that 32 members had been elected and 6 had withdrawn--the total is not given--and that the deficit in the Society's funds had been reduced. A favourite saying of Sidney Webb's is that the activity of the Fabian Society is the sum of the activities of its members. His report as Secretary of the work of the "Lecture Committee" states that a lecture list with 33 names had been printed, and returns made by 31 lecturers recorded 721 lectures during the year. Six courses of lectures on Economics accounted for 52 of these. The "Essays" series of lectures was redelivered by special request in a room lent by King's College, Cambridge, and also at Leicester. Most of the other lectures were given at London Radical Working Men's Clubs, then and for some years later a much bigger factor in politics than they have been in the twentieth century. But an almost contemporary account of the life of Bernard Shaw, probably the most active of the leaders, because the least fettered by his occupation, is given in Tract 41 under the heading: "HOW TO TRAIN FOR PUBLIC LIFE. "We had to study where we could and how we could. I need not repeat the story of the Hampstead Historic Club, founded by a handful of us to read Marx and Proudhon, and afterwards turned into a systematic history class in which each student took his turn at being professor. My own experience may be taken as typical. For some years I attended the Hampstead Historic Club once a fortnight, and spent a night in the alternate weeks at a private circle of economists which has since blossomed into the British Economic Association--a circle where the social question was left out, and the work kept on abstract scientific lines. I made all my acquaintances think me madder than usual by the pertinacity with which I attended debating societies and haunted all sorts of hole-and-corner debates and public meetings and made speeches at them. I was President of the Local Government Board at an amateur Parliament where a Fabian ministry had to put its proposals into black and white in the shape of Parliamentary Bills. Every Sunday I lectured on some subject which I wanted to teach to myself; and it was not until I had come to the point of being able to deliver separate lectures, without notes, on Rent, Interest, Profits, Wages, Toryism, Liberalism, Socialism, Communism, Anarchism, Trade-Unionism, Co-operation, Democracy, the Division of Society into Classes, and the Suitability of Human Nature to Systems of Just Distribution, that I was able to handle Social-Democracy as it must be handled before it can be preached in such a way as to present it to every sort of man from his own particular point of view. In old lecture lists of the Society you will find my name down for twelve different lectures or so. Nowadays I have only one, for which the secretary is good enough to invent four or five different names. Sometimes I am asked for one of the old ones, to my great dismay, as I forget all about them; but I get out of the difficulty by delivering the new one under the old name, which does as well. I do not hesitate to say that all our best lecturers have two or three old lectures at the back of every single point in their best new speeches; and this means that they have spent a certain number of years plodding away at footling little meetings and dull discussions, doggedly placing these before all private engagements, however tempting. A man's Socialistic acquisitiveness must be keen enough to make him actually prefer spending two or three nights a week in speaking and debating, or in picking up social information even in the most dingy and scrappy way, to going to the theatre, or dancing or drinking, or even sweethearting, if he is to become a really competent propagandist--unless, of course, his daily work is of such a nature as to be in itself a training for political life; and that, we know, is the case with very few of us indeed. It is at such lecturing and debating work, and on squalid little committees and ridiculous little delegations to conferences of the three tailors of Tooley Street, with perhaps a deputation to the Mayor thrown in once in a blue moon or so, that the ordinary Fabian workman or clerk must qualify for his future seat on the Town Council, the School Board, or perhaps in the Cabinet. It was in that way that Bradlaugh, for instance, graduated from being a boy evangelist to being one of the most formidable debaters in the House of Commons. And the only opponents who have ever held their own against the Fabians in debate have been men like Mr. Levy or Mr. Foote, who learnt in the same school." But lecturing was not the only activity of the Fabians. There were at that time local Groups, each comprising one or a dozen constituencies in London and its suburbs. The Groups in a corporate capacity did little: but the members are reported as taking part in local elections, County Council, School Board, and Vestry, in the meetings of the London Liberal and Radical Union, the National Liberal Federation, the Metropolitan Radical Federation, the Women's Liberal Federation, and so on. This was the year of the first London County Council Election, when the Progressive Party, as it was subsequently named, won an unexpected victory, which proved to be both lasting and momentous for the future of the Metropolis. The only overt part taken by the Fabian Society was its "Questions for Candidates," printed and widely circulated before the election, which gave definiteness and point to the vague ideas of Progressivism then in the air. A large majority of the successful candidates had concurred with this programme. A pamphlet by Sidney Webb, entitled "Wanted a Programme," not published but printed privately, was widely circulated in time for the meeting of the National Liberal Federation at Birmingham, and another by the same author, "The Progress of Socialism," stated to be published by "the Hampstead Society for the Study of Socialism," is reported as in its second edition. This pamphlet was later republished by the Fabian Society as Tract No. 15, "English Progress Towards Social Democracy." Mrs. Besant and the Rev. Stewart Headlam, standing as Progressives, were elected to the School Board in November, 1888, when Hubert Bland was an unsuccessful candidate. Finally it may be mentioned that a Universities Committee, with Frank Podmore as Secretary for Oxford and G.W. Johnson for Cambridge, had begun the "permeation" of the Universities, which has always been an important part of the propaganda of the Society. At the Annual Meeting in April, 1889, the Essayists were re-elected as the Executive Committee and Sydney Olivier as Honorary Secretary, but he only retained the post till the end of the year. I returned to London in October, was promptly invited to resume the work, and took it over in January, 1890. In July another important tract was approved for publication. "Facts for Londoners," No. 8 in the series, 55 pages of packed statistics sold for 6d., was the largest publication the Society had yet attempted. It is, as its sub-title states: "an exhaustive collection of statistical and other facts relating to the Metropolis, with suggestions for reform on Socialist principles." The latter were in no sense concealed: the Society still waved the red flag in season and out. "The Socialist Programme of immediately practicable reforms for London cannot be wholly dissociated from the corresponding Programme for the kingdom." This is the opening sentence, and it is followed by a page of explanation of the oppression of the workers by the private appropriation of rent and interest, and an outline of the proposed reforms, graduated and differentiated income tax, increased death duties, extension of the Factory Acts, reform of the Poor Law, payment of all public representatives, adult suffrage, and several others. Then the tract settles down to business. London with its County Council only a few months old was at length waking to self-consciousness: Mr. Charles Booth's "Life and Labour in East London"--subsequently issued as the first part of his monumental work--had just been published; it was the subject of a Fabian lecture by Sidney Webb on May 17th; and interest in the political, economic, and social institutions of the city was general. The statistical facts were at that time practically unknown. They had to be dug out, one by one, from obscure and often unpublished sources, and the work thus done by the Fabian Society led up in later years to the admirable and far more voluminous statistical publications of the London County Council. The tract deals with area and population; with rating, land values, and housing, with water, trams, and docks, all at that time in the hands of private companies, with gas, markets, City Companies, libraries, public-houses, cemeteries; and with the local government of London, Poor Law Guardians and the poor, the School Board and the schools, the Vestries, District Boards, the County Council, and the City Corporation. It was the raw material of Municipal Socialism, and from this time forth the Society recognised that the municipalisation of monopolies was a genuine part of the Socialist programme, that the transfer from private exploiters to public management at the start, and ultimately by the amortisation of the loans to public ownership, actually was _pro tanto_ the transfer from private to public ownership of land and capital, as demanded by Socialists. Here, in passing, we may remark that there is a legend, current chiefly in the United States, that the wide extension of municipal ownership in Great Britain is due to the advocacy of the Fabian Society. This is very far from the truth. The great provincial municipalities took over the management of their water and gas because they found municipal control alike convenient, beneficial to the citizens, and financially profitable: Birmingham in the seventies was the Mecca of Municipalisation, and in 1882 the Electric Lighting Act passed by Mr. Joseph Chamberlain was so careful of the interests of the public, so strict in the limitations it put upon the possible profits to the investor, that electric lighting was blocked in England for some years, and the Act had to be modified in order that capital might be attracted.[22] What the Fabian Society did was to point out that Socialism did not necessarily mean the control of all industry by a centralised State; that to introduce Socialism did not necessarily require a revolution because much of it could be brought about piecemeal by the votes of the local electors. And secondly the Society complained that London was singularly backward in municipal management: that the wealthiest city in the world was handed over to the control of exploiters, who made profits from its gas, its water, its docks, and its tramways, whilst elsewhere these monopolies were owned and worked by public authorities who obtained all the advantages for the people of the localities concerned. Moreover, it may be questioned whether the Fabian advocacy of municipalisation hastened or retarded that process in London. In provincial towns municipalisation--the word of course was unknown--had been regarded as of no social or political significance. It was a business matter, a local affair, a question of convenience. In London, partly owing to Fabian advocacy and partly because London had at last a single representative authority with a recognised party system, it became the battle ground of the parties: the claim of the Socialists awakened the Individualists to opposition: and the tramways of London were held as a trench in the world-wide conflict between Socialism and its enemies, whose capture was hailed as an omen of progress by one side, and by the other deplored as the presage of defeat. "Facts for Londoners" was the work of Sidney Webb, but there is nothing in the tract to indicate this. The publications of the Society were collective works, in that every member was expected to assist in them by criticism and suggestion. Although several of the tracts were lectures or papers written by members for other purposes, and are so described, it was not until the issue in November, 1892, of Tract 42, "Christian Socialism," by the Rev. S.D. Headlam, that the author's name is printed on the title page. The reason for the innovation is obvious: this tract was written by a Churchman for Christians, and whilst the Society as a whole approved the conclusions, the premises commended themselves to but a few. It was therefore necessary that the responsibility of the author should be made clear. The autumn of 1889 is memorable for the great strike of the London Dockers, which broke out on August 14th, was led by John Burns, and was settled mainly by Cardinal Manning on September 14th. The Fabian Society held no meeting between July 19th and September 20th, and there is nothing in the minutes or the Annual Report to show that the Society as such took any part in the historic conflict. But many of the members as individuals lent their aid to the Dockers in their great struggle, which once for all put an end to the belief that hopeless disorganisation is a necessary characteristic of unskilled labour.[23] Arising out of the Dock Strike, the special demand of the Socialist section of trade unionists for the next four or five years was a legal eight hours day, and the Fabian Society now for the first time recognised that it could render substantial assistance to the labour movement by putting into a practicable shape any reform which was the current demand of the day. At the members' meeting on September 20 a committee was appointed to prepare an Eight Hours Bill for introduction into Parliament, and in November this was published as Tract No. 9. It consists of a Bill for Parliament, drawn up in proper form, with explanatory notes. It provided that eight hours should be the maximum working day for Government servants, for railway men, and for miners, and that other trades should be brought in when a Secretary of State was satisfied that a majority of the workers desired it. The tract had a large sale--20,000 had been printed in six months--and it was specially useful because, in fact, it showed the inherent difficulty of any scheme for universal limitation of the hours of labour. The Eight Hours Day agitation attained larger proportions than any other working-class agitation in England since the middle of the nineteenth century. For a number of years it was the subject of great annual demonstrations in Hyde Park. It commended itself both to the practical trade unionists, who had always aimed at a reduction in the hours of labour, and to the theoretical socialists, who held that the exploiter's profits came from the final hours of the day's work. The Fabian plan of "Trade Option" was regarded as too moderate, and demands were made for a "Trade Exemption" Bill, that is, a Bill enacting a universal Eight Hours Day, with power to any trade to vote its own exclusion. But the more the subject was discussed, the more obvious the difficulties became, and at last it was recognised that each trade must be dealt with separately. Considerable reductions of hours were meantime effected in particular industries; an eight-hour day became the rule in the Government factories and dockyards; the Board of Trade was empowered to insist on the reduction of unduly long hours of duty on railways; finally in 1908 the Miners' Eight Hours Act became law; and the demand for any general Bill faded away. The autumn meetings were occupied by a course of lectures at Willis's Rooms on "A Century of Social Movements," by Frank Podmore, William Clarke, Graham Wallas, Hubert Bland, and Mrs. Besant, and with the beginning of the year 1890 we come to the publication of "Fabian Essays," and a new chapter in the History of the Society. FOOTNOTES: [16] On this passage Shaw has written the following criticism, which I have not adopted because on the whole I do not agree with it: "I think this is wrong, because the Fabians were at first as bellicose as the others, and Marx had been under no delusion as to the Commune and did not bequeath a tradition of its repetition. Bakunin was as popular a prophet as Marx. Many of us--Bland and Keddell among others--were members of the S.D.F., and I was constantly speaking for the S.D.F. and the League. We did not keep ourselves to ourselves; we aided the working class organisations in every possible way; and they were jolly glad to have us. In fact the main difference between us was that we worked for everybody (permeation) and they worked for their own societies only. The real reason that we segregated for purposes of thought and study was that the workers could not go our pace or stand our social habits. Hyndman and Morris and Helen Taylor and the other bourgeois S.D.F.-ers and Leaguers were too old for us; they were between forty and fifty when we were between twenty and thirty." [17] On this passage Shaw comments, beginning with an expletive, and proceeding: "I was the only one who had any principles. But surely the secret of it is that we didn't really want to be demagogues, having other fish to fry, as our subsequent careers proved. Our decision not to stand for Parliament in 1892 was the turning point. I was offered some seats to contest--possibly Labour ones--but I always replied that they ought to put up a bona fide working man. We lacked ambition." [18] See "The Great Society," by Graham Wallas (Macmillan, 1914), p. 260. [19] For a much fuller account of this subject, see Appendix I. A. [20] See Appendix II. [21] See Fabian Tract 147, "Capital and Compensation," by Edw. R. Pease. [22] See "Fabian Essays," p. 51, for the first point, and Fabian Tract No. 119 for the second. [23] See "The Story of the Dockers' Strike," by Vaughan Nash and H. (now Sir Hubert) Llewellyn Smith; Fisher Unwin, 1890. Chapter V "Fabian Essays" and the Lancashire Campaign: 1890-3 "Fabian Essays" published--Astonishing success--A new presentation of Socialism--Reviewed after twenty-five years--Henry Hutchinson--The Lancashire Campaign--Mrs. Besant withdraws--"Fabian News." Volumes of essays by various writers seldom have any durable place in the history of thought because as a rule they do not present a connected body of ideas, but merely the opinions of a number of people who start from incompatible premises and arrive at inconsistent conclusions. A book, to be effective, must maintain a thesis, or at any rate must be a closely integrated series of propositions, and, as a rule, thinkers strong enough to move the world are too independent to pull together in a team. "Fabian Essays," the work of seven writers, all of them far above the average in ability, some of them possessing individuality now recognised as exceptional, is a book and not a collection of essays. This resulted from two causes. The writers had for years known each other intimately and shared each other's thoughts; they had hammered out together the policy which they announced; and they had moulded each other's opinions before they began to write. Secondly the book was planned in advance. Its scheme was arranged as a whole, and then the parts were allotted to each author, with an agreement as to the ground to be covered and the method to be adopted, in view of the harmonious whole which the authors had designed. It is not often that circumstances permit of a result so happy. "Fabian Essays" does not cover the whole field of Fabian doctrine, and in later years schemes were often set on foot for a second volume dealing with the application of the principles propounded in the first. But these schemes never even began to be successful. With the passage of time the seven essayists had drifted apart. Each was working at the lines of thought most congenial to himself; they were no longer young and unknown men; some of the seven were no longer available. Anyway, no second series of Essays ever approached completion. [Illustration: _From a photograph By Savony of New York_ MRS. ANNE BESANT, IN 1890] Bernard Shaw was the editor, and those who have worked with him know that he does not take lightly his editorial duties. He corrects his own writings elaborately and repeatedly, and he does as much for everything which comes into his care. The high literary level maintained by the Fabian tracts is largely the result of constant scrutiny and amendment, chiefly by Sidney Webb and Bernard Shaw, although the tract so corrected may be published as the work of some other member. Although therefore all the authors of "Fabian Essays" were competent, and some of them practised writers, it may be assumed that every phrase was considered, and every word weighed, by the editor before the book went to press.[24] A circular inviting subscriptions for the book was sent out in the spring, and three hundred copies were subscribed in advance. Arrangements with a publisher fortunately broke down because he declined to have the book printed at a "fair house," and as Mrs. Besant was familiar with publishing--she then controlled, or perhaps _was_, the Freethought Publishing Company, of 63 Fleet Street--the Committee resolved on the bold course of printing and publishing the book themselves. A frontispiece was designed by Walter Crane, a cover by Miss May Morris, and just before Christmas, 1889, the book was issued to subscribers and to the public. None of us at that time was sufficiently experienced in the business of authorship to appreciate the astonishing success of the venture. In a month the whole edition of 1000 copies was exhausted. With the exception of Mrs. Besant, whose fame was still equivocal, not one of the authors had published any book of importance, held any public office, or was known to the public beyond the circles of London political agitators. The Society they controlled numbered only about 150 members. The subject of their volume was far less understood by the public than is Syndicalism at the present day. And yet a six-shilling book, published at a private dwelling-house and not advertised in the press, or taken round by travellers to the trade, sold almost as rapidly as if the authors had been Cabinet Ministers. A second edition of 1000 copies was issued in March, 1890: in September Mr. Walter Scott undertook the agency of a new shilling paper edition, 5000 of which were sold before publication and some 20,000 more within a year. In 1908 a sixpenny paper edition with a new preface by the editor was issued by Walter Scott, of which 10,000 were disposed of in a few months, and in all some 46,000 copies of the book have been sold in English editions alone. It is difficult to trace the number of foreign editions and translations. The authors made over to the Society all their rights in the volume, and permission for translation and for publication in the United States has always been freely given. In that country we can trace an edition in 1894, published by Charles E. Brown of Boston, with an Introduction by Edward Bellamy and a Preface of some length on the Fabian Society and its work by William Clarke: and another edition in 1909, published by the Ball Publishing Company of Boston, also with the Introduction on the Fabian Society. A Dutch translation by F.M. Wibaut was published in 1891; in 1806 the Essays, translated into Norwegian by Francis Wolff, appeared as a series of small books; and in 1897 a German translation by Dora Lande was issued by G.H. Wigand of Leipzig. The effect of "Fabian Essays" arose as much from what it left out as from what it contained. Only the fast-dwindling band of pioneer Socialists, who lived through the movement in its earliest days, can fully realise the environment of ideas from which "Fabian Essays" showed a way of escape. The Socialism of the Social Democratic Federation and the Socialist League, the two societies which had hitherto represented Socialism to the general public, was altogether revolutionary. Socialism was to be the result of an outbreak of violence, engineered by a great popular organisation like that of the Chartists or the Anti-Corn Law League, and the Commune of Paris in 1871 was regarded as a premature attempt which pointed the way to future success. The Socialist Government thus established was to reconstruct the social and industrial life of the nation according to a plan supposed to be outlined by Karl Marx. "On the morrow of the revolution" all things would be new, and at a bound the nation was expected to reach something very like the millennium. The case for this project was based, strange to say, not on any history but on the Marxian analysis of the origin of the value of commodities, and no man who did not understand this analysis, or pretend to understand it, was fit to be called a "comrade." The economic reasoning which "proved" this "law" was expressed in obscure and technical language peculiar to the propagandists of the movement, and every page of Socialist writings was studded with the then strange words "proletariat" and "bourgeoisie." Lastly, the whole world, outside the socialist movement, was regarded as in a conspiracy of repression. Liberals (all capitalists), Tories (all landlords), the Churches (all hypocrites), the rich (all idlers), and the organised workers (all sycophants) were treated as if they fully understood and admitted the claims of the Socialists, and were determined for their own selfish ends to reject them at all costs. Although the Fabian propaganda had no doubt had some effect, especially amongst the working-class Radicals of London, and although some of the Socialist writers and speakers, such as William Morris, did not at all times present to the public the picture of Socialism just outlined, it will not be denied by anybody whose recollections reach back to this period that Socialism up to 1890 was generally regarded as insurrectionary, dogmatic, Utopian, and almost incomprehensible. "Fabian Essays" presented the case for Socialism in plain language which everybody could understand. It based Socialism, not on the speculations of a German philosopher, but on the obvious evolution of society as we see it around us. It accepted economic science as taught by the accredited British professors; it built up the edifice of Socialism on the foundations of our existing political and social institutions: it proved that Socialism was but the next step in the development of society, rendered inevitable by the changes which followed from the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century. It is interesting after twenty-five years to re-read these essays and to observe how far the ideas that inspired them are still valid, and how far the prophecies made have been fulfilled. Bernard Shaw contributed the first Essay on "The Economic Basis of Socialism," and also a second, a paper read to the British Association in September, 1888, on the "Transition to Social Democracy." His characteristic style retains its charm, although the abstract and purely deductive economic analysis on which he relied no longer commends itself to the modern school of thought. Sidney Webb's "Historic Basis" is as readable as ever, except where he quotes at length political programmes long forgotten, and recounts the achievements of municipal socialism with which we are all now familiar. William Clarke in explaining the "Industrial Basis" assumed that the industry would be rapidly dominated by trusts--then a new phenomenon--with results, the crushing out of all other forms of industrial organisation, which are but little more evident to-day, though we should no longer think worthy of record that the Standard Oil Company declared a 10 per cent cash dividend in 1887! If the Essays had been written in 1890 instead of 1888 the authors would have acquired from the great Trade Union upheaval of 1889 a fuller appreciation of the importance of Trade Unionism than they possessed at the earlier date. Working-class organisation has never been so prominent in London as in the industrial counties, and the captious comments on the great Co-operative movement show that the authors of the Essays were still youthful, and in some matters ignorant.[25] Sydney Olivier's "Moral Basis" is, in parts, as obscure now as it was at first, and there are pages which can have conveyed but little to most of its innumerable readers. Graham Wallas treated of "Property" with moderation rather than knowledge. Time has dealt hardly with Mrs. Besant's contribution. She anticipated, as the other Essayists did, that unemployment caused by labour-saving machinery would constantly increase; and that State organisation of industries for the unemployed would gradually supersede private enterprise. She apparently supposed that the county councils all over England, then newly created, were similar in character to the London County Council, which had already inaugurated the Progressive policy destined in the next few years to do much for the advancement of practical socialism. The final paper on "The Outlook," by Hubert Bland, is necessarily of the nature of prophecy, and in view of the difficulty of this art his attempt is perhaps less unsuccessful than might have been expected. He could foresee the advent neither of the Labour Party, mainly formed of Trade Unionists, nor of Mr. Lloyd George and the policy he represents: he assumed that the rich would grow richer and the poor poorer; that Liberals would unite with Tories, as they have done in Australia, and would be confronted with a Socialist Party representing the dispossessed. Possibly the developments he sketches are still to come, but that is a matter which cannot be discussed here. * * * * * I can find no trace in the records of the Society that the first success of their publication occasioned any elation to the Essayists, and I cannot recollect any signs of it at the time. The Annual Report mentions that a substantial profit was realised on the first edition, and states that the authors had made over the copyright, "valued at about £200," to the Society; but these details are included in a paragraph headed "Publications," and the Essays are not mentioned in the general sketch of the work of the year. In fact the obvious results of the publication took some months to materialise, and the number of candidates for election to the Society showed little increase during the spring. It is true that great changes were made in the organisation of the Society at the Annual Meeting held on March 28th, 1890, but these were in part due to other causes. The Executive Committee was enlarged to fifteen, and as I happened to be available I was appointed paid secretary, half time, at the modest salary of £1 a week for the first year. The newly elected Executive included the seven Essayists, Robert E. Dell, now Paris correspondent for several journals, W.S. De Mattos, for many years afterwards an indefatigable organiser for the Society, and now settled in British Columbia, the Rev. Stewart D. Headlam, Mrs. L.T. Mallet, then a prominent member of the Women's Liberal Association, J.F. Oakeshott, of the Fellowship of the New Life, and myself. The lectures of the early months of 1890 were a somewhat brilliant series. Sidney Webb on the Eight Hours Bill; James Rowlands, M.P., on the then favourite Liberal nostrum of Leasehold Enfranchisement (which the Essayists demolished in a crushing debate); Dr. Bernard Bosanquet on "The Antithesis between Individualism and Socialism Philosophically Considered"; Mrs. Besant on "Socialism and the School Board Policy"; Mr. (now Sir) H. Llewellyn Smith on "The Causes and Effects of Immigration from Country to Town," in which he disproved the then universal opinion that the unemployed of East London were immigrants from rural districts; Sydney Olivier on "Zola"; William Morris on "Gothic Architecture" (replacing a lecture on Morris himself by Ernest Radford, who was absent through illness); Sergius Stepniak on "Tolstoi, Tchernytchevsky, and the Russian School"; Hubert Bland on "Socialist Novels"; and finally on July 18th Bernard Shaw on "Ibsen." This last may perhaps be regarded as the high-water mark in Fabian lectures. The minutes, which rarely stray beyond bare facts, record that "the paper was a long one," nearer two hours than one, if my memory is accurate, and add: "The meeting was a very large one and the lecture was well received." In fact the lecture was the bulk of the volume "The Quintessence of Ibsenism," which some regard as the finest of Bernard Shaw's works, and it is perhaps unnecessary to say that the effect on the packed audience was overwhelming. It was "briefly discussed" by a number of speakers, but they seemed as out of place as a debate after an oratorio. * * * * * On June 16th Henry H. Hutchinson of Derby was elected a member, an event of much greater importance than at the time appeared. Mr. Hutchinson had been clerk to the Justices of Derby, and when we first knew him had retired, and was with his wife living a somewhat wandering life accompanied by a daughter, who also joined the Society a few months later. He was not rich, but he was generous, and on July 29th it is recorded in the minutes of the Executive that he had offered us £100 or £200, and approved the suggestion that it should be chiefly used for lectures in country centres. A fortnight later the "Lancashire campaign" was planned. It was thoroughly organised. An advanced agent was sent down, and abstracts of lectures were prepared and printed to facilitate accurate reports in the press. Complete lists of the forthcoming lectures--dates, places, subjects, and lecturers--were printed. All the Essayists except Olivier took part, and in addition Robert E. Dell, W.S. De Mattos, and the Rev. Stewart Headlam. An account of the Society written by Bernard Shaw was reprinted from the "Scottish Leader" for September 4th, 1890, for the use of the audience and the Press. A "Report" of the campaign was issued on November 4th, which says:-- "The campaign began on September 20th and ended on October 27th, when about sixty lectures in all had been delivered ... not only in Lancashire, at Manchester, Liverpool, Rochdale, Oldham, Preston, Salford, and the district round Manchester, but also at Barnsley, Kendal, Carlisle, Sheffield, and Hebden Bridge. "In thus making our first attack upon the stronghold of the old Unionism and the new Toryism, we would have been contented with a very small measure of success, and we are much more than contented with the results obtained. The lectures, except for a few days during the contest at Eccles, were extremely well reported, and even the 'Manchester Guardian' (the 'Daily News' of the manufacturing districts) came out with an approving leader. The audiences throughout the campaign steadily increased and followed the lectures with close and intelligent attention. In particular the members of Liberal working men's clubs constantly declared that they had never heard 'the thing put so straight' before, and complained that the ordinary party lecturers were afraid or unwilling to speak out. Men who frankly confessed that they had hesitated before voting for the admission of our lecturers to their clubs were enthusiastic in welcoming our message as soon as they heard it. The vigorous propaganda in the manufacturing districts of the S.D.F. branches has been chiefly carried on by means of outdoor meetings. Its effect upon working-class opinion, especially among unskilled labourers, has been marked and important, but it has entirely failed to reach the working-men politicians who form the rank and file of the Liberal Associations and Clubs, or the 'well-dressed' Liberals who vaguely desire social reform, but have been encouraged by their leaders to avoid all exact thought on the subject." * * * * * The lectures were given chiefly in sets of four in consecutive weeks, mostly at Liberal and Radical Clubs: others were arranged by Co-operative Societies, and by branches of the S.D.F. and the Socialist League. The subjects were "Socialism," "Where Liberalism Fails," "Co-operation and Labour," "The Future of Women," "The Eight Hours Bill," "The Politics of Labour," and so on. Those arranged by Co-operative Societies were, we are told, the least successful, but it is hoped "that they will bring about a better feeling between Socialists and Co-operators," a state of things which on the side of the Socialists was, as we have previously indicated, badly wanted. It should be noted that much of the success of the campaign was due to friendly assistance from the head-quarters of the Co-operative Union and the National Reform Union. There is no doubt that this campaign with the series of lectures on the same lines which were continued for several years was an event of some importance, not only in the history of the Fabian Society but also in English politics. Hitherto the Socialism presented to the industrial districts of England, which are the backbone of Trade Unionism and Co-operation, to the men who are meant when we speak of the power and independence of the working classes, was revolutionary and destructive, ill-tempered and ungenerous. It had perhaps alarmed, but it had failed to attract them. It had made no real impression on the opinion of the people. From this point a new movement began. It first took the form of local Fabian Societies. They were succeeded by and merged into branches of the Independent Labour Party, which adopted everything Fabian except its peculiar political tactics. A few years later the Labour Party followed, more than Fabian in its toleration in the matter of opinions, and virtually, though not formally, Fabian in its political policy. No doubt something of the sort would have happened had there never been a Lancashire campaign, but this campaign may be fairly described as the first step in an evolution, the end of which is not yet in sight. * * * * * Her lectures in the Lancashire campaign and the formation of the branches were Mrs. Besant's last contributions to the Socialist movement. Early in November she suddenly and completely severed her connection with the Society. She had become a convert to Theosophy, which at that time accepted the Buddhist doctrine that spiritual conditions alone mattered, and that spiritual life would flourish as well in the slum amidst dirt and starvation as in the comfortable cottage, and much better than in the luxurious mansion. Twentieth-century theosophy has receded from that position, and now advocates social amelioration, but Mrs. Besant thought otherwise in 1890. Some twenty years later she lectured on several occasions to the Society, and she joined her old friends at the dinner which celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of its foundation, but in the interval her connection with it completely ceased. The Fabian Society and British Socialism owe much to Mrs. Besant for the assistance she gave it during five important years. Her splendid eloquence, always at our service, has seldom been matched, and has never been surpassed by any of the innumerable speakers of the movement. She had, when she joined us, an assured position amongst the working-class Radicals in London and throughout the country; and through her Socialism obtained a sympathetic hearing in places where less trusted speakers would have been neglected. She was not then either a political thinker or an effective worker on committees, but she possessed the power of expressing the ideas of other people far better than their originators, and she had at her command a certain amount of political machinery--such as an office at 63 Fleet Street, and a monthly magazine, "Our Corner"--which was very useful. Her departure was a serious loss, but it came at a moment of rapid expansion, so rapid that her absence was scarcely felt. * * * * * On the Society itself the effect of the Essays and the Lancashire Campaign was considerable. As the Executive Committee report in April, 1891: "During the past year the Socialist movement has made conspicuous progress in every respect, and a constantly increasing share of the work of its organisation and extension has fallen to the Fabian Society." The membership increased from 173 to 361, and the subscription list--thanks in part to several large donations--from £126 to £520. Local Fabian Societies had been formed at Belfast, Birmingham, Bombay, Bristol, Huddersfield, Hyde, Leeds, Manchester, Oldham, Plymouth, Tyneside, and Wolverhampton, with a total membership of 350 or 400. The business in tracts had been enormous. Ten new tracts, four pamphlets and six leaflets, were published, and new editions of all but one of the old ones had been printed. In all 335,000 tracts were printed and 98,349 distributed. The new tracts include "The Workers' Political Programme," "The New Reform Bill," "English Progress Towards Social Democracy," "The Reform of Poor Law," and a leaflet, No. 13, "What Socialism Is," which has been in circulation ever since. It should be added that at this period our leaflets were given away freely, a form of propaganda which soon proved too expensive for our resources. In March, 1891, just before the end of the official year, appeared the first number of "Fabian News," the monthly organ of the Society, which has continued ever since. It replaced the printed circulars previously issued to the members, and was not intended to be anything else than a means of communicating with the members as to the work of the Society, and also in later years as to new books on subjects germane to its work. It has been edited throughout by the Secretary, but everything of a contentious character relating to the affairs of the Society has been published by the express authority of the Executive Committee. It may be mentioned that from this time forward the documents of the Society are both fuller and more accessible than before. For the period up to the end of 1889 the only complete record is contained in the two minute books of the meetings. No regular minutes of Executive Committee meetings were kept, and the Annual Reports were not printed until 1889. From 1890 onwards the meetings of every committee were regularly recorded: the Annual Reports were printed in octavo and can be found in many public libraries, whilst "Fabian News" contains full information of the current doings of the Society. It will not therefore be necessary to treat the later years with such attention to detail as has seemed appropriate to the earlier. The only "sources" for these are shabby notebooks and the memories of a few men now rapidly approaching old age. The later years can be investigated, if any subsequent enquirer desires to do so, in a dozen libraries in Great Britain and the United States. [Illustration: _From a photograph by Van der Weyde_ WILLIAM CLARKE, ABOUT 1895] FOOTNOTES: [24] Shaw demurs to this passage, and says that he did not revise the papers verbally, especially those by Mrs. Besant and Graham Wallas, but that he suggested or made alterations in the others. I am still disposed to suspect that my statement is not far from the truth. [25] The opinions of some of the Essayists about co-operation were apparently modified by some small meetings with leading co-operators on March 27th, April 17th, and May 22nd, 1889. Bernard Shaw tells me that he thinks that they were held at Willis's Rooms, that he was in the chair, and that Mr. Benjamin Jones (whose name I find as a speaker at Fabian Meetings about this period) played a prominent part on behalf of the Co-operative Wholesale Society. The first printed Annual Report presented on 5th April, 1889, mentions that "the Society is taking part in a 'Round Table Conference' to ascertain amongst other objects how far the various Co-operative and Socialist bodies can act together politically," a problem, thirty years later, still unsolved. It is a pity that the references to Co-operation in "Fabian Essays" were not modified in the light of the Conference which was held after the lectures were written but before they were published. No record of the Conference seems to have been preserved. Chapter VI "To your tents, O Israel": 1894-1900 Progress of the Society--The Independent Labour Party--Local Fabian Societies--University Fabian Societies--London Groups and Samuel Butler--The first Fabian Conference--Tracts and Lectures--The 1892 Election Manifesto--The Newcastle Program--The Fair Wages Policy--The "Fortnightly" article--The "Intercepted Letter" of 1906. During the next two or three years the Society made rapid progress. The membership was 541 in 1892, 640 in 1893, and 681 in 1894. The expenditure, £640 to March, 1891, rose to £1100 for 1892, and £1179 in 1893. In both these years large sums--£350 and £450--were given by two members for the expenses of lectures in the provinces, and in provincial societies the growth was most marked. In March, 1892, 36 were recorded: the report for 1893 gives 74, including Bombay and South Australia. This was the high-water mark. The Independent Labour Party was founded in January, 1893, at a Conference at which the Fabian Society of London and nine local Fabian Societies were represented, and from this time onward our provincial organisation declined until, in 1900, only four local and four University Societies remained. The attitude of the parent society towards its branches has always been somewhat unusual. In early days it made admission to its own ranks a matter of some difficulty. A candidate resident in London had to secure a proposer and seconder who could personally vouch for him and had to attend two meetings as a visitor. We regarded membership as something of a privilege, and a candidate was required not only to sign the Basis, but also to take some personal trouble as evidence of zeal and good faith. To our provincial organisation the same principle was applied. If the Socialists in any town desired to form a local society we gave them our blessing and received them gladly. But we did not urge the formation of branches on lukewarm adherents, and we always recognised that the peculiar political methods of the London Society, appropriate to a body of highly educated people, nearly all of them speakers, writers, or active political workers, were unsuitable for the groups of earnest workmen in the provinces who were influenced by our teaching. In fact the local Fabian Societies, with rare exceptions, of which Liverpool was the chief, were from the first "I.L.P." in personnel and policy, and were Fabian only in name. This somewhat detached attitude, combined with the recognition of the differences between the parent society and its offspring, led to the adoption of a system of local autonomy. The parent society retained complete control over its own affairs. It was governed by a mass meeting of members, which in those days elected the Executive for the year. It decided that a local Fabian Society might be formed anywhere outside London, by any body of people who accepted the Fabian Basis. The parent society would send them lecturers, supply them with literature and "Fabian News," and report their doings in the "News." But in other respects complete autonomy was accorded. No fees were asked, or subventions granted: no control over, or responsibility for, policy was claimed. Just as the political policy of each Fabian was left to his own judgment, so we declined the impossible task of supervising or harmonising the political activities of our local societies. When the I.L.P. was founded in Bradford and set to work to organise Socialism on Fabian lines, adopting practically everything of our policy, except the particular methods which we had selected because they suited our personal capacities, we recognised that provincial Fabianism had done its work. There was no room, except here and there, for an I.L.P. branch and a local F.S. in the same place. The men who were active in the one were active also in the other. We made no effort to maintain our organisation against that of the I.L.P., and though a few societies survived for some years, and for a while two or three were formed every year at such places as Tunbridge Wells, Maidstone, and Swindon, they were bodies of small importance, and contributed scarcely anything to the sum of Fabian activity. The only local Fabian Society which survived the debacle was Liverpool, which has carried on work similar to that of the London Society down to the present time. Its relations with the I.L.P. have always been harmonious, and, like the I.L.P., it has always maintained an attitude of hostility towards the old political parties. Its work has been lecturing, the publication of tracts, and political organisation. The University Fabian Societies are of a different character. Formed by and for undergraduates, but in some cases, especially at Oxford, maintaining continuity by the assistance of older members in permanent residence, such as Sidney Ball of St. John's, who has belonged to the Oxford Society since its formation in 1895, they are necessarily fluctuating bodies, dependent for their success on the personality and influence of a few leading members. Their members have always been elected at once to the parent society in order that the connection may be unbroken when they leave the University. Needless to say, only a small proportion become active members of the Society, but a few of the leading members of the movement have entered it in this way. Oxford, Glasgow, Aberystwyth, and latterly Cambridge have had flourishing societies for long periods, and quite a number of the higher grade civil servants and of the clergy and doctors in remote districts in Wales and Scotland are or have been members. Moreover, the Society always retains a scattering of members, mostly officials or teachers, in India, in the heart of Africa, in China, and South America, who joined it in their undergraduate days. Almost from the first the Executive has endeavoured to organise the members in the London area into groups. The parent society grew up through years of drawing-room meetings; why should not the members residing in Hampstead and Hammersmith, in Bloomsbury or Kensington do the same? Further, the Society always laid much stress on local politics: there were County Council and Borough Council, School Board and Poor Law Guardians elections in which policy could be influenced and candidates promoted or supported. In fact it is only in the years when London government was in the melting-pot, or in times of special socialist activity, and in a few districts, such as Hampstead, where Fabians are numerous, and especially when one or more persons of persistence and energy are available, that the groups have had a more than nominal existence. The drawing-room meetings of the parent society attracted audiences until they outgrew drawing-rooms, because of the exceptional quality of the men and women who attended them and the novelty of the doctrines promulgated. These conditions were not repeated in each district of London, and in spite of constant paper planning, and not a little service by the older members, who spent their time and talents on tiny meetings in Paddington or Streatham, the London group system has never been a permanent success. What has kept the Society together is the series of fortnightly meetings carried on regularly from the first, which themselves fluctuate in popularity, but which have never wholly failed.[26] * * * * * We now return to the point whence this digression started. Our local societies were then flourishing. They were vigorously supported from London. We had funds for the expenses of lecturers and many willing to give the time. W.S. De Mattos was employed as lecture secretary, and arranged in the year 1891-2 600 lectures, 300 of them in the provinces. In all 3339 lectures by members during the year were recorded. All this activity imparted for a time considerable vitality to the local societies, and on February 6th and 7th, 1892, the first (and for twenty years the last) Annual Conference was held in London, at Essex Hall. Only fourteen provincial societies were represented, but they claimed a membership of about 1100, some four-fifths of the whole. The Conference was chiefly memorable because it occasioned the preparation of the paper by Bernard Shaw, entitled "The Fabian Society: What it has done and how it has done it," published later as Tract 41 and renamed, when the passage of years rendered the title obsolete, "The Fabian Society: Its Early History," parts of which have already been quoted. This entertaining account of the Society, and brilliant defence of its policy as opposed to that of the Social Democratic Federation, was read to a large audience on the Saturday evening, and made so great an impression that comment on it seemed futile and was abandoned. The Conference on Sunday was chiefly occupied with the discussion of a proposal that the electors be advised to vote at the coming General Election in accordance with certain test questions, which was defeated by 23 to 21. A resolution to expel from the Society any member becoming "an official of the Conservative, Liberal, Liberal Unionist, or National League parties" was rejected by a large majority, for the first but by no means for the last time. The Conference was quite a success, but a year later there was not sufficient eagerness in the provinces for a second, and the project was abandoned. * * * * * Amidst all this propaganda of the principles of Socialism the activity of the Society in local government was in no way relaxed. The output of tracts at this period was remarkable. In the year 1890-1, 10 new tracts were published, 335,000 copies printed, and 98,349 sold or given away. In 1891-2, 20 tracts, 16 of them leaflets of 4 pages, were published, 308,300 printed, and 378,281 distributed, most of them leaflets. This was the maximum. Next year only 272,660 were distributed, though the sales of penny tracts were larger. At this period the Society had a virtual monopoly in the production of political pamphlets in which facts and figures were marshalled in support of propositions of reform in the direction of Socialism. Immense trouble was taken to ensure accuracy and literary excellence. Many of the tracts were prepared by Committees which held numerous meetings. Each of them was criticised in proof both by the Executive and by all the members of the Society. Every tract before publication had to be approved at a meeting of members, when the author or authors had to consider every criticism and justify, amend, or delete the passage challenged. The tracts published in these years included a series of "Questions" for candidates for Parliament and all the local governing bodies embodying progressive programmes of administration with possible reforms in the law--which the candidate was requested to answer by a local elector and which were used with much effect for some years--and a number of leaflets on Municipal Socialism, extracted from "Facts for Londoners." In 1891 the first edition of "What to Read: A List of Books for Social Reformers," classified in a somewhat elaborate fashion, was prepared by Graham Wallas, the fifth edition of which, issued as a separate volume in 1910, is still in print. "Facts for Bristol," drafted by the gentleman who is now Sir Hartmann Just, K.C.M.G., C.B., was the only successful attempt out of many to apply the method of "Facts for Londoners" to other cities. It is impossible for me to estimate how far the Progressive policy of London in the early nineties is to be attributed to the influence of the Fabian Society. That must be left to the judgment of those who can form an impartial opinion. Something, however, the Society must have contributed to create what was really a remarkable political phenomenon. London up to 1906 was Conservative in politics by an overwhelming majority. In 1892 out of 59 seats the Liberals secured 23, but in 1895 and 1900 they obtained no more than 8 at each election. All this time the Progressive Party in the County Council, which came into office unexpectedly after the confused election in 1889 when the Council was created, maintained itself in power usually by overwhelming majorities, obtained at each succeeding triennial elections in the same constituencies and with substantially the same electorate that returned Conservatives to Parliament. In the early nineties the Liberal and Radical Working Men's Clubs of London had a political importance which has since entirely disappeared. Every Sunday for eight months in the year, and often on weekdays, political lectures were arranged, which were constantly given by Fabians. For instance, in October, 1891, I find recorded in advance twelve courses of two to five lectures each, nine of them at Clubs, and fifteen separate lectures at Clubs, all given by members of the Society. In October, 1892, eleven courses and a dozen separate lectures by our members at Clubs are notified. These were all, or nearly all, arranged by the Fabian office, and it is needless to say that a number of others were not so arranged or were not booked four or five weeks in advance. Our list of over a hundred lecturers, with their subjects and private addresses, was circulated in all directions and was constantly used by the Clubs, as well as by all sorts of other societies which required speakers. Moreover, in addition to "Facts for Londoners," Sidney Webb published in 1891 in Sonnenschein's "Social Science Series" a volume entitled "The London Programme," which set out his policy, and that of the Society, on all the affairs of the metropolis. The Society had at this time much influence through the press. "The London Programme" had appeared as a series of articles in the Liberal weekly "The Speaker." The "Star," founded in 1888, was promptly "collared," according to Bernard Shaw,[27] who was its musical critic, and who wrote in it, so it was said, on every subject under the sun except music! Mr. H.W. Massingham, assistant editor of the "Star," was elected to the Society and its Executive simultaneously in March, 1891, and in 1892 he became assistant editor of the "Daily Chronicle," under a sympathetic chief, Mr. A.E. Fletcher. Mrs. Besant and the Rev. Stewart Headlam had been elected to the London School Board in 1888, and had there assisted a Trade Union representative in getting adopted the first Fair Wages Clause in Contracts. But in the first London County Council the Society, then a tiny body, was not represented. At the second election in 1892 six of its members were elected to the Council and another was appointed an alderman. Six of these were members best known to the public as Trade Unionists or in other organisations, but Sidney Webb, who headed the poll at Deptford with 4088 votes, whilst his Progressive colleague received 2503, and four other candidates only 5583 votes between them, was a Fabian and nothing else. He had necessarily to resign his appointment in the Colonial Office, and thenceforth was able to devote all his time to politics and literary work. Webb was at once elected chairman of the Technical Education Board, which up to 1904 had the management of all the education in the county, other than elementary, which came under public control. The saying is attributed to him that according to the Act of Parliament Technical Education could be defined as any education above elementary except Greek and Theology, and the Board under his chairmanship--he was chairman for eight years--did much to bring secondary and university education within the reach of the working people of London. From 1892 onwards there was always a group of Fabians on the London County Council, working in close alliance with the "Labour Bench," the Trade Unionists who then formed a group of the Progressive Party under the leadership of John Burns. Under this silent but effective influence the policy of the Progressives was largely identical with the immediate municipal policy of the Society itself, and the members of the Society took a keen and continuous interest in the triennial elections and the work of the Council. * * * * * All this concern in local administration did not interfere with the interest taken by the Society in parliamentary politics, and one illustration of this may be mentioned. The Liberal Party has a traditional feud with Landlordism, and at this period its favourite panacea was Leasehold Enfranchisement, that is, the enactment of a law empowering leaseholders of houses built on land let for ninety-nine years, the common practice in London, to purchase the freehold at a valuation. Many Conservatives had come round to the view that the breaking up of large town estates and the creation of numerous freeholders, would strengthen the forces upholding the rights of property, and there was every prospect that the Bill would be passed. A few hours before the debate on April 29th, 1891, a leaflet (Tract No. 22) was published explaining the futility of the proposal from the Fabian standpoint, and a copy was sent to every member of Parliament. To the astonishment of the Liberal leaders a group of Radicals, including the present Lord Haldane and Sir Edward Grey, opposed the Bill, and it was defeated by the narrow majority of 13 in a house numbering 354. A few years later the proposal was dropped out of the Liberal programme, and the Leasehold Enfranchisement Association itself adopted a new name and a revised policy. But the main object of the Fabians was to force on the Liberal Party a programme of constructive social reform. With few exceptions their members belonged or had belonged to that party, and it was not difficult, now that London had learned the value of the Progressive policy, to get resolutions accepted by Liberal Associations demanding the adoption of a programme. Sidney Webb in 1888 printed privately a paper entitled "Wanted a Programme: An Appeal to the Liberal Party," and sent it out widely amongst the Liberal leaders. The "Star" and the "Daily Chronicle" took care to publish these resolutions, and everything was done, which skilful agitators knew, to make a popular demand for a social reform programme. We did what all active politicians in a democratic country must do; we decided what the people ought to want, and endeavoured to do two things, which after all are much the same thing, to make the people want it, and to make it appear that they wanted it. The result--how largely attributable to our efforts can hardly now be estimated--was the Newcastle Program, reluctantly blessed by Mr. Gladstone and adopted by the National Liberal Federation in 1891.[28] The General Election of 1892 was anticipated with vivid interest. Since the election of 1886 English Socialism had come into being and Trade Unionism had been transformed by the rise of the Dockers, and the other "new" unions of unskilled labour. But a Labour Party was still in the future, and our Election Manifesto (Tract 40), issued in June, bluntly tells the working classes that until they form a party of their own they will have to choose between the parties belonging to the other classes. The Manifesto, written by Bernard Shaw, is a brilliant essay on labour in politics and a criticism of both the existing parties; it assures the working classes that they could create their own party if they cared as much about politics as they cared for horse-racing (football was not in those days the typical sport); and it concludes by advising them to vote for the better, or against the worse, man, on the ground that progress was made by steps, a step forward was better than a step backward, and the only thing certain is the defeat of a party which sulks and does not vote at all. The Manifesto was widely circulated by the then vigorous local societies, and no doubt had some effect, though the intensity of the antipathy to Liberal Unionism on the one side and to Home Rule on the other left little chance for other considerations. Six members of the Society were candidates, but none of them belonged to the group which had made its policy and conducted its campaign. In one case, Ben Tillett at West Bradford, the Society took an active part in the election, sending speakers and collecting £152 for the Returning Officer's expenses. Of the six, J. Keir Hardie at West Ham alone was successful, but Tillett did well at West Bradford, polling 2,749, only a few hundred votes below the other two candidates, and preparing the field for the harvest which F.W. Jowett reaped in 1906. The result of the election, which took place in July, was regarded as a justification for the Fabian policy of social advance. In London, where Liberalism was strongly tainted with it, the result was "as in 1885," the year of Liberal victory, and the only Liberal seat lost was that of the President of the Leasehold Enfranchisement Association! In the industrial cities, and in Scotland, where Liberalism was still individualist, the result was rather as in 1886, when Liberalism lost. In London also "by far the largest majorities were secured by Mr. John Burns and Mr. Keir Hardie, who stood as avowed Socialists, and by Mr. Sydney Buxton, whose views are really scarcely less advanced than theirs."[29] I have pointed out that Fabian policy began with State Socialism, and in quite early days added to it Municipal Socialism; but in 1888 the authors of "Fabian Essays" appeared to be unconscious of Trade Unionism and hostile to the Co-operative movement. The Dock Strike of 1889 and the lecturing in London clubs and to the artisans of the north pointed the way to a new development. Moreover, in the summer of 1892 Sidney Webb had married Miss Beatrice Potter, author of an epoch-making little book, "The Co-operative Movement," and together they were at work on their famous "History of Trade Unionism." The "Questions" for local governing bodies issued in 1892 were full of such matters as fair wages, shorter hours, and proper conditions for labour, and it was speedily discovered that this line of advance was the best suited to Fabian tactics because it was a series of skirmishes all over the country, in which scores and hundreds could take part. Each locality had then or soon afterwards three or four elected local councils, and hardly any Fabian from one end of the country to the other would be unable in one way or another to strike a blow or lift a finger for the improvement of the conditions of publicly employed labour. But the Government of Mr. Gladstone had not been in office for much more than a year before a much more ambitious enterprise on this line was undertaken. In March, 1893, Sir Henry (then Mr.) Campbell-Bannerman had pledged the Government to "show themselves to be the best employers of labour in the country": "we have ceased," he said, "to believe in what are known as competition or starvation wages." That was a satisfactory promise, but enunciating a principle is one thing and carrying it into effect in scores of departments is another. Mr. Gladstone, of course, was interested only in Home Rule. Permanent officials doubtless obstructed, as they usually do: and but a few members of the Cabinet accepted or understood the new obligation. The Fabian Society knew the Government departments from the inside, and it was easy for the Executive to ascertain how labour was treated under each chief, what he had done and what he had left undone. At that time legislative reforms were difficult because the Government majority was both small and uncertain, whilst the whole time of Parliament was occupied by the necessary but futile struggle to pass a Home Rule Bill for the Lords to destroy. But administrative reforms were subject to no such limitations: wages and conditions of labour were determined by the department concerned, and each minister could do what he chose for the workmen virtually in his employment, except perhaps in the few cases, such as the Post Office, where the sums involved were very large, when the Chancellor of the Exchequer had the same opportunity. Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb then decided that the time had come to make an attack on old-fashioned Liberalism on these lines. The "Fortnightly Review" accepted their paper, the Society gave the necessary sanction, and in November the article entitled "To Your Tents, O Israel" appeared. Each of the great departments of the State was examined in detail, and for each was stated precisely what should be done to carry out the promise that the Government would be "in the first flight of employers," and what in fact had been done, which indeed, with rare exceptions, was nothing. The "Parish Councils Act" and Sir William Harcourt's great Budget of 1894 were still in the future, and so far there was little to show as results from the Liberal victory of the previous year. The case against the Government from the Labour standpoint was therefore unrelieved black, and the Society, in whose name the Manifesto appeared, called on the working classes to abandon Liberalism, to form a Trade Union party of their own, to raise £30,000 and to finance fifty candidates for Parliament. It is a curious coincidence that thirteen years later, in 1906, the Party formed, as the Manifesto demanded, by the big Trade Unions actually financed precisely fifty candidates and succeeded in electing thirty of them. The Manifesto led to the resignation of a few distinguished members, including Professor D.G. Ritchie, Mrs. Bateson, widow of the Master of St. John's College, Cambridge, and more important than all the rest, Mr. H.W. Massingham. He was on the Continent when the Manifesto was in preparation; otherwise perhaps he might have come to accept it: for his reply, which was published in the same magazine a month later, was little more than a restatement of the case. "The only sound interpretation of a model employer," he said, "is a man who pays trade union rates of wages, observes trade union limit of hours, and deals with 'fair' as opposed to 'unfair' houses. Apply all these tests and the Government unquestionably breaks down on every one of them." If this was all that an apologist for the Government could say, no wonder that the attack went home. The opponents of Home Rule were of course delighted to find another weak spot in their adversary's defences; and the episode was not soon forgotten. In January the article was reprinted with much additional matter drafted by Bernard Shaw. He showed in considerable detail how a Labour Party ought to be formed, and how, in fact, it was formed seven years later. With our numerous and still flourishing local societies, and the newly formed I.L.P., a large circulation for the tract was easily secured. Thousands of working-class politicians read and remembered it, and it cannot be doubted that the "Plan of Campaign for Labour," as it was called, did much to prepare the ground for the Labour Party which was founded so easily and flourished so vigorously in the first years of the twentieth century. At this point the policy of simple permeation of the Liberal Party may be said to have come to an end. The "Daily Chronicle," under the influence of Mr. Massingham, became bitterly hostile to the Fabians. They could no longer plausibly pretend that they looked for the realisation of their immediate aims through Liberalism. They still permeated, of course, since they made no attempt to form a party of their own, and they believed that only through existing organisations, Trade Unions on one side, the political parties on the other, could sufficient force be obtained to make progress within a reasonable time. In one respect it must be confessed we shared an almost universal delusion. When the Liberal Party was crushed at the election of 1895 we thought that its end had come in England as it has in other countries. Conservatism is intelligible: Socialism we regarded as entirely reasonable. Between the two there seemed to be no logical resting place. We had discovered long ago that the working classes were not going to rush into Socialism, but they appeared to be and were in fact growing up to it. The Liberalism of the decade 1895-1905 had measures in its programme, such as Irish Home Rule, but it had no policy, and it seemed incredible then, as it seems astonishing now, that a party with so little to offer could sweep the country, as it was swept by the Liberals in 1906. But nobody could have foreseen Mr. Lloyd George, and although the victory of 1906 was not due to his leadership, no one can doubt that it is his vigorous initiative in the direction of Socialism which secured for his party the renewed confidence of the country. * * * * * Twelve years later another attempt to get administrative reform from the Liberal Party was made on somewhat similar lines. The party had taken office in December, 1905, and in the interval before the General Election of 1906 gave them their unprecedented majority, "An Intercepted Letter," adopted at a members' meeting in December, was published in the "National Review" for January. It purported to be a circular letter addressed by the Prime Minister to his newly appointed colleagues, giving each of them in turn advice how to run his department. In this case there was no necessity to suggest administrative reforms only. The Liberals were certain of a majority, and they had no programme: they were bound to win, not on their merits, but on the defects of their opponents. The Letter, written by Webb in a rollicking style, to which he rarely condescends, touched on each of the great departments of Government, and advocated both the old policy of Trade Union hours and wages, for which the new Prime Minister had made himself in 1893 personally responsible, but also all sorts of progressive measures, graduated and differentiated income-tax for the Treasury, Compulsory Arbitration in Labour Disputes for the Home Office--we discovered the flaw in that project later--reform of Grants in Aid for the Local Government Board, Wages Boards for Agriculture, and so on. A few weeks later the country had the General Election to think about, and the Letter was merely reprinted for private circulation amongst the members of the Society. But we took care that the new Ministers read it, and it served to remind them of the demands which, after the election, the Labour Party, at last in being, would not let them again forget. FOOTNOTES: [26] Bernard Shaw has sent me the following note on this paragraph:-- One London group incident should be immortalized. It was in the W.C. group, which met in Gt. Ormond St. It consisted of two or three members who used to discuss bi-metallism. I was a member geographically, but never attended. One day I saw on the notice of meetings which I received an announcement that Samuel Butler would address the group on the authorship of the Odyssey. Knowing that the group would have no notion of how great a man they were entertaining, I dashed down to the meeting; took the chair; gave the audience (about five strong including Butler and myself) to understand that the occasion was a great one; and when we had listened gravely to Samuel's demonstration that the Odyssey was written by Nausicaa, carried a general expression of enthusiastic agreement with Butler, who thanked us with old-fashioned gravity and withdrew without giving a sign of his feelings at finding so small a meeting of the famous Fabian Society. Considering how extraordinary a man Butler is now seen to have been, there is something tragic in the fact that the greatest genius among the long list of respectable dullards who have addressed us, never got beyond this absurd little group. [27] Tract 41. "The Fabian Society," p. 18. [28] Bernard Shaw has sent me the following note on this point:-- The exact facts of the launching of the Newcastle Program are these. Webb gave me the Program in his own handwriting as a string of resolutions. I, being then a permeative Fabian on the executive of the South St. Pancras Liberal and Radical Association (I had coolly walked in and demanded to be elected to the Association and Executive, which was done on the spot by the astonished Association--ten strong or thereabouts) took them down to a meeting in Percy Hall, Percy Street, Tottenham Court Road, where the late Mr. Beale, then Liberal candidate and subscription milch cow of the constituency (without the ghost of a chance), was to address as many of the ten as might turn up under the impression that he was addressing a public meeting. There were certainly not 20 present, perhaps not 10. I asked him to move the resolutions. He said they looked complicated, and that if I would move them he would second them. I moved them, turning over Webb's pages by batches and not reading most of them. Mr. Beale seconded. Passed unanimously. That night they went down to The Star with a report of an admirable speech which Mr. Beale was supposed to have delivered. Next day he found the National Liberal Club in an uproar at his revolutionary break-away. But he played up; buttoned his coat determinedly; said we lived in progressive times and must move with them; and carried it off. Then he took the report of his speech to the United States and delivered several addresses founded on it with great success. He died shortly after his last inevitable defeat. He was an amiable and worthy man; and the devotion with which he fought so many forlorn hopes for his party should have earned him a safe seat. But that debt was never paid or even acknowledged; and he felt the ingratitude very keenly. [29] "Fabian News," August, 1892. Chapter VII "Fabianism and the Empire": 1900-1 The Library and Book Boxes--Parish Councils--The Workmen's Compensation Act--The Hutchinson Trust--The London School of Economics--Educational Lectures--Electoral Policy--The controversy over the South African War--The publication of "Fabianism and the Empire." The next few years were devoted to quieter work than that of the period described in the previous chapter. The Conservative Party was in power, Liberalism, which had lost its great leader, and a year or two later lost also his successor, Lord Rosebery, was in so hopeless a minority that its return to power in the near future seemed to be and was impossible. It had been easy to permeate the Liberals, because most of our members were or had been connected with their party. It was impossible to permeate Conservatism on similar lines, both because we were not in touch with their organisation and because Conservatives in general regarded our proposals with complete aversion. It was a time, therefore, for educational rather than political activity, and to this the Society devoted the greater part of its energies. Its work in this field took various forms, some of which may be briefly described. [Illustration: _From a photograph by Emery Walker_ G. BERNARD SHAW, IN 1889] * * * * * We had started a lending library in boxes for our local societies, and as these died away we offered the use of it to working-class organisations, and indeed to any organisation of readers or students. Books were purchased from special funds, a collection of some 5000 volumes was ultimately formed, and for the last twenty years the Society has kept in circulation anything up to 200 boxes of books on Socialism, economics, history and social problems, which are lent for ten shillings a year to Co-operative Societies, Trade Unions, Socialist Societies, and miscellaneous organisations. The books are intended to be educational rather than directly propagandist, and each box is made up to suit the taste, expressed or inferred, of the subscriber. Quarterly exchanges are allowed, but the twenty or thirty books in a box usually last a society for a year. It is a remarkable fact that although boxes are lent freely to such slight organisations as reading classes, and are sent even to remote mining villages in Wales or Scotland, not a single box has ever been lost. Delays are frequent: books of course are often missing, but sooner or later every box sent out has been returned to the Society. Another method of securing the circulation of good books on social subjects has been frequently used. We prepare a list of recent and important publications treating of social problems and request each member to report how many of them are in the Public Library of his district, and further to apply for the purchase of such as are absent. * * * * * The Local Government Act of 1894, commonly called the Parish Councils Act, which constituted out of chaos a system of local government for rural England, gave the Society an opportunity for practising that part of its policy which includes the making the best use of all forms of existing legislation. Mr. Herbert Samuel was at that time a friend, though he was never a member, of the Society, and the first step in his successful political career was his candidature for the typically rural Southern Division of Oxfordshire. He was good enough to prepare for us not only an admirable explanation of the Act, but also Questions for Parish Councillors, for Rural District Councillors, and for Urban District Councillors. Probably this was the first time that an analysis of a new Act of Parliament had been published at a penny. Anyway the demand for it was considerable, and over 30,000 copies were sold in five months. Then it was revised, with the omission of temporary matter, and republished as "Parish and District Councils: What they are and what they can do," and in this form has gone through many editions, and is still in print. The tract states that the secretary of the Society will give advice on any obscure point in the law, and in this way the Society has become an Information Bureau; hardly a week passed for many years after the autumn of 1895 without a letter from some village or small town asking questions as to housing, common rights, charities, the duties of chairmen of councils, the qualifications of candidates, and so on. Similar tracts were published describing the powers and duties of the London County Council, the London Vestries, and the Metropolitan Borough Councils, established in 1899, while one giving the powers of various local authorities for housing (No. 76, "Houses for the People") has gone through many editions and still has a steady sale. * * * * * The Workmen's Compensation Act, 1897, afforded another opportunity for this sort of work. Our penny tract (No. 82) describing the rights of the workmen under the Act was reprinted thirteen times in eight months, and over 120,000 were sold in the first year of publication. This tract offered free advice to every purchaser, and the result has been an enormous amount of correspondence which during seventeen years has never entirely ceased. This work of providing expert advice on minor legal matters has been a quiet service to the community constantly rendered by the Society. The barristers amongst our members have freely given assistance in the more difficult matters. Occasionally the solicitors amongst us have taken up cases where the plaintiff was specially helpless. * * * * * In 1894, Henry Hutchinson, who had provided the funds for much of our country lecturing, died, and to our complete surprise it was found that he had appointed Sidney Webb, whom he hardly knew personally, his executor, and had left the residue of his estate, between £9000 and £10,000, to five trustees--Sidney Webb, his daughter, myself, William Clarke, and W.S. De Mattos--with directions that the whole sum be expended within ten years. The two last named took but little part in administering the trust, and Miss Hutchinson died only fifteen months later, also leaving to her colleagues the residue of her estate, something under £1000, for similar purposes. The trustees--Mrs. Bernard Shaw, Hubert Bland, and Frederick Whelen were appointed at later dates--resolved that the money in their charge should be used exclusively for special work, as otherwise the effect would be merely to relieve the members of their obligation to pay for the maintenance of their Society. They decided to devote part of the funds to initiating the London School of Economics and Political Science, because they considered that a thorough knowledge of these sciences was a necessity for people concerned in social reconstruction, if that reconstruction was to be carried out with prudence and wisdom: and in particular it was essential that all classes of public officials should have the opportunity of learning whatever can be known of economics and politics taught on modern lines. Our old Universities provided lectures on political science as it was understood by Plato and Aristotle, by Hobbes and Bentham: they did not then--and indeed they do not now--teach how New Zealand deals with strikes, how America legislates about trusts, how municipalities all over the world organise tramways. The trustees, as I have said, originated the London School of Economics, but from the first they associated others with themselves in its management, and they made no attempt to retain any special share in its control. Their object was to get taught the best science that could be obtained, confident that if their own political theories were right, science would confirm them, and if they were wrong, it was better that they should be discredited. The London School of Economics, though thus founded, has never had any direct or organic connection with the Fabian Society, and therefore any further account of its successful career would be out of place in this volume. But it may be said that it has certainly more than justified the hopes of its founders, or rather, to be accurate, I should say, founder, since the other trustees were wholly guided by the initiative of Sidney Webb. Besides the School, and the Library connected with it, the Trust promoted for many years regular courses of Fabian educational lectures on social and political subjects, such as Socialism, Trade Unionism, Co-operation, Poor Law, Economics, and Economic History. Lecturers were selected with care, and were in some cases given a maintenance allowance during the preparation of their lectures. Then arrangements were made for courses of four lectures each, on what may be called University Extension lines, in four or five centres in one part of the country. For example, in the year 1896-7 180 lectures were given in fifty towns, half of them under the auspices of branches of the I.L.P., and the rest organised by Co-operative Societies, Liberal Associations, Trade Unions, and other bodies. Very careful syllabuses were prepared and widely circulated, and the whole scheme was intended to be educational rather than directly propagandist. The first lecturers engaged were J. Ramsay Macdonald and Miss Enid Stacy, whose premature death, a few years after her marriage to the Rev. Percy Widdrington, was a great loss to the movement. This lecturing was maintained for many years. In 1900, shortly after the creation there of County and District Councils, we experimented upon Ireland, where J. Bruce Glasier and S.D. Shallard gave a number of courses of lectures, without any very obvious results. In 1902 W. Stephen Sanders took over the work, but the fund was coming to an end, and after 1904 subsidised lecturing virtually ceased. * * * * * In order to help working-class students who had the desire to study more continuously than by attendance at lectures, correspondence classes were started in the same class of subject as the lectures. A textbook was selected and divided into sections, to each of which an introduction was written, concluding with questions. Written answers were sent in and corrected by the conductor of the class. This went on regularly until 1900, when Ruskin College, Oxford, organised similar classes on a larger scale, and our services were no longer required. * * * * * In August, 1896, the triennial International Socialist Workers and Trade Union Congress was held in London, at which the Society was represented by a numerous delegation. The chief business proved to be the expulsion of the Anarchists, who at this period attended these conferences and had to be got rid of before the appointed business could be carried on. The Society prepared an important "Report" for circulation at the Congress, one part of it advocating various reforms, no longer of any special interest, and the other part consisting of a summary of the principles and policy of the Society, drafted by Bernard Shaw in a series of epigrammatic paragraphs. This document, still circulated as Tract 70, is interesting both as a brief and vivid exposition of Fabianism and because it gave rise to another of the long series of fights on the policy of political toleration. The passage chiefly objected to, written, of course, for foreigners, and therefore more detailed than otherwise would be necessary, is as follows:-- "FABIAN ELECTORAL TACTICS. "The Fabian Society does not claim to be the people of England, or even the Socialist party, and therefore does not seek direct political representation by putting forward Fabian candidates at elections. But it loses no opportunity of influencing elections, and inducing constituencies to select Socialists as their candidates. No person, however, can obtain the support of the Fabian Society or escape its opposition, merely by calling himself a Socialist or Social-Democrat. As there is no Second Ballot in England, frivolous candidatures give great offence and discredit the party in whose name they are undertaken, because any third candidate who is not well supported will not only be beaten himself but may also involve in his defeat the better of the two candidates competing with him. Under such circumstances the Fabian Society throws its weight against the third candidate, whether he calls himself a Socialist or not, in order to secure the victory to the better of the two candidates between whom the contest really lies. But when the third candidate is not only a serious representative of Socialism, but can organise his party well and is likely to poll sufficient votes to make even his defeat a respectable demonstration of the strength and growth of Socialism in the constituency, the Fabian Society supports him resolutely under all circumstances and against all other parties." This was an extreme statement of our position, because the Society has never, so far as I am aware, taken any action which could be described as "throwing its weight against" a third candidate in a parliamentary election. But it represented our policy as it might have been, if occasion had arisen to carry it to its logical conclusion. It was opposed, not because it was an inaccurate statement of fact, but because a minority of the Society desired to change the policy it described; and after the Congress was over an influential requisition was got up by J. Ramsay Macdonald, who had been elected to the Executive Committee in 1894, demanding that the tract be withdrawn from circulation. The battle was joined at Clifford's Inn in October, and the insurgents were defeated, after an exciting discussion, by 108 to 33. * * * * * There is little to record of the years that followed. Graham Wallas, who had been elected to the London School Board in 1894, resigned his seat on the Executive in 1895; Bernard Shaw became a St. Pancras Vestryman without a contest in 1897, an event rather of literary[30] than political significance, and in 1898 he had a serious illness which kept him out of the movement for nearly two years; whilst at the end of 1899 Sydney Olivier was appointed Colonial Secretary of Jamaica, and spent most of the next fourteen years in the West Indies, latterly as Governor of Jamaica, until 1913, when he was recalled to London to be the Secretary of the Board of Agriculture. * * * * * External events put an end to this period of quiescence, and the Society, which was often derisively regarded as expert in the politics of the parish pump, an exponent of "gas and water Socialism," was forced to consider its attitude towards the problems of Imperialism. War was declared by President Kruger for the South African Republic on October 11th, 1899. Up to this point the whole of the Society, with very few exceptions, had scouted the idea of war. "The grievances alleged, though some of them were real enough, were ludicrously unimportant in comparison with our cognate home grievances. Nobody in his senses would have contemplated a war on their account,"[31] But when war had come the situation was entirely altered. The majority of the Society recognised that the British Empire had to win the war, and that no other conclusion to it was possible. Some of us had joined in the protest against the threat of war: but when that protest was fruitless we declined to contest the inevitable. A large section of the Liberal Party and nearly all other Socialists took another view. They appeared to believe, and some of them even hoped, that the Boers might be successful and the British army be driven to the sea. The I.L.P. regarded the war as a typical case of the then accepted theory of Socialism that war is always instigated by capitalists for the purpose of obtaining profits. They opposed every step in the prosecution of the campaign, and criticised every action of the British authorities. In this matter the left and right wings of the Fabians joined hands in opposition to the centre. Members who came into the movement when Marxism was supreme, like Walter Crane, those who worked largely with the I.L.P., such as J. Ramsay Macdonald, S.G. Hobson, and G.N. Barnes (later M.P. and Chairman of the Labour Party), were joined by others who were then associated with the Liberals, such as Dr. F. Lawson Dodd, Will Crooks (later Labour M.P.), Clement Edwards (later Liberal M.P.), and Dr. John Clifford. On the other side were the older leaders of the Society, who took the view that the members had come together for the purpose of promoting Socialism, that the question at issue was one "which Socialism cannot solve and does not touch,"[32] and that whilst each member was entitled to hold and work for his own opinion, it was not necessary for the Society in its corporate capacity to adopt a formal policy with the result of excluding the large minority which would have objected to whatever decision was arrived at. The first round in the contest was at a business meeting on October 13th, 1899, when on the advice of the Executive the members present rejected a motion of urgency for the discussion of a resolution expressing sympathy with the Boers. It was however agreed that the matter could not end thus, and a members' meeting was fixed for December 8th, at Clifford's Inn Hall, when S.G. Hobson moved a long resolution declaring it essential that the attitude of the Society in regard to the war should be clearly asserted, and concluding: "The Fabian Society therefore formally dissociates itself from the Imperialism of Capitalism and vainglorious Nationalism and pledges itself to support the expansion of the Empire only in so far as it may be compatible with the expansion of that higher social organisation which this Society was founded to promote." Bernard Shaw, on behalf of the Executive Committee, moved a long reasoned amendment declaring that a parliamentary vote was not worth fighting about, demanding that at the conclusion of the war measures be taken for securing the value of the Transvaal mines for the public, and that the interests of the miners be safeguarded. The amendment was barely relevant to the issue, and notwithstanding influential support it was defeated by 58 to 27. Thereupon the "previous question" was moved and carried by 59 to 50. This inconclusive result revealed a great diversity of opinion in the Society, and the Executive Committee, for the first and, so far, the only time, availed itself of the rule which authorised it to submit any question to a postal referendum of all the members. The question submitted in February, 1900, was this: "Are you in favour of an official pronouncement being made now by the Fabian Society on Imperialism in relation to the War?" and on the paper published in the "News" were printed four reasons on one side and five on the other, drafted by those members of the Executive who advocated each policy. On the one hand it was argued that the Society should resist aggressive capitalism and militarism, thus putting itself into line with international socialism, and that expenditure on the war would postpone social reform. On the other it was contended that the question was outside the province of the Society, that a resolution by the Society would carry no weight, would not stop the war, and might have a serious effect on the solidarity of the Society itself. The vote excited great interest: an appeal to the electorate to vote Yes, worded with much moderation, was issued by Walter Crane, S.G. Hobson, Charles Charrington, F. Lawson Dodd, J. Frederick Green, George N. Barnes, Will Crooks, Henry S. Salt, Dr. John Clifford, Mrs. Mallet, Clement Edwards, Mrs. J.R. Macdonald and others; to which a reply was sent, signed only by members of the Executive, Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, Hubert Bland, J.F. Oakeshott, H.W. Macrosty and one or two others. Finally a rejoinder by the signatories of the first circular was issued in the course of the poll which extended over nearly a month. The membership at the time was about 800, of whom 50 lived abroad, and in all only 476 votes were cast, 217 in favour of a pronouncement and 259 against. It was said at the time, and has constantly been alleged since, that the Society had voted its approval of the South African War and had supported imperialist aggression and anti-democratic militarism. As will be seen from the foregoing, no such statement is correct. A vote on the policy of the Government would have given an overwhelming adverse majority, but it would have destroyed the Society. In early days we had drawn a clear line between Socialism and politics: we had put on one side such problems as Home Rule and Church Disestablishment as of the nature of red herrings, matters of no real importance in comparison with the economic enfranchisement which we advocated. In the early eighties Parliament spent futile and fruitless months discussing whether Mr. Bradlaugh should take the oath, and whether an extension of the franchise should or should not be accompanied by redistribution. We wanted to make the working classes pay less attention to these party questions and more attention to their own social conditions. We thought, or at any rate said, that the Liberal and Conservative leaders kept the party ball rolling in order to distract the workers from the iniquity of the distribution of wealth. We insisted that Socialism was an economic doctrine, and had nothing to do with other problems. Later on we realised that the form of government is scarcely less important than its content: that the unit of administration, whether imperial, national, or local, is germane to the question of the services to be administered; that if the governmental machine is to be used for industry, that machine must be modern and efficient: and that in fact no clear line of distinction can be drawn between the problems of constitutional structure which concern Socialism and those, if any, which do not concern it. In the case of the South African war it was mainly the instinct of self-preservation that actuated us; it is certain that any other decision would have destroyed the Society. The passions of that period were extraordinarily bitter. The Pro-Boers were mobbed and howled down, their actions were misrepresented, and their motives disparaged: they retaliated by accusing the British troops of incredible atrocities, by rejoicing over every disaster which befell our arms, and by prophesying all sorts of calamities however the war ended. There was never any question of the Society issuing a pronouncement justifying the war. Only a very few of our members went as far as that. But many others, all or nearly all who were now beginning to be called the "old gang," on whom from first to last the initiative and stability of the Society has depended, would have declined to be associated with what they regarded as the anti-patriotic excesses of certain of the Liberals, and would have resigned their membership, or at any rate their official positions in the Society, had it adopted at that time the same policy as the I.L.P. Happily tolerance prevailed, and although an attempt was made to get up a big secession, only about fifteen members resigned in a group when the result of the poll was declared. These, however, included a few important names, J. Ramsay Macdonald and J. Frederick Green, of the Executive Committee, George N. Barnes and Pete Curran, future Labour Members of Parliament, Walter Crane, H.S. Salt, Mrs. J.R. Macdonald, and Mrs. Pankhurst. At the election of the Executive Committee in April, 1900, the Society by another vote confirmed the previous decision. All the old members were re-elected, and those of the majority party polled the heaviest votes. The two seats vacated by resignation were filled by "Pro-Boers," and the only new candidate who supported the majority was defeated. It was clear, therefore, that the voting was not strictly on party lines--one of the opposition, Charles Charrington, was fourth on the poll--but that the Society as a whole approved of the non-committal policy. The Executive Committee had been elected since 1894 by a postal ballot of the whole Society, and on this occasion 509 members, over 62 per cent of the whole, recorded their votes. The Executive had resolved at the beginning of the war to issue a tract on Imperialism, and at the Annual Meeting in May, 1900, a resolution was passed that it prepare for submission to the members "a constructive criticism from the Socialist standpoint of the actions and programmes of the various political parties." Needless to say, Bernard Shaw undertook the difficult job, for at this period all the official pronouncements of the Executive were drafted by him. At the beginning of September it was announced as nearly ready, and later in the month a proof was sent to every member for criticism, and a meeting was called for the 25th to discuss it. This was the extreme example of the practice at that time habitual, of inviting the co-operation of every member in our publications. No less than 134 members returned amended proofs or wrote letters of criticism; and it is recorded that only one of these was opposed to the whole thing, whilst only nine preferred to have no manifesto at all; and another nine objected to material portions. The great majority were cordial in approval. Bernard Shaw is fond of posing as the most conceited of persons, but those who have had to do with him in literary matters are aware that no pose was ever more preposterous. When he has acted as the literary expert of the Fabian Society he has considered every criticism with unruffled courtesy, and dealt with the many fools who always find their way into extreme parties, not according to their folly, but with the careful consideration properly accorded to eminent wisdom. The business of examining over a hundred marked proofs of a document of 20,000 words, every line of which was more or less controversial, was an immense one, but the author gave every criticism its proper weight, and accepted every useful amendment. Then came the meeting. It was held at Clifford's Inn, and between 130 and 140 members were present, each of whom was entitled to move any amendment on any of the 20,000 words, or any addition to or deletion of them. Nearly three hours were occupied partly in discussing the controversial portion and partly with the general question of publication. Only eighteen voted for omitting the part about Imperialism, and the minority against the publication numbered no more than fourteen. By this time the controversy over the war had reached an intensity which those who cannot recollect it will find difficult to believe, and nobody but the author could have written an effective document on the war so skilfully as to satisfy the great majority of the supporters of both parties in the Society. Bernard Shaw has accomplished many difficult feats, but none of them, in my opinion, excels that of drafting for the Society and carrying through the manifesto called "Fabianism and the Empire." It was published as a shilling volume by Grant Richards, and although it was widely and favourably noticed in the Press the sales were only moderate, just over 2000 copies to the end of the year. Some time later the Society purchased the remainder of 1500 copies at 1d. and since sold them at prices, rising as the stock declined, up to five shillings a copy! The theme of the manifesto is the overriding claim of efficiency not only in our own government, and in our empire, but throughout the world. The earth belongs to mankind, and the only valid moral right to national as well as individual possession is that the occupier is making adequate use of it for the benefit of the world community. "The problem before us is how the world can be ordered by Great Powers of practically international extent.... The partition of the greater part of the globe among such powers is, as a matter of fact that must be faced approvingly or deploringly, now only a question of time" (p. 3). "The notion that a nation has a right to do what it pleases with its own territory, without reference to the interests of the rest of the world is no more tenable from the International Socialist point of view--that is, from the point of view of the twentieth century--than the notion that a landlord has a right to do what he likes with his estate without reference to the interests of his neighbours.... [In China] we are asserting and enforcing international rights of travel and trade. But the right to trade is a very comprehensive one: it involves a right to insist on a settled government which can keep the peace and enforce agreements. When a native government of this order is impossible, the foreign trading power must set one up" (pp. 44-5). "The value of a State to the world lies in the quality of its civilisation, not in the magnitude of its armaments.... There is therefore no question of the steam-rollering of little States because they are little, any more than of their maintenance in deference to romantic nationalism. The State which obstructs international civilisation will have to go, be it big or little. That which advances it should be defended by all the Western Powers. Thus huge China and little Monaco may share the same fate, little Switzerland and the vast United States the same fortune" (p. 46). As for South Africa, "however ignorantly [our] politicians may argue about it, reviling one another from the one side as brigands, and defending themselves from the other with quibbles about waste-paper treaties and childish slanders against a brave enemy, the fact remains that a Great Power, consciously or unconsciously, must govern in the interests of civilisation as a whole; and it is not to those interests that such mighty forces as gold-fields, and the formidable armaments that can be built upon them, should be wielded irresponsibly by small communities of frontiersmen. Theoretically they should be internationalised, not British-Imperialised; but until the Federation of the World becomes an accomplished fact we must accept the most responsible Imperial federations available as a substitute for it" (pp. 23-4). As however the Manifesto was designed for the general election, this theme was only sketched, and the greater part was occupied with matters of a more immediately practicable character. The proposed partition of China at that time seemed imminent, and our attention had been called to the efficiency of the German State organisation of foreign trade in comparison with the _laissez-faire_ policy which dominated our Foreign Office. We regarded our overseas trade as a national asset, and urged that the consular service should be revolutionised. "Any person who thinks this application of Socialism to foreign trade through the consular system impossible also thinks the survival of his country in the age of the Powers impossible. No German thinks it impossible. If he has not already achieved it, he intends to" (pp. 10, 11). We must "have in every foreign market an organ of commercially disinterested industrial intelligence. A developed consulate would be such an organ." "The consulate could itself act as broker, if necessary, and have a revenue from commissions, of which, however, the salaries of its officials should be strictly independent" (pp. 10 and 8). The present army should be replaced "by giving to the whole male population an effective training in the use of arms without removing them from civil life. This can be done without conscription or barrack life" by extending the half-time system to the age of 21 and training the young men in the other half. From the millions of men thus trained "we could obtain by voluntary enlistment a picked professional force of engineers, artillery, and cavalry, and as large a garrison for outlying provinces as we chose to pay for, if we made it attractive by the following reforms": full civil rights, a living wage, adequate superannuation after long service, and salaries for officers on the civil scale. The other reforms advocated included a minimum wage for labour, grants in aid for housing, freedom for municipal trading, municipal public-houses, and reorganisation of the machinery of education, as explained later. "The moral of it all is that what the British Empire wants most urgently in its government is not Conservatism, not Liberalism, not Imperialism, but brains and political science" (p. 93). [Illustration: GRAHAM WALLAS, IN 1891] FOOTNOTES: [30] Shaw has "vehemently protested" against this phrase, saying that he "put in six years of hard committee work to the astonishment of the vestrymen who had not expected (him) to be a man of business and a sticker at it." But I am still of opinion that the secondary effects of those six years on his knowledge of affairs and the lessons he has drawn from them in his writings and speeches have been of greater value to his innumerable readers and hearers than was his administrative diligence to the Parish of St. Pancras. [31] "Fabianism and the Empire," p. 26. [32] "The Fabian Society and the War: reply by the majority of the Executive Committee to the recent circular." (Circular on the referendum mentioned later.) Chapter VIII Education: 1902-5, and the Labour Party: 1900-15 Housing--"The Education muddle and the way out"--Supporting the Conservatives--The Education Acts of 1902 and 1903--Feeding School Children--The Labour Representation Committee formed--The Fabian Election Fund--Will Crooks elected in 1910--A Fabian Cabinet Minister--Resignation of Graham Wallas--The younger generation: H.W. Macrosty, J.F. Oakeshott, John W. Martin--Municipal Drink Trade--Tariff Reform--The Decline of the Birth-rate. The controversy described in the preceding chapter was not the only business that occupied the Society at the period of the South African War. Amongst minor affairs was a change of premises. The office first taken, in 1891, was at 276 Strand, in the island at that time formed by Holywell Street which ran between the churches of St. Clement Danes and St. Martin's in the Fields. At the end of 1899 the London County Council acquired the property for the Kingsway and Aldwych clearance scheme, and we found new quarters in a basement at Clement's Inn, a pleasant couple of rooms, with plenty of light, though sometimes maliciously misdescribed as a cellar. At the end of 1908 we removed into three much more spacious rooms at the same address, also in "a dismal basement," where we remained until in 1914 the Society rented a house at 25 Tothill Street, Westminster. Another undertaking was a conference on Housing. Although the first public effort of the Society was its conference at South Place Chapel in 1886, this particular form of propaganda has never commended itself to the Executive, chiefly no doubt because conferences, to which numerous representative persons are invited, are most useful for promoting moderate reforms which have already made themselves acceptable to the members and officials of local governing bodies. Such reforms the Fabian Society does not regard as its special business; it prefers to pioneer; it is true that it uses its machinery for spreading a knowledge of local government in all its forms, but that is mainly a matter of office routine. However, for once we took up an already popular proposal. The Housing of the Working Classes Act of 1890 was an admirable measure, but it was hedged about with obstacles which rendered it very difficult to work in urban areas and virtually useless in rural districts. We had drafted an amending Bill for rural districts in 1895, which was read a first time in the House of Commons on the day of the vote on the supply of cordite, when the defeat of the Liberal Government led to the dissolution of Parliament. The Act of 1890 was singular in one respect. Part III was headed "Working-Class Lodging Houses," and was drafted accordingly, but the definition of lodging-houses was made to include cottages with not more than half an acre of garden, thus enabling houses to be provided by local authorities in town and country, apart from clearances of insanitary areas. For years this definition was overlooked, and very few people were aware that cottages could be built in rural districts by the Guardians, and later by Rural District Councils. Our Leaflet No. 63, "Parish Council Cottages," issued in 1895, was almost the first publication drawing attention to the subject, and with one exception no use was made of these powers of the Act in rural districts before that year. Our Tract 76, "Houses for the People," published in 1897, explained the Act in simple language, and was widely circulated. In 1900 an amending Act, chiefly to simplify procedure in rural districts, was promised by the Government; and the conference we called was intended to agitate for widening its scope and strengthening its provisions. The papers, read by Clement Edwards (afterwards M.P.), Miss Constance Cochrane, Alderman Thompson, and others, were first discussed at a preliminary private meeting in December, and then submitted to the Conference, which was held on March 1st, the day following the Conference at which the Labour Party was established. By choosing this date we secured a large number of delegates from Trade Unions, and these were reinforced by numerous delegates from Vestries and other local authorities, altogether numbering about 400. At the close of the proceedings a National Committee was formed with headquarters at the Fabian Office, which had however only a short career. The Conference papers were printed as a bulky penny tract, "The House Famine and How to Relieve It," which rapidly went through two editions. We also published "Cottage Plans and Common Sense," by Raymond Unwin, which describes how cottages should be built--an anticipation of garden suburbs and town-planning--and a compilation of everything which Parish Councils had done and could do, including housing, prepared by Sidney Webb and called "Five Years' Fruits of the Parish Councils Act," which in 1908 was revised and reissued as "Parish Councils and Village Life." A speech by W.C. Steadman, M.P., who was a member of the Society, was printed under the title "Overcrowding and Its Remedy." Our agitation was not without results. The amending Acts of 1900, 1903, and 1909 have done much to remove the unnecessary administrative complexities of the Act of 1890, but in fact the problem is still unsolved, and the scandalous character of our housing, both urban and rural, remains perhaps the blackest blot in the record of British civilisation. * * * * * The Society had always been concerned in public education. Its first electoral success was when Mrs. Besant and the Rev. Stewart Headlam were elected to the London School Board in 1888, and except for one interval of three years Mr. Headlam has sat on the School Board and its successor, the London County Council, ever since. Sidney Webb was Chairman or Vice-Chairman of the L.C.C. Technical Education Board from its foundation in 1893, almost continuously until the Board came to an end in 1904, after the London Education Act. Graham Wallas was elected to the School Board in 1894, and from 1897 onwards was Chairman of the School Management Committee; he had been re-elected in 1900, and was therefore filling the most important administrative position on the Board when the Education question was before the Society. The educational scheme of the Society was not, however, the joint production of its experts. It was entirely the work of Sidney Webb. Headlam and Wallas, and the members who took part, contributed their share as critics, but as critics only, and for the most part as hostile critics. It was in part a struggle between the County Councils and the School Boards and in part a controversy over the denominational schools. Wallas opposed our proposals in the main because he regarded them as too favourable to sectarian education: Headlam was against them on both issues. They put up a vigorous fight, but they were beaten every time in the Society, as the defenders of School Boards were beaten ultimately in Parliament and in the country. The first step in the controversy was taken in May, 1899, when a Members' Meeting was held to discuss "The Education Muddle and the Way Out," in the form of sixteen resolutions, six on "General Principles" and the remainder on "Immediate Practicable Proposals." These were introduced by Webb, and the "General Principles," advocating the transfer of education to the local government authority and the abolition of School Boards, were adopted. Amendments by Graham Wallas were defeated by large majorities, and the discussion on the second part, the immediately practicable proposals, was adjourned. At the adjourned meeting in November, 1899, the resolutions were put aside and a draft tract was submitted. Graham Wallas again led the opposition, which was always unsuccessful, though serious shortcomings in the proposals were revealed and it was agreed to meet the criticisms wherever possible. Finally it was decided to appoint a Revision Committee, on which Wallas was placed. Thirteen months passed before the scheme came before the Society again; in December the tract as amended was submitted, and this time the chief critic was Mr. Headlam. On the main question of principle he found only one supporter, and with minor amendments the scheme was adopted. It is unnecessary to describe the Fabian plan, because it is substantially the system of administration, established by the Act of 1902, under which present-day education is organised. The main difference is that we presented a revolutionary proposal in an extremely moderate form and Mr. Arthur Balfour found himself able to carry out our principles more thoroughly than we thought practically possible. Our tract advocated the abolition of all School Boards, but anticipated, incorrectly, that those of the twenty or thirty largest cities would be too strong to be destroyed: and whilst insisting that the public must find all the money required to keep the voluntary schools in full efficiency, we only proposed that this should take the form of a large grant by County Councils and County Boroughs, whilst Mr. Balfour was able to make the Councils shoulder the cost. How far the draughtsmen of the Bill were influenced by the Fabian scheme cannot here be estimated, but the authorities at Whitehall were so anxious to see it that they were supplied with proofs before publication; and the tract when published was greedily devoured by perplexed M.P.'s. It must be recollected that the whole complex machinery of educational administration was in the melting-pot, and nobody knew what was to come out of it. It had been assumed by nearly everybody that education was a department of local government which demanded for its management a special class of representatives. The Liberal Party was attached to School Boards, because their creation had been one of the great party victories of Mr. Gladstone's greatest Government, because they embodied a triumph over the Church and the virtual establishment of nonconformity in control of half the elementary schools of the country. Socialists and the vague labour section took the same view partly because they believed theoretically in direct election for all purposes and partly because the cumulative vote, intended to secure representation to minorities, gave them better chances of success at the polls than they then had in any other local election. The Board schools, with ample funds derived from the rates, were far better than the so-called voluntary schools; but more than half the children of the nation were educated in these schools, under-staffed, ill-equipped, and on the average in all respects inefficient. Every year that passed turned out thus its quota of poorly educated children. Something had to be done at once to provide more money for these inferior schools. It might be better that they should be abolished and State schools everywhere supplied, but this was a counsel of perfection, and there was no time to wait for it. Then again the distinction between elementary education for the poor, managed by School Boards and by the voluntary school authorities, and other education controlled and subsidised by Town and County Councils, was disastrous, the more so since a recent legal decision (the Cockerton case) had restricted the limits of School Board education more narrowly than ever. All sorts of projects might have been proposed for solving these complex difficulties, projects drafted in the interests of the Church or the Nonconformists, the voluntary schools or the schools of the local authorities: but, in fact, the scheme proposed by Mr. Balfour followed almost precisely the lines laid down in our tract, which was published in January, 1901, and of which 20,000 copies were quickly circulated. At the Annual Meeting in May, 1901, a resolution was adopted, in spite of the vigorous opposition of Mr. Headlam, welcoming the Government Bill and suggesting various amendments to it. This Bill was withdrawn, to be reintroduced a year later as the Education Bill, 1902, which ultimately became law. This measure was considered at a meeting in May, 1902, and a long series of resolutions welcoming the Bill and advocating amendments on eighteen different points was carried in spite of vigorous opposition. Nearly all these amendments, the chief of which was directed to making the Bill compulsory where it was drafted as optional, were embodied in the Act. Our support of the Conservative Government in their education policy caused much surprise and attracted not a little attention. We had been suspected by other Socialists, not without excuse, of intrigues with the Liberals, and our attack on that party in 1893 was made exclusively in the interests of Labour. Now when Liberals and Labour were united in denouncing the Government, when Nonconformists who had deserted Liberalism on the Home Rule issue were returning in thousands to their old party, the Fabians, alone amongst progressives (except of course the Irish, who were keen to save the Roman Catholic schools), supported the Government in what was popularly regarded as a reactionary policy. Time has vindicated our judgment. The theological squabbles which occupied so much of the energies of the School Boards are now forgotten because the rival sects are no longer represented on the Education Authorities, that is, the town and county councils. Education has been secularised in the sense that it is no longer governed by clerics, and though some Liberals now desire to carry Mr. Balfour's policy still further, the Liberal Party in its ten years of office has never been able to affect any further change. The Act of 1902 did not apply to London, and in the great province ruled by its County Council the case for maintaining the separate existence of the School Board was stronger than anywhere else. The London County Council itself was unwilling to undertake elementary education, and the School Board, like all other bodies in such circumstances, vehemently objected to its own dissolution. The Board was efficient; its schools were excellent; there was no evidence that the already overburdened County Council could properly carry on the work. On the other hand, the Fabian Society was in a stronger position. The Chairman of the Technical Education Board was something more than a self-constituted authority on the organisation of education: and the other members of the Society were engaged on a contest on their home ground. Into the details of the resolutions submitted to the Fabian Society outlining a plan for London education it is needless now to enter, except to say that Graham Wallas on this issue supported, without enthusiasm, the policy of the Society. Mr. Balfour made no fewer than three attempts to solve the problem, each time approaching more nearly to the plan prepared by the Fabian Society. On the third and eventually successful Bill thirteen amendments were formulated by the Society, eleven of which were adopted by the House of Commons, and finally, to quote our Annual Report, "the Act only departed from our plan by giving to the Borough Councils the appointment of two-thirds of the managers of provided schools, while we desired the proportion to be one-half, and omitting a proposal that the Education Authority should have compulsory powers to acquire sites for schools other than elementary." On the County Council itself, which was strongly opposed to the Bill, Mr. Webb conducted a skilful and successful campaign to defeat a policy of passive resistance which might have led to endless difficulties. But that is outside the history of the Fabian Society. It should be added that the Society did not content itself with merely passing resolutions. All these documents were printed by thousands and posted to members of Parliament and of education authorities up and down the country: our members incessantly lectured and debated at Liberal Associations and Clubs, and indefatigably worked the London and Provincial presses; none of the resources of skilful propagandists was neglected which might shake the opposition to the Bills, or convince some of the Liberal and Labour opponents that for once at any rate a good thing might come from the Conservative Party. The transfer of the control of all elementary schools to the local authorities rendered at last possible the public feeding of school children, long before advocated by the Social Democratic Federation. This had hitherto been regarded by the Fabian Society as impracticable; though an eloquent and often quoted passage in Graham Wallas's contribution to "Fabian Essays" describes the schools of the future with "associated meals [served] on tables spread with flowers, in halls surrounded with beautiful pictures, or even, as John Milton proposed, filled with the sound of music." Our contribution towards this ideal was Tract No. 120, "After Bread Education: a Plan for the State Feeding of School Children," published in 1905, one of the few tracts for which Hubert Bland was largely responsible, which advocated a reform carried into law a year later. * * * * * In 1893, and even before, the Fabian Society had urged the Trade Unionists to form a Labour Party of their own, and earlier in the same year the Independent Labour Party had been founded which was originally intended to achieve the object indicated by its name, but which quickly became a purely Socialist society. It carried on a vigorous and successful propaganda amongst Trade Unionists, with the result that in 1899 the Trade Union Congress passed a resolution directing its Parliamentary Committee, in co-operation with the Socialist Societies, to call a conference in order "to devise ways and means for securing an increased number of Labour members in the next Parliament." In accordance with this resolution the Society was invited to appoint two representatives to meet the delegates of the Parliamentary Committee and of the two other Socialist organisations. Bernard Shaw and myself were appointed, and we took part in the business of arranging for the Conference. This was held on the last two days of February, 1900, and I was appointed the one delegate to which the Society was by its numbers entitled. The "Labour Representation Committee" was duly formed, and it was decided that the Executive Committee of twelve should include one elected by the Fabian Society. This Committee was constituted then and there, and, as "Fabian News" reports, "Edward R. Pease provisionally appointed himself, as the only Fabian delegate, to be on the Executive Committee, and the Executive Committee has since confirmed the appointment." This little comedy was carried on for some years. The Fabian Society was only entitled to send one delegate to the annual conference, but that delegate had the right of electing one member to the Executive Committee, and I was appointed by my Committee to serve in both capacities. But the incident embodies a moral. The Trade Unionists on the Committee represented in the earlier years about 100,000 members each: I then represented some 700. But although it was often proposed to amend the constitution by giving every vote an equal value, the Trade Union leaders always defended the over-representation of the Socialists (the I.L.P. were also over-represented, though their case was not so extreme) partly because the Labour Representation Committee was founded as a federation of Socialists and Trade Unionists, and partly because Socialist Societies, consisting exclusively of persons keenly concerned in politics, were entitled to larger representation per head of membership than Unions which were primarily non-political. But when we remember how attractive to the average man are broad generalisations like "one vote one value," and how plausible a case could be made out against discrimination in favour of Socialist Societies, it has always seemed to me a remarkable example of the practical common sense of organised labour that the old constitution has been preserved, in fact though not precisely in form, to the present day. By the present constitution the "Socialist Section" elects three members to the Executive from nominations sent in advance; but as the I.L.P. always makes two nominations, and the Fabian Society one, the alteration of the rule has not in fact made any change, and the over-representation of this section is of course undiminished. Six months after the Labour Representation Committee was formed the Society adopted a project drafted by Mr. S.G. Hobson for a Labour Members' Guarantee Fund, and circulated it amongst the Unions affiliated to the Committee. The proposal was submitted by its author on behalf of the Society to the Labour Representation Conference of 1901, but an amendment both approving of the scheme and declaring that the time was not ripe for it was carried. A year later however the Conference unanimously agreed to establish its Parliamentary Fund by which salaries for their M.P.'s were provided until Parliament itself undertook the business. For several years after this the Fabian Society did not greatly concern itself with the Labour Party. I attended the Annual Conferences and took a regular part in the work of the Executive Committee, but my colleagues of the Fabian Society as a whole showed little interest in the new body. In a sense, it was not in our line. Its object was to promote Labour Representation in Parliament, and the Fabian Society had never run, and had never intended to run, candidates for Parliament or for any local authority. We had made appeals for election funds on a good many occasions and had succeeded once or twice in collecting substantial sums, but this was a very different matter from accepting responsibility for a candidate and his election expenses. Therefore, for a good while, we remained in a position of benevolent passivity. The Labour Representation Committee was founded as a Group, not as a Party, and one of the two members elected under its auspices at the General Election of 1900 ran as a Liberal. In 1903 it transformed itself into a Party, and then began the somewhat strange anomaly that the Fabian Society as a whole was affiliated to the Labour Party, whilst some of its members were Liberal Members of Parliament. It is true that the Trade Unions affiliated to the party were in the same position: their members also were sometimes official Liberals and even Liberal M.P.'s. The Labour Party itself never complained of the anomaly in the position of the Society or questioned its collective loyalty. And the Liberals in our Society never took any action hostile to the Labour Party, or indeed, so far as I know, supported any of the proposals occasionally made that we should disaffiliate from it. These proposals always came from "Fabian reformers," the younger men who wanted to create a revolution in the Society. And so little was their policy matured that in several cases the same member first tried to get the Society to expel all members who worked with any party other than the Labour Party, and a short time later moved that the Society should leave the Labour Party altogether. Or perhaps it was the other way round. Logical consistency is usually incompatible with political success: compromise runs smooth, whilst principle jams. But the lesser sort of critic, on the look out for a grievance, can always apply a principle to a compromise, point out that it does not fit, and that difficulties may arise. In the case in question they have in fact rarely arisen, and such as have occurred have been easily surmounted. It is not necessary to record here all the proposals put forward from time to time that the Society should disaffiliate from the Labour Party, or on the other hand, that it should expel, directly or indirectly, all members who did not confine their political activities to co-operating with the Labour Party. It may be assumed that one or other of these proposals was made every few years after the Labour Party was constituted, and that in every case it was defeated, as a rule, by a substantial majority. The Labour Party won three remarkable victories in the period between the General Election of 1900 and that of 1906. In 1902 Mr. David Shackleton was returned unopposed for a Liberal seat, the Clitheroe Division of Lancashire; in 1903 Mr. (now the Right Hon.) Will Crooks, an old member of our Society, captured Woolwich from the Conservatives by a majority of 3229, amidst a scene of enthusiasm which none who were present will ever forget: and five months later Mr. (now the Right Hon.) Arthur Henderson, who later became a member of our Society, beat both Liberal and Tory opponents at the Barnard Castle Division of Durham. When the election campaign of 1906 began the Labour Party put fifty candidates into the field and succeeded in carrying no fewer than twenty-nine of them, whilst another joined the party after his election. Four of these were members of the Fabian Society, and in addition three Fabians were successful as Liberals, including Percy Alden, then a member of our Executive Committee. Whilst the election was in progress Mr. H.G. Wells began the Fabian reform movement which is described in the next chapter. At that time he did not bring the Labour Party into his scheme of reconstruction, but some of the members of his Committee were then ardent adherents of that party, and they persuaded his Committee to report in favour of the Society's choosing "in harmonious co-operation with other Socialist and Labour bodies, Parliamentary Candidates of its own. Constituencies for such candidates should be selected, a special election fund raised and election campaigns organised." The result was that a resolution proposed by the Executive Committee was carried early in March, 1907, directing the appointment of a Committee to report on "the best means of promoting local Socialist societies of the Fabian type with the object of increasing Socialist representation in Parliament as a party co-operating as far as possible with the Labour Party whilst remaining independent of that and of all other Parties." This, it will be observed, is a different proposition, and one which resulted in a lot of talk and nothing else. Bernard Shaw had the idea that there might be county constituencies in the South of England, where independent middle-class Socialists could win when Labour candidates had no chance. No such constituency has ever been discovered and the Fabian scheme has never even begun to be realised. In January, 1908, the Committee's Report was considered and adopted, the important item being the decision to send a circular to every member inviting promises to an election fund of at least £5,000, contributions to be spread over five years. This ultimately resulted in promises amounting to £2637--a much larger sum than the Society had ever had at its command--and with this substantial fund in prospect the Society was in a position to begin the business of electioneering. A favourable opportunity soon presented itself. A vacancy at the little town of Taunton was not to be fought by the Liberals, while the Conservative candidate, the Hon. W. (now Viscount) Peel, was a London County Councillor, bitterly opposed even to the mild collectivism of the London Progressives, Frank Smith, a member both of the Society and the London County Council, was willing to fight, the Labour Party Executive cordially approved, and the members promptly paid up the first instalment of their promises. The election cost £316, of which the Society paid £275, and although our candidate was beaten by 1976 votes to 1085, the result was not contrary to our anticipations. During 1909 the Executive Committee resolved to run two candidates, both already nominated by the I.L.P., who willingly transferred to us the responsibility for their election expenses. W. Stephen Sanders had been third on the poll out of six candidates who fought in 1906 for the two seats at Portsmouth, and as he had polled 8172 votes, more than either Conservative, it was reasonably hoped that the Liberals would leave one of the seats to him. Harry Snell at Huddersfield was opposing both parties, but had a fair chance of winning. At the General Election of January, 1910, neither of these candidates was successful, Sanders, opposed by Lord Charles Beresford with an irresistible shipbuilding programme, only obtaining 3529 votes, whilst at Huddersfield Snell was second on the poll, but 1472 behind the Liberal. Elsewhere, however, the members of the Society did well, no less than eight securing seats, four for the Labour Party and four as Liberals. In December, 1910, we won our first electoral victory. Will Crooks had lost his seat at Woolwich in January by 295 votes. It was decided to take over his candidature from the Coopers' Union, a very small society which only nominally financed it, and also to support Harry Snell again at Huddersfield. Will Crooks was victorious by 236 votes, but Harry Snell failed to reduce the Liberal majority. Elsewhere members of the Society were very successful. In all eight secured seats for the Labour Party and four for the Liberals, amongst the latter Mr. (now Sir) L.G. Chiozza Money, then a member of the Executive Committee. This brings the electoral record of the Society up to the present time, except that it should be mentioned that Mr. Arthur Henderson, M.P., who became a member of the Society in 1912, was in 1915 both Secretary of the Labour Party Executive and Chairman of the party in the House of Commons, until he relinquished the latter position on joining the Coalition Cabinet as Minister for Education, being thus actually the first member of a Socialist society to attain Cabinet rank in this country during his membership. During these later years the Fabian Society with its increased numbers was entitled to several delegates at the annual conference of the Labour Party, and it frequently took part in the business by putting motions or amendments on the agenda paper. All talk of forming a Fabian Socialist Party had died away, and the Executive Committee had shown itself far more appreciative of the importance of the Labour Party than in earlier years. I continued to represent the Society on the Executive Committee until the end of 1913, when I retired, and the new General Secretary, W. Stephen Sanders, took my place. When in December, 1915, he accepted a commission for the period of the war, as a recruiting officer, Sidney Webb was appointed to fill the vacancy. * * * * * The account of the part taken by the Society in the work of the Labour Party has carried us far beyond the period previously described, and a short space must now be devoted to the years which intervened between the Education episode and the outburst of activity to be described in the next chapter. Social progress advances in waves, and outbursts of energy are always succeeded by depressions. Up to 1899 the Society slowly grew in membership until this reached 861. Then it slowly declined to 730 in 1904. This was symptomatic of a general lack of interest in Socialism. The lectures and meetings were poorly attended, and the really important debates which decided our educational policy were conducted by only a few dozen members. Twenty years had passed since the Society was founded. Of the Essayists Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, Hubert Bland, and when in England, Sydney Olivier were still leaders of the Society, and so until January, 1904, was Graham Wallas, who then resigned his membership on account of his disagreement with the tract on Tariff Reform, but really, as his letter published in "Fabian News" indicated, because in the long controversy over education policy he had found himself constantly in the position of a hostile critic. It should be added that his resignation has been followed by none of those personal and political disagreements which so commonly accompany the severance of old associations. Mr. Wallas has remained a Fabian in all except name. His friendship with his old colleagues has been unbroken, and he has always been willing to assist the Society out of his abundant stores of special knowledge both by lecturing at its meetings and by taking part in conferences and even by attending quite small meetings of special groups. In all these years a large number of younger members had come forward, none of them of quite the same calibre as the Essayists, but many of them contributing much to the sum total of the Society's influence. Of these perhaps the most active was Henry W. Macrosty,[33] who sat on the Executive from 1895 till 1907, when he retired on account of the pressure of official duties. During and indeed before his period of office Mr. Macrosty was constantly engaged in research and writing for the Society. He prepared the Eight Hours Bill which approached nearest to practicability (Tract 48, "Eight Hours by Law," 1893); in 1898 he wrote for the Society "State Arbitration and the Living Wage" (Tract 83); in 1899, Tract 88, "The Growth of Monopoly in English Industry"; in 1905 "The Revival of Agriculture, a national policy for Great Britain," the last named an extraordinarily farsighted anticipation of the chief reforms which were advocated with such vigour by the Liberal Party, and indeed by all parties in the years preceding the great war. In the same year his "State Control of Trusts" was published as Tract 124. As I have before explained, a great part of the published work of the Society has been prepared co-operatively, and in this process Mr. Macrosty always took an active part. He had a considerable share in drafting the innumerable documents issued in connection with the education controversy, and indeed participated in all the activities of the Executive until his retirement. Scarcely less active was Joseph F. Oakeshott, who has been already mentioned in connection with the Fellowship of the New Life. He joined the Executive when it was first enlarged in 1890, and sat until 1902. A Somerset House official, like Macrosty, he was strong on statistics, and for many years he undertook the constant revisions of the figures of national income, in the various editions of our "Facts for Socialists," His "Democratic Budget" (Tract 39) was our first attempt to apply Socialism to taxation: and his "Humanising of the Poor Law" (Tract 54), published in 1894, set out the policy which in recent years has been widely adopted by the better Boards of Guardians. John W. Martin sat on the Executive from 1894 to 1899, wrote Tract No. 52, "State Education at Home and Abroad" (1894), and did a lot of valuable lecturing, both here and in America, where he married the leading exponent of Fabianism and editor of a monthly called "The American Fabian," and, settling in New York, has since, under the name of John Martin, played a considerable part in the educational and progressive politics of his adopted city. * * * * * I will conclude this chapter with a short account of some of the applications of Socialism to particular problems which were studied by the Society in or about this period of its history. In 1897 and 1898 a good deal of time was devoted to working out a scheme for the municipalisation of the Drink Trade. This was before the publication of "The Temperance Problem and Social Reform," by Joseph Rowntree and Arthur Sherwell, in 1899, a volume which was the first to treat the subject scientifically on a large scale. I took the lead on the question, and finally two tracts were published in 1898, "Liquor Licensing at Home and Abroad" (No. 85), giving a sketch of the facts, and "Municipal Drink Traffic" (No. 86), which set out a scheme drafted by me, but substantially modified as the result of discussions by the Executive Committee and by meetings of members. This is one of the few causes taken up by the Society which has made but little progress in popular favour in the seventeen years that have elapsed since we adopted it. Old Age Pensions, proposed in 1890 by Sidney Webb in Tract 17, "Reform of the Poor Law," was definitely advocated in Tract No. 73, "The Case for State Pensions in Old Age," written in 1896 by George Turner, one of the cleverest of the younger members. The Society did not make itself responsible for the scheme he proposed, universal pensions for all, and the Old Age Pensions Act of 1908 adopted another plan. In 1899 and 1900 we devoted much time to the working out of further schemes of municipalisation in the form of a series of leaflets, Nos. 90 to 97. We applied the principle to Milk, Pawnshops, Slaughterhouses, Bakeries, Fire Insurance, and Steamboats. These were written by various members, and are all careful little studies of the subject, but they were not issued in a convenient form, and none of the schemes advocated has yet been generally carried out. * * * * * The Tariff Reform agitation could not pass unnoticed, and for a time Bernard Shaw showed a certain inclination to toy with it. A tract advocating Free Trade was actually set up, but got no further. Finally Shaw drafted "Fabianism and the Fiscal Question An Alternative Policy" (Tract 116), which we adopted with practical unanimity, though it was the occasion of the resignation of Graham Wallas. It was perhaps the least successful of the many pronouncements written by Bernard Shaw on behalf of the Society. A subtle and argumentative criticism of Mr. Chamberlain's policy on one side and of the Free Trade rejoinder on the other is neither simple nor decisive enough for the general reader: and the alternatives advocated--reorganisation of the consular service in the interests of export trade, free ocean transit for the purpose of consolidating the Empire and nationalisation of railways as a necessary corollary together with improved technical education--were too futurist, and appealed directly to too small and conservative a class, to attract much attention in the heat of a vital controversy. The writer had no anticipation of the triumph of Liberalism, then so near, and Evidently expected that Mr. Chamberlain would carry the country for his policy. The tract was also issued in a shilling edition on superior paper with a preface by the author, and it is the only one of his publications which has failed to sell freely. * * * * * At this period we had a number of Committees appointed to investigate various problems, and one of them, which had for its reference the Birth-rate and Infant Mortality, produced a report of more that temporary significance. When the Society was formed the Malthusian hypothesis held the field unchallenged and the stock argument against Socialism was that it would lead to universal misery by removing the beneficent checks on the growth of population, imposed by starvation and disease upon the lowest stratum of society. Since the year 1876 the birth-rate had declined, and gradually the fear of over-population, which had saddened the lives of such men as John Stuart Mill, began to give way to the much less terrifying but still substantial fear of under-population, caused either by race degeneracy or race suicide. At that period the former of the two was the accepted explanation, and only by vague hints did scientific statisticians indicate that there might be or perhaps must be something else than "natural" causes for the decline. To the Society it seemed an all-important question. Was our race to perish by sterility, and if so, was sterility due to wealth and luxury or to poverty and disease? Or was the cause of the decline a voluntary limitation of families? We determined, as a first step, to form some sort of statistical estimate of the extent of voluntary restriction. We thought, and, as the event proved, thought rightly, that our members would be willing to assist us in this delicate enquiry. They were a sample of the population, selected in a manner which bore no sort of relation to the question at issue, and if we could get returns from them indicating their personal practice in the matter, we might have some clue to the facts. It turned out that the result was far more startling and far more conclusive than we suspected. In November, 1905, carefully drafted enquiry forms were sent out to all members of the Society except unmarried women, so arranged as to allow exact answers to be given to the questions without disclosure of the name or handwriting of the deponent. Of the 634 posted 460 were returned or accounted for, and only two members signified objection to the enquiry. After deduction of bachelors and others not relevant, we obtained particulars of 316 marriages. I prepared an elaborate statistical report, which showed that in the period 1890-1899 out of 120 marriages only 6 fertile marriages were recorded in which no restriction had been adopted. This was the first and possibly is the only statistical enquiry yet made on the subject, and although the number of cases was minute in proportion to the population, the evidence afforded by that sample was sufficient to be conclusive, that at any rate a cause, and probably the chief cause, of the fall in the birth-rate was voluntary limitation of families. The method of publication presented some difficulty, and finally it was decided, in order to secure the most generally impressive publicity, to ask Sidney Webb to collect the other available evidence and to make an article out of the whole, to be published over his name. It appeared as two special articles in "The Times" for October 11th and 18th, 1906, and was subsequently reprinted by us as Tract 131, "The Decline of the Birth-rate." Other Committees at this period discussed Agriculture, Poor Law, Local Government Areas, Public Control of Electricity, and Feeding of School Children. Reports on all these subjects were issued as tracts, some of which have been mentioned already in connection with their authors, H.W. Macrosty and Hubert Bland, whilst others will be referred to in a future chapter. [Illustration: _From a copyright photograph by Lambert Weston and Son, Folkestone_ H.G. WELLS, IN 1908 At the door of his house at Sandgate] FOOTNOTES: [33] Born 1865. Clerk in the Exchequer and Audit Dept. 1884, Assistant Director of the Census of Production 1908. Author of "Trusts and the State" (1901) and "The Trust Movement in British Industry" (1907). Chapter IX The Episode of Mr. Wells: 1906-8 His lecture on administrative areas--"Faults of the Fabian"--The Enquiry Committee--The Report, and the Reply--The real issue, Wells v. Shaw--The women intervene--The Basis altered--The new Executive--Mr. Wells withdraws--His work for Socialism--The writing of Fabian Tracts. The long controversy introduced by Mr. H.G. Wells attracted much public attention to the Fabian Society, added greatly to its numbers, and for a time made it more of a popular institution than it had been before or has been since. But, in fact, its main permanent interest arises from the persons who played the leading parts. The real question at issue was one neither of Socialist theory nor of Socialist policy. In so far as these entered in, Mr. Wells preached to willing listeners, and the only difference of opinion was as to the relative stress to be laid on particular points. When the episode was over, the chief change made in Fabian policy was one which Mr. Wells did not initiate, and which as soon as it was actually adopted he virtually repudiated.[34] The substance of the controversy was whether the members desired to hand over their Society to be managed by Mr. Wells alone, or whether they preferred to retain their old leaders and only to accept Mr. Wells as one amongst the rest. Mr. Wells became a member in February, 1903, and in March gave his first lecture to the Society on a very technical subject, "The Question of Scientific Administrative Areas in Relation to Municipal Undertakings," a paper subsequently published as an appendix to "Mankind in the Making." It was probably his first appearance on a public platform; and as a lecture it was by no means a success, because he read his paper in a low monotonous voice, addressed to a corner of the hall. If Mr. Wells had been by nature or practice as effective in speaking as he is in writing the fate of the Fabian Society might have been different. He was severely handicapped in his contest with the skilled debaters of the "Old Gang," and though after a short time he learnt the art up to a point, he was never really at home on a platform, and since the Fabian episode he has confined himself for the most part to controversy in writing. The next contribution of Mr. Wells to Fabian propaganda was on January 12th, 1906. This date had been fixed for his paper next referred to, but in view of the General Election then in progress he read in its place his admirable article entitled "This Misery of Boots," which was subsequently issued as a special Fabian publication. On February 9th the great controversy began by the paper entitled "Faults of the Fabian," read by Mr. Wells to a members' meeting, and subsequently issued as a private document to all the members of the Society. It was couched altogether in a friendly tone, expressed cordial appreciation of the record of the Society, but criticised it for lack of imaginative megalomania. It was "still half a drawing-room society," lodged in "an underground apartment," or "cellar," with one secretary and one assistant. "The first of the faults of the Fabian, then, is that it is small, and the second that strikes me is that, even for its smallness, it is needlessly poor." The task undertaken by the Fabians "is nothing less than the alteration of the economic basis of society. Measure with your eye this little meeting, this little hall: look at that little stall of not very powerful tracts: think of the scattered members, one here, one there.... Then go out into the Strand. Note the size of the buildings and business places, note the glare of the advertisements, note the abundance of traffic and the multitude of people.... That is the world whose very foundations you are attempting to change. How does this little dribble of activities look then?" The paper goes on to complain that the Society did not advertise itself, made the election of new members difficult, and maintained a Basis "ill-written and old-fashioned, harsh and bad in tone, assertive and unwise." The self-effacive habits and insidious methods of the Society were next criticised, and the writer exclaimed, "Make Socialists and you will achieve Socialism; there is no other plan." The history of the Fabian motto was made use of to enforce the view that victory can only be gained by straight fighters like Scipio, whilst Fabius, however successful at first, ended his career as a stumbling-block to progress. To effect the desired expansion the writer proposed to raise an income of £1000 a year, to increase the staff, to prepare literature for the conversion of unbelievers, and to get a number of young men and women, some paid and some unpaid, to carry on the propaganda and the administrative work. "Unless I am the most unsubstantial of dreamers, such a propaganda as I am now putting before you ought to carry our numbers up towards ten thousand within a year or so of its commencement." At the close of the meeting it was unanimously agreed "that the Executive Committee be instructed to appoint a Committee consisting of members and non-members of the Executive to consider what measures should be taken to increase the scope, influence, income, and activity of the Society." Further, a temporary amendment was made to the rules deferring the Annual Meeting and Executive election until after the Committee had reported. "The Executive Committee," says "Fabian News," "was of opinion that a large Committee including both the Executive and an equal number of unofficial members should be appointed. But as Mr. Wells, the author of the proposal, was resolutely opposed to this plan, the Executive decided that in the circumstances it was best to fall in with his wishes, and they accordingly appointed only those members, both Executive and other, whom Mr. Wells nominated and who were willing to serve." The Committee thus appointed consisted of the Rev. Stewart Headlam, Mrs. Bernard Shaw, and G.R.S. Taylor of the Executive; Dr. Stanton Coit, W.A. Colegate, Dr. Haden Guest, Sydney Olivier, Mrs. Pember Reeves, H.G. Wells, and Mrs. Wells. The Committee held its first sitting on February 28th, but its report was not completed and presented to the Executive until the following October, Mr. Wells having in the interval visited the United States. "Faults of the Fabian," written before the election of 1906, gave little indication that its author anticipated the sudden outburst of interest in Socialism which followed the astonishing success of the Labour Party at the polls. When Keir Hardie was chosen as leader of the party, it was recognised that Socialism was no longer the creed of a few fanatics, but a political force supported, actively or passively, by the great organisations of Labour throughout the country, able to fight, and sometimes to beat both the older parties. A new era in politics had begun. The Tories had been defeated before by Mr. Gladstone's unrivalled personality. Now they were defeated, as they had not been for three-quarters of a century, by a party none of whose leaders possessed an outstanding personality, and by a programme which contained no item with any popular appeal. Everybody was thinking and talking politics; every political conversation began or ended with that unknown factor, the new Labour Party; every discussion of the Labour Party involved a discussion of Socialism. Perhaps Mr. Wells with the intuition of genius in fact foresaw what was about to happen: perhaps it was only chance. Anyway his proposal for an enlarged and invigorated society came at the precise moment, when the realisation of his project was in fact possible; and, of course, his own vigorous and interesting personality attracted many to us who might have moved in other directions, or indeed never have moved at all. The inner history of the Wells Committee has never been revealed, but the composition of the Committee indicates the probable truth of the rumours that the meetings were anything but dull, though in the end the Committee arrived at an unanimous report. Sydney Olivier was one of the "old gang," though at that time a vigorous supporter of all sorts of changes. Mr. Headlam has always stood at the extreme right of the movement, and in party politics has never abated his loyalty to Liberalism. Mr. G.R.S. Taylor and Dr. Haden Guest were at that time eager adherents of the Labour Party, and Dr. Coit, who had just fought an election for the Party, no doubt took the same line. Mrs. Shaw by habit and Mrs. Reeves by instinct belonged to the government rather than to the opposition: and Mr. Colegate, a judicious person, then quite young, doubtless inclined to the same side. Last but not least, Mr. Wells himself, then as always mercurial in his opinions, but none the less intensely opinionated, and unable to believe that anybody could honestly differ from him, was by himself sufficient to disturb the harmony of any committee. Mrs. Wells acted as secretary, and the Committee took evidence from myself and others before the report was drawn up. The Report of the Committee is a much less inspiring document than the irresponsible and entertaining "Faults of the Fabian." It was largely concerned with a number of administrative details. New books and "short readable tracts" were to be written, and the format of our publications was to be changed. Groups were to be revived in all localities (to be called "Wandsworth 1, Wandsworth 2, Wandsworth 3," and so on), together with Head-quarters groups, also numbered 1, 2, 3, etc. This perhaps is the chief remaining trace of the megalomania of the original scheme, and is hidden away in an appendix: all our efforts never yielded Wandsworth No. 1, let alone the others! A fixed minimum subscription payable on a fixed date and a list of subscriptions to be published annually were further suggestions. The rule of the Society had been and is to the contrary in both particulars. "Fabian News" was to be enlarged into a weekly review addressed to the public, a change which would have required an editorial staff and extensive new offices. A publications editor was to be appointed who would be able to publish, or to arrange for the publication of, such books as Mr. Wells' "A Modern Utopia" and Mr. Money's "Riches and Poverty." The Basis of the Society was to be rewritten, its name changed to the British Socialist Party--a title since adopted by the old Social Democratic Federation--the Executive Committee was to be replaced by a Council of twenty-five, which was to appoint three Committees of three members each for Publishing, for Propaganda, and General Purposes respectively. The last, to be entitled the Directing Committee, was to meet frequently and manage most of the affairs of the Society. Finally, "in harmonious co-operation with other Socialist and Labour bodies," the Society was to run candidates for Parliament and raise a fund for the purpose. It will be seen that some of these proposals were merely speculative. Groups could be organised easily enough when the members in any district numbered hundreds instead of units, or, at best, dozens. New tracts could be published when they were written: a weekly review was possible if the capital was provided. The new Basis and the new name were matters of emphasis and taste rather than anything else. The new machinery of government was in the main a question to be decided by experience. Mr. Wells had none; it is said that he never sat on a Committee before that under discussion, and certainly while he remained a Fabian he never acquired the Committee habit. On the principle underlying some of these proposals, viz. that the Society should cease to treat membership as a privilege, and should aim at increasing its numbers, there was no serious controversy. The Executive Committee had already carried through a suggestion made in the discussion on "Faults of the Fabian" for the creation of a class of Associates, entitled to all privileges except control over policy, with a view to provide a means of attracting new adherents. The one constructive proposal, direct collective participation in Parliamentary Elections, was quite alien to Mr. Wells' original ideas; it was forced on him, it is said, by other members of his Committee and was described by himself later on as "secondary and subordinate."[35] The Executive Committee transmitted the Special Committee's Report to the members of the Society accompanied by a Report of their own, drafted by Bernard Shaw and incomparably superior to the other as a piece of literature.[36] The reply of the Executive Committee began by welcoming criticism from within the Society, of which they complained that in the past they had had too little. An opposition, they said, was a requisite of good government. They were prepared to welcome expansion, but they pointed out that the handsome offices proposed must be produced by the large income and not the income by the handsome offices. A publishing business on the scale suggested could not be undertaken by an unincorporated society; moreover, at present the Society had not sufficient income to pay its officials at the market rate, or to keep out of debt to its printer. They agreed that the Executive Committee should be enlarged, but recommended twenty-one instead of twenty-five members; and that the three proposed sub-committees be appointed, but of seven members each instead of three. The project of triumvirates they could not endorse, both for other reasons and because all the leading members of the Society refused to serve on them, while the essence of the scheme was that the triumvirs should be the most influential members of the Society. The abolition of the old-fashioned restrictions on admission to membership was approved, but not the proposal for a fixed subscription payable on an appointed date. The Executive Committee did not object to the proposed new Basis as a whole (and in fact it is on record that its adoption by the Executive was only lost by 7 votes to 6); but considered that passages were open to criticism and that the time and effort necessary for carrying through any new Basis, so worded as to unite practically the whole Society, would be better spent in other ways. A Socialist weekly would be valuable, but it would not replace "Fabian News," which was required for the internal purposes of the Society, and capable journalists like Mr. Wells himself preferred the publicity of the "Fortnightly Review" and "The Times," to the "Clarion" and the "Labour Leader." The Reply goes at great length into the difficulty of forming a Socialist Party, and into the composition and policy of the Labour Party, all admirably argued, but just a little unreal; for Bernard Shaw has never quite understood the Labour Party which he did so much to create, and at the same time he is thoroughly convinced that he sees it as it is, in the white light of his genius. Permeation is described, explained, and defended--the Special Committee had suggested rather than proposed, in scarcely more than a sentence, that the policy be abandoned--and it is announced that as long as the Executive was unchanged there would be no reversal of the political policy of the Society. Finally the Reply asserts that the time had come to attempt the formation of a middle-class Socialist Party. At the end three resolutions were set out, which the Executive submitted to the Society for discussion. How much of personality, how little of principle there was in the great controversy is indicated by the fact that Mrs. Bernard Shaw signed the Special Committee Report, with the reservation that she also completely agreed with the Reply. Mr. Headlam also was a party to both documents: Mr. G.R.S. Taylor, alone of the three Executive members of the Special Committee, supported the Report and dissociated himself from the Reply. Of course the Executive Committee had to decide points in their Report by a majority. That majority, in the case of the proposed revision of the Basis, was, as already mentioned, one vote only. I did not concur with the view expressed about the Labour Party, a body scarcely less easy to be understood by an outsider than the Fabian Society itself: and at that time I was the only insider on the Fabian Executive. But the real issue was a personal one. The Executive Committee at that time consisted, in addition to the three just named, of Percy Alden (Liberal M.P. for Tottenham), Hubert Bland, Cecil E. Chesterton, Dr. F. Lawson Dodd, F.W. Galton, S.G. Hobson, H.W. Macrosty, W. Stephen Sanders, Bernard Shaw, George Standring, Sidney Webb and myself. Mr. Alden was too busy with his new parliamentary duties to take much part in the affair. All the rest, except of course Mr. Taylor, stood together on the real issue--Was the Society to be controlled by those who had made it or was it to be handed over to Mr. Wells? We knew by this time that he was a masterful person, very fond of his own way, very uncertain what that way was, and quite unaware whither it necessarily led. In any position except that of leader Mr. Wells was invaluable, as long as he kept it! As leader we felt he would be impossible, and if he had won the fight he would have justly claimed a mandate to manage the Society on the lines he had laid down. As Bernard Shaw led for the Executive, the controversy was really narrowed into Wells versus Shaw. The Report was sent to the members with "Fabian News" for December, 1906, and it was the occasion of much excitement. The Society had grown enormously during the year. The names of no less than ninety applicants for membership are printed in that month's issue alone. In March, 1907, the membership was 1267, an increase of nearly 500 in two years. The discussion was carried on at a series of meetings held at Essex Hall, Strand, under the chairmanship of Mr. H. Bond Holding, on December 7th and 14th, 1906, and January 11th and 18th, February 1st and March 8th, and also at the Annual Meeting for 1905-6, held on February 22nd, 1907. The series was interrupted for the London County Council Election on March 2nd, in which many of the members were concerned. With a view to a "Second Reading" debate the executive Committee had put down a general resolution that their report be received, but Mr. Wells did not fall in with this plan, and the resolution on the motion of Bernard Shaw was adopted without discussion. On the first clause of the next resolution, instructing the Executive to submit amendments to the Rules for increasing their number to twenty-five, Mr. Wells, acting for himself, moved an amendment "approving the spirit of the report of the Committee of Enquiry, and desiring the outgoing Executive to make the earliest possible arrangements for the election of a new Executive to give effect to that report." His speech, which occupied an hour and a quarter and covered the whole field, would have been great if Mr. Wells had been a good speaker. Written out from notes, it was printed in full by himself for circulation amongst the members, and it is vigorous, picturesque entertaining, and imaginative, as his work always is. But it delivered him into the hands of his more experienced opponents by virtually challenging the society to discard them and enter on a regenerated career under his guidance. It was a heroic issue to force; and it was perhaps the real one; but it could have only one result. The discussion was adjourned to the 14th, and at 9 o'clock on that evening Bernard Shaw replied on the whole debate. His main proposition was that, as the amendment had been converted by Mr. Wells' printed and circulated speech into a motion of want of confidence, the leaders of the Society must and would retire if it were adopted. They were willing to discuss every point on its merits and to abide by the decision of the Society, but they would not accept a general approval of the Committee's Report as against their own when it implied an accusation of misconduct. In the course of the speech Mr. Wells pledged himself not to retire from the Society if he was defeated; and at the end of it he consented to withdraw his amendment. Bernard Shaw's speech, probably the most impressive he has ever made in the Society, was delivered to a large and keenly appreciative audience in a state of extreme excitement. A long report pacifically toned down by Shaw himself, appears in "Fabian News" (January, 1907). It succeeded in its object. The Executive Committee welcomed the co-operation of Mr. Wells; the last thing they desired was to drive him out of the Society, and whilst they could not accept his report as a whole, they were willing to adopt any particular item after full discussion. There is no doubt that they would have won if the amendment had gone to a division, but they were only too glad not to inflict a defeat on their opponents. * * * * * The next episode in the debate requires a few words of introduction. The Society had always been in favour of votes for women. A proposition in the Manifesto, Tract No. 2, published as early as 1884, states that "men no longer need special political privileges to protect them against women," and in all our publications relating to the franchise or local government the claims of women to equal citizenship were prominently put forward. But we had published no tract specially on the subject of the Parliamentary Vote for Women. This was not mere neglect. In 1893 a committee was appointed "to draw up a tract advocating the claims of women to all civil and political rights at present enjoyed by men," and in March, 1894, it reported that "a tract had been prepared which the Committee itself did not consider suitable for publication." Later the Committee was discharged, and in face of this fiasco nothing further was done. Mr. Wells took a strong view on the importance of doing something in relation to women and children, though exactly what he proposed was never clear. He offered to the Society his little book on "Socialism and the Family," subsequently published by Mr. Fifield, but the Executive Committee declined it precisely because of its vagueness: they were not disposed to accept responsibility for criticisms on the existing system, unless some definite line of reform was proposed which they could ask the Society to discuss and approve, or at any rate to issue as a well-considered scheme suitable for presentation to the public. The new Basis proposed by the Special Committee declared that the Society sought to bring about "a reconstruction of the social organisation" by _(a)_ promoting transfer of land and capital to the State, _(b)_ "enforcing equal citizenship of men and women, _(c)_ "substituting public for private authority in the education and support of the young." Precisely what the last clause meant has never been disclosed. Mr. Wells in his speech did nothing to elucidate it. Mr. Shaw in his reply criticised its vagueness and protested against possible interpretations of it. Mr. Wells stated some time later that he had resigned from the Society because we refused to adopt it. I do not think that any of his colleagues attached much importance to it, and none of them has attempted to raise the issue since.[37] Clause (b) was another matter. Nobody objected to the principle of this, but many demurred to inserting it in the Basis. We regarded the Basis as a statement of the minimum of Socialism, without which no man had the right to call himself a Socialist. But there are a few Socialists, such as Mr. Belfort Bax, who are opposed to women's suffrage, and moreover, however important it be, some of us regard it as a question of Democracy rather than Socialism. Certainly no one would contend that approval of women's suffrage was acceptance of a part of the creed of Socialism. It is a belief compatible with the most thoroughgoing individualism. But many of the women members had made up their minds that this clause must appear in the Basis, and under the leadership of Mrs. Pember Reeves, they had indicated they would vote for the Special Committee Report unless they got their way. Those who, like myself, regarded this amendment of the Basis as inexpedient, recognised also that the adoption of the Wells report was far more inexpedient, and the Executive consequently decided to support a proposal that they be instructed to submit an addition to the Basis declaring for equal citizenship for men and women. On January 11th, 1907, Mrs. Pember Reeves obtained precedence for a resolution to this effect, and she was seconded by Mrs. Sidney Webb, who, after fourteen years of membership, was now beginning to take a part in the business of the Society. The opposition was led by Dr. Mary O'Brien Harris, who objected not to the principle but to its inclusion in the Basis, but she was unsuccessful, and the instruction was carried. On January 18th the debate on the Executive resolutions was resumed, and it was resolved to increase the Executive Committee to twenty-one, to form three standing Sub-Committees, and to abolish the old restrictions on membership. On February 1st the debate on Political Action began, and largely turned on the question whether we should attempt to found a Socialist Party or should subordinate our political activity to the Independent Labour Party. As the first step towards founding a middle-class Socialist Party was to be the establishment of Fabian Societies throughout the country, those of us who like myself did not believe in the possibility of the proposed new party could none the less support the scheme. Co-operation with the Labour Party was not in question; nor was the continuance of our friendly relations with the I.L.P., but the proposal to subordinate our political activity to the latter society met with but little support, and finally on March 2nd the Executive resolution to appoint a Committee for the purpose of drawing up a political policy was adopted against a very small minority. Mr. Wells took very little part in the proceedings after the Second Reading debate, and only one speech of his is mentioned in the report. * * * * * Meanwhile the controversy was being fought out on another field. The January meetings had settled the number of the new Executive and decided how the Basis should be altered. The Executive therefore was now able to summon the Annual Meeting in order to make the necessary amendments to the Rules. This was held on February 22nd, when the resolutions were adopted without discussion. The meeting then took up some minor items in the Report, and in particular certain other amendments to the Basis proposed by individual members. On these a resolution was carried that the new Executive appoint a Committee to revise the Basis. The Committee was in fact appointed, and consisted of Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, H.G. Wells, and Sidney Ball of Oxford. Mr. Wells resigned from the Society before its labours were completed, and no report was ever presented. The Annual Meeting over, the way was now clear for the election of the new Executive. The ballot papers, sent out with the March "News," contained the names of 37 candidates, 13 out of the 15 of the retiring Committee and 24 others. In normal years the practice of issuing election addresses is strictly discouraged, because of the advantage they give to those rich enough to afford the expense. Therefore the record of new candidates, severely concrete statements of past achievements, is published in "Fabian News." On this occasion the usual distinction between old and new candidates was not made, and the Executive undertook to send out Election Addresses of candidates subject to necessary limits and on payment by the candidates of the cost of printing. In addition numerous other addresses were posted to the electors. The Old Gang made no attempt to monopolise the Executive by running a full ticket. The candidates in effect formed three groups, 15 supporters of the outgoing Executive, including 10 retiring members who issued a joint address; 13 candidates selected by a temporary Reform Committee whose names were sent out by Mr. Wells and his chief adherents; 7 independents, some of them supporters of the Executive and the others of the Reformers; and finally myself. As I was paid secretary and returning officer I did not formally associate myself with any party, though my general sympathy with my old colleagues was well known. Nine hundred and fifty-four members cast very nearly 17,000 votes. Sidney Webb headed the poll with 819 votes; I followed with 809. Bernard Shaw received 781, and Mr. Wells came fourth with 717. All the retiring members were re-elected except Cecil Chesterton, and including G.R.S. Taylor, who had vehemently opposed his colleagues. Eleven of the Executive list, nine of the Reformers, and myself constituted the new Committee. In fact it was an able and effective body. The Old Gang brought in Mr. Granville Barker; the Reformers included Mr. Wells, Mrs. Pember Reeves, Aylmer Maude, R.C.K. Ensor, Dr. Haden Guest, Sidney Ball, F.W. Pethick Lawrence, and Miss B.L. Hutchins--most, if not all, of whom received support from the friends of the Old Gang. Scarcely anything less like revolutionists can be imagined than this list. Mr. Pethick Lawrence, it is true, has since then done some hard fighting in another cause, but he has always acted with seriousness and deliberation. Most of the others might as well have figured on one ticket as the other. The Old Gang including myself had 12 votes and all the experience, against 9 on the other side. But the two sides did not survive the first meeting of the new Committee. There was, as I have already said, no differences of principle between the two parties. The expansion of the parent Society had come about, local Societies were growing up all over the country; Mr. Wells said no more about public authority over the young--indeed his election address made no reference to it--and Mr. Shaw did nothing to establish his Middle-Class Socialist Party. The new Committee quickly settled down to work, but Mr. Wells was already wearying of his rôle as political organiser. He was appointed both to the General Purposes and the Propaganda Sub-Committees, but after attending two meetings of the former, and none of the latter, he resigned from both in October, and of the seventeen meetings of the Executive Committee during its year of office he attended only seven. In April, 1908, he was re-elected to the Executive, again fourth on the poll, and Mrs. Wells who had not been a candidate before was also successful. But in the following September he resigned his membership of the Society, assigning as reasons "disagreement with the Basis which forms the Confession of Faith of the Society and discontent with the general form of its activities," together with a desire "to concentrate on the writing of novels." He explained that "a scheme which proposes to leave mother and child economically dependent on the father is not to me Socialism at all, but a miserable perversion of Socialism." The letter, printed in "Fabian News," goes on to refer to his objection to the "no compensation" clause in the Basis (the real weakness of which is that it refers hypothetically to a complete change of system and is never applied to any particular case[38]), and added that the opportunity for a propaganda to the British middle classes was now over. Mrs. Wells retained her seat on the Executive Committee till March, 1910, and soon after that date the connection of both of them with the Society altogether ceased. * * * * * I have now traced the main stream of the subject of this chapter, though a good deal remains to be said on other effects of the agitation. I have indicated that the actual proposals made by the Special Committee under the inspiration of Mr. Wells, in so far at any rate as they were controversial or controverted, were futile or impossible, and neither led, nor in my opinion could have led, to any benefit to the Society or to its objects. But it must not be inferred from this that the intervention of Mr. Wells, viewed as a whole, was of this character. He is a man of outstanding genius, and in so far as he used his powers appropriately, his work was of enormous value to Socialism; and his energy and attractive personality added radiance to the Society only equalled in the early days when the seven Essayists were all in the field and all fighting at their bravest. The new life in the Society during those brilliant years was due to other factors as well as Mr. Wells. Other Socialist Societies, in which he took no part, also increased their numbers and launched out into fresh activities. But for us Mr. Wells was the spur which goaded us on, and though at the time we were often forced to resent his want of tact, his difficult public manners, and his constant shiftings of policy, we recognised then, and we remember still, how much of permanent value he achieved. Of this the chiefest is his books, and as the Society as such had no part in them, anything more than a reference to them is outside the scope of this volume. But it must be said that his "New Worlds for Old," published in 1908, whilst he was a member of the Fabian Executive, is perhaps the best recent book on English Socialism. In this connection Mr. Wells displayed unexpected modesty and at the same time inexperience of the ways of the world. His first criticism of the Society, his first project of reform, related to our tracts. To this point he directed an unpublished preface to his paper "This Misery of Boots," when he read it to the Society before the controversy had actually started. He justly observed that very few of our publications were addressed to the unconverted, were emotional appeals to join our movement, or effective explanations of our general principles. He said that these ought to be written, and the odd thing is that he appeared to imagine that anybody, or at any rate a considerable number of people, could just sit down and write them. He was aware that he could do it himself, and he innocently imagined that plenty of other people could do it too. He blamed the Executive for failing to make use of the members in this respect, and persuaded them to invite any member to send in manuscripts. In fact of course something like genius, or, at any rate, very rare ability, is required for this sort of work. Any competent writer can collect the facts about Municipal Drink Trade, or Afforestation, or Poor Law Reform: many can explain an Act of Parliament in simple language: but only one here and there can write what others care to read on the principles of Socialism and the broad aspects of its propaganda. If our list of tracts be examined it will be found that the great majority of the "general" tracts have been written by Sidney Webb and Bernard Shaw. A few other writers have contributed general tracts from a special standpoint, such as those on Christian Socialism. When we have mentioned reprinted papers by William Morris and Sir Oliver Lodge, and a tract by Sidney Ball, the list is virtually complete. Mr. Wells himself only contributed to us his paper "This Misery of Boots," and his appeal to the rank and file yielded nothing at all. Of course there are plenty of people as innocent in this respect as Mr. Wells was at that period referred to. Hardly a month has passed in the last twenty years without somebody, usually from the remote provinces, sending up a paper on Socialism, which he is willing to allow the Society to publish on reasonable terms. But only once have we thus found an unknown author whose work, on a special subject, we could publish, and he resigned a year or two later because we were compelled to reject a second tract which he wrote for us. The history of the intervention of Mr. Wells is now complete. Some account of the expansion of the Society at this period will be given in the next chapter. [Illustration: _From a drawing by Jessie Holliday_ SIDNEY WEBB, IN 1909] FOOTNOTES: [34] The "Wells Report" in October, 1906, recommended cordial co-operation with the Labour Party, including the running of candidates for Parliament, and it "warmly endorsed the conception of Socialists whenever possible,... standing as Socialists in Municipal and Parliamentary elections." In January, 1908, a scheme for effecting this was adopted by the Society. In May, 1908, Mr. Wells, writing to "Fabian News," said he should resign if the Society rejected his view that "the Fabian Society is a Society for the study, development, and propaganda of the Socialist idea. It extends a friendly support to the Labour Party, but it is not a political society and membership involves no allegiance to any political party." This was written in connection with his support of a Liberal against a Socialist Candidate at North-West Manchester. [35] In his election address referred to on p. 179. [36] Private.--Report of the special Committee appointed in February, 1906, to consider measures for increasing the scope, influence, income, and activity of the Society, together with the Executive Committee's Report, and Resolutions thereon. To be submitted to the members at Essex Hall on Fridays the 7th and 14th December, 1906, at 7.30 p.m. The Fabian Society. November, 1906 (pp. 48). [37] See his "New Worlds for Old," Chapter III, The First Main Generalisation of Socialism, which according to Mr. Wells is as follows:-- "The ideas of private individual rights of the parent and of his isolated responsibility for his children are harmfully exaggerated in the contemporary world. We do not sufficiently protect children from negligent, incompetent, selfish, or wicked parents.... The Socialist holds that the community should be responsible ... it is not simply the right but the duty of the State ... to intervene in any default for the child's welfare. Parentage rightly undertaken is a service as well as a duty to the world ... in any completely civilised state it must be sustained, rewarded, and controlled...." Except for the last three words all this is neither new nor controversial amongst not merely Socialists but the mildest of social reformers, always excepting the Charity Organisation Society. The last word is not, I think, further explained. [38] A Tramway or a Gasworks consists of two things: the actual plant, and the nominal capital which represents its value. When the plant is municipalised, its control is vested in the community, and the shareholders are "compensated" with municipal securities or cash obtained by loans from other investors in these securities. The capital value of the tramway still virtually belongs to the private holders of the municipal loan. But no second such step is possible. Holders of municipal stock cannot be "compensated," if it is taken from them. They can be paid off; or their property can be confiscated either by taxation or by repudiation of the debt: there is no middle course. The whole problem therefore arises from confusion of thought. See Fabian Tract 147 "Capital and Compensation." Chapter X The Policy of Expansion: 1907-12 Statistics of growth--The psychology of the Recruit--Famous Fabians--The Arts Group--The Nursery--The Women's Group--Provincial Fabian Societies--University Fabian Societies--London Groups revived--Annual Conferences--The Summer School--The story of "Socialist Unity"--The Local Government Information Bureau--The Joint Standing Committee--Intervention of the International Socialist Bureau. The episode described in the last chapter, which took place during the years 1906 to 1908, was accompanied by many other developments in the activities of the Society which must now be described. In the first place the membership grew at an unprecedented rate. In the year ended March, 1905, 67 members were elected. Next year the number was 167, to March, 1907, it was 455, to March, 1908, 817, and to March, 1909, 665. This was an enormous accession of new blood to a society which in 1904 had only 730 members in all. In 1909 the Society consisted of 1674 men and 788 women, a total of 2462; of these 1277 were ordinary members residing in or near London, 343 scattered elsewhere in the United Kingdom, 89 abroad; 414 were members of provincial Societies and 339 of University Societies. There were in addition about 500 members of local Fabian Societies who were not also members of the London Society, and the Associates numbered 217. The income from subscriptions of all sorts was £473 in 1904 and £1608 in 1908, the high-water mark in the history of the Society for contributions to the ordinary funds. Of course there is all the difference in the world between a new member and an old. The freshly elected candidate attends every meeting and reads every word of "Fabian News." He begins, naturally, as a whole-hearted admirer and is profoundly impressed with the brilliance of the speakers, the efficiency of the organisation, the ability of the tracts. A year or two later, if he has any restlessness of intellect, he usually becomes a critic: he wants to know why there are not more brightly written tracts, explanatory of Socialism and suitable for the unconverted: he complains that the lectures are far less interesting than they used to be, that the debates are footling, the publications unattractive in appearance and too dull to read. A few years later he either settles down into a steady-going member, satisfied to do what little he can to improve this unsatisfactory world; or else, like Mr. Wells, he announces that the Society is no longer any good: once (when he joined) it was really important and effective: its methods _were_ all right: it _was_ proclaiming a fresh political gospel. But times have changed, whilst the Society has only grown old: it has done its work, and missed its opportunity for more. It is no longer worthy of his support. In 1907 and 1908 the Society consisted largely of new members; consequently the meetings were crowded and we were driven out from one hall after another. Moreover the propagandist enthusiasm of Mr. Wells and the glamour of his name helped to attract a large number of distinguished persons into our ranks. Mr. Granville Barker was one of the most active of these. He served on the Executive from 1907 to 1912 and took a large share in the detailed work of the Committees, besides giving many lectures and assisting in social functions. The Rev. R.J. Campbell, who addressed large meetings on several occasions, as also elected to the Executive for the year 1908-9, but did not attend a single meeting. Mr. Aylmer Maude joined the Executive in 1907, held office to 1912, and is still a working member of the Society. Arnold Bennett, Laurence Irving, Edgar Jepson, Reginald Bray, L.C.C. (member of the Executive 1911-12), Sir Leo (then Mr.) Chiozza Money, M.P. (who sat on the Executive from 1908 to 1911), Dr. Stanton Coit, H. Hamilton Fyfe, A.R. Orage, G.M. Trevelyan, Edward Garnett, Dr. G.B. Clark (for many years M.P.), Miss Constance Smedley, Philip Snowden, M.P., Mrs. Snowden (Executive 1908-9), George Lansbury, Herbert Trench, Jerome K. Jerome, Edwin Pugh, Spencer Pryse, and A. Clutton Brock are amongst the people known in politics, literature, or the arts who joined the Society about this period. Some of these took little or no part in our proceedings, beyond paying the necessary subscription, but others lectured or wrote for the Society or participated in discussions and social meetings. These were at this time immensely successful. In the autumn of 1907, for example, Mrs. Bernard Shaw arranged for the Society a series of crowded meetings of members and subscribers at Essex Hall on "The Faith I Hold." Mrs. Sidney Webb led off and was followed by the Rev. R.J. Campbell, S.G. Hobson, Dr. Stanton Coit, H.G. Wells, and Hubert Bland: with an additional discourse later in the spring by Sir Sydney Olivier. Mr. Wells' paper, which proved to be far too long for a lecture, was the first draft of his book "First and Last Things"; but he had tired of the Society when it was published, and the preface conceals its origin in something of a mystery. Sir John Gorst, Mrs. Annie Besant, Dr. Südekum (German M.P.), Sir John Cockburn, K.C.M.G., the Hon. W.P. Reeves, Raymond Unwin, and Sir Leo Chiozza Money were amongst the other lecturers of that year. * * * * * In 1906 and succeeding years a new form of organisation was established. Members spontaneously associated themselves into groups, "The Nursery" for the young, the Women's Group, the Arts Group, and Groups for Education, Biology, and Local Government. The careers of these bodies were various. The Arts Group included philosophy, and, to tell the truth, almost excluded Socialism. But all of us in our youth are anxiously concerned about philosophy and art and many who are no longer young are in the same case. Moreover artists and philosophers are always attractive. Mr. Holbrook Jackson and Mr. A.R. Orage, at that time associated in "The New Age," founded the group early in 1907, and soon obtained lecturers as distinguished, and audiences scarcely less numerous than the Society itself. But in eighteen months "Art and Philosophy in Relation to Socialism" seems to have been exhausted, and after the summer of 1908 the Group disappears from the calendar. Biology and Local Government had a somewhat longer but far less glorious career. The meetings were small and more of the nature of classes. Education is the life-work of a large class, which provides a sensible proportion of Fabian membership, and teachers are always eager to discuss and explain the difficult problems of their profession and the complex law which regulates it. The Education Group has led a diligent and useful life; it prepared a tract (No. 156), "What an Education Committee can do (Elementary Schools)," and besides its private meetings it arranges occasional lectures open to the public, which sometimes attract large audiences. The Nursery belongs to another class. When a society, formed as many societies are, of quite young people, has existed over twenty years, the second generation begins to be adult, and wants to be quit of its parents. Moreover the young desire, naturally, to hear themselves talk, whilst the others usually prefer the older and more famous personages. So a number of younger members eagerly took up a plan which originated in the circle of the Bland family, for forming a group confined to the young in years or in membership in order to escape the overmastering presence of the elderly and experienced. Sometimes they invite a senior to talk to them and to be heckled at leisure. More often they provide their own fare from amongst themselves. Naturally the Nursery is not exclusively devoted to economics and politics: picnics and dances also have their place. Some of the members eventually marry each other, and there is no better security for prolonged happiness in marriage than sympathy in regard to the larger issues of life. The Nursery has produced one tract, No. 132, "A Guide to Books for Socialists," described in the "Wells Report" as intended "to supplement or even replace that arid and indiscriminating catalogue, What to Read." Last in date, but by no means least in importance of the Groups of this period, was the Women's Group, founded by Mrs. C.M. Wilson, who after nearly twenty years of nominal membership had resumed her active interest in the Society. The vigorous part taken by the women of the Society under the leadership of Mrs. Reeves in obtaining the only alteration yet made in the Basis has been already described. The Group was not formed till a year later, and at that time the Women's Suffrage movement, and especially the party led by Mrs. Pankhurst, had attracted universal attention. The early Suffrage movement was mainly Socialist in origin: most of the first leaders of the Women's Social and Political Union were or had been members either of the Fabian Society or of the I.L.P. and it may almost be said that all the women of the Society joined one or more of the Suffrage Societies which for the next seven years played so large a part in national politics. But besides the question of the vote, which is not peculiar to Socialism, there is a very large group of subjects of special interest to Socialist women, either practical problems of immediate politics relating to the wages and conditions of women's labour and the treatment of women by Education Acts, National Insurance Acts, and Factory Acts; or remoter and more theoretical problems, especially those connected with the question whether the wife in the ideal state is to be an independent wage-earner or the mistress and manager of an isolated home, dependent on her husband as breadwinner. Efficiently organised by Mrs. C.M. Wilson, until ill-health required her resignation of the secretaryship in 1914; by Mrs. Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Pember Reeves, Miss Murby, Miss Emma Brooke, and many others, including in later years Dr. Letitia Fairfield, the Group has had many of the characteristics of an independent society. It has its own office, latterly at 25 Tothill Street, rented from the parent Society, with its own paid assistant secretary, and it has issued for private circulation its own publications. In 1913 it prepared a volume of essays on "Women Workers in Seven Professions," which was edited by Professor Edith Morley and published by George Routledge and Sons. It has prepared five tracts for the Society, published in the general list, under a sub-title, "The Women's Group Series," and it has taken an active part, both independently and in co-operation with other bodies, in the political movements specially affecting women, which have been so numerous in recent years. * * * * * It will be recollected that the only direct result of the Special Enquiry Committee, apart from the changes made in the organisation of the Society itself, was the decision to promote local Socialist Societies of the Fabian type with a view to increasing Socialist representation in Parliament. I have recounted in a previous chapter how this scheme worked out in relation to the Labour Party and the running of candidates for Parliament. It remains to describe here its measure of success in the formation of local societies. The summer of 1905 was about the low-water mark of provincial Fabianism. Nine societies are named in the report, but four of these appeared to have no more than a nominal existence. The Oxford University Society had but 6 members; Glasgow had 30 in its University Society and 50 in its town Society; Liverpool was reduced to 63, Leeds and County to 15, and that was all. A year later the Cambridge University Society had been formed, Oxford had more than doubled its membership to 13, but only five other societies were in existence. By the following year a revival had set in. W. Stephen Sanders, at that time an Alderman of the London County Council, who had been a member of the Society since 1890 and of the executive Committee since 1904, was appointed Organising Secretary with the special object of building up the provincial organisation. By 1910 there were forty-six local societies, and in 1912 the maximum of fifty was reached. Since then the number has declined. These societies were scattered over the country, some of them in the great cities, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield, and so on: others within hail of London, at Croydon, Letchworth, Ilford: others again in small towns, Canterbury, Chelmsford, Carnarvon: another was at Bedales School, Petersfield, run by my son and his schoolfellows. The local societies formed at this period, apart from the University Societies, were in the main pallid reflections of the parent Society in its earlier days; none of them had the good fortune to find a member, so far as we yet know, of even second-class rank as a thinker or speaker. One or two produced praiseworthy local tracts on housing conditions and similar subjects. They usually displayed less tolerance than the London Society, a greater inclination to insist that there was but one way of political salvation, usually the Labour Party way, and that all who would not walk in it should be treated as alien enemies. If Socialism is only to be achieved by the making of Socialists, as Mr. Wells announced with all the emphasis of a rediscovery, no doubt the local societies achieved some Socialism, since they made some members. If Socialism is to be attained by the making of Socialist measures, doubtless they accomplished a little by their influence on local administration. Organisation for political work is always educative to those who take part in it, and it has some effect on the infinitely complex parallelogram of forces which determines the direction of progress. Possibly I underestimate the importance of local Fabian Societies; there is a school of thought, often represented in the Society, which regards the provinces with reverent awe--omne ignotum pro magnifico--as the true source of political wisdom, which Londoners should endeavour to discover and obey. Londoners no doubt see little of organised labour, and even less of industrial co-operation: the agricultural labourer is to them almost a foreigner: the Welsh miner belongs to another race. But the business men, the professional class, and the political organisers of Manchester and Glasgow have, in my opinion, no better intuitions, and usually less knowledge than their equivalents in London, and they have the disadvantage of comparative isolation. London, the brain of the Empire, where reside the leaders in politics and in commerce, in literature, in journalism and in art, and which consequently attracts the young men who aspire to be the next generation of leaders, where too are stationed all the higher ranks of Civil Service, is different in kind, as well as in size, from other cities. New thought on social subjects is almost always the product of association. Only those who live in a crowd of other thinkers know where there is room for new ideas; for it takes years for the top layer of political thought to find expression in books. Therefore the provincial thinker on social problems is always a little out of date. Except for one or two University men (e.g. Sidney Ball and Sir Oliver Lodge) practically all Fabian tract-writers have been Londoners. The local Fabian Societies have so far achieved nothing towards the making of a middle-class Socialist party, and they have achieved but little else. They have been fully justified because every association for mutual instruction adds something to the mass of political intelligence, does something to disseminate ideas, but that is all that can be said for them. The University Societies belong to a different type. Nothing is more important than the education of young men and women in politics, and the older Universities have always recognised this. Socialist Societies accordingly grew up naturally alongside Liberal and Tory Clubs, and under the shadow of the "Unions." Oxford, as we have seen, had a University Fabian Society from early days. Cambridge followed at a much later date. For years Glasgow University and University College, Aberystwyth, maintained flourishing societies. The newer Universities, dependent largely on the bounty of wealthy capitalist founders and supporters, and assisted by, or in close touch with, town councils and local industries, have been much less willing to sanction political free-thought amongst their undergraduates, and the pernicious influence of wealth, or rather the fear of alarming the wealthy, has at times induced the authorities to interfere with the freedom of the undergraduates to combine for the study and propaganda of Socialism. Undergraduate societies are composed of a constantly shifting population, and we arranged from the first that all their members should also be elected direct to the parent Society in order that they might remain automatically in membership when they "go down." In fact of course the percentage which retains its membership is very small. "Men" and women at Universities join any organisation whose leaders at the moment are influential and popular. They are sampling life to discover what suits them, and a few years later some of them are scattered over the globe, others immersed in science or art, or wholly occupied in law and medicine, in the church and the army, in the civil service and in journalism. Most of them no doubt have ceased to pretend to take interest in social and political reform. A few remain, and these are amongst the most valuable of our members. At times, when an undergraduate of force of character and high social position, the heir to a peerage for example, is for the moment an ardent Socialist, the Fabian Society becomes, in a certain set or college, the fashionable organisation. On the whole it is true that Socialists are born and not made, and very few of the hundreds who join at such periods stay for more than a couple of years. The maximum University membership--on paper--was in 1914, when it reached 541 members, of whom 101 were at Oxford and 70 at Cambridge. But the weakness of undergraduate Socialism is indicated by the extraordinary difficulty found in paying to the parent Society the very moderate fee of a shilling a head per annum, and the effect of attempting to enforce this in 1915, combined with the propaganda of Guild Socialism, especially at Oxford, was for the moment to break up the apparently imposing array of University Fabianism. In 1912 Clifford Allen of Cambridge formed the University Socialist Federation, which was in fact a Federation of Fabian Societies though not nominally confined to them. Mr. Allen, an eloquent speaker and admirable organiser, with most of the virtues and some of the defects of the successful propagandist, planned the foundations of the Federation on broad lines. It started a sumptuous quarterly, "The University Socialist," the contents of which by no means equalled the excellence of the print and paper. It did not survive the second number. The Federation has held several conferences, mostly at Barrow House--of which later--and issued various documents. Its object is to encourage University Socialism and to found organisations in every University. It still exists, but whether it will survive the period of depression which has coincided with the war remains to be seen. Lastly, amongst the organs of Fabian activity come the London Groups. In the years of rapid growth that followed the publication of "Fabian Essays" the London Groups maintained a fairly genuine existence. London was teeming with political lectures, and in the decade 1889-1899 its Government was revolutionised by the County Councils Act of 1888, the Local Government Act of 1894, and the London Government Act of 1899 which established the Metropolitan Boroughs. Socialism, too, was a novelty, and the few who knew about it were in request. Anyway even with the small membership of those days, the London Groups managed to persist, and "Fabian News" is full of reports of conferences of Group Secretaries and accounts of Group activities. In the trough of depression between the South African War and the Liberal victory of 1906 all this disappeared and the Group system scarcely existed even on paper. With the expansion which began in 1906 the Groups revived. New members were hungry for lectures: many of them desired more opportunities to talk than the Society meetings afforded. All believed in or hoped for Mr. Wells' myriad membership. He himself was glad to address drawing-room meetings, and the other leaders did the same. Moreover the Society was conducting a series of "Suburban Lectures" by paid lecturers, in more or less middle-class residential areas of the Home Counties. Lectures to the Leisured Classes, a polite term for the idle rich, were arranged with considerable success in the West End, and other lectures, meetings, and social gatherings were incessant. For co-ordinating these various bodies the Fabian Society has created its own form of organisation fitted to its peculiar circumstances, and more like that of the British Empire than anything else known to me. As is the United Kingdom in the British Empire, so in the Fabian movement the parent Society is larger, richer, and more powerful, and in all respects more important than all the others put together. Any form of federal organisation is impossible, because federation assumes some approach to equality amongst constituents. Our local societies, like the British self-governing Dominions, are practically independent, especially in the very important department of finance. The Groups, on the other hand, are like County Councils, local organisations within special areas for particular purposes, with their own finances for those purposes only. But the parent Society is not made up of Groups, any more than the British Government is composed of County Councils. The local Groups consist of members of the Society qualified for the group by residence in the group area; the "Subject Groups" of those associated for some particular purpose. The problem of the Society (as it is of the Empire) was to give the local societies and the groups some real function which should emphasise and sustain the solidarity of the whole; and at the same time leave unimpaired the control of the parent Society over its own affairs. The Second Annual Conference of Fabian Societies and Groups was held on July 6th, 1907, under the chairmanship of Hubert Bland, who opened the proceedings with an account of the first Conference held in 1892 and described in an earlier chapter. Fifteen delegates from 9 local and University Societies, 16 from 8 London Groups, 8 from Subject Groups, and 9 members of the Executive Committee were present. The business consisted of the sanction of rules for the Pan-Fabian Organisation. The Conference of 1908 was a much bigger affair. A dozen members of the Executive, including Mr. H.G. Wells and (as he then was) Mr. L.G. Chiozza Money. M.P., and 61 delegates representing 36 Groups and Societies met for a whole-day conference at University Hall, Gordon Square. Miss Murby was chairman, and addressed the delegates on the importance of tolerance, an apposite subject in view of the discussion to follow on the proposed parliamentary action, especially the delicate issue between co-operation with the Labour Party and the promotion of a purely Socialist party. A resolution favouring exclusive support of independent Socialist candidatures moved by Mr. J.A. Allan of Glasgow received only 10 votes, but another advocating preference for such candidates was only defeated by 26 to 21. The resolution adopted left the question to be settled in each case by the constituency concerned. Another resolution directed towards condemnation of members who worked with the Liberal or Tory Party failed by 3 votes only, 17 to 20. In the afternoon Mr. Money gave an address on the Sources of Socialist Revenue, and a number of administrative matters were discussed. The 1909 Conference was attended by 29 delegates of local and University Societies, and by 46 delegates from London Groups and from the parent Society. On this occasion a Constitution was adopted giving the Conference a regular status, the chief provisions of which required the submission to the Conference of any alteration of the Basis, and "any union affiliation or formal alliance with any other society or with any political party whereby the freedom of action of any society ... is in any way limited ... "; and of any change in the constitution itself. These are all matters which concern the local organisations, as they are required to adopt the Basis, or some approved equivalent, and are affiliated to the Labour Party through the parent Society. No contentious topic was on this occasion seriously discussed. The Conference of 1910 was smaller, sixty-one delegates in all. Resolutions against promoting parliamentary candidatures and favouring the by this time vanishing project for an independent Socialist party obtained but little support, and the chief controversy was over an abstract resolution on the "economic independence of women," which was in the end settled by a compromise drafted by Sidney Webb. Sixty delegates were present at the 1911 Conference, held at Clifford's Inn, who, after rejecting by a seven to one majority a resolution to confine Fabian membership to Labour Party adherents, devoted themselves mainly to opposition to the National Insurance Bill then before Parliament. In 1912 the Conference was still large and still concerned in the position of the Society in relation to Labour and Liberalism. Both in 1913 and in 1914 the Conference was well attended and prolonged, but in 1915, partly on account of the war and partly because of the defection of several University Societies, few were present, and the business done was inconsiderable. * * * * * The Summer School was another enterprise started at the period. It was begun independently of the Society in this sense, that half a dozen members agreed to put up the necessary capital and to accept the financial responsibility, leaving to the Society the arrangement of lectures and the management of business. It was opened at the end of July, 1907, at Pen-yr-allt, a large house, previously used as a school, looking out over the sea, near Llanbedr, a little village on the Welsh coast between Barmouth and Harlech. The house was taken for three years partly furnished, and the committee provided the beds, cutlery, etc., needed. One or two other houses near by were usually rented for the summer months. The value of the plan for a propagandist society is largely this, that experience shows that people can only work together efficiently when they know each other. Therefore in practice political and many other organisations find it necessary to arrange garden parties, fêtes, picnics, teas, and functions of all sorts in order to bring together their numbers under such conditions as enable them to become personally acquainted with each other. In times of expansion the Fabian Society has held dinners and soirées in London, many of which have been successful and even brilliant occasions, because the new members come in crowds and the old attend as a duty. When new members are few these entertainments cease, for nothing is so dreary as a social function that is half failure, and a hint of it brings the series to an end. But a Summer School where members pass weeks together is far more valuable in enabling the leaders and officials to find out who there is who is good as a speaker or thinker, or who is a specialist on some subject of value to the movement. Moreover, gatherings of this class attract those on the fringe of the movement, and many of our members have come to us through attendance at the school. Apart from the direct interests of the Society, a School of this character is valued by many solitary people, solitary both socially, such as teachers and civil servants, who are often lonely in the world, and solitary intellectually because they live in remote places where people of their way of thinking are scarce. It is not necessary to describe the arrangements of the School, for these institutions have in the last few years become familiar to everybody. We do not, however, as a rule make quite such a business of the schooling as is usual where the term is short, and study is the sole object. One regular lecture a day for four days a week is the rule, but impromptu lectures or debates in the evenings, got up amongst the guests, are customary. Moreover, frequent conferences on special subjects are held, either by allied bodies, such as the Committee for the Prevention of Destitution, or by a Group, such as the Education Group or the Research Department. On these occasions the proportion of work to play is higher. The School-house belongs to the Society for the whole year, and parties are arranged for Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide whenever possible. After four years at Llanbedr the lease was terminated and the original Committee wound up. The capital borrowed had all been repaid, and there remained, after a sale by auction, a lot of property and nearly £100 in cash. This the Committee transferred to the Society, and thereupon the quasi-independence of the Summer School came to an end. In 1911 a new experiment was tried. A small hotel at Saas Grund, off the Rhone Valley, was secured, and during six weeks three large parties of Fabians occupied it for periods of a fortnight each. The summer was one of the finest of recent years, and the high mountains were exceptionally attractive. On account of the remoteness of the place, and the desire to make the most of a short time, lectures were as a rule confined to the evening, and distinguished visitors were few, but an address by Dr. Hertz of Paris, one of the few French Fabians, may be mentioned, partly because in the summer of 1915 his promising career was cut short in the trenches which protected his country from the German invaders. In 1912 Barrow House, Derwentwater, was taken for three years, a beautiful place with the Barrow Falls in the garden on one side, and grounds sloping down to the lake on the other, with its own boating pier and bathing-place. A camp of tents for men was set up, and as many as fifty or sixty guests could be accommodated at a time. Much of the success of the School has throughout been due to Miss Mary Hankinson, who from nearly the beginning has been a most popular and efficient manager. A director is selected by the Committee to act as nominal head, and holds office usually for a week or a fortnight; but the chief of staff is a permanent institution, and is not only business manager, but also organiser and leader of excursions and a principal figure in all social undertakings. A great part in arranging for the School from the first has been taken by Dr. Lawson Dodd, to whose experience and energy much of its success has been due. * * * * * The year 1911 saw the formation of the Joint Standing Committee with the I.L.P., and this is a convenient place to describe the series of attempts at Socialist Unity which began a long way back in the history of the Society. For the first eight years or so of the Socialist movement the problem of unity did not arise. Until the publication of "Fabian Essays" the Fabian Society was small, and the S.D.F., firm in its Marxian faith, and confident that the only way of salvation was its particular way, had no more idea of uniting with the other societies than the Roman Catholic Church has of union with Lutherans or Methodists. The Socialist League was the outcome of an internal dispute, and, if my memory is correct, the S.D.F. expected, not without reason, that the seceders would ultimately return to the fold. The League ceased to count when at the end of 1890 William Morris left it and reconstituted as the Hammersmith Socialist Society the branch which met in the little hall constructed out of the stable attached to Kelmscott House. In January, 1893, seven delegates from this Society held a conference with Fabian delegates, and at a second meeting at which S.D.F. delegates were present a scheme for promoting unity was approved. A Joint Committee of five from each body assembled on February 23rd, when William Morris was appointed Chairman, with Sydney Olivier as Treasurer, and it was decided that the Chairman with H.M. Hyndman and Bernard Shaw should draft a Joint Manifesto. The "Manifesto of English Socialists," published on May 1st, 1893, as a penny pamphlet with the customary red cover, was signed by the three Secretaries, H.W. Lee of the S.D.F., Emery Walker of the H.S.S., and myself, and by fifteen delegates, including Sydney Olivier and Sidney Webb of the F.S., Harry Quelch of the S.D.F., and the three authors. Like most joint productions of clever men, it is by no means an inspiring document. The less said, the less to dispute about, and so it only runs to eight pages of large print, four devoted to the evils of capitalism, unemployment, the decline of agriculture, and the ill-nurture of children, and the rest to remedies, a queer list, consisting of:-- An eight hours law. Prohibition of child labour for wages. Free Maintenance for all necessitous children (a compromise in which Fabian influence may be traced by the insertion of the word "necessitous"). Equal payment of men and women for equal work. (A principle which, whether good or bad, belongs rather to individualism than to Socialism: Socialism according to Bernard Shaw--and most of us agree with him--demands as an ideal equal maintenance irrespective of work; and in the meantime payment according to need, each to receive that share of the national product which he requires in order to do his work and maintain his dependents, if any, appropriately.) To resume the programme:-- An adequate minimum wage for all adults employed in Government and Municipal services or in any monopolies such as railways enjoying State privileges. Suppression of all sub-contracting and sweating (an ignorant confusion between a harmless industrial method and its occasional abuse). Universal suffrage for all adults, men and women alike. Public payment for all public service. These of course were only means tending towards the ideal, "to wit, the supplanting of the present state by a society of equality of condition," and then follows a sentence paraphrased from the Fabian Basis embodying a last trace of that Utopian idealism which imagines that society can be constituted so as to enable men to live in freedom without eternal vigilance, namely, "When this great change is completely carried out, the genuine liberty of all will be secured by the free play of social forces with much less coercive interference than the present system entails." From these extracts it will be seen that the Manifesto, drafted by William Morris, but mutilated and patched up by the other two, bears the imprint neither of his style, nor that of Shaw, but reminds one rather of mid-Victorian dining-room furniture, solid, respectable, heavily ornate, and quite uninteresting. Happily there is not much of it! Unity was attained by the total avoidance of the contentious question of political policy. But fifteen active Socialists sitting together at a period when parties were so evenly divided that a General Election was always imminent could not refrain from immediate politics, and the S.D.F., like many other bodies, always cherished the illusion that the defeat of a minority at a joint conference on a question of principle would put that minority out of action. Accordingly, as soon as the Manifesto had been published resolutions were tabled pledging the constituent societies to concentrate their efforts on Socialist candidates accepted as suitable by the Joint Committee. On this point the Fabian Society was in a hopeless minority, and an endless vista of futile and acrimonious discussions was opened out which would lead to unrest in our own society--for there has always been a minority opposed to its dominant policy--and a waste of time and temper to the delegates from our Executive. It was therefore resolved at the end of July that our delegates be withdrawn, and that put an end to the Joint Committee. The decision was challenged at a members' meeting by E.E. Williams, one of the signatories of the Joint Manifesto, subsequently well known as the author of "Made in Germany," and in some sense the real founder of the Tariff Reform movement; but the members by a decisive vote upheld the action of their Executive. Four years later, early in 1897, another effort after Unity was made. By this time Morris, whose outstanding personality had given him a commanding and in some respects a moderating influence in the movement, was dead; and the Hammersmith Socialist Society had disappeared. Instead there was the new and vigorous Independent Labour Party, already the premier Socialist body in point of public influence. This body took the first step, and a meeting was held in April at the Fabian office, attended by Hubert Bland, Bernard Shaw, and myself as delegates from our Society. The proposal before the Conference was "the formation of a court of appeal to adjudicate between rival Socialist candidates standing for the same seat at any contested election," an occurrence which has in fact been rare in local and virtually unknown in Parliamentary elections. As the Fabian Society did not at that time officially run candidates, and has always allowed to its members liberty of action in party politics, it was impossible for us to undertake that our members would obey any such tribunal. The difficulty was however solved by the S.D.F., whose delegates to the second meeting, held in July, announced that they were instructed to withdraw from the Committee if the Fabian delegates remained. The I.L.P. naturally preferred the S.D.F. to ourselves, because their actual rivalry was always with that body, and we were only too glad to accept from others the dismissal which we desired. So our delegates walked out, leaving the other two parties in temporary possession of our office, and Socialist Unity so far as we were concerned again vanished. I do not think that the court of appeal was ever constituted, and certainly the relations between the other two Societies continued to be difficult. The next move was one of a practical character. The Fabian Society had always taken special interest in Local Government, as a method of obtaining piecemeal Socialism, and had long acted as an informal Information Bureau on the law and practice of local government administration. The success of the I.L.P. in getting its members elected to local authorities suggested a conference of such persons, which was held at Easter, 1899, on the days preceding the I.L.P. Annual Conference at Leeds. Sidney Webb was invited to be President, and gave an address on "The Sphere of Municipal Statesmanship"; Will Crooks was Chairman of the Poor Law Section. At this Conference it was resolved to form a Local Government Information Bureau, to be jointly managed by the I.L.P. and the Fabian Society; it was intended for Labour members of local authorities, but anybody could join on payment of the annual subscription of 2s. 6d. For this sum the subscriber obtained the right to have questions answered free of charge, and to receive both "Fabian News" and the official publications of the I.L.P., other than their weekly newspaper. The Bureau also published annual Reports, at first on Bills before Parliament, and latterly abstracts of such Acts passed by Parliament as were of interest to its members. It pursued an uneventful but useful career, managed virtually by the secretaries of the two societies, which divided the funds annually in proportion to the literature supplied. Several Easter Conferences of Elected Persons were held with varying success. Later on the nominal control was handed over to the Joint Committee, next to be described. The problem of Socialist Unity seemed to be approaching a settlement when the three organisations, in 1900, joined hands with the Trade Unions in the formation of the Labour Representation Committee, later renamed the Labour Party. But in 1901, eighteen months after the Committee was constituted, the S.D.F. withdrew, and thereafter unity became more difficult than ever, since two societies were united for collective political action with the numerically and financially powerful trade unions, whilst the third took up the position of hostile isolation. But between the Fabian Society and the I.L.P. friendly relations became closer than ever. The divergent political policies of the two, the only matter over which they had differed, had been largely settled by change of circumstances. The Fabian Society had rightly held that the plan of building up an effective political party out of individual adherents to any one society was impracticable, and the I.L.P. had in fact adopted another method, the permeation of existing organisations, the Trade Unions. On the other hand the Fabian Society, which at first confined its permeation almost entirely to the Liberal Party, because this was the only existing organisation accessible--we could not work through the Trade Unions, because we were not eligible to join them--was perfectly willing to place its views before the Labour Party, from which it was assured of sympathetic attention. Neither the Fabian Society nor the I.L.P. desired to lose its identity, or to abandon its special methods. But half or two-thirds of the Fabians belonged also to the I.L.P., and nearly all the I.L.P. leaders were or had been members of the Fabian Society. The suggestion was made in March, 1911, by Henry H. Slesser, then one of the younger members of the Executive, that the friendly relations of the two bodies should be further cemented by the formation of a Joint Standing Committee. Four members of each Executive together with the secretaries were appointed, and W.C. Anderson, later M.P. for the Attercliffe Division of Sheffield, and at that time Chairman of the I.L.P., was elected Chairman, a post which he has ever since retained. The Joint Committee has wisely confined its activities to matters about which there was no disagreement, and its proceedings have always been harmonious to the verge of dullness. The Committee began by arranging a short series of lectures, replacing for the time the ordinary Fabian meetings, and it proposed to the Labour Party a demonstration in favour of Adult Suffrage, which was successfully held at the Royal Albert Hall. In the winter of 1912-13 the Joint Committee co-operated with the National Committee for the Prevention of Destitution (of which later) in a big War against Poverty Campaign, to demand a minimum standard of civilised life for all. A demonstration at the Albert Hall, a Conference at the Memorial Hall, twenty-nine other Conferences throughout Great Britain, all attended by numerous delegates from Trade Unions and other organisations, and innumerable separate meetings were among the activities of the Committee. In 1913 a large number of educational classes were arranged. In the winter of 1913-14 the I.L.P. desired to concentrate its attention on its own "Coming of Age Campaign," an internal affair, in which co-operation with another body was inappropriate. A few months later the War began and, for reasons explained later, joint action remains for the time in abeyance. It will be convenient to complete the history of the movements for Socialist Unity, though it extends beyond the period assigned to this chapter, and we must now turn back to the beginning of another line of action. The International Socialist and Trade Union Congresses held at intervals of three or four years since 1889 were at first no more than isolated Congresses, arranged by local organisations constituted for the purpose in the preceding year. Each nation voted as one, or at most, as two units, and therefore no limit was placed on the number of its delegates: the one delegate from Argentina or Japan consequently held equal voting power to the scores or even hundreds from France or Germany. But gradually the organisation was tightened up, and in 1907 a scheme was adopted which gave twenty votes each to the leading nations, and proportionately fewer to the others. Moreover a permanent Bureau was established at Brussels, with Emile Vandervelde, the distinguished leader of the Belgian Socialists, later well known in England as the Ministerial representative of the Belgian Government during the war, as Chairman. In England, where the Socialist and Trade Union forces were divided, it was necessary to constitute a special joint committee in order to raise the British quota of the cost of the Bureau, and to elect and instruct the British delegates. It was decided by the Brussels Bureau that the 20 British votes should be allotted, 10 to the Labour Party, 4 to the I.L.P., 4 to the British Socialist Party (into which the old S.D.F. had merged), and 2 to the Fabian Society, and the British Section of the International Socialist Bureau was, and still remains, constituted financially and electorally on that basis. In France and in several other countries the internal differences between sections of the Socialist Party have been carried to far greater lengths than have ever been known in England. In France there have been hostile groups of Socialist representatives in the Chamber of Deputies and constant internecine opposition in electoral campaigns. In Great Britain the rivalry of different societies has consisted for the most part in separate schemes of propaganda, in occasional bickerings in their publications, in squabbles over local elections, and sometimes over the selection but not the election of parliamentary candidates. On the other hand co-operation on particular problems and exchange of courtesies have been common. The International Socialist Bureau, under instructions from the Copenhagen Conference had made a successful attempt to unite the warring elements of French Socialism, and in the autumn of 1912 the three British Socialist Societies were approached with a view to a conference with the Bureau on the subject of Socialist unity in Great Britain. Convenient dates could not be fixed, and the matter was dropped, but in July, 1913, M. Vandervelde, the Chairman, and M. Camille Huysmans, the Secretary of the Bureau, came over from Brussels and a hurried meeting of delegates assembled in the Fabian office to discuss their proposals. The Bureau had the good sense to recognise that the way to unity led through the Labour Party; and it was agreed that the three Socialist bodies should form a United Socialist Council, subject to the condition that the British Socialist Party should affiliate to the Labour Party. In December, 1913, a formal conference was held in London, attended on this occasion by all the members of the International Socialist Bureau, representing the Socialist parties of twenty different countries. The crux of the question was to find a form of words which satisfied all susceptibilities; and Sidney Webb, who was chosen chairman of a part of the proceedings when the British delegates met by themselves to formulate the terms of agreement, was here in his element; for it would be hard to find anybody in England more skilful in solving the difficulties that arise in determining the expression of a proposition of which the substance is not in dispute. An agreement was arrived at that the Joint Socialist Council should be formed as soon as the British Socialist Party was affiliated to the Labour Party. The B.S.P. confirmed the decision of its delegates, but the Labour Party referred the acceptance of affiliation to the Annual Conference of 1915[39]. Then came the War. The Labour Party Conference of 1915 did not take place, and a sudden new divergence of opinion arose in the Socialist movement. The Labour Party, the Fabian Society, and the leaders of the B.S.P. gave general support to the Government in entering into the war. The I.L.P. adopted an attitude of critical hostility. Amidst this somewhat unexpected regrouping of parties, any attempt to inaugurate a United Socialist Council was foredoomed to failure. The project for Socialist Unity therefore awaits the happy time when war shall have ceased. FOOTNOTES: [39] The Labour Party Conference held in January, 1916, unanimously accepted the affiliation of the British Socialist Party. Chapter XI The Minority Report, Syndicalism and Research: 1909-15 The emergence of Mrs. Sidney Webb--The Poor Law Commission--The Minority Report--Unemployment--The National Committee for the Prevention of Destitution--"Vote against the House of Lords"--Bernard Shaw retires--Death of Hubert Bland--Opposition to the National Insurance Bill--The Fabian Reform Committee--The "New Statesman"--The Research Department--"The Rural Problem"--"The Control of Industry"--Syndicalism--The Guildsmen--Final Statistics--The War. A former chapter was entitled "The Episode of Mr. Wells." The present might have been called "The Intervention of Mrs. Sidney Webb," save for the fact that it would suggest a comparison which might be misleading. I have insisted with some iteration that the success of the Society, both in its early days and afterwards, must be mainly attributed to the exceptional force and ability of the Essayists. Later in its history only two persons have come forward who are in my opinion entitled in their Fabian work to rank with the original leaders, to wit, Mr. Wells and Mrs. Webb. Of the former I have said enough already. The present chapter will be largely devoted to the influence of the latter. [Illustration: MRS. SIDNEY WEBB, IN 1909] It must however be observed that in all their achievements it is impossible to make a clear distinction between Mrs. Webb and her husband. For example, the Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission, shortly to be dealt with, purported to be the work of Mrs. Webb and her three co-signatories. In fact the investigation, the invention, and the conclusions were in the fullest sense joint, although the draft which went to the typist was in the handwriting of Mr. Webb. On some occasions at any rate Mrs. Webb lectures from notes in her husband's eminently legible handwriting: her own--oddly unlike her character--is indecipherable without prolonged scrutiny even by herself. Sometimes, on the other hand, it is possible to separate the work of the two. Mrs. Webb, although elected a member in 1893, took practically no part in the Fabian Society until 1906. It may be said, with substantial if not literal accuracy, that her only contributions to the Society for the first dozen years of her membership were a couple of lectures and Tract No. 67, "Women and the Factory Acts." The Suffrage movement and the Wells episode brought her to our meetings, and her lecture in "The Faith I Hold" series, a description of her upbringing amongst the captains of industry who built some of the world's great railways, was amongst the most memorable in the long Fabian series. Still she neither held nor sought any official position; and the main work of a Society is necessarily done by the few who sit at its Committees often twice or thrice a week. The transformation of Mrs. Webb from a student and writer, a typical "socialist of the chair," into an active leader and propagandist originated in December, 1905, when she was appointed a member of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law. The Fabian Society had nothing to do with the Commission during its four years of enquiry, though as usual not a few Fabians took part in the work, both officially and unofficially. But when in the spring of 1909 the Minority Report was issued, signed by Mrs. Webb and George Lansbury, both members of the Society, as well as by the Rev. Russell Wakefield (now the Bishop of Birmingham) and Mr. F. Chandler, Secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners, the Society took it up. Mr. and Mrs. Webb reprinted the Minority Report with an introduction and notes in two octavo volumes, and they lent the Society the plates for a paper edition in two parts at a shilling and two shillings, one dealing with Unemployment and the other with the reconstruction of the Poor Law, some 6000 copies of which were sold at a substantial profit. The Treasury Solicitor was rash enough to threaten us with an injunction on the ground of infringement of the Crown copyright and to demand an instant withdrawal of our edition. But Government Departments which try conclusions with the Fabian Society generally find the Society better informed than themselves; and we were able triumphantly to refer the Treasury Solicitor to a published declaration of his own employers, the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury, a score of years before, in which they expressly disclaimed their privilege of copyright monopoly so far as ordinary blue books were concerned, and actually encouraged the reprinting of them for the public advantage. And, with characteristic impudence, we intimated also that, if the Government wished to try the issue, it might find that the legal copyright was not in the Crown at all, as the actual writer of the Report, to whom alone the law gives copyright, had never ceded his copyright and was not a member of the Royal Commission at all! At the same time we prepared to get the utmost advertisement out of the attempt to suppress the popular circulation of the Report, and we made this fact known to the Prime Minister. In the end the Treasury Solicitor had to climb down and withdraw his objection. What the Government did was to undercut us by publishing a still cheaper edition, which did not stop our sales, and thus the public benefited by our enterprise, and an enormous circulation was obtained for the Report. The Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission--although never, from first to last, mentioning Socialism--was a notable and wholly original addition to Socialist theory, entirely of Fabian origin. Hitherto all Socialist writings on the organisation of society, whether contemporary or Utopian, had visualised a world composed exclusively of healthy, sane, and effective citizens, mostly adults. No Socialist had stopped to think out how, in a densely populated and highly industrialised Socialist community, we should provide systematically for the orphans, the sick, the physically or mentally defective and the aged on the one hand, and for the adults for whom at any time no immediate employment could be found. The Minority Report, whilst making immediately practicable proposals for the reform of all the evils of the Poor Law, worked out the lines along which the necessary organisation must proceed, even in the fully socialised State. We had, in the Fabian Society, made attempts to deal with both sides of this problem; but our publications, both on the Poor Law and on the Unemployed, had lacked the foundation of solid fact and the discovery of new principles, which the four years' work of the Fabians connected with the Poor Law Commission now supplied. English Socialists have always paid great and perhaps excessive attention to the problem of unemployment. Partly this is due to the fact that Socialism came to the front in Great Britain at a period when unemployment was exceptionally rife, and when for the first time in the nineteenth century the community had become acutely aware of it. In our early days it was commonly believed to be a rapidly growing evil. Machinery was replacing men: the capitalists would employ a few hands to turn the machines on and off: wealth would be produced for the rich, and most of the present manual working class would become superfluous. The only reply, so far as I know, to this line of argumentative forecast is that it does not happen. The world is at present so avid of wealth, so eager for more things to use or consume, that however quickly iron and copper replace flesh and blood, the demand for men keeps pace with it. Anyway, unemployment in the twentieth century has so far been less prevalent than it was in the nineteenth, and nobody now suggests, as did Mrs. Besant in 1889, that the increasing army of the unemployed, provided with work by the State, would ultimately oust the employees of private capitalism. Unemployment in fact is at least as old as the days of Queen Elizabeth, when the great Poor Law of 1601 was passed to cope with it. Whilst labour was scattered and the artisan still frequently his own master, unemployment was indefinite and relatively imperceptible. When masses of men and women came to be employed in factories, the closing of the factory made unemployment obvious to those on the spot. But two generations ago Lancashire and Yorkshire were far away from London, and the nation as a whole knew little and cared less about hard times amongst cotton operatives or iron-workers in the remote north. It may be said with fair accuracy that Unemployment was scarcely recognised as a social problem before the last quarter of the nineteenth century, though in fact it had existed for centuries, and had been prevalent for fifty years. Mill in his "Political Economy," which treats so sympathetically of the state of labour under capitalism, has no reference to it in the elaborate table of contents. Indeed the word unemployment is so recent as to have actually been unknown before the early nineties[40]. But the Trade Unionists had always been aware of unemployment, since, after strike pay, it is "out-of-work benefit" which they have found the best protection for the standard rate of wages, and nothing in the program of Socialism appealed to them more directly than its claim to abolish unemployment. Finally it may be said that unemployment is on the whole more prevalent in Great Britain than elsewhere; the system of casual or intermittent employment is more widespread; throughout the Continent the working classes in towns are nearly everywhere connected with the rural peasant landowners or occupiers, so that the town labourer can often go back to the land at any rate for his keep; whilst all America, still predominantly agricultural, is in something like a similar case. The Fabian Society had since its earliest days been conscious of the problem of unemployment; but it had done little to solve it. The "Report on the Government Organisation of Unemployed Labour," printed "for the information of members" in 1886, had been long forgotten, and an attempt to revise it made some time in the nineties had come to nothing. In "Fabian Essays" unemployment is rightly recognised as the Achilles heel of the proletarian system, but the practical problem is not solved or even thoroughly understood; the plausible error of supposing that the unemployed baker and bootmaker can be set to make bread and boots for one another still persists. In 1893 we reprinted from the "Nineteenth Century" as Tract No. 47 a paper on "The Unemployed" by John Burns, and we had published nothing else. In fact we found the subject too difficult. There were plenty of palliatives familiar to every social enquirer; Socialism, the organisation of industry by the community for the community, we regarded as the real and final remedy. But between the former, such as labour bureaux, farm colonies, afforestation, the eight hours day, which admittedly were at best only partial and temporary, and Socialism, which was obviously far off, there was a great gulf fixed, and how to bridge it we knew not. At last the Minority Report provided an answer. It was a comprehensive and practicable scheme for preventing unemployment under existing conditions, and for coping with the mass of incompetent destitution which for generations had Been the disgrace of our civilisation. Into the details of this scheme I must not enter because it is, properly speaking, outside the scope of this book. The propaganda for carrying the Report into effect was undertaken by the National Committee for the Prevention of Destitution, established by Mrs. Webb as a separate organisation. The necessity for this step was significant of the extent to which Socialism, as it crystallises into practical measures, invades the common body of British thought. People who would not dream of calling themselves Socialists, much less contributing to the funds of a Socialist Society, become enthusiastically interested in separate parts of its program as soon as it has a program, provided these parts are presented on their own merits and not as approaches to Socialism. Indeed many who regard Socialism as a menace to society are so anxious to find and support alternatives to it, that they will endow expensive Socialistic investigations and subscribe to elaborate Socialistic schemes of reform under the impression that nothing that is thoughtful, practical, well informed, and constitutional can possibly have any connection with the Red Spectre which stands in their imagination for Socialism. To such people the Minority Report, a document obviously the work of highly skilled and disinterested political thinkers and experts, would recommend itself as the constitutional basis of a Society for the Prevention of Destitution: that is, of the condition which not only smites the conscientious rich with a compunction that no special pleading by arm-chair economists can allay, but which offers a hotbed to the sowers of Socialism. Add to these the considerable number of convinced or half-convinced Socialists who for various reasons are not in a position to make a definite profession of Socialism without great inconvenience, real or imaginary, to themselves, and it will be plain that Mrs. Webb would have been throwing away much of her available resources if she had not used the device of a new organisation to agitate for the Minority Report _ad hoc_. Many Fabians served on the Committee--indeed a large proportion of our members must have taken part in its incessant activities--and the relations between the two bodies were close; but most of the subscribers to the Committee and many of its most active members came from outside the Society, and were in no way committed to its general principles. For two whole years Mrs. Webb managed her Committee with great vigour and dash. She collected for it a considerable income and a large number of workers: she lectured and organised all over the country; she discovered that she was an excellent propagandist, and that what she could do with success she also did with zest. In the summer of 1911 Mr. and Mrs. Webb left England for a tour round the world, and Mrs. Webb had mentioned before she left that she was willing to be nominated for the Executive. At the election in April, 1912, whilst still abroad, she was returned second on the poll, with 778 votes, only a dozen behind her husband. From this point onwards Mrs. Webb has been on the whole the dominant personality in the Society This does not necessarily mean that she is abler or stronger than her husband or Bernard Shaw. But the latter had withdrawn from the Executive Committee, and the former, with the rest of the Old Gang, had made the Society what it already was. Mrs. Webb brought a fresh and fertile mind to its councils. Her twenty years of membership and intimate private acquaintance with its leaders made her familiar with its possibilities, but she was free from the influence of past failures--in such matters for example as Socialist Unity--and she was eager to start out on new lines which the almost unconscious traditions of the Society had hitherto barred. * * * * * The story of the Society has been traced to the conclusion of the intervention of Mr. Wells, and I then turned aside to describe the numerous new activities of the booming years which followed the Labour Party triumph of 1906. I must now complete the history of the internal affairs of the Society. As a political body, the Society has usually, though not invariably, issued some sort of pronouncement on the eve of a General Election. In January, 1910, the Executive Committee published in "Fabian News" a brief manifesto addressed to the members urging them to "Vote against the House of Lords." It will be recollected that the Lords had rejected the Budget, and the sole issue before the country was the right of the House of Commons to control finance. Members were urged to support any duly accredited Labour or socialist candidate; elsewhere they were, in effect, advised to vote for the Liberal candidates. In April their action in publishing this "Special advice to members" without the consent of a members' meeting was challenged, but the Executive Committee's contention that it was entitled to advise the members, and that the advice given was sound, was endorsed by a very large majority. At the Annual Meeting the Executive Committee, with a view to setting forth once more their reasoned view on a subject of perennial trouble to new members, accepted a resolution instructing them to consider and report on the advisability of limiting the liberty of members to support political parties other than Labour or Socialist, and on November 4th R.C.K. Ensor on behalf of the Executive gave an admirable address on Fabian Policy. He explained that the Society had never set out to become a political party, and that in this respect it differed in the most marked manner from most Socialist bodies. Its collective support of the Labour Party combined with toleration of Liberals suited a world of real men who can seldom be arranged on tidy and geometrical lines. This report was accepted by general consent, and in December, when Parliament was again dissolved, this time on the question of the Veto of the Lords, the Executive repeated their "Advice to Members" to vote for Liberals whenever no properly accredited Labour or Socialist candidate was in the field. * * * * * But the dissatisfaction with the old policy, and with its old exponents, was not yet dispelled. A new generation was knocking at the door, and some of the old leaders thought that the time had come to make room for them. Hubert Bland was suffering from uncertain health, and he made up his mind to retire from the official positions he had held since the formation of the Society. Bernard Shaw determined to join him and then suggested the same course to the rest of his contemporaries. Some of them concurred, and in addition to the two already named R.C.K. Ensor (who returned a year later), Stewart Headlam, and George Standring withdrew from the Executive in order to make room for younger members. Twenty-two new candidates came forward at the election of April, 1911; but on the whole the Society showed no particular eagerness for change. The retiring members were re-elected ahead of all the new ones, with Sidney Webb at the top of the poll, and the five additions to the Executive, Emil Davies, Mrs. C.M. Wilson, Reginald Bray, L.C.C., Mrs. F. Cavendish Bentinck, and Henry D. Harben, were none of them exactly youthful or ardent innovators. By this time it was apparent that the self-denying ordinance of the veterans was not really necessary, and the Executive, loath to lose the stimulation of Shaw's constant presence, devised a scheme to authorise the elected members to co-opt as consultative members persons who had already held office for ten years and had retired. The Executive itself was by no means unanimous on this policy, and at the Annual Meeting one of them, Henry H. Slesser, led the opposition to any departure from "the principles of pure democracy." On a show of hands the proposal appeared to be defeated by a small majority, and in the face of the opposition was withdrawn. This is almost the only occasion on which the Executive Committee have failed to carry their policy through the Society, and they might have succeeded even in this instance, either at the meeting or on a referendum, if they had chosen to insist on an alteration in the constitution against the wishes of a substantial fraction of the membership. Here then it may be said that the rule of the essayists as a body came to an end. Sidney Webb alone remained in office. Hubert Bland was in rapidly declining health. Only once again he addressed the Society, on July 16th, 1912, when he examined the history of "Fabian Policy," and indicated the changes which he thought should be made to adapt it to new conditions. Soon after this his sight completely failed, and in April, 1914, he died suddenly of long-standing heart disease. Bernard Shaw happily for the Society has not ceased to concern himself in its activities, although he is no longer officially responsible for their management. His freedom from office does not always make the task of his successors easier. The loyalest of colleagues, he had always defended their policy, whether or not it was exactly of his own choice; but in his capacity of private member his unrivalled influence is occasionally something of a difficulty. If he does not happen to approve of what the Executive proposes he can generally persuade a Business Meeting to vote for something else! * * * * * At this same period, the spring of 1911, the National Insurance Bill was introduced. This was a subject to which the Society had given but little attention and on which it had not formulated a policy. It had opposed the contributory system as proposed to be applied to Old Age Pensions, and a paper on "Paupers and Old Age Pensions," published by Sidney Webb in the "Albany Review" in August, 1907, and reprinted by the Society as Tract No. 135, had probably much influence in deciding the Government to abandon its original plan of excluding paupers permanently from the scheme by showing what difficulties and anomalies would follow from any such course. The National Insurance Bill when first introduced was severely criticised by Sidney Webb in documents circulated amongst Trade Unionists and published in various forms; but a few weeks later he started on his tour round the world and could take no further part in the affair. At the Annual Conference of Fabian Societies in July, 1911, an amendment proposed by H.D. Harben to a resolution dealing with the Bill was carried against a small minority. The amendment declared that the Bill should be opposed, and in furtherance of the policy thus casually suggested and irregularly adopted, the Executive Committee joined with a section of the I.L.P. in a vigorous campaign to defeat the Bill. This was a new rôle for the Society. Usually it has adopted the principle of accepting and making the best of what has already happened; and in politics a Bill introduced by a strong Government is a _fait accompli_; it is too late to say that something else would have been preferable. It may be amended: it may possibly be withdrawn: it cannot be exchanged for another scheme. I shall not however dwell on this episode in Fabian history because for once I was in complete disagreement with all my colleagues, except Sir Leo Chiozza Money, and perhaps I cannot yet view the matter with entire detachment. The Labour Party decided to meet the Bill with friendly criticism, to recognise it as great measure of social reform, and to advocate amendments which they deemed improvements. The Fabian Society attacked the Bill with hostile amendments, prophesied all sorts of calamities as certain to result from it: magnified its administrative difficulties, and generally encouraged the duchesses and farmers who passively resisted it; but their endeavour to defeat the Bill was a failure. It may be too soon to be confident that the policy of the Society in this matter was wrong. But the Trade Unions are stronger than ever: the Friendly Societies are not bankrupt: the working people are insured against sickness: and anybody who now proposed to repeal the Act would be regarded as a lunatic. * * * * * Meanwhile the withdrawal of some of the older had by no means satisfied the younger generation, and during the autumn of 1911 a Fabian Reform Committee was constituted, with Henry H. Slesser as Chairman, Dr. Marion Phillips as Vice-Chairman, Clifford Allen as Secretary, and fifteen other members, including Dr. Ethel Bentham, who, like Mr. Slesser, was a member of the Executive. Their programme, like that of Mr. Wells, included a number of reforms of procedure, none of them of much consequence; and a political policy, which was to insist "that if Fabians do take part in politics, they should do so only as supporters of the Labour Party."[41] The campaign of the Committee lasted a year, and as usual in such cases led to a good deal of somewhat heated controversy over matters which now appear to be very trivial. It is therefore not worth while to recount the details of the proceedings, which can be found by any enquirer in the pages of "Fabian News." Two of the leaders, Dr. Marion Phillips and Clifford Allen, were elected to the Executive at the election of 1912, and some of the administrative reforms proposed by the Committee were carried into effect. The Reformers elected to fight the battle of political policy on point of detail, until in July, 1912, the Executive Committee resolved to bring the matter to an issue, and to that end moved at a members' meeting: "That this meeting endorses the constitutional practice of the Society which accords complete toleration to its members; and whilst reaffirming its loyalty to the Labour Party, to which party alone it as a society has given support, it declines to interfere ... with the right of each member to decide on the manner in which he can best work for Socialism in accordance with his individual opportunities and circumstances." (The phrase omitted refers to the rule about expulsion of members, a safeguard which in fact has never been resorted to.) An amendment of the Reformers embodying their policy was defeated by 122 to 27 and after the holiday season the Reform Committed announced that their mission was accomplished and their organisation had been disbanded[42]. "Fabian Reform" embodied no new principle all through the history of the Society there had been a conflict between the "constitutional practice" of political toleration, and the desire of a militant minority to set up a standard of party orthodoxy, and to penalise or expel the dissenters from it. The next storm which disturbed Fabian equanimity involved an altogether new principle, and was therefore a refreshing change to the veterans, who were growing weary of winning battles fought over the same ground. In order to explain this movement it is necessary to describe a new development in the work of the Society. In the autumn of 1912 Mrs. Webb came to the conclusion that the work of the National Committee for the Prevention of Destitution could not be carried on indefinitely on a large scale. Reform of the Poor Law was not coming as a big scheme. It was true that the Majority Report was almost forgotten, but there appeared to be no longer any hope that the Government would take up as a whole the scheme of the Minority Report. It would come about in due time, but not as the result of an agitation. The National Committee had a monthly paper, "The Crusade," edited by Clifford Sharp, a member of the Society who came to the front at the time of the Wells agitation, had been one of the founders of the Nursery, and a member of the Executive from 1909 to 1914. In March, 1913, Bernard Shaw, H.D. Harben, and the Webbs, with a few other friends, established the "New Statesman," with Clifford Sharp as editor. This weekly review is not the organ of the Society, and is not in any formal way connected with it, but none the less it does in fact express the policy which has moulded the Society, and it has been a useful vehicle for publishing the results of Fabian Research. Fabian Research, the other outgrowth of the Committee for the Prevention of Destitution, was organised by Mrs. Webb in the autumn of 1912. Investigation of social problems was one of the original objects of the Society and had always been a recognised part of its work. As a general rule, members had taken it up individually, but at various periods Committees had been appointed to investigate particular subjects. The important work of one of these Committees, on the Decline of the Birth-rate, has been described in an earlier chapter. Mrs. Webb's plan was to systematise research, to enlist the co-operation of social enquirers not necessarily committed to the principles of the Society, and to obtain funds for this special purpose from those who would not contribute to the political side of the Society's operations. The "Committees of Inquiry" then formed took up two subjects, the "Control of Industry" and "Land Problems and Rural Development." The latter was organised by H.D. Harben and was carried on independently. After a large amount of information had been collected, partly in writing and partly from the oral evidence of specialists, a Report was drafted by Mr. Harben and published first as a Supplement to the "New Statesman" on August 4th, 1913, and some months later by Messrs. Constable for the Fabian Society as a half-a-crown volume entitled "The Rural Problem." In fact there is a consensus of opinion throughout all parties on this group of questions. Socialists, Liberals, and a large section of Conservatives advocate Wages Boards for providing a statutory minimum wage for farm labourers, State aid for building of cottages and a resolute speeding up in the provision of land for small holdings. The Fabian presentment of the case did not substantially differ from that of the Land Report published a few months later under Liberal auspices, and our Report, though useful, cannot be said to have been epoch-making. Meanwhile the Enquiry into the Control of Industry was developing on wider lines. The Research Department set up its own office and staff, and began to collect information about all the methods of control of industry at present existing as alternatives to the normal capitalist system. Co-operation in all its forms, the resistances of Trade Unionism, the effects of professional organisations, such as those of the Teachers and of the Engineers, and all varieties of State and Municipal enterprise were investigated in turn; several reports have been published as "New Statesman" Supplements, and a volume or series of volumes will in due time appear. The problem of the Control of Industry had become important because of the rise of a new school of thought amongst Socialists, especially in France, where the rapid growth of Trade Unionism since 1884, combined with profound distrust of the group system of party politics, had led to a revival of old-fashioned anarchism in a new form. Syndicalism, which is the French word for Trade Unionism, proposes that the future State should be organised on the basis of Trade Unions; it regards a man's occupation as more vitally important to him than his place of residence, and therefore advocates representation by trades in place of localities: it lays stress on his desire, his right, to control his own working life directly through his own elected representatives of his trade: it criticises the "servile state" proposed by collectivists, wherein the workman, it is said, would be a wage-slave to officials of the State, as he is now to officials of the capitalists. Thus it proposes that the control of industry should be in the hands of the producers, and not, as at present, in the hands of consumers through capitalists catering for their custom, or through co-operative societies of consumers, or through the State acting on behalf of citizens who are consumers. A quite extraordinary diversity of streams of opinion converged to give volume to this new trend of thought. There was the literary criticism of Mr. Hilaire Belloc, whose ideal is the peasant proprietor of France, freed from governmental control, a self-sufficient producer of all his requirements. His attack was directed against the Servile State, supposed to be foreshadowed by the Minority Report, which proposed drastic collective control over the derelicts of our present social anarchy. Then Mr. Tom Mann came back from Australia as the prophet of the new proletarian gospel, and for a few months attracted working-class attention by his energy and eloquence. The South Wales miners, after many years of acquiescence in the rule of successful and highly respected but somewhat old-fashioned leaders, were awakening to a sense of power, and demanding from their Unions a more aggressive policy. The parliamentary Labour Party since 1910 had resolved to support the Liberal Government in its contest with the House of Lords and in its demand for Irish Home Rule, and as Labour support was essential to the continuance of the Liberals in power, they were debarred from pushing their own proposals regardless of consequences. Although therefore the party was pledged to the demand for Women's Franchise, they refused to wreck the Government on its behalf. Hence impatient Socialists and extreme Suffragists united in proclaiming that the Labour Party was no longer of any use, and that "direct action" by Suffragettes and Trade Unionists was the only method of progress. The "Daily Herald," a newspaper started by a group of compositors in London, was acquired by partisans of this policy, and as long as it lived incessantly derided the Labour Party and advocated Women's Franchise and some sort of Syndicalism as the social panacea. Moreover a variant on Syndicalism, of a more reasoned and less revolutionary character, called "Guild Socialism," was proposed by Mr. A.R. Orage in the pages of his weekly, "The New Age," and gained a following especially in Oxford, where Mr. G.D.H. Cole was leader of the University Fabian Society. His book on Trade Unionism, entitled "The World of Labour," published at the end of 1913, attracted much attention, and he threw himself with great energy into the Trade Union enquiry of the Research Department, of which his friend and ally, Mr. W. Mellor, was the Secretary. Mr. Cole was elected to the Executive Committee in April, 1914, and soon afterwards began a new "Reform" movement. He had become a prophet of the "Guild Socialism" school, and was at that time extremely hostile to the Labour Party. Indeed a year before, when dissatisfaction with the party was prevalent, he had proposed at a business meeting that the Fabian Society should disaffiliate, but he had failed to carry his resolution by 92 votes against 48. In the summer of 1914 however he arrived at an understanding with Mr. Clifford Allen, also a member of the Executive, and with other out and out supporters of the Labour Party, by which they agreed to combine their altogether inconsistent policies into a single new program for the Fabian Society. The program of the "several schools of thought," published in "Fabian News" for April, 1915, laid down that the object of the Society should be to carry out research, that the Basis should be replaced merely by the phrase, "The Fabian Society consists of Socialists and forms part of the national and international movement for the emancipation of the community from the capitalist system"; and that a new rule should be adopted forbidding members to belong to, or publicly to associate with, any organisation opposed to that movement of which this Society had declared itself a part. The Executive Committee published a lengthy rejoinder, and at the election of the Executive Committee a few weeks later the members by their votes clearly indicated their disapproval of the new scheme. At the Annual Meeting in May, 1915, only small minorities supported the plan of reconstruction, and Mr. Cole then and there resigned his membership of the Society, and was subsequently followed by a few other members. A little while later the Oxford University Fabian Society severed its connection with the parent Society, and Mr. Cole adopted the wise course of founding a society of his own for the advocacy of Guild Socialism. This episode brings the history of the Society down to the present date, and I shall conclude this chapter with a brief account of its organisation at the time of writing, the summer of 1915. At the end of 1913 my own long term of service as chief officer of the Society came to an end, and my colleague for several previous years, W. Stephen Sanders, was appointed my successor. The Executive Committee requested me to take the new office of Honorary Secretary, and to retain a share in the management of the Society. This position I still hold. The tide of Socialist progress which began to rise in 1905 had turned before 1914, and the period of depression was intensified by the war, which is still the dominant fact in the world. The membership of the Society reached its maximum in 1913, 2804 in the parent Society and about 500 others in local societies. In 1915 the members were 2588 and 250. The removal to new premises in the autumn of 1914 was more than a mere change of offices, since it provided the Society with a shop for the sale of its publications, a hall sufficiently large for minor meetings, and accommodation in the same house for the Research Department and the Women's Group. Moreover a couple of rooms were furnished as a "Common Room" for members, in which light refreshments can be obtained and Socialist publications consulted. The finances of the Society have of course been adversely affected by the war, but not, so far, to a very material extent. The chief new departure of recent years has been the organisation of courses of lectures in London for the general public by Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, and Mrs. Webb, which have not only been of value as a means of propaganda, but have also yielded a substantial profit for the purposes of the Society. The plan originated with a debate between Bernard Shaw and G.K. Chesterton in 1911, which attracted a crowded audience and much popular interest. Next year Mr. Shaw debated with Mr. Hilaire Belloc: in 1913 Mr. and Mrs. Webb gave six lectures at King's Hall on "Socialism Restated": in 1914 Bernard Shaw gave another course of six at Kingsway Hall on the "Redistribution of Income," in which he developed the thesis that the economic goal of Socialism is equality of income for all. Lastly, in 1915 a course of six lectures at King's Hall by the three already named on "The World after the War" proved to be unexpectedly successful. The lecturing to clubs and other societies carried on by new generations of members still continues, but it forms by no means so prominent a part of the Society's work as in earlier years. Local Fabian organisation, as is always the case in time of depression, is on the down grade. The London groups scarcely exist, and but few local societies, besides that of Liverpool, show signs of life. The Research Department, the Women's Group, and the Nursery are still active. The Society has an old-established tradition and a settled policy, but in fact it is not now controlled by anything like an Old Gang. The Executive Committee numbers twenty-one: two only of these, Sidney Webb and myself, have sat upon it from its early days: only two others, Dr. Lawson Dodd (the Treasurer) and W. Stephen Sanders (the General Secretary) were on the Executive during the great contest with Mr. Wells ten years ago. All the rest have joined it within the last few years, and if they support the old tradition, it is because they accept it, and not because they created it. Moreover the majority of the members are young people, most of them born since the Society was founded. The Society is old, but it does not consist, in the main, of old people. What its future may be I shall consider in the next, and concluding, chapter. * * * * * I must add a final paragraph to my history. At the time I write, in the first days of 1916, the war is with us and the end is not in sight. In accordance with the rule which forbids it to speak, unless it has something of value to say, the Society has made no pronouncement and adopted no policy. A resolution registering the opinion of the majority of a few hundred members assembled in a hall is not worth recording when the subject is one in which millions are as concerned and virtually as competent as themselves. Naturally there is diversity of opinion amongst the members. On the one hand Mr. Clifford Allen, a member of the Executive, has played a leading part in organising opposition to conscription and opposing the policy of the Government. On the other hand two other members of the Executive Committee, Mr. H.J. Gillespie and Mr. C.M. Lloyd, have, since the beginning of the war, resigned their seats in order to take commissions in the Army. Another member, the General Secretary, after months of vigorous service as one of the Labour Party delegates to Lord Derby's Recruiting Committee, accepted a commission in the Army in November, 1915, in order to devote his whole time to this work, and has been granted leave of absence for the period of the war, whilst I have undertaken my old work in his place. Many members of the Society joined the Army in the early months of the war, and already a number, amongst whom may be named Rupert Brooke, have given their lives for their country. [Illustration: EDWARD R. PEASE, IN 1913] FOOTNOTES: [40] The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary kindly inform me that the earliest quotation they have yet found is dated December, 1894. I cannot discover it in any Fabian publication before Tract No. 65, which was published in July, 1895. [41] Manifesto on Fabian Policy issued by the Fabian Reform Committee, 4 pp., 4to, November 28th, 1911. [42] "Fabian News," November, 1912. Chapter XII The Lessons of Thirty Years Breaking the spell of Marxism--A French verdict--Origin of Revisionism in Germany--The British School of Socialism--Mr. Ernest Barker's summary--Mill _versus_ Marx--The Fabian Method--Making Socialists or making Socialism--The life of propagandist societies--The prospects of Socialist Unity--The future of Fabian ideas--The test of Fabian success. The Fabian Society was founded for the purpose of reconstructing Society in accordance with the highest moral possibilities. This is still the most accurate and compendious description of its object and the nature of its work. But the stage of idealism at which more than a very modest instalment of this cosmic process seemed possible within the lifetime of a single institution had passed before the chief Essayists became members, and indeed I cannot recollect that the founders themselves ever imagined that it lay within their own power to reconstruct Society; none of them was really so sanguine or so self-confident as to anticipate so great a result from their efforts, and it will be remembered that the original phrase was altered by the insertion of the words "to help on" when the constitution was actually formulated. Society has not yet been reconstructed, but the Fabians have done something towards its reconstruction, and my history will be incomplete without an attempt to indicate what the Society has already accomplished and what may be the future of its work. Its first achievement, as already mentioned, was to break the spell of Marxism in England. Public opinion altogether failed to recognise the greatness of Marx during his lifetime, but every year that passes adds strength to the conviction that the broad principles he promulgated will guide the evolution of society during the present century. Marx demonstrated the moral bankruptcy of commercialism and formulated the demand for the communal ownership and organisation of industry; and it is hardly possible to exaggerate the value of this service to humanity. But no man is great enough to be made into a god; no man, however wise, can see far into the future. Neither Marx himself nor his immediate followers recognised the real basis of his future fame; they thought he was a brilliant and original economist, and a profound student of history. His Theory of Value, his Economic Interpretation of History, seemed to them the incontestible premises which necessarily led to his political conclusions. This misapprehension would not have much mattered had they allowed themselves freedom of thought. Socialism, as first preached to the English people by the Social Democrats, was as narrow, as bigoted, as exclusive as the strictest of Scotch religious sects. "Das Kapital," Vol. I, was its bible; and the thoughts and schemes of English Socialists were to be approved or condemned according as they could or could not be justified by a quoted text. The Fabian Society freed English Socialism from this intellectual bondage, and freed it sooner and more completely than "Revisionists" have succeeded in doing anywhere else. Accepting the great principle that the reconstruction of society to be worked for is the ownership and control of industry by the community, the Fabians refused to regard as articles of faith either the economic and historic analyses which Marx made use of or the political evolution which he predicted. Socialism in England remained the fantastic creed of a group of fanatics until "Fabian Essays" and the Lancashire Campaign taught the working classes of England, or at any rate their leaders, that Socialism was a living principle which could be applied to existing social and political conditions without a cataclysm either insurrectionary or even political. Revolutionary phraseology, the language of violence, survived, and still survives, just as in ordinary politics we use the metaphors of warfare and pretend that the peaceful polling booth is a battlefield and that our political opponents are hostile armies. But we only wave the red flag in our songs, and we recognise nowadays that the real battles of Socialism are fought in committee rooms at Westminster and in the council chambers of Town Halls. It was perhaps fortunate that none of the Fabian leaders came within the influence of the extraordinary personality of Karl Marx. Had he lived a few years longer he might have dominated them as he dominated his German followers, and one or two of his English adherents. Then years would have been wasted in the struggle to escape. It was fortunate also that the Fabian Society has never possessed one single outstanding leader, and has always refrained from electing a president or permanent chairman. There never has been a Fabian orthodoxy, because no one was in a position to assert what the true faith was. Freedom of thought was without doubt obtained for English Socialists by the Fabians. How far the world-wide revolt against Marxian orthodoxy had its origin in England is another and more difficult question. In his study of the Fabian Society[43] M. �douard Pfeiffer states in the preface that the Society makes this claim, quotes Bernard Shaw as saying to him, "The world has been thoroughly Fabianised in the last twenty-five years," and adds that he is going to examine the accuracy of it. Later he says:-- "Les premiers de tous les Socialistes, les Fabiens out inauguré le mouvement de critique antimarxiste: à une époque oû les dogmes du maître étaient considérés comme intangibles, les Fabiens out prétendu que l'on pouvait se dire socialiste sans jamais avoir lu le Capital ou en en désapprouvant la teneur; par opposition à Marx ils out ressuscité l'esprit de Stuart Mill et sur tous les points ils se sont attaqués à Marx, guerre des classes et materialisme historique, catastrophisme et avant tout la question de la valeur-travail."[44] This is a French view. Germany is naturally the stronghold of Marxism, and the country where it has proved, up to a point, an unqualified success. Although the Social Democratic Party was founded as an alliance between the followers of Marx and of Lassalle, on terms to which Marx himself violently objected, none the less the leadership of the party fell to those who accepted the teaching of Marx, and on that basis by far the greatest Socialist Party of the world has been built up. Nowhere else did the ideas of Marx hold such unquestioned supremacy: nowhere else had they such a body of loyal adherents, such a host of teachers and interpreters. Only on the question of agricultural land in the freer political atmosphere of South Germany was there even a breath of dissent. The revolt came from England in the person of Edward Bernstein, who, exiled by Bismarck, took refuge in London, and was for years intimately acquainted with the Fabian Society and its leaders. Soon after his return to Germany he published in 1899 a volume criticising Marxism,[45] and thence grew up the Revisionist movement for free thought in Socialism which has attracted all the younger men, and before the war had virtually, if not actually, obtained control over the Social Democratic Party. In England, and in Germany through Bernstein, I think the Fabian Society may claim to have led the revolt. Elsewhere the revolt has come rather in deeds than in words. In France, in Italy, and in Belgium and in other European countries, a Socialist Party has grown up which amid greater political opportunities has had to face the actual problems of modern politics. These could not be solved by quotations from a German philosopher, and liberty has been gained by force of circumstances. Nevertheless in many countries, such as Russia and the United States, even now, or at any rate until very recent years, the freedom of action of Socialist parties has been impeded by excessive respect for the opinions of the Founder, and Socialist thought has been sterilised, because it was assumed that Marx had completed the philosophy of Socialism, and the business of Socialists was not to think for themselves, but merely to work for the realisation of his ideas. * * * * * But mere freedom was not enough. Something must be put in the place of Marx. His English followers did not notice that he had indicated no method, and devised no political machinery for the transition; or if they noticed it they passed over the omission as a negligible detail. If German Socialism would not suit, English Socialism had to be formulated to take its place. This has been the life-work of the Fabian Society, the working out of the application of the broad principles of Socialism to the industrial and political environment of England. I say England advisedly, because the industrial and political conditions of Scotland are in some degree different, and the application of the principles of Socialism to Ireland has not yet been seriously attempted. But for England "Fabian Essays" and the Fabian Tracts are by general consent the best expositions of the meaning and working of Socialism in the English language. Marxian Socialism regarded itself as a thing apart. Marx had discovered a panacea for the ills of society: the old was to be cleared away and all things were to become new. In Marx's own thought evolution and revolution were tangled and alternated. The evolutionary side was essential to it; the idea of revolutionary catastrophe is almost an excrescence. But to the Marxians (of whom Marx once observed that he was not one) this excrescence became the whole thing. People were divided into those who advocated the revolution and those who did not. The business of propaganda was to increase the number of adherents of the new at the expense of the supporters of the old. The Fabians regarded Socialism as a principle already in part embodied in the constitution of society, gradually extending its influence because it harmonised with the needs and desires of men in countries where the large industry prevails. Fabian Socialism is in fact an interpretation of the spirit of the times. I have pointed out already that the municipalisation of monopolies, a typically Fabian process, had its origin decades before the Society was founded, and all that the Fabian Society did was to explain its social implications and advocate its wider extension. The same is true of the whole Fabian political policy. Socialism in English politics grew up because of the necessity for State intervention in the complex industrial and social organisation of a Great State. Almost before the evil results of Laissez Faire had culminated Robert Owen was pointing the way to factory legislation, popular education, and the communal care of children. The Ten Hours Act of 1847 was described by Marx himself as "the victory of a principle," that is, of "the political economy of the working class."[46] That victory was frequently repeated in the next thirty years, and collective protection of Labour in the form of Factory Acts, Sanitary Acts, Truck Acts, Employers' Liability Acts, and Trade Board Acts became a recognised part of the policy of both political parties. Fabian teaching has had more direct influence in promoting the administrative protection of Labour. The Fair Wages policy, now everywhere prevalent in State and Municipal employment, was, as has been already described, if not actually invented, at any rate largely popularised by the Society. It was a working-class demand, and it has been everywhere put forward by organised labour, but its success would have been slower had the manual workers been left to fight their own battle. I have said that the work of the Society was the interpretation of an existing movement, the explanation and justification of tendencies which originated in Society at large, and not in societies, Fabian or other. That work is only less valuable than the formulation of new ideas. None of the Fabians would claim to rank beside the great promulgators of new ideas, such as Owen and Marx. But the interpretation of tendencies is necessary if progress is to be sustained and if it is to be unbroken by casual reaction. In an old country like ours, with vast forces of inertia built up by ages of precedents, by a class system which forms a part of the life of the nation, by a distribution of wealth which even yet scarcely yields to the pressure of graduated taxation, legislation is always in arrear of the needs of the times; the social structure is always old-fashioned and out of date, and reform always tends to be late, and even too late, unless there are agitators with the ability to attract public attention calling on the men in power to take action. * * * * * But this victory of a principle is not a complete victory of the principles of Socialism. It is a limitation of the power of the capitalist to use his capital as he pleases, and Socialism is much more than a series of social safeguards to the private ownership of capital. Municipal ownership is a further step, but even this will not carry us far because the capital suitable for municipal management on existing lines is but a small fraction of the whole, and because municipal control does not directly affect the amount of capital in the hands of the capitalists who are always expropriated with ample compensation. We have made some progress along another line. Supertax, death duties, and taxes on unearned increment do a little to diminish the wealth of the few: old age pensions, national insurance, and workmen's compensation do something towards mitigating the poverty of the poor. But it must be confessed that we have made but little progress along the main road of Socialism. Private ownership of capital and land flourishes almost as vigorously as it did thirty years ago. Its grosser cruelties have been checked, but the thing itself has barely been touched. Time alone will show whether progress is to be along existing lines, whether the power of the owners of capital over the wealth it helps to create and over the lives of the workers whom it enslaves will gradually fade away, as the power of our kings over the Government of our country has faded, the form remaining when the substance has vanished, or whether the community will at last consciously accept the teaching of Socialism, setting itself definitely to put an end to large-scale private capitalism, and undertaking itself the direct control of industry. The intellectual outlook is bright; the principles of Socialism are already accepted by a sensible proportion of the men and women in all classes who take the trouble to think, and if we must admit that but little has yet been done, we may well believe that in the fullness of time our ideas will prevail. The present war is giving the old world a great shake, and an era of precipitated reconstruction may ensue if the opportunity be wisely handled. * * * * * The influence of the Fabian Society on political thought is already the theme of doctoral theses by graduates, especially in American universities, but it has not yet found much place in weightier compilation. Indeed so far as I know the only serious attempts in this country to describe its character and estimate its proportions is to be found in an admirable little book by Mr. Ernest Barker of New College, Oxford, entitled "Political Thought in England from Herbert Spencer to the Present Day."[47] The author, dealing with the early Fabians, points out that "Mill rather than Marx was their starting point," but he infers from this that "they start along the line suggested by Mill with an attack on rent as the 'unearned increment' of land," a curious inaccuracy since our earliest contribution to the theory of Socialism, Tract No. 7, "Capital and Land," was expressly directed to emphasising the comparative unimportance of Land Nationalisation, and nothing in the later work of the Society has been inconsistent with this attitude. Then Mr. Barker goes on: "Fabianism began after 1884 to supply a new philosophy in place of Benthamite Individualism. Of the new gospel of collectivism a German writer[48] has said Webb was the Bentham and Shaw the Mill.[49] Without assigning rôles we may fairly say there is some resemblance between the influence of Benthamism on legislation after 1830 and the influence of Fabianism on legislation since, at any rate, 1906.[50] In either case we have a small circle of thinkers and investigators in quiet touch with politicians: in either case we have a 'permeation' of general opinion by the ideas of these thinkers and investigators.... It is probable that the historian of the future will emphasise Fabianism in much the same way as the historian of to-day emphasises Benthamism."[51] Mr. Barker next explains that "Fabianism has its own political creed, if it is a political creed consequential upon an economic doctrine. That economic doctrine advocates the socialisation of rent. But the rents which the Fabians would socialise are not only rents from land. Rent in the sense of unearned increments may be drawn, and is drawn, from other sources. The successful entrepreneur for instance draws a rent of ability from his superior equipment and education. The socialisation of every kind of rent will necessarily arm the State with great funds which it must use.... Shaw can define the two interconnected aims of Fabianism as 'the gradual extension of the franchise and the transfer of rent and interest to the State.'" As Mr. Barker may not be alone in a slight misinterpretation of Fabian doctrine it may be well to take this opportunity of refuting the error. He says that Fabianism advocates the socialisation of rent, and in confirmation quotes Shaw's words "rent _and interest_"! That makes all the difference. If the term rent is widened to include all differential unearned incomes, from land, from ability, from opportunity (i.e. special profits), interest includes all non-differential unearned incomes, and thus the State is to be endowed, not with rents alone, but with all unearned incomes.[52] It is true that the Fabians, throwing over Marx's inaccurate term "surplus value," base their Socialism on the Law of Rent, because, as they allege, this law negatives both equality of income and earnings in proportion to labour, so long as private ownership of land prevails. It is also true that they have directed special attention to the unearned incomes of the "idle" landlord and shareholder, because these are the typical feature of the modern system of distribution, which indeed has come to the front since the time of Marx, and because they furnish the answer to those who contend that wealth is at present distributed approximately in accordance with personal capacity or merit, and tacitly assume that "the rich" are all of them great captains of industry who by enterprise and ability have actually created their vast fortunes.[53] Indeed we might say that we do not mind conceding to our opponents all the wealth "created" by superior brains, if they will let us deal with the unearned incomes which are received independent of the possession of any brains, or any services at all! But although we regard the case of the capitalist employer as relatively negligible, and although we prefer to concentrate our attack on the least defensible side of the capitalist system--and already the State recognises that unearned incomes should pay a larger proportion in income-tax, that property which passes at death, necessarily to those who have not earned it, should contribute a large quota to the public purse, and that unearned increment on land should in part belong to the public--that does not mean that we have any tenderness for the entrepreneur. Him we propose to deal with by the favourite Fabian method of municipalisation and nationalisation. We take over his "enterprise," his gasworks and waterworks, his docks and trams, his railways and mines. We secure for the State the profits of management and the future unearned increment, and we compensate him for his capital with interest-bearing securities. We force him in fact to become the idle recipient of unearned income, and then we turn round and upbraid him and tax him heavily precisely because his income is unearned! If there is any special tenderness in this treatment, I should prefer harshness. To me it seems to resemble the policy of the wolf towards the lamb.[54] I will proceed with quotations from Mr. Barker, because the view of a historian of thought is weightier than anything I could say. "But collectivism also demands in the second place expert government. It demands the 'aristocracy of talent' of which Carlyle wrote. The control of a State with powers so vast will obviously need an exceptional and exceptionally large aristocracy. Those opponents of Fabianism who desire something more revolutionary than its political 'meliorism' and 'palliatives' accuse it of alliance with bureaucracy. They urge that it relies on bureaucracy to administer social reforms from above; and they conclude that, since any governing _class_ is anti-democratic, the Fabians who believe in such a class are really anti-democratic. The charge seems, as a matter of fact, difficult to sustain. Fabians from the first felt and urged that the decentralisation of the State was a necessary condition of the realisation of their aim. The municipality and other local units were the natural bodies for administering the new funds and discharging the new duties which the realisation of that aim would create. 'A democratic State,' Shaw wrote, 'cannot become a Social Democratic State unless it has in every centre of population a local governing body as thoroughly democratic in its constitution as the central Parliament.' The House of Commons he felt must develop 'into the central government which will be the organ of federating the municipalities.' Fabianism thus implied no central bureaucracy; what it demanded was partly, indeed, a more efficient and expert central government (and there is plenty of room for that), but primarily an expert local civil service in close touch with and under the control of a really democratic municipal government. It is difficult to say that this is bureaucracy or that it is not desirable. Many men who are not Fabians or Socialists of any kind feel strongly that the breathing of more vigour and interest into local politics, and the creation of a proper local civil service, are the great problems of the future. "The policy of Fabianism has thus been somewhat as follows. An intellectual circle has sought to permeate all classes, from the top to the bottom, with a common opinion in favour of social control of socially created values. Resolved to permeate all classes, it has not preached class-consciousness; it has worked as much with and through Liberal 'capitalists' as with and through Labour representatives. Resolved gradually to permeate, it has not been revolutionary: it has relied on the slow growth of opinion. Reformist rather than revolutionary, it has explained the impossibility of the sudden 'revolution' of the working classes against capital: it has urged the necessity of a gradual amelioration of social conditions by a gradual assertion of social control over unearned increment.[55] Hence Fabianism has not adopted the somewhat cold attitude of the pure Socialist Party to Trade Unions, but has rather found in their gradual conquest of better wages and better conditions for the workers the line of social advance congenial with its own principles. Again, it has preached that the society which is to exert control must be democratic, if the control is to be, as it must be, self-control: it has taught that such democratic self-control must primarily be exerted in democratic local self-government: it has emphasised the need of reconciling democratic control with expert guidance. While it has never advocated 'direct action' or the avoidance of political activity, while on the contrary, it has advocated the conquest of social reforms on the fields of parliamentary and municipal government, it has not defended the State as it is, but has rather urged the need for a State which is based on democracy tempered by respect for the 'expert.' In this way Socialism of the Fabian type has made representative democracy its creed. It has adopted the sound position that democracy flourishes in that form of state in which people freely produce, thanks to an equality of educational opportunity, and freely choose, thanks to a wide and active suffrage, their own members for their guidance, and, since they have freely produced and chosen them, give them freely and fully the honour of their trust. And thus Socialists like Mr. Sidney Webb and Mr. Ramsay Macdonald have not coquetted with primary democracy, which has always had a magnetic attraction for Socialists. The doctrine that the people itself governs directly through obedient agents--the doctrine of mandate and plebiscite, of referendum and initiative--is not the doctrine of the best English Socialism." Mr. Barker next explains that behind these ideas lies "an organic theory of society," that society is regarded as "an organic unity with a real 'general will' of its own," and after stating that "the development of Liberalism, during the last few years, shows considerable traces of Fabian influence," concludes the subject with the words "Collectivism of the Fabian order was the dominant form of Socialism in England till within the last three of four years." Of the movement of Guild Socialists and others which he deems to have replaced it I shall speak later. I have ventured to quote from Mr. Barker at some length because his summary of Fabian doctrine seems to me (with the exception noted) to be both correct and excellent, and it is safer to borrow from a writer quite unconnected with the Society an estimate of its place in the history of English political thought, rather than to offer my own necessarily prejudiced opinion of its achievements. * * * * * But I must revert again to the Fabian "method." "Make Socialists," said Mr. Wells in "Faults of the Fabian," "and you will achieve Socialism. There is no other way"; and Mr. Wells in his enthusiasm anticipated a society of ten thousand Fabians as the result of a year's propaganda. Will Socialism come through the making of Socialists? If so, Socialism has made but little progress in England, since the number who profess and call themselves Socialist is still insignificant. The foregoing pages have shown in the words of a student of political thought how Socialism has been made in England in quite another way. We did not at the time repudiate Mr. Wells' dictum: indeed we adopted his policy, and attempted the making of Socialism on a large scale. No doubt there is a certain ambiguity in the word "Socialists." It may mean members of Socialist societies, or at any rate "unattached Socialists," all those in fact who use the name to describe their political opinions. Or it may merely be another way of stating that the existing form of society can only be altered by the wills of living people, and change will only be in the direction of Socialism, when the wills which are effective for the purpose choose that direction in preference to another. Mr. Wells himself described as a "fantastic idea" the notion that "the world may be manoeuvred into Socialism without knowing it": that "society is to keep like it is ... and yet Socialism will be soaking through it all, changing without a sign,"[56] and he at any rate meant by his phrase, "make members of Socialist societies." The older and better Fabian doctrine is set out in the opening paragraphs of Tract 70, the "Report on Fabian Policy" (1896). "THE MISSION OF THE FABIANS The object of the Fabian Society is to persuade the English people to make their political constitution thoroughly democratic and so to socialise their industries as to make the livelihood of the people entirely independent of private capitalism. The Fabian Society endeavours to pursue its Socialist and Democratic objects with complete singleness of aim. For example:-- It has no distinctive opinions on the Marriage Question, Religion, Art, abstract Economics, historic Evolution, Currency, or any other subject than its own special business of practical Democracy and Socialism. It brings all the pressure and persuasion in its power to bear on existing forces, caring nothing by what name any party calls itself or what principles, Socialist or other, it professes, but having regard solely to the tendency of its actions, supporting those which make for Socialism and Democracy and opposing those which are reactionary. It does not propose that the practical steps towards Social Democracy should be carried out by itself or by any other specially organised society or party. It does not ask the English people to join the Fabian Society." In old days acting on this view of our "mission" we deliberately allowed the Society to remain small. Latterly we tried to expand, and in the main our attempt was an expensive failure. The other Socialist bodies have always used their propaganda primarily for recruiting; and they have sought to enlist the rank and file of the British people. In this they too have substantially failed, and the forty or fifty thousand members of the I.L.P. and B.S.P. are roughly no larger a proportion of the working class than the three thousand Fabians are of the middle class. If the advance of Socialism in England is to be measured by the "making of Socialists," if we are to count membership, to enumerate meetings, to sum up subscriptions, the outlook is gloomy. Thirty-four years ago a group of strong men led by Mr. H.M. Hyndman founded the Democratic Federation, which survives as the British Socialist Party, with Mr. Hyndman still to the fore; the rest have more or less dropped out, and no one has arisen to take their places. Twenty-two years ago Keir Hardie founded the Independent Labour Party: he has died since the first draft of this passage was written, and no one is left who commands such universal affection and respect amongst the members of the Society he created. Of the seven Essayists who virtually founded the Fabian Society only one is still fully in harness, and his working life must necessarily be nearing its term. It may be doubted whether a society for the propagation of ideas has the power to long outlive the inspiration of its founder, unless indeed he is a man of such outstanding personality that his followers treat him as a god. The religions of the world have been maintained by worshippers, and even in our own day the followers of Marx have held together partly because they regard his teachings with the uncritical reverence usually accorded to the prophets of new faiths. But Marxism has survived in Germany chiefly because it has created and inspired a political party, and political parties are of a different order from propagandist societies. Socialism in England has not yet created a political party; for the Labour Party, though entirely Socialist in policy, is not so in name or in creed, and in this matter the form counts rather than the fact. Europe, as I write in the early days of 1916, is in the melting-pot, and it would be foolish to prophesy either the fate of the nations now at war or, in particular, the future of political parties in Great Britain, and especially of the Labour Party. But so far as concerns the Fabian Society and the two other Socialist Societies, this much may be said: three factors in the past have kept them apart: differences of temperament; differences of policy; differences of leadership. In fact perhaps the last was the strongest. I do not mean that the founders of the three societies entertained mutual antipathies or personal jealousies to the detriment of the movement. I do mean that each group preferred to go its own way, and saw no sufficient advantage in a common path to compensate for the difficulties of selecting it. In a former chapter I have explained how a movement for a form of Socialist Unity had at last almost achieved success, when a new factor, the European War, interposed. After the war these negotiations will doubtless be resumed, and the three Socialist Societies will find themselves more closely allied than ever before. The differences of policy which have divided them will then be a matter of past history. The differences of temperament matter less and less as the general policy becomes fixed, and in a few years the old leaders from whose disputes the general policy emerged must all have left the stage. The younger men inherit an established platform and know nothing of the old-time quarrels and distrusts. They will come together more easily. If the organised propaganda of Socialism continues--and that perhaps is not a matter of certainty--it seems to me improbable that it will be carried on for long by three separate societies. In some way or other, in England as in so many other countries, a United Socialist organisation will be constituted. * * * * * But what of the future of Fabian ideas? In a passage already quoted Mr. Barker indicates that the dominance of "Collectivism of the Fabian order" ceased three or four years ago, and he goes on to indicate that it has been replaced by an anti-state propaganda, taking various forms, Syndicalism, Guild Socialism, and the Distributivism of Mr. Belloc. It is true that Fabianism of the old type is not the last event in the history of political thought, but it is still, I venture to think, the dominant principle in political progress. Guild Socialism, whatever its worth, is a later stage. If our railways are to be managed by the Railwaymen's Union, they must first be acquired for the community by Collectivism. This is not the place to discuss the possibilities of Guild Socialism. After all it is but a form of Socialism, and a first principle of Fabianism has always been free thought. The leading Guild Socialists resigned from the Society: they were not expelled: they attempted to coerce the rest, but no attempt was made to coerce them. Guild Socialism as a scheme for placing production under the management of the producers seems to me to be on the wrong lines. The consumer as a citizen must necessarily decide what is to be produced for his needs. But I do not belong to the generation which will have to settle the matter. The elderly are incompetent judges of new ideas. Fabian doctrine is not stereotyped: the Society consists in the main of young people. The Essayists and their contemporaries have said their say: it remains for the younger people to accept what they choose, and to add whatever is necessary. Those who repudiated the infallibility of Marx will be the last to claim infallibility for themselves. I can only express the hope that as long as the Fabian Society lasts it will be ever open to new ideas, ever conscious that nothing is final, ever aware that the world is enormously complex, and that no single formula will summarise or circumscribe its infinite variety.[57] * * * * * The work of the Fabian Society has been not to make Socialists, but to make Socialism. I think it may be said that the dominant opinion in the Society--at any rate it is my opinion--is that great social changes can only come by consent. The Capitalist system cannot be overthrown by a revolution or by a parliamentary majority. Wage slavery will disappear, as serfdom disappeared, not indeed imperceptibly, for the world is now self-conscious, not even so gradually, for the pace of progress is faster than it was in the Middle Ages, but by a change of heart of the community, by a general recognition, already half realised, that whatever makes for the more equitable distribution of wealth is good; that whatever benefits the working class benefits the nation; that the rich exist only on sufferance, and deserve no more than painless extinction; that the capitalist is a servant of the public, and too often over-paid for the services that he renders. Again, Socialism succeeds because it is common sense. The anarchy of individual production is already an anachronism. The control of the community over itself extends every day. We demand order, method, regularity, design; the accidents of sickness and misfortune, of old age and bereavement, must be prevented if possible, and if not, mitigated. Of this principle the public is already convinced: it is merely a question of working out the details. But order and forethought is wanted for industry as well as for human life. Competition is bad, and in most respects private monopoly is worse. No one now seriously defends the system of rival traders with their crowds of commercial travellers: of rival tradesmen with their innumerable deliveries in each street; and yet no one advocates the capitalist alternative, the great trust, often concealed and insidious, which monopolises oil or tobacco or diamonds, and makes huge profits for a fortunate; few out of the helplessness of the unorganised consumers. But neither the idle rich class nor the anarchy of competition is so outstanding an evil as the poverty of the poor. We aim at making the rich poorer chiefly in order to make the poor richer. Our first tract, "Why are the Many Poor?" struck the keynote. In a century of abounding wealth England still has in its midst a hideous mass of poverty which is too appalling to think of. That poverty, we say, is preventible. That poverty was the background of our thoughts when the Society was founded. Perhaps we have done a little to mitigate it: we believe we have done something to make clear the way by which it may ultimately be abolished. We do not constantly talk of it. We write of the advantages of Municipal Electricity, of the powers of Parish Councils, of the objections to the Referendum; but all the while it is that great evil which chiefly moves us, and by our success or our failure in helping on the reconstruction of society for the purpose of abolishing poverty, the work of the Fabian Society must ultimately be judged. FOOTNOTES: [43] "La Société Fabienne et le Mouvement socialiste anglais contemporain." By �douard Pfeiffer, Paris, F. Giard and E. Brière, 1911; an excellent volume but full of errors. [44] "The Fabians were the first amongst Socialists to start the movement of anti-Marxist criticism. At a period when the dogmas of the Master were regarded as sacred, the Fabians ventured to assert that it was possible to call oneself a Socialist without ever having read 'Das Kapital,' or without accepting its doctrine. In opposition to Marx, they have revived the spirit of J.S. Mill, and they have attacked Marx all along the line--the class war, the economic interpretation of history, the catastrophic method, and above all the theory of value." [45] Published in English by the Independent Labour Party in 1909 as "Evolutionary Socialism." [46] Address to the International, 1862, quoted from Spargo's "Karl Marx," p. 266. [47] Home University Library, Williams and Norgate, 1915, 1s. [48] M. Beer, "Geschichte des Socialismus in England" (Stuttgart, 1913), p. 462. Mr. Beer devotes seven pages to the Society, which he describes with accuracy, and interprets much as Mr. Barker has done. The book was written at the request of the German Social Democratic Party. [49] I quote, but do not endorse the opinion that G.B.S. markedly resembles James Mill (Mr. Barker confuses the two Mills). Beer adds "Webb was the thinker, Shaw the fighter." This antithesis is scarcely happy. The collaboration of the two is much too complicated to be summed up in a phrase. [50] But see chapter VIII for its influence before 1906; and see Appendix 1. A. for a much fuller discussion of this subject. [51] The same idea is expressed by a Canadian Professor:-- "It is necessary to go back to the Philosophical Radicals to find a small group of men who have exercised such a profound influence over English political thought as the little band of social investigators who organised the Fabian Society." "Socialism: a critical analysis." By O.D. Skelton, Ph.D., Professor of Economic Science, Kingston, Canada. (Constable, 1911.) p. 288. [52] Mr. Barker erroneously uses the word "increment" for "income" in several places. Unearned increment is quite another thing. [53] See "Socialism and Superior Brains: a reply to Mr. Mallock," by G.B. Shaw. Fabian Tract 146. [54] Mr. Barker emphasises the "discrimination advocated by the Fabians" in favour of profits in a later passage (p. 224) not here quoted. [55] This should read "incomes." [56] "Faults of the Fabian," p. 9. [57] See Appendix I. B. Appendix I Memoranda by Bernard Shaw Bernard Shaw has been good enough to write the following memoranda on Chapter XII. For various reasons I prefer to leave that chapter as it stands; but the memoranda have an interest of their own and I therefore print them here. A ON THE HISTORY OF FABIAN ECONOMICS Mr. Barker's guesses greatly underrate the number of tributaries which enlarged the trickle of Socialist thought into a mighty river. They also shew how quickly waves of thought are forgotten. Far from being the economic apostle of Socialism, Mill, in the days when the Fabian Society took the field, was regarded as the standard authority for solving the social problem by a combination of peasant proprietorship with neo-Malthusianism. The Dialectical Society, which was a centre of the most advanced thought in London until the Fabian Society supplanted it, was founded to advocate the principles of Mill's Essay on Liberty, which was much more the Bible of English Individualism than Das Kapital ever was of English Socialism. As late as 1888 Henry Sidgwick, a follower of Mill, rose indignantly at the meeting of the British Association in Bath, to which I had just read the paper on The Transition to Social-Democracy, which was subsequently published; as one of the Fabian Essays, and declared that I had advocated nationalisation of land; that nationalisation of land was a crime; and that he would not take part in a discussion of a criminal proposal. With that he left the platform, all the more impressively as his apparently mild and judicial temperament made the incident so unexpected that his friends who had not actually witnessed it were with difficulty persuaded that it had really happened. It illustrates the entire failure of Mill up to that date to undo the individualistic teaching of the earlier volumes of his Political Economy by the Socialist conclusions to which his work on the treatise led him at the end. Sidney Webb astonished and confounded our Individualist opponents by citing Mill against them; and it is probably due to Webb more than to any other disciple that it is now generally known that Mill died a Socialist. Webb read Mill and mastered Mill as he seemed to have read and mastered everybody else; but the only other prominent Socialist who can be claimed by Mill as a convert was, rather unexpectedly, William Morris, who said that when he read the passage in which Mill, after admitting that the worst evils of Communism are, compared to the evils of our Commercialism, as dust in the balance, nevertheless condemned Communism, he immediately became a Communist, as Mill had clearly given his verdict against the evidence. Except in these instances we heard nothing of Mill in the Fabian Society. Cairnes's denunciation of the idle consumers of rent and interest was frequently quoted; and Marshall's Economics of Industry was put into our book boxes as a textbook; but the taste for abstract economics was no more general in the Fabian Society than elsewhere. I had in my boyhood read some of Mill's detached essays, including those on constitutional government and on the Irish land question, as well as the inevitable one on Liberty; but none of these pointed to Socialism; and my attention was first drawn to political economy as the science of social salvation by Henry George's eloquence, and by his Progress and Poverty, which had an enormous circulation in the early eighties, and beyond all question had more to do with the Socialist revival of that period in England than any other book. Before the Fabian Society existed I pressed George's propaganda of Land Nationalisation on a meeting of the Democratic Federation, but was told to read Karl Marx. I was so complete a novice in economics at that time that when I wrote a letter to Justice pointing out a flaw in Marx's reasoning, I regarded my letter merely as a joke, and fully expected that some more expert Socialist economist would refute me easily. Even when the refutation did not arrive I remained so impressed with the literary power and overwhelming documentation of Marx's indictment of nineteenth-century Commercialism and the capitalist system, that I defended him against all comers in and out of season until Philip Wicksteed, the well-known Dante commentator, then a popular Unitarian minister, brought me to a standstill by a criticism of Marx which I did not understand. This was the first appearance in Socialist controversy of the value theory of Jevons, published in 1871. Professor Edgeworth and Mr. Wicksteed, to whom Jevons appealed as a mathematician, were at that time trying to convince the academic world of the importance of Jevons's theory; but I, not being a mathematician, was not easily accessible to their methods of demonstration. I consented to reply to Mr. Wicksteed on the express condition that the editor of To-day, in which my reply appeared, should find space for a rejoinder by Mr. Wicksteed. My reply, which was not bad for a fake, and contained the germ of the economic argument for equality of income which I put forward twenty-five years later, elicited only a brief rejoinder; but the upshot was that I put myself into Mr. Wicksteed's hands and became a convinced Jevonian, fascinated by the subtlety of Jevons's theory and the exquisiteness with which it adapted itself to all the cases which had driven previous economists, including Marx, to take refuge in clumsy distinctions between use value, exchange value, labour value, supply and demand value, and the rest of the muddlements of that time. Accordingly, the abstract economics of the Fabian Essays are, as regards value, the economics of Jevons. As regards rent they are the economics of Ricardo, which I, having thrown myself into the study of abstract economics, had learnt from Ricardo's own works and from De Quincey's Logic of Political Economy. I maintained, as I still do, that the older economists, writing before Socialism had arisen as a possible alternative to Commercialism and a menace to its vested interests, were far more candid in their statements and thorough in their reasoning than their successors, and was fond of citing the references in De Quincey and Austin's Lectures on Jurisprudence to the country gentleman system and the evils of capitalism, as instances of frankness upon which no modern professor dare venture. The economical and moral identity of capital and interest with land and rent was popularly demonstrated by Olivier in Tract 7 on Capital and Land, and put into strict academic form by Sidney Webb. The point was of importance at a time when the distinction was still so strongly maintained that the Fabian Society was compelled to exclude Land Nationalizers, both before and after their development into Single Taxers, because they held that though land and rent should be socialized, capital and interest must remain private property. This really exhausts the history of the Fabian Society as far as abstract economic theory is concerned. Activity in that department was confined to Webb and myself. Later on, Pease's interest in banking and currency led him to contribute some criticism of the schemes of the currency cranks who infest all advanced movements, flourishing the paper money of the Guernsey Market, and to give the Society some positive guidance as to the rapid integration of modern banking. But this was an essay in applied economics. It may be impossible to draw a line between the old abstract deductive economics and the modern historical concrete economics; but the fact remains that though the water may be the same, the tide has turned. A comparison of my exposition of the law of rent in my first Fabian Essay and in my Impossibilities of Anarchism with the Webbs' great Histories of Trade Unionism and of Industrial Democracy will illustrate the difference between the two schools. The departure was made by Graham Wallas, who, abandoning the deductive construction of intellectual theorems, made an exhaustive study of the Chartist movement. It is greatly to be regretted that these lectures were not effectively published. Their delivery wrought a tremendous disillusion as to the novelty of our ideas and methods of propaganda; much new gospel suddenly appeared to us as stale failure; and we recognized that there had been weak men before Agamemnon, even as far back as in Cromwell's army. The necessity for mastering the history of our own movement and falling into our ordered place in it became apparent; and it was in this new frame of mind that the monumental series of works by the Webbs came into existence. Wallas's Life of Francis Place shows his power of reconstructing a popular agitation with a realism which leaves the conventional imaginary version of it punctured and flaccid; and it was by doing the same for the Chartist movement that he left his mark on us. Of the other Essayists, Olivier had wrestled with the huge Positive Philosophy of Comte, who thus comes in as a Fabian influence. William Clarke was a disciple of Mazzini, and found Emerson, Thoreau, and the Brook Farm enthusiasts congenial to him. Bland, who at last became a professed Catholic, was something of a Coleridgian transcendentalist, though he treated a copy of Bakunin's God and the State to a handsome binding. Mrs. Besant's spiritual history has been written by herself. Wallas brought to bear a wide scholastic culture of the classic type, in which modern writers, though interesting, were not fundamental. The general effect, it will be perceived, is very much wider and more various than that suggested by Mr. Ernest Barker's remark that Mill was our starting point. It is a curious fact that of the three great propagandist amateurs of political economy, Henry George, Marx, and Ruskin, Ruskin alone seems to have had no effect on the Fabians. Here and there in the Socialist movement workmen turned up who had read Fors Clavigera or Unto This Last; and some of the more well-to-do no doubt had read the first chapter of Munera Pulveris. But Ruskin's name was hardly mentioned in the Fabian Society. My explanation is that, barring Olivier, the Fabians were inveterate Philistines. My efforts to induce them to publish Richard Wagner's Art and Revolution, and, later on, Oscar Wilde's The Soul of Man under Socialism, or even to do justice to Morris's News From Nowhere, fell so flat that I doubt whether my colleagues were even conscious of them. Our best excuse must be that as a matter of practical experience English political societies do good work and present a dignified appearance whilst they attend seriously to their proper political business; but, to put it bluntly, they make themselves ridiculous and attract undesirables when they affect art and philosophy. The Arts and Crafts exhibitions, the Anti-Scrape (Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings), and the Art Workers' Guild, under Morris and Crane, kept up a very intimate connection between Art and Socialism; but the maintenance of Fabian friendly relations with them was left mostly to me and Stewart Headlam. The rest kept aloof and consoled themselves with the reflection--if they thought about it at all--that the Utilitarians, though even more Philistine than the Fabians, were astonishingly effective for their numbers. It must be added that though the tradition that Socialism excludes the established creeds was overthrown by the Fabians, and the claim of the Christian Socialists to rank with the best of us was insisted on faithfully by them, the Fabian leaders did not break the tradition in their own practice. The contention of the Anti-Socialist Union that all Socialists are atheists is no doubt ridiculous in the face of the fact that the intellectual opposition to Socialism has been led exclusively by avowed atheists like Charles Bradlaugh or agnostics like Herbert Spencer, whilst Communism claims Jesus as an exponent; still, if the question be raised as to whether any of the Fabian Essayists attended an established place of worship regularly, the reply must be in the negative. Indeed, they were generally preaching themselves on Sundays. To describe them as irreligious in view of their work would be silly; but until Hubert Bland towards the end of his life took refuge in the Catholic Church, and Mrs. Besant devoted herself to Theosophy, no leading Fabian found a refuge for his soul in the temples of any established denomination. I may go further and admit that the first problems the Fabians had to solve were so completely on the materialist plane that the atmosphere inevitably became uncongenial to those whose capacity was wasted and whose sympathies were starved on that plane. Even psychical research, with which Pease and Podmore varied their Fabian activities, tended fatally towards the exposure of alleged psychical phenomena as physical tricks. The work that came to our hands in our first two decades was materialistic work; and it was not until the turn of the century brought us the Suffrage movement and the Wells raid, that the materialistic atmosphere gave way, and the Society began to retain recruits of a kind that it always lost in the earlier years as it lost Mrs. Besant and (virtually) William Clarke. It is certainly perceptibly less hard-headed than it was in its first period. B ON GUILD SOCIALISM Here I venture to say, with some confidence, that Mr. Barker is mistaken. That storm has burst on the Fabian Society and has left it just where it was. Guild Socialism, championed by the ablest and most industrious insurgents of the rising generation in the Society, raised its issue with Collectivism only to discover, when the matter, after a long agitation, was finally thrashed out at a conference at Barrow House, that the issue was an imaginary one, and that Collectivism lost nothing by the fullest tenable concessions to the Guild Socialists. A very brief consideration will shew that this was inevitable. Guild Socialism, in spite of its engaging medieval name, means nothing more picturesque than a claim that under Socialism each industry shall be controlled by its own operators, as the professions are to-day. This by itself would not imply Socialism at all: it would be merely a revival of the medieval guild, or a fresh attempt at the now exploded self-governing workshop of the primitive co-operators. Guild Socialism, with the emphasis on the Socialism, implies that the industries, however completely they may be controlled by their separate staffs, must pool their products. All the Guild Socialists admit this. The Socialist State must therefore include an organ for receiving and distributing the pooled products; and such an organ, representing the citizen not as producer but as consumer, reintroduces the whole machinery of Collectivism. Thus the alleged antithesis between Guild Socialism and Collectivism, under cover of which the one was presented as an alternative to the other, vanished at the first touch of the skilled criticism the Fabians brought to bear on it; and now Mrs. Sidney Webb, who was singled out for attack by the Guild Socialists as the arch Collectivist, is herself conducting an investigation into the existing control of industry by professional organizations, whilst the quondam Guild Socialists are struggling with the difficult question of the proper spheres of the old form of Trade Union now called the craft union, and the new form called the industrial union, in which workers of all crafts and occupations, from clerks and railway porters to locomotive drivers and fitters, are organized in a single union of the entire industry. There is work enough for many years to some of the old Fabian kind in these directions; and this work will irresistibly reunite the disputants instead of perpetuating a quarrel in which, like most of the quarrels which the Society has survived, there was nothing fundamental at issue. There is work, too, to be done in the old abstract deductive department. It can be seen, throughout the history of the Society, how any attempt to discard the old economic basis of the law of rent immediately produced a recrudescence of Anarchism in one form or another, the latest being Syndicalism and that form of Guild Socialism which was all Guild and no Socialism. But there is still much to be settled by the deductive method. The fundamental question of the proportions in which the national income, when socialized, shall be distributed, was not grappled with until 1914, when I, lecturing on behalf of the Society, delivered my final conclusion that equal distribution is the only solution that will realize the ideals of Socialism, and that it is in fact the economic goal of Socialism. This is not fully accepted as yet in the movement, in which there is still a strong leaven of the old craving for an easy-going system which, beginning with "the socialization of the means of production, distribution, and exchange," will then work out automatically without interference with the citizen's private affairs. Another subject which has hardly yet been touched, and which also must begin with deductive treatment, is what may be called the democratization of democracy, and its extension from a mere negative and very uncertain check on tyranny to a positive organizing force. No experienced Fabian believes that society can be reconstructed (or rather constructed; for the difficulty is that society is as yet only half rescued from chaos) by men of the type produced by popular election under existing circumstances, or indeed under any circumstances likely to be achieved before the reconstruction. The fact that a hawker cannot ply his trade without a licence whilst a man may sit in Parliament without any relevant qualifications is a typical and significant anomaly which will certainly not be removed by allowing everybody to be a hawker at will. Sooner or later, unless democracy is to be discarded in a reaction of disgust such as killed it in ancient Athens, democracy itself will demand that only such men should be presented to its choice as have proved themselves qualified for more serious and disinterested work than "stoking up" election meetings to momentary and foolish excitement. Without qualified rulers a Socialist State is impossible; and it must not be forgotten (though the reminder is as old as Plato) that the qualified men may be very reluctant men instead of very ambitious ones. Here, then, are two very large jobs already in sight to occupy future Fabians. Whether they will call themselves Fabians and begin by joining the Fabian Society is a question which will not be settled by the generation to which I belong. G.B.S. Appendix II The Basis of the Fabian Society The Fabian Society consists of Socialists. It therefore aims at the reorganisation of Society by the emancipation of Land and Industrial Capital from individual and class ownership, and the vesting of them in the community for the general benefit. In this way only can the natural and acquired advantages of the country be equitably shared by the whole people. The Society accordingly works for the extinction of private property in Land and of the consequent individual appropriation, in the form of Rent, of the price paid for permission to use the earth, as well as for the advantages of superior soils and sites. The Society, further, works for the transfer to the community of the administration of such industrial Capital as can conveniently be managed socially. For, owing to the monopoly of the means of production in the past, industrial inventions and the transformation of surplus income into Capital have mainly enriched the proprietary class, the worker being now dependent on that class for leave to earn a living. If these measures be carried out, without compensation (though not without such relief to expropriated individuals as may seem fit to the community), Rent and Interest will be added to the reward of labour, the idle class now living on the labour of others will necessarily disappear, and practical equality of opportunity will be maintained by the spontaneous action of economic forces with much less interference with personal liberty than the present system entails. For the attainment of these ends the Fabian Society looks to the spread of Socialist opinions, and the social and political changes consequent thereon, _including the establishment of equal citizenship for men and women._[58] It seeks to achieve these ends by the general dissemination of knowledge as to the relation between the individual and Society in its economic, ethical, and political aspects. FOOTNOTES: [58] The words in italics were added in 1907. See page 177. Appendix III List of the names and the years of office of the ninety-six members of the Executive Committee, 1884-1915 The full term of office is from April to March, and such an entry as 1901-2 usually means one year's office. Membership has been terminated in many cases by resignation, in the great majority by refusal to stand for re-election, in perhaps a dozen cases by defeat, and never by death. Alden, Percy, M.P., 1903-7. Allen, Clifford, 1912 to date. Anderson, R. Wherry, 1898-1903. Atkinson, Miss Mabel, 1909 to date. Ball, Sidney, 1907-8. Banner, Robert, 1892. Barker, Granville, 1907-12. Bentham, Dr. Ethel, 1909-14. Bentinck, Mrs. R. Cavendish, 1911-13. Besant, Mrs. Annie, 1886-90. Bland, Hubert, 1884-1911. Honorary Treasurer 1884-1911. Blatch, Mrs. Stanton, 1894-5. Bray, Reginald A., 1911-12. Brooke, Miss Emma, 1893-6. Cameron, Miss Mary, 1893-4. Campbell, Rev. R.J., 1908-9. Charrington, Charles, 1899-1904. Chesterton, Cecil E., 1904-7. Clarke, William, 1888-91. Cole, G.D.H., 1914-15. Davies, Emil, 1911 to date. Dearmer, Rev. Percy, 1895-8. Dell, Robert E., 1890-3; 1898-9. De Mattos, W.S., 1890-4. Dodd, F. Lawson, 1900 to date. Honorary Treasurer 1911 to date. Ensor, R.C.K., 1907-11; 1912 to date. Ervine, St. John G., 1913 to date. Fairfield, Dr. Letitia, 1915 to date. Galton, F.W., 1901-7. Garnett, Mrs. Constance, 1894-5. Gillespie, H.J., 1914. Green, J.F. 1899-1900. Griffith, N.L., 1892-3. Grover, Miss Mary, 1890-2. Guest, L. Haden, 1907-11 Hammill, Fred, 1892-5. Harben, Henry D., 1911 to date Harris, Mrs. O'Brien (Miss Mary O'Brien), 1898-1901. Headlam, Rev. Stewart D., 1890-1; 1901-11. Hoatson, Miss Alice, 1890-2. Assistant Hon. Secretary 1885-6. Hobson, Samuel G., 1900-9. Holding, H. Bond, 1894-6. Hutchins, Miss B.L., 1907-12. Keddell, Frederick, 1884-5. Honorary Secretary 1884-5. Lawrence F.W. Pethick, 1907-8. Lawrence, Miss Susan (L.C.C.), 1912 to date. Lloyd, C.M., 1912-15. Lowerison, Harry (Bellerby), 1891-2. Macdonald, J. Ramsay (M.P.), 1894-1900. Macpherson, Mrs. Fenton, 1900-1. Macrosty, Henry W., 1895-1907. Mallet, Mrs. L.T., 1890-2. Mann, Tom, 1896. Martin, John W., 1894-9. Massingham, H.W., 1891-3. Matthews, John E. (L.C.C.), 1901-2. Maude, Aylmer, 1907-12. Money, (Sir) Leo Chiozza (M.P.), 1908-11. Morley, Professor Edith, 1914 to date. Morris, Miss May, 1896-8. Morten, Miss Honor, 1895-8. Muggeridge, H.T., 1903-5. Murby, Miss M.B., 1907-13. Oakeshott, Joseph F., 1890-1902. Olivier (Sir), Sydney (K.C.M.G.), 1887-1899. Honorary Secretary 1886-9. Pease, Edward R., 1885-6; 1890 to date. Honorary Secretary 1886, and 1914 to date. Secretary 1890-1913. Phillips, Dr. Marion, 1913-14. Phillips, W.L., 1887-8. Podmore, Frank, 1884; 1886-8. Priestley, Miss (Mrs. Bart Kennedy), 1896-8. Assistant Secretary, 1892-5. Reeves, Mrs. Pember, 1907 to date. Sanders, W. Stephen, 1904 to date. Organising Secretary 1907-13. General Secretary 1914 to date. Sandham, Mrs., 1891-3. Sharp, Clifford D., 1909-14. Shaw, G. Bernard, 1885-1911. Shaw, Mrs. Bernard (Miss Payne Townshend), 1898-1915. Slesser, Henry H., 1910-14. Smith, Miss Ellen, 1915 to date. Snell, Harry, 1912 to date. Snowden, Mrs. Philip, 1908-9. Sparling, H. Halliday, 1892-4. Squire, J.C., 1914 to date. Standring, George, 1893-1908; 1909-11. Taylor, G.R.S., 1905-8. Townshend, Mrs. Emily C., 1915. Utley, W.H., 1892-4. Wallas, Graham, 1888-1895. Webb, Sidney, 1886 to date. Webb, Mrs. Sidney, 1912 to date. Wells, H.G., 1907-8. Wells, Mrs. H.G., 1908-10. West, Julius, 1915 to date. Secretary of Research Department, etc., 1908-12. Whelen, Frederick, 1896-1901; 1902-4. Williams, Ernest E., 1893-4. Wilson, Mrs. C.M., 1885-7; 1911-15. Wood, Mrs. Esther, 1902-3. Appendix IV Complete List of Fabian Publications, 1884-1915, with names of authors FABIAN TRACTS The printing of the author's name in italics signifies that the tract was adopted and probably amended by the Society and that it was issued without the author's name. In the other cases the author's name is given in the tract, and as a rule the tract was approved for publication as a whole: a star to the author's name signifies "not a member of the Society." No. 1884. 1. Why are the Many Poor? 4 pp. _W.L. Phillips_. 2. A Manifesto. 4 pp. _G. Bernard Shaw_. 1885. 3. To Provident Landlords and Capitalists: A Suggestion and a Warning. 4 pp. _G. Bernard Shaw_. 1886. 4. What Socialism Is. 12 pp. Mrs. C.M. Wilson and others. 1887. 5. Facts for Socialists. 16 pp. _Sidney Webb_. 6. The True Radical Programme (Fabian Parliamentary League). 12 pp. _G. Bernard Shaw_. 1888. 7. Capital and Land. 16 pp. _(Sir) Sydney Olivier_. 1889. 8. Facts for Londoners. 56 pp. _Sidney Webb_. 9. An Eight Hours Bill. 16 pp. _Do._ 10. Figures for Londoners. 4 pp. _Do_. 1890. 11. The Workers' Political Programme. 20 pp. _Sidney Webb_. 12. Practical Land Nationalisation. 4 pp. _Do_. 13. What Socialism Is. 4 pp. _Bernard Shaw_. 14. The New Reform Bill. 20 pp. _J.F. Oakeshott and others_. 15. English Progress towards Social Democracy. 16 pp. Sidney Webb. 16. A Plea for an Eight Hours Bill. 4 pp. _Sidney Webb_. 17. Reform of the Poor Law. 20 pp. Sidney Webb. 18. Facts for Bristol. 20 pp. _(Sir) Hartmann W. Just_. 19. What the Farm Labourer Wants. 4 pp. _Sidney Webb_. 20. Questions for Poor Law Guardians. 4 pp. _S.W. Group_. 21. Questions for London Vestrymen. 4 pp. _C. Foulger_. 22. The Truth about Leasehold Enfranchisement. 4 pp. _Sidney Webb_. 1891. 23. The Case for an Eight Hours Bill. 16 pp. _Sidney Webb_. 24. Questions for Parliamentary Candidates. 4 pp. _Do_. 25. Questions for School Board Candidates. 4 pp. _Do_. 26. Questions for London County Councillors. 4 pp. _Do_. 27. Questions for Town Councillors. 4 pp. _Rev. C. Peach_. 28. Questions for County Council Candidates (Rural). 4 pp. _F. Hudson_. 29. What to Read. 48 pp. _Graham Wallas_ (1st edition). (Fifth edition, 1910, not included in the series.) 30. The Unearned Increment. 4 pp. _Sidney Webb_. 31. London's Heritage in the City Guilds. 4 pp. _Sidney Webb_. 32. The Municipalisation of the Gas Supply. 4 pp. _Do_. 33. Municipal Tramways. 4 pp. _Do_. 34. London's Water Tribute. 4 pp. _Do_. 35. The Municipalisation of the London Docks. 4 pp. _Do_. 36. The Scandal of London's Markets. 4 pp. _Do_. 37. A Labour Policy for Public Authorities. 4 pp. _Do_. 38. Welsh Translation of No. 1. 1892. 39. A Democratic Budget. 16 pp. _J.F. Oakeshott_. 40. Fabian Election Manifesto. 16 pp. _Bernard Shaw_. 41. The Fabian Society: What it has done and how it has done it. 32 pp. G. Bernard Shaw. 42. Christian Socialism. 16 pp. Rev. Stewart D. Headlam. 43. Vote! Vote! Vote! 2 pp. _Bernard Shaw_. 1893. 44. A Plea for Poor Law Reform. 4 pp. _Frederick Whelen_. 45. Impossibilities of Anarchism. 28 pp. G. Bernard Shaw. 46. Socialism and Sailors. 16 pp. B.T. Hall. 47. The Unemployed. (Rt. Hon.) John Burns. 48. Eight Hours by Law. _Henry W. Macrosty_. 1894. 49. A Plan of Campaign for Labour. 28 pp. _G. Bernard Shaw_. 50. Sweating: Its Cause and Remedy. 16 pp. _H.W. Macrosty_. 51. Socialism: True and False. 20 pp. Sidney Webb. 52. State Education at Home and Abroad. 16 pp. J.W. Martin. 53. The Parish Councils Act: What it is and how to work it. 20 pp. _(Rt. Hon.) Herbert Samuel_.* 54. Humanising of the Poor Law. 24 pp. J.F. Oakeshott. 55. The Workers' School Board Programme. 20 pp. _J.W. Martin_. 56. Questions for Parish Council Candidates. 4 pp. _(Rt. Hon.) Herbert Samuel_.* 57. Questions for Rural District Council Candidates. 4 pp. _(Rt. Hon.) Herbert Samuel_.* 58. Allotments and How to Get Them. 4 pp. _(Rt. Hon.) Herbert Samuel_.* 59. Questions for Candidates for Urban District Councils. 4 pp. 60. The London Vestries: What they are and what they do. 20 pp. Sidney Webb. 1895. 61. The London County Council: What it is and what it does. 16 pp. _J.F. Oakeshott_. 62. Parish and District Councils: What they are and what they can do. 16 pp. (No. 53 re-written.) 63. Parish Council Cottages and how to get them. 4 pp. _Edw. R. Pease_. 64. How to Lose and how to Win an Election. 2 pp. _Ramsay Macdonald_. 65. Trade Unionists and Politics. 2 pp. _F.W. Galton_. 66. A Program for Workers. 2 pp. _Edw. R. Pease_. 1896. 67. Women and the Factory Acts. 16 pp. Mrs. Sidney Webb. 68. The Tenant's Sanitary Catechism. 4 pp. _Arthur Hickmott_. 69. The Difficulties of Individualism. 20 pp. Sidney Webb. 70. Report on Fabian Policy. 16 pp. _Bernard Shaw_. 71. The (London) Tenant's Sanitary Catechism. 4 pp. _Miss Grove_. 72. The Moral Aspects of Socialism. 24 pp. Sidney Ball. 73. The Case for State Pensions in Old Age. 16 pp. _George Turner_. 74. The State and Its Functions in New Zealand. 16 pp. The Hon. W.P. Reeves.* 1897. 75. Labour in the Longest Reign. 20 pp. Sidney Webb. 76. Houses for the People. 20 pp. _Arthur Hickmott_. 77. The Municipalisation of Tramways. 16 pp. F.T.H. Henlé. 78. Socialism and the Teaching of Christ. 16 pp. Rev. John Clifford, D.D. 79. A Word of Remembrance and Caution to the Rich. 16 pp. John Woolman.* 80. Shop Life and its Reform. 16 pp. _William Johnson_. 81. Municipal Water. 4 pp. _C.M. Knowles_.* 82. The Workmen's Compensation Act. 20 pp. _C.R. Allen, junr_. 83. State Arbitration and the Living Wage. 16 pp. _H.W. Macrosty_. 84. The Economics of Direct Employment. 16 pp. Sidney Webb. 85. Liquor Licensing at Home and Abroad. 16 pp. Edw. R. Pease. 86. Municipal Drink Traffic. 20 pp. _Edw. R. Pease_. 1899. 87. A Welsh Translation of No. 78. 16 pp. 88. The Growth of Monopoly in English Industry. 16 pp. Henry W. Macrosty. 89. Old Age Pensions at Work. 4 pp. _Bullock_. 90. The Municipalisation of the Milk Supply. 4 pp. _Dr. G.F. McCleary_. 91. Municipal Pawnshops. 4 pp. _Charles Charrington_. 92. Municipal Slaughterhouses. 4 pp. _George Standring_. 1900. 93. Women as Councillors. 4 pp. _Bernard Shaw_. 94. Municipal Bakeries. 4 pp. _Dr. G.F. McCleary._ 95. Municipal Hospitals. 4 pp. _Do_. 96. Municipal Fire Insurance. 4 pp. (1901). _Mrs. Fenton Macpherson_. 97. Municipal Steamboats. 4 pp. (1901). _S.D. Shallard_. 98. State Railways for Ireland. 16 pp. _Clement Edwards (M.P.)._ 99. Local Government in Ireland. _C.R. Allen, junr_. 100. Metropolitan Borough Councils: Their Powers and Duties. 20 pp. _Henry W. Macrosty_. 101. The House Famine and How to Relieve it. 52 pp. Various. 102. Questions for Candidates: Metropolitan Borough Councils. 4 pp. _H.W. Macrosty_. 103. Overcrowding in London and its Remedy. 16 pp. W.C. Steadman, M.P. 104. How Trade Unions Benefit Workmen. 4 pp. _Edw. R. Pease_. 1901. 105. Five Years' Fruit of the Parish Councils Act. 24 pp _Sidney Webb_. 106. The Education Muddle and the Way Out. 20 pp. _Sidney Webb_. 107. Socialism for Millionaires. 16 pp. Bernard Shaw. 108. Twentieth Century Politics: A Policy of National Efficiency. 16 pp. Sidney Webb. 1902. 109. Cottage Plans and Common Sense. 16 pp. Raymond Unwin. 110. Problems of Indian Poverty. 16 pp. S.S. Thorburn.* 111. Reform of Reformatories and Industrial Schools. 16 pp. H.T. Holmes. 112. Life in the Laundry. 16 pp. Dr. G.F. McCleary. 1903. 113. Communism. 16 pp. William Morris.* Preface by Bernard Shaw. 114. The Education Act, 1902. How to make the best of it. 20 pp. _Sidney Webb_. 115. State Aid to Agriculture. 16 pp. T.S. Dymond.* 1904. 116. Fabianism and the Fiscal Question: An Alternative Policy. 28 pp. _Bernard Shaw_. 117. The London Education Act, 1903: How to make the best of it. 20 pp. _Sidney Webb_. 118. The Secret of Rural Depopulation. 20 pp. Lieut.-Col. D.C. Pedder.* 1905. 119. Public Control of Electric Power and Transit. 16 pp. S.G. Hobson. 120. After Bread, Education. 16 pp. Hubert Bland. 121. Public Service versus Private Expenditure. 12 pp. Sir Oliver Lodge.* 122. Municipal Milk and Public Health. 20 pp. F. Lawson. Dodd. 123. The Revival of Agriculture: A National Policy for Great Britain. 24 pp. Henry W. Macrosty. 124. State Control of Trusts. 16 pp. Henry W. Macrosty. 125. Municipalisation by Provinces. 16 pp. W. Stephen Sanders. 1906. 126. The Abolition of Poor Law Guardians. 24 pp. Edw. R. Pease. 127. Socialism and Labour Policy. 16 pp. _Hubert Bland (Editor)._ 128. The Case for a Legal Minimum Wage. 20 pp. _W. Stephen Sanders_. 129. More Books to Read. 20 pp. _Edw. R. Pease_. 1907. 130. Home Work and Sweating: The Causes and Remedies. 20 pp. Miss B.L. Hutchins. 131. The Decline in the Birth-rate. 20 pp. Sidney Webb. 132. A Guide to Books for Socialists. 12 pp. "The Nursery." 133. Socialism and Christianity. 24 pp. Rev. Percy Dearmer, D.D. 134. Small Holdings, Allotments, and Common Pastures. 4 pp. Revised edition of No. 58. 135. Paupers and Old Age Pensions. 16 pp. Sidney Webb. 136. The Village and the Landlord. 12 pp. Edward Carpenter. 1908. 137. Parish Councils and Village Life. 28pp. Revised version of No. 105. 138. Municipal Trading. 20 pp. _Aylmer Maude_. 139. Socialism and the Churches. 16 pp. Rev. John Clifford, D.D. 140. Child Labour Under Capitalism. 20 pp. Mrs. Hylton Dale. 1909. 141. (Welsh Translation of No. 139). 142. Rent and Value. 12 pp. Adapted by Mrs. Bernard Shaw from Fabian Essays, The Economic Basis. 143. Sosialaeth Yng Ngoleuni'R Beibl (Welsh). J.R. Jones. 144. Machinery: Its Masters and its Servants. 20 pp. H.H. Schloesser (Slesser) and Clement Game. 145. The Case for School Nurseries. 20 pp. Mrs. Townshend. 146. Socialism and Superior Brains. A Reply to Mr. Mallock. 24 pp. Bernard Shaw. 147. Capital and Compensation. 16 pp. Edward R. Pease. 148. What a Health Committee can do. 16 pp. _Miss B.L. Hutchins_. 1910. 149. The Endowment of Motherhood. 24 pp. Henry D. Harben. 150. State Purchase of Railways: A Practicable Scheme. 24 pp. Emil Davies. 151. The Point of Honour. A Correspondence on Aristocracy and Socialism. 16 pp. Mrs. Ruth Cavendish Bentinck. 1911. 152. Our Taxes as they are and as they ought to be. 20 pp. Robert Jones. 153. The Twentieth Century Reform Bill. 20 pp. Henry H. Schloesser (Slesser). 154. The Case for School Clinics. 16 pp. L. Haden Guest. 155. The Case against the Referendum. 20 pp. Clifford D. Sharp. 156. What an Education Committee can do (Elementary Schools). 36 pp. The Education Group. 157. The Working Life of Women. 16 pp. Miss B.L. Hutchins. 158. The Case Against the Charity Organisation Society. 20 pp. Mrs. Townshend. 159. The Necessary Basis of Society. 12 pp. Sidney Webb. 160. A National Medical Service. 20 pp. F. Lawson Dodd. 1912. 161. Afforestation and Unemployment. 16 pp. Arthur P. Grenfell. 162. Family Life on a Pound a Week. 24 pp. Mrs. Pember Reeves. 163. Women and Prisons. 28 pp. Helen Blagg and Charlotte Wilson. 164. Gold and State Banking. A Study in the Economics of Monopoly. 20 pp. Edward R. Pease. 165. Francis Place: The Tailor of Charing Cross. 28 pp. St. John G. Ervine. 166. Robert Owen: Social Reformer. 24 pp. Miss B.L. Hutchins. 167. William Morris and the Communist Ideal. 24 pp. Mrs. Townshend. 1913. 168. John Stuart Mill. 24 pp. Julius West. 169. The Socialist Movement in Germany. 28 pp. W. Stephen Sanders. 170. Profit-Sharing and Co-partnership: A fraud and a failure? 16 pp. Edward R. Pease. 171. The Nationalisation of Mines and Minerals Bill. 16 pp. Henry H. Schloesser (Slesser). 172. What about the Rates, or Municipal Finance and Municipal Autonomy. 12 pp. Sidney Webb. 173. Public versus Private Electricity Supply. 20 pp. C. Ashmore Baker.* 1914. 174. Charles Kingsley and Christian Socialism. 28 pp. Colwyn E. Vulliamy. 175. The Economic Foundations of the Women's Movement. 24 pp. M.A. _(Mabel Atkinson_). 176. War and the Workers. Handbook of some immediate measures to prevent Unemployment and relieve distress. 24 pp. Sidney Webb. 1915. 177. Socialism and the Arts of Use. 16 pp. A. Clutton Brock. 178. The War; Women; and Unemployment. 28 pp. The Women's Group Executive. BOOKS AND SPECIAL PAMPHLETS. Those without any publisher's name were published by the Society. The Government Organisation of Unemployed Labour. Report made by a Committee to the Fabian Society and ordered to be printed for the information of members. 1886. pp. 24. N.P. _Sidney Webb_ and _Frank Podmore._ Fabian Essays in Socialism. Edited by Bernard Shaw. 1889. 1st edition, 6s. Subsequent editions published by Walter Scott. Report on Municipal Tramways, presented to the Richmond (Surrey) Town Council by Aid. Thompson.* Reprinted for the Society by special permission. 4to. pp. 20. 1898. 6d. Labour in the Longest Reign: 1837-1897. By Sidney Webb. A reprint of Tract No. 75. Grant Richards, pp. 62. 1897. 1s. Fabianism and the Empire. A Manifesto by the Fabian Society. Edited by Bernard Shaw. pp. 101. Grant Richards. 1900. 1s. Fabianism and the Fiscal Question: An Alternative Policy. Special edition of Tract 116; with a preface by Bernard Shaw. pp. 39. 1904. 1s. This Misery of Boots. By H.G. Wells. Cover designed by A.G. Watts, pp. 48. 1907. 3d. Tract Index and Catalogue Raisonné of Tracts Nos. 1 to 139. Pp. 35. 1908. 3d. Those Wretched Rates, a dialogue. By F.W. Hayes, pp. 16. 1908. 1d. Ballads and Lyrics of Socialism, 1883-1908. By E. Nesbit (Mrs. Hubert Bland), pp. 80. A.C. Fifield. 1908. 6d. and 1s. Break Up the Poor Law and Abolish the Workhouse. Being Part I of the Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission 1909. pp. 601. 2s. By _Sidney_ and _Beatrice Webb._ The Remedy for Unemployment. Being Part II. 1909. pp. 345. 1s. By _Sidney_ and _Beatrice Webb_. A Summary of Six Papers and Discussions upon the Disabilities of Women as Workers. The writers of the papers: Miss Emma Brooke, Dr. Constance Long,* Mrs. Ernestine Mills, Mrs. Gallichan (G. Gasquoine Hartley), Miss Millicent Murby, Dr. Ethel Bentham. Issued for private circulation only by the Fabian Women's Group, pp. 24. 1909. Summary of Eight Papers and Discussions upon the Disabilities of Mothers as Workers. The writers of the papers: Mrs. Pember Reeves, Dr. Ethel Vaughan Sawyer,* Mrs. Spence Weiss,* Mrs. Bartrick Baker, Mrs. Stanbury, Mrs. S.K. Ratcliffe, Miss B.L. Hutchins, Mrs. O'Brien Harris. Issued for private circulation only by the Fabian Women's Group, pp. 32. 1910. What to Read on Social and Economic Subjects. 5th edition. Earlier editions published as Tract No. 29. pp. 52. P.S. King and Son. 1910. 1s. Songs for Socialists, compiled by the Fabian Society. A.C. Fifield. 1912. 3d. The Rural Problem. By Henry D. Harben. pp. 169. Constable and Co. 1913. 2s. 6d. net. Women Workers in Seven Professions. A survey of their economic conditions and prospects. Edited for the Studies Committee of the Fabian Women's Group. By Edith J. Morley. pp. xxii+318. G. Routledge and Sons. 1914. 6s. Wage-Earning Women and their Dependents. By Ellen Smith on behalf of the Executive Committee of the Women's Group, pp. 36. 1915. 1s. net. BOUND TRACTS. The whole of the numbered tracts at any time in print are sold as a bound volume with a title-page. As the complete set is in demand and as every few months a new tract is published, or an old one is sold out, the sets are usually bound a dozen at a time, and each dozen differs as a rule from all the rest. Price now 5s. net. FABIAN SOCIALIST SERIES. Published for the Society by A.C. Fifield at 6d. and is net each. I. Socialism and Religion. Reprint of Tracts, Nos. 42, 78, 133, and 79. pp. 87. 1908. II. Socialism and Agriculture. Reprint of Tracts, Nos. 136, 118, 115, and 123. pp. 94. 1908. III. Socialism and Individualism. Reprint of Tracts, Nos. 69, 45, 72, and 121. pp. 102. 1908. IV. The Basis and Policy of Socialism. Reprint of Tracts, Nos. 5, 7, 51, and 108. pp. 95. 1908. V. The Common Sense of Municipal Trading. By Bernard Shaw. Reprint with a new preface, pp. 120. 1908. VI. Socialism and National Minimum. Papers by Mrs. Sidney Webb and Miss B.L. Hutchins, and reprint of Tract No. 128. pp. 91. 1909. VII. Wastage of Child Life, as exemplified by Conditions in Lancashire. By J. Johnston, M.D.* A reprint, pp. 95. 1909. VIII. Socialism and Superior Brains. Reprint of Tract, No. 146. pp. 59. 1910. IX. The Theory and Practice of Trade Unionism. By J.H. Greenwood. Preface by Sidney Webb. pp. 70. 1911. RESEARCH DEPARTMENT PUBLICATIONS. New Statesman Supplements: Industrial Organisation in Germany, Report. By W.S. Sanders. 1913. 8 pp. folio. National Insurance Act. First Draft Report of the Insurance Committee. March 14, 1914. 32 pp. folio, 1s. Co-operative Production and Profit-Sharing. February 14, 1914. 32 pp. folio. 2s. 6d. Co-operative Movement. Drafts of the first two parts of the Report on the Control of Industry. By Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb. May 30, 1914. 36 pp. folio, 1s. Industrial Insurance. March 13, 1915. 32 pp. folio, 1s. State and Municipal Enterprise. Draft Report. By Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb. May 8, 1915. 32 pp. folio, 1s. Suggestions for the Prevention of War. Part I. By L.S. Woolf. July 10, 1915. 24 pp. folio, 1s. Part II. By the International Agreements Committee July 17, 1915. 8 pp. folio, 1s. English Teachers and their Professional Organisation. Monograph by Mrs. Sidney Webb. Part I. September 25, 1915. 24 pp. folio. 6d. Part II. October 2, 1915. 24 pp. folio. 6d. Labour Year Book, 1915-16, issued under the auspices of the Parliamentary Committee of the Trade Union Congress, the Executive Committee of the Labour Party, and the Fabian Research Department. 1915. 704 pp. 1s., and 2s. 6d. Index Of the principal references to people and subjects A Agriculture, 15, 47, 157, 228 Alden, Percy, 153, 172, 231 Allen, Clifford, 195, 225, 234 Anarchism, 49, 53, 66 Arts Group, The, 188 B Balfour, Rt. Hon. Arthur J., 45, 142 Ball, Sidney, 103, 180, 183 Barker, Ernest, 244, 258 Barker, Granville, 180, 186 Barnett, Canon, 16 Basis, The Fabian, 71, 169, 177, 178, 231, 269 Bax, Belfort, 66 Beale, Mr., 112 Bentham, Jeremy, 244 Bernstein, Edward, 239 Besant, Mrs. Annie, joins, 47; her position, 64; Fabian Essay, 92; resigns, 98; lecture, 187 Birth-rate, 160 Bland, Hubert, 31, 35, 222, 223, 265 Book-boxes, 121 Brooke, Miss Emma, 190 Brooke, Rupert, 234 Brooke, Rev. Stopford, 69 Burns, Rt. Hon. John, 67, 83, 110, 217 Butler, Samuel, 105 C Campbell, Rev. R.J., 187 Carpenter, Edward, 36 Champion, H.H., 25, 31, 69, 75 Charrington, Charles, 131, 133 Christian Socialism, 25, 83 Chubb, Percival, 29, 69 Clarke, William, 31, 33; joins, 47; position, 64, 123 Clifford, Dr. John, 129 Cole, G.D.H., 230 Comte, Auguste, 14, 18, 263 Conference, of 1886, 55; of 1892, 106; of later years, 197 Conscription, 137 Co-operation, 44, 92, 114, 228 Cox, Harold, 46 Crane, Walter, 66, 71, 75, 88, 129, 131, 133, 264 Crooks, Rt. Hon. Will, 129, 152, 155 D Darwin, Charles, 15 Davidson, Thomas, 26, 28 Decline of birth-rate, 160 De Mattos, W.S., 93, 105, 123 Democratic Federation, 24, 38, 49 Dock Strike, 75, 83, 114 Dodd, F. Lawson, 129, 131, 172, 202 Drink Trade, Municipal, 159 E Edgeworth, Professor, 260 Education, 142 Education Group, 185 Eight Hours Bill, 84, 203 Elections, of 1892, 108, 112; of 1906, 152; of 1910, 220 Ellis, Havelock, 29, 36 Ensor, R.C.K., 180, 221 Evolution, 15, 17 F "Facts for Londoners," 80 "Facts for Socialists," 69 "Fair Wages," 109, 114, 241 "Family, The," 15, 69, 175, 181 Feeding school children, 148, 203 Fellowship of the New Life, 28, 32, 35 Finance, 1884, 35; 1886, 60; 1891, 99; 1893, 100; 1908, 185 G George, Henry, 16, 19, 25, 28, 38, 45, 260 "Government Organisation of Unemployed Labour," 57 Green, J. Frederick, 131, 133 Groups, Fabian, 104, 195 Guild Socialism, 230, 254 H Haldane, Lord, 74, 111 Hampstead Historic, The, 65 Harben, Henry D., 222, 224, 227, 228 Hardie, J. Keir, 113, 167, 253 Headlam, Rev. Stewart D., 25, 57, 75, 94, 142, 166, 168, 172 Henderson, Rt. Hon. Arthur, 152, 155 Hobson, S.G., 130, 150, 172 Housing, 140 Huddersfield Election, 155 Hutchinson, Henry H., 95, 123 Hutchinson, Miss, 123 Huxley, T.H., 18 Hyndman, H.M., 24, 38, 51, 202, 252 I Ibsen, 94 Imperialism, 135 Independent Labour Party, 63, 97, 101, 129, 202 Industrial Remuneration Conference, 44 "Intercepted Letter, An," 118 International Socialist Congress, 126, 209 J Jevons, Stanley, 260 Joint Standing Committee, 202 K "Kapital, Das," 24, 64, 236, 258 Keddell, Frederick, 31, 52 Kropotkin, Prince, 49, 66 L Labour Party, The, 97, 116, 148, 167, 171 Lancashire Campaign, 95 Land, 47, 244, 260 Land taxation, 21, 25, 73 Lavelaye, Emile de, 16, 19 Leasehold Enfranchisement, 94, 110, 113 Lecturing, 77, 105, 108, 124 Library, 120 Local Fabian Societies, 99, 102, 191 Local Government Information Bureau, 206 London County Council, 79, 92, 109 London School Board, 109 London School of Economics, 123 M Macdonald, J. Ramsay, 35, 125, 127, 129, 133, 249 Macrosty, Henry S., 131, 157, 172 Martin, J.W., 158 Marx, Karl, 23, 45, 61, 89, 236, 260 Massingham, H.W., 109, 116, 117 Maude, Aylmer, 180 Middle Class Socialist Party, 153, 172, 178, 180 Mill, John Stuart, 18, 21, 216, 244, 259 Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission, 215 Money, Sir Leo Chiozza, 169, 224 Morris, Miss May, 88 Morris, William, 23, 57, 66, 90, 183, 204, 259, 264 Motto, Fabian, 39, 165 Municipalisation, 81, 159, 242, 247 N National Committee for the Prevention of Destitution, 219 National Insurance, 223 Newcastle Program, 112 Nursery, The Fabian, 189 O Oakeshott, J.F., 36, 131, 158 Old Age Pensions, 159, 223 Olivier, Sir Sydney, 25; joins, 46; secretary, 65; "Capital and Land," 73; Governor of Jamaica, 128; Wells' Committee, 166; opinions, 263, 264 Owen, Miss Dale, 30, 31 Owen, Robert, 23, 241 P Pankhurst, Mrs., 57, 133 Parish Councils, 121, 141 Parliamentary League, Fabian, 68, 73 Pease, Edward R., 29, 59, 80, 93, 149, 159, 232 Phillips, W.L., 39, 73 Podmore, Frank, 28, 39, 48, 53, 57, 73, 80 Poor Law, 14, 46, 213 Portsmouth Election, 155 Positivism, 14, 18 R Reeves, Mrs. Pember, 166, 177, 180 Reform Committee, Fabian, 225 Research Department, 227 Ritchie, Professor D.G., 75, 116 Ruskin, John, 27, 263 S Salt, Henry S., 36, 131, 133 Sanders, W. Stephen, 125, 155, 156, 172, 191, 232 School Boards, 142 Shaw, G. Bernard, 25; joins, 40; first tract, 40; on Burglars, 45; Fabian Essays, 87; "Quintessence of Ibsenism," 94; on Newcastle Program, 112; on Fabian policy, 126; Vestryman, 127; "Fabianism and the Empire," 134; Tariff Reform, 159; versus Wells, 173; retires from Executive, 223; on Economics, 258; on Guild Socialism, 265 Shaw, Mrs. Bernard, 123, 166, 172, 187, 190 Sidgwick, Henry, 258 Slesser, Henry H., 208, 222, 225 Small holdings, 47, 228 Smith, Samuel, 15, 24 Snell, Harry, 155 Social Democratic Federation, 49, 61, 89, 106, 203 Socialist League, 66, 89 South African War, 128 "Spectator," The, 14 Spencer, Herbert, 18 Standring, George, 74, 172 Stepniak, Sergius, 94 Summer School, 199 Syndicalism, 229, 254 T Tariff Reform, 159 Taunton Election, 154 Tchaykovsky, Nicholas, 66 Tillett, Ben, 113 Tobacco, State cultivation of, 59 "Tory Gold," 50, 63 Trade Unionism, 44, 91, 112, 114, 228 Turner, George, 159 U Unemployment, 52, 57, 69, 215 Unity, Socialist, 202, 253 University Fabian Societies, 103, 191, 193 University Socialist Federation, 195 W Wallas, Graham, joins, 47; lectures, 65; London School Board, 127; resigns, 156; ideas, 262 War of 1914, The, 233, 234 Webb, Sidney, joins, 46; Executive, 52; "Facts for Socialists," 69; "Facts for Londoners," 83; elected to L.C.C., 109; Education Acts, 142; co-operation with Mrs. Webb, 212; on Mill, 259 Webb, Mrs. Sidney, 114, 177, 187, Chapter XI Wells, H.G., 39, 153, Chapter IX, 250 Wicksteed, Philip, 260 Williams, E.E., 205 Wilson, Mrs. C.M., joins, 48; Tract 4, 54; Women's Group, 189; Executive, 222 Woolwich Election, 155 Women's Group, The, 189 Women's Suffrage, 175, 204 Workmen's Compensation, 122 THE END 
17881	----	Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 17881-h.htm or 17881-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/1/7/8/8/17881/17881-h/17881-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/1/7/8/8/17881/17881-h.zip) +--------------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Note: | | | | A number of obvious typographical errors have been corrected | | in this text. For a complete list, please see the bottom of | | this document. | | | +--------------------------------------------------------------+ FROM THE BOTTOM UP The Life Story of Alexander Irvine Illustrated [Illustration: Alexander Irvine, 1909. Photograph by Vanderweyde] New York Doubleday, Page & Company 1910 All Rights Reserved, Including that of Translation into Foreign Languages, Including the Scandinavian Copyright, 1909, 1910 by Doubleday, Page & Company Published, February, 1910 TO MAUDE HAZEN IRVINE CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. Boyhood in Ireland 3 II. The Beginning of an Education 24 III. On Board a Man o' War 40 IV. Problems and Places 53 V. The Gordon Relief Expedition 63 VI. Beginnings in the New World 82 VII. Fishing for Men on the Bowery 90 VIII. A Bunk-house and Some Bunk-house Men 105 IX. The Waif's Story 119 X. I Meet Some Outcasts 126 XI. A Church in the Ghetto 144 XII. Working Way Down 156 XIII. Life and Doubt on the Bottoms 166 XIV. My Fight in New Haven 183 XV. A Visit Home 193 XVI. New Haven Again--and a Fight 207 XVII. I Join a Labour Union and Have Something to Do with Strikes 213 XVIII. I Become a Socialist 235 XIX. I Introduce Jack London to Yale 250 XX. My Experiences as a Labourer in the Muscle Market of the South 256 XXI. At the Church of the Ascension 274 XXII. My Socialism, My Religion and My Home 285 ILLUSTRATIONS Alexander Irvine, 1909 _Frontispiece_ FACING PAGE Mr. Irvine's Birthplace 4 Where Irvine Spent His Boyhood 8 Alexander Irvine as a Marine 38 Officers of H.M.S. "Alexandra" Ashore at Cattaro 50 A Page from Mr. Irvine's Diary 54 Dowling, Tinker and Colporter 110 Alexander Irvine. From a sketch by Juliet Thompson 146 State Convention of the Socialist Party of Connecticut 238 The Lunch Hour in an Interborough Shop 248 Alexander Irvine and Jack London 252 In Muckers' Camp in Alabama 258 Irvine and Three Other Muckers as They Left Greenwich Street for the South 258 Irvine, Punching Logs in the Gulf of Mexico, 1907 270 The Church of the Ascension 276 "Happy Hollow," Mr. Irvine's Present Home Near Peekskill, New York 294 Happy Hollow in the Winter, Looking from the House 298 FROM THE BOTTOM UP CHAPTER I BOYHOOD IN IRELAND The world in which I first found myself was a world of hungry people. My earliest sufferings were the sufferings of hunger--physical hunger. It was not an unusual sight to see the children of our neighbourhood scratching the offal in the dunghills and the gutterways for scraps of meat, vegetables, and refuse. Many times I have done it myself. My father was a shoemaker; but something had gone wrong with the making of shoes. Improvements in machinery are pushed out into the commercial world, and explanations follow. A new shoemaker had arrived--a machine--and my father had to content himself with the mending of the work that the machine produced. It took him about ten years to find out what had happened to him. There were twelve children in our family, five of whom died in childhood. Those of us who were left were sent out to work as soon as we were able. I began at the age of nine. My first work was peddling newspapers. I remember my first night in the streets. Food was scarce in the home, and I begged to be allowed to do what other boys were doing. But I was not quite so well prepared. I began in the winter. I was shoeless, hatless, and in rags. My contribution to the family treasury amounted to about fifty cents a week; but it looked very large to me then. It was my first earning. Our home was a two-room cottage. Over one room was a little loft, my bedroom for fourteen years. The cottage floor was hard, dried mud. There was a wide, open fireplace. Several holes made in the wall by displacing of bricks here and there contained my father's old pipes. A few ornaments, yellow with the smoke of years, adorned the mantelpiece. At the front window sat my father, and around him his shoemaking tools. Beside the window hung a large cage, made by his own hands, and in which singing thrushes had succeeded one another for twenty years. The walls were whitewashed. There was a little partition that screened the work-bench from the door. It was made of newspapers, and plastered all over it were pictures from the illustrated weeklies. Two or three small dressers contained the crockery ware. A long bench set against the wall, a table, several stools, and two or three creepies constituted the furniture. There was not a chair in the place. [Illustration: Mr. Irvine's Birthplace. There are four different houses in the picture. The third door from the left is that of the house in which he was born.] There was a fascination about the winter evenings in that cottage. Scarcely a night passed that did not see some man or woman sitting in the corner waiting for shoes. A candlestick about three feet high, in which burned a large tallow candle, was set in front of my father. My mother was the only one in the house who could read, and she used to read aloud from a story paper called _The Weekly Budget_. We were never interested in the news. The outside world was shut off from us, and the news consisted of whatever was brought by word of mouth by the folks who had their shoes cobbled; _that_ was interesting. In those long winter evenings, I sat in the corner among the shoes and lasts. On scraps of leather I used to imitate writing, and often I would quietly steal up to my mother and show her these scratchings, and ask her whether they meant anything or not. I thought somehow by accident I would surely get something. My mother merely shook her head and smiled. She taught me many letters of the alphabet, but it took me years to string them together. My mother had acquired a taste, indeed, it was a craving, for strong drink; and, even from the very small earnings of my father, managed to satisfy it in a small measure, every day, except Sunday. On Sunday there was a change. The cobbler's bench was cleared away, and my mother's beautiful face was surrounded with a halo of spotless, frilled linen. My father's Sunday mornings were spent in giving the thrush an outing and in cleaning his cage. Neither my father nor mother made any pretensions to religion; but they were strict Sabbatarians. My father never consciously swore, but, within even the limitations of his small vocabulary, he was unfortunate in his selection of phrases. I bounced into the alley one Sunday morning, whistling a Moody and Sankey hymn. "Shut up yer mouth!" said my father. "It's a hymn tune," I replied. "I don't care a damn," replied my father. "It's the Lord's day, and if I hear you whistlin' in it I'll whale the hell out o' ye!" That was his philosophy, and he lived it. Saturday nights when the town clock struck the hour of midnight, he removed his leather apron, pushed his bench back in the corner, and the work of the week was over--and if any one was waiting for his shoes, so much the worse for him. He would wait until the midnight clock struck twelve the next night or take them as they were. The first tragedy in my life was the death of a pet pigeon. I grieved for days over its disappearance; but one Sunday morning the secret slipped out. Around that neighbourhood there was a custom among the very poor of exchanging samples of their Sunday broth. Three or four samples came to our cottage every Sunday morning. We had meat once a week, and then it was either the hoofs or part of the head of a cow, or the same parts of a sheep or a calf. On this particular occasion, I knew that there was something in our broth that was unusual, and I did not rest until I learned the truth. They had grown tired of nettle broth, and made a change on the pigeon. There was a pigsty at the end of our alley against the gable of our house; but we never were rich enough to own a pig. One of my earliest recollections is of extemporizing out of the pigsty one of the most familiar institutions in our town--a pawn shop. If anything was missing in the house, they could usually find it in pawn. At the age of ten, I entered the parochial school of the Episcopal Church; but the pedagogue of that period delegated his pedagogy to a monitor, and the monitor to one of the biggest boys, and the school ran itself. The only thing I remember about it is the daily rushes over the benches and seats, and the number of boys about my size I was pitted against in fistic battles. At the close of my first school day I came home with one of my eyes discoloured and one sleeve torn out of my jacket, as a result of an encounter not down on the programme. The ignominy of such a spectacle irritated my father, and I was thoroughly whipped for my inability to defend myself better. It was an _ex parte_ judgment which a look at the other fellow might have modified. After a few weeks at school I begged my father to allow me to devote my mornings as well as my evenings to the selling of newspapers. The extra work added a little to my income and preserved my looks. If there was any misery in my life at this time I neither knew nor felt it. I was living the life of the average boy of my neighbourhood, and had nothing to complain of. Of course, I was in a chronic condition of hunger, but so was every other boy in the alley and on the street. It was quite an event for me occasionally to go bird-nesting with the son of the chief baker of the town. He usually brought a loaf along as toll. My knowledge of the woods was better than his, for necessity took me there for fuel for our hearth. Sometimes the baker's son brought a companion of his class. These boys were well-fed and well-clothed, and it was when we spent whole days together that I noticed the disparity. They were "quality"--the baker was called "Mr.," wore a tall hat on Sundays, and led the psalm singing in the Presbyterian Church. In the summer time, when the church windows were open, the leader's voice could be heard a mile away. My childish misgivings about the distribution of the good things of life were quieted in the Sunday School by the dictum: "It is the will of God." My first knowledge of God was that He was a big man in the skies who dealt out to the church people good things and to others experiences to make them good. The Bible was to me God's book, and a thing to be handled reverently. We had a copy, but it was coverless, loose and incomplete. Every morning I used to take it tenderly in my hands and pretend to read some of it, "just for luck!" My Sunday School teacher informed me that work was a curse that God had put upon the world and from what I saw around me I naturally concluded that life was more of a curse than a blessing--that was the theory. My father, however, never seemed to be able to get enough of the curse to appease our hunger. [Illustration: Where Mr. Irvine Spent His Boyhood and the pig-sty that never had a pig] The lack of class-conscious envy did not prevent an occasional questioning of God's arrangement of the universe; occasionally, in the winter time, when my feet were bleeding, cut by the frozen pavements, I wondered why God somehow or other could not help me to a pair of shoes. Nevertheless, I reverently worshipped the God who had consigned me to such pitiless and poorly paid labour, and believed that, being the will of God, it was surely for my best good. My first hero worship came to me while a newsboy. A former resident of the town had returned from America with a modicum of fame. He had left a labourer, and returned a "Mr." He delivered a lecture in the town hall, and, out of curiosity, the town turned out to hear him. I was at the door with my papers. It was a very cold night, and I was shivering as I stood on one foot leaning against the door post, the sole of the other foot resting upon my bare leg. But nobody wanted papers at a lecture. The doorkeeper took pity upon me, and, to my astonishment, invited me inside. There on a bench, with my back to the wall and my feet dangling six inches from the floor, I listened to a lecture about a "rail-splitter." It took me many years to find out what a rail-splitter was; but the rail-splitter's name was Lincoln, and he became my first hero. From the selling of papers on the streets of Antrim, I went to work on a farm, the owner of which was a Member of Parliament for our county, one James Chaine by name. My first work on the farm was the keeping of crows off the potato crop. Technically speaking, I was a scarecrow. It was in the autumn, and the potatoes were ripe. I was permitted to help myself to them, so three times a day I made a fire at the edge of the wood and roasted as many potatoes as I could eat, and for the first time in my life I enjoyed the pleasure of a full meal. In the solitude of the potato field came my first vision. I was a firm believer in the "wee people," but my visions were not entirely peopled with fairies. The life of the woods was very fascinating to me. I enjoyed the birds and the wild flowers, and the sportive rabbits, of which the woods were full. The bell which closed the labourer's day was always an unwelcome sound to me. After the ingathering of the potato crop, I was given work in the farmyard, attending to horses and cattle, as jack of all jobs. In the spring of the following year, I went again to work in the potato field, and later to care for the crop as before. It was during my second autumn as a scarecrow that I had an experience which changed the current of my life. It was on a Monday, and during the entire day I kept humming over and over two lines of a hymn I had heard in the Sunday School. Nothing ever happened to me that remains quite so vividly in my mind as that experience. I was sitting on the fence at the close of the day, a very happy day. I must have been moved by the colour of the sky, or by the emotion produced by the lines of the hymn. It may have been both. But, as I sat on the fence and watched the sun set over the trees, an emotion swept over me, and the tears began to flow. My body seemed to change as by the pouring into it of some strange, life-giving fluid. I wanted to shout, to scream aloud; but instead, I went rapidly over the hill into the woods, dropped on my knees, and began to pray. It was getting dark, but the woods were filled with light. Perhaps it was the light of my vision or the light of my mind--I know not. But when I came back into the open, I felt as though I were walking on air. As I passed through the farmyard, I came in contact with some of the men; and their questions led me to believe that some of the experience remained on my face; but I naïvely set aside their questions and passed on down the country road to the town. That night as I climbed to the little loft, I realized for the first time in my life that I had never slept in a bed, but on a pallet of straw. My bed covering was composed of old gunny sacks sewed together; and automatically, when I took my clothes off, I made a pillow of them. Many a night I had been kept awake by the gnawing pangs of hunger; but this night I was kept awake for a different reason. It was an indescribable ecstasy, a new-born joy. As I lay there with my head about a foot from the thatched roof, I hummed over and over again the two lines of the hymn, sometimes breaking the continuity in giving way to tears. The second revelation came to me the following morning. I realized the condition of my body. I was in rags and dirty. I shook my mother out of her slumber and begged her to help me sew up the rents in my clothes. I had no shoes, but I carefully washed my feet, combed my tousled, unkempt hair, and took great pains in the washing of my face. All of this was a mystery to my mother. She wanted to know what had happened to me, and a very unusual thing ended the preparations for the day. My mother said I looked "purty," and kissed me as I went out of the door. As I walked up the street that morning, I shared my joy with the first living thing I met--the saloon-keeper's old dog, Rover. I shook his paw and said, "Morrow, Rover." Everything looked beautiful. The world was full of joy. I was perfectly sure that the birds were sharing it, for they sang that morning as I had never heard them sing before. I resolved to let at least one person into the secret. I was sure that my sister would understand me. She used to visit me every noon hour, on the pretence of bringing my dinner. We had a secret compact that, whether there was any dinner to bring or not, she should come with a bowl wrapped in a piece of cloth, as was the custom with other men's sisters and wives. There was a straight stretch of road a mile long, and, as I sat on the roadside watching for her, I could tell a mile off whether she had any dinner or not. When there was anything in the bowl, she carried it steadily; when empty, she would swing it like a censer. When I told my sister about these strange happenings of the heart, she looked very anxiously into my eyes, and said: "'Deed, I just think ye're goin' mad." Before leaving the farm, I experienced an incident which, although of a different character, equalled in its intensity and beauty my awakening to what, for lack of a better term, I called a religious life. A young lady from the city was visiting at the home of the land steward, and, as I knew more about the woods and the inhabitants thereof than anybody else on the farm, I was often ordered to take visitors around. The land steward's daughter accompanied the young lady on her first visit to the roads; but afterward she came alone, and we traversed the ravine from one end to the other. We collected flowers and specimens, and watched the wild animals. I had never seen such a beautiful human being. Her voice was soft and musical. She wore her hair loosely down her back, and was a perfect picture of health and beauty. One day I lay at full length on my back, asleep by the edge of the wood. When I awoke, this city girl was standing at my side. I jumped to my feet and stood erect, and I remember distinctly the emotions that swept through me. I was startled at first, startled as I had been on a previous occasion when, at a sharp turn in the footpath in the ravine, I met a fawn. I remembered my first impulse then was for a word, a word of conciliation, for I was fascinated by the beauty of the graceful beast. Graceful as a nymph it stood there, nerves strained like a bow bent for the discharge of an arrow, its head poised in air, fire shooting from its eyes. It remained only for an instant, and then with a frightened plunge it cleared the clump of laurel bushes and disappeared. When I stood before this beautiful city girl, I remembered the fawn, and expected the girl instantly to vanish out of my sight. There was something of the fawn in her graceful form, some of the fire in her blue eyes, and in her girlish laugh a suggestion of the freedom of the mountain and glen. I think it was in that moment of intensity that I crossed the bridge which separates the boy from the man. An impassable gulf was fixed between this girl's station in life and mine. She was the daughter of a florist, and I was the son of a cobbler. She returned home shortly after this, and I was promoted from the potato field to be a groom's helper in the stables of "the master." We called his residence the "big house." It was like a castle on the Rhine. A very wonderful man was this Member of Parliament to the labourers around on his demesne. Not the least part of this wonder consisted in the tradition that he had a different suit of clothes for every day in the year. He was very fond of fine horses, and gloried in the fact that he owned a winner of the Derby. He kept a large stable of racing, hunting, and carriage horses. This was the advent of a new life to me. I was taken in hand by the head groom and fitted out with two suits of clothes, and in this change the first great ambition of my life was satisfied. I became the possessor of a hard hat. For two years, I had instinctively longed for something on my head that I could politely remove to a lady. The first night I marched down that village street, shoes well polished, starched linen, and hard hat, I expected the whole town to be there to see me. I had made several attempts at this hat business before. They organized a flute band in the town and I joined it for the sake of the hat. But it was too nice a thing to be lying around when people were hungry, and, as it was in pawn most of the time, I finally redeemed it, returned it, and quit. But this time the hat had come to stay. With my new vision still warm in my heart, I became very active in the parish Sunday School. My inability to read relegated me to the children's class; but I had a retentive memory, and before I was able to read, I memorized about three hundred texts from the Bible. The first outworking of my vision was on a drunken stone mason of our town. His family, relatives, and friends had all given him up. He had given himself up. I went after him every night for weeks; talked to him, pleaded with him, prayed for him, and was rewarded by seeing him make a new start. Together we organized a temperance society. I think it was the first temperance society in that town. I was much more at home in this kind of work than in the Sunday School; for, while I could be neither secretary, treasurer, nor president of the temperance society I had organized, my inability to read or write did not prevent me from hustling after such men as my first convert. In the Sunday School, I felt keenly the fact that I was outclassed by boys half my age; but I persevered and went from one class to another, until I had gone through the grades, and was then given the opportunity to organize a class of my own. This I did with the material on the streets, children unconnected with any school or institution. I taught them the Bible stories and helped them to memorize the texts that I had learned myself. Despite the fact that I was now clean and well groomed, I could not help comparing my life to the life of the horses I was attending, especially with regard to their sleeping accommodations. The slightest speck of dirt of any kind around their bedding was an indictment of the grooming. The stables were beautifully flagged and sprinkled with fine, white sand. The mangers were kept cleaner than anything in the houses of the poor, and, when I trotted a mount out into the yard, the master would take out his white silk handkerchief, run it along the horse's side, and then examine it. If the handkerchief was soiled in the slightest degree, the horse was sent back. Probably not once in a year was a horse returned under such circumstances. The regularity of meals was another point of comparison, and the daily washings, brushings, groomings. It meant something to be a horse in that stable--much more than it meant to be a groom. When these points of comparison arose, I pushed them back as evil and discontent with the will of God. This master man used to talk to his horses, but he seldom talked to his grooms. Sometimes I was permitted the luxury of a look at the great dining-hall, or the drawing-rooms. That also was another world to me, a world of beauty for God's good people. Even the butlers, footmen, and other flunkies were superior people, and I envied them, not only the uniform of their servitude but their intimate touch with that inner world of beautiful things. I spent one winter at the big house, and then the shame of my ignorance drove me forever from the haunts of my childhood. I entered the city of Belfast, seventeen miles distant, and became coachman and groom to a man who, by the selling of clothes, had reached the economic status of owning a horse. In adapting himself to this new condition, he dressed me in livery, and, after I had taught him to drive, I sat beside him in the buggy with folded arms, arrayed in a tall hat with a cockade. The wages in this new position were so small that when I had paid for my room and meagre board, I had nothing left for the support of my brothers and sisters, who were still in dire poverty. The young lady I had met on the farm lived in this city and in my neighbourhood; but I would have considered it a matter of gross discourtesy to call on her, or, indeed, do anything save lift my hat if I met her on the street, our social stations were so far apart. But she had told me the name of the church she attended, and, as I was thinking more about her at that time than about anybody else, I stole quietly into the church as soon as the doors were opened, and, ensconcing myself in a corner under the gallery, I scanned the faces eagerly as they came in. From that obscure point I saw the young lady once a week. At the end of three months, her family came without her. The third Sunday of her absence I was almost on the point of asking about her; but I mastered the desire, held my station, and went to Scotland, where I entered a coal-pit as a helper to one of my brothers. My pay for twelve hours a day was a dollar and fifty cents a week. If I had not been living in the same house with my brother, this would not have sustained me in physical efficiency. The contrast between my life as a groom and this blackened underworld was very marked, and I did not at all relish it. We were all, men and boys and sometimes girls, reduced to the common level of blackened humans, with about two garments each. The coal dust covered my skin like a tight-fitting garment, and coal was part of every mouthful of food I ate in that fetid atmosphere. I had a powerful body that defied the dangers of the pit; but the labour was exhausting, and my face was blistered every day with the hot oil dripping from the lamp on my brow. Sometimes I lay flat on my back and worked with a pick-axe at the coal overhead. Sometimes I pushed long distances a thing called "a hutch," filled with coal. I left my brother's pit with the hope of getting a larger wage; but there was very little difference between the pits. Everywhere I went, labour and wages were about the same. Everywhere life had the same dull, monotonous round. It was a writhing, squirming mass of blackened humanity struggling for a mere physical existence, a bare living. The desire to learn to read and write returned to me with renewed intensity, and gave me keen discontent with the life in the pits. At the same time, the spiritual ideal sustained me in the upward look. There was just ahead of me a to-morrow, and my to-morrow was bringing an escape from this drudgery. I exulted in the thought of the future. I could sing and laugh in anticipation of it, even though I lived and worked like a beast. I was conscious that in me resided a power that would ultimately take me to a life that I had had a little taste of--a life where people had time to think, and to live a clean, normal, human life. I do not remember anything about labour unions in that coal region. If there were any, I did not know of them--I was not asked to join. In those same pits and at that same time worked Keir Hardie, and "wee Keir" was just beginning to move the sluggish souls of his fellow labourers to improve their condition by collective effort. My ideal did not lead me in that direction. I was struggling to get into the other world for another reason. I wanted to live a religious life. I wanted to move men's souls as I had moved the soul of the drunken stone mason in my home town. I made various attempts to learn to read, but each of them failed. I was so exhausted at the close of the day's work that I usually lay down in the corner without even washing. Sometimes I pulled myself together and went out into the village, praying as I went, that by some miracle or other I should find a teacher. Sometimes I made excursions into the city of Glasgow. One night I wandered accidentally into a mission in Possilpark, where a congregation of miners was listening to a tall, fine-looking young preacher. I had not sufficient energy to keep awake, so promptly went to sleep. I awoke at a gentle shake from the hand of the teacher. I returned, but succeeded no better in keeping awake. I returned again, and the teacher when he learned of my ambition, advised me to leave the pits entirely and seek for something else to do. There was something magnetic in that strong right hand, something musical and inspiring in that wonderful voice. And just when I was about to sink back in despair, and resign myself, perhaps for years, to the inevitable, this man's influence pushed me out into a new venture. The teacher was Professor Henry Drummond. Trusting to luck, or God, or the power of my hands, I entered the great, smoky, dirty city of Glasgow to look for a job. I considered it a great shame to be without one, and a crime to be prowling the city at night, homeless and workless. God at this time was a very real Person to me and I spent the greater part of many a night on my knees, in some alley, or down by the docks, praying for a chance to work--to be clean--to learn to read. I slept one night in a large dry-goods box on one of the docks, and, in searching for a place in the box to lay my head, I laid my hand on another human, and at daylight discovered him to be a youth of about my own age. We exchanged experiences, and in a few minutes he outlined a programme; and, having none of my own, I dropped naturally into his. He conducted me to a quarter of the city where the recruiting officers parade the streets, gayly attired in their attractive uniforms. We accosted one man, who had the special attraction of a large bunch of gay ribbons flying from his Glengarry cap. We passed the physical examination, "took the shilling," and were drafted, first to London, then to a training depot in the south of Kent. CHAPTER II THE BEGINNING OF AN EDUCATION The first discovery I made in the training depot was that I had not, as I supposed, joined the army at all, but the navy. I was a marine. But there was no disappointment in the discovery, for I saw in the marine service a better opportunity to see the world. Here at last was my school, and schooling was a part of the daily routine. In the daily exercises of the gymnasium, I was made to feel very keenly by the instructors the awkwardness of my body; but I was so thrilled with the joy of the class-room, that it took a good deal of forcing to interest me in the handling of guns, bayonets, the swinging of clubs, vaulting of horses, and other gymnasium exercises. I could think only in the terms of the education I most keenly desired. This was my first source of trouble. Whatever else a soldier may be, he is a soldier first. His chief business in life is to be a killer--a strong, intelligent, professional killer; and nearly all energies of instruction are bent to give him that kind of power. The depot is on the edge of the sea, and the sea breezes with six hours a day of drill, gave me, as it gives all recruits at that stage, an abnormal appetite, so that the most of the Queen's pay went for additional rations. I made rapid progress in school, and I attended all lectures, prayer meetings, religious assemblies and social gatherings, to exercise a talent which I already possessed, of giving voice to my religious beliefs. But my Irish dialect was badly out of place, and it took a good deal of courage to take part in these things. But more embarrassing than my attempts at public speech were my attempts to keep up with my squad in the gymnasium and on the parade ground. My fellow recruits were thinking in the terms of drill only, and I was thinking in the terms of my new-found opportunity for an education. My awkwardness made me the subject of much ridicule and good-natured jest. It also earned for me a brief sojourn in the awkward squad. The gymnasium was open every evening for exercise and amusement. The first time I ventured in to get a little extra drill on my own account, I had an experience of a kind that one is not likely to forget. My drill sergeant happened to be there. I saw him engaged in a whispered conference with one of the gymnasium instructors. A few minutes later the instructor came to me and urged me to enter the boxing contest which was going on in the middle of the floor, and which was the favourite amusement of the evening. I had no desire for such amusement, and frankly told him so; but he was not to be put off. He said, "There is a rule of the gym, that men who come here in the evening, who are very largely given their own way, are nevertheless obliged to do what they are told; and you may escape serious trouble by attending to my orders." I still demurred, but was forced to the ring side, a roped enclosure, with a pair of boxing gloves and an instructor to take care of the proceedings. When the gloves were fastened on my hands, I noticed that my opponent was one of the assistant instructors, and it occurred to me that I was in for a thrashing; and I certainly was. They must have made up their minds that a good thrashing would wake me up from the point of view of the parade ground, and the assistant instructor proceeded to administer it. I knew nothing whatever of boxing, and could put up but a weak defence. I was knocked down several times, one of my eyes partly closed, and my nose smashed, and one of my arms rendered almost useless. When away from the gymnasium at my barrack-room that night, I did some hard thinking. A room-mate whose cot was next to mine, was something of a boxer. He possessed two pairs of gloves. He had often urged me to accommodate him as an opponent, but I had steadily refused. On learning of my plight, he laughed loudly. So did my other room-mates as they learned of it. That night, before "taps," I bound myself to an arrangement by which I was to pay my room-mate two-thirds of my regimental pay per week for instruction in handling the gloves. He gave me an hour each night for six weeks. At the end of the first week, I had gained an advantage over him. I had a very long reach, and a body as lithe as a panther. I gave up prayer meetings, lectures, and socials, and devoted my self religiously to what is called "the noble art of self-defence." If my drill sergeant imagined that a thrashing would wake me up, he was a very good judge. It did. Incidentally, it woke others up, too. It woke my new instructor up, and half a dozen of my room-mates. At the end of my six weeks' training, by dint of perseverance and application to the thing in hand, I had succeeded in this new type of education thrust upon me. During all this time, I had not visited the gymnasium in the evening, but was remembered there by all who had noticed the process of my awakening. One night, I modestly approached the chief instructor and asked him if I might not have another lesson by the man who had taught me the first. He remembered the occasion and laughed, laughed at the memory of it, and laughed at the brogue and what he supposed to be the temerity of my asking. In asking, I had made my brogue just a little thicker, and my manner just as diffident and modest as possible. "Oh, certainly," he replied, chuckling to himself. The man who gave me my first lesson, a man of my own build and height, appeared, also laughing as he noticed who the applicant for another lesson was. My barrack-room instructor was on hand also, for I had confidentially communicated to him that evening my intention to try again. There is something fiendish in the Celtic nature, some beast in the blood, which, when aroused, is exceedingly helpful in matters of this kind. In less than sixty seconds, I had demonstrated to the onlookers, and particularly to my opponent, that I had been to school since last meeting him. I had not been particular about fancy touches, or the pointless, gingerbread style of showing off before a crowd. There was a positive viciousness in my attack, which was perfectly legitimate in such circumstances; but it was the first time I had ever felt the beast in my blood, and I turned him loose; and if I had been made Prime Minister of England by a miracle, I could not have felt one-hundredth part of the pride that I did, when, inside of the first thirty seconds, I had stretched my instructor on his back at my feet, and in the absolute joyfulness and ecstasy of my soul, I yelled at the top of my voice, "Hurry up, ye blind-therin' spalpeen, till I knock yez down again!" The man got up, and was somewhat more cautious, but utterly unprepared to be completely mastered at his own game in five minutes; and, when the chief instructor interfered and ordered his assistant out of the ring, I begged for more; and so a fresh man was put in, and another, and another, until six men had failed to tire me, or to disturb me in the least. After the first two I laughed, laughed loudly, in the midst of my aggressive work, and enjoyed it every moment of the time, and, when occasionally I was the recipient of a stinging blow, it merely added to my zest. Next morning I found myself a hero. In the course of the night, I had become famous in a small circle as a bruiser. In accomplishing this, I had thrown aside for the time being my religious scruples on the question of boxing, not only on boxing, but fighting, and I had set aside a good deal of my prejudice in my struggle for an education, and my success in the thing I started out to do almost unbalanced me. I had for the first few days after this encounter a terrific struggle, a struggle of the human soul, between my character and my reputation. Only about one hundred and fifty men saw the encounter, but, before parade time next morning, fifteen hundred men were acquainted with it. It had reached the officers' mess, and, as I went back and forth, I was pointed out as the new discovery. I finally reached a state of mind that filled me with disgust, and I took an afternoon stroll down the road to Walmer Castle; and just opposite the window of the room in which the Duke of Wellington died--on the sands of Deal beach I knelt on my knees and promised God that I "wudn't put th' dhirty gloves on again," and I kept the promise--while in the training depot. Early in 1882 I was drafted to headquarters near London--a trained soldier. My forenoons were spent in parades, drills, fatigue and other duties. In the afternoons I continued my studies. I entered into religious work with renewed vigour, connecting myself with a small independent church not far from the barracks. My thick Irish brogue militated against my usefulness in the church, and in expressing myself with warmth, I usually made it worse. In the barrack-room, my brogue brought me several Irish nicknames which irritated me. They were names usually attached to the Roman Catholic Irish, and having been brought up in an Ulster community, where part of a boy's education is to hate Roman Catholics, I naturally resented these names. A Protestant Irishman will tolerate "Pat," but "Mick" will put him in a fighting attitude in a moment. The only way out of the difficulty was to rid myself of the brogue, and this I proceeded to do. All around me were cockney Englishmen, murdering the Queen's English, and Scotchmen who were doing worse. I had not yet become the possessor of a dictionary, and my chief instructors in language, and particularly pronunciation and enunciation, were preachers and lecturers. With regard to literature, I was like a man lost in a forest. I had no guide. One night I attended a lecture by Dr. J.W. Kirton, the author of a tract called, "Buy Your Own Cherries." This tract my mother had read to me when a boy, and it had made a very profound impression upon me. The author was very kind, gave me an interview, and advised me to read as my first novel, "John Halifax, Gentleman." Inside of a week I had read the book twice, the second time with dictionary, and pencil. The story fascinated me, and the way in which it was told opened up new channels of improvement. I memorized whole pages of it, and even took long walks by the seaside repeating over and over what I had memorized. The enlargement of my opportunities in garrison life revealed to me something of the amount of work required to accomplish my purpose. In the midst of people who had merely an ordinary grammar school education, I felt like a child. When discouragement came, I took refuge in the fact that several avenues of usefulness were open to me in army life. I had shown some proficiency in gunnery. For a steady plodder who attends strictly to business there is always promotion. As a flunky, there was the incentive of double pay, the wearing of plain clothes, and some intimate touch with the aristocracy. Many a time one of these avenues seemed the only career open for me. I hardly knew what an education meant; but, whatever it meant, it was a long way off and almost out of reach. One day in going over my well-marked "John Halifax," I came across this passage: "'What would you do, John, if you were shut up here, and had to get over the yew hedge? You could not climb it.' "'I know that, and therefore I should not waste time in trying.' "'Would you give up, then?' "He smiled: there was no 'giving up' in that smile of his. 'I'll tell you what I'd do: I'd begin and break it, twig by twig, till I forced my way through, and got out safe at the other side.'" This was a new inspiration. The difficulty was not lessened by the inspiration, but a new method appealed to me. It was the patient plodding method of "twig by twig." The quotation from "John Halifax" was reinforced by one of the first things I ever read of Browning: "That low man seeks a little thing to do, Sees it and does it: This high man with a great thing to pursue, Dies ere he knows it. That low man goes on adding one to one, His hundred's soon hit; This high man, aiming at a million, Misses an unit." The most powerful speaker I ever heard was Charles Bradlaugh. I attended one of his lectures one Sunday afternoon in a large auditorium in Portsmouth. I shall never forget that wonderful voice as it thrilled an audience of four thousand people. Bradlaugh was engaged in one of his favourite themes, demolishing God and the theologians. It was the most daring thing I had ever heard, and my mind and soul were in revolt. When the time for questions came, I pushed my way to the front, was recognized by the chairman, and mounted the platform. My lips were parched and I could scarcely utter a word. The big man with the homely face saw my embarrassment, and said, "Take your time, my boy; don't be in a hurry." He had been a soldier himself, and, I supposed, as I stood there in my scarlet tunic, Glengarry cap in hand, Bradlaugh became reminiscent. When I got command of my voice, I said: "I want to ask Mr. Bradlaugh a question. I have very little education and little opportunity to get more, but I have a peace in my heart; I call it 'Belief in God.' I don't know what else to call it and I want to ask Mr. Bradlaugh whether he is willing to take that away from me and deprive me of the biggest pleasure in my life, and leave nothing in its place?" He rose from his chair, came forward, laid his hand on my shoulder, and amid a most impressive silence, said: "No, my lad, Charles Bradlaugh will be the last man on the face of the earth to take a pleasure from a soldier boy, even though it be a 'belief in God!'" The crowd wildly cheered, and I went out grateful and strengthened. This incident had a very unusual effect upon me--an intense desire to tell others of that belief possessed me. I was already doing this in a small way, but I became bolder and sought larger opportunities. About ten days later I was ordered to London as the personal bearer of a Government dispatch. I made requisition for seven days' leave of absence. My mission was to the Horse Guards, and after its accomplishment I went to Whitechapel and rented a small room for a week. I had with me a suit of plain clothes that I wore during the daytime, but the scarlet uniform was conspicuous and soldier Evangelists very rare, so in the mission halls and on the street corners with the Salvation Army and other open-air preachers, I exercised my one talent, and told the story of what I had now found a name for--my conversion. In the daytime I talked to costermongers, street venders, the unemployed, and the corner loafers. One night I put my plain clothes on and spent the night with the "wharf rats" on the banks of the Thames. For seven days and for seven nights I continuously told that simple story--told it in few words, closing always with an appeal for a change of life. I had spoken to the officer of the Horse Guards with whom I had business of my intention, and he told me of a brother officer who was very much interested in religious work among soldiers, and directed me to his quarters. The interview resulted in an invitation to a Sunday afternoon meeting at the town house of a duke. It was the most gorgeous place I had ever been in, and the audience was composed of the most aristocratic people in London. I felt very much out of place and conspicuous because of my uniform and station in life. The first part of the meeting partook of the nature of a reception. I watched the proceedings from the most obscure corner I could find. Somebody rapped on the table. The hum of voices ceased, and there stepped out, as the speaker of the afternoon, my friend of the Possilpark Mission, Professor Drummond. Up to that hour my theology related largely to another world, but his explanation of a portion of Scripture was so clear and so convincing to my simple mind, that I could neither miss its meaning nor avoid its application. The professor was telling us that religion must be related to life. Many years afterward I came across the treatise in printed form. It was entitled, "The Programme of Christianity." The officer of the Horse Guards by whose invitation I enjoyed this privilege, introduced me to the lecturer and this personal touch, though very slight, marked a distinct period in my development. Drummond had pushed me out of one stage, and, by inviting me to render an account of myself to him, inspired me into another. My Bible studies had given me a longing to see the Holy Land. Perhaps the longing was super-induced by the possibility of being drafted to the Mediterranean Squadron. On inquiry I learned that the flagship of that squadron--the _Alexandra_--had a library and a school on board, so I made this kind of a proposition to the Almighty. I did it, of course, with a humble spirit and a devout mind; but I did it in a very clear and positive manner: "Give me the flagship for the sake of the schooling I will get there, and I will give you my life!" I prayed daily and nightly, for nearly six months for that object, and in my anxiety over the matter I made a dicker with a man who was to embark at the same time--that, if he should be lucky enough to get the flagship and I should be appointed to some other ship, I would give him a money consideration and request the commander to permit us to exchange. This was a break in my faith, and I quickly corrected it, leaving the entire matter in supernatural hands. There came a time when I was sure in my mind that I would get that ship--a time when there was no longer zest in praying for it; and there entered into my praying phrases of gratitude instead of request. There came also a time when I confided this assurance to my closest friend, to whom it was all moonshine. He laughed and poked fun at the idea. It became a barrack-room joke and I was hurt and chagrined. The eventful morning arrived. Those for embarkation were called out for parade in full marching order, and the roll was called. The universe seemed to hang in the balance that morning. Finally the moment arrived. My name was called. I took one pace to the front, ported my arms and awaited the verdict. My name and company were called, and this assignment: "To Her Majesty's ship _Condor_!" My comrades giggled and were sharply rebuked: I gave vent to an inarticulate guttural sound and was also rebuked. After parade I went to my barrack-room, changed my uniform, and disappeared to escape ridicule. "What cheer, Condor?" were the first words that greeted me at reveille next morning, and my room-mates kept it up. Sometimes the ridicule worked overtime. Often I was on the edge of a wild outburst of passion and resentment, but I mastered these things and went on with my duties. At eleven o'clock in the forenoon of the day following my assignment, we "mustered kits." This is the ordinary pre-embarkation inspection. After inspection we packed our kits and were stood to attention. Several corrections were made in the instructions of the previous day. My heart almost stopped beating when my name was called a second time. "A mistake was made----" The officer got no farther. "I knew it, begorra!" I exclaimed, with flushed face and beating heart. The officer came close to me, looked straight into my face, and said, "I have a good mind to put you in the guard room." I stood still, motionless, silent. "A mistake was made yesterday," he continued, "in appointing you to the _Condor_. You are to go, instead, with a detachment to the _Alexandra_, flagship of the Mediterranean Squadron." Parade was dismissed. I went to the officer, saluted him, and begged the privilege of an explanation. In a few words I told him my story and of the hope of my life, and asked him to forgive me for the interruption. He looked astonished and replied very quietly, "I am glad you told me, Irvine. I shall be interested in your future." On the way to the barrack-room, the spirit of exuberant merriment took possession of me. I wanted to do something ludicrous or desperate. I threw my pack into a corner, quickly divested myself of my tunic, rolled up my shirt sleeves, and struck the table such a blow with my clinched fist as to make the dishes jump off. Everybody looked around. My face must have been a picture of facial latitude. [Illustration: Alexander Irvine as a Marine, at the Age of Nineteen] "Boys," I said, "here's yer last chance to oblige an Irishman!" "What is it, Pat?" half a dozen shouted in unison. "I want to box any three blinderin' idiots in the room, and all together, begorra! Come on now, ye spalpeens, and show the stuff yer made of!" The only answer was a loud outburst of applause and laughter. In my exuberance, I danced an Irish hornpipe, and my career in the barrack-room was over. CHAPTER III ON BOARD A MAN O' WAR In January, 1883, the big troop-ship bearing reinforcements for the Mediterranean Squadron steamed into Malta Harbour and we were transferred to our respective ships. The _Alexandra_ was supposed to be the most powerful ship in Victoria's navy at that time. She carried the flag of Admiral Lord John Hay. She was a little city of the sea with her divisions of labour, her social distinctions, her alleys and her avenues. She had a population of about one thousand inhabitants. These were divided into officers, petty officers, bluejackets and marines. Around the flagship lay half a dozen other ships of the fleet. I was fascinated with the variety of things around me in that little city, and for the first few days on board spent all my leisure time in exploring this mysterious underwater world. Her guns were of the heaviest calibre. Her steel walls were decorated with ponderous Pallasier shot and shell. I was struck with the marvellous cleanliness. Her decks were white. Every inch of brasswork was shining; everything in order; everything trim and neat; neither slovenly men nor slovenly conditions. Malta Harbour is one of the finest in the world. The old City of La Vallette looks like an immense fortress, which it really is, and the next thing to explore was the Island. It seemed as if I had entered an entirely new world. My heart was full of joy, my mind full of hope, and my uniform for the time being was more the uniform of a student than of a fighter. My first great discovery on the ship was the thing I had prayed for--a school. I hid myself behind a stanchion out of sight of the instructors and took my bearings. Later, I found a place where I could sit within hearing distance, but was discovered and forced to explain. The chief instructor was interested in my explanation and in my story, and gave me valuable advice as to how to proceed in my studies. Once again my brogue militated against my advancement. Being the only Irishman in the mess, I had to bear more than my share of its humour. I made application to be employed as a waiter in the officers' wardroom, so that I might improve my pronunciation and add to my vocabulary. I had a little pad arranged on the inside of my jacket with a pencil attached, and every new word I heard I jotted down; and every night I gathered together these new friends, looked up their origin, meaning, and pronunciation. I was appointed bodyservant to the paymaster of the ship, a bucolic old Bourbon of the most pronounced aristocracy. This excused me from military and naval duty, and I was privileged to wear plain clothes. I attached myself to a small group of pietists called Plymouth Brethren, orthodox theologians, literalists in interpretation of the Scriptures and exceedingly straight-laced in their morality. They were fine Bible students, indeed, Bible experts. This was a great joy to me at first, but the atmosphere to a red-blooded, jubilant nature like mine was rather stifling after a while. I was fond of a good story and was full of Irish folklore and fairy stories, and I noticed my brethren did not relish my outbursts of laughter. It was explosive, spontaneous and hearty, but not contagious among them. Their faces assumed a rather pained expression, a kind of notice of emotion that a sense of humour and religious beliefs occupied different compartments in the human mind. It was intimated to me that such "frivolousness" was out of kelter with the profession of a Christian. It was merely by accident that I pulled out of a shelf in the library "Adam Bede" by George Eliot. When I was discovered eagerly devouring its contents under the glare of the fighting lamp one night after the crew had "piped down," I was upbraided for spending such precious time on such "worldly trash." "Suppose the Lord should come now and find you reading that; what would you say to Him?" My reply added to their sorrow. "I should say, 'Begorra, Yer Honour, it's a bully good story!'" The judgment of my brethren was that there was good stuff in me for a Christian if I had only been born somewhere else, a judgment I could not be expected to agree with. My disagreement with these men on various lines was no barrier to my participation in their propaganda. There was only one thing in the world to do--get men converted. Each man in this small group picked out another man as a subject of prayer and solicitation and persuasion. At our weekly meetings we reported on our work. Then we worked for each other. Of course, I was a subject of prayer myself. When these men shook hands in parting, they usually said, "If the Lord tarry," for the Lord was expected to come at any moment. This they could not get into my speech or mind. As I looked around me, I got the idea that there was a good deal of work to be done before the Lord came, and I put emphasis rather on the work than on the expectation. The ship was a beehive of activity, not merely the activity of warlike discipline or preparation, but social activity. Of course, this activity was largely for the officers. We had to go ashore for most of ours, and the social activity of the rank and file was rather of a questionable character ashore, but the officers had their dinners, their dances, and their afternoon receptions. The social centre for a portion of the rank and file was a sailors' institute. As this was a temperance institution, it was only patronized by a small percentage of them. Here we had frequent receptions, afternoon teas, lectures, and religious meetings. Here the secret societies met--the Free Masons, Odd Fellows, Foresters, Orangemen, etc. Thursday afternoons we had a half-holiday on board. It was called "Make-and-Mend-Clothes Day." The upper decks belonged to the crew that afternoon, and every conceivable kind of activity was in operation. It looked something like an Irish fair. It was a day on which most men wrote home; but there were sewing, boxing, fencing, and on this afternoon at least almost every man on the ship worked at his hobby. My hobby at this time was mathematics and I could not do that in the crowd, but on Thursday afternoons I rather enjoyed watching the boxing and fencing. My experience in the game had given me at least a permanent interest in it, and as I stood by the ropes the blood tingled in my veins. I was anxious many a time for a rough and tumble, but my religious friends saved me from this indulgence. There were sixteen men in my mess. It was in a corner of the main gun battery alongside one of the big "stern-chasers." We had a table that could be lowered from the roof of the gun battery, and eating three times a day with these men, I knew them fairly well and they knew me. Each man-of-war's man is allowed a daily portion of rum, and I was advised by the small group of Christians to follow their example and refuse to permit anybody else to drink my portion. It took me a long time to make up my mind to follow their advice. It was, of course, considered an old-womanish thing to do, but I finally came to the point when I asked the commissariat department to give me, as was the custom, tea, coffee, and sugar instead. I took very good care, however, not to indulge myself in these things. I handed them over to men on the night watches. This did not save me from the penalty for such an offence. It brought down on my head the curses of a good many men in the mess, but especially of one man who was a sort of a ship's bruiser. It came his turn to be cook about once in ten days. The cook of the mess had as his perquisite a little of each man's ration of rum. With the others, the abuse was mixed with good-humour, for on the whole I managed to lead a fairly agreeable life with my messmates. They looked upon me as a religious fanatic, but my laughter, my funny stories, and my willingness to oblige offset with most of them my temperance principles and religious fanaticism. The insults of the bruiser I usually met with a smile and passed off with a joke; but when they were long continued, they irritated me. There is a monotony in the life of the average soldier or sailor which has a very deadening effect upon character--seeing the same faces, hearing the same things, performing the same routine in the same kind of way every day, year in and year out, makes him a sort of automaton. Kipling has told us something of the effect of this thing in "Soldiers Three." There came a time when I broke under the strain of this man's continued insults. For nearly a year I got comfort from the advice of the brethren. We had a weekly meeting where our difficulties were considered and prayed over, but the consolation of my brethren finally refused to suffice, and, being a healthy, normal, vigorous animal with some little experience of looking after myself, I began to resent the insults and make some show of defence. This change of front incensed the bully, and one day he hurled an exceedingly nasty epithet at me--one of those vulgar but usual epithets current in army speech. The reference in it to my mother stirred me with indignation and I announced in a fit of anger my willingness to be thrashed or thrash him if the thing was repeated. It was not only repeated at once, but seizing a lump of dough, he hurled it at my head. I ducked my head and it hit another man on the jaw, but the gauntlet was on the floor and an hour afterward the port side of the gun deck was a mass of solidly packed sailors and marines. My brethren came to me one after another. They quoted scores of texts to make me uncomfortable. I tried to joke, but my lips were parched and my tongue unwilling to act. I was pale and trembling. I knew what I was up against, but determined to see it through. One text only I could remember in this exigency and I quoted it to Lanky Lawrence, the big sailmaker who was the leader of our sect. "Lanky, m' boy," I said to him, "I'm goin' to hing m' hat on one text fur the space of a good thrashin'." "What is it?" asked the sailmaker. "'As much as lieth in ye, live peaceably wid all men.' Now I have done that same, and bedad, I have done it to the limit and I'm goin' to jump into this physical continshun so that of out it I will bring pace!" "Ye're all wrong!" said the sailmaker. "I know it, but from the straight-lacedness of your theology I want a vacation, Lanky, just for the space that it takes to get a lickin' wan way or th' other." So the thing began. My chief endeavour was to escape punishment, but the space was exceedingly small between the two big guns and I didn't succeed very well. During the first five minutes I was very badly bruised and beaten. One of my ribs was broken and both eyes almost closed. Half the time I could not see the bully at all. In one of the breathing spells, the sailmaker, who, despite his quotations of Scripture, had remained to see the proceedings, whispered something in my ear. It was a point of advice. He told me that if I could stand that five minutes longer, my opponent would be outclassed. The support of Lanky was a great encouragement to me, and a good deal of my fear disappeared. I began to think harder, to plan, and to plant blows as well as to avoid them. This excited the crowd and it became frenzied. Up to that point it was a one-sided thing. Now, I was not only taking but giving; and not only giving, but giving with laughter and ejaculations. Our Bible study for that month was the memorizing of the names of the minor prophets; and once when I managed to toss my opponent's head to one side with a blow on the point of the chin, I shouted full of glee, "Take that, you cross-eyed son of a seacook--take it in the name of Hosea!" The crowd laughed, but above the roar of laughter rang out the voice of a Scotchman who was one of our best Bible students: "Gie him brimstone, Sandy!" A few minutes later I ejaculated, "And, bedad, that's for Joel!" In this new spirit and in this jocular way, I pounded the twelve minor prophets into him one after another, while the rafters of the ship rang with the cheers of the crew. By the time I had exhausted the minor prophets, I was much the stronger man of the two. My opponent was wobbling around in pretty bad shape. Once he was on his knees, and while waiting, I shouted, "I want to be yer friend, Billy Creedan. Shake hands now, you idiot, and behave yourself!" The only answer I got was a string of vile oaths as he staggered to his feet. I pleaded with him to quit, but that is not the way that such fights end. Men fight while their senses last, while their legs keep under them, and at such a moment a blood-thirsty crowd becomes crazed for the accomplishment of something that looks like murder. The injection of the minor prophets made a ludicrous ending of a thing that had at the beginning almost paralyzed me with fear. So the thing ended with the bully of the mess lying prostrate on his back. I was not presentable as a waiter for several days, but inside of an hour everybody on the ship knew what had happened, and for the second time in my life I was hailed as a bruiser. To impress a thousand men in such a manner creates an egotism which is very likely to be lasting. I had not accomplished very much in my studies. I was nothing in particular among my religious brethren. My general reputation up to this moment in the ship was that of a simple-minded Irish lad, who was a religious fanatic, a sort of sky pilot or "Holy Joe." I became flushed with the only victory worth while in the army or navy, and the second experience lasted twice as long as the first. The next thing to be done, of course, by my friends and admirers, was to pit me against the bruisers of other ships. Two of the officers wanted to know my plans. This recognition heightened my vanity. Prayer-meeting night came along, and I was ashamed to attend. A committee was sent to help me out, and the following week the prodigal returned. The proper thing to do on my return was to confess my sin and ask the brethren to pray for me; but when I failed to do this, I became a subject of deep concern and solicitude. I tried to cultivate a sense of conviction, but succeeded indifferently. The deference paid me by the men of the mess was not calculated to help me out. I felt very keenly the suspicion of my brethren, but it was compensated for by the fact that among the ordinary men I had now a hearing on matters of religious interest. I was rather diffident in approaching them on this subject, since, from the viewpoint of the pietists, I had fallen from grace. At the end of a month, a loathing of this cheap reputation began to manifest itself. The man I had beaten became one of my closest friends. I wrote his letters home to his mother. A few weeks later, he entrusted me with a more sacred mission--the writing of his love letters also. Creedan was a Lancashire man, as angular in speech as in body, and lacking utterly a sense of humour. As we became acquainted, I began to suggest some improvements, not only in his manner of writing, but in the matter also. I could not understand how a man could make love with that kind of nature. One day I suggested the idea of rewriting the entire epistle. The effect of it was a huge joke to Creedan. He laughed at the change--laughed loud and heartily. The letter, of course, was plastered all over with Irish blarney. It was such a huge success that Creedan used to come to me and say: [Illustration: Officers of H.M.S. _Alexandra_, Ashore at Cattaro] "Hey, Sandy, shoot off one of them things to Mary, will ye?" And the thing was done. The summer cruise of 1883 was up the Adriatic. All the Greek islands were visited. I knew the historical significance of the places, which made that summer cruise a fairyland to me. There were incidents in that summer cruise of more than ordinary interest. One morning, while our ship was anchored in the harbour of Chios, the rock on which our anchor lay was moved by a sudden convulsion: the mighty cable was snapped, and the ship tossed like a cork by the strain. The guns were torn from their gearing and the shot and shell torn from their racks. Men on their feet were flung prostrate, and everything loose scattered over the decks. The shrill blast of the bugle sounded the "still." Such a sound is very seldom blown from the bugles, but when it is, every man stops absolutely still and awaits orders. The boatswain blew his whistle which was followed with the Captain's order, "Port watch on deck; every other man to his post!" Five minutes later, on the port side of the ship, I saw the British Consul's house roll down the side of the hill. I saw the people flock around a priest who swung his censer and called upon God. The yawning gulf was there into which a part of the little town had sunk. A detachment of marines and bluejackets went ashore, not knowing the moment when the earth would open up and swallow them. The boats were lowered, and orders were given to stand ready to pack the ship to the last item of capacity and carry away the refugees from what we supposed to be a "sinking island." Of course, in a crisis like this, the sentiment of religion becomes dominant. Some of my comrades at once jumped to the conclusion that it was the coming of the Lord, and in the solemnity of the moment I could not resist the suggestion for which I was derided for months: "Gee, but isn't He coming with a bang!" CHAPTER IV PROBLEMS AND PLACES In 1884 I kept a diary--kept it the entire year. It was written in the straggling characters of a child of ten. As I peruse it now, twenty-five years afterward, I am struck not so much with what it records, as with what it leaves unrecorded. The great places visited and the names of great men are chronicled, Bible studies and religious observations find a place--but of the fierce struggle of the human soul with destructive and corrupting influences, not a word! The itinerary of the year included Egypt, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Syria, Asia Minor, Cyprus, Crete and Sicily. Of these Syria was of the greatest interest to me. Of the men whose pathway crossed mine, General Gordon was of the most importance; of the others, the King of Greece and the second son of Victoria were unique, but not interesting. One in my position could only meet them as a flunky meets his master, anyway. Gordon, on his way to his doom in the Soudan, disembarked at Alexandria. It was early in January. There was no parade, no reception of any kind. Gordon was dressed in plain clothes with a cane in his hand. Gladstone had sent him thus to bring order out of chaos in the Land of the Mad Mullah. Officers with a penchant for religious propaganda are scarce either in the army or navy, but into whatever part of the world Gordon went, he was known and recognized and sought after by men engaged in religious work. It was an officer of the Royal Naval Temperance Society, who was at the same time a naval petty officer, who said to me on the wharf at Alexandria--"That's Chinese Gordon!" "Where is he going?" I asked. "Down the Nile to civilize niggers who are dressed in palm oil and mosquitoes," was the answer. A year later Gladstone sent an army and spent millions of money to bring him back, but it was too late. While lying off Piræus, the seaport of Athens, I was doing guard duty on deck in the first watch. I was substitute for a comrade who had gone to visit the ancient city. There had been an informal dinner, and there were whispers among the men that some high mogul was in the Admiral's cabin. Toward the close of the first watch I was joined on my beat by a man in plain clothes, who, with a lighted cigar in his mouth, marched fore and aft the star-board side of the ship with me. In anticipation of entering Greek waters, I had read for months, and this stranger was astonished to find a common soldier so well informed on the history of Greece. I had not yet been ashore, but I had arranged to go the following day. The gentleman, on leaving, handed me a card on which he had pencilled what I think was an introduction. I had only time to ask him his name, and he said, "George--just George." Next day I discovered I had been pow-wowing with a king. The effect on me was almost as bad as a successful go with the gloves. The Channel Squadron, flying the flag of the Duke of Edinburgh, entered Malta Harbour that year, and for some weeks the combined fleets lay moored alongside each other. The Royal Admiral was a frequent visitor to our ship. On one of these visits I had the experience of serving him with luncheon. He was the guest of our skipper. During the luncheon I handed him a note from his Flag Lieutenant. A dealer in mummies had come aboard with some samples. They were spread out on the quarter-deck. The note related the facts, but the Queen's son was not impressed, and said so. [Illustration: A Page from Mr. Irvine's Diary. Kept while serving on H.M.S. _Alexandra_] "Tell him," said he, "to go to ---- Oh, wait a moment"; then he pencilled his reply on the back of a note and handed it to me. When the Flag Lieutenant read it, he laughed, tore it up and handed the pieces to me. The Duke's reply read--"He may go to the D---- with the whole boiling. A." Right off the coast of Sicily, we encountered a bit of rough water, and Commander Campbell, a seaman of the old school, took advantage of it for sail drill. "Strike lower yards and top masts," was the order, "and clear the decks for action!" "Away aloft!" he roared, as the wind soughed through the rigging, and a moment later I heard--"Bear out on the yard-arm!" Something went wrong in the foretop that day, and its captain fell to the hatchway grating below. I was standing a few feet from the spot, and it took me the best part of the day to sponge his blood out of my clothing. We stopped the evolution for a day, and the following day another man was killed performing the same drill, and we buried them both that afternoon in the old cemetery at the base of Mt. Etna. At noon on the third day the ship was ordered to go through the same evolution. Meantime a petty officer named Hicks had been promoted captain of the foretop. He was one of the finest men in the ship. He could dance a hornpipe, sing a good song, make a splendid showing with the gloves or single-sticks; was something of a wag, and when he laughed the deck trembled. His promotion was not wholly a thing of joy, for the superstition of the sea gripped him tight. He was the third man, and to most of us the number had an evil omen. Within an hour after his promotion, the red flush had gone from his cheeks. He was silent and managed to be alone most of the afternoon and evening of that day. He had been a signal boy and was an expert in the language of flags and in flashing the electric light. He was unable to sleep and passed most of the night on deck with the sentries. It was noticed that he begged permission to "monkey" with the electric-light signalling apparatus aft on the poop. When we began the sail drill the following day, the attention of every man on the ship was focused on the captain of the foretop, and at the order--"Away aloft!" he sprang at the rigging like a cat. We stood from under. There was a breathless hush as the second order was given--"Bear out on the yard-arm!" It was the fatal order at which the other men had lost their nerve and their lives! As it rang out over the old ship, we gulped down our lumps and secretly thanked Him in the hollow of whose hand lie the seas. The evolution was completed, and when the man of the foretop descended to the deck, half a dozen men gripped Hicks, and hugged him and kissed him with tears in their eyes. Something really did happen in the foretop that day--something happened to its captain, though nobody knew just what it was. He came to the deck a changed man, and those who knew him best, felt it most. We could not analyze it--he could not himself. I got into the secret by accident. Some weeks later, it may have been months, an officer from another ship was lunching with a friend in our wardroom. I served the lunch and overheard the following conversation: "Have you a signal man by the name of Hicks--Billy Hicks--on board?" "Yes, what about him?" "Well," the officer said, smiling, "we were ten miles out at sea a few weeks ago when I noticed the signals flashing all over the heavens. I was officer of the deck. It was about seven bells in the first watch. I called my signal officer, told him to take down what he read." He pulled out his notebook, still smiling and, spelling out the words, read: "_God this is Billy Hicks. I ain't afraid of no bloomin' man nor devil. I ain't afraid of no Davey Jones bleedin' locker neither. I ain't like a bawlin baby afussin' at his dad for sweeties. I doant ask you for no favours but just one. This is it--when I strike the foretop to-morrow let me do it with the guts of a man what is clean and God dear God from this here day on giv me the feeling I use to have long ago when I nelt at my mother's knee an said Our Father. Good night dear God._" I went out into the pantry of the wardroom, jotted down as much of this as I could remember, and it gave me a splendid introduction to the captain of the foretop. The greatest problem of my life, and perhaps of any life at the age of twenty-one, was the problem of sex instinct. I have often wondered why that problem is discussed so meagrely. I have often wondered why, for instance, Kipling and Frank Bullen and W. Clark Russell, in discussing the life of soldiers and sailors with whom this is a specialized problem, have not frankly discussed the terrific battle that every full-blooded man must fight on this question. The moment I arrived in that foreign port I was overwhelmed with a sense of personal freedom. There I was, with a splendid physical organization that had just come into its own, and around me in the mess and on the ship's deck and on the streets of the cities--everywhere--I heard nothing else but conversation on this problem. To nine out of every ten men it was a joke. It was laughed at, played with, and I knew, of course, that young men of my own age were being smashed on the rocks of this problem. The British Navy serves out once or twice a week a ration, which is one of the biggest jokes of naval life. It is a small ration of lime juice, and the rumoured purpose of it is to modify in some degree this tremendous natural sex instinct. To most of us it was like spitting on a burning building--the battle went on fiercer every day of life! I tackled it from two points of view; first, the moral point of view. My religion demanded purity, continence and self-mastery. The other point of view--I don't think this was clear to me at the time; I don't believe that I intentionally pursued this course with the object in view that it actually accomplished; nevertheless, whether intentional or unintentional, planned or unplanned, the effect was produced. The physical work required of me was light, very light, and all my leisure time was spent in study. I studied so hard and so conscientiously that I tired not only my mind, but my body. There came a time when I was dimly conscious, however, that I was doing two things by hard study: I was preserving my body, conserving my vital energy, and at the same time training my mind, gathering information and equipping myself intellectually. At the present moment my body is as lithe, as powerful and as enduring as the body of a youth of twenty, and I attribute this wealth of health to the fact that twenty-five years ago, I tackled this problem of self-mastery and laid the foundations for my present strength. Who will give the world a novel or a book dealing with this terrific problem? Who will tell millions of young men around the age of twenty that they cannot burn their candle at both ends? With the ordinary man in civil life the temptation is a negligible quantity compared to the life of a soldier or sailor. In the army and navy it is talked incessantly so that a man has a double battle to fight. He fights the thing and he fights a multitude of suggestions that come to him every day of his life. The most revolting, disgusting and degrading thing I ever heard talked about on a man o' war was the perversion of the sex instinct--the unnatural use of it! This, too, is a joke and laughed at and talked lightly about; but the records of the British Navy, and I think of other navies, would reveal something along this line that would shock civilization. I did not believe this possible, but the first six months on board changed my mind. To the great credit of the British Navy, be it said that this crime is held almost equal to murder, and when an officer is convicted of it, the trial is _in camera_, and the findings kept secret; but no matter how high his rank, he is stripped of his standing and marched over the side of the ship as a degraded criminal and an outcast. A man of the ranks convicted of it usually spends the rest of his natural life in prison. The two things responsible for such perversion in the navy are: first, the herding of the male sex together and for long periods; second, the mode of dress in which little boys begin their sea life. These are the problems before which all others sink into utter insignificance. The army and navy of Great Britain, is recruited very largely from the slums of great cities. The most ignorant, the most brutal and most immoral of mankind are drafted by the incentive of a better life than they have ever known; but they are only changed outwardly. Their nature, their habits of life, their mental make-up, does not change; or, if it changes to the automatic action by which they become part of a war machine they lose that individual freedom that is the boast of the Anglo-Saxon race. On the other hand, I must say that in all my contact with life, I have never met nor been associated with a group of men more gentlemanly, better educated, or whose total sum of right thinking and right living was higher than that group of officers on that ship. I certainly attribute a great deal of my quickening of mind to contact with them. CHAPTER V THE GORDON RELIEF EXPEDITION The incarceration of Gordon in Khartoum was a matter of deep concern to every soldier and sailor in the British Empire, particularly to those of us who were in and around Egypt at the time. It has not always been plain to the British soldier in Egypt, why he was there; but he seldom asks why he is anywhere. In the matter of Gordon, however, the case was different. They all knew that Gladstone had sent him and refused to relieve him; at least, the relief was so long-drawn-out, so dilatory, that it was practically useless. I had made application for my discharge from the service by purchase--a matter of one hundred dollars--and had my plans made out for further study; but the plight of Gordon gripped me as it gripped others, and I determined to throw every other consideration aside, and get to the front. There was one chance in a thousand, and I took it. A marine officer of the ship was called for and his valet was a man who had almost served his time; had seen much service and was not at all anxious for any more. I went after him, bank-book in hand: "I will give you all I possess if you will let me go in your place." "It's a go," said this man as a gleam of joy overspread his face. The officer himself was glad, and the whole thing was arranged; and in forty-eight hours, I was on board the Peninsula and Oriental steamship _Bokhara_ bound for the Red Sea. The officer was the most brutal cad I have ever met. He strutted like a peacock, and seemed to take delight in humiliating, when an opportunity would present itself, anybody and everybody beneath him in rank--he was a captain. The trip through the Suez Canal might be considered a new stage of development, for I travelled as a second-class passenger. To be consulted as to what I should eat or to have any choice whatever, was not only new, but startling. In turning a curve in the Canal, we encountered a sunken, water-logged ship which stopped the traffic. We were there four or five days, and the life of ease and luxury, with opportunity for reading and social intercourse with well-gowned people, was so enjoyable that, had it not been for the fact that Gordon was in danger in Khartoum, and I wanted to have a hand in his relief, I should have enjoyed staying there a month. We disembarked at Suakim on the Red Sea, and we were--the officer and myself--immediately attached to the staff of General Sir Gerald Graham in the desert. The seven months in the desert were months of waiting--monotonous, deadening waiting. The greatest difficulty of that period of waiting was the water supply. We were served out with a pint of water a day. Water for washing was out of the question. Our laundry method was a kind of optical illusion. We took our flannel shirts, rolled them up as tightly as possible, tied them with strings, and then thumped them laboriously with the butt end of a rifle; then they were untied, shaken out, brushed, and they were ready for use. Most of this was a make-believe laundry, but the brushing was real. Being attached to the General Staff, I had a little more leeway in the comforts of life, but it was mighty little. Off in the hills, ten miles distant, was encamped the black horde under Osman Digna, and every night of the seven months the Arabs kept up small-arm firing upon us. Sometimes they were bold enough to make an approach in a body in the darkness, but we had powerful electric lights that could search the desert for miles. We got accustomed to this after a while, and would simply lie prostrate while the light was turned on them. Of course, the searching of the desert with the electric lights was always accompanied with the levelling of our artillery on whatever the light revealed. Not very much destruction was accomplished on either side, however. Occasionally a stray bullet would carry off one of our men in his sleep. Sometimes these naked savages would stealthily creep in upon our sentries and with their sharp knives would overpower them and mutilate them in an indescribable manner. To prevent this, we laid dynamite mines in front of our encampments. I watched, late one afternoon, the young engineer officer as he connected the wires for the night--perhaps his hand trembled as he made connections, or perhaps some mistake was made. Anyway, there was an explosion. Great masses of desert sand shot into the air like a cloud, and when it fell again, the mangled body of the engineer fell with it; but the mines were laid, connections made for the night, just the same, by another engineer. At other places we had broken bottles fixed in the sand, for the black men came barefooted, and they were more seared by broken bottles in the sand than they were by the musketry fire. A night of great excitement was that of the capturing of some of our mounted scouts in a sortie near the hills. That night we saw half a dozen immense bon-fires on the hilltops, and the impression we got was that our comrades were being burned alive. There were half a dozen brushes or skirmishes with the natives during my stay in the desert, but I did not experience what might be called a decisive battle. There had been decisive battles of one sort or another, but I was not present. They were before my time. They began the laying of a railway from Suakim to Berber, but afterward they pulled the rails up. The soldiers cursed Gladstone for the laxity of his foreign policy. Gordon, we knew, was in Khartoum, and hard pressed, and outside were the Mahdi and his multitude; and why the Government should hold us back, we could not understand. The desert life was so deadening that any kind of a change would have been welcome. Every man would have been glad of even a repetition of the charge at Balaklava, though only few men would come out. Anything was preferable to rotting in the desert! The sun was striking dead one out of every two men. I thought my time had come when I had a sunstroke. Being the only man on the General's staff stricken, I was well looked after. The General had ice, and I was privileged to have the luxury of it. I was also given a glass of the finest French brandy. I asked the attendant to put it by my side, and when he disappeared out of my tent--my tent was so small that it barely covered my body--I went through a fierce battle with my prejudices. I was a fanatic on the drink question. I had sworn eternal hostility to it, and with good reason. The use of it was partly responsible for my lack of early schooling. It had robbed me of a great deal of the life of my kind-hearted old mother, and I had determined to put up a tremendous fight against it. Here the thing was in my hands, ordered by the doctor; but I tipped it into the sand and made them believe that I had drunk it. I had seen so many stricken men with sunstroke die during the same day, that I had little hope of my own recovery; but inside of twelve hours, I was on my feet again, and, though weak, at work. It was recorded that we lost fifty per cent. of our strength by sunstroke and enteric fever. It was very noticeable that the men of intemperate habits were the first to go. They dropped like sheep in the heat of the day, and by sundown they lay beneath a winding sheet of desert sand. The actual conflict of civilized with savage forces was responsible for the loss of very few men. The sun was our arch enemy! To break the monotony, we tried whatever sport was possible in the sand. The national game, cricket, came in for a trial, but was more laughter-provoking than recreative: a bundle of rags tightly rolled up in a sphere served as a ball, and pieces of boards of old packing-cases served as bats and wickets. Leapfrog and the three-cornered game of "cat" were favourite pastimes, but nothing broke the monotony. It was depressing, and it was not an unusual sight to see men weeping from homesickness--utterly unable to keep back the tears. There were attempts at suicide also, and men eagerly sought opportunity to endanger themselves. Actual fighting on the desert was to us the greatest possible godsend, for it meant either death or relief from the game of waiting. Despite the fact that the love of Gordon had brought me there, I was not enamoured of the way in which the campaign was carried on. Of course, when in actual conflict, I wanted this black horde wiped off the face of the earth; but when I saw boys and girls, ranging from six to ten years of age, approaching the phalanx of British bayonets with their little assagais ready to do battle, I was thrilled with admiration for them. Some of our officers described this as fanaticism, and I remember a discussion that took place between two of them as to whether it was fanaticism or courage, and a unique experiment was tried. We had with us always a contingent of friendly natives, and in order to test the question, one of them was to bare his back (for a shilling) and an officer applied to it, with all his strength, a horsewhip. I saw the black man's body writhe for an instant as he puckered his mouth; but it was only for an instant--then he smiled and asked for another stroke for another shilling. This seemed to indicate to the officers that there was something more than fanaticism in the Soudanese. Their warriors were tall, powerfully built men--we used to say they were dressed in palm oil and mosquitoes. Their hair stood straight up, and their bodies were greased. I think it was the general opinion of our officers that if these men could be disciplined and drilled as European soldiers are, they would make the finest fighters in the world. Perhaps Kipling has described this opinion better than anybody else when he says: So 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your 'ome in the Soudan; You're a pore benighted 'eathen but a first-class fightin' man; An' 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, with your 'ayrick 'ead of 'air-- You big black boundin' beggar--for you broke a British square! There was somewhat of a mixture of my sentiment and feeling on this war. I wanted Gordon released, I wanted the war ended and the Soudanese beaten; but when I contrasted the spirit of the campaign with the spirit of Jesus, I often wished that I could lend my assistance to these black men of the desert who were fighting for the thing under their feet, and the home life of their tribe. But it was not until I was completely out of the desert that I was possessed of a loathing and disgust for the game of war, as such. This disgust grew until I had completely ridden myself not only of the war spirit, but of the paraphernalia of the soldier. The officer whose servant I was, was so hated by everybody who knew him that if he had ever gotten in front of the ranks, as was the ancient custom in war, he would have been the first man to drop, and he would have dropped by a bullet from one of his own men. But leaders no longer lead on the field of battle--they follow! I had some books with me, but the power to interest myself in them had almost completely vanished. I occupied my mind very largely with military tactics. On a large sheet of brown paper I outlined the plan of campaign. On it I had the position of every regiment in our army. The dynamite mines, the region of broken glass, the furze bushes, fort and redoubts were all minutely detailed, and one night an exigency arose in which this paper plan of campaign was called into evidence. Tired of waiting, and very restive and discontented under the privations of the desert, Graham determined to move. The electric-light apparatus was out of order, and the advance forts were too far away to be touched with any less powerful signal of the night. A non-commissioned officer was ordered to take a corporal's guard and deliver marching orders to the advanced forts. When questioned as to the route he was not quite certain as to the exact location of the dynamite mines or broken glass, and as I overheard the entire conversation, I produced my brown-paper map and begged the honour of carrying the dispatch. This was not granted me until several others had been questioned and failed. I was so sure of every inch of the ground, that I was commissioned to take two men with me and deliver the orders. This made my heart leap with joy--it was a relief, an excitement, an opportunity! Osman Digna's men were stealthy. They hid behind the furze bushes in the darkness so often, and so many of our men had been hamstrung, that, of course, we were on the alert; but every furze bush we approached covered an imaginery "Fuzzy-Wuzzy," and this, often repeated, created an unutterable fear, so that by the time we reached our destination, our khaki clothing was black with sweat, and we were literally drenched with fear. Of course, we put on a brave front and smiled complacently as we delivered the orders, and when it was suggested that we remain overnight in the fort, I nonchalantly refused the offer under the pretence that we were expected back. The same thing happened on the return journey, and when the thing was over, we were the most pitiful-looking objects--fear-stricken soldiers! Some months later when it was announced to me that we had been mentioned in dispatches, the absurdity of the thing became for the first time fully apparent. According to the ethics of military life, I had done a brave thing--something worth mentioning; but to my own soul, I had been panic-stricken with physical fear, and, turn it over as I might, I could not discover a vestige of either courage or fortitude in the entire transaction. The phrase, "Everything is fair in love and war," covers a multitude of sins in both departments. We had a unique way of finding out whether the wells in the desert were poisoned. We led up to each well a small detachment of captives and made them drink. If they drank, we could drink also; if they refused, we took it for granted the wells were poisoned, and we hanged them. Sometimes this extreme sentence was mitigated, and we flogged them. Whatever we touched, we destroyed. What the bullet could not accomplish, the torch could. It was a campaign of annihilation! The news of Gordon's death cast a gloom over the entire army. This, of course, meant relief and return home, but no man wanted to return. We were seized with a fiendish impulse to proceed at all hazards to Khartoum to his relief. That, from the point of view of the Government was, of course, out of the question, and we were ordered home. Transport ships were lying in Suakim harbour ready for the journey across the sea, but this could not be accomplished with dispatch. A garrison had to be left to watch the seaboard. The detachment of which I was a part was returned to the town of Suakim, and the officers were quartered in an unfinished building by the seaside at the edge of the water. The officers' servants lived in tents pitched on the roof. We were permitted to bathe as often as we wished. The harbour was full of sharks and rather dangerous for bathing, but the Soudanese seemed to be not over-careful as they skimmed over the water in their "dug-outs." The journey home on a transport was a continuation of the misery of the desert. What the desert had left undone to weakened men, the rough voyage accomplished. The ship was overcrowded and almost every day dead bodies lashed to planks were pitched over the side. The sight (below decks) of scores of men crawling around in a dying condition, struck terror to the hearts of the strong. The smells were nauseating and the food was vile. No man knew when his turn would come. The few doctors were utterly unable to cope with this physical collapse of so many men. The condition of the ship and of the men furnished me with the best opportunity I had had up to that time for evangelistic work. I spent twenty hours of each twenty-four preaching the gospel to the men. The absence of a chaplain on board made the work comparatively easy. My work was done so quietly and unobtrusively, that it was practically unknown save to the sick and the dying until an incident happened that brought me somewhat into the light. We were in the Bay of Biscay, and those who were well were fighting off the atmosphere of disease. It was toward evening and four men were playing cards for money. I stood watching them with my hands behind my back. I must have been there half an hour when the man directly in front of me, looking around and staring me in the face, said: "Get t'ell out of 'ere! I 'aven't won a penny since you've been watching us." The other men laughed and I moved away, excusing myself as I departed; but before I was out of hearing, one of the men addressed the speaker and said: "Don't be too sure of what you could do to that fellow Irvine--his looks belie him. He's got more steam in his elbow than you have." That was all I heard, but as I was looking over the side a minute or two later, a hand was laid on my shoulder. I looked around. It was the man who had threatened me. "Say, pal," he said, "I didn't mean no 'arm. These 'ere blokes tell me as yer name's Irvine. Is that so?" I nodded an assent. "Did yer ever 'ave a chum 'oose name was Creedan?" Again I nodded assent. "D'ye know what became ov 'im?" "He was missing on the field," I replied. "'E's dead," said the man. Then he described to me the last moments of my friend. It appeared that Creedan and this man fell together on the field, Creedan shot through the abdomen; this man, through the shoulder. An officer came along and offered Creedan a mouthful of water, but he refused, saying he was all in, but that he wanted to send a message to his chum, and this is the message he gave to the man who had threatened to punch my head: "Tell Irvine the anchor holds!" I was moved, of course, by the recital of this story; so was the man who told it. "What in 'ell did 'e mean by th' anchor 'oldin'?" the man asked. "Old man," I said, "I had been trying for a long time to lead Creedan to a religious life, and the story you tell is the only evidence that I ever had that he took me seriously." The man looked as if he were going to weep, and in a quivering voice he asked if I could help him. He was going home to marry a maiden in Kent whom he described as "a pure good girl." He felt unworthy, for he was a gambler and a periodical drunkard, and he thought that if a man like Creedan could be helped, he could. I struck the iron while it was hot, and said: "There is a good deal to be done for you, but you have to do it yourself! If you've got the grit in you to face these fellows and make a confession of religion right here and now, I will guarantee to you that you'll land on the shores of England a new man." He looked at me for a moment with a stern, hard face, then he said: "By God, I'll do it!" There was no profanity in this assertion. It was the strongest way he could put it; and we dropped on our knees on the deck and began to pray. In a minute or two half a dozen others joined us. Then it seemed as if everybody around us was on his knees; and then, when I felt the atmosphere of the crowd and the reverence of it, I called on others to pray; half a dozen others responded, and then this man, above the roar of the wind through the sails and the creaking of the boats' davits, prayed to God to make him a new man. Creedan had been drafted from the ship in a detachment for the front, and when we met on the desert, we entered into a compact which stipulated that if either of us fell on the field of battle, the survivor was to take charge of the deceased's effects, and visit his people. The arrival of the troops in England was the occasion for an unusual demonstration. We were banqueted and paraded, and all kinds of honours were showered upon us. As we marched through the streets in our sand-coloured uniforms, we were supposed to be heroes--heroes every one. What a farce the whole thing seemed to me! Nevertheless, I was inconsistent enough to actually enjoy whatever the others were getting. Having purchased my discharge by the payment of £20 I was at liberty to leave at my pleasure; I was offered a lucrative position in the officers' mess which was one of the best in the British Army. This I accepted and held for a year. My furlough, after a short visit to Ireland, I spent in Oxford. The University and its colleges and the town had a wonderful fascination for me, but I think, as I look back at it and try to sum up its influence upon me, that the personality of the "Master of Balliol"--Benjamin Jowett--was the greatest and the most permanent thing I received. I had been striving for years to slough off from my tongue a thick Irish brogue, and had not succeeded very well. The elegance and the chasteness of Jowett's English did more for me in this respect than my years of pruning. I have never heard such English, and behind this master language of a master mind, there was a man, a gentleman! I wrote Dr. Jowett a note one day, asking for an interview. It may have been the execrable handwriting that interested him; but I had a most polite note in return, stating the hour at which he would be glad to see me. I remember attempting in a very awkward, childish way to explain to him something of my ambition to make progress in my studies, and how poorly prepared I was and how handicapped in various ways. He rose from his seat, took down a book from a shelf, consulted it and put it back, and then he told me in a few words of a Spanish soldier who had entered the University of Paris at the age of thirty-three and became an influence that was world-wide. This, by way of encouragement. The model held up had very little effect upon me, but this personal interview, this close touch with the man who himself was a model, was a great inspiration to me, and remains with me one of the most pleasant memories of my life. My first lecture was given in the town hall at my home town in Ireland during the first week of my after-campaign furlough. The townspeople filled the hall, more out of curiosity than to hear the lecture, for when the cobbler's son had left the town a few years before he couldn't read his own name. The Vicar presided. Ministers of other denominations were present. The Young Men's Christian Association was very much in evidence at the lecture. School teachers of the Sunday School where I taught, were present. The class of little boys I had gathered off the streets was there; but personally I had gone after the newsboys of the town, and I had arranged that they should sit in a row of front seats. Indeed, I bribed some of them to be present. My lecture was on Gordon and Khartoum. I described our life on the desert and told something of the war-game as I had seen it played. At the close of the lecture, the usual perfunctory vote of thanks was moved, and several prominent men of the town made the seconding of the vote an excuse for a speech. Curiously enough, I had had an experience with one of these men when I was a newsboy, and in my reply to this vote of thanks I told the story: "One winter's night when I was selling papers on these streets--I think I was about twelve years of age--I knocked at a man's door and asked if he wanted a paper. The streets were covered with snow and slush, and I was shoeless and very cold. The man of the house opened the door himself, and something must have disturbed him mentally, for when he saw it was a newsboy, he took me by the collar and threw me into the gutter. My papers were spoiled and my rags soaked with slush and water. "I picked myself up and came back to the window through which I saw a bright fire on an open hearth, and around it the man's family. I don't think I said any bad words, nor do I think I was very angry; but I certainly was sad and I made up my mind at the window that that man would some day be sorry for an unnecessary act of cruelty. I am glad that the gentleman is present to-night"--a deep silence and breathlessness pervaded the audience--"for I am sure that he is sorry. But here are the newsboys of the town. They are my invited guests to-night. I want to say to the townspeople that the only kindly hand ever laid on my head was the Vicar's. It is too late now to help me--I am beyond your reach: but these boys are here, and they are serving you with papers and earning a few pennies to appease hunger or to clothe their bodies, and I want you to be kind to them." After the lecture the man who had thrown me in the gutter came to me. Of course, he had forgotten it. He had not the slightest idea he was the man, but he said: "What a dastardly shame!" I gripped him by the hands, and said, "You, my brother, are the man who did it." I tightened my grip, and said, "And I forgive you as fully and freely as I possibly can. You are sorry, and I am satisfied." I studied in the military schools for a first-class military certification of education, and got my promotion; but no sooner had the studies ceased and promotion come than the disgust with military life and its restrictions increased with such force that it became unbearable. So I left the service. CHAPTER VI BEGINNINGS IN THE NEW WORLD I came to the United States in September, 1888. I came as a steerage passenger. My first lodging on American soil was with one of the earth's saints, a little old Irish woman who lived on East 106th Street, New York City. I had served in Egypt with her son, and I was her guest. I had come here with the usual idea that coming was the only problem--that everybody had work; that there were no poor people in this country, that there was no problem of the unemployed. I was disillusioned in the first few weeks, for I tramped the streets night and day. I ran the gamut of the employment agencies and the "Help Wanted" columns of the papers. It was while looking for work that I first became acquainted with the Bowery. It was in the current of the unemployed that I was swept there first. It was there that I first discovered the dimensions of the problem of the unemployed, and my first great surprise in the country was to find thousands of men in what I supposed to be the most wonderful Eldorado on earth, workless, and many of them homeless. An advertisement in the morning paper calling for a "bed-hand"--whatever that might mean--led me to a big lodging-house on the Bowery. They wanted a man to wash the floors and make the beds up, and the pay was one dollar a day. I got in line with the applicants. I was about the forty-fifth man. Many a time I have wished that I could understand what was passing in the clerk's mind when he dismissed me with a wave of the hand. I thought, perhaps, that my dismissal meant that he had engaged a man, but that was not the case. A man two or three files behind me got the job. My next attempt led me to a public school on Greenwich Avenue. The janitor wanted an assistant. I was so weary with my inactivity, that any kind of a job at any kind of pay would have been acceptable. The janitor showed me over the school, told me what his work was. Finally, he took me to the cellar where he had piled up in a corner about twenty lots of ashes. That, of course, was the first thing to be done, and though the pile looked rather discouraging, I stripped to the work, and went at it. My task was to get the ashes outside ready for carting away. I was about six hours on the job, when I accidently overheard the janitor say to his wife: "Shut your mouth, I have just got a sucker of a greenhorn to get them out." That was enough. I got my coat and hat, went over to the janitor's door, but before I could open my mouth, his wife said: "What's up?" "Oh, the job's all right," I replied, "but what I object to is the way you do your whispering!" The lowest in the scale of all human employments is the art of canvassing for a sewing machine company. I did it for two weeks. My teacher taught me how to canvass a tenement. The janitor is the traditional arch enemy of the canvasser. My teaching consisted largely in how to avoid him, circumvent him, or exploit him. A Mrs. Smith--a mythical Mrs. Smith--always lived on the top floor. I was taught to interview her first; then I canvassed from the top down. My district was on the East Side from Fourteenth to Forty-Second Street. I encountered some rough work with janitors and janitresses in this region--so rough, indeed, that I considered it a splendid missionary field; and when I found, crushed in the heart of that tenement region, a small Methodist Church, I became interested in its work. I copied its "bill-of-fare" from the board outside the door, and began, as time permitted, to attend its services. As an offset to the discouragements I had experienced, I met in this small church two big men--big, mentally and morally. They were brothers, and during my twenty-one years in the United States, I have not met their superiors. They were Lincoln and Frank Moss, both of them leaders in the church, and although they had moved with the population northward, they remembered the struggles of their childhood, and gave to it some of their best manhood. Selling sewing machines was a failure, but out of it came the discovery of this splendid field for social and religious activity. I was directed to the Twenty-third Street Y.M.C.A. There, day after day, I inquired at the Employment Department until the secretary seemed tired of the sight of me. I got ashamed to look at him. One night I sat in a corner, the picture of dejection and despair, when a big, broad-shouldered man sat down beside me. "You look as if you thought God was dead!" he said, smiling. "He appears to be," I replied. He put his big hand on my shoulder, looked into my eyes, and drew out of me my story. I forget what he said, it was brief and perhaps commonplace, but I went out to walk the streets that night, full of hope and courage. Before leaving that night I approached the little man at the employment desk. "Did you see that big fellow in a gray suit?" I asked. "Yes." "Who is he?" "Mr. McBurney." "The man whose name is on your letterhead?" "The same." "Great guns! and to think that I've been monkeying all these weeks with a man like you--pardon me, brother!" Robert R. McBurney was my friend to the day of his death. Many a time, when out of the pit, I reminded him of the incident. It was from the little man at the employment desk of the Twenty-third Street Y.M.C.A. that I got my real introduction to business life--if the vocation of a porter can be called "business." I became an under-porter in a wholesale house on Broadway at five dollars a week, and spent a winter at the job. The head of the house was a leader of national reputation in his particular denomination. I was sitting on the radiator one winter's morning before the store was opened when the chief clerk came in. It was a Monday morning, and his first words were: "Well, what did you do yesterday?" "I taught a Bible Class, led a people's meeting, and preached once," was my reply. He looked dumbfounded. "Do you do that often?" he asked. "As often as I get a chance," I answered. An abiding friendship began that morning between us. This man might have been a member of the firm and a rich man by this time, but he had a conscience, and it would not permit him to dishonestly keep books, which his employers wanted him to do, and he quit. My next job was running an elevator in an office building on West Twenty-third Street. It was one of the old-fashioned, ice-wagon variety, jerked up and down by a wire cable. It gave me a good opportunity for study. In the side of the cage I had an arrangement for my Greek grammar. This of course, could not escape the notice of the business men, and if I was a few seconds late in answering their bell, they always looked like a thunder-cloud in the direction of my grammar. One of my passengers on that elevator was sympathetic. His name was Bruce Price, an architect; a tall, fine, powerfully built man, who had a kindly word for me every morning, and the only passenger who ever deigned to shake hands with me as if I were a human being. After that, I mounted a milk-wagon and served milk in the region of West Fifty-seventh Street. This drop into the cellars of the well-to-do gave me contact from another angle with janitors, janitresses, and servants. I started at four o'clock each morning. I did not finish until late in the afternoon, but I had all of Sunday off. I found my way by the touch of the hand, and very soon I seemed to have the eyesight of a cat to find shafts, dumb-waiters, circuitous turnings in the sub-cellars of large apartment houses. The life of a milkman is a busy one, but I found time to mumble my Greek roots as I trotted in and out of the cellars. My grammar, when weather permitted, was tied open to a bottle in the cart. From the milk-wagon I went to a publishing house. They had advertised for a man with some literary ability, and I had the effrontery to apply. I drove the milk-cart in front of the publishing-house door, and, with my working clothes bespattered with milk and grease, I applied personally for the job. "What are your qualifications?" the manager asked. "What kind of work do you want done?" I asked in reply. I found that they were going to make a new dictionary of the English language, but their method of making it obviated the necessity for scholarship. They had an 1859 edition of Webster and a lot of the newer dictionaries, and Webster was to be the basis of the new one, and we were to crib and transcribe from all the rest. I was the third man employed on the work. My salary to begin with was ten dollars a week. The word "salary" had a fine sound; it is more refined than "wages," though it was less than my pay as a milkman. After working a month, I had the temerity to outline a plan for a dictionary which would necessitate the most profound scholarship in America. This plan was laughed at, at first, but finally adopted, and it took seven years and millions of dollars, and hundreds of the best scholars in the United States and foreign countries to complete the work. They raised my salary from $10 a week to $100 a month; but when an opening came to work as a missionary among the Bowery lodging houses at $60 a month, I considered it the opportunity of a lifetime, and in 1890 entered my new parish--the Bowery. CHAPTER VII FISHING FOR MEN ON THE BOWERY The Bowery is one of the most unique thoroughfares of the world. The history of the cheap lodging houses, to which I was commissioned to carry the gospel, is one of the most interesting phases of the Bowery's history. Ex-inspector Thomas Byrnes has described the lodging house of the Bowery as "a breeding place of crime." He probably did not know that the cheap lodging house had its origin in a philanthropic effort. It was in 1872, somewhere on the edge of a financial panic, that the first lodging house of this type was organized by two missionaries--Rev. Dr. A.F. Shauffler and the Rev. John Dooley. The Young Men's Christian Association of the Bowery found a lot of young men attending its meetings who were homeless, and their endeavour to solve this problem resulted in the fitting up of a large dormitory on Spring Street. Somebody--Ex-inspector Byrnes says a Mr. Howe--saw a business opportunity in the philanthropy and copied the dormitory. There were from sixty to seventy of them on the Bowery when I began my work. These I visited every day of the week. There was a glamour and a fascination about it in the night-time that held me in its grip as tightly as it did others. What a study were the faces--many of them pale, haggard; many of them painted! How sickly they looked under the white glare of the arc lights that fizzled and sputtered overhead! Many of its shops have been "selling out below cost," for over twenty years. I did not confine myself to the Bowery, but went to the small side streets around Chatham Square. They were also filled with cheap lodging houses. The lowest of these were called "bunk houses." Only one of the bunk houses remains. That is situated at No. 9 Mulberry Street. It is there to-day, little altered from the day I first entered it over twenty years ago. The price for lodging ranges from seven to fifteen cents, but fifteen cents was the more usual price. My headquarters at first was the City Mission Church on Broome Street, called "The Broome Street Tabernacle," and to it I led thousands of weary feet. The minister at that time was the Rev. C.H. Tyndall, a splendid man with a modern mind; but I filled his tabernacle so full of the "Weary Willies of the Bowery" that Mr. Tyndall revolted, and as I look back at the circumstance now, he was fully justified in his revolt. Mr. Tyndall was doing a more important work than I was, more fundamental and far-reaching. He was touching the family life of the community and he saw what I did not see--that our congregations could not be mixed; that my work was spoiling his. I did not see it then. I see it now. So I betook myself to another church, and this other church got a credit which it did not deserve, for they had no family life to touch. It was a church at Chatham Square, and its usefulness consisted in the fact that it was situated where it could catch the ebb and flow of the "tramp-tide." I spent my afternoons in the lodging houses, pocket Bible in hand, going from man to man as they sat there, workless, homeless, dejected and in despair. I very soon found that there was one gospel they were looking for and willing to accept--it was the gospel of work; so, in order to meet the emergency, I became an employment agency. I became more than that. They needed clothing and food--and I became a junk store and a soup kitchen. After six months' experience in the work, I had a story to tell. It was very vivid, and I could always touch the tear glands of a congregation with it, and stir their hearts; so I went from church to church, uptown and out of town and anywhere, and told the story of my congregation on the Bowery. The result was not by any means a solution of my problem, nor of the tramp problem, but carloads of old clothes, and money to pay for lodgings. There was such a terrific tug at my heartstrings all the time that I never had two coats to my own back, or a change of clothing in hardly any department. As for money, I was, as they were, most of the time penniless! Everything I could beg or borrow went into the work. At the close of the first year, the results were rather discouraging. I got a number of men work, but very few had made good. Hundreds of men had been clothed, fed and lodged, but they had passed out of my reach. I knew not where they had gone. Scarcely one per cent. ever let me know even by a postal card what had become of them, or how they fared, and yet my work was called successful. Sunday afternoons, with a baby organ on my shoulder and a small group of converts and helpers following closely behind, I went down the Bowery and held meetings in about half a dozen houses. I did most of the speaking, but urged the converts to tell their own stories at each service. I have said that I was never interfered with or molested in the work, and the following incident can hardly be called an exception. A broken-down prize fighter, slightly under the influence of liquor, tried to prevent us from holding a meeting one afternoon. I reasoned with him. "You don't seem to know who I am," he said. I confessed my ignorance. "Well," he said, "I'm Connelly, the prize fighter!" "Then you're what your profession calls a 'bruiser'." "Sure!" he replied. "Probably you are not aware, Mr. Connelly, that the Bible has something to say about bruisers." He explained that, being a Roman Catholic, his Bible was different from mine, and he did not think there were any bruisers in his Bible. "Oh, you are mistaken, Mr. Connelly. This is your Bible I have with me"--and I produced a small Douey Bible, and turning over the pages in Genesis I read a passage which I thought might appeal to him: "'The seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent's head.' I suppose you know who the woman was, Connelly." "The Holy Virgin?" he inquired. "Yes; and the serpent is the Devil, and he has been pouring firewater into you and has been making you say things you would not otherwise say. As for the seed of the woman, that is Jesus Christ; and this Douey Bible of yours tells you that Jesus Christ is able to bruise the head of the old serpent in you, which is the Devil." That sounded rather reasonable to the retired prize fighter, and he quieted down and we proceeded with the service. The society for which I worked, occasionally sent down visitors to be shown around the lodging houses, and often I took them in there myself; but the thing grew very distasteful to me, for I never got hardened or calloused to the misery and sorrow of the situation, and it seemed to me eminently unfair to parade them. About the last man I took around was Sir Walter Besant. I dined with him at the Brevoort House one night, and took him around first to one of the bunk-houses and then to various others, and also into the tenement region around Cherry Street. "Keep close to me," I told Besant as we entered the bunk house, "don't linger;" so we went to the top floor. The strips of canvas arranged in double tiers were full of lodgers. The floor was strewn with bodies--naked, half naked and fully clothed. We had to step over them to get to the other end. There was a stove in the middle of the room, and beside it, a dirty old lamp shed its yellow rays around, but by no means lighted the dormitory. The plumbing was open, and the odours coming therefrom and from the dirty, sweaty bodies of the lodgers and from the hot air of the stove--windows and doors being tightly closed--made the atmosphere stifling and suffocating. After stepping over the prostrate bodies from one end of the dormitory to the other, the novelist was almost overcome and when we got back to the door he begged to be taken to the open air. When we got to Chatham Square, he said--"Take me to a drugstore." Besant knew the underworld of London as few men of his generation knew it, but he had never seen anything quite so bestial, so debauched and so low as the bunk-house on Mulberry Street. It seems strange to me now that after having tramped the streets of New York with the unemployed and after having shared their misery, disappointment and despair, that I should, as a missionary, have entirely forgotten it, and that after years of experience among them, I should still be possessed of the idea that men of this grade were lazy and would not work if they had it. One afternoon in a bunk-house I was so possessed of this idea that I challenged the crowd. "You men surely do not need any further evidence of my interest in you," I remarked. "All that I have and am belongs to you; but I cannot help telling you of my conviction: that most of you are here because you are lazy. Now, if any man in the house is willing to test the case, I will change clothes with him to-morrow morning and show him how to find work." The words had scarcely escaped my lips when a man by the name of Tim Grogan stood up and accepted the challenge. I made an appointment to meet Grogan on Chatham Square at half-past five the next morning. Before I met him, I had done more thinking on the question of the unemployed than I had ever done in my life. I balked on the change of clothing article in the agreement--and furnished my own. Two or three men had enough courage to get up early in the morning and see Tim off--they were sceptical about my intention. The first thing that we did was to try the piano, soap and other factories on the West Side. From place to place we went, from Fourteenth to Fifty-ninth Street without success. Sometimes under pretence of business and by force of the power to express myself in good English, I gained an entrance to the superintendent; but I always failed to find a job. We crossed the city at Fifty-ninth Street and went down the East Side. Wherever men were working, we applied. We went to the stevedores on the East Side, but they were all "full up." "For God's sake," I said to some of them, but I was brushed aside with a wave of the hand. I never felt so like a beggar in my life. Tim trotted at my heels, encouraging me with whimsical Irish phrases, one of which I remember-- "Begorra, mister, the hardest work for sure is no work at all, at all!" In the middle of the afternoon, I began to get disturbed; then I decided to try a scheme I had worked over for hours. "Keep close to me, now, Tim," I said, as I led him to a drugstore at the corner of Grand Street and the Bowery. "Sir," I said to the clerk, "you are unaccustomed to giving credit, I know; but perhaps you might suspend your rule for once and trust us to the amount of five cents?" "You don't talk like a bum," he said, "but you look like one." I thanked him for the compliment to my language, but insisted on my request. "Well, what is it?" asked the clerk with somewhat of a sneer. "I am hungry and thirsty. I have looked for work all day and have utterly failed to find it. Now I have a scheme and I know it will work. Oxalic acid eats away rust. If I had five cents' worth, I could earn a dollar--I know I could." He looked curiously at me for a moment, and said with an oath: "By--! I've been on the Bowery a good many years and haven't been sold once. If you're a skin-game man, I'll throw up my job!" I got the acid. I played the same game in a tailor-shop for five cents' worth of rags. Then I went to a hardware store on the Square and got credit for about ten cents' worth of brickdust and paste. I took Tim by the arm and led him across the west side of Chatham Square. There used to be a big drygoods store on the east side of the Square, with large plate-glass windows, and underneath the windows, big brass signs. "Nothing doing," said the floorwalker, as I asked for the job of cleaning them; nevertheless, when he turned his back, I dropped on my knees and cleaned a square foot--did it inside of a minute. "Say, boss," I said, "look here! I'm desperately hard up. I want to make money, and I want to make it honestly. I will clean that entire sign for a nickle." It was pity that moved him to give me the job, and when it was completed, I offered to do the other one. "All right," he said; "go ahead." "But this one," I said, "will cost you a dime." "Why a nickle for this one and a dime for the other?" he asked. "Well," I said, "we are just entering business. In the first case I charged you merely for the work done; in the second, I charge you for the idea." "What idea?" he inquired. "The idea that cleanliness is part of any business man's capital." "Well, go ahead." When both signs were polished I offered to do the big plate-glass windows for ten cents each. This was thirty cents below the regular price, and I was permitted to do the job. Tim, of course, took his cap off, rolled his shirtsleeves up and worked with a will beside me. After that, we swept the sidewalk, earning the total sum of thirty-five cents. We tried to do other stores, but the nationality of most of them was against us; nevertheless, in the course of the afternoon, we made a dollar and a half. I took Tim to "Beefsteak John's," and we had dinner. Then I began to boast of the performance and to warn Tim that on the following Sunday afternoon I should explain my success to the men in the bunk-house. "Yes, yes, indeed, yer honour," said Tim, "y're a janyus! There's no doubt about that at all, at all! But----" "Go on," I said. "I was jist switherin'," said Tim, "what a wontherful thing ut is that a man kin always hev worruk whin he invints ut." "Well, that's worth knowing, Tim," I said, disappointedly. "Did you learn anything else?" "There's jist one thing that you forgot, yer honour." "What is it?" I asked. "Begorra, you forgot that if all the brains in the bunk-house wor put together they cudn't think of a thrick like that--the thrick of cleaning a window wid stuff from a dhrugstore! They aint got brains." "Why haven't they?" "Ach, begorra, I dunno except for the same raisin that a fish hasn't no horns!" We retraced our steps to the drugstore and the tailor-shop and the hardware store, and paid our bills and I handed over what was left to Tim. This experiment taught me more than it taught Tim. It made a better student of me. I had investigated the cases of a hundred men in that same bunk-house--their nationality, age and occupation--and I had tried to find out the cause of their failure. And my superficial inquiry led me to the conclusion that the use of intoxicating liquor was the chief cause. The following table shows the trade, nationality and age of one of our Sunday audiences in the B---- bunk-house. The audience numbered 108, and were all well-known individually to the Lodging House Missionary. _Trade_ Engineer 1 Waiter 1 Watchman 1 Labourers 17 'Longshoremen 7 Junkmen 3 Mechanics 3 Coal Heavers 18 Street Peddlers 4 Beer Helpers 2 Knife Grinders 4 Tailors 4 Cooks 2 Cigar Makers 2 Upholsterer 1 Painter 1 Butcher 1 Shoemakers 6 Gardeners 3 Gilder 1 Jeweler 1 Oysterman 1 Bronzer 1 Truckman 1 Firemen 2 Last Maker 1 Farmer 1 Thieves and Bums of various grades 18 ____ Total 108 _Nationality_ Germans 52 Americans 19 Irish 22 English 4 Swedish 2 Austrians 2 Scotch 2 Welsh 1 French 2 Greek 1 Cuban 1 ____ Total 108 _Age_ Between 20 and 30 21 " 30 and 40 30 " 40 and 50 29 " 50 and 60 20 " 60 and 70 8 ____ Total 108 Average age, 41 years Despite my experience with Tim Grogan, I diagnosed the condition of these men as being entirely due to strong drink. I went back over the ground and investigated with a little more care the causes that led them to drink, and this was the more fruitful of the two investigations. I wondered why men would not even stick at a job when I got them work. A careful investigation led me to the belief that, when a man gets out of a job once, he loses just a little of the routine, the continuity, the habit of work, and it is just a little harder to apply himself when he begins again. If a man loses a job two or three times in a year, it is just as many times harder to go on with a regular job when it comes. Lack of regular employment is the cause not only of the physical disintegration, but of the moral disintegration also; so, these men who had been out of employment so often, actually could not stick at a job when they got it. They were disorganized. A few of them had the stamina to overcome this disorganization. I found the same to be true in morals. When a man made his first break, it was easier to make the second, and it was as easy for him to lose a good habit as to acquire a bad one. The same thing holds good in what we call charity. A terrific soul-struggle goes on in every man and woman before the hand is put out for the first time. Self-respect is a tremendous asset, and people hold on to it as to their very souls; but when a hand is held out once and the community puts alms therein, the fabric of self-respect begins to totter, and the whole process of disintegration begins. CHAPTER VIII A BUNK-HOUSE AND SOME BUNK-HOUSE MEN I made my headquarters, while a lodging-house missionary, in the Mulberry Street bunk-house. It was only a block from Chatham Square, and central. The first thing I did was to clean it. I proceeded with soap and water to scrub it out, dressed in a pair of overalls. While performing this operation, a tall gaunt figure lurched into the room with his hands in his pockets--a slit for a mouth, shaggy eyebrows, rather small eyes. He looked at me for a moment as if in astonishment, and then he said: "Hello, bub, what's de game?" "I'm a missionary," I answered. "Ye are, eh?" "Yes. When I finish cleaning the floor, I am going to attempt to clean up some other things around here." "Me too, hey?" "Yes; don't you think you need it?" He laughed a hoarse, gutteral laugh, and said: "Don't get bughouse, boss. Ye'd wind up just where ye begun--on the floor." This man, who was known in the bunk-house as "Gar," was known also by the names of "McBriarty" and "Brady." He had been in the army, but they could not drill him. He had spent fifteen years in State's Prison for various offences, but for a good many years he had been bungling around in cheap lodging houses, getting a living by his wits. He was the toughest specimen of a man I ever saw. There was a challenge in him which I at once accepted. It was in his looks and in his words. It was an intimation that he was master--that missionaries were somewhat feeble-minded and had to do with weak people. I was not very well acquainted with the bunk-house at the time, but I outlined a plan of campaign the major part of which was the capture of this primordial man. Could I reach him? Could I influence and move him to a better life? If not, what was the use of trying my theological programme on others? So I abandoned myself to the task. I knew my friends and the officers of the missionary society would have considered it very ill-advised if the details of the plan had been known to them, so I slept in the bunk-house and stayed with him night and day. Of course, I would not have done it if I had not seen beyond him: that if I could gain this man, I would gain a strategic point. He himself would be a great power in the bunk-house; first of all, because he was physically fit. He was selected because he could pitch any two men in the house out of it; and even from a missionary's point of view, that was important. He resented at first my interference, but gentleness and love prevailed, and he finally acquiesced. The hardest part of the plan was to eat with him in an underground restaurant where meals cost five and ten cents a piece. When he was "tapering off," I went with him into the saloons. He visited the cheap fake auction-rooms and would buy little pieces of cheap jewelry occasionally and sell them at a few cents' profit. These things nauseated me. There was no hope of finding this man any work. He did not want work, anyway; could not work if he had it. He tried, during the first week that I was with him, to disgust me; first with his language and then with his actions. He put the lights out in the dormitory one night, and in the darkness pulled three or four men out of the bunks, cuffed them on the side of the head and kicked them around generally. He thought this was the finishing touch to my vigil. When the superintendent came up and lit the lamp again, he had an idea that it was the bouncer and came over to his cot, which was beside mine, and found him snoring. When all was quiet, the bouncer said to me: "What did ye tink of it, boss, hey?" "Oh," I said, "that was a very tame show, and utterly uninteresting." "Gee!" he said, "you must have been a barker at Coney Island." The test of my theology on him proved a failure. The story of the prodigal son was a great joke to him. He said of it: "Say, bub, if you ever strike an old gazabo as soft as dat one, lemme know, will ye?" Prayer to him was "talking through one's hat." In a few weeks he straightened up and began to give me very fine assistance in the bunk-house. His change of mind and heart almost lost him his job, for he lost a good deal of his brutality--the thing that fitted him for his work. In ushering insubordinate gentlemen downstairs, he did it more with force of persuasion than with the force of his shoe. He continued my campaign of cleaning, and decorated the kalsomined walls with chromos that he bought at one penny apiece. He was a psychologist and would have probably been surprised if anybody had told him so. He could tell at once the moral worth of a lodger; so he was a very good lieutenant and picked out the best of the men who had reached the bottom--and the bunk-house was the bottom rung of the social ladder. Every day he had his story to tell--of the newcomers and their possibilities. His conversion was a matter of slow work. Indeed, I don't know what conversion meant in his case. It certainly was not the working out of any theological formula that I had preached to him. The telling of this man's story in churches helped the work a great deal. It was the kind of thing that appealed to the churches--rather graphic and striking; so, unconsciously we exploited him. We could have gotten a hundred dollars to help a man like this--whose life after all was past or nearly past--to one dollar we could get for the work of saving a boy from such a life! Among the most interesting characters that I came in contact with in those days was Dave Ranney; he is now himself a missionary to the Bowery lodging houses. I was going across Chatham Square one night, when this man tapped me on the shoulder--"touched me"--he would call it. He was "a puddler from Pittsburg," so he said. "Show me your hands," I replied. Instead, he stuck them deep into his trouser pockets, and I told him to try again. He said he was hungry, so I took him to a restaurant, but he couldn't eat. He wanted a drink, but I wouldn't give that to him. He walked the streets that night, but he came to me later and I helped him; and every time he came, he got a little nearer the truth in telling his story. Finally I got it all. He squared himself and began the fight of his life. Another convert of the bunk-house was Edward Dowling. "Der's an old gazabo here," said the bouncer to me one day, "and he's got de angel goods on him O.K." He was a quiet, reticent old man of sixty, an Irishman who had served in the British Army in India with Havelock and Colin Campbell. He had bought a ranch in the West, but an accident to one of his eyes forced him to spend all his money to save the other one. He drifted in to New York, penniless and without a friend. Seeing a tinker mending umbrellas one day on the street, he sat down beside him and watched the process. In that way he learned something of the trade. One Sunday afternoon when I was rallying a congregation in the bunk-house, I found him on his cot, reading the life of Buffalo Bill. I invited him down to the meeting, but he politely refused, saying that he was an Episcopalian. The following Sunday he did come, and his was the most striking spiritual crisis that I had ever seen. His conversion was clean-cut, definite and clear; it was of a kind with the conversion of Paul on the way to Damascus. He was an exceedingly intelligent man, and could repeat more classic poetry by heart than any man I have ever known. He came out from that brown mass of human flotsam and jetsam on the Sunday afternoon following his conversion, and told them what had happened to him. The lodgers were very much impressed. It was in the winter-time. The old man earned very little money at his new trade, but what he had he shared with his fellow-lodgers. The bouncer told me that the old tinker would buy a stale loaf for a few cents, then in the dormitory he would make coffee in tomato cans and gather half a dozen of the hungriest around him, and share his meal with them--plain bread soaked in unsweetened coffee. Sometimes he would read a few verses of the Bible to them, and sometimes merely say in his clear Irish voice: "There, now, God bliss ye!" [Illustration: Dowling, Tinker and Colporter. A Veteran who Served in India under Havelock and Colin Campbell] At this time he was living on a dollar a week, but every morning he had his little tea-party around the old stove, his word of greeting, and his final word of benediction to the men he had selected to share in his bounty as they slunk out of the bunk-house to begin the day. Later, he had a large-type New Testament out of which he read a verse or two every morning at the meal. Very soon the three hundred lodgers began to look upon him with a kind of awe. This was not because he had undergone a radical change, for he had always been quiet, gentle and civil; but because he had found his voice, and that voice was bringing to them something they could not get elsewhere--sympathy, cheer and courage. In the tenement region, particularly in the little back alleys around Mulberry Street, he mended pots, kettles, pans and umbrellas--not always for money, but as often for the privilege of reading to these people messages of comfort out of his large-type New Testament. Going down Mulberry Street one morning in the depth of winter, I happened to glance up one of those narrow alleys in "the Bend," and I noticed my friend standing at a window, his face close to a broken pane of glass and his large New Testament held in front of him a few inches from his face. His tinker's budget was by his feet. The door was closed. In a few minutes he closed the book, put it into his kit, and as he moved away from the window, I saw a large bundle of rags pushed into the hole. "What have you been doing?" I inquired. He laughed. "There, now, God bliss her," he said. "I put a rib in an umbrella for her, but she said the house was too dirty to read the Bible in, so she let me read it through the broken window." All that winter he tinkered and taught. All winter the little ragged audiences gathered around him in the morning; and often at eventime when he retreated into a quiet corner to be silent and rest, he found himself the centre of an inquiring group of his fellow-lodgers. Instead of uniting himself to the mission, as such men usually do after their conversion, I advised him to join one of the prominent churches of the city, in the downtown district. I thought it would be good for the church. But we both discovered our mistake later. He was utterly out of keeping with his surroundings. The church he joined was an institution for the favoured few--and Dowling was a tinker. His diary of that period is before me as I write, and I am astonished at the great humility of this simple-minded man. He had been asked by the minister of his church to call on him; but his modesty prevented him until hunger forced him to change his mind. After starving for three days, he made up his mind to accept that invitation, and reveal his condition to the well-to-do minister of this well-to-do church. He was poorly clad. It was a very cold winter day. The streets were covered with slush and snow. On his way he met an old woman with a shawl around her, a bedraggled dress and wet feet. "My good woman," said Dowling, "you must be very cold, indeed, in this condition." "Sir," she answered, "I am cold; but I am also starving of hunger. Could you afford me one cent to get some bread?" "God bliss ye, dear friend," he said, "I have not been able to taste food for three days myself; but I am now on the way to the house of a good friend, a good servant of the Lord; and if I get any help, I will share it with you. I am a poor tinker, but work has been very slack this last week. I have not earned enough to pay for my lodging." The diary gives all the details, the corner of the street where he met her, the hour of the day. A servant ushered him into the parlour of his "good friend, the servant of the Lord." Presently the reverend doctor came down, somewhat irritated, and, without shaking hands, said: "Dowling, I know I have asked you several times to call, but I am a very busy man and you should have let me know. I simply cannot see you this morning. I have an address to prepare for the opening of a mission and I haven't the time." "No handshake--no Christian greeting," records the tinker's diary; and the account closes with these words: "Dear Lord, do not let the demon of uncharitableness enter into my poor heart." He became a colporteur for a tract society, and was given as territory the towns on the east side of the Hudson River. Tract selling in this generation is probably the most thankless, profitless work that any human being could undertake. The poor old man was burdened with a heavy bundle of the worst literary trash of a religious kind ever put out of a publishing house. He was to get twenty-five per cent. on the sales; so he shouldered his kit, with his heart full of enthusiasm, and began the summer journey on foot. He carried his diary with him, and although the entries are very brief, they are to the point. "August 29. Sold nothing. No money for bread or lodging. _God is good._ Night came and I was _so_ tired and hungry. I went into a grove and with a prayer of confidence on my lips, I went to sleep. A clock not far away struck two. Then, rain fell in torrents and a fierce wind blew. The elements drove me from the grove. A constable held me up. 'I am a servant of God, dear friend,' I said. 'Why doesn't he give you a place to sleep, then?' he answered. 'God forgive me,' thinks I to myself, 'but that is the same unworthy thought that was in my own mind.' I went into a building in course of erection and lay down on some planks; but I was too wet to sleep." Next day hunger drove him to work early. He was turned from one door after another, by saints and sinners alike, until finally he was so weak with hunger that he could scarcely walk. Then he became desperate to a degree, and his diary records a call on another reverend doctor. This eminent divine had no need for religious literature, nor had he time to be bothered with beggars. Dowling records in his diary that he told the minister that he was dropping off his feet with hunger and would be thankful for a little bread and a glass of water. It seems almost incredible that in a Christian community such things could happen; but the diary records the indictment that those tender lips in life were never allowed to utter--it records how he was driven from the door. He had letters of introduction from this rich tract society, and again he presented them to a minister. "A very nice lady came," says the record. "I gave my credentials, explained my condition and implored help. "_We are retired from the active ministry_," the woman said, "and cannot help you. We have no further use for religious books." A third minister atoned for the others, and made a purchase. This was at Tarrytown. On another occasion, when his vitality had ebbed low through hunger and exposure, he was sitting on the roadside when a labourer said, "There is a nigger down the road here who keeps a saloon. He hasn't got no religion, but he wants some. Ye'd better look him up." And he did. The Negro saloon-keeper informed him that being a saloon-keeper shut him and his family from the church. "Now," he said, "I am going to get Jim, my barkeeper, to look after the joint while I take you home to talk to me and my family about God." So they entertained the tinker-preacher, and the diary is full of praise to God for his new-found friends. The Negro bought a dollar's worth of tracts, and persuaded the colporteur to spend the night with them. With this dollar he returned to New York, got his tinker's budget, and went back to his missionary field. If people did not want their souls cured he knew they must have lots of tinware that needed mending; so he combined the work of curing souls with the mending of umbrellas and kitchen utensils, and his period of starvation was past. His business was to preach the new vision and tinker for a living as he went along. "September 12," reads the diary, "I found myself by the brook which runs east of the mountain. I had a loaf of bread and some cheese, and with a tin cup I helped myself to the water of the brook. The fragments that remained I put in a bundle and tied to the branch of a tree by the roadside. On the wrapper I pencilled these words: 'Friend--if you come across this food and you need it, do not hesitate to eat it; but if you don't need it, leave it for I will return at the close of the day. God bless you.'" At eventime he returned and was surprised at the altered shape of the bundle. He found that two beef sandwiches and two big apples had been added, with this note: "Friend: accept these by way of variety. Peace to thee!" This gives occasion for another address of prayer and gratitude to God for His bountiful care. By the brookside he took supper, and then began the ascent of the hill. After a few hours fruitless search for the road, he "got stuck," in the words of the diary. Finding himself in a helpless predicament, he gathered grass and dry leaves around him and prepared himself for the night. "Psalms IV. 8 came to my mind," he said, "and I took great comfort in the words--'I said, I will both lay me down in peace and sleep, for Thou, Lord, makest me dwell in safety!'" He woke next morning and found the earth covered with hoar frost, which suggested to him: "Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean. Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow." One of my duties while engaged as a missionary on the Bowery was to render reports of the work done for the missionary society. The society had a monthly magazine and it was through that medium that they got the greater part of their support. In one of my reports I told the story of a London waif. The story made such an impression upon the superintendent that he thought I was romancing, and said so. My best answer to that was to produce the boy, and I produced him. The boy told his own story. Then it was published in a magazine and produced a strong impression. I think an extra edition had to be printed to supply the demand. CHAPTER IX THE WAIF'S STORY "I know nothing about my father," said the boy to me. "My mother worked in the brick-yard not far from our cottage, where we lived together. I went to school for two years and learned to read and write, a little. "Every evening I used to go to the bend in the road and meet my mother as she came home. She was always very tired--so tired! She carried clay on her head all day and it was heavy. I used to make the fire and boil the supper and run all the errands to the grocery. "One evening at the bend of the road I waited for my mother until it was dark, but she did not come. Then I went home crying. I found my mother lying on the bed with her clothes on. She would not wake up. I shook her by the arm, I rolled her from one side to the other, but she would not speak; then, I got on my knees and I kissed her--and her face was very cold. I was scared. I went for the old woman who lived next door. She shook her; then she cried and told me that my mother was dead. "My mother used to play with me at night and sometimes in the morning, too. When they told me she was dead, I wondered what I would do without her; but all the neighbours were so kind to me that I forgot a good deal about my mother until they put her in a box and carried her away. Then one of the neighbour women took me and said I must live with her; so I did. I sold papers, ran errands, dried the dishes, swept the floor for her; but after a long time she began to speak very crossly to me, and I often trembled with fear. "One day I decided to run away. After I sold all my papers, I came to the cottage and slipped all the pennies under the door, and then ran away as fast as I could. I did not know where I was going, but I had heard so much about London that I thought it must be a very great place and that I could get papers to sell and do lots of other things; so, when a man found me sitting on the side of the road and asked me where I was going, I said, 'To London.' He laughed and said: "'Whom do you know there?' "'Nobody,' I replied, 'but there are lots of people there and lots of work, and I don't like the place where I live.' The man took me to his house and kept me all night and paid my carfare to London next day. "Many days and many nights I had no food to eat, nor no place to sleep. I did not like to beg, not because I thought it wrong, but because I was afraid. I saw boys carrying packages along the street, found out how they got it to do, and imitated them, earning occasionally a few pennies. I saved up enough with these pennies to buy a stock of London papers. By saving these pennies and eating little food, I was able to buy a larger stock of these papers each day. I had good luck, and by economy I managed to live and save. In a few days I was able to pay thru'pence a night for a lodging. One night when I made a big venture in spending all my money on a big stock of papers, I had an accident in which they were all spoiled. I dropped them in a pool of water--and I was penniless again! That night, late, I went up the white stone steps of a big house in Westminster and went to sleep. I had saved a few of the driest papers and used them as a pillow. "'Hi, little cove!' a policeman said, as he poked his baton under my armpit next morning. 'What are you doing here?' I began to whimper, and he took pity on me and showed me the way to Dr. Barnardo's Home; but when I got out of his sight, I went off in another direction, for I had heard that many boys got whipped down there. I got among a lot of boys on the banks of the river. They were diving for pennies. I thought it was a very hard way to earn money, but I did it too, and got about as much as the rest. I did not stay long on the river bank. The boys were sharper than I was and could cheat me out of my pennies. "One night I slept under an arch. Next morning I heard the loud sound of factory whistles. Everybody was aroused. Some of the people lying around were going to work there; and I thought I might get a job also, so I followed them. On the way we came to a coffee stall, and as I was nearly fainting with hunger, I stood in front of it to get the smell of the coffee and fresh bread, for that does a fellow a heap of good when he's got nothing in his stomach. A man with a square paper hat on looked at me, and said: "'What's up, little 'un?' "I said nothing was up except that I was hungry. Then he stepped up to the coffee-man and gave him some money, and I got a bun and a mug of coffee. It seemed to me that I had never been so happy in all my life as with the feeling I got from that bun and coffee--but then, I had been a good many days without food. "There was no work to be had at the factory near the bridge, so I went back to the docks. At night I slept with a lot of other fellows under a big canvas cover that kept the rain from some goods lying at the docks ready to be shipped. I think there must have been as many fellows under that big cover as there were piles of goods. It was while there that I thought for the first time very seriously about my mother, and I began to cry. The other fellows heard me and kicked me from under the cover; but that did not help my crying, however. I smothered a good deal of it and walked up and down by the side of the river all night. My eyes were swollen, and I was feeling very badly when a sailor noticed me. He had been to sea and had just returned home. He talked a lot about life on a ship--said if he were a boy, he would not hang around the docks; he would go to sea. "'Where's yer folks?' he said to me. "'Ain't got none,' I said. "'Where d'ye live, then?' "'I don't live nowheres.' "'Shiver my timbers,' he said, 'ye must have an anchorage in some of these parts? Where d'ye sleep nights?' "'Wherever I be when night comes on,' I told him. "The sailor laughed, and said I was a lucky dog to be at home anywheres. "'See here, young 'un,' the sailor said, 'I've been up agin it in these parts myself when I was a kid, and up agin it stiff, too; and there ain't nothing around here for the likes of ye. Take my advice and get out o' here. There's a big ship down here by the docks--_Helvetia_. Sneak aboard, get into a scupper or a barrel or something, and ship for America.' "The idea of 'sneaking aboard' got very big in my mind, and I went to Woolwich where the ship was lying; and I met a lot of other boys who were trying to sneak aboard, too. I thought my chances were slim, but I was going to have a try, anyway. These boys that were thinking of the same thing, tried to get me to do a lot of things that I knew were not right. There was stuff to steal and they knew how I could get it. There were kind-hearted people around, and they wanted me to beg. When they said the ship was going to sail, I got aboard and hid on the lower deck. "Two days after that I thought the ship was going to the bottom of the sea, and I didn't care very much, for I had been vomiting, and it seemed as if my heart was breaking, and I was sick--so sick that I didn't care whether I was dead or alive. One of the sailors heard me groaning and pulled me out by the leg. Then he looked at me and swore; caught me by the neck and dragged me before the captain. I was so sick I could not stand; but the captain was not angry. He was very funny, for he laughed very loudly, and said: "'Put the kid to work, and if he doesn't do it, put a ten-inch hose on him!' "Four of us altogether had stowed away on that ship. The other boys laughed a good deal at me because I got the easiest job of them all. When I was able to stand on my feet, they made me clean a little brass cannon. I could clean it sitting down, and I liked the job when I was not sick. Every one was good to me, and I had a happy time the last few days of the voyage. Then I came to New York and met you." This, in briefest outline, is the story of Johnnie Walker. I met him at a mission on the edge of the North River, and was as touched by his story as others had been before me. So I took him to my home, introduced him to the bathroom and to a new suit of clothes, and Johnnie entered upon the happiest days of his life. After a few weeks I handed him over to the Children's Aid Society, and they sent him out West. He has always called me "father." One evening I asked him what he knew about Jesus and he replied, "Ain't 'ee th' bloke as they swears about?" His ideas of prayer were also dim, but he made an attempt. He wrote a letter to God and read it on his knees before going to bed. He is now a prosperous farmer in the far West, living on a quarter section of land given to him by the Government, and on which he has made good his claim to American citizenship. CHAPTER X I MEET SOME OUTCASTS A sharp contrast to this waif of the street is the case of a statesman under a cloud. I was sitting on a bench near the bunk-house one day at twilight, when I noticed a profile silhouetted against the window. I had seen only one profile like that in my life, and that was when I was a boy. I moved closer. The man sat like a statue. His face was very pale and he was gazing vacantly at the walls in the rear of the building. Finally, I went over and sat down beside him. "Good evening," he said quietly, in answer to my salutation. I looked into his face--a face I knew when a boy, a face familiar to the law-makers of Victoria for a quarter of a century. I called him by name. At the sound of his own name, his paleness turned to an ashy yellow. "In Heaven's name," I said, "what are you doing here?" He looked at me with an expression of excruciating pain on his face, and said: "I have travelled some thousands of miles in order to be alone; if you have any kindness, any pity, leave me." "Pardon me," I said, "for intruding." That night the Ex-Club invited him to take part in their deliberations. He refused, and his manner showed that he considered the invitation an insult. I had known this man as a brilliant orator, a religious leader, the champion of a sect. In a city across the sea I had sat as a barelegged boy on an upturned barrel, part of an immense crowd, listening to the flow of his oratory. Next day he left the bunk-house. Some weeks afterward I found him on a curbstone, preaching to whoever of the pedestrians would listen. At the close of his address, I introduced myself again. He took me to his new lodging, and I put the questions that filled my mind. For answer he gave me the House of Commons Blue Book, which explained the charge hanging over him. Almost daily, for weeks, I heard him on his knees proclaim his innocence of the unmentionable crime with which he was charged. After some weeks of daily association, he said to me: "I believe you are sent of God to guide me, and I am prepared to take your advice." My advice was ready. He turned pale as I told him to pack his trunk and take the next ship for England. "Face the storm like a man!" I urged, and he said: "It will kill me, but I will do it." He did it, and it swept him to prison, to shame, and to oblivion. Nothing in the life of the bunk-house was more noticeable than the way men of intelligence grouped themselves together. Besides the Judge, there were an ex-lawyer, an ex-soldier of Victoria and a German Graf. I named them the "Ex-Club." Every morning they separated as though forever. Every night they returned and looked at one another in surprise. At election-time both political parties had access to the register, and every lodger was the recipient of two letters. Between elections a letter was always a matter of sensational interest; it lay on the clerk's table, waiting to be claimed, and every lodger inspected it as he passed. Scores of men who never expected a letter would pick it up, handle it in a wistful and affectionate manner, and regretfully lay it down again. I have often wished I could analyze the thoughts of these men as they tenderly handled these rare visitors conducted by Uncle Sam into the bunk-house. It was a big letter with red seals and an aristocratic monogram that first drew attention to a new-comer who had signed himself "Hans Schwanen." "One-eyed Dutchy" had whispered to some of his friends that the recipient of the letter was a real German Graf. He was about sixty years of age, short, rotund, corpulent. His head was bullet-shaped and set well down on his shoulders. His clothes were baggy and threadbare, his linen soiled and shabby. He had blue eyes, harsh red hair, and a florid complexion. When he arrived, he brought three valises. Everybody wondered what he could have in them. The bouncer was consumed with a desire to examine the contents, and, as bouncer and general floor-manager of the house, expected that they would naturally be placed under his care. When, however, it was announced that the newcomer had engaged "One-eyed Dutchy" as his valet, the bouncer swore, and said "he might go to ----." There was something peculiar and mysterious in a ten-cent guest of the Bismarck hiring a valet. The Germans called him Graf von Habernichts. He kept aloof from the crowd. He had no friends and would permit no one to establish any intercourse with him. His valet informed an intimate friend that the Graf received a check from Germany every three months. While it lasted, it was the valet's duty to order, pay for, and keep a record of all food and refreshment. When the bouncer told me of these things, I tried very hard to persuade the Graf to dine at my house; but he declined without even the formality of thanks. After a few months, the revenue of the mysterious stranger dried up and "One-eyed Dutchy" was discharged. A snowstorm found the old Graf with an attack of rheumatism, and helpless. Then he was forced to relinquish his ten-cent cot and move upstairs to a seven-cent bunk. When he was able to get out again, he came back dragging up the rickety old stairs a scissors-grinder. Several of the guests offered a hand, but he spurned them all, and stuck to his job until he got it up. Another snowstorm brought back his rheumatism; he got permission to sit indoors. The old wheel lay idle in the corner; he was hungry and his pipe had been empty for a day and a night; but still he sat bolt upright, in pain, alone, with starvation staring him in the face. The third day of his voluntary fast he got a letter. It contained a one-dollar bill. The sender was watching at a safe distance and he recorded that the Graf's puzzled look almost developed into a smile. He gathered himself together and hobbled out to a nearby German saloon. Next day came the first sign of surrender. He accepted a commission to take a census of the house. This at last helped to thaw him out, but it didn't last long. His rheumatism prevented him from pushing his wheel through the streets and I secured him a corner in a locksmith's basement. He had not been there many weeks when he disappeared. The locksmith told a story which seemed incredible. He said the old Graf had sold his wheel and given the proceeds to an Irishwoman to help defray the funeral expenses of her child. Some months later, the clerk of the bunk-house got a postal card from "One-eyed Dutchy." He was on the Island, and the Graf and he were working together on the ash gang. I secured his release from the Island. When he returned to the bunk-house, every one who had ever seen him noted a marked change. He no longer lived in a shell. He had become a human, and took an interest in what was going on. One night when a few of the Ex-Club were exchanging reminiscences, he was prevailed upon to tell his story. He asked us to keep it a secret for ten years. The time is up, and I am the only one of that group alive. "In 1849 it was; my brother and I, students, were in Heidelberg. Then broke out the Revolution. Two years less of age was I, so to him was due my father's title and most of the estate. 'What is Revolution?' five of us students asked. 'We know not; we will study,' we all said, and we did. For King and Fatherland our study make us jealous, but my brother was not so. "'I am revolutionist!' he says, and we are mad to make him different. "'The King is one,' he said, 'and the people are many, and they are oppressed.' "I hate my brother, and curse him, till in our room he weeps for sorrow. I curse him until he leaves. "By and by in the barricades he finds himself fighting against the King. In the fight the rebels are defeated and my brother escapes. Many are condemned and shot. Not knowing my heart, my mother writes me that my brother is at home. "I lie in my bed, thinking--thinking. Many students have been shot for treason. Love of King and Fatherland and desire to be Graf, are two thoughts in my heart. "I inform. My brother is arrested, and in fortress is he put to be shot. "Four of us students of patriotism go to see. My heart sinks to see my brother, so white is he and fearless. His eyes are bright like fire, and he stands so cool and straight. "'I have nothing but love,' he says; 'I love the cause of truth and justice. To kill me is not to kill the truth; where you spill my blood will Revolution grow as flowers grow by water. I forgive.' "Then he sees me. 'Hans!' he says, 'Hans!' He holds out his arms. 'I want to kiss my brother,' he says. The General he says, 'All right.' "But I love the King. 'No! I have no brother! I will not a traitor kiss!' "My Gott! how my brother looks! He looks already dead--so full of sorrow is he. "A sharp crack of guns! They chill my heart, and down dead falls my brother. "I go away, outside glad, but in my heart I feel burn the fires of hell. Father and mother in one year die for sorrow. Then I am Graf. "I desire to be of society, but society will not--it is cold. Guests do not come to my table. Servants do not stay. They tell that they hear my mother weep for sorrow in the night. I laugh at them, but in my heart I know them true. Peasants in the village hide from me as I come to them. "But my mind is worse. Every night I hear the crack of the rifles--the sound of the volley that was my brother's death. Soldiers I get, men of the devil-dare kind, to stay with me. They do not come back; they tell that they hear tramp, tramp, tramp of soldiers' feet. "One night, with the soldiers, I take much wine, for I say, 'I shall be drunk and not hear the guns at night.' "We drink in our noble hall. Heavy doors are chained, windows barred, draperies close arranged, and the great lamp burns dim. We drink, we sing, we curse God und das Gesindel. 'We ourselves,' we say, 'are gods.' "Then creeps close the hour for the guns. My tongue is fast and cannot move; my brow is wet and frozen is my blood. "Boom! go the guns; then thunder shakes the castle, lightning flashes through the draperies, and I fall as dead. "Was I in a dream? I know not. I did not believe in God; I did not believe in heaven or in hell; yet do I see my past life go past me in pictures--pictures of light in frames of fire: Two boys, first--Max, my brother, and I, playing as children; then my mother weeping for great sorrow; then the black walls of the great fortress--my brother with arms outstretched. Again my blood is frozen, again creeps my skin, and I hear the volley and see him fall to death. I fear. I scream loud that I love the King, but in my ear comes a voice like iron--'Liar!' A little girl, then, with hair so golden, comes and wipes the stain of blood from my brow. I see her plain. "Then I awake. I am alone; the light is out; blood is on my face. I am paralyzed with fear, so I cannot stand. When I can walk, I leave, for I think maybe that only in Germany do I hear the guns. For twenty years I live in Spain. Still do I hear the guns. "I go to France, but yet every night at the same hour freezes my blood and I hear the death volley. "I come to America, which I have hated, yet never a night is missed. It is at the same hour. What I hate comes to me. Whatever I fear is mine. To run away from something is for me to meet it. My estate is gone; money I have not. I sink like a man in a quicksand, down, down, down. I come here. Lower I cannot. "One day in 'the Bend', where das Gesindel live, I see the little girl--she of the golden hair who wiped my stain away. "But she is dead. I know for sure the face. What it means I know not. Again I fall as dead. "I have one thing in the world left--only one; it is my scissors-grinder. I sell it and give all the money to bury her. It is the first--it is the only good I ever did. Then, an outcast, I go out into the world where no pity is. I sit me down in a dark alley; strange is my heart, and new. "It is time for the guns--yet is my blood warm! I wait. The volley comes not! "The hour is past! "'My Gott, my Gott!' I say. 'Can this be true?' I wait one, two, three minutes; it comes not. I scream for joy--I scream loud! I feel an iron hand on me. I am put in prison. Yet is the prison filled with light--yet am I in heaven. The guns are silent!" One day a big letter with several patches of red sealing-wax and an aristocratic monogram arrived at the bunk-house. Nearly two hundred men handled it and stood around until the Graf arrived. Every one felt a personal interest in the contents. It was "One-eyed Dutchy," who handed it to the owner, and stood there watching out of his single eye the face of his former master. The old man smiled as he folded the letter and put it into his pocket, saying as he did so: "By next ship I leave for Hamburg to take life up where I laid it down." * * * * * The only man now living of those bunk-house days is Thomas J. Callahan. He has been attached for many years to Yale University and doing the work of a janitor. Many Yale men will never forget how "Doc" cared for Dwight Hall. He is now in charge of Yale Hall. The circumstances under which I met Doc were rather peculiar. "Say, bub," said Gar, the bouncer, to me one day, "what ungodly hour of the mornin' d'ye git up?" "At the godly hour of necessity," I replied. "Wal, I hev a pal I want ter interjooce to ye at six." I met the bouncer and his "pal" at the corner of Broome Street and the Bowery next morning at the appointed hour. "Dat's Doc!" said Gar, as he laid his hand on his friend's shoulder. His friend bowed low and in faultless English, said: "I am more than pleased to meet you." "I can give you a pointer on Doc," the big fellow continued. "If ye tuk a peaner to th' top av a mountain an' let her go down the side sorter ez she pleases, 'e c'u'd pick up the remains an' put thim together so's ye w'u'dn't know they'd been apart. Yes, sir; that's no song an' dance, an' 'e c'u'd play any chune iver invented on it." Doc laughed and made some explanations. They had a wheezy old organ in Halloran's dive, and Doc kept it in repair and played occasionally for them. Doc had a Rip Van Winkle look. His hair hung down his back, and his clothes were threadbare and green with age. His shoes were tied to his feet with wire, and stockings he had none. Doc had studied in a Medical College until the eve of his graduation. Then he slipped a cog and went down, down, down, until he landed at Halloran's dive. For twelve years he had been selling penny song-sheets on the streets and in saloons. He was usually in rags, but a score of the wildest inhabitants of that dive told me that Doc was their "good angel." He could play the songs of their childhood, he was kind and gentle, and men couldn't be vulgar in his presence. I saw in Doc an unusual man, and was able to persuade him to go home with me. In a week he was a new man, clothed and in his right mind. He became librarian of a big church library, and our volunteer organist at all the Sunday meetings. After two years of uninterrupted service as librarian, during which time Doc had been of great service in the bunk-house, I lost him. Five years later, crossing Brooklyn Bridge on a car, I passed Doc who was walking in the same direction. At the end of the bridge I planted myself in front of him. "Doc," I said, "you will never get away from me again." I took him to New Haven, where he has been ever since. It is needless to say that several years' work in the midst of such surroundings gives one a hopeless outlook for that kind of work. In 1891 a movement to establish a municipal lodging house was organized, and I became part of it. A committee composed largely of business men met in the office of Killaen Van Ransellaer, 56 Wall Street. In discussing the plan of a municipal lodging house, the "Wayfarers Lodge" in Boston, an institution of the character under discussion, was pointed out as a model, and it was decided to send a representative to Boston to investigate and make a report on it. I was suspicious of the printed report of the Boston place. It spoke of the men getting clean bedding, clean sheets and good meals; and experience was teaching me that that kind of catering for the tramp would swamp any institution. Then, I knew something about the padding of charitable reports. I did not care to offer any objection to the sending of a representative, but I determined to go myself; so, dressed in an old cotton shirt with collar attached, a ragged coat, a battered hat and with exactly the railroad fare in my pocket, I went to Boston. I stopped a policeman on the street, told him I was homeless and hungry. "Go to the Police Station," he said, and knowing that at each Police Station tickets of admission were served, I presented myself to the Sergeant at the desk. Furnished with a ticket, I went to No. 30 Hawkins Street, and there fell in line with a crowd of the same kind of people I was working with and for on the Bowery. We had about an hour to wait. When it came my turn for examination, I was rather disturbed to find the representative of the committee sitting beside the superintendent, investigating the tramps as they passed. I knew he could not recognize me by my clothes, but I was not so certain about my voice, so I spoke in a low tone. "Open your mouth," the superintendent said. "Where are you from?" I kept my eyes on the ground and answered a little louder, "Ireland." "You are lying," the superintendent said. "Where are you from?" "Ireland," I answered again in the same tone. Two kinds of checks lay on the table in front of him--one pile green, the other red. After answering the rest of the questions, I was given a red check and taken to a cell where a black man stripped me to the skin. "Why did I get a red card while most of the others got a green card?" I asked. "You're lousy, boss, dat's why." "Well, what are you going to do about it?" "Steam 'em." So he tied my clothes in a bundle and put them under a pressure of two hundred and fifty pounds of steam, the coloured man remarking as he stowed them away: "What's left of 'em when they come out, boss, aint gwine to do no harm." Then I was marched, sockless, with my shoes on and a metal check strung around my neck, to the bath where I was taken charge of by another coloured man. "Here!" he said, as he pointed to an empty tub. I bathed myself to his satisfaction and then looked for the clean towels of the "Annual Report," but found them not. Instead, there was a pile of towels already used--towels made of crash--and I was told to select the driest of them and dry myself. "I was clean when I went into that tub," I said to the black man--"I am cleaner now; but if I dry myself with this sodden piece of crash, I will be dirtier than when I began." The black man proceeded to force me to do this and his attempt nearly ended the experiment, for I refused pointblank to do it. "No, thank you," I said, "I will walk up and down until I dry." When the superintendent of that department was called into counsel, my use of English rather surprised him, and he let it go at that. Then we were marched upstairs to bed; there were one hundred and fifty beds in a big dormitory. I looked around for the linen of the "Annual Report," and was again disappointed. The cots were furnished with horse blankets. The method of arousing the men in the early morning was rather unique. A man with a stick--a heavy stick that reminded me of an Irish flail--thumped the bare floor, and, to my astonishment, there was a rush of this savage-looking, naked crowd to the door. As I knew no reason for the excitement, I took my time. I followed the men to the boiler-room, where, after calling out my number, I got the bundle corresponding to it, and it looked like a crow's nest. Everybody around me was hustling to get his clothes on, boiled or unboiled; and again I was mystified as to the hurry. When I arrived in the yard, I discovered the reason for this unusual activity of my parishioners. The first men out in the yard had a cord of wood each to saw, and it took twice as long to chop as it did to saw it. Those who were last had to chop. I took my axe and began my task. Soon the splinters were flying in all directions. The man next to me was rather put out by this activity and said that if he wanted to work like that he could do it outside. "This ain't no place to work like that," he said; then he began to expectorate over my block and annoy me in that way. I tried a few words of gentle persuasion on him, but it made him worse. He bespattered my hands and the axe handle, and I took him by the neck and ran him to the other end of the yard and dumped him in a corner. Any kind of a fuss in that yard had usually a very serious ending; but this had not, for the yard superintendent took my part. I think it was about eleven o'clock in the forenoon when I finished my wood, and went in to get breakfast, which consisted of a bowl of gruel and two hard biscuits. One of these biscuits I kept hanging in my study for two years. After breakfast I marched into the office, and said to the superintendent: "Brother, I want to ask you a few questions which belong to a domain--that mysterious domain that lies between the facts and your 'Annual Report.'" "Are you a reporter?" was his first question. Assuring him that I was not, I asked him the necessary questions, and, furnished with some real information, I returned to the Wall Street Conference. I think John H. Finley of the City College was the representative, and he rendered his report. Then I stood up and told of my experience which differed vitally from the re-hash of the "Annual Report." The facts, as I found them, were all in favour of such an institution. A man would have to be mighty hard up to go to the Boston municipal lodging house; and that is exactly what was needed. The necessity for padding the "Annual Report" I could never find out. The municipal lodging house agitated at that time is now a fact. It has been duplicated. On February 19th, 1893, in the Church of the Covenant on Park Avenue, I made the suggestion, and it was published in the papers the following day, that there was a splendid opportunity for a philanthropist to invest a few million dollars at five per cent. in a few lodging houses on a gigantic scale. What connection the Mills Hotels bear to that suggestion, I do not know, but they are the exact fulfilment of it. * * * * * A few years in that work gave me a terrific feeling of hopelessness, and I longed for some other form of church work where I could obviate some of the work of the Bowery. The best a man could do on the Bowery was to save a few old stranded wrecks; but the work among children appealed to me now with far greater force. I also saw the necessity of the preacher touching not only the spiritual side of a man, but the material side also. A preacher's function, as I understood it after these experiences, was to touch the whole round sphere of life. CHAPTER XI A CHURCH IN THE GHETTO About this time the old church of Sea and Land at the corner of Market and Henry streets was to be put up for auction. The New York Presbytery wanted to sell it and devote most of the money to the building up of uptown churches. I was sent there by the missionary society to hold the place until they got a good price for it. I gathered the trustees around me--a splendid band of devout men, mostly young men--and I did not need to tell them that it was a forlorn hope. They already knew it. We outlined a plan of campaign to save the church for that community, and the result is that the church is there to-day. Of course, the district is largely Jewish, but there were enough Gentiles to fill a dozen churches. It was inevitable that we should get in touch with the Jewish children. We had a kindergarten, but made it known to the Jewish community that we were not in the business of proselyting, and that they need have no hesitation in sending their children to our kindergarten, which was a great blessing to the whole community. Sunday evenings in the spring and fall, I spoke to large congregations of Jewish people from the steps of the church, on the spirit of Jewish history--as to what it had done for the world and what it could still do. I think it was in the early part of 1893 that I began my work there. It was the year of the panic, and the East Side was in a general state of stringency and starvation. A group of ministers of various denominations got together and devised a plan for a cheap restaurant in which we were to sell meals at cost. Probably for the first time in the history of New York, a Roman Catholic priest, a Jewish rabbi, Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptist pastors sat down around a table to talk over the welfare of the people. A committee was formed, and I nominated the Catholic priest for chairman. He was elected. The restaurant did not last very long, and probably the chief good of the thing was the getting together of these men. Difficulties, of course, came thick and fast. Kosher meat for the Jews, fish for the Catholics on Friday, and any old thing for the Gentiles, were the smallest of the difficulties to be overcome. I was supported in my church work by a band of young men and women, mostly from a distance, who gave their services freely, and in the course of a year or two, we managed to increase the church membership by a hundred or so, and occasionally we filled the structure by serving out refreshments to the lodging-house men of the Bowery. I had an opportunity to touch the social needs of the community by coöperating with the University Settlement which was then in its infancy. I opened the church edifice for their lecture course which included Henry George, Father McGlyn, Thaddeus B. Wakeman, Daniel de Leon, Charles B. Spahr, and W.J. Sullivan. Sixteen years ago these men were the moving spirits in their respective lines in New York City. The New York Presbytery was not altogether pleased by this new departure in church work; but we had the lectures first, and asked permission afterward. Most of these men filled the church to overflowing. In the case of Father McGlyn, hundreds had to be turned away. As I sat beside Father McGlyn in the pulpit, I said, "Father, how do you stand with the Pope, these days? What is the status of the case?" "Well, Irvine," he said, "I can best explain it by a dream that I had some time ago. I dreamed that a young priest visited me with the intention of getting me to recant. 'McGlyn,' he said, 'if you don't recant, you'll be damned!' And I thought for a minute or two and then gave the only answer that a man with a conscience could give: 'Well, brother, I'll be damned if I do!'" I found myself drifting quietly out of old methods of church work, and attempting, at least, to apply religion to the conditions around me. Every aspect of social life was in need of remedial treatment. Of course, I did not neglect the religious teaching, but what the situation demanded was ethical teaching, and, without making any splurge about my change of view, I worked at whatever my hand found to do in that immediate neighbourhood. [Illustration: Alexander Irvine. From a sketch by Juliet Thompson] The push-cart men and organ-grinders were terrorized by the policemen. I hired an organ-grinder one summer afternoon to play for several hours, so that the children of the neighbourhood might have a dance on the street. It was a joy to my soul to see these little bits of half-naked humanity dancing by the hundreds on the streets and sidewalks, most of them barefooted, hatless and coatless. It was on one of these occasions that I discovered the petty graft exercised on the organ-grinders. The push-cart men all paid toll to the policeman on the beat, and the captain of the precinct winked at it. The officers of the precinct looked upon the religious leaders as "easy marks"--every one of them. The detectives of the Society for Prevention of Crime went through my parish and discovered wholesale violations of excise laws and city ordinances by the existence of bawdy-houses and the selling of liquor in prohibited hours and on Sundays. The captain of the precinct came out with a public statement that these men were liars; that the law was observed and prostitution did not exist. As between Dr. Parkhurst and the captain of the precinct, the public was inclined to believe the captain. One Sunday evening after service, I dressed in the clothes of a labourer, took several men with me and went through the parish. The first place we entered was the East River Hotel, a few blocks from my church. We purchased whiskey at the bar. I did not drink the whiskey, for under oath I could not tell whether it was whiskey or not; but my companions were not so hampered. After paying for the liquor, we were invited upstairs, and there we saw one of the ghastliest, most inhuman sights that can be found anywhere on earth outside of Port Said. We counted forty women on the first floor. We saw them and their stalls, surroundings and companions, and we beat a hasty retreat. A cry of alarm was raised, and the barkeeper jumped to the door. It was secured by two heavy chains. No explanation was made, but a straight demand that he open the door, which was done, and we passed out. The grand jury, which at that time was hearing report and counter-report on the condition of the neighbourhood, had for a foreman a Tammany man who owned several saloons. We went into these saloons one after another, purchased liquor in bottles, and next morning appeared before the grand jury armed with affidavits, and the liquor. Dr. Parkhurst stood at the door of the jury room as I went in, and whispered to me as I passed him: "This thing cannot last forever." The first few minutes of my testimony I was unconsciously assuming the position of a criminal myself, and apologizing for interfering with these gentlemen. The assistant district attorney, instead of representing the people and standing for the Law, was inquiring into my reasons for doing such an unusual thing. I objected to the foreman sitting on his own case. "This man," I said, "is an habitual violator of the Law. I am here to testify to that; so are my companions. We have the evidence of his law-breaking here," and I pointed to the bottles that we had placed on the table. They did not move, however, and I think they rather considered the whole thing a joke. We proceeded to describe the East River Hotel and similar resorts that a few days previously had been described as immaculately clean by the captain of the precinct. The result of all this was the sustaining of the testimony of Dr. Parkhurst's detectives. The petty graft among the organ-grinders and the push-cart men went right on. Complaints were jokes and were treated as such. The change of seasons brought little change in the activities of a church centre like that. In the winter it was the provision of coal and clothes. In the summer it was fresh-air parties and doctors. I made the discovery one day in a tenement in talking to a little child of five, that she had never seen a green field or a tree. This led me to ask the missionaries assisting the church to make a search for a few weeks and collect as many such children as possible. We got together seventeen, ranging from three to seven years of age, not any of whom had ever seen a single aspect of the outdoor world, save the world of stone and brick and wood. Some friends in Montclair, N.J., arranged a lawn party for these little ones, and we proceeded. Nothing extraordinary happened. There was no open-eyed wonder, few exclamations as we intently watched the emotions of these children as they gazed for the first time on lawns, flower gardens and trees. Two-thirds of them were seasick on the train and the one regret of the journey was that we had not taken along half a dozen wet nurses. The one unique thing of the day was the luncheon. The children were arranged around an extemporized table where sandwiches, lemonade and milk were abundantly provided. At a signal from the hostess, I said, "Now, children, everything is ready! Have your luncheon." But there was no commotion. Two-thirds of them sat motionless, looking at each other. The sandwiches were made of ham. If I had not seen this with my own eyes, I would scarcely have credited the telling of it by anybody else. Two-thirds of the children were of Jewish parents and had been taught at least one thing thoroughly. The hostess did the best she could under the circumstances and provided other kinds of meat, cake and fruit, and the festal occasion had a happy ending. A certain amount of care has always to be exercised in new enterprises, in departures from the ordinary routine, especially if they involve expense; or, as I have said before, interfere with political or economic progress. Pulpit preaching is the smallest item in the entire programme of a preacher, especially in such a neighbourhood and in such a church. If a preacher wants an audience, all he has to do is to step outside his church door, stand on a box, and the audience is ready-made. It is miscellaneous and cosmopolitan; it is respectful and multitudinous. When I discovered this, I proceeded to act on my convictions, and copy, to the extent of getting an audience, at least, the Socialist propagandist; and I proceeded to work _with_ the people around me instead of _for_ them. There were no lines of demarkation to my activity. I touched the life of the community at every angle, sometimes entering as a fool where an angel would fear to tread. I was called upon to visit a poor couple who lived in a rear tenement. They were of the unattached; had no ecclesiastical connections whatever. I saw that the old man, who lay on a couch, was dying. He was scarcely able to speak, but managed to express a desire that I sing to him; so, as there was no one present but his wife and myself to hear it, I sang. This inspired the old man to sing himself. He coughed violently, tried to clear his throat, pulled himself together, and sang after me a line of "Jesus, Lover of my Soul." This was very touching, but the solemnity was severely jarred by following that line by the first line of: "Little Brown Jug, don't I love you!" So between the Little Brown Jug and the sacred poetry of the church he wound up, dying with his head on my knee. There was an insurance of thirty dollars on his life. I informed the undertaker, and did what I could to comfort the old woman who was now entirely alone in the world. One of the missionaries of the church came next day and helped to make arrangements for the funeral which was to take place in the afternoon. They had not been long in that alley and knew nobody in it, and when I arrived to conduct the funeral service at three o'clock in the afternoon, there was a little crowd of people around the door, and from the inside came agonized yells from the old woman. I opened the door and marched in. I found the undertaker in the act of taking the body out of the casket and laying it on the lounge in the corner. The old woman was on her knees, wringing her hands and begging him in the name of God not to do it. I asked for an explanation and, rather reluctantly, the undertaker told me, proceeding with his programme as he explained that there was a "kink" in the insurance. "Well," I said, "we can fix that up all right." "Yes," he said, "you can fix it up with cash; but we are not in the undertaking business for our health, you know." "Well, stop for a moment," I pleaded, "and let us talk it over!" "Have you got the dough?" he asked. "Not here," I replied, "but I am the pastor of that church up there on the corner, and surely we are good enough for the small expense of this funeral." By this time he had the lid on the casket and was proceeding to carry it out. The old woman was now on her feet and almost in hysterics. I was mightily moved by the situation, and asked the man to wait; but he jabbed the end of the casket under my arm--perhaps accidentally--pushing me to one side on his way to the door. I was there ahead of him however; locked the door and put the key in my pocket. "Now, will you wait for one moment till we talk it over?" His answer was a volley of oaths. I waited until he subsided, and then I said: "I will be responsible for this financially. You are wringing the heart's blood out of this poor old woman, and I don't propose to stand by and allow it." I raised my voice and continued--"I will give you two minutes to put that corpse back in the casket and arrange it for burial, and if you don't do it, there may be two to bury instead of one." I began to time him, making absolutely no answer to anything he said. I quieted the old woman, stood very close to her and put my hand on her head. I said, "It's all right, Mary. Everything is all right. You are not friendless. You are not alone." The two minutes were up. I took off my coat, rolled up my shirt sleeves and advanced toward him. "Are you going to do the decent thing?" There was one long look between us. Then he put the body back in the casket, arranged it for burial, and I opened the door and the crowd came in, not, however, before I had put my coat on again. I read the service and preached the sermon, and the undertaker did the rest. Some months afterward, I was at work in my study in the tower of the old church, when I heard a loud knocking at the church door--a most unusual thing. I came down and found that undertaker and a gentleman and lady, well dressed, evidently of the well-to-do class, standing at the door. "Here is a couple that want to get married, Mr. Irvine," the undertaker said. They came into the study and were married, and I shook hands with the three, and they went off. Next day I went to the undertaker--indeed, he was an undertaker's helper. I went up to his desk and laid down a five-dollar bill, one-fourth of the marriage fee. Without being invited, I pulled a chair up and sat down beside him. "Now, tell me, brother," I said confidentially. "Why did you bring them to me?" A smile overspread his features. "Well," he said, "it was like this. You remember that funeral business?" "Yes." "Well, I figured it out like this: that one of the two of us was puttin' up a damned big bluff; but I hadn't the heart to call it. Shake!" CHAPTER XII WORKING WAY DOWN After some years' experience in missions and mission churches, I would find it very hard if I were a workingman living in a tenement not to be antagonistic to them; for, in large measure, such work is done on the assumption that people are poor and degraded through laxity in morals. The scheme of salvation is a salvation for the individual; social salvation is out of the question. Social conditions cannot be touched, because in all rotten social conditions, there is a thin red line which always leads to the rich man or woman who is responsible for them. Coming in contact with these ugly social facts continuously, led me to this belief. It came very slowly as did also the opinion that the missionary himself or the pastor, be he as wise as Solomon, as eloquent as Demosthenes, as virtuous as St. Francis, has no social standing whatever among the people whose alms support the institutions, religious and philanthropic, of which these men are the executive heads. The fellowship of the saints is a pure fiction, has absolutely no foundation in fact in a city like New York except as the poor saints have it by themselves. Tim Grogan jolted me into a new political economy; the crowded streets of the East Side on a summer night gave me a new theology. I stood one night in August on the tower of the old church and looked down upon the sweltering mass that covered the roofs, fire escapes and sidewalks. The roofs were littered with naked and half-naked children panting for breath. Down on the crowded streets thousands of little children darted in and out like sparrows, escaping as if by miracle the vehicles of all sorts and descriptions. Crowded baby-carriages lined the sidewalks. The stoops, too, were crowded. What a mass of humans! What a ganglia of living wires! As I looked on this vast multitude, I questioned the orthodox theology that held me in its grip. Most of these people belonged to another race. And I stood at that moment firmly rooted in the belief that this multitude was inevitably doomed! Let me put it frankly, even though it seems brutal: doomed to hell! I am unable to analyze the quick currents of thought that went through my mind at that instant. I cannot explain how the change came. I know that there came to me a bigger thought than any I had ever known, and that thought so thrilled me with human feeling, with love for men, that I said to my soul: "Soul, if this multitude is doomed to hell, be brave; gird up your loins and go with them!" In that tenement district people were being murdered by the tens of thousands by tuberculosis, by defective plumbing, by new diseases born of the herding of men and women like cattle. I made some feeble attempt to investigate, to ascertain, to acquaint myself with the facts, and my investigation led me to this result--a result that the lapse of years has not altered; that the private ownership of tenements--the private profits in housing--was not only the mother of the great white plague, but of most of the plagues down there that endanger health. It led me to the belief also that the struggle for bodily health, the struggle to survive, was so fierce as to leave little time for soul health or mental health! It was a source of continual wonder to me that people so helpless and so neglected were as good as they were, or as healthy as they were. It did not seem reasonable to lay the blame at the doors of the owners of the tenements. Many of them had a tenement only as a source of income--and to acquire the tenement had taken long years of savings, earnings and sacrifices. It was part of the great game of business, the game of "live I, die you!" The churches and synagogues are of little vital importance there, because they ignore social conditions, or largely ignore them. And there is a reason for this also, and the reason is that they are supported by the people--the very people who perpetuate the evils against which prophet, priest and pastor ought to cry out continually. The protest against such conditions is a negligible quantity. There is a protest, an outcry, but it is related neither to the church nor to the synagogue. The East Side has a soul, but it is not an ecclesiastical soul! It is a soul that is alive--so much alive to the interest of the people that many times I felt ashamed of myself when I listened to the socialistic orators on the street corners and in the East Side halls. They were stirring up the minds of the people. They were not merely making them discontented with conditions, but they were offering a programme of reconstruction--a programme that included a trowel as well as a sword. The soul of the East Side expressed itself in the Yiddish press, daily, weekly, and monthly, and in Yiddish literature, and in the spoken word of the propagandist whose ideal, though limited in literary expression, made him a flame of living fire. It was this soul of the East Side that drove me against my will to study the relation of politics to the condition of the people. One of the first things that I discovered was the grip that Tammany had on the people. Every saloon keeper was a power in the community. Men, of any force of character whatever, who were willing to hold their hands behind their backs for Tammany graft, were singled out by the organization for some moiety of honour. Small merchants found it to their advantage to keep on the right side of the saloon keepers and the Tammany leaders. I remember trying to express this thought in an uptown church to a wealthy congregation; and I remember distinctly, also, that I was rebuked by one of the leading lights of the missionary society of which I was a part. I was informed that my business was to "save souls," and in my public addresses to tell how I saved them; that political conditions must be left to the politicians--and it was done. To the old church at the corner of Market and Henry streets came Dowling. He followed me as a matter of fellowship--we loved each other. And came also Dave Ranney, the "puddler from Pittsburg." On the first anniversary of Dave's conversion, I gathered a hundred wastrels of the Bowery together and gave them a dinner at the church. Dave, of course, was the guest of honour. When my guests were full and warm, they became reminiscent, and I urged them, a few of them, to tell us their stories--to unfold the torn manuscripts of their lives. Dave told his first. "Boys," he said, "I was one of de toughest gazabos what ever hung aroun' de square. I met dis man an' tried t' bleed 'im, but it warn't no go--'e was on to de game and cudn't be touch't. "I giv'd 'im a song an' dance story fur weeks. One day 'e sez to me, sez 'e, 'Chum!'--well, say boys, when I went out an' had a luk at meself, sez I, 'Ye dhirty loafer, if a man like dat calls y' "chum," why don't y' take a brace an' get on de dead level?' So I did an' I've been on de dead level ever since--ain't I, boss?" I was able to place Dave as janitor of the church. After he had been there for a while and comfortably housed in the janitor's quarters in the basement, he thought it a propitious time to be reconciled to his wife; so we arranged to have Mary come down and inspect the place. We put extra work into the cleaning of the quarters, furnishing it with some sticks of furniture. Reconciliations were getting to be an old story with Mary, and Dave knew he was going to have difficulty in this new attempt. He finally persuaded her to make a visit to the church. When he was ready, Dave, in a most apologetic tone, said: "There is just one thing lacking here." "What is it Dave?" "A white tie." "Where?" "On you." The white tie as ecclesiastical appendage I had avoided. I despised it. But Dave assured me that if Mary came down to look the church over, she would be more interested in my appearance than in the appearance of the church, because what she really wanted was an assurance that Dave was "on the square!" and if he could introduce her to a real minister as his friend, it would enhance his chance. I sent Dave to the Bowery for a five cent white string tie, and I borrowed a Prince Albert coat. There was an old stovepipe hat in the church--sort of legacy from former pastorates--and it was trotted out, carefully brushed and put on the study table. Then Mary appeared! Dave had instructed me to put up a "tall talk," so I put up the tallest possible. Mary inspected the church, the quarters and the minister; then she looked at Dave and said in an undertone--"This looks on the level." "You bet your sweet life!" Dave said. So Mary was installed as "the lady of the temple" at Sixty-one Henry Street, and for seven years ministered to the poor and the needy, and kept in order the House of God. After her death, Dave remained at the church about a year; then he became my successor as missionary to the lodging houses on the Bowery, where he still works--a sort of humble doctor of the humanities; feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, comforting men in despair. It seemed to me at that time that what a weak church like that most needed was a strong, powerful church to put its arms around it and give it support. I interviewed Dr. Parkhurst, as I was Chairman of a Committee of the City Vigilance League which he organized. The result was that Dr. Parkhurst's church gave it for a year support and absolute independence of action at the same time. Then the Rev. John Hopkins Dennison, who had been Dr. Parkhurst's assistant, superseded me in the care of the church, and was able to bring to its support help that I could not have touched. Mr. Dennison's service to that church is worthy of a better record than it has yet received. He performed brilliant service, intensified the life of the church and gathered around it a band of noble people. He transformed the tower of the church into a kind of modern monastery in which he lived himself, and in which Dowling, the old Irish tinker, had a place also, and which he made a centre of ten years' missionary work chiefly among the lodging houses where I found him. One day Dowling was walking along the Bowery when a hand was laid roughly on his shoulder and a voice said: "Ain't you Dowling?" "Yes." "What did you do with the loot?" In the Sepoy Rebellion in India, he had looted the palace of a Rajah with two other soldiers. The most valuable items of the booty were several bamboo canes stuffed with diamonds, rubies and sapphires. In the act of burying them for protection and hiding, one of the soldiers was shot dead; the other two escaped and separated, and all these years each of them had lived in the suspicion that the other had gone back for the loot, and they both discovered on the Bowery that neither of them had and that this valuable stuff was buried in far-off India. Dowling wrote to the Governor-General and told of his part in the affair and volunteered to come out and locate it. But by this time his body was wasted, his steps were tottering and his head bent. Five-hundred dollars were appropriated by the Indian Government to take him out; but Dowling was destined for another journey; and, in the old tower that he loved so well and where he was beloved by every one who knew him, he lay down and died. They buried him in Plainfield, N.J., and his friends put over him a stone bearing these words that were so characteristic of his life: "HE WENT ABOUT DOING GOOD" My next service was in a city of a second class beyond the Mississippi River. I had been invited as a pulpit supply in one of its largest churches, but when I arrived I found them in a wrangle over the pastor who had just left and by whose recommendation I was to fill the pulpit. I arrived in the city on a Sunday morning and went from my hotel to the church prepared to preach. I stood for a few minutes in the vestibule, and what I heard led me to go straight out again, never to return. My first impression of the city was that it contained more vital democracy than any city I had ever been in. It takes an Old World proletarian a long time to outgrow a sense of subserviency. As a missionary and almoner of the rich in New York, this sense was very strong in me. In the West I felt this vital democracy so keenly and saw the vision of political independence so clearly, that my very blood seemed to change. Politically, I was born again. CHAPTER XIII LIFE AND DOUBT ON THE BOTTOMS While studying the social conditions of this city, I took a residence on the banks of the river among the squatters. There were about fifteen hundred people living in shacks on this "no man's land." My residence was a shack for which I paid three dollars a month. It was at the bottom of a big clay bank, and not far from where the city dumped its garbage. There was neither church nor chapel in this neglected district, and the people were mostly foreigners; but the children all spoke English. During the early part of my stay in that shack, I entered my first great period of doubting--doubt as to the moral order of the universe, doubt on the question of God. I had gone through some great soul struggles, but this was the greatest. It was for a time the eclipse of my soul. For weeks I lived behind closed doors--I was shut in with my soul. But the community around me called in a thousand ways for help, for guidance, for instruction, and I opened the door of my shack and invited the children in. I organized a Sunday School and taught them ethics and religion. I got up little entertainments for them. I procured a stereopticon, gave them lectures on my experience in Egypt, and lectures on art, biography and history. I had a peculiar method of advertising these lectures. I informed the little cripple boy on the corner. He whispered the information to a section of the huts, at the farthest end of which a golden-haired courier informed another section; so that by the time the lecture was scheduled to begin, my audience was ready, and most of them slid down the clay bank in front of my door. Later I went out through the surrounding towns and cities, lecturing, and raised money for a chapel, and we called it the "Chapel of the Carpenter." I never knew the meaning of the incarnation until I lived on "the bottoms" with the squatters. I talked of great characters of history; I reviewed great books. I travelled with these children over the great highways of history, science and art, and very soon we had a strong Sunday School, and helpers came from the city--but the door of my own soul was still shut. It seemed to me that my soul was dead. I was without hope for myself: everything around me was dark. Sometimes I locked the door and tried to pray, but no words came, nor thoughts--not a ray of light penetrated the darkness. My mind and intellect became duller and duller. It was at this time that I came across the writings of Schopenhauer; and Schopenhauer suggested to me a method of relief. I may be doing him an injustice, but it was his philosophy that made me reason that, as I did not ask to come into life and had no option, I had a right to go out of it. There was nothing spasmodic in the development of my thought along this line: it was cold, calm reasoning; I had determined to go out of life. So, with the same calm deliberation that I cooked my breakfast, I destroyed every vestige of my correspondence; and, one night went to the river to seek relief. I was sitting on the end of a log when a man, who had been working twelve hours in a packing-house, came out to smoke, after his supper. He had not washed himself. His bloody shirt stuck to his skin--he was haggard, pale; and we dropped naturally into conversation. In language intelligible to him I asked him what life meant to him. "The kids," he said, "that's what it means to me. I work like one of the things I kill every day--I kill hundreds of them, thousands of them every day. I go home and eat like one of them, and sleep like one of them, and go back to hog it again like one of them." "Do you get tired?" "Tired? Tired as hell!" "I mean--tired of life?" "Oh, no," he said, "I aint livin' the best kind of a life, but what I have is better than none. I don't know what's beyond--if there is any life or none at all; but something in me makes me stick to this one. Besides, if there is any chance for a better life here, he must be a damned coward that would go out of it and leave it undone. Good night." I saw him retreat to his shack among the tall weeds. I heard the door close. I fancied him lie down in a heap in the corner and go to sleep. He was a better philosopher than I was, and he had called me a coward, but he had not altered my determination. I began to sweat. It was like the action of a fever on my body, and I became very nervous; but I was determined to meet the crisis, and go. A sudden change in affairs was created by an unearthly scream--the scream of a woman. I looked around suddenly and discovered that the only two-story shack on "the bottoms" was in a blaze, and the thought occurred to me that I might be of some help and accomplish my purpose at the same time. In a moment I was beside the burning hut. It appeared that a lamp had exploded upstairs, and that three small children were hemmed in. That was the cause of the scream. A plank that reached to the upstairs window was lying at the wood pile. I pushed it against the house and climbed like a cat into the burning bedroom. By this time the neighbours had collected, and I helped the woman and lowered the three children down, one by one, and then deliberately groped for the stairs to get hemmed in, the smoke suffocating me as I did so. By the time I found the stairs, my hair was singed, my arms were burned, but I was gradually losing consciousness, and before I reached the bottom I fell, suffocated with the smoke. In that last moment of consciousness, my whole life came up in review. I had no regrets. I had played a part and it was over. When I came out of coma, I was lying on my cot in the hut, the neighbours crowding my little bedroom and standing outside in scores. One of the newspapers that had most severely criticized my interference in politics, gave me a pass to Colorado and return--and in the mountains of Colorado, the door of my soul opened again, and I saw the world beautiful--and opportunities that were golden for helpfulness and service awaiting my touch. So I returned to my hut with the sense of God more fully developed in me than it had ever been. They had a system in that city that I was very much ashamed of--that I thought all men ought to be ashamed of--the segregation of the "social evil." I discovered that the city fined these poor creatures of the streets, and that these fines, amounting to thousands of dollars every year, went straight into the public school fund, so that it could truly be said that the more debauched society was, the more efficiently it could educate its children and its youth. These houses in the red light district were built to imitate castles on the Rhine, and were owned by church people and politicians. Everybody winked at this condition. One minister of this town uttered a loud protest and took his children out of the public schools, but he had to leave the city. The Christians would not stand for such a protest. The newspapers would not touch it, trustees would not touch it, the great political parties would not touch it. I joined the Knights of Labour in that city, an organization then in its prime of strength, but they would not touch it. I joined the People's Party in the hope that there I might do something about it. One of the leading members of that party importuned me to nominate him as presiding officer of the city convention. "On one condition," I told him; "that you appoint me chairman of the committee on resolutions." And the compact was made. Five men were on that committee, and when I asked the committee to put in a resolution condemning the education of children from this fund, they refused. I could only persuade one of four to indorse my minority report, which, signed by two of us, condemned this remnant of Sodom left over; but it swept the convention and was carried almost unanimously. Even the three men on the resolutions committee who refused to sign it before, voted for it in convention. I am aware that it does not matter from what fund or funds the public school system is supported. I am aware also that one of the things we can do is to make that kind of thing cover up its head. What I suffered for that resolution can never be recorded. My period of inclement mental weather was followed by a period of poverty--destitution rather--I was physically unable to work with my hands and I had not yet tried to earn money by my pen. I was often so reduced by hunger that I could scarcely walk. At such times one feels more grateful for friendship. Into my life then came a few choice souls whose fellowship acted as a dynamic to my life. It was when things were at their worst that George D. Herron found me. The almost Jewish cast of feature, the strange, wonderful voice, the prophetic atmosphere of the man forced me to express the belief that I had never met a human being who seemed to me so like Christ. Then came George A. Gates, the president of Iowa College where Dr. Herron was a professor. About the same time came Elia W. Peattie and Ida Doolittle Fleming. Mrs. Fleming and her husband helped me organize a Congregational Church which, when organized, was a means of support. The church was in a growing section of the city but I could not be persuaded to live there. I lived where I thought my life was most serviceable--on "the bottoms." One night after a few days' involuntary fast I found in the hut two cents. To the city I went and bought two bananas--one I ate on the way back and the other I put in my hip pocket. There were no streets, no lights, no sidewalks in that region. As I came to a railroad arch on the edge of the squatter community I saw a figure emerge from the deep shadows. I knew instantly I was to be held up, but as life was rather cheap down there I was not sure what would accompany the assault. A second figure emerged and when I came to within a few yards of them, I whipped the banana from my pocket and pointing it as one would a revolver I said--"Move a muscle, either of you, and I'll blow your brains out!" "Gee!" one of them muttered; "it's Mr. Irvine." They belonged to a gang of young toughs who lived in a dug-out on the banks of the river. Some of them had brothers in my school. There were about a dozen of them. They had hinted several times that they would clean me out when they had time, but they had delayed their plan. I took these fellows to my hut and we talked for hours. When I produced the banana they laughed vociferously and invited me to their "hole." Next evening they gave a reception and, I suppose, fed me on stolen property. They had a stove--a few old mattresses and some dry-goods boxes. I held their attention that night for four hours while I told the story of Jean Valjean. Next day we were all photographed together on a pile of stones near the "hole." After that these fellows protected the chapel and made themselves useful in their way. In less than a year afterward half of them had gone to honest work; the rest went the way of the transgressor, to the penetentiary and the reform school. This period was one of total rejection by any means--powerful influences were at work to render my labour void--but they were offset for a time by the finer influences of life. I gave a series of addresses in Tabor College, Iowa, and they were the beginning of an awakening among the students. After the last word of the last address the student about whom the president and faculty were most concerned walked up the aisle and expressed a desire to lead a new life. "Do it now," I suggested. "Right here?" "Yes, right where you stand." The president and faculty gathered around him, making a circle; he stood in the midst, alone, and in that way with prayer and dedication from the lips of the young man and his friends began one of the most useful lives in the American ministry. This young man became an ascetic. I gave him to read the life of Francis of Assisi, and he went to the extreme in emulation. He divested himself of collars and ties and on graduating read his thesis for his Bachelor's degree collarless and tieless. I was in New Haven when he came there to take his Divinity degree in Yale. He came without either collar or tie, but after days of prayer and fasting he was "led" to enter the University as others entered it. He is now pastor of the First Congregational Church in Rockford, Illinois; his name is Frank M. Sheldon. Nine men have gone by a similar route into the ministry, but Mr. Sheldon is the only one of them who has kept touch with the modern demands on religious leadership. Birthdays have meant nothing whatever to me, but I made my thirty-second an occasion for a party on "the bottoms." I could only accommodate seven guests. Two were favourite boys and the others were selected because of their great need. The hut was the centre of a mud puddle that January morning. I got a long plank and laid it from my doorstep to the edge of the clay bank. I took precaution not to announce the affair, even to the guests, but a grocer's boy who had been sent by a friend with some oranges lost his way and his inquiry after me created such a sensation that when he found me he was accompanied by about fifty children. Old Mrs. Belgarde, my nearest neighbour, had whispered across the fence to her neighbour that something was sure to happen, for she had noticed me making unusual preparations that day. I think the origin of the party idea came with my first birthday gift--I mean the first I had ever received--it was a copy of Thomas à Kempis, given me by my friend the Reverend Gregory J. Powell. [I gave it later to a man who was to die by judicial process in the county jail.] When the hour arrived a crowd of two hundred youngsters stood in the mud outside. On the top of the clay bank stood parents, crossing themselves and praying quietly that their offspring would be lucky enough to get in. I had taught these children some simple rules of order, and when I opened the door I rang a little bell. There was absolute silence. They had been actually tearing each other's clothing to rags for a position near the door. I told them that I was so poor that I had scarcely enough food for myself. That the little I had I was going to share with seven of my special friends; of course they all considered themselves included in that characterization. "Dear little friends," I said, "I never had a birthday party before; and now you are going to spoil this one." Up to this time the crowd didn't know who the guests were. I proceeded to call the names. As those called made a move there was a violent fight for the door. Some of them I had to drag out of the clutches of the unsuccessful. Only six of the seven were there. There was a howl from a hundred throats to take the place of the absent one. "No," I said sternly; "he'll come, all right." A roar of discontent went up and chaos reigned. I couldn't make myself heard; I rang the bell and again calmed them. I was at a loss to know what to say. "Dear little folks," I said, "I thought you loved me!" "Do too!" whined a dozen voices. "Then if you do, go away and some day I will have a party for every child on 'the bottoms.'" That quieted the youthful mob and they departed--that is, the majority departed. Some stayed and bombarded the doors and windows with stones. There were few stones to be found, and as it didn't occur to them to use the same stones twice they used mud and plastered the front of the hut with it. This form of expression, however, did not disturb us much. I sent three of my guests into the back yard to wash and arrange their hair. They returned for inspection but didn't pass, the hair refusing to comply on such short notice. I put the finishing touches on each of their toilets and we sat down to supper. The oldest boy, "Fritz," was half past twelve and the youngest, "Ano," had just struck ten. Ano was a cripple and both legs were twisted out of shape--he hobbled about on crutches. "Jake" was eleven--two of his eleven years he had spent in a reformatory where he had learned to chew tobacco and to swear. "Eddy" was also eleven, but the oldest of all in point of wits. I had a claim on Eddy: one day he was amusing himself by jerking a cat at the end of a string, in and out of Frau Belgarde's well. She was stealthily approaching him with a piece of fence rail when I arrived and possibly prevented some broken bones. "Kaiser" was nearly twelve; he too had been in a reform school--he liked it and would have been glad to stay as long as they wanted him--for he had three meals a day and he had never had such "luck" outside. "Whitey" was a little Swedish boy whose mother worked in a cigar factory. "Kaiser" and "Whitey" had a "dug-out" and they spent more nights together in it than they spent in their huts. "Fritz," the oldest boy, began his career in the open by stealing his father's revolver; and, jumping on the first grocery wagon he found handy, he left town. Of course he was brought back and "sent up" for a year. "Franz," the absent one, was Ano's brother, and the toughest boy in the community. These brief outlines describe the guests of my birthday party. "When ye make a feast call the poor" was stretched a little to cover this aggregation--stretched as to the character of those invited. A blessing was asked, of course--by the host and repeated by the guests. Of things to eat there was enough and to spare. After dinner each one was to contribute something to the entertainment. "Beginning here on my left with 'Whitey,'" I said, "I want each boy to tell us what he would like to be when he becomes a man." Whitey without hesitation said: "A organ-man wid a monkey." "Why?" "'Cause." Eddy said he would like to be a butcher, and as a reason gave: "Plenty ov beef to eat." "Kaiser" preferred to be a "Reformatory boss." "Ano," the cripple, said he would like to be a minister. When pressed for a reason he said, "That's what m' father says--dey ain't got notin' to do!" In the midst of this social quiz a loud noise was heard outside. "Bang! Bang!! Bang!!!" The timbers of the hut shivered, the guests made a rush to the back door. I was there first and found Franz, the missing guest, his arms smeared with blood, his ragged jacket covered with hair of some sort and in his hand a bloody stiletto. He rushed past me into the hut, got to the table and exclaimed: "Gee whiz! der ain't a ---- scrap left!" "Look here, Franz," I said, "I want to know what you've been up to?" "Ye do, hey? Ye look skeered, too, don't yer--hey?" "Never mind how I look; tell me at once what you've been up to!" "Ha, ha, ha!" he laughed, "d'ye tink I kilt some ol' sucker for 'is money--hey? Ha, ha! Well, I hain't, see? I've bin skinnin' a dead hoss an brot ye d' skin for a birfday present, see?" The skin was lying in a bloody heap outside the back door. I arranged "Franz" for dinner and the party was complete. I told some stories; then we played games and at ten o'clock they went home. The moment the front door was opened, about forty children--each with a lighted candle in hand--sang a verse of my favourite hymn: "Lead, Kindly Light." They knew but one verse, but that they sang twice. It was a weird performance and moved me almost to tears. After they sang they came down the clay bank and shook hands, wishing me all sorts of things. Two nights afterward I had a different kind of a party. A bullet came crashing through the boards of my hut about midnight. Rushing to the door, I saw the fire flashes of other shots in a neighbour's garden. I went to the high board fence and saw one of my neighbours--a German--emptying a revolver at his wife who was dodging behind a tree. My first impulse was to jump the fence and save the woman but the man being evidently half-drunk might have turned and poured into me what was intended for his wife; and the first law of nature was sufficiently developed in me to let her have what belonged to her! I tried to speak but my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. I was positively scared. The old fellow walked up to the tree, letting out as he walked a volley of oaths. I recovered my equilibrium, sprang over the fence, crept up behind and jumped on him, knocking him down and instantly disarming him. I went inside with them and sat between them until they seemed to have forgotten what had happened. Then I put them to bed, put the light out and went home. I examined the revolver and found it empty. Next morning I went back and told the old man that I would volunteer to give him some lessons in target practice; and that the reason I knocked him down was because he was such a poor shot. This old couple became my staunchest supporters. I interested the students of Tabor College in the people of that out-of-the-way community, and before I built the Chapel of the Carpenter which still stands there I organized a college settlement which was manned by students. The small church, the chapel on "the bottoms," the work of the college students and the increasing circle of converts and friends made the work attractive to me, but I had entered the political field in order to protest against and possibly remedy something civic that savoured of Sodom; and for a minister that was an unpardonable sin. The "interests" determined to cripple me or destroy my work. This they did successfully by the medium of a subsidized press and other means, fair and foul. It was a case of a city against one man--a rich city against a poor man and the man went down to defeat--apparent defeat, anyway: I packed my belongings and left. As I crossed the bridge which spans the river I looked on the little squatter colony on "the bottoms" and as my career there passed in review, for the second time in my life I was stricken with home-sickness and I was guilty of what my manhood might have been ashamed of--tears. CHAPTER XIV MY FIGHT IN NEW HAVEN The experiences of 1894, '5 and '6 gave me a distaste--really a disgust--with public life I felt that I would never enter a large city again. I sought retirement in a country parish; this was secured for me by my friend, the president of Tabor College, the Rev. Richard Cecil Hughes. It was in a small town in Iowa--Avoca in Pottawattomie County; I stayed there a year. In 1897 I was in Cleveland, Ohio, in charge of an institution called The Friendly Inn; a very good name if the place had been an inn or friendly. My inability to make it either forced me to leave it before I had been there many months. It was in Cleveland that I first joined a labour union. I was a member of what was called a Federal Labour Union and was elected its representative to the central body of the union movement. Early in 1898 I was in Springfield, Mass., delivering a series of addresses to a Bible school there. My funds ran out and not being in receipt of any remuneration and, not caring to make my condition known, I was forced for the first time in my life to become a candidate for a church. There were two vacant pulpits and I went after both of them. Meantime I boarded with a few students who, like their ancestors, had "plenty of nothing but gospel." They lived on seventy-five cents a week. Living was largely a matter of scripture texts, hope and imagination. I used to breakfast through my eyes at the beautiful lotus pond in the park. We lunched usually on soup that was a constant reminder of the soul of Tomlinson of Berkeley Square. Quantitively speaking, supper was the biggest meal of the day--it was a respite also for our imaginations. The day of my candidacy arrived. I was prepared to play that most despicable of all ecclesiastical tricks--making an impression. I almost memorized the Scripture reading and prepared my favourite sermon; my personal appearance never had been so well attended to. The hour arrived. The little souls sat back in their seats to take my measure. It was their innings. I had been duly looked up in the year-book and my calibre gauged by the amount of money paid me in previous pastorates. The "service" began. My address to the Almighty was prepared and part of the game is to make believe that it is purely extemporaneous. Every move, intonation and gesture is noted and has its bearing on the final result. I was saying to the ecclesiastical jury: "Look here, you dumb-heads, wake up; I'm the thing you need here!" Sermon time came and with it a wave of disgust that swept over my soul. "Good friends," I began; "I am not a candidate for the pastorate here. I was a few minutes ago; but not now. Instead of doing the work of an infinite God and letting Him take care of the result I have been trying to please _you_. If the Almighty will forgive me for such unfaith--such meanness--I swear that I will never do it again." Then I preached. This brutal plainness created a sensation and several tried to dissuade me, but I had made up my mind. It was while I was enjoying the "blessings" of poverty in Springfield that I was called to New Haven to confer with the directors of the Young Men's Christian Association about their department of religious work. I had been in New Haven before. In 1892 I addressed the students of Yale University on the subject of city mission work and, as a result of that address, had been invited to make some investigations and outline a plan for city mission work for the students. I spent ten days in the slum region there, making a report and recommendations. On these the students began the work anew. I was asked at that time to attach myself to the university as leader and instructor in city missions, but work in New York seemed more important to me. I rode my bicycle from Springfield to New Haven for that interview. When it was over I found myself on the street with a wheel and sixty cents. I bought a "hot dog"--a sausage in a bread roll--ate it on the street and then looked around for a lodging. "Is it possible," I asked a policeman, "to get a clean bed for a night in this town for fifty cents?" "Anything's possible," he answered, "but----" He directed me to the Gem Hotel, where I was shown to a 12 � 6 box, the walls of which spoke of the battles of the weary travellers who had preceded me. I protected myself as best I could until the dawn, when I started for Springfield, a disciple for a day of the no-breakfast fad. Things were arranged differently at the next interview. I was the guest of the leaders in that work and was engaged as "Religious Work Director" for one year. I think I was the first man in the United States to be known officially by that title. The Board of Directors was composed of men efficient to an extraordinary degree. The General Secretary was a worker of great energy and business capacity and as high a moral type as the highest. He was orthodox in theology and the directors were orthodox in sociology. It was a period when I was moving away from both standpoints. To express a very modern opinion in theology would disturb the churches--the moral backers of the institution; to express an advanced idea in sociology would alienate the rich men--the financial backers. A month after I began my work I "supplied" the pulpit of a church in the New Haven suburbs called the Second Congregational Church of Fair Haven. The chairman of the pulpit supply committee was a member of the Board of Directors of the Y.M.C.A. Gradually I drifted away from the Association toward the church. The former was building a new home and many people were glad of an excuse not to give anything toward its erection. So any utterance of mine that seemed out of the common was held up to the solicitor. An address on War kept the telephone ringing for days. It was as if Christianity had never been heard of in New Haven. Labour men asked that the address be printed and subscribed money that it might be done, but an appeal to the teachings of Jesus on the question of war was lauded by the sinners and frowned upon by the saints. With the General Secretary I never had an unkind word. Though a man of boundless energy he was a man in supreme command of himself. We knew in a way that we were drifting apart and acted as Christians toward each other. What more can men do? Mr. Barnes, the director, who was chairman of the pulpit supply committee of the church, kept urging me to give my whole time to the church. Every day for weeks he drove his old white horse to my door and talked it over. I refused the call to the pastorate but divided my time between them. For the Y.M.C.A. my duties were: To conduct mass meetings for men in a theatre. To organize the Bible departments and teach one of the classes. Care and visiting of converts. Daily office hour. Literary work as associate editor of the weekly paper. Writing of pamphlets. To conduct boys' meetings. For the church: To conduct regular Sunday services. Friday night prayer meetings. Men's Bible class. Visitation of sick and burial of the dead. Class for young converts. Children's meetings. At the same time I entered the Divinity School of Yale University, taking studies in Hebrew, New Testament Greek and Archæology. A little experience in the church taught me that intellectually I was leaving the ordinary type of church at a much quicker pace than I was leaving the Y.M.C.A. Dr. Edward Everett Hale told a friend once that he preached to the South Church on Sunday morning so that he might preach to the world the rest of the week. I told the officers of the church frankly that I was not the kind of man needed for their parish; but they insisted that I was, so I preached for them on Sunday that I might preach to a larger parish during the week. Two things I tried to do well for the church--conduct an evening meeting for the unchurched--which simply means the folk unable to dress well and pay pew rents--and conduct a meeting for children. I organized a committee to help me at the evening meeting. The only qualification for membership on the committee was utter ignorance of church work. The very good people of the community called this meeting "a show." Well, it was. I asked the regular members to stay away for I needed their space and their corner lots with cushioned knee stools. I made a study of the possibilities of the stereopticon. Mr. Barnes gave me a fine outfit. I got the choicest slides and subjects published. Prayers, hymns, scripture readings and illuminated bits of choice literature were projected on a screen. I trained young men to put up and take down the screen noiselessly, artistically, and with the utmost neatness and dispatch. I discovered that many men who either lacked ambition or ability to wear collars came to that meeting, and they sang, too, when the lights were low. When in full view of each other they were as close-mouthed as clams. The singing became a special feature. My brethren in other churches considered this a terrible "come-down" at first, but changed their minds later and copied the thing, borrowing the best of my good slides and not a few of the unique ideas accompanying the scheme. A Methodist brother across the river said confidentially to a friend that he was going to launch on the community "a legitimate sensation"--a boys' choir. My plans for getting the poor people to church succeeded. Such a thing as fraternizing the steady goers--goers by habit and heredity--and the unsteady goers--goers by the need of the soul--was impossible. The most surprising thing in these evening meetings to the men who financed the church was the fact that these poor people paid for their own extras. That goes a long way in church affairs. The weekly children's meeting I called "The Pleasant Hour." Believing that the most important work of the Church is the teaching of the children, it was my custom for many years in many churches to personally conduct a Sunday School on a week day so that the best I had to give would be given to the children. In my larger work for the city two ideas governed my action. One was to get the church people interested in civic problems and the other was to solve civic problems or to attempt a solution whether church people were interested in them or not. I organized a flower mission for the summer months. We called it a Flower House. An abandoned hotel was cleaned up. A few loads of sand dumped in the back yard as a sort of extemporized seashore where little children might play. Flowers were solicited and distributed to the folks who had neither taste nor room for flowers. We did some teaching, too, and gave entertainments. A barrel-organ played on certain days by the sand pile; and that music of the proletariat never fails to attract a crowd. The flower mission developed into a social settlement. We called it Lowell House. At first the church financed it, then it got tired of that, and when I incorporated the settlement work in my church reports in order to stimulate support, the settlement workers--directors rather--got tired of the church and went into a spasm over it. Lowell House is accounted a successful institution of the city now. It is doing a successful church work among the poor--church work with this exception, that its head worker--its educated, sympathetic priestess--lives there and shares her little artistic centre with the crowd who live in places not good enough for domestic animals. In 1898 New Haven's public baths consisted of a tub in the basement of a public school. I photographed the tub and projected the picture on a screen in the Grand Opera House for the consideration of the citizens. That was the beginning of an agitation for a public bath house--an agitation that was pushed until the dream became a brick structure. I was not particularly interested in the bath _per se_. It was an opportunity to get people to work for something this side of heaven, to emphasize the thought that men were as much worth taking care of as horses--an idea that has not yet a firm grip on the mind of the bourgeoisie. The bath-house bill passed the Aldermanic and Councilmanic chambers, was signed by the mayor and the matter of building put into the hands of the Board of Health. The Board forgot all about it and some time later the agitation began again and persisted until another city government and another mayor had made a second law and carried it into effect. There was no ecclesiastical objection to my participation in this movement. It was a small thing and cost little. CHAPTER XV A VISIT HOME My Father had been begging me for years to come home and say good-bye to him; so, in 1901, I made the journey. I hadn't been in the old home long before the alley was filled with neighbours, curious to have a look at "ould Jamie's son who was a clargymaan." I went to the door and shook hands with everybody in the hope that after a while they would go away and leave me with my own. But nobody moved. They stood and stared for several hours. "'Deed I mind ye fine when ye weren't th' height av a creepie!" said one woman, who was astounded that I couldn't call her by name. "Aye," said another, "'deed ye were i' fond o' th' Bible, an' no wundther yer a clargymaan!" A dozen old women "minded" as many different things of my childhood. I finally dismissed them with this phrase, as I dropped easily enough into the vernacular, "Shure, we'd invite ye all t' tay but there's only three cups in the house!" My sister Mary and her four children lived with my father. We shut _and barred_ the door when the neighbours left and sat down to "tay," which consisted of potatoes and buttermilk. Mary had been trying to improve on the old days but I interposed, and together, we went through the old régime. Father took the pot of potatoes to the old tub in which he used to steep the leather. There he drained them--then put them on the fire for a minute to allow the steam to escape. "I'm going to 'kep' them," I said, and they both laughed. "Oh, heavens, don't," he said; "shure they don't 'kep' pirtas in America!" "I'm not in America now," I answered, as I circled as much of the little bare table as I could with my arms to keep the potatoes from rolling off. He dumped them in a heap in the centre; they rolled up against my arms and breast and I pushed them back. Mary cleared a space for a small pile of salt and the buttermilk bowls. "We'll haave a blessin' by a rale ministher th' night," Mary said. "Oh, yis, that's thrue enough," my father said, "but Alec minds th' time whin it was blessin' enough to hev th' murphies--don't ye, boy?" After "tay" I tacked a newspaper over the lower part of the window--my father lit the candle and Mary put a few turfs on the fire and we sat as we used to sit so many years ago. My father was so deaf that I had to shout to make him hear and nearly everything I said could be heard by the neighbours in the alley, many of whom sat around the door to hear whatever they could of the story they supposed I would tell of the magic land beyond the sea. I unbarred the door in answer to a loud knock; it was a most polite note from a Roman Catholic schoolmaster inviting me to occupy a spare room in his house. Half an hour later we were again interrupted by another visitor, an old friend who also invited me to occupy his spare bed. It was evidently disturbing the town to know where I was to sleep. I politely refused all invitations. Each invitation was explained to my father. "Shure that's what's cracking m' own skull," he said; "where th' divil will ye sleep, anyway, at all, at all?" Then they listened and I talked--talked of what the years had meant to me. The old man sighed often and occasionally there were tears in Mary's eyes; and there were times when the past surged through my mind with such vividness that I could only look vacantly into the white flame of the peat fire. Once after a long silence my father spoke--his voice trembled, "Oh," he said, "if she cud just have weathered through till this day!" "Aye," Mary said, "but how do ye know she isn't jist around here somewhere, anyway?" "Aye," the old man said as he nodded his head, "deed that's thrue for you, Mary, she may!" He took his black cutty pipe out of his mouth and gazed at me for a moment. "What d'ye mind best about her?" "I mind a saying she had that has gone through life with me." "'Ivery day makes its own throuble?'" "No, not that; something better. She used to say so often, 'It's nice to be nice.'" "Aye, I mind that," he said. "Then," I continued, "on Sundays when she was dressed and her nice tallied cap on her head, I thought she was the purtiest woman I ever saw!" "'Deed, maan, she was that!" When bed time came I took a small lap-robe from my suit case, spread it on the hard mud floor, rolled some other clothes as a pillow and lay down to rest. Sleep came slowly but as I lay I was not alone, for around me were the forms and faces of other days. Next day I visited the scene of my boyhood's vision--I went through the woods where I had my first full meal. I visited the old church; but the good Rector was gathered to his fathers. It was all a day-dream; it was like going back to a former incarnation. Along the road on my way home I discovered the most intimate friend of my boyhood--the boy with whom I had gathered faggots, played "shinney" and gone bird-nesting. He was "nappin'" stones. He did not recognize my voice but his curiosity was large enough to make him throw down his hammer, take off the glasses that protected his eyes and stare at me. "Maan, yer changed," he said, "aren't you?" "And you?" "Och, shure, I'm th' same ould sixpence!" "Except that you're older!" There was a look of disappointment on his face. "Maan," he said, "ye talk like quality--d'ye live among thim?" I explained something of my changed life; I told of my work and what I had tried to do and I closed with an account of the vision in the fields not far from where we sat. "Aye," he would say occasionally, "aye, 'deed it's quare how things turn out." When I ended the story of the vision he said: "Ye haaven't forgot how t' tell a feery story--ye wor i' good at that!" "Bob" hadn't read a book, or a newspaper in all those years. He got his news from the men who stopped at his stone pile to light their pipes--what he didn't get there he got at the cobbler's while his brogues were being patched or at the barber's when he went for his weekly shave. We talked each other out in half an hour. A wide gulf was between us: it was a gulf in the realm of mind. As I moved away toward the town, I wondered why I was not breaking stones on the roadside, and I muttered Bob's well-worn phrase: "How quare!" It became so difficult to talk to my father without gathering a crowd at the door that I shortened my stay and took him to Belfast where we could spend a few days together and alone. We had our meals at first in a quiet little restaurant on a side street. He had never been in a restaurant. As the waiter went around the table, the old man watched him with curious eyes. I have explained that my father never swore. He was mightily unfortunate in his selection of phrases and when irritated by the attention of the waiter to the point of explosion he said, in what he supposed was a whisper: "What th' hell is he dancin' around us like an Indian fur?" I explained. Everybody in the place heard the explanation; they also heard his reply: "Send him t' blazes--he takes m' appetite away!" We moved into the house of a friend after that. One afternoon I took him for a walk in the suburbs of the city. He rested on a rustic bench on the lawn of a beautiful villa while I made a call. "Twenty-five years ago," I said to the gentleman of the house, "I had a great inspiration from the life of a young lady who lived in this house, and I just called to say 'thank you.'" "Her father is dead," he said. "I am her uncle." Then he told me of the career of the city girl I had met on the farm and whom I had watched entering the church on Sundays. "About the time you missed her at church," he said, "she was married to a rich young man. He spent his fortune in liquor and finally ended his life. She began to drink, after his death, but was persuaded to leave the country. She went to America. We haven't heard from her for a long time." The following Sunday I told my father we were going to church. "Not me!" he said. "Oh, yes," I coaxed; "just this once with me." "What th' divil's the use whin I haave a praycher t' m'silf." "I am to be the preacher at the church." "Och, but that's a horse ov another colour, bedad. Shure thin I'll go." When my father saw me in a Geneva gown, his eyes were filled with tears. The old white-haired lady who found the place in the book for him was the young lady's mother. Her uncle had ushered him into her pew, but they had never met each other nor did the old lady know until after church that he was my father. He never heard a word of the sermon, but as we emerged from the church into the street he put his arms around my neck and kissing me said, "Och, boy, if God wud only take me now I'd be happy!" He had been listening with his eyes and what he saw so filled him with joy that he was more willing to leave life than to have the emotion leave him. Though he was very feeble, I took him to Scotland with me to visit my brothers and sisters; and there I left him. As the hour of farewell drew near he wanted to have me alone--all to himself. "Ye couldn't stay at home awhile? Shure I'll be goin' in a month or two." "Ah, that's impossible, father." He hung his head. "D'ye believe I'll know her whin I go? God wudn't shut me out from her for th' things I've done--" "Of course he won't." "He wudn't be so d----d niggardly, wud He?" "Never!" He fondled my hands as if I were a child. The hour drew nigher. He had so many questions to ask, but the inevitableness of the situation struck him dumb. We were on the platform; the train was about to move out. I made a motion; he gripped me tightly, whispering in my ear: "Ask God onct in a while to let me be with yer mother--will ye, boy?" I kissed him farewell and saw him no more. I went on to France. My objective point in France was the study of Millet and his work. I wanted to interpret him to working people in New Haven. So to Greville on La Hague I went with a camera. Greville consists of a church and a dozen houses. Gruchy is half a mile beyond, on the edge of the sea. In Gruchy Millet was born; in Greville he first came into contact with incentive--I photographed both places and spent a night and a day with M. Polidor, the old inn-keeper who was the painter's friend. Surely, never was so large a statue erected in so small a village. The peasant artist sits there on a bank of mosses, looking over at the old church that squats on the hillside. In Cherbourg I found more traces of his art and some stories of his life there that would be out of place here. I found four portraits painted while he was paying court to his first wife. I found them in a little shoe shop in a by-street, in possession of a distant relative of his first wife. From Cherbourg I went to Barbizon, where Millet spent the latter part of his life. I was very graciously received and entertained by his son François and his American wife. To browse among the master's relics, to handle the old books of his small library, to hold, as one would a babe of tender years, his palette, were small things, judged by the values of the average life: to me it was one of the most inspiring hours of my career. Paris was to me an art centre--little more. I followed the footsteps of Millet from one place to another. I sat before his paintings in the Louvre--I met some of his old friends and gathered material for a lecture on his work. From Paris I went to London. The British capital was more than an art centre to me. It was a centre, literary, sociological and religious. I was the guest of Sir George Williams one afternoon at one of his parties and met Lord Radstock whom I had heard preach on a street corner in Whitechapel twenty years before. Besides visiting and photographing the literary haunts of the great masters, I made the acquaintance of the leaders of the Socialist movement. I went to St. Albans to attend the first convention of the Ruskin societies. The convention was composed of men who in literature and life were translating into terms of life and labour the teachings of John Ruskin. From London I went to Oxford and spent a few weeks browsing around the most fascinating city in the world, to me. My visit was in anticipation of the British convention of the Young Men's Christian Association to which I was a fraternal delegate from the Young Men's Association of Yale University. I was invited to a garden party at Blenheim Palace while at Oxford. I arrived early and presented my card. Without waiting I went into the grounds and proceeded to enjoy the beautiful walks. Before I had gone far, I met a young man who seemed familiar with the place. I told him that I had once taken the Duchess through part of the slum region of New York, and expressed a hope that she was at home. "No," he said, "she is conducting a fair in London for soldiers' wives." My next remark was in the realm of ethics. I had heard that the father of the present Duke was a good deal of a rake and asked the young man whether that was true or not. He said he thought it was like the obituary notice of Mark Twain--very much exaggerated. "I have been a flunky to some of these high fliers," I said, "and I know how hard it is to get at the facts and also how easy it is to form a mistaken judgment." "Yes," he said, "that's true, but men of that type, while they are often worse than they are painted are more often much better than the best the public think of them! I am the successor of the late Duke, and speak with authority on at least one case." He took me through the palace, not only the parts usually open to the public but the private apartments also, and later in the afternoon he took me over some of the property at Woodstock, stopping for a few minutes at the house of Geoffrey Chaucer. The Rector of Exeter College had invited a group of the leaders of the convention to a luncheon in Exeter and, because I was the only American, I was asked to be present and deliver a short address. The grounds of Exeter show the good results of the four or five hundred years' care bestowed upon them. In my brief sojourn in Oxford as a student I had been chased out of the grounds of Exeter by the caretaker, under the suspicion that I was a burglar, taking the measure of the walks, windows, doors, etc. I told this story to a man with whom I later exchanged cards; he was an old man and his card, read "W. Creese, Y.M.C.A. secretary, June 6, 1844." "You were in early, brother," I said. "Yes," he said modestly, "I was in _first_." He helped George Williams to organize the first branch of the Y.M.C.A. My story went the rounds of those invited to luncheon and prepared the way for the address I delivered. The first thing I did on my return from Europe was to visit the last known address of the girl friend of my youth. It was in a Negro quarter of the city. "Does Mrs. G---- live here?" I asked the coloured woman who opened the door. "She did, mistah--but she done gone left, dis mawnin'." "Do you know where she has gone?" "Yes'r, she done squeezed in wif ol' Mammy Jackson," and she pointed out the tenement. As I passed down the steps I noticed a small pile of furniture on the sidewalk. Something impelled me to ask about it. "Yes'r," the negress said, "dem's her house traps; d' landlord done gone frow'd dem out." I found her sitting with an old negress by the stove in a second-floor back tenement. "I bring you a message of love from your mother," I said, without making myself known. We talked for a few minutes. I saw nothing whatever of the girl of long ago. There was a little of the voice--the fine musical voice--but nothing of form, nothing of feature. Deep lines of care and suffering marred her face and labour had calloused her hands. She was poorly dressed--had been ill and out of work, and behind in her rent. Too proud to beg, she was starving with her neighbours, the black people. I excused myself, found the landlord, and rearranged the home she had so heroically struggled to hold intact. "Do you remember the farm at Moylena?" I asked. "Yes, of course." "And a farm boy----" "Yes, yes," she said, adding: "those few days on that farm were the only happy days of my life!" "I am that boy and I have come to thank you for the inspiration you were to me so long ago." She looked at me intently, perhaps searching for the boy as I had been searching for the girl. "There was a wide gulf between us then," she said. "In these long years you have crossed to where I was and I--I have crossed to where you were, and the gulf remains." CHAPTER XVI NEW HAVEN AGAIN--AND A FIGHT In December, 1901, the New Haven Water Company applied for a renewal of its charter. The city had been getting nothing for this valuable franchise, and there was considerable protest against a renewal on the same terms. The Trades Council asked the ministers of the churches to make a deliverance on the question, but there was no answer. I was directly challenged to say something on the subject. I attended a hearing in the city hall. It was the annual meeting night of our church, and I closed the church meeting in the usual manner. As quickly as possible I made my way to the public hearing. The committee room was crowded; on one side were the labouring men and on the other the stockholders and officers of the company. Several prominent members of my church, whom I had missed at the annual meeting, were in the committee room. When called upon to speak, I asked the committee to hold the balance level. "We tax a banana vendor a few dollars a year for the use of the streets," I said, "then why should a rich corporation be given an infinitely larger use of them for nothing?" This provoked the rich men of the church, for most of them were stockholders in the company, and two of them were officers. The thing was talked over afterward in the back end of a small store where all the church policies were formulated. One of the members was sent to the parsonage to question and warn me. My visitor spoke of former pastors who had been "called of God" elsewhere for much less than I had done. Another man came later, and asked for a promise that I would keep out of such affairs in the future. This was the first fly in the ointment, the first break in the most cordial of relationships between me and the church. The church had been organized fifty years when this incident occurred. We were preparing to celebrate the golden jubilee. I gathered the officers together, and we went over the articles one by one. Not a man in the church believed in "everlasting damnation," but they voted unanimously to leave the hell-fire article just as they had found it. They had all subscribed to it, and it "hadn't hurt them." "Do you mean to tell me," I asked, "that none of you believe in eternal punishment, and yet you are going to force every man, woman, and child who joins your church to solemnly swear before God that they do believe in it?" There was a great silence. "Yes, that's exactly what's what," one man said. This incident illustrates the seared, calloused, surfeited condition of the average mind in the churches. It is glutted with sham, and atrophied by the reiteration of high-sounding but meaningless, pious phrases. I managed to persuade them to so amend their by-laws that children baptized into the church became by that act church members. They did not know that by that amendment they were setting aside two-thirds of their creed, because they didn't know the creed. One of my sermons at the Jubilee attracted the attention of Philo S. Bennett, a New York tea merchant, who made his home in New Haven. We became very close friends. One day Mr. Bennett and Mr. W.J. Bryan called at the parsonage. I happened to be out at the time, but dined with them that evening. Next morning a church member, who was a sort of cat's-paw for the rich men, called at the parsonage and informed me of the "disgust" of the leading members. "They won't stand for it!" he said vehemently. When I spoke at the city hall they catalogued me as a Socialist, and when Mr. Bryan called, they moved me into the "free and unlimited coinage of silver" column. By "they," I mean four or five men--men of means, who absolutely ruled the church. The deacons had nothing to say, the church had as little. "The Society" was the thing. The "Society" in a Congregational church is a sort of secular adjunct charged with the duty of providing the material essentials. Their word is law, the only law. In their estimation business and religion could not be mixed, nor could things of the church be permitted to interfere in politics. The purchase of an alderman was to them as legitimate as the purchase of a cow. Some of them laughed as they told me of buying an election in the borough. It was a great joke to them. They were patriotic, very loudly patriotic, and their special hobby was "the majesty of the law." I was to be punished for that water company affair, and a man was selected to administer the punishment. I had brought this man into the church; I had created a church office for him, and pushed him forward before the men. He was supposed to be my closest friend. He came to the parsonage one morning, to talk over casually the question of salary. "Now," he said, "you don't care how we raise your salary, do you?" "Of course not." "Well, the Society's hard up this year and can only raise $1,600; but the church will raise the other $400, and I have one of them already promised." This seemed a most unusual proceeding, but I was unsuspecting. A few months afterward this man, with tears in his eyes, said: "Mr. Irvine, whatever happens you will be my friend--won't you?" He was doing their work, and wincing under the load of it. "Brother," I said, "when I know whether you are playing the rôle of Judas or John, I will be better able to answer you." At the end of the year it all came out. I was literally fined $400 for attending that meeting. As my term of service drew to a close, the workingmen who had joined the church during my incumbency got together. They were in a majority. A church meeting was called, and a motion passed to call a council of the other churches. The purpose of the call was to advise the church how to proceed to force its own Society to pay the pastor's salary. A leading minister drew up the call. All ministers knew the record of the church: only one minister in its history had left of his own accord. The council met. It was composed of ministers and laymen of other churches. Among the laymen was the president of the telephone company. I had publicly criticized the company for disfiguring the streets with ugly cross-bars that looked like gibbets. The president's opposition to me was well known. The council, under such influence, struck several technical snags, and adjourned. The president of the council wrote me later that the president of the telephone company had advised him not to recall the council, and he had come to that decision. Concerning the defrauding me of my salary, the best people in that church to this day, when speaking of it, say: "Well, we didn't owe it to him, _legally_." The Society spent the money in fitting up the parsonage for my successor. CHAPTER XVII I JOIN A LABOUR UNION AND HAVE SOMETHING TO DO WITH STRIKES After the public hearing on the water contract, several labour unions elected me to honorary membership. The carriage makers' union had so elected me, and a night was set for my initiation. It was a wild winter's night--the streets of the city were covered with snow, and the thermometer registered five above zero. Few hard-working men would come out a night like this. Who would expect them? I was rather glad of the inclement weather. I was weary and tired, and hoped the thing would soon be over. I entered an old office building on Orange street and climbed to the top floor. A man met me as I reached the top of the stairs and led me to a door, where certain formalities were performed. There was an eye-hole in the door, through which men watched each other. There were whispered words in an unknown tongue, then a long pause. Why all this secrecy? What means this panther-like vigilance? It is a time of war. This body of craftsmen is an organized regiment. The battle is for bread. Before the door is opened there is a noise like the sound of far-off thunder. What can it mean? To what mysterious doings am I to become an eye-witness to-night? I became a little anxious, perhaps a little nervous, and regretful. An eye appeared at the hole in the door; there is a whispered conference and I find myself between two men marching up the centre of the hall to the desk of the presiding officer. My entrance was the signal of an outburst of applause such as I had seldom heard before. The hall was small, and it was a mystery how six hundred men could be packed into it. But there they were, solidly packed on both sides of the hall, and as I marched through them they seemed to shake the whole building with their cheers. The chairman rapped for order, and made a short speech. "I ain't what ye'd call a Christian," he said, "but I know the genuine article when I see it. If the Bible is true, Jesus went to the poor, and if the rich wanted him they'd have to look him up. Do you fellows ever notice the church ads in the Sunday papers? They remind me of the columns where ye look for a rent. They all advertise their 'modern improvements.' This minister is doin' th' Jesus business in th' old way. That's why we like him, an' that's why he's here." Once again the rafters seemed to shake with the violent vibrations of enthusiasm, and it was some time before order was restored. My initiation concluded, I made an address. It was as brief as the chairman's. "Reference has been made to a great Master to-night," I said. "Let me ask you craftsmen of New Haven to stand and with all the power of your lungs give three cheers for the Master Craftsman of Galilee." There was the shuffling of many feet for an instant--then a pause, a pause which was full of awe--then, with a roar like thunder, six hundred throats broke into wild applause for Jesus, whom such people ever gladly heard; and straightway, for the first time in the history of organized labour in New Haven, a union meeting was closed with the apostolic benediction. Other unions followed suit. I carried a union card of the "Painters, Paper Hangers and Decorators," and there came a time when every street car on the streets of New Haven carried at least two of my friends, for I became chaplain of the Trolleymen's Union, and took an active part in their work. I was a factor in the wage scale adjustments of the Trolleymen's Union for two years. I fought for them when they were right and against them when they were wrong. I fought on the inside. At first the railroad company looked upon me as a dangerous character; but when their spies in the union reported my actions, the general manager wrote me a letter of thanks and thereafter took me into his confidence. The public, also, looked upon me as inimical to the interests of business, but occasionally the newspapers got at the facts and published them. The New Haven _Register_ of August 8, 1904, in its leading editorial on an averted strike, said: "There is a general feeling in New Haven to-day of satisfaction in the news published in yesterday's papers, that the trolleymen's plans for a strike had been relegated to the ash heap. "The trolleymen were evidently satisfied with the attitude of the railroad managers, and satisfied that they were going to get fair treatment. We read with unusual pleasure the reports of 'cheers' at the meeting; and cheers, not for the little pleasantries of battle, but for the friendly propositions of peace. The sentiment shown by the trolleymen does full justice to their record as law-abiding and intelligent public servants. "One or two phases of the completion of peace negotiations in the local trolley situation call for particular notice here and now. We do not remember, for instance, to have heard for some time of the active participation in labour agitations of a regularly ordained clergyman of the Christian church. We noted, therefore, with respectful interest, the manner in which the Reverend Alexander Irvine took part in the meeting at which the final decision was made, and especially the influence which he brought to bear to clear the atmosphere. Usually hot-headed sympathizers with the cause of labour agitation are the principal advisers at such a time. We remember, and the trolleymen certainly do, that at the critical juncture several summers ago, when a final decision was to have been rendered by the striking trolleymen, an agitator from Bridgeport not only agitated, but nearly managed to turn the balance toward an irreparable break in negotiations. We remember that New Haven people absolutely lost all patience at that juncture, and would have stampeded from their thorough sympathy with the trolleymen's cause had not better wisdom finally prevailed. Mr. Irvine seems to have occupied that gentleman's shoes at the Saturday night meeting, and to have acquitted himself much more to the taste of the public. His interest was, we take it, purely that of any citizen who has studied labour questions sufficiently to arrive at a fair and unprejudiced point of view, and who, moreover, possessed the requisite balance of mind and sincerity of purpose to counsel, when his counsel was asked, judicially. There was absolutely lacking, in his whole connection with the case, any of that sky-rocket, uncertain theorizing that makes the attitude of so many labour 'organizers' so detrimental, in the public eye, to real labour benefit. New Haven has considerable to thank Mr. Irvine for in his attitude in the past crisis. More sound advice and friendly counsel and wise sympathy from such men as he are needed in labour troubles." Another New Haven paper, commenting editorially on my attitude toward a strike carried on by the bakers' union, said: "We commend to the Connecticut Railway and Lighting Company, which has now practically four strikes on its hands, in two Connecticut cities, the sentiment of the Reverend Alexander Irvine, in his sermon last Sunday night in reference to the striking bakers of this city who declared against a proposition to arbitrate with the bosses. 'If they have nothing to arbitrate,' said Mr. Irvine, 'they have nothing to strike about.' The proposition would seem to involve a sound principle of business ethics. An honest disagreement is always arbitrable. A body of workmen who make a demand which they are unwilling to submit to the judgment of a fair and intelligent committee deserve little sympathy if they lose their fight, and an employer who refuses to entrust his case to the honesty, fairness and justice of a committee of respectable citizens representing the best element of that public from which he derives his support, must not be surprised if he loses public sympathy." I was elected a member of the teamsters' union while the teamsters were on strike. I was in their headquarters night and day, doing what I could for them; but I was unable to offset the bad leadership which landed nine of them in jail. On May 1st, I left Pilgrim Church. My farewell sermon was a fair statement of the case. The sermon was published in the press. The Hartford _Post_ made the following editorial comments on it: "ONE CHURCH AND ITS PASTOR "Plain speaking is so much out of fashion that when examples of it are discovered they rivet attention. Undoubtedly there was a good deal in the farewell sermon of the Reverend Alexander F. Irvine, who has just closed a pastorate of four and one-half years in the Pilgrim Congregational Church in New Haven, that was applicable only to that church, but possibly some statements have more or less general application. At any rate, it is an interesting case and the sermon was remarkable for its almost brutal directness, its cutting satire, its searching exposition of the wholesale spirit of charity mixed with kindly humour which runs through it. "After four years and six months of labour, a clergyman is certainly qualified to speak of the characteristics of the pastorate. In most cases the farewell sermon is, however, a mass of 'glittering generalities,' a formal, perfunctory affair. Often it is omitted altogether. The pastor simply goes out, leaving the church to its fate, commending it to the care of the Almighty. His private views are not expressed. Mr. Irvine retired in considerable turmoil, but he made his parting memorable by expressing his sentiments, and his frankness was absolute. "In reviewing his pastorate, Mr. Irvine spoke of the children's services on Wednesday nights, the men's Bible class and a group of sixty added to the church at its fiftieth anniversary as among the happy features of his administration. But he went on to say that those new members were not welcomed by the 'Society' because they brought no money into the treasury. The clash that went on during those four and one-half years is revealed by what the pastor said on this matter. He tried to democratize the church. He wanted to get in 'new blood.' He tried to interest the workingmen, as many other pastors have tried to do and are trying to do, with varying success. We hear a great deal about the church and the masses, how they are drifting apart. Here is a minister who tried to bring them together. He had services when all seats were free, and workingmen were invited. He interested many of them, and many joined the church. But the attempt was a failure, for the church as a whole didn't take kindly to people without money. 'In the making of a deacon,' said Mr. Irvine, 'goodness is a quality sought after, but the qualifications for the Society's committee is cash--cold cash. If there is a deviation from this rule, it is on the score of patronage. Power in the case of the former is a rope of sand; in the latter it is law.' Again on this line, Mr. Irvine said: 'It was inevitable that these workingmen should be weighed by their contributions. That is the standard of the Society.' "How true it is that this standard is applied in more churches than the Pilgrim Church in New Haven those who are in the churches know. It is not true, of course, universally, but this is not by any means an isolated case. Possibly the organization of the Congregational churches is faulty in this respect. There is the church and there is the Society. The Society's committee runs the business of the church. It is apt to be made up of men to whom the dollar is most essential, and often the committee exercises absolute power in most of the affairs of the church. In this case it froze out a man who wanted to go out and bring in men from the highways and byways, and now he has gone to establish what he calls the church of the democracy. It is to be a church independent of the rich. There are such churches--not many, to be sure--but they come pretty close to the gospel of the New Testament. "'A man here may do one of three things,' said the democratic clergyman in his good-bye address. 'He may degenerate and conform to type. He may stay for three or four years by the aid of diplomacy and much grace. He may go mad. Therefore, an essential qualification for this pastorate is a keen sense of humour. If my successor has this he will enjoy the community ministry for a few years and will do much good among the children--he will enjoy the view from the parsonage, the bay, the river, the mountains. He will make friends, too, of some of the most genuinely good people on earth. He must come, as I came, believing this place to be a suburb of paradise, and blessed will that man be if he departs before he changes his mind.' "That is satire, and possibly out of place in the pulpit, but it may be that the words could be applied without stretching the truth to other pastorates. 'The preacher is their "hired man." He may be brainy, but not too brainy--social, but not too social--religious, but not too religious. He must trim his sails to suit every breeze of the community; his mental qualities must be acceptable to the contemporary ancestors by whom he is surrounded, or he does not fit.' The bitterness in those words is evident, but the truths they contain are important. "It may be that more sermons with equal plain speaking would do good. It may be that the conservatism, not to say the Phariseeism, of the modern church requires a John the Baptist to pierce it to the core, and expose its inner rottenness. The church that does not welcome the poor man and his family with just as much heartiness, sincerity and kindly sympathy as it does the rich man and his family is certainly not worthy of the great Teacher who spoke of the great difficulty the rich man has in entering the kingdom of God." I have delivered about two written sermons in twenty-five years. That farewell message was one of them. I wanted to be careful, fair, just. I could not escape the belief that at least seven of my predecessors who had been pushed out by unfair means had left with a lie on their lips. Pastor and people, in dissolving relationship, had always assumed and often explicitly stated on the records that the departing minister "had been called of God" elsewhere. If God was the author of their methods of dismissal, He ought to be ashamed of Himself. There was no interregnum. The Sunday following that farewell sermon I preached my first sermon as pastor of the newly organized People's Church of New Haven. About thirty people left the old church and joined the new. Among them was a saintly woman, who had been a member for half a century of Pilgrim Church. We had one man of means--Philo Sherman Bennett, the friend of Mr. Bryan. The opening meeting was in the Hyperion Theatre. The creed was simple, and brevity itself: "This church is a self-governing community for the worship of God and the service of man." A Jewish Rabbi read the Scriptures, a Universalist minister made an address, and a judge of the city led in prayer. Part of my address was a series of serious questions: "Will this movement raise the tone of society? Will it increase mutual confidence? Will it diminish intemperance? Will it find the people uneducated and leave them educated? Will the voice of its leader be lifted in the cause of justice and humanity? Will it tend after all to elevate or lower the moral sentiments of mankind? Will it increase the love of truth or the power of superstition or self-deception? Will it divide or unite the world? Will it leave the minds of men clearer and more enlightened, or will it add another element of confusion to the chaos? These are the tests we put to this new church and to our personal lives." We had an old hall in the outskirts of the city, on a railroad bank. There we opened our Sunday School and began our church activities. I got a band of Yale men to go to work at the hall. The son of Senator Crane, of Massachusetts, became head of the movement, but that plan was spoiled by a man of the English Lutheran persuasion, who was an instructor in Yale. It appeared that the church of which this man was a member had been trying to rent this old hall and, not succeeding in that, they claimed the community. This instructor complained to the Yale authorities, and without a word to me the Yale band was withdrawn. A few weeks after the Lutherans claimed another community, and went to work in it. In the middle of our first year our little church received a staggering blow in the death of Mr. Philo S. Bennett. We had become very intimate. I dined with him once a week. He was about to retire from business, and after a rest he was to give his time to the church idea. He inquired about buildings, and he had fixed his mind on a $25,000 structure. He spoke to others of these plans, but in Idaho, that summer, he was killed in an accident. Mrs. Bennett sent for me and I took charge of the funeral arrangements. Mr. Bryan came on at once and helped. After the funeral he read and discussed the will. I was present at several of these discussions. The sealed letter written by the dead man was the bone of contention. Then the lawyers came in and the case went into the courts. The world knew but a fragment of the truth. It looked to me at first as if a selfish motive actuated Mr. Bryan, but as I got at the details one after another, details the world can never know, I developed a profound respect for him. He was the only person involved that cared anything for the mind, will or intention of the dead man, and his entire legal battle was not that he should get what Mr. Bennett had willed him, but that the designs of his friend should not be frustrated: not merely with regard to the fifty thousand--he offered to distribute that--but with regard to the money for poor students. We missed Mr. Bennett, not only for his moral and financial help, but because of his great business ability. During the coal strike of 1902, for instance, when coal was beyond the reach of the poor, we organized among the working people a coal company. The coal dealers blocked our plans everywhere. We were shut out. Then the idea came to us to charter a shipload and bring it from Glasgow. It was the keen business ability of Mr. Bennett that helped us to success. We needed $15,000 to cable over. I laid the plans before Mr. Bennett; he went over them carefully and put up the money. Before we needed it, however, we had sold stock at a dollar a share, and the coal in Scotland brought in an amount beyond our immediate needs. This, of course, was "interfering with business men's affairs," and the dealers in coal were not slow to express themselves. I was a director of the coal company for some time. The newspapers announced that I was going into the coal business to make a living; but I had neither desire nor ability in that direction. It was a great day in New Haven when our ship entered the harbour and broke the siege. We sold coal for half the current price. The idea of a church building had held a number of people in our little church for a long time, but after Mr. Bennett's death that hope seemed to die, and those to whom a church home was more than a church, left us; those of that mind that didn't leave voluntarily were lured away by ministers who had a building. The amount of ecclesiastical pilfering that goes on in a small city like New Haven is surprising. Conversion is a lost art or a lost experience, and the average minister whose reputation and salary depend upon the number of people he can corral, usually has two fields of action: one is the Sunday School and the other is the loose membership of other churches. The theft is usually deliberate. When my income was about forty dollars a month, subscribed by very poor people, a pastor who had been building up his church at the expense of his neighbours, wrote me that he was trying to persuade one of our members to join his church. It was the most brazen thing I had ever known. He felt that our dissolution was a matter of time, and he wanted his share of the wreckage. He went after the only person in our church who had an income that more than supplied personal needs. Afterward, this same minister entered into a deal with the trustees of the hall we used, by which the hall and the Sunday School were handed over to him. Of course, we made no fight over the thing--we just let him take them. This is called "bringing in the Kingdom of God." We were not free from dissension within our own ranks, either. Mr. Bryan came to lecture for us in the largest theatre in town. Admission was to be by ticket, on Sunday afternoon. The committee of our church that took charge of the tickets began to distribute seats--the best seats and boxes--to their personal friends. Thousands were clamouring for tickets. It was an opportunity to give the city a big, helpful meeting, and to do it democratically and well. But the committee would brook no interference. I announced in the papers that all tickets were general admissions, and "first come, first served" would be our principle. Sunday morning, when I was half-way through my discourse, one of the committee handed me a note. I did not open it until I finished. It was a threat that if I did not call off the democratic order, the committee would leave the church. The meeting was a great success, and the committee made good its threat. What the writer of the following letter expected of me I have no idea, nor did his letter enlighten me: "DEAR SER: "Wen I gave my name for a church member it was fer a peeples church, not a fol-de-rol solo and labour union church. "Drop my name." We had at our opening a solo by the finest singer in the city, and I had thanked the labour unions for their help. His name was dropped. An educated woman thought she saw in our simple creed an open door she had been seeking for years. She joined us with enthusiasm. One day I was calling on her, and as I sat by the door I saw a dark figure pass with a sack of coal on his back. The figure looked familiar. "Pardon me," I said, as I stepped out to make sure. "Hello, Fritz!" I called. The coal heaver had only trousers and an undershirt on, and looked as black as a Negro. Sweat poured over his coal-blackened face. We gripped hands. The lady watched us with interest. "Do you know him?" she asked. "Yes, indeed!" I said. "And you must know him, for he is one of our deacons." She never came back. Democracy like that was too much for her. The deacon himself left our church a few months later because he discovered that I did not believe in a literal hell of "fire and brimstone," whatever that is. The chairman of our trustees was a business man who was very much engrossed with the New Thought. He saw a great future for me if I would get "in tune with the infinite." I was more than willing. He expounded to me the wonders of the new régime. Would I take lessons in healing? Certainly! He paid an American Yogi a hundred dollars to teach me. I was unaware of the cost. At first it was by correspondence. His chirography looked like a plate of spaghetti. I was instructed how to take a bath and when. The second letter ordered me to sleep with my head to the East. I was "a Capricorner, buoyant, lucky," so he said. At the end of a month I paid him a visit. He showed me how to manipulate a patient--absent or present--and how to charge! The correspondence was taken verbatim from a ten-cent book on astrology; I got tired, and handed the letters over to my wife. She took them seriously, and when she had made what she thought was progress she inadvertently told the chairman of the trustees. That settled him. He resigned forthwith, and we saw him no more. I thought we had reached the point where there was nothing further to lose; but I was mistaken. I had been charged with being a Socialist, and, curious to know what a Socialist was, I began to study the subject. What I feared came upon me: I announced myself a Socialist. That settled the Single Taxers; they left in a bunch! No, hardly in a bunch; for two of them remained. The Universalists invited us to use their church for our Sunday night meetings. We thought that a fortunate windfall. We were to pay five dollars a night. We did so until one week we had nothing to eat and we let the rent wait. The trustees of the Universalist Church met and passed a resolution something like this: "Resolved, that in order that the good feeling existing between the People's Church and the Universalist Church be maintained, that the People's Church be requested to pay the rent after each service." We paid up and quit. The most intelligent man in our church was a young draftsman in the Winchester Arms Company. He was a man of boundless energy and great courage. He lost his job. No reason was given. His wife, before her marriage, had been a trained nurse, and in her professional life had nursed the wife of a bank president, who was a director in the gun company. One day these ladies met, and the lady of the bank said she would find out why the husband of her former nurse was discharged. The director got at the facts, and gave them to his wife, _sub rosa_: "He belongs to Irvine's church--and Irvine is an anarchist." The young man got another job in another city. After a few discharges of that kind, men who did not want to leave the city got scared and gave me a wide berth. I looked around for something to do to earn a living. I found a young bookbinder in a commercial house, and as he was a master craftsman, I advised him to hang out a shingle and work for himself. He did so. When I was casting around for a new method of earning a living I thought of him, and asked him to take me as an apprentice. He did so, and I put an apron on and began to work at his bench. One day, when the reporters were hard up for news, one of them called for an interview. "Have you ever published any sermons, Mr. Irvine?" "Yes; one, and a fine one." "Where was it published?" "Right here in New Haven!" "A volume?" "Yes." I went to my case and produced a book--I had sewed it, backed it, bound and tooled it. It was my first job, and I was proud of it. I am proud of it now. It is the best sermon I ever preached. Another day a professor in the Yale Medical School called to have some books bound at the bindery. "Who is that fellow at your bench?" he asked. "Mr. Irvine," the bookbinder replied. "The Socialist?" "Yes." He took the young man aside and told him that he could expect no recognition from the "best citizens" as long as he kept me. Off came my apron, and I looked around again. I was very fond of Dr. T.T. Munger. In his vigorous days his was a great intellect, and when in his study one day he told me that I had no gospel to preach, I felt deeply the injustice of the charge. I could not argue. I would not defend myself. I valued his friendship too highly. I hit upon a plan, however. I had published in a labour paper seventeen sermons for working people. I went to a printer and told him that, if he would print them in a book, I would peddle them from door to door until I got the printer's bill. They were printed in a neat volume, entitled "The Master and the Chisel." I paid the printer's bill, and gave the rest away. I sent one to Dr. Munger; and this is what he said of it: "DEAR MR. IRVINE: "Many thanks for the little book you sent me. I have read nearly all the brief chapters, and this would not be the case if they were dull. That they certainly are not. Nor would they have held my interest if they did not in the main strike me as true. I can say more, namely, that they seem to me admirably suited to the people you have in charge, and good for anybody. They have at least done me good, and often stirred me deeply. Their strong point is the humanity that runs along their pages--along with a sincere reverence. I hope they will have a wide circulation." The tide was ebbing, but it was not yet out. The announcement that I was a Socialist brought, of course, the members of the party around me, but on Sunday nights, when they came, expecting a discourse on economic determinism and found me searching for the hidden springs of the heart, and the larger personal life, as well as the larger social life, they went away disappointed and never came back. As I looked around, however, at the churches and the university, I could find nothing to equal the social passion of the socialists--it was a religion with them. True, they were limited in their expression of that passion, but they were live coals, all of them, and I was more at home in their meetings than in the churches. CHAPTER XVIII I BECOME A SOCIALIST I soon joined the party and gave myself body, soul and spirit to the Socialists' propaganda. The quest for a living took me to a little farm on the outskirts of the city. There were eighteen acres--sixteen of them stones. Gradually I began to feel that my rejection was not a mere matter of being let alone, of ignoring me; it was a positive attitude. There was a design to drive me out of the city. On the farm I was without the gates in person but my influence was within, among the workers. We spent every penny we had on the farm. I hired a neighbouring farmer to plow my ground and plant my seed, for I had neither horse nor machinery. I told him I had a little cottage in the woods in Massachusetts that I was offering for sale and I would pay him out of the proceeds. At first he believed me and did the work. It took me two months to get that cottage sold and get the money for it. The farmer's son camped on my doorstep daily. Every day I met him, in the fields or on the road. I spoke in such soft tones and promised so volubly every time he approached me that he got the impression that I had no cottage--that I was a fraud and cheating his father. He spread that impression. He began after a while to insult me, to make fun of me. I debated with myself one afternoon whether when he again repeated his insults I should thrash him or treat him as a joke. I decided on the former. Meantime the check for the cottage came and relieved the situation. Despite my inability to become a Yogi, I believed in the New Thought. My wife and I used to "hold the thought," "make the mental picture," and "go into the silence." We did this regularly. I had an old counterfeit ten-dollar bill for a decoy. I shut my eyes and imagined myself stuffing big bundles of them into the pigeon-holes of my desk. I got an incubator, filled it with Buff Orpington eggs and kept the thermometer at 103° F. My knees grew as hard as a goat's from watching it. In the course of events, two chickens came. We had pictured the yard literally covered with them. These poor things broke their legs over the eggs. My wife was more optimistic than I was. "Wait," she said, "these things are often several days late." So we waited; waited ten days and then refilled the thing and began all over again. We lost an old hen that was so worthless that we never looked for her. In the fullness of her time she returned with a brood of fourteen! She had been in "the silence" to some purpose! "Well, let's let the hens alone," my wife said with a sigh; "they know this business better than we do." But we kept on monkeying with mental images--it was great fun. During our stay on that farm I did four times more pastoral work than I had ever done in my life. I was the minister of the nondescript and the destitute. I presided over funerals, weddings, baptisms, strikes, protests, mass meetings. Nobody thought of paying anything. To those I served I had a sort of halo, a wall of mystery; to me it was often the halo of hunger--of the wolf and the wall--yes, a wall, truly, and very high that separated me from my own. An incident will show what my brethren thought of my service to the poor. I was in the public library one day when the scribe of the ministerial association to which I belonged accosted me: "Hello, Irvine!" "Hello, C----! Splendid weather we're having, isn't it?" "Splendid," replied C----; and in the same breath he said, "say, you don't come around to the association; do you want your name kept on the roll?" I hesitated for a moment, then said: "Whatever would give you most pleasure, brother--leaving it on or taking it off--do that!" That was all--not another word--he reported that I wanted my name removed, and that practically ended my ministerial standing in the Congregational ministry. The Jewish Rabbi who had taken part in our opening service met me on the street one day. "Dr. Smyth and I are coming to see you, Irvine," he said. "I'll be mighty glad to see you both, Rabbi. What are you coming for?" "Well, we think it's too bad that the labour gang use you as a sucker and we want to see if we can't get a place in some mission for you." "Rabbi, some of your rich Jews have been after you for appearing on our platform. Come now, isn't that so?" "Well, it's because they believe as I believe, that you are used as a sucker." "I don't like your word, Rabbi; but there are fifty ministers in town. If Capital has forty-nine suckers, why not let Labour have one?" That made him rather furious and he said: "You remind me of Jesus, a fanatic. He died at 33 when he might have lived to a good old age and done some good!" "That," I said, "is the highest compliment I have ever received." I bared my head at the word and then left him on the sidewalk. The New Haven water company managed to get what was called an "eternal contract" passed through both chambers of the city government. Only labouring people opposed it. Naturally there was a strong suspicion of foul play. [Illustration: State Convention of the Socialist Party of Connecticut, May 31, 1906] A year afterward a man came to me with a grip-sack full of documents. He had been expert book-keeper for the water company, and knew the facts and figures for twenty-five years. Among them were two cancelled checks--one for a thousand, which was made out by and to the president, and dated the day a certain committee was to meet to go over the terms of the contract. The other was made out to a shyster lawyer and was for fifteen thousand. He expected to create a sensation. The thing had worked on his conscience until it became unbearable. He came to me because of what he had learned of me at the water company office. It takes a civic conscience to deal with such a problem and New Haven had no such thing at that time. He took the documents from one place to another--to ministers, lawyers, judges, legislators, etc. Nothing could be done. They were all the personal friends of the officials. The papers wouldn't print anything about it. The book-keeper said he thought he knew why "editors never had any water bills." Some radicals got the big check printed in facsimile and scattered it abroad. The aldermen had been bought; there was no doubt of that, but it was a matter of business. The whole agitation came back on the reformers like a boomerang. Leading politicians determined to do something to vindicate the leading citizen who had been accused. They elected him to the State Senate! A city of a hundred thousand can by either a positive or a negative process, destroy the usefulness of any man who would be its servant. I felt my loneliness very keenly--indeed, so much so that it was often as though I had committed a great crime. Always, however, at the breaking-point came a word of cheer--a note of approval. Bishop Lines of Newark, New Jersey, who was then Rector of St. Paul's church, sent me a note, that reached me in a dark hour. "I do not suppose," he said, "that I look at things as you do, in all respects, but I would like to assure you of my great regard for you and of my implicit faith in your sincerity and goodness. I know that the world's great sorrow rests upon your heart and that many men who feel it not sit in judgment upon you." The People's Church dwindled to a vanishing point. The farm produced nothing. Autumn came and we lived largely upon apples. "Make a break!" my wife said, but it seemed like running away from the fight. The fight was already over and I was beaten--beaten, but unaware of defeat. One morning I was at the top of a big apple tree, shaking it for three Italian women whom we believed to be worse off than ourselves. A branch broke and I fell on my back on a boulder. I lay as one dead. My wife found me there and hailed a passing grocer's wagon. The boy whipped up his horse to bring a doctor, but on the way spread the news that I had been killed by a fall. Among the first callers after the accident were Donald G. Mitchell and his daughter, my neighbours. I lay on a mattress on the lawn all afternoon in great agony. Although it was with the greatest difficulty that we scraped together the twenty-five dollars a month for the farm, my wife, putting her philosophy of the New Thought to the test, had rented a house in the city at seventy dollars a month. When she rented it, we hadn't seventy cents. We were to move into it the day of the accident. I insisted that we proceed. "Send for Jimmy Moohan," I said. Jimmy was a genial old Irish expressman whose stand was at the New Haven Green. Jimmy came and looked me over. Then came Bob Grant, a foreman from a near-by manufacturing concern, and after him four Socialist comrades on their way home from work. "Ah, Mother o' God," Jimmy said, "shure it's an ambulance yer riverence shud haave." "I want you, Jimmy; pile me in." "Holy Saints," he exclaimed, "shure th' ould cyart'll jolt yer guts out!" "Pile me in." So they lifted me on the mattress and laid me in the express wagon. Bob Grant sat beside me; the four comrades steadied it--two on each side. "Git up now, Larry, an' be aisy wid ye." When the wagon wheel mounted a stone, Jimmy blamed Larry and swore at him. Occasionally he would turn around and say: "How's it goin', yer riverence?" I was in such agony that I sweat. Pains were shooting through every part of my body but I usually answered: "Fine, Jimmy, fine!" So I came back within the gates of the city--rejected, defeated, deserted, and practically a pauper. It had been a long fight but the city had conquered. A few more attempts at work; a few more appeals for fair play, a few more speeches for the propaganda; but as baggage in Jimmy Moohan's express wagon I was down and out! At a regular meeting of the Trades Council of New Haven a member moved that a letter of sympathy be sent to me. A week after my fall, another was made and carried to make me a member of the council and a third to send me a check for fifty dollars. This was the only money I ever received for my services to labour and as it arrived a few hours before the agent called for his rent, it was very welcome. It seemed odd to all sorts of people that, after being starved out, I should bob up again in one of the largest houses on Chapel Street--I couldn't quite understand it myself. My wife could, however. She said the whole business of life was a matter of mental attitude and she only laughed when I asked whether there was any chance of my being kicked to death by a mule for the next month's rent! I made another attempt to interest the students of Yale in the human affairs of New Haven. Ten years previous to this, when there was some suggestion that I take charge of Yale's mission work, I was astounded to be told by the leaders of the Yale Y.M.C.A. that the chief end in view was not the work but the worker. Yale's mission was to give the student practice. Missions were to be laboratories--the specimens were to be humans. The eternal questions of sin and poverty were to be answered by the pious phrases and the cast-off junk of immature students. I gave a series of talks on labour unions to a selected group of students who were leaders. I was a social evangelist then and, after the talks, took stock of the results. Many fell by the wayside, but a group of strong men formed themselves into a "University Federal Labour Union." Dick Morse, captain of the 'Varsity crew, became president of it. Representative union constitutions were studied. The following sentences from the declaration of principles will illustrate how thoroughly these young men got in line with the union movement: "We believe it inconsistent and unworthy that a wage-worker should take the benefits that accrue to a craft as a direct result of organization and at the same time hold himself aloof from the responsibilities and from his share of the expenses of that organization. "We believe that union men whenever possible should demand the union label as a guarantee that the goods were manufactured under conditions fair to labour. We believe that eight hours should constitute a day's work." In the preamble was this statement: "We do not look upon the labour union as an ultimate conception of labour, but we believe that whatever progress has been made in the lot of the labourer has been due wholly to the organization of the wage-workers!" The preamble concludes with this paragraph: "Believing, therefore, in the cause of labour and desiring to add according to our ability to the support of the union movement, we pledge ourselves to study it intelligently and to support it loyally." Here was the beginning of a splendid mission work among the students; but the New Haven labour movement wasn't big enough to take it in; nor was the American Federation of Labour. The labour men would have no dealings whatever with the students. We managed to keep the big house for a year, but we kept little else during that period. Twice we lost the mental image of the monthly rent. Sam Read supplied it the first time and Anson Phelps Stokes the other. These were my only borrowings in New Haven. In that house I had one of the most bitter experiences of my life. "I think," said my wife to me, one morning at 2 A.M., "that the baby will be born in an hour." The announcement chilled me. There was but five cents in the house and that was needed to telephone for the family physician. As I walked down Chapel Street it seemed as if my heart was a nest of scorpions spitting poison. There was no breakfast in the house for the mother of the new-born babe. The churches, the homes of the wealthy and the university filled me with unutterable hate as I passed them. I was in the frame of mind in which murder, theft, violence are committed. I had held my integrity intact until that exigency. Then I only lacked opportunity to smash my ideals--to bend my head, my back, my morals! Cold sweat covered my body, my teeth chattered and my hands twitched. My Socialist philosophy told me that society was in process of evolution. Democracy at heart was correcting its own evils and like a snake sloughing off its outworn skin. I was part of that process. Reason pounded these things in on me but hate pushed them aside and demanded something else. I wondered that morning whether after all there weren't more reforms wrapped up in a stick of dynamite than in a whole life of preaching and moralizing. In that fifteen-minute walk there passed through my mind and heart all the elements of hell. It was a new experience to me--I had not travelled that way before. I went into a little restaurant to use the 'phone. I laid the nickel on the counter, when I had finished, and as I did so the waiter said, "It's a 'phone on me, Mr. Irvine;" and he rang up five cents in the cash register. "Ah," I said, "you know me then?" "Sure thing," he said, "don't you know me?" I shook my head. "Gee!" he said, "you're sick. You look like hell!" "I feel like it." "What's up?" "You heard me 'phone?" "Sure--aint you glad?" "Yes--but----" "Say, have a cup of hot coffee, won't you?" "Thank you, I think I will." His intuition was keen enough to perceive that the trouble was mental and as I took the coffee he said: "Discouraged a bit, hey?" Without waiting for a reply he proceeded to tell me how a few words of mine at one of the trolleymen's midnight meetings had changed his life. He went into details and as he went on I saw a look of contentment on his face and as I watched, it changed the look on my own. I could not drink his coffee but I shared his comradeship and as I went back home I became normal. Hate left my heart. I was beaten, in a way; but the love of mankind was a fundamental thing and the other was a mental storm that passed over and left no ill results. Things took a new turn that morning. We saw a rift in the clouds and were encouraged. It became clear that my work in New Haven was ended. I took a commission from the Young Men's Christian Association on West 57th Street to open up meetings in some of the big shops and factories of New York. Mr. Charles F. Powlison, who is one of the largest minded and noblest hearted men in the Association, is special secretary there, and it was through his faith and confidence that the work came to me. The Interborough Rapid Transit Company gave us permission to hold meetings in several of their largest shops. I enjoyed the work very much--these big crowds of men in jumpers and overalls had a fascination for me. The work in the Interborough went well for a year. I reviewed great books, I gave the biographies of the world's greatest men, I talked of ethics, science, art and religion. I taught the truth as I understood it; but it was all utterly unsectarian and universal. In one shop the company cleaned out the junk and replaced it with a restaurant: the superintendent told me it was the result of my work there. My talks were never over fifteen minutes long and seldom over ten. I was always assisted by a musician of some sort. The work went well for a year in the big shops; then my part in them came to an abrupt end. The board of directors at the West Side Y.M.C.A. is composed of representative men of affairs in New York--men of big responsibilities and large wealth; as splendid a set of men as ever governed an institution. This particular Y.M.C.A. was a pioneer institution in a big way. It stood for large things when those things were unpopular. It was a heretic in a way. In ten years the procession came up and the institution seemed to stand still. It had given the Y.M.C.A. world a larger outlook in religion and it may be that it will yet become a pioneer in giving it a larger sociology. I was one of two men to address the board of directors one night and I stated the case at more length than I do here. "What shall I tell those workingmen you stand for?" I asked. "Do you believe in the right of the workers to organize? If you do, say so, and, as your representative, let me tell them that you do." [Illustration: The Lunch Hour in an Interborough Shop] The next time I addressed a big shop meeting I gave the musician all the minutes save three. Several hundreds of men stood around me--disorganized, poorly paid men. "Men," I said, "there is in this city a thing called the Civic Federation. Its leaders are directly the owners of this shop. In it are also leaders of labour, Mitchell and Gompers. There are several bishops of various beliefs. Now the Civic Federation tells us--tells the world--that it believes in labour unions. What I want to suggest is this: A dozen of you get together; write a note to your masters and ask them if that belief applies to _you_?" Of course I knew it didn't apply to them, but I got very tired merely telling the slaves to be good, and ended my service there in that way. A spy at once informed the superintendent, and I was told--the Y.M.C.A. was told--that I could never enter their shops again. The man who succeeded me as a speaker at that shop, the following week, went much further; he positively advised them to organize, for hardly in the United States could one find greater need of organization. CHAPTER XIX I INTRODUCE JACK LONDON TO YALE The last piece of work in New Haven was a master stroke. It was an inoculation. Jack London was in the East and I persuaded him to pay the comrades in New Haven a visit and make a speech. The theatres were all engaged, so were the halls. The new Y.M.C.A. hall could not be rented--for London. There was only one hope left--Yale. I knew a student who was a Socialist. We outlined a plan. London was a literary man; Yale had probably heard of him. The Yale Union was canvassed. It was a Freshman debating society. Certainly; they had read London's books--"The Call of the Wild," "The Sea Wolf," etc. "Well now, boys, here's your chance. Jack London can be had for a lecture." The Union had no money and Woolsey Hall cost fifty dollars. "That's easy," I suggested, though I didn't have fifty cents at the time. That seemed fine. "Of course," I said, as I remembered the empty Socialist treasury, "we'll have to charge an admission fee of ten cents." That, too, was all right. In case of frost or failure I promised to make good so that the Union would have no responsibility. I meekly suggested that as compensation for "risk involved" I would take the surplus--if there was any. "They say Jack London is Socialistically inclined, Doctor," said the youthful president of the Yale Union. "Yes, he is, rather," I answered. "Well," he added, "I suppose we will have to take our chances." The chances seemed small then; they loomed up larger later. He hoped President Hadley would not interfere with him. "Will you introduce him, Doctor?" "Certainly." "What's his topic?" "He calls it 'The Coming Crisis.'" "Social, I suppose, eh?" "Yes, it's a suggested remedy for a lot of our troubles." The Socialist student had a few rounds with Lee McClung, the Yale treasurer. "Mac" didn't know Irvine from a gate-post but took Billy Phelps's word for it that London was a literary man and let it go at that--let the hall go, I mean. "Yale," said the brilliant Phelps, "is a university, and not a monastery; besides, Jack London is one of the most distinguished men in America." When it was decided we could have the hall the advertising began. Streets, shops and factories were bombarded with printed announcements. Next morning--the morning after securing the hall--Yale official and unofficial awoke to find tacked to every tree on the campus the inscription, "Jack London at Woolsey Hall." Max Dellfant painted a flaming poster that gripped men by the eyes. In it London appeared in a red sweater and in the background the lurid glare of a great conflagration. Yale and New Haven had never been so thoroughly informed on such short notice. The information was in red letters. The first thing done was to run down the officers of the Yale Union. They had previously run each other down. The boys were thoroughly scared, explanations were in order all around. The wiseacres of Yale got busy and the new Yale took a hand also. Professor Charles Foster Kent--the Henry Drummond of Yale--and Professor William Lyon Phelps counselled a square deal and fair play. The Yale Union had a stormy meeting. A real sensation was on their hands; there was possible censure and probable glory and every man in the Union went after his share. It was indignantly moved and carried that the president of the Union introduce the speaker. "Irvine is a Socialist," the mover said, "and would spoil the show before it began." [Illustration: Alexander Irvine and Jack London, 1906] They next discussed the topic. One boy suggested that London be asked to cut out all mention of Socialism. That was tabooed because no one knew that he would mention it anyway. The day of the lecture I got this note from the Socialist student: "Yale Union and many of the faculty are sweating under the collar for fear London _might_ say something Socialistic. The Union realizes that it would be absolutely useless to ask him to smooth over his lecture and cut out anything which sounds radical. Also they have decided that it would be a shock to the university and the public to have _you_ appear upon the platform in any way, shape or manner. They are going to ask you to cancel your engagement to introduce London. In this I think they are unwise, but as they are determined it must be so. I advise you to agree to whatever arrangement they suggest. This done, they will 'take the chances' that London will express Socialistic ideas. Now I fear there will be the devil to pay for the lecture--the university is going to be surprised, the faculty shocked beyond measure and the Yale Union severely criticized!" This is how the president of the Union expressed the situation in a note to me on the day of the lecture. "At a meeting of the executive committee of the Yale Union it was voted that the president of the Union introduce the speaker of the evening as it would tend to identify the Union more conspicuously and also to give it prominence before the student body. For this reason--wholly beyond my power and opposed to my opinion--I shall be forced to forego our little plan which I thought by far the best," etc., etc. Some small portion of prosperity having come our way I was able to dine a small group with Jack London as the chief guest. Professor Charles Foster Kent of Yale, and Charles W. De Forrest, a business man, were among the guests. It was a Socialist innings at Woolsey Hall that night. The big crowd gave the Yale Union an idea--this time it was a financial idea--twenty-eight hundred people paid admission--the officers swept down on the box office; but there was a Socialist inside playing capitalist. Socialists are not familiar enough with the game to play it successfully, but in this instance we played in strict accordance with the rules. We furnished the capital, took the risks and bagged the pot! We conceded nine points out of ten--the tenth was a financial one. The audience represented every phase of life in the city. Over a hundred of the faculty and ten times as many students. Citizens of all classes were there. The Harvard Students had played horse with London a few weeks before this and we--the Socialists--were prepared for any sort of demonstration. "The spectacle of an avowed Socialist," said the New Haven _Register_, "one of the most conspicious in the country, standing upon the platform of Woolsey Hall and boldly advocating the doctrines of revolution was a sight for gods and men." Jack London talked for over two hours to that packed hall and received a most unusual attention. After the lecture he was taken to a students' dormitory where he answered questions till midnight. Then he was escorted by a smaller group to Mory's for supper and at one o'clock we held a reception at the big house which was known as "the Socialist Parsonage." For over twenty years I have been a contributor to newspapers and religious periodicals, but not until I met Jack London did it ever occur to me that I could earn a living by my pen. London made me promise to write. My first story I mailed to California for his criticism and suggestion, but before it returned I had entered the field. CHAPTER XX MY EXPERIENCE AS A LABOURER IN THE MUSCLE MARKET OF THE SOUTH _Appleton's Magazine_ published my first serious attempt at fiction. It was a short story entitled, "Two Social Pariahs." The cry of peonage was in the air and I arranged with _Appleton's Magazine_ for a series of articles on the subject. Dressed as a labourer I went to the muscle market of New York and got hired. To do this I had to assume a foreign accent and look as slovenly as possible. With a picturesque contingent of Hungarians, Finns, Swedes and Greeks, I was drafted for the iron mines of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company. The mines are near Bessemer, Ala. At every turn of the road south we were herded and handled like cattle. It was a big, black porter who led us into the car at Portsmouth, Va. I was the leader of the contingent, and the porter addressed us for the most part by signs, and when he spoke at all he called me "Johnny." When inside, he arranged us in our seats, putting his hands on some of our shoulders to press us down into them. I did not realize that I was in a Southern state until I saw a big yellow card in this car marked "Coloured." Then I knew instantly that we were in a Jim Crow car. A coloured woman sat next to the window in my seat and by her look and little toss of the head and a quick nervous movement she seemed to say, "What are you doing here?" When the train pulled out of the depot, I stepped up to the porter and said: "Haven't you a law in Virginia on the separation of the races." The big black fellow grinned. "Dere sho' is, boss--but you ain't no races. You is jest Dagoes, ain't you?" At Atlanta we changed cars and were again driven into the Jim Crow car. This time I made a more intelligent attempt to solve my race problem. The conductor, faultlessly dressed in broadcloth and covered with gold lace, strode into our car with the air of an admiral of the fleet. He went straight through the car, collecting the block ticket for our gang from the boss, and as he returned I stepped into the aisle in front of him, blocking his passage. "Pardon me, sir," I said, "isn't there a law in Georgia on the separation of the races?" Without a word, he removed the glasses from his nose, stared at me for a moment, then turned sharply, walked to the end of the car, removed the card which read "Coloured" and reversed it. It then read "White." Then he came back through the car slowly, staring at me as he passed but without uttering a word. Our particular destination was "Muckers Camp" at Readers. A group of three buildings on the brow of a hill--the hill where the blacks live. The first of these buildings is a kitchen and dining room, the second is a big dormitory and the third is a wash-house. This was our new home. The dormitory was originally intended for a series of small rooms but the work was arrested before completion. The uprights marking the divisions of the rooms were still standing--bare and uncovered. The floor of the big dormitory was littered with rubbish--miners' cast-off clothing, shoes, broken lamps, and in a corner there was a junk-heap of broken bedsteads, slats, army blankets and sodden mattresses. We were told to make ourselves "at home." There was room enough and plenty of bedding. All we had to do was to fish for what we needed and put it in order. Everything was red--red with ore that men carried out of the mines on their bodies. The junk heap in the corner played an important part in the movements of my gang. The thought of having to sleep in the sodden stuff chilled me to the bones, but I kept silent. Whatever the previous condition of the men had been, they felt as I did as they pulled their bedding out piece by piece. They had gone to spend the winter in the mines of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company; they knew the work, conditions and pay; they had refused to be bribed on the way down, but as they tugged at the junk, a change came over them! They swore in half a dozen languages--they gritted their teeth and vowed that they wouldn't be treated like pigs. [Illustration: In a Mucker's Camp in Alabama] [Illustration: Irvine and Three Other Muckers as They Left Greenwich Street for the South] We went to the wash-house and the outlook was less encouraging. There was a long, narrow trough in the centre. It was half full of red ore. The floor was wet and covered with ore, rags, old papers and other rubbish. There were compartments intended for shower-baths, but there again the work had been arrested and was incomplete. We washed, made our beds, ate dinner and proceeded to the company store to be fitted out. Each man was furnished with a number. By that number he was to be known while in the company's employ. Each man showed his number and drew what he needed--overalls, lamps, and heavy boots. There was nothing niggardly in the credit. The deeper the debt the tighter the grip on the debtor. The goods cost just one hundred per cent. more than anywhere else. The company paid wages once a month. If a labourer borrowed of his own within that time, he paid ten per cent. on the loan. As we came back from the store, the miners were just leaving the mines and it was interesting to see them gaze into our faces and address us in Russian, Hungarian, Swedish and various other languages. It was one of the excitements of camp life--to inspect and classify the newcomers. One of the men had a wheezy accordion and he relieved the monotony of the evening with some German airs. The big shed was unlighted, save as each man was his own lamp-post. Each made his own bed by the light of the lamp on his cap. As he undressed, the cap was the last article to be set aside and the extinguishing of the smoky, flickering blaze the last act of the night. As the first streak of the gray dawn came in through the bare windows, four of our gang dressed and deliberately marched out of the camp--never to return. The first number in the programme of a "mucker's" toilet is to adjust his cap with his lamp in it, trimmed and burning. The second is to light his pipe; then he dresses. It was half-past five and still dark, when those nude, shaggy men with heads ablaze with smoky, flickering lamps, began to move around. They looked grotesque--unearthly--denizens of some underground pit. They were good-humoured and full of boisterous laughter. A breakfast of pork, beans, potatoes, bread and coffee--plenty of each--and we went off with dinner pails over the hill to the valley, where five tall, smoking chimneys marked the entrances to as many mines. Each mine has a complete outfit of men and machinery, and a certain number of chambers or pockets in which, with blast and hammer and hand, the red hills are made to disgorge their treasures of iron ore. Three of us perched ourselves on the rear end of the "skip"--a big iron-ore disgorger--and began the half-mile descent. It was a 45 per cent. grade, and the skip, at the end of a powerful wire cable, went down by jerks. One of my companions was Franz, the Hungarian, the other was a German. The big square mouth of the mine became smaller and smaller as we bumped into the bowels of the earth. In a few minutes it looked like a small window-pane, and then disappeared altogether and we were left in the darkness. Each mine is like a little town. It has a main street and side alleys--"pockets," they are called. There are "live" and "dead" pockets--the dead are the worked out. At the first of the live pockets the skip was stopped by some invisible hand and we clambered over the side to a platform where a foreman met and conducted us to the task of the day. The mine was filled with red dust. We could see but a few feet ahead of us. The lamps on men's brows looked like fire-flies dancing in the red mist. There was a sound of rushing water and the _chug, chug_ of the pumps. As we waded ankle-deep through a water alley, we heard the warning yells of a foreman. A charge of dynamite was about to burst and the men were flying out of danger. We were whisked into a cleft for safety. Half a dozen old miners were squeezed in beside us. Our scarcely soiled caps told the story of our newness and the old hands watched us closely. Boom! The hills shivered like the deck of a warship as she discharges a broadside. Franz shivered too. His eyes bulged and he stared, loose-jawed, at the men around us, who laughed at his fright. The explosion was in our alley; it had torn up the car-tracks like strips of macaroni; it was the salute of dynamite to our soft, flabby muscles, to our white caps and new overalls; it was a stick of concentrated power throwing down the gauntlet to men in the raw. We had a foreman who superintended our compartment, "a driller," who with a steam drill sat all day boring holes for dynamite, and we were the "muckers"--miner's helpers--who carried away with muscular power the effects of the explosion. Each alley had similar crews. "Mule boy!" I roared with all my vocal power into what looked like an ugly rent in the rocks. A moment later, I saw a glimmer of light, then a mule shot up out of a hole and a black boy brought up the rear, clinging to the tail of "Emma," the mule, our sure-footed locomotive. We were handed a huge sledge-hammer each and the work began. My hammer bounded off the rocks as if it were an air ball. It bounded for a dozen heavy strokes. "Turn that rock over and look for the grain!" the foreman shouted in my ear. Then he took the hammer, turned the huge boulder over on its side, struck it twice or thrice and it flew into splinters. We acquired the knack of things quickly, and instinctively struck the working pace. It was the limit of human strength and endurance. My jacket came off first, then my overalls, then my shirt, leaving trousers and undershirt only. The others followed suit. The sweat oozed out of every pore of my body. We smashed, filled and ran out the full cars. We worked silently, doggedly and at top speed. Several hundred men were doing likewise in other pockets; they were less bloody, perhaps, but the work was the same and they did it without knowing that it was brutally hard. There was a halt of fifteen minutes for dinner. Then we went at it again. Our best fell short of the demand. For every car of ore blasted, the foreman got fifty cents and for running out each car, we got twenty cents--a little over six cents each. "---- ---- your souls to h--l," the foreman shouted. "Why don't you get a move on you ---- hey?" We moved a little faster. "You muckers ain't goin' t' get ten cars out t'day if ye don't mend yer licks!" We "mended our licks." He looked like a wild beast. Short of stature, but his arms were hardened and under the red skin the muscles were hard as whip-cords and taut as a drum. His eyebrows were heavy and bushy and over his strong chest grew shaggy masses of black hair. Our car slipped the track once and when he heard the smash he came thundering along, ripping out a string of oaths as he came. Putting his powerful body to the lever, he lifted the car almost alone. As he did so, his lamp came in contact with my hand. Unable to let go, I screamed to him to move. As he did so, he saw the seared flesh. "Too bad! Too bad!" he said, as he dropped the truck. I gazed into his eyes. "Look here!" I said, "if you will look as human as that again, you may burn the other hand!" The human moles who empty these pockets of ore are inured. Life down there is normal to them. After a few years' work, the skin becomes calloused and tough. The hands become claws or talons--broken and disfigured. The muckers laughed at us. They saw we were concerned about trifles. Bloody sweat and hot oil held the red dust around us like a tight-fitting garment. Our scanty clothing was glued to our bodies. Our shoes were filled with water, but that was a luxury--it was cool. What a hades of noise and dust! The continual noise and clatter of the pumps, the rattle of the drillers, the hissing of steam and the ear-splitting roar of the dynamite explosions are matters that one gets accustomed to in time. The frenzied desire to get cars filled and run out leaves little time for novel sensations--for that, brute force _alone_ is needed. At the end of the first day we had filled and run out ten cars. Our pay for that was sixty-six cents apiece. During the same time, Philo, the mule boy, made seventy-five cents and Emma--she had earned what would enable her to return to-morrow to repeat the work of to-day. About five o'clock in the afternoon we were sandwiched into the big iron skip with a score of others--black and white. Eight hours had taken our newness away. We were as others in colour and condition. We looked into their faces and felt their hot breath. Then a signal was given and the panting, squirming mass was jerked to the surface. As we passed over the hill to the camp I was in an ecstasy. The sense of relief under the open sky was intense. Others seemed to have it--for they joked and laughed boisterously over trifles as we went "home." Seven of us together went to the big wash-house. It was rather crowded. I marvelled that nobody was using the shower-baths. I soaped myself, stood beneath the big iron water-pipe and waited, but there was no response. There was a loud laugh, then a miner asked: "Air ye posin' for yer photo, mister?" "No. What's the matter with the water?" "Fits, Buttie--it's got fits!" There was plenty of food, of a kind. The supper, at the close of the day was a brief function, but brutal as it was brief. It was something of a shock, the first night we were in camp, but at the close of my first day's work I found myself on a level with the grossest. The finer instincts were blunted or gone and I was in the clutch of a hunger like that of the jungle, where might and cunning rule. At a signal from the cook, we rushed in, crushed by main force into a seat, seized whatever was nearest and began. Scarcely a word was spoken--heads down, hands and jaws at top speed. The disgusting spectacle lasted but a few minutes, then up and out to smoke and talk. Beside me sat a strong, powerfully built German boy, who joked about the age of the pork for supper. "What you guff about?" the burly steward asked. "Schmell, py gee--its tick mit bad schmell!" "Vell, you shut your ---- maut or I smash your ---- head, see?" The boy laughed, then the steward removed his plate and refused to give any more. Nobody took any notice. We were too busy and too brutally selfish to interfere. The steward was the camp bully and the men were afraid of him. They must not even laugh at his provisions. We had pork for breakfast, we took pork chops to the mines for dinner, and the staple article--the standby--of every supper was pork. Pigs in Alabama are like turnips in Scotland--there are no property rights in them. They breed and litter in the tall dog-fennel; they root around the shanties and cover the landscape. "Who owns these pigs?" I asked old Ransom Pope, a Negro. "One an' anoder!" he said. The gullies and the weeds were full of them and the steward found them easy and cheap feeding. "You come yere for breakfast to-morrow an' I smash your dam head!" the steward said to the boy, as we left the dining room. There was no reply. Each man went his way. They were tired--too tired to think. Though a stranger to even the taste of liquor, I had an intense craving for it and it seemed as if I had used it all my life. An hour after supper, I lay down on my sodden pile and went to sleep. I was awakened next morning by a Norwegian mucker who was organizing a strike over the incident of the tainted pork. Five minutes later, every man in the shed was around the stove in an impromptu indignation meeting. It was agreed that Max, the German boy, should go in first; if the steward put him out, we were all to leave with him and refuse to work. He was allowed to take breakfast but was refused a dinner pail. We dropped ours and marched to the office in a body. An investigation was made and it was discovered that the steward was feeding us on his neighbour's pork and charging it to the company. He was discharged and we went back to the camp to make merry for the rest of the forenoon. The fun, for most of them, consisted of an extra demand on their physical force--rough horse-play, leap-frog and wrestling. One man went to town for extra stimulants. Another, a big Swede, stripped nude, drained at a single draught a bottle of whiskey and lay down to sleep himself drunk and sober again before his next call to the pits. At the close of the day he lay there--a big, shaggy animal, wallowing. The mines were shut down on Sunday and we had an opportunity to look around. Though a place of one thousand inhabitants, it has no post-office. There are ditches but no drains; wide, deep gullies, but no streets. The moon shines there in her season, but there are no street lamps. The hogs are somewhat tame and we fed them as we went along. There is a church but it's for black folks--it's essential to them. The whites fare not so well. If they want one, they travel for it. They do likewise for a school, for the little school beside the church is for coloured children. The only "modern convenience" was an ancient style of hydrant, around which the children were organizing fire companies and extinguishing imaginary fires. After visiting the mule boy in Rat Hollow on Sunday, I returned to the camp. The men were lounging around the stove, smoking, and exchanging experiences. In one corner, a German sailor was playing his wheezy accordion, and in another, to a group of Slavs, a Russian soldier was singing a love song. It was my last day with the muckers. Many of my gang had already gone--the rest would follow. It wasn't a matter of wages or hours--it was a question of muck. Once in it, men lived, moved, and had their being in it, but even the most brutalized quailed at the junk pile in the corner of the shed. The sun was setting behind the red hills. Save for a long, yellow streak just above the horizon, the sky was a mass of purple billows. The yellow changed to amber and later to a blood red. Then rays of sun-fire shot up and splashed the purple billows; the purple and gold later gave place to black clouds through which the stars came one by one, while the muckers were settling down for the night. It seemed at first as if I would have to commit some crime to get admission to the stockade where the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company had their largest convict labour force. I was seedy-looking--my beard had grown and I was still in blue shirt and overalls. I approached the chaplain--told him my story and gained admission to his night school; and for three weeks moved in and out among the socially damned of that horrible stockade. In that time I got the facts of the life there and I became so depressed by what I saw that I had to fight daily to keep off a sense of hate that pressed in upon me every time I went into that atmosphere. Here were eight hundred men, seven hundred of them coloured. They had committed crimes against persons and property. The state of Alabama hired them out to the corporation at so much a head and the corporation proceeded, with state aid, to make their investment pay. The men were underfed and overworked and in addition were exploited in the most shameful manner by officials from the top to the bottom. For the slightest infraction of the rules they were flogged like galley slaves. Women were flogged as well as men. What the lash and the labour left undone tuberculosis finished. Unsanitary conditions, rotten sheds, sent many of them into eternity, where they were better off. They were classified according to their ability to dig coal, not according to the crimes committed. From the stockade I went to a lumber camp where some officials had been found guilty of peonage. [Illustration: Irvine Punching Logs in the Gulf of Mexico, 1907] I got a job as a teamster and took my place in the camp among the labourers as if I had spent my life at it. In this way I got at the facts of how and why men had been decoyed from New York and imprisoned in the forests. I was so much at home in my work and so disguised that no one ever for a moment suspected me. I obtained photographs of the bosses, the bloodhounds and the camp box cars in which the lumber Jacks lived. Several times around a bonfire of pine knots I entertained the men of the camp with stories of travel, history and romance. If I had been discovered, if the purpose of my presence had been known I would have been shot like a dog; for life is as cheap in a Southern lumber field as in any part of the world. From the lumber camp I went to one of the big turpentine camps where conditions are as primitive and as inhuman as in the stockades. My next and last job in the South was punching logs in Pensacola harbour for a dollar and six "bits" a day. There I got material for several stories of peons who had escaped from the woods. While in Pensacola I made a visit, one Sunday morning, to the city jail and asked permission to address the prisoners. The jailer, of course, wanted to know what an unkempt labourer had to say to his charges. In order to convince him I had to deliver an exegesis before the desk! The cells were iron cages with stone floors. A young Englishman, who had just landed after a long sea voyage the night before, was the first man to whom I talked. He claimed to have been drugged and robbed in a saloon. The fact of his incarceration was a small thing to him; what made him swear was the condition of his cage. The excrements of probably half a dozen of his predecessors in the cell lay around him, nauseating and suffocating him. Fire shot from his eyes as he pointed to it. He was bitter, sarcastic, sneering, and with evident and abundant cause. Whatever I had to say to the men and women in that dungeon that morning was driven from my mind and my lips. The young man pushed all the resentment of his soul over into mine! I spent that Sunday in working out a plan by which I could help Pensacola to clean up this social ulcer. There was a Tourist Club there and I offered to lecture for them. It was arranged for the following Sunday afternoon. I called on the mayor and he promised to preside. I interviewed several aldermen and they promised to attend. I lectured for forty minutes on my experiences as a labourer in the camps of the South, and for ten minutes at the close described what I had seen in the city jail. It was a somewhat heroic method of treatment, and I did not remain long enough to see the effect, but I at least deprived them of the plea of ignorance. I found in Florida two Government officials who had done splendid work in behalf of labour. I mean the labourers who were decoyed by false promises and brutally abused on their arrival in the camps. They were both modest men--men unlikely to enter politics for personal advancement. I cut my articles out of the magazine and sent them to President Roosevelt, calling his attention to the conditions and commending these men to his notice. The result was that they were both promoted to positions where their usefulness was increased and the cause of labour considerably helped. CHAPTER XXI AT THE CHURCH OF THE ASCENSION A group of literary people with whom I was acquainted had rented No. 3 Fifth Avenue, and were operating a coöperative housekeeping scheme. I became part of the plan and it was there that I first met the Rector of the Church of the Ascension, the Rev. Percy Stickney Grant. Naturally, we talked of the church and its work. I was so impressed with Mr. Grant's bigness that I volunteered to devote some of my spare time to the work of his parish. A few weeks later I got a letter from him inviting me to become a member of his staff. This was a surprise to me, but I made no immediate decision. I was earning a comfortable living and devoting my spare time to the Socialist propaganda. I was _free_--very free--and I saw danger ahead in church work. I had several interviews with Mr. Grant and went over the situation. I wasn't a man with Socialistic tendencies; I was a Socialist--a member of the party. The danger ahead looked smaller to Mr. Grant than it did to me. He had absolute confidence in the broad-minded men of affairs around him. My Socialism was explained and understood. Just how to fit in was the next problem. The mission of the church is at No. 10 Horatio Street. It was without a minister in charge. For a few Sunday evenings I conducted the service. The audience was composed of half a dozen parishoners and a dozen of my personal friends. Mr. Grant knew nothing of my ability in public address. I took his place one night in the church and that ended my career at the chapel. I had discarded an ecclesiastical title I possessed but never used; I became a lay reader in the Episcopal Church--the church of my youth--the church in which I was baptized and confirmed. The conference and discussion following the service was an afterthought. The audiences steadily grew. It was and is the most cosmopolitan audience I ever saw. I wanted to get acquainted with the people and suggested a sort of reception in the chapel. The ladies of the church provided refreshments. "Who is that man?" one of the ladies at the tea table asked one night. "He is a Socialist agitator," I answered. "Why don't you ask him to talk?" The man was Sol Fieldman and I asked him to speak for five minutes. He did so and from that time the character of the after-meeting changed. The first few evenings after the change the speaking was very informal: any one of note who happened to be in the meeting was asked to speak. Later, the invitation was enlarged and any one who desired to speak could do so. Then came a time limit. A workingman asked that the refreshments be cut out. The table took up valuable space and the time consumed in "serving" was "a pure waste," so he said. Then we arranged for a formal presentation of a topic and a discussion to follow it. The Socialists were always in the majority. Every Socialist is a propagandist--not always an intelligent propagandist. Intelligent and leading Socialists are generally engaged Sunday evenings, so the majority of those who came to us were of the hard-working kind--limited, very limited, in the literary expression of the social soul flame that so passionately moves them. Some of our church officers who took an active part in the first year's meetings were somewhat alarmed at the brusqueness of these men and women, and undertook to correct their manners. The Rector understood. And with great patience and tact he heard all. The Church of the Ascension has in its membership some of the country's biggest leaders in industry; some of these men came to the meetings. What they saw and heard was different to what they expected. They fraternized with the men of toil. It was a fraternity utterly devoid of patronage. There were free exchanges of thought. The average labouring man is incapable of such conference, for no matter how many years a member of a labour union it is only when he becomes a Socialist that he becomes an intelligent advocate of anything. [Illustration: The Church of the Ascension] The Rector and I tried to avoid the notice of the newspapers and for about six months we succeeded. Then came the explosion of the bomb on Union Square and we were at once thrown into the limelight. I was on the Square that afternoon. It was designed to be a mass meeting of the unemployed. The unemployed are not usually interested in any sort of propaganda; the more intelligent of the labour men are, and the Socialists are more so. So the promoters of the mass meeting for the unemployed were Socialists. It was at this meeting that a police official declared to a man who had the temerity to question him that the policeman's club was mightier than the Constitution of the United States. No permit was given and no mass meeting held, but the multitude was there and when the police began to disperse it the people who were neither Socialists nor unemployed resented being driven off the streets. I saw men clubbed and women deliberately ridden over by the mounted police. I kept moving: I wanted to be where it was most dangerous. I suffered for months with a bruised arm that I got as I went with the crowd in front of the horses: it was a blow aimed at a man's head; I was clubbed on the back for not moving fast enough. At every turn, at every angle of the Square, the police were as brutal as any Cossack that ever wielded a knout. Late on that afternoon the police opened the Square--that is, the people were permitted to cross it in all directions. My study was at No. 75 Fifth Avenue, and I was moving in that direction past the fountain when the explosion took place. I was hurled off my feet; that is, the shock to my nervous system was so great that I collapsed. My first flash of thought was of the battle-field! Fifteen feet in front of me two men staggered. It seemed to me that one of them had been ripped in twain. He fell and the other fell on top of him. Instantly the policemen around me seemed crazed: as I staggered to my feet one of them struck me a terrific blow with his club. The blow landed between my shoulders, but glanced upward, striking me on the back of the head. I tumbled over, dazed, but the thought that his next blow would murder me seemed to give me superhuman strength and I ran. As I turned he attacked another man and I thought I was free. I was mistaken, however, for he gave chase and if I had not escaped into the crowd I would have fared badly at his hands. My nerves were so badly shattered that on the way to my room I fell several times. The following Sunday night the Civic Federation packed our meeting with their speakers. Mr. Gompers's representative in New York was the first man put up. He was furnished with quotations from alleged Socialist writers on the question of religion. Then a woman from Boston who had once been a Socialist, sent a note to me--I was presiding--asking for extended time. I was the only Socialist in the place who knew what was going on. The newspapers had all been "tipped off," as the _Herald_ reporter told me later. The discussion waxed so warm that fifty people were on their feet at once, shouting for recognition. Humour in such a situation is a tremendous relief. I managed to inject some into the discussion and it was like grease to a cartwheel. In a humorous way I turned the light on the Civic Federation and the audience laughed. Next day every newspaper in New York had an account of the meeting. From that time until the end of the first year of the meeting the papers reported not only what happened but much that never happened. Most of them were humorous in their treatment. The Marceline of the press gave us much space in its characteristic style. The result was that we were forced to have policemen guard the door so that when the chapel was full the crowd unable to gain admittance could be dispersed. We admitted by ticket for some weeks, but the plan didn't work well. Of course, many who came were moved solely by curiosity, but for two years the chapel has been filled at every meeting. On the wildest winter nights it looked sometimes as if the choir was to be my only audience, yet when the after-meeting opened, the place was as full as usual. The Sunday evening service is designed to be of special helpfulness to working people; it is an extra service permitted by the canons of the church, and in this instance directed to helpful and constructive social criticism. The discourses have not been theological in any sense, but I have seen men and women converted, experiencing a change of heart in exactly the same manner as people are converted in revival meetings. The same energies of the soul were released and the same results obtained with this extra consideration, that the change was a new attitude toward society as well as a change of heart. Men and women who had not been in church since they were children have found an atmosphere--a spiritual atmosphere--that has been a distinct help to them during the week. There have been unique examples of this that cannot be recorded or catalogued. If we were padding a year-book, bolstering a creed or attracting men merely to put our tag on them the meetings would have waned long ago, for the class of people who attend are quick to discover undercurrents or ulterior motives. The spiritual atmosphere is created by a combination of forces. The picture of the Ascension by La Farge has contributed not a little to it--even to people to whom the circumstance was a myth. The architecture and music contributed much. We held the after-meeting in the church one night--to accommodate hundreds of people who couldn't get into the chapel. The meeting was a failure. The most radically minded men told me that they couldn't talk in the church. "Why?" I asked one man. "---- if I know, but it took the fight out of me!" It took the fight out of all. So we went back to the chapel. One man whom I have known for years as a Socialist agitator who fought the intellectuals in his party and was a materialist of the most radical kind made this statement at the last meeting of the first year: "I appreciate the courage of Mr. Grant in opening this church to the people and opening its pulpit to a representative of the people. I am grateful for the fine fellowship, the freedom of discussion, the music, the beautiful architecture and the inspiration that comes from such contact, but these are the smallest of what has come to me during the past winter. I am the son of an orthodox Rabbi but I have been an atheist all my life. I have been over-bitter and destructive in my addresses. I have learned something here. I did not expect nor did I want to, but I have. I am now a believer in the immortality of the soul and I look forward to life instead of death. This has influenced my work, my life. Instead of a hundred words against human slavery to one for human freedom I speak a hundred for human freedom to one against human slavery. That may seem small to you. It's big to me--it's a new psychology." A school teacher, a brilliant young Jewess, said: "The inspiration of that service in the church lasts all week with my scholars. I am worth twice as much as I was to the public schools." A letter from a trained nurse says: "I am going away for the summer, but before I go I want you to know how much of a blessing your service has been to me, and to both physicians and nurses in this hospital, for we have all been at one time or another, and we have always talked over your topics with interest and profit." During the first year we had a tremendous stimulus in the meetings from the active participation of four of the most prominent theosophists in the country--two of whom are members of the vestry. They sharpened the line between spiritual and material things. They brought to the notice of working-class Socialists the essential things of the soul. They made the meetings a melting-pot in which the finest, best and most permanent things were made to stand out distinctly. The world affords not a better field either for the testing or propagating of their philosophy, but they did not come the second year and we missed them very much. There was a good deal of misunderstanding about the meetings, arising from garbled newspaper reports. The newspaper reporter has a bias for things off colour--buzzard-like, he sees only the carrion--at least he is trained to report only the carrion--this always against his will. So we were kept explaining to men and women of the church who had not been able to attend and see for themselves. There was not only misunderstanding but prejudice. I came in contact with it in quarters the most unlikely. The people of independent means in the Church of the Ascension have social ideals, those of the working class who are in the church have none--none whatever, and what prejudice I found came from those who had never contributed anything to the church but their presence, and to whom the church from their childhood had been an almshouse, a hospital, and a place of amusement. These were the people, baptized and confirmed Christians, who spoke with bitterness and a sneer of the evening meetings because the majority of the attendants were Jews. The other phase of their prejudice was against Socialism--which they supposed to be a process of "dividing up." My chief encouragement came from the richest people in the church, the sneer came from the poorest. The range of topics was as wide as the interests of human life. The speakers were the leading men of New York and distinguished visitors from other lands. One of the earliest speakers was Mrs. Cobden Sanderson, the daughter of Richard Cobden and the intimate friend of William Morris. Capitalism was represented by Professor J.B. Clark, Dr. Thomas R. Slicer and Herman Robinson of the American Federation of Labour. There were many others, of course, but these were the best known. The Socialist leaders were W.J. Ghent, Rufus Weeks, Gaylord Wilshire and R.W. Bruére. Exponents of individualism were many, and most of them were brilliant. The most powerful address on behalf of labour was made by R. Fulton Cutting. There has been no attempt to bait an ecclesiastical hook to catch the masses. We have tried to make men think and to act on their best thought. This venture in ecclesiology is not the democratization of a church. It is the leadership of a rector--Mr. Grant is an ecclesiastical statesman--he has a strong cabinet in his vestry. Men who, having made big ventures in the business world, are not averse to an occasional venture in matters not directly in their line. He has enough reaction among them to keep the balance level. The Church of the Ascension is the real Cathedral of New York. What matters it about Canon, Chapter, Dean and Prebend? A cathedral is a church of the people--all the people! CHAPTER XXII MY SOCIALISM, MY RELIGION AND MY HOME My vision spiritual came to me out of the unknown. The facts and experiences of life led me to Socialism. In each case it was a rebirth. "The Way" of Jesus was at first a state of mind; it had no relation to a book; it had no connection with a church. Socialism is a passion for the regeneration of society, it is a state of mind, a point of view. The religion of the peasant Saviour and the movement for industrial democracy expand as they are understood. Both thrive under opposition and are retarded only by unfaithful friends. I caught the spirit, then studied the forms. I got tired of doling out alms. It became degrading to me either to take them from the rich or to give them to the poor. Almsgiving deludes the one and demoralizes the other. I had distributed the crumbs that fall from rich men's tables until my soul became sick. I expected Lazarus the legion to be grateful; I expected him to become pious, to attend church, to number himself with the saved, and he didn't. Almsgiving not only degrades the recipient but the medium also. The average minister or missionary is looked upon by the middle and upper classes as a sort of refined pauper himself. So, like a mendicant he goes to the merchant and trades his piety for a rebate of ten per cent.; or he travels on a child's fare on the railroads. I have scores of times given away my own clothes and have gone to the missionary "Dorcas Room" and fitted myself out with somebody's worn-out garments; and I, too, was expected to be grateful and to write of my gratitude to the person who, "for Jesus' sake," had cleaned out his cellar or garret. In the West I have been the recipient of Home Missionary barrels packed in some rich church in New York or New England--annual barrels in which there is usually a ten-dollar suit for the missionary, bought by some dear old lady to whom all men were alike--in size. This whole process is hoary, antiquated, stupid and degrading. My Socialism is the outcome of my desire to make real the dreams I have dreamed of God. It came to me, not through Marx or Lassalle, but by the way of Moses and Jesus. Twenty years' experience in reform movements taught me the hopelessness of reformation from without. It was like soldering up a thousand little holes in the bottom of a kettle. For a hundred years men and women have been begging the industrial lords to spare the little children of the poor. Have they? Ask the census taker. Millions of them are the victims of the sweater--the dealer in human endurance. The cure for child labour is justice to the father, and justice to the father is his full share of the good things of life. As long as he has to pay tribute to a horde of non-producers, who have merely invested in his endurance, so long will he be unable to keep his child at school. It is the daughters of the poor that become the victims of middle-class lust--Fantine is the daughter of a working man. She is multiplied by tens of thousands on the streets of great cities, selling her soul for a morsel of bread. We are hardened to that and we think we are meriting the approbation of angels when we start a rescue mission for her special class. How pure in the sight of God is poor Fantine when compared with the cowards who will not smash the mill of which she is the mere grist. Just so long as there is a cash consideration in her life must capitalism bear the burden of her sin! There were millions of men out of work last winter. The political parties took no notice. The leaders knew the minds of the electors. They knew that those millions of unemployed were too stupid to see any connection between government and work. Mr. Taft was asked in the campaign what a workless, homeless man could do to find employment. "God knows!" was his reply. Out of this army of the unemployed the ranks of the criminals are reinforced, and the search for creature comforts recruits the ranks of women who are not fallen, but knocked down. The supreme function of the state is to make it easy for citizens to live in harmony with one another and hard to be out of joint. Poverty is the mother curse of the ages. No man suffering from her withering, blighting touch can be in harmony with the best. Socialism tackles the master job of abolishing it. Not by any fantastic plan of redistribution but by giving to the creator all that he creates and to the social charges, pensioners and cripples an assurance of life without the stigma of pauperism. Socialism asks for the application of science to the disease of poverty. Science has chained the lightning and harnessed the ether waves, it has filled the world with horseless carriages and is now filling the air with machines that fly like birds. The inventions of the last twenty years are modern miracles but the sunken millions of our fellowmen never speak through a telephone, never ride in an automobile, never send a telegram, never read good books, or see good plays! They make all these things. They make them all possible for others, but the enjoyment of them is beyond their wildest dreams! The strength of the social chain cannot be greater than its weakest link. Socialists are grouped around the thin places, the leakages, the weaknesses of democracy, and engross themselves in making them strong. The propaganda in times past wielded only a sword; now it has a trowel. Socialism is a positive force; it is leaven in the lump. The party has a discipline which often hampers its own progress, but in the regimentation of an idea discipline can not be dispensed with. There are Socialists who see only the goal--are not willing to see anything else or less. There are others who see every step of the way and emphasize each step. "What kind of a Socialist are you?" a rich man asked me the other day. "Catalogue me with the worst!" I said, "for he who numbers himself with the transgressors is in direct apostolic succession." The Socialists are the only people who seem to have the Bible idea of work. The scriptures make no provision for parasites. In the commonwealth of Israel everybody worked. When there was a departure from this ideal, came the prophet to speak for God and the divine order. Socialists are doing for America what the prophets did for Israel thousands of years ago: we are pointing the way to simple and right living, to justice, brotherhood and religion. Socialism is not an ultimate conception of society: it only paves the way for a divine individualism. When the fear of hunger is vanished men will have a chance to be individuals. Men striving all their lives to live--to merely live--have no time, no opportunity for a career. Opposition to the democratic ideal of Socialism is based on ignorance. Opponents ask for a mechanical contrivance that will wind up and go like a clock. We are asked questions that only our great-grandchildren can answer. We are told by the good people that the ideal leaves out God. The British Parliament proclaimed that bloodhounds and scalping were "means that God and nature had given into its hand." A coal baron of Pennsylvania declares that God has entrusted a few men with untold wealth and consigned a multitude to degrading poverty--that kind of a God the democratic ideal does leave out. He is a God spun out of the fertile brain of the materialist. Critics of Socialism assume and herald their own patriotism, their devotion to law and order, but they are usually men who distrust any extension of the functions of the state not directly beneficial to their personal interests. The Socialists of to-day know that their ideal can not be realized during their lifetime; they are people of vision; they are not saying, "Lord, Lord," but they are bringing in His Kingdom. The early Socialists met their worst opposition in a corrupt church and their writings were coloured by the conflict. We are asked to stand sponsor for all they said. One might as well charge 20th century Christians with the horrors of the Inquisition! We are not even willing to stand sponsor for their economics. Many of their prophecies are yet unfulfilled, the currents of thought and action are not flowing in the direction they anticipated, but the facts they faced have altered little and we moderns have made our own diagnosis, and we have decided on a remedy. The remedy is not revolution in the historic sense; it is not a cataclysm, it has no room for hatred. Its method is evolutionary; its watch-word is solidarity, its hope is regeneration. The process levels up, not down. It has an upward look. It will abolish class struggles and divisions. It will usher in a reign of peace. Just at present it is a class struggle, a struggle on behalf of that social group of labourers on whose back are borne the world's heaviest burdens, but it is no more a labour movement than the emancipation of the slaves was a Negro movement. The man who enunciated the doctrine of the class struggle belonged only by soul contact to the struggling class. The Socialist appeal is made directly to that class, for until it is awakened to its own peril and its own need little progress can be made. Changes in society are like changes in human character: they must have their origin in the heart and work outward. It is at the heart of things we place our hope and the secret of the social passion to me is the knowledge that I am a coöperator with God. There comes over me occasionally an idea, as I look into the future, that the fact may become the mockery of the dream. Our temples are built with hands, they are fair to look upon even in the dream, but other builders will come and build on other foundations temples of the soul more fair, more enduring. Socialism the fact will have the higher individualism as the dream; but the conflict will be lifted from the sordid plane of the stomach to the realm of mind, heart, and soul. The apologist of the _status quo_ is of all things the most pitiful. If a politician, he has no dream; if a business man, he has no vision; if a preacher, he lives in a mausoleum of dead hopes. To these the ten commandments sum up the moral order of the universe. The eleventh commandment shares the fate of the seed that fell on stony ground. The worst that a man can do against the democratic ideal is not to work for it. He might as well fight against the stars in their courses. What does it matter who brings it to pass or how it comes? To work for it is the thing. To feel the thrill of a world-comradeship, a world-endeavour, to be in line with the workers and touch hands with men of all creeds, all classes, this is social joy, this is incentive for life! "Then a man shall work and bethink him, and rejoice in the deeds of his hand, Nor yet come home in the even, too faint and weary to stand. Men in that time a-coming shall work and have no fear For to-morrow's lack of earning and the hunger-wolf a-near. Oh, strange, new wonderful justice! But for whom shall we gather the gain? For ourselves and for each of our fellows, and no hand shall labour in vain. Then all mine and all thine shall be ours and no more shall any man crave For riches that serve for nothing but to fetter a friend for a slave. And what wealth then shall be left us when none shall gather gold To buy his friend in the market and pinch and pine the sold? Nay, what save the lovely city and the little house on the hill, And the wastes and the woodland beauty and the happy fields we till, And the homes of ancient stories, the tombs of the mighty dead, And the wise men seeking out marvels and the poet's teaming head. And the painter's hand of wonder, and the marvellous fiddle-bow, And the banded choirs of music--all those that do and know. For all these shall be ours and all men's, nor shall any lack a share Of the toil and the gain of living in the days when the world grows fair." In the very advent of my spiritual life I gravitated toward the church. There I added to my faith a theology. A theologian is a fighter--a doctrinaire. Every item of knowledge I got I sharpened into a weapon to confound the Catholics. Before my nakedness was wholly covered I was shouting with my sect for "Queen and Constitution," and I could discuss the historic Episcopate before I could write my own name. Then came a hidebound orthodoxy. I measured life by a book and for every ill that flesh is heir to I had an "appropriate" text. I had a formula for the salvation of the race. I divided humanity into two camps--the goats and the sheep. I had a literal hell for one crowd and a beautiful heaven for the other. The logical result of this was a caste of good (saved) people for whom I became a sort of an ecclesiastical attorney. Naturally one outgrows such obsolescence. Such archaism has an antidote: it is an open-minded study of the life of Jesus. The result of such a study to me was a rediscovery of myself, that I think is what Jesus always does for an inquiring soul. He is the Supreme Individualist, the Master of Personality. I did not ask him what to wear or how to vote. I did not even ask him what was moral or immoral, for these things change with time and place and circumstance. I asked him the old eternal questions of life and death and immortality, of God and my neighbour, of sin and service. The answers stripped me of fear and gave me a scorn of consequences. The secret of Jesus is to find God in the soul of humanity. The cause of Jesus is the righting of world wrongs; the religion of Jesus the binding together of souls in the solidarity of the race. * * * * * Three miles north of Peekskill and two miles east of the Hudson river lies this farm place that I have named Happy Hollow. It looks to me as if God had just taken a big handful of earth out from between these hills of Putnam County and made a shelter here for man and beast. [Illustration: "Happy Hollow," Mr. Irvine's Present Home Near Peekskill, New York] The Hollow is meadow-land through which runs a brook. Across the meadow in front of the house, rises almost perpendicularly a hill five hundred feet high. It is clothed now in autumnal glory. On the summit there are several bare patches of granite rock surrounded by tall dark green cedars that look like forest monks, from my study window. There are over two hundred acres, two-thirds of them woodland. Through the woods there are miles and miles of old lumber roads over which my predecessors have hauled lumber since the days of the Revolution. "Is there a view of the Hudson River from any of these hills?" I asked when buying. "Somewhere," said the owner, but she was not quite sure. One day I was exploring the fastnesses and came upon a rock ledge standing a hundred feet high. I walked to the edge, pushed the branches of the elder bushes aside and out there in front of me lay that glorious valley and beyond the valley over the top of my house lay the mighty river like an unsheathed sword! On that ledge I have built a platform of white birch and behind the platform a bungalow from the window of which I have a full view of the valley, the Westchester County hills and the river. I have named the ledge "Ascension Point" in memory of the valued friendships formed at the church on Fifth Avenue. On the edge of the amphitheatre-shaped meadow, beside the old road that leads to the river, stands the farmhouse. It is sheltered from winter winds by the hills and from summer sun by elm, maple and walnut trees. There is nothing to boast of in the arrangement; it was built quickly and not over-well. If the man who planned it had any more taste than a cow he must have expressed it on the building of the barn, not on the house. It had been heated with stoves for years, but I tore away the boards that covered the open fireplaces. I built a cistern on the hill and a cesspool down in the meadow, and between them, in a large room in the house, arranged a bathroom, a big bathroom, big enough to swing a cat around. I am now knocking a wall down here and there, wiping some outbuildings off the map, and by degrees making it habitable throughout the year. There is a five-acre orchard on the hill east of the house and through it runs a brook that can be turned to good account. I had a population of twenty-five during the summer. They were encamped within a few hundred yards of each other in tents, overhauled barns, etc. We were all hand-picked Socialists--dreamers of dreams. Of course we had to eat and as the raw-food fad did not appeal to us we had to have a fire on which to cook; and as there was an abundance of wood I instituted a wood pile! To any one about to form a coöperative community I can recommend this institution as an infinitely better gauge of human character than either the ten commandments or the royal eight-fold pathway! We didn't need much wood and there were plenty of men. We had good tools and--I was going to say, "wood to burn." "It was jolly good fun, don't you know," to hack up about three sticks; then the woodcutter would have a story to tell or he "had something he had left undone for days." There was an atmosphere around the pile that affected us as the hookworm affects its victims in some Southern communities--we grew listless, dull, flaccid. The influence was baneful, subtle. None of us ever confessed to being affected. It rather emphasized our idealism. "In the future," said one comrade as he laid the axe down after his second stick, "wood will be cut by machinery!" We looked interested. "Yes," he said as he rolled a cigarette, "there will be a machine that will cut a cord a second!" "Why don't you invent one?" we asked. "How can one invent anything in this slave age?" he asked, as he glared at us between the curling puffs of smoke. "That's true," we said, and piped down. He went over to the well to get a drink. The housekeeper called for firewood. He smiled--he was a jolly good-natured chap. "Keep cool, comrades," he said gently, "it'll be all the same in a thousand years!" The axe was blunt. He took it to the grindstone--a new patent, with a bicycle seat on it, and there he sat puffing and grinding until a neighbour's cow broke into our corn. He dropped the axe and went after the cow. The housekeeper kept calling for wood. Another comrade was pressed into the killing ether and he smashed and hacked for five minutes; then he straightened himself up and, said, with a look of disgust on his face, "That's a mucker's job!" "Who will be the muckers under Socialism?" I asked mildly. "The dull, brainless clods who can do nothing else!" he said. Just then our neighbour's hired man, a Russian muzik, passed with his ox-team. He wore a smock of his own making and a pair of shoes he had made of hickory bark. "That," said the comrade at the block in a stage whisper, "is the type that will do the rough work. You couldn't wake that thing up with a plug of dynamite!" We watched Michael and his ox-team as they lumbered lazily along the lane. [Illustration: "Happy Hollow" in the Winter, Looking From the House] We had one poet in our midst--just one. He had lately completed a poem on the glories of our valley. Two men stooped to pick up the axe. Gaston and Alphonse like, they stooped together. As they did so the poet came along with a beaming face. "Stop!" he said; "listen, boys, listen." We all straightened up, and stood at attention. He read: "Not far from turmoil, strife, the mountain-vying waves Of life's antagonisms that delude the world-- Amidst elysian valleys, slopes, majestic hills and caves That mark the path where ages wrought their wrath and hurled The crumbling sinews of the soil down to defeat, To linger in the depth as symbols that all power Is at the will of the Supreme--in this retreat, Filled with the chirping music of the nightly hour, And seeking rest from joyous toil, reward for which Is given by the thought that all is mine, that none Do rob, that love adds to each stroke its rich And sweetening cheer: In such rare world that I have won----" The housekeeper rudely broke the spell! "You comrades had better eat that poetry for dinner," she said. We all looked and all understood--all save the poet. He looked aghast, thinking in Yiddish. "Go on," somebody said, but the poet was a sensitive youth and could sense an atmosphere quicker than most of us. "Wood," said the housekeeper, pointing at the few sticks lying around the block. "Ah," exclaimed the poet as he took up the axe, "you shall have it, comrade--have it good and plenty." He laid the poem in the white birch frame against a stone and proceeded. We moved away, every man to his own place. In a community where the communers have to chop the fire-wood, canned salmon is a good standby. That day we had salmon for dinner. Just as a matter of encouragement I had the artist of the community print a Latin motto in fine Gothic characters: "LABORARE EST ORARE" This I tacked to the block at the woodpile. We had one orator in the community--just one. Next morning, when the motto stared him in the face, he said: "Gee whiz! that's great--Labour is oratory!" It was a blow at a venture in the interpretation of Latin and instead of wood to cook the breakfast we had a speech on the labour of the orator! The idea that I was giving land away got noised abroad, and a thousand letters of inquiry came to me. Most of the inquirers asked if I gave "deeds" to the land. Others got an idea that I had a coöperative colony and all they had to do was to come and plant themselves on the land. I never intended to organize a colony but I did invite some families to enjoy the summer on the farm. I shall not ask as many next year for I have no talent as a manager and it takes more management than I imagined to look after even half a dozen families. I had a number of parties from the city during the summer--the largest being from the Church of the Ascension and the Cosmopolitan Church. From Ascension Church came a young men's club on Decoration day. I introduced the boys to their first experience in archery. The people from the Cosmopolitan Church came on a Sunday and I took them over the hill to call on my friends, the Franciscan monks, of the society of the Atonement. The Franciscans are my nearest neighbours on the north and on the south is my neighbour Mr. Epstein, a Russian Jewish farmer. From the north we have had an intellectual and moral fellowship and from the south the comradeship of the soil. To Mr. Epstein's bull we are indebted for the element of excitement--a very necessary element if one could get it in any sort of orderly arrangement. The bull objected to Mr. Epstein interfering in what might be called his (the bull's) family affairs. He tossed his owner into the air three times one afternoon in my meadow and, but for the timely interference of a dog, would have gathered the farmer to his fathers. Several of our community saw the incident, but the vibrations had a more enervating effect than even those around the woodpile, and being armed only with the first law of nature they left the honours of the incident to the dog. The following Sunday morning I saw a crowd in Mr. Epstein's orchard. It looked like a small county fair. A cow doctor had been imported to perform an operation on the bull. Mr. Epstein and his muzik, Michael, almost came to blows in trying to decide which of them should put the yoke on the bull's neck. No decent farmer will stand aloof in such a crisis: so I threw my coat off and offered my services. The patient made serious objections to me, but permitted the yoke to be adjusted by a day labourer named Harvey Outhouse. This Holstein aristocrat had a terrible come-down. He used to stalk around as if he owned the earth, but now he is a common "hewer of wood and drawer of water" like ourselves. I see him occasionally, now, pulling a heavy load of stones or hay past our place as meekly and quiet as the dull ox by his side, and involuntarily I exclaim: "How are the mighty fallen!" I have a horse and a cow. The artist of the community, who remains as one of my family, took charge of the cow and the care of the horse was distributed among the rest of us. The house is made comfortable and snug for the winter and I have settled down here for the remainder of my life. With my family are these two comrades, the artist and the mechanic, and we are in complete harmony in work and ideals. I have been a gypsy most of my life. I am to have a respite now. Here in this corner of Putnam County I have found my happy hills of rest. My work will always be in the city but here my home is to me and here I am to do my writing, thinking, living. In the solitude of these woods I am to find inspiration and quiet, here I am to dream my dreams and see my visions. I am forty-seven years of age now, but I have the health and vigour of a boy and I feel that for me life has just really begun. I have but one ambition: it is not wealth, or fame, or even rest. It is to be of service to my fellow-men; for that is my highest conception of service to God. This memoir is but a catalogue of events--a series of milestones that I have passed. My life has been at times such a tempest and at other times such a calm, and between these extremes I have failed so often and my successes have been so phenomenal that the world would not believe a true recital of the facts, even though I were able to write them. The conflicts of the soul, the scalding tears that bespeak the breaking heart, can not be reduced to print. Nevertheless, I hope that what I have written may be of encouragement to my fellow-travellers along the highway of life, especially men who mistakenly imagine they have been worsted in the fight. There is a great truth in the doctrine of the economic interpretation of history but there is also truth, and a mighty truth, in the spiritual interpretation of life. The awakened human soul is indissolubly inknit with the warp and woof of things divine. It fights not alone, it is linked with God. "No man is born into the world whose work Is not born with him; there is always work And tools to work withal for those who will. And blessed are the horny hands of toil! The busy world shoves angrily aside The man who stands with arms akimbo set, Until occasion tells him what to do; And he who waits to have his task worked out-- Shall die and leave his errand unfulfilled." * * * * * +--------------------------------------------------------------+ | Typographical errors corrected in text: | | | | Page 162: carfully replaced with carefully | | Page 297: guage replaced with gauge | +--------------------------------------------------------------+ 
18397	----	images of public domain material from the Google Print project.) SOCIALISM AND MODERN SCIENCE (DARWIN, SPENCER, MARX) BY ENRICO FERRI TRANSLATED BY ROBERT RIVES LA MONTE THIRD EDITION CHICAGO CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY 1917 Copyright, 1900 by The International Library Publishing Co. Table of Contents. PAGE. Preface 5 Introduction 9 I. THE THREE ALLEGED CONTRADICTIONS BETWEEN DARWINISM AND SOCIALISM Virchow And Haeckel at the Congress of Munich 13 _a_) The equality of individuals 19 _b_) The struggle for life and its victims 35 _c_) The survival of the fittest 49 SOCIALISM AS A CONSEQUENCE OF DARWINISM. Socialism and religious beliefs 59 The individual and the species 67 The struggle for life and the class-struggle 74 II. EVOLUTION AND SOCIALISM. The orthodox thesis and the socialist thesis confronted by the theory of evolution 92 The law of apparent retrogression and collective ownership 100 The social evolution and individual liberty 110 Evolution.--Revolution.--Rebellion.--Violence 129 III. SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIALISM. Sterility of sociology 156 Marx completes Darwin And Spencer. Conservatives and socialists 159 Appendix I.--Reply to Spencer 173 Appendix II.--Socialist superstition and individualist myopia 177 Author's Preface. (_For the French Edition._) This volume--which it has been desired to make known to the great public in the French language--in entering upon a question so complex and so vast as socialism, has but a single and definite aim. My intention has been to point out, and in nearly all cases by rapid and concise observations, the general relations existing between contemporary socialism and the whole trend of modern scientific thought. The opponents of contemporary socialism see in it, or wish to see in it, merely a reproduction of the sentimental socialism of the first half of the Nineteenth Century. They contend that socialism is in conflict with the fundamental facts and inductions of the physical, biological and social sciences, whose marvelous development and fruitful applications are the glory of our dying century. To oppose socialism, recourse has been had to the individual interpretations and exaggerations of such or such a partisan of Darwinism, or to the opinions of such or such a sociologist--opinions and interpretations in obvious conflict with the premises of their theories on universal and inevitable evolution. It has also been said--under the pressure of acute or chronic hunger--that "if science was against socialism, so much the worse for science." And those who thus spoke were right if they meant by "science"--even with a capital S--the whole mass of observations and conclusions _ad usum delphini_ that orthodox science, academic and official--often in good faith, but sometimes also through interested motives--has always placed at the disposal of the ruling minorities. I have believed it possible to show that modern experiential science is in complete harmony with contemporary socialism, which, since the work of Marx and Engels and their successors, differs essentially from sentimental socialism, both in its scientific system and in its political tactics, though it continues to put forth generous efforts for the attainment of the same goal: social justice for all men. I have loyally and candidly maintained my thesis on scientific grounds; I have always recognized the partial truths of the theories of our opponents, and I have not ignored the glorious achievements of the bourgeoisie and bourgeois science since the outbreak of the French Revolution. The disappearance of the bourgeois class and science, which, at their advent marked the disappearance of the hieratic and aristocratic classes and science, will result in the triumph of social justice for all mankind, without distinction of classes, and in the triumph of truth carried to its ultimate consequences. The appendix contains my replies to a letter of Herbert Spencer and to an anti-socialist book of M. Garofalo. It shows the present state of social science, and of the struggle between ultra-conservative orthodoxy, which is blinded to the sad truths of contemporary life by its traditional syllogisms and innovating heterodoxy which is ever becoming more marked among the learned, as well as strengthening its hold upon the collective intelligence. ENRICO FERRI. Brussels, Nov., 1895. Introduction. Convinced Darwinian and Spencerian, as I am, it is my intention to demonstrate that Marxian Socialism--the only socialism which has a truly scientific method and value, and therefore the only socialism which from this time forth has power to inspire and unite the Social Democrats throughout the civilized world--is only the practical and fruitful fulfilment, in the social life, of that modern scientific revolution which--inaugurated some centuries since by the rebirth of the experimental method in all branches of human knowledge--has triumphed in our times, thanks to the works of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. It is true that Darwin and especially Spencer halted when they had travelled only half way toward the conclusions of a religious, political or social order, which necessarily flow from their indisputable premises. But that is, as it were, only an individual episode, and has no power to stop the destined march of science and of its practical consequences, which are in wonderful accord with the necessities--necessities enforced upon our attention by want and misery--of contemporary life. This is simply one more reason why it is incumbent upon us to render justice to the scientific and political work of Karl Marx which completes the renovation of modern scientific thought. Feeling and thought are the two inseparable impelling forces of the individual life and of the collective life. Socialism, which was still, but a few years since, at the mercy of the strong and constantly recurring but undisciplined fluctuations of humanitarian sentimentalism, has found, in the work of that great man, Karl Marx, and of those who have developed and completed his thought, its scientific and political guide.[1] This is the explanation of every one of its conquests. Civilization is the most fruitful and most beautiful development of human energies, but it contains also an infectious _virus_ of tremendous power. Beside the splendor of its artistic, scientific and industrial achievements, it accumulates gangrenous products, idleness, poverty, misery, insanity, crime and physical suicide and moral suicide, _i. e._ servility. Pessimism--that sad symptom of a life without ideals and, in part, the effect of the exhaustion or even of the degeneration of the nervous system--glorifies the final annihilation of all life and sensation as the only mode of escaping from or triumphing over pain and suffering. We have faith, on the contrary, in the eternal _virtus medicatrix naturae_ (healing power of Nature), and socialism is precisely that breath of a new and better life which will free humanity--after some access of fever perhaps--from the noxious products of the present phase of civilization, and which, in a more advanced phase, will give a new power and opportunity of expansion to all the healthy and fruitful energies of all human beings. ENRICO FERRI. Rome, June, 1894. FOOTNOTE: [1] The word in the original means a mariner's compass.--_Tr._ SOCIALISM AND MODERN SCIENCE. PART FIRST. I. VIRCHOW AND HAECKEL AT THE CONGRESS OF MUNICH. On the 18th of September, 1877, Ernest Haeckel, the celebrated embryologist of Jena, delivered at the Congress of Naturalists, which was held at Munich, an eloquent address defending and propagating Darwinism, which was at that time the object of the most bitter polemical attacks. A few days afterward, Virchow, the great pathologist,--an active member of the "progressive" parliamentary party, hating new theories in politics just as much as in science--violently assailed the Darwinian theory of organic evolution, and, moved by a very just presentiment, hurled against it this cry of alarm, this political anathema: "Darwinism leads directly to socialism." The German Darwinians, and at their head Messrs. Oscar Schmidt and Haeckel, immediately protested; and, in order to avert the addition of strong political opposition to the religious, philosophical, and biological opposition already made to Darwinism, they maintained, on the contrary, that the Darwinian theory is in direct, open and absolute opposition to socialism. "If the Socialists were prudent," wrote Oscar Schmidt in the "Ausland" of November 27, 1877, "they would do their utmost to kill, by silent neglect, the theory of descent, for that theory most emphatically proclaims that the socialist ideas are impracticable." "As a matter of fact," said Haeckel,[2] "there is no scientific doctrine which proclaims more openly than the theory of descent that the equality of individuals, toward which socialism tends, is an impossibility; that this chimerical equality is in absolute contradiction with the necessary and, in fact, universal inequality of individuals. "Socialism demands for all citizens equal rights, equal duties, equal possessions and equal enjoyments; the theory of descent establishes, on the contrary, that the realization of these hopes is purely and simply impossible; that, in human societies, as in animal societies, neither the rights, nor the duties, nor the possessions, nor the enjoyments of all the members of a society are or ever can be equal. "The great law of variation teaches--both in the general theory of evolution and in the smaller field of biology where it becomes the theory of descent--that the variety of phenomena flows from an original unity, the diversity of functions from a primitive identity, and the complexity of organization from a primordial simplicity. The conditions of existence for all individuals are, from their very birth, unequal. There must also be taken into consideration the inherited qualities and the innate tendencies which also vary more or less widely. In view of all this, how can the work and the reward be equal for all? "The more highly the social life is developed, the more important becomes the great principle of the division of labor, the more requisite it becomes for the stable existence of the State as a whole that its members should distribute among themselves the multifarious tasks of life, each performing a single function; and as the labor which must be performed by the individuals, as well as the expenditure of strength, talent, money, etc., which it necessitates, differs more and more, it is natural that the remuneration of this labor should also vary widely. These are facts so simple and so obvious that it seems to me every intelligent and enlightened statesman ought to be an advocate of the theory of descent and the general doctrine of evolution, as the best antidote for the absurd equalitarian, utopian notions of the socialists. "And it was Darwinism, the theory of selection, that Virchow, in his denunciation, had in mind, rather than mere metamorphic development, the theory of descent, with which it is always confused! Darwinism is anything rather than socialistic. "If one wishes to attribute a political tendency to this English theory,--which is quite permissible,--this tendency can be nothing but aristocratic; by no means can it be democratic, still less socialistic. "The theory of selection teaches that in the life of mankind, as in that of plants and animals, it is always and everywhere a small privileged minority alone which succeeds in living and developing itself; the immense majority, on the contrary, suffer and succumb more or less prematurely. Countless are the seeds and eggs of every species of plants and animals, and the young individuals who issue from them. But the number of those who have the good fortune to reach fully developed maturity and to attain the goal of their existence is relatively insignificant. "The cruel and pitiless 'struggle for existence' which rages everywhere throughout animated nature, and which in the nature of things must rage, this eternal and inexorable competition between all living beings, is an undeniable fact. Only a small picked number of the strongest or fittest is able to come forth victoriously from this battle of competition. The great majority of their unfortunate competitors are inevitably destined to perish. It is well enough to deplore this tragic fatality, but one cannot deny it or change it. 'Many are called, but few are chosen!' "The selection, the 'election' of these 'elect' is by absolute necessity bound up with the rejection or destruction of the vast multitude of beings whom they have survived. And so another learned Englishman has called the fundamental principle of Darwinism 'the survival of the fittest, the victory of the best.' "At all events, the principle of selection is not in the slightest degree democratic; it is, on the contrary, thoroughly aristocratic. If, then, Darwinism, carried out to its ultimate logical consequences, has, according to Virchow, for the statesman 'an extraordinarily dangerous side,' the danger is doubtless that it favors aristocratic aspirations." I have reproduced complete and in their exact form all the arguments of Haeckel, because they are those which are repeated--in varying tones, and with expressions which differ from his only to lose precision and eloquence--by those opponents of socialism who love to appear scientific, and who, for polemical convenience, make use of those ready-made or stereotyped phrases which have currency, even in science, more than is commonly imagined. It is easy, nevertheless, to demonstrate that, in this debate, Virchow's way of looking at the subject was the more correct and more perspicacious, and that the history of these last twenty years has amply justified his position. It has happened, indeed, that Darwinism and socialism have both progressed with a marvelous power of expansion. From that time the one was to conquer--for its fundamental theory--the unanimous endorsement of naturalists; the other was to continue to develop--in its general aspirations as in its political discipline--flooding all the conduits of the social consciousness, like a torrential inundation from internal wounds caused by the daily growth of physical and moral disease, or like a gradual, capillary, inevitable infiltration into minds freed from all prejudices, and which are not satisfied by the merely personal advantages that they derive from the orthodox distribution of spoils. But, as political or scientific theories are natural phenomena and not the capricious and ephemeral products of the free wills of those who construct and propagate them, it is evident that if these two currents of modern thought have each been able to triumph over the opposition they first aroused--the strongest kind of opposition, scientific and political conservatism--and if every day increases the army of their avowed disciples, this of itself is enough to show us--I was about to say by a law of intellectual _symbiosis_--that they are neither irreconcilable with, nor contradictory to, each other. Moreover, the three principal arguments which form the substance of the anti-socialist reasoning of Haeckel resist neither the most elementary criticisms, nor the most superficial observation of every-day life. These arguments are: I.--Socialism tends toward a chimerical equality of persons and property: Darwinism, on the contrary, not only establishes, but shows the organic necessity of the natural inequality of the capabilities and even the wants of individuals. II.--In the life of mankind, as in that of plants and animals, the immense majority of those who are born are destined to perish, because only a small minority can triumph in the "struggle for existence"; socialism asserts, on the contrary, that all ought to triumph in this struggle, and that no one is inexorably destined to be conquered. III.--The struggle for existence assures "the survival of the best, the victory of the fittest," and this results in an aristocratic hierarchic gradation of selected individuals--a continuous progress--instead of the democratic, collectivist leveling of socialism. FOOTNOTE: [2] Les preuves du transformisme.--Paris, 1879, page 110 _et seq._ II. THE EQUALITY OF INDIVIDUALS. The first of the objections, which is brought against socialism in the name of Darwinism, is absolutely without foundation. If it were true that socialism aspires to "the equality of all individuals," it would be correct to assert that Darwinism irrevocably condemns it.[3] But although even to-day it is still currently repeated--by some in good faith, like parrots who recite their stereotyped phrases; by others in bad faith, with polemical skillfulness--that socialism is synonymous with equality and leveling; the truth is, on the contrary, that scientific socialism--the socialism which draws its inspiration from the theory of Marx, and which alone to-day is worthy of support or opposition,--has never denied the inequality of individuals, as of all living beings--inequality innate and acquired, physical and intellectual.[4] It is just as if one should say that socialism asserts that a royal decree or a popular vote could settle it that "henceforth all men shall be five feet seven inches tall." But in truth, socialism is something more serious and more difficult to refute. Socialism says: _Men are unequal, but they are all_ (of them) _men_. And, in fact, although each individual is born and develops in a fashion more or less different from that of all other individuals,--just as there are not in a forest two leaves identically alike, so in the whole world there are not two men in all respects equals, the one of the other,--nevertheless every man, simply because he is a _human being_, has a right to the existence of a man, and not of a slave or a beast of burden. We know, we as well as our opponents, that all men cannot perform the same kind and amount of labor--now, when social inequalities are added to equalities of natural origin--and that they will still be unable to do it under a socialist regime--when the social organization will tend to reduce the effect of congenital inequalities. There will always be some people whose brains or muscular systems will be better adapted for scientific work or for artistic work, while others will be more fit for manual labor, or for work requiring mechanical precision, etc. What ought not to be, and what will not be--is that there should be some men who do not work at all, and others who work too much or receive too little reward for their toil. But we have reached the height of injustice and absurdity, and in these days it is the man who does not work who reaps the largest returns, who is thus guaranteed the individual monopoly of wealth which accumulates by means of hereditary transmission. This wealth, moreover, is only very rarely due to the economy and abstinence of the present possessor or of some industrious ancestor of his; it is most frequently the time-honored fruit of spoliation by military conquest, by unscrupulous "business" methods, or by the favoritism of sovereigns; but it is in every instance always independent of any exertion, of any socially useful labor of the inheritor, who often squanders his property in idleness or in the whirlpool of a life as inane as it is brilliant in appearance. And, when we are not confronted with a fortune due to inheritance, we meet with wealth due to fraud. Without talking for the moment of the economic organization, the mechanism of which Karl Marx has revealed to us, and which, even without fraud, normally enables the capitalist or property owner to live upon his income without working, it is indisputable that the fortunes which are formed or enlarged with the greatest rapidity under our eyes cannot be the fruit of honest toil. The really honest workingman, no matter how indefatigable and economical he may be, if he succeeds in raising himself from the state of wage-slave to that of an overseer or contractor, can, by a long life of privations, accumulate at most a few hundreds of dollars. Those who, on the contrary, without making by their own talent industrial discoveries or inventions, accumulate in a few years millions, can be nothing but unscrupulous manipulators of affairs, if we except a few rare strokes of good luck. And it is these very parasites--bankers, etc.,--who live in the most ostentatious luxury enjoying public honors, and holding offices of trust, as a reward for their honorable business methods. Those who toil, the immense majority, receive barely enough food to keep them from dying of hunger; they live in back-rooms, in garrets, in the filthy alleys of cities, or in the country in hovels not fit for stables for horses or cattle. Besides all this, we must not forget the horrors of being unable to find work, the saddest and most frequent of the three symptoms of that _equality in misery_ which is spreading like a pestilence over the economic world of modern Italy, as indeed, with varying degrees of intensity, it is everywhere else. I refer to the ever-growing army of the _unemployed_ in agriculture and industry--of those who have lost their foothold in the lower middle class,--and of those who have been _expropriated_ (robbed) of their little possessions by taxes, debts or usury. It is not correct, then, to assert that socialism demands for all citizens material and actual equality of labor and rewards. The only possible equality is equality of obligation to work in order to live, with a guarantee to every laborer of conditions of existence worthy of a human being in exchange for the labor furnished to society. Equality, according to socialism--as Benoit Malon said[5]--is a relative thing, and must be understood in a two-fold sense: 1st, All men, as men, must be guaranteed human conditions of existence; 2d, All men ought to be equal _at the starting point_, ought not to be handicapped, in the struggle for life, in order that each may freely develop his own personality in an environment of equality of _social_ conditions, while to-day a child, sound and healthy, but poor, goes to the wall in competition with a child puny but rich.[6] This is what constitutes the radical, immeasurable transformation that socialism demands, but that it also has discovered and announces as an evolution--already begun in the world around us--that will be necessarily, inevitably accomplished in the human society of the days to come.[7] This transformation is summed up in the conversion of private or individual ownership of the means of production, _i. e._ of the physical foundation of human life (land, mines, houses, factories, machinery, instruments of labor or tools, and means of transportation) into collective or social ownership, by means of methods and processes which I will consider further on. From this point we will consider it as proven that the first objection of the anti-socialist reasoning does not hold, since its starting-point is non-existent. It assumes, in short, that contemporary socialism aims at a chimerical physical and mental equality of all men, when the fact is that scientific and fact-founded socialism never, even in a dream, thought of such a thing. Socialism maintains, on the contrary, that this inequality--though greatly diminished under a better social organization which will do away with all the physical and mental imperfections that are the cumulative results of generations of poverty and misery--can, nevertheless, never disappear for the reasons that Darwinism has discovered in the mysterious mechanism of life, in other words on account of the principle of variation that manifests itself in the continuous development of species culminating in man. In every social organization that it is possible to conceive, there will always be some men large and others small, some weak and some strong, some phlegmatic and some nervous, some more intelligent, others less so, some superior in mental power, others in muscular strength; and it is well that it should be so; moreover, it is inevitable. It is well that this is so, because the variety and inequality of individual aptitudes naturally produce that division of labor that Darwinism has rightly declared to be a law of individual physiology and of social economy. All men ought to work in order to live, but each ought to devote himself to the kind of labor which best suits his peculiar aptitudes. An injurious waste of strength and abilities would thus be avoided, and labor would cease to be repugnant, and would become agreeable and necessary as a condition of physical and moral health. And when all have given to society the labor best suited to their innate and acquired aptitudes, each has a right to the same rewards, since each has equally contributed to that solidarity of labor which sustains the life of the social aggregate and, in solidarity with it, the life of each individual. The peasant who digs the earth performs a kind of labor in appearance more modest, but just as necessary, useful and meritorious as that of the workman who builds a locomotive, of the mechanical engineer who improves it or of the savant who strives to extend the bounds of human knowledge in his study or laboratory. The one essential thing is that all the members of society work, just as in the individual organism all the cells perform their different functions, more or less modest in appearance--for example, the nerve-cells, the bone-cells or the muscular cells--but all biological functions, or sorts of labor, equally useful and necessary to the life of the organism as a whole. In the biological organism no living cell remains inactive, and the cell obtains nourishment by material exchanges only in proportion to its labor; in the social organism no individual ought to live without working, whatever form his labor may take. In this way the majority of the artificial difficulties that our opponents raise against socialism may be swept aside. "Who, then, will black the boots under the socialist regime?" demands M. Richter in his book so poor in ideas, but which becomes positively grotesque when it assumes that, in the name of social equality the "grand chancellor" of the socialist society will be obliged, before attending to the public business, to black his own boots and mind his own clothes! In truth, if the adversaries of socialism had nothing but arguments of this sort, discussion would indeed be needless. But all will want to do the least fatiguing and most agreeable kinds of work, says some one with a greater show of seriousness. I will answer that this is equivalent to demanding to-day the promulgation of a decree as follows: Henceforth all men shall be born painters or surgeons! The distribution to the proper persons of the different kinds of mental and manual labor will be effected in fact by the anthropological variations in temperament and character, and there will be no need to resort to monkish regulations (another baseless objection to socialism). Propose to a peasant of average intelligence to devote himself to the study of anatomy or of the penal code or, inversely, tell him whose brain is more highly developed than his muscles to dig the earth, instead of observing with the microscope. They will each prefer the labor for which they feel themselves best fitted. The changes of occupation or profession will not be as considerable as many imagine when society shall be organized under the collectivist regime. When once the industries ministering to purely _personal_ luxury shall be suppressed--luxury which in most cases insults and aggravates the misery of the masses--the quantity and variety of work will adapt themselves gradually, that is to say naturally, to the socialist phase of civilization just as they now conform to the bourgeois phase. Moreover, under the socialist regime, every one will have the fullest liberty to declare and make manifest his personal aptitudes, and it will not happen, as it does to-day, that many peasants, sons of the people and of the lower middle class, gifted with natural talents, will be compelled to allow their talents to atrophy while they toil as peasants, workingmen or employees, when they would be able to furnish society a different and more fruitful kind of labor, because it would be more in Harmony with their peculiar genius. The one essential point is this: In exchange for the labor that they furnish to society, society must guarantee to the peasant and the artisan, as well as to the one who devotes himself to the liberal careers, conditions of existence worthy of a human being. Then we will no longer be affronted by the spectacle of a ballet girl, for instance, earning as much in one evening by whirling on her toes as a scientist, a doctor, a lawyer, etc., in a year's work. In fact to-day the latter are in luck if they do that well. Certainly, the arts will not be neglected under the socialist regime, because socialism wishes life to be agreeable for all, instead of for a privileged few only, as it is to-day; it will, on the contrary, give to all the arts a marvelous impulse, and if it abolishes private luxury this will be all the more favorable to the splendor of the public edifices. More attention will be paid to assuring to each one remuneration in proportion to the labor performed. This ratio will be ascertained by taking the difficulty and danger of the labor into account and allowing them to reduce the time required for a given compensation. If a peasant in the open air can work seven or eight hours a day, a miner ought not to work more than three or four hours. And, indeed, when everybody shall work, when much unproductive labor shall be suppressed, the aggregate of daily labor to be distributed among men will be much less heavy and more easily endured (by reason of the more abundant food, more comfortable lodging and recreation guaranteed to every worker) than it is to-day by those who toil and who are so poorly paid, and, besides this, the progress of science applied to industry will render human labor less and less toilsome. Individuals will apply themselves to work, although the wages or remuneration cannot be accumulated as private wealth, because if the normal, healthy, well-fed man avoids excessive or poorly rewarded labor, he does not remain in idleness, since it is a physiological and psychological necessity for him to devote himself to a daily occupation in harmony with his capacities. The different kinds of sport are for the leisure classes a substitute for productive labor which a physiological necessity imposes upon them, in order that they may escape the detrimental consequences of absolute repose and ennui. The gravest problem will be to _proportion_ the remuneration to the labor of each. You know that collectivism adopts the formula--to each according to his labor, while communism adopts this other--to each according to his needs. No one can give, in _its practical details_, the solution of this problem; but this impossibility of predicting the future even in its slightest details does not justify those who brand socialism as a utopia incapable of realization. No one could have, _a priori_, in the dawn of any civilization predicted its successive developments, as I will demonstrate when I come to speak of the methods of social renovation. This is what we are able to affirm with assurance, basing our position on the most certain inductions of psychology and sociology. It cannot be denied, as Marx himself declared, that this second formula--which makes it possible to distinguish, according to some, anarchy from socialism--represents a more remote and more complex ideal. But it is equally impossible to deny that, in any case, the formula of collectivism represents a phase of social evolution, a period of individual discipline which must necessarily precede communism.[8] There is no need to believe that socialism will realize in their fulness all the highest possible ideals of humanity and that after its advent there will be nothing left to desire or to battle for! Our descendants would be condemned to idleness and vagabondage if our immediate ideal was so perfect and all-inclusive as to leave them no ideal at which to aim. The individual or the society which no longer has an ideal to strive toward is dead or about to die.[9] The formula of communism may then be a more remote ideal, when collectivism shall have been completely realized by the historical processes which I will consider further on. We are now in a position to conclude that there is no contradiction between socialism and Darwinism on the subject of the equality of all men. Socialism has never laid down this proposition and like Darwinism its tendency is toward a better life for individuals and for society. This enables us also to reply to this objection, too often repeated, that socialism stifles and suppresses human individuality under the leaden pall of collectivism, by subjecting individuals to uniform monastic regulations and by making them into so many human bees in the social honey-comb. Exactly the opposite of this is true. Is it not obvious that it is under the present bourgeois organization of society that so many individualities atrophy and are lost to humanity, which under other conditions might be developed to their own advantage and to the advantage of society as a whole? To-day, in fact, apart from some rare exceptions, every man is valued for what he _possesses_ and not for what he _is_.[10] He who is born poor, obviously by no fault of his own, may be endowed by Nature with artistic or scientific genius, but if his patrimony is insufficient to enable him to triumph in the first struggles for development and to complete his education, or if he has not, like the shepherd Giotto, the luck to meet with a rich Cimabue, he must inevitably vanish in oblivion in the great prison of wage-slavery, and society itself thus loses treasures of intellectual power.[11] He who is born rich, although he owes his fortune to no personal exertion, even if his mental capacity is below normal, will play a leading role on the stage of life's theatre, and all servile people will heap praise and flattery upon him, and he will imagine, simply because he _has_ money, that he is quite a different person from what in reality he _is_.[12] When property shall have become collective, that is to say, under the socialist regime, every one will be assured of the means of existence, and the daily labor will simply serve to give free play to the special aptitudes, more or less original, of each individual, and the best and most fruitful (potentially) years of life will not be completely taken up, as they are at present, by the grievous and tragic battle for daily bread. Socialism will assure to every one a _human_ life; it will give each individual true liberty to manifest and develop his or her own physical and intellectual individuality--individualities which they bring into the world at birth and which are infinitely varied and unequal. Socialism does not deny inequality; it merely wishes to utilize this inequality as one of the factors leading to the free, prolific and many-sided development of human life. FOOTNOTES: [3] J. De Johannis, _Il concetto dell'equaglianza nel socialismo e nella scienza_, in _Rassegna delle scienza sociali_, Florence, March 15, 1883, and more recently, Huxley, "On the Natural Inequality of Men," in the "Nineteenth Century," January, 1890. [4] Utopian socialism has bequeathed to us as a mental habit, a habit surviving even in the most intelligent disciples of Marxian socialism, of asserting the existence of certain equalities--the equality of the two sexes, for example--assertions which cannot possibly be maintained. BEBEL, _Woman in the Past, Present and Future_. Bebel, the propagandist and expounder of Marxian theories, also repeats this assertion that, from the psycho-physiological point of view, woman is the equal of man, and he attempts to refute, without success, the scientific objections that have been made to this thesis. Since the scientific investigations of Messrs. Lombroso and Ferrero, embodied in _Donna delinquente, prostituta e normale_, Turin, 1893 (This book has been translated into English, if my memory serves me right.--Tr.), one can no longer deny the physiological and psychological inferiority of woman to man. I have given a Darwinian explanation of this fact (Scuola positiva, 1893, Nos. 7-8), that Lombroso has since completely accepted (_Uomo di genio_, 6e édit, 1894. This book is also available in English, I believe.--Tr.) I pointed out that all the physio-psychical characteristics of woman are the consequences of her great biological function, maternity. A being who creates another being--not in the fleeting moment of a voluptuous contact, but by the organic and psychical sacrifices of pregnancy, childbirth and giving suck--cannot preserve for herself as much strength, physical and mental, as man whose only function in the reproduction of the species is infinitely less of a drain. And so, aside from certain individual exceptions, woman has a lower degree of physical sensibility than man (the current opinion is just the opposite), because if her sensibility were greater, she could not, according to the Darwinian law, survive the immense and repeated sacrifices of maternity, and the species would become extinct. Woman's intellect is weaker, especially in synthetic power, precisely because though there are no (Sergi, in _Atti della societa romana di antropologia_, 1894) women of genius, they nevertheless give birth to men of genius. This is so true that greater sensibility and power of intellect are found in women in whom the function and sentiment of maternity are undeveloped or are only slightly developed (women of genius generally have a masculine physiognomy), and many of them attain their complete intellectual development only after they pass the critical period of life during which the maternal functions cease finally. But, if it is scientifically certain that woman represents an inferior degree of biological evolution, and that she occupies a station, even as regards her physio-psychical characteristics, midway between the child and the adult male, it does not follow from this that the socialist conclusions concerning the woman question are false. Quite the contrary. Society ought to place woman, as a human being and as a creatress of men--more worthy therefore of love and respect--in a better juridical and ethical situation than she enjoys at present. Now she is too often a beast of burden or an object of luxury. In the same way when, from the economic point of view, we demand at the present day special measures in behalf of women, we simply take into consideration their special physio-psychical conditions. The present economic individualism exhausts them in factories and rice-fields; socialism, on the contrary, will require from them only such professional, scientific or muscular labor as is in perfect harmony with the sacred function of maternity. KULISCIOFF, _Il monopolio dell'uomo_, Milan, 1892, 2d edition.--MOZZONI, _I socialisti e l'emancipazione della donna_, Milan, 1891. [5] B. MALON, _Le Socialisme Integral_, 2 vol., Paris, 1892. [6] ZULIANI, _Il privilegio della salute_, Milan, 1893. [7] LETOURNEAU, _Passé, présent et avenir du travail_, in _Revue mensuelle de l'école d'anthropologie_, Paris, June 15, 1894. [8] M. Zerboglio has very justly pointed out that individualism acting without the pressure of external sanction and by the simple internal impulse toward good (rightness)--this is the distant ideal of Herbert Spencer--can be realized only after a phase of collectivism, during which the individual activity and instincts can be disciplined into social solidarity and weaned from the essentially anarchist individualism of our times when every one, if he is clever enough to "slip through the meshes of the penal code" can do what he pleases without any regard to his fellows. [9] "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp," is the way Robert Browning expresses this in "Andrea Del Sarto."--Translator. [10] Note our common expression: He is worth so much.--Tr. [11] "Full many a gem of purest ray serene The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear: Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its fragrance on the desert air. "Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast The little tyrant of his field withstood, Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, Some Cromwell, guiltless of his country's blood." --Stanzas from GRAY'S "Elegy in a Country Church-yard." Translator. [12] "Cursed be the gold that gilds the straighten'd forehead of the fool!" --Tennyson, in "Locksley Hall." "Gold, yellow, glittering, precious gold! Thus, much of this will make black, white; foul, fair; Wrong, right; base, noble; old, young; coward, valiant." --Shakespeare, in "Timon of Athens."--Translator. III. THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE AND ITS VICTIMS. Socialism and Darwinism, it is said, are in conflict on a second point. Darwinism demonstrates that the immense majority--of plants, animals and men--are destined to succumb, because only a small minority triumphs "in the struggle for life"; socialism, on its part, asserts that all ought to triumph and that no one ought to succumb. It may be replied, in the first place, that, even in the biological domain of the "struggle for existence," the disproportion between the number of individuals who are born and the number of those who survive regularly and progressively grows smaller and smaller as we ascend in the biological scale from vegetables to animals, and from animals to Man. This law of a decreasing disproportion between the "called" and the "chosen" is supported by the facts even if we limit our observation to the various species belonging to the same natural order. The higher and more complex the organization, the smaller the disproportion. In fact, in the vegetables, each individual produces every year an infinite number of seeds, and an infinitesimal number of these survive. In the animals, the number of young of each individual diminishes and the number of those who survive continues on the contrary, to increase. Finally, for the human species, the number of individuals that each one can beget is very small and most of them survive. But, moreover, in the cases of all three, vegetables, animals and men, we find that it is the lower and more simply organized species, the races and classes less advanced in the scale of existence, who reproduce their several kinds with the greatest prolificness and in which generation follows generation most rapidly on account of the brevity of individual life. A fern produces millions of spores, and its life is very short--while a palm tree produces only a few dozen seeds, and lives a century. A fish produces several thousand eggs--while the elephant or the chimpanzee have only a few young who live many years. Within the human species the savage races are the most prolific and their lives are short--while the civilized races have a low birth-rate and live longer. From all this it follows that, even confining ourselves to the purely biological domain, the number of victors in the struggle for existence constantly tends to approach nearer and nearer to the number of births with the advance or ascent in the biological scale from vegetables to animals, from animals to men, and from the lower species or varieties to the higher species or varieties. The iron law of "the struggle for existence," then, constantly reduces the number of the victims forming its hecatomb with the ascent of the biological scale, and the rate of decrease becomes more and more rapid as the forms of life become more complex and more perfect. It would then be a mistake to invoke against socialism the Darwinian law of Natural Selection in the form under which that law manifests itself in the primitive (or lower) forms of life, without taking into account its continuous attenuation as we pass from vegetables to animals, from animals to men, and within humanity itself, from the primitive races to the more advanced races. And as socialism represents a yet more advanced phase of human progress, it is still less allowable to use as an objection to it such a gross and inaccurate interpretation of the Darwinian law. It is certain that the opponents of socialism have made a wrong use of the Darwinian law or rather of its "brutal" interpretation in order to justify modern individualist competition which is too often only a disguised form of cannibalism, and which has made the maxim _homo homini lupus_ (man to man a wolf; or, freely, "man eats man") the characteristic motto of our era, while Hobbes only made it the ruling principle of the "_state of nature_" of mankind, before the making of the "social contract." But because a principle has been abused or misused we are not justified in concluding that the principle itself is false. Its abuse often serves as an incentive to define its nature and its limitations more accurately, so that in practice it may be applied more correctly. This will be the result of my demonstration of the perfect harmony that reigns between socialism and Darwinism. As long ago as the first edition of my work _Socialismo e Criminalità_ (pages 179 _et seq._) I maintained that the struggle for existence is a law immanent in the human race, as it is a law of all living beings, although its forms continually change and though it undergoes more and more attenuation. This is still the way it appears to me, and consequently, on this point I disagree with some socialists who have thought they could triumph more completely over the objection urged against them in the name of Darwinism by declaring that in human society the "struggle for existence" is a law which is destined to lose all meaning and applicability when the social transformation at which socialism aims shall have been effected.[13] It is a law which dominates tyrannically all living beings, and it must cease to act and fall inert at the feet of Man, as if he were not merely a link inseparable from the great biological chain! I maintained, and I still maintain, that the struggle for existence is a law inseparable from life, and consequently from humanity itself, but that, though remaining an inherent and constant law, it is gradually transformed in its essence and attenuated in its forms. Among primitive mankind the struggle for existence is but slightly differentiated from that which obtains among the other animals. It is the brutal struggle for daily food or for possession of the females--hunger and love are, in fact, the two fundamental needs and the two poles of life--and almost its only method is muscular violence. In a more advanced phase there is joined to this basic struggle the struggle for political supremacy (in the clan, in the tribe, in the village, in the commune, in the State), and, more and more, muscular struggle is superseded by intellectual struggle. In the historical period the Graeco-Latin society struggled for _civil_ equality (the abolition of slavery); it triumphed, but it did not halt, because to live is to struggle; the society of the middle ages struggled for _religious_ equality; it won the battle, but it did not halt; and at the end of the last century, it struggled for _political_ equality. Must it now halt and remain stationary in the present state of progress? To-day society struggles for _economic_ equality, not for an absolute material equality, but for that more practical, truer equality of which I have already spoken. And all the evidence enables us to foresee with mathematical certainty that this victory will be won to give place to new struggles and to new ideals among our descendants. The successive changes in the subject-matter (or the ideals) of the struggles for existence are accompanied by a progressive mitigation of the methods of combat. Violent and muscular at first, the struggle is becoming, more and more, pacific and intellectual, notwithstanding some atavic recurrences of earlier methods or some psycho-pathological manifestations of individual violence against society and of social violence against individuals. The remarkable work of Mr. Novicow[14] has recently given a signal confirmation to my opinion, although Novicow has not taken the sexual struggle into account. I will develop my demonstration more fully in the chapter devoted to _l'avenir moral de l'humanité_ (the intellectual future of humanity), in the second edition of _Socialismo e Criminalità_. For the moment I have sufficiently replied to the anti-socialist objection, since I have shown not merely that the disproportion between the number of births and the number of those who survive tends to constantly diminish, but also that the "struggle for existence" itself changes in its essence and grows milder in its processes at each successive phase of the biological and social evolution. Socialism may then insist that human conditions of existence ought to be guaranteed to all men--in exchange for labor furnished to collective society--without thereby contradicting the Darwinian law of the survival of the victors in the struggle for existence, since this Darwinian law ought to be understood and applied in each of its varying manifestations, in harmony with the law of human progress. Socialism, scientifically understood, does not deny, and cannot deny, that among mankind there are always some "losers" in the struggle for existence. This question is more directly connected with the relations which exist between _socialism_ and _criminality_, since those who contend that the struggle for existence is a law which does not apply to human society, declare, accordingly, that _crime_ (an abnormal and anti-social form of the struggle for life, just as _labor_ is its normal and social form) is destined to disappear. Likewise they think they discover a certain contradiction between socialism and the teachings of criminal anthropology concerning the congenital criminal, though these teachings are also deducted from Darwinism.[15] I reserve this question for fuller treatment elsewhere. Here is in brief my thought as a socialist and as a criminal anthropologist. In the first place the school of scientific criminologists deal with life as it now is--and undeniably it has the merit of having applied the methods of experimental science to the study of criminal phenomena, of having shown the hypocritical absurdity of modern penal systems based on the notion of free-will and moral delinquency and resulting in the system of cellular confinement, one of the mental aberrations of the nineteenth century, as I have elsewhere qualified it. In its stead the criminologists wish to substitute the simple segregation of individuals who are not fitted for social life on account of pathological conditions, congenital or acquired, permanent or transitory. In the second place, to contend that socialism will cause the disappearance of all forms of crime is to act upon the impulse of a generous sentiment, but the contention is not supported by a rigorously scientific observation of the facts. The scientific school of criminology demonstrates that crime is a natural and social phenomenon--like insanity and suicide--determined by the abnormal, organic and psychological constitution of the delinquent and by the influences of the physical and social environment. The anthropological, physical and social factors, all, always, act concurrently in the determination of all offences, the lightest as well as the gravest--as, moreover, they do in the case of all other human actions. What varies in the case of each delinquent and each offense, is the decisive intensity of each order of factors.[16] For instance, if the case in point is an assassination committed through jealousy or hallucination, it is the anthropological factor which is the most important, although nevertheless consideration must also be paid to the physical environment and the social environment. If it is a question, on the contrary, of crimes against property or even against persons, committed by a riotous mob or induced by alcoholism, etc., it is the social environment which becomes the preponderating factor, though it is, notwithstanding, impossible to deny the influence of the physical environment and of the anthropological factor. We may repeat the same reasoning--in order to make a complete examination of the objection brought against socialism in the name of Darwinism--on the subject of the ordinary diseases; crime, moreover, is a department of human pathology. All diseases, acute or chronic, infectious or not infectious, severe or mild, are the product of the anthropological constitution of the individual and of the influence of the physical and social environment. The decisiveness of the personal conditions or of the environment varies in the various diseases; phthisis or heart disease, for instance, depend principally on the organic constitution of the individual, though it is necessary to take the influence of the environment into account; pellagra,[17] cholera, typhus, etc., on the contrary, depend principally on the physical and social conditions of the environment. And so phthisis makes its ravages even among well-to-do people, that is to say, among persons well nourished and well housed, while it is the badly nourished, that is to say, the poor, who furnish the greatest number of victims to pellagra and cholera. It is, consequently, evident that a socialist regime of collective property which shall assure to every one human conditions of existence, will largely diminish or possibly annihilate--aided by the scientific discoveries and improvement in hygienic measures--the diseases which are principally caused by the conditions of the environment, that is to say by insufficient nourishment or by the want of protection from inclemency of the weather; but we shall not witness the disappearance of the diseases due to traumatic injuries, imprudence, pulmonary affections, etc. The same conclusions are valid regarding crime. If we suppress poverty and the shocking inequality of economic conditions, hunger, acute and chronic, will no longer serve as a stimulus to crime. Better nourishment will bring about a physical and moral improvement. The abuses of power and of wealth will disappear, and there will be a considerable diminution in the number of crimes due to circumstances (_crimes d'occasion_), crimes caused principally by the social environment. But there are some crimes which will not disappear, such as revolting crimes against decency due to a pathological perversion of the sexual instinct, homicides induced by epilepsy, thefts which result from a psycho-pathological degeneration, etc. For the same reasons popular education will be more widely diffused, talents of every kind will be able to develop and manifest themselves freely; but this will not cause the disappearance of idiocy and imbecility due to hereditary pathological conditions. Nevertheless it will be possible for different causes to have a preventive and mitigating influence on the various forms of congenital degeneration (ordinary diseases, criminality, insanity and nervous disorders). Among these preventive influences may be: a better economic and social organization, the prudential counsels, constantly growing in efficacy given by experimental biology, and less and less frequent procreation, by means of voluntary abstention, in cases of hereditary disease. To conclude we will say that, even under the socialist regime--although they will be infinitely fewer--there will always be some who will be vanquished in the struggle for existence--these will be the victims of weakness, of disease, of dissipation, of nervous disorders, of suicide. We may then affirm that socialism does not deny the Darwinian law of the struggle for existence. Socialism will, however, have this indisputable advantage--the epidemic or endemic forms of human degeneracy will be entirely suppressed by the elimination of their principal cause--the physical poverty and (its necessary consequence) the mental suffering of the majority. Then the struggle for existence, while remaining always the driving power of the life of society, will assume forms less and less brutal and more and more humane. It will become an intellectual struggle. Its ideal of physiological and intellectual progress will constantly grow in grandeur and sublimity when this progressive idealization of the ideal shall be made possible by the guarantee to every one of daily bread for the body and the mind. The law of the "struggle for life" must not cause us to forget another law of natural and social Darwinian evolution. It is true many socialists have given to this latter law an excessive and exclusive importance, just as some individuals have entirely neglected it. I refer to the law of solidarity which knits together all the living beings of one and the same species--for instance animals who live gregariously in consequence of the abundance of the supply of their common food (herbivorous animals)--or even of different species. When species thus mutually aid each other to live they are called by naturalists _symbiotic_ species, and instead of the struggle for life we have co-operation for life. It is incorrect to state that the struggle for life is the sole sovereign law in Nature and society, just as it is false to contend that this law is wholly inapplicable to human society. The real truth is that even in human society the struggle for life is an eternal law which grows progressively milder in its methods and more elevated in its ideals. But operating concurrently with this we find a law, the influence of which upon the social evolution constantly increases, the law of solidarity or co-operation between living beings. Even in animal societies mutual aid against the forces of Nature, or against other animals is of constant occurrence, and this is carried much further among human beings, even among savage tribes. One notes this phenomenon especially in tribes which on account of the favorable character of their environment, or because their subsistence is assured and abundant, become of the industrial or peaceful type. The military or warlike type which is unhappily predominant (on account of the uncertainty and insufficiency of subsistence) among primitive mankind and in reactionary phases of civilization, presents us with less frequent examples of it. The industrial type constantly tends, moreover, as Spencer has shown, to take the place of the warlike type.[18] Confining ourselves to human society alone, we will say that, while in the first stages of the social evolution the law of the struggle for life takes precedence over the law of solidarity, with the growth within the social organism of the division of labor which binds the various parts of the social whole more closely together in inter-dependence, the struggle for life grows milder and is metamorphosed, and the law of co-operation or solidarity gains more and more both in efficiency and in the range of its influence, and this is due to that fundamental reason that Marx pointed out, and which constitutes his great scientific discovery, the reason that in the one case the conditions of existence--food especially--are not assured, and in the other case they are. In the lives of individuals as in the life of societies, when the means of subsistence, that is to say, the physical basis of existence, are assured, the law of solidarity takes precedence over the law of the struggle for existence, and when they are not assured, the contrary is true. Among savages, infanticide and parricide are not only permitted but are obligatory and sanctioned by religion if the tribe inhabits an island where food is scarce (for instance, in Polynesia), and they are immoral and criminal acts on continents where the food supply is more abundant and certain.[19] Just so, in our present society, as the majority of individuals are not sure of getting their daily bread, the struggle for life, or "free competition," as the individualists call it, assumes more cruel and more brutal forms. Just as soon as through collective ownership every individual shall be assured of fitting conditions of existence, the law of solidarity will become preponderant. When in a family financial affairs run smoothly and prosperously, harmony and mutual good-will prevail; as soon as poverty makes its appearance, discord and struggle ensue. Society as a whole shows us the picture on a large scale. A better social organization will insure universal harmony and mutual good-will. This will be the achievement of socialism, and, to repeat, for this, the fullest and most fruitful interpretation of the inexorable natural laws discovered by Darwinism, we are indebted to socialism. FOOTNOTES: [13] Such socialists are LABUSQUIERE, LANESSAU, LORIA And COLAJANNI. [14] NOVICOW, _Les luttes entre sociétés, leurs phases successives_, Paris, 1893. LERDA, _La lotta per la vita_, in _Pensiero italiano_, Milan, Feb. and March, 1894. [15] I regret that M. Loria, ordinarily so profound and acute, has here been deceived by appearances. He has pointed out this pretended contradiction in his "Economic Foundations of Society" (available in English, Tr.). He has been completely answered, in the name of the school of scientific criminal anthropology, by M. RIVIERI DE ROCCHI, _Il diritto penale e un'opera recente di Loria in Scuola positiva nella giurisprudenza penale_ of Feb. 15, 1894, and by M. LOMBROSO, in _Archivio di psichiatria e scienza penali_, 1894, XIV, fasc. C. [16] ENRICO FERRI, Sociologie criminelle (French translation), 1893, Chaps. I. and II. A recent work has just given scientific confirmation to our inductions: FORSINARI DI VERCE, _Sulla criminalità e le vicende economiche d'Italia dal 1873 al 1890_. Turin, 1894. The preface written by Lombroso concludes in the following words: "We do not wish, therefore, to slight or neglect the truth of the socialist movement, which is destined to changed the current of modern European thought and action, and which contends _ad majorem gloriam_ of its conclusions that _all_ criminality depends on the influence of the economic environment. We also believe in this doctrine, though we are unwilling and unable to accept the erroneous conclusions drawn from it. However enthusiastic we may be, we will never, in its honor, renounce the truth. We leave this useless servility to the upholders of classical orthodoxy." [17] A skin-disease endemic in Northern Italy. Tr. [18] See in this connection the famous monographs of Kropotkin, _Mutual aid among the savages_, in the "Nineteenth Century," April 9, 1891, and _Among the barbarians_, "Nineteenth Century," January, 1892, and also two recent articles signed: "Un Professeur," which appeared in the _Revue Socialiste_, of Paris, May and June, 1894, under the title: _Lutte ou accord pour la vie_. [19] ENRICO FERRI, _Omicidio nell' antropologia criminale_, _Introduction_, _Turin_, 1894. IV. THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST. The third and last part of the argument of Haeckel is correct if applied solely to the purely biological and Darwinian domain, but its starting point is false if it is intended to apply it to the social domain and to turn it into an objection against socialism. It is said the struggle for existence assures the survival of the fittest; it therefore causes an aristocratic, hierarchic gradation of selected individuals--a continuous progress--and not the democratic leveling of socialism. Here again, let us begin by accurately ascertaining the nature of this famous natural selection which results from the struggle for existence. The expression which Haeckel uses and which, moreover, is in current use, "survival of the best or of the best fitted," ought to be corrected. We must suppress the adjective _best_. This is simply a persisting relic of that teleology which used to see in Nature and history a premeditated goal to be reached by means of a process of continuous amelioration or progress. Darwinism, on the contrary, and still more the theory of universal evolution, has completely banished the notion of final causes from modern scientific thought and from the interpretation of natural phenomena. Evolution consists both of involution and dissolution. It may be true, and indeed it is true, that by comparing the two extremes of the path traversed by humanity we find that there has really been a true progress, an improvement taking it all in all; but, in any case, progress has not followed a straight ascending line, but, as Goethe has said, a spiral with rhythms of progress and of retrogression, of evolution and of dissolution. Every cycle of evolution, in the individual life as in the collective life, bears within it the germs of the corresponding cycle of dissolution; and, inversely, the latter, by the decay of the form already worn out, prepares in the eternal laboratory new evolutions and new forms of life. It is thus that in the world of human society every phase of civilization bears within it and is constantly developing the germs of its own dissolution from which issues a new phase of civilization--which will be more or less different from its predecessor in geographical situation and range--in the eternal rhythm of living humanity. The ancient hieratic civilizations of the Orient decay, and through their dissolution they give birth to the Graeco-Roman world, which in turn is followed by the feudal and aristocratic civilization of Central Europe; it also decays and disintegrates through its own excesses, like the preceding civilizations, and it is replaced by the bourgeois civilization which has reached its culminating point in the Anglo-Saxon world. But it is already experiencing the first tremors of the fever of dissolution, while from its womb there emerges and is developing the socialist civilization which will flourish over a vaster domain than that of any of the civilizations which have preceded it.[20] Hence it is not correct to assert that the natural selection caused by the struggle for existence assures the survival of the _best_; in fact, it assures the survival of the best _fitted_. This is a very great difference, alike in natural Darwinism and in social Darwinism. The struggle for existence necessarily causes the survival of the individuals best fitted for the environment and the particular historical period in which they live. In the natural, biological domain, the free play of natural (_cosmiques_) forces and conditions causes a progressive advance or ascent of living forms, from the microbe up to Man. In human society, on the contrary, that is to say, in the super-organic evolution of Herbert Spencer, the intervention of other forces and the occurrence of other conditions sometimes causes a retrograde selection which always assures the survival of those who are best fitted for a given environment at a given time, but the controlling principle of this selection is in turn affected by the vicious conditions--if they are vicious--of the environment. Here we are dealing with the question of "social selection," or rather "social selections," for there is more than one kind of social selection. By starting from this idea--not clearly comprehended--some writers, both socialists and non-socialists, have come to deny that the Darwinian theories have any application to human society. It is known, indeed, that in the contemporaneous civilized world natural selection is injuriously interfered with by _military_ selection, by _matrimonial_ selection, and, above all, by _economic_ selection.[21] The temporary celibacy imposed upon soldiers certainly has a deplorable effect upon the human race. It is the young men who on account of comparatively poor physical constitutions are excused from military service, who marry the first, while the healthier individuals are condemned to a transitory sterility, and in the great cities run the risk of contagion from syphilis which unfortunately has permanent effects. Marriage also, corrupted as it is in the existent society by economic considerations, is ordinarily in practice a sort of retrogressive sexual selection. Women who are true degenerates, but who have good dowries or "prospects," readily find husbands on the marriage market, while the most robust women of the people or of the middle class who have no dowries are condemned to the sterility of compulsory old-maiddom or to surrender themselves to a more or less gilded prostitution.[22] It is indisputable that the present economic conditions exercise an influence upon all the social relations of men. The monopoly of wealth assures to its possessor the victory in the struggle for existence. Rich people, even though they are less robust, have longer lives than those who are ill-fed. The day-and-night-work, under inhuman conditions, imposed upon grown men, and the still more baleful labor imposed upon women and children by modern capitalism causes a constant deterioration in the biological conditions of the toiling masses.[23] In addition to all these we must not forget the moral selection--which is really immoral or retrograde--made at present by capitalism in its struggle with the proletariat, and which favors the survival of those with servile characters, while it persecutes and strives to suppress all those who are strong in character, and all who do not seem disposed to tamely submit to the yoke of the present economic order.[24] The first impression which springs from the recognition of these facts is that the Darwinian law of natural selection does not hold good in human society--in short, is inapplicable to human society. I have maintained, and I do maintain, on the contrary, in the first place, that these various kinds of retrograde social selection are not in contradiction with the Darwinian law, and that, moreover, they serve as the material for an argument in favor of socialism. Nothing but socialism, in fact, can make this inexorable law of natural selection work more beneficently. As a matter of fact, the Darwinian law does not cause the "survival of the _best_," but simply the "survival of the _fittest_." It is obvious that the forms of degeneracy produced by the divers kinds of social selection and notably by the present economic organization merely promote, indeed, and with growing efficiency, the survival of those best fitted for this very economic organization. If the victors in the struggle for existence are the worst and the weakest, this does not mean that the Darwinian law does not hold good; it means simply that the environment is corrupt (and corrupting), and that those who survive are precisely those who are the fittest for this corrupt environment. In my studies of criminal psychology I have too often had to recognize the fact that in prisons and in the criminal world it is the most cruel or the most cunning criminals who enjoy the fruits of victory; it is just the same in our modern economic individualist system; the victory goes to him who has the fewest scruples; the struggle for existence favors him who is fittest for a world where a man is valued for what he has (no matter how he got it), and not for what he is. The Darwinian law of natural selection functions then even in human society. The error of those who deny this proposition springs from the fact that they confound the present environment and the present transitory historical era--which are known in history as the _bourgeois_ environment and period, just as the Middle Ages are called _feudal_--with all history and all humanity, and therefore they fail to see that the disastrous effects of modern, retrograde, social selection are only confirmations of the Darwinian law of the "survival of the _fittest_." Popular common sense has long recognized this influence of the surroundings, as is shown by many a common proverb, and its scientific explanation is to be found in the necessary biological relations which exist between a given environment and the individuals who are born, struggle and survive in that environment. On the other hand, this truth constitutes an unanswerable argument in favor of socialism. By freeing the environment from all the corruptions with which our unbridled economic individualism pollutes it, socialism will necessarily correct the ill effects of natural and social selection. In a physically and morally wholesome environment, the individuals best fitted to it, those who will therefore survive, will be the physically and morally healthy. In the struggle for existence the victory will then go to him who has the greatest and most prolific physical, intellectual and moral energies. The collectivist economic organization, by assuring to everyone the conditions of existence, will and necessarily must, result in the physical and moral improvement of the human race. To this some one replies: Suppose we grant that socialism and Darwinian selection may be reconciled, is it not obvious that the survival of the fittest tends to establish an aristocratic gradation of individuals, which is contrary to socialistic leveling? I have already answered this objection in part by pointing out that socialism will assure to all individuals--instead of as at present only to a privileged few or to society's heroes--freedom to assert and develop their own individualities. Then in truth the result of the struggle for existence will be the survival of the best and this for the very reason that in a wholesome environment the victory is won by the healthiest individuals. Social Darwinism, then, as a continuation and complement of natural (biological) Darwinism, will result in a selection of the best. To respond fully to this insistence upon an unlimited aristocratic selection, I must call attention to another natural law which serves to complete that rhythm of action and reaction which results in the equilibrium of life. To the Darwinian law of natural inequalities we must add another law which is inseparable from it, and which Jacoby, following in the track of the labors of Morel, Lucas, Galton, De Caudole, Ribot, Spencer, Royer, Lombroso, and others, has clearly demonstrated and expounded. This same Nature, which makes "choice" and aristocratic gradation a condition of vital progress, afterwards restores the equilibrium by a leveling and democratic law. "From the infinite throng of humanity there emerge individuals, families and races which tend to rise above the common level; painfully climbing the steep heights they reach the summits of power, wealth, intelligence and talent, and, having reached the goal, they are hurled down and disappear in the abysses of insanity and degeneration. Death is the great leveler; by destroying every one who rises above the common herd, it democratizes humanity."[25] Every one who attempts to create a monopoly of natural forces comes into violent conflict with that supreme law of Nature which has given to all living beings the use and disposal of the natural agents: air and light, water and land. Everybody who is too much above or too much below the average of humanity--an average which rises with the flux of time, but is absolutely fixed at any given moment of history--does not live and disappears from the stage. The idiot and the man of genius, the starving wretch and the millionaire, the dwarf and the giant, are so many natural or social monsters, and Nature inexorably blasts them with degeneracy or sterility, no matter whether they be the product of the organic life, or the effect of the social organization. And so, all families possessing a monopoly of any kind--monopoly of power, of wealth or of talent--are inevitably destined to become in their latest offshoots imbeciles, sterile or suicides, and finally to become extinct. Noble houses, dynasties of sovereigns, descendants of millionaires--all follow the common law which, here again, serves to confirm the inductions--in this sense, equalitarian--of science and of socialism. FOOTNOTES: [20] One of the most characteristic processes of social dissolution is _parasitism_. MASSART and VANDERVELDE, Parasitism, organic and social. (English translation.) Swan, Sonnenschein & Co., London. [21] BROCA, _Les sélections_ (§ 6. Les sélections sociales) in _Mémoires d' anthropologie_, Paris, 1877, III., 205. LAPOUGE, _Les sélections sociales_, in _Revue d' anthrop._, 1887, p. 519. LORIA, _Discourse su Carlo Darwin_, SIENNE, 1882. VADALA, _Darwinismo naturale e Darwinismo sociale_, Turin, 1883. BORDIER, _La vie des sociétés_, Paris, 1887. SERGI, _Le degenerazione umane_, Milan, 1889, p. 158. BEBEL, Woman in the past, present and future. [22] MAX NORDAU, Conventional Lies of our Civilization. (English trans.) Laird & Lee, Chicago, 1895. [23] While this is shown by all official statistics, it is signally shown by the facts collated by M. Pagliani, the present Director-General of the Bureau of Health in the Interior Department, who has shown that the bodies of the poor are more backward and less developed than those of the rich, and that this difference, though but slightly manifest at birth, becomes greater and greater in after life, _i. e._ as soon as the influence of the economic conditions makes itself felt in all its inexorable tyranny. [24] TURATI, _Selezione servile_, in _Critica Sociale_, June 1, 1894. SERGI, _Degenerazione umane_, Milan, 1889. [25] JACOBY, _Etudes sur la sélection dans ses rapports avec l'hérédité chez l'homme_, Paris, 1881, p. 606. LOMBROSO, _L'uomo di genio_, 6th edition, Turin, 1894, has developed and complemented this law. This law, so easily forgotten, is neglected by RITCHIE (Darwinism and Politics. London. Sonnenschein, 1891.) in the section called "Does the doctrine of Heredity support Aristocracy?" V. SOCIALISM AND RELIGIOUS BELIEFS. Not one of the three contradictions between socialism and Darwinism, which Haeckel formulated, and which so many others have echoed since, resists a candid and more accurate examination of the natural laws which bear the name of Charles Darwin. I add that not only is Darwinism not in contradiction with socialism, but that it constitutes one of its fundamental scientific premises. As Virchow justly remarked, socialism is nothing but a logical and vital corollary, in part of Darwinism, in part of Spencerian evolution. The theory of Darwin, whether we wish it or not, by demonstrating that man is descended from the animals, has dealt a severe blow to the belief in God as the creator of the universe and of man by a special _fiat_. This, moreover, is why the most bitter opposition, and the only opposition which still continues, to its scientific inductions, was made and is made in the name of religion. It is true that Darwin did not declare himself an atheist[26] and that Spencer is not one; it is also true that, strictly speaking, the theory of Darwin, like that of Spencer, can also be reconciled with the belief in God, since it may be admitted that God created matter and force, and that both afterward evolved into their successive forms in accordance with the initial creative impulse. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that these theories, by rendering the idea of causality more and more inflexible and universal, lead necessarily to the negation of God, since there always remains this question: And God, who created him? And if it is replied that God has always existed, the same reply may be flung back by asserting that the universe has always existed. To use the phrase of Ardigò, human thought is only able to conceive the chain which binds effects to causes as terminating at a given point, purely conventional.[27] God, as Laplace said, is an hypothesis of which exact science has no need; he is, according to Herzen, at the most an X, which represents not the _unknowable_--as Spencer and Dubois Raymond contend--but all that which humanity does not yet know. Therefore, it is a variable X which decreases in direct ratio to the progress of the discoveries of science. It is for this very reason that science and religion are in inverse ratio to each other; the one diminishes and grows weaker in the same proportion that the other increases and grows stronger in its struggle against the unknown.[28] And if this is one of the consequences of Darwinism, its influence on the development of socialism is quite obvious. The disappearance of faith in the hereafter, where the poor shall become the elect of the Lord, and where the miseries of the "vale of tears" will find an eternal compensation in paradise, gives greater strength to the desire for some semblance of an "earthly paradise" here below even for the unfortunate and the poor, who are the great majority. Hartmann and Guyau[29] have shown that the evolution of religious beliefs may be summarized thus: All religions include, with various other matters, the promise of happiness; but the primitive religions concede that this happiness will be realized during the life of the individual himself, and the later religions, through an excess of reaction, place its realization after death, outside the human world; in the final phase, this realization of happiness is once more placed within the field of human life, no longer in the ephemeral moment of the individual existence, but indeed in the continuous evolution of all mankind. On this side, then, socialism is closely related to the religious evolution, and tends to substitute itself for religion, since its aim is for humanity to have its own "earthly paradise" here, without having to wait for it in the _hereafter_, which, to say the least, is very problematical. Therefore, it has been very justly remarked that the socialist movement has many traits in common with, for example, primitive Christianity, notably that ardent faith in the ideal that has definitively deserted the arid field of bourgeois skepticism, and some savants, not socialists, such as Messrs. Wallace, de Lavaleye and the Roberty, etc., admit that it is entirely possible for socialism to replace by its humanitarian faith the faith in the hereafter of the former religions. More direct and potent than these relations (between socialism and faith in a hereafter) are, however, the relations which exist between socialism and the belief in God. It is true that Marxian Socialism, since the Congress held at Erfurt (1891), has rightly declared that religious beliefs are private affairs[30] and that, therefore, the Socialist party combats religious intolerance under all its forms, whether it be directed against Catholics[31] or against Jews, as I have shown in an article against _Anti-Semitism_.[32] But this breadth of superiority of view is, at bottom, only a consequence of the confidence in final victory. It is because socialism knows and foresees that religious beliefs, whether one regards them, with Sergi,[33] as pathological phenomena of human psychology, or as useless phenomena of moral incrustation, are destined to perish by atrophy with the extension of even elementary scientific culture. This is why socialism does not feel the necessity of waging a special warfare against these religious beliefs which are destined to disappear. It has assumed this attitude although it knows that the absence or the impairment of the belief in God is one of the most powerful factors for its extension, because the priests of all religions have been, throughout all the phases of history, the most potent allies of the ruling classes in keeping the masses pliant and submissive under the yoke by means of the enchantment of religion, just as the tamer keeps wild beasts submissive by the terrors of the cracks of his whip. And this is so true that the most clear-sighted conservatives, even though they are atheists, regret that the religious sentiment--that precious narcotic--is diminishing among the masses, because they see in it, though their pharisaism does not permit them to say it openly, an instrument of political domination.[34] Unfortunately, or fortunately, the religious sentiment cannot be re-established by royal decree. If it is disappearing, the blame for this cannot be laid at the door of any particular individual, and there is no need of a special propaganda against it, because its antidote impregnates the air we breathe--saturated with the inductions of experimental science--and religion no longer meets with conditions favorable to its development as it did amid the superstitious ignorance of past centuries. I have thus shown the direct influence of modern science, science based on observation and experiment,--which has substituted the idea of natural causality for the ideas of miracle and divinity,--on the extremely rapid development and on the experimental foundation of contemporary socialism. Democratic socialism does not look with unfriendly eyes upon "Catholic Socialism" (the Christian Socialism of Southern Europe), since it has nothing to fear from it. Catholic socialism, in fact, aids in the propagation of socialist ideas, especially in the rural districts where religious faith and practices are still very vigorous, but it will not win and wear the palm of victory _ad majorem dei gloriam_. As I have shown, there is a growing antagonism between science and religion, and the socialist varnish cannot preserve Catholicism. The "earthly" socialism has, moreover, a much greater attractive power. When the peasants shall have become familiar with the views of Catholic socialism, it will be very easy for democratic socialism to rally them under its own flag--they will, indeed, convert themselves. Socialism occupies an analogous position with regard to republicanism. Just as atheism is a private affair which concerns the individual conscience, so a republican form of government is a private affair which interests only a part of the bourgeoisie. Certainly, by the time that socialism draws near to its day of triumph, atheism will have made immense progress, and a republican form of government will have been established in many countries which to-day submit to a monarchical regime. But it is not socialism which develops atheism, any more than it is socialism which will establish republicanism. Atheism is a product of the theories of Darwin and Spencer in the present bourgeois civilization, and republicanism has been and will be, in the various countries, the work of a portion of the capitalist bourgeoisie, as was recently said in some of the conservative newspapers of Milan (_Corriere della sera_ and _Idea liberale_), when "the monarchy shall no longer serve the interests of the country," that is to say of the class in power. The evolution from absolute monarchy to constitutional monarchy and to republicanism is an obvious historical law; in the present phase of civilization the only difference between the two latter is in the elective or hereditary character of the head of the State. In the various countries of Europe, the bourgeoisie themselves Hill demand the transition from monarchy to republicanism, in order to put off as long as possible the triumph of socialism. In Italy as in France, in England as in Spain, we see only too many republicans or "radicals" whose attitude with regard to social questions is more bourgeois and more conservative than that of the intelligent conservatives. At Montecitorio, for example, there is Imbriani whose opinions on religious and social matters are more conservative than those of M. di Rudini. Imbriani, whose personality is moreover very attractive, has never attacked the priests or monks--this man who attacks the entire universe and very often with good reason, although without much success on account of mistaken methods--and he was the only one to oppose even the consideration of a law proposed by the _Député_ Ferrari, which increased the tax on estates inherited by collateral heirs! Socialism then has no more interest in preaching republicanism than it has in preaching atheism. To each his role (or task), is the law of division of labor. The struggle for atheism is the business of science; the establishment of republicanism in the various countries of Europe has been and will be the work of the bourgeoisie themselves--whether they be conservative or radical. All this constitutes the historical progress toward socialism, and individuals are powerless to prevent or delay the succession of the phases of the moral, political and social evolution. FOOTNOTES: [26] Darwin never made a declaration of atheism, but that was in fact his way of looking at the problem ("_sa manière de voir_."). While Haeckel, concerned solely with triumphing over the opposition, said at the Congress of Eisenach (1882) that Darwin was not an atheist, Büchner, on the contrary, published shortly afterward a letter which Darwin had written him, and in which he avowed that "since the age of forty years, his scientific studies had led him to atheism." (See also, "Charles Darwin and Karl Marx: A Comparison," by Ed. Aveling. Published by the Twentieth Century Press, London.--Translator.) In the same way, John Stuart Mill never declared himself a Socialist, but that, nevertheless, in opinion he was one, is made evident by his autobiography and his posthumous fragments on Socialism. (See "The Socialism of John Stuart Mill." Humboldt Pub. Co., New York.--Tr.) [27] ARDIG�, _La Formazione naturale_, Vol. II. of his _Opere filologiche_, and Vol. VI., _La Ragione_, Padone, 1894. [28] Guyau, _L'Irréligion de l'avenir_. Paris. 1887. [29] The dominant factor, nevertheless, in religious beliefs, is the hereditary or traditional _sentimental_ factor; this it is which always renders them respectable when they are professed in good faith, and often makes them even appeal to our sympathies,--and this is precisely because of the ingenuous or refined sensibility of the persons in whom religious faith is the most vital and sincere. [30] NITTI, _Le Socialisme catholique_, Paris, 1894, p. 27 and 393. [31] Its usual form in America.--Translator. [32] _Nuova Rassegna_, August, 1894. [33] SERGI, _L'origine dei fenomeni psichici e loro significazione biologica_, Milan, 1885, p. 334, _et seq._ [34] DURKHEIM, _De la division du travail social_. Paris. 1893. As regards the pretended influence of religion on personal morality I have shown how very slight a foundation there was for this opinion in my studies on criminal psychology, and more particularly in _Omicidio nell' antropologia criminale_. VI. THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE SPECIES. It can also be shown that scientific socialism proceeds directly from Darwinism by an examination of the different modes of conceiving of the individual in relation to the species. The eighteenth century closed with the exclusive glorification of the individual, of the _man_--as an entity in himself. In the works of Rousseau this was only a beneficent, though exaggerated re-action against the political and sacerdotal tyranny of the Middle Ages. This individualism led directly to that artificiality in politics, which I will consider a little further on in studying the relations between the theory of evolution and socialism, and which is common to the ruling classes under the bourgeois regime and to the individualistic anarchists,--since both alike imagine that the social organization can be changed in a day by the magical effect of a bomb,--more or less murderous. Modern biology has radically changed this conception of the _individual_ and it has demonstrated, in the domain of biology as in that of sociology, that the individual is himself only an aggregation of more simple living elements, and likewise that the individual in himself, the _Selbstwesen_ of the Germans, does not exist in independent isolation, but only as a member of a society (_Gliedwesen_). Every living object is an association, a collectivity. The monad itself, the living cell, the irreducible expression of biological individuality, is also an aggregate of various parts (nucleus, _nucléole_, protoplasm), and each one of them in its turn is an aggregate of molecules which are aggregates of atoms. The atom does not exist alone, as an individual; the atom is invisible and impalpable and it does not live. And the complexity of the aggregation, the federation of the parts constantly increases with the ascent in the zoological series from protozoa to Man. Unifying, Jacobin artificiality corresponds to the metaphysics of individualism, just as the conception of national and international federalism corresponds to the scientific character of modern socialism. The organism of a mammal is simply a federation of tissues, organs and anatomical machinery; the organism of a society can consist of nothing but a federation of communes, provinces and regions; the organism of humanity can be nothing but a federation of nations. If it is absurd to conceive of a mammal whose head should have to move in the same fashion as the extremities and all of whose extremities would have to perform the same motions simultaneously, there is no less absurdity in a political and administrative organization in which the extreme northern province or the mountainous province, for instance, have to have the same bureaucratic machinery, the same body of laws, the same methods, etc., as the extreme southern province or the province made up of plains, solely through the passion for symmetrical uniformity, that pathological expression of unity. If we disregard those considerations of a political order which make it possible to conclude, as I have done elsewhere,[35] that the only possible organization for Italy, as for every other country, appeared to me to be that of an administrative federalism combined with political unity, we can regard it as manifest, that at the close of the nineteenth century the individual, as an independent entity, is dethroned alike in biology and sociology. The individual exists, but only in so far as he forms a part of a social aggregate. Robinson Crusoe--that perfect type of individualism--can not possibly be aught but a legend or a pathological specimen. The species--that is to say, the social aggregate--is the great, the living and eternal reality of life, as has been demonstrated by Darwinism and confirmed by all the inductive sciences from astronomy to sociology. At the close of the eighteenth century Rousseau thought that the individual alone existed, and that society was an artificial product of the "social contract" and, as he attributed (just as Aristotle had done in the case of slavery) a permanent human character to the transitory manifestations of the period, such as the rottenness of the regime under which he lived, he further thought that Society was the cause of all evils, and that individuals are all born good and equal. At the end of the nineteenth century, on the contrary, all the inductive sciences agree in recognizing that society, the social aggregate, is a fact of Nature, inseparable from life, in the vegetable species as in the animal species, from the lowest "animal colonies" of zoophytes up to societies of mammals (herbivora), and to human society.[36] All that is best in the individual, he owes to the social life, although every phase of evolution is marked at its decline by pathological conditions of social decay--essentially transitory, however--which inevitably precede a new cycle of social renovation. The individual, as such, if he could live, would fulfill only one of the two fundamental requirements (needs) of existence: alimentation--that is to say, the selfish preservation of his own organism, by means of that primordial and fundamental function, which Aristotle designated by the name of _ctesi_--the conquest of food. But all individuals have to live in society because a second fundamental requirement of life imposes itself upon the individual, _viz._, the reproduction of beings like himself for the preservation of the species. It is this life of relationship and reproduction (sexual and social) which gives birth to the moral or social sense, which enables the individual not only _to be, but to co-exist with his fellows_. It may be said that these two fundamental instincts of life--bread and love--by their functioning maintain a social equilibrium in the life of animals, and especially in Man. It is love which causes, in the great majority of men, the principal physiological and psychical expenditure of the forces accumulated in larger or smaller quantities by the consumption of daily bread, and which the daily labor has not absorbed or which parasitic inaction has left intact. Even more--love is the only pleasure which truly has a universal and equalitarian character. The people have named it "the paradise of the poor;" and religions have always bidden them to enjoy it without limits--"be fruitful and multiply"--because the erotic exhaustion which results from it, especially in males, diminishes or hides beneath the pall of forgetfulness the tortures of hunger and servile labor, and permanently enervates the energy of the individual; and to this extent it performs a function useful to the ruling class. But indissolubly linked to this effect of the sexual instinct there is an other, the increase of the population. Hence it happens that the desire to eternize a given social order is thwarted and defeated by the pressure of this population which in our epoch assumes the characteristic form of the _proletariat_,--and the social evolution continues its inexorable and inevitable forward march. It follows from our discussion that while at the end of the eighteenth century it was thought that Society was made for the individual--and from that the deduction could be made that millions of individuals could and ought to toil and suffer for the exclusive advantage of a few individuals--at the end of our century the inductive sciences have demonstrated, just the opposite, that it is the individual who lives for the species and that the latter is the only eternal reality of life. There we have the starting-point of the sociological or socialist tendency of modern scientific thought in the face of the exaggerated individualism inherited from the last century. Modern biology also demonstrates that it is necessary to avoid the opposite excess--into which certain schools of utopian socialism and of communism fall--the excess of regarding only the interests of Society and altogether neglecting the individual. An other biological law shows us, in fact, that the existence of the aggregation is the resultant of the life of all the individuals, just as the existence of an individual is the resultant of the life of its constituent cells. We have demonstrated that the socialism which characterizes the end of the nineteenth century and which will illumine the dawn of the coming century is in perfect harmony with the entire current of modern thought. This harmony manifests itself even on the fundamental question of the predominance given to the vital necessity of collective or social solidarity over the dogmatic exaggerations of individualism, and if the latter at the close of the last century was the outward sign of a potent and fruitful awakening, it inevitably leads, through the pathological manifestations of unbridled competition, to the "libertarian" explosions of anarchism which preaches "individual action," and which is entirely oblivious of human and social solidarity. We now come to the last point of contact and essential oneness that there is between Darwinism and socialism. FOOTNOTES: [35] _Sociologie criminelle_, French trans., Paris, 1892. [36] I cannot consider here the recent attempt at eclecticism made by M. Fouillée and others. M. Fouillée wishes to oppose, or at least to add, to the _naturalistic_ conception of society the consensual or _contractual_ conception. Evidently, since no theory is absolutely false, there is even in this consensual theory a share of truth, and the liberty of emigration may be an instance of it--as long as this liberty is compatible with the economic interests of the class in power. But, obviously, this consent, which does not exist at the birth of each individual into such or such a society (and this fact of birth is the most decisive and tyrannical factor in life) also has very little to do with the development of his aptitudes and tendencies, dominated as they are by the iron law of the economic and political organization in which he is an atom. VIII. THE "STRUGGLE FOR LIFE" AND THE "CLASS-STRUGGLE." Darwinism has demonstrated that the entire mechanism of animal evolution may be reduced to the struggle for existence between individuals of the same species on the one hand, and between each species and the whole world of living beings. In the same way all the machinery of social evolution has been reduced by Marxian socialism to the law of the _Struggle between Classes_. This theory not only gives us the secret motive-power and the only scientific explanation of the history of mankind; it also furnishes the ideal and rigid standard of discipline for political socialism and thus enables it to avoid all the elastic, vaporous, inconclusive uncertainties of sentimental socialism. The only scientific explanation of the history of animal life is to be found in the grand Darwinian law of the _struggle for existence_; it alone enables us to determine the natural causes of the appearance, development and disappearance of vegetable and animal species from paleontological times down to our own day. In the same way the only explanation of the history of human life is to be found in the grand Marxian law of the _struggle between classes_; thanks to it the annals of primitive, barbarous and civilized humanity cease to be a capricious and superficial kaleidoscopic arrangement of individual episodes in order to become a grand and inevitable drama, determined--whether the actors realize it or not, in its smallest internal details as well as in its catastrophes--by the _economic conditions_, which form the indispensable, physical basis of life and by the _struggle between the classes_ to obtain and keep control of the economic forces, upon which all the others--political, juridical and moral--necessarily depend. I will have occasion to speak more at length--in studying the relations between sociology and socialism--of this grand conception, which is the imperishable glory of Marx and which assures him in sociology the place which Darwin occupies in biology and Spencer in philosophy.[37] For the moment it suffices for me to point out this new point of contact between Socialism and Darwinism. The expression, _Class-Struggle_, so repugnant when first heard or seen (and I confess that it produced this impression on me when I had not yet grasped the scientific import of the Marxian theory), furnishes us, if it be correctly understood, the primary law of human history and, therefore, it alone can give us the certain index of the advent of the new phase of evolution which Socialism foresees and which it strives to hasten. To assert the existence of the class-struggle is equivalent to saying that human society, like all other living organisms, is not a homogeneous whole, the sum of a greater or smaller number of individuals; it is, on the contrary, a living organism which is made up of diverse parts, and their differentiation constantly increases in direct ratio to the degree of social evolution attained. Just as a protozoon is almost wholly composed of albuminoid gelatine, while a mammal is composed of tissues widely varying in kind, in the same way a tribe of primitive savages, without a chief, is composed simply of a few families and the aggregation is the result of mere material propinquity, while a civilized society of the historical or contemporaneous period is made up of social classes which differ, the one from the other, either through the physio-psychical constitutions of their component members, or through the whole of their customs and tendencies, and their personal, family or social life. These different classes may be rigorously separated. In ancient India they range from the _brahman_ to the _sudra_: in the Europe of the Middle Ages, from the Emperor and the Pope to the feudatory and the vassal, down to the artisan, and an individual cannot pass from one class into another, as his social condition is determined solely by the hazard of birth. Classes may lose their legal character, as happened in Europe and America after the French Revolution, and exceptionally there may be an instance of an individual passing from one class into another, analogously to the endosmose and exosmose of molecules, or, to use the phrase of M. Dumont, by a sort of "social capillarity." But, in any case, these different classes exist as an assured reality and they resist every juridical attempt at leveling as long as the fundamental reason for their differentiation remains. It is Karl Marx who, better than any one else, has proved the truth of this theory by the mass of sociological observations which he has drawn from societies under the most diverse economic conditions. The names (of the classes), the circumstances and phenomena of their hostile contact and conflict may vary with the varying phases of social evolution, but the tragic essence of history always appears in the antagonism between those who hold the monopoly of the means of production--and these are few--and those who have been robbed (expropriated) of them--and these are the great majority. _Warriors_ and _shepherds_ in the primitive societies, as soon as first, family and then individual ownership of land has superseded the primitive collectivism; _patricians_ and _plebeians_--_feudatories_ and _vassals_--_nobles_ and _common people_--_bourgeoisie_ and _proletariat_; these are so many manifestations of one and the same fact--the monopoly of wealth on one side, and productive labor on the other. Now, the great importance of the Marxian law--the struggle between classes--consists principally in the fact that it indicates with great exactness _just what_ is in truth the vital point of the social question and _by what method_ its solution may be reached. As long as no one had shown on positive evidence the economic basis of the political, juridical and moral life, the aspirations of the great majority for the amelioration of social conditions aimed vaguely at the demand and the partial conquest of some _accessory_ instrumentality, such as freedom of worship, political suffrage, public education, etc. And certainly, I have no desire to deny the great utility of these conquests. But the _sancta sanctorum_ always remained impenetrable to the eyes of the masses, and as economic power continued to be the privilege of a few, all the conquests and all the concessions had no real basis, separated, as they were, from the solid and fecund foundation which alone can give life and abiding power. Now, that Socialism has shown--even before Marx, but never before with so much scientific precision--that individual ownership, private property in land and the means of production is the vital point of the question--the problem is formulated in exact terms in the consciousness of contemporaneous humanity. What method will it be necessary to employ in order to abolish this monopoly of economic power, and the mass of suffering and ills, of hate and injustice which flow from it? The method of the _Class Struggle_, based on the scientifically proven fact that every class tends to preserve and increase its acquired advantages and privileges, teaches the class deprived of economic power that in order to succeed in conquering it, the struggle (we will consider, further on, the forms of this struggle) must be a struggle of class against class, and not of individual against individual. Hatred toward such or such an individual--even if it result in his death--does not advance us a single step toward the solution of the problem; it rather retards its solution, because it provokes a reaction in the general feeling against personal violence and it violates the principle of _respect for the human person_ which socialism proclaims most emphatically for the benefit of all and against all opponents. The solution of the problem does not become easier because it is recognized that the present abnormal condition, which is becoming more and more acute--misery for the masses and pleasure for a few--is not the consequence of the bad intentions of such or such an individual. Viewed from this side also socialism is, in fact, in perfect harmony with modern science, which denies the free will of man and sees in human activity, individual and collective, a necessary effect whose determining causes are the conditions of race and environment, acting concurrently.[38] Crime, suicide, insanity, misery are not the fruits of free will, of individual faults, as metaphysical spiritualism believes, and neither is it an effect of free will, a fault of the individual capitalist if the workingman is badly paid, if he is without work, if he is poor and miserable. All social phenomena are the necessary resultants of the historical conditions and of the environment. In the modern world the facility and the greater frequency of communication and relations of every kind between all parts of the earth have also increased the dependence of every fact--economic, political, juridical, ethical, artistic or scientific--upon the most remote and apparently unrelated conditions of the life of the great world. The present organization of private property with no restrictions upon the right of inheritance by descent or upon personal accumulation; the ever increasing and more perfect application of scientific discoveries to the facilitation of human labor--the labor of adapting the materials furnished by Nature to human needs; the telegraph and the steam-engine, the constantly overflowing torrent of human migrations--all these bind, with invisible but infrangible threads, the existence of a family of peasants, work-people or petty trades-people to the life of the whole world. And the harvest of coffee, cotton or wheat in the most distant countries makes its effects felt in all parts of the civilized world, just as the decrease or increase of the sun-spots are phenomena co-incident with the periodical agricultural crises and have a direct influence on the destinies of millions of men. This magnificent scientific conception of the "unity of physical forces," to use the expression of P. Secchi, or of universal solidarity is far, indeed, from that infantile conception which finds the causes of human phenomena in the free wills of individuals. If a socialist were to attempt, even for philanthropic purposes, to establish a factory in order to give work to the unemployed, and if he were to produce articles out of fashion or for which there was no general demand, he would soon become bankrupt in spite of his philanthropic intentions by an inevitable effect of inexorable economic laws. Or, again, if a socialist should give the laborers in his establishment wages two or three times as high as the current rate of wages, he would evidently have the same fate, since he would be dominated by the same economic laws, and he would have to sell his commodities at a loss or keep them unsold in his warehouses, because his prices for the same qualities of goods would be above the market price. He would be declared a bankrupt and the only consolation the world would offer him would be to call him an _honest man_ (_brave homme_); and in the present phase of "mercantile ethics" we know what this expression means.[39] Therefore, without regard to the personal relations, more or less cordial, between capitalists and workingmen, their respective economic situations are inexorably determined by the present (industrial) organization, in accordance with the law of surplus-labor which enabled Marx to explain and demonstrate irrefutably how the capitalist is able to accumulate wealth without working,--because the laborer produces in his day's work an amount of wealth exceeding in value the wage he receives, and this surplus-product forms the gratuitous (unearned) profit of the capitalist. Even if we deduct from the total profits his pay for technical and administrative superintendence, this unearned surplus-product still remains. Land, abandoned to the sun and the rain, does not, of itself, produce either wheat or wine. Minerals do not come forth, unaided, from the bowels of the earth. A bag of dollars shut up in a safe does not produce dollars, as a cow produces calves. The production of wealth results only from a transformation of (Nature-given) materials effected by human labor. And it is only because the peasant tills the land, because the miner extracts minerals, because the laborer sets machinery in motion, because the chemist makes experiments in his laboratory, because the engineer invents machinery, etc., that the capitalist or the landlord--though the wealth inherited from his father may have cost him no labor, and though he may practise _absenteeism_ and thus make no personal exertion--is able every year to enjoy riches that others have produced for him, in exchange for wretched lodgings and inadequate nourishment--while the workers are, in most cases, poisoned by the miasmatic vapors from rivers or marshes, by gas in mines and by dust in factories--in brief, in exchange for wages which are always inadequate, to assure the workers conditions of existence worthy of human creatures. Even under a system of absolute _métayage_ (share-farming)--which has been called a form of practical socialism--we always have this question left unanswered. By what miracle does the landlord, who does not work, get his barns and houses filled with wheat and oil and wine in sufficient quantities to enable him to live in ample comfort, while the _métayer_ (the tenant on shares) is obliged to work every day, in order to wrest from the earth enough to support himself and his family in wretchedness? And the system of _métayage_ does at least give the tenant the tranquillizing assurance that he will reach the end of the year without experiencing all the horrors of enforced idleness to which the ordinary day or wage laborers are condemned in both city and country. But, in substance, the whole problem in its entirety remains unsolved (even under this system), and there is always one man who lives in comfort, without working, because ten others live poorly by working.[40] This is the way the system of private property works, and these are the consequences it produces, without any regard to the wills or wishes of individuals. Therefore, every attempt made against such or such an individual is condemned to remain barren of results; it is the ruling tendency of Society, the objective point which must be changed, it is private ownership which must be abolished, not by a _partition_ ("dividing up"), which would result in the most extreme and pernicious form of private ownership, since by the end of a year the persistence of the old individualist principle would restore the _status quo ante_, and all the advantage would accrue solely to the most crafty and the least scrupulous. Our aim must be the abolition of private ownership and the establishment of collective and social ownership in land and the means of production. This substitution cannot be the subject for a decree,--though the intention to effect it by a decree is attributed to us--but it is in course of accomplishment under our eyes, every day, from hour to hour, directly or indirectly. Directly, because civilization shows us the continuous substitution of public ownership and social functions for private ownership and individual functions. Roads, postal systems, railways, museums, city lighting-plants, water-plants, schools, etc., which were only a few years since private properties and functions, have become social properties and functions. And it would be absurd to imagine that this direct process of socialization is destined to come to a halt to-day, instead of becoming progressively more and more marked, in accordance with every tendency of our modern life. Indirectly, since it is the outcome toward which the economic individualism of the bourgeoisie tends. The bourgeois class, which takes its name from the dwellers in the _bourgs_ (towns) which the feudal chateau and the Church--symbols of the class then dominant--protected, is the result of fecund labor intelligently directed toward its goal and of historical conditions which have changed the economic structure and tendency of the world (the discovery of America, for instance). This class achieved its revolution in the end of the eighteenth century, and conquered the political power. In the history of the civilized world, it has inscribed a page in letters of gold by those wondrous developments in the lives of nations that are truly epic in character, and by its marvelous applications of science to industry ... but it is now traversing the downward branch of the parabola, and symptoms are appearing which announce to us--and offer proof of their announcement--its dissolution; without its disappearance, moreover, the advent and establishment of a new social phase would be impossible. Economic individualism carried out to its ultimate logical consequences, necessarily causes the progressive multiplication of property in hands of a constantly diminishing number of persons. _Milliardaire_ (billionaire) is a new word, which is characteristic of the nineteenth century, and this new word serves to express and emphasize that phenomenon--in which Henry George saw the historic law of individualism--of the rich becoming richer while the poor become poorer.[41] Now it is evident that the smaller is the number of those who hold possession of the land and the means of production the easier is their expropriation--with or without indemnification--for the benefit of a single proprietor which is and can be Society alone. Land is the physical basis of the social organism. It is then absurd for it to belong to a few and not to the whole social collectivity; it would not be any more absurd for the air we breathe to be the monopoly of a few _airlords_. That (the socialization of the land and the means of production) is truly the supreme goal of socialism, but evidently it can not be reached by attacking such or such a landlord, or such or such a capitalist. The individualist mode of conflict is destined to remain barren of results, or, to say the least, it requires a terribly extravagant expenditure of strength and efforts to obtain merely partial or provisional results. And so those politicians, whose conception of statesmanship is a career of daily, trivial protests, who see nothing in politics but a struggle between individuals--and those tactics no longer produce any effect either on the public or on legislative assemblies, because they have at last become wonted to them--produce just about as much effect as would fantastic champions of hygiene who should attempt to render a marsh inhabitable by killing the mosquitoes one by one with shots from a revolver, instead of adopting as their method and their goal the draining of the pestilential marsh. No individual conflicts, no personal violence, but a Class Struggle. It is necessary to make the immense army of workers of all trades and of all professions conscious of these fundamental truths. It is necessary to show them that their class interests are in opposition to the interests of the class who possess the economic power, and that it is by class-conscious organization that they will conquer this economic power through the instrumentality of the other public powers that modern civilization has assured to free peoples. It may, nevertheless, be foreseen that, in every country, the ruling class, before yielding, will abridge or destroy even these public liberties which were without danger for them when they were in the hands of laborers not organized into a class-conscious party, but forming the rearguard of other purely political parties, as radical on secondary questions as they are profoundly conservative on the fundamental question of the economic organization of property. A Class-Struggle, therefore a struggle of class against class; and a struggle (this is understood), by the methods of which I will soon speak in discussing the four modes of social transformation: evolution--revolution--rebellion--individual violence. But a Class-Struggle in the Darwinian sense, which renews in the history of Man the magnificent drama of the struggle for life between species, instead of degrading us to the savage and meaningless brute strife of individual with individual. We can stop here. The examination of the relations between Darwinism and socialism might lead us much further, but it would go on constantly eliminating the pretended contradiction between the two currents of modern scientific thought, and it would, on the contrary, confirm the essential, natural and indissoluble harmony that there is between them. Thus the penetrating view of Virchow is confirmed by that of Leopold Jacoby. "The same year in which appeared Darwin's book (1859) and coming from a quite different direction, an identical impulse was given to a very important development of social science by a work which long passed unnoticed, and which bore the title: _Critique de l'économie politique_ by KARL MARX--it was the forerunner of _Capital_. "What Darwin's book on the _Origin of Species_ is on the subject of the genesis and evolution of organic life from non-sentient nature up to Man, the work of Marx is on the subject of the genesis and evolution of association among human beings, of States and the social forms of humanity."[42] And this is why Germany, which has been the most fruitful field for the development of the Darwinian theories, is also the most fruitful field for the intelligent, systematic propaganda of socialist ideas. And it is precisely for this reason that in Berlin, in the windows of the book-stores of the socialist propaganda, the works of Charles Darwin occupy the place of honor beside those of Karl Marx.[43] FOOTNOTES: [37] LARFARGUE, _Le Matérialisme économique_, in _Ere nouvelle_, 1893. [38] Avoiding both of the mutually exclusive theses that civilization is a consequence of race or a product of the environment, I have always maintained--by my theory of the natural factors in criminality--that it is the resultant of the combined action of the race and the environment. Among the recent works which support the thesis of the exclusive or predominant influence of race, I must mention LE BON, _Les lois psychologiques de l'évolution des peuples_, Paris, 1894. This work is, however, very superficial. I refer the reader for a more thorough examination of these two theses to Chap. IV of my book _Omicidio nell' anthropologia criminale_, Turin, 1894. [39] I use the expression "mercantile ethics," which LETOURNEAU used in his book on the Evolution of Ethics (_L'évolution de la morale_), Paris, 1887. In his scientific study of the facts relating to ethics, Letourneau has distinguished four phases: _animal_ ethics--_savage_ ethics--_barbarous_ ethics--_mercantile_ (or bourgeois) ethics; these phases will be followed by a higher phase of ethics which Malon has called _social_ ethics. [40] Some persons, still imbued with political (Jacobin) artificiality, think that in order to solve the social question it will be necessary to generalize the system of _métayage_. They imagine, then--though they do not say so--a royal or presidential decree: "Art. 1. Let all men become métayers!" And it does not occur to them that if métayage, which was the rule, has become a less and less frequent exception, this must be the necessary result of natural causes. The cause of the transformation is to be found in the fact that _métayage_ represents (is a form typical of) petty agricultural industry, and that it is unable to compete with modern agricultural industry organized on a large scale and well equipped with machinery, just as handicrafts have not been able to endure competition with modern manufacturing industry. It is true that there still are to-day some handicraft industries in a few villages, but these are rudimentary organs which merely represent an anterior phase (of production), and which no longer have any important function in the economic world. They are, like the rudimentary organs of the higher species of animals, according to the theory of Darwin, permanent witnesses of past epochs. The same Darwinian and economic law applies to _métayage_, which is also evidently destined to the same fate as handicrafts. _Conf._ the excellent propagandist pamphlet of BIEL, _Ai contadini toscani_, Colle d' Elsa, 1894. [41] HENRY GEORGE, Progress and Poverty, New York, 1898. Doubleday & McClure Co. [42] L. JACOBY, _L'Idea dell' evoluzione_, in _Bibliotheca dell' economista_, série III, vol. IX, 2d part, p. 69. [43] At the death of Darwin the _Sozialdemokrat_ of the 27th of April, 1882, wrote: "The proletariat who are struggling for their emancipation will ever honor the memory of Charles Darwin." Conf. LAFARGUE, _La théorie darwinienne_. I am well aware that in these last years, perhaps in consequence of the relations between Darwinism and socialism, consideration has again been given to the objections to the theory of Darwin, made by Voegeli, and more recently by Weismann, on the hereditary transmissibility of acquired characters. See SPENCER, _The Inadequacy of Natural Selection_, Paris, 1894.--VIRCHOW, _Transformisme et descendance_, Berlin, 1893. But all this merely concerns such or such a detail of Darwinism, while the fundamental theory of metamorphic organic development remains impregnable. PART SECOND. EVOLUTION AND SOCIALISM. The theory of universal evolution which--apart from such or such a more or less disputable detail--is truly characteristic of the vital tendency of modern scientific thought, has also been made to appear in absolute contradiction with the theories and the practical ideals of socialism. In this case the fallacy is obvious. If socialism is understood as that vague complex of sentimental aspirations so often crystallized into the artificial utopian creations of a new human world to be substituted by some sort of magic in a single day for the old world in which we live; then it is quite true that the scientific theory of evolution condemns the presumptions and the illusions of artificial or utopian political theories, which, whether they are reactionary or revolutionary, are always romantic, or in the words of the American Senator Ingalls, are "iridescent dreams." But, unfortunately for our adversaries, contemporary socialism is an entirely different thing from the socialism which preceded the work of Marx. Apart from the same sentiment of protest against present injustices and the same aspirations toward a better future, there is nothing in common between these two socialisms, neither in their logical structure nor in their deductions, unless it be the clear vision, which in modern socialism becomes a mathematically exact prediction (thanks to the theories of evolution) of the final social organization--based on the collective ownership of the land and the means of production. These are the conclusions to which we are led by the evidence of the facts--facts verified by a scientific examination of the three principal contradictions which our opponents have sought to set up between socialism and scientific evolution. From this point it is impossible not to see the direct causal connection between Marxian socialism and scientific evolution, since it must be recognized that the former is simply the logical consequence of the application of the evolutionary theory to the domain of economics. IX. THE ORTHODOX THESIS AND THE SOCIALIST THESIS IN THE LIGHT OF THE EVOLUTION THEORY. What, in substance, is the message of socialism? That the present economic world can not be immutable and eternal, that it merely represents a transitory phase of social evolution and that an ulterior phase, a differently organized world, is destined to succeed it. That this new organization must be collectivist or socialist--and no longer individualist--results, as an ultimate and certain conclusion, from the examination we have made of Darwinism and socialism. I must now demonstrate that this fundamental affirmation of socialism--leaving out of consideration for the moment all the details of that future organization, of which I will speak further on--is in perfect harmony with the experiential theory of evolutionism. Upon what point are orthodox political economy and socialism in absolute conflict? Political economy has held and holds that the economic laws governing the production and distribution of wealth which it has established are _natural laws_ ... not in the sense that they are laws naturally determined by the conditions of the social organism (which would be correct), but that they are _absolute laws_, that is to say that they apply to humanity at all times and in all places, and, consequently, that they are immutable in their principal points, though they may be subject to modification in details.[44] Scientific socialism holds, on the contrary, that the laws established by classical political economy, since the time of Adam Smith, are laws peculiar to the present period in the history of civilized humanity, and that they are, consequently, laws essentially _relative_ to the period of their analysis and discovery, and that just as they no longer fit the facts when the attempt is made to extend their application to past historical epochs and, still more, to pre-historic and ante-historic times, so it is absurd to attempt to apply them to the future and thus vainly try to petrify and perpetuate present social forms. Of these two fundamental theses, the orthodox thesis and the socialist thesis, which is the one which best agrees with the scientific theory of universal evolution? The answer can not be doubtful.[45] The theory of evolution, of which Herbert Spencer was the true creator, by applying to sociology the tendency to relativism which the historical school had followed in its studies in law and political economy (even then heterodox on more than one point), has shown that everything changes; that the present phase--of the facts in astronomy, geology, biology and sociology--is only the resultant of thousands on thousands of incessant, inevitable, natural transformations; that the present differs from the past and that the future will certainly be different from the present. Spencerism has done nothing but to collate a vast amount of scientific evidence, from all branches of human knowledge, in support of these two abstract thoughts of Leibnitz and Hegel: "The present is the child of the past, but it is the parent of the future," and "Nothing is; everything is becoming." This demonstration had already been made in the case of geology by Lyell who substituted for the traditional catastrophic theory of cataclysmic changes, the scientific theory of the gradual and continuous transformation of the earth.[46] It is true that, notwithstanding his encyclopædic knowledge, Herbert Spencer has not made a really profound study of political economy, or that at least he has not furnished us the evidence of the _facts_ to support his assertions in this field as he has done in the natural sciences. This does not alter the fact, however, that socialism is, after all, in its fundamental conception only the logical application of the scientific theory of natural evolution to economic phenomena. It was Karl Marx who, in 1859 in his _Critique de l'économie politique_, and even before then, in 1847, in the famous _Manifesto_ written in collaboration with Engels, nearly ten years before Spencer's _First Principles_, and finally in _Capital_ (1867) supplemented, or rather completed, in the social domain, the scientific revolution begun by Darwin and Spencer. The old metaphysics conceived of ethics--law--economics--as a finished compilation of absolute and eternal laws. This is the conception of Plato. It takes into consideration only historical times and it has, as an instrument of research, only the fantastic logic of the school-men. The generations which preceded us, have all been imbued with this notion of the absoluteness of natural laws, the conflicting laws of a dual universe of matter and spirit. Modern science, on the contrary, starts from the magnificent synthetic conception of monism, that is to say, of a single substance underlying all phenomena--matter and force being recognized as inseparable and indestructible, continuously evolving in a succession of forms--forms relative to their respective times and places. It has radically changed the direction of modern thought and directed it toward the grand idea of universal evolution.[47] Ethics, law and politics are mere superstructures, effects of the economic structure; they vary with its variations, from one parallel (of latitude or longitude) to another, and from one century to another. This is the great discovery which the genius of Karl Marx has expounded in his _Critique de l'économie politique_. I will examine further on the question as to what this sole source or basis of the varying economic conditions is, but the important point now is to emphasize their constant variability, from the pre-historic ages down to historical times and to the different periods of the latter. Moral codes, religious creeds, juridical institutions both civil and criminal, political organization:--all are constantly undergoing transformation and all are relative to their respective historical and material environments. To slay one's parents is the greatest of crimes in Europe and America; it is, on the contrary, a duty enjoined by religion in the island of Sumatra; in the same way, cannibalism is a permitted usage in Central Africa, and such it also was in Europe and America in pre-historic ages. The family is, at first (as among animals), only a sort of sexual communism; then polyandry and the matriarchal system were established where the supply of food was scanty and permitted only a very limited increase of population; we find polygamy and the patriarchal system appearing whenever and wherever the tyranny of this fundamental economic cause of polyandry ceases to be felt; with the advent of historical times appears the monogamic form of the family the best and the most advanced form, although it is still requisite for it to be freed from the rigid conventionalism of the indissoluble tie and the disguised and legalised prostitution (the fruits of economic causes) which pollute it among us to-day. How can any one hold that the constitution of property is bound to remain eternally just as it is, immutable, in the midst of the tremendous stream of changing social institutions and moral codes, all passing through evolutions and continuous and profound transformations? Property alone is subject to no changes and will remain petrified in its present form, _i. e._, a monopoly by a few of the land and the means of production![48] This is the absurd contention of economic and juridical orthodoxy. To the irresistible proofs and demonstrations of the evolutionist theory, they make only this one concession: the subordinate rules may vary, the _abuses_ may be diminished. The principle itself is unassailable and a few individuals may seize upon and appropriate the land and the means of production necessary to the life of the whole social organism which thus remains completely and eternally under the more or less direct domination of those who have control over the physical foundation of life.[49] Nothing more than a perfectly clear statement of the two fundamental theses--the thesis of classical law and economics, and the economic and juridical thesis of socialism--is necessary to determine, without further discussion, this first point of the controversy. At all events, the theory of evolution is in perfect, unquestionable harmony with the inductions of socialism and, or the contrary, it flatly contradicts the hypothesis of the absoluteness and immutability of the "natural" laws of economies, etc. FOOTNOTES: [44] U. RABBENO, _Le leggi economiche e il socialismo_, in _Rivista di filos. scientif._, 1884, vol. III., fasc. 5. [45] This is the thesis of COLAJANNI, in _Il socialismo_, Catane, 1884, P. 277. He errs when he thinks that I combatted this position in my book _Socialismo e criminalità_. [46] MORSELLI, _Antropologia generale--Lezioni sull' uomo secondo la teoria dell' evoluzione_, Turin, 1890-94, gives an excellent _resumé_ of these general indications of modern scientific thought in their application to all branches of knowledge from geology to anthropology. [47] BONARDI, _Evoluzionismo e socialismo_, Florence, 1894. [48] ARCANGELI, _Le evoluzioni della proprietà_, in _Critica sociale_, July 1, 1894. [49] This is exactly analogous to the conflict between the partisans and the opponents of free-will. The old metaphysics accorded to man (alone, a marvelous exception from all the rest of the universe) an absolutely free will. Modern physio-psychology absolutely denies every form of the free-will dogma in the name of the laws of natural causality. An intermediate position is occupied by those who, while recognizing that the freedom of man's will is not absolute, hold that at least a remnant of freedom must be conceded to the human will, because otherwise there would no longer be any merit or any blameworthiness, any vice or any virtue, etc. I considered this question in my first work: _Teoria dell' imputabilità e negazione del libero arbitrio_ (Florence, 1878, out of print), and in the third chapter of my _Sociologie criminelle_, French trans., Paris, 1892. I speak of it here only in order to show the analogy in the form of the debate on the economico-social question, and therefore the possibility of predicting a similar ultimate solution. The true conservative, drawing his inspiration from the metaphysical tradition, sticks to the old philosophical or economic ideas with all their rigid absolutism; at least he is logical. The determinist, in the name of science, upholds diametrically opposite ideas, in the domain of psychology as well as in those of the economic or juridical sciences. The eclectic, in politics as in psychology, in political economy as in law, is a conservative through and through, but he fondly hopes to escape the difficulties of the conservative position by making a few partial concessions to save appearances. But if the eclecticism is a convenient and agreeable attitude for its champions, it is, like hybridism, sterile, and neither life nor science owe anything to it. Therefore, the socialists are logical when they contend that in the last analysis there are only two political parties: the individualists (conservatives [or Republicans], progressives [or Democrats] and radicals [or Populists]) and the socialists. X. THE LAW OF APPARENT RETROGRESSION AND COLLECTIVE OWNERSHIP. Admitting, say our adversaries, that in demanding a social transformation socialism is in apparent accord with the evolutionist theory, it does not follow that its positive conclusions--notably the substitution of social ownership for individual ownership--are justified by that theory. Still further, they add, we maintain that those conclusions are in absolute contradiction with that very theory, and that they are therefore, to say the least, utopian and absurd. The first alleged contradiction between socialism and evolutionism is that the return to collective ownership of the land would be, at the same time, a return to the primitive, savage state of mankind, and socialism would indeed be a transformation, but a transformation in a backward direction, that is to say, against the current of the social evolution which has led us from the primitive form of collective property in land to the present form of individual property in land--the form characteristic of advanced civilization. Socialism, then, would be a return to barbarism. This objection contains an element of truth which can not be denied; it rightly points out that collective ownership should be a return--apparent--to the primitive social organization. But the conclusion drawn from this truth is absolutely false and anti-scientific because it altogether neglects a law--which is usually forgotten--but which is no less true, no less founded on scientific observation of the facts than is the law of social evolution. This is a sociological law which an able French physician merely pointed out in his studies on the relations between Transmutation and Socialism,[50] and the truth and full importance of which I showed in my _Sociologie criminelle_ (1892)--before I became a militant socialist--and which I again emphasized in my recent controversy with Morselli on the subject of divorce.[51] This law of apparent retrogression proves that the reversion of social institutions to primitive forms and types is a fact of constant recurrence. Before referring to some obvious illustrations of this law, I would recall to your notice the fact that M. Cognetti de Martiis, as far back as 1881, had a vague perception of this sociological law. His work, _Forme primitive nell' evoluzione economica_, (Turin, 1881), so remarkable for the fullness, accuracy and reliability of its collation of relevant facts, made it possible to foresee the possibility of the reappearance in the future economic evolution of the primitive forms characteristic of the status which formed the starting-point of the social evolution. I also remember having heard Carducci say, in his lectures at the University of Bologna, that the later development of the forms and the substance of literature is often merely the reproduction of the forms and the substance of the primitive Græco-Oriental literature; in the same way, the modern scientific theory of monism, the very soul of universal evolution and the typical and definitive form of systematic, scientific, experiential human thought boldly fronting the facts of the external world--following upon the brilliant but erratic speculations of metaphysics--is only a return to the ideas of the Greek philosophers and of Lucretius, the great poet of naturalism. The examples of this reversion to primitive forms are only too obvious and too numerous, even in the category of social institutions. I have already spoken of the religions evolution. According to Hartmann, in the primitive stage of human development happiness appeared attainable during the lifetime of the individual; this appeared impossible later on and its realization was referred to the life beyond the tomb; and now the tendency is to refer its realization to the earthly life of humanity, not to the life of the individual as in primitive times, but to series of generations yet unborn. The same is true in the political domain. Herbert Spencer remarks (Principles of Sociology, Vol. II, Part V, Chap. V,) that the will of all--the sovereign element among primitive mankind--gradually gives way to the will of a single person, then to those of a few (these are the various aristocracies: military, hereditary, professional or feudal), and the popular will finally tends again to become sovereign with the progress of democracy (universal suffrage--the referendum--direct legislation by the people, etc.). The right to administer punishment, a simple defensive function among primitive mankind tends to become the same once more. Criminal law no longer pretends to be a teleological agency for the distribution of ideal justice. This pretension in former days was an illusion that the belief in the freedom of the will had erected on the natural foundation of society's right of self-defense. Scientific investigations into the nature of crime, as a natural and social phenomenon, have demonstrated to-day how absurd and unjustified was the pretension of the lawmaker and the judge to weigh and measure the guilt of the delinquent to make the punishment exactly counterbalance it, instead of contenting themselves with excluding from civil society, temporarily or permanently, the individuals unable to adapt themselves to its requirements, as is done in the case of the insane and the victims of contagious diseases. The same truth applies to marriage. The right of freely dissolving the tie, which was recognized in primitive society, has been gradually replaced by the absolute formulæ of theology and mysticism which fancy that the "free will" can settle the destiny of a person by a monosyllable pronounced at a time when the physical equilibrium is as unstable as it is during courtship and at marriage. Later on the reversion to the spontaneous and primitive form of a union based on mutual consent imposes itself on men, and the matrimonial union, with the increase in the frequency and facility of divorce, reverts to its original forms and restores to the family, that it to say to the social cell, a healthier constitution. This some phenomenon may be traced in the organization of property. Spencer himself has been forced to recognize that there has been an inexorable tendency to a reversion to primitive collectivism since ownership in land, at first a family attribute, then industrial, as he has himself demonstrated, has reached its culminating point, so that in some countries (Torrens act in Australia) land has become a sort of _personal_ property, transferable as readily as a share in a stock-company. Read as proof what such an _individualist_ as Herbert Spencer has written: "At first sight it seems fairly inferable that the absolute ownership of land by private persons, must be the _ultimate_ state which industrialism brings about. But though industrialism has thus far tended to individualize possession of land, while individualizing all other possession, _it may be doubted whether the final stage is at present reached_. Ownership established by force does not stand on the same footing as ownership established by contract, and though multiplied sales and purchases, treating the two ownerships in the same way, have tacitly assimilated them, the assimilation may eventually be denied. The analogy furnished by assumed rights of possession over human beings, helps us to recognize this possibility. For while prisoners of war, taken by force and held as property in a vague way (being at first much on a footing with other members of a household), were reduced more definitely to the form of property when the buying and selling of slaves became general; and while it might, centuries ago, have been thence inferred that the ownership of man by man was an ownership in course of being permanently established;[52] yet we see that a later stage of civilization, reversing this process, has destroyed ownership of man by man. Similarly, at a stage still more advanced, it may be that _private ownership of land will disappear_."[53] Moreover, this process of the socialization of property, though a partial and subordinate process, is nevertheless so evident and continuous that to deny its existence would be to maintain that the economic and consequently the juridical tendency of the organization of property is not in the direction of a greater and greater magnification of the interests and rights of the collectivity over those of the individual. This, which is only a preponderance to-day, will become by an inevitable evolution a complete substitution as regards property in land and the means of production. The fundamental thesis of Socialism is then, to repeat it again, in perfect harmony with that sociological law of apparent retrogression, the natural reasons for which have been so admirably analyzed by M. Loria, thus: the thought and the life of primitive mankind are moulded and directed by the natural environment along the simplest and most fundamental lines; then the progress of intelligence and the complexity of life increasing by a law of evolution give us an analytical development of the principal elements contained in the first genus of each institution; this analytical development is often, when once finished, detrimental to each one of its elements; humanity itself, arrived at a certain stage of evolution, reconstructs and combines in a final synthesis these different elements, and thus returns to its primitive starting-point.[54] This reversion to primitive forms is not, however, a pure and simple repetition. Therefore it is called the law of _apparent_ retrogression, and this removes all force from the objection that socialism would be a "return to primitive _barbarism_." It is not a pure and simple repetition, but it is the concluding phase of a cycle, of a grand rhythm, as M. Asturaro recently put it, which infallibly and inevitably preserves in their integrity the achievements and conquests of the long preceding evolution, in so far as they are vital and fruitful; and the final outcome is far superior, objectively and subjectively, to the primitive social embryo. The track of the social evolution is not represented by a closed circle, which, like the serpent in the old symbol, cuts off all hope of a better future; but, to use the figure of Goethe, it is represented by a spiral, which seems to return upon itself, but which always advances and ascends. FOOTNOTES: [50] L. DRAMARD, _Transformisme et socialisme_, in _Revue Socialiste_, Jan. and Feb., 1885. [51] _Divorzio e sociologia_, in _Scuola positiva nella geurisprudenza penale_, Rome, 1893, No. 16. [52] It is known that Aristotle, mistaking for an absolute sociological law a law relative to his own time, declared that slavery was a natural institution, and that men were divided, _by Nature_, into two classes--free men and slaves. [53] SPENCER, Principles of Sociology, Vol. II, Part. V., Chap. XV., p. 553. New York, 1897. D. Appleton & Co. This idea, which Spencer had expressed in 1850 in his _Social Statics_ is found again in his recent work, _Justice_ (Chap. XI, and Appendix 3). It is true that he has made a step backward. He thinks that the amount of the indemnity to be given to the present holders of the land would be so great that this would make next to impossible that "nationalization of the land" which, as long ago as 1881, Henry George considered as the only _remedy_, and that Gladstone had the courage to propose as a solution of the Irish question. Spencer adds: "I adhere to the inference originally drawn, _that the aggregate of men forming the community are the supreme owners of the land_, but a fuller consideration of the matter has led me to the conclusion that individual ownership, subject to State suzerainty, should be maintained." The "profound study" which Spencer has made in Justice--(and, let us say between parentheses, this work, together with his "_Positive and Negative Beneficence_" furnishes sad evidence of the senile mental retrogression that even Herbert Spencer has been unable to escape; moreover its subjective aridity is in strange contrast with the marvelous wealth of scientific evidence poured forth in his earlier works)--is based on these two arguments: I. The present landed proprietors are not the direct descendants of the first conquerors; they have, in general, acquired their titles by free contract; II. Society is entitled to the ownership of the virgin soil, as it was before it was cleared, before any improvements or buildings were put upon it by private owners; the indemnity which would have to be paid for these improvements would reach an enormous figure. The answer is that the first argument would hold good if socialism proposed to _punish_ the present owners; but the question presents itself in a different form. Society places the expropriation of the owners of land on the ground of "public utility," and the individual right must give way before the rights of society. Just as it does at present, leaving out of consideration for the moment the question of indemnity. To reply to the second argument, in the first place, it must not be forgotten that the improvements are not exclusively the work of the personal exertions of the owners. They represent, at first, an enormous accumulation of fatigue and blood that many generations of laborers have left upon the soil, in order to bring it to its present state of cultivation ... and all of this for the profit of others; there is also this fact to be remembered that society itself, the social life, has been a great factor in producing these improvements (or increased values), since public roads, railways, the use of machinery in agriculture, etc., have been the means of bestowing freely upon the landowners large unearned increments that have greatly swollen the prices of their lands. Why, finally, if we are to consider the amount and the character of this indemnity, should this indemnity be _total_ and _absolute_? Why, even under present conditions, if a landowner, for various reasons, such as cherished memories connected with the land, values it at a sentimental price, he would be forced under the right of eminent domain to accept the market value, without any extra payment for his affection or sentiment. It would be just the same in the case of the collective appropriation which would, moreover, be facilitated by the progressive concentration of the land in the hands of a few great landed proprietors. If we were to assure these proprietors, _for the term of the natural lives_, a comfortable and tranquil life, it would suffice to make the indemnity meet all the requirements of the most rigorous equity. [54] LORIA, _La Teoria economica della constituzione politica_, Turin, 1886. p. 141. The second edition of this work has appeared in French, considerably enlarged: _Les bases économiques de la constitution sociale_, Paris, 1893. (This has also been translated into English.--Tr.) This law of apparent retrogression alone overthrows the greater part of the far too superficial criticisms that Guyot makes upon socialism in _La Tyrannie socialiste_, Paris, 1893 (published in English, by Swan Sonnenschein, London,) and in _Les Principes de 1789 et le Socialisme_, Paris, 1894. XI. THE SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY. The conclusion of the preceding chapter will be of use to us in the examination of the second contradiction that, it is pretended, exists between socialism and the theory of evolution. It is asserted and repeated in all possible tones that socialism constitutes a tyranny under a new form which will destroy all the blessings of liberty won with such toil and difficulty in our century, at the cost of so many sacrifices and of so many martyrs. I have already shown, in speaking of anthropological inequalities, that socialism will, on the contrary, assure to all individuals the conditions of a human existence and the possibility of developing with the utmost freedom and completeness their own respective individualities. It is sufficient here for me to refer to another law, which the scientific theory of evolution has established, to demonstrate (since I cannot in this monograph enter into details) that it is an error to assume that the advent of socialism would result in the suppression of the vital and vitalizing part of personal and political liberty. It is a law of natural evolution, set forth and illustrated with remarkable clearness by M. Ardigò[55], that each succeeding phase of the natural and social evolution does not destroy the vital and life-giving manifestations of the preceding phases, but that, on the contrary, it preserves their existence in so far as they are vital and only eliminates their pathological manifestations. In the biological evolution, the manifestations of vegetable life do not efface the first glimmerings of the dawn of life that are seen even before in the crystallization of minerals, any more than the manifestations of animal life efface those of vegetable life. The human form of life also permits the continued existence of the forms and links which precede it in the great series of living beings, but, more than this, the later forms only really live in so far as they are the product of the primitive forms and co-exist with them. The social evolution follows the same law: and this is precisely the interpretation of transition periods given by scientific evolutionism. They did not annihilate the conquests of the preceding civilizations, but they preserved, on the contrary, whatever was vital in them and fecundated them for the Renaissance of a new civilization. This law, which dominates all the magnificent development of the social life, equally governs the fate and the parabolic career of all social institutions. One phase of social evolution by following upon another phase eliminates, it is true, the parts that are not vital, the pathological products of preceding institutions, but it preserves and develops the parts that are healthy and vigorous while ever elevating more and more the physical and moral diapason of humanity. By this natural process the great stream of humanity issued from the virgin forests of savage life and developed with majestic grandeur during the periods of barbarism and the present civilization, which are superior in some respects to the preceding phases of the social life, but in many others are marred by the very products of their own degeneracy, as I pointed out in speaking of reactionary varieties of social selection. And, as an example of this, it is certain that the laborers of the contemporaneous period, of the bourgeois civilization have, in general, a better physical and moral life than those of past centuries, but it cannot be denied none the less that their condition as free _wage-workers_ is inferior in more than one particular to the condition of the _slaves_ of antiquity and of the _serfs_ of the Middle Ages. The _slave_ of antiquity was, it is true, the absolute property of his master, of the _free_ man, and he was condemned to well nigh an animal existence, but it was to the interest of his master to assure him daily bread at the least, for the slave formed a part of his estate, like his cattle and horses. Just so, the serf or villein of the Middle Ages enjoyed certain customary rights which attached him to the soil and assured him at the least--save in case of famine--of daily bread. The free wage-worker of the modern world, on the contrary, is always condemned to labor inhuman both in its duration and its character, and this is the justification of that demand for an Eight-Hours day which can already count more than one victory and which is destined to a sure triumph. As no permanent legal relation binds the wage-slave either to the capitalist proprietor or to the soil, his daily bread is not assured to him, because the proprietor no longer has any interest to feed and support the laborers who toil in his factory or on his field. The death or sickness of the laborer cannot, in fact, cause any decrease of his estate and he can always draw from the inexhaustible multitude of laborers who are forced by lack of employment to offer themselves on the market. That is why--not because present-day proprietors are more wicked than those of former times, but because even the moral sentiments are the result of economic conditions--the landed proprietor or the superintendent of his estate hastens to have a veterinary called if, in his stable, a cow becomes ill, while he is in no hurry to have a doctor called if it is the son of the cow-herd who is attacked by disease. Certainly there may be--and these are more or less frequent exceptions--here and there a proprietor who contradicts this rule, especially when he lives in daily contact with his laborers. Neither can it be denied that the rich classes are moved at times by the spirit of benevolence--even apart from the _charity fad_--and that they thus put to rest the inner voice, the symptom of the moral disease from which they suffer, but the inexorable rule is nevertheless as follows: with the modern form of industry the laborer has gained political liberty, the right of suffrage, of association, etc. (rights which he is allowed to use only when he does not utilize them to form a class-party, based on intelligent apprehension of the essential point of the social question), but he has lost the guarantee of daily bread and of a home. Socialism wishes to give this guarantee to all individuals--and it demonstrates the mathematical possibility of this by the substitution of social ownership for individual ownership of the means of production--but it does not follow from this that socialism will do away with all the useful and truly fruitful conquests of the present phase of civilization, and of the preceding phases. And here is a characteristic example of this: the invention of industrial and agricultural machinery, that marvelous application of science to the transformation of natural forces which ought to have had only beneficent consequences, has caused and is still causing the misery and ruin of thousands and thousands of laborers. The substitution of machines for human labor has inevitably condemned multitudes of workers to the tortures of enforced idleness and to the ruthless action of the iron law of minimum wages barely sufficient to prevent them from dying of hunger. The first instinctive reaction or impulse of these unfortunates was and still is, unhappily, to destroy the machines and to see in them only the instruments of their undeserved sufferings. But the destruction of the machines would be, in fact, only a pure and simple return to barbarism, and this is not the wish or purpose of socialism which represents a higher phase of human civilization. And this is why socialism alone can furnish a solution of this tragic difficulty which can not be solved by economic individualism which involves the constant employment and introduction of improved machinery because its use gives an evident and irresistible advantage to the capitalist. It is necessary--and there is no other solution--that the machines become collective or social property. Then, obviously, their only effect will be to diminish the aggregate amount of labor and muscular effort necessary to produce a given quantity of products. And thus the daily work of each worker will be decreased, and his standard of existence will constantly rise and become more closely correspondent with the dignity of a human being. This effect is already manifest, to a limited extent, in those cases where, for instance, several small farm proprietors found co-operative societies for the purchase of, for example, threshing-machines. If there should be joined to the small proprietors, in a grand fraternal co-operation, the laborers or peasants (and this will be possible only when the land shall have become social property), and if the machines were municipal property, for example, as are the fire-engines, and if the commune were to grant their use for the labors of the fields, the machines would no longer produce any evil effects and all men would see in them their liberators. It is thus that socialism, because it represents a higher phase of human evolution, would eliminate from the present phase only the bad products of our unbridled economic individualism which creates, at one pole, the billionaires or "Napoleons of Finance" who enrich themselves in a few years by seizing upon--in ways more or less clearly described in the penal code--the public funds, and which, at the other pole, accumulates vast multitudes of poverty-stricken wretches in the slums of the cities or in the houses of straw and mud which reproduce in the South of Italy, the quarters of the Helots of antiquity, or in the valley of the Po, the huts of the Australian bushmen.[56] No intelligent socialist has ever dreamt of not recognizing all that the bourgeoisie has done for human civilization, or of tearing out the pages of gold that it has written in the history of the civilized world by its brilliant development of the various nations, by its marvelous applications of science to industry, and by the commercial and intellectual relations which it has developed between different peoples. These are permanent conquests of human progress, and socialism does not deny them any more than it wishes to destroy them, and it accords a just tribute of recognition to the generous pioneers who have achieved them. The attitude of socialism toward the bourgeoisie might be compared to that of atheists who do not wish either to destroy or to refuse their admiration to a painting of Raphael or to a statue of Michel-Angelo, because these works represent and give the seal of eternity to religious legends. But socialism sees in the present bourgeois civilization, arrived at its decline, the sad symptoms of an irremediable dissolution, and it contends that it is necessary to rid the social organism of its infectious _poison_, and this not by ridding it of such or such a bankrupt, of such or such a corrupt official, of such or such a dishonest contractor ... but by going to the root of the evil, to the indisputable source of the virulent infection. By radically transforming the regime--through the substitution of social ownership for individual ownership--it is necessary to renew the healthy and vital forces of human society, to enable it to rise to a higher phase of civilization. Then, it is true, the privileged classes will no longer be able to pass their lives in idleness, luxury and dissipation, and they will have to make up their minds to lead an industrious and less ostentatious life, but the immense majority of men will rise to the heights of serene dignity, security and joyous brotherhood, instead of living in the sorrows, anxieties and bitter strife of the present. An analogous response may be made to that banal objection that socialism will suppress all liberty--that objection repeated to satiety by all those who more or less consciously conceal, under the colors of political liberalism, the tendencies of economic conservatism. That repugnance which many people, even in good faith, show toward socialism, is it not the manifestation of another law of human evolution which Herbert Spencer has formulated thus: "Every progress effected is an obstacle to further progress"? This is, in fact, a natural psychological tendency, a tendency analogous to _fetishism_, to refuse to consider the ideal attained, the progress effected as a simple instrument, a starting-point for further progress and for the attainment of new ideals, instead of contentedly halting to adore as a fetish the progress already effected, which men are prone to look upon as being so complete that it leaves no room for new ideals and higher aspirations. Just as the savage adores the fruit-tree, whose benefits he enjoys, for itself and not for the fruits it can yield, and, in the end, makes a fetish of it, an idol too holy to be touched and, therefore, barren; just as the miser who has learned in our individualist world the value of money, ends by adoring the money in itself and for itself, as a fetish and an idol, and keeps it buried in a safe where it remains sterile, instead of employing it as a means for procuring himself new pleasures; in the same way, the sincere liberal, the son of the French Revolution, has made Liberty an idol which is its own goal, a sterile fetish, instead of making use of it as an instrument for new conquests, for the realization of new ideals. It is understood that under a regime of political tyranny, the first and most urgent ideal was necessarily the conquest of liberty and of political sovereignty. And we who arrive upon the field after the battle is fought and the victory won, we gladly pay our tribute of gratitude for that conquest to all the martyrs and heroes who bought it at the price of their blood. But Liberty is not and can not be its own end and object! What is the liberty of holding public assemblages or the liberty of thought worth if the stomach has not its daily bread, and if millions of individuals have their moral strength paralyzed as a consequence of bodily or cerebral anemia? Of what worth is the theoretic share in political sovereignty, the right to vote, if the people remain enslaved by misery, lack of employment, and acute or chronic hunger? Liberty for liberty's sake--there you have the progress achieved turned into an obstacle to future progress; it is a sort of political masturbation, it is impotency face to face with the new necessities of life. Socialism, on the other hand, says that just as the subsequent phase of the social evolution does not efface the conquests of the preceding phases, neither does it wish to suppress the liberty so gloriously conquered, by the bourgeois world in 1789--but it does desire the laborers, after they have become conscious of the interests and needs of their class, to make use of that liberty to realize a more equitable and more human social organization. Nevertheless, it is only too indisputable that under the system of private property and its inevitable consequence, the monopoly of economic power, the liberty of the man who does not share in this monopoly, is only an impotent and sentimental toy. And when the workers, with a clear consciousness of their class-interests, wish to make use of this liberty, then the holders of political power are forced to disown the great liberal principles, "the principles of '89," by suppressing all public liberty, and they vainly fancy that they will be able, in this way, to stop the inevitable march of human evolution. As much must be said of another accusation made against socialists. They renounce their fatherland (_patrie_), it is said, in the name of internationalism. This also is false. The national _épopées_ which, in our century, have reconquered for Italy and Germany their unity and their independence, have really constituted great steps forward, and we are grateful to those who have given us a free country. But our country can not become an obstacle to future progress, to the fraternity of all peoples, freed from national hatreds which are truly a relic of barbarism, or a mere bit of theatrical scenery to hide the interests of capitalism which has been shrewd enough to realize, for its own benefit, the broadest internationalism. It was a true moral and social progress to rise above the phase of the communal wars in Italy, and to feel ourselves all brothers of one and the same nation; it will be just the same when we shall have risen above the phase of "patriotic" rivalries to feel ourselves all brothers of one and the same humanity. It is, nevertheless, not difficult for us to penetrate, thanks to the historical key of class-interests, the secret of the contradictions, in which the classes in power move. When they form an international league--the London banker, thanks to telegraphy, is master of the markets in Pekin, New York and St. Petersburg--it is greatly to the advantage of that ruling class to maintain the artificial divisions between the laborers of the whole world, or even those of old Europe alone, because it is only the division of the workers which makes possible the maintenance of the power of the capitalists. And to attain their object, it suffices to exploit the primitive fund of savage hatred for "foreigners." But this does not keep international socialism from being, even from this point of view, a definite moral scheme and an inevitable phase of human evolution. Just so, and in consequence of the same sociological law, it is not correct to assert that, by establishing collective ownership, socialism will suppress every kind of individual ownership. We must repeat again that one phase of evolution can not suppress all that has been accomplished during the preceding phases; it suppresses only the manifestations which have ceased to be vital, and it suppresses them because they are in contradiction with the new conditions of existence begotten by the new phases of evolution. In substituting social ownership for individual ownership of the land and the means of production, it is obvious that it will not be necessary to suppress private property in the food necessary to the individual, nor in clothing and objects of personal use which will continue to be objects of individual or family consumption. This form of individual ownership will then always continue to exist, since it is necessary and perfectly consistent with social ownership of the land, mines, factories, houses, machines, tools and instruments of labor, and means of transportation. The collective ownership of libraries--which we see in operation under our eyes--does it deprive individuals of the personal use of rare and expensive books which they would be unable to procure in any other way, and does it not largely increase the utility that can be derived from these books, when compared to the services that these books could render if they were shut up in the private library of a useless book-collector? In the same way, the collective ownership of the land and the means of production, by securing to everyone the use of the machines, tools and land, will only increase their utility a hundred-fold. And let no one say that, when men shall no longer have the exclusive and transferable (by inheritance, etc.) _ownership_ of wealth, they will no longer be impelled to labor because they will no longer be constrained to work by personal or family self-interest.[57] We see, for example, that, even in our present individualist world, those survivals of collective property in land--to which Laveleye has so strikingly called the attention of sociologists--continue to be cultivated and yield a return which is not lower than that yielded by lands held in private ownership, although these communist or collectivist farmers have only the right of use and enjoyment, and not the absolute title.[58] If some of these survivals of collective ownership are disappearing, or if their administration is bad, this can not be an argument against socialism, since it is easy to understand that, in the present economic organization based on absolute individualism, these organisms do not have an environment which furnishes them the conditions of a possible existence. It is as though one were to wish a fish to live out of water, or a mammal in an atmosphere containing no oxygen. These are the same considerations which condemn to a certain death all those famous experiments--the socialist, communist or anarchist colonies which it has been attempted to establish in various places as "experimental trials of socialism." It seems not to have been understood that such experiments could only result in inevitable abortions, obliged as they are to develop in an individualist economic and moral environment which can not furnish them the conditions essential for their physiological development, conditions which they will, on the contrary, have when the whole social organization shall be guided by the collectivist principle, that is to say, when society shall be _socialized_.[59] Then individual tendencies and psychological aptitudes will adapt themselves to the environment. It is natural that in an individualist environment, a world of free competition, in which every individual sees in every other if not an adversary, at least a competitor, anti-social egoism should be the tendency which is inevitably most highly developed, as a necessary result of the instinct of self-preservation, especially in these latest phases of a civilization which seems to be driven at full steam, compared to the pacific and gentle individualism of past centuries. In an environment where every one, in exchange for intellectual or manual labor furnished to society, will be assured of his daily bread and will thus be saved from daily anxiety, it is evident that egoism will have far fewer stimulants, fewer occasions to manifest itself than solidarity, sympathy and altruism will have. Then that pitiless maxim--_homo homini lupus_--will cease to be true--a maxim which, whether we admit it or not, poisons so much of our present life. I can not dwell longer on these details and I conclude here the examination of this second pretended opposition between socialism and evolution by again pointing out that the sociological law which declares that the subsequent phase (of social evolution) does not efface the vital and fruitful manifestations of the preceding phases of evolution, gives us, in regard to the social organization in process of formation, a more exact (_positive_ or fact-founded) idea than our opponents think, who always imagine that they have to refute the romantic and sentimental socialism of the first half of this century.[60] This shows how little weight there is in the objection recently raised against socialism, in the name of a learned but vague sociological eclecticism, by a distinguished Italian professor, M. Vanni. "Contemporary socialism is not identified with individualism, since it places at the foundation of the social organization a principle which is not that of individual autonomy, but rather its negation. If, notwithstanding this, it promulgates individualist ideas, which are in contradiction with its principles, this does not signify that it has changed its nature, or that it has ceased to be socialism: it means simply that it lives upon and by contradictions."[61] When socialism, by assuring to every one the means of livelihood, contends that it will permit the assertion and the development of all individualities, it does not fall into a contradiction of principles, but being, as it is, the approaching phase of human civilization, it can not suppress nor efface whatever is vital, that is to say, compatible with the new social form, in the preceding phases. And just as socialist internationalism is not in conflict with patriotism, since it recognizes whatever is healthy and true in that sentiment, and eliminates only the pathological part, jingoism, in the same way, socialism does not draw its life from contradiction, but it follows, on the contrary, the fundamental laws of natural evolution, in developing and preserving the vital part of individualism, and in suppressing only its pathological manifestations which are responsible for the fact that in the modern world, as Prampolini said, 90 per cent. of the cells of the social organization are condemned to anemia because 10 per cent. are ill with hyper-emia and hyper-trophy. FOOTNOTES: [55] ARDIG�, _La formazione naturale_, Vol. II. of his _Opere filosofiche_, Padua, 1897. [56] My master, Pietro Ellero, has given in _La Tirrandie borghese_, an eloquent description of this social and political pathology as it appears in Italy. [57] RICHTER, _Où mène le socialisme_, Paris, 1892. [58] M. Loria, in _Les Bases économiques de la constitution sociale_, Paris, 1894, part 1st, demonstrates, moreover, that in a society based on collective ownership selfishness, rightly understood will still remain the principal motive of human actions, but that it will then be the means of realizing a social harmony of which it is the worst enemy under the regime of individualism. Here is an example of this, on a small scale, but instructive. The means of transportation have, in large cities, followed the ordinary process of progressive socialization. At first, everybody went on foot, excepting only a few rich persons who were able to have horses and carriages; later, carriages were made available for the public at a fixed rate of hire (the _fiacres_ which have been used in Paris a little more than a century, and which took their name from Saint Fiacre because the first cab stood beneath his image); then, the dearness of _fiacre_-hire led to a further socialization by means of omnibuses and tramways. Another step forward and the socialization will be complete. Let the cab service, omnibus service, street railways, _bicyclettes_, etc., become a municipal service or function and every one will be able to make use of it gratis just as he freely enjoys the railways when they become a national public service. But, then--this is the individualist objection--everybody will wish to ride in cabs or on trolleys, and the service having to attempt to satisfy all, will be perfectly satisfactory to no one. This is not correct. If the transformation had to be made suddenly, this might be a temporary consequence. But even now many ride gratis (on passes, etc.) on both railways and tramways. And so it seems to us that every one will wish to ride on the street cars because the fact that it is now impossible for many to enjoy this mode of locomotion gives rise to the desire for the forbidden fruit. But when the enjoyment of it shall be free (and there could be restrictions based on the necessity for such transportation) another egoistic motive will come into play--the physiological need of walking, especially for well-fed people who have been engaged in sedentary labor. And so you see how individual selfishness, in this example of collective ownership on a small scale, would act in harmony with the social requirements. [59] Thus it is easy to understand how unfounded is the reasoning among the opponents of socialism that the failure of communist or socialist colonies is an objective demonstration of "the instability of a socialist arrangement" (of society). [60] This is what Yves Guyot, for example, does in _Les Principes de 1789_, Paris, 1894, when he declares, in the name of individualist psychology, that "socialism is restrictive and individualism expansive." This thesis is, moreover, in part true, if it is transposed. The vulgar psychology, which answers the purposes of M. Guyot (_La Tyrannie socialiste_, liv. III, ch. I.), is content with superficial observations. It declares, for instance, that if the laborer works twelve hours, he will produce evidently a third more than if he works eight hours, and this is the reason why industrial capitalism has opposed and does oppose the minimum programme of the three eighths--eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep and eight hours for meals and recreation. A more scientific physio-psychological observation demonstrates, on the contrary, as I said long ago, that "man is a machine, but he does not function after the fashion of a machine," in the sense that man is a living machine, and not an inorganic machine. Every one knows that a locomotive or a sewing machine does in twelve hours a quantity of work greater by one-third than it does in eight hours; but man is a living machine, subject to the law of physical mechanics, but also to those of biological mechanics. Intellectual labor, like muscular labor, is not uniform in quality and intensity throughout its duration. Within the individual limits of _fatigue_ and exhaustion, it obeys the law which Quetelet expressed by his binomial curve, and which I believe to be one of the fundamental laws of living and inorganic nature. At the start the force or the speed is very slight--afterward a maximum of force or speed is attained--and at last the force or speed again becomes very slight. With manual labor, as with intellectual labor, there is a maximum, after which the muscular and cerebral forces decline, and then the work drags along slowly and without vigor until the end of the forced daily labor. Consider also the beneficient _suggestive_ influence of a reduction of hours, and you will readily understand why the recent English reports are so unanswerable on the excellent results, even from the capitalist point of view, of the Eight-Hour reform. The workingmen are less fatigued, and the production is undiminished. When these economic reforms, and all those which are based on an exact physio-psychology, shall be effected under the socialist regime--that is to say, without the friction and the loss of force that would be inevitable under capitalist individualism--it is evident that they will have immense material and moral advantages, notwithstanding the _a priori_ objections of the present individualism which can not see or which forgets the profound reflex effects of a change of the social environment on individual psychology. [61] ICILIO VANNI, _La funzione practica della filosofia del diritto considerata in sè e in rapporto al socialismo contemporaneo_, Bologne, 1894. XII. EVOLUTION--REVOLUTION--REBELLION--INDIVIDUAL VIOLENCE--SOCIALISM AND ANARCHY. The last and the gravest of the contradictions that it is attempted to set up between socialism and the scientific theory of evolution, relates to the question of _how_ socialism, in practice, will be inaugurated and realized. Some think that socialism ought, at the present time, to set forth, in all its details, the precise and symmetrical form of the future social organization.--"Show me a practical description of the new society, and I will then decide whether I ought to prefer it to the present society." Others--and this is a consequence of that first false conception--imagine that socialism wishes in a single day to change the face of the world, and that we will be able to go to sleep in a world completely bourgeois and to wake up next morning in a world completely socialist. How is it possible not to see, some one then says, that all this is directly and thoroughly in conflict with the law of evolution, a law based on the two fundamental ideas--which are characteristic of the new tendencies of scientific thought and which are in conflict with the old metaphysics--of the _naturalness_ and the _gradualness_ of all phenomena in all domains of universal life, from astronomy to sociology. It is indisputable that these two objections were, in great part, well founded when they were directed against what Engels has called "utopian socialism." When socialism, before the time of Karl Marx, was merely the sentimental expression of a humanitarianism as noble as it was neglectful of the most elementary principles of exact science, it was altogether natural for its partisans to give rein to the impetuosity of their generous natures both in their vehement protests against social injustices and in their reveries and day-dreams of a better world, to which the imagination strove to give precise contours, as witness all the utopias from the REPUBLIC of Plato to the LOOKING BACKWARD of Bellamy. It is easy to understand what opportunities these constructions afforded to criticism. The latter was false in part, moreover, because it was the offspring of the habits of thought peculiar to the modern world, and which will change with the change in the environment, but it was well founded in part also because the enormous complexity of social phenomena makes it impossible to prophesy in regard to all the details of a social organization which will differ from ours more profoundly than the present society differs from that of the Middle Ages, because the bourgeois world has retained the same foundation, individualism, as the society which preceded it, while the socialist world will have a fundamentally different polarization. These prophetic constructions of a new social order are, moreover, the natural product of that artificiality in politics and sociology, with which the most orthodox individualists are equally deeply imbued, individualists who imagine, as Spencer has remarked, that human society is like a piece of dough to which the law can give one form rather than another, without taking into account the organic and psychical, ethical and historical qualities, tendencies and aptitudes of the different peoples. Sentimental socialism has furnished some attempts at utopian construction, but the modern world of politics has presented and does present still more of them with the ridiculous and chaotic mess of laws and codes which surround every man from his birth to his death, and even before he is born and after he is dead, in an inextricable network of codes, laws, decrees and regulations which stifle him like the silk-worm in the cocoon. And every day, experience shows us that our legislators, imbued with this political and social artificiality, do nothing but copy the laws of the most dissimilar peoples, according as the fashion comes from Paris or Berlin,--instead of carefully studying the facts of actual life, the conditions of existence and the interests of the people in their respective countries, in order to adapt their laws to them, laws which--if this is not done--remain, as abundant examples show, dead letters because the reality of the facts of life does not permit them to strike their roots into the social soil and to develop a fruitful life.[62] On the subject of artificial social constructions, the socialists might say to the individualists: let him who is without sin, cast the first stone. The true reply is wholly different. Scientific socialism represents a much more advanced phase of socialist thought; it is in perfect harmony with modern, experiential science, and it has completely abandoned the fantastic idea of prophesying, at the present time, what human society will be under the new collectivist organization. What scientific socialism can affirm and does affirm with mathematical certainty, is that the current, the trajectory, of human evolution is in the general direction pointed out and foreseen by socialism, that is to say, in the direction of a continuously and progressively increasing preponderance of the interests and importance of the species over the interests and importance of the individual--and, therefore, in the direction of a continuous _socialization_ of the economic life, and with and in consequence of that, of the juridical, moral and political life. As to the petty details of the new social edifice, we are unable to foresee them, precisely because the new social edifice will be, and is, a _natural_ and _spontaneous_ product of human evolution, a product which is already in process of formation, and the general outlines of which are already visible, and not an artificial construction of the imagination of some utopian or idealist. The situation is the same in the social sciences and the natural sciences. In embryology the celebrated law of Haeckel tells us that the development of the _individual_ embryo reproduces in miniature the various forms of development of the animal _species_ which have preceded it in the zoological series. But the biologist, by studying a human embryo of a few days' or a few weeks' growth, can not tell whether it will be male or female, and still less whether it will be a strong or a weak individual, phlegmatic or nervous, intelligent or not. He can only tell the general lines of the future evolution of that individual, and must leave it to time to show the exact character of all the particular details of its personality, which will be developed naturally and spontaneously, in conformity with the hereditary organic conditions and the conditions of the environment in which it will live. This is what can be and what must be the reply of every socialist. This is the position taken by Bebel in the German _Reichstag_[63] in his reply to those who wish to know at the present time what all the details of the future State will be, and who skilfully profiting by the ingenuity of the socialist romancers, criticize their artificial fantasies which are true in their general outlines, but arbitrary in their details. It would have been just the same thing if, before the French Revolution,--which, as it were, hatched out the bourgeois world, prepared and matured during the previous evolution,--the nobility and the clergy, the classes then in power, had asked the representatives of the Third Estate--bourgeois by birth, though some aristocrats or priests embraced the cause of the bourgeoisie against the privileges of their caste, as the Marquis de Mirabeau and the Abbé Sieyès--"But what sort of a world will this new world of yours be? Show us first its exact plan, and after that we will decide!" The Third Estate, the bourgeoisie, would not have been able to answer this question, because it was impossible for them to foresee what the human society of the nineteenth century was to be. But this did not prevent the bourgeois revolution from taking place because it represented the next natural and inevitable phase of an eternal evolution. This is now the position of socialism with relation to the bourgeois world. And if this bourgeois world, born only about a century ago, is destined to have a much shorter historical cycle than the feudal (aristocratico-clerical) world, this is simply because the marvelous scientific progress of the nineteenth century has increased a hundred-fold the rapidity of life in time and has nearly annihilated space, and, therefore, civilized humanity traverses now in ten years the same road that it took, in the Middle Ages, a century or two to travel. The continuously accelerated velocity of human evolution is also one of the laws established and proved by modern social science. It is the artificial constructions of sentimental socialism which have given birth to the idea--correct so far as they are concerned--that _socialism_ is synonymous with _tyranny_. It is evident that if the new social organization is not the spontaneous form naturally produced by the human evolution, but rather an artificial construction that has issued complete in every detail from the brain of some social architect, the latter will be unable to avoid regulating the new social machinery by an infinite number of rules and by the superior authority which he will assign to a controlling intelligence, either individual or collective. It is easy to understand then, how such an organization gives rise in its opponents--who see in the individualist world only the advantages of liberty, and who forget the evils which so copiously flow from it--the impression of a system of monastic or military discipline.[64] Another contemporary artificial product has contributed to confirm this impression--_State Socialism_. At bottom, it does not differ from sentimental or utopian socialism, and as Liebknecht said at the socialist congress of Berlin (1892), it would be "a State Capitalism which would join political slavery to economic exploitation." State Socialism is a symptom of the irresistible power of scientific and democratic socialism--as is shown by the famous _rescripts_ of Emperor William convoking an international conference to solve (this is the infantile idea of the decree) the problems of labor, and the famous Encyclical on "The Condition of Labor" of the very able Pope, Leo XIII, who has handled the subject with great tact and cleverness.[65] But these imperial rescripts and these papal encyclicals--because it is impossible to leap over or suppress the phases of the social evolution--could only result abortively in our bourgeois, individualist and _laissez faire_ world. Certainly it would not have been displeasing to this bourgeois world to see the vigorous contemporary socialism strangled to death in the amorous embraces of official artificiality and of State Socialism, for it had become evident in Germany and elsewhere, that neither laws nor repressive measures of any kind could kill it.[66] All that arsenal of rules and regulations and provisions for inspection and superintendence has nothing in common with scientific socialism which foresees clearly that the executive guidance of the new social organization will be no more confused than is the present administration of the State, the provinces and the communes, and will, on the contrary, be much better adapted to subserve the interests of both society and the individual, since it will be a natural product and not a parasitic product of the new social organization. Just so, the nervous system of a mammal is the regulating apparatus of its organism; it is, certainly, more complex than that of the organism of a fish or of a mollusc, but it has not, for that reason, tyrannically stifled the autonomy of the other organs and anatomical machinery, or of the cells in their living confederation. It is understood, then, that to refute socialism, something more is needed than the mere repetition of the current objections against that artificial and sentimental socialism which still continues to exist, I confess, in the nebulous mass of popular ideas. But every day it is losing ground before the intelligent partisans--workingmen, middle-class or aristocrats--of scientific socialism which armed--thanks to the impulse received from the genius of Marx--with all the best-established inductions of modern science, is triumphing over the old objections which our adversaries, through force of mental custom, still repeat, but which have long been left behind by contemporary thought, together with the utopian socialism which provoked them. The same reply must be made to the second part of the objection, with regard to the mode by which the advent of socialism will be accomplished. One of the inevitable and logical consequences of utopian and artificial socialism is to think that the architectonic construction proposed by such or such a reformer, ought to be and can be put into practice in a single day by a decree. In this sense it is quite true that the utopian illusion of empirical socialism is in opposition to the scientific law of evolution, and, _looked at in this way_, I combatted it in my book on _Socialismo e Criminalità_, because at that time (1883) the ideas of scientific or Marxian socialism were not yet generally disseminated in Italy. A political party or a scientific theory are natural products which must pass through the vital phases of infancy and youth, before reaching complete development. It was, then, inevitable that, before becoming scientific or _positif_ (fact-founded), socialism, in Italy as in other countries, should pass through the infantile phases of clannish exclusiveness--the era when socialism was confined to organizations of _manual_ laborers--and of nebulous romanticism which, as it gives to the word _revolution_ a narrow and incomplete meaning, is always fed with false hope by the illusion that a social organism can be radically changed in a single day with four rifle-shots, just as a monarchical regime could thus be converted into a republican regime. But it is infinitely easier to change the political envelope of a social organization,--because such a change has little effect on the economic foundation of the social life,--than to completely revolutionize this social life in its economic constitution. The processes of social transformation, as well as--under various names--those of every sort of transformation in living organisms are: evolution,--revolution,--rebellion,--individual violence. A mineral or vegetable or animal species may pass through, during the cycle of its existence, these four processes. As long as the structure and the volume of the centre of crystallization, the germ, or the embryo, increase gradually, we have a gradual and continuous process of _evolution_, which must be followed at a definite stage by a process of _revolution_, more or less prolonged, represented, for example, by the separation of the entire crystal from the mineral mass which surrounds it, or by certain revolutionary phases of vegetable or animal life, as, for example, the moment of sexual reproduction; there may also be a period of _rebellion_, that is to say, of organized personal violence, a frequent and well-verified phenomenon among those species of animals who live in societies; there may also be isolated instances of _personal violence_, as in the struggles to obtain food or for possession of the females between animals of the same species. These same processes also occur in the human world. By _evolution_ must be understood the transformation that takes place day by day, which is almost unnoticed, but continuous and inevitable; by _revolution_, the critical and decisive period, more or less prolonged, of an evolution that has reached its concluding phase; by _rebellion_, the partially collective violence which breaks out, upon the occasion of some particular circumstance, at a definite place and time; and by _individual violence_, the action of one individual against one or several others, which may be the effect of a fanatical passion or of criminal instincts, or the manifestation of a lack of mental equilibrium,--and which identifies itself with the political or religious ideas most in vogue at the moment. It must be remarked, in the first place, that while revolution and evolution are normal functions of social physiology, rebellion and individual violence are symptoms of social pathology. These are, nevertheless, merely natural and spontaneous processes, since, as Virchow has shown, pathology is merely the sequel of normal physiology. Besides, the pathological symptoms have, or should have, a great diagnostical value for the classes in power; but the latter, unfortunately, in every period of history, in times of political crisis, as in those of social crisis, have shown themselves unable to conceive of any other remedy than brutal repression--the guillotine or the prison--and they fancy that thus they can cure the organic and constitutional disease which vexes the social body.[67] But it is indisputable, at all events, that the normal processes of social transformation (and because they are normal, the most fruitful and the surest, although the slowest and the least effective in appearance) are evolution and revolution, using the latter term in its accurate and scientific sense, as the concluding phase of an evolution, and not in the current and incorrect sense of a stormy and violent revolt.[68] It is evident, in fact, that Europe and America are, in these closing years of the nineteenth century, in a period of revolution, prepared by the evolution begotten by the bourgeois organization itself and promoted by utopian socialism as well as by scientific socialism. Likewise, we are in that period of social life which Bagehot calls "the age of discussion,"[69] and already we can see what Zola has called, in _Germinal_, the cracking of the politico-social crust, and, in fact, all those symptoms which Taine has described in his _l'Ancien Régime_, in relating the history of the twenty years which preceded 1789. As repressive methods are of no avail against domestic revolution, and only serve to expose the symptoms, there can be nothing efficacious and productive of good results, except laws of social reform and preparation which, while safe-guarding the present society, will render less painful, as Marx said, "the birth of the new society." In this sense, evolution and revolution constitute the most fruitful and surest processes of social metamorphosis. As human society forms a natural and living organism, like all other organisms, it can not endure sudden transformations, as those imagine who think that recourse must be had only or by preference to rebellion or personal violence to inaugurate a new social organization. This seems to me like imagining that a child or a youth could, in a single day, accomplish a biological evolution and become forthwith an adult.[70] It is easy to understand how a man out of work, in the horrors of starvation, his brain giving way for want of nourishment, may fancy that by giving a policeman a blow with his fist, by throwing a bomb, by raising a barricade, or by taking part in a riot, he is hastening the realization of a social ideal, from which injustice will have vanished. And, even apart from such cases, it is possible to understand how the power of impulsive feeling, the dominant factor in some natures, may, through a generous impatience, lead them to make some real attempt--and not imaginary like those which the police in all times and all countries prosecute in the courts--to spread terror among those who feel the political or economic power slipping from their hands. But scientific socialism, especially in Germany, under the direct influence of Marxism, has completely abandoned those old methods of revolutionary romanticism. Though they have often been employed, they have always resulted abortively, and for that very reason the ruling classes no longer dread them, since they are only light, localized assaults on a fortress which still has more than sufficient resistant power to remain victorious and by this victory to retard temporarily the evolution by removing from the scene the strongest and boldest adversaries of the _status quo_. Marxian socialism is revolutionary in the scientific meaning of the word, and it is now developing into open social revolution--no one will attempt to deny, I think, that the close of the nineteenth century marks the critical phase of the bourgeois evolution rushing under a full head of steam, even in Italy, along the road of individualist capitalism. Marxian socialism has the candor to say, through the mouths of its most authoritative spokesmen, to the great suffering host of the modern proletariat, that it has no magic wand to transform the world in a single day, as one shifts the scenes in a theatre; it says on the contrary, repeating the prophetic exhortation of Marx, "_Proletarians of all countries, unite_," that the social revolution can not achieve its object, unless it first becomes a vivid fact in the minds of the workers themselves by virtue of the clear perception of their class-interests and of the strength which their union will give them, and that they will not wake up some day under a full-fledged socialist regime, because divided and apathetic for 364 days out of the year they shall rebel on the 365th, or devote themselves to the perpetration of some deed of personal violence. This is what I call the psychology of the "_gros lot_" (the capital prize in a lottery, etc.). Many workingmen imagine, in fact, that--without doing anything to form themselves into a class-conscious party--they will win some day the capital prize, the social revolution, just as the manna is said to have come down from heaven to feed the Hebrews. Scientific socialism has pointed out that the transforming power decreases as we descend the scale from one process to another, that of revolution being less than that of evolution, and that of rebellion being less than that of revolution, and individual violence having the least of all. And since it is a question of a complete transformation and, consequently, in its juridical, political and ethical organization, the process of transformation is more effective and better adapted to the purpose in proportion as its _social_ character predominates over its _individual_ character. The individualist parties are individualists even in the daily struggle; socialism, on the contrary, is collectivist even in that, because it knows that the present organization does not depend upon the will of such or such an individual, but upon society as a whole. And this is also one reason why charity, however generous it be, being necessarily personal and partial, can not be a remedy for the social, and thereby collective, question of the distribution of wealth. In political questions, which leave the economico-social foundation untouched, it is possible to understand how, for instance, the exile of Napoleon III. or of the Emperor Don Pedro could inaugurate a republic. But this transformation does not extend to the foundation of the social life, and the German Empire or the Italian Monarchy are, socially, bourgeois just the same as the French Republic or the North American Republic, because notwithstanding the _political_ differences between them, they all belong to the same _economico-social_ phase. This is why the processes of evolution and revolution--the only wholly social or collective processes--are the most efficacious, while partial rebellion and, still more, individual violence have only a very feeble power of social transformation; they are, moreover, anti-social and anti-human, because they re-awaken the primitive savage instincts, and because they deny, in the very _person_ whom they strike down, the principle with which they believe themselves animated--the principle of respect for human life and of solidarity. What is the use of hypnotizing oneself with phrases about "the propaganda of the deed" and "immediate action?" It is known that anarchists, individualists, "amorphists" and "libertarians" admit as a means of social transformation _individual violence_ which extends from homicide to theft or _estampage_, even among "companions;" and this is then merely a political coloring given to criminal instincts which must not be confounded with political fanaticism, which is a very different phenomenon, common to the extreme and romantic parties of all times. A scientific examination of each case by itself, with the aid of anthropology and psychology, alone can decide whether the perpetrator of such or such a deed of violence is a congenital criminal, a criminal through insanity, or a criminal through stress of political fanaticism. I have, in fact, always maintained, and I still maintain, that the "political criminal," whom some wish to class in a special category, does not constitute a peculiar anthropological variety, but that he can be placed under one or another of the anthropological categories of criminals of ordinary law, and particularly one of these three: the _born_ criminal having a congenital tendency to crime, the _insane_-criminal, the criminal by stress of fanatical _passion_. The history of the past and of these latter times afford us obvious illustrations of these several categories. In the Middle Ages religious beliefs filled the minds of all and colored the criminal or insane excesses of many of the unbalanced. A similar insanity was the efficient cause of the more or less hysterical "sanctity" of some of the saints. At the close of our century it is the politico-social questions which absorb (and with what overwhelming interest!) the universal consciousness--which is stimulated by that universal contagion created by journalism with its great sensationalism--and these are the questions which color the criminal or insane excesses of many of the unbalanced, or which are the determining causes of instances of fanaticism occurring in men who are thoroughly honorable, but afflicted with excessive sensibility. It is the most extreme form of these politico-social questions which, in each historical period, possesses the most intense suggestive power. In Italy sixty years ago it was _Mazzinnianisme_ or _Carbonarisme_; twenty years ago, it was _socialism_; now it is _anarchism_. It is very easy to understand how there occurred in each period, in accordance with their respective dominant tendencies, deeds of personal violence.... Felice Orsini, for example, is one of the martyrs of the Italian Revolution. In each case of individual violence, unless one is content with the necessarily erroneous judgments begotten by emotion to reach a correct decision it is necessary to make a physio-psychical examination of the perpetrator, just as it is in the case of any other crime. Felice Orsini was a political criminal through _passion_. Among the anarchist bomb-throwers or assassins of our day may be found the born criminal--who simply colors his congenital lack of the moral or social sense with a political varnish--; the insane-criminal or mattoid whose mental deficiency becomes blended with the political ideas of the period; and also the criminal through political _passion_, acting from sincere conviction and mentally almost normal, in whom the criminal action is determined (or caused) solely by the false idea (which socialism combats) of the possibility of effecting a _social_ transformation by means of _individual_ violence.[71] But no matter whether the particular crime is that of a congenital criminal or of a madman or of a political criminal through passion, it is none the less true that personal violence, as adopted by the anarchist individualists, is simply the logical product of individualism carried to extremes and, therefore, the natural product of the existing economic organization--though its production is also favored by the "delirium of hunger," acute or chronic; but it is also the least efficacious and the most anti-human means of social transformation.[72] But all anarchists are not individualists, _amorphists_ or autonomists; there are also anarchist-communists. The latter repudiates deeds of _personal violence_, as ordinary means of social transformation (Merlino, for example has recently stated this in his pamphlet: _Necessità e base di un accordo_, Prato, 1892), but even these anarchist-communists cut themselves off from Marxian socialism, both by their ultimate _ideal_ and more especially by their _method_ of social transformation. They combat Marxian socialism because it is _law-abiding_ and _parliamentary_, and they contend that the most efficacious and the surest mode of social transformation is _rebellion_. These assertions which respond to the vagueness of the sentiments and ideas of too large a portion of the working-class and to the impatience provoked by their wretched condition, may meet with a temporary, unintelligent approval, but their effect can be only ephemeral. The explosion of a bomb may indeed give birth to a momentary emotion, but it can not advance by the hundredth part of an inch the evolution in men's minds toward socialism, while it causes a reaction in feeling, a reaction in part sincere, but skilfully fomented and exploited as a pretext for repression. To say to the laborers that, without having made ready the requisite material means, but especially without solidarity and without an intelligent conception of the goal and without a high moral purpose, they ought to rise against the classes in power, is really to play into the hands of those very classes, since the latter are sure of the material victory when the evolution is not ripe and the revolution is not ready.[73] And so it has been possible to show in the case of the late Sicilian rebellion, in spite of all the lies of those interested in hiding the truth, that in those districts where socialism was most advanced and best understood there were no deeds of personal violence, no revolts, as, for example, among the peasants of Piana dei Greci, of whom Nicola Barbato had made intelligent socialists; while those convulsive movements occurred outside of the field of the socialist propaganda as a rebellion against the exactions of the local governments and of the _camorre_,[74] or in those districts where the socialist propaganda was less intelligent and was stifled by the fierce passions caused by hunger and misery.[75] History demonstrates that the countries where revolts have been the most frequent are those in which social progress is the least advanced. The popular energies exhaust and destroy themselves in these feverish, convulsive excesses, which alternate with periods of discouragement and despair--which are the fitting environment of the Buddhist theory of _electoral abstention_--a very convenient theory for the conservative parties. In such countries we never see that continuity of premeditated action, slower and less effective in appearance, but in reality the only kind of action that can accomplish those things which appear to us as the miracles of history. Therefore Marxian socialism in all countries has proclaimed that from this time forth the principal means of social transformation must be _the conquest of the public powers_ (in local administrations as well as in national Parliaments) as one of the results of the organization of the laborers into a class-conscious party. The further the political organization of the laborers, in civilized countries, shall progress, the more one will see realized, by a resistless evolution, the socialist organization of society, at first by partial concessions, but ever growing more important, wrested from the capitalist class by the working-class (the law restricting the working-day to Eight Hours, for example), and then by the complete transformation of individual ownership into social ownership. As to the question whether this complete transformation, which is at present being prepared for by a process of gradual evolution which is nearing the critical and decisive period of the social revolution, can be accomplished without the aid of other means of transformation--such as rebellion and individual violence--this is a question which no one can answer in advance. Marxian socialists are not prophets. Our sincere wish is that the social revolution, when its evolution shall be ripe, may be effected peacefully, as so many other revolutions have been, without blood-shed--like the English Revolution, which preceded by a century, with its _Bill of Rights_, the French Revolution; like the Italian Revolution in Tuscany in 1859; like the Brazilian Revolution, with the exile of the Emperor Dom Pedro, in 1892. It is certain that socialism by spreading education and culture among the people, by organizing the workers into a class-conscious party under its banner, is only increasing the probability of the fulfilment of our hope, and is dissipating the old forebodings of a _reaction_ after the advent of socialism, which were indeed justified when socialism was still utopian in its means of realization instead of being, as it now is, a natural and spontaneous, and therefore inevitable and irrevocable, phase of the evolution of humanity. Where will this social revolution start? I am firmly convinced that if the Latin peoples, being Southerners, are more ready for revolt, which may suffice for purely political transformations, the peoples of the North, the Germans and Anglo-Saxons are better prepared for the tranquil and orderly but inexorable process of the true revolution, understood as the critical phase of an organic, incomplete, preparatory evolution, which is the only effective process for a truly social transformation. It is in Germany and England, where the greater development of bourgeois industrialism inevitably aggravates its detrimental consequences, and thereby magnifies the necessity for socialism, that the great social metamorphosis will perhaps being--though indeed it has begun everywhere--and from there it will spread across old Europe, just as at the close of the last century the signal for the political and bourgeois revolution was raised by France. However this may be, we have just demonstrated once more the profound difference there is between socialism and anarchism--which our opponents and the servile press endeavor to confound[76] and, at all events, I have demonstrated that Marxian socialism is in harmony with modern science and is its logical continuation. That is exactly the reason why it has made the theory of evolution the basis of its inductions and why it thus marks the truly living and final phase--and, therefore, the only phase recognized by the intelligence of the collectivist democracy--of socialism which had theretofore remained floating in the nebulosities of sentiment and why it has taken as its guide the unerring compass of scientific thought, rejuvenated by the works of Darwin and Spencer. FOOTNOTES: [62] We have a typical example of this in the new Italian penal code, which, as I said before its enforcement, shows no signs of special adaptation to Italian conditions. It might just as well be a code made for Greece or Norway, and it has borrowed from the countries of the north the system of confinement in cells, which even then in the north was recognized in all its costly absurdity as a system devised for the brutalization of men. [63] BEBEL, _Zukunftstaat und Sozialdemokratie_, 1893. [64] It is this artificial socialism which Herbert Spencer attacks. [65] See "Socialism: a Reply to the Pope's Encyclical," by Robert Blatchford. The International Publishing Co., New York.--Tr. [66] To this State socialism apply most of the individualist and anarchist objections of Spencer In "_Man vs. State_." D. Appleton & Co., New York. You will recall on this subject the celebrated debate between Spencer and Laveleye: "The State and the Individual or Social Darwinism and Christianity," in the "Contemporary Review," 1885. Lafargue has also replied to Spencer, but has not pointed out the fact that Spencer's criticisms apply, not to democratic socialism, our socialism, but to State socialism. See also CICCOTTI on this subject. [67] At the moment when I was correcting the proofs of the Italian edition of this work, M. Crispi had just proposed the "exceptional laws for the public safety," which, using the outrages of the anarchists as a pretext, aimed by this method to strike a blow at and to suppress socialism. Repressive laws can suppress men, but not ideas. Has the failure of the exceptional laws against the socialist party in Germany been forgotten? It is possible to increase the number of crimes, to suppress public liberties ... but that is no remedy. Socialism will continue its forward march just the same. [68] LOMBROSO and LASCHI, _Le Crime politique_, etc., and the monograph of ELISEE RECLUS, Evolution et Révolution. [69] WALTER BAGEHOT, Physics and Politics. D. Appleton & Co. [70] It is this lack of even elementary knowledge of geology, biology, etc., which makes the vague ideal of anarchy so attractive to many men or the people with really bright minds, but with no scientific training, even though they repudiate the employment of violent methods. In my opinion a more wide-spread instruction in the natural sciences--together with their substitution for the classics--would do more than any repressive laws to suppress the outrages of anarchy. [71] HAMON, _Les Hommes et les théories de l'anarchie_, Paris, 1893.--LOMBROSO, _Ultime scoperte ed applicazioni dell' antropologia criminale_, Turin, 1893. [72] At the moment when I was correcting the proofs of the Italian edition of this book, the emotion had not yet subsided which grew out of the harmless attack upon Crispi, at Rome, on the 16th of June, and especially the much keener emotion produced by the death of the President of the French Republic, Sadi Carnot, on the 24th of June. I reproduce here, as documentary evidence, the declaration published by a section of the _Socialist Party of Italian Workers_ in the _Secolo_ of the 27-28 June, and distributed by thousands in Milan as a manifesto, and which was not mentioned by either the Conservative or the Progressive newspapers, who tried by their silence to perpetrate the confusion between socialism and anarchy. Here is the declaration: _The Socialist Party to the Workingmen of Italy._--Down with assassins! "Humanity now understands that life is sacred, and does not tolerate brutal violations of this great principle which is morally the soul of socialism." C. PRAMPOLINI. "He who struggles for the right to life, in exchange for his labor, condemns every assault upon human life,--whether it be the work of bourgeois exploitation in factories, or of the bombs or daggers of unintelligent revolutionists. "The Socialist Party which has this principle for a shibboleth, which expects everything from the class-conscious organization of the working class, execrates the crime committed against the person of the President of the French Republic, as a brutal deed, as the negation of every principle of revolutionary logic. "It is necessary to arouse in the proletariat the consciousness of their own rights, to furnish them the _structure_ of organization, and to induce them to _function_ as a new organism. It is necessary to conquer the public powers by the means which modern civilization gives us. "To revolt, to throw at haphazard a bomb among the spectators in a theatre, or to kill an individual, is the act of barbarians or of ignorant people. The _Socialist Party_ sees in such deeds the violent manifestation of _bourgeois_ sentiments. "We are the adversaries of all the violences of bourgeois exploitation, of the guillotine, of musketry discharges (aimed at strikers, etc.), and of anarchist outrages. _Hurrah for Socialism!_" Socialism represses all these sterile and repugnant forms of individual violence. Carnot's death accomplished nothing except to arouse a transitory atavistic hatred of Italians. Afterward, the French Republic elected another President and everything was as before. The same may be said of Russia after the assassination of Alexander II. But the question may be regarded from another point of view, which the conservatives, the progressives and the radicals too completely forget. The very day of these outrages two explosions of gas took place, one in the mines of Karwinn (Austria), and the other in the mines of Cardiff (England); the first _caused the death of 257 miners_ ..., the second _the death of 210_!! Although the death of an honorable man, like Carnot, may be regretted, it is not to be compared to the mass of human sufferings, misery and woe which fell upon these 467 working-class _families_, equally innocent as he. It will be said, it is true, that the murder of Carnot was the _voluntary_ act of a fanatic, while no one directly killed these 467 miners!--And certainly this is a difference. But it must be remarked that if the death of these 467 miners is not _directly_ the voluntary work of any one, it is _indirectly_ a result of individual capitalism, which, to swell its revenues, reduces expenses to the lowest possible point, does not curtail the hours of labor, and does not take all the _preventive_ measures indicated by science and sometimes even enjoined by law, which is in such cases not respected, for the justice of every country is as flexible to accommodate the interests of the ruling class as it is rigid when applied against the interests of the working-class. If the mines were collectively owned, it is certain the owners would be less stingy about taking all the technical preventive precautions (electric lighting, for instance), which would diminish the number of these frightful catastrophes which infinitely increase the anonymous multitude of the martyrs of toil and which do not even trouble the digestion of the _share-holders_ in mining companies. That is what the individualist regime gives us; all this will be transformed by the socialist regime. [73] RIENZI, _l'Anarchisme_; DEVILLE, _l'Anarchisme_. [74] A. ROSSI, _l'Agitazione in Sicilia_, Milan, 1894. COLAJANNI, _In Sicilia_, Rome, 1894. [75] The _camorre_ were tyrannical secret societies that were formerly prevalent and powerful in Italy.--Translator. [76] I must recognize that one of the recent historians of socialism, _M. l'Abbé Winterer_--more candid and honorable than more than one jesuitical journalist--distinguishes always, in each country, the _socialist_ movement from the _anarchist_ movement. WINTERER, _le Socialisme contemporain_, Paris, 1894, 2nd edition. PART THIRD. SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIALISM. XIII. THE STERILITY OF SOCIOLOGY. One of the strangest facts in the history of the scientific thought of the nineteenth century is that, though the profound scientific revolution caused by Darwinism and Spencerian evolution has reinvigorated with new youth all the physical, biological and even psychological sciences, when it reached the domain of the social sciences, it only superficially rippled the tranquil and orthodox surface of the lake of that social science _par excellence_, political economy. It has led, it is true, through the initiative of Auguste Comte--whose name has been somewhat obscured by those of Darwin and Spencer, but who was certainly one of the greatest and most prolific geniuses of our age--to the creation of a new science, _Sociology_, which should be, together with the natural history of human societies, the crowning glory of the new scientific edifice erected by the experimental method. I do not deny that sociology, in the department of purely descriptive anatomy of the social organism, has made great and fruitful new contributions to contemporary science, even developing into some specialized branches of sociology, of which _criminal sociology_, thanks to the labors of the Italian school, has become one of the most important results. But when the politico-social question is entered upon, the new science of sociology is overpowered by a sort of hypnotic sleep and remains suspended in a sterile, colorless limbo, thus permitting sociologists to be in public economy, as in politics, conservatives or radicals, in accordance with their respective whims or subjective tendencies. And while Darwinian biology, by the scientific determination of the relations between the individual and the species, and evolutionist sociology itself by describing in human society the organs and the functions of a new organism, was making the individual a cell in the animal organism, Herbert Spencer was loudly proclaiming his English individualism extending to the most absolute theoretical anarchism. A period of stagnation was inevitable in the scientific productive activity of sociology, after the first original observations in descriptive social anatomy and in the natural history of human societies. Sociology represented thus a sort of arrested development in experimental scientific thought, because those who cultivated it, wittingly or unwittingly, recoiled before the logical and radical conclusions that the modern scientific revolution was destined to establish in the social domain--the most important domain of all if science was to become the handmaid of life, instead of contenting itself with that barren formula, science for the sake of science. The secret of this strange phenomenon consists not only in the fact that, as Malagodi said,[77] sociology is still in the period of scientific _analysis_ and not yet in that of _synthesis_, but especially in the fact that the logical consequences of Darwinism and of scientific evolutionism applied to the study of human society lead inexorably to socialism, as I have demonstrated in the foregoing pages. FOOTNOTE: [77] MALAGODI, _Il Socialismo e la scienza_. In _Critica Sociale_, Aug. 1, 1892. XIV. MARX COMPLETES DARWIN AND SPENCER. CONSERVATIVES AND SOCIALISTS. To Karl Marx is due the honor of having scientifically formulated these logical applications of experiential science to the domain of social economy. Beyond doubt, the exposition of these truths is surrounded, in his writings, with a multitude of technical details and of apparently dogmatic formulæ, but may not the same be said of the FIRST PRINCIPLES of Spencer, and are not the luminous passages on _evolution_ in it surrounded with a dense fog of abstractions on time, space, the unknowable, etc.? Until these last few years a vain effort was made to consign, by a conspiracy of silence, the masterly work of Marx to oblivion, but now his name is coming to rank with those of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer as the three Titans of the scientific revolution which begot the intellectual renaissance and gave fresh potency to the civilizing thought of the latter half of the nineteenth century. The ideas by which the genius of Karl Marx completed in the domain of social economy the revolution effected by science are in number three. The first is the discovery of the law of surplus-labor. This law gives us a scientific explanation of the accumulation of private property not created by the labor of the accumulator; as this law has a more peculiarly technical character, we will not lay further stress upon it here, as we have given a general idea of it in the preceding pages. The two other Marxian theories are more directly related to our observations on scientific socialism, since they undoubtedly furnish us the sure and infallible key to the life of society. I allude, first, to the idea expressed by Marx, as long ago as 1859, in his _Critique de l'économie politique_, that the economic phenomena form the foundation and the determining conditions of all other human or social manifestations, and that, consequently, ethics, law and politics are only derivative phenomena determined by the economic factor, in accordance with the conditions of each particular people in every phase of history and under all climatic conditions. This idea which corresponds to that great biological law which states the dependence of the function on the nature and capacities of the organ and which makes each individual the result of the innate and acquired conditions of his physiological organism, living in a given environment, so that a biological application may be given to the famous saying: "Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are,"--this sublime idea which unfolds before our eyes the majestic drama of history, no longer as the arbitrary succession of great men on the stage of the social theatre, but rather as the resultant of the economic conditions of each people, this sublime idea, after having been partially applied by Thorold Rogers[78] has been so brilliantly expounded and illustrated by Achille Loria,[79] that I believe it unnecessary to say anything more about it. One idea, however, still appears to me necessary to complete this Marxian theory, as I remarked in the first edition of my book: _Socialismo e criminalità_. It is necessary, indeed, to rid this impregnable theory of that species of narrow dogmatism with which it is clothed in Marx and still more in Loria. It is perfectly true that every phenomenon, as well as every institution--moral, juridical or political--is simply the result of the economic phenomena and conditions of the transitory physical and historical environment. But, as a consequence of that law of natural causality which tells us that every effect is always the resultant of numerous concurrent causes and not of one cause alone, and that every effect becomes in its turn a cause of other phenomena, it is necessary to amend and complete the too rigid form that has been given to this true idea. Just as all the psychical manifestations of the individual are the resultant of the organic conditions (temperament) and of the environment in which he lives, in the same way, all the social manifestations--moral, juridical or political--of a people are the resultant of their organic conditions (race) and of the environment, as these are the determining causes of the given economic organization which is the physical basis of life. In their turn, the individual psychical conditions become causes and effect, although with less power, the individual organic conditions and the issue of the struggle for life. In the same way, the moral, juridical and political institutions, from effects become causes (there is, in fact, for modern science no _substantial_ difference between cause and effect, except that the effect is always the latter of two related phenomena, and the cause always the former) and react in their turn, although with less efficacy, on the economic conditions. An individual who has studied the laws of hygiene may influence beneficently, for instance, the imperfections of his digestive apparatus, but always within the very narrow limits of his organic capacities. A scientific discovery, an electoral law may have an effect on industry or on the conditions of labor, but always within limits fixed by the framework of the fundamental economic organization. This is why moral, juridical and political institutions have a greater influence on the relations between the various subdivisions of the class controlling the economic power (capitalists, industrial magnates, landed proprietors) than on the relations between the capitalist--property-owners on the one side and the toilers on the other. It suffices here for me to have mentioned this Marxian law and I will refer to the suggestive book of Achille Loria the reader who desires to see how this law scientifically explains all the phenomena, from the most trivial to the most imposing, of the social life. This law is truly the most scientific and the most prolific sociological theory that has ever been discovered by the genius of man. It furnishes, as I have already remarked, a scientific, physiological, experiential explanation of social history in the most magnificent dramas as well as of personal history in its most trivial episodes--on explanation in perfect harmony with the entire trend--which has been described as materialistic--of modern scientific thought.[80] If we leave out of consideration the two unscientific explanations of free will and divine providence, we find that two one-sided and therefore incomplete, although correct and scientific, explanations of human history have been given. I refer to the _physical determinism_ of Montesquieu, Buckle and Metschnikoff, and to the _anthropological determinism_ of the ethnologists who find the explanation of the events of history in the organic and psychical characteristics of the various races of men. Karl Marx sums up, combines and completes these two theories by his _economic determinism_. The economic conditions--which are the resultant of the _ethnical_ energies and aptitudes acting in a given _physical_ environment--are the determining basis of all the moral, juridical and political phenomenal manifestations of human life, both individual and social. This is the sublime conception, the fact-founded and scientific Marxian theory, which fears no criticism, resting as it does on the best established results of geology and biology, of psychology and sociology. It is thanks to it that students of the philosophy of law and sociology are able to determine the true nature and functions of the _State_ which, as it is nothing but "society juridically and politically organized," is only the secular arm used by the class in possession of the economic power--and consequently of the political, juridical and administrative power--to preserve their own special privileges and to postpone as long as possible the evil day when they must surrender them. The other sociological theory by which Karl Marx has truly dissipated the clouds which had ere then darkened the sky of the aspirations of socialism, and which has supplied scientific socialism with a political compass by the use of which it can guide its course, with complete confidence and certainty, in the struggles of every-day life, is the great historical law of _class struggles_.[81] ("The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Communist Manifesto. Marx and Engels. 1848.) If it is granted that the economic conditions of social groups, like those of individuals, constitute the fundamental, determining cause of all the moral, juridical and political phenomena, it is evident that every social group, every individual will be led to act in accordance with its or his economic interest, because the latter is the physical basis of life and the essential condition of all other development. In the political sphere, each social class will be inclined to pass laws, to establish institutions and to perpetuate customs and beliefs which, directly or indirectly subserve its interests. These laws, these institutions, these beliefs, handed down by inheritance or tradition, finally obscure or conceal their economic origin, and philosophers and jurists and often even the laity defend them as truths, subsisting by virtue of their own intrinsic merits, without seeing their real source, but the latter--the economic sub-stratum--is none the less the only scientific explanation of these laws, institutions and beliefs. And in this fact consists the greatness and strength of the perspicacious conception of the genius of Marx.[82] As in the modern world there are now but two classes, with subordinate varieties,--on the one side the workers to whatever category they belong, and on the other the property owners who do not work,--the socialist theory of Marx leads us to this evident conclusion: since political parties are merely the echoes and the mouth-pieces of class interests--no matter what the subvarieties of these classes may be--there can be substantially only two political parties: the socialist labor party and the individualist party of the class in possession of the land and the other means of production. The difference in the character of the economic monopoly may cause, it is true, a certain diversity of political _color_, and I have always contended that the great landed proprietors represent the conservative tendencies of political stagnation, while the holders of financial or industrial capital represent in many instances the progressive party, driven by its own nature to petty innovations of form, while finally those who possess only an intellectual capital, the liberal professions, etc., may go to the extreme length of political radicalism. On the vital question--that is to say on the economic question of property--conservatives, progressives and radicals are all individualists. On this point they are all, in their essential nature of the same social class and, in spite of certain sentimental sympathies, the adversaries of the working class and of those who, although born on _the other shore_, have embraced the political programme of that class, a programme necessarily corresponding to the primordial economic necessity--that is to say, the socialization of the land and the means of production with all the innumerable and radical moral, juridical and political transformations, which this socialization will inevitably bring to pass in the social world. This is why contemporary political life cannot but degenerate into the most sterile _bysantinisme_ and the most corrupt strife for bribes and spoils, when it is confined to the superficial skirmishes between individualist parties, which differ only by a shade and in their formal names, but whose ideas are so similar that one often sees radicals and progressives less modern than many conservatives. There will be a new birth of political life only with the development of the socialist party, because, after the disappearance from the political stage of the historical figures of the patriots (the founders of modern Italy) and of the personal reasons which split up the representatives into different political groups, the formation of one single individualist party will become necessary, as I declared in the Italian Chamber on the 20th of December, 1893. The historical duel will then be begun, and the Class Struggle will then display on the field of politics all its beneficent influence. Beneficent, I say, because the class struggle must be understood not in the contemptible sense of a Saturnalia of fist-fights and outrages, of malevolence and personal violence, but must be worthily conceived as a great social drama. With all my heart I hope that this conflict may be settled, for the progress of civilization, without bloody convulsions, but historical destiny has decreed the conflict, and it is not given to us or to others to avert or postpone it. It follows from all that we have just said that these ideas of political socialism, because they are scientific, dispose their partisans both to _personal tolerance_ and to _theoretical inflexibility_.[83] This is also a conclusion reached by experimental psychology in the domain of philosophy. However great our personal sympathies may be for such or such a representative of the radical faction of the individualist party (as well as for every honorable and sincere representative of any scientific, religious or political opinion whatsoever), we are bound to recognize that there are on the side of socialism no _partiti affini_.[84] It is necessary to be on one side or the other--individualist or socialist. There is no middle ground. And I am constantly growing more and more convinced that the only serviceable tactics for the formation of a socialist party likely to live, is precisely that policy of theoretical inflexibility and of refusing to enter into any "alliance" with _partiti affini_, as such an alliance is for socialism only a "false placenta" for a fetus that is unlikely to live. The conservative and the socialist are the natural products of the individual character and the social environment. One is born a conservative or an innovator just as one is born a painter or a surgeon. Therefore the socialists have no contempt for or bitterness toward the sincere representatives of any faction of the conservative party, though they combat their ideas unrelentingly. If such or such a socialist shows himself intolerant, if he abuses his opponents, this is because he is the victim of a passing emotion or of an ill-balanced temperament; it is, therefore, very excusable. The thing that provokes a smile of pity is to see certain conservatives "young in years, but old in thought"--for conservatism in the young can be nothing but the effect of calculating selfishness or the index of psychical anemia--have an air of complacency or of pity for socialists whom they consider, at best, as "misled," without perceiving that what is normal is for the old to be conservatives, but that young conservatives can be nothing but _egoists_ who are afraid of losing the life of idle luxury into which they were born or the advantages of the orthodox fashion of dividing (?) the fruits of labor. Their hearts at least, if not their brains, are abnormally small. The socialist, who has everything to lose and nothing to gain by boldly declaring his position and principles, possesses by contrast all the superiority of a disinterested altruism, especially when having been born in the aristocratic or the bourgeois class he has renounced the brilliant pleasure of a life of leisure to defend the cause of the weak and the oppressed.[85] But, it is said, these bourgeois socialists act in this way through love of popularity! This is a strange form of selfishness, at all events, which prefers to the quickly reaped rewards and profits of bourgeois individualism, "the socialist idealism" of popular sympathy, especially when it might gain this sympathy by other means which would compromise it less in the eyes of the class in power. Let us hope, in concluding, that when the bourgeoisie shall have to surrender the economic power and the political power in order that they may be used for the benefit of all in the new society and that, as Berenini recently said, victors and vanquished may really become brothers without distinction of class in the common assured enjoyment of a mode of life worthy of human beings, let us hope that in surrendering power, the bourgeoisie will do it with that dignity and self-respect which the aristocracy showed when it was stripped of its class privileges by the triumphant bourgeoisie at the time of the French Revolution. It is the truth of the message of socialism and its perfect agreement with the most certain inductions of experimental science which explain to us not only its tremendous growth and progress, which could not be merely the purely negative effect of a material and moral malady rendered acute by a period of social crisis, but above all it explains to us that unity of intelligent, disciplined, class-conscious solidarity which presents, in the world-wide celebration of the first of May, a moral phenomenon of such grandeur that human history presents no parallel example, if we except the movement of primitive Christianity which had, however, a much more restricted field of action than contemporary socialism. Henceforth--disregarding the hysterical or unreasoning attempts to revert from bourgeois scepticism to mysticism as a safeguard against the moral and material crisis of the present time, attempts which make us think of those lascivious women who become pious bigots on growing old[86]--henceforth both partisans and adversaries of socialism are forced to recognize the fact that, like Christianity at the dissolution of the Roman world, Socialism constitutes the only force which restores the hope of a better future to the old and disintegrating human society--a hope no longer begotten by a faith inspired by the unreasoning transports of sentiment, but born of rational confidence in the inductions of modern experimental science. THE END. FOOTNOTES: [78] J. E. TH. ROGERS, The Economic Interpretation of History, London, 1888. [79] LORIA, _Les Bases économiques de la constitution sociale_, 2nd edition, Paris, 1894. (This work is available in English under the title: "The Economic Foundations of Society." Swan Sonnenschein, London.--Tr.) To the general idea of Karl Marx, Loria adds a theory about "the occupation of free land," which is the fundamental cause of the technical explanation of the different econo-micro-social organizations, a theory which he has amply demonstrated in his _Analisi della proprietà capitalistica_, Turin, 1892. [80] It is seen what our judgment must be regarding the thesis maintained by Ziegler, in his book: _La question sociale est une question morale_ (The social question is a moral question). French trans., Paris, 1894. Just as psychology is an effect of physiology, so the moral phenomena are effects of the economic facts. Such books are only intended, more or less consciously, to divert attention from the vital point of the question, which is that formulated by Karl Marx. See on our side, DE GREEF, _l'Empirieme, l'utopié et le socialisme scientifique_, Revue Socialiste, Aug., 1886, p. 688. [81] As proof of that conspiracy of silence about the theories of Karl Marx, it suffices for me to point out that the historians of socialism generally mention only the technical theory of _surplus-labor_, and ignore the two other laws: (1) the determination of social phenomena and institutions by economic conditions, and (2) the Class Struggle. [82] The votes on measures imposing taxes in the legislative bodies of all countries afford obvious illustrations of this principle. (The alignment of forces in the struggle for the income tax under the late administration of President Cleveland, is a very striking instance.--Tr.) [83] If _uncompromisingness_ was an English word, it would express the thought more clearly and strongly.--Tr. [84] Parties related by affinity of object, tactics, or, more especially, of immediate demands.--Tr. [85] See the lectures of DE AMICIS. _Osservazioni sulla questione sociale_, Lecce, 1894. LABRIOLA, _Il Socialismo_, Rome, 1890. G. OGGERO, _Il Socialismo_, 2nd edition, Milan, 1894. [86] There are, however, certain forms of this mysticism which appeal to our sympathies very strongly. Such forms I will call _social mysticism_. We may instance the works of Tolstoi, who envelops his socialism with the doctrine of "non-resistance to evil by violent means," drawn from the _Sermon on the Mount_. Tolstoi is also an eloquent _anti-militarist_, and I am pleased to see quoted in his book _le Salut est en vous_, Paris, 1894, a passage from one of my lectures against war. But he maintains a position aloof from contemporary experimental science, and his work thus fails to reach the mark. APPENDIX I[87] Editor, etc. DEAR SIR:- I have read in your journal a letter from Mr. Herbert Spencer in which he, relying on indirect information conveyed to him, regarding my book, _Socialism and Modern Science_, expresses "his astonishment at the audacity of him who has made use _of his name_ to defend socialism." Permit me to say to you that no socialist has ever dreamt of making Mr. Spencer (who is certainly the greatest of living philosophers) pass as a partisan of socialism. It is strange, indeed, that anyone could have been able to make him believe that there is in Italy enough ignorance among writers as well as among readers for one to misuse so grotesquely the name of Herbert Spencer, whose extreme individualism is known to all the world. But the personal opinion of Herbert Spencer is a quite different thing from the logical consequence of the scientific theories concerning universal evolution, which he has developed more fully and better than anyone else, but of which he has not the official monopoly and whose free expansion by the labor of other thinkers he can not inhibit. I myself, in the preface of my book, pointed out that Spencer and Darwin stopped half-way on the road to the logical consequences of their doctrines. But I also demonstrated that these very doctrines constituted the scientific foundation of the socialism of Marx, the only one who, by rising above the sentimental socialism of former days, has arranged in a systematic and orderly fashion the facts of the social economy, and by induction drawn from them political conclusions in support of the revolutionary method of tactics as a means of approach to a revolutionary goal. As regards Darwinism, being unable to repeat here the arguments which are already contained in my book and which will be more fully developed in the second edition, it suffices for me to remind you--since it has been thought fit to resort to arguments having so little weight as appeals to the authority of individuals--that, among many others, the celebrated Virchow foresaw, with great penetration, that Darwinism would lead directly to socialism, and let me remind you that the celebrated Wallace, Darwinian though he is, is a member of the English _League_ for the _Nationalization_ of the _Land_, which constitutes one of the fundamental conclusions of socialism.[88] And, from another point of view, what is the famous doctrine of "class-struggle" which Marx revealed as the positive key of human history, but the Darwinian law of the "struggle for life" transformed from a chaotic strife between individuals to a conflict between collectivities? Just the same as every individual, every class or social group struggles for its existence. And just as the bourgeoisie struggled against the clergy and the aristocracy, and triumphed in the French Revolution, in the same way to-day the international proletariat struggles, and not by the use of violence, as is constantly charged against us, but by propaganda and organization for its economic and moral existence at present so ill assured and depressed to so sadly low a plane. As regards the theory of evolution, how can any one not see that it most flagrantly contradicts the classical theories of political economy, which looks upon the basic laws of the existing economic organization as eternal and immutable laws? Socialism, on the contrary, maintains that the economic institutions and the juridical and political institutions are only the historical product of their particular epoch, and that therefore they are changing, since they are in a state of continuous evolution, which causes the present to differ from the past, just as the future will be different from the present. Herbert Spencer believes that universal evolution dominates over all orders of phenomena, with the exception of the organization of property, which he declares is destined to exist eternally under its individualistic form. The socialists, on the contrary, believe that the organization of property will inevitably undergo--just as all other institutions--a radical transformation, and, taking into consideration its historical transformations, they show that the economic evolution is marching and will march faster and faster--as a consequence of the increased evils of individualist concentration--toward its goal, the complete socialization of the means of production which constitute the physical basis of the social and collective life, and which must not and can not therefore remain in the hands of a few individuals. Between these two doctrines it is not difficult to decide which is the more in harmony with the scientific theory of physical and social evolution. In any case, with all the respect due to our intellectual father, Herbert Spencer, but also with all the pride to which my scientific studies and conscience give me the right, I am content with having repelled the anathema which Herbert Spencer--without having read my book and on indirect and untrustworthy information--has thought proper to hurl with such a dogmatic tone against a scientific thesis which I have affirmed--not merely on the strength of an _ipse dixi_ (a mode of argument which has had its day)--but which I have worked out and supported with arguments which have, up to this time, awaited in vain a scientific refutation. ENRICO FERRI. Rome, June, 1895. FOOTNOTES: [87] This appendix is a copy of a letter addressed by M. Ferri to an Italian newspaper which had printed a letter addressed by Herbert Spencer to M. Fiorentino. [88] Wallace has advanced beyond this "half way house," and now calls himself a Socialist.--Tr. APPENDIX II.[89] SOCIALIST SUPERSTITION AND INDIVIDUALIST MYOPIA. Among the numerous publications which, for or against socialism, have appeared in Italy since my _Socialismo e scienza positiva_[90]--which demonstrated the agreement of socialism with the fundamental lines of contemporary scientific thought--the book of Baron Garofalo was looked forward to with eager interest. It received attention both because of the fame of the author and the open and radical disagreement which its publication made manifest in the ranks of the founders of the school of positive criminology, formerly united in such close bonds in the propaganda and defense of the new science--criminal anthropology and sociology--created by M. Lombroso. It is true that the scientific union between the founders of the new Italian school of criminology formed an alliance, but they were never in perfect unison. M. Lombroso gave to the study of crime as a natural and social phenomenon the initial impulse, and brilliantly supported the correctness of this conception by his fruitful anthropological and biological investigations. I contributed the systematic, theoretical treatment of the problem of human responsibility, and my psychological and sociological studies enabled me to classify the natural causes of crime and the anthropological categories of criminals. I showed the predominant role of _social_ prevention--quite a different thing from police prevention--of criminality, and demonstrated the infinitesimal influence of repression, which is always violent and only acts after the mischief has been done. M. Garofalo--though he was in accord with us on the subject of the diagnosis of criminal pathology--contributed nevertheless a current of ideas peculiar to himself, ideas more metaphysical and less heterodox; such, for instance, as the idea that the anomaly shown by the criminal is only a "moral anomaly;" that religion has a preventive influence on criminality; that severe repression is, at all events, the effective remedy; that misery (poverty) it not only not the sole and exclusive factor in producing crime (which I always maintained and still maintain), but that it has no determining influence on crime; and that popular education, instead of being a preventive means, is, on the contrary, an incentive, etc. These ideas, in evident disagreement with the inductions of biology and of criminal psychology and sociology--as I have elsewhere demonstrated--nevertheless did not prevent harmony among the positivists of the new school. In fact, these personal and antiquated conceptions of M. Garofalo passed almost unnoticed. His action was especially notable by reason of the greater importance and development he gave to the purely juridical inductions of the new school, which he systematized into a plan of reforms in criminal law and procedure. He was the jurist of the new school, M. Lombroso was the anthropologist, and I the sociologist. But while in Lombroso and myself the progressive and heterodox tendency--extending even to socialism--became more and more marked, it could already be foreseen that in M. Garofalo the orthodox and reactionary tendencies would prevail, thus leading us away from that common ground on which we have fought side by side, and might still so fight. For I do not believe that these disagreements concerning the social future must necessarily prevent our agreement on the more limited field of the present diagnosis of a phenomenon of social pathology. * * * * * After the explanation of this personal matter, we must now examine the contents of this "_Superstition socialiste_," in order to see, in this schism of the scientific criminologists, which side has followed most systematically the method of experimental science, and traced with the most rigorous exactness the trajectory of human evolution. We must see who is the more scientific, he who in carrying the experimental science beyond the narrow confines of criminal anthropology and applying it in the broad field of social science, accepts all the logical consequences of scientific observations and gives his open adherence to Marxian socialism--or he who while being a positivist and innovator in one special branch of science, remains a conservative in the other branches, to which he refuses to apply the positive method, and which he does not study with a critical spirit, but in which he contents himself with the easy and superficial repetition of trite commonplaces. To those familiar with the former work of the author, this book, from the first page to the last, presents a striking contrast between M. Garofalo, the heterodox criminologist ever ready to criticize with penetration classical criminology, always in revolt against the threadbare commonplaces of juridical tradition, and M. Garofalo, the anti-socialist, the orthodox sociologist, the conservative follower of tradition, who finds that all is well in the world of to-day. He who distinguished himself before by the tone of his publications, always serene and dignified, now permits us to think, that he is less convinced of the correctness of his position than he would have us believe, and to cover up this deficiency of conviction screams and shouts at the top of his voice. For instance, on page 17, in a style which is neither aristocratic nor bourgeois, he writes that "Bebel had the _impudence_ to defend the Commune in a public session of the Reichstag;" and he forgets that the Commune of Paris is not to be judged historically by relying solely upon the revolting impressions left upon the mind by the artificial and exaggerated accounts of the bourgeois press of that time. Malon and Marx have shown by indisputable documentary evidence and on impregnable historical grounds what the verdict on the Commune of the impartial judgment must be, in spite of the excesses which--as M. Alfred Maury said to me at the Père-Lachaise, one day in 1879--were far surpassed by the ferocity of a bloody and savage repression. In the same way, on pages 20-22, he speaks (I can not see why) of the "contempt" of Marxian socialists for sentimental socialism, which no Marxian has ever dreamt of _despising_, though we recognize it is little in harmony with the systematic, experimental method of social science. And, on page 154, he seems to think, he is carrying on a scientific discussion when he writes: "In truth, when one sees men who profess such doctrines succeed in obtaining a hearing, one is obliged to recognize that there are no limits to human imbecility." Ah! my dear Baron Garofalo, how this language reminds me of that of some of the classical criminologists--do you remember it?--who tried to combat the positivist school with language too much like this of yours, which conceals behind hackneyed phrases, the utter lack of ideas to oppose to the hated, but victorious heresy! * * * * * But aside from this language, so strange from the pen of M. Garofalo, it is impossible not to perceive the strange contrast between his critical talent and the numerous statements in this book which are, to say the least, characterized by a naiveté one would never have suspected in him. * * * * * It is true that, on page 74, like an individualist of the good old days, and with an absolutism which we may henceforth call pre-historic, he deplores the enactment of even those civil laws which have limited the _jus utendi et abutendi_ (freely, the right of doing what one will with one's own--Tr.), and which have "seriously maimed the institution of private property," since, he says, "the lower classes suffer cruelly, not from the existence of great fortunes, but rather from the economic embarrassment of the upper classes" (page 77). What boldness of critical thought and profundity in economic science! And, in regard to my statement that contemporary science is altogether dominated by the idea and the fact of the _social aggregate_--and, therefore, of socialism--in contrast to the glorification of the individual, and, therefore, of individualism, which obtained in the Eighteenth Century, M. Garofalo replies to me that "the story of Robinson Crusoe was borrowed from a very trustworthy history," and adds that it would be possible to cite many cases of anchorites and hermits "who had no need of the company of their fellows" (page 82). He believes that he has thus demonstrated that I was mistaken when I declared that the species is the sole eternal reality of life and that the individual--himself a biological aggregation--does not live alone and by himself alone, but only by virtue of the fact that he forms a part of a collectivity, to which he owes all the creative conditions of his material, moral and intellectual existence. In truth, if M. Garofalo had employed such arguments to expose the absurdities of metaphysical penology, and to defend the heresies of the positive school, the latter would certainly not number him among its most eloquent and suggestive founders and champions. * * * * * And yet, M. Garofalo, instead of repeating these soporific banalities, ought to have been able to discuss seriously the fundamental thesis of socialism, which, through the social ownership of the land and the means of production, tends to assure to every individual the conditions of an existence more worthily human, and of a full and perfectly free development of his physical and moral personality. For then only, when the daily bread of the body and mind is guaranteed, will every man be able, as Goethe said, "to become that which he is," instead of wasting and wearing himself out in the spasmodic and exhausting struggle for daily bread, obtained too often at the expense of personal dignity or the sacrifice of intellectual aptitudes, while human energies are obviously squandered to the great disadvantage of the entire society, and all this with the appearance of personal liberty, but, in fact, with the vast majority of mankind reduced to dependence upon the class in possession of economic monopoly. But M. Garofalo has altogether refrained from these discussions, which admit of scientific arguments on either hand. He has confined himself, on the contrary, even when he has attempted to discuss seriously, to the repetition of the most superficial commonplaces. Thus, for example (page 92), opposing the socialists who maintain that the variations of the social environment will inevitably bring about a change in individual aptitudes and activities, he writes: "But the world can not change, if men do not first begin by transforming themselves under the influence of those two ideal factors: honor and duty." That is the same as saying that a man must not jump into the water ... unless he has learned beforehand to swim, while remaining on land. Nothing, on the contrary, is more in harmony with the scientific inductions of biology and sociology than the socialist idea, according to which changes in the environment cause correlative changes, both physiological and psychical, in individuals. The soul of Darwinism, is it not wholly in the variability, organic and functional, of individuals and species, under the modifying influence of the environment, fixed and transmitted by natural selection? And neo-Darwinism itself, does it not consist wholly in the constantly increasing importance attributed to the changes in the environment as explanations of the variations of living beings? And, in the realm of sociology, just as, according to the repeated and unquestioned demonstrations of Spencer, in the passage of human societies from the military type to the industrial type--as Saint-Simon had already pointed out--a change, a process of adaptation, also takes place in that "human nature" which the anti-socialists would have us believe is a fixed and immutable thing, like the "created species" of old-school biology; in the same way, in the gradual transition to a collectivist organization, human nature will necessarily adapt itself to the modified social conditions. Certainly, human nature will not change in its fundamental tendencies; and, as an illustration, man like the animals will always shun suffering and strive after pleasure, since the former is a diminution and the latter an augmentation of life; but this is not inconsistent with the fact that the application and direction of these biological tendencies can and must change with the changes in the environment. So that I have been able elsewhere to demonstrate that individual egoism will, indeed, always exist, but it will act in a profoundly different fashion, in a society whose conscious goal will be true human solidarity, from the way in which it acts in the individualist and morally anarchical world of to-day, a world in which every man, by the working of what is called "free competition," is forced to follow the impulses of his anti-social egoism, that is to say, to be in conflict, and not in harmony, with the wants and the tendencies of the other members of society. But the repetition of worn-out commonplaces reaches its climax when M. Garofalo--surely, through inattention--writes these marvelous lines: "Apparently, many young men of aristocratic families do not work. It is nevertheless more correct to say that they do not do any productive labor for themselves, but they work just the same (!!), and this for the benefit of others! "In fact, these gentlemen 'of leisure' are generally devoted to sport--hunting, yachting, horseback riding, fencing--or to travel, or to _dilettantisme_ in the arts, and their activity, unproductive for themselves, provides an immense number of persons with profitable occupations" (page 183). One day, when I was studying the prisoners in a jail, one of them said to me: Such an outcry is made against the criminals because they do not work; but if we did not exist, "an immense number of persons"--jailers, policemen, judges and lawyers--would be without a "profitable occupation!" * * * * * After having noted these _specimens_ of unscientific carelessness, and before entering upon the examination of the few scientific arguments developed by M. Garofalo, it will be well, to aid us in forming a general judgment on his book, to show how far he has forgotten the most elementary rules of the scientific method. And it will be useful also to add a few examples of mistakes in regard to facts bearing either on science in general, or on the doctrines combated by him. On page 41, speaking of the scientific work of Marx with a disdain which can not be taken seriously, since it is too much like that of the theologians for Darwin or that of the jurists for Lombroso, he reasons in this curious fashion: "Starting from the hypothesis that all private property is unjust, it is not logic that is wanting in the doctrine of Marx. But _if one recognizes_, on the contrary, _that every individual has a right to possess some thing of his own_, the direct and inevitable consequence is [the rightfulness of] the profits of capital, and, therefore, the augmentation of the latter." Certainly, if one admits _a priori_ the right of individual property in the land and the means of production ... it is needless and useless to discuss the question. But the troublesome fact is that all the scientific work of Marx and the socialists has been done precisely in order to furnish absolute scientific proof of the true genesis of capitalist property--the unpaid surplus-labor of the laborer--and to put an end to the old fables about "the first occupant," and "accumulated savings" which are only exceptions, ever becoming rarer. Moreover, the negation of private property is not "the hypothesis," but the logical and inevitable consequence of the premises of _facts_ and of _historical_ demonstrations made, not only by Marx, but by a numerous group of sociologists who, abandoning the reticence and mental reservations of orthodox conventionalism, have, by that step, become socialists. * * * * * But contemporary socialism, for the very reason that it is in perfect harmony with scientific and exact thought, no longer harbors the illusions of those who fancy that to-morrow--with a dictator of "wonderful intelligence and remarkable eloquence," charged with the duty of organizing collectivism by means of decrees and regulations--we could reach the Co-operative Commonwealth at a bound, eliminating the intermediate phases. Moreover, is not the absolute and unbridled individualism of yesterday already transformed into a limited individualism and into a partial collectivism by legal limitations of the _jus abutendi_ and by the continuous transformation into social functions or public properties of the services (lighting, water-supply, transportation, etc.), or properties (roads, bridges, canals, etc.), which were formerly private services and properties? These intermediate phases can not be suppressed by decrees, but they develop and finish their course naturally day by day, under the pressure of the economic and social conditions; but, by a natural and therefore inexorable progress, they are constantly approaching more closely that ultimate phase of absolute collectivism in the means of production, which the socialists have not invented, but the tendency toward which they have shown, and whose ultimate attainment they scientifically predict. The rate of progress toward this goal they can accelerate by giving to the proletarians, organized into a class-party, a clearer consciousness of their historic mission. * * * * * All through this book are scattered not only defects of method, but also actual errors in matters of fact. The book is also marred by an immanent contradiction that runs all through it, in connection with the absolutely uncompromising attitude against socialism which the author aims to maintain, but which he is unable to keep up in the face of the irresistible tendency of the facts, as we shall see in the conclusion of this analysis. In chapter IV, M. Garofalo contends that civilization would be menaced with destruction by the elevation to power of the popular classes. M. Garofalo, who is of an old aristocratic family, declares that "the Third Estate, which should have substituted youthful energies for the feebleness and corruption of an effete and degenerate aristocracy, has shown magnified _a hundred-fold_ the defects and corruption of the latter" (p. 206). This is certainly not a correct historical judgment; for it is certain that the Third Estate, which with the French Revolution gained political ascendancy--a political ascendancy made inevitable by its previously won economic ascendancy,--gave in the course of the Nineteenth Century a new and powerful impulse to civilization. And if to-day, after a century of undisputed domination, the bourgeoisie shows "multiplied a hundred-fold" the defects and the corruption of the aristocracy of the Eighteenth Century, this signifies simply that the Third Estate has reached the final phase of its parabola, so that the advent of a more developed social phase is becoming an imminent historical necessity. * * * * * Another error in criminal psychology--natural enough for idealists and metaphysicians, but which may well surprise us in an exact scientist--is the influence upon human conduct which M. Garofalo attributes to the religious sentiment. "Moral instruction has no meaning, or at least no efficacy, without a religious basis" (p. 267). And from this erroneous psychological premise, he draws the conclusion that it is necessary to return to religious instruction in the schools, "selecting the masters from among men of mature age, fathers of families or _ministers of religion_" (p. 268). In combating this conclusion, truly surprising in a scientist, it is useless to recall the teachings of the experience of former times in regard to the pretended moralizing influence of the priest upon the school; and it is also unnecessary to recall the statistics of criminal assaults committed by priests condemned to celibacy. It is equally superfluous to add that at all events, in again turning the priest into a schoolmaster, it would be necessary to recommend to him never to recall the invectives of Jesus against the rich, the metaphor of the camel passing through the eye of a needle, or the still more violent invectives of the Fathers of the Church against private property; for long before Proudhon, Saint Jerome had said that "wealth is always the product of theft; if it was not committed by the present holder, it was by his ancestors," and Saint Ambrose added that "Nature has established community [of goods]; from usurpation alone is private property born." If it is true that later on the Church, in proportion as it departed from the doctrines of the Master, preached in favor of the rich, leaving to the poor the hope of Paradise; and if it is true, as M. Garofalo says, that "the Christian philosophers exhorted the poor to sanctify the tribulations of poverty by resignation" (p. 166); it is also true that, for example, Bossuet, in one of his famous sermons, recognized that "the complaints of the poor are justified;" and he asked: "Why are conditions so unequal? We are all formed of the same dust, and nothing can justify it." So that recently, M. Giraud-Teulon, in the name of an hermaphrodite liberalism, recalled that "the right of private property is rather tolerated by the Church as an existing fact than presented as a necessary foundation of civil society. It is even condemned in its inspiring principle by the Fathers of the Church."[91] But apart from all this, it is sufficient for me to establish that the psychological premise, from which M. Garofalo starts, is erroneous in itself. Studying elsewhere the influence of the religious sentiment on criminality[92], I have shown by positive documentary evidence, that religious beliefs, efficacious for individuals already endowed with a normal social sense, since they add to the sanction of the moral conscience (which, however, would suffice by itself) the sanctions of the life beyond the tomb--"religion is the guarantor of justice"[93]--are, nevertheless, wholly ineffective, when the social sense, on account of some physio-psychical anomaly, is atrophied or non-existent. So that religious belief, considered as a regulator of social conduct, is at once superfluous for honorable people and altogether ineffective for those who are not honorable, if indeed it is not capable of increasing the propensity to evil by developing religious fanaticism or giving rise to the hope of pardon in the confessional or of absolution _in articulo mortis_, etc. It is possible to understand--at least as an expedient as utilitarian as it is highly hypocritical--the argument of those who, atheists so far as they themselves are concerned, still wish to preserve religious beliefs for the people, because they exercise a depressing influence and prevent all energetic agitation for human rights and enjoyments _here below_. The conception of God as a Policeman is only one among many illusions. * * * * * Besides these errors of fact in the biological and psychological sciences, M. Garofalo also misstates the socialist doctrines, following the example of the opponents of the new school of criminology, who found it easier to refute the doctrines they attributed to us than to shake the doctrines we defended. On page 14, M. Garofalo begins by stating, "the true tendency of the party known as the Workingmen's Party, is to gain power, _not in the interest of all_, but in order to expropriate the dominant class and _to step into their shoes_. They do not disguise this purpose in their programmes." This statement is found again on page 210, etc. Now, it suffices to have read the programme of the socialist party, from the MANIFESTO of Marx and Engels down to the propagandist publications, to know, on the contrary, that contemporary socialism wishes, and declares its wish, to accomplish the general suppression of all social divisions into classes by suppressing the division of the social patrimony of production, and, therefore, proclaims itself resolved to achieve the prosperity OF ALL, and not only--as some victims of myopia continue to believe--that of a Fourth Estate, which would simply have to follow the example of the decaying Third Estate. Starting from this fundamental datum of socialism, that _every individual_, unless he be a child, sick or an invalid, _must work, in order to live_, at one sort or another of useful labor, it follows as an inevitable consequence that, in a society organized on this principle, all class antagonism will become impossible; for this antagonism exists only when society contains a great majority who work, in order to live in discomfort, and a small minority who live well, without working. This initial error naturally dominates the entire book. Thus, for instance, the third chapter is devoted to proving that "the social revolution planned for by the new socialists, will be the destruction of all _moral order_ in society, because it is without an _ideal_ to serve it as a luminous standard" (p. 159). Let us disregard, my dear Baron, the famous "moral order" of that society which enriches and honors the well-dressed wholesale thieves of the great and little Panamas, the banks and railways, and condemns to imprisonment children and women who steal dry wood or grass in the fields which formerly belonged to the commune. But to say that socialism is without an _ideal_, when even its opponents concede to it this immense superiority in potential strength over the sordid skepticism of the present world, _viz._, its ardent faith in a higher social justice for all, a faith that makes strikingly clear its resemblance to the regenerating Christianity of primitive times (very different from that "fatty degeneration" of Christianity, called Catholicism), to say this is truly, for a scientist, to blindly rebel against the most obvious facts of daily life. M. Garofalo even goes so far as to say that "the want of the necessaries of life" is a very exceptional fact, and that therefore the condition of "the proletariat is a _social condition_ like that of all the other classes, and the lack of capital, which is its characteristic, is a permanent economic condition _which is not at all abnormal_ FOR THOSE WHO ARE USED TO IT."[94] Then--while passing over this comfortable and egoistic quietism which finds nothing abnormal in the misery ... of others--we perceive how deficient M. Garofalo is, in the most elementary accuracy, in the ascertainment of facts when we recall the suffering and ever-growing multitude of the _unemployed_, which is sometimes a "local and transitory" phenomenon, but which, in its acute or chronic forms, is always the necessary and incontestable effect of capitalist accumulation and the introduction and improvement of machinery, which are, in their turn, the source of modern socialism, scientific socialism, so different from the sentimental socialism of former times. * * * * * But the fundamental fallacy, from which so many thinkers--M. Garofalo among them--can not free themselves, and to which I myself yielded, before I had penetrated, thanks to the Marxian theory of historic materialism--or, more exactly, of economic determinism--into the true spirit of socialist sociology, is the tendency to judge the inductions of socialism by the biological, psychological and sociological data of the present society, without thinking of the necessary changes that will be effected by a different economic environment with its inevitable concomitants or consequences, different moral and political environments. In M. Garofalo's book we find once more this _petitio principii_ which refuses to believe in the future in the name of the present, which is declared immutable. It is exactly as if in the earliest geological epochs it had been concluded from the flora and fauna then existing that it was impossible for a fauna and flora ever to exist differing from them as widely as do the cryptogams from the conifers, or the mammalia from the mollusca. This confirms, once more, the observation that I made before, that to deny the truth of scientific socialism is implicitly to deny that law of universal and eternal evolution, which is the dominant factor in all modern scientific thought. On page 16, M. Garofalo predicts that with the triumph of socialism "we shall see re-appear upon earth the reign of irrational and brutal physical force, and that we shall witness, _as happens every day_ in the lowest strata of the population, the triumph of the most violent men." And he repeats this on pages 209-210; but he forgets that, given the socialist premise of a better organized social environment, this brutality, which is the product of the present misery and lack of education, must necessarily gradually diminish, and at last disappear. Now, the possibility of this improvement of the social environment, which socialism asserts, is a thesis that can be discussed; but when a writer, in order to deny this possibility, opposes to the future the effects of a present, whose elimination is the precise question at issue, he falls into that insidious fallacy which it is only necessary to point out to remove all foundation from his arguments. * * * * * And it is as always by grace of this same fallacy that he is able to declare, on page 213, that under the socialist regime "the fine arts will be unable to exist. It is easy to say, they will henceforth be exercised and cultivated for the benefit of the public. Of what public? Of the great mass of the people _deprived of artistic education_?" As if, when poverty is once eliminated and labor has become less exhausting for the popular classes, the comfort and economic security, which would result from this, would not be sure to develop in them also the taste for æsthetic pleasure, which they feel and satisfy now, so far as that is possible for them, in the various forms of popular art, or as may be seen to-day it Paris and Vienna by the "_Théâtre socialiste_" and at Brussells by the free musical matinées, instituted by the socialists and frequented by a constantly growing number of workingmen. It is just the same with regard to scientific instruction, as witness "University Extension" in England and Belgium. And all this, notwithstanding the present total lack of artistic education, but thanks to the exigence among the workers of these countries of an economic condition lees wretched than that of the agricultural or even the industrial proletariat in countries such as Italy. And from another point of view, what are the museums if not a form of collective ownership and use of the products of art? It is again, as always, the same fallacy which (at page 216) makes M. Garofalo write: "The history of Europe, from the fifth to the thirteenth centuries, shows us, _by analogy_, what would happen to the world if the lower classes should come into power.... How to explain the medieval barbarism and anarchy save by the grossness and ignorance of the conquerors? _The same fate_ would inevitably await the modern civilization, if the controlling power should fall into the hands of the proletarians, who, assuredly, _are intellectually not superior to the ancient barbarians_ and MORALLY ARE FAR INFERIOR TO THEM!" Let us disregard this unjustified and unjustifiable insult and this completely erroneous historical comparison. It is enough to point out that it is here supposed that by a stroke of a magic wand "the lower classes" will be able in a single day to gain possession of power without having been prepared for this by a preliminary moral revolution, a revolution accomplished in them by the acquired consciousness of their rights and of their organic solidarity. It will be impossible to compare the proletarians in whom this moral revolution shall have taken place with the barbarians of the Middle Ages. * * * * * In my book _Socialismo et Criminalità_, published in 1883, and which to-day my adversaries, including M. Garofalo (p. 128 _et seq._), try to oppose to the opinions which I have upheld in my more recent book, _Socialisme et science positive_ (the present work), I have developed two theses: I. That the social organization could not be _suddenly_ changed, as was then maintained in Italy by the sentimental socialists, since the law of evolution dominates with sovereign power the human world as well as the inorganic and organic world; II. That, by analogy, crime could not disappear _absolutely_ from among mankind, as the Italian socialists of those days vaguely hinted. Now, in the first place it would not have been at all inconsistent if, after having partially accepted socialism, which I had already done in 1883, the progressive evolution of my thought, after having studied the systematic, scientific form given to socialism by Marx and his co-workers, had led me to recognize (apart from all personal advantage) the complete truth of socialism. But, especially, precisely because scientific socialism (since [the work of] Marx, Engels, Malon, de Paepe, Dramard, Lanessan, Guesde, Schaeffle, George, Bebel, Loria, Colajanni, Turati, de Greef, Lafargue, Jaurès, Renard, Denis, Plechanow, Vandervelde, Letourneau, L. Jacoby, Labriola, Kautsky, etc.) is different from the sentimental socialism which I had alone in mind in 1883, it is for that very reason that I still maintain to-day these two same principal theses, and I find myself in so doing in perfect harmony with international scientific socialism. And as to the absolute disappearance of all criminality, I still maintain my thesis of 1883, and in the present book (§ 3), I have written that, even under the socialist regime, there will be--though infinitely fewer--some who will be conquered in the struggle for existence and that, though the chronic and epidemic forms of nervous disease, crime, insanity and suicide, are destined to disappear, the acute and sporadic forms will not completely disappear. At this statement M. Garofalo manifests a surprise which, as I can not suppose it simulated, I declare truly inexplicable in a sociologist and a criminologist; for this reminds me too strongly of the ignorant surprise shown by a review of classical jurisprudence in regard to a new scientific fact recorded by the _Archives de psychiatrie_ of M. Lombroso, the case being the disappearance of every criminal tendency in a woman after the surgical removal of her ovaries. But that the trepanning of the skull in a case of traumatic epilepsy or that ovariotomy can cure the central nervous system and, therefore, restore the character and even the morality of the individual, these are facts that can be unknown only to a metaphysical idealist, an opponent of the positivist school of criminology. And yet this is how M. Garofalo comments on my induction (p. 240); this commentary is reproduced again on pages 95, 100, 134 and 291: "It is truly extraordinary that M. Ferri, notwithstanding that criminal anthropology, of which he has so long been (and still is) one of the most ardent partisans, should have allowed himself to be so blinded by the mirage of socialism. A statement such as that which I have quoted at first leaves the reader stunned, since he sees absolutely _no connection_ between nervous diseases and collective ownership. It would be just as sensible to say that by the study of algebra one can make sure of one's first-born child being a male." How exactly like the remarks of the Review of jurisprudence concerning the case of the removal of the ovaries! Now, let us see whether it is possible, by a supreme effort of our feeble intellect, to point out a connection between nervous diseases and collective ownership. That poverty, _i. e._, inadequate physical and mental nutrition--in the life of the individual and through hereditary transmission--is, if not the only and exclusive cause, certainly the principal cause of human degeneration, is henceforth an indisputable and undisputed fact. That the poverty and misery of the working class--and notably of the unhappy triad of the unemployed, the displaced [by machinery, trusts, etc.] and those who have been expropriated by taxation--is destined to disappear with the socialization of the land and the means of production:--this is the proposition that socialism maintains and demonstrates. It is, therefore, natural that under the socialist régime, with the disappearance of poverty, there should be eliminated the principal source of popular degeneracy in the epidemic and chronic forms of diseases, crimes, insanity and suicide; this can, moreover, be seen at present--on a small scale, but clearly enough to positively confirm the general induction--since diseases [nervous], crimes, insanity and suicide increase during famines and crises, while they diminish in years when the economic conditions are less wretched. There is still more to be said. Even among the aristocracy and bourgeoisie, no one can fail to see that the feverish competition and cannibalistic strife of our present system beget nervous disorders, crime and suicide, which would be rendered quite unnecessary by the establishment of a socialist régime, which would banish worry and uneasiness for the morrow from the human race. There then you see established the relation between collective ownership and nervous diseases or degeneration in general, not only among the popular and more numerous classes, but also in the bourgeois and aristocratic classes. It is, indeed, astonishing that the anti-socialist prejudice of M. Garofalo should have been strong enough to cause him to forget that truth which is nevertheless a legitimate induction of criminal biology and sociology, the truth that besides the congenital criminal there are other types of criminals who are more numerous and more directly produced by the vitiated social environment. And, finally, if the congenital criminal is not himself the direct product of the environment, he is indirectly its product through the degeneration begun in his ancestors, by some acute disease in some cases, but by debilitating poverty in the majority of cases, and afterward hereditarily transmitted and aggravated in accordance with the inexorable laws discovered by modern science. * * * * * M. Garofalo's book, which was announced as an assault of science upon socialism, has been, even from this point of view, a complete disappointment, as even the Italian anti-socialists have confessed in several of the most orthodox Reviews. It now remains for me to reply briefly to his observations--and they are few and far between--on the relations which exist between contemporary socialism and the general trend and tendency of thought in the exact sciences. Disregarding the arguments which I had developed on this subject by pointing out that there is an essential connection between economic and social transmutation (Marx) and the theories of biological transmutation (Darwin) and of universal transmutation (Spencer), M. Garofalo has thought it prudent to take up for consideration only "the struggle for existence" and the relations between "evolution and revolution." As to the first, five pages (96-100) are enough to enable him to declare, without supporting his declaration by any positive argument which is not merely a different verbal expression of the same idea, that the Darwinian law of the struggle for existence has not undergone and can not undergo any transformation except that which will change the violent struggle into competition (the struggle of skill and intelligence) and that this law is irreconcilable with socialism; for it necessarily requires the sacrifice of the conquered, while socialism "would guarantee to all men their material existence, so they would have no cause for anxiety." But my friend, the Baron Garofalo, quietly and completely ignores the fundamental argument that the socialists oppose to the individualist interpretation that has hitherto been given of the struggle for life and which still affects the minds of some socialists so far as to make them think that the law of the struggle for life is not true and that Darwinism is irreconcilable with socialism. The socialists, in fact, think that the laws of life are the following, and that they are concurrent and inseparable: _the struggle for existence_ and _solidarity in the struggle against natural forces_. If the first law is in spirit individualist, the second is essentially socialistic. Now, not to repeat what I have written elsewhere, it is sufficient here for me to establish this positive fact that all human evolution is effected through the constantly increasing predominance of the law of solidarity over the law of the struggle for existence. The forms of the struggle are transformed and grow milder, as I showed as long ago as 1883, and M. Garofalo accepts this way of looking at the matter when he recognizes that the muscular struggle is ever tending to become an intellectual struggle. But he has in view only the formal evolution; he wholly disregards the progressive decrease in the importance of the struggling function under the action of the other parallel law of solidarity in the struggle. Here comes in that constant principle in sociology, that the social forms and forces co-exist always, but that their relative importance changes from epoch to epoch and from place to place. Just as in the individual egoism and altruism co-exist and will co-exist always--for egoism is the basis of personal existence--but with a continuous and progressive restriction and transformation of egoism, corresponding to the expansion of altruism, in passing from the fierce egoism of savage humanity to the less brutal egoism of the present epoch, and finally to the more fraternal egoism of the coming society; in the same way in the social organism, for example, the military type and the industrial type always co-exist, but with a progressively increasing predominance of the latter over the former. The same truth applies to the different forms of the family, and also to many other institutions, of which Spencerian sociology had given only the _descriptive_ evolution and of which the Marxian theory of economic determinism has given the _genetic_ evolution, by explaining that the religious and juridical customs and institutions, the social types, the forms of the family, etc., are only the reflex of the economic structure which differs in varying localities (on islands or continents, according to the abundance or scarcity of food) and also varies from epoch to epoch. And--to complete the Marxian theory--this economic structure is, in the case of each social group, the resultant of its race energies developing themselves in such or such a physical environment, at I have said elsewhere. The same rule holds in the case of the two co-existing laws of the _struggle for existence_ and of _solidarity in the struggle_, the first of which predominates where the economic conditions are more difficult; while the second predominates with the growth of the economic security of the majority. But while this security will become complete under the régime of socialism, which will assure to every man who works the material means of life, this will not exclude the intellectual forms of the struggle for existence which M. Tchisch recently said should be interpreted not only in the sense of a _struggle for life_, but also in the sense of a _struggle for the enrichment of life_.[95] In fact, when once the material life of every one is assured, together with the duty of labor for _all_ the members of society, man will continue always to struggle _for the enrichment of life_, that is to say, for the fuller development of his physical and moral individuality. And it is only under the régime of socialism that, the predominance of the law of solidarity being decisive, the struggle for existence will change its form and substance, while persisting as an eternal striving toward a better life in the _solidaire_ development of the individual and the collectivity. But M. Garofalo devotes more attention to the practical (?) relations between socialism and the law of evolution. And in _substance_, once more making use of the objection already so often raised against Marxism and its tactics, he formulates his indictment thus: "The new socialists who, on the one hand, pretend to speak in the name of sociological science and of the natural laws of evolution, declare themselves politically, on the other hand, as revolutionists. Now, evidently science has nothing to do with their political action. Although they take pains to say that by "revolution" they do not mean either a riot or a revolt--an explanation also contained in the dictionary[96]--this fact always remains, _viz._: that they are unwilling to await the _spontaneous_ organization of society under the new economic arrangement foreseen by them in a more or less remote future. For if they should thus quietly await its coming, who among them would survive to prove to the incredulous the truth of their predictions? It is a question then of an evolution _artificially hastened_, that is to say, in other words, of the _use of force_ to transform society in accordance with their wishes." (p. 30.) "The socialists of the Marxian school do not expect the transformation to be effected by a slow evolution, but by a _revolution of the people_, and they even fix the epoch of its occurence." (p. 53.) "Henceforth the socialists must make a decision and take one horn of the dilemma or the other. "Either they must be _theoretical evolutionists_, WHO WAIT PATIENTLY until the time shall be ripe; Or, on the contrary, they must be _revolutionary democrats_; and if they take this horn, it is nonsense to talk of evolution, accumulation, spontaneous concentration, etc. ACCOMPLISH THEN THIS REVOLUTION, IF YOU HAVE THE POWER." (p. 151.) I do not wish to dwell on this curious "instigation to civil war" by such an orthodox conservative as the Baron Garofalo, although he might be suspected of the not specially Christian wish to see this "revolution of the people" break out at once, while the people are still disorganized and weak and while it would be easier for the dominant class to bleed them copiously.... Let us try rather to deliver M. Garofalo from another trouble; for on page 119 he exclaims pathetically: "I declare on my honor I do not understand how a sincere socialist can to-day be a revolutionist. I would be sincerely grateful to anyone who would explain this to me, for to me this is an enigma, so great is the contradiction between the theory and the methods of the socialists." Well then, console yourself, my excellent friend! Just as in the case of the relationship between collective ownership and human degeneration, which seemed so "enigmatical" to this same Baron Garofalo--and although he has not offered his gratitude for the solution of this enigma to the socialist Oedipus who explained it to him--here also, in the case of this other enigma, the explanation is very simple. On the subject of the social question the attitudes assumed in the domain of science, or on the field of politics, are the following: 1st. That of the _conservatives_, such as M. Garofalo. These, judging the world, not by the conditions objectively established, but by their own subjective impressions, consider that they are well enough off under the present régime, and contend that everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds, and oppose in all cases, with a very logical egoism, every change which is not merely a superficial change; 2nd. That of the _reformers_, who, like all the eclectics, whose number is infinite, give, as the Italian proverb says, one blow to the cask and another to the hoop and do not deny--O, no!--the inconveniences and even the absurdities of the present ... but, not to compromise themselves too far, hasten to say that they must confine themselves to minor ameliorations, to superficial reforms, that is to say, to treating the symptoms instead of the disease, a therapeutic method as easy and as barren of abiding results in dealing with the social organism as with the individual organism; 3rd. That, finally, of the _revolutionaries_, who rightly call themselves thus because they think and say that the effective remedy is not to be found in superficial reforms, but in a radical reorganization of society, beginning at the very foundation, private property, and which will be so profound that it will truly constitute a social revolution. It is in this sense that Galileo accomplished a scientific revolution; for he did not confine himself to reforms of the astronomical system received in his time, but he radically changed its fundamental lines. And it is in this same sense that Jacquart effected an industrial revolution, since he did not confine himself to reforming the hand-loom, as it had existed for centuries, but radically changed its structure and productive power. Therefore, when socialists speak of socialism as _revolutionary_, they mean by this to describe the programme to be realized and the final goal to be attained and not--as M. Garofalo, in spite of the dictionary, continues to believe--the method or the tactics to be employed in achieving this goal, the social revolution. And right here appears the profound difference between the method of sentimental socialism and that of scientific socialism--henceforth the only socialism in the civilized world--which has received through the work of Marx, Engels and their successors that systematic form which is the distinctive mark of all the _evolutionary_ sciences. And that is why and how I have been able to demonstrate that contemporary socialism is in full harmony with the scientific doctrine of evolution. Socialism is in fact evolutionary, but not in the sense that M. Garofalo prefers of "waiting patiently until the times shall be ripe" and until society "shall organize _spontaneously_ under the new economic arrangement," as if science necessarily must consist in Oriental contemplation and academic Platonism--as it has done for too long--instead of investigating the conditions of actual, every-day life, and applying its inductions to them. Certainly, "science for the sake of science," is a formula very satisfactory to the avowed conservatives--and that is only logical--and also to the eclectics; but modern positivism prefers the formula of "science for life's sake" and, therefore, thinks that "the ripeness of the times" and "the new economic arrangement" will certainly not be realized by spontaneous generation and that therefore it is necessary to act, in harmony with the inductions of science, in order to bring this realization to pass. To act, but _how_? There is the question of methods and tactics, which differentiates utopian socialism from scientific socialism; the former fancied it possible to alter the economic organization of society from top to bottom by the improvised miracle of a popular insurrection; the latter, on the contrary, declares that the law of evolution is supreme and that, therefore, the social revolution can be nothing but the final phase of a preliminary evolution, which will consist--through scientific study and propaganda work--in the realization of the exhortation of Marx: _Proletarians of all countries, unite!_ There then is the explanation of the _easy_ enigma, presented by the fact that socialism, though revolutionary in its programme, follows the laws of evolution in its method of realization, and that is the secret of its vitality and power, and that is also what makes it so essentially different from that mystical and violent anarchism, which class prejudices or the exigencies of venal journalism assert is nothing but a consequence of socialism, while in fact it is the practical negation of socialism. * * * * * Finally, as a synthetic conclusion, I think it worth while to show that, while in the beginning of his book M. Garofalo starts out in open hostility to socialism with the intention of maintaining an absolutely uncompromising attitude, declaring on the first page that he has written his book "for those who are called the bourgeois," in order to dissuade them from the concessions which they themselves, in their own minds, can not prevent themselves from making to the undeniable truth of the socialist ideal, when he reaches the end of his polemic, the irresistible implications of the facts force M. Garofalo to a series of eclectic compromises, which produce on the reader, after so many accusations and threats of repression, the depressing impression of a mental collapse, as unforeseen as it is significant. Indeed, M. Garofalo, on page 258, recognizes the usefulness of combinations of laborers to enable them "to _resist_ unjust demands," and even declares it obligatory upon factory-owners "to assure a life-pension to their laborers who have served them long." (p. 275.) And he demands for the laborers at all events "a share in the profits" (p. 276); he recognizes also that the adult out of work and in good health has the right to assistance, no less than the sick man or the cripple (p. 281). M. Garofalo, who by all these restrictions to his absolute individualism has permitted himself to make concessions to Socialism, which are in flagrant contradiction with his announced intention and to the whole trend of his book, ends indeed by confessing that "if the new socialists were to preach collectivism _solely within the sphere of agricultural industry_, it would at least be possible to discuss it, since one would not be confronted at the outset by an absurdity, as is the case in attempting to discuss universal collectivism. This is not equivalent to saying that agricultural collectivism[97] would be _easily_ put into practice." That is to say that there is room for compromises and that a mitigated collectivism would not be in contradiction with all the laws of science, a contradiction which it seems his entire argument was intended to establish; for M. Garofalo confines himself to remarking that the realization of collectivism in land would not be _easy_--a fact that no socialist has ever disputed. There is no need for me to point out once more how this method of combating socialism, on the part of M. Garofalo, resemble that which the classical criminologists employed against the positivist school, when, after so many sweeping denials of our teachings, they came to admit that, nevertheless, some of our inductions, for example, the anthropological classification of criminals, might well be applied ... on a reduced scale, in the administration of jails and penitentiaries, but never in the provisions of the criminal law! During many years, as a defender of the positivist school of criminology, I have had personal experience of the inevitable phases that must be passed through by a scientific truth before its final triumph--the conspiracy of silence; the attempt to smother the new idea with ridicule; then, in consequence of the resistance to these artifices of reactionary conservatism, the new ideas are misrepresented, through ignorance or to facilitate assaults upon them, and at last they are partially admitted and that is the beginning of the final triumph. So that, knowing these phases of the natural evolution of every new idea, now when, for the second time, instead of resting upon the laurels of my first scientific victories, I have wished to fight for a second and more radical heresy; this time the victory appears to me more certain, since my opponents and my former companions in arms again call into use against it the same artifices of reactionary opposition, whose impotence I had already established on a narrower battle-field, but one where the conflict was neither less keen nor less difficult. And so, a new recruit enlisted to fight for a grand and noble human ideal, I behold even now the spectacle of partial and inevitable concessions being wrung from those who still pretend to maintain a position of uncompromising and unbending hostility, but who are helpless before the great cry of suffering and hope which springs from the depths of the masses of mankind in passionate emotion and in intellectual striving. ENRICO FERRI. FOOTNOTES: [89] This appendix was written as a reply to a book by Baron Garofalo, called _La Superstition socialiste_. This book made quite a sensation in Italy and France, not on account of the solidity of its arguments, but merely because Garofalo had been associated with Lombroso and Ferri in founding the modern school of criminology. As Garofalo's book is practically unknown in this country, I have felt justified in making many and large omissions from this appendix. Gabriel Deville exposed the emptiness of Garofalo's pretentious book in a most brilliant open letter to the Baron, which appeared in _Le Socialiste_ for the 15th of Sept., 1895.--Tr. [90] The present work, which appeared in Italian in 1894, in French in 1895, and in Spanish in Madrid and Buenos-Ayres in 1895. It now appears in English for the first time. [91] GIRAUD-TEULON, _Double péril social. L'Eglise et le socialisme_, Paris, 1894, p. 17. [92] E. FERRI, _l'Omicidio nell' antropologia criminale_, Turin, 1895, together with _Atlas_ and more especially _Religion et Criminalité_ in _la Revue des Revues_, Oct.. 1895. [93] DE MOLINARI, _Science et Religion_, Paris, 1894. [94] Garofalo suppressed these lines in the French edition of his book. [95] Tchisch, _la Loi fondamentale de la vie_, Dorpat, 1895, p. 19. [96] And yet, how many judges have not, to the injury of the Socialists, denied this elementary truth taught by the dictionary! [97] More correctly, collective ownership of the land.--Tr. 
22651	----	at http://www.eBookForge.net THE UNSOLVED RIDDLE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE BY STEPHEN LEACOCK =B. A., Ph. D., Litt. D., F. R. S. C.= _Professor of Political Economy at McGill University, Montreal_ Author of "Essays and Literary Studies," Etc. NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD TORONTO: S. B. GUNDY: MCMXX BY STEPHEN LEACOCK FRENZIED FICTION FURTHER FOOLISHNESS BEHIND THE BEYOND NONSENSE NOVELS LITERARY LAPSES SUNSHINE SKETCHES ARCADIAN ADVENTURES WITH THE IDLE RICH ESSAYS AND LITERARY STUDIES MOONBEAMS FROM THE LARGER LUNACY THE HOHENZOLLERNS IN AMERICA Copyright, 1920, By John Lane Company _CONTENTS_ CHAPTER PAGE I. The Troubled Outlook of the Present Hour 9 II. Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness 33 III. The Failures and Fallacies of Natural Liberty 48 IV. Work and Wages 66 V. The Land of Dreams: The Utopia of the Socialist 88 VI. How Mr. Bellamy Looked Backward 103 VII. What Is Possible and What Is Not 124 THE UNSOLVED RIDDLEOF SOCIAL JUSTICE _I.--The Troubled Outlook of the Present Hour_ THESE are troubled times. As the echoes of the war die away the sound of a new conflict rises on our ears. All the world is filled with industrial unrest. Strike follows upon strike. A world that has known five years of fighting has lost its taste for the honest drudgery of work. Cincinnatus will not back to his plow, or, at the best, stands sullenly between his plow-handles arguing for a higher wage. The wheels of industry are threatening to stop. The laborer will not work because the pay is too low and the hours are too long. The producer cannot employ him because the wage is too high, and the hours are too short. If the high wage is paid and the short hours are granted, then the price of the thing made, so it seems, rises higher still. Even the high wages will not buy it. The process apparently moves in a circle with no cessation to it. The increased wages seem only to aggravate the increasing prices. Wages and prices, rising together, call perpetually for more money, or at least more tokens and symbols, more paper credit in the form of checks and deposits, with a value that is no longer based on the rock-bottom of redemption into hard coin, but that floats upon the mere atmosphere of expectation. But the sheer quantity of the inflated currency and false money forces prices higher still. The familiar landmarks of wages, salaries and prices are being obliterated. The "scrap of paper" with which the war began stays with us as its legacy. It lies upon the industrial landscape like snow, covering up, as best it may, the bare poverty of a world desolated by war. Under such circumstances national finance seems turned into a delirium. Billions are voted where once a few poor millions were thought extravagant. The war debts of the Allied Nations, not yet fully computed, will run from twenty-five to forty billion dollars apiece. But the debts of the governments appear on the other side of the ledger as the assets of the citizens. What is the meaning of it? Is it wealth or is it poverty? The world seems filled with money and short of goods, while even in this very scarcity a new luxury has broken out. The capitalist rides in his ten thousand dollar motor car. The seven-dollar-a-day artisan plays merrily on his gramophone in the broad daylight of his afternoon that is saved, like all else, by being "borrowed" from the morning. He calls the capitalist a "profiteer." The capitalist retorts with calling him a "Bolshevik." Worse portents appear. Over the rim of the Russian horizon are seen the fierce eyes and the unshorn face of the real and undoubted Bolshevik, waving his red flag. Vast areas of what was a fertile populated world are overwhelmed in chaos. Over Russia there lies a great darkness, spreading ominously westward into Central Europe. The criminal sits among his corpses. He feeds upon the wreck of a civilization that was. The infection spreads. All over the world the just claims of organized labor are intermingled with the underground conspiracy of social revolution. The public mind is confused. Something approaching to a social panic appears. To some minds the demand for law and order overwhelms all other thoughts. To others the fierce desire for social justice obliterates all fear of a general catastrophe. They push nearer and nearer to the brink of the abyss. The warning cry of "back" is challenged by the eager shout of "forward!" The older methods of social progress are abandoned as too slow. The older weapons of social defense are thrown aside as too blunt. Parliamentary discussion is powerless. It limps in the wake of the popular movement. The "state", as we knew it, threatens to dissolve into labor unions, conventions, boards of conciliation, and conferences. Society shaken to its base, hurls itself into the industrial suicide of the general strike, refusing to feed itself, denying its own wants. This is a time such as there never was before. It represents a vast social transformation in which there is at stake, and may be lost, all that has been gained in the slow centuries of material progress and in which there may be achieved some part of all that has been dreamed in the age-long passion for social justice. For the time being, the constituted governments of the world survive as best they may and accomplish such things as they can, planless, or planning at best only for the day. Sufficient, and more than sufficient, for the day is the evil thereof. Never then was there a moment in which there was greater need for sane and serious thought. It is necessary to consider from the ground up the social organization in which we live and the means whereby it may be altered and expanded to meet the needs of the time to come. We must do this or perish. If we do not mend the machine, there are forces moving in the world that will break it. The blind Samson of labor will seize upon the pillars of society and bring them down in a common destruction. * * * * * Few persons can attain to adult life without being profoundly impressed by the appalling inequalities of our human lot. Riches and poverty jostle one another upon our streets. The tattered outcast dozes on his bench while the chariot of the wealthy is drawn by. The palace is the neighbor of the slum. We are, in modern life, so used to this that we no longer see it. Inequality begins from the very cradle. Some are born into an easy and sheltered affluence. Others are the children of mean and sordid want. For some the long toil of life begins in the very bloom time of childhood and ends only when the broken and exhausted body sinks into a penurious old age. For others life is but a foolish leisure with mock activities and mimic avocations to mask its uselessness. And as the circumstances vary so too does the native endowment of the body and the mind. Some born in poverty rise to wealth. An inborn energy and capacity bid defiance to the ill-will of fate. Others sink. The careless hand lets fall the cradle gift of wealth. Thus all about us is the moving and shifting spectacle of riches and poverty, side by side, inextricable. The human mind, lost in a maze of inequalities that it cannot explain and evils that it cannot, singly, remedy, must adapt itself as best it can. An acquired indifference to the ills of others is the price at which we live. A certain dole of sympathy, a casual mite of personal relief is the mere drop that any one of us alone can cast into the vast ocean of human misery. Beyond that we must harden ourselves lest we too perish. We feed well while others starve. We make fast the doors of our lighted houses against the indigent and the hungry. What else can we do? If we shelter _one_ what is that? And if we try to shelter all, we are ourselves shelterless. But the contrast thus presented is one that has acquired a new meaning in the age in which we live. The poverty of earlier days was the outcome of the insufficiency of human labor to meet the primal needs of human kind. It is not so now. We live in an age that is at best about a century and a half old--the age of machinery and power. Our common reading of history has obscured this fact. Its pages are filled with the purple gowns of kings and the scarlet trappings of the warrior. Its record is largely that of battles and sieges, of the brave adventure of discovery and the vexed slaughter of the nations. It has long since dismissed as too short and simple for its pages, the short and simple annals of the poor. And the record is right enough. Of the poor what is there to say? They were born; they lived; they died. They followed their leaders, and their names are forgotten. But written thus our history has obscured the greatest fact that ever came into it--the colossal change that separates our little era of a century and a half from all the preceding history of mankind--separates it so completely that a great gulf lies between, across which comparison can scarcely pass, and on the other side of which a new world begins. It has been the custom of our history to use the phrase the "new world" to mark the discoveries of Columbus and the treasure-hunt of a Cortes or a Pizarro. But what of that? The America that they annexed to Europe was merely a new domain added to a world already old. The "new world" was really found in the wonder-years of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Mankind really entered upon it when the sudden progress of liberated science bound the fierce energy of expanding stream and drew the eager lightning from the cloud. Here began indeed, in the drab surroundings of the workshop, in the silent mystery of the laboratory, the magic of the new age. But we do not commonly realize the vastness of the change. Much of our life and much of our thought still belongs to the old world. Our education is still largely framed on the old pattern. And our views of poverty and social betterment, or what is possible and what is not, are still largely conditioned by it. In the old world, poverty seemed, and poverty was, the natural and inevitable lot of the greater portion of mankind. It was difficult, with the mean appliances of the time, to wring subsistence from the reluctant earth. For the simplest necessaries and comforts of life all, or nearly all, must work hard. Many must perish for want of them. Poverty was inevitable and perpetual. The poor must look to the brightness of a future world for the consolation that they were denied in this. Seen thus poverty became rather a blessing than a curse, or at least a dispensation prescribing the proper lot of man. Life itself was but a preparation and a trial--a threshing floor where, under the "tribulation" of want, the wheat was beaten from the straw. Of this older view much still survives, and much that is ennobling. Nor is there any need to say goodby to it. Even if poverty were gone, the flail could still beat hard enough upon the grain and chaff of humanity. But turn to consider the magnitude of the change that has come about with the era of machinery and the indescribable increase which it has brought to man's power over his environment. There is no need to recite here in detail the marvelous record of mechanical progress that constituted the "industrial revolution" of the eighteenth century. The utilization of coal for the smelting of iron ore; the invention of machinery that could spin and weave; the application of the undreamed energy of steam as a motive force, the building of canals and the making of stone roads--these proved but the beginnings. Each stage of invention called for a further advance. The quickening of one part of the process necessitated the "speeding up" of all the others. It placed a premium--a reward already in sight--upon the next advance. Mechanical spinning called forth the power loom. The increase in production called for new means of transport. The improvement of transport still further swelled the volume of production. The steamboat of 1809 and the steam locomotive of 1830 were the direct result of what had gone before. Most important of all, the movement had become a conscious one. Invention was no longer the fortuitous result of a happy chance. Mechanical progress, the continual increase of power and the continual surplus of product became an essential part of the environment, and an unconscious element in the thought and outlook of the civilized world. No wonder that the first aspect of the age of machinery was one of triumph. Man had vanquished nature. The elemental forces of wind and fire, of rushing water and driving storm before which the savage had cowered low for shelter, these had become his servants. The forest that had blocked his path became his field. The desert blossomed as his garden. The aspect of industrial life altered. The domestic industry of the cottage and the individual labor of the artisan gave place to the factory with its regiment of workers and its steam-driven machinery. The economic isolation of the single worker, of the village, even of the district and the nation, was lost in the general cohesion in which the whole industrial world merged into one. The life of the individual changed accordingly. In the old world his little sphere was allotted to him and there he stayed. His village was his horizon. The son of the weaver wove and the smith reared his children to his trade. Each did his duty, or was adjured to do it, in the "state of life to which it had pleased God to call him." Migration to distant occupations or to foreign lands was but for the adventurous few. The ne'er-do-well blew, like seed before the wind, to distant places, but mankind at large stayed at home. Here and there exceptional industry or extraordinary capacity raised the artisan to wealth and turned the "man" into the "master." But for the most part even industry and endowment were powerless against the inertia of custom and the dead-weight of environment. The universal ignorance of the working class broke down the aspiring force of genius. Mute inglorious Miltons were buried in country churchyards. In the new world all this changed. The individual became but a shifting atom in the vast complex, moving from place to place, from occupation to occupation and from gradation to gradation of material fortune. The process went further and further. The machine penetrated everywhere, thrusting aside with its gigantic arm the feeble efforts of handicraft. It laid its hold upon agriculture, sowing and reaping the grain and transporting it to the ends of the earth. Then as the nineteenth century drew towards its close, even the age of steam power was made commonplace by achievements of the era of electricity. All this is familiar enough. The record of the age of machinery is known to all. But the strange mystery, the secret that lies concealed within its organization, is realized by but few. It offers, to those who see it aright, the most perplexing industrial paradox ever presented in the history of mankind. With all our wealth, we are still poor. After a century and a half of labor-saving machinery, we work about as hard as ever. With a power over nature multiplied a hundred fold, nature still conquers us. And more than this. There are many senses in which the machine age seems to leave the great bulk of civilized humanity, the working part of it, worse off instead of better. The nature of our work has changed. No man now makes anything. He makes only a part of something, feeding and tending a machine that moves with relentless monotony in the routine of which both the machine and its tender are only a fractional part. For the great majority of the workers, the interest of work as such is gone. It is a task done consciously for a wage, one eye upon the clock. The brave independence of the keeper of the little shop contrasts favorably with the mock dignity of a floor walker in an "establishment." The varied craftsmanship of the artisan had in it something of the creative element that was the parent motive of sustained industry. The dull routine of the factory hand in a cotton mill has gone. The life of a pioneer settler in America two hundred years ago, penurious and dangerous as it was, stands out brightly beside the dull and meaningless toil of his descendant. The picture must not be drawn in colors too sinister. In the dullest work and in the meanest lives in the new world to-day there are elements that were lacking in the work of the old world. The universal spread of elementary education, the universal access to the printed page, and the universal hope of better things, if not for oneself, at least for one's children, and even the universal restlessness that the industrialism of to-day have brought are better things than the dull plodding passivity of the older world. Only a false mediævalism can paint the past in colors superior to the present. The haze of distance that dims the mountains with purple, shifts also the crude colors of the past into the soft glory of retrospect. Misled by these, the sentimentalist may often sigh for an age that in a nearer view would be seen filled with cruelty and suffering. But even when we have made every allowance for the all too human tendency to soften down the past, it remains true that in many senses the processes of industry for the worker have lost in attractiveness and power of absorption of the mind during the very period when they have gained so enormously in effectiveness and in power of production. The essential contrast lies between the vastly increased power of production and its apparent inability to satisfy for all humanity the most elementary human wants; between the immeasurable saving of labor effected by machinery and the brute fact of the continuance of hard-driven, unceasing toil. Of the extent of this increased power of production we can only speak in general terms. No one, as far as I am aware, has yet essayed to measure it. Nor have we any form of calculus or computation that can easily be applied. If we wish to compare the gross total of production effected to-day with that accomplished a hundred and fifty years ago, the means, the basis of calculation, is lacking. Vast numbers of the things produced now were not then in existence. A great part of our production of to-day culminates not in productive goods, but in services, as in forms of motion, or in ability to talk across a distance. It is true that statistics that deal with the world's production of cotton, or of oil, or of iron and steel present stupendous results. But even these do not go far enough. For the basic raw materials are worked into finer and finer forms to supply new "wants" as they are called, and to represent a vast quantity of "satisfactions" not existing before. Nor is the money calculus of any avail. Comparison by prices breaks down entirely. A bushel of wheat stands about where it stood before and could be calculated. But the computation, let us say, in price-values of the Sunday newspapers produced in one week in New York or the annual output of photographic apparatus, would defy comparison. Of the enormous increase in the gross total of human goods there is no doubt. We have only to look about us to see it. The endless miles of railways, the vast apparatus of the factories, the soaring structures of the cities bear easy witness to it. Yet it would be difficult indeed to compute by what factor the effectiveness of human labor working with machinery has been increased. But suppose we say, since one figure is as good as another, that it has been increased a hundred times. This calculation must be well within the facts and can be used as merely a more concrete way of saying that the power of production has been vastly increased. During the period of this increase, the numbers of mankind in the industrial countries have perhaps been multiplied by three to one. This again is inexact, since there are no precise figures of population that cover the period. But all that is meant is that the increase in one case is, quite obviously, colossal, and in the other case is evidently not very much. Here then is the paradox. If the ability to produce goods to meet human wants has multiplied so that each man accomplishes almost thirty or forty times what he did before, then the world at large ought to be about thirty or fifty times better off. But it is not. Or else, as the other possible alternative, the working hours of the world should have been cut down to about one in thirty of what they were before. But they are not. How, then, are we to explain this extraordinary discrepancy between human power and resulting human happiness? The more we look at our mechanism of production the more perplexing it seems. Suppose an observer were to look down from the cold distance of the moon upon the seething ant-hill of human labor presented on the surface of our globe; and suppose that such an observer knew nothing of our system of individual property, of money payments and wages and contracts, but viewed our labor as merely that of a mass of animated beings trying to supply their wants. The spectacle to his eyes would be strange indeed. Mankind viewed in the mass would be seen to produce a certain amount of absolutely necessary things, such as food, and then to stop. In spite of the fact that there was not food enough to go round, and that large numbers must die of starvation or perish slowly from under-nutrition, the production of food would stop at some point a good deal short of universal satisfaction. So, too, with the production of clothing, shelter and other necessary things; never enough would seem to be produced, and this apparently not by accident or miscalculation, but as if some peculiar social law were at work adjusting production to the point where there is just not enough, and leaving it there. The countless millions of workers would be seen to turn their untired energies and their all-powerful machinery away from the production of necessary things to the making of mere comforts; and from these, again, while still stopping short of a general satisfaction, to the making of luxuries and superfluities. The wheels would never stop. The activity would never tire. Mankind, mad with the energy of activity, would be seen to pursue the fleeing phantom of insatiable desire. Thus among the huge mass of accumulated commodities the simplest wants would go unsatisfied. Half-fed men would dig for diamonds, and men sheltered by a crazy roof erect the marble walls of palaces. The observer might well remain perplexed at the pathetic discord between human work and human wants. Something, he would feel assured, must be at fault either with the social instincts of man or with the social order under which he lives. And herein lies the supreme problem that faces us in this opening century. The period of five years of war has shown it to us in a clearer light than fifty years of peace. War is destruction--the annihilation of human life, the destruction of things made with generations of labor, the misdirection of productive power from making what is useful to making what is useless. In the great war just over, some seven million lives were sacrificed; eight million tons of shipping were sunk beneath the sea; some fifty million adult males were drawn from productive labor to the lines of battle; behind them uncounted millions labored day and night at making the weapons of destruction. One might well have thought that such a gigantic misdirection of human energy would have brought the industrial world to a standstill within a year. So people did think. So thought a great number, perhaps the greater number, of the financiers and economists and industrial leaders trained in the world in which we used to live. The expectation was unfounded. Great as is the destruction of war, not even five years of it have broken the productive machine. And the reason is now plain enough. Peace, also--or peace under the old conditions of industry--is infinitely wasteful of human energy. Not more than one adult worker in ten--so at least it might with confidence be estimated--is employed on necessary things. The other nine perform superfluous services. War turns them from making the glittering superfluities of peace to making its grim engines of destruction. But while the tenth man still labors, the machine, though creaking with its dislocation, can still go on. The economics of war, therefore, has thrown its lurid light upon the economics of peace. These I propose in the succeeding chapters to examine. But it might be well before doing so to lay stress upon the fact that while admitting all the shortcomings and the injustices of the régime under which we have lived, I am not one of those who are able to see a short and single remedy. Many people when presented with the argument above, would settle it at once with the word "socialism." Here, they say, is the immediate and natural remedy. I confess at the outset, and shall develop later, that I cannot view it so. Socialism is a mere beautiful dream, possible only for the angels. The attempt to establish it would hurl us over the abyss. Our present lot is sad, but the frying pan is at least better than the fire. _II.--Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness_ "ALL men," wrote Thomas Jefferson in framing the Declaration of Independence, "have an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The words are more than a felicitous phrase. They express even more than the creed of a nation. They embody in themselves the uppermost thought of the era that was dawning when they were written. They stand for the same view of society which, in that very year of 1776, Adam Smith put before the world in his immortal "Wealth of Nations" as the "System of Natural Liberty." In this system mankind placed its hopes for over half a century and under it the industrial civilization of the age of machinery rose to the plenitude of its power. In the preceding chapter an examination has been made of the purely mechanical side of the era of machine production. It has been shown that the age of machinery has been in a certain sense one of triumph, of the triumphant conquest of nature, but in another sense one of perplexing failure. The new forces controlled by mankind have been powerless as yet to remove want and destitution, hard work and social discontent. In the midst of accumulated wealth social justice seems as far away as ever. It remains now to discuss the intellectual development of the modern age of machinery and the way in which it has moulded the thoughts and the outlook of mankind. Few men think for themselves. The thoughts of most of us are little more than imitations and adaptations of the ideas of stronger minds. The influence of environment conditions, if it does not control, the mind of man. So it comes about that every age or generation has its dominant and uppermost thoughts, its peculiar way of looking at things and its peculiar basis of opinion on which its collective action and its social regulations rest. All this is largely unconscious. The average citizen of three generations ago was probably not aware that he was an extreme individualist. The average citizen of to-day is not conscious of the fact that he has ceased to be one. The man of three generations ago had certain ideas which he held to be axiomatic, such as that his house was his castle, and that property was property and that what was his was his. But these were to him things so obvious that he could not conceive any reasonable person doubting them. So, too, with the man of to-day. He has come to believe in such things as old age pensions and national insurance. He submits to bachelor taxes and he pays for the education of other people's children; he speculates much on the limits of inheritance, and he even meditates profound alterations in the right of property in land. His house is no longer his castle. He has taken down its fences, and "boulevarded" its grounds till it merges into those of his neighbors. Indeed he probably does not live in a house at all, but in a mere "apartment" or subdivision of a house which he shares with a multiplicity of people. Nor does he any longer draw water from his own well or go to bed by the light of his own candle: for such services as these his life is so mixed up with "franchises" and "public utilities" and other things unheard of by his own great-grandfather, that it is hopelessly intertangled with that of his fellow citizens. In fine, there is little left but his own conscience into which he can withdraw. Such a man is well aware that times have changed since his great-grandfather's day. But he is not aware of the profound extent to which his own opinions have been affected by the changing times. He is no longer an individualist. He has become by brute force of circumstances a sort of collectivist, puzzled only as to how much of a collectivist to be. Individualism of the extreme type is, therefore, long since out of date. To attack it is merely to kick a dead dog. But the essential problem of to-day is to know how far we are to depart from its principles. There are those who tell us--and they number many millions--that we must abandon them entirely. Industrial society, they say, must be reorganized from top to bottom; private industry must cease. All must work for the state; only in a socialist commonwealth can social justice be found. There are others, of whom the present writer is one, who see in such a programme nothing but disaster: yet who consider that the individualist principle of "every man for himself" while it makes for national wealth and accumulated power, favors overmuch the few at the expense of the many, puts an over-great premium upon capacity, assigns too harsh a punishment for easy indolence, and, what is worse, exposes the individual human being too cruelly to the mere accidents of birth and fortune. Under such a system, in short, to those who have is given and from those who have not is taken away even that which they have. There are others again who still view individualism just as the vast majority of our great-grandfathers viewed it, as a system hard but just: as awarding to every man the fruit of his own labor and the punishment of his own idleness, and as visiting, in accordance with the stern but necessary ordination of our existence, the sins of the father upon the child. The proper starting point, then, for all discussion of the social problem is the consideration of the individualist theory of industrial society. This grew up, as all the world knows, along with the era of machinery itself. It had its counterpart on the political side in the rise of representative democratic government. Machinery, industrial liberty, political democracy--these three things represent the basis of the progress of the nineteenth century. The chief exposition of the system is found in the work of the classical economists--Adam Smith and his followers of half a century--who created the modern science of political economy. Beginning as controversialists anxious to overset a particular system of trade regulation, they ended by becoming the exponents of a new social order. Modified and amended as their system is in its practical application, it still largely conditions our outlook to-day. It is to this system that we must turn. The general outline of the classical theory of political economy is so clear and so simple that it can be presented within the briefest compass. It began with certain postulates, or assumptions, to a great extent unconscious, of the conditions to which it applied. It assumed the existence of the state and of contract. It took for granted the existence of individual property, in consumption goods, in capital goods, and, with a certain hesitation, in land. The last assumption was not perhaps without misgivings: Adam Smith was disposed to look askance at landlords as men who gathered where they had not sown. John Stuart Mill, as is well known, was more and more inclined, with advancing reflection, to question the sanctity of landed property as the basis of social institutions. But for the most part property, contract and the coercive state were fundamental assumptions with the classicists. With this there went, on the psychological side, the further assumption of a general selfishness or self-seeking as the principal motive of the individual in the economic sphere. Oddly enough this assumption--the most warrantable of the lot--was the earliest to fall under disrepute. The plain assertion that every man looks out for himself (or at best for himself and his immediate family) touches the tender conscience of humanity. It is an unpalatable truth. None the less it is the most nearly true of all the broad generalizations that can be attempted in regard to mankind. The essential problem then of the classicists was to ask what would happen if an industrial community, possessed of the modern control over machinery and power, were allowed to follow the promptings of "enlightened selfishness" in an environment based upon free contract and the right of property in land and goods. The answer was of the most cheering description. The result would be a progressive amelioration of society, increasing in proportion to the completeness with which the fundamental principles involved were allowed to act, and tending ultimately towards something like a social millennium or perfection of human society. One easily recalls the almost reverent attitude of Adam Smith towards this system of industrial liberty which he exalted into a kind of natural theology: and the way in which Mill, a deist but not a Christian, was able to fit the whole apparatus of individual liberty into its place in an ordered universe. The world "runs of itself," said the economist. We have only to leave it alone. And the maxim of _laissez faire_ became the last word of social wisdom. The argument of the classicists ran thus. If there is everywhere complete economic freedom, then there will ensue in consequence a régime of social justice. If every man is allowed to buy and sell goods, labor and property, just as suits his own interest, then the prices and wages that result are either in the exact measure of social justice or, at least, are perpetually moving towards it. The price of any commodity at any moment is, it is true, a "market price," the resultant of the demand and the supply; but behind this operates continually the inexorable law of the cost of production. Sooner or later every price must represent the actual cost of producing the commodity concerned, or, at least, must oscillate now above and now below that point which it is always endeavoring to meet. For if temporary circumstances force the price well above the cost of producing the article in question, then the large profits to be made induce a greater and greater production. The increased volume of the supply thus produced inevitably forces down the price till it sinks to the point of cost. If circumstances (such, for example, as miscalculation and an over-great supply) depress the price below the point of cost, then the discouragement of further production presently shortens the supply and brings the price up again. Price is thus like an oscillating pendulum seeking its point of rest, or like the waves of the sea rising and falling about its level. By this same mechanism the quantity and direction of production, argued the economists, respond automatically to the needs of humanity, or, at least, to the "effective demand," which the classicist mistook for the same thing. Just as much wheat or bricks or diamonds would be produced as the world called for; to produce too much of any one thing was to violate a natural law; the falling price and the resulting temporary loss sternly rebuked the producer. In the same way the technical form and mechanism of production were presumed to respond to an automatic stimulus. Inventions and improved processes met their own reward. Labor, so it was argued, was perpetually being saved by the constant introduction of new uses of machinery. By a parity of reasoning, the shares received by all the participants and claimants in the general process of production were seen to be regulated in accordance with natural law. Interest on capital was treated merely as a particular case under the general theory of price. It was the purchase price needed to call forth the "saving" (a form, so to speak, of production) which brought the capital into the market. The "profits" of the employer represented the necessary price paid by society for his services, just enough and not more than enough to keep him and his fellows in operative activity, and always tending under the happy operation of competition to fall to the minimum consistent with social progress. Rent, the share of the land-owner, offered to the classicist a rather peculiar case. There was here a physical basis of surplus over cost. But, granted the operation of the factors and forces concerned, rent emerged as a differential payment to the fortunate owner of the soil. It did not in any way affect prices or wages, which were rendered neither greater nor less thereby. The full implication of the rent doctrine and its relation to social justice remained obscured to the eye of the classical economist; the fixed conviction that what a man owns is his own created a mist through which the light could not pass. Wages, finally, were but a further case of value. There was a demand for labor, represented by the capital waiting to remunerate it, and a supply of labor represented by the existing and increasing working class. Hence wages, like all other shares and factors, corresponded, so it was argued, to social justice. Whether wages were high or low, whether hours were long or short, at least the laborer like everybody else "got what was coming to him." All possibility of a general increase of wages depended on the relation of available capital to the numbers of the working men. Thus the system as applied to society at large could be summed up in the consoling doctrine that every man got what he was worth, and was worth what he got; that industry and energy brought their own reward; that national wealth and individual welfare were one and the same; that all that was needed for social progress was hard work, more machinery, more saving of labor and a prudent limitation of the numbers of the population. The application of such a system to legislation and public policy was obvious. It carried with it the principle of _laissez-faire_. The doctrine of international free trade, albeit the most conspicuous of its applications, was but one case under the general law. It taught that the mere organization of labor was powerless to raise wages; that strikes were of no avail, or could at best put a shilling into the pocket of one artisan by taking it out of that of another; that wages and prices could not be regulated by law; that poverty was to a large extent a biological phenomenon representing the fierce struggle of germinating life against the environment that throttles part of it. The poor were like the fringe of grass that fades or dies where it meets the sand of the desert. There could be no social remedy for poverty except the almost impossible remedy of the limitation of life itself. Failing this the economist could wash his hands of the poor. These are the days of relative judgments and the classical economy, like all else, must be viewed in the light of time and circumstance. With all its fallacies, or rather its shortcomings, it served a magnificent purpose. It opened a road never before trodden from social slavery towards social freedom, from the mediæval autocratic régime of fixed caste and hereditary status towards a régime of equal social justice. In this sense the classical economy was but the fruition, or rather represented the final consciousness of a process that had been going on for centuries, since the breakdown of feudalism and the emancipation of the serf. True, the goal has not been reached. The vision of the universal happiness seen by the economists has proved a mirage. The end of the road is not in sight. But it cannot be doubted that in the long pilgrimage of mankind towards social betterment the economists guided us in the right turning. If we turn again in a new direction, it will at any rate not be in the direction of a return to autocratic mediævalism. But when all is said in favor of its historic usefulness, the failures and the fallacies of natural liberty have now become so manifest that the system is destined in the coming era to be revised from top to bottom. It is to these failures and fallacies that attention will be drawn in the next chapter. _III.--The Failures and Fallacies of Natural Liberty_ THE rewards and punishments of the economic world are singularly unequal. One man earns as much in a week or even in a day as another does in a year. This man by hard, manual labor makes only enough to pay for humble shelter and plain food. This other by what seems a congenial activity, fascinating as a game of chess, acquires uncounted millions. A third stands idle in the market place asking in vain for work. A fourth lives upon rent, dozing in his chair, and neither toils nor spins. A fifth by the sheer hazard of a lucky "deal" acquires a fortune without work at all. A sixth, scorning to work, earns nothing and gets nothing; in him survives a primitive dislike of labor not yet fully "evoluted out;" he slips through the meshes of civilization to become a "tramp," cadges his food where he can, suns his tattered rags when it is warm and shivers when it is cold, migrating with the birds and reappearing with the flowers of spring. Yet all are free. This is the distinguishing mark of them as children of our era. They may work or stop. There is no compulsion from without. No man is a slave. Each has his "natural liberty," and each in his degree, great or small, receives his allotted reward. But is the allotment correct and the reward proportioned by his efforts? Is it fair or unfair, and does it stand for the true measure of social justice? This is the profound problem of the twentieth century. The economists and the leading thinkers of the nineteenth century were in no doubt about this question. It was their firm conviction that the system under which we live was, in its broad outline, a system of even justice. They held it true that every man under free competition and individual liberty is awarded just what he is worth and is worth exactly what he gets: that the reason why a plain laborer is paid only two or three dollars a day is because he only "produces" two or three dollars a day: and that why a skilled engineer is paid ten times as much is because he "produces" ten times as much. His work is "worth" ten times that of the plain laborer. By the same reasoning the salary of a corporation president who receives fifty thousand dollars a year merely reflects the fact that the man produces--earns--brings in to the corporation that amount or even more. The big salary corresponds to the big efficiency. And there is much in the common experience of life and the common conduct of business that seems to support this view. It is undoubtedly true if we look at any little portion of business activity taken as a fragment by itself. On the most purely selfish grounds I may find that it "pays" to hire an expert at a hundred dollars a day, and might find that it spelled ruin to attempt to raise the wages of my workingmen beyond four dollars a day. Everybody knows that in any particular business at any particular place and time with prices at any particular point, there is a wage that can be paid and a wage that can not. And everybody, or nearly everybody, bases on these obvious facts a series of entirely erroneous conclusions. Because we cannot change the part we are apt to think we cannot change the whole. Because one brick in the wall is immovable, we forget that the wall itself might be rebuilt. The single employer rightly knows that there is a wage higher than he can pay and hours shorter than he can grant. But are the limits that frame him in, real and necessary limits, resulting from the very nature of things, or are they mere products of particular circumstances? This, as a piece of pure economics, does not interest the individual employer a particle. It belongs in the same category as the question of the immortality of the soul and other profundities that have nothing to do with business. But to society at large the question is of an infinite importance. Now the older economists taught, and the educated world for about a century believed, that these limitations which hedged the particular employer about were fixed and assigned by natural economic law. They represented, as has been explained, the operation of the system of natural liberty by which every man got what he is worth. And it is quite true that the particular employer can no more break away from these limits than he can jump out of his own skin. He can only violate them at the expense of ceasing to be an economic being at all and degenerating into a philanthropist. But consider for a moment the peculiar nature of the limitations themselves. Every man's limit of what he can pay and what he can take, of how much he can offer and how much he will receive, is based on the similar limitations of other people. They are reciprocal to one another. Why should one factory owner not pay ten dollars a day to his hands? Because the others don't. But suppose they all do? Then the output could not be sold at the present price. But why not sell the produce at a higher price? Because at a higher price the consumer can't afford to buy it. But suppose that the consumer, for the things which he himself makes and sells, or for the work which he performs, receives more? What then? The whole thing begins to have a jigsaw look, like a child's toy rack with wooden soldiers on it, expanding and contracting. One searches in vain for the basis on which the relationship rests. And at the end of the analysis one finds nothing but a mere anarchical play of forces, nothing but a give-and-take resting on relative bargaining strength. Every man gets what he can and gives what he has to. Observe that this is not in the slightest the conclusion of the orthodox economists. Every man, they said, gets what he actually makes, or, by exchange, those things which exactly correspond to it as regards the cost of making them--which have, to use the key-word of the theory, the same value. Let us take a very simple example. If I go fishing with a net which I have myself constructed out of fibers and sticks, and if I catch a fish and if I then roast the fish over a fire which I have made without so much as the intervention of a lucifer match, then it is I and I alone who have "produced" the roast fish. That is plain enough. But what if I catch the fish by using a hired boat and a hired net, or by buying worms as bait from some one who has dug them? Or what if I do not fish at all, but get my roast fish by paying for it a part of the wages I receive for working in a saw mill? Here are a new set of relationships. How much of the fish is "produced" by each of the people concerned? And what part of my wages ought I to pay in return for the part of the fish that I buy? Here opens up, very evidently, a perfect labyrinth of complexity. But it was the labyrinth for which the earlier economist held, so he thought, the thread. No matter how dark the passage, he still clung tight to it. And his thread was his "fundamental equation of value" whereby each thing and everything is sold (or tends to be sold) under free competition for exactly its cost of production. There it was; as simple as A. B. C.; making the cost of everything proportional to the cost of everything else, and in itself natural and just; explaining and justifying the variations of wages and salaries on what seems a stern basis of fact. Here is your selling price as a starting point. Given that, you can see at once the reason for the wages paid and the full measure of the payment. To pay more is impossible. To pay less is to invite a competition that will force the payment of more. Or take, if you like, the wages as the starting point: there you are again,--simplicity itself: the selling price will exactly and nicely correspond to cost. True, a part of the cost concerned will be represented not by wages, but by cost of materials; but these, on analysis, dissolve into past wages. Hence the whole process and its explanation revolves around this simple fundamental equation that selling value equals the cost of production. This was the central part of the economic structure. It was the keystone of the arch. If it holds, all holds. Knock it out and the whole edifice falls into fragments. A technical student of the schools would digress here, to the great confusion of the reader, into a discussion of the controversy in the economic cloister between the rival schools of economists as to whether cost governs value or value governs cost. The point needs no discussion here, but just such fleeting passing mention as may indicate that the writer is well and wearily conversant with it. The fundamental equation of the economist, then, is that the value of everything is proportionate to its cost. It requires no little hardihood to say that this proposition is a fallacy. It lays one open at once, most illogically, to the charge of being a socialist. In sober truth it might as well lay one open to the charge of being an ornithologist. I will not, therefore, say that the proposition that the value of everything equals the cost of production is false. I will say that it is _true_; in fact, that is just as true as that two and two make four: exactly as true as that, but let it be noted most profoundly, _only as true as that_. In other words, it is a truism, mere equation in terms, telling nothing whatever. When I say that two and two make four I find, after deep thought, that I have really said _nothing_, or nothing that was not already said at the moment I defined two and defined four. The new statement that two and two make four adds nothing. So with the majestic equation of the cost of production. It means, as far as social application goes, as far as any moral significance or bearing on social reform and the social outlook goes, _absolutely nothing_. It is not in itself fallacious; how could it be? But all the social inferences drawn from it are absolute, complete and malicious fallacies. Any socialist who says this, is quite right. Where he goes wrong is when he tries to build up as truth a set of inferences more fallacious and more malicious still. But the central economic doctrine of cost can not be shaken by mere denunciation. Let us examine it and see what is the matter with it. We restate the equation. _Under perfectly free competition the value or selling price of everything equals, or is perpetually tending to equal, the cost of its production._ This is the proposition itself, and the inferences derived from it are that there is a "natural price" of everything, and that all "natural prices" are proportionate to cost and to one another; that all wages, apart from temporary fluctuations, are derived from, and limited by, the natural prices paid for the things made: that all payments for the use of capital (interest) are similarly derived and similarly limited; and that consequently the whole economic arrangement, by giving to each person exactly and precisely the fruit of his own labor, conforms exactly to social justice. Now the trouble with the main proposition just quoted is that each side of the equation is used as the measure of the other. In order to show what natural price is, we add up all the wages that have been paid, and declare that to be the cost and then say that the cost governs the price. Then if we are asked why are wages what they are, we turn the argument backward and say that since the selling price is so and so the wages that can be paid out of it only amount to such and such. This explains nothing. It is a mere argument in a circle. It is as if one tried to explain why one blade of a pair of scissors is four inches long by saying that it has to be the same length as the other. This is quite true of either blade if one takes the length of the other for granted, but as applied to the explanation of the length of the scissors it is worse than meaningless. This reasoning may seem to many persons mere casuistry, mere sophistical juggling with words. After all, they say, there is such a thing as relative cost, relative difficulty of making things, a difference which rests upon a physical basis. To make one thing requires a lot of labor and trouble and much skill: to make another thing requires very little labor and no skill out of the common. Here then is your basis of value, obvious and beyond argument. A primitive savage makes a bow and arrow in a day: it takes him a fortnight to make a bark canoe. On that fact rests the exchange value between the two. The relative quantity of labor embodied in each object is the basis of its value. This line of reasoning has a very convincing sound. It appears in nearly every book on economic theory from Adam Smith and Ricardo till to-day. "Labor alone," wrote Smith, "never varying in its own value is above the ultimate and real standard by which the value of all commodities can at all times and places be estimated and compared." But the idea that _quantity of labor governs_ value will not stand examination for a moment. What is _quantity_ of labor and how is it measured? As long as we draw our illustrations from primitive life where one man's work is much the same as another's and where all operations are simple, we seem easily able to measure and compare. One day is the same as another and one man about as capable as his fellow. But in the complexity of modern industrial life such a calculation no longer applies: the differences of skill, of native ingenuity, and technical preparation become enormous. The hour's work of a common laborer is not the same thing as the hour's work of a watchmaker mending a watch, or of an engineer directing the building of a bridge, or of an architect drawing a plan. There is no way of reducing these hours to a common basis. We may think, if we like, that the quantity of labor _ought_ to be the basis of value and exchange. Such is always the dream of the socialist. But on a closer view it is shattered like any other dream. For we have, alas, no means of finding out what the quantity of labor is and how it can be measured. We cannot measure it in terms of time. We have no calculus for comparing relative amounts of skill and energy. We can not measure it by the amount of its contribution to the product, for that is the very matter that we want to discover. What the economist does is to slip out of the difficulty altogether by begging the whole question. He deliberately measures the quantity of labor _by what is paid for it_. Skilled labor is worth, let us say, three times as much as common labor; and brain work, speaking broadly, is worth several times as much again. Hence by adding up all the wages and salaries paid we get something that seems to indicate the total quantity of labor, measured not simply in time, but with an allowance for skill and technical competency. By describing this allowance as a coefficient we can give our statement a false air of mathematical certainty and so muddle up the essential question that the truth is lost from sight like a pea under a thimble. Now you see it and now you don't. The thing is, in fact, a mere piece of intellectual conjuring. The conjurer has slipped the phrase, "quantity of labor," up his sleeve, and when it reappears it has turned into "the expense of hiring labor." This is a quite different thing. But as both conceptions are related somehow to the idea of cost, the substitution is never discovered. On this false basis a vast structure is erected. All prices, provided that competition is free, are made to appear as the necessary result of natural forces. They are "natural" or "normal" prices. All wages are explained, and low wages are exonerated, on what seems to be an undeniable ground of fact. They are what they are. You may wish them otherwise, but they are not. As a philanthropist, you may feel sorry that a humble laborer should work through a long day to receive two dollars, but as an economist you console yourself with the reflection that that is all he produces. You may at times, as a sentimentalist, wonder whether the vast sums drawn as interest on capital are consistent with social fairness; but if it is shown that interest is simply the "natural price" of capital representing the actual "productive power" of the capital, there is nothing further to say. You may have similar qualms over rent and the rightness and wrongness of it. The enormous "unearned increment" that accrues for the fortunate owner of land who toils not neither spins to obtain it, may seem difficult of justification. But after all, land is only one particular case of ownership under the one and the same system. The rent for which the owner can lease it, emerges simply as a consequence of the existing state of wages and prices. High rent, says the economist, does not make big prices: it merely follows as a consequence or result of them. Dear bread is not caused by the high rents paid by tenant farmers for the land: the train of cause and effect runs in the contrary direction. And the selling price of land is merely a consequence of its rental value, a simple case of capitalization of annual return into a present sum. City land, though it looks different from farm land, is seen in the light of this same analysis, to earn its rent in just the same way. The high rent of a Broadway store, says the economist, does not add a single cent to the price of the things sold in it. It is because prices are what they are that the rent is and can be paid. Hence on examination the same canon of social justice that covers and explains prices, wages, and interest applies with perfect propriety to rent. Or finally, to take the strongest case of all, one may, as a citizen, feel apprehension at times at the colossal fortune of a Carnegie or a Rockefeller. For it does seem passing strange that one human being should control as property the mass of coin, goods, houses, factories, land and mines, represented by a billion dollars; stranger still that at his death he should write upon a piece of paper his commands as to what his surviving fellow creatures are to do with it. But if it can be shown to be true that Mr. Rockefeller "made" his fortune in the same sense that a man makes a log house by felling trees and putting them one upon another, then the fortune belongs to Mr. Rockefeller in the same way as the log house belongs to the pioneer. And if the social inferences that are drawn from the theory of natural liberty and natural value are correct, the millionaire and the landlord, the plutocrat and the pioneer, the wage earner and the capitalist, have each all the right to do what he will with his own. For every man in this just world gets what is coming to him. He gets what he is worth, and he is worth what he gets. But if one knocks out the keystone of the arch in the form of a proposition that natural value conforms to the cost of production, then the whole edifice collapses and must be set up again, upon another plan and on another foundation, stone by stone. _IV.--Work and Wages_ WAGES and prices, then, if the argument recited in the preceding chapter of this series holds good, do not under free competition tend towards social justice. It is not true that every man gets what he produces. It is not true that enormous salaries represent enormous productive services and that humble wages correspond to a humble contribution to the welfare of society. Prices, wages, salaries, interest, rent and profits do not, if left to themselves, follow the simple law of natural justice. To think so is an idle dream, the dream of the quietist who may slumber too long and be roused to a rude awakening or perish, perhaps, in his sleep. His dream is not so dangerous as the contrasted dream of the socialist, now threatening to walk abroad in his sleep, but both in their degree are dreams and nothing more. The real truth is that prices and wages and all the various payments from hand to hand in industrial society, are the outcome of a complex of competing forces that are not based upon justice but upon "economic strength." To elucidate this it is necessary to plunge into the jungle of pure economic theory. The way is arduous. There are no flowers upon the path. And out of this thicket, alas, no two people ever emerge hand in hand in concord. Yet it is a path that must be traversed. Let us take, then, as a beginning the very simplest case of the making of a price. It is the one which is sometimes called in books on economics the case of an unique monopoly. Suppose that I offer for sale the manuscript of the Pickwick Papers, or Shakespere's skull, or, for the matter of that, the skull of John Smith, what is the sum that I shall receive for it? It is the utmost that any one is willing to give for it. That is all one can say about it. There is no question here of cost or what I paid for the article or of anything else except the amount of the willingness to pay on the part of the highest bidder. It would be possible, indeed, for a bidder to take the article from me by force. But this we presume to be prevented by the law, and for this reason we referred above not to the physical strength, but to the "economic strength" of the parties to a bargain. By this is meant the relation that arises out of the condition of the supply and the demand, the willingness or eagerness, or the sheer necessity, of the buyers and the sellers. People may offer much because the thing to be acquired is an absolute necessity without which they perish; a drowning man would sell all that he had for a life belt. Or they may offer much through the sheer abundance of their other possessions. A millionaire might offer more for a life belt as a souvenir than a drowning man could pay for it to save his life. Yet out of any particular conjunction between desires on the one hand and goods or services on the other arises a particular equation of demand and supply, represented by a particular price. All of this, of course, is A. B. C., and I am not aware that anybody doubts it. Now let us make the example a little more elaborate. Suppose that one single person owned all the food supply of a community isolated from the outside world. The price which he could exact would be the full measure of all the possessions of his neighbors up to the point at least where they would commit suicide rather than pay. True, in such a case as this, "economic strength" would probably be broken down by the intrusion of physical violence. But in so far as it held good the price of food would be based upon it. Prices such as are indicated here were dismissed by the earlier economist as mere economic curiosities. John Stuart Mill has something to say about the price of a "music box in the wilds of Lake Superior," which, as he perceived, would not be connected with the expense of producing it, but might be vastly more or perhaps decidedly less. But Mill might have said the same thing about the price of a music box, provided it was properly patented, anywhere at all. For the music box and Shakespere's skull and the corner in wheat are all merely different kinds of examples of the things called a monopoly sale. Now let us change the example a little further. Suppose that the monopolist has for sale not simply a fixed and definite quantity of a certain article, but something which he can produce in larger quantities as desired. At what price will he now sell? If he offers the article at a very high price only a few people will take it: if he lowers the price there will be more and more purchasers. His interest seems divided. He will want to put the price as high as possible so that the profit on each single article (over what it costs him to produce it) will be as great as possible. But he will also want to make as many sales as he possibly can, which will induce him to set the price low enough to bring in new buyers. But, of course, if he puts the price so low that it only covers the cost of making the goods his profit is all gone and the mere multiplicity of sales is no good to him. He must try therefore to find a point of maximum profit where, having in view both the number of sales and the profit over cost on each sale the net profit is at its greatest. This gives us the fundamental law of monopoly price. It is to be noted that under modern conditions of production the cost of manufacture per article decreases to a great extent in proportion as a larger and larger number is produced and thus the widening of the sale lowers the proportionate cost. In any particular case, therefore, it may turn out that the price that suits the monopolist's own interest is quite a low price, one such as to allow for an enormous quantity of sales and a very low cost of manufacture. This, we say, _may_ be the case. But it is not so of necessity. In and of itself the monopoly price corresponds to the monopolist's profit and not to cheapness of sale. The price _may_ be set far above the cost. And now notice the peculiar relation that is set up between the monopolist's production and the satisfaction of human wants. In proportion as the quantity produced is increased the lower must the price be set in order to sell the whole output. If the monopolist insisted on turning out more and more of his goods, the price that people would give would fall until it barely covered the cost, then till it was less than cost, then to a mere fraction of the cost and finally to nothing at all. In other words, if one produces a large enough quantity of anything it becomes worthless. It loses all its value just as soon as there is enough of it to satisfy, and over-satisfy the wants of humanity. Thus if the world produces three and a half billion bushels of wheat it can be sold, let us say, at two dollars a bushel; but if it produced twice as much it might well be found that it would only sell for fifty cents a bushel. The value of the bigger supply as a total would actually be less than that of the smaller. And if the supply were big enough it would be worth, in the economic sense, just nothing at all. This peculiarity is spoken of in economic theory as the paradox of value. It is referred to in the older books either as an economic curiosity or as a mere illustration in extreme terms of the relation of supply to price. Thus in many books the story is related of how the East India Companies used at times deliberately to destroy a large quantity of tea in order that by selling a lesser amount they might reap a larger profit than by selling a greater. But in reality this paradox of value is the most fundamental proposition in economic science. Precisely here is found the key to the operation of the economic society in which we live. The world's production is aimed at producing "values," not in producing plenty. If by some mad access of misdirected industry we produced enough and too much of everything, our whole machinery of buying and selling would break down. This indeed does happen constantly on a small scale in the familiar phenomenon of over-production. But in the organization in which we live over-production tends to check itself at once. If the world's machinery threatens to produce a too great plenty of any particular thing, then it turns itself towards producing something else of which there is not yet enough. This is done quite unconsciously without any philanthropic intent on the part of the individual producer and without any general direction in the way of a social command. The machine does it of itself. When there is _enough_ the wheels slacken and stop. This sounds at first hearing most admirable. But let it be noted that the "_enough_" here in question does not mean enough to satisfy human wants. In fact it means precisely the converse. It means enough _not_ to satisfy them, and to leave the selling price of the things made at the point of profit. Let it be observed also that we have hitherto been speaking as if all things were produced under a monopoly. The objection might at once be raised that with competitive producers the price will also keep falling down towards cost and will not be based upon the point of maximum profit. We shall turn to this objection in a moment. But one or two other points must be considered before doing so. In the first place in following out such an argument as the present in regard to the peculiar shortcomings of the system under which we live, it is necessary again and again to warn the reader against a hasty conclusion to the possibilities of altering and amending it. The socialist reads such criticism as the above with impatient approval. "Very well," he says, "the whole organization is wrong and works badly. Now let us abolish it altogether and make a better one." But in doing so he begs the whole question at issue. The point is, _can_ we make a better one or must we be content with patching up the old one? Take an illustration. Scientists tell us that from the point of view of optics the human eye is a clumsy instrument poorly contrived for its work. A certain great authority once said that if he had made it he would have been ashamed of it. This may be true. But the eye unfortunately is all we have to see by. If we destroy our eyes in the hope of making better ones we may go blind. The best that we can do is to improve our sight by adding a pair of spectacles. So it is with the organization of society. Faulty though it is, it does the work after a certain fashion. We may apply to it with advantage the spectacles of social reform, but what the socialist offers us is total blindness. But of this presently. To return to the argument. Let us consider next what wages the monopolist in the cases described above will have to pay. We take for granted that he will only pay as much as he has to. How much will this be? Clearly enough it will depend altogether on the number of available working men capable of doing the work in question and the situation in which they find themselves. It is again a case of relative "economic strength." The situation may be altogether in favor of the employer or altogether in favor of the men, or may occupy a middle ground. If the men are so numerous that there are more of them than are needed for the work, and if there is no other occupation for them they must accept a starvation wage. If they are so few in number that they can _all_ be employed, and if they are so well organized as to act together, they can in their turn exact any wage up to the point that leaves no profit for the employer himself at all. Indeed for a short time wages might even pass this point, the monopolist employer being willing (for various reasons, all quite obvious) actually to pay more as wages than he gets as return and to carry on business at a loss for the sake of carrying it on at all. Clearly, then, wages, as Adam Smith said, "are the result of a dispute" in which either party must be pushed to the wall. The employer may have to pay so much that there is nothing or practically nothing left for himself, or so little that his workmen can just exist and no more. These are the upward and downward limits of the wages in the cases described. It is therefore obvious that if all the industries in the world were carried on as a series of separate monopolies, there would be exactly the kind of rivalry or competition of forces represented by the consumer insisting on paying as little as possible, the producer charging the most profitable price and paying the lowest wage that he could, and the wage earner demanding the highest wage that he could get. The equilibrium would be an unstable one. It would be constantly displaced and shifted by the movement of all sorts of social forces--by changes of fashion, by abundance or scarcity of crops, by alterations in the technique of industry and by the cohesion or the slackening of the organization of any group of workers. But the balanced forces once displaced would be seen constantly to come to an equilibrium at a new point. All this has been said of industry under monopoly. But it will be seen to apply in its essentials to what we call competitive industry. Here indeed certain new features come in. Not one employer but many produce each kind of article. And, as far as each employer can see by looking at his own horizon, what he does is merely to produce as much as he can sell at a price that pays him. Since all the other employers are doing this, there will be, under competition, a constant tendency to cut the prices down to the lowest that is consistent with what the employer has to pay as wages and interest. This point, which was called by the orthodox economists the "cost," is not in any true and fundamental sense of the words the "cost" at all. It is merely a limit represented by what the other parties to the bargain are able to exact. The whole situation is in a condition of unstable equilibrium in which the conflicting forces represented by the interests of the various parties pull in different directions. The employers in any one line of industry and all their wage earners and salaried assistants have one and the same interest as against the consumer. They want the selling price to be as high as possible. But the employers are against one another as wanting, each of them, to make as many sales as possible, and each and all the employers are against the wage earners in wanting to pay as low wages as possible. If all the employers unite, the situation turns to a monopoly, and the price paid by the consumer is settled on the monopoly basis already described. The employers can then dispute it out with their working men as to how much wages shall be. If the employers are not united, then at each and every moment they are in conflict both with the consumer and with their wage earners. Thus the whole scene of industry represents a vast and unending conflict, a fermentation in which the moving bubbles crowd for space, expanding and breaking one against the other. There is no point of rest. There is no real fixed "cost" acting as a basis. Anything that any one person or group of persons--worker or master, landlord or capitalist--is able to exact owing to the existing conditions of demand or supply, becomes a "cost" from the point of view of all the others. There is nothing in this "cost" which proportions to it the quantity of labor, or of time, or of skill or of any other measure physical or psychological of the effort involved. And there is nothing whatever in it which proportions to it social justice. It is the war of each against all. Its only mitigation is that it is carried on under the set of rules represented by the state and the law. The tendencies involved may be best illustrated by taking one or two extreme or exaggerated examples, not meant as facts but only to make clear the nature of social and industrial forces among which we live. What, for example, will be the absolute maximum to which wages in general could be forced? Conceivably and in the purest and thinnest of theory, they could include the whole product of the labor of society with just such a small fraction left over for the employers, the owners of capital and the owners of land to induce them to continue acting as part of the machine. That is to say, if all the laborers all over the world, to the last one, were united under a single control they could force the other economic classes of society to something approaching a starvation living. In practice this is nonsense. In theory it is an excellent starting point for thought. And how short could the hours of the universal united workers be made? As short as ever they liked: An hour a day: ten minutes, anything they like; but of course with the proviso that the shorter the hours the less the total of things produced to be divided. It is true that up to a certain point shortening the hours of labor actually increases the total product. A ten-hour day, speaking in general terms and leaving out individual exceptions, is probably more productive than a day of twelve. It may very well be that an eight-hour day will prove, presently if not immediately, to be more productive than one of ten. But somewhere the limit is reached and gross production falls. The supply of things in general gets shorter. But note that this itself would not matter much, if somehow and in some way not yet found, the shortening of the production of goods cut out the luxuries and superfluities first. Mankind at large might well trade leisure for luxuries. The shortening of hours with the corresponding changes in the direction of production is really the central problem in social reform. I propose to return to it in the concluding chapter of these papers, but for the present it is only noted in connection with the general scheme of industrial relations. Now let us ask to what extent any particular section or part of industrial society can succeed in forcing up wages or prices as against the others. In pure theory they may do this almost to any extent, provided that the thing concerned is a necessity and is without a substitute and provided that their organization is complete and unbreakable. If all the people concerned in producing coal, masters and men, owners of mines and operators of machinery, could stand out for their price, there is no limit, short of putting all the rest of the world on starvation rations, to what they might get. In practice and in reality a thousand things intervene--the impossibility of such complete unity, the organization of the other parties, the existing of national divisions among industrial society, sentiment, decency, fear. The proposition is only "pure theory." But its use as such is to dispose of any such idea as that there is a natural price of coal or of anything else. The above is true of any article of necessity. It is true though in a less degree of things of luxury. If all the makers of instruments of music, masters and men, capitalists and workers, were banded together in a tight and unbreakable union, then the other economic classes must either face the horrors of a world without pianolas and trombones, or hand over the price demanded. And what is true of coal and music is true all through the whole mechanism of industry. Or take the supreme case of the owners of land. If all of them acted together, with their legal rights added into one, they could order the rest of the world either to get off it or to work at starvation wages. Industrial society is therefore mobile, elastic, standing at any moment in a temporary and unstable equilibrium. But at any particular moment the possibility of a huge and catastrophic shift such as those described is out of the question except at the price of a general collapse. Even a minor dislocation breaks down a certain part of the machinery of society. Particular groups of workers are thrown out of place. There is no other place where they can fit in, or at any rate not immediately. The machine labors heavily. Ominous mutterings are heard. The legal framework of the State and of obedience to the law in which industrial society is set threatens to break asunder. The attempt at social change threatens a social revolution in which the whole elaborate mechanism would burst into fragments. In any social movement, then, change and alteration in a new direction must be balanced against the demands of social stability. Some things are possible and some are not; some are impossible to-day, and possible or easy to-morrow. Others are forever out of the question. But this much at least ought to appear clear if the line of argument indicated above is accepted, namely, that there is no great hope for universal betterment of society by the mere advance of technical industrial progress and by the unaided play of the motive of every man for himself. The enormous increase in the productivity of industrial effort would never of itself have elevated by one inch the lot of the working class. The rise of wages in the nineteenth century and the shortening of hours that went with it was due neither to the advance in mechanical power nor to the advance in diligence and industriousness, nor to the advance, if there was any, in general kindliness. It was due to the organization of labor. Mechanical progress makes higher wages possible. It does not, of itself, advance them by a single farthing. Labor saving machinery does not of itself save the working world a single hour of toil: it only shifts it from one task to another. Against a system of unrestrained individualism, energy, industriousness and honesty might shatter itself in vain. The thing is merely a race in which only one can be first no matter how great the speed of all; a struggle in which one, and not all, can stand upon the shoulders of the others. It is the restriction of individualism by the force of organization and by legislation that has brought to the world whatever social advance has been achieved by the great mass of the people. The present moment is in a sense the wrong time to say this. We no longer live in an age when down-trodden laborers meet by candlelight with the ban of the law upon their meeting. These are the days when "labor" is triumphant, and when it ever threatens in the overweening strength of its own power to break industrial society in pieces in the fierce attempt to do in a day what can only be done in a generation. But truth is truth. And any one who writes of the history of the progress of industrial society owes it to the truth to acknowledge the vast social achievement of organized labor in the past. And what of the future? By what means and in what stages can social progress be further accelerated? This I propose to treat in the succeeding chapters, dealing first with the proposals of the socialists and the revolutionaries, and finally with the prospect for a sane, orderly and continuous social reform. _V.--The Land of Dreams: The Utopia of the Socialist_ WHO is there that has not turned at times from the fever and fret of the world we live in, from the spectacle of its wasted energy, its wild frenzy of work and its bitter inequality, to the land of dreams, to the pictured vision of the world as it might be? Such a vision has haunted in all ages the brooding mind of mankind; and every age has fashioned for itself the image of a "somewhere" or "nowhere"--a Utopia in which there should be equality and justice for all. The vision itself is an outcome of that divine discontent which raises man above his environment. Every age has had its socialism, its communism, its dream of bread and work for all. But the dream has varied always in the likeness of the thought of the time. In earlier days the dream was not one of social wealth. It was rather a vision of the abnegation of riches, of humble possessions shared in common after the manner of the unrealized ideal of the Christian faith. It remained for the age of machinery and power to bring forth another and a vastly more potent socialism. This was no longer a plan whereby all might be poor together, but a proposal that all should be rich together. The collectivist state advocated by the socialist of to-day has scarcely anything in common with the communism of the middle ages. Modern socialism is the direct outcome of the age of machine production. It takes its first inspiration from glaring contrasts between riches and poverty presented by the modern era, from the strange paradox that has been described above between human power and its failure to satisfy human want. The nineteenth century brought with it the factory and the factory slavery of the Lancashire children, the modern city and city slum, the plutocracy and the proletariat, and all the strange discrepancy between wealth and want that has disfigured the material progress of the last hundred years. The rising splendor of capitalism concealed from the dazzled eye the melancholy spectacle of the new industrial poverty that lay in the shadow behind it. The years that followed the close of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 were in many senses years of unexampled misery. The accumulated burden of the war lay heavy upon Europe. The rise of the new machine power had dislocated the older system. A multitude of landless men clamored for bread and work. Pauperism spread like a plague. Each new invention threw thousands of hand-workers out of employment. The law still branded as conspiracy any united attempt of workingmen to raise wages or to shorten the hours of work. At the very moment when the coming of steam power and the use of modern machinery were piling up industrial fortunes undreamed of before, destitution, pauperism and unemployment seemed more widespread and more ominous than ever. In this rank atmosphere germinated modern socialism. The writings of Marx and Engels and Louis Blanc were inspired by what they saw about them. From its very cradle socialism showed the double aspect which has distinguished it ever since. To the minds of some it was the faith of the insurrectionist, something to be achieved by force; "bourgeois" society must be overthrown by force of arms; if open and fair fighting was not possible against such great odds, it must be blown skyhigh with gunpowder. Dynamite, by the good fortune of invention, came to the revolutionary at the very moment when it was most wanted. To the men of violence, socialism was the twin brother of anarchism, born at the same time, advocating the same means and differing only as to the final end. But to others, socialism was from the beginning, as it is to-day, a creed of peace. It advocated the betterment of society not by violence but by persuasion, by peaceful argument and the recognized rule of the majority. It is true that the earlier socialists almost to a man included, in the first passion of their denunciation, things not necessarily within the compass of purely economic reform. As children of misery they cried out against all human institutions. The bond of marriage seemed an accursed thing, the mere slavery of women. The family--the one institution in which the better side of human nature shines with an undimmed light--was to them but an engine of class oppression; the Christian churches merely the parasitic servants of the tyrannous power of a plutocratic state. The whole history of human civilization was denounced as an unredeemed record of the spoliation of the weak by the strong. Even the domain of the philosopher was needlessly invaded and all forms of speculative belief were rudely thrown aside in favor of a wooden materialism as dogmatic as any of the creeds or theories which it proposed to replace. Thus seen, socialism appeared as the very antithesis of law and order, of love and chastity, and of religion itself. It was a tainted creed. There was blood upon its hands and bloody menace in its thoughts. It was a thing to be stamped out, to be torn up by the roots. The very soil in which it grew must be burned out with the flame of avenging justice. Such it still appears to many people to-day. The unspeakable savagery of bolshevism has made good the wildest threats of the partisans of violence and fulfilled the sternest warnings of the conservative. To-day more than ever socialism is in danger of becoming a proscribed creed, its very name under the ban of the law, its literature burned by the hangman and a gag placed upon its mouth. But this is neither right nor wise. Socialism, like every other impassioned human effort, will flourish best under martyrdom. It will languish and perish in the dry sunlight of open discussion. For it must always be remembered in fairness that the creed of violence has no necessary connection with socialism. In its essential nature socialism is nothing but a proposal for certain kinds of economic reform. A man has just as much right to declare himself a socialist as he has to call himself a Seventh Day Adventist or a Prohibitionist, or a Perpetual Motionist. It is, or should be, open to him to convert others to his way of thinking. It is only time to restrain him when he proposes to convert others by means of a shotgun or by dynamite, and by forcible interference with their own rights. When he does this he ceases to be a socialist pure and simple and becomes a criminal as well. The law can deal with him as such. But with socialism itself the law, in a free country, should have no kind of quarrel. For in the whole program of peaceful socialism there is nothing wrong at all except one thing. Apart from this it is a high and ennobling ideal truly fitted for a community of saints. And the one thing that is wrong with socialism is that it won't work. That is all. It is, as it were, a beautiful machine of which the wheels, dependent upon some unknown and uninvented motive power, refuse to turn. The unknown motive force in this case means a power of altruism, of unselfishness, of willingness to labor for the good of others, such as the human race has never known, nor is ever likely to know. But the worst public policy to pursue in reference to such a machine is to lock it up, to prohibit all examination of it and to allow it to become a hidden mystery, the whispered hope of its martyred advocates. Better far to stand it out into the open daylight, to let all who will inspect it, and to prove even to the simplest that such a contrivance once and for all and for ever cannot be made to run. Let us turn to examine the machine. We may omit here all discussion of the historical progress of socialism and the stages whereby it changed from the creed of a few theorists and revolutionists to being the accepted platform of great political parties, counting its adherents by the million. All of this belongs elsewhere. It suffices here to note that in the process of its rise it has chafed away much of the superfluous growth that clung to it and has become a purely economic doctrine. There is no longer any need to discuss in connection with it the justification of marriage and the family, and the rightness or wrongness of Christianity: no need to decide whether the materialistic theory of history is true or false, since nine socialists out of ten to-day have forgotten, or have never heard, what the materialistic theory of history is: no need to examine whether human history is, or is not, a mere record of class exploitation, since the controversy has long shifted to other grounds. The essential thing to-day is not the past, but the future. The question is, what does the socialist have to say about the conditions under which we live and the means that he advocates for the betterment of them? His case stands thus. He begins his discussion with an indictment of the manifold weaknesses and the obvious injustices of the system under which we live. And in this the socialist is very largely right. He shows that under free individual competition there is a perpetual waste of energy. Competing rivals cover the same field. Even the simplest services are performed with an almost ludicrous waste of energy. In every modern city the milk supply is distributed by erratic milkmen who skip from door to door and from street to street, covering the same ground, each leaving his cans of milk here and there in a sporadic fashion as haphazard as a bee among the flowers. Contrast, says the socialist, the wasted labors of the milkman with the orderly and systematic performance of the postman, himself a little fragment of socialism. And the milkman, they tell us, is typical of modern industrial society. Competing railways run trains on parallel tracks, with empty cars that might be filled and with vast executive organizations which do ten times over the work that might be done by one. Competing stores needlessly occupy the time of hundreds of thousands of employees in a mixture of idleness and industry. An inconceivable quantity of human effort is spent on advertising, mere shouting and display, as unproductive in the social sense as the beating of a drum. Competition breaks into a dozen inefficient parts the process that might conceivably be carried out, with an infinite saving of effort, by a single guiding hand. The socialist looking thus at the world we live in sees in it nothing but waste and selfishness and inefficiency. He looks so long that a mist comes before his eyes. He loses sight of the supreme fact that after all, in its own poor, clumsy fashion, the machine does work. He loses sight of the possibility of our falling into social chaos. He sees no longer the brink of the abyss beside which the path of progress picks its painful way. He leaps with a shout of exultation over the cliff. And he lands, at least in imagination, in his ideal state, his Utopia. Here the noise and clamor of competitive industry is stilled. We look about us at a peaceful landscape where men and women brightly clothed and abundantly fed and warmed, sing at their easy task. There is enough for all and more than enough. Poverty has vanished. Want is unknown. The children play among the flowers. The youths and maidens are at school. There are no figures here bent with premature toil, no faces dulled and furrowed with a life of hardship. The light of education and culture has shone full on every face and illuminated it into all that it might be. The cheerful hours of easy labor vary but do not destroy the pursuit of pleasure and of recreation. Youth in such a Utopia is a very springtime of hope: adult life a busy and cheery activity: and age itself, watching from its shady bench beneath a spreading tree the labors of its children, is but a gentle retrospect from which material care has passed away. It is a picture beautiful as the opalescent colors of a soap bubble. It is the vision of a garden of Eden from which the demon has been banished. And the Demon in question is the Private Ownership of the Means of Production. His name is less romantic than those of the wonted demons of legend and folklore. But it is at least suitable for the matter-of-fact age of machinery which he is supposed to haunt and on which he casts his evil spell. Let him be once exorcised and the ills of humanity are gone. And the exorcism, it appears, is of the simplest. Let this demon once feel the contact of state ownership of the means of production and his baneful influence will vanish into thin air as his mediæval predecessors did at the touch of a thimbleful of holy water. This, then, is the socialist's program. Let "the state" take over all the means of production--all the farms, the mines, the factories, the workshops, the ships, the railroads. Let it direct the workers towards their task in accordance with the needs of society. Let each labor for all in the measure of his strength and talent. Let each receive from all in the measure of his proper needs. No work is to be wasted: nothing is to be done twice that need only be done once. All must work and none must be idle: but the amount of work needed under these conditions will be so small, the hours so short, and the effort so slight, that work itself will no longer be the grinding monotonous toil that we know to-day, but a congenial activity pleasant in itself. A thousand times this picture has been presented. The visionary with uplifted eyes, his gaze bent on the bright colors of the floating bubble, has voiced it from a thousand platforms. The earnest youth grinding at the academic mill has dreamed it in the pauses of his studious labor. The impassioned pedant has written it in heavy prose smothering its brightness in the dull web of his own thought. The brilliant imaginative mind has woven it into romance, making its colors brighter still with the sunlight of inspired phantasy. But never, I think, has the picture of socialism at work been so ably and so dexterously presented as in a book that begins to be forgotten now, but which some thirty years ago took the continent by storm. This was the volume in which Mr. Edward Bellamy "looked backward" from his supposed point of vantage in the year 2000 A. D. and saw us as we are and as we shall be. No two plans of a socialist state are ever quite alike. But the scheme of society outlined in "Looking Backward" may be examined as the most attractive and the most consistent outline of a socialist state that has, within the knowledge of the present writer, ever been put forward. It is worth while, in the succeeding chapter to examine it in detail. No better starting point for the criticism of collectivist theories can be found than in a view of the basis on which is supposed to rest the halcyon life of Mr. Bellamy's charming commonwealth. _VI.--How Mr. Bellamy Looked Backward_ THE reading public is as wayward and as fickle as a bee among the flowers. It will not long pause anywhere, and it easily leaves each blossom for a better. But like the bee, while impelled by an instinct that makes it search for sugar, it sucks in therewith its solid sustenance. I am not quite certain that the bee does exactly do this; but it is just the kind of thing that the bee is likely to do. And in any case it is precisely the thing which the reading public does. It will not read unless it is tempted by the sugary sweetness of the romantic interest. It must have its hero and its heroine and its course of love that never will run smooth. For information the reader cares nothing. If he absorbs it, it must be by accident, and unawares. He passes over the heavy tomes filled with valuable fact, and settles like the random bee upon the bright flowers of contemporary romance. Hence if the reader is to be ensnared into absorbing something useful, it must be hidden somehow among the flowers. A treatise on religion must be disguised as a love story in which a young clergyman, sworn into holy orders, falls in love with an actress. The facts of history are imparted by a love story centering around the adventures of a hitherto unknown son of Louis the Fourteenth. And a discussion of the relations of labor and capital takes the form of a romance in which the daughter of a multi-millionaire steps voluntarily out of her Fifth Avenue home to work in a steam laundry. Such is the recognized method by which the great unthinking public is taught to think. Slavery was not fully known till Mrs. Stowe wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and the slow tyranny of the law's delay was taught to the world for ever in the pages of "Bleak House." So it has been with socialism. No single influence ever brought its ideas and its propaganda so forcibly and clearly before the public mind as Mr. Edward Bellamy's brilliant novel, "Looking Backward," published some thirty years ago. The task was arduous. Social and economic theory is heavy to the verge of being indigestible. There is no such thing as a gay book on political economy for reading in a hammock. Yet Mr. Bellamy succeeded. His book is in cold reality nothing but a series of conversations explaining how a socialist commonwealth is supposed to work. Yet he contrives to bring into it a hero and a heroine, and somehow the warm beating of their hearts and the stolen glances in their eyes breathe into the dry dust of economic argument the breath of life. Nor was ever a better presentation made of the essential program of socialism. It is worth while then, as was said in the preceding chapter, to consider Mr. Bellamy's commonwealth as the most typical and the most carefully constructed of all the ready-made socialisms that have been put forward. The mere machinery of the story can be lightly passed over. It is intended simply as the sugar that lures the random bee. The hero, living in Boston in 1887, is supposed to fall asleep in a deep, underground chamber which he has made for himself as a remedy against a harassing insomnia. Unknown to the sleeper the house above his retreat is burned down. He remains in a trance for a hundred and thirteen years and awakes to find himself in the Boston of the year 2000 A. D. Kind hands remove him from his sepulcher. He is revived. He finds himself under the care of a certain learned and genial Dr. Leete, whose house stands on the very site where once the sleeper lived. The beautiful daughter of Dr. Leete looks upon the newcomer from the lost world with eyes in which, to the mind of the sagacious reader, love is seen at once to dawn. In reality she is the great-granddaughter of the fiancée whom the sleeper was to have married in his former life; thus a faint suggestion of the transmigration of souls illuminates their intercourse. Beyond that there is no story and at the end of the book the sleeper, in another dream, is conveniently transported back to 1887 which he can now contrast, in horror, with the ideal world of 2000 A. D. And what was this world? The sleeper's first vision of it was given him by Dr. Leete, who took him to the house top and let him see the Boston of the future. Wide avenues replace the crowded, noisy streets. There are no shops but only here and there among the trees great marble buildings, the emporiums from which the goods are delivered to the purple public. And the goods are delivered indeed! Dr. Leete explains it all with intervals of grateful cigar smoking and of music and promenades with the beautiful Edith, and meals in wonderful communistic restaurants with romantic waiters, who feel themselves, _mirabile dictu_, quite independent. And this is how the commonwealth operates. Everybody works or at least works until the age of forty, so that it may be truly said in these halcyon days everybody works but father. But the work of life does not begin till education ends at the age of twenty-one. After that all the young men and women pass for three years into the general "Industrial Army," much as the young men used to pass into the ranks of conscription. Afterwards each person may select any trade that he likes. But the hours are made longer or shorter according to whether too many or too few young people apply to come in. A gardener works for more hours than a scavenger. Yet all occupations are equally honorable. The wages of all the people are equal; or rather there are no wages at all, as the workers merely receive cards, which entitle them to goods of such and such a quantity at any of the emporiums. The cards are punched out as the goods are used. The goods are all valued according to the amount of time used in their making and each citizen draws out the same total amount. But he may take it out in installments just as he likes, drawing many things one month and few the next. He may even get goods in advance if he has any special need. He may, within a certain time limit, save up his cards, but it must be remembered that the one thing which no card can buy and which no citizens can own is the "means of production." These belong collectively to all. Land, mines, machinery, factories and the whole mechanism of transport, these things are public property managed by the State. Its workers in their use of them are all directed by public authority as to what they shall make and when they shall make it, and how much shall be made. On these terms all share alike; the cripple receives as much as the giant; the worker of exceptional dexterity and energy the same as his slower and less gifted fellow. All the management, the control--and let this be noted, for there is no escape from it either by Mr. Bellamy or by anybody else--is exercised by boards of officials elected by the people. All the complex organization by which production goes on by which the workers are supervised and shifted from trade to trade, by which their requests for a change of work or an extension of credit are heard and judged--all of this is done by the elected "bosses." One lays stress on this not because it is Mr. Bellamy's plan, but because it is, and it _has to be_, the plan of anybody who constructs a socialist commonwealth. Mr. Bellamy has many ingenious arrangements to meet the needs of people who want to be singers or actors or writers,--in other words, who do not want to work. They may sing or act as much as they like, provided that enough other people will hand over enough of their food cards to keep them going. But if no one wants to hear them sing or see them act they may starve,--just as they do now. Here the author harks back unconsciously to his nineteenth century individualism; he need not have done so; other socialist writers would have it that one of the everlasting boards would "sit on" every aspiring actor or author before he was allowed to begin. But we may take it either way. It is not the major point. There is no need to discuss the question of how to deal with the artist under socialism. If the rest of it were all right, no one need worry about the artist. Perhaps he would do better without being remunerated at all. It is doubtful whether the huge commercial premium that greets success to-day does good or harm. But let it pass. It is immaterial to the present matter. One comes back to the essential question of the structure of the commonwealth. Can such a thing, or anything conceived in its likeness, possibly work? The answer is, and must be, absolutely and emphatically no. Let anyone conversant with modern democracy as it is,--not as its founders dreamed of it,--picture to himself the operation of a system whereby anything and everything is controlled by elected officials, from whom there is no escape, outside of whom is no livelihood and to whom all men must bow! Democracy, let us grant it, is the best system of government as yet operative in this world of sin. Beside autocratic kingship it shines with a white light; it is obviously the portal of the future. But we know it now too well to idealize its merits. A century and a half ago when the world was painfully struggling out of the tyranny of autocratic kingship, when English liberalism was in its cradle, when Thomas Jefferson was composing the immortal phrases of the Declaration of Independence and unknown patriots dreamed of freedom in France,--at such an epoch it was but natural that the principle of popular election should be idealized as the sovereign remedy for the political evils of mankind. It was natural and salutary that it should be so. The force of such idealization helped to carry forward the human race to a new milestone on the path of progress. But when it is proposed to entrust to the method of elective control not a part but the whole of the fortunes of humanity, to commit to it not merely the form of government and the necessary maintenance of law, order and public safety, but the whole operation of the production and distribution of the world's goods, the case is altered. The time is ripe then for retrospect over the experience of the nineteenth century and for a realization of what has proved in that experience the peculiar defects of elective democracy. Mr. Bellamy pictures his elected managers,--as every socialist has to do,--as a sagacious and paternal group, free from the interest of self and the play of the baser passions and animated only by the thought of the public good. Gravely they deliberate; wisely and justly they decide. Their gray heads--for Bellamy prefers them old--are bowed in quiet confabulation over the nice adjustment of the national production, over the petition of this or that citizen. The public care sits heavily on their breast. Their own peculiar fortune they have lightly passed by. They do not favor their relations or their friends. They do not count their hours of toil. They do not enumerate their gain. They work, in short, as work the angels. Now let me ask in the name of sanity where are such officials to be found? Here and there, perhaps, one sees in the world of to-day in the stern virtue of an honorable public servant some approximation to such a civic ideal. But how much, too, has been seen of the rule of "cliques" and "interests" and "bosses;" of the election of genial incompetents popular as spendthrifts; of crooked partisans warm to their friends and bitter to their enemies; of administration by a party for a party; and of the insidious poison of commercial greed defiling the wells of public honesty. The unending conflict between business and politics, between the private gain and the public good, has been for two generations the despair of modern democracy. It turns this way and that in its vain effort to escape corruption. It puts its faith now in representative legislatures, and now in appointed boards and commissions; it appeals to the vote of the whole people or it places an almost autocratic power and a supreme responsibility in the hands of a single man. And nowhere has the escape been found. The melancholy lesson is being learned that the path of human progress is arduous and its forward movement slow and that no mere form of government can aid unless it is inspired by a higher public spirit of the individual citizen than we have yet managed to achieve. And of the world of to-day, be it remembered, elective democratic control covers only a part of the field. Under socialism it covers it all. To-day in our haphazard world a man is his own master; often indeed the mastership is but a pitiful thing, little more than being master of his own failure and starvation; often indeed the dead weight of circumstance, the accident of birth, the want of education, may so press him down that his freedom is only a mockery. Let us grant all that. But under socialism freedom is gone. There is nothing but the rule of the elected boss. The worker is commanded to his task and obey he must. If he will not, there is, there can only be, the prison and the scourge, or to be cast out in the wilderness to starve. Consider what it would mean to be under a socialist state. Here for example is a worker who is, who says he is, too ill to work. He begs that he may be set free. The grave official, as Mr. Bellamy sees him, looks at the worker's tongue. "My poor fellow," says he, "you are indeed ill. Go and rest yourself under a shady tree while the others are busy with the harvest." So speaks the ideal official dealing with the ideal citizen in the dream life among the angels. But suppose that the worker, being not an angel but a human being, is but a mere hulking, lazy brute who prefers to sham sick rather than endure the tedium of toil. Or suppose that the grave official is not an angel, but a man of hateful heart or one with a personal spite to vent upon his victim. What then? How could one face a régime in which the everlasting taskmaster held control? There is nothing like it among us at the present day except within the melancholy precincts of the penitentiary. There and there only, the socialist system is in operation. Who can deny that under such a system the man with the glib tongue and the persuasive manner, the babbling talker and the scheming organizer, would secure all the places of power and profit, while patient merit went to the wall? Or turn from the gray officials to the purple citizens of the soap bubble commonwealth of socialism. All work, we are told, and all receive their remuneration. We must not think of it as money-wages, but, all said and done, an allotted share of goods, marked out upon a card, comes pretty much to the same thing. The wages that the citizens receive must either be equal or not equal. That at least is plain logic. Either everybody gets exactly the same wages irrespective of capability and diligence, or else the wages or salaries or whatever one calls them, are graded, so that one receives much and the other little. Now either of these alternatives spells disaster. If the wages are graded according to capacity, then the grading is done by the everlasting elective officials. They can, and they will, vote themselves and their friends or adherents into the good jobs and the high places. The advancement of a bright and capable young man will depend, not upon what he does, but upon what the elected bosses are pleased to do with him; not upon the strength of his own hands, but upon the strength of the "pull" that he has with the bosses who run the part of the industry that he is in. Unequal wages under socialism would mean a fierce and corrupt scramble for power, office and emolument, beside which the utmost aberrations of Tammany Hall would seem as innocuous as a Sunday School picnic. "But," objects Mr. Bellamy or any other socialist, "you forget. Please remember that under socialism the scramble for wealth is limited; no man can own capital, but only consumption goods. The most that any man may acquire is merely the articles that he wants to consume, not the engines and machinery of production itself. Hence even avarice dwindles and dies, when its wonted food of 'capitalism' is withdrawn." But surely this point of view is the very converse of the teachings of common sense. "Consumption goods" are the very things that we _do_ want. All else is but a means to them. One admits, as per exception, the queer acquisitiveness of the miser-millionaire, playing the game for his own sake. Undoubtedly he exists. Undoubtedly his existence is a product of the system, a pathological product, a kind of elephantiasis of individualism. But speaking broadly, consumption goods, present or future, are the end in sight of the industrial struggle. Give me the houses and the gardens, the yachts, the motor cars and the champagne and I do not care who owns the gravel crusher and the steam plow. And if under a socialist commonwealth a man can vote to himself or gain by the votes of his adherents, a vast income of consumption goods and leave to his unhappy fellow a narrow minimum of subsistence, then the resulting evil of inequality is worse, far worse than it could even be to-day. Or try, if one will, the other horn of the dilemma. That, too, one will find as ill a resting place as an upright thistle. Let the wages,--as with Mr. Bellamy,--all be equal. The managers then cannot vote themselves large emoluments if they try. But what about the purple citizens? Will they work, or will they lie round in their purple garments and loaf? Work? Why should they work, their pay is there "fresh and fresh"? Why should they turn up on time for their task? Why should they not dawdle at their labor sitting upon the fence in endless colloquy while the harvest rots upon the stalk? If among them is one who cares to work with a fever of industry that even socialism cannot calm, let him do it. We, his fellows, will take our time. Our pay is there as certain and as sound as his. Not for us the eager industry and the fond plans for the future,--for the home and competence--that spurred on the strenuous youth of old days,--not for us the earnest planning of the husband and wife thoughtful and anxious for the future of their little ones. Not for us the honest penny saved for a rainy day. Here in the dreamland of socialism there are no rainy days. It is sunshine all the time in this lotus land of the loafer. And for the future, let the "State" provide; for the children's welfare let the "State" take thought; while we live it shall feed us, when we fall ill it shall tend us and when we die it shall bury us. Meantime let us eat, drink and be merry and work as little as we may. Let us sit among the flowers. It is too hot to labor. Let us warm ourselves beside the public stove. It is too cold to work. But what? Such conduct, you say, will not be allowed in the commonwealth. Idleness and slovenly, careless work will be forbidden? Ah! then you must mean that beside the worker will be the overseer with the whip; the time-clock will mark his energy upon its dial; the machine will register his effort; and if he will not work there is lurking for him in the background the shadowed door of the prison. Exactly and logically so. Socialism, in other words, is slavery. But here the socialist and his school interpose at once with an objection. Under the socialist commonwealth, they say, the people will want to work; they will have acquired a new civic spirit; they will work eagerly and cheerfully for the sake of the public good and from their love of the system under which they live. The loafer will be extinct. The sponge and the parasite will have perished. Even crime itself, so the socialist tells us, will diminish to the vanishing point, till there is nothing of it except here and there a sort of pathological survival, an atavism, or a "throwing back" to the forgotten sins of the grandfathers. Here and there, some poor fellow afflicted with this disease may break into my socialistic house and steal my pictures and my wine. Poor chap! Deal with him very gently. He is not wicked. He is ill. This last argument, in a word, begs the whole question. With perfect citizens any government is good. In a population of angels a socialistic commonwealth would work to perfection. But until we have the angels we must keep the commonwealth waiting. Nor is it necessary here to discuss the hundred and one modifications of the socialistic plan. Each and all fail for one and the same reason. The municipal socialist, despairing of the huge collective state, dreams of his little town as an organic unit in which all share alike; the syndicalist in his fancy sees his trade united into a co-operative body in which all are equal; the gradualist, in whose mind lingers the leaven of doubt, frames for himself a hazy vision of a prolonged preparation for the future, of socialism achieved little by little, the citizens being trained as it goes on till they are to reach somehow or somewhere in cloud land the nirvana of the elimination of self; like indeed, they are, to the horse in the ancient fable that was being trained to live without food but died, alas, just as the experiment was succeeding. There is no way out. Socialism is but a dream, a bubble floating in the air. In the light of its opalescent colors we may see many visions of what we might be if we were better than we are, we may learn much that is useful as to what we can be even as we are; but if we mistake the floating bubble for the marble palaces of the city of desire, it will lead us forward in our pursuit till we fall over the edge of the abyss beyond which is chaos. _VII.--What Is Possible and What Is Not_ SOCIALISM, then, will not work, and neither will individualism, or at least the older individualism that we have hitherto made the basis of the social order. Here, therefore, stands humanity, in the middle of its narrow path in sheer perplexity, not knowing which way to turn. On either side is the brink of an abyss. On one hand is the yawning gulf of social catastrophe represented by socialism. On the other, the slower, but no less inevitable disaster that would attend the continuation in its present form of the system under which we have lived. Either way lies destruction; the one swift and immediate as a fall from a great height; the other gradual, but equally dreadful, as the slow strangulation in a morass. Somewhere between the two lies such narrow safety as may be found. The Ancients were fond of the metaphor, taken from the vexed Sicilian Seas, of Scylla and Charybdis. The twin whirlpools threatened the affrightened mariner on either side. To avoid one he too hastily cast the ship to destruction in the other. Such is precisely the position that has been reached at the present crisis in the course of human progress. When we view the shortcomings of the present individualism, its waste of energy, its fretful overwork, its cruel inequality and the bitter lot that it brings to the uncounted millions of the submerged, we are inclined to cry out against it, and to listen with a ready ear to the easy promises of the idealist. But when we turn to the contrasted fallacies of socialism, its obvious impracticality and the dark gulf of social chaos that yawns behind it, we are driven back shuddering to cherish rather the ills we have than fly to others we know not of. Yet out of the whole discussion of the matter some few things begin to merge into the clearness of certain day. It is clear enough on the one hand that we can expect no sudden and complete transformation of the world in which we live. Such a process is impossible. The industrial system is too complex, its roots are too deeply struck and its whole organism of too delicate a growth to permit us to tear it from the soil. Nor is humanity itself fitted for the kind of transformation which fills the dreams of the perfectionist. The principle of selfishness that has been the survival instinct of existence since life first crawled from the slime of a world in evolution, is as yet but little mitigated. In the long process of time some higher cosmic sense may take its place. It has not done so yet. If the kingdom of socialism were opened to-morrow, there are but few fitted to enter. But on the other hand it is equally clear that the doctrine of "every man for himself," as it used to be applied, is done with forever. The time has gone by when a man shall starve asking in vain for work; when the listless outcast shall draw his rags shivering about him unheeded of his fellows; when children shall be born in hunger and bred in want and broken in toil with never a chance in life. If nothing else will end these things, fear will do it. The hardest capitalist that ever gripped his property with the iron clasp of legal right relaxes his grasp a little when he thinks of the possibilities of a social conflagration. In this respect five years of war have taught us more than a century of peace. It has set in a clear light new forms of social obligation. The war brought with it conscription--not as we used to see it, as the last horror of military tyranny, but as the crowning pride of democracy. An inconceivable revolution in the thought of the English speaking peoples has taken place in respect to it. The obligation of every man, according to his age and circumstance, to take up arms for his country and, if need be, to die for it, is henceforth the recognized basis of progressive democracy. But conscription has its other side. The obligation to die must carry with it the right to live. If every citizen owes it to society that he must fight for it in case of need, then society owes to every citizen the opportunity of a livelihood. "Unemployment," in the case of the willing and able becomes henceforth a social crime. Every democratic Government must henceforth take as the starting point of its industrial policy, that there shall be no such thing as able bodied men and women "out of work," looking for occupation and unable to find it. Work must either be found or must be provided by the State itself. Yet it is clear that a policy of state work and state pay for all who are otherwise unable to find occupation involves appalling difficulties. The opportunity will loom large for the prodigal waste of money, for the undertaking of public works of no real utility and for the subsidizing of an army of loafers. But the difficulties, great though they are, are not insuperable. The payment for state labor of this kind can be kept low enough to make it the last resort rather than the ultimate ambition of the worker. Nor need the work be useless. In new countries, especially such as Canada and the United States and Australia, the development of latent natural assets could absorb the labor of generations. There are still unredeemed empires in the west. Clearly enough a certain modicum of public honesty and integrity is essential for such a task; more, undoubtedly, than we have hitherto been able to enlist in the service of the commonwealth. But without it we perish. Social betterment must depend at every stage on the force of public spirit and public morality that inspires it. So much for the case of those who are able and willing to work. There remain still the uncounted thousands who by accident or illness, age or infirmity, are unable to maintain themselves. For these people, under the older dispensation, there was nothing but the poorhouse, the jail or starvation by the roadside. The narrow individualism of the nineteenth century refused to recognize the social duty of supporting somebody else's grandmother. Such charity began, and ended, at home. But even with the passing of the nineteenth century an awakened sense of the collective responsibility of society towards its weaker members began to impress itself upon public policy. Old age pension laws and national insurance against illness and accident were already being built into the legislative codes of the democratic countries. The experience of the war has enormously increased this sense of social solidarity. It is clear now that our fortunes are not in our individual keeping. We stand or fall as a nation. And the nation which neglects the aged and infirm, or which leaves a family to be shipwrecked as the result of a single accident to a breadwinner, cannot survive as against a nation in which the welfare of each is regarded as contributory to the safety of all. Even the purest selfishness would dictate a policy of social insurance. There is no need to discuss the particular way in which this policy can best be carried out. It will vary with the circumstances of each community. The action of the municipality, or of the state or province, or of the central government itself may be called into play. But in one form or another, the economic loss involved in illness and infirmity must be shifted from the shoulders of the individual to those of society at large. There was but little realization of this obligation in the nineteenth century. Only in the sensational moments of famine, flood or pestilence was a general social effort called forth. But in the clearer view of the social bond which the war has given us we can see that famine and pestilence are merely exaggerated forms of what is happening every day in our midst. We spoke much during the war of "man power." We suddenly realized that after all the greatness and strength of a nation is made up of the men and women who compose it. Its money, in the narrow sense, is nothing; a set of meaningless chips and counters piled upon a banker's table ready to fall at a touch. Even before the war we had begun to talk eagerly and anxiously of the conservation of national resources, of the need of safeguarding the forests and fisheries and the mines. These are important things. But the war has shown that the most important thing of all is the conservation of men and women. The attitude of the nineteenth century upon this point was little short of insane. The melancholy doctrine of Malthus had perverted the public mind. Because it was difficult for a poor man to bring up a family, the hasty conclusion was reached that a family ought not to be brought up. But the war has entirely inverted and corrected this point of view. The father and mother who were able to send six sturdy, native-born sons to the conflict were regarded as benefactors of the nation. But these six sturdy sons had been, some twenty years before, six "puling infants," viewed with gloomy disapproval by the Malthusian bachelor. If the strength of the nation lies in its men and women there is only one way to increase it. Before the war it was thought that a simpler and easier method of increase could be found in the wholesale import of Austrians, Bulgarians and Czecho-Slovaks. The newer nations boasted proudly of their immigration tables. The fallacy is apparent now. Those who really count in a nation and those who govern its destinies for good or ill are those who are born in it. It is difficult to over-estimate the harm that has been done to public policy by this same Malthusian theory. It has opposed to every proposal of social reform an obstacle that seemed insuperable,--the danger of a rapid overincrease of population that would pauperize the community. Population, it was said, tends always to press upon the heels of subsistence. If the poor are pampered, they will breed fast: the time will come when there will not be food for all and we shall perish in a common destruction. Seen in this light, infant mortality and the cruel wastage of disease were viewed with complacence. It was "Nature's" own process at work. The "unfit," so called, were being winnowed out that only the best might survive. The biological doctrine of evolution was misinterpreted and misapplied to social policy. But in the organic world there is no such thing as the "fit" or the "unfit," in any higher or moral sense. The most hideous forms of life may "survive" and thrust aside the most beautiful. It is only by a confusion of thought that the processes of organic nature which render every foot of fertile ground the scene of unending conflict can be used to explain away the death of children of the slums. The whole theory of survival is only a statement of what is, not of what ought to be. The moment that we introduce the operation of human volition and activity, that, too, becomes one of the factors of "survival." The dog, the cat, and the cow live by man's will, where the wolf and the hyena have perished. But it is time that the Malthusian doctrine,--the fear of over-population as a hindrance to social reform,--was dismissed from consideration. It is at best but a worn-out scarecrow shaking its vain rags in the wind. Population, it is true, increases in a geometrical ratio. The human race, if favored by environment, can easily double itself every twenty-five years. If it did this, the time must come, through sheer power of multiplication, when there would not be standing room for it on the globe. All of this is undeniable, but it is quite wide of the mark. It is time enough to cross a bridge when we come to it. The "standing room" problem is still removed from us by such uncounted generations that we need give no thought to it. The physical resources of the globe are as yet only tapped, and not exhausted. We have done little more than scratch the surface. Because we are crowded here and there in the ant-hills of our cities, we dream that the world is full. Because, under our present system, we do not raise enough food for all, we fear that the food supply is running short. All this is pure fancy. Let any one consider in his mind's eye the enormous untouched assets still remaining for mankind in the vast spaces filled with the tangled forests of South America, or the exuberant fertility of equatorial Africa or the huge plains of Canada, Australia, Southern Siberia and the United States, as yet only thinly dotted with human settlement. There is no need to draw up an anxious balance sheet of our assets. There is still an uncounted plenty. And every human being born upon the world represents a power of work that, rightly directed, more than supplies his wants. The fact that as an infant he does not maintain himself has nothing to do with the case. This was true even in the Garden of Eden. The fundamental error of the Malthusian theory of population and poverty is to confound the difficulties of human organization with the question of physical production. Our existing poverty is purely a problem in the direction and distribution of human effort. It has no connection as yet with the question of the total available means of subsistence. Some day, in a remote future, in which under an improved social system the numbers of mankind might increase to the full power of the natural capacity of multiplication, such a question might conceivably disturb the equanimity of mankind. But it need not now. It is only one of many disasters that must sooner or later overtake mankind. The sun, so the astronomer tells us, is cooling down; the night is coming; an all-pervading cold will some day chill into rigid death the last vestige of organic life. Our poor planet will be but a silent ghost whirling on its dark path in the starlight. This ultimate disaster is, as far as our vision goes, inevitable. Yet no one concerns himself with it. So should it be with the danger of the ultimate overcrowding of the globe. I lay stress upon this problem of the increase of population because, to my thinking, it is in this connection that the main work and the best hope of social reform can be found. The children of the race should be the very blossom of its fondest hopes. Under the present order and with the present gloomy preconceptions they have been the least of its collective cares. Yet here--and here more than anywhere--is the point towards which social effort and social legislation may be directed immediately and successfully. The moment that we get away from the idea that the child is a mere appendage of the parent, bound to share good fortune and ill, wealth and starvation, according to the parent's lot, the moment we regard the child as itself a member of society--clothed in social rights--a burden for the moment but an asset for the future--we turn over a new leaf in the book of human development, we pass a new milestone on the upward path of progress. It should be recognized in the coming order of society, that every child of the nation has the right to be clothed and fed and trained irrespective of its parents' lot. Our feeble beginnings in the direction of housing, sanitation, child welfare and education, should be expanded at whatever cost into something truly national and all embracing. The ancient grudging selfishness that would not feed other people's children should be cast out. In the war time the wealthy bachelor and the spinster of advancing years took it for granted that other people's children should fight for them. The obligation must apply both ways. No society is properly organized until every child that is born into it shall have an opportunity in life. Success in life and capacity to live we cannot give. But opportunity we can. We can at least see that the gifts that are laid in the child's cradle by nature are not obliterated by the cruel fortune of the accident of birth: that its brain and body are not stunted by lack of food and air and by the heavy burden of premature toil. The playtime of childhood should be held sacred by the nation. This, as I see it, should be the first and the greatest effort of social reform. For the adult generation of to-day many things are no longer possible. The time has passed. We are, as viewed with a comprehensive eye, a damaged race. Few of us in mind or body are what we might be; and millions of us, the vast majority of industrial mankind known as the working class, are distorted beyond repair from what they might have been. In older societies this was taken for granted: the poor and the humble and the lowly reproduced from generation to generation, as they grew to adult life, the starved brains and stunted outlook of their forbears,--starved and stunted only by lack of opportunity. For nature knows of no such differences in original capacity between the children of the fortunate and the unfortunate. Yet on this inequality, made by circumstance, was based the whole system of caste, the stratification of the gentle and the simple on which society rested. In the past it may have been necessary. It is not so now. If, with all our vast apparatus of machinery and power, we cannot so arrange society that each child has an opportunity in life, it would be better to break the machinery in pieces and return to the woods from which we came. Put into the plainest of prose, then, we are saying that the government of every country ought to supply work and pay for the unemployed, maintenance for the infirm and aged, and education and opportunity for the children. These are vast tasks. And they involve, of course, a financial burden not dreamed of before the war. But here again the war has taught us many things. It would have seemed inconceivable before, that a man of great wealth should give one-half of his income to the state. The financial burden of the war, as the full measure of it dawned upon our minds, seemed to betoken a universal bankruptcy. But the sequel is going to show that the finance of the war will prove to be a lesson in the finance of peace. The new burden has come to stay. No modern state can hope to survive unless it meets the kind of social claims on the part of the unemployed, the destitute and the children that have been described above. And it cannot do this unless it continues to use the terrific engine of taxation already fashioned in the war. Undoubtedly the progressive income tax and the tax on profits and taxation of inheritance must be maintained to an extent never dreamed of before. But the peace finance and the war finance will differ in one most important respect. The war finance was purely destructive. From it came national security and the triumph of right over wrong. No one would belittle the worth of the sacrifice. But in the narrower sense of production, of bread winning, there came nothing; or nothing except a new power of organization, a new technical skill and a new aspiration towards better things. But the burden of peace finance directed towards social efforts will bring a direct return. Every cent that is spent upon the betterment of the population will come back, sooner or later, as two. But all of this deals as yet only with the field of industry and conduct in which the state rules supreme. Governmental care of the unemployed, the infant and the infirm, sounds like a chapter in socialism. If the same régime were extended over the whole area of production, we should have socialism itself and a mere soap-bubble bursting into fragments. There is no need, however, to extend the régime of compulsion over the whole field. The vast mass of human industrial effort must still lie outside of the immediate control of the government. Every man will still earn his own living and that of his family as best he can, relying first and foremost upon his own efforts. One naturally asks, then, To what extent can social reform penetrate into the ordinary operation of industry itself? Granted that it is impossible for the state to take over the whole industry of the nation, does that mean that the present inequalities must continue? The framework in which our industrial life is set cannot be readily broken asunder. But we can to a great extent ease the rigidity of its outlines. A legislative code that starts from sounder principles than those which have obtained hitherto can do a great deal towards progressive betterment. Each decade can be an improvement upon the last. Hitherto we have been hampered at every turn by the supposed obstacle of immutable economic laws. The theory of "natural" wages and prices of a supposed economic order that could not be disturbed, set up a sort of legislative paralysis. The first thing needed is to get away entirely from all such preconceptions, to recognize that the "natural" order of society, based on the "natural" liberty, does not correspond with real justice and real liberty at all, but works injustice at every turn. And at every turn intrusive social legislation must seek to prevent such injustice. It is no part of the present essay to attempt to detail the particulars of a code of social legislation. That must depend in every case upon the particular circumstances of the community concerned. But some indication may be given here of the kind of legislation that may serve to render the conditions of industry more in conformity with social justice. Let us take, as a conspicuous example, the case of the Minimum wage law. Here is a thing sternly condemned in the older thought as an economic impossibility. It was claimed, as we have seen, that under free contract a man was paid what he earned and no law could make it more. But the older theory was wrong. The minimum wage law ought to form, in one fashion or another, a part of the code of every community. It may be applied by specific legislation from a central power, or it may be applied by the discretionary authority of district boards, or it may be regulated,--as it has been in some of the beginnings already made,--within the compass of each industry or trade. But the principle involved is sound. The wage as paid becomes a part of the conditions of industry. Interest, profits and, later, the direction of consumption and then of production, conform themselves to it. True it is, that in this as in all cases of social legislation, no application of the law can be made so sweeping and so immediate as to dislocate the machine and bring industry to a stop. It is probable that at any particular time and place the legislative minimum wage cannot be very much in advance of the ordinary or average wage of the people in employment. But its virtue lies in its progression. The modest increase of to-day leads to the fuller increase of to-morrow. Properly applied, the capitalist and the employer of labor need have nothing to fear from it. Its ultimate effect will not fall upon them, but will serve merely to alter the direction of human effort. Precisely the same reasoning holds good of the shortening of the hours of labor both by legislative enactment and by collective organization. Here again the first thing necessary is a clear vision of the goal towards which we are to strive. The hours of labor are too long. The world has been caught in the wheels of its own machinery which will not stop. With each advance in invention and mechanical power it works harder still. New and feverish desires for luxuries replace each older want as satisfied. The nerves of our industrial civilization are worn thin with the rattle of its own machinery. The industrial world is restless, over-strained and quarrelsome. It seethes with furious discontent, and looks about it eagerly for a fight. It needs a rest. It should be sent, as nerve patients are, to the seaside or the quiet of the hills. Failing this, it should at least slacken the pace of its work and shorten its working day. And for this the thing needed is an altered public opinion on the subject of work in relation to human character and development. The nineteenth century glorified work. The poet, sitting beneath a shady tree, sang of its glories. The working man was incited to contemplate the beauty of the night's rest that followed on the exhaustion of the day. It was proved to him that if his day was dull at least his sleep was sound. The ideal of society was the cheery artisan and the honest blacksmith, awake and singing with the lark and busy all day long at the loom and the anvil, till the grateful night soothed them into well-earned slumber. This, they were told, was better than the distracted sleep of princes. The educated world repeated to itself these grotesque fallacies till it lost sight of plain and simple truths. Seven o'clock in the morning is too early for any rational human being to be herded into a factory at the call of a steam whistle. Ten hours a day of mechanical task is too long: nine hours is too long: eight hours is too long. I am not raising here the question as to how and to what extent the eight hours can be shortened, but only urging the primary need of recognizing that a working day of eight hours is too long for the full and proper development of human capacity and for the rational enjoyment of life. There is no need to quote here to the contrary the long and sustained toil of the pioneer, the eager labor of the student, unmindful of the silent hours, or the fierce acquisitive activity of the money-maker that knows no pause. Activities such as these differ with a whole sky from the wage-work of the modern industrial worker. The task in one case is done for its own sake. It is life itself. The other is done only for the sake of the wage it brings. It is, or should be, a mere preliminary to living. Let it be granted, of course, that a certain amount of work is an absolute necessity for human character. There is no more pathetic spectacle on our human stage than the figure of poor puppy in his beach suit and his tuxedo jacket seeking in vain to amuse himself for ever. A leisure class no sooner arises than the melancholy monotony of amusement forces it into mimic work and make-believe activities. It dare not face the empty day. But when all is said about the horror of idleness the broad fact remains that the hours of work are too long. If we could in imagination disregard for a moment all question of how the hours of work are to be shortened and how production is to be maintained and ask only what would be the ideal number of the daily hours of compulsory work, for character's sake, few of us would put them at more than four or five. Many of us, as applied to ourselves, at least, would take a chance on character at two. The shortening of the general hours of work, then, should be among the primary aims of social reform. There need be no fear that with shortened hours of labor the sum total of production would fall short of human needs. This, as has been shown from beginning to end of this essay, is out of the question. Human _desires_ would eat up the result of ten times the work we now accomplish. Human _needs_ would be satisfied with a fraction of it. But the real difficulty in the shortening of hours lies elsewhere. Here, as in the parallel case of the minimum wage, the danger is that the attempt to alter things too rapidly may dislocate the industrial machine. We ought to attempt such a shortening as will strain the machine to a breaking point, but never break it. This can be done, as with the minimum wage, partly by positive legislation and partly collective action. Not much can be done at once. But the process can be continuous. The short hours achieved with acclamation to-day will later be denounced as the long hours of to-morrow. The essential point to grasp, however, is that society at large has nothing to lose by the process. The shortened hours become a part of the framework of production. It adapts itself to it. Hitherto we have been caught in the running of our own machine: it is time that we altered the gearing of it. The two cases selected,--the minimum wage and the legislative shortening of hours,--have been chosen merely as illustrations and are not exhaustive of the things that can be done in the field of possible and practical reform. It is plain enough that in many other directions the same principles may be applied. The rectification of the ownership of land so as to eliminate the haphazard gains of the speculator and the unearned increment of wealth created by the efforts of others, is an obvious case in point. The "single taxer" sees in this a cure-all for the ills of society. But his vision is distorted. The private ownership of land is one of the greatest incentives to human effort that the world has ever known. It would be folly to abolish it, even if we could. But here as elsewhere we can seek to re-define and regulate the conditions of ownership so as to bring them more into keeping with a common sense view of social justice. But the inordinate and fortuitous gains from land are really only one example from a general class. The war discovered the "profiteer." The law-makers of the world are busy now with smoking him out from his lair. But he was there all the time. Inordinate and fortuitous gain, resting on such things as monopoly, or trickery, or the mere hazards of abundance and scarcity, complying with the letter of the law but violating its spirit, are fit objects for appropriate taxation. The ways and means are difficult, but the social principle involved is clear. We may thus form some sort of vision of the social future into which we are passing. The details are indistinct. But the outline at least in which it is framed is clear enough. The safety of the future lies in a progressive movement of social control alleviating the misery which it cannot obliterate and based upon the broad general principle of equality of opportunity. The chief immediate direction of social effort should be towards the attempt to give to every human being in childhood adequate food, clothing, education and an opportunity in life. This will prove to be the beginning of many things. THE END * * * * * Transcriber's Note: Page 67, "are" changed to "and" (wages and all) 
23574	----	Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes images of the pages of the original book. See 23574-h.htm or 23574-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/2/3/5/7/23574/23574-h/23574-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/2/3/5/7/23574/23574-h.zip) SOCIALISM: POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE by ROBERT RIVES LA MONTE "I will make a man more precious than fine gold; even a man than the golden wedge of Ophir." --_Isaiah xiii, 12._ Chicago Charles H. Kerr & Company 1907 Copyright 1907 by Charles H. Kerr & Company [Illustration: logo] Press of John F. Higgins Chicago TO M. E. M. AND L. H. M. PREFACE Of the papers in this little volume two have appeared in print before: "Science and Socialism" in the International Socialist Review for September, 1900, and "Marxism and Ethics" in Wilshire's Magazine for November, 1905. My thanks are due to the publishers of those periodicals for their kind permission to re-print those articles here. The other papers appear here for the first time. There is an obvious inconsistency between the treatment of Materialism in "Science and Socialism" and its treatment in "The Nihilism of Socialism." I would point out that seven years elapsed between the composition of the former and that of the latter essay. Whether the inconsistency be a sign of mental growth or deterioration my readers must judge for themselves. I will merely say here that the man or woman, whose views remain absolutely fixed and stereotyped for seven years, is cheating the undertaker. What I conceive the true significance of this particular change in opinions to be is set forth in the essay on "The Biogenetic Law." Some Socialists will deprecate what may seem to them the unwise frankness of the paper on "The Nihilism of Socialism." To them I can only say that to me Socialism has always been essentially a revolutionary movement. Revolutionists, who attempt to maintain a distinction between their exoteric and their esoteric teachings, only succeed in making themselves ridiculous. But, even were the maintenance of such a distinction practicable, it would, in my judgment, be highly inexpedient. As a mere matter of policy, ever since I first entered the Socialist Movement, I have been a firm believer in the tactics admirably summed up in Danton's "_De l'audace! Puis de l'audace! Et toujours de l'audace!_" Should any reader find himself repelled by "The Nihilism of Socialism," let me beg that he will not put the book aside until he has read the essay on "The Biogenetic Law." I do not send forth this little book with any ambitious hope that it will be widely read, or even that it will convert any one to Socialism. My hope is far more modest. It is that this book may be of some real service, as a labor-saving device, to the thinking men and women who have felt the lure of Socialism, and are trying to discover just what is meant by the oft-used words 'Marxian Socialism,' Should it prove of material aid to even _one_ such man or woman, I would feel that I had been repaid a hundred-fold for my labor in writing it. ROBERT RIVES LA MONTE. Feb. 7, 1907. TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE SCIENCE AND SOCIALISM 15 I. THE MATERIALISTIC CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 25 II. THE LAW OF SURPLUS-VALUE 34 III. THE CLASS STRUGGLE 46 MARXISM AND ETHICS 57 INSTEAD OF A FOOTNOTE 75 THE NIHILISM OF SOCIALISM 81 THE BIOGENETIC LAW 131 KISMET 143 SCIENCE AND SOCIALISM[1] (International Socialist Review, September, 1900.) Until the middle of this (the nineteenth) century the favorite theory with those who attempted to explain the phenomena of History was the Great-Man-Theory. This theory was that once in a while through infinite mercy a great man was sent to the earth who yanked humanity up a notch or two higher, and then we went along in a humdrum way on that level, or even sank back till another great man was vouchsafed to us. Possibly the finest flower of this school of thought is Carlyle's Heroes and Hero Worship. Unscientific as this theory was, it had its beneficent effects, for those heroes or great men served as ideals, and the human mind requires an unattainable ideal. No man can be or do the best he is capable of unless he is ever reaching out toward an ideal that lies beyond his grasp. Tennyson put this truth in the mouth of the ancient sage who tells the youthful and ambitious Gareth who is eager to enter into the service of King Arthur of the Table Round: "-----------the King Will bind thee by such vows as is a shame A man should not be bound by, yet the which No man can keep." This function of furnishing an ideal was performed in former times by these great men and more especially by those great men whom legend, myth and superstition converted into gods. But with the decay of the old faiths the only possible fruitful ideal left is the ideal upheld by Socialism, the ideal of the Co-operative Commonwealth in which the economic conditions will give birth to the highest, purest, most altruistic ethics the world has yet seen. It is true the co-operative commonwealth is far more than a Utopian ideal, it is a scientific prediction, but at this point I wish to emphasize its function as an ideal. But it is obvious that this Great Man theory gave no scientific clue to history. If the Great Man was a supernatural phenomenon, a gift from Olympus, then of course History had no scientific basis, but was dependent upon the arbitrary caprices of the Gods, and Homer's Iliad was a specimen of accurate descriptive sociology. If on the other hand the great man was a natural phenomenon, the theory stopped short half way toward its goal, for it gave us no explanation of the genesis of the Great Man nor of the reasons for the superhuman influence that it attributed to him. Mallock, one of the most servile literary apologists of capitalism, has recently in a book called "Aristocracy and Evolution" attempted to revive and revise this theory and give it a scientific form. He still attributes all progress to Great Men, but with the brutal frankness of modern bourgeois Capitalism, gives us a new definition of Great Men. According to Mallock, the great man is the man who makes money. This has long been the working theory of bourgeois society, but Mallock is the first of them who has had the cynicism or the stupidity to confess it. But mark you, by this confession he admits the truth of the fundamental premise of modern scientific socialism, our Socialism, viz., that the economic factor is the dominant or determining factor in the life of society. Thus you see the ablest champion of bourgeois capitalism, admits, albeit unconsciously, the truth of the Marxian materialistic conception of history. This book, however, is chiefly remarkable for its impudent and shameless misrepresentations of Marx and Marxism, but these very lies show that intelligent apologists of capitalism know that their only dangerous foe is Marxian socialism. But just as according to the vulgar superstition the tail of a snake that has been killed wiggles till sundown, so this book of Mallock's is merely a false show of life made by a theory that received its deathblow long since. It is the wiggling of the tail of the snake that Herbert Spencer killed thirty years ago with his little book "The Study of Sociology." The environment philosophy in one form or another has come to occupy the entire field of human thought. We now look for the explanation of every phenomenon in the conditions that surrounded its birth and development. The best application of this environment philosophy to intellectual and literary phenomena that has ever been made is Taine's History of English Literature. But while Spencer's Study of Sociology is the most signal and brilliant refutation of the Great Man theory, no one man really killed that theory. The general spread and acceptance of Darwinism has produced an intellectual atmosphere in which such a theory can no more live than a fish can live out of water. By Darwinism we mean, as you know, the transmutation of species by variation and natural selection--selection accomplished mainly, if not solely, by the struggle for existence. Now this doctrine of organic development and change or metamorphic evolution, which was, with its originators, Wallace and Darwin, a purely biological doctrine, was transported to the field of sociology by Spencer and applied with great power to all human institutions, legal, moral, economic, religious, etc. Spencer has taught the world that all social institutions are fluid and not fixed. As Karl Marx said in the preface to the first edition of Capital: "The present society is no solid crystal, but an organization capable of change, and is constantly changing," and again in the preface to the second edition, "Every historically developed social form is in fluid movement." This is the theory of Evolution in its broadest sense, and it has struck a death-blow to the conception of Permanence so dear to the hearts of the bourgeoisie who love to sing to their Great God, Private Property, "As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen." "_Saecula saeculorum._" "For the Ages of Ages." Before natural science had thus revolutionized the intellectual atmosphere, great men proclaiming the doctrines of modern socialism might have been rained down from Heaven, but there would have been no socialist movement. In fact many of its ideas had found utterance centuries before, but the economic conditions, and consequently the intellectual conditions were not ripe, and these ideas were still-born, or died in infancy. The general acceptance of the idea that all things change, that property, marriage, religion, etc., are in process of evolution and are destined to take on new forms prepared the way for Socialism. A man who has read Wallace and Darwin is ready to read Marx and Engels. Now the story of the birth of Darwinism is itself a proof of the fallacy of the Great Man theory, and a signal confirmation of the view that new ideas, theories and discoveries emanate from the material conditions. The role of the great man is still an important one. We need the men who are capable of abstract thought, capable of perceiving the essential relations and significance of the facts, and of drawing correct inductions from them. Such men are rare, but there are always enough of them to perform these functions. And the Great Man, born out of due time, before the material and economic conditions are ripe for him, can effect nothing. When the conditions are ripe, the new idea always occurs to more than one man; that is, the same conditions and facts force the same idea upon different minds. It is true there is always some one man who gives this idea its best expression or best marshals the evidence of the facts in its support, and the idea usually becomes inseparably linked with his name. In this way does our race express its gratitude to its great men and perpetuate their memory. Darwinism or the theory of Natural Selection was in this way independently discovered by Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin, and the popular judgment has not erred in giving the chief credit to Charles Darwin. Wallace's paper "On the Law which has Regulated the Introduction of New Species," written by Wallace on one of the far-away islands of the Malay Archipelago, where he was studying the Geographical Distribution of Species, appeared in the "Annals of Natural History" in 1855. Its resultant conclusion was "that every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a preexisting closely allied species." Mr. Darwin tells us that Mr. Wallace wrote him that the cause to which he attributed this coincidence was no other than "generation with modification," or in other words that the "closely allied ante-type" was the parent stock from which the new form had been derived by variation. Mr. Wallace's second paper, which in my judgment is the clearest and best condensed statement of the Doctrine of the Struggle for Existence and the principle of Natural Selection ever written, was written by Mr. Wallace at Ternate in the Malay Archipelago, in February, 1858, and sent to Mr. Darwin. It was called "On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type." Mr. Wallace requested Mr. Darwin to show it to Sir Chas. Lyell, the father of Modern Geology, and accordingly Dr. Hooker, the great botanist, brought it to Sir Chas. Lyell. They were both so struck with the complete agreement of the conclusions of Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace that they thought it would be unfair to publish one without the other, so this paper and a chapter from Darwin's unpublished manuscript of the "Origin of Species" were read before the Linnaean Society on the same evening and published in their Proceedings for 1858, and thus appeared in the same year, 1859, as Marx's Critique of Political Economy. This theory of Natural Selection is, you know, in brief, that more animals of every kind are born than can possibly survive, than can possibly get a living. This gives rise to a Battle for Life. In this battle those are the victors who are the best able to secure food for themselves and their offspring and are best able by fight or flight to protect themselves from their enemies. This is called the Law of the Survival of the Fittest, but remember, the Fittest are not always the best or most highly developed forms, but simply those forms best suited to the then existing environment. These two extremely interesting papers of Wallace are printed as the two first chapters of his book "Natural Selection and Tropical Nature," published by MacMillan, a book so fascinating I would beg all my hearers and readers who have not read it to do so. This law of double or multiple discovery holds good of all great discoveries and inventions, and is notably true of the first of the three great thoughts that we ordinarily associate with the name of Karl Marx. These three are: 1. The Materialistic Conception of History. 2. The Law of Surplus Value. 3. The Class Struggle--the third being a necessary consequence of the first two. Now the Materialistic Conception of History was independently discovered by Engels just as Darwinism was by Wallace, as you will see by reading Engels' preface to the Communist Manifesto. But just as Wallace gave Darwin all the credit, so Engels did to Marx. FOOTNOTE: [1] This essay was originally prepared for and delivered as a Lecture before the Young Mens' Socialist Literary Society, an organization of Jewish Socialists on the lower East Side of New York city, in the early part of the winter of 1899-1900. I THE MATERIALISTIC CONCEPTION OF HISTORY What do we mean by the Doctrine of the Materialistic Conception of History, or of "Economic Determinism," as Ferri calls it? We must make sure we understand, for there is cant in Socialism, just as there is in religion, and there is good reason to fear many of us go on using these good mouth-filling phrases, "Materialistic Conception of History," "Class-Conscious Proletariat," "Class Struggle," and "Revolutionary Socialism," with no more accurate idea of their meaning than our pious friends have of the theological phrases they keep repeating like so many poll-parrots. At bottom, when we talk intelligently of the Materialistic Conception of History, we simply mean, what every man by his daily conduct proves to be true, that the bread and butter question is the most important question in life. All the rest of the life of the individual is affected, yes dominated the way he earns his bread and butter. As this is true of individuals, so also it is true of societies, and this gives us the only key by which we can understand the history of the past, and, within limits, predict the course of future development. That is all there is of it. That is easy to understand, and every man of common sense is bound to admit that that much is true. The word "materialistic" suggests philosophy and metaphysics and brings to our minds the old disputes about monism and dualism, and the dispute between religious people who believe in the existence of spirit and scientists who adopt modern materialistic monism. But no matter what position a man may hold on these philosophical and theological questions he can with perfect consistency recognize the fact that the economic factor is the dominant, determining factor in every day human life, and the man who admits this simple truth believes in the Marxian Materialistic Conception of History. The political, legal, ethical and all human institutions have their roots in the economic soil, and any reform that does not go clear to the roots and affect the economic structure of society must necessarily be abortive. Any thing that does go to the roots and does modify the economic structure, the bread and butter side of life, will inevitably modify every other branch and department of human life, political, ethical, legal, religious, etc. This makes the social question an economic question, and all our thought and effort should be concentrated on the economic question.[2] I am aware of the fact that in the Preface of his "Socialism, Utopian and Scientific," Engels apparently identifies the Materialistic Conception of History with Materialistic Monism in Philosophy, but this connection or identification is not a necessary logical consequence of any statement of the Materialistic Conception of History I have been able to find by Engels, Marx, Deville, Ferri, Loria, or any Marxian of authority and to thus identify it, is detrimental to the cause of Socialism, since many people who would not hesitate to admit the predominance of the economic factor, instantly revolt at the idea of Materialism. Let us take Engels' statement of this doctrine in the preface to the Manifesto. It is as follows: "In every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained the political and intellectual history of that epoch." Does not that agree exactly with the doctrine as I have stated it? Or, take this statement of it by Comrade Vail, of Jersey City: "The laws, customs, education, public opinion and morals are controlled and shaped by economic conditions, or, in other words, by the dominant ruling class which the economic system of any given period forces to the front. The ruling ideas of each age have been the ideas of its ruling class, whether that class was the patricians of ancient Rome, the feudal barons of the middle ages, or the capitalists of modern times. The economic structure of society largely controls and shapes all social institutions, and also religious and philosophical ideas." Or, take this, by Marx himself: "The mode of production obtaining in material life determines, generally speaking, the social, political and intellectual processes of life." Does not that again agree exactly with the doctrine as I have stated it? The doctrine is stated in nearly the same language by Loria and Ferri, though Ferri calls it Economic Determinism, which seems to me a much better and more exact name. Ferri points out that we must not forget the intellectual factor and the various other factors, which though they are themselves determined by the economic factor, in their turn become causes acting concurrently with the economic factor. Loria deals with this whole subject most exhaustively and interestingly in his recently translated book "The Economic Foundations of Society." Curiously enough in this long book he never once gives Marx the credit of having discovered this theory, but constantly talks as though he--Loria--had revealed it to a waiting world. The method of his book is the reverse of scientific, as he first states his theory and conclusions and then starts to scour the universe for facts to support them, instead of first collecting the facts and letting them impose the theory upon his mind. And his book is by no means free from inconsistencies and contradictions. But while you cannot place yourselves unreservedly and confidingly in his hands as you can in those of Karl Marx, still his book has much value. He shows most interestingly how all the connective institutions, as he calls religious and legal and political institutions, have been moulded in the interest of the economically dominant class, and how useful they have been in either persuading or forcing the so-called "lower classes" to submit to the economic conditions that were absolutely against their interests. But the system of Wage Slavery is such a beautifully automatic system, itself subjugating the workers and leaving them no choice, that I cannot see that the capitalists have any further need of any of these connective institutions save the State. At all events, these institutions are fast losing their power over the minds of men. But the most valuable part of his book is the immense mass of evidence he has collected showing how political sovereignty follows economic sovereignty or rather, revenue, and how all past history has been made up of a series of contests between various kinds of revenue, particularly between rent from landed property and profits from industrial or manufacturing capital, but as this is nothing more than the Class Struggle between the landed aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, a struggle sketched by master hands in the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, we can give Loria no credit for originality, but merely praise his industry in collecting evidence. Gabriel Deville, who has probably done more than any one else to popularize the ideas of Marx in France, has pointed out a very nice distinction here. Man, like all living beings, is the product of his environment. But while animals are affected only by the natural environment, man's brain, itself a product of the natural environment, becomes a cause, a creator, and makes for man an economic environment, so that man is acted on by two environments, the natural environment which has made man and the economic environment which man has made. Now in the early stages of human development, it is the natural environment, the fertility of the soil, climatic conditions, abundance of game, fish, etc., which is all-important, but with the progress of civilization, the natural environment loses in relative importance, and the economic environment (machinery, factories, improved appliances, etc.) grows in importance until in our day the economic environment has become well nigh all-important. Hence the inadequacy of the Henry George theory which places all its stress on one element of the natural environment, land, and wholly neglects the dominant economic environment. But while this economic environment, the dominant factor in human life, is the child of the brain of man, man in its creation has been forced to work within strict limitations. He had to make it out of the materials furnished him in the first place by the natural environment and later by the natural environment and the inherited economic environment, so that in the last analysis the material and economic factors are supreme. We Marxians are often accused of neglecting the intellectual factor and, as Deville says, a whole syndicate of factors; but we do not neglect them. We recognize their existence and their importance, but we do refuse to waste our revolutionary energy on derivative phenomena when we are able to see and recognize the decisive, dominant factor, the economic factor. As Deville says, we do not neglect the cart because we insist upon putting it behind the horse instead of in front of or alongside of him, as our critics would have us do. Now, if the economic factor is the basic factor, it behooves us to understand the present economic system--Marx's Law of Surplus-Value is the key to this system. FOOTNOTE: [2] If this be true the question naturally arises: Why do the socialists, instead of using economic methods to solve an economic question, organize themselves into a political party? To answer this question, we must first see what the State is and what relation it holds to the economic conditions. Gabriel Deville defines the State thus: "The State is the public power of coercion created and maintained in human societies by their division into classes, a power which, being clothed with force, makes laws and levies taxes." As long as the economically dominant class retain full possession of this public power of coercion they are able to use it as a weapon to defeat every attempt to alter the economic structure of society. Hence every attempt to destroy economic privilege and establish Industrial Democracy inevitably takes the form of a political class struggle between the economically privileged class and the economically exploited class. II THE LAW OF SURPLUS-VALUE The second great idea that we associate with the name of Karl Marx is the Law of Surplus-Value. Curiously enough this one technical theory is the only discovery that bourgeois writers and economists give Marx credit for. If you look up Marx in any ordinary encyclopedia or reference book you will find they make his fame depend on this theory alone, and to make matters worse they usually misstate and misrepresent this theory, while they invariably fail to mention his two other equally great, if not greater discoveries, the Materialistic Conception of History and the Class Struggle. I think the reason they give special prominence to this law of Surplus-Value is that, as it is a purely technical theory in economics, it is easier to obscure it with a cloud of sophistry and persuade their willing dupes that they have refuted it. And then they raise the cry that the foundation of Marxian Socialism has been destroyed and that the whole structure is about to tumble down on the heads of its crazy defenders, the Socialists. It is much to be regretted that many so-called Socialists are found foolish enough to play into the hands of the Capitalists by joining in the silly cry that some pigmy in political economy has overthrown the Marxian theory of Value. I suppose these so-called Socialists are actuated by a mad desire to be up to date, to keep up with the intellectual band-wagon. Revolutions in the various sciences have been going on so rapidly, they fancy that a theory that was formulated forty years ago must be a back-number, and so they hasten to declare their allegiance to the last new cloud of sophistry, purporting to be a theory of value, that has been evolved by the feeble minds of the anarchists of Italy or the capitalist economists of Austria. The Fabians of London are the most striking example of these socialists whose heads have been turned in this way by the rapid progress of science. But the followers of Bernstein in Europe and this country are running into the same danger and in their eagerness to grasp the very newest and latest doctrine will fall easy victims of the first windy and pretentious fakir who comes along. Ask any one of these fellows who tells you that the Marxian theory of Value has been exploded, to state the new and correct theory of Value that has taken its place and you will find that he cannot state a theory that you or I or any other man can understand. He will either admit he is floored, or else he will emit a dense fog of words. I challenge any one of them to state a theory of value that he himself can understand, let alone make any one else understand. Now the Marxian theory of Value can be clearly stated so that you and I can understand it. But let us begin with surplus-value. This theory of surplus-value is simply the scientific formulation of the fact that workingmen had been conscious of in a vague way long before Karl Marx's day, the fact that the workingman don't get a fair deal, that he don't get all he earns. This fact had been formulated as long ago as 1821 by the unknown author of a letter to Lord John Russell on "The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties." In this letter the very phrases "surplus produce" and "surplus labor" are used. You will find that Marx refers to this letter in a note on page 369 (Humboldt edition, 644 Kerr edition) of the American edition of Capital. The Russian writer, Slepzoff, quotes several passages from this letter in an article in the December, 1899, number of _La Revue Socialiste_, and it is amazing to see how near to Marx's conclusions this unknown writer had come eighty years ago, but the conditions were not ripe and his letter would to-day be forgotten if Marx had not embalmed it in a footnote. I confess I was surprised to learn that this was not a purely original discovery of Marx's, but the fact that it is not is one more signal confirmation of the theory I have given in this lecture of the double or multiple discovery of great ideas. But let us resume the discussion of Surplus Value and see just what it really is. No matter where you, my workingman hearer or reader may work, the person or corporation or trust for whom or which you work gets back more out of your labor, than he or it pays you in wages. If this is not so, your employer is either running a charitable institution or he is in business for his health. You may have employers of that kind here on the East Side of New York, but I have never met any of them elsewhere. It is impossible to conceive of a man going on day after day, week after week, year after year, paying you wages, unless he receives more for the product of your labor than he pays you in wages. Now, this difference between what you get and what he gets is what we call surplus-value. This surplus-value is the key to the whole present economic organization of society. The end and object of bourgeois society is the formation and accumulation of surplus-value, or in other words, the systematic robbery of the producing class. Now when we say robbery, we do not mean to accuse employers of conscious dishonesty. They are the creatures of a system just as the workers are, but it is a system which makes their interests diametrically opposed to the interests of their employees. The only way the capitalists can increase their relative share of the product of their employees' labor is by decreasing the relative share of the latter. Now, if out of the total product of his labor the workingman only receives a part, then it is true to say that he works part of the day for himself and part of the day gratuitously for the capitalist. Let us say, for purposes of illustration, that he works three hours for himself and seven hours for his employer for nothing. This three hours we call his necessary labor time, or his paid labor; and the seven hours we call his surplus labor time or his unpaid labor. The product of his three hours' labor is the equivalent of his wages or as we call it, the value of his Labor-Power. The product of the other seven hours of his labor, his surplus or unpaid labor, is surplus product or surplus-value. Starting from the fact that every workingman knows to be true, that he don't get all he feels he ought to get, we have thus, I think, made the definition of surplus-value clear to every one of you, but we have been talking of surplus-value and value of labor power and we have not yet defined Value. When we speak of the value of an object we mean the amount of human labor that is embodied or accumulated in it, that has been spent in fitting it to satisfy human needs. And we measure the amount of this human labor by its duration, by labor-time. You, if you are a skilled, highly-paid worker, receiving say four dollars a day, may say that it is absurd to say that an hour of your labor produces no more value than an hour of Tom's or Dick's or Pete's, who get only eighty cents a day apiece. You are quite right. Your hour does produce more value. The labor-time that determines value is the labor-time of the average, untrained worker. Again, you may waste your time, spending half of it looking out of the window or carrying on a flirtation. This wasted labor does not count in measuring value. The only labor that counts is the labor that is socially necessary under normal conditions for the production of the given commodity. Again, labor spent to produce a useless article does not produce value. To produce value the labor must serve to satisfy human wants. Now, I think this is quite clear so far. We know what surplus-value is. We know what value is and how it is measured. Let us now see what is meant by the Value of Labor-Power. To begin with, what is Labor-Power? When a workingman goes upon the market to sell something for money with which to buy bread and butter and other necessaries of life, what has he to offer for sale? He cannot offer a finished commodity, such as a watch, a shoe, or a book, because he owns nothing. He has neither the necessary machinery, the necessary raw material, nor even the necessary place in which to work to make these things. These all belong to another class who by owning them, in fact, own him. He cannot offer labor for sale, because his labor does not yet exist. He cannot sell a thing that has no existence. When his labor comes into real objective existence, it is incorporated with materials that are the property of the class that rules him, and no longer belongs to him. He cannot sell what he don't possess. There is only one thing he can sell, namely, his mental and physical or muscular power to do things, to make things. He can sell this for a definite time to an employer, just exactly as a livery stable keeper sells a horse's power to trot to his customers for so much per hour. Now this power of his to do things is what we call his labor-power; that is, his capacity to perform work. Now, its value is determined precisely like the value of every other commodity, _i. e._, by the labor-time socially necessary for its production. Now the labor-time socially necessary for the production of labor-power is the labor-time socially necessary to produce the food, clothing and shelter or lodging that are necessary to enable the laborer to come on the labor market day after day able physically to work, and also to enable him to beget and raise children who will take his place as wage-slaves when he shall have been buried by the County or some Sick and Death Benefit Fund. In the example we used above we assumed that the laborer worked three hours a day to produce a value equal to the value of his labor-power. The price of this value, the value produced by his paid labor, we call "Wages." This price is often reduced by the competition of "scabs" and other victims of capitalist exploitation, below the real value of labor-power, but we have not time to go into that here, so we will assume that the laborer gets in wages the full value of his labor-power. Well, then, if he produces in three or four hours a value equal to the value of his labor-power or wages, why doesn't he stop work then, and take his coat and hat and go home and devote the rest of the day to study, reading, games, recreation and amusement? He don't because he can't. He has to agree (voluntarily, of course) to any conditions that the class who by owning his tools own him choose to impose upon him, and the lash of the competition of the unemployed, Capital's Reserve Army, as Marx called it, is ever ready to fall upon his naked back. Why is he so helpless? Because he and his class have been robbed of the land and the tools and all the means of sustenance and production, and have nothing left them but that empty bauble, legal liberty, liberty to accept wages so small that they barely enable them to live like beasts, or liberty to starve to death and be buried in unmarked graves by the public authorities. The wage system necessarily implies this surplus labor or unpaid labor. So long as there are wages, workingmen, you will never get the full product of your labor. Let no reformer beguile you into a struggle which simply aims to secure a modification of the wage system! Nothing short of the annihilation of the wage system will give you justice and give you the full product of your labor. But while wages necessarily imply surplus-labor, the reverse is not true. You can have surplus-labor without wages. Surplus-labor is not an invention of modern capitalists. Since Mankind emerged from the state of Primitive Communism typified by the Garden of Eden in the Hebraic myth, there have been three great systems of economic organization: 1. Slavery; 2. Serfdom; 3. The Wage System. It is interesting to note the varying appearances of surplus or unpaid labor under these three systems. Under the first, Slavery, all labor appears as unpaid labor. This is only a false appearance, however. During a part of the day the slave only reproduces the value of his maintenance or "keep." During that part of the day he works for himself just as truly as the modern wage slave works for himself during a part of his day. But the property relation conceals the paid labor. Under the second system, Serfdom, or the Feudal System,--the paid labor and the unpaid labor are absolutely separate and distinct, so that not even the most gifted orthodox political economist can confuse them. Under the third system, Wage Slavery, the unpaid labor apparently falls to Zero. There is none. You voluntarily enter into a bargain, agreeing that your day's work is worth so much, and you receive the full price agreed upon. But again this is only a false appearance. As we saw by our analysis, a part of the wage-slave's day is devoted to paid labor and a part to unpaid. Here wages or the money relation conceals the unpaid labor and disguises under the mask of a voluntary bargain the struggle of the working class to diminish or abolish unpaid labor, and the class-conscious, pitiless struggle of the capitalist class to increase the unpaid labor and reduce the paid labor to the minimum, _i. e._, to or below the level of bare subsistence. In other words the Wage System conceals the Class Struggle. III THE CLASS STRUGGLE The third of the great ideas that will always be associated with the name of Karl Marx is that of the Class Struggle. The Class Struggle is logically such a necessary consequence of both the Materialistic Conception of History and the Law of Surplus-Value, that as we have discussed them at some length, but little need be said of the Class Struggle itself. In discussing the Materialistic Conception of History we showed with sufficient fullness and clearness that, in the language of the Communist Manifesto, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of Class Struggles." Hence it is clear the doctrine of class struggles is a key to past history. But it is more than this. It is a compass by which to steer in the present struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat, who cannot, fortunately, emancipate themselves without emancipating and ennobling all mankind. The Law of Surplus-Value has shown us that there is a deep-seated, ineradicable conflict between the direct class interest of the proletariat which coincides with the true interests of the human race, and the direct, conscious guiding interest of the class who own the means of production and distribution. There is here a direct clash between two hostile interests. This fact has been skilfully hidden from the eyes of the workers in the past, but the modern socialist movement, aided by the growing brutality of the capitalist class, is making it impossible to fool them in this way much longer. In other words, the workingmen are becoming Class-Conscious, _i. e._, conscious of the fact that they, as a class, have interests which are in direct conflict with the selfish interests of the capitalist class. With the growth of this class-consciousness this conflict of interests must inevitably become a political class struggle. The capitalists, the economically privileged class, struggle to retain possession of the State that they may continue to use it as a weapon to keep the working class subjugated, servile and dependent. The proletariat, the working-class, struggle to obtain possession of the State, that they may use it to destroy every vestige of economic privilege, to abolish private property in the means of production and distribution, and thus put an end to the division of society into classes, and usher in the society of the future, the Co-operative Commonwealth. As the State is in its very nature a class instrument, as its existence is dependent upon the existence of distinct classes, the State in the hands of the victorious proletariat will commit suicide, by tearing down its own foundation. Until a man perceives and is keenly conscious of this class conflict, a conflict which admits of no truce or compromise, and ranges himself on the side of the workers to remain there until the battle is fought and the victory won, until the proletariat shall have conquered the public powers, taken possession of that class instrument, the State (for so long as the State exists it will be a class instrument) and made it in the hands of the working class a tool to abolish private ownership in the tools and the land, in the means of production and distribution, and to abolish all classes by absorbing them all in the Brotherhood of Man; until a man has thus shown himself clearly conscious of the Class Struggle, with its necessary implications, his heart may be in the right place, but laboring men can not trust him as a leader. The fact that the hearts of many popular reformers, political candidates and so-called "friends of labor," who ignore the class struggle, are on the right side, but gives them added power to mislead and betray workingmen. Workingmen, I beg you to follow no leader who has not a clear enough head to see that there is a class struggle, and a large enough heart to place himself on your side of that struggle. But remember that you are not fighting the battle of a class alone. You are fighting for the future welfare of the whole human race. But while this is true, it is also true that your class must bear the brunt of this battle, for yours is the only class that, in the language of the Manifesto, "has nothing but its chains to lose, and a World to gain!" The rich have much to lose, and this very real and tangible risk of loss not unnaturally blinds the eyes of most of them to the more remote, though infinitely greater compensations that Socialism has to offer them. The Middle Class, even down to those who are just a round above the proletarians on the social ladder, love to ape the very rich and the capitalist magnates. It tickles their silly vanity to fancy that their interests are capitalistic interests, and their mental horizon is too hopelessly limited for them to perceive that the proletariat whom it pleases them to despise as the great army of the "unwashed" are in truth fighting their battles for them, and receiving instead of gratitude, contempt, gibes and sneers. Socialism does occasionally receive a recruit from the very highest stratum of society, but I tell you it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a member of the Middle Class to become a scientific socialist. I have said the Class Struggle is a compass to steer by in the present struggle for the emancipation of the working class. If we steer by this compass, we will resolutely reject all overtures from political parties representing the interests of other classes, even when such parties in their platform endorse some of the immediate demands of the socialists; we will "fear the Greeks bringing gifts;" we will not be seduced for a moment by the idea of fusion with any so-called Socialist party which is not avowedly based on the Class Struggle; especially as individuals will we avoid giving our votes or our support to any Middle Class party which we may at times fancy to be "moving in the right direction." The history of the class conflicts of the past shows that whenever the proletarians have joined forces with the Middle Class or any section of it, the proletarians have had to bear the heat and burden of the day and when the victory has been won their allies have robbed them of its fruits. You, yourselves, then, Workingmen, must fight this battle! To win, it is true, you will need the help of members of the other classes. But this help the economic evolution is constantly bringing you. It is a law of the economic evolution that with the progress of industrialism the ratio of the returns of capital to the capital invested constantly diminishes, (though the aggregate volume of those returns increases). You see this in the constant lowering of the rate of interest. Now, as their incomes decrease, the small capitalists and the middle class, who form the vast majority of the possessing class, become unable to continue to support the members of the liberal professions, the priests, preachers, lawyers, editors, lecturers, etc., whose chief function heretofore has been to fool the working class into supporting or at least submitting to the present system. Now, when the income of these unproductive laborers, an income drawn from the class hostile to the proletariat, shall sensibly decrease or, worse still, cease, these educated members of the liberal professions will desert the army of Capital and bring a much-needed reinforcement to the Army of Labor. Some of the more far-seeing upholders of the present system are keenly conscious of this danger. And this danger (even though most of the expansionists may not realize it), is one of the most potent causes of the Imperialism, Militarism, and Jingoism which are at present disgracing the civilized world. England in Africa, and America in the Philippines are pursuing their present criminal policies, not solely to open new markets for English and American goods, but also to secure new fields for the investment of English and American capital, and thus to stop the continuous dropping of the rate of interest and profits, for if this cannot be stopped, the intellectual proletariat will join the sweating proletariat, and the Co-operative Commonwealth will be established and then the poor capitalists will have to work for their livings like other people. This was clearly pointed out by a capitalist writer in an essay in a recent number of the Atlantic Monthly, who warned the capitalist opponents of McKinley, Destiny & Co.'s policy of expansion that they were attempting to close the only safety-valve which under present conditions could, not avert, but postpone the Social Revolution.[3] But, friends, nothing can postpone it long, for the industrial crises and financial panics are recurring at shorter and shorter intervals, and the process of recovery from them is slower and slower, and every panic and crisis forces thousands of educated, intelligent members of the middle class off their narrow and precarious foothold down into the ranks of the proletariat, where the hard logic of the facts will convert them to class-conscious Socialism. Workingmen, I congratulate you upon the approaching victory of the workers and the advent of the Co-operative Commonwealth, for I tell you, in the language of an English comrade: "Failure on failure may seem to defeat us; ultimate failure is impossible. Seeing what is to be done then, seeing what the reward is, Seeing what the terms are,--are you willing to join us? Will you lend us the aid of your voice, your money, your sympathy? May we take you by the hand and call you 'Comrade'?" FOOTNOTE: [3] The expansion policy also acts as a safety-valve by promoting the emigration of the discontented and by providing employment abroad for the educated proletarians who would, no doubt, become "dangerous and incendiary Socialist agitators" in their native lands. MARXISM AND ETHICS (Wilshire's Magazine, November, 1905). What are "wrong," "right," "vice," "virtue," "bad" and "good"? Mere whips to scourge the backs that naked bear The burden of the world--bent backs that dare Not rise erect, defy the tyrant, "Should," And freely, boldly do the things they would. In living's joy they rarely have a share; They look beyond the grave, and hope that there They'll be repaid, poor fools, for being good. To serve thy master, that is virtue, Slave; To do thy will, enjoy sweet life, is vice. Poor duty-ridden serf, rebel, forget Thy master-taught morality; be brave Enough to make this earth a Paradise Whereon the Sun of Joy shall never set! Thanks to modern science--the child of the machine process--the universality of the law of cause and effect is now assumed on all hands. In Labriola's strong words, "Nothing happens by chance." The Marxist believes this in all its fulness. To him systems of religion, codes of ethics and schools of art are, in the last analysis, just as much products of material causes as are boots or sausages. There are some intellectual Socialists whose mode of life has shielded them from the discipline of the Machine Process--the inexorable inculcator of causation--who attempt to place religion and ethics and other ideological phenomena in a separate category not to be accounted for by the materialistic conception of history. These may turn to Marx and weary their auditors by their iteration of "Lord! Lord!" but verily they know not the mind of the Master. With Marx matter always comes first, thought second. The dialectic materialism of the Socialist is an all-inclusive philosophy, accounting for _all_ phenomena--as fully for those called spiritual as for the most grossly material. The man who narrows this dialectic materialism down to economic determinism and then defines the latter as meaning that the economic factor has been the "dominant" factor--among many independent factors--in producing the civilization of to-day, may be a sincere Socialist, but he is no Marxist. The work of the theoretical Marxist will not be done till the origin and development of all religions, philosophies, and systems of ethics have been explained and accounted for by reference to material and economic causes. To understand history the primary requisite is to understand the processes by which the material means of life have been produced and distributed. "The ruling ideas of every age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class." This applies of ideas of right and wrong--of what is commonly known as morality--as fully as to ideas of any other kind. Conduct that has tended to perpetuate the power of the economically dominant class--since the increase of wealth has divided society into classes--has ever been accounted moral conduct; conduct that has tended to weaken or subvert the power of the ruling class has always been branded as immoral. There you have the key to all the varying codes of ethics the world has seen. For it must never be forgotten that ideas of right and wrong are not absolute, but relative; not fixed, but fluid, changing with the changes in our modes of producing food, clothes and shelter. Morality varies not only with time, but with social altitude. What was accounted a virtue in a bold baron of the feudal days was a crime in that same baron's serf. The pipe-line hand who regulates his daily life by the same moral ideas which have made John D. Rockefeller a shining example of piety will find himself behind prison bars. Ethics simply register the decrees by which the ruling class stamps with approval or brands with censure human conduct solely with reference to the effect of that conduct upon the welfare of their class. This does not mean that any ruling class has ever had the wit to devise _ab initio_ a code of ethics perfectly adapted to further their interests. Far from it. The process has seldom, if ever, been a conscious one. By a process akin to natural selection in the organic world, the ruling class learns by experience what conduct is helpful and what hurtful to it, and blesses in the one case and damns in the other. And as the ruling class has always controlled all the avenues by which ideas reach the so-called lower classes, they have heretofore been able to impose upon the subject classes just those morals which were best adapted to prolong their subjection. Even to-day in America the majority of the working class get their ideas--like their clothes--ready-made. But there is an ever-growing portion of the working class whom the ever-increasing severity of the discipline of the machine process is teaching more and more to think solely in terms of material cause and effect. To them, just as much as to the scholar who has learned by study the relativity of ethics, current morality has ceased to appeal. It is idle to talk of the will of God, or of abstract, absolute ideas of right and wrong to the sociological scholar and the proletarian of the factory alike. George Bernard Shaw, in the preface to "Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant," says: "I have no respect for popular morality." A few weeks since, a workingman, who had been listening to a stereotyped sentimental harangue emitted by one of our amiable Utopian comrades, showed me the palms of his hands, which were thickly studded with callouses, and asked me, "What the hell has a fellow with a pair of mits like those to do with morality? What I want is the goods." Shaw meant just what he wrote; yet the critics will continue to treat his utterance as one of Bernard Shaw's "delightfully witty paradoxes." My friend meant just what he said; yet Salvation Armyists and other good Christians will continue to preach to him and his kind a religion and a morality which have become meaningless to them. Organized government, with its power to make laws and levy taxes--in other words, the State--only came into existence with the division of society into classes. The State is, in its very essence, a class instrument--an agency in the hands of the ruling class to keep the masses in subjection. Hence the name, "State," cannot fitly be applied to the social organization of a society in which there are no classes, whether that society be the primitive communist group of savagery or the co-operative commonwealth of the future. The word "capital," cannot be applied to the machinery and means of production in any and every society. They only become capital when they are used as means to exploit (rob) a subject class of workers, and when they shall cease to be so used they will cease to be capital. The word "wages," necessarily implies the extraction of surplus-value (profits) from the workers by a parasitic class; hence, that share of the social product which the workers of the future will devote to individual consumption cannot be correctly spoken of as "wages." In the same way, morality is, in its very essence, a class institution--a set of rules of conduct enforced or inculcated for the benefit of a class. Hence, to speak of the morality of the future, when one refers to the classless society to which Socialists look forward, is the height or the depth of absurdity. In the free fellowship of the future there will be no morality. This is not saying that there will be no criteria by which conduct will be praised or deplored; it is simply saying that with the abolition of classes, morality, like the State, capital and wages, being a product of class-divisions, will cease to exist. While the revolutionary proletariat have no respect for current morality, it is none the less true that they have in process of growth a morality of their own--a morality that has already emerged from the embryonic stage. The proletariat are to be the active agents in bringing to pass the social revolution which is to put a period to Capitalism and usher in the new order. During this transition period and until the change is fully accomplished, they will be a distinct class with special class interests of their own. As fast as they become class-conscious they will recognize and praise as moral all conduct that tends to hasten the social revolution--the triumph of their class, and they will condemn as unhesitatingly as immoral all conduct that tends to prolong the dominance of the capitalist class. Already we can note manifestations of this new proletarian morality in that sense of class solidarity exhibited by the workers in the many acts of kindness and assistance of the employed to the unemployed, and more especially in the detestation in which the scab is held. The revolutionary workingman, be he avowed Socialist or not, who repudiates the current or capitalist morality, does not abandon himself to unbridled license, but is straightway bound by the obligations of the adolescent proletarian morality which is enforced with ever greater vigor by the public opinion of his class as his class grows in class-consciousness. Does the new morality condemn what the old branded as "crimes against property?" It must be confessed that the revolutionary worker has absolutely no respect for natural rights--including the right of property--as such. Hence, as the act of an individual in appropriating the goods of another is not likely either to help or to injure his class, he neither approves or condemns it on moral grounds; but knowing, as he does, that his class enemies, the capitalists, own not only "the goods," but also the courts and the police, he condemns theft by a workingman as suicidal folly. The Marxist absolutely denies the freedom of the will.[4] Every human action is inevitable. "Nothing happens by chance." Every thing is because it cannot but be. How then can we consistently praise or blame any conduct? If one cares to make hair-splitting distinctions, it may be replied that we cannot, but none the less we can rejoice at some actions and deplore others. And the love of praise, with its obverse, the fear of blame, has ever been one of the strongest motives to human conduct. It is not necessarily the applause of the thoughtless multitude that one seeks; but in writing this paper, which I know will be misunderstood or condemned by the majority of those who read it, undoubtedly one of my motives is to win the approbation of the discerning few for whose good opinion I deeply care. The passengers whose train has come to a standstill on a steep up-grade owing to the inefficiency of the engine, will not fail to greet with a hearty cheer the approach of a more powerful locomotive. In the same way, Socialist workingmen, though they know that no human act deserves either praise or blame, though they know, in the words of the wise old Frenchman, that "_comprendre tout, c'est pardonner tout_," or, better yet, that to understand all is to understand that there is nothing to pardon, will not be chary of their cheers to him who is able to advance their cause, nor of their curses upon him who betrays it. And in so doing they will not be inconsistent, but will be acting in strict accordance with that law of cause and effect which is the very fundament of all proletarian reasoning; for those cheers and curses will be potent factors in causing such conduct as will speed the social revolution. While we have no respect for current morality, we must not fall into the error of supposing that there are no criteria by which to judge conduct, that there are, so to say, no valid distinctions between the acts of a hero and those of a blackguard. By referring to the ethic inspiring the actor we can always pronounce some conduct to be fine and other acts base. It is this power of a fine or noble action to thrill the human heart that makes the triumphs of dramatic art possible. The dramatists, like Shakespeare, whose characters accept the current moral code, appeal to a wide audience--to nearly all. But those dramatists, such as Ibsen, Shaw, Maeterlinck, and above all, Sudermann, whose heroes and heroines attempt to put into practice the ideals of to-morrow in the environment of to-day, are misunderstood and disliked by the majority, and understood and appreciated only by the few who, like themselves, have rejected the current code and adopted the criteria of to-morrow. But those of us who call Sudermann the first of living dramatists, do so on account of the extreme nobility of his heroines' conduct judged by the criteria of the future. While there will be no morality in Socialist society; while in the perfect solidarity of a classless society there can be no conflict of individual with social interests; there will nevertheless be certain actions exceptionally fitted to increase the welfare and augment the happiness of the community, and the men and women who perform these acts will undoubtedly be rewarded by the plaudits and the love of their comrades. Indeed, we with our debased standards are incapable of conceiving how dear to them this reward will be. It is because I believe that this love of one's fellows under Socialism will be a joy far exceeding in intensity any pleasure known to us, that I look for dramatic art to reach under Socialism a perfection and influence to-day inconceivable. The most striking phenomenon in the field of ethics to-day is the rapid growth of the new proletarian morality; and one of the principal functions of the Socialist agitator and propagandist is to facilitate and further this growth. He is the teacher of a new morality and, if one accepted Matthew Arnold's definition of religion as "morality touched with emotion," he might be called the preacher of a new religion. Let who will call this sentimentalism, it is none the less hard fact. For, after all, this new proletarian ethic is nothing else than class-consciousness under a new name. And what Socialist will deny that the chief function of the militant Socialist is to develop class-consciousness in the workers? The one hope of the world to-day is in the victory of the proletariat--aye, it is more than a hope, it is a certainty; but this victory can only be won by a proletariat permeated with the sense of solidarity; and the workingman imbued with this sense of proletarian solidarity will be a living incarnation of the new morality. And what is this class-consciousness which it is our business to preach in season and out of season? There is probably no term in the whole technical vocabulary of Socialism which grates so unpleasantly on the ear of the _petit bourgeois_ who "is coming our way" as this one of "class-consciousness." To say class-consciousness is not to say class hatred; though class-consciousness ofttimes develops into class hatred and does not thereby become the less effective. The Socialist recognizes in the words of Edmund Burke that "Man acts not from metaphysical considerations, but from motives relative to his interests," and hence, he regards it as his first duty to show his fellow-workers that their economic interests are in direct conflict with those of the master-class. He does not create this conflict by pointing it out; he merely shows the working class "where they are at." But besides pointing out this conflict of material interests, the Socialist propagandist shows the workers that it is their high destiny to accomplish a revolution far more glorious and pregnant with blessings for humanity than any of those recorded in the history of the past. This consciousness of the great part that he and his class are called to play on the world's stage is the most uplifting and ennobling influence that can enter the life of a workingman. There can be no doubt that the sentiment expressed by the words, _noblesse oblige_, has had an influence on the lives of the more worthy of the aristocrats. Similar in its nature is the influence here under consideration, and that this influence is not less potent is well known to every one acquainted with the men and women who form what is known as the Socialist Movement. The non-Socialist, who wishes to see the effect of this influence, has but to read even in the files of the capitalist press the accounts of the high and noble bearing of the martyrs of the Paris Commune who faced death with calm and cheerful courage, though they were buoyed up by no hope of a hereafter. While we continue devoting our whole energies to arousing in our fellow-workers a keen and clear consciousness of the hideous class-struggle now waging in all its brutal bitterness, let us keep our courage high and our hope bright by keeping our eyes ever fixed upon the glorious future, upon the "wonderful days a-coming when all shall be better than well!" FOOTNOTE: [4] It will be seen that the text treats the long-debated question of the "freedom of the will" as _res adjudicata_. It may be that some readers will want to know where to turn for fuller discussions of this famous question. As a full bibliography of the literature on this subject would more than fill this volume, I must content myself with telling them that a very helpful discussion of it may be found in Huxley's Life of Hume, and a clear and succinct statement of the conclusions of the modern school of psychology in Ferri's "The Positive School of Criminology." Both of these are to be had in cheap form. INSTEAD OF A FOOTNOTE[5] A photograph of a Fifth Avenue mansion, taken from the partition wall in the back-yard, might be a perfectly accurate picture and yet give a very inadequate idea of the house as a whole. This article on "Marxism and Ethics" is, in a sense, just such a picture. In writing it, space limitations compelled me to confine myself wholly to impressing upon the reader the relative and transitory character of moral codes. But in the popular concept of morality there are elements that are relatively permanent. Darwin in his "Descent of Man" showed that the gregarious and social traits that make associated life possible antedate, not only the division of society into classes, but even antedate humanity itself, since they plainly appear in the so-called lower animals. So that my contention that morality only came into being with the division of society into classes and will pass away when class divisions are abolished, becomes a question of definition. If we include in our definition of morality the almost universal and relatively permanent gregarious traits of men and beasts, then morality has existed longer than humanity itself, and will continue to exist under Socialism. But it cannot be denied that moral codes were not formulated until after class-divisions had arisen. Every moral code of which we have any knowledge has been moulded by the cultural discipline of a society based on class-divisions. In every one of them there is implied the relation of status, of a superior, natural or supernatural, with the right or power to formulate "commandments," and of an inferior class whose lot it is to obey. We find this implication of status in even the noblest expressions of current ethical aspirations. Wordsworth's immortal Ode to Duty begins, "Stern Daughter of the Voice of God!" Since then morality as a word through the force of immemorial habit unavoidably suggests to the mind the relation of status, it appears to me that its use to describe truly social conduct in a society of equals can lead to nothing but confusion. What we really need is the right word to apply to the highest conduct in a classless society; and, I am inclined to think that a generation to whom the idea of status will have become wholly alien will find the word "social" entirely adequate for this purpose, though I frankly confess it is not adequate for us "In the days of the years we dwell in, that wear our lives away." My statement that the Revolutionary worker abstains from crimes against property from expediency rather than from principle must not be construed into an allegation that fear of personal punishment is the only ground for abstaining from such crimes. If it were not for the stupidity and malice of our opponents I would feel that I was insulting my readers by making this explanation; but for their benefit be it said that in a society based economically upon the institution of private property social life is impossible without respect (respect here refers to acts, not to mental attitude) for private property. Crimes against property are distinctly unsocial. But respect for the rights of property is rapidly disintegrating both among trust magnates and proletarians. The Natural Rights Philosophy[6] still has much vitality in the middle classes, but as a broad statement it will hold good that the millionaire or the proletarian who shows respect for private property (the private property of others, be it understood) does so chiefly on grounds of expediency. The socialist materialist is well content to leave this whole question of ethics to adjust itself, since he knows that equality of condition, the economic basis of Socialism, will necessarily evolve a mode of living, and standards of conduct in perfect harmony with their economic environment. FOOTNOTES: [5] It may be as well to state that this was written before the writer had read Karl Kautsky's illuminating work, "Ethics and the Materialist Conception of History." [6] For a fuller discussion of the relation of current conceptions of property-rights to the Natural Rights Philosophy see Veblen's "The Theory of Business Enterprise," Chapters II and VIII, and La Monte's paper "Veblen, The Revolutionist," International Socialist Review, Vol. V. pp. 726-739. THE NIHILISM OF SOCIALISM. "In their negative proposals the socialists and anarchists are fairly agreed. It is in the metaphysical postulates of their protest and in their constructive aims that they part company. Of the two, the socialists are more widely out of touch with the established order. They are also more hopelessly negative and destructive in their ideals, as seen from the standpoint of the established order." THORSTEIN VEBLEN in "The Theory of Business Enterprise." Page 338. To label a truth a truism is too often regarded as equivalent to placing it in the category of the negligible. It is precisely the salient obviousness, which makes a truth a truism, that places it in the direst peril of oblivion in the stress of modern life. Such a truth was well stated by Enrico Ferri, the Italian criminologist, in a recent lecture before the students of the University of Naples: "Without an ideal, neither an individual nor a collectivity can live, without it humanity is dead or dying. For it is the fire of an ideal which renders the life of each one of us possible, useful and fertile. And only by its help can each one of us, in the longer or shorter course of his or her existence, leave behind traces for the benefit of fellow-beings." Platitude though this may be, our greatest poets have not hesitated to use their highest powers to impress it upon us. Robert Browning put this truth into the mouth of Andrea del Sarto in one of the strongest lines in all English verse, "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp." Mr. George S. Street, in a very interesting paper in Putnam's Monthly for November (1906), points out that the most significant contrast between our time and Early Victorian days is a decrease in idealism. "The most characteristic note," he tells us, "in the mental attitude of the forties and fifties in England, and that in which they contrast most sharply with our own times, was confidence.... In party politics this confidence was almost without limit. There was a section of Conservatism which really believed in things as they were, and thought it undesirable to attempt any change for the better.... It was simply--I speak of a section, not the party as a whole--the articulate emotion of privileged and contented people and their parasites, and its denomination as 'stupid' was an accurate description, though hardly the brilliant epigram for which, in our poverty of political wit, it has been taken. On the other hand, there was a confident Liberalism which inspired a whole party. Some wished to go faster, some slower, but all believed sincerely in a broad scheme of domestic policy. They were to reform this and that at home; they were to assist, or at least applaud, the reforming of this and that abroad. So believing and intending, they naturally conceived themselves made very little indeed lower than the angels. "The contrast with our own day hardly needs pointing. You might now search long and in vain for a Conservative in public life who would not admit that reforms are desirable or even urgent, though few might be prepared with precise statements about particulars.... But their (the Liberals') confidence in reform, in their ability to improve the body politic by certain definite measures, is gone. The old Liberal spirit animating a whole party is dead. It may seem an odd remark to make just after the late election, but the evidence is abundant, and the explanation simple. Domestic reform on a large scale and on individualist lines has reached its limit; but to many Liberals, to many eminent and authoritative Liberals, reform on socialist lines is abhorrent.... Consequently there is a large party called Liberal, which, through the faults of its opponents and the accidents of time, is successful and has the high spirits of success, but is no more now than it has been for twenty years a party of homogeneous confidence in domestic reform, while on the world outside the British islands it looks with passivity, perhaps timidity, certainly with no intention of assisting oppressed peoples." * * * * * "Theoretical Socialism of a logical and thoughtful kind, not entangled with Radicalism, has made much progress of late years, more especially, so far as my own experience goes, in the educated and professional classes; but in practice it bides its time, with confidence perhaps, but with a consciousness that the time will be long coming. That is a different spirit from the buoyant expectancy of the old Liberalism." Granted the necessity of idealism to individual and social health, Mr. Street's views do not conduce to optimism. Here we have a competent observer telling us that the only note of idealism he finds in contemporary intellectual life is a growing, but half-hearted, belief in Socialism, which is more noticeable "in the educated and professional classes." There is another note of idealism in the life of to-day which Mr. Street ignores. This is the tendency toward the apotheosis of the individual in antithesis to society. This is a sign of health, in so far as it is a revolt against the stifling pressure of outworn conventionality, and it has found worthy expression in the philosophy of Herbert Spencer and the poetry of Browning and Walt Whitman. But this form of idealism cannot be said to differentiate our time from the Early Victorian era, for it found its classic expression back in the middle of the last century in Max Stirner's _Der Einzige und sein Eigentum_, a book which has been forgotten amid the growing consciousness of the organic solidarity of society. But Mr. Street is possibly justified in ignoring this tendency, for as a school of thought it has committed suicide in the person of Nietzsche's Overman attempting to construct out of materials drawn from his inner consciousness a pair of stilts on which to tower above "the herd." What is the lure of Socialism that is appealing, according to Mr. Street, to more and more of our "educated and professional" people? For, in spite of what Professor Veblen truly says of the "negative and destructive" (in the quotation at the head of this paper) character of socialist ideals, Socialism must hold up some positive ideals to attract such growing numbers of the educated classes. To convince oneself of the actuality of this appeal it is only necessary to run over the writers' names in the tables of contents in our popular magazines. The proportion of socialists is surprisingly large and is constantly growing. There can be no doubt that the percentage of Socialists among writers of distinction is larger than the percentage of socialists in the population at large. Socialism does present certain very definite positive ideals. The first of these is "Comfort for All" (to use a chapter-heading from Prince Kropotkin's too little known book, "_La Conquête du Pain_"). The second is Leisure for All, or, in Paul Lafargue's witty phrase, "The Right to be Lazy." The third is the fullest possible physical and intellectual development of every individual, considered not as an isolated, self-centred entity, but as a member of an interdependent society; or, in the words of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the Communist Manifesto, the socialist ideal is "an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." It may be noted that all that is vivifying in the ideal of individualism is included in this third positive ideal of Socialism, so that, it is now seen, Mr. Street was fully justified in making no separate mention of the ideal of individualism. There can be no doubt that it is the immensely richer literary and artistic life promised by this third ideal of Socialism that accounts for the phenomenon noted by Mr. Street. The beauties of the positive ideals of the socialist Utopias have been sufficiently lauded by scores of writers from Sir Thomas More to Bellamy and Mr. H. G. Wells. What it is desired to emphasize here is the "negative and destructive" (from the standpoint of the established order) aspects of socialist ideals; for it is the Nihilism of Socialism that explains why Mr. Street's "educated and professional" socialists have more patience than confidence in awaiting the realization of their ideal. The Nihilism of Socialism turns aside many, who have felt the lure of the socialist ideal, into what Professor Veblen calls, "some excursion into pragmatic romance,"[7] such as Social Settlements, Prohibition, Clean Politics, Single Tax, Arts and Crafts, Neighborhood Guilds, Institutional Church, Christian Science, New Thought, Hearstism, or "some such cultural thimble-rig." Yet more, there are many of the "educated and professional classes" who call themselves socialists, because they cherish the charming delusion that it is possible to separate the positive from the negative ideals of Socialism, and to work (in a dilettante fashion) for the former while blithely anathematizing the latter. It is the purpose of this paper to show that Socialism is not a scheme for the betterment of humanity to be accomplished by a sufficiently zealous and intelligent propaganda, but that it is, on the contrary, a consistent, (though to many repellent) monistic philosophy of the cosmos; that it is from its Alpha to its Omega so closely and inextricably interlocked that its component parts cannot be disassociated, save by an act of intellectual suicide; that, in a word, the Nihilism[8] of Socialism is of the very essence of Socialism. But, here, a most important distinction should be noted. Socialism, viewed as a political propaganda, is purely positive in its demands. In fact, all its demands may be reduced to two--Collectivism and Democracy. That the people shall own the means of production, and the producers shall control their products--that is the sum and substance of all Socialist platforms. Socialist parties do not attack Religion, the Family, or the State. But socialist philosophy proves conclusively that the realization of the positive political and economic ideals of Socialism involves the atrophy of Religion, the metamorphosis of the Family, and the suicide of the State. The Nihilism of Socialism springs from the Materialist Conception of History, and this is precisely the portion of the socialist doctrine that is usually ignored or half-understood by the enthusiastic young intellectuals who are in growing numbers joining the Socialist movement on both sides of the Atlantic. While the Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1847, is throughout founded on this conception, the first clearly formulated statement of the conception itself is to be found in the Preface to the "Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy," published by Karl Marx in 1859, the same year in which Darwin and Wallace made public their independent and almost simultaneous discoveries of the theory of Natural Selection. This first statement runs thus: "In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society--the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material forces of production in society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or--what is but a legal expression for the same thing--with the property relations within which they had been at work before. From forms of development of the forces of production these relations turn into their fetters. Then comes the period of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed."[9] This statement contains a whole Revolution in embryo. Viewed from the standpoint of the established order, it is the very Quintessence of Nihilism. In a word, it teaches the material origin of Ideas. In the last analysis, every idea can be traced back to the economic and telluric environments. In the words of Joseph Dietzgen, "philosophy revealed to them (Marx and Engels) the basic principle that, in the last resort, the world is not governed by Ideas, but, on the contrary, the Ideas by the material world." This doctrine involves a new epistemology, the distinguishing mark of which is its denial of the immaculate conception of thought. The human mind, according to Marx and Dietzgen, can only bring forth thought after it has been impregnated by the objects of sense perception.[10] Here we have a thorough-going system of materialist monism. "Ours is the organic conception of history," says Labriola. "The totality of the unity of social life is the subject matter present to our minds. It is economics itself which dissolves in the course of one process, to reappear in as many morphological stages, in each of which it serves as a substructure for all the rest. Finally, it is not our method to extend the so-called economic factor isolated in an abstract fashion over all the rest, as our adversaries imagine, but it is, before everything else, to form an historic conception of economics, and to explain the other changes by means of its changes."[11] In another place he says: "Ideas do not fall from heaven, and nothing comes to us in a dream.... The change in ideas, even to the creation of new methods of conception, has reflected little by little the experience of a new life. This, in the revolutions of the last two centuries, was little by little despoiled of the mythical, religious and mystical envelopes in proportion as it acquired the practical and precise consciousness of its immediate and direct conditions. Human thought, also, which sums up this life and theorizes upon it, has little by little been plundered of its theological and metaphysical hypotheses to take refuge finally in this prosaic assertion: in the interpretation of history we must limit ourselves to the objective co-ordination of the determining conditions and of the determined effects." He reiterates: "Ideas do not fall from heaven; and, what is more, like the other products of human activity, they are formed in given circumstances, in the precise fulness of time, through the action of definite needs, thanks to the repeated attempts at their satisfaction, and by the discovery of such and such other means of proof which are, as it were, the instruments of their production and their elaboration. Even ideas involve a basis of social conditions; they have their technique; thought also is a form of work. To rob the one and the other, ideas and thought, of the conditions and environment of their birth and their development, is to disfigure their nature and their meaning."[12] This socialist materialism does not refuse the inspiration of ideals. "By granting that society is dominated by material interests," Dietzgen explains, "we do not deny the power of the ideals of the heart, mind, science, and art. For we have no more to deal with the absolute antithesis between idealism and materialism, but with their higher synthesis which has been found in the knowledge that the ideal depends on the material, that divine justice and liberty depend on the production and distribution of earthly goods."[13] Religions, schools of ethics, philosophy, metaphysics, art, political and juridical institutions are all to be explained in the last analysis by the economic and telluric environments, present and past. This ruthless materialism crushes belief in God, in the Soul, in immortality. It leaves no room for any shred of dualism in thought. It is true that the German Social Democracy included in the famous Erfurt Programme (adopted in 1891--the first clearly Marxian socialist platform ever promulgated) a demand for a "Declaration that religion is a private matter. Abolition of all expenditure from public funds upon ecclesiastical and religious objects. Ecclesiastical and religious bodies are to be regarded as private associations, which order their affairs independently." It will be seen that this is nothing more than a demand that the State withdraw its sanction of religion as France has recently done in the Clemenceau law. But Ferri does nothing but draw the necessary conclusions from socialist premises when he writes: "God, as Laplace has said, is an hypothesis of which exact science has no need; he is, according to Herzen, at the most an X, which represents not the _unknowable_--as Spencer and Dubois Raymond contend--but all that which humanity does not yet know. Therefore, it is a variable X which decreases in direct ratio to the progress of the discoveries of science. "It is for this reason that science and religion are in inverse ratio to each other; the one diminishes and grows weaker in the same proportion that the other increases and grows stronger in its struggle against the unknown."[14] Joseph Dietzgen has thus stated what may be called the law of the atrophy of religion: "The more the idea of God recedes into the past the more palpable it is; in olden times man knew everything about his God; the more modern the form of religion has become, the more confused and hazy are our religious ideas. The truth is that the historic development of religion tends to its gradual dissolution."[15] The characteristic attitude of the socialist materialist toward Christianity appears very clearly in the following excerpt from Professor Ferri's "Socialism and Modern Science": "It is true that Marxian Socialism, since the Congress held at Erfurt (1891), has rightly declared that religious beliefs are private affairs[16] and that, therefore, the Socialist party combats religious intolerance under all its forms.... But this breadth of superiority of view is, at bottom, only a consequence of the confidence in final victory. "It is because Socialism knows and foresees that religious beliefs, whether one regards them, with Sergi, as pathological phenomena of human psychology, or as useless phenomena of moral incrustation, are destined to perish by atrophy with the extension of even elementary scientific culture. This is why Socialism does not feel the necessity of waging a special warfare against these religious beliefs which are destined to disappear. It has assumed this attitude, although it knows that the absence or the impairment of the belief in God is one of the most powerful factors for its extension, because the priests of all religions have been, throughout all the phases of history, the most potent allies of the ruling classes in keeping the masses pliant and submissive under the yoke by means of the enchantment of religion, just as the tamer keeps wild beasts submissive by the terrors of the cracks of his whip" (page 63). It is also well to remember that a prevalent animistic habit of thought in viewing the events of life, whether it take the form of a belief in luck, as in gamblers and sporting men, or the form of a belief in supernatural interposition in mundane affairs, as in the case of the devotees of the anthropomorphic cults, or merely the tendency to give a teleological interpretation to evolution, to attribute a meliorative trend to the cosmic process, as in Tennyson's "through the ages one increasing purpose runs," tends, by retarding the prompt perception of relations of material cause and effect, to lower the industrial efficiency of the community.[17] The socialist materialist can look forward with unruffled serenity to the passing of religion, since his very definition of religion as "a popular striving after the illusory happiness that corresponds with a social condition which needs such an illusion,"[18] implies that it cannot pass away till it has ceased to be needful to human happiness. From the point of view of this Socialist materialism, the monogamous family, the present economic unit of society, ceases to be a divine institution, and becomes the historical product of certain definite economic conditions. It is the form of the family peculiar to a society based on private property in the means of production, and the production of commodities for sale. It is not crystallized and permanent, but, like all other institutions, fluid and subject to change. With the change in its economic basis, the code of sexual morality and the monogamous family are sure to be modified; but, in the judgment of such socialists as Friedrich Engels and August Bebel, we shall probably remain monogamous, but monogamy will cease to be compulsorily permanent.[19] "What we may anticipate," says Engels, "about the adjustment of sexual relations after the impending downfall of capitalist production is mainly of a negative nature and mostly confined to elements that will disappear. But what will be added? That will be decided after a new generation has come to maturity: a race of men who never in their lives have had any occasion for buying with money or other economic means of power the surrender of a woman; a race of women who have never had any occasion for surrendering to any man for any other reason but love, or for refusing to surrender to their lover from fear of economic consequences. Once such people are in the world, they will not give a moment's thought to what we to-day believe should be their course. They will follow their own practice and fashion their own public opinion--only this and nothing more."[20] Changed economic conditions are already reflected in the disintegration of the traditional bourgeois belief in the permanency of the existing forms of the family and the home. A portentous sign of the times for the conservatives is the appearance of Mrs. Elsie Clews Parsons' book on "The Family," the most scholarly work on the subject by a bourgeois writer that has yet appeared. Like all bourgeois writers Mrs. Parsons has been very chary of using materials furnished by Socialist scholars. Very striking is the absence from her very extensive bibliographical notes of the names of Marx, Engels, Bebel and Ferri. But she was compelled to avail herself freely of the wealth of materials provided by the scholarly and industrious researches of Morgan, Kautsky, and Cunow. In her now famous Fifteenth Lecture on "Ethical Considerations," she suggests various modes of ameliorating the condition of Woman, and improving conjugal and family relations; but she is again and again driven to admit that the economic independence of women is a condition precedent to her "reforms." Most of her suggestions are tinged with the utopian fancifulness characteristic of the bourgeois theorist. Two excerpts will illustrate these points sufficiently: "Again reciprocity of conjugal rights and duties is desirable for parenthood. If marriage have a proprietary character, neither the owner nor the owned is entirely fit to develop free personalities in his or her children. Moreover the idea of marital ownership more or less involves that of parental ownership, and the latter, as we have seen, is incompatible with a high type of parenthood. The custom of proprietary marriage inevitably leads, for example, to restrictions upon female education. Now just in so far as a woman's education is limited is she handicapped as an educator of her children. It is unfortunate that in the _emancipation of woman_ agitation of the past half-century the reformers failed to emphasize the social as adequately as the individualistic need of change. If women are to be fit wives and mothers they must have all, perhaps more, of the opportunities for personal development that men have. All the activities hitherto reserved to men must at least be open to them, and many of these activities, certain functions of citizenship[21] for example, must be expected of them. Moreover, whatever the lines may be along which the fitness of women to labor will be experimentally determined, the underlying position must be established that for the sake of individual and race character she is to be a producer as well as a consumer of social values.[22] As soon as this ethical necessity is generally recognized the conditions of modern industry will become much better adapted to the needs of women workers than they are now, the hygiene of workshop, factory, and office will improve, and child bearing and rearing will no longer seem incompatible with productive activity" (pages 345-347). Here follows the paragraph upon which the Reverend Doctor Morgan Dix and other clerical defenders of the economic conditions that cause marital and non-marital prostitution pounced with such avidity: "We have therefore, given late marriage and the passing of prostitution,[23] two alternatives, the requiring of absolute chastity of both sexes until marriage or the toleration of freedom of sexual intercourse on the part of the unmarried of both sexes before marriage, _i. e._, before the birth of offspring. In this event condemnation of sex license would have a different emphasis from that at present. Sexual intercourse would not be of itself disparaged or condemned, it would be disapproved of only if indulged in at the expense of health or of emotional or intellectual activities in oneself or in others. As a matter of fact, truly monogamous relations seem to be those most conducive to emotional or intellectual development and to health, so that, quite apart from the question of prostitution, promiscuity is not desirable or even tolerable. It would therefore, seem well from this point of view, to encourage early trial marriage,[24] the relation to be entered into with a view to permanency, but with the privilege of breaking it if proved unsuccessful and in the _absence of offspring_ without suffering any great degree of public condemnation. "The conditions to be considered in any attempt to answer the question that thus arises are exceedingly complex. Much depends upon the outcome of present experiments in _economic independence for women, a matter which is in turn dependent upon the outcome of the general labor 'question.'_ Much depends upon revelations of physiological science. If the future brings about the full economic independence of women, if physiologists will undertake to guarantee society certain immunities from the sexual excess of the individual,[25] if, and these are the most important conditions of all, increases in biological, psychological and social knowledge make parenthood a more enlightened and purposive function than is even dreamed of at present and if _pari passu_ with this increase of knowledge a higher standard of parental duty and a greater capacity for parental devotion develop, then the need of sexual restraint as we understand it _may_ disappear and different relations between the sexes before marriage and to a certain extent within marriage may be expected." The Socialist materialist leaves idle speculations of this nature to the bourgeois Utopians; he knows that a revolution in economic conditions must precede any material changes in sexual relations, and that when such changes take place they will take place in response to the stimuli of the transformed economic environment, and not in accordance with any preconceived notions of Mrs. Parsons or others. Those, who are horrified at such proposed modifications of marriage as Mr. George Meredith's marriages for a fixed, limited period, and Mrs. Parsons' "trial marriages," will do well to ponder this posthumous aphorism of the clearsighted Norse genius, Ibsen, recently published in Berlin: "To talk of 'men born free' is a mere phrase. There are none such. Marriages, the relations of man and woman, have ruined the whole race and set on all the brand of slavery."[26] In the same case is what we may call the stage-setting of the monogamous family, the home. The home ceases to be regarded as the sacred and eternal Palladium of society. It, too, is destined to change, if not to disappear. "With the transformation of the means of production into collective property," Engels writes, "the private household changes to a social industry. The care and education of children becomes a public matter."[27] This does not deny the splendid role that the Home has played in the history of the last three centuries. Many an English and American home to-day still merits even such an offensively pretentious epithet as "Palladium." What morals our people have known and practised they have learned and been drilled in in the homes. That these morals should have been warped by a class-bias was inevitable. A home, itself the product of a society divided into classes, could not teach anything but a class-morality. A purely social morality (if morality be the proper name for the highest conduct in a classless society) is even yet impossible. But, much as we owe to the home, (I pity the reader who can recall his or her early home life with dry eyes), the Nihilism of Socialism tells us the day of the home is drawing to its close. So it may be as well for us to consider for a moment the bad side of the home as we know it to-day. It may be that when we have done so, we shall be able to anticipate its passing with greater equanimity. At this late day--when seventeen years have rolled by since Ibsen's "The Doll's House" was first introduced to an English-speaking audience at the Novelty Theatre in London--it is surely not necessary to dwell upon the dwarfing and stifling effects upon women of even "happy" homes. In the brilliant preface to "Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant," Bernard Shaw, referring to middle-class home life, speaks of "the normal English way being to sit in separate families in separate rooms in separate houses, each person silently occupied with a book, a paper, or a game of halma, cut off equally from the blessings of society and solitude." "The result," he continues, "is that you may make the acquaintance of a thousand streets of middle-class English families without coming on a trace of any consciousness of citizenship, or any artistic cultivation of the senses." In the following paragraph he adds: "In proportion as this horrible domestic institution is broken up by the active social circulation of the upper classes in their own orbit, or its stagnant isolation made impossible by the overcrowding of the working classes, manners improve enormously. In the middle classes themselves the revolt of a single clever daughter (nobody has yet done justice to the modern clever Englishwoman's loathing of the very word 'home'), and her insistence on qualifying herself for an independent working life, humanizes her whole family in an astonishingly short time; and the formation of a habit of going to the suburban theatre once a week, or to the Monday Popular Concerts, or both, very perceptibly ameliorates its manners. But none of these breaches in the Englishman's castle-house can be made without a cannonade of books and pianoforte music. The books and music cannot be kept out, because they alone can make the hideous boredom of the hearth bearable. If its victims may not live real lives, they may at least read about imaginary ones, and perhaps learn from them to doubt whether a class that not only submits to home life, but actually values itself on it, is really a class worth belonging to. For the sake of the unhappy prisoners of the home, then, let my plays be printed as well as acted." A concrete picture may give us a better idea of what Shaw means when he calls women "the unhappy prisoners of the home." In that magnificent scene in the third act of "Candida," after Morell has called on Candida to choose between him and the poet, Marchbanks, Candida gives us a vivid glimpse of what her home life had been, in this speech, addressed to Marchbanks, and, in reading it, remember that Morell was "a good husband" and that Candida loved him. "--You know how strong he (Morell) is--how clever he is--how happy! Ask James's mother and his three sisters what it cost to save James the trouble of doing anything but be strong and clever and happy. Ask me what it costs to be James's mother and three sisters and wife and mother to his children all in one. Ask Prossy and Maria how troublesome the house is even when we have no visitors to help us slice the onions. Ask the tradesmen who want to worry James and spoil his beautiful sermons who it is that puts them off. When there is money to give, he gives it: when there is money to refuse, I refuse it. I build a castle of comfort and indulgence and love for him, and stand sentinel always to keep little vulgar cares out. I make him master here, though he does not know it, and could not tell you a moment ago how it came to be so." This should make it easy for us to understand why so many women are ready to sympathize with William Morris in the sentiments he expressed in the following paragraph in "Signs of Change:" "As to what extent it may be necessary or desirable for people under social order to live in common, we may differ pretty much according to our tendencies toward social life. For my part I can't see why we should think it a hardship to eat with the people we work with; I am sure that as to many things, such as valuable books, pictures, and splendor of surroundings, we shall find it better to club our means together; and I must say that often when I have been sickened by the stupidity of the mean, idiotic rabbit warrens that rich men build for themselves in Bayswater and elsewhere, I console myself with visions of the noble communal hall of the future, unsparing of materials, generous in worthy ornament, alive with the noblest thoughts of our time, and the past, embodied in the best art which a free and manly people could produce; such an abode of man as no private enterprise could come anywhere near for beauty and fitness, because only collective thought and collective life could cherish the aspirations which would give birth to its beauty, or have the skill and leisure to carry them out. I for my part should think it much the reverse of a hardship if I had to read my books and meet my friends in such a place; nor do I think I am better off to live in a vulgar stuccoed house crowded with upholstery that I despise, in all respects degrading to the mind and enervating to the body to live in, simply because I call it my own, or my house." From the viewpoint of this historical materialism, the State loses its attribute of permanence and becomes the product of definite economic conditions--in a word, it is the child of economic inequality. "The State," in the words of Engels, "is the result of the desire to keep down class conflicts. But, having arisen amid these conflicts, it is as a rule the State of the most powerful economic class that by force of its economic supremacy becomes also the ruling political class, and thus acquires new means of subduing and exploiting the oppressed masses. The antique State was, therefore, the State of the slave owners for the purpose of holding the slaves in check. The feudal State was the organ of the nobility for the oppression of the serfs and dependent farmers. The modern representative State is the tool of the capitalist exploiters of wage labor."[28] "The State, then," Engels says on another page of the same work, "did not exist from all eternity. There have been societies without it, that had no idea of any State or public power.[29] At a certain stage of economic development, which was of necessity accompanied by a division of society into classes, the State became the inevitable result of this division. We are now rapidly approaching a stage of evolution in production, in which the existence of classes has not only ceased to be a necessity, but becomes a positive fetter on production. Hence, these classes must fall as inevitably as they once arose. The State must irrevocably fall with them. The society that is to reorganize production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will transfer the machinery of the State where it will then belong--into the Museum of Antiquities by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze ax."[30] In another work, he says: "The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society--the taking possession of the means of production in the name of Society--this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not abolished. _It dies out._"[31] It is thus seen that, according to the teaching of historical materialism, the State is destined, when it becomes the State of the working-class, to remove its own foundation--economic inequality--and thus, to commit suicide. Many of those, who have witnessed with mingled consternation and amusement the strenuous efforts of Mr. Roosevelt and the frantic zeal of Mr. Hearst to enlarge the scope of governmental action to cover every conceivable field of human activity from spelling to beef-canning, will hail with delight Engels' tidings that the State is to "die out." The thesis, that the realization of the socialist ideal involves the atrophy of Religion, the metamorphosis of the Family, and the suicide of the State, would now appear to be sufficiently demonstrated. One cannot help wondering what proportion of the "educated and professional" persons, who, Mr. Street testifies, are in growing numbers yielding to the lure of Socialism, really desire these results. Many of them, no doubt, are trying on a new field the old experiment of serving God and Mammon, of putting new wine into old bottles. Ibsen's Nora, though she had far less learning than is usual in the "educated and professional classes" of England and America, was, in this matter, far wiser than are they. When the falsehood and slavery of life in "The Doll's House" became unbearable to her, she knew that she must choose between the Old and the New; and that, if she chose the new life of revolt and freedom, she must leave behind her all the badges of her doll's life. Had she taken with her the trinkets and gauds that the master of the Doll's House had given her, she would not have escaped from the doll's life when she turned her back on the Doll's House. Her woman's instinct did not fail her, and, when, with a woman's courage she chose the New and left the Old, she told Torvald, "Whatever belongs to me I shall take with me. I will have nothing from you either now or later on." Many of the young people of education, who have of late come into the socialist movement, have left--temporarily, at least--the Doll's House of conservatism; but they have brought with them many of the habits of thought, many of the conventions of their old doll's life. Some of them, doubtless, realizing that the Materialist Conception of History involves the Nihilism of Socialism, and thus calls on them to abandon their religious, metaphysical, and dualistic habits of thought, to cast aside their conventional class morality, to cease vaporing about that impossible monstrosity, "the Socialist State," attempt to cut the Gordian knot by denying the Materialist Conception of History, while clinging to their socialist ideal. They thus repeat in inverted form the curious feat in intellectual acrobatics performed by Professor Seligman, who believes in historical materialism, but rejects Socialism. "There is nothing in common," he asserts, "between the economic interpretation of history and the doctrine of socialism, except the accidental fact that the originator of both theories happened to be the same man." And a few pages further on he reiterates: "Socialism and 'historical materialism' are entirely independent-conceptions."[32] To the educated socialists, who deny or mutilate the doctrine of historical materialism, the materialist socialist might well reply by asserting that these educated socialists are socialists only because of the artistic, intellectual, ethical, and spiritual changes they expect the economic revolution of socialism to produce. The fact that they, lovers of "the things of the spirit," are socialists proves that they believe, albeit unconsciously, in economic determinism. But, although this personal argument might Well be deemed sufficient, it can readily be proven affirmatively that the whole theory of Modern Socialism rests upon the foundation of historical materialism. This clearly appears in the' admirable summary of the teachings of Marx that Gabriel Deville gives in the Preface to his epitome of Marx's "Capital." "History, Marx has shown, is nothing but the history of class conflicts. The division of society into classes, which made its appearance with the social life of man, rests on economic relations--maintained by force--which enable some to succeed in shifting on to the shoulders of others the natural necessity of labor. "Material interests have always been the inciting motives of the incessant struggles of the privileged classes, either with, each other, or against the inferior classes at whose expense they live. Man is dominated by the material conditions of life, and these conditions, and therefore the mode of production, have determined and will determine human customs, ethics, and institutions--social, economic, political, juridical, etc. "As soon as one part of society has monopolized the means of production, the other part, upon whom the burden of labor falls, is obliged to add to the labor-time necessary for its own support, a certain surplus-labor-time, for which it receives no equivalent,--time that is devoted to supporting and enriching the possessors of the means of production. As an extractor of unpaid labor, which, by means of the increasing surplus-value whose source it is, accumulates every day, more and more, in the hands of the proprietary class the instruments of its dominion, the capitalist regime surpasses in power all the antecedent regimes founded on compulsory labor. "But to-day, the economic conditions begotten by this regime, trammelled in their natural evolution by this very regime, inexorably tend to break the capitalist mould which can no longer contain them, and these destroying principles are the elements of the new society. "The historic mission of the class at present exploited, the proletariat, which is being organized and disciplined by the very mechanism of capitalist production, is to complete the work of destruction begun by the development of social antagonisms. It must, first of all, definitively wrest from its class adversaries the political power--the command of the force devoted by them to preserving intact their economic monopolies and privileges. "Once in control of the political power, it will be able, by proceeding to the socialization of the means of production through the expropriation of the usurpers of the fruits of others' toil, to suppress the present contradiction between collective production and private capitalist appropriation, and to realize the universalization of labor, and the abolition of classes."[33] If the "educated and professional" socialists cannot break the chain of this logic, they find themselves, as Nora did, face to face with the necessity of making a choice. Behind them is the old doll's house life with its manifold conventions--once useful, but through economic evolution outgrown and thus become false and deadly--a life, easy enough mayhap, but wholly devoid of idealism; before them is the new life of freedom, of revolt against outworn beliefs and conventions--a life of great difficulty, mayhap, but a life cheered by a noble ideal--an ideal in whose realization the socialist materialists believe as fully, as passionately as the ancient Hebrews believed in the fulfilment of the Messianic prophecies. Theirs is a hard case. Without ideals they cannot, in any worthy sense, live. The only possible ideal, that even the keen eyes of so shrewd an observer as Mr. Street can perceive, is the ideal of Socialism. But they cannot accept this ideal without abandoning much, I do not say that is dear to them, but much that by habit and tradition has become part and parcel of their intellectual being. If they decide to go forward into the New, the old world of dolls' houses must become a strange land to them. In the difficulties and trials of the new life, they cannot send back for aid to the old world, which will have become a world of strangers to them. Nora's woman's instinct did not fail her here; when Torvald asked if he could send help to her in case of need, her unhesitating reply was, "No, I say. I take nothing from strangers." Far better is the case of the workingman attracted by the socialist ideal. The Nihilism of Socialism has no deterrent terrors for him, for, as Karl Marx said long ago, "he has nothing to lose but his chains, and a whole world to gain." He has long since lost all interest in religion; the factory by enlisting his wife and children as workers has already destroyed his home; and to him the State means nothing but the club of the policeman, the injunction of the judge, and the rifle of the militiaman. But for the man of the "educated and professional classes" leaving the doll's house is indeed a difficult task. For its performance three things are requisite: a free and open mind, courage, and a vivid imagination. The Russian genius, Peshkoff (Maxim Gorky), did it, and did it with relative ease because he was a workingman _before_ he became an educated man. For the same reason, though in a less degree, Jack London has also done it successfully, though here and there he still lapses into the doll's mode of thought. The sex-interest in the latter part of "The Sea Wolf" is obviously treated from the dolls' point of view; but it should be remembered that Mr. London necessarily expected the majority of the purchasers of "The Sea Wolf" to be dolls. But, in spite of this instance, we may be sure that Jack London brought but little with him when he left the Doll's House; and I am very sure he never sends back to have parcels forwarded to him. When Mr. Upton Sinclair left the Doll's House, he evidently stuffed his mental pockets with a large assortment of intellectual _lingerie_ and millinery from the doll wardrobes. In telling us what Life means to him in a recent magazine, he says that during a certain stress and storm period of his life he lived in close intimacy with three friends who "loved" him "very dearly." "Their names are Jesus, Hamlet and Shelley." Can any one imagine William Morris writing a sentiment so perfectly satisfying to a doll's sense of beauty? When I read these lines there rises before me a picture of the author tastefully robed in an exquisite dress--a doll's dress--of dotted swiss.[34] Recently he has started a Co-operative Home Colony quite in the spirit of the bourgeois Utopians who founded Brook Farm more than half-a-century ago. Colony-founding, historians tell us, was a favorite amusement of the dolls of that era. In the "Times Magazine" (for December 1906) he tells us that "the home has endured for ages, and through all the ages it has stayed about the same." This belief, I am informed, is almost universal among dolls. I find myself the prey of a growing suspicion that Mr. Sinclair from time to time receives express parcels from the "Doll's House." William Morris was a genius; he had a free and open mind; he had courage; and he had a vivid imagination. When he left the Doll's House, he took nothing with him, and he never afterward took anything "from strangers." It was his poet's imagination that enabled him to write "News from Nowhere," the only Utopia in whose communal halls the unwary reader does not stumble over dolls' furniture. Morris is the perfect type of the man of culture turned revolutionist.[35] Mr. H. G. Wells has recently written a Utopian romance, "In the Days of the Comet," which, although it possesses in the fullest measure Mr. Wells' well known charm of style, is in substance at best a very feeble echo of "News from Nowhere." One of the modes of thought specially characteristic of eighteenth century French dolls is strongly to the fore in Mr. Wells' treatment of war. In the conversations "after the Change" between Melmount, the famous Cabinet Minister, and the pitiful, cowardly, inefficient hero (?), Leadford, they both appear to be inexpressibly shocked at the _unreasonableness_ of war. It is true it is somewhat difficult to tell just what Melmount did think or feel, for Melmount is in one particular like Boston's distinguished _litterateur_, Mr. Lawson,--he appears to be constantly on the point of uttering some great thought, but never utters it. But so far as light is given us Melmount after the Change seems to have looked on war much as Carlyle did long before. Every one remembers Carlyle's two groups of peasants,[36] living hundreds of miles apart, who never heard of each other, and had not the slightest quarrel, the one with the other, but who none-the-less obeyed the orders of their respective kings, and marched until they met, and at the word of command shot each other into corpses. Most of us will agree with Carlyle and Melmount that, viewed from the peasants' standpoint, this was unreasonable to the point of sheer folly. But, if I understand Mr. Wells aright, he seems to elevate the reason of the peasant into something very like the "eternal reason" of Diderot and Rousseau. He apparently forgets for the nonce that Engels long ago pointed out that "this eternal reason was in reality nothing but the idealized understanding of the eighteenth century citizen, just then evolving into the bourgeois." The difficulty that Mr. Wells will encounter in trying to bring human society into harmony with "eternal reason" is the impossibility of getting different classes of men to agree as to what is reasonable. No one outside of dolls' houses any longer believes in "eternal reason." Every man and every class has an ideal of what is reasonable, but these ideals vary. War is unreasonable to the peasant-target; it is also unreasonable to Melmount and Mr. Wells so far as they are representatives of the citizens of the classless society of the future, a society based on social solidarity, on world-wide brotherhood. But to the socialist materialist, war, in a world based on private ownership of the means of production used to produce commodities, with its concomitants, the wage-system, competition--domestic and international,--and ever-recurring "over-production," is so very far from unreasonable that it is absolutely inevitable.[37] Mr. Wells evidently brought something with him when he left the Doll's House. We now begin to realize what a very difficult matter it is to rid the mind completely of the effects of what Professor Veblen calls "the institutional furniture handed down from the past." The man, who yields to the lure of Socialism, must sooner or later effect a revolution within his own mind; if he does not, he will sooner or later return to his Doll's House, or make an excursion into some field of "pragmatic romance" where he will build himself a new doll's house. Granted the truth of historical materialism, how will future generations look on the literature of to-day and yesterday? To a generation wholly untrained in theological, metaphysical and dualistic modes of thought how much meaning will there be in the poetry of Tennyson and Browning? For my part, I never read Browning now without being unpleasantly reminded of the aphorism Nietzsche put into the mouth of Zarathustra: "Alas, it is true I have cast my net in their (poets') seas and tried to catch good fish; but I always drew up the head of some old God." But I am glad to believe that the matchless melody and the chiseled beauty of Tennyson's verse will charm the senses of men to whom his curious mixture of pantheism and Broad Church theology, which the middle classes of England and America in the latter decades of the nineteenth century welcomed as the ultimate massage of philosophy, will not be ridiculous only because it will be meaningless. But I am unable to think of the men of the future deriving any pleasure from our greatest poet, Browning. On the other hand it is not impossible that the fame of Swinburne will stand higher in the twenty-first century than it does in this opening decade of the twentieth. The men and women of the future will, I am sure, feel themselves akin to Shelley. They will probably enjoy Byron too, so far as they understand him; but men and women, who have never known any relationship between the sexes but that of independence and equality, will be bored and baffled by that great bulk of Byron's verse which shocked his contemporaries. When we turn to the drama, it appears probable that the revolution in the relations of the sexes will convert into mere materials for the historian even our greatest plays, such as Ibsen's "The Doll's House," Sudermann's "The Joy of Living," Maeterlinck's "Monna Vanna," and Shaw's "Mrs. Warren's Profession." Are the "educated and professional" socialists prepared to accept gladly such tremendous changes? They are confronted by a momentous question. It was of their class William Morris was thinking when he wrote: "I have looked at this claim by the light of history and my own conscience, and it seems to me so looked at to be a most just claim, and that resistance to it means nothing short of a denial of the hope of civilization. This, then, is the claim:-- _It is right and necessary that all men should have work to do which shall be worth doing, and be of itself pleasant to do: and which should be done under such conditions as would make it neither over-wearisome nor over-anxious._ Turn that claim about as I may, think of it as long as I can, I cannot find that it is an exorbitant claim; yet again I say if Society would or could admit it, the face of the world would be changed; discontent and strife and dishonesty would be ended. To feel that we were doing work useful to others and pleasant to ourselves, and that such work and its due reward _could_ not fail us! What serious harm could happen to us then? And the price to be paid for so making the world happy is Revolution."[38] Are they willing to pay the price? Nora paid the price for her freedom and paid it in full. _She took nothing from strangers._ If they are unwilling to pay the price, what is there left for them save the joyless sensuality and black despair of pessimism? FOOTNOTES: [7] "The Theory of Business Enterprise," Veblen, New York, 1904. Pages 351, 352. See also my article on Veblen the Revolutionist, International Socialist Review, June, 1905, vol. V, page 726. [8] Throughout this article "nihilism" is not used in its strict technical or philosophical sense, but is used simply as a convenient term by which to designate the aggregate of those aspects of Socialism which, viewed from the standpoint of the existing regime, appear as negative and destructive. [9] "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy." Karl Marx, New York, 1904. Pages 11, 12. [10] "See Philosophical Essays," Joseph Dietzgen, Chicago, 1906. Pages 174 and 52. [11] "Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History." Antonio Labriola, Chicago, 1904. Pages 85, 86. [12] l. c. pages 155-6, 158. [13] "Philosophical Essays." Dietzgen. Page 86. [14] "Socialism and Modern Science." Enrico Ferri, New York, 1904. Pages 60, 61. [15] "Philosophical Essays." Dietzgen. Page 116. [16] The reader will observe that Ferri reads into the Erfurt pronouncement on religion (quoted in full above) a broader spirit of tolerance than its words necessarily imply. [17] See "The Theory of the Leisure Class." Thorstein Veblen, New York, 1905. Pages 287, 288. [18] Marx in "Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechts Philosophie." [19] "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State." F. Engels, Chicago, 1905. Page 99, and "Woman under Socialism," August Bebel, New York, 1904. Page 127. [20] Engels, "Origin of the Family, &c." Page 100. [21] (Mrs. Parsons'.) The enlightened public opinion of to-day finds the chief if not the only warrant for universal male suffrage in its being an educational means. In this view women need the suffrage at present even more than men. [22] (Mrs. Parsons'.) Dr. Alice Drysdale Vickery gave striking expression to one phase of this subject at a recent discussion of the London Sociological Society. She urged that _without economic independence_ the individuality of woman could not exercise that natural selective power in the choice of a mate which was probably a main factor in the spiritual evolution of the race. _The American Journal of Sociology_, Sept., 1905. Page 279. [23] (LaMonte's.) No wonder such a startling hypothesis aroused the ire of our clerical friends. [24] (LaMonte's.) It is worthy of note that this suggestion of a serious modification of marriage _under existing economic conditions_ comes characteristically, not from a Socialist, but from the wife of a Republican member of Congress and the daughter of a distinguished financier. [25] (Mrs. Parsons'.) Through the discovery of certain and innocuous methods of preventing conception. The application of this knowledge would have to be encouraged by public opinion in cases where conception would result in a degenerate offspring. Public opinion would also have to endorse the segregation of persons tainted with communicable sexual disease. [26] Berlin cablegram in the New York Sun of Dec. 7, 1906. [27] "Origin of the Family, &c.," Pages 91, 92. See also Bebel, "Woman under Socialism," Page 122, and elsewhere. [28] "Origin of the Family &c." Pages 208, 209. [29] On the existence of organized societies without a co-ercive State, see also, "Ancient Society." Lewis H. Morgan, Chicago, 1907. [30] "Origin of the Family &c." Pages 211, 212. [31] "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific." F. Engels, Chicago, 1905. Pages 76, 77. [32] "The Economic Interpretation of History." Edwin R. A. Seligman, New York, 1903. Pages 105 and 109. [33] "The People's Marx." Gabriel Deville, New York, 1900. Pages 18, 19. [34] Cartoonists are warned that this idea is protected by copyright. [35] The other day I chanced upon a pamphlet by one Oscar Lovell Triggs of Chicago. It bore the title, "William Morris, Craftsman, Writer and Social Reformer." In turning over its pages I was somewhat startled to read: "'Scientific' socialism he never understood or advocated." And again further on my eye fell on this gem: "It is apparent that Morris's 'Socialism' is poetic and not scientific socialism." This pamphlet should have a place of honor in every doll's library. [36] In "Sartor Resartus." [37] In fact, Professor Veblen has shown that for the last quarter of a century the commonest cause of seasons of "ordinary prosperity" has been war. See "The Theory of Business Enterprise." Pages 250-1. [38] From "Art and Socialism," a pamphlet that is now rare. THE BIOGENETIC LAW It is very easy to go too far in drawing analogies between biology and sociology. Society--as yet, at least--is not an organism in the sense that a tree or a mammal is. It is quite true that with the perfect organization and solidarity to which Socialists look forward the analogy will be more complete than it is to-day, but for the present we must always remember that, as the lawyers would say, "the cases are not on all fours." If we bear these reservations in mind laws drawn from natural science are often of the greatest aid in enabling us to understand the phenomena of psychology and sociology. One of the most helpful of these laws of science is the biogenetic law which is always associated with the great name of Ernest Haeckel, its most distinguished exponent. Doctor William Bölsche, in his book[39] on Haeckel, uses, to illustrate this law, the familiar example of the frog. The mother frog lays her eggs in the water. In due course a new little frog develops from each of these eggs. But the object that develops from them is altogether different from the adult frog. This object is the familiar fish-like tadpole. It finally loses its tail, develops legs, and becomes a frog. Doctor Bölsche discusses the matter as follows:-- "There are reasons on every hand for believing that the frogs and salamanders, which now stand higher in classification than the fishes, were developed from the fishes in earlier ages in the course of progressive evolution. Once upon a time they were fishes. If that is so, the curious phenomenon we have been considering really means that each young frog resembles its fish ancestors. In each case to-day the frog's egg first produces the earlier or ancestral stage, the fish, it then develops rapidly into a frog. In other words, the individual development recapitulates an important chapter of the earlier history of the whole race of frogs. Putting this in the form of a law, it runs: each new individual must, in its development, pass rapidly through the form of its parents' ancestors before it assumes the parent form itself. If a new individual frog is to be developed and if the ancestors of the whole frog stem were fishes, the first thing to develop from the frog's egg will be a fish and it will only later assume the form of a frog. "That is a simple and pictorial outline of what we mean when we speak of the biogenetic law. We need, of course, much more than the one frog-fish before we can erect it into a law. But we have only to look around us and we find similar phenomena as common as pebbles. "Let us bear in mind that evolution proceeded from certain amphibia to the lizards and from these to the birds and mammals. That is a long journey, but we have no alternative. If the amphibia (such as the frog and the salamander) descend from the fishes, all the higher classes up to man himself must also have done so. Hence the law must have transmitted even to ourselves this ancestral form of the gill-breathing fish. "What a mad idea, many will say, that man should at one time be a tadpole like the frog! And yet--there's no help in prayer, as Falstaff said--even the human germ or embryo passes through a stage at which it shows the outlines of gills on the throat just like a fish. It is the same with the dog, the horse, the kangaroo, the duck mole, the bird, the crocodile, the turtle, the lizard. They all have the same structure. "Nor is this an isolated fact. From the fish was evolved the amphibian. From this came the lizard. From the lizard came the bird. The lizard has solid teeth in its mouth. The bird has no teeth in its beak. That is to say, it has none to-day. But it had when it was a lizard. Here, then we have an intermediate stage between the fish and the bird. We must expect that the bird embryo in the egg will show some trace of it. As a matter of fact, it does so. When we examine young parrots in the egg we find that they have teeth in their mouth before the bill is formed. When the fact was first discovered, the real intermediate form between the lizard and the bird was not known. It was afterwards discovered at Solenhofen in a fossil impression from the Jurassic period. This was the archeopteryx, which had feathers like a real bird and yet had teeth in its mouth like the lizard when it lived on earth. The instance is instructive in two ways. In the first place it shows that we were quite justified in drawing our conclusions as to the past from the bird's embryonic form, even if the true transitional form between the lizard and the bird were never discovered at all. In the second place, we see in the young bird in the egg the reproduction of two consecutive ancestral stages: one in the fish gills, the other in the lizard-like teeth. Once the law is admitted, there can be nothing strange in this. If one ancestral stage, that of the fish, is reproduced in the young animal belonging to a higher group, why not several?--why not all of them? No doubt, the ancestral series of the higher forms is of enormous length. What an immense number of stages there must have been before the fish! And then we have still the amphibian, the lizard, and the bird or mammal, up to man. "Why should not the law run: the whole ancestral series must be reproduced in the development of each individual organism? We are now in a position to see the whole bearing of Haeckel's idea." In analogy with this, is it not true that every thinking man and woman in the course of his or her development, epitomizes the history of human thought? To be more specific, I take it that you, reader, are an educated man of middle-class origin, and that you have been a socialist for at least six months, and have, of course, read Engels' "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific." Now, is it not a fact that your socialism has developed from Utopia toward Science exactly along the lines Engels has traced for the movement at large? So true was this in my case that for a long time I was inclined to push the biogenetic law too far and to conclude that every socialist had traveled the same road. I still think the law holds here, but not in the narrow way I first applied it. In the course of my work as an agitator (and socialist agitation is the best School of Socialism) I met many sterling socialists who had never been Utopians as I had. They were born fighters, so to speak, and had been full of the class spirit, and fighting the capitalists in the trade-union and elsewhere in every way they could think of, long before they had ever heard of the ideal of the Co-operative Commonwealth. And these men are among our best and most uncompromising socialists. Here was a hard problem for me. I believed in my law, but it did not seen to cover the cases of these militant socialists. I was long in solving the problem, but I solved it at last. Socialism has two aspects. As the most vital fact of modern life it is a kinetic force. "Modern Socialism" in Engels' words "is, in its essence, the direct product of the recognition on the one hand, of the class antagonisms, existing in the society of to-day, between proprietors and non-proprietors, between capitalists and wage-workers; on the other hand, of the anarchy existing in production." This is Socialism, the most pregnant actuality in the palpitating life all about us. But, as Engels pointed out, Socialism also has its ideological side. In this sense it may correctly be called a theory, if we bear in mind that it is the virile force of class-feeling, and not the theory, that is going to effect the Social Revolution. Now, every individual socialist does in his development conform to the biogenetic law; but the bourgeois socialist is more apt to epitomize the history of Socialist theory, while the proletarian socialist recapitulates the development of class feeling as a kinetic force from blind and often unavailing hatred of the rich to the fruitful class-consciousness of the Marxian Socialist. The individual may combine these two processes in varying proportions; but in broad outline the bourgeois may be expected to reproduce fairly closely the history of Socialism, as a theory, while the proletarian reproduces the history of Socialism, the great kinetic force. While, from the standpoint of socialist theory, the statement of Doctor Parkhurst and many others that "Christ was a Socialist" is a manifest absurdity, the historian who traces back the history of Socialism, the kinetic force, will surely be led by the chain of facts to James and Jesus and Isaiah. For they were among those who gave most effective expression to the class hatred which is the lineal ancestor of Marxian Socialism viewed as a kinetic actuality. In this sense Jesus was one of the founders of Socialism. Here are a few extracts from these ancient sowers of the seeds of discontent: "The Lord will enter into judgment with the ancients of his people, and the princes thereof: for ye have eaten up the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor? saith the Lord God of hosts." "Wo unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!" ISAIAH. "Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter the kingdom of heaven. And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." "Wo unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretense make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation." JESUS. "Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth; and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth." JAMES. James would appear to have been somewhat more class-conscious than is deemed decorous by most of our modern Christian Socialists. But Isaiah and Jesus and James all give expression to precisely the same fierce emotions that I have many a time seen blazing out of the eyes of poor hopeless proletarians grouped around the soap-box; and it is the glory of Modern Socialism that it has been able to transform this fierce class hatred into intelligent class-consciousness which aims by loyalty to the Proletariat to rescue the rich as well as the poor from the fatal curse of economic inequality. The bourgeois and the proletarian who come into the Socialist movement both have tadpole tails to lose in the course of their development into scientific socialists; but the tails are different. The proletarian has to rid himself of his hatred of the rich as individuals. He has to learn that Rockefeller, just as much as he himself, is a product of economic conditions. After he once thoroughly learns this there will be no danger of his being a Democrat or Anarchist or any other species of dangerous reactionary. The bourgeois tail is harder to lose. It consists of animistic, theological and dualistic habits of thought, issuing in utopianism and non-materialistic idealism. For, if I may be permitted to toy with the Hegelian dialectic in the manner of Marx, no man can be a fruitful idealist until he has become a materialist. The reader of this volume will probably find himself able to agree pretty fully with what I have said in "Science and Socialism." That is because, when I wrote that, I had not fully gotten rid of my idealistic tadpole tail. He will probably have more difficulty in assenting to the theses of "The Nihilism of Socialism." That is because he has not yet gotten rid of his tadpole tail. I do not wish to be understood as speaking with contempt or depreciation of the tadpole tails. Without their aid most of us bourgeois socialist frogs would never have been able to get out of our old conservative shells. It was the utopianism of our tails, in most cases, that first cracked the shell. I should be sorry to have any reader interpret the materialism of "The Nihilism of Socialism" into a disposition to deny or depreciate the great and beneficent influence that Christianity has had in the past. I should be greatly chagrined to be accused of irreverence in discussing religion. Irreverence is ever a sign of a narrow intellectual horizon and a limited vision. The scoffer is the product of the limited knowledge characteristic of what Engels called "metaphysical materialism." Unfortunately the mental development of many in the past has been arrested at this Ingersoll-Voltaire stage. But with the growth of Modern Socialism the tendency is for the metaphysical materialist to _grow_ into socialist or dialectic materialism with its Hegelian watchword, "Nothing is; every thing is becoming." The socialist materialist realizes that the obsolescent ideals of Christianity and the Family have played leading roles in the great drama of human progress. It is impossible for him to speak lightly or contemptuously of the ideals which have sustained and comforted, guided and cheered countless hosts of his fellows through the long, dark ages of Christian Faith. But he knows that those ages are past and that present day adherence to the old ideals is atavistic and reactionary. But none-the-less his mental attitude toward the old ideals is one of reverent sympathy and, I had almost added, gratitude. This state of feeling has found perfect expression in these lines by William Morris: "They are gone--the lovely, the mighty, the hope of the ancient Earth: It shall labor and bear the burden as before that day of their birth; It shall groan in its blind abiding for the day that Sigurd hath sped, And the hour that Brynhild hath hastened, and the dawn that waketh the dead; It shall yearn, and be oft-times holpen, and forget their deeds no more, Till the new sun beams on Baldur, and the happy sea-less shore." (From SIGURD the VOLSUNG.) FOOTNOTE: [39] Haeckel: His Life and Work. By William Bölsche. George W. Jacobs & Company. KISMET. "Verily I say unto you. That there be some of them that stand here which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power." Mark, ix, 1. The very close analogy between primitive Christianity and Modern Socialism has often been pointed out both by materialists, such as Enrico Ferri, and by Churchmen, such as the Reverend Doctor Hall. We find in both the doctrine of the Advent. The primitive Christian believed in all simplicity and sincerity that he should not taste death until the Son of Man had come and established upon earth His kingdom of justice, peace and brotherhood. The Marxian Socialist to-day is even more sure that men and women now living will bear a part in the Social Revolution which is to usher in the reign of Fellowship on earth. The secret of the propaganda power of both movements is in the sincerity of this conviction. Just at this point we are often met with two queries, both of which bear witness to the persistence of the utopian tadpole tails of the questioners. The first question is: If the early Christians were sincere and yet mistaken, may not the Socialists also be mistaken in their doctrine of the inevitability of Socialism? The second question is: If Socialism is inevitable--is coming anyhow--why do you Socialists vex your souls agitating for it? The doubt of the inevitability of Socialism on analysis is always found to be a doubt of the pro-socialist desires and actions of the Proletariat. No one disputes that the Capitalist system is breaking down. With the great mass of the producers receiving bare subsistence wages the impossibility of disposing of the almost miraculously stupendous product of modern machines and processes is mathematically demonstrable. The former paradox of the Socialist agitator, that the Utopian is the man who believes in the possibility of the continuance of the present system, has become a platitude. Nor can many be found to dispute the statement that the centralization of industry in the United States has reached a point where Socialism is economically entirely practicable. The doubt of the sceptics is: Will the workers create, in the language of economics, an effective demand for Socialism? Two eminent Utopians have voiced this doubt in the recent past. Their names are George D. Herron and Daniel DeLeon. Both alike forget that the desires, ideals, and motives of the proletariat cannot but be in harmony with their economic environment, and I do not think that either of them would deny that, as we near the downfall of Capitalism, the economic environment will more and more imperatively drive men to Socialism as the only avenue of escape from chaos and pessimism. On this point, of the motives to action of the individual being formed by economic conditions, Marx wrote in "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte": "On the various forms of property, on the conditions of social existence, there rises an entire superstructure of various and peculiarly formed sensations, illusions, methods of thought and views of life. The whole class fashions and moulds them from out of their material foundations and their corresponding social relations. The single individual, in whom they converge through tradition and education, is apt to imagine that they constitute the real determining causes and the point of departure of his action." (Prof. Seligman's translation.) The man who has thoroughly assimilated the doctrine of historical materialism cannot for a moment doubt the inevitability of Socialism. The utopianism which evinces itself in this doubt may be depended upon to betray itself elsewhere in the views of the doubters. We find that this is signally true in the case of the two illustrious utopian sceptics I have mentioned. The Natural Rights platform that Professor Herron wrote and the Socialist Party adopted in 1904 is only less utopian than Daniel DeLeon's curiously childish conceit that in the highly factitious, "wheel of fortune" form of organization of the Industrial Workers of the World[40] we have the precise frame-work of the coming Co-operative Commonwealth. It does not seem too much to say that doubt of the inevitability of Socialism is in all cases a symptom of failure to apprehend clearly the full implications of the Materialist Conception of History. The second question, If Socialism is inevitable, why do Socialists work to bring it about?, would appear to have been answered by implication in the course of our discussion of the first question. In brief, we work for it because we know that if we did not it would never come. It is inevitable simply because Socialists are inevitable. Our activity as Socialist agitators is a necessary result of the development of capitalist industry just as much as the Trust is. Again, we work for Socialism because we know we can get it, and we work all the harder if we believe it is coming soon. One of the most active of our wealthy socialists has said: "If I had to be in 'the hundred year, step at a time, take-what-you-can-get' class, you would find me automobiling my life away down at Newport with Reggie Vanderbilt instead of editing this magazine.... As said, I would rather chase down the pike on my Red Dragon at 'steen hundred miles an hour, terrifying the farmers, than go in for any 'reform game'." (Gaylord Wilshire in Wilshire Editorials. New York, 1907. Pages 232, 233.) So we find that in practice the belief in the inevitability and the proximity of Socialism is the most powerful stimulus to socialist activity. We believe that the doctrine of the inevitability of Socialism is scientifically true, that its proclamation is the most effective weapon in the arsenal of the Socialist agitator, and that it is the most powerful incentive to Socialist activity; so that we mean exactly what the words imply when we address our non-socialist friends in the words of William Morris: _"Come, join in the only battle wherein no man can fail, Where whoso fadeth and dieth, yet his deed shall still prevail."_ FOOTNOTE: [40] I trust that no one will construe this as an attack on the Industrial Workers of the World. It is not my intention to express in this place any opinion as to the merits or demerits of that organization. It is only mentioned here because mention of it was necessary to illustrate the most curious case I know of the abnormally prolonged retention of the utopian tadpole tail. ADVERTISEMENTS [Illustration] Books on Socialism, Modern Science, etc. STANDARD SOCIALIST SERIES. This series of books, the first volumes of which were issued in 1901, contains some of the most important works by the ablest Socialist writers of Europe and America. The size of page is 6¾ by 4¼ inches, making a convenient shape either for the pocket or the library shelf. The books are substantially bound in cloth, stamped with a uniform design, and are mechanically equal to many of the books sold by other publishers at a dollar a copy. Our retail price, postage included, is FIFTY CENTS. 1. +Karl Marx: Biographical Memoirs.+ By Wilhelm Liebknecht, translated by Ernest Untermann. Cloth, 50 cents. This personal biography of Marx, by an intimate friend who was himself one of the foremost Socialists of Germany, gives a new insight into the beginnings of Socialism. 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The book has twenty-four illustrations, for the most part reproductions of telescopic photographs, which make the truth of the statements in the book evident to every reader. THE INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE. This new library, the first volume of which appeared in January, 1906, contains in substantial and artistic cloth binding some of the most important works on socialism and kindred subjects that have ever been offered in the English language. While our price has been fixed at a dollar a volume, most of the books in the library are equal to the sociological books sold by other publishers at from $1.50 to $2.00. 1. +The Changing Order.+ A Study of Democracy. By Oscar Lovell Triggs, Ph.D. Cloth, $1.00. Dr. Triggs was a prominent professor in the University of Chicago, but he taught too much truth for Standard Oil, and is no longer a professor in the University of Chicago. This book contains some of the truth that was too revolutionary for Mr. Rockefeller's institution. It traces the inevitable rise of democracy in industry, in other words, of a working class movement that will take industry out of the control of capitalists. It also studies the necessary effect of this rising democracy on literature and art, on work and play, on education and religion. For description of other books in this library, and a large variety of other Socialistic literature, see catalog; mailed free on request. Address CHARLES H. KERR & CO. 264 East Kinzie Street CHICAGO 
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22733	----	THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. TORONTO SOCIALISM A SUMMARY AND INTERPRETATION OF SOCIALIST PRINCIPLES BY JOHN SPARGO AUTHOR OF "THE BITTER CRY OF THE CHILDREN," "THE COMMON SENSE OF THE MILE QUESTION," "CAPITALIST AND LABORER," "THE SOCIALISTS, WHO THEY ARE AND WHAT THEY STAND FOR," "THE SPIRITUAL SIGNIFICANCE OF MODERN SOCIALISM," ETC., ETC. _NEW AND REVISED EDITION_ New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1913 _All rights reserved_ COPYRIGHT 1906, 1909, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published June, 1906. Reprinted November, 1906; December 1908. New and revised edition, February, 1909; January, 1910; May 1912; March, 1913. Norwood Press J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. To ROBERT HUNTER WITH ADMIRATION AND AFFECTION PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION A new edition of this little volume having been rendered necessary, I have availed myself of the opportunity thus afforded me by the publishers to revise it. Some slight revision was necessary to correct one or two errors which crept unavoidably into the earlier edition. By an oversight, an important typographical blunder went uncorrected into the former edition, making the date of the first use of the word "Socialism" 1835 instead of 1833. That error, I regret to say, has been subsequently copied into many important publications. Even more important were some errors in the biographical sketch of Marx, in Chapter III. These were not due to any carelessness upon the part of the present writer, but were reproduced from standard works, upon what seemed to be good authority--that of his youngest daughter and his intimate friend, the late Wilhelm Liebknecht. It is now known with certainty that the father of Karl Marx embraced Christianity of his own free choice, and not in obedience to an official edict. These and some other minor changes having to be made, I took the time to rewrite large parts of the volume, making such substantial changes in it as to constitute practically a new book. The chapter on Robert Owen has been recast and greater emphasis placed upon his American career and its influence; in Chapter IV the sketch of the Materialistic Conception of History has been enlarged somewhat, special attention being given to the bearing of the theory upon religion. All the rest of the book has been changed, partly to meet the requirements of many students and others who have written to me in reference to various points of difficulty, and partly also to state some of my own ideas more successfully. I venture to hope that the brief chapter on "Means of Realization," which has been added to the book by way of postscript, will, in spite of its brevity, and the fact that it was not written for inclusion in this volume, prove helpful to some who read the book. The thanks of the writer are due to all those friends--Socialists and others--whose kindly efforts made the earlier edition of the book a success. YONKERS, N.Y., December, 1908. CONTENTS PAGE PREFACE vii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Changed attitude of the public mind toward Socialism--Growth of the movement responsible for the change--Unanimity of friends and foes concerning the future triumph of Socialism--Herbert Spencer's pessimistic belief--Study of Socialism a civic duty--Nobility of the word "Socialism"--Its first use--Confusion arising from its indiscriminate use--"Socialism" and "Communism" in the _Communist Manifesto_--Unfair tactics of opponents--Engels on the significance of the word in 1847--Its present significance 1 CHAPTER II ROBERT OWEN AND THE UTOPIAN SPIRIT Utopian Socialism and Robert Owen--Estimates of Owen by Liebknecht and Engels--His early life--Becomes a manufacturer--The industrial revolution in England--Introduction of machinery--"Luddite" riots against machinery--Early riots against machinery--Marx's views--Owen as manufacturer--As social reformer--The New Lanark experiment--He becomes a Socialist--The New Harmony experiment--Abraham Lincoln and New Harmony--Failure of New Harmony--Owen compared with Saint-Simon and Fourier--Emerson's tribute to Robert Owen a fair estimate of the Utopists 16 CHAPTER III THE "COMMUNIST MANIFESTO" AND THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT The _Communist Manifesto_ called the birth-cry of modern Socialism--Conditions in 1848 when it was issued--Communism of the working class--Weitling and Cabet--Marx's parents become Christians--Marx and Engels--Religious spirit of Marx--Note upon the confusion of Marx with Wilhelm Marr--The _Manifesto_ as the first declaration of a working-class movement--Literary merit of the _Manifesto_--Its fundamental proposition stated by Engels--Socialism becomes scientific--The authorship of the _Manifesto_--Engels' testimony 53 CHAPTER IV THE MATERIALISTIC CONCEPTION OF HISTORY Socialism a theory of social evolution--Not economic fatalism--Leibnitz and the savage--Ideas and progress--Value of the materialistic conception of history--Foreshadowings of the theory--What is meant by the term "materialistic conception"--Results of overemphasis: Engels' testimony--Application of the theory to religion--Influence of social conditions upon religious forms--The doctrine of "free will"--Darwin and Marx--Application of the theory, specific and general--Columbus and the discovery of America--General view of historical progress--Antiquity of communism--Coöperation and competition--Slavery--Serfdom--Class struggles--The rise of capitalism and the wage system 75 CHAPTER V CAPITALISM AND THE LAW OF CONCENTRATION A new form of class division arises in the first stage of capitalism--The second stage of capitalism begins with the great mechanical inventions--The development of foreign and colonial trade--Theoretic individualism and practical collectivism--The law of capitalist concentration formulated by Marx--Competition, monopoly, socialization--Trustification, interindustrial and international--Criticisms of the Marxian theory--Engels on the attempts to make a "rigid orthodoxy" of the Marx theory--The small producers and traders--Concentration in production--Failure of the bonanza farms and persistence of the small farms--Other forms of agricultural concentration--Farm ownership and farm mortgages--The factory and the farm--The concentration of wealth--European and American statistics--Concentration of the control of wealth independent of actual ownership--Growth of immense fortunes--General summary 113 CHAPTER VI THE CLASS STRUGGLE THEORY Opposition to the doctrine--Misrepresentations by the opponents of Socialism--Socialists not the creators of the class struggle--Antiquity of class struggles--The theory as stated in the _Communist Manifesto_--Fundamental propositions in the statement--Slavery the first system of class divisions--Class divisions in feudalism--Rise of the capitalist class and its triumph--Inherent antagonism of interests between employer and employee--Commonality of general interests and antagonism of special class interests--Adam Smith on class divisions--Individuals _versus_ classes--Analysis of the class interests of the population of the United States--Class interests as they affect thoughts, opinions, and beliefs--Varying ethical standards of economic classes--Denial of class divisions in America--Our "untitled nobility"--Class divisions real though not legally established--They tend to become fixed and hereditary--Consciousness of class divisions new in America--Transition from class to class becoming more difficult--No hatred of individuals involved in the theory--Socialism _versus_ Anarchism--The labor struggle in the United States--Not due to misunderstandings, but to antagonism of interests--The reason for trade unionism--Trade union methods--Dual exploitation of the workers--Government and the workers--Capitalistic use of police and military--Judicial injunctions--"Taff Vale" law--Political rising of the workers--Triumph of the working class will liberate all mankind and end class rule 151 CHAPTER VII KARL MARX AND THE ECONOMICS OF SOCIALISM First comprehensive statement of the materialist conception of history by Marx--_La Misère de la Philosophie_, a criticism of Proudhon--Marx's first essay in economic science--His frank recognition of the Ricardians--Marx in England becomes familiar with the work of the Ricardians from whom he is accused of "pillaging" his ideas--Criticisms of Menger and others--Marx expelled from Germany and France--Removal to London--The struggle with poverty--Domestic life--_Capital_ an English work in all essentials--The Ricardians and their precursors--Superior method and insight of Marx--The sociological viewpoint in economics--Mr. W. H. Mallock's criticisms of Marx based upon misrepresentation and misstatement--Marx on the Gotha Programme of the German Social Democracy--Marx on the "ability of the directing few"--No ethical deductions in the Marxian theory--"Scientific Socialism," criticisms of the term 201 CHAPTER VIII OUTLINES OF SOCIALIST ECONOMIC THEORY The sociological viewpoint pervades all Marx's work--Commodities defined--Use-values and economic values--Exchange of commodities through the medium of money--The labor theory of value in its crude form--Marx and Benjamin Franklin--Some notable statements by the classic economists--Scientific development of the labor theory of value by Marx--"Unique values"--Price and value--Money as a price-expression and as a commodity--The theory of supply and demand as determinants of value--The "Austrian" theory of final utility as the determinant of value--The Marxian theory not necessarily exclusive of the theory of final, or marginal, utility--Labor-power as a commodity--Wages, its price, determined as the prices of all other commodities are--Wherein labor-power differs from all other commodities--"Surplus Value": why Marx used the term--The theory stated--The division of surplus value--No moral judgment involved in the theory--Other theories of the source of capitalist income--Wherein they fail to solve the problem--Fundamental importance of the doctrine 235 CHAPTER IX OUTLINES OF THE SOCIALIST STATE Detailed specifications impossible--Principles which must characterize it--Man's egoism and sociability--Socialism and Individualism not opposites--The idea of the Socialist state as a huge bureaucracy--Mr. Anstey's picture and Herbert Spencer's fear--Justification of this view in Socialist propaganda literature--Means of production, individual and social--Professor Goldwin Smith's question--The Socialist ideal of individual liberty--Absolute personal liberty not possible--Spencer's abandonment of _laissez faire_--Political organization of Socialist régime must be democratic--Automatic democracy unattainable--The need of eternal vigilance--Delegated authority--The rights of the individual and of society briefly stated--Private property and industry not incompatible with Socialism--Public ownership not the end, but only a means to an end--Economic structure of the Socialist state--Efficiency the test for private or public industry--The application of democratic principles to industry--The right to labor guaranteed by society, and the duty to labor enforced by society--Free choice of labor--Mode of remuneration--Who will do the dirty work?--The "abolition of wages"--Approximate equality attainable by free play of economic law under Socialism--Hoarded wealth--Inheritance--The security of society against the improvidence of its members--The administration of justice--Education completely free--The question of religious education--The state as protector of the child--Strict neutrality upon religious matters--A maximum of personal liberty with a minimum of restraint 277 CHAPTER X THE MEANS OF REALIZATION Impossible to tell definitely how the change will be brought about--Possible only to point out tendencies making for Socialism, and to show how the change _can_ be brought about--Marx's "catastrophe theory" a lapse into Utopian methods of thought--His deeper thought--Testimony of Liebknecht--Socialism not to be reached through a _coup de force_--The political changes necessary for Socialism--Tendencies making for socialization of industry--Monopolies, coöperative societies, the vast extension of collectivism within the capitalist system--Confiscation or compensation?--Change to Socialism to be legal and gradual--Engels and Marx favored compensation--The widow's savings--Elimination of unearned incomes--Violence not necessary 323 INDEX 339 SOCIALISM A SUMMARY AND INTERPRETATION OF SOCIALIST PRINCIPLES SOCIALISM CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION I It is not a long time since the kindest estimate of Socialism by the average man was that expressed by Ebenezer Elliott, "the Corn-Law Rhymer," in the once familiar cynical doggerel:-- "What is a Socialist? One who is willing To give up his penny and pocket your shilling." There was another view, brutally unjust and unkind, expressed in blood-curdling cartoons representing the Socialist as a bomb-throwing assassin. According to the one view, Socialists were all sordid, envious creatures, yearning for the "Equal division of unequal earnings," while the other view represented them as ready to enforce this selfish demand by means of the cowardly weapons of the assassin. Both these views are now, happily, well-nigh extinct. There is still a great deal of misconception of the meaning of Socialism; the ignorance concerning it which is manifested upon every hand is often disheartening, but neither of these puerile misrepresentations is commonly encountered in serious discussion. It is true that the average newspaper editorial confounds Socialism with Anarchism, often enlisting the prejudice which exists against the most violent forms of Anarchism in attacking Socialism, though the two systems of thought are fundamentally opposed to each other; it is likewise true that Socialists are not infrequently asked to explain their supposed intention to have a great general "dividing-up day" for the equal distribution of all the wealth of the nation. The Chancellor of a great American university returns from a sojourn in Norway, and naïvely hastens to inform the world that he has "refuted" Socialism by asking the members of some poor, struggling sect of Communists what would happen to their scheme of equality if babies should be born after midnight of the day of the equal division of wealth! Recognizing it to be the supreme issue of the age, the Republican Party, in its national platform,[1] defines Socialism as meaning equality of ownership as against equality of opportunity, notwithstanding the fact that every recognized exponent of Socialism would deny that Socialism means equality of ownership, or that it goes beyond equality of opportunity; that the voluminous literature of Socialism teems with unequivocal and unmistakable disavowals of any desire for the periodic divisions of property and wealth which alone could make equality of ownership possible for brief periods. Still, when all this has been said, it must be added that these criticisms do not represent the attitude of the mass of people toward the Socialist movement to the same extent as they once did. In serious discussions of the subject among thinking people it is becoming quite rare to encounter either of the two criticisms named. Most of those who seriously and honestly discuss the subject know that modern Socialism comprehends neither assassination nor the equal division of wealth. The enormous interest manifested in Socialism during recent years and the steady growth of the Socialist vote throughout the world bear witness to the fact that the views expressed in the satirical distich of the poet's fancy and the blood-curdling cartoon of the artist's invention are no longer the potent appeals to prejudice they once were. The reason for the changed attitude of the public toward the Socialist movement and the Socialist ideal lies in the growth of the movement itself. There are many who would change the order of this proposition and say that the growth of the Socialist movement is a result of the changed attitude of the public mind toward it. In a sense, both views are right. Obviously, if the public mind had not revised its judgments somewhat, we should not have attained our present strength and development; but it is equally obvious that if we had not grown, if we had remained the small and feeble band we once were, the public mind would not have revised its judgments much, if at all. It is easy to enlist prejudice against a small body of men and women when they have no powerful influence, and to misrepresent and vilify them. But it is otherwise when that small body has grown into a great body with far-reaching influence and power. So long as the Socialist movement in America consisted of a few poor workingmen in two or three of the largest cities, most of them foreigners, it was very easy for the average man to accept as true the wildest charges brought against them. But when the movement grew and developed a powerful organization, with branches in almost every city, and a well-conducted press of its own, it became a very different matter. The sixteen years from 1888 to 1904 saw the Socialist vote in the United States grow steadily from 2068 in the former year to 442,402 in the latter. Europe and America together had in 1870 only about 30,000 votes, but by 1906 the number had risen to considerably over 7,000,000. These figures constitute a vital challenge to the thoughtful and earnest men and women of the world. It is manifestly impossible for a great world-wide movement, numbering its adherent by millions, and having for its advocates many of the foremost thinkers, artists, and poets of the world, to be based upon either sordid selfishness or murderous hate and envy. If that were true, if it were possible for such a thing to be true, the most gloomy forebodings of the pessimist would fall far short of the real measure of Humanity's impending doom. It is estimated that no less than thirty million adults are at present enrolled in the ranks of the Socialists throughout the world, and the number is constantly increasing. This vast army, drawn from every part of the civilized world, comprising men and women of all races and creeds, is not motivated by hate or envy, but by a consciousness that in their hands and the hands of their fellows rests the power to win greater happiness for themselves. Incidentally, their unity for this purpose is perhaps the greatest force in the world to-day making for international peace. Still, notwithstanding the millions enlisted under the banner of Socialism, the word is spoken by many with the pallid lips of fear, the scowl of hate, or the amused shrug of contempt; while in the same land, people of the same race, facing the same problems and perils, speak it with glad voices and hopelit eyes. Many a mother crooning over her babe prays that it may be saved from the Socialism to which another, with equal mother love, looks as her child's heritage and hope. And with scholars and statesmen it is much the same. With wonderful unanimity agreeing that, in the words of Herbert Spencer, "Socialism will come inevitably, in spite of all opposition," they yet differ in their estimates of its character and probable effects upon the race quite as much as the unlearned. One welcomes and another fears; one envies the unborn generations, another pities. To one the coming of Socialism means the coming of Human Brotherhood, the long, long quest of Humanity's choicest spirits; to another it means the enslavement of the world through fear. Many years ago Herbert Spencer wrote an article on "The Coming Slavery," which conveyed the impression that the great thinker saw what he thought to be signs of the inevitable triumph of Socialism. All over the world Socialists were cheered by this admission from their implacable enemy. In this connection it is worthy of note that Spencer continued to believe in the inevitability of Socialism. In October, 1905, a well-known Frenchman, M. G. Davenay, visited Mr. Spencer and had a long conversation with him on several subjects, Socialism among them. Soon after his return, he received a letter on the subject from Mr. Spencer, written in French, which was published in the Paris _Figaro_ a few days after Mr. Spencer's death in December, 1905, two months or thereabouts from the time of the interview which called it forth.[2] After some brief reference to his health, Mr. Spencer wrote: "The opinions I have delivered here before you, and which you have the liberty to publish, are briefly these: (1) Socialism will triumph inevitably, in spite of all opposition; (2) its establishment will be the greatest disaster which the world has ever known; (3) sooner or later, it will be brought to an end by a military despotism." Anything more terrible than this black pessimism which clouded the latter part of the life of the great thinker, it would be difficult to imagine. After living his long life of splendid service to the cause of intellectual progress, and studying as few men have ever done the history of the race, he went down to his grave fully believing that the world was doomed to inevitable disaster. How different from the confidence of the poet,[3] foretelling:-- "A wonderful day a-coming when all shall be better than well." The last words of the great French Utopist, Saint-Simon, were, "The future is ours!" And thousands of times his words have been echoed by those who, believing equally with Herbert Spencer that Socialism must come, have seen in the prospect only the fulfillment of the age-long dream of Human Brotherhood. Men as profound as Spencer, and as sincere, rejoice at the very thing which blanched his cheeks and filled his heart with fear. There is, then, a widespread conviction that Socialism will come and, in coming, vitally affect for good or ill every life. Millions of earnest men and women have enlisted themselves beneath its banner in various lands, and their number is steadily growing. In this country, as in Europe, the spread of Socialism is one of the most evident facts of the age, and its study is therefore most important. What does it mean, and what does it promise or threaten, are questions which civic duty prompts. The day is not far distant when ignorance of Socialism will be regarded as a disgrace, and neglect of it a civic wrong. No man can faithfully discharge the responsibilities of his citizenship until he is able to give an answer to these questions, to meet intelligently the challenge of Socialism to the age. II The word "Socialism" is admittedly one of the noblest and most inspiring words ever born of human speech. Whatever may be thought of the principles for which it is the accepted name, or of the political parties which contend for those principles, no one can dispute the beauty and moral grandeur of the word itself. I refer not merely, of course, to its etymology, but rather to its spiritual import. Derived from the Latin word, _socius_, meaning a comrade, it is, like the word "mother," for instance, one of those great universal speech symbols which find their way into every language. Signifying as it does faith in the comradeship of man as the basis of social existence, prefiguring a social state in which there shall be no strife of man against man, or nation against nation, it is a verbal expression of a great ideal, man's loftiest aspirations crystallized into a single word. The old Hebrew prophet's dream of a world-righteousness that shall give peace, when nations "shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks,"[4] and the Angel-song of Peace and Goodwill in the legend of the Nativity, mean no more than the word "Socialism" in its best usage means. Plato, spiritual son of the Socrates who for truth's sake drained the hemlock cup to its dregs, dreamed of such social peace and unity, and the line of those who have seen the same vision of a love-welded world has never been broken: More and Campanella, Saint-Simon and Owen, Marx and Engels, Morris and Bellamy--and the end of the prophetic line is not yet. But if the dream, the hope itself, is old, the word is comparatively new. It is hard to realize that the word which means so much to countless millions of human beings, and which plays such a part in the vital discussions of the world, in every civilized country, is no older than many of those whose lips speak it with reverence and hope. Yet such is the fact. Because it will help us to a clearer understanding of modern Socialism, and because, too, it is little known, notwithstanding its intensely interesting character, let us linger awhile over that page of history which records the origin of this noble word. Some years ago, anxious to settle, if possible, the vexed question of the origin and first use of the word "Socialism," the present writer devoted a good deal of time to an investigation of the subject, spending much of it in a careful survey of all the early nineteenth-century radical literature. It soon appeared that the generally accepted account of its introduction, by the French writer, L. Reybaud, in 1840, was wrong. Indeed, when once fairly started on the investigation, it seemed rather surprising that the account should have been accepted, practically without challenge, for so long. Finally the conclusion was reached that an anonymous writer in an English paper was the first to use the word in print, the date being August 24, 1833.[5] Since that time an investigation of a commendably thorough nature has been made by three students of the University of Wisconsin,[6] with the result that they have been unable to find any earlier use of the word. It is somewhat disappointing that after thus tracing the word back to what may well be its first appearance in print, it should be impossible to identify its creator. The letter in which the term is first used is signed "A Socialist," and it is quite evident that the writer uses it as a synonym for the commonly used term "Owenite," by which the disciples of Robert Owen were known. It is most probable that Owen himself had used the word, and, to some extent, made it popular; and that the writer of the letter had heard "our dear social father," as Owen was called, use it, either in some of his speeches or in conversation. This is the more likely as Owen was fond of inventing new words. At any rate, one of Owen's associates, now dead, told the present writer that Owen often specifically claimed to have used the word at least ten years before it was adopted by any other writer. The word gradually became more familiar in England. Throughout the years 1835-1836, in the pages of Owen's paper, _The New Moral World_, there are many instances of the word occurring. The French writer, Reybaud, in his "Reformateurs Modernes," published in 1840, made the term equally familiar to the reading public of Continental Europe. By him it was used to designate the teachings not merely of Owen and his followers, but those of all social reformers and visionaries--Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Louis Blanc, and others. By an easy transition, it soon came into general use as designating all altruistic visions, theories, and experiments, from the "Republic" of Plato onward through the centuries. In this way much confusion arose. The word became too vague and indefinite to be distinctive. It was applied--frequently as an epithet--indiscriminately to persons of widely differing, and often conflicting, views. Every one who complained of social inequalities, every dreamer of social Utopias, was called a Socialist. The enthusiastic Christian, pleading for a return to the faith and practices of primitive Christianity, and the aggressive atheist, proclaiming religion to be the bulwark of the world's wrongs; the State worshiper, who would extol Law, and spread the net of government over the whole of life, and the iconoclastic Anarchist, who would destroy all forms of social authority, have all alike been dubbed Socialists, by their friends no less than by their opponents. The confusion thus introduced has had the effect of seriously complicating the study of Socialism from the historical point of view. Much that one finds bearing the name of Socialism in the literature of the middle of the nineteenth century, for example, is not at all related to Socialism as that term is understood to-day. Thus the Socialists of the present day, who do not advocate Communism, regard as a classic presentation of their views the famous pamphlet by Karl Marx and Friederich Engels, _The Communist Manifesto_. They have circulated it by millions of copies in practically all the languages of the civilized world. Yet throughout it speaks of "Socialists" with ill-concealed disdain, and always in favor of Communism and the Communist Party. The reason for this is clearly explained by Engels himself in the preface written by him for the English edition, but that has not prevented many an unscrupulous opponent of Socialism from quoting the _Communist Manifesto_ of Marx and Engels against the Socialists of the Marx-Engels school.[7] In like manner, the utterances and ideas of many of those who formerly called themselves Socialists have been quoted against the Socialists of to-day, notwithstanding that it was precisely on account of their desire to repudiate all connection with, and responsibility for, such ideas that the founders of the modern Socialist movement took the name "Communists." Nothing could be clearer than the language in which Engels explains why the name Communist was chosen, and the name Socialist discarded. He says: "Yet, when it (the _Manifesto_) was written, we could not have called it a _Socialist Manifesto_. By Socialists, in 1847, were understood, on the one hand, the adherents of the various Utopian systems: Owenites in England, Fourierists in France, both of these already reduced to the position of mere sects, and gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks, who, by all manner of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances; in both cases men outside of the working-class movement, and looking rather to the 'educated' classes for support. Whatever portion of the working class had become convinced of the insufficiency of mere political revolution and had proclaimed the necessity of a total social change, that portion, then, called itself Communist. It was a crude, rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of Communism; still, it touched the cardinal point and was powerful enough among the working class to produce the Utopian Communism, in France, of Cabet, and in Germany, of Weitling. Thus Socialism was, in 1847, a middle-class movement; Communism a working-class movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, 'respectable'; Communism was the very opposite. And as our notion, from the very beginning, was that the 'emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself,' there could be no doubt as to which of the names we must take. Moreover, we have ever since been far from regretting it."[8] There is still, unfortunately, much misuse of the word "Socialism," even by some accredited Socialist exponents. Writers like Tolstoy, Ibsen, Zola, and many others, are constantly referred to as Socialists, when, in fact, they are nothing of the sort. Still, the word is now pretty generally understood as defined by the Socialists--not the "Socialists" of sixty years ago, who were mostly Communists, but the Socialists of to-day, whose principles find classic expression in the _Communist Manifesto_, and to the attainment of which they have directed their political parties and programmes. In the words of Professor Thorstein Veblen: "The Socialism that inspires hopes and fears to-day is of the school of Marx. No one is seriously apprehensive of any other so-called Socialistic movement, and no one is seriously concerned to criticise or refute the doctrines set forth by any other school of 'Socialists.'"[9] FOOTNOTES: [1] Republican National Platform, 1908. [2] I quote the English translation from the London _Clarion_, December 18, 1905. [3] William Morris. [4] Isaiah ii. 4. [5] See _Socialism and Social Democracy_, by John Spargo. _The Comrade_, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1903. [6] In _The International Socialist Review_, Vol. VI, No. 1, July, 1905. [7] As an instance of this I note the following example: "No severer critic of Socialists ever lived than Karl Marx. No one more bitterly attacked them and their policy toward the trade unions than he.... And yet Socialists regard him as their patron saint." Mr. Samuel Gompers, in _The American Federationist_, August, 1905. [8] Preface to _The Communist Manifesto_, by F. Engels, Kerr edition, page 7. [9] _Quarterly Journal of Economics._ CHAPTER II ROBERT OWEN AND THE UTOPIAN SPIRIT I As a background to modern, or scientific, Socialism there is the Socialism of the Utopians, which the authors of the _Manifesto_ so severely criticised. It is impossible to understand the modern Socialist movement, the Socialism which is rapidly becoming the dominant issue in the thought and politics of the world, without distinguishing sharply between it and the Utopian visions which preceded it. Failure to make this distinction is responsible for the complete misunderstanding of the Socialism of to-day by many earnest and intelligent persons. It is not necessary that we study the Utopian movements which flourished and declined prior to the rise of scientific Socialism in detail. It will be sufficient if we consider the Utopian Socialism of Owen, which is Utopian Socialism at its best and nearest approach to the modern movement. Thus we shall get a clear view of the point of departure which marked the rise of the later scientific movement with its revolutionary political programmes. Incidentally, also, we shall get a view of the great and good Robert Owen, whom Liebknecht, greatest political leader of the movement, has called, "By far the most embracing, penetrating, and practical of all the harbingers of scientific Socialism."[10] Friederich Engels, a man not given to praising overmuch, has spoken of Owen with an enthusiasm which he rarely showed in his descriptions of men. He calls him, "A man of almost sublime and childlike simplicity of character," and declares, "Every social movement, every real advance in England on behalf of the workers, links itself on to the name of Robert Owen."[11] And even this high praise from the part-author of _The Communist Manifesto_ who for so many years was called the "Nestor of the Socialist movement," falls short, because it does not recognize the great influence of the man in the United States at a most important period of our history. Robert Owen was born of humble parentage, in a little town in North Wales, on the fourteenth day of May, 1771. A most precocious child, at seven years of age, so he tells us in his "Autobiography," he had familiarized himself with Milton's "Paradise Lost," and by the time he was ten years old he had grappled with the ages-old problems of Whence and Whither and become a skeptic! It is doubtful whether his "skepticism" really consisted of anything more than the consciousness that there were apparent contradictions in the Bible, a discovery which many a precocious lad has made at quite as early an age, and the failure of the usual theological subterfuges to satisfy a boy's frank spirit. Still, it is worthy of note as indicating his inquiring spirit. The great dream of his childhood was that he might become an educated man. He thirsted for knowledge and wanted above all things a university education. A passion for knowledge was the controlling force of his life. But his parents were too poor to gratify his desire for an extensive education. He was barely ten years old when his scanty schooling ended, and he set out to fight the battle of life for himself in London. He was apprenticed to a draper, named McGuffeg, who seems to have been a rather superior type of man. From a small peddling business he had built up one of the largest and wealthiest establishments in that part of London, catering to the wealthy and the titled nobility. Above all, McGuffeg was a man of books, and in his well-stocked library young Owen could read several hours each day, and thus make up in a measure for his early lack of educational opportunities. During the three years of his apprenticeship he read prodigiously, and laid the foundations of that literary culture which characterized his whole life and added tremendously to his power. This is not in any sense a biographical sketch of Robert Owen.[12] If it were, the story of the rise of this poor, strange, strong lad, from poverty to the very pinnacle of industrial and commercial power and fame, as one of the leading manufacturers of his day, would lead through pathways of romance as wonderful as any in our biographical literature. We are concerned, however, only with his career as a social reformer and the forces which molded it. And that, too, has its romantic side. II The closing years of the eighteenth century marked the beginning of a great and far-reaching industrial revolution. The introduction of new mechanical inventions enormously increased the productive powers of England. In 1770 Hargreaves patented his "spinning jenny," and in the following year Arkwright invented his "water frame," a patent spinning machine which derived its name from the fact that it was worked by water power. Later, in 1779, Crompton invented the "mule," which was really a combination of the principles of both machines. This was a long step forward, and greatly facilitated the spinning of the raw material into yarn. The invention was, in fact, a revolution in itself. Like so many other great inventors, Crompton died in poverty. Even now, however, the actual weaving had to be done by hand. Not until 1785, when Dr. Cartwright, a parson, invented a "power loom," was it deemed possible to weave by machinery. Cartwright's invention, coming in the same year as the general introduction of Watt's steam engine in the cotton industry, made the industrial revolution. Had the revolution come slowly, had the inventors of the new industrial processes been able to accomplish that, it is most probable that much of the misery of the period would have been avoided. As it was, terrible poverty and hardship attended the birth of the new industrial order. Owing to the expense of introducing the machines, and the impossibility of competing with them by the old methods of production, the small manufacturers themselves were forced to the wall, and their misery, compelling them to become wage-workers in competition with other already far too numerous wage-workers, added greatly to the woe of the time. William Morris's fine lines, written a hundred years later, express vividly what many a manufacturer must have felt at that time:-- "Fast and faster our iron master, The thing we made, forever drives." But perhaps the worst of all the results of the new régime was the destruction of the personal relations which had hitherto existed between the employers and their employees. No attention was paid to the interests of the latter. The personal relation was forever gone, and only a hard, cold cash nexus remained. Wages went down at an alarming rate, as might be expected; the housing conditions became simply inhuman. Now it was discovered that a child at one of the new looms could do more than a dozen men had done under the old conditions, and a tremendous demand for child workers was the result. At first, as H. de B. Gibbins[13] tells us, there was a strong repugnance on the part of parents to sending their children into the factories. It was, in fact, considered a disgrace to do so. The term "factory girl" was an insulting epithet, and it was impossible for a girl who had been employed in a factory to obtain other employment. She could not look forward to marriage with any but the very lowest of men, so degrading was factory employment considered to be. But the manufacturers had to get children somehow, and they got them. They got them from the workhouses. Pretending that they were going to apprentice them to a trade, they arranged with the overseers of the poor regular days for the inspection of these workhouse children. Those chosen were conveyed to their destination, packed in wagons or canal boats, and from that moment were doomed to the most awful form of slavery. "Sometimes regular traffickers would take the place of the manufacturer," says Gibbins,[14] "and transfer a number of children to a factory district, and there keep them, generally in some dark cellar, till they could hand them over to a mill owner in want of hands, who would come and examine their height, strength, and bodily capacities, exactly as did the slave owners in the American markets. After that the children were simply at the mercy of their owners, nominally as apprentices, but in reality as mere slaves, who got no wages and whom it was not worth while even to feed and clothe properly, because they were so cheap and their places could be so easily supplied. It was often arranged by the parish authorities, in order to get rid of imbeciles, that one idiot should be taken by the mill owner with every twenty sane children. The fate of these unhappy idiots was even worse than that of the others. The secret of their final end has never been disclosed, but we can form some idea of their awful sufferings from the hardships of the other victims to capitalist greed and cruelty. The hours of their labor were only limited by exhaustion, after many modes of torture had been unavailingly applied to force continued work. Children were often worked sixteen hours a day, by day and by night." Terrible as this summary is, it does not equal in horror the account given by "Alfred,"[15] in his "History of the Factory System": "In stench, in heated rooms, amid the constant whirl of a thousand wheels, little fingers and little feet were kept in ceaseless action, forced into unnatural activity by blows from the heavy hands and feet of the merciless overlooker, and the infliction of bodily pain by instruments of punishment invented by the sharpened ingenuity of insatiable selfishness." The children were fed upon the cheapest and coarsest food, often the same as that served to their master's pigs. They slept by turns, and in relays, in filthy beds that were never cool. There was often no discrimination between the sexes, and disease, misery, and vice flourished. Some of these miserable creatures would try to run away, and to prevent them, those suspected had irons riveted on their ankles, with long links reaching up to the hips, and were compelled to sleep and work with them on, young women and girls, as well as boys, suffering this brutal treatment. The number of deaths was so great that burials took place secretly, at night, lest an outcry should be raised. Many of the children committed suicide. These statements are so appalling that, as Mr. R. W. Cooke-Taylor says,[16] they would be "absolutely incredible" were they not fully borne out by evidence from other sources. It is not contended, of course, that conditions in all factories were as bad as those described. But it must be said emphatically that there were worse horrors than any here quoted, and equally emphatically that the very best factories were only a little better than those described. Take, for instance, the account given by Robert Owen of the conditions which obtained in the "model factory" of the time, the establishment at New Lanark, Scotland, owned by Mr. David Dale, where Owen himself was destined to introduce so many striking reforms. Owen assumed control of the New Lanark mills on the first day of the year 1800. In his "Autobiography,"[17] he gives some account of the conditions which he found there, in the "best regulated factory in the world," at that time. There were, says Owen, about five hundred children employed, who "were received as early as six years old, the pauper authorities declining to send them at any later age." They worked from six in the morning until seven in the evening, and _then their education began_. They hated their slavery, and many absconded. Many were dwarfed and stunted in stature, and when they were through their "apprenticeship," at thirteen or fifteen years of age, they commonly went off to Glasgow or Edinburgh, with no guardians, ignorant and ready--"admirably suited," is Owen's phrase--to swell the great mass of vice and misery in the towns. The people in New Lanark lived "almost without control, in habits of vice, idleness, poverty, debt, and destitution. Thieving was general." With such conditions existing in a model factory, under a master whose benevolence was celebrated everywhere, it can be very readily believed that conditions elsewhere must have been abominable. As a result of the appalling poverty which developed, it soon became necessary for poor parents to permit their children to go into the factories. The mighty machines were far too powerful for the prejudices of parental hearts. Child wage-workers became common. They were subjected to little better conditions than the parish apprentices had been; in fact, they were often employed alongside of them. Fathers were unemployed and frequently took meals to their little ones who were at work--a condition which sometimes obtains in some parts of the United States even to this day. Michael Sadler, a member of the House of Commons and a fearless champion of the rights of the poor and oppressed, described this aspect of the evil in touching verse.[18] During all this time, let it be remembered, the English philanthropists, and among them many capitalists, were agitating against negro slavery in Africa and elsewhere, and raising funds for the emancipation of the slaves. Says Gibbins,[19] "The spectacle of England buying the freedom of black slaves by riches drawn from the labor of her white ones affords an interesting study for the cynical philosopher." As we read the accounts of the distress which followed upon the introduction of the new mechanical inventions, it is impossible to regard with surprise or with condemnatory feelings, the riots of the misguided "Luddites" who went about destroying machinery in their blind desperation. Ned Lud, after whom the Luddites were named, was an idiot, but wiser men, finding themselves reduced to abject poverty through the introduction of the giant machines, could see no further than he. It was not to be expected that the masses should understand that it was not the machines, but the institution of their private ownership, and use for private gain, that was wrong. And just as we cannot regard with surprise the action of the Luddites in destroying machinery, it is easy to understand how the social unrest of the time produced Utopian movements with numerous and enthusiastic adherents. The Luddites were not the first to make war upon machinery. In 1758, for example, Everet's first machine for dressing wool, an ingenious contrivance worked by water power, was set upon by a mob and reduced to ashes. From that time on similar outbreaks occurred with more or less frequency; but it was not until 1810 that the organized bodies of Luddites went from town to town, sacking factories and destroying the machines in their blind revolt. The contest between the capitalist and the wage-worker, which, as Karl Marx says, dates back to the very origin of capital, took on a new form when machinery was introduced. Henceforth, the worker fights not only, nor even mainly, against the capitalist, but against the machine, as the material basis of capitalist exploitation. This is a distinct phase of the struggle of the proletariat everywhere. In the sixteenth century the ribbon loom, a machine for weaving ribbon, was invented in Germany. Marx quotes an Italian traveler, Abbé Lancellotti, who wrote in 1579, as follows: "Anthony Müller, of Danzig, saw about fifty years ago, in that town, a very ingenious machine, which weaves four to six pieces at once. But the mayor, being apprehensive that this invention might throw a large number of workmen on the streets, caused the inventor to be secretly strangled or drowned."[20] In 1629 this ribbon loom was introduced into Leyden, where the riots of the ribbon weavers forced the town council to prohibit it. In 1676 its use was prohibited in Cologne, at the same time that its introduction was causing serious disturbances in England. "By an imperial Edict of the 19th of February, 1685, its use was forbidden throughout all Germany. In Hamburg it was burned in public, by order of the Senate. The Emperor Charles VI, on the 9th of February, 1719, renewed the Edict of 1685, and not till 1765 was its use openly allowed in the Electorate of Saxony. This machine, which shook all Europe to its foundations, was in fact the precursor of the mule and power loom, and of the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century. It enabled a totally inexperienced boy to set the whole loom, with all its shuttles, in motion by simply moving a rod backward and forward, and in its improved form produced from forty to fifty pieces at once."[21] The introduction of machinery has universally caused the workers to revolt. Much futile denunciation has been poured upon the blind, stupid resistance of the workers, but in view of the misery and poverty which they have suffered, it is impossible to judge them harshly. Their passionate, futile resistance to the irresistible moves to pity rather than to condemnation. As Marx justly says, "It took both time and experience before the work people learned to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used."[22] III Under the new industrial régime, Robert Owen, erstwhile a poor draper's apprentice, soon became one of the most successful manufacturers in England. At eighteen years of age we find him entering into the manufacture of the new cotton-spinning machines, with a borrowed capital of $500. His partner was a man named Jones, and though the enterprise was successful from a financial point of view, the partnership proved to be most disagreeable. Accordingly it was dissolved, Owen taking three of the "mules" which they were making as a reimbursement for his investment. With these and some other machinery, Owen entered the cotton manufacturing industry, employing at first only three men. He made $1500 as his first year's profit. Erelong Owen ceased manufacturing upon his own account, and became superintendent of a Manchester cotton mill, owned by a Mr. Drinkwater, and employing some five hundred work people. A most progressive man, in his new position Owen was always ready to introduce new machinery, and to embark upon experiments, with a view to improving the quality of the product of the factory.[23] In this he was so successful that the goods manufactured at the Drinkwater mill soon commanded a fifty per cent advance above the regular market prices. Drinkwater, delighted at results like these, made Owen his partner. Thus when he was barely twenty years of age Owen had secured an eminent position among the cotton manufacturers of the time. It is interesting to recall that Owen, in that same year, 1791, used the first cotton ever brought into England from the United States. "American sea island cotton," as it was called from the fact that it was then grown only upon the islands near the southern coast of the United States, was not believed to be of any value for manufacture on account, chiefly, of its poor color. But when a cotton broker named Spear received three hundred pounds of it from an American planter, with the request that he get some competent spinner to test it, Owen, with characteristic readiness, undertook the test and succeeded in making a much finer product than had hitherto been made from the French cotton, though inferior to it in color. That was the first introduction of American cotton, destined soon to furnish English cotton mills with the greater part of their raw material. Owen did not long remain with Mr. Drinkwater. He accepted another profitable partnership in Manchester, and it was at this time that he became active in social reform work. As a member of an important literary and philosophical society, he was thrown much into the company of men distinguished in all walks of life, one of his friends and admirers being the poet Coleridge. Here he began that agitation which led to the passing of the very first factory act of Sir Robert Peel, in 1802. The suffering of the children moved his great humane heart to pity. He well knew that his own wealth and the wealth of his fellow-capitalists had been purchased at a terrible cost in child life. He was only a philanthropist as yet; he saw only the pitiful waste of life involved, and sought to impress men of wealth with what he felt. His mind was constantly occupied with plans for practical, constructive philanthropy upon a scale never before attempted. On the first day of the nineteenth century, Owen entered upon the wonderful philanthropic career at New Lanark, which attracted universal attention, and ultimately led him to those social experiments and theories which won for him the title of "Father of Modern Socialism." We have already seen what the conditions were in the "model factory" when Owen assumed control. His influence was at once directed to the task of ameliorating the condition of the work people. He shortened the hours of labor, introduced sanitary reforms, protected the people against the exploitation of traders through a vicious credit system, opening a store and supplying them with goods at cost, and established infant schools, the first of their kind, for the care and education of children from two years of age and upward. Still, the workers themselves were suspicious of this man who, so different from other employers, was zealous in doing things for them. He really knew nothing of the working class, and it had never occurred to him that they might do anything for themselves. New Lanark under Owen was, to use the phrase which Mr. Ghent has adopted from Fourier, "a benevolent feudalism." Owen complains pathetically, "Yet the work people were systematically opposed to every change which I proposed, and did whatever they could to frustrate my object."[24] Opportunity to win the affection and confidence of his employees came to Owen at last, and he was not slow to embrace it. In 1806 the United States, in consequence of a diplomatic rupture with England, placed an embargo upon the shipment of raw cotton to that country. Everywhere mills were shut down, and there was the utmost distress in consequence. The New Lanark mills, in common with most others, were shut down for four months, during which time Owen paid every worker his or her wages in full, at a cost of over $35,000. Forever afterward he enjoyed the love and trust of his work people. In spite of all his seemingly reckless expenditure upon purely philanthropic work, the mills yielded an enormous profit. But Owen was constantly in conflict with his business associates, who sought to restrict his philanthropic expenditures, with the result that he was compelled again and again to change partners, always securing their interests and returning them big profits upon their investments, until finally, in 1829, he left New Lanark altogether. During twenty-nine years he had carried on the business with splendid commercial success and at the same time attracted universal attention to New Lanark as the theater of the greatest experiments in social regeneration the modern world had known. Every year thousands of persons from all parts of the world, many of them statesmen and representatives of the crowned heads of Europe, visited New Lanark to study these experiments, and never were they seriously criticised or their success challenged. It was a wonderful achievement. Had Owen's life ended in 1829, he must have taken rank in history as one of the truly great men of the nineteenth century. IV Let us now consider briefly the forces which led this gentle philanthropist onward to the goal of Communism. His experiences at New Lanark had convinced him that human character depends in large part upon, and is shaped by, environment. Others before Owen had perceived this, but he must ever be regarded as one of the pioneers in the spread of the idea, one of the first to give it definite form and to demonstrate its truth upon a large scale. In the first of those keen "Essays on the Formation of Human Character," in which he recounts the results of his New Lanark system of education, Owen says, "Any general character from the best to the worst, from the most ignorant to the most enlightened, may be given to any community, even to the world at large, by the application of proper means; which means are to a great extent at the command and under the control of those who have influence in the affairs of men." We may admit that there is a good deal of overemphasis in this statement, but the doctrine itself does not seem strange or sensational to-day. It might be promulgated in any fashionable church, or in any ministerial conference, without exciting more than a languid, passing interest. But in Owen's time it was far otherwise. Such a doctrine struck at the very roots of current theology and all that organized Christianity consciously stood for. It denied the doctrine of the freedom of the will, upon which the elaborate theology of the church rested. No wonder, then, that it brought much bitter denunciation upon the heads of its promulgators. A poet of the period, in a poem dedicated to Owen, aptly expresses the doctrine in somewhat prosaic verse:-- "We are the creatures of external things, Acting on inward organs, and are made To think and do whate'er our tutors please. What folly, then, to punish or reward For deeds o'er which we never held a curb! What woeful ignorance, to teach the crime And then chastise the pupil for his guilt!"[25] Owen learned other things at New Lanark besides the truth that character is formed largely by environment. Starting out with no other purpose than to ameliorate the conditions of his work people, he realized before many years had passed that he could never do for them the one essential thing--secure their real liberty. "The people were slaves of my mercy," he writes.[26] He saw, though but dimly at first, that no man could be free who depended upon another for the right to earn his bread, no matter how good the bread-master might be. The hopelessness of expecting reform from the manufacturers themselves was painfully forced upon him. First of all, there was the bitter hostility of those of his class who had no sympathy with his philanthropic ideas, manifested from the beginning of his agitation at Manchester. Then there was the incessant conflict with his own associates, who, though they represented the noblest and best elements of the manufacturing class, constantly opposed him and regarded as dangerous and immoral his belief in the inherent right of every child to the opportunities of sound physical, mental, and moral culture. Class consciousness had not yet become a recognized term in sociological discussions, but class consciousness, the instinctive conformity of thought and action with class interests, was a fact which confronted Owen at every step. The Luddite riots of 1810-1811 awakened England to the importance of the labor question, and Owen, who since 1805 had been devoting much time to its study, secured a wider audience and a much more serious hearing than ever before. Then came the frightful misery of 1815, due to the crisis which the end of the great war produced. Every one seemed to think that when the war was over and peace restored, there would be a tremendous increase in prosperity. What happened was precisely the opposite; for a time at least things were immeasurably worse than before. Peace did not bring with it plenty, but penury. Owen, more clearly than any other man of the time, explained the real nature of the crisis. The war had given an important spur to industry and encouraged many new inventions and chemical discoveries. "The war was the great and most extravagant customer of farmers, manufacturers, and other producers of wealth, and many during this period became very wealthy.... And on the day on which peace was signed, the great customer of the producers died, and prices fell as the demand diminished, until the prime cost of the articles required for war could not be obtained.... Barns and farmyards were full, warehouses loaded, and such was our artificial state of society that this very superabundance of wealth was the sole cause of the existing distress. _Burn the stock in the farmyards and warehouses, and prosperity would immediately recommence, in the same manner as if the war had continued._ This want of demand at remunerating prices compelled the master producers to consider what they could do to diminish the amount of their productions and the cost of producing until these surplus stocks could be taken out of the market. To effect these results, every economy in producing was resorted to, and men being more expensive machines for producing than mechanical and chemical inventions and discoveries so extensively brought into action during the war, the men were discharged and the machines were made to supersede them--while the numbers of the unemployed were increased by the discharge of men from the army and navy. Hence the great distress for want of work among all classes whose labor was so much in demand while the war continued. This increase of mechanical and chemical power was continually diminishing the demand for, and value of, manual labor, and would continue to do so, and would effect great changes throughout society."[27] In this statement there are several points worthy of attention. In the first place, the analysis of the crisis of 1815 is very like the later analyses of commercial crises by the Marxists; secondly, the antagonism of class interests is clearly developed, so far as the basic interests of the employers and their employees are concerned. The former, in order to conserve their interests, have to dismiss the workers, thus forcing them into the direst poverty. Thirdly, the conflict between manual labor and machine production is frankly stated. Owen's studies were leading him from mere philanthropism to Socialism. During the height of the distress of 1815, Owen called together a large number of cotton manufacturers at a conference, held in Glasgow, to consider the state of the cotton trade and the prevailing distress. He proposed (1) that they should petition Parliament for the repeal of the revenue tariff on raw cotton; (2) that they should call upon Parliament to shorten the hours of labor in the cotton mills by legislative enactment, and otherwise seek to improve the condition of the working people. The first proposition was carried with unanimity, but the second, and to Owen the more important, did not even secure a seconder.[28] The conference plainly showed the power of class interests. The spirit in which Owen faced his fellow-manufacturers is best seen in the following extract from the address delivered by him, with copies of which he afterward literally deluged the kingdom:-- "True, indeed, it is that the main pillar and prop of the political greatness and prosperity of our country is a manufacture which, as now carried on, is destructive of the health, morals, and social comfort of the mass of people engaged in it. It is only since the introduction of the cotton trade that children, at an age before they had acquired strength or mental instruction, have been forced into cotton mills,--those receptacles, in too many instances, for living human skeletons, almost disrobed of intellect, where, as the business is often now conducted, they linger out a few years of miserable existence, acquiring every bad habit which they may disseminate throughout society. It is only since the introduction of this trade that children and even grown people were required to labor more than twelve hours in a day, not including the time allotted for meals. It is only since the introduction of this trade that the sole recreation of the laborer is to be found in the pot-house or ginshop, and it is only since the introduction of this baneful trade that poverty, crime, and misery have made rapid and fearful strides throughout the community. "Shall we then go unblushingly and ask the legislators of our country to pass legislative acts to sanction and increase this trade--to sign the death warrants of the strength, morals, and happiness of thousands of our fellow-creatures, and not attempt to propose corrections for the evils which it creates? If such shall be your determination, I, for one, will not join in the application,--no, I will, with all the faculties I possess, oppose every attempt made to extend the trade that, except in name, is more injurious to those employed in it than is the slavery in the West Indies to the poor negroes; for deeply as I am interested in the cotton manufacture, highly as I value the extended political power of my country, yet knowing as I do, from long experience both here and in England, the miseries which this trade, as it is now conducted, inflicts on those to whom it gives employment, I do not hesitate to say: _Perish the cotton trade, perish even the political superiority of our country, if it depends on the cotton trade, rather than that they shall be upheld by the sacrifice of everything valuable in life._"[29] This conference doubtless had much to do with Owen's acceptance of a communistic ideal approaching that of modern Socialism in many important respects. It certainly intensified the hatred and fear of those manufacturers whose interests he had so courageously attacked. In 1817 we find him proposing to the British government the establishment of communistic villages, as the best means of remedying the terrible distress which prevailed at that time. From this time onward his interest in mere surface reforms such as he had been carrying on at New Lanark seemed to wane. He became at this juncture an apostle of Communism, or as he later preferred to say, Socialism. His ideal was a coöperative world, with perfect equality between the sexes. He had completely demonstrated to his own mind that private property was incompatible with social well-being. Every month of his experience at New Lanark had deeply impressed him with the conviction that to make it possible for all people to live equally happy and moral lives they must have equal material resources and conditions of life, and he could not understand why it had never occurred to others before him. Here we have the essential characteristic of Utopian Socialism as distinguished from modern, or scientific, Socialism. The Utopians regard human life as something plastic and capable of being shaped and molded according to systems and plans. All that is necessary is to take some abstract principle as a standard, and then prepare a plan for the reorganization of society in conformity with that principle. If the plan is perfect, it will be enough to demonstrate its advantages as one would demonstrate a sum in arithmetic. The scientific Socialists, on the other hand, are evolutionists. Society, they believe, cannot take leaps at will; social changes are products of the past and the present. They distrust social inventors and schemes. Socialism is not an ingenious plan for the realization of abstract Justice, or Brotherhood, but a necessary outgrowth of the centuries. Owen, then, was a Utopian. He regarded himself as one inspired, an inspired inventor of a new social system, and believed that it was only necessary for him to demonstrate the truth of his contentions and theories, by argument and practical experiment, to bring about the transformation of the world. He conducted a tremendous propaganda, by means of newspapers, pamphlets, lectures, and debates, and established various communities in England and this country. In face of a bitter opposition and repeated failure, he kept on with sublime faith and unbounded courage which nothing could shake. In 1825 Owen began the greatest and most splendid of his social experiments in the village of Harmonie, Indiana, in the beautiful valley of the Wabash. The place had already been the theater of an interesting experiment in religious communism, Owen having bought the property from the Rappites. In February and March, 1825, the brave reformer addressed two of the most distinguished audiences ever gathered in the Hall of Representatives at the national capital. In the audiences were the President of the United States, the Judges of the Supreme Court, several members of the cabinet, and almost the entire membership of both houses of Congress. Owen explained his plans for the regeneration of society in detail, exhibiting a model of the buildings to be erected. It is almost impossible to realize at this day the tremendous interest which his appeal to Congress awakened. His vision of a re-created world caught the popular imagination. Among those whose minds were fired was a boy of sixteen, tall, lank, uncouth, and poor. Word had come to him of Owen's splendid undertaking, and he had caught something of the enthusiasm of the great dreamer. Above all, it was said that New Harmony was to be a wonderful center of learning, that the foremost educators of the world would establish great schools there, fully equipped with books and all sorts of appliances. To be a scholar had been the boy's one great ambition, so he yearned wistfully for an opportunity to join the new community. But his father forbidding, claiming his services, the boy suffered grievous disappointment. One wonders what effect residence at New Harmony would have had upon the life of Abraham Lincoln, and upon the history of America! And how much, one wonders, was that splendid life influenced by that boyish interest in the regeneration of the world? That the influence of New Harmony was felt by Lincoln we know. It was a child of New Harmony, Robert Dale Owen, son of Robert Owen, who, when emancipation seemed to hang in the balance, penned his remarkable letter to President Lincoln, dated September seventeenth, 1862. "Its perusal thrilled me like a trumpet call," said the great President. Five days after its receipt the Preliminary Proclamation was issued. "Your letter to the President had more influence on him than any other document which reached him on the subject--I think I might say than all others put together. I speak of that which I know from personal conference with him," wrote Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury. New Harmony failed. Other communities established by Owen failed, but the story of their failure is nevertheless full of inspiration. The world has long since written the word "Failure" as an epitaph for Robert Owen. But what a splendid failure that life was! Standing by his grave one day, in the picturesque little churchyard at Newton, by a bend of the winding river, not far from the ruins of the ancient castle home of the famous Deist, Lord Herbert, the writer said to an old Welsh laborer, "But his life was a failure, was it not?" The old man gazed awhile at the grave, and then with a voice of unforgettable reverence and love answered, "I suppose it was, sir, as the world goes; a failure like Jesus Christ's. But I don't call it failure, sir. He established infant schools; he founded the great coöperative movement; he helped to make the trade unions;[30] he helped to give us the factory acts; he worked for peace between two great countries. His Socialism has not been realized yet, nor has Christ's--but it will come!" V Owen was not the only builder of Utopias in his time. In the same year that Owen launched his New Harmony venture, there died in Paris another dreamer of social millenniums, a gentle mystic, Henry de Saint-Simon, and in 1837, the year of Owen's third Socialist congress, another great Utopist died in the French capital, Charles Fourier. Each of these contributed something to the development of the theories of Socialism, each has a legitimate place in the history of the Socialist movement. But this little work is not intended to give the history of Socialism.[31] I have taken only one of the three great Utopists, as representative of them all: one who seems to me to be much nearer to the later scientific movement pioneered by Marx and Engels than any of the others. In the Socialism of Owen, we have Utopian Socialism at its best. What distinguishes the Utopian Socialists from their scientific successors we have already noted. Engels expresses the principle very clearly in the following luminous passage: "One thing is common to all three. Not one of them appears as a representative of the interests of that proletariat which historical development had ... produced. Like the French philosophers,[32] they do not claim to emancipate a particular class to begin with, but all humanity at once. Like them, they wish to bring in the kingdom of reason and eternal justice, but this kingdom, as they see it, is as far as heaven from earth from that of the French philosophers. "For, to our three social reformers, the bourgeois world, based upon the principles of these philosophers, is quite as irrational and unjust, and, therefore, finds its way to the dust hole quite as readily, as feudalism and all the earlier stages of society. If pure reason and justice had not, hitherto, ruled the world, this has been the case only because men have not rightly understood them. What was wanted was the individual man of genius, who has now arisen and who understands the truth. That he has now arisen, that the truth has now been clearly understood, is not an inevitable event, following of necessity in the chain of historical development, but a mere happy accident. He might just as well have been born five hundred years earlier, and might then have spared humanity five hundred years of error, strife, and suffering."[33] Neither of these great Utopists had anything like the conception of social evolution, determined by economic conditions and the resulting conflicts of economic classes, which constitutes the base of the philosophy of the scientific Socialists. Each of them had some faint comprehension of isolated facts, but neither of them developed his knowledge very far, nor could the facts appear to them as correlated later by Marx. Saint-Simon, as we know, recognized the class struggle in the French Revolution, and saw in the Reign of Terror only the momentary reign of the non-possessing masses;[34] he saw, too, that the political question was fundamentally an economic question, declaring that politics is the science of production, and prophesying that politics would be absorbed by economics.[35] Fourier, we also know, applied the principle of evolution to society. He divided the history of society into four great epochs--savagery, barbarism, the patriarchate, and civilization.[36] But just as Saint-Simon failed to grasp the significance of the class conflict, and its relation to the fundamental character of economic institutions, which he dimly perceived, so Fourier failed to grasp the significance of the evolutionary process which he described, and, like Saint-Simon, he halted upon the brink, so to speak, of an important discovery. His concept of social evolution meant little to him and possessed only an academic interest. And Owen, in many respects the greatest of the three, realized in a practical manner that the industrial problem was a class conflict. Not only had he found in 1815 that pity was powerless to move the hearts of his fellow-manufacturers when their class interests were concerned, but later, in 1818, when he went to present his famous memorial to the Congress of Sovereigns at Aix-la-Chapelle, he had another lesson of the same kind. At Frankfort, Germany, he tarried on his way to the Congress, and was invited to attend a notable dinner to meet the Secretary of the Congress, M. Gentz, a famous diplomat of the day, "who enjoyed the full confidence of the leading despots of Europe." After Owen had outlined his schemes for social amelioration, M. Gentz was asked for his reply, and Owen tells us that the diplomat answered, "We know very well that what you say is true, but how could we govern the masses, if they were wealthy, and so, independent of us?"[37] Lord Lauderdale, too, had exclaimed on another occasion, "Nothing [_i.e._ than Owen's plans] could be more complete for the poor and working classes, but what will become of us?"[38] Scattered throughout Owen's writings and speeches are numerous evidences that he at times recognized the class antagonisms in industrial society as the heart of the industrial problem,[39] but to him, also, the germ of an important truth meant practically nothing. He saw only the facts in their isolation, and made no attempt to discover their meaning or to relate them to his teaching. Each of the three men regarded himself as the discoverer of the truth which would redeem the world; each devoted himself with magnificent faith and heroic courage to his task; each failed to realize his hopes; and each left behind him faithful disciples and followers, confident that the day must come at last when the suffering and disinherited of earth will be able to say, in Owen's dying words, "Relief has come." Perhaps no better estimate of the value of the visions of these great Utopists has ever been penned than that by Emerson in the following tribute to Owen:[40]-- "Robert Owen of New Lanark came hither from England in 1845 to read lectures or hold conversations wherever he could find listeners--the most amiable, sanguine, and candid of men. He had not the least doubt that he had hit on the plan of right and perfect Socialism, or that mankind would adopt it. He was then seventy years old, and being asked, 'Well, Mr. Owen, who is your disciple? how many men are there possessed of your views who will remain after you are gone to put them in practice?' 'Not one,' was the reply. Robert Owen knew Fourier in his old age. He said that Fourier learned of him all the truth that he had. The rest of his system was imagination, and the imagination of a visionary. Owen made the best impression by his rare benevolence. His love of men made us forget his 'three errors.' His charitable construction of men and their actions was invariable. He was the better Christian in his controversies with Christians. "And truly I honor the generous ideas of the Socialists, the magnificence of their theories, and the enthusiasm with which they have been urged. They appeared inspired men of their time. Mr. Owen preached his doctrine of labor and reward with the fidelity and devotion of a saint in the slow ears of his generation. "One feels that these philosophers have skipped no fact but one, namely, life. They treat man as a plastic thing, or something that may be put up or down, ripened or retarded, molded, polished, made into solid or fluid or gas at the will of the leader; or perhaps as a vegetable, from which, though now a very poor crab, a very good peach can by manure and exposure be in time produced--and skip the faculty of life which spawns and spurns systems and system makers; which eludes all conditions; which makes or supplants a thousand Phalanxes and New Harmonies with each pulsation.... "Yet, in a day of small, sour and fierce schemes, one is admonished and cheered by a project of such friendly aims, and of such bold and generous proportions; there is an intellectual courage and strength in it which is superior and commanding; it certifies the presence of so much truth in the theory, and in so far is destined to be fact. "I regard these philanthropists as themselves the effects of the age in which they live, in common with so many other good facts the efflorescence of the period and predicting the good fruit that ripens. They were not the creators that they believed themselves to be; but they were unconscious prophets of the true state of society, one which the tendencies of nature lead unto, one which always establishes itself for the sane soul, though not in that manner in which they paint it." "Our visions have not come to naught, Who saw by lightning in the night; The deeds we dreamed are being wrought By those who work in clearer light; In other ways our fight is fought, And other forms fulfill our thought Made visible to all men's sight."[41] FOOTNOTES: [10] _Karl Marx: Biographical Memoirs_, by Wilhelm Liebknecht, page 101. [11] _Socialism, Utopian and Scientific_, by F. Engels, London, 1892, pages 20-25. [12] For good accounts of the life of Owen the reader is referred to the Biography, by Lloyd Jones, in _The Social Science Series_, 1890, published by Swan, Sonnenschein & Co., London, and the _Life of Robert Owen_, by Frank Podmore, 2 vols., New York, 1907. [13] _The Industrial History of England_, by H. de B. Gibbins, London, Methuen and Co. [14] _Industrial History of England_, page 179. [15] This anonymous historian is now known to have been Mr. Samuel Kydd, barrister-at-law (_vide_ Cooke-Taylor). [16] _The Factory System and the Factory Acts_, by R. W. Cooke-Taylor, London, 1894. [17] In two volumes: London, Effingham Wilson, 1857 and 1858. Vol. I contains the Life; Vol. II is a Supplementary Appendix. Quotations are from Vol. I. [18] See _Songs of Freedom_, by H. S. Salt, pages 81-83. [19] _Industrial History of England_, page 181. [20] _Capital_, by Karl Marx, Vol. I, page 467, Kerr edition. [21] _Idem_, Vol. I, page 468. [22] _Capital_, Vol. I, page 468. [23] For instance, he so improved the machinery and increased the fineness of the threads that, instead of spinning seventy-five thousand yards of yarn to the pound of cotton, he spun two hundred and fifty thousand! At that time a pound of cotton, which in its raw state was worth $1.25, became worth $50 when spun.--_Life of Robert Owen_, Philadelphia, 1866.--_Anonymous._ [24] _Autobiography._ [25] _The Force of Circumstances_, a poem, by John Garwood, Birmingham, 1808. [26] Quoted by Engels, _Socialism, Utopian and Scientific_, page 22 (English edition, 1892). [27] Quoted by H. M. Hyndman, _The Economics of Socialism_, page 150. [28] _The New Harmony Communities_, by George Browning Lockwood, page 71. [29] Quoted by Lockwood, _The New Harmony Communities_, pages 71-72. [30] Owen presided at the first organized Trade Union Congress in England. [31] For the history of these and other Utopian Socialist schemes, the reader is referred to Professor Ely's _French and German Socialism_ (1883); Kirkup's _History of Socialism_ (1900); and Hillquit's _History of Socialism in the United States_ (1903). [32] The Encyclopædists. [33] Engels, _Socialism, Utopian and Scientific_, pages 6-7. [34] Engels, _Socialism, Utopian and Scientific_, page 15. [35] _Idem._ [36] _Idem_, page 18. [37] _Autobiography._ [38] _Idem._ [39] See, for instance, _The Revolution in Mind and Practice_, by Robert Owen, pages 21-22. [40] _Essay on Robert Owen._ [41] Gerald Massey. CHAPTER III THE "COMMUNIST MANIFESTO" AND THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT I The _Communist Manifesto_ has been called the birth-cry of the modern scientific Socialist movement. When it was written, at the end of 1847, little remained of those great movements which in the early part of the century had inspired millions with high hopes of social regeneration and rekindled the beacon fires of faith in the world. The Saint-Simonians had, as an organized body, disappeared; the Fourierists were a dwindling sect, discouraged by the failure of the one great trial of their system, the famous Brook Farm experiment, in the United States; the Owenite movement had never recovered from the failures of the experiments at New Harmony and elsewhere, and had lost much of its identity through the multiplicity of interests embraced in Owen's later propaganda. Chartism and Trade Unionism on the one hand, and the Coöperative Societies on the other, had, between them, absorbed most of the vital elements of the Owenite movement. There was a multitude of what Engels calls "social quacks," but the really great social movements, Owenism in England, and Fourierism in France, were utterly demoralized and rapidly dwindling away. One thing only served to keep the flame of hope alive--"the crude, rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of Communism" of the workers. This Communism of the working class differed very essentially from the Socialism of Fourier and Owen. It was Utopian, being based, like all Utopian movements, upon abstract ideas. It differed from Fourierism and Owenism, however, in that instead of a universal appeal based upon Brotherhood, Justice, Order, and Economy, its appeal was, primarily, to the laborer. Its basis was the crude class doctrine of "the rights of Labor." The laborer was appealed to as one suffering from oppression and injustice. It was, therefore, distinctly a class movement, and its class-consciousness was sufficiently developed to keep its leaders from wasting their lives in abortive appeals to the master class. The leading exponents of this Communism of the workers were Wilhelm Weitling, in Germany, and Étienne Cabet, in France. Weitling was a man of the people. He was born in Magdeburg, Germany, in 1808, the illegitimate child of a humble woman and her soldier lover. He became a tailor, and, as was the custom in Germany at that time, traveled extensively during his apprenticeship. In 1838 his first important work, "The World As It Is, and As It Might Be," appeared, published in Paris by a secret revolutionary society consisting of German workingmen of the "Young Germany" movement. In this work Weitling first expounded at length his communistic theories. It is claimed[42] that his conversion to Communism was the result of the chance placing of a Fourierist paper upon the table of a Berlin coffeehouse, by Albert Brisbane, the brilliant friend and disciple of Fourier, his first exponent in the English language. This may well be true, for, as we shall see, Weitling's views are mainly based upon those of the great French Utopist. In 1842 Weitling published his best-known work, the book upon which his literary fame chiefly rests, "The Guaranties of Harmony and Freedom." This work at once attracted wide attention, and gave Weitling a foremost place among the writers of the time in the affections of the educated workers. It was an elaboration of the theories contained in his earlier book. Morris Hillquit[43] thus describes Weitling's philosophy and method:-- "In his social philosophy, Weitling may be said to have been the connecting link between primitive and modern Socialism. In the main, he is still a Utopian, and his writings betray the unmistakable influence of the early French Socialists. In common with all Utopians, he bases his philosophy exclusively upon moral grounds. Misery and poverty are to him but the results of human malice, and his cry is for 'eternal justice' and for the 'absolute liberty and equality of all mankind.' In his criticism of the existing order, he leans closely on Fourier, from whom he also borrowed the division of labor into three classes of the Necessary, Useful, and Attractive, and the plan of organization of 'attractive industry.' "His ideal of the future state of society reminds us of the Saint-Simonian government of scientists. The administration of affairs of the entire globe is to be in the hands of the three greatest authorities on 'philosophical medicine,' physics, and mechanics, who are to be reënforced by a number of subordinate committees. His state of the future is a highly centralized government, and is described by the author with the customary details. Where Weitling, to some extent, approaches the conception of modern Socialism, is in his recognition of class distinctions between employer and employee. This distinction never amounted to a conscious indorsement of the modern Socialist doctrine of the 'class struggle,' but his views on the antagonism between the 'poor' and the 'wealthy' came quite close to it. He was a firm believer in labor organizations as a factor in developing the administrative abilities of the working class; the creation of an independent labor party was one of his pet schemes, and his appeals were principally addressed to the workingmen." Weitling visited the United States in 1846, a group of German exiles, identified with the Free Soil movement, having invited him to become the editor of a magazine, the _Volkstribun_, devoted to the principles of the movement. By the time he reached America, however, the magazine had suspended publication. He stayed little more than a year, hastening back to the fatherland to share in the revolutionary activities of 1848. He returned to America again in 1849, after the failure of the "glorious revolution," and for many years thereafter was an active and tireless propagandist. He died in Brooklyn in 1871. Étienne Cabet was, in many ways, a very different type of man from Weitling, but their ideas were not so dissimilar. Cabet, born in Dijon, France, in 1788, was the son of a fairly prosperous cooper, and received a good university education. He studied both medicine and law, adopting the profession of the latter and early achieving marked success in its practice. He took a leading part in the Revolution of 1830 as a member of the "Committee of Insurrection," and upon the accession of Louis Philippe was "rewarded" by being made Attorney-General for Corsica. There is no doubt that the government desired to remove Cabet from the political life of Paris, quite as much as to reward him for his services during the Revolution; his strong radicalism, combined with his sturdy independence of character, being rightly regarded as dangerous to Louis Philippe's régime. His reward, therefore, took the form of practical banishment. The wily advisers of Louis Philippe used the gloved hand. But the best-laid schemes of mice and courtiers "gang aft agley." Cabet, in Corsica, joined the radical anti-administration forces, and became a thorn in the side of the government. Removed from office, he returned to Paris, whereupon the citizens of Dijon, his native town, elected him as their deputy to the lower chamber in 1834. Here he continued his opposition to the administration, and was at last tried on a charge of _lèse majesté_, and given the option of choosing between two years' imprisonment and five years' exile. Cabet chose exile, and took up his residence in England, where he fell under the influence of Owen's agitation and became a convert to his Socialistic views. During this time of exile, too, he became acquainted with the "Utopia" of Sir Thomas More and was fascinated by it. The idea of writing a similar work of fiction to propagate his Socialist belief impressed itself upon his mind, and he wrote "a philosophical and social romance," entitled "Voyage to Icaria," which was published soon after his return to Paris, in 1839. In this novel Cabet follows closely the method of More, and describes "Icaria" as "a Promised Land, an Eden, an Elysium, a new terrestrial Paradise." The plot of the book is simple in the extreme, and its literary merit is not very great. The writer represents that he met, in London, a nobleman, Lord William Carisdall, who, having by chance heard of Icaria and the wonderful and strange customs and form of government of its inhabitants, visited the country. Lord William kept a diary in which he described all that he saw in this wonderland. This record, we are told, the traveler had permitted to be published through the medium of his friend, and under his editorial supervision. The first part of the book contains an attractive account of the coöperative system of the Icarians, their communistic government, equality of the sexes, and high standard of morality. The second part is devoted to an account of the history of Icaria, prior to and succeeding the revolution of 1782, when the great national hero, Icar, established Communism. The book created a tremendous furore in France. It appealed strongly to the discontented masses, and it is said that by 1847 Cabet had no less than four hundred thousand adherents among the workers of France. The numerical strength of revolutionary movements is almost invariably greatly exaggerated, however, and it is not likely that the figures cited are exceptional in this regard. It is possible, _cum grano salis_, to accept the figures only by remembering that a very infinitesimal proportion of these were adherents in the sense of being ready to follow Cabet's leadership, as subsequent events showed. When the clamor rose for a practical test of the theories set forth so alluringly, Cabet visited Robert Owen in England and sought advice as to the best site for such an experiment. Owen recommended Texas, then recently admitted into the union of states and anxious for settlers. Cabet accepted Owen's advice and called for volunteers to form the "advance guard" of settlers, the number responding being pitifully, almost ludicrously, small. Still, the effect of the book was very great, and it served to fire the flagging zeal of those workers for social regeneration whose hearts must otherwise have become deadly sick from long-deferred hopes. The confluence of these two streams of Communist propaganda represented by Weitling and Cabet constituted the real Communist "movement" of 1840-1847. Its organized expression was the Communist League, a secret organization with its headquarters in London. The League was formed in Paris by German refugees and traveling workmen, and seems to have been an offspring of Mazzini's "Young Europe" agitation of 1834. At different times it bore the names, "League of the Just," "League of the Righteous," and, finally, "Communist League."[44] For many years it remained a mere conspiratory society, exclusively German, and existed mainly for the purpose of fostering the "Young Germany" ideas. Later it became an International Alliance with societies in many parts of Europe. In 1847 Karl Marx was residing in Brussels. During a prior residence in Paris he had come into close association with the leaders of the League there, and had agreed to form a similar society in Brussels. Engels was in Paris in 1847, and it was probably due to his activities that the Paris League officially invited both him and Marx to join the international organization, promising that a congress should be convened in London at an early date. We may, in view of the after career of Engels as the politician of the movement, surmise so much. Be that how it may, the invitation, with its promise to call a congress in London, was extended and accepted. The reason for the step, the object of the proposed congress, is quite clear. Marx himself has placed it beyond dispute. During his stay in Paris he and Engels had discussed the position of the League with some of its leaders, and he had, later, criticised it in the most merciless manner in some of his pamphlets.[45] Marx desired a revolutionary working class political party with a definite aim and policy. Those leaders of the League who agreed with him in this were the prime movers for the congress, which was held in London, in November, 1847. At the congress, Marx and Engels presented their views at great length, and outlined the principles and policy which their famous pamphlet later made familiar. Perhaps it was due to the very convincing manner in which they argued that the emancipation of the working class must be the work of that class itself, that there was some opposition to them, on the part of a few delegates, on the ground that they were "Intellectuals" and not members of the proletariat, a criticism which pursued them all through their lives. Their views found general favor, however, as might be expected from such an inchoate mass of men, revolutionaries to the core, and waiting only for effective leadership. A resolution was adopted requesting Marx and Engels to prepare "a complete theoretical and working programme" for the League. This they did. It took the form of the _Communist Manifesto_, published in the early part of January, 1848. II The authors of the _Manifesto_ were men of great intellectual gifts. Either of them alone must have won fame; together, they won immortality. Their lives, from the date of their first meeting in Paris, in 1844, to the death of Marx, almost forty years later, are inseparably interwoven. The friendship of Damon and Pythias was not more remarkable. Karl Heinrich Marx was born on the fifth day of May, 1818, at Treves, the oldest town in Germany, dating back to Roman times. His parents were both people of remarkable character. His mother--_née_ Pressburg--was the descendant of Hungarian Jews who in the sixteenth century had settled in Holland. Many of her ancestors had been rabbis. Marx was passionately devoted to his mother, always speaking of her with reverent admiration. On his father's side, also, Marx boasted of a long line of rabbinical ancestors, and it has been suggested that he owed to this rabbinical ancestry some of his marvelous gift of luminous exposition. The true family name was Mordechia, but that was abandoned by his grandfather, who took the name of Marx, which the grandson was destined to make famous. The father of Karl was a lawyer of some prominence and considerable learning, and a man of great force of character. In 1824, the boy Karl being then six years old, he renounced the Jewish religion and embraced Christianity, all the members of the family being baptized and received into the Church. There is a familiar legend that this act was the result of compulsion, being taken in response to an official edict.[46] He held at the time the position of notary public at the county court, and it is claimed that the official edict in question required all Jews holding official positions to forego them, and to abandon the practice of law, or to accept the Christian faith. Many writers, including Liebknecht[47] and one of the daughters of Karl Marx,[48] have given this explanation of the renunciation of Judaism by the elder Marx. It seems certain, however, that the act was purely voluntary, and that there was no such edict.[49] It may be that social ambitions had something to do with it, that he hoped to attain, as a Christian, a measure of success not possible to an adherent of the Hebrew faith. Whatever the motive, the act was a voluntary one. A great admirer of the eighteenth-century "materialists," and a disciple of Voltaire, he believed in God, he said, as Newton, Locke, and Leibnitz had done before him. He discussed religious and philosophical questions very freely and frankly with his son, and read Voltaire and Racine with him. As for the mother of Marx, she also believed in God--"not for God's sake, but for my own," she explained when asked about it. At the earnest behest of his father, Marx studied law at the universities of Bonn, Berlin, and Jena. But "to please himself" he studied history and philosophy, winning great distinction in these branches of learning. He graduated in 1841, as a Doctor of Philosophy, with an essay on the philosophy of Epicurus, and it was his purpose to settle at Bonn as a professor of philosophy. The plan was abandoned, partly because he had already discovered that his bent was toward political activity, and partly because the Prussian government had made scholastic independence impossible, thus destroying the attractiveness of an academic career. Accordingly, Marx accepted the editorship of a democratic paper, the _Rhenish Gazette_, in which he waged bitter, relentless war upon the government. Time after time the censors interfered, but Marx was too brilliant a polemicist, even thus early in his career, and far too subtle for the censors. Finally, at the request of his managers, who hoped thus to avoid being compelled to suspend the publication, Marx retired from the editorship. This did not serve to save the paper, however, and it was suppressed by the government in March, 1843. Soon after this Marx went to Paris, with his young bride of a few months, Jenny von Westphalen, the playmate of his childhood. The Von Westphalens were of the nobility, and a brother of Mrs. Marx afterward became a Prussian Minister of State. The elder Von Westphalen was half Scotch, related, on his maternal side, to the Argyles. He was a lineal descendant of the Duke of Argyle who was beheaded in the reign of James II. His daughter tells an amusing story of how Marx, many years later, having to pawn some of his wife's heirlooms, especially some heavy, antique silver spoons which bore the Argyle crest and motto, "Truth is my maxim," narrowly escaped arrest on suspicion of having robbed the Argyles![50] To Paris, then, Marx went, and there met, among others, Heinrich Heine, many of whose poems he suggested, Arnold Ruge, the poet, P. J. Proudhon, and Michael Bakunin, the Anarchist philosopher, and, above all, the man destined to be his very _alter ego_, Friedrich Engels, with whom he had already had some correspondence.[51] The attainments of Engels have been somewhat overshadowed by those of his friend. Born at Barmen, in the province of the Rhine, November 28, 1820, he was educated in the gymnasium of that city, and after serving his period of military service, from 1837 to 1841, was sent, in the early part of 1842, to Manchester, England, to look after a cotton-spinning business of which his father was principal owner. Here he seems to have at once begun a thorough investigation of social and industrial conditions, the results of which are contained in a book, "The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844," which remains to this day a classic presentation of the social and industrial life of the period. From the very first, already predisposed, as we know, he sympathized with the views of the Chartists and the Owenite Socialists. He became friendly with the Chartist leaders, notably with Feargus O'Connor, to whose paper, the _Northern Star_, he became a contributor. He also became friendly with Robert Owen, and wrote for his _New Moral World_.[52] His linguistic abilities were very great; it is said that he had thoroughly mastered no less than ten languages--a gift which helped him immensely in his literary and political associations with Marx. When the two men met for the first time, in 1844, they were drawn together by an irresistible impulse. They were kindred spirits. Marx had gone to Paris mainly for the purpose of studying the Socialist movement of the time. During his editorship of the _Rhenish Gazette_ several articles had appeared on the subject, and he had refused to attack the Socialists in any manner. He had gone to Paris with a considerable reputation already established as a leader of radical thought, and at once sought out the Saint-Simonians, under whose influence he was led to declare himself definitely a Socialist. At first this seems difficult to explain, so wide is the chasm which yawns between the "New Christianity" of Saint-Simon and the materialism of Marx. There seems to be no bond of sympathy between the religious mysticism of the French dreamer and the scientific thought of the German economist and philosopher. Marx has been described as being "rigidly mathematical,"[53] and the picture of the man one gets from his writings is that of a cold, unemotional philosopher, dealing only with facts and caring nothing for idealism. But the real Marx was a very different sort of man. His life was itself a splendid example of noble idealism, and underlying all his materialism there was a great religious spirit, using the word "religious" in its noblest and best sense, quite independent of dogmatic theology. All his life he was a deep student of Dante, the _Divine Comedy_ being his constant companion, so that he knew it almost completely by heart. Some of his attacks upon Christianity are very bitter, and have been much quoted against Socialism, but they are not one whit more bitter than the superb thunderbolts of invective which the ancient Hebrew prophets hurled against an unfaithful Church and priesthood. For the most part, they are attacks upon religious hypocrisy rather than upon Christianity. Marx was, of course, an agnostic, even an atheist, but he was full of sympathy with the underlying ethical principles of all the great religions. Always tolerant of the religious opinions of others, he had nothing but scorn and contempt for the blatant dogmatic atheism of his time, and vigorously opposed committing the Socialist movement to atheism as part of its programme.[54] In short, he was a man of fine spiritual instincts, splendidly religious in his irreligion. This spiritual side of Marx must be considered if we would understand the man. It is not necessary, however, to ascribe the influence of Saint-Simonian thought upon him to a predisposing spiritual temperament. Marx, with his usual penetration, saw in Saint-Simonism the hidden germ of a great truth, the embryo of a profound social theory. Saint-Simon, as we have seen, had vaguely indicated the two ideas which were afterward to be cardinal doctrines of the Marx-Engels _Manifesto_--the antagonism of classes, and the economic foundation of political institutions. Not only so, but Saint-Simon's grasp of political questions, instanced by his advocacy, in 1815, of a triple alliance between England, France, and Germany,[55] appealed to Marx, and impressed him alike by its fine perspicacity and its splendid courage. Engels, in whom, as stated, the working-class spirit of Chartism and the ideals of Owenism were blended, found in Marx a twin spirit. They were, indeed,-- "Two souls with but a single thought, Two hearts that beat as one." III The _Communist Manifesto_ is the first declaration of an International Workingmen's Party. Its fine peroration is a call to the workers to transcend the petty divisions of nationalism and sectarianism: "The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!" These concluding phrases of the _Manifesto_ have become the shibboleths of millions. They are repeated with fervor by the disinherited workers of all the lands. Even in China, lately so rudely awakened from the slumbering peace of the centuries, they are voiced by an ever increasing army of voices. No sentences ever coined in the mint of human speech have held such magic power over such large numbers of men and women of so many diverse races and creeds. As a literary production, the _Manifesto_ bears the unmistakable stamp of genius. But it is not as literature that we are to consider the historic document. Its importance for us lies, not in its form, but in its fundamental principle. And the fundamental principle, the essence or soul of the declaration, is contained in this pregnant summary by Engels:-- "In every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the _social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch_, that consequently the whole history of mankind (since primitive tribal society holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes."[56] Thus Engels summarizes the philosophy--as apart from the proposals of immediate measures to constitute the political programme of the party--of the _Manifesto_; the basis upon which the whole superstructure of modern, scientific Socialist theory rests. This is the materialistic, or economic, conception of history which distinguishes scientific Socialism from all the Utopian Socialisms which preceded it. Socialism is henceforth a theory of social evolution, not a scheme of world-building; a spirit, not a thing. Thus, twelve years before the appearance of "The Origin of Species," nearly twenty years after the death of Lamarck, the authors of the _Communist Manifesto_ formulated a great theory of social evolution as the basis of the mightiest proletarian movement in history. Socialism had become a science instead of a dream. IV Naturally, in view of its historic rôle, the joint authorship of the _Manifesto_ has been much discussed. What was the respective share of each of its creators? What did Marx contribute, and what Engels? It may be, as Liebknecht says, an idle question, but it is a perfectly natural one. The pamphlet itself does not assist us. There are no internal signs pointing now to the hand of the one, now to the hand of the other. We may hazard a guess that most of the programme of ameliorative measures was the work of Engels, and perhaps the final section. It was the work of Engels throughout his life to deal with present social and political problems in the light of the fundamental theories to the systematization and elucidation of which Marx was devoted. Beyond this mere conjecture, we have the word of Engels with regard to the basal principle which he has summarized in the passage already quoted. "The _Manifesto_ being our joint production," he says, "I consider myself bound to state that the fundamental proposition which forms its nucleus belongs to Marx.... This proposition, which, in my opinion, is destined to do for history what Darwin's theory has done for biology, we, both of us, had been gradually approaching for some years before 1845. How far I had progressed toward it is best shown by my 'Condition of the Working Class in England.'[57] But when I again met Marx at Brussels, in spring, 1845, he had it ready worked out, and put it before me in terms almost as clear as those in which I have stated it here."[58] Engels has lifted the veil thus far, but the rest is hidden. Perhaps it is well that it should be; well that no man should be able to say which passages came from the mind of Marx and which from the mind of Engels. In life they were inseparable, and so they must be in the Valhalla of history. The greatest political pamphlet of all time must forever bear, with equal honor, the names of both. Their noble friendship unites them even beyond the tomb. "Twin Titans! Whom defeat ne'er bowed, Scarce breathing from the fray, Again they sound the war cry loud, Again is riven Labor's shroud, And life breathed in the clay. Their work? Look round--see Freedom proud And confident to-day."[59] FOOTNOTES: [42] Cf. _Social Democracy Red Book_, edited by Frederic Heath (1900), page 79. [43] _History of Socialism in the United States_, by Morris Hillquit, pages 161-162. [44] E. Belfort Bax, article on _Friederich Engels_, in _Justice_ (London), No. 606, Vol. XII, August 24, 1895. [45] _Disclosures about the Communists' Process, Herr Vogt_, etc. [46] Cf. G. Adler, _Die Grundlagen der Karl Marx'schen Kritik der bestehenden Volkswirthschaft_ (1887), page 226. [47] _Karl Marx: Biographical Memoirs_, by Wilhelm Liebknecht, page 14. [48] _Idem_, page 164. [49] Cf. F. Mehring's _Aus dem literarischen Nachlass von Karl Marx, Friederich Engels, und Ferdinand Lassalle_, 1902; the _Neue Beitrage zur Biographie von Karl Marx und Friederich Engels, in Die Neue Zeit_, 1907, and Mehring's _Geschichte der deutschen Sozialdemokratie_, 1903. [50] _Memoirs of Marx_, by Wilhelm Liebknecht, page 164. [51] Karl Kautsky, article on F. Engels, _Austrian Labor Almanac_, 1887. [52] E. Belfort Bax, article on _Friederich Engels_, in _Justice_ (London), No. 606, Vol. XII, August 24, 1895. [53] Cf. _Reminiscences of Karl Marx_, by W. Harrison Riley, in _The Comrade_, Vol. III, No. 1, pages 5-6. [54] Marx opposed the "Alliance de la Démocratic Socialiste," formed by Bakunin, with its headquarters at Geneva, almost as vigorously for its atheistic plank as for its denial of political methods. The first plank in the programme of the "Alliance" was as follows:-- "The Alliance declares itself Atheist; it demands the abolition of all worship, the substitution of science for faith, and of human justice for Divine justice; the abolition of marriage, so far as it is a political, religious, juridical, or civil institution." This programme is frequently quoted against the Socialist propaganda,--as, for example, by George Brooks, in _God's England or the Devil's_?--in spite of the fact that the "Alliance" was an Anarchist organization, bitterly opposed by Marx, and, in turn, bitterly opposing him. In this connection, it may be well to call attention to an alleged "quotation from Marx" which is frequently used by the opponents of Socialism. It appears in the work of Brooks, quoted above, and in Professor Peabody's _Jesus Christ and the Social Question_ (1907), page 16. Used in a public discussion by a New York labor union official, in April, 1908, it was widely discussed by the press, and, according to that same press, drew from the President of the United States enthusiastic praise of the labor-union official in question. The passage reads: "The idea of God must be destroyed. It is the keystone of a perverted civilization. The true root of liberty, of equality, of culture, is Atheism. Nothing must restrain the spontaneity of the human mind." Had the opponents of Socialism been familiar with the teachings of Marx, they would have known that he could not have said anything like this, that it is absolutely at variance with all his teaching. The man who formulated the materialist conception of history could not by any possibility utter such balderdash. The fact is, the quotation is not from Karl Marx at all, but from a very different writer, an Anarchist, Wilhelm Marr, who was _a most bitter opponent of Socialism_. As given, the quotation is a free translation of a passage contained in Marr's _Das junge Deutschland in der Schweiz_, pages 131-134. Marr's programme, as given in the _Report of the Royal Commission on Labor_ (Vol. V, Germany), was the abolition of Church, State, property, and marriage, with the one positive tenet of "a bloody and fearful revenge upon the rich and powerful." [55] See F. Engels, _Socialism, Utopian and Scientific_, page 16 (London edition, 1892). [56] F. Engels, Introduction to the _Communist Manifesto_ (English translation, 1888). The italics are mine. J. S. [57] F. Engels, _The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844_. See, for instance, pages 79, 80, 82, etc. [58] Introduction to the _Communist Manifesto_ (English edition, 1888). [59] From _Friederich Engels_, a poem by "J. L." (John Leslie), in _Justice_ (London), August 17, 1895. CHAPTER IV THE MATERIALISTIC CONCEPTION OF HISTORY I Socialism, then, in the modern, scientific sense, is a theory of social evolution. Its hopes for the future rest, not upon the genius of some Utopia-builder, but upon the inherent forces of historical development. The Socialist state will never be realized except as the result of economic necessity, the culmination of successive epochs of industrial evolution. Thus the existing social system appears to the Socialist of to-day, not as it appeared to the Utopians and as it still must appear to mere ideologist reformers, as a triumph of ignorance or wickedness, the reign of false _ideas_, but as the result of an age-long evolutionary process, determined, not wholly indeed, but mainly, by certain methods of producing the necessities of life in the first place, and secondly, of effecting their exchange. Not, let it be understood, that Socialism has become a mere mechanical theory of economic fatalism. The historical development, the social evolution, upon the laws of which the theories of Socialism are based, is a human process, involving all the complex feelings, emotions, aspirations, hopes, and fears common to man. To ignore this fundamental fact, as they must who interpret the Marx-Engels theory of history as a doctrine of economic fatalism, is to miss the profoundest significance of the theory. While it is true that the scientific spirit destroys the idea of romantic, magic transformations of the social system and the belief that the world may be re-created at will, rebuilt upon the plans of some Utopian architect, it still, as we shall see, leaves room for the human factor. Otherwise, indeed, it would only be a new kind of Utopianism. They who accept the theory that the production of the material necessities of life is the main impelling force, the _geist_, of human evolution, may rightly protest against social injustice and wrong just as vehemently as any of the ideologists, and aspire just as fervently toward a nobler and better state. The Materialistic Conception of History does not involve the fatalist resignation summed up in the phrase, "Whatever is, is natural, and, therefore, right." It does not involve belief in man's helplessness to change conditions. II The idea of social evolution is admirably expressed in the fine phrase of Leibnitz, "The present is the child of the past, but it is the parent of the future."[60] The great seventeenth-century philosopher was not the first to postulate and apply to society that doctrine of flux, of continuity and unity, which we call evolution. In all ages of which record has been preserved to us, it has been sporadically, and more or less vaguely, expressed. Even savages seem to have dimly perceived it. The saying of the Bechuana chief, recorded by the missionary, Casalis, was probably, judging by its epigrammatic character, a proverb of his people. "One event is always the son of another," he said--a saying strikingly like that of Leibnitz. Since the work of Lyell, Darwin, Wallace, Spencer, Huxley, Youmans, and their numerous followers--a brilliant school embracing the foremost historians and sociologists of Europe and America--the idea of evolution as a universal law has made rapid and certain progress. Everything changes; nothing is immutable or eternal. Whatever is, whether in geology, astronomy, biology, or sociology, is the result of numberless, inevitable, related changes. Only the law of change is changeless. The present is a phase only of a great transition process from what was, through what is, to what will be. The Marx-Engels theory is an exploration of the laws governing this process of evolution in the domain of human relations: an attempt to provide a key to the hitherto mysterious succession of changes in the political, juridical, and social relations and institutions of mankind. Whence, for instance, arose the institution of chattel slavery, so repugnant to our modern ideas of right and wrong, and how shall we explain its defense and justification in the name of religion and morality? How account for the fact that what Yesterday regarded as righteous, To-day condemns as wrong; that what at one period of the world's history is regarded as perfectly natural and right--the practice of polygamy, for example--becomes abhorrent at another period; or that what is regarded with horror and disgust in one part of the world is sanctioned by the ethical codes, and freely practiced elsewhere? Ferri gives two examples of this kind: the cannibalism of Central African tribes, and the killing of parents, as a religious duty, in Sumatra.[61] To reply "custom" is to beg the whole question, for customs do not exist without reason, however difficult it may be to discern the reason for any particular custom. To reply that these things are mysteries, as the old theologians did when the doctrine of the Trinity was questioned, is to leave the question unanswered and to challenge doubt and investigation. The human mind abhors a mystery as nature abhors a vacuum. Despite Spencer, the human mind has never admitted the existence of the _Unknowable_. To explore the _Unknown_ is man's universal impulse; and with each fresh discovery the _Unknown_ is narrowed by the expansion of the _Known_. The theory that ideas determine progress, that, in the words of Professor Richard T. Ely, "all that is significant in human history may be traced back to ideas,"[62] is only true in the sense that a half truth is true. It is true, nothing but the truth, but it is less than the whole truth. Truly all that is significant in human history may be traced back to ideas, but in like manner the ideas themselves can be traced back to material sources. For ideas have histories, too, and the causation of an idea must be understood before the idea itself can serve fully to explain anything. We must go back of the idea to the causes which gave it birth if we would interpret anything by it. We may trace the American Revolution, for example, back to the revolutionary ideas of the colonists, but that will not materially assist us to understand the Revolution. For that, it is necessary to trace the ideas themselves to their source, the economic discontent of an exploited people. This is the spirit which illumines the works of historians like Green, McMaster, Morse Stephens, and others of the modern school, who emphasize social forces rather than individual facts, and find the _geist_ of history in social experiences and institutions. What has been called the "Great Man theory," the theory according to which Luther created the Protestant Reformation, to quote only one example, and which ignored the great economic changes consequent upon the break-up of feudalism and the rise of a new industrial order, long dominated our histories. According to this theory, an idea, developed in the mind of Luther, independent of external circumstances, changed the political and social life of Europe. Had there been no Luther, there would have been no Reformation; or had Luther died before giving his idea to the world, the Reformation would have been averted. The student who seeks in the bulk of the histories written prior to, say, 1870, what he has a legitimate reason for seeking, namely, a picture of the actual life of the people at any period, will be sadly disappointed. He will find records of wars and treaties of peace, royal genealogies and gossip, wildernesses of names and dates. But he will not find such careful accounts of the jurisprudence of the period, nor any hint of the economical conditions of its development. He will find splendid accounts of court life, with its ceremonials, scandals, intrigues, and follies; but no such pictures of the lives of the people, their social conditions, and the methods of labor and commerce which obtained. He will be unable to visualize the life of the period. In other words, the histories lack realism; they are unreal, and, therefore, deceptive. The new spirit, in the development of which the materialist conception of Marx and Engels has been an important creative influence, is concerned less with the chronicle of notable events and dates than with their underlying causes and the manner of life of the people. Had it no other bearing, the Marx-Engels theory, considered solely as a contribution to the science of history, would have been one of the greatest intellectual achievements of the nineteenth century. By emphasizing the importance of the economic factors in social evolution, it has done much for economics and more for history.[63] III While the Materialistic Conception of History bears the names of Marx and Engels, as the theory of organic evolution bears the names of Darwin and Wallace, it is not claimed that the idea had never before been expressed. Just as thousands of years before Darwin and Wallace the theory which bears their names had been dimly perceived, so the idea that economic conditions dominate historical developments had its foreshadowings. The famous dictum of Aristotle, that only by the introduction of machines would the abolition of slavery ever be made possible, is a conspicuous example of many anticipations of the theory. It is true that "In dealing with speculations so remote, we have to guard against reading modern meanings into writings produced in ages whose limitations of knowledge were serious, whose temper and standpoint are wholly alien to our own,"[64] but the Aristotelian saying admits of no other interpretation. It is clearly a recognition of the fact that the supreme politico-social institution of the time depended upon hand labor. In later times, the idea of a direct connection between economic conditions and legal and political institutions reappears in the works of various writers. Professor Seligman[65] quotes from Harrington's "Oceana" the argument that the prevailing form of government depends upon the conditions of land tenure, and the extent of its monopolization. Saint-Simon, too, as already stated, taught that political institutions depend upon economic conditions. But it is to Marx and Engels that we owe the first formulation into a definite theory of what had hitherto been but a suggestion, and the beginnings of a literature, now of considerable proportions, dealing with history from its standpoint. No more need be said concerning the "originality" of the theory. A word as to the designation of the theory. Its authors gave it the name "historical materialism," and it has been urged that the name is, for many reasons, unfortunately chosen. Two of the leading exponents of the theory, Professor Seligman and Mr. Ghent, the former an opponent, the latter an advocate of Socialism, have expressed this conviction in very definite terms. The last-named writer bases his objection to the name on the ground that it is repellent to many persons who associate the word materialism with the philosophy "that matter is the only substance, and that matter and its motions constitute the universe."[66] That is an old objection, and undoubtedly contains much truth. It is interesting in connection therewith to read the sarcastic comment of Engels upon it in the introduction to his "Socialism, Utopian and Scientific." The objection of Professor Seligman is based upon another ground entirely. He impugns its accuracy. "The theory which ascribes all changes in society to the influence of climate, or to the character of the fauna and flora, is materialistic," he says, "and yet has little in common with the doctrine here discussed. The doctrine we have to deal with is not only materialistic, but also economic in character; and the better phrase is ... the 'economic interpretation' of history."[67] For this reason he discards the name given to the theory by its authors and adopts the luminous phrase of Thorold Rogers, without credit to that writer. By French and Italian writers the term "economic determinism" has long been used, and it has been adopted to some extent in this country by Socialist writers. But this term, as Professor Seligman points out, is objectionable, because it exaggerates the theory, and gives it, by implication, a fatalistic character, conveying the idea that economic influence is the _sole_ determining factor--a view which its authors specifically repudiated. While the reasoning of Professor Seligman in the argument quoted against the name "historical materialism" is neither very profound nor conclusive, since climate and fauna and flora are included in the term "economic" as clearly as in the term "materialistic," much may be said in favor of his choice of the term he borrows from Thorold Rogers, and it is used by many Socialist writers in preference to that used by Marx and Engels. Many persons have doubtless been deceived into believing that the theory involves the denial of all influence to idealistic or spiritual factors, and the assumption that economic forces _alone_ determine the course of historical development. Much of the criticism of the theory, especially by the Germans, rests upon that assumption. The theory is attacked, also, as being sordid and brutal upon the same false assumption that it implies that men are governed solely by their economic _interests_, that individual conduct is never inspired by anything higher than the economic interest of the individual. These are misconceptions of the theory, due, no doubt, to the overemphasis placed upon it by its authors--a common experience of new doctrines--and, above all, the exaggerations of too zealous, unrestrained disciples. There is a wise saying of Schiller's which suggests the spirit in which these exaggerations of a great truth--exaggerations by which it becomes falsehood--should be regarded: "Rarely do we reach truth, except through extremes--we must have foolishness ... even to exhaustion, before we arrive at the beautiful goal of calm wisdom."[68] When it is contended that the "Civil War was at bottom a struggle between two economic principles,"[69] we have the presentation of an important truth, the key to the proper understanding of a great historical event. But when that important fact is exaggerated and torn from its legitimate place to suit the propaganda of a theory, and we are asked to believe that Garrison, Lovejoy, and other abolitionists were inspired solely by economic motives, that the urge and passion of human freedom did not enter into their souls, we are forced to reject it. But let it be clearly understood that it forms no part of the theory, that it is even expressly denied in the very terms in which Marx and Engels formulated the theory, and that its authors repudiated such perversions of it. In no respect has the theory been more grossly exaggerated and misrepresented than in its application to religion. True philosopher that he was, Marx realized the absurdity of attempting "to abstract religious sentiment from the course of history, to place it by itself."[70] He recognized that all religion is, fundamentally, man's effort to put himself into harmonious relation with, and to discover an interpretation of, the forces of the universe. The more incomprehensible those forces, the greater man's need of an explanation of them. He could not fail to see that the religion of a people always bears a marked relation to their mental development and their special environment. He knew that at various stages the Yahve of the Hebrews represented very different conceptions, answering to changes in the social and political conditions of the people. To the primitive Israelitish tribes, Yahve was, as Professor Rauschenbusch remarks,[71] a tribal god, fortunately stronger than the gods of the neighboring tribes, but not fundamentally different from them, and the way to win his favor was to sacrifice abundantly. Later, with the development of a national spirit, the religious ideal became a theocracy, and Yahve became a King and Supreme Lord. In times of oppression and war Yahve was a God of War, but under other conditions he was a God of Peace. At every step the conception of Yahve bears a very definite relation to the material life.[72] Marx knew that primitive religions have often a celestial pantheon fashioned after the existing social order, kings being gods, aristocrats being demigods, and common mortals occupying a celestial rank equal to their terrestrial one. The celestial hierarchy of the Chinese, for example, is an exact reproduction of the earthly hierarchy, and all the privileges of rank are observed celestially as on earth. So in India we find the religions reproducing in their concepts of heaven the degrees and divisions of the various castes,[73] while our own American Indian conceived of a celestial hunting ground, with abundant reward of game, as his Paradise. "The religious world is but the reflex of the real world," said Marx,[74] and the phrase has been used, both by disciples and critics, as an attack upon religion itself; as showing that the Marxian philosophy excludes the possibility of religious belief. Obviously, however, the passage will not bear such an interpretation. To say that "the religious world is but the reflex of the real world" is by no means to deny that men have been benefited by seeking an interpretation of the forces of the universe, or to assert that the quest for such an interpretation is incompatible with rational conduct. In his scorn for Bakunin's "Alliance" programme with its dogmatic atheism[75] Marx was perfectly consistent. The passage quoted simply lays down, in bare outline, a principle which, if well founded, enables us to study comparative religion from a new viewpoint. It is not a denial of religion, then, which the famous utterance of Marx involves, but a recognition of the fact that, even as all religions may be traced to the same fundamental instinct in mankind, so the different forms which the religious conception assumes are, or may be, reflexes of the material life of those making them. Thus man makes religion for himself under the urge of his deepest instincts. The application of the theory to religion is analogous to its application to historical events. To say that a given religion assumes the form it does as an unconscious reflex of the environment in which it is produced, is no more a denial of that religion than to say that the Reformation arose out of economic and social conditions, and not out of an idea in Luther's mind, is a denial of the fact that there was a Reformation, or that the Reformation benefited the people. The value of the theory to the study of religions and religious movements is not less than to the study of history. Does anybody pretend that we can understand Christianity without taking into account the Roman Empire; or that we can understand Catholicism without knowing something of the economic life of medieval Europe; or Methodism without knowing the social condition of England in Wesley's day?[76] In one of the very earliest of his writings upon the subject, some comments upon the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach, and intended to form the basis of a separate work, we find Marx insisting that man is not a mere automaton, driven irresistibly by blind economic forces. He says: "The materialistic doctrine, that men are the products of conditions and education, different men, therefore, the products of other conditions and changed education, _forgets that circumstances may be altered by men, and that the educator has himself to be educated_."[77] Thus early we see the master taking a position entirely at variance with those of his disciples who would claim that the human factor has no influence upon historical development, that man is without power over his own destiny. From that position Marx never departed. Both he and Engels recognized the human character of the problem, and the futility of attempting to reduce all the processes of history and human progress to one sole basic cause. And in no case, so far as I am aware, has either of them attempted to do this. In another place, Marx contends that "men make their own history, but they make it not of their own accord or under self-chosen conditions, but under given and transmitted conditions. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a mountain upon the brain of the living."[78] Here, again, the influence of the human will is not denied, though its limitations are indicated. This is the application to social man of the theory of limitations of the will commonly accepted as applying to individuals. Man is only a freewill agent within certain sharp and relatively narrow bounds. In a given contingency, I may be "free" to act in a certain manner, or to refrain from so acting. I may take my choice, in the one direction or the other, entirely free, to all appearances, from restraining or compelling influences. Thus, I have acted upon my "will." But what factors formed my will? What circumstances determined my decision? Perhaps fear, or shame, or pride; perhaps tendencies inherited from my ancestors. Engels admits that the economic factor in evolution has sometimes been unduly emphasized. He says: "Marx and I are partly responsible for the fact that the younger men have sometimes laid more stress on the economic side than it deserves. In meeting the attacks of our opponents, it was necessary for us to emphasize the dominant principle denied by them; and we did not always have the time, place, or opportunity to let the other factors which were concerned in the mutual action and reaction get their deserts."[79] In another letter,[80] he says: "According to the materialistic view of history, the factor which is in _last instance_ decisive in history is the production and reproduction of actual life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. But when any one distorts this so as to read that the economic factor is the sole element, he converts the statement into a meaningless, abstract, absurd phrase. The economic condition is the basis; but the various elements of the superstructure,--the political forms of the class contests, and their results, the constitutions,--the legal forms, and also all the reflexes of these actual contests in the brains of the participants, the political, legal, philosophical theories, the _religious views_ ... all these exert an influence on the development of the historical struggles, and, in many instances, determine their form." It is evident, therefore, that the doctrine does not imply economic fatalism. It does not deny that ideals may influence historical developments and individual conduct. While, as we shall see in a later chapter, it is part of the doctrine that classes are formed upon a basis of unity of material interests, it does not deny that men may, and often do, act in accordance with the promptings of noble impulses and humanitarian ideals, when their material interests would lead them to do otherwise. We have a conspicuous example of this in the life of Marx himself; in his splendid devotion to the cause of the workers through years of terrible poverty and hardship when he might have chosen wealth and fame. It is known, for example, that Bismarck made the most extravagant offers to enlist the services of Marx, who declined them at the very time when he was suffering awful privations. Marx himself has noted more than one instance of individual idealism triumphing over material interests and class environment, and, by a perversity that is astonishing, and not wholly disingenuous, some of his critics, notably Ludwig Slonimski,[81] have used these instances as arguments against his theory, claiming that they disprove it! We are to understand the materialistic theory, then, as teaching, not that history is determined by economic forces only, but that in human evolution the chief factors are social factors, and that these factors in turn are _mainly_ molded by economic circumstances.[82] This, then, is the basis of the Socialist philosophy, which Engels regarded as "destined to do for history what Darwin's theory has done for biology." Marx himself made a similar comparison.[83] Marx was, so Liebknecht tells us, one of the first to recognize the importance of Darwin's investigations to sociology. His first important treatment of the materialistic theory, in "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy," appeared in 1859, the year in which "The Origin of Species" appeared. "We spoke for months of nothing else but Darwin, and the revolutionizing power of his scientific conquests,"[84] says Liebknecht. Darwin, however, had little knowledge of political economy, as he acknowledged in a letter to Marx, thanking the latter for a copy of "Das Kapital." "I heartily wish that I possessed a greater knowledge of the deep and important subject of economic questions, which would make me a more worthy recipient of your gift," he wrote.[85] IV The test of such a theory must lie in its application. Let us, then, apply the materialistic principle, first to a specific event, and then to the great sweep of the historic drama. Perhaps no single event has more profoundly impressed the imaginations of men, or filled a more important place in our histories, than the discovery of America by Columbus. In the schoolbooks, this great event figures as a splendid adventure, arising out of a romantic dream. But the facts are, as we know, far otherwise.[86] In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there were numerous and well-frequented routes from Hindustan, that vast storehouse of treasure from which Europe drew its riches. Along these routes cities flourished. There were the great ports, Licia in the Levant, Trebizond on the Black Sea, and Alexandria. From these ports, Venetian and Genoese traders bore the produce over the passes of the Alps to the Upper Danube and the Rhine. Here it was a source of wealth to the cities along the waterways, from Ratisbon and Nuremburg, to Bruges and Antwerp. Even the slightest acquaintance with the history of the Middle Ages must suffice to give the student an idea of the importance of these cities. When all these routes save the Egyptian were closed by the hordes of savages which infested Central Asia, it became an easy matter for the Moors in Africa and the Turks in Europe to exact immense revenues from the Eastern trade, solely through their monopoly of the route of transit. Thus there developed an economic parasitism which crippled the trade with the East. The Turks were securely seated at Constantinople, threatening to advance into the heart of Europe, and building up an immense military system out of the taxes imposed upon the trade of Europe with the East--a military power, which, in less than a quarter of a century, enabled Selim I to conquer Mesopotamia and the holy towns of Arabia, and to annex Egypt.[87] It became necessary, then, to find a new route to India; and it was this great economic necessity which set Columbus thinking of a pathway to India over the Western Sea. It was this same great problem which engaged the attention of all the navigators of the time; it was this economic necessity which induced Ferdinand and Isabella to support the adventurous plan of Columbus. In a word, without detracting in any manner from the splendid genius of Columbus, or from the romance of his great voyage of discovery, we see that, fundamentally, it was the economic interest of Europe which gave birth to the one and made the other possible. The same explanation applies to the voyage of Vasco da Gama, six years later, which resulted in finding a way to India over the southeast course by way of the Cape of Good Hope. Kipling asks in his ballad, "The British Flag"-- "And what should they know of England, who only England know?" There is a profound truth in the defiant line, a truth which applies equally to America or any other country. The present is inseparable from the past. We cannot understand one epoch without reference to its predecessors; we cannot understand the history of the United States unless we seek the key in the history of Europe--of England and France in particular. At the very threshold, in order to understand how the heroic navigator came to discover the vast continent of which the United States is part, we must pause to study the economic conditions of Europe which impelled the adventurous voyage, and led to the discovery of a great continent stretching across the ocean path. Such a view of history does not rob it of its romance, but rather adds to it. Surely, the wonderful linking of circumstances--the demand for spices and silks to minister to the fine tastes of aristocratic Europe, the growth of the trade with the East Indies, the grasping greed of Moor and Turk--all playing a rôle in the great drama of which the discovery of America is but a scene, is infinitely more fascinating than the latter event detached from its historical setting! It is not easy to give in the compass of a few pages an intelligent view of the main currents of history. The sketch here introduced--not without hesitation--is an endeavor to state the Socialist concept of the course of social evolution in a brief outline and to indicate the principal economic causes which have operated to determine that course. It is now generally admitted that primitive man lived under Communism. Lewis H. Morgan[88] has calculated that if the life of the human race be assumed to have covered one hundred thousand years, at least ninety-five thousand years were spent in a crude, tribal Communism, in which private property was practically unknown, and in which the only ethic was devotion to tribal interests, and the only crime antagonism to tribal interests. Under this social system the means of making wealth were in the hands of the tribes, or _gens_, and distribution was likewise socially arranged. Between the different tribes warfare was constant, but in the tribe itself there was coöperation and not struggle. This fact is of tremendous importance in view of the criticisms which have been directed against the Socialist philosophy from the so-called Darwinian point of view, according to which competition and struggle is the law of life; that what Professor Huxley calls "the Hobbesial war of each against all" is the normal state of existence. This is described as "the so-called Darwinian" theory advisedly, for the struggle for existence as the law of evolution has been exaggerated out of all likeness to the conception of Darwin himself. In "The Descent of Man," for instance, Darwin raises the point under review, and shows how, in many animal societies, the _struggle_ for existence is replaced by _coöperation_ for existence, and how that substitution results in the development of faculties which secure to the species the best conditions for survival. "Those communities," he says, "which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best and rear the greatest number of offspring."[89] Despite these instances, and the warning of Darwin himself that the term "struggle for existence" should not be too narrowly interpreted or overrated, his followers, instead of broadening it according to the master's suggestions, narrowed it still more. Thus the theory has been exaggerated into a mere caricature of the truth. This is almost invariably the fate of theories which deal with human relations, perhaps it would be equally true to say of all theories. The exaggerations of Malthus's law of population is a case in point. The Marx-Engels theory of the materialistic conception of history is, as we have seen, another. Kropotkin, among others, has developed the theory along the lines suggested by Darwin. He points out that "though there is an immense amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various classes of animals, there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, mutual defense, amidst animals belonging to the same species or, at least, to the same society. Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle.... If we resort to an indirect test, and ask nature: 'Who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?' we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more chances to survive, and they attain, in their respective classes, the highest development of intelligence and bodily organization. If the numberless facts which can be brought forward to support this view are taken into account, we may safely say that mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle, but that, as a factor of evolution, it most probably has a far greater importance, inasmuch as it favors the development of such habits and characters as insure the maintenance and further development of the species, together with the greatest amount of welfare and enjoyment of life for the individual, with the least waste of energy."[90] From the lowest forms of animal life up to the highest, man, this law proves to be operative. It is not denied that there is competition for food, for life, within the species, human and other. But that competition is not usual; it arises out of unusual and special conditions. There are instances of hunger-maddened mothers tearing away food from their children; men drifting at sea have fought for water and food as beasts fight, but these are not normal conditions of life. "Happily enough," says Kropotkin again, "competition is not the rule either in the animal world or in mankind. It is limited among animals to exceptional periods.... Better conditions are created by the _elimination of competition_ by means of mutual aid and mutual support."[91] This is the voice of science now that we have passed through the extremes and arrived at the "beautiful goal of calm wisdom." Competition is not, in the verdict of modern science, the law of life, but of death. Strife is not nature's way of progress. Anything more important to our present inquiry than this verdict of science it would be difficult to imagine. Men have for so long believed and declared struggle and competition to be the "law of nature," and opposed Socialism on the ground of its supposed antagonism to that law, that this new conception of nature's method comes as a vindication of the Socialist position. The naturalist testifies to the universality of the principle of coöperation throughout the animal world, and the historian and sociologist to its universality throughout the greatest part of man's history. Present economic tendencies toward combination and away from competition, in industry and commerce, appear as the fulfilling of a great universal law. And the vain efforts of men to stop that process, by legislation, boycotts, and divers other methods, appear as efforts to set aside immutable law. Like so many Canutes, they bid the tides halt, and, like Canute's, their commands are vain and mocked by the unheeding tides. Under Communism, then, man lived for many thousands of years. As far back as we can go into the paleo-ethnology of mankind, we find evidences of this. All the great authorities, Morgan, Maine, Lubbock, Taylor, Bachofen, and many others, agree in this. And under this Communism all the great fundamental inventions were evolved, as Morgan and others have shown. The wheel, the potter's wheel, the lever, the stencil plate, the sail, the rudder, the loom, were all evolved under Communism in its various stages. So, too, the cultivation of cereals for food, the smelting of metals, the domestication of animals,--to which we owe so much, and on which we still so largely depend,--were all introduced under Communism. Even in our day there have been found many survivals of this Communism among primitive peoples. Mention need only be made here of the Bantu tribes of Africa, whose splendid organization astonished the British, and the Eskimos. It is now possible to trace with a fair amount of certainty the progress of mankind through various stages of Communism, from the unconscious Communism of the nomad to the consciously organized and directed Communism of the most highly developed tribes, right up to the threshold of civilization, when private property takes the place of common, tribal property, and economic classes appear.[92] V Private property, other than that personal ownership and use of things, such as weapons and tools, which involves no class or caste domination, and is an integral feature of all forms of Communism, first appears in the ownership of man by man. Slavery, strange as it may seem, is directly traceable to tribal Communism, and first appears as a tribal institution. When one tribe made war upon another, its efforts were directed to the killing of as many of its enemies as possible. Cannibal tribes killed their foes for food, rarely or never killing their fellow-tribesmen for that purpose. Non-cannibalistic tribes killed their foes merely to get rid of them. But when the power of mankind over the forces of external nature had reached that point in its development where it became relatively easy for a man to produce more than was necessary for his own maintenance, the custom arose of making captives of enemies and setting them to work. A foe captured had thus an economic value to the tribe. Either he could be set to work directly, his surplus product enriching the tribe, or he could be used to relieve some of his captors from other necessary duties, thus enabling them to produce more than would otherwise be possible, the effect being the same in the end. The property of the tribe at first, slaves become at a later stage private property--probably through the institution of the tribal distribution of wealth. Cruel, revolting, and vile as slavery appears to our modern sense,--especially the earlier forms of slavery before the body of legislation, and, not less important, sentiment, which surrounded it later arose,--it still was a step forward, a distinct advance upon the older customs of cannibalism and wholesale slaughter. Nor was it a progressive step only on the humanitarian side. It had other, profounder consequences from the evolutionary point of view. It made a leisure class possible, and provided the only conditions under which art, philosophy, and jurisprudence could be evolved. The secret of Aristotle's saying, that only by the invention of machines would the abolition of slavery ever be made possible, lies in his recognition of the fact that the labor of slaves alone made possible the devotion of a class of men to the pursuit of knowledge instead of to the production of the primal necessities of life. The Athens of Pericles, for example, with all its varied forms of culture, its art and its philosophy, was a semi-communism of a caste above, resting upon a basis of slave labor underneath. Similar conditions prevailed in all the so-called ancient democracies of civilization. The private ownership of wealth producers and their products made private exchange inevitable; individual ownership of land took the place of communal ownership, and a monetary system was invented. Here, then, in the private ownership of land and laborer, private production and exchange, we have the economic factors which caused the great revolts of antiquity, and led to that concentration of wealth into few hands, with its resulting mad luxury on the one hand and widespread proletarian misery upon the other, which conspired to the overthrow of Greek and Roman civilization. The study of those relentless economic forces which led to the break-up of Roman civilization is important as showing how chattel slavery became modified and the slave to be regarded as a serf, a servant bound to the soil. The lack of adequate production, the crippling of commerce by hordes of corrupt officials, the overburdening of the agricultural estates with slaves, so that agriculture became profitless, the crushing out of free labor by slave labor, and the rise of a wretched class of freemen proletarians, these, and other kindred causes, led to the breaking up of the great estates; the dismissal of superfluous slaves, in many cases, and the partial enfranchisement of others by making them hereditary tenants, paying a fixed share of their product as rent--here we have the embryonic stage of feudalism. It was a revolution, this transformation of the social system of Rome, of infinitely greater importance than the sporadic risings of a few thousand slaves. Yet, such is the lack of perspective which the historians have shown, it is given a far less important place in the histories than the risings in question. Slavery, chattel slavery, died because it had ceased to be profitable; serf labor arose because it was more profitable. Slave labor was economically impossible, and the labor of free men was morally impossible; it had, thanks to the slave system, come to be regarded as a degradation. In the words of Engels, "This brought the Roman world into a blind alley from which it could not escape.... There was no other help but a complete revolution."[93] The invading barbarians made the revolution complete. By the poor freemen proletarians who had been selling their children into slavery, the barbarians were welcomed. Misery, like opulence, has no patriotism. Many of the proletarian freemen had fled to the districts of the barbarians, and feared nothing so much as a return to Roman rule. What, then, should the proletariat care for the overthrow of the Roman state by the barbarians? And how much less the slaves, whose condition, generally speaking, could not possibly change for the worse? The free proletarian and the slave could join in saying, as men have said thousands of times in circumstances of desperation:-- "Our fortunes may be better; they can be no worse." VI Feudalism is the essential politico-economic system of the Middle Ages. Obscure as its origin is, and indefinite as the date of its first appearances, there can be no doubt whatever that the break-up of the Roman system, and the modification of the existing form of slavery, constituted the most important of its sources. Whether, as some writers have contended, the feudal system of land tenure and serfdom is traceable to Asiatic origins, being adopted by the ruling class of Rome in the days of the economic disintegration of the empire, or whether it rose spontaneously out of the Roman conditions, matters little to us. Whatever its archæological interest, it does not affect the narrower scope of our present inquiry whether economic necessity caused the adoption of an alien system of land tenure and agricultural production, or whether economic necessity caused the creation of a new system. The central fact is the same in either case. That period of history which we call the Middle Ages covers a span of well-nigh a thousand years. If we arbitrarily date its beginning from the successful invasion of Rome by the barbarians in the early part of the fifth century, and its ending with the final development of the craft guilds in the middle of the fourteenth century, we have a sufficiently exact measure of the time during which feudalism developed, flourished, and declined. There are few things more difficult than the bounding of epochs in social evolution by exact dates. Just as the ripening of the wheat fields comes almost imperceptibly, so that the farmer can say when the wheat is ripe, yet cannot say when the ripening occurred, so with the epochs into which social history divides itself. There is the unripe state and the ripe, but no chasm yawns between them; they are merged together. We speak of the "end" of chattel slavery, and the "rise" of feudalism, therefore, in a wide, general sense. As a matter of fact, chattel slavery survived to some extent for centuries, existing alongside of the new form of servitude; and its disappearance took place, not simultaneously throughout the civilized world, but at varying intervals. Likewise, there is a vast difference between the first, crude, ill-defined forms of feudalism and its subsequent development. The theory of feudalism is the "divine right of kings." God is the Supreme Lord of all the earth, the kings are His vice-regents, devolving their authority in turn upon whomsoever they will. All land is held as belonging to the king, God's chosen representative. He divides the realm among his barons, to rule over and defend. For this they pay tribute to the king--military service in times of war and, at a later period, money. In turn, the barons divide the land among the lesser nobility, receiving tribute from them. By these divided among the freemen, who also pay tribute, the land is tilled by the serfs, who pay service to the freeman, the lord of the manor. The serf pays no tribute directly to the king, only to his liege lord; the liege lord pays to his superior, and so on, up to the king. This is the economic framework of feudalism; with its ecclesiastical side we are not here concerned. At the base of the whole superstructure, then, was the serf, his relation to his lord differing only in degree, though in material degree, from that of the chattel slave. He might be, and often was, as brutally ill-treated as the slave before him had been; he might be ill-fed and ill-housed; his wife or daughters might be ravished by his master or his master's sons. Yet, withal, his condition was better than that of the slave. He could maintain his family life in an independent household; he possessed some rights, chief of which perhaps was the right to labor for himself. Having his own allotment of land, he was in a much larger sense a human being. Compelled to render so many days' service to his lord, tilling the soil, clearing the forest, quarrying stone, and doing domestic work, he was permitted to devote a certain, often an equal, number of days to work for his own benefit. Not only so, but the service the lord rendered him, in protecting him and his family from the lawless and violent robber hordes which infested the country, was considerable. The feudal estate, or manor, was an industrial whole, self-dependent, and having few essential ties binding it to the outside world. The barons and their retainers, lords, thanes, and freemen, enjoyed a certain rude plenty, some of the richer barons enjoying a considerable amount of luxury and splendor. The _villein_ and his sons tilled the soil, reaped the harvests, felled trees for fuel, built the houses, raised the necessary domestic animals, and killed the wild animals; his wife and daughters spun the flax, carded the wool, made the homespun clothing, brewed the mead, and gathered the grapes which they made into wine. There was little real dependence upon the outside world except for articles of luxury. Such was the basic economic institution of feudalism. But alongside of the feudal estate with its serf labor, there were the free laborers, no longer regarding labor as shameful and degrading. These free laborers were the handicraftsmen and free peasants, the former soon organizing themselves into guilds. There was a specialization of labor, but, as yet, little division. Each man worked at a particular craft and exchanged his individual products. The free craftsman would exchange his product with the free peasant, and sometimes his trade extended to the feudal manor. The guild was at once his master and protector; rigid in its rules, strict in its surveillance of its members, it was strong and effective as a protector against the impositions and invasions of feudal barons and their retainers. Division of labor first appears in its simplest form, the association of independent individual workers for mutual advantage, sharing their products upon a basis of equality. This simple coöperation involved no fundamental, revolutionary change in society. That came later with the development of the workshop system, and the division of labor upon a definite, predetermined plan. Men specialized now in the making of _parts_ of things; no man could say of a finished product, "This is _mine_, for I made it." Production had become a social function. VII At first, in its simple beginnings, the coöperation of many producers in one great workshop did not involve any general or far-reaching changes in the system of exchange. But as the new methods spread, and it became the custom for one or two wealthy individuals to provide the workshop and necessary tools and materials for production, the product of the combined laborers being appropriated in its entirety by the owners of the agencies of production, who paid the workers a money wage representing less than the actual value of their product, and based upon the cost of their subsistence, the whole economic system was once more revolutionized. The custom of working for wages, hitherto rare and exceptional, became general and customary; individual production for use, either directly or through the medium of personal exchange, was superseded by social production for private profit. The wholesale exchange of social products for private gain took the place of the personal exchange of commodities. The difference between the total cost of the production of commodities, including the wages of the producers, and their exchange value--determined at this stage by the cost of producing similar commodities by individual labor--constituted the share of the capitalist, his profit, and the objective of his investment. The new system did not spring up spontaneously and full-fledged. Like feudalism, it was a growth, a development of existing forms. And just as chattel slavery lingered on after the rise of the feudal régime, so the old methods of individual production and direct exchange of commodities for personal use lingered on in places and isolated industries long after the rise of the system of wage-paid labor and production for profit. But the old methods of production and exchange gradually became rare and almost obsolete. In accordance with the stern economic law that Marx afterward developed so clearly, the man whose methods of production, including his tools, are less efficient and economical than those of his fellows, thereby making his labor more expensive, must either adapt himself to the new conditions or fall in the struggle which ensues. The triumph of the new system of capitalist production, with its far greater efficiency arising from associated production upon a plan of specialized division of labor, was, therefore, but a question of time. The class of wage-workers thus gradually increased in numbers; as men found that they were unable to compete with the new methods, they accepted the inevitable and adapted themselves to the new conditions. The industrial revolution which established capitalism was, like the great revolutions which ushered in preceding social epochs, the product of man's tools. FOOTNOTES: [60] Edward Clodd, _Pioneers of Evolution from Thales to Huxley_, page 1. [61] _Socialism and Modern Science_, by Enrico Ferri, page 96. [62] _Studies in the Evolution of Industrial Society_, by R. T. Ely, page 3. [63] Cf. Seligman, _The Economic Interpretation of History_. [64] Clodd, _Pioneers of Evolution from Thales to Huxley_, page 8. [65] Seligman, _The Economic Interpretation of History_, page 50. [66] _Mass and Class_, by W. J. Ghent, page 9. [67] Seligman, _The Economic Interpretation of History_, page 4. [68] Schiller, _Philosophical Letters_, Preamble. [69] Seligman, _The Economic Interpretation of History_, page 86. [70] Karl Marx, _Notes on Feuerbach_ (written in 1845), published as an Appendix to _Feuerbach, The Roots the Socialist Philosophy_, by Friederich Engels. English translation by Austin Lewis (1903). [71] _Christianity and the Social Crisis_, by Walter Rauschenbusch (1907), page 4. [72] For a very scholarly discussion of this subject, the reader is referred to the series of articles by my friend, M. Beer, on _The Rise of Jewish Monotheism_, in the _Social Democrat_ (London), 1908. [73] Cf. _The Economic Foundations of Society_, by Achille Lorio, page 26. [74] _Capital_, by Karl Marx (Kerr edition). Vol. I, page 91. [75] Cf. _Karl Marx on Sectarianism and Dogmatism_ (A letter written to his friend, Bolte), in the _International Socialist Review_, March, 1908, page 525. [76] Very significant of the possibilities of a study of religious movements from this economic and social viewpoint is Professor Thomas C. Hall's little book, _The Social Meaning of Modern Religious Movements in England_ (1900). [77] Appendix to F. Engels' _Feuerbach, the Roots of the Socialist Philosophy_, translated by Austin Lewis, 1903. [78] _The Eighteenth Brumaire._ [79] Quoted from _The Sozialistische Akademiker_, 1895, by Seligman, _The Economic Interpretation of History_, page 142. [80] _Idem_, page 143. [81] _Karl Marx's Nationaloekonomische Irrlehren_, von Ludwig Slonimski, Berlin, 1897. [82] I have not attempted to give a history of the development of the theory. For a more minute study of the theory, I must refer the reader to the writings of Engels, Seligman, Ferri, Ghent, Bax, and others quoted in these pages. [83] _Capital_, Vol. I, page 406 n. (Kerr edition). [84] Liebknecht, _Memoirs of Karl Marx_, page 91. [85] _Charles Darwin and Karl Marx, A Comparison_, by Edward Aveling, London, 1897. [86] See Thorold Rogers, _The Economic Interpretation of History_, second edition, 1891, pages 10-12. [87] For various reasons, chief of which is that it would take me too far away from my present purpose, I do not attempt to develop the serious consequences of these events to Europe. See _The Economic Interpretation of History_, Chapter I, for a brief account of this. [88] _Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization_, by Lewis H. Morgan. New edition, Chicago, 1907. [89] Darwin, _The Descent of Man_, second edition, page 163. [90] _Mutual Aid a Factor of Evolution_, by Peter Kropotkin, pages 5-6. [91] _Idem_, page 74. [92] Cf. _Ancient Society_, by Lewis H. Morgan, and _The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State_, by Friederich Engels. [93] Engels, _Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State_, p. 182. CHAPTER V CAPITALISM AND THE LAW OF CONCENTRATION I Such was the mode of the development of capitalistic production in its first stage. In this stage a permanent wage-working class was formed, new markets were developed, many of them by colonial expansion and territorial conquest, and production for sale and profit became the rule, instead of the exception as formerly when men produced primarily for use and sold only their surplus products. A new form of class division thus arose out of this economic soil. Instead of being bound to the land as the serfs had been under feudalism, the wage-workers were bound to their tools. They were not bound to a single master, they were not branded on the cheek, but they were, nevertheless, dependent upon the industrial lords. Economic mastery gradually shifted from the land-owning class to the class of manufacturers. The political and social history of the Middle Ages is largely the record of the struggle for supremacy which was waged between these two classes. That struggle is the central fact of the Protestant Reformation and the Cromwellian Commonwealth. The second stage of capitalism begins with the birth of the machine age; the introduction of the great mechanical inventions of the latter half of the seventeenth century, and the resulting industrial revolution, the salient features of which we have already traced. That revolution centered in England, whose proud but, from all other points of view than the commercial, foolish boast for a full century it was to be "the workshop of the world." The new methods of production, and the development of trade with India, and the colonies and the United States of America, providing a vast and apparently almost unlimited market, a tremendous rivalry was created among the people of England, tauntingly, but with less originality than bitterness, designated "a nation of shopkeepers" by Napoleon the First. Competition flourished and commerce grew under its mighty urge. Quite naturally, therefore, competition came to be regarded as "the life of trade," and the one supreme law of progress by British economists and statesmen. The economic conditions of the time fostered a sturdy individualism on the one hand, expressing itself in a policy of _laissez faire_, which, paradoxically, they as surely destroyed. The result was the paradox of a nation of theoretic individualists becoming, through its poor laws, and more especially through the vast body of industrial legislation which developed in spite of theories of _laissez faire_, a nation of practical collectivists. The third and last stage of capitalism is characterized by new forms of industrial ownership, administration, and control. Concentration of industry and the elimination of competition are the distinguishing features of this stage. When, more than half a century ago, the Socialists predicted an era of industrial concentration and monopoly as the outcome of the competitive struggles of the time, their prophecies were mocked and derided. Yet, at this distance of time, it is easy to see what they were foresighted enough to envisage in the future; easy enough to see that competition carries in its bosom the germs of its own inevitable destruction. In words which, as Professor Ely says,[94] seem to many, even non-Socialists, like a prophecy, Karl Marx argued that the business units in production would continuously increase in magnitude, until at last monopoly emerged from the competitive struggle. This monopoly becoming a shackle upon the system under which it has grown up, and thus becoming incompatible with capitalist conditions, socialization must, according to Marx, naturally and necessarily follow.[95] In this as in all the utterances of Marx upon the subject we are reminded of the distinction which must be made between Socialism as he conceived it and the Socialism of the Utopians. We never get away from the law of economic interpretation. Socialism, according to Marx, will develop out of capitalist society, and follow capitalism necessarily and inevitably. It is not a plan to be adopted, but a stage of social development to be reached. II For the moment, we are not concerned with the prediction that Socialism must follow the full development of capitalism. The important point for our present study is the predicted growth of monopoly out of competition, and the manner in which that prediction has been realized. Concerning the manner and extent of the fulfillment of this prediction, there have been many keen controversies, both within and without the ranks of the followers of Marx. While Marx and Engels are properly regarded as the first scientific Socialists, having been the first to postulate Socialism as the outcome of evolution, and to explore the laws of that evolution, they were not wholly free from the failings of the Utopists. It would be unreasonable to expect them to be absolutely free from the spirit of their age and their associates. There is, doubtless, something Utopian in the very mechanical conception of capitalist concentration which Marx held; the process is too simple and sweeping, the revolution too imminent. Still, by followers and critics alike, it is generally conceded that the _control_ of the means of production is being concentrated into the hands of small and ever smaller groups of capitalists. In recent years the increase in the number of industrial establishments has not kept pace with the increase in the number of workers employed, the increase of capital, or the value of the products manufactured. Not only do we find small groups of men controlling certain industries, but a selective process is clearly observable, giving to the same groups of men control of various industries otherwise utterly unrelated. In the early stages of the movement toward concentration and trustification, it was possible to classify the leading capitalists according to the industries with which they were identified. One set of capitalists, "Oil Kings," controlled the oil industry; another set, "Steel Kings," controlled the iron and steel industry; another set, "Coal Barons," controlled the coal industry, and so on throughout the industrial and commercial life of the nation. To-day all this has been changed. An examination of the "Directory of Directors" shows that the same men control varied enterprises. The Oil King is at the same time a Steel King, a Coal Baron, a Railway Magnate, and so on. The men who comprise the Standard Oil group, for instance, are found to control hundreds of other companies. They include in the scope of their directorate, banking, insurance, milling, real estate, railroad and steamship lines, gas companies, sugar, coffee, cotton, and tobacco companies, and a heterogeneous host of other concerns. Not only so, but these same men are large holders of investments in all the great European countries, as well as India, Australia, Africa, Asia, and the South American countries, while foreign capitalists similarly, but to a less extent, hold large investments in American companies. Thus, the concentration of industrial control, through its finance, has become interindustrial and is rapidly becoming international. The predictions of Marx are being fulfilled, even though not in the precise manner anticipated by him. III During recent years there have been many criticisms of the Marxian theory, aiming to show that this concentration has been, and is, much more apparent than real. Some of the most important of these criticisms have come from within the ranks of the Socialist movement itself, and have been widely exploited as portending the disintegration of the Socialist movement. _Inter alia_, it may be remarked here that a certain fretfulness of temper characterizes most of the critics of Socialism. Strict adherence to the letter of Marx is pronounced as a sign of intellectual bondage of the movement and its leaders to the "Marxian fetish," and, on the other hand, every recognition of the human fallibility of Marx by a Socialist thinker is hailed as a sure portent of a split in the movement. Yet the most serious criticisms of Marx have come from the ranks of his followers--perhaps only another sign of the intellectual bankruptcy of the academic opposition to Socialism. Of course, Marx was human and fallible. If "Capital" had never been written, there would still have been a Socialist movement, and if it could be destroyed by criticism, the Socialist movement would remain. Socialism is the product of economic conditions, not of a theory or a book. "Capital" is the intellectual explanation of the genesis of Socialism, and neither its cause nor an argument for it by which it must be judged. Hence the futility of such missions as that undertaken by Mr. W. H. Mallock, for example, based upon the assumption that attacks upon the text of Marx will serve to destroy or seriously hinder the living movement. Like a prophet's rebuke to these critics, as well as to those within the ranks of the Socialist movement who would make of the words of Marx and Engels fetters to bind the movement to a dogma, come the words of Engels, published recently, letters in which he writes vigorously to his friend Sorge concerning the working-class movement in England and America. Of his compatriots, the handful of German Socialist exiles in America, who sought to make the American workers swallow a mass of ill-digested Marxian theory, he writes, "The Germans have never understood how to apply themselves from their theory to the lever which could set the American masses in motion; to a great extent they do not understand the theory itself and treat it in a doctrinaire and dogmatic fashion.... It is a credo to them, not a guide to action." And again, "Our theory is not a dogma, but the exposition of a process of evolution, and that process involves several successive phases." Of the English movement he writes, "And here an instinctive Socialism is more and more taking possession of the masses which, _fortunately_, is opposed to all distinct formulation according to the dogmas of one or the other so-called organizations," and again, he condemns "the bringing down of the Marxian theory of development to a rigid orthodoxy."[96] The critics who hope to destroy the Socialist movement of to-day by stringing together mistaken predictions of Marx and Engels, or who think that Socialism is losing its grip because it is adjusting its expressions to the changed conditions which the progress of fifty years has brought about, utterly mistake the character of the movement. In its abandonment of the errors of Marx it is most truly Marxian--because it is expressing life instead of repeating dogma. Doubtless Marx anticipated a much more complete concentration of capital and industry than has yet taken place; doubtless, too, he underrated the powers of endurance of some petty industries, and saw the breakdown of capitalism in a cataclysm, whereas modern Socialists see its merging into a form of socialization. But, when all this is admitted, it cannot be fairly said that the sum of criticism has seriously affected the general Marxian theory, as apart from its particular exposition by Marx himself. So far as the criticism has touched the subject of capitalist concentration, it has been pitifully weak, and the furore it has created seems almost pathetic. The main results of this criticism may be briefly summarized as follows: First, in industry, the persistence, and, in some cases, even increase, of petty industries; second, in agriculture, the failure of large-scale farming, and the decrease of the average farm acreage; third, in retail trade, the persistence of the small stores, despite the growth in size and number of the great department stores; fourth, the fact that concentration of industry does not imply a like concentration of wealth, the number of shareholders in a great industrial combination being frequently greater than the number of owners in the units of industry prior to the combination. At first sight, and stated in this manner, it would seem as if these conclusions, if justified by the facts, involved a serious and far-reaching criticism of the Socialist theory of a universal tendency toward the concentration of industry and commerce into units of ever increasing magnitude. But upon closer examination, these conclusions, their accuracy admitted, are seen to involve no very damaging criticism of the theory. To the superficial observer, the mere increase in the number of industrial establishments seems a much more important matter than to the careful student, who is not easily deceived by appearances. The student sees that while some petty industries undoubtedly do increase in number, the increase of large industries employing many more workers and much larger capitals is vastly greater. Furthermore, he sees what the superficial observer constantly overlooks, namely, that these petty industries are, for the most part, unstable and transient, being continually absorbed by the larger industrial combinations or crushed out of existence, as soon as they have obtained sufficient vitality and strength to make them worthy of notice, either as tributaries to be desired or potential competitors to be feared. Petty industries in a very large number of cases represent a stage in social descent, the wreckage of larger industries whose owners are economically as dependent as the ordinary wage-workers, or even poorer and more to be pitied. Where, on the contrary, it is a stage in social ascent, the petty industry is, paradoxical as the idea may appear, frequently part of the process of industrial concentration. By independent gleaning, it endeavors to find sufficient business to maintain its existence. If it fails in this, its owner falls back to the proletarian level from which, in most instances, he arose. If it succeeds only to a degree sufficient to maintain its owner at or near the average wage-earner's level of comfort, it may pass unnoticed and unmolested. If, on the other hand, it gleans sufficient business to make it desirable as a tributary, or potentially dangerous as a competitor, the petty business is pounced upon by its mightier rival and either absorbed or crushed, according to the temper or need of the latter. Critics of the Marxian theory have for the most part completely failed to recognize this significant aspect of the subject, and attached far too much importance to the continuance of petty industries. IV What is true of petty industry is true in even greater measure of retail trade. Nothing could well be further from the truth than the hasty generalization of some critics, that an increase in the number of retail business establishments invalidates the theory of a progressive concentration of capital. In the first place, many of these establishments have no independence whatsoever, but are merely agencies of larger enterprises. Mr. Macrosty has shown that in London the cheap restaurants are in the hands of four or five firms, and this is a branch of business which, because it calls for relatively small capital, shows in a marked manner the increase of establishments. Much the same conditions exist in connection with the trade in milk and bread.[97] Similar conditions prevail in almost all the large cities of this country. Single companies are known to control hundreds of saloons, restaurants, cigar stores, shoe stores, bake shops, coal depots, and the like. A multitude of other businesses are subject to this rule, and it is doubtful whether, after all, there has been the real increase of individual ownership which Mr. Ghent concedes.[98] However that may be, it is certain that a very large number of the business establishments which figure as statistical units in the argument against the Socialist theory of the concentration of capital might very properly be regarded as so many evidences in its favor. A very large number of small businesses, moreover, are really manipulated by speculators, and serve only as a means of divesting prudent and thrifty artisans and others of their little savings. Whoever has lived in the poorer quarters of a great city, where small stores are most numerous, and has watched the changes constantly occurring in the stores of the neighborhood, will realize the significance of this observation. The writer has known stores on the upper East Side of New York, where for several years he resided, change hands as many as six or seven times in a single year. What happened was generally this: A workingman having been thrown out of employment, or forced to give up his work by reason of age, sickness, or accident, decided to attempt to make a living in "business." In a few weeks, or a few months at most, his small savings were swallowed up, and he had to leave the store, making place for the next victim. An acquaintance of the writer owns six tenement houses in different parts of New York City, the ground floors of which are occupied by small stores. These stores are rented by the month just as other portions of the buildings are, and the owner, on going over his books for a period of five years, found that the average duration of tenancy in them had been less than eight months. During the past few years in the United States, as a result of the development of the many inventions for the production of "moving pictures," a new kind of cheap, popular theater has become common. Usually the charge of admission is five cents, whence the name "Nickelodeon"; the entertainment consists usually of a number of more or less dramatic incidents portrayed by means of the pictures, and a few songs, generally illustrated by pictures, and sung to the accompaniment of a mechanical piano. In almost every town in the United States these cheap pictorial theaters have appeared and their number will, doubtless, considerably swell the total of business establishments. In the small towns of the State of New York, the writer made an investigation and found that there were frequently several such places in the same town; that they were practically all built by the same persons, started by them, and then leased to others. These were generally people with small savings who, in the course of a few weeks, lost all their money and retired, their places being taken by other victims of the speculators. What seemed to the casual observer an admirable and conspicuous example of an increase in petty business, proved, upon closer study, to be a very striking example of concentration, disguised for purposes of speculation. Thus reduced, the increase of small industries and retail establishments affects the contention that there is a general tendency to concentration very little. It does perhaps seriously weaken, or even destroy, some extreme statements of the theory, contending that the process of monopolization must be a direct, simple process of continuous absorption and elimination, leaving each year fewer small units than before. Small stores do exist; they have not been put out of existence by the big department stores as was at one time confidently predicted. They serve a real social need by supplying the minor commodities of everyday use in small quantities, just as the petty industries serve a real social need. Many of them are conducted by married women to supplement the earnings of their husbands, or by widows; others by men unable to work, whose income from them is less than the wages of artisans. Together, these probably constitute a majority of the small retail establishments which show any tendency to increase.[99] The effect of this increase is still further lessened when it is remembered that only the critics of Socialism interpret the Marxian theory to mean that _all_ petty industry and business must disappear, that all must be concentrated into large industrial and commercial units, to make Socialism possible. If we are to judge Marxism as the basis of the Socialist movement, we must judge it by the interpretation given to it by the Socialists, and not otherwise. There is no Socialist of note to-day who does not realize that many small industrial and business enterprises will continue to exist for a very long time, even continuing to exist under a Socialist régime. Kautsky, perhaps the ablest living exponent of the Marxian theories, leader of the "Orthodox" Marxists, admits this. He has very ably argued that the ripeness of society for Socialism, for social production and control, depends, not upon the number of little industries that still remain, but upon the number of great industries which already exist.[100] The ripeness of society for Socialism is not disproved by the number of ruins and relics abounding. "Without a developed great industry, Socialism is impossible," says this writer. "Where, however, a great industry exists to a considerable degree, it is easy for a Socialist society to _concentrate production, and to quickly rid itself of the little industry_."[101] It is the increase of large industries, then, which Socialists regard as the essential preliminary condition of Socialism. Far more important than the increase or decrease of the number of units is their relative significance in the total production, a phase of the subject which is rather disingenuously avoided by most critics of Marxism. Mr. Lucien Sanial, a Socialist statistician of repute, and one of the profoundest Marxian students in America, has shown this in a number of suggestive tables. For example, he takes twenty-seven typical manufacturing industries for the years 1880, 1900, and 1905, and compares the number of establishments in each year with the total amount of capital invested and workers employed. In 1880 the number of establishments was 63,233; in 1900 the number was 51,912, and in 1905 it was only 44,142. From 1880 to 1905 there had been a decrease in the number of establishments of 35.3 per cent, of which 15 per cent took place within the last five years. But within the same period there had been an increase in the amount of capital invested in these twenty-seven industries as follows: from $1,276,600,000 in 1880 to $3,324,500,000 in 1900 and to $4,628,800,000 in 1905--a total increase from 1880 to 1905 of 262.6 per cent. On the other hand, the number of wage-workers increased in the same period only 60.2 per cent, the number in 1905 being 1,731,500, as against 1,611,000 in 1900 and 1,080,200 in 1880. In another table, forty-seven industries are taken. These forty-seven industries comprised 29,800 establishments in 1900; five years later there were but 26,182. In 1900 the total capital invested in these industries was $1,005,400,000, and in 1905 it had increased to $1,339,500,000. In the same five years the number of wage-workers increased only from 618,000 to 749,000. Thus, in the group of larger industries and the group of smaller ones we find the same evidences of concentration: less establishments, larger capitals, and an increase of wage-workers not equal to the increase in capitalization.[102] In connection with these figures, the following table may be profitably studied, as showing the relative insignificance of the small producer in the total volume of manufacture. It will be seen that the two largest classes of establishments have only 24,163 establishments, 11.2 per cent of the total number. But they have $10,333,000,000, or 81.5 per cent of the total manufacturing capital, and employ 71.6 per cent of all wage-workers in manufacturing industries. It may be added that they turn out 79.3 per cent of the total product. Of the petty industries proper, those having a capital of less than $5000, it will be observed that they number 32.9 per cent of the total number of establishments, but employ only 1.3 per cent of the capital invested, and only 1.9 per cent of the wage-workers. It is clear, therefore, that our manufacturing industry in very highly concentrated, and that the petty industries are, despite their number, a very insignificant factor. TABLE OF MANUFACTURING ESTABLISHMENTS, 1905[103] CAPITALS NUMBER PER TOTAL CAPITAL PER NO. OF PER CENT CENT WAGE-WORKERS CENT Less than $5,000 71,162 32.9 $165,300,000 1.3 106,300 1.9 $5,000 to $20,000 72,806 33.7 531,100,000 4.2 419,600 7.7 $20,000 to $100,000 48,144 22.2 1,655,800,000 13.0 1,027,700 18.8 $100,000 to $1,000,000 22,281 10.0 5,551,700,000 43.8 2,537,550 46.4 Over $1,000,000 1,882 0.9 4,782,300,000 37.7 1,379,150 25.2 When we turn to agriculture, the criticisms of the Socialist theory appear more substantial and important. A few years ago we witnessed the rise and rapid growth of the great bonanza farms in this country. It was shown that the advantages of large capital and the consolidation of productive forces resulted, in farming as in manufacture, in greatly cheapened production.[104] The end of the small farm was declared to be imminent, and it seemed for a while that concentration in agriculture would even outrun concentration in manufacture. This predicted absorption of the small farms by the larger, and the average increase of farm acreage, has not, however, been fulfilled to any great degree. An increase in the number of small farms, and a decrease in the average acreage, is shown in almost all the states. The increase of great estates shown by the census figures probably bears little or no relation to real farming, consisting mainly of great stock grazing ranches in the West, and unproductive gentlemen's estates in the East. Apparently, then, the Socialist theory that "the big fish eat up the little ones, and are in turn eaten by still bigger ones," is not applicable to agriculture. On the contrary, it seems that the great farms cannot compete successfully with the smaller farms. It is therefore not surprising that writers so sympathetic to Socialism as Professor Werner Sombart and Professor Richard T. Ely should claim that the Marxian system breaks down when it reaches the sphere of agricultural industry, and that it seems to be applicable only to manufacture. This position has been taken by a not inconsiderable body of Socialists in recent years, and is one of the tenets of that critical movement within the Socialist ranks which has come to be known as "Revisionism." Nothing is more delusive than statistical argument of this kind, and while these conclusions should be given due weight, they should not be too hastily accepted. An examination of the statistical basis of the argument is necessary. In the first place, small agricultural holdings do not necessarily imply economic independence, any more than do petty industries or businesses. When we examine the census figures carefully, the first important fact which challenges attention is that, whereas of the farms in the United States in 1880, 71.6 per cent were operated by their owners, in 1900 the _proportion_ had declined to 64.7 per cent. In 1900, of the 5,739,657 farms in the United States, no less than 2,026,286 were operated by tenants. Concerning the ownership of these rented farms little investigation has been made, and it is likely that careful inquiry would elicit the fact that this is a not unimportant phase of agricultural concentration, though not revealed by the figures in the census reports. It remains to be said concerning these figures, however, that they do not lend support to the theory that the small farms are being swallowed up by the larger ones, for in the same period there was a very decided increase in the _number_ of farms operated by their owners. Thus we have the same set of figures used to support both sides of the controversy--one side calling attention to the decreased _proportion_ of farms operated by their owners, the other to the increased _number_. A similar difficulty presents itself in connection with the subject of mortgaged farm holdings. In 1890, the mortgaged indebtedness of the farmers of the United States amounted to the immense sum of $1,085,995,960, a sum almost equal to the value of the entire wheat crop. Now, while a mortgage is certainly not suggestive of independence, it may be either a sign of decreasing or increasing independence. It may be a step toward the ultimate loss of one's farm or a step toward the ultimate ownership of one. Much that has been written by Populist and Socialist pamphleteers and editors upon this subject has been based upon the entirely erroneous assumption that a mortgaged farm meant loss of economic independence, whereas it often happens that it is a step toward it. The fact is that we know very little concerning the ownership of these mortgages, which is the crux of the question. It is known that many of the insurance, banking, and trust companies have invested largely in farm mortgages. This is another phase of concentration which the critics of the theory have overlooked almost entirely. One thing seems certain, namely, that farm ownership is not on the decline. It is not being supplanted by tenantry; the small farms are not being absorbed by larger ones. It seems a fair deduction from the facts, then, that the small farmer will continue to be an important factor--indeed, the most important factor--in American agriculture for a long time to come, perhaps permanently. If the Socialist movement is to succeed in America, it must recognize this fact in its propaganda. V Most of the criticism of the Marxian theory of concentration is based upon a very unsatisfactory definition of what is meant by concentration. The decrease of small units and their absorption or supercession by larger units is generally understood when concentration is spoken of. But concentration may take other, very different forms. There may be a concentration of _control_, for example, without concentration of actual ownership, or there may be concentration of actual ownership disguised by mortgages, as already suggested. The sweated trades are a familiar example of the former method of concentration. It has been shown over and over again that while small establishments remain a necessary condition of sweated industry, there is almost always effective concentration of control. To all appearances an independent manufacturer on a small scale, the sweater is generally nothing more than the agent of some big establishment, which finds it more economical to let the work be done in sweatshops than in its own factories. The same thing holds good of the retail trades, many of the apparently independent retail stores being simply agencies for big wholesale houses, controlled by them in every way. In an even larger measure, agriculture is subject to a control that is quite independent of actual or even nominal ownership of the farm. Manifestly, therefore, we need a more accurate and comprehensive definition of concentration than the one generally accepted. Mr. A. M. Simons, in an admirable study of the agricultural question from the Socialist viewpoint, defines concentration as "a movement tending to give a continually diminishing minority of the persons engaged in any industry, a constantly increasing control over the essentials, and a continually increasing share of the total value of the returns of the industry."[105] It is no part of the purpose of this chapter to discuss this definition at length. It is sufficient to have thus emphasized that concentration may be quite as effective when it is limited to control as when it embraces ownership. There are, then, other forms of concentration than the physical one, the amalgamation of smaller units to form larger ones, and very often these forms of concentration go on unperceived and unsuspected. There can be no doubt that this is especially true of agricultural industry. Many branches of farming, as the industry was carried on by our fathers and their fathers before them, have been transferred from the farmhouse to the factory. Butter and cheese making, for example, have largely passed out of the farm kitchen into the factory. The writer recalls a visit to a large farm in the Middle West. The sound of a churn is never heard there, notwithstanding that it is a "dairy farm," and all the butter and cheese consumed in that household is bought at the village store. Doubtless this farm but presented an exaggerated form of a condition that is becoming more and more common. The invention of labor-saving machinery and its application to agriculture leads to a division of the industry and the absorption by the factory of the parts most influenced by the new processes. When we remember the tremendous rôle which complex agencies outside of the farm play in modern agricultural industry, we see the subject of concentration as it applies to that industry in a new light. The grain elevators, cold-storage houses, creameries, and even railroads, are part of the necessary equipment of production, but they are owned and operated independently of the farm. There is a good deal of concentration of production in agriculture which takes the form of the absorption of some of its processes by factories instead of by other farms. VI We must also distinguish between the concentration of industry and the concentration of wealth. While there is a natural relation between these two phenomena, they are by no means identical. The trustification of a given industry may bring together a score of industrial units in one gigantic concern, so concentrating capital and production, but it is conceivable that every one of the owners of the units which compose the trust may have a share in it equal to the capital value of his particular unit, but more profitable. In that case, there can obviously be no concentration of wealth. What occurs is that all are benefited by certain economies, in exact proportion to their holdings in the capital stock. It may even happen that a larger number of persons participate, as shareholders, in the amalgamation than were formerly concerned in the ownership of the units of which the amalgamation is composed. Assuming, for the purposes of our argument, that these persons are represented by new capital, that the former owners of independent units share upon an equitable basis, there will be increased diffusion of wealth instead of its concentration. As Professor Ely says, "If the stock of the United States Steel Corporation were owned by individuals holding one share each, the concentration in industry would be just as great as it is now, but there would be a wide diffusion in the ownership of the wealth of the corporation."[106] Obvious as this distinction may seem, it is very often lost sight of, and when recognized it presents difficulties which are almost insurmountable. It is well-nigh impossible to present statistically the relation of the concentration of capital to the concentration or diffusion of wealth, important as the point is in its bearings upon modern Socialist theory. While the distinction does not affect the argument that the concentration of capital and industry makes their socialization possible, it is nevertheless an important matter. If, as some writers, notably Bernstein,[107] the Socialist, have argued, the concentration of capital and industry really leads to the decentralization of wealth, and the diffusion of the advantages of concentration among the great mass of the people, especially by creating a new class of salaried dependents, then, instead of creating a class of exploiters ever becoming less numerous, and a class of proletarians ever becoming more numerous, the tendency of modern capitalism is to distribute the gains of industry over a widening area--a process of democratization in fact. It is very evident that if this contention is a correct one, there must be a softening rather than an intensifying of class antagonisms; a tendency away from class divisions, and to greater satisfaction with present conditions, rather than increasing discontent. If this theory can be sustained, the advocates of Socialism will be obliged to change the nature of their propaganda from an appeal to the economic interest of the proletariat to the general ethical sense of mankind. There can be no successful movement based upon the interests of one class if the tendency of modern capitalism is to democratize the life of the world and diffuse its wealth over larger social areas than ever before. The exponents of this theory have based their arguments upon statistical data chiefly relating to: (1) The number of taxable incomes in countries where incomes are taxed; (2) the number of investors in industrial and commercial countries; (3) the number of savings bank deposits. As often happens when reliance is placed upon the direct statistical method, the result of all the discussion and controversy upon this subject is extremely disappointing and confusing. The same figures are used to support both sides of the argument with equal plausibility. The difficulty lies in the fact that the available statistics do not include all the facts essential to a scientific and conclusive result. It is not intended here to add to the Babel of voices in this discussion, but to present the conclusions of two or three of the most careful investigators in this field. Professor Ely[108] quotes a table of incomes in the Grand Duchy of Baden, based upon the income tax returns of that country, which has formed the theme of much dispute. The table shows that in the two years, 1886 and 1896, less than one per cent of the incomes assessed were over 10,000 marks a year, and from this fact it has been argued that wealth in that country has not been concentrated to any very great extent. In like manner, the French economist, Leroy-Beaulieu, has argued that the fact that in 1896 only 2750 persons in Paris had incomes of over 100,000 francs a year betokens a wide diffusion of wealth and an absence of concentration.[109] But the important point of the discussion, the _proportion of the total wealth owned by these classes_, is entirely lost sight of by those who argue in this manner. Further, it must always be borne in mind that there is a decided tendency in all income tax schedules to understate the amount of incomes above a certain size, the larger the income the more likelihood of its being understated in the returns. The psychology of this fact needs no elaborate demonstration. Taking the figures for the Grand Duchy of Baden as they are given, we have no particulars at all concerning the number of incomes under 500 marks, but of the persons assessed upon incomes of 500 marks and over, in 1886, the poorest two thirds had about one third of the total income, and the richest 0.69 per cent had 12.78 per cent of the total income. So far, the figures show a much greater concentration of wealth than appears from the simple fact that less than one per cent of the incomes assessed were over 10,000 marks a year. Going further, we compare the two years, 1886 and 1896, and find that this concentration increased during the ten-year period as follows: In 1886, there were 2212 incomes of more than 10,000 marks assessed, being 0.69 per cent of the total number. In 1896, there were 3099 incomes of more than 10,000 marks assessed, being 0.78 per cent of the total number. In 1886, 0.69 per cent of the incomes assessed amounted to 51,403,000 marks, representing 12.77 per cent of the total assessed wealth; while in 1896, 0.78 per cent of the incomes assessed amounted to 81,986,000 marks, representing 15.02 per cent of the total wealth so assessed. In 1886 there were 18 incomes of over 200,000 marks a year, aggregating 6,864,000 marks, 1.70 per cent of the total value of all incomes assessed; in 1896, there were 28 such incomes, aggregating 12,481,000 marks, or 2.29 per cent of the total value of all incomes assessed. The increase of concentration shown by these figures is not disputable, it seems to the present writer, when they are thus carefully analyzed, notwithstanding the fact that the table from which they are drawn is sometimes used to support the opposite contention. According to the late Professor Richmond Mayo-Smith,[110] seventy per cent of the population of Prussia have incomes below the income tax standard, their total income representing only one third of the total income of the population. An additional one fourth of the population enjoys one third of the total income, while the remaining one third goes to about four per cent of the people. The significance of these figures is clearly shown by the following diagram:-- [Illustration: DIAGRAM SHOWING THE DISTRIBUTION OF INCOME BY CLASSES IN PRUSSIA] In Saxony the statistics show that "two thirds of the population possess less than one third of the income, and that 3.5 per cent of the upper incomes receive more than 66 per cent at the lower end." From a table prepared by Sir Robert Giffen, a notoriously optimistic statistician, always the exponent of an ultra-roseate view of social conditions, Professor Mayo-Smith concludes that in England, "about ten per cent of the people receive nearly one half of the total income."[111] These figures are rather out of date, it is true, but they err in understating the amount of concentration rather than otherwise, as the researches of Mr. Chiozza Money, M.P., and others show.[112] In this country, the absence of income tax figures makes it impossible to get direct statistical evidence as to the distribution of incomes. The most careful estimate of the distribution of wealth in the United States yet made is that by the late Dr. Charles B. Spahr.[113] Written in 1895, Dr. Spahr's book cannot be regarded as an accurate presentation of conditions as they exist at the present moment, yet here again there is every reason to believe that the process of concentration has gone on unchecked since he wrote. It is not necessary for our present purpose, however, to accept the estimate of Dr. Spahr as authoritative and conclusive. The figures are quoted here simply as the result reached by the most patient, conscientious, and scientific examination of the distribution of wealth in this country yet made. Dr. Spahr's conclusion was that in 1895 less than one half of the families in the United States were property-less; but that, nevertheless, seven eighths of the families owned only one eighth of the national wealth, while one per cent of the families owned more than the remaining ninety-nine per cent. Mr. Lucien Sanial, in a most careful analysis of the census for 1900, shows that, classified according to occupations, 250,251 persons possessed $67,000,000,000, out of a total of $95,000,000,000 given as the national wealth; that is to say, 0.9 per cent of the total number in all occupations owned 70.5 per cent of the total national wealth. The middle class, consisting of 8,429,845 persons, being 29.0 per cent of the total number in all occupations, owned $24,000,000,000, or 25.3 per cent of the total national wealth. The lowest class, the proletariat, consisting of 20,393,137 persons, being 70.1 per cent of the total number in all occupations, owned but $4,000,000,000, or 4.2 per cent of the total wealth. To recapitulate: Of the 29,073,233 persons ten years old and over engaged in occupations, 0.9 per cent own 70.5 per cent of total wealth. 29.0 per cent own 25.3 per cent of total wealth. 70.1 per cent own 4.2 per cent of total wealth. Startling as these figures are, it will be evident upon reflection that they do not adequately represent the amount of wealth concentration. The occupational basis is not quite satisfactory as applied to the richest class. It serves for the proletarian class, of course, and for a very large part of the middle class. In these classes, as a rule, the _occupied_ persons represent wealth ownership. But this is by no means true of the richest class. In this class we have a very considerable proportion of the wealth owned by _unoccupied_ persons, such as the wives rich in their own right, children and other unoccupied members of families rich by inheritance. Mr. Henry Laurens Call, in a paper read before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, at Columbia University, at the end of 1906, made these figures the basis of the startling estimate that one per cent of our population own not less than ninety per cent of our total wealth. There is a peculiarity of modern capitalism which enables the great capitalists to control vastly more wealth than they own. Take any group of large capitalists, and it will be found that they _control_ a much greater volume of capital than they _own_. The invested capital of a multitude of small investors is in their keeping, and they can and do use it for purposes of their own. Thus we have a concentration of capitalist control which goes far beyond the concentration of ownership. And this concentration of the essential control of the capital of a country becomes more and more important each year. It is recognized to-day that the most important capitalist is not he who himself owns the greatest amount of capital, but he who controls the greatest amount, quite irrespective of its ownership. The growth of immense private fortunes is an indisputable evidence of the concentration of wealth. In 1854 there were not more than twenty-five millionaires in New York City, their total fortunes aggregating $43,000,000. There were not more than fifty millionaires in the whole of the United States, their aggregate fortunes not exceeding $80,000,000. To-day there are several individual fortunes of more than $80,000,000 each. New York City alone is said to have over two thousand millionaires, and the United States more than five thousand. By a curious mental process, the _New York World_, when the first edition of this little book appeared, sought to prove in a labored editorial that the increase of millionaires tended to prove an increasing diffusion of wealth rather than the contrary. It is hardly worth while, perhaps, making any reply to such puerility. Every student knows that the multimillionaire is only possible as a result of the concentration of wealth, that such fortunes are realized by the absorption of numerous smaller ones. Further, it is only necessary to add that all the millionaires of 1854, together with the half millionaires, owned not more than about $100,000,000 out of the total wealth, which was at that time something like $10,000,000,000. In other words, they owned not more than one per cent of the wealth of the country. In 1890, when the wealth of the country was slightly more than $65,000,000,000, Senator Ingalls could quote in the United States Senate a table showing that the millionaires and half millionaires of that time, 31,100 persons in all, owned $36,250,000,000, or just fifty-six per cent of the entire wealth of the United States.[114] Professor Ely accepts the logic of the statistical data gathered in Europe and the United States, and says "such statistics as we have ... all indicate a marked concentration of wealth, both in this country and Europe."[115] VII Summing up, we may state the argument of this chapter very briefly as follows: The Socialist theory is that competition is self-destructive, and that the inevitable result of the competitive process is to produce monopoly, either through the crushing out of the weak by the strong, or the combination of units as a result of a conscious recognition of the wastes of competition and the advantages of coöperation. The law of capitalist development, therefore, is from competition and division to combination and concentration. As this concentration proceeds, a large class of proletarians is formed on the one hand, and a small class of capitalist lords on the other, an essential antagonism of interests existing between the two classes. Petty industries may continue to exist, though, upon the whole, the tendency is toward their extinction. In certain industries, their number may even increase, but their relative importance is constantly decreasing. While Socialism does not preclude the continued existence of small private industry or business, it does require and depend upon the development of a large body of concentrated industry, monopolies which can be transformed into social monopolies whenever the people may decide so to transform them. These conditions are being fulfilled in the evolution of our economic system. The interindustrial and international trustification of industry shows a remarkable fulfillment of the law of capitalist concentration which the Socialists were the first to formulate; the existence of petty industries and businesses, or their numerical increase even, being a relatively insignificant matter compared with the enormous increase in large industries and businesses, and their share in the total volume of industry and commerce. In agriculture, concentration, while it does not proceed so rapidly or directly as in manufacture and commerce, and while it takes directions and forms unforeseen by the Socialists of a generation ago, proceeds surely nevertheless. Along with this concentration of capital and industry proceeds the concentration of wealth into proportionately fewer hands. While a certain diffusion of wealth takes place through the mechanism of capitalist concentration, by developing a new class of highly salaried officials, and enabling numerous small investors to own shares in great industrial and commercial corporations, it is not sufficient to balance the expropriation which goes on in the competitive struggle, and it is true that a larger proportion of the national wealth is owned by a minority of the population than ever before, that minority being proportionately less numerous than ever before. Further, the peculiar financial organization of modern capitalist society enables the ruling capitalists to control and use to their own advantage the wealth of others invested in industrial and commercial corporations. Thus to the concentration of ownership must be added the concentration of control, which plays an increasingly important part in capitalist economics. Whatever defects there may be in the Marxian theory, as outlined by Marx himself, and whatever modifications of his statement of it may be rendered necessary by changed conditions, in its main and essential features it has successfully withstood all the criticisms which have been directed against it. Economic literature is full of prophecies, but in its whole range there is not an instance of prophecy more literally and abundantly fulfilled than that which Marx made concerning the trend of capitalist development. And Karl Marx was not a prophet--he but read clearly the meaning of certain facts which others had not learned to read, the law of social dynamics. That is not prophecy, but science. FOOTNOTES: [94] _Studies in the Evolution of Industrial Society_, by R. T. Ely, page 95. [95] _Capital_, Vol. I (Kerr edition), page 837. [96] _Briefe und Auszüge aus Briefen von Joh. Phil. Becker, Jos. Dietzgen, Friederich Engels, Karl Marx u. A. an F. A. Sorge und Andere_, Stuttgart, 1906. [97] H. W. Macrosty, _The Growth of Monopoly in English Industry_ (Fabian Tract). [98] _Our Benevolent Feudalism_, by W. J. Ghent, pages 17-21. [99] A factor of tremendous importance in the maintenance of petty industries and business establishments in this country, which Marx could not have anticipated, has been the unprecedented volume of foreign immigration. Not only have some menial personal services--such as shoe cleaning, for example--been transformed into regular businesses by immigrants from certain countries, but the massing together of immigrants, aliens in language, customs, tastes, and manners, provides a very favorable soil for the development of small business enterprises. [100] _The Social Revolution_, by Karl Kautsky, Part I, page 144. See also the argument by Paul Lafargue, Marx's son-in-law, that Socialism will not oppose petty agriculture by private individuals working their own farms.--_Revue Politique et Parliamentaire_, October, 1898, page 70. [101] Kautsky, _The Social Revolution_, page 144. [102] The figures are quoted from _Socialism Inevitable_, by Gaylord Wilshire, pages 325-326. [103] The table is quoted from _Socialism Inevitable_, by Gaylord Wilshire, page 326. [104] The cost of raising wheat in California, where large farming has been most scientifically developed, is said to vary from 92.5 cents per 100 pounds on farms of 1000 acres to 40 cents on farms of 50,000 acres. [105] _The American Farmer_, by A. M. Simons, page 97. [106] _Studies in the Evolution of Industrial Society_, by Richard T. Ely, page 255. [107] _Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus_, by Edward Bernstein, page 47. [108] _Studies in the Evolution of Industrial Society_, by Richard T. Ely, pages 261-262. [109] _Essai sur la repartition des richesses et sur la tendance à une moindre inégalité des conditions_, par Leroy-Beaulieu, page 564. [110] _Statistics and Economics_, by Richmond Mayo-Smith, Book III, Distribution. [111] _Statistics and Economics_, by Richmond Mayo-Smith, Book III, Distribution. [112] Cf. _Riches and Poverty_, by Chiozza Money, M.P.; also, _Fabian Tract_, No. 5. [113] _The Present Distribution of Wealth in the United States_, by Charles B. Spahr (1896). [114] _Writings and Speeches of John J. Ingalls_, page 320. [115] _Studies in the Evolution of Industrial Society_, page 265. CHAPTER VI THE CLASS STRUGGLE THEORY I No part of the theory of modern Socialism has called forth so much criticism and opposition as the doctrine of the class struggle. Many who are otherwise sympathetic to Socialism denounce this doctrine as narrow, brutal, and productive of antisocialistic feelings of class hatred. Upon all hands the doctrine is condemned as an un-American appeal to passion and a wicked exaggeration of social conditions. When President Roosevelt attacks the preachers of the doctrine, and wrathfully condemns class-consciousness as "a foul thing," he doubtless expresses the views of a majority of American citizens. The insistence of Socialists upon this aspect of their propaganda is undoubtedly responsible for keeping a great many outside of their movement who otherwise would be identified with it. If the Socialists would repudiate the doctrine that Socialism is a class movement, and make their appeal to the intelligence and conscience of all classes, instead of to the interests of a special class, they could probably double their numerical strength at once. To many, therefore, it seems a fatuous and quixotic policy to preach such a doctrine, and it is very often charitably ascribed to the peculiar intellectual and moral myopia of fanaticism. Before accepting this conclusion, and before indorsing the Rooseveltian verdict, the reader is bound as a matter of common fairness, and of intellectual integrity, to consider the Socialist side of the argument. There is no greater fanaticism than that which condemns what it does not take the trouble to understand. The Socialists claim that the doctrine is misrepresented; that it does not produce class hatred; and that it is a vital and pivotal point of Socialist philosophy. The class struggle, says the Socialist, is a law of social development. We only recognize the law, and are no more responsible for its existence than for the law of gravitation. The name of Marx is associated with the law in just the same manner as the name of Newton is associated with the law of gravitation, but Marx is no more responsible for the social law he discovered than was Newton for the physical law he discovered. There were class struggles thousands of years before there was a Socialist movement, thousands of years before Marx was born, and it is therefore absurd to charge us with the creation of the class struggle, or class hatred. We realize perfectly well that if we ignored this law in our propaganda, making our appeal to a universal sense of abstract justice and truth, many who now hold aloof from us would join our movement. But we should not gain strength as a result of their accession to our ranks. We should be obliged to emasculate Socialism, to dilute it, in order to win a support of questionable value. History teems with examples of the disaster which inevitably attends such a course. We should be quixotic and fatuous indeed if we attempted anything of the kind. Such, briefly stated, are the main outlines of the reply which the average Socialist gives to the criticism of the class struggle doctrine described. The class struggle theory is part of the economic interpretation of history. Since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, the modes of economic production and exchange have inevitably grouped men into economic classes. The theory is thus admirably stated by Engels in the Introduction to the _Communist Manifesto_:-- "In every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch; and, consequently, the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; that the history of these class struggles forms a series of evolution in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed class--the proletariat--cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class--the bourgeoise--without, at the same time, and once and for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions, and class struggles."[116] In this classic statement of the theory, there are several fundamental propositions. First, that class divisions and class struggles arise out of the economic life of society. Second, that since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, which was communistic in character, mankind has been divided into economic groups or classes, and all its history has been a history of struggles between these classes, ruling and ruled, exploiting and exploited, being forever at war with each other. Third, that the different epochs in human history, stages in the evolution of society, have been characterized by the interests of the ruling class. Fourth, that a stage has now been reached in the evolution of society where the struggle assumes a form which makes it impossible for class distinctions and class struggles to continue if the exploited and oppressed class, the proletariat, succeeds in emancipating itself. In other words, the cycle of class struggles which began with the dissolution of rude, tribal communism, and the rise of private property, ends with the passing of private property in the means of social existence and the rise of Socialism. The proletariat in emancipating itself destroys all the conditions of class rule. II As we have already seen, slavery is historically the first system of class division which presents itself. Some ingenious writers have endeavored to trace the origin of slavery to the institution of the family, the children being the first slaves. It is fairly certain, however, that slavery originated in conquest. When a tribe was conquered and enslaved by some more powerful tribe, all the members of the vanquished tribe sunk to one common level of servility and degradation. Their exploitation as laborers was the principal object of their enslavement, and their labor admitted of little gradation. It is easy to see the fundamental class antagonisms which characterized slavery. Has there been no uprisings of the slaves, no active and conscious struggle against their masters, the antagonism of interests between them and their masters would be none the less apparent. But the overthrow of slavery was not the result of the rebellions and struggles of the slaves. While these undoubtedly helped, the principal factors in the overthrow of chattel slavery as the economic foundation of society were the disintegration of the system to the point of bankruptcy, and the rise of a new, and sometimes, as in the case of Rome, alien ruling class. The class divisions of feudal society are not less obvious than those of chattel slavery. The main division, the widest gulf, divided the feudal lord and the serf. Often as brutally ill-treated as their slave-forefathers had been, the feudal serfs from time to time made abortive struggles. The class distinctions of feudalism were constant, but the struggles between the lords and the serfs were sporadic, and of comparatively little moment, just as the risings of their slave forefathers had been. But alongside of the feudal estate there existed another class, the free handicraftsmen and peasants, the former organized into powerful guilds. It was this class, and not the serf class, which was destined to challenge the rule of the feudal nobility, and wage war upon it. As the feudal class was a landed class, so the class represented by the guilds became a moneyed and commercial class, the pioneers of our modern capitalist class. As Mr. Brooks Adams[117] has shown very clearly, it was this moneyed, commercial class, which gave to the king the instrument for weakening and finally overthrowing feudalism. It was this class which built up the cities and towns from which was drawn the revenue for the maintenance of a standing army, thus liberating the king from his dependence upon the feudal lords. The capitalist class triumphed over the feudal nobility, and its interests became in their turn the dominant interests in society. Capitalism in its development effectually destroyed all those institutions of feudalism which obstructed its progress, leaving only those which were innocuous and safely to be ignored. In capitalist society, the main class division is that which separates the employing, wage-paying class from the employed, wage-receiving class. Notwithstanding all the elaborate arguments made to prove the contrary, the frequently heard myth that the interests of Capital and Labor are identical, and the existence of pacificatory associations based upon that myth, there is no fact in the whole range of social phenomena more self-evident than the existence of an inherent, fundamental antagonism in the relationship of employer and employee. As individuals, in all other relations, they may have a commonality of interests, but as employer and employee they are fundamentally and necessarily opposed. They may belong to the same church, and so have religious interests in common; they may have common racial interests, as, for instance, if negroes, in protecting themselves against the attacks made in a book like _The Clansman_, or, if Jews, in opposing anti-Semitic movements; as citizens they may have the same civic interests, be equally opposed to graft in the city government, or equally interested in the adoption of wise sanitary precautions against epidemics. They may even have a common industrial interest in the general sense that they may be equally interested in the development of the industry in which they are engaged, and fear, equally, the results of a depression in trade. But their special interests as employer and employee are antithetical. It cannot be denied that, in certain circumstances, these other interests may become so accentuated that the class antagonisms are momentarily lost sight of, or completely dwarfed in importance; nor is such a denial implied in the Socialist theory. It is not difficult to see that in the case of a general uprising against the members of their race, in which their lives are imperiled, Jewish employers and employees may forget their _class_ interests and remember only that they are Jews. So with negroes and other oppressed races. The economic interests of the class may be engulfed in the solidarity of the race. It is not difficult, either, to see that in the presence of some great common danger or calamity, class interests may likewise be completely subordinated. An admirable example of this occurred at the time of the San Francisco earthquake and fire. The enormous demand for labor occasioned by that disaster practically enabled the artisans, most of whom were organized into unions, to demand and obtain almost fabulous wages. But there was no thought of taking advantage of the calamity. On the contrary, the unions immediately announced that they would make no attempt to do so. Not only that, but they voluntarily waived rules which in normal times they would have insisted upon with all their powers. The temporary overshadowing of the economic interests of classes by other special interests which have been thrust into special prominence, is not, however, evidence that these class interests do not prevail in normal times. Recognition of this fact effectually destroys much criticism of the theory. The interest of the wage-worker, as wage-worker, is to receive the largest wage possible for the least number of hours spent in labor. The interest of the employer, as employer, on the other hand, is to secure from the worker as many hours of service, as much labor power, as possible for the lowest wage which the worker can be induced to accept. The workers employed in a factory may be divided by a hundred different forces. They may be divided by racial differences, for instance; but while preserving these differences in a large measure, they will tend to unite upon the basis of their economic interests. Some of the great labor unions, notably the United Mine Workers,[118] afford remarkable illustrations of this fact. If the difference of religious interests leads to division, the same unanimity of economic interests will sooner or later be developed. No impartial investigator who studies the influence of a great labor union which includes in its membership workers of various nationalities and adherents of various religious creeds, can fail to observe the fact that the community of economic interests which unites them is a powerful factor making for their amalgamation into a harmonious civic whole. With the employers it is the same. They, too, may be divided by a hundred forces; the competition among them may be keen and fierce, but common economic interests will tend to unite them against the organizations of the workers they employ. Racial, religious, social, and other divisions and distinctions, may be maintained, but they will, in general, unite for the protection and furtherance of their common economic interests. So much, indeed, belongs to the very primer stage of economic theory. Adam Smith is rather out of fashion nowadays, but there is still much in "The Wealth of Nations" which will repay our attention. No Socialist writer, not even Marx, has stated the fundamental principle of the antagonism between the employing and employed classes more clearly, as witness the following:-- "The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower the wages of labor.... Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual rate. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbors and equals.... Masters too sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labor.... These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy, till the moment of execution.... Such combinations, however, are frequently resisted by a contrary defensive combination of the workmen; who sometimes, too, without any provocation of this kind, combine of their own accord to raise the price of labor. Their usual pretenses are, sometimes the high price of provisions; sometimes the great profits which the masters make by their work. But whether these combinations be offensive or defensive, they are always abundantly heard of. In order to bring the point to a speedy decision, they have always recourse to the loudest clamor, and sometimes to the most shocking violence and outrage. They are desperate, and act with the extravagance and folly of desperate men, who must either starve, or frighten their masters into an immediate compliance with their demands. The masters upon these occasions are just as clamorous upon the other side, and _never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combinations of servants, laborers, and journeymen_."[119] Thus Adam Smith. Were it essential to our present purpose, it would be easy to quote from all the great economists in support of the Socialist claim that the interests of the capitalist and those of the laborer are irreconcilably opposed. That individual workers and employers will be found who do not recognize their class interests is true, but that fact by no means invalidates the contention that, in general, men will recognize and unite upon a basis of common class interests. In both classes are to be found individuals who attach greater importance to the preservation of racial, religious, or social, than to economic, interests. But because the economic interest is fundamental, involving the very basis of life, the question of food, clothing, shelter, and comfort, these individuals are and must be exceptions to the general rule. Workers sink their racial and religious differences and unite to secure better wages, a reduction of their hours of labor, and better conditions in general. Employers, similarly, unite to oppose whatever may threaten their class interests, without regard to other relationships. The Gentile who is himself an anti-Semite has no qualms of conscience about employing Jewish workmen, at low wages, to compete with Gentile workers; he does not object to joining with Jewish employers in an Employers' Association, if thereby his economic interests may be safeguarded. And the Jewish employer, likewise, has no objection to joining with the Gentile employer for mutual protection, or to the employment of Gentile workers to fill the places of his employees, members of his own race, who have gone out on strike for higher wages. III The class struggle, therefore, presents itself in the present stage of social development, in capitalist countries, as a conflict between the wage-paying and the wage-paid classes. That is the dominating and all-absorbing conflict of the industrial age in which we live. True, there are other class interests more or less involved. This is especially true in the United States with its enormous agricultural industry, to which the description of the industrial conflict cannot be applied. There are the indefinite, inchoate, vague, and uncertain interests of that large, so-called middle class, composed of farmers, retailers, professional workers, and so on. The interests of this large class are not, and cannot be, as definitely defined. They vacillate, conforming now to the interest of the wage-workers, now to the interest of the employers. Thus the farmer may oppose an increase in the wages of farm laborers, because that touches him directly as an employer. His relation to the farm laborer is substantially that of the capitalist to the city worker, and his attitude upon that question is the attitude of the capitalist class as a whole. At the same time, he may heartily favor an increase of wages for miners, carpenters, bricklayers, shoemakers, printers, painters, factory workers, and non-agricultural laborers in general, for the reason that while a general rise of wages, resulting in a general rise of prices, will affect him slightly as a consumer, and compel him to pay more for what he buys, it will benefit him much more as a seller of the products of his farm. In short, consciously very often, but unconsciously oftener still, personal or class interests control our thoughts, opinions, beliefs, and actions. It is impossible with the data at our disposal at present to make such an analysis of our population as will enable us to determine the particular class interests of the various groups. Of the twenty-four million men and boys engaged in industry there are some six million farmers and tenants; three million seven hundred and fifty thousand farm laborers; eleven million mechanics, laborers, clerks, and servants; one million five hundred thousand professional workers, agents, and the like; and about two million employers, large and small. Accurately to place each of these groups is out of the question until such time as we have a much more detailed study of our economic life than has yet been attempted. We may, however, roughly relate some of the groups. First: It is evident that the interests of the eleven million wage-earners are, as a whole, opposed to those of the employing class. There may be exceptions, as in the case of those whose very occupation as confidential agents of the capitalists, overseers, and the like, places them outside of the sphere of working-class interests. They may not receive a salary much above the wage of the mechanic, yet their function is such as to place them psychologically with the capitalists rather than with the workers. It is also evident that, while their _interests_ may be demonstrably antagonistic to those of the employers, not all of the wage-earners will be _conscious_ of that fact. The _consciousness_ of class interests develops slowly among rural and isolated workers, especially as between the small employer and his employee. And even when there is the consciousness of antagonistic interests among these workers it is very difficult for them actively to express it. Hence they cannot play an important part in the actual conflict of classes. Second: We may safely place the three million seven hundred and fifty thousand farm laborers, as regards their economic _interests_, with the general mass of wage-workers, with one important qualification. So far as they are in the actual relation of wage-paid laborers, hired by the month, week, or day, and bearing no other relation to their employers, they belong, in their economic interests, to the proletariat. But there are many farm laborers included in our enumeration who do not hold that relation to their employers. They are the sons of the farmers themselves, expecting to assume their fathers' positions, and their position as wage-paid laborers is largely nominal and fictitious. How many such there are it is impossible to ascertain with anything like certainty, and we can only say, therefore, that the position of the class, as such, must be determined without including these. But while this class has economic interests similar to those of the industrial proletariat, because of their isolation and scattered position, and because of the personal relations which they bear to their employers--farmer and laborer often working side by side, equally hard, and not infrequently having approximately the same standards of living--these cannot, to any very great extent, become an active factor in the class conflict in the same sense as the industrial wage-workers can, by engaging in strikes, boycotts, and other manifestations of the class war. Still, they may, and in fact do, play an important rôle in the _political_ aspects of the struggle. Let a political movement of the proletariat arise and it will be found that these agricultural laborers will join it not less enthusiastically than their fellows from the factories in the cities. It would probably surprise most thoughtful Americans if they could see the organization maps in the offices of the Socialist Party of the United States, dotted with little red-capped pins denoting local organizations of the party. These are quite as common in the agricultural states as in the industrial states. So, too, in Germany. The movement is politically nearly as strong in the agrarian districts as elsewhere. This is a fact of vital significance, one which must not be lost sight of in studying the progress of Socialism in America. Third: Of the exact position of the remaining groups it is very difficult to speak with anything like assurance. In an earlier chapter we have noticed the persistence of the small farm in America, and the fact that a class of small farmers forms a very important part of our population. As already observed, the economic condition of the small farmer is very often little, if any, superior to that of the laborers he employs. Elsewhere, I have shown that the actual income of the small farmer is not infrequently less than that of the hired laborer.[120] This is just as true of the small dealer, and the small manufacturer. But mere poverty of income, companionship in misery, the sharing of an equally poor existence, does not suffice to place the farmer in the proletarian class, as many Socialist writers have shown.[121] The small farmers constitute a distinct class. They are not, as the small dealers and manufacturers are, mere remnants of a disappearing class. The class is a permanent one, apparently, as much so as the class of industrial wage-workers. As a class it is just as essential to agricultural production as the industrial proletariat is essential to manufacture. It is thus a class analogous to the industrial proletariat, and Kautsky has well said that the small farmer is the "proletariat of the country." The exploitation of the small farmer is not direct, like that of the wage-worker by his employer, but indirect, through the great capitalist trusts and railroads. It also happens that these derive their chief income from the direct exploitation of the wage-workers, so that the small farmer and the wage-worker in the city factory have common exploiters. As they become conscious of this, the two classes will tend to unite their forces in the one sphere where such unity of action is possible, the sphere of political action. This is also true, in some degree at least, of a considerable fraction of the one million five hundred thousand workers included in the professional and agent classes, and of the two million employers, the small dealers and manufacturers being included in this enumeration. That there is such a considerable fraction of each of these two classes whose interests lead them to make common cause with the proletariat is not at all a matter of theory or speculation, but of experience. These classes are represented very largely in the membership of the Socialist parties of this country and of Europe. IV Although it is sometimes so interpreted, the theory that classes are based upon commonality of interests does not imply that men are never actuated by other than selfish motives; that a sordid materialism is the only motive force at work in the world. Marx and Engels carefully avoided the use of the word _interests_ in such manner as to suggest that material interests control the course of history. They invariably used the term _economic conditions_, and the careful reader will not fail to perceive that although economic conditions produce interests which form the basis of class divisions, it is not unusual for men to act contrary to their personal _interests_ as a result of existing _conditions_. In general, class interests and personal interests coincide, but there are certainly occasions when they conflict. Many an employer, having no quarrel with his employees and confident that he will be the loser thereby, joins in a fight upon labor unions because he is conscious that the interests of his class are involved. In a similar way, workingmen enter upon sympathetic strikes, consciously, at an immediate loss to themselves, because they place class loyalty before personal gain. It is significant of class feeling and temper that when employers act in this manner, and lock out employees with whom they have no trouble, simply to help other employers to win their battles, they are lauded by the very newspapers which denounce the workers when they adopt a like policy. It is also true that there are individuals in both classes who never become conscious of their class interests, and steadfastly refuse to join with the members of their class. The workingman who refuses to join a union, or who "scabs" when his fellow-workers go out on strike, may act from ignorance or from sheer self-interest and greed. His action may be due to his placing personal interest before the larger interest of his class, or from being too shortsighted to see that ultimately his own interests and those of his class must merge. Many an employer, likewise, may refuse to join in any concerted action of his class for either of these reasons, or he may even rise superior to his class and personal interests and support the workers because he believes in the justness of their cause, realizing perfectly well that their gain means loss to him or to his class. This ought to be a sufficient answer to those shallow critics who think that they dispose of the class struggle theory of modern Socialism by enumerating those of its leading exponents who do not belong to the proletariat. The influence of class environment upon men's beliefs and ideals is a subject which our most voluminous ethicists have scarcely touched upon as yet. It is a commonplace saying that each age has its own standards of right and wrong, but little effort has been made, if we except the Socialists, to trace this fact to its source, to the economic conditions prevailing in the different ages.[122] Still less effort has been made to account for the different standards held by the different social classes at the same time, and by which each class judges the others. In our own day the idea of slavery is generally held in abhorrence. There was a time, however, when it was almost universally looked upon as a divine institution, alike by slaveholder and slave. It is simply impossible to account for this complete revolution of feeling upon any other hypothesis than that slave-labor then seemed absolutely essential to the life of the world. The slave lords of antiquity, and, more recently, the Southern slaveholders in our own country, all believed that slavery was eternally right. When the slaves took an opposite view and rebelled, they were believed to be in rebellion against God and nature. The Church represented the same view just as vigorously as it now opposes it. The slave owners who held slavery to be a divine institution, and the priests and ministers who supported them, were just as honest and sincere in their belief as we are in holding antagonistic beliefs to-day. What was accounted a virtue in the slave was accounted a vice in the slaveholder. Cowardice and a cringing humility were not regarded as faults in a slave. On the contrary, they were the stock virtues of the pattern slave and added to the estimation in which he was held, just as similar traits are valued in personal servants--butlers, waiters, valets, footmen, and other flunkies--in our own day. But similar traits in the slaveholder, or the "gentleman" of to-day, would be regarded as terrible faults. As Mr. Algernon Lee very tersely puts it, "The slave was not a slave because of his slavish ideals and beliefs; the slave was slavish in his ideals and beliefs because he lived the life of a slave."[123] In the industrial world of to-day we find a similar divergence of ethical standards. What the laborers regard as wrong, the employers regard as absolutely and immutably right. The actions of the workers in forming unions and compelling unwilling members of their own class to join them, even resorting to the bitter expedient of striking against them with a view to starving them into submission, seem terribly unjust to the employers and the class to which the employers belong. To the workers themselves, on the other hand, such actions have all the sanctions of conscience. Similarly, many actions of the employers, in which they themselves see no wrong, seem almost incomprehensibly wicked to the workers. Leaving aside the wholesale fraud of our ordinary commercial advertisements, the shameful adulteration of goods, and a multitude of other such nefarious practices, it is at once interesting and instructive to compare the employers' denunciations of "the outrageous infringement of personal liberty," when the "oppressor" is a labor union, with some of their everyday practices. The same employers who loudly, and, let it be said, quite sincerely, condemn the members of a union who endeavor to bring about the discharge of a fellow-worker because he declines to join their organization, have no scruples of conscience about discharging a worker simply because he belongs to a union, and so effectually "blacklisting" him that it becomes almost or quite impossible for him to obtain employment at his trade elsewhere. They do not hesitate to do this secretly, conspiring against the very life of the worker. While loudly declaiming against the "conspiracy" of the workers to raise wages, they see no wrong in an "agreement" of manufacturers or mine owners to reduce wages. If the members of a labor union should break the law, especially if they should commit an act of violence during a strike, the organs of capitalist opinion teem with denunciation, but there is no breath of condemnation for the outrages committed by employers or their agents against union men and their families. During the great anthracite coal strike of 1903, and again during the disturbances in Colorado in 1904, it was evident to every fair-minded observer that the mine owners were at least quite as lawless as the strikers.[124] But there was hardly a scintilla of adverse comment upon the mine owners' lawlessness in the organs of capitalist opinion, while they poured forth torrents of righteous indignation at the lawlessness of the miners. When labor leaders, like the late Sam Parks, for example, are accused of extortion and receiving bribes, the employers and their retainers, through pulpit, press, and every other avenue of public opinion, denounce the culprit, the bribe taker, in unmeasured terms--but the bribe giver is excused, or, at worst, only lightly criticised. These are but a few common illustrations of class conscience. Any careful observer will be able to add almost indefinitely to the number. It would be easy to compile a catalogue of such examples as these from the history of the past few years sufficient to convince the most skeptical that class interests do produce a class conscience. Mr. Ghent aptly expresses a profound truth when he says: "There is a spiritual alchemy which transmutes the base metal of self-interest into the gold of conscience; the transmutation is real, and the resulting frame of mind is not hypocrisy, but conscience. It is a class conscience, and therefore partial and imperfect, having little to do with absolute ethics. But partial and imperfect as it is, it is generally sincere."[125] No better test of the truth of this can be made than by reading carefully for a few weeks the comments of half a dozen representative capitalist newspapers, and of an equal number of representative labor papers, upon current events. The antithetical nature of their judgments of men and events demonstrates the existence of a distinct class conscience. It cannot be interpreted in any other way. V A great many people, while admitting the important rôle class struggles have played in the history of the race, strenuously deny the existence of classes in the United States. They freely admit the class divisions and struggles of the Old World, but deny that a similar class antagonism exists in this country; they fondly believe the United States to be a glorious exception to the rule, and regard the claim that classes exist here as falsehood and treason. The Socialists are forever being accused of seeking to apply to American life judgments based upon European facts and conditions. It is easy to visualize the class divisions of monarchical countries, where there are hereditary ruling classes--even though these are only nominally the ruling classes in most cases--fixed by law. But it is not so easy to recognize the fact that, even in these countries, the power is held by the financial and industrial lords, and not by the kings and their titular nobility. The absence of a hereditary, titular ruling class serves to hide from many people the real class divisions existing in this country. Nevertheless, there is a perceptible growth of uneasiness and unrest; a widening and deepening conviction that while we may retain the outward forms of democracy, and shout its shibboleths with patriotic fervor, its essentials are lacking. The feeling spreads, even in the most conservative circles, that we are developing, or have already developed, a distinct ruling class. The anomaly of a ruling class without legal sanction or titular prestige has seized upon the popular mind; titles have been created for our great "untitled nobility"--mock titles which have speedily assumed a serious import and meaning. Our financial "Kings," industrial "Lords," "Barons," and so on, have received their crowns and patents of nobility from the populace. President Roosevelt gives expression to the serious thought of our most conservative citizenry when he says: "In the past, the most direful among the influences which have brought about the downfall of republics has ever been the growth of the class spirit.... If such a spirit grows up in this republic, it will ultimately prove fatal to us, as in the past it has proven fatal to every community in which it has become dominant."[126] With the exception of the chattel slaves, we have had no hereditary class in this country with a legally fixed status. But "Man is more than constitutions," and there are other laws than those formulated in senates and recorded in statute books. The vast concentration of industry and wealth, resulting in immense fortunes on the one hand, and terrible poverty on the other, has separated the two classes by a chasm as deep and wide as ever yawned between czar and moujik, kaiser and vagrant, prince and pauper, feudal baron and serf. The immensity of the power and wealth thus concentrated into the hands of the few, to be inherited by their sons and daughters, tends to establish this class division hereditarily. Heretofore, passage from the lower class to the class above has been comparatively easy, and it has blinded people to the existing class antagonisms, though, as Mr. Ghent justly observes, it should no more be taken to disprove the existence of classes than the fact that so many thousands of Germans come to this country to settle is taken to disprove the existence of the German Empire.[127] The stereotyping of classes is undeniable. That a few men pass from one class to another is no disproof of this. The classes exist and the tendency is for them to remain permanently fixed, as a whole, in our social life. But passage from the lower class to the upper tends to become, if not absolutely impossible and unthinkable, at least practically impossible, and as difficult and rare as the transition from pauperism to princedom in the Old World is. A romantic European princess may marry a penurious coachman, and so provide the world with a nine days' sensation, but such cases are no rarer in the royal courts of Europe than in our own plutoaristocratic court circles. Has there ever been a king in modern times with anything like the power of Mr. Rockefeller? Is any feature of royal recognition withheld from Mr. Morgan when he goes abroad in state, an uncrowned king, fraternizing with crowned but envious fellow-kings? The existence of classes in America to-day is as evident as the existence of America itself. VI Antagonisms of class interests have existed from the very beginning of civilization, though not always recognized. It is only the consciousness of their existence, and the struggle which results from that consciousness, that are new. As we suddenly become aware of the pain and ravages of disease, when we have not felt or heeded its premonitory symptoms, so, having neglected the fundamental class division of society, the bitterness of the strife resulting therefrom shocks and alarms us. So long as it is possible for the stronger and more ambitious members of an inferior class to rise out of that class and join the ranks of a superior class, so long will the struggle which ensues as the natural outgrowth of opposing interests be postponed. Until quite recently, in the United States, this has been possible. Transition from the status of wage-worker to that of capitalist has been easy. But with the era of concentration and the immense capitals required for industrial enterprise, and the exhaustion of our supply of free land, these transitions become fewer and more difficult, and class lines tend to become permanently fixed. The stronger and more ambitious members of the lower class, finding it impossible to rise into the class above, thus become impressed with a consciousness of their class status. The average worker no longer dreams of himself becoming an employer after a few years of industry and thrift. The ambitious and aggressive few no longer look with the contempt of the strong for the weak upon their less aggressive fellow-workers, but become leaders, preachers of a significant and admittedly dangerous gospel of class consciousness. President Roosevelt has assailed the preachers of class consciousness with all the energy of a confirmed moralizer. It is evident, however, that he has never taken the trouble to study either the preachers or their gospel. Never in his utterances has there been any hint given of a recognition of the fact that there could be no preaching of class consciousness had there been no classes. Never has he manifested the faintest recognition of the existence of conditions which develop classes, out of which the class consciousness of the propagandists springs naturally. He does not see that there is danger only when the preachers are not wise enough, nor sufficiently educated to see their position in its historical perspective; when in blind revolt they engender class hatred, personal hatred of the capitalist by the worker. But when there is the historical perspective, wisdom to see that economic conditions develop slowly, and that the capitalist is no more responsible for conditions than the worker, there is not only no personal hatred for the capitalist engendered, but, more important still, the workers get a new view of the relationship of the classes, and their efforts are directed to the bringing about of peaceful change. The Socialists, accused as they are of seeking to stir up hatred and strife, by placing the class struggle in its proper light, as one of the great social dynamic forces, have done and are doing more to allay hatred and bitterness of feeling, and to save the world from the red curse of anarchistic vengeance, than all the Rooseveltian preaching in which thousands of venders of moral platitudes are engaged. The Socialist movement is vastly more powerful as a force against Anarchism, in its violent manifestations, than any other agency in the world. Wherever, as in Germany, the Socialist movement is strong, Anarchism is impotent and weak. The reason for this is the very obvious one here given. Class divisions are not created by Socialists, but developed in the womb of economic conditions. Class consciousness is not something which Socialism has developed. Before there was a Socialist movement, in the days of Luddite attacks upon machinery, and Captain Swing's rick-burners, there was class consciousness expressed in class revolt. Modern Socialism simply takes the class consciousness of the worker and educates it to see the futility of machine-destroying, or other foolish and abortive attacks upon capitalists and their property, and organizes it into a political movement for the peaceful transformation of society. VII Nowhere in the world, at any time in its history, has the antagonism of classes been more evident than in the United States at the present time. With an average of over a thousand strikes a year,[128] some of them involving, directly, tens of thousands of producers, a few capitalists, and millions of noncombatants, consumers; with strikes like this, boycotts, lockouts, injunctions, and all the other incidents of organized class strife reported daily by the newspapers, denials of the existence of classes, or of the struggle between them, are manifestly absurd. We have, on the one hand, organizations of workers, labor unions, with a membership of something over two million in the United States; one organization alone, the American Federation of Labor, having an affiliated membership of one million seven hundred thousand. On the other hand, we have organizations of employers, formed for the expressed purpose of fighting the labor unions, of which the National Association of Manufacturers is the most perfect type yet evolved. While the leaders on both sides frequently deny that their organizations betoken the existence of a far-reaching fundamental class conflict, and, through ostensibly pacificatory organizations like the National Civic Federation, proclaim the "essential identity of interests between capital and labor"; while an intelligent and earnest labor leader like Mr. John Mitchell joins with an astute capitalist leader like the late Senator Marcus A. Hanna in declaring that "there is no necessary hostility between labor and capital," that there is no "necessary, fundamental antagonism between the laborer and the capitalist,"[129] a brief study of the constitutions of these class organizations, and their published reports, in conjunction with the history of the labor struggle in the United States, in which the names of Homestead, Hazelton, Coeur d'Alene and Cripple Creek appear in bloody letters, will show these denials to be the offspring of hypocrisy or delusion. If this much-talked-of unity of interests is anything but a stupid fiction, the great and ever increasing strife is only a matter of mutual misunderstanding. All that is necessary to secure permanent peace is to remove that misunderstanding. If we believe this, it is a sad commentary upon human limitations, upon man's failure to understand his own life, that not a single person on either side has arisen with sufficient intelligence and breadth of vision to state the relations of the two classes with clarity and force enough to accomplish that end, to make them understand each other. Let us get down to fundamental principles.[130] Why do men organize into unions? Why was the first union started? Why do men pay out of their hard-earned wages to support unions now? The first union was not started because the men who started it did not understand their employers, or because they were misunderstood by their employers. The explanation involves a deeper insight into things than that. When the individual workingman, feeling that from the labor of himself and his fellows came the wealth and luxury of his employer, demanded higher wages, a reduction of the hours of labor, or better conditions in general, he was met with a reply from the employer--who understood the workingman's position very well, much better, in fact, than the workingman himself did--something like this, "If you don't like this job, and my terms, there are plenty of others outside ready to take your place." The workingman and the employer, then, understood each other perfectly. The employer understood the position of the worker, that he was dependent upon him, the employer, for opportunity to earn his bread. The worker understood that so long as the employer could discharge him and fill his place with another, he was powerless. The combat between the workers and the masters of their bread has from the first been an unequal one. Nothing remained for the individual workingman but to join with his fellows in a collective and united effort. So organizations of workers appeared, and the employers could not treat the demands for higher wages or other improvements in conditions as lightly as before. The workers, when they organized, could take advantage of the fact that there were no organizations of the employers. Every strike added to the ordinary terrors of the competitive struggle for the employers. The manufacturer whose men threatened to strike often surrendered because he feared most of all that his trade, in the event of a suspension of work, would be snatched by his rival in business. So, by playing upon the inherent weakness of the competitive system as it affected the employers, the workers gained many substantial advantages. There is no doubt whatsoever that under these conditions the wage-workers got better wages, better working conditions, and a reduction in the hours of labor. It was in many ways the golden age of trade unionism. But there was an important limitation of the workers' power--the unions could not absorb the man outside; they could not provide all the workers with employment. That is an essential condition of capitalist industry, there is always the "reserve army of the unemployed," to use the expressive phrase of Friederich Engels. Rare indeed are the times when all the available workers in any industry are employed, and the time has probably never yet been when all the available workers in all industries were employed. Notwithstanding this important limitation of power, it is incontrovertible that the workers were benefited by their organization. But only for a time. There came a time when the employers began to organize unions also. That they called their organizations by other and high-sounding names does not alter the fact that they were in reality unions formed to combat the unions of the workers. Every employers' association is, in reality, a union of the men who employ labor against the unions of the men they employ. When the organized workers went to individual, unorganized employers, who feared their rivals more than they feared the workers, or, rather, who feared the workers most of all because rivals waited to snatch their trade, a strike making their employees allies with their competitors, the employers were easily defeated. The workers could play one employer against another employer with constant success. But when the employers also organized, it was different. Then the individual employer, freed from his worst terrors, could say, "Do your worst. I, too, am in an organization." Then it became a battle betwixt organized capital and organized labor. When the workers went out on strike in one shop or factory, depending upon their brother unionists employed in other shops or factories, the employers of these latter locked them out, thus cutting off the financial support of the strikers. In other cases, when the workers in one place went out on strike, the employer got his work done through other employers, by the very fellow-members upon whom the strikers were depending for support. Thus the workers were compelled to face this dilemma, either to withdraw these men, thus cutting off their financial supplies, or to be beaten by their own members. Under these changed conditions, the workers were beaten time after time. It was a case of the worker's cupboard against the master's warehouse, purse against bank account, poverty against wealth. The workers' chances are slight in such a combat! A strike means that the employers on one side, and the workers on the other, seek to force each other to surrender by waiting patiently to see who first feels the pinch of hardship and poverty. Employers and employees determine to play the waiting game. Each waits patiently in the hope that the other will weaken. At last one--most often the workers'--side weakens and gives up the struggle. When the workers are thus beaten in a strike, they are not convinced that their demands are unreasonable or unjust; they are simply beaten because their resources are too small to enable them to stand the struggle. When the master class, the masters of jobs and bread, organized their forces, they set narrow and sharp boundaries to the power of labor organizations. Henceforth the chances of victory were overwhelmingly on the side of the employers. The workers learned by bitter and costly experience that they could not play the interests of individual employers against other employers' interests. Meantime, too, they have learned that they are not only exploited as producers, but also as buyers, as consumers. For long, dominated by economic theories, the Socialists refused to recognize this aspect of the labor struggle, though the workers felt it strongly enough. They set their fine-spun theories against the facts of life. Their contention was that wages being determined by the cost of living, it mattered nothing how much or how little the workers got in wages, the cost of living and wages adjusted themselves to each other. But in actual experience the workers found that when prices fall, wages are _quick_ to follow, whereas when prices soar high, wages are _slow_ to follow. Wages climb with leaden feet when prices soar with eagle wings. Because the workers are consumers, almost to the last penny of their incomes, having to spend practically every penny earned, that form of exploitation becomes a serious matter. But against this exploitation the unions have ever been absolutely powerless. Workingmen have never made any very serious attempt to protect the purchasing capacity of their wages, notwithstanding its tremendous importance.[131] The result has been that not a few of the "victories" so dearly won by trade union action have turned out to be hollow mockeries. When better wages have been secured, prices have often gone up, most often, in fact, so that the net result has been little to the advantage of the workers. In many cases, where the advance in wages applied only to a restricted number of trades, the advance in prices becoming general, the total result has been against the working class as a whole, and little or nothing to the advantage of the few who received the advance in immediate wages. At this point, the need is felt of a social revolution, not a violent revolution, be it understood, but a comprehensive social change which will give to the workers the control of the implements of labor, and also of the product of their labor. In other words, the demand arises for independent, working-class action, aiming at the socialization of the means of production and the product. VIII A line of cleavage thus presents itself between those, on the one hand, who would continue the old methods of economic warfare, together with the advocates of physical force, and, on the other hand, the advocates of united political action by the working class, consciously directed toward the socialization of industry and its products. The measure of the crystallization of this latter force is represented by the strength of the political Socialist movement. Whoever has studied the labor movement during the past few years must have realized that there is a tremendous drift of sentiment in favor of that policy in the labor unions of the country. The clamor for political action in the labor unions presages an enormous advance of the political Socialist movement during the next few years. The struggle between the capitalist and working classes must become a political issue, the supreme political issue. This must result, not only because the collective ownership of property can best be brought about by political methods, but also because the capitalists themselves have taken the industrial struggle into the political arena to suit themselves; and when the workers realize the issue and accept it, the capitalists will not be able to resist them. One is reminded of the saying of Marx that capitalism produces its own gravediggers. In taking the industrial issue into the political sphere, to suit their own immediate advantages, the capitalists were destined to reveal to the workers, sooner or later, their power and opportunity. Realizing that all the forces of government are on their side, the legislative, judicial, and executive powers being controlled by their own class, the employers have made the fight against labor political as well as economic in its character. When the workers have gone on strike and the employers have not cared to play the "waiting game," choosing rather to avail themselves of the great reserve army of unemployed workers outside, the natural resentment of the strikers, finding themselves in danger of being beaten by members of their own class, has led to violence which has been remorselessly suppressed by all the police and military forces at the command of the government. In many instances, the employers have purposely provoked striking workers to violence, and then called upon the government to crush the revolt thus made. Workers have been shot down at the shambles in almost every state, no matter which political party has been in power. Nor have these forces of our class government been used merely to punish lawless union men and women on strike, to uphold the "sacred majesty of the law," as the hypocritical phrase goes. They have been also used to deny strikers the rights which belonged to them, and to protect capitalists and their agents in breaking the laws. No one can read with anything like an impartial spirit the records of the miners' strike in the Coeur d'Alene mine, Idaho, or the labor disturbances in the state of Colorado from 1880 to 1905 and dispute this assertion. Most important of all has been the powerful opposition of the makers and interpreters of the law. A body of class legislation, in the interests of the employing class, has been created, while the workers have begged in vain for protective legislation. In no country of the world have the interests of the workers been so neglected as in the United States. There is practically no such thing as employers' liability for accidents to workers; no legislation worthy of mention relating to occupations which have been classified as "dangerous" in most industrial countries; women workers are sadly neglected. Whenever a law of distinct advantage to the workers in their struggle has been passed, a servile judiciary has been ready to render it null and void by declaring it to be unconstitutional. No more powerful blows have ever been directed against the workers than by the judiciary. Injunctions have been issued, robbing the workers of the most elemental rights of manhood and citizenship. They have forbidden things which no law forbids, and even things which the Constitution and statute law declare to be legal. Mr. John Mitchell refers to this subject, in strong but not too strong terms. "No weapon," he says, "has been used with such disastrous effect against trade unions as the injunction in labor disputes. By means of it, trade unionists have been prohibited under severe penalties from doing what they had a legal right to do, and have been specifically directed to do what they had a legal right not to do. It is difficult to speak in measured tones or moderate language of the savagery and venom with which unions have been assailed by the injunction, and to the working classes, as to all fair-minded men, it seems little less than a crime to condone or tolerate it."[132] This is strong language, but who shall say that it is too strong when we remember the many injunctions which have been hurled at organized labor since the famous Debs case brought this weapon into general use? In this celebrated case, which grew out of the Pullman strike, in 1894, Eugene V. Debs, president of the American Railway Union, was arrested and arraigned on indictments of obstructing the mails and interstate commerce. Although arraigned, he was not tried, the case being abandoned, despite his demands for a trial. President Cleveland's strike commission subsequently declared, "There is no evidence before the commission that the officers of the American Railway Union at any time participated in or advised intimidation, violence, or destruction of property." Realizing that it had no sort of evidence upon which a jury might be hoped to convict, a new way was found. Debs and his officers were enjoined in a famous "blanket" injunction directed against Debs and all other officials of the union, and "all persons whomsoever." For an alleged violation of that injunction, Judge Woods, without trial by jury, sentenced Debs to six months' imprisonment and his associates to three months'. The animus and class bias of the whole proceeding may be judged from the fact that President Cleveland selected to represent the United States Government, at Chicago, Mr. Edwin Walker, general counsel at that very time for the General Managers' Association, representing the twenty-four railroads centering or terminating in Chicago. And these railroads were operating in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Law at the time.[133] In 1899 an injunction was issued out of the United States Circuit Court of West Virginia against "John Smith and others," without naming the "others," in the interest of the Wheeling Railway Company. Two men, neither of them being John Smith, nor found to be the agent of "John Smith and others," were jailed for contempt of court![134] In 1900 members of the International Cigarmakers' Union, in New York City, were enjoined by Justice Freeman, in the Supreme Court, from even approaching their former employers for the purpose of attempting to arrange a peaceable settlement! The cigarmakers were further enjoined from publishing their grievances, or in any manner making their case known to the public, if the tendency of that should be to vex the plaintiffs or make them uneasy; from trying, even in a peaceful way, in any place in the city, even in the privacy of a man's own home, to persuade a new employee that he ought to sympathize with the union cause sufficiently to refuse to work for unjust employers; and, finally, the union was forbidden to pay money to its striking members to support them and their families. In the great steel strike of 1901, the members of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers were enjoined from peaceably discussing the merits of their claim with the men who were at work, even though the latter might raise no objection. In Pennsylvania, in the case of the York Manufacturing Company _vs._ Obedick, it was held that workmen had "no legal right" to persuade or induce other workmen to quit, or not to accept, employment.[135] In the strike of the members of the International Typographical Union against the Buffalo _Express_, the strikers were enjoined from discussing the strike, or talking about the paper in any way which might be construed as being against the paper. If one of the strikers advised a friend not to buy a "scab" paper, he was liable under the terms of that injunction to imprisonment for contempt of court. The members of the same union were, in the case of the Sun Printing and Publishing Company _vs_. Delaney and others, enjoined by Justice Bookstaver, in the Supreme Court of New York, from publishing their side of the controversy with the _Sun_ as an argument why persons friendly to organized labor should not advertise in a paper hostile to it. In 1906 members of the same union were enjoined by Supreme Court Justice Gildersleeve from "making any requests, giving any advice, or resorting to any persuasion ... to overcome the free will of any person connected with the plaintiff [a notorious anti-union publishing company] or its customers as employees or otherwise."[136] These are only a few examples of the abuse of the injunction in labor disputes, hundreds of which have been granted, many of them equally subversive of all sound principles of popular government. There is probably not another civilized country in which such judicial tyranny would be tolerated. It is not without significance that in West Virginia, where, as a result of an outcry against a number of particularly glaring abuses of the power to issue injunctions, the legislature passed a law limiting the right to issue injunctions, the Supreme Court decided that the law was unconstitutional, upon the ground that the legislature had no right to attempt to restrain the courts which were coördinate with itself. Even more dangerous to organized labor than the injunction is what is popularly known by union men as "Taff Vale law." Our judges have not been slow to follow the example set by the English judges in the famous case of the Taff Vale Railway Company against the officers of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, a powerful labor organization. The decision in that case was most revolutionary. It compelled the workers to pay damages, to the extent of $115,000, to the railroad company for losses sustained by the company through a strike of its employees, members of the defendant union. That decision struck terror into the hearts of British trade unionists. At last they had to face a mode of attack even more dangerous than the injunction which their transatlantic brethren had so long been contending against. Taff Vale law could not long be confined to England. Very soon, our American courts followed the English example. A suit was instituted against the members of a lodge of the Machinists' Union in Rutland, Vermont, and the defendants were ordered to pay $2500. A writ was served upon each member and the property of every one of them attached. Since that time, numerous other decisions of a like nature have been rendered in various parts of the country. Thus the unions have been assailed in a vital place, their treasuries. It is manifestly foolish and quite useless for the members of a union to strike against an employer for any purpose whatever, if the employer is to be able to recover damages from the union. Taff Vale judge-made law renders the labor union _hors de combat_ at a stroke. IX The immediate effect of the revolutionary judicial decision in England was to arouse the workers to the necessity for class-conscious political action. The cry went up that the unions must adopt a policy of independent political action. There is no doubt whatever that the tremendous advance of the Socialist movement in England during the past few years began as a result of the attack made upon the funds of the labor unions. From the moment of the Taff Vale decision the Socialist movement in England took rapid strides. A similar process is going on in this country, gathering momentum with every injunction against organized labor, every hostile enactment of legislatures, and every use of the judicial and executive powers to defeat the workers in their struggle against capitalism. The workers are being educated to political Socialism by the stern experiences resulting from capitalist rule. Underneath the thin veneer of party differences, the worker sees the class identity of the great political parties, and cries out, "A plague on both your houses!" The Socialist argument comes to him with a twofold force: not only does it show him how he is enslaved and exploited as a producer, but it convinces him that as a citizen he has it in his power to control the government and make it what he will. He can put an end to government by injunctions, to the use of police, state, and federal troops to break strikes, and to the sequestration of union funds by hostile judges. He can, if he so decides, own and control the government, and, through the government, own and control the essentials of life: be master of his own labor, his own bread, his own life. If we take for granted that the universal increase of Socialist sentiment, and the growth of political Socialism, as measured by its rapidly increasing vote, presage this great triumph of the working class; that the heretofore despised and oppressed proletariat is, in a not far distant future, to rule instead of being ruled, the question arises, will the last state be better than the first? Will society be bettered by the change of masters? The very form of the question must be denied. It is not a movement for a change of masters. To regard this struggle of the classes as one of revenge, of exploited masses ready to overturn the social structure that they may become exploiters instead of exploited, is to misread the whole movement. The political and economic conquest of society by the working class means the end of class divisions once and forever. A social democracy, a society in which all things essential to the common life and well-being are owned and controlled by the people in common, democratically organized, precludes the existence of class divisions in our present-day economic and political sense. Profit, through human exploitation, alone has made class divisions possible, and the Socialist régime will abolish profit. The working class, in emancipating itself, at the same time makes liberty possible for the whole race of man, and destroys the conditions of class rule. FOOTNOTES: [116] The _Communist Manifesto_, Kerr edition, page 8. [117] In _Centralization and the Law: Scientific Legal Education, An Illustration_, edited by Melville M. Bigelow. [118] See, for instance, _The Coal Mine Workers_, by Frank Julian Warne, Ph.D. (1905). [119] Adam Smith, _The Wealth of Nations_, Vol. I, Book I, Chapter VIII. [120] _The Common Sense of Socialism_, by John Spargo, page 131 (1908). [121] See, for instance, _The American Farmer_, by A. M. Simons, page 130; _Agrarfrage_, by Karl Kautsky, pages 305-306. [122] Mr. Ghent's excellent work, _Mass and Class_, and Karl Kautsky's _Ethics and the Materialistic Conception of History_, may be named as excellent examples of what Socialists have done in this direction. [123] In _The Worker_ (New York), March 25, 1905. [124] Cf., for instance, _The Labor History of the Cripple Creek District_, by Benjamin McKie Rastall (1908), and Senate Document No. 122, being _A Report on Labor Disturbances in the State of Colorado, from 1880 to 1904, Inclusive_, by Carroll D. Wright (1905), for evidence of this from sources not specially friendly to the miners. [125] _Mass and Class_, page 101. [126] _Message to Congress_, January, 1906. [127] _Mass and Class_, page 53. [128] Vide _War of the Classes_, by Jack London, page 17. [129] _Organized Labor_, by John Mitchell, page ix. [130] The remainder of this chapter is largely reproduced from my little pamphlet, _Shall the Unions go into Politics?_ [131] This aspect of the exploitation of the laborers has been brought to the front very dramatically by the many recent "strikes" against high rents and high prices for meat and other commodities. Rent strikes and riots against high prices have become common events in our large cities. [132] _Organized Labor_, by John Mitchell, page 324. [133] See _Report of Commission of Investigation_, Senate Ex. Doc. No. 7, Fifty-third Congress, third session. [134] Particulars are taken from a pamphlet by five members of the New York Bar and issued by the Social Reform Club, New York, in 1900. [135] See the article by Judge Seabury, _The Abuses of Injunctions, in The Arena_, June, 1903. [136] See the New York daily papers, January 31, 1906. CHAPTER VII KARL MARX AND THE ECONOMICS OF SOCIALISM I The first approach to a comprehensive treatment by Marx of the materialistic conception of history appeared in 1847, several months before the publication of the _Communist Manifesto_, in "La Misère de la Philosophie,"[137] the famous polemic with which Marx assailed J. P. Proudhon's _La Philosophie de la Misère_. Marx had worked out his theory at least two years before, so Engels tells us, and in his writings of that period there are several evidences of the fact. In "La Misère de la Philosophie," the theory is fundamental to the work, and not merely the subject of incidental allusion. This little book, all too little known in England and America, is therefore important from this historical point of view. In it, Marx for the first time shows his complete confidence in the theory. It needed confidence little short of sublime to challenge Proudhon in the audacious manner of this scintillating critique. The torrential eloquence, the scornful satire, and fierce invective of the attack, have rather tended to obscure for readers of a later generation the real merit of the book, the importance of the fundamental idea that history must be interpreted in the light of economic development, that economic evolution determines social life. The book is important for two other reasons. First, it was the author's first serious essay in economic science--in the preface he boldly and frankly calls himself an economist--and, second, in it appears a full and generous recognition of that brilliant coterie of English Socialist writers of the Ricardian school from whom Marx has been unjustly, and almost spitefully, charged with "pillaging" his principal ideas. What led Marx to launch out upon the troubled sea of economic science, when all his predilections were for the study of pure philosophy, was the fact that his philosophical studies had led him to a point whence further progress seemed impossible, except by way of economics. The Introduction to "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy" makes this perfectly clear. Having decided that "the method of production in material existence conditions social, political, and mental evolution in general," a study of economics, and especially an analysis of modern industrial society, became inevitable. During the year 1845, when the theory of the economic interpretation of history was absorbing his attention, Marx spent six weeks in England with his friend Engels, and became acquainted with the work of the Ricardian Socialists already referred to.[138] Engels had been living in England about three years at this time, and had made an exhaustive investigation of industrial conditions there, and become intimately acquainted with the leaders of the Chartist movement. His fine library contained most of the works of contemporary writers, and it was thus that Marx came to know them. Foremost of this school of Socialists which had arisen, quite naturally, in the land where capitalism flourished at its best, were William Godwin, Charles Hall, William Thompson, John Gray, Thomas Hodgskin, and John Francis Bray. With the exception of Hall, of whose privately printed book, "The Effects of Civilisation on the People of the European States," 1805, he seems not to have known, Marx was familiar with the writings of all the foregoing, and his obligations to some of them, especially Thompson, Hodgskin, and Bray, were not slight. While the charge, made by Dr. Anton Menger,[139] among others, that Marx took his surplus value theory from Thompson is quite absurd, and rests, as Bernstein has pointed out, upon nothing but the fact that Thompson used the words "surplus value" frequently, but not at all in the same sense as that in which Marx uses them,[140] we need not attempt to dispute the fact that Marx gleaned much of value from Thompson and the two other writers. While criticising them, and pointing out their shortcomings, Marx himself frequently pays tributes of respect to each of them. His indebtedness to any of them, or to all of them, consists simply in the fact that he recognized the germinal truths in their writings, and saw far beyond what they saw. Godwin's most important work, "An Inquiry Concerning Political Justice," appeared in 1793, and contains the germ of much that is called Marxian Socialism. In it may be found the broad lines of the thought which marks much of our present-day Socialist teaching, especially the criticism of capitalist society. Marx, however, does not appear to have been directly influenced by it to any extent. That he was influenced by it indirectly, through William Thompson, Godwin's most illustrious disciple, is, however, quite certain. Thompson wrote several works of a Socialist character, of which "An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth most Conducive to Human Happiness, Applied to the newly proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth," 1824, and "Labour Rewarded. The Claims of Labour and Capital Conciliated, or How to Secure to Labour the Whole Products of its Exertions," 1827, are the most important and best known. Thompson must be regarded as one of the greatest precursors of Marx in the development of modern Socialist theory. A Ricardian of the Ricardians, he states the law of wages in language that is almost as emphatic as Lassalle's famous _Ehernes Lohngesetz_, which Marx made the butt of his satire.[141] Accepting the view of Ricardo,--and indeed, of Adam Smith and other earlier English economists, including Petty,--that labor is the sole source of exchange value,[142] he shows by cogent argument the exploitation of the laborer, and uses the term "surplus value" to designate the difference between the cost of maintaining the laborer and the value of his labor product, assisted, of course, by machinery and other capital, which goes to the capitalist. By a most labored argument, Professor Anton Menger has attempted to create the impression that Marx took, without acknowledgment, his _theory of the manner in which surplus value is produced_ from Thompson, simply because Thompson frequently used the _term itself_.[143] Marx never claimed to have originated the term. It is to be found in the writings of earlier economists than Thompson even, and Marx quotes an anonymous pamphlet entitled _The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties_. _A Letter to Lord John Russell_, published in London in 1821, in which the phrase "the quantity of the surplus value appropriated by the capitalist" appears.[144] Nor did Marx claim to be the first to distinguish surplus value. That had been done very clearly by many others, including Adam Smith.[145] What is original in Marx is the explanation of the manner in which surplus value is produced. John Gray's "A Lecture on Human Happiness," published in 1825, has been described by Professor Foxwell as being "certainly one of the most remarkable of Socialist writings,"[146] and the summary of the rare little work which he gives amply justifies the description. Gray published other works of note, two of which, "The Social System, a Treatise on the Principle of Exchange," 1831, and "Lectures on the Nature and Use of Money," 1848, Marx subjects to a rigorous criticism in "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy." Thomas Hodgskin's best-known works are "Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital," 1825, and "The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted," 1832. The former, which Marx calls "an admirable work," is only a small tract of thirty-four pages, but its influence in England and America was very great. Hodgskin was a man of great culture and erudition, with a genius for popular writing upon difficult topics. It is interesting to know that in a letter to his friend, Francis Place, he sketched a book which he proposed writing, "curiously like Marx's 'Capital,'" according to Place's biographer, Mr. Wallas,[147] and from which the conservative old reformer dissuaded him. John Francis Bray was a journeyman printer about whom very little is known. His "Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy," published in Leeds in 1839, Marx calls "a remarkable work," and in his attack upon Proudhon he quotes from it extensively to show that Bray had anticipated the French writer's theories.[148] The justification for this lengthy digression from the main theme of the present chapter lies in the fact that so many critics have sought to fasten the charge of dishonesty upon Marx, and claimed that the ideas with which his name is associated were taken by him, without acknowledgment, from these English Ricardians. As a matter of fact, no economist of note ever quoted his authorities, or acknowledged his indebtedness to others, more generously than did Marx, and it is exceedingly doubtful whether even the names of the precursors whose ideas he is accused of stealing would be known to his critics but for his frank recognition of them. No candid reader of Marx can fail to notice that he is most careful to show how nearly these writers approached the truth as he conceived it. II When the February revolution of 1848 broke out, Marx was in Brussels. The authorities there compelling him to leave Belgian soil, at the request of the Prussian government, he returned to Paris, but not for a long stay. The revolutionary struggle in Germany stirred his blood, and with Engels, Wilhelm Wolf, the intimate friend to whom he later dedicated the first volume of "Capital," and Ferdinand Freiligrath, the fiery poet of the movement, Marx started the _New Rhenish Gazette_. Unlike the first _Rhenish Gazette_, the new journal was absolutely free from control by business policy. Twice Marx was summoned to appear at the Cologne assizes, upon charges of inciting the people to rebellion, and each time he defended himself with superb audacity and skill, and was acquitted. But in June, 1849, the authorities suppressed the paper, because of the support it gave to the risings in Dresden and the Rhine Province. Marx was expelled from Prussia and once more sought a refuge in Paris, which he was allowed to enjoy only for a very brief time. Forbidden by the French government to stay in Paris, or any other part of France except Brittany, which, says Liebknecht, was considered "fireproof," Marx turned to London, the mecca of all political exiles, arriving there toward the end of June, 1849. His removal to London was one of the crucial events in the life of Marx. It became possible for him, in the classic land of capitalism, to pursue his economic studies in a way that was not possible anywhere else in the world. As Liebknecht says: "Here in London, the metropolis (mother city) and the center of the world, and of the world of trade--the watch tower of the world whence the trade of the world and the political and economical bustle of the world may be observed, in a way impossible in any other part of the globe--here Marx found what he sought and needed, the bricks and mortar for his work. 'Capital' could be created in London only."[149] Already much more familiar with English political economy than most English writers of his time, and with the fine library of the British Museum at his command, Marx felt that the time had at last arrived when he could devote himself to his long-cherished plan of writing a great treatise upon political economy as a secure basis for the theoretical structure of Socialism. With this object in view, he resumed his economic studies in 1850, soon after his arrival in London. The work proceeded slowly, however, principally owing to the long and bitter struggle with poverty which encompassed Marx and his gentle wife. For years they suffered all the miseries of acute poverty, and even afterward, when the worst was past, the principal source of income, at times almost the only source in fact, was the five dollars a week received from the _New York Tribune_, for which Marx acted as special correspondent, and to which he contributed some of his finest work.[150] There are few pictures more pathetic, albeit also heroic, than that which we have of the great thinker and his devoted wife struggling against poverty during the first few years of their stay in London. Often the little family suffered the pangs of hunger, and Marx and a group of fellow-exiles used to resort to the reading room of the British Museum, weak from lack of food very often, but grateful for the warmth and shelter of that hospitable spot. The family lived some time in two small rooms in a cheap lodging house on Dean Street, the front room serving as reception room and study, and the back room serving for everything else. In a diary note, Mrs. Marx has herself left us an impressive picture of the suffering of those early years in London. Early in 1852, death entered the home for the first time, taking away a little daughter. Only a few weeks later another little daughter died, and Mrs. Marx wrote concerning this event:-- "On Easter of the same year--1852--our poor little Francisca died of severe bronchitis. Three days the poor child was struggling with death. It suffered so much. Its little lifeless body rested in the small back room; we all moved together into the front room, and when night approached, we made our beds on the floor. There the three living children were lying at our side, and we cried about the little angel, who rested cold and lifeless near us. The death of the dear child fell into the time of the most bitter poverty ... (the money for the burial of the child was missing). In the anguish of my heart I went to a French refugee who lived near, and who had sometimes visited us. I told him our sore need. At once with the friendliest kindness he gave me two pounds. With that we paid for the little coffin in which the poor child now sleeps peacefully. I had no cradle for her when she was born, and even the last small resting place was long denied her. What did we suffer when it was carried away to its last place of rest!"[151] The poverty, of which we have here such a graphic view, lasted for several years beyond the publication of the "Critique," on to the appearance of the first volume of "Capital." When this struggle is remembered and understood, it becomes easier to appreciate the life work of the great Socialist thinker. "It was a terrible time, but it was grand nevertheless," wrote Liebknecht years afterward to Eleanor Marx. As this is the last place in which the personality of Marx, or his personal affairs, will be discussed in this volume, and in view of constant misrepresentations on the part of unscrupulous opponents of Socialism, a further word concerning his family life may not be out of place. Those persons who regard Socialism as being antagonistic to the family relation, and fear it in consequence, will find no suggestion of support for that view in either the life of Marx or his teaching. The love of Marx and his wife for each other was beautiful and idyllic. A true account of their love and devotion would rank with the most beautiful love stories in literature. Their friends understood that, too, and there is a world of significance in the one brief sentence spoken by Engels, when told of the death of his friend's beautiful wife, who was likewise his own dear friend: "Mohr [Negro, a nickname given to Marx by his friends when young, on account of his mass of black hair and whiskers] is dead too," he said simply. He knew that from this blow Marx could not recover. It was indeed true. Though he lingered on for about three months after her death, the life of Marx really ended when the playmate of his boyhood, and the lover and companion of all the years of struggle, died with the name of her dear "Karl" upon her lips. Marx was an ideal father as well as an ideal husband. Always passionately fond of children, he could not resist the temptation to join the games of children upon the streets, and in the neighborhoods where he lived the children soon learned to regard him as their friend. To his own children he was a real companion, always ready to amuse and to be amused by them. III The studious years spent in the reading room of the British Museum complete the anglicization of Marx. "Capital" is essentially an English work, the fact of its having been written in German, by a German writer, being merely incidental. No more distinctively English treatise on political economy was ever written, not even "The Wealth of Nations." Even the method and style of the book are, contrary to general opinion, much more distinctly English than German. I do not forget his Hegelian dialectic with its un-English subtleties, but against that must be placed the directness, vigor, and pointedness of style, and the cogent reasoning, with its wealth of concrete illustrations, which are as characteristically English. Marx belongs to the school of Petty, Smith, and Ricardo, and their work is the background of his. "Capital" was the child of English industrial conditions and English thought, born by chance upon German soil. Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, English economic thought was entirely dominated by the ideas and methods of Ricardo, who has been described by Senior, not without justice, as "the most incorrect writer who ever attained philosophical eminence."[152] So far as such a sweeping criticism can be justified by looseness in the use of terms, it is justified by Ricardo's failing in this respect. That he should have attained the eminence he did, dominating English economic thought for so many years, in spite of the confusion which his loose and uncertain use of words occasioned, is not less a tribute to Ricardo's genius than evidence of the poverty of political economy in England at that time. In view of the constant and tiresome reiteration of the charge that Marx pillaged his labor-value theory from Thompson, Hodgskin, Bray, or some other more or less obscure writer of the Ricardian school, it is well to remember that there is nothing in the works of any of these writers connected with the theory of value which is not to be found in the earlier work of Ricardo himself. In like manner, the theory can be traced back from Ricardo to the master he honored, Adam Smith. Furthermore, almost a century before the appearance of "The Wealth of Nations," Sir William Petty had anticipated the so-called Ricardian labor-value theory of Smith and his followers. Petty, rather than Smith, is entitled to be regarded as the founder of the classical school of political economy, and Cossa justly calls him "one of the most illustrious forerunners of the science of statistical research."[153] He may indeed fairly be said to have been the father of statistical science, and was the first to apply statistics, or "political arithmetick," as he called it, to the elucidation of economic theory. He boasts that "instead of using only comparative and superlative Words, and intellectual Arguments," his method is to speak "in Terms of Number, Weight, or Measure; to use only Arguments of Sense; and to consider only such Causes, as have visible Foundations in Nature; leaving those that depend upon the mutable Minds, Opinions, Appetites, and Passions of particular Men, to the Consideration of others."[154] The celebrated saying of this sagacious thinker that "labor is the father and active principle of wealth; lands are the mother," is more Marxian than Ricardian. Petty divided the population into two classes, the productive and non-productive, and insisted that the value of all things depends upon the labor it costs to produce them. This is, as we shall see, entirely Ricardian, but not Marxian. But these are the ideas Marx is supposed to have borrowed, without acknowledgment, from comparatively obscure followers of Ricardo, in spite of the fact that he gives abundant credit to the earlier writer. It has been asked with ample justification whether these critics of Marx have read either the works of Marx or his predecessors. Adam Smith, who accepted the foregoing principles laid down by Petty, followed his example of basing his conclusions largely upon observed facts instead of abstractions. It is not the least of Smith's merits that, despite his many digressions, looseness of phraseology, and other admitted defects, his love for the concrete kept his feet upon the solid ground of fact. With his successors, notably Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, it was far otherwise. They made political economy an isolated study of abstract doctrines. Instead of a study of the meaning and relation of facts, it became a cult of abstractions, and the aim of its teachers seemed to be to render the science as little scientific, and as dull, as possible. They set up an abstraction, an "economic man," and created for it a world of economic abstractions. It is impossible to read either Ricardo or John Stuart Mill, but especially the latter, without feeling the artificiality of the superstructures they created, and the justice of Carlyle's description of such political economy as the "dismal science." With a realism greater even than Adam Smith's, and a more logical method than Ricardo or John Stuart Mill, Marx restored the science of political economy to its old fact foundations. IV The superior insight of Marx is shown in the very first sentence of his great work. The careful reader at once perceives that the first paragraph of the book strikes a keynote which distinguishes it from all other economic works comparable to it in importance. Marx was a great master of the art of luminous and exact definition, and nowhere is this more strikingly shown than in this opening sentence of "Capital": "The wealth of those societies _in which the capitalist mode of production prevails_ presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities, its unit being a single commodity."[155] In this simple, lucid sentence the theory of social evolution is clearly implied. The author repudiates, by implication, the idea that it is possible to lay down universal or eternal laws, and limits himself to the exploration of the phenomena appearing in a certain stage of historical development. We are not to have another abstract economic man with a world of abstractions all his own; lone, shipwrecked mariners upon barren islands, imaginary communities nicely adapted for demonstration purposes in college class rooms, and all the other stage properties of the political economists, are to be entirely discarded. Our author does not propose to give us a set of principles by which we shall be able to understand and explain the phenomena of human society at all times and in all places--the Israel of the Mosaic Age, the nomadic life of Arab tribes, Europe in the Middle Ages, and England in the nineteenth century. In effect, the passage under consideration says: "Political economy is the study of the principles and laws governing the production and distribution of wealth. Because of the fact that in the progress of society different systems of wealth production and exchange, and different concepts of wealth, prevail at different times, and at various places at the same time, we cannot formulate any laws which will apply to all times and all places. We must choose for examination and study a certain form of production, representing a particular stage of historical development, and be careful not to attempt to apply any of its laws to other forms of production, representing other stages of development. We might have chosen to investigate the laws which governed the production of wealth in the ancient Babylonian Empire, or in Mediæval Europe, had we so desired, but we have chosen instead the period in which we live." This that we call the capitalist epoch has grown out of the geographical discoveries and the mechanical inventions of the past three hundred years or so, especially of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its chief characteristic, from an economic point of view, is that of production for sale instead of direct use as in earlier stages of social development. Of course, barter and sale are much older than this epoch which we are discussing. In all ages men have exchanged their surplus products for other things more desirable to them, either directly by barter or through some medium of exchange. In the very nature of things, however, such exchange as this must have been incidental to the life of the people engaging in it, and not its principal aim. Under such conditions of society wealth consists in the possession of useful things. The naked savage, so long as he possessed plenty of weapons, and could get an abundance of fish or game, was, from the viewpoint of the society in which he lived, a wealthy man. In other words, the wealth of pre-capitalist society consisted in the possession of use-values, and not of exchange-values. Robinson Crusoe, for whom the possibility of exchange did not exist, was, from this pre-capitalist viewpoint, a very wealthy man. In our present society, production is carried on primarily for exchange, for sale. The first and essential characteristic feature of wealth in this stage of social development is that it takes the form of accumulated exchange-values, or commodities. Men are accounted rich or poor according to the exchange-values they can command, and not according to the use-values they can command. To use a favorite example, the man who owns a ton of potatoes is far richer in simple use-values than the man whose only possession is a sack of diamonds, but, because in present society a sack of diamonds will exchange for an almost infinite quantity of potatoes, the owner of the diamonds is much wealthier than the owner of the potatoes. The criterion of wealth in capitalist society is exchangeable value as opposed to use-value, the criterion of wealth in primitive society. The unit of wealth is therefore a commodity, and we must begin our investigation with it. If we can analyze the nature of a commodity so that we can understand how and why it is produced, and how and why it is exchanged, we shall be able to understand the principle governing the production and exchange of wealth in this and every other society where similar conditions prevail, where, that is to say, the unit of wealth is a commodity, and wealth consists in an accumulation of commodities. V The visit to America, in 1907, of a distinguished English critic of Socialism, Mr. W. H. Mallock, had the effect of thrusting into prominence a common misconception of Marxian Socialism, and it is highly significant that, except in the Socialist press, none of the numerous comments which the series of university lectures delivered by that gentleman occasioned, called attention to the fact that they were based throughout upon a misstatement of the Marxian position. Briefly, Mr. Mallock insisted that Marx believed and taught that all wealth is produced by manual labor, and that, therefore, it ought to belong to the manual workers. In order that there may be no misstatement of our amiable critic's position, it will be best to quote his own words. He says, in Lecture I: "The practical outcome of the scientific economics of Marx is summed up in the formula which is the watchword of popular Socialism. 'All wealth is due to labor; therefore all wealth ought to go to the laborer'--a doctrine in itself not novel, but presented by Marx as the outcome of an elaborate system of economics"[156] (page 6). The careful reader will notice that Mr. Mallock does not profess to give the exact words of Marx, nor refer to any particular passage, but says that the formula quoted by him is the "practical outcome" of the economic system of Marx, "presented by Marx" as such. But to quote again: "Wealth, says Marx, not only ought to be, but actually can be distributed amongst a certain class of persons, namely, the laborers.... Because these laborers comprise in the acts of labor everything that is involved in the production of it" (page 7). Again: " ... Marx makes of his doctrine that labor alone produces all economic wealth" (page 7). Also: " ... that theory of production which the genius of Karl Marx invested with a semblance, at all events, of sober, scientific truth, and which ascribes all wealth to that _ordinary manual labor which brings the sweat to the brow of the ordinary laboring man_" (page 12).[157] All the foregoing passages are taken from a single lecture, the first of the series. We will take only a few from the others: " ... the doctrine of Marx that all productive effort is absolutely equal in productivity" (Lecture III, page 46); "Marx based the ethics of distribution on what purported to be an analysis of production" (Lecture IV, page 61); " ... Count Tolstoy, ... like Socialists of the school of Marx, declares that ordinary manual labor is the source of all wealth" (Lecture IV, page 76). "One is the attempt of Marx and his school, which represents ordinary manual labor as the sole producer of wealth" (Lecture IV, page 81); " ... the Marxian doctrine ... that manual labor is the sole producer of wealth" (Lecture V, page 115). It would be easy to add many other quotations very similar to these, but it is unnecessary. From the quotations given we can gather Mr. Mallock's conception of what Marx taught regarding the source of wealth. It will be seen that Mr. Mallock alleges: (1) That Marx believed and taught that all wealth is produced by ordinary manual labor; (2) that he held, as a consequence, that all wealth ought to belong to the manual laborers, thus basing an ethic of distribution upon production; (3) that he taught that all productive effort is absolutely equal in productive value, in other words, that ten hours' work of one kind is economically as valuable as ten hours' of any other kind, so long as the labor is productive. It is not easy to command the necessary self-restraint to reply with dignity to such wholesale misrepresentation as this. There is not the slightest scintilla of a foundation in fact for any one of the three statements. Not a single passage can be quoted from Marx which justifies any one of them. As we shall see, Marx specifically repudiated each one of them, a great deal more forcefully than Mr. Mallock does. That such misrepresentations of Marx should have been permitted to pass unchallenged in so many of our great colleges and universities is to our national shame. We will briefly consider the teaching of Marx under each of the three heads. First, the source of wealth. It is true that such phrases as "Labor is the source of all wealth" are constantly met with in the popular literature of Socialism, but so far as that is the case it is not due to the teaching of Marx, but rather in spite of it. In the writings of the early Ricardian Socialists these phrases abound, but nowhere in all the writings of Marx will such a statement be found. For many years the opening sentence in the Programme of the German party contained the phrase "Labor is the source of all wealth and of all culture," _but it was adopted in spite of the protest of Marx_. The Gotha Programme was adopted in 1875. A draft was submitted to Marx and he wrote of it that it was "utterly condemnable and demoralizing to the party." Of the passage in question, he wrote: "Labor is _not_ the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use-values (and of such, to be sure, is material wealth composed) as is labor, which itself is but the expression of a natural force, of human labor-power."[158] That the clause was adopted was a bitter disappointment to Marx, and was due to the insistence of the followers of Ferdinand Lassalle. To say that Marx held labor to be the sole source of wealth is to misrepresent his whole teaching.[159] But while the Lassallians, and before them the Ricardians, used the _phrase_, it is evident that they assumed the inclusion of what Marx calls "Nature." They know very well that labor, mere exertion of physical strength, could produce nothing. If, for instance, a man were to spend all his strength trying to lift the pyramids, alone and unaided by mechanical power, it is quite evident to the meanest intellect that his exertions would not produce a single atom of wealth. It is equally obvious that if we take any use-value, whether it be an exchange-value or not being immaterial, we cannot eliminate from it the substance of which it is composed. Take, for example, the canoe of a savage, which is a simple use-value, and a meerschaum pipe, which is a commodity. In the canoe we have part of the trunk of a tree taken from the primeval forest, one of Nature's products. But without the labor of the savage it would never have become a canoe. It would have remained simply part of the trunk of a tree, and would not have acquired the use-value it has as a canoe. But it is likewise true that without the tree the canoe could not have existed. So with our meerschaum pipe. It is not simply a use-value: it is also an article of commerce, an exchange-value, a commodity. Its elements are, the silicate mineral which Nature provided and the form which human labor has given it. We can apply this test to every form of wealth, whether simple use-values or commodities, and we shall find that, in Mill's phrase, wealth is produced by the application of human labor to _appropriate natural objects_. This brings us to the second point in Mr. Mallock's criticism, namely, that Marx held that only "ordinary manual labor" is capable of producing wealth, and that, therefore, all wealth ought to go to the manual laborers. One looks in vain for a single passage in all the writings of Marx which will justify this criticism. It may be conceded at once that if Marx taught anything of the kind, the defect in Marxian theory is fatal. But it must be proven that the defect exists--and the _onus probandi_ rests upon Mr. Mallock. One need not be a trained economist or a learned philosopher to see how absurd such a theory must be. Suppose we take, for example, a man working in a factory, at a great machine, making screws. We go to that man and say: "Every screw here is made by manual labor alone. The machine does not count; the brains of the inventors of the machine have nothing to do with the making of screws." Our laborer might be illiterate and unable to read a single page of political economy with understanding, but he would know that our statement was foolish and untrue. Or, suppose we take the machine itself and say to the laborer: "That great machine with all its levers and wheels and springs working in such beautiful harmony was made entirely by manual workers, such as molders, blacksmiths, and machinists; no brain workers had anything to do with the making of it; the labor of the inventors, and of the men who drew the plans and supervised the making, had nothing to do with the production of the machine"--our laborer would rightly conclude that we were either fools or seeking to mock him as one. Curiously enough, notwithstanding the frequent reiteration of this criticism of Marx by Mr. Mallock, he himself, in an unguarded moment, provides the answer by which Marx is vindicated! Thus, speaking of the great classical economists, Adam Smith, Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill, he points out that they included "all forms of living industrial effort, from those of a Watt or an Edison down to those of a man who tars a fence, grouped together under the common name of labor" (Lecture I, page 16). And again: "At present the orthodox economists and the socialistic economists alike give us _all human effort_[160] tied up, as it were, in a sack, and ticketed 'human labor'" (Lecture I, page 18). Now, if the Socialist includes in his definition of labor "all human effort," it stands to reason that he does not mean only "ordinary manual labor" when he uses the term. Thus Mallock answers Mallock and vindicates Marx! Of course, Marx, like all the great economists, includes in his concept of labor every kind of productive effort, mental as well as physical, as Mr. Mallock, to the utter destruction of his disingenuous criticism, unconsciously--we must suppose--admitted. Take, for example, this definition: "By labor power or capacity for labor is to be understood the aggregate of those _mental and physical_ capabilities existing in a human being, which he exercises when he produces a use-value of any description."[161] As against this luminous and precise definition, it is but fair to quote that of Mr. Mallock himself. He defines labor as "the faculties of an individual _applied to his own labor_"[162]--a meaningless jumble of words. The fifty-seven letters contained in that sentence would mean just as much if put in a bag, well shaken, and put on paper just as they happened to fall from the bag. Marx never argued that the producers of wealth had a _right_ to the wealth produced. The "right of labor to the whole of its produce" was, it is true, the keynote of the theories of the Ricardian Socialists. An echo of the doctrine appeared in the Gotha Programme of the German Socialists to which reference has already been made, and in the popular agitation of Socialism in this and other countries it is echoed more or less frequently. Just in proportion as the ethical argument for Socialism is advanced, and appeals made to the sense of justice, the rich idler is condemned and an ethic of distribution based upon production becomes an important feature of the propaganda. But Marx nowhere indulges in this kind of argument. Not in a single line of "Capital," or his minor economic treatises, can any hint of the doctrine be found. He invariably scoffed at the "ethical distribution" idea. In the judgment of the present writer, this is at once his great strength and weakness, but that is beside the point of this discussion. Suffice it to say, though it involves some reiteration, that Marx never took the position that Socialism _ought_ to take the place of capitalism, because the producers of wealth _ought_ to get the whole of the wealth they produce. His position was rather that Socialism _must_ come, simply because capitalism _could not_ last. Finally, we come to the charge that Marx taught that "all productive effort is absolutely equal in productivity." Incredible as it may seem, it is nevertheless a fact that everything Marx has to say upon the subject is directly opposed to this notion, and that, as we shall see later on, his famous theory of value is not only not dependent upon a belief in the equal productivity of all productive effort, but would be completely shattered by it. Not only Marx, but also Mill, Ricardo, and Smith, his great predecessors, recognized the fact that all labor is not equally productive. Of course, it requires no special genius to demonstrate this. That a poor mechanic with antiquated tools will produce less in a given number of hours than an expert mechanic with good tools, for example, is too obvious for comment. The Marx assailed by Mr. Mallock, and numerous critics like him, is a myth. The real Marx they do not touch--hence the futility of their work. The Marx they attack is a man of straw, not the immortal thinker. Endowed "With just enough of learning to misquote," their assaults are vain. VI Having thus disposed of some of the more prevalent criticisms of Marx as an economist, we are ready for a definite, consecutive statement of the economic theory of modern Socialism. First, however, a word as to the term "scientific" as commonly applied to Marxian Socialism. Even some of the friendliest of Socialist critics have contended that the use of the term is pretentious, bombastic, and altogether unjustified. From a certain narrow point of view, this appears to be an unimportant matter, and the vigor with which Socialists defend their use of the term seems exceedingly foolish, and accountable for only as a result of enthusiastic fetish worship--the fetish, of course, being Marx. Such a view is very crude and superficial. It cannot be doubted that the Socialism represented by Marx and the modern political Socialist movement is radically different from the earlier Socialism with which the names of Fourier, Saint-Simon, Cabet, Owen, and a host of other builders of "cloud palaces for an ideal humanity," are associated. The need of some word to distinguish between the two is obvious, and the only question remaining is whether or not the word "scientific" is the most suitable and accurate one to make that distinction clear; whether the words "scientific" and "utopian" express with reasonable accuracy the nature of the difference. Here the followers of Marx feel that they have an impregnable position. The method of Marx is scientific. From the first sentence of his great work to the last, the method pursued is that of a painstaking scientist. It would be just as reasonable to complain of the use of the word "scientific" in connection with the work of Darwin and his followers, to distinguish it from the guesswork of Anaximander, as to cavil at the distinction made between the Socialism of Marx and Engels and their followers, and that of visionaries like Owen and Saint-Simon. Doubtless both Marx and Engels lapsed occasionally into Utopianism. We see instances of this in the illusions Marx entertained regarding the Crimean War bringing about the European Social Revolution; in the theory of the increasing misery of the proletariat; in Engels' confident prediction, in 1845, that a Socialist revolution was imminent and inevitable; and in the prediction of both that an economic cataclysm must create the conditions for a sudden and complete revolution in society. These, I say, are Utopian ideas, evidences that the founders of scientific Socialism were tinctured with the older ideas of the Utopists, and even more with their spirit. But when we speak of "Marxism," what mental picture does the word suggest, what intellectual concept is the word a name for? Is it these forecasts and guesses, and the exact mode of realizing the Socialist ideal which Marx laid down, or is it the great principle of social evolution determined by economic development? Is it his naïve and simple description of the process of capitalist concentration, in which no hint appears of the circuitous windings that carried the actual process into unforeseen channels, or the broad fact that the concentration has taken place and that monopoly has come out of competition? Is it his statement of the extent to which labor is exploited, or the _fact_ of the exploitation? If we are to judge Marx by the essential things, rather than by the incidental and non-essential things, then we must admit his claim to be reckoned with the great scientific sociologists and economists. After all, what constitutes scientific method? Is it not the recognition of the law of causation, putting exact knowledge of facts above tradition or sentiment; accumulating facts patiently until sufficient have been gathered to make possible the formulation of generalizations and laws enabling us to connect the present with the past, and in some measure to foretell the outcome of the present, as Marx foretold the culmination of competition in monopoly? Is it not to see past, present, and future as one whole, a growth, a constant process, so that instead of vainly fashioning plans for millennial Utopias, we seek in the facts of to-day the stream of tendencies, and so learn the direction of the immediate flow of progress? If this is a true concept of scientific method, and the scientific spirit, then Karl Marx was a scientist, and modern Socialism is aptly named Scientific Socialism. FOOTNOTES: [137] An English edition of this work, translated by H. Quelch, was published in 1900 under the title _The Poverty of Philosophy_. [138] Cf. F. Engels, Preface to _La Misère de la Philosophie_, English translation, _The Poverty of Philosophy_, page iv. [139] _The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour_, by Anton Menger, 1899. [140] Edward Bernstein, _Ferdinand Lassalle as a Social Reformer_, page ix. [141] _Criticism of the Gotha Programme_, from the posthumous papers of Karl Marx. [142] It should perhaps be pointed out here, to avoid misunderstanding, that Ricardo hedged this doctrine about with important qualifications--not always observed by his followers--till it no longer remained the simple proposition stated above. See Dr. A. C. Whitaker's _History and Criticism of the Labour Theory of Value in English Political Economy_, page 57, for a suggestive treatment of this point. [143] _The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour._ [144] Cf. _Capital_, Vol. I, page 644, and Vol. II, page 19, Kerr edition. [145] Cf., for instance, _The Wealth of Nations_, Vol. I, Chapter VI. [146] Introduction to Menger's _The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour_. [147] _The Life of Francis Place_, by Graham Wallas, M.A., London, 1898, page 268. [148] For this brief sketch of the works of these Ricardian Socialist writers I have drawn freely upon Menger's _The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour_, and Professor Foxwell's Introduction thereto. [149] _Karl Marx: Biographical Memoirs_, by Wilhelm Liebknecht, translated by E. Untermann, 1901, page 32. [150] Much of this work has been collated and edited by Marx's daughter, the late Mrs. Eleanor Marx-Aveling, and her husband, Dr. Edward Aveling, and published in two volumes, _The Eastern Question_ and _Revolution and Counter-Revolution_. [151] The note is quoted by Liebknecht, _Memoirs of Marx_, page 177, and in the Introduction to _Revolution and Counter-Revolution_, by the editor, Eleanor Marx-Aveling. [152] _Political Economy_, page 115. [153] Luigi Cossa, _Guide to the Study of Political Economy_, English translation, 1880. [154] _The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty_, edited by Charles Henry Hull, Vol. I, page 244. [155] The italics are mine.--J. S. [156] All quotations from Mr. Mallock are taken from the volume containing the text of his lectures, entitled _Socialism_, published by The National Civic Federation, New York, 1907. [157] The italics are mine.--J. S. [158] _Letter on the Gotha Programme_, by Karl Marx, published in the collection of the posthumous writings of Marx and Engels, edited by Mehring, 1902. See a translation of the letter by Dr. Harriet E. Lothrop, _International Socialist Review_, May, 1908. [159] I note that my friend, Mr. J. R. Macdonald, M.P., "Whip" of the Labour Party in the British House of Commons, so misrepresents Marx in his admirable little book, _Socialism_, page 54. [160] Italics mine.--J. S. [161] The italics are mine. The passage occurs on page 186, Vol. I, of _Capital_, Kerr edition. In the last of the series of lectures printed in his book, Mr. Mallock attempts a reply to the criticism of an American Socialist, Mr. Morris Hillquit who quoted this passage from Marx to show that Mr. Mallock was in error in saying that Marx regarded manual labor as the sole source of wealth. He evades the real point, namely, that Marx clearly included mental as well as physical labor in his use of the term, and with an ingenuity equaled only by the disingenuousness of the argument, seeks refuge in the fact that it does not cover the special "directive ability" which is a special function, "a productive force distinct from labor." The trick will not do. The fact is that Marx clearly and precisely covers that point in another place. The reader is referred to Chapter XIII of Part IV, Vol. I, of _Capital_, pages 363-368, Kerr edition, for a brilliant and honest treatment of the whole subject of the place of the "directing few" in modern industry. We shall treat the matter briefly later on. [162] Italics mine.--J. S. The passage occurs in Lecture III, page 36. CHAPTER VIII OUTLINES OF SOCIALIST ECONOMIC THEORY I The _geist_ of social and political evolution is economic, according to the Socialist philosophy. This view of the importance of man's economic relations involves some very radical changes in the methods and terminology of political economy. The philosophical view of social and political evolution as a world-process, through revolutions formed in the matrices of economic conditions, at once limits and expands the scope of political economy. It destroys on the one hand the idea of the eternality of economic laws and limits them to particular epochs. On the other hand, it enhances the importance of the science of political economy as a study of the motive force of social evolution. With Marx and his followers, political economy is more than an analysis of the production and distribution of wealth; it is a study of the principal determinant factor in the social and political progress of society, consciously recognized as such. The sociological viewpoint appears throughout the whole of Marxian economic thought. It appears, for instance, in the definition of a commodity as the unit of wealth _in those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails_. Likewise wealth and capital connote special social relations or categories. Wealth, which in certain simpler forms of social organization consists in the ownership of use-values, under the capitalist system consists in the ownership of exchange-values. Capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons established through the medium of things. Robinson Crusoe's spade, the Indian's bow and arrow, and all similar illustrations given by the "orthodox" economists, do not constitute capital any more than an infant's spoon is capital. They do not serve as the medium of the social relation between wage-worker and capitalist which characterizes the capitalist system of production. The essential feature of capitalist society is the production of wealth in the commodity form; that is to say, in the form of objects that, instead of being consumed by the producer, are intended to be exchanged or sold at a profit. Capital, therefore, is wealth set aside for the production of other wealth with a view to its exchange at a profit. A house may consist of certain definite quantities of bricks, timber, lime, iron, and other substances, but similar quantities of these substances piled up without plan will not constitute a house. Bricks, timber, lime, and iron become a house only in certain circumstances, when they bear a given ordered relation to each other. "A negro is a negro; it is only under certain conditions that he becomes a slave. A certain machine, for example, is a machine for spinning cotton; it is only under certain defined conditions that it becomes capital. Apart from these conditions, it is no more capital than gold _per se_ is money; capital is a social relation of production."[163] This sociological principle pervades the whole of Socialist economics. It appears in every economic definition, practically, and the terminology of the orthodox political economists is thereby often given a new meaning, radically different from that originally given to it and commonly understood. The student of Socialism who fails to appreciate this fact will most frequently land in a morass of confusion and difficulty, but the careful student who fully understands it will find it of great assistance. Take, as an illustration, the phrase "the abolition of capital" which frequently occurs in Socialist literature. The reader who thinks of capital as consisting of _things_, such as machinery, materials of production, money, and so on, finds the phrase bewildering. He wonders how it is conceivable that production should go on if these things were done away with. But the student who fully understands the sociological principle outlined above comprehends at once that it is not proposed to do away with the _things_, but with _certain social relations expressed through them_. He understands that the "abolition of capital" no more involves the destruction of the physical things than the abolition of slavery involved the destruction of the slave himself. What is aimed at is the social relation which is established through the medium of the things commonly called capital. II In common with all the great economists, Socialists hold that wealth is produced by human labor applied to appropriate natural objects. This, as we have seen, does not mean that labor is the sole source of wealth. Still less does it mean that the mere expenditure of labor upon natural objects must inevitably result in the production of wealth. If a man spends his time digging holes in the ground and filling them up again, or dipping water from the ocean in a bucket and pouring it back again, the labor so expended upon natural objects would not produce wealth of any kind. Nor is the productivity of mental labor denied. In the term "labor" is implied the totality of human energies expended in production, regardless of whether those energies be physical or mental. In modern society wealth consists of social use-values, commodities. We must, therefore, begin our analysis of capitalist society with an analysis of a commodity. "A commodity," says Marx, "is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference. Neither are we here concerned to know how the object satisfies these wants, whether directly as means of subsistence, or indirectly as means of production."[164] But a commodity must be something more than an object satisfying human wants. Such objects are simple use-values, but commodities are something else in addition to simple use-values. The manna upon which the pilgrim exiles of the Bible story were fed, for instance, was not a commodity, though it fulfilled the conditions of this first part of our definition by satisfying human wants. We must carry our definition further, therefore. In addition to use-value, then, a commodity must possess exchange-value. In other words, it must have a social use-value, a use-value to others, and not merely to the producer. Thus, things may have the quality of satisfying human wants without being commodities. To state the matter in the language of the economists, use-values may, and often do, exist without economic value, value, that is to say, in exchange. Air, for example, is absolutely indispensable to life, yet it is not--except in special, abnormal conditions--subject to sale or exchange. With a use-value that is beyond computation, it has no exchange-value. Similarly, water is ordinarily plentiful and has no economic value; it is not a commodity. A seeming contradiction exists in the case of the water supply of cities where water for domestic use is commercially supplied, but a moment's reflection will show that it is not the water, but the social service of bringing it to a desired location for the consumer's convenience that represents economic value. Over and above that there is, however, the element of monopoly-price which enters into the matter. With that we have not, at this point, anything to do. Under ordinary circumstances, water, like light, is plentiful; its utility to man is not due to man's labor, and it has, therefore, no economic value. But in exceptional circumstances, as in an arid desert or in a besieged fortress, a millionaire might be willing to give all his wealth for a little water, thus making the value of what is ordinarily valueless almost infinite. What may be called natural use-values have no economic value. And even use-values that are the result of human labor may be equally without economic value. If I make something to satisfy some want of my own, it will have no economic value unless it will satisfy the want of some one else. So, unless a use-value is social, unless the object produced is of use to some other person than the producer, it will have no value in the economic sense: it will not be _exchangeable_. A commodity must therefore possess two fundamental qualities. It must have a use-value, must satisfy some human want or desire; it must also have an exchange-value arising from the fact that the use-value contained in it is social in its nature and exchangeable for other exchange-values. With the unit of wealth thus defined, the subsequent study of economics is immensely simplified.[165] The trade of capitalist societies is the exchange of commodities against each other, through the medium of money. Commodities utterly unlike each other in all apparent physical properties, such as color, weight, size, shape, substance, and so on, and utterly unlike each other in respect to the purposes for which intended and the nature of the wants they satisfy, are exchanged for one another, sometimes equally, sometimes in unequal ratio. The question immediately arises: what is it that determines the relative value of commodities so exchanged? A dress suit and a kitchen stove, for example, are very different commodities, possessing no outward semblance to each other, and satisfying very different human wants, yet they may, and actually do, exchange upon an equality in the market. To understand the reason for this similarity of value of dissimilar commodities, and the principle which governs the exchange of commodities in general, is to understand an important part of the mechanism of modern capitalist society. This is the problem of value which all the great economists have tried to solve. Sir William Petty, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx developed what is known as the labor-value theory as the solution of the problem. This theory, as developed by Marx, not in its cruder forms, is one of the cardinal principles in Socialist economic theory. The Ricardian statement of the theory is that the relative value of commodities to one another is determined by the relative amounts of human labor embodied in them; that the quantity of labor embodied in them is the determinant of the value of all commodities. When all their differences have been carefully noted, all commodities have at least one quality in common. The dress suit and the kitchen range, toothpicks and snowshoes, pink parasols and sewing-machines, are unlike each other in every other particular save one--they are all products of human labor, crystallizations of human labor-power. Here, then, say the Socialists, as did the great classical economists, we have a hint of the secret of the mechanism of exchange in capitalist society. The amount of labor-power embodied in their production is in some way connected with the measure of the exchangeable value of the commodities. Stated in the simple, crude form, that the quantity of human labor crystallized in them is the basis and measure of the value of commodities when exchanged against one another, the labor theory of value is beautifully simple. At least, the formula is simplicity itself. At the same time, it is open to certain very obvious criticisms. It would be absurd to contend that the day's labor of a coolie laborer is equal in productivity to the day's labor of a highly skilled mechanic, or that the day's labor of an incompetent workman is of equal value to that of the most proficient. To refute such a theory is as beautifully simple as the theory itself. In all seriousness, arguments such as these are constantly used against the Marxian theory of value, notwithstanding that they do not possess the slightest relation to it. Marxism is very frequently "refuted" by those who do not trouble themselves to understand it. The idea that the quantity of labor embodied in them is the determinant of the value of commodities was held by practically all the great economists. Sir William Petty, for example, in a celebrated passage, says of the exchange-value of corn: "If a man can bring to London an ounce of silver out of the earth in Peru in the same time that he can produce a bushel of corn, then one is the natural price of the other; now, if by reason of new and more easy mines a man can get two ounces of silver as easily as formerly he did one, then the corn will be as cheap at ten shillings a bushel as it was before at five shillings a bushel, _cæteris paribus_."[166] Adam Smith, following Petty's lead, says: "The real price of everything, what everything really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. What everything is really worth to the man who has acquired it, and who wants to dispose of it or exchange it for something else, is the toil and labor which it can save to himself, and which it can impose on other people.... Labor was the first price, the original purchase money, that was paid for all things.... If among a nation of hunters, for example, it usually costs twice the labor to kill a beaver which it does to kill a deer, one beaver would naturally be worth or exchange for two deer. It is natural that what is usually the produce of two days' or two hours' labor, should be worth double of what is usually the produce of one day's or one hour's labor."[167] Benjamin Franklin, whose merit as an economist Marx recognized, takes the same view and regards trade as being "nothing but the exchange of labor for labor, the value of all things being most justly measured by labor."[168] From the writings of almost every one of the great classical economists of England it would be easy to compile a formidable and convincing volume of similar quotations, showing that they all took the same view that the quantity of human labor embodied in commodities determines their value. One further quotation, from Ricardo, must, however, suffice. He says:-- "To convince ourselves that this (quantity of labor) is the real foundation of exchangeable value, let us suppose any improvement to be made in the means of abridging labor in any one of the various processes through which the raw cotton must pass before the manufactured stockings come to the market to be exchanged for other things; and observe the effects which will follow. If fewer men were required to cultivate the raw cotton, or if fewer sailors were employed in navigating, or shipwrights in constructing, the ship in which it was conveyed to us; if fewer hands were employed in raising the buildings and machinery, or if these, when raised, were rendered more efficient; the stockings would inevitably fall in value, and command less of other things. They would fall because a less quantity of labor was necessary to their production, and would therefore exchange for a smaller quantity of those things in which no such abridgment of labor had been made."[169] It is evident from the foregoing quotations that these great writers regarded the quantity of human labor crystallized in them as the basis of all commodity values, and their real measure. The great merit of Ricardo lies in his development of the idea of social labor as against the simple concept of the labor of particular individuals, or sets of individuals. In the passage cited, he includes in the term "quantity of human labor" not merely the total labor of those immediately concerned in the making of stockings, from the cultivation of the raw cotton to the actual making of stockings in the factory, but all the labor indirectly expended, even in the making and navigating of ships, and the building of the factories. One does, indeed, find hints of the social labor concept in Adam Smith, but it is Ricardo who first clearly develops it. Marx further developed this principle, and all criticisms of the labor-value theory in Marxian economic theory which are based upon the assumption that quantity of labor means the simple, direct labor embodied in commodities fall of their own weight. Thus, if we take any commodity, we shall find that it is possible to ascertain with tolerable certainty the amount of direct labor embodied in it, but that it is equally as impossible to ascertain the amount of the indirect expenditure of labor power which entered into its making. In the case of a table, for example, it may be possible to trace with some approximation to accuracy the labor involved in felling the tree and preparing the lumber out of which the table was made; the labor directly spent in bringing the lumber to the factory, and the direct labor expended in making out of the lumber a finished table; allowance may also be made for the labor embodied in the nails, glue, stain, and other articles used in making the table. So we have a fairly accurate statement of the direct labor embodied in the table. But what of the labor used to make the tools of the men who felled the trees and prepared the lumber? What of the coal miner and the iron miner and the tool maker? And what of the numerous and incalculable expenditures of labor to make the railroads, the railway engines, and to provide these with steam-power? What, also, of the machinery in the factory, and of the factory buildings themselves, and, back of them, again, the tool makers and the providers of raw materials? It is obvious that no human intellect could ever unravel the tangled skein of human labor, and that in actual exchange there can be no calculation of the respective labor content of commodities. If the law of value holds good, it must operate mechanically, automatically. And this it does, through the incidence of bargaining and the law of supply and demand. We have noted elsewhere the variations in human capacity and productiveness. Superficial critics still frequently charge Marx with having overlooked this very obvious fact, whereas it has not only been fully treated by him, but was actually covered by Smith and Ricardo before Marx! With these writers and their followers it is the law of averages which solves the difficulties arising from variations in individual capacity and productivity. It is the _average_ amount of labor expended in killing the beaver which counts, not the actual individual labor in a specified case. Nor did these writers overlook the important differentiation between simple, unskilled labor and labor that is highly skilled. If A in ten hours' labor produces exactly double the amount of exchange-value which B produces in the same time devoted to labor of another kind, it is obvious that the labor of B is not equal in value to that of A. Quantity of labor cannot, therefore, be measured, in individual cases, by time units. Despite a hundred passages which, detached from their context, seem to imply the contrary, Adam Smith recognized this very clearly, and attempted to solve the riddle by a differentiation of skilled and unskilled labor in which he likens skilled labor to a machine; and insists that the labor and time spent in acquiring the skill which distinguishes skilled labor must be reckoned.[170] Another frequent criticism of the Marxian theory has not only been answered by Marx himself--is, in fact, ruled out by the terms of the theory itself--but was amply replied to by Ricardo.[171] The criticism in question consists in the selection of what may be called "unique values," or scarcity values, articles which cannot be reproduced by labor, and whose value is wholly independent of the quantity of labor originally necessary to produce them. Such articles are unique specimens of coins and postage stamps, autograph letters, rare manuscripts, Stradivarius violins, Raphael pictures, Caxton books, articles associated with great personages--such as Napoleon's snuffbox--great auks' eggs, and so on _ad infinitum_. No possible amount of human labor could reproduce these articles, reproduce, that is to say, the exact utilities in them. Napoleon's snuffbox might be exactly duplicated so far as its physical properties are concerned, but the association with Napoleon's fingers, the sentimental quality which gives it its special utility, is not reproducible. But the trade of capitalist society does not consist in the manufacture and sale of these things, which, after all, form a very insignificant part of the exchange-values of the world. III Marx saw the soul of truth in the labor-value theory, as propounded by his predecessors, especially Ricardo, and devoted himself to its development and systematization. He has been accused of plagiarizing his theory from the Ricardians, but it is surely not plagiarism when a thinker sees the germ of truth in a theory, and, separating it from the mass of confusion and error which envelops it, restates it in scientific fashion with all its necessary qualifications. This is precisely what Marx did. He developed the idea of social labor which Ricardo had propounded, disregarding entirely individual labor. He recognized the absurdity of the contention that the value of commodities is determined by the amount of labor, either individual or social, _actually embodied in them_. If two workers are producing precisely similar commodities, say coats, and one of them expends twice as much labor as the other and uses tools and methods representing twice the social labor, it is clearly foolish to suppose that the exchange-value of his coat will be twice as great as that of the other worker, regardless of the fact that their utility is equal. Labor, Marx pointed out, has two sides, the qualitative and the quantitative. The qualitative side, the difference in quality between specially skilled and simply unskilled labor, is easily recognized, though the relative value of the one compared with the other may be somewhat obscured. The secret of that obscurity lies hidden in the quantitative side of labor. Here we must enter upon an abstract inquiry, that part of the Marxian theory which is most difficult to comprehend. Yet, it is not so very difficult, after all, to understand that the years devoted to learning his trade, by a mechanical engineer, for instance, during all of which years he must be provided with the necessities of life, must be reckoned somewhere and somehow; and that when they are so reckoned, his day's labor may be found to contain, concentrated, so to speak, an amount of labor time equivalent to two or even many days' simple unskilled labor time. It may be, and in fact is, quite impossible to set forth mathematically the relation of the two, for the reason that the process of developing skilled labor is too complex to be unraveled. Of the fact, however, there can be no doubt. The real law of value, then, according to Marx, is as follows: Under capitalism, _in free competition_, the value of all commodities, other than those unique things which cannot be reproduced by human labor, is determined by the amount of _abstract_ labor embodied in them; or, better, by the amount of social human labor power necessary, on the average, for their production. We may conveniently illustrate this theory by a concrete example. Let us, therefore, return to our coat-makers. Now, always assuming their equal utility, no one will be willing to pay twice as much for the coat produced by the slow worker with poor tools as for the other. If the more economical methods of production employed by the man who makes his coats in half the time taken by the other man are the methods usually employed in the manufacture of coats, and the time he takes represents the average time taken to produce a coat, then the average value of coats will be determined thereby, and coats produced by the slower, less economical process will command only the same price in the market, the fact that they may embody twice the amount of actual labor counting for nothing. If we reverse the order of this proposition, and suppose the slower, less economical methods to be those generally prevailing in the manufacture of coats, and the quicker, more economical methods to be exceptional, then, all other things being equal, the exchange-value, of coats will be determined by the amount of labor commonly consumed, and the fortunate producer who adopts the exceptional, economical methods will, for a time, reap a golden harvest. Only for a time, however. As the new methods prevail, competition being the impelling force, they become less and less exceptional, and, finally, the regular, normal methods of production and the standard of value. It is this very important qualification, fundamental to the Marxian theory, which is most often lost sight of by the critics. They persist in applying to individual commodities the test of comparing the amounts of labor-power actually consumed in their production, and so confound the Marxian theory with its crude progenitors. In refuting this crude theory, they are quite oblivious of the fact that Marx himself accomplished that by no means difficult feat. To state the Marxian theory accurately, we must qualify the bald statement that the exchange-value of commodities is determined by the amount of labor embodied in them, and state it in the following manner: _The exchange-value of commodities is determined by the amount of average labor at the time socially necessary for their production._ This is determined, not absolutely in individual cases, but approximately in general, by the bargaining and higgling of the market, to adopt Adam Smith's well-known phrase. Now, this theory applies to those things, exclusive of the category of "unique values," which cannot be made by labor and are commonly supposed to owe their value to their rarity. For example, we may take diamonds. A man walking along the great wastes of the African _karoo_ comes across a little stream. As he stoops to drink, he sees in the water a number of glittering diamonds. To pick them out is the work of a few minutes only, but the diamonds are worth many thousands of dollars. The law of value above outlined applies just as much to them as to any other commodity. The value of diamonds is determined by the amount of labor expenditure necessary _on an average_ to procure them. If the normal method of obtaining diamonds were simply to go to the nearest stream and pick them out, their value would fall, possibly to zero:-- "When we have nothing else to wear But cloth of gold and satins rare, For cloth of gold we cease to care-- Up goes the price of shoddy." IV Most writers do not distinguish between price and value with sufficient clearness, using the terms as if they were synonymous and interchangeable. Where utilities are exchanged directly one for another, as in the barter of primitive society, there is no need of a price-form to express value. In highly developed societies, however, where the very magnitude of production and exchange makes direct barter impossible, and where the objects to be exchanged are not commonly the product of individual labor, a medium of exchange becomes necessary; a something which is generally recognized as a safe and stable commodity which can be used to express in terms of its own weight, size, shape, or color, the value of other commodities to be exchanged. This is the function of money. In various times and places wheat, shells, skins of animals, beads, powder, tobacco, and a multitude of other things, have served as money, but for various reasons, more or less obvious, the precious metals, gold and silver, have been most favored. In all commercial countries to-day, one or other of these metals, or both of them, serves as the recognized medium of exchange. They are commodities also, and when we say that the value of a commodity is a certain amount of gold, we equally express the value of that amount of gold in terms of the commodity in question. As commodities, the precious metals are subject to the same laws as other commodities. If gold should be discovered in such abundance that it became as plentiful and easy to obtain as coal, its value would be no greater than that of coal. It might, conceivably, still be used as the medium of exchange, but it would--unless protected by legislation or otherwise from the operation of economic law, and so given a monopoly-price--have an exchange-value equal to that of coal, a ton of the one being equal to a ton of the other--provided, of course, that its utility remained. Since the scarcity of gold is an important element in its utility valuation, creating and fostering the desire for its possession, that utility-value might largely disappear if gold became as plentiful as coal, in which case it would not have the same value as coal, and might cease to be a commodity at all. Price, then, is the expression of value in terms of some other commodity, which, generally used for that purpose of expressing the value of other commodities, we call money. It is only an approximation of value, and subject to a much greater fluctuation than value itself. It may, for a time, fall far below or rise above value, but in a free market--the only condition in which the operation of the law may be judged--sooner or later the equilibrium will be regained. Where monopoly exists, the free market condition being non-existent, price may be constantly elevated above value. Monopoly-price is an artificial elevation of price above value, and must be considered separately as the abrogation of the law of value. Failure to discriminate between value and its price-expression, or symbol, has led to endless difficulty. It lies at the bottom of the naïve theory that value depends upon the relation of supply and demand. Lord Lauderdale's famous theory has found much support among later economists, though it is now rather unpopular when stated in its old, simple form. Disguised in the so-called Austrian theory of final utility, it has attained considerable vogue.[172] The theory is plausible and convincing to the ordinary mind. Every day we see illustrations of its working: prices are depressed when there is an oversupply, and elevated when the demand of would-be consumers exceeds the supply of the commodities they desire to buy. It is not so easy to see that these effects are temporary, and that there is an automatic adjustment going on. Increased demand raises prices for a while, but it also calls forth an increase in supply which tends to restore the old price level, or may even force prices below it. In the latter case, the supply falls off and prices find their real level. The relation of supply to demand causes an oscillation of prices, but it is not the determinant of value. When prices rise above a certain level, demand slackens or ceases, and prices are inevitably lowered. Prices may and do fall with a decreased demand, but it is clear that unless the producers can get a price approximately equal to the value of their commodities, they will cease to produce them, and the supply will diminish or cease altogether. Ultimately, therefore, the fluctuations of price through the lack of equilibrium between supply and demand adjust themselves, and prices must tend constantly to approximate values. Monopoly-price is, as already observed, an artificial price in the sense that the laws of free market exchange do not apply to it. The "unique utilities," things not reproducible by human labor, command what might be termed natural monopoly-prices. There are many other commodities, however, the price of which is not regulated by the quantity of social human labor necessary to produce them, but simply by the desire of the purchasers and the means they have of gratifying it and the power of the sellers to control the market and exclude effective competition. Since Karl Marx wrote, the exceptions to his law of value have become more numerous, as a result of the changes in industrial and commercial conditions. The development of great monopolies and near-monopolies has greatly increased the number of commodities which, for considerable periods, are placed outside the sphere of the labor-value theory, their price depending upon their marginal utility, irrespective of the labor actually embodied in them or necessary to their reproduction. It may, in the opinion of the present writer, be said in criticism of the followers of Marx that they have not carried on his work, but largely contented themselves with repeating generalizations which, true when made, no longer fit all the facts. But that is not a criticism of Marx, or of his work. What he professed to make was an analysis of the methods of production and exchange in competitive capitalist society. His followers have largely failed to allow for the enormous changes which have taken place, and go on repeating, unchanged, his phrases. Professor Seligman has pointed out that Ricardo's contention that value is determined by the cost of production, and the contention of Jevons that value is determined by marginal utility, are not mutually exclusive, but, on the contrary, complementary to each other.[173] The present writer has long contended that the marginal utility theory and the Marxian labor-value theory are likewise not antagonistic but complementary.[174] This is not the place to enter into the elaborate discussion which this contention involves. Only a brief indication of the argument for the claim is here and now possible. First, as we have seen, Marx is very careful to insist that utility is essential to value, and that the utility must be a social utility. But social utility does not come of itself, from the skies or elsewhere. It is, so far as the vast majority of commodities is concerned, the product of labor. It is true that the value of a thing is never independent of its social utility; it is likewise true that this is determined by the social labor necessary to the reproduction of that utility. To regard the two theories as antagonistic, it seems to be necessary to say either (1) that the quantity of social labor necessary to produce certain commodities determines their value, utterly regardless of the amount of their social utility, or (2) that we estimate the social utility of commodities, estimate what we are willing to pay for them, utterly regardless of the labor necessary, on an average, for their reproduction. The latter contention would be absurd, and the former would involve the abandonment of the initial premises of the Marxian theory, contained in his definition of a commodity. In so far as the basis of social utility is the social labor necessary for its production, the labor-value theory of Marx may be said, I think, to include the marginal utility law, as one of the forms in which it operates. V Labor, the source and determinant of value, has, _per se_, no value. Only when it is embodied in certain forms has it any value. If a man labors hard digging holes and refilling them, his labor has no value. What the capitalist buys is not labor, but labor-power. Wages in general is a form of payment for a given amount of labor-power, measured by duration and skill. The laborer sells brain and muscle power, which is thus placed at the temporary disposal of the capitalist to be used up like any other commodity that he buys. The philosopher Hobbes, in his "Leviathan," clearly anticipated Marx in thus distinguishing between labor and laboring power in the saying, "_The value or worth of a man is ... so much as would be given for the Use of his Power_." The power to labor assumes the commodity form, being at once a use-value and an exchange-value. At first sight it appears that piecework is an exception to the general rule that the capitalist buys labor-power and not labor itself. It seems that when piece-wages are paid it is not the machine, the living labor-power, but the product of the machine, labor actually performed, that is bought. Superficially, this is so, of course, but it does not affect the principle laid down, because, as a matter of fact, the piecework system is only one of the means used to secure a maximum of labor-power. The average output of pieceworkers in a trade always tends to become the standard output for the time-workers, and, on the other hand, the average wage of pieceworkers tends to keep very near the standard of time-wages. Now, as a commodity, labor-power is subject to the same laws as all other commodities. Its price, wages, fluctuates just as the price of all other commodities does, and bears the same relation to its value. It may be temporarily affected by the preponderance of supply over demand, or of demand over supply; it may be made the subject of monopoly in certain cases. There is, therefore, no such thing as an "iron law" of wages, any more than there is an "iron law" of prices for other commodities. Lassalle took the Ricardian law of wages and, by means of his characteristic exaggeration, distorted it out of all semblance to truth. Says Ricardo: "The natural price of labor, therefore, depends on the price of the food, necessaries, and conveniences required for the support of the laborer and his family. With a rise in the price of food and necessaries, the natural price of labor will rise; with the fall in their price, the natural price of labor will fall."[175] This Lassalle made the basis of his famous "iron law," according to which 96 per cent of the wage-workers were precluded from improving their economic position. Lassalle's chief fault lay in that he made no allowance whatever for either state interference, or the organized influence of the workers themselves. He also attaches too little importance to what Marx calls the traditional standards of living.[176] It is nevertheless true that the price of labor-power, wages, tends to approximate its value, just as the price of all other commodities tends, under normal conditions, to approximate their value. And just as the value of other commodities is determined by the amount of social labor necessary on an average for their reproduction, so the value of labor-power is likewise determined. Wages tend to a point at which they will cover the average cost of the necessary means of subsistence for the workers and their families, in any given time and place, under the conditions and according to the standards of living generally prevailing. Trade union action, for example, may force wages above that point, or undue stress in the competitive labor market may force wages below it. While, however, a trade union may bring about what is virtually a monopoly-price for the labor-power of its members, there is always a counter tendency in the other direction, sometimes even to the lowering of the standard of subsistence itself to the minimum of things required for physical existence. To class human labor-power with pig iron as a commodity, subject to the same laws, may at first seem fantastic to the reader, but a careful survey of the facts will fully justify the classification. The capacity of the worker to labor depends upon his securing certain things; his labor-power has to be reproduced from day to day, for which a certain supply of food, clothing, and other necessities of life is essential. Even with these supplied constantly, the worker sooner or later wears out and dies. If the race is not to be extinguished, a certain supply of the necessities of life must be provided for the children during the years of their development to the point where their labor-power becomes marketable. The average cost of production in the case of labor-power includes, therefore, the necessities for a wife and family as well as for the individual worker. Far from being the iron law Lassalle imagined, this law of wages is one of considerable elasticity. The standard of living itself, far from being a fixed thing, determined only by the necessities of physical existence, varies according to occupational groups; to localities sometimes, as a result of historical development; to nationality and race, as a result of tradition; to the general standard of intelligence, and the degree in which the workers are organized for the promotion of their economic interests. The advance in the culture of the people as a whole, expressing itself in legislation for compulsory education, the abolition of child labor, improvement of housing and general sanitary conditions, and so on, tends to raise the standard of living. Finally, the fluctuations in the price of labor-power due to the operation of the law of supply and demand are much more important than Lassalle imagined. This living commodity, labor-power, differs in one remarkable way from all other commodities, in that when it is used up in the process of the production of other commodities in which it is embodied, it creates new value in the process of being used up, and embodies that new value in the commodity it assists to produce. In the case of raw materials and machinery this is not so. In the manufacture of tables, for example, the wood used up is transformed into tables, embodied in them, but the wood has added nothing to its own value. The same is true of machinery. But with human labor-power it is otherwise. The capitalist buys from the laborer his labor-power at its full value as a commodity. But the laborer, in embodying that labor-power in some concrete form, creates more value than his wages represents. For the commodity he sells, his _power_ to labor, he has been paid its full value, namely, the social labor-cost of its production; but that power may be capable of producing the equivalent of twice its own cost of production. This is the central idea of the famous and much-misunderstood Marxian theory of surplus-value, by which the method of capitalism, the exploitation of the wage-workers, and the resulting class antagonisms of the system are explained. This theory becomes the groundwork of all the social theories and movements protesting against and seeking to end the exploitation of the laboring masses. To understand it is, therefore, of paramount importance. VI As we have seen in an earlier chapter, Marx was not the first to recognize that the secret of capitalism, the object of capitalist industry, is the extraction of surplus-value from the labor-power of the worker. Nor was he the first to use the term. By no means a happy term, since it adds to the difficulty of comprehending the meaning and nature of _value_, Marx took it from the current economic discussion of his time as a term already fairly well understood. What we owe to the genius of Marx is an explanation of the manner in which surplus-value is extracted by the capitalist from the labor-power of the worker, and the part it plays in capitalist society. The essence of the theory can be very briefly stated, but its demonstration involves, naturally, a more extensive study. Under normal conditions, the worker will produce a value equivalent to his means of subsistence, or to the wages actually paid to him, in a very small number of hours. If he owned and controlled the means of production,--land, machinery, raw materials, and so on,--he would, therefore, need to work only so many hours as the production of the necessities of life for himself and his family required. But the laborer in capitalist society does not own the means of production, that condition being quite incompatible with machine production upon a large scale. A separation of the worker from the ownership of the means of production has taken place as one of the inevitable results of industrial evolution. So the laborer must sell the only commodity he has to sell, namely, his labor-power. He sells the utility of that commodity to the capitalist for its exchange-value, or market price. Like any other commodity, the utility of labor-power, its use-value, belongs to the purchaser, the capitalist. It is his to use as he sees fit. He has it used to produce other commodities which he in turn hopes to sell--has the labor-power used up in the manufacture of other commodities, just as he has the raw materials used up. He buys, for example, the labor-power of the workers for a day of ten hours. In five hours, say, the worker creates value equivalent to his wages, but he does not cease at that point. He goes on working for another five hours, thus producing in a day double the amount of his wages, the exchange-value of the labor-power he sold the capitalist. Thus the capitalist, having paid wages equivalent to the product of five hours, receives the product of ten hours. This balance represents the surplus-value (_Mehrwerth_). This takes place all through industry. If the capitalist employs a thousand workers under these conditions, each day he receives the product of five thousand hours over and above the product actually paid for. This constitutes his income. If the capitalist owned the land, machinery, and raw materials, absolutely, without incumbrances of any kind, the whole of that surplus-value would, naturally, belong to him. But as a general rule this is not the case. He rents the land and must pay rent to the landlord, or he works upon borrowed capital and must pay interest upon loans, so that the surplus-value extracted from the laborer must be divided into rent, interest, and profit. But how the surplus-value is divided among landlords, moneylenders, creditors, speculators, and actual employers is a matter of absolutely no moment to the workers as a class. That is why such movements as that represented by the followers of Henry George fail to vitally interest the working class.[177] The division of the surplus-value wrung from the toil of the workers gives rise to much quarrel and strife within the ranks of the exploiting class, but the working class recognizes, and vaguely and instinctively feels where it does not clearly recognize, that it has no interest in these quarrels. All that interests it vitally is how to lessen the extent of the exploitation to which it is subjected, and how ultimately to end that exploitation altogether. That is the objective of the movement for the socialization of the means of life. Such, briefly stated, is the theory. We may illustrate it by the following example: Let us say the average cost of a day's subsistence is the product of five hours' social labor, which is represented by a wage of $1 per day. In a factory there are 1000 workers. Their labor-power they have sold at its exchange value, $1 per day per man, a total of $1000. They use up $1000 worth of labor-power, then. They also use up $1000 worth of raw material and wear out the plant to the extent of $100 in the course of their work. Now, instead of working five hours each, that being the amount of time necessary to reproduce the value of their wages, as above described, they all work ten hours. Thus, in place of the $1000 they received as wages for the labor-_power_ they sold, they create labor _products_, valued at just twice that sum, $2000. According to our suppositions, therefore, the gross value of the day's product will be $3100, the whole of it belonging to the capitalist, for the simple and sufficient reason that he bought and paid for, at their full value as commodities, all the elements entering into its production, the machinery, materials, and labor-power. The capitalist pays,-- For labor-power $1000 For materials 1000 For repairs and replacement of machinery 100 ----- He receives, for the gross product 3100 $2100 The surplus-value is, therefore 1000 and this sum is the fund from which rent, interests, and profits must be paid. It will be observed that there is no moral condemnation of the capitalist involved in this illustration. He simply buys the commodity, labor-power, at its full market price, as in the case of all other commodities. No ethical argument enters into it at all. It is very evident, however, that the interest of the capitalist will be to get as much surplus-value as possible, by buying labor-power at the lowest price possible, prolonging the working day, and intensifying the productivity of the labor-power he buys, while the interest of the workman will be equally against these things. Here we have the cause of class antagonism--not in the speeches of agitators, but in the facts of industrial life. This is the Marxian theory of surplus-value in a nutshell. Rent, interest, and profit, the three great divisions of capitalist income into which this surplus-value is divided, are thus traced to the exploitation of labor, resting fundamentally upon the ownership by the exploiting class of the means of production. Other economists, both before and since Marx, have tried to explain the source of capitalist income in very different ways. An early theory was that profit originates in exchange, through "buying cheap and selling dear." That this is so in the case of individual traders is obvious. If A sells to B commodities above their value, or buys commodities from him below their value, it is plain that he gains by it. But it is equally plain that B loses. If one group of capitalists gains what another group loses, the gains and losses balance each other; there is no gain to the capitalist class as a whole. Yet that is precisely what occurs--the capitalist class as a whole does gain, and gain enormously, despite the losses of individual members of that class. It is that gain to the great body of capitalists, that general increase in their wealth, which must be accounted for, and which exchange cannot explain. Only when we think of the capitalist class buying labor-power from outside its own ranks, generally at its natural value, and using it, is the problem solved. The commodity which the capitalist buys creates a value greater than its own in being used up. The theory that profit is the wages of risk is answerable in substantially the same way. It does not in any way explain the increase in the aggregate wealth of the capitalist class to say that the individual capitalist must have a chance to receive interest upon his money in order to induce him to turn it into capital, to hazard losing it wholly or in part. While the theory of risk helps to explain some features of capitalism, the changes in the flow of capital into certain forms of investment, and, to some small extent, the commercial crises incidental thereto, it does not explain the vital problem, the source of capitalist income. The chances of gain, as a premium for the risks involved, explain satisfactorily enough the action of the gambler when he enters into a game of roulette or faro. It cannot be said, however, that the aggregate wealth of the gamblers is increased by playing roulette or faro. Then, too, the risks of the laborers are vastly more vital than those of the capitalist. Yet the premium for their risks of health and life itself does not appear, unless, indeed, it be in their wages, in which case the most superficial glance at our industrial statistics will show that wages are by no means highest in those occupations where the risks are greatest and most numerous. Further, the wages of the risks for capitalists and laborers alike are drawn from the same source, the product of the laborers' toil. To consider, even briefly, all the varied theories of surplus-value other than these would be a prolonged, dull, and profitless task. The theory of abstinence, that profit is the just reward of the capitalist for saving part of his wealth and using it as a means of production, is answerable by _a priori_ arguments and by a vast volume of facts. Abstinence obviously produces nothing; it can only save the wealth already produced by labor, and no automatic increase of that saved-up wealth is possible. If it is to increase without the labor of its owner, it can only be through the exploitation of the labor of others, so that the abstinence theory in no manner controverts the Marxian position. On the other hand, we see that those whose wealth increases most rapidly are not given to frugality or abstinence by any means. It may, certainly, be possible for an individual to save enough by practicing frugality and abstinence to enable him to invest in some profitable enterprise, but the source of his profit is not his abstinence. That must be sought elsewhere. Abstinence may provide him with the means for taking the profit, but the profit itself must come from the value created by human labor-power over and above its cost of production. Still less satisfactory is the idea that surplus-value is nothing more than the "wages of superintendence," or the "rent of ability." This theory has been advocated with much specious argument. Essentially it involves the contention that there is no distinction between wages and profits, or between capitalists and laborers; that the capitalist is a worker, and his profits simply wages for his useful and highly important work of directing industry. It is a bold theory with a very small basis of fact. Whoever honestly considers it, must, one would think, see that it is both absurd and untrue. Not only is the larger part of industry to-day managed by salaried employees who have no part, or only a very insignificant part, in the ownership of the concerns they manage, but the profits are distributed among shareholders who, as shareholders, have never contributed service of any kind to the industries in which they are shareholders. Whatever services are performed, even by the figure-head "dummy" directors of companies, are paid for before profits are considered at all. This is the invincible answer to such criticisms as that of Mr. Mallock, that Marx and his followers have not recognized "the functions of the directive ability of the few." When all the salaries of the directing "few" have been paid, as well as the wages of the many, and the cost of all materials and maintenance of machinery, there remains a surplus to be distributed among those who belong neither to the "laboring many" nor the "directing few." That profit Mr. Mallock cannot explain away. Marx himself, in "Capital," called attention to the "directing ability of the few," quite as clearly as Mr. Mallock has done. He first shows how the "collective power of masses" is really a new creation; that it involves a special kind of leadership, or directing authority, just as an orchestra does; then he proceeds to point out the development of a special class of supervisors and directors of industry, "a special kind of wage laborer.... The _work of supervision becomes their established and exclusive function_."[178] Socialists, contrary to Mr. Mallock, have not overlooked the function exercised by the directing few, but they have pointed out that when these have been paid, their salaries being sometimes almost fabulous, there is still a surplus-value to be distributed among those who have not shared in the production, either as mental or manual workers. As Mr. Algernon Lee says:-- "The profits produced in many American mills, factories, mines, and railway systems go in part to Englishmen or Belgians or Germans who never set foot in America, and who obviously can have no share in even the mental labor of direction. A certificate of stock may belong to a child, to a maniac, to an imbecile, to a prisoner behind the bars, and it draws profit for its owner just the same. Stocks and bonds may lie for months or years in a safe-deposit vault, while an estate is being disputed, before their ownership is determined; but whoever is declared to be the owner gets the dividends and interest "earned" during all that time."[179] It is an easy task to set up imaginary figures labeled "Marxism," and then to demolish them by learned argument--but the occupation is as fruitless as it is easy. It remains the one central fact of capitalism, however, that a surplus-value is created by the working class and taken by the exploiting class, from which develops the class struggle of our time. FOOTNOTES: [163] _The People's Marx_, by Gabriel Deville, page 288. [164] _Capital_, Vol. I, Kerr edition, page 41. [165] Professor J. S. Nicholson, a rather pretentious critic of Marx, has called sunshine a commodity because of its utility, _Elements of Political Economy_, page 24. Upon the same ground, the song of the skylark and the sound of ocean waves might be called commodities. Such use of language serves for nothing but the obscuring of thought. [166] William Petty, _A Treatise on Taxes and Constitutions_ (1662), pages 31-32. [167] _The Wealth of Nations_, Vol. I, Chapters V-VI. [168] Benjamin Franklin, _Remarks and Facts Relative to the American Paper Money_ (1764), page 267. Marx thus speaks of Franklin as an economist: "The first sensible analysis of exchange-value as labor-time, made so clear as to seem almost commonplace, is to be found in the work of a man of the New World, where the bourgeois relations of production, imported together with their representatives, sprouted rapidly in a soil which made up its lack of historical traditions with a surplus of _humus_. That man was Benjamin Franklin, who formulated the fundamental law of modern political economy in his first work, which he wrote when a mere youth (_A Modest Inquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency_), and published in 1721." _A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy_, by Karl Marx, English translation by N. I. Stone, 1894, page 62. [169] David Ricardo, _Principles of Political Economy and Taxation_, Chapter I, § III. [170] _Wealth of Nations_, Book I, Chapter X. [171] _Principles of Political Economy and Taxation_, Chapter I, Sec. 1, § 4. [172] See "The Final Futility of Final Utility," in H. M. Hyndman's _Economics of Socialism_, for a remarkable criticism of the "final utility" theory, showing its identity with the doctrine of supply and demand as the basis of value. I refer to the theory of final or marginal utility as the "so-called Austrian theory" for the purpose, mainly, or calling attention to the fact that, as Professor Seligman has ably and clearly demonstrated, it was conceived and excellently stated by W. F. Lloyd, Professor of Political Economy at Oxford, in 1833. (See the paper, _On Some Neglected British Economists_, in the _Economic Journal_, V, xiii, pages 357-363.) This was two decades before Gossen and a generation earlier than Menger and Jevons. In view of this fact, the criticism of Marx for his lack of originality by members of the "Austrian" school is rather amusing. [173] _Principles of Economics_, by Edwin R. A. Seligman (1905), page 198. [174] Cf., for instance, my little volume, in the _Standard Socialist Series_ (Kerr), entitled _Capitalist and Laborer_; Part II, _Modern Socialism_, page 112. [175] _Principles of Political Economy and Taxation_, Chapter V, § 35. [176] _Value, Price, and Profit_, by Karl Marx, Chapter XIV. [177] It is worthy of note that the taxation of land values, commonly associated with the name of Henry George, was advocated as a palliative in the _Communist Manifesto_ of Marx and Engels. [178] _Capital_, by Karl Marx, Vol. I, Chapter XIII, of Part IV. [179] _The Worker_ (New York), February 5, 1905. CHAPTER IX OUTLINES OF THE SOCIALIST STATE I Many persons who have thought of Socialism as a scheme, the plan of a new social edifice, have been disappointed not to find in all the voluminous writings of Marx any detailed description of such a plan, any forecast of the future. But when they have grasped the fundamental principles of the Marxian system of thought, they realize that it would be absurd to attempt to give detailed specifications of the Socialist state. As the Socialist movement has outgrown the influence of the early Utopians, its adherents have abandoned the habit of speculating upon the practical application of Socialist principles in future society. The formulation of schemes, more or less detailed, has given place to firm insistence that Socialism must be regarded as a principle, namely, the efficient organization of wealth production and distribution to the end that the exploitation of the wealth producers by a privileged class may be rendered impossible. Whatever contributes to that end is a contribution to the fulfillment of the Socialist ideal. Still, it is natural and inevitable that earnest Socialists and students of Socialism should seek something more tangible by way of a description of the future state than the bald statement that it will be free from the struggle between exploiting and exploited classes. The question is, can we go further in our attempt to scan the future without entering the realms of Utopian speculation? If Socialism is, objectively considered, a state of society which is being developed in the womb of the present, are there any signs by which its peculiar form and spirit, as distinguished from the form and spirit of the present, may be visualized? Within certain limits, an affirmative answer seems possible to each of these questions. There are certain fundamental principles which may be said to be essential to the existence of Socialist society. Without them, the Socialist state cannot exist. Regardless of the fact that Karl Marx never attempted to describe his ideal, to give such a description of his concept of the next epoch in evolution as would enable us to compare it with the present and to measure the difference, it is probable that every Socialist makes, privately at least, his own forecast of the manner in which the new society must shape itself. There is nothing Utopian or fantastic in trying to ascertain the tendencies of economic development; nothing unscientific in trying to read out of the pages of social evolution such lessons as may be contained therein. So long as we bear in mind that our forecasts must not take the form of plans for the arbitrary shaping of the future, specifications of the Coöperative Commonwealth, but that they must, on the contrary, be based upon the facts of life--not abstract principles born in the heart's desire--and attempt to discern the tendencies of social and economic evolution, we are upon safe ground. Such forecasts may indeed be helpful, not only in so far as they provide us with a more or less concrete picture of the ideal to be aimed at, but also, and even more important, in that they at once enable us to gauge from time to time the progress made by society toward the realization of the ideal, and to formulate our policies most effectively. Especially as there are certain fundamental principles essential to the existence of a Socialist state, we may take these and correlate them, and these principles, together with our estimate of economic tendencies, drawn from the facts of the present, may provide us with a suggestive and approximate outline of the Socialist society of the future. So far we may proceed with full scientific sanction; beyond are the realms of fancy and dream, the Elysian Fields of Utopia.[180] We must not set about our task with the mental attitude so well displayed by the yearning of Omar-- "Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, Would not we shatter it to bits--and then Remold it nearer to the Heart's Desire!" From that spirit only vain dreams and fantastic vagaries can ever come. What we must bear in mind is that the social fabric of to-morrow, like that of yesterday, whose ruins we contemplate to-day, will not spring up, complete, in response to our will, but will grow out of social experience and needs. II One of the greatest and most lamentable errors in connection with the propaganda of modern Socialism has been the assumption of its friends, in many instances, and its foes, in most instances, that Socialism and Individualism are entirely antithetical concepts. Infinite confusion has been caused by setting the two against each other. Society consists of an aggregation of individuals, but it is something more than that in just the same sense as a house is something more than an aggregation of bricks. It is an organism, though as yet an imperfectly developed one. While the units of which it is composed have distinct and independent lives within certain limits, they are, outside of those limits, interdependent and inter-related. Man is governed by two great forces. On the one hand, he is essentially an egoist, ever striving to attain individual freedom; on the other hand, he is a social animal, ever seeking association and avoiding isolation. This duality expresses itself in the life of society. There is a struggle between its members motived by the desire for individual expression and gain; and, alongside of it, a sense of solidarity, a movement to mutual, reciprocal relations, motived by the gregarian instinct. All social life is necessarily an oscillation between these two motives. The social problem in its last analysis is nothing more than the problem of combining and harmonizing social and individual interests and actions springing therefrom. In dealing with this social problem, the problem of how to secure harmony of social and individual interests and actions, it is necessary first of all to recognize that both motives are equally important and necessary agents of human progress. The idea largely prevails that Socialists ignore the individual motive and consider only the social motive, just as the ultra-individualists have erred in an opposite discrimination. The Socialist ideal has been conceived to be a great bureaucracy. Mr. Anstey gave humorous and vivid expression to this idea in _Punch_ some years ago, when he represented the citizens of the Socialist state as being all clothed alike, known only by numbers, strangers to all the joys of family life, plodding through their allotted tasks under a race of hated bureaucrats, and having the solace of chewing gum in their leisure time as a specially paternal provision. Some such mental picture must have inspired Herbert Spencer's "Coming Slavery," and it must be confessed that the early forms of Socialism which consisted mainly of detailed plans of coöperative commonwealths afforded some excuse for the idea. Most intelligent Socialists, if called upon to choose between them, would probably prefer to live in Thibet under a personal despotism, rather than under the hierarchies of most of the imaginary commonwealths which Utopian Socialists have depicted. Even in the later propaganda of the modern political Socialist movement, there has been more than enough justification for those who regard Socialism as impossible except under a great bureaucracy. In numberless Socialist programmes and addresses Socialism has been defined as meaning "The social ownership and control of all the means of production, distribution, and exchange." Critics of Socialism are not to be seriously blamed if they take such "definitions" at their face value and interpret them quite literally. It is not difficult to see that in order to place "all means of production, distribution, and exchange" under social ownership and control, the creation of such a bureaucracy as the world has never seen would be necessary. A needle is a means of production quite as much as an electric power machine in a factory is, the difference being in their degrees of efficiency. A jackknife is, likewise, in certain circumstances, a means of production, just as surely as a powerful planing machine is, the difference being in degrees of efficiency. So a market basket is a means of distribution quite as surely as an ocean steamship is; a wheelbarrow quite as much as a locomotive. They differ in degrees of efficiency, that is all. The idea that the housewife in the future, when she wants to sew a button upon a garment, will be obliged to go to some department and "take out" a needle, having it properly checked in the communal accounts, and being responsible for its return, is, of course, worthy only of opera bouffe. So is the notion of the state owning wheelbarrows and market baskets and making their private ownership illegal. "The socialization of _all_ the means of production, distribution, and exchange," literally interpreted, is folly. But none of those using the phrase must be regarded as seriously contemplating its literal interpretation. For many years the phrase was included in the statement of its "Object" by the English Social Democratic Federation, and even now it appears in a slightly modified form, the word "all" being omitted,[181] perhaps because of its tautological character. For several years the writer was a member of the Federation, actively engaged in the propaganda, and how we spent much of our time explaining to popular audiences in halls and upon street corners that the socialization of jackknives, needles, sewing machines, market baskets, beer mugs, frying pans, and toothpicks was not our aim, is a merry memory. When this is understood, the nightmare of the bureaucracy of Socialism vanishes. It is no longer necessary to fret ourselves asking how a government is to own and manage everything without making slaves of its citizens. The question propounded by that venerable and distinguished Canadian scholar, Professor Goldwin Smith,[182] whether a government can be devised which shall hold all the instruments of production, distribute to the citizens their tasks, pick out inventors, philosophers, artists, and laborers, and set them to work, without destroying personal liberty, loses its force when it is remembered that Socialism involves no such necessity. The Socialist ideal may be said to be a form of social organization in which every individual will enjoy the greatest possible amount of freedom for self-development and expression; and in which social authority will be reduced to the minimum necessary for the preservation and insurance of that right to all individuals. There is an incontestable right of the individual to full and free self-development and expression so long as no other individual's right to a like freedom is infringed upon. No individual right can be an _absolute_ right in a society, but must be subject to such restrictions as may be necessary to safeguard the like right of every other individual, and of society as a whole. _Absolute_ personal liberty is not possible; to grant it to any one individual would be equivalent to denying it to others. If, in a certain community, a need is commonly felt for a system of drainage to protect the citizens against the perils of a possible outbreak of typhoid or some other epidemic disease, and all the citizens agree upon a scheme except two or three, who, in the name of personal liberty, declare that their property must not be touched, what is to be done? If the citizens, out of solicitude for the personal liberty of the objecting individuals, abandon or modify their plans, is it not clear that the liberty of the many has been sacrificed to the liberty of the few, which is the essence of tyranny? Absolute individual liberty is incompatible with social liberty. The liberty of each must, in Mill's phrase, be bounded by the like liberty of all. Absolute personal liberty is a chimera, a delusion. Even the Anarchist must come to a realization of the fact that liberty is not an absolute, but a relative and limited, right. Kropotkin, for example, realizes that, even under Anarchism, any individual who did not live up to his obligations, or who persisted in conducting himself in a manner obnoxious or injurious to the community, would have to be expelled.[183] This is very like Spencer's practical abandonment of the doctrine of _laissez faire_ individualism. Says he: "Many facts have shown us that while the individual man has acquired liberty as a citizen and greater religious liberty, he has also acquired greater liberty in respect of his occupations; and here we see that he has simultaneously acquired greater liberty of combination for industrial purposes. Indeed, in conformity with the universal law of rhythm, _there has been a change from excess of restriction to deficiency of restriction_. As is implied by legislation now pending, the facilities for forming companies and raising compound capitals have been too great."[184] Here is a very definite confession of the insufficiency of natural law, the failure of the _laissez faire_ theory, and a virtual appeal for restrictive and coercive legislation. This is inevitable. The dual forces which serve as the motives of individual and collective action, spring, unquestionably, from the fact that individuals are at once alike and unlike, equal and unequal. Alike in our needs of certain fundamental necessities, such as food, clothing, shelter, coöperation for producing these necessities, for protection from foes, human and other, we are unlike in tastes, appetites, temperaments, character, will, and so on, till our diversity becomes as great and as general as our likeness. Now, the problem is to insure equal opportunities of full development to all these diversely constituted and endowed individuals, and, at the same time, to maintain the principle of equal obligations to society on the part of every individual. This is the problem of social justice: to insure to each the same social opportunities, to secure from each a recognition of the same obligations toward all. The basic principle of the Socialist state must be justice; no privileges or favors can be extended to individuals or groups of individuals. III Politically, the organization of the Socialist state must be democratic. Socialism without democracy is as impossible as a shadow without light. The word "Socialism" applied to schemes of paternalism, and to government ownership when the vital principle of democracy is lacking, is a misnomer. As with Peter Bell-- "A primrose by a river's brim, A yellow primrose was to him" and nothing more than that, so there are many persons to whom Socialism signifies nothing more than government ownership. Yet it ought to be perfectly clear that Russia, with her state-owned railways, and liquor and other monopolies, is no nearer Socialism than the United States. The same applies to Germany with her state railways. Externally similar in one respect to Socialism, they radically differ. In so far as they prepare the necessary forms for Socialism, all examples of public ownership may be said to be "socialistic," or making for Socialism. What they lack is a spiritual quality rather than a mechanical one. They are not democratic. Socialism is political democracy allied to industrial democracy. Justice requires that the legislative power of society rest upon universal adult suffrage, the political equality of all men and women, except lunatics and criminals. It is manifestly unjust to exact obedience to the laws from those who have had no share in making them and can have no share in altering them. Of course, there are exceptions to this principle. We except (1) minors, children not yet arrived at the age of responsibility agreed upon by the citizens; (2) lunatics and certain classes of criminals; (3) aliens, non-citizens temporarily resident in the state. Democracy in the sense of popular self-government, the "government of the people, by the people, and for the people," of which political rhetoricians boast, is only approximately attainable in any society. While all can equally participate in the legislative power, all cannot participate directly in the administrative power, and it becomes necessary, therefore, to adopt the principle of delegated authority, representative government. But care must be taken to preserve a maximum of power in the hands of the people. In this respect the United States Constitution is defective. It is not, and was not intended by its framers to be, a democratic instrument,[185] and we are vainly trying to-day to make democratic government through an undemocratic medium. The political democracy of the Socialist state must be real, keeping the power of government in the hands of the people. How is this to be done? Direct legislation by the people might be realized through the adoption of the principles of popular initiative and referendum. Or, if representative legislative bodies should be deemed best, these measures, together with proportional representation and the right of recall, might be adopted. There is no apparent reason why _all_ legislation, except temporary legislation as in war time, famine, plague, and such abnormal conditions, could not be directly initiated and enacted, leaving only the just and proper enforcement of the law to delegated authority. In practically all the political programmes of Socialist parties throughout the world, these principles are included at the present time; not merely as means to secure a greater degree of political democracy within the existing social state, but also, and primarily, to prepare the required political framework of democracy for the industrial commonwealth of the future. The great problem for such a society, politically speaking, consists in choosing wisely the trustees of delegated power and authority, and seeing that they justly and wisely use it for the common good, without abuse, either for the profit of themselves or their friends, and without prejudice to any portion of society. Will there be abuses? Will not political manipulators and bosses betray their trusts? To these questions, and all other questions of a like nature, the Socialist can only give one answer, namely, that there is no such a thing as an "automatic democracy," that eternal vigilance will be the price of liberty under Socialism as it has ever been. There can be no other safeguard against the usurpation of power than the popular will and conscience ever alert upon the watch-towers. With political machinery so responsive to the popular will when it is asserted and an alert and vigilant electorate, political democracy attains its maximum development. Socialism requires that development. IV With these general principles prevised, we may consider, briefly, the respective rights of the individual and of society. The rights of the individual may be summarized as follows: There must be freedom of movement, including the right to withdraw from the domain of the government, to migrate at will to other territories. Freedom of movement is a fundamental condition of personal liberty, but it is easy to see that it cannot be made an absolute right. Quarantine laws, for social protection, for example, may seriously inconvenience the individual, but be imperatively necessary for all that. There must be immunity from arrest, except for infringing others' rights, with compensation of some kind for improper arrest; respect of the privacy of domicile and correspondence; full liberty of dress, subject to decency; freedom of utterance, whether by speech or publication, subject only to the protection of others from insult, injury, or interference with their equal liberties, the individual being held responsible to society for the proper use of that right. Freedom of the individual in all that pertains to art, science, philosophy, and religion, and their teaching, or propaganda, is essential. The state can have nothing to do with these matters, they belong to the personal life alone.[186] Art, science, philosophy, and religion cannot be protected by any authority of the state, nor is such authority needed. Subject to the ultimate control of society, certainly, but normally free from collective authority and control, these may be regarded as imperative rights of the individual. Doubtless many Socialists, in common with many Individualists, would considerably extend the list. Some, for instance, would include the right to possess and bear arms for the defense of person and property. On the other hand, it might be objected with good show of reason by other Socialists that such a right must always be liable to abuses imperiling the peace of society, and that the same ends would be served more surely if individual armament were made impossible. Again, some Socialists, like some Individualists, would include in the category of private acts outside the sphere of law and social authority the union of the sexes. They would do away with legal intervention in marriage and make it and the parental relation exclusively a private concern. On the other hand, probably an overwhelming majority of Socialists would object. They would insist that the state must, in the interest of the children, and for its own self-preservation, assume certain responsibilities for, and exercise a certain control over, all marriages. They would have the state insist upon such conditions as mature age, freedom from dangerous diseases and physical defects. While believing that under Socialism marriage would no longer be subject to economic motives,--matrimonial markets for titles and fortunes no longer existing,--and that the maximum of personal freedom together with the minimum of social authority would be possible in the union of the sexes, they would still insist upon the necessity of that minimum of legal control. The abolition of the legal marriage tie, and the substitution therefor of voluntary sex union, which so many people believe to be part of the Socialist programme, is not only not a part of that programme, but is probably condemned by more than ninety-five per cent of the Socialists of the world, and favored by no appreciable proportion of Socialists more than non-Socialists. There is no such thing as a Socialist view of marriage, any more than there is a Republican or Democratic view of marriage; or any more than there is a Socialist view of vaccination, vivisection, vegetarianism, or homeopathy. The same may be said of the drink evil and tobacco smoking. Some Socialists would prohibit both smoking and drinking; others would permit smoking, but prohibit the manufacture of intoxicating liquors; most Socialists recognize the evils, especially of drunkenness, but believe that it would be foolish at this time to state in what manner the evils must be dealt with by the Socialist state. Our hasty summary by no means exhausts the category of personal liberties, nor does it rigidly define such liberties. To presume to do that would be a piece of charlatanry, social quackery of the worst type. It is not for the Socialist of to-day to determine what the citizens of a generation hence shall do. The citizens of the future, like the citizens of to-day, will be living human beings, not mere automatons; they will not accept places and forms imposed upon them, but make their own. The object of this phase of our discussion is simply to show that individual freedom would by no means be crushed out of existence by the Socialist state. The intolerable bureaucracy of collectivism is wholly an imaginary evil. There is nothing in the nature of Socialism as it is understood to-day by its adherents which would prevent a wide extension of personal liberties in the social régime. In the same general manner, we may summarize the principal functions of the state[187] as follows: the state has the right and power to organize and control the economic system, comprehending in that term the production and distribution of all social wealth, wherever private enterprise is dangerous to the social well-being, or is inefficient; the defense of the community from invasion, from fire, flood, famine, or disease; the relations with other states, such as trade agreements, boundary treaties, and the like; the maintenance of order, including the juridical and police systems in all their branches; and public education in all its departments. It will be found that these five functions include all the services which the state may properly undertake, and that not one of them can safely be intrusted to private enterprise. On the other hand, it is not at all necessary to assume that the state must have an _absolute monopoly_ of any one of these groups of functions in the social organism. It would not be necessary, for example, for the state to prohibit its citizens from entering into voluntary relations with the citizens of other countries for the promotion of international friendship, for trade reciprocity, and so on. Likewise, the juridical functions being in the hands of the state would not prevent voluntary arbitration; or the state guardianship of the public health prevent voluntary associations of citizens from taking measures to advance the health of their communities. On the contrary, all such efforts would be advantageous to the state. Our study becomes, therefore, a study of social physiology. The principle already postulated, that the state must undertake the production and distribution of wealth wherever private enterprise is dangerous, or inefficient, clarifies somewhat the problem of the industrial organization of the Socialist régime, which is a vastly more difficult problem than that of its political organization. Socialism by no means involves the suppression of all private industrial enterprises. Only when these fail in efficiency or result in injustice and inequality of opportunities does socialization present itself. There are many petty, subordinate industries, especially the making of articles of luxury, which might be well allowed to remain in private hands, subject only to such general regulation as might be found necessary for the protection of health and the public order. For example, suppose that the state undertakes the production of shoes upon a large scale as a result of the popular conviction that private enterprise in shoemaking is either inefficient or injurious to society in that the manufacturers exploit the shoemakers on the one hand, and, through the establishment of monopoly-prices, the consumers upon the other hand. The state thus becomes the employer of shoeworkers and the vender of shoes to the citizens. But A, being a fastidious citizen, does not like the factory product of the state any more than he formerly did the factory product of private enterprise. Under the old conditions, he used to employ B, a shoemaker who does not like factory work, a craftsman who likes to make the whole shoe. Naturally, B was not willing to work for wages materially lower than those he could earn in the factory. A willingly paid enough for his hand-made shoes to insure B as much wages as he would get in the factory. What reason could the state possibly have for forbidding the continuance of such an arrangement between two of its citizens? Or take the case of a farmer maintaining himself and family upon a modest acreage, by his own labor. He exploits no one, and the question of inefficiency does not present itself as a public question, for the reason that there is plenty of farming land available, and any inefficiency of the small farmer does not injure the community in any manner. What object could the state have in taking away that farm and compelling the farmer to work upon a communal, publicly owned and managed farm? Of course, the notion is perfectly absurd.[188] On the other hand, there are things, natural monopolies, which cannot be safely left to private enterprise. The same is true of large productive and distributive enterprises upon which great masses of the people depend. Land ownership[189] and all that depends thereon, such as mining, transportation, and the like, must be collective. It will help us to get rid of the difficulty presented by petty industry and agriculture if we bear in mind that collective ownership is not, as is commonly supposed, the supreme, fundamental condition of Socialism. It is proposed only as a means to an end, not as the end itself. The wealth producers are exploited by a class whose source of income is the surplus-value extracted from the workers. Instinctively, the workers struggle against that exploitation, to reduce the amount of surplus-value taken by the capitalists to a minimum. To do away with that exploitation social ownership and control is proposed. If the end could be attained more speedily by other methods, those methods would be adopted. It follows, therefore, that to make collective property of things not used as a means of exploiting labor does not necessarily form part of the Socialist programme. True, some such things might be socialized in response to an urgent demand for efficiency, but, of necessity, the struggle will be principally concerned with the socializing of the means of production which are used as means of exploitation by a class deriving its income from the surplus-value produced by another class. It is easy enough to see that, according to this principle of differentiation, it would be necessary to socialize the railroad, but not at all necessary to socialize the wheelbarrow; while it would be necessary to socialize a clothing factory, it would not be necessary to take away a woman's domestic sewing machine. Independent, self-employment, as in the case of a craftsman working in his own shop with his own tools, or groups of workers working coöperatively, is quite consistent with Socialism. In the Socialist state, then, certain forms of private industry will be tolerated, and perhaps even definitely encouraged by the state, but the great fundamental economic activities will be collectively managed. The Socialist state will not be static and, consequently, what at first may be regarded as being properly the subject of private enterprise may develop to an extent or in directions which necessitate its transformation to the category of essentially social properties. Hence, it is not possible to give a list of things which would be socialized and another list of things which would remain private property, but perfectly possible to state the principle which must be the chief determinant of the extent of socialization. With this principle in mind it is fairly possible to sketch the outlines at least of the economic development of the collectivist commonwealth; the conditions essential to that stage of social evolution at which it will be possible and natural to speak of capitalism as a past and outgrown stage, and of the present as the era of Socialism. Socialists, naturally, differ very materially upon this point. Probably, however, an overwhelming majority of the leaders of Socialist thought in Europe and this country would agree with the writer that it is fairly probable that the economic structure of the new society will include at least the following measures of socialization: (1) Ownership of all natural resources, such as land, mines, forests, waterways, oil wells, and so on; (2) operation of all the means of transportation and communication other than those of purely personal service; (3) operation of all industrial production involving large compound capitals and associated labor, except where carried on by voluntary, democratic coöperation, with the necessary regulation by the state; (4) organization of all labor essential to the public service, such as the building of schools, hospitals, docks, roads, bridges, sewers, and the like; the construction of all the machinery and plant requisite to the social production and distribution, and of things necessary for the maintenance of those engaged in such public services as the national defense and all who are wards of the state; (5) a monopoly of the monetary and credit functions, including coinage, banking, mortgaging, and the extension of credit to private enterprise. With these economic activities undertaken by the state, a pure democracy differing vitally from all the class-dominated states of history, private enterprise would by no means be excluded, but limited to an extent making the exploitation of labor and public needs and interests for private gain impossible. Socialism thus becomes the defender of individual liberty, not its enemy. V As owner of the earth and all the major instruments of production and exchange, society would occupy a position which would enable it to insure that the physical and mental benefits derived from its wealth, its natural resources, its collective experience, genius, and labor, were universalized as befits a democracy. It would be able to guarantee to all its citizens the right to labor, through preventing private or class monopolization of the land and instruments of production and social opportunities in general. It would be in a position to make every development from competition to monopoly the occasion for further socialization. Thus there would be no danger to the state in permitting, or even fostering, private industry within the limits described. As the organizer of the vast body of labor essential to the operation of the main productive and distributive functions of society, and to the other public services, the state would automatically, so to speak, set the standards of income and leisure which private industry would be compelled, by competitive force, to observe. The regulation of production, too, would be possible, and as a result the crises arising from glutted markets would disappear. Finally, in the control of all the functions of credit, the state would effectually prevent the exploitation of the mass of the people through financial agencies, one of the greatest evils of our present system. The application of the principles of democracy to the organization and administration of these great economic services of production, exchange, and credit is a problem full of alluring invitations to speculation. "This that they call the Organization of Labor," said Carlyle, "is the Universal Vital Problem of the World." This description applies not to what we commonly mean by the "organization of labor," namely, the organization of the laborers in unions for class conflict, but to the organization of the brain and muscle of the world to secure the greatest efficiency. This is the great central problem of the socialization of industry and the state, before which all other problems pale into insignificance. It is comparatively easy to picture an ideal political democracy; and the main structural economic organization of the Socialist régime, with its private and public functions more or less clearly defined, is not very difficult of conception. These are foreshadowed with varying degrees of distinctness in present society, and the light of experience illumines the pathway before us. It is when we come to the methods of organization and management, the _spirit_ of the economic organization of the future state, that the light fails and we must grope our way into the great unknown with imagination and our sense of justice for guides. Most Socialist writers who have attempted to deal with this subject have simply regarded the state as the greatest employer of labor, carrying on its business upon lines not materially different from those adopted by the great corporations of to-day. Boards of experts, chosen by civil service methods, directing all the economic activities of the state--such is their general conception of the industrial democracy of the Socialist régime. They believe, in other words, that the methods now employed by the capitalist state, and by individual and corporate employers within the capitalist state, would simply be extended under the Socialist régime. If this be so, a psychological anomaly in the Socialist propaganda appears in the practical abandonment of the claim that, as a result of the class conflict in society, the public ownership evolved within the capitalist state is essentially different from, and inferior to, the public ownership of the Socialist ideal. It is perfectly clear that if the industrial organization under Socialism is to be such that the workers employed in any industry have no more voice in its management than the postal employees in this country, for example, have at the present time, it cannot be otherwise than absurd to speak of it as an industrial democracy. Here, in truth, lies the crux of the greatest problem of all. We must face the fact that, in anything worthy the name of an industrial democracy, the terms and conditions of employment cannot be wholly decided without regard to the will of the workers themselves on the one hand, nor, on the other hand, by the workers alone without reference to the general body of the citizenry. If the former method fails to satisfy the requirements of democracy by ignoring the will of the workers in the organization of their work, the alternate method involves a hierarchical government, equally incompatible with democracy. Some way must be found by which the industrial government of society, the organization of production and distribution, may be securely and fairly based upon the dual basis of common civic rights and the rights of the workers in their special relations as such. And here we are not wholly left to our imaginations, not wholly without experience to guide us. In actual practice to-day, in those industries in which the organization of the workers into unions has been most successful, the workers, through their organizations, do exercise a certain amount of control over the conditions of their employment. Their right to share in the determination of the conditions of labor is conceded. They make trade agreements, for instance, in which such matters as wages, hours of labor, apprenticeship, output, engagement and discharge of workers, and numerous other matters, are provided for and made subject to the joint control of the workers and their employers. Of course, this share in the control of the industry in which they are employed is a right enjoyed only as a fruit of conquest, won by war and maintained by ceaseless vigilance and armed strength. It is not inconceivable that in the Socialist state there might be a frank extension of this principle. The workers in the main groups of industries might form autonomous organizations for the administration of their special interests, subject only to certain fundamental laws of the state. Thus the trade unions of to-day would evolve into administrative politico-economic organizations, after the manner of the mediæval guilds, and become constructive agencies in society instead of mere agencies of class warfare as at present. The economic organization of the Socialist state would consist, then, of three distinct divisions, as follows: (1) Private production and exchange, subject only to such general supervision and control by the state as the interests of society demand, such as protection against monopolization, sanitary laws, and the like; (2) voluntary coöperation, subject to similar supervision and control; (3) production and distribution by the state, the administration to be by the autonomous organizations of the workers in industrial groups, subject to the fundamental laws and government of society as a whole.[190] VI Two other functions of the economic organization of society remain to be considered, the distribution of labor and its remuneration. In the organization of industry society will have to achieve a twofold result, a maximum of general, social efficiency, on the one hand, and of personal liberty and comfort to the workers on the other. The state would not only guarantee the right to labor, but, as a corollary, it would impose the duty of labor upon every competent person. The Pauline injunction, "If any man will not work, neither shall he eat," would be applied in the Socialist state to all except the incompetent to labor. The immature child, the aged, the sick and infirm members of society, would alone be exempted from labor. The result of this would be that instead of a large unemployed army, vainly seeking the right to work, on the one hand, accompanied by the excessive overwork of the great mass of the workers fortunate enough to be employed, a vast increase in the number of producers from this one cause alone would make possible much greater leisure for the whole body of workers. Benjamin Franklin estimated that in his day four hours' labor from every adult male able to work would be more than sufficient to provide wealth enough for human wants; and it is certain that, without resorting to any standards of Spartan simplicity, Franklin's estimate could be easily realised to-day with anything approaching a scientific organization of labor. Not only would the productive forces be enormously increased by the absorption of those workers who under the present system are unemployed, and those who do not labor or seek labor; in addition to these, there would be a tremendous transference of potential productive energy from occupations rendered obsolete and unnecessary by the socialization of society. Thus there are to-day tens of thousands of bankers, lawyers, traders, middlemen, speculators, advertisers, and others, whose functions, necessary to the capitalist system, would in most cases disappear. Because of this, they would be compelled to enter the producing class. The possibilities of the scientific organization of industry are therefore almost unlimited. Every gain made by the state in the direction of economy of production would test the private enterprise existing and urge it onward in the same direction. Likewise, every gain made by the private producers would test the social production and urge it onward. Whether socialized production extended its sphere, or remained confined to its minimum limitations, would depend upon the comparative success or failure resulting. The state would not be a force outside of the people, arbitrarily extending its functions regardless of their will. The decision would rest with the people; they would _be_ the state, and would, naturally, resort to social effort only where it demonstrated its ability to serve the community more efficiently than private enterprise, with greater comfort and liberty to the individual and to the community. While in the Socialist régime labor would be compulsory, it is inconceivable that a free people would tolerate a bureaucratic rule assigning to each individual his or her proper task, no matter how ingenious the assignment might be. Even if the bureaucracy were omniscient, such a condition of life would be intolerable. Just as it is necessary to insist that all must be secured in their right to labor, and required to labor, it is necessary also that the choice of one's occupation should be as far as possible personal and free, subject only to the laws of supply and demand. The greatest amount of personal freedom compatible with the requisite efficiency would be secured to the workers in their chosen occupations through their craft organizations. But, it will be objected, all occupations are not equally desirable. There are certain forms of work which, disagreeable in themselves, are just as essential to the well-being of society as the most artistic and pleasing. Who will do the dirty work, and the dangerous work, under Socialism? Will these occupations also be left to choice, and, if so, will there not be an insurmountable difficulty arising from the natural reluctance of men to choose such work? In answering the question and affirming the principle of free choice--for so it must be answered--the Socialist is called upon to show that the absence of compulsion would not involve the neglect of these disagreeable, but highly important, social services; that it would be compatible with social safety to leave them to personal choice. In the first place, much of this kind of work that is now performed by human labor could be more efficiently done by mechanical means. Much of the work done by sweated women and children in our cities is in fact done in competition with machines. Machinery has been invented, and is now available, to do thousands of the disagreeable and hurtful things now done by human beings. Professor Franklin H. Giddings is perfectly right when he says: "Modern civilization does not require, it does not need, the drudgery of needle-women or the crushing toil of men in a score of life-destroying occupations. If these wretched beings should drop out of existence and no others take their places, the economic activities of the world would not greatly suffer. A thousand devices latent in inventive brains would quickly make good any momentary loss."[191] When, in England, a law was passed forbidding the practice of forcing little boys through chimneys, to clean them, chimneys did not cease to be swept. Other, less disagreeable and less dangerous, means were quickly invented. When the woolen manufacturers were prevented from employing little boys and girls, they invented the piecing machine.[192] Thousands of instances might be compiled in support of the contention of Professor Giddings, equally as pertinent as these. Another important point is that the amount of such disagreeable and dangerous work to be done would be very much less than now. That would be an inevitable result of the scientific organization of industry. It is likely that, if the subject could be properly investigated, it could be shown that the amount of such labor involved in wasteful and unnecessary advertising alone is enormous. Addressing an audience composed mainly of scientific men upon the subject of Socialism, the writer was once questioned upon this phase of the subject. "Gentlemen," was the reply, "it is impossible for me to say exactly how the intelligence of the people in a more or less remote future will solve the problem. The Socialist state will be a democracy, not a dictatorship. But if I were dictator of society to-day and wanted to solve the problem, I should assign to such men as yourselves all the most disagreeable and dangerous tasks I could find. This I should do because I should know that at once your inventive brains would begin to devise mechanical and other means of doing the work. You would make sewer cleaning as pleasant as any other occupation in the world." There was, of course, nothing original in the reply, but the men of science recognized its force, and it fairly states one important part of the Socialist answer to the objection we are discussing. Still, with all possible reduction of the quantity of such work to be done, and with all the mechanical genius brought to bear upon it, we may freely concede that, for a long time to come, there must be some work quite dangerous, altogether disagreeable and repellent, and a great difference in the degree of attractiveness of some occupations as compared with some others. But an occupation repellent in itself might be made attractive, if the hours of labor were relatively few as compared with other occupations. If six hours be regarded as the normal working day, it is quite easy to believe that, for sake of the larger leisure, with its opportunities for the pursuit of special interests, many a man would gladly accept a disagreeable position for three hours a day. The same holds true of superior remuneration. Under the Socialist régime, just as to-day, many a man would gladly exchange his work for less pleasant work, if the remuneration offered were higher. To the old Utopian ideas of absolute equality and uniformity of income these methods would be fatal, but they are not at all incompatible with modern, scientific Socialism. Nothing could well be sillier, or more futile, than the Rooseveltian attacks upon the Socialism of to-day as if it meant equality of possession, or equality of anything except opportunity.[193] Finally, in connection with this question, we must not forget that there is a natural inequality of talent, of power. In any state of society most men will prefer to do the things they are best fitted for, the things they can do best. The man who feels himself to be best fitted to be a hewer of wood or a drawer of water will choose that rather than some loftier task. There is no reason at all to suppose that leaving the choice of occupation to the individual would involve the slightest risk to society. While equality of remuneration, meaning by that uniformity of reward for labor, is not an essential condition of the Socialist régime, it may be freely admitted that _approximate equality of income_ is the ideal to be ultimately aimed at. Otherwise, if there should be the present inequality of remuneration, represented by the enormous salary of a manager like Mr. Schwab, to quote a conspicuous example, and the meager wage of the average laborer, class formations must take place and the old problems incidental to economic inequality reappear. There is no need to regard uniformity of reward for all as the only solution of this problem, however. Given such an industrial democracy as is herein suggested as the essential condition of Socialism, there is little reason to doubt that gradually, by the free play of economic law, approximate equality would be attained. This brings us to the method of the remuneration of labor. VII Socialists are too often judged by their shibboleths, rather than by the principles which those shibboleths imperfectly express, or seek to express. Declaiming, rightly, against the wages system as a form of slave labor,[194] the "abolition of wage slavery," forever inscribed on their banners, the average man is forced to the conclusion that the Socialists are working for a system in which the workers will divide their actual products and then barter the surplus for the surplus products of other workers. Either that, or the most rigid system of governmental production and a method of distributing rations and uniforms similar to that which obtains in the military organization of present-day governments. It is easily seen, however, that such plans do not conform to the democratic ideals of the Socialists, on the one hand, nor would either of them, on the other hand, be compatible with the wide personal liberty herein put forward as characteristic of the Socialist state. The earlier Utopian Socialists did propose to do away with wages; in fact, they proposed to do away with money altogether, and invented various forms of "Labor Notes" as a means of giving equality of remuneration for given quantities of labor, and providing a medium for the exchange of wealth. But when the Socialists of to-day speak of the "abolition of wages," or of the wages system, they use the words in the same sense as they speak of the abolition of capital: _they would abolish only the social relations implied in the terms_. Just as they do not mean by the abolition of capital the destruction of the machinery and implements of production, but the social relation in which they are used to create profit for the few, so, when they speak of the abolition of the wages system, they mean only the use of wages to exploit the producers for the gain of the owners of the means of production and exchange. Though the name "wages" might not be changed, a money payment for labor in a democratic arrangement of industry, representing an approximation to the full value of the labor, minus only its share of the cost of maintaining the public services, and the weaker, dependent members of society, would be vastly different from a money payment for labor by one individual to other individuals, representing an approximation to their cost of living, bearing no definite relation to the value of their labor products, and paid in lieu of those products with a view to the gathering of a rich surplus value by the payer. Karl Kautsky, perhaps the greatest living exponent of the theories of modern Socialism, has made this point perfectly clear. He accepts without reserve the belief that wages, unequal and paid in money, will be the method of remuneration for labor in the Socialist régime.[195] When too many laborers rush into certain branches of industry, the natural way to lessen their number and to increase the number of laborers in other branches where there is need for them, will be to reduce wages in the one and to increase them in the other. Socialism, instead of being defined as an attempt to make men equal, might perhaps be more justly and accurately defined as a social system based upon the natural inequalities of mankind. Not human equality, but equality of opportunity, and the prevention of the creation of artificial inequalities by privilege, is the essence of Socialism. What, it may be asked, will society do to prevent the hoarding of wealth on the one hand, and the exploitation of the spendthrift by the abstinent upon the other? Here, as throughout this discussion, we must be careful to refrain from laying down dogmatic rules, giving categorical replies to questions which the future will settle in its own way. At best, we can only reason as to what possible answers are compatible with the fundamental principles of Socialism. Thus we may safely answer that in the Socialist régime society will not attempt to dictate to the individual how he shall spend his income. If Jones prefers _objets d'art_, and Smith prefers fast horses or a steam yacht, each will be free to follow his inclinations so far as his resources will permit. If, on the contrary, one should prefer to hoard his wealth, he would be free to do so. The inheritance of such accumulated property, other than personal objects, of course, might be denied, the state being made the only possible inheritor of such accumulated property. Even in the absence of such a regulation, the inheritance of hoarded wealth would not be a serious matter and would speedily adjust itself. There would be no opportunity for its _investment_, so that at most individuals inheriting such property would be enabled to live idly, or with extra luxury, until it was spent. The fact of inheriting property would not give the individual power over the life and labor of others. By either method, full play for individual liberty would be coupled with full economic security for society. There would be no danger of the development of a ruling class as a result of natural inequalities. With such conditions as these, it is not difficult nor in any sense romantic to suppose that the tendency to hoard wealth would largely disappear. In the same way we must regard the possibilities of the exploitation of man by man developing in the Socialist state, through the wastefulness and improvidence of the one and the frugality, abstinence, and cunning of the other, as slight. With the credit functions entirely in the hands of the state, the improvident man would be able to obtain credit upon the same securities as from a private creditor, without extortion. Society would further secure itself against the weakness and failure of the improvident by insuring all its members against sickness, accident, and old age. VIII The administration of justice is necessarily a social function in a democratic society. All juridical functions should be socialized in the strict sense of being maintained at the social expense for the free service of its citizens. Court fees, advocates' charges, and other expenses incidental to the administration of justice in present society are all anti-democratic and subversive of justice. Finally, education is likewise a social necessity which society itself must assume responsibility for. We have discovered that for self-protection society must insist upon a certain minimum of education for every child able to receive it; that it is too vital a matter to be left to the option of parents or the desires of the immature child. We have made a certain minimum of education compulsory and free; the Socialist state would make a minimum--probably much larger than our present minimum--compulsory, but it would also make _all_ education free. From the first stages, in the kindergartens, to the last, in the universities, education must be wholly free or equality of opportunity cannot be realized. So long as a single barrier exists to prevent any child from receiving all the education it is capable of profiting by, democracy is unattained. Whether the Socialist state could tolerate the existence of elementary schools other than its own, such as privately conducted kindergartens, religious schools, and so on, is by no means agreed upon by Socialists. It is like the question of marriage, a matter which is wholly beyond the scope of present knowledge. The future will decide for itself. There are those who believe that the state would not content itself with refusing to permit religious doctrines or ideas to be taught in the schools, but would go further, and, as the protector of the child, guard its independence of thought in later life as far as possible by forbidding religious teaching of any kind in schools for children below a certain age. It would not, of course, attempt to prevent parental instruction in religious beliefs in the home. Beyond the age prescribed, religious education, in all other than public institutions of learning, would be freely admitted. This restriction of religious education to the years of judgment and discretion implies no hostility to religion on the part of the state, but complete neutrality. Not the least important of the rights of the child is the right to be protected from influences which bias the mind and destroy the possibilities of independent thought in later life, or make it attainable only as a result of bitter, needless, tragic experience. This is one view. On the other hand, there are probably quite as many Socialists who believe that the state would not attempt to prevent the religious education of children of any age, in schools voluntarily maintained for that purpose, independent of the public schools. They believe that the state would content itself with insisting that these religious schools must be so built and equipped as not to imperil the lives or the health of the children attending them, and so conducted as not to interfere with the public schools,--all of which means simply that, like vaccination, and the form of marriage contract, the question will be settled by the future in its own way. There is nothing in the fundamental principles of Socialism, nor any body of facts in our present experience, from which we can judge the manner of that settlement. In this brief outline of the Socialist state as the writer, in common with many of his associates, conceives it, there are many gaps. The temptation to fill in the outline somewhat more in detail is strong, but that is beyond the borderland which divides scientific and Utopian methods. The purpose of the outline is mainly to show that the ideal of the Socialism of to-day is something far removed from the network of laws and the oppressive bureaucracy commonly imagined; something wholly different in spirit and substance from the mechanical arrangement of human relations imagined by Utopian romancers. If the Socialist propaganda of to-day largely consists of the advocacy of laws for the protection of labor and dealing with all kinds of evils, it must be remembered that these are to _ameliorate conditions in the existing social order_. Many of the laws for which Socialists have most strenuously fought have their _raison d'être_ in the conditions of capitalist society, and would be quite unnecessary under Socialism. If a reference to one's personal work may be pardoned, I will cite the matter of the feeding of school children, in the public schools, at the public expense. I have, for many years, advocated this measure, which is to be found in most Socialist programmes, and which the Socialists of other countries have to a considerable extent carried into practical effect. Yet, I am free to say that the plan is not my ideal of the manner in which children should be fed. It is, at best, a palliative, a necessary evil, rendered necessary by the conditions of capitalist society. One hopes that in the Socialist régime, home life would be so far developed as to make possible the proper feeding and care of all children in their homes. This is but an illustration. The Socialist ideal of the state of the future, when private property is no longer an instrument of oppression used by the few against the many, is not a life completely enmeshed in a network of government, but a life controlled by government as little as possible; not a life ruled and driven by a powerful engine of laws, but a life as spontaneous and free as possible--a maximum of personal freedom with a minimum of restraint. "These things shall be! A loftier race Than e'er the world hath known shall rise With flower of freedom in their souls And light of science in their eyes."[196] FOOTNOTES: [180] Cf. _Das Erfurter Program_, by Karl Kautsky. [181] Cf. Ensor's _Modern Socialism_, page 351. [182] _Labour and Capital: a Letter to a Labour Friend_, by Goldwin Smith, D.C.L. (Macmillan, 1907). The reader of Professor Smith's little book is referred, for the Socialist answer to his criticisms, to a small volume by the author of this book: _Capitalist and Laborer: an Open Letter to Professor Goldwin Smith_, D.C.L. (Kerr, _Standard Socialist Series_), 1907. [183] _La Conquête du pain_, Pierre Kropotkin, 5th edition, Paris, 1895, page 202. [184] _The Principles of Sociology_, by Herbert Spencer, Vol. III, page 534. [185] Cf. _The Spirit of American Government_, by J. Allen Smith, LL.B. Ph.D., for a discussion of this subject. [186] This statement must not be interpreted too narrowly, of course. While the nature of these things makes possible an infinitely wider range of personal liberty than is possible in some other things, individual liberty must _ultimately_ be governed by the liberty of others. A fanatical religious sect practicing human sacrifice, for instance, could not be tolerated by any civilized society. Obscenity in art is another example. [187] I use the word "state" throughout this discussion in its largest, most comprehensive sense, as meaning the whole political organization of society. [188] This view is fully shared by Kautsky, _Agrarfrage_, pages 443-444, and by Paul Lafargue, _Revue Politique et Parliamentaire_, October, 1898, page 70. [189] Of course, this does not mean that there must not be private _use_ of land. [190] The student who cares to pursue the subject will find that this analysis is, in the main, agreed to by the most eminent exponents of Marxian Socialism to-day. Cf., for instance, Kautsky's _Das Erfurter Program_; the same writer's _The Social Revolution_, especially pages 117, 159; Vandervelde, quoted by Ensor, _Modern Socialism_, page 205; also, Vandervelde's _Collectivism_, page 46. Jaurès, the brilliant French Socialist, may not perhaps be strictly included in the category of "eminent Marxists," but he accepts the position of Kautsky, see _Studies in Socialism_, by Jean Jaurès, pages 36-40. See, also, Engels, _Die Bauernfrage in Frankreich und Deutschland_, published in _Die Neue Zeit_, 1894-1895, No. 10; Kautsky, _Die Agrarfrage_; and Simons, _The American Farmer_. That most of these deal with petty agriculture rather than petty industry is true, but the principle holds in regard to both. [191] "Ethics of Social Progress," by Professor Franklin H. Giddings in _Philanthropy and Social Progress_ (1893), page 226. [192] "The Economics of Factory Legislation," in _The Case For the Factory Acts_, by Mrs. Sidney Webb, page 50. [193] See, for instance, Mr. Roosevelt's speech at Matinecock, L.I., near Oyster Bay, July 11, 1908, as reported in the daily papers by the Associated Press. Also, the Republican National Platform, 1908, which states that Socialism stands for "equality of possession," while the Republican Party stands for "equality of opportunity"--a complete misrepresentation, both of Socialism and the Republican Party! [194] For condemning the wages system as a form of slavery, Socialists are often vigorously condemned, but there are few sociologists of repute who question the truth of the Socialist claim. Herbert Spencer, for example, is as vigorous in asserting that wage-labor is a form of slavery as any Socialist. See _The Principles of Sociology_, Vol. III, Chapter 18. [195] See Kautsky's _Das Erfurter Program_, and also _The Social Revolution_, especially pages 128-135; Anton Menger, _L'État Socialiste_, page 35; and Vandervelde's _Collectivism_, pages 149-150. [196] J. Addington Symonds. CHAPTER X THE MEANS OF REALIZATION[197] I You ask me how the goal I have described is to be attained: "The picture," you say, "is attractive, but we would like to know how we are to reach the Promised Land which it pictures. Show us the way!" The question is a fair one, and I shall try to answer it with candor, as it deserves. But I cannot promise to tell how the change will be brought about, to describe the exact process by which social property will supplant capitalist private property. The only conditions under which any honest thinker could give such an answer would necessitate a combination of circumstances which has never existed, and which no one seriously expects to develop. To answer in definite terms, saying, "This is the manner in which the change will be made," one would have to know the exact time of the change; precisely what things would be socialized; the thought of the people, their temper, their courage. In a word, omniscience would be necessary to enable one to make such a reply. All that is possible in this connection for the candid Socialist is to point out those tendencies which he believes to be making for the Socialist ideal, those tendencies in society, whether political or economic, which are making for industrial democracy; to consider frankly the difficulties which must be overcome before the transition from capitalism can be effected, and to suggest such means of overcoming these as present themselves to the mind, always remembering that other means may be developed which we cannot now see, and that great storms of elemental human passion may sweep the current into channels unsuspected. Those who are familiar with the writings of Marx know that, in strange contrast with the fundamental principles of that theory of social evolution which he so well developed, he lapsed at times into the Utopian habit of predicting the sudden transformation of society. Capitalism was to end in a great final "catastrophe" and the new order be born in the travail of a "social revolution." I remember that when I joined the Socialist movement, many years ago, the Social Revolution was a very real event, inevitable and nigh at hand, to most of us. The more enthusiastic of us dreamed of it; we sang songs in the spirit of the _Chansons Revolutionaires_, one of which, as I recall, told plainly enough what we would do-- "When the Revolution comes." Some comrades actually wanted to have military drill at our business meetings, merely that we might be ready for the Revolution, which might occur any Monday morning or Friday afternoon. If this seems strange and comic as I relate it to-day, please remember that we were very few and very young, and, therefore, very sure that we were to redeem the world. We lived in a state of revolutionary ecstasy. Some of us, I think, must have gone regularly to sleep in the mental state of Tennyson's May Queen, with words equivalent to her childish admonition-- "If you're waking call me early," so fearful were we that the Revolution might start without us! There can be no harm in these confessions to-day, for we have grown far enough beyond that period to laugh at it in retrospect. True, there is still a good deal of talk about the Social Revolution, and there may be a few Socialists here and there who use the term in the sense I have described; who believe that capitalism will come to a great crisis, that there will be a rising of millions in wrath, a night of fury and agony, and then the sunrise of Brotherhood above the blood-stained valley and the corpse-strewn plain. But most of us, when we use the old term, by sheer force of habit, or as an inherited tradition, think of the Social Revolution in no such spirit. We think only of the change that must come over society, transferring the control of its life from the few to the many, the change that is now going on all around us. When the time comes that men and women speak of the state in which they live as Socialism, and look back upon the life we live to-day with wonder and pity, they will speak of the period of revolution as including this very year, and, possibly, all the years included in the lives of the youngest persons present. At all events, no considerable body of Socialists anywhere in the world to-day, and no Socialist whose words have any influence in the movement, believe that there will be a sudden, violent change from capitalism to Socialism. If it seemed necessary, abundant testimony to the truthfulness of this claim could be produced. But I shall content myself with two witnesses--chosen from the multitude of available witnesses for reasons which will unfold themselves. The first witness is Marx himself. I choose his testimony, mainly, because there is no other name so great as his, and, secondly, to show that his profoundest thought rejected the idea of sudden social transformations which at times he seemed to favor. It is 1850. Marx is in London, actively engaged in a German Communist movement with its Central Committee in that great metropolis. The majority are impatient, feverishly urging revolt; they are under the illusion that they can make the Social Revolution at once. Marx tells them, on the contrary, that it will take fifty years "not only to change existing conditions but to change yourselves and make yourselves worthy of political power." They, the majority, say on the other hand, "We ought to get power at once, or else give up the fight." Marx tries vainly to make them see this, and resigns when he fails, scornfully telling them that they "substitute revolutionary phrases for _revolutionary evolution_."[198] Mark well that term, "revolutionary evolution," for it bears out the description I have attempted of the sense in which we speak of revolution in the Socialist propaganda of to-day. And mark well, also, that Marx gave them fifty years simply to make themselves worthy of political power. As the second witness, I choose Liebknecht, whose name must always be associated with those of Marx, Engels, and Lassalle, in Socialist history. Not alone because of the fact that Liebknecht, more than almost any other man, has influenced the tactics of the international Socialist movement, but for the additional reason that detached phrases of his are sometimes quoted in support of the opposite view. Words spoken in oratorical and forensic passion, or in the bravado of irresponsible youthfulness, and texts torn from their contexts, are used to show that Liebknecht anticipated the violent transformation of society. But heed this, one of many similar statements of his maturest and profoundest thought: "_But we are not going to attain Socialism at one bound. The transition is going on all the time_, and the important thing for us ... is not to paint a picture of the future--which in any case would be useless labor--_but to forecast a practical programme for the intermediate period, to formulate and justify measures that shall be applicable at once, and that will serve as aids to the new Socialist birth_."[199] So much, then, for quotations from the mightiest of all our hosts. What I would make clear is not merely that the greatest of Socialist theorists and tacticians agree that the change will be brought about gradually, and not by one stroke of revolutionary action, but that, more important still, the Socialist Party of this country, and all the Socialist parties of the world, are based upon that idea. That is why they have their political programmes, aiming to make the conditions of life better now, in the transition period, and also to aid in the happy, peaceful birth of the new order. II Having disposed of the notion that Socialists expect to realize their ideals by a single stroke, and thus swept away some of the greatest obstacles which rise before the imagination of the student of Socialism, we obtain a clearer vision of the problem. And that is no small advance toward its solution. Concerning the political organization of the Socialist state, so far as the extension of political democracy is concerned, not much need be said. You can very readily comprehend that this may be done by legal, constitutional means. Step by step, just as we attain power enough to do so, we shall extend the power of the people until we have a complete political democracy. Where, as in some of the Southern States, there is virtually a property qualification for the franchise, where that remnant of feudalism, the poll tax, remains, Socialists, whenever they come into power in those states, or whenever they are strong enough to force the issue, will insist upon making the franchise free. And where, as in this state, there is a sex qualification for the franchise, women being denied the suffrage, they will work unceasingly to do away with that relic of barbarism. By means of such measures as the Initiative and Referendum, and election of judges by the people, the sovereignty of the people will be established. It may be that without some constitutional amendments it will be found impossible to make political democracy complete. In that case, moving along the line of least resistance, they will do all that they can within the limits of the Constitution as it is, changing it whenever by reason of their power they deem that practicable. As to the organization of the industrial life of the Socialist state, bringing industry from private to public control, here, too, Socialists will work along the line of least resistance. First of all, it must be remembered that there are tendencies to that end within society at present. Every development of industry and commerce, from competition to monopoly, so far as it centers the control in few hands and organizes the industry or business, makes it possible to take it over without dislocation, and, at the same time, makes it the interest of a larger number to help in bringing about that transfer. In like manner every voluntary coöperative organization of producers makes for the Socialist ideal. This is a far less important matter in the United States than in England and other European countries. Finally, we have the enormous extension of public functions developed already in capitalist society, and being constantly extended. Our postal system, public schools, state universities, libraries, museums, art galleries, parks, bureaus of research and information, hospitals, sanatoria, municipal ferries, water supply, fire departments, health boards, lighting systems, these, and a thousand other activities of our municipalities and states, and the nation, are so many forms created by capitalism to meet its own needs which belong, however, to Socialism and require only to be infused with the Socialist spirit. This will be done as they come under the influence of Socialists elected to various legislative and administrative bodies in ever increasing number as the movement grows. All this is not difficult to comprehend. What is more likely to perplex the average man is the method by which Socialists propose to effect the transfer of individual or corporate property to the collectivity. Will it be confiscated, taken without recompense; and if so, will it not be necessary to take the bank savings of the poor widow as well as the millions of the millionaire? On the other hand, if compensation is given, will there not be still a privileged class, a wealthy class, that is, and a poorer class? These are the questions I see written upon your faces as I look down upon them and read the language of their strained interest. Every face seems a challenge to answer these questions. I shall try to answer them with perfect candor, as far as that is possible within the limits of our time. May I not ask you, then, to follow carefully a brief series of propositions, or postulates, which I shall, with your permission, lay before you? _First:_ The act of transfer, whether it take the form of confiscation or otherwise, must be the will of a legal majority of the people. If the unit is the city, a legal majority of the citizens there; if the unit is the state, then a legal majority of the citizens of the state; if the unit is the nation, then a legal majority in the nation. I use the term "legal majority" to indicate my profound conviction that the process itself must be a legal, constitutional process. Of course, in the event of some great upheaval occurring, such as, for example, the rising of a suffering and desperate people in consequence of some terrific panic or period of depression, brought on by capitalist misrule, or by war, this might be swept away. Throughout the world's history such upheavals have occurred, when the people's wrath, or their desperation, has assumed the form of a cyclone, and in such times laws have been of no more resistance than straws in the pathway of the cyclone sweeping across the plain. Omitting such dire happenings from our calculations--for so we must wish to do--we may lay down this principle of the imperative necessity for a legal majority, acting in legal manner. _Second:_ The process must be gradual. There will be no _coup de force_. No effort will be made to socialize those industries which have not been made ready by a degree of monopolization. This we can say with confidence, if for no other reason than that we cannot conceive a legal majority being stirred sufficiently to take action in the absence of some degree of oppression or danger, such as monopoly alone contains. Further, as a matter of hard, practical sense, it is not conceivable that any government will ever be able to deal with all the industries at one time. The railroads may be first to be taken, or it may be the mines in one state and the oil wells in another. The important point is to see that the process of socialization _must_ be piecemeal and gradual. This does not mean that it must be a _slow_ process, suggesting the slowness of geologic formations, but that it must be gradual, progressive, advancing from step to step, and giving opportunities for adjusting things. Otherwise there would be chaos and anarchy. _Third:_ The manner of the acquisition must be determined by the people at the time, and not fixed by us in advance, according to some abstract principle. If the people decide to take any particular individual or corporate property without compensation, that will be done. And they will have great historic precedents for their action. The Socialists of Europe could point to the manner in which many of the feudal estates and rights were confiscated, while American Socialists could point to the manner in which, without indemnity or compensation, chattel slavery was abolished. So much is said merely by way of explanation, first, that the manner of acquiring private and corporate property and making it social property is not to be decided in advance, and secondly, that there are historic precedents for confiscation. On the other hand, there is no good reason why compensation should not be paid for such properties. You start! You have been more shocked than if I had said we should seize the properties and cut the throats of the proprietors! Be assured: I am not forgetting my promise to be frank with you, nor am I expressing my personal opinion merely when I say that there is nothing in the theory of modern Socialism which precludes the possibility of compensation. There is no Socialist of repute and authority in the world, so far as my knowledge goes, who makes a contrary claim. I should regard it as unworthy to lay down as the Socialist position views which were my own, and which were not shared by the great body of Socialist thinkers throughout the world. It is not less nor more than the truth that all the leading Socialists of the world agree that compensation could be paid without doing violence to a single Socialist principle, and most of them favor it.[200] Once more I shall appeal to the authority of Marx. Engels wrote in 1894: "We do not at all consider the indemnification of the proprietors as an impossibility, whatever may be the circumstances. How many times has not Karl Marx expressed to me the opinion that if we could buy up the whole crowd it would really be the cheapest way of relieving ourselves of them."[201] Not only Marx, then, in the most intimate of his discussions with Engels, his bosom friend, but Engels himself, in almost his last days, refused to admit the impossibility of paying indemnity for properties socialized, "_whatever may be the circumstances_." Now, as to the difficulties--especially as to the widow's savings. The socialization of non-productive wealth is not contemplated by any Socialist, no matter whether it consist of the widow's savings in a stocking or the treasures in the safe deposit vaults of the rich. Mere wealth, whether in money or precious gems and jewels, need not trouble us. Non-productive wealth is outside of our calculation. In the next place, as I have attempted to make clear, the petty business, the individual store, the small workshop, and the farm operated by its owner, would not, necessarily, nor probably, be disturbed. We have to consider only the great agencies of exploitation, industries operated by many producers of surplus-value for the benefit of the few. Let us, for example, take a conspicuous industrial organization, the so-called Steel Trust. Suppose the Socialists to be in power: there is a popular demand for the socialization of the steel industry. The government decides to take over the plant of the Steel Trust and all its affairs, and the support of the vast majority of the people is assured. First a valuation takes place, and then bonds, government bonds, are issued. Unlike what happens too often at the present time, the price fixed is not greatly in excess of the value the people acquire--one of the means by which the capitalists fasten their clutches on the popular throat. The Socialist _spirit_ enters into the business. Bonds are issued to all the shareholders in strict proportion to their holdings, and so the poor widow, concerning whose interests critics of Socialism are so solicitous, gets bonds for her share. She is therefore even more secure than before, since it is no longer possible for unscrupulous individuals to plunder her by nefarious stock transactions. So far, good and well. But, you may rightly say, this will not eliminate the unearned incomes. The heavy stockholders will simply become rich bondholders. Temporarily, that is true. But when that has been accomplished in a few of the more important industries, they will find it difficult to invest their surplus incomes profitably. There will also be a surplus to the state over and above the amounts annually paid in redemption of the bonds. Finally, it will be possible to adopt measures for eliminating the unearned incomes entirely by means of taxation, such as the progressive income tax, property and inheritance taxes. Taxation is, of course, a form of confiscation, but it is a form which has become familiar, which is perfectly legal, and which enables the confiscatory process to be stretched out over a long enough period to make it comparatively easy, to reduce the hardship to a minimum. By means of a progressive income tax, a bond tax, and an inheritance tax, it would be possible to eliminate the unearned incomes of a class of bondholders from society within a reasonable period, without inflicting injury or hardship upon any human being. I do not, let me again warn you, set this plan before you as one which Socialism depends upon, which must be adopted. I do not say that the Socialist parties of the world are pledged to this method, for they are not. The subject is not mentioned in any of our programmes, so far as I recall them at this moment. We are silent upon the subject, not because we fear to discuss it, but because we realize that the matter will be decided when the question is reached, and that each case will be decided upon its merits. Still, it is but fair to express my belief that it is to the interest of the workers, no less than of the rest of society, that the change to a Socialist state be made as easy and peaceable as possible. Socialists, being human beings and not monsters, naturally desire that the transition to Socialism shall be made with as little friction and pain as possible. Left to their own choice, I am confident that those upon whom the task of effecting the change falls will not choose the way of violence, if the way of peace is left open to them. Within the limits of this opportunity, I have tried to be as frank as I am to myself in those constant self-questionings which are inseparable from the work of the serious propagandist and honest teacher. Further I cannot go. If I have not been able to tell definitely how the change _will_ be wrought, I have at least been able, I hope, to show that it _may_ be brought about peaceably and without bloodshed. If this has given any one a new view of Socialism--opened, as it were, a doorway through which you can get a glimpse of the City Beautiful, and the way leading to its gates--then my reward is infinitely precious. FOOTNOTES: [197] From the stenographic report of an address given to some students of Socialism in New York, October, 1907. [198] Cf. Jaurès, _Studies in Socialism_, page 44. [199] Quoted by Jaurès, _Studies in Socialism_, page 93. [200] The reader is referred to Kautsky's books, _Das Erfurter Program_ and _The Social Revolution_, and to Vandervelde's admirable work, _Collectivism_, for confirmation of this statement. [201] Quoted by Vandervelde, _Collectivism_, page 155. INDEX (Titles in Italics) A Abbé Lancellotti, quoted, 27-28. _Abuses of Injunctions, The_, 196 n. _A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy_, 93, 202, 206, 212, 245 n. Adams, Mr. Brooks, 156. Adler, G., 64 n. AFRICA: American investments in, 118; cannibalism in, 78; Moors in, 95; slavery in, 26. Agriculture, concentration in, 121, 131-137. Aix-la-Chapelle, conference of sovereigns at, 49. _A Lecture on Human Happiness_, 206. _A Letter to Lord John Russell_, 206. "Alfred" (Samuel Kydd), quoted, 23. Alliance de la Democratie Socialiste, the, 69 n. Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, the, 195. Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, the, 197. AMERICA: class divisions and struggles in, 163-169, 176-178, 182-184, 192-197; concentration of wealth in, 124-150; discovery of, 94-97; first cotton from, used in England, 30-31; foreign capital invested in, 118; Socialism in, 4, 167. _See also_ UNITED STATES. American Association for the Advancement of Science, 146. _American Farmer, The_, 136 n., 168 n., 306 n. _American Federationist, The_, 13 n. American Federation of Labor, 183. American Railway Union, the, 194. American Revolution, the, 79. _A Modest Inquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency_, 245. ANARCHISM: Socialism and, 2; weak where Socialism is strong, 181. Anaximander, 232. _Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress_, 97 n., 102 n. _An Inquiry concerning Political Justice_, 204. _An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth_, 204. Anstey, Mr., satire on Socialist régime, 281. Anthracite coal strike, 1903, 174. _Arena, The_, 196 n. _A Report on Labor Disturbances in the State of Colorado_, etc., 174 n. Argyles, relation of Mrs. Marx to the, 66. Aristotle, 81. Arkwright, English inventor, 19. ASIA: American capital invested in, 118; savages in Central, 95; supposed origin of feudalism in, 106. Atheism, Marx and, 69, 70 n. Athens, 104. _A Treatise on Taxes and Constitutions_, 244 n. _Aus dem literarischen Nachlass von Karl Marx, Friederich Engels, und Ferdinand Lassalle_, 64 n. Australia, American capital invested in, 118. _Austrian Labor Almanac, The_, 66 n. "Austrian" school of economists, the, 257. Aveling, Edward, 93 n., 210 n.; Eleanor Marx, 210 n., 212. B Bachofen, 101. Baden, concentration of wealth in, 140-142. Bakeshops, concentration of ownership of, 124. Bakunin, Michael, 66, 69 n., 88. Bantu tribes of Africa, 102. Bax, E. Belfort, 61 n., 67 n., 93 n. Beaulieu, Leroy, 141. Beer, M., 87 n. Bellamy, Edward, 9. Bernstein, Edward, 139, 203, 204 n. Bigelow, Melville, 156 n. Bismarck, Marx and, 92. "Blacklisting," 173. Blanc, Louis, 12. Bolte, letter from Marx to, 88 n. Bookstaver, Justice, 196. Bootblacks, 127. Bray, John Francis, 203, 207. _Briefe und Auszüge aus Briefen von Joh. Phil. Becker_, etc., 120. Brisbane, Albert, 55. British Museum, Marx and the, 209, 210, 213. Brook Farm, 53. Brooks, George, 69 n. Buffalo _Express_ strike, 196. C Cabet, Étienne, 54, 57-60, 231. California, cost of growing wheat in, 131. Call, Henry Laurens, 146. Campanella, 9. Cannibalism, 78, 102, 103. _Capital_: dedication of, 208; English character of, 213-214; Liebknecht on, 209; quoted, 28, 29, 87, 93 n., 115, 206, 228 n., 239, 274, 275; relation of to Socialism, 119. CAPITAL: nature of, 236; Socialists advocate abolition of, 237. _Capitalist and Laborer_ (Spargo), 259 n., 284 n. Capitalist income, the source of, 266 _et seq._ Carlyle, Thomas, quoted, 217, 302. Cartwright, English inventor, 20. Casalis, African missionary, quoted, 77. _Case for the Factory Acts, The_, 310. _Centralization and the Law: Scientific Legal Education_, 156 n. _Chansons Revolutionaire_, 325. _Charles Darwin and Karl Marx, A Comparison_, 93 n. Chartism and Chartists, 53, 67, 203. Chase, Salmon P., 45. Chicago, trial of E. V. Debs at, 194. Child Labor, 21-26, 31, 39. Children, feeding of school, 321. China, Socialism in, 71. CHRISTIANITY: embraced by Heinrich Marx, 63-65; Marx and, 68-70; Roman Empire and, 89; Robert Owen and, 51. _Christianity and the Social Crisis_, 86 n. Cigar stores, concentration of ownership of, 124. Civil War, the, 85. _Claims of Labour and Capital Conciliated, The_, 204. _Clansmen, The_, 158. _Clarion, The_, 7 n. Class consciousness, 151, 165; President Roosevelt on, 151, 180; Robert Owen and, 48-49; Weitling and, 56. CLASS DIVISIONS: of capitalism, 157 _et seq._; of feudalism, 156; of slavery, 155; of the United States, 163 _et seq._; ultimate end of, by Socialism, 200. Class environment, influence of, on beliefs, etc., 171-175. Class struggle theory, the, 155 _et seq._ Cleveland, President, 194. Clodd, Edward, quoted, 76, 82 n. _Coal Mine Workers, The_, 160 n. Coeur d'Alene, 183, 192. Coleridge, Robert Owen and, 31. _Collectivism_, 306 n. Cologne assizes, Marx tried at, 208. Colorado, labor troubles in, 174, 192. Columbus and the discovery of America, 94-97. _Coming Slavery, The_, 6, 282. Commercial crisis in England, 1815, 39-41. COMMODITY: definition of a, 236, 239-241; labor power as a, 263 _et seq._; money as a, 255-256; sunshine called a, 241 n.; value of a, determined by labor, 243-254. _Common Sense of Socialism, The_, (Spargo), 168. Communism, political, 13, 14, 15, 54, 55; primitive, 97, 101-102. Communist League, the, 60, 61. _Communist Manifesto, The_: birth-cry of modern Socialism, 53; joint authorship of, 62, 73-74; publication of, 62; quoted, 71, 72, 73, 153-154; summary of, by Engels, 72; taxation of land values advocated in, 268 n. Compensation, Socialism and, _see_ CONFISCATION. Competition, 98-101, 114, 115, 148, 149. _Comrade, The_, 10 n., 68 n. Concentration of capital and wealth, the, 115 _et seq._ _Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, The_, 67, 74. Confiscation of property, Socialism and, 331, 333-337. Constitution, the, and Socialism, 329-330. Consumer, exploitation of the, 189. Cooke-Taylor, R. W., 23 n., 24. Coöperation, among animals, 98, 99; Owen and, 45; under Socialism, 299, 300, 305. _Corn-Law Rhymes, The_, 1. Cossa, Luigi, quoted, 215. Cotton manufacture in England, 29 _et seq._; Engels and, 67. Credit functions in Socialist régime, 300-302. Crimean War, the, 36-38, 232. Cripple Creek, 174 n., 183. _Criticism of the Gotha Programme_, 205, 224. Crompton, English inventor, 19. Cromwellian Commonwealth, the, 114. D Dale, David, 24. Dante, Marx and, 68. DARWIN, CHARLES: appreciation of his work by Marx, 93; compared to Marx, 73, 93; letter from, to Marx, 93; on the struggle for existence, 98; quoted, 98. _Das Erfurter Program_, 279 n., 305 n., 315 n. _Das junge Deutschland in der Schweiz_, 70 n. Davenay, M., letter from Herbert Spencer to, 6. Debs, E. V., 193, 194. DEMOCRACY: application of principles of, to industry in Socialist régime, 287, 302-305; only approximately attainable, 288-289; Socialism and, 287-290, 302-305, 329-330. _Descent of Man, The_, 98. Deville, Gabriel, quoted, 237. Diary of Mrs. Marx quoted, 211-212. _Die Agrarfrage_, 168 n., 297 n., 306 n. _Die Bauernfrage in Frankreich und Deutschland_, 306. _Die Grundlagen der Karl Marx'schen Kritik der bestehenden Volkswirthschaft_, 64. _Die Neue Zeit_, 64 n. _Die Voraussetzungen des Socializmus_, 139. Directive ability, 228 n., 273-275. Direct legislation, 289, 329-330. _Directory of Directors, The_, 117. _Disclosures about the Communists' Process_, 61. Drinkwater, partner of Robert Owen, 29-31. E _Eastern Question, The_, 210 n., 212 n. _Economic Foundations of Society, The_, 87 n. _Economic Interpretation of History, The_ (Rogers), 94 n., 95 n. _Economic Interpretation of History, The_ (Seligman), 81 n., 82 n., 83 n., 85 n., 91 n. _Economic Journal, The_, 198 n. _Economics of Socialism, The_, 38 n., 257 n. _Economic Writings of Sir William Petty, The_, 215 n. Edison, 227. _Effects of Civilization on the People of the European States, The_, 203. _Eighteenth Brumaire, The_, 90. _Elements of Political Economy_ (Nicholson), 241 n. Elliott, Ebenezer, quoted, 1. Ely, Professor R. T., 46, 115, 132, 140; quoted, 79, 138, 148. Emerson, R. W., on Robert Owen, 50-52. ENGELS, FRIEDERICH: birth and early training, 66-67; collaboration with Marx in authorship of _Manifesto_, 62; first meeting with Marx, 67; friendship with O'Connor and Owen, 67; his _Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844_, 67; joins International Alliance with Marx, 61; life in England, 67; linguistic abilities, 67; journalistic work, 67; poem on, 74; quoted, 17, 54, 73-74, 91, 105, 120, 153-154, 186, 306 n., 334-335; share in authorship of _Manifesto_, 73; views upon confiscation of capitalist property, 335. England, industrial revolution in, 19 _et seq._; Social Democratic Federation of, 283-284; trade unions in, 45, 197-199. Ensor, R. C. K., 283, 306 n. Equality, Socialists and, 2, 312, 316. Eskimos, the, 102. _Essai sur la repartition des richesses et sur la tendance à une moindre inégalité des conditions_, 141 n. _Essay on Robert Owen_, 50 n. _Essays on the Formation of Human Character_, 34. _Ethics and the Materialistic Conception of History_, 171 n. Europe, growth of Socialism in, 4. Everet's wool-dressing machine, 27. F _Fabian Tracts, The_, 124 n., 144 n. _Factory System and the Factory Acts, The_, 24. Family, _see_ Marriage. Farmers, class interests of, 164, 166-169. Farms, mortgages and ownership of, 133-134; number of, in United States, 133; permanence of small, 134; under Socialism, 128 n. Ferdinand and Isabella, 95. _Ferdinand Lassalle as a Social Reformer_, 204 n. Ferri, Enrico, 78, 93 n. Feudalism, duration of, 107; nature of, 108-110; origin of, 106-107; theory of, 108. Feuerbach, Ludwig, 89. _Feuerbach, the Roots of the Socialist Philosophy_, 86 n., 89 n. _Figaro, The_, 6. "Final Utility" theory of value, the, 257. Fourier, Charles, 32, 46, 48, 50, 54, 231. Foxwell, Professor, 206, 207 n.; quoted, 206. France, concentration of wealth in, 141. Franklin, Benjamin, 244, 245, 307; estimate of, by Marx, 245 n.; his views upon value, 245; quoted, 245. Freeman, Justice, 195. "Free Soil" movement, the, 57. Freiligrath, F., 208. _French and German Socialism_, 46 n. G Garrison, W. Lloyd, 85. Garwood, John, poem by, quoted, 35. Gentz, M., 49. George, Henry, 268 n. German Socialists in America, F. Engels on, 120. GERMANY: Anarchism weak in, 181; ribbon loom invented in, 27; Socialism in, 167; use of loom in, forbidden, 28. _Geschichte der deutschen Sozialdemokratie_, 64 n. Ghent, W. J., 32, 83, 124, 171 n., 178; quoted, 175. Gibbins, H. de B., quoted, 21, 22, 26. Giddings, Professor F. H., quoted, 310. Giffen, Sir Robert, 143. Gildersleeve, Justice, 196. Glasgow, conference of manufacturers in, 39. _God's England or the Devil's?_ 69 n. Godwin, William, 203, 204. Gompers, Samuel, quoted, 13 n. Gossen, 257 n. Gotha Programme of German Socialist Party, 205, 224, 229. Gray, John, 203, 206. Green, J. Richard, 79. _Growth of Monopoly in English Industry, The_, 124 n. _Guaranties of Harmony and Freedom, The_, 55. _Guide to the Study of Political Economy_, 215. H Hall, Charles, 203. Hall, Professor Thomas C., 89 n. Hamburg, loom publicly burned in, 28. Hanna, Marcus A., 183. Hargreaves, English inventor, 19. Harrington, 82. Hazelton and Homestead, 183. Heath, Frederic, 55 n. Hebrews, religious conceptions of the, 86. Heine, Heinrich, 66. _Herr Vogt_, 61. Hillquit, Morris, 46 n., 228 n.; quoted, 55-57. _History and Criticism of the Labor Theory of Value_, 205 n. _History of Socialism_, 46 n. _History of Socialism in the United States_, 46 n., 55 n. _History of the Factory System_, 23. Hobbes, 261. Hodgskin, Thomas, 203, 207. Hull, Henry, 215 n. Huxley, Professor, 77, 98. Hyndman, H. M., 38 n., 257 n. I Ibsen, 15. Icaria, 59. Idaho, class struggle in, 183, 192. Immigration, 127 n. Individualism, Socialism and, 280. _Industrial History of England, The_, 21 n., 22 n., 26 n. Industrial revolution in England, the, 19 _et seq._ Ingalls, Senator John J., 148. Initiative and Referendum, the, 289, 329-330. Injunctions in labor disputes, 193 _et seq._ International Alliance, the, 61. International Cigarmakers' Union, 195. _International Socialist Review, The_, 11, 88 n., 224 n. International Typographical Union, 196. Iron Law of Wages, the, 262-265. Isaiah, quoted, 9. J Jaurès, Jean, 306 n., 327 n., 328 n. _Jesus Christ and the Social Question_, 69 n. Jevons, Professor W. S., 257 n. Jones, Lloyd, biographer of Owen, 19. Jones, Owen's first partner, 29. _Justice_ (London), 61 n., 67 n. K _Karl Marx: Biographical Memoirs_, 17 n., 64 n., 66 n., 93 n., 209 n., 212 n. _Karl Marx's Nationaloekonomische Irrlehren_, 92 n. Karl Marx on Sectarianism and Dogmatism, 88 n. Kautsky, Karl, 66 n., 171 n., 297 n., 305 n., 306 n., 324 n.; quoted, 128, 168. Kipling, Rudyard, quoted, 96. Kirkup, Thomas, 46 n. Kropotkin, Peter, 99, 100, 285, 286 n. Kydd, Samuel ("Alfred"), 23 n. L Labor, defined by Mallock, 228-229; by Marx, 228. _Labor Defended against the Claims of Capital_, 206. _Labor History of the Cripple Creek District_, 174 n. Labor Notes, 314. Labor-power, a commodity, 263 _et seq._; determines value, 243-254. _Labour and Capital; a Letter to a Labour Friend_, 284 n. _Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy_, 207. _La Conquête du pain_, 286 n. Lafargue, Paul, 128 n., 297 n. Lamarck, 72. _La Misère de la Philosophie_, 201, 203 n. Land, ownership of, under Socialism, 297; under tribal communism, 72, 97. _La Philosophie de la Misère_, 201. Lassalle, Ferdinand, 64 n., 204 n., 225, 262-263, 264, 265. Lauderdale, Lord, 49, 257. _Lectures on the Nature and Use of Money_, 206. Lee, Algernon, quoted, 172, 275. Leibnitz, 64, 77; quoted, 76. Leslie, John ("J. L."), quoted, 74 n. _L'État Socialiste_, 315. Liebknecht, W., 64 n., 66 n., 212 n.; quoted, 17, 93, 209, 327-328. _Life of Francis Place_, 207 n. _Life of Robert Owen_ (anonymous), 30 n. Lincoln, Abraham, 43-44. Lloyd, W. F., 257 n. Locke, 64. Lockwood, George Browning, 39 n., 41 n. London, Jack, 182 n. Lothrop, Harriet E., 224 n. Lovejoy, 85. Lubbock, Sir John, 101. Luddites, the, 26, 36. Luther, Martin, 80, 88. Lyell, 77. M Macdonald, J. R., 225. Machinery, introduction of, 19, 20, 26-29. Machinists' Union sued, 198. McMaster, 79. Macrosty, H. W., 124. Maine, Sir Henry, 101. Mallock, W. H., 119, 221, 222, 223, 224, 226, 227, 228, 230, 274, 275. Malthus, 98. Marr, Wilhelm, 70 n. Marriage, Socialism and, 292-293. MARX, KARL: birth and early life, 63-65; _Capital_ written in London, 209; collaborates with Engels, 62, 73; conversion to Socialism, 68-70; correspondent for New York _Tribune_, 210; death, 213; domestic felicity, 212-213; edits _Rhenish Gazette_, 65, 67; expelled from different countries, 209; finds refuge in England, 209; first meeting with F. Engels, 67; his attacks upon Proudhon, 201-202; his obligations to the Ricardians, 203; his surplus value theory, 203, 205, 206, 266-270; in German revolution of 1848, 208; Jewish ancestry, 63-64; marriage, 65-66; mastery of art of definition, 217; misrepresentation by Mallock of his views, 221-230; opposes Bakunin, 69-70; parents' religious beliefs, 64-65; poverty, 210-212; quoted, 27, 28, 29, 61, 86, 87, 89, 90, 93, 115, 191, 202, 217, 236, 239, 245 n., 263, 274, 275, 327, 334-335; related to Argyles through marriage, 66; scientific methods of, 231-234; spiritual nature of, 68-70; starts _New Rhenish Gazette_, 208; views on confiscation of capitalist property, 334-335; views on Social Revolution, 326-327. _Mass and Class_, 83 n., 171 n., 175 n., 178 n. Massey, Gerald, quoted, 52 n. Mayo-Smith, Richmond, 142, 143. Mazzini, G., 60. Mehring, Franz, 64 n., 224 n. Menger, Dr. Anton, 203, 205, 206 n., 207 n. _Message to Congress_, 177. Methodism, 89. Middle Ages, the, 107. Mill, John Stuart, 216, 217, 227, 242. Mitchell, John, 183; quoted, 193. _Modern Socialism_ (Ensor), 306 n. _Modern Socialism_ (Spargo), 259 n. Money, as a commodity, 255-256; various articles used as, 255. Money, Chiozza, M.P., 144. Monopoly, 115, 116, 149, 258, 259. More, Sir Thomas, 9, 58, 59. Morgan, J. P., 179. Morgan, Lewis H., 97, 101, 102 n. Morris, William, quoted, 2, 20. _Mutual Aid a Factor of Evolution_, 99 n., 100 n. N Napoleon, 114, 250. National Association of Manufacturers, the, 183. National Civic Federation, the, 183, 222 n. _Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted, The_, 206-207. "New Christianity" of Saint-Simon, the, 68. New Harmony, 43, 44, 45, 51. _New Harmony Communities, The_, 39 n., 41 n. New Lanark, 31-34, 41, 50. _New Moral World, The_, 11. Newton, Sir Isaac, 152. Newton, Wales, 45. New York _Sun_, the, 196. Nicholson, Professor J. S., 241 n. _Northern Star, The_, 67. Norway, 2. _Notes on Feuerbach_, 86 n. O _Oceana_, 82. _Organized Labor_, 183 n. _Origin of Species, The_, 72. _Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, The_, 105. _Our Benevolent Feudalism_, 124. OWEN, ROBERT: advises Cabet, 60; as cotton manufacturer, 29-34; at Aix-la-Chapelle, 49; Autobiography of, 24 n.; becomes Socialist, 41; begins agitation for factory legislation, 31; biography of, 19; dying words of, 50; Emerson's view of, 50-52; Engels' estimate of, 17; establishes infant schools, 32; first to use word "Socialism," 11; founder of coöperative movement, 45; his failure, 45; improves spinning machinery, 30; Liebknecht on, 17; Lincoln and, 43-44; New Harmony, 43-45; New Lanark, 31-34; presides over first Trade Union Congress, 45; proposes establishment of communistic villages, 41; quoted, 24, 25, 34, 35, 37-38, 39-41; scepticism of, 18; speech to manufacturers, 39-41; views on crisis of 1815, 37; views of Fourier's ideas, 50. Owen, Robert Dale, letter of, to Lincoln, 44. Owenism, synonymous with Socialism, 11. P Peabody, Professor, 69 n. Peel, Sir Robert, 31. Petty, Sir William, 214, 215, 242, 244; quoted, 215, 216, 243-244. _Pioneers of Evolution from Thales to Huxley_, 76 n., 82 n. Place, Francis, 207. Plato, 9. Podmore, Frank, 19 n. _Political Economy_ (Senior), 214 n. _Poverty of Philosophy, The_, 201 n. _Present Distribution of Wealth in the United States, The_, 144 n. Price, an approximation of value, 254 _et seq._ Prices and Wages, 189. _Principles of Economics_ (Seligman), 259 n. _Principles of Political Economy and Taxation_, 246 n., 249 n., 262 n. _Principles of Sociology, The_, 286 n., 313-314 n. Private property, origin of, 97, 102-103; transformation to social, 331-337; under the Socialist régime, 128, 296-300, 316-317. Protestant Reformation, the, 80, 114. Proudhon, P. J., 66, 201, 202. Pullman Strike, the, 193-194. Q _Quarterly Journal of Economics, The_, 15. Quelch, II., 201 n. R Rappites, the, 45. Rastall, Benjamin McKie, 174 n. Rauschenbusch, Professor, 86. Referendum, the, 289, 329-330. _Reformateurs Modernes_, 11. _Remarks and Facts relative to the American Paper Currency_, 245 n. _Reminiscences of Karl Marx_, 68 n. Rent of Ability, the, 273-275. _Report of the Royal Commission on Labour_, 70 n. _Republic, The_, 12. Republican Party, the, 2, 312 n. Revisionism, 132. _Revolution and Counter-Revolution_, 210, 212 n. _Revolution in Mind and Practice, The_, 49 n. Revolution of 1848, 208. _Revue Politique et Parliamentaire_, 128, 297 n. Reybaud, L., 11. Ricardians, the, 202-208, 229, 242. Ricardo, David, 205, 214, 215, 216, 217, 227, 242, 245, 246, 247, 248, 250; quoted, 245-246, 262. _Riches and Poverty_, 144. _Right to the Whole Produce of Labour, The_, 205 n., 206 n., 207 n. Riley, W. Harrison, 68 n. Rockefeller, John D., 179. Rogers, Thorold, 83, 84, 94 n., 95 n. Roosevelt, President, 151, 180, 312 n.; quoted, 177. Ruge, Arnold, 66. Russell, Lord John, 206. S Sadler, Michael, 26 n. Saint-Simon, 7, 9, 12, 46, 48, 231, 232. Salt, H. S., 26 n. San Francisco, disaster in, 158-159. Sanial, Lucien, 129, 145. Saxony, concentration of wealth in, 143. Scarcity values, 249-250. Schiller, quoted, 85. Seabury, Judge, 196 n. Seligman, Professor E. R. A., 81 n., 82, 83, 84, 85 n., 91, 259. Senior, Nassau, 214. _Shall the Unions go into Politics?_ 184 n. Simons, A. M., 136, 168 n., 306 n. Slonimski, Ludwig, 92 n. Smith, Adam, 160, 206, 214, 215, 227, 242, 247; quoted, 161-162, 244. Smith, Professor J. Allen, 289 n. Smith, Professor Goldwin, 284. _Social Democracy Red Book_, 55 n. _Social Meaning of Modern Religious Movements in England, The_, 89 n. SOCIALISM: and assassination, 1, 3; coöperation under, 299, 300, 305; credit functions under, 300-302; definition of the word, 9; democracy essential to, 287-289; education under, 318-320; first use of the word, 10-11; freedom in religious, scientific, and philosophical matters under, 291-292; freedom of the individual under, 284-287; in Europe, 4; in Germany, 4, 167, 181; in United States, 4, 167; inheritance of wealth under, 316-317; justice under, 318; labor and its reward under, 311-316; monopolies and, 115, 128, 148-150, 332-333; not opposed to individualism, 280 _et seq._; private property and industry under, 295-300, 335; realization of, 323 _et seq._; relation of the sexes under, 293; religion and, 291-292, 319; religious training of children and, 319-320; scientific character of, 231-234; Utopian and scientific compared, 42; wages under, 313-315; wealth under, 316-317, 335; women's suffrage and, 288, 329. _Socialism_ (Macdonald), 225 n. _Socialism_ (Mallock), 221 n. _Socialism and Social Democracy_, 10 n. _Socialism Inevitable_, 130, 131. _Socialism Utopian and Scientific_, 35 n., 47 n., 48. Socialist Party organizations among farmers, 167. Social Revolution, the, 324-328. _Social Revolution, The_, 128 n., 306 n., 315 n., 334 n. Sombart, Professor Werner, 132. _Some Neglected British Economists_, 257 n. _Songs of Freedom_, 26 n. Sorge, F. A., 120. Spahr, Charles B., 144. Spargo, John, 10, 168. Spencer, Herbert, 6, 8, 282, 313-314 n.; quoted, 7, 286. _Spirit of American Government, The_, 289 n. Standard Oil group, the, 117. _Statistics and Economics_, 142-143. Stone, N. I., 245 n. _Studies in Socialism_, 306 n., 327 n., 328 n. _Studies in the Evolution of Industrial Society_, 79 n., 115 n., 138 n., 140 n., 148. _Sun_, New York, the, 196. SURPLUS VALUE: early uses of the term, 205, 206; the theory developed by Marx, 206, 266; the theory explained, 266-270; various theories of, 271-275. Symonds, J. Addington, 322 n. T "Taff Vale law," 197-199. Taxation as a means of achieving Socialism, 336-337. Taxation of land values, 268 n. Tendencies to socialization within existing state, 279, 330-331. Texas, Cabet advised to experiment in, 60. _The People's Marx_, 237 n. _The Social System, a Treatise on the Principles of Exchange_, 206. Thompson, William, 203, 204, 205. Tolstoy, 15, 222. TRUSTS, _see_ CONCENTRATION OF CAPITAL _and_ MONOPOLY. U Unionism, principles of labor, 184 _et seq._ United Mine Workers' Union, the, 159-160. UNITED STATES: classes in, 164-169, 176-179; concentration of wealth and capital in, 124-150; farms and farm mortgages in, 133-134; millionaires in, 146-148; Socialism in, 4, 167; strikes in, 182. United States Steel Corporation, 138. V VALUE: and price, 254-259; early labor theory of, 242-252; Marxian theory of, 250-254; other theories of, 259. _Value, Price, and Profit_, 263 n. Vandervelde, Émile, 306 n., 315 n., 334 n., 335 n. Vasco de Gama, 96. Veblen, Professor Thorstein, quoted, 15. _Volkstribun_, the, 57. W Wallace, Alfred Russell, 77, 81. Wallas, G., 207. _War of the Classes, The_, 182 n. Warne, Frank Julian, 160 n. Watt, James, 20, 227. Wealth, defined, 217-221; inheritance of, under Socialism, 316-317, 335. _Wealth of Nations, The_, 160, 162 n., 206 n., 213, 244 n., 249 n. Webb, Mrs. Sidney, 310. Weitling, Wilhelm, 14, 54, 55, 56, 57. Whitaker, Dr. A. C., 205 n. Wilshire, Gaylord, 130 n., 131 n. Wolf, Wilhelm, 208. _Worker, The_, 172, 275. _World as it is, and as it might be, The_, 55. Wright, Carroll D., 174 n. _Writings and Speeches of John J. Ingalls_, 148 n. Y Youmans, Professor, 77. Z Zola, Émile, 15. ADVERTISEMENTS The Bitter Cry of the Children By JOHN SPARGO Introduction by Robert Hunter _Illustrated, cloth, 12mo, $1.50 net; by mail, $1.62_ "The book will live and will set hundreds of teachers and social workers and philanthropists to work in villages and cities throughout the country.... 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27814	----	+--------------------------------------------------+ |Transcriber's note: | | | |Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. | | | +--------------------------------------------------+ FEUERBACH THE ROOTS OF THE SOCIALIST PHILOSOPHY BY FREDERICK ENGELS TRANSLATED WITH CRITICAL INTRODUCTION BY AUSTIN LEWIS CHICAGO CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY Copyright, 1903 By CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY INTRODUCTION. This work takes us back nearly sixty years, to a time when what is now a movement of universal significance was in its infancy. Hegel and the Revolution of 1848; these are the points of departure. To the former, we owe the philosophic form of the socialist doctrine, to the latter, its practical activity as a movement. In the midst of the turmoil and strife and apparent defeat of those days two men, Marx and Engels, exiled and without influence, betook themselves to their books and began laboriously to fashion the form and doctrine of the most powerful intellectual and political movement of all time. To the task they brought genius, scholarship, and a capacity for hard work and patient research. In each of these qualities they were supreme. Marx possessed a colossal mind; no thinker upon social subjects, not even Herbert Spencer, has been his superior, for the lonely socialist could claim a comprehensiveness, a grasp of relations and a power of generalization, together with a boldness of conception, which place him in a class by himself. Engels was the able co-adjutor and co-worker with Marx. He was a deep and acute thinker, a most patient investigator, a careful writer. More practical than his friend, he was better able to cope with material problems, and his advice and his purse were always at the disposal of Marx. The latter could hardly have worked under more discouraging conditions. Poverty, inadequate opportunities, lack of stimulating companionship, and the complete absence of any kind of encouragement and such sympathy as a man of his affectionate temperament craved fell to his lot. His most learned works were written for groups of workingmen, his most laborious efforts were made without the slightest hope of recognition from the learned and the powerful. All through these years Engels remained his faithful friend, and helped him over many hard places when family troubles and straitened circumstances pressed upon the old revolutionist. This work is Engels' testimony with regard to the method employed by them in arriving at their philosophical conclusions. It is the statement of the philosophical foundations of modern socialism by one who helped to lay them; it is an old man's account of the case upon the preparation of which he has spent his entire life, for, this work, short as it is, represents the results of forty years of toil and persevering effort. As the "Communist Manifesto" was a gage flung with all the impetuosity of youthful impatience into the face of constituted authority, so this is the deliberate statement of the veteran, who has learned the game too well to leave any openings, and proceeds to the demolition of pet opinions in a quiet, deadly and deliberate fashion. Step by step, the argument is built up. The ghosts of old controversies long since buried are raised, to show how the doctrine imperishably associated with the names of Marx and Engels came into existence; the "Young Hegelians," the "Tuebingen School," and finally Feuerbach himself are summoned from the grave to which the Revolution of 1848 had consigned them. Still, ancient history as these controversies are from the German standpoint, such is the backwardness of philosophy among English-speaking peoples, that we find Engels exposing again and again fallacies which persist even in our time, and ridiculing sentiments which we receive with approbation in our political assemblies, and with mute approval in our churches and conventicles. The anti-religious note is noticeable throughout, in itself an echo of controversies long past, when the arguments of the critics of the Bible were creating now fury, now dismay, throughout Christendom, before the Higher Criticism had become respected, and before soi-disant sceptics could continue to go solemnly to church. Moreover, the work was written in German for German workmen for whom religion has not the same significance as it apparently still continues to possess for the English-speaking people, whose sensitiveness upon the subject appears to have outlived their faith. However that may be, religious bodies possess a curious and perhaps satisfactory faculty of absorbing the truths of science, and still continuing to exist, and even to thrive, upon what the inexperienced might easily mistake for a deadly diet. Under the circumstances there is no reason why Engels' remarks should affect even the timorous, although it must be remembered that a very able English socialist philosopher is reputed to have damaged his chances irretrievably by an ill-judged quotation from Mr. Swinburne. It must be confessed that the occasional bitterness in which Engels indulges is to be deplored, in a work of so essentially intellectual a character, but it is little to be wondered at. His contempt for university professors and the pretentious cultivated classes, who claim so much upon such slight grounds, is not strange, when we consider the honest labors of himself and his colleagues and the superficial place-hunting of the recognized savants. He loves learning for its own sake, for the sake of truth and scientific accuracy, and he cannot feel anything but scorn for those who use it as a means to lull the consciences of the rich, and to gain place and power for themselves. The degradation of German philosophy affects him with a real sorrow; the scholar is outraged at the mockery. "Sterility," "eclecticism," these are the terms in which he sums up the teachings of the official professors, and they are almost too gentle to be applied to the dispiriting and disheartening doctrines which are taught to the English-speaking student of to-day under the name of economics or philosophy. In the first part of his pamphlet, for it is little more in size, Engels gives a short and concise account of the work of Hegel and the later Hegelian School. He shows how the philosophy of Hegel has both a conservative and a radical side and how conservatives and radicals alike might, (as a matter of fact they did), each derive support from his teachings, according to the amount of stress laid respectively upon the great divisions of his work, the "System" and the "Dialectic." The Extreme Left developed through the application of the dialectic, and applied the philosophic doctrine thus derived to the criticism of existing political and religious institutions. This resulted in the gradual throwing away of the abstract part of the Hegelian philosophy, and in the study of facts and phenomena to an ever-increasing degree. Marx had, in his youth, allied himself with the "Young Hegelians," as this school was called, and this fact had no slight influence upon his subsequent career. His critics lay the blame for much of the obscurity of language from which "Capital" in particular suffers, at the door of this training. His painful elaboration of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, his insistence upon the dialectic, and his continual use of the Hegelian philosophical expressions are due to his earlier controversial experiences. Still, on the other hand, his patient investigation of actual facts, his insistence on the value of positive knowledge as compared with abstract theory, and his diligent and persistent use of blue-books and statistics, were in a great measure results of the same training. Now and again, we find Engels in this work displaying remarkable controversial acumen, as in his discussion of the phrase, "All that is real is reasonable, and all that is reasonable is real" (Alles was wirklich ist, ist vernuenftig, und alles was vernuenftig ist, ist wirklich). From this expression, by the development of the Hegelian argument, he arrives at the conclusion involved in the statement that the value of a social or political phenomenon is its transitoriness, the necessity of its disappearance. Hence the abolition of dogmatic statement and mere subjective reasoning in the realm of philosophy, the destruction of the old school of which Kant was the chief exponent, and the creation of a new school the most advanced teachers of which were, as they still are, the materialistic socialists, of whom Engels and Marx are the chief. The object of this historical sketch is to show the origin of Feuerbach's philosophy as well as of that of Marx and Engels. As the fight between the Young Hegelians and the conservatives grew hotter, the radicals were driven back upon the English-French materialism of the preceding century. This was embarrassing for followers of Hegel, who had been taught to regard the material as the mere expression of the Idea. Feuerbach relieved them from the contradiction. He grasped the question boldly and threw the Hegelian abstraction completely to one side. His book, "Wesen des Christenthums," in which his ideas were set forth, became immediately popular, and an English translation, which was widely read, was made of it by George Eliot under the title of "Essence of Christianity." Engels is by no means grudging of expressions of appreciation with regard to this work, and its effects both upon himself and the educated world in general. This "unendurable debt of honor" paid, however, he proceeds to attack the idealistic humanitarianism which Feuerbach had made the basis and sanction of his ethical theories. Although Feuerbach had arrived at the materialistic conclusion, he expressed himself as unable to accept materialism as a doctrine. He says that as far as the past is concerned he is a materialist, but, for the future, he is not so--"Backward I am in agreement with the materialists, forward not"--a statement which impels Engels to examine the materialism of the eighteenth century, which he finds purely mechanical, without any conception of the universe as a process, and therefore utterly inadequate for the philosophic needs of the period at which Feuerbach wrote; for by that time the advance of science, and the greater powers of generalization, arising from patient experimentation, and the development of the evolutionary theory, had rendered the eighteenth century views evidently absurd. The "vulgarising peddlers" (vulgarisirenden Hausirer) come in for a great deal of contempt at the hands of Engels. These were the popular materialists--"the blatant atheists," who, without scientific knowledge and gifted with mere oratory or a popular style of writing, used every advance of science as a weapon of attack upon the Creator and popular religion. Engels sneers at these as not being scientists at all, but mere tradesmen dealing in pseudo-scientific wares. He calls their occupation a trade, a business (Geschaeft). Of the same class was that host of secularist lecturers who at one time thronged the lecture platforms of the English-speaking countries and of whom Bradlaugh and Ingersoll were in every way the best representatives. These secularists have now ceased to exercise any influence, and the Freethought societies, at one time so numerous, have now practically disappeared. In accordance with the theories as set forth by Engels they were bound to disappear; their teachings had no real bearing upon social progress, they contributed nothing of any scientific value to modern thought, and as Engels carefully shows, the reading of history by these lecturers was vitiated by a lack of scientific grasp, and inability to take a rational view of the great principles of historical development. In the third part of this little book Engels deals with a very interesting question which still disturbs the minds of philosophers, and concerning which much discussion goes on even among the materialists; that is the question as to the effect of religion upon social progress. Feuerbach had made the statement that periods of social progress are marked by religious changes. He uses religion as a synonym for human love, forcing the meaning of the word religion from the Latin "religare," "to tie," in order to give it an etymological and derivative meaning in support of his statement, a controversial trick for which he is rebuked by Engels. The declaration that great historical revolutions are accompanied by religious changes is declared by Engels not to be true, except in a limited degree as regards the three great world-religions--Christianity, Mahommedanism and Buddhism. Engels declared that the change in religion simultaneous with economic and political revolution stopped short with the bourgeois revolt which was made without any appeal to religion whatsoever. It is evident that this is not entirely true, for in the English-speaking countries, at all events, not only the bourgeois but frequently also the proletarian movements attempt to justify themselves from Scripture. The teachings of the Bible and the Sermon on the Mount are frequently called to the aid of the revolutionary party; Christian Socialists, in the English and American, not the continental sense of the term, as such are admitted to the International Congresses; and other evidences of the compatibility of religion with the proletarian movement can be traced. But in the broader sense of his statement Engels is undoubtedly correct. The proletarian movement, unlike that of the bourgeois, has produced no definite religious school, it has not claimed any particular set of religious doctrines as its own. As a matter of fact, there appears to be an ever-widening chasm between the Church and the laborer, a condition of affairs which is frequently deplored in religious papers. The famous Papal Encyclical on Labor was certainly intended to retain the masses in the Church, and the formation of trades unions under the influence of the priests was a logical conclusion from the teachings of the Papal Encyclical. But such religious movements are in no sense representative of the working-class movement; in fact they are resented and antagonized by the regular proletarian movement which proceeds under the leadership of the Socialists. Feuerbach's exaltation of humanitarianism, as a religion, is derided by Engels in a semi-jocular, semi-serious manner, for his statement that Feuerbach's ideals can be completely realized on the Bourse, cannot be taken seriously. Engels' clear-sightedness with regard to the ineffectiveness of a purely humanitarian religion is very remarkable, although the forty years' additional experience which he had over Feuerbach was a great advantage to him in estimating the actual value of humanitarian religion as an influence in human affairs. Since the time of Feuerbach various experiments in the direction of a religion based entirely on Love have been tried, and none of them has succeeded. Positivism or its religious side has been a failure. It has appealed to a small set of men, some of whom are possessed of great ability and have accomplished much, but as a religion in any adequate sense of the word positivism will be admitted a failure by its most sincere adherents. Brotherhood Churches, the Church of Humanity, the People's Church, and other like organizations have been formed having the same humanitarian basis, professing to cultivate a maximum of love with a minimum of faith, and have failed to impress ordinary men and women. Theosophy, a system of oriental mysticism based on an abstract conception of the brotherhood of man, has also put forth its claims to notice, on the grounds of its broad humanitarianism. None of these humanitarian religions, however, appear to satisfy the needs of the times, which do not seem to demand any humanitarian teachings. The only religions which evidently persist are the dogmatic, those appealing undisguisedly to faith, and even these do not maintain their proletarian following. Engels' remarks appear to be more than justified by the facts of to-day, for so far from the proletarian forming a new religion representing his needs on the "ideological" field, he appears to be increasingly desirous of releasing himself from the bands of any religion whatever, and substituting in place of it practical ethics and the teachings of science. Thus we are informed that five out of six of the working classes of Berlin, who attend any Sunday meetings whatever, are to be found in the halls of the Social Democratic Party, listening to the lectures provided by that organization. The revolutionary character of Feuerbach's philosophy is not maintained in his ethic, which Engels declares with much truth to be no better than that of his predecessors, as the basis on which it stands is no more substantial. Feuerbach fails as a teacher of practical ethics; he is smothered in abstraction and cannot attain to any reality. With the last part of the work Engels abandons the task of criticising Feuerbach, and proceeds to expound his own philosophy. With absolute candor and modesty he gives Marx credit for the theory of the materialistic conception of history, upon the enunciation and proof of which he had himself worked almost incessantly ever since the first idea of the theory had occurred to them, forty years prior to the time when he wrote this work. The footnote to the first page of the fourth part is the testimony of a collaborator to the genius of his fellow-workman, an example of appreciation and modest self-effacement which it would not be easy to match, and to which literary men who work together are not over-prone. Nothing else could bear more eloquent testimony to the loftiness of character and sincerity of purpose of these two exiles. The Marxian philosophy of history is clearly stated, and so fully explained by Engels that there is no need to go over the ground again, and there only remains to call attention to some of the modern developments in the direction of rigidity of interpretation, and to the exaggeration of the broad theory of the predominance of the economic factor into a hard and fast doctrine of economic determinism. When we examine the claims of Engels on behalf of the materialistic doctrine it will be found that they are not by any means of such a nature as to warrant the extreme conclusions of subsequent socialist publicists and leaders. It must be remembered that the subject of the influence of economic conditions on religious and political phenomena has been closely examined of late years and continual and accumulating evidence has been forthcoming respecting the remarkable influence of economic facts upon all other manifestations of social activity. It is very probable that the successful investigations in this new field have led, temporarily, to the formation of exaggerated ideas as to the actual value of the economic factor. Marx, in one of his short critical notes on Feuerbach, says: "The materialistic doctrine that men are products of conditions and education, different men therefore products of other conditions, and a different kind of education, forgets that circumstances may be altered by man and that the educator has himself to be educated." In other words, the problem, like all problems, possesses at least two quantities; it is not a question solely of conditions, economic or otherwise; it is a question of man and conditions, for the man is never dissolved in the conditions, but exists as a separate entity, and these two elements, man and conditions, act and react the one upon the other. This is quite a different position from that taken by Lafargue in his fight with Jaures. Lafargue there argued that economic development is the sole determinant of progress, and pronounces in favor of economic determinism, thus reducing the whole of history and, consequently, the dominating human motives to but one elementary motive. Belfort Bax, the well-known English socialist writer, makes a very clever argument against the determinist position by comparing it with the attempts of the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers to reduce nature to one element. His remarks are so pertinent that a brief abstract of his argument is here quoted in his own language. He says in "Outlooks from a New Standpoint": "The endeavor to reduce the whole of Human life to one element alone, to reconstruct all history on the basis of Economics, as already said, ignores the fact that every concrete reality must have a material and a formal side,--that is, it must have at least two ultimate elements--all reality as opposed to abstraction consisting in a synthesis. The attempt to evolve the many-sidedness of Human life out of one of its factors, no matter how important that factor may be, reminds one of the attempts of the early pre-Socratic Greeks to reduce nature to one element, such as water, air, fire, etc." And again: "The precise form a movement takes, be it intellectual, ethical or artistic, I fully admit, is determined by the material circumstances of the society in which it acquires form and shape, but it is also determined by those fundamental psychological tendencies which have given it birth." Enrico Ferri, the famous Italian member of the Chamber of Deputies and criminologist, appears to be at one with Bax in this matter. He says, quoting from a recent translation of his "Socialism and Modern Science": "It is perfectly true that every phenomenon as well as every institution--moral, juridicial or political--is simply the result of the economic phenomena and the conditions of the transitory, physical and historical environments. But as a consequence of that law of natural causality which tells us that every effect is always the resultant of numerous concurrent causes, and not of one cause alone, and that every effect becomes in its turn a cause of other phenomena, it is necessary to amend and complete the too rigid form that has been given to this true idea. "Just as all psychical manifestations of the individual are the result of the organic conditions (temperament) and of the environment in which he lives, in the same way, all the social manifestations of a people are the resultant of their organic conditions (race) and of the environment, as these are the determining causes of the given economic organization which is the physical basis of life." These may be said to be fairly representative of the views of the opposition to the extreme of economic determinism. The whole controversy has spread over a tremendous amount of ground and involves much reading. Some of the chief results have lately been summarized by Professor Seligman in his "Economic Interpretation of History." (Macmillan, 1902.) His written views show a closer approximation to and understanding of the teachings of the socialist philosophy on this subject than we have been accustomed to receive at the hands of official savants, so that it would seem as if the value of Marx's work was at last beginning to be appreciated even in the foggy studies of the professors. Two extracts from the writings of Engels are quoted by Professor Seligman. These extracts apparently go to prove that Engels by no means contemplated the extreme construction which has been placed upon the doctrine, and that he would find such a construction inconsistent with his general views. These extracts are quoted here for the purpose of further elucidating the views of Engels and as further explanatory of the position assumed by him in the last part of the work under consideration. They form part of a series of articles written for the "Sozialistische Akademiker" in 1890, and are as follows: "Marx and I are partly responsible for the fact that the younger men have sometimes laid more stress on the economic side than it deserves. In meeting the attacks of our opponents it was necessary for us to emphasize the dominant principle denied by them, and we did not always have the time, place, or opportunity to let the other factors which were concerned in the mutual action and reaction get their deserts." And in another letter to the same magazine he says: "According to the materialistic view of history, the factor which is, in last instance, decisive in history is the production and reproduction of actual life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. But when anyone distorts this so as to read that the economic factor is the sole element he converts the statement into a meaningless, abstract, absurd phrase. The economic condition is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure--the political forms of the class-contests, and their results, the constitutions--the legal forms and also all the reflexes of these actual contests in the brains of the participants, the political, legal, philosophical theories, the religions views--all these exert an influence on the development of the historical struggles, and in many instances determine their form." Here we may leave this much disputed matter for the present, as any involved discussion of controversial questions would be out of place here. The question in its ultimate form is merely scholastic, for not even the most extreme determinist would hold that only the economic argument must be relied upon by the orators and the press of the proletarian movement. Any one, however, who wishes to pursue the subject farther can find abundant material in the already great and growing amount of literature in connection with it. There is no doubt that the ideas of Marx respecting the basis of historical progress have already revolutionized the teaching of history in the universities, although but few professors have been honest enough to give him credit for it. The economic factor continually acquires greater importance in the eyes of the student of history, but the practical discoverer of this factor is still slighted and the results of his labors are assimilated with a self-satisfied hypocrisy which is, unfortunately, characteristic of the colleges of the English-speaking countries. The bourgeois writers upon socialism generally content themselves with the bold statement that Marx employs the dialectic method of investigation and statement. This is so much Greek to the ordinary reader, and the subject of the dialectic as used by socialist writers requires a few words of explanation. The first part of this work is very valuable, therefore, as showing what Marx and Engels meant when they used the expression, and as declaring their estimation of that method compared with that in general use in their day, and always, prior to their time, employed in philosophy, history and economics. A fuller and more detailed definition of the dialectic as applied by Engels is given by that philosopher in his famous reply to Eugene Duhring known as the "Umwaelzung der Wissenschaft." In that work a more thorough and patient investigation is made into the sources of materialistic philosophy of the socialist movement, for the reputation of his antagonist appears to have acted as a spur to Engels' faculties which certainly never showed to better advantage than in that work. A portion of the argument, in fact an abstract of the general train of reasoning, with the omission of the more obviously controversial parts, has been reprinted under the title of "Socialism from Utopia to Science." The following quotation is taken from the translation prepared for the "People" in 1892: "We also find, upon a closer enquiry, that the two poles of an antithesis, such as positive and negative, are as inseparable from as they are opposed to each other, and that, despite their antagonism, they mutually pervade each other; and in the same way we find cause and effect to be conceptions whose force exists only when applied to a single instance, but which, soon as we consider that instance in its connection with the cosmos, run into each other and dissolve in the contemplation of that universal action and reaction where cause and effect constantly change places--that which is effect, now and here, becoming, then and yonder, cause, and vice versa. "None of these processes and methods of reasoning fits in the metaphysical framework of thought. To dialectics, however, which takes in the objects and their conceivable images above all in their connections, their sequence, their motion, their rise and decline, processes like the above are so many attestations of its own method of procedure. Nature furnishes the test to dialectics, and this much we must say for modern natural science, that it has contributed towards this test an extremely rich and daily increasing material, whereby it has demonstrated that, in the last instance, nature proceeds upon dialectical, not upon metaphysical methods, that it does not move upon the eternal sameness of a perpetually recurring circle, but that it goes through an actual historic evolution. "This new German philosophy culminated in the system of Hegel. There for the first time--and herein consists its merit--the whole natural, historic, and intellectual world was presented as a process, i. e., engaged in perpetual motion, change, transformation and development. Viewed from this standpoint, the history of mankind no longer appeared as a wild tangle of senseless deeds of violence, all equally to be rejected by a ripened philosophic judgment, and which it were best to forget as soon as possible, but as the process of the development of mankind itself--a development whose gradual march, through all its stray paths, and its eternal law, through all its seeming fortuitousness, it now became the task of the intellect to trace and to discover." Kirkup, in his "History of Socialism," has this to say upon the dialectic method of investigation as used by Marx: "In the system of Marx, it means that the business of enquiry is to trace the connection and concatenation in the links that make up the process of historic evolution, to investigate how one stage succeeds another in the development of society, the facts and forms of human life and history not being stable and stereotyped things, but the ever-changing manifestations of the fluent and unresting real, the course of which it is the duty of science to reveal." The translator has endeavored to render the meaning of the original in as simple an English form as possible, and to, generally speaking, avoid technical terms. AUSTIN LEWIS. AUTHOR'S PREFACE. In the preface of the "Critique of Political Economy," published at Berlin, in 1859, Marx explained how we two, in 1845, in Brussels, intended to work out together the antagonism of our views--that is, the materialistic philosophy of history, as developed by Marx--to the ideological German philosophy, and, in fact, to compare it with our present philosophic knowledge. The design was carried out in the form of a criticism of post-Hegelian philosophy. The manuscript, two big octavo volumes, had long been at its intended place of publication in Westphalia, when we received the news that altered circumstances did not permit of its being printed. We postponed the publication of the manuscript indefinitely, all the more willingly, as we had attained our main object, an understanding of our own position. Since then more than forty years have elapsed, and Marx has died without either of us having had an opportunity of coming back to the antithesis. As regards our position with reference to Hegel, we have explained that, as occasion has arisen, but, nowhere, as a whole. We never came back to Feuerbach, who occupies an intermediate position between the philosophy of Hegel and our own. In the meantime the Marxian philosophy has found champions beyond the boundaries of Germany and of Europe, and in all the languages of the civilized world. On the other hand, the classic German philosophy has had a sort of new-birth abroad, particularly in England and Scandinavia, and even in Germany they appear to be substituting the thin soup of eclecticism which seems to flow from the universities under the name of philosophy. Under these circumstances a short, compact explanation of our relations to the Hegelian philosophy, of our going forth and departure from it, appears to me to be more and more required. And just in the same way a full recognition of the influence which Feuerbach, more than all the other post-Hegelian philosophers, had over us, during the period of our youthful enthusiasm, presents itself to me as an unendurable debt of honor. I also seize the opportunity the more readily since the editor of the "Neue Zeit" has asked me for a critical discussion of Starcke's book on Feuerbach. My work was published in the fourth and fifth volumes of 1886 of that publication and here appears in a revised special edition. Before sending this manuscript to press I once again hunted up and examined the old manuscript of 1845-6. The part of it dealing with Feuerbach is not complete. The portion completed consists in an exposition of the materialistic view of history and only proves how incomplete at that time was our knowledge of economic history. The criticism of Feuerbach's doctrine is not given in it. It was therefore unsuitable for our purpose. On the other hand, I have found in an old volume of Marx the eleven essays on Feuerbach printed here as an appendix. These are notes hurriedly scribbled in for later elaboration, not in the least degree prepared for the press, but invaluable, as the first written form, in which is planted the genial germ of the new philosophy. FRIEDRICH ENGELS. London, 21 February, 1888. FEUERBACH I. The volume before us brings us at once to a period which, in the matter of time, lies a full generation behind us, but which is as foreign to the present generation in Germany as if it were quite a century old. And, still, it was the period of the preparation of Germany for the revolution of 1848, and all that has happened to us since is only a continuation of 1848, only a carrying out of the last will and testament of the revolution. Just as in France in the eighteenth, so in Germany in the nineteenth century, revolutionary philosophic conceptions introduced a breaking up of existing political conditions. But how different the two appear! The French were engaged in open fight with all recognized science, with the Church, frequently also with the State, their writings were published beyond the frontiers in Holland or in England, and they themselves were frequently imprisoned in the Bastile. The Germans, on the contrary, were professors, appointed instructors of youth by the State, their writings, recognized text-books, and their definite system of universal progress, the Hegelian, raised, as it were, to the rank of a royal Prussian philosophy of government. And behind these professors, behind their pedantically obscure utterances, in their heavy wearisome periods, was it possible that the revolution could conceal itself? Were not just the people who were looked upon at that time as the leaders of the revolution, the Liberals, the bitterest opponents of the brain-turning philosophy? But what neither the Governmentalists nor the Liberals saw, that saw, at least one man, and that man was Heinrich Heine. Let us take an example. No philosophic statement has so invited the thanks of narrow-minded governments and the anger of the equally narrow Liberals as the famous statement of Hegel: "All that is real is reasonable, and all that is reasonable is real." This was essentially the blessing of all that is, the philosophical benediction of despotism, police-government, star-chamber justice and the censorship. So Frederick William III and his subjects understood it; but, according to Hegel, not everything which exists is, without exception, real. The attribute of reality belongs only to that which is at the same time necessary. Reality proves itself in the course of its development as necessity. Any governmental act--Hegel himself instances the example of a certain "tax law"--by no means strikes him as real in the absence of other qualities. But what is necessary proves itself in the last instance as reasonable also, and applied to the Prussian government, the Hegel doctrine, therefore, only means, this state is reasonable, corresponding with reason, as long as it is necessary, and if it appear to us an evil, but in spite of the evil still continues to exist, the evil of the government finds its justification and its explanation in the corresponding evil of the subjects. The Prussians of that day had the government which they deserved. But reality, according to Hegel, is by no means an attribute which belongs to a given social or political condition, under all circumstances and at all times. Quite the contrary. The Roman Republic was real, but the Roman Empire which replaced it was also real. The French Monarchy had become unreal in 1789, that is, it had lost all the quality of necessity, and was so contrary to reason that it had to be destroyed by the Great Revolution, of which Hegel always speaks with the greatest enthusiasm. Here, therefore, the monarchy was the unreal, the revolution the real. So in the course of progress all earlier reality becomes unreality, loses its necessity, its right of existence, its rationality; in place of the dying reality comes a new vital reality, peaceable when the old is sufficiently sensible to go to its death without a struggle, forcible when it strives against this necessity. And so the Hegelian statement through the Hegelian dialectic turns to its opposite--all that is real in the course of human history becomes in the process of time irrational and is, therefore, according to its destiny, irrational, and has from the beginning inherited want of rationality, and everything which is reasonable in the minds of men is destined to become real, however much it may contradict the apparent reality of existing conditions. The statement of the rationality of everything real dissolves itself, according to the Hegelian mode of thought, in the other, "All that stands has ultimately only so much worth that it must fall." But just there lay the true significance and the revolutionary character of the Hegelian philosophy (to which, as the conclusion of all progress since Kant, we must here limit ourselves) in that it, once and for all, gave the coup de grace to finiteness of results of human thought and action. Truth, which it is the province of philosophy to recognize, was no longer, according to Hegel, a collection of ready-made dogmatic statements, which once discovered must only be thoroughly learned; truth lay now in the process of knowledge itself, in the long historical development of learning, which climbs from lower to ever higher heights of knowledge, without ever reaching the point of so-called absolute truth, where it can go no further, where it has nothing more to look forward to, except to fold its hands in its lap and contemplate the absolute truth already gained. And just as it is in the realm of philosophic knowledge, so is it with every other kind of knowledge, even with that of practical commerce. And just as little as knowledge can history find a conclusion, complete in one completed ideal condition of humanity, a completed society, a perfect state, are things which can only exist as phantasies, on the contrary, all successive historical conditions are only places of pilgrimage in the endless evolutionary progress of human society from the lower to the higher. Every step is necessary and useful for the time and circumstances to which it owes its origin, but it becomes weak and without justification under the newer and higher conditions which develop little by little in its own womb, it must give way to the higher form, which in turn comes to decay and defeat. As the bourgeoisie through the greater industry, competition, and the world market destroyed the practical value of all stable and anciently honored institutions, so this dialectic philosophy destroyed all theories of absolute truth, and of an absolute state of humanity corresponding with them. In face of it nothing final, absolute or sacred exists, it assigns mortality indiscriminately, and nothing can exist before it save the unbroken process of coming into existence and passing away, the endless passing from the lower to the higher, the mere reflection of which in the brain of the thinker it is itself. It has indeed also a conservative side, it recognizes the suitability of a given condition of knowledge and society for its time and conditions, but only so far. This conservatism of this philosophical view is relative, its revolutionary character is absolute, the only absolute which it allows to exist. We do not, at this point, need to go into the question whether this philosophy is consistent throughout with the present position of natural science which predicts for the earth a possible end and for its inhabitability, a fairly certain one; which, therefore, also recognizes that in human history there is not only an upshooting but also a down-growing branch. We find ourselves, at any rate, still a considerable distance from the turning point, where the history of society begins to descend, and we cannot expect the Hegelian philosophy to meddle with a subject which at that time science had not yet placed upon the order of the day. What must, indeed, be said is this, that the Hegelian development does not, according to Hegel, show itself so clearly. It is a necessary consequence of his method which he himself has never drawn with this explicitness. And for this simple reason, because he was compelled to make a system, and a system of philosophy must, in accordance with all its understood pretensions, close somewhere with a definition of absolute truth. So Hegel, therefore, in his logic, urged that this eternal truth is nothing else but the logical, that is, the historical process itself; yet in spite of this he finds himself compelled to place an end to this process, since he must come to an end with his system somewhere or other. He can make this end a beginning again in logic, since here the point of conclusion--the absolute idea, which is only absolute in so far as he has nothing clear to say about it--divests itself in nature, that is, becomes transformed, and later on, in spirit, that is, in thought and in history, comes to itself again. But in the last philosophical analysis, a return to the beginning is only possible in one way, namely, if one place the end of history in this fact, that mankind comes to a knowledge of the absolute idea, and explain that this knowledge of the absolute idea is obtained in the Hegelian philosophy. But in this way the whole dogmatic content of the Hegelian philosophy in the matter of absolute truth is explained in contradiction to his dialectic, the cutting loose from all dogmatic methods, and thereby the revolutionary side becomes smothered under the dominating conservative. And what can be said of philosophical knowledge can also be said of historical practice. Mankind, that is, in the person of Hegel, has arrived at the point of working out the absolute idea, and must also practically have arrived so far as to make the absolute idea a reality. The practical political demands of the abstract idea upon his contemporaries cannot, therefore, be stretched too far. And so we find as the conclusion of the philosophy of Rights that the absolute idea shall realize itself in that limited monarchy which William III. so persistently, vainly promised to his subjects; therefore, in a limited, moderate, indirect control of the possessing classes, suitable to the dominating small bourgeois class in Germany whereby, in addition, the necessity to us of the existence of the nobility is shown in a speculative fashion. The essential usefulness of the system is sufficient to explain the manufacture of a very tame political conclusion by means of a thoroughly revolutionary method of reasoning. The special form of this conclusion springs from this, as a matter of fact, that Hegel was a German, and, as in the case of his contemporary Goethe, he was somewhat of a philistine. Goethe and Hegel, each of them was an Olympian Zeus in his own sphere, but they were neither of them quite free from German philistinism. But all this does not hinder the Hegelian system from playing an incomparably greater role than any earlier system and by virtue of this role developing riches of thought which are astounding even to-day. Phenomenology of the mind (which one may parallel with embryology and palaeontology of the mind), an evolution of the individual consciousness, through its different steps, expressed as a brief reproduction of the steps through which the consciousness of man has historically passed, logic, natural philosophy, mental philosophy, and the latter worked out separately in its detailed historical subdivisions, philosophy of history, of jurisprudence, of religion, history of philosophy, esthetics, etc. Hegel labored in all these different historical fields to discover and prove the thread of evolution, and as he was not only a creative genius, but also a man of encyclopedic learning, he was thus, from every point of view, the maker of an epoch. It is self-evident that by virtue of the necessities of the "System" he must very often take refuge in certain forced constructions, about which his pigmy opponents make such an ado even at the present time. But these constructions are only the frames and scaffoldings of his work; if one does not stop unnecessarily at these but presses on further into the building one will find uncounted treasures which hold their full value to-day. As regards all philosophers, their system is doomed to perish and for this reason, because it emanates from an imperishable desire of the human soul, the desire to abolish all contradictions. But if all contradictions are once and for all disposed of, we have arrived at the so-called absolute truth, history is at an end, and yet it will continue to go on, although there is nothing further left for it to do--thus a newer and more insoluble contradiction. So soon as we have once perceived--and to this perception no one has helped us more than Hegel himself--that the task thus imposed upon philosophy signifies nothing different than the task that a single philosopher shall accomplish what it is only possible for the entire human race to accomplish, in the course of its progressive development--as soon as we understand that, it is all over with philosophy in the present sense of the word. In this way one discards the absolute truth, unattainable for the individual, and follows instead the relative truths attainable by way of the positive sciences, and the collection of their results by means of the dialectic mode of thought. With Hegel universal philosophy comes to an end, on the one hand, because he comprehended in his system its entire development on the greatest possible scale; on the other hand, because he showed us the way, even if he did not know it himself, out of this labyrinth of systems, to a real positive knowledge of the world. One may imagine what an immense effect the Hegelian philosophy produced in the philosophy-dyed atmosphere of Germany. The triumph lasted for ten years and by no means subsided with the death of Hegel. On the contrary, from 1830 to 1840 Hegelianism was exclusively supreme and had fastened itself upon its opponents to a greater or less degree. During this period Hegel's views, consciously or unconsciously, penetrated the different sciences, and saturated popular literature and the daily press from which the ordinary so-called cultured classes derive their mental pabulum. But this victory down the whole line was only preliminary to a conflict within its own ranks. The entire doctrine of Hegel left, as we have seen, plenty of room for the bringing under it the most diverse practical opinions, and the practical, in the then theoretic Germany, consisted in only two things--religion and politics. He who laid the greatest stress upon the Hegelian system, might be moderately conservative in both these respects, while he who considered the dialectic method of the greatest importance could belong to the extreme left in religious and political affairs. Hegel himself, in spite of the frequent outbursts of revolutionary wrath in his books, was inclined, on the whole, to the conservative side. His system, rather than his method, had cost him the hard thinking. At the end of the thirties, the division in the school grew greater and greater. The left wing, the so-called Young Hegelians, in their fight with the pious orthodox, abandoned little by little, that marked philosophical reserve regarding the burning questions of the day, which had up to that time secured for their teachings State toleration and even protection, and as in 1840 orthodox pietism and absolutist feudal reaction ascended the throne with Frederick William IV., open partisanship became unavoidable. The fight was still maintained with philosophical weapons, but no longer along abstract philosophical lines; they went straight to deny the dominant religion and the existing state, and although in the "Deutschen Jahrbuechern" the practical aims were still put forward clothed in philosophical phraseology, the younger Hegelian school threw off disguise in the "Rheinische Zeitung," as the exponents of the philosophy of the struggling radicals, and used the cloak of philosophy only to deceive the censorship. But politics were at that time a very thorny field, and so the main fight was directed against religion. But this was also, particularly since 1840, indirectly a political fight. Strauss' "Leben Jesu," published in 1835, had given the first cause of offense. The theory therein developed regarding the origin of the gospel myths Bruno Bauer later dealt with, adding the additional proof that a whole series of evangelical stories had been invented by their authors. The fight between these two was carried on under a philosophical disguise, as a battle of mind with matter; the question whether the marvellous stories of the gospel came into being through an unconscious myth-creation in the womb of society, or whether they were individually invented by the evangelists broadened into the question whether in the history of the race, mind or matter carried the real weight, and lastly came Stirner, the prophet of modern anarchism--Bakunine has taken very much from him--and overtopped the sovereign power of consciousness with his sovereign power of the individual. We do not follow the decomposition of the Hegelian school on this side any further. What is more important for us is this: The mass of the most decided young Hegelians were driven back upon English-French materialism through the necessities of their fight against positive religion. Here they came into conflict with their school system. According to materialism, nature exists as the sole reality, it exists in the Hegelian system only as the alienation of the absolute Idea, as it were a degradation of the Idea; under all circumstances, thought, and its thought-product, the Idea, according to this view, appears as the original, nature, which only exists through the condescension of the Idea as the derived, and in this contradiction they got along as well or as ill as they might. Then came Feuerbach's "Wesen des Christenthums." With one blow it cut the contradiction, in that it placed materialism on the throne again without any circumlocution. Nature exists independently of all philosophies. It is the foundation upon which we, ourselves products of nature, are built. Outside man and nature nothing exists, and the higher beings which our religious phantasies have created are only the fantastic reflections of our individuality. The cord was broken, the system was scattered and destroyed, the contradiction, since it only existed in the imagination, was solved. One must himself have experienced the delivering power of this book to get a clear idea of it. The enthusiasm was universal, we were all for the moment followers of Feuerbach. How enthusiastically Marx greeted the new idea and how much he was influenced by it, in spite of all his critical reservations, one may read in the "Holy Family." The very faults of the book contributed to its momentary effect. The literary, impressive, even bombastic style secured for it a very large public and was a constant relief after the long years of abstract and abstruse Hegelianism. The same result also proceeded from the extravagant glorification of love, which in comparison with the insufferable sovereignty of pure reason, found an excuse, if not a justification. What we must not forget is, that just on these two weaknesses of Feuerbach "true Socialism" in educated Germany fastened itself like a spreading plague since 1844, and set literary phrases in the place of scientific knowledge, the freeing of mankind by means of love in place of the emancipation of the proletariat, through the economic transformation of production, in short lost itself in nauseous fine writing and in sickly sentimentality, of the type of which class of writers was Herr Karl Gruen. We must furthermore not forget that though the Hegelian school was destroyed the Hegelian philosophy was not critically vanquished. Strauss and Bauer took each a side and engaged in polemics. Feuerbach broke through the system and threw it as a whole aside. But one has not finished with a philosophy by simply declaring it to be false, and so enormous a work as the Hegelian philosophy which has had so tremendous an influence upon the mental development of the nation did not allow itself to be put aside peremptorily. It had to be destroyed in its own way, which means in the way that critically destroys its form but saves the new acquisitions to knowledge won by it. How this was brought about we shall see below. But for the moment, the Revolution of 1848 put aside all philosophical discussion just as unceremoniously as Feuerbach laid aside Hegel. And then Feuerbach was himself crowded out. II. The great foundation question of all, especially new, philosophies is connected with the relation between thinking and being. Since very early times when men, being in complete ignorance respecting their own bodies, and stirred by apparitions,[1] arrived at the idea that thought and sensation were not acts of their own bodies, but of a special soul dwelling in the body and deserting it at death, ever since then they have been obliged to give thought to the relations of this soul to the outside world. If it betook itself from the body and lived on, there was no reason to invent another death for it; thus arose the conception of their immortality, which, at that evolutionary stage, did not appear as a consolation, but as fate, against which a man cannot strive, and often enough, as among the Greeks, as a positive misfortune. Not religious desire for consolation but uncertainty arising from a similar universal ignorance of what to associate with the soul when once it was acknowledged, after the death of the body, led universally to the tedious idea of personal immortality. Just in a similar fashion the first gods arose, through the personification of the forces of nature, and these in the further development of the religions acquired greater and greater supernatural force, until by a natural process of abstraction, I might say of distillation, from the many more or less limited and mutually limiting gods, in the course of spiritual development, at last the idea of the one all embracing god of the monotheistic religions took its place in the minds of men. The question of the relation of thinking to being, of the relation of the spirit to nature, the highest question of universal philosophy, has therefore, no less than all religion, its roots in the limited and ignorant ideas of the condition of savagery. It could first be understood, and its full significance could first be grasped, when mankind awoke from the long winter sleep of Christian Middle Ages. The question of the relation of thought to existence, a question which had also played a great role in the scholasticism of the Middle Ages, the question what is at the beginning spirit or nature, this question was in spite of the church now cut down to this: "Has God made the world or is the world from eternity?" As this question was answered this way or that the philosophers were divided into two great camps. The one party which placed the origin of the spirit before that of nature, and therefore in the last instance accepted creation, in some form or other--and this creation, is often according to the philosophers, according to Hegel for example, still more odd and impossible than in Christianity--made the camp of idealism. The others, who recognized nature as the source, belong to the various schools of materialism. The two expressions signify something different from this. Idealism and materialism, originally not used in any other sense, are not here employed in any other sense. We shall see what confusion arises when one tries to force another signification into them. The question of the relationship of thinking and being has another side; in what relation do our thoughts with regard to the world surrounding us stand to this world itself? Is our thought in a position to recognize the real world? Can we, in our ideas and notion of the real world, produce a correct reflection of the reality? This question is called in philosophical language the question of the identity of thinking and being, and is affirmed by the great majority of philosophers. According to Hegel, for example, its affirmation is self-evident, for that which we know in the actual world is its content, according to our thought, that which compels the world to a progressive realization as it were of the absolute Idea, which absolute idea has existed somewhere, unattached from the world and before the world; and that thought can recognize a content which is already a thought content herein, from the beginning, appears self-evident. It is also evident that what is here to be proved is already hidden in the hypothesis. But that does not hinder Hegel, by any means, from drawing the further conclusion from his proof of the identity of thought and existence that his philosophy, because correct for his thought, is, therefore, the only correct one, and that the identity of thought and existence must show itself in this, that mankind should forthwith translate his philosophy from theory to practice and the whole world shift itself to a Hegelian base. This is an illusion which he shares alike with all philosophers. In addition there is still another class of philosophers, those who dispute the possibility of a perception of the universe or at least of an exhaustive perception. To them belong, among the moderns, Hume and Kant, and they have played a very distinguished role in the evolution of philosophy. This point of view has been now refuted by Hegel, as far as possible, from the idealistic standpoint. The materialistic additions made by Feuerbach are more ingenious than deep. The most destructive refutation of this as of all other fixed philosophic ideas is actual result, namely experiment and industry. If we can prove the correctness of our idea of an actual occurrence by experiencing it ourselves and producing it from its constituent elements, and using it for our own purposes into the bargain, the Kantian phrase "Ding an Sich" (thing in itself) ceases to have any meaning. The chemical substances which go to form the bodies of plants and animals remained just such "Dinge an Sich" until organic chemistry undertook to show them one after the other, whereupon the thing in itself became a thing for us, as the coloring matter in the roots of madder, alizarin, which we no longer allow to grow in the roots of the madder in the field, but make much more cheaply and simply from coal tar. The Copernican system was for three hundred years a hypothesis, with a hundred, a thousand, or ten thousand chances in its favor, but still a hypothesis. But when Leverrier by means of the data of this system not only discovered the existence of a certain unknown planet, but even calculated the position in the heavens which this planet must necessarily occupy, and when Galles really found this planet, then the Copernican system was proved. If, nevertheless, the resurrection of the Kantian idea in Germany is being tried by the Neo-Kantians, and of that of Hume in England (where they never died), by the agnostics, that is, in the face of the long past theoretical and practical refutation of these doctrines, scientifically, a step backwards, and practically, merely the acceptance of materialism in a shame-faced way, clandestinely, and the denial of it before the world. But the philosophers were during this long period from Descartes to Hegel and from Hobbes to Feuerbach by no means, as they thought, impelled solely by the force of pure reason. On the contrary, what really impelled them was, in particular, the strong and ever quicker conquering step of natural science and industry. Among the materialists this very quickly showed itself on the surface, but the idealistic systems filled themselves more and more with materialistic content and sought to reconcile the antagonism between spirit and matter by means of pantheism, so that finally the Hegelian system represented merely a materialism turned upside down, according to idealistic method and content. Of course Starcke in his "Characteristics of Feuerbach" enquired into the fundamental question of the relations of thinking and being. After a short introduction in which the ideas of preceding philosophers, particularly since Kant, are portrayed in unnecessarily heavy philosophical language and in which Hegel, owing to a too formal insistence on certain parts of his work does not receive due credit, there follows a copious description of the development of the metaphysics of Feuerbach, as shown in the course of the recognized writings of this philosopher. This description is industriously and carefully elaborated, and, like the whole book, is overballasted with, not always unavoidable, philosophical expressions, which is all the more annoying in that the writer does not hold to the vocabulary of one and the same school nor even of Feuerbach himself, but mixes up expressions of very different schools, and especially of the present epidemic of schools calling themselves philosophical. The evolution of Feuerbach is that of a Hegelian to materialism--not of an orthodox Hegelian, indeed--an evolution which from a definite point makes a complete breach with the idealistic system of his predecessor. With irresistible force he brings himself to the view that the Hegelian idea of the existence of the absolute idea before the world, the pre-existence of the logical categories before the universe came into being, is nothing else than the fantastical survival of the belief in the existence of an extra-mundane creator; that the material, sensible, actual world, to which we ourselves belong, is the only reality, and that our consciousness and thought, however supernatural they may seem, are only evidences of a material bodily organ, the brain. Matter is not a product of mind, but mind itself is only the highest product of matter. This is, of course, pure materialism. When he reached this point Feuerbach came to a standstill. He cannot overcome ordinary philosophical prejudice, prejudice not against the thing, but against the name materialism. He says "Materialism is for me the foundation of the building of the being and knowledge of man, but it is not for me what it is for the physiologists in the narrow sense, as Moleschott, for example, since necessarily from their standpoint it is the building itself. Backwards, I am in accord with the materialists but not forwards." Feuerbach here confuses materialism, which is a philosophy of the universe dependent upon a certain comprehension of the relations between matter and spirit, with the special forms in which this philosophy appeared at a certain historical stage--namely in the eighteenth century. More than that he confuses it with the shallow and vulgarized form in which the materialism of the eighteenth century exists today, in the minds of naturalists and physicians, and was popularized during a period of fifty years in the writings of Buechner, Vogt and Moleschott. But as idealism has passed through a series of evolutionary developments, so also has materialism--with each epoch-making discovery in the department of natural science it has been obliged to change its form; since then, history also, being subjected to the materialistic method of treatment, shows itself as a new road of progress. The materialism of the preceding century was overwhelmingly mechanical, because at that time of all the natural sciences, mechanics, and indeed, only the mechanics of the celestial and terrestrial fixed bodies, the mechanics of gravity, in short, had reached any definite conclusions. Chemistry existed at first only in a childish, phlogistic form. Biology still lay in swaddling clothes; the organism of plants and animals was examined only in a very cursory manner, and was explained upon purely mechanical grounds; just as an animal was to Descartes nothing but a machine, so was man to the materialists of the eighteenth century. The exclusive application of the measure of mechanics to processes which are of chemical and organic nature and by which, it is true, the laws of mechanics are also manifested, but are pushed into the background by other higher laws, this application is the cause of the peculiar, but, considering the times, unavoidable, narrowmindedness of the French materialism. The second special limitation of this materialism lies in its incapacity to represent the universe as a process, as one form of matter assumed in the course of evolutionary development. This limitation corresponded with the natural science of the time and the metaphysic coincident therewith, that is the anti-dialectic methods of the philosophers. Nature, as was known, was in constant motion, but this motion, according to the universally accepted ideas, turned eternally in a circle, and therefore never moved from the spot, and produced the same results over and over again. This idea was at that time inevitable. The Kantian theory of the origin of the solar system was at first exhibited and considered as a mere curiosity. The history of the development of the earth-geology was still unknown, and the idea that the living natural objects of to-day are the result of a long process of development from the simple to the complex could not be scientifically established at that time. This anti-historical comprehension of nature was, therefore, inevitable. We cannot reproach the philosophers of the eighteenth century with this, as the same thing is also found in Hegel. According to him, nature is the mere outward form of the Idea, capable of no progress as regards time, but merely of an extension of its manifoldness in space, so that it displays all the stages of development comprised in it at one and the same time together, and is condemned to a repetition of the same processes. And this absurdity of a progress in space but outside of time--the fundamental condition of all progress--Hegel loads upon nature, just at the very time when geology, embryology, the physiology of plants and animals, and inorganic chemistry, were being built up, and when above all genial prophecies of the later evolution theory appeared at the very threshold of these new sciences (e. g., Goethe and Lamark), but the system so required it, and the method, for love of the system, had to prove untrue to itself. This unhistoric conception had its effects also in the domain of history. Here the fight against the remnants of the Middle Ages kept the outlook limited. The Middle Ages were reckoned as a mere interruption of history by a thousand years of barbarism. The great advances of the Middle Ages--the broadening of European learning, the bringing into existence of great nations, which arose, one after the other, and finally the enormous technical advances of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries--all this no one saw. Consequently a rational view of the great historic development was rendered impossible, and history served principally as a collection of examples and illustrations for the use of philosophers. The vulgarizing peddlers who during the fifties occupied themselves with materialism in Germany did not by any means escape the limitations of their doctrine. All the advances made in science served them only as new grounds of proof against the existence of the Creator, and indeed it was far beyond their trade to develop the theory any further. Idealism was at the end of its tether and was smitten with death by the Revolution of 1848. Yet it had the satisfaction that materialism sank still lower. Feuerbach was decidedly right when he refused to take the responsibility of this materialism, only he had no business to confound the teachings of the itinerant spouters with materialism in general. However, we must here remark two different things. During the life of Feuerbach science was still in that state of violent fermentation which has only comparatively cleared during the last fifteen years; new material of knowledge was furnished in a hitherto unheard of measure but the fixing of interrelations, and therewith of order, in the chaos of overwhelming discoveries was rendered possible quite lately for the first time. True, Feuerbach had lived to see the three distinctive discoveries--that of the cell, the transformation of energy and the evolution theory acknowledged since the time of Darwin. But how could the solitary country-dwelling philosopher appreciate at their full value discoveries which naturalists themselves at that time in part contested and partly did not understand how to avail themselves of sufficiently? The disgrace falls solely upon the miserable conditions in Germany owing to which the chairs of philosophy were filled by pettifogging eclectic pedants, while Feuerbach, who towered high above them all, had to rusticate and grow sour in a little village. It is therefore no shame to Feuerbach that he never grasped the natural evolutionary philosophy which became possible with the passing away of the partial views of French materialism. In the second place, Feuerbach held quite correctly that scientific materialism is the foundation of the building of human knowledge but it is not the building itself. For we live not only in nature but in human society, and this has its theory of development and its science no less than nature. It was necessary, therefore, to bring the science of society, that is the so-called historical and philosophical sciences, into harmony with the materialistic foundations and to rebuild upon them. But this was not granted to Feuerbach. Here he stuck, in spite of the "foundations," held in the confining bonds of idealism, and to this he testified in the words "Backwards I am with the materialists, but not forwards." But Feuerbach himself did not go forward in his views of human society from his standpoint of 1840 and 1844, chiefly owing to that loneliness which compelled him to think everything out by himself, instead of in friendly and hostile conflict with other men of his calibre, although of all philosophers he was the fondest of intercourse with his fellows. We shall see later on how he thus remained an idealist. Here we can only call attention to the fact that Starcke sought the idealism of Feuerbach in the wrong place. "Feuerbach is an idealist; he believes in the advance of mankind" (p. 19). "The foundations, the underpinning of the whole, is therefore nothing less than idealism. Realism is for us nothing more than a protection against error while we follow our own idealistic tendencies. Are not compassion, love and enthusiasm for truth and justice ideal forces?" In the first place, idealism is here defined as nothing but the following of ideal aims. But these have necessarily to do principally with the idealism of Kant and his "Categorical Imperative." But Kant himself called his philosophy "transcendental idealism," by no means because he deals therein with moral ideals, but on quite other grounds, as Starcke will remember. The superstition that philosophical idealism pivots around a belief in moral, that is in social ideals, arose with the German non-philosophical Philistine, who commits to memory the few philosophical morsels which he finds in Schiller's poems. Nobody has criticised more severely the feeble Categorical Imperative of Kant--feeble because it demands the impossible and therefore never attains to any reality--nobody has ridiculed more cruelly the Philistine sentimentality imparted by Schiller, because of its unrealizable ideals, than just the idealist par excellence, Hegel. (See e. g. Phenomenology.) In the second place, it cannot be avoided that all human sensations pass through the brain--even eating and drinking which are commenced consequent upon hunger and thirst felt by the brain and ended in consequence of sensations of satisfaction similarly experienced by the brain. The realities of the outer world impress themselves upon the brain of man, reflect themselves there, as feelings, thoughts, impulses, volitions, in short, as ideal tendencies, and in this form become ideal forces. If the circumstance that this man follows ideal tendencies at all, and admits that ideal forces exercise an influence over him, if this makes an idealist of him, every normally developed man is in some sense a born idealist, and under such circumstances how can materialists exist? In the third place, the conviction that humanity, at least at present, as a whole, progresses, has absolutely nothing to do with the antagonism between materialism and idealism. The French materialists had this conviction, to a fanatical degree, no less than the deists, Voltaire and Rousseau, and made the greatest personal sacrifices for it. If anybody ever concentrated his whole life to the enthusiasm for truth and justice, taking the words in a moral sense, it was Diderot, for example. Therefore, since Starcke has explained all this as idealism, it simply proves that the word materialism has lost all significance for him, as has also the antagonism between the aims of the two. The fact is that Starcke here makes an unpardonable concession to the prejudices of the Philistines caused by the long continued slanders of the clergy against the word materialism, even if without consciously doing so. The Philistine understands by the word materialism, gluttony, drunkenness, carnal lust, and fraudulent speculation, in short all the enormous vices to which he himself is secretly addicted, and by the word idealism he understands the belief in virtue, universal humanitarianism, and a better world as a whole, of which he boasts before others, and in which he himself at the very most believes, only as long as he must endure the blues which follow necessarily from his customary "materialistic" excesses, and so sings his favorite song--"What is man?--Half beast, half angel." As for the rest, Starcke takes great pains to defend Feuerbach against the attacks and doctrines of those collegians who plume themselves in Germany as philosophers now-a-days. It is true that this is a matter of importance to those people who take an interest in the afterbirth of the German classic philosophy, to Starcke himself this might appear necessary. We spare the reader this, however. FOOTNOTE: [1] To this very day the idea is prevalent among savages and barbarians that the human forms appearing in our dreams are souls which temporarily leave the body, and that, therefore, the real man becomes liable for the deeds done to the dreamer by his dream appearance. So Imthurm, for example, found it in 1884 among the Indians in Guiana. III. The distinct idealism of Feuerbach is evident directly we come to his philosophy of religion and ethics. He does not wish to abolish religion by any means; he wants to perfect it. Philosophy itself will be absorbed in religion. "The periods of human progress are only distinguishable by religious changes. There is only a real historical progress where it enters the hearts of men. The heart is not a place for religion, so that it should be in the heart, it is the very being of religion." Religion is, according to Feuerbach, a matter of the feelings--the feelings of love between man and man which up to now sought its realization in the fantastic reflected image of the reality--in the interposition through one or more gods of the fantastic reflections of human qualities--but now by means of love between "ego" and "tu" finds itself directly and without any intermediary. According to Feuerbach love between the sexes is, if not the highest form, at least one of the highest forms, of the practice of his new religion. Now, feelings of affection between man and man, and particularly between members of the two sexes, have existed as long as mankind has. Love between the sexes has been cultivated especially during the last eighteen hundred years and has won a place which has made it, in this period, a compulsory motive for all poetry. The existing positive religions have limited themselves in this matter to the bestowal of complete consecration upon the State regulation of sexual love, and might completely disappear tomorrow without the least difference taking place in the matter of love and friendship. Thus the Christian religion in France was, as a matter of fact, so completely overthrown between the years 1793 and 1798, that Napoleon himself could not re-introduce it without opposition and difficulty, without, in the interval, any desire for a substitute, in Feuerbach's sense, making itself felt. Feuerbach's idealism consists in this, that he does not simply take for granted the mutual and reciprocal feelings of men for one another such as sexual love, friendship, compassion, self-sacrifice, etc., but declares that they would come to their full realization for the first time as soon as they were consecrated under the name of religion. The main fact for him is not that these purely human relations exist, but that they will be conceived of as the new true religion. They will be fully realized for the first time if they are stamped as religions. Religion is derived from "religare" and means originally "fastening." Therefore, every bond between men is religion. Such etymological artifices are the last resort of the idealistic philosophy. Not what the word means according to the historical development of its true significance, but what it should mean according to its derivation is what counts, and so sex-love and the intercourse between the sexes is consecrated as a "religion" only so that the word religion, which is dear to the mind of the idealist, shall not vanish from the language. The Parisian reformer of the stripe of Louis Blanc used to speak just in the same way in the forties, for they could only conceive of a man without religion as a monster, and used to say to us "Atheism, then, is your religion." If Feuerbach wants to place true religion upon the basis of real materialistic philosophy, that would be just the same as conceiving of modern chemistry as true alchemy. If religion can exist without its God then alchemy can exist without its philosopher's stone. There exists, by the way, a very close connection between alchemy and religion. The philosopher's stone has many properties of the old gods, and the Egyptian-Greek alchemists of the first two centuries of our era have had their hands in the development of Christian doctrines, as Kopp and Berthelot prove. Feuerbach's declaration that the periods of man's development are only differentiated through changes in religion is false. Great historical points of departure are coincident with religious changes only as far as the three world-religions which exist up to the present are concerned--Buddhism, Christianity and Islam. The old tribal and national religions originating in nature were not propagandist and lost all power of resistance as soon as the independence of the tribe and people was destroyed. Among the Germans simple contact with the decaying Roman Empire and the Christian world-religion springing from it and suitable to its economic, political and ideal circumstances, was sufficient. In the first place, as regards these more or less artificial world-religions, particularly in the cases of Christianity and Mohammedanism, we find that the more universal historical movements will take on a religious stamp, and as far as concerns Christianity in particular, the stamp of the religion affecting revolutionary movements of universal significance stopped short at the commencement of the fight of the bourgeois for emancipation from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, and showed itself not as Feuerbach declares in the hearts of men and the thirst for religion, but in the entire earlier history of the Middle Ages which knew no other form of idealism than religion and theology. But as the bourgeoisie in the eighteenth century was sufficiently strong to have its own ideology suitable to its own standpoint, it forthwith made its great and final revolution, the French, by means of an appeal exclusively to juristic and political ideals, and troubled itself with religion only so far as it stood in its way. It never occurred to it to establish a new religion in place of the old one; everybody knows what a mess Robespierre made of the attempt. The possibility of a purely humane sentiment in intercourse with other men is with us today exceedingly impeded through the society founded on class antagonism and class supremacy in which we must move. We have no need to trouble ourselves about sanctifying these sentiments by means of a new religion. And just as the circumstances of the great historical class-fight have been obscured by the current historians, particularly in Germany, so in the same way the understanding of the great historical class-conflicts is sufficiently obscured by the present-day manner of writing history, without our needing to change these conflicts into a mere appendix of ecclesiastical history. Here it is evident how far we in our day are away from Feuerbach. His most beautiful passages in praise of the new religion of love are today unreadable. The only religion which Feuerbach examined closely is Christianity, the universal religion of the western world which is founded upon monotheism. He proves that the Christian God is only the fantastic reflection, the reflected image of man. But that God is himself the product of a lengthy process of abstraction, the concentrated quintessence of the earlier tribal and national gods. And man also whose reflection that God is, is not a real man, but is likewise the quintessence of many real men, the abstract human, and therefore himself again the creature of thought. The same Feuerbach who on each page preaches sensation, diving into the concrete, the real, becomes thoroughly abstract as soon as he begins to talk of more than mere sensual intercourse between human beings. Of this relationship only one side appeals to him, the moral, and Feuerbach's astonishing lack of resources as compared with Hegel is striking. The ethic or rather moral doctrine of the latter, is the Philosophy of Right and embraces: 1, Abstract Right; 2, Morality; 3, Moral Conduct, under which are again comprised: the family, bourgeois, society, and the State. As the form is here idealistic, the content is realistic. The entire scope of law, economy, politics, is therein, besides ethics. With Feuerbach, it is just the reverse. He is realistic in form; he begins with man, but the discussion has absolutely nothing to do with the world in which this man lives, and so, instead of the man, stands an abstract man, who preaches sermons concerning the philosophy of religion. This man is not even the son of a mother; he has developed from the God of the monotheistic religions. He does not live in real historic conditions and the world of history. He comes into relationship with other men, but each of the others is just as much an abstraction as he himself is. In the "philosophy of religion" we had still men and women, but in the "ethic" this final distinction vanishes. At long intervals Feuerbach makes such statements as: "A man thinks differently in a palace than in a hut." "When you have nothing in your body to ward off hunger and misery, you have nothing in your head, mind and heart for morality." "Politics must be our religion," etc. But Feuerbach was absolutely incapable of extracting any meaning from these remarks; they remain purely literary expressions, and Starcke himself is obliged to admit that the science of politics was an insuperable obstacle to Feuerbach and the science of society, sociology, for him a terra incognita. He appears just as uninspired in comparison with Hegel in his treatment of the antithesis of good and evil. "One thinks he is saying something great," Hegel remarks "if one says that mankind is by nature good, but it is forgotten that one says something far greater in the words 'man is by nature evil.'" According to Hegel, evil is the form in which the mechanical power of evolution shows itself, and indeed in this lies the double idea that each new step forward appears as an outrage against a sacred thing, as rebellion against the old, dying, but through custom, sanctified, circumstances, and on the other hand that since the rising of class antagonism, the evil passions of men, greed and imperiousness serve as the levers of historical progress, of which, for example, the history of feudalism and the bourgeoisie affords a conspicuous proof. But Feuerbach does not trouble himself to examine the role of moral evil. History is to him a particularly barren and unwonted field. Even his statement, "Man as he sprang from nature originally was only a mere creature, not a man." "Man is a product of human society, of education, and of history." Even this statement remains from his standpoint absolutely unproductive. What Feuerbach communicates to us respecting morals must therefore be exceedingly narrow. The desire for happiness is born within man and must hence be the foundation of all morality. But the desire for happiness is limited in two ways; first, through the natural results of our acts; after the dissipation comes the headache, as a result of habitual excess, sickness; in the second place, through its results upon society, if we do not respect the similar desire for happiness on the part of other people, they resist us and spoil our pursuit of happiness. It follows, therefore, that in order to enjoy our pursuit of happiness, the result of our acts must be rightly appreciated, and, on the other hand, must allow of the carrying out of the same acts on the part of others. Practical self-control with regard to ourselves and love, always love, in our intercourse with others are therefore the foundation rules of Feuerbach's morality, from which all others lead, and neither the enthusiastic periods of Feuerbach nor the loud praises of Starcke can set off the thinness and flatness of this pair of utterances. The desire for happiness contents itself only very exceptionally, and by no means to the profit of one's self or other people with self. But it requires the outside world--means of satisfying itself--therefore means of subsistence, an individual of the other sex, books, convention, argument, activity, these means and matters of satisfaction are matters of utility and labor. Feuerbach's system of morality either predicates that these means and matters of satisfaction are given to every man _per se_, or, since it gives him only unpractical advice, is not worth a jot to the people who are without these means. And this Feuerbach himself shows clearly in forcible words, "One thinks differently in a palace than in a hut." "Where owing to misery and hunger you have no material in your body, you have also no material in your head, mind and heart for morals." Are matters any better with the equal right of another to the pursuit of happiness? Feuerbach set this statement out as absolute, as applicable to all times and circumstances. But since when has it been true? Was there in the olden time between slave and master or in the Middle Ages between serf and baron any talk about equal rights to the pursuit of happiness? Was not the right to the pursuit of happiness of the subject class sacrificed to the dominant class regardlessly and by means of law?--nay, that was immoral, but still equality of rights is recognized now-a-days--recognized in words merely since the bourgeoisie in its fight against feudalism and in the institution of capitalistic production, was compelled to abolish all existing exclusive, that is, personal, privileges, and for the first time to introduce the right of the private individual, then also gradually the right of the State, and equality before law. But the pursuit of happiness consists for the least part only in ideal rights, and lies, for the most part, in means of material satisfaction takes care that only enough for bare subsistence falls to the great majority of those persons with equal rights, and therefore regards the equality of right to the pursuit of happiness hardly better than slavery or serfdom did. And are we better off as regards mental means of happiness--means of education? Is not the schoolmaster of Sadowa a mythical person? Further, according to the ethical theory of Feuerbach, the Bourse is the highest temple of morality, only provided that one speculate rightly. If my pursuit of happiness leads me to the Bourse, and I, in following my business, manage so well that only what is agreeable and nothing detrimental comes to me, that is that I win steadily, Feuerbach's precept is carried out. In this way I do not interfere with the similar pursuit of happiness of anyone else, since the other man goes on the Bourse just as voluntarily as I do, and at the conclusion of his affairs a sentimental expression, for each finds in the other the satisfaction of his pursuit of happiness which it is just the business of love to bring about, and which it here practically accomplishes. And since I carry on my operations with more exact prudence and therefore with greater success I fulfill the strongest maxims of the Feuerbach moral philosophy and become a rich man into the bargain. In other words, Feuerbach's morality is hewn out of the capitalistic system of today, little as he might wish or think it to be. But love, yes love, is particularly and eternally the magical god who, according to Feuerbach, surmounts all the difficulties of practical life and that in a society which is divided into classes with diametrically opposing interests. The last remnant of its revolutionary character is thus taken from his philosophy, and there remains the old cant--"love one another"--fall into each other's arms without regard to any impediment of sex or position--universal intoxication of reconciliation. In a word, the moral theories of Feuerbach turn out to be the same as those of all of his predecessors. It is a hodge-podge of all times, all people, and all conditions, and for this occasion is applicable to no time and place, and as regards the actual world is as powerless as Kant's "Categorical Imperative." As a matter of fact, every class, as well as every profession, has its own system of morals and breaks even this when it can do it without punishment, and love, which is to unite all, appears today in wars, controversies, lawsuits, domestic broils and as far as possible mutual plunder. But how was it possible that the powerful impetus given by Feuerbach turned out so unprofitable to Feuerbach himself. Simply in this way, because Feuerbach could not find his way out of the abstraction, which he hated with a deadly hatred, to living reality. He clutches hard at Nature and Humanity, but "Nature" and "Humanity" remain empty words with him. He does not know how to tell us anything positive about real nature and real men. We can only reach living men from the abstract men of Feuerbach if we regard them as active historical agents. Feuerbach strove against that, hence the year 1848, which, he did not understand, signified for him merely the final break with the real world, retirement into solitude. German conditions must for the most part bear the guilt of allowing him to starve miserably. But the step which Feuerbach did not make had not yet been made. The cultus of man in the abstract which was the kernel of Feuerbach's religion must be replaced by the knowledge of real men and their historical development. This advance of Feuerbach's view beyond Feuerbach himself was published in 1845 by Marx in the "Holy Family." IV. Strauss, Bauer, Stirner, Feuerbach, these were the minor representatives of the Hegelian philosophy, so far as they did not abandon the field of philosophy. Strauss has, in addition to the "Life of Jesus" and "Dogmatics," only produced philosophical and ecclesiastical historical work of a literary character, after the fashion of Renan; Bauer has merely done something in the department of primitive Christianity, but that significant; Stirner remained a "freak" even after Bakunine had mixed him with Proudhon and designated his amalgamation "Anarchism." Feuerbach alone possessed any significance as a philosopher; but not only did philosophy remain for him the vaunted superior of all other sciences, the quintessence of all science, an impassable limitation, the untouchable holy thing, he stood as a composite philosopher; the under half of him was materialist, the upper half idealist. He was not an apt critic of Hegel but simply put him aside as of no account, while he himself, in comparison with the encyclopedic wealth of the Hegelian system, contributed nothing of any positive value, except a bombastic religion of love and a thin, impotent system of ethics. But from the breaking up of the Hegelian school there proceeded another, the only one which has borne real fruit, and this tendency is coupled with the name of Marx.[2] In this case the separation from the Hegelian philosophy occurred by means of a return to the materialistic standpoint, that is to say, a determination to comprehend the actual world--nature and history--as it presents itself to each one of us, without any preconceived idealistic balderdash interfering; it was resolved to pitilessly sacrifice any idealistic preconceived notion which could not be brought into harmony with facts actually discovered in their mutual relations, and without any visionary notions. And materialism in general claims no more. Only here, for the first time in the history of the materialistic philosophy, was an earnest endeavor made to carry its results to all questions arising in the realm of knowledge, at least in its characteristic features. Hegel was not merely put on one side, the school attached itself on the contrary to his openly revolutionary side, the dialectic method. But this method was of no service in its Hegelian form. According to Hegel the dialectic is the self-development of the Idea. The Absolute Idea does not only exist from eternity, but it is also the actual living soul of the whole existing world. It develops from itself to itself through all the preliminary stages which are treated of at large in "Logic," and which are all included in it. Then it steps outside of itself, changing with nature itself, where it, without self-consciousness, is disguised as a necessity of nature, goes through a new development, and, finally, in man himself, becomes self-consciousness. This self-consciousness now works itself out into the higher stages from the lower forms of matter, until finally the Absolute Idea is again realized in the Hegelian philosophy. According to Hegel, the dialectic development apparent in nature and history, that is a causative, connected progression from the lower to the higher, in spite of all zig-zag movements and momentary setbacks, is only the stereotype of the self-progression of the Idea from eternity, whither one does not know, but independent at all events of the thought of any human brain. This topsy-turvy ideology had to be put aside. We conceived of ideas as materialistic, as pictures of real things, instead of real things as pictures of this or that stage of the Absolute Idea. Thereupon, the dialectic became reduced to knowledge of the universal laws of motion--as well of the outer world as of the thought of man--two sets of laws which are identical as far as matter is concerned but which differ as regards expression, in so far as the mind of man can employ them consciously, while, in nature, and up to now, in human history, for the most part they accomplish themselves, unconsciously in the form of external necessity, through an endless succession of apparent accidents. Hereupon the dialectic of the Idea became itself merely the conscious reflex of the dialectic evolution of the real world, and therefore, the dialectic of Hegel was turned upside down or rather it was placed upon its feet instead of on its head, where it was standing before. And this materialistic dialectic which since that time has been our best tool and our sharpest weapon was discovered, not by us alone, but by a German workman, Joseph Dietzgen, in a remarkable manner and utterly independent of us. But just here the revolutionary side of Hegel's philosophy was again taken up, and at the same time freed from the idealistic frippery which had in Hegel's hands interfered with its necessary conclusions. The great fundamental thought, namely, that the world is not to be considered as a complexity of ready-made things, but as a complexity made up of processes in which the apparently stable things, no less than the thought pictures in the brain--the idea, cause an unbroken chain of coming into being and passing away, in which, by means of all sorts of seeming accidents, and in spite of all momentary setbacks, there is carried out in the end a progressive development--this great foundation thought has, particularly since the time of Hegel, so dominated the thoughts of the mass of men that, generally speaking, it is now hardly denied. But to acknowledge it in phrases, and to apply it in reality to each particular set of conditions which come up for examination, are two different matters. But if one proceeds steadily in his investigations from this historic point, then a stop is put, once and for all, to the demand for final solutions and for eternal truths; one is firmly conscious of the necessary limitations of all acquired knowledge, of its hypothetical nature, owing to the circumstances under which it has been gained. One cannot be imposed upon any longer by the inflated insubstantial antitheses of the older metaphysics of true and false, good and evil, identical and differentiated, necessary and accidental; one knows that these antitheses have only a relative significance, that that which is recognized as true now, has its concealed and later-developing false side, just as that which is recognized as false, its true side, by virtue of which it can later on prevail as the truth; that so-called necessity is made up of the merely accidental, and that the acknowledged accidental is the form behind which necessity conceals itself and so on. The old methods of enquiry and thought which Hegel terms metaphysics, which by preference busied themselves by enquiring into things as given and established quantities, and the vestiges of which still buzz in the heads of people, had at that time great historical justification. Things had first to be examined, before it was possible to examine processes; man must first know what a thing was before he could examine the preceding changes in it. And so it was with natural science. The old metaphysic which comprehended things as stable came from a philosophy which enquired into dead and living things as things comprehended as stable. But when this enquiry had so far progressed that the decisive step was possible, namely, the systematic examination of the preceding changes in those things going on in nature itself, then occurred the death-blow of the old metaphysics in the realm of philosophy. And, in fact, if science to the end of the last century was chiefly a collecting of knowledge, the science of actual things, so is science in our day pre-eminently an arranging of knowledge, the science of changes, of the origin and progress of things, and the mutual connection which binds these changes in nature into one great whole. Physiology, which examines the earlier forms of plant and animal organisms; embryology, which deals with the development of the elementary organism from germ to maturity; geology, which investigates the gradual formation of the earth's crust, are all the products of our century. But, first of all, there are three great discoveries which have caused our knowledge of the interdependence of the processes of nature to progress by leaps and bounds. In the first place, the discovery of the cell, as the unit, from the multiplication and differentiation of which, the whole of plant and animal substance develop so that not only the growth and development of all higher classes of all higher organisms is recognized as following a universal law, but the very path is shown in the capacity for differentiation in the cell, by which organisms are enabled to change their forms and make thereby a more individual development. Secondly, the metamorphosis of energy which has shown us that all the so-called real forces in inorganic nature, the mechanical forces and their complements, the so-called potential energies, heat, radiation (light, radiating heat), electricity, magnetism, chemical energy, are different forms of universal motion, which pass, under certain conditions, the one into the other, so that in place of those of the one which disappear, a certain number of the other appear, so that the whole movement of nature is reduced to this perpetual process of transformation from one into the other. Finally, the proof first developed logically by Darwin, that the organic products of nature about us, including man, are the result of a long process of evolution, from a few original single cells, and these again, by virtue of chemical processes, have proceeded from protoplasm or white of egg. Thanks to these three great discoveries and the resultant powerful advance of science, we have now arrived at a point where we can show the connection between changes in nature, not only in specific cases, but also in the relation of the specific cases to the whole and so give a bird's eye view of the interrelation of nature in an approximately scientific form by means of the facts shown by empirical science itself. To furnish this complete picture was formerly the task of the so-called philosophy of nature. It could then only do this by substituting ideal and imaginary hypotheses for the unknown real interconnection, by filling out the missing facts with mind-pictures and by bridging the chasms by empty imaginings. It had many happy thoughts in these transports (of imagination), it anticipated many later discoveries, but it also caused the survival of considerable nonsense up to the present time which could not otherwise have been possible. At present, when the results of the investigation of nature need only be conceived of dialectically, that is in the sense of their mutual interconnection, to arrive at a system of nature sufficient for our time, when the dialectical character of this interconnection forces itself into the metaphysically trained minds of experimental scientists, against their will, today a philosophy of nature is finally disposed of, every attempt at its resurrection would not only be superfluous, it would even be a step backwards. But what is true of nature, which is hereby recognized as an historical process, is true also of the history of society in all its branches, and of the totality of all sciences which occupy themselves with things human and divine. Here also the philosophy of jurisprudence, of history, of religion, etc., consisted in this, that in place of the true interconnection of events, one originating in the mind of the philosopher was substituted; that history, in its totality as in its parts, was comprehended as the gradual realization of ideas, but, of course, always of the pet idea of the philosopher himself. History worked up to now, unconsciously but necessarily, towards a certain predetermined, fixed, ideal goal, as for example in the case of Hegel, towards the realization of his Absolute Idea, and the unalterable trend towards this Absolute Idea constituted the inward connection of historic facts. In the place of the real, and up to this time unknown, interrelation, man set a new mysterious destiny, unconscious or gradually coming into consciousness. It was necessary in this case, therefore, just as in the realm of nature, to set aside these artificial interrelations by the discovery of the real, a task which finally culminated in the discovery of the universal laws of progress, which established themselves as the dominating ones in the history of human society. The history of the growth of society appears, however, in one respect entirely different from that of nature. In nature are to be found as far as we leave the reaction of man upon nature out of sight--mere unconscious blind agents which act one upon another, and in their interplay the universal law realizes itself. From all that happens, whether from the innumerable apparent accidents which appear upon the surface, or from the final results flowing from these accidental occurrences, nothing occurs as a desired conscious end. On the contrary, in the history of society the mere actors are all endowed with consciousness; they are agents imbued with deliberation or passion, men working towards an appointed end; nothing appears without an intentional purpose, without an end desired. But this distinction, important as it is for historical examination, particularly of single epochs and events, can make no difference to the fact that the course of history is governed by inner universal laws. Here also, in spite of the wished for aims of all the separate individuals, accident for the most part is apparent on the surface. That which is willed but rarely happens. In the majority of instances the numerous desired ends cross and interfere with each other, and either these ends are utterly incapable of realization, or the means are ineffectual. So, the innumerable conflicts of individual wills and individual agents in the realm of history reach a conclusion which is on the whole analogous to that in the realm of nature, which is without definite purpose. The ends of the actions are intended, but the results which follow from the actions are not intended, or in so far as they appear to correspond with the end desired, in their final results are quite different from the conclusion wished. Historical events in their entirety therefore appear to be likewise controlled by chance. But even where according to superficial observation, accident plays a part, it is, as a matter of fact, consistently governed by unseen, internal laws, and the only question remaining, therefore, is to discover these laws. Men make their own history in that each follows his own desired ends independent of results, and the results of these many wills acting in different directions and their manifold effects upon the world constitute history. It depends, therefore, upon what the great majority of individuals intend. The will is determined by passion or reflection, but the levers which passion or reflection immediately apply are of very different kinds. Sometimes it may be external circumstances, sometimes ideal motives, zeal for honor, enthusiasm for truth and justice, personal hate, or even purely individual peculiar ideas of all kinds. But on the one hand, we have seen in history that the results of many individual wills produce effects, for the most part quite other than what is wished--often, in fact, the very opposite--their motives of action, likewise, are only of subordinate significance with regard to the universal result. On the other hand, the question arises: What driving forces stand in turn behind these motives of action; what are the historical causes which transform themselves into motives of action in the brains of the agents? The old materialism never set this question before itself. Its philosophy of history, as far as it ever had one in particular, is hence essentially pragmatic; it judges everything from the standpoint of the immediate motive; it divides historical agents into good and bad and finds as a whole that the good are defrauded and the bad are victorious, whence it follows that, as far as the old materialism is concerned, there is nothing edifying that can be obtained from a study of history, and for us, that in the realm of history the old materialism is proved to be false, since it fixes active ideal impulses as final causes instead of seeking that which lies behind them, that which is the impulse of these impulses. The lack of logical conclusion does not lie in the fact that ideal impulses are recognized, but in this, that there is no further examination into the more remote causes of their activity. The philosophy of history, on the contrary, particularly as it was treated by Hegel, recognizes that the ostensible and even the real motives of the men who figure in history, are by no means the final causes of historical events, that behind these events stand other moving forces which must be discovered; but it seeks these forces not in history itself, it imports them mostly from the outside, from philosophical ideology, into history. Instead of explaining the history of ancient Greece from its own inner connection, Hegel, for example, explains it solely as if it were nothing but the working out of a beautiful individuality, the realization of art, as such. He says much about the old Greeks that is fine and profound, but this does not prevent our dissatisfaction, now-a-days, with such an explanation, which is mere phraseology. If, therefore, we set out to discover the impelling forces, which, acknowledged, or unacknowledged, and for the most part unacknowledged, stand behind historical figures, and constitute the true final impulses of history, we cannot consider so much the motives of single individuals, however pre-eminent, as those which set in motion great masses, entire nations, and again, whole classes of people in each nation, and this, too, not in a momentarily flaring and quickly dying flame, but to enduring action culminating in a great historical change. To establish the great impelling forces which play upon the brains of the acting masses and their leaders, the so-called great men, as conscious motives, clear or unclear, directly or ideologically or even in a supernatural form, that is the only method which can place us on the track of the law controlling history as a whole, as well as at particular periods and in individual lands. All that sets men in motion must act upon their minds, but the force which acts upon the brain depends very largely upon circumstances. The workers have by no means become reconciled to the machine power of the capitalists although they no longer break the machines to pieces as they did on the Rhine in 1848. But while the discovery of these impelling forces of history was entirely impossible in all other periods, on account of the complicated and hidden interrelations with their effects, our present period has so far simplified these relations that the problem can be solved. Since the establishment of the great industry, at least since the peace of Europe in 1815, it has been no longer a secret to anyone in England that the whole political fight has been for supremacy between two classes, the landed aristocracy and the middle-class. In France, with the return of the Bourbons, the same fact was perceived; the writers of history, from Thierry to Guizot, Mignet, and Thiers in particular, pronounce it as a key to an understanding of French history, especially since the Middle Ages. And since 1830 the working class, the proletariat, has been recognized as the third competitor for mastery in both countries. Circumstances had become so simplified that one would have had to close his eyes not to see in the fight of these three classes and in the conflict of their interests, the moving forces of modern history, at least in the two most advanced countries. But how came these classes into existence? If the great feudal ancient property in land can have its origin ascribed to political causes through forcible seizure of territories, this could not be done as regards the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. There are in this case clearly exposed the origin and progress of two great economic classes from plain and evident economic causes. And it was just as clear that in the fight between the landholding class and the bourgeoisie, no less than in that between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, economic interests were the most important, and that political force served only as a mere means of furthering these. The bourgeoisie and the proletariat both arose as results of a change in economic conditions, or, strictly speaking, in methods of production. The transition, first from hand labor, controlled by the gilds, to manufacture and thence from manufacture to the greater industry, with steam and machine force, has developed these two classes. At a certain stage new forces of production were set in motion by the bourgeoisie, following upon the division of labor and the union of many different kinds of labor in one united manufacture, and the methods of exchange and requirements of exchange developed by their means, were incompatible with the existing historical surviving methods of production consecrated by the law, that is to say the gilds and the innumerable personal and other privileges (which for the unprivileged were only so many fetters) of the feudal social organization. The forces of production brought into being by the bourgeoisie rebelled against the methods of production originated by the gildmasters and the feudal landlords; the result is known; the feudal fetters were struck off, in England gradually, in France at one blow; in Germany the process is not yet quite complete. As manufacture came into conflict at a certain stage of progress with feudal methods of production, so has the greater industry now joined battle with the bourgeois organization of industry established in their place. Bound by this system, owing to the narrow limits of the capitalistic methods of production, there occurs on the one hand an ever increasing conversion of the mass of the people into proletarians, and on the other hand an ever increasing amount of products which cannot be disposed of. Over-production, and suffering on the part of the masses, the one the cause of the other, that is the absurd contradiction in which it runs its course, and which of necessity requires a control of the forces of production, through a change in the methods of production. In modern history, at least, it is therefore proved that all political contests are class contests and that all fights of classes for emancipation, in spite of their necessarily political form (for every class struggle is a political struggle), finally, are directed towards economic emancipation. Here, at least, therefore, the State, the political arrangement is the subordinate, bourgeois society, the rule of economic relations, the deciding element. The old fashioned philosophy which even Hegel respected saw in the State the determining element and in bourgeois society the element determined by it. Appearances corresponded with this idea. As all the impulses of each single agent pass through his individual brain and must transform themselves into motives of his will in order to set him to work, so must also the desires of bourgeois society, no matter which class happens to be dominant, penetrate the will of the state in order to secure universal validity in the form of laws. That is the formal side of the matter which is self evident, the question only is what content has this merely formal will--of the individual as well as of the State--and whence comes this content--why is just this desired and nothing else? And if we enquire into this we discover that in modern history the will of the State, as a whole, is declared through the changing needs of bourgeois society, through the domination of this or that class, in the last instance through the development of the forces of production and the conditions of exchange. But if in our modern times, with their gigantic methods of production and commerce, the State is not an independent affair with an independent development, but its existence as well as its evolution is to be explained in the last resort from the economic conditions of the life of society, so much the more must the same thing be true of all earlier times when the production of the necessities of existence was not furthered by these extensive aids, where, therefore, the necessities of this production must exercise a greater control over men. If the State is today, at the time of the great industries and steam railways, merely, as a whole, the summarized, reflected form of the economic desires of the class which controls production, it must, therefore, have been still more so at a period when a generation of men must spend the greater portion of their united life-time in the satisfaction of their material needs, and man was, therefore, much more dependent on them than we are today. The examination of the earlier epochs of history, as far as it is earnestly conducted in this direction, establishes this abundantly, but manifestly this cannot here be taken in hand. If the State and public law are the creatures of economic conditions, so, obviously, is private law, which only sanctions relations between individuals under given normal economic circumstances. The form in which this appears may, however, vary considerably. One can, as happened in England in accordance with the whole national development, retain, for the most part, the forms of the old feudal law, and give them a middle-class content, even read a middle-class meaning into the feudal names, but one may also, as in the western part of the European continent, use as a foundation the first general law of a society producing commodities, the Roman, with its unsurpassably keen elaboration, of all the legal relations of possessions of commodities (sellers and buyers, creditors and debtors, contracts, obligations, etc.), by which we can bring it down as common-law to the use and benefit of a still small bourgeois and half feudal society; or, with the help of pseudo-enlightened and moralizing jurists, a code (which is bad from a legal point of view) can be worked out suitable to the conditions of the particular society (as the Prussian land law). And, still again, after a great bourgeois revolution, a classical code for bourgeois society, such as the French "Code Civil," may be worked out. If, therefore, the bourgeois laws only declare the economic circumstances of society, these may be good or bad according to conditions. In the State appears the first ideological force over men. Society shapes for itself an organ for the protection of its general interests against attack from the outside or inside. This organ is the force of the State. Hardly did it come into being before this organ dominated society, and as a matter of fact, in proportion as it becomes the organ of a particular class, it brings into existence the supremacy of that class. The fight of the subject against the dominant class becomes of necessity political, a fight in the next place against the political control of this latter class. This consciousness of the connection of the political fight with its underlying economic causes becomes more and more obscure and may be altogether lost. Where this is not altogether the case with the combatants it becomes nearly altogether so with the historians. Of the ancient sources of history with regard to the contest within the Roman Republic, Appian alone gives us plain and clear information respecting its final cause, which was property in land. But the State, once become an independent power over society, forthwith displayed a further ideology. Among the practical politicians and the theorists in jurisprudence, and among the jurists in particular, this fact is first completely lost sight of. Since in each single instance the economic facts must take the form of juristic motives so as to be sanctioned in the form of law, and since, therefore, a backward view must be taken over the whole existing system of law, it follows therefrom that the juristic form appears to be the whole and the economic content nothing at all. Public and private law are considered as independent realms which have their own independent historic evolution, which are considered capable of a systematic representation, and stand in need of it through persistent elimination of all inner contradictions. Still higher ideological conceptions, i. e., still further removed from the economic foundations, take the form of philosophy and religion. Here, the connection of the ideas with the material conditions of existence become more and more complicated and obscured by reason of the increasing number of links between them, but it exists. As the whole Rennaissance from the middle of the fifteenth century was an actual product of the city, and therefore of the bourgeois domination, so was also the philosophy, since that time newly awakened. Its content was actually only the philosophical expression of the thoughts corresponding with the development of the small and middle bourgeois into the great bourgeois. Among the English and French of the preceding century, who were for the most part as good political economists as they were philosophers, this is quite evident, and we have proofs on its very face, as regards the Hegelian school. Let us now give a slight glance at religion since it appears to stand furthest away from and to be most foreign to material life. Religion arose at a very remote period of human development, in the savage state, from certain erroneous and barbaric conceptions of men with regard to themselves and the outside world of nature around them. Every ideological notion develops, however, when once it has arisen; it grows by additions to the given idea, and develops it further, otherwise there would be no ideology, that is, no occupation with thoughts as with independent thought-existence, developing independently and subject only to its own laws. That the material conditions of life of the men within whose heads this thought force is at work finally determine the course of this thought-process necessarily remains still unknown to these men, otherwise there would be an entire end of the ideology. These original religious notions, therefore, which are for the most part common to each kindred group of peoples, develop after the separation of the group in a special manner peculiar to each tribe, according to its particular conditions of existence, and this process is for a class of groups of people, and particularly for the Aryans (Indo-Europeans) shown individually by comparative mythology. The gods developed by each tribe were national gods, whose power extended no further than to protect the national territory; beyond the frontier other gods held undisputed sway. They could only be conceived of as existing as long as the nation existed. They fell with its decline. This doctrine of the old nationalities brought about the Roman Empire, whose economic conditions we do not need to examine just now. The old national gods fell, as those of the Romans did also, which were only attached to the narrow limits of the city of Rome. The desire to make the empire a world-empire, by means of a world-wide religion, is clearly shown in the attempts to provide recognition and altars in Rome for all the respectable foreign gods, next to the indigenous ones. But a new world-religion was not to be made in this fashion by imperial decrees. The new world-religion, Christianity, had already arisen in secret by a mixture of combined oriental religions, Jewish theology and popularized Greek philosophy and particularly Stoic philosophy. We must first be at the pains to discover how it originally made its appearance, since its official form as it has come to us is merely that of a State religion, and this end was achieved through the Council of Nice. Enough, the fact that after two hundred and fifty years it was a state religion shows that it was a religion answering to the circumstances of the times. In the Middle Ages it showed itself clearly. In proportion as feudalism developed it grew into a religion corresponding with it, with a hierarchy corresponding to the feudal. And when the rule of the bourgeois came in, it developed into Protestant heresy in antagonism to feudal Catholicism, at first in the South of France, among the Albigenses at the time of the highest growth of the free cities. The Middle Ages had annexed all the surviving forms of ideology, philosophy, politics and jurisprudence, to theology as subordinate parts of theology. It constrained, therefore, all social and political movement to assume a theological form; finally, to the minds of the masses stuffed with religion it was necessary to show their interests in religious guise, in order to raise a tremendous storm. And as the rule of the bourgeois from the beginning brought into being an appendage of propertyless plebeians, with day laborers and servants of all sorts, without any recognized position in their cities, the forerunners of the later proletarians, so the heresy was very early subdivided into a moderate one, on the part of the citizens, and a plebeian revolutionary one, which was an abomination to the bourgeois heretics. The failure to exterminate the protestant heresy corresponded with the invincibility of the rising power of the bourgeois of that time; as this power grew, the fight with the feudal nobles, at first pre-eminently local, began to assume national proportions. The first great conflict occurred in Germany, the so-called Reformation. The power of the bourgeois was neither sufficiently strong nor sufficiently developed for an open rebellious stand, by uniting under the standard of revolt the city plebeians, the smaller nobility, and the peasants of the country districts. The nobility was struck first, the peasants took up a position which was the high-water mark of the entire revolution, the cities left them in the lurch, and so the revolution was left to the leaders of the country gentry who gathered the whole victory to themselves. Thenceforth for three hundred years Germany disappeared from the ranks of independent, energetic progressive countries. But after the German Luther, arose the French Calvin. With natural French acuteness he showed the bourgeois character of the revolution in the Church, republicanised and democratised. While the Lutheran Reformation fell in Germany and Germany declined, the Calvinistic served as a standard to the republicans in Geneva, in Holland, in Scotland, freed Holland from German and Spanish domination, and gave an ideological dress to the second act of the bourgeois revolution which proceeded in England. Here Calvinism proved itself to be the natural religious garb of the interests of the existing rule of the bourgeois and was not realised any further than that the revolution of 1689 was completed by a compromise between a portion of the nobility and the middle-class. The English Established Church was restored, but not in its earlier form with the king for Pope, but was strongly infused with Calvinism. The old-established Church had kept up the merry Catholic Sunday and fought against the tedious Calvinistic one, the new bourgeois Church introduced the latter and added thereby to the charms of England. In France the Calvinistic minority was subdued in 1685, either made Catholic or hunted out of the country. But what was the good? Directly after that the free thinker Pierre Bayle was at work, and in 1694 Voltaire was born. The tyrannical rule of Louis XIV. only made it easier for the French bourgeoisie to be able to make its revolution in the political form finally suitable to the progressive atheistic bourgeoisie. Instead of Protestants, free-thinkers took their seats in the National Assembly. Thereby Christianity entered upon the last lap of the race. It had become incapable of serving a progressive class any further as the ideological clothing of its efforts, it became more and more the exclusive possession of the dominant classes, and these used it merely as a simple means of government to keep the lower classes in subjection. So then each one of the different classes employed its own suitable religion, the landholding squires catholic jesuitism or protestant orthodoxy, the liberal and radical bourgeois rationalism, and it makes no difference therefore whether people themselves believe in their respective religions or not. Thus we see religion once arisen contains material of tradition, hence in all ideological matters religion is a great conservative force. But the changes which take place in this material spring from class-conditions, that is from the economic circumstances of the men who take these changes in hand. And that is enough on this part of the subject. It is only possible at this time to give a general sketch of the Marxian philosophy of history, and particularly as regards illustrations of it. The proof is to be discovered in history itself, and in this regard I may say plainly that it has been sufficiently furnished in other writings. This philosophy, however, makes an end of philosophy in the realm of history, just as the dialectic philosophy of nature renders every philosophy of nature useless or impossible. Practically there is no further need to devise interrelations but to discover them in facts rather. Instead of a philosophy forced from nature and history there remains then only the realm of pure thought--as far as any is left--the teaching of the laws of the thinking process itself, logic and the dialectic. With the Revolution of 1848 "educated" Germany delivered the challenge to theory and proceeded to action. Hand-labor dependent upon small production and manufacture was done away with by the great industry--Germany again appeared in the world-market. The new particularistic Germany, at all events did away with the most crying anomalies, which the rule of the petty states, the remnants of feudalism and the bureaucratic economy, had placed in the way of their development, but just in proportion as speculation abandoned the studies of philosophers to attain its temple in the Bourse, that great theoretic thought which had been the glory of Germany in the period of its deepest political humiliation, the zeal for pure scientific progress, irrespective of practical, profitable results, and of the disapproval of the police, became lost in educated Germany. It is true that the German official natural science maintained its position, particularly in the field of individual discovery, at the head of its time, but now the American journal "Science" justly remarks that the decisive advances in the matter of the broadest inclusive statement of the relations between single facts, and the harmonising of them with law, are making the greater headway in England, instead of, as earlier, in Germany. And with regard to the sciences of history, philosophy included, with the classical philosophy, the old theoretical spirit, with its carelessness of personal results, first completely disappeared. Thoughtless eclecticism, eager backward glances at a career, and income down to the meanest sycophancy occupy their places. The official representatives of this sort of science have become the open ideologists of the bourgeoisie and the existing state, but at a time when they both stand in open antagonism to the working classes. Only among the working classes does the German devotion to abstract thought steadily continue to exist. Here it cannot be got rid of. Here we find no backward glances at a career, at profit making, at kindly protection from the upper classes, but on the contrary the more independent and unrestricted the path of science, just so much the more does it find itself in accord with the interests and endeavors of the working class. The new tendency, which in the history of the development of labor made known the key to the understanding of the universal history of society addressed itself in the first place to the working class and found in them the ready acceptance which it neither sought nor expected from official science. The German working-class movement is the heir of the German classical philosophy. FOOTNOTE: [2] It is incumbent upon me to make a personal explanation at this place. People have lately referred to my share in this theory, and so I can hardly refrain from saying a few words here in settlement of that particular matter. I cannot deny that I had before and during my forty years' collaboration with Marx a certain independent share not only in laying out the foundations, but more particularly in working out the theory. But the greatest part of the leading essential thinking, particularly in the realm of economics, and especially its final sharp statement, belongs to Marx alone. What I contributed Marx could quite readily have carried out without me with the exception of a pair of special applications. What Marx supplied, I could not have readily brought. Marx stood higher, saw further, took a wider, clearer, quicker survey than all of us. Marx was a genius, we others, at the best, talented. Without him the theory would not be what it is today, by a long way. It therefore rightly bears his name. APPENDIX. MARX ON FEUERBACH. (_Jotted down in Brussels in the spring of 1845._) I. The chief lack of all materialistic philosophy up to the present, including that of Feuerbach, is that the thing, the reality, sensation is only conceived of under the form of the object which is presented to the eye, but not as human sense-activity, "praxis," not subjectively. It therefore came about that the active side in opposition to materialism was developed from idealism, but only abstractly; this was natural, since idealism does not recognize real tangible facts as such. Feuerbach is willing, it is true, to distinguish objects of sensation from objects existing in thought, but he conceives of human activity itself not as objective activity. He, therefore, in the "Wesen des Christenthums," regards only theoretical activity as generally human, while the "praxis" is conceived and fixed only in its disgusting form. II. The question if objective truth is possible to human thought is not a theoretical but a practical question. In practice man must prove the truth, that is the reality and force in his actual thoughts. The dispute as to the reality or non-reality of thought which separates itself, "the praxis," is a purely scholastic question. III. The materialistic doctrine that men are the products of conditions and education, different men therefore the products of other conditions and changed education, forgets that circumstances may be altered by men and that the educator has himself to be educated. It necessarily happens therefore that society is divided into two parts, of which one is elevated above society (Robert Owen for example). The occurrence simultaneously of a change in conditions and human activity can only be comprehended and rationally understood as a revolutionary fact. IV. Feuerbach proceeds from a religious self-alienation, the duplication of the world into a religious, imaginary, and a real world. His work consists in the discovery of the material foundations of the religious world. He overlooked the fact that after carrying this to completion the important matter still remains unaccomplished. The fact that the material foundation annuls itself and establishes for itself a realm in the clouds can only be explained from the heterogeneity and self-contradiction of the material foundation. This itself must first become understood in its contradictions and so become thoroughly revolutionized by the elimination of the contradiction. After the earthly family has been discovered as the secret of the Holy Family, one must have theoretically criticised and theoretically revolutionised it beforehand. V. Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thought, invokes impressions produced by the senses, but does not comprehend sensation as practical sensory activities. VI. Feuerbach dissolves religion in humanity. But humanity is not an abstraction dwelling in each individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the conditions of society. Feuerbach, who does not enquire into this fact, is therefore compelled: 1. To abstract religious sentiment from the course of history, to place it by itself, and to pre-suppose an abstract, isolated, human individual. 2. Humanity is therefore only comprehended by him as a species, as a hidden sort of merely natural identity of qualities in which many individuals are embraced. VII. Therefore Feuerbach does not see that religious feeling is itself a product of society, and that the abstract individual which he analyses belongs in reality to a certain form of society. VIII. The life of society is essentially practical. All the mysteries which seduce speculative thought into mysticism find their solution in human practice and in concepts of this practice. IX. The highest point to which materialism attains, that is the materialism which comprehends sensation, not as a practical fact, is the point of view of the single individual in bourgeois society. X. The standpoint of the old materialism is "bourgeois" society; the standpoint of the new, human society, or associated humanity. XI. Philosophers have only interpreted the world differently, but the point is to change it. 
30506	----	Note: Images of the original pages are available by viewing Project Gutenberg's HTML version of this file. See 30506-h.htm or 30506-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30506/30506-h/30506-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30506/30506-h.zip) ANARCHISM AND SOCIALISM by GEORGE PLECHANOFF Translated with the permission of the author by Eleanor Marx Aveling Chicago Charles H. Kerr & Company CONTENTS. PUBLISHERS' NOTE 7 PREFACE 13 I. THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE UTOPIAN SOCIALISTS 17 II. THE POINT OF VIEW OF SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM 30 III. THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE ANARCHIST DOCTRINE 38 IV. PROUDHON 53 V. BAKOUNINE 78 VI. BAKOUNINE--(CONCLUDED) 89 VII. THE SMALLER FRY 103 VIII. THE SO-CALLED ANARCHIST TACTICS. THEIR MORALITY 127 IX. THE BOURGEOISIE, ANARCHISM, AND SOCIALISM 143 PUBLISHERS' NOTE In reprinting _Anarchism and Socialism_, by George Plechanoff, we realize that there is not the same need for assailing and exposing anarchism at present as there has been at different times in the past. Yet the book is valuable, not merely because of its historic interest but also to workers coming into contact with the revolutionary movement for the first time. The general conception of anarchism that a beginner often gets is that it is something extremely advanced. It is often expressed somewhat as follows: "After capitalism comes socialism and then comes anarchism." Plechanoff very ably explodes such notions. Within the pages of this work the author shows not only the reactionary character of anarchism, but he exposes its class bias and its empty philosophic idealism and utopian program. He shows anarchism to be just the opposite of scientific socialism or communism. It aims at a society dominated by individualism, which is simply a capitalist ideal. Such ideals as "liberty," "equality," "fraternity," first sprang from the ranks of the petty property owners of early capitalism, as Plechanoff shows. He also points out that while Proudhon is usually credited with being "the father of anarchism" that actually Max Stirner comes closer to being its "father." Stirner's "League of Egoists," he says, "is only the utopia of a petty bourgeois in revolt. In this sense one may say he has spoken the last word of bourgeois individualism." Bakounine and Kropotkine, the famous Russian anarchists, are exposed as confused idealists, who have not aided but rather hindered the development of the working-class movement. Lenin speaks highly of the book in this relation, but takes Plechanoff severely to task for his failure properly to set forth the Marxian concepts of the State, and for his total evasion of the form the State must take during the time it is in the hands of the workers. When writing on the "Vulgarisation of Marx by the Opportunists," in his _State and Revolution_, Lenin said: "Plechanoff devoted a special pamphlet to the question of the relation of socialism to anarchism entitled _Anarchism and Socialism_, published in German in 1894. He managed somehow to treat the question without touching on the most vital, controversial point, the essential point _politically_, in the struggle with the anarchists: the relation of the revolution to State, and the question of the State in general. His pamphlet may be divided into two parts: one, historico-literary, containing valuable material for the history of the ideas of Stirner, Proudhon, and others; the second, ignorant and narrow-minded, containing a clumsy disquisition on the theme 'that an anarchist cannot be distinguished from a bandit,' an amusing combination of subjects and most characteristic of the entire activity of Plechanoff on the eve of revolution and during the revolutionary period in Russia. Indeed, in the years 1908 to 1917 Plechanoff showed himself to be half doctrinaire and half philistine, walking, politically, in the wake of the bourgeoisie. "We saw how Marx and Engels, in their polemics against the anarchists, explained most thoroughly their views on the relation of the revolution to the State. Engels, when editing in 1891, Marx's _Criticism of the Gotha Program_, wrote that 'we'--that is, Engels and Marx--'were then in the fiercest phase of our battle with Bakounine and his anarchists; hardly two years had then passed since the Hague Congress of the International' (the First). The anarchists had tried to claim the Paris Commune as their 'own,' as a confirmation of their teachings, thus showing that they had not in the least understood the lessons of the Commune or the analysis of those lessons by Marx. Anarchism has given nothing approaching a true solution of the concrete political problems: are we to _break_ up the old State machine, and what shall we put in its place? "But to speak of _Anarchism and Socialism_, leaving the whole question of the State out of account and taking no notice at all of the whole development of Marxism before and after the Commune--that meant an inevitable fall into the pit of opportunism. For that is just what opportunism wants--to keep these two questions in abeyance. To secure this is, in itself, a victory of opportunism." The anarchist desire to abolish the State at one blow, and to abolish money, etc., in much the same way, springs from their inability to understand the institutions of capitalist society. To many of them the State is simply the result of people having faith in authority. Give up this belief and the State will cease to exist. It is a myth like God and rests entirely on faith. The anarchist's desire for the abolition of the State arises from entirely different concepts to that of the communists. To these anarchist anti-authoritarians the State is simply bad. It is the most authoritarian thing in sight. It interferes with individual freedom and consequently is the greatest obstruction to "absolute liberty" and other utopian desires of the champions of individualism. Communists also want a society without a State but realize that such can only come about when society is without classes. The aim of the communist movement is to destroy the capitalist form of the State and substitute a proletarian form during the time in which society is undergoing its classless transformation. When all property is centralized into the hands of this working-class "State" and when the administration of things has taken the place of political dominance, the State, in its final form, will have withered away. Therefore, the communist realizes that the State cannot be abolished in the manner visualized by anarchists, but that it must be used, that is, the proletariat must be raised "to the position of ruling class," for the purpose of expropriating the capitalists and putting an end to the exploitation of the producing class. The State is not abolished. Only its capitalist form is abolished. The State dies out in the hands of the workers when there is no longer an opposing class to coerce. PREFACE. The work of my friend George Plechanoff, "Anarchism and Socialism," was written originally in French. It was then translated into German by Mrs. Bernstein, and issued in pamphlet form by the German Social-Democratic Publishing Office "Vorwärts." It was next translated by myself into English, and so much of the translation as exigencies of space would permit, published in the _Weekly Times and Echo_. The original French version is now appearing in the _Jeunesse Socialiste_, and will be issued in book form shortly. The complete English translation is now given to English readers through the Twentieth Century Press. I have to thank the Editor of the _Weekly Times and Echo_, Mr. Kibblewhite, for his kindness in allowing me to use those portions of the work that appeared in his paper. As to the book itself. There are those who think that the precious time of so remarkable a writer, and profound a thinker as George Plechanoff is simply wasted in pricking Anarchist wind-bags. But, unfortunately, there are many of the younger, or of the more ignorant sort, who are inclined to take words for deeds, high-sounding phrases for acts, mere sound and fury for revolutionary activity, and who are too young or too ignorant to know that such sound and fury signify nothing. It is for the sake of these younger, or for the sake of the more ignorant, folk, that men like Plechanoff deal seriously with this matter of Anarchism, and do not feel their time lost if they can, as this work must, help readers to see the true meaning of what is called "Anarchism." And a work like this one of Plechanoff's is doubly necessary in England, where the Socialist movement is still largely disorganised, where there is still such ignorance and confusion on all economic and political subjects; where, with the exception, among the larger Socialist organisations, of the Social-Democratic Federation (and even among the younger S.D.F. members there is a vague sort of idea that Anarchism is something fine and revolutionary), there has been no little coquetting with Anarchism under an impression that it was very "advanced," and where the Old Unionist cry of "No politics!" has unconsciously played the reactionary Anarchist game. We cannot afford to overlook the fact that the Socialist League became in time--when some of us had left it--an Anarchist organisation, and that since then its leaders have been, or still are, more or less avowed Anarchists. While quite recently the leader of a "new party"--and that a would-be political one!--did not hesitate to declare his Anarchist sympathies or to state that "The methods of the Anarchists might differ from those of the Socialists, but that might only prove that the former were more zealous than the latter." It is also necessary to point out once again that Anarchism and Nihilism have no more in common than Anarchism and Socialism. As Plechanoff said at the Zürich International Congress: "We (_i.e._, the Russians) have had to endure every form of persecution, every thinkable misery; but we have been spared one disgrace, one humiliation; we, at least, have no Anarchists." A statement endorsed and emphasised by other Russian revolutionists, and notably by the American delegate, Abraham Cahan--himself a Russian refugee. The men and women who are waging their heroic war in Russia and in Poland against Czarism have no more in common with Anarchism than had the founders of the modern Socialist movement--Carl Marx and Frederick Engels. This little book of Plechanoff will assuredly convince the youngest even that under any circumstances Anarchism is but another word for reaction; and the more honest the men and women who play this reactionist game, the more tragic and dangerous it becomes for the whole working class movement. Finally, there is a last reason why the issuing of this work at the present moment is timely. In 1896 the next International Socialist and Trade Union Congress meets in London. It is well that those who may attend this great Congress as delegates, and that the thousands of workers who will watch its work, should understand why the resolutions arrived at by the Paris, Brussels, and Zürich International Congresses with regard to the Anarchists should be enforced. The Anarchists who cynically declare Workers' Congresses "absurd, motiveless, and senseless" must be taught once and for all, that they cannot be allowed to make the Congresses of the Revolutionary Socialists of the whole world a playground for reaction and international spydom. ELEANOR MARX AVELING. Green Street Green, Orpington, Kent. August, 1895. ANARCHISM AND SOCIALISM CHAPTER I THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE UTOPIAN SOCIALISTS The French Materialists of the 18th century while waging relentless war against all the "_infâmes_" whose yoke weighed upon the French of this period, by no means scorned the search after what they called "perfect legislation," _i.e._, the best of all possible legislations, such legislation as should secure to "human beings" the greatest sum of happiness, and could be alike applicable to all existing societies, for the simple reason that it was "perfect" and therefore the most "natural." Excursions into this domain of "perfect legislation" occupy no small place in the works of a d'Holbach and a Helvétius. On the other hand, the Socialists of the first half of our century threw themselves with immense zeal, with unequalled perseverance, into the search after the best of possible social organisations, after a perfect social organisation. This is a striking and notable characteristic which they have in common with the French Materialists of the last century, and it is this characteristic which especially demands our attention in the present work. In order to solve the problem of a perfect social organisation, or what comes to the same thing, of the best of all possible legislation, we must eventually have some criterion by the help of which we may compare the various "legislations" one with the other. And the criterion must have a special attribute. In fact, there is no question of a "legislation" _relatively_ the best, _i.e._, _the best legislation under given conditions_. No, indeed! We have to find a _perfect_ legislation, a legislation whose perfection should have nothing relative about it, should be entirely independent of time and place, should be, in a word, absolute. We are therefore driven to make abstraction from history, since everything in history is relative, everything depends upon circumstance, time, and place. But abstraction made of the history of humanity, what is there left to guide us in our "legislative" investigations? Humanity is left us, man in general, human nature--of which history is but the manifestation. Here then we have our criterion definitely settled, a perfect legislation. The best of all possible legislation is that which best harmonises with human nature. It may be, of course, that even when we have such a criterion we may, for want of "light" or of logic, fail to solve this problem of the best legislation. _Errare humanum est_, but it seems incontrovertible that this problem _can_ be solved, that we can, by taking our stand upon an exact knowledge of human nature, find a perfect legislation, a perfect organisation. Such was, in the domain of social science, the point of view of the French Materialists. Man is a sentient and reasonable being, they said; he avoids painful sensations and seeks pleasurable ones. He has sufficient intelligence to recognise what is useful to him as well as what is harmful to him. Once you admit these axioms, and you can in your investigations into the best legislation, arrive, with the help of reflection and good intentions, at conclusions as well founded, as exact, as incontrovertible as those derived from a mathematical demonstration. Thus Condorcet undertook to construct deductively all precepts of healthy morality by starting from the truth that man is a sentient and reasonable being. It is hardly necessary to say that in this Condorcet was mistaken. If the "philosophers" in this branch of their investigations arrived at conclusions of incontestable though very relative value, they unconsciously owed this to the fact that they constantly abandoned their abstract standpoint of human nature in general, and took up that of a more or less idealised nature of a man of the Third Estate. This man "felt" and "reasoned," after a fashion very clearly defined by his social environment. It was his "nature" to believe firmly in bourgeois property, representative government, freedom of trade (_laissez-faire, laissez passer!_ the "nature" of this man was always crying out), and so on. In reality, the French philosophers always kept in view the economic and political requirements of the Third Estate; this was their real criterion. But they applied it unconsciously, and only after much wandering in the field of abstraction did they arrive at it. Their conscious method always reduced itself to abstract considerations of "human nature," and of the social and political institutions that best harmonise with this nature. Their method was also that of the Socialists. A man of the 18th century, Morelly, "to anticipate a mass of empty objections that would be endless," lays down as an incontrovertible principle "that in morals nature is one, constant, invariable ... that its laws never change;" and that "everything that may be advanced as to the variety in the morals of savage and civilised peoples, by no means proves that nature varies;" that at the outside it only shows "that from certain accidental causes which are foreign to it, some nations have fallen away from the laws of nature; others have remained submissive to them, in some respects from mere habit; finally, others are subjected to them by certain reasoned-out laws that are not always in contradiction with nature;" in a word, "man may abandon the True, but the True can never be annihilated!"[1] Fourier relies upon the analysis of the human passions; Robert Owen starts from certain considerations on the formation of human character; Saint Simon, despite his deep comprehension of the historical evolution of humanity, constantly returns to "human nature" in order to explain the laws of this evolution; the Saint-Simonians declared their philosophy was "based upon a new conception of human nature." The Socialists of the various schools may quarrel as to the cause of their different conceptions of human nature; all, without a single exception, are convinced that social science has not and cannot have, any other basis than an adequate concept of this nature. In this they in no wise differ from the Materialists of the 18th century. Human nature is the one criterion they invariably apply in their criticism of existing society, and in their search after a social organisation as it should be, after a "perfect" legislation. Morelly, Fourier, Saint Simon, Owen--we look upon all of them to-day as Utopian Socialists. Since we know the general point of view that is common to them all, we can determine exactly what the Utopian point of view is. This will be the more useful, seeing that the opponents of Socialism use the word "Utopian" without attaching to it any, even approximately, definite meaning. The _Utopian is one who, starting from an abstract principle, seeks for a perfect social organisation_. The abstract principle which served as starting point of the Utopians was that of human nature. Of course there have been Utopians who applied the principle indirectly through the intermediary of concepts derived from it. Thus, _e.g._, in seeking for "perfect legislation," for an ideal organisation of society, one may start from the concept of the Rights of Man. But it is evident that in its ultimate analysis this concept derives from that of human nature. It is equally evident that one may be a Utopian without being a Socialist. The bourgeois tendencies of the French Materialists of the last century are most noticeable in their investigations of a perfect legislation. But this in no wise destroys the Utopian character of these enquires. We have seen that the method of the Utopian Socialist does not in the least differ from that of d'Holbach or Helvétius, those champions of the revolutionary French bourgeoisie. Nay, more. One may have the profoundest contempt for all "music of the future," one may be convinced that the social world in which one has the good fortune to live is the best possible of all social worlds, and yet in spite of this one may look at the structure and life of the body social from the same point of view as that from which the Utopians regarded it. This seems a paradox, and yet nothing could be more true. Take but one example. In 1753 there appeared Morelly's work, _Les Isles Flottantes ou la Basiliade du célébre Pelpai, traduit de l'Indien_.[2] Now, note the arguments with which a review, _La Bibliothèque Impartiale_, combated the communistic ideas of the author:--"One knows well enough that a distance separates the finest speculations of this kind and the possibility of their realisation. For in theory one takes imaginary men who lend themselves obediently to every arrangement, and who second with equal zeal the views of the legislator; but as soon as one attempts to put these things into practice one has to deal with men as they are, that is to say, submissive, lazy, or else in the thraldom of some violent passion. The scheme of equality especially is one that seems most repugnant to the nature of man; they are born to command or to serve, a middle term is a burden to them." Men are born to command or to serve. We cannot wonder, therefore, if in society we see masters and servants, since human nature wills it so. It was all very well for _La Bibliothèque Impartiale_ to repudiate these communist speculations. The point of view from which it itself looked upon social phenomena, the point of view of human nature, it had in common with the Utopian Morelly. And it cannot be urged that this review was probably not sincere in its arguments, and that it appealed to human nature with the single object of saying something in favour of the exploiters, in favour of those who "command." But sincere or hypocritical in its criticism of Morelly, the _Bibliothèque Impartiale_ adopted the standpoint common to all the writers of this period. They all of them appeal to human nature conceived of in one form or another, with the sole exception of the retrogrades who, living shadows of passed times, continued to appeal to the will of God. As we know, this concept of human nature has been inherited by the 19th century from its predecessor. The Utopian Socialists had no other. But here again it is easy to prove that it is not peculiar to the Utopians. Even at the period of the Restoration, the eminent French historian, Guizot, in his historical studies, arrived at the remarkable conclusion that the political constitution of any given country depended upon the "condition of property" in that country. This was an immense advance upon the ideas of the last century which had almost exclusively considered the action of the "legislator." But what in its turn did these "conditions of property" depend on? Guizot is unable to answer this question, and after long, vain efforts to find a solution of the enigma in historical circumstances, he returns, falls back _nolens volens_, upon the theory of human nature. Augustin Thierry, another eminent historian of the Restoration, found himself in almost the same case, or rather he would have done so if only he had tried to investigate this question of the "condition of property" and its historical vicissitudes. In his concept of social life, Thierry was never able to go beyond his master Saint Simon, who, as we have seen above, held firmly to the point of view of human nature. The example of the brilliant Saint Simon, a man of encyclopædic learning, demonstrates more clearly perhaps than any other, how narrow and insufficient was this point of view, in what confusion worse confounded of contradictions it landed those who applied it. Says Saint Simon, with the profoundest conviction: "The future is made up of the last terms of a series, the first of which consist of the past. When one has thoroughly mastered the first terms of any series it is easy to put down their successors; thus from the past carefully observed one can easily deduce the future." This is so true that one asks oneself at the first blush why a man who had so clear a conception of the connection between the various phases of historical evolution, should be classed among the Utopians. And yet, look more closely at the historical ideas of Saint Simon, and you will find that we are not wrong in calling him a Utopian. The future is deducible from the past, the historical evolution of humanity is a process governed by law. But what is the impetus, the motive power that sets in motion the human species, that makes it pass from one phase of its evolution to another? Of what does this impetus consist? Where are we to seek it? It is here that Saint Simon comes back to the point of view of all the Utopians, to the point of view of human nature. Thus, according to him, the essential fundamental cause of the French Revolution was a change in the temporal and spiritual forces, and, in order to direct it wisely and conclude it rightly, it "was necessary to put into direct political activity the forces which had become preponderant." In other words, the manufacturers and the _savants_ ought to have been called upon to formulate a political system corresponding to the new social conditions. This was not done, and the Revolution which had began so well was almost immediately directed into a false path. The lawyers and metaphysicians became the masters of the situation. How to explain this historical fact? "It is in the nature of man," replies Saint Simon, "to be unable to pass without some intermediate phase from any one doctrine to another. This law applies most stringently to the various political systems, through which the natural advance of civilisation compels the human species to pass. Thus the same necessity which in industry has created the element of a new temporal power, destined to replace military power, and which in the positive sciences, has created the element of a new spiritual power, called upon to take the place of theological power, must have developed and set in activity (before the change in the conditions of society had begun to be very perceptible) a temporal or spiritual power of an intermediary, bastard, and transitory nature, whose only mission was to bring about the transition from one social system to another." So we see that the "historical series" of Saint Simon really explained nothing at all; they themselves need explanation, and for this we have again to fall back upon this inevitable human nature. The French Revolution was directed along a certain line, because human nature was so and so. One of two things. Either human nature is, as Morelly thought, invariable, and then it explains nothing in history, which shows us constant variations in the relations of man to society; or it does vary according to the circumstances in which men live, and then, far from being the _cause_, it is itself the _effect_ of historical evolution. The French Materialists knew well enough that man is the product of his social surroundings. "Man is all education," said Helvétius. This would lead one to suppose that Helvétius must have abandoned the human nature point of view in order to study the laws of the evolution of the environment that fashion human nature, giving to socialised man such or such an "education." And indeed Helvétius did make some efforts in this direction. But not he, nor his contemporaries, nor the Socialists of the first half of our century, nor any representatives of science of the same period, succeeded in discovering a new point of view that should permit the study of the evolution of the social environment; the cause of the historical "education" of man, the cause of the changes which occur in his "nature." They were thus forced back upon the human nature point of view as the only one that seemed to supply them with a fairly solid basis for their scientific investigations. But since human nature in its turn varied, it became indispensable to make abstraction from its variations, and to seek in nature only stable properties, fundamental properties preserved in spite of all changes of its secondary properties. And in the end all that these speculations resulted in was a meagre abstraction, like that of the philosophers, _e.g._, "man is a sentient and reasonable being," which seemed all the more precious a discovery in that it left plenty of room for every gratuitous hypothesis, and every fantastical conclusion. A Guizot had no need to seek for the best of social organisations for a perfect legislation. He was perfectly satisfied with the existing ones. And assuredly the most powerful argument he could have advanced to defend them from the attacks of the malcontents would still have been human nature, which he would have said renders every serious change in the social and political constitution of France impossible. The malcontents condemned this same constitution, making use of the same abstraction. And since this abstraction, being completely empty, left, as we have said, full room for every gratuitous hypothesis and the logical consequences resulting therefrom, the "scientific" mission of these reformers assumed the appearance of a geometrical problem; given a certain nature, find what structure of society best corresponds with it. So Morelly complains bitterly because "our old teachers" failed to attempt the solution of "this excellent problem"--"to find the condition in which it should be almost impossible for men to be depraved, or wicked, or at any rate, _minima de malis_." We have already seen that for Morelly human nature was "one, constant, invariable." We now know what was the "scientific" method of the Utopians. Before we leave them let us remind the reader that in human nature, an extremely thin and therefore not very satisfying abstraction, the Utopians really appealed, not to human nature in general, but to the idealised nature of the men of their own day, belonging to the class whose social tendencies they represented. The social reality, therefore, inevitably appears in the words of the Utopians, but the Utopians were unconscious of this. They saw this reality only across an abstraction which, thin as it was, was by no means translucent. FOOTNOTES: [1] See "Code de la Nature," Paris, 1841. Villegardelle's edition, Note to p. 66. [2] "The floating islands or the Basiliades of the celebrated Pelpai, translated from the Indian." CHAPTER II THE POINT OF VIEW OF SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM The great idealistic philosophers of Germany, Schelling and Hegel, understood the insufficiency of the human nature point of view. Hegel, in his "Philosophy of History," makes fun of the Utopian bourgeoisie in search of the best of constitutions. German Idealism conceived history as a process subject to law, and sought the motive-power of the historical movement _outside the nature of man_. This was a great step towards the truth. But the Idealists saw this motive-power in the absolute idea, in the "Weltgeist;" and as their absolute idea was only an abstraction of "our process of thinking," in their philosophical speculation upon history, they reintroduced the old love of the Materialist philosophers--human nature--but dressed in robes worthy of the respectable and austere society of German thinkers. Drive nature out of the door, she flies in at the window! Despite the great services rendered to social science by the German Idealists, the great problem of that science, its essential problem, was no more solved in the time of the German Idealists than in the time of the French Materialists. What is this hidden force that causes the historic movement of humanity? No one knew anything about it. In this field there was nothing to go upon save a few isolated observations, more or less accurate, more or less ingenious--sometimes indeed, very accurate and ingenious--but always disjointed and always incomplete. That social science at last emerged from this No Thoroughfare, it owes to Karl Marx. According to Marx, "legal relations, like forms of State, can neither be understood in themselves nor from the so-called general development of the human mind, but are rather rooted in those material conditions of life, whose totality Hegel, following the English and the French of the 18th century, summed up under the name of 'bourgeois society.'" This is almost the same as Guizot meant when he said that political constitutions had their roots in "the condition of property." But while for Guizot "the condition of property" remained a mystery which he vainly sought to elucidate with the help of reflections upon human nature, for Marx this "condition" had nothing mysterious; it is determined by the condition of the productive forces at the disposal of a given society. "The anatomy of bourgeois society is to be sought in political economy." But Marx himself shall formulate his own conception of history. "In the social production of their lives, men enter upon certain definite, necessary relations, relations independent of their will, relations of production that correspond with definite degrees of development of their material productive forces. The totality of these relations of production constitute the economic structure of society, the true basis from which arises a juridical and political superstructure to which definite social forms of consciousness correspond. The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of mankind that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. In a certain stage of their development, the material forces of production of society come into contradiction with the existing relations of production, or, which is only a juridical expression for the same thing, with the relations of property within which they had hitherto moved. From forms for the development of these forces of production, they are transformed into their fetters. We then enter upon an epoch of social revolution."[3] This completely materialist conception of history is one of the greatest discoveries of our century, so rich in scientific discoveries. Thanks to it alone sociology has at last, and for ever, escaped from the vicious circle in which it had, until then, turned; thanks to it alone this science now possesses a foundation as solid as natural science. The revolution made by Marx in social science may be compared with that made by Kopernicus in astronomy. In fact, before Kopernicus, it was believed that the earth remained stationary, while the sun turned round it. The Polish genius demonstrated that what occurred was the exact contrary. And so, up to the time of Marx, the point of view taken by social science, was that of "human nature;" and it was from this point of view that men attempted to explain the historical movement of humanity. To this the point of view of the German genius is diametrically opposed. While man, in order to maintain his existence, acts upon nature outside himself, he alters his own nature. The action of man upon the nature outside himself, pre-supposes certain instruments, certain means of production; according to the character of their means of production men enter into certain relations within the process of production (since this process is a social one), and according to their relations in this social process of production, their habits, their sentiments, their desires, their methods of thought and of action, in a word, their nature, vary. Thus it is not human nature which explains the historical movement; it is the historical movement which fashions diversely human nature. But if this is so, what is the value of all the more or less laborious, more or less ingenious enquiries into "perfect legislation" and the best of possible social organisations? None; literally none! They can but bear witness to the lack of scientific education in those who pursue them. Their day is gone for ever. With this old point of view of human nature must disappear the Utopias of every shade and colour. The great revolutionary party of our day, the International Social-Democracy, is based not upon some "new conception" of human nature, nor upon any abstract principle, but upon a scientifically demonstrable economic necessity. And herein lies the real strength of this party, making it as invincible as the economic necessity itself. "The means of production and exchange on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property become no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces, they become so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder. Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted to it, and by the economical and political sway of the bourgeois class. A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange, and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society.... The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself."[4] The bourgeoisie destroyed the feudal conditions of property; the proletariat will put an end to the bourgeois conditions of property. Between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie a struggle, an implacable war, a war to the knife, is as inevitable as, was in its way, the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the privileged estates. _But every class war is a political war._ In order to do away with feudal society the bourgeoisie had to seize upon political power. In order to do away with capitalist society the proletariat must do the same. Its political task is therefore traced out for it beforehand by the force of events themselves, and not by any abstract consideration. It is a remarkable fact that it is only since Karl Marx that Socialism has taken its stand upon the class war. The Utopian Socialists had no notion--even an inexact one--of it. And in this they lagged behind their contemporary theorists of the bourgeoisie, who understood very well the historical significance at any rate of the struggle of the third estate against the nobles. If every "new conception" of human nature seemed to supply very definite indications as to the organisation of "the society of the future," Scientific Socialism is very chary of such speculations. The structure of society depends upon the conditions of its productive forces. What these conditions will be when the proletariat is in power we do not know. We now know but one thing--that the productive forces already at the disposal of civilised humanity imperatively demand the socialisation and systematised organisation of the means of production. This is enough to prevent our being led astray in our struggle against "the reactionary mass." "The Communists, therefore, are practically the most advanced and resolute section of the working class parties of every country ... theoretically they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement."[5] These words, written in 1848, are to-day incorrect only in one sense: they speak of "working class parties" independent of the Communist party; there is to-day no working class party which does not more or less closely follow the flag of Scientific Socialism, or, as it was called in the Manifesto, "Communism." Once again, then, the point of view of the Utopian Socialists, as indeed of all social science of their time, was human nature, or some abstract principle deriving from this idea. The point of view of the social science, of the Socialism of our time is that of economic reality, and of the immanent laws of its evolution. It is easy, therefore, to form an idea of the impression made upon modern Socialists by the arguments of the bourgeois theorists who sing ceaselessly the same old song of the incompatibility of human nature and communism. It is as though one would wage war upon the Darwinians with arms drawn from the scientific arsenal of Cuvier's time. And a most noteworthy fact is that the "evolutionists" like Herbert Spencer, themselves are not above piping to the same tune.[6] And now let us see what relation there may be between modern Socialism and what is called Anarchism. FOOTNOTES: [3] "Zur Kritik der Politischen OEkonomie," Berlin, 1859. Preface iv. v. [4] "Manifesto of the Communist Party." By Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Authorised English translation by S. Moore, pp. 11-12. [5] "Communist Manifesto," p. 16. [6] "The belief not only of the Socialists, but also of those so-called Liberals who are diligently preparing the way for them, is that by due skill an ill-working humanity may be framed into well-working institutions. It is a delusion. The defective nature of citizens will show themselves in the bad acting of whatever social structure they are arranged into. There is no political alchemy by which you can get golden conduct out of leaden instincts."--Herbert Spencer's "The Man _versus_ the State," p. 43. CHAPTER III THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE ANARCHIST DOCTRINE THE POINT OF VIEW OF ANARCHISM. "I have often been reproached with being the father of Anarchism. This is doing me too great an honour. The father of Anarchism is the immortal Proudhon, who expounded it for the first time in 1848." Thus spoke Peter Kropotkin in his defence before the Correctional Tribunal of Lyons at his trial in January, 1883. As is frequently the case with my amiable compatriot, Kropotkin has here made a statement that is incorrect. For "the first time" Proudhon spoke of Anarchism was in his celebrated book "_Qu'est-ce que le Propriété, ou Recherches sur le principe du droit et du Gouvernement_," the first edition of which had already appeared in 1840. It is true that he "expounds" very little of it here; he only devotes a few pages to it.[7] And before he set about expounding the Anarchist theory "in 1848," the job had already been done by a German, Max Stirner (the pseudonym of Caspar Schmidt) in 1845, in his book "Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum."[8] Max Stirner has therefore a well defined claim to be the father of Anarchism. "Immortal" or not, it is by him that the theory was "expounded" _for the first time_. MAX STIRNER The Anarchist theory of Max Stirner has been called a caricature of the "philosophy of religion" of Ludwig Feuerbach. It is thus, _e.g._, that Ueberweg in his "Grundzüge der Geschichte der Philosophie," (3rd. part, "Philosophie der Neu Zeit") speaks of it. Some have even supposed that the only object Stirner had in writing his book was to poke fun at this philosophy. This supposition is absolutely gratuitous. Stirner in expounding his theory was not joking. He is in deadly earnest about it, though he now and again betrays a tendency, natural enough in the restless times when he wrote, to outdo Feuerbach and the radical character of his conclusions. For Feuerbach, what men call Divinity, is only the product of their phantasy, of a psychological aberration. It is not Divinity that has created man, but man who creates Divinity in his own image. In God man only adores his own being. God is only a fiction, but a very harmful fiction. The Christian God is supposed to be all love, all pity for poor suffering humanity. But in spite of this, or rather _because of it_, every Christian really worthy the name, hates, and must hate, the Atheists, who appear to him the living negation of all love and all pity. Thus the god of love becomes the god of hate, the god of persecution; the product of the phantasy of man becomes a real cause of his suffering. So we must make an end of this phantasmagoria. Since in Divinity man adores only his own being, we must once for all rend and scatter to the winds the mystic veil beneath which this being has been enveloped. The love of humanity must not extend beyond humanity. "Der Mensch ist dem Menschen das höchste Wesen" (Man is the highest being for man). Thus Feuerbach. Max Stirner is quite at one with him, but wishes to deduce what he believes to be the final, the most radical consequences of his theory. He reasons in this fashion. God is only the product of phantasy, is only a _spook_. Agreed. But what is this humanity the love of which you prescribe to me? Is not this also a spook, an abstract thing, a creature of the imagination? Where is this humanity of yours? Where does it exist but in the minds of men, in the minds of individuals? The only reality, therefore, is the _individual_, with his wants, his tendencies, his will. But since this is so, how can the _individual_, the reality, sacrifice himself for the happiness of man, an abstract being? It is all very well for you to revolt against the old God; you still retain the religious point of view, and the emancipation you are trying to help us to is absolutely theological, _i.e._, "God-inspired." "The highest Being is certainly that of man, but because it is his _Being_ and is not he himself, it is quite indifferent if we see this Being outside of him as God, or find it in him and call it the 'Being of Mankind' or 'Man.' _I_ am neither God nor Man, neither the highest Being, nor my own Being, and therefore it is essentially a matter of indifference if I imagine this Being in myself or outside myself. And, indeed, we do always imagine the highest being in the two future states, in the internal and external at once; for the 'Spirit of God' is, according to the Christian conception, also 'our spirit' and 'dwells within us.' It dwells in heaven and dwells in us; but we poor things are but its 'dwelling-place,' and if Feuerbach destroys its heavenly dwelling-place and forces it to come down to us bag and baggage, we, its earthly abode, will find ourselves very over-crowded."[9] To escape the inconveniences of such over-crowding, to avoid being dominated by any spook, to at last place our foot upon actual ground, there is but one way: to take as our starting-point the only real being, our own Ego, "Away then with everything that is not wholly and solely my own affair! You think my own concerns must at least be 'good ones?' A fig for good and evil! I am I, and I am neither good nor evil. Neither has any meaning for me. The godly is the affair of God, the human that of humanity. My concern is neither the Godly nor the Human, is not the True, the Good, the Right, the Free, etc., but simply my own self, and it is not general, it is individual, as I myself am individual. For me there is nothing above myself."[10] Religion, conscience, morality, right, law, family, state, are but so many fetters forced upon me in the name of an abstraction, but so many despotic lords whom "I," the individual conscious of my own "concerns," combat by every means in my power. Your "_morality_," not merely the morality of the bourgeois philistines, but the most elevated, the most humanitarian morality is only religion which has changed its supreme beings. Your "_right_," that you believe born with man, is but a ghost, and if you respect it, you are no farther advanced than the heroes of Homer who were afraid when they beheld a god fighting in the ranks of their enemies. Right is might. "Whoever has might, he has right; if you have not the former you have not the latter. Is this wisdom so difficult of attainment?"[11] You would persuade me to sacrifice my interests to those of the State. I, on the contrary, declare war to the knife to all States, even the most democratic. "Every State is a despotism, whether it is the despotism of one or many, or whether, as one might suppose would be the case in a Republic, all are masters, _i.e._, one tyrannises over the rest. For this is the case whenever a given law, the expressed will perhaps of some assemblage of the people, is immediately to become a law to the individual, which he must obey, and which it is his _duty_ to obey. Even if one were to suppose a case in which every individual among the people had expressed the same will, and thus a perfect "will of all" had easily been arrived at, the thing would still be the same. Should I not to-day and in the future be bound by my will of yesterday? In this event my will would be paralyzed. Fatal stagnation! My creation, _i.e._, a certain expression of will would have become my master. But I, in my will should be constrained, I, the creator should be constrained in my development, my working out. Because I was a fool yesterday, I must remain one all my life. So that in my life in relation to the State I am at best--I might as well say at worst--a slave to my own self. Because yesterday I had a will, I am to-day without one; yesterday free, to-day bound."[12] Here a partisan of the "People's State" might observe to Stirner, that his "I" goes a little too far in his desire to reduce democratic liberty to absurdity; further, that a bad law may be abrogated as soon as a majority of citizens desire it, and that one is not forced to submit to it "all one's life." But this is only an insignificant detail, to which, moreover, Stirner would reply that the very necessity for appealing to a majority proves that "I" am no longer the master of my own conduct. The conclusions of our author are irrefutable, for the simple reason that to say, I recognize nothing above myself, is to say, I feel oppressed by every institution that imposes any duty upon me. It is simply tautology. It is evident that no "Ego" can exist quite alone. Stirner knows this perfectly, and this is why he advocates "Leagues of Egoists," that is to say, free associations into which every "Ego" enters, and in which he remains when and so long as it suits his interests. Here let us pause. We are now face to face with an "egoist" system _par excellence_. It is, perhaps, the only one that the history of human thought has to chronicle. The French Materialists of the last century have been accused of preaching egoism. The accusation was quite wrong. The French Materialists always preached "Virtue," and preached it with such unlimited zeal that Grimm could, not without reason, make fun of their _capucinades_ on the subject. The question of egoism presented to them a double problem. (1) Man is all sensation (this was the basis of all their speculations upon man); by his very nature he is forced to shun suffering and to seek pleasure; how comes it then that we find men capable of enduring the greatest sufferings for the sake of some idea, that is to say, in its final analysis, in order to provide agreeable sensations for their fellow-men. (2) Since man is all sensation he will harm his fellow-man if he is placed in a social environment where the interests of an individual conflict with those of others. What form of legislation therefore can harmonise public good and that of individuals? Here, in this double problem, lies the whole significance of what is called the materialist ethics of the 18th century. Max Stirner pursues an end entirely opposed to this. He laughs at "Virtue," and, far from desiring its triumph, he sees reasonable men only in egoists, for whom there is nothing above their own "Ego." Once again, he is the theorist _par excellence_ of egoism. The good bourgeois whose ears are as chaste and virtuous as their hearts are hard; they who, "drinking wine, publicly preach water," were scandalised to the last degree by the "immorality" of Stirner. "It is the complete ruin of the moral world," they cried. But as usual the virtue of the philistines showed itself very weak in argument. "The real merit of Stirner is that he has spoken the last word of the young atheist school" (_i.e._, the left wing of the Hegelian school), wrote the Frenchman, St. Réné Taillandier. The philistines of other lands shared this view of the "merits" of the daring publicist. From the point of view of modern Socialism this "merit" appears in a very different light. To begin with, the incontestable merit of Stirner consists in his having openly and energetically combated the sickly sentimentalism of the bourgeois reformers and of many of the Utopian Socialists, according to which the emancipation of the proletariat would be brought about by the virtuous activity of "devoted" persons of all classes, and especially of those of the possessing-class. Stirner knew perfectly what to expect from the "devotion" of the exploiters. The "rich" are harsh, hard-hearted, but the "poor" (the terminology is that of our author) are wrong to complain of it, since it is not the rich who create the poverty of the poor, but the poor who create the wealth of the rich. They ought to blame themselves then if their condition is a hard one. In order to change it they have only to revolt against the rich; as soon as they seriously wish it, they will be the strongest and the reign of wealth will be at an end. Salvation lies in struggle, and not in fruitless appeals to the generosity of the oppressors. Stirner, therefore, preaches the class war. It is true that he represents it in the abstract form of the struggle of a certain number of egoist "Egos" against another smaller number of "Egos" not less egoist. But here we come to another merit of Stirner's. According to Taillandier, he has spoken the last word of the young atheist school of German philosophers. As a matter of fact he has only spoken the last word of idealist speculation. But that word he has incontestably the merit of having spoken. In his criticism of religion Feuerbach is but half a Materialist. In worshipping God, man only worships his own Being idealised. This is true. But religions spring up and die out, like everything else upon earth. Does this not prove that the human Being is not immutable, but changes in the process of the historical evolution of societies? Clearly, yes. But, then, what is the cause of the historical transformation of the "human Being?" Feuerbach does not know. For him the human Being is only an abstract notion, as human Nature was for the French Materialists. This is the fundamental fault of his criticism of religion. Stirner said that it had no very robust constitution. He wished to strengthen it by making it breathe the fresh air of reality. He turns his back upon all phantoms, upon all things of the imagination. In reality, he said to himself, these are only individuals. Let us take the individual for our starting-point. But _what_ individual does he take for his starting-point? Tom, Dick, or Harry? Neither. He takes the _individual in general_--he takes a new abstraction, the thinnest of them all--he takes the "Ego." Stirner naïvely imagined that he was finally solving an old philosophical question, which had already divided the Nominalists and the Realists of the Middle Ages. "No Idea has an existence," he says, "for none is capable of becoming corporeal. The scholastic controversy of Realism and Nominalism had the same content." Alas! The first Nominalist he came across could have demonstrated to our author by the completest evidence, that his "Ego" is as much an "Idea" as any other, and that it is as little real as a mathematical unit. Tom, Dick and Harry have relations with one another that do not depend upon the will of their "Ego," but are imposed upon them by the structure of the society in which they live. To criticise social institutions in the name of the "Ego," is therefore to abandon the only profitable point of view in the case, _i.e._, that of society, of the laws of its existence and evolution, and to lose oneself in the mists of abstraction. But it is just in these mists that the "Nominalist" Stirner delights. I am I--that is his starting-point; not I is not I--that is his result. I+I+I+etc.--is his social Utopia. It is subjective Idealism, pure and simple applied to social and political criticism. It is the suicide of idealist speculation. But in the same year (1845) in which "Der Einzige" of Stirner appeared, there appeared also, at Frankfort-on-Maine the work of Marx and Engels, "Die heilige Familie, oder Kritik der Kritischen Kritik, gegen Bruno Bauer und Consorten."[13] In it Idealist speculation was attacked and beaten by Materialist dialectic, the theoretical basis of modern Socialism. "Der Einzige" came too late. We have just said that I+I+I+etc. represents the social Utopia of Stirner. His League of Egoists is, in fact, nothing but a mass of abstract quantities. What are, what can be the basis of their union? Their interests, answers Stirner. But what will, what can be the true basis of any given combination of their interests? Stirner says nothing about it, and he can say nothing definite since from the abstract heights on which he stands, one cannot see clearly economic reality, the mother and nurse of all the "Egos," egoistic or altruistic. Nor is it surprising that he is not able to explain clearly even this idea of the class struggle, of which he nevertheless had a happy inkling. The "poor" must combat the "rich." And after, when they have conquered these? Then every one of the former "poor," like every one of the former "rich," will combat every one of the former poor, and against every one of the former rich. There will be the war of all against all. (These are Stirner's own words.) And the rules of the "Leagues of Egoists" will be so many partial truces in this colossal and universal warfare. There is plenty of fight in this idea, but of the "realism" Max Stirner dreamed of, nothing. But enough of the "Leagues of Egoists." A Utopian may shut his eyes to economic reality, but it forces itself upon him in spite of himself; it pursues him everywhere with the brutality of a natural force not controlled by force. The elevated regions of the abstract "I" do not save Stirner from the attacks of economic reality. He does not speak to us only of the "Individual"; his theme is "the Individual _and his property_." Now, what sort of a figure does the property of the "Individual" cut? It goes without saying, that Stirner is little inclined to respect property as an "acquired right." "Only that property will be legally and lawfully another's which it suits _you_ should be his property. When it ceases to suit you, it has lost its legality for you, and any absolute right in it you will laugh at."[14] It is always the same tune: "For me there is nothing above myself." But his scant respect for the property of others does not prevent the "Ego" of Stirner from having the tendencies of a property-owner. The strongest argument against Communism, is, in his opinion, the consideration that Communism by abolishing individual property transforms all members of society into mere beggars. Stirner is indignant at such an iniquity. "Communists think that the Commune should be the property-owner. On the contrary, _I_ am a property-owner, and can only agree with others as to my property. If the Commune does not do as I wish I rebel against it, and defend my property, I am the owner of property, but property _is not sacred_. Should I only be the holder of property (an allusion to Proudhon)? No, hitherto one was only a holder of property, assured of possession of a piece of land, because one left others also in possession of a piece of land; but now _everything_ belongs to me, I am the owner of _everything I need_, and can get hold of. If the Socialist says, society gives me what I need, the Egoist says, I take what I want. If the Communists behave like beggars, the Egoist behaves like an owner of property."[15] The property of the egoist seems pretty shaky. An "Egoist," retains his property only as long as the other "Egoists" do not care to take it from him, thus transforming him into a "beggar." But the devil is not so black as he is painted. Stirner pictures the mutual relations of the "Egoist" proprietors rather as relations of exchange than of pillage. And force, to which he constantly appeals, is rather the economic force of a producer of commodities freed from the trammels which the State and "Society" in general impose, or seem to impose, upon him. It is the soul of a producer of commodities that speaks through the mouth of Stirner. If he falls foul of the State, it is because the State does not seem to respect the "property" of the producers of commodities sufficiently. He wants _his_ property, his _whole_ property. The State makes him pay taxes; it ventures to expropriate him for the public good. He wants a _jus utendi et abutendi_; the State says "agreed"--but adds that there are abuses and abuses. Then Stirner cries "stop thief!" "I am the enemy of the State," says he, "which is always fluctuating between the alternative: He or I.... With the State there is no property, _i.e._, no individual property, only State property. Only through the State have I what I have, as it is only through the State that I am what I am. My private property is only what the State leaves me of its own, while it deprives other citizens of it: that is State property." So down with the State and long live full and complete individual property! Stirner translated into German J. B. Say's "Traité D'Economie Politique Pratique" (Leipsic, 1845-46). And although he also translated Adam Smith, he was never able to get beyond the narrow circle of the ordinary bourgeois economic ideas. His "League of Egoists" is only the Utopia of a petty bourgeois in revolt. In this sense one may say he has spoken the last word of bourgeois individualism. Stirner has also a third merit--that of the courage of his opinions, of having carried through to the very end his individualist theories. He is the most intrepid, the most consequent of the Anarchists. By his side Proudhon, whom Kropotkin, like all the present day Anarchists, takes for the father of Anarchism, is but a straight-laced Philistine. FOOTNOTES: [7] See pages 295-305 of the 1841 edition. [8] "The Individual and his Property." [9] "Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum." 2nd ed., Leipzig, 1882, pp. 35-36. (American translation: "The Ego and his Own." New York: 1907.) [10] Ibid. Pp. 7-8. [11] Ibid. pp. 196-197. [12] Ibid. p. 200. [13] "The Holy Family, or Criticism of Critical Criticism, against Bruno Bauer and Company." [14] Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum. [15] Ibid. p. 266. CHAPTER IV PROUDHON If Stirner combats Feuerbach, the "immortal" Proudhon imitates Kant. "What Kant did some sixty years ago for religion, what he did earlier for certainty of certainties; what others before him had attempted to do for happiness or supreme good, the 'Voice of the People' proposes to do for the Government," pompously declares "the father of Anarchism." Let us examine his methods and their results. According to Proudhon, before Kant, the believer and the philosopher moved "by an irresistible impulse," asked themselves, "What is God?" They then asked themselves "Which, of all religions, is the best?" "In fact, if there does exist a Being superior to Humanity, there must also exist a system of the relations between this Being and Humanity. What then is this system? The search for the best religion is the second step that the human mind takes in reason and in faith. Kant gave up these insoluble questions. He no longer asked himself what is God, and which is the best religion, he set about explaining the origin and development of the Idea of God; he undertook to work out the biography of this idea." And the results he attained were as great as they were unexpected. "What we seek, what we see, in God, as Malebranche said ... is our own Ideal, the pure essence of Humanity.... The human soul does not become conscious of its Ego through premeditated contemplation, as the psychologists put it; the soul perceives something outside itself, as if it were a different Being face to face with itself, and it is this inverted image which it calls God. Thus morality, justice, order, law, are no longer things revealed from above, imposed upon our free will by a so-called Creator, unknown and ununderstandable; they are things that are proper and essential to us as our faculties and our organs, as our flesh and our blood. In two words religion and society are synonymous terms, man is as sacred to himself as if he were God." Belief in authority is as primitive, as universal as belief in God. Whenever men are grouped together in societies there is authority, the beginning of a government. From time immemorial men have asked themselves, What is authority? Which is the best form of government? And replies to these questions have been sought for in vain. There are as many governments as there are religions, as many political theories as systems of philosophy. Is there any way of putting an end to this interminable and barren controversy? Any means of escape from this _impasse_! Assuredly! We have only to follow the example of Kant. We have only to ask ourselves whence comes this idea of authority, of government? We have only to get all the information we can upon the legitimacy of the political idea. Once safe on this ground and the question solves itself with extraordinary ease. "Like religion, government is a manifestation of social spontaneity, a preparation of humanity for a higher condition." "What humanity seeks in religion and calls God, is itself." "What the citizen seeks in Government and calls king, emperor, or president, is again himself, is liberty." "Outside humanity there is no God; the theological concept has no meaning:--outside liberty no government, the political concept has no value." So much for the "biography" of the political idea. Once grasped it must enlighten us upon the question as to which is the best form of government. "The best form of government, like the most perfect of religions, taken in a literal sense, is a contradictory idea. The problem is not to discover how we shall be best governed, but how we shall be most free. Liberty commensurate and identical with Order,--this is the only reality of government and politics. How shall this absolute liberty, synonymous with order, be brought about? We shall be taught this by the analysis of the various formulas of authority. For all the rest we no more admit the governing of man by man than the exploitation of man by man."[16] We have now climbed to the topmost heights of Proudhon's political philosophy. It is from this that the fresh and vivifying stream of his Anarchist thought flows. Before we follow the somewhat tortuous course of this stream let us glance back at the way we have climbed. We fancied we were following Kant. We were mistaken. In his "Critique of Pure Reason" Kant has demonstrated the impossibility of proving the existence of God, because everything outside experience must escape us absolutely. In his "Critique of Practical Reason" Kant admitted the existence of God in the name of morality. But he has never declared that God was a topsy-turvy image of our own soul. What Proudhon attributes to Kant, indubitably belongs to Feuerbach. Thus it is in the footsteps of the latter that we have been treading, while roughly tracing out the "biography" of the political Idea. So that Proudhon brings us back to the very starting point of our most unsentimental journey with Stirner. No matter. Let us once more return to the reasoning of Feuerbach. It is only itself that humanity seeks in religion. It is only himself, it is liberty that the citizen seeks in Government.... Then the very essence of the citizen is liberty? Let us assume this is true, but let us also note that our French "Kant" has done nothing, absolutely nothing, to prove the "legitimacy" of such an "Idea." Nor is this all. What is this liberty which we are assuming to be the essence of the citizen? Is it political liberty which ought in the nature of things to be the main object of his attention? Not a bit of it! To assume this would be to make of the "citizen" an "authoritarian" democrat. It is the _absolute liberty of the individual_, which is at the same time _commensurate and identical with_ Order, that our citizen seeks in Government. In other words, it is the Anarchism of Proudhon which is the essence of the "citizen." It is impossible to make a more pleasing discovery, but the "biography" of this discovery gives us pause. We have been trying to demolish every argument in favour of the Idea of Authority, as Kant demolished every proof of the existence of God. To attain this end we have--imitating Feuerbach to some extent, according to whom man adored his own Being in God--assumed that it is liberty which the citizen seeks in Government. And as to liberty we have in a trice transformed this into "absolute" liberty, into Anarchist liberty. Eins, zwei, drei; Geschwindigkeit ist keine Hexerei![17] Since the "citizen" only seeks "absolute" liberty in Government the State is nothing but a fiction ("this fiction of a superior person, called the 'State'"), and all those formulas of government for which people and citizens have been cutting one another's throats for the last sixty centuries, are but the "phantasmagoria of our brain, which it would be the first duty of free reason to relegate to the museums and libraries." Which is another charming discovery made _en passant_. So that the political history of humanity has, "for sixty centuries," had no other motive power than a phantasmagoria of our brain! To say that man adores in God his own essence is to indicate the _origin_ of religion, but it is not to work out its "biography." To write the biography of religion is to write its history, explaining the evolution of this essence of man which found expression in it. Feuerbach did not do this--could not do it. Proudhon, trying to imitate Feuerbach, was very far from recognising the insufficiency of his point of view. All Proudhon has done is to take Feuerbach for Kant, and to ape his Kant-Feuerbach in a most pitiful manner. Having heard that Divinity was but a fiction, he concluded that the State is also a figment: since God does not exist, how can the State exist? Proudhon wished to combat the State and began by declaring it non-existent. And the readers of the "Voix du Peuple" applauded, and the opponents of M. Proudhon were alarmed at the profundity of his philosophy! Truly a tragi-comedy! It is hardly necessary for modern readers to add that in taking the State for a fiction we make it altogether impossible to understand its "essence" or to explain its historical evolution. And this was what happened to Proudhon. "In every society I distinguish two kinds of constitution," says he; "the one which I call _social_, the other which is its _political_ constitution; the first innate in humanity, liberal, necessary, its development consisting above all in weakening, and gradually eliminating the second, which is essentially factitious, restrictive, and transitory. The social constitution is nothing but the equilibration of interests based upon free contract and the organisation of the economic forces, which, generally speaking, are labour, division of labour, collective force, competition, commerce, money, machinery, credit, property, equality in transactions, reciprocity of guarantees, etc. The principle of the political constitution is authority. Its forms are: distinction of classes, separation of powers, administrative centralisation, the judicial hierarchy, the representation of sovereignty by elections, etc. The political constitution was conceived and gradually completed in the interest of order, for want of a social constitution, the rules and principles of which could only be discovered as a result of long experience, and are even to-day the object of Socialist controversy. These two constitutions, as it is easy to see, are by nature absolutely different and even incompatible: but as it is the fate of the political constitution to constantly call forth and produce the social constitution something of the latter enters into the former, which, soon becoming inadequate, appears contradictory and odious, is forced from concession to concession to its final abrogation."[18] The social constitution is innate in humanity, necessary. Yet it could only be discovered as the result of long experience, and for want of it humanity had to invent the political constitution. Is not this an entirely Utopian conception of human nature, and of the social organisation peculiar to it? Are we not coming back to the standpoint of Morelly who said that humanity in the course of its history has always been "outside nature?" No--there is no need to come back to this standpoint, for with Proudhon we have never, for a single instant, got away from it. While looking down upon the Utopians searching after "the best form of government," Proudhon does not by any means censure the Utopian point of view. He only scoffs at the small perspicacity of men who did not divine that the best political organisation is the absence of all political organisation, is the social organisation, proper to human nature, necessary, immanent in humanity. The nature of this social constitution is absolutely different from, and even incompatible with, that of the political constitution. Nevertheless it is the fate of the political constitution to constantly call forth and produce the social constitution. This is tremendously confusing! Yet one might get out of the difficulty by assuming that what Proudhon meant to say was that the political constitutions act upon the evolution of the social constitution. But then we are inevitably met by the question. Is not the political constitution in its turn rooted--as even Guizot admitted--in the social constitution of a country? According to our author _no_; the more emphatically _no_, that the social organisation, the true and only one, is only a thing of the future, for want of which poor humanity has "invented" the political constitution. Moreover, the "Political Constitution" of Proudhon covers an immense domain, embracing even "class distinctions," and therefore "non-organised" property, property as it ought not to be, property as it is to-day. And since the whole of this political constitution has been invented as a mere stop-gap until the advent of the anarchist organisation of society, it is evident that all human history must have been one huge blunder. The State is no longer exactly a fiction as Proudhon maintained in 1848; "the governmental formulas" for which people and citizens have been cutting one another's throats for sixty centuries are no longer a "mere phantasmagoria of our brain," as the same Proudhon believed at this same period; but these formulas, like the State itself, like every political constitution, are but the product of human ignorance, the mother of all fictions and phantasmagorias. At bottom it is always the same. The main point is that Anarchist ("social") organisation could only be discovered as the result of "many experiences." The reader will see how much this is to be regretted. The political constitution has an unquestionable influence upon the social organisation; at any rate it calls it forth, for such is its "fate" as revealed by Proudhon, master of Kantian philosophy and social organisation. The most logical conclusion to be drawn therefrom is that the partisans of social organisation must make use of the political constitution in order to attain their end. But logical as this deduction is, it is not to the taste of our author. For him it is but a phantasmagoria of our brain. To make use of the political constitution is to offer a burnt offering to the terrible god of authority, to take part in the struggle of parties. Proudhon will have none of this. "No more parties," he says; "no more authority, absolute liberty of the man and the citizen--in three words, such is our political and social profession of faith."[19] Every class-struggle is a political struggle. Whosoever repudiates the political struggle by this very act, gives up all part and lot in the class-struggle. And so it was with Proudhon. From the beginning of the Revolution of 1848 he preached the reconciliation of classes. Here _e.g._, is a passage from the Circular which he addressed to his electors in Doubs, which is dated 3rd April of this same year: "The social question is there; you cannot escape from it. To solve it we must have men who combine extreme Radicalism of mind with extreme Conservatism of mind. Workers, hold out your hands to your employers; and you, employers, do not deliberately repulse the advances of those who were your wage-earners." The man whom Proudhon believed to combine this extreme Radicalism of mind with extreme Conservatism of mind, was himself--P. J. Proudhon. There was, on the one hand, at the bottom of this belief, a "fiction," common to all Utopians who imagine they can rise above classes and their struggles, and naïvely think that the whole of the future history of humanity will be confined to the peaceful propagation of their new gospel. On the other hand, this tendency to combine Radicalism and Conservatism shows conclusively the very "essence" of the "Father of Anarchy." Proudhon was the most typical representative of petty bourgeois socialism. Now the "fate" of the petty bourgeois--in so far as he does not adopt the proletarian standpoint--is to constantly oscillate between Radicalism and Conservatism. To make more understandable what we have said, we must bear in mind what the plan of social organisation propounded by Proudhon was. Our author shall tell us himself. It goes without saying that we shall not escape a more or less authentic interpretation of Kant. "Thus the line we propose to follow in dealing with the political question and in preparing the materials for a constitution will be the same as that we have followed hitherto in dealing with the social question." The _Voix du Peuple_ while completing the work of its predecessors, the two earlier journals, will follow faithfully in their footsteps.[20] What did we say in these two publications, one after the other of which fell beneath the blows of the reaction and the state of siege? We did not ask, as our precursors and colleagues had done, Which is the best system of community? The best organisation of property? Or again: Which is the better, property or the community? The theory of St. Simon or that of Fourier? The system of Louis Blanc or that of Cabet? Following the example of Kant we stated the question thus: "How is it that man possesses? How is property acquired? How lost? What is the law of its evolution and transformation? Whither does it tend? What does it want? What, in fine, does it represent?... Then how is it that man labours? How is the comparison of products instituted? By what means is circulation carried out in society? Under what conditions? According to what laws?" And the conclusion arrived at by this monograph of property was this: Property indicates function or attribution; community; reciprocity of action; usury ever decreasing, the identity of labour and capital (_sic!_). In order to set free and to realise all these terms, until now hidden beneath the old symbols of property, what must be done? The workers must guarantee one another labour and a market; and to this end must accept as money their reciprocal pledges. Good! To-day we say that political liberty, like industrial liberty, will result for us from our mutual guarantees. It is by guaranteeing one another liberty that we shall get rid of this government, whose destiny is to symbolise the republican motto: _Liberty_, _Equality_, _Fraternity_, while leaving it to our intelligence to bring about the realisation of this. Now, what is the formula of this political and liberal guarantee? At present universal suffrage; later on free contract.... Economic and social reform through the mutual guarantee of credit; political reform through the inter-action of individual liberties; such is the programme of the "_Voix du Peuple_."[21] We may add to this that it is not very difficult to write the "biography" of this programme. In a society of producers of commodities, the exchange of commodities is carried out according to the labour socially necessary for their production. Labour is the source and the measure of their exchange-value. Nothing could seem more "just" than this to any man imbued with the ideas engendered by a society of producers of commodities. Unfortunately this "justice" is no more "eternal" than anything else here below. The development of the production of commodities necessarily brings in its train the transformation of the greater part of society into proletarians, possessing nothing but their labour-power, and of the other part into capitalists, who, buying this power, the only commodity of the proletarians, turn it into a source of wealth for themselves. In working for the capitalists the proletarian produces the income of his exploiter, at the same time as his own poverty, his own social subjection. Is not this sufficiently unjust? The partisan of the rights of the producer of commodities deplores the lot of the proletarians; he thunders against capital. But at the same time he thunders against the revolutionary tendencies of the proletarians who speak of expropriating the exploiter and of a communistic organisation of production. Communism is unjust, it is the most odious tyranny. What wants organising is not _production_ but _exchange_, he assures us. But how organise exchange? That is easy enough, and what is daily going on before our eyes may serve to show us the way. Labour is the source and the measure of the _value_ of commodities. But is the _price_ of commodities always determined by their value? Do not prices continually vary according to the rarity or abundance of these commodities? The value of a commodity and its price are two different things; and this is the misfortune, the great misfortune of all of us poor, honest folk, who only want justice, and only ask for our own. To solve the social question, therefore we must put a stop to the _arbitrariness of prices_, and to the anomaly of value (Proudhon's own expressions). And in order to do this we must "constitute" value; _i.e._, see that every producer shall always, in exchange for his commodity, receive exactly what it costs. Then will private property not only cease to be theft, it will become the most adequate expression of justice. To constitute value is to constitute small private property, and small private property once constituted, everything will be justice and happiness in a world now so full of misery and injustice. And it is no good for proletarians to object, they have no means of production: by guaranteeing themselves _credit gratis_, all who want to work will, as by the touch of a magic wand, have everything necessary for production. Small property and small parcelled-out production, its economic basis, was always the dream of Proudhon. The huge modern mechanical workshop always inspired him with profound aversion. He says that labour, like love, flies from society. No doubt there are some industries--Proudhon instances railways--in which _association_ is essential. In these, the isolated producer must make way for "companies of workers." But the exception only proves the rule.[22] Small private property must be the basis of "social organization." Small private property is tending to disappear. The desire not merely to preserve it, but to transform it into the basis of a new social organisation is extreme conservatism. The desire at the same time to put an end to "the exploitation of man by man," to the wage-system, is assuredly to combine with the most conservative the most radical aspirations. We have no desire here to criticise this petty bourgeois Utopia. This criticism has already been undertaken by a master hand in the works of Marx: "La Misère de la Philosophie," and "Zur Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie." We will only observe the following:-- The only bond that unites the producers of commodities upon the domain of economics is exchange. From the juridical point of view, exchange appears as the relation between two wills. The relation of these two wills is expressed in the "contract." The production of commodities duly "constituted" is therefore the reign of "absolute" individual liberty. By finding myself bound through a contract that obliges me to do such and such a thing, I do not renounce my liberty. I simply use it to enter into relations with my neighbours. But at the same time this contract is the regulator of my liberty. In fulfilling a duty that I have freely laid upon myself when signing the contract, I render justice to the rights of others. It is thus that "absolute" liberty becomes "commensurate with order." Apply this conception of the contract to the "political constitution" and you have "Anarchy." "The idea of the contract excludes that of government. What characterises the contract, reciprocal convention, is that by virtue of this convention the liberty and well-being of man are increased, while by the institution of authority both are necessarily decreased.... Contract is thus essentially synallagmatic; it lays upon the contracting parties no other obligation than that which results from their personal promise of reciprocal pledges; it is subject to no external authority; it alone lays down a law common to both parties, and it can be carried out only through their own initiative. If the contract is already this in its most general acceptation and in its daily practice, what will the social contract be--that contract which is meant to bind together all the members of a nation by the same interest? The social contract is the supreme act by which every citizen pledges to society his love, his intellect, his labour, his service, his products, his possessions, in exchange for the affection, the ideas, the labour, products, service, and possessions of his fellows; the measure of right for each one being always determined by the extent of his own contribution, and the amount recoverable being in accordance with what has been given.... The social contract must be freely discussed, individually consented to, signed _manu propriâ_, by all who participate in it. If its discussion were prevented, curtailed or burked; if consent to it were filched; if the signature were given to a blank document in pure confidence, without a reading of the articles and their preliminary explanation; or even if, like the military oath, it were all predetermined and enforced, then the social contract would be nothing but a conspiracy against the liberty and well-being of the most ignorant, the most weak, and most numerous individuals, a systematic spoliation, against which every means of resistance or even of reprisal might become a right and a duty.... The social contract is of the essence of the reciprocal contract; not only does it leave the signer the whole of his possessions; it adds to his property; it does not encroach upon his labour; it only affects exchange.... Such, according to the definitions of right and universal practice, must be the social contract."[23] Once it is admitted as an incontestable fundamental principle that the contract is "the only moral bond that can be accepted by free and equal human beings" nothing is easier than a "radical" criticism of the "political constitution." Suppose we have to do with justice and the penal law, for example? Well, Proudhon would ask you by virtue of what contract society arrogates to itself the right to punish criminals. "Where there is no compact there can be, so far as any external tribunal is concerned, neither crime nor misdemeanour. The law is the expression of the sovereignty of the people; that is, or I am altogether mistaken, the social contract and the personal pledge of the man and the citizen. So long as I did not want this law, so long as I have not consented to it, voted for it, it is not binding upon me, it does not exist. To make it a precedent before I have recognised it, and to use it against me in spite of my protests is to make it retroactive, and to violate this very law itself. Every day you have to reverse a decision because of some formal error. But there is not a single one of your laws that is not tainted with nullity, and the most monstrous nullity of all, the very hypothesis of the law. Soufflard, Lacenaire, all the scoundrels whom you send to the scaffold turn in their graves and accuse you of judicial forgery. What answer can you make them?"[24] If we are dealing with the administration and the police Proudhon sings the same song of contract and free consent. "Cannot we administer our goods, keep our accounts, arrange our differences, look after our common interests at least as well as we can look after our salvation and take care of our souls?" "What more have we to do with State legislation, with State justice, with State police, and with State administration than with State religion?"[25] As to the Ministry of Finance, "it is evident that its _raison d'être_ is entirely included in that of the other ministries.... Get rid of all the political harness and you will have no use for an administration whose sole object is the procuring and distribution of supplies."[26] This is logical and "radical;" and the more radical, that this formula of Proudhon's--constituted value, free contract--is a universal one, easily, and even necessarily applicable to all peoples. "Political economy is, indeed, like all other sciences; it is of necessity the same all over the world; it does not depend upon the arrangements of men or nations, it is subject to no one's caprice. There is no more a Russian, English, Austrian, Tartar, or Hindoo political economy than there is a Hungarian, German, or American physics or geometry. Truth is everywhere equal to itself: Science is the unity of the human race. If science, therefore, and no longer religion or authority is taken in all countries as the rule of society, the sovereign arbiter of all interests, government becomes null and void, the legislators of the whole universe are in harmony."[27] But enough of this! The "biography" of what Proudhon called his programme is now sufficiently clear to us. Economically it is but the Utopia of a petty bourgeois, who is firmly convinced that the production of commodities is the most "just" of all possible modes of production, and who desires to eliminate its bad sides (hence his "Radicalism") by retaining to all eternity its good sides (hence his "Conservatism"). Politically the programme is only the application to public relations of a concept (the "contract") drawn from the domain of the private right of a society of producers of commodities. "Constituted value" in economics, the "contract" in politics--these are the whole scientific "truth" of Proudhon. It is all very well for him to combat the Utopians; he is a Utopian himself to his finger tips. What distinguishes him from men like Saint Simon, Fourier, and Robert Owen is his extreme pettiness and narrowness of mind, his hatred of every really revolutionary movement and idea. Proudhon criticised the "political constitution" from the point of view of private right. He wished to perpetuate private property, and to destroy that pernicious "fiction" the State, for ever. Guizot had already said that the political constitution of a country has its root in the conditions of property existing there. For Proudhon the political constitution owes its origin only to human ignorance, has only been "imagined" in default of the "social organisation" at last "invented" by him, Proudhon, in the year of our Lord so and so. He judges the political history of mankind like a Utopian. But the Utopian negation of all reality by no means preserves us from its influence. Denied upon one page of a Utopian work, it takes its revenge on another, where it often appears in all its nakedness. Thus Proudhon "denies" the State. "The State--no, no--I will none of it, even as servant; I reject all government, even direct government," he cries _ad nauseam_. But, oh! irony of reality! Do you know how he "invents" the constitution of value? It is very funny. The constitution of value is the selling at a fair price, at the cost price.[28] If a merchant refuses to supply his merchandise at cost price it is because he is not certain of selling a sufficient quantity to secure a due return, and further he has no guarantee that he will get _quid pro quo_ for his purchases. So he must have guarantees. And there may be "various kinds" of these guarantees. Here is one. "Let us suppose that the Provisional Government or the Constituent Assembly ... had seriously wished to help along business, encourage commerce, industry, agriculture, stop the depreciation of property, assure work to the workers--it could have been done by guaranteeing, _e.g._, to the first 10,000 contractors, factory owners, manufacturers, merchants, etc., in the whole Republic, an interest of 5 per cent. on the capital, say, on the average, 100,000 francs, that each of them had embarked in his competitive business. For it is evident that the State" ... Enough! It is evident that the State has forced itself upon Proudhon, at least "as servant." And it has done this with such irresistible force that our author ends by surrendering, and solemnly proclaiming: "Yes, I say it aloud: the workers' associations of Paris and the departments hold in their hands the salvation of the people, the future of the revolution. They can do everything, if they set about it cleverly. Renewed energy on their part must carry the light into the dullest minds, and at the election of 1852 [he wrote this in the summer of 1851] must place on the order of the day, and at the head of it, the constitution of value."[29] Thus "No more parties! No politics!" when it is a question of the class struggle--and "Hurrah for politics! Hurrah for electoral agitation! Hurrah for State interference!" when it is a question of realising the vapid and meagre Utopia of Proudhon! "_Destruam et ædificabo_," says Proudhon, with the pompous vanity peculiar to him. But on the other hand--to use the phrase of Figaro--it is the truest truth of all he has ever uttered in his life. He destroys and he builds. Only the mystery of his "destruction" reveals itself completely in his formula, "The Contract solves all problems." The mystery of his "_ædificatio_" is in the strength of the social and political bourgeois reality with which he reconciled himself, the more readily in that he never managed to pluck from it any of its "secrets." Proudhon will not hear of the State at any price. And yet--apart from the political propositions such as the constitution of value, with which he turns to the odious "fiction"--even theoretically he "builds up" the State as fast as he "destroys" it. What he takes from the "State" he bestows upon the "communes" and "departments." In the place of one great State we see built up a number of small states; in the place of one great "fiction" a mass of little ones. To sum up, "anarchy" resolves itself into federalism, which among other advantages has that of making the success of revolutionary movements much more difficult than it is under a centralised State.[30] So endeth Proudhon's "General Idea of the Revolution." It is a curious fact that Saint Simon is the "father" of Proudhon's anarchy. Saint Simon has said that the end of social organisation is production, and that, therefore, political science must be reduced to economics, the "art of governing men" must give way to the art of "administration of things." He has compared mankind to the individual, who, obeying his parents in childhood, in his ripe age ends by obeying no one but himself. Proudhon seized upon this idea and this comparison, and with the help of the constitution of value, "built up" anarchy. But Saint Simon, a man of fertile genius, would have been the very first to be alarmed at what this Socialistic petty bourgeois made of his theory. Modern scientific Socialism has worked out the theory of Saint Simon very differently, and while explaining the historical origin of the State, shows in this very origin, the conditions of the future disappearance of the State. "The State was the official representative of society as a whole, the gathering of it together into a visible embodiment. But it was this only in so far as it was the State of that class which itself represented, for the time being, society as a whole; in ancient times the State of slave-owning citizens; in the middle ages, the feudal lords; in our own time, the bourgeoisie. When at last it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule and the individual struggle for existence based on our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a State, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society, the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society, this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not 'abolished.' _It dies out._"[31] FOOTNOTES: [16] For all these quotations see the preface to the third edition of the "Confessions d'un Révolutionnaire." This preface is simply an article reprinted from the _Voix du Peuple_, November, 1849. It was not till 1849 that Proudhon began to "expound" his Anarchist theory. In 1848, _pace_ Kropotkine, he only expounded his theory of exchange, as anyone can see for himself by reading the sixth volume of his complete works (Paris, 1868). This "critique" of Democracy, written in March, 1848, did not yet expound his Anarchist theory. This "critique" forms part of his work, "Solution du Problème Social," and Proudhon proposes to bring about this solution "without taxes, without loans, without cash payments, without paper-money, without maximum, without levies, without bankruptcy, without agrarian laws, without any poor tax, without national workshops, without association (!), without any participation or intervention by the State, without any interference with the liberty of commerce and of industry, without any violation of property," in a word and above all, without any class war. A truly "immortal" idea and worthy the admiration of all bourgeois, peace-loving, sentimental, or bloodthirsty--white, blue, or red! [17] "One, two, three; legerdemain isn't witchcraft." [18] "Les Confessions d'un Révolutionnaire." Vol. ix., 1868 edition of the complete works of Proudhon, pages 166 and 167. [19] "Confessions," pp. 25-26. [20] He is speaking of the two papers _Le Peuple_ and _Le Réprésentant du Peuple_, which he had published in 1848-9 before the _Voix du Peuple_. [21] "Confessions," pp. 7-8. [22] For Proudhon the principle of association invoked by most schools (he means the various Socialist schools), "a principle essentially sterile, is neither an industrial force nor an economic law ... it supposes government and obedience, two terms excluded by the Revolution." (_Idée Générale de la Révolution au XIX Siècle_, 2 ed., Paris 1851, p. 173). [23] "Idée Générale de la Revolution." Paris, 1851, pp. 124-127. [24] "Idée Générale," pp. 298-299. [25] "Idée Générale," p. 304. [26] Ibid. p. 324. [27] Ibid. p. 328. [28] It was thus that Proudhon understood the determining of value by labour. He could never understand a Ricardo. [29] "Idée Générale," p. 268. [30] See his book, "Du Principe Fédératif." [31] _Socialism: Utopian and Scientific._ By F. Engels. Translated by Edward Aveling. Pp. 75-77. CHAPTER V BAKOUNINE We have seen that in their criticism of the "political constitution," the "fathers" of anarchy always based themselves on the Utopian point of view. Each one of them based his theories upon an abstract principle. Stirner upon that of the "Ego," Proudhon upon that of the "Contract." The reader has also seen that these two "fathers" were individualists of the first water. The influence of Proudhonian individualism was, for a time, very strong in the Romance countries (France, Belgium, Italy, Spain) and in the Slaav countries, especially Russia. The internal history of the International Working Men's Association is the history of this struggle between Proudhonism and the modern Socialism of Marx. Not only men like Tolain, Chemalé or Murat, but men very superior to them, such as De Paepe, _e.g._, were nothing but more or less opinionated, more or less consistent "Mutualists." But the more the working class movement developed, the more evident it became that "Mutualism" could not be its theoretical expression. At the International Congresses the Mutualists were forced by the logic of facts to vote for the Communist resolutions. This was the case, _e.g._, at Brussels in the discussion on landed property.[32] Little by little the left wing of the Proudhonian army left the domain of Individualism to intrench itself upon that of "Collectivism." The word "Collectivism" was used at this period in a sense altogether opposed to that which it now has in the mouths of the French Marxists, like Jules Guesde and his friends. The most prominent champion of "Collectivism" was at this time Michel Bakounine. In speaking of this man we shall pass over in silence his propaganda in favour of the Hegelian philosophy, as far as he understood it, the part he played in the revolutionary movement of 1848, his Panslavist writings in the beginning of the sixties, and his pamphlet, "Roumanow, Pougatchew or Pestel"[33] (London, 1862), in which he proposed to go over to Alexander II., if the latter would become the "Tzar of the Moujiks." Here we are exclusively concerned with his theory of Anarchist Collectivism. A member of the "League of Peace and Liberty," Bakounine, at the Congress of this Association at Berne in 1869, called upon the League--an entirely bourgeois body--to declare in favour of "the economical and social equalisation of classes and of individuals." Other delegates, among whom was Chaudey, reproached him with advocating Communism. He indignantly protested against the accusation. "Because I demand the economic and social equalisation of classes and individuals, because, with the Workers' Congress of Brussels, I have declared myself in favour of collective property, I have been reproached with being a Communist. What difference, I have been asked, is there between Communism and Collectivism. I am really astounded that M. Chaudey does not understand this difference, he who is the testamentary executor of Proudhon! I detest Communism, because it is the negation of liberty, and I cannot conceive anything human without liberty. I am not a Communist, because Communism concentrates and causes all the forces of society to be absorbed by the State, because it necessarily ends in the centralisation of property in the hands of the State, while I desire the abolition of the State--the radical extirpation of this principle of the authority and the tutelage of the State, which, under the pretext of moralising and civilising men, has until now enslaved, oppressed, exploited, and depraved them. I desire the organisation of society and of collective or social property from below upwards, by means of free association, and not from above downwards by means of some authority of some sort. Desiring the abolition of the State, I desire the abolition of property individually hereditary, which is nothing but an institution of the State, nothing but a result of the principle of the State. This is the sense, gentlemen, in which I am a Collectivist, and not at all a Communist." In another speech at the same Congress Bakounine reiterates what he had already said of "Statist" Communism. "It is not we, gentlemen," he said, "who systematically deny all authority and all tutelary powers, and who in the name of Liberty demand the very abolition of the "authoritarian" principle of the State; it is not we who will recognise any sort of political and social organisation whatever, that is not founded upon the most complete liberty of every one.... But I am in favour of collective property, because I am convinced that so long as property, individually hereditary, exists, the equality of the first start, the realisation of equality, economical and social, will be impossible."[34] This is not particularly lucid as a statement of principles. But it is sufficiently significant from the "biographical" point of view. We do not insist upon the ineptitude of the expression "the economic and social equalisation of classes;" the General Council of the International dealt with that long ago.[35] We would only remark that the above quotations show that Bakounine-- 1. Combats the State and "Communism" in the name of "the most complete liberty of everybody;" 2. Combats property, "individually hereditary," in the name of economic equality; 3. Regards this property as "an institution of the State," as a "consequence of the very principles of the State;" 4. Has no objection to individual property, if it is not hereditary; has no objection to the right of inheritance, if it is not individual. In other words: 1. Bakounine is quite at one with Proudhon so far as concerns the negation of the State and Communism; 2. To this negation he adds another, that of property, individually hereditary; 3. His programme is nothing but a total arrived at by the adding up of the two abstract principles--that of "liberty," and that of "equality;" he applies these two principles, one after the other, and independently one of the other, in his criticism of the existing order of things, never asking himself whether the results of these two negations are reconcilable with one another. 4. He understands, just as little as Proudhon, the origin of private property and the causal connection between its evolution and the development of political forms. 5. He has no clear conception of the meaning of the words "individually hereditary." If Proudhon was a Utopian, Bakounine was doubly so, for his programme was nothing but a Utopia of "Liberty," reinforced by a Utopia of "Equality." If Proudhon, at least to a very large extent, remained faithful to his principle of the contract, Bakounine, divided between liberty and equality, is obliged from the very outset of his argument constantly to throw over the former for the benefit of the latter, and the latter for the benefit of the former. If Proudhon is a Proudhonian _sans reproche_, Bakounine is a Proudhonian adulterated with "detestable" Communism, nay even by "Marxism." In fact, Bakounine has no longer that immutable faith in the genius of the "master" Proudhon, which Tolain seems to have preserved intact. According to Bakounine "Proudhon, in spite of all his efforts to get a foothold upon the firm ground of reality, remained an idealist and metaphysician. His starting point is the abstract side of law; it is from this that he starts in order to arrive at economic facts, while Marx, on the contrary, has enunciated and proved the truth, demonstrated by the whole of the ancient and modern history of human societies, of peoples and of states, that economic facts preceded and precede the facts of political and civil law. The discovery and demonstration of this truth is one of the greatest merits of M. Marx."[36] In another of his writings he says, with entire conviction, "All the religions, and all the systems of morals that govern a given society are always the ideal expression of its real, material condition, that is, especially of its economic organisation, but also of its political organisation, the latter, indeed, being never anything but the juridical and violent consecration of the former." And he again mentions Marx as the man to whom belongs the merit of having discovered and demonstrated this truth.[37] One asks oneself with astonishment how this same Bakounine could declare that private property was only a consequence of the principle of authority. The solution of the riddle lies in the fact that he did not understand the materialist conception of history; he was only "adulterated" by it. And here is a striking proof of this. In the Russian work, already quoted, "Statism and Anarchy," he says that in the situation of the Russian people there are two elements which constitute the conditions necessary for the social (he means Socialist) revolution. "The Russian people can boast of excessive poverty, and unparalleled slavery. Their sufferings are innumerable, and they bear these, not with patience, but with a profound and passionate despair, that twice already in our history has manifested itself in terrible outbursts: in the revolt of Stephan Razine, and in that of Pougatschew."[38] And that is what Bakounine understood by the material conditions of a Socialist revolution! Is it necessary to point out that this "Marxism" is a little too _sui generis_? While combating Mazzini from the standpoint of the materialist conception of history, Bakounine himself is so far from understanding the true import of this conception, that in the same work in which he refutes the Mazzinian theology, he speaks, like the thorough-faced Proudhonian that he is, of "absolute" human morality, and he bolsters up the idea of this morality--the morality of "solidarity,"--with such arguments as these: "Every actual being, so long as he exists, exists only by virtue of a principle which is inherent in himself, and which determines his particular nature; a principle that is not imposed upon him by a divine law-giver of any sort" (this is the "materialism" of our author!), "but is the protracted and constant result of combinations of natural causes and effects; that is not, according to the ludicrous idea of the idealists, shut up in him like a soul within its body, but is, in fact, only the inevitable and constant form of his real existence. The human, like all other species, has inherent principles quite special to itself, and all these principles are summed up in, or are reducible to, a single principle, which we call _solidarity_. This principle may be formulated thus: No human individual can recognise his own humanity, nor, therefore, realise it in his life except by recognising it in others, and by helping to realise it for others. No man can emancipate himself, except by emancipating with him all the men around him. My liberty is the liberty of everyone, for I am not truly free, free not only in thought but in deed, except when my liberty and my rights find their confirmation, their sanction, in the liberty and the rights of all men, my equals."[39] As a moral precept, solidarity, as interpreted by Bakounine, is a very excellent thing. But to set up this a morality, which by the way is not at all "absolute," as principle "inherent" in humanity and determining human nature, is playing with words, and completely ignoring what materialism is. Humanity only exists "by virtue" of the principle of solidarity. This is coming it a little too strong. How about the "class war," and the cursed State, and property, "individually hereditary"--are these only manifestations of "solidarity," inherent in humanity, determining its special nature, etc., etc? If this is so, everything is all right, and Bakounine was wasting his time in dreaming of a "social" revolution. If this is not so, this proves that humanity may have existed "by virtue" of other principles than that of solidarity, and that this latter principle is by no means "inherent" in it. Indeed, Bakounine only enunciated his "absolute" principle in order to arrive at the conclusion that "no people could be completely free, free with solidarity, in the human sense of the word, if the whole of humanity is not free also."[40] This is an allusion to the tactics of the modern proletariat, and it is true in the sense that--as the rules of the International Workingmen's Association put it--the emancipation of the workers is not a merely local or national problem, but, on the contrary, a problem concerning every civilised nation, its solution being necessarily dependent upon their theoretical and practical cooperation. It is easy enough to prove this truth by reference to the actual economic situation of civilised humanity. But nothing is less conclusive, here as elsewhere, than a "demonstration" founded upon a Utopian conception of "human nature." The "solidarity" of Bakounine only proves that he remained an incorrigible Utopian, although he became acquainted with the historical theory of Marx. FOOTNOTES: [32] " ... Among those who call themselves Mutualists, and whose economic ideas incline, on the whole, to the theories of Proudhon, in the sense that they, like the great revolutionary writer, demand the suppression of all levies of capital upon labour, the suppression of interest, reciprocity of service, equal exchange of products on the basis of cost price, free reciprocal credit, several voted for the collective ownership of the land. Such, _e.g._, are the four French delegates, Aubry of Rouen, Delacour of Paris, Richard of Lyons, Lemonnier of Marseilles, and among the Belgians, Companions A. Moetens, Verricken, De Paepe, Marichal, etc. For them there is no contradiction between Mutualism applicable to the exchange of services and the exchange of products on the basis of cost price, that is to say, the quantity of labour contained in the services and the products, and collective property applicable to the land, which is not a product of labour, and therefore does not seem to them to come under the law of exchange, under the law of circulation."--Reply to an article by Dr. Coullery in the "Voix de l'Avenir," September, 1868, by the Belgians Vanderhouten, De Paepe, Delasalle, Hermann, Delplanque, Roulants, Guillaume Brasseur, printed in the same newspaper and reprinted as a document in the "Mémoire of the Fédération Jurasienne," Souvillier, 1873, pp. 19-20. [33] "Roumanow" is the name of the reigning family in Russia--derived (if we overlook the adultery of Catherine II., admitted by herself in her memoirs) from Peter III., the husband of Catherine II., and Prince of Holstein-Gottorp. Pougatchew, the pretended Peter III., was a Cossack, who placed himself at the head of a Russian peasant rising in 1773. Pestel was a Republican conspirator, hanged by Nicolas in 1826. [34] See the documents published with the "Mémoire de la Fédération Jurasienne," pp. 28, 29, 37. [35] "The equalisation of classes," wrote the General Council to the "Alliance" of Bakounine, who desired to be admitted into the International Working Men's Association, and had sent the Council its programme in which this famous "equalisation" phrase occurs, "literally interpreted comes to the harmony of capital and labour, so pertinaciously advocated by bourgeois Socialists. It is not the equalisation of classes, logically a contradiction, impossible to realise, but on the contrary, the abolition of classes, the real secret of the proletarian movement, which is the great aim of the International Working Men's Association." [36] "Statism and Anarchy, 1873" (the Russian place of publication is not given), pp. 223-224 (Russian). We know the word "Statism" is a barbarism, but Bakounine uses it, and the flexibility of the Russian language lends itself to such forms. [37] "La Théologie Politique de Mazzini et l'Internationale, Neuchatel, 1871," pp. 69 and 78. [38] Ibid. Appendix A, p. 7. [39] "La Théologié Politique de Mazzini," p. 91. [40] Ibid. pp. 110, 111. CHAPTER VI BAKOUNINE--(CONCLUDED) We have said that the principal features of Bakounine's programme originated in the simple addition of two abstract principles: that of liberty and that of equality. We now see that the total thus obtained might easily be increased by the addition of a third principle, that of solidarity. Indeed, the programme of the famous "Alliance," adds several others. For example, "The Alliance declares itself Atheist; it desires the abolition of religions, the substitution of science for faith, of human for divine justice." In the proclamation with which the Bakounists placarded the walls of Lyons, during the attempted rising at the end of September, 1870, we read (Article 41) that "The State, fallen into decay, will no longer be able to intervene in the payment of private debts." This is incontestably logical, but it would be difficult to deduce the non-payment of private debts from principles inherent in human nature. Since Bakounine in tacking his various "absolute" principles together does not ask himself, and does not need to ask himself--thanks to the "absolute" character of his method--whether one of these principles might not somewhat limit the "absolute" power of others, and might not in its turn be limited by them, he finds it an "absolute" impossibility to harmonise the various items of his programme whenever words no longer suffice, and it becomes necessary to replace them by more precise ideas. He "desires" the abolition of religion. But, "the State having fallen into decay," who is to abolish it? He "desires" the abolition of property, individually hereditary. But what is to be done if, "the State having fallen into decay," it should continue to exist? Bakounine himself feels the thing is not very clear, but he consoles himself very easily. In a pamphlet written during the Franco-German war, "Lettres à un français sur la crise actuelle," while demonstrating that France can only be saved by a great revolutionary movement, he comes to the conclusion that the peasants must be incited to lay hands upon the land belonging to the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. But so far, the French peasants have been in favour of property, "individually hereditary," so this unpleasant institution would be bolstered up by the new Social Revolution? "Not at all," answers Bakounine, "_once the State is abolished they_" (_i.e._, the peasants) "_will no longer have the juridical and political consecration, the guarantee of property by the State. Property will no longer be a right, it will be reduced to the condition of a simple fact._" (The italics are Bakounine's own.) This is very reassuring. "The State having fallen into decay," any fellow that happens to come along, stronger than I, will incontinently possess himself of my field, without having any need to appeal to the principal of "solidarity;" the principle of "liberty" will sufficiently answer his purpose. A very pleasant "equalisation of individuals"! "It is certain," Bakounine admits, "that at first things won't work in an absolutely peaceful manner; there will be struggles; public order, that arch saint of the bourgeois, will be disturbed, and the just deeds which will result from such a state of things may constitute what one is agreed to call a civil war. But do you prefer to hand over France to the Prussians?... Moreover, do you fear that the peasants will devour one another; even if they tried to do so in the beginning, they would soon be convinced of the material impossibility of persisting in this course, and then we may be sure they would try to arrive at some understanding, to come to terms, to organise among themselves. The necessity of eating, of providing for their families, and the necessity therefore of safeguarding their houses, their families, and their own lives against unforeseen attacks, all this would soon force them individually to enter into mutual arrangements. And do not believe, either, that in these arrangements, _arrived at outside all official tutelage_" (italicised by Bakounine), "by the mere force of events, the strongest, the richest, will exercise a predominant influence. The wealth of the wealthy, no longer guaranteed by juridical institutions, will cease to be a power.... As to the most cunning, the strongest, they will be rendered innocuous by the collective strength of the mass of the small, and very small peasants, as well as by the agricultural proletarians, a mass of men to-day reduced to silent suffering, but whom the revolutionary movement will arm with an irresistible power. Please note that I do not contend that the agricultural districts which will thus reorganise themselves, from below upwards, will immediately create an ideal organisation, agreeing at all points with the one of which we dream. What I am convinced of is that this will be a _living_ organisation, and as such, one a thousand times superior to what exists now. Moreover, this new organisation being always open to the propaganda of the towns, as it can no longer be held down, so to say petrified by the juridical sanction of the State, it will progress freely, developing and perfecting itself indefinitely, but always living and free, never decreed nor legalised, until it attains as reasonable a condition as we can hope for in our days." The "idealist" Proudhon was convinced that the political constitution had been invented for want of a social organisation "immanent in humanity." He took the pains to "discover" this latter, and having discovered it, he could not see what further _raison d'être_ there was for the political constitution. The "materialist" Bakounine has no "social organisation" of his own make. "The most profound and rational science," he says, "cannot divine the future forms of social life."[41] This science must be content to distinguish the "living" social forms from those that owe their origin to the "petrifying" action of the State, and to condemn these latter. Is not this the old Proudhonian antithesis of the social organisation "immanent in humanity," and of the political constitution "invented" exclusively in the interests of "order?" Is not the only difference that the "materialist" transforms the Utopian programme of the "idealist," into something even more Utopian, more nebulous, more absurd? "To believe that the marvellous scheme of the universe is due to chance, is to imagine that by throwing about a sufficient number of printers' characters at hazard, we might write the Iliad." So reasoned the Deists of the 18th century in refuting the Atheists. The latter replied that in this case everything was a question of time, and that by throwing about the letters an infinite number of times, we must certainly, at some period, make them arrange themselves in the required sequence. Discussions of this kind were to the taste of the 18th century, and we should be wrong to make too much fun of them now-a-days. But it would seem that Bakounine took the Atheist argument of the good old times quite seriously, and used it in order to make himself a "programme." Destroy what exists; if only you do this often enough you are bound at last to produce a social organisation, approaching at any rate the organisation you "dream" of. All will go well when once the revolution has come to stay. Is not this sufficiently "materialist?" If you think it is not, you are a metaphysician, "dreaming" of the impossible! The Proudhonian antithesis of the "social organisation" and the "political constitution" reappears "living" and in its entirety in what Bakounine is for ever reiterating as to the "social revolution" on the one hand, and the "political revolution" on the other. According to Proudhon the social organisation has unfortunately, up to our own days, never existed, and for want of it humanity was driven to "invent" a political constitution. According to Bakounine the social revolution has never yet been made, because humanity, for want of a good "social" programme had to content itself with political revolutions. Now that this programme has been found, there is no need to bother about the "political" revolution; we have quite enough to do with the "social revolution." Every class struggle being necessarily a political struggle, it is evident that every political revolution, worthy of the name, is a social revolution; it is evident also that for the proletariat the political struggle is as much a necessity as it has always been for every class struggling to emancipate itself. Bakounine anathematises all political action by the proletariat; he extols the "social" struggle exclusively. Now what is this social struggle? Here our Proudhonian once again shows himself adulterated by Marxism. He relies as far as possible upon the Rules of the International Workingmen's Association. In the preamble of these Rules it is laid down that the subjection of the worker to capital lies at the bottom of all servitude, political, moral and material, and that therefore the economic emancipation of the workers is the great end to which all political movements must be subordinated as a means. Bakounine argues from this that "every political movement which has not for its immediate and direct object the final and complete economic emancipation of the workers, and which has not inscribed upon its banner quite definitely and clearly, the principle of _economic equality_, that is, the integral restitution of capital to labour, or else the social liquidation--every such political movement is a bourgeois one, and as such must be excluded from the International." But this same Bakounine has heard it said that the historical movement of humanity is a process in conformity with certain laws, and that a revolution cannot be improvised at a moment's notice. He is therefore forced to ask himself, what is the policy which the International is to adopt during that "more or less prolonged period of time which separates us from the terrible social revolution which everyone foresees to-day?" To this he replies, with the most profound conviction, and, as if quoting the Rules of the International: "Without mercy the policy of the democratic bourgeois, or bourgeois-Socialists, must be excluded, which, when these declare that political freedom is a necessary condition of economic emancipation, can only mean this: political reforms, or political revolutions must precede economic reforms or economic revolutions; the workers must therefore join hands with the more or less Radical bourgeois, in order to carry out the former together with them, then, being free, to turn the latter into a reality against them. We protest loudly against this unfortunate theory, which, so far as the workers are concerned, can only result in their again letting themselves be used as tools against themselves, and handing them over once more to bourgeois exploitation." The International "commands" us to disregard all national or local politics; it must give the working-class movement in all countries an "essentially economic" character, by setting up as final aim "the shortening of the hours of labour, and the increase of wages," and as a means "the association of the working masses, and the starting of funds for fighting." It is needless to add that the shortening of the hours of labour must, of course, be obtained without any intervention from the accursed State.[42] Bakounine cannot understand that the working class in its political action can completely separate itself from all the exploiting parties. According to him, there is no other _rôle_ in the political movement for the workers than that of satellite of the Radical bourgeoisie. He glorifies the "essentially economic" tactics of the old English Trade Unions, and has not the faintest idea that it was these very tactics that made the English workers the tail of the Liberal Party. Bakounine objects to the working class lending a hand in any movement whose object is the obtaining or the extension of political rights. In condemning such movements as "bourgeois," he fancies himself a tremendous revolutionist. As a matter of fact he thus proves himself essentially Conservative, and if the working class were ever to follow this line of inaction the Governments could only rejoice.[43] The true revolutionists of our days have a very different idea of Socialist tactics. They "everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things;"[44] which does not prevent them (but quite the contrary) from forming the proletariat into a party separate from all the exploiter parties, opposed to the whole "reactionary mass." Proudhon, who we know had not any overwhelming sympathy for "politics," nevertheless advised the French workers to vote for the candidates who pledged themselves to "constitute value." Bakounine would not have politics at any price. The worker cannot make use of political liberty: "in order to do so he needs two little things--leisure and material means." So it is all only a bourgeois lie. Those who speak of working-class candidates are but mocking the proletariat. "Working-class candidates, transferred to bourgeois conditions of life, and into an atmosphere of completely bourgeois political ideas, ceasing to be actually workers in order to become statesmen, will become bourgeois, and possibly will become even more bourgeois than the bourgeois themselves. For it is not the men who make positions, but, on the contrary, positions which make the men."[45] This last argument is about all Bakounine was able to assimilate of the materialist conception of history. It is unquestionably true that man is the product of his social environment. But to apply this incontestable truth with advantage it is necessary to get rid of the old, metaphysical method of thought which considers things _one after the other, and independently one of the other_. Now Bakounine, like his master, Proudhon, in spite of his flirtation with the Hegelian philosophy, all his life remained a metaphysician. He does not understand that the environment which makes man may change, thus changing man its own product. The environment he has in his mind's eye when speaking of the political action of the proletariat, is the bourgeois parliamentary environment, that environment which must necessarily fatally corrupt labour representatives. But the environment of the _electors_, the environment of a working-class party, conscious of its aim and well organised, would this have no influence upon the elected of the proletariat? No! Economically enslaved, the working class must always remain in political servitude; in this domain it will always be the weakest; to free itself it must begin by an economic revolution. Bakounine does not see that by this process of reasoning he inevitably arrives at the conclusion that a victory of the proletariat is absolutely impossible, unless the owners of the means of production voluntarily relinquish their possessions to them. In effect the subjection of the worker to capital is the source not only of political but of moral servitude. And how can the workers, morally enslaved, rise against the bourgeoisie? For the working class movement to become possible, according to Bakounine, it must therefore first make an economic revolution. But the economic revolution is only possible as the work of the workers themselves. So we find ourselves in a vicious circle, out of which modern Socialism can easily break, but in which Bakounine and the Bakounists are for ever turning with no other hope of deliverance than a logical _salto mortale_. The corrupting influence of the Parliamentary environment on working-class representatives is what the Anarchists have up to the present considered the strongest argument in their criticism of the political activity of Social-Democracy. We have seen what its _theoretical_ value amounts to. And even a slight knowledge of the history of the German Socialist party will sufficiently show how in practical life the Anarchist apprehensions are answered. In repudiating all "politics" Bakounine was forced to adopt the tactics of the old English Trade Unions. But even he felt that these tactics were not very revolutionary. He tried to get out of the difficulty by the help of his "Alliance," a kind of international secret society, organised on a basis of frenetic centralisation and grotesque fancifulness. Subjected to the dictatorial rule of the sovereign pontiff of Anarchy, the "international" and the "national" brethren were bound to accelerate and direct the "essentially economic" revolutionary movement. At the same time Bakounine approved of "riots," of isolated risings of workers and peasants which, although they must inevitably be crushed out, would, he declared, always have a good influence upon the development of the revolutionary spirit among the oppressed. It goes without saying that with such a "programme" he was able to do much harm to the working class movement, but he was not able to draw nearer, even by a single step, to that "immediate" economic revolution of which he "dreamed."[46] We shall presently see the result of the Bakounist theory of "riots." For the present let us sum up what we have said of Bakounine. And here, he shall help us himself. "Upon the Pangermanic banner" [_i.e._, also upon the banner of German Social-Democracy, and consequently upon the Socialist banner of the whole civilised world] "is inscribed: The conservation and strengthening of the State at all costs; on the Socialist-revolutionary banner" (read Bakounist banner) "is inscribed in characters of blood, in letters of fire: the abolition of all States, the destruction of bourgeois civilisation; free organisation from the bottom to the top, by the help of free associations; the organisation of the working populace (_sic!_) freed from all trammels, the organisation of the whole of emancipated humanity, the creation of a new human world." It is with these words that Bakounine concludes his principal work "Statism and Anarchy" (Russian). We leave our readers to appreciate the rhetorical beauties of this passage. For our own part we shall be content with saying that it contains absolutely no human meaning whatsoever. The absurd, pure and simple--that is what is inscribed upon the Bakounist "banner." There is no need of letters of fire and of blood to make this evident to any one who is not hypnotised by a phraseology more or less sonorous, but always void of sense. The Anarchism of Stirner and of Proudhon was completely individualist. Bakounine did not want individualism, or to speak more correctly, one particular phase of individualism. He was the inventor of "Collectivist-Anarchism." And the invention cost him little. He completed the "liberty" Utopia, by the "equality" Utopia. As these two Utopias would not agree, as they cried out at being yoked together, he threw both into the furnace of the "permanent revolution" where they were both at last forced to hold their tongues, for the simple reason that they both evaporated, the one as completely as the other. Bakounine is the _décadent_ of Utopism. FOOTNOTES: [41] "Statism and Anarchy," Appendix A. But for Russia the "science" of Bakounine was quite equal to divining the future forms of social life; there is to be the Commune, whose ulterior development will start from the actual rural commune. It was especially the Bakounists who in Russia spread the notion about the marvellous virtues of the Russian rural commune. [42] See Bakounine's articles on the "Politics of the International" in the _Egalité_ of Geneva, August, 1869. [43] The anathemas pronounced by Bakounine against political liberty for a time had a very deplorable influence upon the revolutionary movement in Russia. [44] Communist Manifesto, p. 30. [45] _Egalité_, 28th August, 1869. [46] On the action of Bakounine in the International, see the two works published by the General Council of that organisation: _Les Prétendus Scissions dans l'Internationale_, and _L'Alliance de la Democratic Sociale_. See also Engels' article _Die Bakunisten an der Arbeit_, reprinted in the recently published pamphlet, _Internationales aus dem Volkstaat_ (_i.e._, a series of articles published in the _Volkstaat_,) 1873-75. Berlin, 1894. CHAPTER VII THE SMALLER FRY Among our present-day Anarchists some, like John Mackay, the author of "Die Anarchisten, Kulturgemälde aus dem Ende des xix. Jahrhunderts," declare for individualism, while others--by far the more numerous--call themselves Communists. These are the descendants of Bakounine in the Anarchist movement. They have produced a fairly considerable literature in various languages, and it is they who are making so much noise with the help of the "propaganda by deed." The prophet of this school is the Russian refugee, P. A. Kropotkine. I shall not here stop to consider the doctrines of the Individualist-Anarchist of to-day, whom even their brethren, the Communist-Anarchists, look upon as "bourgeois."[47] We will go straight on to the Anarchist-"Communist." What is the standpoint of this new species of Communism? "As to the method followed by the Anarchist thinker, it entirely differs from that of the Utopists," Kropotkine assures us. "The Anarchist thinker does not resort to metaphysical conceptions (like 'natural rights,' the 'duties of the State' and so on) to establish what are, in his opinion, the best conditions for realising the greatest happiness of humanity. He follows, on the contrary, the course traced by the modern philosophy of evolution.... He studies human society as it is now, and was in the past; and, without either endowing men altogether, or separate individuals, with superior qualities which they do not possess, he merely considers society as an aggregation of organisms trying to find out the best ways of combining the wants of the individual with those of cooperation for the welfare of the species. He studies society and tries to discover its tendencies, past and present, its growing needs, intellectual and economical, and in this he merely points out in which direction evolution goes."[48] So the Anarchist-Communists have nothing in common with the Utopians. They do not, in the elaborating of their "ideal," turn to metaphysical conceptions like "natural rights," the "duties of the State," etc. Is this really so? So far as the "duties of the State" are concerned, Kropotkine is quite right; it would be too absurd if the Anarchists invited the State to disappear in the name of its own "duties." But as to "natural rights" he is altogether mistaken. A few quotations will suffice to prove this. Already in the _Bulletin de la Fédération Jurasienne_ (No. 3, 1877), we find the following very significant declaration: "The sovereignty of the people can only exist through the most complete autonomy of individuals and of groups." This "most complete autonomy," is it not also a "metaphysical conception?" The _Bulletin de la Fédération Jurasienne_ was an organ of Collectivist Anarchism. At bottom there is no difference between "Collectivist" and "Communist" Anarchism. And yet, since it might be that we are making the Communists responsible for the Collectivists, let us glance at the "Communist" publications, not only according to the spirit but the letter. In the autumn of 1892 a few "companions" appeared before the Assize Court of Versailles in consequence of a theft of dynamite at Soisy-sous-Etiolles. Among others there was one G. Etiévant, who drew up a declaration of Anarchist-Communist principles. The tribunal would not allow him to read it, whereupon the official organ of the Anarchists, _La Révolte_, undertook to publish this declaration, having taken great pains to secure an absolutely correct copy of the original. The "Declaration of G. Etiévant" made a sensation in the Anarchist world, and even "cultured" men like Octave Mirbeau quote it with respect along with the works of the "theorists," Bakounine, Kropotkine, the "unequalled Proudhon," and the "aristocratic Spencer!" Now this is the line of Etiévant's reasoning: No idea is innate in us; each idea is born of infinitely diverse and multiple sensations, which we receive by means of our organs. Every act of the individual is the result of one or several ideas. The man is not therefore responsible. In order that responsibility should exist, will would have to determine the sensations, just as these determine the idea, and the idea, the act. But as it is, on the contrary, the sensations which determine the will, all judgment becomes impossible, every reward, every punishment unjust, however great the good or the evil done may be. "Thus one cannot judge men and acts unless one has a sufficient criterion. Now no such criterion exists. At any rate it is not in the laws that it could be found, for true justice is immutable and laws are changeable. It is with laws as with all the rest (!). For if laws are beneficent what is the good of deputies and senators to change them? And if they are bad what is the good of magistrates to apply them?" Having thus "demonstrated" "liberty," Etiévant passes on to "equality." From the zoophytes to men, all beings are provided with more or less perfect organs destined to serve them. All these beings have therefore the right to make use of their organs according to the evident will of mother Nature. "So for our legs we have the right to all the space they can traverse; for our lungs to all the air we can breathe; for our stomach to all the food we can digest; for our brain to all we can think, or assimilate of the thoughts of others; for our faculty of elocution to all we can say; for our ears to all we can hear; and we have a right to all this because we have a right to life, and because all this constitutes life. These are the true rights of man! No need to decree them, they exist as the sun exists. They are written in no constitution, in no law, but they are inscribed in ineffaceable letters in the great book of Nature and are imprescriptible. From the cheese-mite to the elephant, from the blade of grass to the oak, from the atom to the star, everything proclaims it." If these are not "metaphysical conceptions," and of the very worst type, a miserable caricature of the metaphysical materialism of the eighteenth century, if this is the "philosophy of evolution," then we must confess that it has nothing in common with the scientific movement of our day. Let us hear another authority, and quote the now famous book of Jean Grave, "La Société mourante et l'Anarchie," which was recently condemned by French judges, who thought it dangerous, while it is only supremely ridiculous. "Anarchy means the negation of authority. Now, Government claims to base the legitimacy of its existence upon the necessity of defending social institutions: the family, religion, property, etc. It has created a vast machinery in order to assure its exercise and its sanction. The chief are: the law, the magistracy, the army, the legislature, executive powers, etc. So that the Anarchist idea, forced to reply to everything, was obliged to attack all social prejudices, to become thoroughly penetrated by all human knowledge, in order to demonstrate that its conceptions were in harmony with the physiological and psychological nature of man, and in harmony with the observance of natural laws, while our actual organisation has been established in contravention of all logic and all good sense.... Thus, in combating authority, it has been necessary for the Anarchists to attack all the institutions which the Government defends, the necessity for which it tries to demonstrate in order to legitimate its own existence."[49] You see what was "the development" of the "Anarchist Idea." This Idea "denied" authority. In order to defend itself, authority appealed to the family, religion, property. Then the "Idea" found itself forced to attack institutions, which it had not, apparently, noticed before, and at the same time the "Idea," in order to make the most of its "conceptions," penetrated to the very depths of all human knowledge (it is an ill wind that does not blow some good!) All this is only the result of chance, of the unexpected turn given by "authority" to the discussion that had arisen between itself and the "Idea." It seems to us that however rich in human knowledge it may be now, the "Anarchist Idea" is not at all communistic; it keeps its knowledge to itself, and leaves the poor "companions" in complete ignorance. It is all very well for Kropotkine to sing the praises of the "Anarchist thinker"; he will never be able to prove that his friend Grave has been able to rise even a little above the feeblest metaphysics. Kropotkine should read over again the Anarchist pamphlets of Elisée Reclus--a great "theorist" this--and then, quite seriously tell us if he finds anything else in them but appeals to "justice," "liberty," and other "metaphysical conceptions." Finally, Kropotkine himself is not so emancipated from metaphysics as he fancies he is. Far from it! Here, _e.g._, is what he said at the general meeting of the Federation of the Jura, on the 12th October, 1879, at Chaux-de-Fonds:-- "There was a time when they denied Anarchists even the right to existence. The General Council of the International treated us as factious, the press as dreamers; almost all treated us as fools; this time is past. The Anarchist party has proved its _vitality_; it has surmounted the obstacles of every kind that impeded its development; to-day it is _accepted_." [By whom?] "To attain to this, it has been necessary, above all else, for the party to hold its own in the domain of _theory_, to establish its ideal of the society of the future, to prove that this ideal is the best; to do more than this--to prove that this ideal is not the product of the dreams of the study, but flows directly from the popular aspirations, that it is in accord with the historical progress of culture and ideas. This work has been done," etc.... This hunt after the best ideal of the society of the future, is not this the Utopian method _par excellence_? It is true that Kropotkine tries to prove "that this ideal is not the product of dreams of the study, but flows directly from the popular aspirations, that it is in accord with the historical progress of culture and ideas." But what Utopian has not tried to prove this equally with himself? Everything depends upon the value of the proofs, and here our amiable compatriot is infinitely weaker than the great Utopians whom he treats as metaphysicians, while he himself has not the least notion of the actual methods of modern social science. But before examining the value of these "proofs," let us make the acquaintance of the "ideal" itself. What is Kropotkine's conception of Anarchist society? Pre-occupied with the reorganising of the governmental machine, the revolutionist-politicians, the "Jacobins" (Kropotkine detests the Jacobins even more than our amiable Empress, Catherine II., detested them) allowed the people to die of hunger. The Anarchists will act differently. They will destroy the State, and will urge on the people to the expropriation of the rich. Once this expropriation accomplished, an "inventory" of the common wealth will be made, and the "distribution" of it organised. Everything will be done by the people themselves. "Just give the people elbow room, and in a week the business of the food supply will proceed with admirable regularity. Only one who has never seen the hard-working people at their labour, only one who has buried himself in documents, could doubt this. Speak of the organising capacity of the Great Misunderstood, the People, to those who have seen them at Paris on the days of the barricades" (which is certainly not the case of Kropotkine) "or in London at the time of the last great strike, when they had to feed half a million starving people, and they will tell you how superior the people is to all the hide-bound officials."[50] The basis upon which the enjoyment in common of the food supply is to be organised will be very fair, and not at all "Jacobin." There is but one, and only one, which is consistent with sentiments of justice, and is really practical. The taking in heaps from what one possesses abundance of! Rationing out what must be measured, divided! Out of 350 millions who inhabit Europe, 200 millions still follow this perfectly natural practice--which proves, among other things, that the Anarchist ideal "flows from the popular aspirations." It is the same with regard to housing and clothing. The people will organise everything according to the same rule. There will be an upheaval; that is certain. Only this upheaval must not become mere loss, it must be reduced to a minimum. And it is again--we cannot repeat it too often--by turning to those immediately interested and not to bureaucrats that the "least amount of inconvenience will be inflicted upon everybody."[51] Thus from the beginning of the revolution we shall have an _organisation_; the whims of sovereign "individuals" will be kept within reasonable bounds by the wants of society, by the logic of the situation. And, nevertheless, we shall be in the midst of full-blown Anarchy; individual liberty will be safe and sound. This seems incredible, but it is true; there is anarchy, and there is organisation, there are obligatory rules for everyone, and yet everyone does what he likes. You do not follow. 'Tis simple enough. This organisation--it is not the "authoritarian" revolutionists who will have created it;--these rules, obligatory upon all, and yet anarchical, it is the People, the Great Misunderstood, who will have proclaimed them, and the People are very knowing as anyone who has seen,--what Kropotkine never had the opportunity of seeing--days of barricade riots, knows.[52] But if the Great Misunderstood had the stupidity to create the "bureaux" so detested of Kropotkine? If, as it did in March, 1871, it gave itself a revolutionary Government? Then we shall say the people is mistaken, and shall try to bring it back to a better state of mind, and if need be we will throw a few bombs at the "hide bound officials." We will call upon the People to organise, and will destroy all the organs it may provide itself with. This then is the way in which we realise the excellent Anarchist ideal--in imagination. In the name of the liberty of individuals all action of the individuals is done away with, and in the name of the People we get rid of the whole class of revolutionists; the individuals are drowned in the mass. If you can only get used to this logical process, you meet with no more difficulties, and you can boast that you are neither "authoritarian" nor "Utopian." What could be easier, what more pleasant? But in order to consume, it is necessary to produce. Kropotkine knows this so well that he reads the "authoritarian" Marx a lesson on the subject. "The evil of the present organisation is not in that the 'surplus value' of production passes over to the capitalist--as Rodbertus and Marx had contended--thus narrowing down the Socialist conception, and the general ideas on the capitalist regime. Surplus value itself is only a consequence of more profound causes. The evil is that there can be any kind of 'surplus value,' instead of a surplus not consumed by each generation; for, in order that there may be 'surplus value,' men, women, and children must be obliged by hunger to sell their labour powers, for a trifling portion of what these powers produce, and, especially of what they are capable of producing" (poor Marx, who knew nothing of all these profound truths, although so confusedly expounded by the learned Prince!)... "It does not, indeed, suffice to distribute in equal shares the profits realised in one industry, if, at the same time, one has to exploit thousands of other workers. The point is to _produce with the smallest possible expenditure of human labour power the greatest possible amount of products necessary for the well being of all_." (Italicised by Kropotkine himself.) Ignorant Marxists that we are! We have never heard that a Socialist society pre-supposes a systematic organisation of production. Since it is Kropotkine who reveals this to us, it is only reasonable that we should turn to him to know what this organisation will be like. On this subject also he has some very interesting things to say. "Imagine a Society comprising several million inhabitants engaged in agriculture, and a great variety of industries--Paris, for example, with the Department of Seine-et-Oise. Imagine that in this Society all children learn to work with their hand as well as with their brain. Admit, in fine, that all adults, with the exception of the women occupied with the education of children, undertake to work _five hours a day_ from the age of twenty or twenty-two to forty-five or fifty, and that they spend this time in any occupations they choose, in no matter what branch of human labour considered _necessary_. Such a Society could, in return, guarantee well-being to all its members, _i.e._, far greater comfort than that enjoyed by the bourgeoisie to-day. And every worker in this Society would moreover have at his disposal at least five hours a day, which he could devote to science, to art, and to those individual needs that do not come within the category of _necessities_, while later on, when the productive forces of man have augmented, everything may be introduced into this category that is still to-day looked upon as a luxury or unattainable."[53] In Anarchist Society there will be no authority, but there will be the _Contract_ (oh! immortal Monsieur Proudhon, here you are again; we see all still goes well with you!) by virtue of which the infinitely free individuals "agree" to work in such or such a "free commune." The contract is justice, liberty, equality; it is Proudhon, Kropotkine, and all the Saints. But, at the same time, do not trifle with the contract! It is a thing not so destitute of means to defend itself as would seem. Indeed, suppose the signatory of a contract freely made does not wish to fulfil his duty? He is driven forth from the free commune, and he runs the risk of dying of hunger--which is not a particularly gay outlook. "I suppose a group or a certain number of volunteers, combining in some enterprise, to secure the success of which all rival each other in zeal, with the exception of one associate, who frequently absents himself from his post. Should they, on his account, dissolve the group, appoint a president who would inflict fines, or else, like the Academy, distribute attendance-counters? It is evident that we shall do neither the one nor the other, but that one day the comrade who threatens to jeopardise the enterprise will be told: 'My friend, we should have been glad to work with you, but as you are often absent from your post, or do your work negligently, we must part. Go and look for other comrades who will put up with your off-hand ways.'"[54] This is pretty strong at bottom; but note how appearances are saved, how very "Anarchist" is his language. Really, we should not be at all surprised if in the "Anarchist-Communist" society people were guillotined by persuasion, or, at any rate, by virtue of a freely-made contract. But farther, this very Anarchist method of dealing with lazy "free individuals" is perfectly "natural," and "is practised everywhere to-day in all industries, in competition with every possible system of fines, stoppages from wages, espionage, etc.; the workman may go to his shop at the regular hour, but if he does his work badly, if he interferes with his comrades by his laziness or other faults, if they fall out, it is all over. He is obliged to leave the workshop."[55] Thus is the Anarchist "Ideal" in complete harmony with the "tendencies" of capitalist society. For the rest, such strong measures as these will be extremely rare. Delivered from the yoke of the State and capitalist exploitation, individuals will of their own free motion set themselves to supply the wants of the great All of society. Everything will be done by means of "free arrangement." "Well, Citizens, let others preach industrial barracks, and the convent of "Authoritarian" Communism, we declare that the _tendency_ of societies is in the opposite direction. We see millions and millions of groups constituting themselves freely in order to satisfy all the varied wants of human beings, groups formed, some by districts, by streets, by houses; others holding out hands across the walls (!) of cities, of frontiers, of oceans. All made up of human beings freely seeking one another, and having done their work as producers, associating themselves, to consume, or to produce articles of luxury, or to turn science into a new direction. This is the tendency of the nineteenth century, and we are following it; we ask only to develop it freely, without let or hindrance on the part of governments. Liberty for the individual!" "Take some pebbles," said Fourier, "put them into a box and shake them; they will arrange themselves into a mosaic such as you could never succeed in producing if you told off some one to arrange them harmoniously."[56] A wit has said that the profession of faith of the Anarchists reduces itself to two articles of a fantastic law: (1) There shall be nothing. (2) No one is charged with carrying out the above article. This is not correct. The Anarchists say: (1) There shall be everything. (2) No one is held responsible for seeing that there is anything at all. This is a very seductive "Ideal," but its realisation is unfortunately very improbable. Let us now ask, what is this "free agreement" which according to Kropotkine, exists even in capitalist society? He quotes two kinds of examples by way of evidence: (_a_) those connected with production and the circulation of commodities; (_b_) those belonging to all kinds of societies of amateurs--learned societies, philanthropic societies, etc. "Take all the great enterprises: the Suez Canal, _e.g._, Trans-Atlantic navigation, the telegraph that unites the two Americas. Take, in fine, this organisation of commerce, which provides that when you get up in the morning you are sure to find bread at the bakers' ... meat at the butchers', and everything you want in the shops. Is this the work of the State? Certainly, to-day we pay middlemen abominably dearly. Well, all the more reason to suppress them, but not to think it necessary to confide to the Government the care of providing our goods and our clothing."[57] Remarkable fact! we began by snapping our fingers at Marx, who only thought of suppressing surplus value, and had no idea of the organisation of production, and we end by demanding the suppression of the profits of the middleman, while, so far as production is concerned, we preach the most bourgeois _laissez-faire, laissez passer_. Marx might, not without reason, have said, he laughs best who laughs last! We all know what the "free agreement" of the bourgeois _entrepreneur_ is, and we can only admire the "absolute" naïvété of the man who sees in it the precursor of communism. It is exactly this Anarchic "arrangement" that must be got rid of in order that the producers may cease to be the slaves of their own products.[58] As to the really free societies of _savants_, artists, philanthropists, etc., Kropotkine himself tells us what their example is worth. They are "made up of human beings freely seeking one another after having done their work as producers." Although this is not correct--since in these societies there is often not a single _producer_--this still farther proves that we can only be free after we have settled our account with production. The famous "tendency of the nineteenth century," therefore, tells us nothing on the main question--how the unlimited liberty of the individual can be made to harmonise with the economic requirements of a communistic society. And as this "tendency" constitutes the whole of the scientific equipment of our "Anarchist thinker," we are driven to the conclusion that his appeal to science was merely verbiage, that he is, in spite of his contempt for the Utopians, one of the least ingenious of these, a vulgar hunter in search of the "best Ideal." The "free agreement" works wonders, if not in Anarchist society, which unfortunately does not yet exist, at least in Anarchist arguments. "Our present society being abolished, individuals no longer needing to hoard in order to make sure of the morrow, this, indeed being made impossible, by the suppression of all money or symbol of value--all their wants being satisfied and provided for in the new society, the stimulus of individuals being now only that ideal of always striving towards the best, the relations of individuals or groups no longer being established with a view to those exchanges in which each contracting party only seeks to 'do' his partner" (the "free agreement" of the bourgeois, of which Kropotkine has just spoken to us) "these relations will now only have for object the rendering of mutual services, with which particular interests have nothing to do, the agreement will be rendered easy, the causes of discord having disappeared."[59] Question: How will the new society satisfy the needs of its members? How will it make them certain of the morrow? Answer: By means of free agreements. Question: Will production be possible if it depends solely upon the free agreement of individuals? Answer: Of course! And in order to convince yourself of it, you have only to _assume_ that your morrow is certain, that all your needs are satisfied, and, in a word, that production, thanks to free agreement, is getting on swimmingly. What wonderful logicians these "companions" are, and what a beautiful ideal is that which has no other foundation than an illogical assumption! "It has been objected that in leaving individuals free to organise as they like, there would arise that competition between groups which to-day exists between individuals. This is a mistake, for in the society we desire money would be abolished, consequently there would no longer be any exchange of products, but exchange of services. Besides, in order that such a social revolution as we contemplate can have been accomplished we must assume that a certain evolution of ideas will have taken place in the mind of the masses, or, at the least, of a considerable minority among them. But if the workers have been sufficiently intelligent to destroy bourgeois exploitation, it will not be in order to re-establish it among themselves, especially when they are assured all their wants will be supplied."[60] It is incredible, but it is incontestably true: the only basis for the "Ideal" of the Anarchist-Communists, is this _petitio principii_, this "assumption" of the very thing that has to be proved. Companion Grave, the "profound thinker," is particularly rich in assumptions. As soon as any difficult problem presents itself, he "assumes" that it is already solved, and then everything is for the best in the best of ideals. The "profound" Grave is less circumspect than the "learned" Kropotkine. And so it is only he who succeeds in reducing the "ideal" to "absolute" absurdity. He asks himself what will be done if in "the society of the day after the revolution" there should be a papa who should refuse his child _all education_. The papa is an individual with unlimited rights. He follows the Anarchist rule, "Do as thou wouldst." No one has any right, therefore, to bring him to his senses. On the other hand, the child also may do as he likes, and he wants to learn. How to get out of this conflict, how resolve the dilemma without offending the holy laws of Anarchy? By an "assumption." "Relations" (between citizens) "being much wider and more imbued with fraternity than in our present society, based as it is upon the antagonism of interests, it follows that the child by means of what he will see passing before his eyes, by what he will daily hear, will escape from the influence of the parent, and will find every facility necessary for acquiring the knowledge his parents refuse to give him. Nay more, if he finds himself too unhappy under the authority they try to force upon him, he would abandon them in order to place himself under the protection of individuals with whom he was in greater sympathy. The parents could not send the gendarmes after him to bring back to their authority the slave whom the law to-day gives up to them."[61] It is not the child who is running away from his parents, but the Utopian who is running away from an insurmountable logical difficulty. And yet this judgment of Solomon has seemed so profound to the companions that, it has been literally quoted by Emil Darnaud in his book "La Société Future" (Foix. 1890, p. 26)--a book especially intended to popularise the lucubrations of Grave. "Anarchy, the No-government system of Socialism, has a double origin. It is an outgrowth of the two great movements of thought in the economical and the political fields which characterise our century, and especially its second part. In common with all Socialists, the Anarchists hold that the private ownership of land, capital, and machinery has had its time; that it is condemned to disappear; and that all requisites of production must, and will, become the common property of society, and be managed in common by the producers of wealth. And, in common with the most advanced representatives of political Radicalism, they maintain that the ideal of the political organisation of society is a condition of things where the functions of government are reduced to a minimum, and the individual recovers his full liberty of initiative and action for satisfying, by means of free groups and federations--freely constituted--all the infinitely varied needs of the human being. As regards Socialism, most of the Anarchists arrive at its ultimate conclusion, that is, at a complete negation of the wage-system, and at Communism. And with reference to political organisation, by giving a farther development to the above-mentioned part of the Radical programme, they arrive at the conclusion that the ultimate aim of society is the reduction of the functions of governments to _nil_--that is, to a society without government, to Anarchy. The Anarchists maintain, moreover, that such being the ideal of social and political organisation they must not remit it to future centuries, but that only those changes in our social organisation which are in accordance with the above double ideal, and constitute an approach to it, will have a chance of life and be beneficial for the commonwealth."[62] Kropotkine here reveals to us, with admirable clearness, the origin and nature of his "Ideal." This Ideal, like that of Bakounine, is truly "double;" it is really born of the connection between bourgeois Radicalism, or rather that of the Manchester school, and Communism; just as Jesus was born in connection between the Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary. The two natures of the Anarchist ideal are as difficult to reconcile as the two natures of the Son of God. But one of these natures evidently gets the better of the other. The Anarchists "want" to begin by immediately realising what Kropotkine calls "the ultimate aim of society," that is to say, by destroying the "State." Their starting point is always the unlimited liberty of the individual. Manchesterism before everything. Communism only comes in afterwards.[63] But in order to reassure us as to the probable fate of this second nature of their Ideal, the Anarchists are constantly singing the praises of the wisdom, the goodness, the forethought of the man of the "future." He will be so perfect that he will no doubt be able to organise Communist production. He will be so perfect that one asks oneself, while admiring him, why he cannot be trusted with a little "authority." FOOTNOTES: [47] The few Individualists we come across are only strong in their criticism of the State and of the law. As to their constructive ideal, a few preach an idyll that they themselves would never care to practise, while others, like the editor of _Liberty_, Boston, fall back upon an actual bourgeois system. In order to defend their Individualism they reconstruct the State with all its attributes (law, police, and the rest) after having so courageously denied them. Others, finally, like Auberon Herbert, are stranded in a "Liberty and Property Defence League"--a League for the defence of landed property. _La Révolte_, No. 38, 1893, "A lecture on Anarchism." [48] "Anarchist-Communism; its Basis and Principles," by Peter Kropotkine, republished by permission of the Editor of the _Nineteenth Century_. February and August, 1887, London. [49] _l.c._, pp. 1-2. [50] "La Conquête du Pain." Paris, 1892. pp. 77-78. [51] Ibid., p. 111. [52] As, however, Kropotkine was in London at the time of the great Dock Strike, and therefore had an opportunity of learning how the food supply was managed for the strikers, it is worth pointing out that this was managed quite differently from the method suggested above. An organised Committee, consisting of Trade Unionists helped by State Socialists (Champion) and Social-Democrats (John Burns, Tom Mann, Eleanor Marx Aveling, etc.) made _contracts_ with shopkeepers, and distributed stamped tickets, for which could be obtained certain articles of food. The food supplied was paid for with the money that had been raised by subscriptions, and to these subscriptions the _bourgeois_ public, encouraged by the _bourgeois_ press, had very largely contributed. Direct distributions of food to strikers, and those thrown out of work through the strike, were made by the Salvation Army, an essentially centralised, bureaucratically organised body, and other philanthropic societies. All this has very little to do with the procuring and distributing of the food supply, "the day after the revolution;" with the organising of the "service for supplying food." The food was there, and it was only a question of buying and dividing it as a means of support. The "People," _i.e._, the strikers, by no means helped themselves in this respect; they were helped by others. [53] "La Conquête du Pain," pp. 128-129. [54] Ibid., pp. 201-202. [55] Ibid., p. 202. [56] "_L'Anarchie dans l'Evolution socialiste._" Lecture at the Salle Levis, Paris, 1888, pp. 20-21. [57] Ibid., p. 19. [58] Kropotkine speaks of the Suez Canal! Why not the Panama Canal? [59] "La Société au lendemain de la Révolution." J. Grave, 1889, Paris, pp. 61-62. [60] Ibid., p. 47. [61] Ibid., p. 99. [62] Anarchist Communism, p. 3. [63] "L'Anarchia è il funzionamento armonico di tutte le autonomie, risolventesi nella eguaglianza totale delle condizioni umane." L'Anarchia nella scienza e nelle evoluzione. (Traduzione dello Spagnuolo) Piato, Toscana, 1892, p. 26. "Anarchy is the harmonious functioning of all autonomy resolved in the complete equalisation of all human conditions." "Anarchy in Science and Evolution."--Italian, translated from the Spanish. CHAPTER VIII THE SO-CALLED ANARCHIST TACTICS. THEIR MORALITY The Anarchists are Utopians. Their point of view has nothing in common with that of modern scientific Socialism. But there are Utopias and Utopias. The great Utopians of the first half of our century were men of genius; they helped forward social science, which in their time was still entirely Utopian. The Utopians of to-day, the Anarchists, are the abstracters of quintessence, who can only fully draw forth some poor conclusions from certain mummified principles. They have nothing to do with social science, which, in its onward march, has distanced them by at least half a century. Their "profound thinkers," their "lofty theorists," do not even succeed in making the two ends of their reasoning meet. They are the decadent Utopians, stricken with incurable intellectual anæmia. The great Utopians did much for the development of the working class movement. The Utopians of our days do nothing but retard its progress. And it is especially their so-called tactics that are harmful to the proletariat. We already know that Bakounine interpreted the Rules of the International in the sense that the working class must give up all political action, and concentrate its efforts upon the domain of the "immediately economic" struggle for higher wages, a reduction of the hours of labour, and so forth. Bakounine himself felt that such tactics were not very revolutionary. He tried to complete them through the action of his "Alliance;" he preached riots.[64] But the more the class consciousness of the proletariat develops, the more it inclines towards political action, and gives up the "riots," so common during its infancy. It is more difficult to induce the working men of Western Europe, who have attained a certain degree of political development, to riot, than, for example, the credulous and ignorant Russian peasants. As the proletariat has shown no taste for the tactics of "riot," the companions have been forced to replace it by "individual action." It was especially after the attempted insurrection at Benevento in Italy in 1877 that the Bakounists began to glorify the "propaganda of deed." But if we glance back at the period that separates us from the attempt of Benevento, we shall see that this propaganda too assumed a special form: very few "riots," and these quite insignificant, a great many personal attempts against public edifices, against individuals, and even against property--"individually hereditary," of course. It could not be otherwise. "We have already seen numerous revolts by people who wished to obtain urgent reforms," says Louise Michel, in an interview with a correspondent of the _Matin_, on the occasion of the Vaillant attempt. "What was the result? The people were shot down. Well, we think the people has been sufficiently bled; it is better large-hearted people should sacrifice themselves, and, at their own risk, commit acts of violence whose object is to terrorise the Government and the bourgeois."[65] This is exactly what we have said--only in slightly different words. Louise Michel has forgotten to say that revolts, causing the bloodshed of the people, figured at the head of the Anarchists' programme, until the Anarchists became convinced, not that these partial risings in no way serve the cause of the workers, but that the workers, for the most part, will not have anything to do with these risings. Error has its logic as well as truth. Once you reject the political action of the working-class, you are fatally driven--provided you do not wish to serve the bourgeois politicians--to accept the tactics of the Vaillants and the Henrys. The so-called "Independent" (Unabhängige) members of the German Socialist Party have proved this in their own persons. They began by attacking "Parliamentarism," and to the "reformist" tactics of the "old" members they opposed--on paper, of course--the "revolutionary struggle," the purely "economic" struggle. But this struggle, developing naturally, must inevitably bring about the entry of the proletariat into the arena of political struggles. Not wishing to come back to the very starting-point of their negation, the "Independents," for a time, preached what they called "political demonstrations," a new kind of old Bakounist riots. As riots, by whatever name they are called, always come too late for the fiery "revolutionists," there was only left to the Independents to "march forward," to become converts to Anarchy, and to propagate--in words--the propaganda of deed. The language of the "young" Landauers and Co. is already as "revolutionary" as that of the "oldest" Anarchists. "Reason and knowledge only thou despise The highest strength in man that lies! Let but the lying spirit bind thee, With magic works and shows that blind thee, And I shall have thee fast and sure." As to the "magic work and shows," they are innumerable in the arguments of the Anarchists against the political activity of the proletariat. Here hate becomes veritable witchcraft. Thus Kropotkine turns their own arm--the materialist conception of history--against the Social-Democrats. "To each new economical phase of life corresponds a new political phase," he assures us. "Absolute monarchy--that is Court-rule--corresponded to the system of serfdom. Representative government corresponds to capital-rule. Both, however, are class-rule. But in a society where the distinction between capitalist and labourer has disappeared, there is no need of such a government; it would be an anachronism, a nuisance."[66] If Social-Democrats were to tell him they know this at least as well as he does, Kropotkine would reply that possibly they do, but that then they will not draw a logical conclusion from these premises. He, Kropotkine, is your real logician. Since the political constitution of every country is determined by its economic condition, he argues, the political action of Socialists is absolute nonsense. "To seek to attain Socialism or even (!) an agrarian revolution by means of a political revolution, is the merest Utopia, because the whole of history shows us that political changes flow from the great economic revolutions, and not _vice versâ_."[67] Could the best geometrician in the world ever produce anything more exact than this demonstration? Basing his argument upon this impregnable foundation, Kropotkine advises the Russian revolutionists to give up their political struggle against Tzarism. They must follow an "immediately economic" end. "The emancipation of the Russian peasants from the yoke of serfdom that has until now weighed upon them, is therefore the first task of the Russian revolutionist. In working along these lines he directly and immediately works for the good of the people ... and he moreover prepares for the weakening of the centralised power of the State and for its limitation."[68] Thus the emancipation of the peasants will have prepared the way for the weakening of Russian Tzarism. But how to emancipate the peasants before overthrowing Tzarism? Absolute mystery! Such an emancipation would be a veritable "witchcraft." Old Liscow was right when he said, "It is easier and more natural to write with the fingers than with the head." However this may be, the whole political action of the working-class must be summed up in these few words: "No politics! Long live the purely economic struggle!" This is Bakounism, but perfected Bakounism. Bakounine himself urged the workers to fight for a reduction of the hours of labour, and higher wages. The Anarchist-Communists of our day seek to "make the workers understand that they have nothing to gain from such child's play as this, and that society can only be transformed by destroying the institutions which govern it."[69] The raising of wages is also useless. "North America and South America, are they not there to prove to us that whenever the worker has succeeded in getting higher wages, the prices of articles of consumption have increased proportionately, and that where he has succeeded in getting 20 francs a day for his wages, he needs 25 to be able to live according to the standard of the better class workman, so that he is always below the average?"[70] The reduction of the hours of labour is at any rate superfluous since capital will always make it up by a "systematic intensification of labour by means of improved machinery. Marx himself has demonstrated this as clearly as possible."[71] We know, thanks to Kropotkine, that the Anarchist ideal has a double origin. And all the Anarchist "demonstrations" also have a double origin. On the one hand they are drawn from the vulgar hand books of political economy, written by the most vulgar of bourgeois economists, _e.g._, Grave's dissertation upon wages, which Bastiat would have applauded enthusiastically. On the other hand, the "companions," remembering the somewhat "Communist" origin of their ideal, turn to Marx and quote, without understanding, him. Even Bakounine has been "sophisticated" by Marxism. The latter-day Anarchists, with Kropotkine at their head, have been even more sophisticated. The ignorance of Grave, "the profound thinker," is very remarkable in general, but it exceeds the bounds of all probability in matters of political economy. Here it is, only equalled by that of the learned geologist Kropotkine, who makes the most monstrous statements whenever he touches upon an economic question. We regret that space will not allow us to amuse the reader with some samples of Anarchist economics. They must content themselves with what Kropotkine has taught them about Marx's "surplus-value." All this would be very ridiculous, if it were not too sad, as the Russian poet Lermontoff says. And it is sad indeed. Whenever the proletariat makes an attempt to somewhat ameliorate its economic position, "large-hearted people," vowing they love the proletariat most tenderly, rush in from all points of the compass, and depending on their halting syllogisms, put spokes into the wheel of the movement, do their utmost to prove that the movement is useless. We have had an example of this with regard to the eight hours day, which the Anarchists combated, whenever they could, with a zeal worthy of a better cause. When the proletariat takes no notice of this, and pursues its "immediately economic" aims undisturbed--as it has the fortunate habit of doing--the same "large-hearted people" re-appear upon the scene armed with bombs, and provide the government with the desired and sought for pretext for attacking the proletariat. We have seen this at Paris on May 1, 1890; we have seen it often during strikes. Fine fellows these "large-hearted men!" And to think that among the workers themselves there are men simple enough to consider as their friends, these personages who are, in reality, the most dangerous enemies of their cause! An Anarchist will have nothing to do with "parliamentarism," since it only lulls the proletariat to sleep. He will none of "reforms," since reforms are but so many compromises with the possessing classes. He wants the revolution, a "full, complete, immediate, and immediately economic" revolution. To attain this end he arms himself with a saucepan full of explosive materials, and throws it amongst the public in a theatre or a café. He declares this is the "revolution." For our own part it seems to us nothing but "immediate" madness. It goes without saying that the bourgeois governments, whilst inveighing against the authors of these attempts, cannot but congratulate themselves upon these tactics. "Society is in danger!" _Caveant consules!_ And the police "consuls" become active, and public opinion applauds all the reactionary measures resorted to by ministers in order to "save society." "The terrorist saviours of society in uniform, to gain the respect of the Philistine masses must appear with the halo of true sons of 'holy order,' the daughter of Heaven rich in blessings, and to this halo the school-boy attempts of these Terrorists help them. Such a silly fool, lost in his fantastical imaginings, does not even see that he is only a puppet, whose strings are pulled by a cleverer one in the Terrorist wings; he does not see that the fear and terror he causes only serve to so deaden all the senses of the Philistine crowd, that it shouts approval of every massacre that clears the road for reaction."[72] Napoleon III. already indulged from time to time in an "outrage" in order once again to save society menaced by the enemies of order. The foul admissions of Andrieux,[73] the acts and deeds of the German and Austrian _agents provocateurs_, the recent revelations as to the attempt against the Madrid Parliament, etc., prove abundantly that the present Governments profit enormously by the tactics of the "companions," and that the work of the Terrorists in uniform would be much more difficult if the Anarchists were not so eager to help in it. Thus it is that spies of the vilest kind, like Joseph Peukert, for long years figured as shining lights of Anarchism, translating into German the works of foreign Anarchists; thus it is that the French bourgeois and priests directly subvention the "companions," and that the law-and-order ministry does everything in its power to throw a veil over these shady machinations. And so, too, in the name of the "immediate revolution," the Anarchists become the precious pillars of bourgeois society, inasmuch as they furnish the _raison d'être_ for the most immediately reactionary policy. Thus the reactionary and Conservative press has always shown a hardly disguised sympathy for the Anarchists, and has regretted that the Socialists, conscious of their end and aim, will have nothing to do with them. "They drive them away like poor dogs," pitifully exclaims the Paris _Figaro, à propos_ of the expulsion of the Anarchists from the Zurich Congress.[74] An Anarchist is a man who--when he is not a police agent--is fated always and everywhere to attain the opposite of that which he attempts to achieve. "To send working men to a Parliament," said Bordat, before the Lyons tribunal in 1893, "is to act like a mother who would take her daughter to a brothel." Thus it is also in the name of _morality_ that the Anarchists repudiate political action. But what is the outcome of their fear of parliamentary corruption? The glorification of theft, ("Put money in thy purse," wrote Most in his _Freiheit_, already in 1880), the exploits of the Duvals and Ravachols, who in the name of the "cause" commit the most vulgar and disgusting crimes. The Russian writer, _Herzen_, relates somewhere how on arriving at some small Italian town, he met only priests and bandits, and was greatly perplexed, being unable to decide which were the priests and which the bandits. And this is the position of every impartial person to-day; for how are you going to divine where the "companion" ends and the bandit begins? The Anarchists themselves are not always sure, as was proved by the controversy caused in their ranks by the Ravachol affair. Thus the better among them, those whose honesty is absolutely unquestionable, constantly fluctuate in their views of the "propaganda of deed." "Condemn the propaganda of deed?" says Elysée Reclus. "But what is this propaganda except the preaching of well-doing and love of humanity by example? Those who call the "propaganda of deed" acts of violence prove that they have not understood the meaning of this expression. The Anarchist who understands his part, instead of massacring somebody or other, will exclusively strive to bring this person round to his opinions, and to make of him an adept who, in his turn, will make "propaganda of deed" by showing himself good and just to all those whom he may meet."[75] We will not ask what is left of the Anarchist who has divorced himself from the tactics of "deeds." We only ask the reader to consider the following lines: "The editor of the _Sempre Avanti_ wrote to Elysée Reclus asking him for his true opinion of Ravachol. 'I admire his courage, his goodness of heart, his greatness of soul, the generosity with which he pardons his enemies, or rather his betrayers. I hardly know of any men who have surpassed him in nobleness of conduct. I reserve the question as to how far it is always desirable to push to extremities one's own right, and whether other considerations moved by a spirit of human solidarity ought not to prevail. Still I am none the less one of those who recognise in Ravachol a hero of a magnanimity but little common.'"[76] This does not at all fit in with the declaration quoted above, and it proves irrefutably that citizen Reclus fluctuates, that he does not know exactly where his "companion" ends and the bandit begins. The problem is the more difficult to solve that there are a good many individuals who are at the same time "bandits" and Anarchists. Ravachol was no exception. At the house of the Anarchists, Oritz and Chiericotti, recently arrested at Paris, an enormous mass of stolen goods were found. Nor is it only in France that you have the combination of these two apparently different trades. It will suffice to remind the reader of the Austrians Kammerer and Stellmacher. Kropotkine would have us believe that Anarchist morality, a morality free from all obligations or sanction, opposed to all utilitarian calculations, is the same as the natural morality of the people, "the morality from the habit of well doing."[77] The morality of the Anarchists is that of persons who look upon all human action from the abstract point of view of the unlimited rights of the individual, and who, in the name of these rights, pass a verdict of "Not guilty" on the most atrocious deeds, the most revolting arbitrary acts. "What matter the victims," exclaimed the Anarchist poet Laurent Tailhade, on the very evening of Vaillant's outrage, at the banquet of the "Plume" Society, "provided the gesture is beautiful?" Tailhade is a decadent, who, because he is _blasé_ has the courage of his Anarchist opinions. In fact the Anarchists combat democracy because democracy, according to them, is nothing but the tyranny of the majority as against the minority. The majority has no right to impose its wishes upon the minority. But if this is so, in the name of what moral principle do the Anarchists revolt against the bourgeoisie? Because the bourgeoisie are not a minority? Or because they do not do what they "will" to do? "Do as thou would'st," proclaim the Anarchists. The bourgeoisie "want" to exploit the proletariat, and do it remarkably well. They thus follow the Anarchist precept, and the "companions" are very wrong to complain of their conduct. They become altogether ridiculous when they combat the bourgeoisie in the name of their victims. "What matters the death of vague human beings"--continues the Anarchist logician Tailhade--"if thereby the individual affirms himself?" Here we have the true morality of the Anarchists; it is also that of the crowned heads. _Sic volo, sic jubeo!_[78] _Thus, in the name of the revolution, the Anarchists serve the cause of reaction; in the name of morality they approve the most immoral acts; in the name of individual liberty they trample under foot all the rights of their fellows._ And this is why the whole Anarchist doctrine founders upon its own logic. If any maniac may, because he "wants" to, kill as many men as he likes, society, composed of an immense number of individuals, may certainly bring him to his senses, not because it is its caprice, but because it is its duty, because such is the _conditio sine quâ non_ of its existence. FOOTNOTES: [64] In their dreams of riots and even of the Revolution, the Anarchists, burn, with real passion and delight, all title-deeds of property, and all governmental documents. It is Kropotkine especially who attributes immense importance to these _auto-da-fe_. Really, one would think him a rebellious civil servant. [65] Republished in the _Peuple_ of Lyons, December 20, 1893. [66] "Anarchist Communism," p. 8. [67] Kropotkine's preface to the Russian edition of Bakounine's pamphlet "La Commune de Paris et la notion de l'Etat." Geneva, 1892, p. 5. [68] Ibid., same page. [69] J. Grave "La Société Mourante et L'Anarchie," p. 253. [70] Ibid., p. 249. [71] Ibid., pp. 250-251. [72] _Vorwärts_, January 23, 1894. [73] "The companions were looking for someone to advance funds, but infamous capital did not seem in a hurry to reply to their appeal. I urged on infamous capital, and succeeded in persuading it that it was to its own interest to facilitate the publication of an Anarchist paper.... But don't imagine that I with frank brutality offered the Anarchists the encouragement of the Prefect of police. I sent a well-dressed bourgeois to one of the most active and intelligent of them. He explained that having made a fortune in the druggist line, he wanted to devote a part of his income to advancing the Socialist propaganda. This bourgeois, anxious to be devoured, inspired the companions with no suspicion. Through his hands I placed the caution-money" [caution-money has to be deposited before starting a paper in France] "in the coffers of the State, and the journal, _La Révolution Sociale_, made its appearance. It was a weekly paper, my druggist's generosity not extending to the expenses of a daily."--"Souvenirs d'un Préfet de Police." "Memoirs of a Prefect of Police." By J. Andrieux. (Jules Rouff et Cie, Paris, 1885.) Vol. I., p. 337, etc. [74] In passing, we may remark that it is in the name of freedom of speech that the Anarchists claim to be admitted to Socialist Congresses. Yet this is the opinion of the French official journal of the Anarchists upon these Congresses:--"The Anarchists may congratulate themselves that some of their number attended the Troyes Congress. Absurd, motiveless, and senseless as an Anarchist Congress would be, just as logical is it to take advantage of Socialist Congresses in order to develop our ideas there."--_La Révolte_, 6-12 January, 1889. May not we also, in the name of freedom, ask the "companions" to leave us alone? [75] See in the _L'Etudiant Socialiste_ of Brussels, No. 6 (1894) the republication of the declaration made by Elysée Reclus, to a "correspondent" who had questioned him upon the Anarchist attempts. [76] The _Twentieth Century_, a weekly Radical magazine, New York, September, 1892, p. 15. [77] See Kropotkine's _Anarchist Communism_, pp. 34-35; also his _Anarchie dans l'Evolution Socialiste_, pp. 24-25, and many passages in his _Morale Anarchiste_. [78] The papers have just announced that Tailhade was wounded by an explosion at the Restaurant Foyot. The telegram (_La Tribune de Genève_, 5th April, 1894) adds--"M. Tailhade is constantly protesting against the Anarchist theories he is credited with. One of the house surgeons, having reminded him of his article and the famous phrase quoted above, M. Tailhade remained silent, and asked for chloral to alleviate his pain." CHAPTER IX--CONCLUSION THE BOURGEOISIE, ANARCHISM, AND SOCIALISM The "father of Anarchy," the "immortal" Proudhon, bitterly mocked at those people for whom the revolution consisted of acts of violence, the exchange of blows, the shedding of blood. The descendants of the "father," the modern Anarchists, understand by revolution only this brutally childish method. Everything that is not violence is a betrayal of the cause, a foul compromise with "authority."[79] The scared bourgeoisie does not know what to do against them. In the domain of theory they are absolutely impotent with regard to the Anarchists, who are their own _enfants terribles_. The bourgeoisie was the first to propagate the theory of _laissez faire_, of dishevelled individualism. Their most eminent philosopher of to-day, Herbert Spencer, is nothing but a conservative Anarchist. The "companions" are active and zealous persons, who carry the bourgeois reasoning to its logical conclusion. The magistrates of the French bourgeois Republic have condemned Grave to prison, and his book, "La Société Mourante et l'Anarchie" to destruction. The bourgeois men of letters declare this puerile book a profound work, and its author a man of rare intellect. And not only has the bourgeoisie[80] no theoretical weapons with which to combat the Anarchists; they see their young folk enamoured of the Anarchist doctrine. In this society, satiated and rotten to the marrow of its bones, where all faiths are long since dead, where all sincere opinions appear ridiculous, in this _monde où l'on s'ennui_, where after having exhausted all forms of enjoyment they no longer know in what new fancy, in what fresh excess to seek novel sensations, there are people who lend a willing ear to the song of the Anarchist siren. Amongst the Paris "companions" there are already not a few men quite _comme il faut_, men about town who, as the French writer, Raoul Allier, says, wear nothing less than patent leather shoes, and put a green carnation in their button-holes before they go to meetings. Decadent writers and artists are converted to Anarchism and propagate its theories in reviews like the _Mercure de France_, _La Plume_, etc. And this is comprehensible enough. One might wonder indeed if Anarchism, an essentially bourgeois doctrine, had not found adepts among the French bourgeoisie, the most _blasée_ of all bourgeoisies. By taking possession of the Anarchist doctrine, the decadent, _fin-de-siècle_ writers restore to it its true character of bourgeois individualism. If Kropotkine and Reclus speak in the name of the worker, oppressed by the capitalist, _La Plume_ and the _Mercure de France_ speak in the name of the _individual_ who is seeking to shake off all the trammels of society in order that he may at last do freely what he "wants" to. Thus Anarchism comes back to its starting-point. Stirner said: "Nothing for me goes beyond myself." Laurent Tailhade says: "What matters the death of vague human beings, if thereby the individual affirms himself." The bourgeoisie no longer knows where to turn. "I who have fought so much for Positivism," moans Emile Zola, "well, yes! after thirty years of this struggle, I feel my convictions are shaken. Religious faith would have prevented such theories from being propagated; but has it not almost disappeared to-day? Who will give us a new ideal?" Alas, gentlemen, there is no ideal for walking corpses such as you! You will try everything. You will become Buddhists, Druids, Sârs, Chaldeans, Occultists, Magi, Theosophists, or Anarchists, whichever you prefer--and yet you will remain what you are now--beings without faith or principle, bags, emptied by history. The ideal of the bourgeois has lived. For ourselves, Social-Democrats, we have nothing to fear from the Anarchist propaganda. The child of the bourgeoisie, Anarchism, will never have any serious influence upon the proletariat. If among the Anarchists there are workmen who sincerely desire the good of their class, and who sacrifice themselves to what they believe to be the good cause, it is only thanks to a misunderstanding that they find themselves in this camp. They only know the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat under the form which the Anarchists are trying to give it. When more enlightened they will come to us. Here is an example to prove this. During the trial of the Anarchists at Lyons in 1883, the working man Desgranges related how he had become an Anarchist, he who had formerly taken part in the political movement, and had even been elected a municipal councillor at Villefranche in November, 1879. "In 1881, in the month of September, when the dyers' strike broke out at Villefranche, I was elected secretary of the strike committee, and it was during this memorable event ... that I became convinced of the necessity of suppressing authority, for authority spells despotism. During this strike, when the employers refused to discuss the matter with the workers, what did the prefectural and communal administrations do to settle the dispute? Fifty gendarmes, with sword in hand, were told off to settle the question. That is what is called the pacific means employed by Governments. It was then, at the end of this strike, that some working men, myself among the number, understood the necessity of seriously studying economic questions, and, in order to do so, we agreed to meet in the evening to study together."[81] It is hardly necessary to add that this group became Anarchist. That is how the trick is done. A working man, active and intelligent, supports the programme of one or the other bourgeois party. The bourgeois talk about the well-being of the people, the workers, but betray them on the first opportunity. The working man who has believed in the sincerity of these persons is indignant, wants to separate from them, and decides to study seriously "economic questions." An Anarchist comes along, and reminding him of the treachery of the bourgeois, and the sabres of the gendarmes, assures him that the political struggle is nothing but bourgeois nonsense, and that in order to emancipate the workers political action must be given up, making the destruction of the State the final aim. The working man who was only beginning to study the situation thinks the "companion" is right, and so he becomes a convinced and devoted Anarchist! What would happen, if pursuing his studies of the social question further, he had understood that the "companion" was a pretentious ignoramus, that he talked twaddle, that his "Ideal" is a delusion and a snare, that outside bourgeois politics there is, opposed to these, the political action of the proletariat, which will put an end to the very existence of capitalist society? He would have become a Social-Democrat. Thus the more widely our ideas become known among the working classes, and they are thus becoming more and more widely known, the less will proletarians be inclined to follow the Anarchist. Anarchism, with the exception of its "learned" housebreakers, will more and more transform itself into a kind of bourgeois sport, for the purpose of providing sensations for "individuals" who have indulged too freely in the pleasures of the world, the flesh and the devil. And when the proletariat are masters of the situation, they will only need to look at the "companions," and even the "finest" of them will be silenced; they will only have to breathe to disperse all the Anarchist dust to the winds of heaven. FOOTNOTES: [79] It is true that men like Reclus do not always approve of such notions of the revolution. But again we ask, what is left of the Anarchist when once he rejects the "propaganda of deed"? A sentimental, visionary bourgeois--nothing more. [80] In order to obtain some idea of the weakness of the bourgeois theorists and politicians in their struggle against the Anarchists, it suffices to read the articles of C. Lombroso and A. Bérard in the _Revue des Revues_, 15th February, 1894, or the article of J. Bourdeau in the _Revue de Paris_, 15th March, 1894. The latter can only appeal to "human nature" which, he thinks, "will not be changed through the pamphlets of Kropotkine and the bombs of Ravachol." [81] See report of the Anarchist trial before the Correctional Police and the Court of Appeal of Lyons; Lyons, 1883, pp. 90-91. 
20816	----	[TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE: Footnotes have been corrected and moved to the end of chapters.] SOCIALISM AS IT IS A SURVEY OF THE WORLD-WIDE REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT BY WILLIAM ENGLISH WALLING New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1918 _All rights reserved_ COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published April, 1912. Reprinted October, 1912; January, 1915. Norwood Press J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. PREFACE The only Socialism of interest to practical persons is the Socialism of the organized Socialist movement. Yet the public cannot be expected to believe what an organization says about its own character or aims. It is to be rightly understood only _through its acts_. Fortunately the Socialists' acts are articulate; every party decision of practical importance has been reached after long and earnest discussion in party congresses and press. And wherever the party's position has become of practical import to those outside the movement, it has been subjected to a destructive criticism that has forced Socialists from explanations that were sometimes imaginary or theoretical to a clear recognition and frank statement of their true position. To know and understand Socialism as it is, we must lay aside both the claims of Socialists and the attacks of their opponents and confine ourselves to the concrete activities of Socialist organizations, the grounds on which their decisions have been reached, and the reasons by which they are ultimately defended. Writers on Socialism, as a rule, have either left their statements of the Socialist position unsupported, or have based them exclusively on Socialist authorities, Marx, Engels, and Lasalle, whose chief writings are now half a century old. The existence to-day of a well-developed movement, many-sided and world-wide, makes it possible for a writer to rely neither on his personal experience and opinion nor on the old and familiar, if still little understood, theories. I have based my account either on the acts of Socialist organizations and of parties and governments with which they are in conflict, or on those responsible declarations of representative statesmen, economists, writers, and editors which are not mere theories, but the actual material of present-day polities,--though among these living forces, it must be said, are to be found also some of the teachings of the great Socialists of the past. It will be noticed that the numerous quotations from Socialists and others are not given academically, in support of the writer's conclusions, but with the purpose of reproducing with the greatest possible accuracy the exact views of the writer or speaker quoted. I am aware that accuracy is not to be secured by quotation alone, but depends also on the choice of the passages to be reproduced and the use made of them. I have therefore striven conscientiously to give, as far as space allows, the leading and central ideas of the persons most frequently quoted, and not their more hasty, extreme, and less representative expressions. I have given approximately equal attention to the German, British, and American situations, considerable but somewhat less space to those of France and Australia, and only a few pages to Italy and Belgium. This allotment of space corresponds somewhat roughly to the relative importance of these countries in the international movement. As my idea has been not to describe, but to interpret, I have laid additional weight on the first five countries named, on the ground that each has developed a distinct type of labor movement. As I am concerned with national parties and labor organizations only as parts of the international movement, however, I have avoided, wherever possible, all separate treatment and all discussion of features that are to be found only in one country. The book is divided into three parts; the first deals with the external environment out of which Socialism is growing and by which it is being shaped, the second with the internal struggles by which it is shaping and defining itself, the third with the reaction of the movement on its environment. I first differentiate Socialism from other movements that seem to resemble it either in their phrases or their programs of reform, then give an account of the movement from within, without attempting to show unity where it does not exist, or disguising the fact that some of its factions are essentially anti-Socialist rather than Socialist, and finally, show how all distinctively Socialist activities lead directly to a revolutionary outcome. I am indebted to numerous persons, Socialists and anti-Socialists, who during the twelve years in which I have been gathering material--in nearly all the countries mentioned--have assisted me in my work. But I must make special mention of the very careful reading of the whole manuscript by Mr. J. G. Phelps Stokes, and of the numerous and vital changes made at his suggestion. CONTENTS PAGE PREFACE v INTRODUCTION ix PART I "STATE SOCIALISM" AND AFTER CHAPTER I. THE CAPITALIST REFORM PROGRAM 1 II. THE NEW CAPITALISM 16 III. THE POLITICS OF THE NEW CAPITALISM 32 IV. "STATE SOCIALISM" AND LABOR 46 V. COMPULSORY ARBITRATION 66 VI. AGRARIAN "STATE SOCIALISM" IN AUSTRALASIA 85 VII. "EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY" 97 VIII. THE "FIRST STEP" TOWARDS SOCIALISM 108 PART II THE POLITICS OF SOCIALISM I. "STATE SOCIALISM" WITHIN THE MOVEMENT 117 II. "REFORMISM" IN FRANCE, ITALY, AND BELGIUM 131 III. "LABORISM" IN GREAT BRITAIN 146 IV. "REFORMISM" IN THE UNITED STATES 175 V. REFORM BY MENACE OF REVOLUTION 210 VI. REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS 231 VII. THE REVOLUTIONARY TREND 248 PART III SOCIALISM IN ACTION I. SOCIALISM AND THE "CLASS STRUGGLE" 276 II. THE AGRICULTURAL CLASSES AND THE LAND QUESTION 300 III. SOCIALISM AND THE "WORKING CLASS" 324 IV. SOCIALISM AND LABOR UNIONS 334 V. SYNDICALISM; SOCIALISM THROUGH DIRECT ACTION OF LABOR UNIONS 354 VI. THE "GENERAL STRIKE" 387 VII. REVOLUTION IN DEFENSE OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT 401 VIII. POLITICAL AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION 416 IX. THE TRANSITION TO SOCIALISM 426 NOTES 437 INDEX 447 INTRODUCTION The only possible definition of Socialism is the Socialist movement. Karl Marx wrote in 1875 at the time of the Gotha Convention, where the present German party was founded, that "every step of the real movement is of more importance than a dozen programs," while Wilhelm Liebknecht said, "Marx is dear to me, but the party is dearer."[1] What was this movement that the great theorist put above theory and his leading disciple valued above his master? What Marx and Liebknecht had in mind was a _social class_ which they saw springing up all over the world with common characteristics and common problems--a class which they felt must and would be organized into a movement to gain control of society. Fifty years before it had been nothing, and they had seen it in their lifetime coming to preponderate numerically in Great Britain as it was sure to preponderate in other countries; and it seemed only a question of time before the practically propertyless employees of modern industry would dominate the world and build up a new society. This class would be politically and economically organized, and when its organization and numbers were sufficient it would take governments out of the hands of the old aristocratic and plutocratic rulers and transform them into the instruments of a new civilization. This is what Marx and Liebknecht meant by the "party" and the "movement." From the first the new class had been in conflict with employers and governments, and these struggles had been steadily growing in scope and intensity. Marx was not so much interested in the immediate objects of such conflicts as in the struggle itself. "The real fruit of their victory," he said, "lies, not in immediate results, but in the ever expanding union of the workers."[2] As the struggle evolved and became better organized, it tended more and more definitely and irresistibly towards a certain goal, whether the workers were yet aware of it or not. If, therefore, we Socialists participate in the real struggles of politics, Marx said of himself and his associates (in 1844, at the very outset of his career), "we expose new principles to the world out of the principles of the world itself.... We only explain to it the real object for which it struggles."[3] But the public still fails, in spite of the phenomenal and continued growth of the Socialist movement in all modern countries, to grasp the first principle on which it is based. "Socialism has many phases," says a typical editorial in the _Independent_. "It is a political party, an economic creed, a religion, and a stage of history. It is world-wide, vigorous, and growing. No man can tell what its future will be. Its philosophy is being studied by the greatest minds of the world, and it deserves study because it promises a better, a safer, and a fairer life to the masses. But as yet it is only a theory, a hypothesis. It has never been tried _in toto_.... It has succeeded only where it has allied itself with liberal and opportunist rather than radical policies."[4] As the Socialist movement has nowhere achieved political power, obviously it can neither claim political success or be accused of political failure. Nor does this fact leave Socialism as a mere theory, in view of its admitted and highly significant success in organizing and educating the masses in many countries and animating them with the purpose of controlling industry and government. Mr. John Graham Brooks, in the _Atlantic Monthly_, gives us another equally typical variation of the same fundamental misunderstanding. "Never a theory of social reconstruction was spun in the gray mists of the mind," says Mr. Brooks, "that was not profoundly modified when applied to life. Socialism as a theory is already touching life at a hundred points, and among many peoples--Socialism has been a faith. It is slowly becoming scientific, in a sense and to the extent that it submits its claims to the comparative tests of experience."[5] Undoubtedly Socialist theories have been spun both within and without the movement, and to many Socialism has been a faith. But neither faith nor theory has had much to do with the great reality that is now overshadowing all others in the public mind; namely, the existence of a Socialist movement. The Socialism of this movement has never consisted in ready-made formulas which were later subjected to "the comparative test of experience"; it has always grown out of the experience of the movement in the first instance. Another typical article, in _Collier's Weekly_, admits that Socialism is now a movement. But as the writer, like so many others, conceives of Socialism as having been, in its inception, a "theory," a "doctrine" promoted by "Utopian dreaming," "incendiary rhetoric," an "anti-civic jargon," he naturally views it with little real sympathy and understanding even in its present form. The same Socialism that was accused of all this narrowness is suddenly and completely transformed into a movement of such breadth that it has neither a new message nor even a separate existence. "It is merely a new offshoot of a very old faith indeed," we are now told, "the ideal of the altruistic dreamers of all ages, an awakened sense of brotherhood in men. Stripped of all its husks, Socialism stands for no other aim than that. All its other teachings, the public ownership of the land, for example, the nationalization of the means of production and distribution, the economic emancipation of woman, have only program values, as they lead to that one end. Whether, so stripped, it ceases to be Socialism and becomes merely the advance guard of the world-wide liberal movement is not, of course, a question of more than academic interest."[6] The moment it can no longer be denied that Socialism is a movement, it is at once confused with other movements to which it is fundamentally and irreconcilably opposed. Surely this is no mere mental error, but a deep-seated and irrepressible aversion to what is to many a disagreeable truth,--the rapid growth and development, in many countries, of political parties and labor organizations more and more seriously determined to annihilate the power of private property over industry and government. The radical misconceptions above quoted, almost universal where Socialism is still young, are by no means confined to non-Socialists. Many writers who are supposed, in some degree at least, to voice the movement, are as guilty as those who wholly repudiate it. Mr. H. G. Wells, for instance, says that Socialism is a "system of ideas," and that "Socialism and the Socialist movement are two different things."[7] If Socialism is indeed no more than a "growing realization of constructive needs in every man's mind," and if every man is more or less a Socialist, then there is certainly no need for that antagonism to employers and property owners of which Mr. Wells complains. Mr. Wells himself gives the true Socialist standpoint when he goes on to write that political parties must be held together "by interests and habits, not ideas." "Every party," he continues, "stands essentially for the interests and mental usages of some definite class or group of classes in the existing community.... No class will abolish itself, materially alter its way or life, or drastically reconstruct itself, albeit no class is indisposed to coöperate in the unlimited socialization of any other class. In that capacity of aggression upon the other classes lies the essential driving force of modern affairs."[8] The habits and interests of a large and growing part of the population in every modern country are developing a capacity for effective aggression against the class which controls industry and government. As this class will not socialize or abolish itself, the rest of the people, Socialists predict, will undertake the task. And the abolition of capitalism, they believe, will be a social revolution the like of which mankind has hitherto neither known nor been able to imagine. FOOTNOTES: [1] John Spargo, "Karl Marx," pp. 312, 331. [2] John Spargo, _op. cit._, p. 116. [3] John Spargo, _op. cit._, p. 73. [4] The _Independent_ (New York), commenting on the Socialist victory in the Milwaukee municipal elections of April, 1910. [5] "Recent Socialist Literature," by John Graham Brooks, _Atlantic Monthly_, 1910. Page 283. [6] _Collier's Weekly_, July 30, 1910. [7] H. G. Wells, "Socialism and the Family." [8] H. G. Wells, "The New Macchiavelli." SOCIALISM AS IT IS PART I "STATE SOCIALISM" AND AFTER CHAPTER I THE CAPITALIST REFORM PROGRAM Only that statesman, writer, or sociologist has the hearing of the public to-day who can bind all his proposed reforms together into some large and far-sighted plan. Mr. Roosevelt, in this new spirit, has spoken of the "social reorganization of the United States," while an article in one of the first numbers of _La Follette's Weekly_ protested against any program of reform "which fails to deal with society as a whole, which proposes to remedy certain abuses but admits its incapacity to reach and remove the roots of the other perhaps more glaring social disorders." Some of those who have best expressed the need of a general and complete social reorganization have done so in the name of Socialism. Mr. J. R. MacDonald, recently chairman of the British Labour Party, for example writes that the problem set up by the Socialists is that of "co-ordinating the forces making for a reconstruction of society and of giving them rational coherence and unity,"[9] while the organ of the middle-class Socialists of England says that their purpose is "to compel legislators to organize industry."[10] Indeed, the necessity and practicability of an orderly and systematic reorganization in industrial society has been the central idea of British Socialists from the beginning, while they have been its chief exponents in the international Socialist movement. But the idea is equally widespread outside of Socialist circles. It will be hard for British Socialists to lay an exclusive claim to this conception when comrades of such international prominence as Edward Bernstein, who holds the British view of Socialism, assert that Socialism itself is nothing more than "organizing Liberalism."[11] Whether Socialists were the first to promote the new political philosophy or not, it is undeniable that the Radicals and Liberals of Great Britain and other countries have now taken it up and are making it their own. Mr. Winston Churchill, while Chairman of the Board of Trade, and Mr. Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer, members of the British Cabinet, leaders of the Liberal Party, recognize that the movement among governments towards a conscious _reorganization of industry_ is general and demands that Great Britain should keep up with other countries. "Look at our neighbor and friendly rival, Germany," said Mr. Churchill recently. "I see that great State organized for peace and organized for war, to a degree to which we cannot pretend.... A more scientific, a more elaborate, a more comprehensive social organization is indispensable to our country if we are to surmount the trials and stresses which the future years will bring. It is this organization that the policy of the Budget will create."[12] Advanced and radical reformers of the new type all over the world, those who put forward a general plan of reform and wish to go to the common roots of our social evils, demand, first of all, _reorganization_. But how is such a reorganization to be worked out? The general programs have in every country many features in common. To see what this common basis is, let us look at the generalizations of some of the leading reformers. One of the most scientific and "constructive" is Mr. Sidney Webb. No one has so thoroughly mastered the history of trade unionism, and no one has done more to promote "municipal Socialism" in England, both in theory and in practice, for he has been one of the leaders of the energetic and progressive London County council from the beginning of the present reform period. He has also been one of the chief organizers of the more or less Socialistic Fabian Society, which has done more towards popularizing social reform in England than any other single educative force, besides sending into all the corners of the world a new and rounded theory of social reform--the work for the most part of Sidney Webb, Bernard Shaw, and a few others. Mr. Webb has given us several excellent phrases which will aid us to sum up the typical social reformers' philosophy in a few words. He insists that what every country requires, and especially Great Britain, is to center its attention on the promotion of the "national efficiency." This refers largely to securing a businesslike and economic administration of the existing government functions. But it requires also that _all_ the industries and economic activities of the country should be considered the business of the nation, that the industrial functions of the government should be extended, and that, even from the business point of view, the chief purpose of government should be to supervise economic development. To bring about the maximum of efficiency in production would require, in Mr. Webb's opinion and that of the overwhelming majority of reformers everywhere, a vast extension of government activities, including not only the nationalization and municipalization of many industries and services, but also that the individual workman or citizen be dealt with as the chief business asset of the nation and that wholesale public expenditures be entered into to develop his value. Mr. Webb does not think that this policy is necessarily Socialistic, for, as he very wisely remarks, "the necessary basis of society, whether the superstructure be collectivist or individualist, is the same." Mr. Wells in his "New Worlds for Old" also claims that the new policy of having the State do everything that can promote industrial efficiency (which, unlike Mr. Webb, he persists in calling Socialism) is to the interest of the business man. "And does the honest and capable business man stand to lose or gain by the coming of such a Socialist government?" he asks. "I submit that on the whole he stands to gain.... "Under Socialist government such as is quite possible in England at the present time:-- "He will be restricted from methods of production and sale that are socially mischievous. "He will pay higher wages. "He will pay a large proportion of his rent-rate outgoings to the State and Municipality, and less to the landlord. Ultimately he will pay it all to the State or Municipality, and as a voter help to determine how it shall be spent, and the landlord will become a government stockholder. Practically he will get his rent returned to him in public service. "He will speedily begin to get better-educated, better-fed, and better-trained workers, so that he will get money value for the higher wages he pays. "He will get a regular, safe, cheap supply of power and material. He will get cheaper and more efficient internal and external transit. "He will be under an organized scientific State, which will naturally pursue a vigorous scientific collective policy in support of the national trade. "He will be less of an adventurer and more of a citizen."[13] Mr. Churchill while denying any sympathy for Socialism, as both he and the majority of Socialists understand it, frankly avows himself a collectivist. "The whole tendency of civilization," he says, "is towards the multiplication of the collective functions of society. The ever growing complications of civilizations create for us new services which have to be undertaken by the State, and create for us an expansion of the existing services. There is a growing feeling, which I entirely share, against allowing those services which are in the nature of monopolies to pass into private hands. [Mr. Churchill has expressed the regret that the railways are not in the hands of the State.] There is a pretty steady determination, which I am convinced will become effective in the present Parliament to intercept _all_ future unearned increment, which may arise from the increase in the speculative value of the land."[14] (Italics mine.) Mr. Churchill's declared intention ultimately "to intercept _all_ future unearned increment" of the land is certainly a tremendous step towards collectivism, as it would ultimately involve the nationalization of perhaps a third of the total wealth of society. With railways and monopolies of all kinds also in government hands, a very large part of the industrial capital of the country would be owned by the State, and, though all agricultural capital, and therefore the larger part of the total, remained in private hands, we are certainly justified in calling such a state of society _capitalist collectivism_. But not one of the elements of this collectivism is a novelty. Railroads are owned by governments in most countries, and monopolies often are. The partial appropriation of the "unearned increment" is by no means new, since a similar policy is being adopted in Germany at the present moment, and is favored not by the radicals alone, but by the most conservative forces in the country; namely, the party of landed Prussian nobility. Count Posadovsky, a former minister, has written a pamphlet in which he urges that the State should buy up the land in and about the cities, and also that it should fix a definite limit beyond which land values must not rise. Nearly all the chief cities of Prussia, more than a hundred, are enforcing such a tax in a moderate form, and the conservatives in the Reichstag proposed that the national government should be given a right to tax in the same field. Their bill was enacted, and, in the second half of 1911, the German government, it was estimated, would raise over $3,000,000 by this tax, and in 1912 it is expected to give $5,000,000. This tax, which is collected when land changes hands by sale or exchanges, rises gradually to 30 per cent when the increase has been 290 per cent or more. Of course this scale is likely to be still further raised and to be made more steep as the tax becomes more and more popular. Mr. Churchill's defense of the new policy of the British government is as significant as the new laws it has enacted:-- "You may say that unearned increment of the land," he says, "is on all-fours with the profit gathered by one of those American speculators who engineer a corner in corn, or meat, or cotton, or some other vital commodity, and that _the unearned increment in land is reaped by the land monopolist in exact proportion, not to the service but to the disservice done_. It is monopoly which is the keynote; and where monopoly prevails, the greater the injury to society the greater the reward of the monopolist will be.... "Every form of enterprise, every step in material progress, is only undertaken after the land monopolist has skimmed the cream off for himself, and every where to-day the man, or the public body, who wishes to put land to its highest use is forced to pay a preliminary fine in land values to the man who is putting it to an inferior use, and in some cases to no use at all.... _If there is a rise in wages, rents are able to move forward because the workers can afford to pay a little more_. If the opening of a new railway or a new tramway, or the institution of an improved service of workmen's trains, or the lowering of fares, or a new invention, or any other public convenience affords a benefit to the workers in any particular district, it becomes easier for them to live, and therefore the landlord and the ground landlord, one on top of the other, are able to charge them more for the privilege of living there." (Italics mine.)[15] But we cannot believe that the government of Great Britain, which draws so much of its support from the wealthy free trade merchants and manufacturers has been persuaded to adopt this new principle so much by the argument that a land rent weighs on the working classes, though it is true that the manufacturer may have to pay for this in higher _money_ wages, as it has by that other argument of Mr. Churchill's that it weighs directly on business. "The manufacturer proposing to start a new industry," he says, "proposing to erect a great factory offering employment to thousands of hands, is made to pay such a price for his land that the purchase price hangs around the neck of his whole business, hampering his competitive power in every market, clogging far more than any foreign tariff in his export competition; and the land values strike down through the _profits of the manufacturer_ on to the wages of the workman. The railway company wishing to build a new line finds that the price of land which yesterday was only rated at its agricultural value has risen to a prohibitive figure the moment it was known that the new line was projected; and either the railway is not built, or, if it is, it is built only on terms which largely transfer to the landowner _the profits which are due to shareholders_ and the privileges which should have accrued to the traveling public." (My italics.)[16] No doubt Mr. Churchill's failure to mention shippers was inadvertent. It was a practical application of these business principles and chiefly in the interest of the employers, manufacturers, investors, and shippers, that the State decided, as a first step, to take 20 per cent of all the increase in land values from the present date and to levy an annual tax of one fifth of one per cent on all land held for speculation, _i.e._ used neither for agricultural nor for industrial nor building purposes. The collectivist policy, that governments should undertake to reorganize industry and to develop the industrial efficiency of the population, is a relatively new one, however, and where non-Socialist Liberals and Radicals are adopting it, they do so as a rule with apologies. For while such reforms can be considered as investments which in the long run repay not only the community as a whole, but also the business interests, they involve a considerable initial cost, even beyond what can be raised by the gradual expropriation of city land rents, and the question at once arises as to who is to pay the rest of the bill. The supporter of the new reforms answers that the business interests should do so, since the development of industry, which is the object of this expenditure, is more profitable to them than to other classes. While Mr. Churchill declares that Liberalism attacks landlordism and monopoly only, and not capital itself, as Socialism does, he is at great pains to show that the cost of the elaborate program of social reform is borne not by monopolist alone, but by that larger section of the business interests vaguely known as those possessing "Special Privileges." In distributing the new taxes in the House of Commons, the question to be asked of each class of wealth is, he says, "By what process was it got?" and a distinction is to be made, not between monopoly and competitive business, but "between wealth which is the fruit of productive enterprise and industry or of individual skill, and wealth which represents the capture by individuals of socially created values."[17] "A special burden," says Mr. Churchill, "is to be laid upon certain forms of wealth which are clearly social in their origin and have not at any point been derived from a useful or productive process on the part of their possessors."[18] And since all income "derived from dividends, rent, or interest," is, according to Mr. Churchill, unearned increment, it is evident that nearly every business, all being beneficiaries, ought to share the burden of the new reforms.[19] At the same time he hastens to reassure his wealthy supporters, especially among merchants and shippers, on grounds explained below by Mr. Lloyd George that the new taxes will not rise faster than the new profits they will bring in, that they "will not appreciably affect, have not appreciably affected, the comfort, the status, or even the style of living of any class in the United Kingdom."[20] Mr. Lloyd George in proposing the so-called Socialistic Budget of 1910 reminded the representatives of the propertied interests [he might have added "in proportion to their wealth"] that the State, in which they all owned a share, should not be looked upon so narrowly as a capitalistic enterprise. They could afford to allow the State to wait longer for its returns. "A State can and ought to take a longer and a wider view of its investments," said Mr. Lloyd George, "than individuals. The resettlement of deserted and impoverished parts of its own territories may not bring to its coffers a direct return which would reimburse it fully for its expenditure; but the indirect enrichment of its resources more than compensate it for any apparent and immediate loss. The individual can rarely afford to wait; a State can; the individual must judge of the success of his enterprise by the testimony given for it by his bank book; a State keeps many ledgers, not all in ink, and when we wish to judge of the advantage derived by a country from a costly experiment, we must examine all those books before we venture to pronounce judgment.... "We want to do more in the way of developing the resources of our own country.... "The State can help by instruction, by experiment, by organization, by direction, and even, in certain cases which are outside the legitimate sphere of individual enterprise, by incurring direct responsibility. I doubt whether there is a great industrial country in the world which spends less money on work directly connected with the development of its resources than we do. Take, if you like, and purely as an illustration, one industry alone,--agriculture,--of all industries the most important for the permanent well-being of any land. Examine the budgets of foreign lands,--we have the advantage in other directions,--but examine and compare them with our own, and Honorable Members will be rather ashamed at the contrasts between the wise and lavish generosity of countries much poorer than ours and the short-sighted and niggardly parsimony with which we dole out small sums of money for the encouragement of agriculture in our country.... "We are not getting out of the land anything like what it is capable of endowing us with. Of the enormous quantity of agricultural and dairy produce, and fruit, and the timber imported into this country, a considerable portion could be raised on our own lands."[21] The proposed industrial advance is to be secured largely at the expense of capital, but for its ultimate profit. The capitalists are to pay the initial cost. Mr. Lloyd George is very careful to remind them that even if the present income tax were doubled, five years of the phenomenal yet steady growth of the income of the rich and well-to-do who pay this tax, would leave them as well off as they were before. He proposes to leave the total capital in private hands intact on the pretext that it is needed as "an available reserve for national emergencies." And as an evidence of this he refused to increase the existing rate of inheritance tax levied against the very largest estates (15 per cent on estates of more than £3,000,000). Though up to this point he graduated this tax more steeply than before, and nothing could be more widely popular than a special attack on such colossal estates, Mr. Lloyd George draws the line at 15 per cent, on the ground that a large part of the income from such estates goes into investments, and more confiscatory legislation might seriously affect the normal increase of the capital and "the available reserves of taxation" of the country.[22] Mr. Lloyd George does not fail to guarantee to capital as a whole, "honest capital," that it will suffer no loss from his reforms. "I am not one of those who advocate confiscation," he said several years ago, "and at any rate as far as I am concerned _honest_ capital, capital put in honest industries for the development of the industry, the trade, the commerce, of this country will have nothing to fear from any proposal I shall ever be responsible for submitting to the Parliament of this realm." (My italics.)[23] Mr. Lloyd George is well justified, then, in ridiculing the idea that he is waging war against industry or property or trying to destroy riches. He not only disproves this accusation by pointing to the capitalist character of his collectivist program, but boasts that the richest men in the House of Commons are on the Liberal side, together with hundreds of thousands of the men who are building up trade and business. And the attitude of the Radicals of the present British government is the same as that of capitalist collectivists elsewhere. However certain vested interests may suffer, there is nowhere any tendency to weaken capitalism as a whole. Capitalism is to be the chief beneficiary of the new movement. There are many differences of opinion, however, as to the _ultimate_ effect of the collectivist program. In Great Britain, which gives us our best illustration, there are Liberals who claim that it is Socialistic and others who deny that it has anything to do with Socialism; Conservatives who accept part of the program, and others who reject the whole as being Socialistic; Socialists, who claim that their ideas have been incorporated in the last two Budgets, and other Socialists who deny that either had anything in common with their principles. While it is certain that the present policy of the British government is by no means directed against the power or interests of the capitalist class as a whole, and in no way resembles that of the Socialists, were not Socialist arguments used to support the government's position, and may not these lead towards a Socialist policy? Certainly some of the principles laid down seem at first sight to have been Socialistic enough. For example, when Mr. Churchill said that incomes from dividends, rent, and interest are unearned, or when Mr. Lloyd George cried out: "Who is responsible for the scheme of things whereby one man is engaged through life in grinding labor to win a bare and precarious subsistence for himself, and when, at the end of his days, he claims at the hands of the community he served, a poor pension of eight pence a day, he can only get it through a revolution, and another man who does not toil receives every hour of the day, every hour of the night, whilst he slumbers, more than his poor neighbor receives in a whole year of toil? Where did the table of that law come from? Whose fingers inscribed it?"[24] Lord Rosebery has pointed to the extremely radical nature of Mr. Lloyd George's arguments. The representatives of the Government had urged, he said, that the land should be taxed without mercy:-- "(1) because its existence is not due to the owner; "(2) because it is limited in quantity; "(3) because it owes nothing of its value to anything the owner does or spends; "(4) because it is absolutely necessary for existence and production."[25] Lord Rosebery says, justly, that all these propositions except the last apply to many other forms of property than land, as, for instance, to government bonds, and that it certainly would be Socialism to attempt to confiscate these by taxation. Lord Rosebery's task would have become even easier later, when Mr. Lloyd George enlarged his attack on the landlords definitely into an attack against the idle upper classes, who with their dependents he reckoned at two million persons. He accused this class of constituting an intolerable burden on the community, said that its existence was the symptom of the disease of society, and that only bold remedies could help. The whole class of inactive capitalists he viewed as a load both on the non-capitalist, wage-earning, salaried and professional classes, and on the active capitalists. Mr. Lloyd George argues with his capitalist supporters that capitalism will be all the stronger when freed from its parasites. But Lord Rosebery could answer that the active could no more be distinguished from the passive capitalists than landowners from bondholders. An article in the world's leading Socialist newspaper, _Vorwaerts_, of Berlin, shows that many Socialists even regarded these speeches as revolutionary:-- "The Radical wing of the British Liberals," it said, "is leading the attack with ideal recklessness and lust of battle. It is conducting the agitation in language which in Germany is customarily used only by a 'red revolutionist.' If the German Junker (landlord conservative) were to read these speeches, he would swear that they were delivered by the Social Democrats of the reddest dye, so ferociously do they contrast between the rich and the poor. They appeal to the passion of the people; they exploit social distinctions in the manner best calculated to fire popular anger against the Lords. "In the heart of battle the Liberals are employing language which at other times they would have considered twice. Their words will some day be assuredly turned against them, when more than the mere Budget or the existence of the Lords is at stake. When the Liberals, allied with the conservative enemy of to-day, are fighting the working classes, the Socialists will recall this language as proof that the Liberals themselves recognize the injustice of the existing order. "Mr. Lloyd George made such a speech at Newcastle that the seeds he is planting may first bring forth Liberal fruit, but there can be no doubt that Socialism will eventually reap the harvest. His arguments must arouse the workingmen, and when they have accustomed themselves to look at things from this standpoint it is certain that once standing before the safes of the industrial capitalists they will never close their eyes." It is perhaps true that the Socialists will at some future day reap the harvest from Mr. Lloyd George's and Mr. Churchill's campaigns, though a careful analysis of the expressions of these statesmen will show that they have said nothing and done nothing in contradiction to their State-capitalistic or "State Socialist" standpoint. There is no doubt that the principle of the new taxes and the new expenditure these statesmen are introducing is radical, and that it marks a great stride towards a collectivist form of capitalism. Let us assume that development continues along the lines of their present policies. In a very few years the increased expenditure on social reform will be greater than the increased expenditure on army and navy, and the increase of direct and graduated taxes that fall on the upper classes will be greater than that of the indirect taxes that fall on the masses. We will assume even that military expenditure and indirect taxes on articles the working people consume will begin some day to decrease, while graduated taxes directed against the very wealthy and social reform expenditures rise until they quite overshadow them. There is every reason to believe that the social reformers of the British and other governments hope for such an outcome and expect it. This would be in no way inconsistent with their policy of subordinating everything, to use one of their expressions, to "that trade and commerce which constitutes the source of our wealth." For the collectivist expenditures, intended to increase the national product through governmental enterprises for the promotion of industry, and for raising the industrial efficiency of the workers, would be introduced gradually, and would soon be accompanied by results which would show that they paid financially. And finally, even if railways and monopolies were nationalized and their profits as well as _all_ the future rise in land value went to the State to be used for these purposes, as Mr. Churchill hopes, and even if a method could be found by which a large part of the income of the idle rich would be confiscated without touching the active capital of the merchant and manufacturer, the position of the latter classes, through this policy, might become still more superior relatively to that of the masses than it is at present. The industrial capitalists might even control a larger share of the national income and exercise a still more powerful influence over the State than they do to-day. The classes that the more or less collectivist budgets of 1910 and 1911 actually do favor, those whose economic and political power they actually do increase, are the small and middle-sized capitalists and even the larger capitalists other than landlords and monopolists. The great mass of income taxpayers, business men, farmers, and the professional classes with incomes from about £200 to £3000 ($1000 to $15,000) are given every encouragement, while those with somewhat larger incomes are only slightly discriminated against on the surface, in the incidence of the taxes, and not at all when we inquire into the ways in which the taxes are being expended. Certainly nothing is being done that will "appreciably affect the status or style of living of any class in the United Kingdom," or that will check materially the enormous rise of this "upper middle" class both in wealth and numbers--for the income tax payers have doubled their income in a little more than a decade, until it has reached the total of more than a billion pounds a year. And surely no tendency could be more diametrically opposed to a Socialism whose purpose it is to improve the _relative_ position of the "lower middle" and working classes. While the new reform programs of the various parties are in general agreement in all countries, in that they are all collectivist, and favor as a rule the same social classes, there is much controversy as to names, whether they shall be called Socialistic or merely radical or progressive. The question is really immaterial. "Capital, divested of its perversions, would be natural Socialism," says one of Henry George's most prominent disciples.[26] Whether the proposed reforming is done with a purified and strengthened capitalism in view, or in the name of "natural Socialism" or "State Socialism," the program itself is in every practical aspect the same. If a contrast formerly appeared to exist between "Individualist" and "State Socialist" reformers, it was never more than a contrast in theory, quickly dispelled when the time for action arrived. The individualist radical would have the State do as little as possible, but still is compelled to resort to an increase of its powers at every turn; the "State Socialist" would have the State do as much as practicable, but would still retain State action within the rigid limits imposed by the need of gaining capitalist support and the desire for immediate political success. In economic policy the Individualist is for checking the excess of monopoly and special privilege in order to allow "equal opportunity" or a free development to whatever competition or "natural Capitalism" remains, while the "State Socialist" is more concerned with protecting and promoting the natural checking of the excesses of competitive capitalism and private property that comes with "natural monopoly" and its regulation by government. The "State Socialist," however critical he is towards competition, recognizes that the first practical possibility of putting an end to its excesses comes when monopoly is already established, and when it is relatively easy for the State to step in to nationalize or municipalize; the Individualist reformer who wishes to preserve competition where practicable, at the same time recognizes that it is impossible to do so where monopolies have become firmly rooted in certain industries, and he also at this point proposes nationalization, municipalization, or thoroughgoing governmental control. Henry George himself recognizes that "State Socialism," which he called simply "Socialism," and the "natural Capitalism" he advocated, far from being contradictory, were complementary and interdependent. Mr. Louis Post says:-- "Even in the economic chapters of 'Progress and Poverty' its author saw the possibility of society's approaching the 'ideal of Jeffersonian Democracy, the promised land of Herbert Spencer, the abolition of government. But of government only as a directing and repressive power.' At the same time and in the same degree of approach, he regarded it as possible for society also to realize the dream of Socialism."[27] The following passage leaves no doubt that Mr. Post is correct, and at the same time shows in the clearest way how the two policies of reform were interwoven in Henry George's mind:-- "Government could take up itself the transmission of messages by telegraph, as well as by mail, of building and operating railroads, as well as of the opening and maintaining common roads. With the present functions so simplified and reduced, functions such as these could be assumed without danger or strain, and would be under the supervision of public attention, which is now distracted. There would be a great and increasing surplus revenue from the taxation of land values for material progress, which would go on with great accelerated rapidity, would tend constantly to increase rent. This revenue arising from the common property would be applied to the common benefit, as were the revenues of Sparta. We might not establish public tables--they would be unnecessary, but we could establish public baths, museums, libraries, gardens, lecture rooms, music and dancing halls, theaters, universities, technical schools, shooting galleries, playgrounds, gymnasiums, etc. Heat, light, and motive power, as well as water, might be conducted through our streets at public expense; our roads be lined with fruit trees; discoveries and inventors rewarded, scientific investigation supported; in a thousand ways the public revenues made to foster efforts for the public benefit. _We should reach the ideal of the Socialist_, but not through government repression. _Government would change its character, and would become the administration of a great coöperative society. It would become merely the agency by which the common property was administered for the common benefit_." (Italics mine.)[28] But the "State Socialist" and the Individualist reformer, who are often combined in one person, as in the case of Henry George, differ sharply from Socialists of the Socialist movement in aiming at a society, which, however widely government action is to be extended, is after all to remain a society of small capitalists. Professor Edward A. Ross very aptly sums up the reformer's objections to the anti-capitalist Socialists. Capitalism must be "divested of its perversions," the privately owned monopolies and their political machines, primarily for the purpose of strengthening it _against_ Socialism. "Individualism should make haste to clean the hull of the old ship for the coming great battle with the opponents of private capital...."[29] The reformers, as a rule, like Professor Ross, consciously stand for a new form of private capitalism, to be built up with the aid of the State. This is the avowed attitude of the larger part of the "progressives," "radicals," and "insurgents" of the day. The new reform programs, however radical, are aimed at regenerating capitalism. The most radical of all, that of the single taxers, who plan not only that the state shall be the sole landlord, but that the railways and the mines shall be nationalized and other public utilities municipalized, do not deny that they want to put a new life into private capitalism, and to stimulate commercial competition in the remaining fields of industry. Mr. Frederick C. Howe, for instance, predicts a revival of capitalistic enterprise, after these measures are enacted, and even looks forward to the indefinite continuation of the struggle between capital and labor.[30] FOOTNOTES: [9] The _Socialist Review_ (London), April, 1909. [10] The _New Age_ (London), Nov. 4, 1909. [11] Edward Bernstein, "Evolutionary Socialism," p. 154. [12] Winston Churchill, "Liberalism and the Social Problem," p. 345. [13] H. G. Wells, "New Worlds for Old," p. 185. [14] Winston Churchill, _op. cit._, p. 80. [15] Winston Churchill, _op. cit._, pp. 326, 327. [16] Winston Churchill, _op. cit._, pp. 326. [17] Winston Churchill, _op. cit._, p. 396. [18] Winston Churchill, _op. cit._, p. 399. [19] Winston Churchill, _op. cit._, p. 336. [20] Winston Churchill, _op. cit._, p. 339. [21] Lloyd George, "Better Times," p. 163. [22] Lloyd George, _op. cit._, pp. 94-101. [23] Lloyd George, _op. cit._, p. 58. [24] Lloyd George, _op. cit._, p. 174. [25] Lord Rosebery's Speech at Glasgow, Sept. 10, 1909. [26] Louis F. Post, "Social Service," p. 341. [27] _The Public_ (Chicago), Nov. 4, 1910. [28] Henry George, "Progress and Poverty," Book IV, p. 454. [29] Professor E. A. Ross, "Sin and Society," p. 151. [30] Frederick C. Howe, "Privilege and Democracy in America," p. 277. CHAPTER II THE NEW CAPITALISM President Taft says that if we cannot restore competition, "we must proceed to State Socialism and vest the government with power to control every business." As competition cannot be revived in industries that have been reorganized on a monopolistic basis, this is an admission that, in such industries, there is no alternative to "State Socialism." The smaller capitalists and business interests have not yet reconciled themselves, any more than President Taft, to what the Supreme Court, in the Standard Oil Case, called "the inevitable operation of economic forces," and are just beginning to see that the only way to protect the industries that remain on the competitive basis is to have the government take charge of those that have already been monopolized. But the situation in Panama and Alaska and the growing control over railroads and banks show that the United States is being swept along in the world-wide tide towards collectivism, and innumerable symptoms of change in public opinion indicate that within a few years the smaller capitalists of the United States, like those of Germany and Great Britain, will be working with the economic forces instead of trying to work against them. Monopolies, they are beginning to see, cannot be destroyed by private competition, even when it is encouraged by the legislation and the courts, and must be controlled by the government. But government regulation is no lasting condition. If investors and consumers are to be protected, wage earners will most certainly be protected also--as Mr. Roosevelt advocates. And from government control of wages, prices, and securities it is not a long step to government ownership. The actual disappearance of competition and the growing harmony of all the business interests among themselves are removing every motive for continued opposition to some form of State control,--and even the more far-sighted of the "Captains of Industry," like Judge Gary of the Steel Corporation and many others, are beginning to see how the new policy and their own plans can be made to harmonize. The "Interests" have only recently become sufficiently united, however, to make a common political effort, and it is only after mature deliberation that the more statesmanlike of the capitalists are beginning to feel confident that they have found a political plan that will succeed. As long as the business world was itself fundamentally divided, small capitalists against large, one industry against the other, and even one establishment against another in the same industry, it was impossible for the capitalists to secure any united control over the government. The lack of organization, the presence of competition at every point, made it impossible that they should agree upon anything but a negative political policy. But now that business is gradually becoming politically as well as economically unified, government ownership and the other projects of "State Socialism" are no longer opposed on the ground that they must necessarily prove unprofitable to capital. If their introduction is delayed, it is at the bottom because they will require an enormous investment, and other employments of capital are still more immediately profitable. Machinery, land, and other material factors still demand enormous outlays and give _immediate_ returns, while investments in reforestation or in the improvement of laborers, for example, only bring their maximum returns after a full generation. But the semi-monopolistic capitalism of to-day is far richer than was its competitive predecessor. It can now afford to date a part of its expected returns many years ahead. Already railroads have done this in building some of their extensions. Nations have often done it, as in building a Panama Canal. And as capitalism becomes further organized and gives more attention to government, and the State takes up such functions as the capitalists direct, they will double and multiply many fold their long-term governmental investments--in the form of expenditures for industrial activities and social reforms. Already leading capitalists in this country as well as elsewhere welcome the extension of government into the business field. The control of the railroads by a special court over which the railroads have a large influence proves to be just what the railroads have wanted, while there is a growing belief among them, to which their directors and officers occasionally give expression, that the day may come, perhaps with the competition of the Panama Canal, when it will be profitable to sell out to the government--at a good, round figure, of course, such as was recently paid for railroads in France and Italy. Similarly the new wireless systems are leading to a capitalistic demand for government purchase of the old telegraph systems. Mr. George W. Perkins, recently partner of Mr. J. P. Morgan, foreshadows the new policy in another form when he advocates a Supreme Court of Business (as a preventive of Socialism):-- "Federal legislation is feasible, and if we unite the work for it now we may be able to secure it; whereas, if we continue to fight against it much longer, the incoming time may sweep the question along either to government ownership or to Socialism [Mr. Perkins recognizes that they are two different things]. "I have long believed that we should have at Washington a business court, to which our great problems would go for final adjustment when they could not be settled otherwise. We now have at Washington a Supreme Court, composed, of course, of lawyers only, and it is the dream of every young man who enters law that he may some day be called to the Supreme Court bench. Why not have a similar goal for our business men? Why not have a court for business questions, on which no man could sit who has not had a business training with an honorable record? _The supervision_ of business by such a body of men, _who had_ reached such a court in such a way, would unquestionably _be fair and equitable to business_, fair and equitable to the public." (Italics mine.) Mr. Roosevelt and Senator Root are similarly inspired by the quasi-partnership that exists between the government and business in those countries where prices and wages in certain monopolized industries are regulated for the general good of the business interests. In the words of Mr. Root:-- "Germany, to a considerable extent, requires combination of her manufacturers, producers, and commercial concerns. Japan also practically does this. But in the United States it cannot be done under government leadership, because the people do not conceive it to be the government's function. It seems to be rather that the government is largely taken up with breaking up organizations, and that reduces the industrial efficiency of the country." As the great interests become "integrated," _i.e._ more and more interrelated and interdependent, the good of one becomes the good of all, and the policy of utilizing and controlling, instead of opposing the new industrial activities of the government, is bound to become general. The enlightened element among the capitalists, composed of those who desire a partnership rather than warfare with the government, will soon represent the larger part of the business world. Mr. Lincoln Steffens reflects the views of many, however, when he denies that the financial magnates are as yet guided by this "enlightened selfishness," and says that they are only just becoming "class-conscious," and it is true that they have not yet worked out any elaborate policy of social reform or government ownership. None but the most powerful are yet able, even in their minds, to make the necessary sacrifices of the capitalism of the present for that of the future. The majority (as he says) still "undermine the law" instead of more firmly intrenching themselves in the government, and "corrupt the State" instead of installing friendly reform administrations; they still "employ little children, and so exhaust them that they are poor producers when they grow up," instead of making them strong and healthy and teaching them skill at their trades; they still "don't want all the money they make, don't care for things they buy, and don't all appreciate the power they possess and bestow." But all these are passing characteristics. If it took less than twenty years to build up the corporations until the present community of interests almost forms a trust of trusts, how long, we may ask, will it take the new magnates to learn to "appreciate" their power? How long will it take them to learn to enter into partnership with the government instead of corrupting it from without, and to see that, if they don't want to increase the wages and buying power of the workers, "who, as consumers, are the market," the evident and easy alternative is to learn new ways of spending their own surplus? The example of the Astors and the Vanderbilts on the one hand, and Mr. Rockefeller's Benevolent Trust, on the other, show that these ways are infinitely varied and easily learned. Will it take the capitalists longer to learn to use the government for their purposes rather than to abuse it? It is neither necessary nor desirable, from the standpoint of an enlightened capitalism, that the control of government should rest entirely in the hands of "Big Business," or the "Interests." On the contrary, it is to the interest of capital that all capitalists, and all business interests of any permanence, should be given consideration, no matter how small they may be. The smaller interests have often acted with "Big Business,"--under its leadership, but as industrial activities and destinies are more and more transferred to the political field, the smaller capitalist becomes rather a junior partner than a mere follower. Consolidation and industrial panics have taught him his lesson, and he is at last beginning to organize and to demand his share of profits at the only point where he has a chance to get it, _i.e._ through the new "State Socialism." Moreover, he is going to have a large measure of success, as the political situation in this country and the actual experience of other countries show. And in proportion as the relations between large and small business become more cordial and better organized, they may launch this government, within a few years, into the capitalist undertakings so far-reaching and many-sided that the half billion expended on the Panama Canal will be forgotten as the small beginning of the new movement. It is true that for the moment the stupendous wealth and power of the "Large Interests," already more or less consolidated, threaten to overwhelm the rest. Mr. Steffens does not overstate when he says:-- "To state correctly in billions of dollars the actual value of all the property represented in this community of interests, might startle the imagination to some sense of the magnitude of the wealth of these men. But money is no true measure of power. The total capitalization of all they own would not bring home to us the influence of Morgan and his associates, direct and indirect, honest and corrupt, over presidents and Congresses; governors and legislators; in both political parties and over our political powers. And no figures would remind us of their standing at the bar and in the courts; with the press, the pulpit, the colleges, schools, and in society. And even if all their property and all their power could be stated in exact terms, it would not show their _relative_ wealth and strength. We must not ask how much they have. _We must ask how much they haven't got_."[31] But over against this economic power the small capitalists, farmers, shopkeepers, landlords, and small business men, have a political power that is equally overwhelming. Until the "trusts" came into being, no issue united this enormous mass. Yet they are still capitalists, and what they want, except the few who still dream of competing with the "trusts," is not to annihilate the latter's power, but to share it. The "trusts," on the other hand, are seeing that common action with the small capitalists, costly as it may be economically, may be made to pay enormously on the political field by putting into the hands of their united forces all the powers of governments. If the principle of economic union and consolidation has made the great capitalists so strong, what will be the result of this political union of all capitalists? How much greater will be their power over government, courts, politics, the press, the pulpit, and the schools and colleges! It is not the "trusts" that society has to fear, nor the consolidation of the "trusts," but the organized action of _all_ "Interests," of "Big Business" _and_ "Small Business," that is, of _Capitalism_. A moment's examination will show that there is every reason to expect this outcome. Broadly considered, there is no such disparity between large capitalists and small, either in wealth and power, as at first appears. All the accounts of the tendency towards monopoly have been written, not in the name of non-capitalists, but in that of small capitalists. Otherwise we might see that these two forces, interwoven in interest at nearly every point, are also well matched and likely to remain so. And we should see also that it is inconceivable that they will long escape the law of social evolution, stronger than ever to-day, toward organization, integration, consolidation. Messrs. Moody and Turner, for example, finished a well-weighed study of the general tendencies of large capital in this country with the following conclusion:-- "Through all these channels and hundreds more, the central machine of capital extends its control over the United States. It is not definitely organized in any way. But common interest makes it one great unit--the 'System,' so called. "It sits in Wall Street, a central power, directing the inevitable drift of great industry toward monopoly. And as the industries one after another come into it for control, it divides the wealth created by them. To the producer, steady conditions of labor; to the investor, stable securities, sure of paying interest; to the maker of monopolies and their allies, _the increment of wealth of the continent, and with it the gathering control of all mechanical industry_."[32] (My italics.) Certainly the fundamental social questions in any country at any time are: Who gets the increment of wealth? Who controls industry? No objection can be taken to the facts or reasoning of this and some of the other studies of the "trusts"--_as far as they go_. What vitiates not only their conclusions, but the whole work, is that written from the standpoint of the small capitalists, they forget that the "trusts" are only part of a larger whole. The increment of wealth that has gone to large capital in this country in the census period 1900-1910 is certainly less than what has gone to small capital. Farm lands and buildings have increased in value by $18,000,000,000, while the increased wealth in farm animals, crops, and machinery will bring the total far above $20,000,000,000. The increase in city lands and houses other than owned homes, which has not been less than that of the country in recent years, must be reckoned at many billions, and these, like the farm lands, are only to a small degree in the hands of the "Trusts." Even allowing for the more modest insurance policies, and savings bank accounts, as belonging in part to non-capitalists, small capitalists have piled up many new billions within the same decade, in the form of bank deposits, good-sized investments in insurance companies, in government, municipal, and railway bonds, bank stock, and other securities. No doubt the chief owners of the banks, railways, and "trusts" have increased their wealth by several billions within the same period, but this is only a fraction of the increased wealth of the smaller capitalists. It is not true, then, that "the increment of wealth of the continent" has gone to--"the makers of monopolies and their allies." Let us now examine the question of _the control of industry_ from this broader standpoint. It is admitted that the direct control of the "Interests" extends only over "mechanical industry"--not over agriculture. We have seen that it does not extend over the mine of wealth that lies in city lands, nor over large masses of capital more and more adequately protected by the government. It might be said that by their strategic position in industry the large capitalists control indirectly both agriculture, city growth, savings banks and government. This would be true were it not for the fact that as soon as we turn from the economic to the political field we find that not only in this country, but also in Europe nearly all the strategical positions are held by the small capitalists. They outnumber the large capitalists and their retainers ten to one, and they hold _the political balance of power_ between these and the propertyless classes. The control of industry and the control of government being in the long run one and the same, the only course left to the large capitalists is to compromise with the small, and the common organization of centralized and decentralized capital with the aid and protection of government is assured. The fact that, for the masses of mankind, capitalism is the enemy, and not "Big Business," is then obscured by the warfare of the small capitalists against the large. Perhaps nowhere in the world and at no time in history has this conflict taken on a more definite or acute form than it has recently in this country. So intense is the campaign of the smaller interests, and it is being fought along such broad lines that it often seems to be directed against capitalism itself. The masses of the people, even of the working classes, in America and Great Britain have yet no conception of the real war against capitalism, as carried on by the Socialists of Continental Europe, and it seems to them that this new small capitalist radicalism amounts practically to the same thing. The "Insurgents," it is true, differ fundamentally from the Populists of ten and twenty years ago, in so far they understand fully that in many fields competition cannot be restored, that the large corporations cannot be dissolved into small ones and must be regulated or owned by the government, because they have deserted the Jeffersonian maxim that "that government is best that governs least." "With the growing complexity of our social and business relations," says _La Follette's Weekly_, "a great extension of governmental functions has been necessary. The authority of State and nation reaches out in numberless and hitherto unknown forms affecting and regulating our daily lives, our occupations, our earning power, and our cost of living. The need for this intervention, for collective action by the people through their duly constituted government, to preserve and promote their own welfare, is a need that is growing more and more important and imperative to meet the rapidly growing power of commerce, industry and finance, centralized and organized in the hands of a few men." This is nothing more nor less than the creed of capitalist collectivism. The analysis of the present political situation of the Insurgents is not only collectivist, but, in a sense, revolutionary. After describing how "Big Business," controls both industry and politics, La Follette says:-- "This thing has gone on and on in city, State, and nation, until to-day the paramount power in our land is not a Democracy, not a Republic, but an Autocracy of centralized, systemized, industrial and financial power. 'Government of the people, by the people, and for the people' _has_ perished from the earth in the United States of America." An editorial in _McClure's Magazine_ (July, 1911) draws a similar picture and frankly applies the term, "State Socialism," to the great reforms that are pending:-- "Two great social organizations now confront each other in the United States--political democracy and the corporation. Both are yet new,--developments, in their present form, of the past two hundred years,--and the laws of neither are understood. The entire social and economic history of the world is now shaping itself around the struggle for dominance between them.... "The problem presented by this situation is the most difficult that any modern nation has faced; and the odds, up to the present time, have all been with the corporations. Property settles by economic law in strong hands; it has unlimited rewards for service, and the greatest power in the world--the power of food and drink, life and death--over mankind. Corporate property in the last twenty years has been welded into an instrument of almost infinite power, concentrated in the hands of a very few and very able men. "Sooner or later the so far unchecked tendency toward monopoly in the United States must be met squarely by the American people.... "The problem of the relation of the State and the corporation is now the chief question of the world. In Europe the State is relatively much stronger; in America, the corporation. In Europe the movement towards Socialism--collective ownership and operation of the machinery of industry and transportation--is far on its way; in America we are moving to control the corporation by political instruments, such as State Boards and the Interstate Commerce Commission.... "And if corporate centralization of power continues unchecked, what is the next great popular agitation to be in this country? For State Socialism?" When a treaty of peace is made between "Big Business" and the smaller capitalists under such leadership as La Follette's, we may be certain that it will not amount merely to a swallowing up of the small fish by the large. The struggle waged according to La Follette's principles is not a mere bid for political power and the spoils of office, but a real political warfare that can only end by recognition of the small capitalist's claims in business and politics--in so far as they relate, not to the restoration of competition, but to government ownership or control. As early as 1905, when governor of Wisconsin, La Follette said:-- "It must always be borne in mind that the contest between the State and the corporate powers is a lasting one.... It must always be remembered that their attitude throughout is one of hostility to this legislation, and that if their relation to the law after it is enacted is to be judged by the attitude towards the Interstate Commerce Law, it will be one of continued effort to destroy its efficiency and nullify its provision." Events have shown that he was right in his predictions, and his idea that the war against monopolies must last until they are deprived of their dominant position in politics is now widely accepted. The leading demands of the small capitalists, in so far as they are independently organized in this new movement, are now for protection, as buyers, sellers, investors, borrowers, and taxpayers against the "trusts," railways, and banks. Formerly they invariably took up the cause of the capitalist competitors and would-be competitors of the "Interests"--and millionaires and corporations of the second magnitude were lined up politically with the small capitalists, as, for example, silver mine owners, manufacturers who wanted free raw material, cheaper food (with lower wages), and foreign markets at any price,--from pseudo-reciprocity to war,--importing merchants, competitors of the trusts, tobacco, beer, and liquor interests bent on decreasing their taxes, etc. The great novelty of the "Insurgent" movement is that, in dissociating itself from Free Silver, Free Trade, and the proposal to _destroy_ the "trusts," it has succeeded in getting rid of nearly all the "Interests" that have wrecked previous small capitalist movements. At the same time, it has all but abandoned the old demagogic talk about representing the citizen as consumer against the citizen as producer. It frankly avows its intention to protect the ultimate consumer, not against small capitalist producers (_e.g._ its opposition to Canadian reciprocity and cheaper food), but solely against the monopolies. Indeed, the protection of the ultimate consumer against monopolies is clearly made incidental to the protection of the small capitalist consumer-producer. The wage earner consumes few products of the Steel Trust, the farmer and small manufacturers, many. Nor does the new movement propose to destroy the "trusts" by free trade even in the articles they produce, but merely to control prices by lower tariffs. With the abandonment of the last of the "Interests" and at the same time of the "consumers" that they use as a cloak, the new movement promises for the first time a fairly independent and lasting political organization of the smaller capitalists. While Senator La Follette is the leading general of the new movement, either Ex-President Roosevelt or Governor Woodrow Wilson seems destined to become its leading diplomatist. While Senator La Follette declares for a fight to the finish, and shows that he knows how to lead and organize such a fight, Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Wilson are giving their attention largely to peace terms to be demanded of the enemy, and the diplomatic attitude to be assumed in the negotiations. Perhaps it is too early for such peaceful thoughts, and premature talk of this kind may eliminate these leaders as negotiators satisfactory to the small capitalists. Their interest for my present purpose is that they probably foreshadow the attitude that will finally be assumed when the large "Interests" see that they must make terms. Mr. Wilson's language is at times so conciliatory as to create doubt whether or not he will stand with Senator La Follette and the Republican "Insurgents" for the whole of the small capitalist's program, but it leaves no doubt that, if he lives up to his declared principles, he must aim at the government regulation, not of "Big Business" merely, but of all business--as when he says that "business is no longer in any sense a private matter." "We are dealing, in our present discussion," he said in an address, delivered in December, 1910, "with business, and we are dealing with life as an organic whole, and modern politics is an accommodation of these two. Suppose we define business as economic _service of society for private profit_, and suppose we define politics as the accommodation of all social forces, the forces of _business, of course, included_, to the common interest." (My italics.) It is evident that if the community gains by an extended control over business, that business gains at least as much by its claim to be recognized as a _public service_. And this Mr. Wilson makes very emphatic:-- "Business must be looked upon, not as the exploitation of society, not as its use for private ends, but as its sober service; and private profit must be regarded as legitimate only when it is in fact a reward for what is veritably serviceable,--serviceable to interests which are not single but common, as far as they go; and politics must be the discovery of this common interest, in order that the service may be tested and exacted. "In this acceptation, society is the _senior partner_ in all business. It first must be considered,--society as a whole, in its permanent and essential, not merely in its temporary and superficial, interests. _If private profits are to be legitimatized, private fortunes made honorable_, these great forces which play upon the modern field must, both individually and collectively, be accommodated to a common purpose." (My italics.) Business is no longer "to be looked upon" as the exploitation of society, private profits are to be "legitimatized" and private fortunes "made honorable"--in a word, the whole business world is to be regenerated and at the same time rehabilitated. This is to be accomplished, as Mr. Wilson explained, in a later speech (April 13, 1911), not by excluding the large capitalists from government, but by including the small, and this will undoubtedly be the final outcome. He said:-- "The men who understand the life of the country are the men _who are on the make_, and not the men who are made; because the men who are on the make are in contact with the actual conditions of struggle, and those are the conditions of life for the nation; whereas, the man who has achieved, who is at the head of a great body of capital, has passed the period of struggle. He may sympathize with the struggling men, but he is not one of them, and only those who struggle can comprehend what the struggle is. I would rather take the interpretation of our national life from the general body of the people than from those who have made conspicuous successes of their lives." But the "Interests" are not to be excluded from the new dispensation. "I know a great many men," Mr. Wilson says further, "whose names stand as synonyms of the unjust power of wealth and of corporate privileges in this country, and I want to say to you that if I understand the character of these men, many of them--most of them--are just as _honest_ and just as patriotic as I claim to be. But I do notice this difference between myself and them; I have not happened to be immersed in the kind of business in which they have been immersed; I have not been saturated by the prepossessions which come upon men situated as they are, and I claim to see some things that they do not yet see; that is the difference. _It is not a difference of interest_; it is not a difference of capacity; it is not a difference of patriotism. It is a difference of perception.... "Now, these men have so buried their minds in these great undertakings that you cannot expect them to have reasonable and rational views about the antipodes. They are just as much chained to a task, as if the task were little instead of big. Their view is just as much limited as if their business were small instead of colossal. _But they are awakening._ They are not all of them asleep, and when they do wake, they are going to lend us the assistance of truly statesmanlike minds. "We are not fighting property," Mr. Wilson continues, "but the wrong conception of property. It seems to me that business on the great scale upon which it is now conducted is the service of the community, and the profit is legitimate only in proportion as the service is genuine. I utterly deny the genuineness of any profit which is gathered together without regard to the serviceability of the thing done.... Men have got to learn that in a certain sense, _when they manage great corporations, they have assumed public office_, and are responsible to the community for the things they do. _That is the form of privilege that we are fighting."_ (Italics mine.)[33] A second glance at these passages will show that Mr. Wilson speaks in the name rather of struggling small capitalists, business men "on the make," than of the nation as a whole. His diplomacy is largely aimed to move the "honest" large capitalists. These are assured that the only form of privilege that Mr. Wilson, representing the smaller business men, those "on the make," is attacking, is their freedom from political and government control. But the large capitalists need not fear such control, for they are assured that they themselves will be part of the new government. And as there is no fundamental "difference of interests," the new government will have no difficulty in representing large business as well as small. No better example could be found of the foreshadowed treaty between the large interests and the whole body of capitalists, and their coming consolidation, than the central banking association project now before Congress. Originated by the "Interests" it was again and again moderated to avoid the hostility of the smaller capitalists, until progressives like Mr. Wilson are evidently getting ready to propose still further modifications that will make it entirely acceptable to the latter class. Already Mr. Aldrich has consented that the "State" banks, which represent chiefly the smaller capitalists, should be included in the Reserve Association, and that the President should appoint its governor and deputy governor. Doubtless Congress will insist on a still greater representation of the government on the central board. Mr. Wilson emphasizes the need of action in this direction in the name of "economic freedom," which can only mean equal financial facilities and the indirect loan of the government's credit to all capitalists, through means of a government under their common control:-- "The great monopoly in this country is the money monopoly. So long as that exists, our old variety and freedom and individual energy of development are out of the question. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. _The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men_ who, even if their action be honest and intended for the public interest, are necessarily concentrated upon the great undertakings in which their own money is involved, and who necessarily by every reason of their own limitations, chill and check and destroy genuine economic freedom. This is the greatest question of all, and to this statesmen must address themselves with an earnest determination to serve the long future and the true liberties of men." (My italics.) Undoubtedly this is a great question; the establishment of a political control over credit will mean a political and financial revolution. For it will establish the power of the government over our whole economic system and will lead rapidly to a common political and economic organization of all classes of capitalists for the control of the government, to a compromise between the group of capitalists that now rules the business world and that far larger group which is bound to rule the government. The financial magnates have seen this truth, and, as Mr. Paul Warburg said to the American Association (New Orleans, Nov. 21, 1911), "Wall Street, like many an absolute ruler in recent years, finds it more conducive to safety and contentment to forego some of its prerogatives ... and to turn an oligarchy into a constitutional democratic federation [_i.e._ a federation composed of capitalists]." Mr. Roosevelt has announced a policy with regard to monopolies that foreshadows even more distinctly than anything Mr. Woodrow Wilson has said the solution of the differences between large and small capitalists. He urges that a government commission should undertake "supervision, regulation, and control of these great corporations" even to the point of controlling "monopoly prices" and that this control should "indirectly or directly extend to dealing with all questions connected with their treatment of their employees, including the wages, the hours of labor, and the like."[34] This policy is in entire accord with the declarations of Andrew Carnegie, Daniel Guggenheim, Judge Gary, Samuel Untermeyer, Attorney-General Wickersham, and others of the large capitalists or those who stand close to them. It is in equal accord with the declarations of _La Follette's Weekly_ and the leading "Insurgent" writers. It is true that the private monopolies, as Mr. Bryan pointed out (_New York Times_, Nov. 19, 1911), "will soon be in national politics more actively than now, for they will feel it necessary to control Colonel Roosevelt's suggested commission, and to do that they must control the election of those who appoint the commission." But the private monopolies will soon be more actively in politics no matter what remedy is offered, even government ownership. The small capitalist investors, shippers, and consumers of trust products can only protect themselves by securing control of the government, or at least sharing it on equal terms with the large capitalists. The reason that Mr. Roosevelt's proposal was hailed with equal enthusiasm by the more far-sighted capitalists, whether radical or conservative, small or large, was that they have an approximately equal hope of controlling the government, or sharing in its control. The unbiased observer can well conclude that they are likely to divide this control between them--and, indeed, that the complete victory of either party is economically and politically unthinkable. Already banks, railways, industrial "trusts," mining and lumber interests, are being forced to follow a policy satisfactory to small capitalist investors, borrowers, customers, furnishers of raw material, and taxpayers--while small capitalist competitors are being forced to abandon their effort to use the government to restore competition and destroy the "trusts." In the reorganization of capitalism, the non-capitalists, the wage and salary earning class are not to be consulted. Taken together with those among the professional and salaried class who are small investors or expect to become independent producers, the small capitalists constitute a majority of the electorate (though not of the population), or at least hold the political balance of power. It is capitalist interests alone that really count in present-day politics, and it is for capitalists alone that government control would be instituted. Viewed in this light the statements of Mr. Woodrow Wilson that "business is no longer in any proper sense a private matter," or that "our program, from which we cannot be turned aside, is, that we are going to take possession of the control of our own economic life," and the similar statements of Mr. Roosevelt, are not so Socialistic as they seem. What their use by the leading "conservative-progressive" statesmen of both parties means is that a partnership of capital and government is at hand. FOOTNOTES: [31] Lincoln Steffens in _Everybody's Magazine_, beginning September, 1910. [32] _McClure's Magazine_, 1911. [33] Governor Woodrow Wilson, Speech of April 13, 1911. [34] The _Outlook_, Nov. 18, 1911. CHAPTER III THE POLITICS OF THE NEW CAPITALISM We are told that the political issue as viewed by American radicals is, "Shall property rule, or shall the people rule?" and that the radicals may be forced entirely over to the Socialist position, as the Republicans were forced to the position of the Abolitionists when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Mr. Ray Stannard Baker notes also that capital is continually the aggressor, as were the slaveholders, and that the conflict is likely to grow more and more acute, since "no one imagines that these powerful men of money will give up their advantage lightly" any more than the old slaveholders did. Another "insurgent" publicist (Mr. William Allen White) says that the aim of radicalism in the United States is "the regulation and control of capital" and that the American people have made up their minds that "capital, the product of the many, is to be operated fundamentally for the benefit of the many." It is one of those upheavals, he believes, which come along once in a century or so, dethrone privilege, organize the world along different lines, take the persons "at the apex of the human pyramid" from their high seats and "iron out the pyramid into a plane."[35] If the aim of the "progressives" is the overthrow of "the rule of property" as Mr. Baker claims--if, in the words of Mr. White again, "America is joining the world movement towards equal opportunity for all men in our modern civilization," then indeed the greatest political and economic struggle of history, the final conflict between capitalism and Socialism, is at hand. But when we ask along what lines this great war for a better society is to be waged, and by what methods, we are told that the parties to the conflict are separated, not by practical economic interests, but by "ideas" and "ideals," and that the chief means by which this social revolution is to be accomplished are direct legislation and the recall and their use to extend government ownership or control so as gradually to close one door after another upon the operations of capital until its power for harm is annihilated, _i.e._ democracy and collectivism. In other words, the militant phrases used by Socialists in earnest are adopted by radicals as convenient and popular battle cries in their campaign for "State Socialism," as to banking, railroads, mines, and a few industrial "trusts," but without the slightest attempt either to end the "rule of property" or to secure "equal opportunity" for any but farmers and small business men. They do nothing, moreover, to bring about the new political and class alignment that is the very first requirement, if the rule of property in all its forms is to be ended, or equal opportunity secured for the lower as well as the comparatively well-to-do middle classes. Similarly the essential or practical difference between the "Socialism" of Mr. Roosevelt's editorial associate, Dr. Lyman Abbott, who acknowledges that classes exist and says that capitalism must be abolished, and the Socialism of the international movement is this, that Dr. Abbott expects to work, on the whole, with the capitalists who are to be done away with, while Socialists expect to work against them. Dr. Abbott claims that the "democratic Socialism" he advocates is directly the opposite of "State Socialism ... the doctrine of Bismarck," that it "aims to abolish the distinction between possessing and non-possessing classes," that our present industrial institutions are based on _autocracy_ and _inequality_ instead of liberty, democracy, and equality, that under the _wages system_ or capitalism, the laborers or wage earners are practically unable to earn their daily bread "except by permission of the capitalists who own the tools by which the labor must be carried on." He then proceeds to what would be regarded by many as a thoroughly Socialist conclusion: "The real and radical remedy for the evils of capitalism is the organization of the industrial system in which the laborers or tool users will themselves become the capitalists or tool owners; in which, therefore, the class distinction which exists under capitalism will be abolished."[36] And what separates the advanced "State Socialism" of Mr. Hearst's brilliant editor, Mr. Arthur Brisbane, from the Socialism of the organized Socialist movement? Has not Mr. Brisbane hinted repeatedly at a possible revolution in the future? Has he not insisted that the crux of "the cost of living question" is not so much the control of prices by the private ownership of necessities of life (as some "State Socialist" reformers say, and even some official publications of the Socialist Party), as the _exploitation_ of the worker _at the point of production_, the fact that he does not get the full product of his labor--phrases which might have been used by Marx himself? The _New York Evening Journal_ has even predicted an increasing conflict of economic interests on the political field--failing to state only that the people's fight must be won by a class struggle, a movement directed against capitalism and excluding capitalists (except in such cases where they have completely abandoned their financial interests). Asked whether the influence of the Interests (the "trusts") would increase or diminish in this country in the near future, the _Journal_ answered:-- "The influence of the interests, which means the power of the trusts, or organized industry and commerce, will go forward steadily without interruption. "Just as steadily as early military feudalism advanced and grew, UNTIL THE PEOPLE AT LAST CONTROLLED IT AND OWNED IT, JUST SO STEADILY WILL TO-DAY'S INDUSTRIAL FEUDALISM advance and grow without interruption UNTIL THE PEOPLE CONTROL IT and own it. "The trusts are destined to be infinitely more powerful than now, infinitely more ably organized. "And that will be a good thing in the long run for the people. The trusts are the people's great teachers, proving that destructive, selfish, unbrotherly competition is unnecessary. "They are proving that the genius of man can free a nation or a world. They are saying to the people: 'You work under our ORDERS. One power can own and manage industry.' "It is hard for individual ambition just now. But in time THE PEOPLE WILL LEARN THE LESSON AND WILL SAY TO THE TRUST OWNERS:-- "'THANK YOU VERY MUCH. WE HAVE LEARNED THE LESSON. WE SEE THAT IT IS POSSIBLE FOR ONE POWER TO OWN AND CONTROL ALL INDUSTRY, ALL MANUFACTURES, ALL COMMERCE, AND WE, THE PEOPLE, WILL BE THAT ONE POWER.' "Just as the individual feudal lords organized their little armies in France, and just as the French people themselves have all the armies in one--UNDER THE PEOPLE'S POWER--so the industries organized NOW by the barons of industrial feudalism, one by one, will be taken and put together by the people, UNDER THE PEOPLE'S OWNERSHIP."[37] Yet we find the _Journal_, like all the vehicles and mouthpieces of radicalism, other than those of the Socialists, unready to take the first step necessary in any conflict; namely, to decide who is the enemy. Unless defended by definite groups in the community, "the rule of property," could be ended in a single election. Nor can the group that maintains capitalist government consist, as radicals suggest, merely of a handful of large capitalists, nor of these aided by certain cohorts of hired political mercenaries--nor yet of these two groups supported by the deceived and ignorant among the masses. Unimportant elections may be fought with such support, but not revolutionary "civil wars" or "the upheavals of the centuries." _In every historical instance such struggles were supported on both sides by powerful, and at the same time numerically important, social classes, acting on the solid basis of economic interest._ Yet non-Socialist reformers persist in claiming that they represent all classes with the exception of a handful of monopolists, the bought, and the ignorant; and many assert flatly that their movement is altruistic, which can only mean that they intend to bestow such benefits as they think proper on some social class that they expect to remain powerless to help itself. Here, then, in the attitude of non-Socialist reformers towards various social classes, we begin to see the inner structure of their movement. They do not propose to attack any "vested interests" except those of the financial magnates, and they expect the lower classes to remain politically impotent, which they as democrats, know means that these classes are only going to receive such secondary consideration as the interests of the other classes require. Whether the radical of to-day, the "State Socialist," favors political democracy or not, depends on whether these "passive beneficiaries" of the new "altruistic" system are in a majority. If they are not in a majority, certain political objects may be gained (without giving the non-capitalist masses any real power) by allowing them all to vote, by removing undemocratic constitutional restrictions, and by introducing direct legislation, the recall, and similar measures. If they are a majority, it is generally agreed that it is unsafe to allow them an equal voice in government, as they almost universally fail to rest satisfied with the benefits they secure from collectivist capitalism and press on immediately to a far more radical policy. So in agricultural communities like New Zealand, Australia, and some of our Western States, where there is a prosperous property-holding majority, the most complete political democracy has come to prevail. Judging everything by local conditions, the progressive small capitalists of our West sometimes even favor the extension of this democracy to the nation and the whole world, as when the Wisconsin legislature proposes direct legislation and the recall in our national government. But they are being warned against this "extremist" stand by conservative progressive leaders of the industrial sections like Ex-President Roosevelt or Governor Woodrow Wilson. This latter type of progressive not only opposes the extension of radical democracy to districts like our South and East, numerically dominated by agricultural or industrial laborers, but often wants to restrict the ballot in those regions. Professor E. A. Ross, for example, writes in _La Follette's Weekly_ that "no one ought to be given the ballot unless he can give proof of ability to read and write the English language," which would disqualify a large part, if not the majority, of the working people in many industrial centers; while Dr. Abbott concluded a lengthy series of articles with the suggestion that the Southern States have "set an example which it would be well, if it were possible, for all the States to follow." "Many of them have adopted in their constitutions," Dr. Abbott continues, "a qualified suffrage. The qualifications are not the same in all the States, but there is not one of those States in which every man, black or white, has not a legal right to vote, provided he can read and write the English language, owns three hundred dollars' worth of property, and has paid his taxes. A provision that no man should vote unless he has intelligence enough to read and write, thrift enough to have laid up three hundred dollars' worth of property, and patriotism enough to have paid his taxes, would not be a bad provision for any State in the Union to incorporate in its constitution."[38] Such a provision accompanied by the customary Southern poll tax, which, Dr. Abbott overlooked (evidently inadvertently), would add several million more white workingmen to the millions (colored and white) that are already without a vote.[39] We cannot wonder, then, that the working people, who are enthusiastic supporters of every democratic reform, should nevertheless distrust the democracy of the new movement. It is generally supposed in the United States that the reason the new "Insurgency" is weaker in the East than in the West is because of the greater ignorance and political corruption of the masses of the great cities of the East. But when we see the radicalism of the West also, as soon as it enters the towns, tending to support the Socialists and Labor parties rather than the reformers, we realize that the distrust has no such local cause. Perhaps the issue is more clearly seen in the hostility that exists among the working people and the Socialists towards the so-called commission plan of city government, which the progressives unanimously regard as a sort of democratic municipal panacea. The commission plan for cities vests the whole local government in a board of half a dozen elected officials subject to the initiative and referendum and recall. The Socialists approve of the last feature. They object to the commission and stand for the very opposite principle of an executive subordinate to a legislature and without veto power, because a board does not permit of minority representation, and because it allows most officials to be appointed through "influence" instead of being elected. They object also, of course, to the high percentages usually required for the initiative and the recall. It is Socialist and Labor Union opposition, and not merely that of political machines, that has defeated the proposed plan in St. Louis, Jersey City, Hoboken, and elsewhere, and promises to check it all over the country. As a device for saving the taxpayer's money, the commission plan in its usual form is ideal, as a means for securing the benefits of the expenditure of this money to the non-propertied or very small propertied classes, it is in its present form worse in the long run than the present corruption and waste. State legislatures and courts already protect the taxpayers from any measure in the least Socialistic, whatever form of local government and whatever party may prevail. It has caused more than a little resentment among the propertyless that the taxpayers should actually have the effrontery to propose the still more conservative commission plan as being a radically democratic reform. It is on such substantial grounds that the propertyless distrust the democracy of the progressives and radicals. They find it extends only to sections or districts where small capitalist voters are in a majority. The "State Socialist" and Reform attitude towards political democracy is indeed essentially opportunistic. Not only does it vary from place to place, but it also changes rapidly with events. As long as the new movement is in its early stages, it deserves popularity, owing to the fact that it brings immediate material benefits to all and paves the way, either for capitalistic or for Socialistic progress, robs capitalism of all fear of the masses, and is ready to remove all undemocratic constitutional barriers and to do everything it can to advance popular government. These constitutional checks and balances prevent the small capitalists and their progressive large capitalist allies from bringing to time the reactionaries of the latter class, while they are so many that, in removing a few of them, there is little danger of that pure political democracy which would alone give to the masses any "dangerous" power. At a later stage, when "State Socialism" will have carried out its program, and the masses see that it is ready to go only so far as the small capitalists' interests allow and no farther, and when it will already have forced recalcitrant large capitalists to terms, and so have reunited the capitalist class, we may expect to see a complete reversal of the present semi-democratic attitude. But as long as the "State Socialist" program is still largely ahead of us, the large capitalists not yet put into their place, and full political democracy--in spite of rapid progress--still far in the distance, a radical position as to this, that, or the other piece of political machinery signifies little. So many reforms of this kind are needed before political democracy can become effective--and in the meanwhile many things can happen that will give ample excuse to any of the "progressive" classes that decide to reverse their present more or less democratic attitude, such as an "unpatriotic" attitude on the part of the masses, a grave railroad strike, etc. For there will be abundant time before democratic machinery can reach that point in its evolution, when the non-capitalist masses can make the first and smallest use of it _against_ their small and large capitalist masters. If, for example, the Supreme Court of this country should ever be made elective, or by any other means be shorn of its political power, and if then the President's veto were abolished, and others of his powers given to Congress, there would remain still other alternatives for vetoing the execution of the people's will--and one veto is sufficient for every practical purpose. Even if the senators are everywhere directly elected, the Senate may still remain the permanent stronghold of capitalism unless overturned by a political revolution. The one section of the Constitution that is not subject to amendment is the allotment of two senators to each of the States. And even if public opinion should decide that this feature must be made changeable by ordinary amendment like the rest, it might require 90 or even 95 per cent of the people to pass such an amendment or to call a constitutional convention for the purpose. For Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, Delaware, are not only governed by antiquated and undemocratic constitutions, but are so small that wholesale bribery or a system of public doles is easily possible. The constitutions of the mountain States are more modern, but Utah, Wyoming, Nevada, and New Mexico, and others of these States are so little populated as make them very easy for capitalist manipulation, as present political conditions show. Now if we add to these States the whole South, where the upper third or at most the upper half of the population is in firm control, through the disfranchisement of the majority of the non-capitalistic classes (white and colored), we see that, even if the country were swept by a tide of democratic opinion, it is most unlikely that it will ever control the Senate. Moreover, if the capitalists (large and small) are ever in danger of losing the Senate, they have only to annex Mexico to add half a dozen or a dozen new States with limited franchises and undemocratic constitutions. Either the President, or the Senate, or the Supreme Court might prove quite sufficient to prevent the execution of the will of the people, in any important crisis--they would be especially effective when revolutionary changes in property, and rapid shifting of economic and political power into the hands of the people, are at stake, as Socialists believe they will be. But to resist such a movement, still another political weapon is available,--even if President, Senate, and Supreme Court fell into the hands of the people (and it is highly probable that the small capitalists, who themselves suffer under the above-mentioned constitutional limitations, will force the larger capitalists to fall back on this other weapon in the end),--namely, a limitation of the suffrage. The property and educational qualifications for voting which are directed against the colored people in the Southern States are being used to a considerable degree, both North and South, against the poorer whites. While there is no likelihood that this process will continue indefinitely, or that it will spread to all parts of the country, it is already sufficient to throw the balance of political power in favor of the capitalists in the national elections. If we put the total number of voters in the country at 15,000,000, we can see how significant is the fact that more than a million, black and white, have already been directly disfranchised in the South alone. In view of these numerous methods of thwarting democracy in this country (and there are others) there is no reason why the capitalists should not permit political leaders after a time to accept a number of radical and even revolutionary reforms in political methods. The direct election of senators, though it was bitterly opposed a few years ago, is already widely accepted; the direct nomination of the President has become the law in several States; Mr. Roosevelt threatens that the "entire system" may have to be changed, that constitutions may be "thrown out of the window," and the power of judges over legislation abolished, which, as he notes, has already been advocated by the Socialist member of Congress[40]; the Wisconsin legislature formally calls for a national constitutional convention and proposes to make the constitution amendable henceforth by the "initiative"; Governor Woodrow Wilson suggests that _many_ of our existing evils may be remedied by national constitutional amendments[41], and two such amendments are now nearing adoption after forty years, during which it was thought that all amendment had ceased indefinitely. Whether it will be decided to take away the power of the Supreme Court over legislation and make it directly responsible to Congress or the people, or to call a constitutional convention, is doubtful. A convention, as Senator Heyburn recently pointed out in the Senate, is "bigger than the Constitution" and might conceivably amend what is declared in that instrument not to be amendable, by providing that the States should be represented in the Senate in proportion to population. Even then the existing partial disfranchisement of the electors would prevent a new constitution from going "too far" in a democratic direction. It is also true, as the same senator said, that the habit of amending the Constitution is a dangerous one (to capitalism), and that it might some day put the capitalistic government's life at stake[42]. But this after all amounts only to saying that political evolution, like all other kinds, is cumulative, and that its tempo is in the long run constantly accelerated. Certainly each change leads to more change. None of these proposed political reforms, however, even a constitutional convention, _is in itself_ revolutionary, or promises to establish even a political democracy. All could coexist, for example, with a still greater restriction of the suffrage. Nor do any of these measures _in themselves_ constitute the smallest step in the direction of political democracy as long as a single effective check is allowed to remain. If there is any doubt on the matter, we have only to refer to other constitutions than ours which accomplish the same object of checkmating democracy without a Supreme Court, without an absolute executive veto, without an effective second chamber, and in one important case without a written constitution (England). Or, we can turn to France, Switzerland, or New Zealand, where the suffrage is universal and political democracy is already approximated but rendered meaningless to the non-capitalist masses by the existence of a majority composed of small capitalists. And in countries like the United States, where the small capitalists and their immediate dependents are nearly as numerous as the other classes, a temporary majority may also be formed that may soon make full democracy as "safe" for a considerable period as it is in Switzerland or New Zealand.[43] As soon as "State Socialism" reaches its point of most rapid development, and as long as it continues to reach ever new classes with its immediate benefits, it will doubtless receive the support of a majority, not only of the voters, but also of the whole population. _During this period_ the "Socialistic" capitalists will be tempted to popularize and strengthen their movement not only by uncompleted political reforms, that are abortive and futile as far as the masses are concerned, but also by the most thoroughgoing democracy. For radical democracy will not only be without danger, but useful and invaluable in the struggle of the progressive and collectivist capitalists against the retrogressive and individualist capitalists. As long as there is a majority composed of large and small capitalists and their dependents, together with those of the salaried and professional classes who are satisfied with the capitalistic kind of collectivism (_i.e._ while its progress is most brilliant), it is only necessary for the progressives to hold the balance of power in order to have everything their own way both against Socialism and reaction. The powerful Socialist and revolutionary minority created in industrial communities by equal suffrage and a democratic form of government, _as long as it remains distinctly a minority_, is unable to injure the combined forces of capitalism, while it furnishes a useful and invaluable club by which the progressive capitalists can threaten and overwhelm the reactionaries. In Great Britain, for example, the new collectivist movement of Messrs. Churchill and Lloyd George, basing itself primarily on the support of the small capitalist class, which there as elsewhere constitutes a very large part (over a third) of the population, seeks also the support of a part of the non-propertied classes. It cannot make them any plausible or honest promise of any equitable redistribution of income or of political power, but it can promise an increase of well-paid government employment, and it can guarantee that it will develop the industrial efficiency of all classes and allow them a certain share, if a lesser one, in the benefits of this policy. If then "State Socialism," like the benevolent despotisms and oligarchies of history, sometimes offers the purely _material_ benefits which it brings in some measure to all classes, as a _substitute_ for democratic government, it also favors democracy in those places where the small capitalists and related classes form a majority of the community. The purpose of the democratic policy, where it is adopted, is to stimulate new political interest in the "State Socialistic" program, and by increasing cautiously the political weight of the non-capitalists--without going far enough to give them any real or independent power--to check the reactionary element among the capitalists that tries to hold back the industrial and governmental organization the progressives have in view. It was in order to shift the political balance of power that the reactionary Bismarck introduced universal suffrage in Germany, and the same motive is leading Premier Asquith, who is not radical, to add considerably to the political weight of the working classes in England, _i.e._ not to the point where they have any power whatever for their own purposes, but only to that point where their weight, added to that of the Liberals, counterbalances the Tories, and so automatically aids the former party. The Liberals are giving Labor this almost valueless installment of democracy, just as they had previously granted instead such immediate and material benefits as we see in the recent British budgets, _as if_ they were concessions, only hiding the fact that _they would soon have conferred these benefits on the workers through their own self-interest, whether the workers had given them their political support or not_. Mr. Lloyd George has said:-- "The workingman is no fool. He knows that a great party like ours can, with his help, do things for him he could not hope to accomplish for himself without its aid. It brings to his assistance the potent influences drawn from the great middle classes of this country, which would be frightened into positive hostility by a _purely class organization_ to which they do not belong. No party could ever hope for success in this country which does not win the confidence of a _large portion_ of this middle class.... "You are not going to make Socialists in a hurry out of farmers and traders and professional men of this country, but you may scare them into reaction.... They are helping us now to secure advanced Labor legislation; they will help us later to secure land reform and other measures for all classes of wealth producers, and we need all the help they give us. But if they are threatened with a class war, then they will surely sulk and harden into downright Toryism. What gain will that be for Labor?" (My italics.)[44] The Chancellor of the Exchequer here bids for Labor's political support on the plea that what he was doing for Labor meant an expense and not a profit to the middle class, and that these reforms would only be assented to by that class as the necessary price of the Labor vote. I have shown grounds for believing that the chief motives of the new reforms have nothing to do with the Labor vote. However much Mr. Lloyd George, as a political manager, may desire to control that vote, he knows he can do without it, as long as it is cast _against_ the Tories. The Liberals will hold the balance of power, and their small capitalist followers will continue to carry out their capitalistic progressive and collectivist program--even without a Labor alliance. Nor does he fear that even the most radical of reforms, whether economic or political, will enable Labor to seize a larger share of the national income or of political power. On the contrary, he predicted in 1906 that it would be a generation before Labor could even hope to be sufficiently united to take the first step in Socialism. "Does any one believe," he asked, "that within a generation, to put it at the very lowest, we are likely to see in power a party pledged forcibly to nationalize land, railways, mines, quarries, factories, workshops, warehouses, shops, and all and every agency for the production and distribution of wealth? I say again, within a generation? He who entertains such hopes must indeed be a sanguine and simple-minded Socialist."[45] Mr. Lloyd George sought the support of Labor then, not because it was all-powerful, but because, for a generation at least, it seemed doomed to impotence--except as an aid to the Liberals. The logic of his position was really not that Labor ought to get a price for its political support, but that _having no immediate alternative_, being unable to form a majority either alone or with any other element than the Liberals, they should accept gladly anything that was offered, for example, a material reform like his Insurance bill--even though this measure is at bottom and in the long run purely capitalistic in its tendency. And this is practically what Labor in Great Britain has done. It has supported a government all of whose acts strengthen capitalism in its new collectivist form, both economically and politically. And even if some day an isolated measure should be found to prove an exception, it would still remain true that the present policies _considered as a whole_ are carrying the country rapidly and uninterruptedly in the direction of State Capitalism. And this is equally true of every other country, whether France, Germany, Australia, or the United States, where the new reform program is being put into execution. Many "Socialistic" capitalists, however, are looking forward to a time when through complete political democracy they can secure a permanent popular majority of small capitalists and other more or less privileged classes, and so build their new society on a more solid basis. Let us assume that the railways, mines, and the leading "trusts" are nationalized, public utilities municipalized, and the national and local governments busily engaged on canals, roads, forests, deserts, and swamps. Here are occupations employing, let us say, a fourth or a fifth of the working population; and solvent landowning farmers, their numbers kept up by land reforms and scientific farming encouraged by government, may continue as now to constitute another fifth. We can estimate that these classes together with those among the shopkeepers, professional elements, etc., who are directly dependent on them will compose 40 to 50 per cent of the population, while the other capitalists and their direct dependents account for another 10 per cent or more. Here we have the possibility of a privileged _majority_, the logical goal of "State Socialism," and the nightmare of every democrat for whom democracy is anything more than an empty political reform. With government employees and capitalists (large and small)--and their direct dependents, forming 50 per cent or more of the population, and supported by a considerable part of the skilled manual workers, there is a possibility of the establishment of an iron-bound caste society solidly intrenched in majority rule. There are strong reasons, which I shall give in later chapters, for thinking that some great changes may take place before this day can arrive. FOOTNOTES: [35] William Allen White in the _American Magazine_, January, 1911. [36] Dr. Lyman Abbott in a series of articles published in the _Outlook_, 1910, entitled "The Spirit of Democracy," now in book form. [37] _New York Journal_, Aug. 2, 1910. [38] The _Outlook_, Sept. 10, 1910. [39] In his enthusiasm for these undemocratic measures, Dr. Abbott has retrogressed more than the Southern States, which do not require both a property and educational qualification, but only one of the two. Moreover, by the "grandfather" and "understanding" clauses they seek to exempt as many as possible of the whites, _i.e._ a majority of the population in most of these States, from any substantial qualification whatever. Nor does it seem likely that even in the future they will apply freely; against the poor and illiterate of the white race, the measures Dr. Abbott advocates. Just such restricted suffrage laws were repealed in many Southern States from 1820 to 1850, and it is not likely that the present reaction will go back that far. [40] The _Outlook_, May 24, 1911. [41] Governor Woodrow Wilson, Speech in Portland, Oregon, May 18, 1911. [42] Speech in Senate, May 24, 1911. [43] Miss Jessie Wallace Hughan in her "American Socialism of the Present Day" (page 184) has quoted me as saying (in the _New York Call_ of December 12, 1909) that the amendability of the Constitution by majority vote is a demand so revolutionary that it is exclusively Socialist property. Within the limitations of a very brief journalistic article I believe this statement was justified. It holds for the United States to-day. It does not hold for agrarian countries like Australia, Canada, or South Africa, for backward countries like Russia, or dependent countries like Switzerland or Denmark, where there is no danger of Socialism. And before it can be put into effect, which may take a decade or more, the increased proportion in the population of well-paid government employees and of agricultural lessees of government lands and similar classes, may make a democratic constitution a safe capitalistic policy, for a while, even in the United States. [44] Lloyd George, _op. cit._, pp. 33, 34. [45] Lloyd George, _op. cit._, p. 35. CHAPTER IV "STATE SOCIALISM" AND LABOR State Capitalism has a very definite principle and program of labor reform. It capitalizes labor, views it as the principal resource and asset of each community (or of the class that controls the community), and undertakes every measure that is not too costly for its conservation, utilization, and development--_i.e._ its development to fill those positions ordinarily known as _labor_, but not such development as might enable the laborers or their children to compete for higher social functions on equal terms with the children of the upper classes. On the one hand is the tendency, not very advanced, but unmistakable and almost universal, to invest larger and larger sums for the scientific development of industrial efficiency--healthy surroundings in childhood, good food and healthy living conditions, industrial education, model factories, reasonable hours, time and opportunity for recreation and rest, and on the other a rapidly increasing difficulty for either the laborer or his children to advance to other social positions and functions--and a restriction of the liberty of laborers and of labor organizations, lest they should attempt to establish equality of opportunity or to take the first step in that direction by assuming control over industry and government. From the moment it approaches the labor question the "Socialist" part of "State Socialism" completely falls away, and nothing but the purest collectivist capitalism remains. Even the plausible contention that it will result in the maximum efficiency and give the maximum product breaks down. For no matter how much the condition of the laborers is improved, or what political rights they are allowed to exercise, if they are deprived of all initiative and power in their employments, and of the equal opportunity to develop their capacities to fill other social positions for which they may prove to be more fit than the present occupants, then the human resources of the community are not only left underdeveloped, but are prevented from development. In the following chapters I shall deal successively with the plans of the "State Socialists" to develop the productive powers of the laboring people and their children--_as laborers_, together with the accompanying tendencies towards compulsory labor, and formation of a class society. "Our Home policy," says a manifesto of the Fabian Society (edited by Bernard Shaw), "must include a labor policy, _whether the laborer wants it or not_, directed to securing _for him, what, for the nation's sake even the poorest_ of its subjects should have." (Italics mine.)[46] Here is the basis of the attitude of the "State Socialist" towards labor. Labor is to be given more and more attention and consideration. But the governing is to be done by other classes, and the foundation of the new policy is to be the welfare of society as these other classes conceive it,--and not the welfare of the masses of the people as conceived by the masses themselves. Indeed, a government official has recently pleaded with capital in the name of labor that the time has come when it pays to treat labor as well as valuable horses and cattle. George H. Webb, Commissioner of Labor of Rhode Island, begins his report on Welfare Work by assuring the manufacturers that it is profitable. He says: "Mankind, at least that portion of it that has to do with horseflesh, discovered ages ago that a horse does the best service when it is well fed, well stabled, and well groomed. The same principle applies to the other brands of farm stock. They one and all yield the best results when their health and comforts are best looked after. It is strange, though these truths have been a matter of general knowledge for centuries, that it is only quite recently that it has been discovered that the same rule is applicable to the human race. We are just beginning to learn that the employer who gives steady employment, pays fair wages, and pays close attention to the physical health and comfort of his employees gets the best results from their labor."[47] Mr. George W. Perkins, recently retired from the firm of J. P. Morgan and Company, who has managed the introduction of pensions, profit sharing, and other investments in labor for the International Harvester Company, has also expressed the view that these measures were profitable "from a pecuniary standpoint." A good illustration is the calculation of the Dayton Cash Register Company, which has led in this "welfare work," that "the luncheons given each girl costs three cents, and that the woman does five cents more of work each day." Some such calculation will apply to the whole colossal system of governmental labor reforms now favored so widely by far-sighted employers.[48] In order that the private policy of the more enlightened of the large corporations should become the policy of governments, which employers as a class know they can control, only two conditions need to be filled. Since all employers must to some degree share the burdens of the new taxes needed for such governmental investments in the improvement of labor, there must be some assurance, first, that all capitalists shall share in the opportunity to employ this more efficient and more profitable labor; and second, that the supply of cheap labor, which has cost almost nothing to produce, is either exhausted or, on account of its inefficiency, is less adapted to the new industry than it was to the old. The impending reorganization of governments to protect the smaller capitalists from the large (through better control over the banks, railroads, trusts, tariffs, and natural resources) will furnish the first condition, the natural exhaustion or artificial restriction of immigration now imminent together with the introduction of "scientific management," the second. From a purely business standpoint the greatest asset of the capitalists' government, its chief natural resource, the most fruitful field for conservation, and the most profitable place for the investment of capital will then undoubtedly be in the labor supply. In presenting the British Budget of 1910 to Parliament, Mr. Lloyd George argued that the higher incomes and fortunes ought to bear a greater than proportionate share of the taxes, because present governmental expenditures were largely on their behalf, and because the new labor reforms were equally to their benefit. "What is it," he said, "that enabled the fortunate possessors of these incomes and these fortunes to amass the wealth they enjoy or bequeath? The security insured for property by the agency of the State, the guaranteed immunity from the risks and destruction of war, insured by our natural advantages and our defensive forces. This is an essential element even now in the credit of the country; and, in the past, it means that we were accumulating great wealth in this land, when the industrial enterprises of less fortunately situated countries were not merely at a standstill, but their resources were being ravaged and destroyed by the havoc of war. "What, further, is accountable for this growth of wealth? The spread of intelligence amongst the masses of the people, the improvements in sanitation and in the general condition of the people. These have all contributed towards the efficiency of the people, _even as wealth-producing machines_. Take, for instance, such legislation as the Educational Acts and the Public Health Acts; they have cost much money, but they have made infinitely more. That is true of all legislation which improves the conditions of life for the people. An educated, well-fed, well-clothed, well-housed people _invariably leads to the growth of a numerous well-to-do class_. If _property_ were to grudge a substantial contribution towards proposals which insure the security which is one of the essential conditions of its existence or toward keeping from poverty and privation the old people whose lives of industry and toil have either created that wealth or made it productive, then _property_ would be not only shabby, but shortsighted." (Italics mine.)[49] The property interests should be far-sighted enough to support the present economic and labor reforms, not because there is any fear in Great Britain either from a revolutionary Socialist movement or from an organized political or labor union upheaval, for Mr. Lloyd George ridicules both these bogeys, but because such reforms _contribute towards the efficiency of the people, even as wealth-producing machines_--and increase the incomes of the wealthy and the well-to-do. Mr. Lloyd George continued:-- "We have, more especially during the last 60 years, in this country accumulated wealth to an extent which is almost unparalleled in the history of the world, but we have done it at _an appalling waste of human material_. We have drawn upon the robust vitality of the rural areas of Great Britain, and especially Ireland, and spent its energies recklessly in the devitalizing atmosphere of urban factories and workshops as if the supply were inexhaustible. We are now beginning to realize that we have been spending _our capital_, at a disastrous rate, and it is time we should take a real, concerted, national effort to replenish it. I put forward this proposal, not a very extravagant one, _as a beginning_." (My italics.)[50] In order to do away with the economic waste of profitable "human material" and the still more serious exhaustion of the supply, the propertyless wage earner or salaried man for the first time obtains a definite status in the official political economy; he becomes the property of the nation viewed "as a business firm," a part of "our" capital. His position was much like a peasant or a laborer during the formation of the feudal system. To obtain any status at all, to become half free he had to become somebody's "man." Now he is the "man," the industrial asset, of the government. This paternal attitude towards the individual, however, is not at all similar to the paternalist attitude towards capital. While the individual capitalist often does not object to having his capital reckoned as a part of the resources of a government which capitalists as a class control,--roughly speaking in proportion to their wealth,--we can picture his protests if either _his_ personal activity or ability or _his_ private income were similarly viewed as dependent for their free use and development on the benevolent patronage of the State. However, for the _workers_ to become an asset of the State, even while the latter is still viewed primarily as a commercial institution and remains in the hands of the business class, is undoubtedly a revolutionary advance. Mr. Winston Churchill also gives, as the basis for the whole program, the need of putting an end to that "waste of earning power" and of "the stamina, the virtue, safety, and honor of the British race," that is due to existing poverty and economic maladjustment.[51] Mr. John A. Hobson, a prominent economist and radical, shows that the purpose of the "New Liberalism" is the full development of "the productive resources of our land and labor,"[52] and denies that this broad purpose has anything to do with Socialist collectivism. Professor Simon Patten of the University of Pennsylvania writes very truly about the proposed labor reforms, that "they can cause poverty to disappear and can give a secure income to every family," without requiring any sacrifice on the part of the possessing classes. No one has shown more clearly or in fewer words how intimately connected are the advance of the worker and the further increase of profits. "Social improvement," Professor Patten says, "takes him [the workman] from places where poverty and diseases oppress, and introduce him to the full advantage of a better position.... It gives to the city workman the air, light, and water that the country workman has, but without his inefficiency and isolation. It gives more working years and more working days in each year, with more zeal and vitality in each working day; health makes work pleasant, and pleasant work becomes efficiency when the environment stimulates men's powers to the full.... The unskilled workman must be transformed into an efficient citizen; children must be kept from work, and women must have shorter hours and better conditions."[53] Professor Patten has even drawn up a complete scientific program of social reforms which lead _necessarily_ to the economic advantage of _all_ elements in a community without any decrease of the existing inequalities of wealth. "The incomes and personal efforts of those favorably situated," says Professor Patten, "can reduce the evils of poverty without the destruction of that _upon which their wealth and the progress of society depend_." (Italics mine.) The reform program begins with childhood and extends over every period of the worker's life. Ex-President Eliot of Harvard and President Hadley of Yale and other leading educators propose that its principles be applied to the nation's children. Dr. Eliot insists that greater emphasis should be laid on vocational and physical training and the teaching of hygiene and the preservation of the health, which will secure the approval of every "State Socialist." Anything that can be done to elevate the health of the nation, and to increase its industrial efficiency by the teaching of trades, will pay the nation, considered as a going concern, a business undertaking of all its capitalists. It might not improve the opportunity of the wage earners to rise to better-paid positions, because it would augment competition among skilled laborers; while it would probably improve wages somewhat, it might not advance them proportionately to the general increase of wealth; it might leave the unequal distribution of wealth, political power, and opportunity even more unequal than they are to-day, but as long as the nation as a whole is richer and the masses of the people better off, "State Socialists" will apparently be satisfied. President Hadley is even more definite than Dr. Eliot. The new educational policy so thoroughly in accord with the interests of the business and capitalist classes demands "for the people" every opportunity in education that will make the individual a better _worker_, while it allows his development as a _man_ and a _citizen_ to take care of itself. President Hadley urges that we follow along German lines in public education. What he feels we still lack, and ought to take from Germany, are the "industrial training and the military training of the people": the children are forced to go to the elementary schools for a time, and during that part of their education they are kept out of the shops and the factories. They, however, receive instructions in the rudiments of shop and factory work."[54] In other words, the children are kept out of the factory, but the shop and the factory are permitted to enter the school. Doubtless an improvement, but not yet the sort of education any business or professional man would desire for his own children at twelve, fourteen, or sixteen years of age.[55] "State Socialism" looks at the individual, and especially the workingman, almost wholly from the standpoint of what the community, as _at present organized_, the capitalists being the chief shareholders, is able to make out of him. Each newborn child represents so much cost to the community for his education. If he dies, the community loses so and so much. If he lives, he brings during his life such and such a sum to the community, and it is worth while to spend a considerable amount both to prevent his early death or disablement and to increase his industrial efficiency while he lives. According to this view, Professor Irving Fisher of Yale has calculated that the annual child crop in the United States is worth about seven billion dollars per annum, a sum almost equal to the annual value of our agricultural crops. In both cases great economies are possible. Professor Fisher has estimated that 47 per cent of the children who die in America less than five years old could be saved at an average cost of $20 per child, which means an annual loss to the nation of $576,000,000, according to Professor Fisher's calculation of what would have been the future value of all the children now lost (above their cost of maintenance). "We have counted it our good fortune," says Professor Fisher, "to dwell in a land where nature has been so prodigal that we have not needed to fear want. We are only beginning to realize that this very prodigality of nature has produced a spirit of prodigality in men. "It is the purpose of the conservation movement to rebuke and correct this national trait, and the resources of science are now concentrated in this mighty effort in that direction. "The conservation of human life will, I believe, constitute the grandest movement of the twentieth century. "Not only do human beings constitute by far the greatest part of our natural resources, but the waste of human life and strength is by far the greatest of all wastes. In the report of President Roosevelt's conservation commission, although his commission was primarily appointed to conserve our natural rather than our vital resources, it was pointed out that _human beings, considered as capitalized working power, are worth three to five times all our other capital_, and that, even on a very moderate estimate, the total waste and unnecessary loss of our national vitality amounts to _one and one half billions of dollars per year_."[56] When the "State Socialist" policy has taken possession of the world, which may be in the very near future, or, more correctly speaking, when the world's business and politics are so organized as to give this policy a chance for a full and free application, is it not evident that every advanced nation will consider it as being to its business interest to put an end to this vast, unnecessary loss of life? And if half a billion a year is lost through unnecessary deaths of very young children, is it not probable that an equal sum is lost through death later in childhood or early youth, another similar sum through underfeeding in later life, or through lack of sufficient exercise, rest, recreation, and outdoor life, and a far larger amount through lack of industrial training? Is it not certain that unnecessary industrial accidents, sickness due to overwork and early old age due to overstrain, are responsible for another enormous loss? And, finally, is not unemployment costing a billion a year to the "nation, considered as a business firm"? This last-named loss has been calculated, for the United States alone, as 1,300,000 years of labor time annually. If a round million of these years are saved--if we estimate their value in profits at the low figure of $1000 each,--we have another billion (even allowing for 300,000 unemployable).[57] Is it not clear that nearly every element in the community will soon combine to do all that is humanly possible to put an end to such costly abuses and neglect; and that conscientious and wholesale efforts to preserve the public health and to secure industrial efficiency cannot be a matter of the distant future, when movements in that direction have already been initiated in Great Britain, Australia, Germany, and some other countries? Sir Joseph Ward, Premier of New Zealand, says that the people of that country have already calculated the value of each child--and, on this basis, made it the subject of certain governmental investments. He says:-- "To return to the annuity fund, apart from the assistance it gives to the wife and children if the father is sick, it also contributes the services of a medical man for a woman at childbirth, and the State pays $30 for that purpose. If all of this is not needed to pay the physician, the rest may be used for carrying on the home. This has all been done with the view to helping the birth rate and bringing into the world children under the most healthy conditions possible, so that they may have a free chance of attaining man's or woman's estate. "We assess the value of an adult in our country as $1500. So, _from a business standpoint and on national grounds_, we regard the expenditure of a sum up to $30 as judicious, when the value of the infant to the country may be fifty times that sum. Thus the small wage earner's wife and children are provided for, and his fear about being able to provide for a large family is decreased." (Italics mine.)[58] "I am of the opinion," declares Mr. Churchill, "that the State should increasingly assume the position of the reserve employer of labor," and that "the State must increasingly and earnestly concern itself with the care of the sick and aged, and, above all, of the children." He looks forward "to the universal establishment of the _minimum standards_ of life and labor, and their progressive elevation as the increasing energies of production may permit."[59] Mr. Churchill rejects the supposition that the government intends to stop with the extension of the eight-hour law to miners. "I welcome and support this measure, not only for its own sake," he said, "but more because it is, I believe, simply the precursor of the general movement which is in progress, all over the world, and in other industries besides this, towards reconciling the conditions of labor with the well-ascertained laws of science and health."[60] It might be supposed that this measure would prove costly to employers, but this is only a short-sighted view. In the first place, working for less hours, the miners will produce somewhat more per hour, but an even more important ultimate benefit comes from the fact that the most experienced miners, those who are most profitable, being subject to less overstrain, will have a longer working life. Another measure already enacted towards establishing "a national minimum" applies to the wages in ready-made tailoring and some less important industries, to which shirt-waist making is soon to be added. These are known as the "sweated" trades, "where the feebleness and ignorance of the workers and their isolation from each other render them an easy prey to the tyranny of bad masters and middlemen one step above them upon the lowest rungs of the ladder, and themselves held in the grip of the same relentless forces,"--where "you have a condition not of progress but of progressive degeneration." Mr. Churchill asked Parliament to regard these industries as "sick and diseased," and "to deal with them in exactly the same mood and temper as we should deal with sick people," and accordingly boards were established for the purpose of setting up a minimum wage.[61] But if employers are forced to pay higher wages, it may be thought that they will lose from the law. This Mr. Churchill effectively denies. "In most instances," he says, "the best employers in the trade are already paying wages equal or superior to the probable minimum which the Trade Board will establish. The inquiries I have set on foot in the various trades scheduled have brought to me most satisfactory assurances from nearly all the employers to whom my investigations have addressed themselves.... But most of all I have put my faith in the practical effect of a powerful band of employers, perhaps a majority, who, whether from high motives or self-interest, or from a combination of the two--they are not necessarily incompatible ideas--will form a vigilant and instructed police, knowing every turn and twist of the trade, and who will labor constantly to protect themselves from being undercut by the illegal competition of unscrupulous rivals." Mr. Churchill claims that employers who are trying to pursue such trades with modern machinery and modern methods are more seriously hampered by the competition of the "sweaters" than they are by that of foreign employers. "I cannot believe," he concludes, "that the process of raising the degenerate and parasitical portion of these trades up to the level of the most efficient branches of the trade, if it is conducted by those conversant with the conditions of the trade and interested in it, will necessarily result in an increase in the price of the ultimate product. It may even sensibly diminish it through better methods."[62] Mr. Churchill is able to point out, as with most of the other reforms, that in one country or another they are already being put into effect, the legislation against "sweating" being already in force in Bavaria and Baden, as well as in Australia, under a somewhat different form. But the most striking of the British labor reforms has yet to be mentioned. Not only were the present old age pensions established by the common consent of all the political parties, but a law has now been enacted--also with the approval of all parties (and only twenty-one negative votes in Parliament)--to apply the same methods of state insurance of workingmen to sickness, accidents, and even to unemployment. The old age pensions were already more radical than those of Prussia in that the workingmen do not have to contribute under the British law, while the National Insurance Bill as now enacted surpasses both the former British measure and the German precedent in everything, except that it demands a lesser total sum from the government. In the insurance against accidents, sickness, and unemployment the government, instead of contributing the whole amount, gives from two ninths to one third, one third to one half being assessed against employers and one sixth to four ninths against employees. At first this reform, it is expected, will cost only about $12,500,000, and it will be several years before the maximum expenditure of $25,000,000 is reached. But the measure is radical in several particulars: it applies to clerks, domestic servants, and many other classes usually not reached by measures of the kind,--a total of some 14,000,000 persons; it provides $5,000,000 a year for the maintenance of sanatoria for tuberculosis and creates new health boards to improve sanitation and educate the people in hygiene; and it furnishes physicians and medicines for the insured, thus organizing practically the whole medical force and drug supply as far as the masses are concerned. In fact, the whole scheme may be looked on not so much as a measure to aid the sick and wounded of industry financially, as to set at work an automatic pressure working towards the preservation of the health, strength, and productive capacity of the people, and incidentally to the increase of profits. As Mr. Lloyd George said in an interview printed in the _Daily Mail_: "I want to make the nation more healthy than it is. The great mass of illness which afflicts us weighs us down and is easily preventable. It is a better thing to make a man healthy than to pay him so much a week when he is ill." Mr. Lloyd George points out that the German employers have found that the governmental insurance against accidents has proved a good investment:-- "When Bismarck was strengthening the foundation of the new German Empire, one of the very first tasks he undertook was the organization of a scheme which insured the German workmen and their families against the worst evils arising from these common accidents of life. And a superb scheme it was. It has saved an incalculable amount of human misery to hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of people. "Wherever I went in Germany, north or south, and whomever I met, whether it was an _employer_ or a workman, a _Conservative_ or a Liberal, a Socialist or a Trade-union Leader--men of all ranks, sections and creeds, with one accord joined in lauding the benefits which have been conferred upon Germany by this beneficent policy. Several wanted extensions, but there was not one who wanted to go back. The employers admitted that at first they did not quite like the new burdens it cast upon them, _but they now fully realized the advantages which even they derived from the expenditure_, for it had raised the standard of the workman throughout Germany." (My italics.)[63] It is not only worry and anxiety that were removed, but definite and irregular sums that workers or their employers had formerly set aside for insurance against accident, sickness, and old age, were now calculated and regulated on a business basis more profitable to both parties to the labor contract. It is true that in Germany the employers only pay part of the cost, the rest being borne almost entirely by employees, while in Great Britain--as far as the old age pensions go--the government pays all, and is likely to pay a considerable part, perhaps a third, in the other insurance schemes. But the plan by which the government pays all may prove even less costly to the employing class, since landlords and inactive capitalists on the one hand and the working people on the other, pay the larger part of the taxes--so that state insurance in this thoroughgoing form is perhaps destined to be even more popular than the German kind. The most radical provision of the new bill is that which deals with unemployment. Though applying only to the engineering and building trades, it reaches 2,400,000 people. It proposes to give a weekly allowance to every insured person who loses employment through no fault of his own, though nothing is given in strikes and lockouts. And it is intended to extend this measure to other employments. This is only the first installment. It is probable that Mr. Churchill's project that the State should undertake to abolish unemployment altogether is the most radical of all the proposed policies, excepting only that to gradually expropriate all the future unearned increment of land. "An industrial disturbance in the manufacturing districts and the great cities of this country," says Mr. Churchill, "presents itself to the ordinary artisan in exactly the same way as the failure of crops in a large province in India presents itself to the Hindoo cultivator. The means by which he lives are suddenly removed, and ruin in a form more or less swift and terrible stares him instantly in the face. That is a contingency which seems to fall within the most primary and fundamental obligations of any organization of government. I do not know whether in all countries or in all ages that responsibility could be maintained, but I do say that here and now, in this wealthy country and in this _scientific_ age, it does in my opinion exist, is not discharged, and will have to be discharged."[64] Mr. Churchill proposes not only to guard against periods of unemployment which extend to all industries in the case of industrial crises, but also to provide more steady employment for those who are unoccupied during the slack seasons of the year or while passing from one employer to another. Above all he plans that the youth of the nation shall not waste their strength entirely in unremunerative employment or in idleness, but that every boy or girl under eighteen years of age should be learning a trade as well as making a living. Few will deny that the program of Mr. Churchill and his associates in this direction marks a great step towards that "more complete or elaborate social organization" which he advocates. One of the most significant of all the measures by which Mr. Churchill plans to lend the aid of the State to the raising of the level of the working classes is his "Development" Act. The object of this bill, in the language of Mr. Churchill, is "to provide a fund for the economic development of our country, for the encouragement of agriculture, for afforestation, for the colonization of England (the settlement of agricultural land), and for the making of roads, harbors, and other public works." Stated in these terms, the Development Act is a measure of "State Socialism" for the general industrial advance of the country, but the main argument in its behalf lies in that clause of the bill which provides, to quote from Mr. Churchill again: "that the prosecution of these works shall be regulated, as far as possible, by the conditions of the labor market, so that in a very bad year of unemployment they can be expanded, so as to increase the demand for labor at times of exceptional slackness, and thus correct and counterbalance the cruel fluctuations of the labor market."[65] We have seen that Mr. Churchill has justified these measures, not as increasing the relative share of the working classes, but as adding to the total product. They are to add to the industrial efficiency of the nation as a whole, and so incidentally to bring a greater income to all,--but in much the same proportions as wealth now distributes itself. In this country Mr. Roosevelt has advocated a typical "State Socialist" program of labor reforms including:-- "A workday of not more than eight hours." "The abolition of the sweat-shop system." "Sanitary inspection of factory, workshop, mine, and home." "Liability of employers for injury to body and loss of life" and "an automatically fixed compensation." "The passage and enforcement of rigid anti-child-labor laws which will cover every portion of this country." "Laws limiting woman's labor." All these measures except the first were adopted long ago, in considerable part at least, by the reactionary government of Prussia and are being introduced generally in monarchical and aristocratic Europe, and I have shown that the eight-hour day has been instituted for miners in Great Britain and that Mr. Winston Churchill proposed to extend it. Mr. Roosevelt himself concedes that "we are far behind the older and poorer countries" in such matters. But an examination of the action of State legislatures during the year just past will show that we are making rapid progress in the same direction. "Social" or "industrial" efficiency, promoted by the government, is already the central idea in American labor reform. Government insurance against old age, accident, sickness, and unemployment is regarded, not as the "workingmen's compensation" for injuries done them by society, but as an automatic means of forcing backward employers to economize the community's limited supply of labor power--not to wear it out too soon, not to overstrain it, not to damage it irreparably or lay it up unnecessarily for repairs, and not to leave it idle. Mr. Louis Brandeis points out that mutual fire insurance has appealed to certain manufacturers because in twenty years it has resulted in measures that have prevented more than two thirds of the expected losses by fire. Similarly, he says, "if society and industry and the individual were made to pay from day to day the actual cost of sickness, accident, invalidity, premature death, or premature old age consequent upon excessive hours of labor, of unhygienic conditions of work, of unnecessary risk, and of irregularity in employment, those evils would be rapidly reduced."[66] This, as Mr. Brandeis says, is undoubtedly on the "road to social efficiency" and its practical application will convince employers better than "mere statements of cost, however clear and forceful." It will remove a vast sea of human misery, and the process will immensely enrich society. But like the other State Capitalist reforms (until they are supplemented by some more radical policy) it will at the same time automatically bring about an increase of existing inequalities of income and an intensification of social injustice. Mr. William Hard in a study of workingmen's compensation for _Everybody's Magazine_ has reached a similar conclusion to that of Mr. Brandeis: "Far from attacking the present relationship between employer and employee, automatic compensation specifically recognizes it. The backbone of the present so-called 'capitalism'; namely, the hiring of the unpropertied class by the propertied class to do work for wages, is not caused by automatic compensation to lose a single vertebra, and automatic compensation has nothing whatever to do with Socialism except that it is accomplished under the supervision of the State." If compulsory insurance against accidents "has nothing whatever to do with Socialism," neither have compulsory insurance against sickness, against old age, against certain phases of unemployment. The social reformers propose a labor policy that is _for_ the people whether they like it or not; the only "rights" it gives them are "the right to live" and "the right to work." Its first object is to produce more efficient and profitable laborers, its second to have the government take control of organized charity, to which aspect I must now turn. Most of the labor reforms, enacted to secure for the laborer "what for the Nation's sake even the poorest of its subjects should have," have been urged more strongly by philanthropists and political economists than by representatives of the workers. In America "the minimum wage," for example, is being worked up by a special committee consisting almost exclusively of this class, while workmen's compensation has been indorsed by the most varied political and social elements, from the chief organ of American philanthropists, and Theodore Roosevelt, to the Hearst newspapers. With "the national efficiency" in view, Mr. Webb asks the British government to take up the policy of a "national minimum," including not only a minimum below which wages are not to fall, but also a similar minimum of leisure, sanitation, and education.[67] Mr. Edward Devine, editor of the leading philanthropic and reform journal in America, the _Survey_, outlines an identical policy and also insists like Mr. Webb that the Socialist can lay no exclusive claim to it. "The social economist [_i.e._ reformer]," writes Mr. Devine, "is sometimes confused with the Utopian [_i.e._ Socialist]. They are, however, very distinct types of reformers. The Utopian dreams of ideals. The social economist seeks to establish the normal.... The social worker is primarily concerned, _not_ with the lifting of humanity to a higher level, but with eradicating the maladjustments and abnormalities, the needless inequalities, which prevent our realizing our own reasonable standards." Speaking in the name of American reformers in general, Mr. Devine demands for the lower levels of society "normal standards" of life, which are equivalent to Mr. Webb's national minimum, and definitely denies the applicability of "the question-begging epithet of Socialism which is hurled at all the reformers engaged in such work." "Whether it belongs to the Socialist program," Mr. Devine objects, "is a question so far as we can see of interest only to the Socialists. Our advocacy of such laws as we enumerate has no Socialist origin." He claims that the "expenditures legitimately directed towards the removal of adverse social conditions, are not uneconomic and unproductive," and that "they do not represent a mere indulgence of altruistic sentiment," but are "investments"; of which prison reforms and the expenditures for the prevention of tuberculosis are examples.[68] Another phrase for the proposed saving of the national labor resources and the introduction of minimum standards in its philanthropic aspect is "the abolition of poverty." When he speaks of this as a definite and by no means a distant reform, the reformer refers to _that extreme form of poverty_, so widely prevalent to-day, which results in the physical deterioration and the industrial inefficiency of a large part of the population. This sort of poverty is a burden on industry and the capitalists, and Mr. Lloyd George was widely applauded when he said that it can and must be done away with. He has calculated, too, that this abolition can be accomplished _at half the cost of the annual increase in armaments_. "This is a War Budget," said Mr. Lloyd George in presenting the reform program of 1910. "It is for waging implacable war against poverty and squalidness. I cannot help hoping and believing that before this generation has passed away we shall have advanced a great step toward the time when poverty, and the wretchedness and the human degradation which always follows in its camp, will be as remote from the people of this country as the wolves which once infested its forests." Mr. H. G. Wells, who has been a leading figure in the British reform world and in the Fabian Society for many years, speaks on this reform movement not merely as a keen outside observer. As an advocate of more radical measures, he argues that there is nothing Socialistic about "the national minimum." This "philanthropic administrative Socialism," as Mr. Wells calls it, is very remote, he says, from the spirit of his own.[69] Yet, critical as Mr. Wells is, he also advocates a policy that could be summed up in the single phrase, "industrial efficiency." "The advent of a strongly Socialistic government would mean no immediate revolutionary changes at all," he says. "There would be no doubt an educational movement to increase the economic value and productivity of the average citizen of the next generation, and legislation _upon the lines laid down by the principle of the 'minimum wage'_ to check the waste of our national resources by destructive employment. Also a shifting of the burden of taxation of enterprise to rent would begin." (My italics.) The Liberals who are already setting these reforms on foot disclaim any connection whatever with Socialism, but Mr. Wells argues that they do not realize the real nature of their policy. The establishment of this paternal "State Socialism," whether based on a philanthropic "national minimum" or a scientific policy of "industrial efficiency," many other "Socialists" besides those of Great Britain consider to be the chief task of Socialism itself in our generation. Among the latter was the late Edmond Kelly, a member of the Socialist party in this country at the time of his death, who, in his posthumous work, "Twentieth Century Socialism," has summed up his political faith in much the same way as the anti-Socialist reformer might have done. He says that three of the four chief objects of Socialism are the organization of society, first "to prevent that overwork and unemployment which lead to drunkenness, pauperism, prostitution, and crime"; second, "to preserve the resources of the country"; and third, "to produce with the greatest economy, with the greatest efficiency."[70] Yet Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Rockefeller, as well as Mr. Roosevelt, agree to all three of these policies. They are precisely what the leading Socialists have called "State Socialism." A part of the working people, also, are disposed to subordinate their own conceptions of what is just, in spite of their own better judgment, to an exclusive longing for an immediate trial of this kind of State benevolence. This is expressed in the widely used phrase, "every man to have the right to work and live,"--employed editorially, for example, by Mr. Berger, now Socialist Congressman. What is demanded by this principle is _not a greater proportion of the national income or an increasing share of the control over the national government, but the "State Socialist" remedies, employment, and the minimum wage_. In its origin this is the begging on the part of the economically lowest element, a class which Henry George well remarks has been degraded by poverty until it considers that "the chance to labor is a boon." Some years ago the municipal platform of the Milwaukee Socialists said that it must be borne in mind "that the famine-stricken is better served with a piece of bread than with the most brilliant program of the future" and that "in view of the hopelessness of an immediate radical betterment in the position of the working class" it is necessary to emphasize the importance of attaining "the next best."[71] Here again was admitted complete dependence on those who own the bread and have the disposition of "the next best" in political reforms. When capitalism is a little better organized, the working people will be guaranteed "the next best": steady work and the food, conditions, and training necessary to make that work efficient--just as surely as valuable slaves were given these rights by intelligent masters or as valuable horses even are given care and kindly treatment to-day. "A Socialist Social Worker" has published anonymously in the _Survey_ a letter which presents in a few words the whole Socialist position as to this type of reform. The writer claims that the very fact that he is a social worker shows that even as a Socialist he welcomes "every addition to the standard of living that may be wrested or argued from the Capitalist class," since all Socialists recognize that "no undernourished class ever won a fight against economic exploitation, but that the more is given the more will be demanded and secured." But he does not feel that the material betterments have any closer relation to Socialism. "The new feudalism," he says, "will care for and conserve the powers of the human industrial tool as the lord of the manor looked after the human agricultural implement...." Here is the essential point: the efficiency of the human industrial tool is to be improved with or without his consent. "Unrestrained Capitalism," says the same writer in explanation of his prediction, "has hitherto invariably meant the physical deterioration of the working class and the marginal disintegration of society--the loosening of social ties and the pushing of marginal members of society over the brink into poverty, pauperism, vagrancy, drunkenness, prostitution, wife desertion and crime, _but this deterioration is not the main indictment against capitalism_, and will be remedied by the wiser capitalists themselves. The main indictment of capitalism is that it selfishly and stupidly blocks the road of orderly and continuous progress for the race." The proposal of the social reformers, as far as the workers are concerned aims to put an end to this deterioration, to standardize industry or to establish a minimum of wages, leisure, health, and industrial efficiency. The writer says that the Socialists aim at something more than this. "The criterion of social justice in every civilized community," he writes, "is, and always has been, not how large or how intense is the misery of the social debtor class, but what is done with the social surplus of industry? It was formerly used to build pyramids, to create a landed or ecclesiastical or literary aristocracy, to conduct wars, or to provide the means of a sensuous life for the majority of a privileged class, and the means of dilettantism for the minority of it. _The difference between the near Socialist and the true Socialist is principally that the main attention of the former is given to the negative side of the social problem--the condition of the submerged classes, while that of the latter is given to the positive side of the problem--the wonderful development, power, and life that would come to that race and the individual if a wise and social use were to be made of the surplus of industry._" FOOTNOTES: [46] "Fabianism and Empire," p. 62. [47] Articles by Hyman Strunsky on Welfare Work, _The Coming Nation_, 1910. [48] do, do. [49] Lloyd George, _op. cit._, p. 93. [50] Lloyd George, _op. cit._, p. 81. [51] Winston Churchill, _op. cit._, p. 101. [52] John A. Hobson, "The Crisis of Liberalism," p. 3. [53] Professor Simon Patten, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, July, 1908. [54] Speech of President Hadley before the Brooklyn Institute of Art and Sciences (1909). [55] A more democratic and truthful view of the German educational system is that of Dr. Abraham Flexner (see the _New York Times_, October 1, 1911). He says that the Germans have to solve the following kind of an educational problem:-- "What sort of educational program can we devise that will subserve all the various national policies--that will enable Germany to be a great scientific nation, that will enable it to carry on an aggressive colonial and industrial policy, and yet not throw us into the arms of democracy? Their present educational system is their highly effective reply. "Our problem is a very different one," Dr. Flexner remarks. "Our historic educational problem has been and is quite independent of any position we might be able to achieve in the world. That problem has always been: How can we frame conditions in which individuals can realize the best that is in them?" Dr. Flexner is then reported to have quoted the following from a Springfield Republican editorial:-- "Germany could readily train her masses with a view to industrial efficiency, whereas our industrial efficiency is only one of the efficiencies we care about; the American wishes to develop in many other ways, and to have his educational system help him to do it." [56] _New York Times_, Nov. 12, 1911. [57] F. H. Streightoff, "The Standard of Living among the Industrial People of America." [58] Interview with Sir Joseph Ward, New York, April 15, 1911. [59] Winston Churchill, _op. cit._, p. 325. [60] Winston Churchill, _op. cit._, p. 186. [61] Winston Churchill, _op. cit._, pp. 240, 243. [62] Winston Churchill, _op. cit._, pp. 250, 252. [63] Lloyd George, _op. cit._, pp. 68-69. [64] Winston Churchill, _op. cit._, p. 197. [65] Winston Churchill, _op. cit._, p. 197. [66] The _Outlook_, June, 1911. [67] Sidney Webb, the _Contemporary Review_ (1908) and "Basis and Policy of Socialism," pp. 83, 84. [68] The _Survey_ (New York), 1910, pp. 81-82, 466, 731-732. [69] H. G. Wells, "First and Last Things," p. 133. [70] Edmond Kelly, "Twentieth-Century Socialism," p. 314. [71] _Vorwaerts_ (Milwaukee), Feb. 3, 1898. CHAPTER V COMPULSORY ARBITRATION So far I have spoken only of the constructive side of the new capitalism's labor program, its purpose to produce healthy and industrially efficient laborers so as to increase profits. "State Socialism" gives the workingman as a citizen certain carefully measured political rights, and legislates actively in his behalf as a profit-producing employee at work, but its policy is reversed the moment it deals with him and his organizations _as owners and sellers of labor_. Towards the individual workers, who are completely powerless either politically or economically until they are organized, the new capitalism is, on the whole, both benevolent and actually beneficent. But it does not propose that organized labor shall obtain a power either in industry or in government in any way comparable to that of organized capital. "Successful State Socialism," as Victor S. Clark says in writing of the Australian experiments, "depends largely upon perfecting public control over the individual."[72] But compulsory arbitration of labor disputes which reaches the wage earners' organizations, is far more important to "State Socialism" than any other form of control over individual. A considerable measure of individual liberty may be allowed without endangering this new social polity, and it is even intended systematically to encourage the more able among the workers by some form of individual or piece wages--or at least a high degree of classification of the workers--and by a scheme of promotion that will utilize the most able in superior positions, and incidentally remove them out of the way as possible leaders of discontent. Nor is it intended to use any compulsion on labor organizations beyond that which is essential to prevent them from securing a power in society in any way comparable to that of property and capital. For this purpose compulsory arbitration is the direct and perfect tool. It can be limited in its application to those industries where the unions really occupy a position of strategic importance like railroads and coal mines, and it can be used to attach to the government those employees that are unable to help themselves. I have mentioned those weaker groups of employees who would be unable to improve their condition very materially except by government aid, and, even when so raised to a somewhat higher level, have no power to harm capitalism. Compulsory arbitration or some similar device must therefore replace such crudely restrictive and oppressive measures as have hitherto been applied to the unions. In the United States all "dangerous" strikes are at present throttled by court injunctions forbidding the strikers to take any effective action, and boycotts are held to be forbidden by the Sherman law originally directed against the "trusts." Recently the Supreme Court decided that the officers of the American Federation of Labor were not to be imprisoned for violation of the latter statute. But the decision was purely on technical grounds, and the court upheld unanimously the application of the law to the unions. There is little question that the attorney for the manufacturers, Daniel Davenport, was right when he thus summed up the court's opinion:-- "It held that the boycott is illegal; that the victim of the boycott has the right to go into court of equity for protection by injunction; that such court has the right to enjoin any and every act done in enforcing the boycott, including the sending out of boycott notices, circulars, etc., that the alleged constitutional right of free speech and free press affords the boycotter no immunity for such publication; that for a violation of the injunction the party violating it is liable to be punished both civilly and criminally." Against this law and the use of injunctions in labor disputes the Federation of Labor has introduced a bill through Congressman W. B. Wilson, which aims to free the unions from these legal obstacles by enacting that no right to continue the relation of employer to employee or to carry on business shall be construed as property or a property right; and that no agreement between two or more persons concerning conditions of employment or its termination shall constitute a conspiracy or an offense against the law unless it would be unlawful if done by a single individual, and that, therefore, such an act is not subject to injunctions. While neither of the great parties has definitely promised to support this particular measure, one party has made a vague promise to restrict injunctions, and the leaders of the progressive wings of both are quite definite about it. Nearly half of the House of Representatives voted for the repeal of the Sherman law as applied against union boycotts. Senator La Follette has demanded the abolition of this species of injunction, and Governor Woodrow Wilson has accused our federal courts of "elaborating a theory of conspiracy destined to bring 'the sympathetic strike' and what is termed 'the secondary boycott' under legal condemnation." Such reforms are not as radical as might appear to Americans, for the boycott is legal in Germany, while the crime of "conspiracy" was repealed in Great Britain in 1875, and the rights of strikers were further protected in that country by the repeal of the Taff Vale decision against picketing a few years ago, and yet unions are in no very strong position there. And weak as they are, the talk of compulsory arbitration is growing, and it seems only question of time until some modification of it is adopted. And, though the abuse of injunctions and the other forms of anti-union laws and decisions now prevailing will probably be done away with in this country, there is little doubt that here also employers will use some great coal or railroad strike as a pretext for enacting a compulsory arbitration law.[73] Similarly, as governments continue to take on new industrial functions, great importance is attached to the right of government employees, now denied, to organize and to join unions. Senator La Follette and other progressives also champion this right against President Taft, and will doubtless win their fight, but, as I shall show later a right to organize does not mean a right to strike--and there seems no probability that any government will fail to answer the effort to strike on any very large scale either by punishment for conspiracy against the State or by excluding the strikers permanently from government employment. They will doubtless be offered, as in France, instead of the right to strike, the right to submit their grievances as a body, if they wish it, to some government board (see Part III, Chapter VI). The Australasian labor leaders were the first and are still the chief advocates of compulsory arbitration among the unionists, and if they find it used against them they have nobody but themselves to blame. That Labor is disappointed in the result in those countries is shown by the fact that of late years, both in Australia and New Zealand, the most important strikes have been settled outside of the compulsory arbitration acts, and Mr. Clark states that he is unaware of any important exception. But that the workers in Australia still hope to use this legislation for their purposes is shown by the referendum of 1911, by which they sought to nationalize the State laws on the subject. At the time of the railroad strike in Victoria, Australia, in 1903, a law was passed which imposed a penalty of "twelve months' imprisonment or a fine of one hundred pounds" for engaging in a strike on government railways, and made a man liable to arrest without warrant or bail "for advising a strike orally or by publication, or for attending any meetings of more than six persons for the purpose of encouraging strikers." Even then the limit had not been reached. In 1909 the Parliament of New South Wales passed an act especially directed against strikes in any industry which produced "the necessary commodities of life [these being defined as coal, gas, water, and food] the privation of which may tend to endanger human life or cause serious bodily injury," and the penalty of twelve months' imprisonment of the Victorian law was extended to all this vast group of industries also. The law of New South Wales was most stringent, providing that any one taking part in a strike meeting under these circumstances is also liable to twelve months' imprisonment, and that the police may break into the headquarters of any union and seize any documents "which they reasonably suspect to relate to any walk-out or strike." Under this law the well-known labor leader, Peter Bowling, was sentenced to one year of imprisonment. The unions violently denounced this enactment, but chiefly as they had denounced previous legislation, on the ground that it permitted _unorganized_ workmen to apply for relief under the law. That is to say, while the employers were using the law to make striking a crime, they were extending such benefits as it produced to the nonunion workers who can often be used as tools for their purposes. But the astounding hold that "State Socialism" has on the Australian masses, especially on the working people, is shown by the steadfast belief that this measure can be amended so as to operate to their interest. Bowling and his unions made a serious agitation for the general strike against the coercive measure just mentioned, but it was only by a tie vote that the New South Wales Labour Congress even favored protest in the form of cancelling the agreement which the unions had made under the Industrial Disputes Acts, while in the next elections New South Wales returned a majority of labor representatives opposing Bowling's policy of radical protest. That is, the majority of the working people still express confidence in the possibilities of compulsory arbitration, and even want to extend it. Professor Le Rossignol of the United States and Mr. William D. Stewart of New Zealand have undertaken a careful and elaborate investigation of compulsory arbitration in New Zealand.[74] A reference to a few of their quotations from original documents will show the nature and possibilities of this coercive measure as it has developed in the country of its origin. The original law in New Zealand was introduced by the Honorable William Pember Reeves, the Minister of Labor, in 1894, and was supported by the labor leaders. Mr. Reeves says: "What the act was primarily passed to do was to put an end to the larger and more dangerous class of strikes and lockouts. The second object of the act's framer was to set up tribunals to regulate the conditions of labor." "Mr. Reeves' chief idea," say our authors, "was to prevent strikes, and a great deal more was said in Parliament about industrial peace than about the improvement in the conditions of labor which the act was to bring about. But there can be little doubt that the unionists, without whose help the act could not have been passed, thought more of the latter than of the former result, and looked upon the act as an important part of the new legislation for the benefit of the working class." Here is the contrast that we must always keep in mind. _The purpose of the unionists is to see if they cannot obtain improvements in their conditions; the purpose of the employers and also of "the public" is to prevent strikes._ One of the most able students of the situation, Mr. MacGregor, has shown that since the passing of the law the latter purpose has been thoroughly accomplished, since it has been used not only as was originally intended, to settle labor disputes which become so serious as to threaten to "arrest the processes of industry," but that it has practically built up a "system of governmental regulation of wages and conditions of labor in general." That is to say, the law has accomplished rather the purposes of the employers than those of the employees. In another point of the most fundamental importance the law has become something radically different from what the labor leaders who first favored it hoped it would be. The act of 1894 was entitled: "An act to encourage the formation of industrial unions and associations and to facilitate the settlement of industrial disputes by conciliation and arbitration." By the amendment of 1898 the words, "to encourage the formation of industrial unions and associations," were left out. Thus the law ceased to be directly helpful to the very unions which had done so much to bring it about and are the only means employees possess to make the law serve them instead of becoming a new weapon for employers. An early decision of the Arbitration Court in 1896 had declared that preference should be given to the unionists. "Since the employer was the judge of the qualifications of his employees, the unionists did not gain much by this decision," say Le Rossignol and Stewart. "In later awards it was usually specified that preference was granted only when the union was not a closed guild, but practically open to every person of good character who desired to join." These later decisions brought it about that the so-called preference of unionists became no preference at all. "The Arbitration Court, except in a few minor cases, has refused to grant unconditional preference and the unionists, realizing that preference to an open union is no preference at all, now look to Parliament for redress and demand statutory unconditional preference to unionists." In 1905 strikes and lockouts were made statutory offenses, and a single judge was given the power practically to force the individual worker to labor. After ten years of trial the law had become almost unrecognizable from the workingman's standpoint, and from this moment on the resistance to it has grown steadily. In a decision rendered in 1906, the Chief Justice said: "The right of a workman to make a contract is exceedingly limited. The right of free contract is taken away from the worker, and he has been placed in a condition of servitude or status, and the employee must conform to that condition." Not only do judges have this power, but they have the option of applying or not applying it as they see fit, for the amendment of 1908 "expressly permits the court to refuse to make an award if for any reason it considers it desirable to do so." With a law, then, that in no way aids the unions, as such--however beneficial it may be at times to the individual workingman--and which leaves an arbitrary power in the hands of the judge elected by an agricultural majority, what has been the _concrete_ result? Especially, what principles have been applied by the judges? Of course the first principle has been that all the working people should get what is called a "minimum" or a "living" wage, but our authors show that merely to keep their heads above the sea of pauperism was not at all the goal of the workers of New Zealand. No doubt they were already getting such a wage in that relatively new and prosperous country, yet this was all the new law did or could offer, besides keeping existing wage scales up to the rising cost of living. Anything more would have required, not compulsory arbitration, but a series of revolutionary changes in the whole economic and political structure. "Another stumbling block in the way of advance in wages is the inefficient or marginal or no-profit employer, who, hanging on the ragged edge of ruin, opposes the raising of wages on the ground that the slightest concession would plunge him into bankruptcy. His protests have their effect on the Arbitration Court, which tries to do justice to all the parties and fears to make any change for fear of hurting somebody. But the organized workers, caring nothing for the interests of any particular employer, demand improved conditions of labor, though the inefficient employer be eliminated and all production be carried on by a few capable employers doing business on a large scale and able to pay the highest wages." Here is the essential flaw in compulsory arbitration in competitive industries (its limitations under monopolies will be mentioned later). The courts cannot apply a different standard to different employers. On the other hand, they cannot fix a wage which any employer cannot afford to pay or which will drive him out of business. That is to say, the standard tends to be fixed by what the poorest employer can pay, the employer who, from the standpoint either of capital or of labor or of efficient industry, really deserves to be driven from business. An exception is made only against such employers as cannot even afford to pay a _living_ wage--these alone are eliminated. Le Rossignol and Stewart show that in view of these considerations the court has repeatedly stated that "profit sharing could not be taken as a basis of awards, on the ground that it would involve the necessity of fixing differential rates of wages, which would lead to confusion, would be unfair to many employers, and unsatisfactory to the workers themselves." With such a principle guiding the court, and it is probably a necessity under commercial competition, it is no wonder that some of the representatives of the unions have claimed that annual real wages have actually fallen. "It is not easy," say our authors, "to show that compulsory arbitration has greatly benefited the workers of the Colony. Sweating has been abolished, but it is a question whether it would not have disappeared in the years of prosperity without the help of the Arbitration Court. Strikes have been largely prevented, but it is possible that the workers might have gained as much or more by dealing directly with their employers than by the mediation of the court. As to wages, it is generally admitted that they have not increased more than the cost of living. A careful investigation by Mr. von Dalezman, the Registrar-General, shows that, while the average wages increased from 1895 to 1907 in the ratio of 84.8 to 104.9, the cost of food increased in the ratio of 84.3 to 103.3. No calculation was attempted for clothing or rent." If we take it into account that rents have risen very rapidly and are especially complained of by the working people, we can see that real wages, measured by their purchasing power, probably fell in the first twelve years of compulsory arbitration, notwithstanding that it was on the whole a period of prosperity in the Colony. For ten years, as a consequence, the complaints of the workers against the decisions have been growing, "not because the wages were reduced, but because they were not increased and because other demands were not granted." When the unions perceived that the principles for which they have been contending were not granted, and that their material conditions were not being improved, it was suggested that the judge of the Arbitration Court should be elected by the people, in the hope that the unions might control the election, "but this would be at variance with all British traditions and could not be brought about," say our authors. No doubt British tradition has had something to do with the matter, but the impracticability of this remedy is much more due to the fact that the employees confront an agricultural and middle class majority. At first it was the employers who were displeased, but now they are becoming converted. The employers, say Le Rossignol and Stewart, "have come to realize that they might have lost more by strikes than they have ever lost by arbitration; and, since the workers have been dissatisfied, the employers are more disposed to stand by the act, or to maintain a neutral attitude, waiting to see what the workingmen will do." It would seem, then, that the real gain from the law has been through the abolition of strike losses, and since these had previously been borne by employers and employees alike, this saving has been pretty equally divided between the two classes, neither making any relative gain over the other. But at the bottom this is a blow to the unions, for the purpose of every union policy is not merely to leave things where they were before, but to increase the workers' relative share. Any policy that brings _mutual_ gain requires no organized struggle of any kind. It is the workers who are the plaintiffs, and the employers the defendants. When things are left _in statu quo_ it is a moral and actual defeat for the employees. This is why, in the last two or three years, the whole labor movement in New Zealand has arisen against the law. In 1908 the coal miners' union refused to pay a fine levied against it, alleging that it had no funds. "In this position the union was generally condemned by public opinion, but supported by a number of unions by resolutions of sympathy and gifts of money. Finally, the Arbitration Court decided to proceed against the men individually for their share of the fine. The whole of the fine, together with the costs of collection, amounting to over 147 pounds, was recovered by means of attachment orders under the Wages Attachment Act of 1895. According to a recent decision of the Court of Appeals, the men could have been imprisoned, if they had refused to pay, for a maximum term of one year, but it was not necessary to do this, and public opinion was not in favor of imprisonment for the offense." This and other strikes in 1907 and 1908 "caused a widespread opinion among _employers_ and the general public that the act should be amended chiefly for the sake of preventing strikes. The laborers, as a class, were not enthusiastic about the matter, since the proposed amendments were designed to compel them to obey the law rather than to bring them any additional benefit." After having been debated for a year, a new law was passed, and went into effect January 1, 1909. This new law, though still compulsory, repeals some of the features of the previous legislation which were most obnoxious to the unions. Even this act, however, they found entirely unsatisfactory, and "during the year ending March 31, 1909, sixteen workers' unions, and a like number of employers' unions, had their registration cancelled for neglect, while two other unions formally cancelled their registration." This meant practically that these unions have withdrawn from the field of the act and expressed their disapproval of compulsory arbitration, even in its recently modified form. Not only have the unions been withdrawing, but, freed from its bondage, they began at once to win their most important strikes, indicating what its effect had been. Even the employees of the State have been striking, and successfully. "The workers' position is embarrassing. The original act was passed for their benefit as well as to prevent strikes, but when it could no longer be used as a machine for raising wages, they were the first to rebel against it." There can be no doubt that our authors are correct, and that the working people are beginning to feel they have been trapped. In both New Zealand and Australia they have given their approval to an act which in actual practice may become more dangerous than any weapon that has ever been forged against them. The only possible way they could gain any advantage from it would be if they were able to elect the judge of the Arbitration Court, but, to obtain a political majority for this purpose, they would have to develop a broad social program which would appeal to at least a part of the agriculturists as well as to the working people, but here we turn to the considerations to be brought out in the next chapter. Mr. Charles Edward Russell, as the result of two visits to Australasia, has very ably summed up the Socialist view of compulsory arbitration in _The Coming Nation_, of which he is joint editor. Mr. Russell says:-- "The thing is a failure, greatly to the surprise of many capable observers, and yet just such a result might have been expected from the beginning, and for two perfectly obvious reasons, both of which, strange to say, were universally overlooked. "In the first place, the court was nominally composed of three persons, and really of one. That one was the judge appointed by the government. "The representative of the employers voted every time for the employers; the representative of the unions voted every time for the unions; the judge alone decided, and might as well have constituted the whole court. "At first the judge decided most of the cases in favor of the policy of increasing wages. Fine, again. Many wage scales ascended. "But the judge, as a rule, did not like his job. He desired to get to the Supreme Court as rapidly as possible; to the Supreme Court where the honors were. A succession of judges went by. At last came one that agreed with the employers that wages were too high for the welfare of the country. This had long been a complaint of the manufacturers in particular, who were fond of pointing out how high wages discouraged the opening of new factories, and consequently the development of the country. This judge, being of the same opinion, apparently, began to decide the cases the other way. "Then, of a sudden the second fatal defect in the system opened up. "The men grew restless under the adverse decisions of the court. That raised a new question. "How are you going to compel men to work when they do not wish to work under the conditions you provide? "Nobody had thought of that." Referring, then, to the failure to prevent the strike of the slaughterers against the law in 1907, or to punish them after they had forced their employers to terms, Mr. Russell gives the Socialist opinion of the legislation of 1908, passed to remedy this situation:-- "At the next session of Parliament it amended the law to meet these unexpected emergencies and find a way to compel men to work. "To strike after a case had been referred to the court was now made a crime, punishable by a fine, and if the fine were not paid, the strikers' goods could be distrained and he could be imprisoned. Any labor union that ordered a strike or allowed its members to strike was made subject to a fine of $500. Outside persons or organizations that aided or abetted a strike were made subject to severe penalties. "Fine, again. But suppose the labor unions should try to evade the law by withdrawing from registry under the act? _Government thought once more, and produced another amendment by which the penalties for striking were extended to all trades engaged in supplying a utility or a necessity, whether such trades were organized or not._ "You could hardly surpass this for ingenuity. 'Supplying a necessity' would seem to cover about everything under the sun and to make striking impossible. There must be no more strikes. "Sounds like home, doesn't it? To do away with strikes. You see the employing class, which all around the world gets what it wants and controls every government, had put itself back of the arbitration law. It had discovered that the law could be made to be a good thing, so it was at the dictation of this class that the amendments were passed. What the injunction judges do in America, or try to do, the law was to do in New Zealand. "Except that not Judge Goff nor Judge Guy, nor any other injunction judge of our own happy clime, has dared to go quite so far as to declare that all striking everywhere is a crime to be punished with imprisonment. "How are you going to compel men to work? Why, thus, said the government of New Zealand. Put them in jail if they do not like the terms of their employment." Mr. Russell then gives an account of the miners' strike, above referred to, which he points out was ended by the labor department paying the miners' fines. He concludes:-- "Mr. Edward Tregear, a scholar and thinker, had filled for many years the place of chief secretary for labor. It is not a cabinet office, but comes next thereto. He is a wise person and a sincere friend of the worker, as he has shown on many occasions. As soon as he heard that the ministry actually purposed to imprison the miners because they did not like the terms of their employment, he went to the minister of labor and earnestly protested, protested with tears in his eyes, as the minister himself subsequently testified, begged, argued, and pleaded. No possible good could come from such rigor, and almost certainly it would precipitate grave disaster. "To all this the minister was obdurate. Then Mr. Tregear said that he would resign; he would not retain his office and see men imprisoned for exercising their inalienable right of choice, whether they would or would not work under given conditions. "Now Mr. Tregear was one of the most popular men in New Zealand, and his resignation under such conditions would raise a storm that no ministry would care to face. Hence the government was in a worse situation than ever. On one side it fronted a dangerous venture with the certainty of a tremendous handicap in the resignation of the chief secretary, and on the other hand was an acknowledgment that the arbitration law was a failure and could be violated with impunity. "In this emergency decision was halted for a few hours while the government people consulted. Meantime, by quick and desperate efforts, the strike was ended, and the men went back to work. "This left the fines unpaid. The labor department solved that difficulty and allowed the defeated government to make its escape from a hopeless situation by paying the miners' fines. "To all intents and purposes it was the end of compulsory arbitration in New Zealand. Not nominally, for nominally the thing goes on as before; but actually. It is only by breaking our shins upon a fact that most of us ever learn anything; and the exalted ministry of New Zealand had broken its shins aplenty on a fact that might have been discerned from the start. "If you are to have compulsory arbitration, you must compel one side as much as the other. "But in the existing system of society, when you come to compelling the workers to accept arbitration's awards, you are doing nothing in the world except to compel them to work, and, however the thing may be disguised, compulsory work is chattel slavery, against which the civilized world revolts. "This is the way the thing works out, and the only way it ever can work out. There can be no such thing as compulsory arbitration without this ultimate situation. "If, therefore, any one in America believes in such a plan for the settlement of labor troubles, I invite the attention of such a one to this plain record. "For my own part, years ago I was wont to blame the labor leaders of America because they steadfastly rejected compulsory arbitration, and I now perceive them to have been perfectly right. The thing is impossible."[75] A somewhat similar act to the Australasian ones, though less stringent, has been introduced in Canada. The Canadian law, which is a compromise between compulsory arbitration and compulsory investigation, applies to mines, railways, and other public utilities. Strikes have been prevented, but let us see what benefits the employees have received. Whatever its effect on wages and hours, the law has the tendency to weaken the unions, which hitherto have been the only reliable means by which employees were able to advance their condition. Not only does it make organization seem less necessary, but it takes the most powerful weapon of the union, the ability to call a sudden strike. If we add to this the unfavorable influence on public opinion in case the unions are not contented with the rewards, and the fact that the law works against the union shop, which is the basis of some unions, we can understand the ground of their hostility. "The Canadian Labour Disputes Investigation Act" is especially interesting and important because it is serving as a model for a campaign to introduce legislation along similar lines into the United States. Already Mr. Victor S. Clark, the author of the study of the Australian Labour Movement, to which I have referred at the beginning of the chapter, has been sent by Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Taft to investigate into the working of the act. Ex-President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard has also advocated strenuously and at some length a similar statute, and it has been made the basis for the campaign in Massachusetts and other states. Mr. Clark reported: "Under the conditions for which it was devised, the Canadian law, in spite of some setbacks, is useful legislation, and it promises more for the future than most measures--perhaps more than any other measure--for _promoting industrial peace by government intervention_." Here is the very keynote to compulsory arbitration, according to its opponents, whose whole attack is based on the fact that its primary purpose is not to improve the condition of the working people, but to promote "industrial peace by government intervention." Mr. Clark concedes that "possibly workers do sacrifice something of influence in giving up sudden strikes," though he claims that they gain in other ways. "After such a law is once on the statute books, however, it usually remains, and in New Zealand, Australia, and Canada it has created a new public attitude toward industrial disputes. This attitude is the result of the idea--readily grasped and generally accepted when once clearly presented--that the _public_ have an interest in industrial conflicts quite as immediate and important in its way as that of the conflicting parties. _If the American people have this truth vividly brought to their attention by a great strike, the hopeful example of the Canadian act seems likely, so far as the present experience shows, to prove a guiding star in their difficulties._" (Italics mine.) In the agitation that was made in behalf of a similar law in Massachusetts, just exactly what is meant by the word "public" began to appear. It refers not only to the consumers of the article produced by the industry in which the strike occurs, but also to other dependent industries, to the merchants of the locality where the workmen live, and to the real estate interests. Here, then, are definite economic interests which are concerned primarily in the prevention of strikes and in the uninterrupted operation of the industry, and only in a secondary way in rates of wages. _It is not a disinterested and non-partisan public; it is not on the side of the employers nor on the side of the employees, but it is opposed to the most effective weapons the working people have yet found to advance their interests, namely, the strike and the boycott._ It is said that if the workers lose the right to strike, the employers lose the right to lockout. It has been customary to set the lockout over against the strike as being of equal importance, but this is not the truth. Employers can discharge their workingmen one at a time when they are dissatisfied with a limited number; and they can often find a business protest for temporarily shutting down or restricting their output. To abolish strikes, then, is to take away the employees' chief means of offense or defense; while to pretend to abolish strikes _and lockouts_ is to leave in the hands of the employers the ability to discharge or punish in other ways the men with whom they are dissatisfied. When it was proposed to introduce the Canadian law in Massachusetts, no unionists of prominence indorsed it, but it was favored by a very large number of employers, while those employers who objected did so for widely scattered reasons. Mr. Clark is probably right in suggesting that, while such a law will not be enacted in the United States as things are now, it is very probable that it can be secured after some industrial crisis--and there is little doubt that President Eliot and perhaps also Mr. Roosevelt, for whom Mr. Clark was investigating, and many other influential public men, are expecting this time to arrive soon. The attitude of a large minority of British unions and of a considerable part of the British Socialists is similar to that of the Canadian and Australian majority. When in 1907 the railway employees of Great Britain were for the first time sufficiently aroused and organized, and on the point of a national strike, a settlement was entered into through the efforts of Mr. Lloyd George and the Board of Trade (and it is said with the assistance of King Edward) which involved an entirely new principle for that country. A board was constituted to settle this and future strikes of which the Master of Rolls and other British functionaries were the leading elements. Actually the workers consented for several years to leave in the hands of the judges over whose election and appointment they have only an indirect and partial, if indeed any, control, complete power over their industrial life. The executive of the Fabian Society issued a manifesto congratulating the government on this "progressive" settlement, though few prominent labor leaders were willing to give it their full indorsement. The Fabian manifesto said that the advance in wages which could be secured by the settlement "will undoubtedly have been secured on the trade-union program, through the trade-union organization, by the trade union's representatives, and finally, in the argument before the arbitrator, by the ability of the trade union's secretary." But this settlement had nearly all the features of the Canadian law which I have just mentioned, and especially in failing to give any recognition to the unions, left the strongest possible weapon in the hands of their enemies. Nevertheless, more than a third of the members of the British Trade Union Congress voted since that time for a compulsory arbitration act, and British radicals like Percy Alden, M.P., to say nothing of conservatives, agitate for a law along New Zealand lines. The railway strike of 1911 has decreased the popularity of this proposal among unionists and Socialists, but has augmented it in still greater proportion among nearly all other classes. In the meanwhile, in spite of the employees' efforts, and external concessions by the employers, the power in the newest railway conciliation scheme lies also in the hands of the government (see Part III, Chapter V). Statements by President Taft and other influential Americans lead us to believe it will be a very short period of years before similar legislation is applied to this country, in spite of the hostility of the unions, or perhaps with the consent of some of the weaker among them, which have little to gain by industrial warfare. While Secretary of War, Mr. Taft predicted a controversy between capital and labor which should decide once and for all how capital and labor should share the joint profits which they created. In this and many similar utterances there is foreshadowed the interference of the State. Indeed, the settlement of the Pennsylvania coal strike in 1903 was a clear example of such interference, and there is no question that the precedents established will be followed up on the next occasion of the kind by some arrangement even less advantageous to employees who now almost universally feel, as the present demands of the miner's union show, that they got the worst of the former decision. The railway and mining situations in Great Britain, and the demand for the government to take some measure to protect employees against the "trusts" in this country (to say nothing of the menace of a great coal strike), promise to make compulsory arbitration an issue of the immediate future. Mr. Roosevelt, who now proposes that the government should interfere between monopolies and their employees, is the very man who is responsible for the coal strike tribunal of 1903, which not only denounced sympathetic strike and secondary boycott, but failed to protect the men against discrimination on account of their unionism. Were he or any one like him President, the institution of government wage boards would be dreaded like the plague. Similarly Mr. Winston Churchill, in Great Britain, recognizes the extreme seriousness of the situation. His position is ably summed up by the _Saturday Evening Post_:-- "Winston Churchill has propounded a capital-and-labor puzzle to his British constituents. "To a modern state, he says in substance, railroad transportation is a necessity of life--and how literally true this is of England was shown in the general strike of last August, when the food supply in some localities ran down to only a few days' requirements. So the government cannot permit railroad transportation to be paralyzed indefinitely by a strike. It cannot sit by and see communities starve. A point will soon be reached where it must intervene and force resumption of transportation. "Strikes, however, form one of the modern means of collective bargaining between employer and employees. They are, in fact, the workmen's final and most effective resource in driving a bargain. Denied the right to strike, labor unions would be so many wooden cannon at which employers could laugh. If the employer knew absolutely that the men could not strike, he might offer any terms he pleased. In wage bargaining the men would not stand on a level footing, but be bound and gagged. "If, then, the government takes away, or seriously restricts, the right of the men to strike, isn't it bound to step into the breach and readjust the balance between them and the employer, by compelling the employer to pay them fair wages? There can be no free bargaining if it is known that at a certain point the government will intervene on one side. Must it not, then, also be known that at a certain point the government will intervene on the other side and compel payment of adequate wages? "Mr. Churchill carries his puzzle only that far. On our own account we add, How far will that leave us from regulation of wages as well as of rates by the government, and how far will that leave us from government ownership?"[76] In a word, Mr. Churchill's remedy for the evils of "State Socialism" is more "State Socialism"--and undoubtedly there is an inevitable trend in that direction. But the government railway strikes of France, Austria, Italy, Hungary, and other countries ought to show him that his remedy, advantageous as it may be from many standpoints, is scarcely to be considered even as a first step towards the solution of the labor problem. As long as capitalists continue to control government, "State Socialism," on the contrary, makes the strike more necessary, more decisive, and invaluable, not only to employees, but to every class that suffers from the government or the economic system it supports. The most representative of American Socialists, Eugene V. Debs, has given us an excellent characterization of this movement as it appears to most Socialists. "Successful leaders are wise enough to follow the people. For instance, the following paragraph is to the point:-- "'Ultimately I believe that this control of corporations should undoubtedly, directly or indirectly, extend to dealing with all questions connected with their treatment of their employees, including the wages, the hours of labor, and the like.' "And what Socialist made himself ridiculous by such a foolish utterance? No Socialist at all; only a paragraph from his latest article on the trusts by Theodore Roosevelt. Five years ago, or when he was still in office and had the power, he would not have dared to make that statement. But he finds it politically safe and expedient to make it now. It is not at all a radical statement. On the contrary, it is simply the echo of E. H. Gary, that is to say, John Pierpont Morgan, president of all the trusts. "Mr. Roosevelt now proposes that Bismarck attempted in Germany forty years ago to thwart the Socialist movement, and that is State Socialism, so called, which is in fact the most despotic and degrading form of capitalism. "President Roosevelt, who is popularly supposed to be hostile to the trusts, is in truth their best friend. He would have the government, the capitalist government, of course, practically operate the trusts and turn the profits over to their idle owners. This would mean release from responsibility and immunity of prosecution for the trust owners, _while at the same time the government would have to serve as strikebreaker for the trust owners_, and the armed forces of the government would be employed to keep the working class in subjection. "If this were possible, it would mark the halfway ground between industrial despotism and industrial democracy. But it is not possible, at least it is possible only temporarily, long enough to demonstrate its failure. The expanding industrial forces now transforming society, realigning political parties, and reshaping the government itself cannot be fettered in any such artificial arrangement as Mr. Roosevelt proposes. These forces, with the rising and awakening working class in alliance with them, will sweep all such barriers from the track of evolution until finally they can find full expression in industrial freedom and social democracy. "In this scheme of State Socialism, or rather State capitalism, Mr. Roosevelt fails to inform us how the idle owners of the trusts are to function except as profit absorbers and parasites. In that capacity they can certainly be dispensed with entirely and that is precisely what will happen when the evolution now in progress culminates in the reorganization of society."[77] (My italics.) [72] Victor S. Clark, "The Labour Movement in Australasia." [73] In her "American Socialism of the Present Day" (p. 185), Miss Hughan has quoted me (see the _New York Call_ of December 12, 1909), as classing the abolition of the injunction as one of the revolutionary demands never to be satisfied until the triumph of Socialism. As a means to check the growth of the power of the unions, this method of arbitrary government by judges has never been resorted to except in the United States. It is evident, then, that this statement was only meant for America. It should also have been qualified so as to apply solely to the America of to-day. For as other methods of checking the unions exist in other countries, it is obvious that they could be substituted in this country for the injunction, a proposition in entire accord with all I have written on the subject--though unfortunately not stated in this brief journalistic expression. I have now come to the belief, on the grounds given in the text, not only that a new method of fighting the unions (namely, compulsory arbitration) _can_ be substituted for the injunction, but that this _will_ be done within a very few years. [74] Professor Le Rossignol and Mr. William D. Stewart, "Compulsory Arbitration in New Zealand," in the _Quarterly Journal of Economics_. Reprinted in their book, "State Socialism in New Zealand." N. B. The reader who is interested is referred to the whole of both these volumes. There is little matter in either that does not have a direct bearing on our subject, and they have been utilized throughout this and the following chapter. FOOTNOTES: [75] _The Coming Nation_, Sept. 2, 1911. [76] The _Saturday Evening Post_, Nov. 25, 1911. [77] The _New York Times_, Nov. 25, 1911. CHAPTER VI AGRARIAN "STATE SOCIALISM" IN AUSTRALASIA Australia and New Zealand are commonly taken as the most advanced of all countries in government ownership, labor reforms, and "State Socialism." Indeed they are often pictured as almost ideally governed, and the credulity with which such pictures are received shows the widespread popularity of "State Socialism." The central principle of the Australian and New Zealand reforms is, however, not government ownership or compulsory arbitration, as commonly supposed, but a land policy. By means of a progressive or graduated land tax it is hoped to break up all large estates and to establish a large number of small proprietors. When it was said to Mr. Fisher, the new "Labour Party" Premier of Australia, that this policy was not Socialism, he replied laconically, "It is my kind of Socialism."[78] The "State Socialism" of Australia and New Zealand is fundamentally agrarian; its real basis is a modernized effort to establish a nation of small farm owners and to promote their welfare. Next in importance and closely connected with the policy of gradually bringing about the division of the land among small proprietors, is the policy of the government ownership of monopolies. Already New Zealand is in the banking business, and the Australian Labour Party proposes a national bank for Australia. National life and fire insurance are instituted in New Zealand; the same measures are proposed for Australia. Already many railroads are nationally owned, and it is proposed that others be nationalized. Already extensive irrigation projects have been undertaken; it is proposed that the policy should be carried out on a wider scale. But the Australian Labour Party is not fanatical upon this form of "State Socialism." It does not argue, like the British Independent Labour Party, that the civilization of a community can be measured by the extent of collective ownership, for Australasia's experience has already shown the immediate and practical limits of this kind of a movement. New Zealand is already burdened with a very large national debt; Australia proposes that its debt shall be increased only for the purpose of building commercially profitable railways or irrigation schemes, etc., and not in any case for the purpose of national defense or for other investments not immediately remunerative. The national debt, aside from that based on profit-making governmental undertakings, like railways, is to be reduced, and nationalization of other monopolies is not to be undertaken until new measures of taxation have become effective. These are a graduated land tax and an extension of the graduated income and inheritance taxes.[79] The program concludes with vigorous measures for national defense. Australia is to own her navy (supported not by loans, but by taxation), and is to be as independent as practicable of Great Britain. She feels a need for military defense, but she does not propose to have a military caste, however small; the whole people is to be made military, the Labour Party stands for a citizen defense force and not for a professional army. Finally, Australia is to be kept for the white race, especially for British and other peoples that the present inhabitants consider desirable. There remains that part of the program which has attracted the most attention, namely, the labor reforms: workingmen's insurance, an eight-hour day, and an increase of the powers of the compulsory arbitration courts. Already in fixing wages it has been necessary for the court to decide what is a fair profit to the employers, so profits are already to some degree being regulated. It has been found that prices and the cost of living are rising still more rapidly than wages; it is proposed that prices should also be regulated by withdrawing the protection of the customs tariff from those industries that charge an unduly high price. I have mentioned the labor element of the program last, for the Australian Labour Party is a democratic rather than merely a labor movement. The Worker's Union, and the Sheep Shearer's Society of the Eastern States, enrolled from the first all classes of ranch employees, and "even common country storekeepers and small farmers."[80] Some of the miners' organizations have been built on similarly broad lines, and these two unions constitute the backbone of the Labour Party. The original program of the New South Wales Labour Electoral League, which formed the nucleus of the Labour Party in 1891, proposed to bring together "all electors in favor of democratic and progressive legislation," and was nearly as broad as the present program; that is to say, it was by no means confined to labor reforms. But are there any other features in the Australian situation, besides the dominating importance of the land question, that rob this program of its significance for the rest of the world? It cannot be denied that there are. In the first place, it is only this recent social reform movement that has begun to put New Zealand and Australia under real democratic government, and this democratization is scarcely yet complete, since the constitutions of some of the separate Australian States and Tasmania contain extremely undemocratic elements; while the federal government is dominated by a Supreme Court, as in the United States. Consequently it is only a few years in some of the States since such elementary democratic institutions as free schools were instituted. It is evident, on the other hand, that countries establishing democratic or semidemocratic institutions under the conditions prevailing in the world as late as 1890, when the great change took place in New Zealand, or during the decade, 1900-1910, when the political overturn gave Australia to the Labour Party, should be more advanced than France, Germany, Great Britain, or the United States, where the latest great overturn in the democratic direction occurred in each instance a generation or more ago. So also Australia and New Zealand which, on the one hand, are still suffering from the disadvantage of having lived until recently under a system of large landed estates, on the other hand have the advantage of dealing with the land question in a period when the governments of these new countries are becoming rich enough, through their own enterprises, to exist independently of land sales, and when farmers are more willing to increase the power of their governments, both in order to protect themselves from the encroachments of capital and of labor, and directly to advance the interests of agriculture. The campaign to break up the large estates has kept the farmers engrossed in politics, and this has occurred in a period when industrial organization has made possible a whole program of "Constructive State Socialism." By taking up this program the farmers and those who wished to become farmers have at once looked to their own interests and secured the political support of other small capitalists and even of a large part of the workingmen. But working against the nationalization of the unearned increment, against the policy of leasing instead of selling the public land, central features of every advanced "State Socialist" policy, is the fact that the small farmers, daily becoming more numerous, hope that they might themselves reap this increment through private ownership. In no national legislation is it proposed to tax away this increment in _agricultural_ land, which preponderates both in New Zealand and Australia. But, while in other countries the agricultural population is decreasing relatively to the whole, in New Zealand the settlement of the country by the small farmers has hitherto led it to increase, and the new legislation in Australia must soon have the same result. So, in spite of the favorable auspices, it seems that the climax of the "State Socialism," the transformation of the small farmer into a tenant of the State is not yet to be undertaken, either in the shape of land nationalization or in the taxing away of unearned increment. And while the Australian Labour Party as an organization favors nationalization, a large part of those who vote for this party do not, and its leaders have felt that to have advocated nationalization hitherto would have meant that they would have failed to gain control of the government. And in proportion as the new land tax creates new farmers, the prospects will be worse than they are to-day. The existing land laws of New Zealand are extremely moderate steps in the direction of nationalization. In 1907, after the best land had been taken up, a system of 66-year leases was introduced, but only as a voluntary alternative to purchase. After 1908 the annual purchases of large estates were divided into small lots and leased for terms of 33 years, but this applies only to a relatively small amount of land. It was only in 1907 that the graduated land tax began to be enforced in a way automatically to break up the large estates as it had been expected to do, and it was only in 1910 that the new and more heavily graduated scale went into effect. And finally it was only in 1907 that large landowners were forbidden to purchase, even indirectly, government land. It has taken all these years even to discourage large estates effectively, to say nothing of nationalization. "Some writers have predicted that the appetite for reform by taxation will grow, and that the taxation will be increased and the exemptions diminished until all the rent will be taken and the land practically confiscated, according to the proposals of Henry George. But the landless man, when he becomes a landholder, ceases to be a single taxer, and is strongly opposed to Socialism. The land legislation of New Zealand, although apparently Socialistic, is producing results directly opposed to Socialism by converting a lot of dissatisfied people into stanch upholders of private ownership of land and other forms of private property. The small farmers, then, are breaking away from their former allies, the working people of the towns, who now find themselves in the minority, but who are increasing in numbers and who will demand, sooner or later, a large share in the product of industry as the price of loyalty to the capitalistic system."[81] Without land nationalization the process of nationalizing industry cannot be expected to proceed faster than it pays for itself--for we cannot reckon as part of the national profits the increased land values national enterprises bring about. Nor will capitalist collectivism at this stage proceed even this fast. Not only do the small taxpayers oppose the government going into debt, but as taxpayers they are responsible for all deficiencies, and they want only such governmental enterprises as both produce a surplus and a sufficient one to pay the deficits of the nonproductive departments of government. To-day only about one fifth of the taxpayers pay either land or inheritance taxes. But the increasing military expenditures and the greater difficulty of securing large sums by indirect taxation will increase this proportion. It is likely, then, that State enterprises which, under private capitalism, were used recklessly as aids to land speculation will now be required, as in Germany and other continental countries, to produce a surplus to relieve taxpayers. Private capitalism used the State for promoting the private interests of its directors, State capitalism uses it to produce profits for its shareholders, the small farmers, as taxpayers, or in the form of profits distributed among them as consumers. Only as the government begins to take a considerable share of that increased value in land which nearly every public undertaking brings about, will _all_ wisely managed government enterprises produce such profits. The advance of "State Socialism," though it has several other aspects, can be roughly measured by the number of government enterprises and employees. The railways, telegraphs, and the few government-owned mines of New Zealand, have been calculated to employ about one eighth of the population, a greater proportion than in America or Great Britain, but scarcely greater than in Germany or France--and not a very great stride even towards "State Socialism." And it seems likely that the present proportion in New Zealand will remain for some time where it is. Government banking, steamships, bakeries, and the government monopoly of the sale of liquor and tobacco might not prove immediately profitable, and are less heard of than formerly. Where "State Socialism" has proceeded such a little distance, the material benefits it promises to labor (though in a lesser proportion than to other classes) have not yet accrued. "It must be admitted," write Le Rossignol and Stewart, "that the benefits of land reform and other Liberal legislation have accrued chiefly to the owners of land and other forms of property, and the condition of the landless and propertyless wage earners has not been much improved." Indeed, the condition of the workers is little, if any, better than in America. Mr. Clark writes: "The general welfare of the working classes in Australasia does not differ widely from that in the United States. The hours of work are fewer in most occupations, but the wage per hour is less than in America. The cost of living is about the same in both countries. There appears to be as much poverty in the cities of New Zealand as in the cities of the same size in the United States, and as many people of large wealth." It is no doubt true, as these writers say, that, of the people classed as propertyless, "many are young, industrious, and well-paid wage earners; who, if they have health and good luck may yet acquire a competency" in this as in any other new country. Yet it is only to those who "have saved something," _i.e._ to property holders, that the State really lends a helping hand. Even when New Zealand becomes an industrial country, the writers quoted calculate that "it should be possible for the party of property to attach to itself the more efficient among the working class, by giving them high wages, short hours, pleasant conditions of labor, opportunities for promotion, a chance to acquire property, insurance benefits, and _greater_ advantages of every kind than they could gain under any form of Socialism. If this can be done, the Socialists will be in a hopeless minority." Here we have in a few words the universal labor policy of "State Socialism." Labor reforms are to be given to the working class first, to encourage in them as long as possible the hope to rise; second, when this is no longer effective, to make the upper layers contented, and finally to "increase industrial efficiency," as these same writers say--but at no time to put the workers on a level with the property-owning classes. Indeed, it is impossible to do more on a national scale, as these writers point out, for both capital and labor are international. If "State Socialism" were carried to the point of equalizing the share of labor, either immigration would be attracted until wages were lowered again, or capital would emigrate, or the nation would have to defend its exclusiveness by being prepared for war. "It is hard to see how any country, whether Socialistic or individualistic in its industrial organization, can long keep its advantage over other countries without some restriction of immigration. A thoroughgoing experiment in collectivism, therefore, could not be made under favorable conditions in New Zealand or any other country, unless that country were _isolated_ from the rest of the world, _or_ unless the whole world made the same experiment at the same time." As between comparative isolation possibly in the near future and world-wide or at least international Socialism, certainly many years ahead, the Australian Labour Party, under similar circumstances to that of New Zealand, has chosen to attempt comparative isolation. It does not yet propose to keep out immigrants, but it makes a beginning with all non-white races, and it stands for a policy of high protection and a larger army and navy. Naturally it does not even seek admission into the International Socialist Congress, where if any Socialist principle is more insisted upon than another it is Marx's declaration that the Socialists are to be distinguished from the other working class parties only by the fact that they represent the interests of the entire working class independently of nationality or of groups within the nation. Moreover, the militarism necessary to enforce isolation may cost the nation, capitalists and workers alike, far more heavily than to leave their country open to trade and immigration. Indeed, it must lead, not to industrial democracy, or even to capitalistic progress, but to stagnation and reaction. The policy of racial exclusion will not only increase the dangers of war, but it will bring little positive benefit to labor, even of a purely material and temporary kind, since the farming majority will not allow it to be extended to the white race. Instead of restricting immigration, the new government projects require a thicker settlement, and everything is being done to encourage settlers of means and agricultural experience, and we cannot question that the coming of white laborers will be encouraged when they are needed. The size of the farms the government is promoting in New Zealand proves that the country is deliberately preparing for a class of landless agricultural laborers, and Australia is following the example. Since these new farms average something like two hundred acres, we must realize that as soon as they are under thorough cultivation they will require one or more farm laborers in each case, to be obtained chiefly from abroad, producing a community resting neither on "State Socialism" nor even on a pioneer basis of economic democracy and approximate equality of opportunity similar to that which prevailed during the period of free land in our Western States. Unmistakable signs show that in New Zealand an agrarian oligarchy by no means friendly to labor has already established itself. Even the compulsory arbitration act which bears anything but heavily on employers in general, is not applied to agriculture. After two years of consideration it was decided in 1908 that the law should not apply on the ground that "it was impracticable to find any definite hours for the daily work of general farm hands," and that "the alleged grievances of the farm laborers were insufficient to justify interference with the whole farming industry of Canterbury" (the district included 7000 farms). Whatever we may think of the first justification, the second certainly is a curious piece of reasoning for a compulsory arbitration court, and must be taken simply to mean that the employing farmers are sufficiently powerful politically to escape the law. The working people very naturally protested against this "despotic proceeding," which denied such protection as the law gave to the largest section of workers in the Dominion. What is the meaning, then, of the victory of a "Labour Party" in Australia? Chiefly that every citizen of Australia who has sufficient savings is to be given a chance to own a farm. A large and prosperous community of farmers is to be built up by government aid. Even without "State Socialism" or labor reform the working people would share temporarily in this prosperity as they did to a large degree in that of the United States immediately after the Civil War, until the free land began to disappear. It was impossible to pay exceptionally low wages to a workingman who could enter into farming with a few months' notice. The Labour Party hopes to use nationalization of monopolies and the compulsory regulation of wages to insure permanently to the working classes their share of the benefit of the new prosperity. How much farther such measures will go when the agricultural element again becomes dominant is the question. It is already evident that the Australian reform movement, like that of New Zealand, includes, or at least favors, the same class of employing farmers. The fact that a Labour Party is in the opposition in New Zealand, while in Australia a Labour Party has led in the reforms and now rules the country, should not blind us to the farmers' influence. The very terms of the graduated land tax and the value of the farms chosen for exemption show mathematically the influence, not alone of the small, but even the middle-sized farmers. Estates of less than $25,000 in value are exempt, and those valued at less than $50,000 are to be taxed less than one per cent. Such farms, as a rule, must have one or more laborers. Will these employees come in under the compulsory arbitration law? If they do, will they get much benefit? The experience of New Zealand and the present outlook in Australia do not lead us to expect that they will. Many indications point to a coming realignment of parties such as was recently seen in New Zealand, when in 1909 it was decided to form an opposition Labour Party. And it is likely to come, as in New Zealand, when the large estates are well broken up and the agricultural element can govern or get all they want without the aid of the working people. Already the Australian Labour Party is getting ready for the issue. Its leaders have kept the proposed land nationalization in the background, because they believe it cannot yet obtain a majority. But it may be that the party itself is now ready to fight this issue out on a Socialist basis, even if, like the Socialist parties in Europe, such a decision promises to delay for a generation their control of the government. If the party is ready, it has the machinery to bring its leaders to time, as it has done on previous occasions. For it already resembles the Socialist parties in Europe in this, that it makes all its candidates responsible to the party and not to their constituents. That is to say, while it does not represent the working people exclusively, it is a class organization standing for the interests of that group of classes which has joined its ranks, and for other classes of the community only in so far as their interests happen to be the same. Already the majority of the Labour Party voters are undoubtedly working people. When it takes a definite position on the land question, favoring one-family farms and short leases or else coöperative, municipal, or national large-scale operation, and states clearly that it intends to use compulsory arbitration to advance wages indefinitely, including those of farm laborers, there is every probability that, having lost the support of the employing farmers, it will gradually take its place as a party of permanent opposition to capitalism, like the Socialist parties of Europe--until industry finally and decisively surpasses agriculture, and the industrial working class really becomes the most powerful element in society. Space does not permit the tracing of the "State Socialist" tendency in other countries than Great Britain, the United States, and Australasia. Originally a brief chapter was here inserted showing the similar tendencies in Germany. This is now omitted, but the frequent reference to Germany later in dealing with the Socialist movement makes a brief statement of the German situation essential. For this purpose it will be sufficient to quote a few of the principal statements of the excellent summary and analysis by William C. Dreher entitled "The German Drift towards Socialism": "The German Reichstag passed a law in May, 1910, for the regulation of the potash trade, a law which goes further _in the direction of Socialism_ than any previous legislation in Germany. It assigns to each mine a certain percentage of the total production of the country, and lays a prohibitory tax upon what it produces in excess of this allotment. It fixes the maximum price for the product in the home market, and prohibits selling abroad at a lower price. A government bureau supervises the industry, sees that the prices and allotments are observed, examines new mines to determine their capacity, and readjusts allotments as new mines reach the producing stage.... "But the radical features of the law are not completed in the foregoing description. The bill having reduced potash prices, the mine owners threatened to recoup themselves by reducing wages. But the members of the Reichstag were not to be balked by such threats; they could legislate about wages just as easily as about prices and allotments. So they amended the bill by providing that if any owner should reduce wages without the consent of his employees, his allotment should be restricted in the corresponding proportion.... "While the law is indeed decidedly Socialistic in tendency, it is not yet Socialism. It hedges private property about with sharper restrictions than would be thought justifiable in countries where, as in the United States, the creed of individualism is still vigorous; and yet it is, in effect, hardly more than a piece of social reform legislation, though a more radical one than we have hitherto seen.... "In Germany, 'the individual withers' and the world of State and Society, with its multifarious demands upon him, 'is more and more.' This is, of course, a Socialistic tendency, but the substitute that the Germans are finding for unlimited competition is not radical Socialism, but organization.... "The State, of course, takes hold of the individual life more broadly, with more systematic purpose. The individual's health is cared for, his house is inspected, his children are educated, he is insured against the worst vicissitudes of life, his savings are invested, his transportation of goods or persons is undertaken, his need to communicate with others by telegraph or telephone is met--all by the paternal State or city. "Twenty-five years ago the Prussian government was spending only about $13,500 a year on trade schools; now it is spending above three million dollars on more than 1300 schools.... "The Prussian State had also long been an extensive owner of coal, potash, salt, and iron mines. In 1907 a law was passed giving the State prior mining rights to all undiscovered coal deposits. In general, however, it must cede those rights to private parties on payment of a royalty; but the law makes an exception of 250 'maximum fields,' equal to about 205 square miles, in which the State itself will exercise its mining rights. It has recently reserved this amount of lands adjacent to the coal fields on the lower Rhine and in Silesia. The State has already about 80 square miles of coal lands in its hands, from which it is taking out about 10,000,000 tons of coal a year. Its success as a mine owner, however, appears to be less marked than as a railway proprietor; experienced business men even assert that the State's coal and iron mines would be operated at a loss if proper allowances were made for depreciation and amortization of capital, as must be done in the case of private companies. The State also derives comparatively small revenues from its forest and farming lands of some 830,000 acres, which were formerly the property of the Crown.... "The most important State tax is that on _incomes_, which is in all cases graduated down to a very low rate on the smallest income; in Prussia there is no tax on incomes less than $214. The cities also collect the bulk of their revenues from incomes, using the same classification and sliding scale as the State. "A highly interesting innovation in taxation is the 'unearned increment' tax on land values, first adopted by Frankfort-on-the-Main in 1904, and already applied by over 300 German cities and towns.... "The bill before the Reichstag [since become a law--W. E. W.] extends sick insurance to farm laborers and household servants, a change which will raise the burden of this system for employers from $24,000,000 to $36,000,000. The bill also provides for pensioning the widows and orphans of insured laborers at an estimated additional expense of about $17,000,000.... "A better result of the insurance systems than the modest pensions and the indemnities that they pay is to be found in their excellent work for protecting health and prolonging life. Many offices have their own hospitals for the sick, and homes for the convalescent.... "All these protective measures have already told effectively upon the death rate for tuberculous diseases. In the three years ending with 1908, deaths from pulmonary tuberculosis dropped from 226.6 to 192.12 per 100,000. "The accident system has also had a powerful effect in stimulating among the physicians and surgeons the study of special ways and means for treating accident injuries, with reference to preserving intact the strength and efficiency of the patient.... "Bismarck once, in a speech in the Reichstag, explicitly recognized the laborer's right to work. Some twenty German cities have given practical effect to his words by organizing insurance against nonemployment; and the governments of Bavaria and Baden have taken steps to encourage this movement. Under the systems adopted, the laborer pays the larger part of the insurance money, and the city the rest; in a few cases money has been given by private persons to assist the insurance."[82] [N.B. The word "Socialistic" is used by Mr. Dreher in the sense of "State Socialism," as opposed to what he calls "radical Socialism."] FOOTNOTES: [78] Special Correspondence of _New York Evening Post_, dated Sidney, Dec. 12, 1909. [79] The data upon which this chapter is based is also obtained chiefly from Mr. Victor Clark's "Labour Movement in Australasia," and "State Socialism in New Zealand," by Stewart and Le Rossignol. [80] Victor S. Clark, _op. cit._ [81] Stewart and Rossignol, _op. cit._ [82] The _Atlantic Monthly_, July, 1911. CHAPTER VII "EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY" Many reformers admit that no reforms can bring us towards democracy as long as class rule continues. Henry George, for example, recognizes that his great land reform, the government appropriation of rent for public purposes, is useless when the government itself is monopolized, "when political power passes into the hands of a class, and the rest of the community become merely tenants."[83] In precisely the same way every great "State Socialist" reform must fail to bring us a single step towards real democracy, as long as classes persist. That strongly marked social classes do exist even in the United States is now admitted by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Andrew Carnegie, and by innumerable other, by no means Socialistic, observers. "The average wage earner," says John Mitchell, "has made up his mind that he must remain a wage earner. He has given up the hope of a kingdom to come where he will himself be a capitalist."[84] This feeling is almost universally shared by manual wage earners, and very widely also by salaried brain workers. Large prizes still exist, and their influence is still considerable over the minds of young men. But, as was pointed out recently in an editorial of the _Saturday Evening Post_, they are "just out of reach," and the instances in which they actually materialize are "so relatively few as to be negligible." Even if these prizes were a hundred fold more numerous than they are, the children of the wage earners would still not have a tithe of the opportunity of the children of the well-to-do. To-day in the country opportunities are no better than in the towns. The universal outcry for more farm labor can only mean that such laborers are becoming relatively fewer because they are giving up the hope that formerly kept them in the country, namely, that of becoming farm owners. Already Mr. George K. Holmes of the United States Bureau of Statistics estimates that in the chief agricultural section of the country, the North Central States, a man must be rich before he can become a farmer, and so rapidly is this condition spreading to other sections that Mr. Holmes feels that the only hope of obtaining sufficient farm labor is to persuade the children of the farmers to remain on the farms. "Fifty years ago," said _McClure's Magazine_ in a recent announcement, which sums up some of the chief elements of the present situation, "we were a nation of independent farmers and small merchants. To-day we are a nation of corporation employees." There can be no question that we are seeing the formation in this country of very definitely marked economic and social classes such as have long prevailed in the older countries of Europe. And this class division explains _why the political democracies of such countries as France, Switzerland, the United States, and the British Colonies show no tendency to become real democracies_. Not only do classes defend every advantage and privilege that economic evolution brings them, but, what is more alarming, they utilize these advantages chiefly to give their children greater privileges still. Unequal opportunities visibly and inevitably breed more unequal opportunities. The definite establishment of industrial capitalism, a century or more ago, and later the settlement of new countries, brought about a revolutionary advance towards equality of opportunity. But the further development of capitalism has been marked by steady retrogression. Yet nearly all capitalist statesmen, some of them honestly, insist that equality of opportunity is their goal, and that we are making or that we are about to make great strides in that direction. Not only is the establishment of equality of opportunity accepted as the aim that must underlie all our institutions, even by conservatives like President Taft, but it is agreed that it is a perfectly definite principle. Nobody claims that there is any vagueness about it, as there is said to be about the demand for political, economic, or social equality. It may be that the economic positions in society occupied by men and women who have now reached maturity are already to some slight degree distributed according to relative fitness; and, even though this fitness is due, not to native superiority, but to unfair advantages and unequal opportunity, it may be that a general change for the better is here impossible until a new generation has appeared. But there is no reason, except the opposition of parents who want privileges for their children, why every child in every civilized country to-day should not be guaranteed by the community an equal opportunity in public education and an _equal chance for promotion in the public or semi-public service_, which soon promises to employ a large part if not the majority of the community. _No Socialist can see any reason for continuing a single day the process of fastening the burdens of the future society beforehand on the children of the present generation of wage earners_, children as yet of entirely unknown and undeveloped powers and not yet irremediably shaped to serve in the subordinate rôles filled by their parents. But the reformers other than the Socialists are not even working in this direction, and their claims that they are, can easily be disproved. Mr. John A. Hobson, for example, believes that the present British government is seeking to realize "equality of opportunity," which he defines as the effort "to give equal opportunities to all parts of the country and all classes of the people, and so to develop in the fullest and the farthest-sighted way the national resources."[85] But even the more or less democratic collectivism Mr. Hobson and other British Radicals advocate, if it stops short of a certain point, and its benefits go chiefly to the middle classes, may merely increase middle-class competition for better-paid positions, and so obviously _decrease_ the _relative_ opportunities of the masses, and make them _less equal_ than they are to-day. Edward Bernstein, the Socialist, says: "The number of the possessing classes is to-day not smaller, but larger. The enormous increase of social wealth is not accompanied by a decreasing number of large capitalists, but by an increasing number of capitalists of all degrees." Whether this is true or not, whether the well-to-do middle classes are gradually increasing in each generation, say, to 5, 10, or 15 per cent of the population, cannot be a matter of more than secondary importance to the overwhelming majority, the "non-possessing classes," that remain outside. Nobody denies that social evolution is going on even to-day. But the masses will probably not be willing to wait the necessary generations and centuries before present tendencies, should they chance to continue long enough (which is doubtful in view of the rapid formation of social castes), would bring the masses any considerable share of existing prosperity. To secure anything approaching equality of opportunity, the first and most necessary measure is to give equal educational facilities to all classes of the population. Yet the most radical of the non-Socialist educational reformers do not dare to hope at present even for a step in this direction. No man has more convincingly described what the first step towards a genuinely democratic education must be than Ex-President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard, perhaps our most influential representative of political as opposed to social democracy. "Is it not plain," asks President Eliot, "that if the American people were all well-to-do they would multiply by four or five times the present average school expenditure per child and per year? That is, they would make the average expenditure per pupil for the whole school year in the United States from $60 to $100 for salaries and maintenance, instead of $17.36 as now. Is it not obvious that instead of providing in the public schools a teacher for forty or fifty pupils, they would provide a teacher for every ten or fifteen pupils?"[86] The reform proposed by Dr. Eliot, if applied to all the twenty million children of school age in the United States, would mean the expenditure of two billion instead of three hundred and fifty million dollars per year on public education. Ex-President Eliot fully realizes the radical and democratic character of this proposed revolution in the public schools, and is correspondingly careful to support his demands at every point with facts. He shows, for instance, that while private schools expend for the tuition and general care of each pupil from two hundred to six hundred dollars a year, and not infrequently provide a teacher for every eight or ten pupils, the public school which has a teacher for every forty pupils is unusually fortunate. Dr. Eliot says that while there has been great improvement in the first eight grades since 1870, progress is infinitely slower than it should be, and that the majority of children do not yet get beyond the eighth grade (the statistics for this country show that only one out of nineteen takes a secondary course). "Philanthropists, social philosophers, and friends of free institutions," he asks, "is that the fit educational outcome of a century of democracy in an undeveloped country of immense natural resources? Leaders and guides of the people, is that what you think just and safe? People of the United States, is that what you desire and intend?" In order not only to bring existing public schools up to the right standard, but to create new kinds of schools that are badly needed, the plan suggested by Dr. Eliot would take another billion or two. He advocates kindergartens and further development of the new subjects that have recently been added to the grammar school course; he opposes the specialization of the studies of children for their life work before the sixteenth or seventeenth year, favors complete development of the high school as well as the manual training, mechanics, art, the evening and the vacation schools, greater attention to physical education and development, and, finally, the greatest possible extension and development of our institutions of higher education. He also advocates newer reforms, such as the employment of skilled physicians in connection with the schools, the opening of public spaces, country parks, beaches, city squares, gardens, or parkways for the instruction of school children. He specifies in detail the improvements that are needed in school buildings, shows what is urgently demanded and is immediately practicable in the way of increasing the number of teachers, paying them better and giving them pensions, indicates the needed improvements in the administration of the school systems, urges the development of departmental instruction through several grades, and the addition of manual training to all the public schools along with a better instruction in music and drawing. There are still other improvements in education which have already been tested and found to produce the most valuable results. Perhaps the most important ones besides those demanded by Dr. Eliot are the providing of free or cheap lunches for undernourished children, and the system, already widespread in England and the other countries, of furnishing scholarships to carry the brighter children of the impecunious classes through the college, high school, and technical courses. Even this policy of scholarships would lead us to full democracy in education only if by its means the child of the poorest individual had exactly the same opportunities as those of the richest. _It is not enough that a few children only should be so advanced; but that of impecunious children, who constitute 90 per cent of the population, a sufficient number should be advanced to fill 90 per cent of those positions, in industry, government, and society, which require a higher education._ There is no doubt that this actual equality in the "battle of life" was the expectation and intention of those who settled and built up the western part of the United States, as it has been that of all the democracies of new countries. But this reform alone would certainly require not one but several billion dollars a year; as much as all the other improvements mentioned by Dr. Eliot put together. We may estimate, then, that the application of the principle of democracy or equality of opportunity to education in accordance with the present national income, would require the immediate expenditure of three or four billion dollars on the nation's children of school age, or ten times the sum we now expend, and a corresponding increase as the wealth of the nation develops. This would be a considerable proportion of the nation's income, but not too much to spend on the children, who constitute nearly half the population and are at the age where the money spent is most productive. Here is a program for the coming generation which would be indorsed by a very large part of the democrats of the past. But nothing could make it more clear that political democracy is bankrupt even in its new collective form, that it has no notion of the method by which its own ideals are to be obtained. For no reformer dreams that this perfectly sensible and practicable program will be carried out until there has been some revolutionary change in society. "I know that some people will say that it is impossible to increase public expenditure in the total, and therefore impossible to increase it for the schools," says Dr. Eliot. "I deny both allegations. Public expenditure has been greatly increased within the last thirty years, and so has school expenditure" (written in 1902). But Dr. Eliot doubtless realizes that what he advocates for the present moment, the expenditure of five times as much as we now invest in public schools, at the present rate of progress, might not be accomplished in a century, and that by that time society might well have attained a degree of development which would demand five or ten times as much again. Dr. Eliot is well aware of the opposition that will be made to his reform, but he has not given the slightest indication how it is to be overcome. The well-to-do usually feel obligated to pay for the private education of their own children, and even where public institutions are at their disposal they are forced to support these children through all the years of study. This is expensive, but this very expensiveness gives the children of the well-to-do a practical monopoly of the opportunities which this education brings. How are they to be brought to favor, and, since they are the chief taxpayers, to _pay for_ the extension of these same opportunities to ten times the number of children who now have them? In the meanwhile Dr. Eliot himself seems to have become discouraged and to have abandoned his own ideal, for only seven years after writing the above he came to advocate the division of the whole national school system into three classes: that for the upper class, that for the middle class, and that for the masses of the people--and he even insisted that this division is democratic if the elevation of the pupil from one class to the other is made "easy."[87] Now democracy does not require that the advance of the child of the poor be made what is termed _easy_, but that he be given an _equal_ opportunity with the child of the rich as far as all useful and necessary education is concerned. Democracy does not tolerate that in education the children of the poor should be started in at the bottom, while the children of the rich are started at the top. Those few who do rise under such conditions only strengthen the position of the upper classes as against that of the lower. Tolstoi was right when he said that when an individual rises in this way he simply brings another recruit to the rulers from the ruled, and that the fact that this passage from one class to another does occasionally take place, and is not absolutely forbidden by law and custom as in India, does not mean that we have no castes.[88] Even in ancient Egypt, it was quite usual, as in the case of Joseph, to elevate slaves to the highest positions. This singling out and promotion of the very ablest among the lower classes may indeed be called the basis of every lasting caste system. All those societies that depended on a purely hereditary system have either degenerated or were quickly destroyed. If then a ruling class promotes from below a number sufficient only to provide for its own need of new abilities and new blood, its power to oppress, to protect its privileges, and to keep progress at the pace and in the direction that suits it will only be augmented--and universal equality of opportunity will be farther off than before. Doubtless the numbers "State Socialism" will take up from the masses and equip for higher positions will constantly increase. But neither will the opportunities of these few have been in any way equal to those of the higher classes, nor will even such opportunities be extended to any but an insignificant minority. Nor does President Eliot's advocacy of class schools stand as an isolated phenomenon. Already in America the development of free secondary schools has been checked by the far more rapid growth of private institutions. The very classes of taxpayers who control city and other local governments and school boards are educating their own children privately, and thus have a double motive for resisting the further advance of school expenditure. As if the expense of upkeep during the period of education were not enough of a handicap, those few children of the wage earners who are brave enough to attempt to compete with the children of the middle classes are now subjected to the necessity of attending inferior schools or of traveling impracticable distances. The building of new high schools, for example, was most rapid in the Middle West in the decades 1880-1899, and in the Eastern States in the decade 1890-1900. But within a few years after 1900 the rate of increase had fallen in the Middle West to about one half, and in the East to less than one third, of what it formerly had been.[89] It might be thought that, the country being now well served with secondary schools, the rate of growth must diminish. This may be true of a part of the rural districts, but an examination of the situation or school reports of our large cities will show how far it is from being true there. In Great Britain the public secondary schools for the most part and some of the primary schools, _though supported wholly or largely by public funds, charge a tuition fee_. The fact that a very small per cent of the children of the poor are given scholarships which relieve them of this fee only serves to strengthen the upper and middle classes, without in any appreciable degree depriving them of their privileged position. In London, for example, fees of from $20 to $40 are charged in the secondary schools, and their superintendents report that they are attended chiefly by the children of the "lower middle classes," salaried employees, clerks, and shopkeepers, with comparatively few of the children of the professional classes on the one hand or of the best-paid workingmen on the other. An organized campaign is now on foot in New York City also, among the taxpayers, to introduce a certain proportion of primary pay schools, for the frank purpose of separating the lower middle from the working classes, and to charge fees in all secondary schools so as to bring a new source of income and _decrease_ the number of students and the amounts spent on the schools. This in spite of the annual plea of Superintendent Maxwell for more secondary schools, more primary teachers, and primary school buildings. Instead of going in the direction indicated by Dr. Eliot and preparing to spend four or five times the present amount, there is a strong movement to spend less. And nothing so hastens this reactionary movement as the tendency, whether automatic or consciously stimulated, towards class (or caste) education--such as Dr. Eliot and so many other reformers now directly or indirectly encourage--usually under the cloak of industrial education. The most anti-social aspects of capitalism, whether in its individualist or its collectivist form, are the grossly unequal educational and occupational privileges it gives the young. An examination of the better positions now being obtained by men and women not yet past middle age will show, let us say, that ten times as many prizes are going to persons who were given good educational opportunities as to those who were not. But as the children of those who can afford such opportunities are not a tenth as numerous as the children of the rest of the people, this would mean that the latter have only a _hundredth part_ of the former's opportunities. Under this supposition, one tenth of the population secures ten elevenths of the positions for which a higher education is required. As a matter of fact, the existing inequality of opportunity is undoubtedly very much greater than this, and the unequal distribution of opportunities is visibly and rapidly becoming still less equal. In 1910, of nineteen million pupils of public and private schools in this country, only one million were securing a secondary, and less than a third of a million a higher, education. Here are some figures gathered by the Russell Sage Foundation in its recent survey of public school management. The report covers 386 of the larger cities of the Union. Out of every 100 children who enter the schools, 45 drop out before the sixth year; that is, before they have learned to read English. Only 25 of the remainder graduate and enter the high schools, and of these but 6 complete the course. The expense of a superior education, including upkeep during the increasing number of years required, is rising many times more rapidly than the income of the average man. At the same time, both the wealth and the numbers of the well-to-do are increasing in greater proportion than those of the rest of the people. While the better places get farther and farther out of the reach of the children of the masses, owing to the overcrowding of the professions by children of the well-to-do, the competition becomes ever keener, and the poor boy or girl who must struggle not only against this excessive competition, but also against his economic handicap, confronts an almost superhuman task. It is obvious that this tendency cannot be reversed, no matter how rapidly the people's income is increased, unless it rises _more rapidly_ than that of the well-to-do. And this, Socialists believe, has never happened except when the masses obtained political power and made full use of it _against_ the class in control of industry and government. No amount of material progress and no reorganization of industry or government which does not promise to equalize opportunity,--however rapid or even sensational it may be,--is of the first moment to the Socialists of the movement. Wages might increase 5 or 10 per cent every year, as profits increase to-day; hours might be shortened and the intensity of labor lessened; and yet the gulf between the classes might be growing wider than ever. If society is to progress toward industrial democracy, it is necessary that the people should fix their attention, not merely on the improvement of their own condition, but on their progress _when compared with that of the capitalist classes, i.e._ when measured by present-day civilization and the possibilities it affords. _No matter how fast wages increase, if profits increase faster, we are journeying not towards social democracy, but towards a caste society._ Thus to insist that we must keep our eyes on the prosperity of others in order to measure our own seems like preaching envy or class hatred. But in social questions the laws of individual morality are often reversed. It is _the social duty_ of every less prosperous class of citizens, their duty towards the whole of the coming generation as well as to their own children, to measure their own progress solely by a standard raised in accordance with the point in evolution that society has attained. What would have been comparative luxury a hundred years ago it is our duty to view as nothing less than a degrading and life-destroying poverty to-day. Opportunity is not becoming equal. The tendency is in the opposite direction, and not all the reforms of "State Socialism" promise to counteract it. The _citizen owes it to society_ to ask of every proposed program of change, "Will it, within a reasonable period, bring equality of opportunity?" To rest satisfied with less--a so-called tendency of certain reforms in the right _direction_ may be wholly illusory--is not only to abandon one's rights and those of one's children, but to rob society of the only possible assurance of the maximum of progress. FOOTNOTES: [83] Henry George, "Progress and Poverty," Vol. II, p. 515. [84] John Mitchell, "Organized Labor" (Preface). [85] John A. Hobson, "The Crisis of Liberalism," p. 100. [86] For this and later quotations from Dr. Eliot in this chapter, see his little book entitled "More Money for the Public Schools." [87] See article by Dr. Eliot in the _School Review_, April, 1909. [88] "Knowledge and Education," the _Independent_, 1910. [89] Dexter, "History of Education in the United States," p. 173. CHAPTER VIII THE "FIRST STEP" TOWARDS SOCIALISM "State Socialism" as I have described it will doubtless continue to be the guiding policy of governments during a large part, if not all, of the present generation. Capitalism, in this new collectivist form, must bring about extremely deep-seated and far-reaching changes in society. And every step that it takes in the nationalization of industry and the appropriation of land rent would also be a step in Socialism, _provided_ the rents and profits so turned into the coffers of the State were not used entirely for the benefit either of industry or of the community as a whole, as it is now constituted, but were reserved in part _for the special benefit of the less wealthy, less educated, and less advantageously placed, so as gradually to equalize income, influence, and opportunity_. But what, as matter of fact, are the ways in which the new revenues are likely to be used before the Socialists are either actually or practically in control of the government? First of all, they will be used for the further development of industry itself and of schemes which aid industry, as by affording cheaper credit, cheaper transportation, cheaper lumber, cheaper coal, etc., which will chiefly benefit the manufacturers, since all these raw materials and services are so much more largely used in industry than in private consumption. Secondly, the new sources of government revenue will be used to relieve certain older forms of taxation. The very moderately graduated income and inheritance taxes which are now common, small capitalists have tolerated principally on the ground that the State is in absolute need of them for essential expenses. We may soon expect a period when the present rapid expansion of this form of taxation as well as other direct taxes on industry, building, corporations, etc., will be checked somewhat by the new revenues obtained from the profits of government enterprises and the taxation of ground values. Indirect taxation of the consuming public in general, through tariffs and internal revenue taxes, will also be materially lightened. As soon as new and larger sources of income are created, the cry of the consumers for relief will be louder than ever, and since a large part of consumption is that of the capitalists in manufacture, the cry will be heard. This will mean lower prices. But in the long run salaries and wages accommodate themselves to prices, so that this reform, beneficial as it may be, cannot be accepted as meaning, for the masses, more than a merely temporary relief. A third form of tax reduction would be the special exemption of the poorer classes from even the smallest direct taxation. But as employers and wage boards, in fixing wages, will take this reduction into account, as well as the lower prices and rents, such exemptions will effect no great or lasting change in the division of the national income between capitalists and receivers of salaries and wages. A third way in which the new and vastly increased incomes of the national and local governments can be expended is the communistic way, as in developing commercial and technical education, in protecting the public health, in building model tenements, in decreasing the cost of traveling for health or business, and in promoting all measures that are likely to increase industrial efficiency and profits without too great cost. A fourth way in which the new revenue may be expended, before the Socialists are in actual or practical control, would be in somewhat increasing the wages and somewhat shortening the hours of the State and municipal employees, who will soon constitute a very large proportion of the community. Here again it is impossible to expect any but a Socialist government to go very far. As I have shown, it is to be questioned whether any capitalistic administration, however advanced, would increase real wages (wages measured by their purchasing power), except in so far as the higher wages will result in a corresponding or greater increase in efficiency, and so in the profits made from labor. And the same law applies to most other governmental (or private) expenditures on behalf of labor, whether in shortened hours, insurance, improved conditions, or any other form. The very essence of capitalist collectivism is that the share of the total profits which goes to the ruling class should not be decreased, and if possible should be augmented. In spite of material improvements the economic gulf between the classes, during the period it dominates, will either remain as it is, or become wider and deeper than before. On the ground of the health and ultimate working efficiency of the present and future generation, hours may be considerably shortened, and the labor of women and children considerably curtailed. Insurance against death, old age, sickness, and accident will doubtless be taken over by the government. Mothers who are unable to take care of their children will probably be pensioned, as now proposed in France, and many children will be publicly fed in school, as in a number of the British and Continental places. The most complete code of labor legislation is practically assured; for, as government ownership extends, the State will become to some extent the model employer. A quarter of a century ago, especially in Great Britain and the United States, but also in other countries, the method of allaying discontent was to distract public attention from politics altogether by stimulating the chase after private wealth. But as private wealth is more and more difficult to attain, this policy is rapidly replaced by the very opposite tactics, to keep the people absorbed in the political chase after the material benefits of economic reform. For this purpose every effort is being used to stimulate political interest, to popularize the measures of the new State capitalism, to foster public movements in their behalf, and finally to grant the reforms, not as a new form of capitalism, but as "concessions to public opinion." At present it is only the most powerful of the large capitalists and the most radical of the small that have fully adapted themselves to the new policies. But this will cause no serious delay, for among policies, as elsewhere, the fittest are surely destined to survive. Ten years ago it would have been held as highly improbable that we would enter into such a collectivist period in half a century. Already a large part of the present generation expect to see it in their lifetime. And the constantly accelerated developments of recent years justify the belief of many that we may find ourselves far advanced in "State Socialism" before another decade has passed. The question that must now be answered by the statesman as opposed to the mere politician, by the publicist as opposed to the mere journalist, is, not how soon the program of "State Socialism" will be put into effect, but what is going to be the attitude of the masses towards it. A movement exists that is already expressing and organizing their discontent with capitalism in whatever form. It promises to fill this function still more fully and vigorously in proportion as collectivist capitalism develops. I refer to the international revolutionary movement that finds its chief expression in the federated Socialist parties. The majority of the best-known spokesmen of this movement agree that social reform is advancing; yet most of them say, with Kautsky, that control of the capitalists over industry and government is advancing even more rapidly, partly by means of these very reforms, so that the _Machtverhaeltnisse_, or distribution of political and economic power between the various social classes, is even becoming less favorable to the masses than it was before. The one thing they feel is that no such capitalist society will ever be willing to ameliorate the condition of the non-capitalists to such a degree that the latter will get an increasing _proportion_ of the products of industry or of the benefits of legislation, or an increased influence over government. The capitalists will never do anything to disturb radically the existing balance of power. While Socialists have not always conceded that the capitalists will themselves undertake, without compulsion, large measures of political democracy and social reform,--even of the capitalistic variety,--nearly all of the most influential are now coming to base their whole policy on this now very evident tendency, and some have done so for many years past. For instance, it has been clear to many from the time of Karl Marx that it would be necessary for capitalist society itself to nationalize or municipalize businesses that become monopolized, without any reference to Socialism or the Socialists. "These private monopolies have become unbearable," says Kautsky, "not simply for the wage workers, but for all classes of society who do not share in their ownership," and he adds that it is only the weakness of the bourgeois (the smaller capitalist) as opposed to capital (the large capitalist) that hinders him from taking effective action. Indeed, one of the chief respects in which history has pursued a somewhat different course from that expected by Marx has been in the failure of capitalist society to attempt _immediately_ this solution of the trust problem through government ownership. Marx expected that this attempt would necessarily be made as soon as the monopolies reached an advanced state, and that the resulting economic revolution would develop into a Socialist revolution. But this monopolistic period has come, the trusts are rapidly dominating the whole field of industry and government, and yet it seems improbable that they will be forced to any final compromise with the small capitalist investors and consumers for some years to come. In the meanwhile, no doubt, the process of nationalization will begin, but too late to fulfill Marx's expectation, for the large and small capitalists will have time to become better united, and their combined control over government will have had time to grow more secure than ever. The new partnership of capitalism and the State will, no doubt, represent the small capitalists as well as the large, but there is no sign that the working people will be able to take advantage of the coming transformation for any non-capitalist purpose. Nor did Marx expect national ownership to increase the relative strength of the workers _unless it was accompanied by a political revolution_. Another vast capitalist reform predicted by Socialists since the Communist Manifesto (1847) is nationalization or municipalization of the ground rent or unearned increment of land. At first Kautsky and others were inclined to expect that nothing would be done in this direction until the working classes themselves achieved political power, but it has always been seen from the days of Marx that the industrial capitalists had no particular reason for wishing to be burdened with a parasitic class of landlords that weighed on their shoulders as much as on those of the rest of the people. Not only do industrial capitalists pay heavy rents to landlords, but the rent paid by the wage worker also has to be paid indirectly and in part by the industrial capitalist: "The quantity of wealth that a landlord can appropriate from the capitalist class becomes larger in proportion as the general demand for land increases, in proportion as population grows, in proportion as the capitalist class needs land, _i.e._ in proportion as the capitalist system of production expands. In proportion with all this, rent rises; that is to say, the aggregate amount of wealth increases which the landlord class can slice off--either directly or indirectly--from the surplus that would otherwise be grabbed by the capitalist class alone."[90] The industrial capitalists, then, have very motive to put an end to this kind of parasitism, and to use the funds secured, through confiscatory taxation of the unearned increment of land, to lessen their own taxation, to nationalize those fundamental industries that can only be made in this way to subserve the interests of the capitalist class as a whole (instead of some part of it merely), and to undertake through government those costly enterprises which are needed by all industry, but which give too slow returns to attract the capitalist investor. This enormous reform, in land taxation, which alone would put into the hands of governments ultimately almost a third of the capital of modern nations, was considered by Marx, in all its early stages, as purely capitalistic, "_a Socialistically-fringed attempt to save the rule of capitalism, and to establish it in fact on a still larger foundation at present_."[91] Indeed, I have shown in a previous chapter that radical reformers who advocated this single-tax idea, along with the nationalization and municipalization of monopolies, do so with the conscious purpose of reviving capitalism and making it more permanent, precisely as Marx says. The great Socialist wrote the above phrase in 1881 (in a recently published letter to Sorge of New York) after reading Henry George's "Progress and Poverty," which had just appeared. He calls attention to the fact that James Mill and other capitalistic economists had long before recommended that land rent should be paid to the State so as to serve as a substitute for taxes, and that he, himself, had advocated it in the Manifesto of 1847--among _transitional measures_. Marx says that he and Engels "inserted this appropriation of ground rent by the State among many other demands," which, as also stated in the Manifesto, "are self-contradictory and must be such of _necessity_." He explains what he means by this in the same letter. In the very year of the Manifesto he had written (in his book against Proudhon) that this measure was "a frank statement of the hatred felt by the industrial capitalist for the landowner, who seems to him to be a useless, unnecessary member in the organism of Capitalist society." Marx demanded "the abolition of property in land, and the application of all land rents to public purposes," _not because this is in any sense the smallest installment of Socialism, but because it is a progressive capitalistic measure_. While it strengthens capitalism by removing "a useless, unnecessary member," and by placing it "on a still larger foundation than it has at the present," it also matures it and makes it ready for Socialism--ready, that is to say, as soon as _the working people capture the government and turn the capitalists out, but not a day sooner_.[92] Until that time even the most grandiose reform is merely "a Socialistically-fringed attempt to save the rule of capitalism." Other "transitional measures" mentioned by Marx and Engels in 1847, some of which had already been taken up as "Socialistically-fringed attempts to save the rule of capitalism" even before their death were:-- The heavily graduated income tax. The abolition of inheritance. A government bank with an exclusive monopoly. A partial nationalization of factories. (No doubt, the part they would select would be that operated by the trusts.) Government cultivation of waste lands. Here we have a program closely resembling that of "State capitalism." It omits the important labor legislation for increasing efficiency, since this was unprofitable under competitive and extra-governmental capitalism, and in Marx's time had not yet appeared; _e.g._ the minimum wage, a shorter working day, and workingmen's insurance. As Marx and Engels mention, however, the substitution of industrial education for child labor (one of the most important and typical of these reforms), they would surely have included other measures of the same order, had they been practicable and under discussion at the time. There can be little doubt that Marx and Engels, in this early pronunciamento, were purposely ambiguous in their language. For example, they demand "the extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state." This is plainly a conservatively capitalistic or a revolutionary Socialist measure entirely according to the degree to which, and the hands by which, it is carried out--and the same is evidently true of the appropriation of land rent and the abolition of inheritance. This is what Marx means when he says that every such measure is "self-contradictory and must be such of necessity." Up to a certain point they put capitalism on "a larger basis"; if carried beyond that, they may, _in the right hands_, become steps in Socialism. Marx and Engels were neither able nor willing to lay out a program which would distinguish sharply between measures that would be transitional and those that would be Socialist sixty or seventy years after they wrote, but merely gave concrete illustrations of their policy; they stated explicitly that such reforms would vary from country to country, and only claimed for those they mentioned that they would be "pretty generally applicable." Yet, understood in the sense in which it was originally promulgated and afterwards explained, this early Socialist program still affords the most valuable key we have as to what Socialism is, if we view it on the side of its practical efforts rather than on that of abstract theories. Marx and Engels recognize that the measures I have mentioned must be acknowledged as "insufficient and untenable," because, though they involve "inroads on the rights of property," they do not go far enough to destroy capitalism and establish a Socialistic society. But they reassure their Socialistic critics by pointing out that these "insufficient" and "transitory" measures, "in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, _necessitate further inroads on the old social order_, and are indispensable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production." (My italics.) That is, "State Socialism" is indispensable as a basis for Socialism, indeed necessitates it, provided Socialists look upon "State Socialist" measures chiefly as transitory _means_ "to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class"; for this rise of the proletariat to the position of ruling class is necessarily "the _first step_ in the revolution of the working class." From the day of this first step the whole direction of social evolution would be altered. For, while the Socialists expect to utilize every reform of capitalist collectivism, and can only build on that foundation, their later policy would be diametrically opposed to it. A Socialist government would begin immediately an almost complete reversal of the statesmanship of "State Socialism." The first measure it would undertake would be to begin at once to increase wages _faster than the rate of increase of the total wealth of the community_. Secondly, within a few years, it would give to the masses of the population, according to their abilities, all the education needed to fill _from the ranks of the non-capitalistic classes_ a proportion of all the most desirable and important positions in the community, corresponding to their numbers, and would see to it that they got these positions. It is undoubtedly the opinion of the most representative figures of the international Socialist movement that there is not the slightest possibility that any of the non-Socialist reformers of to-day or of the near future are following or will follow any such policy, or even take the slightest step in that direction; and that there is nothing Socialists can do to force such a policy on the capitalists until they are actually or practically in power. Society may continue to progress, but it is surely inconceivable to any close observer, as it is inconceivable to the Socialists, that the privileged classes will ever consent, without the most violent struggle, to a program which, viewed as a whole, would lead, _however gradually or indirectly_, to a more equitable distribution of wealth and political power. FOOTNOTES: [90] Kautsky, "The Capitalist Class" (pamphlet). [91] Marx's letters to Sorge. [92] Marx's letters to Sorge. PART II THE POLITICS OF SOCIALISM CHAPTER I "STATE SOCIALISM" WITHIN THE MOVEMENT The Socialist movement must be judged by its acts, by the decisions Socialists have reached and the reasoning they have used as they have met concrete problems. The Socialists themselves agree that first importance is to be attached, not to the theories of Socialist writers, but to the principles that have actually guided Socialist parties and their instructed representatives in capitalist legislatures. These and the proceedings of international and national congresses and the discussion that constantly goes on within each party, and not theoretical writings, give the only truthful and reliable impression of the movement. In 1900 Wilhelm Liebknecht, who up to the time of his death was as influential as Bebel in the German Party, pointed out that those party members who disavowed Socialist principles in their _practical application_ were far more dangerous to the movement than those who made wholesale theoretical assaults on the Socialist philosophy, and that political alliances with capitalist parties were far worse than the repudiation of the teachings of Karl Marx. In his well-known pamphlet _No Compromise_ he showed that this fact had been recognized by the German Party from the beginning. I have shown the Socialists' actual position through their attitude towards progressive capitalism. An equally concrete method of dealing with Socialist actualities is to portray the various tendencies _within_ the movement. The Socialist position can never be clearly defined except by contrasting it with those policies that the movement has rejected or is in the process of rejecting to-day. Indeed, no Socialist policy can be viewed as at all settled or important unless it has proved itself "fit," by having survived struggles either with its rivals outside or with its opponents inside the movement. If we turn our attention to what is going on within the movement, we will at once be struck by a world-wide situation. "State Socialism" is not only becoming the policy of the leading capitalistic parties in many countries, but--in a modified form--it has also become the chief preoccupation of a large group among the Socialists. "Reformist" Socialists view most of the reforms of "State Socialism" as installments of Socialism, enacted by the capitalists in the hope of diverting attention from the rising Socialist movement. To Marx, on the contrary, the first "step" in Socialism was the conquest of complete political power by the Socialists. "The proletariat," he wrote in the Communist Manifesto "will use _its political supremacy_ to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the capitalists, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, _i.e. of the proletariat organized as the ruling class_." (My italics.) Here is the antithesis both of "reformist" Socialism within the movement and of "State Socialism" without. The working people are _not_ expected to gain more and more political power step by step and to use it as they go along. It is only _after_ gaining full political _supremacy_ by a revolution (peaceful or otherwise) that they are to socialize industry step by step. Marx and his successors do not advise the working people to concentrate their efforts on the centralization of the instruments of production in the hands of governments as they now are (capitalistic), but only _after_ they have become completely transformed into the tools of the working people "organized as the ruling class," to use Marx's expression.[93] The central idea of the "reformist" Socialists is, on the contrary, that before Socialism has captured any government, and even before it has become an imminent menace, it is necessary that Socialists should take the lead in the work of social reform, and should devote their energies very largely to this object. It is recognized that capitalistic or non-Socialist reformers have taken up many of the most urgent reforms and will take up more of them, and that being politically more powerful they are in a better position to put them into effect. But the "reformist" Socialists, far from allowing this fact to discourage them, allege it as the chief reason why they must also enter the field. The non-Socialist reformers, they say, are engaged in a popular work, and the Socialists must go in, help to bring about the reforms, and claim part of the credit. They then propose to attribute whatever success they may have gained, not to the fact that they also have become reformers like the rest, but to the fact that they happen to be Socialists. The non-Socialist reformers, they say again, are gaining a valuable experience in government; the Socialists must go and do likewise. Reforms which were steps in capitalism thus become to them steps in Socialism. It is not the fashion of "reformists" to try to claim that they are very great steps--on the contrary, they usually belittle them, but it is believed that agitation for such reforms as capitalist governments allow, is the best way to gain the public ear, the best kind of political practice, the most fruitful mode of activity. One of the leading American Socialist weeklies has made a very clear and typical statement of this policy:-- "_If we leave the field of achievement to the reformer, then it is going to be hard to persuade people that reform is not sufficient. If Socialists take every step forward as part of a general revolutionary program_, and never fail to point out that these things are but steps forward in a stairway that mean nothing save as they lead to a higher stage of society, then the Socialist movement will carry along with it all those who are fighting the class struggle. The hopelessness of reform as a goal will become apparent when its real position in social evolution is pointed out."[94] The leading questions this proposed policy arouses will at once come to the reader's mind: Will the capitalist reformers in control of national governments allow the Socialist "reformists" to play the leading part in their own chosen field of effort? If people tend to be satisfied with reform, what difference does it make as to the ultimate political or social ideals of those who bring it about? If the steps taken by reformers and "reformists" are the same, by what alchemy can the latter transform them into parts of a revolutionary program? Mr. Simons, nevertheless, presents this "reformism" as the proper policy for the American Party at its present stage:-- "It has become commonplace," he says, "to say that the Socialist movement of the United States has entered upon a new stage, and that with the coming of many local victories and not a few in State and nation, Socialist activity must partake of the character of preparation for the control of society. "Yet our propaganda has been slow to reflect this change. This is natural. For more than a generation the important thing was to advertise Socialism and to inculcate a few doctrinal truths. This naturally developed a literature based on broad assertions, sensational exposures, vigorous denunciations, and revival-like appeals that resulted in sectarian organization. "It has been hard to break away from this stage. It is easier to make a propaganda of 'sound and fury' than of practical achievement. Once the phrases have been learned, it is much simpler to issue a manifesto than to organize a precinct. It always requires less effort to talk about a class struggle than to fight it; to defy the lightning of international class rule than to properly administer a township. Yet, if Socialism is inevitable, if the Socialist Party is soon to rule in State and nation, then it is of the highest importance that Socialists should know something of the forces with which they are going to deal; something of the lines of evolution which they are going to further; something of the government which they are going to administer; something of the task which they profess to be eager to accomplish." It might seem that, after the first stage has been passed, the next promising way to carry Socialism forward, the way actually to "fight" the class struggle and to achieve something practical is, as Mr. Simons says, to talk less and to go in and "administer a township." Revolutionary Socialists agree that advertising, the teaching of a few basic doctrines, emotional appeals, and the criticism of present society have hitherto taken up the principal share of the Socialist agitation, and that all these together are not sufficient to enable Socialists to achieve their aim, or even to carry the movement much farther. They agree that activity is the best teacher and that the class struggle must be actually fought. But they propose other activities and feel that a whole intermediate stage of Socialist evolution, including the capture of national governments, lies between the Socialist agitation of the past and any administration of a township that can do anything to bring recruits to Socialism and not merely to "State Socialist" reform. This is the view of the revolutionary majority of the international movement. But the "reformist" minority is both large and powerful, and since it draws far more recruits than does the revolutionary majority from the ranks of the book educated and capitalistic reformers, its spokesmen and writers attract a disproportionately large share of attention in capitalistic and reform circles, and thus give rise to widespread misunderstanding as to the position of the majority. Not only are both the more or less Socialistic parties in Great Britain and the Labour parties of the British colonies "reformist" to the extent that they are either entirely outside or practically independent of the international movement, but the parties of Belgium, Italy, and South Germany have, for a number of years, concentrated their attention almost exclusively on such reforms as the capitalist governments of their countries are likely to allow to be enacted--the dominant idea being to obtain all that can be obtained for the working classes at the present moment, even when, for this purpose, it becomes necessary to subordinate or to compromise entirely the plans and hopes of the future. And it is only within the last year or two that the revolutionary wing in these last-named countries has begun to grow rapidly again and promises to regain control. There can be no doubt that Socialist "reformism" has become very widespread. President Gompers of the American Federation of Labor, who had every facility of meeting European Socialists and unionists on a recent tour, made some observations which are by no means without a certain foundation.[95] He says that he talked to these people about Socialism and, though they all knew "the litany, service, and invocation" and the Socialist text for the coming revolution, they preserved this knowledge for their speech making, while in conversation it all faded away into the misty realms of the imagination. "Positively," writes Mr. Gompers, "I never found one man in my trip ready to go further into constructive Socialism than to repeat perfunctorily its time-worn generalities. On the other hand, I met men whom I knew years ago, either personally or through correspondence or by their work, as active propagandists of the Socialists' theoretical creed, who are now devoting their energies to one or other of the practical forms of social betterment--trade unionism, coöperation, legal protection to the workers--and who could not be moved to speak of utopianism [Mr. Gompers's epithet for Socialism]." It is doubtless true, as Mr. Gompers says, that the individuals he questioned have practically abandoned their Socialism, even though they remain members of the Socialist parties. For if such activities as he mentions could be claimed as "Socialism," then there is very little public work an intelligent and honest workingman can undertake, no matter how conservative it may be, which is not to go by that name. The chief characteristic of the reformists is, indeed, frankly to claim, either that all the capitalist-collectivist reforms of the period are Socialist in origin, or that they cannot be put into execution without Socialist aid, or that such reforms are enacted only as concessions, for fear that Socialism would otherwise sweep everything before it. Rev. Carl D. Thompson, formerly a Socialist member of the Wisconsin Legislature, and now Town Clerk of Milwaukee, for example, claims Millerand as a Socialist minister, though the French Socialist Party agreed by an almost unanimous vote that he is not to be so considered, and attributes to this minister a whole series of reforms in which he was only a single factor among many others. Many important legislative changes which have taken place in Italy since 1900, Mr. Thompson accredits to the opportunist Socialist leader, Turati, with his handful of members of the chamber, though it is certain that even at the present moment the Socialists have not yet arrived at a position where they can claim that they are shaping governmental action as strongly as their Radical allies. Mr. Thompson states that the "Socialist Independent Labour Party" of Great Britain had thirty-four representatives in Parliament at a time when the larger non-Socialist Labour Party, which included it, had only this number. He claimed that a majority of this latter party were Socialists, when, as a matter of fact, only a minority were members of any Socialist party even in the ultra-moderate sense in which the term is employed in England, and he accredits all the chief reforms brought about by the Liberal government to this handful of "Socialists," including even the old age pensions which were almost unanimously favored by the old parties.[96] He even lists among his signs of the progress of Socialism the fact that, at the time of writing, fifty-nine governments owned their railways, while a large number had instituted postal savings banks. The same tendency to claim everything good as Socialism is very common in Great Britain. Even the relatively advanced Socialist, Victor Grayson, avoids the question whether there is any social reform which is not Socialism,[97] and it seems to be the general position of British Socialists that every real reform is Socialism--more or less. August Bebel, on the contrary, is quoted as saying, "_It is not a question of whether we achieve this or that; for us the principal thing is that we put forward certain claims which no other party can put forward._" The great German Socialist sees clearly that if Socialism is to distinguish itself from the other parties it must rest its claims solely on demands which are made exclusively by Socialists. This is what those who claim that every reform is Socialism, or is best promoted by Socialists, fail to see. By trying to make the word, "Socialism" mean everything, they inevitably make it mean nothing. It is true that for a time the very advertisement of the word "Socialism," by this method, and even the widest and loosest use of Socialist phrases had the effect of making people think about Socialist principles. But this cannot be long continued before the public begins to ask questions concerning the exact meaning of such expressions as applied to everyday life. The Socialist paper, _Justice_, of London, urged that "the very suggestion that any of the Liberal members of Parliament were connected with the Socialist movement created a more profound impression than all they ever said or did." This is doubtless true, but when the novelty has once worn off of this situation it is what so-called Socialists do that alone will count. For example, the leading reformist Socialist of Great Britain, Mr. J. R. MacDonald, wishes to persuade the Socialists of America to carry on "a propaganda of immediately practicable changes, justified and enriched by the fact that they are the realization of great ideals."[98] Such a reduction of the ideal to what is actually going on, or may be immediately brought about, makes it quite meaningless. Evidently the immediately practicable changes that Mr. MacDonald suggests are themselves his ideal, and what he calls the ideal consists rather of phrases and enthusiasms that are useful, chiefly, for the purpose of advertising his Party and creating enthusiasm for it. The underlying motive of the "reformists" when they claim non-Socialist reforms as their own, and relegate practically all distinctively Socialist principles and methods to the vague and distant future, is undoubtedly their belief that reforms rather than Socialism appeal to the working class. "The mass of workingmen will support the Socialist Party," a Socialist reformer wrote recently, "not because they are being robbed under capitalism, but because they are made to understand that this party can be relied upon to advance certain measures which they know will benefit them and their families here and now. "The constructive Socialist believes that the coöperative commonwealth will be realized, not by holding it up in contrast to capitalism,--but only by the working class fighting first for this thing, then for that thing, until private enterprise is undermined by its rewards being eaten up by taxes and its incentive removed by the inroads made upon profits." The working people, that is, are not intelligent enough to realize that they are "robbed under capitalism," and are not getting their proportionate share of the increase of wealth, nor courageous enough to take up the fight to overthrow capitalism; they appreciate only small advances from day to day, and every step by which "private capitalism" is replaced by State action is such an advance, while these advances are to be secured chiefly through a Socialist Party. In a word, the Socialist Party is to ask support because it can accomplish more than other parties for social reform under capitalism, which at the present period means "State Socialism." For while "reformist" Socialists are taking a position nearly identical with that of the non-Socialist reformers, the latter are coming to adopt a political policy almost identical with that of the reformist Socialists. I have noted that one of America's leading economists advises all reformers, whether they are Socialists or not, to join the Socialist Party. Since both "reformist" Socialists and "Socialistic" reformers are interested in labor legislation, public ownership, democratic political reforms, graduated taxation, and the governmental appropriation of the unearned increment in land, why should they not walk side by side for a very considerable distance behind "a somewhat red banner," and "without troubling themselves about the unlike goals"--as Professor John Bates Clark recommends? The phrases of Socialism have become so popular that their popularity constitutes its chief danger. At a time when so many professed anti-Socialists are agreeing with the New York _Independent_ that, though it is easy to have too much Socialism, at least "we want _more_" than we have, it becomes exceedingly difficult for non-Socialists to learn what Socialism is and to distinguish it from innumerable reform movements. Less than a decade ago the pros and cons of Socialism were much debated. Now it is usually only a question of Socialism sooner or later, more or less. Socialism a century or two hence, or in supposed installments of a fraction of a per cent, is an almost universally popular idea. For the Socialists this necessitates a revolutionary change in their tactics, literature, and habit of thought. They were formerly forced to fight those who could not find words strong enough to express their hostility; they are rapidly being compelled to give their chief attention to those who claim to be friends. The day of mere repression is drawing to a close, the day of cajolery is at hand. Liebknecht saw what was happening years ago, and, in one of the most widely circulated pamphlets the Socialists have ever published (_No Compromise_), issued an impressive warning to the movement:-- "The enemy who comes to us with an open visor we face with a smile; to set our feet upon his neck is mere play for us. The stupidly brutal acts of violence of police politicians, the outrages of anti-Socialist laws, penitentiary bills--these only arouse feelings of pitying contempt; the enemy, however, that reaches out the hand to us for a political alliance, and intrudes himself upon us as a friend and a brother,--_him and him alone have we to fear_. "Our fortress can withstand every assault--it cannot be stormed nor taken from us by siege--it can only fall _when we ourselves open the doors to the enemy and take him into our ranks as a fellow comrade_." "We shall almost never go right," says Liebknecht, "if we do what our enemies applaud." And we find, as a matter of fact, that the enemies of Socialism never fail to applaud any tendency of the party to compromise those acting principles that have brought it to the point it has now reached. For Liebknecht shows that the power which now causes a Socialist alliance to be sought after in some countries even by Socialism's most bitter enemies would never have arisen had the party not clung closely to its guiding principle, the policy of "no compromise." There is no difficulty in showing, from the public life and opinion of our day, how widespread is this spirit of political compromise or opportunism; nor in proving that it enters into the conduct of many Socialists. Such an opposition to the effective application of broad and far-sighted plans to practical politics is especially common, for historical reasons, in Great Britain and the United States. In this country it has been especially marked in Milwaukee from the earliest days of the Socialist movement there. In 1893 the _Milwaukee Vorwaerts_ announced that "if you demand too much at one time you are likely not to get anything," and that "nothing more ought to be demanded but what is attainable at a given time and under given circumstances."[99] It will be noticed that this is a clear expression of a principle of action diametrically opposite to that adopted by the international movement as stated by Bebel and Liebknecht. Socialists are chiefly distinguished from the other parties by the fact that they concentrate their attention on demands beyond "what is attainable at a given time and under given circumstances." They might _attempt_ to distinguish themselves by claiming that they stand for the _ultimate_ goal of Socialism, though their immediate program is the same as that of other parties, but any politician can do that--as has been shown recently by the action of Briand, Millerand, Ferri, and other former Socialists in France and Italy--and the day seems near when hosts of politicians will follow their example. Any static or dogmatic definition of Socialism, like any purely idealistic formulation, no matter how revolutionary or accurate it may be, necessarily invites purely opportunist methods. A widely accepted static definition declares that Socialism is "the collective ownership of the means of production and distribution under democratic management." As an ultimate ideal or a theory of social evolution, this is accepted also by many collectivist opponents of Socialism, and may soon be accepted generally. The chief possibility for a difference of opinion among most practical persons, whether Socialists or not, must come from the questions: How soon? By what means? Evidently such a social revolution is to be achieved only by stages. What are these stages? Many are tempted to give the easy answer, "More and more collectivism and more and more democracy." But progress in political democracy, if it came first, might be accompanied by an artificial revival of small-scale capitalism, and a new majority made up largely of contented farmer capitalists might put Socialism farther off than it is to-day. Similarly, if installments of collectivism came first, they might lead us in the direction of the Prussia of to-day. And finally, even a combination of democracy and collectivism, up to a certain point, might produce a majority composed in part of small capitalists and favored government employees. Collectivist democracy completed or far advanced would insure the coming of Socialism. But a policy that merely gave us _more_ collectivism plus _more_ democracy, might carry us equally well either towards Socialism or in the opposite direction. The ultimate goal of present society does not give us a ready-made plan of action by a mathematical process of dividing its attainment into so many mechanical stages. A very similar political shibboleth, often used by Party Socialists, is "Let the nation own the trusts." Let us assume that the constitution of this country were made as democratic as that of Australia or Switzerland, and the suffrage made absolutely universal (as to adults). Let us assume, moreover, that the "trusts," including railways, public service corporations, banks, mines, oil, and lumber interests, the steel-making and meat-packing industries, and the few other important businesses where monopolies are established, were owned and operated by governments of this character. Taken together with the social and labor reforms that would accompany such a régime, this would be "State Socialism," but it would not _necessarily_ constitute even a _step towards_ Socialism--and this for two reasons. The industries mentioned employ probably less than a third of the population, and, even if we add other government employments, the total would be little more than a third. The majority of the community would still be divided among the owners or employees of the competitive manufacturing establishments, stores, farms, etc.,--and the professional classes. With most of these the struggle of Capital and Labor would continue and, since they are in a majority, would be carried over into the field of government, setting the higher paid against the more poorly paid employees, as in the Prussia of to-day. And, secondly, even if we supposed that a considerable part or all of the government employees received what they felt to be, on the whole, a fair treatment from the government, and if these, together with shopkeepers, farm owners, or lessees, and satisfied professional and salaried men, made up a majority, we would still be as far as ever from a social, economic, or industrial democracy. What we would have would be a class society, based on a purely political democracy, and economically, on a partly private (or individualist) and partly public (or collectivist) capitalism. "Equal opportunities for all" would also mean Socialism. But equal opportunities for a limited number, no matter if that number be much larger than at present, may merely strengthen capitalism by drawing the more able of the workers away from their class and into the service of capitalism. Or opportunities _more_ equal for all, without a complete equalization, may merely increase the competition of the lower classes for middle-class positions and so secure to the capitalists cheaper professional service. So-called steps towards equal opportunities, even if rapid enough to produce a very large surplus of trained applicants for whom capitalism fails to provide and so increase the army of malcontents, may simply delay the day of Socialism. I have spoken of Socialists whose underlying object is opportunistic--to obtain immediate results in legislation no matter how unrelated they may be to Socialism. Others are impelled either by an inactive idealism, or by attachment to abstract dogma for its own sake. Their custom is in the one instance to make the doctrine so rigid that it has no immediate application, and in the other to "elevate the ideal" so high, to remove it so far into the future, that it is scarcely visible for the present-day purposes, and then to declare that present-day activity, even if theoretically subject to an ideal or a doctrine, must be guided also by quite other and "practical" principles, which are never clearly defined and sometimes are scarcely mentioned. Mr. Edmond Kelly, for instance, puts his "Collectivism Proper," or Socialism, so far into the future that he is forced to confess that it will be attained only "ultimately," or perhaps not at all, while "Partial Collectivism may prove to be the last stage consistent with human imperfection."[100] He acknowledges that this Partial Collectivism ("State Socialism") is not the ideal, and it is evident that his ideal is too far ahead or too rigid or theoretical, to have any connection with the ideals of the Socialist movement, which arise exclusively out of actual life. This opportunism defends itself by an appeal to the "evolutionary" argument, that progress must necessarily be extremely slow. Progress in this view, like Darwin's variations, takes place a step at a time, and its steps are infinitesimally small. _The Worker_ of Brisbane, Australia, says: "The complicated complaint from which society suffers can only be cured by the administration of _homeopathic_ doses.... Inculcate Socialism? Yes, but grab all you can to be going on with. Preach revolutionary thoughts? Yes, but rely on the ameliorative method.... The minds of men are of slow development, and we must be content, we fear, to accomplish our revolution piecemeal, bit by bit, till a point is come to when, by accumulative process, a series of small changes amounts to the Great Change. The most important revolutions are those that happen quietly without anything particularly noticeable seeming to occur." What is a Great Change depends _entirely_, in the revolutionist's view, on how rapidly it is brought about, and "revolutionary thoughts" are empty abstractions unless accompanied by revolutionary methods. Once it is assumed that there is plenty of time, the difference between the conservative and the radical disappears. For even those who have the most to lose realize in these days the inevitability of "evolution." The radical is not he who looks forward to great changes after long periods of time, but he who will not tolerate unnecessary delay--who is unwilling to accept the so-called installments or ameliorations offered by the conservative and privileged (even when considerable) as being satisfactory or as necessarily contributing to his purpose at all. The radical spirit is rather that of John Stuart Mill, when he said, "When the object is to raise the permanent condition of a people, small means do not merely produce small effects; they produce no effect at all." Some political standard and quantitative measure is as necessary to social progress as similar standards are necessary in other relations. If the political standard of the Socialists is so low as to regard social reform programs which on the whole are more helpful to the capitalists than to other classes--and therefore "produce no effect at all" as far as the Socialist purpose is concerned--as if they were _concessions_, then it follows naturally that the Socialists will be ready to pay a price for such concessions. They will not only view as a relative gain over the capitalists measures which are primarily aimed at advancing capitalist interests, but they will inevitably be ready at a price to relax to some extent the intensity of their opposition to other measures that are capitalistic and antipopular. For instance, if old age pensions are considered by the workers to be an epoch-making reform and a concession, they may be granted by the capitalists all the more readily. But if thus overvalued, advantage will be taken of this feeling, and they will in all probability be accompanied by restrictions of the rights of labor organizations. On the other hand, if such pensions, however desirable, are considered as a reform which will result indirectly in great savings to the capitalist classes, to public and private charitable institutions, to employers, etc., then the Socialists will accept them and, if possible, hasten their enactment,--but, like the French, will refuse to pay for them out of their own pockets (even through indirect taxation, as the British workingmen were forced to do) and will allow them neither to be used as a cloak for reaction, nor as a substitute for more fundamental reforms. In other words, a rational political standard would teach that a certain measure of political progress is normal in capitalist society as a result of the general increase of wealth and the general improvement in political and economic organization, especially now that the great change to State capitalism is taking place; while reforms of an entirely different character are needed if there is to be any relative advance of the political and economic power of the masses, any tendency that might lead in the course of a reasonable period of time to economic and social democracy. "A new and fair division of the goods and rights of this world should be the main object of all those who conduct human affairs," said De Tocqueville. The economic progress and political reforms of this capitalistic age are doubtless bringing us nearer to the day when a new and fair division of goods and rights _can_ take place, and they will make the great transformation easier when it comes, but this does not mean that in themselves they constitute even a first step in the new dispensation. That they do is denied by all the most representative Socialists from Marx to Bebel. The most bitter opponents of Socialism, like its most thoroughgoing advocates, have come to see that the whole character of the movement has grown up from its unwillingness to compromise the aggressive tactics indispensable for the revolutionary changes it has in view, until it has become obvious that, _just as Socialism as a social movement is the opposite pole to State capitalism, so Socialism as a social method is the opposite pole to opportunism_. FOOTNOTES: [93] The Communist Manifesto. [94] _The Coming Nation_, Sept. 9, 1911. [95] Mr. Gompers's articles in the _Federationist_ have recently appeared in book form. [96] Carl D. Thompson, "The Constructive Program of Socialism" (pamphlet). [97] Victor Grayson and G. R. S. Taylor, "The Problem of Parliament," p. 56. [98] Editorial in the _Socialist Review_ (London), May, 1910. [99] _Vorwaerts_ (Milwaukee), Jan. 3, 1893. [100] Edmond Kelly, "Individualism and Collectivism," p. 398. CHAPTER II "REFORMISM" IN FRANCE, ITALY, AND BELGIUM The Socialist parties in Italy, Belgium, and France, where "reformism" is strong, are progressing less rapidly than the Socialists of these countries had reason to expect, and far less rapidly than in other countries. It would seem that in these cases the same cause that drives the movement to abandon aggressive tactics also checks its numerical growth. For example, it is a matter of principle among Socialists generally to contest every possible elected position and to nominate candidates in every possible district. The revolutionary French Socialist, Jules Guesde, even stated to the writer that if candidates could be run by the party in every district of France, and if the vote could in this way be increased, he would be willing to see the number of Socialists in Parliament reduced materially, even to a handful--the object being to teach Socialism everywhere, and to prepare for future victories by concentrating on a few promising districts rather than to make any effort to become a political factor, at the present moment. Similarly, August Bebel declared that he would prefer that in the elections of 1912 the Socialists should get 4,000,000 votes and 50 Reichstag members rather than 3,000,000 votes and 100 members. In the latter case, of course, the Socialist members would have been elected largely on the second ballot by the votes of non-Socialists. The policy actually carried out in both Italy and France has of late been exactly the opposite to that recommended by Guesde and Bebel. In the elections of 1909, the Socialist Party of Italy put up 114 less candidates for Parliament than they had in the election of 1904, while the number of candidates nominated in France was 50 less in 1910 than it had been in 1906. The consequence was that the French Party received an increase of votes less absolutely than that gained by the conservative republicans and scarcely greater than that of the radicals, while in Italy the Socialists actually cast a smaller _percentage_ of the total vote in 1909 than they did in 1904, while the party membership materially decreased. This policy had a double result; it sent more Socialists to the Parliaments, in each case increasing the number of members by about 50 per cent; on the other hand, it helped materially those radical and rival parties most nearly related to the Socialists, for in many districts where the latter had withdrawn their candidates these parties necessarily received the Socialist vote. A vast field of agitation was practically deserted, and even when the agitation was carried on, the distinction between the Socialist Party and the parties it had favored, and which in turn favored it, became less marked, and the chances of the spread of Socialism in the future were correspondingly diminished. In France it is this policy which has brought forward the so-called "independent Socialists" of the recent Briand ministry. Being neither Socialists nor "Radicals," they are in the best position to draw advantages from the "rapprochement" of these forces, and it was thus that Millerand came into the ministry in 1900, that Briand became prime minister in 1910, and Augagneur minister in 1911. These are among the most formidable opponents of the Socialist movement in France to-day. It will seem from this and many other instances that the opportunist policy which leads at first to a show of success, later results in a weakening of the immediate as well as the future possibilities of the movement. The opportunist policy leads not only to an abandonment of Socialist principle, an outcome that can never be finally determined in any case, but sometimes to an actual betrayal or desertion, visible to all eyes, as, for instance, when Ferri left the movement in Italy, or Briand and Millerand in France. That such desertions must inevitably result from the looseness taught by "reformist" tactics is evident. Yet all through Briand's early political career, Jaurès was his intimate associate, and even after the former had forsaken the party, the latter confessed that, like the typical opportunist, he had still expected to find in Briand's introductory address as minister "reasons for hoping for the progress of social justice." The career of Briand is typical. "One must understand how to manage principles," he had said in 1900 at the very time he was making the revolutionary declarations I shall quote (in favor of the general strike and against the army). Two years later when he made his first speech in the Chamber, the conservative "Temps" said that Briand was "ministrable"; that is, that he was good material for some future capitalistic ministry. Now Briand was making in this speech what appeared to be a very vigorous attack against the government and capitalism, but, like some prominent Socialists to-day, he had succeeded in doing it in such a way that he allowed the more far-seeing of the capitalistic enemy to understand clearly what his underlying principles were.[101] At his first opportunity he became connected with the government, and justified this step on the ground of "his moral attitude," since he was the proposer of the famous bill for separating the Church and the State. He was immediately excluded from the party, since at the time of Millerand's similar step a few years before the party had reached the definite conclusion that Socialists should not be allowed to participate in their opponent's administrations. When Briand became minister, and later (in 1909) prime minister, he did not fail at once to realize the worst fears of the Socialists, elevating military men and naval officers to the highest positions, and promoting that minister who had been most active in suppressing the post office strike to the head of the department of justice. So-called collectivist reforms that were introduced while he was minister, like the purchase of the Western Railway, were carried through, according to conservative Socialists like Jaurès, with a loss of 700,000,000 francs to the State. So that now Jaurès, who had done so much to forward Millerandism and Briandism felt obliged to propose a resolution condemning Briand and Millerand and Viviani as traitors who had allowed themselves to be used "for the purpose of 'capitalism.'" "'Socialistic' ministers," says Rappoport, "have fallen below the level of progressive capitalistic governments. No 'Socialistic' minister has done near so much for democracy as honorable but narrow-minded democrats like Combes. 'Socialistic' ministers have before anything else sought the means of keeping themselves in office. In order to make people forget their past, they are compelled to give continuously new proofs of their zeal for the government." In France, where strong radical, democratic, and "State Socialist" parties already exist, ready to absorb those who put reform before Socialism, the likelihood that such desertions will lead to any serious division of the party seems small, especially since the Toulouse Congress, when a platform was adopted unanimously. Of course, the leading factor in this platform was Jaurès, who stands as strongly for a policy of unity and conciliation within the party as he has for an almost uninterrupted conciliation and coöperation with the more or less radical forces outside of it. If Jaurès was able to get the French Party to adopt this unanimous program, it was because he is not the most extreme of reformists, and because he has hitherto placed party loyalty before everything. In the same way Bebel, voting on nearly every occasion with the revolutionists, is able to hold the German Party together because he is occasionally on the reformist side, as in a case to be mentioned below. Jaurès looks forward, for instance, to a whole series of "successful general strikes intervening at regular intervals," and even to the final use of a great revolutionary general strike, whenever it looks as if the capitalists can be finally overthrown and the government taken into Socialist hands--though he certainly considers that the day for such a strike is still many years off. Nor does he hesitate to extend the hand of Socialist fellowship to the most revolutionary Socialists and labor unionists of his country, though he says to them, "The more revolutionary you are, the more you must try to bring into the united movement not only a minority, but the whole working class." He says he is not against revolution, or the general strike, but that he is against "a caricature of the general strike and an abortive revolution." It is only by actions, however, that men or parties may be judged, and though Jaurès has occasionally been found with the revolutionists, in most cases he acts with their rivals and opponents, the reformists, and in fact is the most eminent Socialist reformer the world has produced. No one will question that there are Socialists who are exclusively interested in reform at the present period, not because they are opposed to revolution, but because no greater movements are taking place at the present moment or likely to take place in the immediate future--and Jaurès may be one of these. But it is very difficult, even impossible, to distinguish by any external signs, between such persons and those for whom the idea of anything beyond the reforms of "State Socialism" is a mere ideal, which concerns almost exclusively the next or some future generation. Many of those who were formerly Jaurès's most intimate associates, like the ministers Briand and Millerand, the recent ministers Augagneur and Viviani, and many others, have deserted the Party and are now proving to be its most dangerous opponents, while several other deputies, who are still members like Brousse, recently Mayor of Paris, are accused by a large part of the organization of taking a very similar position. Surely this shows that, even if Jaurès himself could be trusted and allowed to advocate principles and tactics so agreeable to the rivals and enemies of Socialism, there are certainly few other persons who can be safely left in such a compromising position. In view of these great betrayals on the part of Jaurès's associates, the mere fact that his own position towards the Party has usually been correct in the end--after the majority have shown him just how far he can go--and will doubtless remain technically correct, becomes of entirely secondary importance. He has openly and repeatedly encouraged and aided those individuals and parties which later became the chief obstacles in the way of Socialist advance, as other Socialists had predicted. The result is, not that the Socialist Party has ceased to grow, but that a large part of the enthusiasm for Socialism, largely created by the party, has gone to elect so-called "Independent Socialists" to the Chamber and to elevate to the control of the government men like Briand, who, it was agreed by Socialists and anti-Socialists alike, was the most formidable enemy the Socialists have had for many years. The program unanimously adopted by the French at the Congress of Toulouse must be viewed in the light of this internal situation. "The Socialist Party, the party of the working class and of the Social Revolution," it begins, "seeks the conquest of political power for the emancipation of the proletariat [working class] by the destruction of the capitalist régime and the suppression of classes." The goal of Socialism could not be more succinctly expressed than in these words: "The destruction of the capitalist régime and the suppression of classes." Any party that lives up to this preamble in letter and spirit can scarcely stray from the Socialist road. "It is the party which is most essentially, most actively reformist," continues another section, "the only one which can push its action on to total reform; the only one which can give full effect to each working class demand; the only one which can make of each reform, of each victory, the starting point and basis of more extended demands and bolder conquests...." Here we have the plank on which Jaurès undoubtedly laid the greatest weight, and it was supported unanimously partly because of the necessity of party unity. For this is as much as to say that no reform will ever be brought to a point that wholly satisfies the working people except through a working class government. But it cannot be denied that there are certain changes of very great importance to the working people, like those mentioned in previous chapters, which are at the same time even more valuable to the capitalists, and would be carried out to the end even if there were no Socialists in existence. If the revolutionary wing of the French Party once conceded to capitalism itself this possibility of bringing about certain reforms, they would be in a position effectively to oppose the reformist tactics of Jaurès within the Party. By giving full credit to the semi-democratic and semi-capitalistic reform parties for certain measures, they would go as far as he does in the direction of conciliation and common sense in politics; by denying the possibility of the slightest coöperation with non-Socialists on other and _still more important questions_, they could constantly intensify the political conflict, and since Jaurès is a perpetual compromiser, put him in the minority in every contested vote within the party. By attacking the capitalists blindly and on all occasions they have created the necessity of a conciliator--the rôle that Jaurès so ably and effectively fills. But, however friendly the Toulouse program may have seemed to Jaurès's reform tactics, it is not on that account any less explicit in its indorsement of revolutionary methods whenever the moment happens to be propitious. It states that the Socialist Party "continually reminds the proletariat [working class] by its propaganda that they will find salvation and entire freedom only in a collectivist and communist régime"; that "it carries on this propaganda in all places in order to raise everywhere the spirit of demand and of combat," and that "the Socialists not only indorse the general strike for use in economic struggles, but also for the purpose of finally absorbing capitalism." "Like all exploited classes throughout history," it concludes, "the proletariat affirms its right to take recourse at certain moments to insurrectionary violence." The Toulouse Congress showed, not the present position of the French Party or of the International, but the points on which Socialist revolutionists and reformers, everywhere else at sword's point, can agree. The reformers do not object to promising the revolutionaries that they shall have their own way in the relatively rare crises when revolutionary means are used or contemplated. The revolutionaries are willing to allow the reformers to claim all the credit for all reforms beneficial to the workers that happen to be enacted. Neither gives up their first principle, whether it be revolution or reform, but in the matter of secondary importance, reform or revolution, each side tolerates in the party an attitude in diametrical opposition to its principles and the tactics it requires. Both do this doubtless in the belief that by this opportunism they will some day capture the whole party, and that a split may thus be avoided in the meanwhile. Since the Toulouse Congress the divisions within the French Party have become much more acute. Briand's conduct in the great railway strike in 1911 is discussed below. Yet in spite of this experience of how much the government is ready to pay for railways and how little it is ready to do to their employees, Jaurès's followers at the Party Congresses of 1911 and 1912 stood again for the policy of nationalization, and Guesde was impelled to warn the party that Briand's "State Socialism" was the gravest danger to the movement. Briand's positive achievements are also defended by Jaurès. The recent workingmen's pension law, unlike that of England, demands a direct contribution from the employees. Nevertheless, it contained some slight advantages, and of the seventy-five Socialist members of the Chamber of Deputies, only Guesde voted against it. Even when the Federation of Labor was conducting a campaign against registration to secure these "benefits," Jaurès's organ, _L'Humanité_ took the other side. The working people, as usual, followed their unions. Less than 5 per cent registered; in Paris only 2.5 per cent, and in Brest 22 out of 10,000. The experience with Millerand and Briand has made it impossible for Jaurès to tie the French Party to "reformism." But reformism has brought it about that the Party is often split in its votes in the Chamber of Deputies. In the Party Congresses, however, Jaurès is outvoted where a clear difference arises, an outcome he does his best to avoid. The Congress of 1911 (at St. Quentin) reaffirmed the international decision at Amsterdam which prevents the party going in for reform as a part of a non-Socialist administration. It declared that "Socialists elected to office are the representatives of a party of fundamental and absolute opposition to the whole of the capitalist class, and to the State, its tool." And Vaillant said that since the Amsterdam Congress in 1904 the question of participation in capitalist ministries had ceased to exist in France. It is true that Jaurès secured at this Congress, by a narrow majority, an indorsement of his policy of accepting the government pension offer. But the orthodox followers of Guesde and the revolutionary disciples of Hervé joined to secure its condemnation first by the Paris organization, and later by the National Council of the Party by the decisive vote of 87 to 51. This resolution which marks a great turning point in the French Party, is in part as follows:-- "The National Council declares that each time a labor question is to be decided, the Socialist Party should act in accord with the General Confederation of Labor." As the Confederation has indorsed Socialism both as an end and as a means, few, if any, Socialist parties would object to this resolution. But the Confederation is also revolutionary, and this policy, if adhered to, marks an end to the influence of the "reformism" of Jaurès. The precise objections to the government's insurance proposal are also significant. The National Council protested against the following features:-- (1) The compulsory contributions. (2) The capitalization (of the fund). (3) The ridiculous smallness of the pension. (4) The age required to obtain the pension. (5) The reëstablishment of workingmen's certificates. Among the working people there is no doubt that the first feature was the chief cause of unpopularity. But Socialists know that, through indirect taxes or the automatic fall in wages or rise in prices, the same object of charging the bill to the workers may be reached. The capitalization refers to the investment and management of the large fund required by a capitalist government, thereby increasing its power. The last point has to do with the tendency to restrict the workers' liberty in return for the benefits granted--a tendency more visible with the pensions of the railway employees which were almost avowedly granted to sweeten the bitter pill of a law directed against their organizations. The same orthodox and revolutionary elements in the Party overthrew the Monis Ministry by refusing to vote for it with Jaurès and his followers. But this ministry, perhaps the most radical France has had, was in part a creation of Jaurès, who had hailed it with delight in his organ, _L'Humanité_. The fact that it only lived for three months and was overthrown by Socialists was another crushing blow to Jaurès. As it came simultaneously with his defeat in the National Council, it is highly improbable that the reformists will succeed soon, if ever, in regaining that majority in the movement which they held for a brief moment at the time of the St. Quentin Congress and during the first days of the Monis Ministry. It is now in Belgium and Italy only that "reformism" is dominant and still threatens to fuse the Socialists with other parties. In the last election in Italy the Socialists generally fused with the Republicans and Radicals, while the Belgian Party has decided to allow the local political organizations to do this wherever they please in the elections of 1912. In Belgium, Vandervelde, who has usually represented himself as an advocate of compromise between the two wings in international congresses, has now come out for a position more reformistic than that of Jaurès and only exceeded by the British "Labourites." He was one of the movers of the Amsterdam resolution (see Chapter VII), which he now declares merely repeated the previous one of Paris (1900) which, he says, merely "forbids an individual Socialist to take a part in a capitalist government without the consent of the Party." On the contrary, this Amsterdam resolution, as Vaillant says, forbids Socialist Parties to allow their members to become members of capitalist ministries except under the most extraordinary and critical circumstances.[102] We are not surprised after this to hear Vandervelde say that the Belgian Party has not decided whether it will take part in a future Liberal government or not, because, though the occasion for this might occur this year (1912), he considers it too far off in the future for present consideration--surely a strange position for a Party that pretends to be interested in a future society. We are also prepared to hear from him that Socialists might be ready to accept representation in such a ministry, not in proportion to their numerical strength, or even their votes, but in proportion to the number of seats an unequal election law gives them in Parliament. Whether, when the question actually presents itself, the Party will follow Vandervelde is more than questionable. In Italy "reformism" has reached its furthermost limit. When last year (1911) Bissolati was offered a place in the Giolitti Ministry he hesitated for weeks and was openly urged by a number of other Socialist deputies to accept. After consultations with Giolitti and the king he finally refused, giving as a pretext that, as minister, he would be forced to give some outward obeisance to monarchy, but really because such an action would split the Socialist Party and perhaps, also, because he might not be able altogether to support Giolitti on the one ground of the military elements of his budget. Far from condemning Bissolati, the group of Socialist deputies passed a resolution that expressed satisfaction with his conduct and even appointed him to speak in their name at the opening of the new Parliament. All the deputies save two then voted confidence in the new ministry and approbation of its program. The opinion of the revolutionary majority of the international movement on this situation was reflected in the position of the revolutionaries of the two chief cities of the country, Milan and Rome. At the former city where they had a third of the delegates to the local Socialist committee they moved that the Socialist Party could neither authorize its deputies to represent it in a capitalist ministry or give that ministry its support, "except under conditions determined, not by Parliamentary artifices, but by the needs and mature political consciousness of the great mass of workers." At Rome two thirds of the Socialist delegates voted a resolution condemning the action of Bissolati as "the direct and logical consequence of the thought, program, and practical action of the reformist group," and reproved both the proposal of immediate participation in a capitalist government and "the theoretical encouragement of such a possibility" as being opposed to all sound and consistent Socialist activity. The "reformists," led by Turati, were of the opinion merely that the time was not yet ripe for the action Bissolati had contemplated. But the grounds given in the resolution proposed by Turati on this occasion show that it was not on principle that he went even this far. He declared that "in the present condition of the organization and the present state of mind of the Party" a participation in the government which was "not imposed by a real popular movement, would profoundly weaken Socialist action, aggravating the already existing lack of harmony between purely parliamentary action and the development of the political consciousness and the capacity for victory on the part of the great mass of the workers."[103] In other words, as in France, the working people, especially those in the unions, will not tolerate a further advance in the reformist direction, but Turati and Bissolati, like Jaurès and Vandervelde are striving to compromise, just as far as they will be allowed to do so. There is thus always a possibility of splits and desertions in these countries, but none that the party will abandon the revolutionary path. The tactics of the Italian "reformists" were immensely clarified at the Congress of Modena (October, 1911). For the question of supporting a non-Socialist ministry and of participating in it was made still more acute by the government's war against Tripoli, while the Bissolati case above mentioned was also for the first time before a national Party Congress. Nearly all Socialists had opposed the war, as had also many non-Socialists--but after war was declared, the majority of the Socialist members of Parliament voted against the general twenty-four hours' strike that was finally declared as a demonstration against it. This majority had finally decided to support the strike only after it was declared by a _unanimous_ vote of the executive of the Federation of Labor, and then its chief anxiety had been lest the strike go too far. The revolutionary minority in the parliamentary group, however, which had consisted of only two at the time of the Bissolati affair, was now increased to half a dozen of the thirty-odd members, while the revolutionary opposition to "reformism" in the Modena Congress, as a result of these two issues, rose to more than 40 per cent of the delegates. At this Congress the reformists were divided into three groups, represented by Bissolati, Turati, and Modigliani. All agreed that it was necessary not only to vote for certain reforms--to this the revolutionists are agreed--but also at certain times to vote for the whole budget and to support the administration. Modigliani, however, declared (against Bissolati) that no Socialist could _ever_ become a member of a capitalist ministry; Turati, that while this principle held true at the present stage of the movement, he would not bind himself as to the future; while Bissolati was unwilling to make any pledge on this question. As Bissolati did not propose, however, that the Socialists should take part in the present ministry _at the present moment_, this question was not an immediate issue. What had to be decided was whether, in order to hasten and facilitate the introduction of universal suffrage and other social reforms, the government is to be supported at the present moment--when it is waging a war of colonial conquest to which all Socialists are opposed. The resolution finally adopted by the Congress was drawn up by Turati and others who represented the views of the majority of reformists. While purely negative, it was quite clear, and the fact that it was finally accepted both by Bissolati and by Modigliani is highly significant. It concluded that "the Socialist group in Parliament ought not any longer to support the government _systematically_ with their votes." It did not declare for any systematic _opposition_ to the administration, even at the time when it is waging this war. It did not even forbid occasional support, and it left full discretion in the hands of the same parliamentary group whose policy I have been recording. As a consequence the Italian Party at this juncture intentionally tolerated two contradictory policies. Turati declared: "We are in opposition unless in some exceptional case, in which some situation of extreme gravity might present itself." Rigola, who was one of the three spokesmen appointed for the less conservative reformists (with Turati and Modigliani) said: "We have been ministerialists for ten years, but little or nothing has been done for the proletariat. Some laws have been approved, but it is doubtful if they are due to us rather than to the exigencies of progress itself." In other words, Turati and Rigola thought there could be occasions for supporting capitalist ministries, though the present was not such an occasion; while the latter practically confessed that the policy had always been a failure in Italy. But in the face of all criticism Bissolati announced that he refused absolutely _to pass over to the opposition to the ministry of Giolitti_. Turati and his followers, now in control of the Party, might tolerate this position; the large and growing revolutionary minority would not. This could only mean that Socialist group in the Italian Parliament, like that of France, and even of Germany, would divide its votes on many vital matters, or at least that the minority would abstain from voting. Which could only mean that on many questions of the highest importance there was no longer one Socialist Party, but two.[104] Turati himself wrote of the Modena Congress:-- "Only two tendencies were to be seen in the discussion and the voting; _two parties in their bases and principles_: the Socialist Party as a party of the working people, a class party, a party of political, economic, and social reorganization, and on the other side a bourgeois radical party as a completion of, and perhaps also as a center of new life force for, the sleeping and half moribund bourgeois democratic radicalism."[105] That is, the "reformist" Turati denied that there is anything Socialistic about Bissolati's "ultra-reformist" faction. To this Bissolati answered that compromise and the political collaboration of the working people with other classes, was not to be reserved, as Turati had said, for accidental and extraordinary cases, but was "the very essence of the reformist method."[106] The revolutionaries, of course, agree with Bissolati that, if the Socialists hold that their prime function is to work for reforms favored by a large part of the capitalists, compromises and the habit of fighting with the capitalists instead of against them are inevitable. Turati now began to approach the revolutionaries, said that they had given up their dogmatism, immoderation, and justification of violence, and that he only differed from them now on questions of "more or less." The revolutionaries, however, have made no overtures to Turati, and Turati's overtures to the revolutionaries have so far been rejected. Turati's "reformism" seems to be less opportunistic than it was, but as long as he insists, as he does to-day, that it is only conditions that have changed and not his reformist tactics, that the revolutionaries are moving towards the reformists, the relation of the two factions is likely to remain as embittered as ever. Only if the revolutionaries continue to grow more powerful, until Turati is obliged still further to moderate his "reformist" principles and to abandon some of his tactics permanently, instead of saying, as he does now, that he lays them aside only temporarily, will there be any real unity in the Italian Socialist Party. Within a few weeks after the Modena Congress, Turati had already initiated a movement in this direction when he persuaded the executive committee of the Party, after a bitter conflict, and by a majority of one (12 to 13), to enter definitely into opposition to the government, which in the meanwhile had given a new cause for offense by delaying on a military pretext the convocation of the Chamber of Deputies.[107] Among the opportunist and ultra "reformists" who were still anxious to take no definite action, were such well-known men as Bissolati, Podrecca, Calda, and Ciotti. Bissolati deplored all agitation in criticism of the war except a demand for the convocation of the Chamber. Turati and others who had at last decided to go over definitely to the opposition, did so on entirely non-Socialist and capitalist grounds such as the expense of the war, the unprofitable nature of Tripoli as a colony, the aid the war gave to clericals and other reactionaries (elements opposed also by progressive capitalists), and the interference it caused with other reforms (favored also by progressive capitalists). Turati, indeed, was frank enough to say that he had Lloyd George's successful opposition to the Boer War as a model, and called the attention of his associates to the fact that Lloyd George became Minister (it will be remembered that Turati is not on the whole opposed to Socialists also becoming ministers--even in a capitalist cabinet). Even now it was only the revolutionary Musatti who pointed out the true Socialist moral of the situation, that failure of the non-Socialist democrats to stand by their principles and to oppose the war, ought to lead the party to separate from them, not only temporarily, but permanently, and to make impossible forever either the participation of the Socialists in any capitalist administration or even the support of such an administration in the Chamber of Deputies. It was only when Bissolati secured a majority of the Socialist deputies, and this majority decided to _compel_ the minority to accept Bissolati's neutral tactics as to the war and his readiness actively to support the war government at every point where that government was in need of support, that Turati rebelled and demanded that his minority, which announced itself as willing as a unit to obey the decisions of the Party Congress, should be recognized as its official representative in the Chamber. Turati's position was the same as before, but Bissolati's greater popularity among the voters, _including non-Socialists_, gave the latter control of the Parliamentary group, and forced the former to a declaration of war. The effect was to throw Turati and his followers into the arms of the revolutionaries, where they form a minority. And thus the situation becomes similar to that in France. The reformist "leaders," Jaurès and Turati, do all that is possible to lead the Socialist Parties of the two countries in the opposite direction from that in which these organizations are going. But though these "leaders" are turned in the direction of class conciliation, they are constantly being dragged backwards in the direction of class war. Unconsciously they are doing all they can to retard Socialism--short of leaving the movement. But as long as they consent to go with Socialism when they are unable to make Socialism go with them, their ability to retard the movement is strictly limited. FOOTNOTES: [101] Charles Rappaport, "Das Ministerium Briand," _Die Neue Zeit_ (1910). [102] See _Die Neue Zeit_, April, 1911, p. 46. Article by Vandervelde. [103] The _Avanti_, April, 1911. [104] The _Avanti_, Oct. 18, 1911. [105] _Critica Sociale_, Nov. 1, 1911. [106] _Azione Socialista_, Nov. 19, 1911. [107] _Avanti_, Dec. 2 and 3, 1911. CHAPTER III "LABORISM" IN GREAT BRITAIN The British Socialist situation is almost as important internationally as the German. The organized workingmen of the world are indeed divided almost equally into two camps. Most of those of Australia, South Africa, and Canada, as well as a large majority in the United States, favor a Labour Party of the British type, and even the reformist Socialist leaders, Jaurès in France, Vandervelde in Belgium, and Turati in Italy, often take the British Party as model. On the other hand the majority of the _Socialists_ everywhere outside of Great Britain, including the larger part of all the _working people_ in every country of continental Europe, look towards the Socialist Party of Germany as their model, the political principles and tactics of which are diametrically opposed to those of the British Labour Party. Far from opposing their Socialism to the "State Socialism" of the government, the British Socialists in general frankly admit that they also are "State Socialists," and seem not to realize that the increased power and industrial functions of the State may be used to the advantage of the privileged classes rather than to that of the masses. The Independent Labour Party even claims in its official literature that the "degree of civilization which a state has reached may almost be measured by the proportion of the national income which is spent collectively instead of individually."[108] "Public ownership is Socialism," writes Mr. J. R. MacDonald, until lately Chairman of the Labour Party,[109] while Mr. Philip Snowden says that the first principle of Socialism is that the interests of the State stand over those of individuals.[110] "I believe," says Mr. Keir Hardie, "the collectivist state to be a preliminary step to a communist state. I believe collectivism or State Socialism is the next stage of evolution towards the communist state." "Every class in a community," he said in this same speech, "approves and accepts Socialism up to the point at which its class interests are being served." It would appear, then, that Mr. Hardie means by "Socialism" a program of reforms a part of which at least is to the benefit of every economic class. He contends only that this "Socialism" could never be "fully" established until the working class intelligently coöperate with other forces at work in bringing Socialism into being.[111] "State Socialism with all its drawbacks, and these I frankly admit," said Mr. Hardie, "will prepare the way for free communism." Mr. Hardie considers it to be the chief business of Socialists in the present day to fight for "State Socialism," and is fully conscious that this forces him to the necessity of defending the present-day State, as, for instance, when he writes elsewhere, "It is not the State which holds you in bondage, it is the private monopoly of those means of life without which you cannot live." Private property and war and not the State Mr. Hardie believes to have been the "great enslavers" of past history as of the present day, apparently ignoring periods in which the State has maintained a governing class which consisted not so much of property owners as of State functionaries; to periods which may soon be repeated, when private property served merely as one instrument of an all-powerful State. Mr. MacDonald still more closely restricts the word "Socialism" to the "State Socialist" or State capitalist period into which we are now entering. "Socialism," says MacDonald, "is the _next_ stage in social growth,"[112] and throughout his writings and policy leaves no doubt that he means the very next stage, the capitalist collectivism of which I have been speaking. The international brotherhood of the nations, which many Socialist thinkers feel is an indispensable condition for the establishment of anything like democratic Socialism, Mr. MacDonald expects only in the distant future, while the end of government based on force, which is also considered essential by the majority of Socialist writers, Mr. MacDonald postpones to "some far remote generation."[113] In other words, the position of the recent Chairman of the Labour Party is that what the world has hitherto known as Socialism can only be expected after a vast period of time, and his opinion accords with that of many bitter critics and opponents of the movement, who avoid a difficult controversy by admitting all Socialist arguments and merely asking for time--"Socialism, a century or two hence--but not now,"--for all practical purposes an endless postponement. Mr. MacDonald, who is not only a leader of the Labour Party, but also one of the chief organizers also of the leading Socialist Party of that country, has given us by far the fullest and most significant discussion of that party's policy. He says that an enlightened bourgeoisie will be just as likely to be Socialist as the working classes, and that therefore the class struggle is merely "a grandiloquent and aggressive figure of speech."[114] Struggle of some kind, he concedes, is necessary. But the more important form of struggle in present-day society, he says, is the trade rivalry between nations and not the rivalry between social classes.[115] Here at the outset is a complete reversal of the Socialist attitude. Socialists aim to put an end to this overshadowing of domestic by foreign problems, principally for the very reason that it aids the capitalists to obscure the class struggle--the foundation, the guiding principle, and the sole reason for the existence of the whole movement. Mr. MacDonald claims further that a class struggle, far from uniting the working classes, can only divide them the more; in other words, that it works in exactly the opposite direction from that in which the international organization believes it works. The only "natural conflicts" in the present or future, within any given society, according to the spokesman of the Labour Party, represent, not the conflicting interests of certain economic classes, but the "conflicting views and temperaments" of individuals.[116] And the chief divisions of temperament and opinion, he says, will be between the world-old tendencies of action and inaction--a view which does not differ one iota from that of Mr. Roosevelt. Mr. MacDonald asserts that "it is the _whole_ of society which is developing towards Socialism," and adds, "The consistent exponent of the class struggle must, of course, repudiate these doctrines, but then the class struggle is far more akin to Radicalism than to Socialism."[117] I have already pointed out how the older Radicalism, or political democracy, no matter how individualistic and anti-Socialist it may be, is often, as Mr. MacDonald says, more akin to International Socialism than that kind of "State Socialism" or State capitalism Mr. MacDonald represents. Mr. MacDonald typifies the majority of British Socialists also in his opposition to every modern form of democratic advance, such as the referendum and proportional representation. Far from being disturbed, as so many democratic writers are, because minorities are suppressed where there is no plan of proportional representation, he opposes the second ballot, which has been adopted in the majority of the countries of Continental Europe--and, in the form of direct primaries, also in the United States. The principal thing that the electors are to do, he says, is to "send a man to support or oppose a government." Mr. MacDonald finds that there is quite a sufficiency of democracy when the elector can decide between two parties; and far from considering the members of Parliament as delegates, he feels that they fill the chief political rôle, while the people perform the entirely subordinate task either of approving or of disapproving what they have already done. Parliament "first of all initiates ideas, suggests aims and purposes, makes proposals, and educates the community in these things with a view to their becoming the ideals and aims of the community itself."[118] While Mr. MacDonald continues to receive the confidence of the trade union party, including its Socialistic wing, the Trade Union Congress votes down proportional representation by a large majority, apparently because it does not desire its members to be constituted into a truly independent group in Parliament, does not care to work for any political principle however concrete, but prefers to take such share of the actual powers of government as the Liberal Party is disposed to grant. Proportional representation would send for the first time a few outright Socialists to Parliament, but the election returns demonstrate that the trade unionists, if more independent of the Liberals, would be fewer in number than at present. A part of the Socialist voters desire this result and, of course, believe it is their right. The majority of the trade unionists, however, who have won a certain modicum of authority in spite of the undemocratic constitution of their party, do not care to grant it--as possibly conflicting with the relatively conservative plans of "the aristocracy of labor." The Fabian Society's "Report on Fabian Policy" says that the referendum, "in theory the most democratic of popular institutions, is in practice the most reactionary."[119] Mr. MacDonald refers to it as a "crude Eighteenth Century idea of democracy," "a form of Village Community government."[120] At the Conference of the Labour Party at Leicester in 1911 he declared that it was "anti-democratic" and that if the government were to accept it, the Labour Party "would have to fight them tooth and nail at every step of that policy." As opposed to any plans for a more direct and more popular government, he defends the "dignity and authority" of Parliament and bespeaks the "reverence and deference" that the people ought to observe toward it. Contrast with these views Mr. Hobson's presentation of the non-Socialist Radical doctrine. "Under a professed and real enthusiasm for a representative system," as opposed to direct government, Mr. Hobson finds that there is concealed "a deep-seated distrust of democracy." He acknowledges "that the natural conservatism of the masses of the people might be sufficient to retard some reforms." "But this is safer and better for democracy," he says, "than the alternative 'faking' of progress by pushing legislation ahead of the popular will. It is upon the whole far more profitable for reformers to be compelled to educate the people to a genuine acceptance of their reform than to 'work it' by some 'pull' or 'deal' inside a party machine."[121] Mr. MacDonald not only puts a high value on British conservatism and a low one on the French Revolution and the Declaration of Independence, but declares that no change whatever in the mere structure of government can aid idealists and reformers in any way, and expects politics and parties to be much the same in the future as they are at the present moment. It is this attitude that Mr. Hobson has in mind when he protests that "the false pretense that democracy exists" in Great Britain has proved "the subtlest defense of privilege"--and that this has been the greatest cause of the waste of reform energy not only in England but also in France and in the United States.[122] Mr. MacDonald says explicitly, "The modern state in most civilized countries is democratic," and adds impatiently that "the remaining anomalies and imperfections" cannot prevent the people from obtaining their will.[123] To dismiss in so few words the monarchy, the restrictions of the suffrage, the unequal election districts and other shortcomings of political democracy in Great Britain, and to insist that the government is already democratic, is surely, as Mr. Hobson says, "the subtlest defense of privilege." Mr. MacDonald comes out flatly with the statement that under what he calls the democratic parliamentary government of Great Britain it is practically impossible to maintain a pure and simple Socialist Party. He says proudly that "nothing which the Labour Parties of Australia or Great Britain have ever done or tried to do under their constitutions departs in a hair's breadth from things which the Liberal and the Tory Parties in these countries do every day."[124] "Indeed, paradoxical though it may appear," he adds, "Socialism will be retarded by a Socialist Party which thinks it can do better than a Socialistic Party."[125] The Independent Labour Party, indeed, has had a program of reform that is remarkably similar to that of Ministers Churchill and Lloyd George, and is indorsed in large part by capitalists--as for example, by Andrew Carnegie. The first measure of this program provided for a general eight-hour day. Mr. Carnegie protests that to put the Socialist label on this is as "frank burglary as was ever committed," and the trade union movement in general would agree with him.[126] The second demand was for a "workable unemployment act." The Labour Party had previously introduced a more radical measure which very nearly received the support of a majority of Parliament. The third measure called for old-age pensions. Mr. Carnegie remarked of this with perfect justice: "Mr. MacDonald is here a day behind the fair. These have been established in Britain before this [Mr. Carnegie's "Problems of To-day"] appears in print, both political parties being favorable." It is true that the Labour party demands a somewhat more advanced measure than that to which Mr. Carnegie alludes, but there is no radical difference in principle, and the Labour Party accepted the present law as being a considerable installment of what they want. Of the fourth point the "abolition of indirect taxation (and the gradual transference of all public burdens to unearned incomes)," Mr. Carnegie remarks that "we must read the bracketed works in the light of Mr. MacDonald's philosophy," and "that this is a consummation which cannot be reached (in Mr. MacDonald's words) 'until the organic structure of society has been completely altered.'" We have seen that Mr. Churchill also aims at the _ultimate_ expropriation of the whole future unearned increment of the land. The fifth point of the program was similar,--a series of land acts (aimed at the ultimate nationalization of the land). The sixth point was the nationalization of the railroads and mines. Mr. Carnegie reminds us that many conservative and reactionary governments own their own railroads. We have seen that Mr. Churchill is in favor of the same proposal. Mines also are now national property in several countries, and there is nothing particularly radical or unacceptable to well-informed conservatives in the proposal to nationalize them elsewhere. The seventh demand of the program was for "democratic political reforms." While the Independent Labour Party and some of its leaders are in favor of a complete program of democratic reforms, I have shown that others like Mr. MacDonald are directly opposed even to many modern democratic measures already won in other countries. It would certainly seem that the social reformers, Mr. Carnegie and others, have as much right as the Socialists to claim such measures as all those outlined. Many of the other reforms proposed by the Independent Labour Party are such as might readily find acceptance among the most conservative. Indeed in urging the policy of afforestation, as one means of helping in the solution of the unemployed problem, the party actually uses the argument that even Prussia, Saxony, and many other highly capitalistic governments are undertaking it; though it does not mention the reactionary purposes of these governments, as for example, in Hungary where it is proposed to use the government's new army of labor to build up a scientific system of breaking strikes. Afforestation would add to the general wealth of the country in the future, and would be of considerable advantage to the capitalist classes, which makes the largest uses of lumber. Such a policy could undoubtedly be devised in carrying out this work as would absorb a considerable portion of the unemployed, and, since unemployment is a burden to the community and troublesome in many ways, besides tending to bring about a general deterioration of the efficiency of the working class, it is also to the ultimate interest of the employers to adopt it. A leading organ of British Socialism, the _New Age_, went so far as to say of the Budget of 1910 that it was almost as good "as we should expect from a Socialist Chancellor in his first year of office," and said that if Mr. Philip Snowden, were Chancellor, the Budget would have been little different from what it was.[127] And it is true that the principles of the Budget as interpreted by Mr. Snowden only a few years ago in his booklet, "The Socialist Budget," are in nearly every instance the same, though they are to be somewhat more widely applied in this Socialist scheme. Of course all Socialists would have desired a smaller portion of the Budget to go to Dreadnoughts and a larger part to education, though, in view of the popularity of the Navy, it is doubtful whether Labour Party Socialist's would materially cut naval expenditure (see Chapter V). It must also be noted that the Socialists are wholly opposed to the increase of indirect taxation on tobacco and liquor, some four fifths of which falls on the shoulders of the workingman. But aside from these points, there is more similarity than contrast between the two plans. Mr. Snowden declared that it was the intention of the Socialists to make the rich poorer and the poor richer, that they were going to use the power of taxation for that purpose, and that the Budget marked the beginning of the new era, an opinion in strange contrast with Premier Asquith's statement _concerning the same Budget, for which he was responsible_, that one of its chief purposes was "_to increase the stability and security of property_." Indeed the word "Socialism" has been extended in England to include measures far less radical than those contemplated by the present government. The Fabian Society, the chief advocate of "municipal Socialism" and a professed and recognized Socialist organization, considers even the post office and factory legislation as being installments of Socialism, while the Labour Party would restrict the term to the nationalization or municipalization of industries--but the difference is not of very great importance. The latter class of reform will undoubtedly mark a revolution in the policy of the British government, but, as Kautsky says, this revolution may only serve "to Prussianize it," _i.e._ to introduce "State Socialism." "The best government," says Mr. Webb, "is no longer 'that which governs least,' but 'that which can safely and advantageously administer most.'" "Wherever rent and interest are being absorbed under public control for public purposes, wherever the collective organization of the community is being employed in place of individual efforts, wherever in the public interest, the free use of private land or capital is being further restrained--there one more step toward the complete realization of the Socialist Ideal is being taken." The fight of the British Socialists has thus been directed from the first almost exclusively against the abstraction, "individualism," and not against the concrete thing, the capitalist class. John Morley had said that the early Liberals, Cobden, Bright, and others, were systematic and constructive, because they "surveyed society and institutions as a whole," because they "connected their advocacy of political and legal changes with theories of human nature," because they "considered the great art of government in connection with the character of man, his proper education, his potential capacities," and could explain "in the large dialect of a definite scheme what were their aims and whither they were going." "Is there," Mr. Morley had asked, "any approach to such a body of systematic political thought in our own day?" Mr. Webb announced that the Fabians proposed to fill in this void. It was primarily system and order rather than any particular principle at which he aimed. The keynote of his system was to be opposition to the individualistic _theory_ of the philosophic Liberals whom the Fabians hoped to succeed rather than opposition to the _principles_ of capitalism, which lend themselves equally well either to an individualistic or to a collectivistic application. Just as Mr. Webb is the leading publicist, so Mr. Bernard Shaw is the leading writer, among the exponents of Fabian Socialism. It is now more than twenty years since he also began idealizing the State, and he is doing the same thing to-day. "Who is the people? What is the people?" he asked in the Fabian Essays in 1889. "Tom we know, and Dick; also Harry; but solely and separately as individuals: as a trinity they have no existence. Who is their trustee, their guardian, their man of business, their manager, their secretary, even their stockholder? The Socialist is stopped dead at the threshold of practical action by this difficulty, until he bethinks himself of the State as the representative and trustee of the people."[128] It will be noticed that Mr. Shaw does not say the State may become the representative and trustee of the people, but that it _is_ their representative. "Hegel," he continues, "expressly taught the conception of the perfect State, and his disciples saw that nothing in the nature of things made it possible or even difficult to make the existing State if not absolutely perfect, at least trustworthy;" and then, after alluding with the greatest brevity to the anti-democratic elements of the British government, Mr. Shaw proceeds to develop at great length the wonderful possibilities of the existing State as the practically trustworthy trustee, guardian, man of business, manager, secretary, and stockholder _of the people_.[129] Yet Mr. Shaw says that a Social-Democrat is one "who _desires_ through democracy _to_ gather the whole people into the State, so that the State may be trusted with the rent of the country, and finally with the land and capital and the organization of national industry." He reasons that the transition to Socialism through gradual extensions of democracy and State action had seriously begun forty-five years before the writing of the Essays, that is, in the middle of the nineteenth century (when scarcely one sixth of the adult male population of Great Britain had a vote, and when, through the unequal election districts, the country squires practically controlled the situation--W. E. W.). In Mr. Shaw's reasoning, as in that of many other British Socialists, a very little democracy goes a long way.[130] Later Mr. Shaw repudiated democracy altogether, saying that despotism fails only for want of a capable benevolent despot, and that what we want nowadays is not a new or modern form of democracy, but only capable benevolent representatives. He shelved his hopes for the old ideal, government _by_ the people, by opposing to it a new ideal of a very active and beneficent government _for_ the people. In "Fabianism and the Empire" Shaw and his collaborators say frankly: "The nation makes no serious attempt to democratize its government, because its masses are still in so deplorable a condition that democracy, in the popular sense of government by the masses, is clearly contrary to common sense."[131] Mr. H. G. Wells, long a member of the Fabian Society, has well summed up the character of what he calls this "opportunist Socialist group" which has done so much to shape the so-called British Socialism. He says that Mr. Sidney Webb was, during the first twenty years of his career "the prevailing Fabian." "His insistence upon continuity pervaded the Society, was re-echoed and intensified by others, and developed into something like a mania for achieving Socialism _without the overt change of any existing ruling body_. His impetus carried this reaction against the crude democratic idea to its extremest opposite. Then arose Webbites to caricature Webb. From saying that the unorganized people cannot achieve Socialism, they passed to the implication that organization alone, without popular support, might achieve Socialism. Socialism was to arrive as it were _insidiously_. "To some minds this new proposal had the charm of a schoolboy's first dark lantern. Socialism ceased to be an open revolution, and become a plot. Functions were to be shifted, quietly, unostentatiously, from the representative to the official he appointed; a bureaucracy was to slip into power through the mechanical difficulties of an administration by debating representatives; and since these officials would, by the nature of their positions, constitute a scientific government as distinguished from haphazard government, they would necessarily run the country on the lines of a _pretty distinctly undemocratic Socialism_. "The process went even farther than secretiveness in its reaction from the _large rhetorical forms of revolutionary Socialism_. There arose even a _repudiation of 'principles' of action_, and a type of worker which proclaimed itself 'Opportunist-Socialist.' This conception of indifference to the forms of government, of accepting whatever governing bodies existed and using them to create officials and '_get something done_,' was at once immediately fruitful in many directions, and presently productive of many very grave difficulties in the path of advancing Socialism." (Italics mine.)[132] Besides the obvious absurdities of such tactics, Mr. Wells points out that they ignored entirely that reconstruction of legislative and local government machinery which is very often an indispensable preliminary to Socialization. He is speaking of such Socialism when he says:-- "Socialism has concerned itself only with the material reorganization of Society and its social consequences, with economic changes and the reaction of these changes on administrative work; it has either accepted existing intellectual conditions and political institutions as beyond its control or assumed that they will obediently modify as economic and administrative necessity dictates.... Achieve your expropriation, said the early Fabians, get your network of skilled experts over the country, and your political forms, your public opinion, your collective soul will not trouble you."[133] Here Mr. Wells shows that, while the practical difficulties of making collectivism serve all the people were ignored on the one hand, the first need of the people, political education, was neglected on the other. It is true that during the first few years of its existence the Fabian Society made a great and successful effort to educate public opinion in a Socialist direction, but soon its leading members deserted all such larger work, to support various administrative "experiments." Mr. Wells referred to this same type of Socialism in his "Misery of Boots":-- "Let us be clear about one thing: that Socialism means revolution, and that it means a change in the everyday texture of life. It _may_ be a very gradual change, but it will be a very complete one. You cannot change the world, and at the same time not change the world. You will find Socialists about, or at any rate men calling themselves Socialists, who will pretend that this is not so, who will assure you that some odd little jobbing about municipal gas and water is Socialism, and backstairs intervention between Conservative and Liberal the way to the millennium.... Socialism aims to change, not only the boots on people's feet, but the clothes they wear, the houses they inhabit, the work they do, the education they get, their places, their honors, and all their possessions. Socialism aims to make a new world out of the old. It can only be attained by the intelligent, outspoken, courageous resolve of a great multitude of men and women. You must get absolutely clear in your mind that Socialism means a _complete change, a break with history_, with much that is picturesque; _whole classes will vanish_. The world will be vastly different, with different sorts of houses, different sorts of people. All the different trades and industries will be changed, the medical profession will be carried on under different conditions, engineering, science, the theatrical trade, the clerical trade, schools, hotels, almost every trade, will have to undergo as complete an internal change as a caterpillar does when it becomes a moth ... a change as profound as the abolition of private property in slaves would have been in ancient Rome or Athens." (The italics are mine.) Here is the exact opposite view to that which has been taught for many years by the Fabian Society to no small audience of educated Englishmen (and Americans). For there are comparatively few who have neither read any of the Fabian pamphlets nor seen or read any of Bernard Shaw's plays in which the same standpoint is represented. Mr. John A. Hobson classes the Socialist and non-Socialist reformers of Great Britain together as regards their opportunism. Though a Liberal himself, he objects that some Socialists are not radical enough, and that "the milder and more opportunist brand suffer from excessive vagueness." Of the prevailing tendency towards opportunism, Mr. Hobson writes:-- "This revolt against ideas is carried so far that able men have come seriously to look upon progress as a matter for the manipulation of wirepullers, something to be 'jobbed' in committee by sophistical motions or other clever trickery. Great national issues really turn, according to this judgment, upon the arts of political management, the play of the adroit tactician and the complete canvasser. This is the 'work' that tells; elections, the sane expression of the national will, are won by these and by no other means. "_Nowhere has this mechanical conception of progress worked more disastrously than in the movement towards Collectivism._ Suppose that the mechanism of reform were perfected, that each little clique of specialists and wirepullers were placed at its proper point in the machinery of public life, will this machinery grind out progress? Every student of industrial history knows that the application of a powerful 'motor' is of vastly greater importance than the invention of a special machine. Now, what provision is made for generating the motor power of progress in Collectivism? Will it come of its own accord? Our mechanical reformer apparently thinks it will. The attraction of some present obvious gain, the suppression of some scandalous abuse of monopolist power by a private company, some needed enlargement of existing Municipal or State enterprise by lateral expansion--such are the sole springs of action. In this way the Municipalization of public services, increased assertion of State control over mines, railways, and factories, the assumption under State control of large departments of transport trade, proceed without any recognition of the guidance of general principles. Everywhere the pressure of special concrete interests, nowhere the conscious play of organized human intelligence!... "My object here is to justify the practical utility of 'theory' and 'principle' in the movement of Collectivism by showing that reformers who distrust the guidance of Utopia, or even the application of economic first principles, are not thrown back entirely upon that crude empiricism which insists that each case is to be judged separately and exclusively on its own individual merits." Mr. Hobson then proposes his collectivist program, which he rightly considers to be not Socialist but Liberal merely--and we find it more collectivistic, radical, and democratic than that of many so-called Socialists. Moreover it expresses the views of a large and growing proportion of the present Liberal Party. Then he concludes as follows:-- "If practical workers for social and industrial reforms continue to ignore principles, the inevitable logic of events will nevertheless drive them along the path of Collectivism here indicated. But they will have to pay the price which shortsighted empiricism always pays; with slow, hesitant, and staggering steps, with innumerable false starts and backslidings, they will move in the dark along an unseen track towards an unseen goal. Social development may be conscious or unconscious. It has been mostly unconscious in the past, and therefore slow, wasteful, and dangerous. If we desire it to be swifter, safer, and more effective in the future, it must become the conscious expression of the trained and organized will of a people not despising theory as unpractical, but using it to furnish economy in action."[134] Practically all "State Socialists" hold a similar view to that of Shaw and Webb. Mr. Wells even, in his "First and Last Things," has a lengthy attack on what he calls democracy, when he tells us that its true name is "insubordination," and that it is base because "it dreams that its leaders are its delegates." His view of democracy is strictly consistent with his attitude toward the common man, whom he regards as "a gregarious animal, collectively rather like a sheep, emotional, hasty, and shallow."[135] Democracy can only mean, Mr. Wells concludes, that power will be put into the hands of "rich newspaper proprietors, advertising producers, and the energetic wealthy generally, as the source flooding the collective mind freely with the suggestions on which it acts." The _New Age_, representing the younger Fabians, also despairs of democracy and advocates compromise, because "the democratic party have failed so far to be indorsed and inforced by popular consent." It acknowledges that the power of the Crown is "great and even temporarily overwhelming," but discourages opposition to monarchy for the reason that monarchy rests on the ignorance and weakness of the people and not on sheer physical coercion.[136] The _New Age_ opposes those democratic proposals, the referendum and proportional representation, considers that the representative may so thoroughly embody the ideals and interests of the community as to become "a spiritual sum of them all," and admits that this ideal of a "really representative body of men" might be brought about under an extremely undemocratic franchise.[137] "Outside of a parish or hamlet the Referendum," it says, "is impossible. To an Empire it is fatal."[138] And finally, this Socialist organ is perfectly ready to grant another fifty million pounds for the navy, provided the money is drawn from the rich, as it finds that "a good, thumping provision for an increased navy would do a great deal to sweeten a drastic budget for the rich, as well as strengthen the appeal of the party which professes to be advancing the cause of the poor." Imperialism and militarism, which in most countries constitute the chief form in which capitalism is being fought by Socialists, are actually considered as of secondary importance, on the ground that through acquiescing in them it becomes possible to hasten a few reforms, such as have already been granted by the capitalists of several other countries without any Socialist surrender and even without Socialist pressure of any kind. The recent appeal of the _New Age_, for "a hundred gentlemen of ability" to save England, its regret that no truly intelligent and benevolent "governing class" or "Platonic guardians" are to be found, and its weekly disparagement of democracy do not offer much promise that it will soon turn in the radical direction. On the contrary it predicts that the firm possession of political power by the wealthy classes is foredoomed to result, as in the Roman Empire, in the creation of two main classes, each of which must become corrupt, "the one by wealth and the other by poverty," and that finally the latter must become incapable of corporate resistance. The familiar and scientifically demonstrated fact of the physical and moral degeneration of a considerable part of the British working people doubtless suggests to many persons such pessimistic conclusions. "It is hopeless in our view," the _New Age_ concludes, "to expect that the poor and ignorant, however desperate and however numerous, will ever succeed in displacing their wealthy rulers. No slave revolt in the history of the world has ever succeeded by its own power. In these days, moreover, the chances of success are even smaller. One machine gun is equal to a mob."[139] Indeed the distrust of democracy is so universal among British Socialists that Belloc, Chesterton and other Liberals accuse them plausibly, but unjustly, of actually representing an aristocratic standpoint. In an article entitled "Why I Am Not A Socialist," Mr. Chesterton expresses a belief, which he says is almost unknown among the Socialists of England, namely, a belief "in the masses of the common people."[140] Mr. Belloc, in a debate against Bernard Shaw, predicted that Socialism, if it comes in England, will probably be simply "another of the infinite and perpetually renewed dodges of the English aristocracy." It may be well doubted if any of the more important of the world's conservative, aristocratic, or reactionary forces (except the doctrinaire Liberals) are opposed to Socialism as defined by the Fabian Society, _i.e._ a gradual movement in the direction of collectivism. Not only Czar and Kaiser but even the Catholic Church may be claimed as Socialistic by this standard. Mr. Hubert Bland, one of the original Fabian Essayists and a very influential member of the Society, himself a Catholic, actually asserts that the Church never has attacked Fabian or true Socialism. In view of the fact that the Church is at war with the Socialist Parties of Italy, France, Belgium, Austria, Germany, the United States, and every country where both the Church and the Socialists are a political power, in view of the wholesale and most explicit denunciations by Popes and high ecclesiastics, and the war being waged against the Socialist Parties at every point, Mr. Eland's argument has some interest. Having defined Socialism as "the increase of State rights" and "the tendency to limit the proprietary rights of the individual and to widen the proprietary rights and activities of the community" or as the "control of property by the State and municipality," Mr. Bland has, of course, no difficulty in showing that the Catholic Church has never opposed it--though many individualistic Catholics have done so. "No fewer than two Popes," writes Mr. Bland, "are said to have condemned Socialism in authoritative utterances, but when I examine and analyze these condemnations, I find it is not Socialism in the sense I have defined it here, that is condemned."[141] It is indeed true that few of the most bitter and persistent enemies of the Socialist movement condemn "Socialism" as defined by Mr. Bland and his "State Socialist" associates. This capitalistic collectivism promoted by the Fabian Society has embodied itself practically in the movement towards "municipal Socialism" of which so much was heard some years ago, first in Great Britain and later in other countries. It is now from ten to twenty years since many British cities, notably Glasgow, began municipal experiments on a large scale that were branded by Socialists and non-Socialists alike, as municipal Socialism. The first of these experiments included not only the municipalization of street railways, electric light and current, and so on, but even the provision of municipal slaughter houses, bathing establishments, and outdoor amusements. The later stages have developed in a somewhat different direction. The chief reforms under discussion everywhere seem now to be the proposals that the municipalities should provide housing accommodations for the poorer elements of the population, and that the health of the children should be looked after, even to the extent of providing free lunches in public schools. If less had been heard of "municipal Socialism" in the last year or two, this is merely because reforms on a national scale have for the moment received the greater share of public attention. This does not necessarily mean that the national reforms are more important than the municipal, but only that the latter came first because they were easier to inaugurate, though perhaps more difficult to carry to a successful conclusion. But the first popularity of the municipal reform movement, both in Great Britain and in other countries, has received at least a temporary setback as the relations between this "municipal Socialism" and taxation were recognized. Both the non-taxpaying working people and the small taxpaying middle class saw that the profits of the new municipal enterprises went to a considerable extent towards decreasing the taxation of the well-to-do instead of conferring benefits on the majority. This might appear strange, since under universal suffrage the non-taxpaying and non-landowning majority would be expected to dominate. But in Great Britain, as well as elsewhere, central governments, in the firm control of taxpayers and landowners, exercise a strict control over the municipalities, so that this kind of reform will prove advantageous chiefly to the landlords, by enabling them to raise rents in proportion to the benefits gained by tenants; and to the taxpaying minority, by making it possible to use the profits of municipal undertakings for the purpose of reducing taxes. The tendency toward the extension of municipal enterprises to be noted in all the important cities of the world, is hastened by the public belief that there is no other possible means of preventing the exploitation of all classes, and consequent widespread injury to trade, building, and industry in general, by public service corporations. But it must be observed that whatever municipalization there is will continue to be under the control of the taxpayers, landowners, and business men and largely in their interest as long as national governments remain in capitalist hands. The national social reform administrations that are coming into power in so many countries are encouraging various forms of taxpayers' "municipal Socialism." The ultraconservative governments of Germany, Austria, and Belgium all permit the cities to engage even in the public feeding of school children, while the reactionary national government of Hungary has undertaken to provide for the housing of 25,000 working people at Budapest. The conservative _London Daily Mail_ cries out that the Hungarian minister, Dr. Wekerle has "stolen a march on the Socialists," but that it is the "right sort of Socialism," and that "it has been left to the leader of the privileged Parliament [the Hungarian Parliament representing not the small capitalists, but the landed nobility and gentry] to make the first start." And there is little doubt that both the provision of houses for the working people and the public feeding of school children rest on precisely the same principles as the social reforms now being undertaken by national governments, such as that of Great Britain, and are, indeed, the "right sort of Socialism" from the capitalist standpoint. Taking the municipal reformer as a type of the so-called Socialist, Mr. Belloc, a prominent Liberal Member of Parliament and an anti-Socialist, says that "in the atmosphere in which he works and as regards the susceptibilities which he fears to offend," that the municipal Socialist is entirely of the capitalist class. "You cannot make revolutions without revolutionaries," he continues, "and anything less revolutionary than your municipal reformer never trod the earth. The very conception is alien to this class of persons; usually he is desperately frightened as well. Yet it is quite certain that so vast a change as Socialism presupposes cannot be carried out without hitting. When one sees it verbally advocated (and in practice shirked) by men who have never hit anything in their lives, and who are even afraid of a scene with a waiter in a restaurant, one is not inclined to believe in the reality of the creed." Mr. Belloc concludes finally that all that this kind of Socialism has done during its moments of greatest activity has tended merely to recognize the capitalist more and more and to stereotype the gulf between him and the other classes.[142] And just as Mr. Belloc has reproached the Socialists for their conservatism, so the _New Age_ and other mouthpieces of Socialism condemn the non-Socialist radicals who constitute one of the chief elements among the supporters of the present government (including Mr. Belloc) as being too radical. In the literature of the Fabian Society also, the accusation against the Liberals of being too revolutionary is quite frequent. Years ago Mr. Sidney Webb accused them of having "the revolutionary tradition in their bones," of conceiving society as "a struggle of warring interests," and said that they would reform _nothing_ "unless it be done at the expense of their enemies." While this latter accusation is scarcely true, either of the British Liberals or of the revolutionary Socialists of the Continent, it is obvious that the _most important_ reforms of the Socialists, those to which greatest efforts must necessarily be given, those which alone must be fought for, are precisely the ones that must be brought about "at the expense of the enemy." In no other country has public opinion either within the Socialist movement or outside of it so completely despaired of democracy and the people. In none has the spirit of popular revolt and militant radicalism been so long dormant. Yet, there can be little doubt that the British masses, encouraged by those of France, Germany, and other countries, will one day recover that self-confidence and self-assertion they seem to have lost since the times of the "Levellers" of the Commonwealth, two hundred and fifty years ago. It may take years before this new revolutionary movement gains the momentum it already possesses in Germany and France. But the great strikes of 1910, 1911, and 1912 (see Part III, Chapter VI) and the changes in politics that have accompanied these strikes show that this movement has already begun. There is already a strong division of opinion within the Socialistic "Independent Labour Party," and this organization has also taken issue on several important matters with the non-Socialist Labour Party, of which, however, it is still a part. After the unsatisfactory results of the elections of 1910 the conflict within the Independent Labour Party became more acute than ever. Mr. Barnes, then chairman of the Labour Party itself, and Mr. Keir Hardie, the chief figure in its Socialistic (_Independent Labour Party_) section, criticized severely the tactics that had been followed by the majority, _led also by two members of the same "Socialistic" section_, Mr. MacDonald and Mr. Snowden. It is true that the difference was not very fundamental, but it is interesting to note that MacDonald and Snowden and their avowed non-Socialist trade-union allies were accused of giving so much to the Liberals as even to weaken the position of the Labour Party itself to say nothing of the still greater inconsistency of such compromises with anything approaching Socialism. Mr. Barnes and Mr. Hardie pointed out that the timid tactics pursued had endangered not only the fight against the House of Lords, but also the effort to keep down the naval budget and the proposed solution of the unemployment question that was to have acknowledged "the right to work." That is, Mr. MacDonald and Mr. Snowden had been so anxious to please the Liberal government, that they had risked even these moderate reforms, which were favored by many anti-Socialistic Radicals. At the "Independents'" 1911 conference at Birmingham, again, a motion was proposed by the radical element, Hall, MacLachlan, and others, which demanded that this Party should cease voting perpetually for the government merely because the government claimed that every question required a vote of confidence, and that they should put their own issues in the foreground, and vote on all others according to their merits. This very consistent resolution, in complete accord with the position of Socialist Parties the world over, was however voted down by the "Independents," as it had been shortly previously at the conference of the non-Socialist Labour Party of which they are a section. The executive committee brought in an amendment in the contrary sense to that of the radical resolution, and this amendment was ably supported by MacDonald. Hardie and Barnes, however, persuaded the Congress to vote down both resolution and amendment on the ground that the "Independents" in Parliament _ought to support the Liberal and Radical government, except in certain crises_--as illustrations of which Barnes mentioned the Labourites' opposition to armaments and their demand for the right to work. Keir Hardie also declared that he was not satisfied with the conduct of the Labour Party in Parliament; his motion condemning the government's action in the Welsh coal strike, for example, had secured only seventeen of their forty votes. He claimed that the influence of the Liberals over the party was due, not to their social reform program, but to their passing of the trade-union law permitting picketing after the elections of 1906, and that he feared them more than he did the Conservatives. However, he thought that this Liberal influence was now on the decline, and said that if the Liberals attempted to strengthen the House of Lords, as suggested in the preamble to their resolution, abolishing its veto power, the Labour Party would be ready to vote against the government. The Labourites did, as a matter of fact, vote against this preamble, and the government was saved only because Balfour and the Conservatives lent it their support. It still remains to be seen if the Labourites will detach themselves from the Liberals on a really crucial question, one on which they know the Conservatives will remain in the opposition--in other words, whether they will do the only thing that can possibly show any real independence or make them a factor of first importance in the nation's politics, that is, overturn a government. Doubtless this day will come, but it does not seem to be at hand. This discussion was much intensified by the decision of the executive of the Labour Party (in order to retain the legal right to use trade-union funds for political purposes) to relieve Labour members of Parliament of their pledge to follow a common policy. This decision again was opposed by the majority of the "Independent" section including Hardie and Barnes, but favored by a minority, led by MacDonald. With the aid of the non-Socialistic element, however, it was carried by a large majority at the Labour Party's conference in 1911. Thus while one element is growing more radical another is growing more conservative and the breach between the Independents and the other Labourites is widening. Perhaps the closest and most active associate of Mr. MacDonald at nearly every point has been Mr. Philip Snowden. Even Mr. Snowden finally declared that a recent action of the Labour Party, when all but half a dozen of its members voted with the Liberals, against what Mr. Snowden states to have been the instructions of the Party conference, "finally completes their identity with official Liberalism." Mr. Snowden asserted that if the "Independents" would stand this they would stand anything, that the time had come to choose between principle and party, and that he was not ready to sacrifice the former for the latter. Shortly after this incident, which Mr. MacDonald attributed to a misunderstanding, came the great railway strike and its settlement, in which he and Mr. Lloyd George were the leading factors. Received with enthusiasm by the Liberal press, this settlement was bitterly denounced by the _Labour Leader_, the official organ of the "Independents." Mr. MacDonald on the other hand expressed in the House of Commons deep satisfaction with the final attitude of the government and predicted that if it was maintained no such trouble need arise again in a generation. No statement could have been more foreign to the existing feeling among the workers, a part of whom it will be remembered failed to return to work for several days after the settlement. The "Independents" as the political representatives of the more radical of the unionists, naturally embody this discontent, while the Labour Party, being partly responsible for the settlement, becomes more than ever the semi-official labor representative of the government--a divergence that can scarcely fail to lead to an open breach. It was as a result of all of these critical situations, especially the great railway strike and its sequels, that an effort has been made to form a "British Socialist Party" to embrace all Socialist factions, and to free them from dependence on the Labour Party. It has succeeded in uniting all, except the Independent Labour Party and the Fabian Society, and includes even a number of local branches (though only a small minority of the total number) of the former organization. This Party has issued an outright revolutionary declaration of principles. Mr. Quelch, editor of the Social Democratic organ, _Justice_, had proposed the following declaration of principles, which was far in advance of the present position of the Independent Labour Party, if somewhat ambiguous in the clause printed in italics:-- "The Socialist Party is the political expression of the working-class movement, acting in the closest coöperation with industrial organizations for the socialization of the means of production and distribution--that is to say, the transformation of capitalist society into a collective or communist society. Alike in its object, its ideals, and in the means employed, the Socialist party, _though striving for the realization of immediate social reforms demanded by the working class_, is not a reformist but a revolutionary party, which recognizes that social freedom and equality can only be won by fighting the class war through to the finish, and thus abolishing forever all class distinctions."[143] The phrase in italics was opposed by several of the revolutionary representatives of Independent Labour Party branches who were present as delegates and others, and by a narrow vote was expunged. The declaration as it now stands is as radical as that of any Socialist Party in the world. The new organization is already making some inroads among the membership of the Independent Labour Party and there seems to be a chance that it will succeed before many years in its attempt to free that organization and British Socialism generally from their dependence on the Labour and Liberal Parties. Perhaps the contrast between "Labour" Party and Socialist Party methods and aims comes out even more clearly in Australasia than in Great Britain. A typical view of the New Zealand reforms as being steps towards Socialism is given by Thomas Walsh, of the Auckland _Voice of Labour_ (see _New York Call_, September 10, 1911). After giving a list of things "already accomplished," including a mention of universal suffrage, state operation of the post office, prohibition of child labor, "free and compulsory secular education up to the age of fourteen years," and "State-assisted public hospitals"--besides the other more distinctively capitalist collectivist reforms, such as government railways, mines, telegraphs, telephones, parcel post, life and fire insurance, banks and old-age pensions and municipal ownership, Mr. Walsh concludes:-- "These are some of the things already done: there is a long list more. The revolutionary seize and hold group may label them palliatives, may howl down as red herrings across the scent, may declare that they obscure main issues, but I want to know which of the reforms they want to see abolished, which of them are useless, which of them are not necessary? _Contrary to the fond delusion of the revolutionary group, the defenders of the present system don't and won't hand out anything; everything obtained is wrenched from them_; and in the political arena, armed with the ballot box and the knowledge of its use, there is nothing that labor cannot obtain. "Have the reforms secured blurred the main issue, have we lost sight of the goal? The objective of the New Zealand Labour Party to-day is the 'securing to all of the full value of their labour power by the gradual public ownership of all the means of production, distribution, and exchange.' Contrary to your critic's opinion, what has already been done has but whetted the appetite for more, and to-day New Zealand labour is marshaling its forces for further assaults on the fortress of the privileged. "_Every reform we have secured has been a step toward the goal_; every step taken means one step less to take. The progressive legislation has not sidetracked the movement--it has cleared the road for further advancement. "In New Zealand the enumerated reforms are law--_made law in defiance of the wealth-owning class_. At the moment labour does not possess the power to administer the laws, but far from that being an argument to abandon the law, it has convinced New Zealand labor that the administrative control must be got possession of, and through the ballot box New Zealand labour will march to get that control. _Given control of the national and local government, the food supplies can be nationalized and more competitive State-owned industries established. And by labour administration of the arbitration court the prices and wages can be so adjusted that the worker can buy out of the market all that his labor put into it._ "To the brothers in America I say, Go on. Don't waste time arguing about economic dogma. Get a unified labor movement and _throw the whole industrial force into the political arena_. Anything less than the whole force means delay. The whole force means victory. We have progressed. We have experimented. We have proved. Yours it is but to imitate--and improve." I have put in italics the most important of Mr. Walsh's conclusions that are contradicted by the evidence I have given in this chapter and elsewhere in the present volume. The Socialist view of the last two statements may be best shown by a quotation from Mr. Charles Edward Russell, who is the critic referred to by Mr. Walsh, and has undertaken with great success to uproot among the Socialists of this country the fanciful pictures and fallacies concerning Australasia that date in this country from the time of the radical and fearless but uncritical and optimistic books of Henry D. Lloyd ("A Country Without Strikes," etc.). Mr. Russell shows that a Labor Party as in Australia may gain control of the forms of government, without actually gaining the sovereignty over society or industry. (See the _International Socialist Review_, September, 1911.) In an article that has made a greater sensation in the American movement than any that has yet appeared (with the exception of Debs's "Danger Ahead," quoted in the next chapter), Mr. Russell writes:-- "A proletarian movement can have no part, however slight, in the game of politics. The moment it takes a seat at that grimy board is the moment it dies within. After that, it may for a time maintain a semblance of life and motion, but in truth it is only a corpse. "This has been proved many times. It is being proved to-day in Great Britain. It has been proved recently and most convincingly in the experience of Australia and New Zealand. "In Australia the proletarian movement that began eighteen years ago has achieved an absolute triumph--in politics. Under the name of the Labor Party it has won all that any political combination can possibly win anywhere. It has played the political game to the limit and taken all the stakes in sight. The whole national government is in its hands. It has attained in fullest measure to the political success at which it aimed. It not merely influences the government; it is the government. "To make the situation clear by an American analogy, let us suppose the Socialists of America to join hands with the progressive element in the labor unions and with the different groups of advanced radicals. Let us suppose a coalition party to be formed called the Labor Party. Let us suppose this to have entered the State and national campaigns, winning at each successive election more seats in Congress, and finally, after sixteen years of conflict, electing its candidate for President and a clear majority of the Senate and the House of Representatives. This would be admitted to be the summit of such a party's aims and to mean great and notable success; and it would closely parallel the situation in Australia. "Exactly such a Labor Party has administered the affairs of Australia since April, 1910. Its triumph was the political success of a proletarian movement that was steered into the political game. What has resulted? "This has resulted, that the Labor Party of Australia is now exactly like any other political party and means no more to the working class except its name. Constituted as the political party of that class, it has been swept into power by working-class votes, and after almost a year and a half of control of national affairs, it can show nothing more accomplished for working-class interests than any other party has accomplished. The working class under the Labor Party is in essentially the same condition that it has been in under all the other administrations, nor is there the slightest prospect that its condition will be changed. "In other words, the whole machine runs on exactly as before, the vast elaborated machine by which toilers are exploited and parasites are fed. Once in power, the Labor Party proceeded to do such things as other parties had done for the purpose of keeping in power, and it is these things that maintain the machine. "On the night of the election, when the returns began to indicate the result, the gentleman that is now Attorney-General of the Commonwealth was in the Labor Party headquarters, jumping up and down with uncontrollable glee. "'We're in!' he shouted. 'We're in! We're in!' "That was an excellent phrase and neatly expressed the whole situation. The Labor Party was in; it had won the offices and the places of power and honor; it had defeated the opponents that had often defeated it. It was 'in.' The next thing was to keep in, and this is the object that it has assiduously pursued ever since. 'We are in; now let us stay in. We have the offices; let us keep the offices.' "The first thing it does is to increase its strength with the bourgeoisie and the great middle class always allied with its enemies. To its opponents in the campaigns the handiest weapon and most effective was always the charge that the Labor Party was not patriotic, that it did not love the dear old flag of Great Britain with the proper degree of fervor and ecstasy; that it was wobbly on the subject of war and held strange, erratic notions in favor of universal peace instead of yelling day and night for British supremacy whether right or wrong--which is well known to be the duty of the true and pure patriot. This argument was continually used and had great effect. "Naturally, as the Labor Party was now in and determined to stay in, the wise play indicated in the game upon which it had embarked, was to disprove all these damaging allegations and to show that the Labor Party was just as patriotic as any other party could possibly be. So its first move was to adopt a system of universal military service, and the next to undertake vast schemes of national defense. The attention and admiration of the country were directed to the fact that the Labor administration was the first to build small arms factories, to revise the military establishment so as to secure the greatest efficiency and to prepare the nation for deeds of valor on the battlefield. "At the time this was done there was a crying need for new labor legislation; the system or lack of system of arbitrating labor disputes was badly in need of repairs; workingmen were being imprisoned in some of the States for the crime of striking; the power of government was often used to oppress and overawe strikers, even when they had been perfectly orderly and their cause was absolutely just. These with many other evils of the workingman's condition were pushed aside in order to perfect the defense system and get the small arms factories in good working order, for such were the plain indications of the game that the Labor Party had started out to play. 'We're in; let us stay in.' "Meantime there remains this awkward fact about the condition of the working class. It is no less exploited than before. It is as far, apparently, from the day of justice under the rule of the Labor Party as it was under the rule of the Liberal Party. What are you going to do about that? Why, there is nothing to be done about that as yet. The country, you see, is not ready for any radical measures on that subject. If we undertook to make any great changes in fundamental conditions, we should be defeated at the next election and then we should not be in, but should be out. True, the cost of living is steadily increasing, and that means that the state of the working class is inevitably declining. True, under the present system, power is steadily accumulating in the hands of the exploiters, so that if we are afraid to offend them now, we shall be still more afraid to offend them next year and the next. But the main thing is to keep in. We're in; let us stay in. "Hence, also, the Labor administration has been very careful not to offend the great money interests and powerful corporations that are growing up in the country. These influences are too powerful in elections. Nothing has been done that could in the least disturb the currents of sacred business. It was recognized as not good politics to antagonize business interests. Let the administration keep along with the solid business interests of the country, reassuring them for the sake of the general prosperity and helping them to go on in the same, safe, sane, and conservative way as before. It was essential that business men should feel that business was just as secure under the Labor administration as under any other. Nothing that can in the least upset business, you know. True, this sacred business consists of schemes to exploit and rob the working class, and true, the longer it is allowed to go upon its way the more powerful it becomes and the greater are its exploitations and profits. But if we do anything that upsets business or tends to disturb business confidence, that will be bad for us at the next election. Very likely we shall not be able to keep in. We are in now; let us stay in, and have the offices and the power. "Therefore, it is with the greatest pride that the Labor people point out that under the Labor administration the volume of business has not decreased, but increased; the operations of the banks have shown no falling off; they are still engaged as profitably as of yore in skinning the public; the clearings are in an eminently satisfactory condition; profits have suffered no decline; all is well in our marts of trade. The old machine goes on so well you would never know there had been any change in the administration. Business men have confidence in our Party. They know that we will do the right thing by them, and when in the next campaign the wicked orators of the opposition arise and say that the Labor Party is a party of disturbers and revolutionists, we can point to these facts and overwhelm them. And that will be a good thing, because otherwise we might not be able to keep in. We're in; let us stay in. "If the capitalists had designed the very best way in which to perpetuate their power, they could not have hit upon anything better for themselves than this. It keeps the working class occupied, it diverts their minds from the real questions that pertain to their condition; it appeals to their sporting instincts; we want to win, we want to cheer our own victory, we want to stay in; this is the way to these results. And meantime the capitalists rake off the profits and are happy. We are infinitely better off in the United States. The Labor Party of Australia has killed the pure proletarian movement there. At least we have the beginnings of one here. If there had been no Labor Party, there would now be in Australia a promising working-class movement headed towards industrial emancipation. Having a Labor Party, there is no such movement in sight.... "You say: Surely it was something gained in New Zealand to secure limited hours of employment, to have sanitary factories, clean luncheon rooms, old-age pensions, workingmen's compensation. Surely all these things represented progress and an advance toward the true ideal. "Yes. But every one of these things has been magnified, distorted and exaggerated for the purpose and with the result of keeping the workingman quiet about more vital things. How say you to that? Every pretended release from his chains has been in fact a new form of tether on his limbs. What about that? I should think meanly of myself if I did not rejoice every time a workingman's hours are reduced or the place wherein he is condemned to toil is made more nearly tolerable. But what shall we conclude when these things are deliberately employed to distract his thoughts from fundamental conditions and when all this state of stagnation is wrought by the alluring game of politics? "I cannot help thinking that all this has or ought to have a lesson for the Socialist movement in America. If it be desired to kill that movement, the most effective way would be to get it entangled in some form of practical politics. Then the real and true aim of the movement can at once be lost sight of and this party can go the way of every other proletarian party down to the pit. I should not think that was a very good way to go. "When we come to reason of it calmly, what can be gained by electing any human being to any office beneath the skies? To get in and keep in does not seem any sort of an object to any one that will contemplate the possibilities of the Coöperative Commonwealth. How shall it profit the working class to have Mr. Smith made sheriff or Mr. Jones become the coroner? Something else surely is the goal of this magnificent inspiration. In England the radicals have all gone mad on the subject of a successful parliamentary party, the winning of the government, the filling of offices, and the like. I am told that the leaders of the coalition movement have already picked out their prime minister against the day when they shall carry the country and be in. In the meantime they, too, must play this game carefully, being constantly on their guard against doing anything that would alarm or antagonize the bourgeoisie and sacred businesses and telling the workers to wait until we get in. I do not see that all this relieves the situation in Whitechapel or that any fewer men and women live in misery because we have a prospect of getting in. "Furthermore, to speak quite frankly, I do not see where there is a particle of inspiration for Americans in any of these English-speaking countries. So far as I can make out the whole of mankind that dwells under the British flag is more or less mad about political success, Parliament and getting in. They say in New Zealand that the government can make a conservative of any radical, if he threatens to become dangerous, by giving him some tin-horn honor or a place in the upper chamber. In England we have seen too often that the same kind of influences can silence a radical by inviting him to the king's garden party or allowing him to shake hands with a lord. I do not believe we have anything to learn from these countries except what to avoid." FOOTNOTES: [108] Quoted by John Graham Brooks, in article above cited. [109] J. R. MacDonald, "Socialism and Society," p. 60. [110] Philip Snowden, "A Socialist Budget." [111] Speech in Carnegie Hall, New York, Jan. 13, 1909. [112] J. R. MacDonald, "Socialism and Society," p. 36. [113] J. R. MacDonald, "Socialism and Government," Vol. I, p. 1. [114] J. R. MacDonald, "Socialism and Society," p. 114. [115] J. R. MacDonald, "Socialism and Society," p. 116. [116] J. R. MacDonald, "Socialism and Government," Vol. II, p. 130. [117] J. R. MacDonald, "Socialism and Government," Vol. I, p. 91. [118] J. R. MacDonald, "Socialism and Government," Vol. II, p. 4. [119] Report on Fabian Policy, p. 13. [120] The _Socialist Review_, January, 1909, p. 888. [121] John A. Hobson, "The Crisis of Liberalism," p. 46. [122] John A. Hobson, "The Crisis of Liberalism," p. 6. [123] J. R. MacDonald, "Socialism and Society," p. 133. [124] Editorial in the _Socialist Review_ (London), May, 1910. [125] "Socialism and Government," Vol. II, p. 12. [126] Andrew Carnegie, "Problems of To-day," pp. 123 ff. [127] The _New Age_, Nov. 4, 1909. [128] "Fabian Essays," p. 180. [129] "Fabian Essays," p. 187. [130] "Fabian Essays," p. 184. [131] "Fabianism and the Empire," p. 5. [132] H. G. Wells, "New Worlds for Old," pp. 268-275. [133] H. G. Wells, "New Worlds for Old," pp. 268-275. [134] John A. Hobson, "The Crisis of Liberalism," pp. 116, 132. [135] H. G. Wells, "First and Last Things," p. 242. [136] The _New Age_ (London), June 23, 1910. [137] The _New Age_, June 2, 1910. [138] The _New Age_, Dec. 23, 1909. [139] The _New Age_, Jan. 4, 1908. [140] The _New Age_, June 23, 1910. [141] The _New York Call_, Oct. 22 and 29, 1911. [142] The _New Age_, March 26, 1910. [143] The _New York Call_, Oct. 22, 1911. CHAPTER IV "REFORMISM" IN THE UNITED STATES Because of our greater European immigration and more advanced economic development, the Socialist movement in this country, as has been remarked by many of those who have studied it, is more closely affiliated with that of the continent of Europe than with that of Great Britain. The American public has been grievously misinformed as to the development of revolutionary Socialism in this country. A typical example is the widely noticed article by Prof. Robert F. Hoxie, entitled, "The Rising Tide of Socialism." After analyzing the Socialist vote into several contradictory elements, Professor Hoxie concludes:-- "There seems to be a definite law of the development of Socialism which applies both to the individual and to the group. The law is this: The creedalism and immoderateness of Socialism, other things being equal, vary inversely with its age and responsibility. The average Socialist recruit begins as a theoretical impossibilist and develops gradually into a constructive opportunist. Add a taste of real responsibility and he is hard to distinguish from a liberal reformer."[144] On the contrary, the "theoretical impossibilists," however obstructive, have never been more than a handful, and the revolutionists, in spite of the very considerable and steady influx of reformers into the movement, have increased still more rapidly. That is, revolutionary Socialism is growing in this country--as elsewhere--and a very large and increasing number of the Socialists are become more and more revolutionary. From the beginning the American movement has been radical and the "reformists" have been heavily outvoted in every Congress of the present Party--in 1901, 1904, 1908, and 1910, while the most prominent revolutionist, Eugene V. Debs, has been its nominee for President at each Presidential election, since its foundation (1900, 1904, and 1908).[145] Aside from a brief experience with the so-called municipal Socialism in Massachusetts in 1900 and 1902, the national movement gave little attention to the effort to secure the actual enactment of immediate reforms until the success of the Milwaukee Socialists (in 1910) in capturing the city government and electing one of its two Congressmen. There had always been a program of reforms indorsed by the Socialists. But this program had been misnamed "Immediate Demands," as the Party had concentrated its attention _almost exclusively_ on its one great demand, the overthrow of capitalist government. In the fall elections of 1910 it was observed for the first time that certain Socialist candidates in various parts of the country ran far ahead of the rest of the Socialist ticket, and that some of those elected to legislatures and local offices owed their election to this fact. This appeared to indicate that these candidates had bid for and obtained a large share of the non-Socialist vote. A cry of alarm was thereupon raised by many American Socialists. The statement issued by Mr. Eugene V. Debs on this occasion, entitled "Danger Ahead," was undoubtedly representative of the views of the majority. As Mr. Debs has been, on three occasions, the unanimous choice of the Socialist Party of the United States as its candidate for the Presidency, he remains unquestionably the most influential member of the Party. I, therefore, quote his statement at length, as the most competent estimate obtainable of the present situation as regards reformism in the American Socialist movement:-- "The danger I see ahead," wrote Mr. Debs, "is that the Socialist Party at this stage, and under existing conditions, is apt to attract elements which it cannot assimilate, and that it may be either weighted down, or torn asunder with internal strife, or that it may become permeated and corrupted with the spirit of bourgeois reform to an extent that will practically destroy its virility and efficiency as a revolutionary organization. "To my mind the working-class character and the revolutionary integrity of the Socialist Party are of the first importance. _All the votes of the people would do us no good if our party ceased to be a revolutionary party or became only incidentally so, while yielding_ more and more to the pressure to modify the principles and program of the Party for the sake of swelling the vote and hastening the day of its expected triumph.... The truth is that we have not a few members who regard vote getting as of supreme importance, no matter by what method the votes may be secured, and this leads them to hold out inducements and make representations which are not at all compatible with the stern and uncompromising principles of a revolutionary party. They seek to make the Socialist propaganda so attractive--eliminating whatever may give offense to bourgeois sensibilities--that it serves as a bait for votes rather than as a means of education, and _votes thus secured do not properly belong to us and do injustice to our Party as well as those who cast them_.... The election of legislative and administrative officers, here and there where the Party is still in a crude state and the members economically unprepared and politically unfit to assume the responsibilities thrust upon them as the result of popular discontent, will inevitably bring trouble and set the Party back, instead of advancing it, and while this is to be expected and is to an extent unavoidable, we should court no more of that kind of experience than is necessary to avoid a repetition of it. The Socialist Party has already achieved some victories of this kind which proved to be defeats, crushing and humiliating, and from which the party has not even now, after many years, entirely recovered [referring, doubtless, to Haverhill and Brockton.--W. E. W.]. "Voting for Socialism is not Socialism any more than a menu is a meal.... "The votes will come rapidly enough from now on without seeking them, and we should make it clear that the Socialist Party wants the votes only of those who want Socialism, and that, above all, as a revolutionary party of the working class, it discountenances vote seeking for the sake of votes and holds in contempt office seeking for the sake of office. These belong entirely to capitalist parties with their bosses and their boodle and have no place in a party whose shibboleth is emancipation."[146] (My italics.) After Mr. Debs, Mr. Charles Edward Russell is now, perhaps, the most trusted of American Socialists. His statement, made a few months later (see the _International Socialist Review_ for March, 1912), reaches identical conclusions. As it is made from the entirely independent standpoint of the observations of a practical journalist as to political methods, it strongly reënforces and supplements Mr. Debs's conclusions, drawn chiefly from labor union experience. As I have already quoted Mr. Russell at length in the previous chapter, a few paragraphs will give a sufficient idea of this important declaration:-- "Let us suppose in this country," writes Mr. Russell, "a political party with a program that proposes a great and radical transformation of the existing system of society, and proposes it upon lofty grounds of the highest welfare of mankind. Let us suppose that it is based upon vital and enduring truth, and that the success of its ideals would mean the emancipation of the race. "If such a party should go into the dirty game of practical politics, seeking success by compromise and bargain, striving to put men into office, dealing for place and recognition, concerned about the good opinion of its enemies, elated when men spoke well of it, depressed by evil report, tacking and shifting, taking advantage of a local issue here and of a temporary unrest there, intent upon the goal of this office or that, it would inevitably fall into the pit that has engulfed all other parties. Nothing on earth could save it. "But suppose a party that kept forever in full sight the ultimate goal, and never once varied from it. Suppose that it strove to increase its vote for this object and for none other.... Suppose it regarded its vote as the index of its converts, and sought for such votes and for none others. Suppose the entire body was convinced of the party's full program, aims, and philosophy. Suppose that all other men knew that this growing party was thus convinced and thus determined, and that its growth menaced every day more and more the existing structure of society, menaced it with overthrow and a new structure. What then? "Such a party would be the greatest political power that ever existed in this or any other country. It would drive the other parties before it like sand before a wind. They would be compelled to adopt one after another the expedients of reform to head off the increasing threat of this one party's progress towards the revolutionary ideal. But this one party would have no more need to waste its time upon palliative measures than it would have to soil itself with the dirt of practical politics and the bargain counter. The other parties would do all that and do it well. The one party would be concerned with nothing but making converts to its philosophy and preparing for the revolution that its steadfast course would render inevitable. Such a party would represent the highest possible efficiency in politics, the greatest force in the State, and the ultimate triumph of its full philosophy would be beyond question." Thus we see that in America reformism is regarded as a dangerous innovation, and that, before it had finished its second prosperous year, it had been abjured by those who have the best claim to speak for the American Party. Nevertheless it still persists and, indeed, continues to develop rapidly--if less rapidly than the opposite, or revolutionary, policy--and deserves the most careful consideration. While "reformism" only became a practical issue in the American Party in _1910_, it had its beginnings much earlier. The Milwaukee Socialists had set on the "reformist" course even before the formation of the present national party (in 1900). Even at this early time they had developed what the other Socialists had sought to avoid, a "leader"--in the person of Mr. Victor Berger. At first editor of the local German Socialist organ, the _Vorwaerts_, then of the _Social-Democratic Herald_, acknowledged leader at the time of the municipal victory in the spring of 1910, and now the American Party's first member of Congress, Mr. Berger has not merely been the Milwaukee organization's chief spokesman, organizer, and candidate throughout this period, but he has come to be the chief spokesman of the present reformist wing of the American Party. His editorials and speeches as Congressman, and the policies of the Milwaukee municipal administration, now so much in the public eye, will afford a fairly correct idea of the main features both of the Socialism that has so far prevailed in Milwaukee, and of American "reformism" in general. "Socialism is an epoch of human history which will no doubt last many hundred years, possibly a thousand years," wrote Mr. Berger, editorially, in 1910. "Certainly a movement whose aims are spread out over a period like that need have no terrors for the most conservative," commented Senator La Follette, with perhaps justifiable humor. If Socialism is to become positive, said Mr. Berger again, it must "conduct the everyday fight for the practical revolution of every day." Like the word "Socialism," Mr. Berger retains the word "revolution," but practically it comes to mean much the same as its antithesis, everyday reform. It has been Mr. Berger's declared purpose from the beginning to turn the Milwaukee Party aside from the tactics of the International movement to those of the "revisionist" minority that has been so thoroughly crushed at the German and International Congresses. (See Chapter VII.) "The tactics of the American Socialist Party," he wrote editorially in 1901, "if that party is to live and succeed--can only be the much abused and much misunderstood Bernstein doctrine." "In America for the first time in history," he added, "we find an oppressed class with the same fundamental rights as the ruling class--the right of universal suffrage...."[147] It was the impression of many of the earlier German Socialists in this country that political democracy already existed in America and that it was only necessary to make use of it to establish a new social order. The devices the framers of our Constitution employed to prevent such an outcome, the widespread distribution of property, especially of farms, disfranchisement in the South and elsewhere, etc., were all considered as small matters compared to the difficulties Socialists faced in Germany and other countries. Many have come more recently to recognize, with Mr. Louis Boudin, that the movement "will have to learn that in this country, as in Germany or other alien lands, the fight is on not only for the use of its power by the working class, but for the possession of real political power by the masses of the people." Neither in this country nor in any other does the oppressed class have "the same fundamental rights as the ruling class." In America the working class have not even an approximately equal right to the ballot, because of local property, literacy, residence, and other qualifications, as alluded to in an earlier chapter, and it is at least doubtful whether the workers are in a more favorable position here than elsewhere to gain final and effective control of the government without physical revolution (as Mr. Berger himself has admitted; see Chapter VI). In explanation of what he meant by the Bernstein doctrine, Mr. Berger wrote in 1902: "Others condemn every reform which is to precede the 'Great Revolution.' ... Nothing can be more absurd.... Progress is not attained by simply waiting for a majority of people, for the general reconstruction, for the promised hour of deliverance.... We wicked 'opportunists' want action.... We want to reconstruct society, and we must go to work without delay, and work ceaselessly for the coöperative Commonwealth, the ideal of the future. But we want to change conditions now. We stand for scientific Socialism."[148] It is quite true that there was a Socialist Party in this country before 1900, a large part of which ridiculed every reform that can come before the expected revolution, but these "Impossibilists" are now a dwindling handful. Nearly every Socialist now advocates all progressive reforms, but different views obtain as to which of these reforms do, and which of them do not, properly come within the Socialists' sphere of action. Mr. Berger's opinion is that the Socialists should take the lead in practically all immediate reform activities, and belittles all other reformers. No sooner had Senator La Follette appeared on the political horizon in 1904 than Mr. Berger classed him with Mr. Bryan, as "visionary."[149] And after Senator La Follette had become recognized as perhaps the most effective radical the country has produced, Mr. Berger still persisted in referring to him as "personally honest, but politically dishonest," and was quoted as saying, with particular reference to the Senator and his ideas of reform, and to the great satisfaction of the reactionary press: "An insurgent is 60 per cent of old disgruntled politician, 30 per cent clear hypocrisy, 9 per cent nothing, and 1 per cent Socialism. Put in a bottle and shake well before using and you will have a so-called 'progressive.'"[150] Let us see how the Socialist platform in Wisconsin differs from that of the insurgent Republicans and Democrats. It begins with the statement that the movement aims at "better food, better houses, sufficient sleep, more leisure, more education, and more culture." All progressive and honest reform movements stand for all these things and, as I have shown, promise gradually to get them. Under capitalism per capita wealth and income are increased rapidly and the capitalists can well afford to grant to the workers more and more of all the things mentioned, not out of fear of Socialism, but to provide in the future for that steady increase of industrial efficiency which is destined to be the greatest source of future profits. The platform goes on to state that "the final aim of the Social-Democratic Party is the emancipation of the producers and the abolition of the capitalist system" and describes the list of reforms it proposes as "mere palliatives, capable of being carried out even under present conditions." But it also suggests that these measures are in part, though not all, Socialistic, whereas a careful comparison with the Democratic and Republican platforms, especially the latter, shows that they are practically all adopted by the capitalist parties (not only in Wisconsin, but in States where the Socialists have no representation whatever). If the Social-Democrats of Wisconsin demand more government ownership and labor legislation, the Republicans are somewhat more insistent on certain extensions of political democracy--as in the demand for less partisan primaries. The New York Socialist platform makes very similar demands to that of Wisconsin, but precedes them by the long explanation (see Chapter VI) of the Socialist view of the class struggle, which the Wisconsin platform barely mentions, while containing declarations that might be interpreted as contradicting it. _The Wisconsin idea is that a Socialist minority in the nation has actual power to obtain reforms that will advance us towards Socialism and that would not otherwise be obtained. The New York idea is that a Socialist minority can have no other reforming power than any honest reform minority, unless Socialism has actually won or is about to win a majority._ The legislature of Wisconsin has doubtless gone somewhat faster than those of other "progressive" States, on account of the presence of the "Social-Democrats." It has passed the latters' resolutions, for example, calling for the government ownership of coal mines and of such railroad, telegraph, telephone, and express companies as pass into the hands of receivers, and also to apply incomes from natural resources to old-age pensions as well as other resolutions already mentioned. But an inspection of the resolutions of the legislatures of other States where there are no Socialist legislators and only a relatively small per cent of Socialists shows action almost if not quite as radical. This and the fact that a very radical tendency appeared in Wisconsin when Mr. La Follette was governor and before Socialism had any apparent power in that State, suggests that the influence of the latter has been entirely secondary. The _Social-Democratic Herald_ complains significantly, at a later date, of "the cowardly and hypocritical Socialistic platforms of the two older parties," while Mr. Berger was lately predicting that Senator La Follette would be "told to get out" of the Republican Party. The reformer who was so recently "retrogressive" had now become a rival in reform. Mr. Berger, however, claims that he does not object when reformers "steal the Socialist thunder." If both are striving after the "immediately attainable," how indeed could there be any lasting conflict, or serious difference of opinion? Or if there is to be any difference at all between Socialists and "Insurgents," is it not clear that the Socialists must reject, absolutely, Berger's principles, and follow Bebel's advice (quoted below), _i.e. concentrate their attention exclusively on "thunder" which the enemy will not and cannot steal_? But perhaps an even more striking indication of the nature of Milwaukee Socialism is shown by the very general welcome it has received among capitalist organs of all parties, from the _Outlook, Collier's Weekly_, the _Saturday Evening Post_, and the _American Magazine_, to the _New York Journal_, the _New York World_, the _Chicago Tribune_, the _Milwaukee Journal_, and other capitalist papers all over the country. The _New York Journal_ stated editorially after the municipal election of 1910, that won Milwaukee for the Socialists of the Berger School, that the men of Milwaukee who have accumulated millions show no signs of fear and that "before the election many of the biggest Milwaukee business men (including at least two of the brewers) had expressed themselves privately in admiration of Mr. Berger and his character _and his purposes_." (My italics.)[151] _La Follette's Weekly_ on this occasion quoted from an editorial of Mr. Berger in which he had written: "We must show the people of Milwaukee that the philosophy of international Socialism can be applied and will be applied to the local situation, and that it can be applied with advantage to any American city of the present day.... It is our duty to give this city the best kind of an administration that _a modern city can get under the present system, and the present laws_." (My italics.) La Follette's repeats the phrase in italics and adds that this policy contains "nothing to arouse fear on the part of the business interests that is tangible enough to be felt or genuine enough to be contagious," that the people want "new blood in the city offices," "had confidence in the Socialist candidates," and "are not afraid of a name." I have mentioned Liebknecht's remark that the enemy's praise is a sign of failure. Debs in this country is reported as saying, "When the political or economic leaders of the wage worker are recommended for their good sense and wise action by capitalists, it is proof that they have become misleaders and cannot be trusted." It may be imagined that the revolutionary Socialists have never approved these tactics of Mr. Berger's and do so less to-day than ever. His anti-immigration proposals were defeated by a large majority at the last Socialist congress and some of the best-known Socialists and organs of Socialist opinion have definitely repudiated his policy. Mr. J. G. Phelps Stokes, formerly a member of the National Executive Committee, declared publicly, after the Milwaukee victory of 1910, that the Milwaukee Socialists "had compromised with capitalism" by their campaign utterances, and in certain instances had acted as "mere reformers, not as Socialists at all." It is not surprising that the anti-Socialist reform press thereupon took up the cudgels in behalf of Mr. Berger, including the _New York World_, the _Chicago Tribune_, and _Milwaukee Journal_. The last-named paper very curiously claimed that, wherever Socialists "have been intrusted with the powers of the government," they have taken a similar course to that of Mr. Berger. This is that very obvious truth of which I have spoken in preceding chapters, namely, that when Socialists have allowed themselves to be saddled with the responsibilities of some department or local branch of government, _without having the sovereign power_ needed to apply _Socialist principles_, they have frequently found themselves in an untenable situation. The Socialists have been the first to recognize this, and for this reason oppose any entrance of Socialists into capitalist governments, _i.e._ their acceptance of minority positions in national cabinets or councils of State. (See Chapters II, VI, and VII.) Expressing the belief of the overwhelming majority of those who are watching the progress of affairs in Milwaukee, the _Journal_ of that city stated, "What they [the Socialists] are doing [in Milwaukee] is not essentially Socialistic, though some of the reforms they propose are Socialistic in tendency." This need not be taken to mean that the Milwaukee reforms are supposed to tend to Socialism as Socialists in general understand it, but rather to that capitalistic collectivism to which Mr. Taft refers when he says that in the present regulation of the railroads "we have gone a long way in the direction of State Socialism." Mr. Stokes's comment upon many widely published defenses of the Milwaukee Socialists by anti-Socialists was published in a letter to the _New York World_ which sums up admirably the International standpoint: "It is surely public opinion out of office and not the party in office," wrote Mr. Stokes, "that does the most for progress in this country, and it seems to me exceedingly doubtful whether any party in power has ever led public opinion effectively at any time. I share with very many Socialists the view that it is entirely fallacious to suppose that more can be done at this stage of the world's progress through politics, than through 'education, agitation, and perpetual criticism.'" I have referred to Mr. Berger as a "reformist" to distinguish his policies from the professed opportunism of some of the British Socialists. But I have also noted that his tactics and philosophy, as both he and they have publicly acknowledged, are alike at many points. For example, his views, like theirs, often seem less democratic than those of many non-Socialist radicals, or even of the average American. Years after the labor unions and the farmers of most of the States had indorsed direct legislation, and in a year when it was already becoming the law of several States, Mr. Berger, looking out for the interests of what he and his associates frankly call the "political machine" of the Wisconsin Party, damned it by faint praise, though it was an element of his own platform; and he had claimed credit for having first proposed it in Wisconsin. He acknowledged that the Initiative and Referendum _make towards_ Socialism and are the surest way in the end, but urged that they are "also the longest way," and wrote in the _Social-Democratic Herald_:-- "The real class conscious proletariat is still in a minority, and liable to stay so for a time to come. It can only show results by fighting as a well-organized, compact mass. "But the initiative, the referendum, and the right to recall have a tendency to destroy parties and loosen tightly knit political organizations. "Therefore, while the Socialist Party stands for direct legislation as a democratic measure, we are well aware that the working class will be helped very little by getting it. We are well aware that the proletariat, before all things, must get more economic and political, strength--more education and more wisdom. That, besides teaching coöperation, we must build _political machines_."[152] (My italics.) On the question of Woman Suffrage, also, Mr. Berger long showed a similarly hesitating attitude, saying that intelligent women "have always exercised great political power" even without the ballot; doubting whether women's vote would help the advance of humanity "in the coming time of transition," saying this is a question of fact on which Socialists may honestly differ, and urging that "no one will deny that the great majority of the women of the present day--_and that is the only point we can view now_, are illiberal, unprogressive, and reactionary to a greater extent than the men of the same stratum of society." (The italics are mine.) Finally, Mr. Berger concluded as follows, twice throwing the balance of his opinion from one scale into another:-- "Now, if all this is correct, female suffrage, for generations to come, will simply mean the deliberate doubting of the strength of a certain church,--will mean a great addition to the forces of ignorance and reaction.... "However, we have woman suffrage in our platform, and we should stand by it. Because in the end it will help to interest the other half of humanity in social and political affairs, and it will be of great educational value on both women and men.... "Nevertheless, it is asking a great deal of the proletariat when we are requested to delay the efficiency of our movement _for generations_ on that count. And we surely ought not to lay such stress on this one point as to injure the progress of the general political and economic movement--the success of which is bound to help the women as much as the men."[153] (The italics are mine.) It is no wonder, with such a lukewarm advocacy of its own platform by the Party's organ and its chief spokesman, that some of the lesser figures in the Milwaukee movement--such as certain Socialist aldermen--seem to have lost the road altogether until even Mr. Berger has been forced to call a halt. For the leader of a "political machine," to use Mr. Berger's own expression, may allow himself certain liberties; but when his followers do the same, disintegration is in sight. Witness Mr. Berger's words, written only a few weeks after the Socialist victory in Milwaukee; words which seem to indicate that the tendencies he complains of were the direct result, not of slow degeneration, but of the local Party's reformistic teachings and campaign methods:-- "The most dangerous part of the situation is that some of our comrades seem to forget that we are a Socialist Party. "They not only begin to imitate the ways and methods of the old parties, but even their reasoning and their thoughts are getting to be more bourgeois and less proletarian. To some of these men the holding of the office--whatever the office may be--seems to be the final aim of the Socialist Party. These poor sticks do not know that there are many Socialists who deplore that the necessity of electing and appointing officeholders will make it twice as hard to keep the Socialist Party pure in this country, than in other countries where the movement is relieved of this duty and danger. "And even some of the aldermen seem to have lost their Socialist class consciousness--if they ever had any." It is difficult to see how Mr. Berger can expect to maintain respect for principles that he teaches and applies so loosely himself. It is, furthermore, difficult to understand how he expects submission to the decisions of his organization when he himself has been on the verge of revolt both against the national and international movement. He has always avowed his profound disagreement with the methods of the Socialists in practically every State but his own. He and his associates were at one moment so far from the national and international principle that they sought to support a non-Socialist candidate for judge--on the specious ground that no Socialist was nominated. But the National Congress condemned and forbade such action by an overwhelming majority. Mr. Berger's unwillingness to act with his organization even went so far at one point that he was punished by a temporary suspension from the National Executive Committee. And, finally, he even threatened in Socialist Berlin that if the American Party, which he claimed held his views on immigration, was not allowed to have its way, it would pay no attention to the decision of the International Congress; though at the very time he was threatening rebellion the decision of the recent Congress showed that two-thirds of the American Party stood, not with him, but with the International Movement. Should he be surprised if Milwaukee aldermen, like himself, interpret Socialism as they see fit, and forget that they are a part of a Socialist Party? But while Mr. Berger and the present policies that are guiding American "reformist" Socialists differ profoundly from those of the International movement, and resemble in some ways the policies of the non-Socialist reformers of Wisconsin and other States, in other respects there is a difference. The labor policy of the collectivist reformers and of the "reformist" Socialists might be expected to differ somewhat--not in what is ordinarily called the labor legislation, _i.e._ factory reform, workingmen's compensation, old age pensions, etc., but in their attitude to labor organizations and the labor struggle: strikes, boycotts, and injunctions. Senator La Follette's followers are in the overwhelming majority farmers; the Wisconsin "Social-Democrats," as they call themselves, have secured little more than one per cent of the vote of the State outside of Milwaukee and a few other towns, and even less in the country. On the other hand, the majority of the workingmen of Milwaukee and several other towns vote for the Socialists, while those who do not are usually not followers of Senator La Follette, but Catholics and Democrats. The Wisconsin "Insurgents" have as yet by no means taken the usual capitalist position in the struggle between employers and labor unions, but they have shown repeatedly that they are conscious that they represent primarily the small property holders and the business community generally, including the small shareholders of the "trusts." _La Follette's Weekly_, in an important article defending direct legislation and the recall, says that the reason "we, the people," do not give enough attention to public measures is that "we are so busy with our private affairs," and continues: "Indeed, our success in our private enterprises, nay even equality of opportunity to engage in private enterprises, is coming more and more to depend upon the measure of protection which we may receive through our government from the unjust encroachments of the power of centralized Big Business." These "State Socialist" radicals represent primarily small business men and independent farmers, who are often employers, and their friendship to employees will necessarily have to be subordinated whenever the two interests come into conflict. Mr. Berger and the Wisconsin Social-Democrats on the other hand represent primarily the workingmen of the cities, especially those who are so fortunate as to be members of labor unions. The "Social Democrats" appeal, however, for the votes of the farmers, of "the small business man," and of "the large business men who are decent employers"; they announce that the rights of corporations will be protected under their administrations, declare that they who "take the risks of business" are entitled "to a fair return"; and have convinced many that they are not for the present anti-capitalistic in their policy, though they have not as yet succeeded in getting very much capitalistic support. For many years, indeed, the struggle between employers and unions has been less acute in Milwaukee than in many other large cities, while wages and conditions are on the whole no better. The Milwaukee Socialists have repeatedly called the attention of employers to this relative industrial peace and have attributed it to their influence, much to the disgust of the more militant Socialists, who claim that strikes are the only indication of a fighting spirit on the part of the workers. Mr. Berger, for example, has explained "the rare occurrence of strikes in Milwaukee" as being due largely to the Social-Democrats of that city who, he says, "have opposed almost every strike that has been declared here."[154] Certainly the attitude of the Socialists towards the employers in one of the largest industries, brewing, has on the whole been exceptionally friendly, as evidenced among other things by the Socialists' appointment of one of a leading brewery manager (who was not even a Socialist) as debt commissioner of the city, and their active campaign for the brewing interests, including a denunciation of county option, though this measure has already been indorsed by both of the capitalistic parties even in the liquor-producing State of Kentucky, as well as elsewhere, and is favored by very many Socialists, not as a means of advancing prohibition, but as the fairest present way of settling the controversy. But even relative peace between capital and labor is not lasting in our present society and it will scarcely last in Milwaukee. Already there are signs of what is likely to happen, and the business-men admirers of Milwaukee Socialism are beginning to drop away. A few more strikes, and Berger and his associates may be forced to abandon completely their claim that it is to the interest of employers, with some exceptions, to elect Socialists to office. The situation after a recent strike in Milwaukee is thus summed up by the _New York Volkszeitung_, a great admirer, on the whole, of the Milwaukee movement:-- "The new measures which are taken for the betterment of the city transportation system, for the preparation of better residence conditions and parks for the poorer classes of the people," says the _Volkszeitung_, "did not much disturb Milwaukee's 'Best Society.' Rather the opposite. For all these things did not at the bottom harm their interests, but were, on the contrary, quite to their taste, in so far as they rather increased than injured the pleasure of their own lives. "But at last what had to happen, did happen. The moment a great conflict between capital and labor broke out in the great community of Milwaukee, the caliber of the city administration was bound to show itself.... "The prohibition which Mayor Seidel issued to the police, not to interfere for either side, his grounds and those of the city council's presiding officer, Comrade Melms, their instructions to the striking 'garment workers' how they should conduct the strike in order to win a victory, the admonition that they might safely call a scab a scab without official interference--all this is of decisive importance, not only for its momentary effect on the Milwaukee strike, but especially for the Socialist propaganda, for the demonstration of the tremendous advantage the working people can get even at the present moment by the election of Socialist candidates.... "And now it is all over with the half well-disposed attitude that had been assumed towards our comrades in the city administration. With burning words the capitalistic and commercial authorities protest against these official expressions, as being likely to disturb 'law and order' and as having the object of stirring up the class struggle and of undermining respect for the law. "That came about which must come about, if our Milwaukee comrades did their duty. And they have done it, at the right moment, and without hesitation. And this must never be forgotten. But the real battle between them and their capitalist opponent _begins now for the first time_." Here is the keynote of the situation. Only as more and more serious strikes occur will the Milwaukee movement be forced to emphasize its labor unionism rather than its reforms. It will then, in all probability, be forced to take up an aggressive labor-union attitude like that of the non-Socialist Labor Party in San Francisco. One action at least of Mayor McCarthy in the latter city was decidedly more threatening to the local employing interests than any taken in Milwaukee, which after all had met the approval of one of the capitalistic papers (_i.e._ the _Free Press_). The Bulletin of the United Garment Workers, though grateful for the attitude of the mayor in their Milwaukee strike, uses language just as laudatory concerning this action of the anti-Socialist Labor mayor of San Francisco.[155] The "reformist" Socialists lay much stress upon their loyalty to existing labor unions. Some even favor the creation of a non-Socialist Labor Party, more or less like those of San Francisco or Australia or Great Britain. Indeed, the reformists have often acknowledged their close kinship with the semi-Socialist wing of the British Labour Party, and this relationship is recognized by the latter. All Socialists will agree that even the reformists, as a rule, represent the interests of the labor-union movement better than other parties; but the Socialist Party is vastly more than a mere reformist trade-union party, and most Socialists feel that to reduce it to this rôle would be to deprive it of the larger part of its power even to help the unions. In the statement of Mr. Debs already quoted in part in this chapter, he also expresses the opposition of the Socialist majority to converting the organization into a mere trade-union Party:-- "There is a disposition on the part of some to join hands with reactionary trade unionists in local emergencies and in certain temporary situations to effect some specific purpose, which may or may not be in harmony with our revolutionary program. No possible good can come of any kind of a political alliance, expressed or implied, with trade unions or the leaders of trade unions who are opposed to Socialism and only turn to it for use in some extremity, the fruit of their own reactionary policy. "Of course we want the support of trade unionists, but only of those who believe in Socialism and are ready to vote and work with us for the overthrow of capitalism." It would seem from the expressions of Milwaukee Socialists that they, in direct opposition to the policy of Mr. Debs, are working by opportunist methods towards a trade union party, and that form of collectivism advocated by the Labor Parties of Great Britain and Australia. But they have been in power now in Milwaukee for nearly two years and have had a strong contingent in the Wisconsin legislature, while their representative in Congress has had time to define his attitude in a series of bills and resolutions. We are in a position, then, to judge their policy not by their words alone, but also by their acts. Let us first examine their municipal policy. This assumes special importance since the installation of Socialist officials in Berkeley (California), Butte (Montana), Flint (Michigan), several smaller towns in Kansas, Illinois, and other States, as a result of the elections of April, 1911. To these victories have recently been added others (in November, 1911) in Schenectady (New York), Lima and Lorain (Ohio), Newcastle (Pennsylvania), besides very large votes or the election of minor officials in many places in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Kansas, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, Wisconsin, Oregon, Washington, Utah, California, and other States. While the officials elected received in nearly every case only a plurality (this is true also of most of those elected in Milwaukee), and local or temporary issues existed in many instances, which caused the Socialist Party to be used largely for purposes of protest, a part of the vote was undoubtedly cast for a type of municipal reform somewhat more radical than other parties have, as a rule, been ready to offer in this country; up to the present time, at least, a considerable part of the vote is undoubtedly to be accredited to convinced Socialists. Milwaukee being as yet the only important example of an important American municipality that has rested in Socialist hands for any considerable period, I shall confine myself largely to the discussion of the movement in that city. Some of those already in office in other places have, moreover, taken the Milwaukee policy as their model and announced their intention to follow it. Mayor Seidel's statement after a year in office, and the explanations of the Rev. Carl Thompson (the city clerk) made about the same time, cover the essential points for the present discussion. Both the statement of the mayor and that of the city clerk are concerned with matters that interest primarily the business man and taxpayer. Mr. Thompson disclaims that there is anything essentially new even in the Socialists' plans, to say nothing of their performances. He says of the most discussed municipal projects under consideration by the Socialist administration that all were advocated either by former administrations, by one or both of the older parties or by some of their leading members. He mentions the proposed river park, railway terminal station, and electric lighting plans, as well as home rule for Milwaukee, as being all strictly conservative projects (as they are). Other plans mentioned by Mayor Seidel--harbor improvements, playgrounds, a sterilization plant, and isolation hospital--are approved, if not by the conservatives of Milwaukee, at least by those of many other cities. Some minor and less expensive proposals, a child welfare commission, a board of recreation, and municipal dances are somewhat more novel. These are all the social reforms mentioned by the mayor, as planned or accomplished, with the exception of those that have to do primarily with efficiency or economy in municipal administration, such as improvement in street cleaning, sanitary inspection and inspection of weights and measures, which all conservative reform administration seek to bring about; many cities, especially abroad, having been eminently successful in this direction. To secure the political support of taxpayers and business men, further evidence was required to show that the administration is neither doing nor likely to do anything unprecedented. They want a safe and sane business policy, and assurances that new sources of income will, if possible, be secured and applied to the reduction of taxation; or that, in case taxes are raised, municipal reforms will so improve business and rental values, as to bring into their pockets more than the increased taxation has cost them. Mayor Seidel and City Clerk Thompson presented entirely satisfactory evidences on all these points. Business methods have been introduced, a "complete inventory" of the property of the city is being made, "blanket appropriations" are done away with, "a new system of voucher bills has been installed," all the departments are being brought on "a uniform accounting basis." Finally, taxable property is being listed that was formerly overlooked, and the city is more careful in settling financial claims against it. Mayor Seidel and City Clerk Thompson both promise that taxes will not be increased; the former points to the new resources from property that had escaped taxation and to the future rise in value of land the city intends to purchase, the latter refers to "revenue-producing enterprises which will relieve the burden of taxation rather than increase it." Neither goes so far as to suggest any plan, like the present law of Great Britain, introduced by a capitalist government, according to which not only are the taxes of the wealthy raised, but one fifth of the future increase of value of city lands, as being due to the community, accrues to the public treasury. It is true that such measures would have to be approved by the State of Wisconsin, but this would not prevent them being made the one prominent issue in the city campaign, and insistently demanded until they are obtained. The mayor's attitude on this tax question, which underlies all others, far from being Socialistic, is not even radical. The tendency seems to have been widespread in the municipal campaigns undertaken by the Socialists in the fall of 1911, to abandon even radical, though capitalistic, municipal reformers' policy of raising new taxes to pay for reforms that bring modest benefits to the workers, but chiefly raise realty values and promote the interests of "business," and to substitute for this the conservative policy of reducing taxes. Thus the _Bridgeport Socialist_ advised the voters:-- "Municipal ownership means cheaper water, cheaper light, cheaper gas, cheaper electricity, and a steady revenue into the city treasury _which would reduce taxes_." (Italics mine.)[156] One might infer that the masses of Bridgeport were already sufficiently supplied with schools, parks, and all the free services a municipality can give. Of course it is true that a considerable part of the wage earners in our small cities own their own homes (subject often to heavy mortgages) and, _other things remaining as they are_, would like to have taxes reduced. But two facts are indisputable: the average taxes paid by the wage earners are insignificant compared with those of the wealthier classes, and the wage earner gets, at first at least, an equal share in the benefits of most municipal expenditures. The Socialists know that most of the economic benefits are later absorbed by increasing rents; and that capitalist judges and State governments will see to it that only such expenditures are allowed as have this result, or such as have the effect, through improving efficiency, of increasing profits faster than wages. Socialists recognize, however, that at least municipal collectivism is in the line of capitalist progress, with some incidental benefits to labor, while the policy of decreasing taxes on the unearned increment of land is nothing less than reaction. The only popular ground on which such a policy could be defended is the fallacy that landlords transmit to tenants the fluctuations in taxes, in the form of increased or diminished rents. Even if this were true, the tenants would be as likely as not to profit by enlarged municipal expenditures (_i.e._ in spite of paying for a _minor_ part of their cost). But in the large cities, as a matter of fact, 90 per cent of the wage earners, who are tenants, and not home owners, do not feel these fluctuations at all. Increased land taxes do not as a rule cause an increase in average rents. Increased land taxes force unimproved land upon the market, and compel its improvement, to escape loss in holding it unimproved and idle. The resulting increased competition for tenants operates on the average to _reduce_ rents, not to increase them. The taxes are paid at the cost of _reduced profits_ for the landlord--until population begins to increase more rapidly than taxes. The capitalist leaders perceive the truth as regards this plainly enough. Thus, in their anxiety to get both landlord and capitalist support in the last municipal campaign in New York City, various allied real estate interests claimed credit for their work in keeping taxes down. Commenting upon the subject, the _New York Times_ said: "Rents do not rise with taxes. If they did, the owner would merely need to pass the taxes along to the renter and be rid of the subject."[157] The next day Mayor Gaynor in a letter to the _Times_ quoted a message he had sent to the city council in the previous year in which he had said: "Every landlord knows that he cannot add the taxes to rents. If he could, he would not care how high taxes grew. He would simply throw them on his tenants." It is difficult, therefore, to see why the tenants of New York City or Bridgeport should favor lower taxes, so long as they and their children are in need of further public advantages that increased taxes would enable the municipalities to supply. To favor reduced taxes, while private ownership of land prevails, is not Socialism, or even progressive capitalism. It is, as I have said, _reaction_. The _New York Volkszeitung_ expresses in a few words the correct Socialist attitude on municipal expenditures. After showing the need of more money for schools, hygienic measures, etc., it concludes:-- "These increased expenditures of municipalities are thus absolutely necessary if a Socialist city government is to fulfill its tasks. Since the municipal expenditures must be raised through taxation, it is evident that a good Socialist city government must raise the taxes if it is up to the level of its duties. Provided that--as just remarked--the raising of the taxes is so managed that the possessing classes are hit by it and not the poor and the workingmen. "Most of the Socialist municipal administrations have been shattered hitherto by the tax question; that has been especially evident in France, where the Socialists lost the towns captured by them because their administration appeared to be more costly than those of their capitalist predecessors. That has happened especially wherever the small capitalist element played a rôle in the Socialist movement. "We shall undoubtedly have this experience in America, also, if we do not make it clear to the masses of workingmen that good city government for them means a more expensive city government, and that they are interested in this increase of the cost of the city administration."[158] If the Socialists promise much and perform comparatively little, they have as a valid reason the fact that the city does not have the authority. But opponents can also say, as does the Milwaukee _Journal_, that "the administration would not dare to carry out its promises to engage in municipal Socialism if it had the authority." For while municipal "Socialism" or public ownership is perfectly good capitalism, it is not always good politics in a community where the small taxpayers dominate. While the plans for municipal wood and coal yards and plumbing shops were doubtless abandoned in Milwaukee by reason of legal limitations, and not merely to please the small traders, as some have contended, no Socialist reason can be given for the practical abandonment years ago of the proposed plan for municipal ownership of street railways. If the charter prohibited such an important measure as this, all efforts should have been concentrated on changing the charter. Socialists do not usually allow their world-wide policy, or even their present demands to be shaped by a city charter. If Mr. Berger had announced earlier and more clearly, and if he had repeated with sufficient frequency, his recent declaration that _Milwaukee is administered by Socialists but does not have a Socialist administration_, he would have avoided a world of misunderstanding. In fact, if he had enunciated this principle with sufficient emphasis before the municipal election of 1910, it is highly probable that the Socialists would not yet have won the city, and would never have felt obligated to claim, as they often do now, that Socialists, who must direct part of their energies towards future results, are more efficient as practical reformers than non-Socialists, who are ready to sacrifice every ultimate principle, if they have any, for immediate achievements. The whole question between reformists and revolutionaries refers not so much to the policy of Socialists in control of municipalities, which is often beyond criticism, as to the value of municipal activity generally for Socialist purposes. None deny that it has value, but reformists and revolutionaries ascribe to it different rôles. There are two reasons why Socialism _cannot_ yet be applied on a municipal scale--one economic and one political. I do not refer here, of course, to municipal ownership, often called "municipal Socialism," a typical manifestation of "State Socialism," but to a policy that attempts to make use of the municipality against the capitalist class. Such a policy is economically impossible to-day because it would gradually drive capital to other cities and so indirectly injure the whole population including the non-capitalists. Indeed, Mayor Seidel especially denies that he will allow any "hardship on capital," and City Clerk Thompson gives nearly a newspaper column of statistics to show that "the business of Milwaukee has continued to expand" since the Socialists came into power, remarking that "there have been no serious strikes or labor troubles in Milwaukee for years"--surely a condition which employers will appreciate. Nothing could prove more finally than such statements, how municipal governments at present feel bound to serve the business interests. The political limitations of the situation are similar. Prof. Anton Menger says of Socialism as applied to municipalities, that "it is necessarily deferred to the time when the Socialist party will be strong enough to take into its hands the political power in the whole state or the larger part of it." It is obviously impossible to force the hands of an intelligent ruling majority merely by capturing one branch or one local division of the government. As such branches are captured they will be prevented from doing anything of importance, or forced to act only within the limits fixed by the ruling class. This is especially true in the United States. We have elaborate forms and external symbols of local self-government, and it may really exist--as long as the municipalities are used for capitalistic purposes. When it is proposed to use local self-government for Socialist ends, however, it instantly disappears. Not only do the States interfere, with the national government ready behind them, but the centralized judiciary, state and national, is always at hand to intervene. _This is potential centralization, and for the purposes of preventing radical or Socialist measures the government of the United States is as centralized as that of any civilized nation on earth._ Moreover, the semblance of local power given by municipal victories brings a second difficulty to the Socialists--it means the election of administrators and judges. Now even under the system of potential centralization through the courts, _legislators_ are useful, for they cannot be forced to serve capitalism. But government must be carried on and mayors and judges are practically under the control of higher authorities--in the new commission plan of government, they even do the legislating. In the words of the _New York Daily Call_:-- "The Socialist Legislator finds his task a comparatively easy and simple one. He proposes or supports every measure of advantage to the working class in particular and to the great majority of the people in general, barring such as are of a reactionary character. But the Socialist executive and the Socialist judge find themselves in no such simple situation. Their activities are circumscribed by superior and hostile powers, and by written constitutions adopted at the dictation of the capitalist class. How to harmonize their activities with the just demands of the working class for the immediate betterment of its conditions, as well as with the Socialist program which has for its goal the ultimate overthrow of the capitalist social order, and yet not come into such conflict with the superior and hostile powers as would result in their own removal from office--this question is bound to assume a gravity not yet perhaps dreamed of by the majority of American Socialists. "And yet even now, while our political power is still small, the charge of opportunism, or the neglect of principle in pursuit of some practical advantage, is continually being raised, sometimes justly, sometimes unjustly." The following from the _New York Evening Post_, illustrates both the political and the economic difficulty of enacting Socialistic or even radical measures in municipalities. It is taken from a special article on the situation in Schenectady, where a Socialist, Dr. George R. Lunn had just been elected mayor:-- "Schenectady is trying hard to take its dose of Socialism philosophically. Its most staid and respectable citizens, who have been staid and respectable Republicans and Democrats all their life, console themselves with the thought that, after all, Old Dorp is Old Dorp--Old Dorp being the affectionate way of referring to Schenectady--and that her best citizens are still her best citizens, and that Rev. George R. Lunn and all his Socialist crew can't do a great amount of harm in two years to a city that possesses such an ironclad charter as that with which Horace White, when he was a Senator, endowed every city of the second class in the Empire State. The conservative element in town back that charter against all the reforms that the minister who is to be mayor and his following of machinists, plumbers, coachmen, and armature winders from the General Electric Works, who are going to be common councillors and other things, can hope to introduce.... "The General Electric works--as everybody agrees--'made' Schenectady. Census figures show it and statistics of one sort or another show it. The concern employs more than 16,000 men and women--as many persons as there are voters in the whole town. It owns 275 acres of land, and of this about 60 acres are occupied with shops and buildings. Its capital stock is valued at $80,000,000. The General Electric, or as it is called up here, the 'G. E.,' has given work to thousands, has brought a lot of business into town, has made real estate in hitherto deserted districts valuable. On the tax assessors' books its property is assessed at $4,500,000. It is safe to say that this is less than 25 per cent of its true value. "If Dr. Lunn should attempt to meddle with the 'G. E.'s' assessment, Schenectady knows very well what would happen. The General Electric Company would pack up and move away to some other town that is pining for a nice big factory and does not care much how small taxes it pays. That is the situation. Of course everybody agrees that the company ought to be paying more, but when it comes to a question of leaving well enough alone or losing the company entirely, Schenectady says leave well enough alone, by all means. The loss of the 'G. E.' works would be a disaster, from which the Old Dorp would never recover. Why, even now the company has just opened a brand new plant in Erie, Philadelphia, and if Schenectady does not behave, what is to prevent the 'G. E.' from moving all its belongings to Erie? "Dr. Lunn has not had much to say regarding this phase of his taxation reforms. The day after his election he issued a statement, however, which showed that he did not intend to do anything extremely radical:-- "'In the matter of taxation we have had something to say during the campaign, but we Socialists are too good economists not to know that the burdening of our local industries in the way of taxation above that placed upon them in other cities would be foolhardy. Under the present system, to which we are opposed, manufacturing concerns have their rights, and any special burden placed upon them by one community above that which is placed upon them in other communities would inevitably and of necessity, from the standpoint of economics, hinder their progress. We are not in favor of hindering their progress. We stand for the greatest progress along every line. We will not only encourage industries in every way consistent with our principles, but will endeavor to bring new industries to Schenectady, and furthermore, we will succeed in doing it.'"[159] The newly elected mayor is quoted by _Collier's Weekly_, as saying: "We are only trying to conduct the city's business in the same honest way we should run our own business." _Collier's_ says that the Socialists generally "make their impression by mere business honesty and efficiency," distinguishes this from what it calls the "harmful kind of Socialism," and concludes that, "watching the actual performances of those who choose to call themselves Socialists, we are thus far unable to be filled with terror."[160] Nearly all the comment at the time of the Socialist municipal victories in the fall of 1911 pointed out, in similar terms, the contrast between the very restricted opportunities they offer for the revolutionary program of Socialism. The editorial in the _Saturday Evening Post_ is typical:-- "Theoretically Socialism is the most ambitious of political programs, involving nothing short of a whole-nation-wide or world-wide revolution; but, except a solitary Congressman and seventeen members of State legislatures, Socialists so far have been elected only to local offices, and those usually of an _administrative_ rather than legislative nature--elected, that is, not to bring in a brand-new, all-embracing revolutionary program, but to work the lumbering old bourgeois machine in a little honester, more intelligent, kindlier manner perhaps than some Republican or Democrat would work it. "Designing a new world is more fascinating than scrubbing off some small particular dirt spot on the old one--but less practical." (My italics.)[161] Even where _revolutionary_ Socialists carry a municipality, as they did recently in Newcastle, Pennsylvania, the benefit to the labor movement is probably only temporary. There the Socialist administration dismissed the whole police force and filled their places with Socialists. The result will undoubtedly be that the State will either make the police irremovable, except by some complicated process, or will still further extend the functions of the State constabulary in times of strike. The moral effect of the victory in Newcastle, like that in Schenectady, after the bitter labor struggles of recent years, cannot be questioned, and this, together with temporary relief from petty persecution by local authorities, is doubtless worth all the efforts that have been put forth--provided the Socialists have not promised themselves and their supporters any larger or more lasting results. It is in view of difficulties such as these, which exist to some degree in all countries, that in proportion as Socialists gain experience in municipal action, they subordinate it to other forms of activity. Only such "reformists" as are ready to abandon the last vestiges of their Socialism persist in emphasizing a form of action that has a constant tendency to compel all those involved to give more and more of their time and energy to serving capitalism. Among the first Socialist municipalities were those of Lille and Roubaix in France--which fell a number of years ago into the hands of Guesdists, the revolutionary or orthodox wing of the party. Rappoport reports their present position on this question as presented at the recent Congress at St. Quentin, 1911. "Among the Guesdists there are no municipal theorists but a great many practical municipal men, former or present mayors: Delory (Lille), Paul Constans (Montucon), Compère-Morel, Hubert (Nîmes), only to mention those present at the Congress. _Through experience they have learned that what is called municipal Socialism, is good local government, but in no sense Socialism._ Free meals for school children, weekly subsidies for child-bearing women, etc., are useful to the working people; this is not Socialism, but 'collective philanthropy' according to Compère-Morel. Reforms are good, but the main thing is Socialism. The Guesdists are no adherents of the doctrine, 'all or nothing,' but they are also no admirers of the new doctrine of municipal Socialism." There can be little doubt that a few years of experience in this country will persuade those American Socialists who are now concentrating so much of their attention on municipalities, to give more of their energies to State legislatures and to Congress. The present efforts will not be lost, as they can be easily turned into a new direction. And whatever political reaction may seem to take place, after certain illusions have been shattered, will be a seeming reaction only, and due to the desertion from the ranks of the supporters of the Socialist ticket of municipal reformers who never pretended to be Socialists, but who voted for that Party merely because no equally reliable non-Socialist reformers were in the field, or had so good a chance of election. Such separation of the sheep from the goats will be specially rapid when some variation of the so-called commission form of government will have been gradually introduced, particularly where it is accompanied by direct legislation and the recall. For then municipal Socialists will be deprived of all opportunity of claiming this, that, and the other reform as having some peculiar relation to Socialism. And this day is near at hand. All municipal reforms that interest property owners and non-property owners alike will then be enacted with comparative ease and rapidity, while all political parties, and all prolonged political struggles, will center around the conflict between employers and employees. State and national governments will see to it that no municipality in the hands of the working class is allowed to retain any power that it could use to injure or weaken capitalism. And this specific limitation of the powers of municipalities that escape local capitalist control, will be so frequent and open that all the world will see that Socialists are going to achieve comparatively little by "capturing" local offices. I have already mentioned in a general way the position of the Milwaukee Socialists in the Wisconsin legislature. Let me return now to their representative in Congress. Mr. Berger had differentiated himself from previous trade union Congressmen largely by proposing a series of radical _political_ reforms: the abolition of the Senate, of the President's veto, and of the power of the Supreme Court over the legislation of Congress, and a call for a national constitutional convention. Radical as they are, it is probable that these reforms are only a foreshadowing of the position rapidly being assumed by a large part of the collectivist but anti-Socialist "insurgents," and "progressives." Even Mr. Roosevelt and Justice Harlan, it will be recalled, protest in the strongest terms against the power of the Supreme Court over legislation, and the Wisconsin legislature, by no means under Socialist control, has initiated a call for a national constitutional convention. In proposing his "old-age pension" bill, Mr. Berger appended a clause which asserted that the measure should not be subject to the interpretation of the Supreme Court, and showed that Congress had added a similar clause to its Reconstruction Act in 1868 and that it had later been recognized by the Supreme Court. Later the _Outlook_ suggested that this was a remedy less radical than the widely popular recall of judges, and remarked that it would only be to follow the constitution of most other countries.[162] Also Senator Owen, on the same day on which Mr. Berger introduced his bill, spoke for the recall of federal judges on the floor of the United States Senate. It is impossible, then, to make any important distinction between Mr. Berger's proposed _political_ reforms, sweeping as they are, and those of other radicals of the day. The attitude of many of the "Insurgents" and "Progressives" of the West, is also about all that mere trade unionists could ask for. A large majority of this element in both parties favors the repeal of the Sherman law as applied to labor union boycotts, and Senator La Follette and others stand even for the right of government employees to organize labor unions. The adoption of the recall of judges, owing largely to non-Socialist efforts in Oregon, California, and Arizona, will make anti-union injunctions in strikes and boycotts improbable in the courts of those States, and the widely accepted proposal for the direct election of the federal judiciary would have a similar effect in the federal courts. It may be many years before these measures become general or effective, but there can be no question that they are demanded by a large, sincere, and well-organized body of opinion outside of the Socialist Party. The Wisconsin legislature and most other progressive bodies have so far failed to limit injunctions. But this has been done in the constitution of Oklahoma, and I have suggested reasons for believing that this prohibition may soon be favored by "Progressives" generally. In the first Socialist speech ever made in Congress, Mr. Berger laid bare his economic philosophy and program. The subject was the reduction of the tariff on wool and its manufactures, and Mr. Berger defined his position on the tariff as well as still larger issues. He declared himself practically a free trader, though of course he did not consider free trade as a panacea, and his speech, according to the Socialist as well as other reports, was received with a storm of applause--especially, of course, from free-trade Democrats. He pointed out that the manufacturer, having thoroughly mastered the home market, had found that tariff wars were shutting him out from the foreign markets he now needs. He might have added, as evidenced by the nature of the proposed reciprocity treaty with Canada, that many manufacturers are more interested in cheap raw material and cheap food for their workers (cheap food making low wages possible, as in free-trade Great Britain) than they are in a high tariff, and this even in some instances where they have a certain need for protection for the finished product and where no great export trade is in view. Mr. Berger forgot England when he said that the tariff falls on the poor man's head, for England has shown that the abolition of the tariff does not benefit the poor man in the slightest degree. Poverty is far more widespread there than here. He pointed to the fact that the importation of goods into the United States was restricted, while that of labor was not. He forgot that where both are restricted, as in Australia, the workers are no better off than here. The arguments employed in Mr. Berger's speech, in so far as they referred to the tariff, were for the most part not to be distinguished from those used by the Democrats in behalf of important capitalistic elements of the population, and hence the welcome with which they were received by the Democratic Congress and press. The Socialist matter in the speech relating only indirectly to the tariff was, of course, less favorably commented upon. Mr. Berger's second speech before Congress was also significant. It was in support of governmental old-age pensions, a very radical departure for the United States and difficult of enactment because of our federal system--but already, as Mr. Berger said, in force in Great Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Since the legislatures in all these countries are controlled by opponents of Socialism, it is evident that such measures have been adopted from other than Socialist motives. In fact they have no necessary relation to Socialism at all, but, on the contrary, have been widely enacted for capitalistic reasons without regard to the demands or power of the workers. Mr. Berger is reported to have said a few days after this speech: "The idea will in five years have been incorporated into law. Both of the old parties within that time will have incorporated the theory into their platforms. Both the old parties to-day are approaching Socialistic ideas, and appropriating our ideas to save themselves from the coming overthrow."[163] The idea of governmental old-age pensions, on the contrary, has always been popular in certain anti-Socialist circles and is entirely in accord with any intelligent system of purely capitalistic collectivism. Its common adoption by progressive capitalists would seem to indicate that they consider it as being either directly or indirectly conducive to their own interests. It is unnecessary to assume that they adopt it from fear of Socialism. Few if any capitalists consider the overthrow of capitalism as imminent, or feel that Socialism is likely for many years to furnish them with a really acute political problem. A combination of Republicans and Democrats, for example, with a full vote, would easily overwhelm Mr. Berger, the sole Socialist Congressman in his own Congressional district. If present political successes continue, it will still take years for Socialism to send a score of representatives to Congress, and when it does do so, they will be as impotent as ever to overthrow the capitalist order. For any independent representative without political power or responsibility to propose radical reforms in advance of the larger parties is a very simple matter. Statesmen with actual power cannot afford to take up such reforms until the time is _politically_ ripe for their practical consideration. When such a measure is passed, for the individual or group that first proposed it to claim the credit for the change would be absurd. These reforms, when conditions have suitably evolved, become the order of the day, and are urged by all or nearly all the forces of the time. The radical British old-age pension bill, it will be remembered, was passed almost unanimously, although in the Parliament that passed it there were only about 40 Socialist or semi-Socialist representatives out of a total of 670 members. What, then, could be more fatuous than such a view as the following, expressed recently by a well-known Socialist:-- "Do you not think that the whole country should be apprised that this (Berger's Old-age Pension bill) is a Socialist measure, introduced by a Socialist Representative, and backed by the Socialist Party--before the Republicans and Democrats realize the advisability of stealing our thunder. In England the working-class political movement is stagnant because the Liberal Party has out-generaled the Socialists by voluntarily enacting great social reforms."[164] In his anxiety to prepare a bill that capitalist legislators would indorse and pass in the near future, Mr. Berger aroused great criticism within the Party. The _New York Volkszeitung_ pointed out that in limiting the benefit of the law to those who had been naturalized citizens of the United States for sixteen years, he was requiring a residence of twenty-one years in this country, a provision which involved an excessively heavy discrimination against a very large proportion of our foreign-born workers. Mr. Berger's project, moreover, demanded that those convicted of felonies should also be excluded. Socialists, as is well known, have always asserted that the larger part of crimes and criminals were due to injustices of the existing social order, for which the "criminals" were in no sense to blame. Mr. Berger's secretary, Mr. W. J. Ghent, vigorously defended this clause, on the typical "State Socialist" ground that the future Society would deal _more severely_ with criminals than the present one. Mr. Berger's bill was objected to by New York Socialists on the ground that the old parties could be expected to give a more liberal bill in the near future, and that it would then be difficult to explain the narrower Socialist position. Mr. Ghent answered that nowhere had such a liberal measure been enacted. To this the _Volkszeitung_ remarked that there is a tremendous difference between a bill that owes its origin to a capitalist government and one that comes from a Socialist representative of the working class: "The former sets up a minimum while the latter must demand the maximum." Finally, the _New York Local_ of the Socialist Party resolved: "That we request the National Executive Committee to resolve that Comrade Berger shall, before introducing any bill, submit it to secure its approval by the National Executive Committee." Mr. Berger's maiden speech also summed up excellently the general policy of Socialist "reformism." "When the white man is sick or when he dies," he said, "the employer usually loses nothing." Mr. Berger does not understand that, in modern countries, _employers as a class_ are seeing that the _laborers as a class_ are, after all, their chief asset: and are therefore organizing to care for them through governmental action, as working animals, even more systematically and infinitely more scientifically than slaves were ever cared for. He is exhausting his efforts to persuade, or perhaps he would say to compel, the government to the very action that the interests of its capitalist masters most strongly demand. Curiously enough, Mr. Berger expressed the "reformist," the revolutionary, and the State capitalist principle in this same speech, without being in the least troubled with the contradictions. He spoke of industrial crises, irregular employment and unemployment as if they were permanent features of capitalism:-- "These new inventions, machines, improvements, and labor devices, displace human labor and steadily increase the army of unemployed, who, starved and frantic, are ever ready to take the places of those who have work, thereby still further depressing the labor market." The collectivist capitalists have already set themselves aggressively to work to abolish unemployment, to make employment regular, to connect the worker that needs a job with the job that needs a worker, and to put an end to industrial crises, and with every promise of success. Immediately afterward, Mr. Berger made a correct statement of the Socialist position:-- "The average of wages, the certainty of employment, the social privileges, and the independence of the wage-earning and agricultural population, _when compared with the increase of wealth and social production_, are steadily and rapidly decreasing." The Socialist indictment is not that unemployment, irregularity of employment, or any other social evil is increasing absolutely, or that it is beyond the reach of capitalist reform; but that _the share of the constantly increasing total of wealth and prosperity that goes to the laborers is constantly growing less_. A few minutes later in the same speech, Mr. Berger indorsed pure "State Socialism." Legislation, he said, that does not tend to _an increased measure of control on the part of society as a whole_ is not in line with the trend of economic evolution and cannot last. This formulates capitalistic collectivism with absolute distinctness. What it demands is not a new order, but more order. What it opposes is not so much the rule of capitalists, as the disorder of capitalism--which capitalists themselves are effectively remedying. It is not only our present government that is capitalistic but our present society, also. Increased control over industry, over legislation and government, on the part of the present society _as a whole_, would be but a step toward the achievement of _State capitalism_. The purpose of Socialism is to overcome and eliminate the power of capitalism whether in society or in government, and not to establish it more firmly. Increased control by society as a whole, far from being a Socialist principle, is not necessarily even radical or progressive. In fact _the most far-seeing conservatives_ to-day demand it, for "_control by society as a whole_" means, for the present, _control by society_ as it is. Finally, in reply to questions asked on the floor of Congress after this same speech, Mr. Berger said: "Any interference by the government with the rights of private property is Socialistic in tendency," that is, that every step in collectivism is a step in Socialism. Yet this demand for the restriction of the rights of private property by a conservative government is the identical principle advocated by progressives who will have nothing to do with Socialism. (See Part I, Chapter III.) Mr. Berger and the large minority of Socialist Party members that vote with him in Party Congresses and referendums may be said to represent a combination of trade unionism of the conservative kind, and "State Socialism," together with opportunistic methods more or less in contradiction with the usual tactics of the international movement. These methods and the indiscriminate support of conservative unionism have been repeatedly rejected by the Socialists in this country. But very many Socialists who repudiate all compromise and will have nothing of Australian or British Labor Party tactics in the United States are in entire accord with Mr. Berger on "State Socialist" reform. It is thus a modified form of "State Socialism" and not Laborism that now confronts the organization and creates its greatest problem. Mr. Charles Edward Russell, for example, says that "we are not striving for ourselves alone, but for our children," that "our aim is not merely for one country, but for all the world," that "we stand here immutably resolved against the whole of capitalism."[165] And Mr. Russell will hear nothing either of compromise or of a Labor Party. But when we come to examine the only question of practical moment, how his ideal is to be applied, we are astounded to read that, "every time a government acquires a railroad, it practices Socialism."[166] Mr. Russell points out that "almost all the railroads in the world, outside of the United States, are now owned by government," yet in his latest book, "Business," he refers to Prussia, Japan, Mexico [under Diaz], and other countries as having boldly purchased railways and coal mines when they desired them _for the common good_.[167] Mr. Russell here seems to overlook the fact that the history of Russia, Japan, Mexico, and Prussia has shown that there is an intermediate stage between our status and government "for the Common Good," a stage during which the capitalist class, having gained a more firm control over government than ever, intrusts it (with the opposition of but a few of the largest capitalists) with some of the most important business functions. Yet Mr. Russell himself admits, by implication, that government by Business "properly informed and broadly enlightened" might continue for a considerable period, and therefore directs his shafts largely against Business Government "as at present conducted," and he realizes fully that the most needed _reforms_, even when they directly benefit the workingmen, are equally or still more to the benefit of Business:-- "In the first place, if the masses of people become too much impoverished, the national stamina is destroyed, which would be exceedingly bad for Business in case Business should plunge us into war. In the second place, since poverty produces a steady decline in physical and mental capacity, if it goes too far, there is a lack of hands to do the work of Business and a lack of healthy stomachs to consume some of its most important products. "For these reasons, a Government for Profits, like ours, incurs certain deadly perils, _unless it be properly informed and broadly enlightened_. "Something of the truth of this has already been perceived by the astute gentlemen that steer the fortunes of the Standard Oil Company, a concern that in many respects may be considered the foremost present type of Business in Government. One of the rules of the Standard Oil Company is to pay good wages to its employees, and to see that they are comfortable and contented. As a result of this policy the Standard Oil Company is seldom bothered with strikes, and most of its workers have no connection with labor unions, do not listen to muck-rakers and other vile breeders of social discontent, and are quite satisfied with their little round of duties and their secure prospects in life.... "Unless Business recognizes quite fully the wisdom of similar arrangements for its employees, Business Government (_as at present conducted_) will in the end fall of its own weight."[168] (My italics.) Surely nobody has given more convincing arguments than Mr. Russell himself why Business Government should go in for government ownership and measures to increase the efficiency of labor. Surely no further reasons should be needed to prove that when a government purchases a railroad to-day, it does not practice Socialism. Yet the reverse is sustained by a growing number of members of the Socialist Party (though not by a growing proportion of the Party), which indicates that the Socialism of Bebel, Liebknecht, Kautsky, Guesde, Lafargue, and the International Socialist Congresses is at present by no means as firmly rooted in this country as it is on the Continent of Europe. FOOTNOTES: [144] _Journal of Political Economy_, October, 1911. [145] In her "American Socialism of the Present Day" (p. 252) Miss Hughan _denies that there are many varieties of American Socialism_, and says that the assertion that there are is justified only the many shades of _tactical policy_ to be found in the Party, "founded usually on corresponding gradations of emphasis upon the idea of catastrophe." I do not contend that there are _many_ varieties of Socialism within the Party either here or in other countries, but I have pointed out that there are _several_ and that _their differences are profound, if not irreconcilable_. It is precisely because they are founded on differences in tactics, _i.e. on real instead of theoretical_ grounds that they are of such importance, for as long as present conditions continue, they are likely to lead farther and farther apart, while new conditions may only serve to bring new differences. [146] Eugene V. Debs in the _International Socialist Review_ (Chicago), Jan. 1, 1911. [147] The _Social-Democratic Herald_ (Milwaukee), Oct. 12, 1901. [148] The _Social-Democratic Herald_, Feb. 22, 1902. [149] The _Social-Democratic Herald_, May 28, 1904. [150] _Press Despatch_, Aug. 26, 1911. [151] _New York Journal_, April 22, 1910. [152] _Social-Democratic Herald_, Vol. XII, No. 12. [153] _Social-Democratic Herald_, Vol. XII, No. 12. [154] _Social-Democratic Herald_, Vol. XII, March 24, 1906. [155] The following account is taken from the Garment Workers' Bulletin:-- "Recently the hod carriers in San Francisco presented a petition to their employers for increased pay and pressed for its consideration. This gave the members of the National Association of Manufacturers the opportunity they longed for to open war in San Francisco, and they promptly availed themselves of it. The petition was refused, of course, and two large lime manufacturers in the city took a hand. The contractors resolved on heroic measures, and work was stopped on some sixty buildings to 'bring labor to its senses.' Then Mayor McCarthy came into the controversy. He called his board of public workers together and remarked: 'I see all the contractors are tying up work because of the hod carriers' request. Better notify these fellows to at once clear all streets of building material before these structures and to move away those elevated walks and everything else from the streets.' The board so ordered. Then Mr. McCarthy said: 'Notice that those lime fellows are taking quite an interest in starting trouble. Guess we had better notify them that their temporary permits for railroad spurs to their plants are no longer in force.' And due notice went forth. The result was that the trouble with the hod carriers was settled in a week, and the contemplated industrial war in the city was indefinitely postponed...." [156] The _Bridgeport Socialist_, Oct. 29, 1911. [157] The _New York Times_, Oct. 20, 1911. [158] _New Yorker Volkszeitung_, Dec. 9, 1911. [159] _New York Evening Post_, Nov. 13, 1911. [160] _Collier's Weekly_, Dec. 9, 1911. [161] _Saturday Evening Post_, Nov. 18, 1911. [162] The _Outlook_, Aug. 26, 1911. [163] The _New York Call_, Aug. 14, 1911. [164] W. R. Shier in the _New York Call_, Aug. 16, 1911. [165] Speech at Carnegie Hall, New York, Oct. 15, 1910. [166] _Hampton's Magazine_, January, 1911. [167] "Business," p. 290. [168] "Business," p. 114. CHAPTER V REFORM BY MENACE OF REVOLUTION An American Socialist author expresses the opinion of many Socialists when he says of the movement: "It strives by all efforts in its power to increase its vote at the ballot box. It believes that by this increase the attainment of its goal is brought ever nearer, and also that _the menace of this increasing vote_ induces the capitalist class to grant concessions in the hope of preventing further increases. _It criticizes non-Socialist efforts at reform as comparatively barren of positive benefit_ and as tending, on the whole, to insure the dominance of the capitalist class and to continue the grave social evils now prevalent."[169] (My italics.) Because non-Socialist reforms tend to prolong the domination of the capitalist class, which no Socialist doubts, it is asserted that they are also comparatively barren of positive benefit. And if, from time to time and in contradiction to this view, changes are bought about by non-Socialist governments which undeniably do very much improve the condition of the working people, it is reasoned that this was done by the _menace_ either of a Socialist revolution or of a Socialist electoral majority. "A _Socialist_ reform must be in the nature of a working-class conquest," says Mr. Hillquit in his "Socialism in Theory and Practice"--expressing this very widespread Socialist opinion. He says that reforms inaugurated by small farmers, manufacturers, or traders, cause an "arrest of development or even a return to conditions of past ages, while the reforms of the more educated classes if less reactionary are not of a more efficient type." "The task of developing and extending factory legislation falls entirely on the organized workmen," according to this view, because the dominant classes have no interest in developing it, while the evils of the slums and of the employment of women and children in industry can be cured only by Socialism. Such reforms as can be obtained in this direction, though they are not considered by Mr. Hillquit "as the beginnings or installments of a Socialist system," he holds are to be obtained only with Socialist aid. In other words, while capitalism is not altogether unable or unwilling to benefit the working people, it can do little, and even this little is due to the presence of the Socialists. Another example of the "reformist's" view may be seen in the editorials of Mr. Berger, in the _Social-Democratic Herald_, of Milwaukee, where he says that the Social-Democrats never fail to declare that with all the social reforms, good and worthy of support as they may be, conditions _cannot be permanently improved_. That is to say, present-day reforms are not only of secondary importance, but that they are of merely temporary effect. "There is nothing more to hope from the property-holding classes." "The bourgeois reformers are constantly getting less progressive and allying themselves more and more with the reactionaries." "It is impossible that the capitalists should accomplish any important reform." "With all social reform, short of Socialism itself, conditions cannot be permanently improved." These and many similar expressions are either quotations from well-known Socialist authors or phrases in common use. Many French and German Socialists have even called the whole "State Socialist" program "social-demagogy." As none of the reforms proposed by the capitalists are sufficient to balance the counteracting forces and to carry society along their direction, Socialists sometimes mistakenly feel that _nothing whatever of benefit_ can come to the workers from capitalist government. As the capitalists' reforms all tend "to insure the dominance of the capitalist class," it is denied that they can cure any of the grave social evils now prevalent, and it is even asserted that they are reactionary. "For how many years have we been telling the workingman, especially the trade unionist," wrote the late Benjamin Hanford, on two successive occasions Socialist candidate for Vice President of the United States "that it was folly for him to beg in the halls of a capitalist legislature and a capitalist Congress? Did we mean what we said? I did, for one.... I not only believed it--I proved it." Obviously there are many political measures, just as _there are many improvements in industry and industrial organization_, that may be beneficial to the workers as well as the capitalists, but it is also clear that such changes will in most instances be brought about by the capitalists themselves. _On the other hand, even where they have a group of independent legislators of their own_, however large a minority it may form, the Socialists can expect no concessions of political or economic power until social revolution is at hand. The municipal platform adopted by the Socialist Party in New York City in 1909 also appealed to workingmen not to be deluded into the belief "that the capitalists will permit any measures of real benefit to the working class to be carried into effect by the municipality so long as they remain in undisputed control of the State and federal government and especially of the judiciary." This statement is slightly inaccurate. The capitalists will allow the enactment of measures that benefit the working class, provided those measures do not involve loss to the capitalist class. Thus sanitation and education are of real benefit to the workers, but, temporarily at least, they benefit the capitalist class still more, by rendering the workers more efficient as wealth producers. The Socialist platforms of the various countries all recognize, to use the language of that of the United States, that all the reforms indorsed by the Socialists "are but a preparation of the workers to seize the _whole_ power of government, in order that they may thereby lay hold of the _whole_ system of industry and thus come to their rightful inheritance." (Italics are mine.) This might be interpreted to mean that through such reforms the Socialists are gaining control over parts of industry and government. Marx took the opposite view; "the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling power...." He left open no possibility of saying that the Socialists thought that without overthrowing capitalism they could seize a _part_ of the powers of government (though they were already electing legislative minorities and subordinate officials in his day). Sometimes there are still more ambiguous expressions in Socialist platforms which even make it possible for social reformers who have joined the movement to confess publicly that they use it exclusively for reform purposes, and still to claim that they are Socialists (see Professor Clark's advice in the following chapter). For example, instead of heading such proposals as the nationalization of the railroads and "trusts" and the State appropriation of ground rent "reforms indorsed by Socialists," they have called such reforms, perhaps inadvertently, "_Immediate Demands_," and the American platform has referred to them as measures of relief which "we may be able to _force_ from capitalism." There can be no doubt that Marx and his chief followers, on the contrary, saw that such reforms would come from the capitalists without the necessity of any Socialist force or demand--though this pressure might hasten their coming (see Part I, Chapter VIII). They are viewed by him and an increasing number of Socialists not as _concessions to Socialism forced from the capitalists, but as developments of capitalism desired by the more progressive capitalists and Socialists alike, but especially by the Socialists_ owing to their desire that State capitalism shall develop as rapidly as possible--as a preliminary to Socialism,--and to the fact that the working people suffer more than the capitalists at any delay in the establishment even of this transitional state. The platform of the American Party just quoted classes such reforms as government relief for the unemployed, government loans for public work, and collective ownership of the railways and trusts, as measures it may be able "to force from capitalism," as "a preparation of the workers to seize the whole power of government." But if the capitalists do enact such reforms as these, not on the independent grounds I have indicated, but out of fear of Socialism, as is here predicted, why should not the process of coercing capitalism continue indefinitely until gradually all power is taken away from them? Why should there be any special need to "seize" the whole power, if the capitalists can be coerced even now, while the government is still largely theirs? Some "reformists" do not hesitate to answer frankly that there is indeed no ground for expecting any revolutionary crisis. Mr. John Spargo feels that reforms "will prove in their totality to be the Revolution itself," and that if the Socialists keep in sight this whole body of reforms, which he calls the Revolution, "as the objective of every Reform," this will sufficiently distinguish them from non-Socialist reformers. Mr. Morris Hillquit also speaks for many other influential Socialists when he insists that the Socialists differ from other Parties chiefly in that they alone "see the clear connection and necessary interdependence" between the various social evils. That there is no ground for any such assertion is shown by the fact that the social evils discussed in the capitalist press, and all the remedies which have any practical chance of enactment, as is now generally perceived, are due to extreme poverty, the lack of order in industry, and the need of government regulations, guided by a desire to promote "efficiency," and to perfect the _capitalist_ system. Non-Socialist reformers have already made long strides toward improving the worst forms of poverty, without taking the slightest step towards social democracy. These reforms are being introduced more and more rapidly and are not likely to be checked until what we now know as poverty and its accompanying evils are practically abolished _by the capitalist class while promoting their own comfort and security_. This, for example, is, as I have shown, the outspoken purpose of Mr. Lloyd George and his capitalistic supporters in England. Similarly, it is the outspoken purpose of the promoters of the present "efficiency" movement among the business men of America. However the material conditions of the working classes may be bettered by such means, their personal liberty and political power may be so much curtailed in the process as to make further progress by their own associated efforts more difficult under "State Socialism" than it is to-day. The State platform of the Socialist Party of New York in 1910, while seemingly self-contradictory in certain of its phrases, makes the sharpest distinctions between Socialism and "State Socialist" reform. Its criticism of reform parties is on the whole so vigorous and its insistence on class struggle tactics so strong as to make it clear that there is no expectation of reaching Socialism through reforms granted, from whatever motive, by a non-Socialist majority. I have italicized some significant phrases:-- "The two dominant political parties pretend to stand for all the people; the so-called reform parties claim to speak for the good people; the Socialist party frankly acknowledges that it is concerned chiefly with the working people.... "The great fortunes of the wealthy come from the spoliation of the poor. Large profits for the manufacturers mean starvation wages for the workers; the princely revenues of the landlords are derived from excessive rents of the tenants, and the billions of watered stock and bonds crying for dividends and interest are a perpetual mortgage upon the work and lives of the people of all generations to come.... "_No political party can honestly serve all the people of the state_--those who prey and those who toil; those who rob and those who are robbed. _The parties as well as the voters of this state must take their stand in the conflict of interests of the different classes of society_--they must choose between the workers and their despoilers. "The Republican and Democratic Parties alike always have been the tools of the dominating classes. They have been managed, supported, and financed by the money powers of the State, and in turn they have conducted the legislatures, courts, and executive offices of the State as accessories to the business interests of those classes. "These vices of our government are not accidental, but are deeply and firmly rooted in our industrial system. To maintain its supremacy in this conflict the dominating class _must_ strive to control our government and politics, and must influence and corrupt our public officials. "The two old parties _as well as the so-called reform parties of the middle classes_, which spring up in New York politics from time to time, all stand for the continuance of that system, hence they are bound to perpetuate and to aggravate its inevitable evils...." The New York Party had immediately before it the example of Mr. Hearst, who has gone as far as the radicals of the old parties in Wisconsin, or Kansas, Oklahoma, California, or Oregon in verbally indorsing radical reform measures, and also of Mr. Roosevelt, who occasionally has gone almost as far. Day after day the Hearst papers had sent out to their millions of readers editorials which contain every element of Socialism except its essence, the class struggle. The New York Party, like many in other Socialist organizations, found itself _compelled by circumstances to take a revolutionary stand_. For when opportunistic reformers opposed to the Socialist movement go as far as the Hearst papers in indorsing "State Socialist" reforms, what hope would there be for Socialists to gain the public ear if they went scarcely farther, either as regards the practical measures they propose or the phrases they employ? If the "reformist" Socialists answer that their _ultimate aim_ is to go farther, may they not be asked what difference this makes in present-day affairs? And if they answer that certain reforms must be forced through by Socialist threats, political or revolutionary, will they not be told, first that it can be shown that the whole "State Socialistic" reform program, if costly to many individual capitalists, promises to prove _ultimately profitable_ to the capitalist class, and second, that it is being carried out where there is no present menace either of a Socialist revolution or even of a more or less Socialistic political majority. But the position of the politically ambitious among so-called "orthodox" Socialists (I do not refer to personal or individual, but only to partisan ambition) is often very similar at the bottom to that of the "reformists"; while the latter contend that capitalism can grant few if any reforms of any great benefit to the working people _without Socialist aid_, some of the orthodox lay equal weight on Socialist agitation for these same reforms, on the ground that they cannot be accomplished by collaborating with capitalist reformers at all, but _solely through the Socialist Party_. "The revolutionary Marxists," says the French Socialist, Rappaport, "test the gifts of capitalistic reform through its motives. And they discover that these motives are not crystal clear. The reformistic patchwork is meant to prop up and make firmer the rotten capitalistic building. They test capitalistic reforms, moreover, by the means which are necessary for their accomplishment. These means are either altogether lacking or insufficient, and in any case they flow in overwhelming proportion out of the pockets of the exploited classes."[170] We need not agree with Rappaport that capitalistic reforms bring no possible benefit to labor, or that the capitalistic building is rotten and about to fall to pieces. May it not be that it is strong and getting stronger? May it not be that the control over the whole building, far from passing into Socialist hands, is removed farther and farther from their reach, so that the promise of obtaining, not reforms of more or less importance, but a fair and satisfactory _share_ of progress _without conquering capitalism_ is growing less? Thus many orthodox and revolutionary Socialists even, to say nothing of "reformists," become mere political partisans, make almost instinctive efforts to credit all political progress to the Socialist Parties, contradict their own revolutionary principles. All reforms that happen to be of any benefit to labor, they claim, are due to the pressure of the working classes within Parliaments or outside of them; which amounts to conceding that the Socialists are already sharing in the power of government or industry, a proposition that the revolutionaries always most strenuously deny. For if Socialists are practically sharing in government and industry to-day, the orthodox and revolutionists will have difficulty in meeting the argument of the "reformists" that it is only necessary to continue the present pressure in order to obtain more and more, without any serious conflicts, until all Socialism is gradually accomplished. Kautsky makes much of the capitalists' present fear of the working classes, though in his opinion this fear makes not only for "concessions" but also for reactions, as in the world-wide revival of imperialism. Foreign conquests, he believes, are the only alternative the governing classes are able to offer to the glowing promises of the Socialists. It is for this reason, he believes, that the capitalists are relying more and more on imperialism, even though they know that the conquest of colonies is no longer possible to the extent it was before, and realize that the cost of maintaining armaments is rapidly becoming greater than colonial profits. But this also is to underestimate the resources of capitalism and its capacity for a certain form of progress. If the capitalists are not to be forced to concessions, neither are they to be forced, unless in a very great crisis, to reactionary measures that in themselves bring no profit. The progressive "State Socialist" program is, as a rule, a far more promising road to popularity from their standpoint than is reactionary imperialism. In Kautsky's view the bourgeoisie is driven by the fear of Socialism, in a country like Germany to reaction, and in one like England to _attempt_ reform. In neither case will it actually proceed to reforms of any considerable benefit to labor, apparently because Kautsky believes that all such reforms would inevitably strengthen labor relatively to capital, and will therefore not be allowed. Similarly, he feels that the capitalists will refuse all concessions to political democracy (on the same erroneous supposition, that they will inevitably aid labor more than capital). For example, the British Liberals have abolished the veto of the House of Lords, but only to increase the power of other capitalists against landowners, while the Conservatives have proposed the Referendum, but only to protect the Lords. From 1884 to 1911 neither Party had introduced any measure to democratize the House of Commons and so to increase the representation of labor. Kautsky reminds us of the plural voting, unequal electoral districts, and absence of primary and secondary elections. This he believes is evidence that the capitalists fear to extend political democracy farther. They even fear the purely economic reforms that are being enacted, he claims, and at every concession made to labor desert the Liberals to join the Conservatives. Land reform, taxation reform, the eight-hour day, are being carried out, however. But when it comes to such matters as an extended suffrage, the capitalists will balk. His conclusion is that if economic reforms are to continue, if, for example, the unemployed are to be set to work by the government, or if political reforms are to be resumed, the Labourites have to free themselves from the tutelage of the Liberal Party. And if they do this, they can play so effectively on capitalist fears as to force an extension of the suffrage and even change the British Parliament into a "tool for the dictatorship of the working class." As in Germany, all political advance of value to labor must be obtained through playing on capitalist fears--only in England the process may be more gradual and results easier to obtain. "Every extension of the suffrage to the working class must be fought for to-day," says Kautsky, "and it is only thanks to the _fear_ of the working class that it is not abolished where it exists." By a strange coincidence Kautsky renewed the prediction that the capitalistic Radical government of England would never extend the ballot except when forced by Labor only a few days before Prime Minister Asquith officially, without any special pressure from Labor, pledged it to equal and universal (manhood) suffrage. The passage follows:-- "In England the suffrage is still limited to-day, and capitalistic Radicalism, in spite of its fine phrases, has no idea of enlarging it. The poorest part of the population is excluded from the ballot. In all Great Britain (in 1906) only 16.64 per cent possessed, against 22 per cent in Germany. If England had the German Reichstag suffrage law, 9,600,000 would be enfranchised, instead of 7,300,000, _i.e._ 2,300,000 more."[171] Kautsky's view that capitalists cannot bend a more or less democratic government to their purposes and therefore will not institute such a government, unless forced to do so, is undoubtedly based on German conditions. He contends that the hope of the German bourgeois lies not in democracy nor even in the Reichstag, but in the strength of Prussia, which spells Absolutism and Militarism. He admits in one passage that conditions may be different in the United States, England, and British colonies, and under certain circumstances in France, but for the peoples of eastern Europe advanced measures of democracy such as direct legislation belong to "the future State," while no reforms of importance to the workers are to be secured to-day except through the menace of revolution. It would be perfectly consistent with this, doubtlessly correct, view of present German conditions, if Kautsky said that after Germany has overthrown Absolutism and Militarism, progressive capitalism may be expected to conquer reactionary capitalism in Germany as elsewhere, and to use direct legislation and other democratic measures for the purpose of increasing profits, with certain secondary, incidental and lesser (but by no means unimportant) benefits to labor. But this he refuses to do. He readily admits that Germany is backward politically, but as she is advanced economically he apparently allows his view of other countries to-day and of the Germany of the future to be guided by the fact that the large capitalists now in control in that country (with military and landlord aid) oppose even that degree of democracy and those labor reforms which, as I have shown, would result in an increased product for the capitalist class as a whole (though not of all capitalists). For he pictures the reactionary capitalists in continuous control in the future both in Germany and other countries, and the smaller capitalists as important between these and the masses of wage earners. The example of other countries (equally developed economically and more advanced than Germany politically) suggests, on the contrary, a growing unity of large and small capital through the action of the state--and as a result the more or less progressive policy I have outlined. (See Part I.) But Kautsky's view is that of a very large number of Socialists, especially in Germany and neighboring countries, is having an enormous influence, and deserves careful consideration. The proletariat, he says, is not afraid of the most extreme revolutionary efforts and sacrifices to win equal suffrage where, as in Germany, it is withheld. "And every attempt to take away or limit the German laborer's right of voting for the Reichstag would call forth the danger of a fearful catastrophe to the Empire."[172] It is here and elsewhere suggested, on the basis of German experience, that this struggle over the ballot is a struggle between Capital and Labor. The German Reichstag suffrage was made equal by Bismarck in 1870 for purely capitalistic reasons, and the number of voters in England was doubled as late as 1884, and the suffrage is now to be made universal through similar motives. Yet the present domination of the German Liberals and those of neighboring countries by a reactionary bureaucratic, military, and landlord class, persuades Kautsky that genuine capitalistic Liberalism everywhere is at an end. Yet in 1910 the German Radicals succeeded, after many years of vain effort, in forming out of their three parties a united organization, the Progressive Peoples Party (_Fortschrittliche Volkspartei_). The program adopted included almost every progressive reform, and, acting in accordance with its principles, this Party quite as frequently coöperates with the Socialists on its left as with the National Liberals immediately on its right. The whole recent history of the more advanced countries, including even Italy, would indicate that the small capitalist element, which largely composes this party, will obtain the balance of power and either through the new party or through the Socialist "reformists" (the latter either in or out of the parent organization)--or through both together--will before many years bring about the extension of the suffrage in Prussia (though not its equalization), the equalization of the Reichstag electoral districts, and the reduction of the tariff that supports the agrarian landlords and large capitalists, put a halt to some of the excesses of military extravagance (though not to militarism), institute a government responsible to the Reichstag, provide government employment for the unemployed, and later take up the other industrial and labor reforms of capitalist collectivism as inaugurated in other countries, together with a large part also of the radical democratic program. There is no reason for supposing that the evolution of capitalism is or will be basically different in Germany from that of other countries. (See Chapter VII.) Though he regards Socialism as the sole impelling force for reforms of benefit to labor, Kautsky definitely acknowledges that no reforms that are immediately practicable can be regarded as the _exclusive_ property of the Socialist Party:-- "But this is certain," he says, "there is scarcely a single practical demand for present-day legislation, that is peculiar to any particular party. Even the Social Democracy scarcely shows one such demand. That through which it differentiates itself from other parties is the totality of its practical demands and the goals towards which it points. The eight-hour law, for example, is no revolutionary demand.... "What holds together political parties, especially when like the Social Democrats they have great historic tasks to accomplish, are their final goals; not their momentary demands, not their views as to the attitude to be assumed on all the separate questions that come before the party. "Differences of opinion are always present within the Party and sometimes reach a threatening height. But they will be the less likely to break up the Party, the livelier the consciousness in its members of the great goals towards which they strive in common, the more powerful the enthusiasm for these goals, so that demands and interests of the moment are behind them in importance."[173] The only way to differentiate the Socialists from other parties, the only thing Socialists have in common with one another is, according to this view, not agreement as to practical action, but certain ideals or goals. Socialists may want the same things as non-Socialists, and reject the things desired by other Socialists, and their actions may follow their desires, but all is well, and harmony may reign as long as their hearts and minds are filled with a Socialist ideal. But if a goal thus has no _necessary_ connection with immediate problems or actions, is it necessarily anything more than a sentiment or an abstraction? Kautsky's toleration of reform activities thus has an opposite origin to that of the "reformist" Socialists. _He_ tolerates concentration on capitalistic measures by factions within the Socialist Party, on the ground that such measures are altogether of secondary importance; _they_ insist on these reforms as the most valuable activities Socialists can undertake at the present time. Kautsky and his associates will often tolerate activities that serve only to weaken the movement, provided verbal recognition is given to the Socialist ideal. This has led to profound contradictions in the German movement. At the Leipzig Congress, for example (1909), the reformists voted unanimously for the reaffirmation of the revolutionary "Dresden resolution" of 1903, with the explanation that they regarded it in the very opposite sense from what its words plainly stated. They had fought this resolution at the time it was passed, and condemned it since, and had continued the actions against which it was directed. But their vote in favor of it and explanation that they refused to give it any practical bearing had to be accepted at Leipzig without a murmur. Such is the result of preaching loyalty to phrases, goals, or ideals rather than in action. The reformists can often, though not always, escape responsibility for their acts by claiming loyalty to the goal--often, no doubt, in all sincerity; for goals, ideals, doctrines, and sentiments, like the human conscience, are generally highly flexible and subtle things. Kautsky's policy of ideal revolutionism, combined with practical toleration of activities given over exclusively to non-Socialist reform, which is so widespread in the German movement under the form of a too rigid separation between theory on the one hand and tactics on the other, agrees at another point with the policy of the reformists. The latter, as I have mentioned, seek to justify their absorption in reforms that the capitalists also favor, by claiming that they determine their attitude to a reform by its relation to a larger program, whereas the capitalists do not. Kautsky similarly differentiates the Socialists by the totality of their demands; the individual reform, being, as he concedes, usually if not always supported by other parties also. Yet it is difficult to see how a program composed wholly of non-Socialist elements could in any combination become distinctly Socialist. A Socialist program of _immediate_ demands may be peculiar to some Socialist political group at a given moment, but usually it contains no features that would prevent a purely capitalist party taking it up spontaneously, in the interest of capitalism. What is it that drives Kautsky into the position that I have described? To this question we can find a definite answer, and it leads us into the center of the seeming mysteries of Socialist policy. The preservation of the Socialist Party organization, with its heterogeneous constituent elements, is held to be all-important; and this party organization cannot be kept intact, and _all_ its present supporters retained, without a program of practical reforms that may be secured with a little effort from capitalist governments. In order to claim this program as distinctively theirs, Socialists must differentiate it in some way from other reform programs. As there is no practical difference, they must insist that the ideal is not the same, that Socialists are using the reforms for different purposes, that only part of their program is like that of any one capitalist party, while in other parts it resembles those of other capitalist parties, etc. That "party necessity" can drive even radical and influential Socialists into such a position may seem incredible. But when it is understood that loyalty to party also conflicts with loyalty to principle in many cases even to the point of driving many otherwise revolutionary Socialists to the very opposite extreme, _i.e._ to fighting _against_ progressive capitalist reforms purely for party reasons, this willingness to allow the Socialist organization to claim such reforms as in some sense its own, will appear as the lesser deviation from principle. For example, Kautsky opposes direct legislation--with the proviso that _perhaps_ it may have _a certain value_ in English-speaking countries and _under some circumstances_ in France. His arguments in spite of this proviso are directed almost wholly against it, on the ground that direct legislation would take many reforms out of the hands of the Party, would cause them to be discussed independently of one another instead of bound together as if they were inseparable parts of a program and would weaken the Party in direct proportion as its use was extended.[174] Yet Kautsky himself contends, in the same work in which this passage occurs, that Socialists favor all measures of democracy, even when the movement at first loses by their introduction. In a word he holds that the function of promoting immediately practicable political reforms is so important to the Party, and the Party with its present organization, membership and activities, is so important to the movement, that even the most fundamental principle may, on occasion, be disregarded. Democracy is admitted to be a principle so inviolable that it is to be upheld generally even when the Party temporarily loses by it. Yet because direct legislation might rob the Socialists of all opportunity for claiming the credit for non-Socialist reforms, because it would put to a direct vote a program composed wholly of elements held in common with other parties, and differing only in its combination of these elements, because the Party tactics would have to be completely transformed and the Party temporarily weakened by being forced to limit itself entirely to revolutionary efforts, Kautsky turns against this keystone of democratic reform. "There is indeed no legislation without compromises," he writes; "the great masses who are not experienced political leaders, must be much easier confused and misled than the political leaders. If compromise in voting on bills were really corrupting, then it would work much more harm through direct popular legislation than through legislation by Parliament, ... for that would mean nothing less than to drive the cause of corruption from Parliament, out among the people." "Direct legislation," he continues, "has the tendency to divert attention from general principles and to concentrate it on concrete questions."[175] But if the Socialists cannot educate the masses to know what they want concretely, how much less will they understand general principles? If they cannot judge such concrete and separate questions, how will they control Socialist officials who, as it is now, so often build their programs and decide their tactics for them? There is no mechanical substitute for self-government within Socialist organizations or elsewhere. Direct legislation will do much to destroy all artificial situations and place society on the solid basis of the knowledge or ignorance, the division or organization, the weakness or strength of character of the masses. The present situation, however useful for well-intentioned Socialist "leaders," is even better adapted to the machinations of capitalist politicians. And because it militates against the politically powerful small capitalists as well as against the non-capitalists, it is doomed to an early end. Kautsky, in a word, actually fears that the present capitalist society will carry out, one by one, its own reforms. For the same reason that he denies the ability or willingness of capitalism to make any considerable improvements in the material conditions of labor, except as compelled by the superior force (or the fear of the superior force) of Socialism, he would, if possible, prevent the capitalists from introducing certain democratic improvements that would facilitate reforms independently of the Socialist Party. However, the economic and political evolution of capitalism will doubtless continue to take its course, and through improved democratic methods all Socialist arguments based on the impossibility of any large measure of working-class progress under capitalism, and all efforts to credit what is being done to the advance of Socialism, will be seen to have been futile. The contention between Socialists and capitalists will then be reduced to its essential elements:-- Is progress under capitalism as great as it might be under Socialism? Is capitalist progress making toward Socialism by improving the position of the non-capitalists _when compared with that of the capitalists_, or is it having the opposite effect? Even the "syndicalists," little interested as they are in reform, seem to fear, as Kautsky does, that so long as considerable changes for the better are possible, progress towards Socialism, which in their case also implies revolution, is impossible. I have shown that Lagardelle denies that Labor and Capital have any interest whatever in common. Similarly, a less partisan writer, Paul Louis, author of the leading work on French unionism ("Histoire du Movement Syndicate en France"), while he notes every evil of the coming State Socialism, yet ignores its beneficent features, and bases his whole defense of revolutionary labor unionism on the proposition that important reforms, even if aided by friendly Socialist coöperation or hostile Socialist threats, can no longer be brought about under capitalism:-- "The Parliamentary method was suited by its principle to the reform era. Direct action corresponds to the syndicalist era. Nothing is more simple. "As long as organized labor believes in the possibility of amending present society by a series of measures built up one upon the other, it makes use of the means that the present system offers it. It proceeds through intervening elected persons. It imagines that from a theoretical discussion there will arise such ameliorations that its vassalage will be gradually abolished." The belief here appears that a steady, continuous, and marked improvement in the position of the working class would necessarily lead to its overtaking automatically the rapidly increasing power of capitalism. If this were so, it would indeed be true, as Louis contends, that no revolutionary movement could begin, except when all beneficial labor reforms and other working-class progress had ended. I shall quote (Part III, Chapter V) a passage where Louis indicates that syndicalism, like Socialism itself, is directed in the most fundamental way against all existing governments. He takes the further step of saying that existing governments can do nothing whatever for the benefit of labor, and that their _sole_ function is that of repression:-- "The State, which has taken for its mission--and no other could be conceived--the defense of existing society, could not allow its power of command to be attacked. The social hierarchy which itself rests upon the economic subordination of one class to another, will be maintained only so long as the governmental power shatters every assault victoriously, represses every initiative, punishes without mercy all innovators and all factious persons.... "In the new order [syndicalism] there is no room for any capitalistic attribute, even reduced to its most simple expression. There is no longer room for a political system for safeguarding privileges and conquering rebels. If our definition of the State is accepted, that it is an organ of defense, always more and more exacting because it is in a society always more and more menaced, it will be understood that such a State is condemned to disappear with that society.... "The State crushes the individual, and syndicalism appeals to all the latent energies of that individual, the State suspects and throttles organizations, and syndicalism multiplies them against it.... All institutions created by the State for the defense of the capitalist system are assailed, undermined by syndicalism."[176] Here is a view of the State as far opposed as possible to that of Kautsky, who says truly that it is "a monster economic establishment, and its influence on the whole economic life of a nation to-day is already beyond the power of measurement."[177] For Kautsky, the State is primarily economic and constructive; for Louis it is purely political and repressive. Yet Kautsky, like Louis, seems to feel that if the State were capable of carrying out reforms of any importance to the wage earners, or if it were admitted that it could do so, it would be impossible to persuade the workers that a revolution is necessary and feasible. And so both deny that "State Socialism," which they recognize as an _intervening stage_ between the capitalism of to-day and Socialism, is destined to give better material conditions, if less liberty, than the present society. Both the economic and political revolutionists are, on such grounds, often tempted to agree with the reformists of the party and of the labor unions, in leveling their guns exclusively against the private capitalism of to-day--I might almost say the capitalism of the past--instead of concentrating their attack on the evils that will remain undiminished under the State capitalism of the future. The reformists do this consistently, for they see in the constructive side of "State Socialism," not a mere continuation of capitalism, but a large installment of Socialism itself, and have nothing more to ask for beyond a continuation of such reforms. Revolutionary Socialists are inconsistent, because they may admit that the conditions of the working people under "State Socialism" may be far better than they are to-day, without invalidating their central position that the greater evils of to-day will remain, and that there will be no progress towards Socialism, no matter what reforms are enacted, until the Socialists are either actually or practically in power. When the Socialists have become so numerous as to be on the verge of securing control of the government (by whatever means), it is unlikely that the privileged classes will permit peaceful political or constitutional procedures to continue and put them completely at the mercy of the non-privileged. In all probability they will then resort to military violence under pretext of military necessity (see Part III, Chapter VIII). _If when this time arrives, the Socialists have not only a large political majority, but also the physical power to back it up_, or seem about to secure this majority and this power, then indeed, though not before that time, the capitalists may, possibly, begin to make concessions which involve a weakening of their position in society, _i.e._ which necessitate more and more concessions until their power is destroyed. The revolutionary reformers, if we may apply this term to Kautsky and his associates, are then only somewhat premature in their belief that the Socialist Party is _now_, or will _very shortly_ become, a real menace to capitalism; whereas the political reformers are under the permanent illusion that capitalism will retreat before paper ballots. Moreover, Kautsky and the revolutionary reformers, in order to make _their_ (physical) menace effective, must continually teach the people to look forward and prepare to use all the means in their power for their advance. They are thus thoroughly in accord with the non-reformist revolutionists who, however much they may welcome certain capitalist reforms, do not agree that they will be very materially hastened by anything the Socialists can do. The non-reformist revolutionists assume that Socialists will vote for every form of progress, including the most thoroughly capitalistic, and acknowledge that _if they fail in their duty in this respect, these reforms might be materially retarded_. But they are willing to let the capitalists take the lead in such reform work, giving them the whole credit for what benefits it brings, and placing on their shoulders the whole responsibility for its limitations. Their criticism of capitalist reform is leveled not against what it does, but against what it leaves undone. Revolutions in machinery and business organization under capitalism, with which Socialists certainly have nothing to do, they regard also as not only important, but of vast significance, since it is by their aid alone that Socialism is becoming a possibility. And now a new period is coming in, during which the capitalists, on grounds that have no connection whatever with Socialism or the Socialist movement, will effect another equally indispensable revolution, in the organization of labor and business by _governmental means_. Revolutionary Socialists are ready to give the fullest credit to capitalism for what it has done, what it is doing, and what it is about to do--for, however vast the changes now in process of execution, they feel that the task that lies before the Socialists is vaster still. The capitalists, to take one point by way of illustration, develop such individuals and such latent powers in every individual, as they can utilize for increasing the private income of the capitalists as a class, or of governments which are wholly or very largely in their control. _The Socialists propose to develop the latent abilities of all individuals in proportion to their power to serve the community._ The collectivist capitalists will continue to extend opportunity to more and more members of the community, but always leaving the numbers of the privileged undiminished and always providing for all their children first--admitting only the cream of the masses to the better positions, and this after all of the ruling classes, including the most worthless, have been provided for. The Socialists propose, the moment they secure a majority, to make opportunity, not more equal, but equal. Those Socialists, then, who expect that reforms of importance to wage earners are to be secured to-day exclusively by the menace either of a political overturn or of a Socialist revolution, and those who imagine that the Socialist hosts are going to be strengthened by recruits attracted by the rôle Socialists are playing in obtaining such immediate reforms, make a triple error. They credit Socialism with a power it has nowhere yet achieved and cannot expect until a revolutionary period is immediately at hand; that is, they grossly exaggerate the present powers of the Socialist movement and grossly underestimate the task that lies before it. They are seemingly blind to the possibilities of transformation and progress that still inhere in capitalism--the increased unity and power it will gain through "State capitalism," and the increased wealth that will come through a beneficent and scientific policy of producing, through wholesale reforms and improvements, more efficient and profitable laborers. They fail to see that the strength of the enemy will lie henceforth more frequently in deception than in repression. But even this is not their most fatal blunder. In attacking individualistic and reactionary rather than collectivistic and progressive capitalism, these Socialists are not only wasting their energies by assaulting a moribund power, but are training their forces to use weapons and to practice evolutions that will soon be obsolete and useless. They are doing the work and filling the function of the small capitalists. The large capitalists organized industry; the small capitalists will nationalize it; in so far at least as it has been or will have been organized. Socialists gain from both processes, approve of both, and aid them in every way within their power. But their chief function is to overthrow capitalism. And as the larger part of this task lies off some distance in the future, it is the capitalism of the future and not that of the past with which Socialists are primarily concerned. Evidently but a few years will elapse before State capitalism will everywhere dominate. In the meanwhile, to attribute its progress to the _menace_ of the advance of Socialism, is to abandon the Socialist standpoint just as completely as do the reformist Socialists in regarding capitalist-collectivist reforms as installments of Socialism, to be achieved only with Socialist _aid_. For Socialists will be judged by what they are doing rather than by what they promise to do. If political reformists and revolutionary reformists are both directing their chief attention to promoting the reforms of "State Socialism," it will make little difference whether the first argue that these beneficial measures are a part of Socialism and a guarantee of the whole; or the second claim that, though such reforms are no part of Socialism, the superiority of the movement is shown chiefly by the fact that they could not have been brought about except through its efforts. Mankind will rightly conclude that the things that absorb the chief Socialist activities are those that are also forming the character of the movement. In direct proportion as reforming Socialists spend their energies in doing the same things as reforming capitalists do, they tend inevitably to become more and more alike. Only in proportion as Socialists can differentiate themselves from non-Socialists _in their present activities_ will the movement have any distinctive meaning of its own. FOOTNOTES: [169] W. J. Ghent, "Socialism and Success," p. 47. [170] Rappaport, "Der Kongress von Nimes," _Die Neue Zeit_, 1910, p. 821. [171] _Die Neue Zeit_, Oct. 27, 1911. [172] "Parlamentarismus und Demokratie," edition of 1911, p. 121. [173] "Parlamentarismus und Demokratie," edition of 1911, pp. 132-133. [174] "Parlamentarismus und Demokratie," edition of 1911, pp. 131-134. [175] "Parlamentarismus und Demokratie," edition of 1911, pp. 131-134. [176] "Le Syndicalisme contre L'État," pp. 223-235, 239-242. [177] "Parlamentarismus und Demokratie," p. 114. CHAPTER VI REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS In the most famous document of international Socialism, the "Communist Manifesto" (published by Marx and Engels in 1847), there is a fulmination against "reactionary Socialism," which it will be seen is approximately what we now call "State Socialism." After describing the Utopian Socialism of Fourier, of Saint-Simon and of Owen, the "Manifesto" says:-- "A second form of Socialism, less systematic but more practical, tried to disgust the working people with every revolutionary movement, by demonstrating to them that it is not such and such a political advantage, but only a transformation of the relations of material life and of economic conditions that could profit them. Let it be noted that by transformation of the material relations of society this Socialism does not mean the abolition of capitalist relations of production, but only administrative reforms brought out precisely on the basis of capitalist production, and which consequently do not affect the relation of capital and wage labor, but in the best case only diminish the expenses and simplify the administrative labor of a capitalist government.... In the promotion of their plans they act always with the consciousness of defending first of all the interest of the working class. The working class only exists for them under this aspect of the suffering class. "But in accordance with the undeveloped state of the class struggle and their social position, they consider themselves quite above antagonism. They desire to ameliorate the material condition of life for all the members of society, even the most privileged. As a consequence, they do not cease to appeal to all society without distinction, or rather they address themselves by preference to the reigning class."[178] Marx points out that the chief aim of these "reactionary Socialists" was the transformation of the State into a mere organ for the administration of industry in their interest, which is precisely what we mean to-day by "State Socialism." In contrast with this "reactionary Socialism," now prevalent in Great Britain and Australia, the Socialist parties of every country of the European Continent (where such parties are most developed), without exception are striving for a social democracy and a government of the non-privileged and not for a scheme of material benefits bestowed by an all-powerful capitalist State. Professor Anton Menger, of the University of Vienna, one of the most acute and sympathetic observers of the movement, remarks correctly that--"in all countries, at all times, the proletariat [working class] has rightly thought that the continuous development of its _power_ is worth more than any _economic advantage_ that can be granted it."[179] The late Paul Lafargue, perhaps the leading thinker of the French Socialist movement, a son-in-law of Karl Marx, made a declaration at a recent Party Congress which brings out still more clearly the prevailing Socialist attitude. Denying that the Socialists are opposed to reforms, he said: "On the contrary, we demand all reforms, even the most bourgeois [capitalist] reforms like the income tax and the purchase of the West [the Western railroad, lately purchased by the government]. It matters little to us who proposes reforms, and I may add that the most important of them all for the working class have not been presented by Socialist deputies, but by the bourgeois [capitalists]. Free and compulsory education was not proposed by Socialists." That is to say, Lafargue believed that reforms extremely beneficial to the working class might be enacted without any union of Socialists with non-Socialists, without the Socialists gaining political power and without their even constituting a menace to the rule of the anti-Socialist classes. Capitalism of itself, in its own interest and without any reference to Socialism or the Socialists, may go very far towards developing a society which in turn develops an ever growing and developing working class, though without increasing the actual political or economic powers of this class when compared with its own. In Germany especially, Marx's co-workers and successors developed marked hostility to "State Socialism" from the moment when it was taken up by Bismarck nearly a generation ago (1883). August Bebel's hostility to the existing State goes so far that he predicts that it will expire "with the expiration of the ruling class,"[180] while Engels contended that the very phrase "the Socialist State" was valueless as a slogan in the present propaganda of Socialism, and scientifically ineffective.[181] Engels had even predicted, as long ago as 1880, that the coming of monopolies would bring it about that the State, being "the official representative of capitalistic society," would ultimately have to undertake "the protection of production," and that this necessity would first be felt in the case of the railways and the telegraphs. Later events have shown that his prediction was so correct that even America and England are approaching the nationalization of their railways, while the proposal to nationalize monopolies is rapidly growing in popularity in every country in the world, and among nearly all social classes. Engels did not consider that such developments were necessarily in the direction of Socialism any more than the nationalization of the railways by the Czar or the Prussian government. On the contrary, he suggested that it meant the strengthening of the capitalism. "The modern State," he wrote in 1880, "no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalistic machine, the State of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more it actually becomes the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wageworkers--proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head."[182] Engels did not think that State ownership necessarily meant Socialism; but he thought that it might be utilized for the purposes of Socialism if the working class was sufficiently numerous, organized, and educated to take charge of the situation. "State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that give the elements of the solution." As early as 1892 Karl Kautsky, at the present moment perhaps the greatest living Socialist editor and economist, wrote that the system of laissez-faire, for which "State Socialism" offers itself as a remedy, had long ago lost whatever influence it once had on the capitalist class--which was never very great. If, then, the theory that "that government is best which governs least" had been abandoned by the capitalists themselves, there was no ground why Socialists should devote their time to the advocacy of a view ("State Socialism") that was merely a reaction against an outworn standpoint. The theory of collectivism, that the functions of the State ought to be widely extended, had long been popular among the capitalists themselves. "It has already been seen," wrote Kautsky, "that economic and political development has made necessary and inevitable the taking over of certain economic functions by the State.... It can by no means be said that every nationalization of an economic function or of an economic enterprise is a step towards Socialistic coöperation and that the latter would grow out of the general nationalization of all economic enterprises without making a fundamental change in the nature of the State."[183] In other words, Kautsky denies that partial nationalization or collectivism is necessarily even a step towards Socialism, and asserts that it may be a step in the other direction. The German Socialists acted on this principle when they opposed the nationalization of the Reichsbank, and it has often guided other Socialist parties. Kautsky feels that it is often a mistake to transfer the power over industry, _e.g._ the ownership of the land, into the hands of the State as now constituted, since this puts a tremendous part of the national wealth at the disposal of capitalist governments, one of whose prime functions is to prevent the increase of the political and economic power of the working people. And, although the State employees would probably receive a somewhat better treatment than they had while the industry was privately owned, they would simply form a sort of aristocracy of labor opposed in general to the interests of the working people. "Like every State," says Kautsky, "the modern State is in the first place a tool for the protection of the general interests of the ruling classes. It changes its nature in no way if it takes over functions of general utility which aim at advancing the interests not only of the ruling classes, but also of those of society as a whole _and_ of the ruling classes, and on no condition does it take care of these functions in a way which might threaten the general interests of the ruling classes or their domination.... If the present-day State nationalizes certain industries and functions, it does this, not to put limitations on capitalistic exploitation, but to protect and to strengthen the capitalistic mode of production, or in order itself to take a share in this exploitation, to increase its income in this way, and to lessen the payments that the capitalist class must obtain for its own support in the way of taxes. And as an exploiter, the State has this advantage over private capitalists: that it has at its disposal to be used against the exploited not only the economic powers of the capitalists, but the political force of the State." (My italics.) As an illustration of Kautsky's reference to the lessening of taxes through the profits of government ownership, it may be pointed out that the German Socialists fear the further nationalization of industries in Germany on account of the danger that with this increased income the State would no longer depend on the annual grants of the Reichstag and would then be in a position to govern without that body. The king of Prussia and the Emperor of Germany could in that event rule the country much as the present Czar rules Russia. As a rule, outside of Great Britain, the advocates of the collectivist program are also aware that their "Socialism" is not that of the Socialist movement. In an article in the _Atlantic Monthly_, Mr. John Martin, for example, indicates the "State Socialist" tendency of present-day reform measures in America, and at the same time shows that they are removed as far as possible from that anti-capitalist trend which is held by most Socialist Party leaders to be the essence of their movement. Mr. Martin points to the irrigation projects, the conservation of national resources, the railway policy of the national administration, the expansion of the Federal government, and the tendency towards compulsory arbitration since the interference of President Roosevelt in the coal strike of 1902, as being "Socialistic" and yet in no sense class movements. They tend towards social reconstruction and to greater social organization and order; and there are no "logical halting places," says Mr. Martin, "on the road to Collectivism." But so far is this movement from a class movement in Mr. Martin's opinion that its advance guard consists in part of millionaires like Mr. Carnegie and Mrs. Sage, "who aim at a social betterment of both getting and spending of fortunes," while "behind them, uncommitted to any far-reaching theory, but patriotic and zealous for an improved society, there are marching philanthropists, doctors, lawyers, business men, and legislators, people of distinction." And finally the army is completed by millions of common privates "_for_ whose children the better order will be the greatest boon." (The italicizing is mine.) The privates apparently figure rather as mere recipients of public and private benefactions than as active citizens.[184] Some of the reformers openly advise joining the Socialist movement with the hope of using it for the purpose of reform and without aiding it in any way to reach a goal of its own. Professor John Bates Clark, one of America's most prominent economists, says of the Socialist Party that it is legitimate because "it represents the aspirations of a large number of workingmen" and because "its immediate purposes are good." "It has changed the uncompromising policy of opposing all halfway measures," continues Professor Clark. "It welcomes reforms and tries to enroll in its membership as many as possible of the reformers.... In short, the Socialist and the reformer may walk side by side for a considerable distance without troubling themselves about the unlike goals which they hope in the end to reach.... What the reformers will have to do is to take the Socialistic name, walk behind a somewhat red banner, and be ready to break ranks and leave the army when it reaches the dividing of the ways."[185] Professor Clark, it will be seen, has no difficulty in suggesting a "logical halting place on the road to collectivism"; namely, when the Socialists turn from collectivist reforms and start out towards Socialism. Anti-Socialists may share the Socialist _ideal_ and even favor all the reforms that the capitalists can permit to be put into practice without resigning their power and allowing the overthrow of capitalism. But Socialists have long since seen a way to mark off all such idealists and reformers--by presenting Socialism for what it really is, not as an ideal, nor a program of reform under capitalist direction, but as a method, and the only practical method, of ending capitalist rule in industry and government. When Liebknecht insists on "the extreme importance of tactics and the necessity of maintaining the party's class struggle character," he makes "tactics," or the practical methods of the movement, _identical_ with its basic principle, "the class struggle." Kautsky does the same thing when he says that Socialism is, _both in theory and practice_, a revolution against capitalism. "Those who repudiate political revolution as the principal means of social transformation, or wish to confine the latter to such measures as have been granted by the ruling class," says Kautsky, "are social reformers, no matter how much their social ideas may antagonize existing forms of society." The Socialists' wholly practical grounds against "reformism" have been stated by Liebknecht, in his "No Compromise." "This political Socialism, which in fact is only philanthropic humanitarian radicalism, has retarded the development of Socialism in France exceedingly," he wrote in 1899, before Socialist politicians and "reformists" had come into prominence in other countries than France. "It has diluted and blurred principles and weakened the Socialist Party because it brought into it troops upon which no reliance could be placed at the decisive moment." If, in other words, Socialism is a movement of non-capitalists against capitalists, nothing could be more fatal to it than a reputation due chiefly to success in bringing about reforms about which there is nothing distinctively Socialistic. For this kind of success could not fail ultimately to swamp the movement with reformers who, like Professor Clark, are not Socialists and never will be. It must not be inferred from this that Socialists are indifferent to reform. They are necessarily far more anxious about it than its capitalist promoters. For while many "State Socialist" reforms are profitable to capitalism and even strengthen temporarily its hold on society, they are in the long run indispensable to Socialism. But this does not mean that Socialism is compelled to turn aside any of its energies from its great task of organizing and educating the workers, in order to hasten these reforms. On the contrary, the larger and the more revolutionary the Socialist army, the easier it will be for the progressive capitalists to overcome the conservatives and reactionaries. Long before this army has become large enough or aggressive enough to menace capitalism and so to throw all capitalists together in a single organization wholly devoted to defensive measures, there will be a long period--already begun in Great Britain, France, and other countries--when the growth of Socialism will make the progressive capitalists supreme by giving them _the balance of power_. In order, then, to hasten and aid the capitalistic form of progress, Socialists need only see that their own growth is sufficiently rapid. As the Socialists are always ready to support every measure of capitalist reform, the capitalist progressives need only then secure enough strength in Parliaments so that their votes added to those of the Socialists would form a majority. As soon as progressive capitalism is at all developed, reforms are thus automatically aided by the Socialist vote, without the necessity of active Socialist participation--thus leaving the Socialists free to attend to matters that depend wholly on their own efforts; namely, the organization and education of the non-capitalist masses for aggressive measures leading towards the overthrow of capitalism. Opposition to the policy of absorption in ordinary reform movements is general in the international movement outside of Great Britain. Eugene V. Debs, three times presidential candidate of the American Socialist Party, is as totally opposed to "reformism" as are any of the Europeans. "_The revolutionary character of our party and of our movement_," he said in a personal letter to the present writer, which was published in the Socialist press, "_must be preserved in all its integrity at all cost, for if that be compromised we had better cease to exist_.... If the trimmers had their way we should degenerate into bourgeois reformers.... But they will not have their way." (Italics mine.) No American Socialist has more ably summarized the dangers opportunism brings to the movement than Professor George D. Herron in his pamphlet, "From Revolution to Revolution," taken from a speech made as early as 1903. Later events, it will be noted, have strikingly verified his predictions as to the growing popularity of the word "Socialism" with nearly all political elements in this country. "Great initiatives and revolutions," Herron says, "have always been robbed of definition and issue when adopted by the class against which the revolt was directed.... "Let Socialists take knowledge and warning. The possessing class is getting ready to give the people a few more crumbs of what is theirs.... If it comes to that, they are ready to give some things _in the name of Socialism_.... The old political parties will be adopting what they are pleased to call Socialistic planks in their platforms; and the churches will be coming with the insipid 'Christian Socialism,' and their hypocrisy and brotherly love. We shall soon see Mr. Hanna and Bishop Potter, Mr. Hearst and Dr. Lyman Abbott, even Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Bryan, posing as reasonable kinds of Socialists. You will find the name of Socialism repeatedly taken in vain, and perhaps successfully. You will see the Socialist movement bridled and saddled by capitalism, in the hope of riding it to a new lease of capitalistic power.... "But Socialism, like liberty or truth, is something you cannot have a part of; you must have the whole or you will have nothing; you can only gain or lose the whole, you cannot gain or lose a part. You may have municipal ownerships, nationalized transportation, initiative and referendum, civil service reforms and many other capitalist concessions, and be all the farther away from Social Democracy.... You may have any kind and number of reforms you please, any kind and number of revolutions or revivals you please, any kind and number of new ways of doing good you please, it will not matter to capitalism, so long as it remains at the root of things, the result of all your plans and pains will be gathered into the Capitalist granary." (The italics are mine.) Yet no Socialist dreams that the presence in the movement of semi-Socialist or non-Socialist elements, which is both the cause and the effect of reformism and compromise, is a mere accident, or that there is any device by which they may either be kept out or eliminated--until the time is ripe. The presence of opportunists and reformists in all Socialist parties is as much an inevitable result at a certain stage of social evolution as the appearance of Socialism itself. The time will come when these "Mitlaüfer," as the Germans call them, will either become wholly Socialist or will desert the movement, as has so often happened, to become a part of the rising tide of "State Socialism," but that day has not yet arrived. The division of the organization at a certain stage into two wings is held by the able Austrian Socialist, Otto Bauer, to be a universal and necessary process in its development. The first stage is one where all party members are agreed, since it is then merely a question of the propaganda of general and revolutionary _ideas_. The second stage (the present one) arises when the party has already obtained a modest measure of power which can be either _cashed in_ and utilized for immediate and material gains or saved up and held for obtaining more power, or for both objects in degrees varying according as one or the other is considered more important. Bauer shows that these two policies of accumulating power and of spending it arise necessarily out of the social composition of the party at its present stage and the general social environment in which it finds itself. At the third stage, he says, when the proletariat has come to form the overwhelming majority of the population, their campaign for the conquest of political power appears to the possessing classes for the first time as a threatening danger. The capitalist parties then unite closely together against the Social Democracy; what once separated them now appears small in comparison to the danger which threatens their profits, their rents, and their monopolistic incomes. So there arises again at this higher stage of capitalist domination, as was the case at its beginning, "a Social Democracy in battle _against all the possessing classes, against the whole power of the organized state_." (Italics mine.)[186] When the third stage arrives, these reformists who do not intend to leave the revolutionary movement, begin to get ready to follow it. Already the most prominent reformist Socialists outside of England _claim_ that their position is revolutionary. This is true of the best-known German reformist, Bernstein; it is true of Jaurès; and it is also true of Berger in this country. Bernstein argues in his book, "Evolutionary Socialism," that constitutional legislation is best adapted to positive social-political work, "to the creation of permanent economic arrangements." But he also says that "the revolutionary way does quicker work as far as it deals with removal of obstacles which a privileged minority places in the path of social progress." As for choosing between the revolutionary and non-revolutionary methods, he admits that revolutionary tactics can be abandoned only when the non-propertied majority of a nation has become firmly established in power; that is, when political democracy is so deeply rooted and advanced that it can be applied successfully to questions of property; "when a nation has attained a position where the rights of the propertied minority have ceased to be a serious obstacle of social progress." Certainly no nation could claim to be in such a position to-day, unless it were, possibly, Australia, though there the empire of unoccupied land gives to every citizen possibilities at least of acquiring property, and relieves the pressure of the class struggle until the country is settled. This view of Bernstein's, let it be noted, is a far different one from that prevailing in England--as expressed, for example, in an organ of the Independent Labour Party, where it is said that "fortunately 'revolution' in this country has ceased to be anything more than an affected phrase." Certainly there are few modern countries where the "propertied minority," of which Bernstein speaks, constitutes a more serious obstacle to progress than it does in England. Jaurès's position is quite similar to that of Bernstein. He declared in a recent French Congress that he was both a revolutionist and a reformer. He indorses the idea of the general strike, but urges that it should not be used until the work of education and propaganda has made the time ready, "until a very large and strong organization is ready to back up the strikers," and until a large section of public opinion is prepared to recognize the legitimacy of their object. He says he expects the time to arrive when "the reforms in the interest of the whole working class which have been promised will have been systematically refused," and then "the general strike will be the only resource left"; and finally cries, "Never in the name of the working people will we give up the right of insurrection." This position is verbally correct from the Socialist standpoint, and it shows the power of the revolutionary idea in France, when even Jaurès is forced to respect it. But any capitalist politician might safely use the same expressions--so long, at least, as revolution is still far away. So also Mr. Berger has written in the _Social Democratic Herald_ of Milwaukee that "all the ballot can do is to strengthen the power of resistance of the laboring people." "We whom the western ultra class-conscious proletarians ... are wont to call 'opportunists,'" writes Berger, "we know right well that the social question can no more be solved by street riots and insurrections than by bombs and dynamite. "Yet, by the ballot _alone_, it will never be solved. "Up to this time men have always solved great questions by _blood_ and _iron_." Berger says he is not given to reciting revolutionary phrases, but asserts that the plutocrats are taking the country in the direction of "a violent and bloody revolution." "Therefore," he says, "each of the 500,000 Socialist voters, and of the two million workingmen who instinctively incline our way, should, besides doing much reading and still more thinking, also have a good rifle and the necessary rounds of ammunition in his home and be prepared to back up his ballot with his bullets if necessary.... Now, I deny that dealing with a blind and greedy plutocratic class as we are dealing in this country, the outcome can ever be peaceable, or that any reasonable change can ever be brought about by the ballot in the end. "I predict that a large part of the capitalist class will be wiped out for much smaller things ... most of the plutocratic class, together with the politicians, will have to disappear as completely as the feudal lords and their retinue disappeared during the French revolution. "That cannot be done by the ballot, or _only_ by the ballot. "The ballot cannot count for much in a pinch."[187] (My italics.) And in another number Mr. Berger writes:-- "As long as we are in the minority we, of course, have _no right to force_ our opinion _upon an unwilling majority_.... Yet we do not deny that _after we have convinced the majority of the people_, we are going to use force if the minority should hesitate."[188] (My italics.) Few will question the revolutionary nature of this language. But such expressions have always been common at critical moments, even among non-Socialists. We have only to recall the "bloody-bridles" speech of a former populist governor of Colorado, or the advice of the _New York Evening Journal_ that every citizen ought to provide against future contingencies by keeping a rifle in his home. Revolutionary language has no necessary relation to Socialism. Mr. Berger, moreover, has also used the threat of revolution, not as a progressive but as a reactionary force, not in the sense of Marx, who believed that a revolution, when the times were ripe and the Socialists ready, would bring incalculably more good than evil, but in the sense of the capitalists, for whom it is the most terrible of all possibilities. It is common for conservative statesmen to use precisely the same threat to secure necessary capitalist reforms. "Some day there will be a volcanic eruption," said Berger in his first speech in Congress; "a fearful retribution will be enacted on the capitalist class as a class, and the innocent will suffer with the guilty. Such a revolution would throw humanity back into semi-barbarism and cause even a temporary retrogression of civilization." Such is the language used against revolutions by conservatives or reactionaries. Never has it been so applied by a Marx or an Engels, a Liebknecht, a Kautsky or a Bebel. Without underestimating the enormous cost of revolutions, the most eminent Socialists reckon them as nothing compared with the probable gains, or the far greater costs of continuing present conditions. The assertion of manhood that is involved in every great revolution from below in itself implies, in the Socialist view, not retrogression, but a stupendous advance; and any reversion to semi-barbarism that may take place in the course of the revolution is likely, in their opinion, to be far more than compensated in other directions, even during the revolutionary period (to say nothing of ultimate results). Revolutionary phrases and scares are of course abhorred by capitalistic parties, and considered dangerous, unless there is some very strong occasion for reverting to their use. But such occasions are becoming more and more frequent. Conservative capitalists are more and more grateful for any outbreak that alarms or burdens the neutral classes and serves as a useful pretext for that repression or reaction which their interests require. Progressive capitalists, on the other hand, use the very same disturbances to urge reforms they desire, on the ground that such measures are necessary to avoid "revolution." The disturbance may be as far as possible from revolutionary at bottom. It is only necessary that it should be sufficiently novel and disagreeable to attract attention and cause impatience and irritation among those who have to pay for it. Like the British strikes of 1911, it may not cost the capitalist class as a whole one-hundredth part of one per cent of its income. And it might be possible to repress, within a short time and at no greater expense, a movement many times more menacing. Provided it serves to put the supporters of capitalism on their feet, whatever they do as a result, whether in the way of repression or of reform, will be but to carry out long-cherished plans for advancing their own interests, plans that would have been the same even though there had been no shadow of a "revolutionary" movement on the horizon. The only difference is that such pseudo-revolutionary or semi-revolutionary disturbances serve as stimuli to put the more inert of the capitalist forces in motion, and, until the disturbances become truly menacing, strengthen the capitalist position. The use of revolutionary phrases does not then, of itself, demonstrate an approach to the revolutionary position, though we may assume, on other grounds, that the majority of the reformist Socialists, who take a revolutionary position as regards certain _future_ contingencies, are in earnest. But this indicates nothing as to the character of their Socialism to-day. The important question is, how far their revolutionary philosophy goes when directed, not at a hypothetical future situation but to questions of the present moment. In all the leading countries of the world, except Great Britain, the majority of Socialists expect a revolutionary crisis in the future, because they recognize, with that able student of the movement, Professor Sombart, that "history knows of no case where a class has freely given up the rights which it regarded as belonging to itself."[189] This does not mean that Socialists suppose that all progress must await a revolutionary period. Engels insisted that he and his associates were profiting more by lawful than by unlawful and revolutionary action. It means that Socialists do not believe that the capitalists will allow such action to remain lawful long enough materially to increase the income of the working class and its economic and political power as compared with their own. Jaurès's position as to present politics is based on the very opposite view. "You will have to lead millions of men to the borders of an impassable gulf," he says to the revolutionists, "but the gulf will not be easier for the millions of men to pass over than it was for a hundred thousand. What we wish is to try to diminish the width of the gulf which separates the exploited in present-day society from their situation in the new society."[190] The revolutionaries assert, on the contrary, that nothing Socialists can do at the present time can moderate the class war, or lessen the power of capitalism to maintain and increase the distance between itself and the masses. In direct disagreement with Jaurès, they say that when a sufficient numerical majority has been acquired, especially in this day when the masses are educated, it will be able to overcome any obstacle whatever, even what Jaurès calls the impassable gulf--whether in the meanwhile that gulf will have become narrower or wider than it is to-day, and they believe that the day of this triumph would be delayed rather than brought nearer if the workers were to divert their energies from revolutionary propaganda and organization, to political trading in the interest of reforms that bring no greater gains to the workers than to their exploiters. The revolutionary majority believes that the best that can be done at present is for the workers to train and organize themselves, and always to devise and study and prepare the means by which capitalism can be most successfully and economically assaulted when sufficient numbers are once aroused for successful revolt. When revolutionary Socialism is not pure speculation, it takes the form of the present-day "class struggle" against capitalism. The view that existing society can be _gradually_ transformed into a social democratic one, Kautsky believes to be merely an inheritance of the past, of a period "when it was generally believed that further development would take place exclusively on the _economic_ field, without the necessity of any kind of change in the relative distribution of _political_ institutions." (Italics mine.)[191] "Neither a railroad [that is, its administration] nor a ministry can be changed gradually, but only at a single stroke," says Kautsky, to illustrate the sort of a change Socialists expect. The need of such a complete change does not decrease on account of any reforms that are introduced before such a change takes place. "There are some politicians," he says, "who assert that only _despotic_ class rule necessitates revolution; that revolution is rendered superfluous by _democracy_. It is claimed that we have to-day sufficient democracy in all civilized countries to make possible a peaceable revolutionless development." (My italics.) As means by which these politicians hope to achieve such a revolutionless development, Kautsky mentions the gradual increase of the power of the trade unions, the penetration of Socialists into local governments, and finally the growing power of Socialist minorities in parliaments where they are supposed to be gaining increasing influence, pushing through one reform after another, restricting the power of the capitalists by labor legislation and extending the functions of the government. "So by the exercise of democratic rights upon existing grounds, the capitalist society is [according to these opportunists] gradually and without any shock growing into Socialism."[192] "This idyl becomes true," Kautsky says, "only if we grant that but one side of the opposed forces [the proletariat] is growing and increasing in strength, while the other side [the capitalists] remains immovably fixed to the same spot." But he believes that the very contrary is the case, that the capitalists are gaining in strength all the time, and that the advance of the working class merely goads the capitalists on "_to develop new powers and to discover and apply new methods of resistance and repression_."[193] Kautsky says that the present form of democracy, though it is to the Socialist movement what light and air are to the organism, hinders in no way the development of capitalism, the organization and economic powers of which improve and increase faster than those of the working people. "To be sure, the unions are growing," say Kautsky, "but simultaneously and faster grows the concentration of capital and its organization into gigantic monopolies. To be sure, the Socialist press is growing, but simultaneously grows the partyless and characterless press that poisons and unnerves even wider circles of people. To be sure, wages are rising, but still faster rise the accumulations of profits. Certainly the number of Socialist representatives in Parliament grows, but still more rapidly sinks the significance and efficiency of this institution, while at the same time parliamentary majorities, like the government, fall into ever greater dependence on the powers of high finance." (Possibly events of the past year or two mark the beginning of the waning of the powers of monopolists, and of the partial transfer of those powers to a capitalistic middle class; but exploitation of _the working class_ continues under such new masters no less vigorously than before.) A recent discussion between Kautsky and the reformist leader, Maurenbrecher, brought out some of these points very sharply.[194] Maurenbrecher said, "In Parliament we wish to do practical work, to secure funds for social reforms--so that step by step we may go on toward the transformation of our class government." Kautsky replied that while the revolutionaries wish also to do practical work in Parliament, they can "see beyond"; and he says of Maurenbrecher's view: "This would all be very fine, if we were alone in the world, if we could arrange our fields of battle and our tactics to suit our taste. But we have to do with opponents who venture everything to prevent the triumph of the proletariat. Comrade Maurenbrecher will acknowledge, I suppose, that the victory of the proletariat will mean the end of capitalist exploitation. Does he expect the exploiters to look on good-naturedly while we take one position after another and make ready for their expropriation? If so, he lives under a mighty illusion. Imagine for a moment that our parliamentary activity were to assume forms which threatened the supremacy of the capitalists. What would happen? The capitalists would try to put an end to parliamentary forms of government. In particular they would rather do away with the universal, direct, and secret ballot than quietly capitulate to the proletariat." As Premier von Buelow declared while in office that he would not hesitate to take the measure that Kautsky anticipates, we have every reason to believe that this very _coup d'état_ is still contemplated in Germany--and we have equally good reason to believe that if the Socialists were about to obtain a majority in the governments of France, Great Britain, or the United States, the capitalist class, yet in control, would be ready to abolish, not only universal suffrage and various constitutional rights, but any and all rights of the people that stood in the way of the maintenance of capitalistic rule. Declarations of Briand and Roosevelt quoted in later chapters (Part III, Chapters VI and VII) are illustrations of what might be expected. The same position taken by Kautsky in Germany is taken by Otto Bauer, who seems destined to succeed Victor Adler (upon the latter's death or retirement) as the most representative and influential spokesman of the Austrian Party. Reviewing the political situation after the Vienna food riots of 1911, Dr. Bauer writes:-- "The illusion that, once having won equal suffrage, we might peacefully and gradually raise up the working class, proceeding from one 'positive result' to another, has been completely destroyed. In Austria, also, the road leads to the increase of class oppositions, to the heaping up of wealth on the one side, and of misery, revolt, and embitterment on the other, to the division of society into two hostile camps, arming and preparing themselves for war."[195] Even though underlying economic forces should be found to be improving Labor's condition at a snail's pace, instead of actually heaping up more misery, no changes would be required in any of the other statements, or in the conclusion of this paragraph, which, with this exception, undoubtedly expresses the views of the overwhelming majority of Socialists the world over. "Democracy cannot do away with the class antagonisms of capitalist society," says Kautsky, referring to the "State Socialist" reforms of semidemocratic governments like those of Australia and Great Britain. "Neither can we avoid the final outcome of these antagonisms--the overthrow of present society. One thing it can do. It cannot abolish the revolution, but it can avert many premature, hopeless revolutionary attempts and render superfluous many revolutionary uprisings. It creates clearness regarding the relative strength of the different parties and classes." The late Paul Lafargue stated the same principle at a recent congress of the French Socialist Party, contending that, as long as capitalists still control the national administration, representatives are sent by the Socialists to the Chamber of Deputies, _not in the hope of diminishing the power of the capitalist State to oppress, but to combat this power, "to procure for the Party a new and more magnificent field of battle_." FOOTNOTES: [178] Marx and Engels, the "Communist Manifesto." [179] Anton Menger, "L'État Socialiste" (Paris, 1904), p. 359. [180] August Bebel, "Woman, Past, Present, and Future" (San Francisco, 1897), p. 128. [181] Frederick Engels, "Anti-Duhring" (3d ed., Stuttgart, 1894), p. 92. [182] Frederick Engels, "Socialism, Utopian and Scientific," pp. 71-72. [183] Karl Kautsky's "Erfurter Programm," p. 129. [184] John Martin, in the _Atlantic Monthly_, September, 1908. [185] Professor John Bates Clark, in the _Congregationalist and Christian World_ (Boston), May 15, 1909. [186] Otto Bauer, "Die Nationalitaeten-frage und die Sozial-demokratie," p. 487. [187] _Social-Democratic Herald_, July 31, 1909. [188] _Social-Democratic Herald_, Vol. XII, No. 5. [189] Professor Werner Sombert, "Socialism and the Socialist Movement," p. 59. [190] Jaurès, "Studies in Socialism." [191] Kautsky, "The Road to Power," p. 101. [192] Kautsky, "The Social Revolution," p. 66. [193] Kautsky, "The Social Revolution," pp. 66-67. [194] Kautsky, _International Socialist Review_, 1910. [195] _Die Neue Zeit_, Sept. 11, 1911. CHAPTER VII THE REVOLUTIONARY TREND With the exception of a few years (1899 to 1903) the revolutionary and anti-"reformist" (not anti-reform) position of the international movement has become stronger every year. It is a relatively short time, not more than twenty years, since the reformists first began to make themselves heard in the Socialist movement, and their influence increased until the German Congress at Dresden in 1903, the International Congress of 1904 at Amsterdam, and the definite separation of the Socialists of France from Millerand at this time and from Briand shortly afterwards (Chapter II). Since then their influence has rapidly receded. The spirit of the international movement, on the whole, is more and more that of the great German Socialist Wilhelm Liebknecht, who advised the party to be "always on the offensive and never on the defensive,"[196] or of La Salle when he declared, "True political power will have to be fought for, and cannot be bought."[197] The revolutionary policy of the leading Socialist parties has not become less pronounced with their growth and maturity as opponents hoped it would. On the contrary, all the most important Socialist assemblies of the last ten years, from the International Congress at Paris in 1900, have reiterated or strengthened the old position. The Congress of Paris in 1900 adopted a resolution introduced by Kautsky which declared that the "Social Democracy has taken to itself the task of organizing the working people into an army ready for the social war, and it must, therefore, above all else, make sure that the working classes become conscious of their interests and of their power." The great task of the Socialists at the present time is the preparation of the social war of the future, and not any effort to improve the capitalists' society. The working classes are to be made conscious of _their own strength_--which will surely not be brought about by any reforms which, however much they may benefit the workers, favor equally or to a still greater degree the capitalistic and governing classes. The resolution continued: "The proletariat in a modern democratic State cannot obtain political power accidentally. It can do so only when the long and difficult work of the political and economic organization of the proletariat is at an end, when its physical and moral regeneration have been accomplished, and when more and more seats have been won in municipal and other _legislative_ bodies.... But where the government is centralized, political power cannot be obtained step by step." (The italics are mine.)[198] According to the proposer and mover of this resolution and its supporters, nearly all, if not all, modern governments are at the bottom centralized in one form or another. So the resolution amounts to saying that political power cannot be obtained step by step. The election of Socialist minorities in the legislatures can only be used to urge capitalism on its work of bringing up the physical condition and industrial productivity of the masses, and not for the purpose of organizing and educating them with the object of seizing the reins of power, of overthrowing capitalism, and revolutionizing the present form of government. The resolution adopted at the following International Congress at Amsterdam (in 1904) was necessitated by certain ambiguities in the former one. Yet Kautsky's explanation of his own meaning makes it quite clear that even the Paris resolution was revolutionary in its intent, and the Amsterdam Congresses, moreover, readopted its main proposition that "the Social Democracy could not accept any participation in government in capitalist society." At this latter congress Jaurès's proposed reformist tactics were definitely and finally rejected so that they have not even been discussed at the later international gatherings. This was a critical moment in the international movement; for it was about this time that the tendency to opportunism was at its strongest, and this was the year in which it was decided against Jaurès that all Millerands of the future, impatient to seize immediate power in the name of Socialism, no matter how sincerely they might hope in this way to benefit the movement, should be looked upon as traitors to the cause. The _terms upon which such power was secured or held_ were considered necessarily to be such as to compromise the principles of the movement. Socialists in high government positions, it was pointed out, by the very fact of their acceptance of such responsibilities, become servants of a capitalistic administration--and of the economic régime it supports. Jaurès began his argument with the proposition that the difference between Socialism and mere reform consisted in the fact that the former alone worked for "a total realization of all reforms" and "the complete transformation of capitalistic property into social property"--which is merely the statement of Socialism as an ultimate ideal, now indorsed even by many anti-Socialists. He next quoted Liebknecht to the effect that there were only 200,000 individuals in Germany, and Guesde, Jaurès's chief Socialist opponent in France, to the effect that the number was the same in the latter country, who, on account of their economic interests, were directly and completely opposed to Socialism; and this being the case, he held that the task of the body of working people already organized by the Socialists against capitalism, was gradually to draw all but this 200,000 into the Socialist ranks. He concluded that it was the duty of the Socialists to "ward off reaction, to obtain reforms and to develop labor legislation" by the help of this larger mass, which, when added to their own numbers, constituted 97 or 98 per cent of the population. It goes without saying, replied the revolutionaries, that all Socialists will lend their assistance to any elements of the population who are fighting against reaction and in favor of labor legislation and reform, but it does not follow that they should consider this the chief part of their work, nor that they should even feel it necessary to claim that the Socialists were _leading_ the non-Socialists in these matters. In contrasting his section of the French Party with the German movement, Jaurès claimed that the French were both more revolutionary than the German, and more practical in their efforts at immediate reform. "You," he said, speaking to the Germans, "have neither a revolutionary nor a parliamentary activity." He reminded them that having never had a revolution they could not have a revolutionary tradition, that universal suffrage had been given to them from above (by Bismarck), instead of having been conquered from below, that they had been forced tamely to submit when they had recently been robbed of it in Saxony. "You continue in this way too often," he continued, "to obscure and to weaken, in the German working class, the force of a revolutionary tradition already too weak through historic causes." And finally he asserted that the German Socialists, who, a year or so before this conference, had obtained the enormous number of 3,000,000 votes, had been able to do nothing with them in the Reichstag. He said that this was due in part to the character of the German movement, as shaped by the circumstances of the past, and partly to the fact that the Reichstag was powerless in the German government, and claimed that they would have been only too glad to follow the French reformists' course, if they could have done so, just as their only reason for not using revolutionary measures was also that the German government was too strong for them. "Then," concluded Jaurès, "you do not know which road you will choose. There was expected from you after this great victory a battle cry, a program of action, a policy. You have explored, you have spied around, watched events; the public's state of mind was not ripe. And then before your own working class and before the international working class, you masked the feebleness of your activity by taking refuge in extreme theoretical formulas which your eminent comrade, Kautsky, will furnish to you until the life goes out of him." As time has not yet tested Jaurès's accusations, they cannot yet be finally disproved or proved. The replies of his revolutionary opponents at the Congress were chiefly counter-accusations. But the later development of the German movement gives, as I shall show, strong reasons why Jaurès's criticisms should be accepted as being true only of the reformist minority of the German Party. Jaurès referred to the British unionists as an example of the success of reformist tactics. Bebel was able to dispose of this argument. "The capitalists of England are the most able in the world," he said. "If next year at the general elections English Liberalism is victorious, it will again make one of you, perhaps John Burns, an Under Secretary of State, not to take an advance towards Socialism, but to be able to say to the working people that it gives them voluntarily what has been refused after a struggle on the Continent, in order to keep the votes of the workers." (This is just what happened.) "Socialism," he concluded, "cannot accept a share of power; it is obliged to wait for all of the power." The Amsterdam resolution, passed by a large majority after this debate, was almost identical with that which had been adopted by a vote of 288 to 11 at the German Congress at Dresden in the previous year (1903), and although the Austrian delegates and others, nearly half the total, had expressed a preference for a substitute of a more moderate character, they did not hesitate, when this motion was defeated, to indorse the more radical one that was finally adopted. And in 1909, when this Dresden (or Amsterdam) resolution came up for discussion at the German Congress of Leipzig, it was unanimously reaffirmed. Those opposing it did not dare to dispute it at all in principle, but merely expressed the mental reservation that it was qualified by another resolution adopted at a recent Congress which had declared that the party should be absolutely free to decide the question of _temporary_ political alliances in _elections_. As such electoral combinations, valid only for the _second ballot_, and lapsing immediately after the elections, had always been common, the Dresden resolution was never meant by the majority of those voting for it to forbid them. Its purpose was only to insist that the object of the Socialists must always be social revolution and not reform, since, to use its own words, supreme political power "cannot be obtained step by step." "The Congress condemns most emphatically," the Dresden resolution declared, "the revisionist attempt to alter our hitherto victorious policy, a policy based upon the class struggle; just as in the past _we shall go on achieving power by conquering our enemies, not by compromising with the existing order of things_." (My italics.) In a recent letter widely quoted by the continental press, August Bebel contended that in Germany at least the Social Democracy and the other political parties have grown farther and farther apart during the last fifty years. While Bebel claims that Socialists support every form of progress, he insists that nevertheless they remain fundamentally opposed even to the Liberal parties, for the reason, as he explained at the Jena Congress (1905), that "_an opposition party can, on the whole, have no decisive influence until it gains control of the government_," that until the Socialists themselves have a majority, governments could be controlled only by an alliance with non-Socialist parties. "If you (the Socialist Party) want to have that kind of an influence," said Bebel, "then stick your program in your pocket, leave the standpoint of your principles, concern yourself only with purely practical things, and you will be cordially welcome as allies." (Italics mine.) At the Nuremburg Congress (1908) he said: "We shall reach our goal, not through little concessions, through creeping on the ground, and coming down to the masses in this way, but by raising the masses up to us, by inspiring them with our great aims." Another question arose in the German Party which at the bottom involved the same principles. It had been settled that Socialists could not accept a share in any non-Socialist administration, no matter how progressive it might be. But if a social reform government is ready to grant one or more measures much desired by Socialists, shall the latter vote the new taxes necessary for these measures, thus affording new resources to a hostile government, and shall it further support the annual budget of the administration, thus extending the powers of the capitalist party that happens to be in power? The Socialist policy, it is acknowledged, has hitherto been to vote for these individual reforms, but never to prolong the life of an existing non-Socialist government. The fundamental question, says Kautsky, _is to whom is the budget granted_, and not _what measures are proposed_. "To grant the budget," he says, "means to give the government the right to raise the taxes provided for; it means to put into the hands of the governor the control of hundreds of millions of money, as well as hundreds of thousands of people, laborers and officeholders, who are paid out of these millions." That is to say, the Socialist Party, according to the reasoning of Kautsky and the overwhelming majority of Socialists, wherever it has become a national factor of the first importance, must remain an opposition party--until the main purpose for which it exists has been accomplished; namely, the capture of the government, and for this purpose it must make every effort to starve out one administration after another by refusing supplies. At the National Congress at Nuremburg in 1908 it was decided by a two-thirds vote that in no one of the confederated governments of Germany would Socialists be allowed to vote for any government other than that of their own party, no matter how radical it might be, unless under altogether extraordinary circumstances, such as are not likely to occur. Some of the delegates of South Germany said that they would not be bound by this decision, but later a number expressed their willingness to accede to it, while others of them were forced to do so by the local congresses of their own party. This question was brought up at the German Congress at Leipzig in 1909. The parties in possession of the government had proposed a graduated inheritance tax, which nearly all Socialists approve. Moreover, a _part_ of the taxes of the year would be used for social reforms. Favoring as they did the change in the method of taxation, would the Socialist members of the Reichstag be justified in voting for the proposed tax at the third reading? All agreed that it was well to express their friendly attitude to this form of tax at the earlier readings, but approval at the third reading might have the effect of finally turning over a new sum of money to an unfriendly government; although it would be collected from the wealthier classes alone, it might be expended largely for anti-democratic purposes. The revolutionaries, with whom stood the chairman of the convention, the late Paul Singer, were against voting for the tax on the third reading, for they argued that if the Socialists granted an increased income to a hostile government merely because they were pleased with the form of the taxes proposed, it might become possible in the future for capitalist governments to secure Socialist financial support in raising the money for any kind of reactionary measures merely by proving that they were not obtaining the means for carrying them out from the working people. Half of the members of the Parliamentary group, on the other hand, decided in favor of voting for the tax on the third reading, the reformists largely on the ground that it would furnish the means for social reforms, Bebel and others, however, on the entirely different ground that if the upper classes had to pay the bill for imperialism and militarism, the increase of expenditures on armaments would not long continue. The "radical" Socialists represented by Ledebour proposed that not one penny should be granted the Empire except in return for true constitutional government by the Kaiser. Certainly this was not asking too much, even though it would constitute a political revolution, for the majority of the whole Reichstag afterwards adopted a resolution proposed by Ledebour demanding such guarantees. In other words, he would make all other questions second to that of political power--no economic reform whatever being a sufficient price to compensate for turning aside from the effort to obtain democratic government, _i.e._ more power. Bebel, however, said he would have voted for the bill if he had been present, though he made it clear both at this and at the succeeding congress that he had no intention of affording the least support to a capitalistic administration (see below). It appears that Bebel's position on this matter is really the more radical. Ledebour and Singer seemed to feel that the further democratization of the government depends on Socialist pressure. The more revolutionary view is that capitalism in Germany, with the irresponsible Kaiser, the unequal Reichstag election districts, the anti-democratic suffrage law and constitution in Prussia, is impregnable--but that the progressive capitalists may themselves force the reactionaries to take certain steps toward democracy in order to check absolutism, bureaucracy, church influence, agrarian legislation, and certain excesses of militarism. (See the previous chapter.) The position of the "radicals" was that capitalism was so profoundly reactionary that even the shifting of the burdens of taxation for military purposes to capitalist shoulders should not check it. Bebel's view was more revolutionary. For even conceding to capitalism the possibility of checking armaments and ending wars, and of establishing semidemocratic governments on the French or English models, he finds the remainder of the indictment against it quite sufficient to justify the most revolutionary policy. However, the main question was not really involved at this Congress. A government might be supported on this tax question and the support be withdrawn later when it came to a critical vote on the budget as a whole, or on some other favorable occasion. It was only at the Congress at Magdeburg, in 1910, that the latter question was finally disposed of. The Magdeburg Congress not only reaffirmed the revolutionary policy previously decided upon by the German and International Congresses already mentioned, but it also showed that the revolutionary majority, stronger and more determined than ever, was ready and able to carry out its intention of forcing the reformist minority to follow the revolutionary course. This congress, besides more accurately defining the view of the revolutionary majority, made clearer than ever the profound differences of opinion in the Socialist camp. The subject under discussion was: Can a Socialist party support a relatively progressive capitalist government by voting for the budget when no fatal danger threatens the party's existence, such as some _coup d'état_? Seventeen of the twenty Socialist members of the Legislature of Baden, without any such excuse, had supported a more or less progressive government and kept it in power, the very action that had been so often forbidden. The importance of this act of revolt lay in the fact that the government the Socialists had supported, however progressive it might be, was frankly anti-Socialist. On several occasions the Prime Minister, Herr von Bodman, has made declarations of the most hostile character, as, for instance, that no employee of the government could be a Social-Democrat, and that the local officials should make reports of the personnel of the army recruits "so that those of Social-Democratic leanings could be properly attended to." After one of these declarations, even the Socialist members of the legislature who had previously planned to vote for the government, were repelled, and decided that was impossible to carry out their intentions. The Prime Minister thereupon made a conciliatory speech for the purpose of once more obtaining this vote. But even this speech was by no means free from the most marked hostility to Socialism. "To portray the Social-Democracy as a mere disease is not correct," said he; "it is to be cast aside in so far as it fights the monarchy and the political order. But, on the other hand, it is a tremendous movement for the uplift of the fourth estate, and therefore it deserves recognition." It will be seen that the Prime Minister withdrew nothing of his previous accusations. But the Baden Social-Democrats finally decided that, if they did not support him, some important reforms would be lost, especially a proposed improvement of the suffrage for town and township officials. This was not a very radical advance, for even the _Frankfurter Zeitung_, a strongly anti-Socialist organ, wrote that "from the standpoint of consistent Liberalism the bill left so many aspirations and so many just demands unfulfilled that even the parties of the left, not to speak of the Social-Democrats, would be justified in declining to pass the measure." Indeed the South German reformists do not really pretend that it is any one particular reform that justifies laying aside or temporarily subordinating the fight against capitalist government. At the Nuremburg Congress in 1908 the ground given for an act of this kind was that if Socialists did not vote for that budget particularly, a large number of the officials and workingmen employed by the government would fail to receive the raise of wages or salary that it offered. Herr Frank, spokesman of the Baden Party, now defended the capitalist government of Baden and the Socialist action in supporting it, on the general ground that _advantages could thus be secured for the working classes_. Of course, this brings up immediately the question: if moderate material advantages are all the working people are striving for, why cannot some other party which has more _power_ than the Socialists give still more of these advantages? Indeed, the fact that all these reforms were supported by capitalist parties and were allowed to pass by a frankly capitalistic government (progressive, no doubt, but anti-Socialist), gives this government and these parties a superior claim to the credit of having brought the reforms about. What were "the advantages for the struggle of the working class" that Frank and his associates could obtain by voting for the Baden Budget of 1910--besides the extension of the suffrage? First importance was placed upon school reforms. Several religious normal schools were abolished; women were permitted to serve on municipal committees for school affairs and charities; the wages of teachers were somewhat increased; school girls were given an extra year; physicians were introduced into the schools; and a law was passed by which, for the first time, children were no longer forced to take religious instruction against the will of their parents. Social-Democrats in the legislature were allowed for the first time to write the reports for important committees, such as those on the schools, factory inspection, and town or township taxation. Aside from these considerable improvements in the schools and in the election law, the only advantage of importance was a decrease of the income tax for those who earn less than 1400 marks ($350). One might have expected that a government which claims to be progressive, to say nothing of being radical or Socialistic, would altogether have exempted from taxation incomes as small as $350--modest even for Germany. Frank mentions also that 100,000 marks ($20,000) was appropriated for insurance against unemployment, but this sum is trifling for a State the size of Baden. It was not denied by the radical Socialists that such measures are desirable, but they did not feel that it was worth while, on that account, to lay aside their main business, that of building up a movement to overthrow capitalist government. As I have shown, capitalist governments may be expected continually to inaugurate programs of reform which, while strengthening capitalism, are incidentally of more or less benefit to the working class. This is neither any part of Socialism, nor does it tend towards decreasing the economic disparity between the classes. "If small concessions and trifles have been referred to," said the revolutionary Karl Liebknecht, "it must not be understood that by this it is meant to undervalue the practical work of the Badenese, but that what has been attained is considered to be small, when measured by the greatness of our aims. The so-called radicals, these are the true reformers, the realistic political reformers who do not overlook the forest on account of the trees." Bebel, in two long speeches delivered at this Congress, defined the Socialist attitude to existing governments and existing political parties in a way that no longer leaves it possible that any earnest student of Socialism can misunderstand it. He was supported by the overwhelming majority of the Congress when he said that the policy of the Baden Social-Democrats meant practically the support of the National Liberals; that is to say, of the conservative party of the large capitalists. The Socialists of Germany all consider that the parties nearest related to theirs are the Radical or small capitalist parties, formerly called the "Freethinkers" and the "People's" parties (Freisinnige and Volkspartei) and now united under the name Progressive Party. But a tacit alliance with these alone could not have been brought about in Baden, so that the Socialists there favored going so far as to ally themselves for all practical purposes with the chief organization representing the bankers, manufactures, and employers--with the object, of course, of overcoming the conservatives, the Catholic and aristocratic parties. "Now all of a sudden we hear that our tactics are false, that we must ally ourselves with the National Liberals," said Bebel. "_We even have National Liberals in our party.... But if one is a National Liberal, then one must get out._ The Badenese speak of the great results which they have obtained with the help of the Great Alliance [_i.e._ an alliance with both National Liberals and Radicals]. Now results which are reached with the help of the National Liberals don't bring us very far. "If we combine with capitalistic parties, you can bet a thousand to one that we are the losers by it. It is, so to speak, a law of nature, that in a combination of the right and the left the right draws the profits. Such a combination cripples criticism and places us under obligations." "_The government can well conciliate the exploited classes in case of necessity, but never with a fundamental social transformation in the direction of the socialization of society._" The reader must here avoid confusion. Bebel does not say that the ruling class cannot or will not bring about great legislative and political reforms, such as large governmental undertakings of more or less benefit to every class of the community, like canals or railways, but that such measures as are _conceded to the Socialist pressure_ and at _the same time actually work in the direction of Socialism are few and insignificant_. Bebel's meaning is clear if we remember that we do not move towards Socialism unless the reforms when taken together are sufficient both _to counteract governmental changes and the automatic movement of society in the opposite direction_. Frank tried to make out that his action and that of his companions in allying themselves with a progressive capitalist government was similar to that taken by the Socialists in other countries. He mentioned Denmark, England, and Austria, and one of the governments of Switzerland (Berne), and also claimed that the Belgians would probably support a Liberal government in case they and the Liberals gained a majority. All these statements except one (that concerning England) Bebel denied. We do not need to take his interpretation of the Austrian situation, however, any more than Frank's, for an Austrian delegate, Schrammel, was present and explained the position of his party. "If we voted for the immediate consideration of the budget, we voted only for taking up the question and not for the budget itself.... I declare on this occasion that the comrades can rest assured as to our conduct in the Austrian Parliament, that we would under no circumstances vote for a budget without having the consent of our comrades in the realm. We will not act independently, but will always submit ourselves to the decisions of the majority taken for that particular occasion." It would seem from this that the Austrians are considering the possibility of voting for the budget under certain circumstances. But the Germans would also do this much, and it is uncertain whether the cases in which the Austrians would take this action would be any more frequent. As to the English attitude, Bebel said: "The English cannot serve us as a model for all things, first because England has quite other conditions, and secondly, because there is no great Social-Democratic Party there at the present moment. Marx would no longer point to trade unions there as the champions of the European proletariat. From 1871 Marx showed the German Social-Democracy that it was its duty to take the lead. We have done this, and we will continue to do it, if we are sensible." As to Denmark, Bebel said that he was assured by one of the most prominent representatives of the Danish movement that even if the Socialists and Radicals had secured a majority in the recent elections, that the former would not have become a part of the administration. France had also been mentioned by some of the speakers, since Jaurès and his wing of the French Party had at one time favored the policy of supporting a progressive capitalist government. But Bebel reminded the Congress that Jaurès had expressly declared that he had not been persuaded to vote against the budget by the resolution to that effect passed at the International Congress of Amsterdam, but that, after a long hesitation, he did it "out of his own free conviction." Bebel did not hesitate to condemn roundly those who were responsible for this latest effort to lead the party to abandon its principles. He did not deny that a majority of the organization in Baden and also in Hesse agreed with its representatives. But he attributed this partly to the fact that the revisionists controlled the Baden party newspapers, which he accused of being partisan and of not giving full information, and partly to the regrettable influence of "leaders." Similar conditions occur internationally, and Bebel's words, like so much that was said and done at this Congress, have the highest international significance. "The peoples cannot at all grasp why one still supports a government which one would prefer to set aside to-day rather than to-morrow," he said. "A part of our leaders no longer understand, and no longer know what the masses have to suffer. You have estranged yourselves too much from the masses. "Formerly it was said that the consuls should take care that the state suffers no harm. _To-day one must say, let the masses take care that the leaders prepare no harm. Democratic distrust against everybody, even against me, is necessary. Attend to your editors._" These expressions, like the others I have quoted, received the greatest applause from the Congress. It was almost unanimously agreed that, although the Socialist members of the Baden legislature had acted against the decision of the previous Nuremburg Congress, it was neither wise nor necessary to proceed so far as expulsion, and Bebel especially was in favor of acting as leniently as possible, but this does not mean that he found the slightest excuse for the minority or that he failed to let them understand that he would fight them to the end, if they did not yield in the future to the radical majority. "If a few among us should be mad enough," he said, "to think of a split, I know it is not coming. The masses will have nothing to do with it, and if a small body should follow, it would not take three months until we would have them again in our armies. Our friends in South Germany who are against our resolution ought to ask themselves if, since the Nuremburg Congress, there has not appeared a noteworthy reversal of sentiment. Now to-day North Bavaria is thoroughly against the granting of the budget. Nuremburg is decidedly against it. Stuttgarters and others who spoke at that time occupied an entirely different standpoint to-day. The Hessian minority against the granting of the budget was never as strong as it is to-day. In Hanover voices are to be heard which expressed themselves very differently before, but are now also against it. If anybody thinks that he can easily escape from all these phenomena, then he is mightily mistaken. I guarantee that I could draw out quite another sentiment in Baden." "Try once!" it was called out from the audience, and Bebel answered: "Yes, we are ready to do this if we must. The proletarians of Baden would have to be no proletarians at all if it were otherwise." The principal resolution on the question, signed by a large minority of the Congress, proposed that any persons who voted for a budget by that very act automatically "stood outside the party." Bebel said that this was not the customary method of the organization, and pointed out that no means were provided in the constitution of the party for throwing out a whole group, that the constitution had been drawn up only for individuals, and provided that any one to be expelled should receive a very thorough trial. As opposed to this resolution, he offered a report in the name of the executive committee of the party, which stated, however, that there was no fundamental difference of opinion between the executive and the signers of the resolution above mentioned, but only a difference as to method. This report declared: "We are of the opinion that in case the resolution of the party executive is passed, and notwithstanding this the resolution is not respected, that then the conditions are present for a trial for exclusion according to Article 23 of the organization statutes." This article says: "No one can belong to the party who is guilty of gross misconduct against the party program or of a dishonorable action. Exclusion of a member may also take place if his persistent acts against the resolutions of his party organization or of the party congress damage the interests of the party." The passage of Bebel's resolution, by a vote of 289 to 80, was an emphatic repudiation of reformism. In the minority, besides the South Germans, were to be found a considerable proportion of the delegates from a very few of the many important cities of North Germany, namely, Hanover, Dresden, Breslau, and Magdeburg, together with an insignificant minority from Berlin and Hamburg. The South Germans claimed to be fairly well satisfied with the somewhat conciliatory resolution of Bebel in spite of his strong talk. But, as has been the case for many years, they were very aggressive and, in closing the debate, Frank made some declarations which brought the Congress to take even a stronger stand than Bebel had proposed. "To-day I say to you in the name of the South Germans," said Frank, "that we have the very greatest interest in union and harmony in the party. We will do our duty in this direction, but no one of us can declare to you to-day what will happen in the budget votings of the next few years. That is a question of conditions." This remark caused a great disturbance and was taken by the majority as a defiance and a warning that the South Germans intended to support capitalistic governments in the future. In fact, other remarks by Frank left no doubt of this. "In Nuremburg," he said "we rested our case on the contents of certain points of the budget, namely, the increase of the wages of laborers, and the salaries of officials. This time we gave the political situation as a ground. These are, as Bebel will concede, different things."... Frank went on to say that he and his associates would obey the resolution of the Congress not to vote for the budget _under the particular conditions_ proscribed at Nuremburg or at Magdeburg. "But," he said, "do you believe that there ever exists a situation in the world which is exactly like another? Do you believe that a budget vote to-day must absolutely be like a budget vote two years from now?" That is to say, Frank openly and defiantly announced that the South Germans might easily find some new reason for doing what they wanted to do in the future, in spite of the clear will of the Congress. A new resolution was then brought in by the majority to this effect: "In view of the declaration of Comrade Frank in his conclusion that he and his friends must take exception to the position taken in the resolution of the Congress, we move that the following sentence from the declaration of Comrade Bebel in support of the motion of the party executive should be raised to the position of a resolution; namely, 'We are of the opinion that in case the resolution of the party executive is passed, and notwithstanding the resolution is disrespected, that then the conditions are present for a trial for exclusion according to article 23 of the organization statutes.'" When this motion was put, Frank and the South Germans left the room, and it was carried by 228 to 64, the minority this time consisting mostly of North Germans. This vote showed the very highest number that could be obtained from other sections to sympathize with the South Germans; for the resolution in its finally accepted form was certainly a very sharp one, and Richard Fisher, a member of the Reichstag from Berlin, and others for the first time took a stand with the minority. It is doubtful, however, whether the total support the South Germans secured at any and all points together with their own numbers reached as high a figure as 120 or one third of the Congress. In the matter of their right openly to disobey the majority, the Baden Party could not even secure this vote, but was only able to bring together against the majority (consisting of 301) seventy-one delegates, nearly all South Germans. It appears, then, that the overwhelming majority of the German Party is unalterably opposed to "reformism," "revisionism," opportunism, compromise, or any policy other than that of revolutionary Socialism. For not only the question of supporting capitalist governments, but all similar policies, were condemned by these decisive majorities. How much this means may be gathered from the fact that "revisionists" as the "reformists" are called in Germany, practically propose that the Socialist Party should resolve itself for an indefinite period into an ordinary democratic reform party in close alliance with other non-Socialist parties. "The weightiest step on the road to power," wrote the revisionist Maurenbrecher, "is that we should succeed in the coming Reichstag in shaping the Liberal and Social-Democratic majority (formed) for defense against the conservatives, into a positive and effective working majority." In discussing the support of the budget by the Social-Democrats of Baden, Quessel explained definitely what kind of positive and effective work such an alliance would be expected to undertake; namely, "To fight personal government [of the Kaiser], to protect earnestly the interest of the consumers against the exploiting agrarian politicians, to undertake limitations of armaments on the basis of international treaties, to introduce a new division of the election districts [which has not been done since 1871], and to bring about a legal limitation of the hours of labor to ten at the most." Already the radical parties now united, favor all these measures except the limitation of armaments, which from the analogy with peace movements in other countries, and certain indications even in Germany, they may favor within a very few years. Quessel's program is that of the non-Socialist reformers, and a step, not towards Socialism, but towards collectivist capitalism. Karl Kautsky has dealt with the immediate bearing in German Socialism of what he calls "the Baden rebellion," at some length, in answer to Maurenbrecher, Quessel, and others. "The idea of an alliance from Bassermann [the National Liberal leader] to Bebel appears at the first glance to be quite reasonable," he writes, for "divided we are nothing, united we are a power. And the immediate interest of the Liberals and of the Social-Democrats is the same: 'the transformation of Germany from a bureaucratic feudal state into a constitutional, parliamentary, Liberal, and industrial State.'" Kautsky, however, combats the proposed alliance, from the standpoint of the Social-Democratic Party, along three different lines. First, he shows that the purposes of the Liberals in entering into such a combination are entirely at variance with those of the Socialists; second, that the Liberals are discredited before the German people and are not likely to have the principle or the capacity even to obtain those limited reforms which they have set on their program, and, third, that even if the two former reasons did not hold, the Socialists would necessarily have everything to lose by such common action. The second argument seems to prove too much. Kautsky reasons that neither the Radical not the Liberal parties can be relied upon even to carry out their own platforms:-- "The masses now trust the Social Democracy exclusively because it is the only party which stands in irreconcilable hostility to the reigning régime, which does not treat with it, which does not sell principles for offices; the only one which swings into the field energetically against militarism, personal government, the three-class election system, the hunger tyranny [the protective tariff]. On this depends the tremendous efficiency which our party has to-day. On this depends the great results which it promises us.... The whole effect of the Great Alliance policy [the proposed alliance of Socialists with the Radicals and National Liberals], if ever it became possible in the nation, at the best would be this: that we would serve to the Liberals as the step on which they would climb up into the government crib, in order to continue the same reactionary policies which are now being carried on, with a few unimportant variations: imperialism, the naval policy, increase of the army, the increase of officials, the continuation of the protective tariff policy, and the postponement of Prussian electoral reforms." But if the Liberals and Radicals refuse to carry out their own pledges, the conclusion would seem to be, not Kautsky's revolutionary one, but that the Socialists, far from stopping with a mere alliance, must take up the Liberals' or the Radicals' functions, as the "reformists" desire. However, there are strong grounds for believing that the Liberals in Germany will at last rise to the level of their own opportunities, as they have done in other countries. Already, the last Reichstag passed a resolution demanding that the Kaiser should be held responsible to that body, which means an end to personal rule; already the Radicals are in favor of Prussian electoral reform, and would undertake sweeping, if not satisfactory, changes in the tariff; and already the agitation against militarism is sincere and profound among those powerful elements of the capitalists whose interests are damaged by it, as well as among the "new middle-class." If the present tendencies continue, why may not the Radicals go farther? Is it not probable even that the Reichstag election districts will be equalized, and possible that equal suffrage in Prussia will be established by their support? For if the Radicals recognized, like those of other countries, that equal suffrage would render the reforms of capitalist collectivism feasible, they could considerably increase their vote by means of these reforms and hold the balance of power for a considerable period; the Socialists would be far from a majority, as they would thus lose those supporters who have voted with them solely because for the moment the Socialists were advancing the Radical program more effectively than the Radicals. The chief Socialist argument against any political alliance with capitalist parties is, however, of a more general character. Referring to the elections of 1912, Kautsky said:-- "How far they will bring us an increase in seats cannot be determined to-day.... But an increase of votes is certain--if we remain what we have been, the deadly enemy of the existing social and political condition, which is oppressing the masses more cruelly all the time, and for the overthrow of which they are all the time more ardently longing. If, on the other hand, we go into the electoral struggle arm in arm with the Freethinkers (Radicals) or even with the National Liberals, if we make ourselves their _accomplices_, if we declare ourselves ready for the same miserable behavior which the Freethinkers made themselves guilty of by entering into an alliance with von Buelow, we may disillusion the masses; we may push them from us and kill political life. If the Social Democracy ceases to be an opposition party, if even this party is ready to betray its friends as soon as it becomes by such means "capable of governing," those who are oppressed by present-day conditions will lose all confidence in progress by political struggle; then we shall be sowing on the one side the seeds of political indifference and on the other those of an anarchistical labor unionism." (Italics mine.)[199] Here is the generally accepted reason for the Socialist's radical attitude. In most countries Socialists are unwilling to make themselves _accomplices_ in what they consider to be the political crimes of all existing governments. Especially do they feel that no reform to which the capitalists would conceivably consent would justify any alliance. The inevitable logic of Kautsky's own position is that, _even if the liberals in Germany and elsewhere do undertake a broad program of reform_, including all those Kautsky mentions as improbable, no sufficient ground for an alliance is at hand. Kautsky himself now admits that there seems to be a revival of genuine capitalistic Liberalism in Germany, which may lead the Liberal parties to become more and more radical and even ultimately to democratize that country--with the powerful aid, of course, of the Social-Democrats. Evidence of this possibility he saw both in the support given by Liberals of all shades to Socialist candidates in many of the second ballots (in the election of 1912) and the fact that Bebel secured the overwhelming majority of Liberal votes as temporary President, while another revolutionary Socialist, Scheidemann, was actually elected by their aid as first temporary Vice President of the Reichstag. Kautsky asserts cautiously that this denotes a _possible_ revolution in German Liberalism. He again mentions Imperialism as the great issue that forbids even temporary coöperation between Socialists and the most advanced of the Radicals. But he admits that the rapid development of China and other Eastern countries will probably check the profits to be made by Europe and America from their economic development. And after Imperialism begins to wane in popularity among certain of the middle classes, _i.e._ the salaried and professional classes, he thinks the latter _may_ turn to genuine democratic, though capitalistic, Liberalism.[200] He reaches this conclusion with some hesitation, however. These new middle classes differ fundamentally from the older middle classes, which were composed chiefly of small farmers, shopkeepers, and artisans. The old middle classes, when they found themselves in a hopeless position, have often joined with the proletariat to bring about revolutions, only to betray it, however, after they had won. The new middle class is most dependent on the large capitalists for favor and promotion, and so is not in the least revolutionary. It does not care to fight with the proletariat until the latter becomes very strong, but when victory seems possible, by a concerted action will be ready, because of its lack of property, to stand steadfastly for Socialism. The question remains as to when such a Socialist victory will be imminent. Kautsky holds that as soon as Imperialism fails as a propaganda, the ground is ready for Socialism to flourish, and that the new middle class then divides into two parts, one of which remains reactionary, while the other becomes Socialistic (_Berliner Vorwaerts_, February 25, 1912). I have shown that after Imperialism, on the contrary, we may expect a temporarily successful Liberal policy based on capitalistic collectivism, and even on complete political democracy, where the small farmers are sufficiently numerous. This view would accord with the latest opinion of Kautsky, except that he expects the new policy to be supported chiefly by the salaried and professional classes. I have proved, on the contrary, that it is to the economic interest also of all those capitalists, whether large or small, who are deeply rooted in the capitalist system and therefore want its evolution to continue. In favor of "State Socialism," therefore, will be found most active trust magnates, the prosperous middle and upper groups of farmers, and those remaining capitalists who either through their economic or through their _political_ position have no cause to be alarmed at the present concentration of capital. Against the collectivist tendency will be all those capitalists who want to compete with trusts, city landlords, and real estate dealers, and financial magnates whose power consists largely in their control over the wealth of inactive large capitalists or small investors. Kautsky has begun to see that a progressive capitalistic policy _may_ take hold of the professional and salaried classes in Germany; he would probably not deny that in many other countries it is being taken up by certain groups of capitalists also, and that this same tendency may soon be seen in Germany. And when it is, the German Socialists will obviously be less anxious about the fate of much-needed reforms, will find themselves able more frequently to trust these reforms to capitalistic progressives, and will give themselves over more largely than ever to the direct preparation of the masses for the overthrow of capitalist government. That is to say, the Socialist movement, like all the other forces of individual and social life, becomes more aggressive as it becomes stronger--and it is, indeed, inexplicable how the opposite view has spread among its opponents. Not only does it seem that the German movement is showing little or no tendency to relax the radical nature of its demands, but it does not appear that its enemies are, for the present at least, to be given the satisfaction of seeing even a minority split off from the main body. That a split may occur in the future is not improbable, but if the movement continues to grow as it has grown, it can afford to lose many minorities, just as it has suffered comparatively little damage from the desertion of several prominent individual figures. It is true that the division of opinion in the Party might now be sharper but for the artificial unity created by the great fight for a more democratic form of government that lies immediately ahead. If the needed reforms are granted without any very revolutionary proceedings on the part of the Socialists, as similar reforms were granted in Austria, the Party might then conceivably divide into two parts, in which case it is probable that a majority of the four million Socialist _voters_ might go with the anti-revolutionist and reform wing, but it is equally probable that a large majority of the Party members--now nearly a million (including women)--would go with the revolutionists. In case of a split, the reform wing of the party, already in the friendliest relations with the non-Socialist radicals, would doubtless join with them to constitute a very powerful, semidemocratic party, similar to the Radicals and Labourites of Great Britain or the so-called "Socialist Radicals" and "Independent Socialists," who dominate the Parliament of France. Besides a difference in ideals, which counts for little in practical politics,--for nothing, in the extremely opportunist policies of the "reformists,"--the only difference of importance between them is in their attitude towards militarism and war. If peace is firmly established with France, it is difficult to see what can keep the reformers and the "reformists" of Germany much longer apart. A more or less "State Socialistic" Party, such as would result from this fusion would, of course, involve concessions by both sides. While the non-Socialist "reformers" would have to adopt a more aggressive attitude in their fight for a certain measure of democracy and against militarism, and would have to be ready to defend the rights of the more conservative labor unions, the "reformists" would have to take up a still more active interest in colonies and still further their republicanism. Many of them have already gone far in these directions. Colonialism even had the upper hand among the Germans at the Stuttgart Congress (1907); and the tendency of the South Germans to break the Socialist tradition and tacitly to accept monarchy by participation in court functions is one of the most common causes of recrimination in the German Party. It is difficult, then, to see how these two movements can long keep apart. The only question is whether, when the time comes, individuals or minorities will leave the Socialist Party for this purpose, or whether in some of the States the Party organization will be captured as a whole, leaving only a minority to form a new Socialist Party. "It is a well-known fact," says W. C. Dreher, expressing the prevalent view of the German movement, "that, for some years, many voters have been helping those who by no means subscribe to the Socialists' creed,--doing so as the most effective means of protecting against the general policy of the government. It is equally certain that a large part of the regular Socialist membership is composed of discontented men who have but a lukewarm interest in collectivism, or believe that it can never be realized.... If a change should come over Germany, if Prussia should get rid of its plutocratic suffrage reform and give real ballot reform, if the protective duties should be reduced in the interest of the poorest class of consumers,--it may be safely assumed that the tide of Socialism would soon begin to ebb."[201] If Mr. Dreher had added the reduction of military burdens to tariff reform and equal Reichstag election districts, an extended suffrage for Prussia, and a responsible ministry, there would have been at least this truth in his statement--that _if all these things were accomplished_, the tide of Socialist _votes_ would for the moment be checked. His interpretation of the situation, however, is typical of the illogical statements now so commonly made concerning the growth of the German movement. That political tide which is wrongly assumed to be wholly Socialist would indeed be suddenly and greatly checked; but there is no reason to suppose that the Socialist tide proper, as indicated by growth of the Socialist Party membership, would be checked, nor that the Socialist vote even, after having been purified of the accidental accretions, which are its greatest hindrance, would rise less rapidly than before. The German Socialist situation is important internationally for the decisive defeat of the "revisionists," and for the light it throws on party unity, but it is still more important for the _means_ that have been adopted for preserving that unity. If Socialist parties are to reconstruct society, they must first control their own members in all matters of common concern, especially those who are elected to public office. For before a new society can arise against the resistance of the old, the Socialist parties, according to the prevailing Socialist view, must form a "State within a State." This principle is soon to be put to a severe test in the United States. The policy which says that the Socialist movement must be directed by organized Socialists, who can be taxed, called on for labor, or expelled by the Party, and not by mere voters, over whom the Party has no control, becomes of the first moment when forms and methods of organization are prescribed for all parties by law. By the primary laws of a number of States, anybody who for any reason has voted for Socialist candidates may henceforth have a voice not only in selecting candidates, but in forming the party organization, and in constructing its platform. In some States even, any citizen may vote at any primary he pleases. This makes it possible for capitalist politicians to direct or disrupt the Socialist Party at any moment, until the time arrives when it has secured a majority or a very large part of the electorate, not only as Socialist voters, but as members of the Socialist organization. As Socialists do not expect this to happen for some years to come, or until the social revolution is at hand, it is evident that this new legislation may destroy Socialist parties as they have been, and necessitate the direction of Socialist politics by leagues or political committees of Socialist labor unions--while the present Socialist parties become Populist or Labor parties of the Australian type. _This might create a revolution for the better in that it would free the new Socialist organization from office seeking and other forms of political corruption._ But it would at the same time mark the complete abandonment of the present Socialist method, _i.e._ the strict control of all persons elected to office by an independent organization which in turn controls its conditions of admission to membership. One of the most widely circulated of the leaflets issued from the national headquarters of the American Socialist Party, entitled "Socialist Methods" appeals for public support largely on the ground that "in nominating candidates for public offices the Socialists require the nominee to sign a resignation of the office with blank date, which is placed in the hands of the local organization to be dated and presented to the proper officer in case the candidate be elected and fails to adhere to the platform, constitution, or mandates of the membership." The newer primary laws taken in connection with the recall, as practiced in many American cities and several States, threaten this most valuable of all Socialist methods and may even undermine the Socialist Party as at present organized. The initiative in this process of disruption comes, of course, from Socialist officeholders who owe either their nomination or their election or both, in part at least, to declared non-Socialists, and still more largely to voters who only partially or occasionally support the Socialist Party and have no connection with the organization. Thus, Mayor Stitt Wilson of Berkeley, California, has refused to comply with this custom of executing an undated resignation from office in advance of election, and the local organization has defended his action on the ground that the "Berkeley municipal charter, providing as it does for the initiative, referendum, and recall, there is no necessity for any official placing his resignation in the hands of the local," ignoring the fact that a handful of the least Socialistic of those who had voted for Mr. Wilson in coöperation with his opponents could defeat a recall unanimously indorsed by the Socialist Party. According to this principle a mere majority in the Socialist Party would be helpless against a mayor who is allowed to make his appeal to the far more numerous non-Socialist and anti-Socialist public. As the custom of requiring signed resignations, by which alone the Socialist Party controls its members in public office, is not yet prescribed by the Party constitution, local and state organizations have a large measure of autonomy, and the Berkeley case was dropped until the next national convention (1912). But the action taken by the Socialists of Lima, Ohio, indicates that the Party will not allow itself to be destroyed in this manner. Mayor Shook, by his appointment to office of non-Socialists, and even of a prominent anti-Socialist, caused the local that elected him to present his signed resignation to the city council, which the latter body ignored at the mayor's request. The mayor was promptly expelled from the Party, and the Socialists of the country have almost unanimously approved the expulsion.[202] The comment of the _New York Call_ on this incident undoubtedly reflects the feeling of the majority of the Socialist Party:-- "Owing to the multiplicity of elections we must go through, owing to the peculiar division and subdivision of the administrative authority in this country, this is a thing we shall have to face with accumulating frequency. But that the Socialist Party is sound on the theories of what it is after, and on its own rights as an organization, are both demonstrated by the action taken by Local Lima. The members permanently expelled the traitor. Now let him go ahead and do what he can, personally gain what he can. He does it as a non-Socialist, as a man who is held up to contempt by every decent party member, and is probably held in the most absolute contempt by those who were able to seduce him with such ease. "At the present state of our development, it is easy for a plausible adventurer to take advantage of the Socialist movement and to use it to a certain point. Where such an adventurer falls down never to rise again, is when he tries 'to deliver the goods' to those whom he serves.... "That he did not possess even rudimentary honesty is shown by the fact that he prevented his letter of resignation from being received by the City Council. This manner of resignation is not and never has been with the Socialists a mere formality. It is a vital, necessary thing, and should be insisted upon at all times and in all places. No man should go on the ticket unless he has signed the resignation, and no man, unless he is a scoundrel, will sign it unless he intends to live up to it. "There may be other Shooks in the party, but they should be searched out before nominations, instead of being permitted to reveal themselves after nomination."[203] "The Socialist Party must conform to the conditions imposed upon other parties," says Mr. J. R. MacDonald in agreement with Mr. Wilson's position.[204] On the contrary, no Socialist Party could possibly survive such an attitude. It is only the refusal to conform that assures their continued existence. There is no possibility that the Socialist parties of Continental Europe would for a moment allow the State to prescribe their form of organization. Kautsky thus describes the German and the French methods of control:-- "A class is only sure that its interests in Parliament will always be furthered by its representatives in the most decisive and for the time being most effective manner, if it is not content with electing them to Parliament, but always oversees and directs their Parliamentary activities." Kautsky illustrates this principle of controlling elected persons by referring to the methods of labor unions, and proceeds:-- "The same mass action, the same discipline, the same 'tyranny' which characterize the economic organizations of labor is also suitable to labor parties, and this discipline applies not only to the masses, it also applies to those who represent them before the public, to its leaders. No one of these, no matter in what position he may be, can undertake any kind of political action against the will or _even without the consent of his comrades_. The Social Democratic representative is no free man in _this capacity_, as burdensome as that may sound, but the delegate of his party. If his views come into conflict with theirs, then he must cease to be their representative. "The present-day Member of Parliament ... is not the delegate of his election district, but, as a matter of fact, if not legally, the delegate of his party. But this is not true of any party to such an extent as it is of the Social Democracy. And while the party discipline of the bourgeois parties is, in truth, the discipline of a small clique which stands above the separated masses of voters, with the Social Democracy it is the discipline of an organization which embraces the whole mass of the aggressive and intelligent part of the proletariat, and which is stretching itself more and more to embrace the whole of the working class." (My italics.)[205] In the introduction to the same booklet, Kautsky sums up for us in a few words the methods in use in France:-- "Our French comrades have created for the solution of this difficulty a body between the Party Congress and the Party Executive like our Committee of Control, but different from the latter in that it counts more members who are elected not by the Congress, but directly by the comrades of the various districts which they represent. A right to elect five members to the Party Congress gives the right to elect one member to the National Council. "The National Council elects from the twenty-two members of the permanent Executive Committee the five party secretaries, whose functions are paid. It conducts the general propaganda, oversees the execution of party decisions, prepares for the Congresses, oversees the party press and the group in Parliament, and has the right to undertake all measures which the situation at the moment demands."[206] We see that the Socialist members of the national legislatures, both in Germany and France, are under the most rigid control, and we cannot doubt that if such control becomes impossible on account of legislation enacted by hostile governments, an entirely new form of organization will be devised by which the members of the Socialist Party can regain this power. Either this will be done, or the "Socialist" Party which continues to exist in a form dictated by its enemies, will be Socialist in name only, and Socialists will reorganize--probably along the lines I have suggested. It would seem, then, that neither by an attack from without or from within is the revolutionary character of Socialism or the essential unity of the Socialist organization to be destroyed. The departure from the Party of individuals or factions that had not recognized its true nature, and were only there by some misunderstanding or by local or temporary circumstances is a necessary part of the process of growth. On the contrary, the Party is damaged only in case these individuals and factions remain in the organization and become a majority. The failure of those who represent the Party's fundamental principles to maintain control, might easily prove fatal; with the subordination of its principles the movement would disintegrate from within. In fact, the possibility of the deliberate wrecking of the Party in such circumstances, by enemies within its own ranks, has been pointed out and greatly feared by Liebknecht and other representative Socialists. This tendency, however, seems to be subsiding in those countries in which the movement is most highly developed, such as Germany and France. FOOTNOTES: [196] Quoted by Chairman Singer at the Congress of 1909. [197] Quoted by _Vorwaerts_ (Berlin), Sept. 24, 1909. [198] The proceedings of most of the German Party Congresses may be obtained through the _Vorwaerts_ (Berlin), those of the International and American Congresses from the Secretary of the Socialist Party, 180 Washington St., Chicago, Ill. [199] Kautsky, "Der Aufstand in Baden," in the _Neue Zeit_, 1910, p. 624. [200] The _Socialist Review_, April, 1909. [201] The _Atlantic Monthly_, July, 1911. [202] The _New York Call_, Jan. 6 and 8, 1912. [203] The _New York Call_, Jan. 9, 1912. [204] The _Socialist Review_ (London), April, 1909. [205] "Parlamentarismus und Demokratie," 1911 edition, pp. 114-116. [206] "Parlamentarismus und Demokratie," 1911 edition, pp. 14-15. PART III SOCIALISM IN ACTION CHAPTER I SOCIALISM AND THE "CLASS STRUGGLE" Socialists have always taught that Socialism can develop only out of the full maturity of capitalism, and so favor the normal advance of capitalist industry and government and the reforms of capitalist collectivism--on their constructive side. But if capitalism in its highest form of "State Socialism" is the only foundation upon which the Socialism can be built, it is at the same time that form of capitalism which will prevail when Socialism reaches maturity and is ready for decisive action; and it is, therefore, the very enemy against which the Socialist hosts will have been drilled and the Socialist tactics evolved. The older capitalism, which professed to oppose all industrial activities of the government, must disappear, but it is not the object of attack, for the capitalists themselves will abandon it without Socialist intervention in any form. Socialists have urged on this evolution from the older to the newer capitalism by taking the field against the reactionaries, but they do not, as a rule, claim that by this action they are doing any more for Socialism than they are for progressive capitalism. Socialism can only do what capitalism, after it has reached its culmination in State capitalism, leaves undone; namely, to take effective measures to establish equal opportunity and abolish class government. To accomplish this, Socialists realize they must reckon with the resistance of every element of society that enjoys superior opportunities or profits from capitalist government, and they must know just which these elements are. It must be decided which of the non-privileged classes are to be permanently relied upon in the fight for this great change, to what point each will be ready to go, and of what effective action it is capable. Next, the classes upon which it is decided to rely must be brought together and organized. And, finally, the individual members of these classes must be developed, by education and social struggles, until they are able to overcome the resistance of the classes now in control of industry and government. The popular conviction that the very _existence_ of social classes is in complete contradiction with the principles of democracy, no amount of contrary teaching has been able to blot out. What has not been so clearly seen is the active and constant _resistance_ of the privileged classes to popular government and industrial democracy, _i.e._ the class struggle. "We have long rested comfortably in this country on the assumption," says Senator La Follette, "that because our form of government was democratic, it was therefore automatically producing democratic results. Now there is nothing mysteriously potent about the forms and names of democratic institutions that should make them self-operative. Tyranny and oppression are just as possible under democratic forms as under any other. We are slowly realizing that democracy is a life, and involves continual struggle."[207] Senator La Follette fails only to note that this struggle to make democracy a reality is not a struggle in the heart of the individual, but between groups of individuals, that these groups are not formed by differences of temperament or opinion, but by economic interests, and that nearly every group falls into one of two great classes, those whose interests are with and those whose interests are against the capitalists and capitalist government. Why is the sinister rôle of the upper classes not universally grasped? Because the ideas and teachings of former generations still survive, however much contradicted by present developments. At the time of the American and French Revolutions and for nearly a century afterwards, when political democracy was first securing a world-wide acceptance _as an ideal_, it was looked upon as a creed which had only to be mentally accepted in order to be forthwith applied to life. The only forces of resistance were thought to be due to the ignorance or possibly to the unregenerate moral character of the unconverted. The democratic faith was accepted and propagated by the French and others almost exactly as religion had been. As late as the middle of the last century this conception of democracy, due to the wide diffusion of small and in many localities approximately equal farms and small businesses, continued to prevail. About the middle of the nineteenth century the first advance was made. It became recognized with the coming of railroads and steamships that society could never become fixed as a Utopia or in any other form, but must always be subject to change,--and the ideal of social evolution gained a considerable acceptance even before the evolution theory had been generally applied to biology. It was seen that if the ideal of democracy was to become a reality, a certain degree of intellectual and material development was required,--but it was thought that this development was at hand. It was a period when wealth was rapidly becoming more equally distributed, when plenty of free land remained, and when it was commonly supposed that universal free trade and universal peace were about to dawn upon the nations, and equal opportunity, if not yet achieved, was not far away. The obstacles in the way of progress were not the resistance of privileged classes, but the time and labor required for mankind to conquer the world and nature. With the establishment of so-called democratic and constitutional republics in the place of monarchies and landlord aristocracies, and the abolition of slavery in the United States, all systematic opposition to social progress, except in the minds of a few perverted or criminal individuals, was supposed to be at an end. A generation or two ago, then, though it was now recognized that the golden age could not be attained immediately by merely converting the majority to a wise and beneficent social system (as had been proposed in the first half of the century), yet it was thought that, with the advance of science and the conquest of nature, and without any serious civil strife, "equality of opportunity" was being gradually and rapidly brought to all mankind. This state of mind has survived and is still that of the majority to-day, when the conditions that have given rise to it have disappeared. Not all previous history has a greater economic change to show than the latter half of the nineteenth century, which converted all the leading countries from nations of small capitalists into nations of hired employees. Even such a far-sighted and broad-minded statesman as Lincoln, for example, had no idea of the future of his country, and regarded the slaveowners and their supporters as the only classes that dreamed that we could ever become a nation of "hired laborers" (the capitalism of to-day), any more than we could remain in part a nation of "bought laborers." Lincoln puts a society based on hired labor in the same class with a society based on owned labor, on the ground that both lead to an effort "to place capital on an equal footing, if not above labor in the structure of the government." This effort, marked by the proposal of "the abridgment of the existing right of suffrage and the denial to the people of the right to participate in the selection of public officers except the legislative" (so similar to tendencies prevailing to-day), he calls "returning despotism." And so inevitable did it seem to Lincoln that a nation based on hired labor would evolve a despotic government, that he fell back on the fact that the population was composed chiefly not of laborers, but of small capitalists, and would probably remain so constituted, as the only convincing ground that our political democracy would last. In a word, our greatest statesman recognized that our political democracy and liberty were based on the wide distribution of the land and other forms of capital. (See Lincoln's Message of December 3, 1861.) If Lincoln foresaw no class struggle between "hired labor" and the "returning despotism," this was only because he mistakenly expected that the nation would continue to consist chiefly of small capitalists. Yet his conclusions and those of his contemporaries, so clearly limited to conditions that have passed away, are taught like a gospel to the children in our public schools to-day. The present generation, however, is slowly realizing, through the development of organized capitalism in industry and government, and the increase of hired laborers, that it is not nature alone that civilization must contend against, not merely ignorance or poverty or the backwardness of material development, but, more important than all these, the systematic opposition of the employing and governing classes to every program of improvement, except that which promises still further to increase their own wealth and power. The Socialist view of the evolution of society is that the central fact of history is this struggle of classes for political and economic power. The governing class of any society or period, Marx taught, consists of the economic exploiters, the governed class of the economically exploited. The governing class becomes more and more firmly established in power, until it begins to stagnate, but the machinery of production continues to evolve, and falls gradually into the hands of some exploited element which is able to use this economic advantage as a means for overthrowing its rulers. Marx felt that with the vast revolution in society marked by modern science and modern machinery, the time is fast approaching when the exploited classes of to-day will be able to overthrow the present ruling class, the capitalists, and at the same time establish an industrial democracy, where all class oppression will be brought to an end. However his predictions may turn out in the future, Marx's view of the past is rapidly gaining ground and is possibly accepted by the majority of those most competent to speak on these questions to-day, including many leading economists and sociologists and prominent figures in practical political life. Winston Churchill, for example, says that "the differences between class and class have been even aggravated in the passage of years," that while "the richer classes [are] ever growing in wealth and in numbers, and ever declining in responsibility, the very poor remain plunged or plunging even deeper into helpless, hopeless misery." This being the case, he predicts "a savage strife between class and class," unless the most radical measures are taken to check the tendency. Nor are his statements mere rhetoric, for he shows statistically "that the increase of income assessable to income tax is at the very least more than ten times greater than the increase which has taken place in the same period in the wages of those trades which come within the Board of Trade returns."[208] In other words, the income of the well-to-do classes (which increased nearly half a billion pounds, that is, almost doubled, in ten years) is growing ten times more rapidly than that even of the organized and better paid workmen, who alone are considered in the Board of Trade returns. Here is a situation which is world-wide. The position of the working class, or certain parts of it, may be improving; the income of the employing and capitalist class is certainly increasing _many fold_ more rapidly. Here is the financial expression of the growing _divergence_ of classes which Marx had in mind, a divergence that we have no reason whatever for supposing will be checked, as Mr. Churchill suggests, even by his most "Socialistic" reforms, short of surrendering the political and economic power to those who suffer from this condition. At the German Socialist Congress at Hanover in 1899, Bebel said that even if the income of the working class was increasing, or even if the purchasing power of total wages was becoming greater, the income of the nation as a whole was increasing much more rapidly and that of the capitalist class at a still more rapid rate. The great Socialist statesman laid emphasis on the essential point that capitalists are absorbing continually a greater and a greater proportion of the national income. The class struggle, says Kautsky, rests not upon the fact that the misery of the proletariat is growing greater, but on _its need to annihilate a pressure that it feels more and more keenly_. "The class struggle," he writes, "becomes more bitter the longer it lasts. The more capable of struggle the opponents become in and through the struggle itself, _the more important become the differences in their conditions of life, the more the capitalists raise themselves above the proletariat by the ever growing exploitation_."[209] This feature of present-day (capitalistic) progress, Socialists view as the very essence of social injustice, no matter whether there is a slight and continuous or even a considerable progress of the working class. The question for them is not whether from time to time something more falls to the workingman, but what proportion he gets of the total product. It would never occur to any one to try to tell a business man that he ought not to sell any more goods because his profits were already increasing "fast enough." It is as absurd to tell the workingman that the moderate advance he is making either through slight improvements as to wages and hours, or through political and social reforms, ought to blind him to all the possibilities of modern civilization from which he is still shut off, and which will remain out of his reach for generations, unless his share in the income of society is rapidly increased to the point that he (and other non-capitalist producers) receive the total product. The conflict of class interests is not a mere theory, but a widely recognized reality, and the worst accusation that can be made against Socialists is not that they are trying to create a war of classes where none exists, but that some of them at times interpret the conflict in a narrow or violent sense (I shall discuss the truth or untruth of this criticism in later chapters). Yet Mr. Roosevelt voices the opinion of many when he calls the view that the maximum of progress is to be secured only after a struggle between the classes, the "most mischievous of Socialist theses," says that an appeal to class interest is not "legitimate," and that the Socialists hope "in one shape or another to profit at the expense of the other citizens of the Republic."[210] "There is no greater need to-day," said Mr. Roosevelt in his Sorbonne lecture, "than the need to keep ever in mind the fact that the cleavage between right and wrong, between good citizenship and bad citizenship, runs at right angles to, not parallel to, the lines of cleavage between class and class, between occupation and occupation. Ruin looks us in the face if we judge a man by his position instead of judging him by his conduct in that position." This is as much as to say that there are only individuals, but no class, which it is better to have outside than inside of a progressive majority. The Socialist view is the exact opposite. It holds that _the very foundation of Socialism as a method_ (which is its only aspect of practical importance) is that the Socialist movement assumes a position so militant and radical that every privileged class will voluntarily remain on the outside; and events are showing the wisdom and even the necessity of these tactics. Socialists would say, "Ruin looks us in the face if, in politics, we judge the men who occupy a certain position (the members of a certain class) by their conduct as individuals, instead of judging them by the fact that they occupy a certain position and are members of a certain class." Again, to the Chamber of Commerce at New Haven, Mr. Roosevelt expressed a view which, to judge by their actions, is that of all non-Socialist reformers: "I am a radical," he said, "who most earnestly desires to see a radical platform carried out by conservatives. I wish to see great industrial reforms carried out, not by the men who will profit by them, but by the men who will lose by them; by such men as you are around me." Socialists, on the contrary, believe that industrial reforms will never lead to equality of opportunity except when carried out wholly independently of the conservatives who will lose by them. They believe that such reforms as are carried out by the capitalists and their governments, beneficent, radical, and even stupendous as they may be, will not and cannot constitute the first or smallest step towards industrial democracy. Mr. Roosevelt's views are identical on this point with those of Mr. Woodrow Wilson and other progressive leaders of the opposite party. Mayor Gaynor of New York, for example, was quoted explaining the great changes that took place in the fall elections of 1910 on these grounds: "We are emerging from an evil case. The flocking of nearly all the business men, owners of property, and even persons with $100 in the savings bank, to one party made a division line and created a contrast which must have led to trouble if much longer continued. The intelligence of the country is asserting itself, and business men and property owners will again divide themselves normally between the parties, as formerly." Here again is the fundamental antithesis to the Socialist view. Leaving aside for the moment the situation of persons with $100 in the savings bank, or owners of property in general (who might possess nothing more than a small home), Socialists are working, with considerable success, towards the day when at least one great party will take a position so radical that the overwhelming majority of business men (or at least the representatives of by far the larger part of business and capital) will be forced automatically into the opposite organization. Without this militant attitude Socialists believe that even the most radical reforms, not excepting those that sincerely propose equal opportunity or the abolition of social classes _as their ultimate aim_, must fail to carry society forward a single step in that direction. Take, as an example, Dr. Lyman Abbott, whose advanced views I have already referred to (see Part I, Chap. III). Notwithstanding his advocacy of industrial democracy, his attack on the autocracy of capitalism and the wages system, and his insistence that the distinction between non-possessing and possessing classes must be abolished, Dr. Abbott opposes a class struggle. Such phrases amount to nothing from the Socialist standpoint, if all of these objects are held up merely as an ideal, and if nothing is said of the rate at which they ought to be attained or the means by which the _opposition_ of privileged classes is to be overcome. No indorsement of any so-called Socialist theory or reform is of practical moment unless it includes that theory which has survived out of the struggles of the movement, and has been tested by hard experience--a theory in which ways and means are not the last but the first consideration,--namely, the class struggle. Mr. Roosevelt and nearly all other popular leaders of the day denounce "special privilege." But the denouncers of special privilege, aside from the organized Socialists, are only too glad to associate themselves with one or another of the classes that at present possess the economic and political power. To the Socialists the only way to fight special privilege is _to place the control of society in the hands of a non-privileged majority. The practical experience of the movement_ has taught the truth of what some of its early exponents saw at the outset, that a majority _composed even in part_ of the privileged classes could never be trusted or expected to abolish privileges. Neither Dr. Abbott, Mr. Roosevelt, nor other opponents of the Socialist movement, are ready to indorse this practical working theory. For its essence being that all those who by their economic expressions or their acts stand for anything less than equality of opportunity should be removed from positions of power, it is directed against every anti-Socialist. Dr. Abbott, for example, demands only "opportunity," instead of equal opportunity, and Mr. Roosevelt wishes merely "to start all men in the race for life on a _reasonable_ equality." (My italics.)[211] Let us see what Marx and his successors say in explanation of their belief that the "class struggle" must be fought out to an end. Certainly they do not mean that each individual capitalist is to be regarded by his working people as their private enemy. Nor, on the other hand, can the expression "class struggle" be interpreted, as some Socialists have asserted, to mean that there was no flesh and blood enemy to be attacked, but only "the capitalist system." To Marx capitalism was embodied not merely in institutions, which embrace all classes and individuals alike, but also in the persons of the capitalist class. And by waging a war against that class he meant to include each and every member of it who remained in his class, and every one of its supporters. To Marx the enemy was no abstraction. It was, as he said, "the person, the living individual" that had to be contended with, but only as the embodiment of a class. "It is not sufficient," he said, "to fight the general conditions and the higher powers. The press must make up its mind to oppose _this_ constable, _this_ attorney, _this_ councilor."[212] These individuals, moreover, he viewed not merely as the servants or representatives of a system, but as part and parcel of a class. The struggle that Marx had in mind might be called _a latent civil war_. It was not a mere preparation for revolution, since it was as real and serious in times of peace as in those of revolution or civil war. But it was a civil war in everything except the actual physical fighting, and he was always ready to proceed to actual fighting when necessary. Throughout his life Marx was a revolutionist. And when his successors to-day speak of "the class struggle," they mean a conflict of that depth and intensity that it may lead to revolution. None of the classical Socialist writers, however, has failed to grasp the absolute necessity to a successful social movement, and especially to a revolutionary one, of making the class struggle broad, inclusive, and democratic. In 1851 Marx wrote to the Socialists: "The forces opposed to you have all the advantages of organization, discipline, and habitual authority; unless you bring _strong odds_ against them you are defeated and ruined." (The italics are mine.) Edward Bernstein, while representing as a rule only the ultra-moderate element of the Party, expresses on this question the views of the majority as well. "Social Democracy," he says, "cannot further its work better than by taking its stand unreservedly on the theory of democracy." And he adds that in practice it has always favored coöperation with all the exploited, even if "its literary advocates have often acted otherwise, and still often do so to-day." Not many years ago, it is true, there was still a great deal of talk in Germany about the desirability of a "dictatorship of the proletariat," the term "proletariat" being used in its narrow sense. That is, as soon as the working class (in this sense) became a political majority, it was to make the government embody its will without reference to other classes--it being assumed that the manual laborers will only demand justice for all men alike, and that it was neither safe nor necessary to consult any of the middle classes. And even to-day in France much is said by the "syndicalists" and others as to the power of well-organized and determined minorities in the time of revolution--it being assumed, again, that such minorities will be successful only in so far as they stand for a new social principle, to the ultimate interest of all (see Chapter V). It cannot be questioned that in these schemes the majority is not to be consulted. But they are far less widely prevalent than they were a generation ago. The pioneer of "reformist" Socialism in Germany (Bernstein) correctly defines democracy, not as the rule of the majority, but as "an absence of class government." "This negative definition has," he says, "the advantage that it gives less room than the phrase 'government by the people' to the idea of oppression of the individual by the majority, which is absolutely repugnant to the modern mind. To-day we find the oppression of the minority by the majority 'undemocratic,' although it was originally held up to be quite consistent with government by the people.... Democracy is in _principle_ the suppression of class government, though it is not yet the _actual_ suppression of classes."[213] Democracy, as we have hitherto known it, opposes class _government_, but countenances the existence of classes. Socialism insists that as long as social classes exist, class government will continue. The aim of Socialism, "the end of class struggles and class rule," is not only democratic, but the only means of giving democracy any real meaning. "It is only the proletariat" (wage earners), writes Kautsky, "that has created a great social ideal, the consummation of which will leave only one source of income, _i.e._ labor, will abolish rent and profit, will put an end to class and other conflicts, and put in the place of the class struggle the solidarity of man. This is the final aim and goal of the class struggle by the Socialist Party. The political representatives of the class interests of the proletariat thus become representative of the highest and most general interests of humanity."[214] It is expected that nearly all social classes, though separated into several groups to-day, will ultimately be thrown together by economic evolution and common interests into two large groups, the capitalists and their allies on the one side, and the anti-capitalists on the other. The final and complete victory of the latter, it is believed, can alone put an end to this great conflict. But in the meanwhile, even before our capitalist society is overthrown and class divisions ended, the very fusing together of the several classes that compose the anti-capitalist party is bringing about a degree of social harmony not seen before. Already the Socialists have succeeded in this way in harmonizing a large number of conflicting class interests. The skilled workingmen were united for the first time with the unskilled when the latter, having been either ignored or subordinated in the early trade unions, were admitted on equal terms into the Socialist parties. Then the often extremely discontented salaried and professional men of small incomes, having been won by Socialist philosophy, laid aside their sense of superiority to the wage earners and were absorbed in large numbers. Later, many agricultural laborers and even agriculturists who did all their own work, and whose small capital brought them no return, began to conquer their suspicion of the city wage workers. And, finally, many of those small business men and independent farmers, the _larger part_ of whose income is to be set down as the direct result of their own labor and not a result of their ownership of a small capital, or who feel that they are being reduced to such a condition, are commencing in many instances to look upon themselves as non-capitalists rather than capitalists--and to work for equality of opportunity through the Socialist movement. The process of building up a truly democratic society has two parts: first, the organization and union in a single movement of all classes that stand for the abolition of classes, and class rule; and second, the overthrow of those social elements that stand in the way of this natural evolution, their destruction and dissolution _as classes_, and the absorption of their members by the new society as individuals. It becomes of the utmost importance in such a vast struggle, on the one hand, that no classes that are needed in the new society shall be marked for destruction, and on the other that the movement shall not lean too heavily or exclusively on classes which have very little or too little constructive or combative power. What, then, is the leading principle by which the two groups are to be made up and distinguished? Neither the term "capitalist classes" nor the term "working classes" is entirely clear or entirely satisfactory. Mr. Roosevelt, for example, gives the common impression when he accuses the Socialists of using the term "working class" in the narrow sense and of taking the position that "all wealth is produced by manual workers, that the entire product of labor should be handed over to the laborer."[215] I shall show that Socialist writers and speakers, even when they use the expression "working class," almost universally include others than the manual laborers among those they expect to make up the anti-capitalistic movement. Kautsky's definition of the working class, for example, is: "Workers who are divorced from their power of production to the extent that they can produce nothing by their own efforts, and are therefore compelled in order to escape starvation to sell the only commodity they possess--their labor power." In present-day society, especially in a rich country like America, it is as a rule not sheer "starvation" that drives, but needs of other kinds that are almost as compelling. But the point I am concerned with now is that this definition, widely accepted by Socialists, draws no line whatever between manual and intellectual workers. In another place Kautsky refers to the industrial working class as being the recruiting ground for Socialism, which might seem to be giving a preferred position to manual workers; but a few paragraphs below he again qualifies his statement by adding that "to the working class there belong, just as much as the wage earners, the members of the new middle class," which I shall describe below.[216] In other statements of their position, it is the context which makes the Socialist meaning clear. The party Platform of Canada, for instance, uses throughout the simple term "working class," without any explanation, but it speaks of the struggle as taking place against the "capitalists," and as it mentions no other classes, the reader is left to divide all society between these two, which would evidently make it necessary to classify many besides mere manual wage earners rather among the anti-capitalist than among the capitalist forces. The platform of the American Socialist Party in 1904 divided the population between the "capitalists," and the "working or _producing class_." "Between these two classes," says this platform, "there can be no possible compromise ... except in the conscious and complete triumph of the working class as the only class that has the right or _power_ to be." "By working people," said Liebknecht, "we do not understand merely the manual workers, but _every one who does not live on the labor of another_." His words should be memorized by all those who wish to understand the first principles of Socialism:-- "Some maintain, it is true, that the wage-earning proletariat is the only really revolutionary class, that it alone forms the Socialist army, and that we ought to regard with suspicion all adherents belonging to other classes or other conditions of life. Fortunately these senseless ideas have never taken hold of the German Social Democracy. "The wage-earning class is most directly affected by capitalist exploitation; it stands face to face with those who exploit it, and it has the especial advantage of being concentrated in the factories and yards, so that it is naturally led to think things out more energetically and finds itself automatically organized into 'battalions of workers.' This state of things gives it a revolutionary character which no other part of society has to the same degree. We must recognize this frankly. "Every wage earner is either a Socialist already, or he is on the high road to becoming one. "We must not limit our conception of the term 'working class' too narrowly. As we have explained in speeches, tracts, and articles, we include in the working class all those who live exclusively _or principally_ by means of their own labor, and who do not grow rich from the work of others. "Thus, besides the wage earners, we should include in the working class the small farmers and small shop keepers, who tend more and more to drop to the level of the proletariat--in other words, all those who suffer from our present system of production on a large scale." (My italics.) The chief questions now confronting the Socialists are all connected, directly or indirectly, with these producing middle classes, who, on the whole, do not live on the labor of others and suffer from the present system, yet often enjoy some modest social privilege. While Liebknecht considered that the wage-earning class was more revolutionary and Socialistic than any other, he did not allow this for one moment to persuade him to give a subordinate position to other classes in the movement, as he says:-- "The unhappy situation of the small farmers almost all over Germany is as well known as that of the artisan movement. It is true that both small farmers and small shopkeepers are still in the camp of our adversaries, but only because they do not understand the profound causes that underlie their deplorable condition; it is of prime importance for our party to enlighten them and bring them over to our side. _This is the vital question for our party, because these two classes form the majority of the nation._... We ought not to ask, 'Are you a wage earner?' but, 'Are you a Socialist?' "If it is limited to the wage earners, Socialism cannot conquer. If it included all the workers and the moral and intellectual élite of the nation, its victory is certain.... Not to contract, but to expand, ought to be our motto. The circle of Socialism should widen more and more, _until we have converted most of our adversaries to being our friends_, or at least disarm their opposition. "And the indifferent mass, that in peaceful days has no weight in the political balance, but becomes the decisive force in times of agitation, ought to be so fully enlightened as to the aims and the essential ideas of our party, that it would cease to fear us and can be no longer used as a weapon against us."[217] (My italics.) Karl Kautsky, though he takes a less broad view, also says that the Socialist Party is "the only anti-capitalist party,"[218] and contends in his recent pamphlet, "The Road to Power," that its recruiting ground in Germany includes three fourths of the nation, and probably even more, which (even in Germany) would include a considerable part of those ordinarily listed with the middle class. Kautsky's is probably the prevailing opinion among German Socialists. Let us see how he proposes to compose a Socialist majority. Of course his first reliance is on the manual laborers, skilled and unskilled. Next come the professional classes, the salaried corporation employees, and a large part of the office workers, which together constitute what Kautsky and the other Continental Socialists call the _new_ middle class. "Among these," Kautsky says, "a continually increasing sympathy for the proletariat is evident, because they have no special class interest, and owing to their professional, scientific point of view, are easiest won for our party through scientific considerations. The theoretical bankruptcy of bourgeois economics, and the theoretical superiority of Socialism, must become clear to them. Through their training, also, they must discover that the other social classes continuously strive to debase art and science. Many others are impressed by the fact of the irresistible advance of the Social Democracy. So it is that friendship for labor becomes popular among the cultured classes, until there is scarcely a parlor in which one does not stumble over one or more 'Socialists.'" It is difficult to understand how it can be said that these classes have no special "class interest," unless it is meant that their interest is neither that of the capitalists nor precisely that of the industrial wage-earning class. And this, indeed, is Kautsky's meaning, for he seems to minimize their value to the Socialists, because _as a class_ they cannot be relied upon. "Heretofore, as long as Socialism was branded among all cultured classes as criminal or insane, capitalist elements could be brought into the Socialist movement only by a complete break with the whole capitalist world. Whoever came into the Socialist movement at that time from the capitalist element had need of great energy, revolutionary passion, and strong proletarian convictions. It was just this element which ordinarily constituted the most radical and revolutionary wing of the Socialist movement. "It is wholly different to-day, since Socialism has become a fad. It no longer demands any special energy, or any break with capitalist society to assume the name of Socialist. It is no wonder, then, that more and more these new Socialists remain entangled in their previous manner of thought and feeling. "The fighting tactics of the intellectuals are at any rate wholly different from those of the proletariat. To wealth and power of arms the latter opposes its overwhelming numbers and its thorough organization. The intellectuals are an ever diminishing minority, with no class organization whatever. Their only weapon is persuasion through speaking and writing, the battle with 'intellectual weapons' and 'moral superiority,' and these 'parlor Socialists' would settle the proletarian class struggle also with these weapons. They declare themselves ready to grant the party their moral support, but only on condition that it renounces the idea of the application of force, and this not simply where force is hopeless,--there the proletariat has already renounced it,--but also in those places where it is still full of possibilities. Accordingly they seek to throw discredit on the idea of revolution, and to represent it as a useless means. They seek to separate off a social reform wing from the revolutionary proletariat, and they thereby divide and weaken the proletariat."[219] In the last words Kautsky refers to the fact that although a large number of "intellectuals" (meaning the educated classes) have come into the Socialist Party and remain there, they constitute a separate wing of the movement. We must remember, however, that this same wing embraces, besides these "parlor Socialists," a great many trade unionists, and that it has composed a very considerable portion of the German Party, and a majority in some other countries of the Continent; and as Kautsky himself admits that they succeed in "dividing the proletariat," they cannot be very far removed politically from at least one of the divisions they are said to have created. It is impossible to attribute the kind of Socialism to which Kautsky objects to the adhesion of certain educated classes to the movement (for reasons indicated in Part II). While many of the present spokesmen of Socialism are, like Kautsky, somewhat skeptical as to the necessity of an alliance between the working class and this section of the middle class, others accept it without qualification. If, then, we consider at once the middle ground taken by the former group of Socialists, and the very positive and friendly attitude of the latter, it must be concluded that the Socialist movement _as a whole_ is convinced that its success depends upon a fusion of at least these two elements, the wage earners and "the new middle class." A few quotations from the well-known revolutionary Socialist, Anton Pannekoek, will show the contrast between the narrower kind of Socialism, which still survives in many quarters, and that of the majority of the movement. He discriminates even against "the new middle class," leaving nobody but the manual laborers as a fruitful soil for real Socialism. "To be sure, in the economic sense of the term, then, the new middle class are proletarians; but they form a very special group of wage workers, a group that is so sharply divided from the _real_ proletarians that they form a special class with a special position in the class struggle.... Immediate need does not _compel_ them as it does the real proletarians to attack the capitalist system. Their position may arouse discontent, but that of the workers is unendurable. For them Socialism has many advantages, for the workers it is an _absolute_ necessity." (My italics.)[220] The phrase "absolute necessity" is unintelligible. It is comparatively rarely that need arises to the height of actual compulsion, and when it does instances are certainly just as common among clerks as they are among bricklayers. Pannekoek introduces a variety of arguments to sustain his position. For instance, that "the higher strata among the new middle class have a definitely capitalistic character. The lower ones are more proletarian, but there is no sharp dividing line." This is true--but the high strata in every class are capitalistic. The statement applies equally well to railway conductors, to foremen, and to many classes of manual workers. "And then, too," Pannekoek continues, "they, the new middle class, have more to fear from the displeasure of their masters, and dismissal for them is a much more serious matter. The worker stands always on the verge of starvation, and so unemployment has few terrors for him. The high-class employee, on the contrary, has comparatively an easy life, and a new position is difficult to find." Now it is precisely the manual laborer who is most often blacklisted by the large corporations and trusts; and the brain-working employee is better able to adapt himself to some slightly different employment than is the skilled worker in any of the highly specialized trades. "For the cause of Socialism we can count on this new middle class," says Pannekoek, "even less than on the labor unions. For one thing, they have been set over the workers, as superintendents, overseers, bosses, etc. In these capacities they are supposed to speed up the workers to get the utmost out of them." Is it not even more common, we may ask, that one manual worker is set over another than that a brain worker is set over a manual laborer? "They [the new middle class] are divided," writes Pannekoek, "into numberless grades and ranks arranged one above the other; they do not meet as comrades, and so cannot develop the spirit of solidarity. Each individual does not make it a matter of personal pride to improve the condition of his entire class; the important thing is rather that he personally struggles up into the next higher rank." If we remember the more favorable hours and conditions under which the brain workers are employed, the fact that they are not so exhausted physically and that they have education, we may see that they have perhaps even greater chances "to develop their solidarity" and to understand their class interests than have the manual workers. It is true that they are more divided at the present time, but there is a tendency throughout all the highly organized industries to divide the manual laborers in the same way and to secure more work from them by a similar system of promotions. Pannekoek accuses the brain workers of having something to lose, again forgetting that there are innumerable groups of more or less privileged manual laborers who are in the same position. And finally, he contends that their superior schooling and education is a disadvantage when compared to the lack of education of the manual laborers:-- "They have great notions of their own education and refinement, feel themselves above the masses; it naturally never occurs to them that the ideals of these masses may be scientifically correct and that the 'science' of their professors may be false. As theorizers seeing the world always with their minds, knowing little or nothing of material activities, they are fairly convinced that mind controls the world." On the contrary, nearly all influential Socialist thinkers agree that present-day science, _poorly as it is taught_, is not only an aid to Socialism, but the very best basis for it. Pannekoek is right, for instance, when he says that most of the brain workers in the Socialist movement come from the circles of the small capitalists and bring an anti-Socialist prejudice with them, but he forgets that, on the other side, the overwhelming majority of the world's working people are the children of farmers, peasants, or of absolutely unskilled and illiterate workers, whose views of life were even more prejudiced and whose minds were perhaps even more filled up with the ideas that the ruling classes have placed there. The arguments of the American Socialist, Thomas Sladden, representing as they do the views of _many thousands of revolutionary workingmen in this country_, are also worthy of note. His bitterness, it will be seen, is leveled less against capitalism itself than against what he considers to be intrusion of certain middle-class elements into Socialist ranks. "We find in the United States to-day," writes Sladden, "that we have created several new religions, one of the most interesting of which is called Socialism, and is the religion of a decadent middle class. This fake Socialism or middle-class religion can readily be distinguished from the real Socialist movement, which is simply the wage working class in revolt on both the industrial and political fields against present conditions.... Yesterday I was a bad capitalist--to-day I am a good Socialist, but I pay my wage slaves the same wages to-day as I did yesterday.... They never take the answer of Bernard Shaw, who, when asked by a capitalist what he could do, saying that he could not help being a capitalist, was answered in this manner: You can go and crack rock if you want to; no one forces you to be a capitalist, but you are a capitalist because you want to be. No one forces Hillquit to be a lawyer; he could get a job in a lumber yard. There is no more excuse for a man being a capitalist or a lawyer than there is for him being a Pinkerton detective. He is either by his own free will and accord. The system,--they acclaim in one breath,--the system makes us do what we do not wish to do. The system does nothing of the kind; the system gives a man the choice between honest labor and dishonest labor skinning, and a labor skinner is a labor skinner because he wishes to be, just the same as some men are pickpockets because they wish to be." It can readily be realized that such arguments will always have great weight with the embittered elements of the working class. Nor do the most representative Socialists altogether disagree with Sladden. They, too, feel that if the war is not levied against individuals, neither is it levied against a mere abstract system, but against a ruling class. However, they make exceptions for such capitalists as the late Paul Singer, who definitely abandon their class and throw in their lot with the Socialist movement, while Sladden would admit neither Singer, nor those other millions mentioned by Liebknecht (see above), for he demands that the Socialist Party must declare that "no one not eligible to the labor unions of the United States is eligible to the Socialist Party." The high-water mark of this brand of revolutionism was reached in the State of Washington, when these revolutionary elements in the Socialist Party withdrew to form a new workingmen's party, the chief novelty of which was a plank dividing the organization into "an active list and an assistant list, only wage workers being admitted to the active list." The wage workers were defined as the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live. These are the active list, and they alone hold office and vote. "The assistant list cannot hold office and cannot vote," and the Party will "do active organizing work among wage earners alone." This reminds one very much of the notorious division into active and passive citizens at the early stages of the French Revolution, which gave such a splendid opportunity to the Jacobines to organize a revolt of the passive citizens and was one of the chief causes leading up to the Reign of Terror and the Napoleonic reaction that followed. The Washington plan, however, has been a complete failure. It has had no imitators in the Socialist movement, nor is it likely to have. On the other hand, the most influential representatives of the extreme revolutionary wing of the movement, like Hervé in France, have championed the non-wage-earning elements of the movement as fearlessly as the reformists. "In the ranks of our party," writes Hervé, "are to be found small merchants, small employers, wretched, impoverished, educated people, small peasant proprietors, none of whom on account of occupation can enter into the general Federation of Labor, which only admits those receiving wages and salaries. These are revolutionary elements which cannot be neglected; these volunteers of the Revolution who have often a beautiful revolutionary temperament would be lost for the Revolution if our political organization was not at hand to nourish their activity. Besides, the General Federation of Labor is a somewhat heavy mass; it will become more and more heavy as it comprises the majority of the _working class which is by nature rather pacific at the bottom_." While there is no sufficient reason for the accusation that the Socialist movement neglects the brain workers of the salaried and professional classes, there is somewhat more solid ground, in spite of the above quoted declarations of Liebknecht and Hervé, for the accusation that it antagonizes those sections of the middle classes which are, even to a slight degree, small capitalists, as, for example, especially the farmers. "The unimaginative person," says Mr. H. G. Wells, "who owns some little bit of property, an acre or so of freehold land, or a hundred pounds in the savings bank, will no doubt be the most tenacious passive resister to Socialist ideas; and such I fear we must reckon, together with the insensitive rich, as our irreconcilable enemies, as irremovable pillars of the present order."[221] This view is widespread among Socialists, and is even sustained by Kautsky. "Small merchants and innkeepers," he writes, "have despaired of ever rising by their own exertions; they expect everything from above and look only to the upper classes and to the government for assistance," though they "find their customers only in laboring circles, so that their existence is absolutely dependent upon the prosperity or adversity of the laboring classes." The contradiction Kautsky finds goes even further. He says, "Servility depends upon reaction--and furnishes not only the willing supporters, but the fanatical advocates of the monarchy, the church, and the nobility." With all this they (the shopkeepers, etc.) remain democratic, since it is only through democracy that they can obtain political influence. Kautsky calls them the "reactionary democracy."[222] But if they are democratic and in part economically dependent on the laboring classes, then why should not this part cast its lot economically and politically with the working class? Kautsky extends his criticism of the small capitalists very far and even seems in doubt concerning the owners of small investments such as savings bank deposits. "Well-meaning optimists," he says, "have seen in this a means of decentralizing capital, so that after a while, in the most peaceable manner, without any one noticing it, capital would be transformed into social property. In fact, this movement really means the transformation of all the money of the middle and lower classes, which is not used by them for immediate consumption, into money capital, and as such placing it at the disposal of the great financiers for the buying out of industrial managers, and thereby assisting in the concentration on industry in the hands of a few financiers." The classes which have invested their capital directly or indirectly in stocks or bonds through savings banks and through insurance companies number many millions, and include the large majority of all sections of the middle class, even of its most progressive part, salaried employees, and the professional element. It is undoubtedly true, as Kautsky says, that small investors are not obtaining any direct control over capital, and that their funds are used in the way he points out, constituting one of the striking and momentous tendencies of the time. But it does not follow that they are destined to lose such investments altogether, as the legislative reforms to protect banks may be extended to the railroads and other forms of investments. The small investors will scarcely be turned to favor capitalism by their investments, which bring in small profit and allow them nothing to say in the management of industry, but neither will the losses they sometimes suffer from this source be sufficient in themselves to convert them into allies of the working class. As in the case of the farmers and small shopkeepers, everything here depends upon the economic and political program which the working class develops and offers in competition with the "State Socialism" of the capitalists. If it were true that the ownership of the smallest amount of property brings it about that Socialism is no longer desired, not a small minority of the population will be found aligned with the capitalists, but all the four million owners of farms, and the other millions with a thousand dollars or so invested in a building and loan association, an insurance policy or a savings bank deposit, a total numbering almost half of the occupied population. A bare majority, it is true, might still be without any stake in the community even of this modest character. But neither in the United States nor elsewhere is there any hope that a majority of the absolutely propertyless, even if it becomes a large one, will become sufficiently large within a generation, or perhaps even within a century, to enable it to overthrow the capitalists, unless it draws over to its side certain elements at least, of the middle classes, who, though weaker in some respects are better educated, better placed, and politically stronger than itself. The revolutionary spokesmen of the international Socialist movement now recognize this as clearly as do the most conservative observers. The outcome of the great social struggle depends on the relative success of employers and employed in gaining the support of those classes which, either on account of their ownership of some slight property, or because they receive salaries or fees sufficiently large, must be placed in the middle class, but who cannot be classified _primarily_ as small capitalists That this is the crux of the situation is recognized on all sides. Mr. Winston Churchill, for instance, demands that everything be done to strengthen and increase numerically this middle class, composed of millions of persons whom he claims "would certainly lose by anything like a general overturn, and ... are everywhere the strongest and the best organized millions," and his "State Socialism" is directed chiefly to that end. He believes that these millions, once become completely converted into small capitalists, would certainly prevent by an overwhelming resistance any effort on the part of the rest of the people to gain what he curiously calls, "a selfish advantage." Mr. Churchill says that "_the masses of the people should not use the fact that they are in a majority as a means to advance their relative position in society_." There could not be a sharper contrast between "State Socialism" and Socialism. To Socialists the whole duty of man as a social being is to persuade the masses to "use the fact that they are in a majority as a means to advance their relative position in society." Mr. Churchill seems to feel that as long as everybody shares _more or less_ in the general increase of prosperity from generation to generation, and, as he says, as long as there is "an ever increasing volume of production and an increasing wide diffusion of profit," there is no ground for complaint--whether the relative division of wealth and opportunity between the many and the few becomes more equal or not. But he realizes that his moral suasion is not likely to be heeded and is wise in putting his trust in the middle-class millions. For these are the bone of contention between capitalism and Socialism. While the new middle class (that is, the lower salaried classes, corporation employees, professional men, etc.) is increasing numerically more rapidly than any other, large numbers within it are being deprived of any hope of rising into the wealthy or privileged class. As a consequence they are everywhere crowding into the Socialist ranks--by the hundred thousand in countries where the movement is oldest. Even in the organized Socialist parties these middle-class elements everywhere form a considerable proportion of the whole. Practically a third of the American Party according to a recent reckoning were engaged either in farming (15 per cent) or in commercial (9 per cent) or professional pursuits (5 per cent). It is plain that certain sections of the so-called middle class are not only welcomed by Socialist parties, but constitute their most dependable and indispensable elements. Indeed, the majority of the Socialists agree with Kautsky that the danger lies in the opposite direction, that an unreliable small capitalist element has been admitted that will make trouble until it leaves the movement, in other words, that Socialist friendship for these classes has gone to the point of risking the existence of their organization. Surely their presence is a guarantee that Socialists have not been ruled by the working class or proletarian "fetish," against which Marx warned them more than half a century ago. FOOTNOTES: [207] The _American Magazine_, October, 1911. [208] Winston Churchill, _op. cit._, p. 389. [209] _Die Neue Zeit_, Oct. 27, 1911. [210] Speech just before Congressional Elections of 1910. [211] Speech delivered by Mr. Roosevelt, Dec. 13, 1910. [212] John Spargo, "Karl Marx." [213] Edward Bernstein, "Evolutionary Socialism," p. 143. [214] Karl Kautsky, "The Social Revolution," pp. 58-59. [215] The _Outlook_, March 13, 1909. [216] Karl Kautsky in _Vorwaerts_ (Berlin), Feb. 7, 1909. [217] Quoted by Jaurès, "Studies in Socialism," p. 103. [218] Karl Kautsky, "Erfurter Programm," p. 258. [219] Karl Kautsky, "The Social Revolution," pp. 48-49. [220] The _International Socialist Review_ (Chicago), October, 1911. [221] H. G. Wells, "This Misery of Boots," p. 34. [222] Karl Kautsky, "The Social Revolution," p. 51. CHAPTER II THE AGRICULTURAL CLASSES AND THE LAND QUESTION I have pointed out the relation of the Socialist movement to all classes but one,--the agriculturists,--a class numerically next in importance to the industrial wage earners. On the one hand most agriculturists are small capitalists, who, even when they do not own their farms, are often forced to-day to invest a considerable sum in farm animals and machinery, in rent and interest and in wages at the harvest season; on the other hand, a large part of the farmers work harder and receive less for their work than skilled laborers, while the amount they own, especially when tenants, scarcely exceeds what it has cost many skilled workers to learn their trade. Are the great majority of farmers, then, rather small capitalists or laborers? For many years Socialists paid comparatively little attention to the problem. How was it then imagined that a political program could obtain the support of the majority of the voters without presenting to the agricultural population as satisfactory a solution of their difficulties as that it offered to the people of the towns? On the other hand, how was it possible to adapt a program frankly "formulated by or for the workingmen of large-scale industry" to the conditions of agriculture? The estimate of the rural population that has hitherto prevailed among the Socialists of most countries may be seen from the following language of Kautsky's:-- "We have already seen how the peasant's production [that of the small farmer] isolates men. The capitalists' means of production and the modern State, to be sure, have a powerful tendency to put an end to the isolation of the peasant through taxation, military service, railways, and newspapers. But the increase of the points of contact between town and country as a rule only have the effect that the peasant farmer feels his desolation and isolation less keenly. They raise him up as a peasant farmer, but awake in him a longing for the town; they drive all the most energetic and independently thinking elements from the country into the towns, and rob the former of its forces. So that the progress of modern economic life has the effect of increasing the desolation and lonesomeness of the country rather than ending it. "The truth is that in every country the agricultural population is economically and politically the most backward. That does not imply any reflection on it; it is its misfortune, but it is a fact with which one must deal."[223] Not only Kautsky and Vandervelde, but whole Socialist parties like those of Austria and Germany, are given to the exploitation of the supposed opposition between town and country, the producer and the consumer of agricultural products. At the German Socialist Congress of 1911, Bebel declared that to-day those who were most in need of protection were the consumers of agricultural products, the workingmen, lower middle classes and employees. He felt the day was approaching when the increased cost of living would form the chief question before the German people, the day when the German people would raise a storm and tear down the tariffs on the necessaries of life as well as other measures that unduly favor the agriculturists--while the proposal of socialization would come up first in the field of agriculture. While, in view of the actual level of prices in Germany, there is no doubt that even the smallest of the agriculturists are getting some share of the spoils of the tariffs and other measures Bebel mentions, there can also be little question that in such a storm of revolt as he predicts the pendulum would swing too far the other way, and they would suffer unjustly. It is true that the agriculturist produces bread, while the city worker consumes it, but so also do shoe workers produce shoes that are consumed by garment workers, and certainly no Socialist predicts any lasting struggle between producers of shoes and producers of clothing. It is true also that if the wage earner's condition is to be improved, some limit must be set to prices as wages are raised. But the flour manufacturer and the baker must be restrained as well as the grain producer. Nor do Socialists expect to accomplish much by the mere regulation of prices. And when it comes to their remedy, socialization, there is less reason, as I shall show, for beginning with land rent than with industrial capital, and the Socialist parties of France and America recognize this fact. But it is the practical result of this supposed opposition of town and country rather than its inconsistency with Socialist principles that must hold our attention. Certainly no agricultural program and no appeal to the agricultural population, perhaps not even one addressed to agricultural laborers, can hope for success while this view of the opposition of town and country is maintained; for all agriculturists want what they consider to be reasonable prices for their products, and their whole life depends directly or indirectly on these prices. When the workmen agitate, as they so often do in Europe, for cheap bread and meat, without qualifying their agitation by any regard for the agriculturists, all hope of obtaining the support of _any_ of the agricultural classes, even laborers, is for the time being abandoned. The predominance of town over country is so important to Kautsky that he even opposes such a vital piece of democratic reform as direct legislation where the town-country population is the more numerous than that of the towns. "We have seen" he says, "that the modern representative system is not very favorable to the peasantry or to the small capitalists, especially of the country towns. The classes which the representative system most favors are the large owners of capital or land, the highly educated, and under a democratic electoral system, the militant and class-conscious part of the industrial working class. So in general one can say parliamentarism favors the population of the large towns as against that of the country." Far from being disturbed at this unjust and unequal system, Kautsky prefers that it should _not_ be reformed, unless the town population are in a majority. "Direct legislation by the people works against these tendencies of parliamentarism. If the latter strives to place the political balance of power in the population of the large towns, the former puts it in the masses of the population, but these still live everywhere and for the most part in a large majority, with the exception of England, in the country and in the small country towns. Direct legislation takes away from the population of the large towns their special political influence, and subjects them to the country population."[224] He concludes that wherever and as long as the agricultural population remains in a majority, the Socialists have no special reason to work for direct legislation. Of course Kautsky and his school do not expect this separation or antagonism of agriculture and industry to last very far into the future. But as long as capitalism lasts they believe agriculturists will play an entirely subordinate rôle in politics. "While the capitalist mode of production increases visibly the difficulties of the formation of a revolutionary class (in the country), it favors it in the towns," he says. "It there concentrates the laboring masses, creates conditions favorable to every organization for their mental evolution and for their class struggle.... It debilitates the country, disperses the agricultural workers over vast areas, isolates them, robs them of all means of mental development and resistance to exploitation."[225] Similarly Vandervelde quotes from Voltaire's essay on customs a sentence describing the European peasantry of a hundred and fifty years ago as "savages living in cabins with their females and a few animals," and asks, "who would dare to pretend that these words have lost all their reality?" He admits that "rural barbarism has decreased," but still considers the peasantry, not as a class which must take an active part in bringing about Socialism, but as one to which "conquering Socialism will bring political liberty and social equality."[226] Kautsky says that either the small farmer is not really independent, and pieces out his income by hiring himself out occasionally to some larger landowner or other employer, or else, if entirely occupied with his own work, that he manages to compete with large-scale cultivation only "by overwork and underconsumption, by barbarism, as Marx says." "To-day the situation of the city proletariat," Kautsky adds, "is already so superior to the barbaric situation of the older peasants, that the younger peasants' generation is leaving the fields along with the class of rural wage earners." There can be no question that small farms, those without permanent hired labor, survive competition with the larger and better equipped, only by overwork and underconsumption. But the unfavorable comparison with city wage earners and the repetition to-day of Marx's term "barbarism" is no longer justified. Where these conditions still exist, they are due largely to special legal obstacles placed in the way of European peasants, and to legal privileges given to the great landlords,--in other words, to remnants of feudalism. Kautsky's error in making this as a statement of general application would seem to be based on a confusion of the survivals of feudalism, as seen in some parts of Europe, with the necessary conditions of agricultural production, as seen in this country. Kautsky himself has lately given full recognition to another factor in the agricultural situation--the horrors of wage slavery, which acts in the very opposite manner to these feudal conditions and _prevents_ both small agriculturists and agricultural laborers from immigrating to the towns in greater numbers than they do, and persuades them in spite of its drudgery to prefer the life of the owner of a small farm. "Since labor in large-scale industry takes to-day the repulsive form of wage labor," he says, "many owners of small properties keep holding on to them with the greatest sacrifices, for the sole purpose of avoiding falling into the serfdom and insecurity of wage labor. Only Socialism can put an end to small production, not of course by the forceful ejection of small owners, but by giving them an opportunity to work for the perfected large establishments with a shortened working day and a larger income."[227] Surely there is little ground to lay special stress on the "barbarism" of small farms, if such a large proportion of farmers and agricultural laborers prefer it on good grounds to "the serfdom and insecurity" of labor on large farms or in manufacturing establishments. It is doubtless chiefly because European conditions are such as to make the conversion of the majority of agriculturists difficult, that so many European Socialists claim that an existing or prospective preponderance of manufacturers makes it unnecessary. But, while in many countries of Europe the remnants of feudalism, or rather of eighteenth-century absolutism and landlord rule, to which this backward political condition is largely due, have not only survived, but have been modernized, through the protection extended to large estates, so as to become a part and parcel of modern capitalism, this condition does not promise to be at all lasting. There are already signs of change in the agricultural sections of Bohemia, Hungary, and Italy, while in France, where the political influence of the large landlord class is rapidly on the decline, the Socialists have appealed successfully, under certain conditions, not only to agricultural laborers, but also to small independent farmers. As Socialists come to take a world view, giving due prominence to countries like France and the United States, where agriculture has had its freest development, they grow away from the older standpoint and give more attention to the rural population. The rapid technical evolution of agriculture and the equally rapid changes in the ownership of land in a country like the United States have encouraged our Socialists to reëxamine the whole question. I cannot enter into a discussion, even the most cursory, of agricultural evolution in this country, but a few indications from the census of 1910 will show the general tendencies. Farm owners and tenants probably now have $45,000,000,000 in property (1910), fully a third of the national wealth, and with 6,340,000 farms they are just about a third of our population. This calculation does not allow for interest (where farmers have borrowed) or rent (where they are tenants); on the other hand, it does not allow for the fact that many farmers have bank accounts and outside investments. But it indicates the prosperity of a large part of the farming class. The value of the land of the average farm has doubled since 1900 ($2271 in 1900--$4477 in 1910) in spite of a decrease in the size of farms, while the amount spent for labor increased 80 per cent, which the statistics show was due in part to higher wages, but in larger part _to the greater amount of labor and the greater number of laborers used_. Other expenditures increased almost proportionately, and the capital employed in land, buildings, machinery, fertilizers, and labor has almost doubled in this short period. As prices advanced less than 25 per cent during the decade, all these increases were largely _real_. The gross income of the average farm owner, measured in what it could buy, evidently rose by more than 50 per cent, and his _real_ net income nearly as fast. The average farm owner then was receiving a fair share of the increase of the national wealth. But farmers cannot profitably be considered as a single class. Tenants are rarely at the same time landlords. Farmers paying interest are usually not the same as those holding mortgages. A few of the debtors may be very successful men who borrow only to buy more land and hire more labor. But very few tenants are in this class. We may safely assume that those who own without a mortgage or employ labor steadily with one are getting _more_ than an average share of the national wealth, while tenants or those who have mortgaged their land heavily and do not regularly hire labor (except at harvest) are, in the average case, getting less. Investments of borrowed money in the best machinery or farm animals by a single family working alone and on a very small scale, may give a good return above interest, but this return is strictly limited unless with most exceptional or most fortunate persons. Now the statistics of the increase of agricultural _wages_ show that they rose in no such proportion as the increase of agricultural capital--and the possibility of a farm hand saving his wages and becoming the owner of one of these more and more costly farms is more remote than ever. But there is a third solution--the agricultural laborer may neither remain a laborer nor become an owner. If he can accumulate enough capital for machinery, horses, farm animals, and seed, he can pay for the use of the land from his annual product, he can become a tenant. On the other side, if the value of the usual 160-acre homestead rises to $20,000 or $30,000, the owner is easily able to make a few thousand dollars in addition by selling his farm animals and machinery and to retire to the country town and live on his rent. It is evident that the position of most of these farm tenants is very close to that of laborers. Though working on their own account, it is so difficult for them to make a living that they are forced to the longest hours and to the exploitation of their wives and children under all possible and impossible circumstances. Already farm tenants are almost as numerous in this country as farm owners. The census figures indicated that the proportion of tenants had risen from 23 per cent in 1880 to 37 per cent in 1910. Not only this, but a closer inspection of the figures by States will show that, whereas in new States like Minnesota, where tenancy has not had time to develop, it embraced in 1900 less than 20 per cent of the total number of farms, in many older States the percentage had already risen high above 40. This increase of tenants proves an approach of the United States to the fundamental economic condition of older countries--the divorce of land cultivation from land ownership, and the census of 1910 shows that three eighths of the farms of the United States are already in that condition. Land and hired labor are the chief sources of agricultural wealth, and capital is most productive only when it is invested in these as well as other means of production. That is, if the small farmer is really a small capitalist, if he is to receive a return from his capital as well as his own individual and that of his family labor, he must, as a rule, either have enough capital to provide work for others and his family, or he must get a share of the unearned increment through the ownership of his farm, or long leases without revaluation. Farm tenants who do not habitually employ labor, or those whose mortgages are so heavy as practically to place them in the position of such tenants, are, for these reasons, undoubtedly accessible to Socialist ideas--_as long as they remain farm tenants_. But now after discarding all the European prejudices above referred to, let us look at the other side. Tenants everywhere belong to those classes which, as Kautsky truly says, in the passage quoted in a previous chapter, are also a recruiting ground for the capitalists. They are more likely to be the owners of the capital, now a considerable sum, needed to _operate_ a small farm (cattle, machinery, etc.) than are farm laborers, and it is for their benefit chiefly that the various governmental plans for creating new small farms through irrigation, reclamation, and the division of large estates are contrived. And it is even possible that practically all the present tenants may some day be provided for. By maintaining or creating small farms then, or providing for a system of long leases and small-sized allotments of governmentally owned land, guaranteed against any raise in rents during the term of the lease, capitalist governments may gradually succeed in firmly attaching the larger part of the struggling small farmers and farm tenants to capitalism. While still in the individualistic form capitalism will establish, wherever it can, privately owned small farms; when it will have adopted the collectivist policy, it will inaugurate a system of national ownership and long leases. Even the small farmer who hires no labor, and does not even own his farm, will probably be held, as a class, by capitalism, but only by the collectivist capitalism of the future, which will probably protect him from landlordism by keeping the title to the land, but dividing the unearned increment with him by a system of long leases, and using its share of this increment for the promotion of agriculture and for other purposes he approves. Socialists, then, do not expect to include in their ranks in considerable numbers, either agricultural employers or such tenants, laborers, or farm owners as are becoming, or believe they will become, employers (either under present governments or under collectivist capitalism). Only when the day finally comes when Socialism begins to exert a pressure on the government adversely to the interest of the capitalist class will higher wages and new governmental expenditures on wage earners begin to reverse conditions automatically, making labor dearer, small farms which employ labor less profitable, and a lease of government land less desirable, for example, than the position of a skilled employee on a model government farm. All governments will then be forced by the farming population itself to lend more and more support to the Socialist policy of great national municipal or county farms, rather than to the artificial promotion or small-scale agriculture. For the present and the near future the only lasting support Socialists can find in the country is from _the surplus_ of agricultural laborers and perhaps _a certain part_ of the tenants, _i.e._ those who cannot be provided for even if all large estates are everywhere divided into small farms, all practicable works of reclamation and irrigation completed, and scientific methods introduced--and who will find no satisfactory opportunity in neighboring countries. It must be acknowledged that such tenants at present form no very large part of the agricultural population in the United States. On the other hand, agriculturists are even less backward here than in Europe, and there is less opposition between town and country, and both these facts favor rural Socialism. If, however, the majority of farmers must remain inaccessible to Socialism until the great change is at hand, this is not because they are getting an undue share of the national wealth or because they are private property fanatics, or because agriculturists are economically and politically backward, or because they are hostile to labor, though all this is true of many, but because of all classes, they are the most easily capable of being converted into (or perpetuated as) small capitalists by the reforms of the capitalist statesman in search of reliable and numerically important political support. I have shown the attitude of the Socialists towards each of the agricultural classes--their belief that they will be able to attach to themselves the agricultural laborers and those tenants and independent farmers who are neither landlords nor steady employers, nor expect to become such. But what now is the attitude of laborers, tenants, etc., towards Socialism, and what program do the Socialists offer to attract them? Let us first consider a few general reforms on which all Socialists would agree and which would be acceptable to all classes of agriculturists. Socialists differ upon certain _fundamental_ alterations in their program which have been proposed in order to adapt it to agriculture. Aside from these, all Socialist parties wish to do everything that is possible to attract agriculturists. They favor such measures as the nationalization of forests, irrigation, state fire insurance, the nationalization of transportation, the extension of free education and especially of free agricultural education, the organization of free medical assistance, graduated income and inheritance taxes, and the decrease of military expenditures, etc. It will be seen that all these reforms are such as might be, and often are, adopted by parties which have nothing to do with Socialism. Community ownership of forests and national subsidies for roads are urged by so conservative a body as Mr. Roosevelt's Commission on Country Life. They are all typical "State Socialist" (_i.e._ State capitalist) measures, justifiable and indispensable, but not intimately related with the program of _Socialism_. The indorsement of such measures might indeed assure the Socialists the friendly coöperation of political factions representing the agriculturists, but it could scarcely secure for them the same partisan support in the country as they have obtained from the workingmen of the towns. Besides such legislative reforms as the above, the Socialists generally favor legislative encouragement for every form of agricultural coöperation. Kautsky says that coöperative associations limited to purchase or sale, or for financing purposes, have no special connection with Socialism, but favors _productive_ coöperation, and in France this is one of the chief measures advocated by the most ardent of the Socialist agriculturist agitators, Compère-Morel, who was elected to the Chamber of Deputies from an agricultural district. Compère-Morel notes that the above-mentioned governmental measures of the State Socialistic variety are likely to be introduced by reformers who have no sympathy either with Socialism or with labor unions, and _as a counterweight_ he lays a great emphasis on coöperative organizations for production, which could work with the labor unions and their coöperative stores and also with Socialist municipalities. In France and elsewhere there is already a strong movement to municipalize the milk supply, the municipalization of slaughterhouses is far advanced, and municipal bakeries are a probability of the near future. Such coöperative organizations, however, like the legislative proposals above mentioned, are already so widely in actual operation and are so generally supported by powerful non-Socialist organizations that Socialist support can be of comparatively little value. There is no reason why a collectivist but capitalist democracy should not favor both associations for productive coöperation and friendly relations between these and collectivist municipalities; nor why they should fail to favor an enlightened labor policy in such cases, at least as far as the resulting increase of efficiency in the laborer justified it, _i.e._ as long as his product rises, as a result of such reforms, faster than what it costs to introduce them. Socialists also favor the nationalization of the land, but without the expropriation of self-employing farmers, as these are felt to be more sinned against than sinning. "With the present conservative nature of our farmers, it is highly probable that a number of them would [under Socialism] continue to work in the present manner," Kautsky says. "The proletarian governmental power would have absolutely no inclination to take over such little businesses. As yet no Socialist who is to be taken seriously has ever demanded that the farmers should be expropriated, or that their goods should be confiscated. It is much more probable that each little farmer would be permitted to work on as he has previously done. The farmer has nothing to fear from a Socialist régime. Indeed, it is highly probable," he adds, "that these agricultural industries would receive considerable strengthening through the new régime." Socialists generally agree with Mr. A. M. Simons's resolution at the last American Socialist Convention (1910): "So long as tools are used merely by individual handicraftsmen, they present no problem of ownership which the Socialist is compelled to solve. The same is true of land. Collective ownership is urged by the Socialist, not as an end in itself, not as a part of a Utopian scheme, but as the means of preventing exploitation, and wherever individual ownership is an agency of exploitation, then such ownership is opposed by Socialism."[228] Exploitation here refers to the employment of laborers, and this is the central point of the Socialist policy. To the Socialists the land question and the labor question are one. Every agricultural policy must deal with both. If we were confronted to-day exclusively by large agricultural estates, the Socialist policy would be the same as in other industries. All agricultural capital would be nationalized or municipalized as fast as it became sufficiently highly organized to make this practicable. And as the ground rent can be taken separately, and with the least difficulty, this would be the first to go. Agricultural labor, in the meanwhile, would be organized and as the day approached when the Socialists were about to gain control of the government, and the wages of government employees began rapidly to rise, those of agricultural and all other privately employed labor would rise also, until private profits were destroyed and the process of socialization brought rapidly to completion. But where the scale of production is so small that the farmer and his family do the work and do not habitually hire outside labor, the whole case is different. The chief exploitation here is self-exploitation. The capital owned is so small that it may be compared in value with the skilled worker's trade education, especially when we consider the small return it brings in, allowing for wages for the farmer and his family. Even though, as owner, he receives that part of the rise in the value of his land due to the general increase of population and wealth and not to his own labor (the unearned increment), his income is less than that of many skilled laborers. Two widely different policies are for these reasons adopted by all reformers when dealing with large agricultural estates and small self-employing farmers. On this point there is little room for difference of opinion. But small farmers are not a sharply defined class. They are constantly recruited from agricultural laborers and tenants on the one hand, and are constantly becoming employing farmers on the other--or the process may take the opposite course, large farms may break up and small farmers may become laborers--for all or a part of their time. All agricultural reforms may be viewed not only in their relation to existing small farmers, but as to their effect on the increase or decrease of the relative proportions of small self-employing farmers, of employing farmers, and of agricultural laborers. And here appears the fundamental distinction between the Socialist program and that of collectivist capitalism as far as the small farmers are concerned. Socialists agree in wanting to aid those small farmers who are neither capitalists nor employers on a sufficient scale to classify them with those elements, but they neither wish to perpetuate the system of small farms nor to obstruct the development of the more productive large-scale farming and the normal increase of an agricultural working class ready for coöperative or governmental employment. They point to the universal law that large-scale production is more economical, and show that this applies to agriculture. Small farming strictly limits the point to which the income of the agricultural population can rise, prevents the cheapening of the production of food, and furnishes a constant stream of cheap labor composed of discontented agricultural laborers who prefer the more steady income, limited hours, and better conditions of wage earners. "Even the most energetic champions of small farming," says Kautsky, "do not make the least attempt to show its superiority, as this would be a hopeless task. What they maintain is only the superiority of labor on one's own property to wage labor for a strange exploiter.... But if the large farm offers the greater possibility of lessening the work of the agricultural laborers, then it would be a betrayal of the latter to set before them as a goal, not the capture and technical development of large forms, but their break up into numerous small farms. That would mean nothing less than a willingness to perpetuate the drudgery under which the agricultural laborers and small farmers now suffer."[229] But how shall Socialists aid small farmers without increasing the number of small farms? It might be thought that the nationalization of the land would solve the problem. The government, once become the general landlord, could use the rent fund to improve the condition of all classes of agriculturists, without unduly favoring any, agricultural evolution could take its natural course, and the most economical method of production, _i.e._ large farms or large coöperative associations, would gradually come to predominate. But the capitalist collectivists who now control or will soon control governments, far from feeling any anxiety about the persistence of small-scale farming, believe that the small farmers can be made into the most reliable props of capitalism. Accordingly collectivist reformers either promote schemes of division of large estates and favor the creation of large masses of small owners by this and every other available means, such as irrigation or reclamation projects, or if they indorse nationalization of the land in order to get the unearned increment for their governments, they still make the leases on as small a scale and revaluations at as long intervals as possible, and so do almost as much artificially to perpetuate the small farm under this system as they could by furthering private ownership. Although there is no necessary and immediate conflict of interest between wage earners and small farmers, it is evident that it is impossible for Socialists to offer the small farmers as much as the capitalist collectivists do,--for the latter are willing in this instance to promote, for political purposes, an uneconomic mode of production which is a burden on all society. Here, however, appears an economic tendency that relieves the situation for the Socialist. Under private ownership or land nationalization with long leases and small-scale farms, it is only once in a generation or even less frequently that farms are subdivided. But the amount of capital and labor that can be profitably applied to a given area of land, the intensity of farming, increases very rapidly. The former self-employing farmer, everywhere encouraged by governments, soon comes to employ steadily one or more laborers. And it is notable that in every country of the world these middle-sized or moderate-sized farms are growing more rapidly than either the large-scale or the one-family farms. This has an economic and a political explanation. Though large farms have more economic advantages than small, the latter have nothing to expend for superintendence and get much more work from each person occupied. The middle-sized farms preserve these advantages and gradually come also to employ much of the most profitable machinery, that is out of reach of the small farmer. Politically their position is still stronger. They are neither rich nor few like the large landholders. Their employees are one, two, or three on each farm, and isolated. Here, then, is the outcome of the agricultural situation that chiefly concerns the Socialist. The middle-sized farmer is a small capitalist and employer who, like the rest of his kind, will in every profound labor crisis be found with the large capitalist. His employees will outnumber him as voters and will have little hope that the government will intervene some day to make them either proprietors or possessors of long-term leases. The capital, moreover, to run this kind of farm or to compete with it, will be greater and greater and more and more out of their agricultural laborer's reach. These employees will be Socialists. We are now in a position to understand the divisions among the Socialists on the agricultural question. The Socialist policy as to agriculture may be divided into three periods. During the ascendency of capitalistic collectivism it will be powerless to do more than to support the collectivist reforms, including partial nationalization of the land, partial appropriation of unearned increment by national or local governments, municipal and coöperative production, and the numerous reforms already mentioned. In the second period, the approach of Socialism will hasten all these changes automatically through the rapid rise in wages, and in the third period, when the Socialists are in power, special measures will be taken still further to hasten the process until all land is gradually nationalized and all agricultural production carried on by governmental bodies or coöperative societies of actual workers. If the Socialists gain control of any government, or if they come near enough to doing this to be able to force concessions at the cost of capital, a double effect will be produced on agriculture. The general rise in wages will destroy the profits of many farmer employers, and it will offer to the smallest self-employing farmers the possibility of an income as wage earners so much larger, and conditions so much better, than anything they can hope for as independent producers that they will cease to prefer self-employment. The high cost of labor will favor both large scale production, either capitalistic or coöperative, and national, state, county, and municipal farms. Without any but an automatic economic pressure, small-scale and middle-scale farming would tend rapidly to give place to these other higher forms, and these in turn would tend to become more and more highly organized as other industries have done, until social production became a possibility. Not only would there be no need of coercive legislative measures, but the automatic pressure would be, not that of misery or bankruptcy pressing the self-employing farmer from behind, but of a larger income and better conditions drawing the majority forward to more developed and social forms of production. In France a considerable and increasing number of the Socialist members of Parliament are elected by the peasantry, and the same is true of Italy. In Hervé the French have developed a world-famed ultra-revolutionary who always makes his appeal to peasants as well as workers, and in Compère-Morel, one of the most able of those economists and organizers of the international movement who give the agriculturists their chief attention. The latter has recently summed up the position of the French Party in a few incisive paragraphs--which show its similarity to that of the Americans. His main idea is to let economic evolution take its course, which, in proportion as labor is effectively organized, will inevitably lead towards collective ownership and operation and so pave the way for Socialism:-- "As to small property, it is not our mission either to hasten or to precipitate its disappearance. A product of labor, quite often being merely a tool of the one who is detaining it, not only do we respect it, we do something more yet, we relieve it from taxes, usury, scandalous charges on the part of the middlemen, whose victim it is. And this will be done in order to make possible its free evolution towards superior forms of exploitation and ownership, which become more and more inevitable. "This means that there is no necessity at all to appeal to violence, to use constraint and power in order to inaugurate in the domain of rural production, the only mode of ownership fit to utilize the new technical agricultural tools: collective ownership. "On the other hand, a new form of ownership cannot be imposed; it is the new form of ownership which is imposing itself. "It is in vain that they use the most powerful, the most artificial, means to develop, to multiply, and animate the private ownership of the land; the social ownership of the land will impose itself, through the force of events, on the most stubborn, on the most obstinate, of the partisans of individual ownership of the rural domain." The French Socialists do not propose to interfere with titles of any but very large properties, or even with inheritance. Whether they have to meet government ownership and 33-year leases now being tried on a small scale in New Zealand, or whether a capitalist collectivist government allows agricultural evolution and land titles to take their natural course, they expect to corner the labor supply, and in this way ultimately to urge agriculture along in the Socialist direction. From the moment they have done this, they expect a steady tendency on the part of agriculturists to look forward, as the workingmen have done, to the Socialist State:-- "The question arises, under a Socialist régime, will small property, the property cultivated by the owner and his family, be transmissible, allowed to be sold, or left as inheritance to the children, to the nephews, and even to very remote cousins? From the moment this property is not used as an instrument of exploitation--and in a Socialist society, _labor not being sold_, it could never become one--what do we care whether it changes hands every morning, whether it travels around through a whole family or country?" For, since the Socialist State will furnish work for all that apply, at the best remuneration, and under the best conditions, especially as it will do this in its own agricultural enterprises, relatively few farmers will be able to pay enough to secure other workers than those of their own families. In the United States the Party has definitely decided by a large majority, in a referendum vote, that it does not intend to try to disturb the self-employing farmer in any way in his occupation and use of the land. In a declaration adopted in 1909, when, by a referendum vote of nearly two to one, the demand for the immediate collective ownership of the land was dropped from the platform, the following paragraph was inserted:-- "There can be no absolute private title to land. All private titles, whether called fee simple or otherwise, are and must be subordinate to the public title. The Socialist Party strives to prevent land from being used for the purpose of exploitation and speculation. It demands the collective possession, control, or management of land to whatever extent may be necessary to attain that end. It is not opposed to the occupation and possession of land by those using it in a useful bona fide manner _without exploitation_." (My italics.) Those American Socialists who have given most attention to the subject, like Mr. Simons, have long since made up their minds that there is no hope whatever either for the victory or even for the rapid development of Socialism in this country unless it takes some root among the agriculturists. Mr. Simons insists that the Socialists should array against the forces of conservatism, privilege, and exploitation, "all those whose labor assists in the production of wealth, for all these make up the army of exploited, and all are interested in the abolition of exploitation." "In this struggle," he continues, "farmers and factory wage workers must make common cause. Any smaller combination, any division in the ranks of the workers, must render success impossible. In a country where fundamental changes of policy are secured at the ballot box, nothing can be accomplished without united action by all classes of workers.... The better organization of the factory workers of the cities, due to their position in the midst of a higher developed capitalism and more concentrated industry, makes them in no way independent of their rural brothers. So long as they are not numerous enough to win, they are helpless. 'A miss is as good as a mile,' and coming close to a majority avails almost nothing."[230] Looking at the question after this from the farmers' standpoint, Mr. Simons argues that many of the latter are well aware that the ownership of a farm is nothing more than the ownership of a job, and that the capitalists who own the mortgages, railroads, elevators, meat-packing establishments, and factories which produce agricultural machinery and other needed supplies, control the lives and income of the agriculturists almost as rigidly as they do those of their own employees. Mr. Simons's views on this point also are probably those of a majority of the party. Mr. Victor Berger does not consider that farmers belong to that class by whom and for whom Socialism has come into being. "The average farmer is not a proletarian," he says, "yet he is a producer."[231] This would seem to imply that the farmer should have Socialist consideration, though perhaps not equal consideration with the workingman. Mr. Berger's main argument apparently was that the farmers must be included in the movement, not because this is demanded by principle but because "you will never get control of the United States unless you have the farming class with you," as he said at a Socialist convention. Thus there are three possible attitudes of Socialists towards the self-employing farmer, and all three are represented in the movement. Kautsky, Vandervelde, and many others believe that after all he is not a proletarian, and therefore should not or cannot be included in the movement. The French Socialists and many Americans believe that he is practically a proletarian and should and can be included. The "reformists" in countries where he is very numerous believe he should be included, even when (Berger) they do not consider him as a proletarian. The Socialist movement, on the whole, now stands with Kautsky and Vandervelde, and this is undoubtedly the correct position until the Socialists are near to political supremacy. The French and American view, that the self-employing farmer is practically a wage earner, is spreading, and though this view is false and dangerous if prematurely applied (_i.e._ to-day) it will become correct in the future when collectivist capitalism has exhausted its reforms and the small farmer is becoming an employee of the highly productive government farms or a profit-sharer in coöperative associations. At the last American Socialist Convention (1910) Mr. Simons's resolution carefully avoided the "reformist" position of trying to prop up either private property or small-scale production, by the statement that, while "no Socialist Party proposes the immediate expropriation of the farm owner who is cultivating his own farm," that, on the other hand, "it is not for the Socialist Party to guarantee the private ownership of any productive property." He remarked in the Convention that the most prominent French Marxists, Guesde and Lafargue, had approved the action of the recent French Socialist Congress, which had "guaranteed the peasant ownership of his farm," but he would not accept this action as good Socialism. Mr. Berger offered the same criticism of the French Socialists, and added that the guarantee would not be worth anything in any case, because our grandchildren would not be ruled by it. However, there is a minority ready to compromise everything in this question. Of all American States, Oklahoma has been the one where Socialists have given the closest attention to agricultural problems. The Socialists have obtained a considerable vote in every county of this agricultural State, and with 20,000 to 25,000 votes they include a considerable proportion of the electorate. It is true that their platform, though presented at the last national convention, has not been passed upon, and may later be disapproved in several important clauses, but it is important as showing the farthest point the American movement has gone in this direction. Its most important points are:-- The retention and _constant enlargement of the public domain_. By retaining school and other public lands. By purchasing of arid and overflow lands and the State reclamation of all such lands now held by the State or that may be acquired by the State. By the purchase of all lands sold for the non-payment of taxes. Separation of the department of agriculture from the political government. Election of all members and officers of the Board of Agriculture by the direct vote of the actual farmers. Erection by the State of grain elevators and warehouses for the storage of farm products; these elevators and warehouses to be managed by the Board of Agriculture. Organization by the Board of Agriculture of free agricultural education and the establishment of model farms. Encouragement by the Board of Agriculture of coöperative societies of farmers-- For the buying of seed and fertilizers. _For the purchase and common use of implements and machinery._ For the preparing and sale of produce. Organization by the State of loans on mortgages and warehouse certificates, the interests charges to cover cost only. State insurance against disease of animals, diseases of plants, insect pests, hail, flood, storm, and fire. Exemption from taxation and execution of dwellings, tools, farm animals, implements, and improvements to the amount of one thousand dollars. _A graduated tax on the value of rented land and land held for speculation._ Absentee landlords to assess their own lands, the State reserving the right to purchase such lands at their assessed value plus 10 per cent. Land now in the possession of the State or hereafter acquired through purchase, reclamation, or tax sales to be rented to _landless_ farmers under the supervision of the Board of Agriculture at the prevailing rate of share rent or its equivalent. The payment of such rent to cease as soon as the total amount of rent paid is equal to the value of the land, and the tenant thereby acquires for himself _and his children_ the right of occupancy. The title to all such lands remaining with the commonwealth.[232] I have italicized the most significant items. The preference given to landless farmers in the last paragraph shows that the party in Oklahoma does not propose to distribute its greatest favors to those who are now in possession of even the smallest amount of land. On the other hand, once the land is governmentally "owned" and speculation and landlordism (or renting) are provided against, the farmer passes "the right of occupancy" of this land on to his children. European Socialist parties, with one exception, have not gone so far as this, and it is doubtful if the American Party will sustain such a long step towards permanent private property. It may well be doubted whether the Socialist movement will favor giving to children the identical privileges their parents had, simply because they are the children of these parents, especially if these privileges had been materially increased in value during the parents' lifetime by community effort, _i.e._ if there has been any large "unearned increment." Nor will they grant any additional right after forty years of payments or any other term, but, on the contrary, as the land rises, through the community's efforts they would undoubtedly see to it that _rent was correspondingly increased_. Socialists demand, not penalties against landlordism, but the community appropriation of rent--whether it is in the hands of the actual farmer or landlord. Why, moreover, seek to discriminate against those who are in possession _now_, and then favor those who will be in possession after the new dispensation, by giving the latter an almost permanent title? May there not be as many landless agricultural workers forty years hence as there are now? Why should those who happen to be landless in one generation instead of the next receive superior rights? Not only Henry George, but Herbert Spencer and the present governments of Great Britain (for all but agricultural land) and Germany (in the case of cities), recognize that the element of land values due to the community effort should go to the community. The political principle that gives the community no permanent claim to ground rent and is ready to give a "right of occupancy" for two _or more_ lifetimes (for nothing is said in the Oklahoma program about the land returning to the government) without any provisions for increased rentals and with no rents at all after forty years, is _reactionary_ as compared with recent land reform programs elsewhere (as that of New Zealand). Even Mr. Roosevelt's Commission on Country Life goes nearly as far as the Oklahoma Socialists when it condemns speculation in farm lands and tenancy; while Mr. Roosevelt himself has suggested as a remedy in certain instances the leasing of parts of the national domain. Indeed, the "progressive" capitalists everywhere favor either small self-employing farmers or national ownership and leases for long terms and in small allotments, and as "State Socialism" advances it will unquestionably lean towards the latter system. There is nothing Socialistic either in government encouragement either of one-family farms or in a national leasing system with long-term leases as long as the new revenue received goes for the usual "State Socialistic" purposes. The American Party, moreover, has failed so far to come out definitely in favor of the capitalist-collectivist principle of the State appropriation of ground rent, already indorsed by Marx in 1847 and again in 1883 (see his letter about Henry George, Part I, Chapter VIII). In preparing model constitutions for New Mexico and Arizona (August, 1910), the National Executive Committee took up the question of taxation and recommended graduated income and inheritance taxes, but nothing was said about the State taking the future rise in rents. This is not a reaction when compared to the present world status of non-Socialist land reform, for the taxation of unearned increment has not yet been extended to agricultural land in use, but it is decidedly a reaction when compared with the Socialists' own position in the past. In a semiagricultural country like the United States it is natural that "State Socialism" should influence the Socialist Party in its treatment of the land question more than in any other direction, and this influence is, perhaps, the gravest danger that threatens the party at the present writing. By far the most important popular organ of Socialism in this country is the _Appeal to Reason_ of Girard, Kansas, which now circulates nearly half a million copies weekly--a large part of which go into rural communities. The _Appeal_ endeavors, with some success, to reflect the views of the average party member, without supporting any faction. As Mr. Debs is one of its editors, it may be understood that it stands fundamentally against the compromise of any essential Socialist principle. And yet the exigencies of a successful propaganda among small landowners or tenants who either want to become landowners or to secure a lease that would amount to almost the same thing, is such as to drive the _Appeal_ into a position, not only as to the land question, but also to other questions, that has in it many elements of "State Socialism." A special propaganda edition (January 27, 1902) is typical. Along with many revolutionary declarations, such as that Socialism aims not only at the socialization of the means of production, but also at the socialization of _power_, we find others that would be accepted by any capitalist "State Socialist." Government activities as to schools and roads are mentioned as examples of socialization, while that part of the land still in the hands of our present capitalist government is referred to as being socialized. The use of vacant and unused lands (with "a fair return" for this use) by city, township, and county officials in order to raise and sell products and furnish employment, as was done by the late Mayor Pingree in Detroit, and even the public ownership of freight and passenger automobiles, are spoken of as "purely Socialist propositions." And, finally, the laws of Oklahoma are said to permit socialization without a national victory of the Socialists, though they provide merely that a municipality may engage in any legitimate business enterprise, and could easily be circumscribed by state constitutional provisions or by federal courts if real Socialists were about to gain control of municipalities and State legislature. For such Socialists would not be satisfied merely to demand the abolition of private landlordism and unemployment as the _Appeal_ does in this instance, since both of these "institutions" are already marked for destruction by "State capitalism," but would plan public employment at wages so high as to make private employment unprofitable and all but impossible, so high that the self-employing farmer even would more and more frequently prefer to quit his farm and go to work on a municipal, State, or county farm. The probable future course of the Party, however, is foreshadowed by the suggestions made by Mr. Simons in the report referred to, which, though not yet voted upon, seemed to meet general approval:-- "With the writers of the Communist Manifesto we agree in the principle of the 'application of all rents of land to public purposes.' To this end we advocate the taxing of all lands to their full rental value, the income therefrom to be applied to the establishment of industrial plants for the preparing of agricultural products for final consumption, such as packing houses, canneries, cotton gins, grain elevators, storage and market facilities."[233] There is no doubt that Mr. Simons here indorses the most promising line of agrarian reform under capitalism. But there is no reason why capitalist collectivism may not take up this policy when it reaches a somewhat more advanced stage. The tremendous benefits the cities will secure by the gradual appropriation of the unearned increment will almost inevitably suggest it to the country also. This will immensely hasten the development of agriculture and the numerical increase of an agricultural working class. What is even more important is that it will teach the agricultural laborers that far more is to be gained by the political overthrow of the small capitalist employing farmers and by claiming a larger share of the benefit of these public funds than by attempting the more and more difficult task of saving up the sum needed for acquiring a small farm or leasing one for a long term from the government. The governmental appropriation of agricultural rent and its productive expenditure on agriculture will in all probability be carried out, even if not prematurely promised at the present time, by collectivist capitalism. Moreover, while this great reform will strengthen Socialism as indicated, it will strengthen capitalism still more, especially in the earlier stages of the change. Socialists recognize, with Henry George, that ground rent may be nationalized and "tyranny and spoliation be continued." For if the present capitalistic state gradually became the general landlord, either through the extension of the national domain or through land taxation, greater resources would be put into the hands of existing class governments than by any other means. If, for example, the Socialists opposed the government bank in Germany they might dread even more the _present_ government becoming the universal landlord, though it would be useless to try to prevent it. It is clear that such a reform is no more a step in Socialism or in the direction of Socialism than the rest of the capitalist collectivist program. But it is a step in the development of capitalism and will ultimately bring society to a point where the Socialists, if they have in the meanwhile prepared themselves, may be able to gain the supreme power over government and industry. Socialists do not feel that the agricultural problem will be solved at all for a large part of the agriculturists (the laborers) nor in the most satisfactory manner for the majority (self-employing farmers) until the whole problem of capitalism is solved. The agricultural laborers they claim as their own to-day; the conditions I have reviewed lead them to hope also for a slow but steady progress among the smaller farmers. FOOTNOTES: [223] Karl Kautsky, "Parlamentarismus und Demokratie," edition of 1911, p. 127. [224] Karl Kautsky, "Parlamentarismus und Demokratie," edition of 1911, pp. 126-128. [225] Quotations from Kautsky following in this chapter are taken chiefly from his "Agrarfrage." [226] Émile Vandervelde, "Le Socialisme Agraire." [227] _Die Neue Zeit_, June 16, 1911. [228] Proceedings of 1910 Convention of the Socialist Party of the United States. [229] _Die Neue Zeit_, June 16 and 30, 1911. [230] A. M. Simons, "The American Farmer," pp. 160-162. [231] The 1908 Convention of the Socialist Party of the United States. [232] Reprinted at frequent intervals by the _Industrial Democrat,_ Oklahoma City. [233] Mr. Simons's resolution also contains another proposition, seemingly at variance with this, which would postpone Socialist action indefinitely:-- "In the field of industry what the Socialist movement demands is the social ownership and control of the socially operated means of production, not of all means of production. Only to a very small extent is it [the land] likely to be, for many years to come, a socially operated means of production." On the contrary, it would seem that "State Socialism," the basis on which Socialists must build, to say nothing of Socialism, will bring about a large measure of government ownership of land in the interest of the farmer of the individually operated farm. Socialism, it is true, requires besides government ownership, governmental operation, and recognizes that this is practicable only as fast as agriculture becomes organized like other industries. In the meanwhile it recognizes either in gradual government ownership or in the taxation of the unearned increment, the most progressive steps that can be undertaken by a capitalist government and supports them _even where there is no large-scale production or social operation_. For "wherever individual ownership is an agency of exploitation," to quote Mr. Simons's own resolution, "then such ownership is opposed by Socialism," _i.e. wherever labor is employed_. The Socialist solution, it is true, can only come with "social operation," but that does not mean that Socialism has nothing to say to-day. It still favors the reforms of collectivist capitalism. Where extended national ownership of the land is impracticable there remains the taxation of the future unearned increment. To drop this "demand" also is to subordinate Socialism completely to small-scale capitalism. CHAPTER III SOCIALISM AND THE "WORKING CLASS" If the majority of Socialists are liberal in their conception of what constitutes the "working class," they are equally broad in their view as to what classes must be reckoned among its opponents. They are aware that on the other side in this struggle will be found all those classes that are willing to serve capitalism or hope to rise into its ranks. In its narrow sense the term "capitalist class" may be restricted to mean mere idlers and parasites, but this is not the sense in which Socialists usually employ it. Mere idlers play an infinitely less important part in the capitalist world than active exploiters. It is even probable that in the course of a strenuous struggle the capitalists themselves may gradually tax wholly idle classes out of existence and so actually strengthen the more active capitalists by ridding them of this burden. Active exploiters may pass some of their time in idleness and frivolous consumption, without actual degeneration, without becoming mere parasites. All exploitation is parasitism, but it does not follow that every exploiter is nothing more than a parasite. He may work feverishly at the game of exploitation and, as is very common with capitalists, may be devoted to it for its own sake and for the power it brings rather than for the opportunity to consume in luxury or idleness. If pure parasitism were the object of attack, as certain Socialists suppose it to be, all but an infinitesimal minority of mankind would already be Socialists. Nor do Socialists imagine that the capitalist ranks will ever be restricted to the actual capitalists, those whose income is derived chiefly from their possessions. Take, for example, the class of the least skilled and poorest-paid laborers such as the so-called "casual laborers," the "submerged tenth"--those who, though for the most part not paupers, are in extreme poverty and probably are unable to maintain themselves in a state of industrial efficiency even for that low-paid and unskilled labor to which they are accustomed. Mr. H. G. Wells and other observers feel that this class is likely to put even more obstacles in the path of Socialism than the rich: "Much more likely to obstruct the way to Socialism," says Mr. Wells, "is the ignorance, the want of courage, the stupid want of imagination in the very poor, too shy and timid and clumsy to face any change they can evade! But even with them popular education is doing its work; and I do not fear but that in the next generation we will find Socialists even in the slums."[234] "Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercise such a paralyzing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering," says Oscar Wilde. "They have to be told of it by other people, and they often entirely disbelieve them. What is said by great employers of labor against agitators is unquestionably true. Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them."[235] It is the "very poor" who disbelieve the agitators. They must be embraced in every plan of social reconstruction, but they cannot be of much aid. The _least_ skilled must rather be helped and those who can and do help them best are not any of their "superiors," but their blood brothers and sisters of the economic class just above them--the great mass of the unskilled workers. The class of casual workers and the able-bodied but chronically under-employed play a very serious rôle in Socialist politics. It is the class from which, as Socialists point out, professional soldiers, professional strike breakers, and, to some extent, the police are drawn. Among German Socialists it is called the "lumpen proletariat," and both for the present and future is looked at with the greatest anxiety. It is not thought possible that any considerable portion of it will be brought into the Socialist camp in the near future, though some progress has been made, as with every other element of the working class. It is acknowledged that it tends to become more numerous, constantly recruited as it is from the increasing class of servants and other dependents of the rich and well-to-do. But Socialists understand that the mercenary hirelings drawn from this class, and directly employed to keep them "in order," are less dangerous than the capitalists' camp followers. Bernard Shaw calls this second army of dependents "the parasitic proletariat." But he explains that he means not that they do not _earn_ their living, but that their labor is unproductive. They are parasitic only in the sense that their work is done either for parasites or for the parasitical consumption of active capitalists. Nor is there any sharp line between proletarian and middle class in this element, since parts of both classes are equally conscious of their dependence. Shaw makes these points clear. His only error is to suppose that Socialists and believers in the class war theory, have failed to recognize them. "Thus we find," says Shaw, "that what the idle man of property does is to plunge into mortal sin against society. He not only withdraws himself from the productive forces of the nation and quarters himself on them as a parasite: he withdraws also a body of propertyless men and places them in the same position except that they have to earn this anti social privilege by ministering to his wants and whims. He thus creates and corrupts a class of workers--many of them very highly trained and skilled, and correspondingly paid--whose subsistence is bound up with his income. They are parasites on a parasite; and they defend the institution of private property with a ferocity which startles their principal, who is often in a speculative way quite revolutionary in his views. They knock the class war theory into a cocked hat [I shall show below that class war Socialists, on the contrary, have always recognized, the existence of these facts, "whilst the present system lasts."--W. E. W.] by forming a powerful conservative proletariat whose one economic interest is that the rich should have as much money as possible; and it is they who encourage and often compel the property owners to defend themselves against an onward march of Socialism. Thus we have the phenomenon that seems at first sight so amazing in London: namely, that in the constituencies where the shopkeepers pay the most monstrous rents, and the extravagance and insolence of the idle rich are in fullest view, no Socialist--nay, no Progressive--has a chance of being elected to the municipality or to Parliament. The reason is that these shopkeepers live by fleecing the rich as the rich live by fleecing the poor. The millionaire who has preyed upon Bury and Bottle until no workman there has more than his week's sustenance in hand, and many of them have not even that, is himself preyed upon in Bond Street, Pall Mall, and Longacre. "But the parasites, the West End tradesman, the West End professional man, the schoolmaster, the Ritz hotel keeper, the horse dealer and trainer, the impresario and his guinea stalls, and the ordinary theatrical manager with his half-guinea ones, the huntsman, the jockey, the gamekeeper, the gardener, the coachman, the huge mass of minor shopkeepers and employees who depend on these or who, as their children, have been brought up with a little crust of conservative prejudices which they call their politics and morals and religion: all these give to Parliamentary and social conservatism its real fighting force; and the more 'class conscious' we make them, the more they will understand that their incomes, _whilst the present system lasts_, are bound up with those of the proprietors whom Socialism would expropriate. And as many of them are better fed, better mannered, better educated, more confident and successful than the productive proletariat, the class war is not going to be a walkover for the Socialists."[236] If we take into account both this "parasitic proletariat" and the "lumpen proletariat" previously referred to, it is clear that when the Socialists speak of a class struggle against the capitalists, they do not expect to be able to include in their ranks all "the people" nor even all the wage earners. This is precisely one of the things that distinguishes them most sharply from a merely populistic movement. Populist parties expect to include _all_ classes of the "common people," and every numerically important class of capitalists. Socialists understand that they can never rely on the small capitalist except when he has given up all hope of maintaining himself as such, and that they are facing not only the whole capitalist class, but also their hirelings and dependents. Socialists as a whole have never tended either to a narrowly exclusive nor to a vaguely inclusive policy. Nor have their most influential writers, like Marx and Liebknecht, given the wage earners _a privileged position in the movement_. I have quoted from Liebknecht. "Just as the democrats make a sort of a fetish of the words 'the people,'" wrote Marx to the Communists on resigning from the organization in 1851, "so you may make one of the word 'proletariat.'" But it cannot be denied that many of Marx's followers have ignored this warning, and the worship of the words "proletariat" or "working class" is still common in some Socialist quarters. Recently Kautsky wrote that the Socialist Party, besides occupying itself with the interests of the manual laborers, "must also concern itself with all social questions, but that _its attitude on these questions is determined by the interests of the manual laborers_." "The Socialist Party," he continued, "is forced by its class position to expand its struggle against its own exploitation and oppression into a struggle against all forms of exploitation and oppression, to broaden its struggle for class interests into a struggle for liberty and justice for all members of the community." According to this interpretation, the Socialist Party, starting out from the standpoint of the economic interests of the "manual laborers," comes to represent the interests of all classes, except the capitalists. We may doubt as to whether the other non-capitalist classes will take kindly to this subordination or "benevolent assimilation" by the manual workers. Kautsky seems to have no question on this matter, however; for he considers that the abolition of the oppression and exploitation of the wage earners, _the class at the bottom_, can only be effected by the abolition of all exploitation and oppression, and that therefore "all friends of universal liberty and justice, whatever class they may spring from, are compelled to join the proletariat and to fight its class struggles."[237] Even if this is true, these other classes will demand that they should have an equal voice in carrying on this struggle in proportion to their numbers, and Socialist parties have usually (though not always) given them that equal voice. The kernel of the working class, "the layers of the industrial proletariat which have reached political self-consciousness," provides the chief supporters of the Socialist movement, according to Kautsky, although the latter is the representative "not alone of the industrial wage workers, but of all the working and exploited layers of the community, that is, the great majority of the total population, what one ordinarily calls 'the people.'" While Socialism is to represent all the producing and exploited classes, the industrial proletariat is thus considered as the model to which the others must be shaped and as by some special right or virtue it is on all occasions to take the forefront in the movement. This position leads inevitably to a considerably qualified form of democracy. "The backbone of the party will always be the fighting proletariat, whose qualities will determine its character, whose strength will determine its power," says Kautsky. "Bourgeois and peasants are highly welcome if they will attach themselves to us and march with us, but the proletariat will always show the way. "But if not only wage earners but also small peasants and small capitalists, artisans, middle-men of all kinds, small officials, and so forth--in short, the whole so-called 'common people'--formed the masses out of which Social Democracy recruits its adherents, we must not forget that these classes, with the exception of the class-conscious wage-earners, are also a recruiting ground for our opponents; their influence on these classes has been and still is to-day the chief ground of their political power. "To grant political rights to the people, therefore, by no means necessarily implies the protection of the interests of the proletariat or those of social evolution. Universal suffrage, as it is known, has nowhere brought about a Social Democratic majority, while it may give more reactionary majorities than a qualified suffrage under the same circumstances. It may put aside a liberal government only to put in its place a conservative or catholic one.... "Nevertheless the proletariat must demand democratic institutions under all circumstances, for the same reasons that, once it has obtained political power, it can only use its own class rule for the purpose of putting an end to all class rule. It is the bottommost of the social classes. It cannot gain political rights, at least not in its entirety, except if everybody gets them. Each of the other classes may become privileged under certain circumstances, but not the proletariat. The Social Democracy, the party of the class-conscious proletariat, is therefore the surest support of democratic efforts, much surer than the bourgeois democracy. "But if the Social Democracy is also the most strenuous fighter for democracy, it cannot share the latter's illusions. It must always be conscious of the fact that every popular right which it wins is a weapon not only for itself, but also for its opponents; it must therefore under certain circumstances understand that democratic achievements are more useful at first to the enemy than to itself; but only at first. For in the long run the introduction of democratic institutions in the State can only turn out to the profit of Social Democracy. They necessarily make its struggle easier, and lead it to victory. The militant proletariat has so much confidence in social evolution, so much confidence in itself, that it fears no struggle, not even with a superior power; it only wants a field of battle on which it can move freely. The democratic State offers such a field of battle; there the final decisive struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat can best be fought out." The reader might understand this somewhat vacillating position on the whole to favor democracy, but only a few pages further on Kautsky explains his reasons for opposing the initiative and referendum, and we see that when the point of action arrives, his democratic idealism is abandoned:-- "In our opinion it follows from the preceding that the initiative and referendum do _not_ belong to those democratic institutions which must be furthered by the proletariat in the interest of its own struggle for emancipation everywhere and under all circumstances. The referendum and initiative are institutions which may be very useful under certain circumstances if one does not overvalue these uses, but under other circumstances may cause great harm. The introduction of the initiative and referendum is, therefore, not to be striven for everywhere and under all circumstances, but only in those places where certain conditions are fulfilled. "Among these conditions precedent we reckon, above all, the preponderance of the city population over that of the country--a condition which at the present moment has only been reached in England. A further condition precedent is a highly developed political party life which has taken hold of the great masses of the population, so that the tendency of direct legislation to break up parties and to bridge over party opposition are no more to be feared. "But the weightiest condition precedent is the lack of an overwhelmingly centralized governmental power, standing independently against the people's representatives."[238] (My italics.) The first condition mentioned I have discussed in the previous chapter; the second indicates that Kautsky, speaking for many German Socialists, for the present at least, puts party above democracy. The industrial proletariat is supposed to have the mission of saving society. Even when it is not politically "self-conscious," or educated to see the great rôle it must play in the present and future transformation of society, it is supposed that it is _compelled_ ultimately "by the logic of events" to fill this rôle and attempt the destruction of capitalism and the socialization of capital. This prediction may _ultimately_ prove true, but time is the most vital element in any calculation, and Kautsky himself acknowledges that the industrial proletariat "had existed a long time before giving any indication of its independence," and that during all this long period "no militant proletariat was in existence." The chief practical reason for relying so strongly on the industrial wage earners as stated by Bebel and other Socialists is undoubtedly that "the proletariat increases more and more until it forms the overwhelming majority of the nation." No doubt, in proportion as this tendency exists, the importance of gathering certain parts of the middle class into the movement becomes less and less, and the statement quoted, if strongly insisted upon, even suggests a readiness to attempt to get along entirely without these elements. The figures of the Census indicate that in this country, at least, we are some time from the point when the proletariat will constitute even a bare majority, and that it is not likely to form an overwhelming majority for decades to come. But the European view is common here also. The moderate Vandervelde also says that the Socialist program has been "formulated by or for the workingmen of large-scale industry."[239] This may be true, but we are not as much interested to know who formulated the program of the movement as to understand its present aim. Its aim, it is generally agreed, is to organize into a single movement all anti-capitalistic elements, all those who want to abolish capitalism, those exploited classes that are not too crushed to revolt, those whose chief means of support is socially useful labor and not the ownership of capital or possession of some privileged position or office. In this movement it is generally conceded by Socialists that the workingmen of industry play the central part. But they are neither its sole origin nor is their welfare its sole aim. The best known of the Socialist critics of Marxism, Edward Bernstein, shares with some of Marx's most loyal disciples in this excessive idealization of the industrial working class. Indeed, he says, with more truth than he realizes, that in proportion as revolutionary Marxism is relegated to the background it is necessary to affirm more sharply the class character of the Party. That is to say, if a Socialist Party abandons the principles of Socialism, then the only way it can be distinguished from other movements is by the fact that it embraces other elements of the population, that it is a class movement. But Socialism is something more than this, it is a class movement of a certain definite character, composed of classes that are naturally selected and united, owing to certain definite characteristics. "The social democracy," says Bernstein, "can become the people's party, but only in the sense that the workingmen form the _essential_ kernel around which are grouped social elements having identical interests.... Of all the social classes opposed to the capitalist class, the working class _alone_ represents an invincible factor of social progress," and social democracy "addresses itself principally to the workers." (My italics.) Perhaps the most orthodox Socialist organ in America, and the ablest representative in this country of the international aspects of the movement (the _New Yorker Volkszeitung)_, insists that "the Socialist movement consists in the fusion of the Socialist doctrine with the labor movement and in nothing else," and says that students and even doctors have little importance for the Party. The less orthodox but more revolutionary _Western Clarion_, the Socialist organ of British Columbia, where the Socialists form the chief opposition party in the legislature, asserts boldly, "We have no leaning towards democracy; all we want is a short supply of working-class autocracy." Some of the ultra-revolutionists have gone so far in their hostility to all social classes that do not work with their hands, that they have completed the circle and flown into the arms of the narrowest and least progressive of trade unionists--the very element against which they had first reacted. The Western Socialist, Thomas Sladden, throwing into one single group all the labor organizations from the most revolutionary to the most conservative, such as the railway brotherhoods, says that all "are in reality part of the great Socialist movement," and claims that whenever "labor" goes into politics, this also is a step towards Socialism, though Socialist principles are totally abandoned. Mayor McCarthy of San Francisco, for instance, satisfied his requirements. "McCarthy declares himself a friend of capital," says Sladden, but, he asks defiantly, "Does any sane capitalist believe him?" Here we see one of the most revolutionary agitators becoming more and more "radical" until he has completed the circle and come back, not only to "labor right or wrong," but even to "labor working in harmony with capital." "The skilled workingman," he says, "is not a proletarian. He has an interest to conserve, he has that additional skill for which he receives compensation in addition to his ordinary labor power." Mr. Sladden adds that the _real_ proletarian is "uncultured and uncouth in appearance," that he has "no manners and little education," and that his religion is "the religion of hate." Of course this is a mere caricature of the attitude of the majority of Socialists. Some of the partisans of revolutionary unionism in this country are little less extreme. The late Louis Duchez, for example, reminds us that Marx spoke of the proletariat as "the lowest stratum of our present society," those "who have nothing to lose but their chains," and that he said that "along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this, too, grows the revolt of the working class." It is true that Marx said these things and said them with emphasis. But he did not wish to make any rigid or dogmatic definition of "the proletariat" and much that he has said pointed to an entirely different conception than would be gained from these quotations. In speaking of "the lowest stratum of society" Marx was thinking, not of a community divided into numerous strata, but chiefly of three classes, the large capitalists, the workers, and the middle class. It was the lowest of these three, and not the lowest of their many subdivisions, that he had in mind. From the first the whole Socialist movement has recognized the almost complete hopelessness, as an aid to Socialism, of the lowest stratum in the narrow sense, of what is called the "lumpen proletariat," the bulk of the army of beggars and toughs. Mr. Duchez undoubtedly would have accepted this point, for he wishes to say that the Socialist movement must be advanced by the organization of unions not among this class, but among the next lowest, economically speaking, the great mass of unskilled workers. This argument, also, that the unskilled have a better strategic position than the skilled on account of their solidarity and unity is surely a doubtful one. European Socialists, as a rule, have reached the opposite conclusion, namely, that it is the comparatively skilled workers, like those of the railways, who possess the only real possibility of leading in a general strike movement (see Chapters V and VI). FOOTNOTES: [234] H. G. Wells, "This Misery of Boots," p. 34. [235] Oscar Wilde, "The Soul of Man under Socialism", (brochure). [236] Bernard Shaw's series in the _New Age_ (1908). [237] Karl Kautsky, the _New York Call_, Nov. 14, 1909. [238] Karl Kautsky, "Parlamentarismus und Demokratie," pp. 124, 125, 138. [239] Émile Vandervelde, "Le Socialisme Agraire," p. 236. CHAPTER IV SOCIALISM AND THE LABOR UNIONS One of the grounds on which it is proposed by some Socialists to give manual labor a special and preferred place in the movement is that it is supposed to be the only numerically important non-capitalist element that is at all well organized or even organizable. Let us see, then, to what degree labor is organized and what are the characteristics of this organization. First, the labor unions represent manual wage earners almost exclusively--not by intention, but as a matter of fact. They include only an infinitesimal proportion of small employers, self-employing artisans, or salaried employees. Second, the unions by no means include all the manual wage earners, and only in a few industries do they include a majority. Those organized are, as a rule, the more developed and prosperous, the skilled or comparatively skilled workers. Third, their method of action is primarily that of the strike and boycott--economic and not political. They demand certain legislation and in several cases have put political parties in the field; they exert a political pressure in favor of government employees. But their chief purpose, even when they do these things, is to develop an organization that can strike and boycott effectively; and to secure only such political and civil rights as are needed for this purpose. The unions are primarily economic, and the Socialist Party is primarily political--both, to have any national power, must embrace a considerable proportion of the same industrial wage-earning class. It is evident that conflict between the two organizations is unnecessary and we find, indeed, that it arises only in exceptional cases. Many Socialists, however, look upon the unions primarily as an economic means, more or less important, of advancing political Socialism--while many unionists regard the Socialist parties primarily as political instruments for furthering the economic action of the unions. There are several groups of Socialists, on the other hand, who ascribe to the economic action of the unions a part in attaining Socialism as important or more important than that they ascribe to the political action of the party. These include, first, all those for whom Socialism is to be brought about almost exclusively by wage earners, whether by political or by economic action; second, those who do not believe the capitalists will allow the ballot to be used for anti-capitalistic purposes; third, those who believe that, in spite of all that capitalists and capitalistic governments can do, strikes and boycotts cannot be circumvented and in the end are irresistible. Other Socialists, agreeing that economic action, and therefore labor unions, both of the existing kind and of that more revolutionary type now in the process of formation, are indispensable, still look upon the Socialist Party as the chief instrument of Socialism. As these include nearly all Party members who are not unionists as well as a considerable part of the unionists, they are perhaps a majority--internationally. As the correct relationship between Party and unions, Mr. Debs has indorsed the opinion of Professor Herron, who, he said, "sees the trend of development and arrives at conclusions that are sound and commend themselves to the thoughtful consideration of all trade unionists and Socialists." Professor Herron says that the Socialist is needed to educate the unionists to see their wider interests:-- "He is not to do this by seeking to commit trade-union bodies to the principles of Socialism. Resolutions or commitments of this sort accomplish little good. Nor is he to do it by taking a servile attitude towards organized labor nor by meddling with the details or the machinery of the trade unions. It is better to leave the trade unions to their distinctive work, as the workers' defense against the encroachments of capitalism, as the economic development of the worker against the economic development of the capitalist, giving unqualified support and sympathy to the struggles of the organized worker to sustain himself in his economic sphere. But let the Socialist also build up the character and harmony and strength of the Socialist movement as a political force, that it shall command the respect and confidence of the worker, irrespective of his trade or his union obligations. It is urgent that we so keep in mind the difference between the two developments that neither shall cripple the other."[240] Here is a statement of the relation of the two movements that corresponds closely to the most mature and widespread Socialist opinion and to the decisions of the International Socialist Congresses. This view also meets that of the unions in most countries. The President of the American Federation, Mr. Gompers, understands this thoroughly and quotes with approval the action taken recently by the labor unions in Sweden, Hungary, and Italy, which demand the enforcement of this policy of absolute "neutrality." Formerly the federation of the unions of Sweden, for example, agreed to use their efforts to have the local unions become a part of the local organization of the Social Democratic Party. These words providing for this policy were struck out of the constitution by the Convention of 1909, which at the same time adopted (by a considerable majority) a resolution that "by this decision it was not intended to break up the unity and solidarity of labor's forces, for the convention considers the Social Democratic Party as the natural expression of the political ambitions of the Swedish workers." A similar relation prevails in nearly every country of the Continent. The Secretary of the German Federation (who is its highest officer)--a man who is at the same time an active Socialist,--has defined accurately the relation between the two organizations in that country. He says that the unions cannot accomplish their purposes without securing political representation "through a Party that is active in legislative bodies." This is also the view now of the British unions, which in overwhelming majority support the Labor Party. And they do this for the same purposes mentioned by Legien: to protect the working people from excessive exploitation, to enact into law the advantages already won by the unions, and so to smooth the way for better labor conditions. Similarly, the American Federation of Labor secures representation on legislative bodies, and hesitates to form a national Labor Party, not on principle, but only because American conditions do not in most localities promise that it would be effective. Mr. Mitchell expresses the position of the American Federation when he says that the "wage earners should in proportion to their strength secure the nomination and the election of a number of representatives to the governing bodies of city, State, and nation," but that "a third Labor Party is not for the present desirable, because it would not obtain a majority and could not therefore force its will upon the community at large." The European Socialists would perhaps not understand the political principle of our governmental system, which requires a plurality in the State or nation in order to obtain immediate results. For in this country the more important branches of the government are the executive and judges, and these, unlike the legislatures, cannot as a rule be divided, and therefore give no opportunity for the representation of minorities, and are necessarily elected by State or national pluralities and usually by majorities. In the monarchical countries of the Continent either such officials are not elected, or their powers are circumscribed, and even England lies in this respect halfway between those countries and the United States. What Mr. Mitchell says is in so far true; it would certainly require a large number of elections before a party beginning on the basis of a minority of representatives in Congress or the legislatures could win enough control over the executive and judges to "force its will upon the community at large." Mr. Mitchell and the other leaders of the Federation are, it is seen, unwilling to undertake a campaign so long and arduous, and, since they have no means of attracting the votes of any but wage-earning voters, so doubtful as to its outcome. Mr. Mitchell says that the workingmen in a separate party could not even secure a respectable minority of the legislators. The numerical strength of the Unions in proportion to the _voting_ population is scarcely greater than it was when he wrote (1903), and what he said then holds true as ever to-day. Mr. Gompers has also stated that labor would not be able to secure more than twenty-five or fifty Congressmen by independent political action. This is undoubtedly true, and we may take it for granted, therefore, that, unless the unions most unexpectedly increase their strength, there will be no national or even State-wide Trade Union or Labor Party in this country, though the San Francisco example of a city Labor party may be repeated now and then, and State organizations of the Socialist Party, which enjoy a large measure of autonomy, may occasionally, without changing their present names, reduce themselves to mere trade-union parties in the narrow sense of the term. President Gompers has claimed that 80 per cent of the voting members of the American Federation of Labor followed his advice in the election of 1908, which was, in nearly every case, to vote the Democratic ticket. There were not over 2,000,000 members of the Federation at this time, and of these (allowing for women, minors, and non-voting foreigners) there were not more than 1,500,000 voters. About 60 per cent of this number have always voted Democratic, so that if Mr. Gompers's claim were conceded it would mean a change of no more than 300,000 votes. It is true that such a number of voters could effect the election or defeat of a great many Democrats or Republican Congressmen, but, as Mr. Gompers says, it could only elect a score or two of Independents, a number which, as the example of Populism has shown, would be impotent under our political system. Moreover, as such a Congressional group would be situated politically not in the middle, but at one of the extremes, _it could never hold the balance of power in this or any other country_ until it became _a majority_. Mr. Mitchell is careful to qualify his opposition to the third party (or Labor Party) idea. He writes: "I wish it to be understood that this refers only to the immediate policy of the unions. One cannot see what the future of the dominant parties in the United States will be, and should it come to pass that the two great American political parties oppose labor legislation, as they now favor it, it would be the imperative duty of unionists to form a third party in order to secure some measure of reform."[241] Certainly both parties are becoming more and more willing to grant "some measure" of labor reform, so that Mr. Mitchell is unlikely to change his present position. Whether the unions form a separate party or not, is to them a matter not of principle, but of ways and means, of time and place. Where they are very weak politically they seek only to have their representatives in other parties; where they are stronger they may form a party of their own to coöperate with the other parties and secure a share in government; where they are strongest they will seek to gain control over a party that plays for higher stakes, brings to the unions the support of other elements, and remains in opposition until it can secure undivided control over government, _e.g._ the Socialist Party. Whether the unions operate through all parties or a Labor Party or a Socialist Party, is of secondary importance also to Socialists; what is of consequence is the character of the unions, and the effect of their political policy on the unions themselves. In all three cases the principles of the unions may be at bottom the same, and in any of the three cases they may be ready to use the Socialist Party for the sole purpose of securing a modest improvement of their wages--even obstructing other Party activities--as some of the German union leaders have done. They may also use a Labor Party for the same purpose--as in Great Britain. Or they may develop a political program without really favoring any political party or having any distinctive political aim--as in the United States. The labor unions, even the most conservative, have always and everywhere had some kind of a political program. They have naturally favored the right to organize, to strike and boycott, free speech and a free press. They have demanded universal suffrage, democratic constitutions, and other measures to increase the political power of their members. They have favored all economic reform policies of which working people got a share, even if a disproportionately small one, and all forms of taxation that lightened their burdens.[242] And, finally, they have usually centered their attacks on the most powerful of their enemies, whether Emperor, Church, army, landlords, or large capitalists. In economic and political reform, the American unions, like those of other countries, support all progressive measures, including the whole "State Socialist" program. As to political machinery, they favor, of course, every proposal that can remove constitutional checks and give the majority control over the government, such as the easy amendment of constitutions and the right to recall judges and all other officials by majority vote. Like the Socialists, they welcome the "State Socialist" labor program, government insurance for workingmen against old age, sickness, accidents, and unemployment, a legal eight-hour day, a legal minimum wage, industrial education, the prohibition of child labor, etc. The unions and the parties they use also join in the effort of the small capitalist investors and borrowers, consumers and producers, to control the large interests--the central feature of the "State Socialist" policy. But the conservative unions do not stop with such progressive, if non-Socialist, measures; they take up the cause of the smaller capitalists also _as competitors_. The recent attack of the Federation of Labor on the "Steel Trust" is an example. The presidents of the majority of the more important unions, who signed this document, became the partisans not only of small capitalists who buy from the trust, sell to it, or invest in its securities, but also of the unsuccessful competitors that these combinations are eliminating. The Federation here spoke of "the American institution of unrestricted production," which can mean nothing less than unrestricted competition, and condemned the "Steel Trust" because it controls production, whereas the regulation or control of production is precisely the most essential thing to be desired in a progressive industrial society--a control, of course, to be turned as soon as possible to the benefit of all the people. The Federation's attack was not only economically reactionary, but it was practically disloyal to millions of employees. It applies against the "trust," which happens to be unpopular, arguments which apply even more strongly to competitive business. The trust, it said, corrupts legislative bodies and is responsible for the high tariff. As if all these practices had not begun before the "trusts" came into being, as if the associated manufacturers are not even more strenuous advocates of all the tariffs--which are life and death matters to them--than the "trusts," which might very well get along without them. Finally, the Federation accuses the "Steel Trust" of an especially oppressive policy towards its working people, apparently forgetting its arch enemy, the manufacturer's association. It is notorious, moreover, that the smallest employers, such as the owners of sweat shops, nearly always on the verge of bankruptcy and sometimes on the verge of starvation themselves, are harder on their labor than the industrial combinations, and that in competitive establishments, like textile mills, the periods when employers are forced to close down altogether are far more frequent, making the average wages the year round far below those paid by any of the trusts. The merest glance at the statistics of the United States census will be sufficient evidence to prove this. For not only are weekly wages lower in the textile mills and several other industries than they are in the steel corporation, but also employment year in and year out is much more irregular. Here we see the unions adopting the politics of the small capitalists, not only on its constructive or "State Socialist" side, but also in its _reactionary_ tendency, now being rapidly outgrown, of trying to restore competition, and actually working against their own best interests for this purpose. A writer in the _Federationist_ demands "a reduction of railway charges, express rates, telegraph rates, telephone rates," and a radical change in the great industrial corporations such as the Steel Trust, which is to be subjected to thorough regulation. Swollen fortunes are to be broken up, together with the power of the monopolists, of "the gamblers in the necessities of life, etc."[243] In this writer's opinion (Mr. Shibley), the monopolists are the chief cause of high prices and the only important anti-social group, and all the other classes of society have a common interest with the wage earners. But business interests, manufacturers, the owners of large farms, and employers in lines where competition still prevails, would also, with the fewest exceptions, take sides against the working people in any great labor conflict--as the history of every modern country for the past fifty years has shown. It is not "Big Business" or "The Interests," but business in general, not monopolistic employers, but the whole employing class, against which the unions have contended and always must contend--on the economic as well as the political field. Mr. Gompers and his associates, like Mr. Bryan and Senator La Follette, demand that the people shall rule, but they all depend upon the hundreds of thousands of business men as allies, who, if opposed to government by monopolies, are still more opposed to government by their employees or by the consumers of their products, and are certain to fight any political movement of which they are a predominating part. The American Federation of Labor, and the majority of the labor unions comprising it, are thus seen to have a political program scarcely distinguishable from that of the radical wing of either of the large parties,--for it seeks little if any more than to join in with the general movement against monopolists and large capitalists in a conflict that can never be won or lost, since the leaders in the movement are themselves indirectly and at the bottom a part of the capitalist class. The President of the American Federation views this partly reactionary and partly "State Socialist" program as being directed against "capitalism." "The votes of courageous and honest citizens in all civilized lands," says Mr. Gompers, "are cutting away the capitalistic powers' privilege to lay tribute on the producers. Capitalism, as a surviving form of feudalism,--the power to deprive the laborer of his product,--gives signs of expiring."[244] Democratic reform and improvement in economic conditions are apparently taken by Mr. Gompers as a sign that capitalism is expiring and that society is progressing satisfactorily to the wage earners. Although the constitution of the Federation says that the world-wide "struggle between the capitalist and the laborer" is a struggle between "oppressors and oppressed," Mr. Gompers gives the outside world to understand that the unions have no inevitable struggle before them, but are as interested in industrial peace as are the employers. He has expressed his interpretation of the purpose of the Federation in the single word "more." He sees progress and asks a share for the unionists as each forward step is taken. He does not ask that labor's share be increased in proportion to the progress made--to say nothing of asking that this share should be made disproportionately large in order gradually to make the distribution of income more equal. A capitalism inspired by a more enlightened selfishness might, without any ultimate loss, grant all the Federation's present demands, political as well as economic. Therefore, Mr. Gompers, quite logically, does not see any necessity for an aggressive attitude. "Labor unions," says Mr. John Mitchell, who takes a similar view, "are _for_ workmen, but _against_ no one. They are not hostile to employers, not inimical to the interests of the general public. They are for a class, because that class exists and has class interests, but the unions did not create and do not perpetuate the class or its interests and do not seek to evoke a class conflict."[245] Here it is recognized that the working class exists as a class and has interests of its own. But, if, as Mr. Mitchell adds, the unions do not wish to perpetuate this class or its interests, then surely they must see to it, as far as they are able, that members of this class have equal industrial opportunities with other citizens, and that its children should at least be no longer compelled to remain members of a class from which, as he expressly acknowledges, there is at present no escape. Both Mr. Gompers and Mr. Mitchell have gone to the defense of the leading anti-Socialist organization in this country, Civic Federation--and nothing could draw in stronger colors than do their arguments the complete conflict of the Gompers-Mitchell labor union policy to that of the Socialists. Mr. Gompers defends the Federation as worthy of labor's respect on the ground that many of its most active capitalist members have shown a sustained sincerity, "always having in mind the rights and interests of labor," which is the very antithesis to the Socialist claim that nobody will always have in mind the rights and the interests of labor, except the laborers--and least of all those who buy labor themselves, or are intimately associated with those who buy labor. Mr. Mitchell says that through the Civic Federation many employers have become convinced that their antagonism to unions was based on prejudice, and have withdrawn their opposition to the organization of the men in their plants. No doubt this is strictly true. It shows that the unions had been presented to the employers as being profitable to them. This, Socialists would readily admit, might be the case with some labor organizations as they have been shaped by leaders like Mr. Mitchell and conferences like those of the Civic Federation. To Socialists organizations that create this impression of harmony of interests do exactly what is most dangerous for the workers--that is, they make them less conscious and assertive of their own interests. The Civic Federation, composed in large part of prominent capitalists and conservatives, endeavors to allay the discontent of labor by intimate association with the officers of the unions. Socialists have long recognized the tendency of trade-union leaders to be persuaded by such methods to the capitalist view. Eight years ago at Dresden, August Bebel had already seen this danger, for he placed in the same class with the academic "revisionists" those former proletarians who had been raised into higher positions and were lost to the working classes through "intercourse with people of the contrary tendency." It is this class of leaders, according to the Socialists, which, up to the present, has dominated the trade unions of Great Britain and the United States and occasionally of other countries. No Socialist has been more persistent in directing working-class opinion against all such "leaders" than Mr. Debs, who does not mince matters in this direction. "The American Federation of Labor," he writes, "has numbers, but the capitalist class do not fear the American Federation of Labor; quite the contrary. There is something wrong with that form of unionism whose leaders are the lieutenants of capitalism; something is wrong with that form of unionism that forms an alliance with such a capitalist combination as the Civic Federation, whose sole purpose is to chloroform the working class while the capitalist class go through their pockets.... The old form of trade unionism no longer meets the demands of the working class. The old trade union has not only fulfilled its mission and outlived its usefulness, but is now positively reactionary, and is maintained, not in the interest of the workers who support it, but in the interest of the capitalist class who exploit the workers who support it." In a recent speech Mr. Debs related at length the Socialist view as to how, in his opinion, this misleading of labor leaders comes about:-- "There is an army of men who serve as officers, who are on the salary list, who make a good living, keeping the working class divided. They start out with good intentions as a rule. They really want to do something to serve their fellows. They are elected officers of a labor organization, and they change their clothes. They now wear a white shirt and a standing collar. They change their habits and their methods. They have been used to cheap clothes, coarse fare, and to associating with their fellow workers. After they have been elevated to official position, as if by magic they are recognized by those who previously scorned them and held them in contempt. They find that some of the doors that were previously barred against them now swing inward, and they can actually put their feet under the mahogany of the capitalist. "Our common labor man is now a labor leader. The great capitalist pats him on the back and tells him that he knew long ago that he was a coming man, that it was a fortunate thing for the workers of the world that he had been born, that in fact they had long been waiting for just such a wise and conservative leader. And this has a certain effect upon our new-made leader, and unconsciously, perhaps, he begins to change--just as John Mitchell did when Mark Hanna patted him on the shoulder and said, 'John, it is a good thing that you are at the head of the miners. You are the very man. You have the greatest opportunity a labor leader ever had on this earth. You can immortalize yourself. Now is your time.' Then John Mitchell admitted that this capitalist, who had been pictured to him as a monster, was not half as bad as he had thought he was; that, in fact, he was a genial and companionable gentleman. He repeats his visit the next day, or the next week, and is introduced to some other distinguished person he had read about, but never dreamed of meeting, and thus goes on the transformation. All his dislikes disappear, and all feeling of antagonism vanishes. He concludes that they are really most excellent people, and, now that he has seen and knows them, he agrees with them there is no necessary conflict between workers and capitalists. And he proceeds to carry out this pet capitalist theory, and he can only do it by betraying the class that trusted him and lifted him as high above themselves as they could reach. "It is true that such a leader is in favor with the capitalists; that their newspapers write editorials about him and crown him a great and wise leader; and that ministers of the gospel make his name the text for their sermons, and emphasize the vital point that if all labor leaders were such as he, there would be no objections to labor organizations. And the leader feels himself flattered. And when he is charged with having deserted the class he is supposed to serve, he cries out that the indictment is brought by a discredited labor leader. And that is probably true. The person who brings a charge is very likely discredited. By whom? By the capitalist class, of course; and its press and pulpit and 'public' opinion. And in the present state of the working class, when he is discredited by the capitalists, he is at once repudiated by their wage slaves."[246] Mr. Debs's attitude toward Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Gompers is by no means exceptional among Socialists. Mr. Gompers visited Europe in 1909, spoke at length in Paris and Berlin, and was viewed by the majority of the European Socialists and unionists almost exactly as he is by Mr. Debs. Among other things he said there, was that the very kernel of the difference between the European and the American labor movement and the reason why the wages are so much better in America than in Europe was the _friendlier_ relations between the government and the working people in this country--this after all the recent court decisions against the unions, decisions which, even when outwardly milder, have precisely the same effect as the hostile legislation and administration of the Continent. Mr. Gompers, while in Europe, said that it was unnecessary that governments and the working people should misunderstand one another, and asked, "Is there not for us all the common ground of the fatherland, of common interest and the wish that we feel to make our people more prosperous, happier and freer?" "I do not know what I will see there [in Hungary]," he continued, "but this much I will say, that I know that nothing will convince me that this readiness of the workingmen to fight against the government and of the government to fight against the workingmen can bring anything good to either side."[247] Such expressions naturally aroused the European Socialist and Labor press, and Kautsky even devoted a special article to Gompers in the _Neue Zeit_.[248] It was not necessary in a Socialist periodical to say anything against Gompers's preaching of the common interests of capital and labor, since there is practically no Socialist who would not agree that such a belief amounts to a total blindness to industrial and political conditions. But Kautsky feared that the German workingmen might give some credit to Gompers's claim that the non-Socialist policy of the American unions was responsible for the relatively greater prosperity of the working people in America. "The workingmen," he explained, referring to this country, "have not won their higher wages in the last decade, but have inherited them from their forefathers. They were principally a result of the presence of splendid lands from which every man who wanted to become independent got as much as he needed." Then he proceeded to show by the statistics of the Department of Labor that daily real wages, measured in terms of what they would buy, had actually decreased for the majority of American workingmen during the last decade. It is true, as Mr. Gompers replied, that the hours have become somewhat less, and that therefore the amount of real wages received _per hour of work_ has slightly increased, though there are few working people who will count themselves very fortunate in a decrease of hours if it is paid for _even in a part_ by a decrease of the real wages received at the end of the day. And even if we compare _the early_ nineties with the _last years_ of the recent decade, we find that the slight increase in the purchasing power of the total wages received (_i.e._ real wages) amounted at the most to no more than two or three per cent in these fifteen years. In a word, the disproportion between the prosperity of the wage earning and capitalist classes has in the past two decades become much greater than ever before. The basis of the Socialist economic criticism of existing society--and one that appeals to the majority of the world's labor unionists also--is that while the proportion of the population that consists of wage earners is everywhere increasing, the share of the national income that goes to wages is everywhere growing less. There is no more striking, easily demonstrable, or generally admitted fact in modern life. The whole purpose of Socialism--in so far as it can be expressed in terms of income, is to reverse this tendency and to keep it reversed until private capital is reduced to impotence, as far as the control of industry is concerned. Contrast with the position of Gompers and Mitchell the chief official of the German unions, Karl Legien, a relatively conservative representative of Continental unionism. "The unions," he says, "are based on the conviction that there is an unbridgeable gulf between capital and labor. This does not mean that the capitalists and laborers may not, as men, find points of contact; it means only that the accumulation of capital, resting as it does on keeping from the laborer a part of the products of his labor, forces a propertyless proletariat to sell its labor at any price it can get. Between those who wish to maintain these conditions and the propertyless laborers there is a wall which can be done away with only by the abolition of wage labor. Here the views prevailing in the unions are at one with those of the Social Democratic Party." "The unions are chiefly occupied in the effort to use their power to shape the labor contract in their favor, and do not consider it as their task to propagate this view, but holds the propaganda as being the task rather of the Social Democratic Party and its organizations." Even the struggle for higher wages and shorter hours carried on by the unions, Legien says, is fought in the consciousness that it will make labor "more capable of the final solution of the social problem." He reminds us that the overwhelming majority of the German unionists are Socialists, and says that the labor conflict itself must have led to this result, though he does not want the unions to support the party as unions. In other countries of the Continent, unionists go even farther. In Austria, Belgium, and elsewhere the two organizations act as a single body, and in France, not satisfied with working for Socialism as members of the party, unionists also make it a declared end of their unions, independently of all political action, and shape their everyday policies accordingly. It is only when we come to Great Britain that we find the unions in a conciliatory relation with employers such as has hitherto prevailed in the United States. The relation between the unions and capitalistic "State Socialists" of Great Britain has been friendly. As I have already noted, the enthusiasm of the British unions for the social reforms of the Liberal Party and government has hitherto been so great that they consented that the increase of the taxation needed to pay for these reforms should fall on their shoulders, while the wealthy classes made the world ring with epithets of "revolution" because a burden of almost exactly the same weight was placed on them to pay for the Dreadnoughts they demanded, and because land was nationally taxed for the first time, Mr. Churchill himself conceded that his social reform budget "draws nearly as much from the taxation of tobacco and spirits, which are the luxuries of the working classes, who pay their share with silence and dignity, as it does from those wealthy classes upon whose behalf such heart-rending outcry is made."[249] Perhaps the fact that the labor unions of Great Britain _up to 1910_ spent less than a tenth part of their income on strikes was a still stronger ground for Mr. Churchill's admiration, since he had to deal with the strikers as President of the Board of Trade. While the national income of the country has been increasing enormously in the past two decades, and the higher or taxed incomes have more than doubled (which is a rate of increase far greater than the rise in prices), the income even of unionized workers has not kept up with this rise. In a word, the propertied classes are getting a larger and larger share of the national income (see Mr. Churchill's language in preceding chapter). Now should the unions continue in the moderation of their demands,--or even should they obtain a 10 or 20 per cent increase (as some have done since the railway and seamen's strike of 1911),--_the propertied classes would still have been getting a larger and larger share of the national income_. From 1890 to 1899 prices in England are estimated to have fallen 5 per cent, while wages _of organized working-men_ rose 2 per cent; from 1900 to 1908 prices rose 6 per cent, while these wages fell 1 per cent. A 7 per cent improvement in the first decade was followed by a 7 per cent retrogression in the second--_among organized workers_.[250] There is then no probability that the British unions will check the constant decrease in the share of the total wealth of the country that goes to the wage earner, until they have completed the reversal of older policies now in progress. That this may soon occur is indicated by the great strikes of 1911 (which I shall consider in the next chapter). The American unions also are beginning to take a more radical and Socialistic attitude. At its Convention at Columbus, Ohio (January, 1911), the United Mine Workers, after prolonged discussion, passed by a large majority an amendment to their constitution, forbidding their officers from acting as members of the Civic Federation. This resolution was confessedly aimed at Mr. John Mitchell, as Vice President of the Civic Federation, and resulted in his resignation from that body. It marks a crisis in the American Labor movement. The Miners' Union had already indorsed Socialism, its Vice President is a party Socialist, and its present as well as its former President vote the Socialist ticket. Having forced the Federation of Labor to admit the revolutionary Western Federation of Miners into the Federation of Labor Congresses, the element opposed to Mr. Gompers and Mr. Mitchell's conservative tactics has, for the first time, become formidable, embracing one third of the delegates, and is likely to bring about great changes within a few years, both as to the Federation's political and as to its labor-union policy. This action of the Miners was followed a few months later by the election to office of several of Mr. Gompers's Socialist opponents in his own union (the Cigarmakers). Then another of Mr. Gompers's most valued lieutenants (after Mr. Mitchell), Mr. James O'Connell, for many years President of the very important Machinists' Union, was defeated by a Socialist, Mr. W. H. Johnston,--after a very lively contest in which Socialism and the Civic Federation, and their contrasting the labor policies, played a leading part. The old conservative trade unionism is not only going, but it is going so fast that one or two more years like the last would overwhelm it in the national convention of the Federation of Labor and revolutionize the policy of the whole movement. The change in the political attitude of the American unions has been equally rapid. Until a few years ago the majority of them were opposed to coöperation with any political party. Then they decided almost unanimously to act nationally, and for the time being with the Democrats, and this decision still holds. More recently several local labor parties have been formed, and the Socialist Party has occasionally been supported. The only question that interests us, however, is the purpose behind these changing political tactics. It is natural that unionists on entering into the Socialist Party should seek to control it. Socialists make no objection at this point. The only question relates to their purpose in seeking control. A prominent Socialist miner, John Walker, has frankly advocated a Labor Party of the British type, while others wish to turn the Socialist Party into that sort of an organization; while the Secretary of the Oklahoma Federation of Labor, on joining the Party said: "Let us get into the Socialist Party--on the inside--and help run it as we think it should be run," and then gave an idea of how he proposed to run it by accusing the Party of containing too many people "who are Socialists before anything else." This is a common feeling among new labor-union recruits in the Party. It is difficult to see the difference between those who share Walker's view and want to carry out the present non-Socialist political program of the unions through a non-Socialist Labor Party and those who, like this other union official, expect to use the Socialist Party for the same purpose. Let us notice the similarity of certain arguments used in favor of each method. "The Socialist Party," says the organ of the Garment Workers' Union, "does not command the confidence of American labor to the extent of becoming a national power in our day and generation, and it is, therefore, necessary that the working class should turn its attention to the formation of a party that will be productive of practical results in sweeping away the legislative and the legal obstacles that now stand in the way of our rights and progress."[251] "Much is being written and said nowadays as to the danger of Socialism and in favor of trades unionism," writes the _Mine Workers' Journal_, "To us the condemnation of the Socialists, coming as it does from the capitalistic press, is a reminder that of the two evils to their selfish class interest, they prefer the least.... It is useless to attempt to divide trades unionism from Socialism. It cannot be done. They have all learned that their interests are common; they know that labor divided will continue to suffer, and will hang together before they will allow capital to hang them separately. "Indeed, looking at trades unionism in all its phases and from every angle, we fail to see why Socialism and it should be separated. The man or men in the movement to-day who are not more or less Socialistic in their belief are few and far between and do not know what the principles of unionism are, or what it stands for. We are all more or less Socialistic in our belief."[252] A perusal of the labor papers in general shows that while a number agree with the Garment Workers a still larger number share the opinion of the _Mine Workers' Journal_. Yet what is the essential difference? The Garment Workers' organ claims that the European Socialists and trade unionists support one another's candidates and unite their power without the Socialists demanding the indorsement of their program, and argues for that policy in this country. This statement is not accurate. Only in England, where there has hitherto been no independent Socialist action of any consequence, has there been any such compromise. On the Continent of Europe the Socialists usually agree to leave the unions perfect freedom in their business, and not to interfere in the slightest with their action _on the economic field_, but there is no important instance in recent years where they have compromised with them at the ballot box. And this error is shared by the _Mine Workers' Journal_, which, as I have just shown, is friendly rather than hostile to Socialism. In another editorial in this organ we find it said that "whenever Socialism in America adopts the methods of the British, and other European toilers and pulls in harness with trade unionism, it is bound to make headway faster than at present, because there is scarcely a man in the labor movement that is not more or less of a Socialist." Here again the British (Labor Party) and the Continental (Socialist) methods are confused. It is true that the Socialist parties and the labor unionists everywhere act together. But there are two fundamental differences between the situation in Great Britain and that on the Continent. A large part of the unions on the Continent are extremely radical if not revolutionary in their labor-union tactics, and secondly, the overwhelming majority of their members are Socialists in politics. Surely there could be no greater contrast than that between the swallowing up of the budding Socialist movement by non-Socialist labor unions in Great Britain and the support of the Socialist Party by the revolutionary unionist on the Continent. In America only a minority of the unions are definitely and clearly Socialist. The local federations of the unions in many of our leading cities have declared for the Party. Among the national organizations, however, only the Western Federation of Miners, the Brewers, the Hat and Cap Makers, the Bakers, and a few others, numbering together no more than a quarter of a million members, have definitely indorsed Socialism. The Coal Miners, numbering nearly 300,000, have indorsed collective ownership of industry, but without saying anything about the Socialist Party. Besides these, the Socialist Party, of course, has numerous individual adherents in every union. On the whole the Socialists are very much outnumbered in the unions, and as long as this condition remains, the majority of Socialists do not desire anything approaching fusion between the two movements. Half a century ago, it is true, Marx himself favored the Socialists entering into a labor union party in England. He assumed that English unions would soon go into politics, whereas they took half a century to do it; he assumed, also, that when they entered politics they would be more or less militant and independent, and he never imagined that during fifteen years of "independent action" they would oppose revolutionary and militant ideas more than ever, and would even go so far in support of the Liberal Party as almost to bring about a split within their own anti-revolutionary ranks. Certainly Marx expected that they would accept his leading principles, whereas only the smallest minority of the present Labor Party has done so, while the majority has not yet consented to make Socialism an element of the Party's constitution, confining themselves to a broad general declaration in favor of "State Socialism"--and even this not to be binding on its members. Marx's standard for a workingmen's party was Socialism and nothing less than Socialism. In his famous letter on the Gotha program addressed in 1875 to Bebel, Liebknecht, and others, at the time of the formation of the Socialist Party and perhaps the greatest practical crisis in Marx's lifetime, he said, it will be recalled, that "every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programs," but he was even then against any sacrifice of essential principle. He saw that the workingmen themselves might be satisfied by "the mere fact of the union" of his followers with those of LaSalle, but he said that it was an error to believe that this momentous result could not be bought too dearly, and if any principle was to be sacrificed, he preferred, instead of fusion, "a simple agreement against the common enemy." While Socialist workingmen, then, are inclined to attach more importance to the Socialist Party than to conservative unionism, they expect the new aggressive, democratic, and revolutionary unionism to do even more for Socialism, at least in the expected crisis of the future, than the Party itself. The tendency of the unions towards politics is merely an automatic result of the tendency of governments and capitalists towards a certain form of collectivism. Far more significant is their tendency towards Socialism whether through politics or through the strike, the boycott, and other means. Trade unionism, transferred to the field of politics, is not Socialism. The struggles against employers for more wages, less hours, and better conditions has no necessary relation to the struggle against capitalism for the control of industry and government. The former struggle may evolve into the latter, and usually does so, but long periods may also intervene when it takes no step in that direction. Moreover, a trade union party of the British type, whether it takes the name Socialist or not, if it acts as rival to a genuine Socialist Party, checks the latter's growth. When revolutionary labor organizations composed largely of genuine Socialists enter into politics, the situation is completely reversed--even when such organizations take the step primarily for the sake of their unions rather than to aid the Socialist Party. This situation I shall consider in the following chapter. FOOTNOTES: [240] Eugene V. Debs, "His Life and Writings," p. 140. [241] John Mitchell, "Organized Labor," p. 208. [242] Miss Hughan in her "American Socialism," p. 220, quotes an expression of mine (see the _New York Call_, March 22, 1910) in which I said that "petty reforms never have aroused and never will arouse the enthusiasm of the working class and do not permit of its coöperation, but leave everything in the hands of a few self-appointed leaders." Miss Hughan herself points out that I have never considered all so-called reforms as petty (see "American Socialism of the Present Day," p. 216) and quotes (on p. 199) an expression from the very article above mentioned in which I define what reforms I consider are of special importance to the wage earners, namely, those protecting the strike, the boycott, free speech, and civil government. I even mentioned labor legislation on a national scale. The petty reforms I referred to were State labor laws. These will not only be carried out by non-Socialists, but receive very little attention from active labor bodies such as the city and State federations, which are almost wholly absorbed in the greater and more difficult task of defending the strike, boycott, free speech, and sometimes civil government. Labor will do everything in its power to promote child labor laws, workingmen's compensation etc., except to give them its chief attention instead of the struggle for higher wages and the rights needed to carry it on effectively. As a consequence these matters are left to a few selfish or unselfish persons, who are "self-appointed leaders," even when the unions consent to leave these particular matters in their hands. For active coöperation of the masses in the legal, economic, and political intricacies of such legislation is not only undesirable, but impossible under the present system of society and government. Labor must govern itself through instructed _delegates_, while such work can be done only by _representatives_, who must often have the power to act without further consultation with those who elected them. [243] George H. Shibley in the _American Federationist_, June, 1910. [244] Samuel Gompers in the _American Federationist_, 1910. [245] John Mitchell, "Organized Labor" (Preface). [246] Eugene V. Debs, _op. cit._ [247] Karl Kautsky in _Die Neue Zeit_, 1909, p. 679. [248] Karl Kautsky in _Die Neue Zeit_, 1909, p. 680. [249] Winston Churchill, _op. cit._, pp. 77, 336, 337. [250] _Die Neue Zeit_, June 11, 1911. [251] The Weekly Bulletin of the Garment Trades (New York), 1910. [252] The _Mine Workers' Journal_ (Indianapolis), Aug. 26, 1909, and April 21, 1910. CHAPTER V SYNDICALISM; SOCIALISM THROUGH DIRECT ACTION OF LABOR UNIONS In America, France, Italy, and England, as well as in Germany (in a modified form) a new and more radical labor-union policy has been rapidly gaining the upper hand. This new movement--in its purely economic, as well as its political, bearings--is of far greater moment to Socialists than the political tendencies of those unions that continue to follow the old tactics in their direct relations with employers. In America and in England, unfortunately, the name given to this new movement, "industrial unionism," is somewhat ambiguous. A more correct term would be "labor" unionism as distinct from "trade" unionism, or "class unionism" against "sectional unionism." By "industrial unionism" the promoters of the new movement means that all the employees of a given industry are to be solidly bound together in a single union instead of being divided into many separate organizations as so often happens to-day, and so as to act as a unit against the employer, as, for example, the steel workers, machinists, longshoremen, structural iron workers, etc., are all to be united against the Steel Trust. The essential idea is not any particular form of united action, but united action. Certainly the united action of all the trades at work under a single employer or employers' association is of the first importance, but it is equally important that "industrial" unions so composed should aid one another, that the united railway organizations, for example, should be ready to strike with seamen, dockers, etc., as was done in the recent British strike. An interview with Mr. Vernon Hartshorn, who recently headed the poll in the election for the executive committee of the important South Wales Mining Federation, indicates the tendency in Great Britain at the present moment--when both coal and railway strikes are threatened on a national scale--not merely towards industrial unionism, but towards the far more important _union of industrial unions_, which is really the underlying idea in the minds of most, though not all, of the propagandists of "industrial unionism." "I think it a very silly business," exclaimed Mr. Hartshorn emphatically, "for the workers in different industries to be proceeding with national movements independently of each other. A short time ago we had a national stoppage on the railways; that, as a matter of course, rendered the miners idle. Before that we had something in the nature of a national stoppage in the case of the seamen's dispute; that, also, in many districts paralysed the mining industry and rendered idle the workmen. Now it appears likely that the miners will be taking part in a national stoppage which, in turn, will render the railway men and seamen idle. "The idea is gradually dawning upon all sections of organized labor that the right thing to do would be for these three unions, through their executives, to establish a working alliance by means of which united action should be taken to secure reforms which would result in the raising of the standard of living of the whole of the workmen employed in these undertakings. Of course the grievances in different trades differ considerably in points of detail, but they all have a common basis in that they relate to wages and conditions of work. If the three organizations could be got to act together with a view of establishing a guaranteed minimum wage for all workmen employed, then not all the forces of the Crown, nor all the powers of government, could prevent them from emancipating themselves from their present deplorable position."[253] It is equally necessary for the unions in order to obtain maximum results that a special relation should be established between the members of such trades as are to be found in more than one industry. Teamsters, stationary engineers, machinists, and blacksmiths, for example, whether employed by mines, railways, or otherwise, can aid one another in obvious ways--as by securing positions for blacklisted men and preventing non-unionists from obtaining employment--by means of a special "trade" organization or federation that cuts across the various "industrial" unions or federations. All this, indeed, is provided for in the plans of the "industrial unionists," in the idea of gradually reorganizing the present loose Federation of Labor into "a union of unions," or, as they express it, "One Big Union." This last term also is not very fortunate, for it is by no means proposed to form one absolutely centralized organization, like the former Knights of Labor, but to preserve a considerable measure of autonomy for the constituent industrial unions. Neither does the new unionism require, as some of its exponents allege, the abolition of the older _trade_ unions, either local or national, but only that all unions shall be democratically organized and open to unskilled labor, and that the general organization, of which they are all a part, shall be the first consideration, and the local groupings whether by trade or industry only secondary. The principle of the new union policy is exactly the same translated into terms of economic action, as the principle of revolutionary Socialism as conceived by Marx, and hitherto applied by Socialists chiefly on the political field. In the Communist Manifesto Marx says that the chief thing that distinguishes the Socialists from the other working-class parties is that the former "always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole." So while the older unions represented the economic struggle of certain more or less extensive parts of the working class, the industrial unionists aim at a unionism that represents the whole of the working class, and, since the ranks of labor are always open, all non-capitalist humanity. A closely organized federation of all the unions will rely very strongly upon numbers and embrace a large proportion of unskilled workers. It will, therefore, be forced to fight the cause of the common man. But this can only be done by fighting against every form of oppression and privilege--all of which bear on the men at the bottom. The industrial policy idea has received its most remarkable indorsement in the great British railway strike of 1911. Before showing what lay behind this epoch-making movement, let me refer to the great change in the British Union world that preceded it. In 1910 there occurred an unprecedented series of strikes in the four larges industries of the country, the railroads, shipbuilding, cotton, and coal-mining--all within a few months of one another, _and all against the advice of the officials of the unions_. The full and exact significance of this movement was seen when the hitherto conservative Trade Union Congress, after a very vigorous debate, decided, on the motion of Ben Tillett, to take a referendum of the unions on the question of the "practicability of a confederation of all trades" and on the "_possibility of terminating all trade agreements on a given date after each year_." In the same year a great agitation began, led by the most prominent advocate of industrial unionism in Great Britain, the Socialist, Tom Mann, who with John Burns had been one of the organizers of the great dockers' strike in 1886, and who had returned, in 1910, from many years of successful agitation in Australia to preach the new unionism in his home country. That this agitation was one of the causes of the great seamen's, dockers', and railway strikes that followed is indicated by the fact that Mr. Mann was at once given the chief position in this movement. His first principle is that the unions should include _all_ the workers, in their respective industries:-- "Skilled workers, in many instances doing but little work, receive from two to seven or eight pounds a week, whilst the laborer, having the same responsibilities as regards family and citizenship, is compelled to accept one third of it or less. "This must not be. We must not preach social equality and utterly fail to practice it; and for those receiving the higher pay to try and satisfy the demands of the lower-paid man for better conditions by telling him it will be put right under Socialism, is on a par with the parson pretending to assuage the sufferings of the poverty-stricken by saying, 'It will be better in the next world.' It must be put right in _this_ world, and we must see to it _now_." Unions composed exclusively of skilled workers, as many of the present ones, operate against the interests of the less skilled--often without actually intending to do so. Mr. Mitchell, for instance, concedes that the trade unions bring about "the elimination of men who are below a certain fixed standard of efficiency." This argument will appeal strongly to employers and believers in the survival of the fittest doctrine. But it will scarcely appeal to the numerous unskilled workers eliminated, or the still more numerous workers whose employment is thus lessened at every slack season. Mr. Edmond Kelly shows how the principle acts--"Where there is a minimum wage of $4 a day the workman can no longer choose to do only $3 worth of work and be paid accordingly, but he must earn $4 or else cease from work, at least in that particular trade, locality, or establishment."[254] The result is that the highest skilled workmen obtain steady employment through the union, while the less skilled are penalized by underemployment. The unions have equalized daily wages, but the employer has replied by making employment and therefore annual wages all the more unequal, and many of the workers may have lost more than they gained. Whereas if each man could secure an equal share of work, he might be paid according to his efficiency and yet be far better off than now. But the only way to secure an equal amount of work for all is through a union where all have an equal voice and where the union is strong enough to have a say as to who is to be employed. It is this tendency either automatically or intentionally actually to injure unskilled labor, that has led men like Mann and Debs and Haywood to their severe criticism of the present policies of the unions, and even affords some ground for Tolstoi's classification of well-paid artisans, electricians, and mechanics among the exploiters of unskilled labor. In the days of serfdom, the great writer said, "Only one class were slave owners; all classes, except the most numerous one--consisting of peasants who have too little land, laborers, and workingmen--are slave-owners now." The master class, Tolstoi says, to-day includes, not only "nobles, merchants, officials, manufacturers, professors, teachers, authors, musicians, painters, rich peasants, and the rich men's servants," but also "well-paid artisans, electricians, mechanics," etc. Mr. Mann thus defines the attitude of this new unionism to the old:-- "It is well known that in Britain, as elsewhere, there is only a minority of the workers organized; of the ten millions of men eligible for industrial organization only one fourth are members of trade unions; naturally these are, in the main, the skilled workers, who have associated together with a view to maintaining for themselves the advantage accruing to skilled workers, when definite restrictions are placed upon the numbers able to enter and remain in the trades. "We have had experience enough to know that the difficulties of maintaining a ring fence around an occupation, which secures to those inside the fence special advantages, are rapidly increasing, and in a growing number of instances, the fence has been entirely broken down by changes in the methods of production. We know, further, that ... the majority of trade unionists still remain _sectionally isolated_, powerless to act except in single' sectional bodies, and incapable of approaching each other and merging and amalgamating forces for common action. _This it is that is responsible for the modern practice of entering into lengthy agreements between employers and workers. Sectional trade unions being incapable of offensive action, and gradually giving way before the persistent power of the better organized capitalist class, they fall back upon agreements for periods of from two to five years, during which time they undertake that no demands shall be made._" (My italics.) The industrialists, therefore, advocate the termination of all wage agreements simultaneously and at short intervals or even at will (like tenancies at will, or call loans). They claim that employers are practically free to terminate _existing agreements_ whenever they please, as they can always find grounds for dismissing individuals or for temporarily shutting down their works or for otherwise discriminating against active unionists or varying the terms of a contract before its expiration. But it is in America that the policy of no agreements, or agreements at will is most advanced. In Great Britain it is thought that agreements for one year and all ending on the same day may lead to the same results. If there is a central organization with power to call strikes on the part of any combination of unions, and the large majority of the workers are organized, it is held that the new unionism will soon prove irresistible, even if agreements in this form are retained. The recent strikes have not only been stimulated by this gospel and led by its chief representatives, Tom Mann, Ben Tillett, and others, but from the very first they have been an actual application of the new idea and have marked a long step towards the complete reorganization of the British unions. They were started with the seamen's strike in June, when the dockers in many places struck in sympathy, at the same time adding demands of their own. When the seamen won their strike, they refused to go back to work at several points, against the advice of their conservative officials, until the dockers received what they were striking for. With the dockers were involved teamsters, and these from the first had agreed to support one another, for _they were both connected with Mr. Mann's "National Transport Workers' Federation_." And the railway strike was largely due to the fact that the railway unions decided at least _to coöperate_ with this federation. The dockers had remained on strike at Liverpool in sympathy with the railway porters who had struck in the first instance to aid the dockers, and at the first strike conference of the railway union officials, forty-one being present, it was voted unanimously "that the union was determined not to settle the dispute with the companies unless the lockout imposed upon their co-workers because of their support of the railroad men at Liverpool and elsewhere is removed and all the men reinstated." There can be little doubt that the railway strike would neither have taken place at the critical time it did, nor have gone as far as it went, except for this new and concerted action which embraced even the least skilled and least organized classes of labor. Accompanying this movement toward common action, "solidarity" of labor, and more and more general strikes, was the closely related reaction against existing agreements--on the ground that they cripple the unions' power of effective industrial warfare. For several years there had been a simultaneous movement on the part of the "State Socialist" government towards compulsory arbitration, and among the unions against any interference on the part of a government over which they have little or no control--the railway strike being directed, according to the unionists, as much against the government as against the railways. For many years the government, represented by Mr. Lloyd George or Mr. Winston Churchill, had acted as arbitrator in every great industrial conflict, and had secured many minor concessions for the unions. As long as no critical conflict occurred that might materially weaken either the government or the capitalist or employing classes as a whole, this policy worked well. It was only by a railway strike, or perhaps by a seamen's or miners' strike that it could be put to a real test. By the settlement of the threatened railway strike of 1907 the employees had gained very little, and had _voluntarily_ left the final power to decide disputes in the hands of government arbitrators. A conservative Labourite, Mr. J. R. MacDonald, writing late in 1910, said:-- "We held at the time that the agreement which Mr. Bell accepted on behalf of the Railway Servants would not work. It was a surrender. The railway directors were consulted for days; they were allowed to alter the terms of agreement at their own sweet will, and when they agreed, the men's representatives were asked to go to the Board of Trade and were told that they could not alter a comma, could not sleep over the proposal, could not confer with any one about it, had to accept it there and then. In a moment of weakness they accepted. An agreement come to in such a way was not likely to be of any use to the men."[255] Nevertheless, this extremely important settlement was accepted by the union. Mr. Churchill did not know how to restrain his enthusiasm for unions that were so good as to fall in so obediently with his political plans. "They are not mere visionaries or dreamers," says Churchill, "weaving airy Utopias out of tobacco smoke. They are not political adventurers who are eager to remodel the world by rule of thumb, who are proposing to make the infinite complexities of scientific civilization and the multitudinous phenomena of great cities conform to a few barbarous formulas which any moderately intelligent parrot could repeat in a fortnight. The fortunes of trade unions are interwoven with the industries they serve. The more highly organized trade unions are, the more clearly they recognize their responsibilities."[256] By 1911 the whole situation was completely reversed. Over less important bodies of capitalists and employers than the railways, the government had power and a will to exercise its power. The railways, however, are practically a function of government--absolutely indispensable if it is to retain its other powers _undiminished_. It was for this reason that little if any governmental force was used against them, and the agreement of 1907 came to be of even less value to the men than agreements made in other industries. When the chorus of union complaints continued to swell, and the men asked the government to bring pressure on the railways, at least to meet their committee, it acknowledged itself either unable or unwilling to take any effective action unless to renew the offer to appoint another royal commission, essentially of the same character as that of 1907 except that it should be smaller and should act more speedily. This still meant that the third member of the board was to be appointed by a government, in which experience had taught the workers they could have no confidence--_at least in its dealings with the powerful railways_. In view of this inherent weakness of the government, or its hostility to the new and aggressive unionism, or perhaps a combination of both, the unions had no recourse other than a direct agreement or a strike. But the refusal of the railways to meet the men left no alternative other than the strike, and at the same time showed that they did not much fear that the unions could strike with success. It was no longer a question of the justice or injustice, truth or untruth, of the unions' claims. The railways, in a perfectly practical and businesslike spirit, questioned the power of the unions, by means of a strike, to cause them sufficient damage to make it profitable even to meet their representatives--without the presence of a government representative, who, they had learned by experience, would in all probability take a position with which they would be satisfied. Mr. Asquith's offer, then, to submit the "correctness" of the unions' statements and the "soundness" of their contentions to a tribunal, was entirely beside the point. The representatives of the railways were sure to give such a tribunal to understand, however diplomatically and insidiously, that the unions were without that power, which alone, in the minds of "practical" men, can justify any considerable demand, such as the settlement of all questions through the representatives of the men (the recognition of the union). Doubtless the railways had refused to meet the union representatives until they felt assured that the government's position would on the whole be satisfactory to them. The government's real attitude was made plain when, after the refusal of the unions practically to leave their whole livelihood and future in its hands, as in 1907, it used this as a pretext for taking sides against them--not by prohibiting the strike, but by limiting more and more narrowly the scope it was to be allowed to take. The government loudly protested its impartiality, and gave very powerful and plausible arguments for interference. But the laborers feel that the right not to work is as essential as life itself, and all that distinguishes them essentially from slaves, and that no argument whatever is valid against it. Let us look at a few of the government statements:-- The government, said the Premier, was perfectly impartial in regard to the merits of the various points of dispute. The government had regard exclusively for _the interests of the public_, and having regard for those interests they could not allow the paralysis of the railway systems throughout the country, and would have to take the necessary steps to prevent such paralysis. The representatives of the unions replied by a public statement, in which they declared that this was an "unwarrantable threat" and an attempt to put the responsibility for the suspension of work on the unions:-- "We consider the statement made in behalf of his Majesty's government, _an unwarrantable threat_ uttered against the railroad workers who for years have made repeated applications to the Board of Trade and also to Parliament to consider the advisability of amending the conciliation board scheme of 1907.... And further it shows a failure of the Board of Trade to amend its own scheme, and also of the railroad companies to give an impartial and fair interpretation of such schemes.... And inasmuch as this joint meeting has already urged the employers to meet us with a view to discussing the whole position and which, if agreed to by them, would in our opinion have settled the matter, _we therefore refuse to accept the responsibility the government has attempted to throw upon us_, and further respectfully but firmly ask his Majesty's government whether the responsibility of the railroad companies is in any degree less than that of other employers of labor." In other words, there is and can be no law compelling men to labor, and no matter what the consequences of their refusal to work, it is a matter that concerns the workers themselves more than all other persons. Mr. Winston Churchill made a more detailed statement. He said that "the government was taking all necessary steps to make sure that the _food supply as well as fuel and other essentials_ should not be interrupted on the railways or at the ports." "All services vital to the community should be maintained, and the government would see to that, not because they were on the side either of the employers or the workmen, but because they were bound to protect the public from the danger that a general arrest of industry would entail." He continued:-- "The means whereby the people of this land live are highly artificial, and a serious breakdown would lead to starvation among a great number of poorer people. Not the well-to-do would suffer, but the poor of the great cities and those dependent upon them, who would be quite helpless if the machinery by which they are fed--_on which they are dependent for wages_--was thrown out of gear. "The government believes that the arrangements made for working the lines of communication, and for the maintenance of order, will prove effective; but, if not, other measures of even larger scope will be taken promptly. It must be clearly understood that there is no escape from these facts, and, as they affect the supply of food for the people, and _the safety of the country, they are far more important than anything else_." To this the railway workers answered that it is to protect their own food that they strike, and that food is as important to them as to others, that practically all those who are dependent on wages are willing to undergo the last degree of suffering to preserve the right to strike, that the means of livelihood of this majority are no whit less important than the "safety" of the rest of the country. Moreover, if the government is allowed to use military or other means to aid the railways to transport food, fuel, and other things, more or less essential, it prevents that very "paralysis" which is the necessary object of every strike. Industrial warfare of this critical kind must indeed be costly to the whole community, often endangering health and even life itself, but the workers are almost unanimous in believing that a few days or weeks of this, repeated only after years of interval, costs far less in life and health than the low wages paid to labor year after year and generation after generation. _They demand the right to strike unhampered by any government in which capitalistic or other than wage-earning classes predominate._ Only when the government falls into the hands of a group of wholly non-capitalist classes--of which wage earners form the majority--will they expect it to grant such rights and conditions as are sufficient to compensate them for parting with any element of the right to strike. The great British strike, then, had a double significance. It showed the tremendously increased strength of labor when every class of workers is organized and all are united together, and it showed an increasing unwillingness to allow separate agreements to stand in the way of general strikes. The strength of the strikers in the British upheaval of 1911, however, has been grossly exaggerated on both sides. There is no doubt that the aggressive action came from the masses of the workers, as their leaders held them back in nearly every instance. There is no question that the various unions coöperated more than usual, that vast masses of the unskilled were for the first time organized, and that these features won the strikes. The advance was remarkable--but we can only measure the level reached if we realize the point from which the start was made. As a matter of fact, the unskilled labor of Great Britain until 1911 was probably worse paid and less organized than that of any great manufacturing country--and the advance made by no means brings it to the level of the United States. Since the great dock strike of 1886, led by John Burns and Tom Mann, unskilled labor has tried in vain to organize effectively unions like those of the seamen and railway servants, the majority of whose members were neither of the least skilled nor of the most skilled classes, had an uphill fight, and were only able to organize a part of the workers. Five dollars a week was considered such a high and satisfactory wage by the wholly unskilled (dockers, etc.) that it was often made the basis of their demands. The Board of Trade Report shows that 400,000 railwaymen, including the most skilled, had from 1899 to 1909 an average weekly wage varying from $6.35 to $6.60 per week. The railway union found that of a quarter of a million men 39 per cent got less than $5 a week, and 89 per cent less than $7.50. Seamen at Liverpool received from $20 to $32.50 a month. If then the Liverpool sailors received an increase of $2.50 a month, while the wages of other strikers were raised on the average about 20 per cent, what must we conclude? Undoubtedly the gain was worth all the labor and sacrifice it cost. But it must be remembered, first, that these wages are still markedly inferior to those of this country in spite of its hordes of foreign labor; and second, that the increase is little if any above the rise in the cost of living in recent years, and will undoubtedly soon be overtaken by a further rise. The great steamship lines increased their rates on account of the strike almost the same week that it was concluded, and the railway companies gave in only when the government consented that they should raise their rates. But the larger part of the consumers are workingmen, and their cost of living is thus rising more rapidly than ever _on account of the strikes_. Finally, the unions of the unskilled are as a rule not yet recognized by their employers, while the railway union is probably as completely at the mercy of the government as ever. In a word, _the point reached_ is by no means very advanced; on the other hand, _the material gain made_ in view of the former backwardness of the railwaymen, seamen, and dockers is highly important for England, while the methods employed, the movement having originated from below, and having been sustained against conservative leaders (only a few radicals like Tom Mann and Ben Tillett being trusted), is of world-wide significance. The unions as well as their common organizations, the Trade Union Congress, the Labour Party, and the General Federation of Trade Unions are drawing closer together, while the Socialists and revolutionary unionists are everywhere taking the lead--as evidenced, for example, by the election of the most radical Socialist member of Parliament, Mr. Will Thorne, to be President of the 1912 Trade Union Congress. The success of the new movement as against the older Labour Party and trade union tactics may also be seen from the disturbed state of mind of the older leaders. Take, for example, the attack of the Chairman of the Labour Party, Mr. J. R. MacDonald:-- "The new revolution which Syndicalism and its advocates of the Industrial Workers of the World contemplate has avoided none of the errors or the pitfalls of the old, but it has added to them a whole series of its own. It has never considered the problems which it has to meet. It is, as expressed in the _Outlook_ of this month, a mere escapade of the nursery mind. It is the product of the creative intelligence of the man who is impatient because it takes the earth twenty-four hours to wheel around the sun (sic).... The hospitality which the Socialist movement has offered so generously to all kinds of cranks and scoundrels because they professed to be in revolt against the existing order has already done our movement much harm. Let it not add Syndicalism to the already too numerous vipers which, in the kindness of its heart, it is warming on its hearthstones."[257] [258] The new revolutionary unionism takes different forms in Great Britain, France, and America. In France it has expressed itself through agitation for the general strike and against the army, the only thing that a general strike movement has to fear. The agitation has completely captured the national federation of unions, has a well-developed literature, a daily paper (_La Bataille Syndicaliste_--The Union Battle,--established in 1911), and has put its principles into effect in many ways, especially by more numerous and widespread strikes and by attacks on military discipline. But there has been no strike so nearly general as the recent British one, and both the efforts in this direction and those directed against the army have a future rather than a present importance and will be considered in succeeding chapters (Part III, Chapters VI and VII). In America the new movement first appeared several years ago in the very radical proposal indorsed at the time by Debs, Haywood, and many prominent Socialists, to replace the older unions by a new set built on entirely different principles, including organizations of the least skilled, and the solid union of all unions for fighting purposes. This movement took concrete form in a new organization, the Industrial Workers of the World, which was launched with some promise, but soon divided into factions and was abandoned by Debs and others of its organizers. It has grown in strength in some localities, having conducted the remarkable struggles at McKees Rocks (Pa.) and Lawrence (Mass.), but is not at present a national factor--which is in part due, perhaps, to the fact that the older unions are tending, though gradually, towards somewhat similar principles. Not only is Socialism spreading rapidly in all the unions, but along with it is spreading this new unionism. For many years the Western Federation of Miners, famous as the central figure in all the labor wars in the Rocky Mountain States, was the most powerful union in this country that was representative both of revolutionary Socialism and of revolutionary unionism. But it was not a part of the American Federation of Labor. When it became closely united with the Coal Miners, and the latter union forced its admission into the American Federation of Labor (in 1911), it at once began a campaign for its principles inside this organization. It now stands for two proposals, the first of which would solidly unite all the unions, and the second of which would cut all bonds between labor and capital. Neither is likely to be adopted this year, but both seem sure of a growing popularity and will in all probability result in some radical and effective action within a very few years. In its Convention of July, 1911, the Western Federation of Miners decided to demand of the Federation of Labor the free exchange of membership cards among all its constituent unions. Thus the unions would preserve their autonomy, but every member would be free, when he changed his employer, to pass from one to the other without cost. The result would be that quarrels between the unions over members would lessen automatically, and also admission fees, dues, and benefits would tend towards a level. Thus all the things that keep the unions apart and prevent common action against the employer would be gradually removed, and the tendency of certain unions to ignore the interests of others reduced to a minimum. The plan is practical, because it has already been in successful operation for many years in France. Another new policy--which should be regarded as a supplementary means for bringing about the same result--would be to so strengthen and democratize the general Federation as to allow great power to be placed in the hands of the executive, and at the same time subject it to the direct control of the combined rank and file of all the unions. If, for example, national Federation officials were elected, instructed, and recalled by a vote of all the unionists in the country, the latter would probably be willing to place in the hands of such an executive power to call out the unions in strike in such combinations as would make the resistance of employers most difficult, and power to control national strike funds collected from all the unions for these contests. Unions with a specially strong strategic situation in industry and a favored situation in the Federation are not yet ready to forego their privileges for this form of direct democracy, but the tendency is in this direction. (Since these lines were first written the Federation has taken steps towards the adoption of this plan of direct election of its officials by national referendum.) Indeed, when the Western Miners' second proposal, the refusal to sign agreements for any fixed period, is adopted, this simultaneous centralization and democratization of the Federation may proceed apace. As long as the various unions are bound to the employers by an entirely separate and independent agreement terminable at different dates, it is impossible to arrange strikes in common, especially when the more fortunate unions adopt an entirely different plan of organization and an entirely different policy from the rest. The Western Miners now propose that all agreements be done away with, a practice they had followed long and successfully themselves--with the single tacit exception of the employees of the Smelter Trust (Guggenheim's). This exception they have now done away with. Their fundamental idea is that as long as the capitalist reserves his right to close down his works whenever he believes his interests or those of capital require it, every union should reserve its right to stop work at any moment when the interests of the union or of labor require it. Temporary arrangements are entered into which are binding as to all other matters except the cessation of work. That this cessation would not occur in any well-organized union over trifles goes without saying--strikes are tremendously costly to labor. The agreement binds in a way perfectly familiar to the business world in the call loan or the tenancy at will. President Moyer of the Western Federation (one of those Mr. Roosevelt called an "undesirable citizen" at the time when he was on trial in Idaho, accused of being an accomplice in the murder of Governor Steunenburg) explained that his union knew that agreements might bring certain momentary advantages which it would otherwise lose, that it had often been in a position to win higher wages through an agreement, and in three cases even to gain a seven-hour day. But by such action, he declared the union would have surrendered its freedom. It would have been tied hand and foot, whereas now it was free to fight whenever it wanted to. If working people want to be united and effective, he concluded, they must have the fullest freedom of action. This would always pay in the end. In view of the great advance in the organization and fighting spirit of labor secured by this new kind of industrial warfare, some revolutionary unionists even expect it to do more to bring about Socialism than the Socialist parties themselves. Indeed, a few have gone so far as to regard these parties as almost superfluous. Many of the new revolutionary unionists, though Socialists by conviction, attach so little importance to political action that they have formed no connection with the Socialist parties, and do not propose to do so. Others feel the necessity of some political support, and contend that any kind of an exclusively labor union party, even if it represents anti-revolutionary unions like most of those of the Federation of Labor, would serve this purpose better than the Socialist Party, which belongs less exclusively to the unionists. An American revolutionary unionist and Socialist, the late Louis Duchez, like many of his school, not only placed his faith chiefly in the unskilled workers, either excluding the skilled manual laborers and the brain workers, or relegating them to a secondary position, but wanted the new organizations to rely almost entirely on their economic efforts and entirely to subordinate political action. The hours of labor are to be reduced, child labor is to be abolished, and everything is to be done that will tend to diminish competition between one workingman and another, he argued, with the idea of securing early control of the labor market. Through labor's restriction of output, production is to be cut down and the unemployed are to be absorbed. Thus, he declared, "_a partial expropriation of capital is taking place_" and "_this constructive program is followed until the workers get all they produce_."[259] Here is an invaluable insight into the underlying standpoint of some of these anti-political "syndicalists," to use a term that has come to us from France. Nothing could possibly be more alien to the whole spirit of revolutionary Socialism than these conclusions. The very reason for the existence of Socialism is that Socialists believe that the unions cannot control the labor market in present society. The Socialists' chief hope, moreover, is that economic evolution will make possible and almost inevitable the transformation of a capitalist into a Socialist society; it is then to their interest not to retard the development of industry by the restriction of output, but to advance it. Indeed, Mr. Duchez's philosophy is not that of Socialist labor unionism, but of anarchist labor unionism, and there have been strong tendencies in many countries, not only in France and Italy, but also in the United States, especially among the more conservative unions, to be guided by such a policy. It is the essence of Mr. Gompers's program, as I have shown, to claim that "a partial expropriation of capital" is taking place through the unions, and that by this means, _without any government action_, and _without any revolutionary general strike_ the workers will gradually "get all they produce." According to the Socialist view, such a gradual expropriation can only _begin_ after a _political and economic_ revolution, or when, on its near approach, capitalists prefer to make vital concessions rather than to engage in such a conflict. The leading Socialist monthly in America, the _International Socialist Review_, which has indorsed the new unionism, has even found it necessary recently to remind its readers that the Socialist Party does after all play a certain rôle and a more or less important one, in the revolutionary movement. "Representative revolutionary unionists, like Lagardelle of France and Tom Mann of Australia," said the _Review_, "point out the immense value of a political party _as an auxiliary_ to the unions. A revolutionary union without the backing of a revolutionary party will be tied up by injunctions. Its officers will be kidnapped. Its members, if they defy the courts, will be corralled in bull pens or mowed down by Gatling guns. "A revolutionary party, on the other hand, if it pins its hopes mainly to the passing of laws, tends always to degenerate into a reform party. Its 'leaders' become hungry for office and eager for votes, even if the votes must be secured by concessions to the middle class. In the pursuit of such votes it wastes its propaganda on immediate demands." The _Review_ adds, however, that a non-political menace of revolution does ten times as much for reforms as any political activity; which can only mean that in its estimation revolutionary strikes, boycotts, demonstrations, etc., are of ten times higher present value than the ballot. Mr. Tom Mann seems also to subordinate political to labor union action: "Experience in all countries shows most conclusively that industrial organization, intelligently conducted, is of much more moment than political action, for, entirely irrespective as to which school of politicians is in power, capable and courageous industrial activity forces from the politicians proportionate concessions.... Indeed, it is obvious that a growing proportion of the intelligent pioneers of economic changes are expressing more and more dissatisfaction with Parliament and all its works, and look forward to the time when Parliaments, as we know them, will be superseded by the people managing their own affairs by means of the Initiative and the Referendum."[260] The last sentence shows that Mr. Mann had somewhat modified his aversion to politics, for the Initiative and Referendum is a political and not an economic device. His objection to politics in the form of parliamentarism (that is, trusting everything to elected persons, or _representatives_) as distinguished from direct democracy, would probably meet the views of the majority of Socialists everywhere (except in Great Britain). A later declaration of Mr. Mann after his return from Australia to England shows that he now occupies the same ground as Debs and Haywood in America--favoring a revolutionary party as well as revolutionary unions:-- "The present-day degradation of so large a percentage of the workers is directly due to their economic enslavement; and it is economic freedom that is demanded. "Now Parliamentary action is at all times useful, in proportion as it makes for economic emancipation of the workers. But Socialists and Labour men in Parliament can only do effective work there in proportion to the intelligence and economic organization of the rank and file.... "Certainly nothing very striking in the way of constructive work could reasonably be expected from the minorities of the Socialists and Labour men hitherto elected. But the most moderate and fair-minded are compelled to declare that, not in one country but in all, a proportion of those comrades who, prior to being returned, were unquestionably revolutionary, are no longer so after a few years in Parliament. They are revolutionary neither in their attitude towards existing society nor in respect of present-day institutions. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that many seem to have constituted themselves apologists for existing society, showing a degree of studied respect for bourgeois conditions, and a toleration of bourgeois methods, that destroys the probability of their doing any real work of a revolutionary character. "I shall not here attempt to juggle with the quibble of 'Revolution or Evolution,'--or to meet the contention of some of those under consideration that it is not Revolution that is wanted. 'You cannot change the world and yet not change the world.' _Revolution is the means of, not the alternative to, Evolution._ I simply state that a working-class movement that is not revolutionary in character, is not of the slightest use to the working class."[261] If Mr. Mann later resigned from the British Social Democratic Party, this was in part due to the special conditions in Great Britain, as he said at the time, and partly to his Australian experience of the demoralizing effects of office seeking on the Labour Party there. Mann stands with Hervé in the French Party and Debs and Haywood in the American. The reasons given for his withdrawal from the British Party embody the universal complaint of revolutionary unionists against what is everywhere a strong tendency of Socialist parties to become demoralized like other political organizations. Mr. Mann, in his letter of resignation, said:-- "After the most careful reflection I am driven to the belief that the real reason why the trade unionist movement of this country is in such a deplorable state of inefficiency is to be found in the fictitious importance which the workers have been encouraged to attach to parliamentary action. "I find nearly all the serious-minded young men in the Labour and Socialist movement have their minds centered upon obtaining some position in public life, such as local, municipal, or county councilorship, or filling some governmental office, or aspiring to become a member of Parliament. "I am driven to the belief that this is entirely wrong, and that economic liberty will never be realized by such means. So I declare in favor of Direct Industrial Organization, not as _a_ means but as _the_ means whereby the workers can ultimately overthrow the capitalist system and become the actual controllers of their own industrial and social destiny." There is little disagreement among Socialists that "Direct Industrial Organization" is likely to prove the most important means by which "the workers can ultimately overthrow the capitalist system." This, the "industrial unionism" of Debs and Haywood and Mann, is to be sharply distinguished from French "syndicalism" which undermines all Socialist political action and all revolutionary economic action as well, by teaching that even to-day by direct industrial organization--without a political program or political support, and without a revolution--"a partial expropriation of capital is taking place." The advocates of revolutionary labor unionism in America for the most part are not allowing the new idea to draw away their energies from the Socialist Party; it merely serves to emphasize their hostility to the present unaggressive policy of the Executive American Federation of Labor and some of the unions that compose it. Mr. Haywood (another of Mr. Roosevelt's "undesirable citizens") urges the working class to "become so organized on the economic field that they can take and hold the industries in which they are employed." This view might seem to obviate the need of a political party, but Mr. Haywood does not regard it in that light. He says:-- "There is justification for political action, and that is, to control the forces of the capitalists that they use against us; to be in a position to control the power of government so as to make the work of the army ineffective.... That is the reason that you want the power of government. That is the reason that you should fully understand the power of the ballot. "Now, there isn't any one, Socialist, S.L.P., Industrial Worker, or any other working man or woman, no matter what society you belong to, but what believes in the ballot. There are those--and I am one of them--who refuse to have the ballot interpreted for them. I know or think I know the power of it, and I know that the industrial organization, as I have stated in the beginning, is its broadest interpretation. I know, too, that when the workers are brought together in a great organization they are not going to cease to vote. That is when the workers will _begin_ to vote, to vote for directors to operate the industries in which they are all employed." In the recent pamphlet, "Industrial Socialism," Mr. Haywood and Mr. Frank Bonn develop the new unionism at greater length. Their conclusions as to politics are directed, not against the Socialist Party, but against its non-revolutionary elements:-- "The Socialist Party stands not merely for the POLITICAL supremacy of labor. It stands for the INDUSTRIAL supremacy of labor. Its purpose is not to secure old age pensions and free meals for school children. Its mission is to help overthrow capitalism and establish Socialism. "The great purpose of the Socialist Party is to seize the powers of government and thus prevent them from being used by the capitalists against the workers. With Socialists in political offices the workers can strike and not be shot. They can picket shops and not be arrested and imprisoned.... To win the demands made on the industrial field it is absolutely necessary to control the government, as experience shows strikes to have been lost through the interference of courts and militia. The same functions of government, controlled by a class conscious working class, will be used to inspire confidence and compel the wheels of industry to move in spite of the devices and stumblingblocks of the capitalists.... "Socialist government will concern itself entirely with the shop. Socialism can demand nothing of the individual outside the shop.... It has no concern with the numberless social reforms which the capitalists are now preaching in order to save their miserable profit system. "Old age pensions are not Socialism. The workers had much better fight for higher wages and shorter hours. Old age pensions under the present government are either charity doled out to paupers, or bribes given to voters by politicians. Self-respecting workers despise such means of support. Free meals or cent meals for poverty-stricken school children are not Socialism. Industrial freedom will enable parents to give their children solid food at home. Free food to the workers cuts wages and kills the fighting spirit." The American "syndicalists" are not opposed to political action, but they want to use it _exclusively_ for the purposes of industrial democracy. While Messrs. Haywood and Bohn by no means take an anarchistic position, they show no enthusiasm for the capitalist-collectivist proposals that _present governments_ should take control of industry. They are not hostile to all government, but they think that democracy applied directly to industry would be all the government required:-- "In the shop there must be government. In the school there must be government. In the conduct of the great public services there must be government. We have shown that Socialism will make government democratic throughout. The basis of this freedom will be the freedom of the individual to develop his powers. People will be educated in freedom. They will work in freedom. They will live in freedom.... "Socialism will establish democracy in the shop. Democracy in the shop will free the working class. The working class, through securing freedom for itself, will liberate the race." Even the American "syndicalists," however, attach more importance to economic than to political action. Hitherto revolutionary Socialists have agreed that the only constructive work possible _under capitalism_ was that of education and organization. The "syndicalists" also agree that nothing peculiarly socialistic can be done to-day by _political_ action, but they are reformists as to the immediate possibilities of _economic_ action. Here they believe revolutionary principles can be applied even under capitalism. Even the conservative and purely businesslike effort to secure a little more wages by organized action, they believe, can be converted here and now into a class struggle of working class _vs._ capitalists. What is needed is only organization of all the unions and a revolutionary policy. With the possibilities of a revolutionary union policy when capitalism has largely exhausted its program of political reforms and economic betterment and when Socialism has become the political Opposition, I deal in following chapters. But syndicalists, even in America, say revolutionary tactics can be applied now--Mr. Haywood, for instance, feels that the only thing necessary for a successful revolutionary and Socialistic general strike in France or America to-day, is sufficient economic organization. Mr. Debs admits the need of revolutionary tactics as well as revolutionary principles and even says: "We could better succeed with reactionary principles and revolutionary tactics than with revolutionary principles and reactionary tactics." He admits also that Socialists and revolutionary unionists are inspired with an entirely new attitude towards society and government and indorses as _entirely sound_ certain expressions from Haywood and Bohn's pamphlet which had been violently attacked by reformist Socialists and conservative unionists. Mr. Debs agrees with the former writers in their definition of the attitude of the Socialist revolutionist's attitude towards property: "He retains absolutely no respect for the property 'rights' of the profit takers. He will use any weapon which will win his fight. He knows that the present laws of property are made by and for the capitalists. Therefore he does not hesitate to break them." But he does not agree that this new spirit offers any positive contribution to Socialist tactics at the present time. Just as Hervé has recently admitted that the superior political and economic organization of the Germans were more important than all the "sabotage" (violence) and "direct action" of the French though he still favors the latter policies, so the foremost American revolutionary opposes "direct action" and "sabotage" altogether under present conditions. Both deny that revolutionary economic action under capitalism is any more promising than revolutionary political action. Even Hervé defends his more or less friendly attitude to "direct action" wholly on the ground that it is good _practice_ for revolution, not on Lagardelle's syndicalist ground that it means the beginning of revolution itself (see below). By much of their language Haywood and several industrial unionists of this country would seem to class themselves rather with Lagardelle and Labriola (see below) than with Hervé, Debs, and Mann. Haywood, for example, has said that no Socialist can be a law-abiding citizen. Haywood's very effective and law-abiding leadership in strikes at Lawrence (1912) and elsewhere would suggest that he meant that Socialists cannot be law-abiding by principle and under all circumstances. But this statement as it was made, together with many others, justifies the above classification. Debs, on the contrary, claims that the American workers are law-abiding and must remain so, on the whole, until the time of the revolution approaches. "As a revolutionist," he writes, "I can have no respect for capitalist property laws, nor the least scruple about violating them," but Debs does not believe there can be any occasion to put this principle into effect until the workers have been politically and economically organized and educated, and then only if they are opposed by violence (see the _International Socialist Review_, February, 1912). The French and Italian advocates of revolutionary unionism also assign to the party a very secondary part, though they are by no means, like the anarchists, opposed to all political action. They do not as a rule oppose the Socialist parties, but they protest against the view that Socialist activities should be chiefly political. Their best-known spokesman in Italy, Arturo Labriola, one of the most brilliant orators in the country, and a professor in the University of Naples, writes:-- "The Social Democracy will prove to have been the last capitalistic party to which the defense of capitalistic society will have been intrusted. The syndicalists [revolutionary unionists] ought to get that firmly into their heads and draw conclusions from it in their _necessary_ relations with the official Socialist Party. _The latter ought to resign itself to being no more than a simple party of the legal demands of the proletariat [i.e. the unions,] on the basis of existing society, and not an anti-capitalist party._"[262] This is strong language and brings up some large questions. Far from being displeased with the moderate and non-revolutionary character of the Socialist Party, Labriola, himself a revolutionist, is so indifferent to the party as a direct means to revolution, as to hope that it will drop its revolutionary claims altogether and become a humble and modest but more useful tool of the unions. He even admitted in conversation with the writer that, attaching no value to political advance as such, he was not even anxious at this time that the illiterate South Italians should be given a vote, since they would long remain under the tutelage of the Catholic Church. One of the founders of the present French movement, its earliest and chief theorist, Pelloutier, who has many followers among the present officials of the French Federation of Labor, went even further, denying to the government, and therefore to all political parties, any vital function whatever. To Pelloutier the State is built exclusively upon "superfluous and obnoxious political interests." The unions are expected to work towards a Socialist society without much, if any, political support. They are to use non-political means: "The general strike as a purely economic means that _excludes the coöperation_ of parliamentary Socialists and demands only labor union activity would necessarily suit the labor union groups."[263] The leading "syndicalist" writer to-day, Hubert Lagardelle, feels not only that a Socialist Party is not likely to bring about a Socialist society, but that any steps that it might try to take in this direction to-day would necessarily be along the wrong lines, since it would establish reforms by law rather than as a natural upgrowth out of economic conditions and the activities of labor unions, with the result that such reforms would necessarily go no farther than "State Socialism."[264] Lagardelle speaks of the "State Socialistic" reform tendency as synonymous with "modern democracy." Because it supposes that there are "general problems common to all classes," says Lagardelle, democracy refuses to take into account the real difference between men, which is that they are divided into economic classes. Here we see the central principle of Socialism exaggerated to an absurdity. Few Socialists, even the most revolutionary, would deny that there are some problems "common to all classes." Indeed, the existence and importance of such problems is the very reason why "State Socialism," of benefit to the masses, but still more to the interest of the capitalists, is being so easily and rapidly introduced. Lagardelle would be right, from the Socialist standpoint, if he demanded that it should oppose mere political democracy, or "State Socialism" in proportion as these forces have succeeded in reorganizing the capitalist State--or rather after they have been assimilated by it. But to obstruct their present work is merely to stand against the normal and necessary course of economic and political evolution, as recognized by the Socialists themselves, a similar mistake to that made by the Populists and their successors, who think they can prevent normal economic evolution by dissolving the new industrial combinations and returning to competition. Just as Socialists cannot oppose the formation of trusts under normal circumstances, neither can they oppose the extension of the modern State into the field of industry or democratic reform, even though the result is _temporarily_ to strengthen capitalism and to decrease the economic and political power of the working people. One of the fundamental differences between the Socialist and other political philosophies is that it recognizes ceaseless political evolution and acts accordingly. It teaches that we shall probably pass on to social democracy through a period of monopoly rule, "State Socialism," and political reforms that in themselves promise no relative advance, economic or political, to the working class. In a recent congress of the French Party, Jaurès protested against a statement of Lagardelle's that Socialism was opposed to democracy. "Democracy," Lagardelle answered, "corresponds to an historical movement which has come to an end; syndicalism is an anti-democratic movement to the extent that it is post-democratic. Syndicalism comes after democracy; it perfects the life which democracy was powerless to organize." It is difficult to understand why Lagardelle persists in saying that a movement which thus supplements democracy, which does what democracy was claiming to do, and which is expected to supersede it, should on this account be considered as "anti-democratic." Socialism fights the "State Socialists" and opposes those whose democracy is merely political, but it is attacking not their democracy or their "State Socialism," but their capitalism. "Political society," says Lagardelle, "being the organization of the coercive power of the State, that is to say, of authority and the hierarchy, corresponds to an economic régime which has authority and the hierarchy as its base."[265] This proposition (the truth of which all Socialists would recognize in so far as it applies to political society in its present form) seems sufficient to Lagardelle to justify his conclusion that we can no more expect Socialist results through the State, than we could by association with capitalism. He does not agree with the Socialist majority that, while capitalism embodies a ruling class whose services may be dispensed with, the State is rather a machine or a system which corresponds not so much to capitalism, as to the system and machinery of industry which capitalism controls. Another and closely related idea of the syndicalists is that all political parties, as well as governments, necessarily become the tools of their leaders, that they always become "machines," bureaucratically organized like governments. Lagardelle adopts Rousseau's view that the essence of representative government (all existing governments that are not autocratic being representative) is "the inactivity of the citizen" and urges that political parties, like society in general, are divided between the governing and the governed. While there is much truth in this analysis,--this being the situation which it is sought to correct both in government and within political parties by such means as direct legislation and the recall,--Lagardelle does not seem to see that exactly the same problem exists also in the labor unions. For among the most revolutionary as among the most conservative of labor organizations the leaders tend to acquire the same relative and irresponsible power as they do in political parties. The difficulty of making democracy work inheres in all organizations. It must be met and overcome; it cannot be avoided. Lagardelle's distrust of political democracy goes even further than a mere criticism of representative government. He thinks the citizen to-day unable to judge general political questions at all,--so that in his view even direct democracy would be useless. It is for this reason, he says, that parties have it as an aim to act and to think in the citizen's place. Lagardelle's remedy is not the establishment of direct democracy in government or in parties, but the organization of the people to act together on "the concrete things of life"; that is, on questions of hours, wages, and other conditions closely associated with their daily life and in his view adapted to their understanding. He does not seem to see that such questions lead almost immediately, not only to such larger issues as are already presented by the leading political parties, but also to the still larger ones proposed by the Socialists. Others of the syndicalists' criticisms, if taken literally, would undoubtedly bring them in the end to the position occupied by non-Socialist and anti-Socialist labor unionists. Lagardelle frankly places labor union action not only above political action, which Socialists, under many circumstances, may justify, but above Socialism itself. "Even if the dreams of the future of syndicalistic Socialism should never be realized,--none of us has the secret of history,--it would suffice for me to give it my full support, to know that it is at the moment I am speaking the essential agent of civilization in the world." Here is a labor union partisanship which is certainly not equaled by the average conservative labor leader, who has the modesty to realize that there are other powerful forces making for progress aside from the movement to which he happens to belong. The syndicalists, or those who act along similar lines in other countries, have brought new life into the Socialist movement; their criticism has forced it to consider some neglected questions, and has contributed new ideas which are winning acceptance. The basis of their view is that the working people cannot win by mere numbers or intelligence, but must have a practical power to organize along radically new lines and an ability to create new social institutions independently of capitalist opposition or aid. Lagardelle writes: "There is nothing in syndicalism which can recall the dogmatism of orthodox Socialism. The latter has summed up its wisdom in certain abstract immovable formulas which it intends willy-nilly to impose on life.... Syndicalism, on the contrary, depends on the continually renewed and spontaneous creations of life itself, on the perpetual renewing of ideas, which cannot become fixed into dogmas as long as they are not detached from their trunk. We are not dealing with a body of intellectuals, with a Socialist clergy charged to think for the working class, but with the working class itself, which through its own experience is incessantly discovering new horizons, unseen perspectives, unsuspected methods,--in a word, new sources of rejuvenation."[266] Here, at least, is a valuable warning to Socialism against what its most revolutionary and enthusiastic adherents have always felt is its chief danger. The fact that lends force to Lagardelle's argument is that the average workingman has a much more important, necessary, and continuous function to fill as a member of the labor unions than as a member of the Socialist parties. It still remains a problem of the first magnitude to every Socialist party to give to its members an equally powerful daily interest in that work. On the other hand, it must be said in all fairness that the lack of active participation by the rank and file is very common in the labor unions also, a handful of men often governing and directing, sometimes even at the most critical moments. It is the boast of the syndicalists that in their plan of revolutionary unionism, practice and theory become one, that actions become revolutionary as well as words--"Men are classed," says Lagardelle, "according to their acts and not according to their labels. The revolutionary spirit comes down from heaven onto the earth, becomes flesh, manifests itself by institutions, and identifies itself with life. The daily act takes on a revolutionary value, and social transformation, if it comes some day, will only be the generalization of this act." It is true that Lagardelle's "direct action" tends towards revolution, but does it tend towards Socialism? His answer is that it does. But his answer itself indicates the tendency of syndicalism to drift back into conservative unionism and the mere demand for somewhat more wages. Socialist organizations, he says, "must necessarily be trained in _actions_ of no great revolutionary moment, since these are the only kind of _actions_ now possible, and in agitation; that is, the conversion or the wakening of the will of the working people to desire and to demand an entirely different life, which their intelligence has shown them to be possible, and which they feel they are able to obtain through their organizations."[267] (My italics.) Not all members of the French "syndicats" (labor unions) are theoretical syndicalists of the dogmatic kind, like Lagardelle. Yet even men like Guerard, recently head of the railway union, and Niel of the printers, recently secretary of the Federation of Labor, both belonging to the less radical faction, are in favor of the use of the general strike under several contingencies, and stand for a union policy directed towards the ultimate abolition of employers. But this does not mean that they believe the unions can succeed in either of these efforts if acting alone, or even if assisted in Parliament by a party which represents only the unions, acts as their tool, and therefore brings them no outside assistance. Such men, together with others more radical, like André and the Guesdists in the Federation, realize that a larger and more democratic movement is needed in connection with the unions before there is any possibility of accomplishing the great social changes at which, as Socialists, they aim. (As evidence, see the proceedings of any recent convention of the Confederation Generale de Travail.) Lagardelle, however, is a member of the Socialist Party and was recently even a candidate for the French Chamber of Deputies. Other prominent members of the Party as revolutionary as he and as enthusiastic partisans of the Confederation de Travail (Federation of Labor) are stronger in their allegiance to the Party. And there are signs that even in France syndicalism is losing its anti-political tendency. Hervé, who demanded at the beginning of 1909 that the "directors of the Socialist Party cure themselves of 'Parliamentary idiocy'" (his New Year's wish), expressed at the beginning of 1910 the wish that "certain of the dignitaries of the Federation of Labor should cure themselves of a syndicalist and laborite idiocy, a form of idiocy not less dangerous or clownish than the other." In fact, it may soon be necessary to distinguish a new school of political syndicalism, which is well represented by Paul Louis in his "Syndicalism against the State" (Le Syndicalisme contre l'État). "Syndicalism is at the bottom," says Louis, "only a powerful expression of that destructive and constructive effort which for years has been shaking the old political and social régime, and is undermining slowly the ancient system of property. It points necessarily to collectivism and communism. It represents Socialism in action, in daily and continuous action.... "Now the abolition of the State ... is the object of modern Socialism. What distinguishes this modern Socialism from Utopian Socialism which culminated towards 1848, whose best-known publicists were Cabet, Pecqueur, Louis Blanc, Vidal, is precisely that it no longer attributes to the State the power to transform, the capacity to revolutionize, the rôle of magic regeneration, which the writers in this dangerous phase of enthusiasm assigned to it. For the Utopians all the machinery of a bureaucracy could be put at the service of all the classes, fraternally reconciled in view of the coming social regeneration. For contemporary Socialists since Karl Marx ... this bureaucratic machinery, whose function is to protect the existing system and to maintain an administrative, economic, financial, political, and military guardianship must finally be disintegrated. The new society can only be born at this price. "There still exist in all countries groups of men or isolated individuals who stand for collectivism, who claim to want the complete emancipation of all workers, but who nevertheless adhere to paternalism. These are called revisionists in Germany, reformists in France, Italy, and Switzerland.... They go back, without knowing it, to those theories of enlightened despotism which flourished at the end of the eighteenth century in the courts of Vienna, St. Petersburg, Madrid and Lisbon, the ridiculous inanity of which was sufficiently well demonstrated by events.... "But these Utopians of the present moment, these champions of a limitless adaptation to circumstances, are destined to lose ground more and more, according as Syndicalism expresses better and better the independent action of the organized proletariat. "In its totality the Socialism of the world is as anti-governmental as Syndicalism, and in this is shown the identity of the two movements, for it is difficult to distinguish the field of action of the one from that of the other."[268] We see here that the central idea of syndicalism, which is undoubtedly, as Louis says, a revolutionary action against existing governments, is not on this account anti-political; the foundation of this point of view is that labor union action is bound sooner or later to evolve into syndicalism, which in its essence is an effort to put industry in the immediate control of the non-propertied working classes, without regard to the attitude taken towards this movement by governments;-- "Those who have long imagined that some kind of coördination would be brought about between old economic and social institutions and the union organizations which would then be tolerated, those who thought they could incorporate these industrial groups in the mechanism of production and political society, were guilty of the most stupefying of errors. They were ignorant both of the nature of the State and of the essence of unionism; they were attempting the squaring of the circle or perpetual motion; they had not analyzed the process of disintegration which humanity is undergoing, which, accelerated by the stream of industrialism, has given origin to hostile classes subordinated to one another, incapable of coexisting in a lasting equilibrium."[269] We see here a complete agreement with the position of the revolutionary majority among the Socialists. If syndicalism differs in any way from other tendencies in the Socialist movement, it does so through a difference of emphasis rather than a difference of kind. It undoubtedly exaggerates the possibilities of economic action, and underestimates those of political action. Louis, for example, says that the working people are the subjects of capital, but the masters of production, that they cannot live without suffering in the factory, but that society cannot live without their labor. This, of course, is only true if stated in the most unqualified form. Society is able to dispense with all labor for a short time, and with very many classes of labor for long periods. Moreover, the forcing of labor at the point of the rifle is by no means so impracticable during brief emergencies as is sometimes supposed. Syndicalism may, perhaps, be most usefully viewed as a reaction against the tendency towards "parliamentarism" or undue emphasis on political action, which has existed even among revolutionary Socialists in Germany and elsewhere (see Part II, Chapter V). Among the "revisionist" Socialists of that country a great friendliness to labor union action existed, in view of the comparative conservatism of the unions. For this same reason the revolutionaries became rather cold, though never hostile, towards this form of action, and concentrated their attention on politics. In a word, syndicalism is only to be understood in the light of the criticisms of revolutionary Socialism as presented by Kautsky, just as the standpoint of the latter can only be comprehended after it is subjected to the syndicalist criticism--and doubtless both positions, however one-sided they appear elsewhere, were fairly justified by the economic and political situations in France and Germany respectively. "Only as a _political_ party," says Kautsky, "can the working class as a whole come to a firm and lasting union." He then proceeds to argue that purely economic struggles are always limited either to a locality, a town, or a province, or else to a given trade or industry--the directly opposite view to that of the syndicalists, whose one object is also, undeniably, to bring about a unity of the working class, though they claim that this can be accomplished _only by economic action_, while from their point of view it is political action that always divides the working class by nation, section, and class. "The pure and simple unionist," says Kautsky, "is conservative, even when he behaves in a radical manner; on the other hand, every true and independent political party [Kautsky is speaking here of workingmen's organizations exclusively] is always revolutionary by its very nature, even when, according to its action, or even according to the consciousness of its members, it is still moderate." This again is the exact opposite of the syndicalists' position. They would say that a labor party unconnected with revolutionary economic action would necessarily be conservative, no matter how revolutionary it seemed. The truth from the broader revolutionary standpoint is doubtless that neither political nor economic action in isolation can long continue to be revolutionary. Exclusively economic action soon leads to exclusive emphasis on material and immediate gains, without reference to the relative position of the working class or its future; exclusively political action leads inevitably to concentration on securing democratic political machinery and reforms which by no means guarantee that labor is gaining on capital in the race for power. To Kautsky a labor party, it would seem, might be sufficient in itself, even if economic action should, for any reason, become temporarily impossible:-- "The formation and the activity of a special labor party which wants to win political power for the working class already presupposes in a part of the laboring class a highly developed class consciousness. But the activity of this labor party is the most powerful means to awaken and to further class consciousness in the masses of labor, also. It knows only objects and tasks which have to do with the whole proletariat; the trade narrowness, the jealousies of single and separate organizations, find no place in it."[270] It is easy to see how an equally strong case might be made out for the educative, unifying, and revolutionary effect of an aggressive labor union movement without any political features. The truth would seem to be that any form of organization that honestly represents the working class and is at the same time militant--and no other--advances Socialism. The objections to action exclusively political hold also against action exclusively economic. Both trade union action as such, which inevitably spends a large part of its energies in trying to improve economic conditions in our _present_ society by trade agreements and other combinations with the capitalists, and political action as such, which is always drawn more or less into capitalistic efforts to improve present society by political means is fundamentally conservative. What Socialism requires is not a political party in the ordinary sense, but political organization and a political program; not labor unions, as the term has been understood, but aggressive and effective economic organization, available also for the most far-reaching economic and political ends. It seems probable that the anti-political element in the new revolutionary unionism will soon be outgrown. When this happens, it will meet the revolutionary majority of the Socialists on an identical platform. For this revolutionary majority is steadily laying on more weight on economic organization. FOOTNOTES: [253] The _New York Call_, Nov. 13, 1911. [254] Edmond Kelly, "Twentieth-Century Socialism," p. 152. [255] The _Socialist Review_ (London), September, 1910. [256] Winston Churchill, _op. cit._, p. 73. [257] The _Socialist Review_ (London), October, 1911. [258] The profound opposition between the "State Socialism" of the Labour Party and the revolutionary aims and methods of genuine Socialism and the new labor unionism appeared more clearly in the coal strike of 1912 than it had in the railway strike of the previous year. As Mr. Lloyd George very truthfully remarked in Parliament, no leaders of the Labour Party had committed themselves to syndicalism, while syndicalism and socialism [_i.e._ the socialism of the Labour Party] were mutually destructive. "We can console ourselves with the fact," said Mr. Lloyd George, "that the best policeman for the syndicalists is the socialist [_i.e._ the Labourite]." The conduct of many of the Labour Party leaders during this strike, as during the railway strike, fully justified the confidence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Mr. MacDonald, for example, spoke of syndicalism in much the same terms as those used by Mr. Lloyd George. He viewed it as evil, to be obviated by greater friendliness and consideration on the part of employers towards employees, a position fully endorsed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the other Radicals of the British Cabinet. The coal strike throughout was, indeed, almost a repetition of the railway strike. What I have said of the one applies, with comparatively slight changes, to the other. Even the so-called Minimum Wage Law is essentially identical with the methods adopted to determine the wages of railway employees. [259] The _New York Call_, April 17, 1910. [260] The _International Socialist Review_, June, 1911. [261] The _Industrial Syndicalist_ (London), July and September, 1910. [262] _Le Mouvement Socialiste_ (Paris), 1909, article entitled, "Plechanoff contre les Syndicalistes." [263] "Le Federation des Bourses de Travail de France," p. 67. [264] Hubert Lagardelle, Le Socialisme Ouvrier (Paris), 1911. [265] _Le Mouvement Socialiste_, 1909, article entitled, "Classe Sociale et Parti Politique." [266] Hubert Lagardelle, "Syndicalisme et Socialisme" (Paris), p. 52. [267] Hubert Lagardelle, "Syndicalisme et Socialisme" (Paris), p. 50. [268] Paul Louis, "Le Syndicalisme contre l'État," pp. 4-7. [269] Paul Louis, "Le Syndicalisme contre l'État," p. 244. [270] Karl Kautsky, "Parlamentarismus und Demokratie," pp. 136 and 137. CHAPTER VI THE "GENERAL STRIKE" Nearly all strikes are more or less justified in Socialist eyes. But those that involve neither a large proportion of the working class nor any broad social or political question are held to be of secondary importance. On the other hand, the "sympathetic" and "general" strikes, which are on such a scale as to become great public issues, and are decided by the attitude of public opinion and the government rather than by the employers and employees involved, are viewed as a most essential part of the class struggle, especially when in their relation to probable future contingencies. The social significance of such sympathetic or general strikes is indeed recognized as clearly by non-Socialists as by Socialists--even in America, since the great railroad strike of 1894. The general strike of 1910 in Philadelphia, for instance, was seen both in Philadelphia and in the country at large as being a part of a great social conflict. "The American nation has been brought face to face for the first time with a strike," said the _Philadelphia North American_, "not merely against the control of an industry or a group of allied industries, but _a strike of class against class, with the lines sharply drawn_.... And it is this antagonism, this class war, intangible and immeasurable, that constitutes the largest and most lamentable hurt to the city. It is, moreover, felt beyond the city and throughout the entire nation." (My italics). It goes without saying that all organs of non-Socialist opinion feel that such threatening disturbances are lamentable, for they certainly may lead towards a revolutionary situation. Both in this country and Great Britain the great railway strike of 1911 was almost universally regarded in this light. The availability of a general strike on a national scale as a means of assaulting capitalism at some future crisis or as a present means of defending the ballot or the rights of labor organizations or of preventing a foreign war, has for the past decade been the center of discussion at many European Socialist congresses. The recent Prime Minister of France, Briand, was long one of the leading partisans of this method of which he said only a few years before he became Premier: "It has the seductive quality that it is after all the exercise of an incontestable right. It is a revolution which commences with legality. In refusing the yoke of misery, the workingman revolts in the fullness of his rights; illegality is committed by the capitalist class when it becomes a provocator by trying to violate a right which it has itself consecrated." That Briand meant what he said is indicated by the advice he gave to soldiers who might be ordered to fire against the strikers in such a crisis. "If the order to fire should persist," said Briand, "if the tenacious officer should wish to constrain the will of the soldiers in spite of all.... Oh, no doubt the guns might go off, but it might not be in the direction ordered"--and the universal assumption of all public opinion at that time and since was that he was advising the soldiers that under these circumstances they would be justified in shooting their officers. The Federation of Labor of France has long adopted the idea of the general strike as appropriate for certain future contingencies, as has also the French Socialist Party--"To realize the proposed plan," the Federation declares, "it will be necessary first of all to put the locomotives in a condition where they can do no harm, to stop the circulation of the railways, to encourage the soldiers to ground their arms." As thus conceived by Briand and the Federation, few will question the revolutionary character of the proposed general strike. But in what circumstances do the Socialists expect to be able to make use of this weapon? The Socialists of many countries have given the question careful consideration in hundreds of writings and thousands of meetings, including national and international congresses. Through the gradual evolution of the plans of action developed in all these conferences and discussions, they have come to distinguish sharply between a really general strike, _e.g._ a nation-wide railroad strike, when used for revolutionary purposes, and other species of widespread strikes which have merely a tendency in a revolutionary direction, such as the Philadelphia trouble I have mentioned, and they have decided from these deliberations, as well as considerable actual experience, just what forms of general strike are most promising and under what contingencies each form is most appropriate. Henriette Roland-Holst has summed up the whole discussion and its conclusions in an able monograph (indorsed by Kautsky and others) from which I shall resume a few of the leading points.[271] She concludes that railroad strikes for higher wages, unless for some modest advance approved by a large part of the public, like the recent British strike (which, in view of the rising cost of living, was literally to maintain "a living wage"), can only lead to a ferocious repression. For a nation-wide railroad strike is paid for by the whole nation, and its benefits must be nation-wide if it is to secure the support of that part of the public without which it is foredoomed to failure. Otherwise, says Roland-Holst, "the greater has been the success of the working people at the beginning, the greater has been the terror of the middle classes," and as a consequence the measures of repression in the end have been proportionately desperate. But this applies only when such strikes are for aggressive ends, like that of 1910 in France, and promise nothing to any element of society except the employees immediately involved. If a nation-wide railroad strike or a prolonged coal strike is aggressive, it will inevitably be lost unless it has a definite public object. And the only aggressive political aim that would justify, in the minds of any but those immediately involved, all the suffering and disorder a railroad strike of any duration would entail, would be a social revolution to effect the capture of government and industry. The only other circumstances in which such a strike might be employed with that support of a part at least of the public which is essential to its success would be as a last resort, when some great social injustice was about to be perpetrated, like a declaration of war, or an effort to destroy the Socialist Party or the labor unions. Jaurès says rightly, that even then it would be "a last and desperate means less suited to save one's self than to injure the enemy." These conclusions as to the possibilities and limitations of the general strike are based on a careful study of the military and other powers of the existing governments. "The power of the modern State," says Roland-Holst, "is superior to that of the working class in all its _material_ bases either of a political or of an economic character. The fact of political strikes can change this in no way. The working class can no more conquer economically, through starvation, than it can through the use of powers of the same kind which the State employs, that is, through force. In only one point is the working class altogether superior to the ruling class--in purpose.... Governmental and working class organizations are of entirely different dimensions. The first is a coercive, the second a voluntary, organization. The power of the first rests primarily on its means of physical force; that of the latter, which lacks these means, can break the physical superiority of the State only by its moral superiority." It is almost needless to add that by "moral superiority" Roland-Holst means something quite concrete, the willingness of the working people to perform tasks and make sacrifices for the Socialist cause that they would not make for the State even under compulsion. It is only through advantages of this kind, which it is expected will greatly increase with the future growth of the movement, that Socialists believe that, supported by an overwhelming majority of the people, a time may arrive when they can make a successful use of the nation-wide general strike. It is hoped that the support of the masses of the population will then make it impossible for governments to operate the railroads by military means, as they have hitherto done in Russia, Hungary, France, and other countries. It is thought by many that the general strike of 1905 in Russia, for example, might have attained far greater and more lasting results if the peasants had been sufficiently aroused and intelligent to destroy the bridges and tracks, and it is not doubted that a Socialist agricultural population consisting largely of laborers (see Chapter II) would do this in such a crisis. Here, then, are the two conditions under which it is thought by Roland-Holst and the majority of Socialists that the general strike may some day prove the chief means of bringing about a revolution: the active support of the majority of the people, and the superior organization and methods and the revolutionary purpose of the working classes. In the preparation of the working people to bring about a general strike when the proper time arrives, lies a limitless field for immediate Socialist activity. Both Jaurès and Bebel feel that it is even likely that the general strike will also have to be used on a somewhat smaller scale even before the supreme crisis comes. Jaurès thinks that it will be needed to bring about essential reforms or to prevent war, and Bebel believes that it will very likely have to be used to defend existing political and economic rights of the working class; in other words, to protect the Party and the unions from destruction. At the Congress at Jena in 1905 the conservative trade union official, von Elm, together with a majority of the speakers, argued that it was possible that an attempt would be made to take away from the German working people the right of suffrage, the freedom of the press and assemblage and the right of organization. In such a case he and others advocate a general strike, though he said he fully realized it would be a bloody one. "We must reckon with this," he said. "As a matter of course, we wish to shed no blood, but our enemies drive us into the situation.... The moment comes when you must be ready to give up your blood and your property [here he was interrupted by stormy applause]. Prepare yourselves for this possibility. Our youths must be brought up so that among the soldiers here and there will be a man who will think twice before he shoots at his father and mother [as Kaiser Wilhelm publicly insists he must], and at the same time at freedom." The reception of von Elm's speech showed that his words represented the feeling of the whole German movement. Bebel spoke with the same decision, advocating the use of the general strike under the same conditions as did von Elm, while at the next congress at Mannheim he declared that it would also be justified, under certain circumstances, not only for protecting existing rights, but for extending them, _e.g._ for the purpose of obtaining universal and equal suffrage in Prussia. Bebel did not think that the party or the unions were strong enough at that moment to use the general strike for other than defensive purposes, but he said that, if they were able to double their strength,--and it now seems they will have accomplished this within a very few years,--then the time would doubtless arrive when it would be worth while to risk the employment of this rather desperate measure for aggressive purposes also. While Socialism is thus traveling steadily in the direction of a revolutionary general strike, capitalist governments are coming to regard every strike of the first importance as a sort of rebellion. In discussing the Socialist possibilities of a national railroad strike, Roland-Holst, representing the usual Socialist view, says that it makes very little difference whether the roads are nationally or privately owned; in either case such a strike is likely to be considered by capitalistic governments as something like rebellion. But while this applies only to the employees of the most important services like railroads, when privately operated, it applies practically to _all_ government employees; there is an almost universal tendency to regard strikes against the government as being mutiny--an evidence of the profoundly capitalistic character of government ownership and "State Socialism" which propose to multiply the number of such employees. Here, too, the probable governmental attitude towards a future general strike is daily indicated. President Nicholas Murray Butler, of Columbia University, has written that any strike of "servants of the State, in any capacity--military, naval, or civil," should be considered both treason and mutiny. "In my judgment loyalty and _treason_," he writes, "ought to mean the same thing in the civil service that they do in military and naval services. The door to get out is always open if one does not wish to serve the public on these terms. Indeed, I am not sure that as civilization progresses loyalty and _treason_ in the civil services will not become more important and more vital than loyalty and _treason_ in the military and naval services. The happiness and the prosperity of a community might be more easily wrecked by the paralysis of its postal and telegraph services, for example, than by a mutiny on shipboard.... President Roosevelt's attitude on all this was at times very sound, but he wabbled a good deal in dealing with specific cases. In the celebrated Miller Case at the Government Printing Office he laid down in his published letter what I conceive to be the sound doctrine in regard to this matter. It was then made plain to the printers that to leave their work under pretense of striking was to resign, in effect, the places which they held in the public service, and that if those places were vacated they would be filled in accordance with the provisions of the civil service act, and not by reappointment of the old employees after parley and compromise.... To me the situation which this problem presents is, beyond comparison, the most serious and the most far-reaching which the modern democracies have to face." Dr. Butler concludes that this question "will wreck every democratic government in the world unless it is faced sturdily and bravely now, and settled on righteous lines." (My italics.)[272] Our Ex-President, however, has ceased apparently to "wabble." In Mr. Roosevelt's medium, the _Outlook_, an editorial on the strike of the municipal street cleaners of New York City reads in part as follows:-- _Men who are employed by the public cannot strike. They can, and sometimes they do, mutiny. When they should be treated not as strikers but as mutineers._ This issue was presented by the refusal of the men to do what they were ordered to do. _When soldiers do that in warfare they are given short shrift._ Of course, in combating accumulating dirt and its potent ally, disease, an army of street cleaners is not face to face with any such acute public dangers as those confronting a military force; and therefore insubordination among street cleaners does not call for any such severity as that which is absolutely necessary in war times; _but the principle in the one case is the same as that in the other--those who disrupt the forces of public defense range themselves on the side of the public enemy_. They are not in any respect on the same basis as the employees of a private employer. _They are wage earners only in the sense that soldiers are wage earners._[273] When Senator La Follette indorsed the right of railway mail clerks to organize, President Taft said (May 14, 1911):-- "This presents a very serious question, and one which, if decided in favor of the right of government employees to strike and use the boycott, will be full of danger to the government and to the republic. "The government employees of France resorted to it and took the government by the throat. The executive was entirely dependent upon these employees for its continuance. "When those in executive authority refused to acquiesce in the demands, the government employees struck, and then with the helplessness of the government and the destruction of all authority and the choking of government activities it was seen that to allow government employees the use of such an instrument was to recognize revolution as a lawful means of securing an increase in compensation for one class, and that a _privileged class_, at the expense of all the public.... "The government employees are a privileged class whose work is necessary to carry on the government and upon whose entry into the government service it is entirely reasonable to impose conditions that should not be and ought not to be imposed upon those who serve private employers." Here the Socialists join issue squarely with the almost universally prevalent non-Socialist opinion. They do not consider government employment a "privilege" nor any strike whatever as "mutiny," "treason," or "rebellion." Socialists believe that the only possible means of maintaining democracy at all in this age when government employees are beginning to increase in numbers more rapidly than those of private industry, is that they should be allowed to maintain their right to organize _and to strike_--no matter how great difficulties it may involve. To decide the question as President Butler wishes, or as President Taft implies it should be decided, Socialists believe, would mean to turn every government into a military organization. The time is not far distant when in all the leading nations a very large part and in some cases a majority of the population will be in government employment. If even the present limited rights of organization are done away with, and the military laws of subordination are applied, Socialists ask, shall we not have exactly that military and autocratic bureaucracy, that "State Socialism" which Spencer so rightly feared? The fact that these perfectly legal and necessary strikes may some day lead to revolution is capitalism's misfortune, which society will not permit it to cure by turning the clock back to absolutism. The question of the organization of government employees, one of the most important to-day, will, as President Butler says, be the crucial question of the near future. It is in France that the question has come to the first test, not because the French bureaucracy is more numerous than that of Prussia and some other Continental countries, but because of the powerful democratic and Socialist tendency that has grown up along with this bureaucracy and is now directed against it. Especially interesting is the fact that Briand, who not long ago advocated the Socialist general strike and certainly realized its danger to present government as well as its possibilities for Socialism, has, as Premier, evolved measures of repression against organizations of State employees more stringent than have been introduced in any country making the slightest pretension to democratic or semi-democratic government. The world first became aware of the importance of this issue at the time of the organization and the strike of the French telegraphers and post office employees in the early part of 1909, and again in the railway strike in 1910. As early as 1906 the organized postal employees had been definitely refused the right to strike, and it became manifest that if they attempted to use this weapon to correct the very serious grievances under which they suffered, it would be looked upon as "a kind of treason against the State." At the end of 1908, however, after having discussed the matter for many years, a congress of all the employees of the State was held. More than twenty different associations participated and decided unanimously to claim the full rights of other labor organizations. Finally, when these organizations appealed to the General Federation of Labor to help them, there came the strike of 1909. Unfortunately for the postmen, the French railway and miners' unions were at the moment still in relatively conservative hands, and the majority of their members were as yet by no means anxious to aid in the general strike movement. After a brilliant success in their first effort, a second strike a few weeks later proved a total failure. The government then began to make it clear that public employees were to be allowed no right to strike, and Jaurès pointed out that it was trying to carry this new repressive legislation by accompanying it by new pension laws and other concessions to the State employees,--a repetition of the old policy of more bread and less power, which is likely to play a more and more important rôle every year as we enter into the State capitalistic period. The character of the organizations allowed for government employees, under the new laws, would remind one of Prussia or Russia rather than France. While certain forms of association are permitted, the right to strike is precluded, and the various associations of government employees are forbidden either to form any kind of federation or to unite with other unions outside of government employments. "Councils of discipline are created where the employees are represented," but "in the case of a collected or concerted cessation of work all disciplinary penalties may be inflicted without the intervention of the councils of discipline; courts may order the dissolution of any union at the request of the ministry," which means that at any moment a police war may be instituted against these organizations, in the true Russian style. The reply of the postmen's organization to this kind of legislation is, that the administration of the post office is an industrial and commercial administration; that it is a vast enterprise of general utility; that the notion of loyalty or treason is entirely misplaced in this field. They have declared that the new legislation is wrong "because it perpetuates the bureaucratic tradition; because with a contempt for all the necessities of modern life it discountenances organization of labor; because it has constituted a repressive legal condition for wage earners; and because it is an act of authority which has nothing in common with free contract." Here we see the public employees, supported by the Socialists, insisting on industrial and commercial considerations, on the rights of individuals and on free contract, as against the capitalists and governing classes, who claim to defend these very principles from supposed Socialist attacks, but abandon them the moment they threaten capitalist profits and capitalist rule. This attitude of the French Socialist shows the very heart of the Socialist situation. In fact, it is only as private capitalism becomes State capitalism, or "State Socialism," that Socialists will be able to show what their position really is. It is only then that the coercive aspect of capitalism, which is now partly latent and partly obscured by certain functions that it has still to fill in the development of society, will become visible to all eyes. The French railroad strike of October, 1910, brought the question of organizations of government employees still more into international prominence. Until the recent British upheaval it was, perhaps, the greatest and most menacing strike in modern history. It is true that its apparent object was only a few just, and relatively insignificant economic concessions--which were granted for the most part immediately after the struggle. But behind these, as every one realized, lay the question of the right of government employees to organize and to strike and the determination of the French Socialists and labor unionists to use the opportunity to take a step towards the "general strike." Never has the issue between capitalism and Socialism been more sharply defined than in Premier Briand's impulsively frank declaration after the strike (though it was later retracted): "I say emphatically, if the laws have not given the government the means of keeping the country master of its railways and the national defense, it would not have hesitated to take recourse to illegality." This is almost the exact declaration of Ex-President Roosevelt in his Decoration Day speech in 1911, when he said that really revolutionary men dreaded and hated him because they knew that _he wouldn't let the Constitution stand in the way of punishing them if they did wrong_. Milder but no less positive expressions of an intention to use illegal means to coerce labor, if it does not act as present authorities dictate, were to be heard from responsible sources both in England and America after the recent British railway strike. The non-Socialist press then came almost unanimously to the conclusion that an attempt must be made to take away the sole weapon by which labor is able to protect itself or advance its position as soon as "the public" is damaged by its use--which amounts to reducing wage earners to the status of children, soldiers, or other wards of the community. "If railroad and telegraph strikes are many and violent," said _Collier's Weekly_, "they will encourage government ownership without unionization."[274] The _Outlook_ stopped short of government ownership, but announced a similar principle: "The railways are public highways; they must be controlled by the nation for the public good; the operation of the railways must not be stopped because of disputes; and, as a corollary to this last law of necessity, the government must furnish an adequate and just method of settling railway disputes."[275] Every step in government control is to be accompanied by a step in the control of labor, and restriction of the power of labor unions. The right of employees to protect themselves by leaving their work in a body is to be taken away completely, while the right to discharge or punish is to remain intact in persons over whom the employees can have little or no control. Governments are evidently ready to proceed to illegality for the sake of self-preservation--even from a perfectly legal attack, if it threatens to destroy them or to transfer the government into the hands of the non-capitalist classes. Of course a capitalist government can pass "laws," _e.g._ martial law, under which anything it chooses to do against its opponents becomes "legal" and anything effective its opponents do becomes illegal. In the present age of general enlightenment, however, this method does not even deceive Russian peasants. But the French government is now turning to this device. Briand explained away his sensational declaration above quoted, and then proposed a law by which striking on a railway becomes a crime and almost a felony. This met universal approval in the capitalistic press and universal denunciation in that of the Socialists and labor unions. The _Boston Herald_, for example, said: "The Executive must be armed with greater authority than he now possesses. No Premier must be forced to say, as M. Briand did recently, that, with or without law, national supremacy will be preserved in case it is challenged by allied workers for the State, as well as by other toilers." Here there is no effort to disguise the fact that the new legal form is the _exact equivalent_ of the illegal force formerly proposed. Now the peasants and the lower middle classes of France, as well as the working people (land and opportunities being more and more difficult to obtain), are becoming extremely radical. Though they do not send Socialist deputies to the Chamber, they send representatives who are very suspicious of arbitrary, undemocratic, and centralized authority. Only 215 members of the Chamber could be induced to approve of the government's conduct during the strike of 1910, while more than 200 abstained from voting on this point, and 166 voted in the negative. The proposed measures of repression were carried by a small majority, but it is not likely that they can be enforced many years without bringing about another and far more revolutionary crisis. Briand and his associates, Millerand and Viviani, were forced to resign, partly on account of their conduct in this strike, and it is possible that after another election or two the Chamber will no longer give its consent to this relegation of workingmen to the status of common soldiers. Only six months after the strike, Briand's successor, Monis, with the consent of the Chamber, was bringing governmental pressure to bear on the privately owned railways to force them to take back dismissed strikers. In the next ministry, that of Caillaux, the Minister of Labor, Augagneur, the former Socialist, pursued the same policy of pressing for the reinstatement of a large part of the discharged employees of the private railroads while insisting that the employees of government railroads could not be allowed to strike. And again, at the end of 1911, the government secured only 286 votes in favor of this policy, to 193 against it.[276] France is by no means the only country where the question of strikes of government employees has become all-important. When the railways were nationalized in Italy there was considerable Socialist opposition on the ground that the employees were likely to lose a part of such rights as they had had when in private employment, and it turned out just as was feared. The position of the Italian Socialists on the subject is as interesting as that of the French. The Congress at Florence in 1908 resolved that "considering the fact that a strike of municipalized or nationalized services represents, not the struggle of the proletariat against a private capitalistic enterprise, but the conflict of a class against the collectivity, whence the difficulty of its success, the employees in public service ought to be advised not to proclaim a strike unless urged on by the most compelling motives and when every other means have failed;" but "taking it into consideration at the same time that in the present condition of society the working people in public service have no other means to guarantee the defense of their rights, and that in critical moments of history the suspension of public services is among the most efficacious arms of which the proletariat can avail itself to disorganize the defense of the government, any disposition to bring into legislation the principle of the abolition of the right to strike is dangerous" and "any attempt in that direction" must be defeated. The gulf between those who consider the collective refusal of the organizations of government employees to work under conditions they do not accept, as being "treason" and "mutiny," and those who feel that such an organization is the _very basis_ of industrial democracy of the future and the sole possible guarantee of liberty, is surely unbridgeable. The clash between the classes on this question of livelihood and liberty is already momentous, but its full significance can only be realized when the Socialist aim is recalled. As employees of railroads, of governments, and of industries become Socialists, they will not only be ready to strike to raise their wages, or to protect the unions and the Socialist Party, or to prevent military reaction, but also--when they have the majority with them--to take possession of government. An editorial in the _New York Call_ (October 31, 1911) shows how most American Socialists expect the general strike to work:-- "The failure of one 'general' strike, or any attempt to carry out a general strike, does not bankrupt or destroy the working class, for the reason that it is that class which holds the future in its hands. Nor does such failure help capitalism--the decaying system--in any way. On the contrary, it helps disintegrate it, and the failure itself is merely the necessary prelude to a still stronger assault by the same method. The general strike seems to be like what is said of democracy, that the cure for democracy is still more democracy. In the same way the cure for the general strike is to make it still more 'general' in character. The less 'general' it is, the less chance has it of success, and the more 'general' it can be made, the more certain is it of success. "And that success may not, and very likely will not, take the form hoped for by those who advocate it as a means of immediate or even ultimate social revolution. But even this, if true, is no argument against its use. It will, however, bring the social revolution nearer in other ways. "We hardly, for instance, expect to see the capitalists, paralyzed by the most 'general' of general strikes surrender their property offhand to the victorious proletariat in despair of being able to operate it themselves. Much as we would like to see the working class march in and take possession of the abandoned factories and workshops in this manner, and commence operations under their collective ownership, the vision can only remain while other factors are disregarded. There is possibly much more flexibility and elasticity in the capitalist system than is usually imagined by Socialists. As William Morris tells old John Ball, the 'rascal hedge-priest,' 'Mastership hath many shifts' before it finally goes down and out. "If we were to venture an opinion, the course and procedure of the general strike, with special reference to the railroads and allied industries, will follow something in this order. "General strikes will succeed one another intermittently, each becoming more 'general,' the method finally establishing itself as a settled policy of the workers in enforcing their demands. Some may fail, but from time to time they will grow more 'general' and more powerful, and will wrest more concessions from the owners, until the point is reached where the railroad business will return practically no private profits to its owners. And when this point is reached, or the certainty of its being reached is plainly seen, then mastership will make its next shift. There will be two alternatives. "The first is literal, physical suppression, by the armed forces of the nation still under control of the capitalists, and greatly augmented for the purpose. This, however, for a multitude of reasons, is a most dangerous policy and much more 'impossible' than the general strike. Instead of postponing social revolution, it rather accelerates its approach. "The other alternative, and the one by all means most likely to be adopted, is government ownership of the railroads, with the capitalists, of course, as owners of the government. This will undoubtedly be ushered in as 'State Socialism.' Laws will be passed constituting the railroad workers as direct servants of the State, and forbidding the general strike or any other kind of strike. "The prohibition will not have the desired effect. If attempted to be enforced, it merely throws capitalist society back on the first dangerous alternative policy we have mentioned. But it will give capitalism a breathing spell, and a chance to 'spar for wind' for a while, which is the best it can expect. The general strike will still be utilized to assail the capitalist State and its property. "The final struggle will be a political one, for the capture of the State from the hands of the capitalists, and such capture will mean the transfer of capitalist State-owned property to collective property and the establishment of industrial democracy, or Socialism." FOOTNOTES: [271] The following quotations are taken from the brochure, "Der Generalstreik," by Henriette Roland-Holst (Dresden, 1905). [272] From a private letter published editorially in the _New York Sun_. [273] The _Outlook_, Nov. 25, 1911. [274] _Collier's Weekly_, Sept. 2, 1911. [275] The _Outlook_, Aug. 26, 1911. [276] _Die Neue Zeit_, Oct. 27, 1911. CHAPTER VII REVOLUTION IN DEFENSE OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT "The workers do not yet understand," says Debs, "that they are engaged in a class struggle, and must unite their class and get on the right side of that struggle economically, politically, and in every other way--strike together, vote together, and, if necessary, fight together."[277] Socialists are prepared to use force when governments resort to arbitrary violence--for example, to martial "law." In the Socialist view no occasion whatever justifies the suspension of the regular government the people has instituted--and even if such an occasion could arise there is no authority to which they would consent to give arbitrary power. Military "government" is not government, but organized violence. Tolstoi's masterly language on this matter will scarcely be improved upon:-- "The slavery of the working people is due to this, that there are governments. But if the slavery of the laborers is due to the government, the emancipation is naturally conditioned by the abolition of the existing governments and the establishment of new governments,--such as will make possible the liberation of the land from ownership, the abolition of taxes, and the transference of the capital and the factories into the power and control of the working people. "There are men who recognize this issue as possible, and who are preparing themselves for it.... So long as the soldiers are in the hands of the government, which lives on taxes and is connected with the owners of land and of capital, a revolution is impossible. And so long as the soldiers are in the hands of the government, the structure of life will be such as those who have the soldiers in their hands want it to be. "The governments, who are already in possession of a disciplined force, will never permit the formation of another disciplined force. All the attempts of the past century have shown how vain such attempts are. Nor is there a way out, as the Socialists believe, by means of forming a great economic force which would be able to fight successfully against the consolidated and ever more consolidating force of the capitalists. Never will the labor unions, who may be in possession of a few miserable millions, be able to fight against the economic power of the multimillionaires, who are always supported by the military force. Just as little is there a way out as is proposed by other Socialists, by getting possession of the majority of the Parliament. Such a majority in the Parliament will not attain anything, so long as the army is in the hands of the governments. The moment the decrees of the Parliament are opposed to the interests of the ruling classes, the government will close and disperse such a parliament, as has been so frequently done and as will be done so long as the army is in the hands of the government." Tolstoi, in spite of his contrary impression, here reaches conclusions which are the same as those of the Socialists; for they are well aware that armies are likely to be used to dissolve Parliaments and labor unions. "The introduction of socialistic principles into the army will not accomplish anything," Tolstoi continues. "The hypnotism of the army is so artfully applied that the most free-thinking and rational person will, _so long as he is in the army_, always do what is demanded of him. Thus there is no way out by means of revolution or in Socialism." Here Tolstoi is again mistaken, for at this point also Socialists agree with him completely. The soldier, they agree, must be reached, and some think must even be led to act, _before_ he reaches the barracks--whether he is about to enter them for military training in times of peace or for service in times of war. "If there is a way out," concludes Tolstoi, "it is the one which has not been used yet, and which alone incontestably destroys the whole consolidated, artful, and long-established governmental machine for the enslavement of the masses. This way out consists in refusing to enter into the army, before one is subjected to the stupefying and corrupting influence of discipline. "This way out is the only one which is possible and which at the same time is inevitably obligatory for every individual person."[278] Socialists differ from the great Russian, not in their analysis of the situation, but in their more practical remedy. They would _organize_ the campaign against military service instead of leaving it to the individual, and _after_ they had converted a sufficient majority to their views they would not hesitate to use any kind of force that seemed necessary to put an end to government by force. But they would not proceed to such lengths until their political and economic modes of action were forcefully prevented from further development. If civil government is suspended to combat the great general strike towards which Socialists believe society is moving they will undertake to restore it or to set up a new one to replace that which the authorities have "legally" destroyed. I say _legally_ because all capitalist governments have provided for this contingency by giving their executives the right to suspend government when they please--on the pretext that its existence is threatened by internal disorder. It has been generally and publicly agreed among capitalist authorities that this power shall be used in the case of a general strike--as the British government declared, at the time of the recent railway strike, _whether there is extensive popular violence or not_. I have shown that the Socialists contemplate the use of the general strike whenever, in vital matters, governments refuse to bow to the clearly expressed will of the majority, and that they recognize the difficulties to be overcome before such a measure can be used successfully. Of course the overwhelming majority of the population will have to be against the government. But the military aspect of the question may possibly make it necessary that the majority to be secured will have to be even greater than was at first contemplated, and that an even more intense struggle will have to be carried on. The Bismarcks of the world are already using armies as strike breakers and training them especially for this purpose, while even the more democratic and peaceful States, like England and France, are rapidly following in the same direction. Of course, as Bismarck said, not all of a large army can be so used, but there is a strong tendency in Russia and Germany, which may be imitated elsewhere, for the military leaders to concentrate their efforts and attention on the picked and more or less professional part of their armies, and it is this part that is being used for strike-breaking purposes. No one has dealt more ably with this struggle between the working people and coercive government than Karl Liebknecht, recently elected to the Reichstag from the Kaiser's own district of Potsdam, who spent a year as a political prisoner in Germany for his "Militarismus und Anti-Militarismus." Liebknecht opens his pamphlet by quoting a statement of Bismarck to Professor Dr. Otto Kamaell, in October, 1892:-- "In Rome water and fire were forbidden to him who put himself outside of the legal order. In the middle ages that was called to outlaw. It was necessary to treat the Social-Democracy in the same way, to take away its political rights and its right to vote. So far I have gone. The Social-Democratic question is a military question. The Social-Democracy is being handled now in an extraordinarily superficial way. The Social-Democracy is striving now--and with success--to win the noncommissioned officers. In Hamburg already a good part of the troops consist of Social-Democrats, since the people there have the right to enter exclusively into their own battalion. What now if these troops should refuse to shoot their fathers and brothers as the Kaiser has demanded? Shall we send the regiments of Hanover and Mecklenburg against Hamburg? Then we have something there like the Commune in Paris. The Kaiser was frightened. He said to me he wouldn't exactly care about being called a cardboard prince like his grandfather, nor at the very beginning of his reign to wade up to the knees in blood. Then I said to him, 'Your Majesty will have to go deeper if you give way now.'" Here we have it from the lips of Bismarck that the Social-Democratic question was already a military question in his time, and his view is supported by the present Kaiser. This is high authority. Similar views and threats have been common among the statesmen of our time in nearly every country. As early as 1903 the government of Holland broke a large general strike by the use of the army to operate the railroads, and the same thing was done in Hungary in the following year. Indeed, these measures had such a great success that the Hungarian government went farther two years later, and took away the right of organization from the agricultural laborers; while at the same time it used the army as strike breakers in harvest time and made permanent arrangements for doing this in a similar contingency in the future. In the matter of breaking railway strikes by soldiers, Bulgaria and other countries are following Holland and Hungary. The latest and most extraordinary example is undoubtedly the use of soldiers by the "Socialist" Briand to break the recent railroad strike in democratic France.[279] Even peaceful countries like Belgium and Switzerland, Great Britain, and the United States, are developing and changing their military systems so rapidly as to make it almost certain that they would take similar measures if occasion should arise. The agitation for universal conscription in England may succeed before many years, and the plans for reorganizing the militia in the United States will also make of it a force that can be far more useful in breaking strikes than the present one, and more ready to be used in case of a nation-wide strike crisis. Indeed, the Dick military law made every possible provision for the use of the military in internal disturbances, up to the point of enlisting every citizen and making a dictator of the President. Similar tendencies exist on the Continent of Europe. Formerly the militia of Switzerland was quite democratically organized, and each man kept his gun and ammunition at home, but the government is gradually doing away with this system and modeling the army every year more closely on that of the larger and less democratic European powers. In Belgium a similar movement can be seen in the creation of a Citizens' Guard, entirely for use at home and especially against strikers. Here, then, is a situation to which every Socialist is forced to give constant thought, no matter how peace-loving and law-abiding he may be. What is there in modern systems of government to prevent these large military forces already employed so successfully for the ominous function of strike breaking, from being used for other reactionary and tyrannical purposes--for putting an end to democratic government, when it is attempted to apply it to property and industry? So everywhere Socialists and labor unions are giving special attention to agitation against militarism. Years ago even the most conservative unions began forbidding their members to join the militia, and the practice has become general, while the Boy Scout movement is everywhere denounced and repudiated. Not only is every effort being made by the Socialists, in connection with other democratic elements, to cut off the financial supplies for the army and navy, but they also sought to inspire all the youth, and particularly the children of the workers, with a spirit of revolt against armies, war, and aggressive patriotism, as well as the spirit of servile obedience, the ignorance, and the brutality that invariably accompany them.[280] For a number of years the fight against militarism, and incidentally against possible wars, has occupied the chief attention of international Socialist congresses. While the Stuttgart Congress (1907) did not accept the proposal of the French delegates that in case of war an international strike and insurrection should be declared, the closing part of the resolution adopted was definitely intended to suggest such action by rehearsing with approval the various cases where the working people had already made steps in that direction, and by advising still more revolutionary action in the future, as indicated in the words italicized. "The International," it said, "is unable to prescribe one set mode of action to the working classes; this must of necessity be different in different lands, varying with time and place. But it is clearly its duty to encourage the working classes everywhere in their opposition to militarism. As a matter of fact, since the last International Congress, the working classes have adopted various ways of fighting militarism, by refusing grants for military and naval armaments, and by striving to organize armies on democratic lines. They have been successful in preventing outbreaks of war, or in putting an end to existing war, or the rumor of war. We may mention the agreement entered into between the English and French trade-unions after the Fashoda incident, for the purpose of maintaining peace and for reëstablishing friendly relations between England and France; the policy of the Social-Democratic parties in the French and German Parliaments during the Morocco crisis, and the peaceful declarations which the Socialists in both countries sent each other; the common action of the Austrian and Italian Socialists, gathered at Trieste, with a view to avoiding a conflict between the two powers; the great efforts made by the Socialists of Sweden to prevent an attack on Norway; and lastly, the heroic sacrifices made by the Socialist workers and peasants of Russia and Poland in the struggle against the war demon let loose by the Czar, in their efforts to put an end to their ravages, and at the same time _to utilize the crisis_ for the liberation of the country and its workers. "All efforts bear testimony to the growing power of the proletariat and to its absolute determination to do all it can in order to obtain peace. The action of the working classes in this direction will be even more successful when public opinion is influenced to a greater degree than at present, and _when the workingmen's parties in different lands are directed and instructed by the International_." And finally it was decided _to try to take advantage of_ the profound disturbances caused by every war to _hasten the abolition of capitalist rule_. The International Congress of 1910 referred back to the Socialist parties of the various countries for further consideration a resolution proposed by the French and English delegates which declared: "Among the means to be used in order to prevent and hinder war, the Congress considers as particularly efficacious the general strike, especially in the industries that supply war with its implements (arms and ammunition, transport, etc.), as well as propaganda and popular action in their active forms." This resolution is now under discussion. In referring it to the national parties, the International Socialist Bureau reminded them that the practical measure the authors of the amendment had principally in view was "the strike of workingmen who were employed in delivering war material." The Germans opposed the resolution on the ground that a strike of this kind, guarded against by the government, would have to become general, and that during the martial law of war times it would necessarily mean tremendous violence. They contended that a more effective means of preventing war, _until the Socialists are stronger_, is to vote down all taxes and appropriations for armies and navies. And they accused the British Labourites who supported this resolution of having failed to vote against war supplies, while the Germans and their supporters had. This accusation was true, as against the British Labourites, but did not apply against the French and other Socialists who were for the resolution. We can obtain a key to this situation only by examining the varying motives of reformists and revolutionaries. The French reformists, followers of Jaurès, are so anxious for peace, that, notwithstanding the fact that many capitalists, probably a majority, now also favor it, they are ready to have the working people make the most terrible sacrifices for this semi-capitalistic purpose. (See Part II, Chapter V.) The Germans realize that the capitalists themselves have more and more reasons for avoiding wars, and, being satisfied with their present political prospects, do not propose to risk them--or their necks--for any such object. The French _revolutionaries_, on the other hand, favor extreme measures, not to preserve a capitalistic peace, but to develop the general strike, to paralyze armies, and encourage their demoralization and dissolution. They want to parallel all plans for mobilization by plans for insurrection, and to force armies to disclose their true purpose, which they believe is not war at all, but the arbitrary and violent suppression of popular movements. Whether capitalism or Socialism puts an end to _war_, Socialists generally are agreed their success may ultimately depend on their ability to find some way to put a check to _militarism_. The chief means by which this is likely to be accomplished, they believe, is by the spread of Socialism and the education of youth and even of children in the principles of international working-class solidarity, _always to put the humanity as a whole above one's country_, always to despise and revolt against all kinds of government by violence. Karl Liebknecht remarks that "it is already recognized that every Social-Democrat educates his children to be Social-Democrats." But he says that this is not sufficient. Social-Democratic parents do their best, but the Socialist public must aid them to do better. In other words, the greatest hope for Socialism, in its campaign against militarism as in all else it undertakes, lies in education. The Socialist movement, even if it becomes some day capable of forcing concessions from the capitalists through their fear of a social overturn, depends first, last, and always upon its ability to teach and to train and to organize the masses of the people to solve their own problems without governmental or capitalistic aid, and to understand that, in order to solve them successfully, they must be able to take broad and far-sighted views of all the political and economic problems of the time. Especially Socialists undertake to enlighten the masses on the part played by war in history and in recent times--not because wars are necessarily impending, but because the war talk is an excuse for armies that really serve another purpose. For Socialists believe that the rule of society by economic classes, and rule by war or brute force, in the Socialist view, are one and the same thing. No Socialist has expressed this view more clearly or forcefully than Mr. George R. Kirkpatrick, in his recent book, "War--What For?" Addressed to the heart as well as to the head, and based upon all the most important of the previous attacks on militarism war, whether Socialist or not, it may be doubted whether any non-Socialist could have presented as powerful an argument. Mr. Kirkpatrick gives the following interesting outline of the typical Socialist view of the development of primitive warfare into modern militarism and of slavery into the present industrial system (here abbreviated):-- "For a long time in these intertribal wars it was the practice to take no prisoners (except the younger women), but to kill, kill, kill, because the conquerors had no use for the captive men. When, however, society had developed industrially to a stage enabling the victors to make use of live men as work animals, _that new industrial condition produced a new idea_--one of the greatest and most revolutionary ideas that ever flashed into the human brain; and that idea was simply this: A live man is worth more than a dead one, if you can make use of him as a _work animal_. When industrially it became practicable for the conquerors to make use of live men captured in war, it rapidly became the custom to take prisoners, save them alive, beat them into submission--tame them--and thus have them for work animals, human work animals. "Here the human ox, yoked to the burdens of the world, started through the centuries, centuries wet with tears and red with blood and fire. "Thus originated a _class_ of workers, the _working class_. "Thus also originated the _ruling_ class. Thus originated the 'leading citizens.' "Thus originally, in war, the workers fell into the bottomless gulf of misery. It was thus that war opened wide the devouring jaws of hell for the workers. "Thus was human society long ago divided into industrial classes--into _two_ industrial classes. "Of course the interests of these two classes were in fundamental conflict, and thus originated the class struggle. "Of course the ruling class were in complete possession and control of all the powers of government--and of course they had _sense enough to use the powers of government to defend their own class interests_. "Of course the ruling class made all the laws and controlled all institutions in the interests of the ruling class--naturally."[281] With all other international and revolutionary Socialists, Mr. Kirkpatrick believes that when the masses are educated to see the truth of this view and have learned the true nature of modern industry, class government, and armies, they will put an end to them. He concludes:-- "The working class men _inside_ and _outside_ the _army_ are confused. "They do not understand. "But they will understand. "AND WHEN THEY DO UNDERSTAND, their class loyalty and class pride will astonish the world. They will stand erect in their vast class strength and defend--THEMSELVES. They will cease to coax and tease; they will make _demands_--unitedly. They will desert the armory; they will spike every cannon on earth; they will scorn the commander; they will never club nor bayonet another striker; and in the legislatures of the world they will shear the fatted parasites from the political and industrial body of society."[282] Here we have both the Socialist point of view and a glimpse of the passionate feeling that accompanies it. "War--What For?" has been circulated by scores of thousands among the working people and in the army and navy. In countries like America and England, where there is no compulsory service, the practical objective of such agitation is to prevent enlistment. In France, Belgium, and Italy, where there is compulsory service, the Socialists for years have been preaching openly desertion and insubordination. Complaint against this anti-military propaganda is general in United States army and navy circles. Recently a general in Southern California was said by the press to have reported to Washington that the distribution of one circular had dissuaded many men from joining the army. The circular, which was published, was attributed, whether rightly or not we do not know, to Jack London. It ran in part:-- "Young men, the lowest aim in your life is to be a soldier. The good soldier never tries to distinguish right from wrong. He never thinks; he never reasons; he only obeys. If he is ordered to fire on his fellow citizens, on his friends, on his neighbors, on his relatives, he obeys without hesitation. If he is ordered to fire down a crowded street when the poor are clamoring for bread, he obeys, and sees the gray hair of age stained with blood and the life tide gushing from the breast of women, feeling neither remorse nor sympathy. If he is ordered off as one of a firing squad to execute a hero or benefactor, he fires without hesitation, though he knows that the bullet will pierce the noblest heart that ever beat in a human breast. "A good soldier is a blind, heartless, soulless, murderous machine. He is not a man. He is not even a brute, for brutes only kill in self-defense. All that is human in him, all that is divine in him, all that constitutes the man, has been sworn away when he took the enlistment roll. His mind, conscience, aye, his very soul, is in the keeping of his officer." This language will appeal to many as extremely violent, yet it is no stronger than that of Tolstoi, while Bernard Shaw used almost identical expressions in his Preface to "John Bull's Other Island," without anybody suggesting that they were treasonable. "The soldier," said Shaw, "is an anachronism of which we must get rid. Among people who are proof against the suggestions of romantic fiction there can no longer be any question of the fact that military service produces moral imbecility, ferocity, and cowardice.... For permanent work the soldier is worse than useless; such efficiency as he has is the result of dehumanization and disablement. His whole training tends to make him a weakling. He has the easiest of lives; he has no freedom and no responsibility. He is politically and socially a child, with rations instead of rights, treated like a child, punished like a child, dressed prettily and washed and combed like a child, excused for outbreaks like a child, forbidden to marry like a child, and called Tommy like a child. He has no real work to keep him from going mad except housemaid's work." Mr. Shaw's words are identical with those that are preached by Socialists every day, especially on the Continent. "No soldier is asked to think for himself," he says, "to judge for himself, to consult his own honor and manhood, to dread any consequence except the consequence of punishment to his own person. The rules are plain and simple; the ceremonies of respect and submission are as easy and mechanical as a prayer wheel, the orders are always to be obeyed thoughtlessly, however inept or dishonorable they may be.... No doubt this weakness is just what the military system aims at, its ideal soldier being, not a complete man, but a docile unit or cannon fodder which can be trusted to respond promptly and certainly to the external stimulus of a shouted order, and is intimidated to the pitch of being afraid to run away from a battle." Nor is Mr. Shaw less sparing to the officer, and he represents in this case also the most unanimous Socialist view:-- "If he [the officer] calls his men dogs," says Shaw, "and perverts a musketry drill order to make them kneel to him as an act of personal humiliation, and thereby provokes a mutiny among men not yet thoroughly broken in to the abjectness of the military condition, he is not, as might be expected, shot, but, at the worst, reprimanded, whilst the leader of the mutiny, instead of getting the Victoria Cross and a public testimonial, is condemned to five years' penal servitude by Lynch Law (technically called martial law) administered by a trade union of officers." Like all Socialists, Mr. Shaw recognizes that the evils of militarism rest even more heavily on subject peoples than on the soldiers, citizens, or taxpayers of the dominating races. He says of the officer he has been describing, who is humane and intelligent in civil life, that in his military capacity he will frantically declare that "he dare not walk about in a foreign country unless every crime of violence against an Englishman in uniform is punished by the bombardment and destruction of a whole village, or the wholesale flogging and execution of every native in the neighborhood; and also that unless he and his fellow officers have power, without the intervention of a jury, to punish the slightest self-assertion or hesitation to obey orders, however grossly insulting or disastrous those orders may be, with sentences which are reserved in civil life for the worst crimes, he cannot secure the obedience and respect of his men, and the country would accordingly lose all of its colonies and dependencies, and be helplessly conquered in the German invasion which he confidently expects to occur in the course of a fortnight or so." "That is to say," Mr. Shaw continues, "in so far as he is an ordinary gentleman he behaves sensibly and courageously; and in so far as he is a military man he gives way without shame to the grossest folly, cruelty, and poltroonery. If any other profession in the world had been stained by those vices and by false witness, forgery, swindling, torture, compulsion of men's families to attend their executions, digging up and mutilation of dead enemies, all of which is only added to the devastation proper to its own business, as the military profession has been within recent memory in England, France, and the United States of America (to mention no other countries), it would be very difficult to induce men of capacity and character to enter it. And in England, it is, in fact, largely dependent for its recruits on the refuse of industrial life, and for its officers on the aristocratic and plutocratic refuse of political and diplomatic life, who join the army and pay for their positions in the more or less fashionable clubs which the regimental messes provide them with--clubs, which, by the way, occasionally figure in ragging scandals as circles of extremely coarse moral character."[283] It is not surprising that those who view armies in this light preach desertion and insubordination. A recent cable dispatch sums up some of the results of the activity in this direction of the French Federation of Labor with its million members, and of the Socialist Party with its still larger following:-- "Last year there were 13,500 desertions and 53,000 who refused to answer their call to military service. Loss to France in 1910, two army corps. These figures are given by _La France Militaire_, a soldiers' newspaper. In a fund called '_le sou du soldat et des insoumis_,' the idea was to develop antimilitarism and antipatriotism. Five per cent, on the subscriptions of the workmen, belonging to the labor unions, was ordered to be set apart for this fund. The conscripts before departing were requested to leave the name of their regiment and their number so that sums of money might be sent to them for antimilitary propaganda in the barracks. For eight years that sort of thing has been going on, but things never reached to the extent they do now. "'The comrades of the workshop count on them to spread among those around ideas of revolt and rebellion,' is an extract from a letter read by M. Georges Berry in Parliament, and he added that he had a score of such letters emanating from the unions. In M. Jaurès's organ, _L Humanité_, there appeared an article on December 22, 1910, inviting all the conscripts of the Labor Federation to send in their names so that financial aid might be sent to help them in organizing 'insubordination and desertion.'" When the Caillaux Ministry came into power in 1911, a large number of the most prominent leaders of the Federation of Labor were arrested for participation in this agitation. But for every arrest many other unionists signed declarations favoring identical principles, and as the whole Federation is wedded to this propaganda, it is more than doubtful if the whole million can be arrested and the propaganda done away with. This agitation is not directed primarily against possible war, or even exclusively against compulsory military service. Just as the preparations for an insurrectionary general strike in case of war tend to break down the power and prestige of the army, even if war is never declared, so the teaching of insubordination and desertion have the same effect, even if the compulsory armies are replaced by a compulsory militia, having only a few weeks of drill every year, as in Australia, or by a voluntary militia, as in this country. The Socialist world accepts the word of the American Socialists that a militia, if less burdensome, and less obnoxious in many ways than a standing army, may be just as thoroughly reactionary, and quite as hostile to the working class. The French Socialists and unionists encourage all general and organized movements among common soldiers. And their ideal in this regard is reached when a whole body of soldiers, for any good cause, revolts--especially at a time of popular demonstrations. During the wine troubles in the south of France, a whole regiment refused to march--and for years afterwards was toasted at Socialist gatherings. "Military strikes" have also been frequent in Russia as well as in France--and have received the unanimous approval of the Socialists of all countries. No matter how small the causes, Socialists usually justify them, because they consider military discipline in itself wholly an evil--and the worst tyranny of capitalist government. They promote military revolts in favor of great popular causes for a double reason, and they also have a double motive for supporting purely military revolts against militarism. For if Socialists are engaged in a class war, which practically all of them believe may, and many believe must, lead to revolution, it is as necessary to disarm the opposing classes as it is to abolish military discipline because of its inherent evil. It is this fact that explains the importance of all Socialist efforts against imperialism, colonialism, nationalism, patriotism, war and armies--and not the idea, common among Socialists, that Socialism alone can be relied on to establish permanent international peace. Moreover, the most successful attacks on existing governments in their coercive and arbitrary aspects, as the Stuttgart resolution suggests (see above), have been when there were threats of an unpopular war. The Socialist attack is then not only leveled against war, but also against armies. A good example is the sending of a delegation of workingmen to Berlin by the French federation at the invitation of that of Germany at the time of the Morocco affair (July, 1911). There the Secretary of the associated labor councils of France, Yvetot, made a speech, the importance of which was fully appreciated by the German government, which ordered him to be immediately expelled. His remarks were also appreciated by his German Socialist audience which responded to them by stormy applause lasting several minutes. The sentiments so widely appreciated were contained in the following remarks addressed to the French and German governments:-- "Just try once, you blockheads, to stir up one people against the other, to arm one people against the other, you will see if the peoples won't make an entirely different use of the weapons you put into their hands. Wait and see if the people don't go to war against an entirely different enemy than you expect." The significance of this declaration was not that it declared war against war, but that, under a certain highly probable contingency of the immediate future, it prepared the minds of the people for the forceful overthrow of capitalist governments. To the preparations of capitalist governments to revert to military rule in the case of a successful nation-wide general strike, the Socialists reply at present by plans for weakening and disintegrating armies. And they do not hesitate to say that they will use more active measures if capitalist governments persist in what seems to be their present determination to resort to some form of military despotism when the Socialists have won over a majority of the population to their views. FOOTNOTES: [277] Eugene V. Debs, "Life and Writings," p. 456. [278] Tolstoi's Essay entitled, "Where is the Way Out?"--October, 1900. [279] Dr. Karl Liebknecht, "Militarismus und Anti-Militarismus" (brochure). [280] Dr. Karl Liebknecht, "Militarismus und Anti-Militarismus", (brochure). [281] George R. Kirkpatrick, "War--What For?" pp. 318-325. [282] George R. Kirkpatrick, "War--What For?" (Preface). [283] Bernard Shaw, "John Bull's Other Island," pp. xxxix-xliv. CHAPTER VIII POLITICAL AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION "The legal constitution of every period," says Rosa Luxemburg, "is solely a product of revolution. While revolution is the political _act of creation_ of class history, legislation is the continued political _growth_ of society. The work of legal reform has in itself no independent driving force outside of the revolution; it moves during each period of history only along that line and for that period of time for which the impetus given to it during the last revolution continues, or, to speak concretely, it moves only in the frame of that form of society which was brought into the world through the last overturn.... Therefore, _the person who speaks for the method of legal reform instead of the conquest of political power and the overthrow of_ [_present day_] _society is not as a matter of fact seeking, in a quieter, safer, and slower way, the same goal, but a different goal altogether_; namely, instead of bringing about a new social order, merely the accomplishing of unessential changes in the old one."[284] It is not that Rosa Luxemburg or any other prominent Socialist underestimates the importance to the Socialist movement of universal suffrage, and of the utilization of our more or less democratic governments for the purpose of reform. She realizes that such democracy as we have to-day is useful to-day, and that in a future crisis it may serve as a lever for overturning the present social order. "Democracy is indispensable," she says, "not because it makes the conquest of political power by the working class superfluous, but, on the contrary, because it makes this seizure of power not only necessary, but the only remaining alternative." From Kautsky and Bebel, who have always been known as strong believers in the possibilities of political action, to the somewhat skeptical revolutionary Socialists of France, the ballot has thus far remained the weapon of first practical importance, even for revolutionary purposes. Bebel expects some day a great crisis which will go far beyond the power of any merely political means to solve. Kautsky looks forward to more than one great conflict, in which other means will have to be employed, as does also his Socialist critic and opponent, Jaurès. But for the present all these men are occupying themselves with politics. Even those Socialists who are most skeptical of the revolutionary possibilities of political action by no means turn their back upon it. The French advocate of economic action and revolutionary labor unionism, Lagardelle, who recently surprised some of his French comrades, as I have already pointed out, by running as a candidate for the French Chamber, claimed that he did this in entire consistency with his principles. And even the arch-revolutionary, Gustave Hervé, has declared that in spite of all the faults and limitations of political action, revolutionary Socialists must cling to the Socialist Party. Hervé had looked with a favorable eye on the formation of a revolutionary organization which was to consist only in part of Socialists and in part of revolutionary labor unionists, but he declared at the last moment that such an organization ought to be only a group within the Socialist Party. A bitter critic of Jaurès and also of the orthodox "center" of the party on the ground that their methods are too timid to achieve anything for Socialism in view of the ruthless aggressions of the capitalists, Hervé nevertheless said that it was only very exceptional circumstances that could justify revolutionary Socialists acting against the party organization, even though it seemed to be doing so little effective fighting against the capitalist enemy. There could be no stronger evidence of the powerful hold of political action even on the most revolutionary Socialists than the summary in which Hervé reviews his reasons for this conclusion:-- "_First_: That the only manner of agitating for anti-parliamentarism that succeeds, and is without danger, is before and after electoral periods--showing constantly to the élite of the proletariat the insufficiency and dangers of parliamentarism in general and parliamentarist Socialism in particular; "_Second_: During electoral periods all propaganda disparaging the possibilities of politics unaided by other forms of action should cease, 'in order not to embroil ourselves with the Socialist masses who must be handled carefully at any cost, in the interest of the revolutionary cause'; "_Third_: While the revolutionary Socialists' discontent with the party's moderation and exclusive absorption in the details of politics or reform ought not to lead them to oppose the organization during election periods, it does not follow that revolutionary Socialists can not even at such times continue to preach their principles and proclaim their hatred to the conservative parties and their attitude towards the Parliamentary Socialist Party 'of sympathy mixed with distrust'; "_Fourth_: An exception should be made against certain Socialist candidates who may have taken a scandalously conservative anti-labor and anti-revolutionary position in the legislative session just gone by, and that against the latter there should be a fight to the finish, certain as we are of having with us almost the entire support of the parliamentary Socialist Party."[285] In a word, Hervé proves his democracy by respecting the opinion of the majority of the Socialist Party, because he hopes and believes that it will become revolutionary in his sense of the word. With a strong preference for "direct action," strikes, "sabotage," boycotts, etc., he yet allows his policies to be guided very largely by a political organization. But Socialist politics are not politics at all in the ordinary sense of the word. They are directed primarily to prepare the people for a great struggle to come. "Situations are approaching," said Bebel at the Congress at Jena, in 1905, "which must of physical necessity lead to catastrophes unless the working class develop so rapidly in power, numbers, culture, and insight, that the bourgeoisie lose the desire for catastrophes. We are not seeking a catastrophe,--what use would it be to us? Catastrophes are brought about by the ruling classes." Bebel was referring particularly to the possibility and even the probability that the German government might try to destroy the Socialist Party by limiting the right of suffrage or to crush the unions by limiting the right of labor to organize. If he predicted a revolutionary crisis, it was to come from a life-and-death struggle of the working people in self-defense, in a desperate effort to protect economic and political rights, but especially _political_ rights, which, as the labor unionist, von Elm, said at this congress, were "the key to all." A revolutionary conflict was anticipated, to be fought out by economic means, but only as part of a political crisis--in which the majority of the people would be on the side of the Socialists and the labor unions. Similarly, in America, Mr. Victor Berger stated at the Socialist Convention of 1908 that he had no doubt that "in order to be able to shoot even, some day, we must have the powers of the political government in our hands, at least to a great extent." While neither the political revolution involved in the capture of government by Socialist voters, nor the economic revolution that would follow a wholly successful general strike would lead necessarily to revolution in its narrow sense of a great but relatively brief crisis, or to revolutionary violence; while either political or economic overturn, or both, combined in a single movement, might be accomplished peacefully and by degrees, capitalist governments are just as likely to seize the one as the other, as the occasion for attempts at violent repression. A complete political victory would thus lead to the same crisis and violence as a victorious general strike. As Bebel says, Socialists are not trying to create a revolutionary crisis. But they have little doubt that the capitalists themselves will precipitate one as soon as Socialism becomes truly menacing, as may happen within a few years in some countries. "The politicians of the ruling class have reached a condition where they are ready to risk everything upon a single throw of the dice," says Kautsky, on the supposition that Socialism is _already_ a real menace in Germany. "They would rather take their chances in a civil war than endure the fear of a revolution," he continues. "The Socialists on the other hand, not only have no reason to follow suit in this policy of desperation, but should rather seek by every means in their power to postpone any such insane uprising [of the capitalists] even if it be recognized as inevitable, to a time when the proletariat will be so powerful as to be able at once to whip the enraged [capitalist] mob, and to restrain it, so that the one paroxysm shall be its last, and the destruction that it brings and the sacrifice it costs shall be as small as possible."[286] The majority of Socialists have no inclination towards violence of any kind at the present time, whether domestic or foreign, and will avoid it also for all time if they can. But they fear and expect that the present ruling class will undertake violent measures of repression which will inevitably result in a conflict of physical force. The Civic Federation, of which so many conspicuous Americans have been members (including Grover Cleveland, Andrew Carnegie, August Belmont, Seth Low, Nicholas Murray Butler, and other prominent philanthropists, educators, statesmen, publicists, and multimillionaires), had its earliest origin, to the author's personal knowledge, partly in an effort to divert the energies of the working people from Socialism and revolutionary unionism to the conservative trade unionism of the older British type. It was natural that this organization should give more and more of its attention to an organized warfare against the Socialist movement as the latter continued to grow, and this it has done. Its members have attacked the movement from every quarter, accusing it of a tendency to undermine religion, the family, and true patriotism. But the most direct and important accusation it has made has been that the Socialists are working toward revolutionary violence. In its official organ it has quoted Mr. Debs as saying: "When the revolution comes we will be prepared to take possession and assume control of every industry." The quotation is fairly chosen, and represents the Socialist standpoint, but if it is to be thoroughly understood it must be taken in connection with other positions taken by the party. No revolution is contemplated, other than one of the overwhelming majority of the people, nor is any violence expected, other than such that may be instigated by a privileged minority in order to prevent the majority from gaining control of the government and industries of the country. That the Civic Federation writers also understand that the violence may come from above rather than from below is clearly shown in the context of the article in question. The Federation organ also attacks Mrs. J. G. Phelps Stokes for having said, at Barnard College, that the present government would probably be overturned by the ballot. In answer to this, the Federation's organ said, "Mrs. Stokes is a woman of intelligence and doubtless knows that States are not overturned by ballots." Here is a categorical denial on the part of an organ representing the most powerful privileged element in the country, of the possibility of _peaceful_ political revolution, which can only mean that if a majority desires such a peaceful revolutionary change, the minority now in power will use violence to prevent it. An article by one of the Federation's officials, Ada C. Sweet, in the same number, makes still further disclosures. Among the "fantastic projects and schemes of Socialism," she says, are the demand "that the Constitution be made amendable by a majority vote," and the demand for the abolition of that feature of our government "which makes the Supreme Court the final interpreter and guardian of the federal Constitution." These demands, of course, are becoming common outside of the Socialist Party, and would simply move the United States up to the semi-democratic level of constitutions made during the last half century. Indeed, the judicial precedents that have created an oligarchy of judges in this country, though they have existed for a century, have never been imitated by any country on earth, civilized or uncivilized, with the single exception of Australia. It is these demands, which would not be held even as radical in other countries, which Miss Sweet says cannot be accomplished without violence. If this is so, it means that violence will come from above, and the Socialists would be cowards indeed if they were not ready to resist it. Miss Sweet contends that "to bring about the first practical experiments" demanded by Socialism "would start such a civil war as the world has never yet seen in all its long history."[287] No doubt the writer, who has held a responsible position with the Civic Federation for years, represents the opinions of her associates. Her prediction may be correct, and if so it would indicate that the people who at present control this country and its government, and who have the power to initiate such a civil war, are determined to do so. While Socialists have no desire for revolutionary violence, being convinced, as they are, that the present generation will see the majority of the voters of every modern country in their ranks, and Socialists by right in possession of the legal powers of government, they nevertheless have never been blind to the readiness of the plutocratic and militaristic forces in control of governments to proceed to illegal _coups d'état_, to destroy all vestiges of democracy, if thought necessary, and to use every form of violence, as soon as they feel that they are beginning to lose their political power. The evidence that this is already the intention is abundant. There is no one who has recognized more clearly than the recent "Socialistic" Prime Minister of France (Briand) that the ruling classes force the people to fight for every great advance. In the French Socialist Congress of Paris, in 1899, Briand said: "Now I must reply to those of my friends who through an instinctive horror of every kind of violence have been brought to hope that the transformation of society can be the work of evolution alone.... Such certainly are beautiful dreams, but they are only dreams.... In a general way, in every instance, history demonstrates that the people have scarcely obtained anything except what they have been able to take for themselves.... It is not through a fad, and much less through the love of violence, that our party is and must remain revolutionary, but by necessity, one might say by destiny.... In our Congress we have even pointed out forms of revolt, among the first of which are the general strike." In the International Congress at Paris in 1900, Briand again advocated the general strike on the ground that it was "necessary as a pressure on capitalistic society, indispensable for obtaining continued ameliorations of a political and economic kind, and also, under propitious circumstances, for the purposes of social revolution." Nor can there be any doubt as to the revolutionary meaning of Briand when he advocated the general strike. In 1899 he had said, "One can discuss a strike of soldiers, one can even try to make ready for it ... our young military Socialists busy themselves in making the workingman who is going to quit his shop, and the peasant who is going to desert his fields to go into the barracks, understand that there are duties higher than those discipline would like to impose upon them." I have already quoted his recommendation, made on this occasion, that in the case of a social crisis the soldiers might fire, but need not necessarily fire in the direction suggested by the officers. As late as 1903 he took up the defense of Gustave Hervé, when the latter was accused of anti-militarism, and said before the court: "I am glad to declare that I am not led here by a chance client, I am not here to-day as an advocate pleading for his clients. I am here in a complete and full community of ideas with friends, for whom it is less important that I should defend their liberty, than that I should explain and justify their thought and their writings." There can be no question that the opinions expressed by Briand at this time are approximately those of the majority of the European Socialists to-day. Some of the leading spokesmen of the Socialists are no doubt somewhat more cautious of the form of their statements. But the modifications they would make in Briand's statement would be due, not to any objection in principle, but to expediency and the practical limitations of such measures as he advocates in each given case. The great majority of Socialists feel that a premature revolutionary crisis at the present moment would endanger or postpone the success of a political revolution, peaceful or otherwise, when the time for it is ripe. The position of Kautsky will show how very cautious the most influential are. The movement has become so strong in Germany that it might be supposed that the German Socialists would no longer fear a test of strength. But this is not the case. They feel, on the contrary that every delay is in their favor, as they are making colossal strides in their organization and propaganda, while the political situation is becoming more and more critical. "Our recruiting ground," says Kautsky, "to-day includes fully three fourths of the population, probably even more; the number of votes that are given to us do not equal one third of all the voters and not one fourth of all those entitled to vote. But the rate of progress increases with a leap when the revolutionary spirit is abroad. It is almost inconceivable with what rapidity the mass of the people reach a clear consciousness of their class interests at such a time. Not alone their courage and their belligerency, but their political interest as well, is spurred on in the highest degree through the consciousness that the hour has at last come for them to burst out of the darkness of night into the glory of the full glare of the sun. Even the laziest become industrious, even the most cowardly become brave, and even the most narrow gains a wider view. In such times a single year will accomplish an education of the masses that would otherwise have required a generation."[288] Kautsky's conception of the probable struggle of the future shows that, together with the millions of Socialists he represents, he expects the great crisis to develop gradually out of the present-day struggle. He does not expect a precipitate and comparatively brief struggle like the French Revolution, but rather "long-drawn-out civil wars, if one does not necessarily give to these words the idea of actual slaughter and battles." "We are revolutionists," Kautsky concludes, "and this is not in the sense that a steam engine is a revolutionist. The social transformation for which we are striving can be attained only through a political revolution, by means of the conquest of political power by the fighting proletariat. The only form of the State in which Socialism can be realized is that of a republic, and a thoroughly democratic republic at that. "The Socialist Party is a revolutionary party, but not a revolution-making party. We know that our goal can be obtained only through a revolution. We also know that it is just as little in our power to create this revolution as it is in the power of our opponents to prevent it."[289] The influential French Socialist, Guesde, agrees with Kautsky that a peaceful solution is highly improbable, and that the revolution must be one of an overwhelming majority of the people, not artificially created, but brought about by the ruling classes themselves. Of course a peaceful revolution might be accomplished gradually and by the most orderly means. If, however, these peaceful and legal means are later made illegal, or widely interfered with, if the ballot is qualified or political democracy otherwise thwarted, or if the peaceful acts of labor organizations, with the extension of government ownership, are looked upon as mutiny or treason,--then undoubtedly the working people will regard as enemies those who attempt to legalize such reaction, and will employ all available means to overthrow a "government" of such a kind. From Marx and Bebel none of the most prominent spokesmen of the international movement have doubted that the capitalists would use such violent and extreme measures as to create a world-wide counter-revolution, and began to make their preparations accordingly. This is why, half a century ago, they passed beyond mere "revolutionary talk," to "revolutionary action." This practical "revolutionary evolution," as he called it, was described by Marx (in resigning from a communist society) in 1851: "We say to the working people, 'You will have to go through ten, fifteen, fifty years of _civil wars and wars between nations_ not only to change existing conditions, but to _change yourselves and to make yourselves worthy of political power_.'" (My italics.) "Revolutionary evolution" means that Socialists expect, not a single crisis, but a long-drawn-out series of revolutionary, political, civil, and industrial conflicts. If we substitute for the insurrectionary civil wars of Marx's time, _i.e._ of the periods of 1848 and 1870, the _industrial_ civil wars to-day, _i.e._ the more and more widespread and successful, the more and more general, strikes that we have been witnessing since 1900, in countries so widely separated and representative as France, England, Sweden, Portugal, and Russia and Argentine Republic, Marx's view is that of the overwhelming majority of Socialists to-day.[290] The suppression of such widespread strikes will become especially costly as "State Socialism" brings a larger and larger proportion of the wage earners under its policy of "efficiency wages," so that their incomes will be considerably above the mere subsistence level. A large part of these increased wages can and doubtless will be used against capitalism. Socialists believe that strikes will become more and more extended and protracted, until the capitalists will be forced, sooner or later, either to repressive violence, or to begin to make vital economic or political concessions that will finally insure their unconditional surrender. Already many non-Socialist observers have firmly grasped the meaning of revolutionary Socialism. As a distinguished American editor recently remarked, "Universal suffrage and universal education mean universal revolution; _it may be--pray God it be not--a revolution of brutality and crime_."[291] The ruling minority have put down revolutions in the past by "brutality and crime" under the name of martial "law." Socialists have new evidences every day that similar measures will be used against them in the future, from the moment their power becomes formidable. FOOTNOTES: [284] Rose Luxemburg, "Social-Reform oder Revolution." [285] "La Guerre Sociale" (Paris), April 20, 1910. [286] Kautsky, "The Road to Power," Chapter V. [287] The organ of the Civic Federation, Nov. 15, 1909. [288] "The Road to Power," Chapter VI. [289] "The Road to Power," p. 50. [290] A leading article of the official weekly of the German Socialist Party on the eve of the elections of 1912 gives the strongest possible evidence that the German Socialists regard the ballot primarily as a means to revolution. The article is written by Franz Mehring, the historian of the German movement, and its leading argument is to be found in the following paragraphs:-- "The more votes the Social-Democracy obtains in these elections, the more difficult it will be for the Reaction to carry out exceptional laws [referring to Bismarck's legislation practically outlawing the Socialists], and the more this miserable weapon will become for them a two-edged sword. Certainly it will come to that [anti-Socialist legislation] in the end, for no one in possession of his five senses believes that, when universal suffrage sends a Social-Democratic majority to the Reichstag, the ruling classes will say with a polite bow: 'Go ahead, Messrs. Workingmen; you have won, now please proceed as you think best.' Sooner or later the possessing classes will begin a desperate game, and it is as necessary for the working classes to be prepared for this event as it would be madness for them to strengthen the position of their enemies by laying down their arms. It can only be to their advantage to gather more numerous fighting forces under their banner, even if by this means they hasten the historical process [the day when anti-Socialist laws will be passed], and indeed precisely because of this. "La Salle used to say to his followers in confidential talks: 'When I speak of universal suffrage you must always understand that I mean revolution.' And the Party has always conceived of universal suffrage as a means of revolutionary recruiting" (_Die Neue Zeit_, December 16, 1911). [291] From a press interview with Mr. Henry Watterson in 1909; verified by a private letter to the author. CHAPTER IX THE TRANSITION TO SOCIALISM The Socialist policy requires so complete a reversal of the policy of collectivist capitalism, that no government has taken any steps whatever in that direction. No governments and no political parties, except the Socialists, have any such steps under discussion, and finally, no governments or capitalist parties are sufficiently alarmed or confused by the menace of Socialism to be hurried or driven into a policy which would carry them a stage nearer to the very thing they are most anxious to avoid. If we are moving towards Socialism it is due to entirely different causes: to the numerical increase, and the improved education and organization of the non-capitalist classes, to their training in the Socialist parties and labor unions for the definite purpose of turning the capitalists (as such) out of industry and government, to the experience they have gained in political and economic struggles against overwhelmingly superior forces, to the fact that the enemy, though he can prevent them at present from gaining even a partial control over industry or government, or from seizing any strategic point of the first importance, is utterly unable to crush them, notwithstanding his greater and greater efforts to do so, and cannot prevent them from gaining on him constantly in numbers and superiority of organization. If we are advancing towards Socialism, it is not because the non-capitalist classes, when compared with the capitalists, are gradually gaining a greater share of wealth or more power in society. It is because they are gradually gaining that capacity for organized political and economic action which, though useless except for defensive purposes to-day, will enable them to take possession of industry and government _when their organization has become stronger than that of the capitalists_. The overwhelming majority of Socialists and labor unionists are occupied either with purely defensive measures or with preparations for aggressive action in the future. This does not mean that no economic or political reforms of benefit or importance can be expected until the Socialists have conquered capitalism or forced it to recognize their power; I have shown that, on the contrary, a colossal program of such reforms is either impending or in actual process of execution. It means only that for every advance allotted to labor, a greater advance will be gained by the capitalist class which is promoting these reforms, that their most important effect is to increase the _relative power_ of the capitalists. The first governmental step towards Socialism will have been taken when the Socialist organizations are able to say: _During this administration the position of the non-capitalist classes has improved faster than that of the capitalists._ But even such a governmental step towards Socialism does not mean that Socialism is being installed. It may be followed by a step in the opposite direction. _No advance can be permanently held until the organizations of non-capitalists have become superior to or at least as powerful as those of the capitalists._ An actual step _in_ Socialism, moreover, as distinct from such an insecure political step _towards_ Socialism, depends in no degree upon the action of non-Socialist governments (and still less on local Socialist administrations subject to higher non-Socialist control) unless such governments are already practically vanquished, and so forced to obey Socialist orders. An actual installment of Socialism awaits, first, a certain development of Socialist parties and labor unions, and second, on these organizations securing control of a sovereign and independent government (if there be any such), or of a group of industries that dominates it. And if the governments of the various capitalistic countries are as interdependent as they seem, a number of them will have to be captured before the possession of any is secure. _The essential problem before the Socialists under State capitalism, with every reform now under serious discussion already in force, will be fundamentally the same as it is under the private capitalism of to-day._ The capitalists will be even more powerful than they are, the _relative_ position of the non-capitalists in government and industry still more inferior than it now is. However, with better health, more means, greater leisure, superior education, with a better organized and more easily comprehended social system, with the enemy more united and more clearly defined, Socialists believe that the conditions for the successful solution of this problem will be far more favorable. The evolution of industry and government under capitalism sets the problems and furnishes the conditions necessary for the solution, but the solution, if it comes at all, must come from the Socialists themselves. I have shown what the Socialists are doing to-day to gain supreme control over governments. What do they expect to do when they have obtained that power? I have given little attention to the steps they will probably take at that time because the question belongs to the future, and has not yet been practically confronted. It is impossible to tell how any body of men will answer any question until it is before them and they know their answer must be at once translated into acts. Yet a few concrete statements as to what Socialists expect and intend for the future--especially in those matters where there is practical unanimity among them, may be justified, and may help to define their present aims. There are certain matters where Socialists have as yet had no opportunity to show their position in acts, and yet where their present activities, supported by their statements, indicate what their course will be. First, how do Socialists expect to proceed during the transitional period, when they have won supreme power, but have not yet had time to put any of their more far-reaching principles into execution? The first of these transitional problems is: What shall be done with those particular forms of private property or privilege which stand in the way of an economic democracy? How far shall existing vested rights be compensated? "And as for taking such property from the owners," asks Mr. H. G. Wells, "why shouldn't we? The world has not only in the past taken slaves from their owners, with no compensation or with meager compensation; but in the history of mankind, dark as it is, there are innumerable cases of slave owners resigning their inhuman rights.... There are, no doubt, a number of dull, base, rich people who hate and dread Socialism for purely selfish reasons; but it is quite possible to be a property owner and yet be anxious to see Socialism come into its own.... Though I deny the right to compensation, I do not deny its probable advisability. So far as the question of method goes it is quite conceivable that we may partially compensate the property owners and make all sorts of mitigating arrangements to avoid cruelty to them in our attempt to end the wider cruelties of to-day."[292] Socialists are, of course, quite determined that either the vested interests of all persons dependent on small unearned incomes and unable otherwise to earn their living shall be protected, or that they shall be equally well provided for by other means. No practical Socialist has ever proposed, during this transitional period, to interfere in any way either with savings bank accounts or with life insurance policies on a reasonable scale, or with widows and orphans who are using incomes from very small pieces of property for identical purposes. As to the compensation of the wealthier classes, this becomes entirely a secondary question, a matter of pure expediency. The great British scientist and Socialist, Alfred Russell Wallace, and the moderate Socialist, Professor Anton Menger of Vienna, propose almost identical plans of compromise with the wealthy classes,--compromises which would perhaps result in a saving to a Socialist government and might therefore be advisable, aside from any sentimental question of protecting or abolishing vested "rights." Professor Wallace, objects to "continuing any payments of interests beyond the lives of the present receivers and their direct heirs [now living], who may have been brought up to expect such inheritance." For if we were to compensate any others, Wallace points out that we would be "actually robbing the present generation to the enrichment and supposed advantage of certain unborn individuals, who in most instances, as we now know, are much more likely to be injured than benefited."[293] Professor Menger proposes that, in exchange for property taken by the government from owners of large fortunes, there should be allotted to them, and their descendants now living, a modest annuity "sufficient to satisfy their legitimate needs," as being more reasonable than Wallace's plan of such an income as they were "brought up to expect."[294] But in the long run the difference between the two methods would be immaterial--and the one chosen would doubtless depend on the social or anti-social attitude assumed by the wealthy. In either case there would be no unearned incomes in any generation not yet born. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible that a Socialist Party which had seized the reins of political power might, through motives of caution and self-protection, use greater severity against those of the capitalists whom they thought had played an unfair part in the welfare against the installation of the new government. It is scarcely to be doubted, for instance, that those capitalists who tried to embroil us in foreign wars in order to prevent the establishment of social democracy would probably be exiled and their property confiscated. Certainly these measures would be employed against all such persons as had counseled or participated in the suspension of civil government or other violent measures. But where will the money come from even for the payment of such limited compensation as the Socialists decide upon? Assuming that the stocks and bonds of the railways and other large businesses were paid for at the cost of reproduction, or, let us say, at 50 per cent their present market value, a vast amount would still be required. The Socialist answer to this question is very brightly given by America's most popular and influential Socialist organ, the _Appeal to Reason_. It reminds us that the Socialists, once having the reins of political power, will then be the possessors of all the credit of the government. "How much money," asks the _Appeal_, "did Morgan need in order to buy up all the independent steel companies for the steel trust?" And it answers: "Not a penny. Rather than needing money, he issued stock in the new concern in payment for the old independent mills, and after all was done proceeded to almost double his stock! In other words, instead of needing money, he acquired a vast sum in the transaction. One who is familiar with the way the railroads have been built and the vast fortunes erected understands that there was almost no investment. It all came through a series of tricks. Those tricks, as honest in the reversal as when the capitalist played them, can be reversed. Hardly a corporation but has forfeited its charter. With the charter cancelled stocks would tumble and the water would speedily go. Socialists are not fools that they should merely fall into the hands of men who think that they can unload on them in such a manner as to saddle a perpetual debt on the people. If the steel trust, after organizing and buying up smaller concerns, could still issue vast series of stocks and bonds, why could not the Socialists issue all the money they needed to accomplish the same things? And would not the money based on lands and mills be as good security as the money we now have based on nothing under the sun but inflated railroad and trust stocks [securities]?" Undoubtedly some such method will be followed--with those essential industries that will not already have become collective property under capitalism. In so far as "State Socialism" or collectivist capitalism will have paved the way, by extensive government ownership, the problem of confiscation or compensation becomes much simplified. Kautsky has very ably summarized the prevailing Socialist plan for dealing with it at this point:-- "As soon as all capitalist wealth had taken the form of (government) bonds, it would be possible to raise a progressive income, property and inheritance tax, to a height which until then was impossible. "It is one of our demands at the present time that such a tax shall be substituted for all others, especially for the indirect tax. "But even if we had to-day the power to carry through such a measure with the support of the other parties, which is plainly impossible, because no bourgeois party would go so far, we would at once find ourselves in the presence of great difficulties. "It is a well-known fact that the higher the tax the greater the efforts at tax dodging. "But when a condition exists where any concealment of income and property is impossible, even then we would not be in a position to force the income and property tax as high as we wish, because the capitalists, if the tax on their income or property pressed them too closely, would simply leave the State. "Above a certain measure such taxes cannot rise to-day even if we had the political power. "_The situation is completely changed, however, when capitalist property takes the form of public debts._ "The property to-day that is so hard to find then lies in broad day-light. "It would then only be necessary to declare that all bonds must be public, and it would be known exactly what was the value of every property and every capitalist income. "_The tax would then be raised as high as desired_ without the possibility of tax frauds. "It would then also be impossible to escape taxation by emigration, for the tax could simply be taken from the interest before it was paid out. [A similar tax exists in France to-day.] "_If necessary it might be put so high as to be equivalent, or nearly so, to a confiscation of the great properties._ "It might be well to ask what is the advantage of this round-about way of confiscation over that of taking the direct road? "The difference between the two methods is not so trifling as at first appears. "Direct confiscation of all capitalists would strike all, the small and the great, those utterly useless to labor, in the same manner. "It is difficult, often impossible, in this method to separate the large possession from the small, when these are united in the form of money capital in the same undertaking. "Direct confiscation would complete this quickly, often at one stroke, while _confiscation through taxation permits the disappearance of capitalists' property through a long-drawn-out process, proceeding in the exact degree in which the new order is established and its benevolent influence made perceptible._ "Confiscation in this way loses its harshness and becomes more acceptable and less painful. "The more peaceable the conquest of political power by the proletariat, and the more firmly organized and enlightened it is, the more we can expect that the primitive forms of confiscation will be softened." (My italics.)[295] Nor are any of the more influential Socialists anxious to make a clean sweep of private enterprise in industry. It is only the more important and fundamental industries, those which underlie all the processes of manufacturing, or furnish the sheer necessities of the people, that must necessarily be directly controlled by a Socialist society. "It may be granted," says Kautsky, "that small establishments will have a definite position in the future in many branches of industry that produce directly for human consumption, for machines manufacture essentially only products in bulk, while many purchasers desire that their personal taste shall be considered. It is easily possible that under a proletarian régime the number of small businesses may increase as the well-being of the masses increases." Of such industries Kautsky says that they can produce for private customers or even for the open market. As to-day, he insists, so also in the future, it will be open to the working people to employ themselves either in public or private industry. "A seamstress, for example," he says, "can occupy herself for a time in a national factory, and at another time make dresses for private customers at home, then again she can sew for another customer in her own house, and finally she may, with a few comrades, unite in a coöperative for the manufacture of clothing for sale. "The most manifold forms of property in the means of production--national, municipal, coöperatives of consumption and production and private industry can exist beside each other in a Socialist society--the most diverse forms of industrial organization, bureaucratic, trades union, coöperative and individual; the most diverse forms of remunerative labor, fixed wages, time wages, piece wages, profit sharing in the economies in raw material, machinery, etc., profit sharing in the results of intensive labor; the most diverse forms of distribution of products, like contract by purchase from the warehouses of the State, from municipalities, from coöperatives of production, from producers themselves, etc., etc. _The same manifold character of economic mechanism that exists to-day is possible in a Socialistic society._ Only the hunting and the hunted, the struggling and the resisting, the annihilating and being annihilated of the present competitive struggle are excluded, and therewith the contrast between exploiter and exploited." (Italics mine.)[296] Equally important, or more important, than private coöperative industries in the Socialist State, it is expected, will be the increase of private _organizations of other kinds_, especially in the fields of publications, education, etc., by what Kautsky calls free associations, which will serve art and science and public life and advance production in these spheres in the most diverse ways, or undertake it directly, as the associations which to-day bring out plays, publish newspapers, purchase artistic works, publish writings, fit out scientific expeditions. _He expects such private organizations to play an even more important rôle than the government_, for "it is their destiny to enter into the place now occupied by capital and individual production and _to organize and to lead mankind as a social being_."[297] (Italics mine.) "The utmost restriction of private property under Socialism," Mrs. Gilman says, "leaves us still every article of personal use and pleasure. One may still 'own' land by paying the government for it as now; with such taxation, however, as would make it very expensive to own too much! One may own one's house and all that is in it: one's clothes and tools and decorations; one's horses, carriages and automobiles; one's flying machines--presently. All 'personal property' remains in our personal hands. "But no man or group of men could own the country's coal and decide how much the public can have, and what we must pay for it. Private holding of public property would be abolished."[298] It can never be too often repeated or too strongly emphasized that, with some unfortunate exceptions, from the time of Marx to the present, Socialists have opposed not private property, but capitalism. It is the domination of society by the capitalists, _i.e._ "capitalism" or the capitalist system, that is to be done away with. "The distinguishing feature of Communism," wrote Marx, using this word instead of Socialism, "is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of capitalist property. But modern capitalist property is the final and most complete expression of that system of producing and appropriating products that is based on class antagonism, on the expropriation of the many by the few."[299] In seeking the better organization of industry and leaving the most perfect freedom to individuals and to private organizations, what the Socialists are really aiming at is really to restrict the government to _a government of things rather than to a government of men_; and this phrase is in common use among them. It is sought not to increase the power of higher officials over government employees and citizens, but, on the contrary, to limit their powers to the necessities of industry itself, and to leave the most perfect and complete freedom to the individual _in every other sphere_, as well as in industry, so far as the physical conditions themselves allow. There is no doubt, for instance, that whole departments of restrictive legislation directed against individual liberty would at once be repealed by any Socialist government (though not by a government of so-called "State Socialists"). Perhaps the idea is best expressed by the Belgian Socialist, Vandervelde:-- "The capitalist State has as an end the government of men; it needs centralized power, ministers ready to employ force, functionaries blindly obeying the least sign. Enlarge its domain [_i.e._ institute 'State Socialism.'--W.] and you will create a vast barracks, you will institute a republic of scoundrels. "The Socialist State, on the contrary, will have for its end an administration of things; it will need a decentralized organization, practical men of science, industrial forces over which spontaneity and initiative will be required above every other quality."[300] Surely such a State does not resemble in any way the paternalistic, bureaucratic capitalism or "State Socialism" towards which we are at present tending. "It is quite as possible," says Mr. Spargo, "for a government to exploit the workers in the interests of a privileged class as it is for private individuals, or quasi-private corporations, to do so. Germany with her State-owned railroads, or Austria-Hungary and Russia with their great government monopolies, are not more Socialistic, but less so than the United States, where these things are owned by individuals or corporations. The United States is nearer Socialism for the reason that its political institutions have developed farther towards pure democracy than those of the other countries named.... The real _motif_ of Socialism is not merely to change the form of industrial organization and ownership, but to eliminate exploitation.... Every abuse of capitalism calls forth a fresh installment of legislation restrictive of personal liberty, with an army of prying officials. Legislators keep busy making laws, judges keep busy interpreting and enforcing them, and a swarm of petty officials are kept busy attending to this intricate machine of popular government. In sober truth, it must be said that capitalism has created, and could not exist without, the very bureaucracy it charges Socialism with attempting to foist upon the nation."[301] The Socialists are as far from proposing anything resembling a system of mechanical and absolute equality as they are from attacking personal or industrial liberty. Ninety-nine and one half per cent of the product of the men of the different social classes, says Edward Bellamy, "is due in every case to advantages afforded by modern civilization."[302] So that if one man is twice as capable as another, it merely raises the proportion of the product due to his personal efforts from one half of one per cent to one per cent. International Socialism realizes with Bellamy that the product is social in far greater proportion than is at present recognized, but it does not deny that there are cases in which the contribution of the individual is more important even than everything that can be attributed to his social advantages. It does not propose, therefore, to level incomes. It is true that this communist principle of Bellamy's has a wide practical application both in the Socialist scheme of things and in present-day society, as, for example, in free schools and parks, and in the "State Socialist" program. But the extension of such communism, the distribution of services to the general public without charge, is due to-day, not to any acceptance of the general principle, but to the fact that it is inconvenient or impossible to attempt to distribute the cost of many services among individuals in proportion as they take advantage of them. Kautsky expresses the prevailing Socialist view when he says that the _principle_ of equality, if distinguished from mere _artificial leveling_, will play a certain rôle in a Socialist society. Without any definite legislation in that direction the natural economic forces of such a society will tend to raise low wages, and at the same time, by the increase of competition for higher positions, to lower somewhat the highest salaries. For if Socialists are opposed to any kind of artificial equality or leveling, they are still more opposed to artificial inequality, and all the initial advantages that arise out of the possession of wealth or privileges in education will be done away with.[303] On the supposition that Socialism proposes a communistic leveling of income, it has been stated very often by Socialists that it would be necessary to abolish wages, but there is no authority for this either from Karl Marx or from any of his most prominent successors. It is "wage slavery" or "the wage system" that is to be abolished. In his letter on the Gotha Program written in 1875 Marx said that there will be applied to wages "the principle which at present governs the exchange or merchandise to that degree in which identical values are being exchanged"; that is to say, supply and demand, when it operates _freely_, will give us a standard also in a Socialist system. There will be no starvation wages, no inflated salaries, no "rent" of educational advantages, no unearned income and no monopoly prices, but automatically adjustable prices and wages will continue. In 1896 Jules Guesde, perhaps the best known disciple of Marx in France, expressed nearly the same idea in the Chamber of Deputies--"The play of supply and demand," he said, "will have sufficed to determine without any arbitrary or violent act, that problem of distribution which had seemed insoluble to you before." Here again we see that Socialism, in its aversion to all artificial systems and every restriction of personal liberty is far more akin to the individualism of Herbert Spencer than it is to the "State Socialism" of Plato. Socialists expect their children to be far wiser and more fortunate than themselves, and do not intend to attempt to decide anything for them that can well be left undecided. They intend only that these children shall have the freedom and power necessary to direct society as they think best. The few principles I have mentioned are perhaps the most important of those they believe to be the irreducible minimum needed to insure this result. FOOTNOTES: [292] H. G. Wells, "This Misery of Boots," pp. 29-32. [293] Alfred Russell Wallace, "The Railways and the Nation," the _Arena_, January, 1907. [294] Anton Menger, "L'État Socialiste" (Paris, 1904), p. 348. [295] Karl Kautsky, "The Social Revolution," pp. 121-123. [296] Karl Kautsky, "The Social Revolution," pp. 165-167. [297] Karl Kautsky, "The Social Revolution," p. 179. [298] Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the _Forerunner_ (1910). [299] The Communist Manifesto. [300] Émile Vandervelde, "Collectivism," p. 126. [301] John Spargo, "Socialism." [302] Edward Bellamy, "Equality," p. 89. [303] Karl Kautsky, "Das Erfurter Programm," pp. 161-162. INDEX Abbot, Lyman, 33, 36, 97, 283, 284. AGRICULTURE, 7, 85, 96, 300-323. America, _see_ United States. _American Federation of Labor_, _see_ United States Labor Unions. Amsterdam, _see_ International Congresses. André, 381. _Appeal to Reason, The_, 321, 430. Asquith, Herbert, 153, 362. Augagneur, 132, 134, 398. Australasia, the Labour Parties of, 85, 86, 92-94, 128, 146, 151, 168, 174. Australasia, "States Socialism" in: the labor policy, 53, 86; agrarian and land policy, 85, 88, 89; government ownership, 84, 85, 89-91. Austria, the Socialist Party of, 239, 247, 252, 259, 347. Baden, 256-264. Baker, Ray Stannard, 32. Barnes, George, 164, 165. Bauer, Otto, 239, 247. Bebel, August: on reformism, 117, 123, 126, 130, 131; on revolutionary politics, 232; on the revolutionary trend, 251, 252, 254, 255, 258-264; on the class struggle, 281; on the agricultural problem, 301; on the general strike, 390, 391; on revolution, 416, 418, 419. Belgium, the Socialist Party of, 139, 141, 146, 252. Bellamy, Edward, 435. Belloc, Hilaire, 160, 161, 163. Berger, Victor: and the "State Socialist" labor policy, 63; on reformism, 126, 211; as leader of Milwaukee Socialists, 178, 189, 195, 202-207; on revolutionary politics, 240-242; on the agricultural and land question, 317, 318; on political revolution, 418. Bernstein, Edward, 1, 99, 179, 180, 240, 285, 286, 331. Bismarck, 43, 403, 404. Bissolati, 140-144. Bland, Hubert, 161. Bohn, Frank, 373-375. _Boston Herald, The_, 379. Boudin, Louis, 180. Bowling, Peter, 69, 70. Brandeis, Louis, 60. Briand, Aristide, 126, 132-134, 137, 388, 394-398, 421, 422. _Bridgeport Socialist, The_, 193. Brisbane, Arthur, 33-35, see also _New York Journal_. Brooks, John Graham, x. Brousse, Paul, 135. Bryan, William Jennings, 30, 180, 341. Burns, John, 251, 357. Butler, Nicholas Murray, 392. _Call, New York, The_, 198, 272, 399. Canada, compulsory arbitration in, 78-80. Canada, the Socialist Party of, 288. Carnegie, Andrew, 63, 97, 151, 152. CATHOLIC CHURCH, 87, 258. Chesterton, G. K., 160. Churchill, Winston: and the Social reform program, 2, 4-7, 9, 11, 12; and the politics of state capitalism, 42; and the state capitalist labor policy, 50, 54, 55, 57-59; and compulsory arbitration, 82; and the Labor Party, 151, 152; and the class struggle, 280, 298; and labor unions, 348, 360, 361, 363. _Civic Federation, The_, 343, 344, 419-421. Clark, Professor John Bates, 124, 236, 237. Clark, Victor S., 66, 69, 79, 80, 90. CLASS STRUGGLE, THE, 33-36, 135-136, 245-247, 276-287, 297-299, 347; _see also_ REVOLUTION. _Collier's Weekly_, xi, 199, 397. Compère-Morel, 201, 309, 315. Davenport, Daniel, 68. Debs, Eugene V.: on "State Socialism," 83; on reformism, 175-177, 191; on labor unions, 335, 343-345; on syndicalism, 366, 372, 375; on revolution, 401. DEMOCRATIC REFORMS, 31-45, 148-150, 155, 184, 217-230, 378, 379. Denmark, 259, 260. De Toqueville, Alexander, 130. Devine, Edward, 61. Dreher, W. C., 94, 269. Duchez, Louis, 332, 369. EDUCATION, _see_ PUBLIC SCHOOLS. Eliot, Charles W., 51, 79, 80, 100-105. Elm, von, 391. Engels, Friedrich, 112-115, 231-233. Fabian Society, _see_ Great Britain. Ferri, Enrico, 132. Fischer, Richard, 263. Fisher, Irving, 53. Fisher, Premier, 85. Flexner, Abraham, 52. France, labor unions in, 366, 377-384, 388, 394-398, 412, 414. France, the Socialist Party of: reformism in, 135-139, 200, 240, 244, 247, 274; on the land and agricultural question, 309, 315-318; on labor unions (_see_ France, labor unions); the revolution, 390, 414, 417, 418, 421, 422, 424. Frank, 257, 259, 262. _Frankfurter Zeitung_, 256. Garment Workers, United, 190, 350. Gary, Judge, 16, 29. Gaynor, William J., 195, 283. George, Henry, 13, 14, 97, 320, 323. Germany, "labor unions" in, 68, 336, 346, 347, 352, 384, 385. Germany, the Socialist Party of: position on reformism in, 125, 128, 217-235, 245-247; its revolutionary trend, 248-270; position on class struggle, 280, 284, 285, 288-291, 327-331; the agricultural question in, 300-304, 307, 309, 312, 317, 318; the revolution in, 389-391, 403, 404, 407, 414, 419, 423, 424. Germany, "State Socialism" in, 2, 4, 43, 51, 52, 55-57, 94-96; _see also_ Bismarck. Ghent, W. J., 205, 210. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 433. Gompers, Samuel, 121, 336-338, 341-343, 345-347, 349. GOVERNMENT OWNERSHIP, 4, 14, 16, 17, 24, 85, 90, 111, 112, 126, 146-147, 207-209, 233-234. Grayson, Victor, 122. Great Britain, labor unions: compulsory arbitration, 68; attitude to class struggle, 341, 348; the new unionism, 354, 355-366, 371, 372. Great Britain, the Labour and Socialist parties of (_see also_ MacDonald, Shaw, Wells, Webb, Hardie, etc.): The Labour Party, 1, 44, 123, 146-151, 164-168, 173, 174; The Fabian Society, 2, 47, 62, 149, 152-157, 159-164, 410-412; The Social-Democratic Party, 123; The Independent Labour Party, 146, 147, 151-153, 164-167, 240; The Socialist Party, 167, 168. Great Britain, "State Socialism" in: the Social reform program, 1-12; the politics of the New Capitalism, 42-45; the labor policy, 47-51, 53-59, 61, 62; compulsory arbitration, 80-83; the school question, 104; "State Socialism" and the Socialists, 122, 123, 146, 147, 153. Guerard, 381. Guesde, Jules, 131, 137, 250, 318, 424, 436. Hadley, President, 51. Hanford, Benjamin, 211. Hard, William, 60. Hardie, James Keir, 146, 147, 164, 165. Harlan, Justice, 202. Hartshorn, Vernon, 355. Haywood, William, 366, 371-376. Hearst, William Randolph, 33, 215. Herron, George D., 238, 335. Hervé, Gustave, 138, 295, 372, 375, 382, 417, 418, 422. Hillquit, Morris, 210, 213. Hobson, John A., 50, 99, 150, 157, 158. Holmes, George K., 97. Howe, Frederick C., 15. Hoxie, Professor Robert F., 175. Hughes, Jessie Wallace, 41, 68, 176, 339, 390. Hungary, 152, 163, 336, 345. _Independent, The_, x, 124. INDUSTRIAL UNIONISM, 354-386. International Socialist Congresses: Paris (1900), 139, 248, 249; Amsterdam (1904), 137-139, 248-251; Stuttgart (1907), 406. _International Socialist Review, The_, 372. Italy, the labor unions of, 376. Italy, the Socialist Party of, 140-145, 398. Jaurès, Jean: on reformism, 132-139, 141, 144, 146; on revolutionary politics, 242, 244; on the revolutionary trend, 249-251; on the general strike, 389, 390. _Justice_, 123, 167. Kautsky, Karl: on the first step towards Socialism, 111, 112; on reformism, 153; on reform by menace of revolution, 217-227; on revolutionary politics, 233-236, 244-247; on the revolutionary trend, 248, 249, 253, 264-268, 273, 274; on the class struggle, 290, 291, 296, 297, 299; on the land and agricultural question, 300-304, 307, 312, 317, 318; on the working class, 327-330; on labor unions, 346; on syndicalism, 384-385; on political revolution, 416, 419, 423, 424; on the transition to Socialism, 431-433, 435. Kelly, Edmond, 63, 128, 357. Kirkpatrick, George R., 408-410. LABOR LEGISLATION, 46-96, 137, 339. LABOR UNIONS, 66-84, 334-400. Labour Party, _see_ Great Britain and Australasia. Labriola, Arturo, 376. Lafargue, Paul, 232, 247, 318. La Follette, Robert M., 25, 26, 68, 179, 180, 182, 187, 277, 341, 393. _La Follette's Weekly_, 1, 23, 188. Lagardelle, Herbert, 376-382, 417. LAND QUESTION, 3-6, 87-89, 92, 93, 96, 113, 234, 300-323. La Salle, Ferdinand, 248, 425. Ledebour, 254, 255. Legien, Karl, 342, 347. Le Rossignol and Stewart, 70-75, 89, 91. Liebknecht, Karl, 258, 403, 404, 408. Liebknecht, Wilhelm, ix, 117, 125, 236, 248, 250, 288, 289, 327. Lincoln, 278. Lloyd George, David: and the social reform program, 2, 7-11; and the politics of State Capitalism, 42-44; and the State capitalist labor policy, 48, 49, 56, 62; and compulsory arbitration, 80; and the Labor Party, 151; and labor unions, 360, 386. London, Jack, 410. Louis, Paul, 225, 382, 383. Lunn, George R., 198. Luxemburg, Rosa, 416. McCarthy, Mayor, 190, 332. _McClure's Magazine_, 24, 98. MacDonald, J. R.: on the reformist policy, 1, 123, 273; as spokesman for the Labor Party, 146-152, 164-167; on syndicalism, 360, 365, 386. Machinists, 349. Maxwell, Superintendent, 105. Mann, Tom, 357-359, 364, 365, 370-372. Martin, John, 235. Marx, Karl: Socialism viewed as a movement, ix, x; on "State Socialism," 111-115; on Socialist political policy, 117, 118, 130, 212, 213, 231, 260; on agriculture, 303; on revolution, 424; on Socialist labor union policy, 352, 356; on the policy of a Socialist government, 433, 436; on the class struggle, 279, 284-285, 327, 332. Maurenbrecher, 246, 263, 264. Mehring, Franz, 425. Menger, Anton, 196, 232, 429. Mill, John Stuart, 129. Millerand, 122, 126, 132-134, 137, 248, 249, 393. Milwaukee, 126, 176, 178-196; _see also_ Berger and Thompson. _Milwaukee Journal, The_, 183, 184, 196. Miners, Western Federation of, 366-368. Mine Workers, United, 349-351, 367. Mitchell, John, 97, 336-338, 342-345, 357. Modigliani, 142, 143. Moody, John, 21. Morgan, J. P., 18, 47. Morley, Lord, 154. Moyer, 368. MUNICIPALIZATION, _see_ "MUNICIPAL SOCIALISM" and GOVERNMENT OWNERSHIP. "MUNICIPAL SOCIALISM," 161-163, 175, 176, 182-184, 188-201. Musatti, 144. NATIONALIZATION, _see_ GOVERNMENT OWNERSHIP. _New Age, The_, 1, 159, 160, 163. _New Yorker Volkszeitung_, 189, 195, 331. _New York Evening Journal, The_, 33-35, 183. _New York Evening Post, The_, 198. _New York Times, The_, 195. _New York World, The_, 183, 184. New Zealand, 168; _see also_ Australasia. Niel, 381. Oklahoma, 319, 320. _Outlook, The_, 202, 392, 397. Owen, Senator, 202. Panama Canal, 16, 17, 20. Pannekoek, 292, 293. Paris, _see_ International Congresses. Patten, Simon, 50, 51. Pelloutier, 377. Perkins, George W., 18, 47. _Philadelphia North American, The_, 347. Podrecca, 144. Post, Louis F., 13, 14. PUBLIC SCHOOLS, 99-105. Quelch, 167. Quessel, 264. Rappaport, 133, 201, 216. Reeves, William Pember, 70. REVOLUTION, 231-247, 387-425; _see also_ CLASS STRUGGLE. Rigola, 142. Rockefeller, John D., 19, 63. Roland-Holst, Henriette, 389-391. Roosevelt, Theodore: on the social reform program, 1; and on the economics of the New Capitalism, 16, 18, 29-31; on the politics of the New Capitalism, 36, 40; on the "State Socialist" labor policy, 59, 63; and compulsory arbitration, 79, 80, 82, 83; on the class struggle, 281-284, 287; on commission on Country Life, 309, 320; on labor unions, 368, 373; on government employees, 392, 396. Root, Elihu, 18. Rosebery, Lord, 10. Ross, Edward A., 14, 36. Russell, Charles Edward: on compulsory arbitration, 76-78; on the Labour Parties, 169-173; on reformism, 177, 178; on "State Socialism," 208-210. Russia, 390, 414. _Saturday Evening Post, The_, 97, 200. Seidel, Mayor, 192, 193, 196. Shaw, George Bernard: on the social reform program, 2; on the "State Socialist" labor policy, 47; on Socialism and democracy, 154, 155; on social classes, 325-327; on militarism, 410-412. Shibley, George, 341. Simons, A. M., 119, 120, 310, 316-318, 322. Singer, Paul, 255. Sladden, Tom, 294, 332. Snowden, Philip, 146, 152, 153, 164-166. Sombart, Werner, 243. Spargo, John, 213, 434. Steffens, Lincoln, 19, 20. Stokes, Mrs. J. G. Phelps, 420. Stokes, J. G. Phelps, 183, 184. Stuttgart, _see_ International Congresses. _Survey, The_, 64. Sweet, Ada C., 420, 421. Taft, William H., 16, 68, 79, 81, 98, 393. TAXATION, 8, 12, 96, 114; _see also_ LAND QUESTION, MUNICIPAL SOCIALISM, and GOVERNMENT OWNERSHIP. _Temps_ (Paris), 132. Thompson, Carl D., 122, 192, 193, 196. Thorne, Will, 365. Tillet, Ben., 356, 359, 365. Tolstoi, 358, 401, 402. TRADE UNIONS, _see_ LABOR UNIONS. Turati, 122, 140-145, 146. UNEARNED INCREMENT, _see_ LAND QUESTION. United States, labor unions in: on compulsory arbitration, 81; attitude to politics, 335-341; attitude to class struggle, 341-347; attitude to Socialist Party, 348-352; and "industrial unionism," 355-358, 366-375. United States, the Socialist Party of: "State Socialism" in, 62, 83; reformism in, 122, 123, 126, 175-209, 210-216, 238-242; on social classes, 288, 298, 331-335; on agricultural and land questions, 304-306, 309-323; on labor unions, _see_ United States, labor unions in; the revolution in, 399, 401, 405, 408-410, 418-420. United States, "States Socialism" in: the social reform program, 13-31; the politics of the New Capitalism, 16-31; The Politics of the New Capitalism, 32-42; the labor policy, 47, 48, 50-53, 59-65; compulsory arbitration, 67-69, 80-84; equal "opportunity," 97-99; the school question, 99-106; "State Socialism" and the Socialist, 206-209. Untermeyer, Samuel, 29. Vaillant, Edouard, 138, 139. Vandervelde, Émile: on reformism, 139, 141, 146; on agriculture, 301, 303, 317; on the working class, 331; on the policy of a Socialist government, 434. Viviani, 133, 134, 398. _Voice of Labour_ (Auckland, New Zealand), 168. _Vorwaerts_ (Berlin), 10. Walker, John, 350. Wallace, Alfred Russell, 429. Ward, Sir Joseph, 54. Waterson, Henry, 425. Webb, George H., 47. Webb, Sidney: on the social reform program, 2, 3; on the "State Socialist" and labor policy, 61; on Socialism and individualism, 153-155, 159, 164. Wells, H. G.: "Is Socialism a movement or an idea?" xi; on the social reform program, 3; on the "State Socialist" labor policy, 62; on British Socialism, 155-157, 159; on social classes, 296, 325; on the transition, 428. _Western Clarion, The_ (Vancouver), 332. White, William Allen, 32. Wilde, Oscar, 325. Wilson, Stitt, 271. Wilson, W. B., 67. Wilson, Woodrow, 26-29, 31, 36, 40, 68, 283. _The Worker_ (Brisbane, Australia), 128. Yvetot, 414. Printed in the United States of America. 
30758	----	Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 30758-h.htm or 30758-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30758/30758-h/30758-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30758/30758-h.zip) COMMUNISM AND CHRISTIANISM * * * * * * TO THE PURCHASER: Lying Supernaturalism is going; robbing Capitalism is falling; saving Laborism is rising, and leveling Unionism is coming. This booklet, Communism and Christianism, is a contribution by Bishop and Mrs. Wm. M. Brown, of Galion, Ohio, towards the furtherance of these downward, upward and forward movements, the most fortunate events in the whole history of mankind. We hope that you will read, mark, learn and inwardly digest its extremely revolutionary, comprehensive and salutary teachings concerning both religion and politics with the happy result of becoming an apostle of its illuminating and inspiring interpretation of the scientific gospel of Marx and Engels to wage slaves, the only gospel which points the way to redemption from their body and soul destroying slavery. You may become a missionary of this gospel in your neighborhood, and as such do more good than all its orthodox preachers, teachers, editors and politicians together at no financial cost to yourself by ordering booklets at our special rates: six copies, $1.00; twenty-five copies, $3.00, prepaid, and selling them to workers at our retail price, 25 cents for one copy. As we make no profit and do no bookkeeping, cash should accompany all orders. To organizations working for bail, defense, liberation or unemployment funds, Bishop and Mrs. Brown donate twenty-five copies for each twenty-five ordered with remittance. The Bradford-Brown Educational Company, Inc. Publishers--Galion, Ohio Editions and Their Dates. First Edition, 10,000 copies, October 11th, 1920. Second Edition, 10,000 copies, revised and enlarged from 184 to 204 pages, February 15th, 1921. Third Edition, 10,000 copies, March 2nd, 1921. Fourth Edition, 10,000 copies (2,000 in cloth binding), revised and enlarged from 204 to 224 pages, April 9, 1921. [Illustration: Rt. Rev. William Montgomery Brown, D. D. Fifth Bishop of Arkansas, Resigned; Member House of Bishops Protestant Episcopal Church; Sometime Archdeacon of Ohio and Special Lecturer at Bexley Hall, the Theological Seminary of Kenyon College. Now Episcopos in partibus Bolshevikium et Infidelium.] * * * * * * COMMUNISM AND CHRISTIANISM Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View by WILLIAM MONTGOMERY BROWN Banish the Gods from the Skies and Capitalists from the Earth and make the world safe for Industrial Communism. The Bradford-Brown Educational Company, Inc. Publishers ... Galion, Ohio Fortieth Thousand DEDICATION This booklet is gratefully dedicated to the Proletariat from whom Bishop and Mrs. Brown are sprung, and to whose unrequited labors (not to the good providence of a divinity) they owe their wealth, leisure and opportunities. PROLEGOMENA[A] Religion is the opium of the people. The suppression of religion as the happiness of the people is the revindication of its real happiness. The invitation to abandon illusions regarding its situation is an invitation to abandon a situation which has need of illusions. Criticism of religion is therefore the germ of a criticism of the vale of tears, of which religion is the holy aspect. --Marx. Not only, indeed, is the struggle against religion intellectually useful, but it cannot conscientiously be avoided, for religion is used against the Socialist movement by the possessing class in every country. But to abolish religion is not to abolish exploitation, because only one of the enemy's guns will have been silenced. The workers have, above all, to dislodge the capitalist class from power. The religious question, and indeed all else, is secondary to this. The test of admission to a Socialist Party must be neither more nor less than acceptance of the following seven working principles and the policy of Socialism as a class movement: 1. Society as at present constituted is based upon the ownership of the means of living (i. e., land, factories, railways, etc.) by the capitalist or master class, and the consequent enslavement of the working class, by whose labor alone wealth is produced. 2. In society, therefore, there is an antagonism of interests, manifesting itself as a class struggle, between those who possess but do not produce and those who produce but do not possess. 3. This antagonism can be abolished only by the emancipation of the working class from the domination of the master class by the conversion into the common property of society of the means of production and distribution, and their democratic control by the whole people. 4. As in the order of social evolution the working class is the last to achieve its freedom, the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex. 5. This emancipation must be the work of the working class itself. 6. As the machinery of capitalist government, including the armed forces of the nation, conserves the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers, the working class must organize consciously and politically for acquiring the powers of government, national and local, in order that this machinery, including these forces, may be converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation and the overthrow of privilege, aristocratic and plutocratic.[B] 7. As all political parties are but the expression of class interests, and as the interest of the working class is diametrically opposed to the interests of all sections of the master-class, the party seeking working-class emancipation must be hostile to every other party. If a man supports the church, or in any respect allows religious ideas to stand in the way of the foregoing seven essential principles of socialism or the activity of a Party, he proves thereby that he does not accept Socialism as fundamentally true and of the first importance, and his place is outside. No man can be consistently both a Socialist and a Christian. It must be either the socialist or the religious principle that is supreme, for the attempt to couple them equally betrays charlatanism or lack of thought. There is, therefore, no need for a specifically anti-religious test. So surely does the acceptance of Socialism lead to the exclusion of the supernatural, that the Socialist has little need for such terms as Atheist, Free-thinker, or even Materialist; for the word Socialist, rightly understood, implies one who, on all such questions, takes his stand on positive science, explaining all things by purely natural causation, Socialism being not merely a politico-economic creed, but also an integral part of a consistent world philosophy. So long as the anarchy of modern competitive society exists, the accompanying obscurity and confusion in social life will continue to shelter superstition. This point is illustrated in the following reference by Marx to the United States: When we see in the very country of complete political emancipation not only that religion exists, but retains its vigour, there is no need, I hope, for other proofs in order to show that the existence of religion is not incompatible with the full political maturity of the State. But if religion exists it is because of a defective social organization, of which it is necessary to seek the cause in the very essence of the State. Class domination is the essence of the modern State. It is based on competitive anarchy and parasitism--the evidences of a defective social organization. It still leaves room for religion, because it maintains ignorance and confusion by its structure and contradictions, and because religion is fostered as a handmaiden of class rule. Nevertheless, the growth of the social forces of production within modern society, and the better knowledge the workers obtain of their true relations to each other and to Nature, loosen the chains of ghost worship and mysticism from their limbs and lessen the power of religion as a political weapon in the hands of the ruling class, while they form, at the same time, the material and intellectual preparation for an intelligently organized society. The matter has been put in a nutshell by Marx in the chapter on "Commodities" in "Capital," volume I. The religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of every-day life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellow men and to nature. The life process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan. This, however, demands for society a certain material groundwork or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development. It is, therefore, a profound truth that Socialism is the natural enemy of religion. Through Socialism alone will the relations between men in society, and their relations to Nature, become reasonable, orderly, and completely intelligible, leaving no nook or cranny for superstition. The entry of Socialism is, consequently, the exodus of religion. FOOTNOTES: [A] From the Official Manifesto by the Socialist Party of Great Britain, showing the Antagonism between Socialism and Religion. [B] This section has been slightly changed to make sure of guarding against the advocacy of armed insurrection. Socialists throughout the world want a peaceful evolution from capitalism into socialism; but whether or not it will be so in the case of any country is, as Lenin prophesies, to be determined by the dealings of its capitalists with its laborers. In reply to an inquiry on this vexed subject by an English author, Lenin said, in effect, that in England, as elsewhere, the tactics of the capitalist class will determine the program of the labor class. THE INTERNATIONAL PARTY. Arise, ye prisoners of starvation! Arise, ye wretched of the earth, For justice thunders condemnation, A better world's in birth. No more tradition's chains shall bind us, Arise, ye slaves! no more in thrall! The earth shall rise on new foundations, We have been naught, we shall be all. We want no condescending saviors. To rule us from a judgment hall. We workers ask not for their favors, Let us consult for all. To make the thief disgorge his booty, To free the spirit from its cell, We must ourselves decide our duty, We must decide and do it well. The law oppresses us and tricks us, Taxation drains the victim's blood; The rich are free from obligations, The laws the poor delude. Too long we've languished in subjection, Equality has other laws: "No rights," says she, "without their duties. No claims on equals without cause." Toilers from shops and fields united, The party we of all who work; The earth belongs to us, the people, No room here for the shirk. How many on our flesh have fattened! But if the noisome birds of prey Shall vanish from the sky some morning, The blessed sunlight still will stay. CONTENTS Page PROLEGOMENA 5 PART I. COMMUNISM: THE NATURALISTIC THIS-WORLDLY GOSPEL FOR THE COMING AGE OF CLASSLESS EQUALITY AND ECONOMIC FREEDOM 13 PART II. CHRISTIANISM: A SUPERNATURALISTIC OTHER-WORLDLY GOSPEL FOR THE PASSING AGE OF CLASS INEQUALITY AND ECONOMIC SLAVERY 85 APPENDIX 157 Hitherto, every form of society has been based on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule, because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.--Marx and Engels. COMMUNISM AND CHRISTIANISM ANALYZED AND CONTRASTED FROM THE MARXIAN AND DARWINIAN POINTS OF VIEW PART I. Communism: The Naturalistic This-worldly Gospel for the Coming Age of Classless Equality and Economic Freedom--An Open Letter to a Brother Bishop and a Christian Socialist Comrade. Come over and help us. Abandon Christian Socialism for Marxian Communism. FOREWORD[C] The concept of God, as an explanation of the Universe, is becoming entirely untenable in this age of scientific inquiry. The laws of the persistence of force and the indestructibility of matter, and the unending interplay of cause and effect, make the attempt to trace the origin of things to an anthropomorphic God who had no cause, as futile as is the Oriental cosmology which holds that the world rests on an elephant, and, as an afterthought, that the elephant stands on a tortoise. The inflexible laws of the known universe cannot logically be held to cease where our immediate experience ends, to make way for an unscientific concept of an uncaused and creating being. The Creation idea is unsupported by evidence, and is in conflict with every scientific law. Socialism is consistent only with that monistic view which regards all phenomena as expressions of the underlying matter-force reality and as parts of the unity of Nature which interact according to inviolable laws. Socialism is the application of science, the archenemy of religion, to human social relationships; and just as the basic principle of the philosophy of Socialism finds itself in conflict with religion, so does it, as a propagandist movement, find religion acting against it. FOOTNOTES: [C] From the Official Manifesto by the Socialist Party of Great Britain, showing the Antagonism between Socialism and Religion. COMMUNISM: THE NATURALISTIC THIS-WORLDLY GOSPEL FOR THE COMING AGE OF CLASSLESS EQUALITY AND ECONOMIC FREEDOM. Make the World safe for Industrialism by turning it upside down with Workers above and Owners below. My dear Brother and Comrade: Your letter of June 13th[D] relative to the meeting called for the 27th, in the interest of a more radical socialist movement in our church, came duly to hand, and its invitation to attend, or at least write, was highly appreciated. My days for attending things are, I fear, past. I did not feel able to go to the Annual Convention of the Socialist Party of Ohio, which met much nearer here on the same date, June 27th, and ended on the 29th with a great picnic--a communion, as real and holy, as was ever celebrated. I cannot even be sure of being with you in the House of Bishops during the meeting of the General Convention in October. However, I intended you to have a letter and set the 26th aside for the writing of it, but I work slowly now and its hours slipped away while I was making notes until only one was left. It was spent in trying to condense all I wanted to say in the letter into a telegram. What I regard as the best of these efforts was taken to the office at seven p. m. on that day: Make world safe for democracy by banishing Gods from sky, and capitalists from earth. Here are four of the many other efforts: (1) Come over and help us. Abandon Christian Socialism for Marxian Communism; (2) Make world safe for democracy by turning it upside down with workers above and owners below; (3) Revolutionize capitalism out of state and orthodoxy out of church; (4) Come over and help us. Abandon reformatory for revolutionary socialism. What I wanted you to understand is that, in my judgment, there can be no deliverance for the world from the troubles by which it is overwhelmed so long as theism holds the religious field and capitalism the political field. I. Religion and politics are the two halves of the sphere in which humanity lives, moves and has its social being. Religion is the ideal and politics the practical half of this sphere. Both halves naturally exist as the result of the same natural law of necessity: the matter-force law which makes it necessary for a man to feed, clothe and shelter his body in order to preserve it and its life. Marxian socialism is at once this religion and politics, all there is of both of them which is for the good of the world as a whole. Marxian socialism is a revolutionary movement towards doing away with the existing competitive system for producing and distributing the basic necessities of life (foods, clothes and houses) for the profit of a few parasites, and substituting a system for making and distributing them for the use of all workers. So far some competing, lying, robbing, enslaving system for the production and distribution of these necessities has been the basis of every religion and politics--of none more than the Christian and American, and they with the rest have been tried in the balance of experience and found utterly wanting. Indeed, they are making a hell, not a heaven, of the earth in general and of our country in particular. Christianism as a religion has collapsed. It promised to secure to the world peace and good will, but it has never had more of strife and hate. The tremendous English-German (or if you prefer German-English) war was a conflict at arms between the most outstanding among Christian nations and it was solemnly alleged to have been fought for the high purpose of ending such conflicts; but in reality it scattered the hot coals of war throughout the world, several of which were fanned into blazing by its so-called peace conference and others are ominously smouldering. Americanism as a politics has collapsed. It promised a classless government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people, but has instead given a government of a class, by a class, for a class. This class, comprising not more than one out of every ten of the population, is the capitalist class, which owns the means and machines for the production of the necessities of life and for their distribution, a class which, as such, though bearing no necessary relationship to either one of the branches of this business, yet realizes enormous profits from both, profits which are wholly at the expense of the large class, at least nine out of every ten, which does all the work connected with the making of the machines and the operating of them. This government was to make the country safe for democracy by securing to it the privilege of free speech and free assemblage, the existence of an independent press and the right of appeal for the redress of grievances; but our fathers did not have any too much of these liberties, we have had less and, if the competitive system for the production and distribution of commodities for the profit of the small owning class is to continue, our children are to have none. Indeed, this is already true of the overwhelming majority, the working class. Its representatives have little if any real part in the government. They are completely subjected to the rule of the owning class. There never has been a body, mind and soul destroying slavery which equaled theirs, either as to the number of men, women and children involved in it, or as to the degrees of misery to which it doomed its victims. Nor is the end yet. The world war certainly has taken American slavery out of the frying pan into the fire rather than into the water. American slaves appeal to their government as Jewish slaves appealed to one of their kings for relief and receive the same answer, not in words but in deeds which speak louder: Thy father made our yoke grievous; now therefore make thou the grievous service of thy father, and his heavy yoke which he put upon us, lighter, and we will serve thee. And he said unto them, Depart yet for three days, then come again to me. And the people departed. So all the people came the third day as the king had appointed and the king answered them roughly, saying: My father made your yoke heavy, and I will add to your yoke: My father also chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions. So when all Israel saw that the king harkened not unto them, the people answered the king, saying, What portion have we in David? As to details history does not exactly repeat itself and, therefore, I do not believe that the other planets of the universe, of which no doubt there are many billions, are inhabited by human beings of the same type as those of the earth, nor that its men, women and children are to have their bodies reconstructed and resurrected, after they have been disintegrated by death. Such beings on other planets and such reconstructions on this planet would in every case involve a detailed repetition of infinitely numerous processes of evolution which had extended through an eternal past. Yet in every part of the universe and throughout all eternity, like causes ever have produced and ever shall produce like effect. If, therefore, the course of the Judean masters towards their slaves led to a successful revolt of ten out of twelve tribes, there is every reason for believing that the parallel course which the American masters are pursuing against their slaves will sooner or later issue in a revolution--a revolution which shall do away with both masters and slaves, leaving us with a classless America and a government concerned with the making of provisions for enabling all the people who are able and willing to work to supply themselves in abundance with the necessities of life and with the most desirable among the luxuries, rather than a government which provides that they who produce nothing shall have the cream and top milk of every necessity and the whole bottle of every luxury, leaving of the necessities only the blue milk for the producers of them and of the luxuries, not even the dregs. Under this government those who can but will not work will be allowed to starve themselves into a better mind and out of their laziness. The young and the old, the sick and crippled will have their rightful maintenance from the state and out of the best of everything. The deliverance of the world from commercial imperialism and the making of it safe for industrial democracy would prevent most of its unnecessary suffering and this great salvation is above all else dependent upon a knowledge of the truth. "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free"--free from all the avoidable ills of life, among them the diabolical trinity of evils, war, poverty and slavery. The happiness of the world will be promoted in extent and degree in proportion as the knowledge of the truth is disseminated by a twofold revelation: (1) the truth as it is revealed by history according to the Marxian interpretation thereof, a revelation of the truth which is saving the world from the robbing impositions of the capitalistic interpretation of politics, and (2) the truth as it is revealed by nature, according to the Darwinian interpretation thereof, a revelation which is saving the world from the robbing impositions of the supernaturalistic interpretations of religion. Man has always had as a basis for his thought, belief and action, a system for the production and distribution of the necessities of life. This is the discovery of Karl Marx which is known as the scientific or materialistic interpretation of history. According to the scientific interpretation of history which is taught by naturalistic socialism, man is what he is, and his institutions are what they are, because he has fed, clothed and housed himself as he has. According to the traditional interpretation of history, which is taught by supernaturalistic Christianism, man is what he is because of his thinking, believing and acting with reference to a revelation of a god, as it has been interpreted by his inspired representatives, the great prophets and statesmen, like Isaiah and Luther, Moses and Washington. Perhaps the best proof of the correctness of the scientific or naturalistic explanation of the career of man and of the incorrectness of the traditional or supernaturalistic one is afforded by the history of morals, the soul of both religion and politics, without which neither could have any existence. Before the discovery of the art of agriculture, man was dependent for his food upon fruits and nuts, game and fish. When these sources of sustenance failed, the tribes living in the same neighborhood fought with each other in order that the victorious might eat the vanquished. During this period cannibalism was morally right, and it probably extended through at least two hundred thousand years, even into the Old Testament times. So righteous and holy was it that, in the course of time, the victims were recognized as saviour gods and the drinking of their blood and eating of their flesh constituted a Lord's Supper in which the god was eaten. Cannibalism is the basis of our sacrament of the holy communion of bread and wine. As a connecting link between these extremes there was the form of communion which consisted in the eating of animal sacrifices. By a sacrament with such an origin, you and I render our highest act of worship, though yours is still directed towards one among the supernaturalistic divinities and mine is now directed towards humanity. You say of a divinity: Thou, Lord, hast made me after thine own image and my heart cannot be at rest until I find rest in thee. I say of humanity: Thou, Lord, hast made me after thine own image and my heart cannot be at rest until it find rest in thee. Within the social realm humanity is my new divinity, and your divinity (my old one) is a symbol of it, or else, so I think, he is at best a fiction and at worst a superstition. You will be surprised, and I do not expect you to understand me, when I tell you that by translating the services and hymns from the language of my old literalism into that of my new symbolism, I am getting as much good out of them as ever and indeed more. I love the services, especially that great one, the Holy Communion, and the hymns, especially those great ones, Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah; Lead, Kindly Light; Abide With Me; and Jesus, Lover of My Soul. My experience has convinced me that the sentimental and poetical elements in religion, to which I attach as much importance as ever, are as readily excited and securely sustained by fixing thought and sympathy upon the martyred human savior, the working class, as upon a crucified divine saviour, who after all, as the suffering son of God, is but a symbol of the suffering sons and daughters of man, the workers, from whom all good things come. If grace at dinner means anything, it is addressed to a god who is the symbol of the many workers who did the innumerable things necessary to the producing and serving of it, without whom there would be nothing of all the good things on the table. In the representation about my pleasure in the services of the church and their value to me, and in many representations scattered throughout this letter, I have in mind the question of an unanswered letter of yours, bearing date, February 25th, 1919, the one in which you ask, in effect, by what right a man can remain in an institution after he has, as I have, abandoned its chief doctrines and aims as they are authoritatively interpreted. The right of revolution is the one by which I justify my course, and surely no consistent Protestant Christian or American citizen will doubt the solidity of this ground; for Protestantism and Americanism had their origin in revolutions. Our national declaration of independence contains this famous justification of political revolutions, and it is equally applicable to religious ones, for religion and politics are but the ideal and practical halves of the same social reality: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed: that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established, should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right--and it is their duty--to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their security. Jesus was nothing if he was not a revolutionist. Anyhow, his alleged mother is authoritatively represented as believing him to have been foreordained as one, for this song is put into her mouth: He hath showed strength with his arm: he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the mighty from their seat: and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away. This Christian socialism, like Bolshevik socialism, turns the idle rich empty away; but, whereas the Christian gives them no chance to get anything to eat, the Bolshevik allows them to have as much as the poor, if they will work as hard. Assuming for the sake of argument, that there may have been an historical Jesus who taught some of the doctrines, in accordance with the representations of the gospel, which are attributed to him, I am nevertheless justified in claiming that he was quite as heretical touching the faith of orthodox Judaism as I am touching that of orthodox Christianism. As to the Jewish faith he said, in effect, of himself what I say of myself: I have all of the potentialities of my own life within myself. I and my god are one. He dwells in me and I in him, and we are on the earth, not in the sky. As to the Jewish church and state, Jesus taught that they had become utterly antiquated and that it was the mission of himself and disciples to establish a new heaven, that is to remodel the church; and a new earth, that is, to remodel the state; both remodelings being with reference to the service of humanity by enlightening its darkness and alleviating its misery here and now, rather than teaching it to look for light and happiness elsewhere and elsewhen.[E] As for the faith and church of orthodox Christianism there is no reason for believing that he would be any more loyal to either than am I. His loyalty was to the truth and to the proletarian, and they (this faith and church) are disloyal to both, being ever on the side of tradition against science, and on the side of the owner against the worker. Jesus remained in the Jewish church, in spite of his many and great heresies, until he was put out by death. My contention is that in view of this example, whether it be, as you think, of an historical or, as I think, of a dramatic character, there is no reason why I should voluntarily go out of the Christian church. Religion in general and Christianity in particular are nothing unless they are embodiments of morality, and morality does not consist in professions of belief in a god and his revelations as they are recorded in a bible and condensed in a creed, but in a desire and effort to acquire a knowledge of the laws of nature in order that, by conformity to them, life may be made longer and happier. When this desire exists and this effort is made with reference to one's own self, they constitute morality; when with reference to one's own family and associates, they constitute religion, and when with reference to all others of contemporary and future generations, they constitute Christianity. But in making such distinctions the fact should not be lost sight of that at bottom there is no difference between morality, religion and Christianity. They are synonyms for the same virtues, the desire and effort to know and live the truth as it is revealed in the doings of nature. There are no other revelations of the truth, nor is there any other morality, religion or Christianity. Socialism is for me the one comprehensive term which is a synonym at once of morality, religion and Christianity. Marxian and Bolshevikian socialism are two halves of one thing, the theoretical half and the practical half. Marxism is socialism in theory. Bolshevism is (perhaps imperfectly as yet) socialism in practice. As long as gods dominate the sky and capitalists prevail upon the earth, the world will be safe for commercial imperialism, having a small heaven for the few rich masters and a large hell for the many poor slaves. Come over and help us make the world safe for industrial democracy by banishing the personal, conscious gods from the sky and the lying, robbing capitalists from the earth. But in coming there is no need for leaving your church any more than there is for leaving your state. During the short time which is for me, before the night cometh in which no man can work, I shall remain in both as long as the powers that be allow it, and do what little I can to revolutionize them--revolutionize the church into a school for the teaching of truth instead of lies, and revolutionize the state into a hive for the making of commodities for the use of all instead of for the profit of a few. In doing this I shall be following in the very footsteps of the human Jesus. After it was discovered that the ground, by planting and cultivating, would produce the necessities of life, when a tribe found that it had too little of it for its growing population, it would go to war with the weaker among adjacent tribes for the purpose of securing its territory; but from this on the vanquished were not eaten, and it was morally wrong to eat them. They were kept alive and put to work at raising harvests for their conquerors, hence arose the institution of slavery, and hence its moral rightness even in this country of the free, down to the beginning of the generation to which I belong. However, human slavery has never ended, nor will it ever end while the competitive system for the production of the necessities of life for profit rather than use continues. Human slavery is, so to speak, the basic ingredient of this system. Speaking broadly, there have been three forms of human slavery--the chattel, feudal and wage slaveries--the third much worse than the first, and the second intermediary between them. The chattel slave, as the adjective signifies, was the property of his master, as much so as were the horse or the mule with which he worked, and he was cared for in much the same way and for about the same reason. The feudal slave was as really a chattel as was his predecessor, only he had to look out for himself to a greater extent; and, more was expected from him of accomplishment for the opulence and glory of the master, especially insofar as these depended upon the success of his wars. The wage slave is, likewise, as really owned by his master as was the chattel or the feudal slave; but, if the master has no need for his service, he is altogether down and out, as the feudal slave was not and still less the chattel, and he has accomplished at least ten times more for his master than did either of his predecessors. So far man has produced and distributed the necessities of life by a competitive system. The existing form of this competition is known as capitalism. It has supplanted, or at least overshadowed, every other form and is, so to speak, monarch of all it surveys. The system as it now stands divides the world into two spheres--a small one, in which a few live surfeitingly by owning, and a large one, in which the many live starvingly by working; and, yet, ultimately, absolutely everything for both depends upon the worker and nothing at all on the owner. Yes, the worker is indispensable to the owner, as much so as (to use the classical illustration) the dog to the flea; but the owner is no more indispensable to the worker than a flea to a dog. As dogs would be much better off without fleas, so would workers without owners. The discovery that the itch is caused by a parasite was of an epoch making character because it led to the discovery that many, if not most of the diseases by which mankind and also animal kind are afflicted are of a parasitical character. This is as true of the social organism as of the physical. Capitalism is the tape worm of society. The existence of the master and slave classes inevitably gives rise to four struggles: (1) the struggle of the slaves with the master for better conditions, issuing in rebellions; (2) the struggle between masters for advantages in markets, issuing in wars; (3) the struggle between the slaves for jobs, issuing in a body and soul destroying poverty; and (4) the struggle of the slaves with the master for a reversal of conditions, issuing in revolutions. All this struggling between the classes and within them tends towards two results with both classes. In the case of the master class, these results are the making of the rich fewer and the remaining few richer. In the case of the slave class, these results are the making of the miserable poor more numerous and all less happy. While capitalism stands, all talk about peace on earth and good will among men will be so much hypocrisy; for, until it falls, the world will be divided into the slave and master classes and these four contentions with these results will continue to fill it with hatred and strife. II. The overthrow of capitalism in Russia is the greatest event in the history of the world and it has converted International Socialism (the Marxian revolutionary kind) from a theory into a condition. Theories come and go. Conditions remain and work. From this on revolutionary socialism will be working, night and day, with might and main, here and there, everywhen and everywhere, and its three herculean tasks are: (1) to dethrone the great imperialist, competitive capitalism; (2) to enthrone the great democrat, co-operative industrialism; and (3) to make the world safe for an industrial classless democracy. In less than three years revolutionary socialism in Russia has accomplished more of these three tasks for the world, than all the states and all the churches with all their wars have done in the whole course of man's career, extending through at least two hundred thousand years. Indeed they never did anything to these ends. On the contrary, what progress has been made towards them was made in spite of their strenuous opposition at every step. Revolutionary socialism is a world movement towards the deliverance of the producing slave from the non-producing master who has robbed him of the fruits of his toil and left him half dead on the wayside--the only effective movement to this humanitarian end. Revolutionary socialism is the Good Samaritan of the despoiled and wounded laborer. The reformatory kinds of socialism are so many priests and Levites who pass by on the other side. Of no reformatory socialism is this more true than of the Christian kind. Christian socialism is absolutely worthless, and its utter worthlessness is due to the essentially parasitic character of supernaturalistic or orthodox Christianity. Until the reformation, Christianity was dominated by monks--parasites who lived by begging, lying, and persecuting; and since then by capitalists--parasites who live by robbing, lying and warring. Monks and capitalists have this in common, that they are natives of the realm of parasitism. We shall never have peace on earth and good will among men until we have a parasiteless humanity, and we must wait for this until we have a classless world. Parasitism is a boon companion of classism. Nor can the earth ever be rid of its parasites until the celestial world is rid of the class gods which capitalists have made in their own image and likeness, nor until the terrestrial world is rid of the class states and codes, churches and gospels which their respective class kings or presidents and their class priests or preachers have had the gods of their making impose upon this world, in accordance with their interests and in the furtherance of their lying, robbing, warring schemes for the promotion of them. Neither capitalism nor Christianism is anything except insofar as it is a system of parasitism and as parasitic systems they have striking resemblances, nearly as many and close as indistinguishable twins. Both have gods, churches and priesthoods and these are in each case nothing but symbols. However, the god of capitalism, though only a symbol, is nevertheless real gold, below a real vault, and nearly all the world sincerely worships it. But the god of Christianism, though none the less symbolic, but rather more so, is an unreal imaginary spirit, a magnified man without a body, above an imaginary vault, and only a very small part of the world sincerely worships him. International socialism of the Marxian or Russian type, is for those who starvingly live by working, the most uplifting thing in the world, and for those who surfeitingly live by owning, it is the most depressing thing in the world. Wise people consider theories without losing too much, if any, sleep on their account, but they study conditions and lie awake nights over them. Millions of wise Americans have, in the past, been studying socialism as a theory but, in the future, they will study it as a condition, in the only way by which it can rightly and adequately be studied--the way of reading its official documents, accredited periodicals and books. Of all such, the most notable is the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels. This Manifesto is the Marxian gospel. I read two pages in it every day as faithfully as ever I read a chapter in the Jesuine gospel, and with much greater profit; for, whereas the gospel of Marx is exclusively concerned with this terrestrial world, about which I know much and for which I can do a little, the gospel of Jesus is as exclusively concerned with a celestial world, about which I know nothing and for which I cannot do the least. Here, as a sample of this gospel, I give half of yesterday's reading and most of today's: The immediate aim of the Communists (Socialists) is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties; formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat. The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of Communism. All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions. The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favor of bourgeois property. The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonism, on the exploitation of the many by the few. In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property. We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man's own labor, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence. Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of the petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has, to a great extent, already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily. Or do you mean modern bourgeois private property? But does wage-labor create any property for the laborer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i. e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labor, and which cannot increase except upon condition of getting a new supply of wage-labor for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage-labor. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism. To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion. Capital is therefore not a personal, it is a social power. When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class-character. Let us now take wage-labor: The average price of wage-labor is the minimum wage, i. e., that quantum of the means of subsistence, which is absolutely requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence, as his labor merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labor, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labor of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the laborer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only insofar as the interest of the ruling class requires it. In bourgeois society, living labor is but a means to increase accumulated labor. In Communist society, accumulated labor is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer. In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality. And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at. The version of the Marxian gospel which we have in the Manifesto is among the first of its versions. It was published about the middle of the last century. Within the short period which has intervened, it has changed nearly all of the ideas of a large and rapidly growing part of every nation about almost everything social; and before the middle of the present century, it will revolutionize all nations as it has Russia. Ludendorff, the greatest among the military authorities in Germany, saw and terribly feared this, and called Europe to arms to prevent it. In his almost frantic appeal he said: Bolshevism is advancing now and in a gradual progress from east to west and is crushing everything between the midland sea and the Atlantic ocean. It was easy to foresee that the Bolshevist armies would attack toward the middle of May and defeat the Poles, as they have now done. The world at large must, therefore, figure with a Bolshevist advance in Poland toward Berlin and Prague. Poland's fall will entail the fall of Germany and Czecho-Slovakia. Their neighbors to the north and south will follow. Fate steps along with elementary force. Let no one believe it will come to a stand without enveloping Italy, France and England. Not even the Seven Seas can stop it. Under the capitalist system most people are and must continue to be slaves. If you are a slave (all wage earners, as such, are slaves) the socialist literature, the greatest of all literatures, will thrill you with the hope of liberty. Read, note and inwardly digest it. No wage earner who does this will ever again vote either the Democratic or the Republican ticket. As a whole this literature is a brilliantly illuminating and almost resistlessly persuasive explanation of the most sane, the most salutary and withal the most promising movement towards the freeing of all toiling men, women and children (nine of every ten) from their body and soul destroying slavery. Both Socrates and Jesus are recorded as teaching that the saviour of the world is truth. Among saving truths (there is no truth without some saving efficacy) the greatest is the one which was discovered and formulated concurrently by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and it is in substance this: all which makes for the good of mankind ultimately depends wholly upon the laborious constructors and operators of the machines for the cultivation, production and distribution of the necessities of life, not at all upon the owners of these machines, who at best are idlers and at worst schemers, and in any case parasites. In the beginning was Work. All things were made by it; and without it was not anything made that was made. In it was life; and the life was the light of men. The opening verses of the gospel according to John have been thus interpreted. The commentator acknowledges that they do not read so now, but contends for good and sufficient reasons, that, if there ever was any truth in them, something to this effect must have been their original reading. Certainly there is no truth in them as they have come down to us. This representation to the effect that productive labor is the saviour of the world, its real god, the divinity in which we live, move and have our being, is the great truth, the gospel of International Socialism, the greatest of all movements, the movement which carries the only rational hope for the freeing of mankind from all its unnecessary suffering--and the most poignant sufferings, those imposed by the great trinity of evils: (war, poverty and slavery) are not necessary. Capitalism and Christianism are alike not only in having gods which are symbols, but also in having great buildings set apart for the worshipping of them. The representatives of the god below the vault worship him in banks under the leadership of a threefold ministry: presidents, cashiers and bookkeepers. The representatives of the god above the vault worship him in churches under the leadership of a threefold ministry: bishops, priests and deacons. Speaking particularly of Christianity and America the trouble is not at all with our Brother Jesus and Uncle Sam divinities, but wholly with what they symbolize, capitalism--the god of liars, robbers and warriors. What our Brother Jesus and Uncle Sam should alike symbolize are the classless divinities: (1) law, the king of the physical realm, and (2) truth, the queen of the moral realm. Law is what nature does. There is no other law, and this law is the god of the physical realm. The gods of the supernaturalistic interpretations of religion (Jesus, Jehovah, Allah, Buddha, and all the rest) are personifications, or symbols, of this god, or else they are superstitions. This representation is proved in practice to be true, on the one hand, by the fact that no one needs to live with reference to any among those gods, not even the god, Jesus; and, on the other hand, by the fact that none who fail to live with reference to this god, law, lives at all. Every act of nature, that is, every physical and psychical phenomenon which enters into the constitution of the universe, is a word of the revelation of this god, and there is no other revelation. All men must constantly live with reference to it or else immediately die. Truth is the interpretation of this law in the light of human experience, reason and investigation with the view of making human life, that of self and of all who come or can be brought within the range of one's influence, as long and happy as possible. Any one who desires and endeavors rightly to learn, interpret and live this law to these ends is moral. In everything is he wholly good and in nothing at all bad. Religion is not anything good, except only as it is a synonym of such morality, and this is equally true of politics. War shortens much life and fills more with misery, hence it is utterly immoral, and this is equally true of poverty and slavery. In what I say here and in some other places about war being essentially evil, the wars referred to are those by which the world has been cursed through all the ages--wars between different groups of owners with conflicting interests, not the war between owners and workers which is now on. This war will bless, not curse, the world, because it is for the emancipation of the slave class, not for the enrichment of one group of the masters at the expense of another group, at the cost of increased misery to all the slaves on both sides. If there is any truth in the representation that real religion and real politics alike consist in desiring and endeavoring to make terrestrial life (there is no celestial life of which aught is known) long and happy, the advocate of war is the worst of heretics against Christianism and the worst of traitors against Americanism. War is a necessary characteristic of vegetables and animals, because they cannot make and operate machines for the supplying of their needs. Peace is the necessary characteristic of humans, because they can make and operate machines for the supplying of their needs. Wars between capitalists are inevitabilities, as much so as the wars between two hungry dogs, when one has a bone upon which the lives of both depend. The only difference between capitalists and dogs is, that dogs do their own fighting, whereas capitalists first rob the laborers who produce their commodities, and then persuade or compel them to fight their battles with fellow capitalists in their competitive efforts to distribute them. On the one hand it is true that a few capitalists do lose money in wars, and still fewer their lives, but on the other hand it is equally true that the majority of them are made richer and that producing and distributing laborers ultimately bear every cent of the enormous financial burden, and that for every machine owning master who is killed or wounded there are a hundred wage earning slaves. Yet neither the making nor operating of machines constitutes a man a human. It is co-operation which does this. Nor will co-operation in itself suffice. Bees and ants co-operate and even capitalists do so, yet with all their co-operating bees and ants remain animals and so do capitalists. The co-operation which converts animals into humans is the one which is purposely inaugurated and sustained with the view of securing to each one the fruits of his labor while at the same time increasing them for all--that deliberate co-operation which consists in conscious living, letting live and helping to live. It is this co-operation which constitutes the most essential difference between the animal and the human. Only animalism can exist and flourish on a competitive basis, yet this is the basis upon which men who falsely claim to be humans are living. Until mankind begins the construction of a civilization on a foundation of co-operation in the production and distribution of the necessities of life, it should not set up a claim to humanism for itself, because meantime it cannot sustain such a claim. It is perfectly natural and absolutely necessary for dogs to have belligerent contentions for bones, because they cannot peacefully co-operate in the making of them; and yet men who can do this are more fierce by far in their competitive struggles for the bones which are necessities to their lives. Revolutionary socialists of the Marxian or Bolshevikian type offer the only solution of the two great questions of the world at this time: (1) how to save it from its intermittent and lesser hell of suffering by the bloody wars between rival sets of capitalists, and (2) how to save it from its perpetual and greater hell of suffering by the bloodless wars between the machine owning masters and the machine operating slaves, which wars, if less excruciating, are yet more destructive of both life and happiness. 1. As to the bloody wars, a league of nations could prevent them only while the dogs are sleeping off their exhaustion. Nor could government ownership be depended upon for protection. It would increase the armies and navies, making it next to impossible that more than a decade or two should pass before our children must suffer as much as, or more than, we have by the recent war between the bull dog and the blood hound. We are not at all indebted to the victory of the bull dog (England) over the blood hound (Germany) for what we have in the way of a guarantee against future wars, but wholly to the presumption of the Newfoundland dog (Russia) which has quietly walked off with the bone of contention while the belligerents were scrapping over it. Notwithstanding all appearances and impressions to the contrary, this bone never was really Paris or Berlin, but first one and then another country--the Balkan States, Mexico, Persia, Morocco and Russia. Of late Russia has been the chief bone of contention. Hence all the snarling against Russian Bolshevism, one of a large litter of puppies born to the Newfoundland since the beginning of the war, representatives of which have already made their way to several countries of Europe, and the prospects are that they or their offspring will soon be in evidence everywhere throughout the world. When all these Bolsheviki are grown-ups, they will make the world safe for democracy sure enough--not the competitive democracy of the bull dogs and blood hounds, but the co-operative democracy of the Newfoundland dog. Then, and not before, will the world be safe against war. Since the beginning of the armistice there has been, every now and then, a widespread fear that it might not be permanent, because of a successful effort on the part of the bull dog to put over another war on account of the Russian bone; but for many this fear has now been almost quieted by the total collapse of the Kolchak, Denikin, Yudenich and Wrangel uprisings from within, which were strongly supported by the Allies; and by the repulsion of the Polish invasion which had England, France and the United States behind it. An astonishing illustration of the truth of the Marxian theory concerning the materialistic or economic determination of history, is furnished by the melancholy fact that the representatives of big business in the allied countries would gladly respond to Gen. Ludendorff's call to join the junkers, against whom they so recently fought, in a war against Russia, of which war Germany would be the battle field. A concerted effort was made to organize such a war, but the wisdom learned in the school of the world war by the working-men of all the countries to which the call was made and their consequent opposition to the effort caused it to fail. 2. But great as the suffering of the world is on account of the bloody wars of capitalists with each other, it is but a drop in the bucket of sorrow as compared with its suffering on account of the bloodless wars between masters and slaves--between the machine owners and operators. When this bloodless war ceases, as it will with the triumph of international socialism, the bloody wars will cease and not until then. Under the capitalist system every institution (state, church, school, legislature, court, business, yes, even charity) is necessarily a robbing instrumentality by which a small class of non-producers, fat masters, rob a large class of producers, lean slaves, and rob them twice, each time thrice: 1. The master non-producers rob the slave producers of the three great necessities of physical (body) life--food, clothing and houses. Even in the United States of America, "the land of plenty," at this time and at all times, seventy-five out of every one hundred are insufficiently fed, clothed and housed. 2. The master non-producers rob the slave producers of the necessities of psychical (soul) life--the liberty to learn the facts of nature, the liberty to humanly interpret and live them and the liberty to teach their discoveries and interpretations. Even in the United States of America, "the home of political and religious freedom," there is not one who can learn, live and teach the truth without danger of being put out of a synagogue and into a penitentiary; and this will continue until imperialistic capitalism and supernaturalistic Christianism, the father and mother of the whole brood of robbers, liars, persecutors and warriors, have been dethroned. The gods of the capitalistic interpretations of politics and the gods of the supernaturalistic interpretations of religion, symbolize the same reality, parasitic robbery. Yet within the religious realm the trouble is not with the Jehovahs any more than within the political realm it is with the Sams, but only with what they symbolize. For one I should feel that both the religious and political realms, which are but halves of the same realm--religion the ideal half, and politics the practical half--would be poorer without their respective Jehovahs and Sams, even as the realm of childhood would be without its Santa Claus. If symbols are not absolute necessities to the religious and political realms, nevertheless they always have been, now are and probably ever shall be ornaments of them; I hope for their continuance, but as subjectivities, not objectivities. All the imperialistic interpretations of politics and all the supernaturalistic interpretations of religion must be overthrown, else the world will be lost. The omnipotent, omnipresent saviour who can and will deliver us from them is already in the world. His name is International Communism, the greatest and holiest name which has ever been framed and pronounced; and the gospel of this saviour as it is translated by Thomas Carlyle is written on every wall so that it may be read by all: Understand that well, it is the deep commandment, dimmer or clearer, of our whole being, to be freed. Freedom is the one purpose, wisely aimed at, or unwisely, of all man's struggles, toilings, and sufferings, on this earth. Morality is the greatest thing in the world because without it human life would not be worth the living, or even possible; but, paradoxical as the assertion may seem, freedom or liberty is greater because without it morality would be an impossibility. One can attain to the very highest standard of morality, religion and sainthood without the least necessity of the slightest reference to what the gods of the supernaturalistic religions said or did, and this is quite as true of Jesus as of any other among such gods, but no man can reach even the lowest standard of morality, and so of course not of religion or sainthood, without constant reference to the god of truth. Yet there is a difference between a law and a truth. The law is a doing or act of nature, and as such it is a fact or revelation. There are no other facts or revelations. According to the traditional superstitious conception, a truth is the revelation of the will of a god, involving a service to be rendered directly or indirectly to him, and morality consists in a fulfillment of it. According to the modern scientific conception, a truth is the interpretation of a fact involving a service to be rendered to men. On the scientific theory each man must have what truth he has, either by his own interpretation or by the adoption for himself of another's interpretation. No man can live the moral part of his psychical (soul) life on the truth of another any more than he can live his physical (body) life on the meals of another. Every one must have his own truths, even as he must have his own meals. Hence the necessity of freedom to morality. Hence, too, the impossibility of the moral life under restraint, such as is imposed by orthodox churches in their official dogmas, and such as is imposed by belligerent states in their espionage laws. Capitalism is essentially competitive and therefore necessarily belligerent in character: hence a complete, an ideal moral life is an utter impossibility under it, but even the little of moral life which otherwise might be possible is lessened to one-half by official dogmas and espionage laws; if, then, the governments of churches and nations have any regard for the morality of their memberships and citizenships they will at once repeal them, and never enact others. The democracy which means freedom to learn the laws of the physical realm of nature and to interpret them into laws for the regulation of human life (a democracy which will secure to each one the longest and happiest life which, under the most favorable of conditions, would be within the range of possibilities for him) must wait until the competitive system of capitalism for the production and distribution of the necessities has been universally and completely supplanted by the co-operative system of socialism. The conclusion of the whole matter, as it is well put by an able contributor to the excellent Proletarian, is this: What is needed is a complete revolution of the economic system. Private ownership of the tools of wealth production stands in the way of further peaceful social development and private ownership must be eliminated. The capitalists themselves will not eliminate it. That is certain. It remains for the working class to do so. In order to accomplish this task it will be necessary for the workers to take control of the institution by which the capitalists maintain their ownership of the tools of production--the political state. That is the historic mission of the working class. The mission of the Socialist is to organize and train the workers for this "conquest of political power." Among the signs of the times which unmistakably point to the great day of the happy consummation of the movement towards the proletarian revolution, and the glorious sky is full of them, is the fact that the world has recently learned from the great war that man must work out his own salvation without the least help from the gods of the supernaturalistic interpretations of religion: And that inverted Bowl they call the Sky, Whereunder crawling coop'd we live and die, Lift not your hands to It for help--for It As impotently moves as you or I. --Omar. Yes, and a god moves more impotently than a man; for, whereas the god is driven hither and thither by the laws of matter and force, according to which they co-exist and co-operate through evolutionary processes to the making of the universe what it is, and the god cannot help himself by making it or conditioning himself otherwise, the man, if only he will learn those laws, may combine, guide and ride them to almost any predetermined destination, even out of the class hell of competitive capitalism to the classless heaven of co-operative socialism. III. The salvation of the world from its unnecessary sufferings is dependent upon such an equitable sharing of the labor involved in the making and operating of the machines of production and distribution, and upon such an equitable sharing of the products as shall issue in a classless mankind by doing away, through a revolution, with the class which lives by owning the means and machines of production and distribution. It is this advocacy of classless levelism which constitutes the theoretical core of revolutionary socialism. Those who oppose this socialism proceed upon the assumption of the permanency of existing religious and political institutions, the most ruinous of all heresies. What this heresy is and the fatal policy to which it gives rise has its classic expression, so far as religion is concerned, in the exhortation--"earnestly contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints"--and, so far as politics is concerned, in the representation--"the laws of the Medes and Persians which altereth not." There is no such faith in religion, and cannot be, for as a creed becomes stereotyped it loses the religious character and degenerates into superstition. There are no such laws in politics, and cannot be, for as a law becomes stereotyped it loses the political character and degenerates into tyranny. Religion, which is the ideal half, and politics, which is the practical half, of the same reality, human socialism, are like all else in the universe, constantly changing, and necessarily so, because life and progress are dependent upon change. Orthodoxy in religion and politics is the blight of the ages, because of its assumption that the great institutions, the family, state and church with their customs, laws and doctrines, as they exist for the time being, constitute the foundation of society, without which it could not exist; that these institutions are almost if not altogether what they should be, and that, therefore, the welfare of society, if not indeed its existence, is dependent upon their continuance with but little if any change. But the foundation of society always has been a system for the production and distribution of the necessities of life, and hence social institutions, customs, laws and creeds are what they are at any time because an economic system is what it is. If we compare an economic system for the production of the primary necessities of life (foods, clothes and houses) to a king or bishop (we may well do so, for in all ages such systems have been the power behind every regal and episcopal throne) we shall see that states, with their rulers, codes and police, armies and jails; and churches, with their gods, revelations, heavens and hells, are but so many expediencies for the protection of the system from change. What is true in this respect of the state and church is equally so of the family, the school, the press, the lodge, the club, the library, the theater, the chautauqua and, in short, every institution. Why all these age-long safeguards against change? Because, so far, every economic system has divided society into two classes, a comparatively small class who own things and a large one who make things, and if the few honest owners are to hold their own as divinely favored "grab-it-alls," they must be protected at every point against the many dishonest makers who are diabolically tempted to be "keep-somes!" These rounded out children of god have nothing in common with these caved in imps of the devil, no more than the flea and the dog, or the tapeworm and the man. David hastily said: All men are liars. He might leisurely have said this of every representative of any religious or political orthodoxy, for they insist that their religion and politics are the permanent elements in social truth which remain unchanged from generation to generation through all ages, whereas no religion or politics continues the same during one decade, nor even a single year. Orthodox Christians say that Jesus founded their sectarian churches, though each sect insists that he had to do with only one church, theirs. I doubt that he lived. In any case, I am certain that if he did live and founded a church in the first century and were to come to earth again in this twentieth century, he could not if he would and would not if he could become a member of it, because of its changes. Our own country is different by the width of the whole space of the heavens from what it was before the war, and it is destined to a much wider change. So far are churches with their doctrines, and states with their laws from being changeless, that they are more or less modified by every development in the economic system to which they owe their existence and of which they are servants. In the case of every nation its king, the economic system, has always been a robber and enslaver of the overwhelming majority of the people, and the church and state have been the hands by which he accomplished the robbing and enslaving. Insofar as they differ, Roman orthodoxy is what it is because of its starting out as the religious product of the feudal system of economics; and Protestant orthodoxy is what it is because of its starting out as the religious product of the capitalistic system of economics. Protestantism is preferred before Romanism by most of the leading people in the financial world, because it is the child of capitalism, their sister, so to speak, whereas its rival is only a cousin. As to the Roman and Protestant orthodoxies they are on the same footing. I would not turn my hand over for the difference between them. If literally interpreted in the light of modern science, both are utterly antiquated and irrational. Orthodox Romanists and Protestants have essentially the same bible and creed. In my opinion, as in that of all Marxian and Darwinian socialists, every supernaturalistic representation in both must be regarded as having either a figurative or a superstitious character, for there is not one among them which can endure a scientific and rational analysis; yet, this is an age of science and reason. The difference between Romanism and Protestantism is not at all a question of relative supernaturalism, nor of rightness and wrongness, but wholly one of the difference between the systems of economics which gave them birth. If you ask, is not this difference at least partly a question of the age in which they took their rise, I reply, yes; but the age itself depends upon the system. However, it is a fact that while an economic system does constitute the foundation of every religious and political superstructure, yet below the foundation itself there is always a bed rock upon which it ultimately rests, and this is a question of machinery by which the necessities of life are produced and distributed. The age of feudalism was essentially traditional or theoretical in its character. The age of capitalism is essentially scientific or experimental in its character. This difference between these ages is due to the fact that during the earlier age things were made with hand tools, and during the later one with machine tools. Machinery in a theoretical or traditional age would be an anachronism. It must have an experimental or scientific age for its development, and, paradoxical as it may seem, this the machinery must make for itself. Every period in human history has had its determining character from the tools which brought it into being. Supernaturalism has no place in the observations, investigations or experimentations which are necessary to the invention, construction and operation of a great machine and, hence, the machines have banished the gods from the roof of the earth and the devils from its cellar, leaving it to us to make of it what we please, a heaven or a hell without reference to them. In his brilliant work entitled "Social and Philosophical Studies", translated by Charles H. Kerr, Paul Lafargue writes: The labour of the mechanical factory puts the wage-worker in touch with terrible natural forces unknown to the peasant, but instead of being mastered by them he controls them. The gigantic mechanism of iron and steel which fills the factory, which makes him move like an automaton, which sometimes clutches him, bruises him, mutilates him, does not engender in him a superstitious terror as the thunder does in the peasant, but leaves him unmoved, for he knows that the limbs of the mechanical monster were fashioned and mounted by his comrades, and that he has but to push a lever to set it in motion or stop it. The machine, in spite of its miraculous power and productiveness, has no mystery for him. The labourer in the electrical works, who has but to turn a crank on a dial to send miles of motive power to tramways, or light the lamps of a city, has but to say, like the God of Genesis, "let there be light," and there is light. Never sorcery more fantastic was imagined, yet for him this sorcery is a simple and natural thing. He would be greatly surprised if one were to come and tell him that a certain god might, if he chose, stop the machines and extinguish the lights when the electricity had been turned on; he would reply that this anarchistic god would be simply a misplaced gearing or a broken wire, and that it would be easy for him to seek and find this disturbing god. The practice of the modern factory teaches scientific determinism to the wage-worker, without it being necessary for him to pass through the theoretic study of the sciences. Earth must be a hell as long as we allow the capitalist system to continue on it and to enslave the vast majority of its inhabitants. Marxian socialism will ring out the old era with its hell of human slavery and ring in the new era with its heaven of machine slavery. One point must be grasped and held by all who would understand the changes which take place within the social realm and it is this: they are due to the differences in the instrumentalities or machines by which the necessities of life are produced. Man has risen above the lower animals which have common ancestors with his own, because of the superiority of the hand by which he does things to the hands by which they do things. If a man's body in general and hand in particular were not a great improvement over the bodies and hands of the apes, his mind and morality would differ but little from theirs. The superiority of the civilization of this age over its predecessors is a question of instrumentalities by which the efficiency of the hand is increased. If all the modern machinery were taken from this generation and replaced by the implements of the stone age the civilization of the next generation would begin to sink, and within a century it would reach the ancient level. Strong expression is also given to the great truth upon which we are here dwelling by the Socialist Party of Great Britain in its noteworthy Manifesto: Obviously, in order that there may be ideas and human history, two material things must first be present: human beings, and food and shelter for them. And the fundamental fact that is so seldom realized is, that where, by what means, and how much, food and shelter can be obtained, determines if, where, and how, man shall live, and the forms his social institutions and ideas shall take. It is, indeed, the very basis of Socialist philosophy that, in the words of Frederick Engels: "In every historical epoch the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which, alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch." This materialist concept is the Socialist key to history. It is the first principle of a science of society, and, being directly antagonistic to all religious philosophy, it is destined to drive this "philosophy" and all its superstitions from their last ditch. Civilization will not die with the death of the capitalist system of production any more than it did with the feudal system. It improved under capitalism, because of the improvement in the machinery of production, and it is destined to continue its progress so long as new and better machines are made and this will be to the end. Marxian socialism is a machine optimism. Under this socialism the number and efficiency of machines would increase more rapidly than they have under capitalism and feudalism, because its aim will be the production of commodities for use within the shortest time by the least exertion at the slightest risk of injury. Up to the point of over production, that is, of glutting the markets, it is to the interest of capitalism to encourage improvements in machinery, but the ability to do this has been reached, as is evident from what we hear at increasingly frequent intervals about an over production of commodities. What machinery we now have renders it possible to produce more commodities than can be sold without employing all the labor power. But the idle, starving slave is a danger to the idle, surfeiting master. Hence, under capitalism there can be no further development of machinery, at least not on a large scale. An industrial government would have for its aim to produce enough of everything for all with the least expenditure of energy and time. Hence, the greatest benefactors and heroes under socialism would be the inventors of labor saving, leisure giving machinery. We hear much about the mental superiority of the representatives of the master class over those of the slave class, but there is little or no truth in it. On the contrary, it can be shown that the invention of a great labor saving, rapid-producing machine is, upon the whole, the greatest triumph of the human mind and that nearly all among such machines are invented, made, operated, kept in order and improved by the laborer. Masters may be more cunning than slaves, but cunningness is not an evidence of a high order of intellectual power. Many of the lower animals are quite the equals, if not indeed the superiors, of capitalists in this quality, but no animal is the equal of any man, not to speak of the exceptionally skilled laborer, in the power to produce efficient machines for the production and distribution of the necessities of life. Romanism began its career as a child of the feudal system for the production and distribution of commodities for the profit of the owners of the land and the means for its cultivation. The mission to which it was born was the assistance of its father, feudalism, in robbing and enslaving the workers who tilled the soil, and never did a servant more faithfully or efficiently perform a task during a longer period. Protestantism began its career as a child of the capitalistic system for the production and distribution of commodities for the profit of the owners of the means and machines for their manufacturing. The mission to which it was born was the assistance of its father, capitalism, in robbing and enslaving the workers, who make and operate the machines, and never did a servant more faithfully and efficiently perform a task in a larger or more fruitful field. Hitherto all systems of economics have had the same soul, competition; and, because of it, every one among them has been a diabolical trinity of which lying is the father; robbing is the son, who proceeds from the father; and murder is the spirit, who proceeds from the father and the son. Labor, "the certain man" of every nation, is half dead lying in the ditch by the wayside, despoiled and wounded, the victim of capitalism, the greatest liar, robber and murderer of all the ages. The church is the archangel or prime minister through which this Beelzebub, capitalism, has done most of his lying, though within the last hundred years the business has become so great that the office of coadjutor to this archangel was created, and the press appointed to it. The state is the archangel or prime minister through which this prince of devils, capitalism, has done most of his robbing and killing, though the church has often taken a helpful hand in these departments of the devil's work, the great work of converting earth into a hell. Nearly all of the backwardness of the world and more than half of its unnecessary sufferings have been due to efforts to prevent changes in religion and politics. Our nation is passing through the darkest period of its history because of such efforts on the part of the powers which be in the state, and they are supported by those in the church. Speaking of the change with which we are here especially concerned, the one involved in the supplanting of an old economic system by a new, there have been several revolutions due to such changes, and another is inevitable and imminent. When an economic system fails, as the capitalistic one is failing, to feed, clothe and house the workers of the world who produce all foods, clothes and houses, the time when it must give place to another is manifestly near at hand. Capitalism is failing in this, the only legitimate mission of an economic system. It has indeed over-supplied the needs of about one in ten, but in doing this it has shown partiality, for the remaining nine are left more or less foodless, clotheless and houseless, and this notwithstanding they have done all the feeding, clothing and housing. Those favored by the system will not be able to prevent its overthrow by those who are wronged. With our materials, factories, railroads and skill, all should have enough and to spare of every necessity, but so far is this from being the case that millions are insufficiently fed, clothed, housed and warmed, and are doomed to a perpetual and exhaustive drudgery which leaves neither leisure nor energy for the cultivation of their soul life. The economical and statistical experts of our government's Department of Labor represent that the bare necessities of a comfortable and efficient life for a family of five require an annual income of $1,500, and that the simple luxuries, which are next to being indispensable, require an additional $1,000, in all $2,500, per year. How many American families of five have even the smaller of these sums at their disposal? The overwhelming majority have less than $1,000. Let us be honest with the peoples of other nations by ceasing to speak of our country as "the land of plenty and the home of the free," until there is a great change for the better. Wage slavery may be prolonged by a military coercion but it cannot have a successor in any other form of human slavery. Military coercion prolonged chattel slavery, and by so doing brought what is known as the dark ages upon the world. If wage slavery is to be prolonged by military coercion the world must pass through a second dark age. The league of nations is fixing for this; but let us hope that this coalition will not stand and that wage slavery will soon be followed by machine slavery, the form of slavery which will end human slavery; not until then shall we have peace on earth and good will among men. Then they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. Do you not now see with me that the christ of the world is not a conscious, personal god, but an unconscious, impersonal machine? It is the machine of man, not a lamb of god, to which we may hopefully look for the taking away of the sins of the world. Ignorance is the great misfortune of the world, its devil, and slavery is his hell. The machine is the redeemer who shall save man from this devil and hell. Yes, strange, even blasphemous, as the representation may seem, it is nevertheless true, the machine is the only name given under heaven whereby the world can be saved. Civilization is salvation. The civilization which is salvation depends on leisure and it on slavery, but so long as leisure is dependent upon the slavery of man, civilization must be limited to a diminishing few. Marxian socialism is a movement towards the equalization and universalization of leisure by doing away with the master and slave classes, through transference of slavery from man to machine. If there is any truth in my naturalistic representation about the dependence of morality upon a system for the production of the necessities of life, there is none in the supernaturalistic one, which makes it dependent on any among the gods; and, what is true of the realm of morality is equally so of the realm of history, and this whether it be the history of the universe in general or man in particular. Lavoisier and Mayer showed that no god (Jesus, Jehovah, Allah, Buddha) created the universe out of nothing, for the matter and force which enter into its constitution are eternalities and universalities. Kant and Laplace showed that the earth and the heavenly bodies were not created by any god at all, but evolved from gaseous nebulae. Kepler and Newton showed that these bodies were not governed in their motions by a god but by the law of gravitation. Darwin and Wallace showed that the species of animal and vegetable life were not created by any among the gods, but evolved from a common protoplasm. Marx and Engels showed that man's career has not been determined by any among the gods, but by his systems for producing and distributing the necessities of life. These ten men are the greatest teachers the world has had, and this is the sum of all their great teachings: The universe is self-existing, self-sustaining and self-governing, having all the potentialities of its own life within itself, and what is true of it in general is equally so of all the phenomena which enter into its constitution, including man; who, though he is the highest among them, is only a phenomenon, on a level with all the rest, not excepting the lowest. A microbe and a man are on the same footing, both as to their origin and destiny, and as to their having within themselves all power which is available for making the most of their respective lives. "We are part Of every rock and bird and beast and hill, One with the things that prey on us, And one with what we kill." Darwinism and Marxism constitute one gospel, the only true, comprehensive and sufficient gospel which the world has ever had or can have, and there is no hope for the future of mankind except in it. If it fails the world is lost, but it shall not and indeed cannot fail, for its words are so many acts or facts of nature. There is no fact which is not such an act, and every such fact is a part of the one only law upon the knowing and doing of which terrestrial life and its happiness are wholly and solely dependent. Yes, life, long life, happy life, all there is of such human life, or divine life, (if there be any), depends entirely upon a knowledge of and conformity to this law which is the doing of nature, and not at all upon any law which is the willing of a god, if indeed there is such a law. Neither the religion nor the politics which enters into the constitution of Marxian or proletarian socialism is at all concerned about the heaven above or the hell below the earth, if there are such places: but the concern of both is wholly to ring out a hell from the earth and to ring in a heaven upon it. Nor have the religion and politics which constitute this socialism the least concern about the service of a celestial divinity (Jesus, Jehovah, Allah, Buddha or any other) by doing his will; but both are much concerned with the service of humanity, which consists in rightly learning, interpreting and using the laws of nature, wholly for the purpose of making the terrestrial lives of men, women and children as long and happy as possible, and with absolutely no reference to any celestial life which may be either above or below the earth. Religion and politics are the complementary and inseparable halves of the social sphere, religion being its idealism and politics its practicalism. Religious idealism is a social soul of which the church should be the embodiment. Political practicalism is a social soul of which the state should be the embodiment. Contrary to the representations of orthodox Christianism it is impossible for any soul to exist without an embodiment. In truth the body produces the soul, not the soul the body. We must have the church and state in order that we may have their souls, idealism and practicalism. Why, if the Soul can fling the Dust aside And naked on the Air of Heaven ride, Were't not a Shame--were't not a Shame for him In this clay carcass crippled to abide? --Omar. IV. The church and the state are on the same level as to their origin and importance. Both are human institutions and each is indispensable to the other. It is not at all desirable or possible to rid the world of either, but it is absolutely necessary that both should be revolutionized, the church by having its bible and creed rewritten or at least reinterpreted, on the basis of truth as it is revealed by nature, and the state by having its institutions reorganized on the basis of service to all instead of only to those of a small class, the owner or master class. All the idealistic aims of churches and all the practical undertakings of states should be directly concerned with the answer to three questions: (1) the question as to how to reach the goal where terrestrial life shall in the case of each man, woman and child be as long and happy as it is within the range of possibilities to make it, by the fullest of attainable knowledge concerning the laws of nature; (2) the question as to how to make the most successful endeavor universally to disseminate such knowledge, and (3) the question as to how resistlessly to persuade to the living of it. These are the only concerns and aims of Marxian socialism and they cannot be promoted or even avowed by Christian socialists. The great crime of the ages is the robbing of the producer of the basic necessities of human life by the non-producer. Capitalism is the robber, and the politics and religion of the old states and churches are the right and left hands by which he has been and is doing the robbing. Marxian socialism is an undertaking which has for its task the overthrow of the system which makes it possible for those who produce nothing to live surfeitingly, and renders it necessary for those who produce everything to live starvingly. Poverty is a disease caused by the unjust wage system of competitive capitalism for producing and distributing the necessities of life (food, clothing and shelter) for the profit of capitalists, the few who live by owning the materials and machines of production and distribution; and this blighting malady cannot be cured by charity, but it will spread until this system is supplanted by the just one of co-operative industrialism, a system by which these necessities shall be produced and distributed for the use of laborers, those who live by making and operating the machines. Every gift to charity by a rich man is a robbery of a poor man. You will not see this at once, if ever, and I shall not blame you for the failure to do so. It was not seen by me until I was much older than you; but I am now seeing it as clearly as I ever saw the sun on a cloudless noonday, and this is true of rapidly growing millions who are resolutely resolved to do away with the prevailing conception of charity, according to which capitalists may rob laborers of the fruit of their toil, giving them of it barely enough to keep body and soul together and to raise up children who are doomed to follow in their footsteps; and then, when the strength of their victim fails, to make amends for the robberies, by giving the most highly favored among them beds in hospitals, poor-houses in which to die prematurely, and nameless graves in potter's fields in which to await hopefully a resurrection and ascension to an inheritance of happiness in a sky, which was denied them on the earth. The time is at hand when everywhere the unemployed and the underpaid shall begin a resistless march towards the goal of economic levelism under a banner containing this slogan: We want no charity but the right to work and the fruits of our labors that we and our helpless dependents may have every necessity to the fullest life for body and soul. During more than a whole generation Mrs. Brown and I have not produced a spoonful of any food, a thread of any garment or a shingle of any house; and yet we have had foods, garments and houses in abundance with some to spare, while their producers have had them in scarcity with much to want. While the world war was on, an ill wind for the producers blew a thousand dollars to us and an ill wind for us blew it into the hands of a committee, ostensibly for investment on behalf of a hospital of which we approved, but really for the purchase of a bond in the interest of a war of which we disapproved. The fathers of the present generation of producers and distributors of the necessities of life were robbed in order that we might inherit the property from which our income is derived; the sons and daughters are being robbed over and over again and again, year after year, in order that the property may continue to yield this income to us. We therefore paid nothing of our own for this bond. What we gave for it was of the spoils which the great robber, capitalism, has bestowed upon us, its favorite children, from what it has taken from its unfortunate victims. The same persons or their children and successors were or shall be robbed first to create our property, then to pay the income of it, next to buy the bond, and now they are being robbed to meet the interest on it and finally they will be robbed to pay its face value. If capitalism stands, of course the victims of the last of these robberies will belong, probably, to a remote generation; but this delay is a misfortune in store for many of all intervening generations. If the robbery connected with this bond were limited to its original cost, one thousand dollars, and to its accruing interest, which is likely in time to aggregate several thousand dollars, it would indeed be bad enough, yet not nearly as much so as it is under the melancholy circumstances; for the money paid on account of the bond goes towards killing or wrecking its producers, if not those who produced this particular thousand dollars, yet others of their class to whom the world owes all of its wealth; therefore the thousand dollars which went into this bond has been devoted to the robbery of those who were robbed of it and of the most precious of all things: life and limb. You will ask: how can you and Mrs Brown, in the face of your theory, according to which all who live by owning are robbers of those who live by working, consistently receive and expend the income of your inheritance? The answer was given to a friend who asked us why we did not follow the heroic example of a young American who had recently renounced what had been inherited by him, and this is, in effect, what we said: As we look at the question, our course is more rational than his, because the wealth which he renounces may go to some one who is without his sympathy for the proletariat. We prefer to receive our inheritance and use it to overthrow the economic system which makes it possible for us to do nothing and have everything, and for those who do everything to have nothing. Capitalists, as such, people who live by the owning of the machines of production and distribution, instead of by the making and operating of them, have much to say against the alleged anarchism of socialists and yet they are necessarily what they accuse anarchism of being, robbers and murderers. Every cent of profit, interest and rent is so much robbing, and all wars are so many conflicts between the capitalistic bandits or robbers in the countries involved, and the peace conferences, which follow them, are so many attempts of the bandits on the successful side to have the spoils as large as possible, and to satisfactorily divide them. It is Holy Week 1921. The week in which during all the years of many and long ages benighted people sacrificed their Christs to Shylock gods. If Jesus lived and was a Christ, unhappily He was neither the first nor the last, for there were many both before and after Him. Were they who superstitiously led these victims to their Golgothas greater sinners against humanity than those who did avariciously during the war drive large armies of young men to the terrible trenches, a wholesale sacrifice of the lords of power and wealth and who do now drive the vast majority of the nations involved in that war to a terrible body and soul destroying poverty and slavery? No. The modern robbers even more than the ancient ones are in need of the prayer: Forgive them for they know not what they do. Communism and Christianism have, indeed, this in common, that their object is to promote life, long life, and happy life, both lives in a large and full measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over. Yet, with this sameness in the gospels of Communism and Christianism there is this difference in the aims of the christs who preached them, which separate them as widely as the east is from the west, leaving a great and impassable gulf between them. Marx, the christ of the Communist gospel, said: I am come that the world might have terrestrial life for body, mind and soul, and have it for each in the fullest of possible measures by co-operation with each other in the discovery of the laws of nature and in making them serve men, women and children by securing for them food, clothing, shelter, health and comfort for the body, and leisure for the mind to think and for the soul to grow. Jesus, the christ of the Christian gospel, according to orthodoxy, said: I am come that ye might have celestial life for mind, body and soul and have it for each in the largest and fullest possible measure by co-operation in persuading each other in particular and the world in general to receive a revelation of the will of a conscious, personal God, made through prophets, preserved in the bible and interpreted by the church. With me it is a melancholy but resistless and deepening conviction, that, if orthodox Christianism should become associated with Marxian socialism, as Kingsley and you would associate them, we should soon have a glaring illustration of the truth of two proverbs: a house divided against itself cannot stand; and no man can serve two masters. Moreover, I believe that if Christian socialism were to become a door to Marxian socialism, through which orthodox Christianism could enter and make itself at home, the revolutionary aims of the slave class would be thwarted and the world would enter upon a new dark age, as it did when Constantine was converted to Christianity and Christians became the most loyal citizens and valiant soldiers of the Empire. At that time chattel slavery had run its course as wage slavery has now; and, if it had not been prolonged by a military despotism, as I fear this may be, the world would have had something of the feudal slavery, but nothing of the dark age. This age was the baneful fruit of Christianism. Christianity has held the world back from civilization instead of advancing it towards civilization. The Christianization of Marxian communism, in accordance with the program of Kingsley and our Church Socialist League, would spell another military despotism for the prolongation of a second system of slavery, which has run its course and is in a fair way of being overthrown; but if the revolutionists fail, as the result of being trampled under the iron heel, we are at the threshold of a second dark age and shall soon be passing through all the miseries of it. My interest in the movement within our church looking towards a Christian socialism of a more radical and revolutionary type would be great, if only I could feel as I should so much like, that the Christian socialism to which you have consecrated the whole prime of your life, and the Marxian socialism, to which I have consecrated all of the little that remains of mine, the fag-end, are not utter incompatibilities, so much so that it is absolutely impossible that they can co-exist and co-operate to any good purpose. The irreconcilable incompatibility of Christian socialism and Marxian socialism is due to the fact that, whereas the Christian is essentially imperialistic in its character, the Marxian is as essentially democratic. The reason for this fundamental and ineradicable difference, and the consequent incompatibleness, is the fact that orthodoxism, whether Christian, Jewish, Mohammedan or Buddhistic, is nothing unless it is supernaturalistic and traditional; and Marxism is nothing unless it is naturalistic and scientific, as much so as is Darwinism. In order that you may see the reason, as I understand it, for this wide, deep and bridgeless difference, I draw the following contrasts between the essential beliefs of Marxian socialists and orthodox Christians: 1. Marxian socialism is essentially naturalistic. Orthodox Christianism is essentially supernaturalistic. The consistent socialist says: I have all the potentialities of my own life within myself. The consistent Christian says: My strength is from God. 2. Marxian socialism is essentially classless. Orthodox Christianism is essentially a class system by which the world is divided into two classes, saints and sinners. The consistent socialist says: Every man is my brother. The consistent Christian (like the theist of every name--Jew, Mohammedan, Buddhist and the rest) says: Every true believer is my brother, but those who are not are only potential brethren. 3. Marxian socialism is essentially terrestrial. Orthodox Christianism is essentially celestial. The consistent socialist says: Earth is my home. The consistent Christian says: Heaven is my home. 4. Marxian socialism is essentially materialistic. Orthodox Christianism is essentially spiritualistic. The consistent socialist says: The basic necessities of life, and therefore its first concern, are foods, raiments, shelters, comfort and leisure. The consistent Christian says: Take no primary thought for these, but only for faith in and obedience to God, regarding all else of secondary importance. 5. Marxian socialism is essentially proletarian. Orthodox Christianism is essentially bourgeois. The consistent socialist says: I am, by reason of my antecedents, a man, a woman, a child of nature on an essential level as to my origin and destiny with every other representative of humanity and indeed animality. The consistent Christian, like the theist of every name, says: I am (by reason of my faith, baptism or conversion) a prince or princess, the son or daughter of a king, God. 6. Marxian socialism is essentially democratic. Orthodox Christianism is essentially imperialistic. The consistent socialist says: I live with reference to the will of the majority. The consistent Christian says: I live with reference to the will of a God. 7. Marxian socialism is essentially pacific.[F] Orthodox Christianism is essentially belligerent. The consistent socialist says: Since you are a man, I co-operate with you. The consistent Christian says: Since you are not a believer, I contend with you. 8. Marxian socialism is essentially non-sectarian. The consistent socialist says: All the world is my home and the desire and effort to render service to men, women and children is my religion. The consistent Christian says: Only Christendom is my home and the desire and effort to serve a God is my religion. 9. Marxian socialism is, as to the source of knowledge and the means of attaining it, essentially scientific. Orthodox Christianism is essentially traditional. The consistent socialist says: The salvation of the world is dependent upon what is learned by natural experience, observation and investigation about the doings of a matter-force-law, nature. The consistent Christian says: This salvation depends upon what is learned by revelation, tradition and inspiration about the willings of a father-son-spirit, God. 10. Marxian socialism explains the history of mankind on the naturalistic theory that it has been determined during every period by the existing system for supplying the materialistic necessities of life. Orthodox Christianism explains this history on the supernaturalistic theory that it is determined by the providential directions of a triune divinity. The consistent socialist says: If you will tell me of the economic system by which a people have fed, clothed and housed themselves, I will tell you, at least in general outline, what has been their history. The consistent Christian says: If you will tell me what the providences of my God have been towards a people, I will tell you their history. 11. Marxian socialism has inscribed on one of its banners: Liberty. Orthodox Christianism has this inscription on its corresponding banner: Obedience. The consistent socialist says: This Liberty-banner is the symbol of my freedom as a son of man to be progressively learning, living and teaching the unfolding revelations of nature--to know and to live which is to have life, terrestrial life in an ever increasing measure, all the life there is here and now or elsewhere and elsewhen, if there is to be a conscious, personal life anywhere or anywhen else. The consistent Christian says: This Obedience-banner is a symbol of my slavery as a son of God by which I am bound to receive, live and teach the faith once for all delivered to the saints in the Old and New Testaments or else lose the permanent life in the sky which is to follow this temporary one on the earth. 12. Marxian socialism has inscribed on another of its banners: Justice to Man. Orthodox Christianism has on its corresponding banner: Love to God. The consistent socialist says: It is my aim to do unto others as I would have them do unto me if our circumstances were reversed. The consistent Christian says: It is my aim to love God with all my heart, mind and soul. And if there be any further contrast between this Christianism and Socialism, it is briefly comprehended in these three statements,--in themselves sufficient to show how absolutely impossible it is for a consistent Jesuine Christian to be a consistent Marxian Socialist: 1. Marx seeks to save by doing away with both the master and slave classes--Jesus by exalting the slave class above the master class. 2. Marx exhorts the slave class to look to itself for deliverance--Jesus taught it to look to a God for this. 3. Marx promises salvation for this world here and now, a world about which everybody knows much--Jesus promised it for another world elsewhere and elsewhen, a world about which nobody knows anything. The world has never had a gospel which is at all comparable in its excellency to that of Marxian Socialism. The gospel of Jesuine Christianism, according to the orthodox interpretation of it, is no exception; for, granting it to be superior to the Mosaic, Buddhistic, Mohammedan and other gospels, it is, nevertheless, almost infinitely inferior to the Marxian gospel. Gospels are for the purpose of saving the world from its suffering. The Jesuine and Marxian gospels are alike in having for their object the salvation of the proletarian world. V. About three years ago I discovered that I had spent a long, strenuous and open-handed ministry in preaching lies to the permanent ruin of my health and the temporary embarrassment of my purse; therefore I had the unhappy experience of being forced to see that all this part of my life, its prime, had been mostly, if not wholly wasted and worse. What was to be done? My friends told me as plainly as they could, and some succeeded in making it brutally plain, that in losing my faith in the supernaturalistic dogmas of traditional Christianism, as they are literally interpreted in the doctrinal standards of the orthodox churches, I had lost the pearl of great price. My soul told me that I had never possessed this jewel, but that, even with the little time and enfeebled strength that remained to me, I might yet find it, if only I should cease looking for it in the field of supernaturalism, under the direction of divine authority, and begin looking for it in the field of naturalism, under the direction of human reason. Happily, where faith went out courage came in, and it increased with my desperation until (though standing on the shore of death where the deep and unknown stream lies darkly between the present and future) I could and I did undertake the supreme task of my life--the breaking of the chains by which I was bound as a slave to the degrading superstition that I was, both by an inherited and cultivated disposition, a doomed man, and by an inherent weakness, a helpless one with no power to emancipate myself. Of such enslaving chains I mention three among the strongest, the severed parts of which, with those of all the rest, now lie scattered about me: (1) the chain of the fear of God; (2) the chain of the fear of the devil, and (3) the chain of the fear of man. Hitherto I had been a child, thinking as a child, understanding as a child and speaking as a child. Henceforth I was to be a man, the greatest, conscious, personal being who has anything to do with this world; and as a man, I put away the things of a child, especially the most childish of all things, fear, the fear of God, the fear of devil and the fear of man. Preachers of the supernaturalistic interpretations of religion say that the fear of God is salvation. It is damnation. No one who has fear of any conscious, personal master whomsoever or wheresoever, God in heaven, devil in hell or man on earth, is free or other than a slave. Nor has any such attained to the full stature of manhood. There is only one fear which saves and that is the fear of ignorance. The world's destroyer-god is ignorance. There is no other devil on earth or in hell below it, and this one lives, moves and has his being in the fear of knowledge. The world's saviour-god is knowledge. There is no other Christ on earth or in any heaven above it, and this one lives, moves and has his being in the fear of ignorance. Happily, I listened to my soul and I have found the pearl of great price, yes, a whole bed of them, so that I am now in position to substitute in my preaching a truth for every lie I used to preach, and thus save myself; but woe unto me unless I make the substitution by ringing out the lie and ringing in the truth. Within the last three years I have learned that, as I have not been, since the beginning of my Christian ministry, more than a generation ago, a producer, I have nothing of my own to give to charity, and what is true of me is true of Mrs. Brown. No one is a producer who does not grow things on the farm, make things in a shop, discover things in a laboratory or render some necessary or helpful service to those who do such things. I have done nothing of the kind. If I had been preaching truths I might have rendered such service, but I preached lies. Every possession rightfully belongs to the productive worker and nothing to the unproductive idler. This is one of the two greatest and most salutary among all the truths known to mankind. Recently I made acknowledgment of it on the pledges to a good cause, that of the Red Cross, by writing on their upper left hand corners: "The gift of Unknown Laborers through Bishop and Mrs. Brown, whose possessions are the fruits of their enforced toil and sacrifices." By this acknowledgment I rang out a great lie--the lie which makes the salvation of the world depend upon the capitalists with their servants, the preachers on the right and the politicians on the left hand. Salvation or, what is the same reality, civilization, always has been and always will be dependent upon the producer. It will never be attained until the laboring class has done away with the capitalist class. The ideal civilization (which is the salvation of the world from its unnecessary sufferings, especially the overwhelming ones due to the great trinity of evils, war, poverty and slavery) is in the very nature of things an impossibility on the basis of class sectarianism, such as we have even in our Anglo-American Christianity, the best interpretation of traditional religion, and in our American democracy, the best interpretation of traditional politics. Among the pathetic things about war, there is this, the laboring class makes by far the greater sacrifices, not only of life and limb, but also of money. Quite contrary to the general impression, capitalists, as such, pay no part of the enormous and ruinous pecuniary cost of war. When Mr. Rockefeller pays out three million dollars in war taxes he is disposing of what rightfully belongs to laborers, because they, not he, earned it. Capitalists, as such, neither earn nor pay anything, in time of either war or peace. So much for one of the two great truths. The other, which is the greater because it includes its companion, is this: Man has within himself all the potentialities of his own life. This is true of the universe as a whole, and, therefore, necessarily so of all that therein is. The sum of both truths is that the salvation of the world is wholly dependent upon productive laborers and that they must look individually only to the exertion of their own mental and physical powers and collectively to co-operation with each other for the accomplishment of their mission. Through the whole of my past ministry in the field I rang out these great truths and rang a great lie in by representing that the salvation of the world depends upon a potentiality which is in the sky and not in man, that heaven is above the earth and hell below it, not on it. When I commenced my present ministry in the study, I sent my Soul through the Invisible, Some letter of that After-life to spell; And by and by my Soul return'd to me, And answer'd 'I Myself am Heaven and Hell!' Omar, the poetic astronomer, might have added a stanza which would have closed. "I myself am God." This is, in effect, what Jesus did say: "I and my Father are one." This is as true of you and me and of every man, woman and child as it was of Jesus. And Jesus represented that God, both as Father and Son, dwells in the hearts of believers. But every relevant fact which has been scientifically established as such (and there is a whole mountain of such facts) points to the conclusion that Christians are no more divine than other people, and that, as to his essential nature, no man would be less divine than he is if Jesus had never been born. Gods in the skies (Jesus, Jehovah, Allah, Buddha) are all right as subjective symbols of human potentialities and attributes and of natural laws, even as the Stars and Stripes on a pole, Uncle Sam in the capitol and Santa Claus in a sleigh are all right as such symbols; but such gods are all wrong, if regarded as objective realities existing independently of those who created them as divinities and placed them in celestial habitations. What is true of the gods is equally so of all the supernaturalistic dogmas of the several traditional interpretations of religion. Insofar as they are not pure superstitions they are symbols of imaginary events which people think should or must have occurred in the past or should or must occur in the future; not statements of historical events which have occurred or are to occur. So far I have not found it necessary to renounce the Christian God or any of the things which go with him and I have no idea of doing this, any more than I have of renouncing the American Uncle Sam and the things which go with him, but I place the Brother Jesus of the Christian religion and the Uncle Sam of the American politics on the same footing with each other and with others of their kind as subjective realities. I could be a Jew and an Englishman as conscientiously as a Christian and an American. Many of the early Christians were also Pagans, worshippers of other Gods than Jesus. Nor is this all or even much more than half of my religious and political levelism. On the one hand as a religionist I can be any and everything but an orthodox sectarian. This orthodoxy is a libel against humanity. The world owes to it a great part of all its unnecessary troubles--those which are brought about by the triune devil of persecution, ignorance and superstition. On the other hand as a politician I can be any and everything but a nationalistic sectarian. This nationalism is a libel against humanity. The world owes to it a great part of all its unnecessary troubles--those which are brought upon it by the triune devil of war, poverty and slavery. Hoping that you will abandon Jesuine socialism for Marxian communism and join me in an effort to banish the fictitious, superstitious gods from the skies and the lying, robbing capitalists from the earth, I am with every good wish, Very cordially yours, WM. M. BROWN. Brownella Cottage, Galion, Ohio. FOOTNOTES: [D] This letter was written in July, 1919, and sent to the press in September, 1920. In the interim several of its representations and arguments were made more complete: therefore, some among the additions bear the marks of dates belonging to later months. [E] According to the showing of the science of biblical criticism there is more than one Jesus of whom we have an account in the New Testament: (1) a naturalistic, this-worldly, pacific, human Jesus, and (2) a supernaturalistic, other-worldly, belligerent, divine Jesus, the Jesus of orthodox Christians. [F] This shall be true of Marxian socialism when it is triumphant, but it will not be so while it is persecuted. Socialist Russia has asked for peace after every war which the capitalist nations (England, France, Italy and America) have waged against her, not because she could no longer defend herself, but for the reason that her socialism, being co-operative in its character, necessarily imposes humaneness; yet they could not grant it, because their capitalism, being competitive in its character, as necessarily imposes inhumaneness. The hand of the capitalist world is aggressively against socialist Russia, and must be, because the life of capitalism depends upon her death: and her hand is defensively against all the capitalist nations. Capitalism and socialism cannot occupy the earth together. Either the one or the other must have all of it. Mankind in general is illustrating the truth of the proverb which has been illustrated by so many families in particular--a house divided against itself cannot stand. THE GRAND MARCH By Helen Keller The hour has struck for the Grand March! Onward, Comrades, all together! Fall in line! Start the New Year with a cheer! Let us join the world's procession marching toward a glad tomorrow. Strong of hope and brave in heart the West shall meet the East! March with us, brothers every one! March with us to all things new! Climb with us the hills of God to a wider, holier life. Onward, Comrades, all together, onward to meet the Dawn! Leave behind you doubts and fears! What need have we for "ifs" and "buts"? Away with parties, schools and leagues! Get together, keep in step, shoulder to shoulder, hearts throbbing as one! Face the future, out-daring all you have dared! March on, O Comrades, strong and free, out of darkness, out of silence, out of hate and custom's deadening sway! Onward, Comrades, all together, onward to the wind-blown Dawn! With us shall go the New Day, shining behind the dark. With us shall go Power, Knowledge, Justice, Truth. The time is full! A new world awaits us. Its fruits, its joys, its opportunities are ours for the taking! Fear not the hardships of the road--the storm, the parching heat or winter's cold, hunger or thirst or ambushed foe! There are bright lights ahead of us, leave the shadows behind! In the East a new star is risen! With pain and anguish the Old Order has given birth to the New, and behold, in the East a man-child is born! Onward, Comrades, all together! Onward to the camp-fires of Russia! Onward to the coming Dawn! Through the night of our despair rings the keen call of the New Day. All the powers of darkness could not still that shout of joy in far-away Moscow! Meteor-like through the heavens flashed the golden words of light, "Soviet Republic of Russia". Words sun-like piercing the dark, joyous radiant love-words banishing hate, bidding the teeming world of men to wake and live! Onward, Comrades, all together, onward to the bright, redeeming Dawn! With peace and brotherhood make sweet the bitter way of men! Today, and all the days to come, repeat the Word of Him who said, "Thou shall not kill". Send on psalming winds the angel-chorus, "Peace on earth, good-will to men". Onward march, and keep on marching until His Will on earth is done! Onward, Comrades, all together, onward to the life-giving fountain of Dawn! All along the road beside us throng the peoples sad and broken, weeping women, children hungry, homeless like little birds cast out of their nest. With their hearts aflame, untamed, glorying in martyrdom they hail us passing quickly, "Halt not, O Comrades, yonder glimmers the star of our hope, the red-centered dawn in the East! Halt not, lest you perish ere you reach the Land of Promise". Onward, Comrades, all together, onward to the sun-red Dawn! [Illustration: KARL MARX] [Illustration: CHARLES DARWIN] COMMUNISM AND CHRISTIANISM ANALYZED AND CONTRASTED FROM THE MARXIAN AND DARWINIAN POINTS OF VIEW PART II. Christianism: A Supernaturalistic Other-worldly Gospel for the Passing Age of Class Inequality and Economic Slavery--An Open Letter to a Christian Theologian and Brother Churchman. Revolutionize capitalism out of state and orthodoxy out of church. FOREWORD[G] The contradiction in terms known as the Christian Socialist is inevitably antagonistic to working-class interests and the waging of the class struggle. His policy (that of the Christian Socialist) is the conciliation of classes, the fraternity of robber and robbed, not the end of classes. His avowed object, indeed, is usually to purge the Socialist movement of its materialism, and this means to purge it of its Socialism and to divert it from its material aims to the fruitless chasing of spiritual will-o'-the-wisps. A Christian Socialist is, in fact, an anti-Socialist. Clearly, then, the basis of Socialist philosophy is utterly incompatible with religious ideas; indeed, the latter have been reduced to their logical absurdity in what is called "Christian Science." Moreover, the consistent Christian, if such exists, could look upon the existing world only as an essential part of God's plan, to be accounted for only through God, and modified at God's pleasure. He could regard those who sought the explanation of social conditions in purely natural causes, and who also sought to take advantage of economic development in order to turn this vale of tears into a pleasant garden, only as men who denied by their acts the very basis of his faith. FOOTNOTES: [G] From the Official Manifesto by the Socialist Party of Great Britain, showing the Antagonism between Socialism and Religion. CHRISTIANISM: A SUPERNATURALISTIC OTHER-WORLDLY GOSPEL FOR THE PASSING AGE OF CLASS INEQUALITY AND ECONOMIC SLAVERY. Come over and help us. Abandon Reformatory for Revolutionary Socialism. My Dear Brother: Your letter (April 1st, 1920) enclosing an essay, entitled, Is There a God, came duly to hand and I thank you warmly for it. The essay is a masterpiece and I hope you can let me keep this copy, or make another for myself, for reference when I am writing or conversing on its lines, as is frequently the case. I. In the dispute between yourself and friend of which you speak, you are altogether right and he is entirely wrong. In the last analysis it is a disputation as to whether or not the Jewish-Christian bible contains an infallible revelation from an omniscient being, a triune god, Father, Son and Spirit. It does not. As an objectivity there is no such divinity. He is a subjectivity existing in the imagination of orthodox Christians. You do not agree with me in this, but every day of thought and study deepens the conviction that it is true. None among the gods of the supernaturalistic interpretations of religion are objectivities. The lesser ones are generally ghosts of dead men, and the greater ones are as generally versions of the sun-myth. The one god of the Jews and the triune god of the Christians, if taken seriously, are superstitions; and the bible revelations of their willings and records of their doings, if taken literally, are lies. Both the Old and New Testaments are utterly worthless as history. The twelve patriarchs of the Jewish God, Jehovah, are not historical personages, but myths, and this is true of the twelve apostles of the Christian God, Jesus. Yes, the Old Testament is the Jewish version of the immemorial and universal sun-myth, rewritten several times for the purpose, not of telling any truth, but of imposing the fiction that Jehovah and his people constitute the greatest procession that ever came down the pike of supernaturalism. The New Testament is the Christian version of the same myth, only with the view of showing that Jehovah and the Jews were not, but Jesus and Christians are, this procession. In itself, the sun-myth, as symbolism, is not only poetically beautiful, but also scientifically true; yet, as literalism, it is in the case of the ignorant, superstition, and in the case of the educated, self-deception. The sun is, in a very literal and real sense, the creator-god in whom this world lives, moves and has its being; and he is the saviour-god who was born of a virgin nebula, and every winter descends into hell and rises from the dead (the southern solstice) by a new birth and ascends into heaven to be seated at the right hand of the father (the sky) at the northern solstice, and finally he is the illuminator god who lighteth every man that cometh into the world. And the apostles who preached the gospel of the redemption of the world are the twelve signs of the zodiac through which the sun apparently passes in its annual ascension to the summer solstice and descension to the winter solstice. Nor is this all: "the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world" is the sign of the zodiac, Aries (sheep, ram) through which the sun passes towards the end of March, when all the saviour-gods annually died and rose again. The rising symbolizes the return of the sun towards the northern solstice from the southern one, upon which return seed-time and harvest are dependent, without which the world would perish, not indeed by sin but by starvation. Jehovah is the sun-myth rewritten to fit in with the ideals and hopes of the owning, master class of the Jews. Jesus is the sun-myth rewritten to fit in with the ideals and hopes of the owning master class of the Christians. The Christian god, Jesus, is an improvement upon the Jewish god, Jehovah, because of the division of labor. The task of the owning master class is a twofold one, the robbing of the weak owners by the strong ones in wars, and the robbing of the slaves by the masters which under the capitalist system is done in surplus profits. Jehovah serves Christians as the god of war. In his name they wage wars, either as groups within a nation having different commercial interests, as in the case of the Civil War of the United States, or as nations against nations with different commercial interests, as in the case of the Revolutionary war of the Colonies with England, or the World War of the Allied countries with the Central ones. Jesus serves Christians as the god of slavery. When they have successfully waged a war of conquest, as the Pilgrim Fathers did against the Indians of America, or when they have appropriated all the means and machines of production, as the capitalists have everywhere, they reconcile the propertyless to a terrestrial hell of toil, want, sorrow and slavery by preaching the Jesuine gospel of hope for a celestial heaven of eternal rest, joy, plenty and freedom. "Some for the Glories of This World; and some Sigh for the Prophet's Paradise to come; Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go, Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum." In remaking the Jewish god to suit their purposes of robbing and enslaving, the Christian owning master class provided for a further division of his work by creating the Holy Ghost, who devotes himself to the giving of new revelations of the will of Jehovah and interpreting the earlier ones as they are recorded in the bible. It is generally supposed that the masters are the strong people of the world, but they are not. Labor is really the giant, the Samson, and it would be impossible for the pigmy, capital, to rob him, but for his lack of knowledge. The Holy Ghost sees to it that the slave class is kept in ignorance. The English-German, or if you prefer, the German-English war has been an eye-opener to the giant, labor, and capital is ruined unless he can get him to sleep again. Capital knows that Marx was right in characterizing the orthodox interpretations of religion, including the Christian one, and especially it, as a sleeping potion. The churches were the dormitories in which the slaves slept through the night of the dark ages of traditionalism, but the light of the age of scientism is breaking upon the world and most of the slaves have left the churches and are now beyond the reach of their care-takers, the preachers. When I wrote the Level Plan for Church Union, I believed that the coming together of the churches would prove to be a blessing to the world, but I am now persuaded that it would be a curse, because the league of churches would co-operate with the league of nations in its robbing and enslaving schemes, the churches doing the lying and the nations the coercing. We are living in the age of scientism and, in the case of its true sons and daughters, only scientifically demonstrated facts count in any argumentation. From the scientific point of view it is seen that there is but one universal Kingdom of Life, Nature. This kingdom may be divided into three, perhaps four, states constituting the United States of Life: the mineral, the vegetable, the animal and the human. Beginning with the highest, each of these states, except the lowest, is dependent upon the next lower. The only independent autonomous state in the kingdom is the mineral. This is the greatest both as to its extent and importance. It is the common source of every supply of all the states of life, and the seat of each of their governments. All theologians and some metaphysicians postulate a fifth state of life, the divine, placing it above the rest as their source. Comte, who preceded Marx as a social philosopher, and who is the founder of modern socialism of the reformatory type, as Marx is of the revolutionary one, had this to say about the theologians, metaphysicians and scientists, and he was right: From the study of the development of human intelligence, in all directions, and through all times, the discovery arises of a great fundamental law, to which it is necessarily subject, and which has a solid foundation of proof, both in the facts of our organization and in our historical experience. This law is this: that each of our leading conceptions--each branch of our knowledge--passes successively through three different theoretical conditions: the theological, or fictitious; the metaphysical, or abstract; and the scientific, or positive. In other words, the human mind, by its nature, employs in its progress three methods of philosophizing, the character of which is essentially different and radically opposed: viz., the theological method, the metaphysical and the positive. Hence arise three philosophies, or general systems of conceptions on the aggregate of phenomena, each of which excludes the others. The first is the necessary point of departure of the human understanding; the third is its fixed and definite state. The second is merely a state of transition. In order for a man who has reached the scientific stage in his intellectual development to make anything out of the reasonings of those who are still in the stage of theological childhood or in that of metaphysical adolescence, it is necessary for him to use their insubstantialities as symbols of his substantialities. The only difference that I can see between a theologian and a metaphysician is that, whereas the former personifies a generality which is the creation of his imagination, calling it a god, the latter objectifies a particularity which is the creation of his imagination calling it an entity; but all such personifications and objectifications (gods, things-in-themselves, vital entities, souls) are alike fictitious, because the childish theologians and metaphysicians proceed on the basis of philosophically assumed realities, not on scientifically established facts which pave the way on which an adult proceeds. Comte analyzes the difference between the intellectuality of theological children, metaphysical youths and scientific adults as follows: In the theological state, the human mind, seeking the essential nature of beings, the first and final causes (the origin and purpose) of all effects--in short, absolute knowledge--supposes all phenomena to be produced by the immediate action of supernatural beings. In the metaphysical state, which is only a modification of the first, the mind supposes, instead of supernatural beings, abstract forces, veritable entities (that is, personified abstractions) inherent in all beings, and capable of producing all phenomena. What is called the explanation of phenomena is, in this stage, a mere reference of each to its proper entity. In the final, the positive state, the mind has given over the vain search after absolute notions, the origin and destination of the universe, and the causes of phenomena, and applies itself to the study of their laws--that is, their invariable relations of succession and resemblance. Reasoning and observation, duly combined, are the means of this knowledge. What is now understood when we speak of an explanation of facts is simply the establishment of a connection between single phenomena and some general facts the number of which continually diminishes with the progress of science. There is no science which, having attained the positive stage, does not bear the marks of having passed through the others. Some time since it was (whatever it might be now) composed, as we can now perceive, of metaphysical abstractions: and, further back in the course of time, it took its form from theological conceptions. Our most advanced sciences still bear very evident marks of the two earlier periods through which they passed. The progress of the individual mind is not only an illustration, but an indirect evidence of that of the general mind. The point of departure of the individual and the race being the same, the phases of the mind of men correspond to the epochs of the mind of the race. How each of us is aware, if he looks back upon his own history, that he was a theologian in his childhood, a metaphysician in his youth and a natural philosopher in his manhood. All men who are up to their age can verify this for themselves. According to the scientific classification, there are only three kingdoms or states of life, the mineral, the vegetable and the animal. The life of the vegetable kingdom has arisen out of the life of the mineral kingdom and is sustained by it. The distinguished scientist, Professor Lowell, says, "there is now no more reason to doubt that plants grew out of chemical affinity than to doubt that stones did," and nearly all outstanding zoologists would say as much of animals. Sir J. Burdon Sanderson, one of the most eminent among biologists, insists that "in physiology the word life is understood to mean the chemical and physical activities of the parts of which the organism consists." The renowned Sir Ray Lankester strenuously holds that "zoology is the science which seeks to arrange and discuss the phenomena of animal life and form, as the outcome of the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry," and goes so far as to say that he knows of no leading biologist who is of a different opinion. The prince of biologists, the late Professor Haeckel, occupied this position and impregnably fortified it in several great books, especially in his "Riddle of the Universe." There is no force that is not life, nor life which is not force; and there is no life or force, about which we know anything, without a body or chemical laboratory. So far as is known, there is only one life--force. The difference between lives is a question of the organism, the laboratory, which gives embodiment to force. The life that enables the wheels of a locomotive to go, the sap of a tree to flow, the heart of an animal to beat and the brain of a man to think is the same chemical potentiality differently organized. During all historical time and over all the earth, under one name or another, the whole world has kept days of rejoicing for life, especially Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year and Easter. Nothing is so wonderful as life and perhaps the greatest of its wonders is that all of it is of the same kind. Everything and every being is alive with the same life. The Thanksgiving day sheaf of wheat, the Christmas day Son of Man and the Easter day Son of God (if there are conscious, personal gods and they have sons) are alive and their life is the same, the difference being wholly in the form and degree, not at all in kind. A proof of the oneness and sameness of all life, notwithstanding its widely different forms and degrees, is the fact that a bar of iron, a stick of wood, a piece of flesh and a section of brain respond alike to the same electrical stimulus, and all may be poisoned or otherwise killed so that they will make no response to it. Perhaps even a more conclusive evidence is that the eggs (every form of both vegetable and animal life develops from an egg) of some animals rather high in the one tree of mundane life, which has a common root and a stump, but two stems, the vegetable and the animal, can be mechanically fertilized by chemical processes. Even Sir Oliver Lodge, the most conspicuous among the comparatively few men of science who hold to the theory that life comes to the earth as vital entities of celestial origin and destination, makes this fatal admission: "There is plenty of physics and chemistry and mechanics about every vital action." On the theory of traditional Christianity there was no physics, chemistry or mechanics connected with the vital actions which originally brought the universe and all that therein was, including the earth with its vegetable, animal and human kingdoms, into existence. Every representative of each form of life in these kingdoms (in the vegetable: a grass blade, a wheat stalk, an oak tree; or in the animal: an insect, a horse, a man) is a chemical laboratory for the production, sustentation, advancement and procreation of a particular type of one universal life. These laboratories have all the potentialities of their respective lives within themselves,--no laboratory, no chemistry; no chemistry, no life. What life is, both as to its manifestation and character, is determined by the form of organization through which force, all there is of life, becomes a particular and differentiated vital phenomenon. This is as true of states and churches as it is of trees and men, for a church or a state is a vital phenomenon as really so as a tree or a man. The trouble with every reformatory socialism of modern times is that it undertakes the impossibility of changing the fruit of the capitalistic state into that of the communistic one, without changing the political organism; but to do that is as impossible as to gather grapes from thorns or figs from thistles. Hence an uprooting and replanting are necessary (a revolution not a reformation) which will give the world a new tree of state. Capitalism no longer grows the fruits (foods, clothes and houses) which are necessary to the sustenance of the world. Hence it encumbers the ground and must be dug up by the roots in order that a tree which is so organized that it will bear these necessities may be planted in its place. The people of Russia have accomplished this uprooting and replanting (this revolution) in the case of their state, and those of every nation are destined to do the same in one way or another, each according to its historical and economic development, some perhaps with violence, most, I hope, peaceably. The Russian Bolsheviki occupy the highest peak in man's history; and while they stand, the world will be safe for industrial democracy. This democracy is the tree of life whose fruits are for the sustenance of the nations and whose very leaves are for their healing. The only lives of which we need know aught are those that we shall live in our bodies by chemical processes and in the race by conscious or unconscious influences; for, if there is another, it will take care of itself, if we take care of these. Since, therefore, all life is on a level and since morality, religion and Christianity are but manifestations of it, do you not see how profoundly and incontrovertibly true is my levelism? According to this levelism all interpretations of Christianity (protestant and catholic--congregational, presbyterian, episcopalian and papal) and all the interpretations of religion (Christian, Jewish, Mohammedan, Buddhistic and the rest) are essentially on the same footing, the difference between them being wholly a question of natural excellencies, not at all of supernatural uniqueness. The science of biology establishes my levelism by proving that animal and human life are on a level as to their origin, character and destiny. The science of sociology establishes my levelism by proving that animal and human institutions are on a level, and that therefore, there is nothing more supernatural about a human state or church than about an ant hill or a bee hive. The science of literary criticism establishes my levelism by proving that the bibles of the several interpretations of religion are on a level as to their entirely human origin and authority. The science of the comparative interpretations of religion establishes my levelism by proving that all the conscious, personal creator-gods, destroyer-gods, saviour-gods and illuminator-gods, with all their angels, heavens and hells, are so many myths--creations of the human imagination, subjective fictions, not objective realities. Until comparatively recent times, through all the theological history of mankind, the sun was almost universally regarded as a god. Manifestly without it there could be no life on earth, and its annually recurring motions are such as to give the impression of birth and death--of birth by ascension into the heaven of the summer solstice--of death by descension into the hell or grave of the winter solstice. Not only is the sun the giver and sustainer of life, but it is also the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. Modern science justifies this ancient conception as to the dependence of the earth, and all that thereon is, upon the sun for its being. By a slight adaptation men of science and scientific philosophers could use the very words of the apostle John at the opening of his version of the Christian gospel, where he says of Jesus, what they say of the sun: All things were made by him and without him was not anything made that was made. In him is life; and the life is the light of men. The birth, death, descension, resurrection and ascension of all the Saviour-gods, not excepting Jesus, are versions of the sun-myth. Yet the naturalness, the universalness, the beautifulness and withal the profound truthfulness of this myth are such as to render it almost as undesirable as it is next to impossible to relegate it to the realm of superstition, to which it should undoubtedly be assigned if a literal interpretation is a necessity. The more science advances, the more of precious poetry and pathos, and of deep verity, too, is seen in the Saviour-gods, who are essentially the same mythical personifications of the glorious sun and of the happy events of its annual career, because from it the earth with its brother and sister planets had their origin, and because from it the earth, not to speak of the other planets, has the heat, light and force which make its life a possibility. There is no reason for believing that any one among the gods of the four old supernaturalistic interpretations of religion (Jehovah, Jesus, Allah, Buddha) or that either of the gods of the two new interpretations by the renowned physicist, Sir Oliver Lodge, and the distinguished sociologist, Mr. H. G. Wells, has had more to do in creating, sustaining and governing this world than another, that is to say, there is no ground for believing that the personal, conscious gods in the skies either individually or collectively have had anything at all to do with it. Science, as it is understood by the great majority of its exponents, teaches that the earth (with all things, physical and psychical, which contribute to make its world what it has been, is, and is to be) was originally in the sun, and would quickly disappear into its original, unorganized elements but for the sun. This is as true of man as of all else. He with his brain and its thought, with his hand and its skill; with his homes, farms, cities, mines, shops, stores, trains, ships, schools, hospitals and churches; with his hate, bestiality and barbarism, and with his love, humaneness and civilization, was in the sun, billions of years before his appearance on the earth. Speaking of things appertaining to the world war: there in the sun, before it had thrown off the earth, were the kaiser on the throne, the president in the white house, the millions of soldiers, the uniforms, the rations, the forts, the cannons, guns, powder and shot, the trenches, the barbed wire, the dreadnoughts, the submarines, the aeroplanes, the wireless telegraph stations, the wounded, their sufferings and groans, the doctors and nurses, the corpses, the cripples, the broken hearts; yes, and all the things connected with that terrible war; the bereaved mothers, the widowed wives, the outraged girls, the ruined country, the wrecked cities, were in the sun from its beginning, indeed while it was yet a nebula, many thousands of millions of years previous to the birth of the earth. If we except intruders into our solar system, such as comets and their comparatively inconsiderable effects, we may say that every physical or psychical reality which at any time has entered into the history of this planet and that of its brothers and sisters was in that vast flowing, swirling, revolving globe of gases which is known to have been at one time at least five billion miles in diameter, or fifteen billions in circumference. Of course no phenomenon, such as Jesus hanging on the cross, if He lived and was crucified, was in the sun as an actuality, but only as a potentiality. Nevertheless He, with His doctrine and His suffering, was there, else He would never have been anywhere, not in the realm of history, not even in the realm of imagination. The universe is ever all that it can be, and every potentiality which contributes to make it so is within itself. What is true in this respect of the universe as a whole is equally so of every part of it, including man, and especially him, because he is exceptionally capable of controlling his own destiny, being able not only to preserve life by a discovery of and conformity to the laws upon which it is dependent, but also to enlarge and enrich its content by making these laws co-operative servants. The time cannot be far off when it will be seen by all educated, thoughtful men and women that if the traditional, supernaturalistic interpretation of Christianity is the only possible one, its message is not a gospel, because its teaching touching three fundamentals is, in each case, contrary to that of three relevant sciences: 1. The sciences of astronomy, geology and biology teach that the representation of traditional supernaturalistic interpretation of Christianity to the effect that the universe, including the earth with its physical and psychical life, was supernaturally created out of nothing by a conscious, personal god is not true and therefore can be no part of any gospel; for, according to the teaching of these three sciences, the truth is: the universe with all that therein is, not excepting mankind and civilization, was naturally evolved out of a self-existing matter by a self-existing force co-operating in accordance with the necessity of their nature. 2. The sciences of biology, physiology and embryology teach that the representation of the traditional, supernaturalistic interpretation of Christianity to the effect that man and woman are unique beings, who have supernaturally derived their physical form, vital and psychical potentialities directly from a conscious, personal creator with whom are their natural affiliations, is not true, and therefore can be no part of any gospel; for, according to the teaching of these three sciences, the truth is: man and woman as to their whole beings (body and mind, life and soul) were naturally evolved from pre-existing animal life, not supernaturally created respectively out of the dust and a rib, so that they owe their existence to and natural affinities with a terrestrial and bestial parentage, not a celestial and divine one. 3. The sciences of anthropology, sociology and comparative interpretations of religion teach that the representation of the traditional, supernaturalistic interpretation of Christianity to the effect that man and woman were supernaturally created in the image and likeness of a conscious, personal god, sinless and deathless beings with ideal environments, but that they fell from this happy estate, through a serpentine incarnation of a supernatural devil, and are being restored to it, through a human incarnation of a supernatural saviour, is not true, and therefore can be no part of any gospel; for, according to the teaching of these three sciences, the truth is: during many ages man and woman, in both appearance and predilection, were much more animal than divine and that gradually, without any supernatural assistance, they have worked themselves out of a state of bestial barbarism into one of human civilization. It follows therefore that the representations of both the Old and New Testaments, concerning the origin and history of man are largely fictitious impositions, not historical compositions, so much so, that no confidence can safely be reposed in any of them. There is no rational doubt about the fictitious character of the divine Jesus. Some think that the human Jesus may have been an historical personage; but, none among outstanding scholars believes that we have a connected account of his life and work, and most of them insist that we do not certainly know any saying or doing of his. No religious doctrine or institution of which we have an account in the New Testament is peculiar to Christianity and this is equally true of moral precepts. The gods of all the supernaturalistic interpretations of religion are so many creations of the dominant or master class, and their revelations were put into their mouths by the makers for the purpose of keeping the slave class ignorant and contented. Orthodox Christians earnestly contend that this naturalistic doctrine makes for immorality. Heretical socialists rationally answer that the life which men, women and children live with reference to their terrestrial influence, rather than to celestial rewards or punishments, is the only one which is lived to any moral purpose. According to socialism, morality, religion and Christianity are but synonyms of one and the same reality, which consists wholly in the desire and effort of a man to learn the laws or doings of nature, and to conform his thoughts and words to them, in order to make his present life on earth, and that of others, as long and happy as possible, and not at all in a desire and effort to learn what the will of a conscious, personal god is and to conform to it, in order to avoid a hell and gain a heaven for a future life in the sky. O threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise! One thing at least is certain--This Life flies; One thing is certain and the rest is Lies; The Flower that once has blown forever dies. If you object that this is a representation of a sceptical poet, I reply that it is in alignment with a representation of a scriptural preacher: For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; Even one thing befalleth them; As the one dieth, so dieth the other; Yea, they have all one breath; So that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast; For all is vanity. All go unto one place; All are of the dust, And all turn to dust again. Darwin showed that each man in his physical development from the embryonic cell to birth passes through, by short cuts, the different forms of life from say, the worm, fish and lemur with all that went before, intervened between and followed after, and Romanes showed that this is as true of the mind as of the body; that, in fact, all the representatives of the animal kingdom are physically and psychically related, and therefore on the same level as to their origin and destiny. In his illuminating book entitled, "The Universal Kinship," Professor Moore says: The embryonic development of a human being is no different from the embryonic development of any other animal. Every human being at the beginning of his organic existence is a protozoan, about 1-125 inch in diameter; at another stage of development he is a tiny sac-shaped mass of cells without blood or nerves, the gastrula; at another stage he is a worm, with a pulsating tube instead of a heart, and without a head, neck, spinal column, or limbs; at another stage he has as a backbone, a rod of cartilage extending along the back, and a faint nerve cord, as in the amphioxus, the lowest of the vertebrates; at another stage he is a fish with a two-chambered heart, mesonephric kidneys, and gill-slits, with gill arteries leading to them, just as in fishes; at another stage he is a reptile with a three-chambered heart, and voiding his excreta through a cloaca like other reptiles; and finally, when he enters upon post-natal sins and actualities, he is a sprawling, squalling, unreasoning quadruped. The human larva from the fifth to the seventh month of development is covered with a thick growth of hair and has a true caudal (tail) appendage, like the monkey. At this stage the embryo has in all thirty-eight vertebrae, nine of which are caudal, and the great toe extends at right angles to the other toes, and is not longer than the other toes, but shorter, as in the ape. Surely no argument is needed to convince you that Darwinism corroborates the representation of our ancient heretical poet and scriptural preacher concerning a life beyond the grave rather than the representations of modern orthodox theologians. Strange, is it not? that of the myriads who Before us pass'd the door of Darkness through, Not one returns to tell us of the Road, Which to discover we must travel, too. --Omar. II. In history slavery stands out as a huge mountain range traversing the whole of a continent. During long ages it was supposed that these phenomena of the human and physical worlds were due to the will of a god (Jesus, Jehovah, Allah or Buddha) but the vanguard of humanity has now reached a viewpoint from which it sees that both are alike due to a law, that a law is what nature does, not what a god has willed, and that a system of slavery and a range of mountains are due to the same law. The matter-force law is everywhere the same, and it is as omnipotent and immutable in a social order as in a solar system. "The very law that moulds a tear, And bids it trickle from its source, That law preserves the earth a sphere, And guides the planets in their course." Most of the time, and especially just now, our world is very full of tears, almost as much so as space is full of spheres, but there would not be half so many tears at any time, if the laws of states were so many correct interpretations of the laws of nature. In every age, nearly all the hot tears which deluge the world flow, like streams of springs, from their deep sources as the result of unnecessary suffering by grinding poverty, by hopeless slavery, by avoidable diseases and by premature deaths; and by far the most of these and of all sufferings may be traced to man-made laws which not only have no correspondence with those of nature but are contrary to them--laws of which both the civil codes and religious bibles are too full. You will agree with me that society should punish none of its members by the slightest fine or shortest imprisonment, not to speak of death, except on the basis of justice. So far, and it is a long way, we certainly walk together. We part company, if at all, on the question as to the basis of justice, but come together again in the conclusion that it is right, not might. What, then, is this right? If you answer: the law of the state as it is interpreted by a competent court, I reply: no legal enactment, and so, of course, no interpretation of one, can really constitute a right, unless it is an embodiment of a truth containing an indispensable stone in the foundation which is necessary to the superstructure of the ideal civilization, under the roof of which every man, woman and child shall possess the greatest of possible opportunities to make life for self as long and happy as it can be, and to help others in an ever widening circle to do this for themselves. Laws are not made. All social laws (domestic, civil, commercial, yes, even the moral and religious ones) are matter-force realities, as much so as is any other among all the physical or psychical realities entering into the constitution of the universe; which realities are but the expressions of the processes necessarily resulting from the necessary co-existence and co-operation of this matter and force; therefore, laws are so many eternal necessities and, this being the case, it is not possible that men in states or churches should make them, no, not even gods in heavens. Man would, then, have progressed much further with the superstructure of an ideal civilization, if only in his efforts to rightly regulate his life, he had happily searched out the laws of nature as they are revealed through its phenomena and interpreted by experience and reason, instead of looking for direction to the laws of the gods (Jehovah, Allah, Buddha or even Jesus) as they are revealed through prophets and interpreted by kings or presidents, by priests or preachers and by other "powers that be of God" in states and churches--institutions which exist in the interest of the capitalist class and against that of the labor class. The world owes by far the greater part of its most poignant sufferings to this fatal mistake of looking to gods in heavens and their representatives on earth for direction instead of to nature and reason. Life in the physical realm is dependent upon living in harmony with the matter-force law. The representative of any form of life (mineral, vegetable, animal, human) which either through ignorance, accident or willfulness does not conform to it, is destroyed or at least injured. Life in the moral part of the psychical realm consists in a disposition and effort to learn the matter-force law, and to fulfill in thought, word and deed the individual obligations to self and the social obligations to others imposed by it when it has been humanely interpreted by a man for himself. Religion and Christianity are but wider extensions of one and the same great all-inclusive virtue, morality, without which human life would not be worth living, indeed not even a possibility, for without morality a man is a beast, not a human. Morality is the greatest thing in the world. Yet, paradoxical as the representation may seem, there is one greater thing, freedom--the liberty to think, speak and act in accordance with one's own convictions as to what is the law and as to what are its requirements. Without this liberty there could be no morality, and therefore, freedom is greater than the greatest thing in the world, morality. But liberty, the greatest and most indispensable necessity to morality, religion and Christianity, indeed, to the existence of a human being, is manifestly impossible on the theory that a man must be guided by the will of a conscious, personal God in the sky as it is interpreted by the kings and priests, presidents and preachers on earth. You will note that I am not contending for the liberty to live without reference to an external authority. If this were my contention you would rightly insist (as some among my friends do) that I am an atheist in religion and an anarchist in politics; but I am neither, for I recognize the fact that I must live with reference to the existence of an external authority, matter-force law, and there is no other, upon which anything good in religion or politics is dependent. No one is an atheist in religion, an anarchist in politics or anything bad, who, in the physical realm of life, tries to live with reference to the law of nature, and who, in the moral realm of life, tries to live with reference to a truth which is that law humanely interpreted by himself in accordance with his own experience, observation, investigation and reason. In the nature of things, the interpretation cannot be by some one else, because one man cannot live the moral life on another's ideals any more than he can live the physical life on another's meals. Since this is the case, it follows that the whole conception of a law which is willed by a god and revealed or formulated by his representatives (prophets, kings, priests, legislators) to which a man must have reference, if he would live the moral life, is, at best, a harmless fiction and at worst a hurtful superstition. There is no one (man or god) with whom people can stand in the moral realm except themselves alone, and if they are not within this realm they are not men and women. Manhood is dependent upon standing alone with matter-force nature and with human reason, and it is manhood which really counts everywhere in the social realm, for without manhood one is nothing anywhere in that realm. Nature is my God. The gods of the several supernaturalistic interpretations of religion (Jesus, Jehovah, Allah, Buddha) are so many symbols of this divinity. The words of this God are the facts of nature. My religion and politics, worship and patriotism consist in a desire and effort to discover these facts and to interpret and live them humanely. My God, Nature, is a triune divinity--matter being the Father, force the Son, and law the Spirit. Nature is the sum of the matter-force-law phenomena of which the universe is constituted. Man with his barbarism and civilization is but one among such phenomena, on a level with the rest, as to his beginning and ending, and as to the dependence of his life and its fullness upon conformity to the matter-force law, without necessary or, indeed, possible reference to any divine-human system of laws as set forth by a catholic or protestant church or by an imperialistic or democratic state. Unless states and churches persuade, encourage and help man to more fully discover, more correctly interpret and more perfectly live the matter-force law they are worthless; and indeed worse, if in the long run and on the whole they hinder him; and undoubtedly they have done this in the case of the slave class--a class which, ever since the rise of private property in the means of producing the necessities of life, has comprehended the vast majority of the human race. Whether then man is barbarous or civilized is really and truly, wholly and entirely a question of the knowledge of and conformity to the matter-force law, that is, of whether or not the articles of his religious creed and political code are so many ideal embodiments and practical interpretations of facts or realities as they are revealed by the doings of my god, Nature. There is no other creed, belief in the articles of which, and there is no other code, obedience to the articles of which, will advance mankind, individually or collectively, so much as one step in the long, rugged and steep way towards the goal of a perfect civilization--a civilization which will secure to every man, woman and child the greatest of possible opportunities to make the most of life that is within the range of possibilities. My god, Nature (the triune divinity, matter-force-motion) the doings of which god are so many words of the only gospel upon which the salvation of the world is to any degree dependent, is an impersonal, unconscious, non-moral being. For me, this god, Nature, rises into personality, consciousness and morality in myself, and in no other does nature do this for me, though what is true of me is of course equally so of every representative of mankind. Jesus (either as an historical or dramatic personage, and it does not matter which he was) said, "I and my Father (god) are one," and in saying this he gave expression in one form to the most revolutionary and salutary of all truths. The other form of the same truth as taught by Darwin and Marx is: man has all the potentialities of his own life within himself. Every representative of the human race can and should say with Jesus, "I and my Father, God, are one." Stop man! where dost thou run? Heav'n lies within thy heart, If thou seek'st God elsewhere Misled, in truth, thou art. --Angelus Silensius. This truth constitutes the most ennobling and inspiring part of man's knowledge, and it was naturally discovered by him, not supernaturally revealed to him. It is the foundation of socialism and the justification of optimism. The universe moves, with all that therein is. The vanguard of mankind is moving to a viewpoint from which rapidly increasing numbers will see that a revolution which is necessary on the part of a slave to free himself from a master is not only justified but required by the great, first law of the biological realm, the law of self-preservation--a nature-made law on behalf of freedom. This nature-made law will ultimately nullify all class laws, every law which is in favor of the enslaving capitalist class and against the enslaved labor class. Every state with its executive, legislative, judiciary, military and educative systems is founded on capitalism. Since this is the case and since human nature is what it is, all political institutions, the American with the rest, are of the capitalist, by the capitalist, for the capitalist, and each to the end that the capitalist may keep the laborer in poverty and slavery. Every modern church with its ministry, bible, creed, heaven and hell is founded on capitalism. Since this is the case, and since human nature is what it is, all religious institutions, the Christian with the rest, are of the capitalist, by the capitalist, for the capitalist and each to the end that the capitalist may keep the laborer in ignorance and slavery. Whether Jesus was an historical or a dramatic person, the morality involved in his trial, condemnation and execution is the same. Assuming the historicity, he was put to death by Pilate because a class of the people said: We have a law and by it, according to its official interpretation, he should die. The Governor, finding that the legal enactment and the judicial decision were in accordance with the representation of the Jews, turned Jesus over to the executioners for crucifixion, and the world condemns him because he knew that the law was the embodiment of a fiction instead of a truth, because he interpreted it in the interest of a sect instead of a people, and because he basely acted with reference to his own political interests without regard to justice for an heroic but helpless champion of slaves in their struggle against the masters. Philosophic anarchy differs by the space of the whole heavens from practical anarchy, and it is the latter that I always have in mind. The great essential of philosophic anarchy is individualistic freedom. The great essential of practical anarchy is imperialistic slavery. Capitalism is the outstanding, overshadowing imperialist, the father of all the kaisers by which the world has been cursed, not only of the terrestrial ones such as Wilhelm II, Nicholas II, Woodrow I, but also of the celestial ones such as Jehovah, Allah, Buddha. The occupants of regal thrones have no more responsibility for the existence of imperialism than those of presidential chairs, nor they any more than I, and I have none. The truth is that the responsibility for this blight of all the ages is now at last, if indeed it has not always been, wholly with the representatives of the working class. They have the great majority in numbers and all of the revolutionary incentives and power; therefore they, and only they can do away with imperialism, and they can rid themselves of it whenever they choose. Prince Kropotkin, the philosophic anarchist, a great soul, would agree to this representation, for he says: The working men of the civilized world and their friends in the other classes ought to induce their Governments entirely to abandon the idea of armed intervention in the affairs of Russia--whether open or disguised, whether military or in the shape of subventions to different nations. Russia is now living through a revolution of the same depth and the same importance as the British nation underwent in 1639-1648 and France in 1789-1794; and every nation should refuse to play the shameful part that Great Britain, Prussia, Austria and Russia played during the French Revolution. Since death ends all of consciousness, the most inhuman of all inhumanities and the most immoral of all immoralities is the shortening of human life; and next to it is the diminishing of its happiness. War shortens many lives and fills more with misery; hence its essential inhumanity and immorality. A large part of the world has just passed through the furnace of war--a war between the German and English nations with their respective national allies. All international wars are contests for supremacy in the markets of the world, or at least for advantage in some among them. This one was no exception. The furnace of this war was seven times larger and seven times hotter than any other has been. According to the latest estimates (September, 1920) its fierce flames directly and indirectly killed thirty million young men and wrecked totally twice and partially thrice as many more. Yet the fire by which the world upon the whole and in the long run suffers most is not the intermittent, flaming one of the hell of international war, which is always kindled and sustained by the capitalists of the belligerent nations for the purpose solely of securing commercial advantages over each other; but the greater suffering is by the permanent, smoking fire of the hell of the inter-class war which is always kindled and sustained by the capitalist class in each nation for the purpose solely of robbing the labor class of the fruit of their toil. These national and class wars (hells, flaming and smouldering) are due to the same matter-force law, the law of self-preservation, and, paradoxical as it may seem, this law is equally operative on both sides in each war. Both hells exist as the result of the working out of the same law of animal preservation by competition--the law of capitalism, and both hells will be done away with as the result of the working out of the same law of human preservation by co-operation--the law of socialism. One proof of the rightness of the co-operative system is the fact that it necessarily operates for the whole people and not for a class, whereas the competitive system as necessarily operates for a class and not for the whole people. Still another proof, and it is in itself almost if not quite conclusive, of the rightness of the co-operative system is the fact that its competitive rival breaks down in every great emergency. It broke down completely in all the belligerent countries (in none more than the United States) immediately upon their entrance into the world war. Our government was obliged to assume control of the railroads, coal mines and food products. If a class government, such as ours is, can provide during a war by the co-operative system, and only by it, for the wants of a country, and better, too, than during the time of peace, what may we expect in the way of plenty, comfort and leisure, when under the classless administration there shall be no more war with its wholesale waste, and when there shall be one vast army of producers? All the days which the fifty millions of soldiers spent in idleness will then be so many holidays for toilers who are in need of them for rest and self-improvement; and every dollar which is now wasted will then be two dollars saved, so that the pecuniary prosperity of war times will be increased, rather than diminished, and made continuous. Under a classless administration the world would soon become comparatively rich and happy.[H] Representatives of the capitalist class are trying to create the impression that the co-operative system which our government temporarily established as a military necessity is socialism, and that the labor class should seek no more than its restoration and continuance: but this system is the same old wolf in sheep's clothing. The rickety house in which we are living is a competitive structure and it cannot be made into a co-operative one, at least not upon its present foundation, the sand of capitalistic classism. Industrialism must take it down and rebuild it upon the rock of classless labor. Neither this demolition nor this reconstruction constitutes any part of the government program. Its socialism is a mirage, not a reality, and the matter-force law renders it necessarily so. Marxian socialism is simplicity itself. It requires only three conditions, each of which is perfectly intelligible; but no one of them ever has existed or could exist under any capitalist government, because all such governments, not excepting our own, especially not it, are organized in the interest of parasitic profiteers, not productive laborers. The three indispensable yet simple prerequisites to this real socialism or communism are: First, that the people within a municipality, either town or city, own and control the utilities within the area occupied by that municipality, which have to do with the immediate comfort of the people who live there. Second, that the people in each state own and control the utilities that come in contact with the people on a state-wide scale. Third, that the people within the nation own collectively and control democratically the utilities which affect us on a national scale. Should we desire to go into more detail, we might say that the things necessary to the individual be owned and controlled by the individual, that the home be controlled by the family, and so on. To go into the question on an international scale we might also add that utilities mutually necessary to all the nations be owned by the nations, as the Panama Canal, for instance.--Higgins. Prince Kropotkin, though not a bolshevik, says approvingly of the Russian revolution that it is trying to build up a society where the whole produce of the joint efforts of labor by technical skill and scientific knowledge should go entirely to the commonwealth; and he declares that for the unavoidable reconstruction of society, by pacific or any other revolutionary means, there must be a union of all the trade unions of the world to free the production of the world from its present enslavement to capitalism. Higgins and Kropotkin have here put co-operative socialism or communism in a nutshell both as to its aim and program. The law of self-preservation is ever the same, but whether its salvation is for a part of the people by competition--capitalist salvation, or for the whole people by co-operation--socialist salvation, depends upon whether it rides or is ridden. So long as the law of self-preservation was supposed to be the will of a conscious, personal god whose earthly representatives were kings and priests or presidents and preachers, the law did the riding within the large domain of animal competition--the domain of capitalism. War is the normal, indeed necessary evil of this domain, and hence the world must have wars so long as it remains within it, and it will remain there so long as it has celestial divinities with terrestrial representatives in states and churches for its governors. Now that the law is known to be a matter-force necessity, not a divine decree, the time may rationally be hoped for when the people will do the riding within the small domain of human co-operation--the domain of socialism. Peace is the normal, indeed necessary, state of this domain, and hence the world must cease to have war when it enters it, and is governed by itself instead of by a god and the powers of state and church alleged to have been ordained by him. Capital punishment should not be administered, if at all, except to a murderer whose guilt has been established to the satisfaction of the great majority of the people in the community to which he belongs, and never in the case of a suspected murderer of whom this is not true. If William II were really the devil behind the European war by which many millions of the young men of the world have lost their lives, and if Thomas Mooney were really the devil behind the San Francisco explosion by which ten citizens of California lost their lives, their punishment by death might be urged with much show of reason as a social necessity. But if both were hung on the same gallows the world would go on suffering by the ever recurring and closely related misfortunes of war and riot as if nothing had happened. The real devil behind all wars and riots is the capitalist system. There will never be an end of wars and riots until this devil is overthrown. The so-called Kaiser-war and the so-called Mooney riot are on the same footing, both having the character of an insurrection and both having the aim of self-preservation. The insurrection of the Kaiser was a riot on behalf of the capitalist class of Germany and for the purpose of protecting it against the capitalist class of England. The insurrection of Mooney (assuming his guilt, merely for illustration) was a riot on behalf of the labor class of California and for the purpose of protecting it against the capitalist class of that state. Incidentally, both riots have secondary aims of world-wide extent. The Kaiser had two of these: to overthrow the commercial supremacy of England that Germany might have it, and to overthrow industrial republicanism (socialism) everywhere. Mooney had this: the overthrow of commercial imperialism (capitalism) everywhere. As rioters, there is this in common between Kaiser William and Thomas Mooney, that though moving in opposite directions, they are nevertheless carried by the same matter-force law which manifests itself in the same riotous system, capitalism--a system which, under one form or another, has ever produced international wars and class revolutions; and, so long as it is allowed to exist, never will cease the production of them. Hence the interests of the world require not that these rioters, Kaiser William and Thomas Mooney, should be hung, but that the capitalist system, which by the operation of the law of self-preservation by animal competitions, produced both of the riots with which they are respectively credited, should be overthrown by the labor system, which, by the operation of the same law of self-preservation by human co-operation, will put an end to all bloody conflicts. But taking the popular view concerning the responsibility for this commercial war and labor riot and assuming that they should be charged respectively to Kaiser William and Thomas Mooney, why should the promoter of the little riot die, or worse, suffer imprisonment during life, and the promoter of the big war live? Yet, if the Kaiser were captured even by England there is no probability that he would be turned over to a court constituted of representatives of the allied nations, tried, found guilty and put to death. Why not? Because, like all wars, his war, no matter which side won the victory, has been upon the whole, or will be in the long run, in the interest of the capitalists of every nation on both sides, at least of the great ones. If Kaiser William would not be sent to the gallows by such a court why should the court which tried Thomas Mooney be allowed to send him to it; and, especially why, since California is part of a republic, and the Kaiser's war was on behalf of imperialism and a small minority, while Mooney's riot was on behalf of republicanism and the overwhelming majority? Just now the human part of the world is especially afflicted by unnecessary and therefore unjustifiable deaths. The Governor of California has the opportunity to prevent one such death. I say to him, do it. In the name of Justice and in the name of Humanity, I with millions of others solemnly call upon him to save Mooney, the revolutionist, as Pilate, the Governor of Judea, according to the verdict of all right-thinking men and women, should have saved Jesus, the revolutionist. III. You say in effect that we must postulate a divine consciousness to account for human consciousness; but, on your theory, how could human consciousness come out of a divine consciousness; and, anyhow, contrary to your implication, we know of no consciousness which has come, except by inheritance, from another consciousness, but only of consciousnesses which have come from unconsciousnesses. Your contention, in this connection, is to the effect that nothing can come out of nothing, and this is the core of a book, "A Short Apology for Being a Christian in the Twentieth Century," by the learned ex-president of Trinity College, Hartford, Dr. Williamson Smith, with whom you have had, I think, some correspondence. This Apology was written against a letter of mine to the House of Bishops, entitled, "A Natural Gospel for a Scientific Age," which has never seen the light, partly because the ex-President convinced me that if I must give up the orthodox conception of God, I could not hold to the one which I had worked out in the letter. If you have not seen the ex-President's book, you will, I am sure, enjoy it more than I did, but I doubt whether you will profit as much by it, for it verges towards your lines and away from mine; and so it set me to studying as it will not you, with the result of rejecting the new conception of God which I had worked out for myself, but with it I threw over the old one and ceased to believe in the existence of a conscious, personal divinity. Of course, my faith in the existence of a spiritual world and hope for a future life in it went with the god. Dr. Williamson Smith and you are entirely correct in the contention that something cannot come out of nothing: but I no longer pretend that it can and I now see that the stones which have been thrown at me by you both and others have come from glass houses; for this is really the pretension of orthodox theologians. They affirm that the universe was created by God out of nothing, but produce no scrap of evidence for His existence, and even if they could prove that He exists, they would have to admit that He came out of nothing, or at least from something which did so. It is indeed true that I am unable to tell what matter, force and motion came from, or if I agree with most physicists that they arose from ether, I cannot give its derivative; but, granting that I am as incapable of proving their existence as you are of proving the existence of the Christian trinity, nevertheless I have this immense advantage over you, that I can prove that everything both physical and psychical (including man and his civilization) entering into the constitution of the universe, lives, moves and has its being in my divine trinity--matter, force and motion: whereas you cannot prove that anything is indebted for what it is to your divine trinity--Father, Son and Spirit: therefore I insist that your trinity is a symbol of mine. What is true of the Christian trinity is true of all the divinities of the supernaturalistic interpretations of religion. The Jews live with no reference to the Christian God, or at least not with any to his second and third persons, and neither Christians nor Jews do so in the case of either the Mohammedan or Buddhistic divinity, and so on, all around the whole circle of gods. But no representative of any god lives without constant reference to mine, of which yours and all the others are, as I think, symbols, if they are anything better than fetishes. If you and ex-President Smith mean by your fundamental thesis, that a thing which is essentially different from that from which it came is an impossibility, you are certainly wrong, for the world is full of such things. In the tree of life there are millions of examples, since (using language in its general significance) everything above the amoeba must be regarded as essentially different from it, though all, including man, came out of it. Going back as far as we safely can on solid ground, we come to the nebulae from which the solar systems of the universe have evolved, and surely a solar system is as essentially different from the nebula as a man is from an amoeba. Coming to our earth when its primeval, flaming, swirling gases had been condensed into inorganic matter, the protoplasm which is organic matter, arose from it, and so something which grows from within out, comes from something which grows from without in. The large hoofed horse came from a small five-toed animal, not much larger than a rabbit. The piano and the gun are brother and sister, born of the bow and arrow, yet how different the children from the parent. An infant is unconscious at birth and what it has of consciousness as a child and an adult is dependent upon the development of its body. Moreover, as the human body is a development through animal bodies, we may logically conclude that human consciousness is ultimately dependent upon and inherited from animal consciousness rather than a divine one. Jesus is represented as saying that God is a spirit; and the fathers of the English part of the Christian reformation said that there is but one living and true God without body, parts or passions. This is their explanation of his conception of God. When the Jesuine definition of God and the Anglican explanation of it were framed, the Divine Spirit was supposed to be an objective personality. Modern psychology teaches that no spirit, divine, human or otherwise, is a personality. According to this science, spirit and soul are synonyms for the subjective content of a conscious life, which content consists of feelings, aspirations, ideals, convictions and determinations. Psychologists know of no spirit or soul without a body constituted of parts any more than physicists know of a force without matter constituted of molecules, atoms, electrons and ions. Gods represent the religious ideals of people and are symbols of what they think they should be as religionists. They are symbolic, emblematic, parabolic, allegoric devices of the imagination, and contain nothing but the ideal, imaginary things which are put into them by people for themselves, and they do nothing except what the people perform through them in their names for themselves. Matter and force constitute a machine, an automatic one, which produces things, everything which enters into the constitution of the cosmos, by evolutionary processes, or rather all such things, and there are no others, are the result of one universal and eternal process of evolution. What is known as nature is the aggregation of the products of this machine by this process. The machine is unconscious and its workings are mechanical, yet some of its products rise into self-consciousness with the power of self-determination, but both the consciousness and the determination are limited. The infinite consciousness, personality and determination which are postulated of gods are contradictions. Of all beings man possesses most of consciousness, personality and determination. What he has of these is not dependent upon gods, but all they have of them is dependent upon him. Divine beings are, as to their self-consciousness, personality and determination, human beings personified and placed in the sky. Man does everything for gods. They do nothing for him. Such are the facts and arguments based upon them, which have forced me step by step over the long way from the position of supernaturalistic traditionalism in its Christian form, still occupied by you, to that of naturalistic scientism in its socialist form which I am now occupying, as tentatively as possible, pending further study in the light of additional facts, for which (some six years ago, when I was desperately battling to prevent the shipwreck of my faith in the god and heaven of orthodox Christianity) I appealed to about 800 outstanding theologians, among them yourself, representing all parts of christendom and every great church, including of course all our bishops among the theologians, and the Anglican communion among the churches. You may remember how much of correspondence we had at that time, though neither you nor any one who kindly tried to reach me with the rope of the new scientific apologetics for which I appealed, can realize how eagerly I looked for the replies to my questions, nor the sickness of heart which I experienced when I saw that, in spite of every possible effort of my own and help of others, I was slowly but surely drifting towards what I then thought to be the fatal whirlpools and rocks, but what I now regard as a sheltered port--the golden gate of that delectable country, Marxian socialism, the only heaven that I am now hoping to behold. You earnestly contend that I am wrong in representing that the majority of outstanding men of science and scientific philosophers do not believe in the existence of a conscious, personal divinity, who created, sustains and governs the universe, or in a conscious, personal life for man beyond the grave, and that none among such scientists and philosophers are orthodox Christians. Prof. Leuba, the Bryn Mawr psychologist, is one among my authorities for these representations. In his "Belief in God and Immortality" (1916) he exhibits the results of a recent and thorough-going investigation in a chart from which it appears that, taking the greater and lesser representatives of the scientists together, they fall below 50 per cent as to their belief in God, and below 55 per cent in their belief in immortality.[I] The showing for the scientists who are especially concerned with the origin and destiny of life, biologists and psychologists, is much less favorable to you; for, taking the greater and lesser together, only 31 per cent of the biologists believe in God and 35 per cent in immortality; and only 25 per cent of the psychologists believe in God, and 20 per cent in immortality. But the worst by far, is yet to come; for, taking the greater biologists and psychologists, those who count most, of the former 18 per cent believe in God, and 25 per cent in immortality; and of the latter, the greatest of all authorities, only 13 per cent believe in God, and only 8 per cent in immortality. The greater psychologists are comparatively consistent in that fewer among them believe in a conscious, personal life for humanity beyond the grave than in the conscious, personal life of divinity beyond the clouds. Human immortality is an absurdity without divine existence. The overwhelming majority of great psychologists (the greatest of all authorities, as to whether or not gods "without bodies, parts or passions" can consciously exist in the skies, and disembodied men, women and children in celestial paradises) see this and limit the career of man to earth. In their judgment his heaven and hell are here, and the gods who make and the devils who unmake civilizations are humans, not good or bad divinities. This is the conclusion of a rapidly increasing number of educated people. A century ago only a few men of science and scientific philosophers had reached it, not twenty five per cent, but now the percentage is nearly ninety and it will soon be ninety-nine. The time is coming, and in the not distant future, when no educated man shall look to the god of any supernaturalistic interpretation of religion for light or strength, and when none shall hope for a heaven above the earth or fear a hell below it. Heav'n but the Vision of fulfill'd Desire, And Hell the Shadow from a Soul on fire Cast on the Darkness into which Ourselves, So late emerg'd from, shall so soon expire. --Omar. Joseph McCabe and Chapman Cohen are among the most brilliant of present day writers on scientific and philosophic subjects. They are not socialists, but both see that modern socialism and orthodox Christianism are utterly irreconcilable incompatibilities. "How is it that on the Continent democratic bodies are so sceptical, or sceptical bodies so democratic? Precisely because they doubt (or reject altogether) the Christian heaven. They want to make this earth as happy as it can be, to make sure of happiness somewhere. Having taken their eyes from the sky, they have discovered remarkable possibilities in the earth. Having to give less time to God, they have more time to give to man. They think less about their heavenly home, and more about their earthly home. The earthly home has grown very much brighter for the change. The heavenly home is just where it was. "The plain truth is, of course, that the sentiment which used to be absorbed in religion is now embodied in humanitarianism. Religion is slowly dying everywhere. Social idealism is growing everywhere. People who want to persuade us that social idealism depends on religion are puzzled by this. It is only because they are obstinately determined to connect everything with Christianity, in spite of its historical record. There is no puzzle. We have transferred our emotions from God to man, from heaven to earth."--Joseph McCabe. "Socialists who have one eye on the ballot box may assure these people that Socialism is not Atheistic, but few will be convinced. The statement that Socialism has nothing to do with religion, or that many professedly religious people are Socialist, is quite futile. A thoughtful religionist would reply that the first point concedes the truth of all that has been said against Socialism, while the second evades the question at issue. No one is specially concerned with the mental idiosyncracies of individual Socialists; what is at issue is the question whether Socialism does or does not take an Atheistic view of life? He might add, too, that a Socialism which leaves out the belief in God and a future life, which does not, in even the remotest manner, imply these beliefs, which does not make their acceptance the condition of holding the meanest office in the State, and, at most, will merely allow religious beliefs to exist so long as they do not threaten the well-being of the State, is, to all intents and purposes, an Atheistical system."--Chapman Cohen. In summing up the results of his investigations Prof. Leuba observes that: In every class of persons investigated, the number of believers in God is less and in most classes very much less than the number of non-believers, and that the number of believers in immortality is somewhat larger than in a personal God; that among the more distinguished, unbelief is very much more frequent than among the less distinguished; and finally that not only the degree of ability, but also the kind of knowledge possessed, is significantly related to the rejection of these beliefs. In another connection Prof. Leuba speaking of Christian dogmatism as a whole says: Christianity, as a system of belief, has utterly broken down, and nothing definite, adequate, and convincing has taken its place. There is no generally acknowledged authority; each one believes as he can, and few seem disturbed at being unable to hold the tenets of the churches. This sense of freedom is the glorious side of an otherwise dangerous situation. Your conception of the origin, sustenance and governance of the universe is burdened, as are all interpretations of religion which are hinged upon the existence of conscious, personal divinities, with two difficulties: (1) its physical impossibility, and (2) its moral impossibility. 1. Physical Impossibilities. The atomic and molecular movements required for the thinking of a single man would be beyond the capacity of all the gods of the supernaturalistic interpretations of religion together. Some idea of the number of such motions which are taking place in every human brain, will be derived from the conservative representations of Hofmeister as exhibited in the following condensed form by McCabe in his book, "The Evolution of Mind:" We have reason to believe that there are in each molecule of ordinary protoplasm at least 450 atoms of carbon, 720 atoms of hydrogen, 116 of nitrogen, 6 of sulphur, and 140 of oxygen. Nerve-plasm is still more complex. Recent discoveries have only increased the wonder and potentiality of the cortex. Each atom has proved to be a remarkable constellation of electrons, a colossal reservoir of energy. The atom of hydrogen contains about 1,000 electrons, the atom of carbon 12,000, the atom of nitrogen 14,000, the atom of oxygen 16,000, and the atom of sulphur 32,000. These electrons circulate within the infinitesimal space of the atom at a speed of from 10,000 to 90,000 miles a second. It would take 340,000 barrels of powder to impart to a bullet the speed with which some of these particles dart out of their groups. A gramme of hydrogen--a very tiny portion of the simplest gas--contains energy enough to lift a million tons more than a hundred yards. Of these astounding arsenals of energy, the atoms, we have, on the lowest computation, at least 600 million billion in the cortex of the human brain. Scientists, says Professor Olerich, in his book, "A Modern Look at the Universe," estimate that the chemical atom is so infinitesimally small that it requires a group of not less than a billion to make the group barely visible under the most powerful microscope, and a thousand such groups would have to be put together in order to make it just visible to the naked eye as a mere speck floating in the sunbeam. The microscope reveals innumerable animalcules in the hundredth part of a drop of water. They all eat, digest, move and from all appearances of their frolics, they are endowed with sensation and ability of enjoyment. What then shall we say of the minuteness of the food they eat; of the blood that surges through their veins; of their nervous system that thrills and guides them? Their minutest organs must be composed of molecules, atoms, ions and electrons inconceivably smaller than are the organs themselves. Is there any god in a celestial field who could care for the movements which occur in the molecules constituting a hundredth part of a drop of water, not to speak of those which occur in the bodies of its myriads of inhabitants? And what shall we say of all the inorganic and organic movements in a small cup of whole drops of water, let alone those of a great ocean of them? But why go further into this subject? Is not the utter childishness of the orthodox representative of a supernaturalistic interpretation of religion, who credits his god with the governance of the motions occurring in the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms of this globe, leaving out of account those of its solar system, and of other systems which constitute the universe, sufficiently manifest? If you say that the motions which issue in the phenomena of the universe are regulated by a law which was once for all willed by the god of the Christian interpretation of religion, I ask why the law should be credited to the willing of this god rather than to that of the god of Jewish, Mohammedan or Buddhistic interpretation. Newton took the first of the six initiatory steps in the long way which led to the conclusion that the universe is self-existing, self-sustaining and self-governing, by showing that all the movements of the solar systems were necessarily what they have been by reason of a matter-force law, gravitation. This discovery is the most momentous event in the whole history of mankind. Laplace took the second step by showing that the cosmic nebulae contain within themselves all the potentialities necessary to the formation of solar systems. Lavoisier took the third step by showing that the matter which enters into the constitution of the universe is an eternality. Mayer took the fourth step by showing that the force which enters into the constitution of the universe is an eternality. Darwin took the fifth step by showing that the protoplasm contains all the potentialities of every form of physical and degree of psychical life from the moneron to man; that all representatives of both the vegetable and animal kingdoms, including man, are related and so on a level as to their origin and destiny, and that the different species are the natural results of the necessary struggle with rivals and with adverse environments for existence. Marx took the sixth step by showing that the essential difference between humans and beasts is primarily a question of the hand and secondarily of the machines by which its efficiency is immeasurably increased; that slavery has been and must continue to be the means of advancement towards the ideal civilization; that the kinds of human slavery were what they have been because machines have been what they were, and that the time is coming when the slaves will no longer be men, women and children, but machines which will be exploited for the good of the many, not the profit of the few--then, and not until then, rapid advance shall be made towards the goal where the whole world shall be one great co-operative family, every member of which shall have the greatest of possible opportunities to make the most of terrestrial life by having it as long and happy as possible. 2. Moral Impossibilities. The moral impossibility of the assumptions of these apologies is seen by all who have eyes for seeing things as they are in the fact that if God is credited with the good He must also be debited with the evil. If for example, He endowed the human body with its useful and necessary parts. He also endowed it with its harmful and unnecessary parts. Experts in the field of anatomy tell us that there are in our bodies at least 180 useless parts, some among which are the occasion of much suffering and many premature deaths, the vermiform appendix alone causing many thousands of such cases annually. Do you not see that these useless structures, all of which are inherited from the lower animals, are so many evidences of the truth of Darwinism and the untruthfulness of Mosaism? Eleven of these wholly useless and more or less harmful inheritances have been of no use to any of our ancestors from the fish up and four are inherited from our reptilian and amphibian forefathers, but according to Moses we have no such progenitors. Admitting the fact of the existence of evil there is no escaping from the logical conclusions of dear, old sensible Epicurus: Either God is willing to remove evil from this world and cannot, or he can and is not willing, or finally he can and is willing. If he is willing and cannot, it is impotence, which is contrary to the nature of God. If he can and is unwilling, it is wickedness, and that is no less contrary to the nature of God. If he is not willing and cannot, there is both wickedness and impotence. If he is willing and can, which is the only one of these suppositions that can be applied to God, how happens it that there is evil on earth? Oh, if only the world had been influenced by this logic instead of by the metaphysics of the supernaturalistic interpretations of religion, it would have been so far on the way towards the ideal civilization as to have long since passed the point where it would have been possible to have the world war which has recently deluged the earth with blood and tears, or to make the Versailles treaty which is destined to issue in one war after another, ever filling the world fuller with the tyranny, poverty, slavery and misery which are the inevitable concomitants of all wars. In my opinion the fascinating essayist, Mallock, has written the best of all apologies for theism. I cannot imagine a better one. He, however, makes no more attempt than Sir Oliver Lodge does to establish Christianity, or any other supernaturalistic interpretations of religion. Like Kant and yourself, Mallock takes his stand on the ground that a belief in a celestial God, and in the immortality which goes with it, is necessary to morality, the basic virtue upon which civilization rests. As Kant admits that the existence of God cannot be inferred from pure reason, so Mallock admits and even strongly contends that it cannot be established on scientific grounds. I quote a striking passage: We must divest ourselves of all foregone conclusions, of all question-begging reverences, and look the facts of the universe steadily in the face. If theists will but do this, what they will see will astonish them. They will see that if there is anything at the back of this vast process, with a consciousness and a purpose in any way resembling our own--a Being who knows what he wants and is doing his best to get it--he is, instead of a holy and all-wise God, a scatter-brained, semi-powerful, semi-impotent monster. They will recognize as clearly as they ever did the old familiar facts which seemed to them evidences of God's wisdom, love and goodness; but they will find that these facts, when taken in connection with the others, only supply us with a standard in the nature of this being himself by which most of his acts are exhibited to us as those of a criminal madman. If he had been blind, he had not had sin; but if we maintain that he can see, then his sin remains. Habitually a bungler as he is, and callous when not actively cruel, we are forced to regard him, when he seems to exhibit benevolence, as not divinely benevolent, but merely weak and capricious, like a boy who fondles a kitten and the next moment sets a dog at it. And not only does his moral character fall from him bit by bit, but his dignity disappears also. The orderly processes of the stars and the larger phenomena of nature are suggestive of nothing so much as a wearisome court ceremonial surrounding a king who is unable to understand or to break away from it; whilst the thunder and whirlwind, which have from time immemorial been accepted as special revelations of his awful power and majesty, suggest, if they suggest anything of a personal character at all, merely some blackguardly larrikin kicking his heels in the clouds, not perhaps bent on mischief, but indifferent to the fact that he is causing it. But we need not attempt to fill in the picture further. The truth is, as we consider the universe as a whole, it fails to suggest a conscious and purposive God at all; and it fails to do so not because the processes of evolution as such preclude the idea that God might have made use of them for a definite purpose, but because when we come to consider these processes in detail, and view them in the light of the only purposes they suggest, we find them to be such that a God who could deliberately have been guilty of them would be a God too absurd, too monstrous, too mad to be credible. The god who had any part in bringing upon the world the English-German war, the Versailles peace, the Russian blockade, is for me a devil not a divinity. If you say that the Christian god had nothing to do with them, I reply that these are among the greatest of all curses wherewith mankind has been afflicted in modern times; and if he could not or would not prevent them, what ground is there for looking to him for help in any time of need? How can I adequately express my contempt for the assertion that all things occur for the best, for a wise and beneficent end? It is the most utter falsehood, and a crime against the human race.... Human suffering is so great, so endless, so awful, that I can hardly write of it.... The whole and the worst, the worst pessimist can say is far beneath the least particle of the truth.... Anyone who will consider the affairs of the world at large ... will see that they do not proceed in the manner they would do for our happiness if a man of humane breadth of view were placed at their head with unlimited power. A man of intellect and humanity could cause everything to happen in an infinitely superior manner. But that which is ... credited to a non-existent intelligence (or cosmic "order," it is just the same) should really be claimed and exercised by the human race. We must do for ourselves what superstition has hitherto supposed an intelligence to do for us.--Richard Jeffries. Would but some winged Angel ere too late Arrest the yet unfolded Roll of Fate, And make the stern Recorder otherwise Enregister, or quite obliterate! Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, Would not we shatter it to bits--and then Remold it nearer to the Heart's Desire! --Omar. You frequently intimate that my doctrine concerning the origin and destiny of the universe with all that therein is, including man, is not that of the majority of men of science and scientific philosophers, but that yours is. It will therefore be of interest to you to know that I have submitted the most radical of my materialistic pieces to three men of science, all great authorities, one of whom replied, that he was in substantial agreement with me, but thought me to be 400 years ahead of our time; another, that he found nothing to criticize unless it might be my failure to give greater prominence to the fact that the gods of the redemptive interpretations, of religion were so many versions of the sun-myth, and the other, that the essay would pass any world congress of scientists by a large majority. You think that I am wrong in quoting Newton and Darwin on my side, because they believed in the existence of a conscious, personal god. I am persuaded that such was not the case with Darwin at his death; but, however this may be, it is in neither of these cases, nor in that of any other scientist, a question of what he philosophically believed concerning a god, but of what he scientifically established as a fact. Newton established the fact that the movements of the stars in their courses are naturally regulated by the law of gravitation, not supernaturally by the will of a god. Darwin established the fact that all living species of animal and vegetable life exist as the natural results of evolutionary processes, not as the supernatural results of creative acts. If Newton were to stand by his theological writings, he would fall in your estimation, for his work on the book of Daniel would be regarded by you as an absurdity. He considered Daniel to be the great revelation of a God, Jehovah, but you know it to be the purest fiction of a man, quite as much the work of the imagination of its author as Don Quixote is that of Cervantes. Among the many theological authorities whom you quote against me, the greatest, in my estimation, is Dr. Inge, Dean of St. Paul's, London, whose utterances I have been noting with great interest of late; partly, no doubt, because he seems to be giving up your orthodox side and coming over, slowly but surely, to my heterodox one. In a London paper which has just reached me, the Literary Guide, this is said of the Dean: The theological opinions of Dean Inge, one of the official mouthpieces of the Church of England, and probably the most distinguished spokesman for the more liberally minded of the clergy, have now reached an interesting stage, both for those without the Church as well as for those within it. Although he does not feel called upon to state his own private conclusions on such debatable questions, he no longer regards the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and the Bodily Resurrection as essential prerequisites of Christianity and would consider fit for ordination any candidate who rejected them, provided such a person still acknowledged the divine nature of Jesus Christ--that is, he would not exclude him from the Church's ministry. If I understand Dean Inge as he is reported in the article of which this is the opening paragraph, he bases his faith in the divinity of Jesus upon the uniqueness of his character and teachings, not on the miraculousness of his birth and healings. But Dean Inge has no authentic or reliable account of the life and teachings of Jesus; and so, as a theologian, like all theologians, he lives, moves and has his being in the realm of fiction, the difference between him and yourself being that he is in that part of it where the imagination sits enthroned, and you in the region where metaphysics is monarch of all it surveys. An outstanding theologian who, as it seems to me, overshadows Dean Inge, commenting upon a piece of my writing which is quite as radical as any part of this letter goes even further than he. "I have," he says, "just read the Chapter of your Natural Gospel for a Scientific Age, which you have kindly sent me, with the greatest interest. Indeed I have come so heartily to share your point of view that I can find no points for criticism; I can only say how grateful I am to have had an opportunity of seeing your uncompromising and clear expression of the only kind of Modernism that has any promise for the future. I am beginning to feel more and more uncomfortable in our Christian movement because so many of our leaders here are attempting an impossible compromise with dogma. Men like Dr. Rashdall have no place in the movement for men who cannot accept their 'fullblooded theism.' In fact they are Harnackians with their one or two unalterably fixed dogmas." IV. If you ask why I continue to be a member of an orthodox church and its ministry, the answer is, there is no reason why I should not for (if they may be interpreted by myself, for myself, spiritually) I accept every article of the creed of catholic orthodoxy; but if the articles of this creed must be interpreted literally there is no one in our church (the Episcopal) or in any among the churches, who believes all of them. For example, who believes, that God created the heavens and the earth out of nothing in six days, as he is represented to have done in his alleged revelation of which the creed is a condensation? All in this church, or at least all the ministers of it, who have obeyed its requirement respecting the devotion of themselves to study, as I have, know that the firmament or heaven of which the revelation speaks has no substantial existence, only an imaginary one. What was supposed to be it, is but the reflection of light upon the dust of the atmosphere. As for the earth it was not made out of nothing; and, indeed, it was not supernaturally made at all but naturally evolutionized out of matter and force, and even they were not created by a god, for they are co-existing eternalities; nor were their evolutionary processes directed by him, for they have eternally, automatically and necessarily co-operated in such processes to the production of every phenomenon which has contributed to make both the physical and psychical parts of the universe what they have been at any time, including the divine, diabolical and angelic fictions which men have made and placed above and below the earth. If you ask whether I am still a professing Christian, I will answer: yes, yet the Brother Jesus of the New Testament, catholic creed and protestant confessions, is not for me an historical personage, but only a symbol of all that is for the good of the world, even as the Uncle Sam of American literature is not an historical personage but only a symbol of all which is for the good of the United States. If you ask whether I am a praying Christian, I shall answer: yes, yet when I pray, as I do every day, my prayer is an appeal to a real divinity within my heart, the better self, of which self all the unreal divinities in the skies including the Christian trinity, Father, Son and Spirit, are but poetic symbols, and I no longer expect this God to answer otherwise than the symbol of parents, Santa Claus, answers the prayers of children, or the symbol of the United States, Uncle Sam, answers the prayers of Americans. If you ask whether I am a communing Christian, I shall answer: yes, yet when I go to the Lord's Supper, as I do every month, the strength which I receive is derived from the feeling that through it I place myself in communion with my human brethren on earth, not with a divine brother in the sky, particularly with the members of my church and the citizens of my town and its neighborhood, but generally with all men, women and children throughout the whole world, of which real brethren the brother god in the sky, Jesus, is but a poetic symbol; nor do I now regard the communion of this supper as being essentially different from that of any ordinary family-meal, lodge-banquet, or socialist-picnic, with each of which repasts the informal Lord's Supper of the apostolic church had much more in common than it has with the formal celebrations of the sacrament in any among the sectarian churches.[J] Many critics represent that, in view of the changes in my theological opinion, if I am an honest man, not a hypocrite, I will leave the ministry and communion of the Episcopal Church. But why should I go while any of my brother clergymen remain? I give a symbolic or allegorical interpretation to every article of the whole system of Christian supernaturalism and uniqueism; yet as symbols, allegories, parables, or myths, I do not reject any, and no member of our House of Bishops literally accepts all. Who among influential preachers of any rank in any church believes: (1) that the world was made about six thousand years ago by a personal, Creator-God out of nothing; or that it was made at any time out of anything? (2) that such a God formed Adam out of dust and Eve out of a rib; that they left His hands as perfect physical and moral images of Himself, and fully civilized representatives of the human race; or that there was any first man and woman? (3) that He planted a Garden of Eden and placed them therein under ideal conditions, and that He walked in it and talked with them; or that there ever was any such garden? (4) that a personal destroyer-Devil, incarnated in a talking serpent, tempted them into disobedience; or that there ever was any such Devil? (5) that but for this Devil's influence and their sin, labor and suffering, physical death and moral degradation would have been unknown on earth, and that it would have been the permanent abode of mankind, as indeed of all sentient creatures; or that any of the higher forms of life would have been possible without death? and (6) that to repair the evils accomplished by this Destroyer-Devil it was necessary for a personal Restorer-God to become incarnated in a man, in order that he might shed this blood as a sufficient sacrifice for the satisfaction of the offended Creator-God; also, in order that the resurrection of the bodies (bones, flesh, blood and animal organism) of all deceased men, women and children and the rehabitation of them by their respective souls could be accomplished, to the end that a few, on account of their faith, might be transferred to a permanent home in a heaven on a firmament above the earth, and the many, because of their lack of faith, to a permanent home in a hell below; or that there ever was any such incarnation for these purposes; or that there are any such firmament, heaven, and hell, or that there will be any such resurrection, ascension or descension? If other bishops, priests and deacons can, as they must, bring in their symbolism or allegorism touching any or all of these six fundamentals, which constitute the basis of the supernaturalism of traditional Christianity, and yet not leave the church, why may not I bring in mine and remain? Attention is called by several critics to Sir Oliver Lodge, as an example of an outstanding man of science who accepts supernaturalism. While I was desperately trying to retain my conception of a supernaturalistic God and of all the supernaturalism that goes with it (revelation of truth, answer to prayer, guidance by providence, resurrection of the dead and their ascension, eternal consciousness and happiness) I at one time centered a great deal of hope in him, and eagerly studied his works as indeed I did those of most apologists for supernaturalism among them the greatest, Flammarion, Balfour, Bergson and Hudson, but my careful study of his many writings convinced me that he does not hold any of the supernaturalistic doctrines which are distinctively Christian. However, it is my doctrine concerning Jesus, rather than that of Christian traditionalism, that is in exact alignment with that of this renowned physicist. We agree that Jesus, if historical, was a Son of God and the Christ to men in no other sense, and therefore in no higher degree, than all representatives of the human race may be sons or daughters of God, if there are gods and christs, to the men, women and children with whom they come in contact. Most critics think that I am wrong in representing that the great majority of the leading men of science are naturalistic, not supernaturalistic, but Sir Oliver Lodge represents that among such scientists it is generally believed that the universe is "self-explained, self-contained and self-maintained;" and speaking on his own behalf of its creation out of nothing he says: "The improbability or absurdity of such a conception, except in the symbolism of poetry, is extreme, and it is unthinkable by any educated person." All these gods were created, endowed and located by man, and then he had them make revelations, create churches, institute sacraments and appoint priesthoods for his redemption from devils whom he also created, endowed and located. This is why people of the same country and time have such different gods and revelations. Jehovah is the god and the Old Testament the revelation of the kings and plutocrats who are responsible for wars; Jesus is the god and the New Testament is the revelation of the doctors and nurses who do what they can to alleviate the misery of them. The gods, not excepting Jehovah and Jesus, are as mythical as Santa Claus and answer their suppliants not otherwise than he answers his, through human representatives. If the suffering, needy or afflicted do not get help and sympathy from men, women and children they get none from the gods and angels. While on the one hand the great majority of scientists, scientific philosophers and educated people generally doubt that any god ever answered a prayer or exercised a providence, on the other, no one doubts that men, women and children answer millions of prayers daily and that every person's career is wholly different from what it would have been but for human providence; that, indeed, life would be impossible without the providence which all people exercise in the hearing and answering of prayers. Representatives of many of the interpretations of religion strewed every battle-field of the European war. The celestial saviours did not care for one of their devotees. The terrestrial saviours (doctors and nurses) did everything for the desperately wounded and saved millions who would have miserably perished but for them. These were the real christs and angels of whom the celestial ones are but symbols. The celestials always have passed by on the other side. The terrestrials are the Good Samaritans when there are any. Sceptics infer from this negligence that the gods and angels have no real objective existence. Believers contend that they really exist objectively and excuse the neglect on account of preoccupation. For example, the God of traditional Christianity is supposed to spend much time counting hairs on the heads of His people and watching sparrows fall to the ground. Sceptics are reverently but earnestly asking: Why does He not keep the sparrows from falling? Why does He not let the hairs remain unnumbered, until He has put a stop to wars and promoted good will among men to a degree which will render it impossible that the world should any longer be cursed by them? If believers say that we have no knowledge of the ways of God, sceptics reply: Since all which is known about any objective reality is concerning the ways thereof, what the action is under given circumstances, how do you know that your God has anything to do with either sparrows or men, or even that He exists? As to their philosophy concerning the origin, sustenance and governance of the universe, socialists of the school of Marx, are almost to a man materialists; but, as to their philosophy concerning life, they are as generally idealists. There is, I feel sure, as much idealism in my thinking and living now as there was in the days of my orthodoxy, but I will let you judge for yourself after reading the following confession of faith: My early life was blighted as the result of the premature death of my father by the Civil War and the consequent breaking up of his family and my bondage to a German who made a slave of me, broke my health by overwork and exposure, and, worst of all, kept me in ignorance, so that when, at the age of twenty-one, I began my education, I was assigned to the fourth grade of a public school. The prime of my life has been wasted in preaching as truths the dogmas of the Christian theology, the representations of which I now believe, with the overwhelming majority of educated people, to be at best so many symbols and at worst superstitions. But though I do not now and probably never shall again believe in the existence of a conscious, personal god, a knowledge of and obedience to whose will is necessary to salvation, yet an injustice is done me by those who say I have abandoned god and religion. Every one who desires and endeavors to fulfill the requirements of a law which is independent of his will and beyond his control has a god and a religion. I desire and endeavor this in the case of two such laws and so have two gods and two religions. Both of my divinities are trinities. One is in the physical realm and the other in the moral one. In the physical realm my triune god is: matter, the father; force, the son, and motion, the spirit. In the moral realm, my triune god is: fact, the father; truth, the son, and life, the spirit. For me the triune divinity of Christianity is a symbol of these trinities and it is my desire and effort to discover and fulfill what they require of me, in order that I may make my own physical, psychical and moral life as long, happy and complete as possible and help others in doing this for themselves. This desire and effort is at once my morality and religion, my politics and patriotism, and they are spiritual realities. On account of the first of these sets of spiritual virtues (morality and religion) I claim to be a Christian of the highest type, and that any accusation which is raised against me because of alleged disloyalty to any essential of Christianism is an injustice. On account of the second of these sets of spiritual virtues (politics and patriotism) I claim to be an American of the highest type, and that any accusation which is raised against me because of alleged disloyalty to an essential of Americanism is an injustice. From the viewpoint of the self-styled one hundred per cent Christians, I am a betrayer of Brother Jesus because I do not believe that he ever had any existence as a god and that, if he was at any time a man, the world does not now and never can know of one thing that he did or of one word that he said. From the viewpoint of the self-styled one hundred per cent Americans, I am a traitor to Uncle Sam, because I did oppose his going into the English-German war, and because I do object to the partiality which he shows to his rich nephews and nieces. Still Jesus and Uncle Sam are as dear to me as ever and indeed dearer, yet not as objective, conscious personalities, but as symbols, ideals or patterns. However, though I love my Brother Jesus and Uncle Sam all the time, as a child does Santa Claus at Christmas time, I am no longer childish enough at any time to look to either of them to do anything for me, because I know that what is done for me must be done either by myself or by men, women and children, and that as objective, conscious personalities, my Brother Jesus and Uncle Sam have had no more to do with my life than the man-in-the-moon. Your observation concerning the American government as being the standard to which all governments will ultimately conform challenges an earnest word of friendly dissent. Our government is what all the governments of the world are (with the single exception of the Russian) a government in the interest of a small class, the representatives of which own the means and machines of production and distribution and who produce and distribute things for profit, each for himself. The representatives of one class produce things socially, and those of another class appropriate them individually. This is capitalistic anarchy, the worst of possible anarchism, and it must have an end soon or the world will be lost. Robbery is the essence of anarchy and Marx showed that every cent of profit made under the existing system of economics (and in the United States it amounts to several billions of dollars every year) is so much robbery of the many who make and operate the machines, because they are paid less in wages than the value of the products made and distributed by them. We are hearing much in these days about the anarchy of those who are dissatisfied with the capitalistic governments, but the governments themselves and those in whose interests they exist are the real anarchists. The flesh and blood of anarchism are robbery and lying, and these are the meat and drink of capitalism. The English-German war was the most flagrant act of anarchy in the whole history of mankind. The peace of Versailles and the blockade of Russia were outrageous acts of anarchy, and so also are the terrorism and tyranny of which every capitalistic country is so full, our own with the rest. Morality is the very heart of civilization and of all that really makes for it; but morality is impossible on a capitalistic basis, for it is founded on the most immoral things in the world, robbery, lying, murder, ignorance, poverty and slavery. If I am right in the conviction that the United States is more wholly given over to capitalism than any other nation, not excepting even England, it is the greatest robber, liar and murderer on earth. How then, can the United States become the standard for the governments of the nations? If the government of Russia holds its own, it, rather than that of the United States, will become the standard to which all governments must measure up or else go down. Yes, not the government of the United States but that of Russia is destined to become the standard of all peoples, for the aim of our government is money, more money, and then some, for the few, while the infinitely higher aim of theirs is life, more life, fuller life for every man, woman and child. Within my generation the vanguard of humanity has passed from the age of traditionalism to that of scientism and this transition is the greatest and most salutary event in the whole history of humanity. It is impossible to exaggerate its importance. It marks the time when man began consciously to realize that he must look to himself rather than to any god for salvation. From time immemorial man has realized that ignorance is his ruin and knowledge his salvation, but during the too many and too long ages of traditionalism he made the fatal mistake of supposing that he was dependent upon a supernatural revelation by an unconscious, personal god for the necessary knowledge. But now the leading people of the world, the shepherds of the sheep, are seeing with increasing clearness that man has naturally inherited his knowledge and must naturally acquire by his own experience, reason and investigation every addition to it. The world is indeed passing through a long, dark night, but neither the longest nor the darkest, and since at last a great and rapidly increasing multitude happily realize that humanity must work out its own salvation through the living of its own knowledge by its own inherited and increased strength, not by a supernatural grace, we of this generation may rationally hope, as those of no other did or could, for the dawning of the longest and brightest of all days. As an old year dies into a new one, and as flourishing generations die into rising ones, so the old traditional ages, when nations and sects looked to their rival gods in the skies for help, are happily dying into the new scientific age, when all sensible and good men, relying upon the strength of a common divinity which is within themselves, will unite in an all-inclusive brotherhood for the promotion of the ideal civilization, a universal reign of righteousness. It is night,--midnight. The clock is striking twelve. But this is the very hour and the very minute, when all the saviours of mankind have always been and ever will be born. Then it is that the Virgin, Nature, comes to this dark world with her new born Son, Truth, whom to know and follow is morality, religion, politics and life. It is then that those who give expression to the highest ideals and deepest longings of mankind, hear the angels, Reason and Hope, sing: On earth peace and good will towards men. Very cordially and gratefully yours, WM. M. BROWN. Brownella Cottage, Galion, Ohio. [Illustration: FREDERICK ENGELS] [Illustration: NIKOLAI LENIN] FOOTNOTES: [H] The difference between a political republic, such as America has developed, and an industrial republic, such as Russia is developing, is that the administrators of the former are elected from the geographical divisions and those of the latter from the productive divisions into which the population is divided. If we liken states to fruit trees, the American tree may be said to have been evolutionized for the purpose of producing the fruit of commodities for the profit of the owning class, and the Russian, the fruit of commodities for the use of the working class. [I] See appendix. [J] Nevertheless I consider church-going to be a bad habit, and if I could live my life over, I would not allow myself to become addicted to it. COMMUNISM AND CHRISTIANISM ANALYZED AND CONTRASTED FROM THE MARXIAN AND DARWINIAN POINTS OF VIEW Appendix. I Scientific Socialism. II God and Immortality. III Mythical Character of Old and New Testament Personages. IV Would Socialism Change Human Nature? V What Will be the Form of the Workers' State? VI Withdrawal of Prize Offer. VII Afterword. Morality is the greatest thing in the world; but paradoxical as it may seem, there is one greater thing, liberty--the liberty which is freedom to learn, interpret, live and teach the truth as it is revealed by the facts or acts of nature. Without this freedom there can be no morality, and of course no true religion, politics or civilization. SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST. In northern climes, the polar bear Protects himself with fat and hair, Where snow is deep and ice is stark, And half the year is cold and dark; He still survives a clime like that By growing fur, by growing fat. These traits, O bear, which thou transmittest Prove the Survival of the Fittest. To polar regions waste and wan, Comes the encroaching race of man, A puny, feeble, little bubber, He has no fur, he has no blubber. The scornful bear sat down at ease To see the stranger starve and freeze; But, lo! the stranger slew the bear, And ate his fat and wore his hair; These deeds, O Man, which thou committest Prove the Survival of the Fittest. In modern times the millionaire Protects himself as did the bear: Where Poverty and Hunger are He counts his bullion by the car: Where thousands perish still he thrives-- The wealth, O Croesus, thou transmittest Proves the Survival of the Fittest. But, lo, some people odd and funny, Some men without a cent of money-- The simple common human race Chose to improve their dwelling place; They had no use for millionaires, They calmly said the world was theirs, They were so wise, so strong, so many, The Millionaires?--there wasn't any. These deeds, O Man, which thou committest Prove the Survival of the Fittest. --Mrs. Charlotte Stetson. I. SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM. The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery of production, and abolish the wage system. We find that the centering of management of the industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers. These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all. Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work", we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system". It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for the every-day struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.--Preamble of the Industrial Workers of the World. The following Synopsis of Scientific Socialism will serve both as a summary of and supplement to my little book. It is the introductory part of a catechism (a series of questions and answers) entitled "Scientific Socialism Study Course" published by Charles H. Kerr & Company, 341 East Ohio Street, Chicago, and is reprinted here by their consent, with certain changes in the interests of brevity and perspicuity. As a whole this short Study Course of only thirty small pages in large type is the greatest piece of catechetical literature of which I have any knowledge. Even the synopsis as given here contains more of the education which makes for the good of the world than all the catechisms of all the churches. The Catechism was published in 1913. 1. How do you explain the phenomena of History? Ans.: History, from the capitalist point of view, is a record of political and intellectual changes and revolutions of so-called great men, wherein the economic causes for these acts and changes are ignored or concealed; but, from the socialist view point, history reveals a series of class struggles between an exploited wealth-producing class and an exploiting ruling class over the wealth produced. 2. What effect have "great men" had on history? Ans.: Great men were simply ideal expressions of the hopes of some class in society that was becoming economically powerful. They formed a nucleus around which a class gathered itself in attaining economic conquests in its own interest, and in establishing social institutions in harmony with, and for the perpetuation of, such class interests. These men had to embody some vital principles from the economic conditions of their time and represent some class interest. The same men with the same ideas would not be great men under a different mode of production when the time for their ideas was not ripe. 3. What great factor is responsible for the rise of "great men?" Ans.: The fact that the ideas of these men coincided with the class interests of some class in society that was becoming economically powerful. Therefore economic conditions must exist or be developing which find their highest expression in the ideas of such men. 4. Why do social institutions change and not remain fixed? Ans.: Because the process of economic evolution will not permit them to remain fixed. The development and improvement of the means of production and distribution produce economic changes, therefore social institutions (the state, church, school and even the family) are forced to change to conform with changing economic conditions. These are due to evolutionary and revolutionary processes connected with the means of production and distribution. 5. What is responsible for the birth of new ideas, and do they occur to some one individual only? Ans.: New ideas, theories and discoveries emanate from material conditions, and such conditions act upon individuals. The same idea or discovery may be brought out by different individuals independently and apart from each other. This proves that it is not great men who are responsible for material conditions, but that material conditions (modes of production and distribution) produce the men best able to marshal the facts and express the idea; usually in the interest of some class. 6. What single great idea occurred to both Darwin and Wallace independently? Ans.: The theory of "Natural Selection" which showed that the closely allied ante-type was the parent stock from which the new form had been derived by variation. 7. What single great idea occurred to both Marx and Engels independently? Ans.: The "Materialistic Conception of History." 8. Name the three great ideas developed by Marx and Engels which now form the bed-rock basis for the socialist philosophy. Ans.: (1) the Materialistic Conception of History, or, the law of economic determinism, (2) the Law of Surplus Value, and (3) the Class Struggle. 9. Explain, briefly, the "materialistic conception of history." Ans.: "In every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange and the social organization necessarily following from it forms the basis upon which is built up and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch." The laws, customs, education, religion, public opinion and morals are in the long run controlled and shaped by economic conditions; or, in other words, by the dominant ruling class which the economic system of any given period forces to the front. 10. What is the most important question in life? Ans.: The problem of securing food and shelter. 11. What bearing does this have on the materialistic conception of history? Ans.: It gives us the only key by which we can understand the history of the past, and within limits, predict the course of future development. 12. What effect does the prevailing mode of production and exchange in any particular epoch, have on the social organization and political and intellectual history of that epoch? Ans.: "Anything that goes to the roots of the economic structure and modifies it (the food and shelter question in life) will inevitably modify every other branch and department of human life, political, ethical, religious and moral. This makes the social question primarily an economic one and all our thought and effort should be concentrated on it." 13. Do the ideas of the ruling class, in any given epoch, correspond with the prevailing mode of economic production? Ans.: They correspond exactly, as all connective institutions, civil, religious, legal, educational, political and domestic have been moulded in the interest of the economically dominant class who control these institutions in a manner to uphold their class interests where their ideas find expression. 14. What effect do these ideas of the ruling class have on the interests of the subject class? Ans.: The effect is detrimental to the interests of the subject class as the different class interests conflict. Therefore the ruling class finds the institutions mentioned very useful in either persuading or forcing the so-called "lower classes" to submit to the economic conditions that are absolutely against their interest, even though they are the wealth producing class. 15. Distinguish natural environment from man-made environment. Ans.: Natural environment which consisted of the fertility of the soil, climatic conditions, abundance of fruits, nuts, game and fish was all-important in the early stage of man's development. With the progress of civilization this nature-made environment loses its supreme importance and the man-made economic environment becomes equally important. 16. Explain, briefly, the law of Surplus Value. Ans.: It is the difference between what the working class as a whole gets for its labor power at its value in wages, say an average of five dollars per day, for producing commodities, and what the employing class as a whole gets, say an average of twenty-five dollars, for the same commodities when sold at their value. According to this conservative estimate capital is upon the whole and in the long run robbing labor of four-fifths of the value of its productive power. Capitalism is therefore the great robber, the Beelzebub of robbers. 17. Since the economic factor is the determining factor, what does the law of Surplus Value furnish us? Ans.: "Surplus Value is the key to the whole present economic organization of society. The end and object of capitalist society is the formation and accumulation of surplus value; or in other words, the systematic, legal robbery of the subject working class." 18. Define value and state how measured. Ans.: Value is the average amount of human labor time socially, not individually, necessary under average, not special, conditions for the production or reproduction of commodities. 19. What determines the value of labor power? Ans.: It is determined precisely like the value of every other commodity, i. e., by the amount of labor time socially necessary for its production or reproduction by the raising and support of children to succeed their parents as wage-earning slaves. 20. Since labor power is a commodity, what condition is it subject to? Ans.: It is subject to the same conditions that all other commodities are subject to without regard to the fact that it is the source of all social value. The worker in whom the commodity labor power is embodied, does not get the value of the product of his labor, but only about one-fifth of it, enough to keep him in working order and reproduce more labor power in his children. If the worker received the value of the product of his labor he would receive much more than enough to keep him in working order and to raise his family. Such an economic condition would abolish all forms of surplus value or profit, also the wage system, by substituting economic and social organization in the interest of the working class. No other class could remain in existence and the class struggle would be ended. 21. In what economic system, past or present, does surplus value appear? Ans.: It is the root of all social systems since the rise of the institution of private property, but only under the present system (capitalism) has labor power assumed the commodity form. Labor power is a commodity with a two fold character: it has a use and an exchange value. Its use value consists in its being capable of producing values over and above its own needs for sustenance and reproduction. Its exchange value consists in the amount of socially necessary labor time required for its production and reproduction. The chattel and feudal systems of slavery were not directly concerned with the production of commodities for the profit of the masters, but rather with the producing of the necessities of life for all, masters and slaves, and the luxuries for some, the masters. That which was not produced for immediate consumption was sold, if opportunities presented themselves, and occasionally the professional traders developed, for example, the Phoenicians; but they were an exception to the rule. The same holds good for feudalism, except that during the latter stages of that system commercialism arose; but this commercialism was no feature of feudalism--it was the rising capitalism that began to unfold and assert itself. 22. Name the three great systems of economic organization upon which the structure of past history and social institutions have their basis. Ans.: (1) Chattel slavery, (2) serfdom, or feudal slavery and (3) wage slavery. 23. Explain, briefly, how the subject class was exploited under each of these economic systems. Ans.: 1. Under chattel slavery the laborer was a chattel (possession or property) the same as a mule or horse, and only received his "keep," that is, enough food, clothing and shelter to keep him in working order and to reproduce labor power by raising children. All he produced (use values and children) was taken by his master. The body of the slave was the property of his master. 2. Under serfdom or feudal slavery, the worker produced what was necessary to keep him in working order and to raise a family of slaves, and then the balance of his time produced use values for his feudal lord. The body of the slave was his own, though he could not go about with it from one place to another; for it was bound to the land of his master. 3. Under the wage slavery, the worker receives wages which again equals only the amount necessary to keep him in working order and to reproduce more labor power in his children. His entire product belongs to the capitalist, and out of this resource he pays the wages for the commodity labor, also for other commodities such as raw materials, and appropriates all of the balance and converts it into capital with which he not only continues but increases the exploitation of his workers. The body of the capitalist's slave is indeed his own as under the feudal system but with this difference, that if he does not like his master, or he is disliked by him, he can or must go abroad with it from one place to another looking for a job--a liberty or necessity which is to the advantage of the owning class and the disadvantage of the working class. Unemployment is necessary to the existence of capitalism, but this necessity is a danger to the system and will ultimately destroy it in all countries as it has in Russia. 24. Define the "Class Struggle." Ans.: It is the direct clash between two hostile class interests wherein the employing class makes every effort to appropriate more of the wealth produced by the working class, and the working class ever struggles to retain more of the wealth which it produces. The capitalist class strives to get more surplus value and the working class strives to get more wages. The class consciousness of those who live by working has found one of its best expressions in the following paragraphs: "The world stands upon the threshold of a new social order. The capitalist system of production and distribution is doomed; capitalist appropriation of labor's product forces the bulk of mankind into wage slavery, throws society into the convulsions of the class struggle, and momentarily threatens to engulf humanity in chaos and disaster. Since the advent of civilization human society has been divided into classes. Each new form of society has come into being with a definite purpose to fulfill in the progress of the human race. Each has been born, has grown, developed, prospered, become old, outworn, and, has finally been overthrown. Each society has developed within itself the germs of its own destruction as well as the germs which went to make up the society of the future. The capitalist system rose during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the overthrow of feudalism. Its great and all-important mission in the development of man was to improve, develop, and concentrate the means of production and distribution, thus creating a system of co-operative production. This work was completed in advanced capitalist countries about the beginning of the 20th century. That moment capitalism had fulfilled its historic mission, and from that moment the capitalist class became a class of parasites. In the course of human progress mankind has passed (through class rule, private property, and individualism in production and exchange) from the enforced and inevitable want, misery, poverty, and ignorance of savagery and barbarism to the affluence and high productive capacity of civilization. For all practical purposes, co-operative production has now superseded individual production. Capitalism no longer promotes the greatest good of the greatest number, It no longer spells progress, but reaction. Private production carries with it private ownership of the products. Production is carried on, not to supply the needs of humanity, but for the profit of the individual owner, the company, or the trust. The worker, not receiving the full product of his labor, can not buy back all he produces. The capitalist wastes part in riotous living; the rest must find a foreign market. By the opening of the twentieth century the capitalist world--England, America, Germany, France, Japan, China, etc.--was producing at a mad rate for the world market. A capitalist deadlock of markets brought on in 1914 the capitalist collapse popularly known as the World War. The capitalist world can not extricate itself out of the debris. America today is choking under the weight of her own gold and products. This situation has brought on the present stage of human misery--starvation, want, cold, disease, pestilence, and war. This state is brought about in the midst of plenty, when the earth can be made to yield a hundredfold, when the machinery of production is made to multiply human energy and ingenuity by the hundreds. The present state of misery exists solely because the mode of production rebels against the mode of exchange. Private property in the means of life has become a social crime. The land was made by no man; the modern machines are the result of the combined ingenuity of the human race from time immemorial; the land can be made to yield and the machines can be set in motion only by the collective effort of the workers. Progress demands the collective ownership of the land on and the tools with which to produce the necessities of life. The owner of the means of life today partakes of the nature of a highwayman; he stands with his gun before society's temple; it depends upon him whether the million mass may work, earn, eat, and live. The capitalist system of production and exchange must be supplanted if progress is to continue. In place of the capitalist system we must substitute a system of social ownership of the means of production, industrially administered by the workers, who assume control and direction as well as operation of their industrial affairs." 25. Define "class consciousness." Ans.: Class consciousness of the workers means that they are conscious of the fact that they, as a class, have interests which are in direct conflict with the interests of the capitalist class. 26. What function does the state perform in the class struggle? Ans.: "The state is a class instrument, and is the public power of coercion created and maintained in human societies by their division into classes, a power which, being clothed with force, makes laws." It is, therefore, used by the dominant class to keep the subject working class in subjection in accordance with the interests of the ruling and owning class. It is also used to prevent the workers from altering the economic structure of society in the interests of the working class. As the author of the catechism, of which these twenty-six questions and answers constitute a small part, says: "Society is a growth subject to the laws of evolution. When evolution reaches a certain point, revolution becomes necessary in order to break the bonds of the old and bring in the new. As the chicken grows through evolution until it reaches the point where it must break its shell (the revolution) in order to continue its growth, so do classes of people come to the point in their evolution where revolution is necessary in order to continue their growth, bring in the new society and consummate the next step in civilization." Since 1913, when the foregoing catechism was published, we have had the war to end war and to make the world safe for democracy--a fateful and mournful war in which millions of lives were lost and other millions wrecked with the result of multiplying wars and increasing imperialism. It was a war between national groups of capitalists with conflicting interests for commercial advantages, which is unexpectedly issuing in three great crises: (1) the imminent bankruptcy of capitalism; (2) the communist revolution in Russia, and (3) the imminent taking over of the world by the revolutionary proletariat. Hitherto, the sons and daughters of capitalism have owned the earth with all that thereon and therein is. Henceforth, the sons and daughters of the useful workers shall be the owners. The future belongs to the workers, but not until they organize themselves into one big revolutionary union. What ideas and aims are involved in the faith and endeavor of Revolutionary Unionism will appear from this passage in Comrade Philip Kurinsky's Industrial Unionism and Revolution, a brilliant pamphlet, published by The Union Press, Box 205, Madison Square, New York City: "Slavery is not abolished. It is merely a change in the struggle which throws itself hither and thither like the waves of the seas. In ancient times chattel slavery existed. Feudalism then took its place. Feudalism in its turn was overthrown by capitalism which at present reigns supreme. As the immortal Tolstoy explained, 'The abolition of the old slavery is similar to that which Tartars did to their captives. After they had cut up their heels they placed stones and sand in the wounds and then took the chains off. The Tartars were sure that when the feet of their prisoners were swollen, that they could not run away and would have to work even without chains. Such is the slavery of wages'. Of this slavery does revolutionary unionism speak in the name of the revolutionary worker. It analyzes the present society and shows that it is divided into two economic classes. One class, the capitalist class, is the master class which controls all the factories, mills, mines, railroads, lands and fields and all the finished and raw materials. This class possesses all the natural riches of the world and this economic supremacy gives it control of the state, of the church, and of all educational institutions. In short, this class owns everything and controls the whole social and political life of each country. The other class, the working class, owns nothing. It produces all and enjoys little. It uses the machines and tools but does not possess them, and is therefore forced to sell its only possession, its labor power, to the master class. And the latter uses the opportunity to buy that wonderful power like any raw material or some other commodity (some of the representatives of craft unionism wish to deny this but unsuccessfully). For the commodity which the worker is compelled to sell in order that he might live, he receives a wage which is determined as is the price of every other commodity. The price is always smaller than the value of the product which the worker produces for the capitalist. Between these two classes there must, naturally, exist a tremendous struggle which often has the character of actual war. No one urges the workers to this war--not the terrible I. W. W.'s nor the political socialist, neither the Bolsheviks nor the Anarchists, but the war naturally and inevitably arises from existing conditions. On the one hand, the capitalists are continually chasing after higher profits which results in the employment of cheap labor under the worst conditions. Naturally the ideal of the capitalist class is to keep the workers in a condition of slavery. If the workers attempt to revolt, as they do daily, their masters try to suppress the revolt with all the power at their command. On the other hand, the workers struggle with all their power to lighten their burdens. They strive to get better conditions, higher wages and shorter hours, and in general the ideal of the working class is to throw off the yoke of capitalism. No one rightfully can say that this struggle is merely a theory. We can see this struggle in the attempts of the capitalist class to destroy the victorious Russian Proletariat. It is mirrored before our eyes in the continual strikes. Nothing can stop this struggle except the abolition of exploitation. No matter how hard the Citizens' Committees, Boards of Arbitration, of Conciliation and of Mediation, with their so-called impartial members try to convince the world that it is possible to bring the warring classes into closer relations, their attempts are doomed to failure. At best their success is only temporary and their efforts succeed only in blinding the eyes of the working masses. And if at some time these boards claim a victory, the credit is not due to them, but to the force exerted by the workers. It is the strike-weapon, held in reserve by the toilers, that brings victory to the workers--not the efforts of the philanthropic gentlemen. Furthermore the efforts of these gentlemen greatly harm the workers, for at times when the workers can attain success through the use of the strike, these philanthropists interfere, and deaden the initiative and aggressiveness of the strikers. Often this causes strife between the strikers themselves. They lose confidence in one another, and the existence of the organizations which the workers succeeded in building up through their efforts and sacrifices are jeopardized. The "Conciliation," however, can bring no conciliation between the employers and workers, because that is unnatural. On the contrary, the hatred of one side to the other is intensified and war breaks out oftener and assumes a more bitter and more obstinate character. Thus viewing the two struggling classes of capitalist society, revolutionary industrial unionism comes to the logical conclusion that between capital and labor there exists nothing in common, that the struggle must go on and peace can come only when economic oppression will cease, which is possible only when the program of revolutionary unionism will be realized; namely, when the workers will take over the means of production and abolish the system of private ownership. The autocratic control of industry, the unequal division of products will then disappear and society will be built on a socialist foundation, where the industries will be owned and operated by the workers, organized in a truly democratic manner, and where the individual will receive the full product of his labor. These are the principles of revolutionary unionism, the principles of the international proletariat. They are the true expressions of the class struggle and because of that, revolutionary unionism attracts more and more followers whose ideal is to develop within the working masses a consciousness of their historic mission." In the words of an eloquent representative of the organized workers in the United States, I exhort the working men and working women of America: Keep your eyes on Russia. Watch what is going on there and what the capitalist plunderbund will try to do. Do not be misled by the lies and slanders that are daily dished up to you. Bear in mind that those who tell you these yarns have an interest to mislead you. They want to use you as a makeweight in their game of wresting from the Russian workers their dearly-won liberty. It is of no use to enumerate the lies that have already been punctured because they will invent new ones faster than one can write and print. Let your reason guide you. Think yourselves into the shoes of your Russian fellow workers. Think how you would act if placed in the same position and then draw the conclusion that they act about the same way that you would, because they are like you moved by the same emotions, the same desires, the same aspirations. You, too, would like to keep for yourselves the fruits of your toil, if you only knew how to go about it, if you had the organization that would make it possible. But as yet you do not know and you have not that organization. In politics you still vote against one another in the Republican or Democratic camp. You will have to wait until you do know and until you do have the means--the Industrial Unions of the entire working class that will be able to take and hold and administer industry for the reason that it will have the might, the power to do so. And when you have expressed through the ballot your will for that new society, which will guarantee to you the full fruits of your labor, remember the slogan of revolutionary Russia: "All power to the Soviets," and let your slogan then be: "All power to the Industrial Unions!" These are prophetic words written fifty years ago by Frederick Engels: Since the historical appearance of the capitalist mode of production, the appropriation by society of all the means of production has often been dreamed of, more or less vaguely, by individuals, as well as by sects, as the ideal of the future. But it could become possible, could become a historical necessity, only when the actual conditions for its realization were there. Like every other social advance, it becomes practicable, not by men understanding that the existence of classes is in contradiction to justice, equality, etc., not by the mere willingness to abolish these classes, but by virtue of certain new economic conditions.... So long as the total social labor only yields a produce which but slightly exceeds that barely necessary for the existence of all; so long, therefore, as labor engages all or almost all the time of the great majority of the members of society--so long, of necessity, this society is divided into classes.... But if, upon this showing, division into classes has a certain historical justification, it has this only for a given period, only under given social conditions. It was based on the insufficiency of production. It will be swept away by the complete development of modern productive forces. And, in fact, the abolition of classes in society presupposes a degree of historical evolution, at which the existence, not simply of this or that particular ruling class, but of any ruling class at all, has become an obsolete anachronism.... With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organization. The struggle for individual existence disappears. Then for the first time man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions into really human ones.... It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom. The capitalist countries are ruled through banks, and a bank is necessarily an institution of the owning class. Russia is ruled through Soviets, and a soviet is necessarily an institution of the working class. Banks and Soviets are so many headquarters for big unions. In capitalist countries the banks are such for the one big union of the owners, and in Russia the soviets are this for the one big union of the workers. These big unions cannot co-exist and flourish in the same country. All owners everywhere see the necessity for their one big union and in all capitalistic countries, nowhere more than in the United States, they have the advantage of being on the ground floor and indeed on all the floors of all the sky scrapers with their union which is the most universally inclusive and the most relentlessly efficient organization on earth. Some workers everywhere see the necessity for their one big union, but nowhere is it seen as generally and clearly as in Russia,--the only country in which the workers have held the ground floor for any considerable time against all comers. In all countries a beginning has been made by the workers in laying the foundation for their one big union, but in only one country, Russia, has progress been made with the superstructure, and here as everywhere the owners have hindered the workers so that they must defend themselves with their right hand while they build with their left. Nevertheless wonderful progress is being made and when the industrial structure has been completed, as it soon must be, else the world is doomed to destruction, it shall tower above its capitalist rival as a mountain over a foot hill. After all, the power of the owner is money and it is not a real potentiality, for within the social realm there is in reality only one potentiality, the power of productivity which exclusively belongs to the worker. In the sky there is no god, and on earth there is no king or priest like unto Labor, the lord of gods, the tzar of kings and the pope of priests. Labor is high above all potentialities. The motto, "All Power to the Workers," which the class-conscious proletarians inscribe on their banners, is not the expression of an ideal fiction, but the declaration of a practical reality, the greatest among all realities, that reality in which the whole social realm lives, moves and has its being. Down with the one big union of the owners. Long live the one big union of the workers. II. GOD AND IMMORTALITY. We have done with the kisses that sting, With the thief's mouth red from the feast, With the blood on the hands of the king, And the lie on the lips of the priest. --Swinburne. Many critics contend that socialism and supernaturalism are not, as I represent, incompatibilities; but they lose sight of four facts: (1) this is a scientific age; (2) Marxian socialism is one of the sciences; (3) the vast majority of men of science reject all supernaturalism, including of course the gods and devils with their heavens and hells, and (4) only in the case of one of the sciences, psychology, is this majority greater than in the science of sociology. The truth of the last two of these representations will be overwhelmingly evident from the chart on the next page. It and its explanation given in the following quotation is taken with the kind consent of the author and also of the publishers of a book entitled God and Immortality, by Professor James H. Leuba, the Psychologist of Bryn Mawr College. This book is having a great influence and I strongly recommend it to all who think that I am wrong in the contention that conscious, personal existence is limited to earth; that, therefore, we are having all that we shall ever know of heaven and hell, here and now, and that whether we have more of heaven and less of hell depends altogether upon men and women, not at all upon gods and devils. The second edition of Professor Leuba's book is now in the press of The Open Court Publishing Company, 122 South Michigan Ave., Chicago, Ill. Here is the quotation in support of our contentions: [Illustration: Chart XI PARTIAL SUMMARY OF RESULTS] What, then, is the main outcome of this research? Chart XI, Partial Summary of Results, shows that in every class of persons investigated, the number of believers in God is less, and in most classes very much less than the number of non-believers, and that the number of believers in immortality is somewhat larger than in a personal God; that among the more distinguished, unbelief is very much more frequent than among the less distinguished; and finally that not only the degree of ability, but also the kind of knowledge possessed, is significantly related to the rejection of these beliefs. The correlation shown, without exception, in every one of our groups between eminence and disbelief appears to me of momentous significance. In three of these groups (biologists, historians, and psychologists) the number of believers among the men of greater distinction is only half, or less than half the number of believers among the less distinguished men. I do not see any way to avoid the conclusion that disbelief in a personal God and in personal immortality is directly proportional to abilities making for success in the sciences in question. A study of the several charts of this work with regard to the kind of knowledge which favors disbelief shows that the historians and the physical scientists provide the greater; and the psychologists, the sociologists and the biologists, the smaller number of believers. The explanation I have offered is that psychologists, sociologists, and biologists in very large numbers have come to recognize fixed orderliness in organic and psychic life, and not merely in inorganic existence; while frequently physical scientists have recognized the presence of invariable law in the inorganic world only. The belief in a personal God as defined for the purpose of our investigation is, therefore, less often possible to students of psychic and of organic life than to physical scientists. The place occupied by the historians next to the physical scientists would indicate that for the present the reign of law is not so clearly revealed in the events with which history deals as in biology, economics, and psychology. A large number of historians continue to see the hand of God in human affairs. The influence, destructive of Christian beliefs, attributed in this interpretation to more intimate knowledge of organic and psychic life, appears incontrovertibly, as far as psychic life is concerned, in the remarkable fact that whereas in every other group the number of believers in immortality is greater than that in God, among the psychologists the reverse is true; the number of believers in immortality among the greater psychologists sinks to 8.8 per cent. One may affirm it seems that, in general, the greater the ability of the psychologist, the more difficult it becomes for him to believe in the continuation of individual life after bodily death. Within the generation to which I belong Darwin and Marx, the greatest teachers that the world has had, went over the top of entrenched ignorance with the greatest books of the world, worth infinitely more to it than all its bibles together. Darwin did this in 1859 with his Origin of Species by Natural Selection and Marx in 1867 with his Capital, a Critique of Political Economy. Darwin with his book is driving the Christian church out of its trench of supernaturalism and uniqueism by showing that the different kinds of vegetable and animal life are not, according to the representation of its bible, so many separate creations by a personal, conscious divinity, but interrelated evolutions by an impersonal, unconscious nature, the higher out of the lower, and that, therefore, man is so far from being a special creation, having his most vital relationships with a celestial divinity and his most glorious prospects in a heavenly place with him, that he is really more or less closely related to every living thing on earth, and is as hopelessly limited to it, as an elephant, a tree or even a mountain. Marx with his book is driving the states out of the trench of imperialism and capitalism. As Darwin is driving the conscious, personal gods out of the realm of biology, placing all animal and human life of body, mind and soul on essentially the same footing, so Marx is driving all such divinities out of the realm of sociology, placing all life of family, state, church, lodge, store and shop on essentially the same level. According to Darwin, all animal life is what it is at any time by reason of the effort to accommodate the physical organism to its environment. According to Marx, human civilization is what it is at any time because of the economic system by which people feed, clothe and house themselves. This Darwinian-Marxian interpretation of terrestrial life in general, and of the human part of it in particular, is known as materialism. It is the materialistic, naturalistic, levelistic interpretation of history, and differs fundamentally from the spiritualistic, supernaturalistic, uniqueistic interpretation of Christian preachers. The contrast between these interpretations is especially strong in the case of human history. On the one hand the Christian preacher says, man's history is what it is because of the directing providence of a God, the Father, Son and Spirit, and because of His directing inspiration of great leaders, such as Washington, Luther, Caesar and Moses. On the other hand Darwin and Marx agree in saying that both the triune god and the inspired leader are what they are, because society is what it is; that, again, the character of society depends upon the economic system by which it feeds, clothes and houses itself, and that finally all such systems owe their existence to the machinery in use for the production of the basic necessities of life, the primal machine being the human hand to which all other machines are auxiliaries. The most insatiable and universal among all human longings is for freedom--freedom from economic want, social inequality and imperialistic tyranny, also freedom to learn, think, live and teach truths. Socialism of the Marxian type is the gospel of freedom, because a classless god, nature, reveals it in the interest of a classless world: therefore, it is true, and slavery, of which there never was so much before on the earth, and nowhere is there more than in the United States, is utterly incompatible with truth, and classless interests. All the supernaturalistic gospels are revealed by a class god (Jesus, Jehovah, Allah, Buddha) in the interest of the capitalist class: therefore, they are false and freedom is utterly incompatible with falsehood and class interest. Ignorance is the destroyer-god and capitalism is the diabolical scourge by which he afflicts the wage-earner with many unnecessary sufferings, especially the crushing ones arising from the great trinity of evils, war, poverty and slavery. Knowledge is the saviour-god and Marxism is his divine gospel of freedom from these capitalistic sufferings. III. MYTHICAL CHARACTER OF OLD AND NEW TESTAMENT PERSONAGES. What man of sense will agree with the statement that the first, second, and third days, in which the evening is named and the morning, were without sun, moon and stars? What man is found such an idiot as to suppose that God planted trees in Paradise like an husbandman? I believe that every man must hold these things for images under which a hidden sense is concealed.--Origen. One of the critics of Communism and Christianism whose representations are in alignment with several others says: While the Bishop speaks in the language of scholarship, he entirely ignores all the findings of modern scholars on the literature of the Bible. The failure to show more clearly that my representations concerning the untenableness of the basic doctrines of Christian supernaturalism are in alignment with the conclusions of outstanding authorities in the newly developed sciences of historical and biblical criticisms is indeed a defect and an attempt will here be made to remove it by a short but faithful and, as I think, convincing summary of what such authorities in these sciences have to say on the subject. My summary is summarized from a pamphlet by Charles T. Gorham, published by Watts and Company, 17 Johnson's Court, Fleet St., E. C. 4, London, England, which is itself an able summarization of the relevant facts which have been scientifically established as they are given in the greatest of all the Bible Dictionaries, the Encyclopedia Biblica. It will be seen that all except one among my contentions concerning the baselessness of the supernaturalism of orthodox Christians are well sustained. This exception is the contention that Jesus is not an historical personage, but a fictitious one. However the great critics are unanimously with me even in this, for two crushing facts are admitted by them: (1) the Old Testament affords no scientifically established data from which a reliable history of the Jews can be written, and (2) the New Testament has no such data for a biography of Jesus. The illuminating summary which is a large part of my answer to the criticism under review follows, and it is as far as possible in the language of Mr. Gorham: Once upon a time there was a system of Christian Theology. It was a wonderful though a highly artificial structure, composed of fine old crusted dogmas which no one could prove, but very few dared to dispute. There was the "magnified man" in the sky, the Infallible Bible, dictated by the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, the Fall, the Atonement, Predestination and Grace, Justification by Faith, a Chosen People, a practically omnipotent Devil, myriads of Evil Spirits, an eternity of bliss to be obtained for nothing, and endless torment for those who did not avail themselves of the offer. Now the house of cards has tumbled to pieces, or rather it is slowly dissolving, as Shakespeare says, "like the baseless fabric of a vision". The Biblical chronology, history, ethics, all are alike found to be defective and doubtful. Divine Revelation has become discredited; a Human Record takes its place. What has brought about this startling change? The answer is, Knowledge. Thought, research, criticism, have shown that the traditional theories of the Bible can no longer be maintained. The logic of facts has confirmed the reasonings of the independent thinker, and placed the dogmatist in a dilemma which grows ever more acute. The result is not pleasant for the believer; but it is well that the real state of things should be known, that the kernel of truth should be separated from the overgrown husk of tradition. During the last few years a work has been issued which sums up the conclusions of modern criticism better than any other book. It is called the Encyclopedia Biblica, and its four volumes tersely and ably set forth the new views, and support them by a mass of learning which deserves serious consideration. And the most significant thing about it is not merely that the entire doctrinal system of Christianity has undergone a radical change, but that this change has largely been brought about by Christian scholars themselves. A rapid glance at this store-house of the heresy of such scholars will give the reader some idea of the extent of the surrender which Christianity has made to the forces of Rationalism. It must be premised that space will permit of the conclusions only being given, without the detailed evidence by which they are supported. Let us begin with our supposed first parents. Is the story of Adam and Eve a true story? There are, we are told, decisive reasons why we cannot regard it as historical, and probably the writer himself never supposed he was relating history.[K] The Creation story originated in a stock of primitive myths common to the Semitic races, and passed through a long period of development before it was incorporated in the book of Genesis. If, then, it is the fact, as Christian scholars assert, that this story of the Creation originated in a pagan myth, and was shaped and altered by unknown hands for nearly a thousand years, it is nothing more nor less than superstition to hold that it is divinely true. As for the Old Testament patriarchs, we now learn that their very existence is uncertain. The tradition concerning Abraham is, as it stands, inadmissible; he is not so much a historical personage as an ideal type of character, whose actual existence is as doubtful as that of other heroes. All the stories of the patriarchs are legendary. The whole book of Genesis, in fact, is not history at all, as we understand history. Exodus is another composite legend which has long been mistaken for history. The historical character of Moses has not been established, and it is doubtful whether the name is that of an individual or that of a clan. The story of his being exposed in an ark of bulrushes is a myth probably derived from the similar and much earlier myth of Sargon.[L] Turning to the New Testament, we find that modern critical research only brings out more clearly than ever the extraordinary vagueness and uncertainty which enshroud every detail of the narrative. From the article on "Chronology" we learn that everything in the Gospels is too uncertain to be accepted as historical fact. There are numerous questions which it is "wholly impossible to decide". We do not know when Jesus was born, or when he died, or who was his father, or what was the duration of his ministry. As these are matters on which the Gospel writers purport to give information, the fact of their failure to do so settles the question of their competency as historians. The supposed supernatural birth of Jesus has of late exercised the minds of theologians. It is not surprising that some of them should reject the notion, for it is one without a shred of evidence in its favor. Setting aside the well-known fact that many other religions assume a similar origin for their founders, we may note the New Testament accounts are in such hopeless conflict with each other that reconciliation is impossible. The important subject of the "Resurrection" is treated by Professor P. W. Schmiedel, of Zurich, who tells us that the Gospel accounts "exhibit contradictions of the most glaring kind". The article on the Gospels by Dr. E. A. Abbott and Professor Schmiedel is crammed with criticism of a kind most damaging to every form of the orthodox faith. The view hitherto current, that the four Gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and appeared thirty or forty years after the death of Jesus, can, it is stated, no longer be maintained. The alleged eclipse of the sun at the Crucifixion is impossible. One of the orthodox shifts respecting this phenomenon is that it was an eclipse of the moon! Modern criticism decides that no confidence whatever can be placed in the reliability of the Gospels as historical narratives, or in the chronology of the events which they relate. It may even seem to justify a doubt whether any credible elements at all are to be found in them. Yet it is believed that some such credible elements do exist. Five passages prove by their character that Jesus was a real person, and that we have some trustworthy facts about him. These passages are: Matthew xii. 31, Mark x. 17, Mark iii. 21, Mark xiii. 32, and Mark xv. 34, and the corresponding passage in Matthew xxvii. 46, though these last two are not found in Luke. Four other passages have a high degree of probability--viz., Mark viii. 12, Mark vi. 5, Mark viii. 14-21, and Matthew xi. 5, with the corresponding passage in Luke vii. 22. These texts, however, disclose nothing of a supernatural character. They merely prove that in Jesus we have to do with a completely human being, and that the divine is to be sought in him only in the form in which it is capable of being found in all men.[M] The four Gospels were compiled from earlier materials which have perished, and the dates when they first appeared in their present form are given as follows:--Mark, certainly after the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70; Matthew, about 119 A. D.; Luke, between 100 and 110; and John, between 132 and 140. The question of the genuineness of the Pauline Epistles, is now far from being so clear as was once universally supposed. Advanced criticism, Professor Van Manen tells us in his elaborate article on "Paul", has learned to recognize that none of these Epistles are by him, not even the four generally regarded as unassailable. They are not letters to individuals, but books or pamphlets emanating from a particular school. We know little, in reality, of the facts of Paul's life, or of his death: all is uncertain. The unmistakable traces of late origin indicate that the Epistles probably did not appear till the second century. The strange book of Revelation is not of purely Christian origin. Criticism has clearly shown that it can no longer be regarded as a literary unit, but it is an admixture of Jewish with Christian ideas and speculations. Ancient testimony, that of Papias in particular, assumed the Presbyter John, and not the Apostle, as its author or redactor. The Epistles of Peter, James and Jude are none of them held to be the work of the Apostles. They probably first saw the light in the second century; the second Epistle of Peter may even belong to the latter half of that period. All the above conclusions are summarized, as nearly as may be, in the words of the authors of the respective articles. Their significance is surely enormous. Right or wrong, eminent Christian scholars here proclaim results in complete antagonism to the ideas usually accepted as forming the true basis of the Christian faith. They amount, in fact, to a complete and unconditional surrender of the whole dogmatic framework which has hitherto been held as divinely revealed, and therefore divinely true. Thomas Paine was a Deist. As such he believed that nature may be compared with a clock and God with its maker. As the clock maker, under normal conditions, has but little to do with his handiwork, so it has been with the Creator and his universe. The theists of every name (Christian, Jew, Mohammedan and Buddhist), not to speak of others, believe that the universe, with all which therein is, lives, moves and has its being as the result of the willings of their respective gods. Though I have my god, indeed two gods, one god in the world of my physical existence--a trinity: matter, force and motion, and another god in the world of my moral existence--a trinity: fact, truth and life, yet if the rejection of both deism and theism is atheism, I am an atheist. But assuming for the sake of argument that there is a conscious personal being who has had and is having something to do with making things what they are, I set my seal to this arraignment: Of all the systems of religion that were ever invented, there is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself, than this thing called Christianity. Too absurd for belief, too impossible to convince, and too inconsistent for practice, it renders the heart torpid, or produces only atheists and fanatics. As an engine of power, it serves the purpose of despotism and as a means of wealth, the avarice of priests; but for the good of mankind it leads to nothing here or hereafter. --Thomas Paine. William Rathbone Greg in his Creed of Christendom says that much of the Old Testament which Christian divines, in their ignorance of Jewish lore, have insisted on receiving and interpreting literally, the informed Rabbis never dreamed of regarding as anything but allegorical. The literalists they called fools. Origen and Augustine, the two greatest men which Christianity has produced, would agree with Greg in this. We have already quoted the motto of this section from Origen, and we will now quote this from Augustine: It very often happens that there is some question as to the earth or the sky, or the other elements of this world, respecting which one who is not a Christian has knowledge derived from most certain reasoning or observation, and it is very disgraceful and mischievous and of all things to be carefully avoided, that a Christian, speaking of such matters as being according to the Christian Scriptures, should be heard by an unbeliever talking such nonsense that the unbeliever, perceiving him to be as wide from the mark as east from west, can hardly restrain himself from laughing. FOOTNOTES: [K] But if Adam and Eve are not historical personages there is no doctrine of supernaturalistic Christianism resting on the solid ground of facts and the whole of its immense dogmatic structure is floating in the air of theories and myths.--Author. [L] It is questionable whether such persons as Samson, Jonah and Daniel ever lived, but it is certain that their adventures are as mythical as anything in Aesop's Fables.--Author. [M] But these nine texts which for some years were often triumphantly pointed to as the pillars upon which securely rested the historicalness of Jesus as a man are now lying in the dust where the learned and brilliant Professor William Benjamin Smith of Tulane University put them by his great contribution to the Christological problem in a book, entitled Ecce Deus in which he, as I think, proves conclusively that the Jesus of the New Testament never was a real man but always an imaginary god, the Christian recasting of the Jewish God, a new Jehovah.--Author. IV. WOULD SOCIALISM CHANGE HUMAN NATURE? Fear not the tyrants shall rule for ever, Or the priests of the bloody Faith: They stand on the brink of that mighty river Whose waves they have tainted with death, It is fed from the depths of a thousand dells, Around them it foams and rages and swells, And their swords and their scepters I floating see Like wrecks in the surge of eternity. --Shelley. My revolt against the existing capitalist system of economics and the capitalized political and religious systems which support it is complete, and the end which I have in view in this booklet is that of primitive Christianism, as it is taught by Mary in the Magnificat, the putting down of the owning masters of the world and the exaltation of the working slaves, only that I do not recommend, as she did, that the masters should be banished to starve but rather that they should be allowed to become producers and to live then as such, not as robbers, as they now live. This is bolshevism. It is not anarchy, but a new dictatorship instead of the old, that of the proletariat in place of the bourgeoisie. But this dictatorship (though necessary during the period of transition from the capitalist system, by which commodities are made only for the profit of a few to an industrial system by which they will be made only for use of the many) is not the goal of socialism. Its goal is a classless world--a world in which all who are able to work shall directly or at least indirectly contribute their due proportion, according to their abilities and opportunities, towards feeding, clothing, housing and educating it. Perhaps the truest thing in the Bible relates to the utterly corrupt condition of civilization, nor was it ever truer than now, and it always must be equally true while the world is divided into master and slave classes under the dictatorship of the masters: The whole head is sick and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even unto the head, there is no soundness in it, but wounds and bruises, and putrifying sores: they have not been closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with ointment. Capitalism and Socialism differ fundamentally in that the former always has sought and always will seek to exercise a permanent dictatorship, whereas that of the latter is to constitute the temporary bridge over which the world is to pass from the economic system under which commodities are competitively made for the profit of the few, to the economic system under which they will be co-operatively made for the use of the many. It is contended with much show of reason that the dictatorship of the proletariat will not lead to the goal, because human nature being what it is the slaves will automatically develop into another class of masters. But those who raise this contention proceed upon the assumption that human nature is a constant quantity so that it cannot be essentially changed and that it has made the economic systems, what they have been. This is not the case. Human nature, like animal nature, is constantly changing and neither the one nor the other voluntarily changes itself, but both are forced to change by the development of new and external conditions and by the necessity of conformity to them. Professor Joseph McCabe, not a socialist, observes that these developments and conformities were so many revolutions and that the man who says, the secret of progress is evolution, not revolution, may be talking very good social philosophy but he is not talking science, as he thinks. In every modern geological work you read of periodical revolutions in the story of the earth, and these are the great ages of progress--and, I ought to add, of colossal annihilation of the less fit. Darwin discovered that animal nature changed (for example snake nature changed into bird nature) because of changed physical environments and the necessity of life to adaptation to them. Marx discovered that human nature changed from what it was during the period of chatteldom to what it was during serfdom and from that to what it is under capitalism by reason of the difference in the economic systems of these periods by which the world fed, clothed and housed itself and that these differences are in turn accounted for by the differences in the machines by which the necessities of life are produced. Thus Darwin explained the history of animal life without the hypothesis of a divine creator, and Marx explained the history of mankind without the hypothesis either of a divine ruler or human leaders. These Darwinian and Marxian explanations constitute what is known as the materialistic explanation of history. Marx represented that capitalism would end the class struggle and issue in a classless world because its profiteering system of production and distribution could not be succeeded by another, since it divides mankind into masters who are ever growing less numerous and slaves who are ever growing more numerous, without the possibility of those who are half capitalists and half workers rising out of their nondescript condition into a new master class, as did the bourgeoisie under feudalism. For these reasons he contended the proletarian slaves would become the grave diggers for the bourgeois masters and so end capitalism with the burial of its representatives. But with the complete and sustained triumph of the proletarian class the bourgeois class will rapidly pass away, as is now the case with it in Russia, and a classless world will be born to live on a co-operative instead of a competitive basis, in a heaven instead of a hell. V. WHAT WILL BE THE FORM OF THE WORKERS' STATE. Hail Soviet Russia, the first Communist Republic, the land of, by and for the common people. We greet you, workers and peasants of Russia, who by your untold sacrifices, by your determination and devotion, are transforming the Russia of black reaction, of the domination of a few, into a land of glorious promise for all. Comrades in America, watch the bright dawn in the East; you have but your chains to lose, and a world to gain!--The Workers' Council. In general outline the form of the workers' state will be that of the Russian Soviet Republic, and what it is will appear from the following semi-official description, the briefest and clearest of any which I have seen. Its authorship is unknown to me but I know it to be the work of a committee of which Zinoviev, one of the directing and inspiring minds of the proletarian movement in Russia, was a member, and it may be that he is the author. Anyhow it is a recently published, authoritative classic containing the information for which a large part of the world has been waiting: We have before us the example of the Russian Soviet Republic, whose structure, in view of the conflicting reports printed in other countries, it may be useful to describe briefly here. The unit of government is the local Soviet, or Council, of Workers', Red Army, and Peasants' Deputies. The city Workers' Soviet is made up as follows: Each factory elects one delegate for a certain number of workers, and each local union also elects delegates. These delegates are elected according to political parties--or, if the workers wish it, as individual candidates. The Red Army delegates are chosen by military units. For the peasants, each village has its local Soviet, which sends delegates to the Township Soviet, which in turn elects to the County Soviet, and this to the Provincial Soviet. Nobody who employs labor for profit can vote. Every six months the City and Provincial Soviets elect delegates to the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which is the supreme governing body of the country. This Congress decides upon the policies which are to govern the country for six months, and then elects a Central Executive Committee of two hundred, which is to carry out these policies. The Congress also elects the Cabinet--The Council of People's Commissars, who are heads of Government Departments--or People's Commissariats. The People's Commissars can be recalled at any time by the Central Executive Committee. The members of all Soviets can be recalled very easily, and at any time, by their constituents. These Soviets are not only Legislative bodies, but also Executive organs. Unlike your Congress, they do not make the laws and leave them to the President to carry out, but the members carry out the laws themselves; and there is no Supreme Court to say whether or not these laws are "constitutional." Between the All-Russian Congresses of Soviets the Central Executive Committee is the supreme power in Russia. It meets at least every two months, and in the meanwhile, the Council of People's Commissars directs the country, while the members of the Central Executive Committee go to work in the various government departments. In Russia the workers are organized in Industrial Unions all the workers in each industry belonging to one Union. For example, in a factory making metal products, even the carpenters and painters are members of the Metal Workers' Union. Each factory is a local Union, and the Shop Committee elected by the workers is its Executive Committee. The All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the federated Unions is elected by the annual Trade Union Convention. A Scale Committee elected by the Convention fixes the wages of all categories of workers. With very few exceptions, all important factories in Russia have been nationalized, and are now the property of all the workers in common. The business of the Unions is therefore no longer to fight the capitalists, but to run industry. Hand in hand with the Unions works the Department of Labor of the Soviet Government, whose chief is the People's Commissar of Labor, elected by the Soviet Congress with the approval of the Unions. In charge of the economic life of the country is the elected Supreme Council of People's Economy, divided into departments, such as, Metal Department, Chemical Department, etc., each one headed by experts and workers, appointed, with the approval of the Union by the Supreme Council of People's Economy. In each factory production is carried on by a committee consisting of three members: a representative of the Shop Committee of the Unions, a representative of the Central Executive of the Unions, and a representative of the Supreme Council of People's Economy. The Unions are thus a branch of the government--and this government is the most highly centralized government that exists. It is also the most democratic government in history. For all the organs of government are in constant touch with the working masses, and constantly sensitive to their will. Moreover, the local Soviets all over Russia have complete autonomy to manage their own local affairs, provided they carry out the national policies laid down by the Soviet Congress. Also, the Soviet Government represents only the workers, and cannot help but act in the workers' interests. The motto of this section is the conclusion of a good article in the first number of one among the best of the periodicals devoted to the promotion of Marxism, The Workers' Council, published by the International Educational Company, New York City. This article is so short and lends itself so naturally as a supplement to the foregoing explanation of the new economic system which has been established and is being developed in Russia that I quote the rest as the conclusion of this section about Sovietism. Communist Russia, the Russia of the common people, marks a new epoch in the world's history. It marks a basic change in the structure of human society. Up to this time society lived under the rule of the few, under the rule of the class which possessed the wealth of the country. The methods were different at different periods in the world's history, but the results were the same: riches and power for the few, a bare existence and endless toil for the many. The slaves, the serfs, or the wage workers of today, who compose the masses of the people, have ever been the hewers of wood and the carriers of water, the beasts of burden on whose backs sported and fattened kings and nobles, landlords and capitalists. They who possessed wealth had the power. And they passed laws to protect that power, to make the possession of wealth a social institution. Private property was enthroned and every striving of mankind was subjected to the rule of property. Thence grew the exploitation of man by man for private profit, and all abuses resulting therefrom; fear of loss of property, care of possession, dread of the future, fear of loss of employment, envy and greed. Human society was ruled by property grabbers; masters, kings, capitalists, providing toil, disease, war for the masses of mankind. That is the rule of capitalism, and cannot be otherwise. But under communism, profit is abolished, and with it the exploitation of man by man; private property is no longer a factor in the life of man; property becomes universal, all natural and created wealth belong to society, to every member of the community, as secure a birth right as air and sunlight. Everybody's measured work provides a common fund of things to satisfy material needs, today, tomorrow and in years to come. There can be no fear of losing one's job, of seeing one's children starve, of the poor-house in old age. As sure as the sun will rise on the morrow, man is secure of his bread, his shelter and clothing. Man is freed from animal cares, free to develop his human qualities, his intelligence, his brain and heart. Russia points the way. Russia is now one huge corporation, every man, woman and child an equal shareholder. The state is administered as a business; the benefit of the stockholders being the object of the corporation. The individual contributes his labor, whatever it may be: manual, mental, artistic. This labor is applied to available materials: the soil of the farm, the natural resources, the mines, and mills and factories. The finished product is distributed through the agencies of the corporation, in the shape of food and clothes and shelter, of education and amusement, of protection to life and limb, of literature and art, of inventions and improvements: to every man, woman and child of the nation. To be sure this ideal of a human brotherhood is not yet realized in Russia. No sane person would expect so tremendous a change to be consummated in three years, in the face of universal aggression, intrigues and blockades. It may take ten years, perhaps a generation. What of it! Russia is past the most difficult period of transition from the capitalist state to a communist state, while other capitalist countries must still face the period of revolution. Therefore let Russia lead the way. Let the American workers realize that Russia's fight is their fight, that Soviet Russia's success is the success of the laboring people the world over! Have you ever been to Crazy Land,[N] Down on the Looney Pike? There are the queerest people there-- You never saw the like! The ones that do the useful work Are poor as poor can be, And those who do no useful work All live in luxury. They raise so much in Crazy Land Of food and clothes and such, That those who work don't have enough Because they raise too much. They're wrong side to in Crazy Land, They're upside down with care-- They walk around upon their heads, With feet up in the air. --T. VI. WITHDRAWAL OF PRIZE OFFER. Never have anything to do with those who pretend to have dealings with the supernatural. If you allow supernaturalism to get a foothold in your country the result will be a dreadful calamity.--Confucius. Mrs. Brown and I hereby withdraw, for the present at least, our prize offer, and for two reasons: 1. We are convinced that it is as necessary to the welfare of the world to smite supernaturalism in religion as capitalism in politics, but while many are able and willing to attack the octopus of capitalism, this is true of only a few in the case of the dragon of supernaturalism. Some hesitate because they feel with one of the critics of Communism and Christianism that revolutionary forces are coming to the surface in the churches. "Where," he asks, "shall we classify the stand of the Catholic Church against the open shop? What shall be said of the Interchurch report on the steel strike? What of the attitude of the combined commission in Denver of Catholics, Protestants and Jews on the street car strike?" We have no desire to belittle such efforts nor to discourage their promoters; but (though they may afford some local and temporary alleviation to the miseries of far the greater part of the world--miseries growing out of its division into two classes, a small class of owning masters and a large class of working slaves) we center no hope in them, because the whole history of the supernaturalistic interpretations of religion, not excepting the Christian, show these efforts to be only reformatory and temporary bubbles which sooner or later are always pricked by the masters of what little revolutionary air they contain, and so never issue in any general or permanent improvement of the sad lot of the overwhelming majority of the slaves. How little the church serves the working slaves, and how much the owning masters, will appear from the following representations of Roger W. Babson, the well-known financial expert and adviser: The value of our investments depends not on the strength of our banks, but rather upon the strength of our churches. The underpaid preachers of the nation are the men upon whom we really are depending, rather than the well-paid lawyers, bankers and brokers. The religion of the community is really the bulwark of our investments. And when we consider that only 15 per cent of the people hold securities of any kind and less than 3 per cent hold enough to pay an income tax, the importance of the churches becomes even more evident. For our sakes, for our children's sakes, for the nation's sake, let us business men get behind the churches and their preachers. Never mind if they are not perfect. Never mind if their theology is out of date. This only means that were they efficient they would do very much more. The safety of all we have is due to the churches, even in their present inefficient and inactive state. By all that we hold dear, let us from this very day give more time, money and thought to the churches, for upon these the value of all we own ultimately depends. What our critics say about the recent efforts of the American churches being in the right direction is interesting to Mrs. Brown and me, but we are much more impressed by the observation of a writer in a late issue of Soviet Russia. In speaking of the baneful influence of the Russian church through all the ages he says: Out of the shadows of antiquity, from the morning of man's cupidity and avarice, two sinister figures have crawled with crooked talons through history, leaving a trail of blood and fear most horrible which has not halted yet. These are the monarch and the priest. The one is symbolical of despotic or oligarchic power, the other typifies the sordid ignorance and fearful superstition of the credulous masses which maintains the power of the first. High in the streets of Moscow, where one may see the pallid, long-haired, degenerate-looking venders of holy lies and pious impositions shuffle along like spectres from a remoter age, there hangs a woven streamer of scarlet hue with huge white lettering, which defiantly proclaims that religion is the opium of the people. Though many still cross themselves a score of times daily on passing the church, yet nevertheless the people are rapidly assimilating the knowledge which elevates and enlightens, and learning to reject that which terrorizes and deforms the mind, and just so sure as the last filthy tyrant has been placed for ever beyond mischief, so will the last priest soon vanish from the land once contemptuously known as "Holy Russia". The foregoing is from a revolutionary sympathizer with soviet Russia and the following is from a reactionary criticizer of it, but both are to the same effect, that orthodox Christianity is wholly against the interest of the proletariat and entirely for that of the bourgeoisie: One of the most striking characteristics of Bolshevism is its pronounced hatred of religion, and of Christianity most of all. To the Bolshevik, Christianity is not merely the theory of a mode of life different from his own; it is an enemy to be persecuted and wiped out of existence. To understand this is not difficult. The tendency of the Christian religion to hold before the believer an ideal of a life beyond death is diametrically opposed to the ideal of Bolshevism, which tempts the masses by promising the immediate realization of the earthly paradise. From that point of view Christianity is not only a false conception of life; it is an obstacle to the realization of the Communist ideal. It detaches souls from the objects of sense and diverts them from the struggle to get the good things of this life. According to the Bolshevist formula, religion is opium for the people: and serves as a tool of capitalist domination. This influence of the churches, in the long run and on the whole has been and will continue to be the same throughout christendom everywhere and everywhen, not excepting these United States in the twentieth century. Nor is it to any convincing purpose that the representatives of the owning class contend that kings and priests have lost their supremacy to presidents and preachers, for it is imperialism in politics which enthralls and supernaturalism in religion which degrades. The world is greatly afflicted with both, none of it much, if any, more than our country. It seems to us that we see two fundamentally important facts more clearly than our critics see them: (1) the first step in the way of salvation for the proletariat is class consciousness, and (2) the Christian interpretation of supernaturalistic religion has been, and until it is discredited will continue to be the most efficient among the many preventives to this consciousness. Let me show this to be the case by an experience which I had some years ago when Mr. Pierpont Morgan, Senior, was at the height of his glory, as the king of the great realm of big business, receiving homage on the one hand from the Rockefellers and Rothschilds, and on the other hand from the Blockheads and Henry Dubbs of all the world. At that time I made a confirmation visitation for my sick episcopal brother, the Bishop of New York, to what was popularly known as Pierpont Morgan's church (St. George's, one of the downtown churches for working people.) He was the senior warden of this great parish having nearly 5,000 communicants. He went with the collecting procession out through the great congregation and back to the chancel where each collector ceremoniously emptied the contents of his basket into the great gold alms basin held by the Rector. While the famous financier was collecting contributions from obscure toilers, how could any, brought up as I was and as nearly all of the great congregation were, see that capitalism has divided humanity into two conflicting classes which "have nothing in common, the working class and the employing class, between which a struggle must go on until the workers organize, take possession of the earth and the machinery of production and abolish the wage system!" By the light of what I had been taught all along and of what I was then seeing with my own eyes from the bishop's chair such a representation would have seemed preposterous and what was true of me was equally so of all present, rector, wardens, vestrymen, members and visitors. There were not many I. W. W.'s. in those days, but if one had been there and upon leaving the church had made a representation to this effect to a fellow-worker who was a member of St. George's would not the reply have been something as follows: See what Pierpont Morgan and I have in common: the same God; the same religion; the same church; the same services for worship; the same collection basket in which he puts a $100.00 bill and I a ten cent piece; the same Lord's Supper where we eat and drink together; and, besides all this, there is the same hell where he will go unless he gives me a fair day's wage and where I will go unless I do a fair day's work, and the same heaven where both will go to equally glorious mansions, if we are alike 100 percenters in church and state, and if he pays me liberally for my work and I slave hard enough for his money. Assuming the truth of the Christian interpretation of religion this conclusion is correct. But this Christian religion is not true. Christianism offers nothing to either the owners or workers in the sky for its god and heaven, devil and hell are lies. And neither religious Christianism nor political Republicanism or Democracy, not to speak of the other isms of religion and politics, offers the workers aught on earth. Capitalism is the god of this world, of no part of it more than of these United States, and capitalism is to the laborer a robbing, lying, murderous devil, not a good divinity. 2. The recall of the prize offer is also occasioned and justified, we think, by a demand, which was as unexpected as it is gratifying, for our little propagandist in foreign countries, and we have been persuaded that it should be met by securing to him the gift of tongues. We propose to do this by devoting the money which was set aside for the prizes to the encouragement of making and publishing translations. FOOTNOTES: [N] The capitalist countries of the world constitute the United States of Crazy Lands. VII. AFTERWORD. "So many Gods, so many Creeds, So many ways that wind and wind, When all this sad world really needs Is just the art of being kind." --Ella Wheeler Wilcox. I. My title, given in Latin on the picture page, is bestowed upon me by some in jest and by others in reproach, and I am accepting it from both as compliments, because they prove that I have at least succeeded in making clear the general outlines of my religious and political position. The use of this title is due to the desire that those who pick up the booklet should not buy it, much less undertake to read it, under a mistaken impression as to its doctrinal trends. In English the Latin title is, "Bishop of the Countries belonging to the Bolsheviki and the Infidels." Certain friends greatly fear that some things said in this booklet may fall foul of the criminal-syndicalism laws. I have carefully read those of Ohio and believe that the booklet contains nothing which is not safely within them. Anyhow, I have spoken the truth about supernaturalistic religion and capitalistic politics as I understand it, and I believe that I have adequately supported all my representations on bases of relevant facts which cannot be gainsaid or, at any rate, upon sound arguments which have such facts for their foundations. However, I am trying to hold myself open to conviction; and, this being the case, if "the powers that be" in state or church feel that they must proceed against me, I beg that, in justice to all the persons and interests concerned, they will come with their resources of persuasion, not coercion. My appeal to the religious and political rulers to do this shall be in the burning words of a celebrated defender of the capitalistic system of economics, John Stuart Mill, words which constitute the most remarkable passage in his powerful essay on Liberty: No argument, we may suppose, can now be needed, against permitting a legislature or an executive, not identified in interest with the people, to prescribe opinions to them, and determine what doctrines or what arguments they shall be allowed to hear. Speaking generally, it is not, in constitutional countries, to be apprehended, that the government, whether completely responsible to the people or not, will often attempt to control the expression of opinion, except when in doing so it makes itself the organ of the general intolerance of the public. Let us suppose, therefore, that the government is entirely at one with the people, and never thinks of exerting any power of coercion unless in agreement with what it conceives to be their voice. But I deny the right of the people to exercise such coercion, either by themselves or by their government. The power itself is illegitimate. The best government has no more title to it than the worst. It is as noxious, or more noxious, when exerted in accordance with public opinion, than when in opposition to it. If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. Were an opinion a personal possession of no value except to the owner; if to be obstructed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private injury, it would make some difference whether the injury was inflicted on only a few persons or on many. But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. This passage should be inscribed in letters of gold on the doors of every church and court house in the world. It was written in condemnation of the persecution by majorities of minorities in states, but it applies equally to all intolerance of dissentient opinions. It is utterly impossible in a printed discussion of the length of this booklet to weed out every word capable of misconstruction; and equally so to furnish a definition or limitation to every doubtful word or phrase. Nevertheless I call attention to a few: The word "revolution" as used here should not be taken as implying armed insurrection or violence, unless expressly so described. These are not necessary features of revolution. There have been both political and industrial revolutions entirely unattended by violence or bloodshed; for example, the political revolution of 1787 when the old Articles of Confederation were abolished and the federal Constitution imposed upon the United States; also the political and industrial revolution of 1919 in Hungary when for a time a soviet system was established, with Bela Kun as premier. The bloodshed which often attends revolutions comes almost invariably from the lawless counter-revolutionary efforts of the deposed ruling class to maintain themselves in power or regain power by terrorism and murder. When I eulogize the Bolsheviki and their system in Russia, I am not to be taken as advocating for the United States the employment of the bloody tactics for gaining power, which the capitalist press of America persists in describing--and as I believe, falsely. I deal in this booklet not with tactics but with facts. I concern myself here not with the ways by which the Bolsheviki of Russia gained power, but with what they did with the power after gaining it. As I was trained in theology, I am certain that my religious position has been so clearly outlined that no mistake as to where I stand will be made by the rulers in my church; but, having had no training in the law, I am less certain that my political position will be as unmistakably understood by the rulers in my state. Therefore, to avoid misinterpretation of certain words and phrases in this booklet, I here expressly disclaim any intention of violating the criminal-syndicalism statute of Ohio, following as closely as may be its phraseology in these my denials of criminal intention: Nothing herein is to be understood as advocating or teaching the duty, necessity, or propriety of crime, sabotage, violence or unlawful methods of terrorism as a means of accomplishing industrial or political reform. This booklet is not issued for the purpose of advocating, advising, or teaching the doctrine that industrial or political reform should be brought about by crime, sabotage, violence or unlawful methods of terrorism; nor of justifying the commission or the attempt to commit crime, sabotage, violence or unlawful methods of terrorism with intent to exemplify, spread or advocate the propriety of the doctrines of criminal syndicalism; nor of organizing any society, group or assemblage of persons formed to teach or advocate the doctrines of criminal syndicalism. If any such meaning shall be read into any passage of this booklet by any reader, it will be a wrong meaning, not what I intended to convey. A revolution by which a new industrial democracy--the freedom to make things for the use of workers--will supplant the old capitalist democracy--the freedom to make things for the profit of owners--is an inevitable event in the history of every country within the twentieth century. II. My object in this booklet is not the promotion of class hatred and strife. Far from it. It is to persuade to the banishment of gods from skies and capitalists from earth. Theism and capitalism are the great blights upon mankind, the fatal ones to which it owes, more than to all others together, the greatest and most unnecessary of its suffering, those arising from ignorance, war, poverty and slavery. This recommendation as to banishments and this representation in support of it stand out on nearly every page of the booklet, and in order to make sure of special prominence for them on its last pages, I quote the following from an article by G. O. Warren (a major in the British army, I think) an occasional contributor of brilliant articles to rationalist publications on sociological lines: If there be a God who rules men and things by His arbitrary will, it is an impertinence to attempt to abolish poverty, because it is according to His will. But if there be no such God, then we know that poverty is caused by men and may be removed by men. If there be a God who answers prayers, the remedy for social injustice is to pray. But if there be no such God, the remedy is to think and act. If men go to heaven when they die, and if heaven is a place in which everybody will be made perfectly happy, then there is no need to struggle against poverty in this world, because a few years of trouble, or even degradation, in this world are of no consequence when compared with an eternity of happiness that must be ours by simply following the directions of the clergy. But if there be no such heaven, then it becomes a matter of first importance that we make our condition as happy as possible in this world, which is the only one of which we are certain. I maintain that there is no God who rules men and things by His arbitrary will and who answers prayers, and that there is no heaven of everlasting bliss to which we are to be wafted after death. And I maintain this not only because I think that these religious beliefs are erroneous, but because I know that they are most potent to make men docile and submissive to the most degrading conditions imposed on them. I feel sure that the doctrine that obedience to rulers and contentment in poverty are according to the will of God, and the doctrine that the poor and the oppressed will be compensated in heaven are the chief causes of slums, prisons, lunatic asylums and poor-houses. All political tyranny is backed up and made possible by belief in an arbitrary God, and all poverty is endured because of the belief that after death everlasting happiness and wealth await us. Two conditions are necessary to human happiness: personal freedom and general wealth. But we never can be free as long as we believe that it is the will of an infinite heavenly ruler that we should submit to a finite earthly ruler, whether he gets upon the throne by hereditary succession or by the votes of a majority; and wealth will never be justly, and therefore, generally, distributed as long as most of the people believe that because they are poor in this world they will be rich in the world to come. The apostle Paul says that political rulers are ordained by God and must be obeyed, from the King to the constable, from the President to the policeman. He says that if you are refractory, "the minister of God" will use his sword, and will not use it "in vain." He says that the sword-bearer is God's minister. Christ himself recites a parable about a rich man who went to hell because he was rich and a poor man who went to heaven because he was poor. Rich Christians are told by the clergy that the surest way for them to get to heaven is by being rich; but they use this parable to console the poor with the idea that the surest way for them to get to heaven is by being poor. And this idea is confirmed by the saying of Christ: 'Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.' I claim that it is impossible to prove that any being exists who can do, or ever does, anything outside of the regular processes of Nature, and therefore that the word "God," which has always meant such a being, should be dropped. I would have no objection to the current use of the word "God" if that use were harmless, but it is very far from that. It is a word that every despot conjures with to keep the people in ignorance and subjection. It is a word that crafty politicians use in carrying out their schemes of bribery and plunder. The same thing applies to the word "heaven." It is impossible to show that there is any such place, and the word is used as a bribe to the poor to keep them quiet under injustice. I do not see how there can be a life after death, but if there is it will not be any better because we are poor and undeveloped in this world, and therefore immortality should be a reason rather for discontentment among the poor than for submission to injustice. As an atheist, I object to a God who is for every tyrannical ruler and against the rebels that he imprisons, tortures and slays; who is for the idle landlord and usurer and against the workers; who is for the purse-proud prelate and against the people; who is for the boodle politician and against the happiness of the many; who is for the white exploiter and against the simple colored man; who is for the rich profiteer and against the petty burglar and pickpocket. If I am told there is no such God as this, I reply that there is, or there is none. The God of every Christian creed is the God of the rulers, the God of the idle rich. There never has been any other God known to the world. This is the God that the church now worships and always has worshiped. There are forces in Nature that we do not yet understand, and therefore should not name. But they can only help us as we learn what they are and how to use them. It is therefore neither our duty nor our privilege to pray, nor can any good be thus achieved. It is for us to observe, to think, and to examine the pretensions of the privileged. It is for us to understand that there is no God to raise our wages, and no heaven to compensate us for our poverty and all the misery it entails in this world. "Said the parson, 'Be content; Pay your tithes due, pay your rent; They that earthly things despise Shall have mansions in the skies, Though your back with toil be bent,' Said the parson, 'be content.' "Then the parson feasting went With my lord who lives by rent; And the parson laughed elate For my lord has livings great, They that earthly things revere May get bishop's mansions here. "Be content! Be content! Till your dreary life is spent, Lowly live and lowly die, All for mansions in the sky! Castles here are much too rare, All may have them--in the air!" III. According to Marxian socialism, the history of man arose from the need of his body for food, raiment and shelter. This is the materialistic explanation of history, and the following is one of the passages in which Marx clearly shows that it is true and reasonable: In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society--the real foundations, on which rise legal and political superstructures and which correspond to definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material forces of production in society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or--what is but a legal expression for the same thing--with the property relations within which they had been at work before. From forms of development of the forces of production these relations turn into their fetters. Then comes the period of social revolution. Marx and his followers are justified in their contention that the physical necessities of man (not gods or great men) constitute the key to his history by the fact that there was no mind of man before the human body nor will there be any mind when the body has been disintegrated; for the mind was made by the body, for the body, not the body by the mind, for the mind. This very remarkable fact, when duly considered, will change nearly all the ideas of most men and women about almost everything. A leader is but a mouthpiece of a people through which they give expression to their deepest convictions and highest aspirations. Early in my life Lincoln was the great leader of the people in the United States, and late in it Lenin is the great leader of the people of the world. The earlier of these was at least a rationalist and the latter is an atheist, so that the first probably did not suppose himself to have been inspired by a divinity, and the second certainly does not. I claim, said Lincoln, not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. In Lenin's Birthday Anniversary number of the magazine, Soviet Russia, the Editor says: At the very outset, we must clearly state that much of Lenin's powerful position in present-day history is made by the history itself,--by the fact that we are living at the moment when the entire life of the race is vindicating in a most emphatic manner the theoretical position occupied by Lenin for many years. After all, Lenin, like Trotsky, was an unknown man, except to certain political circles, and the mass of Russian revolutionists, even as late as 1916. And yet, he was the same Lenin; had not the opportunity come to put into practice the system for which he and his associates had been laboring and suffering for many years, no doubt the circle of his admirers and readers would not be much wider in 1920 than it was in 1916. Lenin would probably be the first to admit--nay, insist--that the material circumstance that enables a certain individual to assert himself is the prime element in building his reputation. So that, if the Russian Revolution had not taken the course it did take, Lenin, with exactly the same mental and idealogical preparation, might have remained a relatively unknown man. Those who on the one hand interpret life from the naturalistic or materialistic point of view, and those who on the other hand interpret it from the supernaturalistic viewpoint need not and generally do not differ as widely as is commonly supposed. Materialism is the name for two totally different things, which are constantly confused. There is, in the first place, materialism as a theory of the universe--the theory that matter is the source and the substance of all things. That is (if you associate "force" or "energy" or "motion" with your "matter," as every materialist does) a perfectly arguable theory. It has not the remotest connection with the amount of wine a man drinks or the integrity of his life. But we also give the name of materialism to a certain disposition of the sentiments, which few of us admire, and which would kill the root of progress if it became general. It is the disposition to despise ideals and higher thought, to confine one's desires to selfish and sensual pleasure and material advancement. There is no connection between this materialism of the heart and that of the head. For whole centuries of Christian history whole nations believed abundantly in spirits without it having the least influence on their morals; and, on the other hand, materialists like Ludwig Buchner, or Vogt, or Moleschott, were idealists (in the moral sense) of the highest order. Look around you and see whether the belief or non-belief (for the Agnostic is in the same predicament here) in spirit is a dividing-line in conduct. There is no ground in fact for the confusion, and it has wrought infinite mischief.--McCabe. As to their philosophy concerning the origin, sustenance and governance of the universe, communists are almost to a man materialists; but, as to their philosophy concerning life, they are as generally idealists. There is, I feel sure, as much idealism in my thinking and living now as there was in the days of my orthodoxy. Many of the representations of the Jewish-Christian Bible are materialistic in a high, if not gross, degree. This is true of the account of the creation according to which the god, Jehovah, with hands moulded a man out of dust; performed a surgical operation upon him for the purpose of securing a rib out of which he carved a woman; made a garden; and provided worship for himself by a system of material sacrifices. The ark of the covenant was a wooden chest, and its contents (a pot, some manna, and Aaron's rod) were materialities. The conception, birth, death, descension, resurrection, ascension and session of the god, Jesus, were (if they occurred) material realities. And the eating of the flesh and drinking of the blood of the god sounds like materialism, especially according to the explanation of the Greek, Roman, Lutheran and Anglican churches. IV. A nutshell summary of this booklet is contained in these confessions of my religious and political faith: I. My religious faith is summed up in the following creed of twelve Articles: (1) The chief end of every man should be to make the most of his own life by having it as long and as happy as possible and to help others in doing this for themselves. (2) Though parents live unconsciously in their children and all do so in those over whom they have had any influence, yet all there is of conscious, personal life for man is of a terrestrial character, none celestial. (3) Knowledge is the Christ of the World. The saviour-gods of the supernaturalistic interpretations of religion are symbols of this one. (4) Ignorance is the devil of the world. The destroyer-gods of the supernaturalistic interpretations of religion are symbols of this one. (5) Knowledge consists in knowing facts and truths. Every real fact and truth is a word of the only gospel which the world possesses. (6) A fact is something which matter, force and motion have unconsciously done, not what a god has consciously willed. There are no other facts. (7) A truth is a fact so interpreted that if it is lived it will contribute towards making the most of life. There are no other truths. (8) Hence the greatest people in the world are the scientists who discover facts, and the preachers who interpret them and persuade to their living. If you contend that mothers are greater than teachers, I shall agree with you on condition that you will admit that a mother is not really great unless she is a teacher. (9) The desire and effort to learn facts, interpret and live them constitute morality. (10) Morality is the greatest thing in the world, because it is all there is of real religion and politics. (11) But, paradoxical as it may seem, there is one thing which is greater than the greatest thing in the world--freedom. (12) And the freedom which is greater than morality consists in the liberty to learn, interpret, live and teach facts, without which liberty a man may be a non-moral child, or an immoral hypocrite, but he cannot be the possessor of the pearl of great price--morality, without which human life is not worth the living or even possible. II. My political faith is summed up in the following creed of twelve articles: (1) As the universe in general is self-existing, self-sustaining and self-governing, so man in particular, who is but one among the transitory, cosmic phenomena, has all of the potentialities of his own life within himself, so that every man can say of himself what the makers of Jesus had him say: I and my Father are one. (2) Man has set a far-off and high-up goal of an ideal civilization for himself, and is finding the way to it by his own discoveries, and is walking therein by his own strength, so that he is not in the least indebted to any of the gods of the supernaturalistic interpretations of religion, either for the setting of the goal, or for what progress he has made towards it. (3) Nor is humanity indebted to its outstanding representatives for the advance in the way of civilization, as is evident from the fact that, but for the gods, it would have long since been far beyond the point where the English-German war would have been within the range of possibilities, and these gods are the gifts to a blind humanity by its blind leaders. (4) Humanity is not indebted to its physical scientists any more than to its spiritual prophets for its advance in the way of civilization, because the scientists have always worked, as the prophets have preached, in the interests of the profiteers of the existing system of economics. Economic systems have been the chief, if not indeed, the only promoters of war, and the world war with its tremendous horrors would not have been possible but for science. (5) So, then, the history of civilization has been what it is because of the economic systems by which the material necessities of life (foods, raiments and houses) have been produced, not because gods have made spiritual revelations, nor yet because men have made great discoveries and persuasively taught them. According to Marx, who discovered the key to the door of history, it is constituted neither by the gods in the skies, nor the great men on earth; but by economic systems. These create the divinities and the leaders, not they them. (6) Thus far in the history of mankind every civilization has rested upon the institution of slavery and there have been, speaking broadly, three different forms of it, with their correspondingly different civilizations, chattel, feudal and capital. Each of these forms of slavery has been the foundation for a superstructure of a civilization peculiar to a distinct period of history. Chattel, feudal and capital slaveries respectively constituted the foundations for the superstructures of ancient, mediaeval and modern civilizations. The second of the two great discoveries by Marx was that the wage slavery of capitalism, by far the worst of all slaveries, is due to surplus profits. (7) Since civilizations have their embodiments in religious and political institutions (churches and states with what goes with them) so clearly as to justify the contention that religion and politics are the halves of one and the same reality--civilization--it follows that I am right in carrying my materialism over from the realm of religion into that of politics. (8) A system of economics is about the most materialistic thing in the world, yet it is the only key which will open the door to the temple of human history. Having opened it with this key, the first thing to be seen is a world divided into two classes, one class whose representatives live by owning the material means and the machines for production and distribution; and another class whose representatives live by working in making and operating these machines, with the result of producing and distributing the material commodities by which the world is fed, clothed and housed, but to the surfeiting of the owners who as such produce nothing and have everything and the starving of the workers who produce everything and have nothing. (9) Capitalists and communists agree that when the goal of humanity has been reached the world will find itself to be one all inclusive co-operating family. (10) Capitalists say that then the co-operating will be between the owners as fathers, and the workers as children. The capitalists will recognize every laborer who does a fair day's work as a good son or daughter, and the laborer will recognize every owner who gives a fair day's wage as a good father. (11) But communists say that then the co-operating will be between men, all of whom are on the same footing as laborers, since, when the goal is reached, the world will no longer be divided as it has been, from time out of mind, into a small owning or master class and a large working or slave class; but it will constitute one great all inclusive family, every member of which will be on the same footing with all others, except that the older members will regard the younger as sons and daughters, and they in turn will be regarded as fathers and mothers, and all of the same generation will look upon each other as brothers and sisters. (12) Civilization always has been and ever will be impossible without slavery, because leisure and opportunity for study, social intercourse and travel are necessary to it, but under capitalism, as it works out, only representatives of the owning or master class have these prerequisites, and those of the working or slave class must be deprived of them. When communism supplants capitalism all will have their equal parts in both the labor necessary to the sustenance of the physical (body) life, and also the leisure necessary to the development of the psychical (soul) life. There will still be slavery, indeed much more of it than the world has hitherto known, but machines, not men, women and children will be the slaves. Of course there will remain much work connected with the making and operating of the machines, but the time and energy required for it will more and more decrease with the inevitable increase in the number and efficiency of the machines until, according to conservative estimates, three or four hours per day of comparatively light and pleasant employment will be quite sufficient to provide the necessities of life in abundance for every worker and his dependents, so that, then, all will have as much of them as the few have now; and this without any sense of slavery because when one is working for the benefit of himself and his own in particular, and the public to which he belongs in general, not for the profit of a class of which he is not a representative, there is no feeling of irksome servitude. V. A world-wide revolution has begun and is rapidly spreading over the earth. Why? Because a world-wide economic system for feeding, clothing and housing the people has broken down so that it must be supplanted by a new system, else mankind will perish for the lack of food, raiment and shelter. This revolutionary war is between the working class whose representatives live starvingly, though they produce and distribute all the necessities of life and the capitalist class whose representatives live surfeitingly, though taking no part in the production and distribution of these necessities. Nearly one hundred years ago our fourth President, James Madison, saw partly and dimly what nearly every one now sees fully and clearly: We are free today substantially, but the day will come when our Republic will be an impossibility. It will be an impossibility because wealth will be concentrated in the hands of a few. A republic cannot stand upon bayonets, and when that day comes, when the wealth of the nation will be in the hands of a few, then we must rely upon the wisdom of the best elements in the country to readjust the laws of the nation to the changed conditions. The laborers of Russia have turned the country right side up so that they themselves are above and the capitalists below, having the privilege of remaining down to idle and starve or else to crawl up to work and live, but not to rob, war and enslave. As I lay down my pen the working man's government of Russia is fighting a double war, the Poland-Crimea war, to prevent its overthrow by the capitalist governments of the world, especially England, France, Japan and the United States, which in this war are surreptitiously confederated against it, and the victory seems assured to it, largely because of the sympathy and help of their fellow workers throughout the world. Marx though dead yet speaketh. He is speaking more widely and persuasively in death than in life. Russia is the megaphone from which his voice goes out through every land and over every sea. Never man nor god spake with as much power as he speaks. His gospel is to the slave, and this is its thrilling appeal--workers of the world unite, and this is its inspiring assurance--you have nothing to lose but your chains and a world to gain. WM. M. BROWN. Brownella Cottage, Galion, Ohio. September 24th, 1920. * * * * * * Transcriber's note: The typographical error "overwhelmlingly" was changed to "overwhelmingly." All other spelling, capitalization, and punctuation was retained. 
28361	----	+-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's note: | | | | Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has | | been preserved. | | | | This e-book has many unusual words and spelling that have | | been retained. | | | | Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For | | a complete list, please see the end of this document. | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------+ BRITISH SOCIALISM An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals by J. ELLIS BARKER Author of 'Modern Germany: Her Political and Economic Problems, etc.' 'The Rise and Decline of the Netherlands' London Smith, Elder, & Co. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons 1908 CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. INTRODUCTION--WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 1 II. SOME SOCIALIST VIEWS OF PRESENT SOCIETY AND OF THE SOCIETY OF THE FUTURE 10 III. THE GRIEVANCES OF THE SOCIALISTS 30 IV. THE FUNDAMENTAL DOCTRINES OF SOCIALISM 50 V. THE AIMS AND POLICY OF THE SOCIALISTS 92 VI. THE ATTITUDE OF SOCIALISTS TOWARDS THE WORKING MASSES 115 VII. THE ATTITUDE OF SOCIALISTS TOWARDS TRADE UNIONISTS AND CO-OPERATORS 131 VIII. SOCIALIST VIEWS AND PROPOSALS REGARDING LAND AND THE LANDLORDS 145 IX. SOCIALIST VIEWS AND PROPOSALS REGARDING CAPITAL AND THE CAPITALISTS 152 X. SOCIALIST VIEWS AND PROPOSALS REGARDING TAXATION AND THE NATIONAL BUDGET 160 XI. SOCIALISM AND THE EMPIRE 170 XII. SOCIALIST VIEWS ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND FOREIGN POLICY 183 XIII. SOCIALISM AND THE ARMY 192 XIV. SOCIALISM AND THE MONARCHY 207 XV. SOCIALIST VIEWS ON PARLIAMENT AND THE NATIONAL ADMINISTRATION 209 XVI. THE ATTITUDE OF THE SOCIALISTS TOWARDS THE TWO PARLIAMENTARY PARTIES 225 XVII. SOCIALISM AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT 240 XVIII. SOCIALISM AND AGRICULTURE 261 XIX. SOCIALIST VIEWS ON BRITISH RAILWAYS AND SHIPPING 269 XX. SOME SOCIALIST VIEWS ON MONEY, BANKS, AND BANKING 278 XXI. SOME SOCIALIST VIEWS ON FREE TRADE AND PROTECTION 285 XXII. SOCIALISM AND EDUCATION 302 XXIII. THE ATTITUDE OF SOCIALISTS TOWARDS PROVIDENCE, THRIFT, AND TEMPERANCE 311 XXIV. SOCIALIST VIEWS ON LAW AND JUSTICE 325 XXV. SOCIALISM AND WOMAN, THE FAMILY AND THE HOME 330 XXVI. THE SOCIALIST ATTITUDE TOWARDS CHRISTIANITY AND RELIGION 354 XXVII. THE RELIGION OF SOCIALISM 364 XXVIII. CHRISTIAN SOCIALISM 375 XXIX. SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM 381 XXX. SOCIALISM AND ANARCHISM 394 XXXI. SOCIALISM AND REVOLUTION 404 XXXII. STATE SOCIALISM 411 XXXIII. THE SOCIALIST ORGANISATIONS: THEIR MUTUAL RELATIONS AND THEIR POLICY 415 XXXIV. THE GROWTH AND DANGER OF BRITISH SOCIALISM 431 XXXV. HOW THE PROGRESS OF SOCIALISM MAY BE CHECKED 440 XXXVI. IS SOCIALISM POSSIBLE?--A GLANCE INTO THE SOCIALIST STATE OF THE FUTURE 444 XXXVII. CONCLUSION 470 APPENDIX--OFFICIAL PROGRAMMES OF THE SOCIALISTIC ORGANISATIONS 481 BIBLIOGRAPHY 493 ANALYTICAL INDEX 509 BRITISH SOCIALISM CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION--WHAT IS SOCIALISM? What is Socialism? It is exceedingly difficult to answer that question in a few words, for Socialism is exceedingly elusive and bewildering in its doctrines, its aims, and its proposals. Its opponents have described it as "a doctrine of sordid materialism and of atheism," they have denounced it as "the gospel of everlasting bellyful,"[1] and as "the coming slavery."[2] They have stated that Socialism means to abolish religion, that it "would try to put laziness, thriftlessness, and inefficiency on a par with industry, thrift, and efficiency, that it would strive to break up not merely private property, but, what is far more important, the home, the chief prop upon which our whole civilisation stands."[3] The Socialists, on the other hand, claim that "Socialism presents the only living ideal of human existence"[4]; that "Socialism is science applied with knowledge and understanding to all branches of human activity"[5]; that "Socialism is freedom,"[6] and that it is exceedingly just, for "the justice of Socialism will see all things, and therefore understand all things."[7] One of the Socialist leaders has told us "Socialism is much more than either a political creed or an economic dogma. It presents to the modern world a new conception of society and a new basis upon which to build up the life of the individual and of the State."[8] Another informs us "Socialism to Socialists is not a Utopia which they have invented, but a principle of social organisation which they assert to have been discovered by the patient investigators into sociology whose labours have distinguished the present century."[9] A third has stated that "Socialism is really neither more nor less than the science of sociology."[10] A fourth asserts that "it is a scientific scheme of national government entirely wise, just, and practical."[11] A fifth states "Socialism to me has always meant not a principle, but certain definite economic measures which I wish to see taken."[12] Other Socialists have taught that "Socialism is an ethical system founded on justice and truth; it is a heartfelt, soul-inspiring religion, resting upon the love of God."[13] "Socialism is a theory of social organisation, which reconciles the individual to society. It has discovered how the individual in society can attain to a state of complete development."[14] "Socialism is the right of the community, acting in its corporate capacity, to intervene in the lives and labours of men and women."[15] "Socialism is nothing but the extension of democratic self-government from the political to the industrial world."[16] "Socialism is an endeavour to substitute for the anarchical struggle or fight for existence an organised co-operation for existence."[17] "Socialism may be described as an endeavour to readjust the machinery of industry in such a way that it can at once depend upon and issue in a higher kind of character and social type than is encouraged by the conditions of ordinary competitive enterprise."[18] "Socialism is the development of policies concerning the welfare of society."[19] "It is not arbitrary destruction and reconstruction, but a natural process of development."[20] "The idea of Socialism will conquer the world, for this idea is nothing but the real, well understood interest of mankind."[21] "Its principles will carry the whole human race to a higher state of perfection."[22] "It is the great modern protest against unreality, against the delusive shams which now masquerade as verities."[23] "Socialism is of the character of a historical discovery."[24] "Socialism, the inspiring principle of all Labour Parties, whether they know it or not, is the next world movement--the movement of the constructive intellect."[25] Socialism is rich in promises, and its claims to our consideration and support are manifold. Are these claims justified or not? Are the Socialists or the Anti-Socialists right in their conception of Socialism? The Socialists maintain that all opposition to Socialism is based either on self-interest or ignorance, and principally upon the latter. Therefore one of the Socialist leaders wrote: "Those who wish to understand Socialism will be wise to study Socialist books and papers. One does not expect a true and fair account of any theory or cause from its enemies. The man who takes his ideas of Trade-Unionism from the Free Labour League, his ideas of Liberalism from the Tory papers, his ideas of South African affairs--or any other affairs--from the Yellow Press, will be misled into all manner of absurdities and errors. The statements of party politicians and party newspapers on most controversial subjects are prejudiced and inaccurate; but there is no subject upon which the professional misleaders of the people are so untrustworthy and so disingenuous as they are upon the subject of Socialism."[26] A leading Socialist organ complained: "Our opponents decline to deal with the fundamental principles of Socialism--its unanswerable indictment of the capitalist system, with all its concomitants of wage-slavery and slumdom; prostitution and child murder--and prefer instead to indulge in calumniation and misrepresentation of Socialism. We need not complain about that. It is a tribute to the soundness of the Socialist position, to the irrefutability of its principles, the impregnability of the rock of economic truth upon which it is based, that our enemies dare not oppose the principles of Socialism, dare not attempt to meet the charge Socialism levels against the existing order."[27] There is much truth in these complaints. The general public and most writers and speakers know very little about Socialism, because this most interesting subject has been very inadequately treated in the existing books. The existing books on Socialism describe, analyse, and criticise the Socialist doctrines only in the abstract as a rule. However, Socialism is not only an elaborate economic doctrine, it is at the same time a complete system of practical politics. Hence it does not suffice to study the doctrines of Socialism by themselves. In order to understand Socialism we must also investigate its practical proposals. Following the methods of our political economists, most writers on Socialism have, unfortunately, treated Socialism rather as a scientific abstraction than as a business proposition. Consequently the most important practical details of Socialism, such as: What are the views of the Socialist with regard to the Monarchy, the Army, the Banks, the National Currency, the Law, Education? what are their practical aims as regards Parliamentary Representation, Foreign Policy, Agriculture, Taxation, Old-age Pensions, Fiscal Policy? what are their relations with the Parliamentary Parties, the Trade-Unions, the Co-operators, etc? what is their attitude towards International Communism and Anarchism? is English Socialism an Evolutionary or a Revolutionary Movement?--these and many other questions are touched but lightly or are not touched at all. It is somewhat difficult to deal fully with the practical proposals of the Socialists, because the Socialists are very averse from formulating their aims and disclosing their plans. An English Socialist wrote: "To dogmatise about the form which the Socialist State shall take is to play the fool."[28] Another one stated: "It is quite impossible, at this time, nor would it be desirable, if possible, to lay down any hard and fast line as to the development of the details of Socialist organisation. Broad principles are all that can with any degree of confidence be spoken about. The details will arrange themselves, as the time arrives when it becomes necessary to settle them."[29] Gronlund, perhaps the most prominent American Socialist, stated: "Socialists do not profess to be architects. They have not planned the future in minute detail."[30] Herr Bebel, the leader of the German Social-Democratic Party, said on February 3, 1893, in the Reichstag, replying to the Roman Catholics, "We do not ask from you the details of the future life of which you speak so incessantly. Why, then, do you ask us about the future society?"[31] Although we are told that "Socialism claims the consideration of mankind, because it comes forward and offers a complete scheme to improve the conditions of human life,"[32] Socialists carefully abstain as a rule from giving us the details of that scheme. The Socialists of all countries have very excellent reasons for keeping to themselves the details of their plans for the future. Nevertheless, a careful search through their numerous writings will enable us to obtain a fairly clear and comprehensive view of their political and economic plans and intentions. Great Britain does not as yet possess a great Socialist party but only a number of Socialist groups and factions which are totally at variance as regards their aims, policy, and tactics. "They differ as to the best means of getting what they want, and as to the best ways of managing the work, and as to the proper way of sharing the earnings. Some Socialists still believe that Socialism will have to be got by force. I think there are not many. Some are in favour of buying the land, the railways, the machinery, and other things; and some are in favour of taking them, by force, or by new laws. Then some say that there should be no wages paid at all, but that everyone should do an equal share of work, and take whatever he needed from the nation's goods. Others say that all men should do an equal share of work, and have an equal share of the goods, or of the earnings. Others say it would be better to pay wages, as now, but to let the wages be fixed by the Government, or by corporations, or other officials, and that all wages should be equal. Others, again, say that wages should be paid, that the wages should be fixed as above stated, and that different kinds of work should be paid for at different rates. In one kind of Socialism the civil engineer, the actor, the general, the artist, the tram guard, the dustman, the milliner, and the collier would all be paid the same wages. In another kind of Socialism there would be no wages, but all would be called upon to work, and all who worked would 'take according to their needs.' In another kind of Socialism the civil engineer would be paid more than the navvy, the opera singer more than the milliner, the general more than the sergeant, and the editor more than the scavenger."[33] Notwithstanding these numerous and important differences, of which more will be learned in the course of this book, British Socialists are absolutely united in certain important respects. "The policies of Socialism are a changeable quantity, though the principle is as fixed as the Northern Star."[34] "Socialism is as flexible in its form as it is definite in its principles."[35] A superficial study of Socialism reveals to us not a single and generally accepted plan, but a confused and confusing mass of mutually contradictory plans and doctrines. Therefore he who wishes to know what Socialism is, must study the many-headed movement in its entirety and give an impartial hearing to all its advocates. We can understand Socialism only if we are acquainted with practically its entire literature. Unfortunately the literature of Socialism is very vast. A complete collection of modern Socialist literature would embrace at least thirty thousand items. Therefore a full analysis of international Socialism based upon the study of the original sources is a forbidding undertaking. I have consequently limited myself to the investigation of the British Socialist movement, although I have cast a cursory glance upon foreign Socialism whenever it seemed necessary to do so. I have consulted altogether about a thousand books and pamphlets, and have given representative extracts from four hundred or five hundred of those which seemed most proper to elucidate the subject of this book. Having given space to the views of all the Socialist groups, this book is a summary of the whole literature of British Socialism and a key to it. It is based exclusively on first-hand evidence, and every statement contained in it can instantly be verified by reference to the original sources indicated in the footnotes. In the Bibliography at the end of this volume the full title, publisher's address, and date of publication of all sources drawn upon are given, so that readers will have no difficulty in procuring any Socialist books they may want for further study. Most of the books quoted are unknown to booksellers, and are not in public libraries. Even the British Museum Library possesses only part of the publications used in this book, which is the first to exploit fully the whole Socialist party literature. Whilst most books on Socialism take note only of Socialist text-books addressed to students, the present volume considers chiefly the propaganda literature which is educating the Socialist rank and file and shaping its political views. For all practical political purposes the propaganda literature is undoubtedly by far the more important of the two to the statesman and the citizen. The present volume is the only book of its kind, and I hope that the Socialist movement in Germany, France, and the United States will be treated with similar completeness by writers of these countries. The perusal of the present volume will enable us to form an opinion of the merits or demerits of the Socialistic theories and practical plans, and make it possible for us to separate the grain from the chaff, the wisdom from the folly, in the teachings of the Socialists. Thus we shall be able to see which of their complaints and proposals are justified and practical, and which are unjustified and unpractical. Popular dissatisfaction, Socialistic and non-Socialistic, points to the existence of ills in the body politic, and the Socialistic agitation is exceedingly valuable inasmuch as it draws general attention to these ills. Some complaints of the Socialists will be found to be imaginary, others are very real. It would be a sterile undertaking merely to analyse and criticise Socialism and the Socialistic proposals. Therefore, after having described the policy, ideals, and aims of the Socialists, I mean to analyse the disease of which Socialism is a consequence and a symptom, and to propose practical measures for curing it. In the course of this book I shall show that Socialism seems likely to become a very great danger in this country--a far greater danger than is generally realised. Therefore its opponents will be wise not to sneer at Socialism, but to study it and to try to understand it. That task will be found worth our while, and only after it shall we be able to further Socialism if it is beneficial, to combat it if it is pernicious, and to correct it if it is only the misguided expression of genuine suffering and want. Indifference to a great and dangerous political movement such as Socialism may have the gravest consequences. Idlers do not make history. They suffer it. FOOTNOTES: [1] Millar, _Socialism_, p. 21. [2] Herbert Spencer, _The Man versus the State_, p. 18 ff. [3] Roosevelt, Presidential Message, December 1907. [4] Walter Crane in Squire, _Socialism and Art_, Foreword. [5] Bebel, _Woman_, p. 256. [6] Kessack, _Capitalist Wilderness_, p. 2. [7] Ford, _Woman and Socialism_, p. 3. [8] Keir Hardie, _From Serfdom to Socialism_, p. 1. [9] Webb, _The Difficulties of Individualism_, p. 3. [10] Hyndman, _Socialism and Slavery_, Preface. [11] Blatchford, _Merrie England_, p. 100. [12] Shaw, _The Impossibilities of Anarchism_, p. 3. [13] "Veritas," _Did Jesus Christ teach Socialism?_ p. 1. [14] Macdonald, _Socialism_, p. 3. [15] _Labour Record_, February 1907. [16] Webb, _The Difficulties of Individualism_, p. 15. [17] _Will Socialism benefit the British People?_ p. 4. [18] Ball, _The Moral Aspects of Socialism_, p. 3. [19] Williams, _The Difficulties of Socialism_, p. 3. [20] Bebel, _Woman_, p. 257. [21] Sorge, _Socialism and the Worker_, p. 13. [22] _Ibid._ p. 16. [23] Bax, _Religion of Socialism_, p. ix. [24] Lafargue, in Bliss, _Encyclopedia of Social Reform_, p. 1264. [25] Macdonald, _Labour and the Empire_, p. 108. [26] Blatchford, _What is this Socialism?_ p. 2. [27] _Justice_, October 19, 1907. [28] Keir Hardie, _From Serfdom to Socialism_, p. 96. [29] Ethel Snowden, _The Woman Socialist_, p. 44. [30] Gronlund, _Co-operative Commonwealth_, p. 126. [31] Guyot, _Pretensions of Socialism_, p. 11. [32] Hird, _From Brute to Brother_, p. 1. [33] Robert Blatchford, _Real Socialism_, p. 15. [34] Williams, _Difficulties of Socialism_, p. 4. [35] Bliss, _Encyclopedia of Social Reform_, p. 1265. CHAPTER II SOME SOCIALIST VIEWS OF PRESENT SOCIETY AND OF THE SOCIETY OF THE FUTURE "We are not indebted to reason," wrote the greatest American Socialist, "for the landmarks of human progress, for the introduction of Christianity, the institution of the monastic orders, the Crusades, the Reformation, the American Revolution, or the abolition of slavery. Man is only irresistible when he acts from passion. The masses of men are never moved except by passions, feelings, interests."[36] "Socialism has the advantage of appealing to the interests as well as to the enthusiasm of all except the few who think the world good enough as it is.... It is, of course, to the discontented wage-workers that the Socialist can appeal with the greatest chance of success."[37] These indiscreet words, which might have been written by the most implacable of Anti-Socialists, sum up and explain the Socialistic agitation and tactics. They are a proclamation and an avowal, and the worst enemy of Socialism would have found it difficult to pen a more damaging statement. Socialists rely not on reason or justice, but on unreason and passion, for the victory of their cause; and that fact is very much to be regretted, for it is bound to create prejudice and suspicion, and to greatly weaken their case. The British Socialists, seeking to rouse the passions of men, habitually rely on exaggeration and misrepresentation. They do not tire of painting the present state of society in the darkest colours and of describing with an unbounded but hardly justifiable optimism and enthusiasm the advantages which will accrue to society when Socialism has come to rule. It will be seen that in describing society of the present and society of the future, Socialists let their imagination run riot in the most astounding fashion. To the Socialist modern civilisation is worse than a failure. "Our civilisation seems all so savage and bestial and filthy and inartistic; all so cowardly and devilish and despicable. We fight by cheatery and underselling, and adulteration and bribery, and unmanly smirking for our bone of a livelihood; all scrambling and biting round the platter when there is abundance for all, if we were orderly and courteous and gentlemanly; all crushing the weaker; all struggling to the platter-side for the privilege of wearing tall hats and of giving good advice to the poor dogs outside. We, the well-fed, shout lordily to the hungry and cheer them with legends to the effect that though the poor are juggled out of earth, they may be masters in Heaven. Our civilisation is barbarous."[38] Where'er we go, to east or west North or south, 'tis all the same; Civilisation at it's best Is savagery's newer name. For we see on every hand 'Midst the whirr and noise of trade The toilers, crushed and trampled, and Into beasts of burden made.[39] "The one reality of the nineteenth century is the scramble for wealth; politics, literature, science, religion, art, are, apart from money-getting, mere lifeless wraiths."[40] Government in general, and British Government in particular, is vicious, tyrannous, and neglectful, and deserves the utmost contempt. "National Government is devised for other objects than the adjustment of essential, economic, and hygienic arrangements for the redemption of human life; to use it for such a purpose is gross tyranny and a deadly blow at the very foundations of morality and religion! Governments exist for quite other purposes than this--to pay a million pounds yearly to one family and its immediate parasites, to supply power of life and death over the people to the exploiting class and fat places to their satellites and creatures, to squander hundreds of millions on gunpowder and armaments, to use the whole socialised power of the nation to overawe, exploit, rob, and ruin the so-called lower races--all these are the proper objects of government according to our orthodox wiseacres, but to use the same obvious instrument adequately to protect human life at home, and that life, to quote Mr. Burns, 'the weakest, the smallest, and the dearest to us all,' is to undermine the foundations of British manliness and to poison the fountain of British liberty and greatness. Such is the curious _mélange_ of selfishness, hypocrisy, prejudice, ignorance, and incoherence which passes muster for argument amongst our anti-Socialist opponents."[41] British social legislation has been a failure. Never was the lot of the workers worse than it is now. "Your legislation for the past hundred years is a perpetual and fruitless effort to regulate the disorders of your economic system. Your poor, your drunken, your incompetent, your sick, your aged, ride you like a nightmare. You have dissolved all human and personal ties. The salient characteristic of your civilisation is its irresponsibility. The making of dividends is the universal preoccupation; the well-being of the labourer is no one's concern. You depend on variations of supply and demand which you can neither determine nor anticipate. The failure of a harvest, the modification of a tariff in some remote country dislocates the industry of millions, thousands of miles away. You are at the mercy of a prospector's luck, an inventor's genius, a woman's caprice--nay, you are at the mercy of your own instruments. Your capital is alive and cries for food."[42] Virtue has disappeared, religion is a fraud, clergy and priesthood are mercenary, cowardly, and interested time-servers. "The priests and the parsons are salary-slaves as much as the workers are wage-slaves. The majority of them dare not preach the Gospel of Humanity, Justice, and Socialism from their pulpits owing to their fear of their paymasters. Religion is divorced from business, politics, the administration of public authorities, the treatment of the aged worker, and written across the actions of the professing Christians is 'Self-interest; every man for himself and the Workhouse take the hindmost.'"[43] Life is hell, and only Socialism can regenerate the world. Things are all wrong, and we must put them right So say all Socialists, and truly too. Man does not get the chance here to subdue The brute in self; and hence the fearful blight Which makes one sicken at the dreadful sight Of all society in one hell stew.[44] Apparently all British workers spend their lives in terrible misery and constant privation. Hunger and despair are their constant companions, and they will see in Socialism their only salvation even if Socialism should destroy individual liberty, for to them individual liberty is a word without meaning. One of the most prominent British Socialists, Mr. Philip Snowden, M.P., in a pamphlet addressed to working men, writes: "Let those who fear that Socialism will destroy individual liberty and hinder intellectual development go with their talk to the machine-workers of our great northern towns, who are chained for eleven hours a day to a monotonous toil, with the eye of the overseer and the fear of dismissal spurring them on to an exertion which leaves them at the end of their day's work physical wrecks, with no ambition but to restore their wasted energies at the nearest public-house. Let them go with their talk of the blessings of civilisation to the pottery and chemical workers, whose systems are poisoned, whose sight is destroyed, where, through the bodies of the parents being saturated with poison, half the children are born dead, and of the rest not one in four lives to be five--tell them to hold fast to their share of the blessings of our glorious civilisation. Or go to the sweaters' victims, living, eating, working, dying in one room, for which a vampire landlord will take in rent one-half of all the family can earn by working day and night--talk to them of individual liberty and warn them of the tyranny of the coming Socialism. Or go on a bitterly cold winter morning to the dock gates of one of our great ports and see thousands of men waiting in the hope of a day's job, and watch how a few here and there of the strongest are selected, and the rest left to another day of hunger and despair; or, wait still, and see how a few remain behind in the hope that their mate may meet with an accident and 'they can snatch at the work he had.' Why, to talk of individual freedom and equality of opportunity under a system of cannibalistic competition like this is like the mocking laughter of a raving maniac gloating over the torture of the victim it holds in its murderous grip."[45] In another popular pamphlet the worker is told: "After all, John, does it not strike you that there is some foul iniquity in a system which allows one part of the community to do another portion of it to death and to rob and enslave those it is pleased to let live? Do you not see that those your capitalists find it convenient and profitable to employ may live; and that those they do not choose to employ must die? Do you not see that these are hurried and driven hither and thither in haggard, destitute misery; are thrust into festering heaps in your foul slums; into your gaols, and penitentiaries, and workhouses; that they wander in hopeless misery, hungering within sight of food, penniless amid plenty, enforcedly idle, and work to which they can have no access lying upon every hand of them, as though the world were under an enchantment and God were dead!"[46] The British working man, as he is generally known, is a manly and very independent personage. As a rule his master is more afraid of him than he is of his master. Yet, according to the picture drawn of him by the Socialists, he is a timorous, cowardly, whining, pitiful creature who has to cringe to his tyrannic employers: See the toiler, how he slaves For a trifle of his toil. How disease and death he braves, Yet the masters take the spoil; And how often, cap in hand, Trembling, pleading piteously, He is forced to take his stand In the mart of slavery. Oh! ye tyrants of the earth, Who make others' ruin your trade, 'Midst licentious love and mirth Fashion, pomp, and church parade. Do you never think, oh, tell Of the hideous crime and shame That has made this earth a hell Of commercial fraud and shame?[47] During the week the British workers work at most five and a half days out of seven, and as a rule they work during from eight to ten hours a day. Generally speaking, the pace at which British workmen work is not forced. Except in a few special industries overwork among the working men is practically unknown. Besides, the pace at which work is performed is as a rule determined not by the employer, but by the employees. Nevertheless we read, "It is monstrous that, while some half million of men are vainly seeking employment, millions of their fellows should have no respite from arduous ill-requited toil and should be hastening to a premature death through overwork."[48] In prose and verse the British workers are constantly told that they are slaves[49] who are driven into starvation and suicide: Let them brag until in the face they are black That over oceans they hold their sway, Of the flag of Old England, the Union Jack, About which I have something to say. 'Tis said that it floats o'er the free; but it waves Over thousands of hard-worked, ill-paid British slaves, Who are driven to pauper and suicide graves-- The starving poor of Old England. _Chorus._ 'Tis the poor, the poor the taxes have to pay, The poor who are starving every day, Who faint and die on the King's highway-- The starving poor of Old England. There's the slaves of the needle and the slaves of the mine, The postmen, and the sons of the plough, And the hard-worked servants on the railway line, Who get little by the sweat of their brow. 'Tis said that the labourer is worthy of his hire; But of whom does he get it? we'd like to enquire. Not of any mill-owner, or farmer, or squire, Who grind down the poor of Old England.[50] Now let us cast a glance at the Socialist picture of the society of the future under Socialistic rule. The first thing which Socialism would do would be to organise work, for "practical Socialism is a kind of national scheme of co-operation, managed by the State."[51] There would be no more employers, for "under Socialism all the work of the nation would be managed by the nation for the nation,"[52] and all would have plenty to eat, because "Socialism would leave no man to starve."[53] "All the work of the nation would be organised--that is to say, it would be ordered or arranged so that no one need be out of work, and so that no useless work need be done, and so that no work need be done twice where once would serve."[54] It is expected that the national organisation and administration of all the industries would prove more efficient than private enterprise. We are assured that "under Socialism the efficiency of production developed by Capitalism will not only be preserved but improved. Mechanical invention will be encouraged and utilised to the utmost."[55] Compulsory labour, State regulation of work, and increased production would lead to increased consumption and increased comfort. "Who would deny that, if it is everybody's duty to work, if the production of unnecessary--nay, even of injurious--articles is abolished, if production is organised in conformity with the real wants and pleasures of mankind--who would deny, I ask, that the standard of life of the whole human race might be raised infinitely above its present grade?"[56] Although Socialism would make work compulsory to all, and place every man, woman, and child under the direction of the great Socialist organisation with its army of officials, and although it would destroy individual liberty as at present understood, by placing the daily life of every citizen under Government regulations and restrictions, it would bring with it a greater liberty. Unfortunately the Socialists fail to say what that liberty consists in, and we must take their assurances in lieu of details. "Those who fear that Socialism will destroy individual liberty fail to distinguish between liberty and licence. Individualism is licence--it is the freedom of the individual to do as he likes without regard to the effect of his action on others, or even without regard to his own best welfare. Socialism is liberty; for it will restrict the freedom of the individual to inflict injury upon others or to do what is morally injurious to himself."[57] Socialism will release the British slaves out of their slavery, and restore them to everlasting freedom. "Such Socialism as we champion means for all future generations not slavery, but full and never-ending freedom."[58] "Socialism declares it to be the duty of man to remove all artificial barriers to the improvement of circumstances, in order that humanity, as a whole, may have freedom and all possible assistance to attain to its full stature, physically, mentally, and spiritually."[59] With the introduction of the Socialist _régime_ the earth would, as by a magician's wand, be transformed into a paradise. Over-population, bad harvests, the maladjustment of international demand and supply, and individual folly, laziness, wastefulness, improvidence, and passion would apparently no longer have the same unfortunate consequences which they have now. "The struggle for individual existence disappears...."[60] "The words 'poor' and 'charity' will be expunged from the dictionary as relics of a barbarous past."[61] "There would be no starvation, there would be no pauperism, there would be no sweaters; there would be no barefooted children in the streets; there would be no fraudulent trustees, no bankrupts; there would be no slums, no annual massacre of innocents by preventable disease; there would be hardly such a thing known as ignorance, there would be scarcely any drunkenness, and crime would shrink to microscopic dimensions."[62] "Practical Socialism would educate the people. It would provide cheap and pure food. It would extend and elevate the means of study and amusement. It would foster literature and science and art. It would encourage and reward genius and industry. It would abolish sweating and jerry-work. It would demolish the slums and erect good and handsome dwellings. It would compel all men to do some kind of useful work. It would recreate and nourish the craftsman's pride in his craft. It would protect women and children. It would raise the standard of health and morality; and it would take the sting out of pauperism by paying pensions to honest workers no longer able to work."[63] "There is something in Socialism to kill ignorance and to destroy vice. There is something in it to shut up the gaols, to do away with prostitution, to reduce crime and drunkenness, and wipe out for ever the sweater and the slums, the beggars and the idle rich, the useless fine ladies and lords, and to make it possible for sober and willing workers to live healthy, and happy, and honourable lives."[64] The Socialist Government would apparently be all-powerful and all-wise. At any rate, it would improve the character of the people. "Socialism would teach and train all children wisely; it would foster genius and devotion to the common good; it would kill scamping, and loafing, and jerrymandering; it would give us better health, better homes, better work, better food, better lives, and better men and women."[65] When Socialism is introduced and private capital abolished, the golden age of the world will begin: When all mankind are workers, And no drones in the hive; Oh, what a happy, glorious time They'll have who are alive. This world will be a garden, An Eden full of bliss; Oh, brother--sister--won't you strive For such a state as this? There will be no starving children, no; Nor tramps, nor beggars then; No workhouses, nor prisons, and No slums, nor sweater's den. The land-grabber and the vampire, And the fleecer of our toil, Will all have ceased to crush us In their vile rush for the spoil.[66] So far we have looked chiefly at the economic consequences which the introduction of Socialism is going to bring about. However, according to the Socialists, it is not true that "Socialism is merely sordid and material, and has no regard for the more ideal side of human interests. The Socialist recognises, far more than others, the higher ideals of human life as being its true end."[67] Therefore "Socialism seeks to improve the physical, mental, and spiritual environment of every man, woman, and child, so that all mankind may be purer, healthier, happier, stronger, nobler, and that each generation may be nearer perfection than the one immediately preceding."[68] In other words, "the creation of a higher type of mankind than the modern man will be the result of Socialism. Men will have no need to think, day in, day out, where to get the bread for to-morrow."[69] "Material conditions form the fundamental basis of human existence. When these become common property, free to all and abundant for all, they will cease to have that importance they now possess. The sordid struggle for mere material things will disappear; free play will be given to man's higher faculties, and the struggle, competition, or emulation between man and man will be for the realisation of his highest conceivable aspirations."[70] According to many Socialists, money and wages would disappear. Food, clothing, lodging, &c., would be given gratis to the citizens. "Under ideal Socialism there would be no money at all and no wages. The industry of the country would be organised and managed by the State, much as the Post Office now is; goods of all kinds would be produced and distributed for use, and not for sale, in such quantities as were needed; hours of labour would be fixed, and every citizen would take what he or she desired from the common stock. Food, clothing, lodging, fuel, transit, amusements, and all other things would be absolutely free, and the only difference between a prime minister and a collier would be the difference of rank and occupation."[71] Not only food, clothing, and shelter would be supplied gratis by a bountiful State to the people. In order to banish _ennui_ from among the workers, entertainments and amusements also would be provided, free of charge. Gratis travel on the railways would make life a permanent holiday, and the last cause of dissatisfaction would be removed by transferring the surroundings of the gratuitously maintained and amused people into a garden of Eden. "I would have the towns rebuilt with wide streets, with detached houses, with gardens and fountains and avenues of trees. I would make the railways, the carriage of letters, and the transit of goods as free as the roads and bridges. I would make the houses loftier and larger, and clear them of all useless furniture. I would institute public dining-halls, public baths, public washhouses on the best plans, and so set free the hands of those slaves--our English women. I would have public parks, public theatres, music-halls, gymnasiums, football and cricket fields, public halls and public gardens for recreation and music and refreshment. I would have all our children fed and clothed and educated at the cost of the State. I would have them all taught to play and to sing. I would have them all trained to athletics and to arms. I would have public halls of science. I would have the people become their own artists, actors, musicians, soldiers, and police. Then, by degrees, I would make all these things free."[72] In the words of the Socialist poet-- We'll grow up true men and women And enjoy life from our birth.[73] Men, being no longer compelled to work hard for a living, will lose the desire for wealth and all that wealth supplies and will devote themselves more and more to the culture of their mind. "Under Socialism the possession of riches will cease to be a ruling passion, for honest labour will be a guarantee against want, and riches will no longer be the passport to social position. Under such conditions the possession of riches will be a superfluous burden which no sane man will wish to bear."[74] "When land and capital are the common property of all the people, class distinctions, as we know them at present, will no longer exist. The Mind will then be the standard by which a man's place among his fellows will be determined."[75] Hence "Socialism means the elevation of the struggle for existence from the material to the intellectual plane. Socialism will raise the struggle for existence into a sphere where competition shall be emulation, where the treasures are boundless and eternal, and where the abundant wealth of one does not cause the poverty of another."[76] The poet has described in a vision this phase of the golden age of Socialism as follows: A strain of distant music Floats on the gentle breeze, Its captivating sweetness Bends e'en the proudest knees; Now soft as angel whispers, Then, loud as trumpet's blast It sounds the knell of sorrows And pains for ever past. Now sweeter and more varied, The music doth appear; Ten thousand harps �olian Seem to be drawing near. Ten thousand angels' voices Are mingled with the strain, Chanting the song of Freedom-- Justice has come to reign; Telling of bounteous harvests, Of waving golden corn, Waiting the reaper's sickle, And asking to be shorn; Lands rich with milk and honey Promised in days of yore; Asking all those that hunger To eat and faint no more. The song grows loud and mighty As thunder in the storm, The tyrant quakes and trembles, And hides his guilty form; And stronger and still stronger The joyous chorus grows-- Rejoice! all ye that labour, Ye triumph o'er your foes.[77] "Socialism, being at the same time the sublimest science, art, and religion, will naturally elevate man. The British people will become a nation of scientists and philosophers who, throwing natural enjoyments aside, will lead a life of pure intellectual happiness. Mortal men will become demi-gods. Socialism will justify God's way to man."[78] "Socialism comes as the Angel of Light bearing to mankind this message of truth. Socialism, equipped with all the learning of the ages, takes up the ripest teaching of the poet, the philosopher, the economist, the scientist, the historian, and joins the conclusion of each together into one harmonious whole. Now we know that suffering, misery, and poverty are a violation of God's will. Now we know that the fulness of time has come for us to cast the last relic of our fallen nature from us and to follow the beckoning angel who is waiting to lead us back through the gates of Paradise into an Eden of intellectual joys."[79] These things shall be! a loftier race Than e'er the world hath known shall rise With flame of freedom in their souls, And light of science in their eyes. They shall be gentle, brave, and strong, To spill no drop of blood, but dare All that may plant man's lordship firm On earth, and fire, and sea, and air. Nation with nation, land with land, Unarmed shall live as comrades free; In every heart and brain shall throb The pulse of one fraternity. New arts shall bloom of loftier mould, And mightier music thrill the skies, And every life shall be a song When all the earth is paradise. These things--they are no dreams--shall be For happier men when we are gone. These golden days for them shall dawn, Transcending aught we gaze upon.[80] All men will be brothers. The difference among nations and races will disappear by the rule of love and justice. "Justice is to be the foundation on which we must build: not the kind of justice we have hitherto considered as sufficient for us, and which many countries pride themselves is their watchword and standard, but a justice that demands freedom for all."[81] Equal rights it gives, my brothers, To the eagle and the dove; Right to air, and light, and knowledge, Right to rise your toil above-- Hearken! hearken! O, my brothers, For this new great Right is Love.[82] Wars will be abolished. There's a good time coming, boys, A good time coming; The pen shall supersede the sword, And right, not might, shall be the lord In the good time coming. Worth, not birth, shall rule mankind, And be acknowledged stronger; The proper impulse has been giv'n-- Wait a little longer.[83] Being a religion of peace and love, and preaching the brotherhood of man, Socialism will conquer the world. "Socialism with its promise of freedom, its larger hope for humanity, its triumph of peace over war, its binding of the races of the earth into one all-embracing brotherhood, must prevail."[84] "We mean the establishment of a political power which shall have for its conscious and definite aim the common ownership and control of the _whole_ of the world's industry, exchange, &c."[85] According to many Socialists, Socialism is not an original religion, but it is the most sublime form of Christianity. "Socialism is in accordance with the revealed will of God."[86] "Karl Marx was an utter pagan, but there is not an essential proposition in 'Das Kapital' that Jesus of Nazareth did not inculcate. Is it a question of rent? You are as much entitled to immunity from it as the birds of the air, or the grass of the fields. Is it a question of usury or interest? Lend, hoping for nothing again. Is it a question of profit or inequitable exchange? Do unto others as ye would that they should do unto you."[87] "Did Jesus Christ teach Socialism? Unless we are prepared to deny the truth of the Gospel, there can be but one answer--Yes. And Socialism naturally evolves from Christianity."[88] Socialism will mean the establishment of the rule of Christ upon earth. "The political democracy, dominated by the social ideal, will be the coming of Christ to rule the nations in righteousness."[89] The Socialist leaders see visions. "I do sometimes dream dreams, and I see a vision of what the world will be when this spirit of love and sacrifice which has actuated some noble spirits in all ages and which shone with the glory of full perfection in the life and example of Jesus of Nazareth--I sometimes see, as through a glass darkly, a vision of what the world will be when this spirit of love and sacrifice shall animate all men. I see our modern towns swept away, and in their place beautiful cities whose buildings reflect the pride of the community in their common life, and whose healthy homes show the value society attaches to the individual life. I see everywhere a change come over the face of the landscape; every meadow smiles with plenty, every valley blossoms as the rose, every hill is green with the glory of Lebanon. I see a revived art and a revived literature. I see a people healthy, happy, cultured, contented, whose wealth is life, full and free, 'whose ways are ways of pleasantness, whose flowery paths are paths of peace.' And my vision extends, though more dimly, beyond the confines of my own dear land, and I see this spirit of brotherhood among the nations has broken down international barriers, and international hatred is no more. The sword is beaten into a ploughshare, the spear into a pruning-hook, and the peoples of all lands are one, each freely sharing of its special bounties to add to the comforts of all."[90] The new Christian religion, like the old one, demands its saints and its martyrs, if not the reincarnation of Christ. "The only way to regain the earthly paradise is by the old, hard road to Calvary--through persecution, through poverty, through temptation, by the agony and bloody sweat, by the crown of thorns, by the agonising death, and then the resurrection to the New Humanity--purified by suffering, triumphant through Sacrifice."[91] The new Christ also has his forerunner and herald. "Mr. Keir Hardie, M.P., the leader of the Labour Party, resembles John the Baptist,"[92] and the Socialist leaders will do even greater things than did Christ. We are told: "When Christ told His disciples that it was possible for them to do greater things than they had seen Him do they must have been fairly staggered. Just think for a moment of the nature of the works He had done, most of them in their very presence. Those who are striving to obtain a better social order and provide a fairer distribution of the good gifts of God among the sons of men, these men I say, in so far as their efforts are successful, are doing greater things than Christ did when He performed the miracle of feeding the hungry."[93] "Man is only irresistible when he acts from passion. The masses of men are never moved except by passions feelings, interests. It is of course to the discontented wage-earners that the Socialist can appeal with the greatest chance of success."[94] All Socialists agree in depicting to the workers life in present society as hell incarnate and in giving a picture of life in the Socialist State of the future which resembles the descriptions found in the "Arabian Nights" tales. They only disagree in this: that some promise him heaven, whilst those possessed of less enthusiasm promise him only an earthly paradise. FOOTNOTES: [36] Gronlund, _The Co-operative Commonwealth_, p. 187. [37] _Ibid._ p. 184. [38] _Forward_, October 12, 1907. [39] Neil, _Songs of the Social Revolution_, p. 22. [40] Bax, _Outlooks from the New Standpoint_, p. 140. [41] Fisher, _The Babies' Tribute_, p. 6. [42] Glyde, _The Misfortune of being a Working Man_, p. 1. [43] _Ibid._ p. 7. [44] Neil, _Songs of the Social Revolution_, p. 1. [45] Snowden, _The Individual under Socialism_, pp. 4-5. [46] Washington, _A Corner in Flesh and Blood_, p. 15. [47] _Social-Democratic Federation Song Book_, p. 29. [48] Quelch, _The Social-Democratic Federation_, p. 7. [49] Sidney Webb, _The Difficulties of Individualism_, p. 18. [50] _Social-Democratic Federation Song Book_, p. 32. [51] Blatchford, _Merrie England_, p. 100. [52] Blatchford, _What is this Socialism?_ p. 7. [53] Blatchford, _Britain for the British_, p. 96. [54] Blatchford, _What is this Socialism?_ pp. 5, 6. [55] Macdonald, _Socialism_, p. 74. [56] Sorge, _Socialism and the Worker_, p. 13. [57] Snowden, _The Individual under Socialism_, pp. 12, 13. [58] Hyndman, _Socialism and Slavery_, p. 13. [59] "Veritas," _Did Jesus Christ teach Socialism?_ p. 1. [60] Engels, _Socialism: Utopian and Scientific_, p. 81. [61] Davidson, _The Old Order and the New_, p. 170. [62] Blatchford, _The Pope's Socialism_, p. 16. [63] Blatchford, _Merrie England_, p. 102. [64] Blatchford, _Britain for the British_, p. 89. [65] _Ibid._ p. 89. [66] Neil, _Songs of the Social Revolution_, p. 8. [67] Bax and Quelch, _A New Catechism of Socialism_, p. 43. [68] "Veritas," _Did Jesus Christ teach Socialism?_ p. 1. [69] Kautsky, _The Social Revolution_, p. 43. [70] Bax and Quelch, _A New Catechism of Socialism_, p. 44. [71] Blatchford, _Merrie England_, p. 103. [72] _Ibid._ pp. 43, 44. [73] Neil, _Songs of the Social Revolution_, p. 8. [74] Snowden, _The Individual under Socialism_, p. 9. [75] Keir Hardie, _From Serfdom to Socialism_, p. 24. [76] Snowden, _The Individual under Socialism_, p. 8. [77] _Clarion Song Book_, p. 18. [78] Snowden, _The Individual under Socialism_, p. 8. [79] Snowden, _The Individual under Socialism_, p. 9. [80] _Clarion Song Book_, p. 14. [81] Ford, _Women and Socialism_, p. 2. [82] _Clarion Song Book_, p. 31. [83] _Ibid._ p. 25. [84] Keir Hardie, _From Serfdom to Socialism_, p. 104. [85] Bax and Quelch, _A New Catechism of Socialism_, p. 9. [86] "Veritas," _Did Jesus Christ teach Socialism?_ p. 15. [87] Davidson, _The Gospel of the Poor_, p. 153. [88] "Veritas," _Did Jesus Christ teach Socialism?_ p. 16. [89] Snowden, _The Christ that is to be_, p. 13. [90] Snowden, _The Christ that is to be_, pp. 13, 14. [91] _Ibid._ p. 14. [92] "Veritas," _Did Jesus Christ teach Socialism?_ p. 4. [93] Ward, _Prevention is Better than Cure_, pp. 2, 5, and 6. [94] Gronlund, _The Co-operative Commonwealth_, p. 184. CHAPTER III THE GRIEVANCES OF THE SOCIALISTS "Socialism is not only a theory of another and better system of society: it is an indictment of the existing order."[95] The Socialist conception of society as at present constituted, given in the preceding chapter, will have prepared the reader to some extent for the Socialist grievances. These grievances are three in number, and may be summed up as follows: (1) The workers are for all practical purposes slaves who are kept in chains and forced to work by the capitalist class. (2) The rich men cause the poverty of the poor by defrauding them of the largest part of their wages. (3) The workers receive only from one third to one fourth of the wage which is their rightful due. Let us look into these grievances. According to the Socialist leaders, the workers-- Helots in hunger nursed Slaves of their reign accursed[96]-- keep the rich in affluence. Nevertheless they themselves are kept in poverty, degradation, and slavery by the capitalists whom they nourish by their labour. "The landlord owns the raw material and can live in idleness. The capitalist owns the machinery and can live in idleness. The worker has nothing, except his ability to work, and he cannot work without the consent of the landlord and the capitalist. Therefore, he is virtually a slave. He cannot control his own life."[97] As a matter of fact the position of the worker is worse than was that of the slave. "It did not always pay to starve a slave, because if he died you might have to buy another one. Therefore the lot of the slave under a good master was in many respects better than that of the proletariat in our great cities."[98] "Poverty rather than property is the reward of labour to-day."[99] "Poverty is our reward for creating plenty, and the class that lives in luxury by exploiting our labour contemptuously informs us that the law of supply and demand condemns us to suffer the most hideous privation whenever our excessive industry has created a glut of all the things that satisfy human needs."[100] The workers are unfree, being enslaved by the capitalists. It is true that they possess freedom of contract, but freedom of contract, like individual liberty, is an illusion, because the workers, being penniless, are compelled to accept whatever work is obtainable, and to be satisfied with whatever wages are offered. "The right to sell in the markets is now well established, but the chief difficulty with the majority of workers lies in the fact that they have nothing but their labour to sell, and a market is not easy to find even for that."[101] Although co-operation has made millions of workers in Germany, France, Belgium, and other countries prosperous and independent, independence is, according to the Socialists, for some unspecified reason, unobtainable for the workers of Great Britain, and co-operation is a failure. "The chance of the great bulk of the labourers ever coming to work upon their own land and capital in associations for co-operative production, has become even less hopeful than it ever was."[102] "Everywhere the workman is coming to understand that it is practically hopeless for him, either individually or co-operatively, to own the constantly growing mass of capital by the use of which he lives."[103] The advent of the great industry has not benefited but harmed him. "The supersession of the small by the great industry has given the main fruits of invention and the new power over Nature to a comparatively small proprietary class, upon whom the mass of the people are dependent for leave to earn their living."[104] "The worker is now a mere item in a vast industrial army over the organisation and direction of which he has no control. He is free, but free only to choose to which master he will sell his labour--free only to decide from which proprietor he will beg that access to the new instruments of production without which he cannot exist."[105] As the capitalist class owns the factories, workshops, &c., the worker has become to that class a slave in the full and generally accepted meaning of the word. "The effect of private property in land and capital is in all essential respects the same as was the effect of private property in human beings. In each case slavery is the result. The form may have changed, but the substance remains."[106] "The labourer to-day is a slave, and labour has become a mark of bondage."[107] Except for a slight difference in outward form, the British wage-slaves are no better off than were the black slaves on the sugar plantations in the past. "Much as the 'free-born Briton' may dislike to hear the painful truth recited, it is a fact, not to be controverted, that four-fifths of our total population are bound as completely and as miserably as ever was a black African slave to a Western planter. There is no real freedom which is not economic freedom. He is a slave who depends for his bread upon the will or the whim of a man like himself, or of a number of such masters."[108] In other words, capitalism and slave-owning are for all practical purposes synonymous words, as may be seen from the Socialist Catechism: "Q. What constitutes the chief difference between capitalism and slave-owning? A. The fact that the capitalist goes through the form of bargaining with the labourer as to the amount of the portion of the produce that shall be returned to him.--Q. What is this farce called? A. Freedom of contract.--Q. In what sense is it free? A. In this sense--that the labourer is free to take what is offered or nothing.--Q. Has he anything to fall back upon? A. He has absolutely nothing in countries where the tyranny of capitalism is untempered by any form of Socialism."[109] To those working men who might object that it is a gross exaggeration to say that the British worker is a slave, and that he is penniless, the Socialist agitator answers: "What? You are a free man and not a slave? There are no slaves in this country? What is a slave? One who works at the bidding of another, and only by permission of another, and for the profit of that other. Does not that fit your case exactly? Do you work when you like and idle when you like? Not you! You work when the capitalist requires your labour, when your services will be useful in making a profit for him. When that is not the case you can starve in the gutter, although there may be all the necessaries of life in profusion around you. These things do not belong to you, although you and your class have made them; they are so much wealth which your masters have acquired from your unpaid labour, things which you have produced, but for which you have never been paid, out of which you have been swindled by the natural operation of the system of wage-slavery of which you are the unconscious victim. From this condition of things there is no escape while the whole of the people do not own the means of production. Nothing but the abolition of the class ownership of the means of life, and the substitution of ownership of the whole people, will abolish this form of slavery."[110] The foregoing grievance is absurd. If regular work for a regular wage, agreed upon by contract, is slavery, then all salaried men from the Prime Minister and the Lord Chancellor downward are also "wage-slaves." The Socialist agitator, after having told the working men that they are no better off than negro slaves, then asks his hearers, as a rule: "Why is it that the producers in this country are the poorest of the population? Why is it that those who do not produce are the richest?"[111] The manner in which this question is put suggests the reply. Indeed, all Socialists agree in holding the rich responsible for the poverty of the poor, as the following utterances will show: "Socialism contends that the poverty of the poor is caused by robbery on the part of the rich. The mansion explains the hovel. Belgravia has its counterpart in Shoreditch. The factory, the foundry, the ship-building yard account for the shooting lodge, the yacht, and the tours in foreign lands. The long day's toil of one class renders possible the life-long play of the other."[112] "If you have no unemployed at the top of the social ladder you will have none at the bottom."[113] "The riches of the rich class are the cause of the poverty of the masses."[114] "You make the automobile, he rides in it. If it were not for you, he would walk; and if it were not for him, you would ride."[115] "Colossal poverty is the foundation of colossal wealth; he who would eliminate the poverty of the masses assails the wealth of the few."[116] The foregoing arguments, or rather assertions, may sound very convincing and may be exceedingly useful for propaganda purposes, but they are disproved by facts. If the existence of the rich were the cause of the poverty of the masses, the workers in countries which possess few rich capitalists, such as Ireland, Spain, Italy, Servia, and Bulgaria, should be exceedingly well off; the workers in the countries where the richest millionaires live, such as the United States, should be the poorest. In reality, the American workmen are the most prosperous, whilst the workers in Ireland and other millionaire-less countries are the poorest. Rich men are not the consumers, but merely the trustees and managers, of the national wealth which is invested chiefly in reproductive undertakings--mills, railways, mines, &c.--which supply comforts and conveniences to all. The capitalists, the employers, British Socialists say, have become rich by defrauding the worker of his wages. The worker must starve so that a few rich people may live in luxury, and things will become better for the worker only when there are no more rich men. "The gains of the capitalist are simply the losses of labour! The partly or wholly unearned incomes of the rich consist of the unpaid, withheld wages of the industrious poor."[117] "Only by living off another man's labour and denying another man the fruits of his toil can riches be acquired. Riches are directly responsible for poverty, and the art of being rich is the art of keeping one's neighbour poor. When there are no rich there will be no poor. To the wealth of the few, acquired at the expense of the many, and not to drink or want of thrift, are all the evils of our social life to be ascribed."[118] "Production is carried on to-day purely in the interest and for the profit of the class which owns the instruments of production."[119] There are ninety-and-nine who live and die In want and hunger and cold, That one may revel in luxury, And be wrapped in its silken fold; The ninety-and-nine in their hovels bare, The one in a palace with riches rare.[120] Ye poor of wealthy England, Who starve and sweat and freeze By labour sore to fill the store Of those who live at ease; 'Tis time to know your real friends, To face your real foe, And to fight for your right Till ye lay your masters low; Small hope for you of better days Till ye lay your masters low.[121] The working men are, according to the Socialist agitators, "excluded" from property by the capitalist class which owns all the land, factories, machinery, &c. The capitalist class has thus reserved for itself a monopoly of all the instruments of production. Consequently, "the only means by which the excluded class can live is by working for the capitalist class--by getting some one or other of the capitalist class to allow them access to the tools and materials in his possession, and pay them wages in return for their labour."[122] However, the capitalists do not grant to the workers access to the instruments of production free of charge. They exact a toll from them, and employ them only if, by so doing, they can secure a profit for themselves. In the fact that an employer will engage workmen only if he can make a profit by their labour, the Socialists see a cruel injustice. "Your capitalist class draw upon this excluded horde of landless, toolless, foodless lack-alls, and do actually find work for as many as they can employ at a profit to themselves. This excluded class have no rights--not even the elementary right to exist. What God meant by creating them when He knew, or might have known, that everything belonged to the capitalists, nobody can understand."[123] "The whole of our industrial system is founded on a principle existing nowhere else in Nature, the principle of production and distribution for profit. If no employer can make a profit out of the worker's labour he is cast into the unemployed army."[124] "Seven out of every eight persons in your community, 37,500,000 of the men, and women, and children who form your nation, can lay no claim to any right to exist--exist only on sufferance. If one or other of the irresponsible persons who own the country can be induced to allow them to earn their bread, well and good; if not, they must die. At the present moment there are 700,000 persons shut out in this manner from any chance of obtaining food to eat. You call it being 'out of work,' and can see the spectral army, 700,000 strong, hungry and in want. They are not kept idle and hungry because there is no 'work.' The earth is there with all its boundless store that their 'work' would turn into wealth if they could but get at it. They are kept idle because those who own the country cannot find them employment at a profit to themselves, because the blind, fatuous insanity of your 'system of trade' makes no provision even for keeping its slaves in work."[125] According to the Socialists, the employer of labour has no right to work at a profit, and the capitalist has no right to demand rent or interest. "The great central truth of Socialistic economy, ever to be kept in mind, is Adam Smith's definition of wages: 'The produce of labour is the natural recompense or wages of labour.' From this 'natural recompense' rent and profit are, in Socialist eyes, unnatural, illegitimate abstractions, to be recovered and added to wages as speedily as possible."[126] "Profit is the result of unpaid labour; it is the produce of the working man, for which the latter receives no equivalent. If he received his proper and just share, if the capitalist could not deprive him of this, then the capitalist could make no profit."[127] Not only are "rent" and "profit" illegitimate abstractions, but they are downright theft. Every landowner, every banker, every manufacturer, every shopkeeper is a thief. All business for profit is swindling. "Land-rent and capital-rent are thefts from the produce of labour."[128] "The manufacturer aims primarily at producing, by means of the labour he has stolen from others, not goods, but profits."[129] "What is successful business but cheating? What is the whole basis of capitalist industry but the use of the means of production, not for the legitimate end of producing wealth for use, but for the purpose of making profit for the few by despoiling, sweating, pillaging, and murdering the many?"[130] Even the more moderate Socialists complain that work is carried on by the employers only "at a profit to themselves," and they wish to abolish this state of affairs, which, they argue, is demoralising to the working men, and is the cause of low wages and unemployment. "The workman is called into the workshop when capital can profitably employ him, and turned adrift again the moment capital finds it can no longer turn his services to profitable account. He is not consulted as to when he shall be employed or when cast adrift. His necessities and those of his dependents are no concern of anyone save himself. He has no right to employment, no one is under obligation to find him work, nor is he free to work for himself, since he has neither the use of land nor the command of the necessary capital."[131] "So long as industry is carried on for profit instead of for use, for gain instead of for need, so long must the evils of low wages and no wages go on."[132] The grievance that the manufacturers manufacture "not for use but for profit" is ridiculous. The manufacturers manufacture things which the public will buy and use. There is consequently no distinction between manufacturing for use and manufacturing for profit, except this, that no manufacturer will give his time and trouble, and run considerable risks, without adequate compensation. The complaint must therefore be limited to the fact that the employer of labour makes a profit. The question now arises: "What does the manufacturer do with his earnings?" In the vast majority of cases he will use by far the larger part of his profits for renewing machinery and enlarging his works, and thus increase the national capital and the national power of production, spending privately only a director's salary which he would also receive as a director-employee of the Socialist commonwealth. "The employer who works without a profit breaks himself,"[133] and in breaking himself he breaks up the factory. Universal production regardless of profit would lead to universal bankruptcy, whilst the curtailing of profits may lead to a proportionate curtailment in the expansion of industry and in the production of articles for use, and to general poverty. It has the same effect whether the workers destroy the capitalist's capital or whether they break the machinery and devastate the corn-fields. The complaints of the Socialists as to the way in which the workers are exploited by the capitalist class are founded not only on arguments such as those given in the foregoing but on figures as well, and these are exceedingly curious and interesting. Under titles such as "How the Worker is Robbed,"[134] statements are made every day, and by all Socialists, which are to prove that the national income is inequitably divided between capitalists and workers. These statements are calculated to make every workman's blood boil, and they seem to confirm the contention of the Socialists that the capitalists inhumanely plunder the working masses. However, these figures are so palpably false and so grossly misleading that attention cannot sufficiently strongly be drawn to the deception which is constantly being practised upon the workers. I hope, therefore, that my readers will patiently and carefully consider the following. The figures relating to the yearly income of the "capitalist class" and the "working class" which are given in innumerable Socialistic writings, and which are brought forward at almost every Socialist meeting and lecture, are usually taken from a pamphlet entitled "Facts for Socialists from the Political Economists and Statisticians," published by the Fabian Society. The copy lying before me bears the notice, "Tenth Edition (Revised), 111th thousand, 1906." That pamphlet furnishes the statistical basis of fact to the Socialist agitation. Its effect may be measured by its enormous circulation. It contains a vast number of quotations from Blue-books, political economists, and statisticians; and a certain show of learning, of thoroughness, and of conscientiousness gives it at first sight the appearance of being a reliable and honest production. However, appearances are proverbially deceptive. According to "Facts for Socialists," the whole national income amounts to _1,800,000,000l._ per year (page 3), and is derived from the following sources: "I.--RENT "The total profits from the ownership of lands, houses, tithes, &c., the rents of mines, quarries, ironworks, gasworks, waterworks, canals, fishings, shootings, markets, tolls, &c., must amount to at least _290,000,000l._[135] "II.--INTEREST ON CAPITAL "The profits of public companies, foreign investments, railways, &c., assessed to income tax in the United Kingdom, the interest payable from British public funds and from Indian, Colonial, and Foreign Governments' funds, and the interest on capital employed in private undertakings of manufacture or trade cannot be less than _360,000,000l._ Adding hereto the rent (_290,000,000l._), we have a total of _650,000,000l._ for rent and interest together. This represents the proportion of the nation's income claimed from the workers, _not in return for any service rendered to the community, but merely as the payment for permission to use the land and the already accumulated capital of the country_.[136] "III.--PROFITS AND SALARIES "The numbers and total income of this large class cannot be exactly ascertained. It includes workers of all grades, from the exceptionally skilled artisan to the Prime Minister, and from the city clerk to the President of the Royal Academy. It is convenient for statistical purposes to include in it all those who do not belong to the 'manual labour class.' If we take the 'rent of ability' to have increased in the same proportion as the assessments to income tax, this prosperous body may be estimated to receive for its work as profits and salaries about _460,000,000l._ annually.[137]" Adding up the income from "Rent," "Interest and Capital," and "Profits and Salaries," the pamphlet continues: "THE CLASSES "The total drawn by the legal disposers of what are sometimes called the 'three rents' of land, capital, and ability amounts at present to about _1,110,000,000l._ yearly, or just under two-thirds of the total produce. "AND THE MASSES "Allowing for the increase since these estimates were made, we may safely say that the manual labour class receives for all its millions of workers only some _690,000,000l._"[138] In a short table the distribution of the national income is then given as follows: Rent £290,000,000 Interest 360,000,000 Profits and Salaries 460,000,000 ------------- Total (that is, the income of the legal proprietors of the three natural monopolies of land, capital, and ability) 1,110,000,000 Income of manual labour class 690,000,000 ------------- Total produce £1,800,000,000[139] At first sight it seems outrageous that "the income of the legal proprietors of the three natural monopolies of land, capital, and ability" should come to _1,110,000,000l._ per annum, and the income of the manual labour class only to _690,000,000l._ per annum, about one-third of the whole, especially as we learn on page 4 of the pamphlet that the "idle rich" are only a small fraction of the community. This statement would prove the assertion that the idle rich are causing the poverty of the poor to be correct if it were honest and fair, but it is neither the one nor the other. In the first place the foregoing statement divides the nation into two classes "the masses" and "the classes": manual labourers and "the legal proprietors of the three natural monopolies." As the pamphlet is addressed to the uncritical body of general readers, and especially to working men, these will naturally divide, owing to the artful wording of the phrase, the national income between manual labourers and capitalist monopolists. According to this pamphlet everyone who is not a labourer is a capitalist monopolist. Therefore the capitalist monopolist class includes all lawyers and doctors, all parsons and clerks, all officers and salaried officials. Every business man, every farmer, every fisherman, every greengrocer, every baker, every butcher, every sailor, every cobbler, every chimney-sweep, every clerk, being not a wage-earning labourer, is "one of the legal proprietors of the three natural monopolies," or in plainer language, a monopolist. At least, the income of this very large class has barefacedly been credited to the capitalist class, whilst its members have been utilised (on page 4 of the pamphlet) to swell the ranks of the workers. This is dishonesty number one. The income of the exceptionally skilled artisans, who also form a very large class, is credited on page 7 to the "classes" under the heading "profits and salaries." They also are included among the "monopolists," although their number has likewise been utilised (on page 4) to swell the number of the workers. This is dishonesty number two. Let us now look at the result of the dishonest Fabian juggling with figures by comparing the statement regarding the national income contained in the Fabian pamphlet with a recent statement of Mr. Chiozza Money, M.P., who is a Socialist, and who divides the national income as follows: Income of working class (33,000,000 people) about £650,000,000 Income of middle class (all except manual labourers and the rich--small business men, managers, clerks, public servants, &c., with incomes up to £700--9,750,000 people) about 475,000,000 Income of rich (with incomes £700 and above) (1,250,000 people) about 600,000,000 -------------- Total about £1,725,000,000[140] From the foregoing statement it appears that the rich draw not two-thirds, but only one-third, of the national income, and this fact should be carefully borne in mind in view of the contents of the following pages. The pamphlet states on page 6 that _650,000,000l._ per annum are paid in the shape of rent and interest, "not in return for any service rendered to the community, but merely as the payment for permission to use the land and the already accumulated capital of the country." The national capital is invested chiefly in perishable objects such as houses, factories, railways, steamships, mines, &c., which depreciate unless kept in proper repair. There is wear and tear in capital as in everything else. Capital is lost and destroyed every day. Lastly, the national capital is growing, and must continue growing, in accordance with the growing capital requirements of the time and the growing number of its inhabitants, or the country will decay. New houses, new factories, new railways, new steamships must be built and new mines be opened to increase the comfort of all. From _200,000,000l._ to _300,000,000l._ are thus reinvested every year in Great Britain, and only by this constant process of reinvestment is it possible to maintain and increase the productive power of the country for the benefit of all. The _200,000,000l._ to _300,000,000l._ which are yearly reinvested in reproductive undertakings are found by the capitalists, the trustees, directors and managers, not the consumers, of the national industry and of the national wealth. This sum comes out of their earnings, which thus benefit not only the capitalists but the whole nation. Much irrelevant statistical matter is given in the pamphlet, but this large item is left out. That is dishonesty number three. On page 6 the profits of public companies are treated as "Interest on capital," and interest on capital is disparagingly called "unearned income" on page 7. Most British industries are carried on by limited companies, and limited companies are as a rule formed in this way, that the partners in the former private enterprise become directors. As directors they receive a purely nominal salary. They work as much as they did whilst the business was a private concern, and their income depends on their usually very large holding of shares. The large director-shareholders, and their number is very great, earn their dividends by hard work. Nevertheless their whole income is included in the item "interest on capital," and called "unearned income." This is dishonesty number four. On page 7 the property of the "manual labour class," or the poor, in land and capital is given as follows:-- In 1901 the deposits in P.O. Savings Bank were £140,392,916 The deposits in Trustee Savings Banks were 51,966,386 Consols purchased for small holders were 14,450,877 In 1900 the capital of Building Societies was 46,775,143 The funds of Trade-Unions, Co-operative, Friendly, and Provident Societies were 72,219,991 The funds of Industrial Life Assurance Societies were 22,998,793 ------------ Total £348,804,106[141] In reality the property of the "manual labour class" in land and capital amounts not to _348,804,106l._, but to at least _1,000,000,000l._[142] This is dishonesty number five. The imports of Great Britain are larger than the exports by about _150,000,000l._ The larger part of the money paid for these imports goes in wages paid to foreigners, and is paid away by the British capitalist class out of their earnings. British wage-earners surely cannot expect to be paid wages in respect of articles made abroad. However, no allowance for this large item has been made in comparing the appropriation of the national income between capital and labour. This is dishonesty number six. Between one hundred and two hundred million pounds of the national income is derived from foreign investments. The income derived from foreign investments should in fairness either be left out of the account or the income of foreign labour, received in respect of these investments, be added to the British labour income. In comparing the income of capital and labour, the pamphlet takes note of the earnings of British capital on all five continents and on the sea, and compares with it only the income of British labour--although foreign, not British labour, produces the foreign income of British capital. Giving as authority an ancient Board of Trade Return, and wishing to magnify the difference in the earnings of the idle rich and the industrious poor, the average yearly income of "those of the manual labour class who are best off" is given at _48l._ per adult. This means _18s._ per week. In view of the fact that most British workers earn between _1l._ and _2l._ per week, that in many Trade-Unions the _average_ wage is about _35s._ per week, the figures given are palpably wrong unless the female workers are included. Whether this is the case or no is not stated, but even if the wages of both sexes should be joined together they appear to be very considerably understated. This is dishonesty number seven. There are many more unfair, misleading, and dishonest statements in this pamphlet which it would lead too far to enumerate. Most of the important pamphlets issued by the Fabian Society are signed by their authors. The fact that the most effective, "Facts for Socialists," is unsigned seems to indicate that the author--apparently a well-known leader of the Fabians--had some sense of shame, and it is to be hoped that the Fabian Society will immediately, and publicly, repudiate this dishonest pamphlet. The statements contained in the pamphlet "Facts for Socialists," may be misleading and utterly dishonest, but they are very useful for propaganda purposes. Nothing is more likely to inflame the masses than to be told that the "idle rich" take more than two-thirds of the national income. The practical effect of this pamphlet may be seen in utterances such as the following: "It has been estimated that in our country of the wealth produced, one-third is enjoyed by those who earn it and two-thirds by those who have not laboured for it. To put it in other words, of every three pounds earned by labour, one pound goes to him who earned it and two pounds to others who have done nothing towards its production."[143] "For two-thirds of his time the worker is a slave, labouring not for himself but for others."[144] "On the average at the present time the workers produce nearly four times as much as they consume."[145] "Nearly two-thirds of the wealth produced is retained by an eighth of the population."[146] "The great mass of the people, the weekly wage-earners, four out of five of the whole population, toil perpetually for less than a third of the aggregate product of labour, at an annual wage averaging at most _40l._ per adult, and are hurried into unnecessarily early graves by the severity of their lives."[147] "Out of the wealth which his labour creates, the worker receives but one-third. He is paid one-third the value of his labour, and when he seeks to lay it out he is robbed of one-half its purchasing power, and all this is done by a Christian people."[148] "Q. How does the capitalist act? A. He extorts from those labourers who are excluded from the land a share of all that they produce, under threat of withholding from them the implements of production and thus refusing to let them work at all.--Q. On what terms does the capitalist allow the labourers to work? A. The capitalist agrees to return to them as wages about a quarter of what they have produced by their work, keeping the remaining three-quarters for himself and his class.--Q. What is this system called? A. The capitalist system."[149] "By analysing the returns of the income-tax, various economists show that the value received by the working class and the superintendents of labour amount to a third or less of the wealth produced. The income-tax returns, however, are not a very reliable test of the degree of exploitation, though, of course, they afford us valuable and incontestable evidence that the worker does not receive more than a third of what he produces. One to four, or one to five, in my opinion, expresses more accurately the rate of exploitation."[150] I am not prepared to give an estimate how the national income is distributed between hand workers, brain workers, and men who live on their income without doing any useful work, because such an estimate could be arrived at only by guesswork. However, it is quite clear that it is untrue that the wage-earners receive only one-third, one-fourth, or one-fifth of the wages which they ought to receive, as is constantly stated. FOOTNOTES: [95] _Justice_, October 19, 1907. [96] _Social-Democratic Federation Song Book_, p. 13. [97] _The Worker's Burden_, p. 1. [98] Hyndman, _Social Democracy_, p. 9. [99] Macdonald, _Socialism_, p. 12. [100] _Protect the Home_, p. 1. [101] _John Ball_, p. 10. [102] _Facts for Socialists_, p. 12. [103] Sidney Webb, _The Difficulties of Individualism_, p. 15. [104] _Ibid._ p. 7. [105] _Ibid._ p. 12. [106] Keir Hardie, _Can a Man be a Christian on a Pound a Week?_ p. 12. [107] McClure, _Socialism_, p. 27. [108] Ethel Snowden, _The Woman Socialist_, p. 11. [109] Joynes, _The Socialist Catechism_, p. 5. [110] _To the Man in the Street_, Social-Democratic Federation Leaflet. [111] Hyndman in Debate, _Will Socialism Benefit the English People?_ p. 5. [112] Leatham, _The Class War_, p. 4. [113] _Socialism, For and Against_, p. 6. [114] Snowden, _Socialists' Budget_, p. 11. [115] Debs, _Industrial Unionism_, p. 5. [116] Kautsky, _Class Struggle_, p. 10. [117] Hall, _The Old and New Unionism_, p. 4. [118] Lister, _Riches and Poverty_, pp. 13, 14. [119] Bax and Quelch, _A New Catechism of Socialism_, p. 7. [120] _Poems for Socialists_, p. 8. [121] _Social-Democratic Federation Song Book_, p. 25. [122] Washington, _A Corner in Flesh and Blood_, p. 14. [123] _Ibid._ [124] Benson, _Socialism_, p. 5. [125] Washington, _Nation of Slaves_, p. 11. [126] Davidson, _The Old Order and the New_, p. 30. [127] _Some Objections to Socialism_, p. 7. [128] Davidson, _The Old Order and the New_, p. 45. [129] Morris, _Useful Work and Useless Toil_, p. 30. [130] _Some Objections to Socialism_, p. 20. [131] Keir Hardie, _From Serfdom to Socialism_, p. 52. [132] Hall, _The Old and New Unionism_, p. 5. [133] Macdonald, _Socialism_, p. 6. [134] _The Socialist Annual_, 1907, p. 16 f. [135] _Facts for Socialists_, p. 5. [136] _Facts for Socialists_, pp. 6, 7. [137] _Ibid._ p. 7. [138] _Ibid._ p. 8. [139] _Facts for Socialists_, pp. 8, 9. [140] See _Daily News_, November 28, 1907. [141] _Facts for Socialists_, p. 7. [142] See Mr. Quail's paper in the _Contemporary Review_ for August 1907. [143] Ward, _The Ideal City_, pp. 5, 6. [144] Keir Hardie, _From Serfdom to Socialism_, p. 15. [145] Quelch, _Social-Democratic Federation_, p. 5. [146] _Manifesto of the Socialist Party of Great Britain_, p. 8. [147] Sidney Webb, _The Difficulties of Individualism_, p. 8. [148] Keir Hardie, _Can a Man be a Christian on a Pound a Week?_ p. 7. [149] Joynes, _The Socialist Catechism_, p. 2. [150] Hazell, _Summary of Marx's "Capital,"_ p. 9. CHAPTER IV THE FUNDAMENTAL DOCTRINES OF SOCIALISM In describing the doctrines of Socialism I do not mean to state in detail the whole of the Socialistic theories. Such a statement would fill a volume, it would be excessively tedious to most readers, and it is for all practical purposes quite unnecessary. A statement of the leading doctrines on which the activity of the Socialists is based--the doctrines which are constantly asserted and which are the fundamental dogmas of the Socialist faith--will enable us to obtain a clear view of the foundations upon which the theoretic fabric of Socialism is built, and to judge whether that foundation is scientific and sound, or unscientific and unsound. The basic doctrine of Socialism, upon which the great edifice of Socialistic theory has been reared, may be summed up in the phrase "LABOUR IS THE ONLY SOURCE OF WEALTH" Therefore we read in the celebrated pamphlet "Facts for Socialists," of which some important extracts were given in the preceding chapter: "Commodities are produced solely by the 'efforts and sacrifices' (Cairns), whether of muscle or of brain, of the working portion of the community, employed upon the gifts of Nature. Adam Smith 'showed that labour is the only source of wealth.... It is to labour, therefore, and to labour only, that man owes everything possessed of exchangeable value (McCulloch's 'Principles of Political Economy,' Part II., section 1). 'No wealth whatever can be produced without labour' (Professor Henry Fawcett (Cambridge), 'Manual of Political Economy,' p. 13),"[151] This statement is scarcely honest, for it quotes opinions of Adam Smith and others which are erroneous, as will be seen in the following, and which have been generally abandoned. This statement may impose upon the simple by its show of learning, but it is somewhat vague, for it only suggests, but does not distinctly assert, that manual labour is the only source of wealth. However, in most--one might say in nearly all--Socialist books, pamphlets, and declarations of policy we find the basic doctrine of Socialism asserted in a form which leaves no doubt that according to the Socialist theories the manual labour of the labourer is the only source of wealth. The founder of modern Socialism declared, "Labour is the only source of wealth,"[152] and his disciples--at least his British disciples--support that declaration. "All wealth is due to labour; therefore, to the labourers all wealth is due."[153] "Labour applied to natural objects is the source of all wealth."[154] The Socialist Party of Great Britain declares: "Wealth is natural material converted by labour-power to man's use, and as such is consequently produced by the working class alone."[155] The Independent Labour party asserts: "No man or class of men made the first kind of wealth, such as land, minerals, and water. Therefore no man or class of men should be allowed to call these things their own, or to prevent others from using them (except on certain conditions), as the landowners and mine-owners do now. The only class of human beings who make the second kind of wealth are the workers. Working men and women produce and prepare for us all those things which we use or consume, such as food, clothing, houses, furniture, instruments and implements, trams, railways, pictures, books, gas, drains, and many other things. They produce all the wealth obtained by toil from the land."[156] Those who maintain that labour, or, as some Socialists assert, the labourer's labour, is the only source of wealth, look merely at the mechanical factor, but omit the force which directs and controls it. The Socialistic argument "We can run the mills without the capitalists, but they cannot run them without us"[157] is misleading. Labour is certainly an indispensable ingredient in production, but it is no more indispensable than is direction, invention, and thrift. Hence it is as absurd to assert "All wealth is due to labour" as to say "All wealth is due to invention," or "All wealth is due to thrift." As the brain is more important than the hand, at least in a highly organised state of production, so invention, organisation, management, and thrift are more important than manual labour, because invention, organisation, management, and thrift alone enable manual labour, working with modern machinery, to be highly productive. In fact, it may be asserted that wealth is created not so much by labour as by the saving of labour. A factory-owner who is dissatisfied with the profits of his factory or with its products does not get better workers, but gets a better manager or better machinery, keeping his workers. This fact proves that labour is the least important factor in modern production. The doctrine "Labour is the only source of wealth" is untenable and absurd. Another fundamental doctrine of Socialism is that of "THE IRON LAW OF WAGES" According to that law, "wages under competition can never be higher than that which will just support the labourer and enable him to renew his kind."[158] In the words of Lassalle, the inventor of the Iron Law of Wages, "the wages of the labourer are limited to the exact amount necessary to keep him alive."[159] The British Socialist writers tell us: "The average price of wage-labour is the minimum wage--_i.e._ that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the labourer in bare existence."[160] "The labourer cannot as a rule command more than his cost of subsistence in return for his labour. This principle, that the return to labour is determined by the cost of subsistence of the labourer, is generally known as 'The Iron Law of Wages.' But has not this law been discarded even by some Socialists? There have been attempts in some quarters to demonstrate that this law does not actually operate with the rigidity at first claimed for it; but in truth, it stands as firmly to-day as when insisted upon by Lassalle."[161] "Capitalism always keeps the wages down to the lowest standard of subsistence which the people will accept,"[162] for "the basis of wages is the cost of subsistence of the labourer. This is called the 'Iron Law of Wages.'"[163] "By the Iron Law of Wages the recompense of the workers always tends to the minimum on which they are willing to subsist. If they are content with water to drink and cabbage to eat, they may be sure that the means of buying whisky or roast beef will very soon be taken from them. Messrs. Rentmonger, Interestmonger, and Profitmonger will speedily scent additional swag, and they will have it, too."[164] "The 'Iron Law of Wages' reduces the wages to as near the level of the means of subsistence as local circumstances will admit of."[165] If these arguments were correct it would follow that the workers could cause their wages to rise by drinking wine instead of whisky, and by smoking Havana cigars instead of pipe-tobacco. This theory of wages is called the "Iron Law of Wages" because of its absolute and pitiless rigidity. For instance, the Iron Law of Wages will prevent lower prices of food benefiting the workman in any way. "If the working class is enabled to buy cheap bread, the operation of the 'Iron Law of Wages' will secure all the advantage for the capitalists, as it did in the days of the saintly Bright, when the corn laws were repealed. Capital is always the same in its effect on the working-class, whether manipulated by an individual capitalist, joint-stock enterprise, municipality, or government, and with each step in concentration the working-class gets relatively less and the master class gets richer, more corrupt, and more bestial, as recent events in Berlin and elsewhere show."[166] The "Iron Law of Wages" is irrefutable and irresistible. "Economists have come to talk about the 'Iron Law of Wages' with as much assurance as if it were an irreversible law of Nature."[167] The Iron Law of Wages exists chiefly in the imagination of British Socialists. The general wage of British workmen living in towns ranges from, say _18s._ to more than _2l._ per week, and its amount does not depend on the cost of subsistence, but on the working skill and various other factors. If the Iron Law of Wages were correct, wages would be almost uniform. The Iron Law of Wages can possibly apply only to one small class of workers, the lowest and least skilled labourers, provided that unemployment is so great among them that they abandon collective bargaining and underbid one another down to the level of subsistence. When workers are organised, the Iron Law of Wages does not apply. The level of wages depends, broadly speaking, on supply and demand. Wages rise when two employers run after one workman; wages fall when two workmen run after one employer. An employer who engages a workman does not ask, "How much do you eat?" but "What can you do?" and he proportions the worker's remuneration not to his appetite, but to his ability and his value as a producer. The wages paid to married men and to unmarried men are identical in the same trade. If there was an "Iron Law of Wages," the wages of married men should be about twice as large as those of unmarried men. The Iron Law of Wages is manifestly absurd. It has therefore been officially abandoned by the German Socialists at the Halle Congress of 1890 "as being scientifically untenable."[168] "German Social Democracy no longer recognises the Iron Law of Wages."[169] The British Socialists have not abandoned it, probably not because they believe it to be scientifically correct--no one can believe that--but because it is a plausible and effective means of poisoning the minds of the people. As regards the factors which determine wages, one of the foremost Socialist authorities says: "Thoughtful workmen in the staple trades have become convinced by their own experience, no less than by the repeated arguments of the economists, that a rising standard of wages and other conditions of employment must depend ultimately on the productivity of labour, and therefore upon the most efficient and economical use of credit, capital, and capacity."[170] In other words, productivity and profit determine wages, and it is ridiculous that Socialists argue: "Over 90 per cent. of our women do not drink, back horses, smoke, attend football or cricket matches, they do not stop off their work to watch England and Australia play at cricket, and the result is they are paid less wages than men in our factories for doing the same work."[171] Does Councillor Glyde really believe that women's wages would rise as soon as they took to smoking and drinking? THE LAW OF INCREASING MISERY According to this law the improvements in machinery, the increase of capital and increase of production do not benefit the worker. They only lead to a decline in wages and thus increase the workers' misery. "In proportion as the use of machinery and division of labour increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases whether by prolongation of the working hours, by increase of the work exacted in a given time, or by increased speed of the machinery, &c."[172] "The faster productive capital increases, the more does the division of labour and the employment of machinery extend. The more the division of labour and the employment of machinery extend, so much the more does competition increase among the labourers and so much the more do their average wages dwindle. And thus the forest of arms outstretched by those who are entreating for work becomes ever denser and the arms themselves grow ever leaner."[173] "The more the worker labours the less reward he receives for it; and that for this simple reason, that he competes against his fellow-workmen and thus compels them to compete against him and to offer their labour on as wretched conditions as he does, and that he thus, in the last result, competes against himself as a member of the working-class."[174] "The worker in the factory gets, as a worker, absolutely no advantage from the machinery which causes the product of his labour to be multiplied a hundredfold."[175] "John Stuart Mill, it will be remembered, questioned whether mechanical invention had lightened the labours of a single human being."[176] "With increasing powers of production, the worker's share, and therefore his purchasing power, grows less."[177] "Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers."[178] "The iron law of competition means, and must mean, continued degradation for the workers, even though their physical condition in youth may be improved."[179] "The worker in the factory is now seen to work no shorter hours or gain no higher wages merely because the product of his labour is multiplied a hundredfold by machinery which he does not own. 'The remuneration of labour as such,' wrote Cairnes in 1874, 'skilled or unskilled, can never rise much above its present level.'"[180] The celebrated "Doctrine of Increasing Misery" stands in diametrical opposition to those facts with which nowadays every child is acquainted. During the time when our Socialists have been preaching the "Doctrine of Increasing Misery" working hours have been very greatly diminished and wages have not been reduced, but have risen by about 100 per cent. During the same time working hours in Germany have also been reduced and wages have risen up to 400 per cent.[181] The German Socialists have been honest enough to abandon the Doctrine of Increasing Misery under the guidance of Bernstein; the French have dropped it under the guidance of Sorel; the Dutch have seen its absurdity, guided by Vandervelde, their foremost leader. The British Socialists, on the other hand, have not abandoned it, though they must see its absurdity, probably because, though palpably and ridiculously false, the Doctrine of Increasing Misery is considered to be a useful and effective part of the Socialist agitator's stock-in-trade. The next doctrine to be considered is THE SURPLUS-VALUE DOCTRINE The Socialists argue that the position of the worker cannot improve because the capitalist, possessing the monopoly of property, pockets all that the worker produces except the mere cost of his subsistence, which, owing to the "Iron Law of Wages," is given to the workman in the form of wages. "The amount of wealth which the labourer produces in the time for which he has sold his labour-force is out of all proportion to what it costs to produce and maintain his labour-force for that time. This, the difference between what he produces and his own cost of production, is surplus-value, and is taken and divided up by the capitalist into rent, interest, profit. This surplus-value, then, this profit, is so much robbery effected by taking advantage of the necessity of the proletarian--the naked propertyless labourer."[182] "All that the worker produces beyond what is absolutely necessary to keep himself and his offspring in life, this surplus beyond subsistence--this difference between the recompense of labour and its products--this unrighteous subtrahend, this swag, is the booty alike of slavelord, serflord, and drudgelord, or capitalist."[183] The question now arises: "How does the capitalist secure this surplus-value of labour without paying for it? If the workman is free, why cannot he insist on receiving, not the mere exchange-value of his commodity--'labour-power'--but the full value of the labour he expends for the capitalist? The capitalist obtains this surplus-value owing to his monopoly of the means of production. The labourer cannot, as a rule, command more than his cost of subsistence in return for his labour--although his wages, like the prices of all commodities, sometimes rise above this and sometimes fall below--because, although apparently free, he is really not free. He must sell his labour-power in order to live; he has no other commodity to dispose of. Consequently he must accept the terms that the purchaser will offer, subject only to two conditions--his own cost of subsistence and the fluctuations of the market."[184] "Owing to the monopoly of the means of production in the past, industrial inventions and the transformation of surplus income into capital have mainly enriched the proprietary class, the worker being now dependent on that class for leave to earn a living."[185] The Surplus-Value Doctrine, like the preceding doctrines, is founded rather upon imagination than upon fact. In the first place, it is absurd to speak of a "capitalist class" which, having a "monopoly of the means of production," exploits "the naked and propertyless labourer." This picture is a fancy picture. In the second place, "class" is not synonymous with "caste." The population is not divided into two rigidly defined and limited castes of capitalists and wage-earners. There is neither a monopoly of capital nor a monopoly of labour. Capital is founded by thrift. Most respectable workmen are capitalists to a greater or lesser extent. Every day workmen become capitalists. It should not be forgotten that many of the wealthiest men, such as Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Krupp, the first Rothschild, Sir Thomas Lipton, Passmore Edwards, and many others, have risen from the ranks and were working men--and every day capitalists lose their money and become workmen. Workmen may become capitalists by thrift. Co-operating workmen in England, France, Germany, and other countries own vast industrial undertakings, banks, &c. In those districts where thrift and co-operation are general (France, Switzerland, Holland) the "naked and propertyless labourers" disappear, whilst in equally prosperous districts where improvidence is general, they are many. The prosperity of the working classes in France, Switzerland, Holland, and other countries disproves the assertion that the workman is condemned to everlasting poverty because of the Surplus-Value Doctrine. Assertions in support of the "Surplus-Value Doctrine" such as "Carnegie and other millionaires have wrung their wealth literally out of the bodies of the underfed"[186] are as malicious as they are untrue. Men like Carnegie and Krupp have not "wrung their wealth out of the bodies of the underfed," but out of Nature. They have created vast industries in barren places, and the industries which they have created nourish now tens of thousands of working men. Men like Krupp and Carnegie have diminished misery, not increased it. Their capital, created by their brains with the assistance of labour out of Nature, has rather enriched labour than that labour has enriched Carnegie and Krupp. Their wealth is not dead wealth; it produces wages and articles of use. The "Surplus-Value Doctrine" is a grotesque distortion of, and an unjustified protest against, the fact that manufacturers and other organisers and directors of labour will not work for nothing. We have seen in the foregoing that, according to the fundamental Socialist doctrines, "labour is the only source of wealth." We have also seen that, according to the "Iron Law of Wages" and the "Law of Increasing Misery," the workmen are condemned to great, permanent, and constantly increasing misery. Further, we have learned that, according to the "Surplus-Value Doctrine," all the fruit of their labour, minus the cost of their bare subsistence, is taken from the workers by the capitalists. Hence it is only natural and logical that the assertion of the fundamental doctrines, namely-- 1. Labour is the only source of wealth, 2. Wages maintains mere animal existence, 3. The misery of the workers is constantly increasing, 4. The position of the worker is hopeless, has led to this fifth doctrine: THE LABOURER IS ENTITLED TO THE ENTIRE PRODUCT OF HIS LABOUR This doctrine is put forth by practically all British Socialists, not only as a doctrine but also as a demand. For instance "the New School of Trades-Unionists declare themselves in open and uncompromising revolt against the established relations between capital and labour; and they expound a new political economy which says that nothing less than the full fruits of industry shall be reckoned the fair reward of the producing class. They want the whole four-fourths of their earnings, instead of the one-fourth at present doled back in wages."[187] This demand must have precedence over all other measures whatsoever, for "until you have settled the material question as to how the producers of wealth are to get for themselves the full value of what they produce by their labour, it is impossible to settle anything else."[188] According to many Socialists, Socialism would immediately abolish their grievances and give to the worker the entire produce of his labour. "At present the frugal workman only gets about one-third of his earnings. Under Socialism he would get all his earnings."[189] "Under the new order all will be productive workers, receiving an equivalent for what they produce--not merely one-half of it as now under the wage-system--in some form."[190] Under the heading "Basis of the Fabian Society," the Fabian Society publishes a statement of the fundamental principles of that Society in which we read: "If these measures" (confiscation of all private property) "be carried out, without compensation (though not without such relief to expropriated individuals as may seem fit to the community), rent and interest will be added to the reward of labour, the idle class now living on the labour of others will necessarily disappear, and practical equality of opportunity will be maintained by the spontaneous action of economic forces with much less interference with personal liberty than the present system entails." The absurdity of the demand for "the entire product of labour," which is raised by Socialists on behalf of the labourer is clear even to the most superficial thinker. The majority of Socialists know quite well that writing off, repairs, renewals, the replacing of machinery, the enlargement of factories, &c., cannot be done gratis, that the distribution of the whole produce of labour to the workers can be effected only by neglecting and destroying the means of production. The impossibility of giving to the worker the "whole product of his labour" by abolishing the private capitalist is clearly recognised and honestly admitted by the German Socialists. Kautsky, for instance, writes: "If the income of the capitalists were added to that of the workers, the wages of each would be doubled. Unfortunately, however, the matter will not be settled so simply. If we expropriate capitalism, we must at the same time take over its social functions--among these the important one of capitalist accumulation. The capitalists do not consume all their income; a portion of it they put away for the extension of production. A proletarian _régime_ would also have to do the same in order to extend production. It would not therefore be able to transfer, even in the event of a radical confiscation of capital, the whole of the former income to the working class. Besides, a portion of the surplus value which the capitalists now pocket, they must hand over to the State in the shape of taxes. For these reasons our Socialists are guilty of wilful deception if they tell the workers that under a Socialist _régime_ their wages would be doubled and trebled."[191] Nevertheless, the doctrine and the demand that "the labourer is entitled to the entire product of his labour" is not abandoned by British Socialists, apparently because it is extremely useful for arousing the passions of the workers against the capitalists in accordance with Gronlund's advice,[192] and for bringing new adherents to the Socialist camp. Only the Fabian Society, the more scientific section of the English Socialists, has mildly protested against this absurd doctrine and demand, but that protest has not been heeded. In a little-read pamphlet of that Society, the following statement may be found: "The Fabian Society steadfastly discountenances all schemes for securing to any person or any group of persons the entire product of their labour. It recognises that wealth is social in its origin and must be social in its distribution" (which means in plain English, must be preserved by the thrifty few, official or non-official, for the use of the unthrifty many), "since the evolution of industry has made it impossible to distinguish the particular contribution that each person makes to the common product, or to ascertain the value."[193] Notwithstanding these emphatic statements, the Fabian Society preserves with characteristic duplicity[194] the statement in its programme that "rent and interest, will be added to the reward of labour." Most British Socialist writers are not aware, or rather pretend not to be aware, of the necessity of preserving and increasing the national capital. In "Land, Labour, and Liberty," we read: "Whilst in 1845 the total wealth of this country was estimated at _4,000,000,000l._, it is now estimated at over _12,000,000,000l._ The monopolist classes, without denying themselves anything, and whilst producing comparatively nothing, have piled up an additional eight thousand millions. The superfluous handful of mere possessors remain the flowers and foliage of society; the three-quarters of the nation of indispensable producers remain the manure."[195] This writer, like most Socialists, though acknowledging the enormous growth of the national capital of Great Britain, pretends that the "monopolist classes" have not denied themselves anything. If that were true, the national capital would still amount to only _4,000,000,000l._ as in 1845. Great Britain would have few factories, no new machinery, no steamships, and but a very few miles of railway. But for the self-denial, the thrift of the "superfluous handful of mere possessors," Englishmen would still live in the Hungry Forties and Great Britain would be able to nourish only about 20,000,000 people as she did in 1845. National capital and the comforts and conveniences which it supplies to all are at least as much the result of thrift, inventiveness, enterprise, and wise direction as of manual labour. The foregoing shows that, to say the least, the grievances of the Socialists are greatly--one might almost say grotesquely--exaggerated, and that they are largely founded on a perversion of facts; a perversion which can be easily explained by the desire of the Socialist leaders to arouse the blind passions of the discontented wage-earners in accordance with Gronlund's advice, quoted on page 10. The next doctrine which should be considered may be summed up in the words: "THE EXISTING MISERY CAN BE ABOLISHED, NOT BY INCREASING PRODUCTION, BUT BY ALTERING THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE WEALTH PRODUCED" "The Socialist emphatically denies the assertion that the poor must always be with us. The productive capacity of society is now so great that none need want, and all are able to earn their livelihood, and more, except where they are prevented from doing so by sickness, infirmity, or by the existence of laws and customs which the individual cannot himself, acting alone, remove."[196] "There is a demand for the labour of every man under any well-ordered social system. If there is a waste of men now, it is the fault of the wage system."[197] "Sufficient wealth is produced in this country to-day which would, under a well-ordered state of society, enable every man, woman, and child to have a sufficiency of all things essential to a healthy human life. To-day the people produce this wealth, and, after they have produced it, quite two-thirds of it is taken from them by a very small section of the people. Consequently we have a very few rich, and many that are poor."[198] "We may claim to have solved the problem of how to produce enough, and the question which confronts us is how to bring distribution into line with the productive capacity of our people."[199] "The old argument that there is not enough work to do cannot be seriously listened to by anyone who has walked through a London or Manchester slum. There is work in the world for all, just as there is wealth in the world for all, and every man has a right to work, just as he has a right to wealth."[200] "The chief problem is not the production of more wealth, but its equitable distribution."[201] The increase of production and therefore of reproductive capital in the form of machinery, mines, railways, ships, &c., in which most of the "Surplus-Value" is invested, is explained to be a matter of secondary consideration and importance, and it is stated that the world suffers rather from over-production than from under-production. "The tendency of the conditions of employment under present circumstances, under the capitalist system, always is for production to outstrip consumption."[202] "Our power to produce has always, since the beginnings of capitalism, shown a tendency to grow more rapidly than our power to consume."[203] "Then because there is a plethora of goods and a dearth of purchasers, the workshops are closed and Hunger lashes the working population with his thousand-thonged whip. The workers, stupefied by the dogma of work, do not understand that the cause of their present misery is the overwork that they have inflicted on themselves during the time of sham prosperity."[204] "For some insane reason the capitalist has thought of nothing but production."[205] "If, by a fiat from heaven, the wealth of the world were doubled to-morrow and the present system of capitalistic monopoly and commercial competition were allowed to continue, the social misery would, in a very short time, reappear in a form even still more accentuated, were that possible. Individualism, commercialism, capitalism--call it what we may--has demonstrably produced the evil."[206] THE EXISTING CAPITALIST SYSTEM IS RESPONSIBLE FOR POVERTY, WANT, AND UNEMPLOYMENT Unemployment is largely caused by commercial crises, commercial crises are caused by over-production, over-production is caused by the fact that the national industries are divided and the industrial output is regulated not by the nation in accordance with the national demand but by irresponsible private individuals whose aim is profit, not the fulfilment of a national demand. "The causes of commercial depression lie in the non-consumption of the incomes of our millionaires."[207] Another Socialist writer asserts: "Our era is cursed with crises occurring far more frequently than plagues and causing as much misery. Economists say that these crises are caused by over-production. Private enterprise compels every producer to produce for himself, to sell for himself, to keep all his transactions to himself, without regard to anybody else in the wide world. Merchants have got no measure at hand by which they can, even approximately, either estimate the effective demand of their customers or ascertain the producing capacity of their rivals. Production by all these manufacturers is, and must necessarily be, absolutely planless. This planless production must end in the market being overstocked with commodities of one kind or another; that is, that it must end in 'over-production.' In the trade which has been thus overdone, prices fall and wages come down; or a great manufacturer fails and a smaller or greater number of workmen are discharged. Crises are therefore the direct result of private enterprise."[208] "Why are men--men that is who are able and willing, nay, eager and anxious, to work--unemployed? Because, it is said, there is nothing for them to do. Nothing for them to do? Is all the necessary work of the world, then, already finished, so that there is nothing more remaining for anyone to do? No; it is not because all the necessary and useful work is done that men are unemployed, it is because all the means of production--all the machines, tools, and implements of labour and all the raw material--are owned by a class, and may only be used by permission of that class, and when that class can make a profit out of their use."[209] "It is indisputable that modern poverty is artificial. It is neither the result of divine anger nor the niggardliness of Nature. It is the product of the private ownership of land and capital by which men are prevented from earning their living unless the proprietary class can make profit from their labour. The inevitable result of this system is that in all industries and at all times there are more men seeking employment than there is employment for.[210]" "Your system of private ownership, in conferring the possession and control of the nation's storehouse of wealth and of the instruments by which all further wealth must be obtained from it, upon your capitalist class, has reduced the nation at large into nothing more nor less than an elaborate machine which your capitalists use for extracting wealth from the earth for their own benefit.... It is not well that by a foolish and wicked system of government, one small class of the community should be enabled to organise its production in such a manner that the full stream of wealth is diverted into their own possession whilst the mass of the nation by whose labour it is obtained are defrauded of it, and brought into a state of subtle slavery worse both in kind and degree than could be possible under any system of direct and open slavery."[211] "Unemployment is an inevitable feature of capitalism, and is impossible of removal without at the same time abolishing the capitalist system that produces it. That is a fact known to any Socialist with the most elementary knowledge of the economics of capitalism. Unemployment is caused by the exactions of the capitalist class. The prime cause of unemployment is the robbery of the workers by which the capitalist class appropriate the whole of the wealth produced by the workers, returning to them just as much on the average as will keep them physically fit to continue working. The difference between the quantities produced and consumed by the working class (a difference continually increasing with every increase in the productivity of labour) represents a surplus which all the waste and all the luxury of its owners cannot absorb, with the result that the markets are glutted with an excess of commodities. Thus the 'over-production,' the crisis, and the slackening of production involving an increase of unemployment."[212] Employers of labour profit directly from unemployment, and will therefore presumably do all they can to bring it about. "Employers and other well-to-do people have no interest in finding work for the workless. They benefit from the unemployment of the poor."[213] The foregoing statement is as malicious as it is absurd. Employers do not desire unemployment, partly from humanitarian reasons, partly because it is a loss to them. The father of English Socialism taught: "The labourer perishes if capital does not employ him. Capital perishes if it does not exploit labour."[214] In other words, unemployed labour means unemployed capital; besides, those business men who do not actually dismiss their workers suffer also through unemployment, because the unemployed are supported by the rates. The doctrines that "the existing misery can be abolished, not by increased production but by altering the distribution of the wealth produced," and that the "capitalist system is responsible for want, poverty, and unemployment," are manifestly unsound. A larger consumption of food, clothing, &c., can be effected only by a larger production. Gluts and crises, with consequent unemployment, occur, not through general over-production, which would benefit all, but by ill-balanced production, as the following example will prove: Imagine an island off the African coast on which there are two villages, the inhabitants of which require only two commodities, loin-cloths and mealies. One village manufactures loin-cloths, the other raises mealies, and these are exchanged against each other. These villages fulfil the Socialistic ideal. There are no capitalists and no middlemen, and production is only "for use," not "for profit." Balanced over-production will result in this, that every native will have a superabundance of loin-cloths and food. But supposing that the agriculturists go in for loin-cloth making, finding that occupation more congenial, and that they abandon much agriculture; or supposing that inclement weather, or a plague of grasshoppers, should seriously curtail the harvest, then there will soon be a glut of loin-cloths and a crisis. The cry of over-production will arise among the loin-cloth makers, but that cry will be unjustified and absurd. The more the people make the more they will have, provided production is properly balanced. The doctrine that we suffer from over-production and that the capitalist system is at fault, that altered distribution rather than increased production will abolish misery, and that Socialism can prevent want and unemployment by a scientific organisation of production, is wrong. Socialists may, of course, argue, "In the Socialist State production would be organised, and controlled, and properly balanced and harmonised," an argument which is irrelevant with regard to the over-production doctrine, and which besides is unsound, although it may be found in most Socialistic writings. As production is world-wide, the Socialists' control of production would also have to be world-wide. It would involve not only the control of all human energy throughout the world, but also the control of the seasons, of the weather, of insect plagues, of fashions, of appetite, &c. The foregoing proves that "men can never become richer till the produce of their labour increases. The more they produce the richer they will be, provided there be a demand for the produce of their labour. If a shoemaker makes four pairs of shoes in a day he will be twice richer than he would be if he made only two pairs in a day, provided that an increased demand is co-existing. The question, therefore, 'How can we become richer?' is reduced to this one, 'How can we increase the produce of labour and at the same time maintain an equivalent demand for that produce?'"[215] The doctrines that want and unemployment are due to over-production and to the capitalist system are wrong. We now come to the DOCTRINE OF THE CLASS WAR Having, by the fundamental doctrines enumerated in the foregoing, proved that all misery of the working masses is caused by the existence of a capitalist class which has enslaved the workers, the Socialists conclude that there is a natural antagonism between capital and labour; that social life is dominated by the Class War. "The Socialists say that the present form of property-holding divides society into two great classes."[216] "Capitalist society is divided into two classes: owners of property and owners of no property."[217] "Society is to-day divided into two classes with opposing interests, one class owning the means of life, and the other nothing but their power to work. Never in the history of society was the working-class so free from all traces of property as to-day."[218] "There are in reality but two classes, those who live by labour and those who live upon those who labour, the two classes of exploiter and exploited."[219] "Society has been divided mainly into two economic classes, a relatively small class of capitalists who own tools in the form of great machines they did not make and cannot use, and a great body of many millions of workers who did make these tools and who do use them, and whose very lives depend upon them, yet who do not own them."[220] It is usually said that society has three classes, but Socialists maintain that there are in reality only two classes. William Morris still divided society into three groups, which, however, at closer inspection will be found to form but two classes. According to Morris, "Civilised States consist of (1) the class of rich people doing no work, who consume a great deal while they produce nothing. Therefore, clearly they have to be kept at the expense of those who do work, just as paupers have, and are a mere burden on the community. (2) The middle class, including the trading, manufacturing, and professional people of our society. It is their ambition and the end of their whole lives to gain, if not for themselves, yet at least for their children, the proud position of being obvious burdens on the community. Here then is another class, this time very numerous and all-powerful, which produces very little and consumes enormously, and is therefore supported, as paupers are, by the real producers. (3) The class that remains to be considered produces all that is produced and supports both itself and the other classes, though it is placed in a position of inferiority to them, real inferiority, mind you, involving a degradation both of mind and body. To sum up, then, civilised States are composed of three classes--a class which does not even pretend to work, a class which pretends to work but which produces nothing, and a class which works."[221] In other words, William Morris divided society into two classes: propertied non-producers and non-propertied toilers. According to practically all living English Socialists, there are but two classes in society. "Modern society is divided into two classes--the possessors of property and the non-possessors: the dominant class and the subject class; the class which rules and the class which has to obey. He who possesses sufficient wealth to exercise control over the labour of others, to exploit that labour for his own profit, belongs to the one class; he who possesses nothing but the power to labour contained in his own body, and who is therefore compelled to sell that labour power in order to live, belongs to the other. It is this struggle and conflict between these two classes that Socialists call the class war, a recognition of which is essential to a clear conception of what the Socialist movement involves."[222] "Society is divided into two opposite classes, one, the capitalists and their sleeping partners the landlords and loanmongers, holding in their hands the means of production, distribution, and exchange, and being therefore able to command the labour of others; the other, the working class, the wage-earners, the proletariat, possessing nothing but their labour power, and being consequently forced by necessity to work for the former."[223] "In society there is an antagonism of interests, manifesting itself as a class struggle between those who possess but do not produce, and those who produce but do not possess."[224] "The people of this unfortunate country have been aptly divided by Mr. Gladstone into the 'masses' and the 'classes'--that is to say, into those who live by their own labour and those who live on the labour of others. Among the latter tribe of non-producers are included all manner of thieves, pick-pockets, burglars, sharpers, prostitutes, Peers of Parliament, their families and menials, all, or nearly all, the 'six hundred and odd scoundrels of the House of Commons,' the twenty thousand State parsons, who every Sunday shamelessly travesty the Christian religion in the interest of the 'classes.'"[225] The theory of dividing society into two classes, capitalists and workers, or as others put it, "exploiters and exploited," is manifestly absurd, and its absurdity has been pointed out by a few Socialists. "It is not true that there are only two great economic classes in the community. The Communist Manifesto, even in its day, admitted as much, but made no place for the fact in its theories. There is an economic antagonism between landlords and capitalists as well as between capitalists and workmen."[226] Besides, most capitalists are workers, and probably the great majority of English workers are capitalists to a larger or smaller extent. Now let us study the Socialists' description of the hostile forces which are engaged in the Class War. According to the Socialist teaching, the property-owners as a class are useless idlers who impoverish the workers and who shamelessly spend their whole income on demoralising luxuries. "The idlers and non-workers produce no wealth and take the greater share. They live on the labour of those who work. Nothing is produced by idleness; work must be done to obtain a thimble, a pin, and even a potato for dinner. The non-workers get the greater share of the wealth, and the greater part of this share is wasted. Therefore it is not good to have any people in the land who do not work. Only those who are old or sick should be kept by the toil of the rest."[227] Taking their figures from the pamphlet "Facts for Socialists," of which details have been given on pp. 41-48, the Independent Labour party states under the heading of "Wealth Makers and Wealth Takers": "The total incomes of persons in the United Kingdom amount in round figures to _1,800,000,000l._ How is this wealth distributed? 250,000 persons actually receive a total of _585,000,000l._--that is, one-thirtieth of the population receive one-third of the national income. Nearly the whole of these large incomes are unearned--_i.e._ they are made up of rents, interest, dividends, &c. This small class of rent and interest receivers perform no useful function. We may describe these people as social parasites, absolutely useless, yet levying toll to the extent of _6s. 8d._ in every _20s._ value of wealth created."[228] "At present more than _600,000,000l._ of the national income goes in the form of unearned rent and interest to support an idle class who spend it mainly on profitless and demoralising luxuries."[229] The foregoing extracts make it clear that, in the eyes of Socialists, practically all citizens, manual labourers excepted, are "drones and parasites." Directors, managers, doctors, chemists, ships' captains, teachers, &c., and even workmen of exceptional ability also, rob the general body of workers of half their wages and subsist only owing to the monopoly of property-holders who control the distribution of wealth. Upon these curious premisses are based the conclusions: "The profits and salaries of the class who share in the advantages of the monopoly of the instruments of production, or are endowed by Nature with any exceptional ability of high marketable value, amount according to the best estimate that can be formed, to about _460,000,000l._ annually, while out of a national income of some _1,800,000,000l._ a year the workers in the manual labour class--four-fifths of the whole population--obtain in wages not more than _690,000,000l._ It may be safely said that the workers from top to bottom of society pay a fine of one-half the wealth they produce to a parasitic class before providing for the maintenance of themselves and their proper dependents."[230] "It is this robbery and waste on the part of the minority which keeps the majority poor."[231] "So long as the instruments of production are in unrestrained private ownership, so long must the tribute of the workers to the drones continue, so long will the toiler's reward inevitably be reduced by their exactions."[232] "Socialism regards the capitalist proper not as a useful captain of industry, but as a mere share-holding, dividend-drawing parasite upon labour, and the Socialist party presses forward to his elimination from the field of production."[233] "The workers who have produced all this wealth only get a part--the smallest part at that--of the wealth they produce. Now we Socialists say that this wealth produced by the labour of the workers should belong to them, and not to the capitalists who produce nothing. Seeing that the interest of the worker is to get as much of this wealth, and on the other hand the capitalist wants as much of this wealth, as he can get, therefore we say that the interests of the workers and of the capitalists are not identical, but opposite."[234] "The interest of the working class can only be served even in the smallest degree by the curtailment of the power of the master class; that every material advance is useless except in so far as it helps to effect other achievements, and that the realisation of Labour politics, the well-being of the working class, can only be accomplished by its complete emancipation from capitalism."[235] In other words, the Socialist writers quoted agree in this: that the lot of the wage-earners can be improved only by taking the wealth from the rich. In order to introduce Socialism the present social order must be overturned. With this object in view they have addressed declarations of war to the owners of property. We owe to Marx not only the Class War doctrine, but also a declaration of war to the propertied class: "The Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. In all these movements they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time. Finally they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries. The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!"[236] Marx's disciples have issued similar declarations. For instance, in the official programme of the Social Democratic Federation we read: "The Social Democratic Federation is a militant Socialist organisation whose members, men and women, belong almost entirely to the working class. Its object is the realisation of Socialism, the emancipation of the working class from its present subjection to the capitalist class. To this end the Social Democratic Federation proclaims and preaches the Class War."[237] "There is no way in which the Class War can be avoided. You cannot have the reward of your labour and the idler have it too. There is just so much wealth produced every day. It may be more, it may be less; but there is always just so much, and the more the capitalist gets the less you will get, and _vice versa_. We preach the gospel of hatred, because in the circumstances it seems the only righteous thing we can preach. The talk about the 'Gospel of Love' is simply solemn rubbish. It is right to hate stealing, right to hate lying, it is right to hate meanness and uncleanness, right to hate hypocrisy, greed, and tyranny. Those who talk of the Gospel of Love with landlordism and capitalism for its objects want us to make our peace with iniquity."[238] "The Class War is inevitable under the present form of property-holding, and for it there can be neither truce, quarter, nor ending, save by the extinction of the class system itself. The identity of interests between capitalism and labour is a shibboleth that can only be given any sane meaning at all in the cynical sense that the interests of the wolf and the lamb are also 'identical' when the wolf has got the lamb inside him."[239] The doctrine of the Class War is a holy faith, the expropriation of property-owners is a divine task. "Unless we hate the system which prevents us from being what we otherwise might have been, we will not be able to strive against it with the patient, never-flagging zeal which our work, to be well done, requires. And to keep alive and undimmed this flame of hatred, divine not diabolical, we require to not only look around us, but especially to look back upon the world as it has been and to the example of those who have fought the good fight. To Socrates, to Savonarola, to John Ball, Wat the Tyler, and Jack Cade, in our land the first forerunners of Socialism; to Bruno and Vanini, to Cromwell, Milton, Hampden, and Pym, to John Eliot, Harry Vane; to Defoe, Mure, and Thomas Spence; to Ernest Jones, Bronterre O'Brien, and Robert Owen; to Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet; to Allen, Larkin, and O'Brien; to Vera Sassoulitch, Marie Spiridonova, Sophia Perovsky; to Karl Marx."[240] The company of reformers and revolutionists seems somewhat mixed. The doctrine that the interests of employers and employees are irreconcilably opposed, not identical, is false, Socialist rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding. As soon as a calamity threatens capital--for instance, a rise in raw cotton or a cotton famine--masters and men are seen to be in the same boat and devise combined measures for meeting the difficulty. The doctrine of the Class War is opposed to common experience and to common-sense. Let us now take note of the doctrine PRIVATE PROPERTY IS IMMORAL AND PRIVATE WEALTH IS A CRIME In the Class War right is, according to the Socialists, on the side of the propertyless. Not only are the owners of property objectionable in their persons, being "drones and parasites" who squander the earnings of the poor on riotous living, as we have learned in the foregoing pages, but private property as an institution is immoral in itself and ought to be abolished. No man has a right to be rich; no man can become rich honestly. Hence it follows that all rich men are robbers, thieves, and swindlers. "The poor owe no duty to the rich, unless it be the duty which an honest man owes to the thief who has robbed him. The rich have no right to any of their possessions, for there is but one right, and that is the right of the labourer to the fruits of his labour, and the rich do not labour. No man has any right to be rich. No man ever yet became rich by fair means. No man ever became rich by his own industry."[241] "No man or class of men made the first kind of wealth, such as land, minerals, and water. Therefore no man or class of men should be allowed to call these things their own."[242] As private property is immoral in itself, it is doubly immoral to lend out such property and to charge rent or interest for the use of it. Mr. G.J. Wardle, M.P., said, in a recent speech at Glasgow, that rent "was social immorality, and the State or society which allowed crimes of that kind to go on unpunished could never be a moral society. The same thing applied to interest on money. From the moral standpoint interest is unearned by the man who gets it, and it does not matter how that is cloaked over, that is the fact. Nowadays it was counted the greatest virtue to lend at so much per cent. That was a socially immoral proceeding, and because it was socially immoral it ate like a canker into the heart of society. As Socialists they objected to profit."[243] There are Socialists who preach the same doctrine of immorality and criminality of private property in more decided terms. They assert that it is criminal and immoral to make a profit as a compensation for the work of directing and taking heavy capital risks in productive business because such profits are opposed to the principle, "The labourer is entitled to the whole product of his labour" (see page 61). "A man has a 'right' to that which he has produced by the unaided exercise of his own faculties; but he has not a right to that which is not produced by his own unaided faculties; nor to the whole of that which has been produced by his faculties aided by the faculties of another man."[244] "Everyone who pockets gains without rendering an equivalent to society is a criminal. Every millionaire is a criminal. Every company-chairman with nominal duties, though his salary be but _400l._, is a criminal. Everyone who lends his neighbour _5l._ and exacts _5l. 5s. 0d._ in return, is a criminal."[245] "When Proudhon advanced the somewhat startling proposition, 'Property is theft,' he merely stated positively what good, orthodox Adam Smith, in his 'Wealth of Nations' set forth more urbanely when he wrote, 'The produce of labour (it is clear from the context that he meant the whole produce), is the natural recompense or wages of labour.'"[246] "'Property' is theft, said Proudhon, and surely private property in the means of production is not only theft, but the means of more theft."[247] Starting from the premiss that profit is immoral, the philosopher of British Socialism logically concludes: "The cheapest way of obtaining goods is not to pay for them, and if a buyer can avoid payment for the goods he obtains, he has quite as much right to do so as the seller has to receive for them double or treble their cost price and call it profit."[248] Private property being, according to the Socialist doctrines, immoral and criminal, it follows that "PRIVATE PROPERTY OUGHT TO BE ABOLISHED" Let us take note of an utterance in support of that doctrine: "If the life of men and women were a thing apart from that of their neighbours, there would be no need for a Socialist party nor any call for social reform. But man is not an entity; he is only part of a mighty social organism. Every act of his has a bearing upon the like of his fellow. It is difficult, if not impossible, to determine the moral title to private property in anything. Private property exists entirely on sufferance. Private property therefore cannot be justly allowed when it interferes with the law of our social life or intercepts the progress of social development."[249] Let us now consider the doctrine "COMPETITION SHOULD BE REPLACED BY CO-OPERATION" Socialists teach: "Under Socialism you would have all the people working together for the good of all. Under non-Socialism you have all the persons working separately (and mostly against each other), each for the good of himself. So we find Socialism means co-operation and non-Socialism means competition."[250] "Socialism is constructive as well as revolutionary, and Socialists propose to replace competition by co-operation."[251] The question now arises: "On what ground do capitalists defend the principle of competition? A. On the ground that it brings into play a man's best qualities.--Q. Does it effect this? A. This is occasionally its result, but it also brings out his worst qualities by stimulating him to struggle with his fellows for the relative improvement of his own position rather than for the absolute advancement of the interests of all."[252] "Apart altogether from its injustice, competitive capitalism, regarded as a system of serving the community, is a business bungle. What the party of the Fourth Estate objects to in the existing commercial and industrial system is, not merely the stealages which go on under the guise of rent, profit, and interest, but the enormous waste arising from lack of consolidation and co-operation in the processes of production and distribution."[253] "During the last half-century we have lost more by our 'business principle' of dividing up our national work into competing one-man and one-company speculations, and insisting on every separate speculation paying its own separate way, than by all the tariffs and blockades that have been set up against us."[254] "In our age there is, as we have seen, throughout our whole economic sphere, no social order at all. There is absolute social anarchy. Against this anarchy Socialism is a protest."[255] "There is only one remedy for both the waste and the stealages, and that is the substitution of public enterprise with organisation for private enterprise with competition."[256] "Socialism means the socialising of the means and instruments of production, distribution, and exchange. For the individual capitalist it would substitute, as the director and controller of production and distribution, the community in its organised capacity. The commercial and industrial chaos and waste which are the outcome of monopolistic competition would give place to the orderliness of associated effort, and under Socialism society would for the first time in history behave like an organism."[257] Private capitalism and consequent competition are responsible not only for waste and muddle, but also for the adulteration of food and other necessaries of life. "Every man who knows anything of trade knows how general is the knavish practice of adulteration. Now all adulteration is directly due to competition. Did not Mr. John Bright once say that adulteration is only another form of competition?"[258] There is much truth in the contention of the Socialists that co-operation is mightier, and often better, than free competition. However, that is no new discovery, and the introduction of Socialism is not needed to bring about co-operation. In Germany, Switzerland, and Denmark national and private co-operation are far more developed than in Great Britain, and waste, muddle, and stealages are rare in those countries, although none of these is ruled by a Socialist Government. Co-operation, national as well as private, is developing also in Great Britain, and it will continue to develop as its value becomes more and more understood. It is a curious fact that Socialists, though they recommend co-operation in the abstract, oppose it in the concrete for similar reasons. They fear that satisfied and prosperous co-operators will oppose Socialism.[259] The assertion that adulteration is due to competition is not founded upon fact. Adulteration springs from many causes, and would continue to flourish even under the Socialistic _régime_. If all cowkeepers were salaried officials of the Socialist State or municipality, they might nevertheless mix water with the milk to obtain milk for their own consumption and that of their families, and to diminish the labour of milking. Adulteration may be abolished by efficient supervision and well-devised and rigorously enforced sanitary laws. Let us now glance at the doctrine "THE SOCIALIST STATE WILL ARISE BY NATURAL DEVELOPMENT, AND IT WILL HANDLE BUSINESS MORE EFFICIENTLY THAN DO PRIVATE INDIVIDUALS" "The State now registers, inspects, and controls nearly all the industrial functions which it has not yet absorbed. The inspection is often detailed and rigidly enforced. The State, in most of the larger industrial operations, prescribes the age of the worker, the hours of work, the amount of air, light, cubic space, heat, lavatory accommodation, holidays, and meal-times; where, when, and how wages shall be paid; how machinery, staircases, lift-holes, mines, and quarries are to be fenced and guarded; how and when the plant shall be cleaned, repaired, and worked."[260] "Step by step political power and political organisation have been used for industrial ends, until a Minister of the Crown is the largest employer of labour in the country, and at least 200,000 men, not counting the army and navy, are directly in the service of the community, without the intervention of the profit of any middleman."[261] From the fact that the State inspects many things and carries on some business, it does not by any means follow that the State should inspect all things and could efficiently carry on all business. Questions such as "If the State can build battleships and make swords, why not also trading ships and ploughshares,"[262] are ridiculous. One might as well ask, "If Messrs. Whiteley or Marshall Field can supply furniture, houses, dresses, and funerals, being universal providers, why not also battleships, armies, and colonies?" It is also not true that the State or municipal corporations have more business ability than private business men. As an example of successful business management Socialists are fond of pointing to the Post Office, and of asserting that no private company could work as efficiently and as cheaply. These statements are erroneous. The success of the British Post Office, as of every post office, is due not to ability but to monopoly, as the following example will prove. Private individuals in Germany discovered some years ago a flaw in the legislation regarding the Post Office which enabled them to compete with the Imperial Post Office, not in postal business between different towns, but in local delivery. Private post offices sprang up in many towns and began to deliver letters at the rate of two pfennigs (one farthing) each. Although the German Post Office is the most efficient Post Office in Europe, it could not compete with these private post offices, and, after lengthy competition, steps had to be taken to extend the postal monopoly to town deliveries. The British Post Office, like most public offices, is a most conservative institution. Every progress and every reform had to be forced upon it by outside agitation. Services such as money delivery at private residences, cash on delivery parcels, &c., which other countries have enjoyed during several decades, are stubbornly denied to England. Private competition would probably have furnished these conveniences long ago. In London the Messenger Boy Company competes with the Post Office in the carrying of express letters, and various private carriers compete with it in delivering parcels, and in both instances the private trader supplies a better and cheaper service than the Government Post Office. A comparison of the Post Office telephone in England and the private telephone in America shows the great superiority of the latter. The slow and ultra-conservative British Post Office supplies no proof that the Government would handle production and distribution better than private enterprise. On the contrary. British Socialists claim unanimously that their theories and demands are founded upon science. "The Socialist doctrine systematises the industrial changes. It lays down a law of capitalist evolution. It describes the natural history of society. It is not, therefore, only a popular creed for the market-place, but a scientific inquiry for the study. Like every theory in Sociology, it has a political bearing, but it can be studied as much detached from politics as is Darwinism."[263] Do the fundamental doctrines of British Socialism bear out the claims of its champions? The foregoing pages prove that the scientific basis of Socialism, or rather of British Socialism, consists of a number of doctrines which cannot stand examination and which are disproved by daily experience and by common-sense. The question now suggests itself: "How is it that the British Socialists base their demands on pseudo-scientific doctrines of obvious absurdity?" British Socialism has been imported from Germany. Marx, Engels, Lassalle, Rodbertus, and various other Germans are the fathers of modern scientific Socialism. "To German scholars is largely due the development of Socialism from the Utopian stage to the scientific. Universality is its distinguishing feature."[264] "Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in 1847 laid, through the 'Communist Manifesto,' the scientific foundation of modern Socialism."[265] "And 'Capital,' Karl Marx's great work, has become the loadstar of modern economic science."[266] Karl Marx's "Manifesto" appeared in 1847; the first volume of his "Capital" was published in 1867. Since the appearance of the former sixty years, and since the publication of the latter forty years, have passed by. Much has changed in the world, but the Marxian doctrines have remained unchanged. The worst about speculative doctrines is that time is apt to disprove them. Whilst the German Socialists have thinkers in their ranks who have adapted the older Communist theories to present conditions, leaving out those theories which are palpably false, English Socialists have stood still and are satisfied to repeat those ancient doctrines which the Germans have abandoned long ago. English Socialists try to impose upon an uncritical public by parading the worn-out stage properties of the forties. Marx is to the vast majority of British Socialists still an oracle and the fountain head of all wisdom. "Marx is the Darwin of modern sociology."[267] "All over the world his brain is put on pretty much the same level as Aristotle's."[268] "Modern Socialism is based, nationally and internationally, theoretically and to a large extent practically, on the writings of Karl Marx. These writings have been expounded, and where necessary applied, extended, and amplified, to meet conditions which have developed since his death nearly a quarter of a century ago, in every civilised country. It is safe to say that no one who does not understand and accept in the main the views set forth by Marx, comprehends the real position of capitalist Society, nor, what is even more important, can fully master the problems of the coming time."[269] "The Social-Democratic Federation, which is by far the oldest and still the most active Socialist organisation in this country, bases its teaching to-day, as it has always done, upon the words of Karl Marx."[270] Most active Socialists in Great Britain think Marx and Lassalle infallible. It is true that the Fabian Society has pointed out "the necessity of maintaining as critical an attitude towards Marx and Lassalle, some of whose views must by this time be discarded as erroneous or obsolete,"[271] but that protest appears to have been left unheeded by most British Socialists. In fact, the abandonment of revolutionary Marxianism has caused the Fabians to be treated with open hostility by the other Socialist sections. The reasons for that hostility are obvious. The doctrines of Marx and Lassalle, though they are, to say the least, erroneous and obsolete, are admirably fitted to inflame the passions of the masses. Their doctrines may not be true, but they are useful to professional agitators. Independent Socialists in all countries have not disguised their opinion of Marx's "Capital," which, in the words of an English Socialist, "is not a treatise on Socialism; it is a jeremiad against the bourgeoisie, supported by such a mass of evidence and such a relentless Jewish genius for denunciation as had never been brought to bear before."[272] British Socialism is neither scientific nor sincere. Its leaders know that the Iron Law of Wages (see p. 53), the Law of Increasing Misery (see p. 56), and other doctrines, which are exceedingly useful to the agitator who wishes to poison the mind of the masses, have been thrown into the lumber room in Germany and most other countries (see the writings of Bernstein, Jaurès, and others), but they do not abandon them. Apparently it is their policy rather to create strife and confusion than to alleviate existing misery. That attitude must have covered English Socialists with ignominy in the eyes of foreign Socialists. The very humiliating treatment which the English Socialists received at the International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart of 1907 from their Continental comrades suggests that the curious attitude and the not very estimable tactics of British Socialists have not found the approval of their Continental colleagues. The doctrines of the English Socialists with regard to property are identical with those of most Anarchists (see Eltzbacher, "Der Anarchismus"). For instance, Proudhon taught: "We rob (1) by murder on the highway; (2) alone, or in a band; (3) by breaking into buildings, or scaling walls; (4) by abstraction; (5) by fraudulent bankruptcy; (6) by forgery of the handwriting of public officials, or private individuals; (7) by manufacture of counterfeit money; (8) by cheating; (9) by swindling; (10) by abuse of trust; (11) by games and lotteries; (12) by usury; (13) by farm rent, house rent, and leases of all kinds; (14) by commerce, when the profit of the merchant exceeds his legitimate salary; (15) by making profit on our product, by accepting sinecures, and by exacting exorbitant wages."[273] "What is property? It is robbery."[274] "Property, after having robbed the labourer by usury, murders him slowly by starvation."[275] Practically the identical doctrines are propounded by British Socialists. Further instances of the resemblance between Socialism and Anarchism will be found in Chapter XXX, "Socialism and Anarchism." Society is at present based upon individualism. In their anxiety to prove the failure of modern civilisation British Socialists deny that the world has progressed under individualism. "Not by individual selfishness, or national selfishness, has the progress of the human race been advanced."[276] And they boldly declare that all history, having been written by men of the dominant class, is a deception. "Are we then to understand that the whole of history, so far, has been written from the point of view of the dominant class of every age? Most assuredly so; and this applies to well-nigh the whole of the sources of past history."[277] The foregoing should suffice to make it clear that the Socialist agitation is not based on irrefutable scientific doctrines, as Socialists pretend, but on deception. It may be said that no agitation is free from deception, that the end justifies the means, that Socialism means for the best. We have been told "Socialism is a religion of humanity. Socialism is the only hope of the race. Socialism is the remedy--the only remedy--which Lord Salisbury could not find."[278] We must look into the practical proposals of British Socialism in order to be able to judge its character. FOOTNOTES: [151] _Facts for Socialists_, p. 3. [152] Hazell, _Summary of Marx's "Capital,"_ p. 1; Macdonald, _Socialism_, p. 54. [153] _Socialism made Plain_, p. 8. [154] Hobart, _Social-Democracy_, p. 7. [155] _Manifesto_, Socialist Party of Great Britain, p. 8. [156] _What Socialism Means_: Independent Labour Party Leaflet, No. 8, p. 3. [157] Debs, _Industrial Unionism_, p. 20. [158] Bliss, _Encyclopedia of Social Reform_, 1368. [159] _Ibid._ 807. [160] _Manifesto of the Communist Party_, p. 17. [161] Bax and Quelch, _A New Catechism of Socialism_, p. 15. [162] Blatchford, _Merrie England_, p. 163. [163] Quelch, _Economics of Labour_, p. 13. [164] Davidson, _The Old Order and the New_, p. 107. [165] Bax, _Outlooks from the New Standpoint_, p. 99. [166] _Socialist Standard_, December 1907. [167] Davidson, _The Old Order and the New_, p. 32. [168] Stegman und Hugo, _Handbuch_, p. 473. [169] _Christliche Arbeiterpflichten_, p. 15. [170] Webb, _Industrial Democracy_, p. 548. [171] Councillor Glyde, _A Peep behind the Scenes on a Board of Guardians_, p. 5. [172] Marx and Engels, _Manifesto of the Communist Party_, p. 12. [173] Marx, _Wage, Labour, and Capital_, pp. 23, 24. [174] Marx, _Wage, Labour, and Capital_, p. 22. [175] _English Progress towards Social-Democracy_, p. 12. [176] Keir Hardie, _From Serfdom to Socialism_, p. 99. [177] Marx and Engels, _Manifesto of the Communist Party_, p. 8. [178] _Ibid._ p. 16. [179] Hyndman, _Socialism and Slavery_, p. 12. [180] Sidney Webb, _The Difficulties of Individualism_, p. 9. [181] Ellis Barker, _Modern Germany_, p. 528. [182] Quelch, _Economics of Labour_, p. 18. [183] Davidson, _The Old Order and the New_, p. 3. [184] Bax and Quelch, _A New Catechism_, p. 15. [185] Sidney Webb, _The Difficulties of Individualism_, p. 19. [186] _Clarion_, November 29, 1907. [187] Hall, _The Old and New Unionism_, p. 5. [188] _Socialism and the Single Tax_, p. 6. [189] Blatchford, _Merrie England_, p. 189. [190] Gronlund, _Co-operative Commonwealth_, p. 86. [191] Kautsky, _The Social Revolution_, pp. 7, 8. [192] See _ante_ p. 10. [193] _Report on Fabian Policy_, p. 8. [194] See Chapter XXXIII. [195] Hall, _Land, Labour, and Liberty_, p. 5. [196] Jowett, _The Socialist and the City_, p. 66. [197] Gronlund, _Co-operative Commonwealth_, p. 86. [198] _Rich and Poor_, Introd. [199] Martyn, _Co-operation_, p. 3. [200] Lister, _Riches and Poverty_, p. 12. [201] Fisher, _The Babies' Tribute_, p. 16. [202] _Socialism and the Single Tax_, p. 7. [203] Kessack, _The Capitalist Wilderness and the Way Out_, p. 9. [204] Lafargue, _Right to Leisure_, p. 11. [205] Tillett, _Trades Unionism and Socialism_, p. 14. [206] Fisher, _The Babies' Tribute_, p. 16. [207] Davidson, _The Old Order and the New_, p. 67. [208] Gronlund, _Co-operative Commonwealth_, pp. 32, 33. [209] Social-Democratic Federation, _The Unemployed_, leaflet. [210] Smart, _The Right to Work_, p. 3. [211] Washington, _A Corner in Flesh and Blood_, p. 12. [212] _The Socialist Standard_, December 1907. [213] _Why Labour Men should be on Town Councils_, p. 2. [214] Marx, _Wage-Labour and Capital_, p. 12. [215] L'Auton, _The Nationalisation of Society_, p. 4. [216] Jaurès, _Studies in Socialism_, p. 1. [217] _Handbuch für Sozialdemokratische Wähler_, 1903, p. 233. [218] _Manifesto of the Socialist Party of Great Britain_, p. 7. [219] _The Socialist Standard_, December 1907. [220] Debs, _Industrial Unionism_, p. 4. [221] Morris, _Useful Work_ versus _Useless Toil_, pp. 22, 25. [222] _The Class War_, p. 1. [223] _Programme and Rules, Social-Democratic Federation._ [224] _Socialist Standard_, October 1, 1907. [225] Davidson, _The New Book of Kings_, p. 115. [226] Macdonald, _Socialism and Society_, pp. 111, 112. [227] _What Socialism Means_, p. 3. [228] _Wealth Makers and Wealth Takers_, p. 2. [229] _After Bread, Education_, p. 12. [230] _Capital and Land_, p. 13. [231] Morris, _Useful Work versus Useless Toil_, p. 26. [232] Sidney Webb, _The Difficulties of Individualism_, p. 8. [233] Leatham, _Was Jesus a Socialist?_ p. 4. [234] _The Socialist_, October 1907. [235] _The Socialist Annual_, 1907, p. 42. [236] Marx and Engels, _Manifesto_, pp. 30, 31. [237] Quelch, _The Social-Democratic Federation_, p. 1. [238] Leatham, _The Class War_, p. 10. [239] Hall, _The Old and the New Unionism_, p. 4. [240] Leatham, _The Class War_, p. 11. [241] Blatchford, _The Pope's Socialism_, p. 2. [242] _What Socialism Means_, p. 3. [243] _Forward_, November 23, 1907. [244] Blatchford, _Merrie England_, p. 58. [245] Gronlund, _Co-operative Commonwealth_, p. 166. [246] Davidson, _The Old Order and the New_, p. 4. [247] McClure, _Socialism_, p. 16. [248] Bax, _Outlooks from the New Standpoint_, p. 98. [249] Williams, _The Difficulties of Socialism_, pp. 3, 4. [250] Blatchford, _Real Socialism_, p. 11. [251] Hyndman, _Social-Democracy_, p. 24. [252] Joynes, _The Socialists' Catechism_, p. 13. [253] Leatham, _The Evolution of the Fourth Estate_, p. 3. [254] _Fabianism and the Fiscal Question_, p. 19. [255] Gronlund, _Co-operative Commonwealth_, p. 41. [256] Leatham, _The Evolution of the Fourth Estate_, p. 3. [257] Leatham, _Was Jesus a Socialist?_ p. 4. [258] Blatchford, _Competition_, p. 15. [259] See Chapters VII & XXIII. [260] _English Progress towards Social-Democracy_, p. 14. [261] _Ibid._ p. 13. [262] Keir Hardie, _From Serfdom to Socialism_, p. 15. [263] Macdonald, _Socialism_, p. 3. [264] McClure, _Socialism_, p. 13. [265] Kautsky, _The Class Struggle_, p. 24. [266] Kautsky, _The Socialist Republic_, p. 21. [267] Hyndman, _Historic Basis of Socialism_, p. 435. [268] _Justice_, October 12, 1907. [269] _Justice_, October 12, 1907. [270] _The Social Democrat_, November 1907, p. 676. [271] _Report on Fabian Policy_, 1896, p. 6. [272] G.B. Shaw, quoted in Jackson, _Bernard Shaw_, p. 100. [273] Proudhon, _What is Property?_ pp. 252-256. [274] _Ibid._ p. 37. [275] _Ibid._ p. 184. [276] Snowden, _The Christ that is to be_, p. 6. [277] Bax and Quelch, _A New Catechism of Socialism_, p. 32. [278] Blatchford, _What is this Socialism?_ p. 11. CHAPTER V THE AIMS AND POLICY OF THE SOCIALISTS Those people who formerly called themselves Communists now call themselves Socialists. Marx and Engels wrote in their celebrated "Manifesto": "The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property."[279] The policy of modern British Socialism may be summed up in the identical words. Indeed, we are told by one of its most eager champions that "The programme of Socialism consists essentially of one demand--that the land and other instruments of production shall be the common property of the people, and shall be used and governed by the people for the people."[280] "We suggest that the nation should own all the ships, all the railways, all the factories, all the buildings, all the land, and all the requisites of national life and defence."[281] According to the Socialist doctrines which have been given in Chapter IV, private property is the enemy of the workers. Therefore they quite logically demand that all private property must be abolished. "The problem has to be faced. Either we must submit for ever to hand over at least one-third of our annual product to those who do us the favour to own our country without the obligation of rendering any service to the community, and to see this tribute augment with every advance in our industry and numbers, or else we must take steps, as considerately as may be possible, to put an end to this state of things."[282] "The modern form of private property is simply a legal claim to take a share of the produce of the national industry year by year without working for it. Socialism involves discontinuance of the payment of these incomes and addition of the wealth so saved to incomes derived from labour. The economic problem of Socialism is thus solved."[283] A general division of the existing private property among all the people is not intended, because it is considered to be impracticable. "Socialism does not consist in violently seizing upon the property of the rich and sharing it out amongst the poor."[284] "Plans for a national 'dividing up' are not Socialism. They are nonsense. 'Dividing up' means individual ownership. Socialism means collective ownership."[285] "It is obvious that, in the present stage of economic development, individual ownership is impossible. All the great means of production are collectively owned now. Individual liberty based upon individual property is therefore out of the question, and the emancipation of the working class can only be achieved in social freedom, based upon social property, through the transformation of privately owned collective property into publicly owned collective property."[286] Starting from these premisses, the Socialists arrive at the demand that "all the means of production and distribution, all the machinery, all the buildings, everything that is necessary to provide the fundamental necessaries of life, must be common property."[287] "We want all the instruments for the purposes of trade to be the property of the State. With that will have come at the same time the abolition of power permitting any individual to exact rent or interest for the loan of land or of the implements of production. The abolition of all private property will mean the extinction of the parasite."[288] "The overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth, by and in the interest of the whole community: That is Socialism."[289] "The Fabian Society aims at the reorganisation of society by the emancipation of land and industrial capital from individual and class ownership, and the vesting of them in the community for the general benefit. The Society accordingly works for the extinction of private property in land, and of the consequent individual appropriation, in the form of rent, of the price paid for permission to use the earth, as well as for the advantages of superior soils and sites. The Society, further, works for the transfer to the community of the administration of such industrial capital as can conveniently be managed socially."[290] "Here in plain words is the principle, or root idea, on which all Socialists agree--that the country and everything in the country shall belong to the whole people (the nation), and shall be used by the people and for the people. That principle, the root idea of Socialism, means two things: (1) That the land, and all the machines, tools, and buildings used in making needful things, together with all the canals, rivers, roads, railways, ships, and trains used in moving, sharing (distributing) needful things, and all the shops, markets, scales, weights, and money used in selling or dividing needful things, shall be the property of (belong to) the whole people (the nation). (2) That the land, tools, machines, trains, rivers, shops, scales, money, and all the other things belonging to the people, shall be worked, managed, divided, and used by the whole people, in such way as the greater number of the whole people shall deem best."[291] A perusal of the party programmes and other Socialist documents contained in the Appendix will show that the abolition of all private property, and its transference to the State, is the aim of all the Socialist organisations and parties, and no further extracts need be given in order to prove the unanimity of the Socialists on this point. The question now arises: How is this transference of all private property to the State to be effected? Will the present holders of property be fully compensated, partly compensated, or not compensated at all? Do the Socialists aim at purchase or at confiscation of existing private property. Will they respect existing rights, or are they bent upon open or more or less disguised spoliation? It is, unfortunately, very difficult to obtain a plain and straightforward answer upon this important point. Instead of giving this answer, British Socialists loudly protest that it is not their aim to destroy or abolish property. As nobody has suspected the Socialists to be foolish enough to abolish or destroy property--which means the instruments of production, such as factories, machines, railways, &c., by the use of which the people live, and thus bring starvation upon themselves--their eagerness to explain that they do not intend to abolish or destroy property can only be explained by the surmise that they hope shallow simpletons will say, "The Socialists have no intention to take our capital away from us by force and without compensation, for they have declared that they do not intend to abolish property." A few of these declarations should here be given: "So far from abolishing property, Socialism desires to establish it upon the only basis which makes property secure--that of service, of creative service."[292] "Socialism does not propose to abolish land or capital. Only a genius could have thought of this as an objection to Socialism."[293] "Socialism is far from aiming at the destruction of private property. Its object is to increase private property amongst those whose property is so limited that they have a difficulty in keeping themselves alive."[294] Another Socialist makes the very irrelevant and unnecessary observation: "It is a firm principle of Socialism never to interfere with personal property in order to investigate its origin or to arrange it in a different way. Never and nowhere! And whoever asserts to the contrary either does not know the principles of Socialism or willingly and knowingly asserts an untruth. The Socialists deem an investigation into the origin of an acknowledged personal property an unnecessary trouble. They consider the personal property an accomplished fact and respect it: so much so, that they consider stealing a crime."[295] Mr. Blatchford informs us, "We do not propose to seize anything. We do propose to get some things and to make them the property of the whole nation by Act of Parliament or by purchase."[296] As regards the question whether compensation or no compensation will be given, our Socialist leaders give us very vague and unsatisfactory replies, which rather contain highly respectable but perfectly irrelevant commonplaces than definite proposals. Most Socialists will answer the plain question of confiscation or no confiscation with a quibble or a conundrum, as the following examples will show: "One view of Socialism is that it is a scheme of confiscation of property from one class to give it to another class--that Socialists are Dick Turpins made respectable by using Acts of Parliament instead of pistols. Now the real fact is that the Socialist has come to put an end to Dick Turpin methods. Socialism is a rational criticism of our present methods of production and distribution. It desires to say to the possessors: Show us by what title you possess; and it proposes to pass its judgments upon the axiom that whoever renders service to society should be able to have some appropriate share in the national wealth."[297] In other words, an inquisitorial tribunal with arbitrary powers would be empowered to confiscate at will. "Socialism is not a plan to despoil the rich: it is a plan to stop the rich from despoiling the poor. Socialism is not a thief; it is a policeman."[298] "Do any say we attack private property? We deny it. We attack only that private property for a few thousand loiterers and slave-drivers which renders all property in the fruits of their own labour impossible for millions. We challenge that private property which renders poverty at once a necessity and a crime."[299] "Socialism would not rob anyone. It would distinguish between the lawful possessor and the rightful possessor, and it would compel the 'lawful' possessor to restore to the rightful possessor the property of which he had robbed him."[300] "We do not propose to rob the rich man of his wealth; we deny that it is his wealth. Wealth is a social product, and therefore belongs to society. It is not an act of brigandage to demand that society shall own and use what society has created."[301] Some Socialists consider the question of compensation or no compensation as one of very minor importance. "The question of compensation need not greatly worry us. Socialists hold that plutocrats owe all their wealth to society; and therefore that society has the right at any moment to take it back."[302] The more cautious and moderate French and German Socialists are apt to promise compensation in terms such as the following: "We declare expressly that it is the duty of the State to give to those whose interests will be damaged by the necessary abolition of laws which are detrimental to the common interest compensation as far as it is possible and consistent with the interests of all."[303] It will be observed that the plain word compensation is circumscribed by the phrase, "compensation as far as it is possible and consistent with the interests of all." In other and plainer words, compensation is to be arbitrarily given, and its proportion to the property acquired is apparently to be determined not by its value or by fairness and equity, but by the will of those who may be in power. English Socialists, on the other hand, are apt to recommend a far more drastic treatment of property-owners. "We claim that land in country and land in towns, mines, parks, mountains, moors, should be owned by the people for the people, to be held, used, built over, and cultivated upon such terms as the people themselves see fit to ordain. The handful of marauders who now hold possession have, and can have, no right save brute force against the tens of millions whom they wrong."[304] The most moderate school of British Socialism, the Fabian Society, favours in its statement of policy given under the heading "Basis of the Fabian Society" the expropriation of all private capital "without compensation, though not without such relief to expropriated individuals as may seem fit to the community." In other words, expropriated property-owners may, or may not, be given something to protect them from starvation, not as a matter of right, but of charity. Most Socialists who favour compensation recommend that it should be given only in the form of consumable articles such as food, clothes, &c., or in bonds which are changeable only into consumable articles. "Rothschild will be paid in bread and meat and luxury and wine and theatre tickets."[305] "When capitalistic property shall have been socialised, the holders of compensation deeds will not be able to purchase either fresh means of production or producers; they will only be able to buy products."[306] Some Socialists suggest that the bonds given in exchange for property acquired by the State might be cancelled later on. The property-owners could be deprived of their possessions without any difficulty, either gradually by taxation or at one blow by confiscation at the option of the men in power. "When the entire capitalistic property takes the form of State bonds, the property which it is impossible to ascertain to-day would then be known to everybody. It would only be necessary to decree that all bonds are to be registered in the name of the owner, and it would be possible to estimate exactly the capitalist income and the property of everyone. It would then also be possible to screw up the taxes to any extent without fear of their being evaded by any concealments. It would then be also impossible to escape them by emigration, since it is the public institutions of the country, and in the first place the State, from which all interest comes, and the latter can deduct the tax from the interest before it is paid out. Under these circumstances it would be possible to raise the progressive income and property tax as high as necessary--if necessary as high as would come very near, if not actually amount to, confiscation of the large property."[307] The foregoing is a simple plan of swindling property-owners out of their holdings. Some of the more moderate Socialists argue: "There is much to be said in favour of the liberal treatment of the present generation of proprietors and even of their children. But against the permanent welfare of the community the unborn have no rights."[308] On the other hand, Bax, the philosopher of British Socialism, quite logically and honestly states that the idea of compensation has no room in the Socialist code of ethics, that the bourgeois idea of compensation on grounds of justice is irreconcilable with the Socialist conception of justice. He says: "Between possession and confiscation is a great gulf fixed, the gulf between the bourgeois and the Socialist worlds. Well-meaning men seek to throw bridges over this gulf by schemes of compensation, abolition of inheritance, and the like. But the attempts, as we believe, even should they ever be carried out practically, must fall disastrously short of their mark and be speedily engulfed between the two positions they are intended to unite. Nowhere can the phrase 'He that is not for us is against us' be more aptly applied than to the moral standpoint of modern individualism and of modern Socialism. To the one, individual possession is right and justice, and social confiscation is wrong and injustice; to the other, individual possession is wrong and injustice, and confiscation is right and justice. This is the real issue. Unless a man accept the last-named standpoint unreservedly, he has no right to call himself a Socialist. If he does accept it, he will seek the shortest and most direct road to the attainment of justice rather than any longer and more indirect ones, of which it is at best doubtful whether they will attain the end at all. For be it remembered the moment you tamper with the sacredness of private property, no matter how mildly, you surrender the conventional bourgeois principle of justice, while the moment you talk of compensation you surrender the Socialist principle of justice, for compensation can only be real if it is adequate, and can only be adequate if it counterbalances, and thereby annuls, the confiscation. It is just, says the individualist, for a man to be able to do what he likes with his own. Good; but what is his own?"[309] "The great act of confiscation will be the seal of the new era; then and not till then will the knell of civilisation, with its rights of property and its class society, be sounded; then, and not till then, will justice--the justice not of civilisation but of Socialism--become the corner-stone of the social arch."[310] I think the straightforwardness of Bax is preferable to the crooked and insincere explanations and proposals of the British and foreign Socialist given in the foregoing. Bax's opinion is irrefutable. According to the doctrines of Socialism given in Chapter IV., labour is the source of all wealth; the greater part of the products of that labour is dishonestly abstracted from the labourer by the capitalist class, which has converted the result of that labour into property. Hence Socialists think with Proudhon, and they very often openly declare, that property is theft. Capitalist society will not compensate the thief when taking from him his booty. Socialism will not compensate property-owners when taking away their property. Besides, compensation would be utterly opposed to the root idea of Socialist justice. At present expropriation without indemnity is called theft, but it would not be called theft under a Socialist _régime_. The chapter on "Law and Justice under Socialism" will make that quite clear. Socialism teaches that no man is entitled to anything except that which he has made himself. "No man has a right to call anything his own but that which he himself has made. Now, no man makes the land. The land is not created by labour, but it is the gift of God to all. The earth belongs to the people. For the nonce please take the statement on the authority of Herbert Spencer, All men 'have equal rights to the use of the earth.' So that he who possesses land possesses that to which he has no right, and he who invests his savings in land becomes a purchaser of stolen property."[311] "No man made the land, and laws and lawyers notwithstanding no man has any moral right before God to call a solitary strip of God's earth his than has the burglar to call his stolen goods his personal property. It is therefore evident that the bite named 'rent' given to landlords for permission to live upon and use God's free gift to man is as much the fruit of robbery, the spoil of plunder, as is the result of a burglar's night's marauding, a common pickpocket's day's 'takings.'"[312] Capital is in the same position as land, for "Land and capital are indistinguishable."[313] The more honest Socialists agree with Bax that compensation for property acquired would be inadvisable and impracticable. "In a pamphlet called 'Collectivism and Revolution' M. Jules Guesde said, 'Expropriation with indemnity is a chimera. And whatever regret one may feel, however difficult may appear to peaceful natures the last method, we have no other way than to retake violently that which belongs to all, by--let us say the word--the Revolution.' He added, 'Capital which it is necessary to take from individuals, such as the land, is not of human creation; it is anterior to man, for whom it is a _sine qua non_ of existence. It cannot therefore belong to some to the exclusion of others, without the others being robbed. And to make the robbers deliver up, to oblige them to restore in any and every way is not so much a right as a duty, the most sacred of duties."[314] A respected English Socialist says bluntly, "How to secure the swag to the workers is the problem."[315] A Christian Socialist clergyman sarcastically proposes: "If you are a Christian and love your rich neighbour as yourself, you will do all you can to help him to become poorer. For if you believe in the Gospel, you know that to be rich is the very worst thing that can happen to a man. That if a man is rich, it is with the greatest difficulty that he can be saved; for 'it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God' (Mark x. 25). This is startling now, but it was not less strange and startling to the disciples who 'were astonished out of measure, saying among themselves, Who then can be saved?' But the needle's eye has not grown any larger since then, and the camels certainly have not grown smaller! All true Christians then must desire to relieve the rich man of his excess for his own sake, since the inequality that ruins the body of Lazarus ruins the soul of Dives; and Dives is the more miserable of the two, because the soul is more precious than the body."[316] The abolition of private property requires also the abolition of the right of inheritance, as otherwise capital might again be accumulated in the hands of the thrifty and the enterprising. Therefore the manifesto of Marx and Engels already demands the "abolition of all right of inheritance."[317] Other Socialists say that this right should not be abolished. "Socialists used to insist upon the abolition of the right of inheritance and bequest. But if what I gain by my own labour is rightfully my property--and the Co-operative Commonwealth will, as we have seen, declare it to be so--it will be inexpedient in that Commonwealth to destroy any of the essential qualities of propertyship; and I can hardly call that my property which I may not give to whom I please at my death. No man in a Co-operative Commonwealth could acquire so much more wealth than his fellows as to make him dangerous to them."[318] "Socialists do not object to property; they are not opposed to private property. They are therefore not opposed to inheritance. The right to acquire and hold involves the right to dispose by will or by gift. We only object to such a use of property as enables classes for generation after generation to live on the proceeds of other people's labour without doing any useful service to society."[319] This very diplomatic sentence may be explained in a variety of ways. Probably it means that holders of property of large size could summarily be deprived of their possessions by order of the Government, as has been indicated by that writer in another passage (see page 97). Such a power would make the right to hold and to bequeath property a farce. Property could be held then only on the same terms on which, I believe, it is held by Central African negroes. Another Socialist states, "If I am entitled to what I produce, then it follows that I am entitled to dispose of all that I produce;" and then denies the right to personal property by continuing: "The Socialists say, 'Not thine or mine, but ours.'"[320] It would be only logical that the Socialist State, after abolishing private property by following the principle "not thine but ours," should not allow its re-creation and re-accumulation. "This pernicious right (wrong) of inheritance must be abolished. It is the means by which the 'classes' perpetuate their robbery of the 'masses' from generation to generation and age to age. The disinherited would of course have the community to look to for sound education in youth, suitable employment in years of maturity, generous pension in old age, &c., and to what else can any rational human being lay just claim?"[321] Some Socialists argue that in the Socialist State "there will be nothing to bequeath, unless we choose to regard household furniture as a legacy of any importance. This settles the question of the right of inheritance, which Socialism will have no need to abolish formally."[322] "Socialism condemns as reactionary and immoral all that tends to the debasement of humanity. It condemns our industrial and commercial system as a degrading system--degrading both to the few who amass wealth and to the many who by their labour enable the few to lay up riches. It is degrading to those who rob and to those who are robbed; to those who cheat and to those who are cheated; to those who swim and to those who sink; to those who revel in luxury and to those who, barely sustaining their own lives, are compelled by their toil to supply luxuries for others to enjoy."[323] Therefore Socialism means to abolish the present system root and branch, and the most straightforward Socialists are frankly in favour of the most thorough measures for abolishing private property. Children and poets proverbially speak the truth. Let us see what the Socialist poets think of the expropriation of property-owners. Some of the poets tell the workers that the labourers not only produce all the wealth, but are also all-powerful, and, if they wish to, they can do what they like with the country. Shall you complain who feed the world-- Who clothe the world, who house the world? Shall you complain who are the world Of what the world may do? As from this hour you use your power, The world must follow you. As from this hour you use your power. The world must follow you.[324] Others remind them of their grievances, and urge them to drive the rich man out of the country: Think on the wrongs ye bear, Think on the rags ye wear, Think on the insults endured from your birth; Toiling in snow and rain, Bearing up heaps of gain, All for the tyrants who grind ye to earth. Your brains are as keen as the brains of your masters. In swiftness and strength ye surpass them by far, Ye've brave hearts that teach ye to laugh at disasters, Ye vastly outnumber your tyrants in war. Why, then, like cowards stand. Using not brain or hand, Thankful, like dogs, when they throw ye a bone? What right have they to take Things that ye toil to make? Know ye not, boobies, that all is your own?[325] Arise, unite each scattered band, To sweep all masters from our land, Then shall each mine and loom and field Its produce to the workers yield.[326] Others, again, urge the workers to seize all property and to make the rich man work for them. They're never done extolling The nobility of work; But the knaves! they always take good care Their share of toil to shirk. Do they send their sons and daughters, To the workshop or the mill? Oh! we'll turn things upside down, my lads; It will change their tune, it will![327] We'll drive the robbers from our lands, our meadows and our hills; We'll drive them from our warehouses, our workshops and our mills; We'll make them fare upon their bonds, their bankbooks and their bills, As we go marching to liberty.[328] Some Socialists believe that they will come to power suddenly and by violence, and abolish private capital at a stroke. Others are inclined to think that they will only gradually abolish it. Karl Marx was of the latter opinion. Therefore he wrote in his "Manifesto": "The first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State--_i.e._ of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible. Of course in the beginning this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property and on the conditions of bourgeois production: by means of measures therefore which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which in the course of the movement outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production. These measures will of course be different in different countries. Nevertheless in the most advanced countries the following will be pretty generally applicable: 1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. 2. A heavy progressive or graduated income-tax. 3. Abolition of all right of inheritance. 4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. 5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly. 6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State. 7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. 8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. 9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country. 10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c."[329] Marx's programme has served as a model to the English Socialists, as the following demands of some of our Socialists will show: "The things you will be working for will be something like this. Shorter hours is the first thing, then a tax on landlords, then abolition of the House of Lords and the Monarchy, then more Home-Rule and more Local Government, then extension of municipal operations, the socialisation of coal stores, dairy farms, bakeries, laundries, public-houses, cab-hiring, the slaughter of cattle and the sale of butcher meat, the building and letting of houses--in short, the taking over by the local bodies of as many departments of production and distribution as need be. By this time the Class War will be shaping for a last great engagement."[330] "As stepping stones to a happier period we urge for immediate adoption: The compulsory construction of healthy artisans' and agricultural labourers' dwellings in proportion to the population, such dwellings to be let at rents to cover the cost of construction and maintenance alone. Free compulsory education for all classes, together with the provision of at least one wholesome meal a day in each school. Eight hours or less to be the normal working day in all trades. Cumulative taxation upon all incomes above a fixed minimum not exceeding _500l._ a year. State appropriation of railways with or without compensation. The establishment of national banks which shall absorb all private institutions that derive a profit from operations in money or credit. Rapid extinction of the National Debt. Nationalisation of the land and organisation of agricultural and industrial armies under State control on co-operative principles. By these measures a healthy, independent, and thoroughly educated people will steadily grow up around us, ready to abandon that baneful competition for starvation wages which ruins our present workers, ready to organise the labour of each for the benefit of all, determined, too, to take control finally of the entire social and political machinery of a State in which class distinctions and class privileges shall cease to be."[331] The Social-Democratic Federation demands the following immediate reforms: "The socialisation of the means of production, distribution, and exchange to be controlled by a democratic State in the interests of the entire community, and the complete emancipation of labour from the domination of capitalism and landlordism with the establishment of social and economic equality between the sexes. Abolition of the Monarchy. Democratisation of the governmental machinery, viz. abolition of the House of Lords, payment of members of legislative and administrative bodies, payment of official expenses of elections out of the public funds, adult suffrage, proportional representation, triennial Parliaments, second ballot, initiative and referendum. Foreigners to be granted rights of citizenship after two years' residence in the country, on the recommendation of four British-born citizens, without any fee. Canvassing to be made illegal. Legislation by the people in such wise that no legislative proposal shall become law until ratified by the majority of the people. Legislative and administrative independence for all parts of the empire. "Repudiation of the National Debt. Abolition of all indirect taxation and the institution of a cumulative tax on all incomes and inheritances exceeding _300l._ "Extension of the principle of local self-government. Systematisation and co-ordination of the local administrative bodies. Election of all administrators and administrative bodies by equal direct adult suffrage. "Elementary education to be free, secular, industrial, and compulsory for all classes. The age of obligatory school attendance to be raised to sixteen. Unification and systematisation of intermediate and higher education, both general and technical, and all such education to be free. Free maintenance for all attending State schools. Abolition of school rates, the cost of education in all State schools to be borne by the National Exchequer. "Nationalisation of the land and the organisation of labour in agriculture and industry under public ownership and control on co-operative principles. Nationalisation of the trusts, of railways, docks, and canals, and all great means of transit. Public ownership and control of gas, electric light, and water-supplies, tramway, omnibus, and other locomotive services, and of the food and coal supply. The establishment of State and municipal banks and pawnshops and public restaurants. Public ownership and control of the lifeboat service, of hospitals, dispensaries, cemeteries and crematoria, and control of the drink traffic. "A legislative eight-hour working day or forty-eight hours per week to be the maximum for all trades and industries. Imprisonment to be inflicted on employers for any infringement of the law. Absolute freedom of combination for all workers, with legal guarantee against any action, private or public, which tends to curtail or infringe it. No child to be employed in any trade or occupation until sixteen years of age, and imprisonment to be inflicted on employers, parents, and guardians who infringe this law. Public provision of useful work at not less than trade-union rates of wages for the unemployed. Free State insurance against sickness and accident, and free and adequate State pensions or provision for aged and disabled workers. Public assistance not to entail any forfeiture of political rights. The legislative enactment of a minimum wage of _30s._ for all workers. Equal pay for both sexes for the performance of equal work. "Abolition of the present workhouse system, and reformed administration of the Poor Law on a basis of national co-operation. Compulsory construction by public bodies of healthy dwellings for the people, such dwellings to be let at rents to cover the cost of construction and maintenance alone, and not to cover the cost of the land. The administration of justice to be free to all; the establishment of public offices where legal advice can be obtained free of charge."[332] Mr. Blatchford suggests the following: "The public maintenance and the public education of children. The public provision of work for all. The taxation of the land and of all large incomes. The confiscation of unearned increment. Old-age pensions. The minimum wage. Compulsory land cultivation. Universal adult suffrage. The second ballot. The payment of election expenses. The nationalisation of the railways and of the land. The nationalisation or municipalisation of trams, gas, water, bread, liquor, milk, coal, and many other things. The abolition of hereditary titles and of the House of Lords."[333] The general policy which the Socialists should follow was summed up by Marx in the following way. "The Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things."[334] "Socialism is the only hope of the workers. All else is illusion. Workers of all lands, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to win."[335] "This is the final struggle. The extinction of classes must follow the overthrow of the last form of class domination and the emancipation of the last class to be set free. Rally then, fellow workers, to the standard of the international class-conscious proletariat, the Red Flag of Social-Democracy. 'Workers of all countries, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains, you have a world to win!'"[336] "The land of England is no mean heritage."[337] "What has hitherto prevented the workers from combining for the overthrow of the capitalist system? A. Ignorance and disorganisation.--Q. What has left them in ignorance? A. The system itself, by compelling them to spend all their lives upon monotonous toil and leaving them no time for education.--Q. What account have they been given of the system which oppresses them? A. The priest has explained that the perpetual presence of the poor is necessitated by a law of God; the economist has proved its necessity by a law of Nature; and between them they have succeeded in convincing the labourers of the hopelessness of any opposition to the capitalist system.--Q. How is it that the labourers cannot see for themselves that they are legally robbed? A. Because the present method of extracting their surplus value is one of fraud rather than of force, and has grown gradually."[338] The philosopher of British Socialism well sums up the aims and policy of the Socialists. He says: "What is vital in Socialism? In the first line, I take it, come "1. The collectivisation of _all_ the instruments of production by _any_ effective means; "2. The doctrine of the Class War as the general historical method of realising the new form of society; "3. The principle of internationalism, the recognition, _i.e._ that distinction of nationality sinks into nothingness before the idea of the union of all progressive races in the effort to realise the ideal of true society as understood by the Social-Democratic Party; "4. The utmost freedom of physical, moral, and intellectual development for each and all consistent with the necessities of an organised social State. "The Socialist's adhesion to the doctrine of the Class War involves his opposition to all measures subserving the interest of any section of capitalism. This coupled with his 'Internationalism' leaves him no choice but to be the enemy of 'his country' and the friend of his country's enemies whenever 'his country' (which means of course the dominant classes of his country, who always are for that matter his enemies) plays the game of the capitalist. Let us have no humbug! The man who cannot on occasion be (if needs be) the declared and active enemy of that doubtful entity, 'his country,' is no Social Democrat."[339] "Justice being henceforth identified with confiscation, and injustice with the right of property, there remains only the question of 'ways and means.' Our bourgeois apologist, admitting as he must that the present possessors of land and capital hold possession of them simply by right of superior force, can hardly refuse to admit the right of the proletariat organised to that end to take possession of them by right of superior force. The only question remaining is, How? And the only answer is, How you can."[340] FOOTNOTES: [279] Page 17. [280] Blatchford, _Merrie England_, p. 100. [281] _Clarion_, October 11, 1907. [282] Sidney Webb, _The Difficulties of Individualism_, p. 10. [283] _Fabian Essays in Socialism_, pp. 26, 27. [284] Blatchford, _Merrie England_, p. 99. [285] Blatchford, _What is this Socialism?_ p. 1. [286] _Socialist Annual_, 1907, p. 39. [287] Kirtlan, _Socialism for Christians_, p. 15. [288] Tillett, _Trades Unionism and Socialism_, p. 12. [289] _Manifesto of the Socialist Party of Great Britain_, p. 9. [290] _Basis of the Fabian Society._ [291] Blatchford, _Real Socialism_, p. 10. [292] Macdonald, _Socialism_, p. 103. [293] Keir Hardie, _From Serfdom to Socialism_, p. 11. [294] Ethel Snowden, _The Woman Socialist_, p. 3. [295] Sorge, _Socialism and the Worker_, p. 9. [296] Blatchford, _Real Socialism_, p. 3. [297] Macdonald, _Socialism_, p. 103. [298] Blatchford, _What is this Socialism?_ p. 2. [299] _Socialism made Plain_, p. 10. [300] Blatchford, _The Pope's Socialism_, p. 3. [301] Hobart, _Social-Democracy_, p. 7. [302] Gronlund, _Co-operative Commonwealth_, p. 94. [303] Jaurès, _Practical Socialism_, p. 3. [304] _Socialism Made Plain_, p. 8. [305] Gronlund, _Co-operative Commonwealth_, p. 105. [306] Jaurès, _Practical Socialism_, p. 5. [307] Kautsky, _The Social Revolution_, p. 10. [308] Sidney Webb, _The Difficulties of Individualism_, p. 10. [309] Bax, _The Ethics of Socialism_, pp. 75, 76. [310] _Ibid._ p. 83. [311] Blatchford, _The Pope's Socialism_, p. 6. [312] Muse, _Poverty and Drunkenness_, p. 9. [313] _Facts for Socialists_, p. 7. [314] Guyot, _Pretensions of Socialism_, p. 16. [315] Davidson, _The Old Order and the New_, p. 9. [316] Dearmer, _Socialism and Christianity_, pp. 17, 18. [317] Marx and Engels, _Manifesto_, p. 22. [318] Gronlund, _Co-operative Commonwealth_, p 105. [319] Macdonald, _Socialism_, p. 105. [320] _Socialism, For and Against_, p. 9. [321] Davidson, _The Old Order and the New_, p. 158. [322] Bebel, _Woman_, pp. 231, 232. [323] "Veritas," _Did Jesus Christ teach Socialism?_ p. 2. [324] _Social-Democratic Federation Song Book_, p. 56. [325] _Ibid._ p. 30. [326] _Independent Labour Party Song Book_, p. 33. [327] _Social-Democratic Federation Song Book_, p. 43 [328] _Independent Labour Party Song Book_, p. 7. [329] Marx and Engels, _Manifesto_, pp. 21, 22. [330] Leatham, _The Class War_, pp. 13, 14. [331] _Socialism Made Plain_, p. 10. [332] Programme, _Social-Democratic Federation_. [333] _Clarion_, October 18, 1907. [334] Marx and Engels, _Manifesto_, p. 30. [335] _Motto of The Socialist_, weekly, taken from Marx and Engels' _Manifesto_. [336] _The Class War_, p. 2. [337] _Socialism Made Plain_, p. 10. [338] Joynes, _The Socialist Catechism_, p. 5. [339] Bax, _Essays in Socialism_, pp. 101, 102. [340] Bax, _Ethics of Socialism_, p. 82. CHAPTER VI THE ATTITUDE OF SOCIALISTS TOWARDS THE WORKING MASSES Before investigating the attitude of British Socialism towards the working masses, it is necessary to take note of its doctrines regarding work. Most thinkers, from the time of King Solomon, Socrates, and Confucius down to the present age, have seen in work conscientiously performed a blessing; many, probably most, British Socialists declare it to be a curse and a vice. The leading English philosopher of Socialism, for instance, tells us: "To the Socialist labour is an evil to be minimised to the utmost. The man who works at his trade or avocation more than necessity compels him, or who accumulates more than he can enjoy, is not a hero but a fool from the Socialists' standpoint."[341] A leading French Socialist informs us: "Through listening to the fallacious utterances of the middle-class economists, the workers have delivered themselves body and soul to the vice of work."[342] When Mr. Victor Grayson, M.P., a Socialist, in a speech ventured to refer to work as "one of the greatest blessings and privileges ever conferred on humanity," one of the Socialist papers wrote: "Victor Grayson is simply an agent of the capitalist class. Is Mr. Victor Grayson, M.P., trying to allure the capitalist class by picturing work as a blessing, or is he trying to get the worker to look upon work through a rosy mist conjured from the brains of the capitalist's agent who is saturated with capitalist philosophy? It is time the Beatitudes were extended or revised. How would this do?--'Blessed is the worker who works (for the capitalist), for he shall inherit the kingdom (of starvation and misery under capitalism).' 'Blessed is work in itself, because it enables (the capitalist) to live in peace and happiness.' Since work is a blessing, it follows that whatever saves work is a curse. All the beautiful machinery which the working class have shed their life blood to produce, to develop which an army of them have been sacrificed under capitalism by the capitalists; this which the workers of ages and ages have contributed their mite towards; have laboured long and suffered silently to create; this is an evil!!!"[343] British Socialists do their utmost to convert the workers into shirkers by teaching them not only that work is an evil in itself, but by constantly admonishing them, "on scientific grounds," to work as little as possible during the time they are employed. "It is the interest of the employer to get as much work out of his hands as possible for as little wages as possible. It is the interest of the workers to get as high a wage as possible for as little labour as possible."[344] "The workers have been taught by the practical economists of the trade-unions, and have learnt for themselves by bitter experience, that every time any of them in a moment of ambition or good will does one stroke of work not in his bond, he is increasing the future unpaid labour not only of himself, but of his fellows."[345] The Independent Labour Party has issued a leaflet entitled "Are you a Socialist?" in which the question occurs, "Do you believe that every individual should have sufficient leisure to cultivate his higher faculties and enjoy life to the fullest extent?" and the answer is, "If you say 'Yes,' join the Independent Labour Party and help to carry its principles into effect."[346] Many Socialists promise the workers that the Socialist State of the future will abolish the curse of work by greatly diminishing the hours of labour. A leading English Socialist writer says: "It is as plainly demonstrable as that twice four make eight that a due system of organised effort would enable your 43,000,000 of people to win from Nature an overflowing superfluity of all that man desires, without one-fourth the effort put forth now to win a beggarly subsistence so far short of what your community requires that 13,000,000 of your people live continually upon the very verge of starvation."[347] A leading American Socialist promises somewhat vaguely, "A few hours of work will secure to everybody all necessaries, decencies, and comforts of life."[348] William Morris tells us that four hours' work will suffice, and that it will not all be "mere machine-tending."[349] Morrison-Davidson prophesies that the "hours of labour will probably not exceed a minimum of two and a maximum of five daily."[350] Hyndman feels quite certain that "two or three hours' labour out of the twenty-four by all adult males would be enough to give the whole community all the wholesome necessaries and comforts of life,"[351] and Bax thinks that "In a perfectly organised Socialist State men never worked more than two or three hours a day."[352] Yves Guyot wittily says: "There is no reason why their demands should not go further. Zero alone can bid them defiance."[353] It is worth noting that many Anarchists also promise a great lessening of the hours of labour when the State has been destroyed. Kropotkin, for instance, requires only from four to five hours' work.[354] Agitators desirous to secure the support of the workers cannot be too lavish in their promises. In the Socialist State of the future a few hours' work every day will give boundless prosperity to all, for "Wealth may easily be made as plentiful as water at the expense of trifling toil."[355] "Under Socialism, nineteen-twentieths of the people will be better off materially than they are to-day, for they will be equal partners in all the productive and distributive wealth of the community."[356] "Comparative affluence would be enjoyed by each member of the community."[357] In the Socialist commonwealth of the future "all wages will be immediately increased," for "the social community will apply itself to raise all salaries of workers and peasants."[358] "In a Socialist State you will have everyone paid a living wage. The surplus will be dispensed by the State, bringing happiness to the whole community."[359] The British national revenue amounts at present only to a little more than _140,000,000l._ By the abolition of the private capitalists and landowners the Socialist Government of Great Britain "would at once find themselves in possession of a revenue amounting to some _900,000,000l._ per annum, and would probably be puzzled for a time how to dispose of it and prevent themselves being buried under its accumulation."[360] This is neither a joke nor a misprint, for the well-known writer, author of countless Socialist pamphlets, continues: "After a variety of attempts to dispose of it by dividing into good fat salaries among those of your community who had had least to do with its production, after the usual custom, I believe means would be employed ultimately for inducing them to keep it under by increasing the wages of the workers, which is another way of saying that those whose labour had produced the wealth would be allowed to enjoy it, which would be something quite novel."[361] The Socialist Government would not only diminish the working hours making them from three to five hours a day, but would also double and treble wages, partly in order to get rid of the glut of money flowing into the National Exchequer, partly because the workers would presumably receive the whole produce of their labour (see Chapter IV.) in the form of wages as soon as the private capitalists were eliminated. Repairs, renewals, replacement of capital losses, and the extension of national industry, which are at present effected out of the savings of private capitalists, would, under the Socialist _régime_, apparently no longer be required, and direction, supervision, and distribution would apparently no longer cost anything. The workers are quite seriously told by the philosopher of British Socialism, collaborating with the editor of "Justice": "Under present conditions the total wealth produced would, if equitably divided, amount to a value equal to more than _200l._ per year per family. But to suppose that any mere distributive readjustment is what is meant by Socialism is to entirely misunderstand what Socialism really involves. Socialism means the complete reorganisation of production as well as distribution. With production scientifically and socially organised, the productivity of labour would be quintupled, and the amount of wealth would be increased in proportion."[362] In other words, there would be _1,000l._ a year for each family. Another Socialist more plainly states: "At the present hour it is calculated that the wealth of the United Kingdom exceeds 2,000 millions per year. This divided among forty millions gives _250l._ per family. It is said that the abolition of waste labour and the absorption of the idle classes would quadruple the production. One thousand pounds per year per family is a very good standard of comfort under a co-operative system of living."[363] The two estimates agree in this, that the Socialist family of five should receive in wages _1,000l._ per annum, or about _3l. 10s._ per working day. In another chapter we shall learn that in the Socialist State only the young and strong would work, and they would work, as we have seen in the foregoing pages, between three and four hours a day. In other words, the worker who earns now, say, _10d._ an hour, would, under the Socialist commonwealth, receive _1l._ per hour. Who would not be a Socialist? A leading German Socialist has endeavoured to gauge the effect of Socialism upon the working classes. In making his calculations he has borne in mind the necessity of providing for the wear and tear of capital, and for other expenditure, and he has arrived at the conclusion: "A generous sick insurance will have to be set up, as well as an invalid and old-age insurance for all incapacitated workers, &c. Thus we see that not much will remain for the raising of the wages from the present income of the capitalists, even if capital were confiscated at a stroke, still less if we were to compensate the capitalists. It will consequently be necessary, in order to be able to raise the wages, to raise at the same time the production far above its present level."[364] The value of high wages lies in the produce they buy. It is of course quite clear that a nation, in order to consume more, must also produce more. It would be interesting to know whether leading Socialists, such as Messrs. Bax, Quelch, and Hazell, who must be acquainted with the sober estimates of the German Socialists, honestly believe that under a Socialist _régime_ _1,000l._ per annum will be available per family, or whether these statements have only been made to obtain supporters on the not very honourable principle, _Vulgus vult decipi, decipiatur_. Let us now look into the practical proposals of the Socialists to the workers. In the official programme of the Social-Democratic Federation[365] the following "Immediate Reforms" concerning the workers are demanded: "A legislative eight hours' working day, or forty-eight hours per week, to be the maximum for all trades and industries. Imprisonment to be inflicted on employers for any infringement of the law. Absolute freedom of combination for all workers, with legal guarantee against any action, private or public, which tends to curtail or infringe it. No child to be employed in any trade or occupation until sixteen years of age, and imprisonment to be inflicted on employers, parents, and guardians who infringe this law. Public provision of useful work at not less than trade-union rates of wages for the unemployed. Free State insurance against sickness and accident, and free and adequate State pensions or provision for aged and disabled workers. Public assistance not to entail any forfeiture of political rights. The legislative enactment of a minimum wage of _30s._ for all workers. Equal pay for both sexes for the performance of equal work." It will be noticed that imprisonment is to be inflicted upon employers who allow their men to work overtime. Would there also be imprisonment for workers working undertime? Similar demands have been made by other Socialist bodies. Let us look more closely into some of those demands which are to be fulfilled forthwith. OLD-AGE PENSIONS With the same recklessness with which the Socialist leaders promise to the working man a large income in return for three or four hours' daily work in the golden age of Socialism, they try to dazzle him with promises of wonderful old-age pension schemes which are to be carried out in the immediate future. Mr. Smart thinks "The smallest sum upon which an old man can exist, even when his lodging is provided by his friends, is _7s._ a week. The pension, therefore, should not be less than this amount, and should be obtainable at sixty years of age. The annual cost for a universal system would be, with the necessary administrative expenses, about _60,000,000l._"[366] To Councillor Glyde the pensionable age of sixty seems to be too high, and the pension too low. Therefore he proposes that "Old-age pensions of at least _7s. 6d._ per week should be provided for all aged workers over fifty-five years of age."[367] But why should a working man have to wait till he is fifty-five before receiving a pension? In another pamphlet, Mr. Glyde amends his scheme and tells us, "To give a pension of _7s. 6d._ per week to all who wished to give up work at fifty years of age would have very satisfactory results. In the first place, it would make the aged workers happy and comfortable. In the second place, it would help to solve the unemployed question by the steady withdrawal of the aged workmen from the labour market, give them purchasing power, and thus find a home market for the productivity of the younger, able-bodied workers. Thirdly, it would prevent the competition for jobs, and the playing off against the younger workmen by the employers of the cheaper-paid labour of those who cannot as they formerly could, so that there would be less strikes, reduction in wages, and petty tyranny practised upon the younger generation of workers. Fourthly, it would cause the abolition of workhouses, with their great army of expensive, well-paid officials. There would be no need for workhouses, because cottage homes would be provided for those who were infirm and feeble, on the lines of the present homes for children; an infirmary for those who were sick and invalids, and asylums for the imbecile. Thousands would be cared for by relatives and friends. Fifthly, by Imperial funds being used for old-age pensions, the Poor rate could be reduced from _6d._ to _1s._ in the pound. These reforms could be carried out without a single farthing extra taxation, nor anyone being any worse off than formerly, by the practice of economy."[368] To pension all workers at fifty would cost about _100,000,000l._ a year, and I think it would be very difficult to save that amount on a budget of _140,000,000l._ unless army, navy, and civil service were abolished. Mr. Morrison Davidson is neither satisfied with a pension of _7s. 6d._ a week nor with the pensionable ages of sixty, fifty-five, or even of fifty. He proposes, therefore, that "Superannuation _on full pay_ will take place at, say, forty-five or, at the most, fifty."[369] UNEMPLOYMENT In the Socialist State of the future there would be no unemployed workers. Many Socialist writers make forecasts such as the following: "Under Socialism all the work of the nation would be organised--that is to say, it would be 'ordered,' or 'arranged,' so that no one need be out of work and so that no useless work need be done, and so that no work need be done twice where once would serve."[370] "There would be a mathematical ordering of production determined by the demands of the consumer."[371] "Periods of glut and want of work will be impossible in the new community."[372] It is already difficult enough even for the ablest manager to secure constant employment to workers in a moderate-sized manufactory, shop, or office. A Socialist Administration composed of fallible men would have to control and satisfy the whole national demand and supply. It would have to sow and to reap, to dig for coal and ore, to fish, to manufacture and to distribute everything wanted and made by all the people. At the same time it would have to control the vast international trade on the regular flow of which constant employment in Great Britain necessarily depends. To satisfy every demand by an adequate supply, it would therefore have to direct and control not only all British industries, but also the fashions and the seasons in Great Britain and in all the countries which stand in commercial relations with the United Kingdom. The British Socialist Administration would not only have to provide a sufficient cotton crop in the United States, a sufficient wool crop in Australia, a sufficient wheat crop in Canada, but it would also have to provide an adequate demand for British cotton goods in India and China, for British coal on the continent of Europe, &c. It would have to provide sufficient sun in America to produce an adequate cotton crop and sufficient rain in India to enable the natives to buy part of that cotton crop in the shape of manufactured articles made in Lancashire. Unless the Socialist Administration controls not only all foreign tariffs but also Nature the world over, there might be unemployment in a socialised Great Britain--and worse. The doctrines of English Socialism may be summed up in a single phrase. Every existing evil is due solely to the capitalistic system, and every existing evil can be abolished only by Socialism. Unemployment is no exception to the rule. Our Socialists have, for reasons which will presently be given, concentrated much energy upon convincing the working masses that unemployment is due solely to private property in land and capital. The Social-Democratic Federation has shown that "The existence of an unemployed class is an essential characteristic of the capitalist system."[373] The Fabian Society in congress assembled has registered the declaration: "That the existence of a class of unemployed willing but unable to find work is a necessary result of the present industrial system, in which every improvement in machinery throws fresh masses of men out of work" [would improved machinery not have the same effect in the Socialist commonwealth?] "and the competition of capitalists for the market produces recurring commercial crises; that, consequently, unemployment can only be abolished with the complete abolition of the competitive system, and can only be limited in proportion as order and regulation are introduced into the present competitive confusion."[374] Yet the same Fabian Society frankly admits in another pamphlet that "No plan has yet been devised by which the fluctuations of work could be entirely prevented, or safe and profitable employment found for those rendered idle by no fault of their own. It is easy enough to demand something should be done, and I entirely agree with agitating the subject; but something more than agitation is required. It is of no use urging remedies which can be demonstrably proved to be worse for the patient than the disease itself. I fear that if we were given full power to-morrow to deal with the unemployed all over England, we should find ourselves hard put to it how to solve the problem."[375] At the last Conference (1907) of the Social-Democratic Federation the resolution was moved, "That this Conference reasserts its statement that unemployment is due to the private ownership of land and capital."[376] The emphatic statements contained in the foregoing declarations that unemployment is due to the private ownership of land and capital are absurd. If the private ownership of land and capital were the cause of unemployment, unemployment should be almost equally great in all civilised countries, because in all civilised countries land and capital are in private hands. Whilst in Great Britain unemployment is a fearful and permanent evil, it has been practically unknown during a long time in Germany, where there has been for many years so great a scarcity of labour that immigration is greater than emigration.[377] Whilst in capitalist Great Britain employment is so bad that from 200,000 to 300,000 people have to emigrate every year, employment in capitalist Germany has been excellent, and in the capitalist United States it has been so good that they have absorbed during a number of years almost 1,000,000 immigrants per year. These facts prove that private ownership of land and capital and over-production have nothing to do with unemployment, which is, as a rule, due not to over-production but to ill-balanced production, as has been proved on page 70 of this book. In the case of a country such as Great Britain, unemployment is due principally to the insufficiency and insecurity of her markets for her manufactured goods and to the decay of her agriculture. The various Socialist organisations have so constantly preached the doctrine that unemployment is due to the private ownership of land and capital that the Trade Unions have at last come to believe it. Owing to Socialist inspiration, the Trade Union Congresses have passed resolutions in favour of the nationalisation of land and of the other means of production at most of the meetings since 1888, and a Socialist weekly has been able to assert that "Every member of the Socialist Labour Party, either by Trade Union Congresses or by Independent Labour Party programme, is committed to the nationalisation of land and the instruments of production."[378] To the delight of the Socialists, resolutions of the Trade Unions urging the nationalisation of all land and capital are becoming more and more emphatic. In the "Social Democrat" for October 1907 we read, under the heading "Trade Unionists and Unemployment," the following: "The resolution on unemployment passed at the Bath Trade Union Congress shows that the Trade Unionists are falling into line with Social Democrats on this question, and that they are beginning to see that Trade Unionism alone is no solution for this evil. After referring to the failure of the Unemployed Workmen Act, and the niggardly manner of doling out the grant of _200,000l._, the resolution goes on to say that 'This Congress, recognising that unemployment is now permanent in character in busy as in slack seasons, in summer and in winter, and is common to all trades and industries; also that this is due to industry being unorganised and carried on for private profit and is bound to continue, and indeed become more accentuated as the development of machinery and other wage-saving methods proceeds, calls the attention of the Government to its neglect of the interests of the people in not grappling with this social evil, and urges it to at once embark upon work of public utility with the object of (a) absorbing the present unemployed labour, (b) laying the foundation for a permanent reorganisation of industry upon a co-operative basis.'"[379] The Socialists have been anxious to convince the workers that unemployment is due to the private ownership of land and capital, and that all unemployed should be relieved by the State because "A really adequate system of helping the unemployed will completely alter the relation of power between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. It will make the proletariat masters in the factory. If the workers sell themselves to-day to the employer, if they allow themselves to be exploited and oppressed, it is the ghost of unemployment, the whip of hunger, which compels them to it. If, on the other hand, the worker is secure in his existence, even when not in work, then nothing is easier to him than to disable the capitalist. He no longer requires the capitalist, while the latter cannot conduct his business without him. When the matter has gone so far as that every employer, whenever a dispute breaks out, will get the worst of it and be forced to yield, the capitalists may certainly continue to be managers of the factories, but they will cease to be their masters and exploiters. But in that case the capitalists will recognise that they only carry the burdens and risks of the undertakings without receiving any advantage, and will be the first to give up capitalist production and insist on being bought out."[380] "The right to work is a charter of industrial freedom, the emancipation of labour from capitalist tyranny. Till it is obtained there can be neither social nor moral progress. When it is obtained all other things become possible."[381] The British Labour Party has drafted a Bill which, asserting the right to work, makes provision of work for the unemployed compulsory and enables the local authorities compulsorily to acquire land with a view of setting the unemployed to work.[382] The Annual Conference of the Independent Labour Party of 1907, going a step further, demanded the erection of a national department for creating work and giving a living wage to the unemployed. It resolved: "This Conference welcomes the news that a Bill to secure the right to work is to be introduced into Parliament by the Labour party, expresses the hope that every effort will be made to secure its passing into law, and declares in favour of the establishment of a properly equipped and financed national department for dealing with the whole problem of unemployment on the basis of putting useful work at a living wage within the reach of every worker, and of training such as require to be taught in husbandry, and other forms of work upon the land."[383] There is a great danger in these proposals.[384] Creating work for the unemployed may not cure, but may aggravate, the disease which springs not from private property in land and capital, but from an insufficient outlet for British manufactures. If the disease is wrongly treated, the unemployed may become an incubus which will cripple both workers and capitalists. A champion of the policy of _laisser faire_ argues: "The State cannot make work, if by work is meant the doing of something that somebody wants done. It is of course true that the State can take on new functions, and do more of the work that is now left to private enterprise. But that would not make additional employment; it would only transfer employment from one set of men to another. When the State or the municipality, instead of seeking to do the thing that is wanted in the most economical and most efficient manner, deliberately picks out the least competent workmen and sets them to work on things that are not wanted, no new wealth is created, and the previous creation of wealth is diminished, because the taxpayer has been deprived of the means of employing as many persons as he would have employed. Artificial jobs may be created for the unemployed, who will be perfectly conscious that these jobs are artificial, and thus the independent and self-respecting workman will be arbitrarily deprived of his job. It cannot be too often repeated that the so-called 'right to work,' on which Socialists are fond of insisting, means in practice the right to deprive another man of his job."[385] These arguments are fallacious. There is work such as the reclamation of the foreshore, draining of bogs, constructing canals, planting of forests, &c., which are, as general experience shows, rather the province of the community than of the private individual. Unemployment may be relieved by the State and the local authorities if discretion be used. Proposals to create work of this kind for the genuine unemployed, and to provide compulsory labour for idlers and loafers, have been advanced by many Socialists and non-Socialists, and these proposals are worth considering and adopting. FOOTNOTES: [341] Bax, _Religion of Socialism_, p. 94. [342] Lafargue, _Right to Leisure_, p. 11. [343] _The Socialist_, October 1907. [344] Leatham, _The Evolution of the Fourth Estate_, p. 13. [345] _Fabian Essays in Socialism_, p. 145, [346] _Are you a Socialist?_ p. 1. [347] Washington, _A Nation of Slaves_, p. 5. [348] Gronlund, _Co-operative Commonwealth_, p. 170. [349] Morris, _A Factory as it Might Be_, p. 10. [350] Davidson, _The Old Order and the New_, p. 170. [351] Hyndman, _Socialism and Slavery_, p. 10. [352] Bax, _Religion of Socialism_, p. 58. [353] Guyot, _Pretensions of Socialism_, p. 9. [354] Kropotkin, _Conquête du Pain_, p. 239. [355] _Socialism Made Plain_, p. 11. [356] Snowden, _The Individual under Socialism_, p. 10. [357] _Fabian Essays in Socialism_, p. 159. [358] Jaurès, _Practical Socialism_, p. 6. [359] _Socialism, For and Against_, p. 11. [360] Washington, _Milk and Postage Stamps_, p. 5. [361] _Ibid._ p. 5. [362] Bax and Quelch, _A New Catechism of Socialism_, p. 17. [363] A.P. Hazell, _Summary of Marx's "Capital,"_ p. 17. [364] Kautsky, _The Social Revolution_, p. 18. [365] See Appendix. [366] Smart, _Socialism and the Budget_, p. 12. [367] Councillor Glyde, _A Peep Behind the Scenes on a Board of Guardians_, p. 27. [368] Councillor Glyde, _Britain's Disgrace_, pp. 31, 32. [369] Davidson, _The Old Order and the New_, p. 170. [370] Robert Blatchford, _Real Socialism_, p. 13. [371] Ben Tillett, _Trades Unionism and Socialism_, p. 12. [372] Bebel, _Woman_, p. 192. [373] Quelch, _The Social-Democratic Federation_, p. 5. [374] _Report on Fabian Policy and Resolutions_, p. 11. [375] Webb, _Socialism True and False_, pp. 8, 9. [376] _Report of 21th Annual Conference, 1907, Social-Democratic Federation_, p. 17. [377] Ellis Barker, _Modern Germany_, p. 546. [378] _New Age_, November 30, 1907. [379] _Social Democrat_, October 1907, p. 580. [380] Kautsky, _The Social Revolution_, p. 6. [381] Russell Smart, _The Right to Work_, p. 15. [382] A Bill to Provide Work through Public Authorities for Unemployed Persons. [383] _Independent Labour Party Report, Annual Conference, 1907_, p. 54. [384] See Thorold Rogers, _Work and Wages_, p. 557. [385] Cox, _Socialism_, pp. 37, 39, 40. CHAPTER VII THE ATTITUDE OF SOCIALISTS TOWARDS TRADE UNIONISTS AND CO-OPERATORS The British Socialists have during many years attacked and denounced the Trade Unionists and the Co-operators, firstly, because the trade unionists and co-operators are "capitalists," and therefore traitors to the Socialist cause; secondly, because Socialism unconditionally condemns providence and thrift among the working men, as will be seen in Chapter XXIII. Although the Socialists pretend that they denounce co-operation and thrift, and even abstinence from alcoholic drink, on economic and scientific grounds, their real reasons are political. Socialism can flourish only if the masses are dissatisfied. The Socialists are therefore little interested in improving the position of the worker, but very greatly in increasing his poverty, unhappiness, and discontent. Socialism is revolutionary, and the Socialists know that people who are well off are not revolutionists. For tactical reasons, therefore, the Socialists oppose and denounce thrift, co-operation, and abstinence, qualities which are found pre-eminently in co-operators and trade unionists. The trade unionists, the aristocracy of British labour, are too conservative, too temperate, too cautious, too prosperous, and too little revolutionary for the taste of Socialists. The Socialists complain: "The British trade union suffers from three fatal defects: (1) It is anti-revolutionary. It disavows the fact of the class struggle. It accepts the capitalist system as a permanency. The rules and constitutions of many unions explicitly refer to the 'just rights of the employer,' and those who do not set forth any such statement openly, admit it in actual practice. The capitalist class, as voiced by the capitalist press, recognise in these unions the bulwark of present-day society against the advance of Socialism. (2) The British trade union method of organisation is a complete negation of the solidarity of labour. Each trade or section of a trade has its own particular and autonomous organisation. Even trades which are most closely connected are divided into separate unions, each union ignoring the interest of the rest, making its own special contracts with the capitalists, and assisting them by remaining at work when their fellow-workers in a kindred trade are on strike. The most noteworthy example of this form of inter-trade treachery was offered in the case of the engineers' strike of 1897-8, when the Boilermakers' Society by remaining at work were the means of defeating the Amalgamated Society of Engineers and of forcing them to return to work on the masters' terms. (3) The British trade union refuses to admit to its ranks those teeming millions of workers whom it terms 'unskilled.'"[386] Other Socialists complain: "Trade unionism recognises the present system of society, justifies capitalism, and defends wage-slavery, and only seeks to soften the tyranny of the one and assuage the evils of the other. Social Democracy aims at destroying the whole system."[387] "We are never allowed to forget the splendid incomes earned by these aristocrats of labour, a mere tenth of the whole labour class. The trade unionist can usually only raise himself on the bodies of his less fortunate comrades."[388] "The old-fashioned policy of the English trade unions has made them _guilds of privileged_, rather than fighting representatives of their class."[389] Similar complaints are raised against the co-operators. "Co-operation, though regarded by the individual trader as an enemy, does not necessarily enter into conflict with the capitalist at all. Indeed, so far as it transforms workmen into shareholders, it forms a bulwark for capitalism, the same as the creation of small landholders or any other class of small proprietors would do."[390] "At present the co-operative societies in England are very apathetic with regard to political affairs."[391] "In spite of abstract resolutions, our trade unionists are devoted to the wages system; still our co-operators yearn after dividends; still the mass of our producers admire the men who rise upon their shoulders to place and pay. The twin curses of democracy, slavishness and jealousy, are curiously blended in their views of social and political life. They envy capacity; they bow down before successful blackguardism."[392] Some Socialists have called for the unification of all the trades unions, arguing "Union has failed to adapt itself to changed conditions. Just as budding industrial development called into being the shop union, and further industrial expansion meant development of the union to the local and then the national organisation, so the exigencies of our time demand a working-class union--one union, not eleven hundred, as now."[393] Others have bespattered the unions with insults, and some do so still. A very violent Socialist organ recently wrote: "Our trade union leaders are not so corrupt as those of America? Are they not? As a matter of fact, the corruption is tenfold greater. The difference is that here it is legalised and respectable. In America the corruption takes the form of a wad of dollar notes pushed into the fakir's hands in a dark corner. In this country our trade union leaders are openly corrupted in the face of day by positions on conciliation boards, Justiceships of the Peace, Cabinet positions" [this is a hit at Mr. John Burns], "and well-paid jobs in the Labour Department of the Board of Trade. Are Shackleton, Bell, and Barnes honester men than Gompers, Mitchell, and Tobin? As Dr. Johnson very coarsely expressed it: 'It is difficult to settle the question of precedence between a bug and a louse.'"[394] To the more far-sighted Socialists the folly of attacking the powerful trade unions, with their 2,000,000 members, was perfectly clear. One of the Socialist leaders wrote: "Of all the blind, fatuous policies in the world, that of decrying trades unionism by professing Socialists is about the worst; and the next worst thing is the trades unionist abusing Socialism."[395] Some Socialists recommended changing the policy of denunciation for a wiser one: "We have to _convert_ the trade unions, not to _antagonise_ them"[396]; and their conversion was thought to be all the more easy because, to quote Ben Tillett, "The whole of the trades union movement has been tinged with Socialism; unconsciously the guides of the working classes have always marched towards the goal of Socialism."[397] With this object in view the trade unionists were urged to reform their tactics, to abandon the economic struggle in the form of strikes, and to enter upon the more efficacious political struggle with the employers of labour in the House of Commons. "To go on following the old beaten paths of trade unionism is simply to go on exhausting the possibilities of error for an indefinite period. If the new unions are simply to play the part of regulators of wages, as trade and prices rise and fall, they will be of very slight advantage to the workers compared with what they might accomplish if they took a broader view of their opportunities and their duties. What they have to do, and that now, is to use the power which organisation gives them to get control of the political machinery of the country and use it for the advancement of their class. By this means they could, if they chose, achieve as much in a year or two as would be gained in a century by the old methods of trade agitation and strikes."[398] "If the Labour party had a tithe of the money that the unions have spent upon getting thrashed and starved and defrauded, it would be a party to wonder at and be proud of. The miners of Yorkshire have spent _212,000l._ on six strikes--all of which have been lost. Do you call this industrial warfare? Insanity and suicide--that is what it is. The engineers spent three-quarters of a million on the great lock-out. That is a sum in itself, the ransom of all the workers from the bonds of wage-slavery. What can the engineers show for their money to-day? Ask them! We could capture the British Parliament with that sum _plus_ a little brains and courage."[399] The Fabian Society has issued numerous pamphlets in which it has shown how the position of the workers might be improved, and in these it has at every opportunity urged upon every worker to join a union, and has urged upon the trade unions to better the position of the workers by relying upon political action.[400] In pursuance of this policy the railway employees were told by the Socialists, when the difference between the British railway companies and their workers had been arranged: "You men must cling tight to the union and keep fostering the discontent of your fellows, not only with the sectional wrongs which affect you personally, but with the brutal system of competition of which your own wrongs are but one fractional consequence. Stick to the Labour party. You have two representatives in Parliament. Run some more. You need not bother now to build up a strike fund. Spend the money in politics. The more men you get in the House, the better chance you will have of convincing a Government arbitrator of the justice of your claims."[401] Wishing to secure the support of the trade unionists and the co-operators, the Socialists began to preach that there was no antagonism between Socialists, trade unionists, and co-operators, and to stretch out a hand towards them. "Socialist influence makes its way in the union. The trade unions generally must sooner or later become--they already in some instances are to-day--part and parcel of the working-class Socialist movement, or must cease to exist as class organisations. Co-operation is in its inception Socialist. That is to say, that all co-operation implies co-operative effort and social union."[402] Another Socialist writer said: "I am sorry that some Socialists used to cry down the co-operative movement. I know it has some serious defects, but it has taught the workers of this country what they can do when they choose. If any power could induce trade unionists, co-operators, and Socialists to unite, a co-operative commonwealth would be flourishing in this country before the rich and educated classes had rubbed open their drowsy eyes."[403] The recommendations which the Socialists addressed to the trade unionists to increase their political power, and to improve their economic position by the use of their political power, became louder and louder. They were told that the capitalists were the enemies of both trade unionists and Socialists, and that co-operation would be of the greatest benefit to both bodies. The Socialist group of the London Society of Compositors, for instance, argued: "It is unfortunate that after some dozen years or more of Socialist propaganda there should still be considerable bitterness existing between trade unionists and Socialists. The cause of the unpopularity of the Socialists was not due to any desire on their part to irritate trade unionists, but arose out of the stupid prejudices of the spokesmen and leaders of the trade unionists themselves. Socialists are staunch trade unionists. The New trade unionism is evidence of this, for Socialists are responsible for calling it into existence. The movement which is now gaining ground in favour of federation among trade unionists generally, is one of Socialist origin. Trade unionists look solely to unionism to maintain their miserable standard of living, ignorant of the economic laws working against them. Socialists accept unionism as only one method to maintain their present standard of comfort. "Both Socialists and trade unionists have a common enemy, a common want, and a common economic force which continually and relentlessly drives them in one direction. Both are driven to defend attacks against their standard of living by the capitalist, and the one point of agreement between Socialists and trade unionists, therefore, is that they both desire to maintain and increase their present standard of living. Trade unionists enter a union to resist the exactions of the capitalists, and to baulk attempts on their part to reduce wages. Socialists enter a union for precisely the same reason. If they would view Parliamentary action from the standpoint of the collective welfare of the people, they would soon realise its far-reaching effects. A legal forty-eight hour working week, for instance, would bring benefit to all and raise the standard of all by giving more leisure; thereby affording workers an opportunity of obtaining fresh air and following artistic and intellectual pursuits. "One of the strongest agents which work in favour of the capitalists is the necessity of the workers to find food and clothing for their families. This evil can be met by the State proposal which is now making such headway in England--namely, Free Maintenance for Children. The old-fashioned prejudices, fostered by the capitalists and their hangers-on, that it is degrading to accept anything from the State, is fast dying out in the face of free education, free libraries, free maintenance for all sickened with infectious fevers. Free maintenance for children would be a tax on that surplus wealth which the capitalists and the aristocracy share between them. To the worker, free maintenance for his children would be equivalent to an additional income. His standard of living would rise. No doubt the capitalist would reduce his wages as much as possible, but the worker would then be able to fight him on more equal terms. His children being well cared for, he would be able to hold out against the capitalist for an indefinite period. "The Housing Question is also worthy of attention. Trade unionism should require the State to erect buildings to be let at a sum which would cover cost of construction and maintenance alone. This would give them a stationary rent, and when locked out by their employers, they, as unemployed workers, would not be so liable to be turned into the street. "The workers, unconscious of economic development, unfortunately side with one political party or the other, not seeing that the one must inevitably be as antagonistic to their interests as the other. Tory and Liberal politically represent two classes, who divide the spoils between them. One is connected by tradition with the soil, the other with commerce. When they have a quarrel, it is as between kites and crows for the possession of prey. To assert that a Tory is better than a Liberal, or a Liberal better than a Tory, is like affirming that one exploiter is less a thief than another. Until trade unionists form themselves into an independent party, there can politically be no common agreement between them and Socialists, because, while they support the capitalist class they are placing power into the hands of the exploiting class, who is the common enemy. Co-operation between Socialists and trade unionists should be adopted whenever possible, and, when occasion offers, an alliance should be entered into for common purposes. In America a large section of trade unionists have already recognised that the class war is inevitable under the present system of exploitation, and they have entered into an active alliance with the Socialist party. It is to be hoped that the trade unions of Great Britain will ere long see their way to follow the example set by their American brethren in the United States."[404] Another writer urged: "Is it not time that we combined and strove for something higher, wider, and more far-reaching? Let the trade unionists unite, combine, federate; not for constantly squabbling with the capitalist over the spoil which the workers alone create, but to secure for the latter, organised, the control of their own tools and raw materials--of the mines, the railways, the factories, the shipping, the land--of all those things which only have value through their labour. Let the co-operators co-operate with each other, with trade unionists, and Social Democrats for the same object. Let us all agitate, educate, and organise to form the workers of the world into a gigantic Trade Union, an International Co-operation, a Social-Democratic Commonwealth."[405] Since the time when these words were written attempts have constantly been made by the Socialists to co-operate with the unionists, and, at least outwardly, their relations have become intimate. Many Socialists have high hopes for a united Socialist Labour party. At a recent conference of the Social-Democratic Federation the chairman declared, in his opening address: "There can be but one Independent Labour Party, and there ought to be a united Socialist party. Not many years will pass before the new Labour party will join the Socialist movement, but in the meantime everything seems ripening for a united Socialist party, consolidating both forces and funds, preventing overlapping and removing friction. Never were the times so favourable to Socialism. In spite of the boycott, the misrepresentation, the influence of the temporal powers against us, the word Socialism is no longer unknown or feared. In the workshop, the mine, the train, or the tram, men are eagerly discussing Socialism. The workers need grumble of their chains no longer; they can fling them off at will; for they, and they alone, hold the keys of freedom. This poor blind Samson is waking up and groping his way; Socialists must be ready to lead him."[406] Socialism has of late years strongly permeated the unions. Will it succeed in capturing them? The Socialists are very optimistic on that point. "The outlook is full of promise for the political Labour movement. It only requires the adoption of a candidate by the united local societies to turn every trade union institute or office, miners' lodge and branch meeting-room into a committee-room, and when the call is made by the Parliamentary group there will be plenty of voluntary workers. The great fact stands out prominently: Labour is moving; and that fact points to stirring times and a new phase in the history of the nation."[407] The character of the trade unions has undoubtedly been greatly changed through Socialist agitation. The trade unionist has almost ceased to be an individualist. "The modern trade unionist is out for a political revolution. He has dismissed, as an obsolete absurdity, the idea of paying for his benefits, pensions, sick-pay, unemployed relief, out of his union subscriptions. He intends to combine with his fellows of all trades in a demand for Parliamentary legislation which will provide these benefits out of national funds, mainly by way of a graduated income-tax. So he demands old-age pensions and an Unemployed Act. He has given up the tedious task of bargaining with his master for higher wages and shorter hours; he intends to compel him by the more drastic method of an eight-hour day and a minimum wage and State Arbitration Act."[408] There is much truth in this description. As the real nature of the relations between the trades unions and the Socialists is known to only a few, the following documents should be of great interest:-- "In consequence of a decision of the International Socialist Bureau (June 9, 1907), its secretary sent a circular to the affiliated parties in order to obtain from them official notes on the relations between the political Parties and trade unions of their country, and he received the following replies from the Social-Democratic Federation, the Labour party, and the Independent Labour Party:-- "'Although from its formation in March 1881 the Social-Democratic Federation has strongly opposed the abstention of the older trade unions from politics, and has still more strongly objected to the very close alliance which some of its leading members have made with the capitalist Liberal party, resulting in high office and even Cabinet rank'" [another hit at Mr. John Burns] "'for those who have thus deliberately betrayed the interests of their fellows and supporters of the working class; nevertheless, we have never at any time failed to help in every way possible, personally and pecuniarily, every strike which has taken place since 1881 (even in spite of our doubting the value of the mere strike as a weapon against organised capitalism), and our organisation has invariably agitated in favour of every Parliamentary measure accepted by the trade unions which could at all help the trade unionists and the workers at large. Our relations with the trade unions may therefore be described as friendly whenever they take action against capitalism, and appreciative of their increasing tendency towards Socialism. We always recommend all workers to join the trade union of their trade. No Socialist propaganda is officially carried on by the trade unions, but as quite 75 per cent. of the members of the Social-Democratic Federation are also trade unionists in their respective trades, by their agency Socialist thought is steadily permeating the ranks of trade unionism. As also the older leaders, brought up entirely in the bourgeois school of thought and action, die or are superannuated, there can be no doubt whatever that they will be succeeded by Socialists, and in fact they are being so replaced at the present time. Trade union Socialist leaders, of course, will then use the trade union organisation to spread Socialism. So far as they have been elected to executive office, they do this even now.--H.W. LEE, Secretary.' "'The Labour party is a federation of Socialist societies and trade union organisations. Trade unions are directly affiliated, their membership forming, together with the membership of the Socialist organisations, the membership of the Labour party. In some cases Socialist propaganda is conducted by the trade unions, several of them embracing the Socialist basis in their rules.--J.S. MIDDLETON, for J. RAMSAY MACDONALD.' "'The Independent Labour Party is affiliated to the Labour party, which is a federation of trade unions, co-operative societies, and Socialist societies, for political action. The Independent Labour Party consists of individual members, and not of federated organisations. Our membership is only open to Socialists individually. Our association with the trade unions comes through the Labour party, with which both we and they are affiliated. The trade unions of Great Britain do not carry on any specific Socialist propaganda among their members, although several of the unions state in their constitution that they believe in Socialism. Many Socialist speeches are made from trade union platforms and demonstrations held under the auspices of trade unions.--FRANCIS JOHNSON, Secretary.'"[409] The foregoing three letters are most interesting and most important, and they should be carefully read because they prove that the forces of trade unionism and Socialism are commingling, and that the trade unionists may reckon upon the support of the Socialists whenever they come into conflict with capitalists. Although in constructive policy Socialism and trade unionism are as yet things apart, they possess a common working basis as soon as trouble occurs between capital and labour. To increase the intimacy between them and the representatives of labour pure and simple, and to accustom them to co-operation, the Socialist cannot do anything better than to cause conflicts to arise between capital and labour. Therefore it is only natural that the Socialists will urge the trade unionists to make great, and ever greater, demands upon capital; that every concession will only be considered as a stepping-stone to a further concession. Every conflict between capital and labour, everything that will increase the dissatisfaction of the workers, will serve the Socialists, because it will cause the workers to believe in the doctrine of the Iron Law of Wages, in the Law of Increasing Misery, and in the promised Socialist paradise. Therefore the Socialists will do all they can to embitter the relations between capital and labour, and to bring about strikes. For instance, at the time when, in the autumn of 1907, the differences between the British railway companies and the men were acute, practically the whole Socialist press urged the railway servants to declare a strike, and the settlement of the difficulty by Mr. Lloyd George was greeted with derision and regret. Mr. Bell, who had accepted the settlement, was treated with contempt, and the result of the Railway Conference was declared to be the Sedan of the British trade union movement.[410] Owing to the persistent agitation of the Socialists, the trade unions are becoming permeated with Socialism. Of late years there have been few great strikes in Great Britain, but, unless the relations between Socialists and trade unionists alter, it seems likely that great and violent industrial disputes will occur in the near future. FOOTNOTES: [386] _S.L.P. Bulletin No. 2, 1907._ [387] Quelch, _Trade Unionism_, p. 10. [388] _English Progress towards Social Democracy_, p. 8. [389] _S.L.P. Bulletin No. 1, May 1907._ [390] Quelch, _Trade Unionism_, p. 16. [391] John Penny, _The Political Labour Movement_, p. 10. [392] Hyndman, _Darkness and Dawn of May Day, 1907_, p. 2. [393] J. O'Connor Kessack, _The Capitalist Wilderness and the Way Out_, p. 15. [394] _S.L.P. Bulletin No. 2._ [395] Ben Tillett, _Trades Unionism and Socialism_, p. 1. [396] Quelch in _The Socialist_, November 1907. [397] Ben Tillett, _Trades Unionism and Socialism_, p. 14. [398] Quelch, _Trade Unionism_, p. 13. [399] _Clarion_, November 29, 1907. [400] _The Workmen's Compensation Act, 1906, What it Means and How to Make Use of it_; _How Trade Unions Benefit Workmen_; _Eight Hours by Law: A Practical Solution_; _Cottage Plans and Common Sense_; _Houses for the People_; _The Case for a Legal Minimum Wage_. [401] _Clarion_, November 15, 1907. [402] Bax and Quelch, _A New Catechism of Socialism_, p. 40. [403] Dennis Hird, _From Brute to Brother_, p. 14. [404] _Socialism and Trade Unionism: Wherein do they Differ?_ pp. 2-8. [405] Quelch, _Trade Unionism_, p. 16. [406] Opening Address, Chairman Hartley at Annual Conference, _Social-Democratic Federation Annual Report, 1906_, pp. 3, 4. [407] John Penny, _The Political Labour Movement_, p. 15. [408] _New Age_, November 30, 1907. [409] _Social Democrat_, September 1907, pp. 548, 549. [410] See the _Labour Leader_, _Clarion_, _Justice_, _Socialist Standard_, _Socialist_, &c., for November 1907. CHAPTER VIII SOCIALIST VIEWS AND PROPOSALS REGARDING LAND AND THE LANDLORDS British Socialists, as we have learned in Chapter IV.,[411] adopting the celebrated formula of Proudhon, have proclaimed "Property is theft," and they are of opinion that property in land is a particularly heinous form of theft. Therefore they demand the restitution of the land to the people, not as a matter of expediency but as a matter of right. "Man has a right only to what his labour makes. No man 'makes' the land."[412] "Land is the gift of Nature. It is not made by man. Now, if a man has a right to nothing but that which he has himself made, no man can have a right to the land, for no man made it."[413] "The land belongs by inalienable right not to any body of individuals but to all."[414] O high cliffs looking heavenward, O valleys green and fair. Sea cliffs that seem to gird and guard Our island once so dear, In vain your beauty now ye spread, For we are numbered with the dead; A robber band has seized the land, And we are exiles here. The ploughman ploughs, the sower sows. The reaper reaps the ear; The woodman to the forest goes Before the day grows clear, But of our toil no fruit we see; The harvest's not for you and me: A robber band has seized the land, And we are exiles here.[415] Appealing to the passions, hatred, and greed of their followers, and relying on their credulity, Socialist leaders proclaim not only that the landlords are useless, but also that the people will have the land rent free as soon as the present owners have been expropriated. "The landlord, _qua_ landlord, performs no function in the economy of industry or of food production. He is a rent-receiver; that, and nothing more. Were the landlord to be abolished, the soil and the people who till it would still remain, and the disappearance of the landowner would pass almost unnoticed."[416] "Rent is brigandage reduced to a system. So long as the English people are content to be tenants-at-will on their own soil, and to pay for the privilege, they will remain virtually slaves."[417] "The tenant earns the rent. The landlord spends it. If the tenant had not to pay the rent he could spend it himself, and so it would get spent, and get spent by the man who earns it and has the best right to spend it."[418] Whilst some Socialist agitators are unscrupulous enough to make their followers believe that in the Socialist State they may have land for the asking, others are so unkind as to destroy that pleasing illusion. For instance, we learn from a Fabian pamphlet, "A Socialist State or municipality will charge the full economic rent for the use of its land and dwellings, and apply that rent to the common purposes of the community."[419] Another Socialist authority very pertinently remarks: "It is of not the least consequence to the person who rents the land whether he pays the rent for it to an individual or whether he Pays it to the State,"[420] and therefore it is clear that statements such as "If the tenant had not to pay the rent he could spend it himself," are merely meant to deceive the simple. Tenants, instead of paying their rent to a human landlord, would have to pay it to an impersonal State or municipality, and the latter might prove as grasping and as heartless as rating committees are now. Others base their demand for the spoliation of landlords upon the Bible and upon the ideal of a "Divine brotherhood," forgetting that the Bible contains a commandment "Thou shalt not steal," as well as many warnings against lying, deceit, cant, and covetousness. One of the champion Bible-Socialists, for instance, writes: "If all men are brothers, as Christ undoubtedly taught, then the land, the source of wealth, the means by which men can earn their livelihood, should not be the property of any set of individuals, but should belong to the whole community. The fact of a man being born into the world gives him the divine right to the opportunity of earning his living, and that right cannot be enjoyed so long as there is a single man on earth deprived of access to the land from which to earn his bread. When the spirit of brotherhood prevails, it will be a simple and a natural thing to arrange that these things shall be used not in the interests of the few, but for the common good. There are innumerable signs that the hearts and minds of men are now turning in this direction, and that they are coming to see that the only just and permanent arrangement is the divine solution of working on the basis of universal brotherhood."[421] There is a fraternity among Sicilian bandits. The "Divine brotherhood" of the writer would be based on robbery, and have robbery as its object. Others demand the confiscation of all land by relying upon misrepresentation: "If the injustice of the land monopoly is great in the country, by robbing the grower of his improvements or scaring him from making any, by robbing the nation of its own legitimate independent food supply, and by laying waste vast tracts of the surface, the injustice is even greater in the towns, if only by reason of the greater numbers whose interests are now involved: (1) by flooding the town labour markets with surplus labourers, and so--by their competition between each other for jobs of any sort at any terms, rather than starve--keeping wages down at the privation point; (2) by robbing the town workers of that proper and legitimate home market which a flourishing and proportionately numerous agricultural population would afford; (3) by the bloated rentals in cities, only made possible by driving and crowding the people into our unnaturally swollen centres; and (4) by the continuous re-investment of those enormous rent extortions in all those secondary monopolies of transit, finance, and business generally, which can only arise from the primary monopoly of the soil, and which complete this devil's chain of the subjection of labour and the dependence of the community."[422] The complaints that land is going out of cultivation, that the British home market has been spoiled, and that towns are overgrown and overcrowded are unfortunately only too well justified, but these phenomena are not due to private property in land. Private property in land is universal, but the desertion of the country and overcrowding in towns are not universal. These evils are to be found chiefly in Great Britain, because British economic policy, whilst fostering trade and the manufacturing industries, has deliberately sacrificed to them the rural industries. That fact is acknowledged by many Socialists, as will be seen in Chapter XXL., "Some Socialist's Views on Free Trade and Protection." The question now arises: How do the Socialists propose to deal with the land and the owners of land? Mr. Blatchford informs us: "The titled robbers of England have always done their robberies in a legal manner. We propose to enforce their cessation in a legal manner. We respect the law, and mean to use it. We are not mere brigands. We are the new police; our duty is to 'arrest the rogues and dastards'; our motto is, 'The law giveth and the law taketh away, blessed be the name of the law.'"[423] A leading Christian-Socialist clergyman tells us "As for compensation, from the point of view of the highest Christian morality, it is the landlords who should compensate the people, not the people the landlords. But practically if you carry out this reform by taxation, no compensation would be necessary or even possible."[424] Mines and mine-owners are to be treated in the same way as land and land-owners. "The minerals should be at once taken over without compensation; the present owners should think themselves well off if they escape paying compensation for previous robbery of the people."[425] Views such as those expressed in the foregoing are held not only by some unscrupulous agitators. At the last Annual Conference of the Independent Labour Party the following resolution was carried: "This Conference, being of opinion that the high price of coal is a serious menace to the nation, and bears extremely hard upon householders and especially upon the working classes of the country, declares in favour of the nationalisation of the mines and municipalisation of the coal-supply."[426] At the last Annual Conference of the Miners' Federation of Great Britain, various resolutions urging the nationalisation of all mines were proposed and carried. Mr. W.E. Harvey, M.P., for instance, moved "That the members of Parliament supported by this federation be instructed to direct the attention of the Government to bring in a Bill for the nationalisation of land, mines, and mining royalties, as we believe that it is only by such reforms that the workers can obtain full value for their labours."[427] It will be observed that nothing is said about compensation in this resolution, which was passed unanimously. How is the nationalisation of the land to be effected? "The land of every country belongs of natural and inalienable right to the whole body of the people in each generation. We say therefore, 'You need not kick the landlords out; you must not buy them out; you had better tax them out.'"[428] "If the people rose in revolt, took up arms, confiscated the lands of the nobles, and handed them over to the control of a Parliament, that would not be brigandage; it would be revolution. But if the people by the exercise of constitutional means, passed an Act through Parliament making the estates of the nobles the property of the nation, with or without compensation, that would be neither brigandage nor revolution; it would be a legal, righteous, and constitutional reform. We propose to be neither revolutionaries nor brigands, but legal, righteous, and constitutional reformers."[429] Legality implies and presupposes justice, but Socialist law and justice are different from that conception of law and justice which has been held hitherto. Chapter XXIV. will make that point clear. The foregoing should suffice to show that the Socialists intend to abolish private property in land by "taxing landowners out of existence." They apparently forget that not all the owners of land are rich; that many small farmers, shopkeepers, artisans, &c., own freehold land and freehold houses; and that the insurance companies have a very large proportion of their funds invested in land and on the security of land. A confiscation of land would therefore ruin a vast number of hard-working people. It would cripple some insurance companies and ruin others. Hence the savings of thrifty workers would be confiscated or destroyed by the State together with those of the larger capitalists. The Socialists are not entirely agreed as to the way by which the abolition of private ownership in land should be effected, but some interesting proposals will be found in Chapter X., "Socialist Views and Proposals regarding Taxation and the National Budget." The purely agricultural aspect of the land question is treated in Chapter XVIII., "Socialism and Agriculture," and in Chapter XXI., "Some Socialist Views on Free Trade and Protection." FOOTNOTES: [411] Page 81. [412] Blatchford, _Merrie England_, p. 61. [413] _Ibid._ p. 60. [414] Washington, _A Corner in Flesh and Blood_, p. 60. [415] _Clarion Song Book_, p. 6. [416] Keir Hardie, _From Serfdom to Socialism_, p. 11. [417] Davidson, _Book of Lords_, p. 25. [418] Blatchford, _Land Nationalisation_, p. 9. [419] Sidney Webb, _Socialism, True and False_, p. 19. [420] _Socialism and the Single Tax_, p. 7. [421] Ward, _Are All Men Brothers?_ pp. 14, 15. [422] Hall, _Land, Labour, and Liberty_, p. 12. [423] Blatchford, _Some Tory Socialisms_, p. 6. [424] Headlam, _Christian Socialism_, p. 14. [425] _Forward_, October 12, 1907. [426] _Independent Labour Party Report, Annual Conference, 1907_, p. 59. [427] _Times_, October 12, 1907. [428] Headlam, _Christian Socialism_, p. 7. [429] Blatchford, _Some Tory Socialisms_, p. 3. CHAPTER IX SOCIALIST VIEWS AND PROPOSALS REGARDING CAPITAL AND THE CAPITALISTS We have seen in Chapter VIII. that Socialists claim that "Man has a right to nothing but that which he has himself made," that therefore, "No man can have a right to the land, for no man made it." May, then, owners of property keep at least that part of their property which is not invested in land? The reply is, of course, in the negative. "As land must in future be a national possession, so must the other means of producing and distributing wealth."[430] "Supposing we assume it true that land is not the product of labour and that capital is; it is not by any means true that the rent of land is not the product of labour and that the interest on capital is. Since private ownership, whether of land or capital, simply means the right to draw and dispose of a revenue from the property, why should the landowner be forbidden to do that which is allowed to the capitalist, in a society in which land and capital are commercially equivalent? Yet land nationalisers seem to be prepared to treat as sacred the landlords' claim to private property in capital acquired by thefts of this kind, although they will not hear of their claim to property in land. Capital serves as an instrument for robbing in a precisely identical manner. In England industrial capital is mainly created by wage workers--who get nothing for it but permission to create in addition enough subsistence to keep each other alive in a poor way. Its immediate appropriation by idle proprietors and shareholders, whose economic relation to the workers is exactly the same in principle as that of the landlords, goes on every day under our eyes. The landlord compels the worker to convert his land into a railway, his fen into a drained level, his barren seaside waste into a fashionable watering-place, his mountain into a tunnel, his manor park into a suburb full of houses let on repairing leases; and lo! he has escaped the land nationalisers; his land is now become capital and is sacred. The position is so glaringly absurd and the proposed attempt to discriminate between the capital value and the land value of estates is so futile, that it seems almost certain that the land nationalisers will go as far as the Socialists. Whatever the origin of land and capital, the source of the revenues drawn from them is contemporary labour."[431] Most Socialists think it wiser to tax capital gradually out of existence than to confiscate it at one stroke. "The direct confiscation of capital affects all, the small and the great, those unable to work and the able-bodied, everybody in an equal way. It is difficult by this method, often quite impossible, to separate the large property from the small invested in the same undertakings. The direct confiscation would also proceed too quickly, often at one stroke, while confiscation through taxation would permit the abolition of capitalist property being made a long-drawn process, working itself out further and further in the measure as the new order gets consolidated and makes its beneficent influence felt."[432] The argument that excessive taxation would drive capital out of the country is laughed at by Socialists. A Socialist pamphlet says: "It is true that the land-sweaters and labour-skinners whom the people keep on electing to rule and rob them can still frighten noodles by threatening that they will run away from the country and take their capital with them; that They'll ship the mines and farms to Amsterdam, The houses and the railways to Peru, The canals and docks to Russia, The woods and workshops off to Prussia, And all the enterprise and brains to Timbuctoo. "We calmly reply that there is not one single service that all the landlords, financiers, and their lesser parasites pretend to perform for society that could not be performed far more efficiently and infinitely more cheaply without them." Straightway those rich men started To move their capitals. On board of ships they carted Their railways and canals; With mines mine-owners scurried. The bankers bore their books. With mills mill-owners hurried. The bishops took their crooks.[433] The despoiled capitalists might leave the country, but they would have to leave in the country all their property except perhaps a few valuables which they might remove. Property being theft, capitalists as well as landowners are thieves who possess no claim whatever to consideration or even to mercy. "To talk about 'the respective claims of capital and labour' is as inaccurate as to talk about the 'respective claims' of coals and colliers, or of ploughs and ploughmen. Capital has no claims. This is not a quibble. The distinction between capital and the capitalists is one of vital importance. Capital is a necessary thing. The capitalist is as unnecessary as any other kind of thief or interloper. The capitalist, though as loud as greedy in his 'claims,' has no rights at all."[434] "Do you mean to say, then, that the capitalist does not perform a useful function in running a risk for the profit he receives?--No. In so far as he exercises the function of management and receives remuneration for this, his remuneration is not profit at all, but wages of superintendence, and the functions of management would be undertaken by the organised society of the future through its appointed representatives. As to any necessary risks, all individuals would be relieved from this under Socialism, as it would be borne by the whole of society."[435] "If capitalists attempt to justify their way of making profit by saying that they have to run risks sometimes, that a part of their property might occasionally be lost, we answer that labour has nothing to do with that."[436] Capital large and small is the result of thrift. If capital is theft, then thrift also is theft. The thrifty investor, being an immoral person, has no right to protest against the confiscation of his property. "By capitalist I mean the investor who puts his money into a concern and draws profits therefrom without participating in the organisation or management of the business. Were all these to disappear in the night, leaving no trace behind, nothing would be changed."[437] Nothing would be changed for the Socialist agitator, the loafer, and the tramp. On the contrary, they would profit from the ruin of the industrious and the thrifty. The fact that honest and hardworking men who do their duty to their family and who wish to leave their children provided for should have the result of the economy of a lifetime confiscated matters little to the Socialist leaders. According to the Socialist doctrines the industrious and the thrifty are thieves and exploiters of those workers who have never saved a penny. On the other hand, those men who live from hand to mouth, who work only a few days each week and loaf on the remaining days, who waste all their earnings in drink, gambling, and music-halls, and who possess nothing they can call their own, are honest and excellent citizens. They are entitled to the savings of the thrifty. In accordance with the Socialist principles stated in the foregoing, all shareholders, being merely exploiters of labour, would be expropriated. "Are shareholders in companies useful in organising labour?--As a rule they employ others to organise labour, and the work done by the company would go on just as well if the shareholders disappeared."[438] Besides, "Stocks when analysed, in nine cases out of ten simply mean the right to squeeze tribute out of workers who are nominally free. By far the greatest part of what is set down as national 'capital' is merely slave flesh-and-blood."[439] Holders of Government stocks would be treated no better than landowners and shareholders. Foremost among the "immediate reforms" demanded in the programme of the Social-Democratic Federation[440] ranges the "Repudiation of the National Debt." The repudiation of the National Debt has during many years been demanded, and is still demanded, by the Social-Democratic Federation, as may be seen from a recent issue of "Justice," its weekly publication, in which we find the following statement: "The National Debt is simply a means of extracting unearned incomes from the people of this country. It is idle to nationalise or municipalise industries by means of loans on which interest is paid. Such interest would be only another form of rent and profit. When capitalism is abolished, every one of its many forms will necessarily have to go."[441] The repudiation of the National Debt is demanded by many Socialist leaders and leading writers. "The National Debt (falsely so-called) has already been paid thrice over in usury. All future interest-payments should be held as part of the principal."[442] "The few thousand persons who own the National Debt, saddled upon the community by a landlord Parliament, exact _28,000,000l._ yearly from the labour of their countrymen for nothing."[443] "Outside the land monopoly, the most infamous source of usury is unquestionably the so-called 'National Debt.' There the whole of the capital is absolutely spurious. The real capital consisted of the gunpowder and the lead which Sovereigns and statesmen expended so liberally about a century ago in attempting to murder liberty on the Continents of Europe and America. Our war debt is the most stupendous monument of human crime and folly in existence; and worst of all, the 'butcher's bill' has already been paid by the unhappy toilers thrice over in usury."[444] "The entire national liability has been discharged to the moneylenders by the people once during the last thirty-seven years. We repay public debts once every thirty-seven years without wiping out a penny of the said debts. We pay away in blank usury _20,000,000l._ per year on this one head, or enough to provide old-age pensions for three-fourths of our aged poor in the United Kingdom on the basis of _7s. 6d._ per head per week."[445] "236,514 blackmailers suck the udder of industry through the convenient teat of what, with audacious cynicism, is called the 'National Debt.'"[446] The largest part of the National Debt was not created by "murdering liberty" but by fighting the armies of the French Revolution and of Napoleon I. Besides, the defence against the French Revolution and Napoleon was not a "crime," but a necessary duty. Furthermore, the holders of the National Debt are not "blackmailers" but industrious, useful, and thrifty citizens, or the children and descendants of industrious, useful, and thrifty citizens. About one-half of the National Debt is held by thrifty wage-earners, as all the money deposited in the savings banks, and most of the savings deposited with friendly societies, &c., is invested in Consols, and as a very large part of the assets of the industrial and other insurance societies consists of Government Stocks. Property being theft, and thrift being akin to it, the thrifty workman whose savings are invested in Consols has apparently no right to complain of being robbed of his savings by the Socialists. Some Socialist agitators have the audacity to tell the thrifty worker that he will not suffer, but benefit, by the confiscation of his savings. "Opponents try to scare this man against Socialism by the fear of losing his interest. Granting for a moment he would do so, would he not gain by the general abolition of interest, &c., which would double his wage in common with that of all workers?"[447]--The worker is to be indemnified for his positive and certain loss in property through the confiscation of his savings, or at the least of the interest paid on them, by a problematical rise in general wages which would benefit the unthrifty quite as much as the thrifty. But if the promised doubling of wages should not take place, what will happen? The Socialist agitators will explain that they are sorry to have made a mistake, whilst the thriftless are squandering the property of the thrifty. According to the Socialist teachings, the capitalist is a perfectly useless being in the national household. "Does he himself want to work: to do something useful? Far from it. His money works for him; his money makes money, as the saying is."[448] Most capitalists--and I think the large majority of wage-earners are capitalists to some extent--are engaged in useful productive work of hand or brain. However, the capitalist of the Socialist imagination, the wealthy man who lives without any work, who studies the money market and Stock Exchange quotations, and who is occupied solely in investing and reinvesting his money to the best advantage, is an extremely useful member of society. It is of the utmost consequence to all workers, and to the whole nation, that the national capital should grow, that mines, railways, ships, machinery, houses, &c., should multiply and be constantly improved. Now the thrifty, not the wasteful, preserve and increase the national capital. Wise and cautious capitalists in enriching themselves will enrich the nation. Careless ones will lose their money and impoverish the nation. The wealth of France has, to a very large extent, been created by cautious and far-seeing _rentiers_, and thus France has become the banker among nations. Socialists teach that the wealth of the few causes the poverty of the many; that therefore the private capitalist should be destroyed. Why, then, are the workers most prosperous in those countries which possess the wealthiest capitalists, such as France and the United States, and why are they poorest in countries, such as Turkey and Servia, where wealthy capitalists do not exist? And may not the destruction of the capitalists reduce Great Britain to the level of Turkey and Servia? FOOTNOTES: [430] _Socialism Made Plain_, p. 9. [431] _Capital and Land_, pp. 5, 6. [432] Kautsky, _The Social Revolution_, p. 11. [433] Blatchford, _The Clarion Ballads_, p. 9. [434] Blatchford, _The Pope's Socialism_, p. 2. [435] Bax and Quelch, _A New Catechism of Socialism_, p. 17. [436] Sorge, _Socialism and the Worker_, p. 11. [437] Keir Hardie, _From Serfdom to Socialism_, p. 11. [438] Joynes, _The Socialist Catechism_, p. 3. [439] Davidson, _The Gospel of the Poor_, p. 54. [440] See Appendix. [441] _Justice_, October 19, 1907. [442] Davidson, _The Democrat's Address_, p. 5. [443] _Socialism Made Plain_, p. 8. [444] Davidson, _The Gospel of the Poor_, p. 49. [445] McLachlan, _Tyranny of Usury_, p. 13. [446] Davidson, _The Old Order and the New_, p. 76. [447] _Wealth Makers and Wealth Takers_, p. 1. [448] Sorge, _Socialism and the Worker_, p. 10. CHAPTER X SOCIALIST VIEWS AND PROPOSALS REGARDING TAXATION AND THE NATIONAL BUDGET To Socialists taxation is chiefly a means for impoverishing the rich and the well-to-do. It is their object to transfer by taxation the wealth from the few to the many, as they believe that the impoverishment of the rich will mean the enrichment of the poor. Therefore they do not aim at economy in national and local expenditure. On the contrary, they wish to spend as much as possible. As money is to be obtained solely from the rich, "An increase in national taxation has no terrors for Socialists."[449] Every increase in expenditure is greeted by them with joy, and wastefulness in national and local undertakings is rather encouraged than condemned. "Socialists look to the Budget as a means not only of raising revenue to meet unavoidable expenditure, but as an instrument for redressing inequalities in the distribution of wealth."[450] Let us first look into the financial views of the Socialists, and then into their positive proposals. "The purpose of Socialism is to transfer land and industrial capital to the people. There are two ways in which, simultaneously, this object may be carried out. The one way is by the municipal and national appropriation--with such compensation to the existing owners as the community may think fit to give--of the land and industrial concerns. The second method is by taxation. Taxation has its special sphere of usefulness in helping the community to secure some part of its own by diverting into the national purse portions of the rent, interest, and profit which now go to keep an idle class in luxury at the expense of the industrious poor."[451] "The existence of a rich class, whose riches are the cause of the poverty of the masses, is the justification for the Socialist demand that the cost of bettering the condition of the people must be met by the taxation of the rich. The Socialist's ideas of taxation may be briefly summarised as follows: (1) Both local and national taxation should aim primarily at securing for the communal benefit all 'unearned' or 'social' increment of wealth. (2) Taxation should aim deliberately at preventing the retention of large incomes and great fortunes in private hands, recognising that the few cannot be rich without making the many poor. (3) Taxation should be in proportion to ability to pay and to protection and benefit conferred by the State. (4) No taxation should be imposed which encroaches upon the individual's means to satisfy his physical needs."[452] "To the Socialist taxation is the chief means by which he may recover from the propertied classes some portion of the plunder which their economic strength and social position have enabled them to extract from the workers; to him, national and municipal expenditure is the spending for common purposes of an ever-increasing proportion of the national income. The degree of civilisation which a State has reached may almost be measured by the proportion of the national income which is spent collectively instead of individually. To the Socialist the best of Governments is that which spends the most. The only possible policy is deliberately to tax the rich, especially those who live on wealth which they do not earn; for thus, and thus only, can we reduce the burthen upon the poor."[453] The Fabian Society suggests the following reform of national taxation: "In English politics successful ends must have moderate beginnings. Such a beginning might be an income-tax of _2s. 6d._ in the pound. Unearned incomes above _5,000l._ a year would pay _2s. 6d._ in the pound, below _5,000l._ a year _1s. 8d._ in the pound. The estate duty might be handled upon similar principles. Estates between _500,000l._ and _1,000,000l._ would be charged twelve and a half per cent, instead of seven and a half, and estates exceeding _1,000,000l._ fifteen per cent, instead of eight."[454] The Fabian Society does not disguise its aim in proposing the foregoing: "These suggestions are doubtless confiscatory, and that is why they should recommend themselves to a Labour party. But even so, the confiscation is of a timorous and a slow-footed sort. The average British millionaire dies worth about _2,770,000l._, on which the death duty would be _415,500l._, leaving the agreeable nest-egg of _2,254,500l._ to the heirs. Even if we assume that the inheritance passes to one person only, so as to be subject to the highest rate of duty, it would not be until five more lives had passed that it would be reduced to a pitiful million. The most patient Labour party might not unreasonably demand something a trifle more revolutionary than this."[455] According to the above proposals the income-tax would return _47,600,000l._ per annum. This sum seems far too moderate to most Socialist writers. Councillor Glyde, for instance, gives in a widely read pamphlet elaborate tables in which the produce of a graduated income-tax is carefully calculated. The Fabian Society would make "a moderate beginning" by taxing large incomes _2s. 6d._ in the pound. Councillor Glyde would begin by levying a _3s._ income-tax on them. Taxation of incomes in accordance with his proposals would bring in _70,281,839l._ per annum.[456] Mr. Smart, of the Independent Labour Party, gives lengthy details of a taxation reform scheme in which figure a foundation-tax, a special property-tax, and a super-tax. Large incomes would have to pay 17-1/2 per cent., or _3s. 6d._ in the pound, and his property and income tax would bring in _78,000,000l._ per annum.[457] Mr. Philip Snowden, M.P., submits a different scheme of taxation. There is to be an income-tax of _1s._ in the pound and a graduated super-tax up to _6s._ in the pound. Whilst the three authorities mentioned so far propose to take from the large incomes _2s. 6d._, _3s._, and _3s. 6d._ in the pound as a "moderate beginning," Mr. Snowden would, presumably also as a "moderate beginning," take _7s._ in the pound from them. He is quite touched with his own generosity and magnanimity, for might he not demand at once _17s._ or _20s._ in the pound? "To console the possessors of incomes in the higher grade, say _50,000l._ a year, to the payment of an income-tax of _1s._ in the pound, we may remind them that they still retain _33,500l._ a year, which is a very generous payment by labour to them for the privilege of seeing them exist in gorgeous splendour and sumptuous idleness."[458] The proposals regarding the estate duty to be charged also vary. The Fabian Society proposes a maximum of 15 per cent. Mr. Smart would be satisfied with a graduated estate duty with a maximum of 25 per cent, instead of the present maximum of 8 per cent.[459] Mr. Snowden proposes a scale of duties which ranges from 1 per cent, up to 50 per cent.[460] Besides the very greatly increased income-tax and estate duty, there would be, according to Mr. Snowden, a land value tax of a penny in the pound of its capital value, which is equal to 10 per cent. annual value. It is to be the small beginning of the policy of taxing landowners out of existence, to be speedily followed by confiscation. "The annual value of land being _250,000,000l._, the produce of the land value tax would be _25,000,000l._ a year."[461] The author justifies the creation of that tax as follows: "Liverpool, London, Glasgow owe their existence and their prosperity to their respective situations, which are natural advantages and which ought not in justice to be enjoyed solely by those who live upon the sites. Every town and village in the country contributes to the prosperity of every other part. The nation is a unit; its resources and its obligations should be mutually shared." "Land values are so obviously not created by individual effort that the justice of taking the increment for the use of the community appeals to those who may have some difficulty in grasping the working of the 'unearned increment' in commercial concerns, where, however, it operates just as truly though not so obviously. The imposition of an Imperial tax of one penny in the pound on the capital value of the site would be a beginning, but by no means the end, of the process of diverting socially-created rent of land into the public exchequer. Taxation will do something towards that end; but taxation would be a long, irritating, and untrustworthy way of trying to secure the whole annual value of the land for the community."[462] "The taxation of land values is not a land reform. To get the full usefulness and the full value of the land for the community there is no way but for the State to own the land."[463] The contemplated reform of taxation will not be limited to taxing the rich and the well-to-do out of existence. Relief will be afforded to the masses by the repeal of all duties on food, and, indeed, of all indirect taxation. "The reforms which the Labour party will endeavour to obtain from the Government, in which it believes it will be expressing the democratic sentiment of the country, are: 1. Repeal of the duties on foods. 2. A minimum wage of _30s._ to all workers in Government employ or working under a contractor for the Government. 3. Old-age pensions of _7s._ a week for persons over sixty."[464] Practically all Socialists agree that all indirect taxation should be abolished. "Indirect taxation has nothing whatever to recommend it to an intelligent people, however advantageous it may be to the well-to-do. Indirect taxation violates every principle of sound economy."[465] "Its maintenance is excused on the ground that indirect taxation is the only means by which the working class can be made to contribute to the cost of national government at ah. The poorer working classes should not be taxed by the Government at all."[466] "Under a just system of taxation all indirect taxation for revenue purposes would be abolished."[467] "With 43 per cent, of the working classes living in poverty, with an average wage over the whole working class not sufficient to provide themselves with the standard of workhouse comfort, it becomes a crime to tax them for the protection of their property and the enjoyment of their privileges"[468]--Is it true that, as Mr. Snowden, M.P., writes, the whole working class of Great Britain is so badly paid that it cannot provide for itself the standard of workhouse comfort? How then can he reconcile with that assertion the following statement which he gives in the same book a few pages further on: "Experts assign the proportion of the total annual drink bill of the United Kingdom contributed by the wage-earning classes at _100,000,000l._ A committee of the British Association, reporting on the 'appropriation of wages,' in 1882 said that 75 per cent, of the total consumption of beer and spirits, and 10 per cent. of the wine bill, might be assigned as the shares of the working class."[469] As a matter of fact experts estimate that the British working men spend even more than _100,000,000l._ per year on drink, and that they spend about _50,000,000l._ on betting. It is really very inartistic for a professional agitator to tell us that the British workers are too poor to pay any taxes, that it is a "crime" to tax them at all, and then to remind us that the same starving ill-used workers can afford to spend more than the amount of the whole nation's Budget in drink and betting, that about one-sixth of the workman's wages are spent at the public-house, that many workmen spend the larger half of their income in drink, and that the British nation is the most drunken in the world, although drink is far more expensive in Great Britain than in any other country. With part of the money taken by means of extortionate taxation from the rich, whole sections of the population are to be bribed into supporting Socialism. "Two objectionable heads of revenue would find no place in a Socialist national balance-sheet--the profit from the Post Office and the stamp duties. Improvements in the wages and conditions of labour in the lower grades of the postal service would absorb a considerable part of the present annual profit of _5,000,000l._ and the rest might, with benefit, be utilised for cheapening the cost to the public of postal rates and services."[470] Mr. Snowden, in promising in one phrase the repeal of stamp duties and cheapening of postage, very likely thought that that step would relieve the poor. He apparently imagined that duty stamps were identical with postage stamps. If he had known that stamp duties are largely derived from Stock Exchange transactions and the sale of every kind of property on a large scale, from legal documents, &c., he would probably have proposed that they should be increased tenfold in order to strike another blow at private property, not that they should be abolished. Even the policy of confiscation requires an elementary knowledge of facts. Furthermore, "The Socialist Budget would provide for a very considerable increase of the grants-in-aid, retaining for the central Government just sufficient control or inspection over the expenditure as would not interfere with the reasonable freedom of the local authority."[471] "Control which would not interfere" is at present illogical and impossible, because the one excludes the other. It may be possible in the Socialist State of the future, because logic will have to be abolished in it. At all events it seems clear that Mr. Snowden wishes to secure the support of the local authorities by the same curious means by which he strives to secure the support of the Post Office servants. The foregoing extracts should suffice to show that the Socialists mean to ruin the owners of property of every kind by indirect confiscation in the form of extortionate taxation, which is to be constantly increased and which may be followed by direct confiscation, and that they rely upon force for achieving their aim. Capitalists may leave the country, but they must leave their capital behind, and their disappearance, Socialists assert, will be no loss. "The vast majority of our employers are routineers, who could no more contribute an intelligent statement of their industrial function to this paper than a bee could write the works of Lord Avebury. Routineers can always be replaced, and replaced with profit, by educated functionaries. Consequently when the employers threaten us with emigration, our only regret as to the majority of them is that it is too good to be true."[472] "Supposing those who have the money were to threaten to leave the country and to take their money with them, would not that upset your plans? Money is not wealth. You would have cause to rejoice. So would the country which was fortunate enough to see its capitalists emigrate."[473] According to the Socialist teaching, the workers maintain the capitalists. The brain is mightier than the hand, though the brain requires the hand. In reality it rather seems that the capitalists maintain the workers. It cannot too often be pointed out that those countries which have many wealthy capitalists are highly civilised and prosperous, and their workers are well off. On the other hand, those countries which have few or no wealthy capitalists are little civilised and poor, and their workers are exceedingly badly off. The masses may conceivably rob the capitalists of their property, and try to manage the national capital themselves, but whether they will benefit by spoliation remains to be seen. Lacking direction, foresight, unity, organisation, discipline, and thrift, the masses will probably quickly waste the national capital, and national ruin and distress and starvation will be the consequences of wholesale robbery. The confiscation experiment has often been tried in the past, and it has always failed. The last time it has been tried was at the time of the French Revolution. The money secured by robbery was recklessly squandered. Production was neglected, and the people became poorer than ever. In the country agriculture came to a standstill, weeds grew where corn had been growing, gardens became a natural wilderness, and wolves roamed in thousands.[474] The great manufacturing towns were dead, manufacturers in Paris who had employed sixty or eighty men employed but ten.[475] The people in town and country were starving. Many lived on roots and bark. Many of the poor in Paris waited outside the slaughter-houses and lapped the blood from the gutters like dogs. Private capital has existed in all countries and at all times, because it is a plant of natural growth. One can destroy it, but it will ever grow again. FOOTNOTES: [449] Snowden, _Socialist Budget_, p. 1. [450] _Ibid._ [451] Snowden, _The Socialist's Budget_, p. 2. [452] _Ibid._ pp. 7, 8. [453] _Socialism and Labour Policy_, p. 4. [454] _Ibid._ pp. 4, 5. [455] _Ibid._ p. 5. [456] Glyde, _A Peep Behind the Scenes on a Board of Guardians_, pp. 28,29. [457] Smart, _Socialism and the Budget_, pp. 14,15. [458] Snowden, _The Socialist's Budget_, pp. 78, 79. [459] Smart, _Socialism and the Budget_, p. 8. [460] Snowden, _The Socialist's Budget_, p. 81. [461] _Ibid._ p. 82. [462] _Ibid._ pp. 82, 83. [463] Snowden, _The Socialist's Budget_, p. 84. [464] Smart, _Socialism and the Budget_, p. 15. [465] Snowden, _The Socialist's Budget_, p. 15. [466] _Ibid._ p. 31. [467] _Ibid._ p. 16. [468] Snowden, _The Socialist's Budget_, p. 17. [469] _Ibid._ pp. 21, 22. [470] Snowden, _The Socialist's Budget_, p. 71. [471] _Ibid._ p. 59. [472] G.B. Shaw in the _New Age_, November 30, 1907. [473] Wheatley, _How the Miners are Robbed_, p. 12. [474] Vandal, _Avènement de Bonaparte_, 1903, vol. i. p. 25. [475] Schmidt, _Tableaux de la Révolution_, vol. iv. p. 383. CHAPTER XI SOCIALISM AND THE EMPIRE Most British Socialists object to the Empire on various grounds, and desire its downfall and dissolution. According to their views Great Britain should, in the first place, give up her non-self-governing colonies. Let us take note of some Socialistic pronouncements to that effect: "Governments have no right to exist except with the consent of the governed, and the British have no more right to dominate other peoples than other peoples have to dominate us. What we can only hold by maintaining an alien garrison had better be given up. The people of these islands would not be losers, but the gainers by such a course."[476] "Is it possible for a self-governing people to rule a subject race, and yet keep its own love for liberty? Neither the Greeks nor the Romans could do it, and we are not doing it very well ourselves. The reason is obvious. No nation can play the part of the despot (even the benevolent despot) abroad and that of the democrat at home."[477] "Socialists should oppose the creation of empires on this simple ground--that empire-building is accompanied by terrible misery and suffering for those subject races, as they are called, which are the chosen victims sacrificed on the altar of cupidity and pride."[478] "A people gain power and influence in the world in proportion as they solve for themselves the great problems of democratic self-government. We shall do more to civilise Africa by civilising the East End of London than by governing from Cape to Cairo."[479] "It is not only impossible for one nation to civilise another by governing it; it is wrong that it should attempt to do so. Conquest may have opened up one civilisation to another in times long antecedent to the steam engine and a world commerce, but to-day its only effect is to crush out and level down all national life to the dead uniformity of an alien political routine."[480] "What is the attitude of Socialism towards backward races, savage and barbaric peoples who are to-day outside the civilised world? The position of Socialism towards these races is one of absolute non-interference. We hold that they should be left entirely alone to develop themselves in the natural order of things; which they must inevitably do or die out. It is the duty of Socialists to support the barbaric races in their resistance to aggression."[481] "It is the duty of International Socialists, the only international non-capitalist party, to denounce, and wherever possible to prevent, the extension of colonisation and conquest, leaving to each race and creed and colour the full opportunity to develop itself until complete economic and social emancipation is secured by all."[482] "Duty, like charity, begins at home, and if the civilisation of the blacks is to be purchased only by the destruction of our own democratic spirit, the balance to the world is of evil, not of good. There is another view of Imperialism expressed with brutal candour by Mr. Rhodes when he said that the flag was our best commercial asset, that trade follows the flag. Trade does no such thing. Trade follows business enterprise. Imperialism is, indeed, a policy of industrial deterioration, and by impoverishing the skill of the country and encouraging the worst forms of financial capitalism, must crush out every budding hope that labour has of becoming economically and politically free."[483] The foregoing extracts should suffice to show that there is among British Socialists a strong desire to abandon the non-self-governing colonies. The attitude of the British Socialists towards the great self-governing dominions is not much more favourable than it is towards tropical colonies. Their attitude is one of hardly disguised hostility, which appears to spring partly from jealousy of the colonists, partly from hatred of the British capitalists who have invested money in the colonies. The loss of British capital invested in the colonies would probably be greeted with jubilation by the Socialists. "The well-to-do sections of society in Great Britain have found a secure and profitable outlet for their capital in loans and advances to the colonists alike as organised communities and as individual property-owners. But the drain for interest and dividends to England on this account is heavy, and is severely felt at times of depression, such as that which Australia as a whole has been suffering from during the recent seven years of almost continuous drought. It seems tolerably certain, therefore, that this comparative handful of colonists, eleven millions in all, of which only four millions in Australia, will in time to come, and as the Labour party and Socialists gain strength, repudiate, or at any rate reduce, these onerous obligations. It is also probable that with regard to Australia, as the white population does not increase and England's day as a colonising power proper is practically over (having no longer any agricultural population to send out as emigrants), this huge territory will not be permanently left at the sole dog-in-the-manger control of its present handful of inhabitants. We may expect, at least, that Australia will not be permanently able to retain its position without an infusion of entirely fresh blood, and should other peoples require an outlet in that direction, the present preposterous policy will have to be abandoned."[484] Socialists seem, on the whole, to be opposed to the federation of the British Empire. "The Labour party approaches Imperial problems with the politics of the industrious classes as guide on the one hand, and the internationalism of its nature as guide on the other."[485] Its "internationalism" apparently prevents it from approving of any practical scheme of Imperial Federation. Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, M.P., of the Labour party, has not expressed actual hostility to the Empire. In fact, he has even declared: "Socialism did not intend to re-write history. It accepted the facts of life, and one of these facts was that we were responsible for the Empire, and, whether we liked it or not, we had to rule that Empire. He was overjoyed the other day to find that at Stuttgart their Dutch and German and French friends were fully aware of the fact that, if Socialism was to play the proper part that belonged to it, it must devise a colonial policy."[486] Nevertheless, Mr. Macdonald's views do not appear to be very practical, as will be seen in the following pages. "These free colonies, though of enormous extent, count for little in the matter of population. Their wealth is out of all proportion to their numbers, as their pretensions are out of all proportion to their power. That they will play any very great part in the future of the world, either federated to the mother country or in any other way, seems exceedingly improbable."[487] "Imperialism is crudely ineffective. Imperial Federation would give the colonies a fuller sense of independence and liberty, and thus far would benefit them. But Imperial Federation is not approved on this account, but because it is supposed to be a way of uniting the Empire. That, it will not do: it will very likely do the opposite. In whatever form it comes, it will give to the independent interests of the colonies new importance. We shall then hear less of the Empire and more of Canada, or New Zealand, or South Africa, and a great danger will arise that a purely sectional view of Imperial interests may secure the support of the might and the arrogance of the whole Empire."[488] "Canada has almost claimed that it is a right of self-governing States to be allowed to make treaties for themselves. When that happens, the colonies might as well sever themselves from the mother country altogether. For under present circumstances the authority which makes treaties is the authority which ultimately controls armies. To give any of our colonies the power to embroil us in war, or to determine our relations with European Powers, is to give the first shattering blow to Imperial solidarity."[489] Nearly all British Socialists passionately oppose the retention of India. They never tire of condemning British rule in India, and of endeavouring to incite the native races to rebellion. According to the assertions of Socialists, the British Government has "manufactured" famine and plague in India, and its rule is the worst, the most cruel, and the most pernicious form of despotism which the world has seen. Mr. Hyndman says: "India is the greatest and most awful instance of the cruelty, greed, and short-sightedness of the capitalist class of which history gives any record. Even the horrors of Spanish rule in South America are dwarfed into insignificance in comparison with the cold, calculating, economic infamy which has starved, and is still deliberately starving, millions of people to death in British India."[490] "I charge it against the British Government, at this moment, that the economic condition of India is much more horrible than ever it was. I declare that the despotism of Russia is more apparently cruel, but the actual economic effect of the British Government's rule in India is more desperate than anything in the situation in Russia."[491] Mr. Hare also speaks of "famine made by Government"[492]--India suffers from two great evils: famine and the plague. India is very densely populated. The natives live chiefly upon rice, and rice requires an enormous quantity of moisture. If rain fails, there is famine, and no Government can prevent it, though it may alleviate it. Therefore all rice countries--China, India, Japan--are periodically stricken by famine. It is difficult enough, and taxes the resources of a country to the utmost, to feed in a barren country an army of 500,000 men who are closely assembled. It is impossible to feed a population of 60,000,000, even if funds and stores of food are unlimited. With the most perfect system of harbours, canals, railways, &c., the distribution of food for 60,000,000 people offers insurmountable obstacles. Plague is caused by infection, and may be stamped out by the observance of those sanitary rules which Indians refuse to observe. Cases of plague are not reported to the authorities, but are hidden from them, so that the sanctity of the home may not be defiled by the entrance of a medical man. Nevertheless, Socialists never tire of preaching: "If there is one disease which is more directly the outcome of poverty than any other, it is the plague."[493] "Just think of 250,000 people dying of manufactured black plague in one month. It is not the people of England who benefit by our murderous despotism in India. It is not the working classes who would suffer if India were relieved from its present frightful oppression. If the present trade is beneficial, it is beneficial to the wealthy rather than to the workers."[494] "If ever there was a population in the history of the world possessed of a remarkable climate, with a fruitful soil, with all the opportunities for making wealth, and having been the source of wealth to the peoples who have traded with them for centuries, the population of India is that people and Hindostan is that country which ought to be supremely wealthy."[495] Socialists have done all in their power to arouse the hostility of Europe and America against Great Britain by denouncing British misrule, cruelty, and tyranny in India. "I rejoice, as an Englishman, that I have done my share for nearly thirty years to expose in Europe, America, and Asia the systematic rascality of my aristocratic and plutocratic countrymen."[496] "I appeal to this International Socialist Congress to denounce the statesmen and the nation guilty of this infamy before the entire civilised world, and to convey to the natives of India the heartfelt wish of the delegates of the workers of all nations here assembled that they may shortly, no matter in what manner, free themselves finally from the horrors of the most criminal misrule that has ever afflicted humanity."[497] Socialists unceasingly work for the overthrow of British rule in India. Theirs is a larger humanity. They wish to bring about a rising of the Indian population, and they seem to care little if the 250,000 British people residing in that country are incidentally exterminated. Their hatred of the "capitalist" Empire is apparently greater than their sense of humanity and duty towards their own countrymen. At a recent Socialist meeting in connection with the unrest in India, Mr. Hyndman submitted the following motion: "This meeting of the citizens of London expresses its deepest sympathy and admiration for Lajpat Kai, Adjit Singh, and the Sikh leaders at Rawal Pindi, Amritsar, and Lahore, now undergoing imprisonment without trial, at the command of Mr. John Morley and the Liberal Government, and sends its cordial greetings to the agitators all over India who are doing their utmost to awaken their countrymen of every race and creed to the ruinous effect of our rule, which, by draining away _35,000,000l._ worth of produce yearly from India without return, has manufactured poverty upon a scale unprecedented in history and is converting the greatest Empire the world has ever seen into a vast pauper warren and human plague farm. This meeting further records its fervent hope that this infamous British system which crushes all economic, social, and political life out of 230 millions of people will ere long be peaceably or forcibly swept away for ever."[498] Proceeding, Mr. Hyndman said: "I may mention I have just finished a pamphlet on India I have written for the International Socialist Congress at Stuttgart, which is going to be translated by the International Socialist Bureau into German and French, and I will take care it is translated into some other languages--Eastern languages--including the Japanese language."[499] Attempts to incite the native Indians to rise in rebellion and to massacre the British garrison and the British people residing in India are not restricted to Mr. Hyndman. We read in the leading Socialist monthly: "The maintenance of British rule in India means that the working people of Great Britain are engaged in helping their masters--the class which robs them--to plunder the unfortunate people of India of over thirty millions sterling every year. We desire to see the people of India, as of every other country, not only possessed of national independence and political rights, but of social and economical liberty and equality. We assert the right of the Indian people to manage their own affairs, and ardently desire the destruction of British rule there."[500] From the official organ of the Independent Labour Party we learn that that party also "has declared itself wholly in favour of constitutional government in India and the social emancipation of the poverty-stricken Indian people. We believe that Mr. Hardie has had that purpose solely in view, and the party will stand solidly with him in conveying to the Indian people the strongest expression of the sympathy and support of British Socialists in their struggle against social and political oppression."[501] If British subjects are murdered in India by the ten thousand, we may thank our revolutionary Socialists. Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, M.P., of the Labour party very sensibly recommends with regard to India: "The Government should win the confidence and assent of the people."[502] He then continues: "The immediate reforms necessary are a lightening of India's financial load by relieving it of the Imperial burdens which it now unjustly bears, and a readjustment of taxes; the extension of local and State self-government and further opportunities for natives to be employed in public offices; the freeing of the press."[503] It is easy to formulate a policy by expressing generous abstract sentiments. Is Mr. Macdonald aware that "the lightening of India's financial load" would mean its transference to English shoulders, that the granting of self-government and the freeing of the press might lead to a position which would put before this country the alternative of a war of repression in India or of its abandonment, and that the abandonment of India would ruin Lancashire? We have taken note of the destructive part of the policy which Socialists wish to pursue towards the Empire. Now let us take note of their constructive proposals, though these are not nearly as numerous as their destructive ones. Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, M.P., of the Labour party, is dissatisfied with Imperial administration in its present form. He would democratise it and replace the present Imperial Governors by labour men and Socialist agitators and orators. "The Crown cannot be the custodian of an Imperial policy, though it may be an Imperial link--and even in this respect its influence is greatly exaggerated at home."[504] "The real difficulty lies in securing the confidence of the Imperial States for whatever authority is to be custodian of the Imperial standard. Downing Street is ignorant of colonial opinion and needs. Above all, Downing Street is the surviving symbol of the era of the British 'dominions' and the real 'colonies.' The Imperial States will not repose confidence in Downing Street, therefore Downing Street cannot remain the custodian of Imperial standards. What is to take its place?"[505] "The failure of our Empire, except to produce mechanical results, such as keeping warring tribes at peace, is largely owing to the fact that the Empire is governed by the most narrow-visioned of our social classes. National pride may be a valuable possession, but when it becomes a consciousness of racial superiority it ceases to be an Imperial virtue. Thus it is not only in its origin, but also in its present administration, that the Empire in a special sense is a perquisite of the rich classes, and the influence of the Labour party on Imperial politics must be to democratise the _personnel_ of the Imperial machine. A trade union secretary could govern a province _prima facie_ better than the son of an ancient county family or someone who was a friend of the Colonial Secretary when he was passing time at Balliol. We honestly think that the colonies appreciate our aristocracy, but the colonies laugh at our amiable illusions."[506] Is Mr. Macdonald sure that the dominions and colonies would welcome a change, and that "trade union secretaries" in their very narrow circle of activity might not become even more "narrow-visioned" than our present pro-consuls? At the same time it cannot be doubted that all labour leaders and Socialist agitators will highly approve of his proposals to make all vice-royalties and governorships their "perquisites." Apart from a few not very practical proposals, Socialists follow not a constructive, but a purely destructive, policy with regard to the Empire, which in their eyes is merely a capitalist institution. Pursuing consciously or unconsciously a policy of revolutionary anarchism, they would break up the Empire and even Great Britain herself. Therefore many Socialists advocate the legislative independence of both Ireland and Scotland, although some preach, "'Home Rule' _per se_ will not rid Ireland of Lord Deliverus and the gang he represents; the remedy for Ireland's distress, as the early leaders of Irish discontent perceived, is release from the grip of the brigands who stole the nation's heritage. In other words, the real object of the Irish movement is Socialism; their cause is ours, and our paths lie side by side. But they too have been tricked and led astray by the old political will-o'-the-wisp, the seeming angel of 'Liberty' translated in their case to 'Home Rule.' For many years now they have pursued this shifty light through the arid desert of politics, and unless they can come to a clear understanding of their own original purpose again, and join with their English Socialist comrades to find a way out of our common difficulties, they are like to abide in that dreary desert for ever."[507] Whilst the vast majority of British Socialists are unpatriotic, anti-national, and anti-Imperial, and would act as traitors to their country, the powerful Socialist party of Germany is strongly, one might almost say passionately, national and Imperial. Many German Socialists are enthusiastic supporters of the German Navy League, and they would not hesitate in depriving, if possible, and if need be by force, Great Britain of those colonies which her Socialists desire to get rid of. The attitude of German Socialists towards their Fatherland, Empire, colonial possessions, and native races, may be gauged from the words of Herr Bernstein, one of her most prominent Socialist leaders: "The national quality is developing more and more. Socialism can and must be national. Even when we sing _Ubi bene, ibi patria_ we still acknowledge a _patria_, and therefore, in accordance with the motto 'No rights without duties,' also duties towards her. To-day the Social-Democratic party is, and that unanimously, the most decided Imperial party that Germany knows. No other party is so keen to make over more and more legislative authority to the Empire and to widen its competence as the Social-Democratic party. The idea that in a country there exists a powerful party which is only waiting for war in order to make difficulties for its own Government, to set on foot a military strike and such-like, this idea may become the greatest menace to peace by being a spur to adventurous politicians to work towards a war with that country. But the home Government knows very well that the declaration that the Social-Democrats would, in case of need, give their lives for the independence of Germany against a foreign Power is by no means a free pass for them to take war easily."[508] In another periodical Herr Bernstein wrote: "The advantages of colonial possessions are always conditional. At a given period a nation can only sustain a certain quantity of such possessions. As long as she was ahead of all other nations in productive power, England could support a much larger amount than any other modern nation. But the time of her industrial supremacy has passed away, or at least is nearing its end. Protectionism on the Continent and in the United States may protract the advent of the inevitable in some degree. But its hour will strike one day, and when the advantages which free trade secures her to-day disappear, she would either have, I believe, to free herself of part of her colonial burdens or lose more and more of her trade, and with it her regenerative force. So much for England. With Germany the question is quite different. Although her rural population is now decreasing, she could, with a yearly increase of about 800,000, well stand more colonial possessions than she actually holds, nor would the costs and outlays for her colonies press very hard on her finances. Where two civilisations clash, the lower must give way to the higher. This law of evolution we cannot overthrow, we can only humanise its action. To counteract it would mean to postpone social progress."[509] It is sad to compare the sane, manly, national, and patriotic attitude of German Socialists with the foolish, anti-national cosmopolitanism of British Socialists, who, parading beautiful motives of the largest humanity, would not hesitate to sacrifice their country and their countrymen, their Empire and their colonies. FOOTNOTES: [476] Quelch, _Social Democracy and the Armed Nation_, p. 14. [477] _Imperialism: Its Meaning and Its Tendency_, p. 10. [478] Norman, _Empire and Murder_, p. 3. [479] _Imperialism: Its Meaning and Its Tendency_, p. 15. [480] _Ibid._ p. 7. [481] Bax and Quelch, _A New Catechism of Socialism_, p. 36. [482] Hyndman, _Colonies and Dependencies_, p. 14. [483] _Imperialism: Its Meaning and Its Tendency_, pp. 12, 13. [484] Hyndman, _Colonies and Dependencies_, p. 8. [485] Macdonald, _Labour and the Empire_, p. 108. [486] _Labour Leader_, October 10, 1907. [487] Hyndman, _Colonies and Dependencies_, p. 8. [488] _Imperialism: Its Meaning and Its Tendency_, p. 5. [489] Macdonald, _Labour and the Empire_, pp. 76, 77. [490] Hyndman, _Colonies and Dependencies_, p. 12. [491] Hyndman, _The Unrest in India_, p. 13. [492] Hare, _Famine in India_, p. 17. [493] Hyndman, _The Unrest in India_, p. 7. [494] _Ibid._ p. 16. [495] _Ibid._ p. 7. [496] Hyndman, _Colonies and Dependencies_, pp. 11, 12. [497] _Ibid._ p. 14. [498] Hyndman, _The Unrest in India_, p. 1. [499] _Ibid._ p. 4. [500] _Social-Democrat_, July 1907, pp. 393, 394. [501] _Labour Leader_, October 11, 1907. [502] Macdonald, _Labour and the Empire_, p. 104. [503] _Ibid._ p. 105. [504] Macdonald, _Labour and the Empire_, p. 70. [505] _Ibid._ pp. 67, 68. [506] Macdonald, _Labour and the Empire_, pp. 27, 28. [507] Thompson, _That Blessed Word Liberty_, p. 10. [508] Ed. Bernstein in the _Sozialistische Monatshefte_, translated in the _Social-Democrat_, July 1907. [509] _Nation_, October 12, 1907. CHAPTER XII SOCIALIST VIEWS ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND FOREIGN POLICY "Socialism," Mr. Ramsay Macdonald writes, "has a great part to play immediately in international politics. It alone can banish national jealousies from the Foreign Offices; it alone offers the guarantees of peace which are a necessary preliminary to disarmament. Socialism has a world policy as well as a national one--a corollary to its belief in the brotherhood of man."[510] These words contain assurances, not a plan, and therefore we must inquire, What is the foreign policy of Socialism? As regards foreign policy one may divide the Socialists into two classes: revolutionaries and visionaries. It will be seen in the following pages that the aims of both are similar. The foreign policy of the revolutionary Socialists of Great Britain is based on the celebrated "Communist Manifesto" of Marx and Engels, which contains the following programme regarding foreign policy: "The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: in the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality."[511] "The Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. In all these movements they bring to the front, as the leading question of each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time. Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries. The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!"[512] In accordance with the foregoing proclamation of Marx and Engels, the philosopher of British Socialism teaches: "For the Socialist the word 'frontier' does not exist; for him love of country, as such, is no nobler sentiment than love of class. Race pride and class pride are, from the standpoint of Socialism, involved in the same condemnation. The establishment of Socialism, therefore, on any national or race basis is out of the question. The foreign policy of the great international Socialist party must be to break up these hideous race monopolies called empires, beginning in each case at home. Hence everything which makes for the disruption and disintegration of the empire to which he belongs must be welcomed by the Socialist as an ally. It is his duty to urge on any movement tending in any way to dislocate the commercial relations of the world, knowing that every shock the modern complex commercial system suffers weakens it and brings its destruction nearer. This is the negative side of the foreign policy of Socialism. The positive is embraced in a single sentence; to consolidate the union of the several national sections on the basis of firm and equal friendship, steadfast adherence to definite principles, and determination to present a solid front to the enemy."[513] The head of the Social-Democratic Federation informs us: "We have never failed to hold up before the people the high ideal of a complete social revolution, which shall replace the capitalist sweating system and its terrible class war by the happiness, contentment, and glory of a great co-operative commonwealth for all mankind."[514] Faithful to the teaching of Karl Marx, Mr. Tom Mann proclaims: "We do not want any walls built round cities or nations for fear of invasion; what we do now stand in urgent need of is an international working alliance among the workers of the whole world. The only position of safety will be found in international action among the organised workers of the world."[515] These being the doctrines of revolutionary Socialism, it is only natural that many British Socialists take the enemy's part in case of war.[516] The foreign policy of the visionary Socialists is based on the idea of human brotherhood and the equality of men of all races, creeds, and colours. "Socialism is brotherhood; and brotherhood is as wide as the heavens and as broad as humanity. The growth of international Socialism is the promise of the realisation of the angels' natal song: On earth, peace; Good will toward men. Socialism will remove the causes of international antagonism and make the interests of all nations the same."[517] "Socialism implies the inherent equality of all human beings. It does not assume that all are alike, but only that all are equal. Holding this to be true of individuals, the Socialist applies it also to races. Only by a full and unqualified recognition of this claim can peace be restored to the world. Socialism implies brotherhood, brotherhood implies a living recognition of the fact that the duty of the strong is not to hold the weak in subjection but to assist them to rise higher and ever higher in the scale of humanity, and that this cannot be done by trampling upon and exploiting their weakness, but by caring for them and showing them the better way."[518] Thus Socialism will bring to the world eternal peace. In the words of the poet: There's a good time coming, boys, A good time coming; And war in all men's eyes shall be A monster of iniquity, In the good time coming. Nations shall not quarrel then, To prove which is the stronger; Nor slaughter men for glory's sake-- Wait a little longer.[519] The ideas expressed in the above are very noble, but they seem to be hardly in accordance with historical experience or with human nature as we know it. The race war on the Pacific coast, and the murderous attacks by strikers on free labourers who have taken their place which are of frequent occurrence in all countries, show that even Socialists are apt to rely rather on threats, violence, and superior force than on brotherliness and reason, although the Chinaman and the Japanese have, according to the Socialist doctrines given in the foregoing, as much right to earn a living as any white man. "Socialism is essentially international. It recognises no distinction between the various nations comprising the modern civilised world. 'My country, right or wrong,' the expression of modern patriotism, is the very antithesis of Socialism.... This internationalism means liberty and equality between nations as between individuals, and amalgamation as soon as feasible, and as close as possible, under the red flag of Social Democracy, which does not recognise national distinctions or the division of progressive humanity into nations and races."[520] "The new community will be built up on an international basis. The nations will fraternise together, will shake hands over old quarrels, and unite in gradually extending the new State over all peoples of the earth."[521] "Nationalisation is only the beginning of Socialism. Once let any nation be thoroughly imbued with the Socialist spirit, it will become a missionary nation. It will preach the glad tidings of salvation to people of other tongues, and that which was national shall become universal: East and West, North and South, all shall realise, all shall rejoice in, the glorious brotherhood of man."[522] The "brotherhood of man" reminds one of the French Revolution. Like the French Revolution, Socialism has imposed upon itself the mission to convert the world to its doctrine, and people may again be placed before the alternative "La Fraternité ou la Mort." Let despots frown and tyrants sneer, The red flag is unfurled; We'll to our principles adhere And socialise the world.[523] Being anxious to "socialise the world," Socialists eagerly note every progress of Socialism in foreign countries from Paris to Pekin. For instance, we read in the "Reformers' Year Book": "The belief that the quick-witted Japanese would, at the beginning of their new civilisation, avoid the evils of European capitalism by accepting a scheme of Socialism is not being fulfilled. The dividend-hunter, who has been to Europe and received a business training, is fastening the chains of monopoly upon the people. To meet this growing danger there is already a thriving Socialist-Labour party, which has a daily newspaper, the 'Hikari' ('Light')."[524] To facilitate the "socialisation of the world" and the introduction of "the brotherhood of man" by making Socialism truly international, Socialists are urged to study Esperanto, which apparently is to be the international Socialist language of the future. The "Clarion" and other Socialist papers regularly contain articles written in Esperanto, and the anti-patriotic writings of Hervé and Gohier--an extract from the writings of the former will be found in Chapter XIII.--have been translated into Esperanto, apparently in the hope that these incendiary pamphlets may help in bringing about the great Socialist revolution. Among the 'immediate reforms' demanded in the programme of the Social-Democratic Federation (see Appendix) are to be found the demands: "The people to decide on peace and war. The establishment of international courts of arbitration." In view of these demands, which are made by most Socialist organisations, it is quite natural that Socialists condemn the secret action of diplomacy. For instance, a Socialist writer remarks on the Anglo-French agreements: "Are we the masters of our destinies, when a Delcassé may at any moment immerse us in international troubles of the first magnitude? Lord Lansdowne, as the accomplice of Delcassé, was equally guilty, and Sir Edward Grey, by now securing this triple alliance without the consent or the knowledge of the 150 millions of people whom it most vitally concerns, completes a trio of international plotters and murderers."[525] Many Socialists believe that wars may soon be abolished by international agreement, either among the nations or among the working masses, who will force their views upon the governments. According to a very prolific Socialist writer, "There are many signs and portents to-day that the evil of war, which is not more deeply rooted than was slavery a hundred years ago, will, ere long, meet a similar fate."[526] And what are the "signs and portents" upon which the belief is based that war will be abolished? "It is a significant fact that whenever the working classes meet to discuss this question of war, they invariably express themselves in favour of its speedy end. A few days ago, when the Trades Union Congress met at Liverpool, when delegates were present representing some two millions of the organised workers of the country, the representative of the Navvies' Union declared, amid the resounding cheers of the Congress, that it was impossible for a man to be a Christian and in favour of war at the same time."[527] The Navvies' Union will no doubt play a great part in the foreign policy of the Socialist commonwealth, but is the importance of their declaration not exaggerated? Wars begin, as a rule, by an act of aggression. What would the Navvies' Union and the Trades Union Congress have said if the secretary had read a telegram stating that British ships had been fired upon and sunk by an enemy, or that British territory had been invaded and British blood had been spilt? I fear that eternal peace is not yet in sight, notwithstanding the "sign and portent" of the statement made by the representative of the Navvies' Union. Indeed, clear-headed foreign Socialists are aware of the very limited usefulness of Peace Conferences, and they deride disarmament proposals, such as that submitted to the last Hague Conference by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. An exceedingly able article in the foremost Socialist organ of Germany gave, early in the spring of 1907, the following views on the probable result of The Hague Conference and on the British proposals regarding the limitation of armaments, views which are particularly interesting because they show the sound good sense of the German Socialists and the difference between the political views of German and British Socialists. The article stated: "Just as the first Hague Conference of 1898 in reality achieved nothing more than a few secondary amendments to the law of nations, conformity with which was left completely to the fancy of the individual Powers, so the second Hague Conference will, it is highly probable, result in nothing further than a few general peace assertions and international arrangements which, when it comes to a war, will not outlive the first interchange of shots. Certainly the English Premier is right. There does exist among the thoughtful persons in all European States an intellectual tendency towards the peaceful settlement of differences between the nations and the diminution of the gigantic military and naval armaments. But this body of thoughtful people is--as the last elections in Germany have again proved--on the whole rather small; and above all, these thoughtful people do not belong to the economically powerful class who determine the policy of Governments. "The old ideologic conception of the English free trade doctrine, that the free exchange of goods between the nations leads to the abolition of war, to the brotherhood of humanity, that conception which found its most original expression in Dr. Bowring's exclamation 'Free trade is Jesus Christ,' still haunts some people's minds. With the greatest number of the liberal advocates of disarmament, their point of view originates simply in the consideration that the strong naval and military armaments demand more and more, not only from England's purse, but from her human material, while, on the other hand, England possesses all that she can expect, and has, on that account, not much more to gain. All over the earth's surface she has the most valuable colonies, and is, since the alliances with Japan and France, in a perfectly secure position, which awakens in her the wish to consolidate her position and to economise her finances for the upholding of her supremacy. It is that satisfied state of mind which makes the fortunate winner of the game say, 'Let us leave off; I am tired of playing now.' English capitalists feel themselves in a safe position. Nothing can easily go wrong at present. The thing is, therefore, to secure what they have got and to diminish the heavy burdens. This desire is comprehensible--only the other Powers will probably not respect it. "The working-class party is very much in sympathy with the disarmament idea in itself. For this party is the most consistent opponent of militarism, and demands in its programme not only the formation of a citizen army in place of the standing army, but also that questions of peace and war should be determined by the people themselves, and that all international differences should be settled by arbitration. But no amount of sympathy can get over the fact that in the present capitalist world there is very little chance of a general disarmament of the Powers. The conception that war is only a product of human unreason is on the same level as the idea that revolutions are only mental aberrations of the masses. War is rooted in the opposing interests of the nations, as are revolutions in the opposing interests of the classes."[528] FOOTNOTES: [510] Macdonald, _Socialism_, p. 120. [511] Marx and Engels, _Manifesto_, p. 1 [512] Marx and Engels, _Manifesto_, p. 31. [513] Bax, _Religion of Socialism_, pp. 126, 127. [514] Debate, Hyndman, _Will Socialism Benefit the English People?_ Introduction. [515] Mann, _International Labour Movement_, p. 6. [516] See, for instance, Hyndman in _The Transvaal War and the Degradation of England_. [517] Snowden, _The Individual under Socialism_, p. 14. [518] Keir Hardie, _From Serfdom to Socialism_, p. 10. [519] _Clarion Song Book_, p. 25. [520] Bax and Quelch, _A New Catechism of Socialism_, p. 31. [521] Bebel, _Woman in the Past, Present, and Future_, p. 235. [522] "Veritas," _Did Jesus Christ teach Socialism?_ p. 2. [523] Neil, _Songs of the Social Revolution_, p. 13. [524] _Reformers' Year Book, 1907_, p. 195. [525] _Social-Democrat_, September 1907, p. 534. [526] Ward, _The War Drum shall Throb no Longer_, p. 13. [527] _Ibid._ p. 14. [528] _Vorwärts_, March 10, 1907, translated in the _Social-Democrat_, April 1907, pp. 220-224. CHAPTER XIII SOCIALISM AND THE ARMY Most Socialists, British and foreign, are opposed to the existing armies, for two reasons: (1) Because they wish to overturn practically all existing institutions from the Monarchy downwards, and they fear that the military may defend the _status quo_; (2) Because they aim at the abolition of States and of nationality and at the disappearance of frontiers, as the ideal Socialist State of the future would, for economic and political reasons, have to embrace the world. The Socialist State of the future, embracing the whole universe, can be created only after the existing States have been overturned. Therefore the more immediate aim of Socialists is to seize upon the political power in accordance with the advice given by Karl Marx in his celebrated "Manifesto."[529] Most Socialists apparently believe that not by Parliamentary means but only by violence will they succeed in making themselves supreme, for we are told: "The ballot-box is no doubt a safer weapon than the rifle; but even when there will be a sufficient number of people in these islands convinced of the necessity and possibility of the co-operative commonwealth, the end will not yet be certain. There are the classes in possession to be considered. Are they going to allow themselves to be voted out? Will they respect a franchise and ballot-box which will vote that they shall get off the backs of the workers? Franchise 'Reform' Bills--and it is astonishing to what use 'reform' can now be put--can be rushed through Parliament, like Crimes Acts, in twenty-four hours; and there is the 'voluntary' professional army, under military law, to overawe the recalcitrants who may resent the suffrage and the ballot-box being jerrymandered against the popular interest. But none are so likely to be overawed by threatened displays of armed force--whether voluntary or conscript--as those who have a difficulty in distinguishing the butt end of a rifle from its muzzle."[530] Under the heading "Will it come to barricades?" we read: "The barricade is to-day, all will agree, in this country at any rate, an impossible weapon. Armed insurrection on the part of the workers in this country would to-day be the height of folly, and will continue to be so, so long as our standing army of hired mercenaries exists. Standing armies are the instruments of capitalist oppression at home and aggression abroad. But so long as even one great Power maintains the present form of military organisation, so long as war is possible, so long will it be necessary that some form of military organisation exist in all countries. We dare not preach peace when we know there can be no peace. This is why the Socialists of all countries are to-day in favour of an educational policy which will make every citizen fit for military service within the ranks of a citizen army, organised and maintained for purposes of defence only. The advantages of such a force, from the Socialist standpoint, are so obvious that they need hardly be stated. And it would at least put the working class in a position to understand what a barricade means, and how, if need be, to act in their own defence. There are, I am well aware, a handful of individual Socialists with us who are against universal military training, but they are a diminishing quantity, and will in due season find their natural vocation within the ranks of the Liberty and Property Defence League."[531] Mr. Quelch, the editor of "Justice," shares the foregoing opinion, for he tells us: "Revolutions, it is said, can no longer be accomplished by force, but only by peaceful means--the vote, Parliamentary action, and legislation. It may be so, but it will be unprecedented if the present ruling class surrender without a struggle. And if they had the armed force of the nation at their command, they would struggle successfully no matter what the Legislature may have done. The ruling class will not be made to submit to law and order which is not their law and order, except by overwhelmingly superior force. Nobody supposes that in such a contest the people could win against the ruling class unless they had been able first to win over the army. With a professional 'voluntary' army, well paid and well affected to its paymasters, such winning over would be practically impossible. But with the armed nation there would be no winning over required. An armed nation--whatever it may do or submit to--is essentially a free nation, and whatever such a nation determines upon, that it can do and have, in spite of any ruling class."[532] Similar opinions have frequently been expressed by leading Continental Socialists. Herr Kautsky, for instance, wrote under the heading "Expropriation of the Expropriators," as follows: "The arming of the people is a political measure. It can, under certain circumstances, cost just as much as a standing army, but it is needed for the safety of the democracy in order to deprive the Government of its most important weapon against the people."[533] Those who are of opinion that only the extreme section of British Socialists, the revolutionary wing, is hostile to the army, are mistaken. This may be seen from the following resolution of the Fabian Society, which is the most moderate exponent of British Socialism: "Armies act as a standing menace not to neighbouring States, but to the working populations of their own countries. A study of the strategical disposition of many of the great railway stations and barracks of the Continent will prove that the most important function of the modern army is to suppress the resistance of labour to capital in the war of classes."[534] Among the "immediate reforms" demanded in the programme of the Social-Democratic Federation[535] we find a demand for "the abolition of standing armies and the establishment of national citizen forces." Army and police are to most Socialists very objectionable because it is their function to protect the national order and national property against predatory, anarchistic, and revolutionary attempts. Therefore it is only natural that "No Social Democrat regards the present police system as a satisfactory one, or a professional police as other than a dubious expedient."[536] According to the opinion held by many Socialists, "The soldier's primary function is to come to the rescue of the policeman when the latter is overpowered."[537] Voluntary armies of the British type are quite as objectionable to Socialists as are the national armies of the compulsory type raised on the Continent of Europe. "We are told that the advantage of our present military system is that it is not compulsory, that people are free to join the service or not as they please. The freedom of the average recruit to join the army is about on a par with the freedom of an unemployed workman to work for lower wages than the recognised rate of wages, or the freedom of the prostitute."[538] "Your soldier, ostensibly a heroic and patriotic defender of his country, is really an unfortunate man driven by destitution to offer himself as food for powder for the sake of regular rations, shelter, and clothing."[539] "A standing army of professional soldiers is the most effective instrument in the hands of the dominant class, the greatest menace to democracy and popular liberty, and the most effective barrier to revolutionary change that could possibly be devised. And surely, too, the antithesis to that is the Armed Nation--every citizen a soldier and every soldier a citizen."[540] The ideal army from the Socialist point of view is the armed nation. It is, as we shall see in the following, an army composed of Socialist workmen and commanded by Socialist leaders. It is not an army for national defence, but one for attack on the existing order; it is a revolutionary army, an army of plunder. The very natural desire of Socialists to create such a force is, as a rule, disguised under the demand for a democratic army and universal military training. "We Socialists advocate the military training of all citizens and the abolition of professional armies, as ensuring the maximum of military efficiency and the minimum of menace to democratic principles and popular rights. We propose that every man should undergo a thorough military training so as to be equal to any other man. A professional army is maintained in the main for the defence and maintenance of the master class. A professional army is a specialised class or caste, divorced from civil life, hostile to the general body of the community, and maintained as an instrument to serve the purpose of the master class. That purpose is as often the suppression of popular movements at home as aggression abroad. If it were possible to abolish all military organisations, the remedy would be simple. But we have seen that that is, under present conditions, impossible. Therefore we urge that all citizens should be armed and trained to the use of arms, so that all reasonable military requirements may be met and professional soldiering be entirely dispensed with."[541] The fact that the abolition of the professional army would involve the loss of India and of other possessions to Great Britain is a matter of no importance to the Socialists. In fact the Socialists wish Great Britain to lose not only India but all her colonies, as will be seen by reference to Chapter XI., "Socialism and the Empire."[542] Every attempt at improving the voluntary army of Great Britain is considered a blow at Socialism, and is therefore vigorously resisted by the Socialists. Hence the scheme of army reform of Mr. Haldane, Secretary of State for War, has been loudly condemned by them as reactionary and likely to strengthen the capitalists, and they entreat the workers not to oppose universal military training. "The capitalist class would be perfectly delighted that all the rest of the people outside themselves and their mercenaries should be peaceful unarmed non-resisters. Nothing could suit them better. We have Mr. Haldane's territorial army--on paper; and a more reactionary, militarist (in the worst sense), and anti-democratic system than that to which the present War Minister has had the effrontery to apply our term of the 'Armed Nation' could scarcely be devised."[543] Whether Mr. Haldane's proposals give Great Britain a better army for national and Imperial defence, is apparently immaterial to the Socialists, for they criticise it merely from the point of view of intending rioters and revolutionaries. They complain: "The position of the Volunteers now is this, that they are not under military law, and cannot be called out as soldiers to shoot down workmen at the bidding of the capitalists. Mr. Haldane's scheme, however, destroys the civilian character of the Volunteers, and converts them into professional soldiers."[544] Although most Socialists are in favour of a national militia, a considerable number oppose even a national militia of the Swiss type, fearing that it would refuse to aid the Socialists in overturning society as at present constituted. "We have been told of the readiness with which the Swiss militia have donned their uniforms and seized their rifles when called upon to act against strikers."[545] The Socialist delegates who accompanied the committee of inquiry which the National Service League sent to Switzerland in the autumn of 1907 were apparently less interested in the efficiency of the Swiss army for national defence than in its attitude during conflicts between labour and capital.[546] Fearing that a national militia might not be willing to lend itself to revolutionary purposes, that it might become a patriotic force as is the Swiss militia, many Socialists condemn every kind of military service, and are quite ready to disarm the nation in the name of humanity and civil freedom. For instance, at the annual conference of the Socialist Independent Labour Party of 1907 the following was moved by a well-known revolutionary Socialist, Mr. Bruce Glasier: "That this Conference believes that the time has come when militarism in every form should be denounced and resisted as alien to civil freedom and social progress, and expresses itself emphatically against compulsory military service, and the attempts which are being made to introduce military training in public schools or other public institutions, and views with alarm the purposes of Mr. Haldane's Army Territorial Bill, which, if passed, will make military service practically compulsory under officers drawn wholly from, the upper classes, will make industrial employment dependent upon military service, and, instead of promoting international unity, will foster and increase the spirit of militarism and aggression."[547] In moving this resolution Mr. Glasier said that "he denounced militarism root and branch," and Mr. Keir Hardie, a Communist Socialist, in seconding, said: "The resolution was not only a declaration against militarism, but a special and specific condemnation of the Territorial Army Scheme now before the House of Commons. The Socialist party was bound to protest against a system of that kind. The particular feature which emphasised the danger was that there were to be county associations formed to have charge of the new territorial forces, and to have a majority of military men upon them with landlords and possibly employers of labour. A citizen army was as great a menace to an industrial population as a professional army. The new army would be recruited from the people, and officered by the enemies of the people, just as the professional army was. Children were to be taught that the flag was the great thing to value in life. They would find that a citizen army, officered by the rich and recruited from their own ranks, would be taught to regard the flag as something holy, while they shot down strikers and Socialists just as freely as the most exclusive professional army in the world could do. Patriotism was one of the weapons used by the enemies of the people to blind them to facts."[548] The Trade Union Congress of 1907, disregarding the security of the country and the Empire from foreign aggression, also condemned military training of every kind. Commenting hereon, the "Social-Democrat," the organ of the Social-Democratic Federation, which favours a national democratic army, wrote: "The Trades Union Congress declares against conscription and also condemns military training, which is a totally different matter. To condemn conscription is purely negative. It would be very much more to the point if the representatives of the organised working class would formulate an expression of opinion on the actual military problem. Conscription, at the worst, is in the air; but the present-day military problem is not in the air; it is on the earth, practical and urgent. What have the trade unionists to say to it? Do they approve of the present system of a nominally voluntary professional soldiery, maintained as an instrument at the service of the capitalist class for suppression at home and aggression abroad?"[549] The trade unionists were urged to abolish the voluntary army and to create a national citizen army, which will assist the Socialist in overturning society. A national citizen army, composed of Socialists and commanded by Socialists, is the ideal, and until such an army be created it is in the interest of Socialists to weaken the existing army and to undermine its discipline to such an extent that, in the event of a rising or a revolution, it will side with the revolutionaries. With this object in view, Socialists are trying to create dissatisfaction in the army by means of emissaries and literature. For instance, in a leaflet entitled "An Appeal to Soldiers," the Social-Democratic Federation says: "If you are to fight for patriotism and country, then let it be a national duty for all, wealthy as well as poor, to bear arms. Let not those who are called upon to fight remain a pariah class apart, bereft of the rights of citizenship--regarded by the upper classes as something to be avoided."[550] In its official programme the Social-Democratic Federation demands, under the heading "Immediate Reforms," "the abolition of courts-martial: all offences against discipline to be transferred to the jurisdiction of civil courts."[551] Why do the Socialists demand the abolition of military law? Because, in their own words, "With the abolition of military law, upon which we have always laid the greatest possible stress, militarism falls to the ground."[552] Therefore the "Appeal to Soldiers" admonishes the military: "You are and will remain a class apart from the rest of the nation so long as you are compelled to serve under a barbarous military code called 'military law.' The system of trial by court-martial is a mere farce and a mockery. We of the Social-Democratic Federation intend to do our utmost to abolish it root and branch. Give us your support. Remember that the late War Minister, Mr. St. John Brodrick, compared the soldier to the Chinese coolie in South Africa. This is how you are looked upon by the very people who use you as food for powder in the interest of their class. Now is the time for all who wish you well to demand the abolition of military law, the civilising of military service, and the establishment of a national citizen force."[553] In the autumn of 1907 a letter to the editor was published by the "Daily Telegraph" which contained the following statement: "I do not think that many people, least of all the authorities, realise what a vigorous campaign is now being waged amongst the rank and file by the Social-Democratic Federation. Herewith I forward a leaflet which, I believe, is being distributed in thousands to the military stations in all the corners of our Empire. The one I enclose I found attached to a tree by the roadside during the recent manoeuvres near Aylesbury. Copies of the same leaflet have reached me from India and Belfast, where they were distributed during the recent strike trouble. It is no exaggeration to say that this leaflet is dangerous; the men of our army are peculiarly susceptible to the tenets of the Social-Democratic Federation. Officers and N.C.O.s will tell you what a serious effect such propaganda must have upon discipline. "Yours faithfully, "H.C. SMART, Editor, 'Army Graphic'" "_October 7, 1907._" Socialism is carrying on a vigorous propaganda for destroying discipline in the army and also in the navy. Hervéism has been imported into Great Britain, and is making rapid progress. "The Socialist," the organ of the Socialist Labour party, a party which at present is small in number, but which is most violent in attitude, in an article entitled "The Socialist Labour Party and the Citizen Army," quotes with approval Hervé's saying: "The present countries are cruel step-mothers to the proletariat. There is at present no country so superior to any other that its working class should get themselves killed in its defence. In case of mobilisation the proletariat should respond to the call to arms by an insurrection against their rulers to establish the Socialist or Communist _régime_. Rebellion sooner than war! In case of an order to mobilise, we would seize the moment to attempt the revolution, to place our hands on the social wealth to-day usurped by a minority." The foregoing is printed in very large type. The article then continues, commenting upon Hervé's advice as follows: "The soldier has been fed and clothed by the working class. His continued efficiency as a military automaton depends upon regular supply of food, clothing, and the necessaries of life from the same source. He has been transported to the field of conflict by the labour of a whole army of railwaymen. Let us suppose that the day of the final struggle has been reached. Suppose the capitalist attempts to stifle the revolution in blood; suppose he calls upon the army to crush the revolutionary working class by brute force. Let us suppose, too, that the revolutionary agitation has not penetrated the Chinese walls of military discipline (a most improbable hypothesis) and that the soldiers, instead of turning their guns against the capitalist murderers, cheerfully and willingly serve their masters in the attempt to crush the people--what then? We shall put the army in quarantine. We shall isolate it from the rest of the community. We shall cut off supplies of food, clothing, and fuel. The railway and telegraph service will no longer be at its disposal--and in this respect we are in a more advantageous position than our French and German fellow-workers, inasmuch as the Government ownership of the railways in these countries is used to deny the workers connected with them the right of organisation. The army would be in a state of siege, surrounded on all sides by implacable foes. That, coupled with whatever may be possible and necessary in the way of armed insurrection within and outside of the army, is the policy proposed by the Socialist Labour party and Industrial Unionism. Circumstances may, and probably will, modify it in many important details, but there is the main outline. Is it not more logical, more coherent, more likely to succeed than any 'citizen army scheme'?"[554] Love of country has apparently no room in the Socialist's ethics. Its defence does not trouble him, since he is taught that his worst enemies are those Englishmen who happen to be better off. Waste not your ready blows, Strike not at foreign foes, Your bitterest enemies tread your own soil; The preachers who blind ye, The landlords who grind ye, The gluttons who revel whilst ye are at toil. Rise in your might, brothers, bear it no longer, Assemble in masses throughout the whole land; Teach the vile bloodsuckers who are the stronger When workers and robbers confronted shall stand. Through Castle, Court, and Hall, Over their acres all, Onward we'll press like the waves of the sea. Seizing the wealth we've made. Ending the spoilers' trade; Till Labour has triumphed, and England is free.[555] In their desire to abolish the army, some Socialists argue that "The whole of your military system is entirely unnecessary."[556] Others falsify history and boldly assert that British wars, "in nearly every case have been waged for the suppression of liberty abroad, or from the irritating desire on the part of British statesmen to interfere with the internal affairs of other nations."[557] On the other hand, Mr. Quelch very sensibly argues: "Militarism is an evil against which we have to fight with all the means in our power, but to talk of universal disarmament at the present stage is mere Utopianism, a crying of peace where there is no peace, and where existing antagonisms make peace impossible. We have at first to eradicate the causes of conflict. To-day the unarmed nation offers itself as a temptation and a prey to some mighty brigand Power. War is the last argument of kings, and all Governments rest on force. So long as that is the case, it is only the people which is armed that can maintain its freedom, or can indeed lay claim to be a free people. An unarmed nation cannot be free. An armed nation, on the contrary, is a guarantee of individual liberty, of social freedom, and of national independence."[558] Mr. Quelch would have the same ideals as the National Service League, did not later utterances of his contradict sensible statements such as the above. It is a curious and most interesting phenomenon that in France and Great Britain, two eminently non-aggressive countries, the Socialists do all in their power to disarm the nation, whilst in Germany, which can hardly be described as non-aggressive, the Socialists are patriotic and are ready to go to war, not only for the defence but also for the aggrandisement of their country. Numerous declarations to that effect made by the leading German Socialists are on record, and the following extract is characteristic of their attitude: "That Germany be armed to the teeth, possessing a strong fleet, is of the utmost importance to the working men. What damages our exports damages them also, and working men have the most pressing interest in securing prosperity for our export trade, be it even by force of arms. Owing to her development, Germany may perhaps be obliged to maintain her position sword in hand. Only he who is under the protection of his guns can dominate the markets, and in the fight for markets German working men may come before the alternative either of perishing or of forcing their entrance into markets sword in hand."[559] In the spring of 1907 the leading German Socialist paper wrote in a weighty article on the Peace Conference at The Hague: "The conception that war is only a product of human unreason is on the same level as the idea that revolutions are only mental aberrations of the masses. War is rooted in the opposing interests of the nations, as are revolutions in the opposing interests of the classes."[560] A comparison of German Socialism with English Socialism shows that English Socialism is more violent and far less patriotic than German Socialism. German Socialists love their country. Most British Socialists apparently love only themselves. FOOTNOTES: [529] See p. 107. [530] H.W. Lee in the _Social-Democrat_, June 1, 1907. [531] Thomas Kennedy in _Forward_ of May 25, 1907, reprinted in the _Social-Democrat_, June 1907. [532] Quelch in the _Social-Democrat_ for October 1907. [533] Kautsky, _Social Revolution_, p. 4. [534] _Report on Fabian Policy and Resolutions_, p. 11. [535] See Appendix. [536] _Social-Democrat_, October 1907, p. 588. [537] Shaw, _The Impossibilities of Anarchism_, p. 25. [538] _Social-Democrat_, June 1907. [539] Shaw, _The Impossibilities of Anarchism_, p. 25. [540] _Social-Democrat_, October 1907, p. 586. [541] _Social-Democrat_, April 1907, p. 204. [542] See p. 170. [543] _Social-Democrat_, October 1907, p. 586. [544] _Social-Democrat_, October 1907, p. 589. [545] _Ibid._ [546] See _The Nation in Arms_, October 1907, and _Journal de Neuchatel_, September 22, 1907. [547] _Independent Labour Party Report_, 1907, p. 64. [548] _Ibid._ pp. 64, 65. [549] _Social-Democrat_, November 1907, p. 516. [550] _An Appeal to Soldiers._ [551] See Appendix. [552] H.W. Lee in _Social-Democrat_, June 1907. [553] _An Appeal to Soldiers._ [554] _Socialist_, October 1907. [555] _Social-Democratic Federation Song Book_, No. 30. [556] Kirtlan, _Socialism for Christians_, p. 6. [557] Smart, _Socialism and the Budget_, p. 6. [558] Quelch, _Social Democracy and the Armed Nation_, p. 3 f. [559] _Sozialistische Monatshefte_, December 1899. [560] _Vorwärts_, March 10, 1907. CHAPTER XIV SOCIALISM AND THE MONARCHY The first of the "Immediate Reforms" demanded in the official programme of the Social-Democratic Federation[561] is the "Abolition of the Monarchy." That that demand has been made so crudely and that it has been given so prominent a position cannot surprise anybody who is acquainted with British Socialism. "Socialists are essentially thorough-going Republicans. Socialism, which aims at political and economic equality, is radically inconsistent with any other political form whatever than that of Republicanism, Monarchy and Socialism, or Empire and Socialism, are incompatible and inconceivable. Socialism involves political and economic equality, while Monarchy or Empire essentially imply domination and inequality."[562] "As in the political history of the race the logical development of progress was found in the abolition of the institution of monarchy and not in its mere restriction, so in industrial history the culminating point to which all efforts must at last converge lies in the abolition of the capitalist class, and not in the mere restriction of its powers. The Socialist Labour Party, recognising these two phases of human development, unites them in its programme, and seeks to give them a concrete embodiment by its demand for a Socialist Republic."[563] Most Socialists describe all monarchs as the drones of society, and habitually refer to crowned heads either as "loafers" or as "Royal paupers, able-bodied and outdoor."[564] "If the people were of my mind they would not tolerate for twelve months that the Royal paupers should wear robes and have every luxury, and the honest, industrious aged poor should wear rags and eat a crust or be imprisoned for being hungry."[565] (Has ever anybody in Great Britain, or in any other country, been imprisoned "for being hungry"?) "Is it possible that this degrading monarchical superstition can survive in England much longer? Has the schoolmaster now been abroad so long in vain? Will the English people never take their destinies into their own hands and close the long era of monarchical and aristocratic robbery? Are we never to have a Government that can hear the bitter cry of the outcast, and, hearing, act? We know the goal. The goal is the Democratic Republic."[566] Many further extracts regarding English and foreign monarchs might be given, but they are so indescribably coarse and so offensive--even the late Queen is most shamelessly slandered, abused, and calumniated--that they are hardly fit for publication, and their authors shall be nameless. FOOTNOTES: [561] See Appendix. [562] Bax and Quelch, _A New Catechism of Socialism_, p. 37. [563] _Platform, Constitutions, Rules, and Standing Orders, Socialist Labour Party_, pp. 2, 3. [564] See _The Socialist Annual_, 1907, p. 25. [565] Glyde, _Britain's Disgrace_, p. 9. [566] Davidson, _The New Book of Kings_, p. 107. CHAPTER XV SOCIALIST VIEWS ON PARLIAMENT AND THE NATIONAL ADMINISTRATION The opinion of most Socialists with regard to the British Parliament is well summed up in the phrase "Parliament a way to the Democracy? Why, 'tis not a road at all, but only a barricade across our road."[567] It will be seen in this and the following Chapter that Socialism means either to capture and hold that barricade or to pull it down. Let us take note of some representative Socialist opinions on the British Parliament. "The House of Commons is a machine elaborately contrived by the exploiting classes to serve their own ends. In the race for Parliamentary seats the wisest and the best are nowhere. They are rarely even permitted to start. The prizes are for the richest, the most unscrupulous, cunning, and pushing. And without a complete revolution in our ideas regarding the objects as well as the methods of legislation, it must always remain so."[568] "Parliament is appointed, we are told, to fulfil the will of the nation. Then why doesn't it do it? If it has a job to do, why does it stand day after day, week after week, year after year, cackling, cackling, cackling about it? Can the mind of man conceive anything more intensely ridiculous than this spectacle solemnly presented for our admiration by the champions of the system, of six hundred garrulous old gentlemen making a set and formal business of cackling--cackling, cackling, cackling, with infinite pride in their own preposterous squeaking and nagging, and then filing out one by one at intervals, like a stately Lord Mayor's procession in the kingdom of the black and white penguins? What is to be done with such a museum?"[569] "Government by Parliament is a preposterous pretence--a delusion and a snare to the people. It is a gag imposed by the classes on the aspirations of the masses. Our Parliamentary representation is a fraud. If we could appeal directly to the whole people as to whether willing workers should starve, or little children suffer hunger, then something might be done. But how can the electors express their desires on this vital matter under our present electoral system?"[570] Socialists complain that Parliament is run by a class. "It is colossal impudence for a party paper to talk against 'class representation.' Every class is over-represented--except the great working class. The mines, the railways, the drink trade, the land, finance, the army (officers), the navy (officers), the Church, the law, and most of the big industries (employers) are represented largely in the House of Commons. And nearly thirty millions of the working classes are represented by about a dozen men, most of whom are palsied by their allegiance to the Liberal party."[571] "The rich man's club at St. Stephen's is merely a committee of plutocrats--rentmongers, interestmongers, and profitmongers--assembled for the purpose of safeguarding the spoils which the 'classes' have theftuously contrived to heap up."[572] "The inequality of representation of classes in Parliament at present is somewhat startling. It stands as follows: _House of Lords_ Capitalist members 614 Labour members 0 --- Total 614 _House of Commons_ Capitalist members 640 Labour members 30 --- Total 670 "That is, we have 640 members representing the interests of, say, 6,000,000 of persons, and 30 members representing the interests of 37,000,000."[573] "As recipients of rents, royalties, interests, and dividends, some 600 of the representatives of the people in the House of Commons are parasites upon the people's backs. The railway shareholders have 78 representatives; the railway workers, nearly 400,000 strong, have one. One hundred and eighty thousand landed proprietors have 155 members; 1,000,000 agricultural labourers have one. Coal-mine owners have 21; and 655,000 miners have seven members. The shipowners and builders have 22 representatives; the 200,000 sailors have none."[574] "The social composition of the House of Commons is as follows: 124 lawyers, 108 manufacturers (including brewers, colliery-owners, &c.), 85 landowners, 64 merchants and shopkeepers, 37 army and navy men, 33 journalists and authors, 28 financiers, 23 professors, teachers, &c., 18 Civil servants, 18 newspaper proprietors and publishers, 16 heirs to the peerage, 67 of miscellaneous occupations and professions, and 50 working men. Thus the bulk of the present House of Commons consists of rent, profit, and interest mongers and their hirelings and hangers-on. The exploited masses of the people are only represented by fifty men."[575] See your masters, how unceasingly they strive to keep you down, How they manage all your business up in Parliament and town; Well, it is not quite your business, for it really is their own. And that is why the millions of the toilers slave and groan.[576] "On the top of all this political chicanery and impudent pretence of popular representation, there sits an autocratic, irresponsible, hereditary legislative body, consisting exclusively of idlers and parasites who reserve to themselves the right of rejecting all laws which do not clearly further their own exactions and monopolies! Then ask yourselves: Of what use is Parliament? Of what use can it ever be to the mass of the common people?"[577] Parliament is not only useless to the worker, but is also, according to the Socialists, utterly corrupt and callous to the sufferings of the people. "Whenever an American is met abroad with the assertion that government in the Republic is corrupt, he can safely say that for one ounce of corruption in America there is a full pound avoirdupois in Britain."[578] "It is extremely doubtful, indeed, whether either slavery or the slave-trade would be abandoned in the British Empire if they still existed to-day, and their abrogation and suppression depended upon the English House of Commons. The hideous corruption in that assembly and the utter indifference of the majority of its plutocratic members and their retainers to the welfare of any people, at home or abroad, where money is to be made by neglecting the commonest rules of ethics, have never been so clearly manifested as they are to-day."[579] "The suffrage in Great Britain is very unsatisfactory, as the following table shows: Per cent. of the population having a vote. France 27.9 Switzerland 23.5 Greece 23.0 Spain 22.4 Belgium 21.5 Germany 21.2 Bulgaria 21.2 Norway 19.9 Austria 19.9 Portugal 19.0 Great Britain 16.5 Denmark 16.4 Servia 16.0 Holland 16.0 As to England, she occupies a very low place in the scale. But then the people here have not even got universal suffrage! And this is a 'democratic,' 'self-governing' community."[580] Furthermore, "The time has come when members of Parliament will have to receive payment for their services in the House of Commons, because the people have realised that they cannot be adequately represented only by men of wealth and position who are able to pay their own expenses."[581] The national Administration is quite as unsatisfactory to Socialists as is the national Parliament. "To-day honesty wears rags, and rascality and idleness wear robes. Every pint of beer, and every drop of wine or spirits the workers drink, every pipe of tobacco or cigar they smoke, every cup of tea, coffee, or cocoa they drink, every patent medicine they purchase, every dog they keep, every pound of sugar they use, even their playing cards and their insurance policies, are taxed to help to pay big salaries and pensions to the younger sons of the aristocracy, &c. The eldest sons live on the family estate; the younger live on the State. One becomes a lawyer, and will lie for anyone who will pay him well; another becomes an officer in the army or navy, and he will cut the throat of anyone in return for a good salary; another becomes a parson, and in return for a good stipend he will pray for anyone; the others are quartered on the consular or the diplomatic service, or are placed as clerks at _1,000l._ per year in the Colonial, Foreign, or Home Office, &c."[582] The official Parliamentary Report of the Independent Labour Party for 1907 states: "Our short experience has been sufficient to teach us that it is as important to democratise our administrative departments as it is to democratise our Statute Book. We have found that the doors to the higher offices in Whitehall are closed to everyone who has not had a middle-class or aristocratic education, and recent changes have placed our Civil service more completely in the hands of the wealthy classes."[583] In the foregoing statements we find some of the principal complaints of the Socialists regarding the national Parliament and Administration. Let us now take note of their wishes and proposals. Among the "Immediate Reforms" demanded in the programme of the Social-Democratic Federation we find the following regarding Parliament and the Administration: "Abolition of the Monarchy. Democratisation of the Government machinery, viz. Abolition of the House of Lords, Payment of members of legislative and administrative bodies, Payment of official expenses of elections out of the public funds, Adult suffrage, Proportional representation, Triennial parliaments, Second ballot, initiative and referendum. Foreigners to be granted rights of citizenship after two years' residence in the country, on the recommendation of four British-born citizens, without any fees. Canvassing to be made illegal. Legislation by the people in such wise that no legislative proposal shall become law until ratified by the majority of the people. Legislative and administrative independence for all parts of the Empire." As the above demands are somewhat vague, it is worth while to take note of another and clearer statement of the political demands made by the Social-Democratic Federation. "We of the Democratic Federation demand complete adult suffrage for every man and woman in these islands, because in this way alone can the whole people give free expression to their will; we are in favour of paid delegates and annual conventions, because by this means alone can the people control their representatives; we stand up for the direct references of all grave issues to the country at large and for the punishment as felony of every species of corruption, because thus only can tyranny be checked and bribery be uprooted; we call for the abolition of all hereditary authority, because such authority is necessarily independent of the mass of the people. But all these reforms, when secured, mean only that the men and women of these islands will at length be masters in their own house. Mere political machinery is worthless unless used to produce good social conditions."[584] A widely read Socialist writer formulates the Socialistic demands regarding Parliamentary reform as follows: "(1) The suffrage should not be given to a man's house or his lodgings, but to the man himself. I believe in adult suffrage, male and female. (2) Constituencies should be numerically equal, each having three members, one retiring annually by rotation. (3) Cabinets should be chosen annually by the members of the House of Commons, to whom alone they should be responsible. (4) Payment of members and election expenses. Members should receive reasonable 'wages' according to the ancient practice of the Constitution, while all election expenses (not strictly personal to the candidate) should be defrayed out of the rates. (5) The Monarchy. If we are to have more kings or queens, their cost ought not to exceed that of the President of the United States, viz. _10,000l._ a year. 'The office of a king in this nation is useless, burdensome, and dangerous, and ought to be abolished' (Resolution of the Long Parliament, 1649). (6) The House of Lords. 'A House of Peers in Parliament is useless and dangerous and ought to be abolished.'"[585] The Fabian Society proclaims: "To complete the foundation of the democratic State, we need manhood suffrage, abolition of all poverty disqualifications, abolition of the House of Lords, public payment of candidature expenses, public payment of representatives, and annual elections."[586] "The problem how the Lords are to be abolished is of easy solution. They cannot present themselves at the Gilded Chamber without writs, and these a democratic Ministry could and would peremptorily stop. Should they come without writs, Inspector Denning could be instructed to take charge of them. Or the House of Commons could simply revive its resolution of January 6, 1649, decreeing their abolition."[587] Many Socialists are opposed not only to the House of Lords but to all second chambers. "When the hereditary House is abolished, the demand which will be made by reactionaries for a representative second chamber must be sternly resisted. True, most nations have second chambers in imitation of our pernicious example; but there is not one of them, however constituted, whose history is not a conclusive argument against such institutions. The second chambers of Europe and America are nothing more than standing monuments of the gregarious folly of mankind. Nations can no more have two wills than individuals. A second chamber at one with the first is superfluous, in opposition it is noxious."[588] A large number of Socialists do not think that the democratisation of the House of Commons and the abolition of the House of Lords will suffice. They fear that party politics and party intrigues may become more pernicious in a Labour Parliament than they have proved to be in a middle-class Parliament. They fear that adult suffrage may not improve matters, and that impecunious professional politicians may prove worse than the class of politicians who up till now have sat in Parliament. "We stand in England at the parting of the ways. One leads to the payment of members and the creation of a class of professional political adventurers; the other leads to the referendum and initiative."[589] "In the Republics of France and the United States the electors are virtually endowed with male adult suffrage, and Labour representation is facilitated by State payment of members and of their election expenses. Yet the French Chamber, with its Panama and Southern Railway scandals, in which the patriots have gorged their servile lusts, has stood for many years before the nations as a monument of infamy. The United States Congress has not a single Labour representative within its walls, and the Government of the country is become a vile synonym for corruption."[590] "In America the compensation of each Senator and each Representative is fixed at five thousand dollars, or one thousand pounds per year. In addition to this the members have special fares on the railways, and many other perquisites. Yet the American 'Encyclopedia of Social Reform,' edited by W.D.P. Bliss, says, on page 325, 'Congressmen, notoriously, do not represent the people, but special interests and great moneyed corporations. The Congress is almost the only great national legislative body owned wholly by the well-to-do. In the British Parliament, even after the Conservative victories of the last election, there are thirteen Labour men. In Congress there is not one."[591] "Better the stupid British hereditary gentleman than the cunning politician-for-a-living. Better a Cabinet of Chamberlains and Gladstones than a circus of conflicting unscrupulous demagogues on the make." "The Parliamentary system tends, not to the summoning of thoughtful patriots to their country's service, but to the exaltation and glorification of plausible windbags."[592] "The panacea of Labour representation will not remedy those defects. It is in the eternal nature of things that in the electoral competition of rival personalities the scum must rise to the top. So long as self-seeking is rewarded by the highest honours self-seeking will flourish."[593] "A Parliament of Labour members would develop just the same tendency as any other to division into parties commanded by rival ambitions, between which the democratic vote would, as always, annul itself."[594] "If there were five hundred delegates of Labour, if the whole of the Cardiff Trade Unions Congress could be suddenly translated to Parliament and power, there might still be some envious, spiteful braggarts subterraneously scheming and gnawing to undermine and engulf a rival, though a people's cause were wrecked in the catastrophe. Leaders are always dangerous. The workmen have too many leaders. Their first political necessity is to get rid of the politicians. Therefore I would like to see abolished all Legislative Chambers, Senates, and Councils of State."[595] Views identical with the foregoing are held by many Socialists, and therefore a Socialist writer has asked: "Why cannot the people, even of a populous and extensive country, vote upon all laws?"[596] "Instead of representation we shall have what is technically called the referendum, or submission of all proposed measures to the people, who must signify their approval by vote before the measures can pass into law. This has been practised already to some extent in Switzerland, both in national and cantonal affairs. It was first proposed by Robespierre when he advised the king of France to say: 'My people, here are the laws I have made for you. Will you accept them?'"[597] Another Socialist says: "It is impossible that any delegate should completely represent the desires of ten or twenty thousand electors. No two human beings are agreed about everything; and, in every election, electors, in order to express approval of one cherished principle, are driven to adopt half-a-dozen others which they bitterly disapprove."[598] "The way to true democracy will never be found through delegacy. The only safe way is through direct legislation--through the referendum and initiative. The referendum and initiative does not mean more laws, but fewer, shorter, simpler, and more understandable ones."[599] "What is wanted is neither aristocracy, plutocracy, nor demagoguecracy, but democracy--the one governing system which never has been tried. The people must learn that the game of politics is not an unfathomable science, but a struggle of rival interests in which no delegate can so well represent their needs as themselves."[600] "The referendum quite changes the character of the Federal Assembly. It ceases to be a Parliament, and becomes merely a drafting committee. In other countries the initiative comes from above; the Parliament and the King are together the legal sovereign. In Switzerland it comes from below, for the legal sovereign is the electorate."[601] Other Socialists are strongly opposed to the referendum: "Democracy, as understood by the Fabian Society, means simply the control of the Administration by freely elected representatives of the people. The Fabian Society energetically repudiates all conceptions of democracy as a system by which the technical work of Government administration, and the appointment of public officials, shall be carried on by referendum or any other form of direct popular decision. Such arrangements may be practical in a village community, but not in the complicated industrial civilisations which are ripening for Social-Democracy."[602] "The people can only judge political measures by their effect when they have come into operation; they cannot plan measures themselves, or foresee what their effect will be, or give precise instructions to their representatives; nor can any honest representative tell, until he has heard a measure thoroughly discussed by representatives of all other sections of the working class, what form the measure should take so as to keep the interests of his constituents in due subordination to those of the community. It is to be considered, further, that intelligent reformers, especially workmen who have grasped the principles of Socialism, are always in the minority; they may address themselves with success to the sympathies of the masses and gain their confidence; but the dry details of the legislative and administrative steps by which they, move towards their goal can never be made interesting or intelligible to the ordinary voter. For these reasons the referendum, in theory the most democratic of popular institutions, is in practice the most reactionary."[603] Other Socialists are in favour of a reformed Parliament which is to be a glorified trade union congress. "Each industry would have adequate representation in the Parliament of Industry, and this Parliament would connect and harmonise the affairs of the whole. In the future society the descendant of the union of to-day will be the centre of social life and the administration of things. Let 'workers of all trades unite.'"[604] Others, again, call for a Parliament of a frankly revolutionary type which is characteristically called a "National Convention." "What is the use of the suffrage? It has but one use--to enable the workers, as a class, to take peaceful possession of the power of the State, so as to use that power for social purposes. But to do this you must have paid delegates from your own class, not timeserving unpaid representatives from the classes which rob you; you must put your servants, not your masters, at Westminster; you must have a National Convention of the People, not a House of the Confiscating Classes."[605] Readers will no doubt remember the French National Convention and its reign of terror and crime which culminated in the execution of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette. Many Socialists, like most Anarchists, are utterly opposed to Parliamentary government and majority rule, preferring rule by violence to rule by argument. "What has hitherto been called the will of the people, or the will of the majority as manifested in the modern constitutional State, does not express any act of will at all, but the absence of will. It is not the will but the apathy of the majority that is represented."[606] "The preaching of the _cultus_ of the majority in the modern State is an absurdity which can only for a moment go down with the Parliamentary Radical who is wallowing in the superstitions of exploded Whiggery."[607] "The Socialist has a distinct aim in view. If he can carry the initial stages towards its realisation by means of the count-of-heads majority, by all means let him do so. If, on the other hand, he sees the possibility of carrying a salient portion of his programme by trampling on this majority, by all means let him do this also."[608] The Women's Suffrage problem has lately come to the front, and it is characteristic and noteworthy that it has been taken up with the greatest energy, we might almost say with hysterical energy, by Socialist women. They tell us, "We desire the stain removed from our womanhood. Remove the hateful stigma from your mothers, your wives, and your daughters, which places the noblest and the best of them in a lower position than the most uncultured and immoral specimen of the male sex who pays his rates and taxes."[609] According to a woman Socialist, the Votes-for-Women problem is "the greatest moral and spiritual problem that has torn asunder the souls of men since the fall of Adam and the coming of Christ."[610] "Society has no brighter hope, humanity no larger promise than her coming, radiant with health and happiness, love and liberty shining from her eyes, the beautiful, high-souled, sister-mother of the men that are going to be."[611] "The State cannot spare from its high councils the deep wisdom of its mothers and the comradeship of its wives."[612] It is obvious why Socialist women demand the vote with almost frenzied fervour, and why the various Socialist societies and parties support their agitation. Socialists believe that their wives, and the women workers in general, will vote for Socialism, and that most other women will be indifferent and abstain from voting. Therefore we learn: "Socialism in the only true sense of that term, in the only wise conception of that state, can never be brought into the fulness of its being until women have been made equal with men as citizens."[613] "The benches of the National Chamber may yet be seen accommodating three hundred and thirty-five intelligent women."[614] In referring to the elections in Finland, Mrs. Snowden writes: "To Socialists, an interesting point is the fact that, in spite of the women voters, who are supposed to be retrograde in politics, by far the largest number of party votes recorded were for the Socialist party."[615] The claims of women for the franchise have been supported by large majorities at important meetings of Socialists. The resolution of the Independent Labour Party, "That this Conference declares in favour of adult suffrage and the political equality of the sexes, and considers that the right of suffrage should immediately be extended to women on the same conditions as men," was carried by 236 votes to 24.[616] The Social-Democratic Federation resolved: "That this Conference declares that the time has arrived when equal rights of citizenship be extended to all women and men of full age; urges all members to take advantage of the present suffrage agitation to focus public opinion upon the only logical solution of the question, viz. the abolition of existing franchise qualifications and the establishment of universal adult suffrage; and calls upon them actively to work for this practical measure of reform." This resolution was carried by 42 votes to 9.[617] The recent clamour of "Votes for Women" emanated not so much from philosophic Radicals who had read John Stuart Mill as from Socialists, and many non-Socialist women have become their dupes. Socialist women hope that they will have the voting all to themselves. Therefore they, and most men Socialists also, would very likely resist to the utmost all proposals which would make voting compulsory for _all_ women. FOOTNOTES: [567] Thompson, _Hail Referendum_, p. 3. [568] Davidson, _The Old Order and the New_, p. 99. [569] Thompson, _Hail Referendum_, pp. 4, 5. [570] Thompson, _The Referendum and Initiative in Practice_, p. 4. [571] Blatchford, _Britain for the British_, p. 152. [572] Davidson, _The Gospel of the Poor_, p. 59. [573] Washington, _Whose Dog art Thou?_ p. 14. [574] Thompson, _The Only Way to Democracy_, p. 8. [575] _The Socialist Annual_, 1907, p. 43. [576] Neil, _Songs of the Social Revolution_, p. 21. [577] Thompson, _Hail Referendum_, p. 7. [578] Davidson, _The New Book of Kings_, p. 118. [579] Hyndman, _Colonies and Dependencies_, p. 9. [580] _The Socialist Annual_, 1907, p. 58. [581] _The Reformers' Year Book_, 1907, p. 121. [582] Councillor Glyde, _Britain's Disgrace_, p. 30. [583] _Report Annual Conference of Independent Labour Party_, 1907, p. 52. [584] _Socialism Made Plain_, p. 7. [585] Davidson, _A Democrat's Address_, p. 4. [586] _Fabian Essays in Socialism_, p. 187. [587] Davidson, _The Book of Lords_, p. 78. [588] Davidson, _The House of Lords, Useless, Dangerous, &c._, p. 13. [589] Thompson, _The Only Way to Democracy_, p. 11. [590] Thompson, _Hail Referendum_, p. 8. [591] Thompson, _The Only Way to Democracy_, p. 10. [592] Thompson, _The Referendum, &c._, p. 3. [593] _Ibid._ p. 1. [594] _Ibid._ p. 16. [595] Thompson, _Hail Referendum_, pp. 8, 9. [596] Gronlund, _Co-operative Commonwealth_, p. 130. [597] _Ibid._ p. 129. [598] Thompson, _The Only Way to Democracy_, p. 4. [599] _Ibid._ p. 15. [600] Thompson, _The Referendum, &c._, p. 5. [601] _Ibid._ p. 11. [602] _Report on Fabian Policy_, p. 5 [603] _Report on Fabian Policy_, p. 13. [604] Kessack, _The Capitalist Wilderness and the Way Out_, p. 3. [605] _What Use is a Vote?_ p. 1. [606] Bax, _The Ethics of Socialism_, p. 120. [607] _Ibid._ p. 128. [608] _Ibid._ pp. 127, 128. [609] Ethel Snowden, _The Woman Socialist_, p. 20. [610] _Ibid._ p. 19. [611] Ethel Snowden, _The Woman Socialist_, Introd. [612] _Ibid._ p. 93. [613] _Ibid._ p. 97. [614] _Ibid._ p. 92. [615] _Ibid._ p. 98. [616] _Independent Labour Party Report, Annual Conference_, 1907, p. 45. [617] _Report of 27th Annual Conference, 1907, Social-Democratic Federation_, p. 26. CHAPTER XVI THE ATTITUDE OF THE SOCIALISTS TOWARDS THE TWO PARLIAMENTARY PARTIES From the Socialist point of view there is for all practical purposes no difference between the two great parties. Both are representative, not of the people, but of capitalism. Both are hostile to labour. "The difference between Liberalism and Toryism is merely a question of phraseology; there is no fundamental clashing of principle. Both stand for the private ownership of the means of life. They both support a competitive state of society with its inevitable exploitation of the wealth-producers."[618] "Both the Conservative and Liberal parties are agreed in supporting private ownership in the instruments of production for the purposes of profit-making. Their differences are merely superficial and their programmes admittedly offer no solution of the problems of poverty. The Independent Labour Party regards them both as equally the enemies of labour, and in fact merely as two sections of the entrenched forces of plutocracy."[619] "There are not really two parties in the State. There is but one great party, that of privilege, divided into two factions, labelled Whig and Tory, or Liberal and Conservative. Both do much the same things in office. The mimic warfare which they wage with each other, no shrewd observer takes seriously. It is merely a pleasant game of which the stakes are the spoils of office and patronage. An 'organised hypocrisy' is but a mild description of an English Government, whether Liberal or Conservative. The Liberal and the Conservative are the two thieves between whom the people are evermore crucified."[620] "Neither of the political parties is of any use to the workers, because both the political parties are paid, officered, and led by capitalists whose interests are opposed to the interests of the workers. The Socialist laughs at the pretended friendship of Liberal and Tory leaders for the workers."[621] "There's no difference whatever between Bannerman, the Scottish landowner, and Balfour, whose uncle made _200,000l._ out of army contracts in India in four years. These people are entirely antagonistic to the worker."[622] The assertions of the Liberals that they are the true friends of the people, that they have always fought for liberty and democracy, that they have given the vote to the people, and that they trust the people, are treated with derision and contempt. "Liberalism has historically opposed itself alike to Toryism, landed interest, and democracy, working-class interest whenever that interest appeared as a distinct political party."[623] "Since 1832 the Liberals had eight opportunities to give justice to the voteless multitude. In every election from 1832 to 1865 solemn pledges were made by the Liberals that a Reform Bill should be introduced as soon as they were elected, and each time these pledges were ignored after they had secured power and position."[624] As regards the giving of the franchise, the Conservatives have not been much better than the Liberals. "Neither party can claim much credit for its Reform Bills, extorted as they have been, not by belief in democracy, but by fear of the opposing faction. Even now the citizen is tricked out of his vote by every possible legal and administrative technicality; so that more than one-third of our adult men are unenfranchised, together with the whole of the other sex. Neither the Conservative party nor the self-styled 'Party of the Masses,' gives proof of any real desire to give the vote to this not inconsiderable remnant; but both sides pay lip-homage to democracy."[625] Socialists say that the claims of the Liberals to the gratitude of the masses are hypocritical. Their policy has not been based on philanthropy, but on a sordid selfishness. They attacked the landed interest not in order to benefit the people, but in order to make themselves supreme in the State and to fill their own purses. Liberalism, with talk of liberty of the individual and of freedom of trade on its lips, is in reality the representative of capitalism of the most heartless kind. "The political power of the landed classes was to be broken; the capitalists were to be allowed to do as they liked with their own; a state of individualism was to be established; it was to be a fair field for all and devil take the hindmost. So far as politics and the law are concerned, this ideal of Liberalism has been realised. Land is no longer supreme. Money ranks with it. Everyone has a chance of obtaining money. _Ergo_, we are a democratic nation."[626] "With the change in economic conditions, with the growth of manufacture, the rise of the bourgeoisie meant the downfall of feudalism. The plutocrat supplanted the baron, capitalism became king. The 'old nobility' of England to-day are successful brewers, bankers, and traders, and the Nonconformist Conscience dominates in the place of Holy Mother Church."[627] "The representatives of this class in Parliament repealed the Corn Laws, securing cheap bread for their workers at the expense of the landlords and the farmers. The new masters opposed the Factory Acts, championed by Tories such as Lord Ashley, Thomas Sadler, and 'King Richard' Oastler, They fostered railway development, at the public expense, so that they might have quick and cheap transit for their manufactures."[628] The Liberals have shown their selfishness, heartlessness, and greed by opposing the greatest boon to workers, the Factory Acts. "Was it the Liberal party which initiated the Factory Acts, which were certainly the greatest step towards the elevation of the working class that was ever taken in the course of the last century? Oh, no! So far from the Liberal party initiating the Factory Acts, we know perfectly well that the Liberal party--leading members of the Liberal party, like Mr. John Bright and Mr. Richard Cobden--fiercely and bitterly opposed the Factory Acts. We know that no one fought more strenuously against the ten-hour day than Mr. John Bright. We know that all these canting Liberal hypocrites--I can call them nothing else--said with regard to the ten-hour day, just what they say now about the proposal for an eight-hour day--one of the proposals we put forward in order to get rid of this hideous difficulty of the unemployed. The argument was put forward then, that the restriction of the hours of labour would ruin our industries. Precisely the same argument was put forward when it was proposed to put a stop to the terrible over-work of the children deep down in the bowels of the earth. Women and children were mercilessly driven by brutal overseers at their task, and this was maintained by your Liberal party in order that they might obtain large profits out of their white slaves. Only let the Liberal party appeal to history in its claim for working-class support, and then the working class will arrive at the conclusion to which many of us have already come--that the Liberal party, so far from being entitled to our support, is entitled to our greatest loathing and hatred."[629] "As to the Factory Acts, it was not a question of Messrs. Bright and Cobden alone, but of the whole organised body of the Liberal party, which opposed the Factory Acts, and they were only carried by the hostility of the Tory party to the Liberals for having dared to interfere with the Corn Laws. The Factory Acts were passed in retaliation by the landlord party against the capitalist party."[630] "Mr. Gladstone was the only member who endeavoured to delay the Bill which delivered women and children from mines and pits; and never did he say a word on behalf of the factory children until, when defending slavery in the West Indies, he taunted Buxton with indifference to the slavery in England."[631] "If I were to draw a comparison between the Liberal and the Tory parties, I should say that the Tory party has done more in that direction than the Liberal party has done."[632] Mr. Blatchford wrote in the "Clarion" that "the Liberal party has never helped the trade unions," and proved this assertion by giving a detailed statement of the trade union legislation, which showed that modern trade unionism was constantly opposed by the Liberals and was created by the Conservatives.[633] In consequence of its record, Socialists see in Liberalism not a friend, but an enemy. "Liberalism stands for individualism, and the Liberal capitalist and trader are bitterly opposed to the trade union and co-operative society. They found that these bodies, however, were beginning to exercise an important, if indirect, influence upon their party. Liberal leaders, alive to the importance of vote-catching, began to angle for the support of the working-class organisations."[634] "We have no reason for supporting the Liberal party any more than the Tory party. Men do not gather grapes from thorns, nor figs from thistles. The Liberal party is to-day what it has always been--an organisation of capitalists formed to serve the interests of the capitalist class."[635] Liberalism, with its championship of exaggerated individualism, stands not for liberty, but for administrative anarchy. "The trouble with nineteenth century Liberalism is that, by instinct, by tradition, and by the positive precepts of its past exponents, it 'thinks in individuals.' It visualises the world as a world of independent Roundheads, with separate ends, and abstract rights to pursue those ends. Nineteenth century Liberalism is, in fact, axiomatically hostile to the State. It is not 'little Englandism' that is the matter with those who still cling to such views; it is, as Huxley and Matthew Arnold correctly diagnosed, administrative Nihilism. So far as political action is concerned, they tend to be inveterately negative. They have hung up temperance reform and educational reform for a quarter of a century, because, instead of seeking to enable the citizen to refresh himself without being poisoned or inebriated and to get the children thoroughly taught, they have wanted primarily to revenge their outraged temperance principles on the publican and their outraged Nonconformist principles on the Church. Of such Liberals it may be said that the destructive revolutionary tradition is in their bones; they will reform nothing unless it can be done at the expense of their enemies."[636] "The question is frequently put: 'Why are Socialists so much opposed to Liberalism?' But a little serious reflection will explain the circumstance. Liberalism is really more conservative than Toryism. This is not a paradox, it is a fact. Toryism stands for government, and it does not necessarily follow that it stands for bad government. Liberalism, on the other hand, admittedly seeks an unrestrained operation of the individual will. It is opposed to government. It does not consciously subscribe to the recognition of our social being. It regards individuals as self-contained units operating in separate spheres. The less government we have the better, is the keynote of Liberalism. This was Emerson's theory, and Emerson was an anarchist."[637] "The modern Conservative candidate is politically a man without prejudices. No abstract principle forbids him to listen sympathetically to any proposal for reform. Hence he seems on the platform less belated than the nineteenth century Liberal with his stock of shop-soiled principles at full price."[638] "In many people's minds the terms 'Liberalism' and 'insincerity' are held to be synonymous. Lacking a central idea of its own, and necessarily failing to nourish on borrowed ones, there is nothing before the Liberal party but decay. For progress in the future we must look to a party which has an ideal and is prepared to stand by it."[639] Before the general election of 1906 Socialists wrote: "The political force of Liberalism is spent. During the last twenty years its aspirations and its watchwords, its ideas of daily life, and its conceptions of the universe, have become increasingly distasteful to the ordinary citizen as he renews his youth from generation to generation. Its worship of individual liberty evokes no enthusiasm. Its reliance on 'freedom of contract' and 'supply and demand,' with its corresponding 'voluntaryism' in religion and philanthropy, now seems to work out disastrously for the masses who are too poor to have what the economists call an 'effective demand' for even the minimum conditions of physical and mental health necessary to national well-being."[640] "For the last twenty years the Liberal party has been trying to fit itself with a new programme. It took up Home Rule for Ireland, but found that split the party; it took up temperance reform, quite a deviation from its old policy of individual liberty, and again found itself divided; it avowed friendliness to Labour, and frightened off still another batch of supporters. The Party of Progress finds itself now in the unhappy position that its basic idea is old-fashioned, and when it tries to assimilate a new one it becomes a case of putting new wine into old bottles. That is the sad plight of the Liberal party. The party is merely living from hand to mouth as an anti-Tory party, hoping to profit by the mistakes of its rival. The party has split up on temperance, on labour, on the war, on Imperialism, on education, simply because there is no central vivifying ideal to bind together and shape the policy. Can the party adopt a new ideal? is the great question. Can it drop its fundamental idea of individualism and take up the idea of co-operation? and the answer is emphatically 'No.'"[641] The philosopher of British Socialism thinks that, owing to the principles and attitude of the Liberal party, Liberalism and Socialism are deadly enemies. "Liberalism, in so far as it aims at maintaining the liberty of private property, is reactionary and false to the principle which it has always implicitly or explicitly maintained, of the right of each and every individual to a full and free development. In so far as Liberalism does this, in so far as it assumes as axiomatic a state of society based on unrestricted freedom of private property, and proceeds to adjust social arrangements solely or primarily in the interests of the owners of private property, in so far Liberalism and Socialism are death enemies."[642] The leading Fabian organ stated: "A party subsisting on illusions, concealments, and hypocrisies, could hardly survive in the atmosphere engendered by a real fight like that between plutocracy and Socialism. For some time it may contrive to subsist by telling the electorate that the only true way of resisting Socialism is by means of Liberal reforms, while at the same time (with doubtful consistency) asking for Socialist support on the ground that it goes 'part of the way.' But its best chance is probably to divert public attention from Socialism to other matters, and this the Prime Minister evidently feels. The existence of the Liberal party is incompatible with the existence of intellectual honesty in its leaders. And with all his faults Sir Henry is too fundamentally honest a man to lead it effectively at the present juncture. The reins had better be handed over to Mr. Winston Churchill, against whom no such objection can be urged."[643] Before the Liberals set to work in 1906, Mr. Philip Snowden wrote: "It might be said that in the next Parliament the Liberal party is on its last trial."[644] That trial has had, as far as the Socialists and the Labour party are concerned, an unsatisfactory result. Before the general election Socialists asked themselves: "Will the Liberal party come into power with a clear mandate for reform which even the House of Lords will not dare entirely to obstruct, or will it shuffle into power on the misdoings of its predecessors and carry out a halfhearted policy in the hope of not estranging any of its moderate followers? If it takes the latter course, it will win the undying contempt of all real reformers; it will be the last time that a Liberal Administration holds sway, and Labour will be left the only really progressive force in the country."[645] Twelve months later, in a review of the activity of the Liberal Government, "The Reformers' Year Book" stated: "The story of Chinese labour in the Transvaal during the year 1906 has been one of continuous perfidy on the part of the Liberal Government at home. Returned to power largely on account of the opposition of the people of this country to Chinese slavery in any shape or form, they have burked the main issue at every point, and only carried out a few minor changes which have been totally ineffective, retaining all the while a hypocritical devotion to the popular ideal."[646] "The Liberal Government has failed entirely to justify the confidence reposed in it by the electorate, not only upon the newer questions as they have arisen--such as the war in Natal--but on the very matters upon which it was returned to power, of which the chief was the continuance of Chinese labour in the Transvaal."[647] Socialists think that the Liberal agitation against the House of Lords is insincere and hypocritical. "Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's brave talk about fighting the House of Lords sounds very much like blarney when we call to mind the fact that he has beaten all records in the creation of peers. He has not yet been two years in office, but he has managed to make no less than twenty new peers. They include a tobacco man, a whisky man, a newspaper man who sold his journal to the Tories, several usurers and company promoters."[648] The assurance of the Liberals that they are the friends of Labour is doubted in view of the attitude of the party towards Labour candidates. "Liberals are continually saying that there is no quarrel between Liberalism and Labour. Why, then, do we have the constantly recurring spectacle of a middle-class Liberal being run against a popular and capable man who can claim to directly represent the people who live by the work of their hands and heads as distinguished from those who live upon rent, dividends, or interest? Are there not even upon the Liberal side plenty of landlords, railway directors, bankers, stockbrokers, and employers of labour, that a seat cannot be spared to a workman till he wins it in despite of Liberal and Tory opposition alike?"[649] An amalgamation of the Liberals and the Socialist-Labour members is impossible. "Liberal-Labourism" is a delusion. "Labour men and capitalist Liberals are beginning to see that individualism and co-operation will not mix. If Liberalism to-day swallows Labourism, it will have a severe attack of indigestion. Mr. Keir Hardie in the Liberal ranks would do more to disrupt and destroy the Liberal party than he can possibly do from the outside. Labour, it is true, might capture the Liberal party, and this is advocated by some, but if this took place the party would wither away. The capitalist element would drop out and Labour would be left alone. Labour might just as well build up a new party outside. It is no use capturing a weapon which crumbles to pieces as soon as you grasp it. Better make a new weapon."[650] "The Labour party in the House of Commons is as yet not disliked only because as yet it is not feared. Until it has made itself both disliked and feared, it will be far short of having fulfilled the objects of its very existence. It is not saying too much to say that in the very near future the measure of the Labour party's effectiveness will be its unpopularity in the House of Commons. Acrimonious as are the feelings often evoked by political controversies, they are urbanity itself as compared with the passions aroused over economic issues. The limits of Liberal concession must needs soon be reached. The Liberal-Labour candidate is but a transient phenomenon of our time, and with his disappearance the storm will break."[651] The great Liberal majority was created by accident and it is rapidly dissolving. "The Liberals succeeded to power through no merit of their own, but merely through the errors of their opponents. Liberalism is shedding its supporters at both ends, and is rapidly on the way to becoming a mere _caput mortuum_."[652] It is true that "at the general election many Socialists climbed into Parliament on the backs of the Liberals,"[653] but Liberal-Socialist co-operation is not possible. Many Socialists believe that Liberalism and Socialism are fundamentally antagonistic, and that therefore Socialism must fight its battles unaided. "In Great Britain, as in France, Belgium, Germany, and Italy, the cleavage has now been definitely marked between capitalist Liberalism and Socialist Democracy."[654] "Political power, properly so-called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another."[655] "All political parties are but the expression of class interests, and as the interest of the working class is diametrically opposed to the interests of all sections of the master class, the party seeking working class emancipation must be hostile to every other party."[656] "We shall see Liberals and Tories working together in cordial agreement, as they do in Germany, to prevent the election of the only politicians who can really profess to go to the poll on the broad ground of citizenship--labour done by hand or brain for the community, as apart from idleness and pleasure-seeking supported by rents, dividends, and interest taken from the community."[657] "As the machinery of government, including the armed forces of the nation, exists only to conserve the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers, the working class must organise consciously and politically for the conquest of the powers of government, national and local, in order that this machinery, including these forces, may be converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation and the overthrow of privilege, aristocratic and plutocratic."[658] "The property question is the issue which is creating a new political cleavage in the State. Somewhat dimly at present, but with growing clearness of vision, the worker begins to see that he will remain a menial, outcast and forlorn, until he has made himself master of the machine he tends, and the soil he tills."[659] "The only true position for a genuine working-class party is that of open hostility to all who support capitalism in any shape or form. This is the safe, sure, and scientific position."[660] "Liberals will declare and do declare in most pathetic tones that they have done more, and will do more, for the workers than the Tories have done or will do. And Liberals will assure you that they are really more anxious to help the workers than we Socialists believe. But those are side issues. The main thing to remember is, that even if the Liberals are all they claim to be, they will never do as much for Labour as Labour could do for itself."[661] Oh heed not the talk of those fat agitators. Who prattle of Gladstone, or Churchill, or worse; Expect not your rights from professional praters, But manfully trust in your courage and force.[662] Onward! Sons of Labour! nerve ye for the fray; Soon shall beam the dawning of a brighter day. Keep the red flag flying, herald of the free-- On yourselves relying, on to liberty. See! the coming glory streams across the plains. Soon the Sons of Labour shall take up the reins. Then in every nation shall our Cause increase Till it reigns triumphant--pledge of joy and peace.[663] On the other hand, there are Socialists who think that Socialism cannot succeed if it cuts itself adrift from the great national parties and pursues a purely Socialistic Labour policy. "A member of an Imperial Parliament is an Imperialist in spite of himself. A party which concerns itself with sectional interests only will soon cease to be a party; it will degenerate into a group, and as such it cannot hope to receive serious backing in the country."[664] Many Socialists feel confident that they will conquer power by conquering Parliament. "Parliament has always governed the country in the interest of the class to which the majority of its members belonged. It governed in the interest of the country gentlemen in the old days when they were in a majority in the House of Commons; it has governed in the interests of the capitalists and employers since they won a majority by the Reform Bill of 1832; and it will govern in the interest of the people when the majority is selected from the wage-earning class."[665] "No sooner shall two hundred Labour members be firmly seated upon the cross-benches of the House, than both parties will approach them with bended knee, bringing gold and frankincense and programmes."[666] "There is a fine impartiality about the policeman and the soldier, who are the cutting edge of the State power. They take their wages and obey their orders without asking questions. If those orders are to demolish the homestead of every peasant who refuses to take the bread out of his children's mouths in order that his landlord may have money to spend as an idle gentleman in London, the soldier obeys. But if his orders were to help the police to pitch his lordship into Holloway Gaol until he had paid an income-tax of twenty shillings on every pound of his unearned income, the soldier would do that with equal devotion to duty, and perhaps with a certain private zest that might be lacking in the other case. Now these orders come ultimately from the State, meaning in this country the House of Commons. A House of Commons consisting of 660 gentlemen and 10 workmen will order the soldier to take money from the people for the landlords. A House of Commons consisting of 660 workmen and 10 gentlemen will probably, unless the 660 are fools, order the soldier to take money from the landlords for the people."[667] FOOTNOTES: [618] _John Burns and the Unemployed_, p. 1. [619] Independent Labour Party, _A Statement of Principles_, p. 3. [620] Davidson, _The New Book of Kings_, p. 7. [621] Blatchford, _Britain for the British_, p. 151. [622] Casey, _Who are the Bloodsuckers?_ p. 16. [623] Bax, _Outlooks from the New Standpoint_, p. 70. [624] Councillor Glyde, _Liberal and Tory Hypocrisy_, p. 12. [625] _Fabian Essays in Socialism_, pp. 39, 40. [626] Penny, _The Political Labour Movement_, p. 2. [627] Quelch, _Economics of Labour_, pp. 9, 10. [628] Leatham, _The Evolution of the Fourth Estate_, p. 11. [629] _Should the Working-class Support the Liberal Party?_ p. 10. [630] _Ibid._ p. 19. [631] Diack, _Socialism and Current Politics_, p. 10. [632] _Should the Working-class Support the Liberal Party?_ p. 19. [633] _Clarion_, February 16, 1906. [634] Penny, _The Political Labour Movement_, p. 2. [635] _Should the Working-class Support the Liberal Party?_ p. 13. [636] _Twentieth Century Politics_, p. 4. [637] Russell Williams, _The Difficulties of Socialism_, pp. 3, 4. [638] _Twentieth Century Politics_, p. 6. [639] Penny, _The Political Labour Movement_, p. 4. [640] _Twentieth Century Politics_, p. 2. [641] Penny, _The Political Labour Movement_, p. 3. [642] Bax, _Outlooks from the New Standpoint_, pp. 69, 70. [643] _New Age_, October 10, 1907. [644] _Daily News_, January 20, 1906. [645] _The Reformers' Year Book_, 1906, Preface p. 6. [646] _Ibid._ 1907, p. 104. [647] _Ibid._ Preface. [648] _Clarion_, November 1, 1907. [649] Leatham, _The Evolution of the Fourth Estate_, p. 14. [650] Penny, _The Political Labour Movement_, p. 13. [651] _Socialism and Labour Policy_, p. 14. [652] _New Age_, November 7, 1907. [653] _Ibid._ [654] _Clarion_, January 19, 1906. [655] Marx and Engels, _Manifesto_, p. 22. [656] _Declaration of Socialist Party of Great Britain_, see Appendix. [657] Leatham, _The Evolution of the Fourth Estate_, p. 16. [658] _Declaration of Principles of Socialist Party of Great Britain._ [659] Keir Hardie, _From Serfdom to Socialism_, p. 30. [660] Marx and Engels, _Manifesto of the Communist Party_, p. 16. [661] Blatchford, _Britain for the British_, pp. 148, 149. [662] _Social-Democratic Federation Song Book_, p. 30. [663] _Clarion Song Book_, p. 21. [664] _Socialism and Labour Policy_, p. 3. [665] _What Socialism Is_, p. 3. [666] Leakey, _Co-operators and Labour Platform_, p. 16. [667] Shaw, _The Impossibilities of Anarchism_, p. 26. CHAPTER XVII SOCIALISM AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT Many Socialists, especially the Fabians, hope to introduce Socialistic principles and Socialistic rule into Great Britain rather through the local than through the national authorities. They are strenuously exerting themselves to bring about that result, and so far their exertions have been by no means unsuccessful. "Socialists to-day are working in the towns with a twofold object. (1) To level up their districts. If Glasgow has municipal telephones, there is a very good precedent for Liverpool, Manchester, Bradford, Leeds, &c., doing likewise. If Liverpool owns a municipal milk-supply, London, Manchester, Bradford, Leeds, must be brought into line. Each town must adopt the good points from every other town. (2) To urge their districts to launch out into something new."[668] "The property held and worked and controlled by municipalities already exceeds _500,000,000l._ sterling in value, and is being added to yearly. This process has but to continue long enough to ensure that every industry will pass under public control, and thus State Socialism will become an accomplished fact by a gradual process of easy transition."[669] "The proper sphere of municipal activity includes everything a municipality can do better than a private company."[670] "The immediate object should be to municipalise all those services which are necessary to a healthy life. Food, fuel, clothing, shelter--these are required by all--and no man should have the right to deny them to any worker. We must not stop at municipal trams. We must not stop at municipal gas. We must not stop at municipal electricity. These are only stepping-stones. Not until we can say that poverty and disease and unemployment are abolished out of the land shall we have the right to discuss the limits of municipal trading."[671] "The economic forces which replaced the workshop by the factory will replace the private shop by the municipal store, and the private factory by the municipal one."[672] According to Socialist teaching the destruction of private enterprise by municipal undertakings will be a blessing to all citizens. "Where a city supplies its own gas there is no 'middle-man.' The corporation stands in the place of the 'middle-man,' and as the corporation is elected by the citizens the people are thus in the position of getting their own gas made and paying for it in their own way. Some of the citizens are makers of gas, or workmen; most of the citizens are users of gas, or consumers; and all of the citizens are owners and managers of the gasworks and of the gas supply."[673] The suppression of the "unnecessary middleman" sounds so very plausible that it is certain to prove an excellent election cry. But has the middleman really disappeared when a city corporation takes his place? Does the corporation-middleman supply gas gratis? Are the private middleman's profits not distributed to a host of corporation officials in the shape of substantial salaries? The transfer of gasworks, &c., from private hands to a city corporation is no doubt very beneficial to those who draw the corporation salaries. It may be very profitable to the local politicians and their hangers-on. Jobs may be had as a reward for political support. But the citizens may find the gas to be no cheaper and the rates to be considerably higher after the suppression of the "unnecessary middleman." And will it then console him that he is the "owner and manager of the gasworks and of the gas supply"? Under the heading "The Justice of Abolishing the Private Trader" one of the leading champions of municipal Socialism writes: "Is it unfair to take away the living of the private trader? Then it is unfair to take away the living of the unemployed, the twelve millions on the verge of starvation, and the thousands slain annually by poverty and preventable disease. I say that the welfare of the nation must be considered before the profits of the monopolists and the wasteful freedom of the small trader. Under the present system a large proportion of the population have so deteriorated in health and stamina as to endanger the existence of the nation. Private enterprise and competition are responsible for nine-tenths of the misery and suffering of our twenty million poor. But we must not attempt to alter the conditions because the small private trader would be ruined. Nevertheless the system is going to be altered, whether the small trader likes it or not."[674] The foregoing are typical Socialist arguments. In the first place, the writer grossly exaggerates existing poverty by speaking of "twenty million poor." Then he boldly asserts that all poverty is due to private enterprise and that municipal enterprise will abolish it. So far municipal enterprise has not even succeeded in diminishing poverty. On the contrary, with the phenomenal growth of municipal enterprise in Great Britain pauperism, actual and percentual, has also grown at an alarming rate. It is significant that poverty and distress have increased most rapidly, and have become most acute, in those localities in which municipal enterprise has been most active and in which Socialist councils have held undisputed sway, as, for instance, in East and West Ham and Poplar. Municipal enterprise, by increasing the rates--and, with the rates, the rents--has increased the general cost of living without at the same time increasing production. On the contrary, it has driven factories away through high rates. Therefore municipal enterprise has increased the expenditure of the general body of workers without increasing their earnings, and consequently has directly increased the existing poverty which it has promised to abolish. Municipal enterprise has succeeded chiefly in giving from the rates high wages to municipal employees at the cost of all other workers. Municipal Socialists rather rely on force than on justice in dealing with private business men. "For private traders to fight against municipalisation is a short-sighted policy. One thing is certain--they have to go. 'What! Compete with us with the ratepayers' money? Our own money? What injustice!' says the small trader."[675] This just objection of the ratepayers is answered with a contemptible quibble. "The small trader is mistaken. The municipality does not use their money, and would not use their money, under the supposed circumstances. If the London County Council decided to open 1,000 bread-shops, how would they raise the capital required? Not by taking the ratepayers' money, or the private traders' money, but by going into the money market and borrowing on the credit of all the citizens. Suppose _100,000l._ were required? Not a penny would come out of the rates. The credit of all the citizens of London is so good that they can borrow all the money they want without any difficulty."[676] In other words, the Social-"Democratic" politician claims for himself the right of arbitrarily depriving citizens who possess property of that property and to ruin them by underselling them. They borrow the money they require for these undertakings on the credit of the very property-owners whom they wish to ruin, not on the credit of "all the citizens," as Mr. Suthers pretends, and then they have the impudence to assert that the corporations do not ruin the citizens with their own money but only with money borrowed on their credit--as if the one were not identical with the other. The objections to municipal enterprise on a Socialist basis are twofold: (1) That it increases the rates and the municipal debt, and therefore the rent of houses and lodgings; (2) That it is, on the whole, unprofitable, being undertaken without due regard to sound finance, efficiency, and economy. Socialists intend to "tax the rich out of existence." Therefore they endeavour to increase as much as possible not only the Imperial taxation but also the rates. Owners of house property are used to a certain income. If the rates are put up, they put up the rent. Therefore every increase in the rates leads, as a rule, automatically to an equivalent increase in the rent. The fact that a rise in the rates leads to a rise in the rent of houses and lodgings, and that the Socialist policy of waste and squander falls therefore most heavily not on the capitalist but on the working man, is boldly denied. "Generally speaking, the reduction of rates is of no benefit whatever to the working class. Rates are levied upon property.--Q. Do not the working class pay the rates and taxes? A. No. Rates and taxes are paid out of the surplus value taken from the workers by their exploiters. As already explained, the return to the workers, their wages, is determined by their cost of subsistence, regulated by competition in the labour market; consequently they have nothing wherewith to pay taxes, and whether these be high or low, or whoever has to pay them directly, the position of the worker remains the same. He gets, on the average, his subsistence, that is all."[677] Unfortunately, many working men know to their cost that the arguments given above are absolutely untrue. Whilst their wages have remained stationary, their expenditure for rent has greatly increased owing to municipal enterprise carried on by Socialists regardless of expense, which has greatly increased rates. At West Ham "Local government was to be carried on in a way regardless of expense, and under the compounding system the vast majority of the electors were not to realise that there were such things as rates at all. One member of the Socialist party publicly declared that it did not matter to the working men of the borough how high the rates were. But the 'people' got to see in course of time that there were drawbacks, even for them, in unrestricted Socialism. They found that, because of the increased rates, house rents were going up twelve and a half to twenty per cent., notwithstanding the threats of the Socialists that every landlord who raised his rents should have his assessments increased."[678] Owing to municipal enterprise directed by Socialists, "The sum-total of the rates, which stood at _6s._ in the pound in 1890 and at _8s._ _1d._ in 1896, rose to _8s. 10-1/2d._ in the pound in 1900 and _9s._ _5-1/2d._ in the pound in 1901. From that figure it advanced to _9s._ _8d._ in the pound,"[679] and to _10s. 8d._ a little later. It is an impudent misstatement of fact when Socialist leaders tell the workers, "We are not killed by rates, we are killed by rent."[680] "The whole of our municipal expenditure is only a paltry 110 millions a year. What do we pay in rent? Two hundred and seventy-five millions!"[681] After all, people in other countries, where the blessings of Socialist local government are unknown, and where poverty is much rarer than in Great Britain, also pay rent. On an average the rates are 150 per cent. higher in Great Britain than in Germany.[682] Whilst the national Government endeavours to diminish the dead weight and the heavy yearly charge of national indebtedness, Socialist local authorities vie with each other in piling up local indebtedness as fast as possible with a reckless disregard of the future. The increase of the municipal debt, the increase of local taxation, like the increase of national taxation, has no terrors for Socialists. On the contrary, "Municipal debt is not a burden. It is a splendid investment. We 'owe' 370 millions. Do we 'own' nothing? The municipalities own all the roads, drains, sewers, public buildings, parks, libraries, a thousand waterworks, two hundred and sixty gasworks, three hundred and thirty-four electricity undertakings, one hundred and sixty-two tramways, two or three hundred markets, a hundred and fifty cemeteries, forty-three harbours, piers, and docks, numerous baths, washhouses, and working-class dwellings, thousands of schools, and thousands of acres of land."[683] Since these words were written local indebtedness has increased. "We owe" now 470 millions. Unfortunately, many of the splendid assets enumerated possess no realisable value whatever, and many municipal enterprises are run without an adequate profit or with a loss. The Socialist views and aims regarding local indebtedness are well summed up as follows by Suthers: "The 'municipal debt' argument is a bogey. The greater the municipal debt, the less private enterprise there will be. The greater the municipal debt, the cheaper and better the public services will be. The less private capital, the less profits going into a few pockets, the richer the general public will be. Up, then, with municipal debt."[684] These are principles which threaten to make Great Britain bankrupt. "The annual report of the work of the Local Government Board for 1907 shows that the local debt of England and Wales, from being 17 per cent. of the National Debt in 1879-80, has grown to 58.5 per cent. of the National Debt in 1904-5. The National and Local debts have grown as follows: 1879-80 1904-5 _Increase_ National Debt £770,604,774 £796,736,491 £26,131,717 Local Debt 136,934,070 466,459,269 329,525,199"[685] Unless the Imperial Government interferes, the local debt will soon be larger than the National Debt. We have seen in the beginning of this Chapter that, as regards local government, the Socialists pursue a twofold aim: (1) To level up their districts; (2) To urge their districts to launch out into something new. Therefore we find, as Mr. John A. Fairlie says in his book on "Municipal Administration," that "the danger of excessive debt is most serious in the smallest cities. The largest cities, while they have the largest debts, have also the largest resources, and also the best-developed financial administration. The cities of modest size, however, which attempt to equal the works of the metropolis without its available sources of revenue, are very likely to find themselves in serious difficulties." The time may come, and it may come soon, when British local indebtedness will become greatly reduced by local bankruptcy and repudiation. That process would have no terrors for Socialists. They ought rather to look forward to it. As they demand the repudiation of the National Debt (see Chapter IX.), they should logically also strive to repudiate the local debt. A general repudiation of local debt would be the fitting and logical aim and end of municipal enterprise. Municipal enterprise aims at expropriating private property-owners, who, rightly considered, are paid not in cash but in debt certificates. The repudiation of all local debts would convey gratis to the municipality the municipally managed undertakings which, rightly considered, belong to the stockholders, and would at the same time ruin the capitalists who have advanced the money for acquiring those undertakings. The Socialist policy would triumph. This would be the fitting end of a rule by irresponsible and penniless demagogues. To the Socialist there is no limit to municipal enterprise. Not some branches of private trade and production, but all private trade and production are to be taken over by the municipalities. Private enterprise is to be extinguished altogether. The municipalities are to be universal owners, manufacturers, and providers. Among the first things which Socialist municipalities wish to control are the supply of bread, milk, coal; hospitals and public-houses, banks, fire insurances, and pawnshops.[686] All workers are to be municipal officials. Stretching out beyond their borders, the municipalities are ultimately to absorb the country, and to bring it under Socialist management and government.[687] Some of the more immediate aims of Socialism as regards London are expressed by Sydney Webb, the brilliant, but unfortunately somewhat over-imaginative, leader of British scientific Socialism, as follows: "We see in imagination the County Council's aqueducts supplying London with pure soft water from a Welsh lake; the County Council's mains furnishing, without special charge, a constant supply up to the top of every house: the County Council's hydrants and standpipes yielding abundant cleansing fluid from the Thames to every street. When every parish has its public baths and washhouses open without fees, every Board school its swimming-bath and teacher of swimming, every railway station and public building its drinking-fountain and basin for washing the hands, every park its bathing and skating ponds--then we shall begin to show the world that we do not, after all, fall behind Imperial Rome in this one item of its splendid magnificence. By that time the landlord will be required, as a mere condition of sanitary fitness, to lay on water to every floor, if not to every tenement, and the bath will be as common an adjunct of the workman's home as it now is of the modern villa residence. And just as in some American cities hot water and superheated steam are supplied in pipes for warming purposes over large areas, we may even see the County Council laying on a separate service of hot water to be drawn at will from a tap in each tenement. Why should London's million families waste their million fires every time hot water is needed? "The economy of fuel leads, indeed, to the municipalised gas-supply, then laid on, as a matter of course, to every tenement, and used, not only for lighting, but still more largely for cooking in the stoves supplied at a nominal charge. "In order to relieve the pressure of population in the centre, and reduce the rents of the metropolitan "Connaughts," the County Council tramways will doubtless be made as free as its roads and bridges. Taxes on locomotion are universally condemned, and the economic effects of a penny tram-fare are precisely the same as those of a tax on the trip. The County Council will, however, free its trams on the empirical grounds of economy and the development of its suburban estates of artisans' dwellings, built on land bought to retain the unearned increment for the public benefit. Free trams may well imply free trains in the metropolitan and suburban area. Does not the Council already run a free service of steamboats on the Thames at North Woolwich--eventually, no doubt, to be extended all along the stream? "Public libraries and reading-rooms in every ward are nearly here already, but we may expect that the library and the public hall will go far to cut out the tavern (at present our only 'public' house) as the poor man's club. As for bands of music in the parks, municipal fêtes, and fireworks on 'Labour Day,' and other instances of the communalisation of the means of 'enjoyment,' all this is already common form in France. The parks, indeed, will be tremendous affairs. But when London's gas and water and markets are owned and controlled by its public authorities; when its tramways, and perhaps its local railways, are managed like its roads and parks, not for private profit, but for public use; when the metropolis at length possesses its own river, and its own docks; when its site is secure from individual tyranny, and its artisans' dwellings from the whims of philanthropy; when, in short, London collectively really takes its own life into its own hands, a vast army of London's citizens will be directly enrolled in London's service."[688] The foregoing political and economic programme would be more creditable to an imaginative schoolgirl ten years old than to a man of science and a politician. How are all these wonderful and almost miraculous changes to be financed? Quite simply and very easily--by plunder. Mr. Sidney Webb, like most "scientific" Socialists, is a loose and shallow thinker. He forgets in his calculations that stubborn little item--human nature. He forgets that nobody can become richer by transferring money from the right pocket to the left. If you plunder all capitalists and all middlemen, the workers will certainly not be better off. Owing to the absence of direct self-interest, the management by salaried officials will be inefficient. All experience of management by public bodies through officials shows that public enterprise is far more wasteful and far less efficient than private enterprise; that in official management routine, sloth, waste, irresponsibility, nepotism, favouritism, and often peculation too, become supreme. Besides, far more money than is wasted now by capitalists on themselves will be wasted by politicians hankering after popularity, and after jobs for themselves and their followers and dependents. The greatest wasters in the poorest districts are the irresponsible Socialist authorities. In palatial town halls sumptuously furnished, in magnificent public libraries, in marble baths, and other outlets of civic magnificence, money wrung from the hard-worked wage-earners is wasted in far greater sums than could possibly be spent by the most reckless capitalist on his private amusement. The most magnificent town halls, &c., are to be found in the poorest districts. Besides, "salaries must be liberal enough to attract the best men to the public service."[689] It is a matter of course that the rule of irresponsible Socialist agitators, that a system of local government whereby those who have no money are enabled to spend lavishly by drawing upon those who have money, will not make for efficiency and economy, and the end will be the Poplar-ising of Great Britain. There is a generally accepted principle, "No taxation without representation." That principle requires as a supplement, "No representation without taxation." Otherwise Great Britain will be ruled by a mob headed by imaginative and dishonest demagogues. No enterprise is too large or too costly for the Socialists. Quite recently the Fabians recommended in a leaflet that Glasgow should acquire the whole built-over ground of the city at a cost of _24,000,000l._, issuing against that sum Corporation Bonds bearing 3-1/4 per cent. interest. Provided that everything should be settled according to expectations, and supposing that Glasgow should be able to borrow _24,000,000l._ at 3-1/4 per cent., which seems extremely unlikely, there would accrue, on the most favourable showing, a net profit of _200,000l._ per annum to Glasgow, if nothing be allowed for the cost of management.[690] The possibility that that gigantic speculation might prove a failure is not even considered. On the contrary, it is assumed as certain that Glasgow will greatly profit by the growing value of land. Now if through natural economic development, or through the rule of a Socialist national or local administration, Glasgow should decline and land in Glasgow should fall in value, the town might be ruined. Of course that would not hurt the penniless Socialist agitators. Besides, there would always be the sovereign remedy of repudiation. According to the fundamental Socialist doctrines which condemn profit,[691] "Municipal trading does not seek profit. To the private trader the making of profits or losses is a vital matter. He makes the mistake of thinking the same motives induce a municipality to provide a public service."[692] To the Socialist administrators it is quite immaterial whether their enterprises are run at a profit or at a loss, so long as they can draw freely on the rich and well-to-do to pay for their extravagance. "The Socialist view of the fair way of dealing with profits on trading concerns is to have none--if one may be excused so paradoxical a statement. Fair wages and good conditions generally for the employees, and selling at cost so that all may use freely the commodity or service, is the nearest approach to justice in respect to such municipal concerns as are incapable of being used with equal freedom by all."[693] "The only sound principle of municipal management is to run all these things primarily for use, with no idea of making profit at all, and as far as possible at a price to the user covering the cost of the production only. Such profits as are made should be used either to extend municipal enterprise or be utilised for what in Scotland is known as "the common good," that is, in the provision of instruction, amusements, parks and open spaces, helpful and beneficial to all."[694] "Municipalisation or nationalisation must proceed on the right lines and for a practical object. What should be the object of municipalisation and nationalisation? The primary object should be the most economical provision of the best possible public services. The general well-being should be the first consideration to be served, having due regard to the welfare of each and all engaged in these services. The idea of profit either in the shape of interest on loans, or of reduced rates and taxes, should be eliminated altogether."[695] "The private trader always pursues profits. That is why he is such a dreadful failure. The motive of municipal trading, on the contrary, is public welfare--the benefit of all the citizens. That is why it is such a tremendous success. No one ever thinks of criticising a town council because they make no profits on these services. Now when we consider the question of municipal trading in gas, tramways, and electricity, is the principle involved any different? Not at all. The provision of gas, trams, and electricity is inspired by just the same motives as inspired the provision of roads, parks, libraries, sewerages, police, and education. That is to say, the benefit of all the citizens."[696] "The day may come when municipal trams and municipal light will be just as free as municipal streets and municipal libraries. That is to say, a rate will be levied on the citizens for their upkeep, and everyone will be free to use them as required."[697] Such an ideal state of affairs, as pictured by scientific Mr. Webb and his rapacious followers, would be most desirable from the point of view of the town loafer. He would no longer monopolise the free library, the lodging-house, and the public-house corners, as he does at present. He would vary the monotony of the reading-room and the street corner by free rides up and down the town and into the country. In the evening he would take a hot bath in the free public baths recommended by Sidney Webb, sit for a while in the free clubs recommended by the same gentleman, and then stroll out to the free public park to view the free fireworks and listen to the free music. Free meals and lodgings will no doubt follow in due course. Great Britain will be ruled for the benefit of the tramp. Why should anybody work in such a "free" country? Who would not be a loafer or a tramp under these conditions--especially as the "vice" of work, to use a Socialistic expression, would speedily be visited by punishment in the shape of confiscatory taxation, if not of direct confiscation? The populace of decaying Athens and Rome lived under those conditions which are the ideals of British Socialists. The citizens lived by their votes for a time in idleness. They were fed and clothed by slaves and subject nations. But the end was starvation. To provide all these free benefits for those unwilling to work, the owners of property would of course have to be taxed out of existence. "There is no limit to the present rating powers of the local authority, nor to the taxing powers of the State. The recognised limits to local and national taxation are the needs of the respective authorities. Though not perhaps clearly or generally understood, the taxing powers of the community are based upon the principle that private property is only permitted to be held or enjoyed by individuals so long as that private possession is not opposed to the general welfare, and so long as the community does not require the property or the income for public purposes. The Socialist accepts the principle of taxation--taxation 'according to ability derived from the profits of stock-in-trade and other property'--but desires deliberately to incorporate another idea and purpose in taxation, namely, the taxation of the rich to secure such socially created wealth as is now taken in rent, interest, and profit, and to use this revenue for social reform purposes. In other words, we would by that means compel 'the rendering unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's.'"[698] Municipal funds would be provided, not only by local rates, but also by a local income and land taxes.[699] In other words, Socialism would eat the goose that lays the golden eggs. According to leading Socialists, municipal enterprise is preferable to private enterprise, not only for economic but also for moral reasons. "The system of private enterprise and competition reeks with corruption. Honesty under it is impossible. Municipal Socialism, on the contrary, would provide an environment which would encourage and promote the growth of moral activities. Instead of leading to corruption it would lead away from it."[700] "Private enterprise must lead to fraud, deceit, bribery, corruption, and even murder, in the struggle for existence. Municipal Socialism would entirely remove any temptation to commit these immoral actions. Why? Because, under municipal Socialism, every person who worked would be sure of a living."[701] We have seen some samples of the moral and purifying influence of municipal Socialism in the investigations recently made by the Board of Trade. Unfortunately these have revealed the fact that, in many of the most advanced Socialist corporations, fraud, bribery, intimidation, favouritism, and common theft are of daily occurrence. What else can be expected when men of predatory instincts, who preach the gospel of idleness and confiscation, who live not by work but by talk, who have been accustomed to handle pence, and who have to be taught by the town clerk how to sign a cheque, are suddenly enabled to dispose of thousands of pounds and to negotiate loans? The general public takes little interest in local elections. Most citizens abstain from voting. Therefore the numerous corporation employees often have the decisive vote in local elections, and they will support only a candidate who promises shorter hours or higher pay. Municipal employees sitting in the public galleries will even dominate the council chamber, intimidate councillors, and shout down those of whom they disapprove. Besides, they may strike and disorganise the public services, and make the Socialistic authorities look ridiculous. Therefore it is better to humour and to obey them than to oppose them. The Fabian Society demands for municipal servants "full liberty of combination," because "the servants of the public may often need protection against the public, as in the Post Office."[702] The results of Socialist teachings are to be seen in many municipalities. "The servants of the public" are already, and will in an increasing degree become, the masters of the public. Under municipal Socialism the wages of tramway-men have increased as follows: "In Sheffield, where the private company paid _100l._ for labour, the Corporation pay _165l._ for the same amount of work. In Bolton, where the private company paid _100l._, the Corporation pay _137l._ In Wallasey, where the private company paid _100l._, the District Council pay _185l._ In Northampton, where the private company paid _100l._, the Corporation pay _120l._ In Birkenhead, where the private company paid _100l._, the Corporation pay _315l._ In Portsmouth, where the private company paid _100l._, the Corporation pay _130l._ In Sunderland, where the private company paid _100l._, the Corporation pay _145l._ When the Manchester Corporation took over the trams they paid increased wages amounting to _60,000l._ a year."[703] The foregoing information is given by a Socialist. Some of the advances may be justified, but others, and probably the majority, have been made with that fine disregard of economy which is commonly found among men who can afford to be generous at other people's expense. Municipal Socialism is an ever-growing cancer which is rapidly exhausting the country. "Half the municipal debt is of a nature which can never yield a profit."[704] The other half is invested in enterprises many of which are run regardless of economy and of expense, regardless of profit and loss, in accordance with the Socialistic principles stated in this Chapter. The policy of deliberate waste and of constant increase of debt, the principles of "launching out into something new" and "levelling up their districts," perhaps also the fear of eventual bankruptcy and repudiation, have at last frightened the investor. Corporation stocks can no longer be considered as safe first-class securities. Besides, the banks have begun to refuse to accommodate Socialistic municipalities with the necessary funds by overdrafts, short loans, &c. Socialists have therefore begun to complain when they saw that the unlimited supply of other peoples' money was diminishing. They consider it a grievance that they can no longer arbitrarily squander on fantastic undertakings what is not their own. "The hostility of the banking interest to municipal borrowing, and the threat to 'cut off supplies' has at length taken practical form. Disappointed in their attempt to secure sufficiently favourable treatment from their bankers (Parr's), the Chester Corporation applied to four other banks in the city, viz. Lloyds, North and South Wales, National Provincial, and Liverpool Banks. All refused to tender for the account. The banks are not run for the public, the public are run for the bankers."[705] Also, the banks, instead of lending their funds gratis to Socialist corporations, are heartless enough to demand interest "usury" on their loans. "Unfortunately at present public bodies must pay heavy tribute as interest on borrowed money."[706] "Our embryo Socialistic enterprises are even now suffering from the toll of interest which a restricted credit and currency permit the money lords to exact."[707] Has the attitude of the investing public and the banks caused the Socialist municipalities to restrain their insane expenditure, and to keep it within legitimate bounds? No, they have tried to obtain money by borrowing it in small sums directly from the public. "The Corporation of Bolton, the Boroughs of Heywood, Middleton, and others, invite the investment of small sums of money in municipal enterprise, offering a higher rate of interest on deposits than the banks can supply."[708] Many Socialists advocate that the municipalities should raise money by issuing paper-money in unlimited quantities or that they should become bankers, pay interest on deposits, and invest the savings of the poor in highly speculative enterprises carried on without regard to economy and expense, or to profit and loss. "Why pay in usury at all? Abolish the gold monopoly by demonetising metals, and the sole remaining argument against municipal trading disappears along with the most crippling restriction under which public enterprise labours."[709] "Credit notes would be of little use were the city's credit gone, because the people would be afraid to take them. However valuable the assets of a municipal authority might be--and municipal concerns are usually far more substantial and sound than banking companies are--it is public confidence that constitutes the first requisite, and this it is the duty of all reformers to establish and maintain against the assaults of those whose interest it is to break it down. The institution of municipal savings banks under the protection of, and subject to inspection by, the State would assist public authorities and render them less dependent on the bankers; then when people had become accustomed to thinking their city's credit at least equal to that of the leading banks, a limited issue of notes might be allowed."[710] Further proposals for "demonetising" gold and issuing unlimited amounts of unconvertible notes, on the model of the assignats of the French Revolution, will be found in Chapter XX. "Some Socialist Views on Money, Banks, and Banking."[711] These and many other dangerous experiments could easily be undertaken by needy demagogues with fantastic ideas, if the supervision of municipalities by the national Government were abolished. Therefore the Independent Labour Party passed at the last Annual Conference the following resolution: "That this Conference urges the Labour party in Parliament to secure the extension of power to municipalities, enabling them to undertake trading and the development of existing municipal concerns, without the sanction of the Local Government Board, and to use any profits accruing from same in such manner as may be decided by the municipality, without the necessity of promoting Parliamentary Bills."[712] No administration can continue for long a financial and general policy of waste and pillage, such as that followed by the Socialist municipalities of Great Britain, without diminishing not merely private wealth but also the national wealth. The British Socialists seem determined to do all they can to destroy as fast as possible the accumulated wealth of the country and its productive power. FOOTNOTES: [668] _The Advance of Socialism_, p. 2. [669] Keir Hardie, _From Serfdom to Socialism_, pp. 27, 28. [670] Snowden, _Straight Talk to Ratepayers_, p. 8. [671] Suthers, _Mind your own Business_, p. 148. [672] _Fabian Essays in Socialism_, p. 157. [673] Blatchford, _Competition_, p. 4. [674] Suthers, _Mind your own Business_, pp. 93, 94. [675] Suthers, _Mind your own Business_, pp. 87, 88. [676] Suthers, _Mind your own Business_, p. 88. [677] Bax and Quelch, _A New Catechism of Socialism_, p. 42. [678] _The Times, Municipal Socialism_, p. 43. [679] _Ibid._ [680] Suthers, _Killed by High Rates_, p. 12. [681] _Ibid._ p. 11. [682] Ellis Barker, _Modern Germany_, p. 552. [683] Suthers, _Killed by High Rates_, p. 9. [684] Suthers, _Municipal Debt_, p. 4. [685] _Daily Mail_, November 26, 1907. [686] See _A Municipal Bread Supply_; _Municipal Bakeries_; _Municipal Drink Traffic_; _Municipal Fire Insurance_; Washington, _Milk and Postage Stamps, &c._ [687] _Municipalisation by Provinces._ [688] Sidney Webb, _The London Programme_, 1892, pp. 208-213. [689] Jowett, _Socialism and the City_, p. 17. [690] _Forward_, October 12, 1907. [691] See Chapter IV. [692] Suthers, _Mind your own Business_, p. 14. [693] Jowett, _The Socialist and the City_, p. 40. [694] Irving, _The Municipality_, p. 6. [695] Bax and Quelch, _A New Catechism of Socialism_, p. 42. [696] Suthers, _Mind your own Business_, p. 9. [697] _Ibid._ p. 8. [698] Snowden, _The Socialist's Budget_, pp. 3, 4, 6. [699] Jowett, _The Socialist and the City_, p. 38; Snowden, _The Socialist's Budget_, p. 83. [700] Suthers, _Mind your own Business_, p. 119. [701] _Ibid._ p. 122. [702] _A Labour Policy for Public Authorities_, p. 19. [703] Suthers, _Mind your own Business_, p. 103. [704] Snowden, _A Straight Talk to Ratepayers_, p. 8. [705] McLachlan, _The Tyranny of Usury_, p. 15. [706] Jowett, _The Socialist and the City_, p. 42. [707] McLachlan, _The Tyranny of Usury_, p. 11. [708] McLachlan, _The Tyranny of Usury_, p. 13. [709] _Ibid._ pp. 13, 14. [710] Jowett, _The Socialist and the City_, pp. 45, 46. [711] See p. 281 ff. [712] _Independent Labour Party Report, Annual Conference_, 1907, p. 50. CHAPTER XVIII SOCIALISM AND AGRICULTURE In one of his books Mr. Blatchford gives prominence to the following statement contained in Prince Kropotkin's book, "Fields, Factories, and Workshops": "If the soil of the United Kingdom were cultivated only as it was thirty-five years ago, 24,000,000 people could live on home-grown food. If the cultivable soil of the United Kingdom were cultivated as the soil is cultivated on the average in Belgium, the United Kingdom would have food for at least 37,000,000 inhabitants. If the population of this country came to be doubled, all that would be required for producing food for 80,000,000 inhabitants would be to cultivate the soil as it is now cultivated in the best farms of this country, in Lombardy, and in Flanders." Commenting on this statement Mr. Blatchford says: "Why, indeed, should we not be able to raise 29,000,000 quarters of wheat? We have plenty of land. Other European countries can produce, and do produce, their own food. Take the example of Belgium. In Belgium the people produce their own food. Yet their soil is no better than ours, and their country is more densely populated, the figures being: Great Britain per square mile, 378 persons; Belgium per square mile, 544 persons. Suppose wheat will cost us _2s._ a quarter more to grow it than to buy it. On the 23,000,000 quarters we now import we should be saving _2,000,000l._ a year. Is that a very high price to pay for security against defeat by starvation in time of war?"[713] Many Socialists very wisely demand that everything possible should be done to bring about a revival of our agriculture. They point to the agricultural prosperity of Belgium, France, and Germany, and they would be quite ready to sanction the re-introduction of Protection, as will be seen in Chapter XXI. Nevertheless they absolutely and unconditionally oppose the creation of a class of peasant proprietors, although the intensive agriculture of France, Belgium, and Germany is founded upon the system of peasant proprietorship, and although general experience, both in Europe and on other continents, has proved the great superiority of peasant proprietors over large farmers in intensive culture. "No Socialist desires to see the land of the country divided among small peasant freeholders, though this is still the ideal professed by many statesmen of 'advanced' views."[714] "Socialism is hostile to small properties."[715] Socialists pretend to be opposed to the creation of peasant proprietors either on scientific grounds or for ethical reasons. "As a matter of economic evolution, small properties will have to go. But viewed from an ethical standpoint, surely nothing has been more conducive to the development of the worst side of human nature--of 'hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness' than the system of small properties."[716] "If England were cut up into small allotments, the general state would be harder and leaner than before."[717] "Would Socialists take away the land from the landlords and let it out in little plots? No. Because that would make a lot of little proprietors as selfish as the landlords."[718] "Divide the land into small allotments and very soon the cunning and rapacious would 'acquire' the estates of other men, and so we should come back to the present state of chaos. In fact, the parcelling out of the land means putting back the clock of civilisation about one thousand years."[719] The real reason which prompts Socialists to oppose by all means the creation of peasant proprietors is to be found neither in the realm of political economy nor in that of abstract ethics, but in that of party politics. The peasant proprietor, like every sensible owner of property, is hostile to Socialism. "The peasant has nothing else in the world but his farm, and that is one of the reasons why it is so very difficult to win him over to our cause. He is, indeed, one of the last bulwarks of private property."[720] The philosopher of British Socialism frankly confesses: "On the Continent the peasant proprietor, who may now be reckoned as part of the _petite bourgeoisie_, just as the large landlord with us may be reckoned as part of the big capitalist class, is a potent factor in retarding the process of Socialisation."[721] The experience of Socialists in Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and Switzerland shows that Socialism finds practically no adherents among the land-owning peasants. At the German Reichstag elections of 1903, for instance, the Social-Democrats received almost 60 per cent. of the votes in the large towns as compared with less than 20 per cent. of the votes in the country. Of the latter, the vast majority was given by artisans and landless rural labourers. The peasant, like every property-owner, is an enemy of fantastic schemes of confiscation and of general plunder lavishly embellished with promises of Utopia. Therefore Social-Democrats will rather see the countryside of Great Britain turned into a wilderness than see it peopled by peasants. Desperately anxious lest the Government of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman should create a British peasantry, the Socialist press opposed the creation of a British peasantry as unscientific and certain to lead to disaster. The people were told in countless articles that peasant proprietorship had proved a failure everywhere. Under the heading "The Small-Holding Fraud" the "Social-Democrat" showed the true motive of the Socialist agitation by expressing the hope that "The Government will assuredly fail in their attempt to erect a peasant proprietary barrier against the rising proletariat"[722]--Has the Socialist outcry against creating peasant proprietors influenced Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's Government in its land-settlement policy? Did Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman wish to satisfy the Socialists by rather creating small leaseholders than small freehold farmers? The positive proposals of Socialists for bringing about a revival of agriculture are frankly Utopian. Their proposals can of course not be practical, because they object to the present agricultural arrangements of Great Britain and to those prevailing on the continent of Europe. Many Socialists desire the towns to control and resettle the country. "The towns should claim the right of dictating to England the way in which the land should be put to profit. The great majority of the classes nearest the land, squires and farmers and parsons, are disqualified respectively by self-interest, by religious prejudice that scruples at anything that may lead to the mental enfranchisement of the poor, and by sheer sluggishness of intellect joined to a blind selfishness without parallel in any class of English society. The land and the labourer have hitherto been left to them. And we want a change of management."[723] Socialists want a "change of management" in agriculture, replacing the expert by the amateur in accordance with their general policy of turning everything upside down. Their ideal would seem to be that the owners of land should be dispossessed and driven into the towns, and be replaced by Socialistic town officials who would exploit the country in the interest of the town. The tenants whom the Socialists would like to create would, rightly considered, be merely wage-earners in the pay of the Socialistic administration, who, living from hand to mouth, would not be able to put anything by. With that object in view, rents would apparently be adjusted by Socialist administrations. "Tenancies would be granted for seven years or for twenty-one years revisable at periods of seven years, so that the tenant might not be able to appropriate the unearned increment of the land; but it should also be clearly understood that a satisfactory tenant would not be arbitrarily disturbed in his holding. At the same time no mercy would be extended to a bad cultivator; and when a tenant left his holding, either by the efflux of time or for any other reason, he would have no tenant-right to dispose of, but would only be entitled to compensation for unexhausted improvements and to a fair settlement of accounts as between himself and the committee. Rents would be fixed and disputes settled by the independent agricultural court, which would also continue the regulation of agricultural wages. Exploitation of the economically weak must not be permitted, even to a communal authority. It would be within the power of the committee to rent farms to co-operative associations of labourers if satisfied as to their industrial and financial capacity. Arrangements might also be made whereby a town could run its own dairy-farm or farms, since this is probably the only way in which a municipality can be sure of an uncontaminated supply of milk."[724] Many Socialists would like to resettle the country with colonies of town unemployed, but these proposals are opposed by some as impractical. "To imagine that any such colony could be self-supporting, that the land which no capitalist will now till with expert farm labourers at ten shillings a week would yield trade-union rates of wages to a mixed crowd of unemployed townsmen, that such a heterogeneous collection of waifs and strays, without a common acquaintanceship, a common faith, or a common tradition, could be safely trusted for a single day to manage the nation's land and capital; finally, to suppose that such a fortuitous agglomeration of undisciplined human atoms offers 'the most suitable and hopeful way of ushering in a Socialist State'--all this argues such a complete misconception of the actual facts of industrial and social life, such an entire misunderstanding of the process by which a democratic society passes from one stage of its development to another, that I feel warranted in quoting it as an extreme instance of Utopia-founding."[725] Whilst the various Socialist schools propound different Utopian schemes for the resettlement of the land in the future, their immediate aim is of course not so much to benefit agriculture, as they profess, but to gain adherents among the rural labourers. With this object in view they are urged to agitate for, and are promised to be given by the Socialists, better wages, safe and healthy homes, more powers for the parish councils, which are to be used for the restoration of common lands, real free schools and better ones, cheap and good allotments, pensions for the old people, reform of taxation, &c. The rural labourers are urged to form trade unions, and they are told, "All these things you can get for yourself by your trade union and your vote if you and all the other labourers in the district will join the union and will agree to vote only for those who will promise to help to get them for you."[726] In other pamphlets specially addressed to the rural labourers they are told how to get allotments, how to force the district councils to build good cottages for them, &c.[727] Many Socialists propound the doctrine that the first and the principal object in re-creating the rural industries must be the bettering of the wages of rural labourers, and that the State should secure them better wages by arbitrarily reducing rents. The object, it need hardly be mentioned, is rather to destroy private capital in accordance with the Socialists' tenets than to benefit the labourers. The Fabian Society, for instance, claims, "It is necessary for the State to interfere, partly to secure the better utilisation of our national resources, partly to increase our agricultural population. The class most needing protection, the labourers, must be dealt with first in order to raise them to a decent level of comfort. A living wage must be secured to them, and, as a consequence, the farmers' rents must be fixed at a fair level. An agricultural court must be set up in each county to regulate wages and fix rents. Continental success in agriculture depends on co-operation, and that in turn is associated with the peasant-proprietor system. That system for sundry reasons cannot be adopted here, but its advantages can be obtained through security of tenure. The small farm system should, therefore, form the basis of our reconstruction, free play being left for a graded system of farms where possible. In each county an agricultural committee should have compulsory power to acquire land and let it out to tenants, chiefly smallholders. It should have power to advance capital to individuals on the collective guarantee of its tenants, and it should be its duty to organise the collection of farm produce and its disposal in the market."[728] FOOTNOTES: [713] Blatchford, _Britain for the British_, pp. 111, 112. [714] _Socialism True and False_, p. 18. [715] _Some Objections to Socialism Considered._ [716] _Ibid._ [717] Blatchford, _The Pope's Socialism_, p. 8. [718] Hazell, _The Red Catechism_, p. 11. [719] Blatchford, _The Pope's Socialism_, p. 9. [720] Kautsky, _The Social Revolution_, p. 30. [721] Bax, _Essays in Socialism_, p. 41. [722] _Social-Democrat_, November 1907. [723] Pedder, _The Secret of Rural Depopulation_, p. 18. [724] _The Revival of Agriculture_, p. 17. [725] Sidney Webb, _Socialism True and False_, p. 12. [726] _What the Farm Labourer Wants_, p. 4. [727] _Allotments and How to get Them_; _Parish Council Cottages and How to get Them._ [728] _The Revival of Agriculture_, p. 22. CHAPTER XIX SOCIALIST VIEWS ON BRITISH RAILWAYS AND SHIPPING Many Socialists complain, and they complain with good cause, about the railways of Great Britain. All the British railways are in private hands, and they are very inefficient. They are in many respects very backward, badly equipped, and badly managed. They have wasted their capital, watered their stock, and have paid dividends out of capital; their freight charges are exorbitant; besides, they give habitually and by various means, with which it would lead too far to deal in this book, preferential treatment of a very substantial kind to the foreigner. Many Socialists have extracted from British Government publications instances of such preferential treatment. One of the most widely read Socialist writers, for example, gives among others the following freight charges favouring the foreigner: "Carriage of a ton of British meat, Liverpool to London, _2l._: Carriage of a ton of foreign meat, Liverpool to London, _1l. 5s._: Carriage of a ton of eggs Galway to London, _4l. 14s._: Carriage of a ton of eggs Denmark to London, _1l. 4s._: Carriage of a ton of plums, apples, and pears, Queenborough (Kent) to London, _1l. 5s._: Carriage of same from Flushing (Holland), _12s. 6d._: Carriage per ton of English pianos Liverpool to London _3l. 10s._: Carriage as above of foreign, _1l. 5s._: British timber per ton Cardiff to Birmingham, _16s. 8d._: foreign as above _8s. 10d._ In the carriage of iron ore and steel rails the American railways charge _6s. 3d._ where the British charge _29s. 3d._"[729] "The real enemy are the monopolists of land and locomotion--the landlord and the raillord who are uprooting the British people from their native soil. It is in fact by no means easy to say which is the greater malefactor of the two."[730] Such differential charges are bound to cripple the British industries, and in view of the harm which is thus being done to British farmers, manufacturers, and traders, it is only natural that British Socialists are unanimous in condemning the anti-British freight policy of the railways and in recommending that they should be taken over and managed by the State. "There are nearly 24,000 miles of railway in the kingdom, the greater part of which is owned or controlled by a dozen great companies, who, moreover, have standing conferences through which they exercise a virtual monopoly against the public, although they have all the expenses of competing concerns. The public bears the costs and inconveniences of competition without many of its benefits. The total capital of the companies is _1,300,000,000l._ of which _200,000,000l._ is nominal or 'watered' stock. A very large part of the rest was for extravagant sums paid to great landowners for their land and another large part for legal expenses. On this huge capital a sum of _44,000,000l._ has to be earned in dividends. If the State bought out the railways, it could borrow this necessary sum for at least _5,000,000l._ to _8,000,000l._ a year less than this, and at once effect enormous savings resulting from the present competitive and chaotic methods of the companies. Despite the virtual monopoly, there are over 3,000 railway directors drawing fees or salaries amounting to nearly _1,500,000l._ Of the principal of these there are eighty in the Lords and twenty-five in the Commons. Mr. Gladstone predicted that if the State did not control the railway companies, they would control the State, and this has come to pass. Their servants are overworked and underpaid, extortionate freights are charged on the carriage of goods, unfair preferences are given, but Parliament is powerless to check this."[731] "The railway system to-day is the greatest protection ever heard of in favour of the foreigner, and neither Mr. Chamberlain nor Mr. Balfour, nor any other man makes a single proposal to touch the railway question. Why? Because the House of Commons is dominated by the railway interest."[732] "Our railway experience proves that it is not enough to make preferential rates illegal. They reappear too easily in the form of rebates and even of allowances which belong to the more private chapters of capitalist history. The attempt of the Railway Commission to abolish preference in railway rates has left us with a system which could not be much worse from the national industrial point of view."[733] "Imperial trade suffers no more serious handicap than that imposed upon it by shipping rings and railway companies, which exploit the Imperial needs of transport for their own purposes, which hamper the ready flow of Imperial trade, and, for an insignificant percentage, turn the British seamen off the water in favour of the Lascar."[734] "The railways of India, which yield a great portion of our Indian revenue, are owned by the Indian Government. The well-managed and prosperous systems of Australasia, with the best conditions of labour and the lowest freights of any railways in the world, are State owned. Why, then, should not the British Government own and control in the public interest the systems which are so wastefully and inefficiently managed by the present companies?"[735] The last Annual Conference of the Independent Labour Party resolved: "That in the opinion of this Conference the time is ripe for the nationalisation of the railways of the country, and that our representatives be asked to urge forward a measure to that effect in Parliament."[736] The Fabians think that "An equitable basis of purchase may be found in Mr. Gladstone's Act of 1844, which enables the Treasury to buy out the shareholders of lines built since that date at twenty-five years' purchase, calculated on the earnings of the previous three years. The price of the railways need not be an insuperable, or even a serious, difficulty in the way of national possession of the means of transit."[737] The demand of the Socialists that the Government should acquire the railways would perhaps be reasonable if that demand was not coupled with extravagant and fantastic ideas regarding their future management. The different Socialistic views as to the proper management of State railways are summed up as follows by Mr. Blatchford: "The railways belong to railway companies, who carry goods and passengers and charge fares and rates to make profit. Socialists all say that the railways should be bought by the people. Some say that fares should be charged, some that the railways should be free--just as the roads, rivers, and bridges now are; but all agree that any profit made by the railways should belong to the whole nation, just as do the profits now made by the Post Office and the telegraphs."[738] One Socialist writer modestly proposes that the fare anywhere in Great Britain should be a shilling. "Look at our railroads--might they not be the property of the community at large as well as the high roads, instead of being a monopoly in the hands of private persons whose sole object is to enrich themselves at the cost of their fellow citizens? If so, it has been proved that you could go to any part of these islands with a shilling ticket."[739] Other Socialists advocate that railway travelling should be made absolutely free to all, and that the costs of running the railways free of charge should be borne exclusively by the rich. "The blessings of free travel are too many by far for enumeration, but one stands out. It is the only effective means yet suggested for the extirpation of our vile city slums. At present the sweated must live near their work."[740] "Overcrowding can only be cured outright by one sovereign remedy--by giving the toiler a home in the country; and free travel alone makes this possible. There is no reason why a 'docker' should not grow his own vegetables and be his own dairyman at the same time. Free travel would in a few years change the whole face of society."[741] "A nation that can afford to spend _140,000,000l._ a year on strong liquors might not unreasonably be asked to strike even the forty odd millions off its drink-bill--about half that amount would suffice for the purpose--and take them out in free ozone."[742] "Then would rise the question how to make up for the abolition of passenger fares. The answer, it seems to me, is not far to seek. The substitute tax must be levied on the 'unearned increment' of land, urban and rural. The people must therefore unfalteringly press for the reassessment of the 'land-tax' by gradual increase up to _20s._ in the pound, and in the meantime procure any further funds necessary from our surplus capital by a graduated income-tax. Personally I abhor usury, whether in the shape of railway dividends or Government Consols, as alike _contra naturam_ and _contra Christum_."[743] In order to further the policy of free travelling by railway, Socialists appear to have founded a "Free Railway Travel League," domiciled at 359 Strand, London, W.C. I am not aware whether the Free Railway Travel League--every tramp should join it--exists still. It is only logical that, if the railways should be made free for the carriage of people, they should likewise be made free for the transport of goods. "It is obvious that if railways can be worked free for passengers they may be made free for goods as well. Free goods traffic would everywhere equalise the price of commodities, be they the produce of sea or land, mine or manufacture, and equal wages in town and country would speedily follow equal prices with beneficial results to the people altogether incalculable. Granted free passes, free freights will doubtless in time follow almost as a matter of course."[744] When free travel by railway has been established, free travel by tramway, which has already been demanded by municipal reformers (see Chapter XVII.), will necessarily also be introduced. A publication issued by the most scientific body of British Socialists, the Fabian Society, urges: "There is only one safe principle to guide the reformer. The tramways, the light railways, and the railways must be regarded as the modern form of the king's highway. Our fathers spent time and trouble ridding the roads of tolls; and railway rates and passenger fares are merely modern tolls. Their abolition must come sooner or later."[745] "We have abolished the turnpike gate and the toll-collector, and our highways are free in the sense that they are maintained by general assessment. And if the turnpike gate was an odious obstruction to the traveller, how much more obnoxious to him, or her, is the railway ticket-box?"[746] Railways may be made free before the ideal Socialist State of the future has been created, but they will certainly be free as soon as the Socialist commonwealth has been established. "Railways will play a very great part indeed in the Socialist State, They will be absolutely 'free' for every purpose. The cost of actual working is comparatively inconsiderable, while the benefits of free transit are incalculable. To decentralise the population so as to efface the distinction between dwellers in town and country is to renovate humanity physically and morally."[747] After travel and transport has been made absolutely free on land throughout the length and breadth of Great Britain, the free travel and transport principle will of course be extended to travel and transport by sea, and free travel and transport by sea will better bind the Empire together than a Pan-Britannic Customs Union. The most scientific body of British Socialists, the Fabian Society, says: "A logical consequence of the national management of internal means of communication will be the completion of the State control of our oversea transit. It is impossible here to go into details. Let it suffice to remark that already the nation has a direct financial interest in the great steamship lines, through its mail subsidies and Admiralty loans with corresponding claims for service in war; that intellectually the nation, by its pride in its magnificent mercantile fleet, regards it as a national possession, and declines to consider our shipping as the mere private property of the shareholders of the steamship companies; and finally, that our navy is maintained at enormous public expense expressly to protect the mercantile fleet, which at present is mainly private property."[748] "The notion that the forces making for disintegration can be neutralised by 10 per cent. preferential duties is not worth discussing; indeed, the raising of the fiscal question seems at least as likely to reveal our commercial antagonisms as our community of interests. And the huge distances will be mighty forces on the side of disintegration unless we abolish them. Well, why not abolish them? Distances are now counted in days, not in miles. The Atlantic Ocean is as wide as it was in 1870; but the United States are four days nearer than they were then. Commercially, however, distance is mainly a matter of freightage. Now it is as possible to abolish ocean freightage as it was to make Waterloo Bridge toll-free, or establish the Woolwich free ferry. It is already worth our while to give Canada the use of the British Navy for nothing. Why not give her the use of the mercantile marine for nothing instead of taxing bread to give her a preference? Or, if that is too much, why not offer her special rates? It is really only a question of ocean road making. A national mercantile fleet plying between the provinces of the Empire, and carrying Empire goods and passengers either free or at charges far enough below cost to bring Australasia and Canada commercially nearer to England than to the Continent, would form a link with the mother-country which once brought fully into use could never be snapped without causing a commercial crisis in every province."[749] The purchase of the whole British mercantile marine by the Government would incidentally have the effect of abolishing the British shipping rings, which, like the British railways, frequently penalise with discriminating rates the British producer and shipper. "Of the real conditions of ocean traffic, at present, the public has no suspicion. All our lines of communication are controlled by shipping rings which carry preferential rating (an illegal practice in our inland transit) to an extent that would shock Mr. Chamberlain back again to Free Trade if he realised it; for their preferences are by no means patriotic; they have helped Belgium into our Indian market, and Germany and America into South Africa and New Zealand. The cotton conference of Liverpool directly assisted the American exporters of cotton to China by the heavy charges they made against the Lancashire manufacturer--charges which were modified only after repeated protests. These rings and rates constitute the most dangerous disintegrating force we have to face."[750] There is much justification in the complaints of the Socialists with regard to British railways and shipping, but their proposals are, as usual, quite Utopian. For all ills of the body politic and economic, the Socialists have only one remedy, and that an infallible one--nationalisation, or rather Socialisation. The policy of the British railway and shipping rings is no doubt a national scandal, but their defects and delinquencies may no doubt be counteracted by appropriate Government action and legislation. It is probably now too late for the State to acquire the railways. The State cannot afford to risk a large capital loss. Railway purchase would apparently be too speculative an undertaking. If the State should acquire the railways, they would certainly be run at a profit. The sooner the Socialists abandon their fixed idea that profit on private and national undertakings is immoral, the better will it be for them. So long as they decry profit and propose to work State undertakings without a profit, so long can they not be taken seriously. Profit consists in part of the salary of direction, in part of the earnings set aside for effecting the necessary alterations, improvements, and extensions, and for forming a reserve fund for making losses good, &c. Therefore abandonment of profit would mean the decline and decay of the national capital. FOOTNOTES: [729] Davidson, _Free Trade_ v. _Fettered Transport_, p. 9. [730] _Ibid._ p. 7. [731] _Reformers' Year Book_, 1907, pp. 119, 120. [732] Hyndman, _Real Reform_, p. 14. [733] _Fabianism and the Fiscal Question_, p. 17. [734] Macdonald, _Labour and the Empire_, p. 96. [735] _Reformers' Year Book_, 1907, p. 120. [736] _Independent Labour Party Report, Annual Conference_, 1907, p. 50. [737] _Socialism and Labour Policy_, p. 14. [738] Blatchford, _Britain for the British_, p. 86. [739] Sorge, _Socialism and the Worker_, p. 13. [740] Davidson, _Free Trade and Fettered Transport_, p. 17. [741] Davidson, _Free Rails and Trams_, p. 9. [742] _Ibid._ p. 13. [743] Davidson, _Free Rails and Free Trams_, p. 7. [744] _Ibid._ p. 14. [745] _Public Control of Electric Power and Transit_, p. 10. [746] Davidson, _Free Rails and Trams_, p. 5. [747] Davidson, _The Old Order and the New_, p. 158. [748] _Public Control of Electric Power and Transit_, p. 14. [749] _Fabianism and the Fiscal Question_, p. 16. [750] _Fabianism and the Fiscal Question_, p. 16. CHAPTER XX SOME SOCIALIST VIEWS ON MONEY, BANKS, AND BANKING All Socialists wish to abolish private capital. Money embodies private capital in its most portable form. It can easily be hidden, and as the Socialists wish to prevent the re-accumulation of new private capital, the abolition of money, and especially of gold and silver, has prominently figured in all Socialistic programmes since the time of Protagoras and of Plato. Socialists wish to effect the exchange of commodities, the payment of labour, and the settlement of accounts mainly by book-keeping. "As there are no wares in the new community neither will there be any money."[751] "In the Social-Democratic State the citizen will be granted an income, which will be indicated by labour checks or credit cards, as advocated by Gronlund, Bellamy, and John Carruthers."[752] "Under ideal Socialism there would be no money at all and no wages. The industry of the country would be organised and managed by the State, much as the Post Office now is; goods of all kinds would be produced and distributed for use and not for sale, in such quantities as were needed. Hours of labour would be fixed, and every citizen would take what he or she liked from the common stock. Food, clothing, lodging, fuel, transit, amusement, and all other things would be absolutely free, and the only difference between a Prime Minister and a collier would be the difference of rank and occupation."[753] "How will exchange then be carried on? By account facilitated by some such contrivance as labour checks. When in the Co-operative Commonwealth money becomes superannuated we shall have nothing but checks, notes, tickets--whatever you will call them--issued by authority."[754] And how will international exchange be carried on? Very simply and easily. By barter. "So much tea is wanted from China. The Chinese Government is advised of the quantity and asked what British goods will be acceptable by the Celestials in exchange. There will be international barter on a grand and equitable scale."[755] It is quite logical that the Socialists who wish to introduce the primitive Communism of the prehistoric ages (see Chapter XXIX.), wish also to reintroduce the aboriginal system of barter. However, the contemplated form of "international barter on a grand and equitable scale" will have its difficulties. China, for instance, may sell much silk and tea to England and take in exchange mostly foreign manufactured goods from America, Germany, Belgium, and Japan, as she does at present. It is to be feared that the "grand and equitable system of international barter" will prove impracticable even if, as most Socialists somewhat rashly assume, all States should become Socialistic commonwealths, or if the grand Socialist Republic of the world should actually be created. We have at present an international currency, Gold. The contemplated creation of unlimited paper issues in lieu of gold, the fulfilment of the ideal of many Socialists, would have a very simple, a very certain, and a very unpleasant consequence. Foreign merchants, doubting the value of the new paper currency and the stability of the new Socialist Government, would of course refuse to part with their goods. Not a pound of cotton, not a bushel of wheat would reach England from abroad. The nation would be starving, and Socialist deputations would hasten to search out Lord Rothschild in the workhouse, where no doubt he would reside, and implore him to reintroduce capitalism and food into Great Britain. Some Socialists of the saner kind fear that it will not be possible to abolish money. Kautsky, for instance, writes: "To abolish money I consider impossible. Money is the simplest means as yet known which renders it possible in a mechanism so complicated as the modern system of production, with its enormously minute subdivision of labour, to arrange for the smooth circulation of products and their distribution among the individual members of society; it is the means which enables everyone to satisfy his needs according to his individual taste (naturally within the limits of his economic power). As a medium of circulation, money will remain indispensable so long as nothing better is found."[756] Socialists declaim against the immorality of charging interest--"usury" as they call it (see Chapters IV., IX., and XVII.), and they are indignant that the banks are unwilling to advance gratis unlimited funds to Socialist town councils to be wasted as fancy may direct (see page 258). Therefore they wish to abolish "that most costly of all modern parasites, the banker."[757] Some very irreligious, if not atheistic, Anarchist-Socialists, such as Mr. Morrison Davidson, pretend to object to interest on religious grounds because, "the Way, the Truth, and the Life said, 'Lend hoping for nothing again.'"[758] Other Socialists wish to abolish the banks and the charging of interest for the benefit of the people and of the Socialist municipal and other councils. "Usury--in that offensive pregnant little word is contained the secret of Society's worries and Man's woes. Abolish usury: that is the true Fiscal Reform Policy."[759] "Usury can be arrested at present by nationalisation of exchange. The nationalisation of exchange must be undertaken. Metal must be demonetised and reduced to the ranks. Banking must be undertaken by the municipalities and county councils, and by these elective bodies only, while a durable paper currency issued on the basis of the ascertained wealth of the nation, and maintained in true relation to it, shall supersede gold. Then we arrive at a scientific solution of the question of exchange and put in operation the currency and credit system of Socialism."[760] When the banks and the gold currency have been abolished and when "exchange has been nationalised" the Socialist local authorities will no longer have any difficulty in procuring the unlimited funds they need for the execution of their boundless plans. They will raise the money by the printing of practically unlimited quantities of paper money issued against the security of "the ascertained wealth of the nation." If they wish to spend money, they simply "make it" by means of an ordinary printing press. Could a simpler and more ingenious system for making money be devised? "Recently notice has been given by leading bankers of their intention to discriminate against municipal loans. And as things now stand, it is certain that, if an organised effort is made generally by the bankers throughout the country by advising clients against such investments and by refusing to accept municipal bonds as collateral security for overdrafts, &c.--a serious check will be put upon public enterprise. Those who imagine bankers either impotent or incapable of such treason against the public interest should remember what took place in the United States in 1893. "The natural suggestion to be offered as a counter-move to the threat of the bankers and their Industrial Freedom League is to add to those enterprises now under municipal control that of banking. And surely there is nothing which lends itself more easily to municipalisation! If the credit of a banking house can be employed for promoting enterprise and earning dividends, why cannot municipalities employ their own credit directly? In others words, why cannot the credit of a city be utilised to carry on its municipal works instead of it having to borrow the credit of a bank and pay interest charges? Consider how public works are now financed. The London County Council decides to build decent and respectable houses in some locality for the working classes. It requires, we will say, _500,000l._ with which to build dwellings for 2,000 families. Bankers are invited to tender for the loan, and finally the Council gets this advance on a guarantee of 3 per cent. per annum, the principal being repayable at the end of thirty-three and a third years. At the end of this period the Council will have paid the bank _500,000l._ in interest as well as the _500,000l._ original loan. The charge for the loan is equal to the entire cost of the whole undertaking; the result is that each family must pay about twice the amount of rent that it would otherwise have to pay if the Council had not incurred interest charges through borrowing other people's credit. Was there ever greater lunacy in public affairs? "Suppose that instead of issuing credit in the shape of bonds of large denomination, the Council issued it in notes of small denominations of pounds and shillings. Does anyone mean to assert that that credit which is eagerly purchased by a banker would be refused by a bricklayer or stonemason? Supposing the London County Council was empowered to issue its credit in one-pound notes, as well as large amounts, and supposing it was compulsory that these notes were good in payment of rates. Is there any question as to their being acceptable? The plan is so simple and so safe that at first it seems amazing it should have been so long out of employment."[761] "Of course gold will drain off abroad--if the foreigners don't follow in our footsteps at once. If the demonetised gold is withdrawn--well, we can have a new currency by nationalising the railways and paying the shareholders 'in current coin'" (which means in unconvertible notes), "not in redeemable, interest-bearing bonds. So long as solid wealth rests behind our issue, our financial policy is sound. Of course, the railway and other shareholders will want fresh investments; they won't find them, because no man will pay interest to usurers when he can monetise his credit at the mere cost of banking and exchange. They must therefore spend it, and the currency will never be restricted henceforward. And this national ownership of exchange can be operated to compel every monopolist to sell his monopoly to the nation."[762] This insane project is called by the writer, "A scientific way to Socialism."[763] Surely science is the most abused word in modern language. The creation of money by unlimited issues of paper secured by the national possessions was tried on the grandest scale at the French Revolution. The "assignats" were secured on the national domains, and their security seemed absolute to the revolutionaries. The great Mirabeau had stated on September 27, 1790: "Our assignats are not ordinary paper money. They are a new creation for which there is no precedent. What constitutes the value of metal money? Its intrinsic value. Now I ask you: Does paper which represents the foremost of the possessions of a nation such as France not possess all the characteristics of intrinsic and generally accepted value which metal money possesses?"[764] The "assignats" speedily fell to a discount, although dealing in them at a discount was made punishable with twenty years' imprisonment with hard labour,[765] and they fell ultimately to waste-paper value. A pair of boots worth thirty francs in gold cost 10,000 francs in paper. On paper all were immensely rich. Yet the masses were starving. Unfortunately people cannot live by consuming unlimited quantities of credit notes. They can become prosperous neither by robbing the rich nor by calling a shilling a sovereign, but only by producing more. Greater wealth means simply increased consumption, and increased consumption, unless based on increased production, can only be effected by intrenching upon and diminishing the national capital, the national reserve store of food, clothing, tools, &c., and thus causing widespread misery and starvation. FOOTNOTES: [751] Bebel, _Woman in the Past, Present, and Future_, p. 192. [752] Leatham, _Socialism and Character_, p. 90. [753] Blatchford, _Merrie England_, p. 100. [754] Gronlund, _Co-operative Commonwealth_, p. 103. [755] Davidson, _The Old Order and the New_, p. 157. [756] Kautsky, _The Social Revolution_, p. 14. [757] Jowett, _The Socialist and the City_, p. 44. [758] Davidson, _The Old Order and the New_, p. 57. [759] McLachlan, _The Tyranny of Usury_, p. 1. [760] _Ibid._ pp. 10, 17. [761] _How to Finance Municipal Enterprises_, pp. 3-5. [762] McLachlan, _The Tyranny of Usury_, p. 20. [763] _Ibid._ [764] _Nouvelle Biographie Générale_, vol. xxxv. p. 39. [765] Roscher, _System_, p. 227. CHAPTER XXI SOME SOCIALIST VIEWS ON FREE TRADE AND PROTECTION In his thoughtful book on Socialism, Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, M.P., the Socialist leader, attributes the rise of the Socialist movement in great Britain to various causes, one of which is "the reaction against Manchesterism."[766] Socialists, generally speaking, are opposed to Free Trade. Neither the moderate nor the revolutionary sections of British Socialism have a good word to say for it. The Socialist leaders, looking at the question of Free Trade and Protection from the worker's point of view, have arrived with Lecky at the conclusion that the whole Liberal Free Trade agitation is one of the greatest political impostures which the world has witnessed,[767] a view which, by the by, was also expressed by Bismarck.[768] Socialists are not under any illusion as to the causes which led to the introduction of Free Trade into Great Britain, and they sneer at the humanitarian cant with which its promoters successfully surrounded it. One of the leading Socialist books states with regard to this point: "Protection was no longer needed by the manufacturers, who had supremacy in the world-market, unlimited access to raw material, and a long start of the rest of the world in the development of machinery and in industrial organisation. The landlord class, on the other hand, was absolutely dependent on Protection. The triumph of Free Trade therefore signifies economically the decay of the old landlord class pure and simple, and the victory of capitalism. The capitalist class was originally no fonder of Free Trade than the landlords. It destroyed in its own interest the woollen manufacture in Ireland, and it would have throttled the trade of the colonies had it not been for the successful resistance of Massachusetts and Virginia. It was Protectionist so long as it suited its purpose to be so. But when cheap raw material was needed for its looms, and cheap bread for its workers; when it feared no foreign competitor, and had established itself securely in India, in North America, in the Pacific; then it demanded Free Trade."[769] "Protection at home was needless to manufacturers who beat all their foreign rivals, and whose very existence was staked on the expansion of their exports. Protection at home was of advantage to none but to the producers of articles of food and other raw materials, to the agricultural interest, which, under the then existing circumstances in England, meant the receivers of rent, the landed aristocracy."[770] The Free Trade manufacturers, who were chiefly interested in cheapness of production, cared little what became of the workers. "The individualist devotees of _laisser faire_ used to teach us that when restrictions were removed, free competition would settle everything. Prices would go down, and fill the 'consumer' with joy unspeakable; the fittest would survive, and as for the rest--it was not very clear what would become of them, and it really didn't matter."[771] The doctrines and the boasts of the Free Traders are usually treated by the Socialists with contempt. "Cobdenites ascribe every known or imagined improvement in commerce, and the condition of the masses, to Free Trade. Things are better than they were fifty years ago: Free Trade was adopted fifty years ago. _Ergo_--there you are. There is not a word about the development of railways and steamships, about improved machinery, about telegraphs, the cheap post and telephones, about education and better facilities of travel."[772] The unsoundness of the fundamental doctrine of Free Trade, "Buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market," has frequently been exposed by Socialists. Mr. Blatchford, for instance, in a book of his of which more than a million copies have been sold gives prominence to Cobden's pronouncement in the House of Commons in which he expounded the celebrated maxim: Buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market: "To buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest, what is the meaning of the maxim? It means that you take the article which you have in the greatest abundance and with it obtain from others that of which they have the most to spare; so giving to mankind the means of enjoying the fullest abundance of earth's goods."[773] Mr. Blatchford then comments upon Cobden's doctrine as follows: "Let us reduce these fine phrases to figures. Suppose America can sell us wheat at _30s._ a quarter, and suppose ours costs _32s. 6d._ a quarter. That is a gain of 1/15th in the cost of wheat. We get a loaf for _3d._ instead of having to pay _3-1/4d._ That is all the fine phrases mean. What do we lose? We lose the beauty and health of our factory towns; we lose annually some twenty thousand lives in Lancashire alone; we are in constant danger of great strikes; we are reduced to the meanest shifts and the most violent acts of piracy and slaughter to 'open up markets' for our goods; we lose the stamina of our people, and we lose our agriculture."[774] Most Socialists recognise that under the Free Trade _régime_ Great Britain has sacrificed her safety and her strength to profit. "Did you ever consider what it involved, this ruin of British agriculture? Don't you see that if we lose our power to feed ourselves we destroy the advantages of our insular position?"[775] "Don't you see that the people who depend on foreigners for their food are at the mercy of any ambitious statesman who chooses to make war upon them? And don't you think that is rather a stiff price to pay to get a farthing off the loaf? No nation can be secure unless it is independent; no nation can be independent unless it is based upon agriculture."[776] "We must buy wheat from America with cotton goods; but first of all we must buy raw cotton with which to make those goods. We are therefore entirely dependent upon foreigners for our existence."[777] "The present national ideal is to become 'The workshop of the world.' That is to say, the British people are to manufacture goods for sale to foreign countries, and in return for those goods are to get more money than they could obtain by developing the resources of their own country for their own use. My ideal is that each individual should seek his advantage in co-operation with his fellows, and that the people should make the best of their own country before attempting to trade with other people's."[778] "The Free Traders tell me that under their glorious system of free exchange nations naturally occupy themselves in those industries which produce the most wealth. Thus, if Great Britain, by employing a million men in growing corn, can produce _50,000,000l._ a year, while she can produce _51,000,000l._ by employing the men in getting coal. Great Britain will 'naturally' employ those men in getting coal! Sending her coal abroad, Great Britain can get _1,000,000l._ a year more wealth. What a beautiful doctrine! Enormous increase in wealth. Foreigners can send us _51,000,000l._ of corn for our coal, while Great Britain could only grow _50,000,000l._ Free Trade for ever! It never occurs to the Free Traders to ask: 'Is it better to have a million men working in the bowels of the earth, or a million men tilling the surface?"[779] "The idea is, that if by making cloth, cutlery, and other goods we can buy more food than we can produce at home with the same amount of labour, it pays us to let the land go out of cultivation and make Britain the 'workshop of the world.' Now, assuming that we can keep our foreign trade, and assuming that we can get more food by foreign trade than we could produce by the same amount of work, is it quite certain that we are making a good bargain when we desert our fields for our factories? Suppose men can earn more in the big towns than they could earn in the fields, is the difference all gain? Rents and prices are higher in the towns; the life is less healthy, less pleasant. It is a fact that the death-rates in the towns are higher, that the duration of life is shorter, and that the stamina and physique of the workers are lowered by town life and by employment in the factories. And there is another very serious evil attached to the commercial policy of allowing our British agriculture to decay, and that is the evil of our dependence upon foreign countries for our food. The plain and terrible truth is that even if we have a perfect fleet and keep entire control of the seas, we shall still be exposed to the risk of almost certain starvation during a European war. As I have repeatedly pointed out before, we have by sacrificing our agriculture destroyed our insular position. As an island we may be, or should be, free from serious danger of invasion. But of what avail is our vaunted silver shield of the sea if we depend upon other nations for our food? We are helpless in case of a great war. It is not necessary to invade England in order to conquer her. Once our food-supply is stopped, we are shut up like a beleaguered city, to starve or to surrender. Stop the import of food into England for three months and we shall be obliged to surrender at discretion. And our agriculture is to be ruined and the safety and honour of the Empire are to be endangered that a few landlords, coal-owners, and moneylenders may wax fat upon the vitals of the nation."[780] "For over half a century we have been committing industrial suicide. By laying waste our own land and throwing ourselves upon the mercy of the foreign food-producers, we have been deliberately sacrificing the millions and the future to the millionaires and the moment."[781] The celebrated cheapness argument of the Free Traders has little attraction for Socialists. "'Ah,' says the Free Trader, 'but think of the cheaper grocery and the cheaper boots!' Yes, let us think of them. What good does it do me, my countrymen, one of the unemployed, to think of the wealth of the Rothschilds, or the cheap boots and the cheap bread and the cheap clothes of those who benefit by these things? I am one of the nation. Are these things that are so good for the nation good for me? How can these cheap wares do me any good, who have no money at all? The fact is that Free Trade and cheap goods are only good for certain individuals. They are good for those who benefit by them."[782] Cheapness means low wages. Cheapness may benefit that strange and mythical figure the abstract "consumer" of the text-books, but need not benefit the working man. Very likely it will harm him, because "Cheap goods mean cheap labour, and cheap labour means low wages. You have nothing but your labour to sell, and you are told that it will pay you to sell that cheaply."[783] "All commodities are produced by labour, therefore to drive commodities down to their cheapest rate must result in cheap labour."[784] Cheapness may fill those with joy who have money in their pocket and who do not care how cheap goods are produced. But incidentally the policy of Free Trade and of _laisser faire_, the policy of cheapness which benefits the consumer and takes no notice of the producer, encourages and causes sweating and untold misery to the workers. "Do you ever consider the lives of the people who make these marvellously cheap things? And do you ever think what kind of homes they have; in what kind of districts the homes are situated; and what becomes of those people when they are too ill, or too old, or too infirm to earn even four shillings as the price of a hundred and twelve hours' work?"[785] Free Trade may have been beneficial in Cobden's time, when Great Britain was the chief manufacturing country in the world. But what is its effect under the changed conditions of the present time, and how will these changes affect her industries and her workers? "In the early days of our great trade the commercial school wished Britain to be the 'workshop of the world,' and for a good while she was the workshop of the world. But now a change is coming. Other nations have opened world-workshops, and we have to face competition. France, Germany, Holland, Belgium, and America are all eager to take our coveted place as general factory, and China and Japan are changing swiftly from customers into rival dealers. Is it likely, then, that we can keep all our foreign trade, or that what we keep will be as profitable as it is at present?"[786] "Suppose we lost a lump of our export trade. Suppose the Japanese, Chinese, or Americans capture some of our markets. Where should we get our food? If we could not sell our exports, we could not buy imports of food. We are walking on thin ice, my countrymen. And if competition became keener, what would the champions of Free Trade do to meet it? They would say: 'We must sell our manufactures, or you will get no food. To sell our manufactures we must reduce the price. To reduce the price we must reduce the cost of production. To reduce the cost of production we must cut down wages.'"[787] "Free Trade means _laisser faire_ all round, not only in regard to inanimate commodities, but in respect to that most important commodity of all--human labour power. Chinese, Japanese, Indians, negroes are all permitted under complete Free Trade to compete freely on their lower standard of life against the white man."[788] "A demand for a general reduction of wages is the end of the fine talk about big profits, national prosperity, and the 'workshop of the world.' The British workers are to emulate the thrift of the Japanese, the Hindoos, and the Chinese, and learn to live on boiled rice and water. Why? So that they can accept low wages and retain our precious foreign trade. Yes, that is the latest idea. With brutal frankness the workers of Britain have been told again and again that, 'If we are to keep our foreign trade, the British workers must accept the conditions of their foreign rivals,' and that is the result of our commercial glory! For that we have sacrificed our agriculture and endangered the safety of our Empire."[789] The assertion of the Free Traders that Free Trade has made Great Britain prosperous is treated with scorn. "The Free Traders say we, the nation, are richer under this system than we should be under Protection. By employing ourselves in those occupations in which we can produce the cheapest article, we earn the most wealth in money value.--In money value.--They do not consider the twelve million underfed, the hundreds of thousands of unemployed. The nation, _we_, are richer. That is the test. Well, my countrymen, I think it is a damnable doctrine, and its results are damnable. The Free Traders boast of our wealth. Are twelve million underfed, a million starving children, a million paupers, an infantile death-rate of 150 per 1,000--are these signs of wealth? The question is not 'Is the nation wealthy?' but 'Are the people wealthy?' Judged by this standard, how poor a nation is this, my countrymen! The Free Traders tell us that we earn more wealth under Free Trade than we should under Protection. Again I ask: Who are _we_?"[790] A Socialist weekly lately said: "Great Britain, I understand, has recovered its prosperity; our exports are going strong, and our imports have nothing much to complain about. Prosperity? Why, Great Britain is simply rolling in--statistics."[791] Socialists rightly demand that the effect of British fiscal policy should be judged not by its effect upon the wealth of the few, but upon the employment of the many, and they clearly recognise the destructive effect which Free Trade has upon the national industries. "Under Free Trade it is possible for a foreign trader to take trade away from a British trader. If for any reason we lost an important trade, or several small trades, our unemployed would naturally grow. The Free Trade theory that the capital and the labour in the lost trades will find other employment is simply theory. Suppose they didn't. The Free Trader has no answer except: Look at our enormous wealth. My countrymen, looking at another man's wealth does not feed me, clothe me, and house me."[792] "When men are thrown out of work, by competition, or depression, or any cause, they do not so easily 'transfer their services to some other new employment.' It is easy to make them do so--on paper. And when they do get a fresh job, is it always as good as the one lost? Do they not often lose all their belongings, and get into debt, while looking for that new employment which the Free Traders talk about so glibly? and do not capitalists often lose a good deal of capital before they give up the fight for the trade? Nevertheless, say the Free Traders, we, the nation, are richer under this system than we should be under Protection. By employing ourselves in those occupations in which we can produce the cheapest article, we earn the most wealth in money value."[793] To this argument the Socialists reply: "Does your moral law say it is right that men should be thrown on the streets to starve because other men in other countries produce goods 2-1/2 per cent. cheaper?"[794] The statistics of an enormous foreign trade, which Free Traders triumphantly display for the edification of the masses, give, according to the Socialists, little consolation to the unemployed and ill-employed workers. "Figures, be they never so dazzling, and numbers, be they never so round, will not feed the hungry, house the homeless, or bring light and warmth into the drear, precarious lives of the mass of our people. The increase of trade means only an increase of production, and not necessarily of persons employed or wages gained. With the rapid concentration of industries and the perfection of labour-saving devices, production has been enormously increased without any corresponding increase of employment; in some cases, with an actual decrease of employment. What the workers are interested in is not the mere growth of profitable trade, but the extent to which the industries of their country afford them and their families a security of livelihood, and the reasonable comforts and recreations which their labour has more than earned."[795] Most Socialists frankly own that Free Trade has been a failure. "In the House of Commons on March 12th, 1906, Mr. P. Snowden, M.P., said: 'Sixty years of Free Trade had failed to mitigate or palliate to any considerable extent the grave industrial and social evils which Free Traders and Protectionists alike were compelled to admit. Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman had admitted them when he said that 30 per cent. of our population were on the verge of hunger. He contended that whatever improvement had been effected in the condition of the people during the last sixty years was due to other causes than Free Trade."[796] During 1907 the complaints among the Socialists about the effect of Free Trade upon employment have become louder. The fact that British unemployed workmen furnished an apparently inexhaustible supply of strike-breakers to Continental employers, that men fought like wild beasts at the registry offices in order to be allowed to act as strike-breakers in Hamburg and Antwerp, has shown the great prevalence of unemployment. Commenting hereon a Socialist monthly said in bitter irony, under the heading "British Blacklegs": "The intervention in the Antwerp dock-workers' strike of British workmen as blacklegs is a striking commentary on the prosperity of the people of this country. Under Free Trade we have been told--_ad nauseam_--by Liberal politicians that the British working-man is the most prosperous and well-fed human being on the face of the earth. He, with wages nearly double those of the best-paid Continental workman, with all kinds of provisions infinitely cheaper--thanks to Free Trade--than they can be procured elsewhere, is indeed 'God's Englishman.' It would be as unkind as rude to suggest that these honourable politicians had been lying. The only alternative conclusion to be arrived at is that the British workman is a most disinterested being, willing to sacrifice his prosperity and comfort in order to compel the miserably paid dockers of Antwerp and Hamburg to submit to the conditions against which they have revolted."[797] The action of Mr. Haldane, the present Secretary of State for War, in dismissing a large number of workmen from Woolwich Arsenal and giving a contract for 100,000 horseshoes for the British Army to an American firm on account of greater cheapness, prompted the following verses: Mr. Haldane was smiling and suave As his views upon horseshoes he gave; He will buy from the Yanks (Who take orders with thanks). And believes that much money he'll save. How thankful we all ought to be That this most kind and careful M.P. Thus shows Woolwich men They will be employed when They're off to the States--Q.E.D.[798] Some Socialists take a very pessimistic view of the economic position of Great Britain. Mr. Hyndman said that "Great Britain had lost her commercial and industrial supremacy. The United States now stood first, Germany second, and Great Britain was forced into third place."[799] Many years ago some far-seeing Socialists had prophesied the coming industrial decline of Great Britain. "The notion that Britain can hold a monopoly of engineering, or of any other trade, must be given up. Britain cannot; countries that have been almost wholly agricultural are rapidly becoming manufacturers too."[800] Of late these pessimistic forecasts have become louder and more frequent. The progress of industrial countries can be measured, to some extent, by their output of coal, and "at no distant date Germany will probably also surpass our output and we will be relegated to third place."[801] This event will very likely take place about 1910. The statistics published by the British Board of Trade are deceptive. They leave out Germany's very large and constantly growing output of lignite, which amounts to about 60,000,000 tons per annum, and which increases Germany's coal output, as stated by the Board of Trade, by about 50 per cent. British Socialists have found out that the Free Trade doctrine with its hypothetical "consumer" for a centre is opposed to science, to experience, and to common-sense. "The present system of trade is, in my opinion, opposed entirely to reason and justice. Nearly all our practical economists of to-day put the consumer first and the producer last. This is wrong. There can be no just or sane system which does not first consider the producer and then widely and equitably regulates the distribution of the things produced."[802] They recognise that Free Trade has caused ill-balanced production, and that, through the stagnation and decay of industries, men who ought to be engaged in production have been forced into more or less unprofitable and more or less useless employments. "What this country is rotting for is the want of more and better producers of necessaries--more and better market-gardeners, fruit-growers, foresters, general farmers, wool-workers, builders, and useful makers generally. Instead of which, the present system is giving us more and more non-producers--more and more shopkeepers, middlemen, commercial travellers, advertising agents, dealers, and wasters generally. According to the last census returns, we find that whilst the agricultural class shows a terrible decline, and the industrial class has barely kept pace with the population as a whole, on the other hand the commercial, or selling class, shows an increase of over 42 per cent. inside ten years."[803] Free Trade has been tried and has been found wanting, and a return to Protection, which is in accordance with the needs of the times and the spirit of the workers, especially of the trade unionists, is inevitable. "Capitalist Free Trade is a manifest failure. Trade unionism is, in its essence, a very sturdy form of Protection, as we can see, if not here in Great Britain, certainly in America and in Australia."[804] "Society is constantly changing its form of living: every day some supposed old truth goes into the limbo of forgotten things, and, looking around us, those who have eyes to see and ears to hear may see and hear on all hands the death-knell of the old Manchester school of political economy."[805] The claims of Free Trade and the cheap-food cry are disregarded and treated with contempt. "Free Traders talk about the folly of Protection. But Free Trade itself is a form of Protection. It protects the strong and the cunning against the weaker and the more honest. It protects the cheap and nasty against the good."[806] The founder of modern Socialism had stated already in 1847: "What is Free Trade under the present conditions of society? Freedom of capital."[807] Free Trade undoubtedly directly protects capital and leaves labour unprotected. "Your food will cost you more! I am to bow down to the idol of cheapness. I, one of the unemployed. What is cheapness to me, who have no money at all?"[808] "Your Manchester school treat all social and industrial problems from the standpoint of mere animal subsistence."[809] Declarations such as "The Social-Democratic Federation stands for universal free trade or free exchange and for the abolition of all indirect taxation,"[810] and "The only form of Protection advocated by the Social-Democratic Federation is the protection of the proletariat against the robbery and exploitation of the master-class"[811] have not the ring of seriousness about them. Only very rarely are utterances in favour of Free Trade to be found in Socialist writings. However, frequently the demand is made that Tariff Reform and Socialism must go hand in hand, and doubt is expressed whether the Tariff Reform agitation is carried on for the benefit of the manufacturer or for that of the workers. "Mr. Chamberlain is not a Socialist. His Government will not be a Socialist Government. His plan would protect only the rich. This fiscal fight is a fight between capitalists as to who shall make the profits. It is not a fight for the benefit of the 'nation.' That is what they tell you. The capitalist who loses his trade through foreign competition is a Tariff Reformer. He wants Protection. The capitalist who depends on cheap foreign imports for raw material is a Free Trader. He does not want his prices raised."[812] "Preferential trade is the proposal of individual capitalists who desire to make profits out of our Imperial connections."[813] The Fabian organ looks at Free Trade and Protection merely as a business proposition. "We care nothing for abstract Cobdenite economics, and are quite willing to welcome Tariff Reform if its advocates show us that it can be used as a lever for raising the standards of life and labour. The Labour party is therefore eminently wise in seeing how far it can be used for their advantage. Protectionism of the Australian Labour party is the right kind of Protectionism--Labour-Protectionism: a very different thing from the Capital-Protectionism which is (with a few exceptions) the characteristic mark of Tariff Reformers in this country."[814] Some revolutionary Socialists are in favour of Free Trade because they hope that it will bring on a revolution in Great Britain. Their great leader, Karl Marx, taught sixty years ago, when Free Trade was being introduced: "The Protective system is nothing but a means of establishing manufacture upon a large scale in any given country. Besides this, the Protective system helps to develop free competition within a nation. Generally speaking, the Protective system in these days is conservative, while the Free Trade system works destructively. It breaks up old nationalities and carries the antagonism of proletariat and bourgeoisie to the uttermost point. In a word, the Free Trade system hastens the social revolution. In this revolutionary sense alone I am in favour of Free Trade."[815] Those Socialist revolutionaries who wish to increase the misery of the people, hoping that unbearable poverty, owing to increasing unemployment and consequent want, will at least madden the people and cause a revolution--they remember that the great French revolutions were also brought about by unemployment and consequent widespread misery--are the most determined champions of Free Trade. FOOTNOTES: [766] Macdonald, _Socialism_, p. 16. [767] Lecky, _History of the Eighteenth Century_, quoted in _Fabian Essays in Socialism_, p. 81. [768] Ellis Barker, _Modern Germany_, p. 531. [769] _Fabian Essays in Socialism_, pp. 80, 81. [770] F. Engels in Marx, _Discourse on Free Trade_, p. 5. [771] _Fabian Essays in Socialism_, p. 90. [772] Blatchford, _God and My Neighbour_, p. 154. [773] Blatchford, _Merrie England_, p. 33. [774] Blatchford, _Merrie England_, p. 33. [775] _Ibid._ pp. 33, 34. [776] _Ibid._ p. 35. [777] _Ibid._ p. 34. [778] _Ibid._ p. 12. [779] Suthers, _My Right to Work_, p. 100. [780] Blatchford, _Britain for the British_, pp. 97, 98, and 118. [781] Hall, _Land, Labour, and Liberty_, p. 11. [782] Suthers, _My Right to Work_, p. 82. [783] Blatchford, _Merrie England_, p. 92. [784] _Ibid._ p. 97. [785] _Ibid._ p. 97. [786] Blatchford, _Britain for the British_, p. 100. [787] Suthers, _My Right to Work_, p. 103. [788] _Justice_, November 23, 1907. [789] Blatchford, _Britain for the British_, p. 100. [790] Suthers, _My Right to Work_, pp. 102, 103. [791] _Clarion_, October 25, 1907. [792] Suthers, _My Right to Work_, pp. 96, 97. [793] _Ibid._ p. 101. [794] _Ibid._ p. 104. [795] _Labour Leader_, January 12, 1906. [796] _National Union Gleanings_, vol. xxvi. January-June 1906, p. 220. [797] _Social-Democrat_, September 1907, pp. 519, 520. [798] _Battersea Vanguard_, November 1907, p. 5. [799] _Report, 27th Annual Conference Social-Democratic Federation_ 1907, p. 29. [800] Mann, _The International Labour Movement_, p. 8. [801] Jones, _Mining Royalties_, p. 14. [802] Blatchford, _Competition_, p. 9. [803] Hall, _Land, Labour, and Liberty_, pp. 9, 10. [804] _Justice_, November 23, 1907. [805] George Lansbury, _The Principles of the English Poor Law_, p. 16. [806] Suthers, _My Right to Work_, p. 104. [807] Karl Marx, _A Discourse on Free Trade_, p. 39. [808] Suthers, _My Right to Work_, p. 100. [809] Blatchford, _Merrie England_, p. 15. [810] H. Quelch, _The Social-Democratic Federation_, p. 11. [811] _Ibid._ [812] Suthers, _My Right to Work_, p. 119. [813] J. Ramsay Macdonald, _Labour and the Empire_, p. 97. [814] _New Age_, October 10, 1907, p. 369. [815] Karl Marx, _A Discourse on Free Trade_, p. 42. CHAPTER XXII SOCIALISM AND EDUCATION The attitude of Socialists towards education is a peculiar one. They see in it apparently less an agency for distributing knowledge and discovering ability than an instrument for the propagation of Socialism and an institution for relieving parents of all cost and responsibility for the maintenance and the bringing up of their children. Hence most Socialists, in discussing education, consider it rather from the point of view of those who are desirous of State relief than from the point of view of those who wish for good education. Among the "Immediate Reforms" demanded by the Social-Democratic Federation, the following embody its education programme: "Elementary education to be free, secular, industrial, and compulsory for all classes. The age of obligatory school attendance to be raised to sixteen. Unification and systematisation of intermediate and higher education, both general and technical, and all such education to be free. Free maintenance for all attending State schools. Abolition of school rates; the cost of education in all State schools to be borne by the national Exchequer."[816] An influential Socialist writer demands: "Education should be fee-less from top to bottom of the ladder, the universities included."[817] In accordance with the Socialist views regarding the relation of the sexes, which are described in Chapter XXV. "Socialism and Woman, the Family and the Home,"[818] most Socialists demand co-education and identical education for both sexes. "Under Socialism boys and girls will receive exactly the same training and exercise in the fundamentals of a liberal education. Success in examinations of whatever character shall bring equal reward and distinction. There will be no separation into boys' classes and girls' classes. The instruction being the same, they shall receive it at the same time."[819] "Education will be the same for all and for both sexes. The sexes will be separated only in cases in which functional differences make it absolutely necessary."[820] Socialists see in the schools chiefly a means whereby to abolish parental responsibilities and to secure "free State maintenance" for all children. In claiming free State maintenance, Socialists grossly exaggerate with regard to the number of underfed children. "It is doubtful if half the children at present attending school are physically fit to be educated, and medical men of eminence have unhesitatingly expressed the opinion that the alarming increase of insanity, which is one of the most terrible characteristics of modern social life, is largely, if not entirely, due to the attempt to educate those who are too ill-nourished to stand the mental strain that even the most elementary school-training involves. As a remedy for this, the Social-Democratic Federation advocates a complete system of free State maintenance for all children attending school. This is an essential corollary of compulsory education. Only complete free maintenance will meet the requirements of the case."[821] "All children, destitute or not, should be fed, and fed without charge, at the expense of the State or municipality. We propose that the regular school course should include at least one meal a day. Thus only can we make sure that all the children who need feeding will be fed."[822] "To cram dates into the poor little skulls of innocent children when you ought to be cramming dates down their throats is not a right thing to do, especially when you remember that the most precious thing in this world is a human life, and when you realise that you are murdering systematically thousands of children every year because they cannot get proper food--they cannot even get pure milk in the great cities of our land. One of our first duties in this nation is to see that every child has a right to the best and most ample provision for its physical needs. That should be the primary charge upon the nation. I am not here to-night to discuss the great question of the State maintenance of children. Personally I am absolutely in favour of it."[823] Experience of other nations has taught that the institution of free meals for necessitous school-children is immediately and very grossly abused by unscrupulous parents easily able to feed their children. From Milan, for instance, we learn that "When in 1900 this service began, meals were given on only 133 days out of a possible 174 days of school attendance. The outlay was then set down at 98,300 francs. During the second year, however, free meals were served on 153 days and cost 149,337 francs. In 1903 the free meals cost the municipality 247,766 francs and 277,603 in 1904. The outlay will now exceed 300,000 francs, and the number of pupils who manage to establish their claim to be fed gratuitously is ever increasing."[824] British experiments of free feeding on a smaller scale have shown that "In the large majority of cases the children who are sent to school hungry are so sent, not by honest and poor parents, but by those who have an imperfectly developed sense of parental responsibility and are willing to shuffle out of the duty of providing for their children if they think anybody else will undertake it for them. These parents are not in need of assistance--they are perfectly well able to feed their own children; but if free meals can be had for the asking, they are not too proud to tell the child to ask. It relieves the mother of the trouble of preparing a meal for the child, and the money saved can be used for some more attractive form of personal expenditure."[825] At Birmingham, for example, numerous applications were made by the teachers to the relieving officers on behalf of children under their care, but when inquiries were made into the circumstances of the parents it was found that many of them were earning over thirty shillings a week, and in one case the parent was in constant employment with an average wage of _3l. 17s. 6d._ a week.[826] In Bolton, where during the winter of 1904-5 a charitable society provided free meals for children in certain centres of the town, it was found that the parents of some of the children who were partaking of the free meals so provided, and even reported as being underfed, were in receipt of as much as from _2l._ to _3l._ a week.[827] In Fulham (London) "More than one hundred names were sent to the Boards of Guardians of children who were adjudged to be underfed and were receiving meals from public charity. In hardly one of these cases did the relieving officer consider the complaint well founded. One family was found by him to be earning an income of _4l. 4s._ a week, and yet the children were sent to share in the charitable meals."[828] "Some of the parents who sent their children to the Johanna Street school in Lambeth said that they did not give their children food before going to school as they knew that if they did not do so they would receive it at the school, as the children of other people got food there and they did not see why theirs should not too."[829] The fact that Socialists grossly exaggerate in giving the proportion of underfed school children, and in ascribing the cause of underfeeding solely to the poverty of parents, is clear to all who have studied the problem of poverty. Mr. Cyril Jackson, the chief inspector of public elementary schools, for instance, in summarising the evidence of the women inspectors appointed to inquire into the age of admission of infants into elementary schools, says: "The question of underfed children cannot fail to be touched in the course of such an inquiry. It is interesting to find a general agreement that it is unsuitable rather than insufficient feeding that is responsible for sickly children. Want of sufficient sleep, neglect of personal cleanliness, badly ventilated homes, are contributory causes of the low physical standard reached."[830] Some Socialists, though only a few, have been honest enough to express similar views. A Fabian tract, for instance, says: "We have said that universal free feeding appears to be the only way in which the evil of improper (as distinct from insufficient) feeding can be removed. At present many children whose parents get fairly good wages cannot feed their children properly, either because they do not know what is the best food to give, or because they have not the time or the skill to prepare it. Manifestly the case of these will not be met by any system which feeds only the patently starved and destitute child. But it will be met both directly and indirectly by a universal system; directly, because the children, whatever they get at home, will at least get proper food at school; indirectly, because it will serve to educate the next generation of mothers in the knowledge of what is the best and most economical way of providing for their families. This is not the place to go into the very large question of what is the ideal diet for a child. All that need be insisted on here is that the provision should be bought and prepared under expert advice, and that consideration of cheapness should never be allowed to count as against the needs of nourishment. Every child should receive at least one solid meal in the middle of the day, and perhaps a glass of hot milk on arrival in the morning."[831] The "hungry children" argument is a valuable one for purposes of agitation, and it is used by the Socialists to the fullest extent. The workers are told: "The children are too ill provided for to be educated. This is not because the worker is idle or thriftless, but actually because he is too industrious and produces so much that his labour as a producer is at a discount. It is objected that to provide free State maintenance for all the children would be to destroy parental responsibility. But it is too late in the day to urge this objection, seeing that the State has taken upon itself the education of the children and is prepared to undertake, and does undertake, their maintenance and bringing-up when the parents are so careless of their responsibilities as to neglect them entirely."[832] "The old-fashioned prejudice fostered by the capitalists and their hangers-on that it is degrading to accept anything from the State is fast dying out"[833]--That workmen who are daily told by their leaders that it is unreasonable to expect that they should bring up their children frequently desert their family is natural. Every year many thousands of wives and children are deserted. At every police station the names of such men may be seen posted up, and those desertions are undoubtedly largely due to Socialistic teaching. The real object of the Socialists in demanding free maintenance for the children is not humanity. In making that demand they do not even think of the welfare of the children, as the following extracts will prove, which clearly reveal the real object of their demands. "Free maintenance for children should be accepted by trade unionists as tending to raise the standard of comfort. All should demand it with the object of personally benefiting themselves."[834] "In nine cases out of ten it is the hungry child who breaks the back of the strike. Let them feel assured that their children's dinner is secure, and they will continue the struggle to a victorious end."[835] "Free maintenance for children would be a tax on that surplus wealth which the capitalists and the aristocracy share between them. To the worker free maintenance for his children would be equivalent to an additional income. His standard of living would rise. No doubt the capitalist would reduce his wages as much as possible, but the worker would then be able to fight him on more equal terms. His children being well cared for, he would be able to hold out against the capitalist for an indefinite period."[836] "We counsel the workers to accept the offer as a small payment on account of a huge debt, but to accept it with no more gratitude than is shown by the class which is maintained in luxury, parents and children alike, by the collective industry of the workers. By dint of organisation they may be able very soon to exact payment of a more substantial sum--State maintenance, to wit."[837] The doctrines above given have unfortunately been accepted by many organised workers. A resolution of the Trades Union Congress at Leeds, in September 1904, asserted: "That having regard to the facts (_a_) that twelve millions of the population are living in actual poverty, or close to the poverty line; (_b_) that physical deterioration of the people is the inevitable result of this; (_c_) that it is impossible to teach starving and underfed children, this Congress urges the Government to introduce, without further delay, legislation instructing education authorities to provide at least one free meal a day for children attending State-supported schools." A resolution passed at the Scottish Miners' Conference on December 30, 1904, stated: "That this Conference is in favour of State maintenance of children, but that in the meantime we identify ourselves with the movement in favour of free meals for school children." Resolutions passed by the National Labour Conference on the State maintenance of children, at the Guildhall, City of London, Friday, January 20, 1905, declared: "That this Conference of delegates from British Labour Organisations, Socialist and other bodies, declares in favour of State maintenance of children as a necessary corollary of universal compulsory education and as a means of partially arresting that physical deterioration of the industrial population of this country which is now generally recognised as a grave national danger. As a step towards such State maintenance this Conference, supporting the decision of the last Trades Union Congress upon this question, calls upon the Government to introduce without further delay such legislative measures as will enable the local authorities to provide meals for children attending the common schools, to be paid for out of the National Exchequer; and in support of this demand calls attention to the evidence given by Dr. Eichholz, the official witness of the Board of Education on the Committee on Physical Deterioration, in which he stated that the question of food is at the base of all the evils of child degeneracy, and that if steps were taken to ensure the proper adequate feeding of the children the evil will rapidly cease." A Socialist has worked out in a widely read book the cost of free education and State maintenance, which will require a yearly expenditure of _458,750,000l._, a sum four times as large as the entire national Budget. This outlay does not deter him. Combining the State schools with State workshops, he promises that they will yield a profit of exactly _105,850,000l._ a year.[838] This scheme should recommend itself to Chancellors of the Exchequer in search of a few millions. Another imaginative Socialist would make the abolition of all existing languages part of his educational scheme: "Socialism will steadfastly aim at the adoption of a universal language, be it English or volapuk. All the modern languages--and for the matter of that, the ancient also--are but jungles of verbiage which retard, rather than facilitate, human thought and progress. They have grown up anyhow; but what we now want is a made language, constructed on scientific principles, and so easy of comprehension that any intelligent person can acquire it in a few months."[839] Across the educational, as most other, proposals of British Socialists should be written in large letters, Utopia! FOOTNOTES: [816] See Appendix. [817] Davidson, _Democrat's Address_, p. 5. [818] See p. 330. [819] Ethel Snowden, _The Woman Socialist_, pp. 39, 40. [820] Bebel, _Woman_, p. 218. [821] Quelch, _The Social-Democratic Federation_, p. 8. [822] Fabian Tract, _After Bread, Education_, No. 120, p. 9. [823] Kirtlan, _Socialism for Christians_, p. 8. [824] _Free Feeding of School Children_, p. 23. [825] Cox, _Socialism_, p. 16. [826] _Local Government Board Report_, Cd. 3105, p. 495. [827] _Ibid._ p. 506. [828] _Times_, March 17, 1906. [829] Cox, _Socialism_, pp. 16, 17. [830] _Cd._ 2726, p. iii. [831] Fabian Tract, _After Bread, Education_, No. 120, p. 14. [832] Quelch, _Social-Democratic Federation_, p. 9. [833] _Socialism and Trade Unionism_, p. 5. [834] _Socialism and Trade Unionism_, p. 5. [835] Fabian Tract, _After Bread, Education_, No. 120, p. 11. [836] _Socialism and Trade Unionism_, p. 5. [837] Watts, _State Maintenance for Children_, p. 4. [838] Richardson, _How It Can Be Done_, pp. 50-61. [839] Davidson, _The Old Order and the New_, p. 166. CHAPTER XXIII THE ATTITUDE OF SOCIALISTS TOWARDS PROVIDENCE, THRIFT, AND TEMPERANCE Socialism thrives upon the poverty, unhappiness, and misery of the workers. Starving and desperate men may easily be aroused to rebellion. Contented men will not become Socialists. Therefore it lies in the interest of the professional Socialist agitators to maintain poverty and misery among the masses, and if possible to increase it. With this object in view, many Socialist agitators oppose all measures which are likely to turn the propertyless wage-earner--the "wage slave" as the Socialists like to call him, in order to exasperate him--into an owner of property, a small capitalist. That might make him a contented man. Therefore, as we have seen in Chapter XVIII., the Socialist leaders strenuously oppose "for scientific reasons" the creation of peasant proprietors. They distinctly encourage improvidence and oppose, also "for scientific reasons," providence, thrift, and abstinence among the workers. The philosopher of British Socialism informs us: "Thrift, the hoarding up of the products of labour, it is obvious, must be without rhyme or reason, except on a capitalist basis,"[840] and the Socialists do not wish the workers to become capitalists. Some Socialists were indiscreet enough to confess that they opposed providence, thrift, and temperance among the workers, as practised especially by the members of trade unions, co-operative societies, and friendly societies, because these are likely to elevate the masses and rob the Socialist leaders of supporters. We read, for instance: "The so-called thrift and temperance movements are essentially antagonistic to Socialism."[841] "The trade co-operator canonises the bourgeois virtues, but Socialist vices, of 'over-work' and 'thrift.'"[842] "Co-operation, though regarded by the individual trader as an enemy, does not necessarily enter into conflict with the capitalist at all. Indeed, so far as it transforms workmen into shareholders, it forms a bulwark for capitalism, the same as the creation of small landholders or any other class of small proprietors would do."[843] "Co-operation, as carried on in England, is an obstacle and a danger to the Socialist cause. Being capitalist concerns pure and simple, co-operative societies are subjected to the same influences as all other capitalistic ventures."[844] "The friendly societies are the least promising of any of the democratic movements from the political point of view. The doctrine of 'thrift' also has been preached very vigorously to them. There is at present little prospect of the friendly societies identifying themselves with the general political labour movement of the country."[845] The Anarchist Congress of 1869 at Marseilles stated very truly: "La coopération démoralise les ouvriers en faisant des bourgeois."[846] Now let us take note of the "scientific" arguments with which British Socialists oppose providence, thrift, and sobriety among the workers. "Under present circumstances, the more frugal, thrifty, and abstemious working people as a class become, the more cheaply they have to live, the more cheaply they have to sell their labour power to the capitalist class, wages being determined by the cost of subsistence."[847] "Temperance, thrift, industry only serve to make labour an easier or more valuable prey to capital. If they reduce the cost of living in any particular, they but reduce the cost of labour to the capitalist."[848] "If _all_ the workers were very thrifty, sober, industrious, and abstemious they would be worse off in the matter of wages than they are now."[849] "The mere cheapening of the cost of living only tends to reduce wages, and thus cannot advantage the worker."[850] "If _all_ workers were to become teetotalers and vegetarians, wages would inevitably fall to the wretched level, perchance, of Oriental countries like India and China, where thrift in every form is carried to incredible lengths."[851] "Is it not proved that the Hindoos and the Chinese, who are the most temperate and the most thrifty people in the world, are always the worst paid? And don't you see that if the Lancashire workers would live upon rice and water, the masters would soon have their wages down to rice and water point?"[852] The foregoing arguments, which are based on the "Iron Law of Wages," of which a refutation has been given in Chapter IV.,[853] may sound plausible to the unthinking workman. They may infuriate him and therefore serve the ends of the Socialist agitator, but they are utterly false and dishonest, as all Socialist leaders know. Wages depend partly on the supply and demand for labour, partly on the productiveness of labour. In machineless countries, such as China and India, the average worker produces very little, and the supply of workers is unlimited. Hence their wages are low. If the Socialistic arguments were right, Chinese and Hindoos could double or treble their wages by becoming drunkards, and English navvies could earn _5l._ a week by agreeing among themselves to drink champagne instead of beer. If the cost of subsistence determined the rate of wages, the wages for all workers in London ought to be approximately the same. In reality, however, we find that wages range in London from _3l. 10s._ to _18s._ per week. The most skilled workers receive the highest, the least skilled the lowest, wages. It is therefore evident that wages are determined by the cost of subsistence only in the case of the least skilled workers, provided an unlimited supply of such workers and unrestricted competition among them for work drive down their wages to the bare existence level. Providence, thrift, and temperance are habitually attacked by Socialists not only on "scientific" but also on moral and philosophical grounds. For instance, Mr. Keir Hardie tells us: "As for thrift, much which passes for such at present is little different from soul-destroying parsimony. Men and women starve their years of healthy activity that they may have enough to keep alive an attenuated old age scarcely worth preserving."[854] In other words, he advises the workers to spend all they earn and to become paupers in their old age. A very influential Socialist writer says: "A man by starving his mind and his body is able to save money. He borrows books instead of buying them. He starves his emotional nature by neglecting to go to the theatre, because to go to the theatre costs money. He doesn't go to concerts because concerts cost money. He is a teetotaler, not so much because he wishes to keep his stomach clean and his head clear, but because his ideal men are teetotalers, grad-grinds, who mortify the flesh in order to save. And the money is saved with a bad intention. The aim is either to start independently in business, or else to secure shares in the undertaking paying the highest dividends compatible with security. The object of this man is to leave his class behind him, and to live _upon_ labour rather than _by_ it"[855]--According to this authority it would be immoral for the rural labourer to save in order to be able to till his own field and to live in his own cottage; it would be immoral for the artisan to endeavour to have a workshop and a house of his own; it would be immoral for the worker to put his savings into a savings-bank or a friendly society, or some limited company, and to live upon his savings during his old age. It would almost seem as if from the Socialist point of view the only moral way of obtaining property was by plundering the rich. "Waste all you earn and die in the workhouse" is at present their advice to the worker, and the worker who follows that advice and who lives from hand to mouth easily becomes a pauper. For him a short spell of unemployment means starvation and despair. This is evidently a state of affairs which Socialist agitators favour because it will increase their following.--Another prominent Socialist writer says: "Among the many quack remedies for poverty, the most venerable and the most illusive is thrift or saving. The habit of saving is always represented by the rich as the highest of social virtues; but it is one they are careful rarely to practise themselves"[856]--If the rich are so wasteful, how is it then that the national capital, held by the rich, as the Socialists tell us, has increased from _4,000,000,000l._ to _12,000,000,000l._ during the last sixty years, notwithstanding huge capital losses caused by suffering industries? The decay of agriculture alone has caused a capital loss which approximates _2,000,000,000l._ The great co-operative movement in England was created by the celebrated Rochdale Pioneers, the name given to the weavers of Rochdale who started it. On a rainy night in November 1843, twelve men met in the back room of a mean inn and commenced the co-operative movement by organising themselves as "The Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers." They agreed to pay twenty pence a week into a common fund, but only a few of these twelve men were able to pay their pence that evening. They began by buying a little tea and sugar at wholesale prices, which they sold to their members at little more than cost. In a year their number had grown to twenty-eight, and they had collected _28l._, with which they rented a little store and stocked it with _15l._ worth of flour. During the first year they made no profit. In its second year the society had seventy-four members, _181l._ in funds, _710l._ of business, and made _22l._ profit, 2-1/2 per cent. of which was used as a fund for education.[857] Gradually but constantly growing, this movement has branched out in every direction, and the result is that there are now in Great Britain 1,685 co-operative societies with 2,263,562 members. These co-operative societies are manufacturers, ship owners, bankers, brokers, factors, merchants, millers, printers, bookbinders, and shopkeepers of every kind on the largest scale. The rapidly growing assets of the various undertakings represent a value of about _50,000,000l._, the combined nominal capital comes to _42,813,348l._, and the yearly net profits amount to about _11,000,000l._, or to more than 35 per cent. per annum on the subscribed capital. In 1905 the net profits amounted to 37.4 per cent., in 1906 to 36.4 per cent. on the share capital. Capitalised at 4 per cent, the co-operative societies represent an investment value of about _300,000,000l._, or about _100l._ per co-operator. The societies maintain an army of 107,727 employees. Their progress during the last decade may be seen at a glance from the following figures: _Total Trade of British Co-operative Societies._ 1896 £58,729,643 1901 88,394,304 1906 110,085,826[858] Already the income of the co-operative societies is twice as large as the interest paid on the whole of the deposits in the British savings-banks. There is no reason why the co-operative movement should not further grow and increase, and it is to be hoped that it will further extend in every direction to the benefit of the industrious and thrifty workers. There ought to be no propertyless workers in Great Britain. The British co-operative societies have proved to the dismay of the Socialists that working men may improve their position unaided and may become capitalists. They have proved that thrift and ability create prosperity, and they have therefore incurred the hatred of the Socialist agitators. The philosopher of British Socialism complains: "Co-operation so far from being Socialism is the very antithesis of Socialism. Trade co-operation is simply a form of industrial partnership, in which the society of co-operators is in the relation of capitalist to the outer world. The units of the society may be equal amongst themselves, but their very existence in this form presupposes exploitation going on above, below, and around them."[859] The editor of "Justice" seems to regret that co-operation encourages and rewards ability and thrift, for he says: "Co-operation is most valuable to those among the workers who are best off. The artisan earning a regular weekly wage has not only a better opportunity of becoming a member of the co-operative society than the more precariously employed and more poorly paid labourer, but the advantage to him is greater by reason of his having more money to spend at the store. In many cases the poorer members have to sell out, and then the affair becomes simply a joint-stock company of the more fortunate, the race being once more to the swift, the battle to the strong."[860] "The ordinary workman can if he likes become a shareholder in the "co-op." So he may become a shareholder in a railway if he likes; but this does not make the capitalist domination of our railways less a fact. In a co-operative store, as elsewhere, the man with _2l._ a week is worth just twice as much as the man with _1l._ Co-operation as a factor in social progress has effected nothing, and is absolutely valueless except to a certain extent as an educational influence."[861] Some Socialist writers show their hatred of the co-operative societies and the co-operators by bitter and almost vicious attacks upon them. One of them complains: "Instances of successful co-operation _in production_ have, as yet, been very few, and their moral results disappointing. Their general tendency has been, not to raise the workers as a class, but to raise a certain number of prudent--I had almost said selfish--workmen _out_ of their class, and so to constitute a _Labour Caste_. Such co-operators employ and exploit other workmen even more mercilessly than the capitalist employers, and in struggles between Labour and Capital their sympathies have nearly always been on the side of the capitalists."[862] Another says: "The Rochdale Pioneers hire and fleece labourers in the usual manner. Experience teaches, indeed, that such associations are the hardest taskmasters. Their interest becomes identified with Capital; and if ever circumstances should make it easier for the smarter labourers to start companies of the kind successfully, the creation of a _Labour Caste_ would be the result. In a general dispute between Labour and Capital these associations, instead of being a vanguard of Labour, will go over to the side of Capital. The sons of Rochdale Pioneers, living in luxury, and imitating the airs and fashions of the wealthy of all times, point the moral. Where, then, is the gain to the labouring class? No, instead of advising workmen to save and to invest their savings in such risky enterprises, it would be much better to advise them to put their savings into their own flesh and bone."[863] The foregoing extracts, and many similar ones which might be given, display a regrettable hatred of ability, providence, and thrift--qualities which, it is true, are not easily reconcilable with the tenets of Socialism. The British nation spends on intoxicating drink about _160,000,000l._ per annum. Out of this enormous sum--a sum much larger than the national Budget--between _100,000,000l._ and _120,000,000l._ is spent by the working class alone. Drink is a fearful evil in Great Britain. The average working man spends every year two months' earnings in drink, and as there are many moderate drinkers and abstainers, there must be many who spend three months' earnings and more--that is, one-quarter of their wages, sometimes one-half, and sometimes more than one-half, on intoxicants. According to some of the foremost authorities on social science, and according to some of the most prominent medical men, drink is chiefly responsible for poverty, underfeeding, ill-health, and racial degeneration. Nevertheless, the British Socialists, instead of condemning drunkenness, rather encourage, or at least excuse, this terrible vice; and again, the universally discredited Iron Law of Wages is solemnly brought forth to prove "scientifically" that sobriety and abstinence on the part of the workers would not benefit the workers but the capitalists. "We are not prepared to admit that, if all workers were to become teetotalers, as I am, the _140,000,000l._ now spent on intoxicants would benefit the workers to any appreciable extent. On the contrary, all economists tell us that wages always tend towards the minimum subsistence point--the level at which the wage-slave is willing to subsist and to reproduce his kind."[864] The Iron Law of Wages has been abandoned by all scientists because of its manifest absurdity. However, supposing the Iron Law of Wages were true, it would not by any means follow that general abstinence would lead to a lower rate of wages. Non-abstemious wage-earners live frequently in the most wretched homes, and are dressed in rags because they spend all they can spend in drink. If they should become sober, they would find better houses, better clothing, better furniture as indispensable as drink is now to them. In reality abstinence, instead of lowering wages, would probably increase them very considerably in accordance with the increased productive power of the worker. It is a general experience that the steady and abstemious worker commands a higher wage than his more or less drunken, unreliable, and untidy colleague. Socialists are fond of excusing drunkenness by arguing that the worker gets drunk "because he is physically and mentally exhausted, used up with the day's work";[865] "because the wretched social condition of the mass of workers of this country--the long hours, the uncertainty of work, the insufficient food and clothing, and degrading home-life, which are their daily portion--makes drunkards."[866] Another well-known writer states: "If thousands of the workers drink to drown the cares and sorrows of their dreary, degraded, wretched existence, they do so at the expense of going without some of the merest necessaries."[867] This is, unfortunately, only too true. But it is not true that "Our damnable, infernal, profit-mongering system manufactures and produces drunkards because huge profits can be made out of the business for the brewer and the publican."[868] The above statements, which excuse drunkenness as something natural and unavoidable in Great Britain, are untrue. All civilised countries are based upon the private possession of capital, and in all large profits can be made by brewers and publicans. Now, if it were true, as has been stated in the foregoing, that hard work and long hours cause drunkenness, drunkenness should be greater in the United States, Germany, and France than in Great Britain, for in these countries and most others workers work much harder and work much longer hours than in Great Britain. The British nation should therefore be the most sober nation, but it is in reality the most drunken nation, a fact which is known to all who have studied this question. The majority of British Socialist leaders apparently desire to keep the workers drunken, for every suggestion that the worker might improve his position by greater moderation in drinking is passionately denounced by them. In a speech Andrew Carnegie mentioned that "he had employed forty-five thousand men at one time, and his experience was that the man who drank was good for drinking and for nothing else. He had nothing to do with the man who drank. He did not believe in the Submerged Tenth, but what he wanted to do, remembering he was a working man himself, was to take an honest, sober, well-doing, hard-working man by the hand and help him if he could. He only wanted to help those who could help themselves." Commenting on this speech, one of the Socialist weeklies said: "According to the foregoing, no drunkard, no matter how chronic, could display a greater specimen of human demoralisation than does that reported speech of Dr. Andrew Carnegie depict himself; soulless beyond imagination almost, in spite of his self-advertised respect and sympathy for the honest, sober working man." In the same article we read: "Total abstainers are capable of viler actions than those of certain drunkards, while the profoundest depth of ignorance and incapacity to think are attributes of millions of total abstainers."[869] When Mr. John Burns advised the workmen to help themselves by abstaining from drink and gambling, the whole Socialist press raged, and he was called a traitor to the cause and an agent of capitalism. Only rarely does a Socialist rebuke drunkenness. In "Socialism for Christians" we find a passage: "As long as you have a democracy sodden in drink you will have a democracy under the hoofs of capitalists. There is no hope for the democracy as long as it is content to grovel before the great pewter pot which it has made into a god."[870] However, that passage was not penned by a professional Socialist, but by a clergyman, an outsider, and an amateur in Socialism. While British Socialist leaders try to degrade the masses and to increase their misery by encouraging them to waste a very large part of their wages in drink, instead of spending the money on necessary food and clothing, on sufficient living room and furniture, foreign Socialists try to elevate their followers and to combat the drinking evil among them. The foremost Belgian Socialist, who constantly agitates against drunkenness, wrote: "How often have we not found in Socialist pamphlets, or in our newspapers, statements such as the following: 'Misery produces alcoholism,' or 'Drink is a consequence of capitalism, and will only disappear with the capitalistic system itself.' These are comfortable theories indeed, but they unfortunately come in conflict with the facts. The labourer must not only regard alcohol as one of the causes of poverty, demoralisation, and degeneration, but as a canker which destroys his strength and powers of resistance. We therefore address to all our comrades this warning: The more earnest you are and the stricter towards yourself, the greater will be the authority you bring to bear upon the branding of this evil. Everything which decreases the consumption of alcohol increases the helping powers of labour movements, raises the moral tone of the working class, and gives it fresh strength in its struggle for emancipation. Therefore all Socialistic societies should break away from out-of-date ideas with regard to alcoholism, and leave off expecting results from a social revolution which they themselves can attain to-day. It is our bounden duty to declare war against alcohol. War to the knife, for it is all the more dangerous as it dwells in our midst in the guise of friendship. When addicted to drink, the working class cannot do what must be done. Alcohol, by its paralysing qualities, naturally leads to fatigue, negligence, weakness, and impotence. Only those who can rule themselves are able and worthy to rule the world."[871] The German Socialist leaders also endeavour to elevate their followers by fighting drunkenness. At the Congress at Essen in 1907, a resolution was unanimously passed by the German Social-Democratic party in which various recommendations were made to the Government regarding the diminution of drunkenness, and which concluded with the words: "The working-class organisations are invited to suppress in their meeting all compulsion to consume alcoholic liquors, to put a stop to its sale in schools, in registry offices, and in places where collections are made for strikers, and to inform children and young men by word of mouth and by the Press of the danger of alcohol, and to watch over drinking habits which lead to the abuse of alcohol."[872] A German Socialist periodical recently wrote: "Workers who drink neglect their duties towards their family, drink away their wages, bring disorder into their unions, lose the sympathy of the quiet and industrious citizens, become the slaves of the public-house, and damage Socialism. Therefore Socialists should abstain absolutely from drinking intoxicating drinks. Ordinary capitalism exploits the proletariat, but does not poison them too in their own persons and in their posterity. But alcohol does both; it lames the power of a whole nation and leads to the degeneration of the race, as does opium in China. The drinker loses his self-respect, his higher aims as a human being. It must be made a fundamental principle of the German Social-Democratic party that the proletariat can vanquish capital only after it has first vanquished drink. The sooner that victory is won, the sooner the fate of society will be decided."[873] Continental Socialist leaders recommend to their followers thrift, sobriety, and co-operation. British Socialist leaders, who have taken the whole of their doctrines from the Continent, condemn "on scientific and moral grounds," thrift, sobriety, and co-operation. FOOTNOTES: [840] Bax, _Religion of Socialism_, p. 95. [841] Bax and Quelch, _A New Catechism_, p. 40. [842] Bax, _Religion of Socialism_, p. 94. [843] Quelch, _Trade Unionism_, p. 16. [844] _Social-Democrat_, April 1907, p. 212. [845] Penny, _Political Labour Movement_, p. 11. [846] Roscher, _Politik_, p. 575. [847] Bax and Quelch, _A New Catechism_, p. 41. [848] Quelch, _Economics of Socialism_, p. 16. [849] Blatchford, _Britain for the British_, p. 127. [850] Quelch, _Economics of Socialism_, p. 16. [851] Davidson, _The Old Order and the New_, p. 107. [852] Blatchford, _Britain for the British_, p. 129. [853] See p. 53 ff, _ante._ [854] Keir Hardie, _Can a Man be a Christian on a Pound a Week?_ p. 13. [855] Leatham, _The Class War_, p. 8. [856] Davidson, _The Old Order and the New_, p. 105. [857] Bliss, _Encyclopedia of Social Reform_, pp. 358 and 1195. [858] _Labour Gazette_, December 1907. [859] Bax, _Religion of Socialism_, p. 94. [860] Quelch, _Trade Unionism_, p. 10. [861] _Ibid._ p. 13 [862] Davidson, _The Old Order and the New_, p. 109. [863] Gronlund, _Co-operative Commonwealth_, p. 51. [864] Muse, _Poverty and Drunkenness_, p. 3. [865] Leatham, _Was Jesus a Socialist?_ p. 11. [866] Muse, _Poverty and Drunkenness_, p. 12. [867] Glyde, _Britain's Disgrace_, p. 20. [868] _Ibid._ p. 20. [869] _Forward_, November 16, 1907. [870] Kirtlan, _Socialism for Christians_, p. 15. [871] Vandervelde, _Drink and Socialism_, pp. 3, 8. [872] _Social-Democrat_, October 1907, p. 620. [873] _Die Neue Gesellschaft_, November 1907, pp. 332, 337. CHAPTER XXIV SOCIALIST VIEWS ON LAW AND JUSTICE Most Socialists have a very strong objection to the existing laws. "Law is only a masked form of brute force."[874] "The laws to-day are defences of the foolish rich against the ignorant and hungry poor. The laws to-day, like the laws of the past, make more criminals than they punish. The laws keep the people ignorant and poor, and the rich idle and vicious."[875] "The laws were made by ignorant and dishonest men; they are administered by men ignorant and selfish; they are dishonest laws, good for neither rich nor poor; evil in their conception, evil in their enforcement, evil in their results."[876] Most Englishmen are proud of the English judges because of their learning, high character, and integrity. To many Socialists the judges are the most contemptible and mercenary of men. The philosopher of British Socialism informs us: "It is an undoubted truth that no judge can be strictly an honest man. The judge must necessarily be a man of inferior moral calibre. A judge, by the fact of his being a judge, proclaims himself a creature on a lower moral level than us ordinary mortals, and this without any assumption of moral superiority above the average on our part. He deliberately pledges himself, that is, to be false to himself. He may any day have to pass sentence on one whom he believes to be innocent. He lays himself under the obligation of administering a law which he may know to be bad on any occasion when called upon, merely because it is a law. He makes this surrender of humanity and honour for what? For filthy lucre and tawdry notoriety. Now, I ask, can we conceive a more abjectly contemptible character than that which acts thus?"[877] The cause of the hatred with which the British Socialists contemplate the law and the judges is obvious: They're blocking up the highway; yes, they think to keep us back By piling barriers of law and falsehood on the track; We'll break the barriers down, and burn them into cinders black, As we go marching to liberty.[878] Come every honest lad and lass! Too long we've been kept under By rusty chains of fraud and fear-- We'll snap them all asunder! That robbers' paction styled the Law To frighten honest folk, sirs, We'll set ablaze and fumigate The country with the smoke, sirs.[879] When Jack Cade, whom the Socialists praise as a social reformer, marched at the head of the insurrectionists into London, one of his first acts was to burn the stored-up documents of the law, an act which Shakespeare immortalised in his "Henry VI." in the following words: "Cade: Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? that parchment, being scribbled o'er, should undo a man?... Away, burn all the records of the realm: my mouth shall be the parliament of England. "John (_aside_): Then we are like to have biting statutes, unless his teeth be pulled out. "Cade: And henceforward all things shall be in common."[880] Socialism will abolish the law: "The great act of confiscation will be the seal of the new era; then, and not till then, will the knell of Civilisation, with its rights of property and its class-society, be sounded; then, and not till then, will justice--the justice not of Civilisation but of Socialism--become the corner-stone of the social arch."[881] Therefore one of the first acts of Socialist government will be "the abrogation of 'civil law,' especially that largest department of it which is concerned with the enforcement of contract and me recovery of debt."[882] Socialists never tire of denouncing the barbarity of the existing law. According to their religious views given in Chapter XXVI. (see p. 360), man is an irresponsible being. He does not know the difference between right and wrong, between good and evil. Therefore it is according to their opinion unjust and cruel to punish criminals. "The Christian regards the hooligan, the thief, the wanton, and the drunkard as men and women who have done wrong. But the humanist regards them as men and women who have been wronged."[883] "Human law, like divine law, is based upon the false idea that men know what is right and what is wrong, and have power to choose the right."[884] "Man becomes that which he is by the action of forces outside himself."[885] "All human actions are ruled by heredity and environment. Man is not responsible for his heredity and environment. Therefore all blame and all punishment are unjust. Blame and punishment, besides being unjust, are ineffectual."[886] "To the Socialist, for every crime committed the State, or the society in which it is committed, is as much or more responsible than the individual."[887] "A society that employs the gallows and the 'cat' pretty much deserves all it gets at the hands of criminals. If the criminal, when he gets the chance of doing so with impunity, commits the crime for which the gallows or the lash is reserved, society has only itself to thank."[888] From the foregoing considerations it logically follows that "a Socialist administration would treat delinquents with the utmost leniency consistent with the existence of society."[889] "A man of average sense ought to be able to protect himself against fraud. Theft only requires the restitution of the stolen property plus an addition, such as the Roman law provided. The ideal condition of a community is that the remorse following the commission of a crime should be an adequate preventive of its commission"[890]--By its attitude towards crime, Socialism should secure for itself the enthusiastic support of the criminal classes. By abrogating the enforcement of contract and the recovery of debt, it should secure for itself the equally enthusiastic support of all fraudulent debtors. Conspirators and revolutionaries since the time of Catiline have opened the gaols and have relied on criminal desperadoes for the realisation of their ambitions. It is worth noting that most Anarchists also recommend the abolition of law and the law courts.[891] Until the ideal Socialist commonwealth has been firmly established, and "until the economic change has worked itself out in ethical change, it is clear that a criminal law must exist. The only question is whether its basis shall be a mass of anomalous statutes and precedents or a logical system."[892] Bax decides that the logical system and the Code Napoléon is to be introduced after the Socialist revolution.[893] The fact that the people do not know the French laws apparently does not matter. Many Socialists complain that British laws, and American laws too, are not collected and codified. Hence the citizen does not, and cannot, know the law. "What is called 'the law' is something that no lawyer can learn in a lifetime, both on account of the bulk of the Reports, and because he never can be absolutely certain what is good and what is bad law. The profession chooses rather than ascertains the law."[894] Owing to lack of a code of laws, the law is uncertain and exceedingly costly. Hence the poor man can obtain justice only with difficulty, if at all. Besides, "The fear of litigation is a weapon society places in the hands of the rich man to coerce the poor man, irrespective of the merits of the case, by dangling ruin before him."[895] There is much justification for these complaints. We have seen in former Chapters that Socialism teaches that property is theft and that rich men are criminals. In the present Chapter we have learned that criminals are men wronged by society. The Socialist conception of law and justice should recommend itself to all criminals, and all criminals should be Socialists. FOOTNOTES: [874] Bax, _Outlooks from the New Standpoint_, p. 107. [875] Blatchford, _Not Guilty_, p. 258. [876] _Ibid._ p. 259. [877] Bax, _Religion of Socialism_, p. 108. [878] _Independent Labour Party Song Book_, p. 17. [879] _Social-Democratic Federation Song Book_, p. 19. [880] _King Henry VI._, Part II. Act IV. Scenes 2 and 7. [881] Bax, _The Ethics of Socialism_, pp. 82, 83. [882] _Ibid._ pp. 85, 86. [883] Blatchford, _God and My Neighbour_, p. 100. [884] Blatchford, _Not Guilty_, p. 19. [885] _Ibid._ p. 23. [886] Blatchford, _Not Guilty_, p. 251. [887] Bax, _Outlooks from the New Standpoint_, p. 146. [888] _Ibid._ p. 105. [889] Bax, _Ethics of Socialism_, p. 59. [890] Bax, _Outlooks from the New Standpoint_, p. 104. [891] See Stirner, _Der Einzige und sein Eigentum_; Bakounine, _Dieu et l'�tat_; Kropotkine, _Paroles d'un Révolté_, &c. [892] Bax, _The Ethics of Socialism_, p. 88. [893] _Ibid._ p. 89. [894] Gronlund, _Co-operative Commonwealth_, p. 138. [895] Bax, _Religion of Socialism_, p. 147. CHAPTER XXV SOCIALISM AND WOMAN, THE FAMILY AND THE HOME Men in all classes of society save and endeavour to become owners of some property, not so much for their own sake as for the sake of their wives and of their children, whom they wish to leave "provided for." Married men are notoriously more provident and thrifty than unmarried ones. Property is the defence of the family. The fundamental aim of Socialism is the abolition of that private property which is the prop of the family. Consequently every prudent head of a family is likely to resist Socialism, and thus there exists a natural and innate hostility between Socialism and the family. Besides, the idea of the family is not easily reconcilable with the idea of the Socialistic State. The maintenance of the family requires private capital, and the present capitalistic and individualistic system of society, the modern State and modern civilisation, are based upon the family and have sprung from it. The citizen of the modern civilised State places the interest of his family above the interest of the community. Socialism wishes to reverse the situation and to subordinate the interest of the family to the interest of the community. Socialism strives after equality among the citizens. Therefore many British Socialists are avowed communists, as will be shown in Chapter XXIX. Now it is clear that a perfect equality among the citizens cannot be created by abolishing merely the institution of private property. The man who envied his neighbour for the exclusive possession of his property may, after the abolition of private property, envy him for the exclusive possession of a particularly attractive wife. Therefore most of the great thinkers since Plato who have mapped out systems for the equalisation of fortunes, have logically insisted on the community of wives. Lastly, the subordination of the private family under the State, the control of work and food for all by the State, must logically lead also to State control of the increase of the population. Two thousand two hundred years ago, when in Athens the idea of the equalisation of fortunes had come to the front, Aristotle wrote: "Whoever would regulate the extent of private fortunes must also regulate the increase of families. If children multiply beyond the means of supporting them, the intention of the law will be frustrated and families will be suddenly reduced from opulence to beggary, a revolution always dangerous to public tranquillity."[896] At the same time Aristophanes showed in his comedy "Ecclesiazusae" that the community of goods would necessarily lead to the community of wives. The assertion of the opponents of Socialism that Socialism means the dissolution of the marriage tie and the abolition of the family has been met with an indignant denial by many Socialists: "Socialism does not 'threaten the sanctity of the home.' Socialism has no more to do with the marriage laws than Toryism has."[897] "No party--neither Socialist nor non-Socialist--has openly identified itself with the views of its prominent members on this question. The idea that marriage, as an institution, ought to be abolished has never received the sanction of any political organisation in Great Britain."[898] "No Socialist entertains the remotest idea of 'abolishing' the family, whether by law or otherwise. Only the grossest misrepresentation can fasten upon them such a purpose; moreover, it takes a fool to imagine that any form of family can either be created or abolished by decree."[899] The above is confirmed by an official declaration of recent date. At a meeting of the National Council of the Independent Labour Party, which took place in London on October 4 and 5, 1907, the following resolution was adopted: "The National Council of the Independent Labour Party repudiates the attack upon Socialism on the ground that Socialism is opposed to religion, and declares that the Socialist movement embraces men and women of all religions and forms of belief, and offers the most complete freedom in this respect within its ranks. It further repudiates the charge that Socialism is antagonistic to the family organisation, and reminds the public that the disintegration of the family, which has been in progress for some generations, has been owing to the creation of slums, the employment of children in factories, the dragging of mothers into workshops and factories, owing to the economic pressure created by low wages, sweating, and other operations of capitalism which the anti-Socialist campaign is designed to support, and which it is the purpose of Socialism to supplant." Now let us compare with these emphatic denials addressed to the general public the deliberate statements of the intellectual leaders of British and foreign Socialism regarding marriage and the family, addressed to their followers. The celebrated "Manifesto" issued by the founder of modern international Socialism declares: "On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes. Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common, and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised, community of women."[900] The founders of British Socialism state: "Even now it is necessary that a certain code of morality should be supposed to exist, and to have some relation to that religion which, being the creation of another age, has now become a sham. With this sham, moreover, its accompanying morality is also stupid, and this is clung to with a determination, or even ferocity, natural enough, since its aim is the perpetuation of individual property in wealth, in workman, in wife, in child."[901] "Like every other institution of existing society, marriage, as we know it, is a consequence of private property. The primitive swag-monger could think of no better method of keeping his swag together after his death than by making the child of a particular slave-wife his heir. The chief pre-eminence of the Sultana of the harem lay in the fact that she acted, so to speak, as the conveyancer of the estate."[902] The spokesmen of the Social-Democratic Federation say: "What is the position of Socialism towards the question of marriage as at present constituted? The existing monogamic relation is simply the outcome of the institution of private or individual property. It has developed, in proportion to the accentuation of the institution of private, as against communal, property. When private property ceases to be the fulcrum around which the relations between the sexes turn, any attempt at coercion, moral or material, in these relations must necessarily become repugnant to the moral sense of the community."[903] The foregoing statements lead to the inevitable conclusion that "The transformation of the current family form into a freer, more real, and therefore a higher form, must inevitably follow the economic revolution which will place the means of production and distribution under the control of all for the good of all."[904] Another authority informs us "Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by converting private property into public wealth and substituting co-operation for competition, will restore society to its proper condition of a thoroughly healthy organism, and ensure the material well-being of each member of the community. It will, in fact, give life its proper basis and its proper environment. Socialism annihilates family life, for instance. With the abolition of private property, marriage in its present form must disappear. This is part of the programme."[905] A distinguished Fabian proclaims: "The Socialist no more regards the institution of marriage as a permanent thing than he regards a state of competitive industrialism as a permanent thing."[906] The leading book of the Fabian Society states: "The economic independence of women and the supplanting of the head of the household by the individual as the recognised unit of the State will materially alter the status of children and the utility of the institution of the family."[907] The leading periodical of the Fabians says: "Of all the stupid theories regarding the family, the most stupid is the belief that it is natural. On the contrary, the trinitarian family organisation is plainly a work of art, a deliberate device of man's. Nothing is more plain than the fact that the hierarchy of the family has been employed, and is still employed, as a model for the hierarchy of the State and of human society generally; in other words, as a prop of aristocracy."[908] A leading member of the Independent Labour Party tells us: "I do not believe it is desirable to cultivate the family idea as at present understood, which in the main is designed to teach the children to think more of their own family than any other; I want to see the broader family life of society taught in the spirit of the West Country motto, 'One for all and all for each.'"[909] Marriage is, according to many Socialists, not only incompatible with Socialistic progress, but is also immoral. The philosopher of British Socialism, going a step further than did Marx in his Manifesto, endeavours to prove that marriage and prostitution are equally immoral. "Both legalised monogamic marriage and prostitution are based essentially on commercial considerations. The one is purchase, the other hire. The higher and only really moral form of the marriage relation which transcends both is based neither on sale nor hire. Prostitution is immoral as implying the taking advantage by the woman of a monopoly which costs her no labour for the sake of extorting money from the man. But the condition of legal marriage--maintenance--does the same."[910] This opinion is shared by the leading American Socialist writer, who says: "The one has sold her person for money under cover of marriage, the other has done the same thing outside marriage."[911] Other Socialists express similar opinions: "The present marriage system cannot be claimed by anyone as a success. Complete economic independence of women will, however, solve the question. Under Communism will and affection will be supreme. Marriage will be infinitely holier and more permanent than it is to-day."[912] "Mere legal matrimony and familism could not survive the communalisation of property, and it may be well so. Marriage as we know it is merely one of the many unwholesome fungi that grow out of the reeking, rotting corpus of private property, and it would not be difficult to conceive of a sexual order infinitely more angelic."[913] There is no reason why an "infinitely more angelic sexual order" should not replace marriage as at present conceived and constituted, for "Marriage is no more a Christian ethic than it is a Mohammedan ethic, or a Japanese custom. We have already 'considered' the marriage laws and altered them. Where, then, is the immorality in demanding a further consideration? Our notions concerning the relations of men and women have changed with the changing times, and at each stage we have reached a more exalted plane of understanding. What right have we to assume, therefore, that the future does not hold a nobler ideal than our present one?"[914] The direction in which inter-sexual relations should be changed in order to attain a nobler ideal than the present one is obvious: "What we need is freedom from the restraints of an artificial existence; liberty to make the most of our inherent capacity, and human longing for a higher life will do all the rest."[915] "Socialism will strike at the root at once of compulsory monogamy and of prostitution by inaugurating an era of marriage based on free choice and intention, and characterised by the absence of external coercion. For where the wish for the maintenance of the marriage relation remains, there external compulsion is unnecessary; where it is necessary, because the wish has disappeared, there it is undesirable."[916] "The present marriage system was based on the general supposition of the economic dependence of the woman on the man, and the consequent necessity for his making provision for her which she can legally enforce. This basis would disappear with the advent of social economic freedom, and no binding contract would be necessary between the parties as regards livelihood; while property in children would cease to exist, and every infant that came into the world would be born into full citizenship and would enjoy all its advantages, whatever the conduct of its parents might be. Thus a new development of the family would take place, on the basis not of a predetermined life-long business arrangement to be formally and nominally held to, irrespective of circumstances, but on mutual inclination and affection, an association terminable at the will of either party. There would be no vestige of reprobation weighing on the dissolution of one tie and the forming of another."[917] Many Socialists, led by Bax, the philosopher of Socialism in Great Britain, and by Bebel, the head of the Social-Democratic party in Germany, take a very broad and a very primitive view with regard to marital relations and to the greater freedom in these relations in the Socialistic State of the future: "The whole of our sexual morality (as such), in so far as it has a rational, as opposed to a mystical, basis, is nothing but a 'plant' to save the ratepayers' pockets by fixing the responsibility for the maintenance of children on the individuals responsible for the procreation of them. To the consistent Socialist, the sexual relation is, _per se_, morally indifferent (neither moral nor immoral) like any other bodily function, but it may easily become immoral _per accidentem_, i.e., from the special circumstances under which it takes place, and whereby it acquires the character of an act of injustice or treachery, such as seduction of a friend's wife or daughter."[918] A very influential Socialist writer asks: "Is chastity a virtue, and is there such a vice as unchastity?" and he answers his question by quoting the above statement of Bax.[919] "If it be asked, Is marriage a failure? the answer of any impartial person must be--monogamic marriage is a failure--the rest is silence. We know not what new form of the family the society of the future, in which men and women will be alike economically free, may evolve and which may be generally adopted therein. Meanwhile, we ought to combat by every means within our power the metaphysical dogma of the inherent sanctity of the monogamic principle. Economic development on the one side and the free initiative of individuals on the other will do the rest."[920] Bebel thinks, "The satisfying of amatory desires is a law which every individual must fulfil as a sacred duty towards himself, if his development is to be healthy and normal, and he must refuse gratification to no natural impulse. The so-called animal passions occupy no lower rank than the so-called mental passions. A healthy manner of life, healthy employment, and a healthy education in the broadest sense of the word, combined with the natural gratification of natural and healthy instincts, must be brought within the reach of all."[921] Freedom of love is to be equal to men and women: "In the choice of love woman is free just as man is free. She woos and is wooed and has no other inducement to bind herself than her own free will. The contract between the two lovers is of a private nature as in primitive times. The gratification of the sexual impulse is as strictly the personal affair of the individual as the gratification of every other natural instinct. No one has to give an account of him or herself and no third person has the slightest right of intervention."[922] A prominent British Socialist shares Bebel's views: "For the non-childbearing woman the sex-relationship, both as to form and substance, ought to be a pure question of taste, a simple matter of agreement between the man and her, in which neither the society nor the State would have any need to interfere, a free sexual union, a relation solely of mutual sympathy and affection, its form and direction varying according to the feelings and wants of the individuals."[923] The founders of British Socialism agree with the foregoing opinion. "Under a Socialistic system contracts between individuals would be free and unenforced by the community. This would apply to the marriage contract as well as others, and it would become a matter of simple inclination. Nor would a truly enlightened public opinion, freed from mere theological views as to chastity, insist on its permanently binding Nature in the face of any discomfort or suffering that might come of it."[924] "Socialists expect that, under Socialism, the terrible evil of prostitution will disappear. If it does not, it will be either because women are still denied political power, or because their votes have decided that the prostitute must remain. But if, as at present, the 'unfortunate woman' be regarded as a necessity in those days of advanced thought and increased opportunities, then her status must be raised. She must not be an acknowledged necessity and a scorned outcast at the same time, as is the case now. Her position in the State will be clearly defined. She will be held to be performing a necessary social service. Whether this idea meets with favour or not, it is the only fair, the only possible, solution, if the prostitute is to remain."[925] "In a Socialistic State, no woman will be economically dependent upon any one man, father, brother, or husband. Her living will be assured to her by the community. Marriage will not make her the more dependent. If she should have children, she will be salaried, or otherwise supported, according to the number and the healthiness of her offspring. If no children are born to her, she will be at liberty to occupy herself with some other profitable work--not necessarily household labour, certainly not household labour all the time--for that will be reduced to a minimum. But she will engage in such useful work as her special tastes will direct. A free woman, she will thus be able to give her love freely."[926] "The 'subjection of woman' being at an end in consequence of her economic emancipation, actions for breach of promise or seduction, as well as prostitution itself, will be rendered meaningless. When a woman sues for breach of promise she is really suing for loss of a lucrative situation. When she plies for hire on the public street, she does so because the scourge of starvation is laid on her shoulders. Remove that scourge, and instead of the hideous commerce between lust and lucre we shall, in all cases, have the fair exchange of genuine human love for love."[927] "Free as the wind, the Socialist wife will be bound only by her natural love for husband and children."[928] Men and women being sexually free in the Socialist State of the future, the law will take cognisance neither of breach of promise, seduction, prostitution, and desertion of the family, nor of even graver offences against the present code of morality. The philosopher of British Socialism informs us: "Society is directly concerned--(1) with the production of offspring, (2) with the care that things sexually offensive to the majority shall not be obtruded on public notice, or obscenity on 'young persons.' Beyond this, all sexual actions (of course excluding criminal violence or fraud) are matters of purely individual concern." "Offences connected with sexual matters, from rape downwards, may be viewed from two or three different sides, and are complicated in ways which render the subject difficult of discussion in a work intended for promiscuous circulation. Here, as in the last case--viz. of theft or robbery--we must be careful in considering such offences to eliminate the element of brutality or personal injury, which may sometimes accompany the crime referred to, from the offence itself. For the rest I confine myself to remarking that this class also, though not so obviously as the last, springs from an instinct legitimate in itself but which has been suppressed or distorted. The opinions of most, even enlightened, people on such matters are, however, so largely coloured by the unconscious survival in their minds of sentiment derived from old theological and theosophical views of the universe, that they are not of much value. This is partly the reason why the ordinary good-natured bourgeois, who can complacently pass on by the other side after casting a careless look on the most fiendish and organised cruelty in satisfaction of the economic craving--gain--is galvanised into a frenzy of indignation at some sporadic case of real or supposed ill-usage perpetrated in satisfaction of some bizarre form of the animal craving--lust. Until people can be got to discuss this subject in the white light of physiological and pathological investigation rather than the dim religious gloom of semi-mystical emotion, but little progress will be effected towards a due appreciation of the character of the offences referred to. It is a curious circumstance, as illustrating the change of men's view of offences, that an ordinary indecent assault, which in the Middle Ages--in Chaucer's time, for instance--would evidently have been regarded as a species of rude joke, should now be deemed one of the most serious of crimes."[929] "When a sexual act, from whatever cause, is not, and cannot be, productive of offspring, the feeling of the majority has no _locus standi_ in the matter. Not only is it properly outside the sphere of coercion, but it does not concern morality at all. It is a question simply of individual taste. The latter may be good or bad, but this is an æsthetic, and not directly a moral or social question."[930] "No social and secular argument readily presents itself against the act for which the brilliant and wretched Wilde is to-day the associate of felons. In view of the exclamations of bated horror over this offence, and the tacit assumption that it stands second only to murder in its enormity, it may be worth while to point out that, tested by a non-theological ethic, it is not quite certain that such practices are immoral at all."[931] "It has been well said that there are few laws so futile as those that profess to seek out and punish acts--normal or abnormal--done in secret and by mutual consent between adult persons. There are also few laws more unjust when the acts thus branded by law are the natural outcome of inborn disposition and not directly injurious to the community at large. The Moltke-Harden case brings these considerations clearly before us afresh, and compels us to ask ourselves whether it would not be possible to amend our laws in the direction not only of social purity and sincerity but of reason and humanity."[932] The "social purity" of Socialism would be the purity of Sodom and Gomorrah. It would be unrestricted bestiality. The majority of Socialists who have seriously considered the marriage problem in the Socialist State of the future--Marx, Lassalle, Rodbertus, and others, consider only the economic problems--have pronounced themselves in favour of free love in some form or the other. In this the conclusions of the Socialists agree with those of the Anarchists.[933] Indeed, "collective" marriage and other abominations have been freely practised during a long time in the Socialist colonies of North America, such as Oneida and Wallingsford.[934] Some Socialist thinkers, such as Saint-Simon and Enfantin, following the footstep of Plato, condemn marriage for life and recommend the organisation of procreation by the State. Others, such as Fourier, favour polygamy and polyandry. Others, such as Bellamy[935] and Kautsky,[936] believe that the people will remain attached to marriage as at present constituted. Others again find consolation in the fact that "despite the marital customs of the East, there is in the average human animal a strong monogamous instinct."[937] Anton Menger compares free love with free competition, and therefore objects to it[938] for the same reason for which Aristophanes objected to it in his "Ecclesiazusae" 2200 years ago. He thinks that free love would benefit the young, strong and good-looking, and believes that the doctrine of free love owes its rise to hatred of Christianity among Socialists,[939] monogamous marriage being a Christian institution. Socialists propose to break all the bonds which at present connect woman with her husband and her children, and to put her into an artificial and unnatural position calculated to unsex her. "For the first time since the world began, woman will in every respect be the equal of man. She will be the guardian of her own honour, and marriage will assume an entirely novel character. All unions will be unions of affection and esteem, and children, as of old, will primarily be the children of the mother. Her right to select the father of her own children is absolute. In such a society all children will be equally 'legitimate,' and the Seventh Commandment will become practically obsolete, because the economic circumstances in which it was formulated will have passed away. She will be the complete arbiter of her own destiny. Her unsullied conscience will be the foundation of a purer morality than is at present even conceivable."[940] The principles expressed in the foregoing recall to one's mind the decree of the French Convention, dated June 28, 1793, which runs as follows: "La nation se charge de l'éducation physique et morale des enfants abandonnés. Désormais ils seront désignés sous le seul nom d'orphelins. Aucune autre qualification ne sera permise"; and the principle of the French Code, "La récherche de la paternité est interdite," will become a principle of British law. The State will have to become the protector of the husbandless mothers and the fatherless children. "Woman stands to gain much from the growth of a Socialist State. Among the free communistic services the right of the wife to maintenance during the period of maternity will quickly find a place."[941] "For every child born, the State will make provision. Either the mother will be paid so much per child so long as it lives and thrives, as her wages for important work done for society in bearing and rearing it" (it should be noted that children will belong no more to their parents but to "society," that childbearing will be "work" paid for by "wages," and that the breeding of children will become as much a business on the part of independent women as is now the breeding of cats and dogs for profit), "or her absolute independence of her husband will be secured in some other way. The State doctor (a woman for this office) will prescribe and care for the child from the moment of its birth, and State nurses will be in attendance to see that the mother is in need of nothing for her own and the child's well-being."[942] "Socialism will simply be the scientific development of those natural tendencies which augment the happiness or improve the comfort of the people. It is conceivable that every child shall come under the care of the administrative assembly. The right of the child is not interwoven with parental responsibility. They are separate considerations. Only a madman will hold that in the event of its parents being unmindful of their duties a helpless little one should be allowed to suffer. The fact of its being is the child's title to whatever provision society is able to make for it."[943] "Socialism therefore teaches men to expect a communal watchfulness over infant life. If parents refuse, or are unable, to meet the requirements of the case, the State will supply the deficiency."[944] "A State that truly represents its members will legislate generously for those who announce frankly and without cant that they have no desire for the care of children."[945] In the Socialist State of the future, people could therefore get rid of new-born babes far more easily than they now can of puppies and kittens. The institution round the corner would be the general foster-mother. Hordes of fatherless and motherless children would throng the State nurseries. The words "father" and "mother" would lose their meaning. However, we are told that "Socialism would begin by making sure that there should not be a single untaught, unloved, hungry child in the kingdom."[946] Love would evidently also be "organised" by the authorities. Some Socialists fear that, under a _régime_ of free love and free State maintenance for mothers and children, life will become a riot, that husbands will constantly change wives and wives husbands, and that, owing to the absence of all responsibility on the part of the parents for their offspring, over-population and consequent pauperisation will take place. Therefore some Socialists think that "A time will come when the patriot will consider it to be his duty, not to kill as many enemies as possible in time of war, but to restrict his family as far as possible in time of peace."[947] Socialist daydreamers seem to be unaware that the best preventive against over-population lies in the duty of parents to bring up and educate their children, a duty which they wish to abolish. As Aristotle pointed out 2200 years ago, the all-regulating State would also have to regulate the increase of population. "If the State is to guarantee wages, it is bound in self-protection to provide that no person shall be born without its consent. The State is to sanction the number of births; all others are immoral, because anti-social. As national wealth increased, a larger number of births would be allowed, or a larger sum would be expended on such as were allowed. An unsanctioned birth would receive no recognition from the State, and in times of over-population it might be needful to punish, positively or negatively, both father and mother. As such births may be due to ignorance or inefficiency of some check system, it would be the duty of the State to scientifically investigate the whole system of checks, and to spread among its citizens a thorough knowledge of such as were harmless and efficient in practice."[948] The State would control procreation. Intending couples would apparently have to take out a procreation licence, which would be granted only to those able to pass a searching examination. "Marriage between the mentally weak will not be allowed. Imbeciles, lunatics, and those with dangerous and ineradicable criminal tendencies will not be permitted to reproduce their species at all."[949] Unfortunately the writer fails to specify how unauthorised reproduction of the species would be prevented, and how contravention of the procreation laws would be punished. These details are furnished by another writer. "All those actually certified as degenerates must be prevented from procreating. Society has not only a right but a duty to protect itself against such by-products, and it can only do this by State control of marriage."[950] "Marriage without a satisfactory medical certificate should be subjected to a penalty which would be in effect prohibitive. In certain cases asexualisation and sterilisation should be applicable under special safeguards and conditions."[951] Free love has apparently its limitations and its dangers. The procreation inspector might make an irreparable mistake. There are, of course, Socialists who think that the family ought to be preserved, and who oppose State nurseries. One of them writes: "The State, in its own interests, will do everything it can to develop individuality in its children. The barrack school and State nursery--never much more than the Utopian dreams of amiable people--are condemned by up-to-date psychologists. The personal touch and affection of the mother, the surroundings and ethics of a small community, the sense of continuity which comes to the maturing child's mind from a personal organisation like the family, are all invaluable to a State which must take as much care of its citizens of to-morrow as it does of its citizens of to-day."[952] Mr. Macdonald's views on Socialism are hardly orthodox, and he has been denounced by thorough-going Socialists as an agent of the bourgeoisie. As women may be the strongest opponents to the dissolution of the family, Socialists addressing themselves to women try to persuade them that they are forced into matrimony by necessity, that marriage is a degradation to them and to their children, and that Socialism will elevate them and make them free and happy. "The average young woman of the working class, who is not herself employed in some well-paid occupation, has nothing but marriage to which to look forward. She gives herself and all she has or is in exchange for such board as her husband's means permit."[953] "For the sake of bread and shelter she marries and becomes the unpaid cook and housekeeper of a husband and the mother of his children."[954] "Woman has been degraded, the mother has been kept down; so the children have been born with slavish instincts, ready to creep for any favour, and only just awakening to the need for self-assertion and independence of action."[955] Socialism will change all that, for "Socialism means freedom for women, just as it does for men."[956] What is the Socialistic conception of "freedom for women"? What are its privileges and its advantages? "In considering the position of the woman Socialist, one great central fact must be borne constantly in mind. What she will be, what she will do, how she will live--all will depend upon one great fact, the greatest fact in Socialism--a fact which constitutes Socialism--namely, that she will be economically free."[957] "The new order will make husband and wife equals simply by enabling the wife to earn her living by fitting employment."[958] "A living will be assured to every woman."[959] "In the new community woman is entirely independent, a free being, the equal of man. Her education is the same as that of man except where the difference of sex makes a deviation from this rule and special treatment absolutely unavoidable. She works under exactly the same conditions as a man."[960] "Under a Socialist _régime_ every profession will be open to women as to men."[961] "Socialism means enfranchising them, giving them the vote, so that they can lift their voice alongside with men's voice and fight with the same weapon for a better, happier life."[962] "It is only by removing the disabilities and restraints imposed upon woman, and permitting her to enter freely into competition with men in every sphere of human activity, that her true position and function in the economy of life will ultimately be ascertained."[963] "Socialism alone offers woman complete economic emancipation, with all that that implies. It provides her with suitable work, and it pays her exactly as men are paid. It educates her as men are educated, and protects her in pregnancy with tender regard; and, in so doing, Socialism will raise the whole level of society to a height of moral grandeur never yet attained and hardly ever dreamed of by the most optimist of poets and philosophers."[964] Apparently Socialists will elevate downtrodden woman by compelling her to work for a living, and it is doubtful, as will be seen in Chapter XXXVI., whether she will be allowed to select her task or whether she will have to work under a system of forced labour. She will be given that freedom and liberty which is now called licence by the abolition of all the laws of morality. In the words of an exceedingly straightforward Socialist, "Independence for women will mean a heavy sacrifice for them, for it will mean for them compulsory work."[965] In return for such work they will be given full sexual license and the vote. There is another aspect to be taken note of with regard to the emancipation of woman. Many Socialists, in giving to woman equality with man as a wage-earner and voter, wish to unsex her completely. They wish to deprive her of those privileges which she possesses at present owing to her sex. The philosopher of British Socialism informs us: "The law nowadays makes no distinction of persons between men. True; but it makes distinctions between men and women, and where law draws no distinction, practice does. 'Benefit of clergy' is superseded by 'benefit of sex.'"[966] "The tendency of the bourgeoisie world, as expressed in its legislation and sentiment, has been towards a factitious exaltation of the woman at the expense of the man--in other words, the cry for 'equality between the sexes' has in the course of its realisation become a sham, masking a _de facto_ inequality. The inequality in question presses, as usual, heaviest upon the working man, whose wife, to all intents and purposes, now has him completely in her power. If dissolute or drunken, she can sell up his goods or break up his home at pleasure and still compel him to keep her and live with her to her life's end. There is no law to protect him. On the other hand, let him but raise a finger in a moment of exasperation against this precious representative of the sacred principle of 'womanhood,' and straightway he is consigned to the treadmill for his six months amid the jubilation of the 'Daily Telegraph' and its kindred, who pronounce him a brute and sing pæans over the power of the 'law' to protect the innocent and helpless female. Thus does bourgeois society offer sacrifice to the idol 'equality between the sexes.' For the law jealously guards the earnings or property of the wife from possible spoliation. She on any colourable pretext can obtain magisterial separation and protection."[967] Bax concludes that if the law is right in flogging men it should flog women too, for "the brutality and cowardice of the proceeding is no greater in the one case than in the other."[968] The abolition of the marriage tie may mean that general barracks will take the place of private houses. Is the home worth preserving? Most Socialists think it is not. "It may be doubted after all whether it is necessary to regard 'the home' in the sense in which the phrase is here used as the final and immutable form of social organisation. Humanity does not stand or fall by the arrangement whereby families take their food in segregated cubicles."[969] "The entire preparation of food will be undertaken by society in the future. The private kitchen will disappear."[970] "Instead of a hundred kitchens and fires and cooks, we shall have one. Instead of a hundred meals to prepare, we shall have one. Instead of a hundred homes being made to reek of unsavoury dishes, or the detestable odour of bad cooking, the offensive effluvia will be confined to one building. Under Socialism domestic duties will be reduced to a minimum."[971] "We set up one great kitchen, one general dining-hall, and one pleasant tea-garden."[972] Only a few Socialists are in favour of individual houses, believing that "Each house should be self-contained."[973] The proposals of British Socialists regarding woman, the family, the home, and marriage are not new. They were tried in the French Revolution, and the consequences of the experiments recommended by the philosophers of the Revolution were as follows: "The legislation of the Revolution diminished the paternal authority and converted the family into a republic. Marriage became a contract which could be broken at will by either party, a contract which allowed of short notice and which could be concluded for any space of time. People married for a year, sometimes only for a month. They married for fun or for profit, and marriages were dissolved and others contracted if it paid to do so."[974] The French police reports tell us: "The depravity of morals is extremely great, and the new generation is growing up in a state of disorder which promises to have the most unfortunate and most far-reaching consequences to future generations. Sodomy and Sapphic love flourish with the same shamelessness as prostitution, and the progress of all these vices is terrifying."[975] From another source we learn: "Society has become terribly depraved; fornication, adultery, incest, and murder by poison or violence are the fruits of philosophism. Things are as bad in the villages as in Paris. Justices of the peace report that immorality has spread to such an extent that many communes will soon no longer be inhabitable by decent people."[976] This is the new and the better world towards which Socialism is steering. FOOTNOTES: [896] Aristotle, _Politics_, Book ii. Chapter v. [897] Blatchford, _What is this Socialism?_ p. 2. [898] Russell Williams, _The Difficulties of Socialism_, p. 13. [899] Kautsky, _The Socialist Republic_, p. 23. [900] Marx and Engels, _Manifesto of the Communist Party_, pp. 19, 20. [901] Morris and Bax, _Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome_, p. 9. [902] Davidson, _The Old Order and the New_, p. 164. [903] Bax and Quelch, _A New Catechism of Socialism_, p. 39. [904] Bax, _The Religion of Socialism_, p. 145. [905] Oscar Wilde, "The Soul of Man under Socialism," _Fortnightly Review_, February 1891. [906] Wells, "Socialism and the Middle Classes," _Fortnightly Review_, November 1906. [907] _Fabian Essays in Socialism_, p. 200. [908] A.R. Orage in the _New Age_, November 21, 1907. [909] Lansbury, _The Principles of the English Poor Law_, p. 10. [910] Bax, _Outlooks from the New Standpoint_, p. 160. [911] Gronlund, _Co-operative Commonwealth_, p. 151. [912] Benson, _Woman, the Communist_, p. 16. [913] Davidson, _Gospel of the Poor_, p. 149. [914] Russell Williams, _The Difficulties of Socialism_, pp. 14, 15. [915] _Ibid._ p. 15. [916] Bax, _Outlooks from the New Standpoint_, pp. 159, 160. [917] Morris and Bax, _Socialism; Its Growth and Outcome_, p. 199. [918] Bax, _Outlooks from the New Standpoint_, pp. 114, 115. [919] Leatham, _Socialism and Character_, p. 30. [920] Bax, _Outlooks from the New Standpoint_, p. 160. [921] Bebel, _Woman_, pp. 44, 86. [922] Bebel, _Woman in the Past, Present, and Future_, pp. 229, 230. [923] Karl Pearson, _The Ethic of Free Thought_, p. 108. [924] Morris and Bax, _Manifesto of the Socialistic League_, p. 100. [925] Ethel Snowden, _The Woman Socialist_, p. 56. [926] _Ibid._ pp. 59, 60. [927] Davidson, _The Old Order and the New_, p. 165. [928] Ethel Snowden, _The Woman Socialist_, p. 61, [929] Bax, _The Ethics of Socialism_, p. 62. [930] _Ibid._ p. 126. [931] Leatham, _Socialism and Character_, p. 24. [932] "The Moltke-Harden Case" in the _New Age_, November 14, 1907. [933] For details on this subject see Bebel, _Woman_; Meslier, _Le Testament_, 1864, ii. 226; Dezamy, _Code de la Communauté_, 1842, p. 266; Godwin, _Enquiry concerning Political Justice_, ii. 507; Owen, _The Marriage System_, 1838, p. 66; Owen, _Manifesto_, 1840, p. 56; Owen, _What is Socialism?_ 1841, p. 40; Morris, _News from Nowhere_, 1899, p. 90; Tucker, _Instead of a Book_, 1897, p. 15; Grave, _Société Future_, ch. xii.; Charles Albert, _L'Amour Libre_, 1899, p. 191, &c. [934] See Nordhoff, _Communistic Societies_, 1875, p. 275; Noyes, _History of American Socialism_, 1870, p. 623; Hinds, _American Communities_, 1902, p. 196. [935] _Looking Backward_, ch. xxiv. [936] _Erfurter Programm_, 1892, p. 145. [937] Leatham, _Socialism and Character_, p. 32 [938] Menger, _L'�tat Socialists_, 1904, p. 187. [939] _Ibid._ p. 188. [940] Davidson, _The Old Order and the New_, pp. 164, 166. [941] Benson, _Woman the Communist_, p. 15. [942] Ethel Snowden, _The Woman Socialist_, pp. 48, 49. [943] Russell Williams, _The Difficulties of Socialism_, p. 9. [944] Russell Williams, _The Difficulties of Socialism_, p. 10. [945] _New Age_, Letter to Editor, November 14, 1907. [946] Blatchford, _What is this Socialism?_ p. 7. [947] A. Menger, _Volkspolitik_, p. 51. [948] Karl Pearson, _Socialism and Sex_, pp. 12, 108. [949] Ethel Snowden, _The Woman Socialist_, p. 49. [950] Victor Fisher, _The Babies' Tribute_, p. 14. [951] Victor Fisher, _The Babies' Tribute_, p. 15. [952] Macdonald, _Socialism_, p. 98. [953] Keir Hardie, _From Serfdom to Socialism_, p. 64. [954] Ethel Snowden, _The Woman Socialist_, p. 13. [955] _Ibid._ p. 42. [956] _Independent Labour Party Leaflet_, No. 5. [957] Ethel Snowden, _The Woman Socialist_, p. 37. [958] Gronlund, _Co-operative Commonwealth_, p. 148. [959] Ethel Snowden, _The Woman Socialist_, p. 57. [960] Bebel, _Woman_, p. 229. [961] Ethel Snowden, _The Woman Socialist_, p. 86. [962] _What Socialism means for Women_, p. 1. [963] Keir Hardie, _Citizenship of Women_, p. 6. [964] Davidson, _The Old Order and the New_, p. 113. [965] Menger, _L'�tat Socialiste_, p. 191. [966] Bax, _Ethics of Socialism_, p. 66. [967] Bax, _Religion of Socialism_, p. 116. [968] _Ibid._ p. 117. [969] _After Bread, Education_, p. 10. [970] Bebel, _Woman_, p. 227. [971] Ethel Snowden, _The Woman Socialist_, p. 70. [972] Blatchford, _Merrie England_, p. 49. [973] Jowett, _The Socialist and the City_, p. 60. [974] Vandal, _L'Avénement de Bonaparte_. [975] _Rapports de police publiés par Schmidt_, iii. p. 389. [976] Roussel, _Un Evéque assermenté_, p. 298. CHAPTER XXVI THE SOCIALIST ATTITUDE TOWARDS CHRISTIANITY AND RELIGION What is the attitude of Socialism towards Christianity and religion? A clerical apologist of Socialism informs us that "Socialism is founded on the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man."[977] Another reverend gentleman states: "Socialism in the first place means combination, bringing together men for the building up of a sacred, holy life on this earth. It means the building up together of the different elements of human life. It is, in the grand words of the New Testament, which we were told Socialists did not believe in, 'No man liveth unto himself, and no man dieth unto himself.'"[978] A third clergyman tells us that "The ethics of Socialism are identical with the ethics of Christianity."[979] Some British Socialist leaders explain that Socialists are good Christians, and that Socialism attacks only the Church and professed Christians, but not religion. "Much of what is regarded as anti-Christian Socialist doctrine is only an attack upon the Churches and professed Christians, and, so far from being anti-Christian, is, as a matter of fact, inspired by the ethics of Christ's teaching."[980] Other British Socialist leaders say that Socialism, not being a religious doctrine, has no concern with religion and does not meddle with it. "A charge against Socialists is that they are Atheists whose aim is to destroy all religion and all morality. This is not true. It is true that many Socialists are Agnostics, and some are Atheists. But Atheism is no more a part of Socialism than it is a part of Toryism, or of Radicalism, or of Liberalism."[981] "Socialism has no more to do with a man's religion than it has with the colour of his hair. Socialism deals with secular things, not with ultimate beliefs."[982] It is quite true that "there is at present no consensus of Socialist opinion on religious questions,"[983] but it is hardly honest on the part of Socialist leaders to assert that Socialism has nothing to do with religion. The leading journal of the Fabian Society frankly confesses: "There is the argument that Socialism has nothing whatever to do with subjects such as religion and marriage. But if Socialism is a theory of the State, nothing human is alien to it. It may be true that no one of the specific theories of religion or marriage so far put forward by Socialists has any claim to be regarded as the Socialist view; but there is all the difference in the world between such an admission and the denial that Socialism has any concern with the questions at all."[984] Some Socialists proclaim that Socialism will carry out the will of Christ upon earth. Mr. Keir Hardie, for instance, says: "Christ laid down no elaborate system of either economics or theology. No great teacher ever did. His heart beat in sympathy with the great human heart of the race. His words are simple and not to be misunderstood when taken to mean what they say. His prayer--Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven--was surely meant to be taken literally Are our opponents prepared to assert that in Heaven there will be factories working women and children for starvation wages; coal-mines and private property in land, dividing the population of Heaven into two classes, one revelling in riches and luxury, destructive of soul and body, the other grovelling in poverty, also destructive of all that is best in life? If not, how can they consistently support the system which inevitably produces that state of things upon earth?"[985] Other Socialists frankly confess that Socialism is absolutely incompatible with Christianity and all other religions; that Socialism can succeed only if religion be abolished, and that therefore religion must be abolished. The philosopher of British Socialism states: "Socialism utterly despises the 'other world' with all its stage properties--that is, the present objects of religion. It brings back religion from heaven to earth."[986] "As to the ethical teaching of Christ, with its one-sided, introspective, and individualistic character, we venture to assert that no one acquainted with the theory of modern scientific Socialism can for one moment call it Socialistic. Socialism has no sympathy with the morbid, eternally-revolving-in-upon-itself transcendent morality of the Gospel discourses. This morality sets up a forced, to the vast majority impossible, standard of 'personal holiness' which, when realised, has seldom resulted in anything but (1) an apotheosised priggism, _e.g._ the Puritan type, or (2) in an epileptic hysteria, _e.g._ the Catholic saint type."[987] Mr. Blatchford states: "I have been asked why I have 'gone out of my way to attack religion.' In reply I beg to say that I am working for Socialism when I attack a religion which is hindering Socialism, that we must pull down before we can build up, and that I hope to do a little building, if only on the foundation. I oppose the Christian religion because I do not think the Christian religion is beneficial to mankind, and because I think it an obstacle in the way of humanism."[988] Another very influential writer says: "Personally I feel called upon to attack Christianity as I would any other harmful delusion. I do not believe in the theology of Jesus any more than I do in his sociology. It is no use pretending that Socialism will not profoundly revolutionise religion. The change in the economic basis of society is the more important thing to strive for; but if the triumph of the Socialist ideal does not crush supernatural religion, then we shall still have a gigantic fabric of falsity and convention upon which to wage war. Happily Christianity becomes less and less of a power every day. So far, indeed, from Christianity being able to support Socialism, it goes hard with Christianity to stand by itself. As a support to Socialism it would surely prove a broken reed."[989] A Socialist poet proclaims: The name of Christ has been the sovereign curse, The opium drug that kept us slaves to wrong, Fooled with a dream, we bowed to worse and worse. "In heaven," we said, "He will confound the strong." O hateful treason that has tricked too long! Had we poor down-trod millions never dreamed Your dream of that hereafter for our woe, Had the great powers that rule, no Father seemed, But Law relentless, long and long ago Had we risen and said, "We will not suffer so!" "O Christ, O You who found the drug of heaven, To keep consoled an earth that grew to hell, That else to cleanse and cure its sores had striven, We curse That name!"[990] There is an eminently practical reason for the hostility of Socialists to Christianity. Religious people are not likely to become Socialists. "Christianity is like a set of manacles fastened upon the minds of those who believe in it. It is vain for us to look for aid from the Church and Christianity. It might be supposed that a hungry Christian would rebel against his hunger as readily as a hungry Atheist. But it is not the case."[991] The belief in a life after death also is incompatible with Socialism, and must therefore be combated: "We are compelled to abandon the belief in immortality. He who is given to meditating on his latter end and for whom the question of a post-physical future life for himself as an individual is of primary importance, is, generally speaking, indifferent where not positively hostile to social ideals."[992] "The moment this belief in an after-death existence is erected into a dogma, the moment it comes to be looked upon as an article of faith, which it is a duty to hold, or at least which it is the evidence of an ignoble disposition of mind not to hold, then it becomes an enemy to be combated."[993] The practical teachings of Christ are directly opposed to the practical teachings of Socialism: "Jesus said, 'Blessed are the poor.' Socialism recognises that wealth is a good thing, and it exists for the purpose of securing a better share of it for the 'blessed' poor. Socialism declares that all ought to work; but Jesus did no manual work after he was thirty years of age, and he encouraged his disciples to leave their occupations, to wander about and to beg, and this last feature of discipleship has in all ages been well maintained. Socialism incites the workers of all countries to unite for the prosecution of the class war; but Jesus approved of obedience, contentment, and humility of spirit."[994] Socialism has no use for Christianity. "To-day we have to settle down to our primers and our programmes, our Blue-books and our social experiments, just as if Jesus had never lived, or perhaps all the more because he lived. We get no assistance from Him. His followers are our enemies in every country which owns His influence--and the worst enemies of all because ever professing friendship."[995] Christianity is, according to Socialists, an outworn creed. "As Marx says, 'The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. Christianity, like all religions, is but an expression of material conditions, a direct outcome of social relations, the unsubstantial image of a world reflected in the muddy pool of human intellect. Jesus varies with the ages. Redeemer of Roman slave; War-God of Crusader; General Overseer of Manufacturing Capitalist."[996] Besides, Socialists resent "the continual reference of ideal perfection to a semi-mythical Syrian of the first century when they see higher types even in some now walking this upper earth, but in vulgar flesh and blood and without the atmosphere of nineteen centuries to lend enchantment to them."[997] Lastly, Christianity has been a failure: "The success of Christianity as a moral force has been solely upon isolated individuals. In its effects on societies at large it has signally and necessarily failed."[998] "Holiness! Your religion does not make it. Its ethics are too weak, its theories too unsound, its transcendentalism is too thin. There ought to be no such thing as poverty in the world. The earth is bounteous: the ingenuity of man is great. He who defends the claims of the individual, or of a class, against the rights of the human race is a criminal. A hungry man, an idle man, an ignorant man, a destitute or degraded woman, a beggar or pauper child, is a reproach to society and a witness against existing religion and civilisation. In such a world as this, friend Christian, a man has no business reading the Bible, singing hymns, and attending divine worship. He has not time. All the strength and pluck and wit he possesses are needed in the work of real religion, of real salvation. The rest is all 'dreams out of the ivory gate and visions before midnight.'"[999] "In a really humane and civilised nation there should be and need be no such thing as poverty, ignorance, crime, idleness, war, slavery, hate, envy, pride, greed, gluttony, vice. But this is not a humane and civilised nation, and never will be while it accepts Christianity as its religion."[1000] Our belief in God also must be abandoned, but if we continue believing in God it follows that man is not responsible for his actions, that he cannot do wrong: "Man is what God made him; could only act as God enabled him or constructed him to act. If God is responsible for man's existence, God is responsible for man's act. Therefore man cannot sin against God."[1001] "If God is all-knowing, He knew before He made man what man would do. If God is all-powerful, He need not have made man at all, or He could have made a man who would be strong enough to resist temptation. Or He could have made a man who was incapable of evil. If God had never made man, then man could never have succumbed to temptation. God made man of His own divine choice and made him to His own divine desire. How then could God blame man for anything man did? Man might justly say to God: 'I did not ask to be created. You knew when You made me how I should act. If You wish me to act otherwise, why did You not make me different? I was fore-ordained by You to be and to do what I am and have done. Is it my fault that You fore-ordained me to be and to do thus?' The actions of a man's will are as mathematically fixed at his birth as are the motions of a planet in its orbit. God, who made the man and the planet, is responsible for the actions of both."[1002] "Divine law says that certain acts are good and that certain acts are evil; and that God will reward those who do well and will punish those who do ill. And we are told that God will so act because God is just. But I claim that God cannot justly punish those who disobey, nor reward those who obey His laws. If God created all things, He must have created the evil as well as the good. Who, then, is responsible for good and evil? Only God, for he made them. He who creates all is responsible for all. God created all: God is responsible for all. He who creates nothing is responsible for nothing. Man created nothing: man is responsible for nothing. Therefore man is not responsible for his nature, nor for the acts prompted by that nature. Therefore God cannot justly punish man for his acts. Therefore the Divine law, with its code of rewards and punishments, is not a just law and cannot have emanated from a just God."[1003] "I do not pretend to say whether there is, or is not, _a_ God, but I deny that there is a loving Heavenly Father who answers prayer. I deny the existence of Free Will and possibility of man's sinning against God. I deny that Christ is necessary to man's salvation from Hell or from Sin. I do not assert or deny the immortality of the soul. I know nothing about the soul, and no man is, or ever was, able to tell me more than I know."[1004] "I do seriously mean that no man can, under any circumstances, be justly blamed for anything he may say or do. That is one of my deepest convictions."[1005] Mr. Blatchford's philosophy excuses, and therefore encourages, every action based upon a bad impulse, every vice and every crime, and his creed should find the unqualified approval of habitual criminals and loafers. Views similar to those of Mr. Blatchford are expressed by many other Socialists. We read, for instance: "It was pleasant to believe that a benevolent hand was guiding the steps of society; overruling all evil appearances for good; and making poverty here the earnest of a great blessedness and reward hereafter. It was pleasant to lose the sense of worldly inequality in the contemplation of our equality before God. But utilitarian questioning and scientific answering turned all this tranquil optimism into the blackest pessimism. Nature was shown to us as 'red in tooth and claw': if the guiding hand were indeed benevolent, then it could not be omnipotent, so that our trust in it was broken: if it were omnipotent, it could not be benevolent; so that our love in it turned to fear and hatred."[1006] As long as childhood pines in City slum; As long as Landlords steal their racking rent; As long as Love and Faith to gold succumb; As long as human life in war is spent; While false religion teaches men to pray To a false Tyrant, whom they misname God; Whose "Holy Will" is--so they glibly say-- The poor should suffer 'neath His chast'ning rod; As long as men do buy and sell the soil, And thereby make their fellow men their slaves; While selfishness exacts its cruel spoil; While yet the poor are ground into their graves; Until these crying wrongs are made to cease Nowhere upon this earth can there be peace.[1007] Although the Socialists have declared war against the Christian religion and the Christian Churches, they freely quote the Scriptures and the Fathers if it suits their purpose, and shamelessly misuse the name of Christ. In support of their maxim "Property is theft," they quote St. Jerome's saying: "Opulence is always the result of theft: if not by the actual possessor, then by his predecessors."[1008] They quote Christ in support of their demand for the abolition of private property, marriage and the family. "Christ abolished all private property, and with it the State. He abolished all distinctions of race, rank, sex, and intellect. He made the first last and the last first, acknowledging only devoted _service_ as true greatness; the only law, the Law of Love. In His sweeping condemnation of egoism in every form it seems doubtful if He did not even lay iconoclastic hands on marriage and the family, as they existed and exist. In the resurrection they neither marry nor give in marriage, but are as the angels in heaven. Woman (to His mother), what have I to do with thee? Whosoever shall do the will of My Father which is in heaven the same is My brother, and sister, and mother."[1009] They use the name of Christ for electioneering purposes. At a West Ham election, for instance, the electors received leaflets which stated "If you vote for the Municipal Alliance you vote against God. If Christ were in Plaistow Ward, Christ would vote for Coe."[1010] Professor Schäffle, perhaps the most fair-minded and moderate scientist who ever criticised Socialism, was perfectly right in stating: "Socialism of the present day is out-and-out irreligious, and hostile to the Church. It says that the Church is only a police institution for upholding capital, and that it deceives the common people with a 'cheque payable in heaven,' that the Church deserves to perish."[1011] The above words were written with regard to German Socialism, and British Socialism is far more irreligious, violent, and revolutionary than is the German variety. FOOTNOTES: [977] Rev. E.T. Russell in _Forward_, November 23, 1907. [978] Rev. L. Jenkyns Jones in _Forward_, November 16, 1907. [979] Rev. Frank Ballard in _Socialism: A Cancerous Growth_, p. 19. [980] Macdonald, _Socialism_, p. 99. [981] Blatchford, _Real Socialism_, p. 4. [982] Macdonald, _Socialism_, p. 101. [983] _New Age_, October 10, 1907. [984] _Ibid._ p. 10. [985] Keir Hardie, _Can a Man be a Christian on a Pound a Week?_ p. 18. [986] Bax, _Religion of Socialism_, p. 52. [987] _Ibid._ p. 97. [988] Blatchford, _God and My Neighbour_, p. 189. [989] Leatham, _Was Jesus a Socialist?_ p. 14. [990] Francis Adams, _The Mass of Christ_, p. 12. [991] Leatham, _Was Jesus a Socialist?_ p. 14. [992] Bax, _Ethics of Socialism_, pp. 192, 193. [993] _Ibid._ pp. 196, 197. [994] Leatham, _Was Jesus a Socialist?_ p. 6. [995] Leatham, _Was Jesus a Socialist?_ p. 16. [996] _Socialist Standard_, December 1, 1907. [997] Bax, _The Religion of Socialism_, p. 90. [998] _Ibid._ p. 98. [999] Blatchford, _God and My Neighbour_, p. 194. [1000] _Ibid._ p. 197. [1001] _Ibid._ p. 124. [1002] Blatchford, _God and My Neighbour_, pp. 135, 136. [1003] Blatchford, _Not Guilty_, pp. 11, 12. [1004] Blatchford, _God and My Neighbour_, p. 122. [1005] _Ibid._ p. 137. [1006] _Fabian Essays in Socialism_, p. 27. [1007] _The Deadly Parallel_, October 1907. [1008] Wheatley, _How the Miners are Robbed_, p. 13. [1009] Davidson, _Gospel of the Poor_, p. 149. [1010] _Times, Municipal Socialism_, p. 42. [1011] Schäffle, _Quintessence of Socialism_, p. 116. CHAPTER XXVII THE RELIGION OF SOCIALISM We have seen in Chapter XXVI. that Socialism makes war upon Christianity and upon religion, that it strives to eradicate religion out of the people's hearts. Now the question arises: How do Socialists propose to fill the void? What do they intend to put into the place of that religion which they wish to destroy? "Socialism involves a change which would be almost a revolution in the moral and religious attitude of the majority of mankind."[1012] "Religion will share the fate of the State. It will not be 'abolished,' God will not be dethroned, religion will not be 'torn out of the people's hearts.' Religion will disappear by itself without any violent attack."[1013] "The establishment of society on a Socialistic basis would imply the definitive abandonment of all theological cults, since the notion of a transcendent god or semi-divine prophet is but the counterpart and analogue of the transcendent governing class. So soon as we are rid of the desire of one section of society to enslave another, the dogmas of an effete creed will lose their interest. As the religion of slave industry was Paganism; as the religion of serfage was Catholic Christianity, or Sacerdotalism; as the religion of Capitalism is Protestant Christianity or Biblical dogma, so the religion of collective and co-operative industry is Humanism, which is only another name for Socialism."[1014] "The religion of the future is to be the religion of the common life. It will have for its ideal the complete organic unity of the whole human race. And this religion will be a political religion. It will be a religion which will seek to realise its ideal in our industrial and social affairs by the application and use of political methods. The popular conception of politics as something apart from religion is a cunning device of the devil to serve his own ends; just in the same way as the popular impression that politics is something apart from bread and butter, and shorter hours, and better homes, and better industrial conditions. There can be no separation between politics and religion. The religion of the future will be an application of the moral truths of religion through politics to our industrial and social conditions."[1015] To root out the very memory of Christianity, Socialists would abolish the Sunday. "We would surrender once and for all this chimerical notion of one day of universal rest and institute three days a week, or, if necessary, more, as days of partial rest, _i.e._ on which different sections of the community would be freed from labour in turn."[1016] This proposal, like so many Socialist proposals, reminds us of the French Revolution, which also simultaneously abolished the Christian religion and changed the calendar. The month was divided into three periods of ten days. The tenth day, the "_decadi_," replaced Sunday.[1017] The people were compelled to rest on _decadi_ and to work on Sunday. Peasants who on Sundays did not bring their vegetables to market were prosecuted.[1018] Policemen who on _decadi_ heard suspicious noises broke by force into houses to find out whether people were "desecrating" _decadi_ by work, and the people complained, "Where is the liberty you promised us when we may not even dance on any day we like?"[1019] The French Revolutionaries destroyed the statues and pictures in the churches. British Socialists at present only propose to replace the effigies of Christ and the saints by Socialist heroes: "Let the painters, sculptors, poets, and musicians do honour to the heroes of humanity, the apostles of science and progress, as they have heretofore lavished their taste and skill and imagination on a conventional Jesus, an ideal Madonna and imaginary saints, and Gospel scenes; let statues arise to Bruno, Vanini, Servetus; let the historian and the biographer recount with loving wealth of detail their struggles, controversies, flights, imprisonments, and martyrdoms; let poets and painters cast the halo of romantic art around Caxton, Galileo, William the Silent, Milton, Harry Vane, and great masterful Cromwell; let hymns be sung to Copernicus, Newton, Harvey, to Massaniello, Danton, Garibaldi, Delescluze, to Grace Darling, Sister Dora and Father Damien."[1020] "To the Socialist, Marx has said the last word that need be said on the subject of the relation of Socialism and religion. 'The religious reflex of the real world can only finally vanish when the practical relations of everyday life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellow men.' Material conditions rule. 'The English Established Church will more readily pardon an attack on thirty-eight of its thirty-nine articles than on one-thirty-ninth of its income.' This is as true to-day as when written in 1867."[1021] Among the "Immediate Reforms" demanded by the Social-Democratic Federation is, of course, "the disestablishment and disendowment of all State churches."[1022] British Socialists, like the French Revolutionaries, have issued numerous travesties of the Christian church service. The following are extracts from a widely read "Socialist Ritual." "A CATECHISM FOR THE MOB "Q. What is thy name? A. Wageworker.--Q. Who are thy parents? A. My father was called Wageworker--my mother's name is Poverty.--Q. Where wast thou born? A. In a garret under the roof of a tenement house which my father and his comrades built.--Q. What is thy religion? A. The Religion of Capital.--Q. What duties does thy religion lay upon thee with regard to society? A. To increase the national wealth--first through my toil, and next through my savings, as soon as I can make any.--Q. What does thy religion order thee to do with thy savings? A. To entrust them to the banks and such other institutions that have been established by philanthropic financiers, to the end that they may loan them out to themselves. We are commanded to place our earnings at all times at the disposal of our masters." "A LITANY for the use of the respectable classes. Edited by Edward Carpenter. "O God, the Father of Heaven, have mercy upon us, miserable sinners.--Remember not, Lord, our offences, nor the offences of our forefathers, neither take thou vengeance of our sins. Spare us, good Lord; spare us whom thou hast brought into honour and good position through the precious blood of the toiling masses, and be not angry with us for ever: Spare us, good Lord.--From all evil and mischief, from the crafts and assaults of the thief and the burglar, from poverty and the everlasting damnation of the workhouse: Good Lord, deliver us.--From bad trade and bogus dividends, from shady and unprofitable investments, from all unsuccessful speculation and losses, whether on the turf or in the City: Good Lord, deliver us." "THE CAPITALIST'S TEN COMMANDMENTS "I am Capital, thy Master, that brought thee out of the Land of Liberty into a State of Slavery. Thou shalt not become thine own Master, nor have any other Masters but me. Thou shalt commit murder for my sake only. Thou shalt give thy daughters in prostitution and thy wife in adultery to me." THE LATEST DECALOGUE Thou shalt have one God only, who Would be at the expense of two? No graven images may be Worshipped, except the currency. Swear not at all, as for thy curse Thine enemy is none the worse. At Church on Sunday to attend Will serve to keep the world thy friend.[1023] The foregoing representative statements and extracts clearly prove that the teachings of Socialism, far from being in harmony with Christianity, are incompatible and directly hostile not only to Christianity but to all religion. The philosopher of British Socialism has very truly said, "Socialism has been well described as a new conception of the world, presenting itself in industry as co-operative Communism, in politics as international Republicanism, in religion as atheistic Humanism, by which is meant the recognition of social progress as our being's highest end and aim."[1024] As there is very little difference between "atheistic Humanism" and Atheism pure and simple, Socialists have really no right to complain if their opponents, relying on Bax's high authority, reproach them with being Atheists. The excerpts given above show that the religion of Socialism is a political and economic one. Its character and principles may be found in the publications of the Labour Church Union and of the Socialist Sunday School Union. The prospectus of the Labour Church Union contains the following declaration of principles: "(1) That the Labour Church exists to give expression to the religion of the Labour movement. (2) That the religion of the Labour movement is not theological, but respects each individual's personal convictions upon this question. (3) That the religion of the Labour movement seeks the realisation of universal well-being by the establishment of Socialism--a Commonwealth founded upon justice and love. (4) The religion of the Labour movement declares that improvement of social conditions and the development of personal character are both essential to emancipation from social and moral bondage, and to that end insists upon the duty of studying the economic and moral forces of society." It will be noticed that the words Christianity, God, morality, virtue, &c., do not occur in the foregoing statement. Now let us study the details of the Socialist religion. These details are taken from a statement of the aims, methods, &c. of the Socialist Sunday Schools, published for the enlightenment of the public by the Glasgow and District Socialist Sunday School Union, the principal Socialist Sunday School Union of Great Britain. In that official publication we read: "Socialism, which the children are taught, is an idealism. It has been described as 'the highest flight of the ideal into the realm of the practical.' It is a faith--a faith based on the divine brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity--irrespective of class, colour, or creed. It is a religion--a religion greater than creeds or dogmas. It is a religion of love! Its followers and disciples are lovers of mankind! Its worship is service to humanity! Socialism has absorbed not only all the essential spiritual elements contained in the Christ teaching, but it has also, as Christianity itself has done before it, absorbed all the highest altruistic teaching of the ages. But Socialism has done something more--it has struck a new note, deep-sounding, far-reaching, and its vibrations are stirring in the hearts of the nations! Socialism has proclaimed its tenets, declaring the only possible ways and means whereby the sacred rites of the religion of love can be observed, and without which there can be no realisation of the divine sentiment--'the brotherhood of man.' "The Church, the State, and the people alike, in so far as they sanction and sanctify unrighteous social conditions, are equally guilty of breaking the very first laws of brotherhood, and thereby of violating the pure and holy religion of love. When the Sun of Social Justice--Socialism--has arisen in its full glory, all the artificial and unnatural causes of evil and error will have been rooted out from the pathway of human progress. The sons and daughters of men may then, without mockery, stand before the great throne of love and worship the beauty and the wonder and the glory of the earth, sky, and sea, as brothers and sisters in one holy unity, and be more worthy to fathom the deeper mystery. Thus Socialism, or the law of the religion of love, unfalteringly maintains: That private property in land is public robbery. It is public robbery because, the land being the source of all the necessaries of life, it should belong equally to all, by birthright of our common inheritance in the brotherhood of the world. 'Let them know that the earth from which they were created is the common property of all men, and that therefore the fruits of the earth belong indiscriminately to all. Those who make private property of the gift of God, pretend in vain to be innocent, for they are the murderers of those who die daily for want of it.' Such is the terrible and unassailable dictum of one of the great founders of the early Christian Church, Saint Gregory I. Private property in capital--whether in money, railways, mines, factories, machinery, tools, &c.--is public robbery. It is public robbery because it creates and divides the human family into classes. Classes of rich and idle people who claim and hold all these things as by right--and classes of hirelings who are thus forced to pay for the use of them--as rent in land, interest in capital, profit on labour. This means that the hireling classes require to give all the work of their hands and brains in order to secure a small share of the things which they need to live, and which they themselves have produced out of Nature's ample store. And this at once hinders the possibility of any unity of brotherhood or sisterhood and breaks the law of love."[1025] It will be noticed that in this lengthy statement God is mentioned only for party purposes, and that the chief aim of the "religion of love" is to sow hatred and to incite to plunder. The Labour Church Union and the Socialist Sunday Schools use the same form of the Socialist Ten Commandments, which are as follows: "Love your schoolfellows, who will be your fellow-workers in life. Love learning, which is the food of the mind, and be grateful to your teacher as to your parents. Make every day holy by good and useful deeds and kindly actions. Honour good men, be courteous to all, bow down to none. Do not hate or speak evil of anyone, do not be revengeful, but stand up for your rights and resist oppression. Do not be cowardly, be a friend to the weak and love justice. Remember that all the good things of the earth are produced by labour. Whoever enjoys them without working for them is stealing the bread of the workers. Observe and think in order to discover the truth. Do not believe what is contrary to reason, and never deceive yourself or others. Do not think that he who loves his own country must hate and despise other nations, or wish for war, which is a remnant of barbarism. Look forward to the day when all men will be free citizens of one fatherland and live together as brothers, in peace and righteousness. Socialism is the hope of the world." Here also the words Christianity and God do not occur. We are officially told that "Socialist Sunday Schools are intended to serve as a means of teaching economic causes of present-day social evils and of implanting a love of goodness in the child mind."[1026] The following extracts from the "Red Catechism" serve to show how "love of goodness" is inculcated in the Socialist Sunday Schools: "Q. Is there any difference in the teachings at Socialist Sunday schools and other Sunday schools? A. Yes.--Q. What is taught in Christian schools? A. Christian morals and capitalist teachings.--Q. What is meant by the term 'employing men for profit'? A. Capitalists, when they pay wages, make the workers produce three or four times the amount they pay them. The extra which the men produce over their wages is called profit.--Q. What evidence is there that the workers earn a great amount and get very little? A. The national amount of wealth produced every year is two thousand millions and the amount paid out in wages is only five hundred millions, showing that the poor are poor because they are robbed.--Q. Who creates all wealth? A. The working class.--Q. Who creates all poverty? A. Our capitalist society.--Q. Who are the workers? A. Men who work for wages.--Q. What class of men get into Parliament? A. The capitalist and aristocratic class?--Q. How is that? A. Because the workers are opposed by men interested in keeping them poor.--Q. How many children are there in London who go to school insufficiently fed and clothed? A. It is stated as many as 100,000; a number equal to the population of a small county.--Q. To what class do these poor starving children belong? A. The working class.--Q. Is it not the working class which creates all wealth? A. Yes.--Q. Do the rich trouble about the poor children of London who are ill-fed and clothed? A. No.--Q. What is a pauper? A. One who lives upon others, while being able to work?--Q. Are the rich class able to work? A. Yes; because they are well cared for when young and grow up strong?--Q. Do they work? A. No; they consider it menial and beneath them.--Q. Then they are paupers? A. Yes.--Q. Do the rich and their children live at the expense of those who work? A. Yes.--Q. What does machinery enable the workers to do? A. To produce wealth quicker.--Q. Do the workers benefit by machinery? A. No. On the contrary. It generally reduces their wages and throws them out of work.--Q. Why is that? A. Because the machinery is controlled by the capitalist class.--Q. What is a wage-slave? A. A person who works for a wage and gives all he earns to a capitalist.--Q. What proportion does a wage-slave receive of what he earns? A. On the average about a fourth. The slave and serf always had food, clothing, and shelter. The wage-slave, when he is out of work, must now starve or go into the workhouse and be made miserable, or commit suicide.--Q. What is the remedy for wage-slavery? A. Socialism.--Q. Who pays the rent? A. Father and mother.--Q. Who demands the rent? A. The landlord.--Q. Can you say how much the landlord takes from the wages of father, generally for rent? A. Yes; a fourth.--Q. That is sheer robbery, is it not? A. Yes; but working men cannot help it.--Q. Why is that? A. Because the landlord class have a monopoly of land and houses, and workmen have no land and are too poor to build for themselves."[1027] With this mendacious stuff the "Religion of Love" systematically poisons the innocent minds of little children. The religion of Socialism is indeed a political religion, as Mr. Snowden, M.P., has stated. FOOTNOTES: [1012] Ball, _The Moral Aspects of Socialism_, p. 23. [1013] Bebel, _Woman_, p. 213. [1014] Bax, _Religion of Socialism_, p. 81. [1015] Snowden, _The Christ that Is to be_, pp. 6, 7. [1016] Bax, _Religion of Socialism_, pp. 58, 59. [1017] Mignet, _Revolution Française_, ch. viii. [1018] Sciout, iii. 176. [1019] Sciout, iv. 386. [1020] Leatham, _Was Jesus a Socialist?_ p. 16. [1021] _Socialist Standard_, December 1, 1907. [1022] See Appendix. [1023] _A Socialists' Ritual_, pp. 7-16. [1024] Bax, _Religion of Socialism_, p. 81. [1025] Glasier, _Socialist Sunday Schools_, p. 9. [1026] Glasier, _Socialist Sunday Schools_, p. 10. [1027] Hazell, _The Red Catechism_, pp. 3-10. CHAPTER XXVIII CHRISTIAN SOCIALISM The position of the Christian Churches and of Christian ministers towards Socialism is one of considerable difficulty. Socialism and Christianity are two words which are not easily reconcilable. Chapters XXVI. and XXVII. show that the attitude of British Socialists, not only towards Christianity but towards all religion, is in the main a hostile one. Their attitude is only logical. Socialists see in religious men and in religious corporations obstacles to their revolutionary and predatory progress. However, as many Socialists have declared that the teachings of Christ and of Socialism are identical, some large-hearted Christian ministers have tried to reconcile Christianity and Socialism. Working under the banner of Christian Socialism, these are rather trying to exercise practical Christianity than to assist the Socialist agitation, as may be seen from their programmes given in the Appendix. Many Christian Socialist ministers are pious and worthy men whose actions are wise and moderate. Others have adopted an attitude of hysterical enthusiasm and admiration towards Socialism. Whilst the former have only a few adherents, some of the latter have rapidly secured for themselves a considerable Socialist following, and if one takes note of their views, one cannot help doubting whether their motives are entirely disinterested. The following utterances, for instance, one would expect from the mouth of a Soudanese dervish or an Indian fakir, but not from the pen of a Christian minister: "Socialism is the Greatest Movement for Justice and Brotherhood that this old Planet has ever known. Socialism is the Greatest Passion for the Release and Freedom of the Human Soul that this world has ever felt. Socialism is the Greatest Urge of the Average Man to stand erect, independent, and free, without a Master and without a slave, that the human race has ever experienced. "The Spirit of the Lord of Life within me, burning as a fierce flame in my bones, saith 'Speak unto the people these words': There is only one Sacred Thing beneath the stars--Human Life. Human Life is the Incarnation of the Desire of the Lord of Life. Behold! He awaits the Full Expression, the Complete Emancipation, the Perfect Freedom of that Human Life, as Life, in all its undisclosed majestic meanings. And it doth not yet appear what it shall be! The Average Man at your side in the street, next door--the average woman, any woman, the child, any child--Behold here is the Sacred One. Love, Worship, and Bless in the name of the Lord of Life. 'Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, ye have done it unto Me.' No artificial, conventional, social, or financial dignity can make that Human One worthy; no present degradation or humiliation can finally obscure that Radiant One. 'I see through your sham tinsel and title; I see through the dirt and despair to the Human One shining there,' saith the Living Truth. 'The worship that passeth these Darlings of My Heart and leaveth them--that worship I am against,' saith the Lord of Life. O stand erect now, just where you are, just as you read these words. Thou hast no Superior! Thou art very Beautiful! Thou art the Freedom Incarnate, whose Heart-beat shall dissolve all slaveries and Injustice. I Love thee, O Thou Human One. There is only one Sacred Thing beneath the stars--Human Life. Whatever hurts, harms, makes cheap, blights, hinders, enslaves, subordinates, or profits off Human Life is Wrong tho' demanded by ten thousand priests, tho' framed in a thousand laws, tho' hoary with ten thousand years. Whatever hurts the Son of man--that--that is the Blasphemy. Whatever helps, releases, emancipates, makes free, glorifies, makes sacred, enlarges, enricheth Human Life, that is the Right and Good, tho' persecuted by private interests; that is the Truth, tho' withstood by dead men's creeds. Whatever emancipates the average man--that--that is the coming of the Lord. The Fundamental fact of Life is Bread. Man doth not--cannot live by Bread alone. But man cannot live without Bread. In the eating of Bread, behold the Divine Democracy of Human Life. The necessity of eating Bread--there is the Universal Sacrament--all are present--all partake. Behold, the Supper of the Lord is--just Bread--our common Daily Bread. Why is this Bread Sacred? Not in itself. No! Why, then? It is the food of the Sacred Ones--the Human Ones. It is the Food of the Incarnation of the Lord of Life. And the first Basic Sacred Ceremony of Man is--Labour in securing that Bread--the Fact of Bread-Getting. If that is not Just, True, Right, Good, a Blessing--then nothing is. All else is measured here. You cannot build a Sacred Ceremony in the superstructure of Human Life if the Basis in Bread-getting is a Lie, a Fraud, a Cheat, a Theft, a Slavery, a Service to the Gain-god--Mammon, a Gamble with Human Flesh. Nay, verily! 'I will not hear your prayers, your chants, your liturgies, your praises; My soul hateth even your solemn meeting,' said the Lord of Life, if thou wilt not see Me in these Human Ones as they struggle for Bread, if thou wilt not make thy Bread-getting Just, and Holy, and Good, and True. "And now, O Capitalism, Thou art doomed! I am against thee, saith the Spirit. O Capitalism, I have weighed thee in My balances--thou art found wanting. O Capitalism, thou hast gambled with the Land that I gave to all for Bread. O Capitalism, thou hast gambled with the great machines that are for the bread-getting of the people. O Capitalism, thou hast made Human need an asset of thy gains. Thy Purse is filled with Bloody Coin. Thy Store-Houses burst where the many Hunger. The Little Ones cry in the streets whilst thou hidest thy Plunder. I am against thee, O Capitalism, I am against thee! Thou hast gambled with the very Bodies and Souls of men in thy Mad Mammonism. Thy fierce Profit-Hunger Hath rejoiced in the Hunger of Man. I am against thee, O Capitalism! "Behold! the Day Dawns! I see Justice arise. I see the Land redeemed! I see the Titans of Iron, the machinery of shops, used for man! I see the Toilers go forth to their labours and return with the product of their toil! I see Capitalism lie prone! I see Mammonism fallen! I see the Profit of the Many Arise! I see Freedom! I see Brotherhood! I see the Socialist Age! I see the Commonwealth of Man! 'Tis the coming of the Lord of Life."[1028] Much of the foregoing is printed in half-inch letters. At the end of these wild utterances we read in letters an inch tall: "Rally, Rally, Rally! Great Social Crusade! Rally, Rally, Rally!"--which unpleasantly reminds one of the shouting butcher's insistent cry, "Buy, Buy, Buy!" to be heard in crowded thoroughfares on Saturday nights. The moderate Christian Socialists cannot help opposing the most important item in the Socialist programme. For example, "The Christian Social Union asserts that it has not the slightest sympathy with confiscation." In fact, "the whole question of expropriation is tacitly ignored in the literature of Christian Socialism."[1029] "The Christian who believes in the words: 'Take heed, and keep yourselves from all covetousness, for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth,' cannot easily be a Socialist, and a Christian minister cannot easily approve of the spoliation of the Church."[1030] Professor Flint stated quite correctly: "What is called Christian Socialism will always be found to be unchristian in so far as it is socialistic, or unsocialistic in so far as it is truly and fully Christian."[1031] Christian Socialist leaders urge Socialists to join the Christian Socialist movement. "Every Socialist who understands how deeply religion has been concerned in every movement that has ever won the enthusiasm of men, every Socialist who realises how enormous is the work before him, must welcome the assistance of this ancient and imperishable organ of love and justice. And every Christian who rejoices in the singular growth of religious zeal in recent years must long to see all that huge force given to the service of the Humanity which Jesus Christ has taken up into the Godhead. For the man that loves much is a Socialist, and the man that loves most is a saint, and every man that truly loves the brotherhood is in a state of salvation."[1032] These words seem rather perfunctory and laboured. By far the largest number of Socialists regard the Christian Socialist movement with suspicion and dislike. The philosopher of British Socialism, Mr. Bax, for instance, wrote contemptuously: "The leaders of the Guild of St. Matthew wish to accomplish vast changes through 'a clarified Christianity'?--a Christianity which shall consist apparently of the skins of dead dogmas stuffed with adulterated Socialist ethics." A leading Socialist weekly wrote of the early Christian Socialists: "Whether their labours were largely beneficial depends on the way one looks at these things. We have no doubt that for the capitalist class these labours were eminently beneficial, and that is why Maurice and his friends are held in such great esteem by them. For the working class, however, their labours spelt slavery, and ought always to be remembered when similar attempts to 'Christianise' Socialism are made by the 'servants' of the Church. Here, as in many other things, the motto of the worker must be 'I fear the Greeks, even when they come with gifts.'"[1033] FOOTNOTES: [1028] _The Social Crusade to Herald the Message of Truth and Freedom to this Age, conducted by Rev. J. Stitt Wilson, M.A._, November 1907. [1029] Woodworth, _Christian Socialism in England_, p. 161. [1030] _Church and Socialism_, p. 39. [1031] Flint, _Socialism_, p. 441. [1032] Dearmer, _Socialism and Christianity_, pp. 22, 23. [1033] _Justice_, October 19, 1907. CHAPTER XXIX SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM Socialism is not a simple but a complex movement. It contains a powerful strain both of Communism and of Anarchism. In fact one might almost divide all Socialists into two classes: Communist Socialists and Anarchist Socialists. A study of the history of Socialism, Communism, and Anarchism shows that all three movements have much in common. It shows instances of Socialistic parties branching out and having Communist and Anarchist offshoots, and shows instances of Anarchist and Communist groups combining under the red banner of Socialism. Owing to its intimate historical and sentimental connection with Communism and Anarchism, Socialism is hostile to the State, and many Socialists desire its downfall: "The expropriation of all the private proprietors of the means of production being effected, society starts on a new basis. The conditions of existence and of human life are changed. The State Organisation gradually loses its foundation. The State expires with the expiration of a ruling class, just as religion expires when the belief in supernatural beings or supernatural reasoning powers ceases to exist."[1034] "The first act wherein the State appears as the real representative of the whole body social--the seizure of the means of production in the name of society--is also its last independent act as State. The interference of the State in social relations becomes superfluous in one domain after another and falls of itself into desuetude. The place of a government over persons is taken by the administration of things and the conduct of the processes of production. The State is not 'abolished,' it dies out."[1035] "The representatives of the State will have disappeared along with the State itself--ministers, parliaments, standing armies, police and _gens-d'armes_, law courts, lawyers and public prosecutors, prisons, rates, taxes and excises--the entire political apparatus. The great and yet so petty parliamentary struggles have given place to administrative colleges and administrative delegations, whose function it is to settle the best methods of production and distribution."[1036] "The Co-operative Commonwealth will incorporate the whole people into society. The whole people does not want, or need, any government at all. It simply wants administration--good administration,"[1037] The arguments contained in the foregoing extracts are exceedingly shallow. The various authorities quoted tell us in more or less involved language that the State disappears because "governments" will be replaced by "administrations." Unconvincing verbiage apart, the only change which would take place would be a change of name. Countries would be ruled by Socialist governments instead of by non-Socialist ones. The State could disappear only with the disappearance of nations and of frontiers, with the advent of the "Brotherhood of Man." The first Socialist State might of course proclaim the Brotherhood of Man in accordance with the precedent set by the French Revolution, but other nations might feel as little inclined to join it as during the time when bloodthirsty demagogues ruled France in the name of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality, with the liberal assistance of the rifle and the guillotine. What is Communism? John Stuart Mill tells us: "The assailants of the principle of individual property may be divided into two classes--those whose scheme implies absolute equality in the distribution of the physical means of life and enjoyment, and those who admit inequality, but grounded on some principle, or supposed principle, of justice or general expediency, and not, like so many of the existing social inequalities, dependent on accident alone. The characteristic name for the former economical system is Communism."[1038] "Palgrave's Dictionary of Political Economy" says: "Communism is the theory which teaches that the labour and the income of society should be distributed equally among all its members by some constituted authority."[1039] Let us now take note of some Socialist views on Communism. "Laurence Gronlund, whose 'Co-operative Commonwealth' has been styled the New Testament of Socialism (as the 'Capital' is its Old Testament), has tried to distinguish between Socialism and Communism by describing Communism as meaning 'each according to his needs,' and Socialism 'each according to his deeds.'"[1040] "As soon as the principle of equality is applied to Socialism, Socialism becomes 'Communism.'"[1041] "Socialism and Communism are very generally confounded, but they are quite distinct economic systems. Socialists seek only to control the instruments of production--Land and Capital; Communists leave nothing to the individual which he can call his own. St. Paul was a Socialist, Christ a Communist."[1042] Many so-called Socialists are in reality avowed Communists who look forward to the introduction of Communism more than to the advent of Socialism. They see in Socialism merely an intermediate stage towards their final goal. "If the millennial haven of Communism is to be reached by mankind generally, it must be through the disciplinary portal of Socialism."[1043] "Communism, the final goal of Socialism, is a form of Social Economy very closely akin to the principles set forth in the Sermon on the Mount."[1044] "Socialism and freedom 'gang thegither.' Socialism implies the inherent equality of all human beings. It does not assume that all are alike, but only that all are equal."[1045] "Between complete Socialism and Communism there is no difference whatever in my mind. Communism is, in fact, the completion of Socialism; when that ceases to be militant and becomes triumphant it will be Communism."[1046] "The vision of freedom is an ever-expanding conception of life and its possibilities. The slave dreams of emancipation, the emancipated workman of citizenship; the enfranchised citizen of Socialism; the Socialist of Communism."[1047] Some Socialists champion Communism because Communism, the equality of all, is "natural," whilst individualism is "unnatural": "Capitalistic individualism has no prototype in Nature and is therefore unnatural. But some opponent will say, 'It is here, and therefore it must be a natural product.' The answer is simple. It is here, but it is one of Nature's failures. We have seen how, low down in the organic scale, Nature makes many failures in order to achieve one success. Sometimes even millions perish in order that one of high type may survive. Nature always accomplishes her purposes in the end. We know that her aim is Communism, for some of the higher species have already reached it, and all are tending towards it."[1048] The assertion, "We know" (who are we?) "that Nature's aim is Communism," can hardly be called a sufficient scientific proof of the foregoing proposition. Other Socialists assert that Communism is in accordance with the Bible: "Christ's teaching is often said to be Socialistic. It is not Socialistic, but it is Communistic, and Communism is the most advanced form of the policy generally known as Socialism."[1049] A Socialist Bible student and very prolific writer says: "Can anything be conceived more diametrically opposed to the principle laid down by Christ than the present system, based as it is on the principle of competition? 'You are all brothers,' says Christ, and if all are brothers, then it needs no philosopher to tell us that all should work together for the common good."[1050] In support of this doctrine that Communism is in accordance with the Bible, the said writer quotes Acts iv. 32-35, "And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common. Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, and laid them down at the apostles' feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need."[1051] The Socialist can quote Scripture for his purpose--and misquote it too. Therefore the pious Socialist writer leaves out the lines which follow: "But a certain man named Ananias, with Sapphira his wife, sold a possession, and kept back part of the price."[1052] Will there be no Ananiases in the Socialist Commonwealth? Besides, the early Christian Communism was voluntary and dictated only by charity. It certainly was not enjoined as a religious duty.[1053] Lastly, the first Christian experiment in Communism proved immediately a failure, probably because there were many Ananiases, and because Communism is opposed to human nature and leads to poverty and strife, not to prosperity and peace. Hence, St. Paul founded no more Communist settlements, but collected everywhere for the "poor saints at Jerusalem" in order to relieve them in their "deep poverty," as may be seen in Romans xv. 26-27, 1 Corinthians xvi. 1-3, 2 Corinthians viii. and ix. To misquote Scripture in support of Socialist Communism with an attitude of deep piety is not only in bad taste, but also dishonest. It is cant and hypocrisy. Another prolific Socialist writer, under the title "Was Jesus a Socialist?" tells us that Socialism "claims complete equality of rewards for all members of society, not on any theologico-metaphysical ground, such as the Christian abstract principle of brotherhood, but because it sees men to have on the whole the same natural endowments, and the same natural needs."[1054] Have they? Considered merely as two-legged animals requiring only food, warmth, and shelter, men have not even the same physical needs. It is very difficult to make out a good case in favour of Communism, an equal reward for all, a doctrine which will be attractive only to the lowest rank of workers, the lazy, and the inefficient. Therefore Socialist Communists endeavour to make Communism appear more palatable to the active and the efficient by the lavish use of poetry and hyperbole. For instance, we learn: "He who makes the canvas is as useful as he that paints the picture. He who cleanses the sewer and prevents disease is as useful as the physician who cures the malady after it has been contracted."[1055] To learn painting or medicine requires at least ten years' study; sewer-cleaning requires no study. The offer of equal rewards for an hour's work at painting, at amputating in a hospital, and at cleaning sewers must be very attractive to sewermen. Will it prove equally attractive to surgeons and painters? Socialism is to be world-wide. Will the highly skilled British trade unionist agree to work side by side with unskilled Chinamen and for equal wages? In youth, as I lay dreaming, I saw a country fair. Where Plenty sheds its blessing down, And all have equal share. There Poverty's sad features Are never, never, seen; And each soul in the Brotherhood Scorns cunning arts or mean.[1056] I think skilled workers will hardly hail with enthusiasm the day of liberty and equality and of sewermen's wages all round, poetry notwithstanding. Other Socialists try to recommend Communism by a ridiculous and dishonest play upon words: "He who declares himself an enemy of Communism declares himself an enemy of common interest, an enemy of society and mankind. Whoever wishes to annihilate Communism will have to destroy the common roads, the schools, he will have to destroy the public gardens and parks, he will have to abolish the public baths, the theatres, the waterworks, all the public buildings; he will have to destroy the railroads, the telegraphs, the post-office. For all these belong to Communism."[1057] It would be as logical to say, "He who opposes Socialism will have to destroy the Royal Society, and all clubs, for all these are social institutions." The Social-Democratic Federation says about Communism: "Has there not always been the aggregation of wealth in the hands of a few in all stages of human society?--Certainly there has been a tendency to such concentration throughout history. In what did tribal society differ from civilised society?--Briefly, it differed in that its underlying principle was that of social solidarity and Communism. We may instance such examples as survived in the village communities of India before the establishment of British institutions; in the Russian Mir, in its older form; in the Arab tribal organisation and the Javan village communities."[1058] That "primitive Communism" of "tribal society," the organisation of savages and semi-savages, of the decadent and of the unfit, Socialists wish to foist upon a highly cultured nation. The above arguments, penned by the philosopher of British Socialism and the editor of "Justice" in recommendation of Communism, suffice to condemn it. We have a survival of ancient Communism in the Russian Mir, and to the Mir is the great backwardness of Russian agriculture chiefly to be attributed.[1059] The Russian peasants, recognising the disadvantages of the Communist Mir, are gradually abandoning it and converting common into individual properties. Nevertheless some Socialists have the hardihood to ascribe the universal disappearance of ancient Communism to the tyranny of man, not to the logic of facts and the action of Nature which replaces inefficient by efficient organisations. "There have been attempts in all ages to introduce some system of holding things in common in order to alleviate and soften the hard struggle with Nature for food, clothing, and shelter. This voluntary Communism rendered the workers too independent for the governing classes, and the jealousy of Church and State invariably destroyed it as the Russian village communes are now being destroyed by the Government."[1060] Another Socialist quotes with approval the pronouncement of Gregory the Great "Let them know that the earth from which they spring, and of which they are formed, belongs to all men in common, and that therefore the fruits which the earth brings forth must belong, without distinction, to all."[1061] China suffers from over-population and is very poor. Would the writer give to the Chinese a share of Great Britain's wealth since "the earth and its fruits belong without distinction to all?" Mr. Keir Hardie, M.P., who has apparently a somewhat elementary knowledge of ancient history, and who seems to rely for information on a primer such as "Little Willie's First History Book," recommends Communism because "In Sparta there were not only common lands, but also a common table, whilst dogs and horses were practically common property also. Sparta, which kept its Communism almost to the end, was also the Republic from which came the immortal heroes who made the pass of Thermopylae one of the great inspirations of the world."[1062] The Spartans were barbarians among the Greeks. Spartan Communism was founded on slavery and on the virtual community of women. Slave-murder, child-murder, rape, and theft were legally enjoined, and that is the community which Mr. Keir Hardie bids us consider as our model. Mr. Keir Hardie concludes: "We have seen how mankind when left free has always, and in all parts of the world, naturally turned to Communism. [Has it? When, and where?] That it will do so again is the most likely forecast of the future which can be made, and the great industrial organisations, the Trade Unions, the Co-operative Movement, the Friendly Orders, the Socialist organisations and the Labour party are each and all developing the feeling of solidarity and of mutual aid which will make the inauguration of Communism a comparatively easy task as the natural successor to State Socialism."[1063] The ideas of Socialists with regard to Communism are incredibly confused. For instance, we find in the same book the following contradictory statements describing Socialism: "Socialism is the common holding of the means of production and exchange, and _the holding of them for the equal benefit of all_"[1064] (the italics are in the original), and "To distribute the gifts of Nature justly according to the labour done by each in the collective search for them. This desire is Socialism."[1065] These absolutely contradictory statements, telling us that Socialism is both individualistic and that it is also Communistic, are taken from the fundamental book of the Fabian Society, the most scientific body of Socialists, and they have been reprinted again and again down to the edition bearing the imprint "43rd Thousand." Socialism is eternally between the horns of a dilemma. It promises to make all men happy. If it rewards men by results, the inefficient and the lazy will be dissatisfied. If it rewards all men alike (Communism), the efficient, able, and energetic will be dissatisfied. Reward by result will, in the absence of self-regulating commercial demand and supply, require an autocratic and absolute authority which arbitrarily apportions the unequal rewards of labour. It would be the tyranny of the few over the many, and would mean the abolition of democracy. Communism, equal rewards for all, would lead to the tyranny of the many over the few, and would stifle all motives to excel. Well might the Fabians ask: "Since we are too dishonest for Communism without taxation or compulsory labour, and too insubordinate to tolerate task work under personal compulsion, how can we order the transition so as to introduce just distribution without Communism and maintain the incentive to labour without mastership?"[1066] Unfortunately for the Socialists, that question is unanswerable. It is likely always to remain so, and the impossibility of answering it makes Socialism impossible. However, since Socialists wish to array the masses against the classes, the poor against the rich, they naturally incline, for tactical reasons rather than from honest conviction, to Communism, the worst of all tyrannies, and the most retrograde and inefficient of economic organisations. "Communism in proposing the appropriation of the results of the unequally productive labour for a uniformly equal distribution according to needs, seeks to establish a universal and monstrous appropriation by one set of persons of the surplus value belonging to others. Socialism would, in short, do to a far greater degree the very thing with which to-day it so indignantly and bitterly reproaches capitalism."[1067] Whilst Mr. Keir Hardie and his numerous followers enthusiastically support a free Communism in which "the rule of life will be--From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,"[1068] "the Fabian Society resolutely opposes all pretensions to hamper the Socialisation of industry with equal wages, equal hours of labour, equal official status, or equal authority for everyone. Such conditions are not only impracticable, but incompatible with the equality of subordination to the common interest which is fundamental in modern Socialism."[1069] The Communistic idea is not yet dead. The short-sightedness and folly of mankind is such that Communism, in spite of a record of more than 2,000 years of universal failure, is still a power to be reckoned with. Visionaries like Saint-Simon and Owen, and madmen like Fourier, are still able to lead the people astray. Fourier taught that Communism would alter not only man but the physical world as well. The duration of the human race on earth would be 80,000 years, divided into two periods of ascending and two of descending vibrations. Lions would be taught to draw waggons, as a symbol of the victory of man over Nature. Human life would on an average last 144 years. The aurora borealis, which now rarely appears in northern regions, would become permanently visible and be fixed at the Pole. It would give out, not only light, as at present, but also heat. It would decompose the sea water by the creation of citric boreal acid and convert it into a kind of lemonade which would dispense with the necessity of provisioning ships with fresh water. Oranges would grow in Siberia and tame whales would pull becalmed sailing-ships. The full indulgence of human nature in all its passions would produce happiness and virtue. Society would harmoniously be organised in groups (phalanxes) of 1,600 persons to inhabit a large palace called a phalanstery. If England would introduce these phalanxes, her labour would become so productive that she could pay off her national debt in six months by the sale of hens' eggs. Labour would be organised and occupation be changed every two hours. Workers would be taken in carriages to and from their work, and agricultural labourers would work under tents so as to be protected against the rain. The relations between the sexes would be of the freest. All should freely satisfy all their passions, and all passions would naturally combine in one grand harmony. The world would become a huge Republic which would be governed from Constantinople, and French would be the universal language.[1070] Notwithstanding the evident insanity of Fourier's proposals, and the almost equally extravagant proposals of Owen, more than a hundred phalansteries and other Communistic settlements were founded in Great Britain and elsewhere, especially in the United States. Their failure was universal and their immorality was very great.[1071] "The trouble with all the Fourierite communities was that they were fanciful and theoretical schemes, not simple and natural growths. They had little definite religious spirit to hold them together. They had little business headship. At the least discouragement and misfortune they melted away. Only religious communism, the facts seem to prove, can be successful."[1072] Only the communism of the convent and of the monastery, the equality of all based on a fervent religious belief, on a firm discipline, on an equal and absolute poverty, and on the almost insurmountable difficulty of re-entering the world, has hitherto proved practicable from the time of the Essenes to the present day. FOOTNOTES: [1034] Bebel, _Woman_, p. 178. [1035] Engels, _Socialism: Utopian and Scientific_, pp. 76, 77. [1036] Bebel, _Woman_, p. 212. [1037] Gronlund, _Co-operative Commonwealth_, p. 123 [1038] Mill, _Political Economy_, Book iii. ch. i. par. 2. [1039] _Palgrave's Dictionary of Political Economy_, vol. i. p. 297. [1040] Leatham, _Socialism and Character_, p. 89. [1041] Menger, _L'�tat Socialiste_, p. 35. [1042] Davidson, _The Old Order and the New_, p. 93. [1043] Davidson, _The Old Order and the New_, p. 94. [1044] Keir Hardie, _From Serfdom to Socialism_, p. 36. [1045] _Ibid._ p. 9. [1046] Morris, _Communism_, pp. 11, 12. [1047] Keir Hardie, _From Serfdom to Socialism_, p. 77. [1048] Connell, _Socialism and the Survival of the Fittest_, p. 19. [1049] Blatchford, _Real Socialism_, p. 5. [1050] Ward, _Are All Men Brothers?_ p. 19. [1051] Ward, _All Things in Common_, p. 5. [1052] Acts v. 1, 2. [1053] Acts v. 4. [1054] Leatham, _Was Jesus a Socialist?_ p. 5. [1055] Davidson, _The Old Order and the New_, p. 159. [1056] _Clarion Song Book_, p. 27. [1057] Sorge, _Socialism and the Workers_, p. 8 [1058] Bax and Quelch, _A New Catechism of Socialism_, pp. 20, 21. [1059] See Simkhowitsch, _Die Feldgemeinschaft_, 1898; Haxthausen, _Studien_, &c. [1060] Benson, _Socialism_, p. 4. [1061] Ward, _All Things in Common_, p. 1. [1062] Keir Hardie, _From Serfdom to Socialism_, p. 17. [1063] Keir Hardie, _From Serfdom to Socialism_, pp. 96, 97. [1064] _Fabian Essays in Socialism_, p. 212. [1065] _Ibid._ p. 4. [1066] B. Shaw, _The Impossibilities of Anarchism_, p. 17. [1067] Schäffle, _The Impossibility of Social Democracy_, p. 60. [1068] Keir Hardie, _From Serfdom to Socialism_, p. 89. [1069] _Report on Fabian Policy and Resolutions_, p. 7. [1070] See Fourier, _Oeuvres_; Pellarin, _Fourier_; Sargant, _Social Innovators_. [1071] See Noyes, _History of American Socialism_; Nordhoff, _Communistic Societies of the United States_. [1072] Bliss, _Encyclopedia of Social Reform_, p. 319. CHAPTER XXX SOCIALISM AND ANARCHISM Socialism is, on the whole, hostile to the State. All Socialists hate the State as at present constituted, because it protects the property which they wish to seize. However, many Socialists hate not only the State in its present form. They have become doubtful whether private capital or the State is the greater evil. They long for liberty, and would not welcome the restraint of any State, and least of all that of the absolute, all-regulating, and constantly interfering Socialistic State. Hence many Socialists have become Anarchists. Socialists may be divided into two classes--Communists and Anarchists--and Prince Kropotkin, the foremost Anarchist leader living, described the two Socialistic sections as follows: "A section of Socialists believes that it is impossible to attain Socialism without sacrificing personal liberty on the altar of the State. Another section, to which we belong, believes, on the contrary, that it is only by the abolition of the State, by the conquest of perfect liberty by the individual, by free agreement, association, and absolute free federation, that we can reach Communism."[1073] Many Socialists, seeing the enemy rather in the State than in private capital, express their passionate hatred of the State: "The State at present is simply a huge machine for robbing and slave-driving the poor by brute force."[1074] "The Parliament ever cries for more money, more money for the service of the State. Just heavens! Of what service is the State? Of very little service to honest, industrious men,"[1075] The philosopher of British Socialism frankly confesses himself a revolutionary Anarchist: "As an international revolutionist I have always been strongly sympathetic with all movements for local autonomy as most directly tending to destroy the modern 'nation' or centralised bureaucratic State."[1076] "It is quite true that Socialism will have to take over the accursed legacy of existing national frontiers from the bourgeois world-order; but Socialism will take it over merely with the view of killing it off and burying it at the earliest possible moment. The modern nation or centralised State is a hideous monstrosity, the offspring of capitalism in its various phases; in its present shape the outcome of the developed capitalism of the great industry. We quite admit that in form it may, and probably will, survive the earlier stage of Socialism, but its ultimate disappearance is none the less certain. The sentiment of the national patriotism will then, let us hope, be reduced to its last expression--the holding of annual dinners, or some harmless festivity of this sort, such as is affected by the natives of certain English counties resident in the metropolis. The Nationalist movement, therefore, is an old Radical 'plank' which clearly no longer belongs to us as Socialists."[1077] The Socialist-Anarchist hates State government in every form. To him a Social-Democratic State is quite as hateful as any other form of government: "The State is the evil, the inveterate foe of labour--be the Government Autocratic, Bureaucratic, or Social-Democratic. For what, after all, is our vaunted nose-counting, majority-ridden Democracy but an expansion of the old-time tyranny of monarch and oligarch, inasmuch as the Governmentalist, whatever his stripe, is doomed to act on the two root principles of statecraft--force and fraud? And, obviously, so long as that is so, his particular profession of political faith is almost a matter of indifference."[1078] "What was, what is the State, wherever it exists, but a community of human beings barbarically held together by a well-drilled gang of magistrates, soldiers, policemen, gaolers, and hangmen?"[1079] Mr. Blatchford, who is apparently never quite sure in his mind whether he is a Socialist, a Communist, or an Anarchist, gives voice to his Anarchist sentiments in the words: "Rightly or wrongly, I am opposed to godship, kingship, lordship, priestship. Rightly or wrongly, I am opposed to imperialism, militarism, and conquest. Rightly or wrongly, I am for universal brotherhood and universal freedom."[1080] Another influential Socialist writer exclaims: "What is freedom but the unfettered use of all the powers which God for use has given?"[1081]--a sentiment which is heartily endorsed by all Anarchists. However, the unfettered use of all powers means that the will of the individual, not the will of society, is the supreme law. It means the denial of the supremacy of society, the State, government. Similar sentiments are expressed with greater energy and greater fulness by many Socialist writers. Mr. Davidson, for instance, says: "In the new order every man (woman, of course, included) will be his own legislator. In the state of ultimate and universal freedom to which we aspire, when the greatest of all tyrants, poverty, is slain and plenty sits on the throne which the lean monster has so long usurped--it may well be that there shall be no necessity for any law except that which the purified conscience of every individual man and woman will readily supply. Then will have come the true Golden Age, the millennium of Christian Anarchism."[1082] The claims, programme, and aims of Socialism and Anarchism are curiously alike. Prince Kropotkin, the leading exponent of Anarchism, writes: "Anarchy appears as a constituent part of the new philosophy, and that is why Anarchists come in contact on so many points with the greatest thinkers and poets of the present day. In fact, it is certain that in proportion as the human mind frees itself from ideas inculcated by minorities of priests, military chiefs, and judges, all striving to establish their domination, and of scientists paid to perpetuate it, a conception of society arises, in Which conception there is no longer room for those dominating minorities. A society entering into possession of the social capital accumulated by the labour of preceding generations, organises itself so as to make use of this capital in the interests of all, and constitutes itself without reconstituting the power of the ruling minorities. Acknowledging as a fact the equal rights of all its members to the treasures accumulated in the past, it no longer recognises a division between exploited and exploiters, governed and governors, dominated and dominators, and it seeks to establish a certain harmonious compatibility in its midst not by subjecting all its members to an authority that is fictitiously supposed to represent society, not by trying to establish uniformity, but by urging all men to develop free initiative, free action, free association."[1083] There is little difference between the Anarchism of Proudhon, Bakounin, and Kropotkin, and the Socialism of many British Socialists. The economic doctrines of Socialism and Anarchism are practically identical. Socialism has taken the most important doctrines from Proudhon,[1084] and, owing to the similarity of their views and aims, Socialists and Anarchists are commingling and fraternising. Anarchists see in Socialists a wing of the great Anarchist army of destruction, and Socialists see in Anarchists associates and friends and partners in the revolution and general pillage which both movements equally strongly desire to bring about. Therefore a leading Fabian Socialist tells us: "Kropotkin is really an advocate of free Democracy, and I venture to suggest that he describes himself as an Anarchist rather from the point of view of the Russian recoiling from a despotism compared to which Democracy seems to be no government at all, than from the point of view of the American or Englishman who is free enough already to begin grumbling over Democracy as 'the tyranny of the majority' and 'the coming slavery.'"[1085] If Kropotkin is a "Democrat," then Ravachol, Vaillant, Henry, Pallas, and Bresci were also merely Democrats. British Anarchists are closely watching the British Socialist Labour movement, which they wish to lead into Anarchist channels. Thus we learn from an Anarchist monthly: "The question of the position to be taken in relation to the labour movement is certainly one of the greatest importance to Anarchists. It does not suffice for us to form groups for propaganda and for revolutionary action. We must convert as far as possible the mass of the workers, because without them we can neither overthrow the existing society nor reconstitute a new one. And since to rise from the submissive state in which the great majority of the proletarians now vegetate to a conception of Anarchism and a desire for its realisation, is required an evolution which generally is not passed through under the sole influence of the propaganda; since the lessons derived from the facts of daily life are more efficacious than all doctrinaire preaching, it is for us to take an active part in the life of the masses and to use all the means which circumstances permit to gradually awaken the spirit of revolt, and to show by these facts the path which leads to emancipation. Amongst these means the Labour movement stands first, and we should be wrong to neglect it. In this movement we find numbers of workers who struggle for the amelioration of their conditions. They may be mistaken as to the aim they have in view and as to the means of attaining it, and in our view they generally are. But at least they no longer resign themselves to oppression nor regard it as just--they hope and they struggle. We can more easily arouse in them that feeling of solidarity towards their exploited fellow-workers and of hatred against exploitation, which must lead to a definitive struggle for the abolition of all domination of man over man."[1086] Anarchists therefore constantly try to influence the British Socialist Labour movement. When, for instance, in the autumn of 1907 the possibility of a railway strike was being discussed, Anarchists did their best to bring about a revolutionary struggle: "The railway crisis must have shown very clearly that if the men had but the will, they have the power to bring about at any time a revolutionary situation in the struggle of labour against capital. Some day they will have to do this, for the conditions of the conflict will leave them no choice. They will perhaps learn also that the glorification of a man like Bell--whose fooling of their cause is his method of advertisement--means putting powers into one man's hands that no man ought to possess. Nothing could be more absurd than the prolongation of this 'crisis' which has been done so that one man might have the centre of the stage, while hundreds of thousands of men toil on in suspense. Bell is everything: the workers are mere cyphers. Yet this man is mistrusted by many; and everyone knows how on occasion he can join the feast of the directors and be one of them. And if generalship were needed, what an ass this would be to attempt to lead the men to victory! Successful strikes are never made by the farcical tactics of a Bell. Recognition, forsooth! They'll recognise you when you strike. Workers, watch your leaders!"[1087] In view of the connection existing between British Socialism and Anarchism, it is but natural that Socialists have become the apologists of Anarchism. "The vulgar notion that Anarchism is a synonym for disorder is as nearly as possible the reverse of the truth. It is Governments and Laws that do all the mischief. They produce the very evils they pretend to remedy."[1088] "Verily the State is the evil. Back to the land. Back to the simple life. Away with Governments, palavers, Dumas, and Courts of Law. Long live the Commune."[1089] Anarchists contend that the "Social Revolution" for which most Socialists strive will become an Anarchist revolution: "If the workers succeed by revolt in destroying the mutual insurance society of landlords, bankers, priests, judges, and soldiers; if the people become masters of their destiny for a few months, and lay hands on the riches they have created and which belong to them by right--will they really begin to reconstitute that blood-sucker, the State[1090]?" "On the day when ancient institutions splinter into fragments before the axe of the proletariat, voices will be heard shouting: Bread for all! Lodging for all! Right for all to the comforts of life! And these voices will be heeded. The people will say to themselves: Let us begin by satisfying our thirst for the life, the joy, the liberty we have never known. And when all have tasted happiness we will set to work; the work of demolishing the last vestiges of middle-class rule, with its account-book morality, its philosophy of debit and credit, its institutions of mine and thine. 'While we throw down we shall be building' as Proudhon said, 'we shall build in the name of Communism and of Anarchy."[1091] Anarchists are authorities on revolutions. Very likely Prince Kropotkin's view is right. There are two kinds of Anarchists: Philosophic Anarchists who propagate their views by speech and pen, and Anarchists of action who propagate their views by dynamite and dagger, and the former are responsible for the crimes of the latter. Many British Socialists defend not only philosophic Anarchism, but also that form of Anarchism which finds its expression in murder. Leading British Socialists refer, for instance, to the four Anarchists, Spies, Fischer, Engel, and Parsons, the heroes of the Chicago bomb outrage, who were responsible for the death of six policemen and for the wounding of about sixty, and who were hanged in November 1886 in Chicago, as "martyrs,"[1092] and British Socialists are urged to follow the glorious footsteps of the Chicago Anarchists: Then on to revolution, boys! Keep Freedom's highway broad. The path where Spies and Parsons fell--as fearlessly they trod; And though we fall as they fell--millions follow on the road, To carry the Red Flag to victory.[1093] The sympathy which British Socialists feel for the Chicago Anarchists arises from the similarity of their aims. The programme of the American Anarchists was, according to the Pittsburg proclamation, as follows: (1) Destruction of the existing class rule, by all means, _i.e._ by energetic, relentless, revolutionary, and international action. (2) Establishment of a free Society based upon co-operative organisation of production. (3) Free exchange of equivalent products by and between the productive organisations without commerce and profit-mongery. (4) Organisation of education on a secular, scientific, and equal basis for both sexes. (5) Equal rights for all without distinction of sex or race. (6) Regulation of all public affairs by free contracts between the autonomous (independent) communes and associations resting on a federalists basis.[1094] The attitude of many leading British Socialists towards the murdering of monarchs and statesmen may be gauged from the following extracts: "On the occasion of the assassination of any potentate or statesman, the public opinion of the possessing class and its organs is lashed up to a white heat of artificial fury and indignation against the perpetrator, while they have nothing but approbation for the functionary--military or civil--who puts to death a fellow-creature in the course of what they are pleased to call his duty. Evidently force and bloodshed, when contrary to the interests of the possessing class, is a monstrous crime, but when it is in their favour it becomes a duty and a necessity."[1095] "We believe the 'potting' of the 'heads' of States to be a foolish and reprehensible policy, but the matter does not concern us as Socialists. We have our own quarrel with the Anarchists, both as to principles and tactics, but that is no reason why, as certain persons seem to think, we should put on sackcloth and ashes, and dissolve ourselves in tears because, say, M. Carnot or the head of any other State has been assassinated by Anarchists. What is Carnot to us or we to Carnot, that we should weep for him? We do not specially desire the death of political personages, while we often regret their slaying on grounds of expediency, if on no others. But at the same time Socialists have no sentimental tears to waste over the heads of States and their misfortunes. To the Socialist the head of a State, as such, is simply a figure-head to whose fate he is indifferent--a ninepin representing the current political and social order."[1096] We're low, we're low, we're very very low. And yet when the trumpets ring. The thrust of a poor man's arm will go Through the heart of the proudest king.[1097] The "Socialist Annual" contains in its calendar pages numerous items under the heading "For the Working Class to Remember," which is filled with Socialist dates such as "birth of Mr. Blatchford," and with the records of the most conspicuous Anarchist, Nihilist, and Revolutionary crimes. Details regarding the deeds of Orsini and Louise Michel, Jack Cade and Wat Tyler, the execution of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, the assassination of Presidents Lincoln, McKinley, and Carnot, the attempt on King Alfonso, and other facts are there recorded--"for the working class to remember." Earlier or later the Socialist-Communist-Anarchist agitation in Great Britain may, and very likely will, lead to Anarchist outrages. FOOTNOTES: [1073] Prince Kropotkin, _Anarchism_, p. 16. [1074] B. Shaw, _The Impossibilities of Anarchism_, p. 24. [1075] Davidson, _The Democrat's Address_, p. 15. [1076] Bax, _Paris Commune_, p. 35. [1077] Bax, _Essays in Socialism_, pp. 98, 99. [1078] Davidson, _Christ, State, and Commune_, pp. 16, 17. [1079] _Ibid._ p. 6. [1080] Blatchford, _God and My Neighbour_, p. 195. [1081] Thompson, _That Blessed Word Liberty_, p. 13. [1082] Davidson, _The Old Order and the New_, p. 172. [1083] Kropotkin, _Anarchism_, p. 8. [1084] Brockhaus, _Konversations Lexikon_, vol. i. p. 578. [1085] Shaw, _The Impossibilities of Anarchism_, p. 26. [1086] _Freedom_, November 1907. [1087] _Freedom_, November 1907. [1088] Davidson, _Christ, State, and Commune_, p. 22. [1089] _Ibid._ p. 31. [1090] Kropotkin, _Anarchism_, p. 19. [1091] Kropotkin, _The Wage System_, p. 15. [1092] See Leatham, _Lives of the Chicago Martyrs_. [1093] _Social-Democratic Federation Song Book_, p. 35. [1094] Bliss, _Encyclopedia of Social Reform_, p. 63. [1095] Bax and Quelch, _A New Catechism of Socialism_, p. 31. [1096] Bax, _A Short History of the Paris Commune_, p. 78. [1097] _Independent Labour Party Song Book_, p. 33. CHAPTER XXXI SOCIALISM AND REVOLUTION The "Socialist Catechism" contains the following passage: "Q. How are forms of government changed so as to readjust them to the economical changes in the forms of production which have been silently evolving in the body of society? A. By means of revolution.--Q. Give an instance of this? A. The French Revolution of 1789."[1098] Many British Socialists are revolutionaries. They hope to introduce Socialism into Great Britain by revolutionary means. They have studied the French revolutions, and have become pupils of the French revolutionary leaders. "Socialism is essentially revolutionary, politically and economically, as it aims at the complete overthrow of existing economic and political conditions. We should organise and be prepared for what might be described as a revolutionary outbreak. The economic changes which are taking place, and the corresponding changes in other conditions, are bringing about a revolutionary transformation in human society, and what we have to do is to help on this development, and to prepare the way for it."[1099] "We Socialists are not reformers; we are revolutionists. We Socialists do not propose to change forms. We care nothing for forms. We want a change of the inside of the mechanism of society; let the form take care of itself."[1100] British Socialism was founded by revolutionary Communists. Marx was a revolutionary. "For a number of years the late William Morris, the greatest man whom the Socialist movement has yet claimed in this country, held and openly preached this doctrine of cataclysmic upheaval and sudden overthrow of the ruling classes."[1101] That idea has been revived by modern British Socialists, many of whom believe that "The only effective way to induce the ruling class to attempt to palliate the evils of their system is to organise the workers for the overthrow of that system."[1102] "In the International Socialist movement we are at last in the presence of a force which is gathering unto itself the rebel spirits of all lands and uniting them into a mighty host to do battle, not for the triumph of a sect, or of a race, but for the overthrow of a system which has filled the world with want and woe. 'Workers of the world, unite!' wrote Karl Marx; 'you have a world to win and nothing to lose but your chains.' And they are uniting under the crimson banner of a world-embracing principle which knows nor sect, nor creed, nor race, and which offers new life and hope to all created beings--the glorious gospel of Socialism."[1103] In many respects the French Revolution has served as a model to British Socialists of the Anarchist-Revolutionary type. They have adopted its outward emblems, its songs, and its most effective catch-phrases: "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity was the brave and splendid legend inscribed on the blood-red banners of the French Revolutionists. And in strange ways the oppressed and hunger-maddened people sought to realise their ideal. It is still the battle-cry of the English Socialists--indeed, of the world-wide Socialist movement."[1104] In the Socialist song-books a translation of the "Marseillaise" is to be found, which is sung at Socialist gatherings: Shall hateful tyrants, mischief-breeding, With hireling hosts, a ruffian band, Affright and desolate the land, While Peace and Liberty lie bleeding? To arms! to arms, ye brave! The avenging sword unsheathe! March on! March on! all hearts resolved On Liberty or death.[1105] In the eyes of many British Socialists the French Revolution was not sufficiently democratic, not sufficiently radical, not sufficiently violent. We are told that the French revolutionaries were soft-hearted men, and that our sympathy with their innocent victims, such as Queen Marie Antoinette, is quite uncalled for. "The Revolution was in its conception, its inception, and its results a middle-class revolution. The revolution was inaugurated by the Parliament of Paris--a pettifogging legal assembly. Marie Antoinette was but one fine useless woman among the millions, and she personified the heedless prodigal selfishness of autocracy. We of the Socialist movement, who are full of the idea of social service, of making a full return to society for the bread we eat, the clothes we wear out, and the house-room we occupy, how can we be expected to think so much of the suffering of one idle extravagant woman and so little of the age-long privation and torture of the hard-working useful mothers and sisters of France? The crimes of ignorant, passionate democracy, of which Burke and Carlyle have made so much, are as a drop in the ocean by comparison with the deliberate enormities perpetrated by enlightened cold-blooded autocracy, from Herod to Nicholas. The democracy has always been pitiful, extremely pitiful. Even the September massacres, carried out by the lowest of the low in an enraged and degraded and terror-stricken populace, are brightened by golden patches of clemency and love such as the annals of class punishment nowhere reveal."[1106] The outbreak of the Paris Commune of 1871, having been less a "middle-class" revolution, is considered by Socialists with greater approval than the French Revolution of 1789. The philosopher of British Socialism writes: "The Commune of Paris is the one event which Socialists throughout the world have agreed with single accord to celebrate. Every 18th of March witnesses thousands of gatherings throughout the civilised world to commemorate the (alas! only temporary) victory of organised Socialist aspiration over the forces of property and privilege in 1871."[1107] Another leading Socialist writer says: "Year by year as the 18th of March comes round, it is the custom with Socialists to commemorate the proclamation of the Commune of Paris. As a Socialist I am a friend of the Commune."[1108] What was the Paris Commune, and what did it do? In the words of an impartial publication, "The Communard chiefs were revolutionaries of every sect, who, disagreeing on governmental and economic principles, were united in their vague but perpetual hostility to the existing order of things. History has rarely known a more unpatriotic crime than that of the insurrection of the Commune."[1109] "The Commune was an insurrection which initiated a series of terrible outrages by the murder of the two generals Lecomte and Thomas.... The incapacity and mutual hatred of their chiefs rendered all organisation and durable resistance impossible.... The Communists were committing the most horrible excesses: the Archbishop of Paris, President Bonjean, priests, magistrates, journalists, and private individuals, whom they had seized as hostages, were shot in batches in prisons, and a scheme of destruction was ruthlessly carried into effect by men and women with cases of petroleum. The Hôtel de Ville, the Palais de Justice, the Tuileries, the Ministry of Finance, the Palace of the Legion of Honour, that of the Council of State, part of the Rue de Rivoli, &c., were ravaged by the flames; barrels of gunpowder were placed in Notre Dame and the Pantheon ready to blow up the buildings, and the whole city would have been involved in ruin if the national troops had not gained a last and crowning victory."[1110] Socialists have nothing but praise for the Communards, who killed and burned, desecrated the churches and devastated the town. They speak with enthusiasm of the leaders of that outbreak as of heroes who fought for the "Brotherhood of Man," and they exalt them above the saints of early Christianity. The philosopher of British Socialism exclaims: "Limitless courage and contempt of death was displayed in defence of an ideal, the colossal proportions of which dwarf everything in history, and which alone suffices to redeem the sordidness of the nineteenth century. Here was a heroism in the face of which the much-belauded Christian martyrs cut a very poor figure."[1111] "It was in the Commune that we saw manifested as never before the strong compelling force of a secular altruism. Without hope of heaven and without fear of hell, men lived and died for the idea of a brotherhood of self-governing and self-respecting men and women."[1112] Even the murderous Paris Commune was too moderate for the taste of many British Socialists, who favour sterner measures. The philosopher of British Socialism informs us; "The Commune had one special fault, that of a fatuous moderation in all its doings. Probably never since history began have any body of men allowed themselves and theirs to be treated as lambs in the slaughterhouse with more lamb-like forbearance and absence of retaliation than the Commune and its adherents; we have seen this illustrated by the incredible fact that up to the last, amid all the slaughterings of Communists, the vast majority of the hostages and prisoners in its hands remained unscathed."[1113] "One of the most unfortunate characteristics of the leaders of the Commune was their sensitiveness to bourgeois public opinion. The first thing for the leader of a revolutionary movement to learn is a healthy contempt for the official public opinion of the 'civilised world.' He must resolutely harden his heart against its 'thrills of horror,' its 'indignation,' its 'abomination,' and its 'detestation,' and he must learn to smile at all the names it will liberally shower upon him and his cause."[1114] Whilst the revolutionary criminals who ruled by murder and arson were heroes and martyrs, the defenders of law and order were criminals according to British Socialists: "The thirst of the well-to-do classes for the blood of the Communards was insatiable. The latter were tried and shot in batches."[1115] "The Communards, desperate as they were, only faintly imitated the wholesale savagery of the regular troops."[1116] Peaceful M. Thiers, being at the head of the government, was "probably the cleverest, most hypocritical, and most unscrupulous villain that ever denied the pages of history."[1117] Although Socialists pose as democrats, they do not believe in majority government.[1118] Being aware that they will hardly be able to gain over the majority of the people to their revolutionary and visionary plans, they may, like the Paris Commune, try to force Socialism upon an unwilling majority. Therefore the attempt of the Parisian Socialists to overrule France is not condemned but regretted by the British Socialists: "The revolt was open to the objection that may be urged against most insurrections. It was an attempt to impose the will of a minority on a large majority of the people. The Socialists in the Commune must have realised at times that the people of France were not prepared for even the small instalments of Socialism which they sought to introduce. The revolutionists may have thought to impose their policy upon France by a mere _coup de main_."[1119] The attitude of Socialists makes it appear possible that the revolutionary outbreak of 1871 will not be the last. The next revolutionary attempt may conceivably take place in Great Britain. "One man with an idea in his head is in danger of being considered a madman; two men with the same idea in common may be foolish, but can hardly be mad; ten men sharing an idea begin to act; a hundred draw attention as fanatics, a thousand and society begins to tremble, a hundred thousand and there is war abroad."[1120] "Whilst our backers at the polls are counted by tens, we must continue to crawl and drudge and lecture as best we can. When they are counted by hundreds, we can permeate and trim and compromise. When they rise to tens of thousands, we shall take the field as an independent party. Give us hundreds of thousands, as you can if you try hard enough, and we will ride the whirlwind and direct the storm."[1121] FOOTNOTES: [1098] Joynes, _A Socialist Catechism_, p. 13. [1099] Bax and Quelch, _A New Catechism of Socialism_, p. 37. [1100] De Leon, _Reform or Revolution_, p. 3. [1101] Keir Hardie, _From Serfdom to Socialism_, p. 23. [1102] _Socialist Standard_, October 1, 1907. [1103] Keir Hardie, _From Serfdom to Socialism_, p. 86. [1104] Ethel Snowden, _The Woman Socialist_, p. 10. [1105] _Independent Labour Party Song Book_, p. 20. [1106] Leatham, _French Revolution_, pp. 13, 14. [1107] Bax, _Paris Commune_, Preface. [1108] Leatham, _The Commune of Paris_, p. 3. [1109] _Encyclopædia Britannica_, vol. xxviii. p. 480. [1110] _Encyclopædia Britannica_, vol. xviii. p. 294. [1111] Bax, _Paris Commune_, p. 59. [1112] Leatham, _The Commune of Paris_, p. 18. [1113] Bax, _Paris Commune_, p. 74. [1114] _Ibid._ p. 88. [1115] Leatham, _The Commune of Paris_, p. 13. [1116] _Ibid._ p. 19. [1117] Bax, _Paris Commune_, p. 86. [1118] See Chapters XV. and XXX. _ante._ [1119] Leatham, _The Commune of Paris_, p. 15. [1120] Morris, _Art, Labour, and Socialism_, p. 24. [1121] Shaw, _The Fabian Society and its Early History_, p. 28. CHAPTER XXXII STATE SOCIALISM Most Socialist agitators in Great Britain oppose and condemn State Socialism for two reasons: firstly, because, owing to their Communist and Anarchist leanings, they oppose and hate the State as such, as has been shown in the Chapters on "Socialism and Communism," "Socialism and Anarchism," "Socialism and Revolution"; secondly, because with the introduction of State Socialism their occupation would be gone. Socialist agitators do not wish others to govern the State. They wish to govern it themselves. The welfare of the masses is to them apparently only a secondary consideration. Hence most British Socialist agitators condemn the State Socialism of Germany, though it has greatly benefited the masses, and perhaps because it has greatly benefited the masses. They also condemn the British Post Office, although, being not overburdened with scruples, they praise it to the skies as a Socialistic model institution when it happens to suit them. In fact, most Socialist leaders condemn all existing Government institutions, ostensibly because they are capitalistic enterprises which are run at a "profit," and because they "exploit" their workers. It would of course be fatal to the Socialist agitators had they to preach the gospel of envy and hatred, of destruction and pillage, to the contented. "The State of to-day, nationally and locally, is only the agent of the possessing class."[1122] "Mere nationalisation or mere municipalisation of any industry is not Socialism or Collectivism; it may be only the substitution of corporate for private administration; the social idea and purpose with which Collectivism is concerned may be completely absent."[1123] "Mere Statification, as we may term it, does not mean Socialism. The State of to-day is mainly an agent of the possessing classes, and industrial or commercial undertakings run to-day by Governmental bodies are largely run in the interests of these classes. Their aim in all cases is to show a profit, in the same way as ordinary capitalistic enterprises. This profit accrues to the possessing classes in the form of relief of imperial or local taxation, mainly paid by them, interests on loans, &c. In other words, these industrial undertakings are run for profit and not for use, and their employees are little, if at all, better off than those of private employers."[1124] "The modern State is but the organisation which capitalist society gives itself in order to maintain the external conditions of capitalist production against the attacks both of the workmen and of individual capitalists. The modern State, whatever its form, is essentially a capitalist machine."[1125] "State administration is very far from being the same as a Socialistic administration, as is sometimes erroneously supposed. The State administration is just as much a system of capitalistic exploitation as if the institutions in question were in the hands of private undertakers."[1126] "A bureaucracy--that is, a body of permanent officials, entrenched in Government departments, according to whose piping ministers themselves have willingly or unwillingly to dance--is totally incompatible with the very elementary conditions of Socialistic administration."[1127] "Bismarckian State control is brusque and baneful, and is certainly not the desire of the true Socialist."[1128] "State ownership, State tyranny, State interference exist to-day. We have to bear them now; we have to submit to them now; we have to pay for them now. The people, as such, own nothing. And the Socialists demand that the people shall own everything. Not the 'State,' the 'People.' So great is the difference between the word 'State' and the word 'people.'"[1129] "Do you propose that all these means of production which are now owned by individuals, by this class, as you say, should be made the property of the Government, like the Post Office and the telegraph system are in this country, and the railways as well in some others, or that they should be owned by municipal bodies, as waterworks, tramways, gasworks, and so on, are in many cases already?--No. Socialism does not mean mere Governmental ownership or management. The State of to-day, nationally or locally, is only the agent of the possessing class; the Post Office and the other State-owned businesses are run for profit just as other businesses are; and the Government, as the agent of the possessing class, has, in the interests of its employers, to treat the employees just as other employees are treated. The organised democratic society contemplated by Socialists is a very different thing from the class State of to-day. When society is organised for the control of its own business, and has acquired the possession of its own means of production, its officers will not be the agents of a class, and production will be carried on for the use of all and not for the profit of a few."[1130] "The Post Office to-day is an organised sweating-den. The Government get the largest possible amount of work for the lowest possible wages. That is capitalist wage-slavery under Government control."[1131] "The country postman has to walk excessive distances for miserable wages in order that the profit on the Post Office may be filched from the employees and from the public by the Chancellor of the Exchequer."[1132] The Fabians, on the other hand, advocate State Socialism, but they are a small minority. "The Socialism advocated by the Fabian Society is State Socialism exclusively."[1133] Some Socialists would welcome State Socialism in the hope that it would prepare the way for free Communism. Mr. Keir Hardie, for instance, says: "State Socialism with all its drawbacks, and these I frankly admit, will prepare the way for free Communism, in which the rule, not merely the law of the State, but the rule of life will be--From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."[1134] "Socialists only believe in the fraternal State. Paternal State Socialism all Socialists unanimously oppose."[1135] FOOTNOTES: [1122] Bax and Quelch, _A New Catechism of Socialism_, p. 8. [1123] Ball, _The Moral Aspects of Socialism_, p. 9. [1124] Bax, _Essays in Socialism_, p. 7. [1125] Engels, _Development of Socialism from Utopia to Science_, p. 71. [1126] Bebel, _Woman_, pp. 198, 199. [1127] Bax, _Essays in Socialism_, p. 9. [1128] Ben Tillett, _Trades Unionism and Socialism_, p. 14. [1129] _Clarion_, October 18, 1907. [1130] Bax and Quelch, _A New Catechism of Socialism_, pp. 8, 9. [1131] Hyndman, _Social-Democracy_, p. 22. [1132] _Fabian Election Manifesto_, 1892, p. 3. [1133] _Report on Fabian Policy_, 1896, p. 5. [1134] Keir Hardie, _From Serfdom to Socialism_, p. 89. [1135] Bliss, _Encyclopedia of Social Reform_, p. 1262. CHAPTER XXXIII THE SOCIALIST ORGANISATIONS: THEIR MUTUAL RELATIONS AND THEIR POLICY The Social-Democratic Federation is the most honest and straightforward of the various Socialist organisations. Its aims are revolutionary, as the following statement proves: "The Social-Democratic Federation is a militant Socialist organisation whose members--men and women--belong almost entirely to the working classes. Its object is the realisation of Socialism--the emancipation of the working class from its present subjection to the capitalist class. The means by which it seeks to attain that end are: agitation, education, and the organisation of the working class into a class-conscious political party--that is, a party clearly conscious of the present position of the workers as a subject class, in consequence of all the means of production being owned and controlled by another class, and clearly conscious of its duty and mission to free them from that position by the conquest of all the powers of the State, and by making all the means of production collective common property, to be used for the benefit of all instead of for the profit of a class. To this end the Social-Democratic Federation proclaims and preaches the class war."[1136] "According to the report for the year ending March 1907 it has 186 branches and affiliated societies. One of its members sits in Parliament as a member of the Labour party, and about 120 are members of various local bodies. Its gross income and expenditure through, out the country is estimated at _15,500l._ It has a weekly paper, 'Justice,' and a monthly magazine, 'The Social-Democrat.'[1137] "In its own estimation "Justice" is "the most respected of Socialist newspapers."[1138] The various Socialist organisations do not love each other. The Fabian Society caustically remarks: "The Federation runs a newspaper called 'Justice' which has not hitherto been worth a penny to any man whose pence are so scarce as a labourer's, and which has made repeated attacks on the ordinary working-class organisations without whose co-operation Socialists can at present do nothing except cry in the wilderness. The branches are expected to sell this paper at their meetings."[1139] "The Social-Democratic Federation is virtually the oldest Socialist society and is certainly the most conservative. It was founded as the Democratic Federation about 1880, and adopted its present name in 1884. Mr. H.M. Hyndman, its most prominent member, imported its doctrines--which were of German origin--and the S.D.F. (as it is familiarly called) has ever since endeavoured to maintain an unshaken faith in all the teachings of Karl Marx. In fact, the S.D.F. changes its doctrines not with the times, but a dozen years or so after; so that it is always rather out of touch with the actualities of politics and attracts the type of mind that prefers clear-cut principles to practical political progress."[1140] Other Socialist organisations which are less straightforward than the Social-Democratic Federation hide their identity and object under misleading titles. The Independent Labour Party, for instance, is a purely Socialist party notwithstanding its name. "Its object is, an Industrial Commonwealth founded upon the Socialisation of land and capital. Its methods are the education of the community in the principles of Socialism; the industrial and political organisation of the workers; the independent representation of Socialist principles on all elective bodies."[1141] "No one will find much difference in the programmes of the Social-Democratic Federation and the Independent Labour Party."[1142] "The Independent Labour Party, commonly called the I.L.P., which must be carefully distinguished from the Labour party, is much the largest, and politically the most important, Socialist organisation. It was founded at Bradford in 1892, by Mr. Keir Hardie, M.P., and others, and it has from the first advocated Socialism of the English type and endeavoured to work in harmony with trade unionists. The Labour party is mainly due to its initiative, and through its members in trade unions it largely controls the policy of the party. In August 1907 it had over 700 branches, of which 155 had been formed in the preceding six months. Its operations have recently expanded with extraordinary rapidity, its central office expenditure for the years ending February 28 having been _955l._ in 1905, _1,817l._ in 1906, and _3,552l._ in 1907. It does a very large business in the publication and sale of pamphlets and books, and has a weekly paper, "The Labour Leader." At the general election of 1906, eighteen of its members were returned to Parliament, all belonging to the Labour party, and two more have since been elected, one for the Labour party, and one, Mr. Victor Grayson, as an independent Socialist. Over five hundred of its members sit on town councils and other local bodies. The total membership is estimated at 40,000, and its income and expenditure at perhaps _100,000l._"[1143] "The Independent Labour Party was formed in January 1893. As years have passed the Independent Labour Party has steadily strengthened its programme, until it is to-day entirely Socialist, but it has not quite got rid of the strain of opportunism, at elections its independence being more in evidence in its name than in its conduct."[1144] Wishing to secure Socialist and non-Socialist adherents, and masquerading as a Liberal Labour party, the attitude of the Independent Labour Party is not a straightforward one. One of its competitors states: "The Independent Labour Party has continued its policy of bargain-making with capitalist politicians. The leaders at times call themselves Socialists, and at other times protest against frightening their supporters by introducing the word into resolutions. At the general election, Mr. Ramsay Macdonald at Leicester, and Mr. James Parker at Halifax, were amongst the candidates who entered into compacts with the Liberals. At the Amsterdam International Congress they voted for a resolution extolling the 'tried and victorious policy based on the class war,' and on their return to England referred to the class war as a 'shibboleth' and as a 'reactionary and Whiggish precept, certain to lead the movement away from the real aims of Socialism.'"[1145] The Fabian Society is the least open and the least straightforward Socialist organisation. Ostensibly it adopted its curious name because "for the right moment you must wait, as Fabius did most patiently when warring against Hannibal, though many censured his delays; but when the time comes you must strike hard as Fabius did, or your waiting will be in vain, and fruitless."[1146] In reality the misleading title was probably adopted because the Fabian Society habitually and on principle sails under a false flag, wishing not to arouse suspicion as to its objects. The object of the small but powerful Fabian Society is a peculiar one: "Founded on a small scale in 1884 and actually the oldest of the three great Socialist organisations, the Fabian Society has never aimed at a large membership or endeavoured to become a political party. Its work has been mainly educational, its endeavour to translate the principles of Socialism into practical politics suited to English conditions. From the first it refused to accept Marxian teaching. The Fabian Society is not a political body, in that it allows its members complete freedom to adopt any method of carrying out the principles they profess. Hence its members in Parliament belong to the Liberal or the Labour party, and they sit as Progressives on London local bodies. The Society is mainly middle-class, and the majority of its members belong to London, where fortnightly meetings are held for the discussion of Socialism. Its great force lies in the ability of many of its members, some of whom, Mr. Bernard Shaw, the dramatist; Mr. Sidney Webb, the political writer; Sir Sydney Olivier, now Governor of Jamaica, have belonged to it from the start; whilst others, such as Mr. H.G. Wells and the Rev. R.J. Campbell, are more recent recruits. Recently it has greatly increased its membership, now nearly 2,000, and has formed substantial branches in the Universities and in many large towns. Eleven of its members sit in Parliament."[1147] "The chief object to which the Society devotes its resources is the education of the people in political, economic, and social subjects. To effect this purpose it must in the first place educate itself by the discussion of those problems which from time to time appear ripe for solution. Its members therefore undertake the study of such problems, and lay the results before the Society, where they are considered from various points of view. Finally the conclusions adopted and generally approved by the members are published, usually in penny tracts, and by this means made available for the information of all. The Society further endeavours to promote social amelioration by the dissemination of information about existing institutions, in order that better use may be made of the powers already possessed by local administrative authorities, now too often neglectful of their obligations. The same ends are sought to be attained by means of circulating libraries supplied to Working-men's Clubs, Co-operative Societies, Trade Unions, and similar bodies, and by the publication of lists of best books on social and political subjects. The Society also at times engages trained lecturers to give courses of lectures during the winter months on social politics to working-class and other organisations. The members of the Society who control its policy are Socialists; that is to say, are committed to the theory of the probable direction of economic evolution which is now often called Collectivism."[1148] "The object of the Fabian Society is to persuade the English people to make their political constitution thoroughly democratic, and so to socialise their industries as to make the livelihood of the people entirely independent of private Capitalism. The Fabian Society endeavours to pursue its Socialist and Democratic objects with complete singleness of aim. For example: It has no distinctive opinions on the Marriage Question, Religion, Art, abstract Economics, historic Evolution, Currency, or any other subject than its own special business of practical Democracy and Socialism. It brings all the pressure and persuasion in its power to bear on existing forces, caring nothing by what name any party calls itself, or what principles, Socialist or other, it professes, but having regard solely to the tendency of its actions supporting those which make for Socialism and Democracy and opposing those which are reactionary. It does not propose that the practical steps towards Social Democracy should be carried out by itself, or by any other specially organised society or party. It does not ask the English people to join the Fabian Society. The Fabian Society does not claim to be the people of England, or even the Socialist party, and therefore does not seek direct political representation by putting forward Fabian candidates at elections. But it loses no opportunity of influencing elections and inducing constituencies to select Socialists as their candidates."[1149] "The Fabian Society, far from holding aloof from other bodies, urges its members to lose no opportunity of joining them and permeating them with Fabian ideas as far as possible."[1150] "The typical Fabian is an uncompromising Socialist and Democrat; but he holds aloof from no association that can possibly be induced to push in his direction. Instead of wasting time in forming new sects, he tries to inoculate with his Socialism the existing organisations--the political clubs, the caucuses, the trade unions, the Press, the co-operative societies, and the rival party leaders."[1151] Whilst the other Socialist organisations rely chiefly on direct driving force, the Fabian Society relies chiefly on subtle, indirect action and on intrigue. One of its most prominent men boasted: "In 1888 it only cost us twenty-eight postcards, written by twenty-eight members, to convince the newly-born 'Star' newspaper that London was aflame with Fabian Socialism."[1152] "Our policy has been to try to induce some of these regular papers to give a column or two to Socialism, calling it by what name they please. And I have no hesitation in saying that the effect of this policy as shown in the 'Manchester Sunday Chronicle,' the 'Star,' the London 'Daily Chronicle,' and other more exclusively working-class papers, notably the 'Clarion,' has done more for the cause than all the time and money that has been wasted on 'Justice' since the 'Star' was founded. Our mission is to Socialise the Press as we hope to Socialise Parliament and the other estates of the realm, not to run the Press ourselves."[1153] Owing to these peculiar methods, by which they secured the support of many people who did not know they were Socialists, the Fabians have been very successful in their policy: "In 1888 we had not been found out even by the 'Star.' The Liberal party was too much preoccupied over Mr. O'Brien's breeches and the Parnell Commission, with its dramatic climax in the suicide of the forger Pigott, to suspect that the liveliness of the extreme left of the Radical wing in London meant anything but the usual humbug about working-class interests. We urged our members to join the Liberal and Radical Associations of their districts, or if they preferred it, the Conservative Associations. We told them to become members of the nearest Radical club and co-operative store and to get delegated to the Metropolitan Radical Federation and the Liberal and Radical Union if possible. On these bodies we made speeches and moved resolutions, or better still, got the Parliamentary candidate for the constituency to move them, and secured reports and encouraging little articles for him in the 'Star.' We permeated the party organisations and pulled all the wires we could lay our hands on with our utmost adroitness and energy; and we succeeded so far that in 1888 we gained the solid advantage of a Progressive majority, full of ideas that would never have come into their heads had not the Fabian put them there, on the first London County Council. The generalship of this movement was undertaken chiefly by Sidney Webb, who played such bewildering conjuring tricks with the Liberal thimbles and the Fabian peas that to this day both the Liberals and the sectarian Socialists stand aghast at him."[1154] Fabians rely for their success chiefly on their artfulness. "Always remember that, even if you cannot convert a man to Socialism, you may get his vote all the same."[1155] Fabian middle-class Socialism differs from the democratic Socialism of the larger Socialist organisations which appeal to the working class: "The Socialism advocated by the Fabian Society is State Socialism exclusively."[1156] "We have never advanced the smallest pretensions to represent the working classes of this country."[1157] Therefore the Fabians are very cordially hated by the Democratic Socialists. The Social-Democratic Federation blames them for their "cynical opportunism."[1158] Another organisation declares: "The Fabian Society poses as a Socialist organisation, for we are told that this Society 'consists of Socialists.' It is indeed composed of middle-class men who naturally deny the class struggle, profess to believe in permeating the capitalist class with Socialism, and hold that the tendency of society is towards government by the expert-Fabianism therefore tends towards the rule of the bureaucrats or that section of the educated middle-class. The Fabians are the cult of the civil service and are Socialists neither in name nor in fact."[1159] Let us now consider the genesis and character of the great Labour party. Formerly Socialists and trade unionists marched and fought apart. However, "On the 27th February, 1900, a joint Socialist and Trade Union Conference met in the Memorial Hall, London. One hundred and seventeen delegates were present representing sixty-seven Trade Unions, seven representing the Independent Labour Party, four the Social-Democratic Federation, one the Fabian Society. The result was the formation of the Labour Representation Committee,"[1160] simultaneously representing trade unions and Socialists. "At the General Election of 1906, the Labour Representation Committee ran fifty candidates for Parliament and returned thirty. That year its name was changed to the Labour Party."[1161] The Labour party therefore unites trade unionists and Socialists. The Fabian Society and the Independent Labour party have joined it. Only the Social-Democratic Federation has so far kept aloof from it. The Labour party, being chiefly composed of trade unionists, is fond of posing as a non-Socialist party. It is true that "Mr. Keir Hardie, the Labour leader, said they did not want Toryism, Liberalism, or Socialism, only Labourism, but the same Keir Hardie sits as a delegate on the International Socialist Bureau."[1162] "Many of the Labour members in Parliament are avowed Socialists. The working-class movement already is largely a Socialist movement, and is in continual process of becoming more so. With the speculative side of Socialism the average man with us has but small concern; it is its common-sense which appeals to him. By inherited instinct we are all Communists at heart."[1163] "The Labour party, which now has thirty-one members in the House of Commons, is not purely Socialist, but twenty-three or twenty-four of its M.P.s, and nearly all its elected executive, are Socialists. It has no official programme; but in view of its membership its policy is and must be Socialist. This is not because the majority rules. It is because the Socialist section has a policy and the non-Socialist section approves of that policy so far as it can be translated into Bills or resolutions to be laid before Parliament. There is no anti-Socialism in the Labour party. There is far more difference between sections of Liberals or Conservatives than there is between Socialist and non-Socialist Labour men. All these bodies are working more or less together for the same great ends."[1164] The connection between organised Labour and organised Socialism is further illustrated by the important letters printed on pages 141-143 of this book. The demands and semi-official programme of the Labour party are practically identical with those of avowed Socialists, as may be seen from the following statement of its Secretary: "We are in favour of the special taxation of land values, of a minimum income-tax on earned incomes, and a super-tax on a graded scale on all incomes over, say, _1,000l._ This is described as robbing the rich. That does not express either the purpose or the spirit of the Labour party however. We call it--securing for the public values created by the public. Our critics, if they are to have any effect on intelligent public opinion, must understand this cardinal point in our creed, this axiom in our programme-making. We do not regard taxation as a taking by the State of property which belongs to other people, but the appropriation of property which ought to belong to itself. This theory of taxation goes very far, and its full application involves the complete destruction of parasitic classes. It can only be applied slowly, but as people get clearly to understand that socially-created values should be socially-owned values, many of our most recondite problems, like overcrowding, waste-lands, high rating, will be in a fair way to settlement."[1165] The foregoing shows that the Labour party, like the most predatory Socialist, wishes to tax all private capital out of existence. "The Labour party is not as yet a purely Socialist organisation, because any attempt to make it such would disrupt it."[1166] However, its rank and file are rapidly being permeated with Socialism. The following table shows the composition of the Labour party and its numerical strength and growth: "GROWTH OF THE LABOUR PARTY Trades Union Socialist Membership Membership Total 1900-1 353,070 22,861 375,931 1901-2 455,450 13,861 169,311 1902-3 847,315 13,835 861,150 1903-4 956,025 13,775 969,800 1904-5 885,270 14,730 900,000 1905-6 904,496 16,784 921,280 1906-7 975,182 20,885 *998,338 *This total includes 2,271 co-operators"[1167] Apparently only one-fiftieth of the members of the Labour party are Socialists, but in reality their proportion is very much larger, because only a few working men with Socialistic leanings have actually joined a Socialist party. "When the daily Press states that out of a million affiliated members of the Labour party there are only 17,000 Socialists, its readers naturally inquire, 'How then is it that there are at least twenty Socialists among its thirty M.P.s?' The reply is that as the trade union candidates were elected by the ballot of the members of their respective societies, it must be supposed that those candidates with Socialist views were the most acceptable to the majority of members. This situation was strikingly reflected in the results of the election of 1906. The votes cast for declared Socialists account for 232,378, or 70 per cent. of the total Labour Representation Committee poll of 331,280, whilst of the whole Labour poll, comprising that of the L.R.C., Scottish workers, miners, trades union group, and Socialists, the votes for declared Socialists accounted for 274,631 out of 530,643, or nearly 52 per cent."[1168] "The Labour party is not a Socialist party yet, but those who possess an ear for the great changes now taking place in the depths of the nation will understand that the Labour party is going to be a Socialist party one day."[1169] It seems likely that the more or less Socialist Labour party in Parliament will soon absorb practically the whole trade union group. "Of the eighteen miners' representatives in the House of Commons fifteen are in the trade union group. In October 1907, at the Conference of the Federated Miners' Associations, a resolution was adopted declaring that the time had come for joining the Labour party and ordering a ballot of the whole Federation area to be taken. It is practically a foregone conclusion that the proposal will be carried, in which case the fifteen miners' representatives now sitting on the Ministerial benches will cross the House and practically double the effective power of the Labour party as against the Government. The trade union group will then practically cease to exist. The railway servants have decided that all their candidates at the next election must join the Labour party. Therefore Richard Bell must sign the constitution of the Labour party or retire in favour of someone who will. Of the remaining seven members of the group W.C. Steadman is the only recognised leader of trade unionism."[1170] Apart from the larger Socialist parties described in the foregoing, there are two smaller organisations composed of revolutionary Socialists of the most violent type, whose Socialism is a misnomer for Anarchism. They are "The Socialist Party of Great Britain" domiciled in London, and "The Socialist Labour Party" (an American importation), domiciled in Edinburgh. Their programmes, as those of the other Socialist organisations, will be found in the Appendix. The numerous Socialistic organisations mentioned in this Chapter oppose and fight one another. Many Socialists recommend that a united Socialist party should be formed, but it is clear to all who are acquainted with the inner history of British Socialism that "the vital differences that exist among Socialist parties as to tactics--as to the way to attain Socialism--cannot be glossed over by a few expressions of brotherly love."[1171] The Socialists are divided among themselves, and the rivalry and enmity between some of the sections is deep-seated and bitter. Nominally they differ with regard to the policy to be pursued, but in reality their differences seem to be rather of a personal nature. Socialist leaders, though they have the words "democracy," "freedom," "liberty," and "love" constantly on their lips, are apt to be very autocratic as soon as their sphere of political influence is threatened by competition, and as soon as their private property, their political capital which they have created, is threatened with "socialisation." The men who so glibly recommend the world-wide brotherhood of man, and the socialisation and co-operation of the world, cannot even co-operate among themselves although they pursue the identical immediate aim: the plunder of the well-to-do. It is an old experience that revolutionaries always end in cutting one another's throats. Some Socialist groups have been formed owing to very peculiar and very unsavoury circumstances. A comparatively innocent though psychologically highly interesting and characteristic Socialist new formation has recently occurred in that ally of the Socialists, the Women's Social and Political Union. "In September 1907 a bombshell was thrown into the camp of the Women's Social and Political Union by the extraordinary action of Mrs. Pankhurst, who, as 'the founder,' announced that she had discharged the Executive Committee of the Union."[1172] In the words of an opponent: "Mrs. Pankhurst tore up the constitution, robbed the branches and members of all control over the National Committee, abolished the annual conference, and elected herself and a few personal friends as an autocratic permanent committee answerable to no one in the world and to sit at her pleasure."[1173] The consequence of this personal squabble among leaders for supremacy was of course the splitting up of the party, and the aggrieved ladies formed a new party, the "Women's Freedom League." Socialists never tire of declaiming against competition, and of praising co-operation. At present there are two "competitive" Women's Freedom societies. If they continue pushing the identical article of agitation, all custom will go to the larger party. Therefore we may expect that, unless the breach is healed, the two parties will agree to differ "on the basic principles of women's freedom" and will recommend slightly different political mixtures. The example of France, Germany, and other countries shows that the jealousy and envy of leaders and party tyranny is nowhere greater than among Socialists. It will not be easy for British Socialists to found a united party, especially as it is more difficult to create unity among individualistic Englishmen, who are by their nature impatient of restraint, than among Frenchmen and Germans, who are more used to co-operation and who through their military training have learned the necessity of discipline and the duty of obedience. FOOTNOTES: [1136] Quelch, _The Social-Democratic Federation_, p. 3. [1137] _Reformers' Year Book_, 1908, pp. 74, 75. [1138] _Annual Report, Social-Democratic Federation Conference 1906_, p. 2. [1139] Shaw, _The Fabian Society_, p. 23. [1140] The Secretary of the Fabian Society in _Daily Mail Year Book_, 1908, p. 72. [1141] _Reformers' Year Book_, 1906, p. 73. [1142] _Report of the Twenty-sixth Annual Conference, Social-Democratic Federation, 1906_, p. 1. [1143] _Reformers' Year Book, 1908_, p. 73; _Daily Mail Year Book, 1908_, p. 72. [1144] _Annual Report, Social-Democratic Federation Conference, 1906_, p. 3. [1145] _Manifesto of the Socialist Party of Great Britain_, p. 2. [1146] _Capital and Land_, Motto. [1147] Secretary of Fabian Society in _Daily Mail Year Book, 1908_, p. 72. [1148] Official Circular: _The Fabian Society_. [1149] _Report on Fabian Policy_, 1896, p. 3. [1150] _Ibid._ p. 4. [1151] _Scottish Leader_, September 4, 1890, reprinted by Fabian Society and issued in form of a leaflet. [1152] Shaw, _The Fabian Society_, p. 26. [1153] _Ibid._ p. 24. [1154] Shaw, _The Fabian Society_, pp. 18, 19. [1155] _How to Lose and How to Win an Election_, p. 1. [1156] _Report on Fabian Policy_, 1896, p. 5. [1157] Shaw, _The Fabian Society_, p. 23. [1158] _Annual Report, Social-Democratic Federation Conference, 1906_, p. 2. [1159] _Manifesto, Socialist Party of Great Britain_, p. 11. [1160] Macdonald, _Socialism_, p. 52. [1161] _Ibid._ p. 53. [1162] _Manifesto, Socialist Party of Great Britain_, p. 13. [1163] Keir Hardie, _From Serfdom to Socialism_, pp. 33, 34. [1164] Secretary, Fabian Society, in _Daily Mail Year Book_, 1908, p. 73. [1165] R. Macdonald, M.P., in _Daily Mail Year Book_, 1908, p. 109. [1166] _Manifesto, Socialist Party of Great Britain_, p. 3. [1167] _Reformers' Year Book_, 1908, p. 8. [1168] _Reformers' Year Book_, 1907, p. 51. [1169] _Social-Democrat_, October 1907, p. 607. [1170] _Reformers' Year Book_, 1908, p. 23. [1171] _Socialist_, December 1907. [1172] _Independent Labour Party Year Book_, 1908, p. 28. [1173] _Forward_, November 23, 1907. CHAPTER XXXIV THE GROWTH AND DANGER OF BRITISH SOCIALISM Up to a recent date the Socialists in Great Britain had neither power nor influence. Whilst Germany, France, and other countries had large Socialist parties, British Socialism was practically unrepresented in Parliament. Many Englishmen thought that the free British democracies did not offer a soil favourable to the growth of Socialism, whilst many Socialist leaders believed that England possessed ideal conditions for effecting a social revolution because no other country contains, proportionally, so large a propertyless proletariat as England.[1174] In view of the large number of propertyless people in Great Britain and the nervous restlessness of the race since it has become a race of town-dwellers we cannot wonder at the rapid growth of British Socialism, and we must look forward to its further increase. The following most interesting table gives a picture of the growth of the Socialist vote in the three most Socialistic countries on the Continent of Europe, and in Great Britain. It shows that Socialism has apparently passed the zenith on the Continent of Europe, but that it has not yet reached maturity in Great Britain. "GERMANY Members of Votes Parliament 1867 30,000 8 1878 437,158 9 1887 763,123 11 1890 1,427,298 35 1893 1,876,738 44 1896 2,107,076 57 1903 3,010,472 81 1907 3,258,968 43 GREAT BRITAIN Members of Votes Parliament 1895 46,000 0 1900* 65,000 2 1906* 335,000 30 FRANCE Members of Votes Parliament 1887 47,000 19 1889 120,000 9 1893 440,000 49 1898 790,000 50 1902 805,000 48 1906 896,000 52 BELGIUM Members of Votes Parliament 1894 320,000 32 1900 344,000 33 1902 467,000 34 1904 463,967 28 1906 469,094 30 *This is the vote of the Labour party candidates, not all of whom were Socialists."[1175] A glance at the above table shows that the Socialist vote in Great Britain is as yet insignificant by comparison with other countries, and it seems likely to increase very greatly. More than a third of the Australian House of Representatives and Senate consists of Socialists. May not proportionately as large a Socialist party arise in Great Britain, especially as no political party can outbid the Socialists? The Socialist danger is probably greater in Great Britain than it is in France, Germany, or Belgium. In those countries a vast body of freehold peasants exists who are absolutely opposed to revolutionary schemes. Besides, owing to the fact that the majority of Continental workers have a substantial stake in the country, either in the form of land, houses, or other property, Continental Socialism is comparatively moderate, whilst it is violent, Anarchistic, and revolutionary in Great Britain, where the majority of workers possess far less property than the majority of French, German, and Belgian workers. The German Socialists, since Germany's unity, have gone the way of Lassalle, the patriot Socialist. "They have ceased to denounce the churches. From a necessary evil or a mere stop-gap, the present State has become to them gradually, and perhaps unconsciously, their own State."[1176] It is true that the Socialist vote is ten times larger in Germany than in Great Britain. Nevertheless the danger of Socialist troubles of the very gravest kind is perhaps greater in England than in Germany, especially as unemployment is far greater in Great Britain than in Germany.[1177] It seems that Great Britain will pass through bad industrial times, and it should not be forgotten that the French Revolutions of 1789 and of 1848 were made by unemployed workmen upon whom Socialist and Communistic doctrines had taken a firm hold; that the distress caused by the siege of Paris led to the rising of the Commune in 1871; that between 1837 and 1848 the Chartist movement in Great Britain rose and declined in almost exact correspondence with the variations in the economic distress of the people. The present aspect of Great Britain resembles the aspect of pre-Revolution France, owing to the unequal distribution of property. "Almost three-quarters of the soil of France belonged to the nobility and the clergy, or to 350,000 people. The whole of the rest of the nation possessed less than one-third of the soil."[1178] The absence of a sturdy property-owning lower middle-class, the disappearance of the yeomen, is a source of instability and weakness to Great Britain. Vast numbers of British workers live from hand to mouth. They are being inflamed by Socialist agitators against the wealthy, and they are being promised an equal share in the whole wealth of the nation. In case of very acute distress, either through purely economic causes or through a war with a strong naval power, which might lead to starvation in a country which is absolutely dependent on foreign countries for its food, a revolutionary outbreak in the overgrown towns of Great Britain seems by no means impossible. The revolutionary centre of the world may conceivably move from Paris to London. The Socialists in Great Britain may not always remain a chaotic multitude led by rival agitators who fight and intrigue against one another. Socialists believe: "So soon as Socialism becomes popular, great statesmen and philosophers will arise and take their stand boldly with the people in their fight for industrial freedom."[1179] There are more than 2,000,000 trade unionists in Great Britain, and Socialism is spreading rapidly among them. "Already the working-class movement is largely a Socialistic movement and is in continual process of becoming more so."[1180] The political character of the trade unionists is changing owing to the influence of Socialism and of the new unions. "The differences between the 'old' and 'new' unions are becoming more and more accentuated. The former adhere to the 'No politics' cry, _i.e._ no working-class politics, and still pin their faith to the Liberal or even Tory party; while the latter, like their Continental comrades, understand that their emancipation can only be achieved by means of political action as a class."[1181] "It is not possible for the working-class movement to dissociate itself from the Socialists, or from Socialism, because Socialism, however vaguely the fact may yet be recognised, is as essentially the political expression of that movement as Toryism was the political expression of landlordism and Liberalism is that of the bourgeoisie. In other words, there can be no working-class movement as such without Socialism."[1182] "It is true that the present Parliamentary Labour party is committed to independence on 'Labour questions only,' but no one has yet defined what is a 'Labour question,' and still less has anyone attempted to show what political questions are not labour questions."[1183] The letters printed on pages 141-143 of this book show that Socialism and Labour are commingling. Socialism and Socialist influence have grown far more rapidly in Great Britain than is generally known. Their growth can be gauged not so much by the result of the General Election of 1906, and of some startling by-election results, as by the reports of the Socialist societies, and especially by the sale of their literature. Therefore the following facts indicating the growth of British Socialism should prove to be of considerable interest. The Independent Labour Party reported at its yearly meeting held at Derby on April 1 and 2, 1907: "No department of our activities has been more encouraging in its work this year than that of literature. Last year our literature sales amounted to _1,200l._, which was _600l._ more than the previous twelve months. This year they amount to _2,830l._, or _1,600l._ more than last year. The sales of books and pamphlets are nearly double that of last year. This is a magnificent result. Many branches have established literature stalls in the markets or public streets of their towns, and have met with much success. The fruits of this propaganda are certain, and will be reaped sooner or later by the branches concerned. The income is larger than has been the case in any former year, and amounts to the sum of _6,064l. 12s._, as against _1,884l. 7s. 9d._ for last year. The excess of assets over liabilities amounts to _3,729l. 2s. 5d._, as against _1,511l._ last year. The financial position of the party is thus becoming increasingly solid and stable."[1184] Since the time when that report was given, the Independent Labour Party has continued its rapid growth, as may be seen from the following "Facts of Progress" recently published by that party. "At the time of the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the Independent Labour Party, held at Derby at Easter 1907, there were then in existence 545 branches of the party. Now (November 1907), there are 709 branches. Gain in seven months, 164 branches. There are few Parliamentary constituencies in the United Kingdom without branches, and it is hoped before the present year to make even these omissions good. There are now six branches of the Independent Labour Party in Ireland, and more to follow. The Independent Labour Party has now 845 of its members on local governing bodies, endeavouring to put into operation locally the principles for which the party stands. During the summer nearly 2,000 meetings have been held each week throughout the country. Twenty-two special organisers have been at work for this last six months."[1185] The latest reports of the other Socialist Societies give a picture of a similarly great activity, and of a similarly rapid growth. It is true that the funds of the Socialist organisations are comparatively small, but it must not be forgotten that "1,000 men who subscribe _1d._ are stronger in the poll than one man who subscribes _1,000l._"[1186] Besides, the Independent Labour Party has since 1893 spent more than _250,000l._ for purposes of propaganda. That is a large sum to be spent in agitation. Furthermore, it is significant that many Socialist pamphlets and books have been sold in more than a hundred thousand copies, and a few even in more than a million copies. The Socialist periodicals have a considerable circulation. "The circulation of the 'Clarion' alone is 74,000."[1187] The danger of British Socialism lies not only in its rapid increase among the workers, but also in the fact that it is making converts among the large class of people who possess no settled conviction of their own, and who are easily carried away by a plausible catch-phrase. The persons who count are the multitude of loose thinkers who are drifting towards Socialism without knowing it. "Politicians who have no suspicion that they are Socialists are advocating further instalments of Socialism with a recklessness of indirect results which scandalises the conscious Social-Democrat."[1188] "Year by year more legislation is proposed of which the effect is to draw upon the earnings of the efficient for the benefit of the inefficient. Year by year Parliament makes life harder for those whose labour benefits the State and easier for those who are a drag upon it."[1189] "There is in fact no definite and declared Socialist party in the present House of Commons, and yet what may be called the spirit of Socialism pervades the whole House to a greater extent than in any previous Parliament."[1190] For instance, Mr. Rutherford, M.P., in an anti-Socialistic speech brought forward a "Democratic Tory Programme" which, in the words of a Socialist periodical, was "cribbed almost bodily from the Socialist programme. He advocated among other reforms-nationalisation of the railways, State provision of work for the unemployed, payment of Members, manhood and womanhood suffrage, the suppression of adulteration, town planning on the German system, crime to be treated as a disease, compulsory closing of slums, taxation of site values, and State powers to purchase any site at the price on the rate-book, a national system of insurance against accident and sickness, feeding and clothing poor children, free opening of secondary schools and universities."[1191] In giving prominence to this "anti-Socialist" speech the "Labour Leader" sarcastically remarked: "The items do not, of course, take us quite as far as we Socialists would go; but they are fairly good to be going on with. Ours is to once again cordially welcome Mr. Rutherford as champion against Socialism."[1192] A further danger consists in this, that many Socialists in Parliament and out of it like to sail under a false flag, in accordance with the tactics usually employed by the Fabian Society (see _ante_, Chapter XXXIII). Socialist publications inform us: "Among Socialists who stood and were elected as official Liberals are P. Alden, Clement Edwards, and L.G. Chiozza Money."[1193] "Many Liberals, like Mr. Chiozza Money, Mr. Masterman, Mr. J.M. Robertson, not to speak of the Liberal-Labour group, are committed to Socialist or semi-Socialist legislation. Many Liberal newspapers, we cannot fairly deny, are avowedly on the side of Socialism. The Liberal rank and file are also in the majority of instances quite favourable to the general principles of municipalisation and Labour legislation. Above all, as has so often been predicted by us, the two political camps of landlordism and capitalism are bound to combine together against Socialism, and they can only do so effectively under the Imperialist, Tariff Reform, anti-Land Reform, and anti-Municipalisation flags. The Liberal party cannot attempt single-handed to withstand us."[1194] Socialism often poses as Liberalism and is accepted as such by the unwary. A further danger of British Socialism lies in the fact that it leads to the deterioration of the national character. "The strength of every community must finally depend on the character of the individuals who compose it. If they are self-reliant, energetic, and dutiful, the community will be strong; if, on the contrary, they have been taught to rely upon others rather than on themselves, to take life easily and to avoid unpleasant duties, then the community will be weak. Teach men that they owe no duty to their families, no duty to their country, and that their only responsibility is to humanity at large, and they will quickly begin to think and act as if they had no responsibility to anyone but themselves."[1195] "Many workmen are being ruined morally and materially by Socialistic doctrines, because directly a man becomes imbued with the idea that he is not receiving full recompense for his labours he thinks himself justified in doing as little as he can for his employer. The consequence is that his labour, which is to him his stock-in-trade, depreciates in value and when business slackens down he is one of the first to get the 'sack.'"[1196] FOOTNOTES: [1174] See Karl Marx, _Capital_; Yorke, _Secret History of the International_; Stegmann und Hugo, _Handbuch_, p. 177; Kautsky, _Social Revolution_. [1175] Macdonald, _Socialism_, pp. 125, 126. [1176] _Encyclopædia Britannica_, vol. xxxii. p. 666. [1177] Ellis Barker, _Modern Germany_, p. 546. [1178] Block, _Dictionnaire Général_, vol. ii. p. 822. [1179] Keir Hardie, _From Serfdom to Socialism_, p. 8. [1180] _Ibid._ p. 34. [1181] Aveling, _Working-Class Movement in England_, p. 40. [1182] _The Socialist Annual_, 1907, p. 38. [1183] _Ibid._ p. 39. [1184] _Independent Labour Party Annual Report Conference_, pp. 10, 12, 9. [1185] _Labour Leader_, November 29, 1907. [1186] _Reformers' Year Book_, 1906, p. 80. [1187] _Clarion_, December 20, 1907. [1188] _Fabian Essays in Socialism_, p. 188. [1189] Lord Balfour of Burleigh in the _Times_, October 3, 1907. [1190] Cox, _Socialism_, p. 7. [1191] _Labour Leader_, October 18, 1907. [1192] _Ibid._ [1193] _Reformers' Year Book_, 1907, p. 58. [1194] _Labour Leader_, October 11, 1907. [1195] Cox, _Socialism_, p. 20. [1196] Daw, _Socialism Unmasked_, p. 7. CHAPTER XXXV HOW THE PROGRESS OF SOCIALISM MAY BE CHECKED What can be done to check the growth of Socialism? Some most interesting statistics supplied by the German Social-Democratic party will furnish the best reply to that question. An analysis of the electorate of Magdeburg and Bremen, two typical commercial and industrial towns, gave the following result: COMPOSITION OF ELECTORATE Magdeburg Bremen Numbers Per cent. Numbers Per cent. 1. Capitalists 4,491 = 8.08 5,085 = 8.34 2. High officials 559 = 1.06 197 = 0.32 3. Medium officials 2,304 = 4.35 615 = 1.01 4. Lower officials 4,364 = 7.75 3,567 = 5.85 5. Professional men 1,422 = 2.55 1,047 = 1.72 6. Newer middle-class 3,924 = 7.06 4,882 = 8.01 7. Independent artisans 3,704 = 6.67 5,196 = 8.53 8. Bakers and grocers 932 = 1.57 1,124 = 1.84 9. Older middle-class 2,787 = 5.01 4,074 = 6.68 10. Clerks and bookkeepers 3,121 = 5.62 5,247 = 8.61 11. Working men in State and municipal employment 1,424 = 2.55 1,415 = 2.32 12. Working men in privateer employment 26,423 = 47.73 28,573 = 46.77 ------ ----- ------ ----- 55,563 = 100 60,962 = 100[1197] Commenting upon the foregoing table, a German Socialist periodical wrote: "An analytical comparison of the electorate of Hamburg and Bremen reveals an extraordinary similarity in its social composition. It shows that the workers form hardly a majority of the population. They can be victorious only when they march hand in hand with professional men, the lower officials, and the newer middle-class. However, not all working men are Socialists. At the last election 3,000 working men in Magdeburg, and 2,500 working men in Bremen, voted against Social-Democracy. The patriotic anti-Socialist working-men's associations are rapidly increasing their membership. A thousand workmen, one-third of the whole occupied at the Krupp-Gruson Works in Magdeburg, have joined the anti-Socialist working-men's associations. The 'working-men's associations for fighting Social-Democracy' have grown in a surprising fashion."[1198] The lower middle-class forms the strongest bulwark against the progress of Socialism, and Socialists know it. The philosopher of British Socialism, for instance, wrote: "The proletariat proper, the class which bears the future Socialist world in its womb, by no means at present everywhere outweighs, numerically, all other classes. On the contrary, so far as I am aware, this is only the case in Great Britain and some of the North American States, and even in these countries the majority is not large. The bulk of the non-proletarian sections of the democracy are by no means proletarian or Social-Democratic, even in their instincts, let alone Socialistic in their convictions. The predominating, or at all events most influential, elements in the non-proletarian democracy are what, for brevity, I have rather loosely termed the clerk and the shopkeeping class: in other words, they who are, or hope to become, small capitalists, the small middle-class. This last section of the 'people' or the democracy is, as such, the most formidable, because the most subtle, enemy with which the Socialist movement has to contend. The aim of the small capitalist, and of him who hopes to become one, is security and free play under the most advantageous conditions for his small capital to operate. On this account the little bourgeois, the small middle-class in its various sections, is the great obstacle which will have to be suppressed before we can hope to see even the inauguration of a consciously Socialist policy. It must be destroyed or materially crippled as a class before real progress can be made."[1199] Whilst many Socialists wish to destroy the lower middle-class, others, especially the Fabians, endeavour to convert it to Socialism, and to set it on against the wealthy. They argue: "The commercial clerk with his reading, his writing, his arithmetic, and his shorthand is a proletarian, and a very miserable proletarian, only needing to be awakened from his poor little superstition of shabby gentility to take his vote from the Tories and hand it over to us. The small tradesmen and ratepayers who are now allying themselves with the Duke of Westminster in a desperate and unavailing struggle--against the rising rates entailed by the eight hours day and standard wages for all public servants, besides great extensions of corporate activity in providing accommodation and education at the public expense, must sooner or later see that their interest lies in making common cause with the workers to throw the burden of taxation directly on to unearned incomes."[1200] "It only needs one evening's intelligent discussion of this monstrous state of affairs to make a beginning of a really sensible and independent organisation of the middle classes for their own defence and for their escape from between the two millstones of organised Labour and organised Plutocracy, which are at present grinding the last penny in the pound out of them."[1201] It is estimated that there are in England 500,000 clerks.[1202] With the object of permeating this large section of the middle class with Socialism, a new monthly paper, the "Clerk," has recently been started under Fabian auspices. Socialism is undermining the lower middle-class, and it is unconsciously being assisted in this policy by short-sighted anti-capitalistic Parliamentary legislation, which, as usual, hits hardest the smaller capitalists. If Great Britain wishes to erect a dam against the rising tide of Socialism, she must strengthen the lower middle-class in town and country by well-devised legislation, and she should before all re-create her peasantry. Great Britain should encourage the accumulation of small capitals by encouraging thrift. At present thrift is discouraged by the difficulty which small savers experience in obtaining satisfactory investments. The low interest of 2-3/4 per cent. paid by the British savings-banks--Continental savings-banks give 4 per cent.--is quite inadequate; and the British Company Laws are so bad and sound investments so scarce that the small investor who wants a higher return than 2-3/4 per cent. is almost certain to lose his money if he buys stocks or shares. Leasehold investments are very unsatisfactory, because the object bought automatically reverts to the landlord, and small freehold properties are as a rule unobtainable under the present system of land-holding. Therefore the first and most important step to encourage thrift should be to enable the small saver to invest his savings profitably and securely in land and houses where it is under his own control. Co-operation also should be encouraged. Co-operative banking, which is highly developed in Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy, but almost unknown in Great Britain, would at the same time greatly benefit the small investor and the small _bonâ-fide_ borrower. FOOTNOTES: [1197] _Die Neue Gesellschaft_, September 1907, p. 325. [1198] _Die Neue Gesellschaft_, September 1907, pp. 325, 326. [1199] Bax, _Essays in Socialism_, pp. 40, 41. [1200] Shaw, _The Fabian Society_, p. 26. [1201] _New Age_, November 1907, p. 23. [1202] _Clerk_, January 1908. CHAPTER XXXVI IS SOCIALISM POSSIBLE?--A GLANCE INTO THE SOCIALIST STATE OF THE FUTURE The realisation of Socialism, the creation of a Socialistic commonwealth in which private property does not exist, seems impossible. Socialists entirely leave out of their calculations two elementary factors: NATURE, AND HUMAN NATURE A State devoid of private property is an unthinkable proposition. Private property is not a fortuitous creation, but a natural growth. It is founded not merely upon law, but upon immemorial custom which owes its rise to a fundamental human instinct, an instinct which has been a characteristic of the human race in all countries, and which is as old as humanity itself. The instinct of acquisition, of accumulation, and of property is common to all men from Central Africa to the poles. It is equally strongly developed in the most civilised nations and among savages. However, supposing that the instinct of acquisition, of accumulation, and of property, which is found not only among all races of mankind but even among the higher animals, could be overcome, would human nature allow of the creation of a co-operative commonwealth based on voluntary co-operation, not on compulsion? Could the brotherhood of man be made a reality, and would men co-operate without strife in that mutual friendship and good-fellowship which one finds but rarely, even among those who are connected by the closest ties of affection and blood relationship, unless self-interest acts as the determining factor? Did not Plato found his ideal commonwealth upon perfectly wise and virtuous men? "Does not Socialist society presuppose extraordinary human beings, real angels, as regards unselfishness and gentleness, joy of work and intelligence? Is not the Social Revolution, with the present brutal and egoistical race of men, bound to become the signal for desolating struggles for the booty or for general idleness in which it would go to ruin?"[1203] "Who is more ready to tilt against society than the average Socialist? And if the individuals in it are so deeply imbued with a double dose of original sin as not to be able to handle any part of distribution and exchange, it follows that you cannot trust the individual."[1204] "In a social State you must consider two things--man and his surroundings. You often forget man, because you think it easier to alter his surroundings. The real question is: Can you produce men fit for the new social State?"[1205] "Socialism postulates an intelligent democracy."[1206] "The proletariat will require high intelligence, strong discipline, perfect organisation of its great masses. We may expect that it will only succeed when it will have developed these qualities in the highest degree."[1207] "Socialists demand a higher morality than any now to be found."[1208] "It is incumbent upon Socialism to recognise the existence of an intellectual motive, and it must place that motive above the economic, because without it the economic struggle would be devoid of any constructive value; it would be a mere tug-of-war; it would never bring us to Socialism. It would lead to a scramble for the spoils and mutual throat-cutting."[1209] "If 'each for all and all for each' be nothing more than a text for a banner or a motto for a wall; if its truth has not captured the hearts and minds of men and women in that new society, we shall be an official-ridden people with our eye on the best posts in the State for ourselves or our sons; and we shall be as pitiable in our spiritual deformity as we are in our economic bondage."[1210] "Socialism demands more than that we should merely import Socialistic institutions into our midst. It insists on a moral regeneration of society of the most complete and searching kind in order to make a lasting foundation for the political and social changes we many of us long to see."[1211] "Convey it in what spirit we may, an appeal to class interest is an appeal to personal interest. Socialist propaganda carried on as a class war suggests none of those ideals of moral citizenship with which Socialist literature abounds, 'each for all and all for each,' 'service to the community is the sole right of property' and so on. It is an appeal to individualism" [which seems to be a euphemism for envy and cupidity], "and results in getting men to accept Socialist formulæ without becoming Socialists."[1212] Unfortunately there is nothing ideal and elevating in the Socialist teachings, as the previous chapters show. Socialism appeals to all the passions and to all the vices, such as hatred, jealousy, envy, cupidity. It encourages, or at least excuses, wastefulness, improvidence, profligacy, and drunkenness. Its aim is plunder. The voluntary co-operation of all for the benefit of all presupposes the existence of wise, virtuous, and unselfish citizens. Do the people in England, or in any other country, possess these high qualities, or are these qualities likely to be created by the teachings of the Socialists? A distinguished Socialist despairingly exclaimed: "That spirit which animated the apostles, prophets, martyrs, is alive in Japan to-day. Is it alive in us as a nation? If not, if we have replaced it to any extent by some selfish opposite, by any such diabolically careless sentiment as 'after me the deluge,' then we as a nation have lost our soul, sold it for mere individual prosperity, sold it in some poor cases for not even that, for mere liquid refreshment, and we are on the down grade."[1213] Another Socialist wrote: "We are all of us great-great-grandchildren of the beasts. We carry the bestial attributes in our blood, some more, some less. Who amongst us is so pure and exalted that he has never been conscious of the bestial taint?"[1214] "Descendants of barbarians and beasts, we have not yet conquered the greed and folly of our bestial and barbarous inheritance. Our nature is an unweeded garden. Our hereditary soil is rank."[1215] The Socialists themselves acknowledge that Socialism presupposes a nation composed of ideal individuals, industrious, gentle, mutually helpful, unselfish, forbearing, and wise. They also acknowledge that men are the descendants of barbarians and beasts. Do Socialist agitators really believe that they can convert the descendants of barbarians and beasts into ideal beings by constantly preaching to them the gospel of hatred, envy, selfishness, self-indulgence, and plunder, and by even encouraging them to continue poisoning themselves and their descendants by over-indulgence in alcoholic drink?[1216] Surely "the defective natures of citizens will show themselves in the bad acting of whatever social structure they are arranged into. There is no political alchemy by which you can get golden conduct out of leaden instincts."[1217] It is clear to most thinking Socialists that human nature, as at present constituted, will make the realisation of Socialism impossible. How do Socialists, then, propose to meet the difficulty? Very simply. By bold assertions and prophecies. That which all religions and all philosophers have been unable to accomplish during 3,000 years, Socialists will effect as by the touch of a magician's wand. "Socialism will change human nature. The opportunity makes the man. Socialism will take away the desire for accumulating riches. Under such conditions the possession of riches will be a superfluous burden which no sane man will wish to bear."[1218] "As soon as high purpose, intense human attachments, are the springs of action and resolve, discipline will come into our movement to crush out base selfishness, vanity, and personal ambition,"[1219] This is very nice, but how are "high purpose" and "intense human attachment" to be made the "springs of action"? Unfortunately the writer keeps the secret to himself. The philosopher of British Socialism states: "Socialism only calls for enlightened selfishness. But the fact that this selfishness is enlightened and recognises that it can serve itself by serving the common interest will completely change its character, so that it will cease to be the narrow selfishness of to-day, which so often defeats its own ends. Selfishness passing through the refining fire of economic change ceases to be selfishness and becomes Socialism."[1220] If selfishness ceases to be selfishness and becomes Socialism, then it changes merely its name, and Socialism and selfishness are identical, which is quite correct. Other Socialist leaders prophesy: "May we not assume that under these conditions a new type of mankind will evolve which will surpass the highest type which culture has produced up till now? An overman, if you please, not as an exception, but as the rule."[1221] "Selfishness will become public spirit."[1222] "The desire to serve the common life, to advance its welfare, will be the highest ambition of the individual."[1223] "Just as the nightingale sings in the evening shades, or the lark trills in the summer sky, so man in natural surroundings" [does Socialism create "natural" surroundings or unnatural ones?] "will seek to gratify his higher nature. Socialism will create a condition of things favourable to the development of the higher type of individuality."[1224] "This is the religious aspect of labour. It is dignified, ennobling. That is the divine ideal, the aspect concerning labour which God intended should be realised. Just think of it! The ordinary working man as divinely taught and inspired as the prophets and seers of old, and having the capacity to understand the sublimest truths and the profoundest philosophy concerning human life and the eternal destinies."[1225] The statements given above, with their superlatives, their laboured philosophy, their lyrics, hysterics, and prophecies, are singularly unconvincing. The manner in which the simple question, "How do you propose to fit actual human nature into your scheme?" is answered by the Socialists, proves that they find that question unanswerable. History teaches us that revolutions based on plunder, euphemistically called confiscation, expropriation, or socialisation, have indeed altered human nature, but they have altered it for the worse. All revolutions have hitherto caused a fearful depravation of manners and led to the most hideous crimes--and will a Socialistic revolution prove an exception? Why should it be an exception? Are its teachings such as make it seem likely that a Socialistic revolution will prove an exception? An attempt to establish the Socialist Commonwealth would undoubtedly lead, not to a revolution, but to a series of revolutions, to Anarchism and to civil war. The tragedy of the great French Revolution might be acted over again. Now let us look into some practical questions which the Socialist State of the future will have to settle. Let us, for instance, inquire: HOW WILL LABOUR BE REMUNERATED? Many Socialists think that different workers should get different wages: "The citizens shall be consciously public functionaries, and their labours shall be rewarded according to results."[1226] "Socialism does not propose that everyone shall have an equal share of the product of collective labour."[1227] How, then, is the amount of the unequal wages to be calculated? Some Socialists, following Marx, propose to determine wages by means of labour-time. "Ascertain the time taken to produce two commodities and we know their relative exchange value. And this quality tallies with market valuations. So far as creating value is concerned, then, one man creates as much value as another, and on the basis of equal labour-time equal value, Socialists rest their argument of social equality."[1228] "The working time which the making of an article requires is the only scale by which its social value can be measured. Ten minutes of social work in one branch are exchangeable for ten minutes of social work in another. It will be easy to calculate how much social working time each single product requires."[1229] A hunter hunts all day and shoots a deer. A fisher fishes all day and catches a sprat. Will the hunter exchange his deer for the sprat, on the principle of equal labour-time? Will highly skilled workers be satisfied to receive the same wages as the most unskilled labourers? Will equal labour-time pay for all not lead to universal dawdling, shrinkage in production, and consequent starvation? Would workers not strive to get the maximum pay for the minimum work? To prevent dawdling, could it be ascertained how long it should take to repair a machine, paint a picture, amputate a leg, plough an acre? It is manifestly impossible to pay men of varying capacity and productive power equal labour-time wages. Therefore many Socialists, especially the Fabians, maintain: "The principle of inequality of payment must be recognised. It is a necessary consequence of inequality of ability."[1230] "Every man should receive from the Commonwealth a fair equivalent in payments or services for the payments or services which the Commonwealth receives from him. It is not possible to say exactly how much each citizen has contributed to the wealth of the State, and absolute economic justice is therefore impossible."[1231] The question now arises how is the "fair equivalent for services rendered" to be determined? Many Socialists teach the doctrine that "the labourer is entitled to the entire product of his labour."[1232] Should the labourer be given an equivalent to the product of his labour _minus_ various necessary expenditures? Could the value of the labour of an individual be calculated at all in the complicated processes of modern industry? What is the value produced by a day's labour of a ploughman, a railway porter, a postman, a book-keeper, a policeman, a machine-minder? Mr. Bax very sensibly argues: "What does each man produce of himself as an individual? Show me how much cotton any given factory operative has produced in the course of a year? I don't mean the amount of wages the capitalist has given him for the exploitation of his labour power during that period--but the actual product of his labour in the manufactured article. You could not do so, because his labour, like all modern labour, is associated; and the work of the individual producer is completely and indissolubly merged in that of the group (factory, mill) to which he belongs, which is again inseparable from that of the machinery employed in the process and from that of other groups."[1233] It is impossible to calculate the exact value of service to the community by work in a factory or a field as soon as the wages system based on demand and supply has ceased to exist. Besides, differential pay will be impossible, because none will be satisfied with the pay received, except those who receive the highest pay. Therefore the same Fabian Society which in other writings, such as those quoted in the foregoing, advocates unequal payment, concludes: "Inequality of pay would be odious; the impossibility of estimating the separate value of each man's labour with any really valid result, the friction which would arise, the jealousies which would be provoked, the inevitable discontent, favouritism, and jobbery that would prevail: all these things will drive the Communal Council into the right path--equal remuneration of all workers."[1234] The Fabians, like so many other Socialists, cannot apparently quite make up their mind whether to plunge into the Scylla of equal pay or into the Charybdis of unequal pay. Therefore they plunge alternately into the one or the other. Many Socialists are in favour of equal pay: "The credits granted to the citizens will be equal in all cases, without reference to skill, intelligence, or the nature of the service performed."[1235] "The labours of the bus driver or the mangler will be appraised just as highly as those of the Prime Minister, with this difference perchance, that if it can be clearly shown by statistics that buscraft uses up the life energy of a man more rapidly than statecraft, four hours of busmanship shall count, say, as five of statesmanship."[1236] Equal wages should logically be followed by equal treatment for all. "An anti-Socialist will say, 'How will you sail a ship in a Socialist condition?' How? Why, with a captain and mates and sailing-master and engineer (if it be a steamer) and A.B.s and stokers, and so on, and so on. Only there will be no first and second and third class among the passengers, the sailors and stokers will be as well fed and lodged as the captain or passengers, and the captain and the stoker will have the same pay."[1237] So confused are the minds even of the leading Socialists with regard to the important question of the remuneration of labour that Mr. William Morris, one of the founders of British Socialism, in a poem first recommends individualistic Socialism and pay according to results: _For that which the worker winneth shall then be his indeed_, Nor shall half be reaped for nothing by him that sowed no seed. Two lines later in the same poem he recommends Communism and equal pay for all, regardless of the work done: _Then all Mine and Thine shall be Ours_, and no more shall any man crave For riches that serve for nothing but to fetter a friend for a slave.[1238] The above extracts show that confusion reigns in the Socialist camp regarding the settlement of the Wage Question. Wage-earners are not philanthropists. Highly skilled men will not be content with wages equal to those of unskilled labour, not even in the name of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. In the absence of a free demand and supply, which automatically graduates wages in accordance with the social value of the work done, its attractiveness or unattractiveness, &c., it cannot scientifically, though it can perhaps autocratically, be determined how wages should be graduated. When it comes to the fixing of differential wages in the Socialist State of the future, quarrels will immediately arise, which will lead to strife and rebellion, for all workers will use arguments such as the following ones recently put forward by Mr. Smillie, President of the Lanarkshire Miners' County Union. In reply to the reproach that miners, by unduly high wages, increased the cost of coal to the poor, Mr. Smillie answered: "Miners are being blamed in some quarters for the high price of coal. Their wages at present range from _6s. 6d._ to _8s._ per day, or from _30s._ to _2l. 5s._ per week when broken time is taken into consideration. Will anyone grudge an income of this kind to a worker whose labour is of a most uncomfortable and exhausting nature, and who takes his life in his hand from the moment he steps into the cage until he reaches the surface again? The miner recognises that high-priced coal means pinching and suffering in the homes of the poor, and he has real sympathy for this class, but he argues that the true value of coal must include a reasonable sustenance for those who risk their lives in its production."[1239] If miners claim higher wages than other workers because their work is uncomfortable and dangerous, railway workers, sailors, and many others will raise the same claims; fishers and butchers will claim higher wages because their work is disgusting; factory workers because their work is sedentary and monotonous; waiters because it is menial; postmen because they have to walk; drivers because they have to sit still; washerwomen because they have to stand; farm labourers because they have to work in the cold; bakers because they have to work in the heat, &c. All workers would of course demand the maximum pay, and who could adjudicate on all the rival claims? The Wages Question seems likely to prove insoluble. HOW WILL LABOUR BE ORGANISED AND DIRECTED? We are told: "Labour will be organised on principles of perfect freedom. Everyone decides for himself in which branch he desires to be employed. If a superfluity of workmen occur in one branch and a deficiency in another, it will be the duty of the executive to arrange matters and readjust the inequality."[1240] In accordance with the variations in demand and supply and the rise and decay of industries, the introduction of labour-saving machinery, &c., labour requires continual redistribution. That redistribution is at present automatically effected largely through the rise and fall of wages. A rise in the wages of industries which require more labour, and a decline in the wages of industries which require less labour, cause labour to turn from shrinking to growing industries. When wages are no longer fixed with reference to commercial demand and supply, how will the periodical and necessary redistribution of labour be effected? Some Socialist leaders think: "As the workers, of course, will not be drafted into the different branches of production under military compulsion, irrespective of their wishes, it may well turn out that some will have a superfluity of labour, while others will suffer from scarcity. The necessary equilibrium could then be restored by reducing the wages in those industries where the applicants are too many and by raising them in those where the applicants are too few, till each branch has just the number of workers which it requires. It could be restored also by other means; for instance, by the shortening of the hours of labour in those industries that are short of workers. With all that, however, the general rate of wages throughout the working class will be influenced no longer by supply and demand, but by the quantity of available products. A general fall of wages in consequence of over-production will be impossible."[1241] In other words, the beautiful schemes of remuneration independent of the laws of supply and demand discussed in the foregoing would immediately break down. In order to redistribute labour, workers would either have to be compelled by direct force to work in those trades which required additional labour, or their wages or hours of work would arbitrarily be altered in order to effect the necessary changes by economic pressure--that is, by reducing their food. In other words, commercial demand and supply would break down the Utopian regulations of the Socialist Commonwealth as soon as they had been framed. While some Socialists wish to distribute and redistribute labour by arbitrarily changing wages and hours of labour, some of the more logical and scientific Socialist leaders are frankly in favour of compulsory labour: "We already see official salaries regulated, not according to the state of the labour market, but by consideration of the cost of living. This principle we seek to extend to the whole industrial world. Instead of converting every man into an independent producer, working when he likes and as he likes, we aim at enrolling every able-bodied person directly in the service of the community for such duties and under such kind of organisation, local or national, as may be suitable to his capacity and social function. If a man wants freedom to work or not to work, just as he likes, he had better emigrate to Robinson Crusoe's island or else become a millionaire. To suppose that the industrial affairs of a complicated industrial State can be run without strict subordination and discipline, without obedience to orders, and without definite allowances for maintenance, is to dream, not of Socialism but of Anarchism."[1242] "Everyone should have a legal right to an opportunity of earning his living in the society in which he has been born; but no one should or could have the right to ask that he shall be employed at the particular job which suits his peculiar taste and temperament. Each of us must be prepared to do the work which society wants doing, or take the consequences of refusal."[1243] And what consequences would refusal to do the allotted work at the allotted pay entail? Either dismissal, which would mean starvation--for the State, as the sole employer, would control all employment and all the food--or bodily chastisement, or imprisonment. There could be no strike on the part of dissatisfied workers, for the State--that is, the officials--holding all the wealth, would be able to starve them out in a week. Socialists admit: "Mankind is as lazy as it dares to be."[1244] "In the average man there is a strong tendency to mere idleness and aimlessness which, but for the compulsions and temptations of existing circumstances, might run to great lengths. The trouble is that, while the average man is willing to work occasionally where his choice is free, he considers his lot a hard one if necessity compels him to continue regularly at a given task. He is willing to work at almost anything save that at which he is asked to work. It is a common thing to hear even good workmen profess a dislike to their trade."[1245] How will shirking and idling be prevented in the Socialist Commonwealth when men are no longer compelled by economic necessity and free competition to do their best? The leading American exponent of Socialism prophesies that workers will work no longer in order to live in comfort, but that they will henceforth see in work a semi-religious duty, which they perform owing to their strong sense of beneficence: "In the New Commonwealth the butcher will be conscious and satisfied that 'the essential thing is not that he shall have a living, but that meat shall be supplied.' The work of the citizen will be the willing performance of social office. He will be a worker whose best efforts, best ardour, and highest aims will be drawn out by his sense of the beneficence of his work, even though it be such a coarse routine of manual labour as machinery should soon remove altogether from human hands. He will be habituated to regard his wages, not as a _quid pro quo_, but as the provision made by society to enable him to carry out his labour."[1246] Will the "sense of beneficence" induce men who are not satisfied with the condition and remuneration of labour to transport milk and other provisions during the night so that the townspeople may have them early in the morning? Will men be induced by their sense of duty to clean the sewers? To ask these questions is to answer them. Bebel puts the question, "What becomes of the difference between the industrious and the idle, the intelligent and the stupid?" and answers, "There will be no such difference, because that which we associate with these conceptions will have ceased to exist."[1247] "If there is one vice more certain than another to be unpopular in a Socialist community, it is laziness. The man who shirked would find his mates making his position intolerable even before he suffered the doom of expulsion."[1248] Arguments such as the above should really not be placed before grown-up people. They are only fit for the nursery. The tendency towards lazing and idling, the desire to make money without exertion, is strongly developed in Great Britain. "The essence of gambling is the craving to obtain something from others without giving an equivalent."[1249] Perhaps in no country is betting and gambling in every form so much in evidence as it is in Great Britain. Betting on the turf, missing-word competitions, limerick competitions, &c., draw every year many millions of pounds from the pockets of millions of British workers. How then can the natural tendency of men to loaf and idle and to live rather by their wits than by their work, which is strong in all men, be overcome in the Socialist State of the future? The fundamental book of the Fabian Society, the most scientific Socialist body in Great Britain, tells us: "A very small share of the profits arising from associated labour acts as a tremendous stimulus to each individual producer,"[1250] and it suggests, as do many Socialist writers, that the workers will do their best because they know that the more they produce the greater will be their individual share in the general production. Great Britain has 12,000,000 workers. Therefore a worker will make as his own share an extra sovereign if by extra exertion he succeeds in producing an extra _12,000,000l._ worth of goods, a feat the accomplishment of which will require several thousand years. That is a "tremendous stimulus" to the individual producer! Can any argument be more foolish than the foregoing one? An influential Socialist writer tells us: "The credits granted to the citizens will be equal in all cases, without reference to skill, intelligence, or the nature of the service performed; but no credits will be given to the able-bodied shirkers, who will thus be starved into doing their share of the world's work without other compulsion."[1251] Other Socialist writers have put forth similar views. This is a cheerful outlook for the free citizens of the free Socialist Commonwealth. The workers will become "wage-slaves" in the fullest sense of the term. They will have to submit to forced labour, arbitrary wages, and arbitrary hours of labour, and those who do not produce as much as the official overseers require--and they may have a private grudge against some unfortunate worker who does his best--will be starved until they work harder. The lot of savages ruled by the knout, the kourbash, and the sjambok will be preferable to the lot of men ruled by starvation in the free Socialist Commonwealth of the future. The former have at least some liberty, while the latter will be kept by officials, who will distribute food and force them to work by rewards of food alternated by starvation, like performing dogs and apes. To carry on the business of the country the Socialist Government would have to drop the principle of perfect freedom and to rely on coercion, and it would be justified in doing so. If, as Mr. Blatchford has repeatedly told us, "man has no right to himself because he did not make himself," if man belongs not to himself and his family, but to "society," it logically follows that society may compel him to work, apportioning to him his task and his pay, without reference to his wishes. Society being represented by its officials, elected or appointed, these officials would absolutely dispose of the people. Great Britain would be ruled like a gigantic convict prison. The spirit in which even moderate Socialists already contemplate the freedom of the individual may be seen from an address on Sweated Labour which Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, M.P., delivered in Glasgow in autumn 1907. He said: "There was no use tinkering with the problem. Personally, he was not in favour of home work at all. To eliminate it might seem a cold-blooded way of dealing with sweating, but it was the only way that would give definite and final results. He would, however, proceed carefully and scientifically. Home work had got extremes, but one section was much riper for treatment than the other, and he would begin with the worst. The first difficulty was to find out the sweated workers. It was certain that a great percentage escaped detection by sanitary inspectors. Now his proposal was that, instead of the sanitary inspectors hunting for the home worker, the home worker should hunt for the inspector; and this he sought to accomplish under the Bill introduced last session, by making it necessary for the home worker to take out a licence and by making it obligatory on the employer to keep an absolutely complete list of his workers. The factory inspector must have right of access, and a certificate must be obtained from him for a separate licence. The casual home-worker would be discouraged." In other words, factory inspectors should apparently be authorised to break without a search warrant into private houses. They should certainly be empowered to prosecute a working man if he defended the privacy of his house by refusing the inspector admittance. That measure would abolish the sanctity of the home. The "Right to Work," which the Socialists so loudly champion, would be taken from the home-worker, and one cannot help asking: Is that high-handed measure devised for the benefit of the sweated or for that of the highly paid workers, represented by Mr. Macdonald, who wish to abolish the competition of underpaid home-workers? Sweated labour can be abolished and must be abolished, and it can be abolished, as I may show in another book, without destroying the home. If Mr. Macdonald should have his way, the Socialist principle, "Property is robbery," will have to be supplemented with the principle "Liberty is tyranny." The unchecked absolutism of a Socialist State will hardly be palatable to Socialist workers who have been told that Socialism means freedom, and these see the only solution in the establishment of Anarchism: "The damnable idea of being marshalled and drilled or numbered and docketed like any other merchandise in a state of glorified capitalism is not the Socialist's ideal, but its antithesis, no matter what the capitalists and their protagonists, the pseudo-Socialists, choose to name it. We don't want to be driven to the gate of the municipal or other factory to hustle and elbow our fellows out of the way so that we may catch the official's eye in the mad and sordid scramble for mere belly food, for a mere animal subsistence. With the advent of Socialism, the whole of the capitalist State and its superstructure will collapse, with its cant of living wages, its Brotherhoods of Man, and the rest of its nauseous humbug."[1252] "If the worker continues to be paid in wages, he necessarily will remain the slave or the subordinate of the one to whom he is forced to sell his labour force; be the buyer a private individual or the State--it would still be an odious tyranny."[1253] "Socialism will entail compulsory service on all able-bodied members of the community, or rather the State. For that is what we shall have; the State with its hosts of functionaries, its big pots and its little pots, and its never-ending officialism and petty tyrannies. Organisation must either be compulsory or free. If compulsory, you have the military spirit with all its attendant evils; if free, you have the Anarchist spirit with all the advantages that arise when the fetters that hinder individual initiative and development are removed."[1254] The foregoing should suffice to show that the Socialist State could organise work only by relying on forced labour and by creating the most unbearable despotism which the world has seen, or by "organising" the chaos of Anarchism, and it is difficult to say which of the two would be the more hideous solution. HOW WILL THE SOCIALIST STATE BE GOVERNED? Socialists tell us rather vaguely: "Socialism means the elevation of the struggle for existence from the material to the intellectual plane. Socialism will raise the struggle for existence into a sphere where competition shall be emulation, where the treasures are boundless and eternal, and where the abundant wealth of one does not cause the poverty of another."[1255] "State employment, when the State itself is only an organised democracy and class distinctions cease, means not slavery, but freedom."[1256] "Freedom and equality will then be no longer empty and cheap phrases, but will have a meaning; when all men are really free and equal, they will honour and advance one another."[1257] "In Socialistic administrations there are no employers, no superiors, no oppression; all are equals and enjoy equal rights."[1258] "Under Socialism all the work of the nation would be managed by the nation."[1259] "Under Socialism the State, as we have known the State in the past, will have disappeared; for under Socialism there will be no classes, but all the people will form one class, and the Government and organisation will be democratic, each individual having an equal voice in directing the affairs of the common life."[1260] "The State will no longer be the bureaucratic State of to-day, but a democratic State assisted directly by the whole people."[1261] "All adult members of the commune, without distinction of sex, take part in the necessary elections, and determine to what persons the conduct of affairs shall be entrusted. There is no such thing as a hierarchical system."[1262] "Appointments will be made from below. In the Post Office Department, for example, the letter carriers will elect their immediate superiors; these, we will say, the post-masters; and these, in their turn, the Post-Master General."[1263] In other and plainer words, the Socialist State would, according to the authorities quoted, be ruled by the same system by which it is ruled at present, although elections might be more numerous, and although the suffrage might be given a wider basis. Now if the system of government remains the same as it is at present, is there any reason for anticipating better results than those obtained at present? Will the elected administrators no longer place personal and party interests above national ones? And will not the infinitely greater range of administrative functions make it more difficult to exercise control and to allocate responsibilities, and thus make irresponsibility, favouritism, dishonesty, and the evasion of punishment more easy and more frequent? Is a larger number of voters likely to pick out abler administrators than a small one? Does not the elective system, according to the Socialists themselves, cause the scum to rise to the top, and result in the election of plausible windbags?[1264] Are the people's votes never won by any other means than the testimony of results? Will there no longer be the fascination of eloquence, the attraction of boundless promises, the glamour of prejudice, the tie of party, the pressure put by an Association upon its members? If amateurs show now little ability in administering a few comparatively simple things, is it likely that results will be better when they have to administer everything? Will not amateur government prove an absolute failure? Most thinking Socialists clearly foresee that the Socialist State of the future could not possibly be administered by amateurs; that it would have to be administered by experts, by permanent officials; that Socialism would mean the death-knell of elected governors, and therefore of democracy, as may be seen in Chapter XV. of this book. The philosopher of British Socialism tells us: "Socialism aims at the supersession of democracy, as of every other form of government. The will of the majority of an ideal democracy, a social democracy, must, as regards its special expressions, be subordinate to the general moral canon of a Socialist Commonwealth. That in affairs of management, of tactics, of administration, or in decisions requiring special knowledge, authority, in its nature dictatorial, is necessary, all must admit. There must be a controlling, an authoritative voice in direction; so much must be clear, one would think, to all practical or reasonable persons when once stated. The real point to determine is the nature and limits of that amount of dictatorial power which, we must admit, is essential in any organised community of which we can at present conceive. _Social Democracy_, while it means all _for_ the people, does not mean the impossible absurdity that everything should be directly regulated _by_ the people, _i.e._ by a direct popular vote."[1265] These views seem irrefutable, and it follows that not only for economic reasons, but for political reasons as well, the establishment of the Socialist State will lead to the establishment of a "dictatorial authority." If Socialism be introduced, the fall of democracy and the establishment of absolutism cannot possibly be avoided. Democratic States are ruled by public opinion. The voice of an individual does not carry very far. Therefore public opinion can be formed only by means of an independent Press. An independent Press is the strongest, one might almost say the only, guarantee of national liberty. As long as there are numerous independent papers owned by private people, papers which represent all shades of opinion, everyone who has something to say can always freely express his opinion in one set of papers or the other. A striking speech is read the next day by the whole nation; a striking injustice to a single individual, or a Government blunder, may be taken up by the whole nation. The disappearance of private property will necessarily mean the disappearance of the free Press, and therefore of public opinion. All newspapers would be owned, edited, and printed by the Government, and is any Government likely to assist a hostile opposition by printing its views, and to assist in bringing about a revolution, probably accompanied by bloodshed and its own destruction? Such a thing has never been. Such a thing will never be. People might be dissatisfied and be ill-treated by the Socialist Government; they might be starved to death or shot by the thousand; there might be risings and rebellions and civil war in some parts of the country; the fleet might be defeated and the colonies lost--yet not a word need appear in the Socialist Government Press. Some Socialists are childish enough to argue: "Though the printing press will be a collective institution, it will be available to all. Anyone, whatever unpopular opinions he may entertain, however hostile to the administrators he may be, will be entitled to have anything decent printed, provided he is ready to pay for the work done, or to guarantee, or induce his friends to guarantee, that the cost will be defrayed."[1266] "It would always be open to individuals or to groups of individuals to publish anything they pleased on covering the cost of publication. With the comparative affluence which would be enjoyed by each member of the community, anyone who really cared to reach the public ear would be able to do so by diminishing his expenditure in other directions."[1267] The Government would certainly neither print, nor circulate through its post-office and newsagents, matter which it would consider to be dangerous to its existence or seditious. The assertion that a private individual in the Socialist Commonwealth might at his own expense circulate his views throughout the country--there would be no more millionaires but only wage-earners--is like asserting that a bricklayer might with his savings pay off the British National Debt. Lacking an independent public opinion, elections could be managed by the officials through the official Press in their own interest; elections would become a sham, and would no doubt soon fall into disuse. The official class would become a caste of hereditary rulers governing millions of serfs. The foregoing makes it clear that in political as in economic matters the Socialist State must fall a prey to the most complete absolutism which the world has known, an absolutism which probably, through a series of revolutions and civil wars, would at last end in anarchy. At present a dissatisfied worker can change his employer, he can get justice in the Law Courts, and in extreme cases he can put his grievances before the nation. In the Socialist State there would be only one authority--the all-controlling and all-powerful State, or rather an all-controlling and all-powerful bureaucracy. The nation would be composed of two classes: permanent officials possessing absolute power, and ordinary citizens possessing neither power nor right; overseers and workers; slave-drivers and slaves; and the only way of escaping the tyranny of the State--for absolute and unchecked power has always led, and will always lead, to tyranny--would be by committing suicide. As in Rome under the rule of Nero and Caligula, suicide would be the only way to liberty. A leading Socialist wrote with unconscious humour: "The Utopist needs no knowledge of facts. Indeed such a knowledge is a hindrance. For him the laws of social evolution do not exist. He is a law unto himself; and his men are not the wayward, spasmodic, irregular organisms of daily life, but automata obeying the strings he pulls. In a word, he creates, he does not construct. He makes alike his materials and the laws within which they work, adapting them all to an ideal end. In describing a new Jerusalem the only limits to its perfection are the limits of the writer's imagination.... Humanity will rise to heights undreamed of now; and the most exquisite Utopias, as sung by the poet and idealist, shall to our children seem but dim and broken lights compared with their perfect day. All that we need are Courage, Prudence, and Faith. Faith above all."[1268] Every reader of this book will no doubt heartily agree with the latter remark. Socialists are wise to appeal rather to blind faith than to plain common-sense. The philosopher of British Socialism tells us: "Socialism is the great modern protest against _un_reality, against the delusive shams which now masquerade as verities."[1269] Another Socialist leader asserts: "Socialism is a scientific scheme of national government entirely wise, just, and practical."[1270] A third leader affirms: "Socialism is neither more nor less than the science of Sociology."[1271] The "Socialist Catechism" asks: "How may Socialists reply to the taunt that their scheme is impracticable? By quoting the opinion of John Stuart Mill that the difficulties of Socialism are greatly overrated; and they should declare that, so far from being an impracticable Utopian scheme, it is the necessary and inevitable result of the historical evolution of society."[1272] Socialism stands condemned, not so much by the criticism of its opponents as by the doctrines and proposals of its leaders, and these are the men who aspire to rule the universe and who claim: "We mean the establishment of a political power in place of the present class-State, which shall have for its conscious and definite aim the common ownership and control of the _whole_ of the world's industry, exchange, &c."[1273] I think the readers of the foregoing pages will be inclined to believe that Socialism is methodised insanity. FOOTNOTES: [1203] Kautsky, _Social Revolution_, p. 41. [1204] Socialism, _For and Against_, p. 7. [1205] Clemenceau, in Jaurès' _Practical Socialism_, p. 11. [1206] Snowden, _The Individual under Socialism_, p. 12. [1207] Kautsky, _The Social Revolution_, p. 42. [1208] Blatchford, _Real Socialism_, p. 5. [1209] Macdonald, _Socialism and Society_, p. 126. [1210] Ethel Snowden, _The Woman Socialist_, p. 7. [1211] Ford, _Woman and Socialism_, p. 2. [1212] Macdonald, _Socialism and Society_, pp. 122, 123. [1213] Sir Oliver Lodge, _Public Service_ v. _Private Expenditure_, p. 11. [1214] Blatchford, _Not Guilty_, p. 37. [1215] _Ibid._ p. 251. [1216] See _ante_, Chapter XXIII. [1217] Herbert Spencer, _The Man versus the State_, p. 43. [1218] Snowden, _The Individual under Socialism_, p. 9. [1219] Ben Tillett, _Trades Unionism and Socialism_, p. 14. [1220] Bax and Quelch, _A New Catechism_, p. 30. [1221] Kautsky, _The Social Revolution_, p. 43. [1222] Joynes, _The Socialist Catechism_, p. 14. [1223] Snowden, _The Individual under Socialism_, p. 11. [1224] _Ibid._ p. 18. [1225] Ward, _Religion and Labour_, pp. 7, 8. [1226] Gronlund, _Co-operative Commonwealth_, p. 77. [1227] Kautsky, _The Social Republic_, p. 32. [1228] Hazell, _Summary Marx's Capital_, p. 6. [1229] Bebel, _Woman in the Past, Present, and the Future_, p. 193. [1230] Sir Oliver Lodge, _Public Service versus Private Expenditure_, p. 10. [1231] _New Age_, November 21, 1907. [1232] See _ante_, p. 61 ff. [1233] Bax, _Outlooks from the New Standpoint_, p. 81. [1234] _Fabian Essays in Socialism_, pp. 163, 164. [1235] Leatham, _Socialism and Character_, p. 91. [1236] Davidson, _The Old Order and the New_, p. 170. [1237] Morris, _Communism_, pp. 14, 15. [1238] _Independent Labour Party Song Book_, p. 40. [1239] _Forward_, October 12, 1907. [1240] Bebel, _Woman in the Past, Present, and Future_, pp. 183, 184. [1241] Kautsky, _The Social Revolution_, pp. 16, 17. [1242] Sidney Webb, _Socialism True and False_, pp. 17, 18. [1243] _Socialism and Labour Policy_, p. 7. [1244] _The Economics of Direct Employment_, p. 6. [1245] Leatham, _Socialism and Character_, pp. 102, 103. [1246] Gronlund, _Co-operative Commonwealth_, p. 169. [1247] Bebel, _Woman_, p. 194. [1248] _Fabian Essays in Socialism_, p. 167. [1249] Ward, _The Ideal City_, p. 7. [1250] _Fabian Essays in Socialism_, p. 167. [1251] Leatham, _Socialism and Character_, p. 91. [1252] _Socialist_, December 1907. [1253] Kropotkin, _Anarchism, its Philosophy and Ideal_, p. 15. [1254] _Freedom_, October 1907. [1255] Snowden, _The Individual under Socialism_, p. 1. [1256] Hyndman, _Socialism and Slavery_, p. 10. [1257] Sorge, _Socialism and the Worker_, p. 14. [1258] Bebel, _Woman_, p. 199. [1259] Blatchford, _Real Socialism_, p. 14. [1260] Snowden, _The Individual under Socialism_, p. 12. [1261] Jaurès, _Practical Socialism_, p. 6. [1262] Bebel, _Woman_, p. 181. [1263] Gronlund, _Co-operative Commonwealth_, p. 126. [1264] Thompson, _Hail Referendum_, pp. 3, 4. [1265] Bax, _Essays in Socialism_, pp. 75, 76. [1266] Gronlund, _Co-operative Commonwealth_, p. 135. [1267] _Fabian Essays in Socialism_, p. 159. [1268] _Fabian Essays in Socialism_, pp. 149, 169. [1269] Bax, _Religion of Socialism_, p. ix. [1270] Blatchford, _Merrie England_, p. 100. [1271] Hyndman, _Socialism and Slavery_, Preface. [1272] Joynes, _The Socialist Catechism_. [1273] Bax and Quelch, _A New Catechism_, p. 9. CHAPTER XXXVII CONCLUSION The leading Socialists claim that Socialism is at the same time a scientific doctrine and a practical policy. A perusal of this book should suffice to prove that it is neither the one nor the other. On its scientific side it consists of twenty catch-phrases which are very effective for propaganda purposes, but which are contrary to general experience and to common-sense. On its practical side it consists of a number of fantastic proposals which are likewise contrary to general experience and to common-sense. Socialism has two faces. The one which is turned towards the cultured and towards the non-Socialists of the middle class constantly asserts that Socialism is a scientific and perfect system of well-ordered government and co-operation, which will evolve order and harmony out of the chaos of individualism and of competition, and which will raise men to the highest level of perfection. The other, which is turned towards the masses, and which is by far the more important, is purely predatory in character. It appeals to all the passions of the multitude. It denounces law, religion, charity, thrift, temperance, and all existing institutions. It preaches envy, hatred, greed, selfishness, violence, civil war, and general plunder. It sets class against class, and creates among its supporters a frame of mind which makes not for harmony, order, and co-operation, but for disorder, revolution, and anarchy. The followers of Socialism do not see in it a science. "With the speculative side of Socialism the average man has but a small concern; it is its common-sense which appeals to him. By inherited instinct we are all communists at heart."[1274] The attraction of Socialism to the masses lies in its promise of the spoliation of the rich and of the general division of their wealth. It is true that Socialists habitually and very emphatically protest that Socialism is not a system of robbery and of general division. It is true that Socialists merely propose that all private property should be transferred to the State by expropriation--which is a euphemism for confiscation--and that the State should manage it for the general good of the masses. However, that is a distinction without a difference. Property is valuable because of the income which it yields. Therefore it comes for all practicable purposes to the same, whether the Socialist leaders propose dividing all the private property or all the income derived from that property. A prominent Socialist writer has asked: "Is not honesty--the sense of right of possession in the fruits of our labour--the very basis of Socialism?"[1275] Regretfully one must answer that question with a very emphatic "No." Socialism is not a system of organisation and of national co-operation, but merely a plan of spoliation and of general division. That may clearly be seen from the fact that the Socialist leaders have not the slightest desire to create a Socialistic model commonwealth, and thus demonstrate the practical value of their highly speculative doctrines, in a new country where Socialism could be introduced peacefully, easily, and without a revolution, where co-operation and exchange would be comparatively simple because wants are simple, the commodities produced are few, and the opposition of vested interests would be _nil_. In spite of all these great advantages, the Socialist leaders prefer introducing Socialism into old countries where the confiscation of the existing property seems a shorter way to wealth than work, and where confiscation will have the most satisfactory results to the despoilers. We have seen that the various Socialistic organisations agree on hardly one point in their constructive policy. However, they absolutely agree in their main purpose--spoliation. On that point there is absolute unanimity among all the British Socialists, and they condemn State Socialism (see Chapter XXXII.) because State Socialism would not mean confiscation and general division. Besides, it would not enable the Socialist leaders to overturn the State and to seize the reins of Government. British Socialism is purely destructive in character, and if Socialism should ever be established in Great Britain it would lead not to national co-operation, but to civil war among the various Socialistic sections for the spoils, and to a series of sanguinary _coups d'état_ similar to those which arose out of the great French Revolution. The "scientific" proposal of transferring all private property to the State, and of using that property for the common good, merely circumscribes the word and act of confiscation and of general division. Therefore we may say that Socialism has no scientific basis, unless we choose to call science a collection of fallacies expressed in involved terms so as to deceive the simple. Karl Marx was not a scientist but a professional demagogue and revolutionist, and his merit from the Socialists' point of view consists only in this, that he elaborated a formula of roundabout spoliation and general division, which he took from his Anarchist predecessors, and gave it a much needed, though rather transparent, cloak of scientific respectability. Socialism is, in the first place, a business proposition. Therefore, if it were practical, it should appeal particularly to business men. However, it is noteworthy that the loudest champions of British Socialism are not business men, of whom but few are to be found in the Socialist ranks, but pushing writers in search of self-advertisement, whose special domain is the highly spiced and the sensational, writers who, knowing that many people mistake eccentricity for genius and paradoxical absurdity for brilliancy, have discarded common-sense, let their imaginations run riot, and outbid one another for notoriety. The complaints of the Socialists about the unequal distribution of wealth are as old as is humanity itself. Since the earliest times demagogues have endeavoured to obtain a following by working upon the misery, envy, short-sightedness, and passions of the poor, by promising them equality and boundless wealth to be obtained by the simple process of seizing and dividing up the property of the well-to-do. The identical arguments and proposals which are now put forward in the name of Marx, and of modern "scientific" Socialism, as something new and original may be found throughout literature since the very dawn of history.[1276] However, history teaches us that, although countless Socialistic experiments have been made, all attempts at enriching the poor by spoliation and at creating an artificial equality among men have proved a failure. They have invariably ended in national ruin, and have left the masses poorer and more miserable than ever. The reason of this universal failure is obvious. Man cannot reconstruct Nature. He may violate, but cannot alter, the laws of Nature. Inequality rules throughout Nature, and it seems as little possible to equalise the fortunes, as it is to equalise the bodily and mental powers, of men. We all are the slaves of Nature. The inequality of natural gifts and the division of labour are the principal causes of the division of men into classes and of the unequal distribution of wealth. Nature is only governed by obeying her. We can certainly diminish poverty, but we cannot, for any length of time, maintain an artificial equality among naturally unequal men. The first duty of the State, as of the individual, is self-preservation. British Socialism, being by those teachings which it addresses to its supporters a revolutionary doctrine in the worst sense of the term, and therefore a purely destructive factor, must unconditionally be resisted and combated. However, at the same time all that can be done must be done to alleviate the distress of the British masses, which is undoubtedly very great, and which makes them exceedingly receptive to the revolutionary doctrines of Socialism. As it would require too much space to deal with the social problem in Great Britain in its entirety, only a few of the most important points can be touched upon. The greatest scourge of the British worker is no doubt irregular and ill-paid employment. The first step to improve his position is therefore to improve employment. Hence the most urgent reform is the revision of Great Britain's economic policy. Great Britain's present economic policy, Free Trade, was based upon the supposition that Great Britain, as Cobden prophesied, was, and always would remain, the workshop of the world; that other countries were compelled to buy British manufactures because British manufactures were as necessary to them as foreign foodstuffs are now to Great Britain. In 1846, when Free Trade was introduced, there was some reason for that supposition. Before the advent of electricity manufacturing was based exclusively upon coal. Great Britain's absolute predominance in manufacturing for the markets of the whole world immediately before the introduction of Free Trade may therefore best be seen from the following table: PRODUCTION OF COAL IN 1845[1277] Quantity produced. Percentage of Tons world's production Great Britain 31,500,000 64.2 Belgium 4,960,077 10.1 United States 4,400,000 8.9 France 4,141,617 8.4 Prussian States 3,500,000 7.0 Austrian States 659,340 1.4 ---------- ---- 49,161,034 100 The above table shows that Great Britain produced two-thirds of the world's coal, and the coal of most other countries was supposed to be unsuitable for manufacturing purposes. However, Great Britain produced not only two-thirds of the world's coal, but she produced likewise two-thirds of the world's iron, she consumed two-thirds of the world's cotton, and she possessed two-thirds of the world's shipping. Her railway mileage was greater than that of the whole Continent of Europe.[1278] Times have changed. Great Britain is no longer the workshop of the world. British manufactures are no longer indispensable to foreign countries. In the present age of steel, the production of steel is the best index of a nation's manufacturing eminence, and how greatly conditions have changed, and are still changing, to England's disadvantage may be seen from the following figures: OUTPUT OF STEEL United States. Germany. Great Britain. Tons Tons Tons 1890 4,277,000 2,127,000 3,679,000 1906 23,246,000 11,135,000 6,462,000 Great Britain, which formerly produced nine-tenths of the world's steel, produces now little more than one-tenth of the world's steel. As Great Britain has to buy vast quantities of food and raw material from foreign countries, she must sell to foreign countries vast quantities of manufactured goods. However, market after market is being closed to her industries by ever-rising tariff walls, and the profits from her exports have been greatly diminished through foreign competition. Her home market has been reduced through the decay of her agriculture and the shrinkage of her agricultural population, and it is systematically spoiled by combinations of foreign manufacturers. Foreign syndicates determine not only the price of British wheat and meat, but of British iron and other manufactures too, and they endeavour to ruin the British industries completely. Great Britain, far from being the world's manufacturer, has become the world's dumping ground. From the richest country in the world she is rapidly becoming one of the poorer countries of the world. Her industries are suffering, and the result is bad times, low wages, irregular employment, unemployment, poverty, and distress. It is noteworthy that, on an average, unemployment among the skilled workers in free-trade Great Britain is always five times greater than it is in protectionist Germany;[1279] that British emigration per million is eleven times larger than German emigration; that German savings-banks deposits are four times larger than British savings-banks deposits, and that the former increase ten times faster than the latter.[1280] What can be done to improve the position of the British workers? Emigration on the largest scale has proved a palliative, but no remedy. During the last twenty years almost five million people have left Great Britain. Yet the labour market is as over-stocked, and unemployment and poverty are as great, as ever. Besides, the United States and the British colonies may not always be able to absorb the vast and ever-growing numbers of British unemployed workers. Employment and wages depend upon the prosperity of industries, and the prosperity of industries depends on a sufficiency of markets. The British industries have not a sufficiency of markets. Therefore the British population suffers from irregular employment, unemployment, and consequent want and misery; and want and misery among the British masses are likely to continue increasing and ever increasing until Great Britain adapts her economic policy to the altered circumstances of the time, protects the industries by which her workers live, and secures a sufficient outlet for their productions by preferential arrangements with the self-governing Dominions. Under the shelter of Protection at home and with the aid of preferential arrangements throughout the empire, Great Britain will be able vastly to extend her manufacturing industries. Great Britain has unrivalled facilities for manufacturing. Whilst the manufacturing centres of the United States, Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Italy, and other countries lie far inland near their coalfields, Great Britain has the unique advantage of being able to manufacture on the seashore, where coal, iron, great manufacturing towns, and excellent harbours lie in close proximity. The potentialities of the British industries under fair conditions and under the wise care of a fostering Government are boundless. Under the shelter of Protection the rural industries of Great Britain may be revived, especially if the British peasantry be re-created. A hundred years ago the great agricultural authority, Arthur Young, wrote: "The magic of property turns sand into gold. Give a man a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden. Give him a nine years' lease of a garden, and he will convert it into a desert." Since the time when these words were written most European countries have created a freehold peasantry by buying out the landed proprietors and settling the rural labourers on the land, and Great Britain will be wise in following their example. The tripartite question of Fiscal Protection for the home market, of an Imperial Customs Union, and of Imperial Federation is not a party question. It is a question of life or death for Great Britain. It may soon become a question of prosperity or starvation for the masses. Great Britain stands at the parting of the ways. She must either protect and re-create her industries, federate with her colonies, and make the British Empire a reality, or sink into insignificance, and history knows no instance of a great nation becoming a small one without the most intense suffering to the masses of the people. Great Britain must either adopt that constructive and protective national policy which the greatest statesmen and Empire builders of modern times--Richelieu, Cromwell, Colbert, Lord Chatham, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, Stein, and Bismarck--have pursued, or she will share the fate of the great commercial world empires of the past, from Phoenicia to the Netherlands. She must either follow the policy of Mr. Chamberlain, build up the Empire and make it strong and prosperous, or that of revolutionary demagogues, who will wreck the Empire and drag Great Britain through plunder and ruin to destruction and anarchy. The experience of other industrial nations allows us to conclude that a wisely framed protective tariff will save the British industries and improve employment and wages. But better wages alone will not improve the position of the workers. A large part of the British working class must alter their personal habits, and especially their drinking habits. At present every rise in wages leads immediately to a great increase in the Drink Bill, and therefore benefits rather the brewer than the worker. "The strongest answer to the theory that poverty causes drink is the statistical fact that as wages rise general drunkenness follows, insanity increases, and criminal disorders due to drink keep pace with all three. Wherever one seeks for information dispassionately, one sees that drink does cause poverty to a greater extent, overwhelmingly so, than that poverty causes drink. Poverty is due to intemperance in varying degrees from twenty-five to fifty-one per cent, of cases and areas investigated."[1281] "The Committee on Physical Deterioration in 1904 declared that if the drink question were removed three-fourths of the difficulty with regard to poverty and deterioration would disappear with it."[1282] The drinking section of the working class spends _18l. 15s. 4d._ per family on drink,[1283] a sum much larger than that spent on rent. "There are two great causes of physical deterioration--these are dirt and drink. The former is responsible for nearly every form of disease. The latter is the direct cause of the vast number of defects."[1284] "The most urgently needed public health reform of the present day is not so much one of environment as one of personal life."[1285] Many British workmen are incredibly wasteful. When one visits public-houses and working-men's clubs, when one goes to racecourses, football or other matches, and music-halls, the British workers seem to be the richest in the world. When one looks at their homes, their clothes, and especially their savings, they seem to be the poorest in the world. British working men drink, waste, and gamble to a much greater extent than foreign working men. Therefore not only the higher paid American workers, but also the lower paid French, German, and Swiss workers, are better housed, better clothed, and better fed--and are therefore better off and healthier--than British workers.[1286] Besides, as their savings are much larger they are better able to stand a short spell of ill-luck or of bad times. Whether a working man is prosperous or poor, happy or unhappy, depends--under fair conditions of employment, which Protection should create--perhaps more on his personal habits and on those of his wife than on the actual amount he receives in wages. Social reform, to be effective, must be assisted in the home. The worker must aid the social reformer. Outside assistance alone will little benefit wasteful and improvident men who refuse to help themselves. FOOTNOTES: [1274] Keir Hardie, _From Serfdom to Socialism_, pp. 33, 34. [1275] Leatham, _Socialism and Character_, p. 96. [1276] See Mencius' Works in Legge's _Chinese Classics_; Euripides, _The Suppliants_; Aristotle, _Politics_, vii. 5; Aristophanes, _Ecclesiazusae_ and _Plutus_; Plutarch, _Tiberius Gracchus_, 9; Livius, ii. 32; Sallust, _Catiline's Conspiracy_, 20, 23, 37-39; Virgil, _Georgics_, i. 125; Tibullus, i. 3, 35 Propertius, ii. 13, iii. 5, 11; Seneca, _Epistles_, 90, &c. [1277] Taylor, _Statistics of Coal_, p. xxi. [1278] See _Encyclopædia Britannica_, 8th edition, 1853-1860, articles: Cotton, Iron, Railways; Meyer, _Konversations Lexikon_, 1839-1855, article: Grossbritannien; Porter, _Progress of the Nation_, 1847; MacCulloch, _British Empire_, 1846; MacCulloch, _Dictionary of Commerce_, 1847; Macgregor, _Commercial Statistics_, 1844-1850, &c. [1279] See _Board of Trade Labour Gazette_ and _Reichs Arbeitsblatt_. [1280] Ellis Barker, _Modern Germany_, 546 ff. [1281] Burns, _Labour and Drink_, pp. 15, 18. [1282] Newman, _The Health of the State_, p. 189. [1283] Whittaker, _Drink Problem_, p. 10. [1284] McMillan, _The Child and the State_, p. 4. [1285] Newman, _Health of the State_, p. 194. [1286] See _Reports of the Mosely Industrial Commission to the United States_; _The Brassworkers of Berlin and of Birmingham_; _The Gainsborough Commission, Life and Labour in Germany_; Horsfall, _The Improvement of the Dwellings--The Example of Germany_; Marr, _Housing Conditions in Manchester_; _City of Birmingham, Report of the Housing Committee_; Steele, _The Working Classes in France_; Rowntree and Sherwell, _The Temperance Problem_; Rowntree, _Poverty_; the publication of Charles Booth, &c. APPENDIX OFFICIAL PROGRAMMES OF THE SOCIALISTIC ORGANISATIONS SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC FEDERATION _Programme and Rules as revised previous to the Annual Conference held at the Labour Institute, Bradford, Easter 1906_ _Object._--The Social-Democratic Federation is a part of the International Social-Democracy. It believes:-- 1. That the emancipation of the working class can only be achieved through the socialisation of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, and their subsequent control by the organised community in the interests of the whole people. 2. That, as the proletariat is the last class to achieve freedom, its emancipation will mean the emancipation of the whole of mankind, without distinction of race, nationality, creed, or sex. 3. That this emancipation can only be the work of the working class itself,[1287] organised nationally and internationally into a distinct political party, consciously striving after the realisation of its ideals: and, finally, 4. That, in order to ensure greater material and moral facilities for the working class to organise itself and to carry on the class war, the following reforms must immediately be carried through:-- IMMEDIATE REFORMS _Political._--Abolition of the Monarchy. Democratisation of the Governmental machinery, viz. Abolition of the House of Lords, Payment of Members of Legislative and Administrative bodies. Payment of Official Expenses of Elections out of the Public Funds, Adult Suffrage, Proportional Representation, Triennial Parliaments, Second Ballot, Initiative, and Referendum. Foreigners to be granted rights of citizenship after two years' residence in the country, without any fees. Canvassing to be made illegal. All elections to take place on one day, such day to be made a legal holiday and all premises licensed for the sale of intoxicating liquors to be closed. Legislation by the people in such wise that no legislative proposal shall become law until ratified by the majority of the people. Legislative and Administrative independence for all parts of the Empire. _Financial and Fiscal._--Repudiation of the National Debt. Abolition of all indirect taxation and the institution of a cumulative tax on all incomes and inheritances exceeding _300l._ _Administrative._--Extension of the principle of Local Self-Government. Systematisation and co-ordination of the local administrative bodies. Election of all administrators and administrative bodies by Equal Direct Adult Suffrage. _Educational._--Elementary education to be free, secular, industrial, and compulsory for all classes. The age of obligatory school attendance to be raised to 16. Unification and systematisation of intermediate and higher education, both general and technical, and all such education to be free. State Maintenance for all attending State schools. Abolition of school rates; the cost of education in all State schools to be borne by the National Exchequer. _Public Monopolies and Services._--Nationalisation of the land and the organisation of labour in agriculture and industry under public ownership and control on co-operative principles. Nationalisation of the Trusts. Nationalisation of Railways, Docks, and Canals, and all great means of transit. Public ownership and control of Gas, Electric Light, and Water supplies, as well as of Tramway, Omnibus, and other locomotive services. Public ownership and control of the food and coal supply. The establishment of State and municipal banks and pawnshops and public restaurants. Public ownership and control of the lifeboat service. Public ownership and control of hospitals, dispensaries, cemeteries, and crematoria. Public ownership and control of the drink traffic. _Labour._--A legislative eight-hour working day, or 48 hours per week, to be the maximum for all trades and industries. Imprisonment to be inflicted on employers for any infringement of the law. Absolute freedom of combination for all workers, with legal guarantee against any action, private or public, which tends to curtail or infringe it. No child to be employed in any trade or occupation until 16 years of age, and imprisonment to be inflicted on employers, parents, and guardians who infringe this law. Public provision of useful work at not less than trade union rates of wages for the unemployed. Free State Insurance against sickness and accident, and free and adequate State pensions or provision for aged and disabled workers. Public assistance not to entail any forfeiture of political rights. The legislative enactment of a minimum wage of _30s._ for all workers. Equal pay for both sexes for the performance of equal work. _Social._--Abolition of the present workhouse system, and reformed administration of the Poor Law on a basis of national co-operation. Compulsory construction by public bodies of healthy dwellings for the people; such dwellings to be let at rents to cover the cost of construction and maintenance alone, and not to cover the cost of the land. The administration of justice and legal advice to be free to all; justice to be administered by judges chosen by the people; appeal in criminal cases; compensation for those innocently accused, condemned, and imprisoned; abolition of imprisonment for contempt of court in relation to non-payment of debt in the case of workers earning less than _2l._ per week; abolition of capital punishment. _Miscellaneous._--The disestablishment and disendowment of all State Churches. The abolition of standing armies, and the establishment of national citizen forces. The people to decide on peace and war. The establishment of international courts of arbitration. The abolition of courts-martial; all offences against discipline to be transferred to the jurisdiction of civil courts. INDEPENDENT LABOUR PARTY _Constitution and Rules. 1907-8_ _Object._--An Industrial Commonwealth founded upon the Socialisation of Land and Capital. _Methods._--The education of the community in the principles of Socialism. The Industrial and Political Organisation of the Workers. The Independent Representation of Socialist Principles on all elective bodies. _Programme._--The true object of industry being the production of the requirements of life, the responsibility should rest with the community collectively, therefore: The land, being the storehouse of all the necessaries of life, should be declared and treated as public property. The capital necessary for industrial operations should be owned and used collectively. Work, and wealth resulting therefrom, should be equitably distributed over the population. As a means to this end, we demand the enactment of the following measures: 1. A maximum of 48 hours working week, with the retention of all existing holidays, and Labour Day, May 1, secured by law. 2. The provision of work to all capable adult applicants at recognised trade union rates, with a statutory minimum of sixpence per hour. In order to remuneratively employ the applicants, Parish, District, Borough, and County Councils to be invested with powers to: (_a_) Organise and undertake such industries as they may consider desirable. (_b_) Compulsorily acquire land; purchase, erect, or manufacture buildings, stock, or other articles for carrying on such industries. (_c_) Levy rates on the rental values of the district, and borrow money on the security of such rates for any of the above purposes. 3. State pensions for every person over 50 years of age, and adequate provision for all widows, orphans, sick, and disabled workers. 4. Free secular, moral, primary, secondary, and university education, with free maintenance while at school or university. 5. The raising of the age of child labour, with a view to its ultimate extinction. 6. Municipalisation and public control of the drink traffic. 7. Municipalisation and public control of all Hospitals and Infirmaries. 8. Abolition of indirect taxation and the gradual transference of all public burdens on to unearned incomes with a view to their ultimate extinction. The Independent Labour Party is in favour of adult suffrage, with full political rights and privileges for women, and the immediate extension of the franchise to women on the same terms as granted to men; also triennial Parliaments and second ballot. THE LABOUR PARTY has no official programme. A semi-official programme, contained in a statement of its Secretary, Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, M.P., will be found on page 425 of this book. THE FABIAN SOCIETY _Basis._--The Fabian Society consists of Socialists. It therefore aims at the reorganisation of Society by the emancipation of Land and Industrial Capital from individual and class ownership, and the vesting of them in the community for the general benefit. In this way only can the natural and acquired advantages of the country be equitably shared by the whole people. The Society accordingly works for the extinction of private property in Land and of the consequent individual appropriation, in the form of Rent, of the price paid for permission to use the earth, as well as for the advantages of superior soils and sites. The Society, further, works for the transfer to the community of the administration of such industrial Capital as can conveniently be managed socially. For, owing to the monopoly of the means of production in the past, industrial inventions and the transformation of surplus income into Capital have mainly enriched the proprietary class, the worker being now dependent on that class for leave to earn a living. If these measures be carried out, without compensation (though not without such relief to expropriated individuals as may seem fit to the community), Rent and Interest will be added to the reward of labour, the idle class now living on the labour of others will necessarily disappear, and practical equality of opportunity will be maintained by the spontaneous action of economic forces with much less interference with personal liberty than the present system entails. For the attainment of these ends the Fabian Society looks to the spread of Socialist opinions, and the social and political changes consequent thereon, including the establishment of equal citizenship for men and women. It seeks to achieve these ends by the general dissemination of knowledge as to the relation between the individual and Society in its economic, ethical, and political aspects. THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN _Object._--The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community. DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES The Socialist Party of Great Britain holds that society as at present constituted is based upon the ownership of the means of living (_i.e._ land, factories, railways, &c.) by the capitalist or master class, and the consequent enslavement of the working class, by whose labour alone wealth is produced. That in society, therefore, there is an antagonism of interests, manifesting itself as a class struggle, between those who possess but do not produce, and those who produce but do not possess. That this antagonism can be abolished only by the emancipation of the working class from the domination of the master class, by the conversion into the common property of society of the means of production and distribution, and their democratic control by the whole people. That as in the order of social evolution the working class is the last class to achieve its freedom, the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind, without distinction of race or sex. That this emancipation must be the work of the working class itself. That as the machinery of government, including the armed forces of the nation, exists only to conserve the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers, the working class must organise consciously and politically for the conquest of the powers of government, national and local, in order that this machinery, including these forces, may be converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation, and the overthrow of privilege, aristocratic and plutocratic. That as all political parties are but the expression of class interests, and as the interest of the working class is diametrically opposed to the interests of all sections of the master class, the party seeking working-class emancipation must be hostile to every other party. The Socialist Party of Great Britain, therefore, enters the field of political action determined to wage war against all other political parties, whether alleged labour or avowedly capitalist, and calls upon the members of the working class of this country to muster under its banner to the end that a speedy termination may be wrought to the system which deprives them of the fruits of their labour, and that poverty may give place to comfort, privilege to equality, and slavery to freedom. PLATFORM OF THE SOCIALIST LABOUR PARTY The Socialist Labour Party is a political organisation seeking to establish political and social freedom for all, and seeing in the conquest by the Socialist Working Class of all the governmental and administrative powers of the nation the means to the attainment of that end. It affirms its belief that political and social freedom are not two separate and unrelated ideas, but are two sides of the one great principle, each being incomplete without the other. The course of society politically has been from warring but democratic tribes within each nation to a united government under an absolutely undemocratic monarchy. Within this monarchy again developed revolts against its power, revolts at first seeking to limit its prerogatives only, then demanding the inclusion of certain classes in the governing power, then demanding the right of the subject to criticise and control the power of the monarch, and finally, in the most advanced countries this movement culminated in the total abolition of the monarchical institution, and the transformation of the subject into the citizen. In industry a corresponding development has taken place. The independent producer, owning his own tools and knowing no master, has given way before the more effective productive powers of huge capital, concentrated in the hands of the great capitalist. The latter, recognising no rights in his workers, ruled as an absolute monarch in his factory. But within the realm of capital developed a revolt against the power of the capitalist. This revolt, taking the form of trade unionism, has pursued in the industrial field the same line of development as the movement for political freedom has pursued in the sphere of national government. It first contented itself with protests against excessive exactions, against all undue stretchings of the power of the capitalist; then its efforts broadened out to demands for restrictions upon the absolute character of such power, _i.e._, by claiming for trade unions the right to make rules for the workers in the workshop; then it sought to still further curb the capitalist's power by shortening the working day, and so limiting the period during which the toiler may be exploited. Finally, it seeks by Boards of Arbitration to establish an equivalent in the industrial world for that compromise in the political world by which, in constitutional countries, the monarch retains his position by granting a parliament to divide with him the duties of governing, and so hides while securing his power. And as in the political history of the race the logical development of progress was found in the abolition of the institution of monarchy, and not in its mere restriction, so in industrial history the culminating point to which all efforts must at last converge lies in the abolition of the capitalist class, and not in the mere restriction of its powers. The Socialist Labour Party, recognising these two phases of human development, unites them in its programme, and seeks to give them a concrete embodiment by its demand for a Socialist Republic. It recognises in all past history a preparation for this achievement, and in the industrial tendencies of to-day it hails the workings out of those laws of human progress which bring that object within our reach. The concentration of capital in the form of trusts at the same time as it simplifies the task we propose that society shall undertake, viz. the dispossession of the capitalist class, and the administration of all land and instruments of industry as social property, of which all shah be co-heirs and owners. As to-day the organised power of the State theoretically guarantees to every individual his political rights, so in the Socialist Republic the power and productive forces of organised society will stand between every individual and want, guaranteeing that right to life without which all other rights are but mockery. Short of the complete dispossession of the capitalist class which this implies there is no hope for the workers. SPEED THE DAY. THE CHRISTIAN SOCIAL UNION The Union consists of members of the Church of England who have the following objects at heart:-- 1. To claim for the Christian law the ultimate authority to rule social practice. 2. To study in common how to apply the moral truths and principles of Christianity to the social and economic difficulties of the present time. 3. To present Christ in practical life as the living Master and King, the enemy of wrong and selfishness, the power of righteousness and love. THE CHURCH SOCIALIST LEAGUE _Principles._--The Church has a mission to the whole of human life, Social and Individual, Material and Spiritual. 2. The Church can best fulfil its social mission by acting together in its corporate capacity. 3. To this end the members of the League accept the principles of Socialism. _Object._--To secure the corporate action of the Church on these principles. _Method._--1. To cultivate by the regular use of prayer and sacraments the life of brotherhood. 2. Members undertake to help each other in fulfilling the object of the League by speaking and lecturing and in other ways. 3. Members shall co-operate as far as possible to secure the consideration of social questions at their various Ruridecanal and Diocesan Conferences and the election of Socialists on these and other representative bodies. 4. Members shall work for the disestablishment of the patron and the substitution of the Church in each parish in conjunction with the Church in the diocese in the patron's place. 5. To secure the representation of the wage-earning classes upon all the representative bodies of the Church. GUILD OF ST. MATTHEW _Objects._--1. To get rid, by every possible means, of the existing prejudices, especially on the part of "Secularists," against the Church, her sacraments and her doctrines: and to endeavour to "justify God to the people." 2. To promote frequent and reverent worship in the Holy Communion, and a better observance of the teaching of the Church of England as set forth in the Book of Common Prayer. 3. To promote the study of social and political questions in the light of the Incarnation. FOOTNOTES: [1287] This paragraph is not to be understood as debarring individual members of the possessing classes from participating in the work of the movement. BIBLIOGRAPHY OF BOOKS, PAMPHLETS, PERIODICALS, REPORTS, AND PAPERS QUOTED IN THIS VOLUME _Abolition of Poor Law Guardians._ Fabian Society. London. 1906. ADAMS, FRANCIS: "_The Mass of Christ._" Labour Press Society. Manchester. _The Advance of Socialism._ (Leaflet.) Independent Labour Party. London. 1907. _After Bread--Education._ Fabian Society. London. 1905. _Allotments, and How to Get Them._ Fabian Society. London. 1894. _An Appeal to Soldiers._ (Leaflet.) Social Democratic Federation. London. _Are You a Socialist?_ (Leaflet.) Independent Labour Party. 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Twentieth Century Press. London. 1907. WILSON, Rev. J. STITT: _The Social Crusade._ (Periodical.) Bradford. WOODWORTH: _Christian Socialism in England._ Swan Sonnenschein & Co. London. 1903. _The Workers' Burden._ (Leaflet.) Independent Labour Party. London. ANALYTICAL INDEX NOTE.--_The abbreviation "f." following a page number signifies "and following page"; "ff." "and following pages."_ ABSOLUTISM, Socialism makes for, 460 ff. ABSTINENCE, Co-operation, and Thrift denounced by Socialists, 131 ff., 311 ff. ADMINISTRATION, Imperial, Socialist views regarding, 179 f. National, Socialist views regarding, 213 f. ADULT suffrage demanded, 213 ADULTERATION, cause of, 84 f. AGITATORS, Socialistic, appeal to passions, 10, 446, 470 Socialist wish to govern themselves, 411 AGRICULTURE, Socialist views on, 261 ff., 288 ff. AIMS and policy of Socialists, 92 ff. ALCOHOLIC DRINK, expenditure of British workers on, 166, 319, 479 ALLOTMENTS, 262 ff. ANANIAS, the story of, 385 ANARCHISM and Socialism, similarity of views and aims of, and connection between them, 81, 90, 118, 328, 381 f., 394 ff. ANARCHISTS, Chicago, and Socialists, 401 f. ANGLO-FRENCH agreements, views of Socialists on, 188 ANTWERP DOCK strike, 295 APPROPRIATION without adequate compensation is theft, 102 ARBITRATION, international, Socialists on, 188, 190 f. ARMED nation, why many Socialists are in favour of, 193 ff. ARMIES, standing, are to be dissolved, 194 ff. ARMY reform of Mr. Haldane, condemned by Socialists, 197 ff. Socialist propaganda to undermine discipline and cause revolt in, 200 ff. Socialist proposals regarding the, 192 ff. ASSIGNATS, history of the, 283 f. ATHEISM, Socialism and, 354 ff. BANKS and banking, Socialist views on, 258 f., 278 ff. BARRICADES, Socialist views on, 258 f., 278 ff. BARTER, international, proposed by Socialists, 279 BENEFICENCE, sense of, relied on by Socialists as principal motive in men, 458 f. BETTING, expenditure of working men on, 166 BLACKLEGS, British, in Antwerp and Hamburg, 295 f. BREMEN, Socialism in, 440 BRITISH EMPIRE--_see_ Empire, British BROTHERHOOD OF MAN promised and proclaimed by Socialists, 25 f., 185 ff., 370, 382, 444 BUDGET, national, Socialist proposals regarding, 160 ff. CADE, JACK, 326 f. CAPITAL is theft, 81 f., 102, 370 national growth of, owing to savings of capitalists, 64 f. private, cannot leave the country, 153 f. is immoral, 80 ff. is not to be tolerated, 152 ff. why its constant increase is necessary, 45 CAPITALISTS and landowners are thieves, 38, 102, 370 f. and workers, division of national income between, 40 ff., 75 ff. relations between, 30 ff., 75 ff. are the managers and trustees of the national wealth, 35 employ labour only at a profit, 33 exploit the poor, 31, 75 ff. greatest, were originally working men, 60 live in idleness, 30, 75 ff. maintain the workers, not the workers the capitalists, 168 private, are responsible for commercial crises, 67 ff. are responsible for unemployment, 65 ff., 125 f. useless and unnecessary, 155, 168 benefit from unemployment, 69 f. have no rights and no claims to consideration, 154 their disappearance would be a blessing, 155, 168 usefulness of, 64 f., 168, 315 CARNEGIE, ANDREW, on drink, 321 f. CATECHISM for the mob, 367 the Red, 372 ff. CHEAPNESS, Socialist views on, 290 ff. CHICAGO Anarchists and Socialists, 401 f. CHILDREN, free maintenance of, demanded, 138 free meals for--_see_ Free Maintenance production of, to be regulated by the State, 347 f. will belong not to parents but to society, 345 f. will belong to parents, 348 CHRIST, name of, used for electioneering purposes, 363 CHRISTIAN Socialism, 375 ff. programmes of, 490 f. CHRISTIANITY and religion, Socialist attitude towards, 354 ff. CIVILISATION, Socialist views on, 11 ff. "CLARION," circulation of, 437 CLASS war doctrine, the, 72 ff. disproved, 79 CLASSES of society, are there only two? 72 ff. CLERGY, Socialist views on the, 13 COAL, production of, in 1845, 475 COBDEN, Socialists on, 287 CODE NAPOL�ON, 329, 344 COIN--_see_ Money COMMANDMENTS, the capitalists' ten, 368 the Socialist ten, 371 f. COMMONS, House of, Socialist views on the, 209 ff. COMMUNE of Paris, Socialists and the insurrection of the, 407 ff. COMMUNISM and Socialism, 381 ff. early Christian, 386 in Sparta, 389 of Fourier, 392 f. Socialist recommendations of, 21, 381 ff. why it is impossible, 393 COMMUNIST manifesto quoted, 77 f., 92, 103, 107, 112, 183 f., 332 f., 405 COMMUNITY of women, 331 ff. COMPENSATION has no place in Socialist ethics, 100 f. or no compensation in expropriating private property? 95 ff., 149 f. COMPETITION and co-operation, 82 ff., 312 ff., 444 ff., 470 COMPLAINTS, the, of Socialists, 30 ff. COMPULSORY labour, necessity of, in Socialist commonwealth, 455 ff. CONFISCATION, plans of, 95 ff. probable result of, 168 f., 251 f., 254 CONTRACT, freedom of, useless to workers, 33 CO-OPERATION and competition, 82 ff., 312 ff., 444 ff., 470 cannot benefit British worker, 31 greatly benefits British worker, 315 ff. is opposed by Socialists, 84, 131 ff., 311 ff. thrift and abstinence denounced by Socialists, 131 ff., 311 ff. CO-OPERATIVE societies, record and statistics of the British, 315 ff. COURTS-MARTIAL, Socialist agitation against, 201 f. CRIME--_see_ Justice, Theft CRIMES, sexual, Socialist views on, 340 ff. CRISES caused by private capitalists, 67 ff. could they be prevented by Socialists? 70 f., 124 f. CROWN, the--_see_ also Monarchy is unfit to administer the Empire, 179 CURRENCY--_see_ Money DEBT, Local, huge increase and danger of, 246 ff. Local, will it be repudiated? 248 National, repudiation of, 110, 156 ff. DEMONETISATION of gold and silver--see Money DESERTION of family, frequency of, 307 DISARMAMENT, Socialists and, 189 ff. DISTRIBUTION, alteration of, will abolish misery, 65 ff. is more important than production, 65 ff. disproved, 70 f. DIVISION, general, of existing property disclaimed, 93 is the principal aim of Socialists, 471 f. DOCTRINES, fundamental, of Socialism, 50 ff. DOWNING STREET, Socialist views regarding government from, 179 f. DRINK, expenditure of workers on, 166, 319, 479 DRUNKENNESS, condemned and combated by foreign Socialists, 322 ff. excused and encouraged by British Socialists, 319 ff. DUTIES--_see_ Budget ECONOMIC policy of Great Britain, 474 ff. EDUCATION, Socialist views and proposals on, 302 ff. EMIGRATION, 476 f. EMPIRE, British, federation of, opposed by Socialists, 173 f. federation of, is necessary, 478 German Socialists' views on the, 181 f. has been a failure, 179 Socialists and the, 170 ff. EMPLOYERS and capitalists benefit from unemployment, 69 f. and workers' interests are opposed, 77 identical, 79 are useless, 168 ENGLAND--_see_ Great Britain ENTERPRISE, Governmental and municipal, inefficiency and wastefulness of, 85 ff., 251 ff. municipal, 240 ff. is undertaken regardless of cost and profit, 252 ff. EQUALITY of all races proclaimed by Socialists, 185 ff. ESPERANTO, why studied by Socialists, 188 ESTATE Duty--_see_ Budget EXPENDITURE, local, 246 EXPROPRIATION of private property without compensation, 95 ff., 149 f. FABIAN SOCIETY, details regarding, 94, 418 ff. programme of, 486 f. FAMILY, desertion of, very frequent, 307 Karl Marx on, 332 Socialism and the, 330 ff. FATALISM of Socialists, 327 f., 360 f. FEDERATION, Imperial, opposed by Socialists, 173 f. why necessary, 478 FEEDING of school-children--_see_ Free Maintenance FISCAL policy, Socialist views on, 285 ff. reform, why it is necessary, 474 ff. FOOD--_see_ Agriculture and Protection FORCED labour, necessity of, in Socialist Commonwealth, 455 ff. FOREIGN policy, Socialist views on, 183 ff. FOURIER, Communism of, 392 f. FRANCE, aspect of, before the Revolution, 433 FRANCHISE and suffrage in Great Britain and other countries, 213 FREEDOM of contract useless to workers, 33 FREE love, 330 ff. maintenance for children, 138, 303 ff. trade and protection, Karl Marx on, 300 Socialist views on, 285 ff. why it must be abandoned, 474 ff. FRONTIERS are to be abolished, 184 ff. GAMBLING spirit in Englishmen, 459 GERMAN and British Socialism compared, 88, 236, 432 f. Socialists' patriotic and imperial attitude, 181 f., 190 f., 205, 433 views on colonial policy, 181 f, 190 f. Great Britain, 181 f., 190 f. GERMANY, composition of electorate in, 440 GLASGOW, vast Socialist plans regarding, 252 GOD--_see_ Religion GOLD and silver money are to be abolished, 21, 258 f., 278 ff. GOVERNMENT--_see also_ Administration complaints about, 11 f., 394 ff., 411 ff. of Socialist State, 463 ff. GREAT BRITAIN, aspect of, resembles pre-Revolution France, 433 changed economic position of, 475 ff. dangerous position of, 484 f. German Socialists' views on, 181 f., 190 f. GRIEVANCES of Socialists, 30 ff. GRONLAND advises Socialists to appeal to the passions, 10 HALDANE, Mr., and Woolwich Arsenal dismissals, 296 HAMBURG DOCK strike, 295 HISTORY, all, is untrue, 91 HOME--_see_ Family HOME RULE, Socialists and, 180 HOUSE OF COMMONS, Socialist views on the, 209 ff. HOUSE OF LORDS, Socialist views on the, 211 to be abolished, 109, 110, 216 i. HUMAN nature and Socialism, 444 ff. HUNGRY children--_see_ Free Maintenance IDLING, how it is to be prevented, 457 ff. IMMORALITY, sexual, Socialist views regarding, 336 ff. IMPERIAL federation opposed by Socialists, 173 f. INCOME, national, how divided between capitalists and workers, 40 ff., 75 ff. of workers and capitalists compared, 40 ff, 75 ff. INCOME-TAX--_see_ Budget INCREASING misery, law of, 56 ff. disproved, 57 f. INDEBTEDNES, local, 246 ff. INDEPENDENT LABOUR PARTY, details regarding, 417 f., 435 f. programme of, 485 f. INDIA, Socialist views and aims regarding, 174 ff. INHERITANCE, right of, 103 ff., 108 INTEMPERANCE--_see_ Drink, Drunkenness, Temperance INTEREST, profit and rent are theft, 38, 80 ff., 102, 371, 374 Socialist objections to, 38, 80, 258 f., 280 f. INTERNATIONAL Arbitration, Socialists on, 188, 190 f. relations, Socialist views on, 183 ff., 469 INTOXICATING drink--_see_ Drink, Drunkenness, Temperance IRON law of wages, 53 ff., 245, 312 f., 319 f. disproved, 54 ff., 313 f., 320 JUDGES, English, Socialists on, 325 f. JUSTICE and Law, Socialist Views regarding, 100 f., 114, 325 ff., 396 f. KEIR HARDIE resembles John the Baptist, 28 LABOUR CHURCH, the, and its teaching, 369 fewer hours of, promised by Socialists, 117 f. forced, would be necessary in Socialist commonwealth, 455 ff. is the only source of wealth, 50 ff. disproved, 52 organisation of, in Socialist commonwealth, 455 ff. Party, details regarding, 424 ff. informal programme of, 425 f. representation committee, details regarding, 424 remuneration of, in Socialist commonwealth, 450 ff. sweated, proposals regarding, 461 time theory, 450 f. LABOURER is entitled to entire product of labour, 38, 61, 451 absurdity of demand, 62 ff., 451 ff. receives only from one-third to one-fifth of his rightful wage, 30, 43, 48 f. LABOURERS, rural, 266 f. LAND--_see_ also Agriculture and Landlords and Socialists, 145 ff. belongs to all, 102 f., 145 ff. individual men have no right to, 102 f., 145 ff. is to be had rent free from Socialist State, 146 is not to be had rent free from Socialist State, 146 f. is to be seized without compensation to owners, 95 ff., 149 f., 486 property in, is robbery, 38, 102, 145 ff., 370 LAND settlement policy of Socialists, 262 ff. LAND Tax--_see_ Budget LANDOWNERS and capitalists are thieves, 38, 102 LAW and Justice, Socialist views regarding, 100 f., 114, 325 ff., 396 f. iron, of wages, 53 ff., 245, 312 f., 319 f. disproved, 54 ff., 313 t, 320 of increasing misery, 56 ff. disproved, 57 f. LAZINESS, how it is to be prevented, 457 ff. LIBERAL PARTY, Socialist dissatisfaction with, 233 ff. views of and attitude towards the, 226 ff. LITERATURE, Socialist, increase of sales of, 435 ff. LOAFERS and tramps, ideal conditions for, to be created by Socialists, 254 LOCAL expenditure, 245 f. Government, Socialist views and proposals regarding, 166, 240 ff. indebtedness, 246 ff. LONDON, fantastic schemes regarding, 249 ff. LORDS, abolition of the House of, demanded, 109, 110, 216 f. House of, views of Socialists on the, 211 LOVE, free, 330 ff. MAGDEBURG, Socialism in, 440 MAINTENANCE, free, for children, demanded, 138, 303 ff. why demanded, 138, 308 MAN, brotherhood of, promised and proclaimed by Socialists, 25 f., 185 ff., 370, 382, 444 has no right to himself, 102 is not responsible for his actions, 327 f. MAN, nature of, and Socialism, 444 ff. MARRIAGE--_see also_ Family, Women is akin to prostitution, 335 f. MARX and Engels, Communists' manifesto quoted, 77 f., 92, 103, 107 f., 112, 183 f., 332 f., 405 MARX, KARL, appreciation of, 89 on Christianity and religion, 359, 366 on Free Trade and Protection, 300 on women and the family, 332 f. political programme of, 107 f. unmerited praise of, 88 f. was not a scientist, but a demagogue and a revolutionary, 472 MEALS, free, for school children--_see_ Free Maintenance MEMBERS of Parliament, payment of, advocated, 213, 216 MIDDLE CLASS, importance of strengthening the, 441 ff. Socialistic attempt to permeate the, 442 f. MIDDLEMAN, promised suppression of, by Socialists is illusory, 241 f. MILITARY LAW, Socialist agitation against, 201 f. MILLIONAIRES are criminals, 81 MINES and minerals to be taken over without compensation, 149 MIR, the, 388 MIRABEAU on paper money, 283 f. MISERY, law of, increasing, 56 ff. disproved, 57 f. MONARCHY, abolition of, 109, 110, 207 f. Socialism and the, 207 f. MONEY, abolition of gold and silver proposed, 21, 258, 278 ff. consequences of, 279 f. banks and banking, Socialist views on, 258 f., 278 ff. MORALITY, sexual. Socialist views regarding, 336 ff. MUNICIPAL and national enterprise, inefficiency and wastefulness of, 85 ff., 251 ff. enterprise, 240 ff. enterprises are undertaken regardless of cost and profit, 252 ff. Socialism, 240 ff. NATIONAL budget, Socialist views regarding, 160 ff. debt, repudiation of, 110, 156 ff. enterprise, inefficiency and wastefulness of, 85 ff., 251 ff. income, how divided between capitalists and workers, 40 ff., 75 ff. NATIONALISATION of land--_see_ Land NATURE, human, and Socialism, 444 ff. OFFENCES, sexual, Socialist views on, 340 ff. OLD-AGE pensions, Socialist plans regarding, 19, 122 f. OPINION, public, under Socialism, 466 f. ORGANISATION of work proposed by Socialists, 17, 70 f., 124 I, 455 ff, fallacies regarding, 70 f., 85 ff., 124 f., 241 f. ORGANISATIONS, Socialist, and their policy, 415 ff. OVER-PRODUCTION, complaints as to, 66 f. are not justified, 70 f. can it be prevented by Socialists? 70 f., 124 f. is not the cause of crises and unemployment, but ill-balanced production, 70 f. OVERWORK, complaints of, 16 PAPER money, unlimited issues of, proposed, 258 f., 278 ff. consequences of, 279 f. PARIS Commune, Socialists and the insurrection of the, 407 ff. PARLIAMENT, Socialism and, 209 ff. Socialist spirit in, 437 f. unofficial Socialists in, 438 PARLIAMENTARY Government to be abolished, 218 ff. PARTIES, Socialist attitude towards the, 225 ff. the Socialist and their policy, 415 ff. PASSIONS, Socialists appeal to the, 10, 446, 470 PATRIOTISM, Socialism is destructive of, 114, 186 f., 202 ff. PAUPERISM and distress, growth of, under Socialist régime, 242 f. PAYMENT of Members of Parliament advocated, 213, 216 PEACE conference, 189 ff. PEASANT proprietors are everywhere hostile to Socialism, 263 Socialists object to, 262 ff. PEASANTRY, importance of re-creating the, 443 PENSIONS to workers, 19, 122 POLICY, agricultural, of Socialists--_see_ Agriculture and aims of Socialists, 92 ff. fiscal, of Socialists--_see_ Free Trade and Protection foreign, of Socialists--_see_ Foreign Policy POPLAR, 243 POSTAGE, Socialist proposals regarding, 166 f. POST OFFICE, British, praised by Socialists, 21 condemned by Socialists, 411, 413 fallacies regarding business aptitude of, 85 ff. servants, Socialist proposals regarding, 166 f. POVERTY and drink and gambling, 166, 319, 479 f. extravagant Socialist estimates of, 165, 242, 302 f. complaints about, 16, 33, 165 of the poor is caused by wealth of the rich, 30, 34 ff., 161 disproved, 35, 159 PRESS, the, under Socialism, 466 f. PRIVATE trader to be abolished, 242 ff. PRODUCTION, ill-balanced, causes crises and unemployment, 70 f. is carried on for the profit of a class, 36 is less important than distribution, 65 ff. is more important than distribution, 71 PROFIT, what it is and why it is necessary, 39, 45 interest and rent are theft, 38, 80 ff., 102, 371, 374 the working at a, objected to, 33, 38 ff., 252 ff. sharing in Socialist commonwealth, 459 PROGRAMME, political, of Karl Marx, 107 f. PROGRAMMES of Socialism, 92, 107 ff., 481 ff. PROPERTY--_see also_ Capital, Land, Mines instinct of, is as old as humanity, 444 "PROPERTY is theft," 81 f., 102, 370 f. PROPERTY, private, general division of, disclaimed, 93 is the real object of Socialism, 471 ff. private, is immoral, 80 ff. is to be acquired without compensation, 95 ff., 149 f., 486 ought to be abolished, 82, 92 Socialist plans regarding, 95 ff., 149 f. right to, denned by Socialists, 80, 96 ff., 102, 145 PROSTITUTION, 339 ff. is akin to marriage, 335 f. PROTECTION, why it must be adopted, 474 ff. and Free Trade, Karl Marx on, 300 Socialist views on, 285 ff. PROUDHON quoted, 81, 90 PROVIDENCE--_see_ Thrift PUBLIC opinion under Socialism, 466 f. RAILWAY rates, preferential to foreigners denounced, 269 ff. RAILWAYS and shipping, Socialist views on, 269 ff. nationalisation of, demanded, 271 f. seems too speculative an undertaking, 277 should be run free of charge to all, 272 ff. wastefulness and inefficiency of, 269 ff. RATES, alarming increase of, 245 f. increase of, means increase of rent, 243, 245 RED CATECHISM, the, 372 ff. REFERENDUM demanded by Socialists, 217 ff. opposed by Socialists, 220 REFORM, fiscal, why it is necessary, 474 ff. social, the true, 480 RELIGION and Christianity, Socialist attitude towards, 354 ff. Socialism is a, 26, 364 ff. Socialist views on present, 13, 354 ff. the, of Socialism, 364 ff. RENT, interest and profit are theft, 38, 80 ff., 102, 371, 374 REVOLUTION, French, parallels furnished to Socialist proposals by the, 168 f., 283 f, 352 f., 365 f. aspect of France before the, 433 Socialists and, 404 ff. REVOLUTIONARY aims and plans of Socialists, 77 ff., 112 ff., 183 ff., 200 ff., 394 ff., 403, 404 ff., 410, 470 ff. REVOLUTIONS always cause depravity of morals, 450 RICH, the, are the managers and trustees of the national wealth, 35 are thieves, 80, 102, 370 f. cause poverty of the poor, 30, 34 ff., 161 disproved, 35, 159 RICHES of the rich are the cause of poverty, 30, 34 ff., 161 disproved, 35, 159 RIGHT to work, sinister aim of Socialists in proclaiming, 128 f. disregarded by Socialists, 461 RIGHTS of individual defined, 102 ROBBERY encouraged by Socialists, 82, 114 ROCHDALE Pioneers, history of the, 315 f. RURAL labourers, 266 f. SAVING--_see_ Thrift SAVINGS, contemplated confiscation of, 157 ff. SAVINGS banks deposits, 46 SELFISHNESS and Socialism, 444 ff. SEXUAL crimes. Socialist views on, 340 ff. offences and crimes, 340 ff. SMALL holdings, 262 ff. SOCIAL-Democratic Federation, details regarding, 415 ff. programme of, 481 ff. SOCIALISM and Anarchism, similarity of views and aims of, and connection between, 81, 90, 118, 328, 381 f., 394 ff. and Christianity and religion, 354 ff. and Communism, 381 ff. and education, 302 ff. and Free Trade and Protection, 285 ff. and law and justice, 325 ff. and the monarchy, 207 f. and Parliament, 209 ff. and revolution, 395 ff., 404 ff. appeals to passions, 10, 446, 470 British and German compared, 88, 206 Christian, 375 ff. definitions of, I ff., 390, 469 flourishes on dissatisfaction and misery, 131 fundamental doctrines of, 50 ff. growth and danger of, 431 ff. is a religion, 2, 26 ff., 364 ff. is a science, 1, 2, 3, 87 is based, not on science, but on deception, 91 is destructive of patriotism, 114, 186 f., 202 ff. is it possible? 444 ff. is merely a plan of spoliation and of general division, 471 f. is not a science, 87, 89 f., 470 ff. means absolutism, 460 ff. municipal, 240 ff. disregards cost and profit, 252 ff. presupposes perfect men, 444 ff. principal demand of, 92 programme of, 92 ff. progress of, how it may be checked, 440 ff. promises to alter human nature, 448 f. to abolish war, 186 f., 189 to make all races equal, 185 ff. why it is impossible, 390 f., 444 ff. SOCIALIST and Anarchist doctrines compared, 81, 90 f. Labour Party, details regarding, 428 programme of, 488 ff. literature, increase of sales of, 435 ff. organisations, the, and their policy, 415 ff. Party of Great Britain, details regarding, 428 programme of, 487 f. spirit in Parliament, 437 f. State, how will it be governed? 463 ff. of the future, 5 f., 17 ff., 444 ff. -enterprise, will it be more efficient than private enterprise? 85 ff. Sunday schools, 369 ff. SOCIALISTS, aims and policy of, 92 ff. and Chicago Anarchists, 401 f. and land and landlords, 145 ff. and revolution, 395 ff., 404 ff. and rural labourers, 266 f. and terrorist outrages, 402 f. and the Empire, 170 ff. and the two Parties, 225 ff. and the working masses, 115 ff. and Trade Unionists, official connection between, 141 ff., 434 f. relations between, 131 ff., 424 ff., 434 f. are antagonistic to providence, thrift, and temperance, 312 ff. are hostile to the Empire, 170 ff. to their own country, 114, 186 f. assert that all history is garbled, 91 assert that man has no right to himself, 102 condemn imperial administration, 179 f. national administration, 213 f., 394 ff., 411 ff. State Socialism, 411 ff. consist of two classes, revolutionaries and visionaries, 183 demand free maintenance for children, 138 Government purchase of all British railways and shipping, 271 ff. denounce co-operation, thrift, and abstinence, 131 ff. desire the destruction of the State, 381 f., 394 ff., 411 ff. different aims, proposals, and views of, 6 f. disregard right to work, 461 encourage theft, 82 excuse and encourage drunkenness, 319 ff., grievances of the, 30 ff. numbers of, in various countries, 432 on Free Trade and Protection, 285 ff. oppose co-operation, 84, 312 promise brotherhood of man, 25 f., 185 ff., 370, 382, 444 equal wages for all, 22 gratis amusements, 22 baths, 250 clothing, 21 concerts, 250 food, 21 fuel, 21 libraries, 250 lodging, 21 travel and transport on railways and tramways, 22, 250, 272 S. on ships, 275 f. wash-houses, 250 working men's clubs, 250 to transform the world into a paradise, 19 ff. propose issuing paper money in unlimited quantities, 258 f., 278 ff. revolutionary aims and plans of, 77 ff., 112 ff., 183 ff., 200 ff., 394 ff., 403, 404 ff., 410 try to destroy discipline in the army and so cause it to revolt, 200 ff. unofficial in Parliament, 438 wish for an international language, 188 to abolish parliamentary government, 218 ff., the army, 192 ff. the existing languages, 310 the monarchy, 109, 110, 207 f. to capture or abolish Parliament, 209 ff. to conquer Parliament, 238 f. to dissolve the army, 192 ff. German, on Peace Conferences, disarmament, and international arbitration, 190 f. patriotic and imperial attitude of, 181 f., 190 f., 205, 433 views of, on colonial policy, 181 f., 190 f. regarding Great Britain, 181 f., 190 f. SOCIETY, Socialist views on, 10 ff. SPARTA, Communism in, 389 SPENCER, Herbert, 447 f. SPOLIATION, plans of, 95 if., 149 f. probable result of, 168 f., 251 f., 254 STAMP duties, proposals regarding, 166 f. STATE enterprise usually inefficient, 85 ff., 251 ff. Socialism, Socialist attitude towards, 411 ff. Socialist, of the future, 5 f., 17 ff., 444 ff. how will it be governed? 463 ff. Socialists are hostile to the, and desire its destruction, 381 f., 394 ff., 411 ff. STOCKS, Municipal, are no longer first-class investments, 258 STUTTGART, International Socialist Congress at, 90, 177 SUFFRAGE, adult, demanded, 213 and franchise in Great Britain and other countries, 213 reform demanded, 213 f. SUNDAY, will it be abolished? 365 schools, Socialist, 369 ff. SURPLUS-VALUE doctrine, 58 ff., 244 f. disproved, 59 f. SWEATED labour proposals of Socialists, 461 TARIFF reform, Socialist views on, 285 ff. TAXATION, indirect, condemned by Socialists, 165 f. leading Socialist principle of, 255 local--_see_ Rates national--_see_ Budget TAXING private property out of existence, plans for, 99 f., 149, 153, 160 ff., 244 f., 255 TEMPERANCE condemned by British Socialists, 319 ff. praised and encouraged by foreign Socialists, 322 ff. providence, and thrift are antagonistic to Socialism, 131 ff., 312 ff. Socialistic views on, 131 ff., 311 ff. TEN COMMANDMENTS, the capitalists', 368 the Socialist, 371 f. TERRORIST outrages. Socialist views on, 402 f. THEFT encouraged by Socialists, 82, 114 THRIFT denounced by Socialists, 131 ff., 155, 311 ff. is immoral, 314 f. is theft, 155 providence, and temperance are antagonistic to Socialism, 131 ff., 312 ff. Socialist views on, 131 ff., 311 ff. TRADE Unionists and Socialists, official connection between, 141 ff., 434 f. relations between, 131 ff., 424 ff., 434 f. Unions and unemployed problem, 127 ff. have become Socialistic, 141 ff., 434 f., 471 secretaries are to administer the Empire, 179 TRADER, private, to be abolished, 242 ff. TRAMPS and loafers, ideal conditions for, to be created by Socialists, 254 UNDERFEEDING--_see_ Free Maintenance UNEMPLOYED, the, 37, 474 ff. and agriculture, 266 UNEMPLOYMENT benefits employers, 69 f. could it be prevented by Socialists? 124 f. is due to private capital, 65 ff., 125 f. disproved, 126 f. real causes of, 70 f., 124 ff., 474 ff. sinister aims of Socialists regarding, 128 f. Socialist plans regarding, 123 ff. views on, 67 ff., 123 ff. USURY--_see_ Interest VOTES for women, 222 ff. WAGES, amount and purchasing-power of, depends on production, 120 f. are to be abolished, 6, 21 are not to be abolished, 22, 278, 386 f., 450 ff. are to be equal for all, 22, 278, 386 f., 450 ff. are not to be equal for all, 390, 450 ff. different views of Socialists regarding, 6, 450 ff. factors determining amount of, 54 ff., 313 f. great increase of, in Socialist State promised by Socialists, 118 ff. doubted by German Socialists, 120 iron law of, 53 ff., 245, 312 f., 319 f. disproved, 54 ff., 313 f., 320 rise in, 57 f. WAR will be abolished by Socialists, 186 f., 189 WEALTH creates poverty, 30, 34 ff., 161 disproved, 35, 159 is a crime, 80 ff. labour is the only source of, 50 ff. disproved, 52 love of, will disappear, 23, 448 various sources of, 52 why unequally distributed, 473 WEST HAM, 243, 363 WOMAN, the family, and the home. Socialism and, 330 ff. will be given the vote, 222 ff., 349 will be made equal to man, 349 f. will be made free, 349 will have to work for a living, 349 f. will her privileges be abolished? 350 f. will receive wages for childbearing, 345 WOMEN, community of, 331 Karl Marx on, 332 f. WOMEN'S Freedom League, 429 Social and Political Union, 429 split in, 429 suffrage. Socialist views on, 222 ff. WOOLWICH Arsenal dismissals, 296. WORK, fewer hours of, promised by Socialists, 117 f. is a curse, 115 organisation of, in Socialist Commonwealth, 455 ff. remuneration of, in Socialist Commonwealth, 450 ff. Socialist views regarding, 115 ff. WORKERS and capitalists, division of national income between, 40 ff., 75 ft. relations between, 30 ff. are entitled to entire produce of their labour, 38, 61 ff., 451 absurdity of demand, 62 ff., 451 ff. are most prosperous where capitalists are richest, 35, 159 are swindled out of their earnings, 34 become capitalists every day, 60 British, are slaves, 15, 18, 31 f. how to improve conditions of, 474 ff. cannot acquire capital, 31 ff. expenditure of, on betting, 166, 479 f. on drink, 106, 319, 479 f. miserable state of, 13 ff. possess absolutely nothing, 33 poverty of, 16, 33, 165 receive only from one-third to one-fifth of their rightful wages, 30, 43, 48 f. value of property owned by, 46 WORKING masses and Socialists, 115 ff. PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND C. LTD., NEW-STREET SQUARE LONDON * * * * * +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Typographical errors corrected in text: | | | | Page 84: reponsible replaced with responsible | | Page 89: Britian replaced with Britain | | Page 103: repected replaced with respected | | Page 108: furthur replaced with further | | Page 112: Social-Democrary replaced with Social-Democracy | | Page 157: MacLachlan replaced with McLachlan | | Page 167: interefere replaced with interfere | | Page 178: self-goverment replaced with self-government | | Page 212: parasities replaced with parasites | | Page 217: 'which will be be made' replaced with | | 'which will be made' | | Page 260: Parliamentry replaced with Parliamentary | | Page 279: Co-opervative replaced with Co-operative | | Page 280: irreligous replaced with irreligious | | Page 290: beleagured replaced with beleaguered | | Page 322: democrary replaced with democracy | | Page 328: L'Etat replaced with L'�tat | | Page 334: (fn 905) Fornightly replaced with Fortnightly | | Page 337: marrige replace with marriage | | Page 350: L'Etat replaced with L'�tat | | Page 406: Parlement replaced with Parliament | | Page 425: indentical replaced with identical | | Page 446: enconomic replaced with economic | | Page 419: Progessives replaced with Progressives | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------+ 
31193	----	Manifesto Of the Communist Party By KARL MARX and FREDERICK ENGELS AUTHORIZED ENGLISH TRANSLATION Edited and Annotated by Frederick Engels _Price 10 Cents_ NEW YORK Published by the New York Labor News Co., 28 City Hall Place 1908 PREFACE The "Manifesto" was published as the platform of the "Communist League," a workingmen's association, first exclusively German, later on international, and, under the political conditions of the Continent before 1848, unavoidably a secret society. At a Congress of the League, held in London in November, 1847, Marx and Engels were commissioned to prepare for publication a complete theoretical and practical party programme. Drawn up in German, in January, 1848, the manuscript was sent to the printer in London a few weeks before the French revolution of February 24. A French translation was brought out in Paris, shortly before the insurrection of June, 1848. The first English translation, by Miss Helen Macfarlane, appeared in George Julian Harney's "Red Republican," London, 1850. A Danish and a Polish edition had also been published. The defeat of the Parisian insurrection of June, 1848--the first great battle between Proletariat and Bourgeoisie--drove again into the background, for a time, the social and political aspirations of the European working class. Thenceforth, the struggle for supremacy was again, as it had been before the revolution of February, solely between the different sections of the propertied class; the working class was reduced to a fight for political elbow-room, and to the position of extreme wing of the Middle-class Radicals. Wherever independent proletarian movements continued to show signs of life, they were ruthlessly hunted down. Thus the Prussian police hunted out the Central Board of the Communist League, then located in Cologne. The members were arrested, and, after eighteen months' imprisonment, they were tried in October, 1852. This celebrated "Cologne Communist trial" lasted from October 4 till November 12; seven of the prisoners were sentenced to terms of imprisonment in a fortress, varying from three to six years. Immediately after the sentence the League was formally dissolved by the remaining members. As to the "Manifesto," it seemed thenceforth to be doomed to oblivion. When the European working class had recovered sufficient strength for another attack on the ruling classes, the International Workingmen's Association sprang up. But this association, formed with the express aim of welding into one body the whole militant proletariat of Europe and America, could not at once proclaim the principles laid down in the "Manifesto." The International was bound to have a programme broad enough to be acceptable to the English Trades' Unions, to the followers of Proudhon in France, Belgium, Italy and Spain, and to the Lassalleans(a) in Germany. Marx, who drew up this programme to the satisfaction of all parties, entirely trusted to the intellectual development of the working class, which was sure to result from combined action and mutual discussion. The very events and vicissitudes of the struggle against Capital, the defeats even more than the victories, could not help bringing home to men's minds the insufficiency of their various favorite nostrums, and preparing the way for a more complete insight into the true conditions of working-class emancipation. And Marx was right. The International, on its breaking up in 1874, left the workers quite different men from what it had found them in 1864. Proudhonism in France, Lassalleanism in Germany, were dying out, and even the conservative English Trades' Unions, though most of them had long since severed their connection with the International, were gradually advancing towards that point at which, last year at Swansea, their President could say in their name, "Continental Socialism has lost its terrors for us." In fact, the principles of the "Manifesto" had made considerable headway among the workingmen of all countries. The Manifesto itself thus came to the front again. The German text had been, since 1850, reprinted several times in Switzerland, England and America. In 1872 it was translated into English in New York, where the translation was published in "Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly." From this English version a French one was made in "Le Socialiste" of New York. Since then at least two more English translations, more or less mutilated, have been brought out in America, and one of them has been reprinted in England. The first Russian translation, made by Bakounine, was published at Herzen's "Kolokol" office in Geneva, about 1863; a second one, by the heroic Vera Zasulitch, also in Geneva, 1882. A new Danish edition is to be found in "Socialdemokratisk Bibliothek," Copenhagen, 1885; a fresh French translation in "Le Socialiste," Paris, 1886. From this latter a Spanish version was prepared and published in Madrid, 1886. The German reprints are not to be counted; there have been twelve altogether at the least. An Armenian translation, which was to be published in Constantinople some months ago, did not see the light, I am told, because the publisher was afraid of bringing out a book with the name of Marx on it, while the translator declined to call it his own production. Of further translations into other languages I have heard, but have not seen them. Thus the history of the Manifesto reflects, to a great extent, the history of the modern working class movement; at present it is undoubtedly the most widespread, the most international production of all Socialist Literature, the common platform acknowledged by millions of workingmen from Siberia to California. Yet, when it was written, we could not have called it a _Socialist_ Manifesto. By Socialists, in 1847, were understood, on the one hand, the adherents of the various Utopian systems: Owenites in England, Fourierists in France, both of them already reduced to the position of mere sects, and gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks, who, by all manners of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances; in both cases men outside the working class movement and looking rather to the "educated" classes for support. Whatever portion of the working classes had become convinced of the insufficiency of mere political revolutions, and had proclaimed the necessity of a total social change, that portion, then, called itself Communist. It was a crude, rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of Communism; still it touched the cardinal point and was powerful enough among the working class to produce the Utopian Communism, in France of Cabet, and in Germany of Weitling. Thus, Socialism was, in 1847, a middle class movement, Communism a working class movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, "respectable"; Communism was the very opposite. And as our notion, from the very beginning was, that "the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself," there could be no doubt as to which of the two names we must take. Moreover, we have ever since been far from repudiating it. The "Manifesto" being our joint production, I consider myself bound to state that the fundamental proposition which forms its nucleus belongs to Marx. That proposition is: that in every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; that the history of these class struggles forms a series of evolution in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and the oppressed class--the proletariat--cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class--the bourgeoisie--without, at the same time, and once for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions and class struggles. This proposition, which, in my opinion, is destined to do for history what Darwin's theory has done for biology, we, both of us, had been gradually approaching for some years before 1845. How far I had independently progressed toward it, is best shown by my "Condition of the Working Class in England."(b) But when I again met Marx at Brussels in the spring of 1845, he had it ready worked out, and put it before me, in terms almost as clear as those in which I have stated it here. From our joint preface to the German edition of 1872, I quote the following: "However much the state of things may have altered during the last twenty-five years, the general principles laid down in this Manifesto are, on the whole, as correct to-day as ever. Here and there some detail might be improved. The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and for that reason no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded to-day. In view of the gigantic strides of modern industry since 1848, and of the accompanying improved and extended organization of the working class; in view of the practical experience gained, first in the February revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has in some details become antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that 'the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.' (See 'The Civil War in France; Address of the General Council of the International Workingmen's Association,' London, Truelove, 1871, p. 15, where this point is further developed.) Further, it is self-evident that the criticism of Socialist literature is deficient in relation to the present time, because it comes down only to 1847; also, that the remarks on the relation of the Communists to the various opposition parties (Section IV.), although in principle still correct, yet in practice are antiquated, because the political situation has been entirely changed, and the progress of history has swept from off the earth the greater portion of the political parties there enumerated. "But, then, the Manifesto has become a historical document which we have no longer any right to alter." The present translation is by Mr. Samuel Moore, the translator of the greater portion of Marx's "Capital." We have revised it and I have added a few notes explanatory of historical allusions. FREDERICK ENGELS. London, January 30, 1888. (a) Lassalle personally, to us, always acknowledged himself to be a disciple of Marx, and, as such, stood on the ground of the "Manifesto." But in his public agitation, 1862-64, he did not go beyond demanding co-operative workshops supported by State credit. (b) The condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. By Frederick Engels. Translated by Florence K. Wischnewetzky. To be had from the N. Y. Labor News Co., 28 City Hall Place, New York. MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY. BY KARL MARX AND FREDERICK ENGELS. A specter is haunting Europe--the specter of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter; Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French radicals and German police spies. Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as Communistic by its opponents in power? Where the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries? Two things result from this fact. I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be in itself a power. II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Specter of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself. To this end the Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London, and sketched the following manifesto to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages. I. BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS.(a) The history of all hitherto existing society(b) is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster(c) and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. In the earlier epochs of history we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the middle ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations. The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society, has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeois, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. From the serfs of the middle ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed. The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development. The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production was monopolized by close guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labor between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labor in each single workshop. Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of the industrial middle class, by industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois. Modern industry has established the world's market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. The market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation and railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the middle ages. We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange. Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the medieval commune(d), here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany), there taxable "third estate" of the monarchy (as in France), afterwards, in the period of manufacture proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, corner-stone of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world's market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part. The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous "cash payment." It has drowned the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom--Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation. The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigor in the middle ages, which Reactionists so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered forms, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away; all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world's market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones, industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature. The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, _i.e._, to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image. The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West. The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralized means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralization. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class interest, one frontier, and one customs tariff. The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground--what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor? We see then: the means of production and of exchange on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organization of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property, became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder. Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted to it, and by the economical and political sway of the bourgeois class. A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange, and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the bourgeois society. In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, is periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity--the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented. The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself. But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons--the modern working class--the proletarians. In proportion as the bourgeoisie, _i.e._, capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed; a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market. Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labor, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted almost entirely to the means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labor, is equal, in the long run, to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. Nay, more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labor increase, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by increase of the work exacted in a given time, or by increased speed of the machinery, etc. Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State, they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-seer, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is. The less skill and exertion of strength is implied in manual labor, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labor of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labor, more or less expensive to use, according to age and sex. No sooner is the exploitation of the laborer by the manufacturer so far at an end that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc. The lower strata of the middle class--the small trades-people, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants--all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which modern industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population. The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by individual laborers, then by the workpeople of a factory, then by the operatives of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labor, they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the middle ages. At this stage the laborers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, and land owners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeoisie. Thus the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie. But with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalized, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labor, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The unceasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workman and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon the workers begin to form combinations (Trades' Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there the contest breaks out into riots. Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies not in the immediate result but in the ever improved means of communication that are created in modern industry and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralize the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the middle ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern proletarians, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years. This organization of the proletarians into a class and consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again; stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus the ten-hours' bill in England was carried. Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further, in many ways, the course of the development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all times with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these countries it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for its help, and thus to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie. Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling classes are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress. Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the process of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole. Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie to-day, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product. The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay, more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat. The "dangerous class," the social scum, that passively rotting class thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue. In the conditions of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industrial labor, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests. All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property. All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole super-incumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air. Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie. In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat. Hitherto every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state that it has to feed him instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie; in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society. The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labor. Wage-labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of modern industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. (a) By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern Capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage-labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage-laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor-power in order to live. (b) That is, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organization existing previous to recorded history, was all but unknown. Since then, Haxthausen discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history, and by and by village communities were found to be, or to have been the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland. The inner organization of this primitive Communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Morgan's crowning discovery of the true nature of the Gens and its relation to the Tribe. With the dissolution of these primaeval communities society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes. I have attempted to retrace this process of dissolution in: "Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats," 2nd edit., Stuttgart, 1886. (c) Guildmaster, that is a full member of a guild, a master within, not a head of a guild. (d) "Commune" was the name taken, in France, by the nascent towns even before they had conquered from their feudal lords and masters, local self-government and political rights as the "Third Estate." Generally speaking, for the economical development of the bourgeoisie, England is here taken as the typical country; for its political development, France. II. PROLETARIANS AND COMMUNISTS. In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole? The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working class parties. They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement. The Communists are distinguished from the other working class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole. The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement. The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat. The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of Communism. All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change, consequent upon the change in historical conditions. The French revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favor of bourgeois property. The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few. In this sense the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property. We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man's own labor, which property is alleged to be the ground work of all personal freedom, activity and independence. Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of the petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily. Or do you mean modern bourgeois private property? But does wage labor create any property for the laborer? Not a bit. It creates capital, _i.e._, that kind of property which exploits wage-labor, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labor for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage labor. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism. To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion. Capital is therefore not a personal, it is a social power. When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class character. Let us now take wage-labor. The average price of wage-labor is the minimum wage, _i.e._, that quantum of the means of subsistence, which is absolutely requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence as a laborer. What, therefore, the wage-laborer appropriates by means of his labor, merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labor, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labor of others. All that we want to do away with, is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the laborer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it. In bourgeois society living labor is but a means to increase accumulated labor. In Communist society accumulated labor is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer. In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality. And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois: abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at. By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying. But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other "brave words" of our bourgeoisie about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered traders of the middle ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the Communistic abolition of buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production, and of the bourgeoisie itself. You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society. In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so: that is just what we intend. From the moment when labor can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolized, _i.e._, from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say, individuality vanishes! You must, therefore, confess that by "individual" you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible. Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society: all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriation. It has been objected, that upon the abolition of private property all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us. According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of tautology, that there can no longer be any wage-labor when there is no longer any capital. All objections against the Communistic mode of producing and appropriating material products, have, in the same way, been urged against the Communistic modes of producing and appropriating intellectual products. Just as, to the bourgeois the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture. That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine. But don't wrangle with us so long as you apply to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will, whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class. The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property--historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production--the misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property. Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists. On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution. The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital. Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty. But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social. And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention, direct or indirect, of society by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class. The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child become all the more disgusting, as, by the action of modern industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor. But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the whole bourgeoisie in chorus. The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women. He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production. For the rest nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial. Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's wives. Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common, and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with, is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalized community of women. For the rest it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, _i.e._, of prostitution both public and private. The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality. The workingmen have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word. National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing; owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world's market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto. The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilized countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat. In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end. The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical, and, generally, from an ideological standpoint are not deserving of serious examination. Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views, and conceptions, in one word, man's consciousness changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life? What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class. When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society they do but express the fact that within the old society the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence. When the ancient world was in its last throes the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the eighteenth century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competition within the domain of knowledge. "Undoubtedly," it will be said, "religious, moral, philosophical and juridical ideas have been modified in the course of historical development. But religion, morality, philosophy, political science, and law, constantly survived this change. "There are besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience." What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs. But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz., they exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms. The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas. But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to Communism. We have seen above that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class; to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie; to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, _i.e._, of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible. Of course, in the beginning this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production. These measures will, of course, be different in different countries. Nevertheless in the most advanced countries the following will be pretty generally applicable: 1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. 2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 3. Abolition of all right of inheritance. 4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. 5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly. 6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State. 7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. 8. Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. 9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries: gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country. 10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc., etc. When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms, and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class. In place of the old bourgeois society with its classes and class antagonisms we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. III. SOCIALIST AND COMMUNIST LITERATURE. I. REACTIONARY SOCIALISM. (_a_) _Feudal Socialism_. Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the aristocracies of France and England to write pamphlets against modern bourgeois society. In the French revolution of July, 1830, and in the English reform agitation, these aristocracies again succumbed to the hateful upstart. Thenceforth, a serious political contest was altogether out of question. A literary battle alone remained possible. But even in the domain of literature the old cries of the restoration period(a) had become impossible. In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy were obliged to lose sight, apparently, of their own interests, and to formulate their indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new master, and whispering in his ears sinister prophecies of coming catastrophe. In this way arose feudal Socialism; half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future, at times by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart's core, but always ludicrous in its effects, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history. The aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the proletarian alms-bag in front for a banner. But the people, so often as it joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats of arms and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter. One section of the French Legitimists, and "Young England," exhibited this spectacle. In pointing out that their mode of exploitation was different from that of the bourgeoisie, the feudalists forget that they exploited under circumstances and conditions that were quite different and that are now antiquated. In showing that under their rule the modern proletariat never existed they forget that the modern bourgeoisie is the necessary offspring of their own form of society. For the rest, so little do they conceal the reactionary character of their criticism, that their chief accusation against the bourgeoisie amounts to this: that under the bourgeois _regime_ a class is being developed, which is destined to cut up root and branch the old order of society. What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it creates a proletariat, as that it creates a revolutionary proletariat. In political practice, therefore, they join in all coercive measures against the working class; and in ordinary life, despite their high falutin phrases, they stoop to pick up the golden apples dropped from the tree of industry, and to barter truth, love, and honor for traffic in wool, beet-root sugar and potato spirit(b). As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord, so has Clerical Socialism with Feudal Socialism. Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriages, against the State? Has it not preached in the place of these charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian Socialism is but the Holy Water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat. (_b_) _Petty Bourgeois Socialism_. The feudal aristocracy was not the only class that was ruined by the bourgeoisie, not the only class whose conditions of existence pined and perished in the atmosphere of modern bourgeois society. The medieval burgesses and the small peasant proprietors were the precursors of the modern bourgeoisie. In those countries which are but little developed, industrially and commercially these two classes still vegetate side by side with the rising bourgeoisie. In countries where modern civilization has become fully developed, a new class of petty bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie, and ever renewing itself as a supplementary part of bourgeois society. The individual members of this class, however, are being constantly hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition and as modern industry develops, they even see the moment approaching when they will completely disappear as an independent section of modern society to be replaced in manufactures, agriculture and commerce, by overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen. In countries like France, where the peasants constitute far more than half of the population, it was natural that writers who sided with the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, should use in their criticism of the bourgeois _regime_, the standard of the peasant and petty bourgeois, and from the standpoint of these intermediate classes should take up the cudgels for the working class. Thus arose petty bourgeois Socialism. Sismondi was the head of this school, not only in France but also in England. This school of Socialism dissected with great acuteness the contradictions in the conditions of modern production. It laid bare the hypocritical apologies of economists. It proved incontrovertibly the disastrous effects of machinery and division of labor; the concentration of capital and land in a few hands; overproduction and crises; it pointed out the inevitable ruin of the petty bourgeois and peasant, the misery of the proletariat, the anarchy in production, the crying inequalities in the distribution of wealth, the industrial war of extermination between nations, the dissolution of old moral bonds, of the old family relations, of the old nationalities. In its positive aims, however, this form of Socialism aspires either to restoring the old means of production and of exchange, and with them the old property relations and the old society, or to cramping the modern means of production and of exchange, within the frame work of the old property relations that have been and were bound to be exploded by those means. In either case, it is both reactionary and Utopian. Its last words are: corporate guilds for manufacture; patriarchal relations in agriculture. Ultimately, when stubborn historical facts had dispersed all intoxicating effects of self-deception, this form of Socialism ended in a miserable fit of the blues. (_c_) _German or "True" Socialism_. The Socialist and Communist literature of France, a literature that originated under the pressure of a bourgeoisie in power, and that was the expression of the struggle against this power, was introduced into Germany at a time when the bourgeoisie in that country had just begun its contest with feudal absolutism. German philosophers,--would-be philosophers and _beaux esprits_,--eagerly seized on this literature, only forgetting that when these writings immigrated from France into Germany, French social conditions had not immigrated along with them. In contact with German social conditions, this French literature lost all its immediate practical significance, and assumed a purely literary aspect. Thus, to the German philosophers of the eighteenth century, the demands of the first French Revolution were nothing more than the demands of "Practical Reason" in general, and the utterances of the will of the revolutionary French bourgeoisie signified in their eyes the laws of pure will, of will as it was bound to be, of true human will generally. The work of the German _literati_ consisted solely in bringing the new French ideas into harmony with their ancient philosophical conscience, or rather, in annexing the French ideas without deserting their own philosophic point of view. This annexation took place in the same way in which a foreign language is appropriated, namely, by translation. It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written. The German _literati_ reversed this process with the profane French literature. They wrote their philosophical nonsense beneath the French original. For instance, beneath the French criticism of the economic functions of money they wrote "Alienation of Humanity," and beneath the French criticism of the bourgeois State they wrote "Dethronement of the Category of the General," and so forth. The introduction of these philosophical phrases at the back of the French historical criticisms they dubbed "Philosophy of Action," "True Socialism," "German Science of Socialism," "Philosophical Foundation of Socialism," and so on. The French Socialist and Communist literature was thus completely emasculated. And, since it ceased in the hands of the German to express the struggle of one class with the other, he felt conscious of having overcome "French one-sidedness" and of representing not true requirements but the requirements of truth, not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests of human nature, of man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, and exists only in the misty realm of philosophical phantasy. This German Socialism, which took its school-boy task so seriously and solemnly, and extolled its poor stock in trade in such mountebank fashion, meanwhile gradually lost its pedantic innocence. The fight of the German, and especially of the Prussian bourgeoisie, against feudal aristocracy and absolute monarchy, in other words, the liberal movement, became more earnest. By this, the long wished-for opportunity was offered to "True Socialism" of confronting the political movement with the Socialist demands, of hurling the traditional anathemas against liberalism, against representative government, against bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom of the press, bourgeois legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality, and of preaching to the masses that they had nothing to gain and everything to lose by this bourgeois movement. German Socialism forgot, in the nick of time, that the French criticism, whose silly echo it was, presupposed the existence of modern bourgeois society, with its corresponding economic conditions of existence, and the political constitution adapted thereto, the very things whose attainment was the object of the pending struggle in Germany. To the absolute governments, with their following of parsons, professors, country squires and officials, it served as a welcome scarecrow against the threatening bourgeoisie. It was a sweet finish after the bitter pills of floggings and bullets with which these same governments, just at that time, dosed the German working-class risings. While this "True" Socialism thus served the government as a weapon for fighting the German bourgeoisie, it, at the same time, directly represented a reactionary interest, the interest of the German philistines. In Germany the _petty bourgeois_ class, a relique of the 16th century and since then constantly cropping up again under various forms, is the real social basis of the existing state of things. To preserve this class, is to preserve the existing state of things in Germany. The industrial and political supremacy of the bourgeoisie threatens it with certain destruction; on the one hand, from the concentration of capital; on the other, from the rise of a revolutionary proletariat. "True" Socialism appeared to kill these two birds with one stone. It spread like an epidemic. The robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of rhetoric, steeped in the dew of sickly sentiment, this transcendental robe in which the German Socialists wrapped their sorry "eternal truths" all skin and bone, served to wonderfully increase the sale of their goods amongst such a public. And on its part, German Socialism recognized more and more its own calling as the bombastic representative of the petty bourgeois philistine. It proclaimed the German nation to be the model nation, and the German petty philistine to be the typical man. To every villainous meanness of this model man it gave a hidden, higher, socialistic interpretation, the exact contrary of its real character. It went to the extreme length of directly opposing the "brutally destructive" tendency of Communism, and of proclaiming its supreme and impartial contempt of all class-struggles. With very few exceptions, all the so-called Socialist and Communist publications that now (1847) circulate in Germany belong to the domain of this foul and enervating literature. 2. CONSERVATIVE OR BOURGEOIS SOCIALISM. A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances, in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society. To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organizers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole and corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of Socialism has, moreover, been worked out into complete systems. We may cite Proudhon's _Philosophie de la Misère_ as an example of this form. The socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeosie. A second and more practical, but less systematic form of this Socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class, by showing that no mere political reform but a change in the material conditions of existence in economical relations could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence this form of Socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production,--an abolition that can be effected only by a revolution--but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labor, but, at the best, lessen the cost and simplify the administrative work of bourgeois government. Bourgeois Socialism attains adequate expression, when, and only when, it becomes a mere figure of speech. Free Trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective Duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working class. This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of bourgeois Socialism. It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois--for the benefit of the working class. 3. CRITICAL-UTOPIAN SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM. We do not here refer to that literature which, in every great modern revolution, has always given voice to the demands of the proletariat, such as the writings of Baboeuf and others. The first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own ends, made in times of universal excitement, when feudal society was being overthrown, these attempts necessarily failed, owing to the then undeveloped state of the proletariat, as well as to the absence of the economic conditions for its emancipation, conditions that had yet to be produced, and could be produced by the impending bourgeois epoch alone. The revolutionary literature that accompanied these first movements of the proletariat had necessarily a reactionary character. It inculcated universal asceticism and social levelling in its crudest form. The Socialist and Communist systems properly so called, those of St. Simon, Fourier, Owen and others, spring into existence in the early undeveloped period, described above, of the struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie (see: Section I., Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.) The founders of these systems see, indeed, the class antagonisms as well as the action of the decomposing elements in the prevailing form of society. But the proletariat, as yet in its infancy, offers to them the spectacle of a class without any historical initiative or any independent political movement. Since the development of class antagonism keeps even pace with the development of industry, the economic situation, as they find it, does not as yet offer to them the material conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat. They therefore search after a new social science, after new social laws, that are to create these conditions. Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive action, historically created conditions of emancipation to phantastic ones, and the gradual, spontaneous class organization of the proletariat to an organization of society specially contrived by these inventors. Future history resolves itself, in their eyes, into the propaganda and the practical carrying out of their social plans. In the formation of their plans they are conscious of caring chiefly for the interest of the working class, as being the most suffering class. Only from the point of view of being the most suffering class does the proletariat exist for them. The undeveloped state of the class struggle as well as their own surroundings cause Socialists of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favored. Hence they habitually appeal to society at large, without distinction of class; nay, by preference to the ruling class. For how can people, when once they understand their system, fail to see in it the best possible plan of the best possible state of society? Hence they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, and endeavor, by small experiments, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social Gospel. Such phantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time when the proletariat is still in a very undeveloped state and has but a phantastic conception of its own position, correspond with the first instinctive yearnings of that class for a general reconstruction of society. But these Socialist and Communist publications contain also a critical element. They attack every principle of existing society. Hence they are full of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class. The practical measures proposed in them, such as the abolition of the distinction between town and country, of the family, of the carrying on of industries for the account of private individuals, and of the wage system, the proclamation of social harmony, the conversion of the functions of the State into a mere superintendence of production, all these proposals point solely to the disappearance of class antagonisms which were, at that time, only just cropping up, and which, in these publications, are recognized under their earliest, indistinct and undefined forms only. These proposals, therefore, are of a purely Utopian character. The significance of Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism bears an inverse relation to historical development. In proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this phantastic standing apart from the contest, these phantastic attacks on it lose all practical value and all theoretical justification. Therefore, although the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have in every case formed mere reactionary sects. They hold fast by the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development of the proletariat. They, therefore, endeavor, and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realization of their social Utopias, of founding isolated "phalansteres," of establishing "Home Colonies," of setting up a "Little Icaria"(c)--duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem, and to realize all these castles in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois. By degrees they sink into the category of the reactionary conservative Socialists depicted above, differing from these only by more systematic pedantry, and by their fanatical and superstitious belief in the miraculous effects of their social science. They, therefore, violently oppose all political action on the part of the working class; such action, according to them, can only result from blind unbelief in the new Gospel. The Owenites in England, and the Fourierists in France, respectively, oppose the Chartists and the "Réformistes." (a) Not the English Restoration 1660 to 1689, but the French Restoration 1814 to 1830. (b) This applies chiefly to Germany where the landed aristocracy and squirearchy have large portions of their estates cultivated for their own account by stewards, and are moreover, extensive beet-root sugar manufacturers and distillers of potato spirits. The wealthier British aristocracy are, as yet, rather above that; but they, too, know how to make up for declining rents by lending their names to floaters of more or less shady joint-stock companies. (c) Phalansteres were socialist colonies on the plan of Charles Fourier; Icaria was the name given by Cabet to his Utopia and, later on, to his American Communist colony. IV. POSITION OF THE COMMUNISTS IN RELATION TO THE VARIOUS EXISTING OPPOSITION PARTIES. Section II. has made clear the relations of the Communists to the existing working class parties, such as the Chartists in England and the Agrarian Reformers in America. The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement. In France the Communists ally themselves with the Social-Democrats(a), against the conservative and radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right to take up a critical position in regard to phrases and illusions traditionally handed down from the great Revolution. In Switzerland they support the Radicals, without losing sight of the fact that this party consists of antagonistic elements, partly of Democratic Socialists, in the French sense, partly of radical bourgeois. In Poland they support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution, as the prime condition for national emancipation, that party which fomented the insurrection of Cracow in 1846. In Germany they fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a revolutionary way against the absolute monarchy, the feudal squirearchy, and the petty bourgeoisie. But they never cease, for a single instant, to instil into the working class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat, in order that the German workers may straightway use, as so many weapons against the bourgeoisie, the social and political conditions that the bourgeoisie must necessarily introduce along with its supremacy, and in order that, after the fall of the reactionary classes in Germany, the fight against the bourgeoisie itself may immediately begin. The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilization, and with a much more developed proletariat, than that of England was in the seventeenth, and of France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution. In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. In all these movements they bring, to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time. Finally, they labor everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries. The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries unite! (a) The party then represented in parliament by Ledru-Rollin, in literature by Louis Blanc, in the daily press by the Reforme. The name of Social-Democracy signified, with these its inventors, a section of the Democratic or Republican party more or less tinged with Socialism. THE END. The Preamble OF THE INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD An Address Delivered at Minneapolis, Minn, By DANIEL DE LEON The organization of the Industrial Workers of the World, at Chicago, July 10, 1905, marked an epoch in the history of the Labor Movement in America, for the reason that, as the preamble to the constitution declares, there can be no peace between the exploited working class and the exploiting capitalist class; the I. W. W. organized on that basis--the recognition of the class struggle. A 48-PAGE PAMPHLET, 5 CENTS Send all orders to .... NEW YORK LABOR NEWS CO. 28 CITY HALL PLACE NEW YORK WHAT MEANS THIS STRIKE? By DANIEL DE LEON "What Means This Strike?" is an address delivered before the striking textile workers of New Bedford, Mass. It is the best thing extant with which to begin the study of Socialism. The strike is used as an object lesson to show the nature of capitalist society. The development of the capitalist is clearly given, showing why it is that the capitalist class is able to live in idleness and luxury while the working class rots in poverty and toil. CONTENTS.--Whence Do Wages Come, and Whence Profits--The Capitalist System of Production--Nature of the "Work" Performed by the Capitalist--Mechanism of Stock Corporation--Nature of the "Work" Performed by the "Directors" of Stock Corporations--"Original Accumulation"--How the Capitalist in General Gets His Capital--How Levi P. Morton Got His Capital--The Class Struggle--Nature of the Conflict Between the Working Class and the Capitalist Class--Development of Capitalist Society--Development of the Strike--How the Capitalists Rob Inventors--How the Capitalist Uses Machinery to Rob and Subjugate the Working Class--Why the Modern Strike Is Usually a Failure--Principles of the Organization the Working Class Must Have to Fight Successfully the Capitalist Class--Weaknesses of "Pure and Simple" Trade Unions--Career of Samuel Gompers--There Will Be No Safety for the Working Class Until It Wrenches the Government from the Capitalist Class, Abolishes the Wages System of Slavery, and Unfurls the Banner of the Socialist Republic. Single Copies, 5 Cents; 100 Copies, LITERATURE. Leaflets, in English, per thousand .......................... $1.75 Leaflets, in German, " " .......................... 3.00 Leaflets, in Italian, " " .......................... 4.00 Leaflets, in French, " " .......................... 4.00 Leaflets, in Slavonic, " " .......................... 3.00 Leaflets, in Croatian, " " .......................... 3.00 Leaflets, in Spanish, " " .......................... 5.00 Leaflets, in Polish, " " .......................... 4.00 Leaflets, in Finnish, " " .......................... 5.00 Leaflets, in Swedish, " " .......................... 3.00 NOTE.---The requisite amount of each must accompany each order. All supplies sent by the General Office have the postage or express charges paid in advance. NEW YORK LABOR NEWS CO. 28 CITY HALL PLACE, NEW YORK VALUE, PRICE, AND PROFIT By KARL MARX. Edited by his daughter ELEANOR MARX AVELING. With an Introduction and Annotations by LUCIEN SANIAL. This book is especially timely, like everything else that Marx wrote. Written a couple of years before his "Capital" appeared, it is an address to workingmen, and covers in popular form many of the subjects later scientifically expanded in "Capital." Lucien Sanial says of it: "It is universally considered as the best epitome we have of the first volume of 'Capital,' and as such, is invaluable to the beginner in economics. It places him squarely on his feet at the threshold of his inquiry; that is, in a position where his perceptive faculties cannot be deceived and his reasoning power vitiated by the very use of his eyesight; whereas, by the very nature of his capitalist surroundings, he now stands on his head and sees all things inverted." Special interest attaches to what Marx says relative to strikes. Were the working Class thoroughly acquainted with the subject matter of this little work, we should hear no more of the "common ground" on which capital and labor might meet to settle their differences. The thousand and one schemes that are daily being flaunted in the faces of the working class by the lieutenants of the capitalists show the necessity there is on the part of the working class for a comprehensive understanding of the matter of wages, the relation of the worker to the employer, the source of profits, and the relation between profits and wages. These and other subjects are here presented, and so clearly does Marx present them that all he has to say can be understood by any person willing to pay close attention to his words. Cloth, 50 Cents. Paper, 15 Cents. NEW YORK LABOR NEWS COMPANY, 28 CITY HALL PLACE, NEW YORK. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From a Mechanical Standpoint it is the first one Marx's works published in America that can be looked upon as a careful piece of publishing. It is to be hoped that this excellent volume is the forerunner of other volumes of Marx, and that America will have the honor of publishing an edition that is accurate as to text, thorough in annotations, convenient in size, and presentable in every way. The present book will delight the lover of Marx, and every Socialist will desire a copy of it.--N. Y. Daily People. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
31933	----	http://www.archive.org/details/landmarksofscien00engeuoft +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Note: | | | | Inconsistent hyphenation and use of quotation marks in | | the original document have been preserved. | | | | Subscripted characters in chemical formulas are enclosed | | in curly braces after an underscore. For example, the | | formula for water is represented by H_{2}O. Obvious | | errors in chemical formulas were corrected without | | comment. | | | | Superscripted numbers are preceded by a carat character. | | For example, a-squared is represented by a^2. | | | | Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For | | a complete list, please see the end of this document. | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------+ LANDMARKS OF SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM "Anti-Duehring" by FREDERICK ENGELS Translated and Edited by Austin Lewis Chicago Charles H. Kerr & Company Co-Operative Copyright, 1907 by Charles H. Kerr & Company John F. Higgins Printer and Binder 376-382 Monroe Street Chicago, Illinois TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER I PAGE TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION 7 CHAPTER II PREFACES 23 Part I 23 Part II 27 Part III 35 CHAPTER III INTRODUCTION 36 I. In General 36 II. What Herr Duehring Has to Say 50 PART I CHAPTER IV Apriorism 54 The Scheme of the Universe 63 CHAPTER V NATURAL PHILOSOPHY 70 Time and Space 70 Cosmogony, Physics, and Chemistry 82 The Organic World 94 The Organic World (conclusion) 107 CHAPTER VI MORAL AND LAW 116 Eternal Truths 116 Equality 130 Freedom and Necessity 146 CHAPTER VII THE DIALECTIC 150 Quantity 150 Negation of the Negation 159 Conclusion 175 PART II CHAPTER VIII POLITICAL ECONOMY 176 I. Objects and Methods 176 II. The Force Theory 184 III. Force Theory (continued) 193 IV. Force Theory (conclusion) 203 V. Theory of Value 214 VI. Simple and Compound Labor 219 VII. Capital and Surplus Value 223 VIII. Capital and Surplus Value (conclusion) 227 IX. Natural Economic Laws--Ground Rent 232 X. With Respect to the "Critical History" 235 PART III CHAPTER IX SOCIALISM 236 Production 236 Distribution 245 The State, The Family, and Education 256 APPENDIX 261 LANDMARKS OF SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM CHAPTER I TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION When Dr. Eugene Duehring, privat docent at Berlin University, in 1875, proclaimed the fact that he had become converted to Socialism, he was not content to take the socialist movement as he found it, but set out forthwith to promulgate a theory of his own. His was a most elaborate and self-conscious mission. He stood forth as the propagandist not only of certain specific and peculiar views of socialism but as the originator of a new philosophy, and the propounder of strange and wonderful theories with regard to the universe in general. The taunt as to his all-comprehensiveness of intellect, with which Engels pursues him somewhat too closely and much too bitterly, could not have affected Herr Duehring very greatly. He had his own convictions with respect to that comprehensive intellect of his and few will be found to deny that he had the courage of his convictions. Thirty years have gone since Duehring published the fact of his conversion to socialism. The word "conversion" contains in itself the distinction between the socialism of thirty years ago and that of to-day. What was then a peculiar creed has now become a very widespread notion. Men are not now individually converted to socialism but whole groups and classes are driven into the socialist ranks by the pressure of circumstances. The movement springs up continually in new and unexpected places. Here it may languish apparently, there it gives every indication of strong, new and vigorous life. The proletariat of the various countries race as it were towards the socialist goal and, as they change in their respective positions, the economic and political fields on which they operate furnish all the surprises and fascinations of a race course. In 1892 Engels wrote that the German Empire would in all probability be the scene of the first great victory of the European proletariat. But thirteen years have sufficed to bog the German movement in the swamps of Parliamentarianism. Great Britain, whose Chartist movement was expected to provide the British proletariat with a tradition, has furnished few examples of skill in the management of proletarian politics, but existing society in Great Britain has none the less been thoroughly undermined. The year before that in which Herr Duehring made his statement of conversion, the British Liberals had suffered a defeat which, in spite of an apparent recuperation in 1880, proved the downfall of modern Liberalism in Great Britain, and showed that the Liberal Party could no longer claim to be the party of the working class. Not only that, but the British philosophic outlook has become completely changed. The nonconformist conscience grows less and less the final court of appeal in matters political. A temporary but fierce attack of militant imperialism coupled with the very general acceptance of an empiric collectivism has sufficed to destroy old ideas and to make the road to victory easier for a determined and relentless working class movement. But if thirty years have worked wonders in Europe, and disintegration can be plainly detected in the social fabric, the course of social and political development in the United States has been still more remarkable. In 1875 the country was still a farming community living on the edge of a vast wilderness through which the railroad was just beginning to open a path. Thirty years have been sufficient to convert it into the greatest of manufacturing and commercial states. The occupation of the public lands, the establishment of industry on an hitherto undreamed of scale, the marvellous, almost overnight creation of enormous cities, all these have resulted in the production of a proletariat, cosmopolitan in its character, and with no traditions of other than cash relations with the class which employs it. The purity of the economic fact is unobscured. Hence a socialistic agitation has arisen in the United States, the enthusiasm of which vies with that in any of the European countries and the practical results of which bid fair to be even more striking. This movement has arisen almost spontaneously as the result of economic conditions. It is a natural growth not the result of the preaching of abstract doctrines or the picturing of an ideal state. The modern American proletariat is, as a matter of fact, given neither to philosophic speculation nor to the imagination which is necessary to idealism. Such socialism as it has adopted it has taken up because it has felt impelled thereto by economic pressure. Hence, apart from all socialistic propaganda, a distinct disintegration-process has been proceeding in modern society. Each epoch carries within itself the seeds of its own dissolution. Things have just this much value, they are transitory, says Engels in his paraphrase of Hegel, and this is in fact the central idea of his dialectic philosophy. He criticises the work of Duehring from this standpoint. He labors not so much to show that Duehring is mistaken in certain conclusions as to prove that the whole method of his argument is wrong. His diatribes, though the subject matter of his argument requires him to attack the Berlin tutor, are directed chiefly against all absolute theories. "Eternal truth," in the realm of science, equally with that of philosophy, he scouts as absurd. To interpret the history of the time in terms of the spirit of the time, to discover the actual beneath the crust of the conventional, to analyse the content of the formulæ which the majority are always ready to take on trust, and to face the fact with a mind clear of preconceived notions is what Engels set out to do. It cannot be said that he altogether succeeded. No man can succeed in such a task. The prejudices and animosities created by incessant controversy warped his judgment in some respects, and tended on more than one occasion to destroy his love of fair play. The spirit which is occasionally shown in his controversial writing is to be deplored but it may be said in extenuation that all controversies of that time were disfigured in the same way. He pays the penalty for the fault. Much of the work is valueless to-day because of Engels' eagerness to score a point off his adversary rather than to state his own case. But where the philosopher lays the controversialist on one side for a brief period, and takes the trouble to elucidate his own ideas we discover what has been lost by these defects of temperament. He possesses in a marked degree the gift of clear analysis and of keen and subtle statement. The socialist movement everywhere arrives some time or other at what may be called the Duehring stage of controversy. There are two very distinct impulses towards socialism. The individuals who are influenced by these impulses must sooner or later come into collision, and as a result of the impact the movement is for a time divided into hostile parties and a war of pamphleteering and oratory supervenes. This period has just ended in France. For the last few years the French movement has been divided upon the question of the philosophical foundation of the movement, and the parties to the controversy may be divided into those who sought to justify the movement upon ethical grounds and those who have regarded it as a modern political phenomenon dependent alone upon economic conditions. The former of these parties based its claims to the suffrages of the French people upon the justice of the socialistic demands. It proclaimed socialism to be the logical result of the Revolution, the necessary conclusion from the teachings of the revolutionary philosophers. Justice was the word in which they summed up the claims of socialism, that and Equality, for which latter term as Engels points out in the present work, the French have a fondness which amounts almost to a mania. Hence one party of the French socialist movement chose as a platform those very "eternal truths" which Engels ridicules and which it is the sole purpose of the present work to attack. To kill "eternal truths" is however by no means an easy matter. Years of habit have made them part of the mental structure of the citizens of the modern democratic or semi-democratic states. Not only in France but to an even greater degree in the English speaking countries these "eternal truths" persist, they form the stock in trade of the clergyman and the ordinary politician. Bernard Shaw directs the shafts of his ridicule against these "eternal truths" and smites with a sarcasm which is more fatal than all the solemn German philosophy which Engels has at his command. But Shaw is not appreciated by the British socialist. The latter cannot imagine that the writer is really poking fun at things so exceedingly serious and so essential to any well constituted man, to a well-constituted Briton in particular. The British socialist is as much in love with "eternal truths" as is the stiffest and most unregenerate of his bourgeois opponents. He therefore toploftily declares that Mr. Shaw is an unbalanced person, a licensed jester. Precisely the same results would attend the efforts of an American iconoclast who would venture to ridicule the "eternal truths" which have been handed down to us in documents of unimpeachable respectability, like the Declaration of Independence, and by Fourth of July orators, portly of person and of phrase. The "eternal truth" phase of socialist controversy seems to be as eternal as the truth, and must necessarily be so as long as the movement is recruited by men who bring into it the ideas which they have derived from the ordinary training of the American citizen. The other side of the controversy to which reference has been made derived its philosophy from the experience of the proletariat. This modern proletariat, trained to, the machine, is a distinct product of the occupation by which it lives. The organisation of industry in the grasp of which the workman is held during all his working hours and manufacture by the machine-process, the motions of which he is compelled to follow have produced in him a mental condition which does not readily respond to any sentimental stimulus. The incessant process from cause to effect endows him with a sort of logical sense in accordance with which he works out the problems of life independent of the preconceptions and prejudices which have so great a hold upon the reason of his fellow citizens who are not of the industrial proletariat. Without knowing why he arrives by dint of the experience of his daily toil at the same conclusions as Engels attained as the result of philosophic training and much erudition. The Church is well aware of this fact to her sorrow for the industrial proletarian seldom darkens her portals. He has no hatred of religion, as the atheistic radical bourgeois had, but with a good-natured "non possumus" says by his actions what Engels says by his philosophy. Revolution is an every day occurrence with the industrial proletarian. He sees processes transformed in the twinkling of an eye. He wakes up one morning to find that the trade which he has learned laboriously has overnight become a drug on the market. He is used to seeing the machine whose energy has enchained him flung on the scrap heap and contemptuously disowned, in favor of a more competent successor whose motions he must learn to follow or be himself flung on the scrap heap also. This constant revolution in the industrial process enters into his blood. He becomes a revolutionist by force of habit. There is no need to preach the dialectic to him. It is continually preached. The transitoriness of phenomena is impressed upon him by the changes in industrial combinations, by the constant substitution of new modes of production for those to which he has been accustomed, substitutions which may make "an aristocrat of labor" of him to-day, and send him tramping to-morrow. The industrial proletarian therefore knows practically what Engels has taught philosophically. So that when in the course of his political peregrinations he strays into the socialist movement and there finds those who profess a socialism based upon abstract conceptions and "eternal truths" his contempt is as outspoken as that of a Friedrich Engels who chances upon a certain Eugen Duehring spouting paraphrases of Rousseau by the socialistic wayside. Engels simply anticipated by the way of books the point of view reached by the industrial proletarian of to-day by the way of experience, and by the American machine-made proletarian in particular. This is a matter of no mean importance. In the following pages we can detect if we can look beyond and beneath the mere criticism of Duehring, an attitude of mind, not of one controversialist to another merely but of an entire class, the class upon which modern society is driven more and more to rely, to the class which relies upon it. For their popular support classes and governments rely upon formulæ. When the cry of "Down with the Tsar" takes the place of the humbly spoken "Little Father" what becomes of the Tsardom? When the terms "Liberty" and "Equality" become the jest of the workshop, upon what basis can a modern democratic state depend? This criticism of "eternal truths" is destructive criticism, and destructive of much more than the "truths." It is more destructive than sedition itself. Sedition may be suppressed cheaply in these days of quick-firing guns and open streets. But society crumbles away almost insensibly beneath the mordant acid of contemptuous analysis. So to-day goaded on the one side by the gibes of the machine-made proletariat, and on the other, by the raillery of the philosophic jester, society staggers along like a wounded giant and is only too glad to creep into its cave and to forget its sorrows in drink. As for 1875, "Many things have happened since then" as Beaconsfield used to say, but of all that has happened nothing could have given more cynical pleasure to the "Old Jew" than the lack of faith in its own shibboleths which has seized the cocksure pompous society in which he disported himself. The rhetoric of a Gladstone based upon the "eternal truths" which constituted always the foundations of his political appeals would fail to affect the masses to-day with any other feeling than that of ridicule. We have already arrived at the "Twilight of the Idols" at least so far as "eternal truths" are concerned. They still find however an insecure roosting place in the pulpits of the protestant sects. If blows have been showered upon the political "eternal truths" in the name of which the present epoch came into existence social and ethical ideals have by no means escaped attack. Revolt has been the watchword of artist and theologian alike. The pre-Rafaelite school, a not altogether unworthy child of the Chartist movement, raised the cry of artistic revolt against absolutism and the revolt spread in ever widening circles until it has exhausted itself in the sickly egotism of the "art nouveau." Even Engels, with all his independence and glorification of change as a philosophy, can find an opportunity to fling a sneer at Wagner and the "music of the future." The remnants of early Victorianism cling persistently to Engels. He cannot release himself altogether from the bonds of the bourgeois doctrine which he is so anxious to despise. He is in many respects the revolutionist of '48, a bourgeois politician possessed at intervals by a proletarian ghost, such as he says himself ever haunts the bourgeois. The younger generation without any claims to revolutionism has gone further than he in the denunciation of authority and without the same self consciousness. The scorn of Bernard Shaw for the moguls of the academies and for social ideals is greater than the scorn of Engels for "eternal truths." Says Mr. Shaw, "The great musician accepted by his unskilled listener is vilified by his fellow musician. It was the musical culture of Europe that pronounced Wagner the inferior of Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer. The great artist finds his foes among the painters and not among the men in the street. It is the Royal Academy that places Mr. Marcus Stone above Mr. Burne Jones. It is not rational that it should be so but it is so for all that. The realist at last loses patience with ideals altogether and finds in them only something to blind us, something to numb us, something to murder self in us. Something whereby instead of resisting death we disarm it by committing suicide." Here is a note of modernity which Engels was hardly modern enough to appreciate and yet it was written before he died. Nietzsche, Tolstoy and a host of minor writers have all had their fling at "eternal truths" and modern ideals. The battle has long since rolled away from the ground on which Engels fought. His arguments on the dialectic are commonplaces to-day which it would be a work of supererogation to explain to anyone except the persistent victim of Little Bethel. The world has come to accept them with the equanimity with which it always accepts long disputed truths. The sacred right of nationality for which men contended in Engels' youth, as a direct consequence of political "eternal truths" has been ruthlessly brushed aside. The philosopher talks of the shameful spoliation of the smaller by the larger nations, a moral view of commercial progress, which an age, grown more impatient of "eternal truths" than Engels himself simply ignores, and moves on without a qualm to the destruction of free governments in South Africa. Backward and unprogressive peoples jeer, it is true, and thereby show their political ineptitude, for even the American Republic, having freed the negro under the banner of "eternal truth" annexes the Philippines and raids Panama in defiance of it. And so since the days of 1875 the world has come to accept the general correctness of Engels' point of view. The enemy which Engels was most anxious to dislodge was "mechanical socialism," a naïve invention of a perfect system capable of withstanding the ravages of time, because founded upon eternal principles of truth and justice. That enemy has now obeyed the law of the dialectic and passed away. Nobody builds such systems, nowadays. They have ceased their building however not in obedience to the commands of Friedrich Engels but because the lapse of time and the change in conditions have proved the dialectic to the revolutionist. With the annihilation of "eternal truths," system building ceased to be even an amusing pastime. The revolutionist has been revolutionized. He no longer fancies that he can make revolutions. He knows better. He is content to see that the road is kept clear so that revolutions may develop themselves. Your real revolutionist, for example, puts no obstacle in the path of the Trust, he is much too wise. He leaves that to the corrosion of time and the development of his pet dialectic. He sees the contradiction concealed in the system which apparently triumphs, and in the triumph of the system he sees also the triumph of the contradiction. He waits until that shadowy proletariat which haunts the system takes on itself flesh and blood and shakes the system with which it has grown up. But this waiting for the development of the inevitable is weary work to those who want to realise forthwith, so they, unable to confound the logic of Engels, attack the "abstractions" on which his theory is founded. They still oppose their "eternal truths" to the dialectic. Thus in England, where the strife between the two parties in the socialist movement has lately been waged with a somewhat amusing ferocity, Engels is charged with a wholesale borrowing from Hegel. In any other country than England this would not be laid up against a writer, but the Englishman is so averse to philosophy that the association of one's name with that of a philosopher, and a German philosopher in particular, is tantamount to an accusation of keeping bad company. But a glance at the following pages should tend to dispose of so romantic a statement which could, in fact, only have been made by those who know neither Hegel nor Engels. That Hegel furnished the original philosophic impetus to both Marx and Engels is true beyond question, but the impetus once given, the course of the founders of modern socialism tended ever further from the opinions of the idealistic philosopher. In fact Engels says somewhat self consciously, not to say boasts, that he and his followers were pioneers in applying the dialectic to materialism. Whatever accusation may be made against Engels, this much is certain that he was no Hegelian. In fact both in the present work and in "Feuerbach" he is at great pains to show the relation of the socialist philosophy as conceived by himself and Marx to that of the great man for whom he always kept a somewhat exaggerated respect, but from whom he differed fundamentally. Engels' attack upon the philosophy of Duehring is based upon dislike of its idealism, the fundamental thesis upon which the work depends being entirely speculative. Duehring insisted that his philosophy was a realist philosophy and Engels' serious arguments, apart from the elaborate ridicule with which he covers his opponent and which is by no means a recommendation to the book, is directed to show that it is not realist, that it depends upon certain preconceived notions. Of these notions some are axiomatic, as Duehring claims, that is they are propositions which are self evident to Herr Duehring but which will not stand investigation. Others again are untrue and are preconceptions so far as they are out of harmony with established facts. Much of Engels' work is out of date judged by recent biological and other discoveries, but the essential argument respecting the interdependence of all departments of knowledge, and the impossibility of making rigid classifications holds good to-day in a wider sense than when Engels wrote. Scientific truths which have been considered absolute, theories which have produced approximately correct results, have all been discredited. The dogmas of science against which the dogmatic ecclesiastics have directed their scornful contempt have shared the same fate as the ecclesiastical dogmas. Nothing remains certain save the certainty of change. There are no ultimates. Even the atom is suspect and the claims of the elements to be elementary are rejected wholesale with something as closely resembling scorn as the scientist is ever able to attain. A scientific writer has recently said "What is undeniable is that the Daltonian atom has within a century of its acceptance as a fundamental reality suffered disruption. Its proper place in nature is not that formerly assigned to it. No longer 'in seipso totus, teres, atque rotundus' its reputation for inviolability and indestructibility is gone for ever. Each of these supposed 'ultimates' is now known to be the scene of indescribable activities, a complex piece of mechanism composed of thousands of parts, a star-cluster in miniature, subject to all kinds of dynamical vicissitudes, to perturbations, accelerations, internal friction, total or partial disruption. And to each is appointed a fixed term of existence. Sooner or later the balance of equilibrium is tilted, disturbance eventuates in overthrow; the tiny exquisite system finally breaks up. Of atoms, as of men, it may be said with truth 'Quisque suos patitur manes.'" The discovery of radium was in itself sufficient to revolutionise the heretofore existing scientific theories and the revolution thereby effected has been enough to cause Sir William Crookes to say, "There has been a vivid new start, our physicists have remodelled their views as to the constitution of matter." In his address to the physicists at Berlin the same scientist said, "This fatal quality of atomic dissociation appears to be universal, and operates whenever we brush a piece of glass with silk; it works in the sunshine and raindrops in lightnings and flame; it prevails in the waterfall and the stormy sea" and a writer in the Edinburgh Review (December, 1903) remarks in this connection "Matter he (Sir William Crookes) consequently regards as doomed to destruction. Sooner or later it will have dissolved into the 'formless mist' of protyle and 'the hour hand of eternity will have completed one revolution.' The 'dissipation of energy' has then found its correlative in the 'dissolution of Matter.'" The scope of this revolution may only be gauged by the fact that one writer ("The Alchemy of the Sea," London "Outlook," Feb. 11, 1905) has ventured to say, and this is but one voice in a general chorus: "To-day no one believes in the existence of elements; no one questions the possibility of a new alchemy; and the actual evolution of one element from another has been observed in the laboratory--observed by Sir William Ramsey in London, and confirmed by a chemist in St. Petersburg." Helium being an evolution of radium and it is expected furthermore that radium will prove to be an evolution of uranium and so there is a constant process as the writer points out of what was formerly called alchemy the transmutation of one metal into another. It is clear that in face of these facts the arguments of Engels possess even greater force at the present day than when they were enunciated and that the old hard and fast method of arguing from absolute truths is dead and done for. Only statesmen see fit to still harp on the same phrases which have become as it were a part of the popular mental structure and by constant appeals to the old watchwords to obscure the fact of change. Were one not acquainted with the essential stupidity of the political mind and the lack of grasp which is the characteristic of statesmen, it might be imagined that all this was done with malice aforethought and that there was a sort of tacit conspiracy on the part of the politicians to delude the people. But experience of the inexcusable blunders and the inexplicable errors into which statesmen are continually driven forces the conclusion that they are in reality no whit in advance of the electorate and that only now and then a Beaconsfield appears who can understand the drift of events. Such a man is the "revolutionist" which Beaconsfield claimed himself to be. But what shall we say of the President of the country that has attained the highest place in industrial progress among the nations, whose whole history is a verification of the truth of the dialectic and who can still appeal to "individualism" as a guiding principle of political action? It is a wanton flying in the face of the experience of the last quarter of a century and such rashness will require its penalty. "Back to Kant" appears to be the hope of reactionary politicians as well as of reactionary philosophers. CHAPTER II PREFACES I The following work is by no means the fruit of some "inward compulsion," quite the contrary. When three years ago, Herr Duehring suddenly challenged the world, as a scholar and reformer of socialism, friends in Germany frequently expressed the wish that I should throw a critical light upon these new socialist doctrines, in the central organ of the Social Democratic Party, at that time the "Volkstaat." They held it as very necessary that new opportunity for division and confusion should not be afforded in a party so young and so recently definitely united. They were in a better condition than myself to comprehend the condition of affairs in Germany, so that I was compelled to trust to their judgment. It appeared furthermore that the proselyte was welcomed by a certain portion of the socialist press, with a warmth, which meant nothing more than kindliness to Herr Duehring, but it was seen by a portion of the party press that a result of this kindly feeling towards Herr Duehring was the introduction unperceived of the Duehring doctrine. People were found who were soon ready to spread his doctrine in a popular form among the workingmen, and finally Herr Duehring and his little sect employed all the arts of advertisement and intrigue to compel the "Volksblatt" to change its attitude respecting the new teachings which put forth such tremendous claims. However, a year elapsed before I could make up my mind to engage in so disagreeable a business to the neglect of my other labors. It was the sort of thing one had to get through as quickly as possible, once it was begun. And it was not only unpleasant but quite a task. The new socialist theory appeared as the last practical result of a new philosophic system. It therefore involved an investigation of it in connection with this system and therefore of the system itself. It was necessary to follow Herr Duehring over a wide expanse of country where he had dealt with everything under the sun, yea, and more also. So there came into existence a series of articles which appeared from the beginning of 1877 in the successor of the "Volkstaat," the "Vorwaerts" of Leipsic, and are collected here. It was my object which extended the criticism to a length out of all proportion to the scientific value of the matter and, therefore, of Herr Duehring's writings. There are two further reasons in extenuation of this lengthiness. In the first place it gave me an opportunity of developing my views, in a positive fashion, with respect to matters which are connected with this, though very different, and which are of more general scientific and practical interest to-day. I have taken the opportunity to do so in every chapter, and, as this book cannot undertake to set up a system in opposition to that of Herr Duehring, it is to be hoped that the reader will not overlook the real significance of the views which I have set forth. I have already had sufficient proof that my labors have not been altogether in vain in this regard. On the other hand the "system-shaping" Herr Duehring is by no means an exceptional phenomenon in Germany these days. Nowadays in Germany systems of cosmogony, of natural philosophy in particular, of politics, of economics, etc., are in the habit of shooting up over night like mushrooms. The most insignificant Doctor of Philosophy, nay, even the student, has no further use for a complete "system." In the modern state, it is predicated that every citizen is able to pass judgment on all the questions upon which he is called upon to vote; in political economy it is assumed that every consumer is thoroughly acquainted with all commodities, which he has occasion to buy to maintain himself withal, and the same idea is also held as regards knowledge. Freedom of knowledge demands that a person write of that which he has not learned and proclaim this as the only sound scientific method. But Herr Duehring is one of the most conspicuous types of those absurd pseudo-scientists, who to-day occupy so conspicuous a place in Germany and drown everything with their noisy nonsense. Noisy nonsense in poetry, in philosophy, in political economy, in writing history: noisy nonsense in the professor's chair and tribune; noisy nonsense too in the claims to superiority and intellectuality above the vulgar noisy nonsense of other nations, noisy nonsense the most characteristic and mightiest product of German intellectual activity, cheap and bad, like other German products, along with which, I regret to say, they were not exhibited at Philadelphia. So, German socialism, particularly since Herr Duehring set the example, beats the drum, and produces here and there one who prides himself upon a "science" of which he knows nothing. It is this, a sort of child's disease which marks the first conversion of the German university man to social democracy and is inseparable from him, but it will soon be thrust aside by the remarkable sound sense of our working class. It is not my fault that I am obliged to follow Herr Duehring into a realm in which I can at the very most only claim to be a dilettante. On such occasions I have for the most part limited myself to placing the plain incontrovertible facts in contrast with the false or crooked assertions of my opponent, as in relation to jurisprudence and many instances with regard to natural science. In other places he indulges in universal views on the subject of natural science theories and therefore on a field where the professional naturalist must range out of his own particular specialty to neighboring regions, where he, according to Herr Virchow's confessions is just as good a "half-knower" as the rest of us. For slight deficiencies and unavoidable errors in the publication I hope that the same indulgence will be extended to me as has been shown the other side of the controversy. Just as I was completing this preface I received the publishers' notice of a new important book by Herr Duehring. "New Foundations for rational Physics and Chemistry." Although I am very well aware of my deficiencies in physics and chemistry I still believe that I know my Duehring well enough, without having read the book, to venture to say that the laws of physics and chemistry there set forth are worthy of being placed alongside of Herr Duehring's former discoveries and the laws of economics, scheme of the universe, etc., examined in my writings and proved to be misunderstood or commonplace, and that the rhigometer, an instrument constructed by Herr Duehring for measuring temperature will be found to serve not only as a measure for high or low temperature but of the ignorance and arrogance of Herr Duehring. _London, 11 June, 1878._ II It came to me as quite a surprise that a new edition of this work was called for. The special views which it criticised are practically forgotten to-day. The work itself has not only been placed before many thousands of readers by its serial publication in "Vorwaerts" of Leipsic in 1877 and 1878, but it has also been published in large editions in its entirety. How then can there be any further interest in what I have to say about Herr Duehring? In the first place, I fancy, that it is owing to the fact that this book, as indeed, all my writings at that time, was prohibited in Germany soon after the publication of the anti-Socialist laws. Whosoever was not fettered by the inherited officialdom of the countries of the Holy Alliance should have clearly seen the effect of this measure--the double and treble sale of the prohibited books, and the advertisement of the impotence of the gentlemen in Berlin, who issued injunctions and could not make them effective. Indeed the amiability of the Government was the cause of the publication of several new editions of my shorter writings, as I am able to affirm. I have no time for a proper revision of the text and so allow it to go to press, just as it is. But there is still an additional circumstance. The "system" of Herr Duehring here criticised spreads over a very extensive theoretical ground and I was compelled to pursue him all over it and to place my ideas in antagonism to his. Negative criticism thereupon became positive; the polemic developed into a more or less connected exposition of dialectic methods and the socialist philosophy, of which Marx and myself are representative, and this in quite a number of places. These our philosophic ideas have had an incubation period of about twenty years since they were first given to the world in Marx's "Misère de la Philosophie" and the Communist Manifesto until they obtained a wider and wider influence through the publication of "Capital" and now find recognition and support far beyond the limits of Europe in all lands where a proletariat exists together with progressive scientific thinkers. It seems that there is also a public whose interests in this matter are sufficient to induce them to purchase the polemic against Duehring's opinions, in spite of the fact that it is now without an object, and who evidently derive pleasure from the positive development. I must call attention to the fact, by the way, that the views here set out were, for by far the most part, developed and established by Marx, and only to a very slight degree by myself, so that it is understood that I have not represented them without his knowledge. I read the entire manuscript to him before sending it to press and the tenth chapter of the section on Political Economy was written by Marx and unfortunately had to be somewhat abbreviated by me. It was our wont to mutually assist each other in special branches of work. The present edition is with the exception of one chapter an unchanged edition of the former. I had no time for revision although there was much in the mode of presentation which I wanted altered. But there is incumbent upon me the duty of preparing for publication the manuscripts which Marx left, and this is much more important than anything else. Then my conscience rebels against making any changes. The book is controversial and I have an idea that it is unfair to my antagonist for me to alter anything when he cannot do so. I could only claim the right to reply to Herr Duehring's answer. But what Herr Duehring has written with respect to my attack I have not read and shall not do so, unless obliged. I am theoretically done with him. Besides I must observe the rules of literary warfare all the more closely as a despicable wrong has since been inflicted upon him by the University of Berlin. It has been chastised for this, indeed. A university which so degrades itself as to refuse permission to Herr Duehring to teach under the known circumstances should not be surprised if a Herr Schwenninger is forced upon it under circumstances just as well known. The one chapter in which I have permitted myself any explanations is the Second of the Third Section "Theory." Here where the sole concern is the presentation of a most important part of the philosophy which I represent, my antagonist cannot complain if I put myself to some trouble to speak popularly and to generalise. This was undoubtedly a special occasion. I had made a French translation of three chapters of the book (the First of the Introduction and the First and Second of the Third Section) into a separate pamphlet for my friend Lafargue, and the French edition afterwards served as a basis for one in Italian and one in Polish. A German edition was provided under the title "The Development of Socialism from Utopia to Science." The latter has exhausted three editions in a few months and has also made its appearance translated into Russian and Danish. In all these publications only the chapter in question was added to and it would have been pedantic in me if I had confined myself to the actual wording of the original in the new edition in spite of the later and international form which it had assumed. Where I wished to make changes had particular reference to two points. In the first place with regard to primitive history, as far as known, to which Morgan was the first to give us the key in 1877. In my book "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State," Zurich, 1884, I have since had an opportunity of working up material more lately accessible which I employed in this later work. In the second place, as far as that portion which is concerned with theoretical science is concerned, the presentation of the subject is very defective and a much more definite one could now be given. If I did not allow myself the right of improving it now, I should be in duty bound to pass criticism on myself instead of the other. Marx and I were probably the first to import the well known dialectic of the German idealistic philosophy into the materialistic view of nature and history. But to a dialectical and at the same time materialistic view of nature there pertains an acquaintance with mathematics and natural science. Marx was a sound mathematician but the sciences we only knew in part, by fits and starts, sporadically. After I retired from mercantile pursuits and went to London and had time, I made as far as possible a complete mathematical and scientific "molting," as Liebig calls it, and spent the best part of eight years on it. I was occupied with this molting process when it chanced that I was called upon to busy myself with Herr Duehring's so-called philosophy. If, therefore, I often fail to find the correct technical expression, and am a little awkward in the field of natural science it is only too natural. On the other hand the consciousness of insecurity which I have not yet got over has made me cautious. Actual blunders respecting facts up to the present known, and incorrect presentations of theories thus far recognised cannot be proved against me. In this relation just one great mathematician, who is laboring under a mistake, has complained to Marx in a letter that I have made a mischievous attack upon the honor of the square root of minus one. As regards my review of mathematics and the natural science it was necessary for me to reassure myself on some special points--since I had no doubts about the truth of the general proposition--that in nature the same dialectic laws of progress fulfill themselves amid all the apparent confusion of innumerable changes as dominate the apparently accidental in nature; the same laws whose threads traverse the progressive history of human thought, and little by little come to the consciousness of thinking men. These were first developed by Hegel in a comprehensive fashion but in a mystical form. Our efforts were directed towards stripping away this mystical form and making them evident in their full simplicity and universal reality. It was self evident that the old philosophies of nature--in spite of all their actual value and fruitful suggestiveness--could be of no value to us. There was an error in the Hegelian form, as shown in this book, in that it recognised no progression of nature in time, no "one after another" (Nacheinander) but merely "one besides another" (Nebeneinander). This was due on the one hand to the Hegelian system itself which ascribed to the Spirit (Geist) alone a progressive historical development, but on the other hand, the general attitude of the natural sciences was responsible. So Hegel fell far behind Kant in this respect for the latter had already by his nebular hypothesis proclaimed the origin and, by his discovery of the stoppage of the rotation of the earth through the tides, the destruction of the solar system. And finally, I could not undertake to construct the dialectical laws of nature but to discover them in it and to develop them from it. To do this entirely and in each separate division is a colossal task. Not only is the ground to be covered almost immeasurable but on this entire ground natural science is involved in such tremendous changes that even those who have all their time to give can hardly keep up with it. Since the death of Marx however my mind has been occupied by more pressing duties and so I had to interrupt my work. I must, for the moment, confine myself to the hints in the work before us and wait for a later opportunity to correct and publish the results obtained, probably together with the most important manuscripts on mathematics left behind by Marx. But the advance of theoretical science makes my work in all probability, in a great measure, or altogether, superfluous. Since the revolution which overturned theoretical science the necessity of arranging the accumulation of purely empirical discoveries has caused the opposing empiricists to pay more and more attention to the dialectical character of the operations of nature. The old stiff antagonisms, the sharp impassable frontier lines are becoming more and more abolished. Since the last "true" gases have been liquefied, since the proof that a body can be put in a condition in which liquid and gaseous forms cannot be differentiated, aggregate conditions have to the last remnant lost their earlier absolute character. With the statement of the kinetic theory of gases that, in gases, the squares of the speeds with which the separate gas molecules move are in inverse ratio to the molecular weights, under the same temperature, heat takes its place directly in the series of such measurable forms of motion. Ten years ago the newly discovered great fundamental law of motion was still understood as a mere law of the conservation of energy, as a mere expression of the indestructibility and uncreatibility of motion, and therefore merely on its quantitative side. That narrow negative expression has been more and more subordinated to the transformation of energy, in which the qualitative content of the process is duly recognised and the last notion of an extramundane Creator is destroyed. That the quantity of motion (of energy, so called) is not changed when it is transformed into kinetic energy (mechanical force, so called), into electricity, heat, potential static energy need not now be preached any longer as something new, it served as the foundation, once attained, of many valuable investigations of the process of transformation itself, of the great fundamental process, in the knowledge of which is comprehended the knowledge of all nature. And since biology has been treated in the light of the theory of evolution it has abolished one stiff line of classification after another in the realm of organic nature. The entirely unclassified intermediate conditions increase in number every day. Later investigations throw organisms out of one class into another, and marks of distinction which have become articles of faith lose their individual reality. We have now mammals which lay eggs and, if the news is established, birds also which go on all fours. It was already observed, before the time of Virchow, as a conclusion of the discovery of the cell, that the identity of the individual creature is lost, scientifically and dialectically speaking, in a federation of cells, so the idea of animal (and therefore human) individuality is still further complicated by the discovery of the amoeba in the bodies of the higher animals constituting the white blood corpuscles. And these are just the things which were considered polar opposites, irreconcilable and insoluble, the fixed boundaries and differences of classification, which have given modern theoretical science its limited and metaphysical character. The knowledge that these distinctions and antagonisms actually do occur in nature, but only relatively, and that on the other hand that fixity and absoluteness are the products of our own minds--this knowledge constitutes the kernel of the dialectic view of nature. The view is reached under the compulsion of the mass of scientific facts, and one reaches it the more easily by bringing to the dialectic character of these facts a consciousness of the laws of dialectic thought. At all events, the scope of science is now so great that it no longer escapes the dialectic comprehension. But it will simplify the process if it is remembered that the results in which these discoveries are comprehended are ideas, that the art of operating with ideas is not inborn, moreover, and is not vouchsafed every day to the ordinary mind, but requires actual thought, and this thought has a long history crammed with experiences, neither more nor less than the accumulated experiences of investigation into nature. By these means, then, it learns how to appropriate the results of fifteen hundred years development of philosophy, it gets rid of any separate natural philosophy which stands above or alongside of it and the limited method of thought brought over from English empiricism. _London, 22nd September, 1885._ III The following new edition is, with the exception of a very few changes in form of expression, a reproduction of the former. Only in one chapter, namely in the Xth. of the Second Section (that on Critical History) I have allowed some important emendations, for the following reasons. As has been stated already in the preface to the second edition, this chapter is in all its essentials, the work of Marx. In its first form, which was intended as an article in a review, I was compelled to abbreviate the manuscript of Marx very much, particularly in those points in which the criticism of Herr Duehring's propositions is subordinate to the particular development of the history of economics. But these are just the portions of the manuscript which constitute the greatest and most important of, as regards its permanent interest, part of the work. The places in which Marx gives their appropriate place in the genesis of political economy to such writers as Petty, North, Locke and Hume, I consider myself obliged to give as literally and completely as possible, and still more so, his explanation of the "economic tableaux" by Quesnay, the insoluble riddle of the sphinx to all economists. I have omitted however that part which dealt solely with the writings of Herr Duehring as far as the connection permitted. For the rest, I am perfectly well satisfied with the extent to which the views represented in this work, have made their way into the minds of the working class and the scientists throughout the world since the publication of the former edition. F. ENGELS. _London, 23d May, 1894._ CHAPTER III INTRODUCTION _I. In General._ Modern socialism is in its essence the product of the existence on the one hand of the class antagonisms which are dominant in modern society, between the property possessors and those who have no property and between the wage workers and the bourgeois; and, on the other, of the anarchy which is prevalent in modern production. In its theoretical form however it appears as a development of the fundamental ideas of the great French philosophers of the eighteenth century. Like every new theory it was obliged to attach itself to the existing philosophy however deeply its roots were embedded in the economic fact. The great men in France who cleared the minds of the people for the coming revolution were themselves uncompromisingly revolutionary. They did not recognise outside authority of any kind whatsoever. Religion, natural science, society, the state, all were subjected to the most unsparing criticism, and everything was compelled to justify its existence before the judgment seat of reason or perish. Reason was established as the one and universal measure. It was the time when, as Hegel said, the world was turned upside down, first in the sense that the human mind and the principles arrived at by process of thought were claimed as the foundations of all human actions and social relations, but later also, in the wider sense, that the reality which contradicted these theories had indeed to be turned upside down. All forms of society and the state existent heretofore, all survivals of old notions, were thrown into the lumber room as unreasonable. Up to that time the world had only allowed itself to be led by prejudice. All that had been done deserved merely pity and contempt. Now for the first time day broke: from now on, superstition, injustice, tyranny and privilege should be replaced by eternal truth, eternal justice, equality founded on natural rights and the inalienable rights of man. We now know that the rule of reason was nothing more than the rule of the bourgeoisie idealised, that eternal right found its realisation in bourgeois justice, that equality was materialised in bourgeois equality before the law, that when the rights of man were proclaimed bourgeois rights of property were proclaimed at one and the same time, and that the state of reason, Rousseau's Social Contract, could only come into existence as the bourgeois democratic republic. To such a slight extent could the great thinkers of the eighteenth century, just as their predecessors, prevail over the limits which their own epoch had placed upon them. But besides the antagonism between feudal baron and bourgeois there existed the general antagonism between the robbers and the robbed, between the rich idlers and the toiling poor. It was just this antagonism which made it possible for the leaders of the bourgeoisie to pose as the representatives not merely of a special class but of the whole of suffering humanity. Furthermore the bourgeoisie was saddled with an antithesis right from the start. Capitalists cannot exist without laborers, and, in proportion, as the members of the gilds in the Middle Ages developed into the modern bourgeois, the journeymen of the gilds and the day laborers, on their part, developed into the proletariat. And though the bourgeois, as a general rule, might claim to represent also the interests of the different working classes of the period, still, independent movements of the latter classes broke out in connection with each great movement on the part of the bourgeoisie; such working classes being the more or less developed predecessors of the modern proletariat. Thus there came into being at the time of the German Reformation and the Peasant War the party of Thomas Munzer, in the great English Revolution the Levellers, and in the great French Revolution, Baboeuf. Besides these revolutionary demonstrations of a class still undeveloped, occurred certain theoretical manifestations of a corresponding nature. Thus in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, utopian pictures of an ideal social condition, in the eighteenth century, absolutely communistic theories (Morelly and Mably). The demand for equality was confined no longer to political rights, it had to be extended to the social condition of individuals; the demand was made for the abolition not merely of class privileges but of class distinctions also. An ascetic communism patterned on that of Sparta was the first form which the new teachings assumed. Then came the three great utopians--Saint Simon, in whose eyes bourgeois aims possessed a certain merit as well as those of the proletariat: then Fourier and Owen, who, in the land of the most highly developed capitalistic production, and under the influence of the antagonisms which arise therefrom, developed in direct relation to French materialism their proposals which tended to the abolition of class distinctions. One common feature pertaining to all the three is the fact that they did not appear as the representatives of the interests of the proletariat which had been in the meantime developed through the historical process. Like the philosophers, their ambition is not to free a particular class but the whole world. Like them they wish to introduce the government of reason and eternal justice. But there is a world of difference between their government and that of the philosophers. According to the philosophers, the bourgeois world as it exists is unreasonable and unjust and is destined for the rubbish heap, just as feudalism and all other earlier forms of society. The reason that true justice and reason have not dominated the world is because up to the present man has not properly comprehended them. That a man of genius has appeared and that the truth concerning these things should have now been made clear are not results arising from a combination of historical progress and necessity, but a mere piece of luck. He might just as well have been born five hundred years earlier and saved mankind the mistakes, conflicts and sorrows of five hundred years. This is actually the idea of all English and French socialists and of the earlier German socialists, Weitling included. According to this view, socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason, and justice, and only has to be perceived in order to vanquish the world by reason of its truth. Hence, absolute truth, reason, and justice vary according to each founder of a school, and therefore with each one, the variety of absolute truth, reason and justice is dependent, in turn, upon the subjective temperament of that founder, his conditions of life, the extent of his knowledge and mental discipline, so that in this conflict of absolute truths there is no possible solution save that they rub each other smooth by mutual contact. Hence nothing could result from it except a sort of eclectic, average socialism, which is, as a matter of fact, up to the present, the prevailing notion in the minds of the great majority of socialist agitators in France and England--a mixture admitting of manifold shades, of a few notable critical utterances, economic teachings and pictures of a future state of society by leaders of different sects, a mixture which flows all the easier in proportion as the sharp precise corners are rubbed off the separate notions in the stream of debates, just as pebbles become round in a brook. In order that a science can be made out of socialism it is first necessary that it be placed on a sound basis. Meanwhile, close to and just after the French philosophy of the eighteenth century, the new German philosophy arose and culminated in Hegel. Its greatest service was the restoration of the dialectic as the highest form of thought. The old Greek philosophers were all natural dialecticians, and the most universal intellect among them, Aristotle, was already the discoverer of the essential forms of dialectic thought. On the other hand, subsequent philosophy although in it there were brilliant exponents of the dialectic (e.g. Descartes and Spinoza), was more and more involved in the so-called metaphysical mode of thought, chiefly owing to English influence which completely mastered the French philosophers, at least of the eighteenth century. Outside of the strict frontiers of philosophy, masterpieces of the dialectic might be found occasionally of which I can only recall "Rameau's Nephew" by Diderot, and the treatise upon the origin of human inequality by Rousseau. We now give briefly the essential features of the two modes of thought: we will return to them more fully later. If we examine nature, the history of man or our own intellectual activities, we have presented to us an endless coil of interrelations and changes in which nothing is constant whatever be its nature, time or position, but every thing is in motion, suffers change, and passes away. This original, naïve and very nearly correct philosophy of the world is that of the old Greek philosophers and was first put in a very clear form by Heraclitus. Everything is and yet is not, since everything is in a state of flux, is comprehended as undergoing constant modification, as eternally existing and disappearing. But this philosophy, correct as it is as regards phenomena in general, viewed as a picture, is insufficient to explain the individual phenomena of which the picture of the universe is composed, and as long as we cannot do that we are not clear about the general picture. In order to study these individual phenomena we are obliged to take them out of their natural or social connection, and examine each of them by itself according to its own form and its particular origin and development. This is the task of natural science and historical investigation, branches of discovery to which the Greeks of classical times assigned a subordinate place for very good reasons, since they, first of all, had to collect the material. The beginning of an exact observation of nature was made first by the Greeks of the Alexandrine period, and was later developed further by the Arabs in the Middle Ages. True natural science hence dates from the second half of the fifteenth century, and from then on has advanced at a constantly growing rate. The dissection of nature into its separate parts, the separation of different natural events and natural conditions into certain classes, the examination of the interiors of organic bodies with respect to their manifold anatomical forms, furnished the fundamental reasons for the progress in a knowledge of nature which the last four hundred years have brought in their train. But it has caused us occasionally to drop into the habit of regarding natural phenomena and events as entities, apart from the great universal interrelations, and therefore not as moving but quiescent, not as changeable in their essence but fixed and constant, not in their life but in their death. And hence, just as happened with Bacon and Locke, this point of view has been carried over from science into philosophy, and has constituted the specially narrow view of the last century, the metaphysical mode of thought. For the metaphysician, things and their pictures in the minds, concepts, are separate entities, one following the other without any regard to each other, stable, rigid, eternally fixed objects of investigation. The metaphysician thinks in antitheses. His conversation is "Yea, yea; Nay, nay" and whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil. For him a thing exists or it does not exist, a thing can never be itself and something else at the same time; positive and negative are mutually exclusive, cause and effect stand in stiff antagonism to each other. This method of thought seems at the first glance to be quite plausible because it is in accordance with sound common sense. But sound common sense, respectable fellow though he may be in his own home surrounded by his four walls, meets with strange adventures when he betakes himself into the wide world of investigation; and the metaphysical way of looking at things, sound and useful as it is, under given conditions, runs sooner or later into a stone wall, beyond which it is one-sided, stupid and abstract, and loses itself in insoluble contradictions. Because it omits to notice the interrelations of the individual phenomena, their existence, their coming and their going, their static and mobile conditions, and so to speak does not see the forest for trees. We know for example, with sufficient certainty for every day affairs, whether an animal is alive or dead, but, on closer examination, we find that this is sometimes no easy matter to decide, as jurists know very well and have gone indeed to great pains to discover a rational border line beyond which the killing of a child in the womb of its mother is murder. It is just as impossible too to fix the precise moment of death, for physiology shows that death is not a single and sudden event but a very slow process. Just so is every organic being at the same moment itself and not itself. Every moment it takes up matter coming to it from the outside and throws off other matter, every moment its body-cells die and are recreated. Indeed after a longer or shorter period the whole material of the body is renewed through the taking up of other particles of matter so that each organic being is at the same time itself and something else. We find also if we look at the matter more closely that the two poles of an antithesis, positive and negative, are just as inseparable as they are antagonistic, and that they, in spite of all their fixed antagonisms permeate each other, also that the cause and effect are concepts which can only realise themselves in relation to a particular case. However when we come to examine the separate case in its general relation to the world at large they come together and dissolve themselves in face of the working out of the universal problem, for, here, cause and effect exchange places, what was at one time and place effect becoming cause and vice versa. All these phenomena and thought-concepts do not fit into the frame of metaphysical philosophy. According to the dialectic method of thinking which regards things and their concepts in relation to their connection with each other, their concatenation, their coming into being and passing away, phenomena, like the preceding, are so many confirmations of its own philosophy. Nature is the proof of the dialectic, and we must give to modern science the credit of having furnished an extraordinary wealth and daily increasing store of material towards this proof, and thereby showing in the last instance things proceed dialectically and not in accordance with metaphysical notions. But as the scientists who have learned to think dialectically may be still easily counted, the chaos arising from the confusion between actual results and an antiquated mode of thought is thus explained, and this confusion is to-day dominant in theoretical science, and drives teachers and pupils, writers and readers to despair. A correct notion of the universe, of the human race, as well as of the reflection of this progress in the human mind can only be had by means of the dialectic method, together with a steady observation of the change and interchange which goes on in the universe, the coming into existence and passing away, progressive and retrogressive modification. And the later German philosophy has proceeded from this standpoint. Kant began his career in this way by abolishing Newton's conception of a stable solar system which persisted after receiving its first impulse, in favor of a historical process, to wit, the origin of the sun and all the planets from a rotating mass of nebulæ. From this concept he drew the conclusion that, granted this origin, the future dissolution of the solar system is inevitable. His theory was mathematically proved by Laplace half a century later, and half a century later still the spectroscope discovered the existence of such glowing masses of gas in space in different stages of condensation. This later German philosophy found its conclusion in the philosophy of Hegel where for the first time, and this is his greatest service, the entire natural, historical and spiritual universe was regarded as a process, that is, as in constant progress, change, transformation and development, and the attempt was made to show the more subtle relations of this process and development. From this historical point of view the history of mankind no longer appeared as a barren confusion of mindless forces, all alike subject to rejection before the judgment seat of the most recently ripened philosophy, and which, at the very best, man puts out of his mind as soon as possible, but as the development-process of humanity itself, to follow the process of which, little by little, through all its ramifications, and to establish the essential laws of which, in spite of all apparent accidents, is now the task of philosophic thought. It is immaterial at this place that Hegel did not solve this problem. His epoch-making service was to have proposed it. It is a problem, moreover, which no individual can solve. Though Hegel, next to Saint Simon, was the most universal intellect of his time he was still limited, in the first place, through the necessarily narrow grasp of his own knowledge and in addition through the limitations of the contemporary conditions of knowledge. There was a third reason, too. Hegel was an idealist, that is he regarded thought not as a mere abstract representation of real phenomena, but, on the contrary, phenomena and their development appeared to him as the representations of the Idea which existed before the world. The result was an inversion of everything, the actual interrelations of the universe were turned completely upside down, and though of these interrelations, many single ones were set out justly and correctly by Hegel, much of the detail is patched, labored, made up, in short, incorrect. The Hegelian system was, to speak briefly, a colossal miscarriage, and the last of its kind. It rested on an incurable contradiction; on the other hand, it actually proclaimed the historical conception according to which human history is a process of development, which, in its very nature, cannot find its intellectual conclusion in the discovery of a so-called absolute truth, on the other hand it declared itself to be the central idea of just such an absolute truth. An all embracing and determined knowledge of nature and history is in absolute contradiction with the foundations of dialectic thought, but it is not denied, on the contrary, it is strongly affirmed, that the systematic knowledge of the entire external world may from age to age make giant strides. The total perversion of modern German idealism of necessity drove men to materialism, but not, and this is well worth noting, to the mere metaphysical mechanical materialism of the eighteenth century. In contradiction to the naïvely simple revolutionary pushing on one side of all earlier history, modern materialism sees in history the process of the development of society, to discover the laws of whose development is its task. In contradistinction to the conception of nature which prevailed among the French philosophers, as well as with Hegel, as something moving in a narrow circle with an eternal and unchangeable substantial form, as Newton conceived it, and with invariable species of organic beings, as Linnæus thought, materialism embraces the more recent discoveries of natural science, according to which nature has also a history in time. For the forms of the worlds, like the species of organisms by which they are inhabited under suitable conditions, come into being and pass away, and the cycles of their progress, in so far as it is permissible to use the term, take on eternally more magnificent dimensions. In either case it is entirely dialectic and no longer forces a static philosophy upon the other sciences. As soon as the demand is made upon each separate branch of science that it make clear its relation to things in general, and science as a whole, the individual science thereupon becomes superfluous. Of all philosophy up to the present time the only peculiar property which remains as its characteristic is the study of thought and the formal laws of thought--logic and the dialectic. All else belongs to the positive sciences of nature and history. While the revolution in natural science was only able to be completely carried out in proportion as investigation furnished the necessary positive material, there were known a multitude of earlier historical facts which gave a distinct bias to the philosophy of history. In 1831 in Lyons the first purely working class revolt occurred. The first national working class movement, that of the English Chartists, reached its height between 1838 and 1842. The class war between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie proceeded historically in the most advanced European countries just in proportion as the newly developed greater industry has progressed, on the one hand, and the political power of the bourgeoisie on the other. The teachings of the bourgeois economists with respect to the identity of the interests of capital and labor and with respect to the universal peace and well being which would follow as a matter of course from the adoption of free trade were more and more contradicted by facts. All these things could be as little ignored as the French and English socialism which was their theoretical though very insufficient expression. But the old idealistic philosophy of history which was as yet by no means laid aside knew nothing of class wars dependent upon material interests, and nothing of material interests, specially. Production, like all economic phenomena only occupied a subordinate position as a secondary element of the "history of civilisation." The new facts, moreover rendered necessary a new investigation of all preceding history and then it became evident that all history up to then had been a history of class struggles and that these mutually conflicting classes are the results of a given method of production and distribution at a given period, in a word, of the economic conditions of that epoch. Hence, that the economic structure of society at a given time furnishes the real foundations upon which the entire superstructure of political and juristic institutions as well as the religious, philosophical and other abstract notions of a given period are to be explained in the last instance. Idealism was thereupon driven from its last refuge, the philosophy of history; a materialistic philosophy of history was set up, and the path was discovered by which the consciousness of man could be shown as springing from his existence rather than his existence from his consciousness. But the socialism which had existed so far was just as incompatible with the materialistic conception of history as was the naturalistic French materialism with the dialectic and the modern discoveries in natural science. The then existing socialism criticised the prevailing capitalistic methods of production and their results but it could not explain them and thus could not match itself against them, it could only brush them on one side as being bad. But it was necessary to show, on the one hand, the capitalistic methods of production in their historical connection, and their necessity at a given historical epoch and therefore the necessity of their ultimate disappearance. On the other hand their inner character had to be explained and this was all the more concealed for criticism had up to then been chiefly engaged in pointing out the evil results flowing from them rather than in destroying the thing itself. This was made clear by the discovery of surplus value. It was shown that the appropriation of unpaid labor is the basis of the capitalistic mode of production and the robbery of the worker is carried out by its means; that the capitalist, although he buys the labor-force of the worker at the full value which it possesses in the market as a commodity, yet derives more from it than he has paid for it, and that in the last instance this surplus creates the total amount of value from which the capital steadily increasing in the hands of the capitalistic class is amassed. The phenomenon not only of capitalistic production but of the creation of capital has thus been explained. For these two great discoveries, the materialistic conception of history and the disclosure of the mystery of capitalistic production we must thank Marx. Granted these, socialism became a science, which thereupon had to busy itself in the working out of these ideas in their individual aspects and connections. Thus matters stood in the realm of theoretical socialism and the dead philosophy (of metaphysics Ed.) when Herr Eugene Duehring, with no slight impressement sprang up before the public and announced that he had accomplished a complete revolution in political economy and socialism. Let us now see what Herr Duehring promises and--how he keeps his promises. _II. What Herr Duehring Has to Say._ Up to now, the notable writings of Herr Duehring are his "Course of Philosophy," his "Course of Political and Social Science" and his "Critical History of Political Economy and Socialism." The first work is the one which particularly claims our attention. Right on the first page Herr Duehring announces himself as "one who claims to represent this power (of philosophy) at the present time and its unfolding in the undiscoverable future." He discovers himself, therefore, as the one true philosopher for the present and the hidden future. Whoso differs from him differs from truth. Many people even before Herr Duehring, have thought this about themselves or something like it, but, with the exception of Richard Wagner, he is the first who has allowed himself to say it right out. And, as a matter of fact, the truth, as it is handled by him is "a final truth of the last instance." Herr Duehring's philosophy is "the natural system, or the philosophy of reality.... Reality is so understood as to exclude every sudden impulse towards an unreal and subjectively limited comprehension of the universe." The philosophy is therefore so shaped as to exclude Herr Duehring himself from the somewhat obvious limitations of his own personal, subjective narrowness. It is quite necessary to explain how this miracle is worked, if he is in a position to lay down unquestionable truths of the last instance, though, for our part, we cannot discover any particular merit in them. This "natural system of valuable knowledge" has "with great profundity established the foundation forms of existence." Out of his real critical attitude proceed the elements of a real critical philosophy, based on the realities of nature and life, which does not allow of any merely imaginary horizon but in its mighty revolutionary progress opens up the earth and heaven of external and inner nature; it is a "new method of thought" and its results are "from the bottom up, peculiar results and philosophies ... system-shaping ideas ... fixed truths." We have in it before us "a work which must seek its force in the concentrated initiative," whatever that may mean; an "investigation reaching to the roots ... a rooted science ... a severely scientific conception of things and men ... a comprehensive thorough effort of the mind ... a creative sketch of suppositions and conclusions from overmastering ideas ... the absolute fundamental." In the realm of political economy he gives us not only "historical and systematic comprehensive efforts" of which the historical are moreover distinguished by "my presentation of history in the grand style" and those in political economy have produced "creative movements," but closes with a special completely elaborated scientific scheme for a future society which is "the actual fruit of a clear and basic theory," and is therefore just as free from the possibility of error and as individual as Duehring's philosophy ... for "only in that socialistic structure which I have disclosed in my "Course of Political and Social Science" can a true ownership arise in place of the present apparent private property which rests on force such an ownership as must be recognised in the future." These flowers of rhetoric from the praises of Herr Duehring by Herr Duehring might be increased tenfold with ease. They must cause a doubt to arise in the mind of the reader whether he is reading the words of a philosopher or of a--but we must ask him to withhold his judgment until he shall have learnt the aforesaid grasp of the root of things by a closer acquaintance. We only quote the foregoing flowery remarks to show that we have to do with no ordinary philosopher and socialist who simply speaks what he thinks and leaves the future to decide with respect to their value, but with an extraordinary personality like the Pope whose individual teachings must be received if the damnable sin of heresy is to be avoided. We have not by any means to deal with the kind of work which abounds in all the socialist writings, and the later German ones, in particular, works in which people of varying calibre seek to explain in the most naïve fashion their notions of things in general and for an answer to whom there is more or less material available. But whatever may be the literary or scientific deficiencies of these works their goodwill towards socialism is always manifest. On the other hand, Herr Duehring presents us with statements which he declares to be final truths of the last instance, exclusive truths, according to which any other opinion is absolutely false. Thus he owns the only scientific methods of investigation, and all others are unscientific in comparison. Either he is right and we are face to face with the greatest genius of our time, the first superhuman, because infallible, man; or he is wrong, and then, since our judgment may always be at fault, benevolent regard for his possible good intentions would be the deadliest insult to Herr Duehring. When one is in possession of final truths of the last instance and the only absolutely scientific knowledge one must have a certain contempt for the rest of erring and unscientific humanity. We cannot therefore be surprised that Herr Duehring employs very abusive terms with regard to his predecessors, and that only a few exceptional people, recognised by him as great men, find favor in face of his comprehension of fundamental truths. (Then follows a list of the epithets applied by Duehring to philosophers, naturalists, Darwin, in particular, and to the socialist writers. This list has been omitted as it contributes nothing of value to the general discussion and is only useful for the particular controversial matter in hand. Ed.) And so on--and this is only a hastily gathered bouquet of flowers from Herr Duehring's rose garden. It will be understood that if these amiable insults which should be forbidden Herr Duehring on any grounds of politeness, are found somewhat disreputable and unpleasant, they are, still, final truths of the last instance. Even now we shall guard against any doubt of his profundity because we might otherwise be forbidden to discover the particular category of idiots to which we belong. We have but considered it our duty on the one hand to give what Herr Duehring calls "The quintessence of a modest mode of expression," and on the other hand, to show that in Herr Duehring's eyes the objectionableness of his predecessors is no less firmly established than his own infallibility. Accordingly if all this is actually true we bow in reverence humbly before the mighty genius of modern times. CHAPTER IV PHILOSOPHY _Apriorism._ Philosophy is, according to Herr Duehring, the development of the highest forms of consciousness of the world and life, and embraces, in a wider sense, the principles of all knowledge and volition. Wherever a series of perceptions, or motives or a group of forms of life becomes a matter of consideration in the human mind the principles which underly these forms, of necessity, become an object of philosophy. These principles are single, or, up to the present, have been considered as single ingredients out of which are composed the complexities of knowledge and volition. Like the chemical composition of material bodies, the entire universe may be also resolved into fundamental forms and elements. These elementary constituents and principles serve, when once discovered, not only for the known tangible world but for that also, which is unknown and inaccessible. Philosophical principles therefore constitute the last complement required by the sciences in order that they may become a uniform system by means of which nature and human life are explained. In addition to the examination of the fundamental forms of all existence, philosophy has only two particular objects of investigation, Nature and Humanity. Hence our material may be classified into three main groups,--a general scheme of the universe, the teaching of the principles of nature and finally the principles which regulate Humanity. This arrangement at the same time comprises an inner logical order, for the formal principles which are true for all existence take precedence, and the concrete realms in which these principles display themselves follow in the gradation of their successive arrangements. So far, this is Herr Duehring's conception of things given almost in his very words. He is therefore engaged with principles, formal conceptions, which are subjective and not derived from the knowledge of external phenomena, but which are applied to Nature and Humanity, as the principles according to which Nature and Humanity must regulate themselves. But how are these subjective principles derived? From thought itself? No, for Herr Duehring himself says: the purely ideal realm is limited to logical arrangements and mathematical conceptions (which latter as we shall later see is false). Logical arrangements can only be referred to forms of thought, but we are engaged here only with forms of existence, the external world, and these forms can never be created by thought nor derived from it but only from the external world. Hereupon the entire matter undergoes a change. We see that principles are not the starting point of investigation but the conclusion of it, they are not to be applied to nature and history but are derived from them. Nature and Humanity are not steered by principles, but principles are, on the other hand, only correct so far as they correspond with nature and history. That is just the materialistic conception of the matter, and the opposite, that of Herr Duehring is the idealistic conception, it turns things upside down and constructs a real world out of the world of thought, arrangements, plans and categories existing from everlasting before the world, just like Hegelianism. As a matter of fact, we prefer Hegel's "Encyclopedia," with all its fever phantoms, to the "final truths of the last instance" of Herr Duehring. In the first place, according to Herr Duehring we have the general scheme of the universe which by Hegel is called "logic." Then according to both of them we have the application of this scheme to nature by means of the logical categories, the philosophy of nature, and finally their application to Humanity, by what Hegel calls "the Philosophy of the Spirit." "The inner logical arrangement" of Duehring's scheme brings us therefore logically back to Hegel's "Encyclopedia" from which it is taken with a fidelity which would move that Wandering Jew of the Hegelian school, Professor Michelet of Berlin, to tears. Such a result follows if one takes it for granted that "consciousness," "thought," is something which has existed from the beginning in contradistinction to nature. It would then be of the greatest importance to bring consciousness and Nature, thought and existence, into harmony, to harmonise the laws of thought and the laws of Nature. But one enquires further what are thought and consciousness and whence do they originate. It is consequently discovered that they are products of the brain of man, and that Humanity is itself a product of nature which has developed in and along with its environment; wherefore it becomes self-apparent that the products of the brain of man being themselves, in the last instance, natural products, do not contradict all the rest of Nature but correspond with it. But Herr Duehring cannot allow so simple a treatment of the subject. He thinks not only in the name of Humanity which would be quite a large affair, but in the name of the conscious and thinking beings of the whole universe. Indeed, it would be "a degradation of the foundation concepts of knowledge and consciousness if one should wish to exclude or even to throw suspicion upon their sovereign value and undoubted claims to truth by means of the epithet 'human.'" In order that there may be no suspicion that upon some heavenly body or other twice two may make five, Herr Duehring does not venture to call thought a human attribute, and therefore he is obliged to separate it from the only true foundation on which it rests, as far as we are concerned, namely, from man and nature, and thereby falls, without any possibility of getting out, into an "ideology" which causes him to play baby to Hegel. It is self-evident that one cannot build materialistic doctrines on foundations so ideological. We shall see later that Herr Duehring is compelled to push nature to the front as a conscious agent and, therefore, as that, which people in plain English call God. Indeed, our philosopher had other motives in shifting the foundation of reality from the material world to that of thought. The knowledge of this general scheme of the universe, of these formal principles of being is just the foundation of Herr Duehring's philosophy. If we derive the scheme of the universe not from our own brain, but merely by means of our own brain, from the material world, we need no philosophy, but simply knowledge of the world and what occurs in it, and the results of this knowledge likewise do not constitute a philosophy, but positive science. In such a case, however, Herr Duehring's entire book would have been love's labor lost. Further, if no philosophy, as such, is longer required there is no longer the necessity of any philosophy of nature even. The view that all the phenomena of nature stand in systematic mutual relations compels science to prove this systematic interconnection in all respects, in single cases as well as in the entirety. But an appropriate creative, scientific representation of this mutual connection in such a way as to show the composition of an exact thought-picture of the system of the universe in which we live remains not only for us but for all time an impossibility. Should such a final conclusive system of the interconnection of the various activities of the universe, physical, as well as intellectual and historical, ever be brought to completion at any point of time in the history of the human race, human knowledge would forthwith come to an end and future historical progress would be cut off from the very moment in which society was directed in accordance with the system, which would be an absurdity, mere nonsense. Man is therefore confronted by a contradiction, on the one hand he is obliged to study the interconnections of the world-system exhaustively, and, on the other hand, he is unable to fully accomplish the task either as regards himself or as regards the system of nature. This contradiction, however, does not consist solely in the nature of the two factors World and Man; it is the main lever also of universal intellectual progress and is solved every day and for ever in an endless progressive development of humanity, just as mathematical problems find their solution in an endless progression of a recurring decimal. As a matter of fact also every concept of the universe is subject to objective limitations owing to the conditions of historical knowledge, and subjectively in addition owing to the physical and mental make up of the author of the concept. But Herr Duehring exhibits a mode of thought which is confined in its application to a limited and subjective idea of the universe. We saw earlier that he was omnipresent, in all possible forms of the universe, now we see that he is omniscient. He has solved the final problems of science and has nailed up tight all future knowledge. Herr Duehring considers that he can, as with the fundamental forms of existence, produce aprioristically by means of his own cogitations the whole of pure mathematics without making any use of the experience which is afforded us in the objective world. In pure mathematics the understanding is engaged "in its own free creations and imaginations"; the concepts of number and form are "self-sufficient objects proceeding from themselves" and so have "a value independent of individual experience and actual objective reality." That pure mathematics has a significance independent of particular individual experience is quite true as are also the established facts of all the sciences and indeed of all facts. The magnetic poles, the formation of water from oxygen and hydrogen, the fact that Hegel is dead and that Herr Duehring is alive, are facts independent of my experience or that of any other single individual, and will be independent of that of Herr Duehring himself, as soon as he shall sleep the sleep of the just. But in pure mathematics the mind is not by any means engaged with its own creations and imaginings. The concepts of number and form have only come to us by the way of the real world. The ten fingers on which men count and thereby performed the first arithmetical calculations are anything but a free creation of the mind. To count not only requires objects capable of being counted but the ability, when these objects are regarded, of subtracting all qualities from them except number and this ability is the product of long historical development of actual experience. The concept form is, like that of number, derived exclusively from the external world and is not a purely mental product. To it things possessed of shape were necessary and these shapes men compared until the concept form was arrived at. Pure mathematics considers the shapes and quantities of things in the actual world, very real objects. The fact that these objects appear in a very abstract form only superficially conceals their origin in the world of external nature. In order to understand these forms and qualities in their purity it is necessary to separate them from their content and thus one gets the point, without dimensions, the line, without breadth and thickness, a and b, x and y, constants and variables, and we finally first arrive at independent creations of the imagination and intellect, imaginary magnitudes. Also the apparent derivation of mathematical magnitudes from each other does not prove their aprioristic origin, but only their rational interconnection. Before one attained the concept that the form of a cylinder was derived from the revolution of a rectangle round one of its sides, he must have examined a number of rectangles and cylinders even if of imperfect form. Like all sciences, mathematics has sprung from the necessities of men, from the measurement of land and the content of vessels, from the calculation of time and mechanics. But, as in every department of thought, at a certain stage of development, laws are abstracted from the actual phenomena, are separated from them and set over against them, as something independent of them, as laws, which apparently come from the outside, in accordance with which the material world must necessarily conduct itself. So, it has happened in society and the state, so, and not otherwise, pure mathematics though borrowed from the world is applied to the world, and though it only shows a portion of its component factors is all the better applicable on that account. But as Herr Duehring imagines that the whole of pure mathematics can be derived from the mathematical axioms, "which according to purely logical concepts are neither capable of proof nor in need of any, and without empirical ingredients anywhere and that these can be applied to the universe, he likewise imagines, in the first place, the foundation forms of being, the single ingredients of all knowledge, the axioms of philosophy, to be produced by the intellect of man; he imagines also that he can derive the whole of philosophy or plan of the universe from these, and that his sublime genius can compel us to accept this, his conception of nature and humanity." Unfortunately nature and humanity are not constituted like the Prussians of the Manteuffel regime of 1850. The axioms of mathematics are expressions of the most elementary ideas which mathematics must borrow from logic. They may be reduced to two. (1) The whole is greater than its part; this statement is mere tautology, since the quantitatively limited concept, "part," necessarily refers to the concept, "whole,"--in that "part" signifies no more than that the quantitative "whole" is made up of quantitative "parts." Since the so-called axiom merely asserts this much we are not a step further. This can be shown to be a tautology if we say "The whole is that which consists of several parts--a part is that several of which make up a whole, therefore the part is less than the whole." Where the barrenness of the repetition shows the lack of content all the more strongly. (2) If two magnitudes are equal to a third they are equal to one another; this statement is, as Hegel has shown, a conclusion, upon the correctness of which all logic depends, and which is demonstrated therefore outside of pure mathematics. The remaining axioms with regard to equality and inequality are merely logical extensions of this conclusion. Such barren statements are not enticing either in mathematics or anywhere else. To proceed we must have realities, conditions and forms taken from real material things; representations of lines, planes, angles, polygons, spheres, etc., are all borrowed from reality, and it is just naive ideology to believe the mathematicians, who assert that the first line was made by causing a point to progress through space, the first plane by means of the movement of a line, and the first solid by revolving a plane, etc. Even speech rebels against this idea. A mathematical figure of three dimensions is called a solid--corpus solidum--and hence, according to the Latin, a body capable of being handled. It has a name derived, therefore, by no means from the independent play of imagination but from solid reality. But to what purpose is all this prolixity? After Herr Duehring has enthusiastically proclaimed the independence of pure mathematics of the world of experience, their apriorism, their connection with free creation and imagination, he says "it will be readily seen that these mathematical elements (number, magnitude, time, space, geometric progression), are therefore ideal forms with relation to absolute magnitudes and therefore something quite empiric, no matter to what species they belong." But "mathematical general notions are, apart from experience, nevertheless capable of sufficient characterization," which latter proceeds, more or less, from each abstraction, but does not by any means prove that it is not deprived from the actual. In the scheme of the universe of our author pure mathematics originated in pure thought, in his philosophy of nature it is derived from the external world and then set apart from it. What are we then to believe? _The Scheme of the Universe._ "All-comprehending existence is sole. It is sufficient to itself and has nothing above or below it. To associate a second existence with it would be to make it just what it is not, a part of a constituent or all-embracing whole. When we conceive of our idea of soleness as a frame there is nothing which can enter into this, nothing which retains twofoldness can enter into this concept of unity. But nothing can alienate itself from this concept of unity. The essence of all thought consists in uniting the elements of consciousness in a unity. The indivisible concept of the universe has arisen by comprehending everything, and the universe, as the word signifies, is recognised as something in which everything is united into one unity." So far Herr Duehring is quoted. The mathematical method, "Everything must be decided on simple axiomatic foundation principles, just as if it were concerned with the simple principles of mathematics," this method is for the first time here applied. "The all-embracing existence is sole." If tautology, simple repetition in the predicate of what has been stated in the subject, if this constitutes an axiom, then we have a splendid specimen. In the subject Herr Duehring tells us that existence comprehends everything, in the predicate he explains intrepidly that there is nothing outside it. What a system-shaping thought. It is indeed system-shaping until we find six lines further down that Herr Duehring has transformed the soleness of being by means of our idea of unity into its one-ness. As the work of all thought consists in the bringing together of all thought into a unity so is existence, as soon as it is conceived, thought of as a unity, an indivisible concept of the universe, and because existence so conceived is the sole universal concept, so is real existence, the real universe, just as much an indivisible unity, and consequently "the beings in the beyond have no further place as soon as the mind has learned to comprehend existence in the homogeneous universality." That is a campaign with which in comparison Austerlitz and Jena, Koeniggratz and Sedan sink in insignificance. In a couple of expressions after we have set the first axiom moving we have abolished, put away, and destroyed all the inhabitants of the spirit-world, God, the heavenly hierarchies, heaven, hell and purgatory as well as the immortality of the soul. How do we arrive at the idea of the unity of existence from that of its soleness? As a matter of fact, we generally conceive it. As we spread out our idea of unity as a frame around it the concept of existence becomes the concept of unity, for the existence of all thought consists in the bringing of elements of consciousness into unity. This last statement is simply false. In the first place thought consists in the decomposition of objects of consciousness into their elements as well as in the uniting of mutually connected elements into a unity. There can be no synthesis without analysis. In the second place, thought can, without error, only bring those elements of consciousness into a unity in which or in the actual prototypes of which this unity already existed beforehand. If I comprehend a shoebrush under the class mammal, it does not thereupon become a milk-giver. The unity of existence is therefore just the thing which had to be proved in order to justify his concept of thought as a unity, and if Herr Duehring assures us that he regards existence as a unity and not as twofold he tells us nothing more than that he himself personally thinks so. To give a clear explanation of his method of reasoning, it is as follows, "I begin with existence. Therefore I think of existence. The idea of existence is an idea of unity. Thought and existence must therefore belong together, they answer one another, they mutually cover each other. Therefore existence is in reality a unity and there are no beings beyond." But if Herr Duehring had spoken thus plainly instead of entertaining us with oracular statements, the ideology of his argument would have been completely exposed. To attempt to undertake to prove from the identity of thought and existence the reality of the result of thought, that indeed were one of the fever-phantoms of a Hegel. If his entire method of proof were really correct Herr Duehring would not have gained a single point over the spiritists. The spiritists would curtly reply, "The universe is simple from our standpoint also. The division into the hither and the beyond only exists from our special earthly original sin standpoint. In its essence, that is God, the entire universe is a unity." And they will take Herr Duehring with them to his beloved heavenly bodies, and will show him one or more where no original sin can be found, and where there is therefore no antagonism between the hither and the beyond, and the oneness of the universe is a demand of faith. The most comical thing about the matter is that Herr Duehring in order to prove the non-existence of God from his concept of existence, furnishes the ontological proof of God's existence. This runs as follows--If we think of God we think of Him as the concept of complete perfection. To the idea of perfection existence is a first essential, since a non-existent being is of necessity imperfect. We must therefore add existence to the perfections of God. Therefore God must exist. Thus Herr Duehring reasons exactly. If we think of existence we think of it as a concept. What is united into a concept is a unity, therefore existence would not correspond with its concept if it were not a unity. Therefore it must be a unity, therefore there is no God, etc. If we speak of existence and merely of existence, the unity can only consist in this that all objects with which it is concerned are--exist. They are comprised under the unity of this common existence, and no other, and the general dictum that they all exist cannot give them any further qualities, common or not common, but excludes all such from consideration in advance. For as soon as we take a step beyond the simple fact that existence is common to all things, the distinctions between these separate things engage our attention, and if these differences consist in this that some are black, some white, some alive, others not alive, some hither and some beyond, we cannot conclude therefrom that mere existence can be imputed to all of them alike. The unity of the universe does not consist in its existence, although its existence is a presumption of its unity, since it must first exist before it can be a unit. Existence beyond the boundary line of our horizon is an open question. The real unity of the universe consists in its materiality, and this is established, not by a pair of juggling phrases but by means of a long and difficult development of philosophy and natural science. With respect to the subject in hand; the existence which Herr Duehring presents to us is "not that pure existence which is self sufficient and without any other qualities, in fact, only representing the antithesis of no-idea or absence-of-idea." Now we shall very soon see that the universe of Herr Duehring has its origin simultaneously with an existence which is without essential differentiation, progress or change, and is therefore merely in fact a contradiction of absence of thought, therefore really nothing. From this non-existence is developed the present differentiated, changeable universe which represents progressive growth; and when we grasp this idea, only by virtue of this eternal change do we arrive at "the concept of the self sufficing, universal existence." We have therefore now the concept of existence on a higher plane where it comprises within itself stability as well as change, being as well as development. Arrived at this point we find that "species and genera in fact the special and the general, are the simplest forms of differentiation, without which the constitution of things cannot be grasped." But this is a means of distinguishing quality and after a discussion of this part of the subject we proceed "Over against the idea of species stands the idea of the whole, a homogeneity, as it were, in which no differentiation of species can longer be found," so we pass from quality to quantity and this is always "capable of measurement." Let us compare this "clear analysis of the actual, universal scheme of things" and its "real, critical standpoint" with the fever-phantasies of a Hegel. We find that Hegel's "Logic" begins with existence as does that of Herr Duehring; that existence displays itself as nothing, as with Herr Duehring; that out of this not-being, a leap is made into being, and that existence is the result of this, that is a more complete and higher form of being, as with Herr Duehring. Being leads to quality, quality to quantity, just as with Herr Duehring. And in order that no essential shall be lacking Herr Duehring tells us elsewhere "from the realm of absence of sensation man leaps to that of sensation in spite of all the quantitative steps with but one qualitative leap ... from which we can show that he is entirely differentiated from the mere gradation of one and the same quality." This is just the Hegelian standard of measurement according to which mere quantitative expansion or contraction causes a sudden qualitative change at a given point, as for example with heated or cooled water, there are points where the spring into a new set of conditions is fulfilled under normal circumstances, and where therefore quantity suddenly changes into quality. Our investigation has likewise sought to penetrate to the deepest roots, and discovers the rooted Duehring foundations to be the "fever-phantasies" of a Hegel, the categories of the Hegelian logic, in the first place, teachings in regard to existence after the antique Hegelian method, and an ineffective cloak of plagiarism. And not content with purloining the whole scheme of existence from his despised predecessors, Herr Duehring after giving the above example of a change of quantity into quality has the coolness to say of Marx, "Is it not comical, this appeal (of Marx) to Hegelian confusion and mistiness, that quantity changes into quality." Confused mixture, who changes his ground, who is a comical fellow Herr Duehring? All these pretty little statements are not only not "axiomatic utterances" according to label, but are simply taken from foreign sources, that is, from Hegel's "Logic." Of a truth there is not revealed in the whole chapter the shadow of any "inner connection," except so far as it is borrowed from Hegel, and the whole talk about stability and change finally runs out into mere garrulity on the subject of time and space. From existence Hegel comes to substance, to the dialectic. Here he treats of reflex-movements, antagonisms and contradictions, positive and negative for example, and thence proceeds to causality, or the conditions of cause and effect and closes with necessity. Herr Duehring does not vary this method. What Hegel calls the "doctrines of existence" Herr Duehring has translated into "logical properties of existence." These exist, above all else in the antagonism of forces, in antithesis, Herr Duehring denies the antithesis in toto, but we shall return to this matter later. Then he proceeds to causality and thence to necessity. If Herr Duehring says of himself, "I do not philosophise from a cage," he must mean that he philosophises in a cage, the cage of the Hegelian arrangement of categories. CHAPTER V NATURAL PHILOSOPHY _Time and Space._ We now come to natural philosophy. Here again Herr Duehring takes it upon himself to be dissatisfied with his predecessors. He says "Natural philosophy sank so low that it became barren dregs of poetry and had fallen into the degraded rubbish of the sham philosophy of a Schelling and the like, grubbing in priest-craft and mystifying the public." Disgust has rid us of these deformities, but up to the present it has been succeeded by instability, and "what is of concern to the public at large is that the disappearance of a particularly great charlatan merely gives an opportunity to a smaller but more expert successor who repeats the production in another form." Naturalists have little desire for "a flight into the kingdom of the universe-comprehending ideas," and therefore indulge too freely in speculations which "go to pieces." Thus complete salvation must be found, and, fortunately, Herr Duehring is at hand. In order to comprehend aright the following conclusions respecting the unfolding of the universe in time and its limitation in space, we must again turn our attention to certain portions of the "scheme of the universe." Eternity is ascribed to existence, in agreement with Hegel, what Hegel calls "tiresome (schlecht) eternity," and this eternity is now investigated. "The plainest form of an incontrovertible idea of eternity is the piling up of numbers unlimitedly in arithmetical progression. Just as we can give a complete unity to each number without the possibility of repetition, so at every stage of its being it progresses still further and eternity consists in the unlimited manifestation of this condition. This sufficiently conceived eternity has but one single beginning with one single direction. Although it is not material to our concept to imagine a direction opposite to that in which the progression piles up, this notion of a backward moving eternity is only a hasty picture drawn by the imagination. Since it must necessarily run in a contrary direction, it would have behind it in each instance an endless succession of numbers. But this would be inadmissible as constituting the contradiction of a calculated infinity of numbers, and so it seems absurd to imagine a second direction of eternity." The first conclusion to be drawn from this conception of eternity is that the chain of cause and effect in the universe must once have had a beginning: an endless number of causes which have followed one another endlessly is therefore unthinkable, "because innumerability is thus considered as enumerated," therefore a final cause is proved. The second conclusion is "the law of the definite number: the accumulation of identical independent objects of an actual species is only thinkable as being made up of a definite number of these individual objects." Not only must the actual number of the heavenly bodies be definite at a given time, but the total number of all existent objects, the smallest independent particles of matter. This last necessity constitutes the real reason why no composite body is thinkable except as made up of atoms. All actual division has a fixed limit and must have it, if the contradiction of a numerated innumerability is to be avoided. On the same grounds not only must the revolutions of the sun and earth be fixed as they have occurred up to the present, even if they cannot be indicated, but all the periodical processes of nature must have had a beginning somewhere, and all the distinctions and complexities of nature which succeed each other must similarly have had an origin. This must indisputably have existed from eternity, but such an idea would be excluded if time consisted of real parts and was not arbitrarily divided to accommodate the possibilities of our understanding. It is different with time, self regarded, but the facts and phenomena of which time is made up being capable of differentiation can be enumerated. Let us conceive of a condition in which no change occurs and which undergoes no alteration in its stable identity; the time concept then becomes transformed into the general notion of existence. What is the result of piling up an empty duration of time is not discoverable. So far, Herr Duehring writes and he is not a little edified concerning the significance of these discoveries. He hopes that "it is perceived as a not insignificant truth," and later on says, "One should note the very simple phrases by which we have helped the concept of immortality and the criticism of it to a point at present unknown, through the sharpening and deepening of the simple elements of the universal conception of time and space." We have helped! This deepening and sharpening! Who are we? In what are we manifest? Who deepens and who sharpens? "Thesis--the world has a beginning in time and is bounded by space. Proof--If one suppose that the world has no beginning in time he is bound to grant infinity to each point of time, and so an infinite succession of things has passed away in the universe. But infinity of a series consists in the impossibility of its completion by successive syntheses. Therefore an eternal progression of the world is impossible. Hence a beginning of the world is a necessary condition of its existence, which was to be proved. Let us take the other concept. The world now appears as an eternal given whole consisting of things which have a simultaneous existence. Now we can conceive of the mass of a quantity, which can only be regarded under certain conditions, in no other way than by means of the synthesis of its parts, and we conceive the totality of the quantity by means of the completed synthesis or repeated additions of the unity to itself. Thus, in order to conceive of the universe as a whole which fills all space, the successive syntheses of the parts of an infinite universe must be regarded as being completed, that is an eternity of time must in calculating all coexisting things, be regarded as having existed, but this is impossible. Therefore an unending aggregate of actual things cannot be regarded as a given whole and therefore also not as coexistent. A world is therefore extension in space which is not unlimited and which has therefore bounds. And this was the second thing to be proved." These statements are copied from a well-known book which made its appearance in 1781 and is entitled "The Critique of Pure Reason," by Immanuel Kant. They can be read there in Part I, Division 2, second section, second part. "First Antinomy of Pure Reason." To Herr Duehring alone remains the name and fame of having pasted the law of fixed numbers on one of the published thoughts of Kant and of having made the discovery that there was once a time when time did not exist but only a universe. For the rest, therefore, when we come across anything sensible in Herr Duehring's exposition "We" means Immanuel Kant, and the "present" is only ninety-five years old. Quite simple indeed, and unknown until now! But Kant does not establish the above statement by his proof. On the other hand, he shows the reverse, namely, that the universe has no beginning in time and no end in space, and he fixes his antinomy in this, the unsolvable contradiction that the one is just as capable of proof as the other. People of small calibre might be inclined to think that here Kant had found an insuperable difficulty, not so our bold author of fundamental results "especially his own." He copies all that he can use of Kant's antinomy and throws the rest away. The matter solves itself very simply. Eternity in time and endlessness in space signify from the very words that there is no end in either direction, forwards or backwards, over or under, right or left. This infinity is quite different from an endless progression, since the latter always has some beginning, a first step. The inapplicability of this progression idea to our object is evident directly we apply it to space. Infinite progression translated in terms of space is a line produced continuously in a given direction. Is infinity in space expressed in this way, even remotely? On the contrary it requires six of these lines drawn from this point in three opposite directions to express the dimensions of space and we should have accordingly six of these dimensions. Kant saw this so plainly that he employed his progression merely indirectly in a round about way to express the extent of the universe. Herr Duehring on the contrary forces us to accept his six dimensions of space and at the same time has no words in which to express his contempt of the mathematical mysticism of Gauss who would not content himself with the three dimensions of space. Applied to time, the series or row of objects, infinite at both extremities, has a certain figurative significance. But let us picture time as proceeding from unity or a line proceeding from a fixed point. We can say then that time has had a beginning. We assume just what we wanted to prove. We give a one-sided half-character to infinity of time. But a one-sided eternity split in halves is a contradiction in itself, the exact opposite of a hypothetical infinity, incapable of contradiction. We can only overcome this contradiction by assuming that the unity which we began to count the progression from, the point from which we measure the line, is a unity taken at pleasure in the series, a point taken at pleasure in the line. Hence as far as the line or series is concerned it is immaterial where we put it. But as for the contradiction of the "counted endless progression" we shall be in a position to examine it more closely as soon as Herr Duehring has taught us the trick of reckoning it. If he has accomplished the feat of counting from minus infinity to zero, we shall be glad to hear from him again. It is clear that wherever he begins to count he leaves behind him an endless progression, and with it the problem which he had to solve. Let him only take his own infinite progression 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 etc. and try to reckon back to 1 again from the infinite end. He evidently does not comprehend the requirements of the problem. And furthermore, if he affirms that the infinite progression of past time is capable of calculation he must affirm that time has a beginning for otherwise he could not begin to calculate. Therefore he again substitutes a supposition for what he had to prove. The idea of the calculated infinite series, in other words Duehring's all-embracing law of the fixed number, is therefore a contradiction in adjecto, is a self contradiction, and an absurd one, moreover. It is clear that an infinity which has an end but no beginning is neither more nor less than an infinity which has a beginning but no end. The least logical insight would have compelled Herr Duehring to the statement that beginning and end are mutually necessary to each other, like North Pole and South Pole, and that if one omit the end the beginning becomes the end, the one end which the series has and vice versa. The entire fallacy would not be possible if it were not for the mathematical practice of operating with an infinite series. Because in mathematics one must proceed from the given and finite to that which is not given and infinite, all mathematical series whether positive or negative, begin with a fixed point otherwise one cannot calculate. The ideal necessities of the mathematician however are very far from being a law compulsory upon the universe. Besides Herr Duehring will never succeed in imagining an infinity without contradiction. In the first place, infinity is a contradiction and full of contradictions. For example it is a contradiction that infinity should be made up of finite things and yet such is the case. The notion of a limited universe leads to contradictions just as much as the notion of its unlimitedness, and each attempt to abolish these contradictions leads, as we have seen, to new and worse contradictions. But just because infinity is a contradiction, it is without end, endlessly developing itself in time and space. The abolition of the contradiction would be the end of infinity. Hegel saw that very clearly, and covers the people who entered upon intricate arguments about this contradiction with merited scorn. Let us proceed. Now, time has had a beginning. What was before this beginning? The unchangeable universe incomparable with anything else. And as no changes occur in this condition the particular concept time is transformed into the general concept existence. In the first place we have nothing to do with the transformation which goes on in the brain of Herr Duehring. We are not engaged with a concept of time, but with actual time of which Herr Duehring cannot so easily dispose. In the second place no matter how much the concept of time is transformed into the general concept existence it does not bring us one step nearer the goal. For the fundamental forms of all existence are space and time, and a thing existing outside of time is as silly an idea as that of a being outside of space. The Hegelian "past existence in which there was no time" and the neo-Schelling "being beyond the scope of thought" are rational conceptions compared with this being outside of time. For this reason Herr Duehring goes to work very cautiously "intrinsically it may be called time, but one cannot really call it time, as time does not consist in itself of real parts but is merely divided by us into parts to suit our own convenience," only a real filling up of time with distinct facts makes it capable of calculation. It is impossible to see the significance of piling up an empty duration. But it does not matter anyway. The question is whether the universe in this presupposed condition continues, that is persists, through a period of time. We have long known that it is useless to try and measure such empty space and to calculate without plan or aim and just because of the tiresomeness of such a proceeding Hegel calls this infinity "miserable." According to Herr Duehring time exists only by virtue of change, not change in and through time. Because time is different from change and independent of it, we can measure it by the changes, because in order to measure we need something different from that which is to be measured. And the time in which no recognisible changes take place is very far from being no time, on the other hand since it is free from other ingredients, it is pure, that is to say, true time. Indeed if we want to contemplate time as a pure concept separated from all foreign admixture, we are obliged to eliminate all the various events which occur in time, either successively or simultaneously, and thus imagine a time in which nothing occurs. By this means we have not permitted the concept time to be overcome by the general concept of existence, but we have thereby arrived at a pure time concept. All these contradictions and impossibilities are mere child's play compared with the confusion into which he plunges the universe with its self-sufficient commencement. If the universe was in a condition in which no change occurred in it, how did it ever manage to get from that state to one of change? Moreover, an absolute condition of absence of change existing from eternity cannot possibly get out of that state unaided so as to pass over to a condition of progress and change. A first cause of motion must therefore have come from the outside, from beyond the universe, which caused the movement. This first cause of motion is clearly only another term for God, The God and the Beyond of which Herr Duehring fancied that he had so nicely settled in his scheme of the universe, return sharpened and deepened in his natural philosophy. Further Herr Duehring says: "Where a fixed element of existence is capable of measurement, it will remain in unalterable stability. This is evident from material and mechanical force." The former quotation gives, it may be incidentally mentioned, a good example of Herr Duehring's axiomatic grandiloquence. Fixed quantities remain exactly the same, the quantity of mechanical force, once in the universe, is always the same. We will not dwell on this, so far as it is true, Descartes knew and said it three hundred years ago as regards philosophy, while in mechanical science the doctrine of the conservation of energy has been preached for the last twenty years. Herr Duehring has not improved upon it in so far as he limits it to mechanical energy. But where was mechanical energy at the period of unchangeableness? To this question Herr Duehring stubbornly refuses an answer. Where was the unchangeable mechanical force then, Herr Duehring, and what was it busy about? Answer: "The original state of the universe, or, better, the existence of unchangeable matter, not allowing of any changes in time, is a question which no mind can pass except one which sees the acme of wisdom in the destruction of its own powers." Therefore you must either take my original condition with your eyes shut, or I, the lusty Eugene Duehring, brand you as an intellectual eunuch. Some people might be quite alarmed about this, but we who have seen a few examples of Herr Duehring's powers, can let the elegant abuse pass and reiterate the question, "But how about that mechanical energy, Herr Duehring, if you please?" Herr Duehring is staggered at once. In fact, he stammers, "There is no proof of the actual existence of that original condition. Let us remember that this is also the case with each new step in the series with which we are acquainted. He therefore who will make difficulties in the foregoing case may see that he does not avoid them in the smaller apparent cases. Besides, the possibility exists that there are successively graduated intermediate states inserted, and thus there is a stable bridge by the means of which we can work backwards to the solution of the problem. As a matter of fact this notion of stability does not assist the main thought, but it is for us the fundamental form of regular progression, and of each transition known so far, so that we have a right to consider it as intermediate between the first original state and its disturbance. But if we consider the independent condition of equipoise from the point of view of mathematical concepts as, admittedly, without independent existence, there is no need of indicating the mode in which matter came into a dynamic condition." Outside of the mechanics of matter a change in movement of matter depends upon a change in the movement of the most insignificant particles. "Up to the present we have no universal principle of knowledge and we must therefore not be surprised if we are somewhat in the dark as to these matters." That is all that Herr Duehring has to say, and we should seek the very pinnacle of wisdom not alone in a mutilation of the creative faculty, but in blind superstition, if we were to let the matter pass with these foolish evasions and statements. Absolute stability has no power of change in itself, Herr Duehring admits this. The absolute condition of equipoise possesses no means by which it can pass into a dynamic state. What have we then? Just three false and foolish phrases. In the first place, Herr Duehring says that to show the transition from each most insignificant step in the chain of things with which we are acquainted to the next presents the same difficulty. He seems to think that his readers are infants. The proof of the transitions and interrelations of the most insignificant links in the chain of existence is just what constitutes the subject matter of natural science. If there is an impediment anywhere, nobody, not even Herr Duehring, thinks to explain the development as proceeding from nothing, but on the other hand as only proceeding from transition, change, and forward movement from a completed evolutionary stage. Here, however, he undertakes to show with reference to matter that it proceeds from absence of movement and therefore from nothing. In the second place, we have the "stable bridge." This does not help us appreciably over the difficulty, but we have a right to use it as a bridge between rigid stability and motion. Unfortunately stability consists in absence of motion, and the question as to the generation of motion remains as dark a secret as before. And if Herr Duehring shifts his no-movement at all to universal movement in infinitely small particles and ascribes to this ever so long a duration of time, we are still not the thousand part of an inch further from the place whence we started. Without a creative act we can get nothing from nothing, not even anything as small as a mathematical differential. The bridge of stability is therefore not even a _pons asinorum_. Herr Duehring is the only person able to cross it. Thirdly, as long as the present theories of mechanics prevail, this constitutes one of Herr Duehring's most reliable props, we cannot indicate how anything passes from a state of quiescence to one of motion. But the mechanical theory of heat teaches us that the movement of the mass depends upon the movements of the molecules, (so that even in this case movement proceeds from other movement and not from lack of movement) and this Herr Duehring shyly points out might serve as a bridge between the entirely static (the state of equipoise) and the dynamic (self-movement). But here Herr Duehring leaves us entirely in the dark. All his deepening and sharpening has dug a pit of folly and we are brought up necessarily in "darkness." But Herr Duehring troubles himself very little about that. He says right on the next page, with considerable audacity that he has been able to endow the self contained stability with real significance by means of the properties of matter and the mechanical forces. In spite of all these errors and confused statements we have still an inspiring faith remaining that "The mathematics of the inhabitants of other planets cannot rest on any axioms other than our own." _Cosmogony, Physics, and Chemistry._ Proceeding we come to theories respecting the mode by which the world, as it is to-day, came into being. A universal separation of matter from one element was the notion of the Ionic philosophers, but, since Kant, the conception of an original nebulous state has played a new role and according to this gravitation and heat expansion have built up the worlds, little by little and one by one. The mechanical theory of heat of our time has fixed the origin of the earlier condition of the universe with much greater precision. In spite of all this "the universal condition of the gaseous form can only be a point of departure for serious conclusions if one can define the mechanical system of it more precisely beforehand. If not, the idea becomes not only very cloudy, but the original nebula becomes really in the progress of those conclusions denser and more impenetrable."... For the present everything remains in the vagueness and formlessness of an indefinite idea, and so with regard to the gaseous universe we have only an insubstantial conception. The theory of Kant that all existing worlds were created from a mass of rotating vapor was the greatest advance made by astronomy since the days of Copernicus. The idea that nature had no history in time was then shaken for the first time. Up to then the worlds were fixed in bounds and conditions from their very beginning, and though the individual organisms on the separate worlds were transient, the species remained unalterable. Nature was conceived as an apparently limited movement and its motion seemed to be the repetition of the same movements perpetually. It was in this conception which is entire accord with the metaphysical mode of thought that Kant made the first breach and so scientifically that most of his grounds of proof stand good to-day. Really the theory of Kant is a mere hypothesis even to-day. The Copernican theory of the universe has no longer any weight and since the spectroscope discovered such glowing gaseous matter in space all objections have been disposed of and scientific opposition to Kant's theory has been silenced. Even Herr Duehring cannot produce his universe without the nebulous state and he takes his revenge by asking to be shown the mechanical system of this nebulous state and because this cannot be done he inflicts all sorts of contemptuous remarks upon this nebulous state. Unfortunately modern science cannot show this system and please Herr Duehring. But there are many other questions which it cannot answer. For example regarding the question why toads have no tails it can only answer so far "Because they have lost them." But if people get angry and say that this is all vague and formless, a mere fanciful idea, incapable of being made definite and a very poor notion, such views would not carry us a step further, scientifically. Such insults and exaggerations are sufficiently numerous. What is there to hinder Herr Duehring himself from discovering the mechanical system of the original nebular state? Fortunately we are informed that the nebular hypothesis of Kant "is far from showing a fully distinct condition of the world-medium or of explaining how matter arrived at a similar state." This is really very fortunate for Kant who is to be congratulated on having been able to trace the existing celestial bodies to the nebular condition, and who yet does not allow himself to dream of the self-contained unchanged condition of matter. It is to be remarked by the way that although the nebular condition of Kant is supposed to be the original vapor-form of matter, this is to be understood merely relatively. It is to be understood on the one hand as the original vapor form of the heavenly bodies, as they are at present, and on the other hand as the earliest form of matter to which we have been able to trace our way backwards. The fact that matter passed through an endless series of other forms before arriving at the nebular state is not excluded from this conception but is on the other hand rather included in it. Herr Duehring is at an advantage here. Whereas science comes to a halt at the existence of the nebulous state his quack science carries him back to that "Condition of the development of the world which cannot be called actually static in the present sense of the word but most emphatically cannot be called dynamic. The unity of matter and mechanical force which we call the world is, so to speak, a formula of pure logic, to signify the self-contained condition of matter as the point of departure of all enumerable stages of material progress." We have obviously not yet got away from the original self-contained condition of matter. Here it is explained as consisting of mechanical force and matter, and this as a formula of pure logic, etc. As soon then as the unity of matter and mechanical force is at an end evolution proceeds. The formula of pure logic is nothing but a lame attempt to make the Hegelian categories "an Sich and fuer Sich" of use in a philosophy of realism. In "an Sich" according to Hegel the original unity of a thing consists; in "fuer Sich" begins the differentiation and movement of the concealed elements, the active antithesis. We shall therefore depict the original condition as one in which there is a unity of matter and mechanical force and the transition to movement as the separation and antithesis of these two elements. But we have not thereby established the proof of the real existence of the fantastic original condition but only this much that it exists according to the Hegelian category "an Sich" and just as fantastically disappears according to the Hegelian category "fuer Sich." Matter, says Duehring, implies all that is real, therefore there is no mechanical force outside of matter. Mechanical force is furthermore a condition of matter. In the original condition where no change occurred matter and its mechanical force were a unity. Afterwards when the change commenced there was a differentiation from matter. Thus we are obliged to be satisfied with these mystical phrases and with the assurance that the self contained original state was neither static nor dynamic, neither in a state of rest nor of motion. We are still without information with regard to the whereabouts of mechanical force at that period and how we arrived at a condition of motion from one of rest without a push from the outside, that is without God. Before the time of Herr Duehring materialists were wont to speak of matter and motion. He reduces motion to mechanical force as its necessary original form and so renders incomprehensible the real connection between matter and motion which was also not evident to the earlier materialists. Yet the thing is easy enough. Matter has never existed without motion, neither can it. Motion in space, the mechanical motion of smaller particles to single worlds, the motion of molecules as in the case of heat, or as electric or magnetic currents, chemical analysis or synthesis, organic life, each single atom of the matter of the world--they all discover themselves in one or other of the forms of motion or in several of them together at any given moment. All quiescence, all rest, is only significant in relation to this or that given form of motion. A body for example may be upon the ground in mechanical quiescence, in mechanical rest. This does not prevent its participation in the movements of the earth and of the whole solar system, just as little does it prevent its smallest component parts from completing the movements conditioned by the temperature or its atoms from going through a chemical process. Matter without motion is just as unthinkable as motion without matter. Motion is just as uncreatable or indestructible as matter itself, the older philosophy of Descartes proclaimed precisely that the quantity of motion in the world has been fixed from the beginning. Motion cannot be generated therefore it can only be transferred. If motion is transferred from one body to another, one may as far as it is regarded as transferring itself, as active, consider it as the original cause of motion, but so far as it is transferred, as passive. This active motion we call force; the passive, expression of force. It is therefore just as clear as noon that force is just as great as its expression because the same motion fulfils itself in both. A motionless condition of matter is therefore one of the hollowest and most absurd notions, a mere delirium. In order to arrive at it one is obliged to consider the relative absence of motion in the case of a body lying on the ground, as absolute rest, and then to transfer this idea to the entire universe. This is made easier by the reduction of motion in general to mere mechanical force. By the limitation of motion to mere mechanical force we can conceive of a force as at rest, as confined, as momentarily ineffective. If for example in the transference of motion which transference is very frequently a somewhat complicated process in the carrying out of which various intermediate steps are necessary, one may stay the actual transference at a chosen point and stop the process, as for example if one loads a gun and delays the moment when the charge shall be set at liberty by the pull of the trigger, through the firing of powder. Therefore one may conceive of matter as being loaded with force in the unprogressive static period, and this Herr Duehring appears to mean by his unity of matter and force if indeed he means anything at all. This notion is absurd, since it pictures as absolute for the entire universe a condition which is by nature only relative and to which therefore only a portion of matter can be subjected at one and the same time. Let us look at it from this point of view and we do not escape the difficulty of explaining first how the universe came to be loaded and in the second place, whose finger drew the trigger. We may revolve all we please but under the guidance of Herr Duehring we always come back over and over again to the finger of God. From astronomy our realist philosopher passes on to mechanics and physics and complains that the mechanical theory of heat has brought us no further in the course of a generation than the point which Robert Mayer reached by his own efforts. Moreover the whole thing is very obscure. We must "always remember that with conditions of the movement of matter statical conditions are also given and that these last are not measured in mechanical work. If we have earlier typified nature as a great workwoman, and we still hold to the statement, we must now add that the static condition, the condition of rest, does not imply any mechanical labor. We are again without the bridge from the static to the dynamic and if latent heat, so called, is up to the present a stumbling block to the theory we can recognise a lack which may be denied in the cosmic process." This whole oracular utterance is again merely an outpouring of bad science which very clearly perceives that it has got itself into a place from which it cannot be saved by creating motion from a state of absolute freedom from motion, and is ashamed to call upon its only saviour, the Creator of heaven and earth. If in mechanics, heat included, there is no bridge to be found from statics to dynamics, from equipoise to motion, why should Herr Duehring be obliged to find a bridge from his condition of absence of motion to motion? Thus he would have the luck to escape from his dilemma. In ordinary mechanics the bridge from statics to dynamics is--the push from the outside. If a stone of the weight of a hundred grammes be lifted ten meters high and then flung free so that it should remain hanging in a self-contained condition and in a state of rest, you would have to appeal to a public of sucking infants to declare that the existing condition of that body represents no mechanical labor and that its removal from its earlier condition has no measure in mechanical work. Any passerby would tell Herr Duehring that the stone did not come on the string by its own efforts and the first good hand book in mechanics would inform him that if he let the stone fall again, the latter in its fall does just as much mechanical work as is necessary to lift it to the height of ten meters. The very simple fact that the stone is suspended represents mechanical force in itself, since if it remain long enough, the string breaks, as soon as it, as a result of its chemical constitution, is no longer strong enough to hold the stone. All mechanical phenomena, may, we must inform Herr Duehring, be reduced to just such simple fundamental forms, and the engineer is still unborn who cannot discover the bridge from statics to dynamics as long as he has sufficient initial force at his disposal. It is quite a hard nut and bitter pill for our metaphysician that motion should find its measure in its opposite rest. It is such a glaring contradiction, and every contradiction is an absurdity in the eyes of Herr Duehring. It is nevertheless true that the hanging stone by reason of its weight and its distance from the ground represents a means of mechanical movement sufficiently easily measured in different ways, as for example through gravity direct, through glancing on an incline or through the undulation of a wave--and it is just the same with a loaded gun. The expression of motion in terms of its opposite rest presents no difficulty at all to the dialectic philosophy. The whole contradiction in its eyes is merely relative, for absolute rest, complete equipose does not exist. The movement of the particles strives towards equipose, the movement of the mass in turn destroys the equipose, so that rest and equipose where they occur are the results of arrested motion, and it is evident that this motion is capable of being measured in respect of its results, of being expressed in itself and of being restored in some form or other external to itself. But Herr Duehring would never be satisfied with such a simple explanation of the matter. Like a good metaphysician he creates a yawning gulf between motion and equipose which does not really exist and then wonders if he can find no bridge across the self-created chasm. He might just as well bestride his metaphysical Rosinante and hunt the "Ding an Sich" of Kant since it is in the last analysis nothing else than this which stands behind the undiscoverable bridge. But what about the mechanical theory of heat and of latent heat which is a "stumbling block" in the path of the theory? If one convert a pound of ice at freezing point under normal atmospheric pressure into a pound of water of the same temperature by means of heat there vanishes a quantity of heat which could heat the same pound of water from 0° centigrade to 79° centigrade, or seventy-nine pounds of water one degree centigrade. If one heat this pound of water to boiling point, that is, to one hundred degrees centigrade and change it into steam of the heat of one hundred degrees centigrade there vanishes up to the time when the last of the water is changed into steam a seven fold greater quantity of heat, capable of raising the temperature of 537.2 pounds of water one degree. This dissipated heat is called latent. It is transformed, by cooling the steam, into water again, and the water into ice, so the same mass of heat which was formerly latent, is again set free, that is, as heat capable of being felt and measured. This setting free of heat by the condensation of steam and the freezing of water is the reason that steam if it is cooled off at 100° transforms itself little by little into water, and that a mass of water at freezing point is but slowly transformed into ice. These are the facts. The question is what becomes of the heat while it is latent? The mechanical theory of heat according to which the heat of a body at a certain temperature is dependent upon the greater or less vibration of the smallest physical parts (molecules) a vibration which can, under certain conditions, be transformed into some other form of motion, shows the whole thing completely, that the latent heat has performed work, has been expended in work. By the melting of the ice the close connection of the separate particles is broken asunder and changed into a loose relationship; by the conversion of water into steam at boiling point a condition is entered where the separate molecules exercise no noticeable influence upon each other, and under the influence of heat fly from one another in all directions. It is now evident that the separate molecules of a body in the gaseous state are endowed with much greater energy than in the fluid state, and in the fluid state than in the solid. Latent heat is therefore not dissipated, it is merely transformed and has taken on the form of molecular elasticity. As soon as conditions are at an end under which the molecules can exercise this relative freedom with regard to each other as soon namely as the temperature falls below one hundred degrees to zero, this elasticity becomes released and the molecules come together with the same force with which they formerly flew apart, but only to appear again as heat, as exactly the same quantity of heat as was latent before. This explanation is of course a hypothesis, as is the whole mechanical theory of heat, in so far as no one has yet seen a molecule, much less a molecule in motion. Like all recent theories, this hypothesis is full of flaws but it can at least offer an explanation which does not conflict with the uncreatability and indestructibility of motion and it is able to give an account of the whereabouts of the heat in the transformation. Latent heat is therefore by no means an obstacle in the way of the mechanical theory of heat. On the contrary this theory for the first time provides a rational explanation of the subject and an obstacle arises from the fact in particular that the physicists make use of the old and ineffective expression "latent heat" to signify the heat transformed into some other shape by molecular energy. The static conditions of the solid, liquid and gaseous states therefore represent mechanical work in so far as mechanical work is a measure of heat. Thus the solid crust of the earth, like the water of the ocean, represents in its present form a certain quantity of heat set free which implies the same quantity of mechanical force. By the passing of the vaporous state which was the original form of the earth into the fluid state and later into a condition, for the most part solid, a certain quantity of molecular energy was set free in space, the difficulty of which Herr Duehring whispers does not therefore exist. We are frequently brought to a stop in our cosmic observations by lack of knowledge, but nowhere by insuperable theoretical difficulties. The bridge from statics to dynamics is therefore the push from the outside caused by the cooling or heating occasioned by other bodies which influence certain objects in equipoise. The further we explore Herr Duehring's philosophy, the more impossible appear all his attempts to explain rotation from absence of rotation, or to discover the bridge by which that which is purely static, self-contained, can without disturbance come to be the dynamic, in motion. We should here be glad to get rid of the whole self-contained condition business. Herr Duehring, however, goes to chemistry and gives us three permanent natural laws established by the philosophy of realism as follows, 1. The constant amount of matter in the universe. 2. The simple chemical elements, and 3. The mechanical forces are unchangeable. Therefore the impossibility of creating or destroying matter, the simple forms of its existence as far as they exist, and motion, these old, well known facts, inadequately expressed, that is the only positive thing which Herr Duehring is in a position to offer us as a result of his real philosophy of the inorganic world. All these things we have long known. But what we have not known is that they are permanent laws and as such natural properties of the system of things. It is just the same thing over again as in the case of Kant. Herr Duehring takes some universally known expressions, pastes the Duehring label on them and calls them "fundamentally original results and views, system shaping thoughts, profound science." We have not long to hesitate on this account. Whatever deficiencies the most profound science and the best contrived social theories may have, for once Herr Duehring can say precisely "The quantity of gold in the universe must always remain the same and cannot be increased or diminished any more than matter in general. But unfortunately Herr Duehring does not tell us what we may buy with this gold." _The Organic World._ "From mechanics in rest and motion to the relation of sensation and thought there is a uniform progression of interruptions." With this assurance Herr Duehring spares himself from saying anything further about the origin of life, though one might reasonably expect that a thinker who has followed the development of the world from its self-contained condition, and who is so much at home with the other heavenly bodies would be here at home also. Besides this assurance is only half true in so far as it is not yet completed by means of the log line of Hegel, of which mention has been made already. In all its gradations the transition from one form of evolution to another remains a leap, a differentiating movement. So in the transition from the mechanics of the worlds to those of the smaller amounts of matter in each single world, just so also in that from the mechanics of the mass to that of the molecule--the motion which we examine particularly in physics, so-called, heat, light, electricity, magnetism, just in the same way also the transition from the physics of the molecule to the physics of the chemical atom is completed by a differentiating leap, and it is just the same with the transition from ordinary chemical action to the chemistry of albumen which we call life. Within the sphere of life the changes become less frequent and less remarkable. Therefore Hegel must again correct Herr Duehring. The idea of purpose furnishes Herr Duehring with his conception of the transition to the organic world. This is again borrowed from Hegel, who in his "logic"--teachings of the concept--mingled with teachings of teleology or of purpose, passes over from chemistry to life. Whichever way we look we discover Herr Duehring to be in possession of Hegelian lore which he gives forth without any embarrassment as his own fundamental philosophy. It would be too long a task to find out here just how far the application of the ideas of purpose is correctly stated and applied to the organic world. The application of the Hegelian "inner purpose" at all events is evident, that is, of a purpose which is imported into nature not through a consciously acting third party, like the wisdom of Providence, but which is inherent in matter itself, which among people who are not well versed in philosophy proceeds to the unthinking supposition of a conscious and all-wise agent; the same Herr Duehring who breaks out into unmeasured moral indignation at the least tendency towards spiritism on the part of other people, tells us that "sex sensations are certainly mainly directed towards the gratification which is bound up in their exercise." He tells us moreover that "poor Nature must always hold the objective world in order" and it has besides to perform acts which require more subtlety from Nature than we usually attribute to her. But nature knows not only why she does this and that. She has not only her housemaid's duties to perform, she has not only subtlety, which is a very pretty accomplishment, in subjective conscious thought, she has also a will, for "we must regard the additional natural desires which occur, such as feeding and propagation, not as directly but as indirectly willed." We now arrive at a consciously thinking and acting nature, and we therefore stand right at the bridge, not indeed between the static and dynamic but between pantheism and deism, or perhaps Herr Duehring is pleased to indulge himself in a little "natural-philosophical half-poetry." Impossible. All that the realistic philosophy has to say on organic nature is limited to a war against this natural philosophical half-poesy against "Charlatanism with its wanton superficialities and pseudo-scientific mysticism, against the poetic features of Darwinism." Darwin comes in for a share of blame chiefly because he transferred the Malthusian theory of population from political economy to natural science, because he is entangled by his notions of breeding, so that his work is a sort of unscientific half-poetic attack against design in creation, and that the whole of Darwinism, after what he has borrowed from Lamark has been deducted, is a piece of brutality aimed against humanity. Darwin had brought home with him as the result of his scientific journeys the conclusion that species of plants and animals are not fixed but are subject to variations. In order to pursue this idea he entered upon experiments in the breeding of plants and animals. Just for this reason England has become a classic land. The scientists of other countries, Germany, for example, have nothing to offer comparable with England in this respect. Moreover, most of the conclusions belong to the last century so that the establishment of the facts presented few difficulties. Darwin found that this artificial breeding produced differences in the species of plants and animals greater than occur among those which are universally recognised as belonging to different species. Therefore it was, up to a certain point, proved that species can change and furthermore there was established the possibility of a common ancestry for organisms which partake of the characteristics of different species. Darwin now examined the question whether there were not in nature causes--which without the conscious intention of the breeder--might in the course of time, by means of heredity, produce changes in the living animal analogous to those produced by scientific breeding. These causes he found in the disproportion between the enormous number of germs made by nature and the small number of beings which actually come to maturity. But as the germ struggles for its own development there is of necessity a consequent struggle for existence, which not only shows itself directly in the wear and tear of the body, but also as a struggle for space and light, as in the case of plants. And it is evident that in this fight those individuals have the best prospect of coming to maturity and reproducing themselves which possess certain qualities, perhaps insignificant, but advantageous in their fight for existence. There is a tendency towards the inheritance of these individual properties, and if they occur in several individuals of the same species towards development in the direction once taken, by virtue of the accumulated heredity, while the individuals which are not possessed of these qualities succumb more easily and little by little disappear in the struggle for existence. Thus a species naturally changes by the survival of the fittest. Against this theory of Darwin Herr Duehring urges that the origin of the idea of the struggle for existence is, as Darwin himself confessed, based on the views of the political economist and theorist, Malthus, on the population question, and he covers it with all the abuse appropriate to the clerical Malthusian views on keeping down the population. Now it happens that Darwin never said that the cause of the struggle for existence theory was to be sought from Malthus. He only said that his theories respecting the struggle for existence are the theories of Malthus applied to the entire vegetable and animal world. How great a blunder Darwin made when he so naively accepted the teachings of Malthus without examination may be seen from the fact that there is no need to employ the spectacles of Malthus in order to detect the struggle for existence in nature,--the contradiction between the innumerable mass of germs which nature produces in such prodigality and the slight number which can manage to reach maturity, a contradiction which resolves itself into an apparently grim fight for existence. And with regard to the law of wages the Malthusian doctrines are widely advertised and Ricardo based his contentions upon them,--so the struggle for existence in nature may find a standing even without the Malthusian interpretation. Besides the organisms of nature have their law of population, the establishment of which would decide the theories of the development of species. And who gave the decisive impetus in that direction? Nobody but Darwin. Herr Duehring is on his guard against entering upon the positive side of this question. Instead he must again find fault with the struggle for existence. There can be no argument about a struggle for existence between plants and the genial eaters of plants "in a sufficiently accurate sense the struggle for existence only occurs within the sphere of brutality, in so far as nourishment depends upon robbery and consumption." And after he has reduced the concept struggle for existence to these narrow limits he gives his wrath free play as regards the brutality of this conception which he himself has narrowed down to a brutal conception. But this moral wrath simply reacts on Herr Duehring himself, the inventor of this sort of struggle for existence. It is not Darwin therefore who seeks among the lower animals the "conditions of the operations of nature" (as a matter of fact Darwin would have included the whole of organic nature in the struggle), but one of Herr Duehring's bugaboos. The expression "struggle for existence" in particular excites Herr Duehring's lofty moral scorn. That this actually exists among plants every meadow, every cornfield and every wood can show him. We need not trouble about the name, whether one call it "struggle for existence" or "lack of the conditions of existence and want of mechanical realisation," but as to how this fact operates as regards the maintenance or transformation of species. With regard to this Herr Duehring persists in a characteristically stubborn silence. We cannot trouble ourselves any more about natural selection. But "Darwinism produces its changes and differentiations out of nothing." Darwin thoroughly understands that he is engaged with the causes which have produced changes in individuals and in the second place he is engaged with the mode in which such individual differentiations tend to mark off a race, a genus, or a species. Darwin moreover was less occupied in discovering these causes, which up to the present are either entirely unknown or on which there is only general information, than in discovering a rational form in which to establish their reality, to embrace their permanent significance. But Darwin ascribed too wide a reach to his discovery in this that he made it an exclusive means of variation in species and neglected the causes of individual differentiations from the general form. This mistake however is common to most people who make a step forwards. Next, if Darwin produces his changes in individual types out of nothing and thereby excludes the wisdom of the breeder, the breeder on his part must not only display his wisdom but he must produce out of nothing real changes in plant and animal forms. But who has given the impetus to the investigation as to whence these variations and differentiations proceed? It is again no one but Darwin. Lately the conception of natural selection has been broadened, by Haeckel, in particular, and the variation of species has been shown to be the result of actual change owing to adaptation and inheritance, whereby adaptation is considered as the source of variations and heredity as the conserving element in the process. Even this is not correct in Herr Duehring's eyes. "Peculiar adaptation to the circumstances of life as they are offered or withheld by nature supposes impulses and facts which answer to the conception. Hence adaptation is only apparent and actual causality does not elevate itself above the lowest steps of physical, chemical and plant physiology." It is again the name which provokes Herr Duehring. But how does he deal with the matter? The question is if such changes do take place in the species of organic beings or not. And again Herr Duehring has no reply. "If a plant in the course of its growth takes a direction by which it gets the most light the result is nothing but a combination of physical forces and chemical agents, and if we are to call it an adaptation, not metaphorically but strictly, confusion is certain to arise in the motion." This man is so exacting with other people because he is quite well acquainted with the intentions of nature and speaks of the subtlety of nature, even of its will. There is confusion, indeed, but with whom, with Haeckel or with Herr Duehring? And the confusion is not only spiritual but logical. We have seen that Herr Duehring put forth all his efforts to make the purpose idea in nature real. "The relation of means and end does not by any means show a conscious intention." But what is adaptation without conscious intention, without any intrusion of design of which he complains so loudly, but an unconscious teleology? If the color of tree frogs and leaf eating insects is as a rule green and that of beasts that inhabit the desert sandy-yellow, and that of polar animals white, they have certainly not come into possession of this coloring intentionally or through any kind of mental process, on the contrary the coloring can only be explained by means of the operation of physical substances and chemical agents. And yet it cannot be denied that by these colors these animals are particularly adapted to the conditions in which they are and it is certain that they are by their means rendered less visible to their enemies. Just of a similar nature are the organs by which certain plants seize and consume certain insects (the means being on their under side, suited to this purpose and adapted to this end). Now if Herr Duehring insists that the adaptation must be realised through the operation of thought, he only says that the purpose must be carried out through mental operation, must be conscious and intentional. Thus again, just as in the philosophy of realism we arrive at the Creator with a purpose, at God. Formerly this kind of declaration was called "deism" and Herr Duehring says that we had not much regard for it, but it now appears that the world has gone backwards in this respect also. From adaptation we come to heredity and here according to Herr Duehring Darwinism is quite out. "The whole organic world, Darwin explained, came from a single germ, is, so to speak, the brood of a single being. Independent similar products of nature according to Darwin do not exist without heredity and his retrogressive philosophy must come to a full stop when the end of the thread of ancestry is reached, or the original vegetable form." The statement that Darwin traced all existing organisms from one original germ is to put it politely a piece of pure imagination on the part of Herr Duehring. Darwin says distinctly on the last page of the Origin of Species, Sixth Edition, that he regards all living beings not as separate creations but as the descendants in a direct line from some fewer beings and Haeckel makes a distinct advance on this ascribes "an entirely distinct source for plants and another for the animal kingdom" and on and between both of them "a number of original stems each of which has developed independently from one single primary monistic form." (History of Creation page 397.) This original form of life Herr Duehring discovers solely to bring it into contempt by paralleling it with the first man according to Jewish tradition, Adam. Here, unfortunately for Herr Duehring, he does not know how this original Jew turns out, according to Smith's Assyrian discoveries to have been the original Semite, and that the entire Biblical story of the Creation and the Flood has been shown to have been taken from a legendary store common to the Jews, Babylonians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians. It is brought forward as a severe and irrefutable reproach to Darwin that he is at an end where the thread of descent fails him. Unfortunately the whole of our science deserves the same reproach. When the thread of descent fails it it is "at an end." It has not yet come to the point of creating organic beings without an ancestry, not even once has it been able to make simple protoplasm or other albuminous bodily forms out of the chemical elements. It can only say therefore with any certainty regarding the origin of life, that it must have come about by a chemical process. But perhaps the philosophy of realism can give us some assistance here since it is engaged with independent organic natural products, without any descent one from another. How can these come into being? By original creation? But up to the present not even the most audacious advocates of spontaneous generation have claimed to create in this way anything except bacteria, fungi, or other very elementary organisms, but not insects, birds, fish or mammals. If these homogeneous products of nature--it is understood for all this discussion that they are organic--are not related through descent, they or their ancestors, then "where the thread of descent breaks" they must have been placed in the world by a separate act of creation, and this again requires a creator, what we call "deism." Herr Duehring further explains that "it was a piece of superficiality on the part of Darwin to make the mere fact of the sex-composition of qualities the foundation for the existence of these qualities." Here we have again a piece of pure imagination on the part of our profound philosopher. On the contrary Darwin says that natural selection has to do only with the maintenance of variations and not with their origin. This new supposition however of things which Darwin did not say serves to assist us to this deep idea of Duehring. "If a principle of individual variation had been sought in the inner scheme of creation it would have been an entirely rational idea. For it is natural to unite the idea of universal generation with that of sex propagation, and to regard the so-called original creation from the higher point of view, not as absolutely antagonistic to reproduction but even as reproduction itself." And the man who could write this is not ashamed to reproach Hegel with writing jargon. Let us call a halt to the vexatious and contradictory babble with which Herr Duehring proclaims his wrath against the advance given to science by the theory of Darwin. Neither Darwin nor his followers among the natural scientists have any idea of belittling Lamark's tremendous services, in fact they are the very people who first restored his fame. But we are unable to ignore the fact that in the time of Lamark science was still far from supplied with competent material to enable it to answer the question of the origin of species other than in a prophetic or, as it were anticipatory, manner. In addition to the enormous amount of material in the realm of general, as well as of that of anatomical, botany and zoology, accumulated since that time, two entirely new sciences have since come into existence--the investigation of the development of plant and animal germs (embryology), and the investigation of the organic survivals in the earth's crust which still remain. There is a distinct similarity between the steps in the development of the organic germ to mature organism, and the successive steps by which plants and animals succeed each other in the history of the world. It is just this similarity which has placed the evolution theory on its most secure foundations. The theory of evolution is however still very young and it is beyond question that upon further investigation the rigid Darwinian ideas upon the origin of species will be considerably modified. But what has the realist philosophy of a positive nature to contribute with respect to the evolution of organic life? "The variation of species is an acceptable supposition, but there exists, in addition, the independent order of the products of nature belonging to the same species without any intervention of descent." According to this we are to conclude that products of unlike species, that is species which vary, are descended from one another, but those of similar species not. But even this is not altogether correct, for he ventures to say of the varying species, "The part played by descent is on the contrary a very secondary activity of nature." There is heredity, then, but it is only to be reckoned as a factor of the second class. Let us be glad that heredity of which Herr Duehring has said so much that is evil and mysterious is at least let in by the back door. It is just the same with natural selection, since after all his moral indignation with respect to the struggle for existence by means of which natural selection fulfils itself he suddenly exclaims, "The most important constituent is to be found in the conditions of life and cosmic conditions, while natural selection as set forth by Darwin may be considered as secondary." Natural selection still exists, even if a factor of the second class, like the struggle for existence, and the clerical malthusian surplus-population theory. That is all, for the rest Herr Duehring refers us to Lamark. Finally, he warns against misuse of the terms metamorphosis and evolution. Metamorphosis, he says, is a very obscure notion, and the concept of evolution is only admissible in so far as a law of evolution can be really proved. Instead of either of these expressions we should employ the term "composition" and then everything would be all right. It is the same old story over again, Herr Duehring is satisfied if we change the names. If we speak of the evolution of the chicken in the egg we give rise to confusion because we have only an incomplete knowledge of the law of evolution. But if we speak of its "composition" everything becomes clear. We must therefore say no longer "this child is growing nicely" but, "he composes himself splendidly," and we congratulate Herr Duehring upon the fact that he is not only a peer of the author of the Niebelungen Ring in his opinion of himself but in his own particular capacity is also a composer of the future. _Organic World (Conclusion)._ "One reflects upon our natural philosophical portion of positive knowledge in order to fix it relatively to all one's scientific hypotheses. Next in importance come all the actual acquisitions of mathematics as well as the leading principles of exact science in mechanics, physics and chemistry and particularly the scientific results in physiology, zoology, and antiquarian investigation." Herr Duehring speaks in this confident and decided fashion with respect to the mathematical and scientific scholarship of Herr Duehring. One cannot detect in its meager shape and in its scanty and audacious results the extent of positive knowledge which lies behind. Every time the oracle is consulted for a definite statement as regards physics or chemistry we get nothing as regards physics but the equation which expresses the mechanical equivalent of heat, and concerning chemistry only this that all bodies are divisible into elements and combinations of elements. He who can speak as Duehring does about "gravitating atoms" shows at once that he is quite at a loss to understand the difference between an atom and a molecule. Atoms, of course, exist, not with respect to gravitation or any other physical or mechanical form of motion, but only as concerns chemical action. And if the last chapter on organic nature is read, the empty, self-contradictory, assertive, oracular, stupid, circuitous absolute nothingness of the final result lead one to the conclusion that Herr Duehring talks about things of which he knows very little and this conclusion becomes a certainty when we come to his proposal in the course of his writing on organic life (biology) to use the term "composition" instead of evolution. He who can make such a suggestion as that gives evidence that he is not acquainted with the building up of organic bodies. All organic bodies, the very lowest excepted, develop from small cells by the increment of visible pieces of albumen with a central cell. The cell generally develops an outer skin and the contents are more or less fluid. The lowest cell-bodies develop from one cell; the enormous majority of organic beings are many-celled and among the lower forms these take on similar, and among the higher forms greater variations of, groupings and activities. In the human body for example are bones, muscles, nerves, sinews, ligaments, cartilage, skin, all either made up of cells or originating in them. But for all organic bodies, from the amoeba which is a simple and for the most part unprotected piece of albumen with a cell centre in the midst to man, and from the smallest one-celled desmidian to the highest developed plant, the mode is one and the same by which the cells propagate themselves, that is by division. The cell centre is first laced across its midst, the lacing which separates the centre into two knobs becomes stronger and stronger and at last they become separated and two cell centres are formed. The same occurrence takes place in the cell itself. Each of the cell centres becomes the middle point of a collection of cell stuff which by knitting ever closer becomes combined with the other, and finally both of them part and live on as separate cells. Through such repeated cell divisions the full sized animal gradually develops from the germ of the animal egg after fructification and the substitution of used up cells in the full grown animal is brought about similarly. To call such a process "composition" and to speak of the term "evolution" as a purely imaginary term belongs to one who does not know anything of the matter, hard as it is to imagine such ignorance at this date. We have still somewhat to say with respect to Herr Duehring's views of life in general. Elsewhere he sets forth the following statement with respect to life. "Even the inorganic world is a self-regulated system but one may undertake to speak of life in the proper sense first when the organs and the circulation of matter through special separate channels from a central point to another germ collection of a minor formation begin." If life begins where the separate organs begin then we must hold all Haeckel's protozoa (Protistenreich) and probably many others as dead; all organisms at least up to those composed of one cell and those included are not capable of life. If the means of circulation of matter through different channels is the distinguishing mark of life we must place outside of this definition all the upper classes of the colenterata entirely, with the exception of the medusae, and therefore all the polypi and other plant animals are also to be considered as being outside the class of living creatures. And if the circulation of matter through different canals from an inner point is the distinguishing characteristic of life we must reckon all animals as dead which either have no heart or several hearts. Besides these there belong also to this category all worms, starfish and ringed creatures (annuloids and annulous according to Huxley's definition) a portion of the shell fish, crabs, and finally a vertebrate animal, the lancelet (amphioxus) and all plants. When Herr Duehring therefore undertakes to distinguish life narrowly and strictly, he gives four mutually contradictory modes of distinguishing life, one of which condemns not only the whole of plant life but about half the animal kingdom to eternal death. No one can accuse him of having deceived us when he promised us peculiar results based on individual ideas. In another place he says "There is a simple fundamental type in nature belonging to all organisms from the lowest to the highest" and this type is to be met "in the subordinate movements of the most undeveloped plants." This is again an absolutely false statement. The simplest type in the whole of organic nature is the cell, and it lies universally at the foundation of the highest organisms. On the other hand there is a substance among the lowest organisms lower even than the cell, the protomoeba, a single piece of undifferentiated protoplasm, without any differentiation, a complete series of monads and the entire class of siphoneae. All of these are connected with the higher organisms only by virtue of the fact that protoplasm is its substantial foundation, and that they fulfill the functions of protoplasm, that is they live and die. Further Herr Duehring tells us "physiologically the concept of existence consists in this, that it embraces a single nerve apparatus. Sensation is therefore the characteristic of all animal organisms that is the capacity of conscious subjective recognition of circumstances. The sharp line of differentiation between plants and animals consists in the leap to sensation. This distinguishing line cannot any more be abolished by known forms of transition than it can be brought into existence by the logical necessity of externally distinguishable characteristics." And further "Plants are totally and eternally without sensation and are devoid of the faculty for it." In the first place Hegel says that "sensation is the specific differentiation, the distinguishing mark of the animal." Thus one of Hegel's erudite statements becomes an indubitable truth of the last instance merely by being copied into Herr Duehring's book. In the second place we now arrive for the first time at the forms of transition between animals and plants. That these intermediate forms exist, that there are organisms concerning which we are unable to say flatly whether they are plants or animals, that we are therefore unable to fix accurately the frontiers between plant and animal life, all these things make Herr Duehring logically anxious to fix a decisively distinguishing line, which in the next breath he declares cannot be thoroughly relied on. But there is no need for us to go to the doubtful region; intermediate between plants and animals are sensitive plants which at the least contact fold their leaves or close their petals. Are insect eating plants utterly without sensation? Even Herr Duehring cannot make such an assertion without indulging in "unscientific half-poetry." In the third place Herr Duehring is again giving free rein to his imagination when he says that sensation is psychologically existent, even when the nerve apparatus is exceedingly simple. This is found regularly among reptiles yet Herr Duehring is the first to say that they have no sensation because they have no nerves. Sensation is not necessarily bound up with nerves but it is bound up with some albuminous substance the true nature of which has not yet been discovered. In addition, the biological knowledge of Herr Duehring becomes exceedingly evident in that he is not ashamed to fling at Darwin the question do animals develop from plants? so that it is a question whether he is more ignorant with regard to plants or animals. Of life in general Herr Duehring can only tell us "The change in the form of matter which fulfills itself by plastic constructive arrangement remains a distinguishing characteristic of the individual life-process." That is all that we learn of life and with respect to the plastic creative arrangement we sink knee deep in the nonsense of Duehring's jargon. If we want to learn what life is we shall have to look at the problem a little more closely on our own account. That organic change in matter is the most universal and distinctive evidence of life has been declared by physiological chemists and chemical physiologists times without number during the last thirty years and their utterances are translated by Herr Duehring into his own clear and elegant language. But to define life as an organic change of matter is simply to define life as life, for organic change of matter, or change of matter with plastic creative arrangement is a statement which must itself be explained by life, and the explanation in its turn by the difference between organic and inorganic, that is between that which is alive and that which is not alive. So that with this explanation we do not get at the problem. Organic change, as such, is frequently found where life does not exist. There are whole series of processes in chemistry, which by the proper combination of the elements, produce again their own conditions, so that thereby a certain body is the creator of a process. Thus in the manufacture of sulphuric acid by the burning of sulphur, there is created in this process sulphuric dioxide SO_{2}, and if one add steam and nitric acid thereto, the sulphuric dioxide takes up the water and the oxygen and becomes H_{2} SO_{4}. Nitric acid gives off oxygen and becomes nitric oxide, this nitric oxide simultaneously takes up new oxygen from the atmosphere and is transformed into a higher oxide of nitrogen and from this acid sulphuric dioxide is again given off and made by the same process, so that, theoretically, an infinitely small amount of nitric acid should be effective to transform an unlimited quantity of sulphuric dioxide, oxygen and water into sulphuric acid. Change in matter regularly occurs through the passing of fluids through dead organic and inorganic membranes as in the artificial cells of Traube. It therefore appears that there is no progress by the way of organic change for the quality of organic change which was to explain life must itself be explained by life. We must therefore seek it elsewhere. Life is a mode of existence of protoplasm and consists essentially in the constant renewal of the chemical constituents of this substance. Protoplasm is here understood in the modern chemical sense and comprises under this name all substances analogous to the white of an egg, otherwise called protein substances. The name is not satisfactory, for the ordinary white of egg plays the least active role of all transformed substances, since it only serves as mere nourishment for the yolk, for the self-developing germ. As long however as so little is known of the chemical constituents of protoplasm the name is better than any other because more inclusive. Whenever we discover life we also find it bound up with protoplasm, and when we find a piece of protoplasm not in solution there we find also life, without exception. Doubtless the presence of other chemical constituents is necessary to a living body, to produce the various differentiations of these elements of life. They are not necessary to life in itself, hence they enter as food and become transformed into protoplasm. The lowest forms of life with which we are acquainted are nothing but simple pieces of protoplasm and yet they have all the appearance of living objects. But in what consist these signs of life which are common to all living objects? In this, that the protoplasm takes from its surroundings other matter suitable to itself and assimilates it while other former portions of the body become decomposed and are thrown off. Other things, not living bodies, decompose or make combinations, but cease thereby to be what they were. The rock worn by atmospheric action is no longer rock, the metal which becomes oxidised goes off in rust. But what causes the destruction of dead bodies is the essential of the existence of living protoplasm. From the very moment when the unbroken interchange in the constituents of protoplasm ceases, the continual interchange of receiving and throwing off, from that moment the protoplasmic substance itself ceases, becomes decomposed, that is, dies. Life, the mode of existence of protoplasmic substance, therefore consists in this, that at one and the same moment it is itself and something else, and this is not the result of a process to which it is compelled by external agency, since this may happen also with objects which are dead. On the contrary life, which is change of matter, is consequent upon nourishment and throwing off, is a self-fulfilling process inherent in its medium, protoplasm, without which it cannot exist. Hence, it follows that if chemistry should ever discover how to make protoplasm artificially, this protoplasm must show some signs of life, even if very insignificant. It is, of course, doubtful if chemistry will discover the proper food for this protoplasm at the same time as the protoplasm. Through the changes in matter produced by nourishment and throwing off, as actual functions of the protoplasm, and through its own plasticity, proceed all the other most simple factors of life, sensibility which consists in the interchange between the protoplasm and its food, contractibility which shows itself at a very low stage in the consumption of food, possibility of growth which is shown in the lowest stages of development by splitting, and internal motion without which neither the consumption nor assimilation of food is possible. Our definition of life is, of course, very incomplete since in order to include all the widely differing manifestations of life it must confine itself to the most universal and simple. Definitions are of little scientific worth. In order to determine what life is we must examine all forms of its manifestation from the lowest to the highest. For ordinary use such definitions are very convenient and in a certain sense indispensable, and they can do no harm as long as their inevitable deficiencies are not forgotten. (The remainder of this section simply teases Herr Duehring.) CHAPTER VI MORALS AND LAW _Eternal Truths._ We refrain from offering examples of the hodge podge of stupidity and sham solemnity with which Herr Duehring regales his readers for fifty full pages as fundamental knowledge on the elements of consciousness. We merely quote the following: "He who merely conceives of thought through the medium of speech has never understood what is signified by abstract and true thought." Hence, animals are the most abstract and true thinkers, for their thought is never obscured by the importunate interference of speech. With regard to Herr Duehring's thought in particular, it may be perceived that they are but little suited to speech and that the German language in particular is quite inadequate to express them. The fourth part of his book, however, possesses some redeeming features, for here and there it offers us some comprehensible notions on the subject of morals and law in spite of the tedious and involved rhetoric. Right at the beginning we are invited to take a journey to the other heavenly bodies. Thus, the elements of morality are to be found among superhuman beings among whom exist an understanding of things and a regular system of the harmonious conduct of life. Our share in such conclusions must then be small, but there always remains a beneficent and enlarging idea in picturing that even in other spheres individual and social life follows one purpose which cannot be escaped or evaded by any intelligent living creature. There is good reason for our altering the position of the statement that Herr Duehring's truth is good for all possible worlds from the close to the beginning of the chapter. When once the correctness of Herr Duehring's notions of morals and law have been established so as to apply to all world the beneficent notion may easily be extended to all time. Here again, however, we run across another final truth of last instance. The moral universe has "just as well as that of universal knowledge its general principles and simple elements." Moral principles are beyond history and the national distinctions of to-day ... the various truths from which in the course of development the fuller moral consciousness, and, so to speak, conscience itself is derived, can, as far as their origin is investigated, claim a similar acceptation and extent to that of mathematics and its applications. Real truths are immutable and it is folly to conceive of correct knowledge as liable to the attacks of time or of change in material conditions. "Hence the certainty of sound knowledge and the sufficiency of general acceptation forbid to doubt the absolute correctness of the fundamental principles of knowledge.... Continual doubt is in itself an evidence of weakness and is merely the expression of a barren condition of confusion, which although conscious of possessing nothing still seeks to maintain the appearance of holding on to something. Regarding morals, it denies universal principles with respect to the manifold variations in moral ideas owing to geographical and historical conditions, and thinks that with the admission of the unavoidable necessity of evil and wickedness there is no need for it to acknowledge the truth and efficiency of moral impulses. This mordant scepticism which is not directed against any false doctrine in particular, but against human capacity to recognise morality resolves itself finally into nothingness, it is no more than mere nihilism. It flatters itself that it can attain supremacy and give free rein to unprincipled pleasures by destroying moral ideas and creating chaos. It is greatly deceived, however, if merely pointing at the inevitable fate of the intellect with respect to error and truth is sufficient to show by analogy that natural liability to error does not exclude the arriving at a correct decision but rather tends to that end." Up to now we have not commented upon Herr Duehring's pompous opinions on final truths of the last instance, sovereignty of the will, absolute certainty of knowledge, and so forth, until the matter could first be brought to an issue. Up to this point the investigation has been useful to show how far the separate assertions of the philosophy of realism had "sovereign validity" and "unrestricted claim to truth" but we now come to the question if any and what product of human knowledge can have in particular "sovereign validity" and "unrestricted claims to truth." If I speak of human knowledge I do not do so as an affront to the dwellers in other worlds whom I have not the honor to know, but only because animals have knowledge also, not sovereign, however. The dog recognises a divinity in his master, who may, however, be a great fool. "Is human thought sovereign?" Before we can answer "yes" or "no" we must first examine what human thought is. Is it the thought of an individual man? No. It exists only as the individual thoughts of many millions of men, past, present and to come. If I now say, having comprehended the thought of all men in the future also under my concept, that it is able to understand the entire universe, if man only lasts long enough, and the organs of perception are unlimited, and the objects to be comprehended have no limits upon their comprehensibility, my statement is banal and barren. The most valuable result of such a conclusion would be to cause in us a tremendous distrust of present day knowledge. Because, to all appearance, we are just standing at the threshold of human history and the generations which will correct us will be much more numerous than those whose knowledge--often with little enough regard,--we ourselves correct. Herr Duehring himself explains the necessity of consciousness, knowledge and perception only becoming apparent in a collection of separate individuals. We can only apply the word sovereignty to the thought of these individuals in so far as we do not know of any force which can defeat thought. But we all know that there is no significance to nor power of interpretation of the sovereign power of the knowledge of the thought of each individual, and, according to our experience, there is much more that requires improvement and correction in it than not. In other words, the sovereignty of thought is realised in a number of highly unsovereign men capable of thinking, the knowledge which has unlimited pretensions to truth is realised in a number of relative blunders; neither the one nor the other can be fully realised except through an endless eternity of human existence. We have here again the same contradiction as above between the necessary, as an absolute conceived characteristic of human thought, and its reality in the very limited thinking single individual, a contradiction which can only be solved in the endless progression of the human race, that is endless as far as we are concerned. In this sense human thought is just as sovereign as not--sovereign, and its possibility of knowledge just as unlimited as limited. It is sovereign and unlimited as regards its nature, its significance, its possibilities, its historical end, it is not sovereign and limited with respect to individual expression and its actuality at any particular time. It is just the same with eternal truths. If mankind only operated with eternal truths and with thought which possessed a sovereign significance and unlimited claims to truth, mankind would have arrived at a point where the eternity of thought becomes realised in actuality and possibility. Thus the famous miracle of the enumerated innumerable would be realised. But what about those truths which are so well established that to doubt them is to be, as it were, crazy? That twice two is four, that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, that Paris is in France, that a man will die of hunger if he does not receive food, etc.? Do we not perceive then that there are eternal truths, final truths of last instance? Quite so. We can divide the entire field of knowledge in the old-fashioned way into three great divisions. The first includes all the sciences which are concerned with inanimate nature and which can be treated mathematically, more or less--mathematics, astronomy, mechanics, physics and chemistry. If one like to use big words to express simple things, it may be said that certain results of these sciences are eternal truths, final truths of last instance, whence they are called the exact sciences. But all the results are by no means of this character. With the introduction of variable quantities and the extension of the variability to the infinitely small and the infinitely large, mathematics, otherwise erect, meets with its fall, it has eaten of the apple of knowledge and there has been opened up to it the path of limitless progress as well as that of error. The virgin condition of absolute purity, the undisturbable certainty of all mathematics has vanished forever, a period of controversy has intervened, and we have now arrived at the state of affairs in which most people carry on the operations of multiplication and division not because they really understand what they are engaged in, but from mere belief because the operation has so far always given correct results. Astronomy and mechanics, physics and chemistry are in a still more confused state, and hypotheses crowd one another thick as a swarm of bees. It cannot be otherwise. In physics we investigate the movements of molecules, in chemistry the development of molecules from atoms, and if the theory of light waves should not be correct we have no absolute knowledge that we even see these interesting things. The lapse of time produces a very thin crop of final truths of last instance. In geology we are in a still more embarrassing situation for we are here involved in the study of preceding epochs in which, as a matter of fact, neither we ourselves nor any other human being ever existed. Here there is much labor spent in the harvesting of truths of last instance, and they are a scanty crop withal. The second division of knowledge is occupied in the investigation of living organisms. In this field the changes and causalities are so complex that not only does the solution of each question bring about the rise of an unlimited number of new questions, but the solution of each of these separate new questions depends upon years, frequently centuries, of investigation, and can then be only partially completed. So that the need of systematic arrangement of the various interrelations continually surrounds the final truths of the last instance with a prolific and spreading growth of hypotheses. Look at the long succession of progressive steps from Galen to Malpighi necessary to establish correctly so simple a thing as the circulation of the blood of mammals, yet how little we know of the origin of blood corpuscles and how many mistakes we make in, for example, rationally connecting the symptoms and cause of a disease. Besides there are frequently discoveries like those of the cell which compel us to entirely revise all hitherto firmly established truth of the last instance in biology, and to lay numbers of such truths aside for good and all. He who would therefore in this science undertake the proclamation of absolute and immutable truths must be content with such platitudes as the following: "All men must die; all female mammals have mammary glands, etc." He will not even be able to say that the greater animals digest their food by means of the stomach and bowels and not with the head because the centralised system of nerves in the head is not adapted to digestion. But things are worse with regard to final truths of last instance in the third group of sciences--the historical. These are concerned with the conditions of human life, social conditions, forms of law and the state with their idealistic superstructure of philosophy, religion, art, etc., in their historic succession and in their present day manifestations. In organic nature we have at least to do with a succession of regular phenomena which regularly repeat themselves as far as our immediate observation goes, within very wide limits. Organic species have remained on the whole unaltered since the time of Aristotle. In social history, on the other hand, repetitions of conditions are the exception, not the rule, directly we leave behind the prehistoric conditions of humanity, the stone-age, so-called. Where such repetitions do occur, moreover, they never recur under precisely similar conditions, as for example the occurrence of early tribal communism among all peoples anterior to civilisation and the form of its break up. As regards human history, then, as far as science is concerned, we are at a greater disadvantage than in biology. Furthermore, when the intimate relations existing between a social and political phenomenon come to be recognised it is not, as a rule, perceived until the conditions are actually on the way to decay. Knowledge is therefore entirely relative, since it is limited to a given people and a given epoch, and their nature under transitory social and political forms, when it examines relations and forms conclusions. He who therefore is after final truths of last instance, pure and immutable, will only manage to catch flat phrases and the most arrant commonplaces, like these--man cannot, generally speaking, live without working; up to the present men have for the most part been divided into masters and servants; Napoleon died on May 5th, 1821, and things of that sort. It is worth noting that in this department of knowledge pretended final truths of last instance are met with most frequently. Only the person who wishes to show that there are eternal truth, eternal morality, and eternal justice in human history, and that these are similar in scope and application to those of mathematics, will proclaim that twice two is four and that birds have beaks and the like to be eternal truths. We can also certainly rely upon the same friend of humanity taking the opportunity to explain that all former inventors of eternal truths have been more or less asses or charlatans, that they have been circumscribed by error and have made mistakes. The fact of their error, however, is natural and proves the existence of the truth, and that it can be reached, and the newly arisen prophet has a ready-to-hand stock of final truths of last instance, eternal law and eternal justice. This has happened hundreds, nay, thousands of times, so that it is a wonder that men are still sufficiently credulous to believe it not only of others, but even of themselves. Here we find a prophet clad in the armour of righteousness who proclaims in the old-fashioned way that whoever else may deny there is still one left to declare final truths of last instance. Denial, nay, doubt even, is a weakness, barren confusion, mole-like scepticism, worse than blank nihilism, confusion worse confounded and other little amiabilities of this sort. As with all prophets, there is no scientific investigation, but merely off-hand condemnation. We might have made mention of the sciences which investigate the laws of human thought, logic and dialectics. Here we are, however, no better off as regards eternal truths. Herr Duehring explains that the dialectic proper is pure nonsense, and the many books which have been and are still being written on logic prove clearly that final truths of last instance are more sparsely distributed than many believe. Moreover, we are not at all alarmed because the step of science upon which we to-day stand is not a bit more final than any of the preceding steps. Already it includes an immense amount of material for investigation and offers a great chance for specialisation and study to anyone who desires to become expert in any particular branch. Whoever expects to find final and immutable truths in observations which in the very nature of things must remain relative for successive generations, and can only be completed piecemeal, as in cosmogony, geology and human history, which must always be incomplete owing to the complexity of the historical material, shows perverse ignorance even where he does not, as in the present case, set up claims of personal infallibility. Truth and error, like all such mutually antagonistic concepts, have only an absolute reality under very limited conditions, as we have seen, and as even Herr Duehring should know by a slight acquaintance with the first elements of dialectics, which show the insufficiency of all polar antagonisms. As soon as we bring the antagonism of truth and error out of this limited field it becomes relative and is not serviceable for new scientific statements. If we should seek to establish its reality beyond those limits we are at once confronted by a dilemma, both poles of the antagonism come into conflict with their opposite; truth becomes error and error becomes truth. Let us take, for example, the well-known Boyle's law, according to which, the temperature remaining the same, the volume of the gas varies as the pressure to which it is subjected. Regnault discovered that this law does not apply in certain cases. If he had been a realist-philosopher he would have been obliged to say, "Boyle's law is mutable, therefore it does not possess absolute truth, therefore it is untrue, therefore it is false." He would thus have made a greater error than that which was latent in Boyle's law, his little particle of truth would have been drowned in a flood of error; he would in this way have elaborated his correct result into an error compared with which Boyle's law with its particle of error fastened to it would have appeared as the truth. Regnault, scientist as he was, did not trouble himself with such childish performances. He investigated further and found that Boyle's law is only approximately correct, having no validity in the case of gases which can be made liquid by pressure when the pressure approaches the point where liquefaction sets in. Boyle's law therefore is shown only to be true within specific bounds. But is it absolute, a final truth of last instance within specific bounds? No physicist would say so. He would say that it is correct for certain gases and within certain limits of pressure and temperature, and even then within these somewhat narrow limits he would not exclude the possibility of a still narrower limitation or change in application as the result of further investigation. This is how final truths of last instance stand in physics, for example. Really scientific works as a rule avoid such dogmatic expressions as truth and error, but they are constantly cropping up in works like the Philosophy of Reality, where mere loose talking vaunts itself the supreme result of sovereign thought. But a naïve reader may say, "Where has Herr Duehring expressly stated that the content of his philosophy of reality is final truth of the last instance?" Well, for example, in his dithyramb on his system which we quoted above, and again where he says "Moral truths as far as they are known are as sound as those of mathematics." Does not Herr Duehring explain that by reason of his powers of criticism and searching investigations, the fundamental philosophy has been brought to light and that he has thus bestowed upon us final truths of last instance? But if Herr Duehring does not set up such a claim either on his own behalf or that of his time, if he says that some time in the misty future final truths of last instance will be established, and that therefore his own statements are merely accidental and confused, a kind of "mole-like scepticism" and "barren confusion," what is all the fuss about, and what useful purpose is served by Herr Duehring? If we gain no ground in the matter of truth and error we gain less in respect of good and evil. Here we have an antagonism of ethical significance, and ethics is a department of human history in which final truths are but slight and few. From people to people, from age to age, there have been such changes in the ideas of good and evil that these concepts are contradictory in different periods and among different peoples. But some one may remark, "Good is still not evil and evil is not good; if good and evil are confused all morality is abolished, and each may do what he will." When the rhetoric is stripped away this is the opinion of Herr Duehring. But the matter is not to be disposed of so easily. If things were as easy as that there would be no dispute about good and evil. Everybody would know what was good and what was evil. How is it to-day, however? What system of ethics is preached to us to-day? There is first the Christian-feudal, a survival of the early days of faith, which is as a matter of fact subdivided into Catholic and Protestant, of which there are still further subdivisions, from the Jesuit-Catholic and orthodox Protestant to loosely drawn ethical systems. There figure also the modern or bourgeois, and still further the proletarian future system of morality, so that the progressive European countries alone present three contemporaneous and coexistent actual theories of ethics. Which is the true one? No single one of them, regarded as a finality, but that system assuredly possesses the most elements of truth which promises the longest duration, which existent in the present is also involved in the revolution of the future, the proletarian. But if we now see that the three classes of modern society, the feudal aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the proletarian, have their distinctive ethical systems, we can only conclude therefrom that mankind consciously or unconsciously shapes its moral views in accordance with the material facts upon which in the last instance the class existence is based--upon the economic conditions under which production and exchange are carried on. But in the three above mentioned systems of ethics there is much which is common to all three of them, and might not this at least constitute a portion of an eternally stable system of ethics? These ethical theories pass through three distinct steps in their historical development, they have therefore a common historical basis and hence necessarily much in common. Further, for approximately similar economic stages there must, necessarily be a coincidence of similar stages of economic development, and ethical theories must of necessity coincide with a greater or less degree of closeness. From the very moment when private property in movables developed there had to be ethical sanctions of general effect in all communities in which private property prevailed, thus: Thou shalt not steal. Is this commandment, then, an eternal commandment? By no means. In a society in which the motive for theft did not exist stealing would only be the practice of the weak-minded, and the preacher of morals who proclaimed "Thou shalt not steal" as an eternal commandment would only be laughed at for his pains. We here call attention to the attempt to force a sort of moral dogmatism upon us as eternal, final, immutable moral law, upon the pretext that the moral law is possessed of fixed principles which transcend history and the variations of individual peoples. We state, on the contrary, that up to the present time all ethical theory is in the last instance a testimony to the existence of certain economic conditions prevailing in any community at any particular time. And in proportion as society developed class-antagonisms, morality became a class morality and either justified the interests and domination of the ruling class, or as soon as a subject class became strong enough justified revolt against the domination of the ruling class and the interests of the subject class. That, by this means, there is an advance made in morals as a whole, just as there is in all other branches of human knowledge, there can be no doubt. But we have not yet advanced beyond class morals. Real human morality superior to class morality and its traditions will not be possible until a stage in human history has been reached in which class antagonisms have not only been overcome but have been forgotten as regards the conduct of life. Now the colossal egotism of Herr Duehring may be understood when it is seen that, on the eve of a revolution which will bring about a state of society devoid of classes, he claims from the midst of an old and class divided society to proclaim an eternal system of morals independent of time and material change. He himself declares what up to the present has been hid from the rest of us that he understands the structure of this future society at least as regards its salient features. In conclusion he makes a revelation which is essentially original but none the less "fundamental respecting the origin of evil." We have the fact that the type of the cat with its inherent treachery is pictured as the representative animal type, and this also displays a form of character to be found also in man. There is no mystery then about evil if one can detect a mysticism in the cat or any other beast of prey. Evil is--the cat. Goethe was evidently wrong when he introduced Mephistopheles as a black dog instead of a cat similarly colored. This is ethics suited not only to all worlds but to cats also. _Equality._ By dint of experience we have come to learn Herr Duehring's "method." It consists in separating each department of knowledge into what are assumed to be its most simple elements, then of making so called self evident axioms with regard to these simple elements, and thereupon operating with the results obtained in this way. Thus a sociological question is to be "decided on simple axiomatic principles just as if it were a matter of elementary mathematics." Thus the application of the mathematical method to history, ethics and law gives mathematical certainty to the final results which appear as pure and immutable truths. This is only another form of the old ideological, _a priori_ method so called, which learned the properties of an object not from the object itself but derived them by proof from the concept of the object. First you derive a concept of the object from the actual object, then you turn the spit and measure the object in terms of its derivative the concept. The concept is not shaped after the pattern of the object but the object after the pattern of the concept. In Herr Duehring's method, the simplest elements, the last abstractions to which he can attain do duty for the concept which is unchangeable, the simplest elements are under the best conditions purely imaginary in their nature. The philosophy of realism hence appears to be mere ideology, and has no derivation from real life but is absolutely dependent upon the imagination. When such an ideologist proceeds to construct a system of morals and law from his concept of the so-called simplest elements of society instead of from the real social conditions of the men about him, where does he get his material for construction? The material evidently consists of two kinds--firstly, the slim vestiges of reality which are still present in every fundamental abstraction, and secondly in the actual content which our ideologist evolves from his own consciousness. And what does he discover in his consciousness? For the most part moral and ethical philosophic ideas and these constitute an expression corresponding more or less closely, whether positive or negative, harmonious or hostile, with the social and political conditions which environ him. Besides he probably has notions derived from literature pertaining to these conditions, and finally he has possibly personal idiosyncrasies. Let our ideologist dodge all that he can, the historical reality which he has thrown out of doors comes in again at the window and although he may fancy that he is employed in the manufacture of moral and legal doctrines good for all worlds and all ages he is actually making a distorted, counterfeit of the conservation or revolutionary tendencies of his time, because torn from its real place, as things seen in a concave mirror are upside down. Herr Duehring therefore resolves society into its simplest elements and discovers accordingly that the most elementary society consists of at least two human beings. He thereupon operates with these two human beings to produce his axiom. Then he delivers himself of the fundamental maxim of morals, "Two human wills, as such, are entirely identical, and the one can in consequence make no positive demands upon the other." Here the "foundation of moral law" is apparent, so "in order to develop the principal concepts of justice we require two human beings under absolutely simple and elementary conditions." That two human wills or two human beings are just alike is not only no axiom, it is a glaring exaggeration. In the first place two human beings may differ as regards sex, and this simple fact shows us, if we look at childhood for a moment, that the elements of society are not two men, but a little man and a little woman, which constitute a family, the simplest and earliest form of association for productive purposes. But Herr Duehring cannot by any means agree to this. On the one hand the two constituents of society might very possibly be made alike and on the other Herr Duehring would not be able to construct the moral and legal equality of man and woman from the original family. Therefore one of two things must take place. Either the molecules of Herr Duehring's society from the multiplication of which all society is built up is merely _a priori_ and destined to fail, since two men cannot produce a child, or we must consider them as two heads of families. In this case the entire foundation is made its very opposite. Instead of the equality of man we have at the most the equality of two heads of families, and since women are not comprehended we have the consequent subjection of women. We are sorry to warn the reader that these two notorious men cannot be got rid of, for a long time. They take up in the realm of social conditions the role heretofore played by the dwellers in the other world with whom it is to be hoped we have now finished. Should any question of political economy, of politics or any other such matter require solution, out come the two men and make the thing axiomatic forthwith. This is a remarkable, clever, and system-shaping discovery of our system-shaping philosopher. But to give the truth its due we are regretfully bound to say that he did not discover the two men. They are common to the whole of the eighteenth century. They appear in Rousseau's Treatise on Equality, 1754, where, by the way, they serve to prove axiomatically the direct opposite of Herr Duehring's contentions. They play an important part in political economy from Adam Smith to Ricardo, but here they are so far unequal that they follow different trades, principally hunting and fishing, and they exchange their mutual products. They serve through the entire eighteenth century principally as mere illustrative examples, and the originality of Herr Duehring consists in the fact that he elevates this method of illustration to a fundamental method for all social science and to a measure of all historical instruction. There is no easier way to arrive at "a really scientific philosophy of things and men." In order to create the fundamental axiom the two men and their wills are mutually equal and neither has any right to lord it over the other. We cannot find two suitable men. They must be two men who are so free from all national, economic, political and religious conditions, from sex and personal peculiarities that nothing remains of either of them but the mere concept "man" and then they are entirely equal. They are therefore two fully-equipped ghosts conjured up by that very Herr Duehring who particularly ridicules and denounces "spiritistic" movements. These two phantoms must of course do all that their wizard wants of them and so their united productions are a matter of complete indifference to the rest of the world. Now let us follow Herr Duehring's axiomatic utterances a little further. These two men cannot make positive demands upon each other. The one who does so and enforces his demand thereupon performs an unjust act, and with this idea as a foundation Herr Duehring explains the injustice, the tyranny, the servitude, in short all the evil happenings of history up to the present time. Now Rousseau has in the work above mentioned proved the contrary just as axiomatically, by means of two men. A. cannot forcibly enslave B. except by putting B. in a place where he cannot do without A. This is far too materialistic an idea for Herr Duehring. He has accordingly put the same matter somewhat differently. Two shipwrecked men being by themselves on an island form a society. Their wills are, theoretically speaking, entirely equal and this is acknowledged by both. But in reality the inequality is tremendous. A. is resolute and energetic, B. inert, irresolute and slack. A. is sharp, B. is stupid. How long will it be before A. imposes his will upon B., first by taking the upper hand, and keeping it habitually, under the pretence that B.'s submission is voluntary. Whether the form of voluntariness continues or force is resorted to slavery still is slavery. Voluntary entering into a state of slavery lasted all through the Middle Ages in Germany up to the Thirty Years War. When serfdom was abolished in Prussia after the defeats of 1806 and 1807 and with it the duty of the nobility to take care of their subjects in need, sickness and old age the peasants thereupon petitioned to be allowed to remain in slavery--for who would care for them when they were in trouble? The concept of the two men is just as applicable to inequality and slavery as it is to equality and mutual aid, and since, under the penalty of extinction, men must assume the headship of a family, hereditary slavery may be foreseen in it. Let us put this view of the case on one side for a moment. We assume that we are convinced by Herr Duehring's maxim and that we are zealous for the full equalisation of the two wills, for the "universal sovereignty of man" for the "sovereignty of the individual," magnificent expressions, in comparison with which Stirner's "individual" with his private property is a mere bungler though he might claim his modest part therein. Then we are all free and independent. All? No, not even now. There are still "occasional dependent relations" but these are to be explained "on grounds which must be sought not in the action of two wills as such but in a third consideration, in the case of children, for example, in the inadequateness of their self-assertion." Indeed, the foundations of independence are not to be sought in the realisation of the two wills as such. Naturally not, since the realisation of one of the wills is thus interfered with. But they must be sought in a third direction. And what is the third direction? The actual fixing of a subjected will as an inadequate one. So far has our realistic philosopher departed from reality that will, the real content, the characteristic determination of this will serves him as a third ground, for abstract and indefinite speech. However this may be we must agree that equality has its exceptions. It does not apply to a will which is infected with inadequateness of self expression. Further, "Where the animal and the human are intermingled in one person can one in the name of a second fully developed human being demand the same actions as in the case of a single human being ... our supposition is here of two morally unequal persons of which one has a share of purely animal characteristics in a certain sense the typical fundamental conception which characterises the differences in and between groups of men." Now the reader may see by these modest excuses in which Herr Duehring turns and winds like a Jesuit priest to establish a casuistical position, how far the human human can prevail over the bestial human, how far he can employ deceit, warlike, keen terrorising means of deceit against the latter without overstepping immutable ethical bounds. Therefore, if two persons are "morally unequal" there is an end of equality. It was therefore not worth while to conjure up two fully equal men, since there are no two individuals who are morally equal. But inequality consists in this that one is a human being and the other has some part of the animal in his composition. It is evident that since man is descended from the animal creation he is not free from animality. So that as regards man degrees of animality can only be differentiated to a greater or less degree. A division of men into two sharply differentiated groups, into humans and human beasts, into good and bad, into sheep and goats, even Christianity, let alone the realist philosophy, is aware, implies a judge who makes the distinction. But who shall be judge as regards the realist philosophy? We must follow the practice of Christians according to which the pious little sheep undertake to act as judges of the universe against their unworthy neighbors the goats, with results which are too well known. The sect of the realist philosophers supposing it ever comes into existence will certainly not give up anything quietly. This is indeed a matter of small concern to us but we are interested in the confession that as a conclusion of the moral inequality between men equality no longer exists. Again "If the one acted in accordance with truth and science but the other in accordance with a superstition or prejudice a mutual disagreement would generally occur. At a certain stage of incapacity barbarism or an evil tendency of character must in all circumstances produce an antagonism. Force is the last resort not alone with children and incapables. The peculiar characteristics of whole classes of men, whether in a state of nature or civilised, may render necessary the subjection of their inimical will, due to their own impotency, in order to bring them into harmony with social arrangements. But such a man has challenged his own equality by the perversity of his inimical and hurtful actions, and if he suffers at the hands of a superior force he only reaps the recoil of his own actions." Thus not only moral but spiritual inequality is sufficiently potent to do away with the "full equality" of two wills and to furnish an ethical rule by which all the shameful acts of civilised plundering states against backward peoples down to the atrocities of the Russians in Turkestan may be justified. When General Kaufmann, in the summer of 1873, fell upon the Tartar tribes of the Jomuden, burnt their tents, mowed down their wives and families, as the command ran, he explained that the destruction was due to the perversity, the inimical minds of the people of the Jomuden, and was employed for the purpose of bringing them back to the social order, and the means used by him had been the most efficient. But he who wills the end wills also the means. But he was not so cruel as to insult the Jomuden people in addition and to say that he massacred them in the name of equality, that he considered their wills equal to his own. And again in this conflict the select, those who pose as champions of truth and science, the realist philosophers in the last instance must be able to distinguish superstition, prejudice, barbarism, evil tendencies of character, and when force and subjection are necessary to bring about equality. So that equality now means equalisation by means of force, and the will of one recognises the will of the other as equal by overthrowing it. The phrase that an external will in its bringing about equalisation by force is only to be regarded as producing equality is nothing but a distortion of the Hegelian theory that punishment is a right of the criminal. "That punishment is to be regarded as implying a right to it in accordance with which the criminal is respected as a rational being." (Rechtsphil, 100.) We may pause here. It would be superfluous to follow Herr Duehring any further in the piecemeal destruction of his axiomatically established equality, universal human sovereignty, etc., to observe how he brings society into existence with two men and produces yet a third in order to establish the state, because to put the matter briefly, no majority can be had without the third, and without him, that is, without the domination of the majority over the minority, no state can exist. There is no need either for us to observe how he launches his future social state on the more peaceful waters of construction, where we may have the honor some fine morning of beholding it. We have seen so far that the complete equality of two wills only exists as long as they do not will anything. That as soon as they cease to become human wills as such and to be converted into real individual wills, into wills of real persons, that is, equality ceases; that childhood, idiocy, animality so called, superstition, prejudice, supposed lack of power on the one hand and supposed humanity and insight into truth and science on the other hand, that therefore every difference in the quality of the two wills and in the degree of intelligence accompanying it justifies an inequality which may go as far as subjection. Why should we seek further since Herr Duehring has brought his own edifice of equality which he so laboriously constructed tumbling to the ground? But if we are now prepared to meet Herr Duehring's silly and incompetent consideration of equality of rights we are not yet ready to take issue with the idea itself which through the influence of Rousseau has played a theatrical part, and since the days of the great Revolution a practical and political part, and now plays no insignificant role in the agitation carried on by the socialist movement of all countries. The establishment of its scientific soundness has a value for the proletarian agitation. The idea that all men have something in common as men and that they are equal with respect to that common quality is naturally older than history. But the modern doctrine of equality is something quite different than that. This derives from the property of humanity, common to man, the equality of man, as man, or at least of all citizens of a given state or of all members of a given society. Until the conclusion of equality of rights in the state and society was deduced from the original notion of relative equality, and until this conclusion was to be stated as something natural and self evident, many thousands of years had to pass and indeed have passed. In the oldest and most elementary communities it may be said that equality of rights among the members existed in the highest degree, women, slaves, and foreigners, however, being excluded. Among the Greeks and Romans inequality existed to a greater degree. Greeks and barbarians, freemen and slaves, citizens and subjects, Roman citizens and Roman subjects (to employ a comprehensive expression) that these should have any claim to equality of political rights would have been regarded by the ancients necessarily as madness. Under the Roman Empire there was a complete elimination of all these distinctions with the exception of those of freemen and slaves. There arose therefore as far as the freemen were concerned that equality of private individuals upon which Roman law was founded and developed as the most perfect system of jurisprudence based on private property with which we are acquainted. But while the contradiction of freemen and slaves existed there could be no statement based upon the universal equality of man as such, as was recently shown in the slave states of the Northern American Union. Christianity recognised one equality on the part of all men, that of an equal taint of original sin, which entirely corresponded with its character as a religion of slaves and the oppressed. In the next place it recognised completely the equality of the elect but it only declared this at the beginning of its teaching. The traces of common property in possessions which may be found occasionally in the earliest days of the religion was based rather upon the mutual assistance which persecuted people hold out to each other, than upon any real concepts of human equality. Very soon the establishment of the antithesis between the priesthood and the laity put an end to even this expression of Christian equality. The inundation of Western Europe by the Germans abolished for centuries all concepts of equality by the creation of a universal, social and political gradation of rank of a much more complicated nature than had existed up to that time. Contemporaneously with this Western and Middle Europe entered upon a historical development, shaped for the first time a compact civilisation, and a system which was on the one hand dynamic and on the other conservative, the leading national states. Thereupon a soil was prepared for the declaration of the equality of human rights so recently made. The feudal middle ages moreover developed the class in its womb destined to be the apostle of the modern agitation for equality, the bourgeois class. In the beginning even under the feudal system the bourgeois class had developed the prevalent hand-industry and the exchange of products even within feudal society to a high degree considering the circumstances, until with the close of the fifteenth century the great discoveries of lands beyond the seas opened before it a new and individual course. The trade beyond Europe which up to that time had been carried on between the Italians and the Levant was now extended to America and the Indies and soon exceeded in amount the reciprocal trade of the European countries as well as the internal commerce of any particular land. American gold and silver flooded Europe and like a decomposing element penetrated all the fissures, crevices and pores of feudal society. The system of hand-labor was no longer sufficient for the growing demand, it was replaced by manufacture in the leading industries of the most highly developed peoples. A corresponding change in the political structure followed this powerful revolution in the economic conditions of society but by no means immediately. The organisation of the State remained feudal in form while society became more and more bourgeois. Trade, particularly international, and to a greater degree world-commerce demanded for its development the free and unrestricted possessors of commodities, who have equality of right to exchange commodities at least in one and the same place. The transition from hand labor to manufacture presupposes the existence of a number of free laborers, free on the one hand from the fetters of the gild and on the other free to employ their labor force in their own behalf, who could make contracts for the hire of their labor force to the manufacturers and therefore face him as if endowed with equal rights as contracting parties. At last then there arose equality of rights and actual equality of all human labor, for labor force finds its unconscious but strongest expression in the law of value of modern bourgeois economy according to which the value of a commodity finds its measure in the socially necessary labor incorporated in it. But where the economic circumstances render freedom and equality of rights necessary, the political code, gild restrictions and peculiar privileges oppose them at every step. Local provisions of a legal character, differential taxation, exceptional laws of every description, interfere not only with foreigners or colonials but frequently enough also with whole categories of citizens in the nation itself. Gild privileges in particular constituted a continual impediment to the development of manufacture. The course was nowhere open and the chances of the bourgeois victory were by no means equal, but to make the course open was the first and ever more pressing necessity. As soon as the demand for the abolition of feudalism and for the equality of rights was set on the order of the day it had necessarily to take an ever widening scope. As soon as the claim was made in behalf of commerce and industry it had also to be made in behalf of the peasants who, being in every stage of slavery from serfdom labored for the most part without any return for the feudal lords and were obliged in addition to perform innumerable services for them and for the State. Also it became desirable to abolish feudal privileges, the immunity of the nobility from taxation, and the superiority which attached to a certain status. And as men no longer lived in a world empire like the Roman, but in an independent system with states which approximated to a similar degree of bourgeois development and which had intercourse with one another on an equal footing, the demand took on necessarily a universal character reaching beyond the individual state, and freedom and equality were thus proclaimed as human rights. But as regards the special bourgeois character of these human rights, it is significant that the American Constitution which was the first to recognise these rights of man in the same breath established slavery among the colored people: class privileges were cursed, race privileges were blessed. As is well known, the bourgeois class as soon as it escaped from the domination of the ruling class in the cities, by which process the medieval stage passes into the modern, has been steadily and inevitably dogged by a shadow, the proletariat. So also the bourgeois demands for equality are accompanied by the proletarian demands for equality. Directly the demand for the abolition of class privileges was made by the bourgeois there succeeded the proletarian demand for the abolition of classes themselves. This was first made in a religious form and was based upon early Christianity, but later derived its support from the bourgeois theories of equality. The proletarians take the bourgeois at their word, they demand the realisation of equality not merely apparently, not merely in the sphere of government but actually in the sphere of society and economics. Since the French bourgeoisie of the great Revolution placed equality in the foreground of their movement, the French proletariat has answered it blow for blow with the demand for social and economic equality, and equality has become the special battle cry of the French proletariat. The demand for equality as made by the proletariat has a double significance. Either it is, as was particularly the case at first, in the Peasants' War, for example, a natural reaction against social inequalities which were obvious, against the contrast between rich and poor, masters and slaves, luxurious and hungry, and as such it is simply an expression of revolutionary instinct finding its justification in that fact and in that fact alone. On the other hand it may arise from reaction against the bourgeois claims of equality from which it deduces more or less just and far reaching claims, serves as a means of agitation to stir the workers, by means of a cry adopted by the capitalists themselves, against the capitalists, and in this case stands or falls with bourgeois equality itself. In both cases the real content of the proletarian claims of equality is the abolition of classes. Every demand for equality transcending this is of necessity absurd. We have already given examples and can furnish many more when we come to consider Herr Duehring's prophecies of the future. So the notion of equality, in its proletarian as well as in its bourgeois form, is itself a historic product. Certain circumstances were required to produce it and these in their turn proceeded from a long anterior history. It is therefore anything but an eternal truth. And if the public regards it as self-evident in one sense or another if it, as Marx remarks "already occupies the position of a popular prejudice" it is not due to its being an axiomatic truth but to the universal broadening of conception in accordance with the spirit of the eighteenth century. If Herr Duehring then can set up his two famous men in housekeeping on the grounds of equality, it is apparent that the prejudices of the mass of men in its favor is an antecedent condition. In fact Herr Duehring calls his philosophy the "natural" because it proceeds from generally recognised things, which appear to him to be entirely natural. But why they seem to him to be natural he does not take the trouble to enquire. _Freedom and Necessity._ (The former part of this section is taken up with a criticism of Herr Duehring's knowledge of law of which he had boasted. It is a purely technical discussion and is of merely local interest. Having disposed of Duehring's juristic claims Engels proceeds to discuss "Freedom and Necessity" as follows.) One cannot deal properly with the question of morals and law without a discussion of free will, human responsibility, and the limits of necessity and freedom. The realistic philosophy has not only one but two solutions of these questions. "One must substitute for false theories of freedom the actual conditions in which reason on the one hand and instinct on the other unite upon a middle ground. The fundamental facts of this sort of dynamics are to be learned from observation and as regards the calculation in advance of phenomena which have not yet occurred, we must judge of them in general terms according to their special qualities. In this way the silly speculations with respect to the freedom of the will which have wasted thousands of years are not only entirely removed but are replaced by something positive, something useful for practical life." So freedom of the will consists in this that reason impels men to the right and irrationality to the left and according to this parallelogram of forces the true direction is that of the diagonal. Freedom would therefore be the average between insight and impulse, between understanding and lack of understanding, and its degree would to use an astronomical expression be empirically established by the "personal equation." But a few pages later we read "We establish moral responsibility upon freedom by which we only mean susceptibility to known motives according to the measure of natural and acquired reason. All such motives in spite of antagonism realise themselves in action with the inevitability of natural law, but we count upon this inevitable necessity when we deal with morals." This second definition of freedom which is quite opposed to the first is nothing but a very weak paraphrase of Hegel's notions on the subject. Hegel was the first man to make a proper explanation of the relations of freedom and necessity. In his eyes freedom is the recognition of necessity. "Necessity is blind only in so far as it is not understood." Freedom does not consist in an imaginary independence of natural laws but in a knowledge of these laws and in the possibility thence derived of applying them intelligently to given ends. This is true both as regards the laws of nature and of those which control the spiritual and physical existence of man himself,--two classes of laws which we can distinguish as an abstraction but not in reality. Freedom of the will consists in nothing but the ability to come to a decision when one is in possession of a knowledge of the facts. The freer the judgment of a man then in relation to a given subject of discussion so much the more necessity is there for his arrival at a positive decision. On the other hand lack of certainty arising from ignorance which apparently chooses voluntarily between many different and contradictory possibilities of decision shows thereby its want of freedom, its control by things which it should in reality control. Freedom, therefore, consists in mastery over ourselves and external nature founded upon knowledge of the necessities of nature, it is, therefore, necessarily a product of historical development. The first human beings to become differentiated from the lower animals were in all essentials as devoid of freedom as these animals themselves but each step in human development was a step towards freedom. At the threshold of human history stands the discovery of the transformation of mechanical motion in heat, the generation of fire by friction; at the close of development up to the present stands the discovery of the transformation of heat into mechanical motion, the steam engine. In spite of the tremendous revolution in the direction of freedom which the steam engine has produced in society it is not yet half complete. There is no question that the production of fire by friction still surpasses it as an agent in the liberation of humanity. Because the production of fire by friction for the first time gave man power over the forces of nature and separated him for ever from the lower animals. The steam engine can never bridge so wide a chasm. It appears however as the representative of all those productive forces by the help of which alone a state of society is rendered possible in which no class subjection or pain will be produced by reason of the lack of means for the sustenance of the individual, in which moreover it will be possible to speak of real human freedom as arising from living in accordance with the recognised laws of nature. But considering the youth of humanity it would be absurd to wish to impute any universal absolute validity to our present philosophical views, and it follows from the mere facts that the whole of history up to the present time is to be regarded as the history of the period extending from the time of the practical discovery of the transformation of mechanical movement into heat to that of the transformation of heat into mechanical movement. (The above constitutes a reply to the view which regards history simply as the record of human error and is followed by a discussion of Duehring's opinions in that regard.) CHAPTER VII THE DIALECTIC _Quantity and Quality._ (Here Herr Duehring contends "The first and most important statement with respect to the foundation logical properties of existence points to the exclusion of contradiction. Contradiction is a category which can belong to thought alone but which can pertain to nothing real. There are no contradictions in things; in other words the law of contradiction is itself the crowning point of absurdity." To which Engels replies as follows): The thought content of the foregoing passages is contained in the statement that contradiction is an absurdity and cannot occur in the actual world. This statement will have for people of average common sense the same self-evident truth as to say that straight cannot be crooked nor crooked straight. But the differential calculus shows in spite of all the protests of common sense that under certain conditions straight and crooked are identical, and reaches thereby a conclusion which is not in harmony with the common sense view of the absurdity of there being any identity between straight and crooked. Considering moreover the significant role which the so called Dialectic of the Contradiction played in the ancient Greek philosophy, a stronger opponent than Herr Duehring would be obliged to meet it with better arguments than a mere affirmation and a number of epithets. As long as we regard things as static and without life, each by itself, separately, we do not run against any contradictions in them. We find certain qualities sometimes common, sometimes distinctive, occasionally contradictory, but in this last case they belong to different objects and are hence not self contradictory. While we follow this method we pursue the ordinary metaphysical method of thought. But it is quite different when we consider things in their movement, in their change, their life and their mutually reciprocal relations. Then we come at once upon contradictions. Motion is itself a contradiction since simple mechanical movement from place to place can only accomplish itself by a body being at one and the same moment in one place and simultaneously in another place by being in one and the same place and yet not there. And motion is just the continuous establishing and dissolving the contradiction. Here we have a contradiction which is "objective, and so to speak corporeal in things and events." And what does Herr Duehring say about it? He affirms that "in rational mechanics there is no bridge between the strictly static and the dynamic." Finally the reader is able to see that there is behind this pretty little phrase of Herr Duehring nothing more than this--that the metaphysical mode of thought can absolutely not pass from the idea of rest to that of motion because the aforesaid contradiction intervenes. Motion is absolutely inconceivable to the metaphysician, because a contradiction. And as he affirms the inconceivability of motion he admits the existence of this contradiction against his will and therefore admits that it constitutes an objective contradiction in actual facts and events, and is moreover an actual fact. But if simple mechanical motion contains a contradiction in itself still more so do the higher forms of motion of matter and to a high degree organic life and its development. We saw above that life consists chiefly in this that a being is at one and the same time itself and something different. Life itself then is likewise a contradiction contained in things and events, always establishing and dissolving itself, and as soon as the contradiction ceases life also ceases, death comes on the scene. Thus we saw also that we cannot put an end to the Contradictions in the realm of thought, and how for example the contradiction between the intrinsically unlimited possibilities of human knowledge and its actual existence in the persons of human beings with limited faculties and powers of knowledge, is dissolved in the, for us at least, practically endless progression of the race, in unending progress. We stated just now that higher mathematics holds as one of its basic principles that straight and crooked may be identical under certain circumstances. It shows another contradiction, that lines which apparently intersect yet are parallel from five to six centimeters from the point of intersection, should be such as should never intersect although indefinitely produced, and yet, notwithstanding these and even greater contradictions, it produces not only correct results but results which are unattainable by lower mathematics. But even in the latter there is a host of contradictions. It is a contradiction, for example, that a root of A should be and actually is a power of A. A to the power of one-half equals the square root of A. It is contradiction that a negative magnitude should be the square of anything, since every negative magnitude multiplied by itself gives a positive square. The square root of minus one is therefore not only a contradiction but an absurd contradiction, a veritable absurdity. And yet the square root of minus one is in many instances the necessary result of correct mathematical operations, nay further, where would mathematics higher or lower be if one were forbidden to operate with the square root of minus one. Mathematics itself enters the realm of the dialectic and significantly enough it was a dialectic philosopher, Descartes, who introduced this progressiveness into mathematics. As is the relation of the mathematics of variable magnitudes to that of invariable quantities, so is the relation of the dialectic method of thought to the metaphysical. This does not prevent the great majority of mathematicians from only recognising the dialectic in the realms of mathematics, a condition of things satisfactory to those who operate in the antiquated, limited, metaphysical fashion by methods attained by means of the dialectic. * * * * * (Duehring having made an attack upon Marx's "Capital" because of its reliance upon the dialectic, and having indulged in the epithets to which he is too prone with respect to this work, Engels takes up its defence in that respect as follows): It is not our business to concern ourselves at this point with the correctness or incorrectness of the investigations of Marx as regards economics, but only with the application which he makes of the dialectic method. So much is certain, that it is only now that the readers of "Capital" will by the aid of Herr Duehring understand what they have read properly, and among them Herr Duehring himself, who in the year 1867 was still in a position, as far as possible to a man of his calibre, to review the book rationally. He did not then, it may be noted, first translate the arguments of Marx into Duehringese, as now seems indispensable to him. Even if he at that time made the blunder of identifying the Marxian dialectic with that of Hegel he had not altogether lost the ability to distinguish methods from the results attained by them and to comprehend that an abuse of the former is no contradiction of the latter. Herr Duehring's most astonishing observation is that from the Marxian standpoint, "in the last analysis everything is identical," that therefore in the eyes of Marx, for example, capitalists and wage workers, feudal, capitalistic and social methods of production are "all one." In order to show the possibility of such sheer stupidity it only remains to point out that the mere word "dialectic" makes Herr Duehring mentally irresponsible and makes what he says and does so inaccurate and confused as to be in the last analysis "all one." * * * * * (Herr Duehring remarks, "How comical for example is the declaration based upon Hegel's confused notions that quantity becomes lost in quality and that money advanced [i.e. for productive purposes. Ed.] becomes capital when it reaches a certain limit merely through quantitative increase." To which Engels replies thus): This seems peculiar when presented in this washed out fashion by Herr Duehring. On page 313 (2nd ed. "Capital") Marx, after an investigation of fixed and variable capital and surplus value, derives from his investigations the conclusion that "not every amount of gold or value capable of being transformed into capital is so transformed; rather a certain minimum of gold or of exchange value is presupposed to be in the possession of the individual owner of gold or goods." He thereupon gives an example, thus, in a branch of industry the worker works eight hours per day for himself, i.e. in order to produce the value of his wages, and the following four hours for the capitalist in producing surplus value to go into their pockets. One must have sufficient values to permit of the setting up of two workmen with raw material, means of labor and wages, in order to live as well as a workman. But since capitalistic production is not undertaken for mere livelihood but for increase of wealth, our individual with his two workmen would still be no capitalist. If he lives twice as well as an ordinary workman and transforms half of the surplus value produced into capital he will have to employ eight workmen and possess four times the aforementioned amount of value, and only after this and other examples for the purpose of illustrating and establishing the fact that not every small amount of value can effect a transformation of itself into capital, but that each period of industrial development and each branch of industry has its own minimum, fixed, Marx remarks "Here, as in nature, the correctness of the law of logic, as discovered by Hegel, is established--that mere quantitative changes at a certain point suddenly take on qualitative differences." One may remark the elevated and dignified fashion in which Duehring makes Marx say the exact opposite of what he did say. Marx says "The fact that a given amount of value can only transform itself into capital as soon as it has attained a definite minimum, varying with circumstances, in each individual case,--this fact is proof of the correctness of the law of Hegel. Herr Duehring makes him say "Because, according to the law of Hegel, quantity is transformed into quality therefore 'a sum of money when it has reached a certain amount becomes capital.'" He says just the opposite. We have seen above in the Scheme of the Universe that Herr Duehring had the misfortune to acknowledge and apply, in a weak moment, this Hegelian system of calculation, according to which at a given point quantitative changes suddenly become qualitative. We then gave one of the best known examples, that of the transformation of the form of water which at 0° C. changes from a liquid to solid and at 100° C. from liquid to gaseous, where thus at both these points of departure a mere quantitative change in temperature produces a qualitative change in the water. We might have cited from nature and human society a hundred more such facts in proof of this law, thus the whole fourth section of Marx's "Capital" entitled "Production of Relative Surplus Value in the realm of co-operative industry, the Division of Labor, and Manufacture, Machinery and the Great Industry," goes to show innumerable instances in which qualitative change alters the quantity of the thing, and where also, to use Herr Duehring's exceedingly odious expression, quantity is converted and transformed into quality. So also the mere coöperation of large numbers, the melting of several diverse crafts into one united craft, to use Marx's expression, produces a new "industrial power" which is substantially different from the sum of the individual crafts. Marx, in the interest of the entire truth, has remarked, in complete contrast to the perverted style of Herr Duehring "The molecular theory employed in modern chemistry, first scientifically developed by Laurent and Gerhardt, rests upon no other law." But what does Herr Duehring care for that? He knows that "the eminently modern constructive elements of scientific thought make just the same mistake as was made by Marx and his rival Lassalle; half-knowledge and a touch of pseudo-philosophy furnish the tools necessary for a display of learning." While with Herr Duehring "elevated notions of exact knowledge in mechanics, physics and chemistry" are, as we have seen, the foundations. But that the public may be in a position to decide we shall examine somewhat more closely the example cited by Marx in his note. Here we have, for example, the homologous series of compounds of carbon of which many are known and each has its own algebraic formula. If we, for example, according to the practice of chemistry, represent an atom of carbon by C, an atom of hydrogen by H, an atom of oxygen by O and the number of atoms contained in each combination of carbon by n, we can express the molecular formula of each one of this series thus, C_{n}H_{2n+2}--Series of normal paraffin. C_{n}H_{2n+2}O--Series of primary alcohol. C_{n}H_{2n}O_{2}--Series of the monobasic oleic acids. Let us take, for example, the last of this series and set one after the other n = 1, n = 2, etc., we get the following results omitting the compounds. CH_{2}O_{2}--Formic Acid--boiling point 100°--melting point 1°. C_{2}H_{4}O_{2}--Acetic Acid--boiling point 118°--melting point 17°. C_{3}H_{6}O_{2}--Propionic Acid--boiling point 140°--melting point--. C_{4}H_{8}O_{2}--Butyric Acid--boiling point 162°--melting point--. C_{5}H_{10}O_{2}--Valerianic Acid--boiling point 175°--melting point--. And so on to C_{30}H_{60}O_{2}, Melissic Acid, which melts first at 180°, and which has no boiling point, because it does not evaporate without splitting up. Here we see therefore a whole series of qualitatively different bodies, produced by single quantitative additions of the elements and always in the same proportions. This occurs absolutely where all elements of the combinations change their quantity in the same proportions, so with normal paraffin, C_{n}H_{2n} + 2: the lowest is CH_{4} a gas, the highest known is C_{16}H_{34}, a body forming a hard colorless crystal which melts at 21° and boils at 278°. In both the series each new step is reached through the introduction of CH_{2}, an atom of carbon and two atoms of hydrogen, to the molecular form of the preceding step, and this quantitative change in the molecular form brings about a qualitatively different body. These series are merely obvious examples. Almost universally in chemistry, particularly in the different oxides of nitrogen, in the oxi-acids of phosphorus or sulphur, one can see how "quantity suddenly changes into quality" and how this so called "confused Hegelianism" is, so to speak, inherent in things and events, and no one is ever confused or beclouded by it, except Herr Duehring. If Marx is the first to observe this, and if Herr Duehring points this out, without understanding it (since he could not let so unheard of a crime pass), he should explain which of the two, Marx or Duehring, is without elementary conceptions of natural science and the established principles of chemistry, and do it without boasting about his own ideas on natural philosophy. In conclusion, let us call attention to a witness on the change of quantity into quality, namely Napoleon. He describes the conflicts between the French cavalry, bad riders but disciplined, with the Mamelukes who, as regards single combat were better horsemen but undisciplined, as follows--"Two Mamelukes were a match for three Frenchmen, one hundred Mamelukes were equal to one hundred Frenchmen, three hundred Frenchmen could beat three hundred Mamelukes and a thousand Frenchmen invariably defeated fifteen hundred Mamelukes." Just as in the statement of Marx, that a certain amount of money, variable in amount, is necessary as a minimum, to make its transformation into capital possible, so, according to Napoleon, a certain minimum number of cavalrymen is required to bring into being the force of discipline inherent in military organisation, to make them evidently superior to greater numbers of individually better riders and fighters, cavalry at least as brave, though irregular. But what effect has this argument on Herr Duehring? Was not Napoleon utterly defeated in his conflict with Europe? Did he not suffer defeat after defeat? And why? Simply as a result of his introduction of confused Hegelian ideas into cavalry tactics. _Negation of the Negation._ "The historical sketch (of the so called original accumulation of capital in England) is comparatively the best part of Marx's book and it would be even better if it had been developed scientifically and not by means of the Dialectic. The Hegelian negation of the negation is called upon to serve here as a midwife, in default of anything better and clearer, and by means of it the future is brought into existence from the present. The abolition of private property which is shown to have been going on since the sixteenth century is the first negation. Another negation must follow which is characterised as the negation of the negation and therefore the restoration of individual private property, but in a higher form, founded on the common ownership of land and instruments of labor. If this new 'individual private property' is called also 'social property' by Herr Marx, the higher Hegelian unity is here manifested in which the contradiction will be destroyed, that is, in accordance with this juggling of words, be destroyed and preserved.... The dispossession of the dispossessor is, as it were, in this case the automatic product of historical reality in its material external form.... It would be difficult for a cautious man to convince himself of the necessity of communism in land and property on the credit of Hegel's shiftiness, of which the negation of the negation is an example.... The confusion of the Marxian philosophic notions will not be strange to him who knows what can be done by means of the Hegelian dialectic or rather what cannot be done. For those who do not know the trick, it must be noted that the first negation of Hegel is the teaching of the catechism with respect to the Fall, and the second is a higher unity leading to the Redemption. On these analogies, which pertain to religion no logic of facts can be established.... Herr Marx consoles himself in the midst of his simultaneously individual and social property and leaves his disciples to solve his profound dialectic puzzle." (Thus far Herr Duehring is quoted.) So Marx cannot prove the necessity of the social revolution, the restoration of a common property in land and the means of production, except by a reliance upon Hegel's negation of the negation. And, since he founds his socialistic theories upon analogies pertaining to religion, he comes to the conclusion that in future society a simultaneously individual and social property will prevail, as the Hegelian higher unity of the contradiction destroyed. Let us leave the negation of the negation for a little and look at "the coexistent individual and social property." This will be called by Herr Duehring a "cloud realm," and, strange to say he is really right in this regard. But sad to say it is not Marx who is found to be in the cloud realm but on the contrary Herr Duehring himself. Since by virtue of his wonderful versatility in the vagaries of Hegel he does not experience any difficulty in telling us the necessary contents of the as yet unpublished volume of "Capital," so, after setting Hegel right, he is able to correct Marx without any trouble in that he ascribes to him a higher unity of a private property of which Marx has not said a word. Marx says "It is the negation of the negation. This reestablishes private property but on the basis of the acquisitions of the capitalistic era, of the cooperation of free laborers and their common ownership of the land and the means of production. The transformation of the private property of individuals, depending upon the labor of individuals, into capitalistic property is naturally a process much more tedious, hard and difficult than the transformation of capitalistic private property, as it now exists, resting upon social production, into social property." That is all. The condition attained by the dispossession of the dispossessor is here shown as the restoration of individual private property resting however on a basis of social property in the land and means of production. For people who can understand English, the meaning of this is that social property extends to the land and means of production, and private property to the products, therefore to consumption. And that the matter should be evident even to infants Marx shows on page 56. "A society of free men who labor with social means of production, and consciously expend their individual labor power as social labor power," therefore a socialistically organised society, and he says further "The total product of the society is a social product. A portion of this product serves again as a means of production. It remains social. But another portion is consumed by the members of the society. It must therefore be distributed among them." And that ought to be clear, even to Herr Duehring, in spite of his having Hegel on the brain. The coexistent individual and social property, this confused and indefinite thing, this nonsense proceeding from the Hegelian dialectic, this misty world, this deep dialectic puzzle which Marx leaves his pupils to solve is merely a creation of Herr Duehring's imagination. Marx, as a so-called Hegelian, is obliged, as a result of the negation of the negation, to furnish a correct higher unity, and since he does not do this in accordance with the taste of Herr Duehring, the latter has to take a lofty stand and to smite Marx in the interests of the full truth of things upon which Herr Duehring holds a patent. What attitude did Marx take to the negation of the negation? On page 761 and following he states the conclusion with respect to his economic and historical investigations into the so-called accumulation of original capital, extending over the fifty preceding pages. Before the capitalistic era in England, at least, small production existed, based upon the private property of the worker in his tools. The so-called accumulation of capital consists in the expropriation of these immediate producers, that is in the abolition of private property resting on the labor of individuals. This was possible because the aforesaid small production is only compatible with a narrow and primitive stage of production and of society and at a certain grade of development furnishes the means of its own suicide. This suicide, the transformation of individual and divided modes of production into social production, constitutes the early history of capitalism. As soon as the workers are transformed into proletarians and their means of labor into capital, as soon as the capitalistic methods of production are firmly established, the growing association of labor and the further transformation of the land and other means of production and hence the further expropriation of the owners of private property takes on a new form, "there is no longer the self-employing worker to expropriate, but the capitalist who expropriates many workers. This expropriation fulfils itself through the play of laws immanent in capitalistic production itself, through the concentration of capital. One capitalist kills many. Hand in hand with this concentration, or the expropriation of many capitalists by a few, there develop continually the conscious technical application of science, the deliberate organised exploitation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labor into instruments of labor which can only be employed collectively, and the economising of all means of production through their employment as the common means of production of combined social labor. With the constantly diminishing numbers of capitalist magnates who usurp and monopolise all the advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, pressure, slavery, degradation and robbery but there grows also revolt and the constant progress in union and organisation of the working class brought about through the mechanism of the capitalistic process of production. Capitalism becomes an impediment to the methods of production developed with and under it. The concentration of the means of production and the organisation of labor reach a point where it comes into collision with its capitalistic covering. It is broken. The hour of capitalistic private property strikes. The expropriators are expropriated." And now I ask the reader, where are the dialectic twists and twirls, the intellectual arabesques, where the confused thought the result of which is the identity of everything, where the dialectic mystery for the faithful, where the dialectic hocus pocus, and the Hegelian intricacies, without which, Marx, according to Herr Duehring, cannot develop his own ideas? Marx simply pointed to history and showed briefly that just as the small industry necessarily produced the conditions of its own downfall, by its own development, that is to say by the expropriation of the small holders of private property so now the capitalistic method of production has itself developed likewise the material circumstances which must cause its downfall. The process is a historical one and, if it is at the same time dialectic, it is not to the discredit of Marx, that it happens to be so fatal to Herr Duehring. In the first place, since Marx is ready with his historical economic proof, he proceeds "The capitalistic method of production and method of appropriation, that is to say capitalistic private property is the first negation of individual private property founded on labor of individuals, the negation of capitalistic production will be self-produced with the necessity of a natural process, etc." (as quoted above). Although Marx therefore shows the occurrence of this event as negation of the negation, he has no intention of proving by this means that it is a historical necessity. On the contrary "After he has shown that the actual fact has partially declared itself, and has, as yet partially to declare itself, he shows it also as a fact which fulfils itself in accordance with a certain dialectic law." That is all. It is therefore again merely supposition on Herr Duehring's part to assert that the negation of the negation must act as a midwife by whose means the future is brought out of the womb of the present, or that Marx wants to convince anyone of the necessity of social ownership of land and capital upon the credit of the negation of the negation. It shows a complete lack of comprehension of the nature of the dialectic to regard it as Herr Duehring does, as an instrument of mere proof, just as one can after a limited fashion employ formal logic or elementary mathematics. Formal logic is itself more than anything else a method for the discovery of new results, for advancing from the known to the unknown, and so, but in a much more distinguished sense, is the dialectic, which, since it transcends the narrow limits of formal logic, attains a more comprehensive philosophical position. It is the same with mathematics. Elementary mathematics, the mathematics of constant quantities, proceeds within the limits of formal logic, at least as a rule: the mathematics of variable quantities which is peculiarly concerned with calculations running to the infinite, is substantially nothing but the application of the dialectic in mathematics. Mere proof becomes secondary before the manifold application of the method to new fields of investigation. But nearly all the proofs of higher mathematics from the first of the differential calculus, are, strictly speaking, false from the standpoint of elementary mathematics. This cannot be otherwise, if one, as is here the case, wishes to establish results won in the realm of dialectics by means of formal logic. For a crass metaphysician like Herr Duehring to want to prove anything by means of the dialectic would be the same wasted labor as Leibnitz and his pupils went through when they tried to establish the thesis of calculation to infinity by means of the mathematics of their time. The differential gave them the same spasms as the negation of the negation gives Herr Duehring and it played a role in it as we shall see. They admitted it at last, at least as many as did not die first, not because they were convinced but because it always worked out right. Herr Duehring, is, as he says, just in his forties, and if he attains old age, as we hope he will, he may also experience the same. But what is this dreadful negation of the negation which makes life so bitter to Herr Duehring and which is to him what the unpardonable sin, the sin against the Holy Ghost, is to Christianity? It is a very simple process, and one, moreover, which fulfils itself every day, which any child can understand when it is deprived of mystery, under which the old idealistic philosophy found a refuge, and beneath which it will pay unprotected metaphysicians to take refuge from the stroke of Herr Duehring. Let us take a grain of barley. Millions of such grains of barley will be ground, cooked and brewed and then consumed. But let such a grain of barley fall on suitable soil under normal conditions; a complete individual change at once takes place in it under the influence of heat and moisture, it germinates. The grain, as such disappears, is negated, in its place arises the plant, the negation of the grain. But what is the normal course of life of this plant? It grows, blossoms, bears fruit and finally produces other grains of barley and as soon as these are ripe the stalk dies, and becomes negated in its turn. As the result of this negation of the negation, we have the original grains of barley again, not singly, however, but ten, twenty or thirty fold. Forms of grain change very slowly and so the grain of barley remains practically the same as a hundred years ago. But let us take a cultivated ornamental plant, like the dahlia or orchid. Let us consider the seed and the plants developed from it by the skill of the gardener, and we have in testimony of this negation of the negation, no longer the same seeds but qualitatively improved seed which produces more beautiful flowers, and every repetition of this process, every new negation of the negation, increases the tendency to perfection. Similarly this process is gone through by most insects, butterflies, for example. They come out of the egg by a negation of the egg, they go through certain transformations till they reach sex maturity, they copulate and are again negated, since they die as soon as the process of copulation is completed, and the female has laid her innumerable eggs. That the matter is not so plainly obvious in the case of other plants and animals, seeing that they produce seeds, plants, and animals not once but oftener, does not affect us in this case, we are now only concerned in showing that the negation of the negation actually does occur in both kingdoms of the organic world. Besides, all geology is a series of negated negations, one layer after another following the destruction of old and the establishment of new rock foundations. First, the original crust of the earth, through the cooling of the fluid mass, and through oceanic, meteorological, and chemical atmospheric action, being broken up into small parts, these broken masses form layers in the seas. Local elevations of the seas, through the ebb and flow of the waters, bring portions of these layers afresh under the influence of rain, the warmth of the seasons, and the oxygen and carbon in the atmosphere: melted and almost cooled masses of rock from the interior of the earth underlie these and break through the layers. Through millions of centuries new layers are continually being formed, always to a large extent destroyed and serving again as building materials for new layers. But the result of the process is always positive, the restoration of a piece of ground made up of exceedingly diverse chemical elements to a condition of mechanical pulverisation, which is the cause of a most abundant and diverse vegetation. It is the same also in mathematics. Let us take an ordinary algebraic quantity a. Let us negate it, then we have-a (minus a). Let us negate this negation, that is let us multiply --a by --a and we have + a^2, that is the original positive quantity but in a higher form that is to the second power. It does not matter that we can attain the same a^2 by the multiplication of a positive by itself. The negated negation is established so completely in a^2 that under all circumstances it has two square roots a and --a. And this impossibility, the negated negation, the getting rid of the negative root in the square has much significance in quadratic equations. The negation of the negation is more evident in the higher analyses, in those "unlimited summations of small quantities," which Herr Duehring himself explains as being the highest operations of mathematics and which are usually called the differential and integral calculus. How do these forms of calculation fulfil themselves? I have for example in a given problem two variable quantities x and y, of which one cannot vary without causing the other to vary also under fixed conditions. I differentiate x and y, that is I consider x and y as being so infinitesimally small that they do not represent any real quantities, even the smallest, so that, of x and y nothing remains, except their reciprocal relations, a quantitative relation without any quantity; therefore dx/dy, the relation of the two differentials of x and y, is 0/0 but 0/0 is fixed as the expression of y/x. That this relation between two vanished quantities, the fixed moment of their vanishing, is a contradiction I merely mention in passing, it should give us as little uneasiness as it has given mathematics for the two hundred or so years past. What have I done except to negate x and y; not as in metaphysics so as not to trouble myself any further about them, but in a manner demanded by the problem? Instead of x and y, I have therefore their negation dx and dy in the formulæ or equations before me. I now calculate further with these formulæ. I treat dx and dy as real quantities, as quantities subject to certain exceptional laws, and at a certain point I negate the negation, that is, I integrate the differential formula. I get instead of dx and dy the real quantities x and y again, and am thereby no further forward than at the beginning, but I have thereby solved the problem over which ordinary geometry and algebra would probably have gnashed their teeth in vain. It is not otherwise in history. All civilised peoples began with common property in land. Among all peoples which pass beyond a certain primitive stage the common property in land becomes a fetter upon production in the process of agricultural development. It is cast aside, negated, and, after shorter or longer intervening periods, is transformed into private property. But at a higher stage, through the development still further of agriculture, private property becomes in its turn a bar to production, as is to-day the case with both large and small land proprietorship. The next step, to negate it in turn, to transform it into social property, necessarily follows. This advance however does not signify the restoration of the old primitive common property, but the establishment of a far higher better developed form of communal proprietorship, which, far from being an impediment to production, rather, for the first time is bound to put an end to its limitations and to give it the full benefit of modern discoveries in chemistry and mechanical inventions. But again; ancient philosophy was primitive naturalistic materialism. In the state of thought at that period it was, as such, incapable of clear conceptions of matter. But the necessity of clearness on this point led to the doctrine of a soul which could leave the body, then to the idea of the immortality of the soul, finally, to monotheism. The old materialism was therefore negated by idealism. But in the further development of philosophy idealism became untenable, and is negated by modern materialism. This, the negation of negation, is not the mere reestablishment of the old, but unites, with the surviving foundations, the whole thought content of a two thousand years' development of philosophy and science, as well as the history of these two thousand years. It is in a special sense no philosophy but a single concept of the universe which has to prove and realise itself not in a science of sciences apart, but in actual science. Philosophy is here also cast aside, that is "destroyed and preserved," destroyed as to its form, preserved as to its real content. Where Herr Duehring only sees word-jugglery a more real content is brought to light by the newer point of view. Finally, even the Rousseau doctrine of equality, of which that of Herr Duehring is only a feeble and false plagiarism, has no existence unless the Hegelian negation of the negation serve it as a midwife, although it originated twenty years prior to the birth of Hegel. Far from being ashamed of this it bears in plain sight the stamp of its dialectic derivation in its earliest manifestation. In a state of nature and savagery men were equal, and, since Rousseau regards speech as a falsifying of natural conditions, he is quite right in predicating equality of animals of one species as far as this reaches, and the same also with regard to those speechless animal-men, recently hypothetically classified by Haeckel as Alali. But these equal animal men had one quality beyond the other animals,--perfectibility, the power of further development and this was the reason of inequality. Rousseau sees therefore in the existence of equality a step forward. But this advance was self contradictory, it was at the same time a retrogression. "All further advances (beyond the primitive stage) were so many steps, seemingly in the development of individual men, but actually in the decay of the species. Working in metals and agriculture were the two arts whose discovery brought about this great revolution" (the transformation of the primitive forests into cultivated lands, but also the introduction of poverty and slavery together with private property). "The poets hold that gold and silver, the philosophers that iron and corn have civilised men and ruined the human race." Each new advance of civilisation is at the same time an advance of inequality. All contrivances with which society endows itself by means of civilisation are in direct opposition to their original purpose. "It is beyond question and a foundation principle of the entire public law that people made rulers to defend their liberties, not to destroy them." And yet these rulers become of necessity the oppressors of the people and they carry the oppression to the point where inequality is brought to a climax and, then, transformed into its opposite, again becomes the reason of equality, for to despots all are equal, that is equally of no account. Here is the extreme of inequality, the crowning point which closes the circle, and touches the point from which we have proceeded; here all private individuals are equal, since they are of no account, and subjects have no law other than the will of their master. "But the despot is master only as long as he has the power, and for this reason he cannot complain of the use of force if he is banished.... Force upholds him, force throws him down, everything goes according to a straight and naturally appointed path." And thus again inequality is transformed into equality, but not into the old materialistic equality of speechless, primitive men, but into the higher equality of organised society. The oppressor is oppressed, it is negation of the negation. We have then, as regards Rousseau, not merely a method of thought which is quite analogous to that pursued in Marx's "Capital," but also a whole series of single dialectic turns of which Marx avails himself: Processes, which are antagonistic in their nature, containing a contradiction in themselves, are transformed from one extreme to its opposite, finally, as the quintessence of the whole, negation of the negation. Although Rousseau in 1754 could not speak the jargon of Hegel, he was then, at a period twenty-three years before the birth of Hegel, deeply infected with the Hegel contagion, the dialectic of contradiction, doctrine of logic, theology, etc. And if Duehring in his misapplication of Rousseau's theory of equality, operates with his two victorious men, he having lost his feet, falls, of necessity into the arms of the negation of the negation. The conditions under which the equality of the two men flourishes and which is set forth as an ideal condition is shown on page 271 of the Philosophy as the original condition. This original condition on page 279 is of necessity destroyed by the "robber system"--first negation. But we have now, thanks to the philosophy of reality, arrived at the point of abolishing the "robber system" and substituting for it the economic commune discovered by Herr Duehring--negation of the negation, equality on a higher plane. What is the negation of the negation, therefore? It is a very far reaching, and, just, for this reason, a very important law of development of nature, human history and thought, a law which we see realised in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, in geology, in mathematics, in history, and philosophy, and which Herr Duehring himself, in spite of his opposition and resistance, must follow, after his own fashion. It is evident that I say nothing of the special development of the grain of barley from the germ to the crop bearing plant, if I say it is negation of the negation. Since the integral calculus is likewise negation of the negation, with the other assertion I should only affirm that the life process of a grain of barley is integral calculus or even socialism. But that is just the kind of thing which the metaphysicians push off on the dialectic. If I say that all these processes constitute negation of the negation, I embrace them all under this one law of progress, and leave the distinctive features of each special process without particular notice. The dialectic is, as a matter of fact, nothing but the science of the universal laws of motion, and evolution in nature, human society and thought. At this point, however, the objection may be urged that the final negation is no true negation, I negate a grain of barley also when I grind it, an insect when I crush it, a positive quantity when I eliminate it, etc. Or I negate the statement "the rose is a rose" if I say "the rose is no rose" and what happens if I negate this negation again and say "but the rose is a rose"? These objection are, in fact, the chief arguments of the metaphysicians against the dialectic and are quite worthy of this idiotic method of reasoning. To negate in the dialectic is not simply to say "No," or to describe a thing as non-existent, or to destroy it after any fashion that you may choose. Spinoza says "omnis determinatio est negatio," every limitation or determination is at the same time a negation. Furthermore, the sort of negation here is shown first by means of the universal and in the second place by means of the distinctive nature of the process. I must not only negate but I must also restore the negation again. I must therefore so direct the first negation that the second remains possible or shall be so. How? Just according to the peculiar nature of each particular case. I grind a grain of barley, I crush an insect, I have certainly fulfilled the first act but have made the second impossible. Every species of things has therefore its own peculiar properties to be negated in order that a progression may proceed, and every species of properties and ideas is precisely the same in this regard. In infinitesimal calculations the negation is brought about after a different fashion than in the restoration of positive powers from negative roots. That has to be learnt like everything else. With the mere knowledge that the stalk of barley and infinitesimal calculation fall under the principle of the negation of the negation, I cannot cultivate more barley nor can I differentiate and integrate, just as I cannot play the violin by virtue of a mere knowledge of the laws of harmony. But it is evident that a merely childish negation of the negation such as writing down a and erasing it, or by affirming that a rose is a rose and that it is not a rose leads to no conclusion other than to show the silliness of the people who undertake processes so tedious. And yet metaphysicians would inform us that that is the right way to carry out the negation of the negation. Herr Duehring is therefore a mystifier when he asserts that the negation of the negation was an analogy made by Hegel derived from religion and built up on the story of the Fall and the Redemption. Men thought dialectically a long time before they knew what the dialectic really was, just as they spoke prose a long time before the term "prose" was used. The law of the negation of the negation which operates in history and which until it is once learned goes on in our brains unconsciously to ourselves, was first clearly formulated by Hegel, and if Herr Duehring desires to employ it in secret but cannot stand the name, he should discover a better name. But if he insist on expelling it from the processes of thought, he must first be good enough to expel it from nature and from history, and find a system of mathematics in which --a multiplied by --a does not give us + a^2 and where the differential and integral calculus are both forbidden by law. _Conclusion._ In this short section Engels leaves the general discussion in order to again pay his respects to the shortcomings and deficiencies of Herr Duehring. The matter possesses no general interest for Engels merely teases his opponent upon the magnificence of his claims and the slightness of his performances. PART II CHAPTER VIII POLITICAL ECONOMY _I. Objects and Methods._ Political economy is, in the widest sense, the science of the laws controlling the production and exchange of the material necessities of life in human society. Production and exchange are two entirely different functions. Production may exist without exchange, exchange--since there can only be exchange of products--cannot exist without production. Each of the two social functions is controlled by entirely different external influences and thus has, generally speaking, its own peculiar laws. But on the other hand they become so mutually involved at a given time and react one upon the other that they might be designated the abscisses and ordinates of the economic curve. The conditions under which men produce and exchange develop from land to land, and in the same land from generation to generation. Political economy cannot be the same for all lands and for all historical epochs. From the bow and arrow, from the stone knife and the exceptional and occasional trading intercourse of the barbarian to the steam engine with its thousands of horse-power, to the mechanical weaving machine, to the railway and the Bank of England is a tremendous leap. The Patagonians do not have production on a large scale and world-commerce any more than they have swindling or bankruptcy. Anyone who should attempt to apply the same laws of political economy to Patagonia as to present-day England would only succeed in producing stupid commonplaces. Political economy is thus really a historical science. It is engaged with historical material, that is, material which is always in course of development. At the close of this investigation it can, for the first time, show the few (especially as regards production and exchange) general laws which apply universally. In this way it is made evident that the laws which are common to certain methods of production or forms of exchange are common to all historical periods in which these methods of production and forms of exchange are the same. Thus for example with the introduction of specie, there came into being a series of laws which holds good for all lands and historical epochs in which specie is a means of exchange. The method of distributing the product is in accordance with the method of production and exchange of a given society at a given time. In the tribal or village community with communal ownership of land, of which there are obvious survivals in the history of all civilized peoples, there is practically an equal distribution; where a greater inequality of distribution of the product has been introduced among the members of a society, it is a sign of the coming dissolution of the community--large and small farming have very different modes of distribution according to the historical circumstances from which they have developed. But it is apparent that large farming requires a different mode of distribution than small farming; that the large farming shows the existence of class antagonism--slave-holders and slaves, landlords and tenants, capitalists and wage workers,--but that, on the contrary, in small farming, class distinction does not arise from the farming operations of separate individuals but from the mere beginnings of farming on a large scale. The introduction and development of the use of gold into a country where formerly exchange of actual goods was the exclusive or general practice, is closely associated with a slow or rapid revolution of the mode of distribution hitherto prevailing, and to such an extent that inequality of distribution among individuals and, so, antagonism between rich and poor becomes more and more apparent. Local gild hand-production as it prevailed in the Middle Ages made great capitalists and life-long wage-workers just as impossible as the great modern industry, the credit system of to-day, and form of exchange, corresponding with the development of these, free competition, render them inevitable. With the difference in distribution however class differences are introduced. Society becomes divided into upper and lower classes, into plunderers and plundered, into master and servant classes, and the state which the original groups composed of societies claiming the same ancestry only regarded as a means of protection of the common interests (remnants of which remain in the Orient, e.g.) and against foreign force, takes upon itself the duty of maintaining the economic and political supremacy of the dominant class against the dominated class by means of force. So distribution is not a mere passive witness of production and exchange; it has an immediate influence on both. Every new method of production and form of exchange is impeded, not only through the old forms and their particular forms of political development, but also through the old method of distribution. It can only bring about its own method of distribution as the result of long conflict. But just in proportion as a given method of production and exchange is built up and develops, distribution all the more rapidly reaches a point where it outstrips its predecessor and where it comes into collision with the system of production and exchange existing up to that time. The old tribal communistic forms of which we have already spoken may last thousands of years, as is seen in the case of the Indians and Slavs of to-day, until intercourse with the outside world develops causes of disruption within them as a conclusion of which their dissolution comes about. Modern capitalistic production on the other hand which is hardly three hundred years old and which first became dominant with the introduction of the greater industry about one hundred years ago, has, in this short time, developed antagonisms in distribution--concentration of capital on the one hand in the possession of a few persons and, on the other, concentration of propertyless masses in the great cities--which must of necessity bring it to an end. The connection between the form of distribution and the material economic conditions of a society is so much in the nature of things that it is generally reflected in the popular instinct. As long as a method of production is in the course of development, even those whose interests are against it, who are getting the worst of the particular method of production, are highly satisfied. It was just so with the English working class at the introduction of the greater industry. As long as this method of production remained the normal social method, satisfaction with the methods of distribution was, on the whole, prevalent; and when a protest against it rose even in the bosom of the dominant class itself (Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen) it found at first practically no sympathy among the masses of the exploited. But directly the method of production has travelled a good portion of its upward progress, when half of its life was over, when its destiny was in a great measure accomplished and its successor was knocking at the door--then for the first time the ever increasingly unequal distribution appeared as unjust. Then was the first appeal made from actual facts to so-called eternal justice. This appeal to morality and justice does not bring us a step further scientifically. Economic science can find no grounds of proof in moral indignation, however justifiable, but merely a symptom. Its task is to show the newly developing social wrongs as the necessary results of existing methods of production and, at the same time, as signs of its approaching dissolution, and to point out, amid the break up of the existing economic system, the elements of the new organization of production and exchange which will abolish those social wrongs. The feeling stirred up by the poets whether in the picturing of these social wrongs or by attack upon them or, on the other hand, by denial of them and the glorification of harmony in the interests of the dominant class, is quite timely, but its slight value as furnishing proof for a given period is shown by the fact that one finds an abundance of it in every epoch. Political economy, as the science of the conditions and forms under which various human societies have produced and exchanged and according to which they have distributed the products of their labor,--political economy, in this broad sense, has yet to be planned for the first time. All that we have so far of political economic science is almost entirely limited to the beginning and development of the capitalistic mode of production. It begins with the genesis and growth of the capitalistic mode of production, and exchange, recognises the necessity of the disappearance of these by means of the capitalistic forms, then develops the laws of the capitalistic methods of production and their corresponding forms of exchange on the positive side, that is on the side on which they further the objects of society, as a whole and closes with the socialist criticism of the capitalistic methods of production, that is, with the exhibition of its laws on the negative side, with the proof that this method of production arrives at the point, by its own development, where it is no longer possible. This criticism proves that the capitalistic methods of production and exchange constitute more and more an insufferable fetter upon production itself. The mode of distribution which is necessarily associated with this form of production has brought about a class condition which grows daily more unbearable. It has produced the daily sharpening antagonism between the continually less numerous but constantly richer capitalists and the more numerous, but on the whole, continually poorer propertyless wage-workers. Finally the tremendous productive forces of the capitalistic methods of production, which are practically unlimited, are only awaiting their seizure at the hands of an organized co-operative society to secure for all the members of that society the means of existence and the fuller development of their faculties in an ever increasing degree. In order to fully accomplish this criticism of the bourgeois economy acquaintance with the capitalistic form of production of exchange and of distribution was not enough. Preceding forms and others, existing side by side with the capitalistic mode in a few highly developed countries, had to be examined and compared at least in their chief features. Such an investigation and comparision has been undertaken as a whole by Marx alone and we consider that this investigation practically sums up all that has been established respecting theoretical economy prior to that of the bourgeois. While political economy in a narrow sense arose in the minds of a few geniuses of the seventeenth century, it is, in its positive formulation by the physiocrats and Adam Smith, substantially a child of the eighteenth century, and expresses itself in the acquisitions of the great contemporary French philosophers with all the excellencies and defects of that time. What we have said of the French philosophers applies also to the economists of that day. The new science was with them not the expression of the condition and needs of the time but the expression of eternal reason; the laws of production and exchange discovered by them were not the laws of a given historical form of those facts but were eternal natural laws; they derived them from the nature of man. But this man, seen clearly, was a burgher of the Middle Ages on the high road to becoming a modern bourgeois, and his nature consisted in this that he had to manufacture commodities and carry on his trade according to the given historical conditions of that period. (Herr Duehring having applied the two man theory to political economic conditions and having decided that such conditions are unjust, upon which conclusion he bases his revolutionary attitude, Engels remarks as follows): "If we have no better security for the revolution in the present methods of distribution of the products of labor with all their crying antagonisms of misery and luxury, of poverty and ostentation, than the consciousness that this method of distribution is unjust and that justice must finally prevail, we should be in evil plight and would have to stay there a long time. The mystics of the Middle Ages who dreamed of an approaching thousand years kingdom of righteousness had the consciousness of the injustice of class antagonisms. At the beginning of modern history three hundred years ago, Thomas Muenzer shouted it aloud to all the world. In the English and French bourgeois revolutions the same cry was heard and died away ineffectually. And if the same cry, after the formation of class antagonisms and class distinctions left the working, suffering classes cold until 1830, if it now takes hold of one land after another with the same results and the same intensity, in proportion as the greater industry has developed in the individual countries if, in one generation, it has acquired a force which defies all the powers opposed to it and can be sure of victory in the near future--how comes it about? From this, that the greater industry has created the modern proletariat, a class, which for the first time in history can set about the abolition not of this or that particular class organization or of this or that particular class privilege but of classes in general, and it is in the position that it must carry out this line of action on the penalty of sinking to the Chinese coolie level. And that the same greater industry has on the other hand produced a class which is in possession of all the tools of production and the means of life but in every period of prosperity (Schwindelperiode) and in each succeeding panic shows that it is incapable of controlling in the future the growing productive forces; a class under whose leadership society runs headlong to ruin like a locomotive whose closed safety valve the engine driver is too weak to open. In other words it has come about that the productive forces of the modern capitalistic mode of production as well as the system of distribution based upon it are in glaring contradiction to the mode of production itself and to such a degree that a revolution in the modes of production and distribution must take place which will abolish all class differences or the whole of modern society will fall. It is in these actual material facts, which are necessarily becoming more and more evident to the exploited proletariat, that the confidence in the victory of modern socialism finds its foundation and not in this or that bookworm's notions of justice and injustice. _II. The Force Theory._ (Herr Duehring argues that the causes of class subjection are to be sought in political conditions and that political force is the primary, and economic conditions merely the secondary, cause of class distinctions Engels makes the following reply to these arguments): * * * * * This is Herr Duehring's theory. It is set out, decreed so to say, here and in several other places. But we cannot find the slightest attempt to prove it or to disprove the opposite theory in the three thick volumes. Moreover if there was an abundance of proof we should get none from Herr Duehring, for the matter is proven by the famous fall of man in that Robinson Crusoe made Friday his slave. That was an act of force and so a political act. And this slavery constitutes the point of departure and fundamental fact of history up to the present time and inoculates the heirs of sin with injustice so certainly that only lately it has become milder and "transformed into the more indirect forms of economic dependency." Since the whole of the remaining actual "force-possession" rests upon this original enslavement, it is clear that all economic phenomena can be explained from original political causes, that is from force. And whoever is not satisfied with this is a secret reactionary. Let us first remark that one has to be as much in love with himself as Herr Duehring is to consider this idea as "original" since it is not so by any means. The idea that the political doings of monarch and states are decisive events in history is as old as the writing of history itself and is the reason why we are so little aware of the real and quietly developing progress of the peoples which goes on behind these noisy and spectacular activities. This idea has dominated the whole of history in the past and got its first shock at the hands of the French bourgeois historians of the Restoration period. To proceed, let us grant for the present that Herr Duehring is correct when he says that all history up to now has been the slavery of man by men, and we are still a long way from the root of the matter. Let us ask now how it was that Robinson came to enslave Friday. Was it merely for the pleasure of doing so? Surely not. On the contrary we are informed that Friday "was subjugated as a slave or mere tool for economic service and was kept in subjection merely as a tool." Robinson only enslaved Friday that he might work for the benefit of Robinson. And how could Robinson derive benefit from the labor of Friday? Only by virtue of the fact that Friday produced more means of livelihood by his labor than Robinson had to give him to keep him able to work. Robinson has therefore, contrary to Herr Duehring's pretty prescription, made, by the enslavement of Friday, a political organization, not just because he wanted to, but simply as a means of providing himself with food, and he ought to see how little he has in common with his lord and master Herr Duehring. The childish example therefore which Herr Duehring has discovered in order to show that force is the "historical fundamental" proves that force is only a means to further an economic interest, and in history the economic side is likewise more fundamental than the political. The example therefore proves just the opposite of what it ought to prove. And, as with Robinson and Friday, so it is also with all the examples of lordship and slavery up to now. Slavery, to use Duehring's own elegant expression, always implies a means for supplying sustenance (using the term in its broadest sense) and never merely implies a political organization which has been developed by its own will. One would have to be a Herr Duehring to venture to call taxes only a secondary feature of government, or, to say that the political groupings of the dominant bourgeois of to-day and the subjugated proletariat are purely voluntary and not made to serve the material interests of the bourgeois, namely profit making and the accumulation of capital. Let us give our attention again to our two men. Robinson "sword in hand" makes Friday his slave. But to do this Robinson uses something else besides his sword. A slave is not made by that means solely. In order to be able to keep a slave one has to be superior to him in two respects, one must first have control over the tools and objects of labor of the slave and over his means of subsistence also. Therefore, before slavery is possible, a certain point in production has to be reached and a certain degree of inequality in distribution attained. And when slave labor becomes the dominant mode of production of an entire society a higher development of the powers of production, of trade and of wealth, accumulation occurs. In early tribal communities which had common ownership of the soil, slavery is either nonexistent or its role is very subordinate. So it was at first in Rome, as a state of farmers, but when Rome became the capital city of the world and the soil of Italy came more and more to be owned by a numerically small class of enormously wealthy property owners, the population of farmers perished in front of the slave population. When at the time of the Persian War, the number of slaves in Corinth was 460,000, and in Ægina 470,000, and there were ten slaves to every freeman in the population, the explanation must be sought in something other than force; there were a highly developed art and handicraft and foreign commerce. Slavery in the United States of America was much less due to force than to the English cotton industry; where there was not cotton grown or where slaves were not raised, as in the border states, for the cotton producing states, it perished of its own accord and without any employment of force simply because it did not pay. When Herr Duehring therefore calls the property of the present day property resting on force and designates it as "that form of domination which does not merely signify the exclusion of one's fellow beings from the use of the natural means of sustenance, but implies in addition that the subjection of man has lain at the foundation of human slavery" he puts the matter upside down. The subjection of humanity to slavery in all its forms means the control by the master of the means of labor by virtue of which alone he can employ his slaves upon them and the disposal of the means of livelihood by which he can keep his slaves alive. In all cases therefore it implies a certain power of possession which transcends the ordinary? How did this arise? Occasionally it is clear that it was seized and can therefore be said to rest upon force but this is by no means essential. It can be got by labor, be robbed, be obtained by trade, or taken by fraud. It must be worked for generally before it can be stolen. Private property does not historically come into existence by any means as a rule as the product of robbery and violence. On the contrary. It arises from the limitation of certain things in the early tribal communes. It develops in the first place within the tribe and afterwards in exchange with peoples outside of the tribe in the form of wares. In proportion as the products of the tribe assume the form of commodities, i.e., the less they are produced for the use of the producer and the more for the purpose of exchange, the exchange destroys the original form of distribution in the commune itself, and the more unequal become the shares of the individual members of the community with respect to material possessions. So the old communal ownership of land becomes more and more invaded, the communal property is rapidly converted into a village of farmers, each tilling his own piece of ground. Oriental despotism and the changing government of conquering nomads had no power to alter the old form of communal ownership for a thousand years. But the continual destruction of the primitive domestic industry through the competition of the products of the great industry is bringing about its dissolution. The thing has little to do with force as has lately appeared in the matter of the division of the communal property of the feudal societies on the Moselle and in Hochwald. The peasants are finding the substitution of individual for communal holdings to their interests. Even the growth of a primitive aristocracy as among the Celts, the Germans, and in Mesopotamia, is a result of the communal ownership of landed property, and does not depend upon force in the slightest degree but upon free will and custom. Especially where private property arises it appears as the result of a change in the methods of production and exchange in the interests of the increase of production and the development of commerce and therefore arises from economic causes. Force plays no role in this. It is clear that the institution of private property must have already existed before the robber is able to possess himself of other people's goods and that force may change the possession but cannot alter private property as such. But to explain the "subjection of men to slavery" in its modern form, in wage-labor, we can make no use of either force or property acquired by force. We have already mentioned the part which the transformation of the products of labor into commodities, their production not for use alone, but for exchange, plays in the destruction of the primitive communal property and therefore in the bringing into existence directly or indirectly the universality of private property. But Marx has proved in his "Capital"--and Herr Duehring does not venture to intrude upon the matter--that at a certain stage in economic development the production of commodities is transformed into capitalistic production and that at this point "the law of appropriation resting upon the production and circulation of commodities, the law of private property, by its own inevitable dialectic becomes changed into its opposite, the exchange of equivalents, which appeared as its original mode of operation, but has now become so twisted that there is only an appearance of exchange since. In the first place, the portion of capital exchanged for labor-force is itself only a portion of the product of another's labor taken without an equivalent, and in the second place, it is not only supplied by its producers, the workers, but it must be supplied also with a new surplus. Originally property seemed to us to be established on labor only--property now appears (as a conclusion of the Marxian argument), on the side of the capitalist, as the right to unpaid labor and, on the side of the workingman, as an impossibility, the ownership of his own product. The difference between property and labor is the result of a law which apparently proceeded from their identity." In other words if we exclude the possibility of force, robbery, and cheating absolutely, if we take the position that all private property originally depended upon the personal labor of its possessor and that equivalents are always exchanged we nevertheless come, in the course of the development of production and exchange, of necessity, to the modern capitalistic methods of production, to the monopolisation of the means of production and livelihood in the hands of a single class few in numbers, to the degradation of the other consisting of the immense majority of producers to the position of propertyless proletarians, to the periodical alternations of swindling operations and trade crises and to the whole of the present anarchy in production. The entire result rests on purely economic grounds without robbery, force, or any intervention of politics or the government being necessary. Property resting on force becomes a mere phrase which merely serves to obscure the understanding of the real development of things. This course, historically expressed, is the story of the development of the bourgeoisie. If "political conditions are the decisive causes of economic conditions," the modern bourgeoisie would necessarily not have progressed as the result of a fight with feudalism, but would be the darling child of its womb. Everybody knows that the opposite is the case. The bourgeoisie, originally bound to pay feudal dues to the dominant feudal nobility, recruited from bond slaves and thralls, in a subject state, has, in the course of its conflict with the nobility captured position after position, and finally has come into possession of the power in civilized countries. In France it directly attacked the nobility, in England it made the aristocracy more and more bourgeois and finally incorporated it with itself as a sort of ornament. And how did this come about? Entirely through the transformation of economic conditions which was sooner or later followed either by the voluntary or compulsory transformation of political conditions. The fight of the bourgeoisie against the feudal nobility is the fight of the city against the country, of industry against landlordism, of economy based on money against economy based on natural products. The distinctive weapons of the bourgeois in this fight were those which came into existence through the development of increasing economic force by reason of the growth at first of hand manufacture and afterwards machine-manufacture and through the extension of trade. During the whole of this conflict the political power was in the hands of the nobility, with the exception of a period when the king employed the bourgeoisie against the nobility in order to hold one in check by means of the other. From the very moment, however, in which the bourgeoisie still deprived of political power began to be dangerous because of the development of its economic power the monarchy again turned to the nobility and thereby brought about the revolution of the bourgeois first in England and then in France. The political conditions in France remained unaltered until the economic conditions outgrew them. In politics the noble was everything, the bourgeois nothing. As a social factor the bourgeoisie was of the highest importance while the nobility had abandoned all its social functions and yet pocketed revenues, social services which it did not any longer perform. Even this is not sufficient. Bourgeois society was, as far as the whole matter of production is concerned, tied and bound in the political feudal forms of the Middle Ages, which this production, not only as regards manufacture but as regards handwork also had long transcended amid all the thousandfold gild-privileges and local and provincial tax impositions which had become mere obstacles and fetters to production. The bourgeois revolution put an end to them. But the economic condition did not, as Herr Duehring would imply, forthwith adapt itself to the political circumstances,--that the king and the nobility spent a long time in trying to effect--but it threw all the mouldy old political rubbish aside and shaped new political conditions in which the new economic conditions might come into existence and develop. And it has developed splendidly in this suitable political and legal atmosphere, so splendidly that the bourgeoisie is now not very far from the position which the nobility occupied in 1789. It is becoming more and more not alone a social superfluity but a social impediment. It takes an ever diminishing part in the work of production and becomes more and more, as the noble did, a mere revenue consuming class. And this revolution in its position and the creation of a new class, that of the proletariat, came about without any force-nonsense but by purely economic means. Further more, it has by no means accomplished it by its own willful act. On the other hand it has accomplished itself irresistibly against the wish and intentions of the bourgeoisie. Its own productive forces have taken the management of affairs and are driving modern bourgeois society to the necessity of revolution or destruction. And if the bourgeoisie now appeals to force to ward off the ruin arising from the decrepit economic condition it proves thereby that it suffers from the same error as Herr Duehring, in that it thinks that "political conditions are the distinctive causes of economic condition" and that by the use of the prime factor of mere political force it can manufacture the secondary factor of economic conditions. It thinks that it can shape economic conditions and their inevitable development, and therefore eliminate the economic effects of the steam engine, and the modern industry which has proceeded from it. It thinks that it can abolish the world commerce and the bank credit development of to-day from the universe by means of Krupp guns and Mauser rifles. _III. Force Theory (Continued)._ Let us look at this omnipotent "force" of Herr Duehring a little more closely. Robinson enslaved Friday "sword in hand." How did he get the sword? Robinson's imaginary island never grew swords on trees and some answer to this question is due from Herr Duehring. We might just as well assume that as Robinson became possessed of a sword so, one fine morning, Friday appeared with a loaded revolver in his hand. Thereupon the "force" is entirely reversed. Friday takes command and Robinson must submit. We beg pardon of the reader for returning to the story of Robinson Crusoe, which is more appropriate to the nursery than to an economic discussion, but what can we do about it? We are compelled to pursue Herr Duehring's axiomatic scientific methods and it is not our fault if we always find ourselves in the realms of childishness. The revolver then triumphs over the sword and it should be apparent even to the maker of childish axioms that superior force is no mere act of the will but requires very real preliminary conditions for the carrying out of its purposes, especially mechanical instruments, the more highly developed of which have the superiority over the less highly developed. Furthermore these tools must be produced, whence it appears that the producer of the more highly developed tool of force, commonly called weapon, triumphs over the producer of the less highly developed tool. In a word, the triumph of force depends upon the production of weapons, therefore upon economic power, on economic conditions, on the ability to organize actual material instruments. Force at the present day implies the army and the navy, and the two of them cost, to our sorrow, a heap of money. But force cannot make money, on the contrary it gets away very fast with what is made, and it does not make good use of it as we have just discovered painfully with respect to the French indemnity. Money must therefore finally be provided by means of economic production, force is thus again limited by the economic conditions which shape the means of making and maintaining the instruments of production. But that is not all by any means. Nothing is more dependent upon economic conditions than armies and fleets. Arming, concentration, organization, tactics, strategy, depend before anything else upon the degree of development in production and transportation. In the trade of war the free inventiveness of liberal-minded generals has never worked a revolution, but the discovery of better weapons and the change in military equipment have never failed to do so. The inventiveness of the general under the most favorable conditions finds its limitations in the adaptation of methods of warfare to the new weapons and the new soldiers. At the beginning of the fourteenth century gunpowder was brought from the Arabs to Western Europe and, as every schoolboy knows, entirely revolutionized warfare. The introduction of gunpowder and firearms was however by no means an act of force but an industrial and therefore economic advance. Industry is still industry whether its object in the creation or the destruction of material things. The introduction of firearms not only produced a revolution in the methods of warfare but also in the relations of master and subject. Trade and money are concomitants of gunpowder and firearms and these former imply the bourgeoisie. Firearms from the first were bourgeois instruments of warfare employed on behalf of the rising monarchy against the feudal nobility. The hitherto unassailable stone castles of the nobles submitted to the cannon of the burghers, the fire of their guns pierced the mail armor of the knights. The supremacy of the nobility fell with the heavily armed cavalry of the nobility. With the development of the bourgeoisie, infantry and artillery became more and more the important arms of the service and because of artillery the trade of war had to create another industrial subdivision, to-wit, engineering. The development of firearms proceeded very slowly. Shooting remained clumsy and small arms were ineffective in spite of many individual inventions. Three hundred years elapsed before a musket was produced which sufficed for the arming of a complete infantry. First at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a musket with a bayonet attached, which discharged a stone superseded the pike as an infantry weapon. The infantry of that day was exceedingly unreliable, only kept together by physical force, composed of the basest elements of society, frequently made up of men picked up by the press gang and prisoners of war intermingled with soldiers recruited by the various princes. The only fighting formation in which these soldiers could be made to use the new weapon was the linear tactic, which reached its highest development under Frederick II. The whole infantry of an army was drawn up in a very long hollow square three files deep and advanced in battle array en masse. It was usually permitted to one of the two wings to be a little in advance or a little in the rear. This helpless body could only advance and keep its formation on perfectly level ground and then only at a slow marching time (seventy-five steps to the minute) a change of formation during the fight was impossible and victory or defeat was determined rapidly at a stroke as soon as the infantry came under fire. These helpless lines in the American Revolutionary War came into collision with the rebel troops, which certainly could not drill but could shoot so much the better in that they were fighting for their own interests and therefore did not desert like the enlisted soldiers. These did not, like the English, deploy in massed bodies on the open field, but in rapidly moving bodies of sharpshooters in the thick woods. The organised lines were here powerless and had to contend against invisible and unapproachable foes. The sharpshooters thereupon were brought into existence as a part of the army organization--a new method of fighting arising from a change in the military material. What the American Revolution began the French completed in the military realm. To the drilled troops of the Coalition the French Revolution opposed soldiers who were badly drilled but who constituted large masses, the product of the whole nation. Some means had to be discovered of protecting Paris with these masses. That could not be done without victory in the open field. A mere musketry engagement would not suffice, a form would have to be discovered by which the masses could be utilized and this was found in the column. The column formation allowed slightly drilled troops to keep better order and by means of a better marching speed (one hundred steps to the minute) allowed it to break through the stiff old-fashioned line arrangement. It was possible by this formation to fight in country unsuitable to the line formation, to mass troops in places suitable, to associate scattered sharpshooters with the columns, to keep back, occupy and wear the lines of the enemy, until the decisive movement came when a charge could be made by the troops held in reserve. This new method of combining riflemen and columns and making a complete army corps consisting of all arms, which was fully developed on its tactical and strategic side by Napoleon, was only rendered possible by the change in military material brought about by the French Revolution. There were still two very important technical preliminaries, first the making of light carriages for field pieces which were constructed by Gribevaul by means of which alone the required quick advance was rendered possible, and making the army rifle a more precise weapon by adapting to it some of the features of the hunting rifle. Without these improvements military sharpshooting would have been impossible. The revolutionary method of arming the entire population was subjected to certain limitations and chiefly as regards the excusing of the well to do, and in this form became common to most of the great continental countries. Prussia alone sought by its militia system to make the entire force of its people available for military purposes. Prussia was the first state to provide its entire infantry with the latest weapons, and to place officers in the rear, since between 1830 and 1860 trained officers leading their troops had played an unimportant part. The results of 1866 were largely due to these innovations. In the Franco Prussian War two armies came into contact both of which had their officers in the rear and which both used substantially the same tactics as in the time of the old smooth bore flintlocks. The Prussians however by the introduction of company columns had made an attempt to discover a method of fighting more suitable to the new system of arming. But on the 18th of August at St. Privat the Prussian guard which employed the company column formation lost the most part of five regiments, over a third of its strength in two hours (176 officers and 5114 men) after which the company column form of battle order came in for no less criticism than the battalion column form and the line formation. Every attempt to oppose a solid formation to the fire of the enemy was thereafter abandoned. The battle was thereafter, on the German side, carried on by dense swarms of riflemen into which the columns dissolved under the fire of the enemy spontaneously, without orders from the superior officers, and this was, in fact, the only possible method of advance under fire. The private soldier was again cleverer than his officer; he had discovered the only form of fighting formation, and set himself to follow it in spite of the resistance of his leaders. In the Franco-German war there is a point of departure of entirely different significance from all preceding wars. In the first place the weapons are now so complete that a new revolutionary departure in this respect is no longer possible. When you have cannon with which you can decimate a battalion as far as your eye can make it out, and when you have rifles by which you can aim at individuals, and which take less time to load than to aim, all further advances as far as battle in the field goes are immaterial. The era of progress on this side is substantially closed. In the second place, however, this war has induced all the great states of the continent to adopt the highly developed Prussian militia system and thus to take up a military burden which will ruin them in a few years. The army has become the main object of the state, it has become an object in itself. The people only exist to furnish and maintain soldiers. Militarism dominates and devours Europe. But this militarism has in it the seeds of its own destruction. The competition of the various states with each other necessitates the spending of more money every year on the army, the fleet, weapons of destruction, etc., and thus accelerates financial breakdown. On the other hand, with the increasingly rigid military service, the whole people becomes familiar with the use of military weapons. It therefore becomes able at some time to impose its will upon the dominating military authority. And this time arrives as soon as the mass of the people--country and city workers and farmers--has the will. At this point the army of the classes becomes the army of the masses, the machine refuses to do the work, militarism goes under in the dialectic of its own development. What the bourgeois democrats of 1848 could not accomplish, just because they were bourgeois and not proletarian, namely the endowment of the laboring masses with a will, the content of which corresponded with their class condition, socialism will certainly accomplish. And that means the destruction of militarism and with it of all standing armies absolutely and entirely. That is the moral of our history of modern infantry. The second moral which brings us back to Herr Duehring is that the entire organization and methods of warfare of modern armies and, with them, victory and defeat, are dependent upon material things, that is upon economic conditions, upon soldier material and upon weapon material and therefore upon the quality of a population and upon technique. Only a hunting people like the Americans could rediscover the sharpshooter. Now the Yankees of the old States have, from purely economic causes, become transformed into farmers, industrialists, sailors and merchants, who no longer shoot in the primeval forests and on that account have become all the more successful in the field of speculation where they have developed into colossal appropriators. Only a Revolution like the French which emancipated the burghers and still more the peasants could discover the simultaneously massed armies and free advance by which they overcame the stiff old line formation, the military product of the absolutism against which they fought. And as for the advances in technique as soon as they were applicable and were applied, forthwith changes, nay revolutions, in the methods of warfare were at once made, often against the will of the military leaders as we have seen over and over again to be the case. A diligent subaltern could explain to Herr Duehring how at the present day the making of war is dependent upon the productivity and means of communication of the back country as well as of the theatre of war. In short, economic conditions and means of power are always the things which help "force" to victory, and without them "force" comes to an end. So that he who would reform the art of war according to the axioms of Herr Duehring would only get a flogging for his pains. If we go from the land to the sea we shall discover a complete revolution, even within the last twenty years. The warship of the Crimean War was the wooden three decker, with from sixty to a hundred guns, which depended upon its sailing power and had only a weak auxiliary steam engine. It carried in general thirty-two pounders of about sixty hundred weight and only a few sixty-eight pounders of ninety-five hundred weight. At the end of the war ironclad floating batteries were used, clumsy and slow but impregnable to the artillery of that time. Very soon iron plates were placed on the warships, at first thin, four inches thickness of iron was then considered to constitute a remarkably great thickness. But the progress in artillery soon discounted the thickness of armour, for every addition to the armour there was a new and more powerful artillery which pierced it with the greatest ease. So now we have warships with ten, twelve, fourteen, twenty-four inches of armour plate (the Italians are going to build a warship with armourplate three feet thick) on the one hand and on the other hand guns which reach to a hundred tons and which hurl projectiles amounting to two thousand pounds in weight to unheard of distances. The modern war vessel is a rapid travelling armoured screw steamer of eight to ten thousand tons and of from six to eight thousand horse power provided with turrets and four or six very powerful big guns, together with a ram at the bow below the water line for the purpose of destroying the ship of the enemy. It is a colossal machine in which steam not only furnishes the driving power but also steers, raises the anchor, moves the towers, aims and loads the guns, works the pumps, takes in and lowers the boats, which are frequently steamers, and so forth. And the contest between the armour plate and the projectile is so far from having been settled that a ship is to-day practically obsolete as soon as it has left the ways. The modern warship is not only a product of modern industry but a masterpiece, a product of the dissipation of wealth. The country in which the greater industry has developed the most completely has a monopoly of shipbuilding. All the Turkish, almost all the Russian and the greater part of the German warships are built in England. Armour plate of the best type is made almost exclusively in Germany. Of the three iron foundries which are alone in the position to turn out the heaviest artillery, two of them, Woolwich and Elswick, are in England, the third Krupp's is in Germany. Here it may be seen that the pure political power which Herr Duehring maintains to be the original reason for economic conditions is on the contrary inseparable from economic conditions and that not only the existence but the very management of the tool of force on the sea, the warship, is in itself a branch of modern industry. And that this is so gives nobody more trouble than just that force, the state, which has now to pay more for one ship than it had formerly for a small fleet and sees that these expensive ships are obsolete as soon as they are launched. And the state is just as much upset as Herr Duehring would be over the fact that the controller of the economic force of the ship, the engineer, is a much more important person than the man of pure force, the captain. On the other hand we have no further grounds for annoyance when we see that how as a result of this contest between armour plate and projectile the battle ship has arrived at the point when it is as expensive as it is unfit for fighting and that this contest shows the dialectic law of progress at work in naval warfare according to which militarism like every other historical phenomenon must come to an end as a result of its own development. We can thus see as plain as noonday that it is not true that "the original reason must be sought in pure political force and not in indirect economic force." Quite the contrary. Economic force is the control of the power of the great industry. Political force in naval matters which is dependent upon modern ships of war is by no means "pure force" but is involved in economic force, in the advanced development of metallurgy, in the mastery of historical technique and the possession of rich coal-fields. _IV. Force Theory (Conclusion)._ (Herr Duehring makes an argument which is briefly summarised by Engels as follows and which may be said to involve the notion that the monopolization of land is the cause of human slavery and is the product of force. Engels proceeds): Thesis--The domination of nature by man is the reason of the domination of man by man. Proof--The existence of landlordism on a large scale cannot be carried on anywhere except by means of slavery. Proof of proof--Landlordism on a large scale cannot exist without slavery because the great landlord with his own family without the help of slaves can only cultivate a small piece of his property. Therefore, in order to show that man cannot subdue nature without the subjugation of his fellowman, Herr Duehring transforms "nature" forthwith into "private ownership of large tracts of land" and this indefinite private ownership into the ownership exercised by a great landlord, who naturally cannot cultivate his land without slaves. In the first place the domination of nature and the cultivation of private landed property do not imply the same thing. The domination of nature in industrial affairs is displayed in a manner altogether different from that in agricultural affairs, for these latter are always at the mercy of the climate instead of being supreme over the climate. In the second place if we limit ourselves to the exploitation of private property in land in large amounts we come to the question as to whom the land belongs. We find that in the beginnings of civilised peoples the land was not owned by great landlords but was held in common by tribal and village communities. From India to Ireland the exploitation of land property in large tracts has proceeded from the tribal and village communal ownership which was the original form. Sometimes the land was cultivated in common for the benefit of the common members, sometimes in separate pieces, parcelled by the community to separate families from time to time with wood and willow land retained for communal use. It is pure imagination on the part of Herr Duehring to declare that the exploitation of landed property is responsible for the existence of master and servant. Who is the owner of private landed property in the entire Orient where the land is possessed by the community or the State and the word landlord is not to be found in the language? The Turks first introduced a species of feudalism into the lands which they conquered. The Greeks in heroic times had a classified system of rank which itself bore witness to a long unknown preceding history, but the land was then cultivated by an independent peasantry. The large possessions of the nobles and leaders of the tribes were the exception and had no permanence. Italy was originally cultivated by small peasant farmers; when in the latter days of the Roman Republic the great holdings, the _latifundia_ destroyed the small farmer-holdings, cattle raising was substituted for agriculture, and as Pliny points out Italy was ruined (_latifundia Italiam perdidere_). In the whole of Europe during the Middle Ages small farming was the rule and it is very appropriate to the above discussion to note what tasks these peasants were obliged to perform for the feudal lords. The Frisians, lower Saxons, Flemings and people from the lower Rhine who invaded the lands of the Slavs to the east of the Elbe and cultivated them did so under very favorable terms of rent but by no means under a species of slavery. In North America, by far the greatest amount of the land is cultivated by the labor of free small farmers, while the great landed proprietors of the South with their slaves and extravagant farming methods destroyed the soil until the land ceased to be productive and the cultivation of cotton travelled ever Westward. In Australia and New Zealand the attempts to artificially establish an agrarian aristocracy by the British government have failed. In short, if we except the tropical and sub-tropical colonies, in which the climate is prohibitive of agriculture by Europeans, it seems that the idea of a great land holding class originally dominating nature by means of the employment of slaves and serfs is a pure product of the imagination. Things are quite otherwise. If one goes to the older countries like Italy the land was not waste originally but the transformation of the agricultural land cultivated by the small farmers into cattle-land utterly ruined the country. Latterly, for the first time since the growth in the intensity of the population has increased the value of land and especially since the progress in agriculture has made possible the reclamation of poor lands, the greater landlordism has begun to obtain possession of waste and pasture lands and has stolen the old communal lands of the peasants in this country, as well in England as in Germany. And this has not happened without a counter-poise. For every acre of common land which the great landlords in England converted into arable land they have made at least three acres of arable land in Scotland into shooting preserves and mere places for the hunting of wild animals. We have to consider the declaration of Herr Duehring to the effect that the cultivation of large parcels of land has not come into existence otherwise than through great landlords and their slaves, a declaration which we have seen implies an entire ignorance of history. We have now to see how far at different epochs the cultivation of the soil has been carried on by means of slaves, as in the palmy days of Greece, or by means of tenants, like the socage tenure, since the Middle Ages, and then what has been the social function of the greater landlordism at different periods of history. If Herr Duehring means that the mastery of man by men as a preliminary to the mastery of nature by man is a universal law, that our present economic condition, the stage attained to-day in agriculture and industry, is the result of a society which has developed itself in class antagonisms, in mastership on the one hand and in slavery on the other hand, he says something which is a mere commonplace since the publication of the Communist Manifesto. We have thus to explain the existence of these classes and when Herr Duehring has no further explanation to give than "force" we are right back at the beginning again. The mere fact that the subject and the plundered have always been more numerous and that therefore the actual force has rested with them is enough to show the stupidity of the entire force theory. We have therefore still to explain the origin of master and subject classes. They have come into being in two ways. When men originally sprang from the lower animals they came into history, still half-wild animals, elementary, with no power over the forces of nature, still unacquainted with their own powers, as poor as the animals and hardly more productive than they. There prevailed a certain equality in the conditions of life and as far as the heads of families were concerned an equality of social condition--there was at least an absence of those class distinctions which developed later in the agricultural communities. In such a social state there were certain common interests which overrode the interests of the individual in certain respects, the settlement of disputes, the repression of individuals who exceeded their rights, the looking after the water supply, particularly in hot countries, and finally under the conditions of life in the primeval forests, religious functions. We find analogous communal duties exercised by communal officials at all periods as well in the oldest German mark communities as in India to-day. These are contemporaneous with a sort of beginning of authority and state power in a rudimentary form. The productive forces develop; a denser population produces common and then conflicting interests between members of the society, the grouping of which in accordance with a new division of labor causes the creation of new organs for the purpose of maintaining the society on the one hand and repressing the antagonistic interests on the other. These organs which act for the entire group have different forms according to the varying circumstances of the individual groups, partly through the natural growth of a hereditary leadership in a world where everything proceeds naturally and partly through a growing need owing to the development of conflicts with other groups. How these social functions which were subsidiary to society came in the course of time to triumph over society; how the original servant, under favorable conditions became transformed into the master, how, according to circumstances, this master made his appearance as Oriental despot or satrap, as Greek chieftain, as Celtic clan chief, etc., how far he relied on force for this transformation and finally how the individual leaders associated themselves into a dominant class we have here no opportunity to consider. We can only state that real social duties lay at the base of the political domination and that the political supremacy has only existed as long as the politically supreme fulfilled these social functions. How many despotisms have risen and fallen among the Persians and Hindoos, and everybody knows quite well that the public management of the irrigation was the prime necessity of agriculture in those places. The "educated" English were the first to observe this among the Hindoos; they let the canals and locks fall into disuse and they have now discovered by the regular recurrence of famine that they have neglected the only opportunity to make their rule at least as righteous as that of their predecessors. But there is another form of class distinction besides the one described. The natural division of labor in the agricultural families permitted at a certain point of prosperity the introduction of foreign labor power. This was particularly the case in countries where the old common ownership of the soil had disappeared or where at least the old system of common cultivation had become supplanted by the cultivation of separate plots by individual families. Production had so far developed that the human labor force was able to produce more than was necessary for the support of the individual laborer. The time was ripe for the employment of more labor-power, labor-power had become a value. But the limitations of the communal system did not afford any attainable surplus labor power. Yet war did give such an opportunity for getting surplus labor power and war was as old as the simultaneous existence of groups of communal groups in close juxtaposition. Up to this time men did not take prisoners of war, they killed them right off, and, at a still earlier date, they ate them. But at the stage of economic development of which we speak they had a value and they were not only allowed to live but were set to work. So force instead of being the master of economic conditions was pressed into the service of those conditions. Slavery was discovered. It soon became the dominant form of production among all people who had developed beyond the tribal communal stage and as a matter of fact was at the end one of the main reasons for the break up of the communal system. Slavery first made the division of labor between agriculture and industry completely possible and brought into existence the flower of the old world, Greece. Without slavery there would have been no Grecian state, no Grecian art and science and no Roman Empire. There would have been no modern Europe without the foundation of Greece and Rome. We must not forget that our entire economic, political and intellectual development has its foundation in a state of society in which slavery was regarded universally as necessary. In this sense we may say that without the ancient slavery there would have been no modern socialism. It is very easy to make preachments about slavery and to express our moral indignation at such a scandalous institution. Unfortunately the whole significance of this is that it merely says that these old institutions do not correspond with our present conditions and the sentiments engendered by these conditions. We do not however in this way explain how these institutions came into existence, why they came into existence and the role which they have played in history. And when we enter upon this matter we are obliged to say in spite of all contradiction and accusations of heresy that the introduction of slavery under the conditions of that time was a great step forwards. It is a fact that man sprang from the lower animals and has had to employ barbaric and really bestial methods in order to rid himself of barbarism. The old communal system where it persisted built up the most elementary form of the state, Oriental despotism, from India to Russia. Only where it has been dissolved has the people progressed and the next economic step lay in the development of production by means of slave labor. It is evident that as long as human labor was so little productive that it afforded only a small surplus over the necessary means of life, the development of the productive forces, the institution of commerce, the development of the State and of law and the foundation of art and science were only possible through an increase in the subdivision of labor. This implied the broad division between the mass of the workers and the directors of labor, trade, state, state-business, and later the occupation of a few privileged persons in art and science. The simplest and most natural form of this subdivision of labor was slavery. In the conditions of the ancient, and especially the Greek world, the advance to a society founded on class distinction could only be for the slaves, the prisoners of war from whom the majority of slaves were recruited instead of being murdered as they would have been at an earlier date or instead of being eaten as they would have been at a stage still earlier. Here we add that all the historical antitheses of robbers and robbed of master and subject classes find their explanation in the relatively undeveloped productivity of human labor. As long as the actual working people claim that they have no time left at the close of their necessary labors to attend to the common business of society--the organization of labor, the business of the government, the administration of justice, art, science, etc., just so long will distinct classes exist which are free from actual labor to carry on these functions. Naturally these classes do not hesitate to lean more and more and more upon the shoulders of the working class for their own advantage. The development of the great industry with its enormous increase in the forces of production for the first time permitted of the subdivision of labor in all social grades and thus allowed of the reduction of the time necessary for labor so that enough leisure remains for all to take part in the actual public business--theoretical as well as practical. So that now for the first time the dominant and exploiting classes have become superfluous and even an obstacle to social progress, and so now for the first time they will be unceremoniously brushed aside in spite of their "pure force." When Herr Duehring then shows his scorn of the Greek civilisation because it was founded on slavery he might just as reasonably reproach the Greeks for not having steam engines and electric telegraphs. And when he explains that our modern wage slavery is only a somewhat transformed and ameliorated inheritance of chattel slavery and not to be explained from itself (that is from the economic laws of modern society) it only signifies that wage slavery, like chattel slavery, is a form of class domination and class subjection as every child knows, or it is false. So we might with the same right maintain that wage slavery is only a milder form of cannibalism, the established original method of disposing of conquered enemies. The role which force has played in history with respect to economic development is therefore clear. In the first place, all political force rests originally on an economic social function, and developed in proportion as the old tribal communistic society was dissolved and transformed into various grades of private producers, and the administrators of the communal functions therefore became more widely separated from the rest of the community. In the second place, when political force, independent of society, has transformed itself from the position of servant to that of master, it may work in two directions. In the first place, it may work sensibly and in the direction of general economic development. In this case there is no quarrel between the two, economic development is advanced. Or it may work against it and then with few exceptions it succumbs to the economic development. These few exceptions consist of individual cases of tyranny where barbaric conquerors have overcome a country and have destroyed the economic forces which they did not know how to handle. Thus the Christians in Spain destroyed the irrigation works upon which the highly developed agriculture and horticulture of that country depended. Every conquest by a more barbarous people interferes with economic development and destroys numerous productive forces. But in the great majority of instances of the permanent conquest of a country, the more barbaric conquerors are obliged to adopt the higher economic conditions into which their conquest has brought them. They are assimilated into the conquered people and are compelled to adopt their language. But where--apart from instances of conquest--the inner political forces of a country comes in conflict with its economic development, which at the present day is practically true of all political force, the battle has always ended with the destruction of the political force. Without exception and inexorably, economic development has attained its goal. The last most striking example of which we have already called attention to, the French Revolution. If, as according to Herr Duehring's teachings, the economic development and the economic conditions of a certain country are altogether dependent upon political forces there is no explanation of the fact that Frederick William IV after 1848 could not succeed, in spite of his army, in attaching the guilds of the Middle Ages and other romantic tomfooleries to the steam-engines, railroads and the newly developing greater industry, or why the Czar who is still much more powerful could not only not pay his debts but could not collect his forces without drawing on the credit of the economic conditions of Western Europe. According to Herr Duehring force is the absolute evil. The first act of force is to him the first fall into sin. His whole conception is a preachment over the infection of all history up to the present time with the original sin. He talks about the disgraceful falsifying of all natural and social laws by the invention of the devil, force. That force plays another role in history, a revolutionary role, that it is in the words of Marx, the midwife of the old society which is pregnant with the new, that it is the tool by the means of which social progress is forwarded, and foolish, dead political forms destroyed,--of that Herr Duehring has no word to say, only with sighs and groans does he admit the possibility that force may be necessary for the overthrow of a thievish economic system. He simply declares that every application of force demoralizes him who uses it. And this in spite of the moral and intellectual uplift which has followed every victorious revolution. He says this in Germany, too, where a powerful and necessary uprising would at least have the advantage of abolishing the slavish snobbery of the national mind which has prevailed since the humiliation of the Thirty Years War. And this foolish and senseless sort of preaching is set up in opposition to the most revolutionary party known to history. _V. Theory of Value._ It is now about a hundred years since a book appeared in Leipsic which by the beginning of this century had gone through thirty-one editions and which was distributed throughout the towns and the country districts by officials, preachers and humanitarians, of all sorts, and which was universally adopted in the schools as a reader. This book was called, "The Children's Friend" by Rochow. It had the object of teaching the children of the peasant and laboring classes their vocation in life and their duties to their social and political superiors, and making them satisfied with their lot in life, with black bread and potatoes, compulsory servitude, low wages, fatherly beatings and other similar agreeable things. In pursuit of this end, the youth in town and country was informed what a wise provision of nature it was that man was obliged to get his food and enjoyment by means of his labor, and how fortunate the peasant and handworker ought to feel that they were able to spice their food with hard labor while the spendthrift and the picture suffered the pangs of indigestion or lack of appetite. These commonplaces which old Rochow thought good enough for the peasant children of his day have been elevated into the "absolute fundamental" of the newest political economy by Herr Duehring. Value is defined as follows by Herr Duehring "Value is what economic goods and activities will fetch in exchange." What they will fetch is shown "by the price or some other equivalent, wages for example." In other words Value is price. Or not to do Herr Duehring an injury and to show the absolute absurdity of his definition in his own language, "Value is prices." On page 19 he says "Value and its prices expressed in money" and he also affirms that the same value has very different prices and therefore has different values. If Hegel had not died long ago he would hang himself out of pure jealousy, for, with all his theology, he could not have produced this value which has as many different values as it has prices. One would have to possess the confidence of Herr Duehring to begin a new and more profound treatment of political economy with the declaration that there is no difference between value and price except that one is expressed in terms of money and the other is not. (After gentle raillery of Duehring's statements Engels proceeds.) The actual, practical value of an object according to Herr Duehring consists in two things, first in the amount of human labor contained in it and secondly in a forcibly imposed tax. In other words value as it exists to-day is a monopoly price. If all wares have this monopoly price, as according to this theory, only two things are possible. Either every buyer, as buyer, loses what he made as seller, for prices have only changed their names, they are really the same, everything remains as it was and the much talked of exchange value is merely imaginary, or the imposed cost represents real values, values produced by the working value-making class, but taken by the monopolising class, and this sum of values is simply unpaid labor. In this latter case we come, in spite of the force theory, and the compulsory taxation theory and the special exchange value theory back again to the Marxian theory of value. The fixing of the value of a commodity by wages which is frequently confused by Adam Smith with the fixing of value by the time expended in labor has been, since the time of Ricardo, denounced by political economists and only to-day persists in popular economics. It is now the sycophants of the existing capitalistic system who declare that value is fixed by wages and therefore declare the profits of the capitalists to be higher kind of wages, wages of abstinence, in that the capitalist has not dissipated his capital, wages of superintendence, premiums on risks, etc. Herr Duehring only differs from them in that he calls profits robbery. In other words Herr Duehring founds his socialism on the worst teachings of the popular economists. His popular economics and his socialism stand or fall together. It is clear that what a workman accomplishes and what he costs are different matters from what a machine makes and what it costs. The value which a workman makes in a day of twelve hours has nothing in common with the value of the means of life which he consumes in this working day and the periods of rest in connection with it. There may be one, three, four or seven hours of labor time incorporated in these means of livelihood according to the stage of the productivity of labor. Let us take seven hours as the necessary time for the production of them. Then Herr Duehring and the vulgar economists declare that the product of twelve hours labor has the value of the product of seven hours labor or in other words twelve is equal to seven. To make the matter more explicit, a peasant produces say twenty hectolitres of wheat in a year. During this time he consumes a sum of values which may be expressed by fifteen hectolitres. Then the twenty hectolitres have the same value as the fifteen in the same market under identical conditions. In other words 20 equals 15. And this is called political economy! The entire development of human society from the position of savagery began from the day when the labor of a family resulted in the production of more than was necessity for its support, from the day when a part of the labor was no longer expended on mere means of living but was transformed into means of production. A surplus of labor product over and above the cost of the maintenance of labor, and the creation and increase of a social production and reserve fund out of this surplus was and is the foundation of all social, political and intellectual development. In history up to the present time this fund has been the property of a certain superior class which has, with its possession, also the political mastery and the spiritual supremacy. The approaching social revolution will make this social production and reserve fund that is the entire mass of raw material, instruments of production, and means of life for the first time really social property, in that it will put an end to its monopolisation by the superior class and make it the common possession of the entire society. It is one of two things. Suppose value shows itself in the cost of maintenance of the necessary labor, that is in present society in wages. If such is the case every worker gets the value of his product in wages and the robbery of the working class by the capitalistic class is an impossibility. Let it be granted that the cost of maintaining a worker in a given society is three marks. Then the daily product of the worker is, according to the popular economist, of the value of three marks. Now let us consider that the capitalist who employs this worker takes a profit on this product and sells it for four marks. Other capitalists do the same thing. But thereupon the worker can no longer maintain himself with three marks a day, it will cost him four marks. Other conditions remaining the same, wages expressed in terms of the means of life must remain the same and wages expressed in gold will rise therefore from three to four marks daily. What the capitalists gain in the form of profit on the working class they have to return in the form of wages. So we are just where we were at the beginning. If wages signify value, no plunder of the working class by the capitalist is possible. But the creation of a surplus is impossible if, according to our hypothesis the workers consume as much as they produce. And since the capitalists produce no value it is impossible to see how they can live. And if such a surplus of production over consumption does exist, if such a production and reserve fund exists in the hands of the capitalists there is no other explanation possible than that the working class uses only enough values for its own maintenance and turns over the rest of the goods which it produces to the capitalist. On the other hand, if this production and reserve fund actually exists in the hands of the capitalist class, if it has really come into existence through the piling up of profits, (we will leave rent out of the question for the present); it necessarily comes from the accumulated profits of the capitalist class taken from the working class over and above the sums paid by the capitalist class to the working class in the form of wages. Value therefore does not depend upon wages, but upon amount of labor. The working class renders to the capitalist class a greater amount of value than it receives in wages and thus the profit of capital as of all other forms of the appropriation of unpaid for products of labor is to be explained on the simple ground of the surplus value discovered by Marx. _VI. Simple and Compound Labor._ (The argument of Duehring against which Engels here directs his efforts may be best summed up in Duehring's concluding words "Marx in his utterances on value cannot escape the lurking ghost of highly skilled labor. The prevalent notion of the intellectual classes has been a hindrance to him in this matter, for according to this idea it is an enormity to reckon the labor time of a barrow pusher and an architect as economic equivalents.") Engels thereupon says "the passage in the works of Marx which caused this outbreak on the part of Duehring is very short." Marx is examining the question as to the basis of the value of commodities and answers it by the statement that it is the amount of human labor contained in them. "This" he goes on "is the expression of that simple labor force which belongs to the average human being without any special development. Skilled labor is a power or rather a multiple of simple labor, so that a small amount of skilled labor is equivalent to a larger amount of unskilled labor. Practice shows that this reduction to the terms of unskilled labor takes place. A commodity may be the product of skilled labor, its value may be equivalent to a product of unskilled labor skilled labor. The proportion in which different forms of labor are reduced to their general standard in unskilled labor is established by a social process going on behind the backs of the producers, and appears to them merely customary." Here Marx is only dealing with the value of commodities, that is of objects produced and exchanged by private producers in a society consisting of private producers producing for their own profit. He is therefore not concerned here with "absolute value" whatever that may be but only with the value which is realised in a given form of society. This value under the given social conditions is shaped and measured by the human labor incorporated in the commodities and this human labor shows itself as the expression of simple human energy. But every piece of work is not merely an expression of simple labor force. Very many labor products require the expenditure of more or less time, money, trouble, and acquired skill or knowledge. Do these kinds of compound labor show at the same period of time the same commodity values as simple labor, are they the expression of merely simple labor force? Evidently not. The product of an hour of compound labor is a commodity of higher, double or three times the value of a product of an hour of simple labor. The value of the product of compound labor can in this comparison be expressed through the measure of simple labor; and this reduction of compound labor is carried on by means of a social progress behind the back of the producer, by means of which can here be established according to the theory of value but not explained. The thing which Marx states here is a simple fact which happens every day before our eyes in the present capitalistic society. (After some invective and satire hurled at Duehring Engels proceeds:) Let us examine with regard to equality of value a little more closely. All labor time is of equal value, that of the barrow pusher and that of the architect. Therefore labor time and consequently labor itself has a value. But labor is the creator of all values. It is the only thing which gives the original products of nature a value in the economic sense. Value in itself is nothing but the expression in a given object of necessary, social, human labor. One might just as well speak of and fix a value to labor as speak of the value of value, of the weight, not of a specific body, but of gravity itself. Herr Duehring calls people like Owen, St. Simon and Fourier, social alchemists. When he invents a value for labor time, that is for labor, he shows that he is far below these same alchemists. For Socialism, which will emancipate human labor force from its place as a commodity, the understanding that labor has no value and can have none is a matter of the greatest importance. With an understanding of it, all attempts made by Herr Duehring by means of his crude worker-socialism (Arbeitersozialismus) to regulate the division of the means of existence, as a kind of higher wages, fall to the ground. From it there follows the broader view, since it is controlled by purely economic motives, that distribution regulates itself in the interests of production, and production is advanced in the greatest degree by a method of distribution which permits all the social departments to develop, maintain, and express their capacities to the fullest possible extent. To the ideas of the intellectuals which have come into Herr Duehring's possession, it must always seem to be an enormity that it will abolish barrow pushing and architecture simultaneously as professions, and that the man who has given half an hour to architecture will also push the cart a little until his work as architect is again in demand. It would be a pretty sort of socialism which perpetuated the business of barrow-pushing. If the equality of value of labor time has the significance that workers produce equal products in equal periods of time it is evidently false, unless an average is first taken. Of two workmen at the same branch of industry the value of the product of their labor time will differ according to the intensity of labor and their respective ability. No scheme of economic equality, at least on our planet, can remedy this unfortunate state of affairs. What then is left of the equality of all and every sort of labor? Nothing but high sounding phrases which have no economic value, nothing but the evident inability of Herr Duehring to distinguish between the fixing of value by labor and the fixing of value by the wages of labor, only the ukase, which is the foundation of the new social economy, that wages shall be equal for equal amounts of labor time. Really the old French communists and Weitling had much better grounds for their equality of wages theories. How then do we solve the whole weighty question of the higher wages of compound labor? In a society of private producers, private individuals or their families have to bear the cost of creating intellectual workers. An intellectual slave always commanded a better price, an intellectual wage worker gets higher wages. In an organized socialist society, society bears the cost and to it therefore belong the fruits, the greater value produced by intellectual labor. The laborer himself has no further claim. Whence it follows that there are many difficulties connected with the beloved claim of the worker for the full product of his toil. _VII. Capital and Surplus Value._ ("Marx does not have the usual economic idea of capital that it is means of production already produced, but he seeks to endow it with a special dialectic history in the metamorphosis of a historical idea. Capital is expressed in gold, it creates an historical period which has its beginning in the sixteenth century and the establishment of a world-market. Any keen economic analysis is impossible with such a notion. Such barren conceptions which are half historical and half logical destroys the possibility of any proper discrimination with respect to the matter." These remarks of Duehring are answered as follows by Engels:) According to Marx, then, capital manifested itself as gold at the beginning of the sixteenth century. It is just as if anybody were to say that specie had expressed itself as cattle for three thousand years, because formerly cattle had performed the gold functions along with others. Only Herr Duehring could be guilty of such a crude and distorted expression. Marx in his analysis of the economic forms in which the process of the circulation of commodities takes places simply declares gold to be the last form. "This last product of the circulation of commodities is the form in which capital first appears. Historically capital comes with the possession of property in the form of money, as hoards of money, merchant-capital, and usury-capital.... This history is going on every day before our eyes. New capital comes on the scene, that is the market,--the market for commodities, the labor market or the money market, simply as money, money which is transformed into capital by a definite process." Again Marx states the fact. It is useless for you to struggle against it, Herr Duehring, Capital must express itself in gold. Marx further examines the process by which money is transformed into capital and discovers that the form in which money circulates as capital is the inversion of the form in which it circulates as the universal equivalent. The individual owner of commodities sells to buy, he sells what he does not need, and buys with the money thus obtained what he does need. The budding capitalist buys on the contrary what he does not want himself, he buys to sell, and to sell for a higher money value than he put into the business, he makes a money profit, and this profit Marx calls surplus value. What is the origin of this surplus value? Either the buyer buys goods below their value or the seller sells them above their value. In both cases gain and loss would balance one another, since every buyer is also a seller. It can also not arise from extortion, for extortion might enrich one at the expense of the other but it could not increase the total sum of money neither could it increase the amount of commodities in circulation. "The entire capitalist class of a country cannot overreach itself." Now, we find that the totality of the capitalist class in every country grows richer before our very eyes, by the process of selling dearer than it bought, by appropriating surplus value. So we are just at the beginning of the discussion. Where does this surplus value come from? This question has to be answered on purely economic grounds to the exclusion of all cheating, and all invasion of force. How is it possible to keep selling dearer than one buys under the assumption that equal values are always exchanged for equal values? The solution of this problem is the crowning glory of the work of Marx. He sheds clear daylight in economic places where the earlier socialists no less than the bourgeois economists have groped in utter darkness. From his work dates the origin of scientific socialism. The solution is as follows. The power of increase in money which is transformed into capital cannot proceed from the money neither does it depend upon trade, since the money only realizes the price of the commodities and this price is, since we hold that only equal values are exchanged, no different from its value. On the same grounds the power of increase cannot come from the exchange of commodities. The change therefore depends upon the commodities which are exchanged, but not upon their value, since they are bought and sold at their value. It arises from their consumption-value as such; that is the change must arise out of the consumption of commodities. "In order for a commodity to derive value from consumption our possessor of money must be fortunate enough to discover a commodity whose use-value has the peculiar property of being a source of value, whose consumption would imply the expenditure of labor and thus be value-producing. And the possessor of money finds such a specific commodity on the market in the shape of labor-power." If, as we have seen, labor has no value this is by no means the case with labor-force. This has a value, as it is a commodity, and, as a matter of fact, it is a commodity to-day and this value is fixed "like that of every other commodity by the amount of labor time necessary for the production and reproduction of this specific commodity." It is fixed by the labor time which is necessary for the procuring of the means of livelihood required to maintain the laborer in a condition to continue laboring and reproduce his kind. Let us suppose that these means of livelihood represent, taking one day with another, six hours labor-time a day. Our budding capitalist who buys labor force for his business, that is hires a laborer, pays this laborer the full daily value of his labor force, if he pays him a sum of money which represents six hours of labor. If the laborer has only expended six hours in the service of the capitalist he has got the full return of his expenditure, the day's value of his labor-force has been paid. But money could not be transformed into capital in this fashion, it would have produced no surplus value. The buyer of labor-power has quite another view of the nature of his business. Since only six hours' work is necessary to maintain the laborer for twenty-four hours, it does not follow that the laborer cannot work twelve hours out of the twenty-four. The value of labor force and its realization in the labor-process are two different magnitudes. The owner of money pays out a day's value of labor-force but there belongs to him its use for the day, the whole day's labor. That the value which it produces in the course of a day is double its own value for the day is fortunate for the buyer but according to the laws of exchange no injustice to the seller. The laborer then costs the owner of money according to our calculation the value product of six hours' labor, but he gives him daily the value product of twelve hours' labor. The difference to the credit of the owner of the money is six hours' unpaid extra labor, an unpaid for surplus product, in which the labor of six hours is incorporated. The trick is done. Surplus value is produced, money is transformed into capital. While Marx, in this way, proved how surplus value exists and the only possible way in which it can exist, under the laws which regulate the exchange of commodities he also exposed the present capitalistic methods of production and the methods of appropriation resting upon them and unveiled the secret upon which the whole arrangement of the society of to-day depends. There is a necessary presupposition to this origin and birth of capital. "For the transformation of money into capital the money owner must first find free laborers in the market, free in the double sense that as a free person the laborer can use his labor power as a commodity, that he has no other wares to sell, that he is unemployed and that he is free of everything necessary to the realisation of his labor power." But this condition of a possessor of money or commodities on the one hand, and, on the other, of the possessor of nothing, except his own labor force, is no natural condition of affairs nor is it common to all periods of history; "it is clearly the result of a historical development, the product of a whole series of older forms of social production." And this free laborer first strikes our notice as a historical phenomenon at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century as a result of the dissolution of feudal society. Thereupon with the creation of the world trade and the world market which dates from the same period the foundation was laid for the mass of moveable wealth to become more and more transformed into capital and for the capitalistic system, directed more and more to the production of surplus value, to become the dominant system. _VIII. Capital and Surplus Value (Conclusion)._ (Duehring having said that the term surplus value merely signifies in ordinary language, rent, profit and interest, Engels still further explains) We have already seen that Marx does not say that the surplus product of the industrial capitalist, of which he is the first owner, is always exchanged for its value, as Herr Duehring points out. Marx plainly says that trade profit only constitutes a portion of the surplus value and under the foregoing conditions this is only possible if the factory proprietor sells his product under value to the trader and thus parts with a portion of the booty. Marx' contention rationally put is How is surplus value transformed into its subordinate forms, profit, interest, trade-profits, ground rents etc.? and this question Marx undertakes to answer in the third volume of Capital. But since Herr Duehring cannot wait long enough for the second volume to appear he has in the meantime to take a close look at the first volume. He thereupon reads that the immanent laws of capitalistic production, the course of the development of capitalism, realise themselves as the necessary laws of competition and thus are brought to the consciousness of the individual capitalists as dominant motives. That therefore a scientific analysis of competition is only possible when the real nature of capital is grasped, just as the apparent movement of heavenly bodies can only be understood by apprehending their real movement, and not merely those movements which are perceptible to the senses. So Marx shows how a certain law, the law of value, appears under given conditions in the competitive system and makes evident its impelling force. Herr Duehring might have understood that competition plays an important role in the distribution of surplus values, and, after sufficient thought, might have grasped at least the outlines of the transformation of surplus value into its subordinate forms from the examples given in the first volume. Herr Duehring finds competition to be the stumbling block in the way of his comprehension. He cannot understand how competing entrepreneurs can manage to sell the entire product of labor including the surplus product for so much more than the natural cost of production. Here again that "force" of his which, in his estimation, is the very evil thing, comes into play. According to Marx, the surplus product does not have any cost of production, it is the part of the product which costs the capitalist nothing. If the entrepreneurs were to sell the surplus product at its real cost of production they would have to give it away. Is it not a fact that the competing entrepreneurs really sell the product of labor every day at its natural cost of production? According to Herr Duehring the cost of production consists "in the expenditure of labor or force and therefore in the last analysis must be measured by cost of maintenance," and therefore, in present day society, is to be estimated at the cost of the raw material, instruments of labor and actual wages paid in distinction to taxation, profit and compulsory raising of prices. It is well recognised that in modern society the competing entrepreneurs do not sell their wares at the natural cost of production but calculate on a profit and generally get it. This question which Herr Duehring fancies will level the walls of Marxism as the blast of Joshua did those of Jericho is a question which the economic doctrines of Duehring have to meet also. "Capitalistic property," he says, "has no practical value and only realises itself because it implies the exercise of indirect power over man. The testimony to the existence of this force is capitalistic profit, and the amount of this latter depends upon the extent and intensity of the power of 'force.'... Capitalistic profit is a political and social institution which manifests itself very strongly as competition. The entrepreneurs take their stand on this relation and each one of them maintains his position. A certain amount of profit is a necessity of the dominant economic condition." We know quite well that the entrepreneurs are in a position to sell the products of labor at a cost above the natural cost of production. Surely Herr Duehring does not think so meanly of his public as to hold the position that profit on capital stands above competition as the King of Prussia used to stand above the law. The proceeding by which the King of Prussia reached his position of superiority to the law we all know, the methods by which profit has come to be mightier than competition is just what Herr Duehring has to explain and what he stubbornly refuses to explain. It is no argument when he says that the entrepreneurs trade from this position and each one of them maintains his own place. If we take him at his word, how is it possible for a number of people each to be able to trade only on certain terms and yet each one of them to keep his position? The gildmen of the Middle Ages and the French nobility of 1789 operated from a decidedly superior position, and yet they came to grief. The Prussian army at Jena occupied an advantageous position and yet it had to abandon it and surrender piecemeal. It is not enough to tell us that a certain measure of profit is a necessary concomitant of domination in the economic sphere, it is necessary to tell us why. We do not get a step further by the statement of Duehring. "Capitalistic superiority is inseparable from landlordism. A portion of the peasantry is transformed in the cities into factory hands and in the final analysis into factory material. Profit appears as another form of rent." This is a mere assertion and only repeats what should have been explained and proved. We can come to no other conclusion, then, except that Herr Duehring does not like to tackle the answer to his own question how the capitalists are in a position to sell products of labor for more than the natural cost of production, in short Herr Duehring shirks an explanation of profit. He takes the only path open to him, a short cut, and simply declares that profit is the product of "force." This has been stated by Herr Duehring in his economic theory under the statement "force distributes." That is all very well; but the question still persists what does force distribute? There must be something to distribute otherwise force cannot distribute it. The profit which the competing capitalists pocket is something actual and tangible. Force may take but it cannot create. And if Herr Duehring still obstinately persists in his statement that "force" takes the profits for the entrepreneurs he is as silent as the grave as to whence it takes it. Where there is nothing the Kaiser, as all other "force," ceases to operate. From nothing comes nothing, particularly nothing in the shape of profits. If capitalistic private property has not practical actuality, and cannot realize itself, except by the exercise of indirect force over men, the question still persists, in the first place, how did the capitalist government come into possession of this "force" and in the second place how has this force been transformed into profits, and in the third place where does it get these profits? (The remainder of this section is merely further elaboration of this idea with more caustic satire at the expense of the antagonist of Engels.) _IX. Natural Economic Laws--Ground Rent._ (In this chapter Engels proceeds to examine what Herr Duehring called the "fundamental laws" of his theory of economic science.) LAW NO. I. "The productivity of economic instruments, natural resources and human force are capable of being increased by invention and discovery." We are amazed. Herr Duehring treats us like that joke of Moliere on the parvenu who was informed that he had talked prose all his life without being aware of it. That inventions and discoveries increase the productive force of labor in many cases (but in many cases not, as the patent records everywhere show) we have been for a long time aware. LAW NO. II. "Division of Labor. The formation of branches of work and the splitting up of activities increases the productivity of labor." As far as this is true it is a mere commonplace since the time of Adam Smith. How far it is true will appear in the third division of this work. LAW NO. III. "Distance and transportation are the most important causes of the advance or hindrance of the organization of productive forces." LAW NO. IV. "The industrial state has incomparably greater capacity for population than the agricultural state." LAW NO. V. "In economics only material interests count." These are the natural laws on which Herr Duehring founds his new economics. He remains true to his philosophic methods. (Hereupon Engels proceeds to the discussion of Duehring's opinions on ground-rent.) Herr Duehring defines ground-rent as "that income which the landowner as such derives from ground and land." The economic idea of ground-rent, which Herr Duehring undertakes to explain to us, is transformed right away into the juristic concept so that we are no further than at first. He compares the leasing of a piece of land with the loan of capital to an entrepreneur but finds, as is so often the case, that the comparison will not hold. Then he says "to pursue the analogy the profit which remains to the lessee after the payment of ground-rent, answers to that portion of the profit on capital which remains to the entrepreneur who operates with borrowed capital after the interest on the borrowed capital has been paid." (To these arguments Engels replies:) The theory of ground-rent is a special English economic matter, and this of necessity because only in England does a mode of production exist by which rent is separated from profit and interest. In England there prevail the greater landlordism and the greater agriculture. The individual landlords lease their lands in great farms to lessees who are able to cultivate them in a capitalistic fashion and do not, like our peasants, work with their own hands, but employ laborers just like capitalistic entrepreneurs. We have here then the three classes of bourgeois society, and the income which each receives--the private landlord in the form of ground-rent, the capitalist in that of profit and the laborer in the form of wages. No English economist has ever regarded the profit of the lessee as Herr Duehring does and still less would he have to explain that the profit of the lessee is what it indubitably is, profit on capital. In England there is no use to discuss this question for the question as well as its answer are obvious from the facts and, since the time of Adam Smith, there has been no doubt at all about it. The case in which the lessee cultivates his own land, as the rule in Germany, for the profit of the ground landlord does not make any difference in this respect. If the landlord cultivates the land for his own profit and furnishes the capital he puts the profit on capital in his pocket as well as the ground-rent for it cannot be otherwise under existing conditions. And if Herr Duehring thinks that rent is something different when the lessee cultivates the land for himself it is not so and only shows his ignorance of the matter. For example:-- "The revenue derived from labor is called wages; that derived from stock by the person who manages or employs it is called profit. The revenue which proceeds from land is called rent and belongs altogether to the landlord. The revenue of the farmer is derived partly from his labor and partly from his stock.... When those three different sorts of labor belong to different persons they are readily distinguished, but when they belong to the same they are sometimes confounded with one another at least in common language. A gentleman who farms part of his own estate, after paying the expenses of cultivation, should gain both the rent of the landlord and the profit of the farmer. He is apt to denominate, however, his whole gain, profit, and thus confounds rent with profit, at least in common language. The greater part of our North American and West Indian planters are in this situation. They farm, the greater part of them, their own estates, and accordingly we seldom hear of the rent of a plantation but frequently of its profit.... A gardener who cultivates his own garden with his own hands, unites in his own person the three different characters of landlord, farmer, and laborer. His produce, therefore, should pay him the rent of the first, the profit of the second and the wages of the third. The whole, however, is commonly considered as the wages of his labor. Both rent and profit are in this case confounded with wages." This passage is in the sixth chapter of the first book of Adam Smith. The case of the landholder who tills his own land has been examined a hundred years ago and the doubts which perplex Herr Duehring so much are caused entirely by his own ignorance. _X. With Respect to the "Critical History"._ This which is the concluding portion of the Second Division of the work and which deals with Herr Duehring's estimates of economic writers is omitted as being of too limited and polemic a character for general interest. PART III CHAPTER IX SOCIALISM The first two chapters of this Division, which deal respectively with the historical and the theoretical sides of Socialism, are omitted. They have been already translated. The well known pamphlet "Socialism, Utopian and Scientific" contains both of them. The second has also been translated by R.C.K. Ensor and published in his "Modern Socialism." _Production._ For him (Herr Duehring) socialism is by no means a necessary product of economic development, and, still less, a development of the purely economic conditions of the present day. He knows better than that. His socialism is a final truth of the last instance, it is "the natural system of society." He finds its root in a "universal system of justice." And if he cannot take notice of the existing conditions which are the product of the sinful history of man up to the present time in order to improve them that is so much the worse, we must look upon it as a misfortune for the true principles of justice. Herr Duehring forms his socialism as he does everything else on the basis of his two famous men. Instead of these two marionnetes, as heretofore, playing the game of lord and slave they are converted to that of equality and justice and the Duehring socialism is already founded. Clearly in the view of Herr Duehring the periodic industrial crises have by no means the same significance as we must attribute to them. According to Herr Duehring they are only occasional departures from normality and furnish a splendid motive for the institution of a properly regulated system. (Duehring attributes crises to underconsumption; to which Engels replies:) It is unfortunately true that the underconsumption of the masses and the limitation of the expenditures of the great majority to the necessities of life and the reproduction thereof is not by any means a new phenomenon. It has existed as long as the appropriating and the plundered classes have existed. Even in those historic periods where the condition of the masses was exceptionally prosperous, as in England in the fifteenth century, there was underconsumption; men were very far from having their entire yearly product at their own disposal. Although underconsumption has been a constant historical phenomenon for a thousand years, the general break down in trade, due to overproduction, has appeared, for the first time, within the last fifteen years. Yet the vulgar political economy of Herr Duehring attempts to explain the new phenomenon, not by means of the new factor of overproduction, but by means of the exceedingly old factor of underconsumption. It is just as if one were to try and explain a change in the relation of two mathematical quantities, one of which is constant and the other variable, not from the fact that the variable quantity has varied, but that the constant has remained constant. The underconsumption of the masses is a necessary condition of all forms of society in which robbers and robbed exist, and therefore of the capitalist system. But it is the capitalist system which first brings about the economic crisis. Underconsumption is a prerequisite of crises and plays a very conspicuous role in them, but it has no more to do with the economic crisis of the present day than it had with the former absence of such crises. * * * * * In every society in which production has developed naturally, to which class that of to-day belongs, the producers do not master the means of production but the means of production dominate the producers. In such a society every new leverage of production is converted into a new means of subduing the producers beneath the means of production. This was the cause of that instrument of production, the mightiest up to the time of the introduction of the greater industry, the division of labor. The first great division of labor, the separation of the city and country, doomed the inhabitants of the rural districts to a thousand years of stupidity and the people of the towns to be the slaves of their own handiwork. It denied the chance of intellectual development to the one and of physical development to the other. If the peasant had his land and the town dweller his handiwork, it is just as true to say that the land had the peasant and the handiwork the townsman. As far as there was a division of labor there was also a division of man. The rise of one single fact slaughtered all former intellectual and bodily capacities. This annexation of man grew in proportion as the division of labor developed and reached its culmination in manufacture. Manufacture distributes production into its separate operations, makes one of these operations the function of the individual worker, and imprisons the worker for his whole life to a given function and to a given tool. "It forces the workingman to become an abnormality, since it makes him concentrate his efforts on detail at the expense of the sacrifice of a world of forces and capacities.... The individual himself becomes subdivided, he is transformed into the automatic tool of the division of labor" (Marx). This tool in many cases finds its perfection in the literal crippling of the worker, body and soul. The machinery of the greater industry degrades the workingman from a machine to being the mere appendage of a machine. "From the lifelong specialization of looking after a machine there comes the lifelong specialization of serving a part of a machine. The abuse of machinery transforms the worker from childhood into a portion of a part of a machine" (Marx). And not only the workingman but the classes which indirectly or directly plunder the workingman are also themselves involved in the division of labor and become the slaves of their own tools. The spiritually-barren bourgeois is the slave of his own capital and his own profit-getting, the jurist is dominated by his ossified notions of justice which rule him as a self-contained force; the "refined classes" are dominated by the local limitations and prejudices, by their own physical and spiritual astigmatism, by their specialised education and their lifelong bondage to this specialty, even though the specialty be doing nothing. The Utopists were thoroughly aware of the effects of the division of labor, of the effect on the one hand of crippling the worker and on the other of crippling the work, the unavoidable result of the lifelong, monotonous repetition of one and the same act. The rise of the antagonism between town and country was regarded by Fourier as well as Owen as the beginning of the rise of the old division of labor. According to both of them the population should be divided into groups of from six hundred to three thousand each, distributed over the country. Each group has an enormous house in the midst of its territory and the housekeeping is done in common. Fourier occasionally speaks of towns but these only consist of four or five of the big communal houses in close proximity to each other. By both of them the work of society is divided into agriculture and industry. According to Fourier, handwork and machine manufacture were both included in the latter while Owen made the great industry play the most important part, and the steam engine and machinery performed the work of the community. But both in agriculture and manufacture the two writers named gave the greatest possible variety of occupation to individuals, and accordingly the education of the young provided for the most universal technical training. Both of them think that there will be a universal development of the human race as a result of a universal practical participation in practical work, and that work will recover its old attractiveness, which has been lost as a result of the division of labor, by virtue of this variety and the shortening of the time expended upon it. * * * * * Just as far as society obtains the domination of the social means of production in order to organize them socially it abolishes the existing servitude of man to his own means of production. Society cannot be free without every member of society being free. The old methods of production must be completely revolutionized and the old form of the division of labor must be done away with above all. In its place an organization of production will have to be made in which, on the one hand, no single individual will be able to shift his share in productive labor, in providing the essentials of human existence, upon another, and on the other hand productive labor instead of being a means of slavery will be a means towards human freedom, in that it offers an opportunity to everyone to develop his full powers, physical and intellectual, in every direction and to exercise them so that it makes a pleasure out of a burden. This is no longer at the present time a phantasy, a pious wish. Owing to the present development of the powers of production, production has proceeded far enough, provided that society endows itself with the possession of the social forces and abolishes the checks and impediments, as well as the waste of products and productive forces, which springs from the capitalistic methods, to make a general reduction of labor time, to an amount, small as compared with present day ideas. The abolition of the old method of division of labor is not an advance which would not be possible except at the expense of the productivity of labor, quite otherwise. It is a condition of production which has come about spontaneously through the great industry. "The machine industry does away with the necessity of constantly distributing groups of workmen at the different machines by keeping the worker constantly at the same task. Since the total product of the factory, proceeds not from the worker but from the machine, a continual changing about of individuals could not exist, without an interruption of the labor-process. Finally the speed with which work at the machine is learnt even by children does away with the necessity of training a distinct class of workmen exclusively as machine laborers." But while the capitalistic method of use of machinery does away with the old limited particularity of labor, and, in spite of the fact, that technique is rendered superfluous, machinery itself rebels against the anachronism. The technical basis of the greater industry is revolutionary. "Through machinery, chemical processes and other methods, the functions of the working class and the social labor process are revolutionized along with the technical basis of production. The division of labor is also revolutionized and masses of capital and labor are hurled incontinently from one branch of industry to another. The nature of the greater industry demands mobility of labor, a fluidity of functions and a complete adaptibility on the part of the laborers. We have seen how this absolute contradiction shows itself in the continual sacrifice of the working class, the most complete waste of labor force, and the dominance of social anarchy. But if the mobility of labor now appears to be a law of nature beyond human control which realizes itself, in spite of all obstacles, it also becomes a matter of life and death for the greater industry, owing to its catastrophic character, to recognise the mobility of labor and hence the greatest possible adaptibility of the working class, as a universal law of social production, and to accommodate circumstances to its normal development. It becomes a question of life and death for the greater industry to keep an enormous number of people on the edge of starvation always in reserve, in order that they may be able to be placed at the disposal of the needs of capital as these vary." While the greater industry has taught us how to transform molecular movement into mass movement in order to fulfill technical needs, it has, in the same measure, freed industrial production from local limits. Water power was local, steam power is free. If water power belongs to the country, steam power is by no means limited to the town. It is capitalistic practice which causes concentration into cities and which makes manufacturing towns of manufacturing villages. But thereby at the same time it undermines the essentials of its own motive force. The first requisite of the steam engine and a prime requisite of all branches of motive power is a sufficient quantity of pure water. The factory town transforms all water into evil smelling sewage. Therefore, in proportion as the concentration into cities is the foundation of capitalistic production, each individual capitalist tries to get away from the towns which have been necessarily produced to the motive forces of the country. This process may be individually observed in the textile districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire. The greater industry creates new towns in the course of its progress from the town to the country. The same phenomenon was to be observed in the districts of the metal industry where somewhat different causes produce identical results. The capitalistic character of the greater industry is responsible for this aimless blundering and these new contradictions. Only a society which organizes its industrial forces according to a single great harmonious plan, can permit industry to settle itself in such a manner throughout the land as to secure its own development and the retention and development of the most important elements of production. The abolition of the antagonism between town and country is now not only possible, it has become an absolute necessity for industrial production itself. It has also become a necessity for agricultural production, and is, above all, essential to the maintenance of the public health. Only through the amalgamation of city and country can the present poisoning of air, water, and localities, be put at an end and the waste filth of the cities be used for the cultivation of vegetation rather than the spreading of disease. The capitalistic industry has made itself relatively independent of local limitations for its raw materials. The textile industry works with imported raw materials for the most part. Spanish iron ores are worked up in England and Germany, and South American copper ores in England. Every coal field supplies a yearly increasing number of places beyond its own confines. The whole coast of Europe has steam engines driven by English and, occasionally German and Belgian, coal. A society freed from the limits of capitalistic production could make still further advances. While it makes a sort of all round skilled producers, who are acquainted with the scientific requirements of general industrial production, and by whom every new succession of branches of production is completely developed from beginning to end, it creates a new productive force which undertakes the transportation of a superabundance of raw material or fuel. The abolition of the separation between town and country is no Utopia, it is an essential condition of the proportionate distribution of the greater industry throughout the country. Civilization has left us a number of large cities, as an inheritance, which it will take much time and trouble to abolish. But they must and will be done away with, however much time and trouble it may take. Whatever fate may be in store for the German nation, Bismarck may have the proud consciousness that his dearest wish, the downfall of the great city, will be fulfilled. And now we can see the childishness of Herr Duehring's notion that society can obtain possession of the means of production without revolutionizing the old methods of production from the ground up and above all doing away with the old form of the division of labor. * * * * * It is easy to see that the revolutionary elements which will abolish the old division of labor together with the separation of town and country and will revolutionize production as a whole are already in embryo in the methods of production of the modern great industry and their unfolding is only hindered by the capitalistic methods of production of to-day. But to see all this, it is necessary to have a broader outlook than the mere limitations of the Prussian Code, the country where schnapps and beet sugar are the staple industries, and you have to study industrial crises by way of the book-trade. (This is a sneer at one of Duehring's illustrations: Ed.) One has to understand the history and the present manifestations of the greater industry particularly in that land where it has its home and where it has had its classic development. It must not be imagined that modern scientific socialism can be done away with by the specific Prussian Socialism of Herr Duehring. _Distribution._ We have seen that Duehring's economics depend upon the statement that the capitalistic method of production is good enough and can be kept up, but that the capitalistic method of distribution is bad and must be done away with. We now discover that the "sociality" of Herr Duehring is merely the imaginary putting into force of this statement. In fact it appears that Herr Duehring has nothing to declare respecting the method of production as such in a capitalistic society, and that he will maintain the old division of labor in all its essential features. So he has hardly a word to say about production in his social state. Production is too dangerous a ground for him to tread on. On the other hand, in his estimation, distribution is not bound up with production but can be settled by an act of the will. * * * * * Let us consider all the ideas of Herr Duehring as realized. Let us then assume that the society pays each of its members for his work a sum in gold in which are incorporated six hours of labor, say twelve marks. Let us now imagine that prices and values are in full accord, so that under our hypothesis only the cost of raw materials, the wear and tear of machinery, the use of tools and wages are comprehended. A society then of a hundred working members produces daily goods of the value of 1200 marks, and in a year of three hundred working days three hundred and sixty thousand marks and expends the entire amount on its working members and thus each member has his share of three thousand six hundred marks a year. At the end of the year and at the end of a hundred years the society is no better off than it was at the beginning. Accumulation is entirely overlooked. Worse than that, since accumulation is a social necessity and the hoarding of gold is an elementary form of accumulation, the organization of a society on this basis will necessitate private accumulation on the part of its members and consequently the destruction of the society. How can this difficulty with respect to the economic society be overcome? Refuge might be taken in a forcible raising of proceeds and the produce of the society sold at four hundred and eighty thousand marks instead of for three hundred and sixty thousand. But all other economic societies would be in the same fix and each would have to make it out of the other with the result that they would only be extorting tribute from their own members. Or it might find an easy way out by paying for six hours work less than the product of six hours work, eight marks a day instead of twelve, prices remaining the same. It accomplishes in this way plainly and openly what formerly it did secretly, it adopts the Marx surplus value notion to the amount of one hundred and twenty thousand marks a year, since it pays the members under the value of their work and reckons the goods which they are only able to buy by its means at their full value. His economic society therefore can only get a reserve fund by adopting the truck system. Therefore one of two things is certain, either the economic society practices "equal work for equal work" and then it can get no funds for the maintenance and development of industry except through private sources, or it does create such a fund and ceases to practice "equal work for equal work." This is the fact about the exchange in the economic society, but what about the form of it? According to Herr Duehring in his economic society money does not function as money between the members of the society. It serves merely as a labor certificate; it corresponds with the expression of Marx "only the share of the individual of the common labor, and his individual claim to the consumption of a certain portion of the common product" and in this function, says Herr Duehring, it is just as little money as a theater ticket. In short it functions in exchange like Owens "labor-time money." As far as the mere calculating between amount due for production and the amount to be expended in consumption of the individual member of the society is concerned, paper markers or gold would serve the purpose equally well. But it would not do for other purposes as will appear. If the specie does not function as money among the members of a given society, but as a mark of labor, it functions still less as money in the exchange between different economic societies. According to the theory of Herr Duehring, therefore, specie as money is entirely superfluous. In fact it would be mere bookkeeping to set off the products of equal labor against the products of equal labor, according to the natural measure of labor-time, taking the labor-hour as a unit--if the labor hours are first translated into terms of money. Exchange is in reality only simple exchange; all surpluses are easily and simply equalized by means of bills of exchange on other societies. But when one community has a deficit in its dealings with another community it can only make it up by increasing its labor output, if it is not to suffer disgrace in the eyes of other communities. The reader will notice here that this is no attempt at social reconstruction. We are simply taking the notions of Herr Duehring and showing their unavoidable conclusions. Therefore neither in exchange among the individual members of a society nor in exchange between different economic societies can gold realize itself as money. Yet Herr Duehring says that the function of money is carried out even in his "sociality." We must therefore discover another field of activity for this money function. Herr Duehring predicates a quantitatively equal consumption. But he cannot compel that. On the other hand, he prides himself that in his community one can do with his money as he will. He cannot prevent one man, therefore, from saving money and another from not making his wages sufficient. This is indisputable, for he recognises the common property of the family in inheritance and talks about the duty of parents to provide for their children. Thereby his quantitatively equal consumption comes a cropper. The young unmarried man can get along splendidly on twelve marks a day, but the widower with eight young children has a hard time of it. On the other hand the community, since it takes money in payment without ceremony, lets money be acquired otherwise than by individual labor when the opportunity offers. _Non olet._ It does not know whence it comes. But now arises the chance for money which has up to now played the role of a standard of work performed to operate as real money. The opportunities and the motives arise for saving money on the one hand and squandering it on the other. The needy borrows from the saver. The borrowed money taken by the community in payment for means of living becomes again, what it is in present day society, the social incarnation of human labor, the real measure of labor, the universal means of circulation. All the laws in the world are powerless against it, just as powerless as they are against the multiplication table or the chemical composition of water. And the saver of money is in a position to demand interest so that specie functioning as money again becomes a breeder of interest. So far as we have only dealt with the operation of specie inside of Herr Duehring's economic society. But beyond the confines of that society the world goes peacefully along its old way. Gold and silver remain in the world-market, as world money, as the universal means of purchase and payment, as the absolute social incorporation of wealth. And in this ownership of the precious metals the individual societies find a new motive for saving, for getting rich, for increasing their supply,--the motive of becoming free and independent of the communities beyond their borders and of converting into money their piled up wealth in the world market. The profit hunters transform themselves into traders in the means of circulation, into bankers, into controllers of the means of production, though these may remain forever as the property of the economic and trading communities in name. Therewith the savers and profit mongers who have been converted into bankers become the lords of the economic and trading communes. The "sociality" of Herr Duehring is very distinct from the "cloudy ideas" of the earlier socialists. It has no other end than the resurrection of the high finance. The only value with which political economy is acquainted is the value of commodities. What are commodities? Products produced in a society composed of more or less separated private producers and therefore private products. But these private products first become commodities when they are made not for private use but for the use of someone else, that is for social use. They are converted into objects of social use by means of exchange. The private producers are therefore in a social relationship, they constitute a society. Their private products, while the private products of each individual, are at the same time, unconsciously and indeed involuntarily, social products also. Wherein does the social character of these private products consist? Plainly in two properties, in the first place because they satisfy human needs but have no use-value for the producers, and in the second place that, while they are the products of individual private producers, they are at the same time plainly the products of human labor, of human labor in general. In so far as they have a use-value for other people they can be exchanged; in so far as they all possess the common quality of human labor in general, they can be mutually compared in exchange by means of this labor. In two similar products under identical social conditions there may be unequal amounts of private labor, but equal amounts of human labor in general. An unskillful smith might take as long to make five horseshoes as it would take a skillful smith to make ten. But society does not fix the price according to accidental lack of skill of the one, it recognises only human labor in general, the human labor of the ordinary normal skilled smith. Each of the five horseshoes then made by the first does not have any more value than each of the other ten which were made in the same time as the five. Only so far as is socially necessary does private labor comprehend human labor in general. Therefore I maintain that a commodity has a certain value, 1st. because it is a socially useful product, 2nd. because it is produced by a private individual for private profit, 3d. because while it is a product of private labor, it is, at the same time, unconsciously and involuntarily a social product and exchanges socially according to a definite social standard, 4th. this standard is not expressed in terms of labor, in so many hours, but in another commodity. If, therefore, I say that this clock is worth this piece of cloth and that they are both worth fifty marks, I say that in the clock, the cloth and the gold there is an equal amount of social labor. I also affirm that the amounts of social labor time in them are socially measured and found to be equal, not directly and absolutely however, as one measures labor time in hours or days, but in a round about fashion, relatively, by means of exchange. I cannot therefore express this certain amount of labor-time in labor hours, since their number is not known to me, but I can express it relatively in terms of another commodity, which has the same amount of labor time incorporated in it. The clock is worth as much as the piece of cloth. But while the production of commodities and the exchange of commodities compel the society resting upon them to take this roundabout course, they are impelled to a shortening of the process. They separate from the mass of commodities one sovereign commodity, in which the value of all other commodities can be universally expressed, a commodity which is the complete incarnation of social labor, and, against which, all other commodities may be set in direct comparison--gold. Gold already germinates in the idea of value, it is only developed value. But since the commodity value exists in gold also, itself being a commodity, a new factor arises in the society which produces and exchanges commodities, a factor with new social functions and operations. We can now examine this a little more closely. The economy of the production of commodities is by no means the only science which has to reckon with relatively known factors. Even in physics, we do not know how many single gas molecules there are in a given volume of gas, pressure and temperature being given. But we know, as far as Boyle's law is correct, that a given volume of that gas has as many molecules as a similar volume of another selected gas at the same pressure and the same temperature. We can therefore compare the different volumes of different gases with respect to their molecular content, and, if we take one litre of gas at 0° Fahrenheit as the unit we can refer the molecular content of each to this standard. In chemistry the absolute atomic weights of separate elements is unknown to us. But we know them relatively when we know their mutual conditions. And just as the production of commodities and their economy has a relative expression for the unknown quantities of labor existing in commodities, since it compares these commodities according to the relative amounts of labor which they contain, so chemistry makes a relative expression for the amounts of atomic weights unknown to it, since it compares the separate elements according to their atomic weights and expresses the weight of the one as multiples or factors of the other. And just as the production of commodities elevates gold to the position of an absolute commodity, to the universal equivalent for other commodities, the measure of values, so chemistry elevates hydrogen to the position of a chemical gold-commodity, since it fixes the atomic weight of hydrogen at 1 and reduces the atomic weights of all the other elements in terms of hydrogen and expresses them as multiples of its atomic weight. The production of commodities is by no means the exclusive form of social production. In the ancient Indian communities and the family communities of the Southern Slavs products were not transformed into commodities. The members of the community were directly engaged in social production, the work was distributed as custom and circumstances required as were the products as they came into the realm of consumption. Direct social production and direct social consumption exclude all exchange of commodities and hence the transformation of products into commodities (at least within the confines of the society) and therewith their transformation into value. As soon as society comes into direct possession of the means of production and undertakes production as a society, the labor of each, however distinctive its special useful character may be, becomes direct social labor. The amount of social labor existing in a product does not then have to be established in a roundabout way, daily experience shows the average amount of human labor necessary. Society can easily determine how many hours of labor there are in a steam engine, how many in a hectolitre of wheat of last harvest, how many in a hundred square yards of cloth of a given quality. It cannot therefore happen that the quantities of labor embodied in commodities, which will then be absolutely and directly known, will be expressed in terms of a measure which is only relative, fluctuating, inadequate and absolute, in a third product, and not in their natural, adequate and absolute measure, time. This would not happen any more than in chemistry. One would express the atomic weights indirectly by means of hydrogen if it were possible to express them absolutely in their adequate measure, that is in real weight, that is in billions or quadrillions of grammes. Under the foregoing conditions, then, society ascribes no value to products. The simple fact that a hundred yards of cloth have taken a thousand hours in their production need not be expressed in any distorted or foolish fashion, they would be worth a thousand labor hours. Society would then know how much labor each object of use required for its creation. It would have to direct the plan of production in accordance with the means of production to which labor-force also belongs. The advantageous effects of the different objects of use and their relations to each other and the creation of the necessary means of labor would be the sole determinants of the plan of production. People make things very easily without any interference on the part of the much discussed "value." The value idea is the most universal and the most comprehensive expression of the economic conditions of the production of commodities. In the idea of value there is not only the germ of gold but also of those more highly developed forms of commodity production and exchange. Since value is the expression of the social labor incorporated in individual products, there lies the possibility of a difference between this and the individual labor embodied in the same product. This difference becomes very apparent to a private producer who abides by an old fashioned method of production while the social method of production has taken a step forward. It then appears that the sum of all the private manufacturers of a given commodity produce an amount in excess of the social needs. Then, since the value of a commodity is expressed only in terms of other commodities and can only be realised in exchange with them, the possibility arises that either exchange will cease or that the commodity will not realise its full value. Finally, the specific commodity labor-force finds its value like that of other wares in the social labor time necessary for its production. In the value form of the product there is already in embryo the entire capitalistic form of production, the antagonism between the capitalists and the wage-workers, the industrial reserve army, the crisis. The capitalistic system will be abolished by the restoration of true value (just as Catholicism will be abolished by the restoration of the true Pope), or by the restoration of a society in which the producer finally dominates his product, by the doing away of an economic category which is the most comprehensive expression of the slavery of the producer to his own product. When the society producing commodities has developed the inherent value form of the commodities, as such, to the gold-form, various germs of value hitherto hidden thereupon begin to sprout. The next substantial step is the generalising of commodity forms. Gold makes objects directly produced for use into commodities by driving them into exchange. Thereupon the commodity and the gold smite the community which is engaged in social production, break one social tie after another and finally dissolve the society into a mass of private producers. Gold establishes, as in India, individual cultivation of the land in the place of communal cultivation, then it destroys the system of regular distribution of communal lands among individuals and makes ownership final, and lastly it leads to the division of the communal wood land. Whatever other causes arising from the industrial development may work along with it, gold is always the most powerful instrument for the destruction of the communal society. _The State, the Family, and Education._ (Herr Duehring says "In the free society there will be no religion, since, in all its degrees, it tends to destroy the originality of the child, in that it places something above nature or behind it, which may be affected by means of works or prayers" also "a properly constituted socialist state will do away with all the paraphernalia of spiritualistic magic, and all the actual forms of religion." Engels proceeds--) Religion will be forbidden. Now, religion is nothing but the fantastic reflection in men's minds of the external forces which dominate their every day existence, a reflection in which earthly forces take the form of the super-natural. In the beginning of history it is the forces of nature which first produce this reflection and in the course of development of different peoples give rise to manifold and various personification. This first process is capable of being traced, at least as far as the Indo-European peoples are concerned, by comparative mythology, to its source in the Indian Vedas and its advance can be shown among the Indians, Greeks, Persian, Romans, and Germans, and, as far as the material is available, also among the Celts, Lithuanians, and Slavs. But, besides the forces of nature, the social forces dominated men by their apparent necessity, for these forces were, in reality, just as strange and unaccountable to men as were the forces of nature. The imaginary forms in which, at first, only the secret forces of nature were reflected, became possessed of social attributes, became the representatives of historical forces. By a still further development the natural and social attributes of a number of gods were transformed to one all-powerful god, who is, on his part, only the reflection of man in the abstract. So arose monotheism, which was historically the latest product of the Greek vulgar philosophy, and found its impersonation in the Hebrew exclusively national god, Jahve. In this convenient, handy and adaptible form religion can continue to exist as the direct, that is, the emotional form of the relations of man to the dominating outside, natural, and social forces, as long as man is under the power of these forces. But we have seen over and over again in modern bourgeois society that man is dominated by the conditions which he has himself created and that he is controlled by the same means of production which he himself has made. The fundamental facts which give rise to the reflection by religion therefore still persist and with them the reflection persists also. And just because bourgeois economy has a certain insight into the relations of the original causes of this phenomenon, it does not alter it a particle. Bourgeois economy can neither prevent crises, on the whole, nor can it stop the greed of the individual capitalists, their disgrace and bankruptcy, nor can it prevent the individual laborers from suffering deprivation of employment and poverty. Man proposes and God (to wit, the outside force of the capitalistic method of production) disposes. Mere knowledge even though it be broader and deeper than bourgeois economics is of no avail to upset the social forces of the master of society. That is fundamentally a social act. Let us suppose that this act is accomplished and society in all its grades freed from the slavery to the means of production which it has made but which now dominate it as an outside force. Let us suppose that man no longer merely proposes but that he also disposes. Under such conditions the last vestiges of the external force which now dominates man are destroyed, that force which is now reflected in religion. Therewith, the religious reflection itself is destroyed owing to the simple fact that there is nothing more to reflect. But Herr Duehring cannot wait until religion dies a natural death. He treats it after a radical fashion. He out Bismarcks Bismarck, he makes severe "May laws" not only against Catholicism but against all religion. He sets his gendarmes of the future on religion and thereby gives it a longer lease of life by martyrdom. Wherever we look we find that Duehring's socialism has the Prussian brand. After Herr Duehring has blithely got rid of religion he says "Man can now, since he is dependent upon himself and nature alone, intelligently direct the social forces in every way which open to him the course of things and his own existence." Let us look for a little while at that course of things to which the self-reliant human can give direction. The first in the course of things by which man becomes self-reliant is being born. Then during the time of his immaturity his education is in the hands of his mother. "This period may, as in the old Roman law, reach to the age of puberty, that is to about fourteen years of age." Only where the older boys do not respect the authority of the mother does the father's assistance play a part and the public method of education robs this of all harm. With puberty the boy comes under the natural care of his father, where this is exercised in a truly fatherly manner, in other cases society takes charge of his education. As Herr Duehring has already maintained the position that it is possible to convert the capitalistic methods of production into social methods without disturbing the mode of production itself, so he here seems to think that one can separate the modern bourgeois family from its entire economic foundations without any change in the whole form of the family. This form is so permanent in his estimation that he thinks of the old Roman jurisprudence, in an "improved" form, as the model of the family for ever, and he does not conceive of the family otherwise than as a permanent unit. The Utopists have the superiority over Herr Duehring here. In their estimation a really free mutual condition would arise in all the family relations as a result of the free association and the public ownership of the instruments of production together with the institution of a system of public education. And Marx has shown furthermore in his "Capital" how "the greater industry, which takes widows, young persons and children of both sexes from the home, and employs them in organized social productive processes, lays the foundation for a higher form of the family and better conditions for people of both sexes." LANDMARKS OF SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM APPENDIX The foregoing pages will have given the reader some idea of the infinite care which Engels expended in order to keep abreast of the chief scientific discoveries of his times. He was as painstaking as a genius. On the other hand, his modesty was almost absurd, for he never ventured to claim anything for himself, and such ability as was displayed in the laying of the economic political foundations of the socialist movement was invariably credited by him to the superior talent and comprehension of Marx. There is no question that the work constitutes a most effective reply to the arguments of Duehring, with whom, poor fellow, we need no longer trouble ourselves. It constitutes, moreover, a very formidable answer to all those who seek for a justification of the socialist movement in those abstract conceptions which the average man finds it so hard to escape. In fact, so removed is the point of view of the writer of the foregoing pages from that of the man in the street that it is doubtful whether it is possible for more than a comparatively few students thoroughly to grasp the significance of the dialectic and to apply it in a satisfactory and effective fashion. Still, there is no question that this understanding of the socialist movement, as a movement, is absolutely required of all who can be considered as taking an intelligent and useful attitude with regard to social and political questions. The possession of this key gave the two founders of the modern socialist movement such a comprehension of the tendencies of modern civilization as enabled them to make those economic and political predictions which have been so completely fulfilled. There is little need to call attention to the fact that much of Engels' argument is now antiquated in face of the growth of science and the almost incredible development of mechanical invention and the material progress consequent upon it. It could not have been otherwise. The wonders of Engels' day are the commonplaces of our existence. The machines, which he considered so wonderful and so change-compelling have already been "scrapped" for new machines of greater power and capacity for production. The remark that the battleship had in his time arrived at a point where it was as expensive as it was unfit for fighting sounds almost ridiculous in face of the tremendous development of the engines of naval warfare since he wrote, and the invention and use of the submarine. Still it must be remembered that there has been no really great test of ships of war since Engels' day and that the expense of modern navies is worrying the governments to distraction. Only a few weeks ago Lord Charles Beresford refused to accept the command of the Channel Squadron unless provided with an equipment the expense of which seemed almost intolerable to Great Britain, wealthy as that country is and dependent as she is on the maintenance of the sea power. Great armies are still on the increase and the expense of their support combined with the unsatisfactoriness of their performances is by no means reassuring to those who have the responsibility for national military organization. The Boer War proved the unreliability of the armed forces of one power, at all events, and the performances of great masses of trained men in the Russo-Japanese conflict have not inspired any very great respect for the effectiveness of these colossal and expensive fighting machines. Together with the breakdown of armies and navies, as a material fact, there has grown up a strong prejudice against their employment, and the anti-war attitude of the international proletariat has been supplemented and strengthened by the distinct growth of an international peace spirit in certain sections of the middle class. So that in spite of superficial appearances it does not seem to be so very unlikely that the action of the dialectic will be manifest in the destruction of modern armaments, at least as far as the greater nations are concerned, though there is little doubt that military forces will still be maintained for the purpose of bullying and overawing the smaller and weaker peoples. Mention has already been made of the fact that Engels never really divested himself of the old "forty-eight" spirit. The notion that a revolution would break out somewhere in the near future finds a curiously fixed, if unexpressed, lodgment in his mind. One cannot help feeling that he expected things to mature earlier than they have done and that he anticipated that changes in the mode of production and the development of industry would have made a stronger impression upon the mind of the proletarian than history shows to have been the case. This latent, but still persistent, notion is in curious contrast to the almost detached way in which, particularly in his later years, he views the course of economic and political events. He never really in fact divested his mind of the notion of the imminence of social revolution, for in his 1892 preface to "The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844" he says, "I have taken care not to strike out of the text the many prophecies, amongst others that of an imminent social revolution in England, which my youthful ardor induced me to venture upon." His youthful ardor seems never to have really abated in that respect. The dreams of boyhood seem to have haunted him and the old fighter stirred uneasily in his study chair at the echoes of past conflicts in which he also heard the bugles of the coming fight. To those who have watched the development of Engels' thought, as shown in his works, this philosophic, unemotional way of looking at things proves the effect of experience and age upon the fighter. He started with a heart inflamed with the wrongs of the suffering, as the damning pages of the work above cited show; he ends with a calm and dispassionate enquiry (apart from what he considered to be the exigencies of controversy) into the fundamental causes of economic and social progress. The burning enthusiasm and white-hot indignation had died down in him ere he reached the stage of the Duehring controversy. He finds that although not everything that is real is reasonable, to use the phrase against which he has fulminated in "Feuerbach," nevertheless every step in human progress has been an essential step and it is impossible to hurry things. To the proletarian he looks of course as the next great actor in the drama of social development. But the proletarian, while his destiny is indubitable, is still not a being apart from existing conditions. He exists in the conditions, is in fact part of the conditions, and, while at war with them, takes on the color of his surroundings. The facts of life have driven him to an unconscious rejection of old faiths and old philosophies but they have not forced him to take up the sword against the actual realities of modern life, to which he appears, in fact, to submit himself with a humility which is at least provoking to the eager and enthusiastic revolutionist. What wonders of economic organization, what triumphs in mechanical production have been achieved since Engels gave the last revision to this book in 1894 we in the United States at least have cause to know. The entire structure of production has been modified from top to bottom, the old individual doctrine has fallen victim to its dialectic, and concentrated industry and collective capital now rise supreme over the ruins of that individualism which gave them birth and to which they owe their existence. In the name of the individual the individual is denied. The courts hand down decisions in the name of individual liberty which have for their result the dethroning and extermination of the individual. The conglomeration of individual states which was considered the very foundation of the American government, and the outward and visible sign of collective sovereignty is already in its death throes. The dialectic of the United States is in course of development and there comes about in consequence the birth of the United Imperial Republic, a republic which is so only in name, which is, in fact, as little of a republic as were those oligarchies of the Middle Ages whose very existence defamed the name of republic. The old things have passed away, all things have become new. Still there is one factor which has not really appreciably changed, one factor which is always confronted by the same necessity, the necessity of maintaining its existence. This factor is the working class. The dialectic is at work with the working class also, and that which according to the individualistic notion consisted of isolated units seeking their daily bread in meek conformity with the laws of contract and property will disappear into that great collective organized body of labor which spurns the theories of contract and thereby makes itself no longer subject but master. AUSTIN LEWIS. * * * * * +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Typographical errors corrected in the text: | | | | Page 40: socalled replaced with so-called | | Page 85: "each single each single" replaced with | | "each single" | | Page 89: "self contained" replaced with "self-contained" | | Page 102: "any any" replaced with "any" | | Page 126: Boyles replaced with Boyle's | | Page 128: prevailng replaced with prevailing | | Page 134: stpuid replaced with stupid | | Page 140: excepiton replaced with exception | | Page 154: inaccurrate replaced with inaccurate | | Page 171: "serve it is a midwife" replaced with | | "serve it as a midwife" | | Page 173: "a grain or barley" replaced with | | "a grain of barley" | | Page 175: discusion replaced with discussion | | Page 181: unberable replaced with unbearable | | Page 186: framers replaced with farmers | | Page 192: "so so splendidly" replaced with | | "so splendidly" | | Page 192: bourgeoise replaced with bourgeoisie | | Page 193: maunfacture replaced with manufacture | | Page 194: inventivness replaced with inventiveness | | Page 205: "these peasant" replaced with "these peasants" | | Page 217: impossiblity replaced with impossibility | | Page 219: devolpment replaced with development | | Page 231: "on the first place" replaced with | | "in the first place" | | Page 233: entrepeneurs replaced with entrepreneurs | | Page 250: communties replaced with communities | | Page 251: horeshoes replaced with horseshoes | | Page 257: himsel replaced with himself | | Page 265: develment replaced with development | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------+ 
32644	----	ESSAYS on the Materialistic Conception of History by ANTONIO LABRIOLA _Professor in the University of Rome_ translated by CHARLES H. KERR Chicago CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY CO-OPERATIVE COPYRIGHT 1908 BY CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY CHICAGO JOHN F. HIGGINS PRINTER AND BINDER [Illustration: Logo] 376-382 MONROE STREET CHICAGO, ILLINOIS TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. On the tenth of March, 1896, the same year that the last despairing revolt of the small producer against capitalism in America was to end in the overwhelming defeat of Bryan, an Italian scholar published in the city of Rome the remarkable work which is now for the first time offered to American readers. To publish this book in America at that time would have been an impossibility. The American socialist movement was then hardly more than an association of immigrants who had brought their socialism with them from Europe. Today it numbers at least half a million adherents, and its platform is an embodiment of the ideas first adequately stated in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, and now first adequately explained and elaborated in this remarkable work of Labriola. The central and fundamental proposition of socialism is not any scheme for reconstructing society, on a cut-and-dried programme, nor again is it any particular mathematical formula showing to what extent the laborer is robbed by the present system of the fruits of his labor; it is precisely this Historical Materialism, which Labriola has so admirably explained in the present work. Some idea of the place accorded to this book by European socialists may be gathered from the preface to the French edition by G. Sorel, one of the most prominent socialists of France. He says: "The publication of this book marks a date in the history of socialism. The work of Labriola has its place reserved in our libraries by the side of the classic works of Marx and Engels. It constitutes an illumination and a methodical development of a theory which the masters of the new socialist thought have never yet treated in a didactic form. It is therefore an indispensable book for whoever wishes to understand something of _proletarian ideas_. More than the works of Marx and Engels it is addressed to that public which is unacquainted with socialist preconceptions. In these pages the historian will find substantial and valuable suggestion for the study of the origin and transformation of institutions." The economic development of the United States has reached a point where the growth of the Socialist Party must henceforth go forward with startling rapidity. That the publication of this volume may have some effect in clarifying the ideas of those who discuss the principles of that party, whether with voice or pen, is the hope of the TRANSLATOR. ESSAYS ON THE MATERIALISTIC CONCEPTION OF HISTORY I. In Memory of the Communist Manifesto 7 II. Historical Materialism 93 ESSAYS on the Materialistic Conception of History PART I IN MEMORY OF THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO. I. In three years we can celebrate our jubilee. The memorable date of the publication of the Communist Manifesto (February, 1848) marks our first unquestioned entrance into history. To that date are referred all our judgments and all our congratulations on the progress made by the proletariat in these last fifty years. That date marks the beginning of the new era. This is arising, or, rather, is separating itself from the present era, and is developing by a process peculiar to itself and thus in a way that is necessary and inevitable, whatever may be the vicissitudes and the successive phases which cannot yet be foreseen. All those in our ranks who have a desire or an occasion to possess a better understanding of their own work should bring to mind the causes and the moving forces which determined the genesis of the Manifesto, the circumstances under which it appeared on the eve of the Revolution which burst forth from Paris to Vienna, from Palermo to Berlin. Only in this way will it be possible for us to find in the present social form the explanation of the tendency toward socialism, thus showing by its present necessity the inevitability of its triumph. Is not that in fact the vital part of the Manifesto, its essence and its distinctive character? We surely should be taking a false road if we regarded as the essential part the measures advised and proposed at the end of the second chapter for the contingency of a revolutionary success on the part of the proletariat,--or again the indications of political relationship to the other revolutionary parties of that epoch which are found in the fourth chapter. These indications and these measures, although they deserved to be taken into consideration at the moment and under the circumstances where they were formulated and suggested, and although they may be very important for forming a precise estimate of the political action of the German communists in the revolutionary period from 1848 to 1850, henceforth no longer form for us a mass of practical judgments for or against which we should take sides in each contingency. The political parties which since the International have established themselves in different countries, in the name of the proletariat, and taking it clearly for their base, have felt, and feel, in proportion as they are born and develop, the imperious necessity of adopting and conforming their programme and their action to circumstances always different and multiform. But not one of these parties feels the dictatorship of the proletariat so near that it experiences the need or desire or even the temptation to examine anew and pass judgment upon the measures proposed in the Manifesto. There are really no historic experiences but those that history makes itself. It is as impossible to foresee them as to plan them beforehand or make them to order. That is what happened at the moment of the Commune, which was and which still remains up to this day the only experience (although partial and confused because it was sudden and of short duration) of the action of the proletariat in gaining control of political power. This experience, too, was neither desired nor sought for, but imposed by circumstances. It was heroically carried through and it has become a salutary lesson for us to-day. It might easily happen that where the socialist movement is still in its beginnings, appeal may be made, for lack of personal direct experience--as often happens in Italy--to the authority of a text from the Manifesto as if it were a precept, but these passages are in reality of no importance. Again, we must not, as I believe, seek for this vital part, this essence, this distinctive character, in what the Manifesto says of the other forms of socialism of which it speaks under the name of _literature_. The entire third chapter may doubtless serve for defining clearly by way of exclusion and antithesis, by brief but vigorous characterizations, the differences which really exist between the communism commonly characterized to-day as scientific,--an expression sometimes used in a mistaken and contradictory way,--that is to say, between the communism which has the proletariat for its subject and the proletarian revolution for its theme, and the other forms of socialism; reactionary, bourgeois, semi-bourgeois, petit-bourgeois, utopian, etc. All these forms except one[1] have re-appeared and renewed themselves more than once. They are reappearing under a new form even to-day in the countries where the modern proletarian movement is of recent birth. For these countries and under these circumstances the Manifesto has exercised and still exercises the function of contemporary criticism and of a literary whip. And in the countries where these forms have already been theoretically and practically outgrown, as in Germany and Austria, or survive only as an individual opinion among a few, as in France and England, without speaking of other nations, the Manifesto from this point of view has played its part. It thus merely records as a matter of history something no longer necessary to think of, since we have to deal with the political action of the proletariat which already is before us in its gradual and normal course. That was, to anticipate, the attitude of mind of those who wrote it. By the force of their thought and with some scanty data of experience they had anticipated the events which have occurred and they contented themselves with declaring the elimination and the condemnation of what they had outgrown. Critical communism--that is its true name, and there is none more exact for this doctrine--did not take its stand with the feudalists in regretting the old society for the sake of criticising by contrast the contemporary society:--it had an eye only to the future. Neither did it associate itself with the petty bourgeois in the desire of saving what cannot be saved:--as, for example, small proprietorship, or the tranquil life of the small proprietor whom the bewildering action of the modern state, the necessary and natural organ of present society, destroys and overturns, because by its constant revolutions it carries in itself the necessity for other revolutions new and more fundamental. Neither did it translate into metaphysical whimsicalities, into a sickly sentimentalism, or into a religious contemplation, the real contrasts of the material interests of every day life: on the contrary, it exposed those contrasts in all their prosaic reality. It did not construct the society of the future upon a plan harmoniously conceived in each of its parts. It has no word of eulogy and exaltation, of invocation and of regret, for the two goddesses of philosophic mythology, justice and equality, those two goddesses who cut so sad a figure in the practical affairs of everyday life, when we observe that the history of so many centuries maliciously amuses itself by nearly always contradicting their infallible suggestions. Once more these communists, while declaring on the strength of facts which carry conviction that the mission of the proletarians is to be the grave diggers of the bourgeoisie, still recognize the latter as the author of a social form which represents extensively and intensively an important stage of progress, and which alone can furnish the field for the new struggles which already give promise of a happy issue for the proletariat. Never was funeral oration so magnificent. There is in these praises addressed to the bourgeoisie a certain tragical humor,--they have been compared to dithyrambics. The negative and antithetical definitions of other forms of socialism then current, which have often re-appeared since, even up to the present time, although they are fundamentally beyond criticism both in their form and their aim, nevertheless, do not pretend to be and are not the real history of socialism; they furnish neither its outlines nor its plan for him who would write it. History in reality does not rest upon the distinction between the true and the false, the just and the unjust and still less upon the more abstract antithesis between the possible and the real as if the things were on one side and on another side were their shadows and their reflections in ideas. History is all of a piece, and it rests upon the process of formation and transformation of society; and that evidently in a fashion altogether objective and independent of our approval or disapproval. It is a dynamic of a special class to speak like the positivists who are so dainty with expressions of this sort but are often dominated by the new phrases which they have put out. The different socialist forms of thought and action which have appeared and disappeared in the course of the centuries, so different in their causes, their aspects, and their effects, are all to be studied and explained by the specific and complex conditions of the social life in which they were produced. Upon a close examination it is seen that they do not form one single whole of continuous process because the series is frequently interrupted by changes in the social fabric and by the disappearance and breaking off of the tradition. It is only since the French Revolution that socialism presents a certain unity of process, which appears more evident since 1830 with the definite political supremacy of the capitalist class in France and England and which finally becomes obvious, we might say even palpable, since the rise of the International. Upon this road the Manifesto stands like a colossal guide post bearing a double inscription: on one side the first sketch of the new doctrine which has now made the circle of the world; on the other, the definition of its relations to the forms which it excludes, without giving, however, any historic account of them. The vital part, the essence, the distinctive character of this work are all contained in the new conception of history which permeates it and which in it is partially explained and developed. By the aid of this conception communism, ceasing to be a hope, an aspiration, a remembrance, a conjecture, an expedient, found for the first time its adequate expression in the realization of its very necessity, that is to say, in the realization that it is the outcome and the solution of the struggles of existing classes. These struggles have varied according to times and places and out of them history has developed; but, they are all reduced in our days to the single struggle between the capitalist bourgeoisie and the workingmen inevitably forced into the ranks of the proletariat. The Manifesto gives the genesis of this struggle; it details its evolutionary rhythm, and predicts its final result. In that conception of history is embodied the whole doctrine of scientific communism. From that moment the theoretical adversaries of socialism have no longer had to discuss the abstract possibility of the democratic socialization of the means of production;[2] as if it were possible in this question to rest their judgment upon inductions based upon the general and common aptitudes of what they characterize as human nature. Thenceforth, the question was to recognize, or not to recognize, in the course of human events the necessity which stands over and above our sympathy and our subjective assent. Is or is not society in the countries most advanced in civilization organized in such a way that it will pass into communism by the laws inherent in its own future, once conceding its present economic structure and the friction which it necessarily produces within itself, and which will end by breaking and dissolving it? That is the subject of all discussion since the appearance of this theory and thence follows also the rule of conduct which imposes itself upon the action of the socialist parties whether they be composed of proletarians alone or whether they have in their ranks men who have come out from the other classes and who join as volunteers the army of the proletariat. That is why we voluntarily accept the epithet of scientific, provided we do not thus confuse ourselves with the positivists, sometimes embarrassing guests, who assume to themselves a monopoly of science; we do not seek to maintain an abstract and generic thesis like lawyers or sophists, and we do not plume ourselves on demonstrating the reasonableness of our aims. Our intentions are nothing less than the theoretical expression and the practical explanation of the data offered us by the interpretation of the process which is being accomplished among us and about us and which has its whole existence in the objective relations of social life of which we are the subject and the object, the cause and the effect. Our aims are rational, not because they are founded on arguments drawn from the reasoning of reason, but because they are derived from the objective study of things, that is to say, from the explanation of their process, which is not, and which cannot be, a result of our will but which on the contrary triumphs over our will and subdues it. Not one of the previous or subsequent works of the authors of the Manifesto themselves, although they have a much more considerable scientific leaning, can replace the Manifesto or have the same specific efficacy. It gives us in its classic simplicity the true expression of this situation; the modern proletariat exists, takes its stand, grows and develops in contemporary history as the concrete subject, the positive force whose necessarily revolutionary action must find in communism its necessary outcome. And that is why this work while giving a theoretical base to its prediction and expressing it in brief, rapid and concise formulae, forms a storehouse, or rather an inexhaustible mine of embryonic thoughts which the reader may fertilize and multiply indefinitely; it preserves all the original and originating force of the thing which is but lately born and which has not yet left the field of its production. This observation is intended especially for those who applying a learned ignorance, when they are not humbugs, charlatans, or amiable dilettanti, give to the doctrine of critical communism precursors, patrons, allies and masters of every class without any respect for common sense and the most vulgar chronology. Or again, they try to bring back our materialistic conception of history into the theory of universal evolution which to the minds of many is but a new metaphor of a new metaphysics. Or again they seek in this doctrine a derivative of Darwinism which is an analogous theory only in a certain point of view and in a very broad sense; or again they have the condescension to favor us with the alliance or the patronage of that positive philosophy which extends from Comte, that degenerate and reactionary disciple of the genial Saint-Simon, to Spencer, that quintessence of anarchical capitalism, which is to say that they wish to give us for allies our most open adversaries. It is to its origin that this work owes its fertilizing power, its classic strength, and the fact that it has given in so few pages the synthesis of so many series and groups of ideas.[3] It is the work of two Germans, but it is not either in its form or its basis the expression of personal opinion. It contains no trace of the imprecations, or the anxieties, or the bitterness familiar to all political refuges and to all those who have voluntarily abandoned their country to breathe elsewhere freer air. Neither do we find in it the direct reproduction of the conditions of their own country, then in a deplorable political state and which could not be compared to those of France and England socially and economically, except as regards certain portions of their territory. They brought to their work, on the contrary, the philosophic thought which alone had placed and maintained their country upon the level of contemporary history:--this philosophic thought which in their hands was undergoing that important transformation which permitted materialism, already renewed by Feuerbach combined with dialectics, to embrace and understand the movement of history in its most secret and until then unexplored causes,--unexplored because hidden and difficult to observe. Both were communists and revolutionists, but they were so neither by instinct, by impulse nor by passion. They had elaborated an entirely new criticism of economic science and they had understood the connection and the historic meaning of the proletarian movement on both sides of the Channel, in France and in England, before they were called to give in the Manifesto the programme and the doctrine of the Communist League. This had its center in London and numerous branches on the continent; it had behind it a life and development of its own. Engels had already published a critical essay in which passing over all subjective and one-sided corrections he brought out for the first time in an objective fashion the criticism of political economy and of the antitheses inherent in the data and the concepts of that economy itself, and he had become celebrated by the publication of a book on the condition of the English working class which was the first attempt to represent the movements of the working class as the result of the workings of the forces and means of production.[4] Marx, in the few years preceding, had become known as a radical publicist in Germany, Paris and Brussels. He had conceived the first rudiments of the materialistic conception of history. He had made a theoretically victorious criticism of the hypotheses of Proudhon and the deductions from his doctrine, and had given the first precise explanation of the origin of surplus value as a consequence of the purchase and the use of labor power, that is to say the first germ of the conceptions which were later demonstrated and explained in their connection and their details in Capital. Both men were in touch with the revolutionists of the different countries of Europe, notably France, Belgium and England; their Manifesto was not the expression of their personal theory, but the doctrine of a party whose spirit, aim and activity already formed the International Workingmen's Association. These are the beginnings of modern socialism. We find there the line which separates it from all the rest. _The Communist League_ grew out of the _League of the Just_; the latter in its turn had been formed with a clear consciousness of its proletarian aims through a gradual specialization of the generic group of the refugees, the exiles. As a type, bearing within itself in an embryonic design the form of all the later socialist and proletarian movements, it had traversed the different phases of conspiracy and of equalitarian socialism. It was metaphysical with Gruen and utopian with Weitling. Having its principal seat at London it was interested in the Chartist movement and had had some influence over it. This movement showed by its disordered character, because it was neither the fruit of a premeditated experience, nor the embodiment of a conspiracy or of a sect, how painful and difficult was the formation of a proletarian political party. The socialist tendency was not manifested in Chartism until the movement was near its end and was nearly finished (though Jones and Horner can never be forgotten). The _League_ everywhere carried an odor of revolution, both because the thing was in the air and because its instinct and method of procedure tended that way: and as long as the revolution was bursting forth effectively, it provided itself, thanks to the new doctrine of the Manifesto, with an instrument of orientation which was at the same time a weapon for combat. In fact, already international, both by the quality and differences of origin of its members, and still more by the result of the instinct and devotion of all, it took its place in the general movement of political life as the clear and definite precursor of all that can to-day be called modern socialism, if by modern we mean not the simple fact of extrinsic chronology but an index of the internal or organic process of society. A long interruption from 1852 to 1864 which was the period of political reaction and at the same time that of the disappearance, the dispersion and the absorption of the old socialist schools, separates the International of the _Arbeiterbildungsverein_ of London, from the International properly so called, which, from 1864 to 1873, strove to put unity into the struggle of the proletariat of Europe and America. The action of the proletariat had other interruptions especially in France, and with the exception of Germany, from the dissolution of the International of glorious memory up to the new International which lives to-day through other means and which is developing in other ways, both of them adapted to the political situation in which we live, and based upon riper experience. But just as the survivors of those who in December, 1847, discussed and accepted the new doctrine, have re-appeared on the public scene in the great International, and later again in the new International, the Manifesto itself has also re-appeared little by little and has made the tour of the world in all the languages of the civilized countries, something which it promised to do but could not do at the time of its first appearance. There was our real point of departure; there were our real precursors. They marched before all the others, early in the day, with a step rapid but sure, over this exact road which we were to traverse and which we are traversing in reality. It is not proper to give the name of our precursors to those who followed ways which they later had to abandon, or to those who, to speak without metaphor, formulated doctrines and started movements, doubtless explicable by the times and circumstances of their birth, but which were later outgrown by the doctrine of critical communism, which is the theory of the proletarian revolution. This does not mean that these doctrines and these attempts were accidental, useless and superfluous phenomena. There is nothing irrational in the historic course of things because nothing comes into existence without reason, and thus there is nothing superfluous. We cannot even to-day arrive at a perfect understanding of critical communism without mentally retracing these doctrines and following the processes of their appearance and disappearance. In fact these doctrines have not only passed, they have been intrinsically outgrown both by reason of the change in the conditions of society and by reason of the more exact understanding of the laws upon which rest its formation and its process. The moment at which they enter into the past, that is to say, that at which they are intrinsically outgrown, is precisely that of the appearance of the Manifesto. As the first index of the genesis of modern socialism, this writing, which gives only the most general and the most easily accessible features of its teaching, bears within itself traces of the historic field within which it is born, which was that of France, England and Germany. Its field for propaganda and diffusion has since become wider and wider, and it is henceforth as vast as the civilized world. In all countries in which the tendency to communism has developed through antagonisms under aspects different but every day more evident between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the process of its first formation is wholly or partly repeated over and over. The proletarian parties which are formed little by little have traversed anew the stages of formation which their precursors traversed at first; but this process has become from country to country and from year to year always more rapid by reason of the greater evidence, the pressing necessity and energy of the antagonisms, and because it is easier to assimilate a doctrine and a tendency than to create both for the first time. Our co-workers of 50 years ago were also from this point of view international, since by their example they started the proletariat of the different nations upon the general march which labor must accomplish. But the perfect theoretical knowledge of socialism to-day, as before, and as it always will be, lies in the understanding of its historic necessity, that is to say, in the consciousness of the manner of its genesis; and this is precisely reflected, as in a limited field of observation and in a hasty example, in the formation of the Manifesto. It was intended for a weapon of war and thus it bears upon its own exterior the traces of its origin. It contains more substantial declarations than demonstrations. The demonstration rests entirely in the imperative force of its necessity. But we may retrace the process of this formation and to retrace it is to understand truly the doctrine of the Manifesto. There is an analysis which while separating in theory the factors of an organism destroys them in so far as they are elements contributing to the unity of the whole. But there is another analysis, and this alone permits us to understand history, which only distinguishes and separates the elements to find again in them the objective necessity of their co-operation toward the total result. It is now a current opinion that modern socialism is a normal and thus an inevitable product of history. Its political action, which may in future involve delays and set-backs but never henceforth a total absorption, began with the _International_. Nevertheless the Manifesto precedes it. Its teaching is of prime importance in the light which it throws on the proletarian movement, which movement indeed had its birth and development independently of any doctrine. It is also more than this light. Critical communism dates from the moment when the proletarian movement is not merely a result of social conditions, but when it has already strength enough to understand that these conditions can be changed and to discern what means can modify them and in what direction. It was not enough to say that socialism was a result of history. It was also necessary to understand the intrinsic causes of this outcome and to what all its activity tended. This affirmation, that the proletariat is a necessary result of modern society, has for its mission to succeed the bourgeoisie, and to succeed it as the producing force of a new social order in which class antagonisms shall disappear, makes of the Manifesto a characteristic epoch in the general course of history. It is a revolution--but not in the sense of an apocalypse or a promised millennium. It is the scientific and reflected revelation of the way which our _civil society_ is traversing (if the shade of Fourier will pardon me!). The Manifesto thus gives us the inside history of its origin and thereby justifies its doctrine and at the same time explains its singular effect and its wonderful efficacy. Without losing ourselves in details, here are the series and groups of elements which, reunited and combined in this rapid and exact synthesis, give us the clue to all the later development of scientific socialism. The immediate, direct and appreciable material is given by France and England which had already had since 1830 a working-class movement which sometimes resembles and sometimes differentiates itself from the other revolutionary movements and which extended from instinctive revolt to the practical aims of the political parties (Chartism and Social Democracy for example) and gave birth to different temporary and perishable forms of communism and semi-communism like that to which the name of socialism was then given. To recognize in these movements no longer the fugitive phenomenon of meteoric disturbances but a new social fact, there was need of a theory which should explain them,--and a theory which should not be a simple complement of the democratic tradition nor the subjective correction of the disadvantages, thenceforth recognized, of the economy of competition: although many were then concerned with this. This new theory was the personal work of Marx and Engels. They carried over the conception of historical progress through the process of antitheses from the abstract form, which the Hegelian dialectic had already described in its most general features, to the concrete explanation of the class struggle; and in this historic movement where it had been supposed that we observed the passage from one form of ideas to another form they saw for the first time the transition from one form of social anatomy to another, that is from one form of economic production to another form. This historic conception, which gave a theoretic form to this necessity of the _new social revolution_ more or less explicit in the instinctive consciousness of the proletariat and in its passionate and spontaneous movements, recognizing the intrinsic and imminent necessity of the revolution, changed the concept of it. That which the sects of conspirators had regarded as belonging to the domain of the will and capable of being constructed at pleasure, became a simple process which might be favored, sustained and assisted. The revolution became the object of a policy the conditions of which are given by the complex situation of society; it therefore became a result which the proletariat must attain through struggles and various means of organization which the old tactics of revolts had not yet imagined. And this because the proletariat is not an accessory and auxiliary means, an excrescence, an evil, which can be eliminated from the society in which we are living but because it is its substratum, its essential condition, its inevitable effect and in turn the cause which preserves and maintains society itself; and thus it cannot emancipate itself without at the same time emancipating every one, that is to say, revolutionizing completely the form of production. Just as the _League of the Just_ had become _The Communist League_ by stripping itself of the forms of symbolism and conspiracy and adopting little by little the means of propaganda and of political action from and after the check attending the insurrection of Barbès and Blanqui (1839), so likewise the new doctrine, which the _League_ accepted and made its own, definitely abandoned the ideas which inspired the action of conspiracies, and conceived as the outcome and objective result of a process, that which the conspirators believed to be the result of a pre-determined plan or the emanation from their heroism. At that point begins a new ascending line in the order of facts and another connection of concepts and of doctrines. The communism of conspiracy, the Blanquism of that time, carries us up through Buonarotti and also through Bazard and the "Carbonari" to the conspiracy of Baboeuf, a true hero of ancient tragedy who hurled himself against fate because there was no connection between his aim and the economic condition of the moment, and he was as yet incapable of bringing upon the political scene a proletariat having a broad class consciousness. From Baboeuf and certain less known elements of the Jacobin period, past Boissel and Fauchet we ascend to the intuitive Morelly and to the original and versatile Mably and if you please to the chaotic _Testament_ of the _curé_ Meslier, an instinctive and violent rebellion of "good sense" against the savage oppression endured by the unhappy peasant. These precursors of the socialism of violence, protest and conspiracy were all equalitarians; as were also most of the conspirators. Thus by a singular but inevitable error they took for a weapon of combat, interpreting it and generalizing it, that same doctrine of equality which developing as a _natural right_ parallel to the formation of the economic theory, had become an instrument in the hands of the bourgeoisie which was winning step by step its present position to transform the society of privilege into that of liberalism, free exchange and the civil code.[5] Following this immediate deduction which at bottom was a simple illusion, that all men being equal in nature should also be equal in their enjoyments, it was thought that the appeal to reason carried with it all the elements of propaganda and persuasion, and that the rapid, immediate and violent taking possession of the exterior instruments of political power was the only means to set to right those who resisted. But whence come and how persist all these inequalities which appear so irrational in the light of a concept of justice so simple and so elementary? The Manifesto was the clear negation of the principle of equality understood so naively and so clumsily. While proclaiming as inevitable the abolition of classes in the future form of collective production, it explains to us the necessity, the birth and the development of these very classes as a fact which is not an exception, or a derogation of an abstract principle, but the very process of history. Even as the modern proletariat involves the bourgeoisie, so the latter cannot exist without the former. And both are the result of a process of formation which rests altogether upon the new mode of production of the objects necessary to life, that is to say, which rests altogether upon the manner of economic production. The bourgeois society grew out of the corporative and feudal society and it grew out of it through struggle and revolution in order to take possession of the instruments and means of production which all culminate in the formation, the development and the multiplication of capital. To describe the origin and the progress of the bourgeoisie in its different phases, to explain its successes in the colossal development of technique and in the conquest of the world market, and to point out the political transformations which followed it, which are the expression, the defense and the result of these conquests is, at the same time, to write the history of the proletariat. The latter in its present condition is inherent in the epoch of bourgeois society and it has had, it has, and will have as many phases as that society itself up to the time of its extinction. The antithesis of rich and poor, of happy and unhappy, of oppressors and oppressed is not something accidental which can easily be put on one side as was believed by the enthusiasts of justice. Still further it is a fact of necessary correlation, once granted the directing principle of the present form of production which makes the wageworker a necessity. This necessity is double. Capital can only take possession of production by converting laborers into proletarians and it cannot continue to live, to be fruitful, to accumulate, to multiply itself and to transform itself except on the condition of paying wages to those whom it has made proletarians. The latter, on their side, can only live and reproduce their kind on the condition of selling themselves as labor power, the use of which is left to the discretion, that is to say, to the good pleasure of the possessors of capital. The harmony between capital and labor is wholly contained in this fact that labor is the living force by which the proletarians continually put in motion and reproduce by adding to it the labor accumulated in the capital. This connection resulting from a development which is the whole inner essence of modern history, if it gives the key to comprehend the true reason of the new class struggle of which the communist conception has become the expression, is of such a nature that no sentimental protest, no argument based on justice can resolve it and disentangle it. It is for these reasons which I have explained here as simply as possible that equalitarian communism remained vanquished. Its practical powerlessness blended with its theoretical inability to account for the causes of the wrongs or of the inequalities which it desired, bravely or stupidly, to destroy or eliminate at a blow. To understand history became thenceforth the principal task of the theorists of communism. How could a cherished ideal be still opposed to the hard reality of history? Communism is not the natural and necessary state of human life in all times and in all places and the whole course of historic formations cannot be considered as a series of deviations and wanderings. One does not reach communism nor return to it by Spartan abnegation or Christian resignation. It can be, still more it must be and it will be the consequence of the dissolution of our capitalist society. But the dissolution cannot be inoculated into it artificially nor imported from without. It will dissolve by its own weight as Machiavelli would say. It will disappear as a form of production which engenders of itself and in itself the constant and increasing rebellion of its productive forces against the conditions (juridical and political) of production and it continues to live only by augmenting (through competition which engenders crises, and by a bewildering extension of its sphere of action) the intrinsic conditions of its inevitable death. The death of a social form like that which comes from natural death in any other branch of science becomes a _physiological case_. The Manifesto did not make, and it was not its part to make the picture of a future society. It told how our present society will dissolve by the progressive dynamics of its forces. To make this understood it was necessary above all to explain the development of the bourgeoisie and this was done in rapid sketches, a model philosophy of history, which can be retouched, completed and developed, but which cannot be corrected.[6] Saint-Simon and Fourier, although neither their ideas nor the general trend of their development were accepted, found their justification. Idealists both, they had by their heroic vision transcended the "liberal" epoch which in their horizon had its culminating point at the epoch of the French revolution. The former in his interpretation of history substituted social physics for economic law and politics, and in spite of many idealistic and positivistic uncertainties, he almost discovered the genesis of the third estate. The other, ignorant of details which were still unknown or neglected, in the exuberance of his undisciplined spirit imagined a great chain of historic epochs vaguely distinguished by certain indications of the directing principle of the forms of production and distribution. He thereupon proposed to himself to construct a society in which the existing antitheses should disappear. From all these antitheses he discovered by a flash of genius and he, more than any other, developed "the vicious circle of production"; he there unconsciously reached the position of Sismondi, who at the same epoch, but with other intentions and along different roads, studying crises and denouncing the disadvantages of the large scale industry and of unbridled competition, announced the collapse of the newly established economic science. From the summit of his serene meditation on the future world of the harmonians he looked down with a serene contempt upon the misery of civilization and unmoved wrote the satire of history. Ignorant both, because idealists, of the bitter struggle which the proletariat is called upon to maintain before putting an end to the epoch of exploitation and of antitheses, they arrived through a subjective necessity at their conclusions, in the one case scheme-making, in the other utopianism. But as by divination they foresaw some of the direct principles of a society without antitheses. The former reached a clear conception of the technical government of society in which should disappear the domination of man over man, and the other divined, foresaw and prophesied along with the extravagances of his luxuriant imagination a great number of the important traits of the psychology and pedagogy of that future society in which according to the expression of the Manifesto, "the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all." Saint-Simonism had already disappeared when the Manifesto appeared. Fourierism, on the contrary, was flourishing in France and in consequence of its nature not as a party but as a school. When the school attempted to realize its utopia by means of the law, the Parisian proletarians had already been beaten in those days of June by that bourgeoisie which through this victory was preparing a master for itself: it was a military adventurer whose power lasted twenty years. It is not in the name of a school, but as the promise, the threat, and the desire of a party that the new doctrine of critical communism presented itself. Its authors and its adherents did not feed upon the utopian manufacture of the future but their minds were full of the experience and the necessity of the present. They united with the proletarians whom instinct, not as yet fortified by experience, impelled to overthrow, at Paris and in England, the rule of the bourgeois class with a rapidity of movement not guided by well-considered tactics. These communists disseminated their revolutionary ideas in Germany: they were the defenders of the June martyrs, and they had in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung a political organ, extracts from which, reproduced occasionally after so many years, still carry authority.[7] After the disappearance of the historic situations which in 1848 had pushed the proletarians to the front of the political stage, the doctrines of the Manifesto no longer found either a foundation or a field for diffusion. Many years were required before it circulated again and that because many years were required before the proletariat could re-appear by other roads and under other methods as a political force upon the scene, making of this doctrine its intellectual organ and directing its course by it. But from the day when the doctrine appeared it made its anticipated criticism of that _socialismus vulgaris_ which was flourishing in Europe and especially in France from the coup d'�tat to the International; the latter moreover in its short period of life had not time to vanquish and eliminate it. This vulgar socialism found its intellectual food (when nothing even more incoherent and chaotic was at hand) in the doctrine and especially in the paradoxes of Proudhon who had already been vanquished theoretically by Marx[8] but who was not vanquished practically until the time of the Commune when his disciples, and it was a salutary lesson in affairs, were forced to act in opposition to their own doctrines and those of their master. From the time of its appearance this new communist doctrine carried an implied criticism of all forms of State socialism from Louis Blanc to Lassalle. This State socialism, although mingled with revolutionary doctrines, was then summed up in the empty dream, in the abracadabra, of the _Right to Work_. This is an insidious formula if it implies a demand addressed to a government even of revolutionary bourgeois. It is an economic absurdity if by it is meant to suppress the unemployment which ensues upon the variations of wages, that is to say upon the conditions of competition. It may be a tool for politicians, if it serves as an expedient to calm a shapeless mass of unorganized proletarians. This is very evident for any one who conceives clearly the course of a victorious proletarian revolution which cannot proceed to the socialization of the means of production by taking possession of them, that is to say, which cannot arrive at the economic form in which there is neither merchandise nor wage labor and in which the right to work and the duty of working are one and the same, mingled in the common necessity of labor for all. The mirage of the right to work ended in the tragedy of June. The parliamentary discussion of which it was the object in the sequel was nothing but a parody. Lamartine, that tearful rhetorician, that great man for all proper occasions, had pronounced the last, or the next to the last of his celebrated phrases, "Catastrophes are the experiences of nations," and that sufficed for the irony of history. The brevity and simplicity of the Manifesto were wholly foreign to the insinuating rhetoric of faith or creed. It was of the utmost inclusiveness by virtue of the many ideas which it for the first time reduced to a system and it was a series of germs capable of an immense development. But it was not, and it did not pretend to be a code of socialism, a catechism of critical communism, or the handbook of the proletarian revolution. We may leave its "quintessence" to the illustrious Dr. Schaeffle, to whom also we willingly leave the famous phrase, "The social question is a question of the stomach." The "ventre" of Dr. Schaeffle has for long years cut a fine enough figure in the world to the great advantage of the dilettanti in socialism and to the delight of the politicians. Critical communism, in reality, scarcely begun with the Manifesto it needed to develop and it has developed effectively. The sum total of the teachings customarily designated by the name of "Marxism" did not arrive at maturity before the years 1860-1870. It is certainly a long step from the little work Wage Labor and Capital[9] in which is seen for the first time in precise terms how from the purchase and the use of the labor-commodity is obtained a product superior to the cost of production, this being the clue to the question of surplus value--it is a long step from this to the complex and multiple developments of "Capital." This book goes exhaustively into the genesis of the bourgeois epoch in all its inner economic structure, and intellectually it transcends that epoch because it explains its course, its particular laws and the antitheses which it organically produces and which organically dissolve it. It is a long step also from the proletarian movement which succumbed in 1848 to the present proletarian movement which through great difficulties after having re-appeared on the political scene has developed with continuity and deliberation. Until a few years ago this regularity of the forward march of the proletariat was observed and admired only in Germany. The social democracy there had normally increased as upon its own field (from the Workingmen's Conference of Nuremburg, 1868, to our day). But since then the same phenomenon has asserted itself in other countries, under various forms. In this broad development of Marxism and in this increase of the proletarian movement in the limited forms of political action, has there not been, as some assert, an alteration from the militant character of the original form of critical communism? Has there not been a passing from revolution to the self-styled evolution? Has there not been an acquiescence of the revolutionary spirit in the exigencies of the reform movement? These reflections and these objections have arisen and arise continually both among the most enthusiastic and most passionate of the socialists and among the adversaries of socialism whose interest it is to give an appearance of uniformity to the special defeats, checks and delays, so as to affirm that communism has no future. Whoever compares the present proletarian movement and its varied and complicated course with the impression left by the Manifesto when one reads it without being provided with knowledge from other sources, may easily believe that there was something juvenile and premature in the confident boldness of those communists of fifty years ago. There is in them the sound as of a battle cry and an echo of the vibrant eloquence of some of the orators of Chartism; there is the declaration of a new '93 with no room left for a new Thermidor. And Thermidor has re-appeared several times since in various forms, more or less explicit or disguised, and their authors have been since 1848 French ex-radicals, or Italian ex-patriots, or German bureaucrats, adorers of the god State and practically slaves of the god Mammon, English parliamentarians broken by the artifices of the art of government, or even politicians under the guise of anarchists. Many people believe that the constellation of Thermidor is destined never to disappear from the heaven of history, or to speak in a more prosaic fashion, that liberalism, that is to say a society where men are equal only in law, marks the extreme limit of human evolution beyond which nothing remains but a return backward. That is the opinion of all those who see in the progressive extension of the bourgeois form over the whole world the reason and the end of all progress. Whether they are optimists or pessimists here are, for them, the columns of Hercules of the human race. Often it happens that this sentiment in its pessimistic form operates unconsciously upon some of those, who with others unclassified, go to swell the ranks of anarchism. There are others who go further and who theorize upon the objective improbabilities of the assertions of critical communism. That affirmation of the Manifesto that the reduction of all class struggles to a single one carries within itself the necessity of the proletarian revolution, would seem to them intrinsically false. That doctrine would be without foundation because it assumes to draw a theoretical deduction and a practical rule of conduct from the prevision of a fact which, according to these adversaries, would be a simple theoretical point which might be displaced and set ahead indefinitely. The assumed inevitable collision between the productive forces and the form of production would never take place because it is reduced, as they claim, to an infinite number of particular cases of friction, because it multiplies itself into the partial collisions of economic competition, and because it meets with checks and hindrances in the expedients and attacks of the governmental art. In other words, our present society, instead of breaking up and dissolving would in a continuous fashion repair the evils which it produced. Every proletarian movement which is not repressed by violence as was that of June, 1848, and that of May, 1871, would perish of slow exhaustion as happened with Chartism which ended in trade unionism, the war horse of this fashion of arguing, the honor and glory of the economists and of the vulgar sociologists. Every modern proletarian movement would be regarded as meteoric and not organic, it would be a disturbance and not a process, and according to these critics, in spite of ourselves, we should be still utopians. The historic forecast which is found in the doctrine of the Manifesto and which critical communism has since developed by a broad and detailed analysis of the actual world, has certainly taken on by reason of the circumstances in which it was produced a warlike appearance and a very aggressive form. But it did not imply, any more than it implies now, either a chronological datum or a prophetic picture of the social organization like those in the apocalypses and the ancient prophesies. The heroic Father Dolcino did not re-appear with the prophetic war cry of Joachino del Fiore. We did not celebrate anew at Münster the resurrection of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. There were no more Taborites nor millenarians. Nor was there another Fourier waiting in his house at a fixed hour year after year for the "candidate of humanity." Nor again, was there an initiator of a new life, beginning with artificial means to create the first nucleus of an association proposing to make man over, as was the case with Beller, Owen, Cabet, and the enterprise of the Fourierites in Texas, which was the tomb of utopianism, marked by a singular epitaph: the dumbness which succeeded the fiery eloquence of Considerant. Neither is there here a sect which retires modestly and timidly from the world in order to celebrate in a closed circle the perfect idea of communism as in the socialist colonies of America. Here, on the contrary, in the doctrine of critical communism, it is society as a whole which at a moment of its general process discovers the cause of its destined course and at a critical point asserts itself to proclaim the laws of its movement. The foresight indicated by the Manifesto was not chronological, it was not a prophecy nor a promise, but a morphological prevision. Beneath the noise of the passions over which our daily conversation extends itself, beyond the visible movements of the persons who formed the material at which the historians stop, beyond the juridical and political apparel of our civil society, far enough from the meanings which religion and art give to life, there remains, grows and develops the elementary structure of society which supports all the rest. The anatomical study of this underlying structure is economics. And as human society has several times changed, partially or entirely, in its most visible exterior form, or in its ideological, religious or artistic manifestations, we must first find the cause and the reason of these changes, the only ones which historians relate, in the transformations more hidden, and at first less visible, of the economic _processus_ of this structure. We must set ourselves to the study of the differences which exist between the various forms of production when we have to deal with historic epochs clearly distinct and properly designated; and when we have to explain the succession of these forms, the replacing of one by the other, we must study the causes of erosion, and of the destruction of the form which disappears; and finally when we wish to understand the historic fact determined and concrete, we must study the frictions and the contrasts which take their rise from the different currents, that is to say, the classes, their subdivisions and their intersections which characterize a given society. When the Manifesto declared that all history up to the present time has been nothing but the history of class struggles and that these are the cause of all revolutions as also of all reactions, it did two things at the same time, it gave to communism the elements of a new doctrine and to the communists the guiding thread to discover in the confused events of political life the conditions of the underlying economic movement. In these last fifty years the generic foresight of a new historic era has become for socialists the delicate art of understanding in every case what it is expedient to do, because this new era is in itself in continual formation. Communism has become an art because the proletarians have become, or are on the point of becoming, a political party. The revolutionary spirit is embodied to-day in the proletarian organization. The desired union of communists and proletarians is henceforth an accomplished fact.[10] These last fifty years have been the ever stronger proof of the ever growing revolt of the producing forces against the forms of production. We "utopians" have no other answer to offer than this lesson from events to those who still speak of meteoric disturbances which, as they would have it, will disappear little by little and will all resolve themselves into the calm of this final epoch of civilization. And this lesson suffices. Eleven years after the publication of the Manifesto, Marx formulated in clear and precise fashion the directing principles of the materialistic interpretation of history in the preface to a book which is the forerunner of "Capital."[11] "The first work which I undertook for the purpose of solving the doubts which perplexed me was a critical re-examination of Hegel's Philosophy of Law. The introduction to this work appeared in the German-French Year Books, published in Paris in 1844. My investigation ended in the conviction that legal relations and forms of government cannot be explained either by themselves or by the so-called general development of the human mind, but on the contrary, have their roots in the conditions of man's physical existence, whose totality Hegel, following the English and French writers of the eighteenth century, summed up under the name of civil society; and that the anatomy of civil society must be sought in political economy. The study of the latter which I began at Paris was continued at Brussels whither I had betaken myself in consequence of an order of Guizot expelling me from France. The general result which I arrived at and which, once obtained, served as a guide for my subsequent studies, can be briefly formulated as follows: In making their livelihood together men enter into certain necessary involuntary relations with each other, industrial relations which correspond to whatever stage society has reached in the development of its material productive forces. The totality of these industrial relations constitutes the economic structure of society, the real basis upon which the legal and political superstructure is built, and to which definite forms of social consciousness correspond. The method of producing the material livelihood determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not men's consciousness which determines their life; on the contrary, it is their social life which determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the old conditions of production or, to use a legal expression, with the old property relations under which these forces have hitherto been exerted. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into fetters of production. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic basis the whole vast superstructure undergoes sooner or later a revolution. In considering such revolutions one must constantly distinguish between the industrial revolution, to be carefully posited scientifically, which takes place in the economic conditions of production, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophical, in short ideological, forms wherein men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. As little as we judge an individual by what he himself thinks he is, just as little can we judge such a revolutionary epoch by its own consciousness. We must rather explain this consciousness out of the antagonisms of men's industrial life, out of the conflict existing between the forces of social production and the relations of social production. A form of society never breaks down until all the productive forces are developed for which it affords room. New and higher relations of production are never established, until the material conditions of life to support them have been prepared in the lap of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets for itself only such tasks as it is able to perform; for upon close examination it will always be found that the task itself only arises where the material conditions for its solution are already at hand or are at least in process of growth. We may in broad outlines characterize the Asiatic, the antique, the feudal and the modern capitalist methods of production as progressive epochs in the economic evolution of society. The industrial relations arising out of the capitalistic method of production constitute the last of the antagonistic forms of social production; antagonistic not in the sense of an individual antagonism, but of an antagonism growing out of the social conditions of individuals. But the productive forces which are developed in the lap of capitalistic society create at the same time the material conditions needed for the abolition of this antagonism. The capitalist form of society therefore, brings to a close this prelude to the history of human society." Marx had some years before left the political arena and he did not return to it until later with the International. The reaction had triumphed in Italy, Austria, Hungary and Germany over the patriotic, liberal or democratic revolution. The bourgeoisie on its side had overcome the proletarians of France and England. The indispensable conditions for the development of a democratic and proletarian movement suddenly disappeared. The battalion small in numbers indeed of the Manifesto communists who had taken part in the revolution and who had participated in all the acts of resistance and popular rebellion against reaction saw its activity crushed by the memorable process of Cologne. The survivors of the movement tried to make a new start at London, but soon Marx, Engels and others separated themselves from the revolutionaries and retired from the movement. The crisis was passed. A long period of repose followed. This was shown by the slow disappearance of the Chartist movement, that is to say, the proletarian movement of the country which was the spinal column of the capitalist system. History had for the moment discredited the illusions of the revolutionaries. Before giving himself almost entirely to the long incubation of the already discovered elements of the critique of political economy, Marx illustrated in several works the history of the revolutionary period from 1848 to 1850 and especially the class struggles in France, showing thus that if the revolution in the forms which it had taken on at that moment had not succeeded, the revolutionary theory of history was not contradicted for all that.[12] The suggestions given in the Manifesto found here their complete development. Later the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte[13] was the first attempt to apply the new conception of history to a series of facts contained within precise limits of time. It is extremely difficult to rise from the apparent movement to the real movement of history and to discover their intimate connection. There are indeed great difficulties in rising from the phenomena of passion, oratory, Parliaments, elections and the like to the inner social gearing to discover in the latter the different interests of the large and small bourgeois, of the peasants, the artisans, the laborers, the priests, the soldiers, the bankers, the usurers and the mob. All these interests act consciously or unconsciously, jostling each other, eliminating each other, combining and fusing, in the discordant life of civilized man. The crisis was passed and this was precisely true in the countries which constituted the historic field from which critical communism proceeded. All that the critical communists could do was to understand the reaction in its hidden economic causes because, for the moment, to understand the reaction was to continue the work of the revolution. The same thing happened under other conditions and other forms 20 years later when Marx, in the name of the International made in the "Civil War in France" an apology for the Commune which was at the same time its objective criticism. The heroic resignation with which Marx after 1850 abandoned political life was shown again when he retired from the International after the congress at the Hague in 1872. These two facts have their value for biography because they give glimpses of his personal character. With him, in fact, ideas, temperament, policy and thought were one and the same. But, on the other hand, these facts have a much greater bearing for us. Critical communism does not manufacture revolutions, it does not prepare insurrections, it does not furnish arms for revolts. It mingles itself with the proletarian movement, but it sees and supports that movement in the full intelligence of the connection which it has, which it can have, and which it must have, with all the relations of social life as a whole. In a word it is not a seminary in which superior officers of the proletarian revolution are trained, but it is neither more nor less than the consciousness of this revolution and especially the consciousness of its difficulties. The proletarian movement has grown in a colossal fashion during these last thirty years. In the midst of numberless difficulties, through gains and losses, it has little by little taken on a political form. Its methods have been elaborated and gradually applied. All this is not the work of the magic action of the doctrine scattered by the persuasive virtue of written and spoken propaganda. From their first beginnings the communists had this feeling that they were the extreme left of every proletarian movement, but in proportion as the latter developed and specialized it became their necessity and duty to assist, (through the elaboration of programmes, and through their participation in the political action of the parties) in the various contingencies of the economic development and of the political situation growing out of it. In the fifty years which separate us from the publication of the Manifesto the specialization and the complexity of the proletarian movement have become such that there is henceforth no mind capable of embracing it in its completeness, of understanding it in its details and grasping its real causes and exact relations. The single International, from 1864 to 1873, necessarily disappeared after it had fulfilled its task. The preliminary equalization of the general tendencies and of the ideas common and indispensable to all the proletariat, and no one can assume or will assume to re-constitute anything like it. Two causes, notably, contributed in a high degree to this specialization, this complexity of the proletarian movement. In many countries the bourgeoisie felt the need of putting an end in the interest of its own defense to some of the abuses which had arisen in consequence of the introduction of the industrial system. Thence arose labor legislation, or as it has been pompously called social legislation. This same bourgeoisie in its own interest or, under the pressure of circumstances has been obliged, in many countries to increase the generic conditions of liberty, and notably to extend the right of suffrage. These two circumstances have drawn the proletariat into the circle of daily political life. They have considerably increased its chance for action and the agility and suppleness thus acquired permit it to struggle with the bourgeoisie in elective assembles. And as the _processus_ of things determines the _processus_ of ideas, this practical multiform development of the proletariat is accompanied by a gradual development of the doctrines of critical communism, as well in the manner of understanding history or contemporary life as in the minute description of the most infinitesimal parts of economics: in a word, it has become a science. Have we not there, some ask, a deviation from the simple and imperative doctrine of the Manifesto? Others again say, have we not lost in intensity and precision what we have gained in extension and complexity? These questions, in my opinion, arise from an inexact conception of the present proletarian movement and an optical illusion as to the degree of energy and revolutionary valor of the former movements. Whatever be the concessions that the bourgeoisie can make in the present economic order even if it be a very great reduction in the hours of labor, it always remains true that the necessity for exploitation upon which the whole present social order rests imposes limits beyond which capital as a private instrument of production has no more reason for existence. If a concession to-day can allay one form of discontent in the proletariat, the concession itself can do nothing less than to give rise to the need of new and ever increasing concessions. The need of labor legislation arose in England before the Chartist movement and it developed afterwards along with it. It had its first successes in the period which immediately followed the fall of Chartism. The principles and the reasons of this movement in their causes and their effects were studied in a critical manner by Marx in Capital and they afterwards passed, through the International, into the programmes of the different socialist parties. Finally this whole process, concentrating itself into the demand for eight hours, became with the 1st of May an international marshalling of the proletariat, and a means for estimating its progress. On the other hand, the political struggle in which the proletariat takes part democratizes its habits; still more a real democracy takes birth which, with time, will no longer be able to adapt itself to the present political form. Being the organ of a society based on exploitation it is constituted as a bureaucratic hierarchy, as a judicial bureaucracy and a mutual aid society of the capitalists for the defense of their special privileges, the perpetual income from the public debt, the rent of land and the interest on capital in all its forms. Consequently the two facts, which according to the discontented and the hypercritical seem to make us deviate infinitely from the lines laid down by communism, become, on the contrary, new means and new conditions which confirm these lines. The apparent deviations from the revolution are, at bottom, the very thing which is hastening it. Moreover, we must not exaggerate the significance of the revolutionary faith of the communists of fifty years ago. Given the political situation of Europe, if they had a faith, it was that they were precursors, and this they have been; they hoped that the political conditions of Italy, Austria, Hungary, Germany and Poland might approximate to modern forms, and this has happened later, in part, and through other means; if they had a hope, it was that the proletarian movement of France and England might continue to develop. The reaction which intervened upset many things and stopped more than one development which had already begun. It upset also the old revolutionary tactic, and in these last years a new tactic has arisen. Therein lies all the change.[14] The Manifesto was designed for nothing else than the first guiding thread to a science and a practice which nothing but experience and time could develop. It gives only the scheme and the rhythm of the general march of the proletarian movement. It is perfectly evident that the communists were influenced by the experience of the two movements which they had before their eyes, that of France, and especially the Chartist movement which the manifestation of April 10th was soon to strike with paralysis. But this scheme does not fix in any invariable fashion a tactic of war, which indeed had already been made frequently. The revolutionists had often indeed explained in the form of catechism what ought to be a simple consequence of the development of events. This scheme became more vast and complex with the development and extension of the bourgeois system. The rhythm of the movement has become more varied and slower because the laboring mass has entered on the scene as a distinct, political party, which fact changes the manner and the measure of their action and consequently their movement. Just as in view of the improvement of modern weapons the tactic of street riots has become inopportune, and just as the complexity of the modern state shows the insufficiency of a sudden capture of a municipal government to impose upon a whole people the will and the ideas of a minority, no matter how courageous and progressive, even so, on its side, the mass of the proletarians no longer holds to the word of command of a few leaders, nor does it regulate its movements by the instructions of captains who might upon the ruins of one government raise up another. The laboring mass where it has developed politically has made and is making its own democratic education. It is choosing its representatives and submitting their action to its criticism. It examines and makes its own the ideas and the propositions which these representatives submit to it. It already knows, or it begins to understand according to the situation in the various countries, that the conquest of the political power cannot and should not be made by others in its name, and especially that it cannot be the consequence of a single blow. In a word it knows, or it is beginning to understand that the dictatorship of the proletariat which shall have for its task the socialization of the means of production cannot be the work of a mass led by a few and that it must be, and that it will be, the work of the proletarians themselves when they have become in themselves and through long practice a political organization. The development and the extension of the bourgeois system have been rapid and colossal in these last fifty years. It already invades sacred and ancient Russia and it is creating, not only in America, Australia and in India, but even in Japan, new centers of modern production, thus complicating the conditions of competition and the entanglements of the world market. The consequences of political changes have been produced, or will not be long to wait for. Equally rapid and colossal has been the progress of the proletariat. Its political education takes each day a new step toward the conquest of political power. The rebellion of the productive forces against the form of production, the struggle of living labor against accumulated labor, becomes every day more evident. The bourgeois system is henceforth upon the defensive and it reveals its decadence by this singular contradiction; the peaceful world of industry has become a colossal camp in which militarism develops. The peaceful period of industry has become by the irony of things the period of the continuous invention of new engines of war. Socialism has forced itself into the situation. Those semi-socialists, even those charlatans who encumber with their presence the press and the meetings of our party and who often are a nuisance to us, are a tribute which vanity and ambitions of every sort render in their fashion to the new power which rises on the horizon. In spite of the foreseen antidote which scientific socialism is, the truth of which many people have not come to understand, there is a group of quacks on the social question, all having some particular specific to eliminate such or such a social evil: land nationalization, monopoly of grains in the hands of the State, democratic taxes, statization of mortgages, general strike, etc. But social democracy eliminates all these fantasies because the consciousness of their situation leads the proletarians when once they have become familiar with the political arena to understand socialism in an integral fashion. They come to understand that they should look for only one thing, the abolition of wage labor; that there is but one form of society which renders possible and even necessary the elimination of classes,--the association which does not produce commodities, and that this form of society is no longer the State, but its opposite, that is to say, the technical and pedagogical administration of human society, the self-government of labor. Behind the Jacobins are the gigantic heroes of 1793 and their caricatures of 1848. _Social democracy!_ But is not that, say some, an evident attenuation of the communist doctrine as it is formulated in the Manifesto in terms so ringing and so decisive? This is not the moment to recall that the phrase _social democracy_ has had in France many significations from 1837 to 1848, all of which were based upon a vague sentimentalism. Neither is it necessary to explain how the Germans have been able in this nomenclature to sum up all the rich and vast development of their socialism from the episode of Lassalle now passed over and transformed up to our own days. It is certain that _social democracy_ can signify, has signified and signifies many things which have not been, are not, and never will be, either critical communism or the conscious march toward the proletarian revolution. It is also certain that contemporary socialism even in the countries where its development is most advanced, carries with it a great deal of dross which it throws off little by little along the road. It is certain also, in fine, that this broad designation of social democracy serves as an escutcheon and a buckler to many intruders. But here we need to fix our attention only upon certain points of capital importance. We must insist upon the second term of the expression in order to avoid any equivocation. Democratic was the constitution of the _Communist League_; democratic was its fashion of welcoming and discussing each new teaching; democratic was its intervention in the revolution of 1848 and its participation in the rebellious resistance against the invasion of reaction; democratic finally was the very way in which the League was dissolved. In this first type of our present parties, in this first cell so to speak, of our complex organism, elastic and highly developed, there was not only the consciousness of the mission to be accomplished as precursor, but there was already the form and the method of association which alone are suitable for the first initiators of the proletarian revolution. It was no longer a sect; that form was already, in fact, outgrown. The immediate and fantastic domination of the individual was eliminated, what predominated was a discipline which had its source in the experience of necessity and in the precise doctrine which must proceed from the reflex consciousness of this necessity. It was the same with the International, which appeared authoritarian only to those who could not make their own authority prevail in it. It must be the same, and it is so, in the working class parties and where this character is not or cannot yet be marked, the proletarian agitation still elementary and confused simply engenders illusions and is only a pretext for intrigues, and when it is not so, then we have a passover where men of understanding touch elbows with the madman and the spy; as for example the society of The International Brothers which attached itself like a parasite to the International and discredited it; or again the co-operative which degenerates into a business and sells itself to capitalists; the labor party which remains outside politics and which studies the variations of the market to introduce its tactic of strikes into the sinuosities of competition; or again a group of malcontents, for the most part social outcasts and little bourgeois, who give themselves up to speculations on socialism considered as one of the phases of political fashion. Social democracy has met all these impedimenta upon its way and it has been obliged to relieve itself of them as it will have to do again from one time to another. The art of persuasion does not always suffice. Oftener it was necessary and it is necessary to resign ourselves and wait until the hard school of disillusion serves to instruct, which it does better than reasonings can do. All these intrinsic difficulties of the proletarian movement, which the wily bourgeoisie oftener than not stirs up of itself and which it makes the most of, form a considerable part of the internal history of socialism during these last years. Socialism has not found impediments merely in the general conditions of economic competition and in the resistance of the political power, but also in the very conditions of the proletarian mass and in the mechanism sometimes obscure although inevitable of its slow, varied, complex movements, often antagonistic and contradictory. That prevents many people from seeing the increasing reduction of all class struggles to the single struggle between the capitalists and the proletarianized workers. Even as the Manifesto did not write, as the utopians did, the ethics and the psychology of the future society, just so it did not give the mechanism of that formation and of the development in which we find ourselves. It is surely enough that these few pioneers have opened the road. We must walk upon it to arrive at understanding and experience. Moreover man is distinctively the experimental animal; that is why he has a history, or rather that is why he makes his own history. Upon this road of contemporary socialism which constitutes its development because it is its experience, we have met the mass of the peasants. Socialism which at first kept itself practically and theoretically to the study and experience of the antagonisms between capitalists and proletarians in the circle of industrial production properly so called, has turned its activity toward that mass in which _peasant stupidity_ blossoms. To capture the peasants is the question of the hour, although the quintessential Schaeffle long ago mobilized the anti-collectivist brains of the peasants for the defense of the existing order. The elimination and the capture of domestic industry by capital, the passage more and more rapid of agrarian industry into the capitalist form, the disappearance of small proprietorship, or its lessening through mortgages, the disappearance of the communal domaines, usury, taxes and militarism, all this is beginning to work miracles even in those brains assumed to be props of the existing order. The Germans have been the pioneers in this field. They were brought to it by the very fact of their immense expansion; from the cities they have gone to the smallest centers and they thus arrive inevitably at the frontiers of the country. Their attempts will be long and difficult; this fact explains, excuses, and will excuse, the errors which have been and will be committed.[15] As long as the peasant shall not be gained over we shall always have behind us this _peasant stupidity_ which unconsciously repeats, and that because it is stupid, the errors of the 18th Brumaire and the 2d of December. The development of modern society in Russia will probably proceed on parallel lines with this conquest of the country districts. When that country shall have entered into the liberal era with all its imperfections and all its disadvantages, with all the purely modern forms of exploitation and of proletarization, but also with the compensations and the advantages of the political development of the proletariat, social democracy will no longer have to fear the threat of unforeseen perils from without, and it will at the same time have triumphed over the internal perils by the capture of the peasants. The example of Italy is instructive. This country after having opened the capitalist era dropped out for several centuries from the current history. It is a typical case of decadence which can be studied in a precise fashion from original documents in all its phases. It partly returned into history at the time of the Napoleonic domination. It reconquered its unity and became a modern state after the period of the reaction and conspiracies, and under circumstances known to all, and Italy has ended by having all the vices of parliamentarism, of militarism and of finance without having at the same time the forms of modern production and the resulting capacity for competition on equal terms. It cannot compete with countries where industry is more advanced by reason of the absolute lack of coal and scarcity of iron, the lack of technical ability,--and it is waiting, or hoping now, that the application of electricity may permit it to regain the time lost. It is this which gave the impulse to different attempts from Biella to Schio. A modern state in a society almost exclusively agricultural and in a country where agriculture is in great part backward, it is that which gives birth to this general sentiment of universal discontent. Thence come the incoherence and the inconsistency of the parties, the rapid oscillations from demagogy to dictatorship, the mob, the multitude, the infinite army of the parasites of politics, the makers of fantastic projects. This singular social spectacle of a development prevented, retarded, embarrassed and thus uncertain, is brought out in bold relief by a penetrating spirit which, if it is not always the fruit and the expression of a modern, broad and real culture nevertheless bears within itself as the relic of an excellent civilization the mark of great cerebral refinement. Italy has not been for reasons easy to guess a suitable field for the indigenous formation of socialist ideas and tendencies. The Italian Philippe Buonaroti, at first the friend of the younger Robespierre, become the companion of Babeuf and later attempted to re-establish Babeufism in France, after 1830. Socialism made its first appearance in Italy at the time of the International, in the confused and incoherent form of Bakuninism; it was not, moreover, a labor movement, but it was the work of the small bourgeois and instinctive revolutionists.[16] In these last years socialism has fixed itself in a form which _almost_ reproduces the general type of _social democracy_.[17] Now in Italy the first sign of life which the proletariat gave is in the shape of the rising of the Sicilian peasants followed by other revolts of the same kind on the continent to which others will perhaps succeed in the future. Is it not very significant? After this incursion into the history of contemporary socialism we gladly return to our precursors of fifty years ago, who put on record in the Manifesto how they took possession of an advance post on the road of progress. And that is true not merely of the theorizers, that is to say, Marx and Engels. Both of these men would have exercised, under other circumstances and at all times either by tongue or pen, a considerable influence over politics and science such was the force and originality of their minds and the extent of their knowledge even if they had never met on their way the _Communist League_. But I am referring to all the "unknown" according to the exclusive and vain jargon of bourgeois literature:--of the shoemaker, Bauer, the tailors, Lessner and Eccarius, the miniature painter, Pfaender, the watchmaker, Moll,[18] of Lochner, etc., and many others who were the first conscious initiators of our movement. The motto, "Workingmen of all countries, unite," remains as their monument. The passage of socialism from utopia to science marks the result of their work. The survival of their instinct and of their first impulse in the work of to-day is the ineffaceable title which these precursors have acquired to the gratitude of all socialists. As an Italian, I return so much the more willingly to these beginnings of modern socialism because for me, at least, this recent warning of Engels' is not without importance. "Thus the discovery that everywhere and always political conditions and events find their explanation in economic conditions would not have been made by Marx in 1845, but rather by Loria in 1886. He has at least succeeded in impressing this belief upon his compatriots, and since his book has appeared in French even upon some Frenchmen and he may now go on inflated with pride and vanity as if he had discovered an epoch-making historic theory until the Italian socialists have time to despoil the illustrious Mr. Loria of the peacock feathers which he has stolen."[19] I would willingly close here, but more remains to be said. On all sides and from all camps protests arise and objections are urged against historical materialism. And some times these voices are swelled here and there by newly converted socialists, socialists who are philosophical, socialists who are sentimental and sometimes hysterical. Then reappears, as a warning, the "question of the belly." Others devote themselves to exercise of logical gymnastics with abstract categories of egoism and altruism; for others again the inevitable struggle for existence always turns up at the right moment. Morality! But it is high time that we understand the lesson of this morality of the bourgeois epoch in the fable of the bees by Mandeville, who was contemporary with the first projection of classic economics. And has not the politics of this morality been explained in classic phrases that can never be forgotten by the first great political writer of the capitalist epoch Machiavelli, who did not invent Machiavellism, but who was its secretary and faithful and diligent editor. And as for the logical tourney between egoism and altruism, has it not been in full view from the time of the Reverend Malthus up to that empty, prolix and tiresome reasoner, the indispensable Spencer? Struggle for existence! But could you wish to observe, study and understand a struggle more important for us than the one which has its birth and is taking on gigantic proportions in the proletarian agitation? Perhaps you would reduce the explanation of this struggle which is developing and working in the supernatural domain of society, which man himself has created in the course of history, through his labor, through improved processes and through social institutions, and which man himself can change through other forms of labor, processes and institutions,--you would perhaps reduce it to the simple explanation of the more general struggle in which plant and animals, and men themselves in so far as they are animals, are contending in the bosom of nature. But let us return to our subject. Critical communism has never refused, and it does not refuse, to welcome the multiple and valuable suggestions, ideological, ethical, psychologic and pedagogic which may come from the knowledge and from the study of all forms of communism from Phales of Chalcedon down to Cabet.[20] More than this, it is by the study and the knowledge of these forms that the consciousness of the separateness of scientific socialism from all the rest becomes developed and fixed. And in making this study who is there who will refuse to recognize that Thomas More was a heroic soul and a great writer on socialism? Who will not find in his heart a large tribute of admiration for Robert Owen who first gave to the ethics of communism this indisputable principle, that the character and the morals of men are the necessary result of the conditions in which they live and of the circumstances which surround them? And the partisans of critical communism believe it is their duty, traversing history in thought, to claim fellowship with all the oppressed, whatever may have been their destiny, which was that of remaining oppressed and of opening the way after an ephemeral success for the rule of new oppressors. But the partisans of critical communism differentiate themselves clearly on one point from all other forms or manners of communism, or of socialism, ancient, modern or contemporaneous, and this point is of capital importance. They cannot admit that the ideologies of the past have remained without effect and that the past attempts of the proletariat have been always overcome by pure chance, by pure accident, by the effect of a caprice of circumstances. All these ideologies although they reflected in fact the sentiment directly due to social antitheses, that is to say, the real class struggles, with a lofty sense of justice and a profound devotion to an ideal, nevertheless all reveal ignorance of the true causes and of the effective nature of the antitheses against which they hurled themselves by an act of revolt spontaneous and often heroic. Thence their utopian character. We can moreover explain why the oppressive conditions of other epochs although they were more barbarous and cruel did not bring that accumulation of energy, that concentration of force, or that continuity of resistance which is seen to be realizing itself and developing in the proletariat of our time. It is the change of society in its economic structure; it is the formation of the proletariat in the bosom of the great industry and of the modern state. It is the appearance of the proletariat upon the political scene,--it is the new things, in fine, which have engendered the need of new ideas. Thus critical communism is neither moralizer, nor preacher, nor herald, nor utopian--it already holds the thing itself in its hands and into the thing itself it has put its ethics and its idealism. This orientation which seems harsh to the sentimentalists because it is too true, too realistic and too real, permits us to retrace the history of the proletariat and of the other oppressed classes which preceded it. We see their different phases; we take account of the failures of Chartism, of the Conspiracy of Equals and we explore still further back to attempts at relief, to acts of resistance, and to wars,--to the famous peasants' war in Germany, to the Jacquerie and to Father Dolcino. In all these facts and in all these events we discover forms and phenomena relating to the future of the bourgeoisie in proportion as it tears to pieces, overthrows, triumphs over and issues from the feudal system. We can do the same with the class struggles of the ancient world but with less clearness. This history of the proletariat and of the other oppressed classes, of the vicissitudes of their struggles and their revolts, is already a sufficient guide to assist us in understanding why the ideologies of the communism of other epochs were premature. If the bourgeoisie has not yet arrived everywhere at the final stage of its evolution, it surely has arrived in certain countries at its accomplishment. In fact, in the most advanced countries it is subjecting the various older forms of production, either directly or indirectly, to the action and to the law of capital. And thus it simplifies, or it tends to simplify, the different class struggles of former times, which then obscured each other by their multiplicity, into this single struggle between capital which is converting into merchandise all the products of human labor indispensable to life and the mass of proletarians which sells its labor power,--now also become simple merchandise. The secret of history is simplified. It is all prosaic. And just as the present class struggle is the simplification of all other, so likewise, the communism of the Manifesto simplifies into rigid and general theoretical formulas the ideologic, ethic, psychologic and pedagogic suggestion of the other forms of communism not by denying but by exalting them. All is prosaic and communism itself partakes of this character, it is now a science. Thus there are in the Manifesto neither rhetoric nor protestations. It does not lament over pauperism to eliminate it. It sheds tears over nothing. The tears are transformed of themselves into a spontaneous revolutionary force. Ethics and idealism consist henceforth in this, to put the thought of science at the service of the proletariat. If this ethics does not appear moral enough for the sentimentalists, usually hysterical and silly, let them go and borrow altruism from its high priest Spencer who will give a vague and insipid definition of it, such as will satisfy them. But, again, should the economic factor serve alone to explain the whole of history! Historic factors! But that is an expression of empiricists or ideologists who repeat Herder. Society is a complex whole or an organism according to the expression of some who waste their time in discussions over the value and the analogical use of this expression. This _complexus_ has formed itself and has changed several times. What is the explanation of this change? Even long before Feuerbach gave a final blow to the theological explanation of history (man makes religion and not religion man) the old Balzac[21] had made a satire of it by making men the puppets of God. And had not Vico already recognized that Providence does not act in history from without? And this same Vico, a century before Morgan, had he not reduced history to a process which man himself makes through successive experimentation consisting in the invention of language, religion, customs and laws? Had not Lessing affirmed that history is an education of the human race? Had not Rousseau seen that ideas are born from needs? Had not Saint Simon guessed when he did not lose himself in the distinction between organic and inorganic epochs the real genesis of the Third Estate, and did not his ideas translated into prose make of Augustin Thierry a reconstructor of historical research? In the first fifty years of this century and notably in the period from 1830 to 1850 the class struggles which the ancient historians and those of Italy during the Renaissance had described so clearly, instructed by the experience of these struggles in the narrow domain of their own urban republic had grown and had reached on both sides of the Channel greater proportions and an evidence always more palpable. Born in the midst of the great industry, illuminated by the recollection and by the study of the French Revolution they have become intuitively instructive because they found with more or less clearness and consciousness their actual and suggested expression in the programmes of the political parties: free exchange or tariffs on grain in England, and so on. The conception of history changed to the observer in France, on the right wing as on the left wing of the literary parties, from Guizot to Louis Blanc and to the modest Cabet. Sociology was the need of the time and if it sought in vain its theoretic expression in Auguste Comte, a belated scholastic, it found its artist in Balzac who was the actual inventor of class psychology. To put into the classes and into their frictions the real subject of history and the movement of this in their movement,--this is what was then on the point of being studied and discovered, and it was necessary to fix a theory of this in precise terms. Man has made his history not by a metaphorical evolution nor with a view of walking on a line of preconceived progress. He has made it by creating his own conditions, that is to say, by creating through his labor an artificial environment, by developing successively his technical aptitudes and by accumulating and transforming the products of his activity in this new environment. We have but one single history and we cannot compare real history, which is actually made, with another which is simply possible. Where shall we find the laws of this formation and of this development? The very ancient formations are not evident at first sight. But bourgeois society because it is born recently and has not yet reached its full development, even in all parts of Europe, bears within itself the embryonic traces of its origin and its _processus_, and it puts them in full evidence in countries where it is in process of birth before our eyes, as for example, in Japan. In so far as it is society which transforms all the products of human labor into commodities by means of capital, society which assumes the proletariat or creates it and which bears within itself the anxiety, the trouble and the uncertainty of continuous innovations, it is born in determined times according to clear methods which can be indicated although they may be varied. In fact in different countries it has different modes of development. In Italy, for example, it begins before all the others and then stops. In England it is the product of three centuries of economic expropriation of the old forms of production, or of the old proprietorship, to speak the language of the jurists. In one country it elaborates itself little by little combining itself with pre-existing forces, as was the case in Germany, and it undergoes their influences through adaptation; in another country it breaks its envelope and crushes out resistance violently, as happened in France, where the great revolution gives us the most intense and the most bewildering example of historic action that is known, and thus forms the greatest school of sociology. As I have already indicated this formation of modern or bourgeois history has been summed up in rapid and masterly strokes in the Manifesto, which has given its general anatomical profile with its successive aspects, the trade guild, commerce, manufacture and the great industry and has also indicated some of the organs and appliances of a derived and complex character, law, political forms, etc. The elements of the theory which was to explain history by the principle of the class struggle were already implicitly contained in it. This same bourgeois society which revolutionized the earlier forms of production had thrown light upon itself and its _processus_ in creating the doctrine of its structure, economics. In fact it has not developed in the unconsciousness which characterized primitive societies but in the full light of the modern world beginning with the Renaissance. Economics, as is known, was born by fragments, and its origin was associated with that of the first bourgeoisie, which was that of commerce and the great geographical discoveries, that is to say, it was contemporary with the first and second phases of mercantilism. And it was born to answer special questions: for example, is interest legitimate? Is it advantageous for states and for nations to accumulate money? It continued to grow, it occupied itself with the most complex sides of the problem of wealth; it developed in the passage from mercantilism to manufacture and then more rapidly and more resolutely in the passage from the latter to the great industry. It was the intellectual soul of the bourgeoisie which was conquering society. It had already as discipline almost defined its general lines on the eve of the French Revolution; it was the sign of the rebellion against the old forms of feudalism, the guild, privilege, limitations of labor, that is to say it was the sign of liberty. The theory of "natural right" which developed from the precursors of Grotius to Rousseau, Kant, and the Constitution of 93, was nothing else than a duplicate and the ideological complement of economics, to the extent that often the thing and its complement are confounded in one in the mind and in the postulates of writers; of this we have a typical example in the Physiocrats. In so far as it was a doctrine it separated, distinguished and analyzed the elements and the forms of the _processus_ of production, of circulation and of distribution and reduced them all into categories: money, money capital, interest, profit, land rent, wages, etc. It marched, sure of itself, accumulating its analyses from Petty to Ricardo. The sole mistress of the field, it met only rare objections. It started from two hypotheses which it did not take the trouble to justify since they appeared so evident; namely, that the social order which it illustrated was the natural order, and that private property in the means of production was one and the same thing with human liberty; all of which made wage labor and the inferiority of the wage laborers into necessary conditions. In other terms, it did not recognize the historic character of the forms which it studied. The antitheses which it met on its way in its attempt at systematization, after several vain attempts it tried to eliminate logically as was the case with Ricardo in his struggle against the income from land rents. The beginning of the nineteenth century is marked by violent crises and by those first labor movements which have their immediate origin in the distress attending lockouts. The ideal of the "natural order" is overthrown. Wealth has engendered poverty. The great industry in changing all social relations has increased vices, maladies and subjection. It has, in a word, caused degeneration. Progress has engendered retrogression. What must be done that progress may engender nothing else but progress, that is to say, prosperity, health, security, education and intellectual development equal for all? With this question Owen is wholly concerned and he shares with Fourier and Saint Simon this characteristic that he no longer appeals to self-sacrifice and to religion, and that he wishes to resolve and surmount the social antitheses without diminishing the technical and industrial energy of man, but rather to increase this. It is by this road that Owen became a communist and he is the first who became so in the environment created by modern industry. The antithesis rests entirely on the contradiction between the mode of production and the mode of distribution. This antithesis must, then, be suppressed in a society which produces collectively. Owen becomes utopian. This perfect society must needs be realized experimentally and to this he devotes himself with a heroic constancy and unequalled self-sacrifice bringing a mathematical precision even into his thoughts of its details. The antithesis between production and distribution once discovered, there arose in England from Thompson to Bray a series of writers of a socialism which is not strictly utopian, but which should be qualified as one-sided for its object is to correct the manifest vices of society by as many appropriate remedies.[22] In fact the first stage of all those who are on the road toward socialism is the discovery of the contradiction between production and distribution. Then, these ingenuous questions immediately arise: Why not abolish poverty? Why not eliminate lockouts? Why not suppress the middle man? Why not favor the direct exchange of products in consideration of the labor that they contain? Why not give the worker the entire product of his labor, etc.? These demands reduce the _things_, tenacious and resistant, of real life, into as many reasonings, and they have for their object to combat the capitalist system as if it were a machine from which one can take away or to which one can add pieces, wheels and gearings. The partisans of critical communism have broken definitely with all these tendencies. They have been the successors and the continuers of classical economics.[23] What is the doctrine of the structure of present society? No one can combat this structure in practice, in politics or in revolution without first taking an exact account of its elements and its relations and making a fundamental study of the doctrine which explains it. These forms, these elements and these relations arise in certain historic conditions but they constitute a system and a necessity. How can it be hoped to destroy such a system by an act of logical negation and how eliminate it by reasoning? Eliminate pauperism? But it is a necessary condition of capitalism. Give the worker the entire product of his labor? But what would become of the profit of capital, and where and how could the money expended in the purchase of commodities be increased if among all the commodities which it meets and with which it makes exchanges there were not a particular one which returns to the buyer more than it costs him; and is not this commodity precisely the labor power of the wage worker? The economic system is not a tissue of reasonings but it is a sum and a complexus of facts which engenders a complex tissue of relations. It is a foolish thing to assume that this system of facts which the ruling class has established with great pains through the centuries by violence, by sagacity, by talent and by science will confess itself vanquished, will destroy itself to give way to the demands of the poor and to the reasonings of their advocates. How demand the suppression of poverty without demanding the overthrow of all the rest? To demand of this society that it shall change its law which constitutes its defense is to demand an absurd thing. To demand of this State that it shall cease to be the buckler and the defense of this society and of this law is plunging into absurdities.[24] The one-sided socialism which without being clearly utopian starts from the hypothesis that society admits of certain errata without revolution, that is to say without a fundamental change in the general elementary structure of society itself, is a mere piece of ingenuity. This contradiction with the rigid laws of the process of things is shown in all its evidence in Proudhon, who, reproducing without knowing it, or copying directly, some of the one-sided English socialists, wished to arrest and change history, armed with a definition and a syllogism. The partisans of critical communism recognized that history has the right to follow its course. The bourgeois phase can be outgrown and it will be. But as long as it exists it has its laws. The relativity of these consists in the fact that they grow and develop in certain determined conditions, but their relativity is not simply the opposite of necessity, a mere appearance, a soap-bubble. These laws may disappear and they will disappear by the very fact of the change of society, but they do not yield to the arbitrary suggestion which demands a change, proclaims a reform, or formulates a programme. Communism makes common cause with the proletariat because in this resides the revolutionary force which, bursts, breaks, shakes and dissolves the present social form and creates in it, little by little, new conditions; or to be more exact, the very fact of its movement shows to us that these new conditions are already born. The theory of the class struggle was found. It was seen to appear both in the origins of the bourgeoisie (whose intrinsic _processus_ was already illustrated by the science of economics), and in this new appearance of the proletariat. The relativity of economic laws was discovered, but at the same time their relative necessity was understood. Herein lies the whole method and justification of the new materialistic conception of history. Those deceive themselves who, calling it the economic interpretation of history, think they understand it completely. That designation is better suited, and is only suited, to certain analytic attempts,[25] which, taking separately and in a distinct fashion on the one side the economic forms and categories, and on the other, for example, law, legislation, politics, customs,--proceed to study the reciprocal influences of the different sides of life considered in an abstract fashion. Quite different is our position. Ours is the organic conception of history. The totality of the unity of social life is the subject matter present to our minds. It is economics itself which dissolves in the course of one process, to reappear in as many morphological stages, in each of which it serves as a substructure for all the rest. Finally, it is not our method to extend the so-called economic factor isolated in an abstract fashion over all the rest, as our adversaries imagine, but it is, before everything else, to form an historic conception of economics and to explain the other changes by means of its changes. Therein lies our answer to all the criticisms which come to us from all the domains of learned ignorance, not excepting the socialists who are insufficiently grounded and who are sentimental or hysterical. And we explain our position thus as Marx has done in his Capital, not the first book of critical communism, but the last great book of bourgeois economics. At the moment when the Manifesto was written the historic horizon did not go beyond the classic world, the scarcely studied German antiquities and the Biblical tradition which had only lately been reduced to the prosaic conditions of all profane history. Our historic horizon is now quite another thing, since it extends to the Aryan antiquities and to the ancient deposits of Egypt and Mesopotamia which precede all the Semitic traditions. And it extends still further back into prehistory, that is to say, into, unwritten history. Morgan has given us a knowledge of ancient society, that is to say a pre-political society, and the key to understand how from it came all the later forms marked by monogamy, the development of the paternal family, the appearance of property, first of the _gens_, then of the family, lastly individual, and by the successive establishment of the alliances between _gentes_ which are the origin of the State. All this is illustrated by the knowledge of the process of technique in the discovery and in the use of the means and instruments of labor and by the understanding of the effect of this process upon the social complexus, urging it in certain directions and making it traverse certain stages. These discoveries may still be corrected at certain points, notably by the study of the different specific fashions according to which in different parts of the world the passage from barbarism to civilization has been effected. But, henceforth, one fact is indisputable, namely, that we have before our eyes the general embryogenic record of human development from primitive communism to those complex formations as at Athens or at Rome with their constitutions of citizens arranged in classes according to census which not long ago constituted the columns of Hercules for research into written tradition. The classes which the Manifesto assumed have been later resolved into their process of formation and in this can already be recognized the plexus of reasons and of different economic causes for the categories of the economic science of our bourgeois epoch. The dream of Fourier to find a place for an epoch of civilization in the series of a long and vast process has been realized. A scientific solution has been found for the problem of the origin of inequality among men which Rousseau had tried to solve by arguments of an original dialectic, relying however upon too few real data. At two points, the extreme points for us, the human process is palpable. One of these is the origin of the bourgeoisie, so recent and in the full light of the science of economics; the other is the ancient formation of the society divided into classes, which marks the passage from higher barbarism to civilization (the epoch of the State) to use expressions employed by Morgan. All that is found between these two epochs is what has, up to this time, formed the subject matter of the chroniclers, the historians properly so-called, the jurists, the theologians and the philosophers. To traverse and reanimate all this domain with the new historic conception is not an easy thing. We must not be over-hasty in tabulating it. At the very beginning we must understand the economics relative to each epoch,[26] in order to explain specifically the classes which develop in it, avoiding hypothetical and uncertain data and taking care not to carry over our own conditions into each epoch. For that, skilled fingers are needed. Thus, for example, what the Manifesto says of the first origin of the bourgeoisie proceeding from the serfs of the Middle Ages incorporated little by little into the cities is not a general truth. This mode of origin is peculiar to Germany and to the other countries which reproduce its process. It is not the case either in Italy, nor in Southern France, nor in Spain, which were the fields upon which began the first history of the bourgeoisie, that is to say, of modern civilization. In this first phase are found all the premises of the whole capitalist society as Marx informed us in a note to the first volume of Capital.[27] This first phase which reaches its perfect form in the Italian municipalities forms the pre-historic background for that capitalist accumulation which Marx has explained with so many characteristic details in the evolution of England. But I will stop there. The proletarians can have in view nothing but the future. That with which all scientific socialists are primarily concerned is the present in which are spontaneously developed and in which are ripening the conditions of the future. The knowledge of the past is practically of use and of interest only in so far as it throws light upon and explains the present. For the moment it is enough to say that the partisans of critical communism fifty years ago conceived the elements of the new and definite philosophy of history. Soon this fashion of seeing will impose itself because it will be impossible to think the contrary; and this discovery will have the fate of Columbus' egg. And perhaps before an army of scientists has made an application of this conception to the continuous narration of the whole history, the success of the proletariat will have become such that the bourgeois epoch will appear to all as something that must be left behind because it will nearly be so in reality. _To understand is to leave behind_ (Hegel). When, fifty years ago, the Manifesto made of the proletarians, of the unfortunates who excited pity, the predestined grave-diggers of the bourgeoisie, the circumference of this burial place must have appeared very small to the imagination of the writers who scarcely concealed in the gravity of their style the idealism of their intellectual passion. The probable circumference in their imagination then embraced only France and England, and it would scarcely have touched the frontiers of other countries, for instance, Germany. To-day the circumference appears to us immense by reason of the rapid and colossal extension of the bourgeois form of production which by inevitable reaction enlarges, makes universal and multiplies the movement of the proletariat and immensely expands the scene upon which is projected the picture of the coming communism. The burial place extends as far as the eye can reach. The more productive forces this magician calls forth, the more he excites and prepares forces that must rebel against himself. All those who were communists ideological, religious and utopian, or even prophetic and apocalyptic in the past have always believed that the reign of justice, equality and happiness was destined to have the world for its theatre. To-day the world is invaded by civilization and everywhere is developing that society which lives upon class antagonisms and class domination, the form of bourgeois production. (Japan may serve us for an example.) The coexistence of the two nations in one and the same state, which the divine Plato had already described, is perpetuated. The earth will not be won over to communism to-morrow. But as the confines of the bourgeois world enlarge, more numerous are those who enter into it, abandoning and leaving behind the lower forms of production,--and thus the attempt of communism gains in firmness and precision; especially because in the domain and struggle of competition, the deviations due to conquest and colonization are diminishing. The proletarian International, while embryonic in the Communist League of fifty years ago, henceforth becomes Interoceanic and it affirms on the first of every May that the proletarians of the whole world are really and actively united. The future grave-diggers of the bourgeoisie and their descendants to many generations will ever remember the date of the Communist Manifesto. FOOTNOTES: [1] I refer to that form which the Manifesto designates ironically under the name of "German or 'True' Socialism." This paragraph, which is unintelligible for those who are not well versed in the German philosophy of that epoch, notably in certain of its tendencies marked by acute degeneracy, has, with good reason, been suppressed in the Spanish translation. [2] It is better to use the expression "democratic socialization of the means of production" than that of "collective property" because the latter implies a certain theoretical error in that, to begin with, it substitutes for the real economic fact a juridical expression and moreover in the mind of more than one it is confused with the increase of monopolies, with the increasing _statization_ of public utilities and with all the other fantasmagoria of the ever recurring State socialism, the whole effect of which is to increase the economic means of oppression in the hands of the oppressing class. [3] Twenty-five octavo pages in the original edition (London, February, 1848) for a copy of which I am indebted to the special kindness of Engels. I should say here in passing that I have resisted the temptation to affix any bibliographical notes, references and citations, for I should then have been making a work of scholarship, or a book, rather than a simple essay. I hope the reader will take my word for it that there are in this essay no allusions, or statements of fact or opinion, which I could not substantiate with authorities. [4] The "Umrisse zu einer Kritik der National-oekonomie" appeared in the German-French Year Book, Paris, 1844, pp. 85-114; and his book on "The Condition of the Working Class in England" at Leipzig in 1845. [5] In these last years many jurists have thought they found in the re-adjustment of the civil Code a practical means for ameliorating the condition of the proletariat. But why have they not asked the pope to become the head of the free thought league? The most delightful of these is that Italian author who occupying himself with the class struggle asks that by the side of the code which establishes the rights of capital another be elaborated which should guarantee the rights of labor. [6] This development has been given in Marx's Capital which can be considered as a philosophy of history. [7] It was not until after the publication of the Italian edition of this essay that I had at my disposal for some months a complete collection of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung for which I owe hearty thanks to the Partei-Archiv of Berlin. The impression derived from this reading surpasses expectation. It is desirable either that this journal which now has become very rare, be reprinted entire or that the most important articles and letters in it be reproduced. [8] Misere de la Philosophie, by Karl Marx, Paris and Brussels, 1847; new edition, Paris, Giard and Briere, 1896. [9] This is made up of articles which appeared in 1849 in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung and which reproduced the lectures given by Marx to the German Workingmen's Circle of Brussels in 1847. It has since been published as a propaganda leaflet. [10] See Chapter II. of the Manifesto. [11] Zur Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, Berlin, 1859, pp. IV.-VI. of the preface. (Instead of retranslating this extract from the French I have availed myself of the assistance of Comrade Hitch, who has translated direct from the German of Marx. C. H. K.) [12] These articles which appeared in the Neue Rheinische Politischokonomische Review, Hamburg, 1850, have recently been brought together into a pamphlet by Engels (Berlin, 1895) under the title of "Die Klassenkampfe in Frankreich 1848 bis 1850." The little work has a preface by Engels. [13] Appeared for the first time in New York in 1852 in a review. Several editions have since been made in Germany. A French translation appeared in 1891 published by Delory, Lille. [14] In the preface to the "Class Struggle in France in 1848-50" and elsewhere Engels treated fundamentally the objective development of the new revolutionary tactic. (It is well to remember that the first Italian edition of this essay appeared June 18th, and the second, October 15, 1895.) [15] In my opinion this is the case in France. The recent discussions of the agrarian programme submitted to the deliberations of the social democracy in Germany confirm the reasons which I have indicated. [16] It was otherwise in Germany. After 1830 socialism was imported there and became a current literature; it underwent philosophical alterations of which Gruen was the typical representative. But already before the _new doctrine_ socialism had received a characteristic imprint which was proletarian, thanks to the propaganda and the writings of Weitling. As Marx said in 1844 in the Paris Vorwaerts, "it was the giant in the cradle." [17] It is what many people call Marxism. Marxism is and remains a doctrine. Parties can draw neither their name nor their justification from a doctrine. "I am no Marxist" said--guess who? Marx himself. [18] It is he who established the first relations between Marx and the League and who served as intermediary in the publication of the Manifesto. He fell in the insurrection of 1849 at Murg. [19] Marx's Capital, Vol. III., Hamburg, 1894, pp. xix-xx. The date of 1845 refers principally to the book "Die heilige Familie, Frankfort, 1845," which was produced in collaboration by Marx and Engels. This book is indispensable to an understanding of the theoretical origin of historical materialism. [20] I stop with Cabet who lived at the epoch of the Manifesto. I do not think I ought to go as far as the sporadic forms of Bellamy and Hertzka. [21] The Balzac of the 17th century. [22] It is these writers whom Menger thought he had discovered as the authors of scientific socialism. [23] It is for this reason that certain critics, Wieser for example, propose to abandon Ricardo's theory of value because it leads to socialism. [24] Thus there arises notably in France the illusion of a social monarchy which, succeeding the liberal epoch, should solve harmoniously what is called the social question. This absurdity reproduces itself in infinite varieties of socialism of the pulpit and State socialism. To the different forms of ideological and religious utopianism is joined a new form of bureaucratic and fiscal utopianism, the Utopia of the idiots. [25] For example in the essays of Th. Rogers. [26] Who would have thought a few years ago of the discovery and the authentic interpretation of an ancient Babylonian law? [27] Note 189, p. 740, of the 3rd German edition. PART II HISTORICAL MATERIALISM. I. This class of studies, like many others, but this more than any other, is confronted with a great difficulty, indeed an irksome hindrance, in that vice of minds educated by literary methods alone which is ordinarily called _verbalism_. This bad habit creeps into and spreads itself through all domains of knowledge; but in studies which relate to the so-called moral world, that is to say, to the historico-social _complexus_, it very often happens that the cult and the dominion of words succeed in corrupting and blotting out the real and living sense of things. In the field where a long observation, repeated experiences, the certain use of improved instruments, the general or partial application of the calculus have resulted in putting the mind into a constant and methodical relation with things and their variations, as in the natural sciences properly so-called,--there the myth and superstition of words are left behind and vanquished; there the questions of terminology no longer have more than the secondary value of pure convention. In the study of human relations and actions, on the contrary, the passions, the interests, the prejudices of school, sect, class and religion, the literary abuse of the traditional means of representing thought, and scholasticism, ever vanquished and always reborn, conceal the actual things, or transform them involuntarily into terms, into words, into abstract and conventional fashions of speech. We must, first of all, take account of this difficulty when we use the expression or the formula "materialistic conception of history." Many have imagined, do imagine, and will imagine that it is possible and convenient to penetrate into the sense of the phrase by the simple analysis of the words which compose it instead of arriving at it from the context of an explanation, from the genetic study of the formation of the doctrine,[28] or from the polemical writings in which its partisans refute the objections of its opponents. Verbalism tends always to shut itself up in purely formal definitions; it gives rise in the minds to this erroneous belief, that it is an easy thing to reduce into terms and into simple and palpable expressions the agitated and immense _complexus_ of nature and history and that it is easy to picture the multiform and complicated interlacings of causes and effects; in clearer terms, it obliterates the meaning of the problems because it sees in them nothing but questions of nomenclature. If, moreover, it then happens that verbalism finds a support in certain theoretical hypotheses, for example, that _matter_ indicates something which is below or opposed to another higher or nobler thing which is called spirit; or if it happens to be at one with that literary habit which opposes the word materialism, understood in a disparaging sense, to all that, in a word, is called idealism, that is to say, to the sum total of the anti-egoistic inclinations and acts; then our embarrassment is extreme! Then we are told that in this doctrine it is attempted to explain the whole of man by the mere calculation of his material interests and that no value whatever is allowed to any ideal interest. The inexperience, the incapacity and the haste of certain partisans and propagandists of this doctrine have also been a cause of these confusions. In their eagerness to explain to others what they themselves only half understand, at a time when the doctrine itself is only in its beginnings and still has need of many developments, they have believed they could apply it, such as it was, to whatever historic fact they were considering, and they have almost reduced it to tatters, exposing it thus to the easy criticism and the ridicule of people on the watch for scientific novelties, and other idle persons of the same type. Since it has been my privilege in these first pages simply to rebut these prejudices (in a preliminary fashion) and unmask the intentions and the tendencies underlying them, it must be remembered that the meaning of this doctrine ought, before all else, to be drawn from the position which it takes and occupies with regard to the doctrines against which it is in reality opposed, and particularly with regard to the ideologies of every sort;--that the proof of its value consists exclusively in the more suitable and more appropriate explanation of the succession of human events which is derived from it;--that this doctrine does not imply a subjective preference for a certain quality or a certain sum of human interests opposed by free choice to other interests, but that it merely affirms the objective co-ordination and subordination of all interests in the development of all society; and this it affirms, thanks to that genetic _processus_ which consists in going from the conditions to the conditioned, from the elements of formation to the things formed. Let the verbalists reason as they like over the value of the word _matter_ in so far as it implies or recalls a metaphysical conception, or in so far as it is the expression of the last hypothetical substratum of experience. We are not here in the domain of physics, chemistry or biology; we are only searching for the explicit conditions of human association in so far as it is no longer simply animal. It is not for us to support our inductions or our deductions upon the data of biology, but, on the contrary, to recognize before all else the peculiarities of human association, which form and develop through the succession and the growing perfection of the activity of man himself in given and variable conditions, and to find the relations of co-ordination and subordination of the needs which are the substratum of will and action. It is not proposed to discover an intention nor to formulate a criticism; it is merely the necessity arising from the facts that must be put in evidence. And as men, not by free choice, but because they could not act otherwise, satisfy first certain elementary needs, which, in their turn, give rise to others in their upward development, and as for the satisfaction of their needs, whatever they may be, they invent and employ certain means and certain tools and associate themselves in certain definite fashions, the materialism of historical interpretation is nothing else than an attempt to reconstruct by thought with method the genesis and the complexity of the social life which develops through the ages. The novelty of this doctrine does not differ from that of all the other doctrines which after many excursions through the domains of the imagination have finally arrived, very painfully, at reaching the prose of reality and halting there. II. There is a certain affinity, apparently at least, between that formal vice of verbalism and another defect of the mind, whose origins may, however, be varied. In consideration of some of its most common and popular effects I will call it _phraseology_, although this word is not an exact expression of the thing and does not set forth its origin. For long centuries men have written on history, have explained it, have illustrated it. The most varied interests, from the interests more immediately practical to the interests purely æsthetic, have moved different writers to conceive and to execute this type of composition. These different types have always taken birth in different countries long after the origins of civilization, of the development of the state and of the passage from the primitive communist society to the society which rests upon class differences and class antagonisms. The historians, even if they have been as artless as Herodotus, were always born and formed in a society having nothing ingenuous in it, but very complicated and complex, and at a time when the reasons for this complication and complexity were unknown and their origins forgotten. This complexity, with all the contrasts which it bears within itself and which it reveals later and makes burst forth in its various vicissitudes, stood forth before the narrators as something mysterious and calling for an explanation, and if the historian wished to give some sequence and a certain connection to the things narrated, he was obliged to add certain general views to the simple narration. From the jealousy of the gods of Father Herodotus to the environment of M. Tame, an infinite number of concepts serving as means of explanation and as complements to the things related have been imposed upon the narrators by the natural voices of their immediate thought. Class tendencies, religious ideas, popular prejudices, influences or imitations of a current philosophy, excursions of imagination and a desire to give an artistic appearance to facts known only in a fragmentary fashion, all these causes and other analogous causes have contributed to form the substratum of the more or less artless theory of events which is implicitly at the bottom of the narration, or which serves at least to flavor and adorn it. Whether men speak of chance or of destiny, whether they appeal to the providential direction of human events, or adhere to the word and concept of chance, the only divinity left in the rigid and often coarse conception of Machiavelli, or whether they speak, as is frequent enough at the present time, of the logic of events, all these conceptions were and are effects and results of ingenuous thought, of immediate thought, of thought which cannot justify to itself its course, and its products, either by the paths of criticism or by the methods of experience. To fill up with conventional causes (e. g., _chance_) or with a statement of theoretical plausibility (e. g., the _inevitable course of events_ which sometimes is confused in the mind with the notion of progress) the gaps of our knowledge as to the fashion in which things have been actually produced by their own necessity without care for our free will and our consent, that is the motive and the result of this popular philosophy, latent or explicit, in the chroniclers, which by reason of its superficial character dissolves as soon as scientific criticism appears. In all these concepts and all these imaginings which in the light of criticism appear as simple provisional devices and effects of an unripe thought, but which often seem to "cultured people" the _non plus ultra_ of intelligence,--in all these a great part of the human _processus_ is revealed and reflected; and, consequently, we should not consider them as gratuitous inventions nor as products of a momentary illusion. They are a part and a moment in the development of what we call the human mind. If later it is observed that these concepts and these imaginings are mingled and confounded in the accepted opinions of cultured people, or of those who pass for such, they make up an immense mass of prejudices and they constitute an impediment which ignorance opposes to the clear and complete vision of the real things. These prejudices turn up again as etymological derivations in the language of professional politicians, of so-called publicists and journalists of every kind, and offer the support of rhetoric to self-styled public opinion. To oppose and then to replace this mirage of uncritical conceptions, these idols of the imagination, these effects of literary artifice, this conventionalism by the real subjects, or the forces which are positively acting--that is to say, men in their various and diversified social relations,--this is the revolutionary enterprise and the scientific aim of the new doctrine which renders objective and I might say naturalizes the explanation of the historical _processus_. A certain definite nation, that is to say, not a certain mass of individuals, but a _plexus_ of men organized in such and such a fashion by natural relations of consanguinity, or following such or such an artificial or customary order of relationship and affinity, or by reason of permanent proximity;--this nation, on a certain circumscribed and limited territory, having such and such fertility, productive in such and such a manner acquired through certain definite forms by continuous labor;--this nation, thus distributed over this territory and thus divided and articulated by the effect of a definite division of labor which is scarcely beginning to give birth to or which has already developed and ripened such and such a division of classes, or which has already disintegrated or transformed a whole series of classes;--this nation which possesses such and such instruments from the flint stone to the electric light and from the bow and arrow to the repeating rifle, which produces according to a certain fashion and shares its products, conformably to its way of producing;--this nation, which by all these relations constitutes a society in which either by habits of mutual accommodation or by explicit conventions, or by acts of violence suffered and endured, has already given birth, or is on the point of giving birth to legal-political relations which result in the formation of the state;--this nation, which by the organization of the state, which is only a means for fixing, defending and perpetuating inequalities, by reason of the antagonisms which it bears within itself, renders continuously unstable the organization itself, whence result the political movements and revolutions, and therefore the reasons for progress and retrogression:--there is the sum of what is at the bottom of all history. And there is the victory of realistic prose over all the fantastic and ideological combinations. Certainly it requires some resignation to see things as they are, passing beyond the phantoms which for centuries have prevented right vision. But this revelation of realistic doctrine was not and is not designed to be the rebellion of the material man against the ideal man. It has been and is, on the contrary, the discovery of the principles and the motives which are real and which belong to all human development, including all that we call the ideal in positive conditions, determined by facts which carry in themselves the reasons and the law and the rhythm of their own development. III. But it would be a complete error to believe that the writers who narrate, explain, or illustrate have themselves invented and given life to this enormous mass of unripe concepts, imaginings, and explanations which, thanks to the force of prejudice, concealed for centuries the real truth. It may happen, and it certainly does happen, that some of these concepts are the fruit and the product of personal views, or of literary currents formed in the narrow professional circle of the universities and academies. The people in this case are absolutely ignorant of them. But the important fact is that history itself has put on these veils; that is to say, that the very actors and workers of the historic events--great masses of people, directing and ordering classes, masters of state, sects or parties, in the narrowest sense of the word, if we make exception for an occasional moment of lucid interval--never had up to the end of the past century a consciousness of their own work, unless it be through some ideological envelope which prevented any sight of the real causes. Already at the distant epoch when barbarism was passing over into civilization, that is to say, when the first discoveries of agriculture, the stable establishment of a population upon a definite territory, the first division of labor in society, the first alliances of different gentes, gave the conditions in which developed property and the state, or at least the city,--even then, at the epoch of all the first social revolutions, men ideally transformed their work, seeing in it the miraculous acts of gods and heroes. So much so that, while acting as they could and as they must, granted the necessity and the fact of their relative economic development, they conceived an explanation of their own work as if it did not belong to them. This ideological envelope of human works has changed since then more than once in form, in appearance, in combinations and in relations in the course of the centuries, from the immediate production of the ingenuous myths up to the complicated theological systems and to _The City of God_ of St. Augustine--from the superstitious credulity in miracles down to the bewildering miracles of the metaphysicians, that is to say, down to the _Idea_ which for the _decadents_ of Hegelianism engenders of itself, in itself, by its own disaggregation the most incongruous variations of social life in the course of history. Now, precisely because the visual angle of ideological interpretation has not been finally outgrown until very lately, and because it is only in our days that a sum total of the real and really acting relations has been clearly distinguished from the ingenuous reflections of myth and the more artificial reflections of religion and metaphysics, our doctrine states a new problem and carries within itself grave difficulties for whoever wishes to fit it for providing a specific explanation of the history of the past. The problem consists in this: that our doctrine necessitates a new criticism of the sources of history. And I do not wish to be understood as speaking exclusively of the criticism of documents in the proper and ordinary sense of the word, because as for this we may content ourselves with what is delivered to us ready made by the critics, the scholars, and the professional philologists. But I would speak of that immediate source which is behind the so called documents properly and which, before expressing itself and fixing itself in these, resides in the spirit and in the form of the consciousness in which the actors accounted to themselves for the motives of their own work. This spirit, that is to say, this consciousness, is often inadequate to the causes which we are now in a position to discover, from which it follows that the actors seem to us enveloped, as it were, in a circle of illusions. To strip the historic facts from these envelopes which clothe the very facts while they are developing--this is to make a new criticism of the sources in the realistic sense of the word and not in the formal documentary sense. It is, in short, to make react upon the knowledge of past conditions the consciousness of which we are now capable, and thereby to reconstruct them anew. But this revision of the most direct sources, if it marks the extreme limit of the historic self-consciousness which may be reached, may be an occasion for falling into a serious error. As we place ourselves at a point of view which is beyond the ideological views to which the actors in history were indebted for a consciousness of their work and in which they often found both the motives and the justification of their action, we may falsely believe that these ideological views were a pure appearance, a simple artifice, a pure illusion in the vulgar sense of the word. Martin Luther, like the other great reformers, his contemporaries, never knew, as we know to-day, that the Reformation was but an episode in the development of the Third Estate, and an economic revolt of the German nation against the exploitation of the Papal court. He was what he was, as an agitator and a politician, because he was wholly taken up with the belief which made him see in the class movement which gave an impulse to the agitation a return to true Christianity and a divine necessity in the vulgar course of events. The study of remote effects, that is to say, the increasing strength of the bourgeoisie of the cities against the feudal lords, the increase of the territorial dominion of the princes at the expense of the inter-territorial and super-territorial power of the emperor and the pope, the violent repression of the movement of the peasants and the more properly proletarian movement of the Anabaptists permit us now to reconstruct the authentic history of the economic causes of the Reformation, particularly in the final proportions which it took, which is the best of proofs. But that does not mean that we are privileged to detach the fact arrived at from the mode of its realization and to analyze the circumstantial integrality by a posthumous analysis altogether subjective and simplified. The inner causes, or, as would be said now, the profane and prosaic motives of the Reformation, appear to us clearly in France, where it was not victorious; clearly again in the Low Countries, where, apart from the differences of nationality, the contrasts of economic interests are shown strikingly in the struggle against Spain; very clearly again in England, where the religious renovation realized, thanks to political violence, placed in full light the passage to those conditions which are for our modern bourgeoisie the forerunners of capitalism. _Post factum_, and after the tardy realization of unforeseen consequences, the history of the real movements which were the inner causes of the Reformation, in great part unknown to the actors themselves, will appear in full light. But that the fact came about precisely as it did come about, that it took on certain determined forms, that it clothed itself in certain vestments, that it painted itself in certain colors, that it put in movement certain passions, that it displayed a special degree of fanaticism,--in these consist its specific character, which no analytic ability can make otherwise than as it was. Only the love of paradox inseparable from the zeal of the passionate popularizers of a new doctrine can have brought some to believe that to write history it was sufficient to put on record merely the _economic moment_ (often still unknown and often unknowable), and thereupon to cast to the earth all the rest as a useless burden with which men had capriciously loaded themselves, as a superfluity, a mere trifle, or even, as it were, something not existent. From the fact that history must be taken in its entirety and that in it the kernel and the husk are but one, as Goethe said of all things, three consequences follow:-- First, it is evident that in the domain of historico-social determinism, the linking of causes to effects, of conditions to the things conditioned, of antecedents to consequents, is never evident at first sight in the subjective determinism of individual psychology. In this last domain it was a relatively easy thing for abstract and formal philosophy to discover, passing above all the baubles of fatalism and free will, the evidence of the motive in every volition, because, in fine, there is no wish without its determining motive. But beneath the motives and the wish there is the genesis of both, and to reconstruct this genesis we must leave the closed field of consciousness to arrive at the analysis of the simple necessities, which, on the one side, are derived from social conditions, and on the other side are lost in the obscure background of organic dispositions, in ancestry and in atavism. It is not otherwise with historical determinism, where, in the same way, we begin with motives religious, political, æsthetic, passionate, etc., but where we must subsequently discover the causes of these motives in the material conditions underlying them. Now the study of these conditions should be so specified that we may perceive indubitably not only what are the causes, but again by what mediations they arrive at that form which reveals them to the consciousness as motives whose origin is often obliterated. And thence follows indubitably this second consequence that in our doctrine we have not to re-translate into economic categories all the complex manifestations of history, but only to explain in the _last analysis_ (Engels) all the historic facts _by means of the underlying economic structure_ (Marx), which necessitates analysis and reduction and then interlinking and construction. It results from this, in the third place, that, passing from the underlying economic structure to the picturesque whole of a given history, we need the aid of that complexus of notions and knowledge which may be called, for lack of a better term, social psychology. I do not mean by that to allude to the fantastic existence of a social psyche nor to the concept of an assumed collective spirit which by its own laws, independent of the consciousness of individuals and of their material and definable relations, realizes itself and shows itself in social life. That is pure mysticism. Neither do I wish to allude to those attempts at generalization which fill up treatises on social psychology and the general idea of which is to transport and apply to a subject which is called social consciousness the known categories and forms of individual psychology. Nor again do I wish to allude to that mass of semi-organic and semi-psychological denominations by the aid of which some attribute to the social being, as Schäffle does, a brain, a spinal column, sensibility, sentiment, conscience, will, etc. But I wish to speak of more modest and more prosaic things, that is to say, of those concrete and precise states of mind which make us know as they really were the plebeians of Rome at a certain epoch, the artisans of Florence at the moment when the movement of the Ciompi burst forth, or those peasants of France within whom was engendered, to follow Taine's expression, the "spontaneous anarchy" of 1789, those peasants who finally became free laborers and small proprietors, or, aspiring to property, transformed themselves rapidly from victors over the foreigner into automatic instruments of reaction. This social psychology, which no one can reduce to abstract canons because, in most cases, it is merely descriptive, this is what the chroniclers, the orators, the artists, the romancers and the ideologists of every sort have seen and up to now have conceived as the exclusive object of their studies. In this, psychology, which is the specific consciousness of men in given social conditions, the agitators, orators and propagandists trust to-day, and to it they appeal. We know that it is the fruit, the outcome, the effect of certain social conditions actually determined;--this class, in this situation, determined by the functions which it fulfills, by the subjection in which it is held, by the dominion which it exercises;--and finally, these classes, these functions, this subjection and this dominion involve such and such a determined form of production and distribution of the immediate means of life, that is to say, a determined economic structure. This social psychology, by its nature always circumstantial, is not the expression of the abstract and generic process of the self-styled human intellect. It is always a specified formation from specified conditions. We hold this principle to be indisputable, that it is not the forms of consciousness which determine the human being, but it is the manner of being which determines the consciousness (Marx). But these forms of consciousness, even as they are determined by the conditions of life, constitute in themselves also a part of history. This does not consist only in the economic anatomy, but in all that combination which clothes and covers that anatomy even up to the multicolored reflections of the imagination. In other words, there is no fact in history which does not recall by its origin the conditions of the underlying economic structure, but there is no fact in history which is not preceded, accompanied and followed by determined forms of consciousness, whether it be superstitious or experimental, ingenuous or reflective, impulsive or self-controlled, fantastic or reasoning. IV. I was saying a moment ago that our doctrine makes history objective and in a certain sense naturalizes it, going from the explanation of the data, evident at first sight, of the personalities acting with design, and of the auxiliary conceptions of the action, to the causes and the motives of the will and the action, in order to find thereupon the co-ordination of these causes and of these motives in the pre-elementary _processus_ of the production of the immediate means of existence. Now this term "naturalizing" has led more than one mind into confusing this order of problems with another order of problems, that is to say, into extending to history the laws and the manners of thinking which have already appeared suitable to the study and explanation of the material world in general and of the animal world in particular. And because Darwinism succeeded in carrying, thanks to the principle of the transformation of species, the last citadel of the metaphysical fixity of things, and in discerning, in the organisms, phases, as it were, and moments of a real and proper natural history, it has been imagined that it was a commonplace and simple enterprise to borrow for an explanation of the future and the history of human life the concepts, the principles and the methods of examination to which that animal life is subjected which in consequence of the immediate conditions of the struggle for existence is unfolding to topographical environments not modified by the action of labor. Darwinism, political and social, has, like an epidemic, for many years invaded the mind of more than one thinker, and many more of the advocates and declaimers of sociology, and it has been reflected as a fashionable habit and a phraseological current even in the daily language of the politicians. It seems at first sight that there is something immediately evident and instinctively plausible in this fashion of reasoning, which it may be said is principally distinguished by its abuse of analogy and by its haste in drawing conclusions. Man is without doubt an animal, and he is linked by connections of descent and affinity to other animals. He has no privileges of origin or of elementary structure, and his organism is merely one particular case of general physiology. His first immediate field was that of simple nature not modified by work, and from thence are derived the imperious and inevitable conditions of the struggle for existence, with the consequent forms of adaptation. Thence are born races in the true and authentic sense of the word; that is to say, in so far as they are immediate determinations of black, white, yellow, woolly-haired, straight-haired, etc., and not secondary historico-social formations, that is to say, peoples and nations. Thence are born the primitive instincts of sociability and in life in promiscuity arise the first rudiments of sexual selection. But if we can reconstruct in imagination the primitive savage, by combining our conjectures, it is not given us to have an empirical intuition of him, just as it is not given us to determine the genesis of that hiatus, that is to say, that break in continuity, thanks to which human life is found detached from animal life to rise, in the sequel, to an ever higher level. All men who live at this moment on the earth's surface and all those who, having lived in the past, were the objects of any trustworthy observation, are found, and were found, already sufficiently removed from the moment when purely animal life had ceased. A certain social life with customs and institutions, even if it be of the most elementary form that we know, that is to say, of the Australian tribes, divided into classes and practising the marriage of all the men of one class with all the women of another class, separates human life by a great interval from animal life. If we consider the _maternal gens_, of which the classic type, the Iroquois type, has, thanks to Morgan's work, revolutionized prehistoric science, while giving us at the same time the key to the origins of history properly so called, we have a form of society already much advanced by the complexity of its relations. At that stage of social life which, according to our knowledge, seems very elementary, that is to say, in the Australian society, not only does a very complicated language differentiate men from all other animals (and language is a condition and an instrument, a cause and an effect of sociability), but the specialization of human life, apart from the discovery of fire, is manifested by the use of many other artificial means by which the needs of life are satisfied. A certain territory acquired for the common use of a tribe, a certain art of hunting--the use of certain instruments of defense and attack and the possession of certain utensils for preserving the things acquired--and then the ornamentation of the body, etc., all this means that at bottom this life rests upon an artificial, although very elementary, basis, upon which men endeavor to fix themselves and adapt themselves,--upon a basis which is after all the condition of all further progress. According as this artificial basis is more or less formed, the men who have produced it and who live in it are considered more or less savage or barbarous. This first formation constitutes what we may call pre-history. History, according to the literary use of the word, namely, that part of the human _processus_ whose traditions are fixed in the memory, begins at a moment when the artificial basis has been formed for a considerable length of time. For example, the canalization of Mesopotamia gives us the ancient pre-Semitic Babylonian state, while the extremely ancient Egyptian civilization rests upon the application of the Nile to agriculture. Upon this artificial basis, which appears in the extreme horizon of known history, lived, as now, not shapeless masses of individuals, but organized groups whose organization was fixed by a certain distribution of tasks, that is to say, of labor and by consecutive methods of co-ordination and subordination. These relations, these connections, these ways of living were not and are not the result of the crystallization of customs under the immediate action of the animal struggle for existence. What is more, they presuppose the discovery of certain instruments, and, for example, the domestication of certain animals, the working of minerals and even of iron, the introduction of slavery, etc., instruments and methods of economy which have first differentiated communities from each other and have subsequently differentiated the component parts of these communities themselves. In other words, the works of men in so far as they live together react upon the men themselves. Their discoveries, and their inventions, by creating artificial ways of living, have produced not only habits and customs (clothing, cooking of food, etc.), but relations and bonds of coexistence proportioned and adapted to the mode of production and reproduction of the means of immediate life. At the dawn of traditional history economics is already operating. Men are working to live, on a foundation which has been in great part modified by their work and with tools which are completely their work. And from that moment they have struggled among themselves to conquer each from the other a superior position in the use of these artificial means; that is to say, they have struggled among themselves whether as serfs and masters, subjects and lords, conquered and conquerors, exploited and exploiters, both where they have progressed and where they have retrograded and where they have halted in a form which they have not been capable of outgrowing, but never have they returned to the animal life by the complete loss of their artificial foundation. Historical science has, then, as its first and principal object the determination and the investigation of this artificial foundation, its origin, its composition, its changes and its transformations. To say that all this is only a part and a prolongation of nature, is to say a thing which by its too abstract and too generic character has no longer any meaning. The human race, in fact, lives only in earthly conditions, and we cannot suppose it to be transplanted elsewhere. Under these conditions it has found from its very first beginnings down to the present day the immediate means necessary for the development of labor, that is to say, for its material progress as for its inner formation. These natural conditions were and they are always indispensable to the sporadic agriculture of the nomads, who sometimes cultivated the earth merely for the pasturage of animals, as well as for the refined products of intensive modern horticulture. These earthly conditions, precisely as they have furnished the different sorts of stones suited for the fabrication of the first weapons, furnish now also, with coal, the elements of the great industry; precisely as they gave the first laborers osiers and willows to plait, they give now all the materials necessary to the complicated technique of electricity. It is not, however, the natural materials themselves which have progressed. On the contrary, it is only men who progress, through discovering little by little in nature the conditions which permit them to produce in more and more complex forms, thanks to the labor accumulated in experience. This progress does not consist merely in the sort of progress with which subjective psychology is concerned that is to say, the inner modifications which would be the proper and direct development of the intellect, the reasoning and the thought. Moreover, this inner progress is but a secondary and derived product, in proportion as there is already a progress realized in the artificial foundation which is the sum of the social relations resulting from the forms and the distributions of labor. It is, then, a meaningless affirmation to say that all this is but a simple prolongation of nature, unless one wishes to employ this word in so generic a sense that it no longer indicates anything precise and distinct; that which is not realized by the work of man. History is the work of man in so far as man can create and improve his instruments of labor, and with these instruments can create an artificial environment whose complicated effects react later upon himself, and which by its present state and its successive modifications is the occasion and the condition of his development. There are, then, no reasons for carrying back that work of man which is history to the simple struggle for existence. If this struggle modifies and improves the organs of animals, and if in given circumstances and methods it produces and develops new organs, it still does not produce that continuous, perfected and traditional movement which is the human _processus_. Our doctrine must not be confounded with Darwinism, and it need not invoke anew the conception of a mythical, mystical or metaphorical form of fatalism. If it is true in effect that history rests, before all else, upon the development of technique, that is to say, if it is true that the successive discovery of tools gives rise to the successive distributions of labor, and therewith to the inequalities whose sum total, more or less stable, forms the social organism, it is equally true that the discovery of these instruments is at once the cause and the effect of these conditions and of those forms of the inner life to which, isolating them by psychological abstraction, we give the name of imagination, intellect, reason, thought, etc. By producing successively the different social environment, that is to say, the successive artificial foundations, man has produced himself, and in this consists the serious kernel, the concrete reason, the positive foundation of that which by various fantastic combinations and by a varied logical architecture has suggested to the ideologists the notion of the progress of the human mind. Nevertheless, this expression of _naturalizing_ history, which, understood in too broad and too generic a sense, may be the occasion of the equivocations of which we have spoken, when it is, on the contrary, employed with proper precaution and in a tentative fashion, sums up briefly the criticism of all the ideological views which, in the interpretation of history, start from this hypothesis, that human work or activity are one and the same with free will, free choice and voluntary designs. It was easy and convenient for the theologians to carry back the course of human events to a preconceived plan or design, because they passed directly from the facts of experience to an assumed mind which ruled the universe. The jurists, who first had occasion to discover in the institutions which formed the object of their studies a certain guiding thread through the forms which manifestly succeeded each other, carried over, as they still carry over as cheerfully, the reasoning faculty which is their own quality, to serve as an explanation for the whole vast social fabric, however complicated. The men of politics, who naturally take their point of departure in this datum of experience, that the officers of the state, whether by the acquiescence of the subject masses or profiting by the antitheses of interests of the different social groups, may set aims for themselves and realize them voluntarily and in a deliberate fashion,--these men are brought to see in the succession of human events only a variation of these designs, these projects and these intentions. Now our conception, while revolutionizing in their foundations the hypotheses of the theologians, the jurists and the politicians, terminates in this affirmation, that human labor and activity in general are not always one and the same thing in the course of history with the will which acts with design, with preconceived plans and with its free choice of means; that is to say, that they are not one and the same thing with the reasoning faculty. All that has happened in history is the work of man, but it was not, and is not, with rare exceptions, the result of a critical choice or of a reasoning desire. Moreover, it was and is through necessity that, determined by external needs and occasions, this activity engenders an experience and a development of internal and external organs. Among these organs we must include intelligence and reason which also are the result and consequence of repeated and accumulated experience. The integral formation of man in his historical development is henceforth no longer a hypothetical datum nor a simple conjecture. It is an intuitive and palpable truth. The conditions of the _processus_ which engenders a step of progress are henceforth reducible into a series of explanations; and up to a certain point we have under our eyes the schedule of all historical developments, morphologically conceived. This doctrine is the clear and definite negation of all ideology, because it is the explicit negation of every form of rationalism, understanding by this word this concept, that things in their existence and their development answer to a norm, an ideal, a measure, an end, in an implicit or explicit fashion. The whole course of human events is a sum, a succession of series of conditions which men have made and laid down for themselves through the experience accumulated in their changing social life, but it represents neither the tendency to realize a predetermined end nor the deviation of a first principle from perfection and felicity. Progress itself implies merely that empirical and circumstantial notion of a thing which is at present defined in our mind, because, thanks to the development thus far realized, we are in a position to estimate the past and to foresee, at least in a certain sense and in a certain measure, the future. V. In this fashion a serious ambiguity is dissolved and the errors carried with it are removed. Reasonable and well founded is the tendency of those who aim to subordinate the sum total of human events in their course to the rigorous conception of determinism. There is, on the contrary, no reason for confusing this derived, reflex and complex determinism with the determinism of the immediate struggle for existence which is produced and developed on a field not modified by the continued action of labor. Legitimate and well founded, in an absolute fashion, is the historical explanation which proceeds in its course from the volitions which have voluntarily regulated the different phases of life, to the motives and objective causes of every choice, discovered in the conditions of environment, territory, accessible means of existence and conditions of experience. But there is, on the contrary, no foundation for that opinion which tends to the negation of every volition by consequence of a theoretical view which would substitute automatism for voluntarism. There is nothing in it, as a matter of fact, but a pure and simple conceit. Wherever the means of production have developed, to a certain point, wherever the artificial foundation has acquired a certain consistency, and wherever the social differentiations and their resulting antitheses have created the need, the possibility and the conditions of an organization more or less stable or unstable, there, always and necessarily, appear premeditated designs, political views, plans of conduct, systems of law and finally maxims and general and abstract principles. In the circle of these products, and of these derived and complex developments of the second degree, spring up also the sciences and arts, philosophy and learning, and history as a literary fashion of production. This circle is what the rationalists and the ideologists, ignorant of its real foundations, have called, and call, in an exclusive fashion, civilization. And, in fact, it has happened, and it happens, that some men, and especially professional scientists, lay or clerical, have found, and find, the means of intellectual livelihood in the closed circle of the reflex and secondary products of civilization, and that they have been able and are able consequently to submit all the rest to the subjective view which they have elaborated under these conditions; that is, the origin and explanation of all the ideologies. Our doctrine has definitely outgrown the visual angle of ideology. The premeditated designs, the political views, sciences, systems of law, etc., instead of being the means and the instrument of the explanation of history, are precisely what require to be explained, because they are derived from determined conditions and situations. But that does not mean that they are pure appearances, soap bubbles. If they are things which have been developed and derived, that does not imply that they are not real things; and that is so true that they have been, for centuries, to the unscientific consciousness, and to the scientific consciousness still on the way towards its formation, the only ones which really existed. But that is not all. Our doctrine, like others, may lead to reverie and offer an occasion and a theme for a new inverted ideology. It was born on the battlefield of communism. It assumes the appearance of the modern proletariat on the political stage, and it assumes that alignment upon the origins of our present society which has permitted us to reconstruct in a critical manner the whole genesis of the bourgeoisie. It is a doctrine revolutionary from two points of view; because it has found the reasons and the methods of development of the proletarian revolution which is in the making, and because it proposes to find the causes and the conditions of development of all other social revolutions which have taken place in the past, in the class antagonisms which arrived at a certain critical point, by reason of the contradiction between the forms of production and the development of the producing forces. And this is not all. In the light of this doctrine what is essential in history is summed up in these critical moments, and it abandons, momentarily at least, what unites these different moments to the learned ministrations of the professional narrators. As a revolutionary doctrine it is, before all else, the intellectual consciousness of the actual proletarian movement in which, according to our assertion, the future of communism is preparing long beforehand; so much so that the open adversaries of socialism reject it as an opinion, which, under a scientific mask, is only working out another utopia. Thus it may happen, and that has already resulted, that the imagination of people unfamiliar with the difficulties of historic research, and the zeal of fanatics, find a stimulus and an opportunity even in historic materialism for forming a new ideology and drawing from it a new philosophy of systematic history, that is to say, history conceived as schemes or tendencies and designs. And no precaution can suffice. Our intellect is rarely contented with purely critical research; it is always attempting to convert into an element of pedantry and into a new scholasticism every discovery of thought. In a word, even the materialistic conception of history may be converted into a form of argumentation for a thesis and serve to make new fashions with the ancient prejudices like that of a history based on syllogisms, demonstrations and deductions. To guard against this, and especially to avoid the reappearance in an indirect and disguised fashion of any form whatever of finality, it is necessary to resolve positively upon two things: First, that all known historic conditions are circumstanced, and, second, that progress has thus far been circumscribed by various obstacles and that for this reason it has always been partial and limited. Only a part, and, until recent times, only a small part of the human race, has traversed completely all the stages of the _processus_ by the effect of which the most advanced nations have arrived at modern civil society, with the advanced technical forms founded upon the discoveries of science and with all the consequences, political, intellectual, moral, etc., which correspond to this development. By the side of the English,--to take the most striking example--who, transporting European manners with them to New Holland, have created there a center of production which already holds a notable place in the competition of the world's market, there still live, like fossils of prehistoric times, the Australian aborigines, capable only of disappearing, but incapable of adapting themselves to a civilization which was not imported among them, but next to them. In America, and especially in North America, the series of events which have brought on the development of modern society began with the importation from Europe of domestic animals and agricultural tools, the use of which in ancient times gave birth to the slow moving civilization of the Mediterranean; but this movement remained entirely inside the circle of those descended from the conquerors and colonists, while the aborigines are lost in the mass through the intermingling of races or perish and disappear completely. Western Asia and Egypt, which already in very ancient times, as the first cradle of all our civilization, gave birth to the great semi-political formations which marked the first phases of certain and positive history, have appeared to us for centuries as crystallizations of social forms incapable of moving on of themselves to new phases of development. Upon them is the age-long weight of the barbaric camp--the dominion of the Turk. Into this stiffened mass is introduced by secret ways a modern administration, and in the name of business interests the railroads and the telegraphs push in,--bold outposts of the conquering European bank. All this stiffened mass has no hope of resuming life, heat and motion except by the ruin of the Turkish dominion, for which are being substituted in the different methods of direct and indirect conquest the dominion and the protectorate of the European bourgeoisie. That a process of transformation of backward nations or of nations arrested in their march, can be realized and hastened under external influences, India stands as a proof. This country, with its own life still surviving, re-enters vigorously under the action of England into the circulation of international activity even with its intellectual products. These are not the only contrasts in the historic physiognomy of our contemporaries. And while in Japan, by an acute and spontaneous phenomenon of imitation, there has developed, in less than thirty years, a certain assimilation of western civilization which is already moving normally the country's own energies, the forcible law of Russian conquest is dragging into the circle of modern industry, and even into great industry, certain notable portions of the country beyond the Caspian, as an outpost of the approaching acquisition to the sphere of capitalism of Central Asia and Upper Asia. The gigantic mass of China appeared to us but a few years ago as motionless in the hereditary organization of its institutions, so slow is every movement there, while for ethnic and geographical reasons almost all Africa remained impenetrable, and, it seemed, even up to the last attempts at conquest and colonization, that it was destined to offer only its borders to the process of civilization, as if we were still in the times not even of the Portuguese, but of the Greeks and Carthaginians. These differentiations of men on the track of written and unwritten history seem to us easily explicable when they can be referred to the natural and immediate conditions which impose limits upon the development of labor. This is the case with America, which up to the arrival of the Europeans had but one cereal, maize, and but one domestic animal for labor, the llama, and we can rejoice that the Europeans imported with themselves and their tools the ox, the ass and the horse, corn, cotton, sugarcane, coffee and finally the vine and the orange tree, creating there a new world of that glorious society which produces merchandise and which with an extraordinary swiftness of movement has already traversed the two phases of the blackest slavery and the most democratic wage system. But where there is a real halt and even an attested retrogression, as in Western Asia, in Egypt, in the Balkan Peninsula and in Northern Africa,--and this arrest cannot be attributed to the change of natural conditions,--we find the problem before us which is awaiting its solution from the direct and explicit study of the social structure studied in the internal modes of its development, as in the interlacings and complications of the different nations upon that field which is ordinarily called the scene of historic struggles. This same civilized Europe, which by the continuity of its tradition, presents the most complete diagram of its _processus_, so much so that upon this model have been conceived and constructed, thus far, all the systems of historical philosophy, this Western and Central Europe, which produced the epoch of the bourgeoisie and has sought and is seeking to impose that form of society upon the whole world by different modes of conquest, direct or indirect,--this Europe is not completely uniform in the degree of its development, and its various agglomerations, national, local and political, appear disturbed, as it were, over a decidedly sloping ladder. Upon these differences depend the conditions of relative superiority and inferiority of one country to another and the reasons, more or less advantageous or disadvantageous, for economic exchange; and thereon have depended, and still depend, not only the frictions and the struggles, the treaties and the wars, but also everything that with more or less precision the political writers have been able to relate to us since the Renaissance, and certainly with increasing evidence, from Louis XIV. and Colbert to our own time. This Europe in itself is highly variegated. Here is the consummate flower of industrial and capitalist production, namely, England, while at other points survives the artisan, vigorous or rickety, at Paris and at Naples, to grasp the fact in its extreme points. Here the land is almost industrialized, as in England; and elsewhere vegetates, in various traditional forms, the stupid peasant, as in Italy and in Austria, and in the latter country more than in the former. In one country the political life of the state--suited to the prosaic consciousness of a bourgeoisie which knows its business because it has conquered the space that it occupies--is exerted in the surest and most open fashion of an explicit class domination (it will be understood that I am speaking of France). Elsewhere, and particularly in Germany, the old feudal customs, the hypocrisy of Protestantism and the cowardice of a bourgeoisie which exploits favorable economic circumstances without bringing to them either intelligence or revolutionary courage, strengthen the existing state by preserving the lying appearances of an ethical mission to be accomplished. (With how many unpalatable sauces this state ethics, Prussian into the bargain, has been served up by the heavy and pedantic German professors!) Here and there modern capitalist production is edging its way into countries which from other points of view do not enter into our movement and especially into its political side, as is the case with unhappy Poland; or again this form only penetrates indirectly, as in the Slavonic countries. But now comes the sharpest contrast, which seems destined to put under our eyes, as in an epitome, all the phrases, even the most extreme, of our history. Russia could not have advanced, as it is now advancing, toward the great industry, without drawing from Western Europe, and especially from our charming French _Chauvinism_, that money which she would in vain have sought within her own borders, that is to say, from the conditions of her obese territorial mass, where vegetate in ancient economic forms fifty million peasants. Russia, in order to become an economic modern society ripening the conditions of a corresponding political revolution, and preparing the means which will facilitate the addition of a large part of Asia to the capitalist movement, has been led to destroy the last relics of agrarian communism (whether its origins be primitive or secondary) which had been preserved within herself up to this point in such characteristic forms and on so large a scale. Russia must capitalize herself, and to this end she must, to start with, convert land into merchandise capable of producing merchandise, and at the same time transform into miserable proletarians the excommunists of the land. And, on the contrary, in Western and Central Europe we find ourselves at the opposite point of the series of development which has scarcely begun in Russia. Here, with us, where the bourgeoisie, with varied fortunes and triumphing over such a variety of difficulties, has already traversed so many stages of its development, it is not the recollection of primitive or secondary communism, which scarcely survives through learned combinations in the heads of scholars, but the very form of bourgeois production, which engenders in the proletarians the tendency to socialism, which presents itself in its general outlines as an indication of a new phase of history and not as the repetition of what is inevitably perishing in the Slavonic countries under our eyes. Who could fail to see in these illustrations, which I have not sought out, but which have come almost by chance, and which can be indefinitely prolonged in a volume of economic-political geography of the present world, the evident proof of the manner in which historic conditions are all circumstanced in the forms of their development? Not only races and peoples, nations and states, but parts of nations and various regions of states, even orders and classes, are found, as it were, upon so many rounds of a very long ladder, or, rather, upon the various points of a complicated and slowly developing curve. Historic time has not marched uniformly for all men. The simple succession of generations has never been the index of the constancy and intensity of the _processus_. Time as an abstract measure of chronology and the generations which succeed one another in approximate periods give no criterion and furnish no indication of law or of process. The developments thus far have been varied because the things accomplished in one and the same unit of time were varied. Between these varied forms of development there is an affinity or rather a similarity of movements, that is, an analogy of type, or again an identity of form; thus the advance forms may by simple contact or by violence accelerate the development of backward forms. But the important thing is to comprehend that progress, our notion of which is not merely empirical, but always circumstanced and thus limited, is not suspended over the course of human events like a destiny or a fate, nor like a commandment. And for this reason our doctrine cannot serve to represent the whole history of the human race in a unified perspective which repeats, _mutatis mutandis_, the historic philosophy from thesis to conclusion, from St. Augustine to Hegel, or, better, from the prophet Daniel to M. De Rougemont. Our doctrine does not pretend to be the intellectual vision of a great plan or of a design, but it is merely a method of research and of conception. It is not by accident that Marx spoke of his discovery as a guiding thread, and it is precisely for this reason that it is analogous to Darwinism, which also is a method, and is not and cannot be a modern repetition of the constructed or constructive natural philosophy as used by Shelling and his school. The first to discover in the notion of progress an indication of something circumstantial and relative was the genial Saint Simon, who opposed his way of seeing to the doctrine of the eighteenth century represented by the party of Condorcet. To that doctrine, which may be called unitary, equalitarian, formal, because it regards the human race as developing upon one line of process, Saint Simon opposes the conception of the faculties and of the aptitudes which substitute themselves and compensate for each other, and thus he remains an ideologist. To penetrate the true reasons for the relativity of progress another thing was necessary. It was necessary, first of all, to renounce those prejudices which are involved in the belief that the obstacles to the uniformity of human development rest exclusively upon natural and immediate causes. These natural obstacles are either sufficiently problematical, as is the case with races, no one of which shows the privilege of birth in its history, or they are, as is the case in geographical differences, insufficient to explain the development of the completely different historico-social conditions on one and the same geographical field. And as the historic movement dates precisely from the time when the natural obstacles have already been in great part either vanquished or notably circumscribed, thanks to the creation of an artificial field upon which it has been given to men to develop themselves further, it is evident that the successive obstacles to the uniformity of progress must be sought in the proper and intrinsic conditions of the social structure itself. This structure has thus far started in forms of political organization, the object of which is to try to hold in equilibrium the economic inequalities; consequently this organization, as I have said more than once, is constantly unstable. From the point where there is a known history; it is the history of society tending to form the state, or having already constructed it completely. And the state is this struggle, within and without, because it is, above all, the organ and the instrument of a larger or smaller part of society against all the rest of society itself, in so far as the latter rests upon the economic domination of man over man in a more or less direct and explicit fashion, according as the different degree of the development of production, of its natural means and its artificial instruments, requires either chattel slavery, or the serfdom of the soil, or the "free" wage system. This society of antitheses, which forms a state, is always, although in different forms and various modes, the opposition of the city to the country, of the artisan to the peasant, of the proletarian to the employer, of the capitalist to the laborer, and so on _ad infinitum_, and it always ends, with various complications and various methods, in an hierarchy, whether it be in a fixed scaffolding of privilege, as in the Middle Ages, or whether, under the disguised forms of supposed equal rights for all, it be produced by the automatic action of economic competition, as in our time. To this economic hierarchy corresponds, according to various modes, in different countries, in different times, in different places, what I may call almost a hierarchy of souls, of intellects, of minds. That is to say, that culture, which, for the idealists, constitutes the sum of progress, has been and is by the necessities of the case very unequally distributed. The greater portion of mankind, by the quality of their occupations, are composed of individuals who are disintegrated, broken into fragments and rendered incapable of a complete and normal development. To the economics of classes and to the hierarchy of social positions corresponds the psychology of classes. The relativity of progress is then for us the inevitable consequence of class distinctions. These distinctions constitute the obstacles which explain the possibility of relative retrogression, up to the point of degeneracy and of the dissolution of an entire society. The machines, which mark the triumph of science, become, by reason of the antithetic conditions of the social plexus, instruments which impoverish millions and millions of artisans and free peasants. The progress of technique, which fills the towns with merchandise, makes more miserable and abject the condition of the peasants, and in the cities themselves it further humbles the condition of the humble. All the progress of science has served thus far to differentiate a class of scientists and to keep ever further from culture the masses who, attached to their ceaseless daily toil, are thus feeding the whole of society. Progress has been and is, up to the present time, partial and one-sided. The minorities which share in it call this human progress; and the proud evolutionists call this human nature which is developing. All this partial progress, which has thus far developed upon the oppression of man by man, has its foundation in the conditions of opposition, by which economic distinctions have engendered all the social distinctions; from the relative liberty of the few is born the servitude of the greater number, and law has been the protector of injustice. Progress, thus seen and clearly appreciated, appears to us as the moral and intellectual epitome of all human miseries and of all material inequalities. To discover this inevitable relativity it was necessary that communism, born at first as an instinctive movement in the soul of the oppressed, should become a science and a political party. It was then necessary that our doctrine should give the measure of value for all past history, by discovering in every form of social organization, antithetical in its origin and organization, as they have all been up to this time, the innate incapacity for producing the conditions of a universal and uniform human progress, that is to say, by discovering the fetters which turn each benefit into an injury. VI. There is one question which we cannot evade: What has given birth to the belief in _historic factors_? That is an expression familiar to many and often found in the writings of many scholars, scientists and philosophers, and of those commentators who, by their reasonings or by their combinations, add a little to simple historic narration and utilize this opinion as an hypothesis to find a starting point in the immense mass of human facts, which, at first sight and after first examination, appear so confused and irreducible. This belief, this current opinion, has become for reasoning historians, or even for rationalists, a semi-doctrine, which has recently been urged several times, as a decisive argument, against the unitary theory of the materialistic conception. And indeed, this belief is so deeply rooted and this opinion so widespread, of history being only intelligible as the juncture and the meeting of various factors, that, in consequence, many of those who speak of social materialism, whether they be its partisans or adversaries, believe that they save themselves from embarrassment by affirming that this whole doctrine consists in the fact that it attributes the preponderance or the decisive action to the _economic factor_. It is very important to take account of the fashion in which this belief, this opinion, or this semi-doctrine takes its rise, because real and fruitful criticism consists principally in knowing and understanding the motive of what we declare an error. It does not suffice to reject an opinion by characterizing it as false doctrine. Error always arises from some ill-understood side of an incomplete experience, or from some subjective imperfection. It does not suffice to reject the error; we must overcome it, explain it and outgrow it. Every historian, at the beginning of his work, performs, so to speak, an act of elimination. First, he makes erasures, as it were, in a continuous series of events; then he dispenses with numerous and varied suppositions and precedents; more than this, he tears up and decomposes a complicated tissue. Thus, to begin with, he must fix a point, a line, a boundary, as he chooses; he must say, for example: I wish to relate the beginning of the war between the Greeks and the Persians, or to inquire how Louis XVI. was brought to convene the States General. The narrator finds himself, in a word, confronted with a _complexus_ of accomplished facts and of facts on the point of being produced, which in their totality present a certain aspect. Upon the attitude which he takes depends the form and the style of every narration, because to compose it he must take his point of departure from things already accomplished, in order to see henceforth how they have continued to develop. Yet into this _complexus_ he must introduce a certain degree of analysis, resolving it into groups and into aspects of facts, or into concurrent elements, which afterwards appear at a certain moment as independent categories. It is the state in a certain form and with certain powers; it is the laws, which determine, by what they command or what they prohibit, certain relations; it is the manners and customs which reveal to us tendencies, needs, ways of thinking, of believing, of imagining; altogether it is a multitude of men living and working together, with a certain distribution of tasks and occupations; he observes then the thoughts, the ideas, the inclinations, the passions, the desires, the aspirations which arise and develop from this varied mode of coexistence and from its frictions. Let a change be produced, and it will show itself in one of the sides or one of the aspects of the empirical _complexus_, or in all of these within a longer or a shorter time; for example, the state extends its boundaries, or changes its internal limits as regards society by increasing or diminishing its powers and its attributes, or by changing the mode of action of one or the other; or, again, the law modifies its dispositions, or it expresses and affirms itself through new organs; or, again, finally, behind the change of exterior and daily habits, we discover a change in the sentiments, the thoughts and the inclinations of the men variously distributed in the different social classes, who mingle, change, replace each other, disappear or reappear. All this may be sufficiently understood, in its exterior forms and outlines, through the usual endowments of normal intelligence which is not yet aided, corrected or completed by science strictly so-called. Assembling within precise limits a conception of such facts is the true and proper object of narration, which is so much the clearer, more vivid and more exact, as it takes the form of a monograph; witness Thucydides in the Peloponnesian war. Society already evolved in a certain fashion, society already arrived at a certain degree of development, society already so complicated that it conceals the economic substructure which supports all the rest, has not revealed itself to the simple narrators, except in these visible facts, in these most apparent results, and in these most significant symptoms which are the political forms, the legal dispositions and the partisan passions. The narrator, both because he lacks any theoretical doctrine regarding the true sources of the historic movement, and by the very attitude which he takes on the subject of the things which he unites according to the appearances which they have come to assume, cannot reduce them to unity, unless it be as a result of a single, immediate intuition, and if he is an artist, this intuition takes on a color in his mind and transforms itself there into dramatic action. His task is finished if he succeeds in massing a certain number of facts and events in certain limits and confines over which the observer may look as on a clear perspective; in the same way, purely descriptive geography has accomplished its task, if it sums up in a vivid and clear design a concourse of physical causes which determine the immediate aspect of the Gulf of Naples, for example, without going back to its genesis. It is in this need of graphic narration that arises the first intuitive, palpable, and, I might almost say, æsthetic and artistic occasion for all those abstractions and those generalizations, which are finally summed up in the semi-doctrine of the so-called factors. Here are two notable men, the Gracchi, who wished to put an end to the process of appropriation of the public land and to prevent the agglomeration of the _latifundium_, which was diminishing or causing to completely disappear the class of small proprietors, that is to say, of the free men, who are the foundation and the condition of the democratic life of the ancient city. What were the causes of their failure? Their aim is clear, their spirit, their origin, their character, their heroism are manifest. They have against them other men with other interests and with other designs. The struggle appears to the mind at first merely as a struggle of intentions and passions, which unfolds and comes to an end by the aid of means which are permitted by the political form of the state and by the use or abuse or the public powers. Here is the situation: the city ruling in different manners over other cities or over territories which have lost all character of autonomy; within this city a very decided differentiation between rich and poor; and facing the comparatively small group of the oppressors and the all-powerful, stands the immense mass of the proletarians, who are on the point of losing or who have already lost the consciousness and the political strength of a body of citizens, the mass which therefore suffers itself to be deceived and corrupted, and which will soon decay till it is but a servile accessory to its aristocratic exploiters. There is the material of the narrator, and he cannot take account of the fact otherwise than in the immediate conditions of the fact itself. The complete whole is directly seen and forms the stage on which the events unfold, but if the narration is to have solidity, vividness and perspective there must be points of departure and ways of interpretation. In this consists the first origin of those abstractions, which little by little take away from the different parts of a given social _complexus_ their quality of simple sides or aspects of a whole, and it is their ensuing generalization which little by little leads to the doctrine of factors. These factors, to express it in another way, arise in the mind as a sequence of the abstraction and generalization of the immediate aspects of the apparent movement, and they have an equal value with that of all other empirical concepts. Whatever be the domain of knowledge in which they arise, they persist until they are reduced and eliminated by a new experience, or until they are absorbed by a conception more general, genetic, evolutionary or dialectic. Was it not necessary that in the empirical analysis and in the immediate study of the causes and the effects of certain definite phenomena, for example the phenomena of heat, the mind should first stop at this presumption and this persuasion, that it could and should attribute them to a subject, which if it was never for any physicist a true and substantial entity, was certainly considered as a definite and specific force, namely, heat. Now we see that at a given moment, as a result of new experiences, this heat is resolved in given conditions into a certain quantity of motion. Still further, our thought is now on the way toward resolving all these physical factors into the flux of one universal energy, in which the hypotheses of the atoms, in the extent to which it is necessary, loses all residue of metaphysical survival. Was it not inevitable, as a first step of knowledge in what concerns the problem of life, to spend a considerable time in the separate study of the organs and to reduce them to systems? Without this anatomy, which seems too material and too gross, no progress in these studies would have been possible; and nevertheless, above the unknown genesis and co-ordination of such an analytic multiplicity, there were evolving, uncertain and vague, the generic conceptions of life, soul, etc. In these mental creations have long been seen that biological unity which has finally found its object in the certain beginning of the cell and in its _processus_ of immanent multiplication. More difficult certainly was the way which the thought had to traverse to reconstruct the genesis of all the facts of psychic life, from the most elementary successions up to the most complex derived products. Not only for reasons of theoretical difficulties, but in consequence of popular prejudices, the unity and continuity of psychic phenomena appeared, up to the time of Herbart, as separated and divided into so many factors, faculties of the soul. The interpretation of the historico-social _processus_ met the same difficulties; it also was obliged to stop at first in the provisional view of factors. And that being so, it is easy for us now to find again the first origin of that opinion in the necessity that the historians have of finding in the facts that they relate with more or less artistic talent and in different professional views, certain points of immediate orientation, such as may be offered by the study of the apparent movement of human events. But in this apparent movement, there are the elements of a more exact view. These concurrent factors, which abstract thought conceives and then isolates, have never been seen acting each for itself. On the contrary, they act in such a manner that it gives birth to the concept of reciprocal action. Moreover, these factors themselves arise at a given moment, and it is not until later that they acquired that physiognomy which they have in the particular narration. This State, it is well known, arose at a given moment. As for every rule of law, it may either be remembered or conjectured that it went into effect under such or such circumstances. As for many customs, it may be remembered that they were introduced at a given moment; and the simplest comparisons of the facts in different times or different places would show how society, as a whole, and in its character of being an aggregation of different classes, had taken and took continuously various forms. The reciprocal action of the different factors, without which not even the simplest narration would be possible, like the more or less exact information upon the origins and the variations of the factors themselves, called for research and thought more than did the constructive narration of those great historians who are real artists. And, in effect, the problems which arise spontaneously from the data of history, combined with other theoretical elements, gave birth to the different so-called practical disciplines, which in a more or less rapid fashion and with varying success, have developed from the ancients up to our days, from ethics to the philosophy of law, from politics to sociology, from law to economics. Now with the rise and formation of so many disciplines, through the inevitable division of labor, _points of view_ have been multiplied out of all proportion. It is certain that for the first and immediate analysis of the multiple aspects of the social _complexus_, a long labor of partial abstraction was necessary: which has always inevitably resulted in one-sided views. This can be shown, in a clearer and more evident manner than for any other domain, in that of law and its various generalizations, including the philosophy of law. By reason of these abstractions, which are inevitable in particular and empirical analysis, and by the effect of the division of labor, the different sides and different manifestations of the social _complexus_ were, from time to time, fixed and stratified in general conceptions and categories. The works, the effects, the emanations, the effusions of human activity,--law, economic forms, principles of conduct, etc.,--were, so to speak, translated and transformed into laws, into imperatives and into principles which remained placed above man himself. And from time to time it has been necessary to discover anew this simple truth: that the only permanent and sure fact, that is to say, the only datum from which departs and to which returns every practical detail of discipline, is men grouped in a determined social form by means of determined connections. The different analytical disciplines, which illustrate the facts that develop in history, have finally given rise to the need of a common and general social science, which renders possible the unification of the historic _processus_, and the materialistic doctrine marks precisely the final term, the apex of this unification. But that has not been, nor ever will be, lost time which is expended in the preliminary and lateral analysis of complex facts. To the methodical division of labor we owe precise learning, that is to say, the mass of knowledge passed into the sieve, systematized, without which social history would always be wandering in a purely abstract domain, in questions of form and terminology. The separate study of the historico-social factors has served, like any other empirical study which does not transcend the apparent movement of things, to improve the instrument of observation and to permit us to find again in the facts themselves, which have been artificially abstracted, the keystones which bind them into the social _complexus_. The different disciplines which are considered as isolated and independent in the hypotheses of the concurrent factors in the formation of history, both by reason of the degree of development which they have reached, the materials which they have gathered, and the methods which they have elaborated, have to-day become quite indispensable for us, if one desires to reconstruct any portion out of past times. Where would our historic science be without the one-sidedness of philology, which is the fundamental instrument of all research, and where should we have found the guiding thread of a history of juridical institutions, which returns again from itself to so many other facts and to so many other combinations, without the obstinate faith of the Romanists in the universal excellence of the Roman law, which engendered with generalized law and with the philosophy of law so many problems which serve as points of departure for sociology? It is thus, after all, that the historic factors, of which so many speak, and which are mentioned in so many works, indicate something which is much less than the truth, but much more than simple error, in the ordinary sense of a blunder, of an illusion. They are the necessary product of a knowledge which is in the course of development and formation. They arise from the necessity of finding a point of departure in the confused spectacle which human events present to him who wishes to narrate them; and they serve thenceforth, so to speak, as a title, category or index to that inevitable division of labor, by the extension of which the historico-social material has, up to this time, been theoretically elaborated. In this domain of knowledge, as well as in that of the natural sciences, the unity of real principle and the unity of formal treatment are never found at the first start, but only after a long and troublous road. So that again from this point of view the analogy affirmed by Engels between the discovery of historical materialism and that of the conservation of energy appears to us excellent. The provisional orientation, according to the convenient system of what are called factors, may, under given circumstances, be useful also to us who profess an altogether unitary principle of historic interpretation, if we do not wish simply to rest in the domain of theory, but wish to illustrate, through personal research, a definite period of history. As in that case we must proceed to direct and detailed research, we must first of all follow the groups of facts that seem pre-eminent, independent, or detached in the aspects of immediate experience. We should not imagine, in fact, that the unitary principle so well established, at which we have arrived in the general conception of history, may, like a talisman, act always and at first sight, as an infallible method of resolving into simple elements the immense area and the complicated gearing of society. The underlying economic structure, which determines all the rest, is not a simple mechanism whence emerge, as immediate, automatic and mechanical effects, institutions, laws, customs, thoughts, sentiments, ideologies. From this substructure to all the rest, the process of derivation and of mediation is very complicated, often subtile, tortuous and not always legible. The social organization is, as we already know, constantly unstable, although that does not seem evident to every one, except at the time when the instability enters upon that acute period which is called a revolution. This instability, with the constant struggles in the bosom of that same organized society, excludes the possibility for men coming to an agreement which might involve a new start at living an animal life. It is the antagonisms which are the principal cause of progress (Marx). But it is equally true, notwithstanding, that in this unstable organization, in which is given to us the inevitable form of domination and subjection, intelligence is always developed not only unequally, but quite imperfectly, incongruously and partially. There has been and there is still in society what we may call a hierarchy of intelligence, sentiments and conceptions. To suppose that men, always and in all cases, have had an approximately clear consciousness of their own situation, and of what was the most rational thing to do, is to suppose the improbable and, indeed, the unreal. Forms of law, political acts and attempts at social organization were, and they still are, sometimes fortunate, sometimes mistaken, that is to say, disproportionate and unsuitable. History is full of errors; and this means that if all was necessary, granted the relative intelligence of those who have to solve a difficulty or to find a solution for a given problem, etc., if everything in it has a sufficient reason, yet everything in it was not reasonable, in the sense which the optimists give to this word. To state it more fully, the determined causes of all changes, that is to say the modified economic conditions, have ended and end by causing to be found, sometimes through tortuous ways, the suitable forms of law, the appropriate political orders and the more or less perfect means of social adjustment. But it must not be thought that the instinctive wisdom of the reasoning animal has been manifested, or is manifested, definitely and simply, in the complete and clear understanding of all situations, and that we have left only the very simple task of following the deductive road from the economic situation to all the rest. Ignorance--which, in its turn, may be explained--is an important reason for the manner in which history is made; and, to ignorance we must add the brutishness which is never completely subdued and all the passions, and all the injustices, and the various forms of corruption, which were and are the necessary product of a society organized in such a way, that the domination of man over man in it is inevitable, and that from this domination falsehood, hypocrisy, presumption and baseness were and are inseparable. We may, without being utopians, but simply because we are critical communists, foresee, as we do in fact foresee, the coming of a society which, developing from the present society and from its very contrasts by the laws inherent in its historic development, will end in an association without class antagonisms; which will have for its consequence that regulated production will eliminate from life the element of chance which, thus far, has been revealed in history as a multiform cause of accidents and incidents. But that is the future, and it is neither the present nor the past. If we propose to ourselves, on the contrary, to penetrate into the historic events which have developed up to our own times, by taking, as we do, for a guiding thread the variations of the forms of the underlying economic structure up to the simplest datum in the variations of the tool of production, we must become fully conscious of the difficulty of the problem which we are setting ourselves: because here we have not merely to open our eyes and behold, but to make a supreme effort of thought, with the aim of triumphing over the multiform spectacle of immediate experience to reduce its elements into a genetic series. That is why I said that, in particular investigations, we must ourselves start from those groups of apparently isolated facts, and from this heterogeneous mass, in a word, from that empirical study, whence arose the belief in factors, which afterwards became a semi-doctrine. It is useless to attempt at counterbalancing these essential difficulties by the metaphorical hypothesis, often equivocal, and after all of a purely analogical value, of the so-called social organism. It was necessary too that the mind should pass through even this hypothesis, which so shortly became phraseology pure and simple. It indeed prepares the way for the comprehension of the historic movement as springing from the laws immanent in society itself, and thereby excludes the arbitrary, the transcendental and the irrational. But the metaphor has no further application; and the particular, critical and circumstantial research into historic facts is the sole source of that concrete and positive knowledge which is necessary to the complete development of economic materialism. VII. Ideas do not fall from heaven, and nothing comes to us in a dream. The change in the ways of thinking, lately produced by the historic doctrine which we are here examining and commenting upon, takes place at first slowly and afterwards with an increasing rapidity, precisely in that period of human development, in which were realized the great politico-economic revolutions, that is to say, in that epoch which, considered in its political forms, is called liberal, but which, considered in its basis, by reason of the domination of capital over the proletarian mass, is the epoch of anarchical production. The change in ideas, even to the creation of new methods of conception, has reflected little by little the experience of a new life. This, in the revolutions of the last two centuries, was little by little despoiled of the mythical, religious and mystical envelopes in proportion as it acquired the practical and precise consciousness of its immediate and direct conditions. Human thought, also, which sums up this life and theorizes upon it, has little by little been plundered of its theological and metaphysical hypotheses to take refuge finally in this prosaic assertion: in the interpretation of history we must limit ourselves to the objective co-ordination of the determining conditions and of the determined effects. The materialistic conception marks the culminating point of this new tendency in the investigation of the historic-social laws, in so far as it is not a particular case of a generic sociology, or of a generic philosophy of the State, of law, and of history, but the solution of all doubts and all uncertainties which accompany the other forms of philosophizing upon human affairs, and the beginning of their integral interpretation. It is thus an easy thing, especially in the way it has been done by certain shallow critics, to find precursors for Marx and Engels, who first defined this doctrine in its fundamental points. And when did it ever occur to any of their disciples, even of the strictest school, to represent these two thinkers as miracle-workers? What is more, if we wish to go on a search after the premises of the logical creation of Marx and Engels, it will not suffice to stop at those who are called the precursors of socialism, Saint-Simon for example, and his predecessors, or the philosophers, particularly Hegel, or the economists who had laid bare the anatomy of the society which produces commodities; we must go back to the very formation of modern society, and then at last declare triumphantly that the theory is a plagiarism from the things that it explains. The truth is that the real precursors of the new doctrine were the facts of modern history, which has become so transparent and so explanatory of itself since the accomplishment in England of the great industrial revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, and since the great social upheaval took place in France. These things, _mutatis mutandis_, have subsequently been reproduced, in various combinations and in milder forms, throughout the whole civilized world. And what else is our thought at bottom if not the conscious and systematic complement of experience, and what is this last if not the reflection and the mental elaboration of the things and the processes which arise and unfold either outside our volition, or through the work of our activity; and what is genius but the individualized, derived and acute form of thought, which arises through the suggestion of experience, in many men of the same epoch, but which remains in most of them fragmentary, incomplete, uncertain, wavering and partial? Ideas do not fall from heaven; and what is more, like the other products of human activity, they are formed in given circumstances, in the precise fullness of time, through the action of definite needs, thanks to the repeated attempts at their satisfaction, and by the discovery of such and such other means of proof which are, as it were, the instruments of their production and their elaboration. Even ideas involve a basis of social conditions; they have their technique; thought also is a form of work. To rob the one and the other, ideas and thought, of the conditions and environment of their birth and their development, is to disfigure their nature and their meaning. To show how the materialistic conception of history arises precisely in given conditions, not as a personal and tentative opinion of two writers, but as the new conquest of thought by the inevitable suggestion of a new world which is in process of birth, that is to say the proletarian revolution, that was the object of my first essay, "In Memory of the Communist Manifesto." That is, to repeat, a new historic situation found its complement in its appropriate mental instrument. To imagine now that this intellectual production might have been realized at any time and at any place, would be to take absurdity for the ruling principle in research. To transport ideas arbitrarily from the basis and the historic conditions in which they arise to any other basis whatever, is like taking the irrational for the basis of reasoning. Why should one not fancy equally that the ancient city, in which arose Greek art and science and Roman law, remaining all the while an ancient democratic city, with slavery, might at the same time acquire and develop all the conditions of modern technique? Why not believe that the trade guild of the Middle Ages, remaining all the while on its inflexible mould, should take its way to the conquest of the world market without the conditions of unlimited competition, which actually began by its destruction and negation? Why not imagine a fief which, remaining a fief all the while, should become a factory producing commodities exclusively? Why could not Michel de Lando have written the Communist Manifesto? Why could we not also believe that the discoveries of modern science could have proceeded from the brains of men of no matter what other time and place, that is to say, before determined conditions had given rise to determined needs, and before repeated and accumulated experiences should have provided for the satisfaction of these needs? Our doctrine assumes the broad, conscious and continuous development of modern technique, and with it that society which produces commodities in the antagonisms of competition, that society which as a first condition and an indispensable means for its own perpetuation presupposes capitalist accumulation in the form of private property; that society which continually produces and reproduces proletarians, and which if it is to perpetuate itself, must incessantly revolutionize its tools, and with them the State and its legal gearings. This society, which, by the very laws of its movement, has laid bare its own anatomy, produces by its reaction the materialistic conception. Even as it has produced in socialism its positive negation, so it has engendered in the new historic doctrine its ideal negation. If history is the product, not arbitrary, but necessary and normal, of men in so far as they are developing, and if they are developing in so far as they are making social experiments, and if they are experimenting in so far as they are making improvements in their labor, which accumulate and preserve products and results, the phase of development in which we live cannot be the last and final phase, and the contrasts which are intimately bound to it and inherent in it are the productive forces of new conditions. And this is how the period of the great economic and political revolutions of these last two centuries has ripened in the mind these two concepts: the immanence and constancy of the _processus_ in historic facts, and the materialist doctrine, which is at bottom the objective theory of social revolutions. It is beyond doubt that to reascend through the centuries and reconstruct in our thought the development of social ideas to the extent that we find their documents in writers, is something always very instructive, and serving especially to add to our critical knowledge of our concepts as of our ways of thinking. Such a return of the mind over its historic premises, when it does not lead us astray into the empiricism of a boundless erudition, and does not lead us to set up hastily vain analogies, serves without any doubt to give suppleness and a persuasive force to the forms of our scientific activity. In the sum of our science we find again, in fact and through the approximative continuity of tradition, the excellence of all that has been found, conceived and proved, not only in modern times but even in ancient Greece, where first begins precisely and in a definite fashion for the human race the orderly development of conscious, reflective and methodical thought. It would be impossible to take a single step in scientific research without employing means long ago found and tried, such for example as logic and mathematics. To think otherwise would be to assume that each generation must begin over again all the work done since the childhood of humanity. But it was not given either to the ancient authors in the limited circle of their urban republics, nor to the writers of the Renaissance, always drifting between an imaginary return to antiquity and the need of grasping intellectually the new world in process of birth, to arrive at the precise analysis of the last elements from which society results, and which the incomparable genius of Aristotle did not see, and did not understand beyond the limits within which passes the life of the typical citizen. The investigation of the social structure, considered in its manners of origin and _processus_, became active and penetrating and took on multiform aspects in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when economics took shape and when under the different names of "Natural Rights," "The Spirit of the Laws," or "The Social Contract," it was attempted to resolve into causes, into factors and into logical and psychological data, the multiform and often obscure spectacle of a life in which was preparing the greatest revolution ever known. These doctrines, whatever may have been the subjective intention and spirit of the authors--as in the contrasting cases of the conservative Hobbes and the proletarian Rousseau--were all revolutionary in their substance and their effects. Under all of them is always found, as a stimulus and motive, the material and moral needs of a new age, which, by reason of historic conditions, were those of the bourgeoisie. Thus it was necessary to wage war in the name of liberty upon tradition, the Church, privileges, fixed classes, that is to say, the orders and conditions, and consequently upon the State which was or appeared to be their author, and then upon the special privileges of commerce, the arts, labor and science. And man was studied in an abstract fashion, that is to say, individuals taken separately, emancipated and delivered by a logical abstraction from their historic connection and from every social necessity: in the mind of many the concept of society was reduced to atoms, and it even seemed natural to the greatest number to believe that society is only the sum of the individuals composing it. The abstract categories of individual psychology sufficed for the explanation of all human facts; and this is how in all these systems, nothing is spoken of but fear, self-love, egoism, voluntary obedience, tendency toward happiness, the original goodness of man, the freedom of contract and of the moral consciousness, and of the moral instinct or sense, and also many other similar abstract and generic things, as if they were sufficient to explain history, and to create a new history out of its fragments. By the fact that all society was entering upon an acute crisis, its horror at the antique, at what was superannuated, at what was traditional and had been organized for centuries, and the presentiment of a renovation of all human life, finally produced a total eclipse of the ideas of historic necessity and social necessity, that is to say, of those ideas which, barely indicated by the ancient philosophers, and so developed in our century, had at this period of revolutionary rationalism only rare representatives, like Vico, Montesquieu, and, in part, Quesnay. In this historic situation, which gave birth to a literature that was nimble, destructive and very popular, is found the reason for what Louis Blanc with a certain emphasis has called individualism. Later some have thought they saw in this word the expression of a permanent fact in human nature, which especially might serve as a decisive argument against socialism. A singular spectacle, and a singular contrast! Capital, however produced, tended to overcome all previous forms of production, and, breaking every bond and boundary, to become the direct or indirect master of society, as, in fact, it has become in the greater part of the world; hence it resulted, that apart from all forms of modern misery and the new hierarchy in which we live, there was realized the most acute antithesis of all history, that is to say, the existing anarchy of production in the whole of society, and an iron despotism in the mode of production in each workshop and each factory! And the thinkers, the philosophers, the economists and the popularizers of the eighteenth century saw nothing but liberty and equality! All reasoned in the same way; all started from the same premises, which brought them to conclude that liberty must be obtained from a government of pure administration, or that they were democrats or even communists. The approaching reign of liberty was before the eyes of all as a certain event, provided they could suppress the bonds and fetters which forced ignorance and the despotism of church and state had imposed upon men, good by nature. These fetters did not appear to be conditions and boundaries within which men were found by the laws of their development, and by the effect of the antagonistic and thus uncertain and tortuous movement of history, but simply obstacles from which the methodical use of reason was to deliver us. In this idealism, which reached its culminating point in certain heroes of the French Revolution, is the seed of a limitless faith in the certain progress of the whole human race. For the first time, the concept of humanity appeared in all its branches, unmingled with religious ideas or hypotheses. The boldest of these idealists were the extreme materialists, because, denying every religious fiction, they assigned this earth as a certain domain to the necessity of happiness provided that reason might open the way. Never were ideas abused in so inhuman a fashion as between the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. The lesson of things was very hard, the saddest disillusions arose and a radical upheaval followed in the minds of men. Facts, in a word, proved to be contrary to all expectations; and this at first produced a profound discouragement among the disillusioned, which, notwithstanding, gave rise to the desire and the need of new investigations. We know that Saint Simon and Fourier, in whom operated precisely at the beginning of the century, in the exclusive forms of the ideas of premature genius, the reaction against the immediate results of the politico-economic revolution, arose resolutely, the first against the jurists, and the second against the economists. In fact, when once the obstacles to liberty, which had been characteristic of other times, had been suppressed, new obstacles, graver and more painful, had replaced them, and, as equal happiness for all was not realized, society remained in its political form as it had been before, an organization of inequalities. It must be, then, that society is something autonomous, innate, a complex automaton of relations and conditions, which defies the subjective good intentions of each of the members who compose it, and which escapes from the illusions and the designs of the idealists. It thus follows a course of its own from which we may infer certain laws of process and development, but does not suffer us to impose laws upon it. By this transformation in the minds of men, the nineteenth century heralded itself as the century of historic science and of sociology. The principle of development has, indeed, since then, invaded all domains of thought. In this century, the grammar of history has been discovered, and thus the key has been found to explore the genesis of myths. The embryonic traces of pre-history have been sought out, and, for the first time, the processes of political and legal forms have been arranged into a series. The nineteenth century heralded itself as the century of sociology in the person of Saint Simon, in whom, as happens with the self-taught precursors of genius, we find confused together the germs of so many contradictory tendencies. In this aspect the materialistic conception is a result; but it is a result which is the complement of the whole process of formation; and as a result and a complement it is also the simplification of all historic science and of all sociology, because it takes us back from things derived and from complex conditions to elemental functions. And that is brought about by the direct suggestion of new dynamic experience. The laws of economics, such as they are of themselves and their own inherent force, have triumphed over all illusions and have shown themselves to be the directing power of social life. The great industrial revolution which was produced made it clear that social classes, if they are not a fact of nature, are still less a consequence of chance and of free will; they arise historically and socially in a determined form of production. And who, in truth, has not seen the birth under his eyes of new proletarians upon the economic ruin of so many classes of small proprietors, small peasants and artisans; and who has not been in a position to discover the method of this new creation of a new social status, to which so many men were reduced and in which they were necessarily obliged to live. Who has not been in a position to discover that money, transformed into capital, had succeeded, in a few years, in becoming master by the attraction which it exercises over the labor of free men, in whom the necessity of selling themselves freely as wage workers had been prepared long before by so many ingenious legal processes and by violent or indirect expropriation? And who has not seen the new cities rise around factories and create around their circumference this desolating poverty, which is no longer the effect of individual misfortune, but the condition and the source of wealth? And in this new poverty were numerous women and children, arising for the first time from an unknown existence to take their place on the page of history as a sinister illustration of a society of equals. And who did not feel--even if that had not been announced in the so-called doctrine of the Rev. Malthus--that the number of guests which this mode of economic organization can entertain, if it is sometimes insufficient for him who, by reason of the favorable state of production, has need of hands, is often also superabundant, and therefore finds no occupation and becomes a source of danger? It becomes evident, also, that the rapid and violent economic transformation which was accomplished openly in England had succeeded there, because that country had been able to build up for itself, as compared with the rest of Europe, a monopoly till then unknown, and because to maintain this monopoly an unscrupulous policy had been rendered necessary, and that permitted all, for one happy moment, to translate into prose the ideological myth of the state, which was to be the guardian and the preceptor of the people. This immediate perception of these consequences of the new life was the origin of the pessimism, more or less romantic, of the _laudatores temporis acti_ from De Maistre to Carlyle. The satire of liberalism invaded minds and literature at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Then begins that criticism of society, which is the first step in all sociology. It was necessary before all else to overthrow the ideology, which had accumulated and expressed itself in so many doctrines of the Natural Right or the Social Contract. It was necessary to get into contact with the facts which the rapid events of so intensive a _processus_ imposed upon the attention in forms so new and startling. Here appears Owen, incomparable at all points of view, but especially for the clearness which he displayed in the determination of the causes of the new poverty, even though he was but a child in his quest of the means for overcoming it. It was necessary to arrive at the objective criticism of economics, which appeared for the first time, in one-sided and reactionary forms, in Sismondi. In this period where the conditions of a new historic science were ripening, arose so many different forms of socialism, utopian, one-sided or completely extravagant, which never reached the proletarians, either because these had no political consciousness, or if they had any, it manifested itself in sudden starts, as in the French conspiracies and riots from 1830 to 1848, or they kept on the political ground of immediate reforms, as is the case with the Chartists. And nevertheless all this socialism, however Utopian, fantastic and ideological it may have been, was an immediate and often salutary criticism of economics--a one-sided criticism, indeed, which lacked the scientific complement of a general historical conception. All these forms of criticism, partial, one-sided and incomplete had their culmination in scientific socialism. This is no longer subjective criticism applied to things but the discovery of the self-criticism which is in the things themselves. The real criticism of society is society, itself, which, by the antithetic conditions of the contrasts upon which it rests, engenders from itself, within itself, the contradiction, and finally triumphs over this by its passage into a new form. The solution of the existing antitheses is the proletariat, which the proletarians themselves know or do not know. Even as their misery has become the condition of present society, so in their misery is the justification of the new proletarian revolution. It is in this passage from the criticism of subjective thought, which examines things outside and imagines it can correct them at once, to the understanding of the self-criticism exercised by society over itself in the immanence of its own _processus_--it is in this only that the dialectic of history consists, which Marx and Engels, in so far as they were materialists, drew from the idealism of Hegel. But on the final reckoning it matters little whether the literary men, who knew no other meaning for dialectics than that of an artificial sophistry nor whether the doctors and scholars who are never apt to go beyond the knowledge of particular facts can ever account themselves for these hidden and complicated forms of thought. But the great economic transformation, which has furnished the materials composing modern society, in which the empire of capitalism has arrived at the limit of its complete development, would not have been so immediately and so suggestively instructive, if it had not been luminously illustrated by the bewildering and catastrophic movement of the French Revolution. This put in evidence, like a tragedy on the stage, all the antagonistic forces of modern society, because this society has developed on the ruins of previous forms, and because, in so short a time and with so hasty a march, it has traversed the phases of its birth and its establishment. The revolution ensued from the obstacles which the bourgeoisie had to overcome by violence, since it appeared from evidence that the passage from the old forms to the new forms of production--or of property, if we borrow the language of jurists--could not be realized by the quieter ways of successive and gradual reforms. It brought in its train the upheaval, the friction and the intermingling of all the old classes of the Ancient Regime, and the rapid and bewildering formation at the same time of new classes, in the very rapid but very intensive period of ten years, which, compared with the ordinary history of other times and other countries, seems to us like centuries. This rapid succession of monumental events brought to light the most characteristic moments and aspects of the new or modern society, and that so much the more clearly since the militant bourgeoisie had already created for itself intellectual means and organs which had given it with the theory of its own work the reflex consciousness of its movement. The violent expropriation of the great part of the old property, that is to say, of the property crystallized in fiefs, in royal and princely domains and in mortmain, with the real and personal rights derived therefrom, put at the disposal of the state, which by the necessity of things had become an exceptional, terrible and all-powerful government, an extraordinary mass of economic resources; thus, there were, on the one side, the singular policy of the assignats which finally annulled themselves, and on the other side, the formation of the new proprietors who owed their fortune to the chances of gambling, to intrigue and to speculation. And who again would have dared thereafter to swear upon the ancient, sacred altar of property, when his recent and authentic title rested in so evident a manner upon the knowledge of fortunate circumstances? If it had ever passed through the head of so many troublesome philosophers, beginning with the Sophists, that law is a creation of man, useful and convenient, this heretical proposition might seem thenceforth a simple and intuitive truth to the meanest of the beggars in Paris. Had not the proletarians with all the common people given the impulse to the revolution in general by the expected movements of April, 1789, and did they not afterwards find themselves, as it were, driven anew from the stage of history after the failure of the revolt of Prairial in 1795? Had they not carried on their shoulders all the ardent defenders of liberty and equality? Had they not held in their hands the Paris Commune, which was, for a time, the impulsive organ of the Assembly and of all France; had they not finally the bitter disillusion of having created new masters for themselves with their own hands? The bewildering consciousness of this disillusion constitutes the psychological motive, rapid and immediate, of the conspiracy of Babeuf, which, for that very reason, is a great fact in history, and bears in itself all the elements of objective tragedy. The land which fief and mortmain had, as it were, bound to a body, to a family, to a title, now, delivered from its bonds, had become a commodity, to serve as a basis and instrument for the production of merchandise; so docile a commodity, that it was put into circulation in the form of morsels of paper. And around these symbols, multiplied to such a degree over the things that they were to represent that they finished by no longer having any value, Business came forth, a giant, arising, from all sides, on the shoulders of those most wretched in their poverty, and through all the devious ways of politics; it was especially shameless in its way of taking part in war and its glorious successes. Even the rapid progress of technique, hastened by the urgency of circumstances, gave material and occasion to the prosperity of business. The laws of bourgeois economics, which are those of individual production in the antagonistic field of competition, revolted furiously, through violence and ruse, against the idealistic efforts of a revolutionary government which, strong in its certainty of saving its country, and stronger still in its illusion of founding for eternity the liberty of equals, believed it was possible to suppress gambling by the guillotine, to eliminate Business by closing the Stock Exchange and to assure existence to the common people by fixing the maximum of prices for objects of prime necessity. Commodities, prices and Business reasserted with violence their own liberty against those who wished to preach to them and impose ethics upon them. Thermidor, whatever may have been the original intentions of the Thermidorians, whether vile, cowardly, or misguided, was, in its hidden causes as in its apparent effects, the triumph of Business over democratic idealism. The constitution of 1793, which marks the extreme limit that can be reached by the democratic ideal, was never put into practice. The grave pressure of circumstances, the menace of the foreigner, the different forms of internal rebellion, from the Girondists to the Vendée, rendered necessary an exceptional government, which was the Terror, born of fear. In proportion as dangers ceased, the need of the terror ceased. But the democracy shattered itself against the Business which was bringing into existence the property of new proprietors. The constitution of the year III. consecrated the principle of moderate liberalism, whence proceeds all the constitutionalism of the European continent; but it was, before all else, the road leading to the guaranty of property. To change the proprietors while preserving property--that is the banner, the watchword, the ensign which defied through the years from Aug. 10, 1792, the violent tumults as well as the bold designs of those who attempted to found society upon virtue, equality and Spartan abnegation. But the Directory was the footpath by which the revolution arrived at the downfall of itself as an idealistic effort; and with the Directory, which was open and professed corruption, this banner became a reality; the proprietors are changed, but property is saved. And, indeed, to raise upon so many ruins a stable edifice, there was need of real force; and this was found in that strange adventurer of incomparable genius, upon whom fortune had imperially smiled, and he was the only one who possessed the virtue of putting an end to this gigantic fable, because there was in him neither shadow nor trace of moral scruples. In this furor of events strange things happened. The citizens armed for the defense of their country, victorious beyond its frontiers over surrounding Europe, into which with their conquest they carried the revolution, transformed themselves into a soldiery to oppress the liberty of their country. The peasants who, at a moment of imperious suggestion, produced over the feudal estates the anarchy of 1789, now having become soldiers, or small proprietors, or small farmers, and having remained for a moment the advance sentinels of the revolution, fell back into the silent and stolid calm of their traditional life, which, without risks and without movements, served as a sure basis for the so-called social order. The petty bourgeois of the cities, and the former members of the guilds rapidly developed, in the camp of economic struggle, into free traffickers in manual labor. The freedom of trade required that every product become easily merchantable, and thus it triumphed over the last obstacle, by enforcing the demand that labor also become for it a free commodity. All changed at this moment. The state, which for centuries so many million deluded ones had regarded as a sacred institution or a divine mandate, allowed its sovereign to be beheaded by the prosaic means of a technical machine, and thereby lost its sacred character. The state, also, was becoming a technical appliance, which substituted bureaucracy for hierarchy. And as the ancient titles no longer assured their possessors the privilege of exercising diverse functions, this new state could become the prey of all those who wished to seize upon it; it found itself, in a word, put up at auction, with the provision that the successful aspirants must be the solid guarantors of the property of the new and the old proprietors. The new state, which had need of its Eighteenth Brumaire to become an orderly bureaucracy, supported upon victorious militarism, this state which completed the revolution in the act which denied it, could not dispense with its scripture, and it found it in the Civil Code, which is the golden book for a society which produces and sells commodities. It is not in vain that generalized jurisprudence had preserved and annotated for centuries, in the form of a scientific discipline, this Roman law, which was, which is and ever shall be, the typical and classical form of the law of every shopkeeping society, until communism puts an end to the possibility of buying and selling. The bourgeoisie, which, by the concurrence of so many singular circumstances effected the revolution with the concurrence of so many other classes and semi-classes which after a short lapse of time almost all disappeared from the political stage, seemed, in the moments of the most violent shocks, as if moved by motives inspired by an ideology, which would have absolutely no relation with the effects which actually supervene and perpetuated themselves. The meaning of that is that in the heat of struggle the bewildering change of the economic substructure appeared, as if it were, disguised by ideals and obscure by the interlacings of so many intentions and designs, whence sprung so many acts of cruelty and of unparalleled heroism, so many currents of illusion and hard facts of disenchantment. Never had so powerful a faith in the ideal of progress sprung from human breasts. To deliver the human race from superstition, and even from religion, to make of each individual a citizen, or of every private man a public man; those are its beginnings:--and then on the line of this programme to sum up, in the short activity of a few years, an evolution which appears to the most idealistic of to-day as the work of several centuries to come--that is the idealism of that time! And why should it revolt at the pedagogy of the guillotine? That poetry, grand certainly, if not joyous, left behind it a prose that was severe enough. And it was the prose of the proprietors who owned their property to chance, it was that of the high finance and the newly rich purveyors, marshals, prefects, journalists and mercenary men of letters; it was the prose of the court of that strange man to whom the qualities of military genius grafted upon the soul of a brigand, had, without any doubt, conferred the right of treating as an ideologist whoever did not admire the bare fact which, in life, as it was with him, can be nothing else than the simple brutality of success. The French Revolution hastened the course of history in a large part of Europe. To it attaches, on the Continent, all that we call liberalism and modern democracy, except in the case of the false imitation of England, and up to the establishment of Italian unity, which was and will remain perhaps the last act of the revolutionary bourgeoisie. This revolution was the most vivid and most instructive example of the fashion in which a society transforms itself and how new economic conditions develop, and in developing co-ordinate the members of society into groups and classes. It was the palpable proof of the fashion in which law is found, when it is necessary for the expression and the defense of definite relations, and how the state is created, and how disposal is made of its means, its forces and its organs. Here is seen how ideas arise from the fields of social institutions, and how characters, tendencies, sentiments, volitions, that is to say, in a word, moral forces, are produced and develop into conditions governed by circumstances. In a word, the data of social science were, so to speak, prepared by society itself, and it is no wonder if the revolution, which was preceded ideologically by the most acute form of rationalistic doctrinairism ever known, ended finally by leaving behind it the intellectual need of an anti-doctrinaire historical and sociological science, like that which our own century has attempted to construct. And here, both by what we have seen and by what is known generally, it is useless to recall anew, how Owen forms one of the same group with Saint Simon and Fourier, and to repeat through what ways scientific socialism took its birth. The important thing is in these two points; that historical materialism could not arise but from the theoretical consciousness of socialism; and that it can henceforth explain its own origin with its own principles, which is the greatest proof of its maturity. Thus I have justified the phrase at the beginning of this chapter: ideas do not descend from heaven. VIII. The road traversed thus far has enabled us to take exact account of the precise and relative value of the so-called doctrine of factors; we know also how its adherents come to eliminate objectively those provisional concepts, which were and are a simple expression of a thought not fully arrived at maturity. And, nevertheless, it is necessary that we speak further of this doctrine, in order to explain better and more in detail for what reasons two of the so-called factors, the state and the law, have been and are still considered as the principal and exclusive subject of history. Historians have indeed for centuries placed in these forms of social life the essence of development. Moreover, they have perceived this development only in the modification of these forms. History has for centuries been treated as a discipline relative to the juridico-political movement and even to the political movement principally. The substitution of society for politics is a recent thing, and much more recent still is the reduction of society to the elements of historical materialism. In other words, sociology is of quite recent invention, and the reader, I hope, will have understood for himself that I employ this term for the sake of brevity, to indicate in a general manner the science of social functions and variations, and that I do not hold to the specific sense given it by the Positivists. It is more satisfactory to say that, up to the beginning of this century, the data bearing upon usages, customs, beliefs, etc., or even upon the _natural conditions_, which serve as the foundation and connection for social forms, were not mentioned in political histories unless as objects of simple curiosity, or as accessories and complements of the narration. All this cannot be a simple accident, and indeed is not. There is, then, a double interest in taking account of the tardy appearance of social history, both because our doctrine justifies yet again by this means its reason for existence, and because we thus eliminate, in a definite manner, the so-called factors. If we make an exception of certain critical moments in which social classes, by an extreme incapacity for adapting themselves to a condition of relative equilibrium, enter into a crisis of more or less prolonged anarchy, and if we make an exception of those catastrophes in which an entire world disappears, as at the fall of the Roman Empire of the West, or at the dissolution of the Califate, then it may be said that, ever since there has been a written history, the state appears not only as the creation of society but also as its support. The first step that child-like thought had made in this order of considerations is in this statement: That which governs is also that which creates. If, moreover, we make an exception of certain short periods of democracy exercised with the vivid consciousness of popular sovereignty, as was the case in a few Greek cities, especially at Athens, and in a few Italian cities, and especially Florence (the former nevertheless were composed of free men who were proprietors of slaves, and the latter of privileged citizens who exploited foreigners and peasants) the society organized into a state was always composed of a majority at the mercy of the minority. And thus the majority of men has appeared in history as a mass sustained, governed, guided, exploited and ill treated, or at least as a variegated conglomeration of interests, which a few had to govern, maintaining in equilibrium the divergences, either by pressure or by compensation. Thence the necessity of an art of government, and as it is this before all else which strikes those who are studying collective life, it was natural that politics should appear as the author of the social order and as the sign of the continuity in the succession of historic forms. To say politics is to say activity, which, up to a certain point, is exercised in a desired direction, until the moment at least when calculations dash themselves against unknown or unexpected obstacles. By taking the state as an imperfect experience would suggest for the author of society, and politics for the author of the social order, it resulted that the narrators or philosophical historians were driven to place the essence of history in a succession of forms, institutions and political ideas. Whence the state drew its origin, where the basis of its performance was found, that mattered not, as that matters not in current reasoning. The problems of the genetic order arose, as is known, rather late. The state is and it finds its reason for existence in its present necessity; that is so true that the imagination has not been able to adapt itself to the idea that it has not always existed, and so it has prolonged its conjectural existence back to the first origins of the human race. The gods or demigods and heroes were its founders, in mythology at least, just as in mediæval theology the Pope is the first and therefore the divine and perpetual source of all authority. Even in our time, inexperienced travelers and imbecile missionaries find the state where there is, as among savages and barbarians, nothing but the gens, or the tribe of gentes, or the alliance of gentes. Two things were necessary that these prejudices of the judgment should be overcome. In the first place, it was necessary to recognize that the functions of the state arise, increase, diminish, alter and follow each other with the variations of certain social conditions. In the second place, it was necessary to arrive at a comprehension of the fact that the state exists and maintains itself in that it is organized for the defense of certain definite interests, of one part of society against all the rest of society itself, which must be made in such a way, in its entirety, that the resistance of the subjects, of the ill treated and the exploited, either is lost in multiple frictions, or is tempered by the partial advantages, wretched though they be, to the oppressed themselves. Politics, that art so miraculous and so admired, thus brings us back to a very simple formula; to apply a force or a system of forces to the total of resistances. The first step, and the most difficult, is taken when the state has been reduced to the social conditions whence it draws its origin. But these social conditions themselves have been subsequently defined by the theory of classes, the genesis of which is in the manner of the different occupations, granted the distribution of labor, that is to say, granted the relations which co-ordinate and bind men together in a definite form of production. Thenceforth the concept of the state has ceased to represent the direct cause of the historic movement as the presumed author of society, because it has been seen that in each of its forms and its variations there is nothing else than the positive and forced organization of a definite class rule, or of a definite compact between different classes. And then by an ulterior consequence from these premises, it is finally to be recognized that politics, as the art of acting in a desired direction, is a comparatively small part of the general movement of history, and that it is but a feeble part of the formation and the development of the state itself, in which many things, that is to say, many relations, arise and develop by a necessary compact, by a tacit consent, or by violence endured and tolerated. The reign of the unconscious, if by that we mean what is not decreed by free choice and forethought, but what is determined and accomplished by a succession of habits, customs, compacts, etc., has become very considerable in the domain of the data which form the object of the historic sciences; and politics, which has been taken as an explanation, has itself become something to explain. We know now in a positive way the reasons in consequence of which history had necessarily to appear under a purely political form. But this does not mean that we ought to believe that the state is a simple excrescence, a mere accessory of the social body, or of free association, as so many Utopians and so many ultra-liberal thinkers of anarchist tendencies have imagined. If society has thus far culminated in the state, it is because it has had need of this complement of force and authority, because it is at first composed of units which are unequal by reason of economic differentiations. The state is something very real, a system of forces which maintain equilibrium and impose it through violence and repression. And to exist as a system of forces it has been compelled to develop and to establish an economic power, whether this latter rests upon robbery, the result of war, or whether it consists in direct property in the domain, or whether it is constituted little by little, thanks to the modern method of public taxes, which takes on the constitutional appearance of a self-imposed system of taxation. It is in this economic power, so considerable in modern times, that its capacity for acting is founded. It results, that by reason of a new division of labor, the functions of state give rise to special orders and conditions, that is to say, to very particular classes, without including the class of parasites. The state, which is and which must be an economic power that in its defense of the ruling classes it may be furnished with means to repress, to govern, to administer and to make war, creates in a direct or an indirect manner an aggregation of new and particular interests, which necessarily react upon society. Thus the state, by the fact that it has arisen and that it maintains itself as a guaranty of the social antitheses, which are a consequence of economic differentiations, creates around itself a circle of persons interested directly in its existence. Two consequences follow therefrom. As society is not a homogeneous whole, but a body of specialized articulations, or, rather, a multiform complexus of objects and interests, it happens that sometimes the directors of the state seek to isolate themselves, and by this isolation they oppose themselves to the whole of society, and then, in the second place, it happens that organs and functions, created first for the advantage of all, end by no longer serving any interest but those of groups, and permit abuses of power on the part of coteries and camorras. Thence arise aristocracies and hierarchies born from the use of the public power, thence arise dynasties; in the light of simple logic these formations appear wholly irrational. From the first beginnings of written history the state has increased or diminished its powers, but it has never disappeared, because ever since there have been, in the society of men unequal in consequence of economic differentiation, reasons for maintaining and for defending, through force or conquest, slavery, monopolies, or the predominance of one form of production, with the domination of man over man. The state has become, as it were, the field of an endless civil war, which is developing always, even if it does not always show itself under the startling form of Marius and Sylla, days of June and wars of Secession. Within the state, the corruption of man by man has always flourished, because, if there is no form of domination which does not meet resistance, there are no forms of resistance which, in consequence of the pressing needs of life, may not degenerate into a passive compact. For these reasons, historic events, seen on the surface of the ordinary monotonous narrative, appear like the repetition of the same type, with few variations, like a series of kaleidoscopic pictures. We need not be astonished if the idealistic Herbart and the caustic or pessimistic Schopenhauer arrived at this conclusion, that there is no history, in the sense of any actual _processus_, which is to say in common language; history is a tiresome song. When political history is once reduced to its quintessence, the state remains illuminated in all its prose. Thenceforth there is no more trace either of theological divination, nor of metaphysical transubstantiation, so much in vogue among certain German philosophers,--for whom the state is the Idea, the State Idea which is realized in history, the state is the full realization of the personality, and other stupidities of the same sort. The state is a real organization of defense to guarantee and perpetuate a mode of association, the foundation of which is a form of economic production, or a compact and a transaction between forms. To sum up, the state assumes, either a system of property, or a compact between several systems of property. There is the foundation of all its art, the exercise of which demands that the state itself became an economic power, and that it also dispose of means and processes to make property pass from the hands of some into the hands of others. When, by the effect of an acute and violent change of the forms of production, it is necessary to resort to an unusual and extraordinary readjustment of the relations of property (for example, the abolition of mortmain and fiefs, the abolition of commercial monopolies), then the old political form is insufficient and revolution is necessary to create a new organ which may operate the new economic transformation. If we make an exception of the very ancient times which are unknown to us, all history is developed in the contacts and the antagonisms of the different tribes and communities, and thereafter of the different nations and different states; that is to say, that the reasons for the internal antitheses in the circle of each society are always more and more complicated with frictions with the outside world. These two reasons for antagonism condition each other reciprocally, but in ways which are always varying. Often it is internal disturbance which urges a community or a city to enter into external collisions; at other times it is these collisions which alter the internal relations. The principal motive for the different relations between the different communities has been from the beginnings, even as it is to-day, _commerce_ in the broad sense of the word, that is to say, exchange, whether it is a matter of giving up, as in the poor tribes, merely the surplus in exchange for other things, or whether it is a matter, as to-day, of production on a large scale, which is carried on with the exclusive intention of selling so as to draw from a sum of money a larger sum of money. This enormous mass of events exterior and interior, which accumulate and pile upon each other in history, is such a trouble to the historians who content themselves with exploring it and summarizing it, that they become lost in the infinite attempts at chronological groups and bird's-eye views. Whoever, on the contrary, knows the internal development of the different social types in their economic structure, and who considers political events as the particular results of the forces acting in society, ends by triumphing over the confusion born out of the multiplicity and the uncertainty of first impressions, and instead of a chronological or synchronous series, or a view of the whole, he can arrive at the concrete series of a real _processus_. In the presence of these realistic conditions all the ideologies founded on the ethical mission of the state or on any such conception, fall to the ground. The state is, so to speak, fitted into its place, and it remains encased, as it were, in the surroundings of the social development, in its capacity of a form resulting from other conditions, and in its turn, by reason of its existence, reacting naturally upon the rest. Here arises another question. Will this form ever be outgrown?--or can there be a society without a state?--or can there be a society without classes?--and if we must be more explicit, will there ever be a form of communist production with a distribution of labor and of tasks such that there will be no room in it for the development of inequalities, that source of domination of man over man? It is in the affirmative answer to this question that _scientific socialism_ consists, in so far as it affirms the coming of communistic production, not as a postulate, nor as the aim of a free volition, but as the result of the _processus_ immanent in history. As is well known, the premise of this prevision is in the actual conditions of present capitalist production. This, socializing continually the mode of production, has subjected living labor more and more with its regulations to the objective conditions of the technical process, it has day after day concentrated the property in the means of production more and ever more into the hands of a few, who as stockholders, or speculators, are always found to be more and more removed from immediate labor, the direction of which passes over to intelligence and science. With the increased consciousness of this situation among the proletarians, whose instruction in solidarity comes from the actual conditions of their employment, and with the decrease of the capacity of the holders of capital to preserve the private direction of productive labor, a moment will come, when in one fashion or another, with the elimination in every form of private rent, interest, profit, the production will pass over to the collectivist association, that is to say, will become communistic. Thus will disappear all inequalities, except those of sex, age, temperament and capacity, that is to say, all those inequalities will cease which engender economic classes, or which are engendered by them, and the disappearance of classes will put an end to the possibility of the state, as domination of man over man. The technical and pedagogical government of intelligence will form the only organization of society. In this fashion, scientific socialism, in an ideal fashion at least, has triumphed over the state; and its triumph has given it a complete knowledge both of its mode of origin and the reasons for its natural disappearance. It has understood it precisely because it does not rise up against it in a one-sided and subjective fashion, as did more than once, at different epochs, the cynics, the stoics, the epicureans of all sorts, the religious sectaries, the visionary monks, the utopians and finally, in our days, the anarchists of every stripe. Still more, instead of rising up against it, scientific socialism is proposing to show how the state continually rises up of itself against itself, by creating in the means with which it cannot dispense, as, for example, a colossal system of taxation, militarism, universal suffrage, the development of education, etc., the conditions of its own ruin. The society which has produced it will reabsorb it; that is to say, that just as society in organizing a new form of production will eliminate the antagonisms between capital and labor, so, with the disappearance of proletarians and the conditions which render proletarians possible, will disappear all dependence of men upon his fellow man in any form of hierarchy, whatever it may be. The terms in which the genesis and the development of the state evolve, from its initial point of appearance in a particular community, where economic differentiation is beginning, up to the moment where this disappearance begins to foreshadow itself, make it henceforth intelligible to us. The State has been reduced till it is but a necessary complement of certain definite economic forms, and thus the theory which would have seen in it an independent factor in history is thenceforth forever eliminated. It is henceforth relatively easy to take account of the fashion in which _law_ has been raised up to the rank of a decisive factor of society, and thus of history, directly or indirectly. Before all else, we must remember in what fashion arose this philosophic conception of justice generalized, which is the principal foundation of the theory which maintains that history is dominated by the progress of independent legislation. With the precocious dissolution of the feudal society in certain parts of Central and Northern Italy, and with the birth of the Communes, which were republics of production grouped in trade guilds and merchant guilds, the Roman law was forced into a place of honor. This law flowered anew in the Universities. It entered into a struggle with the barbaric laws and also in part with the canon law; it was then evidently a form of thought which answered better to the needs of the bourgeoisie, which was beginning to develop. In fact, considering the peculiarities of rival laws, which were either customs of barbarous nations, or corporation privileges, or papal or imperial concessions, this law appeared as the universality of _written reason_. Had it not arrived at the point of regarding human personality in its most abstract and human relations, since a certain Titius is capable of becoming debtor and creditor, of selling and buying, of making a cession, a donation, etc.? Roman law, although elaborated in its last editing at the command of emperors by servile parasites, appeared then, amid the decline of mediæval institutions, as a revolutionary force, and as such it constituted a great step of progress. This law, so universal that it gave the means of overthrowing barbaric laws, was certainly a law which corresponded to human nature considered under its generic relations; and by its opposition to private laws and privileges it appeared as a natural law. We know, moreover, how this ideology of natural law arose. It acquired its greatest distinction in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; but it had long been prepared for by the jurisprudence which took for its base the Roman law, whether it adopted it, revised it, or corrected it. To the formation of the ideology of natural law another element contributed, the Greek philosophy of later epochs. The Greeks, who were the inventors of those definite arts of the mind which are sciences, never, as is known, drew from their multiple local laws a discipline corresponding to that which we call the science of law. On the contrary, by the rapid progress of abstract research in the circle of their democracies, they arrived very soon at a logical, rhetorical and pedagogical discussion on the nature of justice, the state, the law, penalty; and in their philosophy we may trace the rudimentary forms of all later discussions. But it is not until later, that is to say, in the Hellenistic epoch, when the limits of Greek life were sufficiently enlarged to be mingled with those of the civilized world, that, in the cosmopolitan environment which carried with it the need of searching in each man for the generic man, the rationalism of justice arose--of justice or of natural right in the form given it by the stoic philosophy. The Greek rationalism which had already furnished a certain formal element to the logical codification of Roman law reappeared in the eighteenth century in the doctrine of natural right. That ideology, whose criticism has served as an arm and an instrument for giving a juridical form to the economic organization of modern society, has had, consequently, various sources. Yet, in fact, this juridical ideology reflects, in the struggle for law and against law, the revolutionary period of the bourgeois spirit. And, although it takes its doctrinal point of departure in a return to the traditions of the ancient philosophy, in the generalization of Roman jurisprudence, in everything else, and in all its development, it is completely new and modern. Roman law, although it was generalized by scholasticism and by modern elaboration, still remains within itself a collection of special cases which have not been deduced according to a preconceived system, nor preordained by the systematic mind of the legislator. On the other hand, the rationalism of the stoics, their contemporaries and their disciples, was a work of pure contemplation, and it produced no revolutionary movement around it. The ideology of natural law, which finally took the name of philosophy of law, was, on the contrary, systematic, it started always from general formulae, it was aggressive and polemic, and still more, it was at war with orthodoxy, with intolerance, with privilege, with constituted bodies; in fine, it fought for the liberties which to-day constitute the formal conditions of modern society. It is with this ideology, which was a method of struggle, that arose for the first time, in a typical and decisive form, that idea that there is a law which is one and the same with reason. The laws against which the struggle was carried on appear as deviations, backward steps, errors. From this faith in rational law arose the blind belief in the power of the legislator, which grew into fanaticism at the critical moments of the French Revolution. Thence the belief that society as a whole is to be submitted to one single law, equal for all, systematic, logical, consistent. Thence the conviction that a law guaranteeing to all a legal equality, that is to say, the privilege of contracting, guaranteed also liberty to all. The triumph of true law assures the triumph of reason, and the society which is regulated by a law equal for all is a perfect society! It is useless to say that there were illusions at the bottom of these tendencies. We all know to what this universal liberation of men was to lead. But what is most important here is the fact that these persuasions arose from a conception of law, which considered it as detached from the social causes which produced it. Likewise that reason, to which these ideologies appealed, reduced itself to relieving labor, association, traffic, commerce, political forms and conscience from all limits and all obstacles which prevented free competition. I have already shown in another chapter how the great Revolution of the eighteenth century may serve us for experience. And if there is still some one to-day who insists on speaking of a rational law which dominates history, of a law, in short, which would be a _factor_, instead of being a simple _fact_ in historic revolution, that means that he is living out of our time and that he has not understood that our liberal and equalitarian codification has already, in fact, marked the end and the term of that whole school of natural law. By different ways we have arrived in this century at reducing law, considered previously as a rational thing, into a material thing, and thus into a thing corresponding to definite social conditions. In the first place, the interest in history gained in extent and in depth, and it led students to recognize that to understand the origins of law, it was not sufficient to stop at the data of pure reason, nor at the study of Roman law alone. Barbaric laws, the usages and customs of nations and societies, so despised by the rationalists, have been theoretically restored to honor. That was the only way to arrive, through the study of the most ancient forms, at an understanding of how the most recent forms could have been successively produced. Codified Roman law is a very modern form; that personality, which it assumes as a universal subject, is an elaboration of a very advanced epoch, in which the cosmopolitanism of social relations was dominated by a military-bureaucratic constitution. In this environment, in which a written code of reason had been built up, there was no longer any trace of spontaneity or popular life, there was no more democracy. This same law, before arriving at this crystallization, had arisen and had developed: and if we study it in its origins and in its developments, and especially if, in this study, we employ the comparative method, we recognize that, upon many points, it is analogous to the institutions of inferior societies and nations. It therefore becomes evident that the true science of law can be nothing less than the genetic history of the law itself. But, while the European continent had created in the codification of civil law the type and the textbook of practical bourgeois judgment, was there not in England another self-originating form of law, which arose and developed in a purely practical manner, from the very conditions of the society which produced it without system, and without the action of methodical rationalism having any part in it? The law, which actually exists and is applied, is therefore a much simpler and much more modest thing than was imagined by the enthusiasts who sing the praises of written judgment, of the empire of reason. For their defense, it must not be forgotten that they were the ideal precursors of the great Revolution. For ideology it was necessary to substitute the history of legal institutions. The philosophy of law ended with Hegel; and if objectors mention the books published since, I reply that the works published by professors are not always the index of the progress of thought. The philosophy of law thus became the philosophical study of the history of law. And it is not necessary to repeat here again how historic philosophy ended in economic materialism and in what sense critical communism is the reversal of Hegel. This revolution, apparently a revolution in ideas alone, is merely an intellectual reflection of the revolutions which have been produced in practical life. In our century, legislating has become an epidemic; and reason enthroned in legal ideology has been dethroned by parliaments. In these the antitheses of class interests have taken on the form of parties; and the parties struggle for or against definite laws; and all law appears as a simple fact, or as a thing which it is useful or not useful to do. The proletariat has arisen; and wherever the struggle of the laborers has taken definite form, the bourgeois codes have been convicted of falsehood. Written judgment has shown itself powerless to save the wage-workers from the oscillations of the market, to guarantee women and children against the oppressive hours of the factories, or to find an expedient to solve the problem of forced idleness. The partial limitation of the hours of labor has, itself alone, been the subject and the occasion of a gigantic struggle. The small and the large bourgeoisie, agrarians and manufacturers, advocates of the poor and defenders of accumulated wealth, monarchists and democrats, socialists and reactionaries, have bitterly contended over extracting profit from the action of the public authorities and over exploiting the contingencies of politics and parliamentary intrigue, to find the guaranty and the defense of certain definite interests in the interpretation of existing law, or in the creation of a new law. This new legislation has more than once been revised, and the strangest oscillations may be observed in it; extending from the humanitarianism which defends the poor and even animals, to the promulgation of martial law. Justice has been stripped of its mask and has become merely a profane thing. The consciousness of experience has come to us and has given us a formula as precise as it is modest; every rule of law has been and is the customary, authoritative, or judicial defense of a definite interest; the reduction of law to economics is then almost immediately accomplished. If the materialistic conception finally came to furnish to these tendencies an explicit and systematic view, it is because its orientation has been determined by the visual angle of the proletariat. This last is the necessary product and the indispensable condition of a society in which all the persons are, from an abstract point of view, equal before the law, but where the material conditions of development and the liberties of each are unequal. The proletarians are the forces through which the accumulated means of production reproduce themselves and reconstitute themselves into new wealth; but they themselves live only by enrolling themselves under the authority of capital; and from one day to the next they find themselves out of work, impoverished and exiles. They are the army of social labor, but their chiefs are their masters. They are the negation of justice in the empire of law, that is to say, that they are the irrational element in the pretended domain of reason. History then has not been a _processus_ for arriving at the empire of reason in law; it has thus far been nothing else than a series of changes in the form of subjection and servitude. History then consists entirely in the struggle of interests, and law is but the authoritative expression of the interests which have triumphed. These formulæ indeed do not permit us to explain, by the immediate examination of the various interests which are at its base, every particular law which has appeared in history. The facts of history are very complicated; but these general formulæ suffice to indicate the style and the method of research which has been substituted for legal ideology. IX. Here I must give certain formulæ. Granted the conditions of the development of labor and the instruments appropriated to it, the economic structure of society, that is to say, the form of production of the immediate means of life, determines, on an artificial field, _in the first place and directly_, all the rest of the practical activity of those associated, and the variation of this activity in the _processus_ which we call history, that is to say:--the formation, the frictions, the struggles and the erosions of the classes;--the corresponding regulations relative to law and morality;--and the reasons and modes of subordination and subjection of men toward men and the corresponding exercise of dominion and authority, in fine, that which gives birth to the State and that which constitutes it. It determines, _in the second place_, the tendency and in great part, _in an indirect fashion_, the objects of imagination and of thought in the production of art, religion and science. The products of the _first_ and of the _second stage_, in consequence of the interests which they create, the habits which they engender, the persons whom they group and whose spirit and inclinations they specify, tend to fix themselves and isolate themselves as independent entities; and thence comes that empirical view, according to which different independent factors, having an efficacy and a rhythmic movement of their own, contribute to form the historic _processus_ and the social configurations which successively result from it. It is the social classes, in so far as they consist in differentiations of interests, which unfold in definite ways and in forms of opposition (--whence come the friction, the movement, the process and the progress--), which have been the factors--if it was ever necessary to employ this expression:--the real, proper and positive factors of history, from the disappearance of primitive communism until to-day. The variations of the underlying (economic) structure of society which, at first sight, show themselves intuitively in the agitation of the passions, develop consciously in the struggles against law and for law, and become realized in the shaking and in the ruin of a definite political organization, have in reality their adequate expression only in the change in the relations which exist between the different social classes. And these relations change with the change of the relations which previously existed between the productivity of labor and the (legal-political) conditions of co-ordination of those who co-operate in production. And finally, these connections between the productivity of labor and the co-ordination of those who co-operate in it are changed with the changing of the instruments--in the broad sense of the word--necessary to production. The _processes_ and the progress of technique, as they are the index, are also the condition of all the other _processus_ and of all progress. Society is for us a fact, which we cannot solve, unless it be by that analysis which reduces the complex forms to the simpler forms, the modern forms to the older forms: but that is to remain always, nevertheless, in a society which exists. History is but the history of society--that is to say, the history of the variations of human co-operation, from the primitive horde down to the modern State, from the immediate struggle against nature, by the means of a few very simple tools, down to the present economic structure, which reduces itself to these two poles; accumulated labor (capital) and living labor (proletarians). To resolve the social _complexus_ into simple individuals, and to reconstruct it afterwards by the acts of free and voluntary thought; to construct, in fine, society with its reasons, is to misunderstand the objective nature and the immanence of the historic _processus_. Revolutions, in the broadest sense of the word, and in the specific sense of the destruction of a political organization, mark the real and proper dates of historic epochs. Seen from afar, in their elements, in their preparation and their effects, at long range, they may appear to us as moments of a constant evolution, with minute variations; but considered in themselves, they are definite and precise catastrophes, and it is only as catastrophes that they are historic events. X. Ethics, art, religion, science, are they then but products of economic conditions?--expositions of the categories of these very conditions?--effluvia, ornaments, emanations and mirages of material interests? Affirmations of this sort, announced with this nudity and crudity, have already for some time passed from mouth to mouth, and they are a convenient assistance to the adversaries of materialism, who use them as a bugbear. The slothful, whose number is great even among the intellectuals, willingly fit themselves to this clumsy acceptance of such declarations. What a delight for all careless persons to possess, once for all, summed up in a few propositions, the whole of knowledge, and to be able with one single key to penetrate all the secrets of life! All the problems of ethics, æsthetics, philology, critical history and philosophy reduced to one single problem and freed thus from all difficulties! In this way the simpletons might reduce the whole of history to commercial arithmetic; and finally a new and authentic interpretation of Dante might give us the Divine Comedy illustrated with the process of manufacturing pieces of cloth which the wily Florentine merchants sold for their greater profit! The truth is that the declarations which involve problems are converted very easily into vulgar paradoxes in the heads of those who are not accustomed to triumph over the difficulties of thought by the methodical use of appropriate means. I shall speak here, in general terms, of these problems, but, as it were, by aphorisms; and certainly I do not propose to write an encyclopedia in this short essay. And first of all, ethics. I do not mean systems and catechisms, religious or philosophic. Both of these have been and are above the ordinary and profane course of human events in most cases, as Utopias are above things. Neither do I speak of those formal analyses of ethical relations, which have been elaborated from the Sophists down to Herbart. This is science and not life. And it is formal science, like logic, geometry and grammar. The one who latest and with so much profundity defined these ethical relations (Herbart), knew well that ideas, that is to say, the formal points of view of the moral judgment, are in themselves powerless. Therefore he put into the circumstances of life and into the pedagogic formation of character the reality of ethics. He might have been taken for Owen if he had not been a retrograde. I am speaking of that ethics which exists prosaically and in an empirical and current fashion, in the inclinations, the habits, the customs, the counsels, the judgments and the appreciations of ordinary mortals. I am speaking of that ethics which as suggestion, as impulse and as bridle, appears in different degrees of development, and more or less unmistakably, although in a fragmentary fashion, among all men; by the very fact of association because each occupies a definite position in the association, they naturally and necessarily reflect upon their own works and the works of others, and they conceive obligations and appreciations and all the first elements of general precepts. There is the _factum_; and what is most important is that this _factum_ appears to us varied and multiple in the different conditions of life, and variable through history. This _factum_ is the _datum_ of research. Facts are neither true nor false, as Aristotle already knew. Systems, on the contrary, theologic or rational, may be true or false because they aim to comprehend, explain and complete the fact, by bringing that fact to another fact, or integrating it with another. Some points of preliminary theory are henceforth settled, in all that concerns the interpretation of this _factum_. The will does not choose of itself, as was supposed by the inventors of _free will_, that product of the impotency of the psychological analysis not yet arrived at maturity. Volitions, in so far as they are facts of consciousness, are particular expressions of the psychic mechanism. They are a result, first of necessities, and then, of all that precedes them up to the very elementary organic impulse. Ethics does not place itself nor does it engender itself. There is no such universal foundation of the ethical relations varied and variable, as that spiritual entity which has been called the _moral conscience_, one and unique for all men. This abstract entity has been eliminated by criticism like all other such entities, that is to say, like all the faculties of the soul. What a beautiful explanation of the fact, in truth, to assume the generalization of the fact itself as a means of explanation. People reasoned thus: the sensations, the perceptions, the intuitions at a certain moment are found imagined, that is to say, changed in their form, therefore the imagination has transformed them. To this class of inventions belongs the _moral conscience_, which was accepted as a postulate of the ethical estimates, which are always conditioned. The moral conscience which really exists is an empirical fact; it is an index or a summary of the relative ethical formation of each individual. If there can be in it material for science, this cannot explain the ethical relations by means of the conscience, but the very thing it needs is to understand how that conscience is formed. If volitions are derived, and if morality results from the conditions of life, ethics, in its completeness, is but a formation; its problem is altogether pedagogic. There is a pedagogy which I will call individualistic and subjective, which, granted the generic conditions of human perfectibility, constructs abstract rules by which men, who are still in a period of formation, may be led to be strong, courageous, truthful, just, benevolent, and so on through the entire extent of the cardinal or secondary virtues. But again, can subjective pedagogy construct of itself a social background upon which all these beautiful things ought to be realized? If it constructs it, it simply elaborates a Utopia. And, in truth, the human race, in the rigid course of its development, never had time nor occasion to go to the school of Plato or of Owen, of Pestalozzi or Herbart. It has done as it has been forced to do. Considered in an abstract manner, all men can be educated and all are perfectible; as a matter of fact, they have always been perfected and instructed as much as and in the measure that they could, granted the conditions of life in which they were obliged to develop. It is here precisely that the word environment is not a metaphor, and that the use of the word compact is not metaphorical. Real morality always presents itself as something conditioned and limited, which the imagination has sought to outgrow, by constructing Utopias, and by creating a supernatural pedagogue, or a miraculous redemption. Why should the slave have had the ways of seeing and the passions and the sentiments of the master whom he feared? How could the peasant relieve himself of his invincible superstitions, to which he was condemned by his immediate dependence upon nature and his mediate dependence upon a social mechanism unknown to him, and by his blind faith in the priest, who stands to him as a magician and sorcerer. In what fashion could the modern proletarian of the great industrial cities, exposed continuously to the alternatives of misery or subjection, how could he realize that way of living, regulated and monotonous, which was the one suited to the members of the trade guilds, whose existence seemed imbedded in a providential plan? From what intuitive elements of experience could the hog merchant of Chicago, who furnishes Europe with so many products at a cheap rate, extract the conditions of serenity and intellectual elevation which gave to the Athenian the qualities of the noble and good man, and to the Roman citizen, the dignity of heroism? What power of docile Christian persuasion will extract from the souls of the modern proletarians their natural reasons of hate against their determined or undetermined oppressors? If they wish that justice be done, they must appeal to violence; and before the love of one's neighbor as a universal law can appear possible to them, they must imagine a life very different from the present life, which makes a necessity of hatred. In this society of differentiations, hatred, pride, hypocrisy, falsehood, baseness, injustice and all the catechism of the cardinal vices and their accessories make a sad appendage to the morality, equal for all, upon which they constitute the satire. Ethics then reduces itself for us to the historical study of the subjective and objective conditions of how morality develops or meets obstacles to its development. In this only, that is to say, within these limits, we can recognize some value in the affirmation that morality corresponds to the social situations, and, _in the last analysis_, to the economic conditions. Only an idiot could believe that the individual morality of each one is proportionate to his individual economic situation. That is not only empirically false, but intrinsically irrational. Granted the natural elasticity of the psychic mechanism, and also the fact that no one lives so shut up in his own class that he does not undergo the influence of other classes, of the common environment and of the interlacing traditions, it is never possible to reduce the development of each individual to the abstract and generic type of his class and his social status. We are dealing there with the phenomena of the mass, of those phenomena which form, or should form, the objects of _moral statistics_: the discipline which has thus far remained incomplete, because it has taken for the objects of its combinations groups which it creates of itself by the addition of numbers of cases (for example, adulteries, thefts, homicides) and not the groups which, as classes, conditions, or situations exist really, that is to say, socially. To recommend morality to men while assuming or ignoring their conditions, this was hitherto the object and the class of argument of all the catechists. To recognize that these are given by the social environment, that is what the communists oppose to the utopia and the hypocrisy of the preachers of morality. And as they see in morality not a privilege of the elect, nor a gift of nature, but a result of experience and education, they admit human perfectibility through reasons and arguments which are, in my opinion, more moral and more ideal than those which have been given by the ideologists. In other words, man develops, or produces himself, not as an entity generically provided with certain attributes, which repeat themselves, or develop themselves, according to a rational rhythm, but he produces and develops himself as at once cause and effect, as author and consequence, of certain definite conditions, in which are engendered also definite currents of ideas, of opinions, of beliefs, of imaginations, of expectations, of maxims. Thence arise ideologies of every sort, as also the generalization of morality in catechisms, in canons and in systems. We must not be surprised if these ideologies, once arisen, are afterwards cultivated alone by themselves, if they finally appear, as it were, detached from the living field whence they took their birth, nor if they hold themselves above man as imperative rules and models. The priests and the doctrinaires of every sort have given themselves for centuries to this labor of abstraction, and have forced themselves to maintain the resulting illusions. Now that the positive sources of all ideologies have been found in the mechanism of life itself, we must explain realistically their mode of generation. And as that is true of all ideologies, it is true also and, in particular of those which consist in projecting ethical estimates beyond their natural and direct limits, making of them anticipations of divine announcements or presuppositions of universal suggestions of conscience. Therein lies the object of the special historic problems. We cannot always find the tie which unites certain ethical ideas to practical definite conditions. The concrete social psychology of past times often remains impenetrable to us. Often the commonest things remain for us unintelligible, for example, the animals considered as unclean, or the origin for the repugnance at marriage between persons of remote degrees of relationship. A prudent course of study leads us to conclude that the motives of many details will remain always concealed. Ignorance, superstition, singular illusions, symbolisms, these with many others are causes of that unconscious element, often found in customs, which now constitutes for us the unknown and the unknowable. The principal cause of all difficulty is precisely in the tardy appearance of what we call reason, so that the traces of the proximate motives of ideas have been lost or have remained enveloped in the ideas themselves. On the subject of science we can be much more brief. For a long time history has been made in an artless fashion. Granted and admitted that the different sciences have their statements in manuals and encyclopedias, it seemed sufficient to work out chronologically the appearance of the different formulas, resolving the total of the systematic summary into the elements which have successively served to compose it. The general presupposition was simple enough; underneath this chronology is the rational conception which develops and progresses. This method, if so it could be called, had within itself a certain disadvantage; it permitted us at best to understand how, one stage of science being granted, another stage of science may be derived from it by reason, but it did not permit us to discern by what condition of facts men were driven to discover science for the first time, that is to say, to reduce considered experience into a new and definite form. The question was, then, to find why there is an actual history of science, to find the origin of the scientific necessity, and what unites in a genetic fashion that necessity to our necessities in the continuity of the social _processus_. The great progress of modern technique, which really constitutes the intellectual substance of the bourgeois epoch, has worked, among other miracles, this one also, of revealing to us for the first time the practical origin of the _scientific attitude_. (We can never forget the Florentine Academy, which produced this phrase, when Italy was in the twilight of its past grandeur and when modern society was in the dawn of the great industry.) Henceforth we are in a position to take up the guiding thread of what, by abstraction, is called the scientific spirit; and no one is any longer astonished at finding that everything in scientific discoveries has come about, as was the case in other primitive times, when the clumsy elementary geometry of the Egyptians arose from the necessity of measuring the fields exposed to the annual inundations of the Nile, and when the periodicity of these inundations suggested, in Egypt and in Babylon, the discovery of the rudiments of the astronomical movements. It is certainly true that when science is once created and partially ripened, as had already happened in the Hellenic period, the work of abstraction, of deduction and of combination continues among scientists in such a way that it possibly obliterates the consciousness of the social causes of the first production of science itself. But if we examine in their main features the epochs of the development of science, and if we confront the periods which the ideologists would characterize as periods of progress and of retrogression of intelligence, we perceive clearly the social reason for the impulses, sometimes increasing, sometimes decreasing, toward scientific activity. What need had the feudal society of Western Europe for this ancient science, which the Byzantines preserved, at least materially, while the Arabs, free agriculturists, industrious artisans, or skillful merchants, had succeeded in increasing it a little. What is the Renaissance, if not the joining of the initiatory movement of the bourgeoisie to the traditions of ancient learning, which had become usable? What is all the accelerated movement of scientific knowledge, since the seventeenth century, but the series of acts accomplished by intelligence, refined by experience, to assure human labor, in the forms of an improved technique, the dominion over natural forces and conditions? Thence arises the war against darkness, superstition, the Church, religion; thence arise naturalism, atheism, materialism; thence the installation of the domain of reason. The bourgeois epoch is the epoch of minds in full play. (Vico.) It is worth remembering that this government of the Directory, which was the prototype and the compendium of all liberal corruption, was the first to introduce in the University and at the Academy in a formal and solemn fashion the science of free inquiry with Lamark! This science, which the bourgeois epoch has, through its inherent conditions, stimulated and made to grow like a giant, is the only heritage of past centuries which communism accepts and adopts without reserve. It would not be useful to stop here for the discussion of the so-called antithesis between science and philosophy. If we accept those fashions of philosophizing which are confounded with mysticism and theology, philosophy never means a science or doctrine separate from its appropriate and particular things, but it is simply a degree, a form, a stage of thought with relation to the things which enter into the domain of experience. Philosophy is, then, either a generic anticipation of the problems which science has still to elaborate specifically, or a summary and a conceptual elaboration of the results at which the sciences have already arrived. As for those who, that they may not appear behind the times, talk now of scientific philosophy, if we do not wish to stop over the humorous element that there is in that expression, it will suffice to say that they are simply fools. I said some pages back, in my statement of formulas, that the economic structure determines in the second place the direction, and in great part and indirectly, the objects of imagination and of thought in the production of art, of religion and of science. To express this otherwise, or to go further, would be to put one's self voluntarily on the road toward the absurd. Before all else, in this formula, we are opposing the fantastic opinion, that art, religion and science are subjective developments and historical developments of a pretended artistic, religious or scientific spirit, which would go on manifesting itself successively through its own rhythm of evolution, favored or retarded on this side or that by material conditions. By this formula, it is desired to assert, moreover, the necessary connection, through which every fact of art and of religion is the exponent, sentimental, fantastic and thus derived, of definite social conditions. If I say _in the second place_, it is to distinguish these products from the facts of legal-political order which are a true and proper projection of economic conditions. And if I say _in great part and indirectly the objects_ of these activities, it is to indicate two things: that in artistic or religious production the mediation from the conditions to the products is very complicated, and again that men, while living in society, do not thereby cease to live alone by themselves in nature, and to receive from it occasion and material for curiosity and for imagination. After all, this is all reduced to a more general formula; man does not make several histories at the same time, but all these alleged different histories (art, religion, etc.) make up one alone. And it is not possible to take account of that clearly except at the characteristic and significant moment of the production of new things, that is to say in the periods which I will call revolutionary. Later, the acceptance of the things that have been produced, and the traditional repetition of a definite type, obliterated the sense of the origins of things. Try, if you will, to detach the ideology of the _fables_ which are at the foundation of the Homeric poems, from that moment of historic evolution where we find the dawn of Aryan civilization in the basin of the Mediterranean, that is to say, from that phase of the higher barbarism in which arises, in Greece and elsewhere, the epic. Or try to imagine the birth and the development of Christianity elsewhere than in Roman cosmopolitanism, and otherwise than by the work of those proletarians, those slaves, those unfortunates, those desperate ones, who had need of the redemption of the Apocalypse and of the promise of the Kingdom of God. Find, if you will, the ground for supposing that in the beautiful environment of the Renaissance the romanticism should begin to appear, which scarcely appeared in the decadent Torquato Tasso; or that one might attribute to Richardson or to Diderot the novels of Balzac, in whom appears, as a contemporary of the first generation of socialism and sociology, the _psychology of classes_. Far back, farther, farther, at the first origins of the mythical conceptions, it is evident that Zeus did not assume the characters of father of gods and men until the power of the _patria potestas_ was already established, and that series of _processus_ began which culminated in the State. Zeus thus ceases to be what was at first the simple _divus_ (brilliant) or the Thunderer. And it is to be observed that at an opposite point of historic evolution, a great number of thinkers of the past century reduced to a single abstract God, who is a simple regent of the world, all that variegated image of the unknown and transcendental type, developed in so great a wealth of mythological, Christian or pagan creations. Man felt himself more at home in nature, thanks to experience, but felt himself better able to penetrate the gearing of society, the knowledge of which he possessed in part. The miraculous dissolved in his mind, to the point where materialism and criticism could afterwards eliminate that poor remnant of transcendentalism, without taking up war against the gods. There is certainly a history of ideas; but this does not consist in the vicious circle of ideas that explain themselves. It lies in rising from things to the idea. There is a problem; still more, there is a multitude of problems, so varied, multiple, multiform and mingled are the projections which men have made of themselves and of their economic-social conditions, and thus of their hopes and their fears, of their desires and their deceptions, in their artistic and religious concepts. The method is found, but the particular execution is not easy. We must above all guard against the scholastic temptation of arriving by deduction at the products of historic activity which are displayed in art and in religion. We must hope that philosophers like Krug, who explained the pen with which he wrote by a process of dialectic deduction, have remained forever buried in the notes of Hegel's logic. Here I must state certain difficulties. Before attempting to reduce secondary products (for example, art and religion) to the social conditions which they idealize, one must first acquire a long experience of specified social psychology, in which the transformation is realized. Therein consists the justification of that sum of relations, which is designated in another form of language, under the name of Egyptian _world_, Greek _consciousness_, _spirit_ of the Renaissance, _dominant ideas_, _psychology of nations_, of society or of classes. When these relations are established, and men have become accustomed to certain conceptions and certain modes of belief or of imagination, the ideas transmitted by tradition tend to become crystallized. Thus they appear as a force which resists new formations; and as this resistance shows itself through the spoken word, through writing, through intolerance, through polemics, through persecution, so the struggle between the new and the old social conditions takes on the form of a struggle between ideas. In the second place, through the centuries of history properly so-called, and as a consequence of the heredity of the pre-history of savagery and of the conditions of subjection and those of inferiority in which the majority of men were and are placed, resulted acquiescence in what is traditional, and the ancient tendencies are perpetuated as obstinate survivals. In the third place, as I have said, men living socially, do not cease to live also in nature. They are not, of course, bound to nature as animals are, because they live on an artificial groundwork. Every one understands, moreover, that a house is not a cave, that agriculture is not natural pasturage, and that pharmacy is not exorcism. But nature is always the immediate subsoil of the artificial groundwork, and it is the environment which contains us. The industrial arts have put between us social animals, and nature, certain intermediaries which modify, set aside or remove the natural influences; but it has not for all that destroyed the efficacy of these, and we continually feel their effects. And even as we are born men or women, as we die almost always in spite of ourselves, and as we are dominated by the instinct of generation, so we also bear in our temperament certain special conditions which education in the broad sense of the word, or social compact, can modify, it is true, within certain limits, but which they can never suppress. These conditions of temperament, repeated in infinite cases throughout the centuries, constitute what is called the race. For all these reasons, our dependence upon nature, although it has diminished since prehistoric times, continues in our social life, just as the food which the sight of nature affords to the curiosity and the imagination continues also in our social life. Now these effects of nature, and the sentiments immediate or mediate which result from it, although they have been perceived, since history began, only on the visual angle which is given us by the conditions of society, never fail to reflect themselves in the products of art and of religion, and that adds to the difficulties of a realistic and complete interpretation of both. XI. In employing this doctrine as a new principle of research, as a precise means of defining our position, and as a visual angle, will it really be possible finally to arrive at a new narrative history? It is not possible to make an affirmative answer in general to this generic demand. Because, in fact, if we assume that the critical communist, the sociologist of economic materialism, or as he is commonly called, the Marxist, has the necessary critical preparation, the habit of historical study, and also the gift required for an orderly and vivacious narration, there is no reason for affirming that he cannot write history, as heretofore the partisans of all other political schools have written it. We have the example of Marx, and there is an argument from fact which admits of no reply. But he was the first and the principal author of the decisive concepts of this doctrine, reducing it at once into an instrument of political orientation, in his character of an incomparable publicist, during the revolutionary period of 1848 to 1850. And then he applied it with the greatest precision in that essay entitled Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, of which it may be said today, at a great distance, and after so many publications, if we except certain infinitesimal details and certain false forecasts, that it would be possible to make neither corrections nor important complements. I will not repeat, since I am not writing a bibliography, the list of the different writings of Marx or Engels--of which we have so many attempts from the Peasants' War (1850) down to his posthumous writings on The Present Unity of Germany--which are an application of the doctrine, nor those of their successors and of the popularizers of scientific socialism. Even in the socialist press we may read, from time to time, valuable attempts at explanation of certain political events, in which is found, precisely by reason of historic materialism, a clearness of vision which would be sought in vain among the writers and the disputants who have not yet torn away the fantastic veils and ideological envelopes of history. Here is not the place to take up the defense of an abstract thesis, as an advocate would do. It is evident, nevertheless, in all the histories which have been written up to the present time, that there is always at bottom, if not in the explicit intentions of the writers, certainly in their spirit, a tendency, a principle, a general view of life; and so this doctrine, which has enabled us to study the social structure in an objective manner, must finally direct with precision the researches of history, and must end in a narrative complete, transparent and integral. Helps are not lacking. _Economics_, which, as everyone sees it today, had its birth and development as the science of bourgeois production, after being puffed up with the illusion of representing the absolute laws of all forms of production, has through the dear school of experience entered since, as everyone knows, upon a period of self-criticism. Just as this self-criticism gave birth, on one side, to critical communism, so on the other side it has given birth, through the labor of the calmest, the wisest and the most prudent of the academic tradition, to the _historical school of economic phenomena_. Thanks to this school, and through the effect of the application of the descriptive and comparative methods, we are henceforth in possession of a vast sum of knowledge on the different historical forms of _economics_, from the most complex facts and those best specified through essential differences of types, down to the special domain of a cloister or a trade guild of the Middle Ages. The same thing has taken place with _statistics_, which, by the indefinite combination of its sources, succeeds now in throwing light, with a sufficient approximation, upon the movement of population in past centuries. These studies, certainly, are not made in the interest of our doctrine, and oftener than not they are made in a spirit hostile to socialism; something not observed, we may say in passing, by those foolish readers of printed papers who so often confuse _economic history_, _historical economics_, and _historical materialism_. But these studies, apart from the materials which they gather, are remarkable in that they witness the progress which is in course of making the _internal history_ which, little by little, is taking the place of the _external history_ with which, for centuries, the men of letters and artists were occupied. A good part of these materials that have been gathered must always be submitted to new corrections, as for that matter happens in every domain of empirical knowledge, which oscillates continually between what is held for certain and what is simply probable, and what must, later, be integrated or eliminated. The deductions and the combinations of the historians of economics, or of those who relate history in general, availing themselves of the guiding thread of economic phenomena, are not always so plausible or so conclusive, that one does not feel the need of saying to them: All this must be taken back and worked over. But that which is undoubted is the fact that in this present time all writing of history tends to become a science, or, better, a social discipline; and when that movement, now uncertain and multiform, shall be accomplished, the efforts of the scholars and inquirers will lead inevitably to the acceptance of economic materialism. By this incidence of efforts and of scientific labors, which start from points so opposite, the materialistic conception of all history will end by penetrating men's minds as a definite conquest of thought; and this will finally take away from partisans and adversaries the attempt to speak _pro_ and _con_ as for partisan theses. Apart from the direct helps just enumerated, our doctrine has many indirect helps, so that it can profitably employ the results of many disciplines, in which by reason of the greater simplicity of the relations, it has been possible more easily to make the application of the genetic method. The typical case is furnished by glottology, and in a more special fashion by the study which has for its object the ancient languages. The application of historical materialism is certainly, hitherto, very far from that evidence and that clearness of _processus_ of analysis and of reconstruction. It would be consequently a vain attempt to try, at this moment, to write a summary of universal history, which should propose to develop all the varied forms of production in order to deduce from them afterwards all the rest of human activity, in a particular and circumstantial fashion. In the present state of knowledge, he who should try to give this _compendium_ of a new _Kulturgeschichte_ would do nothing but translate into economic phraseology the points of general orientation which, in other books, for example, in Hellwald, give it in Darwinian phraseology. It is a long step from the acceptance of the principle to its complete and particular application to the whole of a vast province of facts, or to a great succession of phenomena. So the application of our doctrine must be kept for a moment to the exposition and the study of definite parts of history. The modern forms are clear to all. The economic developments of the bourgeoisie, the manifest knowledge of the different obstacles which it has had to overcome in the different countries, and, consequently, the development of the different revolutions, taking this word in its broadest sense, contribute to make our understanding of it easy. To our eyes the pre-history of the bourgeoisie, at the moment of the decline of the Middle Ages, is equally clear, and it would not be difficult to find, for example, in the development of the city of Florence, an attested series of developments, in which the economic and statistical movement finds a perfect correspondence in the political relations and a sufficient illustration in the contemporary development of intelligence already reduced into prose and stripped, in great part, of ideological illusions. Nor would it be impossible to reduce, now, under the definite visual angle of materialism, the whole of ancient Roman history. But for that, and particularly, for the primitive period, there are no direct sources; they are, on the contrary, abundant in Greece, from popular tradition, the epic, and the authentic juridical inscriptions, down to the pragmatic studies of the historical social relations. At Rome, on the other hand, the struggles for political rights carry with them almost always the economic reasons upon which they rest. Thus, the decline of definite classes, the formation of new classes, the movement of conquest, the change of the laws and of the forms of political array, appear to us with perfect clearness. This Roman history is hard and prosaic; it was never clad with these ideological complements which were suited to Greek life. The rigid prose of conquest, of planned colonization, of institutions and of the forms of law, conquered and devised for solving the problems arising from definite frictions and contrasts, makes all Roman history a chain of events which follow each other in a sequence which is grossly evident. The true problem consists, indeed, not in substituting sociology for history, as if the latter had been an appearance which conceals behind it a secret reality, but in understanding history as a whole, in all its intuitive manifestations, and in understanding it through the aid of economic sociology. It is not a question of separating the accident from the substance, the appearance from the reality, the phenomenon from the intrinsic kernel, or applying any other formula used by the partisans of any species of scholasticism, but of explaining the connection and the _complexus_ precisely in so far as it is a connection and a _complexus_. It is not merely a question of discovering and determining the social groundwork, and then of making men appear upon it like so many marionettes, whose threads are held and moved, no longer by Providence but by economic categories. These categories have themselves developed and are developing, like all the rest--because men change as to the capacity and the art of vanquishing, subduing, transforming and utilizing natural conditions; because men change in spirit and attitude through the reaction of their tools upon themselves; because men change in their respective and co-associated relations; and therefore as individuals depending in various degrees upon one another. We have, in fine, to do with history, and not with its skeleton. We are dealing with narration and not with abstraction, with the explaining and treating of the whole, and not merely with resolving and analyzing it; we have to do, in a word, now, as always, with an art. It may be that the sociologist who follows the principles of economic materialism proposes to keep himself simply to the analysis, for example, of what the classes were at the moment when the French Revolution broke out, and to pass then to the classes that result from the Revolution and survive it. In that case the titles, the indications and the classifications of the materials to analyze are definite; they are, for example, the city and the country, the artisan and the laborer, the nobles and the serfs, the land which is freed from feudal charges, and the small proprietors who came into being, commerce which frees itself from so many restrictions, money which accumulates, industry which prospers, etc. There is nothing to object to in the choice of this method, which, because it follows the track of embryonic origins, was indispensable to the preparation of historical research according to the direction of the new doctrine.[29] But we know that the study of embryonic origins does not suffice to make us understand animal life, which is not a scheme, but is composed of living beings which struggle, and in their struggle employ forces, instincts and passions. And it is the same, _mutatis mutandis_, with men also, in so far as they live historically. These particular men, moved by certain passions, urged by certain circumstances, with such and such designs, such intentions, acting in such an attempt with such an illusion of their own, or with such a deception, of another, who, martyrs of themselves or of others, enter on harsh contests and reciprocal suppressions of each other--there is the real history of the French Revolution. If, however, it is true that all history is but the unfolding of definite economic conditions, it is equally true that it develops only in definite forms of human activity,--whether the latter be passionate or reflective, fortunate or unsuccessful, blindly instinctive or deliberately heroic. To understand the interlacings and the _complexus_ in its inner connection and its outer manifestations; to descend from the surface to the foundation, and then to return from the foundation to the surface; to analyze the passions and the intentions, in their motives, from the closest to the most remote, and then to bring back the data of the passions and of the intentions and of their causes to the most remote elements of a definite economic situation; there is the difficult art which the materialistic conception must realize. And as we must not imitate that teacher who on the bank taught his pupils to swim by the definition of swimming, I beg the reader to await the examples which I shall give in other essays in a real historical narration, working over into a book which for some time I have already been doing in my teaching. In this way certain secondary and derivative questions are once for all cleared up. What, for example, is the meaning of the lives of the great men? In these later times, answers have been given, which, in one sense or another, have an extreme character. On the one side, there are the extreme sociologists, on the other side the individualists who, after the fashion of Carlyle, put the heroes into the first rank of their history. According to some it is sufficient to show what were the reasons, for example, of Cæsarism, and Cæsar matters little. According to others, there are no objective reasons of classes and social interests which suffice to explain anything; it is the great minds which give the impulse to the whole historic movement; and history has, so to speak, its lords and its monarchs. The empiricists of narration extract themselves from embarrassment in a very simple fashion, putting together at hazard men and things, objective necessities of fact and subjective influences. Historical materialism goes beyond the antithetical views of the sociologists and the individualists, and at the same time it eliminates the eclecticism of the empirical narrators. First of all the _factum_. Let this particular Cæsar, as Napoleon was, be born in such a year, let him follow such a career, and find himself ready for the Eighteenth Brumaire. All this is completely accidental with relation to the general course of things which was pushing the new class, mistress of the field, to save from the Revolution that which appeared to it necessary to save, and that necessitated the creation of a bureaucratico-military government. It was, however, necessary to find the man, or the men. But what actually happened came about in the fashion that we know. It depended on this fact, that it was Napoleon who directed the enterprise and not a pitiable Monk, or a ridiculous Boulanger. And from that moment the accident ceases to be accident, precisely because it is this definite person who gives his imprint and physiognomy to the events, determining the fashion or the manner in which they have unfolded. The very fact that all history rests upon antitheses, contrasts, struggles and wars, explains the decisive influence of certain men in definite occasions. These men are neither a negligible accident of the social mechanism, nor miraculous creators of what society, without them, could have made in no other fashion. It is the very interlacings of the antithetic conditions, which causes the fact that definite individuals, generous, heroic, fortunate, mischievous, are called at critical moments to say the decisive word. As long as the particular interests of the different social groups are in such a state of tension, that all the parties in the struggle reciprocally paralyze each other, then to make the political gearing move, there is need of the individual consciousness of a definite individual. The social antitheses, which make of every human community an unstable organization, give to history, especially when it is seen and examined rapidly and in its main features, the character of a drama. This drama in all its relations is repeated from community to community, from nation to nation, from state to state, because the inner inequalities concurring with the external differentiations, have produced and produce the whole movement of wars, conquests, treaties, colonizations, etc. In this drama have always appeared, in the role of leaders of society, the men who are characterized as eminent, as great, and empiricism has concluded from their presence that they were the principal authors of history. To carry back the explanation of their appearance to the general causes and the common conditions of the social structure, is a thing which harmonizes perfectly with the data of our doctrine; but to try to eliminate them, as certain affected objectivists of sociology would willingly do, is pure capriciousness. And to conclude, the partisan of historical materialism who sets himself the task of explaining, or relating, cannot do it through schemes. History has always received a definite form, with an infinite number of accidents and variations. It has a certain grouping, it has a certain perspective. It is not enough to have eliminated preventively the hypothesis of factors, because the narrator constantly finds himself in the presence of things which seem incongruous, independent, and self-directing. To present the whole as a whole, and to discover in it the continuous relations of the events which border on each other, there is the difficulty. The sum of events narrowly consecutive and precise gives the whole of history; and this is equivalent to saying that it is all that we know of our being, in so far as we are social beings and not simply natural beings. XII. In the successive whole, and in the continuous necessity of all historical events, is there, then, some ask, any meaning, any significance? This question, whether it comes from the camp of the idealists, or whether it comes to us from the mouth of the most circumspect critics, certainly, and in all cases, demands our attention, and requires an adequate answer. In fact, if we stop at the premises, intuitive or intellectual, from which is derived the conception of _progress_ as an idea which incloses and embraces the total of the human _processus_, it is seen that these presumptions all rest upon the mental need, which is in us, of attributing to one or more series of events a certain sense and a certain signification. The conception of progress, for whoever examines it carefully in its specific nature, always implies judgments of estimation, and therefore, there is no one who can confuse it with the crude and bare notion of simple development, which does not contain that increment of clue which makes us say of a thing that it is progressing. I have already said, and, it seems to me, at sufficient length, how it is that progress does not exist as something imperative or regulative over the natural and immediate succession of the generations of men. That is as intuitive as is the actual coexistence of peoples, of nations and of states, which find themselves, at the same time, in a different stage of development; so undeniable is the actual condition of relative superiority and inferiority of nation as compared with nation; and again so certain is the partial and relative retrogression which has been produced several times in history, as Italy has exemplified for centuries. Still more, if there is a convincing proof of how progress must be understood in the sense of immediate law, and, to use a strong expression, of a physical and inevitable law, it is precisely this fact,--that social development by the very reasons of the _processus_ which are inherent in it, often leads to retrogression. It is evident, on the other hand, that the faculty of progressing, like the possibility of retrogressing, does not constitute, to begin with, an immediate privilege, or an innate defect of a race, nor is either one the direct consequence of geographical conditions. And, in fact, the primitive centers of civilization were multiple, those centers have been removed in the course of centuries, and finally the means, the discoveries, the results and the impulses of a definite civilization, already developed, are, within certain limits, communicable to all men indefinitely. In a word, progress and retrogression are inherent in the conditions and the rhythm of social development. Now then, the faith in the universality of progress, which appeared with so much violence in the eighteenth century, rests upon this first positive fact, that men, when they do not find obstacles in external conditions, or do not find them in those which result from their own work in their social environment, are all capable of progress. Moreover, at the bottom of this supposed or imagined unity of history, in consequence of which the _processus_ of the different societies would form one single series of progress, there is another fact, which has offered motive and occasion for so many fantastic ideologies. If all nations have not progressed equally, still more, if some have stopped and have followed a backward route, if the _processus_ of social development has not always, in every place and in all times, the same rhythm and the same intensity, it is nevertheless certain that, with the passage of the decisive activity from one people to another people in the course of history, the useful products, already acquired by those who were in decadence, have been transmitted to those who were growing and rising. That is not so true of the products of sentiment and imagination, which nevertheless are themselves preserved and perpetuated in literary tradition, as of the results of thought, and especially of the discovery and of the production of technical means, which, once found, are communicated and transmitted directly. Need we remind the reader that writing was never lost, although the peoples who invented it have disappeared from historic continuity? Need we recall again that we all have in our pockets, engraved on our watches, the Babylonian dial, and that we make use of algebra, which was introduced by those Arabs, whose historical activity has since been dispersed like the sands of the desert? It is useless to multiply these examples, because it is sufficient to think of technology and the history of discoveries in the broad sense of the word, for which the almost continuous transmission of the instruments of labor and production is evident. And after all, the provisional summaries which are called universal histories, although they always reveal, in their aim and in their execution, something forced and artificial, would never have been attempted if human events had not offered to the empiricism of the narrators a certain thread, even though subtle, of continuity. Take for example the Italy of the sixteenth century, which is evidently in decadence; but while it is declining, it transmits to the rest of Europe its intellectual weapons. These are not all that pass to the civilization which continues, but even the world market establishes itself upon the foundation of those geographical discoveries, and those discoveries in the naval art, which were the work of Italian merchants, travelers and sailors. It is not only the methods of the art of war and the refinements of political diplomacy which passed outside of Italy (though it is only with these that men of letters ordinarily concerned themselves), but even the art of making money, which had acquired all the evidence of an elaborate commercial discipline, and one after the other the rudiments of the science, upon which is founded modern technique, and to begin with all the methodical irrigation of fields and the general laws of hydraulics. All that is so precisely true, that an amateur in conjectural theses might come to the point of asking himself this question: what would have become of Italy, in this modern bourgeois epoch, if, executing the project of the Venetian Senate (1504) of making something which would have resembled in its effects a piercing of the Isthmus of Suez, the Italian navy had found itself in a direct struggle with the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean, at the very moment when the shifting of historical activity from the Mediterranean to the ocean prepared the decadence of Italy? But enough of fantasy! A certain historical continuity, in the empirical and circumstantial sense of the transmission and the successive increase of the means of civilization, is then an incontestable fact. And, although this fact excludes all idea of preconceived design, of intentional or hidden finality, or pre-established harmony, and all the other whimsicalities in regard to which there has been such a deal of speculation, it does not exclude, for all that, the _idea of progress_, which we can utilize as an _estimation_ of the course of human development. It is undeniable that progress does not embrace _materially_ the succession of generations, and that its conception implies nothing categorical, considering that societies have also been in retrogression, but that does not prevent this idea from serving as a guiding thread and a _measure_ to give a meaning to the historical _processus_. There is no common ground for critics who are prudent, in the use of specific concepts as in the method of their application, and those poor extreme evolutionists, who are scientists without the grammar and the principle of science, that is to say, without logic. As I have said several times, ideas do not fall from heaven, and even those which, at a given moment arise from definite situations with the impetuosity of faith and with a metaphysical garb, carry always within themselves the index of their correspondence with the order of the facts, of which the explanation is sought or attempted. The idea of progress, as the unifier of history, appears with violence and becomes a giant in the eighteenth century, that is to say, in the heroic period of the intellectual and political life of the revolutionary bourgeoisie. Just as this engendered, in the order of its works, the most intensive period of history that is known, it also produced its own ideology in the notion of progress. This ideology in its substance means that capitalism is the only form of production which is capable of extending all over the earth and of reducing the whole human race to conditions which resemble each other everywhere. If modern technique can be transported everywhere, if all the human race appear on a single field of competition and all the world as a single market, what is there astonishing in the ideology which, reflecting intellectually these conditions of fact, reaches the affirmation that the present historical unity has been prepared by everything which precedes it? Translating this concept of pretended _preparation_ into the altogether natural concept of _successive condition_, and there is opened before us the road by which the passage is made from the ideology of progress to historical materialism; and now we arrive at the affirmation of Marx, that this form of bourgeois production is the last antagonistic form of the _processus_ of society. The miracles of the bourgeois epoch, in the unification of the social _processus_, find no parallel in the past. Here are the whole New World, Australia, Northern Africa, and New Zealand! And they all resemble us! And the rebound in the extreme East is made through imitation, and in Africa through conquest! In the presence of this universality and this cosmopolitanism, the acquisition of the Celts and the Iberians to Roman civilization, and of the Germans and that the Slavs to the cycle of Roman Byzantine Christian civilization shrink into insignificance. This ever-growing unification is reflected more every day in the political mechanism of Europe; this mechanism, because founded on the economic conquest of the other parts of the world, oscillates henceforth with the flux and reflux which come from the most distant regions. In this most complicated mingling of action and reactions the war between Japan and China, made with methods imitated, or directly borrowed, from European technique, leaves its traces, deep and far-reaching, in the diplomatic relations of Europe, and still clearer traces in the stock exchange, which is the faithful interpreter of the consciousness of our time. This Europe, mistress of all the rest of the world, has recently seen the relations of the politics of the states of which it is composed oscillate in consequence of a revolt in the Transvaal, and in consequence of the ill success of the Italian armies in Abyssinia in these last days.[30] The centuries which have prepared and carried to its present form the economic domination of bourgeois production have also developed the tendency to a unification of history under a general view; and in this fashion we find explained and justified the ideology of progress, which fills so many books of the philosophy of history and of _Kulturgeschichte_. The unity of social form, that is to say, the unity of the capitalistic form of production, to which the bourgeoisie has tended for centuries, is reflected in the conception of the unity of history in more suggestive forms than the mind could ever have received from the narrow cosmopolitanism of the Roman empire or the one-sided cosmopolitanism of the Catholic Church. But this unification of the social life, by the working of the capitalist form of production, developed itself from the beginning, and continues to develop itself, not according to preconceived rules, plans and designs, but, on the contrary, by reason of frictions and struggles, which in their sum form a colossal complication of antitheses. War without and war within. Struggle incessant among the nations, and struggles incessant between the members of each nation. And the interlacings of the deeds and the action of so many emulators, competitors and adversaries is so complicated, that the co-ordination of events very often escapes the attention, and it is a very difficult thing to discover their intimate connection. The struggle which actually exists among men, the struggles which now, with various methods, are unfolding among nations and within nations, have come to make us understand better in the midst of what difficulties the history of the past has unfolded. If the bourgeois ideology, reflecting the tendency to capitalist unification, has proclaimed the progress of the human race, historical materialism, on the contrary, and without proclamation, has discovered that these are the antitheses which have thus far been the cause and the motive of all historical events. Thus the movement of history, taken in general, appears to us as it were oscillating;--or rather, to use a more appropriate image, it seems that it is unfolding on a line often interrupted, and at certain moments it seems to return upon itself, sometimes it stretches out, removing itself far from the point of departure:--in an actual zigzag. Granted the internal complication of every society, and granted the meeting of several societies on the field of competition (from the ingenuous forms of robbery, rapine and piracy to the refined methods of the elegant sport of the stock exchange) it is natural that every historical result, when it is measured in the one measure of individual expectation, appears very often like chance, and afterwards, considered theoretically, becomes for the mind more inextricable than the track of meteors. Speaking of the irony which sits as a sovereign above history is not a simple phrase; because, in truth, if there is no god of Epicurus laughing above over human affairs, here below human affairs are of themselves playing a divine comedy. Will this irony of human destinies ever cease? Will that form of association ever be possible which gives room for the possible complete development of all aptitudes, in such a way that the ulterior _processus_ of history may become a real and true evolution? And, to speak like the amateurs of high-sounding phrases, will there ever be a humanization of all men? When once in the communism of production the antitheses which are now the cause and the effect of economic differentiations are eliminated, will not all human energies acquire a very high degree of efficacy and intensity in co-operative effects, and at the same time will they not develop with a greater liberty of self-expression among all individuals? It is in the affirmative answers to these questions that consists what _critical communism_ says, that is to say foresees, of the future. But it does not say it and it does not foretell it as if it were discussing an abstract possibility, or like him who wishes, by his will, to give life to a state of things which he desires and which he dreams. But it says and predicts because what it announces must inevitably happen by the immanent necessity of history, seen and studied henceforth in the foundation of its economic substructure. "It is only in an order of things where there will no longer be classes and class antagonisms that social revolutions will cease to be political revolutions.[31] "To the old bourgeois society with its classes and class antagonisms will succeed an association in which the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all.[32] "The relations of bourgeois production are the last antagonistic form of the social _processus_ of production--a form antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism, but of the antagonism which proceeds from the conditions of the social life of individuals; but the productive forces which are developing in the lap of bourgeois society are creating at the same time the material conditions to terminate that antagonism. With this social organization ends the prehistory of the human race.[33] "With the taking possession of the means of production on the part of society, is excluded the production of commodities, and with it the dominance of the product over the producer. The anarchy which dominates in social production will be succeeded by conscious organization. The struggle for individual existence will cease. Only in this way man will detach himself, in a certain sense, from the animal world in a definite fashion, and will pass from a condition of animal existence to conditions of human existence. The entire sum of the conditions of life which has thus far dominated men will pass under the rule and the examination of men themselves, who will thus for the first time become the real masters of nature, because they will be the masters of their own association. The laws of their own social activity, which had been outside of them like foreign laws imposed upon them, will be applied and mastered by the men themselves, with full knowledge of their cause. Their very association, which appeared to men as if imposed by nature and history, will become their own and their free work. The foreign and objective forces, which till then dominated history, will pass under the care of men. Only from that moment will men make their own history with full understanding; only from that moment will the social causes which they put in motion, be able to arrive, in great part and in a proportion ever increasing, at the desired effects. It is the leap of the human race from the reign of necessity into that of liberty. To accomplish this action emancipating the world, such is the historic mission of the modern proletariat." If Marx and Engels had been phrasemakers, if their spirit had not been made prudent, even scrupulous, by the daily and minute use and application of scientific methods, if the permanent contact with so many conspirators and visionaries had not given them a horror of every Utopia, opposing it indeed up to the point of pedantry, these formulas might pass for good-natured paradoxes, which criticism need not examine. But these formulas are, as it were, the close, the effective conclusion of the doctrine of historic materialism. They are the direct result of the criticism of economies and of historical dialectics. In these formulas, which may be developed, as I have had occasion to show elsewhere, is, summed up every forecast of the future, which is not and is not intended for a romance or a Utopia. And in these very formulas there is an adequate and conclusive response to the question with which this chapter began: Is there in the series of historic events a meaning and a significance? THE END. FOOTNOTES: [28] This genetic study forms the subject of my first essay, _In Memory of the Communist Manifesto_, which is the indispensable preamble to an understanding of all the rest. [29] (I allude to the excellent work of Karl Kautsky, _Die Klassengensaetze von 1789_.) [30] The Italian edition of this Essay bears the date of March 10, 1896. [31] Marx, Misere de la Philosophie, Paris, 1817, p. 178. [32] Communist Manifesto, p. 16. [33] Marx, Zur Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, Berlin, 1859, p. 6 Pref. Compare my first Essay, pp. 48-50. 
33979	----	SEBASTIAN MELMOTH [OSCAR WILDE] London Arthur L. Humphreys 1911 (Miscellaneous aphorisms, followed by The Soul of Man.) The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death. Women are made to be loved, not to be understood. It is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. Moren than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read. Women, as someone says, love with their ears, just as men love with their eyes, if they ever love at all. It is better to be beautiful than to be good, but it is better to be good than to be ugly. Nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion. Misfortunes one can endure, they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's faults--ah! there is the sting of life. Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall away like sand, creeds follow one another, but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons, a possession for all eternity. Questions are never indiscreet; answers sometimes are. Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building. The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Anyone can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success. Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live: and unselfishness is letting other people's lives alone, not interfering with them. A man who does not think for himself does not think at all. Nowadays people seem to look on life as a speculation. It is not a speculation. It is a sacrament. Its ideal is love. Its purification is sacrifice. In old days nobody pretended to be a bit better than his neighbour. In fact, to be a bit better than one's neighbour was considered excessively vulgar and middle class. Nowadays, with our modern mania for morality, everyone has to pose as a paragon of purity, incorruptibility, and all the other seven deadly virtues. And what is the result? You all go over like ninepins--one after the other. All sympathy is fine, but sympathy with suffering is the least fine mode. If you pretend to be good the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism. It is most dangerous nowadays for a husband to pay any attention to his wife in public. It always makes people think that he beats her when they're alone. The world has grown so suspicious of anything that looks like a happy married life. Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or in comedy, whether they will suffer or make merry, laugh or shed tears. But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications. The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast. Men know life too early; women know life too late-that is the difference between men and women. He who stands most remote from his age is he who mirrors it best. There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves and fibres and slowly built-up cells, in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. Man is a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex, multiform creature that bears within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh is tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead. As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter she is perfectly satisfied. There is always something infinitely mean about other people's tragedies. Public and private life are different things. They have different laws and move on different lines. When one is placed in the position of guardian one has to adopt a very high moral tone on all subjects. It's one's duty to do so. I have always been of opinion that a man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing. An engagement should come on a young girl as a surprise, pleasant or unpleasant, as the case may be. It is hardly a matter that she could be allowed to arrange for herself. If the lower classes don't set us a good example what on earth is the use of them? They seem, as a class, to have absolutely no sense of moral responsibility. If a woman cannot make her mistakes charming she is only a female. The world was made for men and not for women. It is always with the best intentions that the worst work is done. If you wish to understand others you must intensify your own individualism. Why do you talk so trivially about life? Because I think that life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it. What a pity that in life we only get our lessons when they are of no use to us. It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating. Relations are simply a tedious pack of people who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live nor the smallest instinct about when to die. Charity creates a multitude of sins. My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better they don't know anything at all. Truth is a very complex thing and politics is a very complex business. There are wheels within wheels. One may be under certain obligations to people that one must pay. Sooner or later in political life one has to compromise. Everyone does. Men can love what is beneath them--things unworthy, stained, dishonoured. We women worship when we love; and when we lose our worship we lose everything. The proper basis for marriage is a mutual misunderstanding. The one advantage of playing with fire is that one never gets even singed. It is the people who don't know how to play with it who get burned up. There are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life fully, entirely, completely, or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands. When one is in town one amuses oneself. When one is in the country one amuses other people. It is excessively boring. Romance is the privilege of the rich, not the profession of the unemployed. The poor should be practical and prosaic. An acquaintance that begins with a compliment is sure to develop into a real friendship. It starts in the right manner. The truths of metaphysics are the truths of masks. Science can never grapple with the irrational. That is why it has no future before it in this world. The happy people of the world have their value, but only the negative value of foils. They throw up and emphasise the beauty and the fascination of the unhappy. In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst--the last is a real tragedy. Disobedience in the eyes of anyone who has read history is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made--through disobedience and rebellion. It is not wise to find symbols in everything that one sees. It makes life too full of terrors. Comfort is the only thing our civilisation can give us. Politics are my only pleasure. You see nowadays it is not fashionable to flirt till one is forty or to be romantic till one is forty-five, so we poor women who are under thirty, or say we are, have nothing open to us but politics or philanthropy. And philanthropy seems to me to have become simply the refuge of people who wish to annoy their fellow-creatures. I prefer politics. I think they are more ... becoming. One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged. In a very ugly and sensible age the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other. It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is fatal. Secrets from other people's wives are a necessary luxury in modern life. So, at least, I am told at the club by people who are bald enough to know better. But no man should have a secret from his own wife. She invariably finds it out. Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They discover everything except the obvious. Life holds the mirror up to art, and either reproduces some strange type imagined by painter or sculptor or realises in fact what has been dreamed in fiction. I feel sure that if I lived in the country for six months I should become so unsophisticated that no one would take the slightest notice of me. To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it. I am always saying what I shouldn't say; in fact, I usually say what I really think--a great mistake nowadays. It makes one so liable to be misunderstood. Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes. The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is. The basis of every scandal is an absolute immoral certainty. People talk so much about the beauty of confidence. They seem to entirely ignore the much more subtle beauty of doubt. To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. To be on the alert is to live, to be lulled into security is to die. Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be a mediocrity. It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions, my one quarrel is with words. That is the reason I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for. A high moral tone can hardly be said to conduce very much to either one's health or one's happiness. There are terrible temptations that it requires strength--strength and courage--to yield to. To stake all one's life on one throw--whether the stake be power or pleasure I care not--there is no weakness in that. There is a horrible, a terrible, courage. Nowadays it is only the unreadable that occurs. All charming people are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction. There is more to be said for stupidity than people imagine. Personally, I have a great admiration for stupidity. It is a sort of fellow-feeling, I suppose. All men are monsters. The only thing to do is to feed the wretches well. A good cook does wonders. There is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that. Crying is the refuge of plain women but the ruin of pretty ones. Love art for its own sake and then all things that you need will be added to you. This devotion to beauty and to the creation of beautiful things is the test of all great civilisations; it is what makes the life of each citizen a sacrament and not a speculation. It is always worth while asking a question, though it is not always answering one. It takes a thoroughly good woman to do a thoroughly stupid thing. With a proper background women can do anything. Chiromancy is a most dangerous science, and one that ought not to be encouraged, except in a 'tête-à-tête.' One should never take sides in anything. Taking sides is the beginning of sincerity, and earnestness follows shortly afterwards, and the human being becomes a bore. The work of art is beautiful by being what art never has been; and to measure it by the standard of the past is to measure it by a standard on the reflection of which its real perfection depends. There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannises over the body. There is the despot who tyrannises over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannises over soul and body alike. The first is called the prince. The second is called the pope. The third is called the people. Costume is a growth, an evolution, and a most important, perhaps the most important, sign of the manners, customs, and mode of life of each century. I really don't see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love, but there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. What consoles one nowadays is not repentance but pleasure. Repentance is quite out of date. Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they are better. Unless one is wealthy there is no use in being a charming fellow. Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude. An eternal smile is much more wearisome than a perpetual frown. The one sweeps away all possibilities, the other suggests a thousand. To disagree with three-fourths of England on all points is one of the first elements of vanity, which is a deep source of consolation in all moments of spiritual doubt. Women live by their emotions and for them, they have no philosophy of life. As long as war is regarded as wicked it will always have a fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar it will cease to be popular. There is only one thing worse than injustice, and that is justice without her sword in her hand. When right is not might it is evil. We spend our days, each one of us, in looking for the secret of life. Well, the secret of life is in art. The truth isn't quite the sort of thing that one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl. If one plays good music people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk. How fond women are of doing dangerous things. It is one of the qualities in them that I admire most. A woman will flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are looking on. Englishwomen conceal their feelings till after they are married. They show them then. Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess. Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless. Life is terrible. It rules us, we do not rule it. In art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true. One's days are too brief to take the burden of another's sorrows on one's shoulders. Each man lives his own life, and pays his own price for living it. The only pity is that one has to pay so often for a single fault. One has to pay over and over again, indeed. In her dealings with man Destiny never closes her accounts. Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval. When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy. The people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty and their fidelity I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Better to take pleasure in a rose than to put its root under a microscope. Of Shakespeare it may be said that he was the first to see the dramatic value of doublets and that a climax may depend on a crinoline. Plain women are always jealous of their husbands; beautiful women never are! They never have time. They are always so occupied in being jealous of other people's husbands. What between the duties expected of one during one's lifetime and the duties exacted from one after one's death land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position and prevents one from keeping it up. A man who moralises is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralises is invariably plain. There is nothing in the whole world so unbecoming to a woman as a nonconformist conscience. And most women know it, I am glad to say. It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone and can be made as offensive as a brickbat. A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias. What is the difference between scandal and gossip? Oh! gossip is charming! History is merely gossip, but scandal is gossip made tedious by morality. All beautiful things belong to the same age. It is personalities, not principles, that move the age. Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious and their method too clearly defined. One exhausts what they have to say in a very short time, and then they become as tedious as one's relations. To know nothing about our great men is one of the necessary elements of English education. The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either and modern literature a complete impossibility. You may laugh, but it is a great thing to come across a woman who thoroughly understands one. The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism. The number of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one's clean linen in public. The chief thing that makes life a failure from the artistic point of view is the thing that lends to life its sordid security--the fact that one can never repeat exactly the same emotion. We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow. Vulgar habit that is people have nowadays of asking one, after one has given them an idea, whether one is serious or not. Nothing is serious except passion. The intellect is not a serious thing and never has been. It is an instrument on which one plays, that is all. The only serious form of intellect I know is the British intellect, and on the British intellect the illiterate always plays the drum. It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious. It is only the modern that ever become old-fashioned. It is only the Philistine who seeks to estimate a personality by the vulgar test of production. Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf. Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern. One is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly. The fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose. The domestic virtues are not the true basis of art. To the philosopher women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals. The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life. The only horrible thing in the world is 'ennui.' That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness. French songs I cannot possibly allow. People always seem to think that they are improper, and either look shocked, which is vulgar, or laugh, which is worse. It has often been made a subject of reproach against artists and men of letters that they are lacking in wholeness and completeness of nature. As a rule this must necessarily be so. That very concentration of vision and inversity of purpose which is the characteristic of the artistic temperament is in itself a mode of limitation. To those who are preoccupied with the beauty of form nothing else seems of so much importance. The work of art is to dominate the spectator. The spectator is not to dominate the work of art. One should sympathise with the joy, the beauty, the colour of life. The less said about life's sores the better. You can't make people good by act of Parliament--that is something. Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and having done so passes on to other things. Nature, on the other hand, forgetting that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating the effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it. It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true. A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent. One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything. Nothing is so aggravating as calmness. There is something positively brutal about the good temper of most modern men. I wonder we women stand it as well as we do. The truth is a thing I get rid of as soon as possible. Bad habit, by the way, makes one very unpopular at the club ... with the older members. They call it being conceited. Perhaps it is. My own business always bores me to death. I prefer other people's. Don't be led astray into the paths of virtue--that is the worst of women. They always want one to be good. And if we are good, when they meet us they don't love us at all. They like to find us quite irretrievably bad and to leave us quite unattractively good. Men are such cowards. They outrage every law in the world and are afraid of the world's tongue. Wicked women bother one. Good women bore one. That is the only difference between them. To know the principles of the highest art is to know the principles of all the arts. I don't believe in the existence of Puritan women. I don't think there is a woman in the world who would not be a little flattered if one made love to her. It is that which makes women so irresistibly adorable. When I am in trouble eating is the only thing that consoles me. Indeed, when I am in really great trouble, as anyone who knows me intimately will tell you, I refuse everything except food and drink. When one is going to lead an entirely new life one requires regular and wholesome meals. The soul is born old, but grows young. That is the comedy of life. The body is born young, and grows old. That is life's tragedy. One can survive everything nowadays except death, and live down anything except a good reputation. The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what men should not have been. The present is what men ought not to be. The future is what artists are. Men become old, but they never become good. By persistently remaining single a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation. Men should be more careful; this very celibacy leads weaker vessels astray. I think that in practical life there is something about success, actual success, that is a little unscrupulous, something about ambition that is scrupulous always. Every man of ambition has to fight his century with its own weapons. What this century worships is wealth. The god of this century is wealth. To succeed one must have wealth. At all costs one must have wealth. I love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself don't interest me. They have not got the charm of novelty. Moderation is a fatal thing. Enough is as bad as a meal. More than enough is as good as a feast. The English can't stand a man who is always saying he is in the right, but they are very fond of a man who admits he has been in the wrong. It is one of the best things in them. Life is simply a 'mauvais quart d'heure' made up of exquisite moments. There is the same world for all of us, and good and evil, sin and innocence, go through it hand in hand. To shut one's eyes to half of life that one may live securely is as though one blinded oneself that one might walk with more safety in a land of pit and precipice. Married men are horribly tedious when they are good husbands and abominably conceited when they are not. Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship. Everybody is clever nowadays. You can't go anywhere without meeting clever people. This has become an absolute public nuisance. I don't think man has much capacity for development. He has got as far as he can, and that is not far, is it? I am not quite sure that I quite know what pessimism really means. All I do know is that life cannot be understood without much charity, cannot be lived without much charity. It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the explanation of this world, whatever may be the explanation of the next. I do not approve of anything that that tampers with natural arrogance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit: touch it, and the blossom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately, in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square. No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating. Emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of life and of that practical organisation of life that we call society. Men of the noblest possible moral character are extremely susceptible to the influence of the physical charms of others. Modern, no less than ancient, history supplies us with many most painful examples of what I refer to. If it were not so, indeed, history would be quite unreadable. I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other's character before marriage, which I think is never advisable. It is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. The two weak points in our age are its want of principle and its want of profile. Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women who have of their own free choice remained thirty-five for years. Never speak disrespectfully of society. Only people who can't get into it do that. It is always painful to part with people whom one has known for a very brief space of time. The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity. But even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has just been introduced is almost unbearable. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic. One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason. The essence of thought, as the essence of life, is growth. What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities. In a temple everyone should be serious except the thing that is worshipped. We are never more true to ourselves than when we are inconsistent. There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love. Intellectual generalities are always interesting, but generalities in morals mean absolutely nothing. To be in society is merely a bore, but to be out of it simply a tragedy. We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities. One should never make one's début with a scandal. One should reserve that to give an interest to one's old age. What man has sought for is, indeed, neither pain nor pleasure, but simply life. Man has sought to live intensely, fully, perfectly. When he can do so without exercising restraint on others, or suffering it ever, and his activities are all pleasurable to him, he will be saner, healthier, more civilised, more himself. Pleasure is nature's test, her sign of approval. When man is happy he is in harmony with himself and his environment. Society often forgives the criminal, it never forgives the dreamer. It is so easy for people to have sympathy with suffering. It is so difficult for them to have sympathy with thought. Conversation should touch on everything, but should concentrate itself on nothing. There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution. There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating--people who know absolutely everything and people who know absolutely nothing. The public is wonderfully tolerant; it forgives everything except genius. Life makes us pay too high a price for its wares, and we purchase the meanest of its secrets at a cost that is monstrous and infinite. This horrid House of Commons quite ruins our husbands for us. I think the Lower House by far the greatest blow to a happy married life that there has been since that terrible thing they called the Higher Education of Women was invented. Once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties he becomes painfully effeminate, does he not? And I don't like that. It makes men so very attractive. Experience is a question of instinct about life. What is true about art is true about life. One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing. I like men who have a future and women who have a past. Women, as some witty Frenchman put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out. In matters of grave importance style, not sincerity, is the vital thing. The only way to behave to a woman, is to make love to her if she is pretty and to someone else if she is plain. Women give to men the very gold of their lives. Possibly; but they invariably want it back in such very small change. Define women as a sex? Sphinxes without secrets. What do you call a bad man? The sort of man who admires innocence. What do you call a bad woman? Oh! the sort of woman a man never gets tired of. One can resist everything except temptation. Don't let us go to life for our fulfilment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence or form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic and critical temperament. It is a dangerous thing to reform anyone. One can always know at once whether a man has home claims upon his life or not. I have noticed a very, very sad expression in the eyes of so many married men. A mother who doesn't part with a daughter every season has no real affection. To be good is to be in harmony with oneself. Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others. A really grand passion is comparatively rare nowadays. It is the privilege of people who have nothing to do. That is the one use of the idle classes in a country. There is no secret of life. Life's aim, if it has one, is simply to be always looking for temptations. There are not nearly enough of them; I sometimes pass a whole day without coming across a single one. It is quite dreadful. It makes one so nervous about the future. All thought is immoral. Its very essence is destruction. If you think of anything you kill it; nothing survives being thought of. What is truth? In matters of religion it is simply the opinion that has survived. In matters of science it is the ultimate sensation. In matters of art it is one's last mood. It is so easy to convert others. It is so difficult to convert oneself. A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal. Life cheats us with shadows, like a puppet-master. We ask it for pleasure. It gives it to us, with bitterness and disappointment in its train. We come across some noble grief that we think will lend the purple dignity of tragedy to our days, but it passes away from us, and things less noble take its place, and on some grey, windy dawn, or odorous eve of silence and of silver, we find ourselves looking with callous wonder, or dull heart of stone, at the tress of gold-flecked hair that we had once so wildly worshipped and so madly kissed. There are two ways of disliking art One is to dislike it and the other to like it rationally. There is nothing sane about the worship of beauty. It is too splendid to be sane. Those of whose lives it forms the dominant note will always seem to the world to be mere visionaries. I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in this world. Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance. A sentimentalist is a man who sees an absurd value in everything and doesn't know the marked price of any single thing. Punctuality is the thief of time. Self-culture is the true ideal for man. There's nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It's a thing no married man knows anything about. No woman should have a memory. Memory in a woman is the beginning of dowdiness. One can always tell from a woman's bonnet whether she has got a memory or not. There are things that are right to say but that may be said at the wrong time and to the wrong people. The meaning of any beautiful created thing is, at least, as much in the soul of him who looks at it as it was in his soul who wrought it. Nay, it is rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful thing its myriad meanings, and makes it marvellous for us, and sets it in some new relation to the age, so that it becomes a vital portion of our lives and a symbol of what we pray for, or perhaps of what, having prayed for, we fear that we may receive. The Renaissance was great because it sought to solve no social problem, and busied itself not about such things, but suffered the individual to develop freely, beautifully, and naturally, and so had great and individual artists and great and individual men. In England people actually try to be brilliant at breakfast. That is so dreadful of them! Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast. When one is in love one begins by deceiving oneself, and one ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance. The secret of life is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. The development of the race depends on the development of the individual, and where self-culture has ceased to be the ideal the intellectual standard is instantly lowered and often ultimately lost. An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all. To elope is cowardly; it is running away from danger, and danger has become so rare in modern life. When a man is old enough to do wrong he should be old enough to do right also. The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden. It ends with Revelations. In married life three is company and two is none. Out of ourselves we can never pass, nor can there be in creation what in the creator was not. Don't tell me that you have exhausted life. When a man says that one knows that life has exhausted him. When a woman marries again it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs. The highest criticism really is the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilised form of autobiography, as it deals, not with the events, but with the thoughts of one's life, not with life's physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind. To know anything about oneself one must know all about others. Duty is what one expects from others, it is not what one does oneself. After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations. Talk to every woman as if you loved her and to every man as if he bored you, and at the end of your first season you will have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact. Man--poor, awkward, reliable, necessary man--belongs to a sex that has been rational for millions and millions of years. He can't help himself; it is in his race. The history of women is very different. They have always been picturesque protests against the mere existence of common-sense; they saw its dangers from the first. More marriages are ruined nowadays by the common-sense of the husband than by anything else. How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly rational being. It is very vulgar to talk about one's business. Only people like stock-brokers do that, and then merely at dinner-parties. It is awfully hard work doing nothing. However, I don't mind hard work when there is no definite object of any kind. To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual. To Plato, with his passion for wisdom, this was the noblest form of energy. To Aristotle, with his passion for knowledge, this was the noblest form of energy also. It was to this that the passion for holiness led the saint and the mystic of mediæval days. Youth! There is nothing like it. It is absurd to talk of the ignorance of youth. The only people to whose opinions I listen now with any respect are persons much younger than myself. They seem in front of me. Life has revealed to them her latest wonder. Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art. I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex. There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to life. The old are in life's lumber-room. But youth is the lord of life. Youth has a kingdom waiting for it. Everyone is born a king, and most people die in exile--like most kings. All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime. Society, civilised society at least, is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It instinctively feels that manners are of more importance than morals, and in its opinion the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef. And, after all, it is a very poor consolation to be told that the man who has given one a bad dinner or poor wine is irreproachable in his private life. Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold entrees. While, in the opinion of society, contemplation is the gravest thing of which any citizen can be guilty, in the opinion of the highest culture it is the proper occupation of man. Life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce. One is always wounded when one approaches it. Things last either too long or not long enough. If a woman wants to hold a man she has merely to appeal to what is worst in him. We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods. It is the symbol of symbols. It reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it shows us itself it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world. Men always want to be a woman's first love. That is their clumsy vanity. Women have a more subtle instinct about things. What they like is to be a man's last romance. Anything approaching to the free play of the mind is practically unknown amongst us. People cry out against the sinner, yet it is not the sinful but the stupid who are our shame. There is no sin except stupidity. One regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality. It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection; through art and through art only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence. A man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world. The future belongs to the dandy. It is the exquisites who are going to rule. It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that. Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthrals us. When a woman finds out that her husband is absolutely indifferent to her, she either becomes dreadfully dowdy or wears very smart bonnets that some other woman's husband has to pay for. It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. It is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates. Art is always more abstract than we fancy. Form and colour tell us of form and colour-that is all. It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realise his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely. For when the ideal is realised it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than itself. People who go in for being consistent have just as many moods as others have. The only difference is that their moods are rather meaningless. It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. Good women have such a limited view of life, their horizon is so small, their interests so petty. The fact is they are not modern, and to be modern is the only thing worth being nowadays. Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation. Men marry because they are tired, women because they are curious. Both are disappointed. All men are married women's property. That is the only true definition of what married women's property really is. I am not in favour of this modern mania for turning bad people into good people at a moment's notice. As a man sows so let him reap. Nothing refines but the intellect. It is very painful for me to be forced to speak the truth. It is the first time in my life that I have ever been reduced to such a painful position, and I am really quite inexperienced in doing anything of the kind. The man who regards his past is a man who deserves to have no future to look forward to. Just as it is only by contact with the art of foreign nations that the art of a country gains that individual and separate life that we call nationality, so, by curious inversion, it is only by intensifying his own personality that the critic can interpret the personality of others; and the more strongly this personality enters into the interpretation the more real the interpretation becomes, the more satisfying, the more convincing, and the more true. Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth. All women become like their mothers: that is their tragedy. No man does: that is his. Women are a fascinatingly wilful sex. Every woman is a rebel, and usually in wild revolt against herself. One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry. No man came across two ideal things. Few come across one. To become the spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life. The state is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful. A community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature and not on its growth and development. Jealousy, which is an extraordinary source of crime in modern life, is an emotion closely bound up with our conceptions of property, and under socialism and individualism will die out. It is remarkable that in communistic tribes jealousy is entirely unknown. All art is immoral. He to whom the present is the only thing that is present knows nothing of the age in which he lives. To realise the nineteenth century one must realise every century that has preceded it and that has contributed to its making. Few parents nowadays pay any regard to what their children say to them. The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out. The history of woman is the history of the worst form of tyranny the world has ever known; the tyranny of the weak over the strong. It is the only tyranny that lasts. The happiness of a married man depends on the people he has not married. There is no one type for man. There are as many perfections as there are imperfect men. And while to the claims of charity a man may yield and yet be free, to the claims of conformity no man may yield and remain free at all. A practical scheme is either a scheme that is already in existence or a scheme that could be carried out under existing conditions. All imitation in morals and in life is wrong. The world has been made by fools that wise men may live in it. Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them they will forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects. Society is a necessary thing. No man has any real success in this world unless he has got women to back him--and women rule society. If you have not got women on your side you are quite over. You might just as well be a barrister or a stockbroker or a journalist at once. The worship of the senses has often, and with much justice, been decried; men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions and sensations that seem stronger than themselves, and that they are conscious of sharing with the less highly organised forms of existence. But it is probable the true nature of the senses has never been understood, and that they have remained savage and animal merely because the world has sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty will be the dominant characteristic. Women appreciate cruelty more than anything else. They have wonderfully primitive instincts. We have emancipated them, but they remain slaves, looking for their master all the same. They love being dominated. Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob. It is through the voice of one crying in the wilderness that the way of the gods must be prepared. Circumstances are the lashes laid on to us by life. Some of us have to receive them with bared ivory backs, and others are permitted to keep on a coat--that is the only difference. Criticism is itself an art.... It is no more to be judged by any low standard of imitation or resemblance than is the work of poet or sculptor. The critic occupies the same relation to the work of art that he criticises as the artist does to the visible world of form and colour or the unseen world of passion and thought. He does not even require for the perfection of his art the finest materials. Anything will serve his purpose. It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. In the sphere of actual life that is, of course, obvious. Anybody can make history, only a great man can write it. If we lived long enough to see the results of our actions it may be that those who call themselves good would be filled with a wild remorse and those whom the world calls evil stirred with a noble joy. Each little thing that we do passes into the great machine of life, which may grind our virtues to powder and make them worthless or transform our sins into elements of a new civilisation more marvellous and more splendid than any that has gone before. Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them, sometimes they forgive them. We live in an age that reads too much to be wise and that thinks too much to be beautiful. One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar. It will be a marvellous thing--the true personality of man--when we see it. It will grow naturally and simply flowerlike, or as a tree grows. It will not be at discord. It will never argue or dispute. It will not prove things. It will know everything, and yet it will not busy itself about knowledge. It will have wisdom. Its value will not be measured by material things. It will have nothing, and yet it will have everything, and whatever one takes from it it will still have, so rich it will be. It will not be always meddling with others or asking them to be like itself. It will love them because they will be different. And yet, while it will not meddle with others, it will help all, as a beautiful thing helps us, by being what it is. The personality of man will be very wonderful. It will be as wonderful as the personality of a child. Cynicism is merely the art of seeing things as they are instead of as they ought to be. Three addresses always inspire confidence, even in tradesmen. If one doesn't talk about a thing it has never happened. It is simply expression that gives reality to things. No man is able who is unable to get on, just as no woman is clever who can't succeed in obtaining that worst and most necessary of evils, a husband. The one charm of the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen. They always want a sixth act, and as soon as the interest of the play is entirely over they propose to continue it. If they were allowed their way every comedy would have a tragic ending and every tragedy would culminate in a farce. They are charmingly artificial, but they have no sense of art. Each time that one loves is the only time that one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. The real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich. Human life is the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there is nothing else of any value. It is true that as one watches life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure one cannot wear over one's face a mask of glass nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams. There are poisons so subtle that to know their properties one has to sicken of them. There are maladies so strange that one has to pass through them if one seeks to understand their nature. And yet what a great reward one receives! How wonderful the whole world becomes to one! To note the curious, hard logic of passion and the emotional, coloured life of the intellect--to observe where they meet, and where they separate, at what point they are in unison and at what point they are in discord--there is a delight in that! What matter what the cost is? One can never pay too high a price for any sensation. There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else. That is the misery of being poor. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist--that is all. Personality is a very mysterious thing. A man cannot always be estimated by what he does. He may keep the law, and yet be worthless. He may break the law, and yet be fine. He may be bad without ever doing anything bad. He may commit a sin against society, and yet realise through that sin his true perfection. Mediæval art is charming, but mediæval emotions are out of date. One can use them in fiction, of course; but then the only things that one can use in fiction are the only things that one has ceased to use in fact. Man is complete in himself. What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. It's the old, old story. Love--well, not at first sight--but love at the end of the season, which is so much more satisfactory. No nice girl should ever waltz with such particularly younger sons! It looks so fast! Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us now and then some of those luxurious, sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak. That is all that can be said for them. They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account. What is the difference between literature and journalism? Journalism is unreadable and literature is unread. I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy. My husband is a sort of promissory note; I am tired of meeting him. Conscience makes egotists of us all. Never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons. It always means that they have a history. There is a fatality about good resolutions-they are always made too late. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible. Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there. That is the reason why people who live out of town are so absolutely uncivilised. Civilisation is not by any means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt. Country people have no opportunity of being either, so they stagnate. What nonsense people talk about happy marriages! A man can be happy with any woman so long as he does not love her. The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of faith and the lesson of romance. In the common world of fact the wicked are not punished nor the good rewarded. Success is given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. Nothing should be able to harm a man except himself. Nothing should be able to rob a man at all. What a man really has is what is in him. What is outside of him should be a matter of no importance. Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality. Perplexity and mistrust fan affection into passion, and so bring about those beautiful tragedies that alone make life worth living. Women once felt this, while men did not, and so women once ruled the world. Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's, face. It cannot be concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices. There are no such things. If a wretched man has a vice it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the drop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even. There are sins whose fascination is more in the memory than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratify the pride more than the passions and give to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than they bring or can ever bring to the senses. No civilised man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilised man ever knows what a pleasure is. As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested. If you want to mar a nature you have merely to reform it. Socialism itself will be of value simply because it will lead to individualism. Some years ago people went about the country saying that property has duties. It is perfectly true. Property not merely has duties, but has so many duties that its possession to any large extent is a bore. If property had simply pleasures we could stand it, but its duties make it unbearable. It is through joy that the individualism of the future will develop itself. Christ made no attempt to reconstruct society, and consequently the individualism that He preached to man could be realised only through pain or in solitude. Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined oneself over poetry is an honour. The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply on what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. What are the virtues? Nature, Renan tells us, cares little about chastity, and it may be that it is to the shame of the Magdalen, and not to their own purity, that the Lucretias of modern life owe their freedom from stain. Charity, as even those of whose religion it makes a formal part have been compelled to acknowledge, creates a multitude of evils. The mere existence of conscience, that faculty of which people prate so much nowadays, and are so ignorantly proud, is a sign of our imperfect development. It must be merged in instinct before we become fine. Self-denial is simply a method by which man arrests his progress, and self-sacrifice a survival of the mutilation of the savage, part of that old worship of pain which is so terrible a factor in the history of the world, and which even now makes its victims day by day and has its altars in the land. Virtues! Who knows what the virtues are? Not you. Not I. Not anyone. It is well for our vanity that we slay the criminal, for if we suffered him to live he might show us what we had gained by his crime. It is well for his peace that the saint goes to his martyrdom. He is spared the sight of the horror of his harvest. Nowadays all the married men live like bachelors and all the bachelors like married men. The higher education of men is what I should like to see. Men need it so sadly. The world is perfectly packed with good women. To know them is a middle-class education. Hesitation of any kind is a sign of mental decay in the young, of physical weakness in the old. Our husbands never appreciate anything in us. We have to go to others for that. Most women in London nowadays seem to furnish their rooms with nothing but orchids, foreigners and French novels. The canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a ceremony as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such plays delightful to us. Is sincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities. The tragedy of old age is not that one is old but that one is young. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise. Being adored is a nuisance. Women treat us just as humanity treats its gods. They worship us, and are always bothering us to do something for them. If a man treats life artistically his brain is his heart. The 'Peerage' is the one book a young man about town should know thoroughly, and it is the best thing in fiction the English have ever done. The world has always laughed at its own tragedies, that being the only way in which it has been able to bear them. Consequently whatever the world has treated seriously belongs to the comedy side of things. The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future. What is termed sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate or grow old or becomes colourless. By its curiosity it increases the experience of the race. Through its intensified assertion of individualism it saves us from the commonplace. In its rejection of the current notions about morality it is one with the higher ethics. Formerly we used to canonise our heroes. The modern method is to vulgarise them. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable. Individualism does not come to man with any claims upon him at all. It comes naturally and inevitably out of man. It is the point to which all development tends. It is the differentiation to which all organisms grow. It is the perfection that is inherent in every mode of life and toward which every mode of life quickens. Individualism exercises no compulsion over man. On the contrary, it says to man that he should suffer no compulsion to be exercised over him. It does not try to force people to be good. It knows that people are good when they are let alone. Man will develop individualism out of himself. Man is now so developing individualism. To ask whether individualism is practical is like asking whether evolution is practical. Evolution is the law of life, and there is no evolution except towards individualism. The longer I live the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us. In art, as in politics, 'les grand pères ont toujours tort.' No woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say but they say it charmingly. Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave men had known how to laugh history would have been different. I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. To get into the best society nowadays one has either to feed people, amuse people, or shock people--that is all. You should never try to understand women. Women are pictures, men are problems. If you want to know what a woman really means--which, by the way, is always a dangerous thing to do--look at her, don't listen to her. Ordinary women never appeal to one's imagination. They are limited to their century. No glamour ever transfigures them. One knows their minds as easily as one knows their bonnets. One can always find them. There is no mystery in any of them. They ride in the park in the morning and chatter at tea parties in the afternoon. They have their stereotyped smile and their fashionable mauve. Don't run down dyed hair and painted faces. There is an extraordinary charm in them--sometimes. To have been well brought up is a great drawback nowadays. It shuts one out from so much. The people who have adored me--there have not been very many, but there have been some--have always insisted on living on long after I had ceased to care for them or they to care for me. They have become stout and tedious, and when I meet them they go in at once for reminiscences. That awful memory of women! What a fearful thing it is! And what an utter intellectual stagnation it reveals! Examinations are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman whatever he knows is bad for him. Credit is the capital of a younger son, and he can live charmingly on it. The object of art is not simply truth but complex beauty. Art itself is really a form of exaggeration, and selection, which is the very spirit of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of over-emphasis. The popular cry of our time is: 'Let us return to Life and Nature, they will recreate Art for us and send the red blood coursing through her veins; they will shoe her feet with swiftness and make her hand strong.' But, alas! we are mistaken in our amiable and well-meant efforts. Nature is always behind the age. And as for life, she is the solvent that breaks up Art, the enemy that lays waste her house. There are only two kinds of women--the plain and the coloured. The plain women are very useful. If you want to gain a reputation for respectability you have merely to take them down to supper. The other women are very charming. They commit one mistake, however--they paint in order to try and look young. The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we must see it on the tight-rope. When the verities become acrobats we can judge them. Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.... The Greeks with their quick, artistic instinct understood this, and set in the bride's chamber the statue of Hermes or of Apollo, that she might bear children as lovely as the works of art that she looked at in her rapture or her pain. They knew that life gains from art not merely spirituality, depth of thought and feeling, soul-turmoil or soul-peace, but that she can form herself on the very lines and colours of art, and can reproduce the dignity of Pheidias as well as the grace of Praxiteles. Hence came this objection to realism. They disliked it on purely social grounds. They felt that it inevitably makes people ugly, and they were perfectly right. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect--simply a confession of failure. There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up. What a fuss people make about fidelity! Why, even in love it is purely a question for physiology. It has nothing to do with our own will. Young men want to be faithful and are not; old men want to be faithless and cannot--that is all one can say. Modernity of form and modernity of subject-matter are entirely and absolutely wrong. We have mistaken the common livery of the age for the vesture of the muses, and spent our days in the sordid streets and hideous suburbs of our vile cities when we should be out on the hillside with Apollo. Certainly we are a degraded race, and have sold our birthright for a mess of facts. Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul. I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect. Those who live in marble or on painted panel know of life but a single exquisite instant, eternal, indeed, in its beauty but limited to one note of passion or one mood of calm. Those whom the poet makes live have their myriad emotions of joy and terror, of courage and despair, of pleasure and of suffering. The seasons come and go in glad or saddening pageant, and with winged or leaden feet the years pass by before them. They have their youth and their manhood, they are children, and they grow old. It is always dawn for St Helena as Veronese saw her at the window. Through the still morning air the angels bring her the symbol of God's pain. The cool breezes of the morning lift the gilt threads from her brow. On that little hill by the city of Florence, where the lovers of Giorgione are lying, it is always the solstice of noon--of noon made so languorous by summer suns that hardly can the slim, naked girl dip into the marble tank the round bubble of clear glass, and the long fingers of the lute player rest idly upon the chords. It is twilight always for the dancing nymphs whom Corot set free among the silver poplars of France. In eternal twilight they move, those frail, diaphanous figures, whose tremulous, white feet seem not to touch the dew-drenched grass they tread on. But those who walk in epos, drama, or romance see through the labouring months the young moons wax and wane, and watch the night from evening into morning star, and from sunrise into sun-setting can note the shifting day with all its gold and shadow. For them, as for us, the flowers bloom and wither, and the earth, that green-tressed goddess, as Coleridge calls her, alters her raiment for their pleasure. The statue is concentrated to one moment of perfection. The image stained upon the canvas possesses no spiritual element of growth or change. If they know nothing of death it is because they know little of life, for the secrets of life and death belong to those, and to those only, whom the sequence of time affects, and who possess not merely the present but the future, and can rise or fall from a past of glory or of shame. Movement, that problem of the visible arts, can be truly realised by literature alone. It is literature that shows us the body in its swiftness and the soul in its unrest. Behind every exquisite thing that exists there is something tragic. Worlds have to be in travail that the merest flower may blow. Beauty is a form of genius--is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned, it has its divine right of sovereignty. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself. Women spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever. He's sure to be a wonderful success. He thinks like a Tory and talks like a Radical, and that's so important nowadays. Nowadays to be intelligible is to be found out. We make gods of men and they leave us. Others make brutes of them and they fawn and are faithful. The husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes. To me beauty is the Wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. The thoroughly well-informed man is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value. Women have no appreciation of good looks in men--at least good women have none. To influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love; it is the faithless who know love's tragedies. An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool. They are all men of some intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me. The value of an idea has nothing whatever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world. He who would lead a Christ-like life is he who is perfectly and absolutely himself. He may be a great poet, or a great man of science; or a young student at the university, or one who watches sheep upon a moor; or a maker of dramas, like Shakespeare, or a thinker about God, like Spinoza; or a child who plays in a garden, or a fisherman who throws his nets into the sea. It does not matter what he is as long as he realises the perfection of the soul that is within him. The aim of life is self-development. To realise one's nature perfectly--that is what each of us is here for. There is no such thing as a good influence. All influence is immoral--immoral from the scientific point of view. Words have not merely music as sweet as that of viol and lute, colour as rich and vivid as any that makes lovely for us the canvas of the Venetian or the Spaniard, and plastic form no less sure and certain than that which reveals itself in marble or in bronze, but thought and passion and spirituality are theirs also--are theirs, indeed, alone. There is nothing so absolutely pathetic as a really fine paradox. The pun is the clown among jokes, the well-turned paradox is the polished comedian, and the highest comedy verges upon tragedy, just as the keenest edge of tragedy is often tempered by a subtle humour. Our minds are shot with moods as a fabric is shot with colours, and our moods often seem inappropriate. Everything that is true is inappropriate. The longer one studies life and literature the more strongly one feels that behind everything that is wonderful stands the individual, and that it is not the moment that makes the man but the man who creates the age. To know the vintage and quality of a wine one need not drink the whole cask. It is a sad thing to think of, but there is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. To have a capacity for a passion, and not to realise it is to make oneself incomplete and limited. Even in actual life egotism is not without its attractions. When people talk to us about others they are usually dull. When they talk to us about themselves they are nearly always interesting, and if one could shut them up when they become wearisome as easily as one can shut up a book of which one has grown wearied they would be perfect absolutely. Every great man nowadays has his disciples and it is invariably Judas who writes the biography. Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil rather than a mirror. She has flowers that no forest knows of, birds that no woodland possesses. She makes and unmakes many worlds, and can draw the moon from heaven with a scarlet thread. Hers are the 'forms more real than living man,' and hers the great archetypes, of which things that have existence are but unfinished copies. Nature has, in her eyes, no laws, no uniformity. She can work miracles at her will, and when she calls monsters from the deep they come. She can bid the almond-tree blossom in winter and send the snow upon the ripe cornfield. At her word the frost lays its silver finger on the burning mouth of June, and the winged lions creep out from the hollows of the Lydian hills. The dryads peer from the thicket as she passes by, and the brown fauns smile strangely at her when she comes near them. She has hawk-faced gods that worship her, and the centaurs gallop at her side. In literature mere egotism is delightful. If we live for aims we blunt our emotions. If we live for aims we live for one minute, for one day, for one year, instead of for every minute, every day, every year. The moods of one's life are life's beauties. To yield to all one's moods is to really live. Many a young man starts in life with a natural gift for exaggeration which, if nurtured in congenial and sympathetic surroundings, or by the imitations of the best models, might grow into something really great and wonderful. But, as a rule, he comes to nothing. He either falls into careless habits of accuracy or takes to frequenting the society of the aged and the well-informed. Both things are equally fatal to his imagination. The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal. As for believing things, I can believe anything provided that it is quite incredible. 'Know thyself' was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world 'Be thyself' shall be written. And the message of Christ to man was simply: 'Be thyself.' That is the secret of Christ. London is full of women who trust their husbands. One can always recognise them, they look so thoroughly unhappy. For those who are not artists, and to whom there is no mode of life but the actual life of fact, pain is the only door to perfection. The English public always feels perfectly at its ease when a mediocrity is talking to it. Men always fall into the absurdity of endeavouring to develop the mind, to push it violently forward in this direction or in that. The mind should be receptive, a harp waiting to catch the winds, a pool ready to be ruffled, not a bustling busybody for ever trotting about on the pavement looking for a new bun shop. There is nothing more beautiful than to forget, except, perhaps, to be forgotten. All bad art comes from returning to life and nature, and elevating them into ideals. Life and nature may sometimes be used as part of art's rough material, but before they are of any real service to art they must be translated into artistic conventions. The moment art surrenders its imaginative medium it surrenders everything. As a method realism is a complete failure, and the two things that every artist should avoid are modernity of form and modernity of subject-matter. Men may have women's minds just as women may have the minds of men. London is too full of fogs and serious people. Whether the fogs produce the serious people or whether the serious people produce the fogs I don't know. How marriage ruins a man! It's as demoralising as cigarettes, and far more expensive. He must be quite respectable. One has never heard his name before in the whole course of one's life, which speaks volumes for a man nowadays. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us or affects us in any way, either for pain or pleasure, or appeals strongly to our sympathies or is a vital part of the environment in which we live, it is outside the proper sphere of art. I couldn't have a scene in this bonnet: it is far too fragile. A harsh word would ruin it. Music creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one's tears. Nothing is so fatal to personality as deliberation. I adore London dinner parties. The clever people never listen and the stupid people never talk. Learned conversation is either the affection of the ignorant or the profession of the mentally unemployed. The Academy is too large and too vulgar. Whenever I have gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures--which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people--which was worse. All art is quite useless. Beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think one becomes all nose or all forehead or something horrid. The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties. Secrecy seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. Conceit is one of the greatest of the virtues, yet how few people recognise it as a thing to aim at and to strive after. In conceit many a man and woman has found salvation, yet the average person goes on all-fours grovelling after modesty. It is difficult not to be unjust to what one loves. Humanity will always love Rousseau for having confessed his sins not to a friend but to the world. Just as those who do not love Plato more than truth cannot pass beyond the threshold of the Academe, so those who do not love beauty more than truth never know the inmost shrine of art. There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction: the sort of fatality that seems to dog, through history, the faltering steps of kings. It is better not to be different from one's fellows. To be born, or at any rate bred, in a handbag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. There must be a new Hedonism that shall recreate life and save it from that harsh, uncomely Puritanism that is having, in our own day, its curious revival. It must have its service of the intellect, certainly, yet it must never accept any theory or system that will involve the sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience. Its aim, indeed, is to be experience itself and not the fruits of experience, bitter or sweet as they may be. Of the æstheticism that deadens the senses, as of the vulgar profligacy that dulls them, it is to know nothing. But it is to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is itself but a moment. Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as thought has, and develops purely on its own lines. It is not necessarily realistic in an age of realism nor spiritual in an age of faith. So far from being the creation of its time it is usually in direct opposition to it, and the only history that it preserves for us is the history of its own progress. People who mean well always do badly. They are like the ladies who wear clothes that don't fit them in order to show their piety. Good intentions are invariably ungrammatical. Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable. When art is more varied nature will, no doubt, be more varied also. If a man is sufficiently imaginative to produce evidence in support of a lie he might just as well speak the truth at once. The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction. Nature is no great mother who has home us. She is our own creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see them, and what we see and how we see it depends on the arts that have influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. The proper school to learn art in is not life but art. I won't tell you that the world matters nothing, or the world's voice, or the voice of society. They matter a good deal. They matter far too much. I wouldn't marry a man with a future before him for anything under the sun. I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly, but I don't see any chance of it just at present. Modern memoirs are generally written by people who have entirely lost their memories and have never done anything worth recording. Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. Women are like minors, they live upon their expectations. Twisted minds are as natural to some people as twisted bodies. It is the very passions about whose origin we deceive ourselves that tyrannise most strongly over us. Our weakest motives are those of whose nature we are conscious. It often happens that when we think we are experimenting on others we are really experimenting on ourselves. Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing it is always from the noblest motives. I thought I had no heart. I find I have, and a heart doesn't suit me. Somehow it doesn't go with modern dress. It makes one look old, and it spoils one's career at critical moments. I don't play accurately--anyone can play accurately--but I play with wonderful expression. As far as the piano is concerned sentiment is my forte. I keep science for life. I delight in men over seventy. They always offer one the devotion of a lifetime. Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching--that is really what our enthusiasm for education has come to. Nature hates mind. From the point of view of form the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling the actor's craft is the type. Where we differ from each other is purely in accidentals--in dress, manner, tone of voice, religious opinions, personal appearance, tricks of habit, and the like. The more we study art the less we care for Nature. What art really reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition.... It is fortunate for us, however, that nature is so imperfect, as otherwise we should have had no art at all. Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place. As for the infinite variety of nature, that is a pure myth. It is not to be found in Nature herself. It resides in the imagination or fancy or cultivated blindness of the man who looks at her. Facts are not merely finding a footing-place in history but they are usurping the domain of fancy and have invaded the kingdom of romance. Their chilling touch is over everything. They are vulgarising mankind. Ordinary people wait till life discloses to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life are revealed before the veil is drawn away. Sometimes this is the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature which deals immediately with the passions and the intellect. But now and then a complex personality takes the place and assumes the office of art, is, indeed, in its way a real work of art, Life having its elaborate masterpieces just as poetry has, or sculpture, or painting. Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite and it leaves one unsatisfied. The aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilised society. It is quite a mistake to believe, as many people do, that the mind shows itself in the face. Vice may sometimes write itself in lines and changes of contour, but that is all. Our faces are really masks given to us to conceal our minds with. What on earth should we men do going about with purity and innocence? A carefully thought-out buttonhole is much more effective. The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer. People say sometimes that beauty is only superficial. That may be so, but at least it is not so superficial as thought is. It is the spectator and not life that art really mirrors. Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Conscience and cowardice are really the same things. Conscience is the trade name of the firm--that is all. In every sphere of life form is the beginning of things. The rhythmic, harmonious gestures of dancing convey, Plato tells us, both rhythm and harmony into the mind. Forms are the food of faith, cried Newman, in one of those great moments of sincerity that make us admire and know the man. He was right, though he may not have known how terribly right he was. The creeds are believed not because they are rational but because they are repeated. Yes; form is everything. It is the secret of life. Find expression for a sorrow and it will become dear to you. Find expression for a joy and you intensify its ecstasy. Do you wish to love? Use love's litany and the words will create the yearning from which the world fancies that they spring. Have you a grief that corrodes your heart? Learn its utterance from Prince Hamlet and Queen Constance and you will find that mere expression is a mode of consolation and that form, which is the birth of passion, is also the death of pain. And so, to return to the sphere of art, it is form that creates not merely the critical temperament but also the æsthetic instinct that reveals to one all things under the condition of beauty. Start with the worship of form and there is no secret in art that will not be revealed to you. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue. Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common-sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes. Lady Henry Wotton was a curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest. She was usually in love with somebody, and, as her passion was never returned, she had kept all her illusions. She tried to look picturesque but only succeeded in being untidy. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. With an evening coat and a white tie anybody, even a stockbroker, can gain a reputation for being civilised. There is nothing so interesting as telling a good man or woman how bad one has been. It is intellectually fascinating. One of the greatest pleasures of having been wicked is that one has so much to say to the good. Laws are made in order that people in authority may not remember them, just as marriages are made in order that the divorce court may not play about idly. To get back one's youth one has merely to repeat one's follies. Never marry a woman with straw-coloured hair. They are so sentimental. The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbours with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the high-wayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets. I have the greatest contempt for optimism. Art begins with abstract decoration, with purely imaginative and pleasureable work dealing with what is unreal and non-existent. This is the first stage. Then life becomes fascinated with this new wonder, and asks to be admitted into the charmed circle. Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it and refashions it in fresh form; is absolutely indifferent to facts; invents, imagines, dreams, and keeps between herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, of decorative or ideal treatment. The third stage is when Life gets the upper hand and drives Art out into the wilderness. This is the true decadence, and it is from this that we are now suffering. Good intentions have been the ruin of the world. The only people who have achieved anything have been those who have had no intentions at all. I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do. You know I am not a champion of marriage. The real drawback to marriage is that it makes one unselfish, and unselfish people are colourless--they lack individuality. Still there are certain temperaments that marriage makes more complex. They retain their egotism, and add to it many other egos. They are forced to have more than one life. They become more highly organised, and to be highly organised is, I should fancy, the object of man's existence. Besides, every experience is of value, and whatever one may say against marriage it is certainly an experience. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. I never talk during music--at least not during good music. If anyone hears bad music it is one's duty to drown it in conversation. When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself. Faith is the most plural thing I know. We are all supposed to believe in the same thing in different ways. It is like eating out of the same dish with different coloured spoons. Experience is of no ethical value. It is merely the name men give to their mistakes. Moralists have, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, have claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, have praised it as something that teaches us what to follow and shows us what to avoid. But there is no motive power in experience. It is as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All that it really demonstrates is that our future will be the same as our past and that the sin we have done once, and with loathing, we shall do many times, and with joy. Sensations are the details that build up the stories of our lives. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. She looks like an 'edition de luxe' of a wicked French novel meant specially for the English market. I never knew what terror was before; I know it now. It is as if a hand of ice were laid upon one's heart. It is as if one's heart were beating itself to death in some empty hollow. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. One knows so well the popular idea of health. The English country gentleman galloping along after a fox--the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable. People seldom tell the truths that are worth telling. We ought to choose our truths as carefully as we choose our lies and to select our virtues with as much thought as we bestow upon the selection of our enemies. Soul and body, body and soul--how mysterious they are! There is animalism in the soul, and the body has its moments of spirituality. The senses can refine and the intellect can degrade. Who can say where the fleshly impulse ceases or the psychical impulse begins? How shallow are the arbitrary definitions of ordinary psychologists! And yet how difficult to decide between the claims of the various schools! Is the soul a shadow seated in the house of sin? Or is the body really in the soul, as Giordano Bruno thought? The separation of spirit from matter is a mystery, and the unison of spirit with matter is a mystery also. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written-that is all. Marriage is a sort of forcing house. It brings strange sins to fruit, and sometimes strange renunciations. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. A sense of duty is like some horrible disease. It destroys the tissues of the mind, as certain complaints destroy the tissues of the body. The catechism has a great deal to answer for. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Few people have sufficient strength to resist the preposterous claims of orthodoxy. She wore far too much rouge last night and not quite enough clothes. That is always a sign of despair in a woman. A virtue is like a city set upon a hill--it cannot be hid. We can conceal our vices if we care to--for a time at least--but a virtue will out. Can't make out how you stand London society. The thing has gone to the dogs: a lot of damned nobodies talking about nothing. You don't know what an existence they lead down there. It is pure, unadulterated country life. They get up early because they have so much to do, and go to bed early because they have so little to think about. Nothing is so fatal to a personality as the keeping of promises, unless it be telling the truth. Who cares whether Mr Ruskin's views on Turner are sound or not? What does it matter? That mighty and majestic prose of his, so fervid and so fiery coloured in its noble eloquence, so rich in its elaborate symphonic music, so sure and certain, at its best, in subtle choice of word and epithet, is, at least, as great a work of art as any of those wonderful sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in England's gallery--greater, indeed, one is apt to think at times, not merely because its equal beauty is more enduring but on account of the fuller variety of its appeal--soul speaking to soul in those long, cadenced lines, not through form and colour alone, though through these, indeed, completely and without loss, but with intellectual and emotional utterance, with lofty passion and with loftier thought, with imaginative insight and with poetic aim--greater, I always think, even as literature is the greater art. Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one. Mrs Cheveley is one of those very modern women of our time who find a new scandal as becoming as a new bonnet, and air them both in the Park every afternoon at 5.30. I am sure she adores scandals, and that the sorrow of her life at present is that she can't manage to have enough of them. The world divides actions into three classes: good actions, bad actions that you may do, and bad actions that you may not do. If you stick to the good actions you are respected by the good. If you stick to the bad actions that you may do you are respected by the bad. But if you perform the bad actions that no one may do then the good and the bad set upon you and you are lost indeed. I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To me the word 'natural' means all that is middle class, all that is of the essence of Jingoism, all that is colourless and without form and void. It might be a beautiful word, but it is the most debased coin in the currency of language. I pity any woman who is married to a man called John. She would probably never be allowed to know the entrancing pleasure of a single moment's solitude. It is only when we have learned to love forgetfulness that we have learned the art of living. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The world taken 'en masse' is a monster, crammed with prejudices, packed with prepossessions, cankered with what it calls virtues, a Puritan, a prig. And the art of life is the art of defiance. To defy--that is what we ought to live for, instead of living, as we do, to acquiesce. Some resemblance the creative work of the critic will have to the work that has stirred him to creation, but it will be such resemblance as exists, not between nature and the mirror that the painter of landscape or figure may be supposed to hold up to her, but between nature and the work of the decorative artist. Just as on the flowerless carpets of Persia tulip and rose blossom indeed, and are lovely to look on, though they are not reproduced in visible shape or line; just as the pearl and purple of the sea shell is echoed in the church of St Mark at Venice; just as the vaulted ceiling of the wondrous chapel at Ravenna is made gorgeous by the gold and green and sapphire of the peacock's tail, though the birds of Juno fly not across it; so the critic reproduces the work that he criticises in a mode that is never imitative, and part of whose charm may really consist in the rejection of resemblance, and shows us in this way not merely the meaning but also the mystery of beauty, and by transforming each art into literature solves once for all the problem of art's unity. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. Nothing is more painful to me than to come across virtue in a person in whom I have never suspected its existence. It is like finding a needle in a bundle of hay. It pricks you. If we have virtue we should warn people of it. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. Hopper is one of nature's gentlemen--the worst type of gentleman I know. If one intends to be good one must take it up as a profession. It is quite the most engrossing one in the world. I like Wagner's music better than anybody's. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says. All art is at once surface and symbol. Childhood is one long career of innocent eavesdropping, of hearing what one ought not to hear. The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. The only things worth saying are those that we forget, just as the only things worth doing are those that the world is surprised at. Maturity is one long career of saying what one ought not to say. That is the art of conversation. Virtue is generally merely a form of deficiency, just as vice is an assertion of intellect. People teach in order to conceal their ignorance, as people smile in order to conceal their tears. To be unnatural is often to be great. To be natural is generally to be stupid. To lie finely is an art, to tell the truth is to act according to nature. People who talk sense are like people who break stones in the road: they cover one with dust and splinters. Jesus said to man: You have a wonderful personality. Develop it. Be yourself. Don't imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your perfection is inside of you. If only you could realise that you would not want to be rich. Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man, real riches cannot. In the treasury-house of your soul there are infinitely precious things that may not be taken from you. Try to so shape your life that external things will not harm you, and try also to get rid of personal property. It involves sordid preoccupation, endless industry, continual wrong. Personal property hinders individualism at every step. When Jesus talks about the poor He simply means personalities, just as when He talks about the rich He simply means people who have not developed their personalities. An echo is often more beautiful than the voice it repeats. * * * * * THE SOUL OF MAN The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody. In fact, scarcely anyone at all escapes. Now and then, in the course of the century, a great man of science, like Darwin; a great poet, like Keats; a fine critical spirit, like M, Renan; a supreme artist, like Flaubert, has been able to isolate himself, to keep himself out of reach of the clamorous claims of others, to stand 'under the shelter of the wall,' as Plato puts it, and so to realise the perfection of what was in him, to his own incomparable gain, and to the incomparable and lasting gain of the whole world. These, however, are exceptions. The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism--are forced, indeed, so to spoil them. They find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this. The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man's intelligence; and, as I pointed out some time ago in an article on the function of criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease. They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor. But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good; and at last we have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem and know the life-educated men who live in the East End--coming forward and imploring the community to restrain its altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like. They do so on the ground that such charity degrades and demoralises. They are perfectly right. Charity creates a multitude of sins. There is also this to be said. It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. It is both immoral and unfair. Under Socialism all this will, of course, be altered. There will be no people living in fetid dens and fetid rags, and bringing up unhealthy, hunger-pinched children in the midst of impossible and absolutely repulsive surroundings. The security of society will not depend, as it does now, on the state of the weather. If a frost comes we shall not have a hundred thousand men out of work, tramping about the streets in a state of disgusting misery, or whining to their neighbours for alms, or crowding round the doors of loathsome shelters to try and secure a hunch of bread and a night's unclean lodging. Each member of the society will share in the general prosperity and happiness of the society, and if a frost comes no one will practically be anything the worse. Upon the other hand, Socialism itself will be of value simply because it will lead to Individualism. Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by converting private property into public wealth, and substituting co-operation for competition, will restore society to its proper condition of a thoroughly healthy organism, and insure the material well-being of each member of the community. It will, in fact, give Life it's proper basis and its proper environment. But for the full development of Life to its highest mode of perfection, something more is needed. What is needed is Individualism. If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first. At present, in consequence of the existence of private property, a great many people are enabled to develop a certain very limited amount of Individualism. They are either under no necessity to work for their living, or are enabled to choose the sphere of activity that is really congenial to them, and gives them pleasure. These are the poets, the philosophers, the men of science, the men of culture--in a word, the real men, the men who have realised themselves, and in whom all Humanity gains a partial realisation. Upon the other hand, there are a great many people who, having no private property of their own, and being always on the brink of sheer starvation, are compelled to do the work of beasts of burden, to do work that is quite uncongenial to them, and to which they are forced by the peremptory, unreasonable, degrading Tyranny of want. These are the poor, and amongst them there is no grace of manner, or charm of speech, or civilisation, or culture, or refinement in pleasures, or joy of life. From their collective force Humanity gains much in material prosperity. But it is only the material result that it gains, and the man who is poor is in himself absolutely of no importance. He is merely the infinitesimal atom of a force that, so far from regarding him, crushes him: indeed, prefers him crushed, as in that case he is far more obedient. Of course, it might be said that the Individualism generated under conditions of private property is not always, or even as a rule, of a fine or wonderful type, and that the poor, if they have not culture and charm, have still many virtues. Both these statements would be quite true. The possession of private property is very often extremely demoralising, and that is, of course, one of the reasons why Socialism wants to get rid of the institution. In fact, property is really a nuisance. Some years ago people went about the country saying that property has duties. They said it so often and so tediously that, at last, the Church has begun to say it. One hears it now from every pulpit. It is perfectly true. Property not merely has duties, but has so many duties that its possession to any large extent is a bore. It involves endless claims upon one, endless attention to business, endless bother. If property had simply pleasures, we could stand it; but its duties make it unbearable. In the interest of the rich we must get rid of it. The virtues of the poor may be readily admitted, and are much to be regretted. We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it. As for being discontented, a man who would not be discontented with such surroundings and such a low mode of life would be a perfect brute. Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. For a town or country labourer to practise thrift would be absolutely immoral. Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal. He should decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on the rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing. As for begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg. No: a poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented, and rebellious, is probably a real personality, and has much in him. He is at any rate a healthy protest. As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them; They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad pottage. They must also be extraordinarily stupid. I can quite understand a man accepting laws that protect private property, and admit of its accumulation, as long as he himself is able under those conditions to realise some form of beautiful and intellectual life. But it is almost incredible to me how a man whose life is marred and made hideous by such laws can possibly acquiesce in their continuance. However, the explanation is not really difficult to find. It is simply this. Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercise such a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering. They have to be told of it by other people, and they often entirely disbelieve them. What is said by great employers of labour against agitators is unquestionably true. Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community, and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them. That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary. Without them, in our incomplete state, there would be no advance towards civilisation. Slavery was put down in America, not in consequence of any action on the part of the slaves, or even any express desire on their part that they should be free. It was put down entirely through the grossly illegal conduct of certain agitators in Boston and elsewhere, who were not slaves themselves, nor owners of slaves, nor had anything to do with the question really. It was, undoubtedly, the Abolitionists who set the torch alight, who began the whole thing. And it is curious to note that from the slaves themselves they received, not merely very little assistance, but hardly any sympathy even; and when at the close of the war the slaves found themselves free, found themselves indeed so absolutely free that they were free to starve, many of them bitterly regretted the new state of things. To the thinker, the most tragic fact in the whole of the French Revolution is not that Marie Antoinette was killed for being a queen, but that the starved peasant of the Vendée voluntarily went out to die for the hideous cause of feudalism. It is clear, then, that no Authoritarian Socialism will do. For while under the present system a very large number of people can lead lives of a certain amount of freedom and expression and happiness, under an industrial-barrack system, or a system of economic tyranny, nobody would be able to have any such freedom at all. It is to be regretted that a portion of our community should be practically in slavery, but to propose to solve the problem by enslaving the entire community is childish. Every man must be left quite free to choose his own work. No form of compulsion must be exercised over him. If there is, his work will not be good for him, will riot be good in itself, and will not be good for others. And by work I simply mean activity of any kind. I hardly think that any Socialist, nowadays, would seriously propose that an inspector should call every morning at each house to see that each citizen rose up and did manual labour for eight hours. Humanity has got beyond that stage, and reserves such a form of life for the people whom, in a very arbitrary manner, it chooses to call criminals. But I confess that many of the socialistic views that I have come across seem to me to be tainted with ideas of authority, if not of actual compulsion. Of course, authority and compulsion are out of the question. All association must be quite voluntary. It is only in voluntary associations that man is fine. But it may be asked how Individualism, which is now more or less dependent on the existence of private property for its development, will benefit by the abolition of such private property. The answer is very simple. It is true that, under existing conditions, a few men who have had private means of their own, such as Byron, Shelley, Browning, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, and others, have been able to realise their personality more or less completely. Not one of these men ever did a single day's work for hire. They were relieved from poverty. They had an immense advantage. The question is whether it would be for the good of Individualism that such an advantage should be taken away. Let us suppose that it is taken away. What happens then to Individualism? How will it benefit? It will benefit in this way, under the new conditions Individualism will be far freer, far finer, and far more intensified than it is now. I am not talking of the great imaginatively-realised Individualism of such poets as I have mentioned, but of the great actual Individualism latent and potential in mankind generally. For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be. The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is. Private property has crushed true Individualism, and set up an Individualism that is false. It has debarred one part of the community from being individual by starving them. It has debarred the other part of the community from being individual by putting them on the wrong road, and encumbering them. Indeed, so completely has man's personality been absorbed by his possessions that the English law has always treated offences against a man's property with far more severity than offences against his person, and property is still the test of complete citizenship. The industry necessary for the making of money is also very demoralising. In a community like ours, where property confers immense distinction, social position, honour, respect, titles, and other pleasant things of the kind, man, being naturally ambitious, makes it his aim to accumulate this property, and goes on wearily and tediously accumulating it long after he has got far more than he wants, or can use, or enjoy, or perhaps even know of. Man will kill himself by overwork in order to secure property, and really, considering the enormous advantages that property brings, one is hardly surprised. One's regret is that society should be constructed on such a basis that man has been forced into a groove in which he cannot freely develop what is wonderful, and fascinating, and delightful in him--in which, in fact, he misses the true pleasure and joy of living. He is also, under existing conditions, very insecure. An enormously wealthy merchant may be--often is--at every moment of his life at the mercy of things that are not under his control. If the wind blows an extra point or so, or the weather suddenly changes, or some trivial thing happens, his ship may go down, his speculations may go wrong, and he finds himself a poor man, with his social position quite gone. Now, nothing should be able to harm a man except himself. Nothing should be able to rob a man at all. What a man really has, is what is in him. What is outside of him should be a matter of no importance. With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. It is a question whether we have ever seen the full expression of a personality, except on the imaginative plane of art. In action, we never have. Cæsar, says Mommsen, was the complete and perfect man. But how tragically insecure was Cæsar! Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority. Cæsar was very perfect, but his perfection travelled by too dangerous a road. Marcus Aurelius was the perfect man, says Renan. Yes; the great emperor was a perfect man. But how intolerable were the endless claims upon him! He staggered under the burden of the empire. He was conscious how inadequate one man was to bear the weight of that Titan and too vast orb. What I mean by a perfect man is one who develops under perfect conditions; one who is not wounded, or worried or maimed, or in danger. Most personalities have been obliged to be rebels. Half their strength has been wasted in friction. Byron's personality, for instance, was terribly wasted in its battle with the stupidity, and hypocrisy, and Philistinism of the English. Such battles do not always intensify strength: they often exaggerate weakness. Byron was never able to give us what he might have given us. Shelley escaped better. Like Byron, he got out of England as soon as possible. But he was not so well known. If the English had had any idea of what a great poet he really was, they would have fallen on him with tooth and nail, and made his life as unbearable to him as they possibly could. But he was not a remarkable figure in society, and consequently he escaped, to a certain degree. Still, even in Shelley the note of rebellion is sometimes too strong. The note of the perfect personality is not rebellion, but peace. It will be a marvellous thing--the true personality of man--when we see it. It will grow naturally and simply, flowerlike, or as a tree grows. It will not be at discord. It will never argue or dispute. It will not prove things. It will know everything. And yet it will not busy itself about knowledge. It will have wisdom. Its value will not be measured by material things. It will have nothing. And yet it will have everything, and whatever one takes from it, it will still have, so rich will it he. It will not be always meddling with others, or asking them to be like itself. It will love them because they will be different. And yet while it will not meddle with others, it will help all, as a beautiful thing helps us, by being what it is. The personality of man will be very wonderful. It will be as wonderful as the personality of a child. In its development it will be assisted by Christianity, if men desire that; but if men do not desire that, it will develop none the less surely. For it will not worry itself about the past, nor care whether things happened or did not happen. Nor will it admit any laws but its own laws; nor any authority but its own authority. Yet it will love those who sought to intensity it, and speak often of them. And of these Christ was one. 'Know thyself' was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, 'Be thyself' shall be written. And the message of Christ to man was simply 'Be thyself.' That is the secret of Christ. When Jesus talks about the poor he simply means personalities, just as when he talks about the rich he simply means people who have not developed their personalities. Jesus moved in a community that allowed the accumulation of private property just as ours does, and the gospel that he preached was not that in such a community it is an advantage for a man to live on scanty, unwholesome food, to wear ragged, unwholesome clothes, to sleep in horrid, unwholesome dwellings, and a disadvantage for a man to live under healthy, pleasant, and decent conditions. Such a view would have been wrong there and then, and would, of course, be still more wrong now and in England; for as man moves northward the material necessities of life become of more vital importance, and our society is infinitely more complex, and displays far greater extremes of luxury and pauperism than any society of the antique world. What Jesus meant, was this. He said to man, 'You have a wonderful personality. Develop it. Be yourself. Don't imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your perfection is inside of you. If only you could realise that, you would not want to be rich. Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man. Real riches cannot. In the treasury-house of your soul, there are infinitely precious things, that may not be taken from you. And so, try to so shape your life that external things will not harm you. And try also to get rid of personal property. It involves sordid preoccupation, endless industry, continual wrong. Personal property hinders Individualism at every step. It is to be noted that Jesus never says that impoverished people are necessarily good, or wealthy people necessarily bad. That would not have been true. Wealthy people are, as a class, better than impoverished people, more moral, more intellectual, more well-behaved. There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else. That is the misery of being poor. What Jesus does say is that man reaches his perfection, not through what he has, not even through what he does, but entirely through what he is. And so the wealthy young man who comes to Jesus is represented as a thoroughly good citizen, who has broken none of the laws of his state, none of the commandments of his religion. He is quite respectable, in the ordinary sense of that extraordinary word. Jesus says to him, 'You should give up private property. It hinders you from realising your perfection. It is a drag upon you. It is a burden. Your personality does not need it. It is within you, and not outside of you, that you will find what you really are, and what you really want.' To his own friends he says the same thing. He tells them to be themselves, and not to be always worrying about other things. What do other things matter? Man is complete in himself. When they go into the world, the world will disagree with them. That is inevitable. The world hates Individualism. But that is not to trouble them. They are to be calm and self-centred. If a man takes their cloak, they are to give him their coat, just to show that material things are of no importance. If people abuse them, they are not to answer back. What does it signify? The things people say of a man do not alter a man. He is what he is. Public opinion is of no value whatsoever. Even if people employ actual violence, they are not to be violent in turn. That would be to fall to the same low level. After all, even in prison, a man can be quite free. His soul can be free. His personality can be untroubled. He can be at peace. And, above all things, they are not to interfere with other people or judge them in any way. Personality is a very mysterious thing. A man cannot always be estimated by what he does. He may keep the law, and yet be worthless. He may break the law, and yet be fine. He may be bad, without ever doing anything bad. He may commit a sin against society, and yet realise through that sin his true perfection. There was a woman who was taken in adultery. We are not told the history of her love, but that love must have been very great; for Jesus said that her sins were forgiven her, not because she repented, but because her love was so intense and wonderful. Later on, a short time before his death, as he sat at a feast, the woman came in and poured costly perfumes on his hair. His friends tried to interfere with her, and said that it was an extravagance, and that the money that the perfume cost should have been expended on charitable relief of people in want, or something of that kind. Jesus did not accept that view. He pointed out that the material needs of Man were great and very permanent, but that the spiritual needs of Man were greater still, and that in one divine moment, and by selecting its own mode of expression, a personality might make itself perfect. The world worships the woman, even now, as a saint. Yes; there are suggestive things in Individualism. Socialism annihilates family life, for instance. With the abolition of private property, marriage in its present form must disappear. This is part of the programme. Individualism accepts this and makes it fine. It converts the abolition of legal restraint into a form of freedom that will help the full development of personality, and make the love of man and woman more wonderful, more beautiful, and more ennobling. Jesus knew this. He rejected the claims of family life, although they existed in his day and community in a very marked form. 'Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?' he said, when he was told that they wished to speak to him. When one of his followers asked leave to go and bury his father, 'Let the dead bury the dead,' was his terrible answer. He would allow no claim whatsoever to be made on personality. And so he who would lead a Christ-like like life is he who is perfectly and absolutely himself. He may be a great poet, or a great man of science; or a young student at a University, or one who watches sheep upon a moor; or a maker of dramas, like Shakespeare, or a thinker about God, like Spinoza; or a child who plays in a garden, or a fisherman who throws his net into the sea. It does not matter what he is, as long as he realises the perfection of the soul that is within him. All imitation in morals and in life is wrong. Through the streets of Jerusalem at the present day crawls one who is mad and carries a wooden cross on his shoulders. He is a symbol of the lives that are marred by imitation. Father Damien was Christ-like when he went out to live with the lepers, because in such service he realised fully what was best in him. But he was not more Christ-like than Wagner when he realised his soul in music; or than Shelley, when he realised his soul in song. There is no one type for man. There are as many perfections as there are imperfect men. And while to the claims of charity a man may yield and yet be free, to the claims of conformity no man may yield and remain free at all. Individualism, then, is what through Socialism we are to attain to. As a natural result the State must give up all idea of government. It must give it up because, as a wise man once said many centuries before Christ, there is such a thing as leaving mankind alone; there is no such thing as governing mankind. All modes of government are failures. Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things. Oligarchies are unjust to the many, and ochlocracies are unjust to the few. High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. It has been found out. I must say that it was high time, for all authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised. When it is violently, grossly, and cruelly used, it produces a good effect, by creating, or at any rate bringing out, the spirit of revolt and Individualism that is to kill it. When it is used with a certain amount of kindness, and accompanied by prizes and rewards, it is dreadfully demoralising. People, in that case, are less conscious of the horrible pressure that is being put on them, and so go through their lives in a sort of coarse comfort, like petted animals, without ever realising that they are probably thinking other people's thoughts, living by other people's standards, wearing practically what one may call other people's second-hand clothes, and never being themselves for a single moment. 'He who would be free,' says a fine thinker, 'must not conform.' And authority, by bribing people to conform, produces a very gross kind of over-fed barbarism amongst us. With authority, punishment will pass away. This will be a great gain--a gain, in fact, of incalculable value. As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment, than it is by the occurrence of crime. It obviously follows that the more punishment is inflicted the more crime is produced, and most modern legislation has clearly recognised this, and has made it its task to diminish punishment as far as it thinks it can. Wherever it has really diminished it, the results have always been extremely good. The less punishment, the less crime. When there is no punishment at all, crime will either cease to exist, or, if it occurs, will be treated by physicians as a very distressing form of dementia, to be cured by care and kindness. For what are called criminals nowadays are not criminals at all. Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime. That indeed is the reason why our criminals are, as a class, so absolutely uninteresting from any psychological point of view. They are not marvellous Macbeths and terrible Vautrins. They are merely what ordinary, respectable, commonplace people would be if they had not got enough to eat. When private property is abolished there will be no necessity for crime, no demand for it; it will cease to exist. Of course, all crimes are not crimes against property, though such are the crimes that the English law, valuing what a man has more than what a man is, punishes with the harshest and most horrible severity, if we except the crime of murder, and regard death as worse than penal servitude, a point on which our criminals, I believe, disagree. But though a crime may not be against property, it may spring from the misery and rage and depression produced by our wrong system of property-holding, and so, when that system is abolished, will disappear. When each member of the community has sufficient for his wants, and is not interfered with by his neighbour, it will not be an object of any interest to him to interfere with anyone else. Jealousy, which is an extraordinary source of crime in modern life, is an emotion closely bound up with our conceptions of property, and under Socialism and Individualism will die out. It is remarkable that in communistic tribes jealousy is entirely unknown. Now as the State is not to govern, it may be asked what the State is to do. The State is to be a voluntary association that will organise labour, and be the manufacturer and distributor of necessary commodities. The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful. And as I have mentioned the word labour. I cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine. And I have no doubt that it will be so. Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve. This, however, is, of course, the result of our property system and our system of competition. One man owns a machine which does the work of five hundred men. Five hundred men are, in consequence, thrown out of employment, and, having no work to do, become hungry and take to thieving. The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more than he really wants. Were that machine the property of all, everyone would benefit by it. It would be an immense advantage to the community. All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure--which, and not labour, is the aim of man--or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will he doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends. And when scientific men are no longer called upon to go down to a depressing East End and distribute bad cocoa and worse blankets to starving people, they will have delightful leisure in which to devise wonderful and marvellous things for their own joy and the joy of everyone else. There will be great storages of force for every city, and for every house if required, and this force man will convert into heat, light, or motion, according to his needs. Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias. Now, I have said that the community by means of organisation of machinery will supply the useful things, and that the beautiful things will be made by the individual. This is not merely necessary, but it is the only possible way by which we can get either the one or the other. An individual who has to make things for the use of others, and with reference to their wants and their wishes, does not work with interest, and consequently cannot put into his work what is best in him. Upon the other hand, whenever a community or a powerful section of a community, or a government of any kind, attempts to dictate to the artist what he is to do, Art either entirely vanishes, or becomes stereotyped, or degenerates into a low and ignoble form of craft. A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want. Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman. He has no further claim to be considered as an artist. Art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known. I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of Individualism that the world has known. Crime, which, under certain conditions, may seem to have created Individualism, must take cognisance of other people and interfere with them. It belongs to the sphere of action. But alone, without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all. And it is to be noted that it is the fact that Art is this intense form of Individualism that makes the public try to exercise over it an authority that is as immoral as it is ridiculous, and as corrupting as it is contemptible. It is not quite their fault. The public has always, and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity. Now Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic. There is a very wide difference. If a man of science were told that the results of his experiments, and the conclusions that he arrived at, should be of such a character that they would not upset the received popular notions on the subject, or disturb popular prejudice, or hurt the sensibilities of people who knew nothing about science; if a philosopher were told that he had a perfect right to speculate in the highest spheres of thought, provided that he arrived at the same conclusions as were held by those who had never thought in any sphere at all--well, nowadays the man of science and the philosopher would be considerably amused. Yet it is really a very few years since both philosophy and science were subjected to brutal popular control, to authority in fact--the authority of either the general ignorance of the community, or the terror and greed for power of an ecclesiastical or governmental class. Of course, we have to a very great extent got rid of any attempt on the part of the community, or the Church, or the Government, to interfere with the individualism of speculative thought, but the attempt to interfere with the individualism of imaginative art still lingers. In fact, it does more than linger; it is aggressive, offensive, and brutalising. In England, the arts that have escaped best are the arts in which the public take no interest. Poetry is an instance of what I mean. We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it. The public like to insult poets because they are individual, but once they have insulted them, they leave them alone. In the case of the novel and the drama, arts in which the public do take an interest, the result of the exercise of popular authority has been absolutely ridiculous. No country produces such badly-written fiction, such tedious, common work in the novel form, such silly, vulgar plays as England. It must necessarily be so. The popular standard is of such a character that no artist can get to it. It is at once too easy and too difficult to be a popular novelist. It is too easy, because the requirements of the public as far as plot, style, psychology, treatment of life, and treatment of literature are concerned are within the reach of the very meanest capacity and the most uncultivated mind. It is too difficult, because to meet such requirements the artist would have to do violence to his temperament, would have to write not for the artistic joy of writing, but for the amusement of half-educated people, and so would have to suppress his individualism, forget his culture, annihilate his style, and surrender everything that is valuable in him. In the case of the drama, things are a little better: the theatre-going public like the obvious, it is true, but they do not like the tedious; and burlesque and farcical comedy, the two most popular forms, are distinct forms of art. Delightful work may be produced under burlesque and farcical conditions, and in work of this kind the artist in England is allowed very great freedom. It is when one comes to the higher forms of the drama that the result of popular control is seen. The one thing that the public dislike is novelty. Any attempt to extend the subject-matter of art is extremely distasteful to the public; and yet the vitality and progress of art depend in a large measure on the continual extension of subject-matter. The public dislike novelty because they are afraid of it. It represents to them a mode of Individualism, an assertion on the part of the artist that he selects his own subject, and treats it as he chooses. The public are quite right in their attitude. Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine. In Art, the public accept what has been, because they cannot alter it, not because they appreciate it. They swallow their classics whole, and never taste them. They endure them as the inevitable, and as they cannot mar them, they mouth about them. Strangely enough, or not strangely, according to one's own views, this acceptance of the classics does a great deal of harm. The uncritical admiration of the Bible and Shakespeare in England is an instance of what I mean. With regard to the Bible, considerations of ecclesiastical authority enter into the matter, so that I need not dwell upon the point. But in the case of Shakespeare it is quite obvious that the public really see neither the beauties nor the defects of his plays. If they saw the beauties, they would not object to the development of the drama; and if they saw the defects, they would not object to the development of the drama either. The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms. They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist. A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry and bewildered, that they always use two stupid expressions--one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true. The former expression has reference to style; the latter to subject-matter. But they probably use the words very vaguely, as an ordinary mob will use ready-made paving-stones. There is not a single real poet or prose-writer of this century, for instance, on whom the British public have not solemnly conferred diplomas of immorality, and these diplomas practically take the place, with us, of what in France, is the formal recognition of an Academy of Letters, and fortunately make the establishment of such an institution quite unnecessary in England. Of course, the public are very reckless in their use of the word. That they should have called Wordsworth an immoral poet, was only to be expected. Wordsworth was a poet. But that they should have called Charles Kingsley an immoral novelist is extraordinary. Kingsley's prose was not of a very fine quality. Still, there is the word, and they use it as best they can. An artist is, of course, not disturbed by it. The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself. But I can fancy that if an artist produced a work of art in England that immediately on its appearance was recognised by the public, through their medium, which is the public press, as a work that was quite intelligible and highly moral, he would begin to seriously question whether in its creation he had really been himself at all, and consequently whether the work was not quite unworthy of him, and either of a thoroughly second-rate order, or of no artistic value whatsoever. Perhaps, however, I have wronged the public in limiting them to such words as 'immoral,' 'unintelligible,' 'exotic,' and 'unhealthy.' There is one other word that they use. That word is 'morbid.' They do not use it often. The meaning of the word is so simple that they are afraid of using it. Still, they use it sometimes, and, now and then, one comes across it in popular newspapers. It is, of course, a ridiculous word to apply to a work of art. For what is morbidity but a mood of emotion or a mode of thought that one cannot express? The public are all morbid, because the public can never find expression for anything. The artist is never morbid. He expresses everything. He stands outside his subject, and through its medium produces incomparable and artistic effects. To call an artist morbid because he deals with morbidity as his subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad because he wrote 'King Lear.' On the whole, an artist in England gains something by being attacked. His individuality is intensified. He becomes more completely himself. Of course, the attacks are very gross, very impertinent, and very contemptible. But then no artist expects grace from the vulgar mind, or style from the suburban intellect. Vulgarity and stupidity are two very vivid facts in modern life. One regrets them, naturally. But there they are. They are subjects for study, like everything else. And it is only fair to state, with regard to modern journalists, that they always apologise to one in private for what they have written against one in public. Within the last few years two other adjectives, it may be mentioned, have been added to the very limited vocabulary of art-abuse that is at the disposal of the public. One is the word 'unhealthy,' the other is the word 'exotic.' The latter merely expresses the rage of the momentary mushroom against the immortal, entrancing, and exquisitely lovely orchid. It is a tribute, but a tribute of no importance. The word 'unhealthy,' however, admits of analysis. It is a rather interesting word. In fact, it is so interesting that the people who use it do not know what it means. What does it mean? What is a healthy, or an unhealthy work of art? All terms that one applies to a work of art, provided that one applies them rationally, have reference to either its style or its subject, or to both together. From the point of view of style, a healthy work of art is one whose style recognises the beauty of the material it employs, be that material one of words or of bronze, of colour or of ivory, and uses that beauty as a factor in producing the æsthetic effect. From the point of view of subject, a healthy work of art is one the choice of whose subject is conditioned by the temperament of the artist, and comes directly out of it. In fine, a healthy work of art is one that has both perfection and personality. Of course, form and substance cannot be separated in a work of art; they are always one. But for purposes of analysis, and setting the wholeness of æsthetic impression aside for a moment, we can intellectually so separate them. An unhealthy work of art, on the other hand, is a work whose style is obvious, old-fashioned, and common, and whose subject is deliberately chosen, not because the artist has any pleasure in it, but because he thinks that the public will pay him for it. In fact, the popular novel that the public calls healthy is always a thoroughly unhealthy production; and what the public call an unhealthy novel is always a beautiful and healthy work of art. I need hardly say that I am not, for a single moment, complaining that the public and the public press misuse these words. I do not see how, with their lack of comprehension of what Art is, they could possibly use them in the proper sense. I am merely pointing out the misuse; and as for the origin of the misuse and the meaning that lies behind it all, the explanation is very simple. It comes from the barbarous conception of authority. It comes from the natural inability of a community corrupted by authority to understand or appreciate Individualism. In a word, it comes from that monstrous and ignorant thing that is called Public Opinion, which, bad and well-meaning as it is when it tries to control action, is infamous and of evil meaning when it tries to control Thought or Art. Indeed, there is much more to be said in favour of the physical force of the public than there is in favour of the public's opinion. The former may be fine. The latter must be foolish. It is often said that force is no argument. That, however, entirely depends on what one wants to prove. Many of the most important problems of the last few centuries, such as the continuance of personal government in England, or of feudalism in France, have been solved entirely by means of physical force. The very violence of a revolution may make the public grand and splendid for a moment. It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone, and can be made as offensive as the brickbat. They at once sought for the journalist, found him, developed him, and made him their industrious and well-paid servant. It is greatly to be regretted, for both their sakes. Behind the barricade there may be much that is noble and heroic. But what is there behind the leading-article but prejudice, stupidity, cant, and twaddle? And when these four are joined together they make a terrible force, and constitute the new authority. In old days men had the rack. Now they have the press. That is an improvement certainly. But still it is very bad, and wrong, and demoralising. Somebody--was it Burke?--called journalism the fourth estate. That was true at the time, no doubt. But at the present moment it really is the only estate. It has eaten up the other three. The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by Journalism. In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs for ever and ever. Fortunately in America Journalism has carried its authority to the grossest and most brutal extreme. As a natural consequence it has begun to create a spirit of revolt. People are amused by it, or disgusted by it, according to their temperaments. But it is no longer the real force it was. It is not seriously treated. In England, Journalism, not, except in a few well-known instances, having been carried to such excesses of brutality, is still a great factor, a really remarkable power. The tyranny that it proposes to exercise over people's private lives seems to me to be quite extraordinary. The fact is, that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands. In centuries before ours the public nailed the ears of journalists to the pump. That was quite hideous. In this century journalists have nailed their own ears to the keyhole. That is much worse. And what aggravates the mischief is that the journalists who are most to blame are not the amusing journalists who write for what are called Society papers. The harm is done by the serious, thoughtful, earnest journalists, who solemnly, as they are doing at present, will drag before the eyes of the public some incident in the private life of a great statesman, of a man who is a leader of political thought as he is a creator of political force, and invite the public to discuss the incident, to exercise authority in the matter, to give their views, and not merely to give their views, but to carry them into action, to dictate to the man upon all other points, to dictate to his party, to dictate to his country; in fact, to make themselves ridiculous, offensive, and harmful. The private lives of men and women should not be told to the public. The public have nothing to do with them at all. In Prance they manage these things better. There they do not allow the details of the trials that take place in the divorce courts to be published for the amusement or criticism of the public. All that the public are allowed to know is that the divorce has taken place and was granted on petition of one or other or both of the married parties concerned. In France, in fact, they limit the journalist, and allow the artist almost perfect freedom. Here we allow absolute freedom to the journalist, and entirely limit the artist. English public opinion, that is to say, tries to constrain and impede and warp the man who makes things that are beautiful in effect, and compels the journalist to retail things that are ugly, or disgusting, or revolting in fact, so that we have the most serious journalists in the world, and the most indecent newspapers. It is no exaggeration to talk of compulsion. There are possibly some journalists who take a real pleasure in publishing horrible things, or who, being poor, look to scandals as forming a sort of permanent basis for an income. But there are other journalists, I feel certain, men of education and cultivation, who really dislike publishing these things, who know that it is wrong to do so, and only do it because the unhealthy conditions under which their occupation is carried on oblige them to supply the public with what the public wants, and to compete with other journalists in making that supply as full and satisfying to the gross popular appetite as possible. It is a very degrading position for any body of educated men to be placed in, and I have no doubt that most of them feel it acutely. However, let us leave what is really a very sordid side of the subject, and return to the question of popular control in the matter of Art, by which I mean Public Opinion dictating to the artist the form which he is to use, the mode in which he is to use it, and the materials with which he is to work. I have pointed out that the arts which have escaped best in England are the arts in which the public have not been interested. They are, however, interested in the drama, and as a certain advance has been made in the drama within the last ten or fifteen years, it is important to point out that this advance is entirely due to a few individual artists refusing to accept the popular want of taste as their standard, and refusing to regard Art as a mere matter of demand and supply. With his marvellous and vivid personality, with a style that has really a true colour-element in it, with his extraordinary power, not over mere mimicry but over imaginative and intellectual creation, Mr Irving, had his sole object been to give the public what they wanted, could have produced the commonest plays in the commonest manner, and made as much success and money as a man could possibly desire. But his object was not that. His object was to realise his own perfection as an artist, under certain conditions, and in certain forms of Art. At first he appealed to the few; now he has educated the many. He has created in the public both taste and temperament. The public appreciate his artistic success immensely. I often wonder, however, whether the public understand that that success is entirely due to the fact that he did not accept their standard, but realised his own. With their standard the Lyceum would have been a sort of second-rate booth, as some of the popular theatres in London are at present. Whether they understand it or not the fact however remains, that taste and temperament have, to a certain extent, been created in the public, and that the public is capable of developing these qualities. The problem then is, why do not the public become more civilised? They have the capacity. What stops them? The thing that stops them, it must be said again, is their desire to exercise authority over the artist and over works of art. To certain theatres, such as the Lyceum and the Haymarket, the public seem to come in a proper mood. In both of these theatres there have been individual artists, who have succeeded in creating in their audiences--and every theatre in London has its own audience--the temperament to which Art appeals. And what is that temperament? It is the temperament of receptivity. That is all. If a man approaches a work of art with any desire to exercise authority over it and the artist, he approaches it in such a spirit that he cannot receive any artistic impression from it at all. The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art. The spectator is to be receptive. He is to be the violin on which the master is to play. And the more completely he can suppress his own silly views, his own foolish prejudices, his own absurd ideas of what Art should be, or should not be, the more likely he is to understand and appreciate the work of art in question. This is, of course, quite obvious in the case of the vulgar theatre-going public of English men and women. But it is equally true of what are called educated people. For an educated person's ideas of Art are drawn naturally from what Art has been, whereas the new work of art is beautiful by being what Art has never been; and to measure it by the standard of the past is to measure it by a standard on the rejection of which its real perfection depends. A temperament capable of receiving, through an imaginative medium, and under imaginative conditions, new and beautiful impressions, is the only temperament that can appreciate a work of art. And true as this is in the case of the appreciation of sculpture and painting, it is still more true of the appreciation of such arts as the drama. For a picture and a statue are not at war with Time. They take no count of its succession. In one moment their unity may be apprehended. In the case of literature it is different. Time must be traversed before the unity of effect is realised. And so, in the drama, there may occur in the first act of the play something whose real artistic value may not be evident to the spectator till the third or fourth act is reached. Is the silly fellow to get angry and call out, and disturb the play, and annoy the artists? No, the honest man is to sit quietly, and know the delightful emotions of wonder, curiosity, and suspense. He is not to go to the play to lose a vulgar temper. He is to go to the play to realise an artistic temperament. He is to go to the play to gain an artistic temperament. He is not the arbiter of the work of art. He is one who is admitted to contemplate the work of art, and, if the work be fine, to forget in its contemplation all, the egotism that mars him--the egotism of his ignorance, or the egotism of his information. This point about the drama is hardly, I think, sufficiently recognised. I can quite understand that were 'Macbeth' produced for the first time before a modern London audience, many of the people present would strongly and vigorously object to the introduction of the witches in the first act, with their grotesque phrases and their ridiculous words. But when the play is over one realises that the laughter of the witches in 'Macbeth' is as terrible as the laughter of madness in 'Lear,' more terrible than the daughter of Iago in the tragedy of the Moor. No spectator of art needs a more perfect mood of receptivity than the spectator of a play. The moment he seeks to exercise authority he becomes the avowed enemy of Art and of himself. Art does not mind. It is he who suffers. With the novel it is the same thing. Popular authority and the recognition of popular authority are fatal. Thackeray's 'Esmond' is a beautiful work of art because he wrote it to please himself. In his other novels, in 'Pendennis,' in 'Philip,' in 'Vanity Fair' even, at times, he is too conscious of the public, and spoils his work by appealing directly to the sympathies of the public, or by directly mocking at them. A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent. He has no poppied or honeyed cakes through which to give the monster sleep or sustenance. He leaves that to the popular novelist. One incomparable novelist we have now in England, Mr George Meredith. There are better artists in France, but France has no one whose view of life is so large, so varied, so imaginatively true. There are tellers of stories in Russia who have a more vivid sense of what pain in fiction may be. But to him belongs philosophy in fiction. His people not merely live, but they live in thought. One can see them from myriad points of view. They are suggestive. There is soul in them and around them. They are interpretative and symbolic. And he who made them, those wonderful quickly-moving figures, made them for his own pleasure, and has never asked the public what they wanted, has never cared to know what they wanted, has never allowed the public to dictate to him or influence him in any way, but has gone on intensifying his own personality, and producing his own individual work. At first none came to him. That did not matter. Then the few came to him. That did not change him. The many have come now. He is still the same. He's an incomparable novelist. With the decorative arts it is not different. The public clung with really pathetic tenacity to what I believe were the direct traditions of the Great Exhibition of international vulgarity, traditions that were so appalling that the houses in which people lived were only fit for blind people to live in. Beautiful things began to be made, beautiful colours came from the dyer's hand, beautiful patterns from the artist's brain, and the use of beautiful things and their value and importance were set forth. The public were really very indignant. They lost their temper. They said silly things. No one minded. No one was a whit the worse. No one accepted the authority of public opinion. And now it is almost impossible to enter any modern house without seeing some recognition of good taste, some recognition of the value of lovely surroundings, some sign of appreciation of beauty. In fact, people's houses are, as a rule, quite charming nowadays. People have been to a very great extent civilised. It is only fair to state, however, that the extraordinary success of the revolution in house-decoration and furniture and the like has not really been due to the majority of the public developing a very fine taste in such matters. It has been chiefly due to the fact that the craftsmen of things so appreciated the pleasure of making what was beautiful, and woke to such a vivid consciousness of the hideousness and vulgarity of what the public had previously wanted, that they simply starved the public out. It would be quite impossible at the present moment to furnish a room as rooms were furnished a few years ago, without going for everything to an auction of second-hand furniture from some third-rate lodging-house. The things are no longer made. However they may object to it, people must nowadays have something charming in their surroundings. Fortunately for them, their assumption of authority in these art-matters came to entire grief. It is evident, then, that all authority in such things is bad. People sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist to live under. To this question there is only one answer. The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all. Authority over him and his art is ridiculous. It has been stated that under despotisms artists have produced lovely work. This is not quite so. Artists have visited despots, not as subjects to be tyrannised over, but as wandering wonder-makers, as fascinating vagrant personalities, to be entertained and charmed and suffered to be at peace, and allowed to create. There is this to be said in favour of the despot, that he, being an individual, may have culture, while the mob, being a monster, has none. One who is an Emperor and King may stoop down to pick up a brush for a painter, but when the democracy stoops down it is merely to throw mud. And yet the democracy have not so far to stoop as the emperor. In fact, when they want to throw mud they have not to stoop at all. But there is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad. There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannises over the body. There is the despot who tyrannises over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannises over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope The third is called the People. The Prince may be cultivated. Many Princes have been. Yet in the Prince there is danger. One thinks of Dante at the bitter feast in Verona, of Tasso in Ferrara's madman's cell. It is better for the artist not to live with Princes. The Pope may be cultivated. Many Popes have been; the bad Popes have been. The bad Popes loved Beauty, almost as passionately, nay, with as much passion as the good Popes hated Thought. To the wickedness of the Papacy humanity owes much. The goodness of the Papacy owes a terrible debt to humanity. Yet, though the Vatican has kept the rhetoric of its thunders, and lost the rod of its lightning, it is better for the artist not to live with Popes. It was a Pope who said of Cellini to a conclave of Cardinals that common laws and common authority were not made for men such as he; but it was a Pope who thrust Cellini into prison, and kept him there till he sickened with rage, and created unreal visions for himself, and saw the gilded sun enter his room, and grew so enamoured of it that he sought to escape, and crept out from tower to tower, and falling through dizzy air at dawn, maimed himself, and was by a vine-dresser covered with vine leaves, and carried in a cart to one who, loving beautiful things, had care of him. There is danger in Popes. And as for the People, what of them and their authority? Perhaps of them and their authority one has spoken enough. Their authority is a thing blind, deaf, hideous, grotesque, tragic, amusing, serious, and obscene. It is impossible for the artist to live with the People. All despots bribe. The people bribe and brutalise. Who told them to exercise authority? They were made to live, to listen, and to love. Someone has done them a great wrong. They have marred themselves by imitation of their inferiors. They have taken the sceptre of the Prince. How should they use it? They have taken the triple tiara of the Pope. How should they carry its burden? They are as a clown whose heart is broken. They are as a priest whose soul is not yet born. Let all who love Beauty pity them. Though they themselves love not Beauty, yet let them pity themselves. Who taught them the trick of tyranny? There are many other things that one might point out. One might point out how the Renaissance was great, because it sought to solve no social problem, and busied itself not about such things, but suffered the individual to develop freely, beautifully, and naturally, and so had great and individual artists, and great and individual men. One might point out how Louis XIV., by creating the modern state, destroyed the individualism of the artist, and made things monstrous in their monotony of repetition, and contemptible in their conformity to rule, and destroyed throughout all France all those fine freedoms of expression that had made tradition new in beauty, and new modes one with antique form. But the past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are. It will, of course, be said that such a scheme as is set forth here is quite unpractical, and goes against human nature. This is perfectly true. It is unpractical, and it goes against human nature. This is why it is worth carrying out, and that is why one proposes it. For what is a practical scheme? A practical scheme is either a scheme that is already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under existing conditions. But it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to; and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish. The conditions will be done away with, and human nature will change. The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development. The error of Louis XIV. was that he thought human nature would always be the same. The result of his error was the French Revolution. It was an admirable result. All the results of the mistakes of governments are quite admirable. It is to be noted also that Individualism does not come to man with any sickly cant about duty, which merely means doing what other people want because they want it; or any hideous cant about self-sacrifice, which is merely a survival of savage mutilation. In fact, it does not come to man with any claims upon him at all. It comes naturally and inevitably out of man. It is the point to which all development tends. It is the differentiation to which all organisms grow. It is the perfection that is inherent in every mode of life, and towards which every mode of life quickens. And so Individualism exercises no compulsion over man. On the contrary, it says to man that he should suffer no compulsion to be exercised over him. It does not try to force people to be good. It knows that people are good when they are let alone. Man will develop Individualism out of himself. Man is now so developing Individualism. To ask whether Individualism is practical is like asking whether Evolution is practical. Evolution is the law of life, and there is no evolution except towards Individualism. Where this tendency is not expressed, it is a case of artificially-arrested growth, or of disease, or of death. Individualism will also be unselfish and unaffected. It has been pointed out that one of the results of the extraordinary tyranny of authority is that words are absolutely distorted from their proper and simple meaning, and are used to express the obverse of their right signification. What is true about Art is true about Life. A man is called affected, nowadays, if he dresses as he likes to dress. But in doing that he is acting in a perfectly natural manner. Affectation, in such matters, consists in dressing according to the views of one's neighbour, whose views, as they are the views of the majority, will probably be extremely stupid. Or a man is called selfish if he lives in the manner that seems to him most suitable for the full realisation of his own personality; if, in fact, the primary aim of his life is self-development. But this is the way in which everyone should live. Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people's lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognises infinite variety of type as a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it. It is not selfish to think for oneself. A man who does not think for himself does not think at all. It is grossly selfish to require of one's neighbour that he should think in the same way, and hold the same opinions. Why should he? If he can think, he will probably think differently. If he cannot think, it is monstrous to require thought of any kind from him. A red rose is not selfish because it wants to be a red rose. It would be horribly selfish if it wanted all the other flowers in the garden to be both red and roses. Under Individualism people will be quite natural and absolutely unselfish, and will know the meanings of the words, and realise them in their free, beautiful lives. Nor will men be egotistic as they are now. For the egotist is he who makes claims upon others, and the Individualist will not desire to do that. It will not give him pleasure. When man has realised Individualism, he will also realise sympathy and exercise it freely and spontaneously. Up to the present man has hardly cultivated sympathy at all. He has merely sympathy with pain, and sympathy with pain is not the highest form of sympathy. All sympathy is fine, but sympathy with suffering is the least fine mode. It is tainted with egotism. It is apt to become morbid. There is in it a certain element of terror for our own safety. We become afraid that we ourselves might be as the leper or as the blind, and that no man would have care of us. It is curiously limiting, too. One should sympathise with the entirety of life, not with life's sores and maladies merely, but with life's joy and beauty and energy and health and freedom. The wider sympathy is, of course, the more difficult. It requires more unselfishness. Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature--it requires, in fact, the nature of a true Individualist--to sympathise with a friend's success. In the modern stress of competition and struggle for place, such sympathy is naturally rare, and is also very much stifled by the immoral ideal of uniformity of type and conformity to rule which is so prevalent everywhere, and is perhaps most obnoxious in England. Sympathy with pain there will, of course, always be. It is one of the first instincts of man. The animals which are individual, the higher animals, that is to say, share it with us. But it must be remembered that while sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of joy in the world, sympathy with pain does not really diminish the amount of pain. It may make man better able to endure evil, but the evil remains. Sympathy with consumption does not cure consumption; that is what Science does. And when Socialism has solved the problem of poverty, and Science solved the problem of disease, the area of the sentimentalists will be lessened, and the sympathy of man will be large, healthy, and spontaneous. Man will have joy in the contemplation of the joyous life of others. For it is through joy that the Individualism of the future will develop itself. Christ made no attempt to reconstruct society, and consequently the Individualism that he preached to man could be realised only through pain or in solitude. The ideals that we owe to Christ are the ideals of the man who abandons society entirely, or of the man who resists society absolutely. But man is naturally social. Even the Thebaid became peopled at last. And though the cenobite realises his personality, it is often an impoverished personality that he so realises. Upon the other hand, the terrible truth that pain is a mode through which man may realise himself exercises a wonderful fascination over the world. Shallow speakers and shallow thinkers in pulpits and on platforms often talk about the world's worship of pleasure, and whine against it. But it is rarely in the world's history that its ideal has been one of joy and beauty. The worship of pain has far more often dominated the world. Mediævalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its whipping with rods--Mediævalism is real Christianity, and the mediæval Christ is the real Christ. When the Renaissance dawned upon the world, and brought with it the new ideals of the beauty of life and the joy of living, men could not understand Christ. Even Art shows us that. The painters of the Renaissance drew Christ as a little boy playing with another boy in a palace or a garden, or lying back in his mother's arms, smiling at her, or at a flower, or at a bright bird; or as a noble, stately figure moving nobly through the world; or as a wonderful figure rising in a sort of ecstasy from death to life. Even when they drew him crucified they drew him as a beautiful God on whom evil men had inflicted suffering. But he did not preoccupy them much. What delighted them was to paint the men and women whom they admired, and to show the loveliness of this lovely earth. They painted many religious pictures--in fact, they painted far too many, and the monotony of type and motive is wearisome, and was bad for art. It was the result of the authority of the public in art-matters, and is to be deplored. But their soul was not in the subject Raphael was a great artist when he painted his portrait of the Pope. When he painted his Madonnas and infant Christs, he is not a great artist at all. Christ had no message for the Renaissance, which was wonderful because it brought an ideal at variance with his, and to find the presentation of the real Christ we must go to mediæval art. There he is one maimed and marred; one who is not comely to look on, because Beauty is a joy; one who is not in fair raiment, because that may be a joy also: he is a beggar who has a marvellous soul; he is a leper whose soul is divine; he needs neither property nor health; he is a God realising his perfection through pain. The evolution of man is slow. The injustice of men is great. It was necessary that pain should be put forward as a mode of self-realisation. Even now, in some places in the world, the message of Christ is necessary. No one who lived in modern Russia could possibly realise his perfection except by pain. A few Russian artists have realised themselves in Art; in a fiction that is mediæval in character, hecauae its dominant note is the realisation of men through suffering. But for those who are not artists, and to whom there is no mode of life but the actual life of fact, pain is the only door to perfection. A Russian who lives happily under the present system of government in Russia must either believe that man has no soul, or that, if he has, it is not worth developing. A Nihilist who rejects all authority, because he knows authority to be evil, and welcomes all pain, because through that he realises his personality, is a real Christian. To him the Christian ideal is a true thing. And yet, Christ did not revolt against authority. He accepted the imperial authority of the Roman Empire and paid tribute. He endured the ecclesiastical authority of the Jewish Church, and would not repel its violence by any violence of his own. He had, as I said before, no scheme for the reconstruction of society. But the modern world has schemes. It proposes to do away with poverty and the suffering that it entails. It desires to get rid of pain, and the suffering that pain entails. It trusts to Socialism and to Science as its methods. What it aims at is an Individualism expressing itself through joy. This Individualism will be larger, fuller, lovelier than any Individualism has ever been. Pain is not the ultimate mode of perfection. It is merely provisional and a protest. It has reference to wrong, unhealthy, unjust surroundings. When the wrong, and the disease, and the injustice are removed, it will have no further place. It will have done its work. It was a great work, but it is almost over. Its sphere lessens every day. Nor will man miss it. For what man has sought for is, indeed, neither pain nor pleasure, but simply Life. Man has sought to live intensely, fully, perfectly. When he can do so without exercising restraint on others, or suffering it ever, and his activities are all pleasurable to him, he will be saner, healthier, more civilised, more himself. Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval. When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment. The new Individualism, for whose service Socialism, whether it wills it or not, is working, will be perfect harmony. It will be what the Greeks sought for, but could not, except in Thought, realise completely, because they had slaves, and fed them; it will be what the Renaissance sought for, but could not realise completely except in Art, because they had slaves, and starved them. It will be complete, and through it each man will attain to his perfection. The new Individualism is the new Hellenism. _Reprinted from the 'Fortnightly Review,' by permission of Messrs Chapman & Hall._ 
30646	----	WOMAN UNDER SOCIALISM [Illustration: AUGUST BEBEL] Woman Under Socialism _By_ AUGUST BEBEL Translated from the Original German of the 33d Edition _By_ DANIEL DE LEON. 1917 NEW YORK LABOR NEWS COMPANY NEW YORK "The end of social development resembles the beginning of human existence. The original equality returns. The mother-web of existence starts and rounds up the cycle of human affairs."--Bachofen. "Since the advent of civilization, the outgrowth of property has been so immense, its forms so diversified, its uses so expanding and its management so intelligent in the interests of its owners, that it has become, on the part of the people, an unmanageable power. The human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation. The time will come, nevertheless, when human intelligence will rise to the mastery over property, and define the relations of the State to the property it protects, as well as the obligations and the limits of the rights of its owners. The interests of society are paramount to individual interests, and the two must be brought into just and harmonious relations. A mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind, if progress is to be the law of the future as it has been of the past. The time which has passed away since civilization began is but a fragment of the past duration of man's existence; and but a fragment of the ages yet to come. The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim; because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction."--Morgan. Copyright 1904, by the New York Labor News Company TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. Bebel's work, "Die Frau und der Socialismus," rendered in this English version with the title "Woman under Socialism," is the best-aimed shot at the existing social system, both strategically and tactically considered. It is wise tactics and strategy to attack an enemy on his weakest side. The Woman Question is the weakest link in the capitalist mail. The workingman, we know, is a defenceless being; but it takes much sharpening of the intellect to appreciate the fact that "he cannot speak for himself." His sex is popularly coupled with the sense of strength. The illusion conceals his feebleness, and deprives him of help, often of sympathy. It is thus even with regard to the child. Proverbially weak and needing support, the child, nevertheless, is not everywhere a victim in the existing social order. Only in remote sense does the child of the ruling class suffer. The invocation of the "Rights of the Child" leaves substantially untouched the children of the rich. It is otherwise with woman. The shot that rips up the wrongs done to her touches a nerve that aches from end to end in the capitalist world. There is no woman, whatever her station, but in one way or other is a sufferer, a victim in modern society. While upon the woman of the working class the cross of capitalist society rests heaviest in all ways, not one of her sisters in all the upper ranks but bears some share of the burden, or, to be plainer, of the smudge,--and what is more to the point, they are aware of it. Accordingly, the invocation of the "Rights of Woman" not only rouses the spirit of the heaviest sufferers under capitalist society, and thereby adds swing to the blows of the male militants in their efforts to overthrow the existing order, it also lames the adversary by raising sympathizers in his own camp, and inciting sedition among his own retinue. Bebel's exhaustive work, here put in English garb, does this double work unerringly. I might stop here. The ethic formula commands self-effacement to a translator. More so than well-brought-up children, who should be "seen and not heard," a translator should, where at all possible, be neither seen nor heard. That, however, is not always possible. In a work of this nature, which, to the extent of this one, projects itself into hypotheses of the future, and even whose premises necessarily branch off into fields that are not essentially basic to Socialism, much that is said is, as the author himself announces in his introduction, purely the personal opinion of the writer. With these a translator, however, much in general and fundamental accord, may not always agree. Not agreeing, he is in duty bound to modify the ethic formula to the extent of marking his exception, lest the general accord, implied in the act of translating, be construed into specific approval of objected-to passages and views. Mindful of a translator's duties as well as rights, I have reduced to a small number, and entered in the shape of running footnotes to the text, the dissent I thought necessary to the passages that to me seemed most objectionable in matters not related to the main question; and, as to matters related to the main question, rather than enter dissent in running footnotes, I have reserved for this place a summary of my own private views on the family of the future. It is an error to imagine that, in its spiral course, society ever returns to where it started from. The spiral never returns upon its own track. Obedient to the law of social evolution, the race often is forced, in the course of its onward march, to drop much that is good, but also much that is bad. The bad, it is hoped, is dropped for all time; but the good, when picked up again, never is picked up as originally dropped. Between the original dropping and return to its vicinity along the tracks of the spiral, fresh elements join. These new accretions so transmute whatever is re-picked up that it is essentially remodeled. The "Communism," for instance, that the race is now heading toward, is, materially, a different article from the "Communism" it once left behind. We move in an upward spiral. No doubt moral concepts are the reflex of material possibilities. But, for one thing, moral concepts are in themselves a powerful force, often hard to distinguish in their effect from material ones; and, for another, these material possibilities unfold material facts, secrets of Nature, that go to enrich the treasury of science, and quicken the moral sense. Of such material facts are the discoveries in embryology and kindred branches. They reveal the grave fact, previously reckoned with in the matter of the breeding of domestic animals, that the act of impregnation is an act of inoculation. This fact, absolutely material, furnishes a post-discovered material basis for a pre-surmised moral concept,--the "oneness of flesh" with father and mother. Thus science solidifies a poetic-moral yearning, once held imprisoned in the benumbing shell of theological dogma, and reflects its morality in the poetic expression of the monogamic family. The moral, as well as the material, accretions of the race's intellect, since it uncoiled out of early Communism, bar, to my mind, all prospect,--I would say danger, moral and hygienic,--of promiscuity, or of anything even remotely approaching that. Modern society is in a state of decomposition. Institutions, long held as of all time and for all time, are crumbling. No wonder those bodies of society that come floating down to us with the prerogatives of "teacher" are seen to-day rushing to opposite extremes. On the matter of "Woman" or "The Family" the divergence among our rulers is most marked. While both extremes cling like shipwrecked mariners to the water-logged theory of private ownership in the means of production, the one extreme, represented by the Roman Catholic church-machine, is seen to recede ever further back within the shell of orthodoxy, and the other extreme, represented by the pseudo-Darwinians, is seen to fly into ever wilder flights of heterodoxy on the matter of "Marriage and Divorce." Agreed, both, in keeping woman nailed to the cross of a now perverse social system, the former seeks to assuage her agony with the benumbing balm of resignation, the latter to relieve her torture with the blister of libertinage. Between these two extremes stand the gathering forces of revolution that are taking shape in the militant Socialist Movement. Opinion among these forces, while it cannot be said to clash, takes on a variety of shades--as needs will happen among men, who, at one on basic principles, on the material substructure of institutional superstructure, cannot but yield to the allurements of speculative thought on matters as yet hidden in the future, and below the horizon. For one, I hold there is as little ground for rejecting monogamy, by reason of the taint that clings to its inception, as there would be ground for rejecting co-operation, by reason of the like taint that accompanied its rise, and also clings to its development. For one, I hold that the smut of capitalist conditions, that to-day clings to monogamy, is as avoidable an "incident" in the evolutionary process as are the iniquities of capitalism that to-day are found the accompaniment of co-operative labor;--and the further the parallel is pursued through the many ramifications of the subject, the closer will it be discovered to hold. For one, I hold that the monogamous family--bruised and wounded in the cruel rough-and-tumble of modern society, where, with few favored exceptions of highest type, male creation is held down, physically, mentally and morally, to the brutalizing level of the brute, forced to grub and grub for bare existence, or, which amounts to the same, to scheme and scheme in order to avoid being forced so to grub and grub--will have its wounds staunched, its bruises healed, and, ennobled by the slowly acquired moral forces of conjugal, paternal and filial affection, bloom under Socialism into a lever of mighty power for the moral and physical elevation of the race. At any rate, however the genius of our descendants may shape matters on this head, one thing is certain: Woman--the race's mothers, wives, sisters, daughters--long sinned against through unnumbered generations--is about to be atoned to. All the moral and intellectual forces of the age are seen obviously converging to that point. It will be the crowning work of Militant Socialism, like a mightier Perseus, to strike the shackles from the chained Andromeda of modern society, Woman, and raise her to the dignity of her sex. DANIEL DE LEON. New York, June 21, 1903. INDEX TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE iii INTRODUCTION 1 WOMAN IN THE PAST-- Chapter I--Before Christianity 9 Chapter II--Under Christianity 47 WOMAN IN THE PRESENT-- Chapter I--Sexual Instinct, Wedlock, Checks and Obstructions to Marriage 79 Chapter II--Further Checks and Obstructions to Marriage, Numerical Proportion of the Sexes, Its Causes and Effects 118 Chapter III--Prostitution a Necessary Social Institution of the Capitalist World 146 Chapter IV--Woman's Position as a Breadwinner, Her Intellectual Faculties, Darwinism and the Condition of Society 167 Chapter V--Woman's Civic and Political Status 216 Chapter VI--The State and Society 235 Chapter VII--The Socialization of Society 272 WOMAN IN THE FUTURE 343 INTERNATIONALITY 350 POPULATION AND OVER-POPULATION 355 CONCLUSION 372 INTRODUCTION. We live in the age of a great social Revolution, that every day makes further progress. A growingly powerful intellectual stir and unrest is noticeable in all the layers of society; and the movement pushes towards deep-reaching changes. All feel that the ground they stand on shakes. A number of questions have risen; they occupy the attention of ever widening circles; and discussion runs high on their solution. One of the most important of these, one that pushes itself ever more to the fore, is the so-called "Woman Question." The question concerns the position that woman should occupy in our social organism; how she may unfold her powers and faculties in all directions, to the end that she become a complete and useful member of human society, enjoying equal rights with all. From our view-point, this question coincides with that other:--what shape and organization human society must assume to the end that, in the place of oppression, exploitation, want and misery in manifold forms, there shall be physical and social health on the part of the individual and of society. To us, accordingly, the Woman Question is only one of the aspects of the general Social Question, which is now filling all heads, which is setting all minds in motion and which, consequently, can find its final solution only in the abolition of the existing social contradictions, and of the evils which flow from them. Nevertheless, it is necessary to treat the so-called Woman Question separately. On the one hand the question, What was the former position of woman, what is it to-day, and what will it be in the future? concerns, in Europe at least, the larger section of society, seeing that here the female sex constitutes the larger part of the population. On the other hand, the prevailing notions, regarding the development that woman has undergone in the course of centuries, correspond so little with the facts, that light upon the subject becomes a necessity for the understanding of the present and of the future. Indeed, a good part of the prejudices with which the ever-growing movement is looked upon in various circles--and not least in the circle of woman herself--rests upon lack of knowledge and lack of understanding. Many are heard claiming there is no Woman Question, because the position that woman formerly occupied, occupies to-day and will in the future continue to occupy, is determined by her "natural calling," which destines her for wife and mother, and limits her to the sphere of the home. Accordingly, whatever lies beyond her four walls, or is not closely and obviously connected with her household duties, concerns her not. On the Woman Question, the same as on the general Social Question, in which the position of the working class in society plays the chief role, opposing parties stand arrayed against each other. One party, that which would leave everything as it is, have their answer ready at hand; they imagine the matter is settled with referring woman to her "natural calling." They forget that, to-day, for reasons later to be developed, millions of women are wholly unable to fill that "natural calling," so much insisted upon in their behalf, of householders, breeders and nurses of children; and that, with other millions, the "calling" has suffered extensive shipwreck--wedlock, to them, having turned into a yoke and into slavery, compelling them to drag along their lives in misery and want. Of course, this fact concerns those "wise men" as little as that other fact, that unnumbered millions of women, engaged in the several pursuits of life, are compelled, often in unnatural ways, and far beyond the measure of their strength, to wear themselves out in order to eke out a meager existence. At this unpleasant fact those "wise men" stuff their ears, and they shut their eyes with as much violence as they do before the misery of the working class, consoling themselves and others with "it has ever been, and will ever remain so." That woman has the right to share the conquests of civilization achieved in our days; to utilize these to the easing and improving of her condition; and to develop her mental and physical faculties, and turn them to advantage as well as man,--they will none of that. Are they told that woman must also be economically, in order to be physically and intellectually free, to the end that she no longer depend upon the "good-will" and the "mercy" of the other sex?--forthwith their patience is at end; their anger is kindled; and there follows a torrent of violent charges against the "craziness of the times," and the "insane emancipational efforts." These are the Philistines of male and female sex, incapable of finding their way out of the narrow circle of their prejudices. It is the breed of the owls, to be found everywhere when day is breaking, and they cry out in affright when a ray of light falls upon their comfortable darkness. Another element among the adversaries of the movement cannot shut its eyes before the glaring facts. This element admits that there was hardly a time when a larger number of women found themselves in so unsatisfactory a condition as to-day, relatively to the degree of general civilization; and they admit that it is therefore necessary to inquire how the condition of woman can be improved, in so far as she remains dependent upon herself. To this portion of our adversaries, the Social Question seems solved for those women who have entered the haven of matrimony. In keeping with their views, this element demands that, to unmarried woman, at least, all fields of work, for which her strength and faculties are adequate, shall be opened, to the end that she may enter the competitive field for work with man. A small set goes even further, and demands that competition for work be not limited to the field of the lower occupations, but should also extend higher, to the professions, to the field of art and science. This set demands the admission of woman to all the higher institutions of learning, namely, the universities, which in many countries are still closed to her. Their admission is advocated to the classes of several branches of study, to the medical profession, to the civil service (the Post Office, telegraph and railroad offices), for which they consider women peculiarly adapted;, and they point to the practical results that have been attained, especially in the United States, through the employment of woman. The one and the other also make the demand that political rights be conferred upon woman. Woman, they admit, is human and a member of the State, as well as man: legislation, until now in the exclusive control of man, proves that he exploited the privilege to his own exclusive benefit, and kept woman in every respect under guardianship, a thing to be henceforth prevented. It is noteworthy that the efforts here roughly sketched, do not reach beyond the frame-work of the existing social order. The question never is put whether, these objects being attained, any real and thoroughgoing improvement in the condition of woman will have been achieved. Standing on the ground of bourgeois, that is, of the capitalist social order, the full social equality of man and woman is considered the solution of the question. These folks are not aware, or they slide over the fact that, in so far as the unrestricted admission of woman to the industrial occupations is concerned, the object has already been actually attained, and it meets with the strongest support on the part of the ruling class, who as will be shown further on, find therein their own interest. Under existing conditions, the admission of women to all industrial occupations can have for its only effect that the competitive struggle of the working people become ever sharper, and rage ever mere fiercely. Hence the inevitable result,--the lowering of incomes for female and male labor, whether this income be in the form of wage or salary. That this solution cannot be the right one is clear. The full civic equality of woman is, however, not merely the ultimate object of the men, who, planted upon the existing social order, favor the efforts in behalf of woman. It is also recognized by the female bourgeois, active in the Woman Movement. These, together with the males of their mental stamp, stand, accordingly, with their demands in contrast to the larger portion of the men, who oppose them, partly out of old-fogy narrowness, partly also--in so far as the admission of woman to the higher studies and the better-paid public positions is concerned--out of mean selfishness, out of fear of competition. A difference in principle, however, a class difference, such as there is between the working and the capitalist class, does not exist between these two sets of male and female citizens. Let the by no means impossible case be imagined that the representatives of the movement for the civic rights of woman carry through all their demands for placing woman upon an equal footing with man. What then? Neither the slavery, which modern marriage amounts to for numberless women, nor prostitution, nor the material dependence of the large majority of married women upon their marital lords, would thereby be removed. For the large majority of women it is, indeed, immaterial whether a thousand, or ten thousand, members of their own sex, belonging to the more favored strata of society, land in the higher branches of learning, the practice of medicine, a scientific career, or some government office. Nothing is thereby changed in the total condition of the sex. The mass of the female sex suffers in two respects: On the one side woman suffers from economic and social dependence upon man. True enough, this dependence may be alleviated by formally placing her upon an equality before the law, and in point of rights; but the dependence is not removed. On the other side, woman suffers from the economic dependence that woman in general, the working-woman in particular, finds herself in, along with the workingman. Evidently, all women, without difference of social standing, have an interest--as the sex that in the course of social development has been oppressed, and ruled, and defiled by man--in removing such a state of things, and must exert themselves to change it, in so far as it can be changed by changes in the laws and institutions within the frame-work of the present social order. But the enormous majority of women are furthermore interested in the most lively manner in that the existing State and social order be radically transformed, to the end that both wage-slavery, under which the working-women deeply pine, and sex slavery, which is intimately connected with our property and industrial systems, be wiped out. The larger portion by far of the women in society, engaged in the movement for the emancipation of woman, do not see the necessity for such a radical change. Influenced by their privileged social standing, they see in the more far-reaching working-women's movement dangers, not infrequently abhorrent aims, which they feel constrained to ignore, eventually even to resist. The class-antagonism, that in the general social movement rages between the capitalist and the working class, and which, with the ripening of conditions, grows sharper and more pronounced, turns up likewise on the surface of the Woman's Movement; and it finds its corresponding expression in the aims and tactics of those engaged in it. All the same, the hostile sisters have, to a far greater extent than the male population--split up as the latter is in the class struggle--a number of points of contact, on which they can, although marching separately, strike jointly. This happens on all the fields, on which the question is the equality of woman with man, within modern society. This embraces the participation of woman in all the fields of human activity, for which her strength and faculties are fit; and also her full civil and political equality with man. These are very important, and as will be shown further on, very extensive fields. Besides all this the working woman has also a special interest in doing battle hand in hand with the male portion of the working class, for all the means and institutions that may protect the working woman from physical and moral degeneration, and which promise to secure to her the vitality and fitness necessary for motherhood and for the education of children. Furthermore, as already indicated, it is the part of the working-woman to make common cause with the male members of her class and of her lot in the struggle for a radical transformation of society, looking to the establishment of such conditions as may make possible the real economic and spiritual independence of both sexes, by means of social institutions that afford to all a full share in the enjoyment of all the conquests of civilization made by mankind. The goal, accordingly, is not merely the realization of the equal rights of woman with man within present society, as is aimed at by the bourgeois woman emancipationists. It lies beyond,--the removal of all impediments that make man dependent upon man; and, consequently, one sex upon the other. Accordingly, this solution of the Woman Question coincides completely with the solution of the Social Question. It follows that he who aims at the solution of the Woman Question to its full extent, is necessarily bound to go hand in hand with those who have inscribed upon their banner the solution of the Social Question as a question of civilization for the whole human race. These are the Socialists, that is, the Social Democracy. Of all existing parties in Germany, the Social Democratic Party is the only one which has placed in its programme the full equality of woman, her emancipation from all dependence and oppression. And the party has done so, not for agitational reasons, but out of necessity, out of principle. _There can be no emancipation of humanity without the social independence and equality of the sexes._ Up to this point all Socialists are likely to agree with the presentation made of fundamental principles. But the same cannot be said on the subject of the manner in which we portray the ultimate aims to ourselves; how the measures and special institutions shall be shaped which will establish the aimed-at independence and equality of all members of the sexes, consequently that of man and woman also. The moment the field of the known is abandoned, and one launches out into pictures of future forms, a wide field is opened for speculation. Differences of opinion start over that which is probable or not probable. That which in that direction is set forth in this book can, accordingly, be taken only as the personal opinion of the author himself; possible attacks must be directed against him only; only he is responsible. Attacks that are objective, and are honestly meant, will be welcome to us. Attacks that violate truth in the presentation of the contents of this book, or that rest upon false premises we shall ignore. For the rest, in the following pages all conclusions, even the extremest, will be drawn, which, the facts being verified, the results attained may warrant. Freedom from prejudice is the first condition for the recognition of truth. Only the unrestricted utterance of that which is, and must be, leads to the goal. PART I WOMAN IN THE PAST CHAPTER I. BEFORE CHRISTIANITY. Woman and the workingman have, since old, had this in common--_oppression_. The forms of oppression have suffered changes in the course of time, and in various countries. But the oppression always remained. Many a time and oft, in the course of the ages, did the oppressed become conscious of their oppression; and such conscious knowledge of their condition did bring on changes and reliefs. Nevertheless, a knowledge, that grasped the actual feature of the oppression by grasping its causes, is, with woman as with the workingman, the fruit of our own days. The actual feature of society, and of the laws that lie at the bottom of its development, had first to be known, before a general movement could take place for the removal of conditions, recognized as oppressive and unjust. The breadth and intensity of such a movement depends, however, upon the measure of the understanding prevalent among the suffering social layers and circles, and upon the measure of freedom of motion that they enjoy. In both respects, woman stands, through custom and education, as well as the freedom allowed her by law, behind the workingman. To this, another circumstance is added. Conditions, lasting through a long series of generations, finally grow into custom; heredity and education then cause such conditions to appear on both sides as "natural." Hence it comes that, even to-day, woman in particular, accepts her subordinate position as a matter of course. It is no easy matter to make her understand that that position is unworthy, and that it is her duty to endeavor to become a member of society, equal-righted with, and in every sense a peer of man. However much in common woman may be shown to have with the workingman, she leads him in one thing:--_Woman was the first human being to come into bondage: she was a slave before the male slave existed._ All social dependence and oppression has its roots in the _economic dependence_ of the oppressed upon the oppressor. In this condition woman finds herself, from an early day down to our own. The history of the development of human society proves the fact everywhere. The knowledge of the history of this development is, however, comparatively new. As little as the myth of the Creation of the World--as taught us by the Bible--can be upheld in sight of the investigations of geographers and, scientists, grounded as these investigations are upon unquestionable and innumerable facts, just so untenable has its myth proved concerning the creation and evolution of man. True enough, as yet the veil is far from being lifted from all the sub-departments of this historical development of mankind; over many, on which already light has been shed, differences of opinion still exist among the investigators on the meaning and connection of this or that fact; nevertheless, on the whole, there is agreement and clearness. It is established that man did not, like the first human couple of the Bible, make his first appearance on earth in an advanced stage of civilization. He reached that plane only in the course of endlessly long lapses of time, after he had gradually freed himself from purely animal conditions, and had experienced long terms of development, in the course of which his social as well as his sexual relations--the relations between man and woman--had undergone a great variety of changes. The favorite phrase--a phrase that the ignorant or impostors daily smite our ears with on the subject of the relations between man and woman, and between the poor and the rich--"it always has been so," and the conclusion drawn therefrom--"it will always be so," _is in every sense of the word false, superficial and trumped-up_. For the purposes of this work a cursory presentation of the relations between the sexes, since primitive society, is of special importance. It is so because it can thereby be proved that, seeing that these relations have materially changed in the previous course of human development, and that the changes have taken place in even step with the existing systems of production, on the one hand, and of the distribution of the product of labor, on the other, it is natural and goes without saying that, along with further changes and revolutions in the system of production and distribution, _the relations between the sexes are bound to change again_. Nothing is "eternal," either in nature or in human life; eternal only is change and interchange. As far back as one may go in the development of human society, the horde is found as the first human community. True enough, Honeger mentions in his "General History of Civilization" that even to-day in the little explored interior of the island of Borneo, there are wild people, living separately; and Huegel likewise maintains that, in the wild mountain regions of India, human couples have been discovered living alone, and who, ape-like, fled to the trees as soon as they were met; but there is no further knowledge on the subject. If verified, these claims would only confirm the previous superstition and hypothesis concerning the development of the human race. The probability is that, wherever human beings sprang up, there were, at first, single couples. Certain it is, however, that so soon as a larger number of beings existed, descended from a common parent stock, they held together in hordes in order that, by their joint efforts, they might, first of all, gain their still very primitive conditions of life and support, as well as to protect themselves against their common enemies, wild animals. Growing numbers and increased difficulties in securing subsistence, which originally consisted in roots, berries and fruit, first led to the splitting up or segmentation of the hordes, and to the search for new habitats. This almost animal-like state, of which we have no further credible antiquarian proofs, undoubtedly once existed, judging from all that we have learned concerning the several grades of civilization of wild peoples still living, or known to have lived within historic times. Man did not, upon the call of a Creator, step ready-made into existence as a higher product of civilization. It was otherwise. He has had to pass through the most varied stages in an endlessly long and slow process of development. Only via ebbing and flowing periods of civilization, and in constant differentiation with his fellows in all parts of the world, and in all zones, did he gradually climb up to his present height. Indeed, while in one section of the earth's surface great peoples and nations belong to the most advanced stages of civilization, other peoples are found in different sections standing on the greatest variety of gradations in development. They thus present to us a picture of our own past history; and they point to the road which mankind traversed in the course of its development. If but certain common and generally accepted data are established, that may serve everywhere as sign-posts to guide investigation, a mass of facts will follow, throwing a wholly new light upon the relations of man in the past and the present. A number of social phenomena--unintelligible to us to-day, and attacked by superficial judges as nonsensical, not infrequently even as "immoral"--will become clear and natural. A material lifting of the veil, formerly spread over the history of the development of our race, has been effected through the investigations made, since Bachofen, by a considerable number of scientists, like Tylor, MacLennan, Lubbock and others. Prominently among the men who joined these was Morgan, with his fundamental work, that Frederick Engels further substantiated and supplemented with a series of historical facts, economic and political in their nature, and that, more recently, has been partly confirmed and partly rectified by Cunow.[1] By means of these expositions--especially as clearly and lucidly presented by Frederick Engels, in his support of Morgan's excellent and fundamental work,--a mass of light is shed upon hitherto unintelligible, partly seemingly contradictory phenomena in the life of the races and tribes of both high and low degree of culture. Only now do we gain an insight into the structure that human society raised in the course of time. According thereto, our former views of marriage, the family, the community, the State, rested upon notions that were wholly false; so false that they turn out to be no better than a fancy-picture, wholly devoid of foundation in fact. All that is said and proved about marriage, the family, the community and the State holds good especially with regard to woman, who, in the various periods of development did likewise fill a place, that differs materially from the "eternal," imputed to her. Morgan, whom Engels agrees with in this, divides the history of mankind into three main epochs:--savagery, barbarism and civilization. Each of the two first ones he again divides into an under, a middle and an upper period, each distinguishing itself from the other by certain innovations and improvements, predicated in each instance upon the control over subsistence. Morgan, accordingly, exactly in the sense of the materialist conception of history, as established by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,--perceives the leading characteristics in the development of society to be the changes that, in given epochs, the conditions of life are molded into; and he perceives the changes to be due to the progress made in the process of production, that is to say, in the procurement of subsistence. Summed up in a few words, the lower period of savagery constitutes the infancy of the human race, during which the race, partly living in trees, is mainly nourished by fruits and roots, and during which articulate language takes its inception. The middle period of savagery commences with the acquisition of a fish subsistence, and the use of fire. The construction of weapons begins; at first the club and spear, fashioned out of wood and stone. Thereby also begins the chase, and probably also war with contiguous hordes for the sources of food, for domiciles and hunting grounds. At this stage appears also cannibalism, still practiced to-day by some tribes and peoples of Africa, Australia and Polynesia. The upper period of savagery is characterized by the perfection of weapons to the point of the bow and arrow; finger weaving, the making of baskets out of filaments of bark, the fashioning of sharpened stone tools have here their start, and thereby begins also the preparation of wood for the building of boats and huts. The form of life has accordingly, become many-sided. The existing tools and implements, needed for the control of a plentiful food supply, make possible the subsistance of larger communities. The lower period of barbarism Morgan starts with the invention of the art of pottery. The taming and domestication of animals, and, along with that, the production of meat and milk, and the preparation of hides, horns and hair for various purposes of use, have here their start. Hand in hand therewith begins the cultivation of plants,--in the West of maize, in the East of almost all known cereals, maize excepted. The middle period of barbarism shows us, in the East, the ever more extensive domestication of animals; in the West, the cultivation of maize and plants by irrigation. Here also begins the use of adobe-bricks and of stone for house-building. The domestication of animals promotes the rearing of herds, and leads to the pastoral life. The necessity of larger quantities of food for men and beasts leads to field agriculture. Along therewith, the people begin to be localized; food increases in quantity and diversity, and gradually cannibalism disappears. The upper period of barbarism begins finally with the smelting of iron ore, and the discovery of the phonetic alphabet. The iron plow-share is invented, making possible agriculture on a larger scale; the iron axe and spade are brought into requisition, making easy the clearing of the forests. With the preparation of iron, a number of fields are opened to activity, imparting to life a new form. Iron utensils help the building of houses, vessels and weapons; with the preparation of metals arises skilled handwork, a more perfect knowledge of weapons, and the building of walled cities. Architecture, as an art, then rises; mythology, poetry and history find support and expansion in the discovery of the phonetic alphabet. The Orient and the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, particularly Egypt, Greece and Italy, are those in which the last sketched stage of life principally unfolded; and it laid the foundation for the social transformation that in the course of time exercised a determining influence on the social development of Europe and of the whole earth. As a matter of course, the social development of the human race through the periods of savagery and barbarism had also its peculiar sexual and social relations, differing materially from those of later days. Bachofen and Morgan have traced these relations by means of thorough investigations. Bachofen, by studying closely all ancient and modern writings, so as to arrive at the nature of phenomena that appear singular to us in mythology, folk-lore and historic tradition, and that, nevertheless, seem to be re-echoed in incidents and events of later days, occasionally even of our own. Morgan, by spending decades of his life among the Iroquois Indians, located in the State of New York, and thereby making observations, through which he gained new and unexpected insight into the system of life, the family and the relationships of the said Indian tribe, and, based upon which, observations made elsewhere, first received their correct interpretation and explanation. Both of them, Bachofen and Morgan, discovered, each along his own line of research, the latter, however, far more clearly than the former, that the relations of the sexes during primitive times of human development were substantially different from the relations existing in historic days, and among the modern civilized peoples. Especially did Morgan discover--thanks to his many years' sojourn among the Iroquois of North America, and grounded upon comparative studies, which he was moved to by that which he there observed,--that all the existing races, that are still materially backward, possess systems of family and consanguinity that are totally different from ours, but must be similar to those once prevalent among all races during the previous stages of civilization. Morgan found, at the time that he lived among the Iroquois, that among them there existed a system of monogamy, easily dissolvable by both parties, and which he designated as the "pairing family." He also found that the terms for the degrees of consanguinity--father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister--although, according to our conception, there can be no doubt as to their application, were there, nevertheless, applied in quite different sense. The Iroquois calls not only his own children "sons" and "daughters," but also the children of all his brothers; and their children call him "father." Conversely, the female Iroquois calls not only her own children "sons" and "daughters," but all those of her sisters, and likewise do their children call her "mother." On the other hand, she calls the children of her brothers "nephews" and "nieces," and these call her "aunt." The children of brothers call one another "brothers" and "sisters;" likewise the children of sisters. Finally, the children of a woman and those of her brother call one another "cousins." Accordingly, the singular spectacle is seen of the terms of relationship going, not as in our sense, by the degree of consanguinity, but by the sex of the relative. This system of relationship is in full force, not only among all the American Indians, as well as among the aborigines of India, the tribes of Dekan and the Gaura tribes of Hindostan, but, according to the investigations that have taken place since Bachofen, similar conditions must have existed everywhere in primitive times, as they still exist to-day among many peoples of Upper and Further Asia, Africa and Australia. When, in connection with these investigations and established facts, the investigation will be everywhere taken up on the sex and family relations of wild and barbarous nations still living, then will the fact transpire that, what Bachofen still confusedly found among numerous peoples of antiquity, and rather surmised than otherwise; what Morgan found among the Iroquois; what Cunow found among the Austral-Negros, are but social and sexual formations, that constitute the _groundwork of human development for all the peoples of the earth_. The investigations of Morgan bring, moreover, other interesting facts to light. Although the "pairing family" of the Iroquois starts in insolvable contradiction with the terms of consanguinity in use among them, it turns out that, as late as the first half of the 19th Century, there existed on the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) a family-form that actually tallied with that which, among the Iroquois, existed in name only. But the system of consanguinity, in force in Hawaii, failed, in turn, to tally with the family-form actually in existence there. It referred to an older family-form, one still more primitive, but no longer extant. There, all the children of brothers and sisters, without exception, were "brothers" and "sisters." Accordingly, they were not considered the common children of their mothers and of the sisters of these, or of their fathers and of the brothers of these, but of all the brothers and sisters of their parents, without distinction. The Hawaiian system of consanguinity corresponded, accordingly, with a stage of development that was lower than the family-form still actually in existence. Hence transpires the curious fact that, in Hawaii, as with the Indians of North America, two distinct systems of consanguinity are, or rather, at a time, were in vogue, which no longer tallied with actual conditions, but were both overtaken by a higher state. On this head Morgan says: "The family represents an active principle. It is never stationary, but advances from a lower to a higher form as society advances from a lower to a higher condition, and finally passes out of one form into another of higher grade. Systems of consanguinity, on the contrary, are passive; recording the progress made by the family at long intervals apart, and only changing radically when the family has radically changed." The theory,--even to-day generally considered conclusive, and which is stubbornly upheld as irrefutable by the representatives of the _status quo_--to the effect that the existing family-form has existed since time immemorial, and, lest the whole social fabric be put in jeopardy, must continue to exist forever, turned out, accordingly, after these discoveries of the investigators, to be wholly false and untenable. The form, under which the relations of the sexes appear and the situation of the family is raised, depends rather upon the social conditions, upon the manner in which man controls his subsistence. The form changes with the changed degree of culture at each given period. The study of primitive history leaves now no room for doubt that, at the lowest grades of human development, the relation of the sexes is totally different from that of latter times, and that a state of things resulted therefrom, which, looked at with modern eyes, appears as monstrous, and as a sink of immorality. Nevertheless, as each social stage of human development has its own conditions of production, so likewise has each its own code of morals, which is but the _reflection of the social condition_. That is moral which is usage; and that, in turn, is usage which corresponds with the innermost being, i. e., the needs of a given period. Morgan reaches the conclusion that, at the lower period of savagery, there was sexual intercourse between the several grades or generations, every woman belonging to every man, and every man to every woman,--in other words, promiscuity. All men live in polygamy and all women in polyandry. There is a general community of women and of men, but also a community of children, Strábo reports (sixty-six years before our reckoning) that, among the Arabians, brothers cohabited with sisters and with their own mother. On any route other than that of incest, the increase of population is nowhere possible, if, as alleged in the Bible also, descent from one couple is granted. The Bible itself contradicts itself on this delicate point. It is stated there that Cain, after he had murdered his brother Abel, took a wife of another people. Whence came that other people? The theory of promiscuity in primitive times, that is to say, that the horde was endogamous, that sexual intercourse was indiscriminate, is furthermore supported by the Hindoo myth, according to which Brahma married his own daughter Saravasti. The same myth turns up again among the Egyptians and the northern Edda. The Egyptian god Ammon was the spouse of his own mother, and boasted of it. Odin, according to the Edda, was the mate of his own daughter Frigga.[2] Morgan proceeds from the principle that, from the state of promiscuity, soon a higher form of sexual intercourse took shape. He designates this the consanguine family. Here the groups, that stand in sexual relation, are separated by grades or generations, so that grandfathers and grandmothers, within an age group, are husbands and wives. Their children, likewise, constitute a group of common couples; likewise the children of these, so soon as they have reached the requisite age. Accordingly, in contrast with the sex relations of the rawest period, in which promiscuity of sexes exists without distinction of age, now one generation is excluded from sexual intercourse with another. Sexual intercourse, however, exists between brothers and sisters, male and female cousins of the first, second and third remove. All of these together are brothers and sisters, but towards one another, they are all husbands and wives. This family-form corresponds with the system of consanguinity that still existed in Hawaii during the first part of the 19th Century, in name only, but no longer in fact. On the other hand, according to the American Indian system of consanguinity, a brother and sister can never be the father and mother of the same child--a thing, however, permissible in the Hawaiian family system. Probably the consanguine family was the state that, at the time of Herodotus, existed among the Massagetae, on the subject of which he reports: "Each man received a wife, but all were allowed to use her." And he continues: "At any time a man desires a woman, he hangs his quiver in front of his wagon, and cohabits, unconcerned, with her.... He at the same time sticks his staff into the ground, a symbol of his own act.... Cohabitation is exercised in public."[3] Similar conditions Bachofen shows have existed among the Lycians, Etruscans, Cretans, Athenians, Lesbians and Egyptians. According to Morgan, the consanguine family is supervened by a third and higher form of family relationship, which he designates as the Punaluan family. _Punalua_, "dear friend," "intimate companion." Cunow, in his above named book, takes exception to Morgan's views that the consanguine family, which rests on the organization of marriage classes by generations, preceded the punaluan family as an original organization. Cunow does not see in the consanguine family the most primitive of all social forms, until now discovered. He sees in it merely a middle form, that takes its origin in the generation groups; a transition stage toward the pure gentile organization, on which, as a graft, the division in age classes, belonging to the consanguine family system, still continues for a time in altered form, along with the division in totem-groups.[4] Cunow explains further: The division in classes--every individual, man or woman, carries the name of his or her class and generation group totem--does not serve to exclude sexual intercourse between collateral, but to prevent cohabitation between relatives in the ascending and descending line, between parents and children, aunts and nephews, uncles and nieces. Terms such as "aunt," "uncle," etc., he designates as grade-names. Cunow furnishes the proofs for the correctness of the views in which he differs from Morgan on some points. But, however he may differ from Morgan in single instances, he emphatically defends him against the attacks of Westermann and others. He says: "Although here and there a hypothesis of Morgan may have proved itself false, and some others may be allowed only a qualified approval, that merit none can gainsay him that he has been the first to establish the identity of the North American totem-group with the gentile organization of the Romans; and, secondly, to demonstrate that our modern systems of consanguinity and family-forms are the result of a long process of development. In a measure he has thereby first made recent investigations possible; he has first built the foundation on which we may build further." In the introduction also to his book he says expressly that his own work is partly a supplement to Morgan's book on primitive man. The Westermanns, the Starckes, the Zieglers--the latter of whom, in his book, criticized in the introduction to the twenty-fifth edition of this work, refers mainly to the first named, in order to attack our statements with theirs--will have to submit, with good grace or bad, to the fact that the rise and development of the family has not taken the course that fits in with their bourgeois prejudices. The refutation that, in the last part of his work, Cunow bestows upon Westermann and Starcke, Ziegler's authorities, are calculated to enlighten their most fanatic followers upon the value of their caviling criticisms of, and arguments against, Morgan. According to Morgan, the punaluan family has its start with the exclusion of consanguineous brothers and sisters, on the mother's side. Where a woman has several husbands, the evidence of paternity is impossible. Paternity becomes a fiction. Even to-day, under the rule of strict monogamous marriage, paternity, as Goethe, in his "Apprenticeship," lets Frederick say, "rests only upon faith." If with monogamy, paternity is often doubtful, it is impossible of proof in polygamy: only descent from the mother is certain and unquestionable. Accordingly, descent from the mother afforded the only criterion. As all deep-reaching transformations in the social relations of primitive man are accomplished only slowly, the change of the so-called consanguine into the punaluan family must unquestionably have engaged vast periods of time, and been broken through by many relapses, still noticeable in much later days. The proximate external inducement for the development of the punaluan family was, possibly, the necessity of splitting up the strongly swollen membership of the family, to the end that new grounds could be occupied for cattle ranges and agriculture. Probably, also, with the reaching of a higher grade of civilization, a sense gradually asserted itself of the harmfulness and indecorousness of sexual intercourse between brothers and sisters, and close relatives. In favor of this theory stands a pretty tradition, that, as related by Cunow, Gaston found among the Dieyeries, one of the South Australian tribes, on the rise of the "Mordu" consanguine group. He says: "After creation, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers and other near relatives married promiscuously among one another, until the evil effects of such connections showed themselves clearly. A conference of leaders was held, and it was considered in what way this could be avoided. The outcome of the conference was a request to the Muramura (Great Spirit); and he ordered in his answer that the tribe be divided into several branches, and that, in order to distinguish them, they be called by different names, after animate or inanimate objects. For instance: after the dingo, the mouse, the emu, the rain, the iguana-lizard, etc. The members of one and the same group could not marry another. The son of a Dingo could not, for instance, marry the daughter of a Dingo; each of the two could, however, enter into connections with the Mouse, the Emu, the Rat, or any other family." This tradition is more sensible and natural, by a good deal, than the Christian tradition, taught by the Bible. It shows plainly the rise of the consanguine groups. Moreover, Paul Lafargue, makes in the "Neue Zeit" the sagacious, and, we think, felicitous point, that names, such as Adam and Eve, are not names of individual persons, but the names of gentes, in which, at the time, the Jews were joined. Lafargue solves by his argument a series of otherwise obscure and contradictory passages in the first Book of Moses. Again, M. Beer calls attention, likewise in the "Neue Zeit," that, to this day, it is a conjugal custom among Jews that the bride and the bridegroom's mother _may not carry the same name_, otherwise--thus runs this belief--a misfortune will befall the family: sickness and death will pursue them. In our opinion, this is a further proof for the correctness of Lafargue's theory. The gentile organization forbids marriage between persons that descend from the same gens stock. Such a common descent must be considered to exist, according to gentile principles, between the bride, that carries the name of "Eve," and the bridegroom's mother of the same name. Modern Jews, of course, have no longer the remotest suspicion of the real connection between their prejudice and their old gentile constitution, which forbade such marriages of relatives. The old gentile order had for its object to avoid the degenerating consequences of in-breeding. Although this gentile constitution has for thousands of years been destroyed among the Jews, tradition, as we see, has continued to live in superstition. Quite possible, the experience, made at an early day with the breeding of animals, revealed the harmfulness of in-breeding. How far this experience went transpires from the manner in which, according to the first Book of Moses, chap. 30, verse 32 and sequel, Jacob understood how to outwit his father-in-law Laban, by knowing how to encompass the birth of eanlings that were streaked and pied, and which, according to Laban's promises, were to be Jacob's. The old Israelites had, accordingly, long before Darwin, studied Darwinism. Once upon the subject of the conditions existing among the old Jews, a few other facts are in order, clearly proving that, among them, descent in the female line was actually in force of old. True enough, on the subject of woman, I Moses, 3, 16, runs this wise: "And thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee;" and the verse also undergoes the variation: "the woman shall leave father and mother, and cleave to her husband." In point of fact, however, I Moses, 2, 24, has it this way: "_Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother and shall cleave unto his wife_, and they shall be one flesh." The same language recurs in Matthew 19, 15; Mark 10, 7, and in the Epistle to the Ephesians 5, 31. The command sprang, accordingly, from the system of descent in the female line, and the exegetists, at a loss what to do with it, allowed it to appear in a light that is utterly false. Descent in female line appears clearly also in IV Moses, 32, 41. It is there said that Jair had a father, who was of the tribe of Judah, but his mother was of the tribe of Manasseh, and Jair is expressly called the son of Manasseh, and he inherited in that tribe. Another instance of descent in the female line among the Jews is met in Nehemiah 7, 63. There the children of a priest, who took to wife one of the daughters of Barzillai--a Jewish clan--are called children of Barzillai; they are, accordingly, not called after the father, who, moreover, as a priest occupied a privileged position, but after the mother. For the rest, already in the days of the Old Testament, accordingly, in historic times, the father-right prevailed among the Jews, and the clan and tribe organization rested on descent in the male line. Accordingly, the daughters were shut off as heirs, as may be seen in I Moses 31, 14-15, where even Leah and Rachel, the daughters of Laban, complain: "Is there yet any portion or inheritance for us in our father's house? Are we not counted of him strangers? for he has sold us, and hath quite devoured also our money." As happened with all peoples where descent in male replaced descent in female line, woman among the Jews stood wholly bereft of rights. Wedlock was marriage by purchase. On woman the obligation was laid of the strictest chastity; on the other hand, man was not bound by the same ordinance; he, moreover, was privileged to possess several wives. Did the husband, after the bridal night, believe to have found that his wife had, before marriage, lost her maidenhood, not only had he the right to cast her off, she was stoned to death. The same punishment fell upon the adultress; upon the husband, however, only in case he committed adultery with a married Jewish woman. According to V Moses 24, 1-4, the husband had also the right to cast off his newly-married wife, if she found no favor in his eyes, even if only out of dislike. He was then to write her a bill of divorcement, give it in her hand, and let her out of the house. An expression of the low position that woman took later among the Jews is furthermore found in the circumstances that, even to this day, woman attends divine service in the synagogue, in a space strictly separated from the men, and they are not included in the prayers.[5] The relations of the sexes in the punaluan family consisted, according to Morgan, in one or more sisters, belonging to one family group, marrying jointly one or more brothers of another group. The consanguine sisters, or the first, second and more remote cousins were wives in common with their husbands in common, who could not be their brothers. These consanguine brothers, or cousins of several degrees, were the husbands in common of their wives in common, who could not be their sisters. With the stopping of in-breeding, the new family-form undoubtedly contributed towards the rapid and vigorous development of the tribes, and imparted to the tribes, that had turned to this form of family connection, an advantage over those that still retained the old form of connections. In general, the physical and intellectual differences between man and woman were vastly less in primitive days than in our society. Among all the peoples, living in the state of savagery or barbarism, the differences in the weight and size of the brain are slighter than among the peoples in civilization. Likewise, in strength of body and agility, the women among these peoples are but little behind the men. This is attested not only by the testimony of the ancient writers on the peoples who clung to the mother-right. Further testimony is furnished by the armies of women among the Ashantees and of the King of Dahomey in West Africa, who distinguished themselves by special bravery and ferocity. Likewise does the opinion of Tacitus on the women of the old Germans, and Caesar's accounts of the women of the Iberians and Scots confirm the fact. Columbus had to sustain a fight before Santa Cruz with an Indian skiff in which the women fought as bravely as the men; and we find this theory further confirmed in the passages from Havelock Ellis's work, "Man and Woman," which Dr. Hope B. Adams-Walther deals upon in Nos. 39 and 40 of the "Neue Zeit." He says: "About the Andombis of the Congo, Johnson relates that the women work hard as carriers and in other occupations. All the same, they lead a perfectly happy life. They are often stronger and more handsomely built than the men; not a few of them have positively magnificent figures. Parke styles the Manynema of the same neighborhood 'fine animals,' and he finds the women very stately. They carry burdens as heavy as the men and with equal ease. A North American Indian chief said to Hearne: 'Women are created for labor; a woman can carry or drag as much as two men.' Schellong, who published a painstaking study on the Papuans of New Guinea in the Ethnologic Journal, issued in 1891, is of the opinion that the women are more strongly built than the men. In the interior of Australia, women are sometimes beaten by men out of jealousy; but it happens not infrequently that it is the man, who, on such occasions, receives the stronger dose. In Cuba the women fought shoulder to shoulder with the men. Among some tribes in India, as well as the Pueblos of North and the Patagonians of South America, the women are as tall as the men. Even among the Arabians and Druses the difference in size is slight; and yet nearer home, among the Russians, the sexes are more alike than is the case among the western Europeans. Accordingly, in all parts of the earth there are instances of equal or approximately equal physical development." The family relations that flow from the Punaluan family were these: The children of my mother's sisters are her children, and the children of my father's brothers are his children, and all together are my brothers and sisters. Conversely, the children of my mother's brothers are her nephews and nieces, and the children of my father's sisters are his nephews and nieces, and they, all together, are my cousins. Again, the husbands of my mother's sisters are her husbands also, and the wives of my father's brothers are also his wives; but my father's sisters and my mother's brothers are excluded from family relationship, and their children are my cousins.[6] Along with arising civilization, sexual intercourse is proscribed between brothers and sisters, and the proscription gradually extends to the remotest collateral relatives on the mother's side. A new group of consanguinity arises, the gens, which, in its first form, is made up of a series of consanguine and more remote sisters, together with their children and their consanguine and more remote brothers on their mother's side. The gens has a common female ancestor, from whom the female successors descend in generations. The husbands of these women are not of the consanguine group, the gens, of their wives; they are of the gens of their sisters. Conversely, the children of these men belong to the family group of their, the children's mother, descent being in the female line. The mother is the head of the family; and thus arises the "mother-right," which for a long time constitutes the basis of the family and of inheritance. In keeping therewith--so long as descent was recognized in the female line--woman had a seat and voice in the councils of the gens; they voted in the election of the sachems and of the military chiefs, and deposed them. About the Lycians, who abided by the mother-right, Herodotus says; "Their customs are partly Cretan, partly Carian. They have, however, a custom that distinguishes them from all other nations in the world. Ask a Lycian who he is, and he answers by giving you his own name, the name of his mother, and so on in the female line. Aye, if a free-born woman marries a slave, her children are citizens, but if a free man marries a stranger, or takes a concubine, even if he be the highest person in the State, his children forfeit all citizen rights." In those days, "matrimonium" and not "patrimonium," "mater familias" and not "pater familias" were the terms used; and the native land is called the "dear motherland." As with the previous family-forms, so did the gens rest upon the community of property, and had a communistic system of household. The woman is the real guide and leader of this family community; hence she enjoys a high degree of respect, in the house as well as in the affairs of the family community concerning the tribe. She is judge and adjuster of disputes, and frequently performs the ceremonies of religion as priestess. The frequent appearance of Queens and Princesses in antiquity, their controlling influence, even there where their sons reigned, for instance, in the history of old Egypt, are results of the mother-right. Mythology, at that epoch, assumes predominantly female characters: Astarte, Ceres, Demeter, Latona, Isis, Frigga, Freia, Gerdha, etc. Woman is considered inviolable; matricide is the blackest of all crimes: it summons all men to retribution. The blood-feud is the common concern of all the men of the tribe; each is obliged to avenge the wrong done to a member of the family community by the members of another tribe. In defence of the women the men are spurred to highest valor. Thus did the effects of the mother-right, gyneocracy, manifest themselves in all the relations of life among the peoples of antiquity--among the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, before the time of the Heroes; among the peoples of Italy, before the founding of Rome; among the Scythians, the Gauls, the Iberians and Cantabrians, the Germans of Tacitus, etc. Woman, at that time, takes in the family and in public life a position such as she has never since taken. Along these lines, says Tacitus in his "Germania": "They (the Germans) even suppose somewhat of sanctity and prescience to be inherent in the female sex; and, therefore, neither despise their counsels, nor disregard their responses;" and Diodorus, who lived at the time of Caesar, feels highly indignant over the position of women in Egypt, having learned that there, not the sons, but the daughters, supported their aging parents. He contemptuously shrugs his shoulders at the poltroons of the Nile, who relinquish household and public rights to the members of the weaker sex, and allow them privileges that must sound unheard-of to a Greek or a Roman. Under the gyneocracy, a state of comparative peace prevailed in general. The horizon was narrow and small, life primitive. The different tribes separated themselves from one another, as best they could, and respected their mutual boundaries. Was, however, one tribe attacked by another, then the men were obliged to rush to its defence, and in this they were supported by the women in the most vigorous fashion. According to Herodotus, the women joined in battle among the Scythians: as he claims, the maid could not marry before she had slain an enemy. What _role_ women played in battle among the Germans, Iberians, Scots, etc., has already been stated. But in the gens also did they, under given circumstances, command a strong regiment:--woe to the man who was either too lazy or too unskilled to contribute his share to the common support. He was shown the door, and, either he returned to his own gens, where it was with difficulty he was again received with friendliness, or he joined another gens that was more tolerant toward him.[7] That conjugal life still bears this character in the interior of Africa, Livingstone learned to his great surprise, as he narrates in his "Missionary Travels and Researches in Southern Africa," London, 1857. On the Zambesi he ran across the Valonda--a handsome, vigorous negro tribe, devoted to agriculture--where he found confirmed the informations received from the Portuguese, and which at first seemed incredible to him, with regard to the privileged position enjoyed by women. They sit in council; the young man who marries must move from his own, to the village of his wife: he thereby pledges himself to furnish the mother of his wife for life with kindling wood: if he divorces, the children remain the property of the mother. On the other hand, the wife must see to the sustenance of the husband. Although, occasionally, slight disagreements break out between man and wife, Livingstone found that the men did not retaliate, but he discovered that the men, who offended their wives, were punished in the most sensitive manner--through their stomachs. The husband, he says, comes home to eat, but one woman sends him off to another, and he gets nothing. Tired and hungry he climbs a tree in the most populous part of the village, and announces in woeful tones: "Hear! Hear! I thought I had married women, but they are witches to me! I am a bachelor; I have not a single wife! Is that right towards a man like me?" If a woman gives physical expression to her anger at a man, she is sentenced to carry him on her back from the court of the chieftain to her own house. While she is carrying him home, the other men scoff at and jeer her; the women, on the contrary, encourage her with all their might, calling out to her: "Treat him as he deserves; do it again!" Similar conditions still exist in the German colony of Cameroon in West Africa. A German ship's doctor, who studied the country and its people by personal observation, writes us thus: "With a large number of tribes, inheritance is based on maternity. Paternity is immaterial. Brothers and sisters are only the children of one mother. A man does not bequeath his property to his children, but to the children of his sister, that is to say, to his nephews and nieces, as his nearest demonstrable blood relatives. A chief of the Way people explained to me in horrible English: "My sister and I are certainly blood relatives, consequently her son is my heir; when I die, he will be the king of my town." "And your father?" I inquired. "I don't know what that means, 'my father,'" answered he. Upon my putting to him the question whether he had no children, rolling on the ground with laughter, he answered that, with them, men have no children, only women. "I can assure you," our informant goes on to write, "that even the heir of King Bell in Cameroon _is the King's nephew, and not one of his sons_. The so-called children of King Bell, several of whom are now going through training in German cities, are merely children of his wives, _whose fathers are unknown_; one of them I might, possibly, claim for myself." What say the adversaries of the theory of descent in the female line to this sketch drawn from the immediate present? Our informant is a man with eyes open, who probed things to the very bottom. How many of those who live among these semi-savage races, do as much? Hence the wild accounts about the "immorality" of the natives. Furthermore, there come to our notice the memorials of the Imperial Government, submitted to the Reichstag on the German colonies (Session of 1894-95). In the memorial on the Southwestern territory of Africa there occurs this passage, p. 239: "Without their advice--the oldest and wealthiest--he (chief of the tribe in principal village) can not render the slightest decision, and not the men only, _but quite often the women also_, even the servants, _express their opinion_." In the report of the Marshall Islands, p. 254 of the memorial, it runs thus: "The ruling power over all the islands of the Marshall group never rested in the hands of a single chieftain.... _Seeing, however, that no female member of this class (the Irody) is alive, and only the mother conveys nobility and rank to the child, the Irodies dies out with their chieftain._" The expression used, and the descriptions made, by reporters betray what an utter blank are to them the conditions that they refer to: they can not find their bearings among them. With an increasing population, there arise a number of sisters, which, in turn, produce daughter gentes. Over and against these, the mother gens appears as phratry. A number of phratries constitute a tribe. This social organization is so firm that it still constituted the foundation for the military organization in the old States, after the old gentile constitution had fallen to pieces. The tribe splits up into several tribes, all of which have the same constitution, and in each of which the old gentes are reproduced. However, seeing that the gentile constitution forbids the intermarriage of brothers and sisters, and of relatives on the mother's side to the furthest degree, it undermines its own foundation. Due to the evermore complicated relations of the separate gentes with one another--a condition of things that the social and economic progress promotes--the inhibition of marriage between the several gentes, that descend from the mother's side, becomes in the long run impracticable: it breaks down of itself, or is burst asunder. So long as the production of the means of subsistence was still at the lowest stages, and satisfied only simple wants, the activity of man and woman was essentially the same. Along with an increasing division of labor, there came about, not merely a division of functions, but also a division of occupations. Fishing, the hunt, cattle-raising,--demanded separate knowledge; and, to a still higher degree, the construction of tools and utensils, which became mainly the property of the men. Field agriculture expanded materially the circle of activities, and it created a supply of subsistence that satisfied the highest demands of the time. Man, whose activity stood in the foreground in the course of this development, became the real lord and owner of these sources of wealth, which, in turn, furnished the basis for commerce; and this created new relations, and social changes. Not only did ever fresh causes of friction and conflicts arise for the possession of the best lands, due to the increase of population, and the need of wider domains for cattle-raising and agriculture, but, along with such increase of population, there arose the need of labor power to cultivate the ground. The more numerous these powers, all the greater was the wealth in products and herds. These struggles led, first, to the rape of women, later to the enslaving of conquered men. The women became laborers and objects of pleasure for the conqueror; their males became slaves. Two elements were thereby simultaneously introduced into the old gentile constitution. The two and the gentile constitution could not, in the long run, get along together. Furthermore, hand in hand with the increasing differentiation of occupations, owing to the growing need of tools, utensils, weapons, etc., handicraft rises into existence. It follows its own course of development and separates itself from agriculture. As a consequence, a distinct population, one that plies the trades, is called into life; and it splits off from the agricultural population with entirely different interests. According to the mother-right, i. e., so long as descent followed only in female line, the custom was that the gentile relatives inherited from the deceased gentile fellow-members on the mother's side. The property remained in the gens. The children of the deceased father did not belong to his gens, but to that of the mother: accordingly, they did not inherit from the father; at his death his property fell back to his own gens. Under the new conditions, where the father was the property-holder, i. e., the owner of herds and slaves, of weapons and utensils, and where he had become a handicraftsman, or merchant, his property, so long as he was still considered of the gens of his mother, fell after his death, not to his own children, but to his brothers and sisters, and to the children of his sisters, or to the successors of his sisters. His own children went away empty-handed. The pressure to change such a state of things was, accordingly, powerful;--and it was changed. Thereupon a condition arose that was not yet monogamy, but that approximated it; there arose the "pairing family." A certain man lived with a certain woman, and the children, born of that relation, were that couple's own children. These pairing families increased in the measure in which the marriage inhibitions, that flowed from the gentile constitution, hampered marriage, and in which the above mentioned economic grounds rendered desirable this new form of family life. Personal property accorded ill with the old condition of things, which rested upon the community of goods. Both _rank_ and _occupation_ now decidedly favored the necessity for the choice of a domicile. The production of merchandise begot commerce with neighboring and foreign nations; and that necessitated money. It was man who led and controlled this development. His private interests had, accordingly, no longer any real points of contact with the old gentile organization, whose interests often stood in opposition to his own. Accordingly, the importance of the gentile organization sank ever more. The gens finally became little more than the center of the religious functions for the family, its economic significance was gone. The complete dissolution of gentile organization became only a question of time. With the dissolution of the old gentile organization, the influence and position of woman sank rapidly. The mother-right vanished; the father-right stepped into its shoes. Man now became a private property-holder: he had an interest in children, whom he could look upon as legitimate, and whom he made the heirs of his property: hence _he forced upon woman the command of abstinence from intercourse with other men_. At the same time man assumed the right of taking unto himself, beside his own wife, or several of them, as many concubines as his condition allowed; and the children of these concubines were likewise treated as legitimate. On this head we find two valuable illustrations in the Bible. In I Book of Moses, chapter 16, verses 1 and 2, we read: "Now Sarai, Abram's wife, bare him no children: and she had a hand-maid, an Egyptian, whose name was Hagar. And Sarai said unto Abram, Behold now, the Lord has restrained me from bearing: I pray thee, go in unto my maid; it may be that I may obtain children by her. And Abram hearkened to the voice of Sarai." The second remarkable illustration is found in I Book of Moses 30, 1 and sequel: "And when Rachel saw that she bare Jacob no children, Rachel envied her sister; and said unto Jacob, Give me children, or else I die. And Jacob's anger was kindled against Rachel; and he said, Am I in God's stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb? and she said, Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees that I may also have children by her. And she gave him Bilhah her handmaid to wife: and Jacob went in unto her." Jacob, accordingly, had not only the daughters of Laban, two sisters, simultaneously for wives, they also helped him to their maids, all of which, according to the usage of the times, was wholly free from taint of impropriety. The two principal wives he had bought, as is well known, by serving Laban seven years for each. The purchase of a wife was at the time common among the Jews, but, along with the purchase of wives, whom they were compelled to take from among their own people, they practiced on an extensive scale the rape of women from among the peoples that they conquered. The Benjaminites raped the daughters of Silos.[8] In such wars, it was originally customary that all the men who fell into the hands of the vanquisher were killed. The captured woman became a slave, a concubine. Nevertheless, she could be raised to the dignity of a legitimate wife so soon as she had fulfilled certain conditions of the Jews: she had to cut her hair and nails; to lay off the dress she was captured in, and exchange it for another that was given her; thereupon she had to mourn a whole month for her father and mother: she was, in a manner to be dead to her own people, become estranged from them: then could she climb into the conjugal bed. The largest number of wives had King Solomon, as is known. According to Kings 1, 11, not less than 700 wives and 300 concubines are ascribed to him. With the rule of the father-right and descent in the male line in the Jewish gentile organization, the daughters were excluded from inheritance. Later this was, however, changed, at least when a father left no sons. This appears from IV Book of Moses 27, 2-8, where it is reported that, as Zelaphehad died without sons, and his daughter complained bitterly that she was to be excluded from her father's inheritance, which was to fall back to the tribe of Joseph, Moses decided that, in that case, the daughters should inherit. But seeing that she contemplated marrying, according to custom, in another tribe, the tribe of Joseph complained that thereby the inheritance would be lost to it. Thereupon Moses decided further (4, 36) that heiresses, though free in the choice of a husband, were bound to marry in the tribe of their own father. For the sake of property, the old ordinance was overthrown. Similarly, in Athens, did Solon decree that an heiress had to marry her nearest male agnate, even though both belonged to the same gens, and, according to former law, such a marriage was forbidden. Solon ordered also that a property-holder was not compelled as thitherto, to leave his property to his own gens in case he died childless; but that he could by testament constitute any one else his heir. From all this it is obvious:--man does not rule property, property rules him, and becomes his master. With the rule of private property, the subjection of woman to man, her bondage was sealed. Then came the time of disregard, even of contempt for woman. _The reign of the mother-right implied communism; equality for all; the rise of the father-right implied the reign of private property, and, with it, the oppression and enslavement of woman._ It is difficult to trace in detail the manner in which the change was achieved. A knowledge of the events is lacking. Neither did this _first great revolution_ in the lap of mankind come into force simultaneously among the ancient nations; nor yet is it probable that it was accomplished everywhere in the same manner. Among the peoples of old Greece, it was Athens where the new order of things first prevailed. Frederick Engels is of the opinion that this great revolution was accomplished peacefully, and that, after all the conditions for the new rights were at hand, it only required a simple vote in the gens in order to rear the father in the place of the mother-right. Bachofen, on the contrary, grounding his opinion upon more or less reliable information from the old writers, holds that the women offered strong resistance to this social transformation. He, for instance, sees in the legends of the Amazonian Kingdoms, which re-appear under manifold variations in the old history of Asia and the Orient, and also have turned up in South America and in China, proofs for the struggle and resistance which the women offered to the new order. We leave that as it may be. With the rule of man, women lost their position in the community; they were excluded from the councils and from all leading influence. Man exacts conjugal fidelity from her, but claims exemption for himself. If she violates that, she is guilty of the most serious deception that can afflict the new citizen; she thereby introduces into his house stranger's children as heirs of his property. Hence, among all ancient nations, the breach of conjugal fidelity on the part of woman is punished with death or slavery. Notwithstanding women were thus removed from their position as leaders, the customs connected with the old system of morals continued for centuries to sway the public mind, although the meaning of the surviving customs was gradually lost to the people. It is only in modern times that pains are being taken to inquire into the original meaning of these old customs. In Greece, for instance, it remained a religious practice that Greek women prayed only to goddesses for advice, help and favors. Likewise, the yearly recurring celebration of the Thesmophoria owed its origin to the days of mother-right. Even in later days, the women of Greece celebrated this festival for five days in honor of Demeter; and no man was allowed to be present. It was similarly in old Rome with a festival in honor of Ceres. Both Demeter and Ceres were considered goddesses of fertility. In Germany also such festivals, once customary in the heathen days of Frigga, were held, deep into the Middle Ages, Frigga being considered the goddess of fertility among the old Germans. According to the narratives, women gave a free reign to their frolicsomeness on the occasions of these festivals. Also here men were excluded from participation in the festival. In Athens, where, as already stated, the mother-right made earliest room for the father-right, but, as it seems, under strong opposition from the women, the transition is portrayed touchingly and in all the fullness of its tragic import, in the "Eumenides" of Aeschylus. The story is this: Agamemnon, King of Mycene, and husband of Clytemnestra, sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia, upon the command of the oracle on his expedition against Troy. The mother, indignant at the sacrifice of her daughter, takes, during her husband's absence, Aegysthos for her consort. Upon Agamemnon's return to Mycene, after an absence of many years, he is murdered by Aegysthos with the connivance of Clytemnestra. Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, avenges the murder of his father, at the instigation of Apollo and Athene, by slaying his mother and Aegysthos. The Erinnyes, as representatives of the old law, pursue Orestes on account of the murder of his mother. Apollo and Athene, the latter of whom, according to mythology, is motherless--she leaped full-armed out of the head of Jupiter--represent the new law, and defend Orestes. The issue is carried to the Areopagus, before which the following dialogue ensues. The two hostile principles come here into dramatic vividness of expression: Erinnyes--The prophet bade thee be a matricide? Orestes--And to this hour I am well content withal. Erinnyes--Thoul't change that tune, when judgment seizes thee. Orestes--My father from his tomb will take my part; I fear not. Erinnyes--Ay, rely on dead men's aid, When guilty of matricide! Orestes--She, that is slain, Was doubly tainted. Erinnyes--How? Inform the court. Orestes--She slew her wedded lord, and slew my sire. Erinnyes--Death gave her quittance, then. But thou yet livest. Orestes--And while she lived, why did you not pursue her? Erinnyes--No tie of blood bound her to whom she slew. Orestes--But I was tied by blood-affinity To her who bare me? Erinnyes--Else, thou accursed one, How nourished she thy life within her womb? Wouldst thou renounce the holiest bond of all? The Erinnyes, it will be noticed, recognize no rights on the part of the father and the husband; to them there exists only the right of the mother. That Clytemnestra slew her husband is indifferent to them; on the other hand, they demand punishment for the matricide, committed by Orestes: in killing his mother he had committed the worst crime imaginable under the old gentile order. Apollo, on the contrary, stands on the opposite principle. Commissioned by Zeus to avenge the murder of his father, he had led Orestes to the murder of his own mother. Apollo now defends Orestes' action before the judges, saying: That scruple likewise I can satisfy. She who is called the mother of the child Is not its parent, but the nurse of seed Implanted in begetting. He that sows Is author of the shoot, which she, if Heaven Prevent not, keeps as in a garden-ground. In proof whereof, to show that fatherhood May be without the mother, I appeal To Pallas, daughter of Olympian Zeus, In present witness here. Behold a plant, Not moulded in the darkness of the womb, Yet nobler than all scions of Heaven's stock. According to Apollo, the act of begetting confers the superior right; whereas, according to the views in force until then, the mother, who gives to the child her blood and its life, was esteemed the sole possessor of the child, while the man, the father of her child, was regarded a stranger. Hence the Erinnyes reply to the strange notions of Apollo: Thou didst lead astray Those primal goddesses with draughts of wine, O'erturning ordinance. Young, thou wouldst override our ancient right. The judges, thereupon, make ready for the sentence. One half stand by the old, one half by the new right; a tie is threatened; thereupon Athene seizes the ballot from the altar and dropping it in the urn, says: To me it falls to give my judgment last. Here openly I give it for Orestes. No mother bore me. To the masculine side For all save marriage my whole heart is given,-- In all and everything the father's child. So little care I for a woman's death, That slew her lord, the guardian of her home. Now though the votes be even, Orestes wins. The new right won. Marriage with the father as head, had overpowered the gyneocracy. Another legend represents the downfall of the mother-right in Athens this way: "Under the reign of Kekrops, a double miracle happened. There broke forth simultaneously out of the earth an oil-tree, and at another place water. The frightened king sent to Delphi to interrogate the Oracle upon the meaning of these happenings. The answer was: 'The oil-tree stands for Minerva, the water for Neptune; it is now with the citizens after which of the two deities they wish to name their city.' Kekrops called together the assembly of the people in which men and women enjoyed the right of suffrage. The men voted for Neptune, the women for Minerva; and as the women had a majority of one, Minerva won. Thereupon Neptune was angered and he caused the sea to wash over the territory of the Athenians. In order to soothe the wrath of the god, the Athenians placed a threefold punishment upon their women:--_they were to forfeit the suffrage, children were no longer to carry their mother's name, and they themselves were no longer to be called Athenian women_."[9] As in Athens, the transition from the mother to the father-right was everywhere achieved so soon as a certain height was reached in social development. Woman is crowded into the house; she is isolated; she is assigned special quarters--the gynekonitis--, in which she lives; she is even excluded from intercourse with the male visitors of the house. That, in fact, was the principal object of her isolation. This change finds its expression as early as the Odyssey. Telemachus forbids Penelope's, his mother's, presence among the suitors. He, the son, orders his mother: But come now, go to thy bower, and deal with such things as ye can; With the sock and the loom be busy, and thine handmaids order and teach, That they speed the work and the wearing; but for men is the word and the speech; For all, but for me the chiefest, for here am I the might and the power. Such was the doctrine already common in Greece at that time. It went even further. Woman, even if a widow, stands so completely under the rule of the nearest male relative, that she no longer has even the choice of a husband. The suitors, tired of long waiting, due to the cunning of Penelope, address themselves to Telemachus through the mouth of Antinous, saying: But for thee, do we the suitors this answer to thee show, That thou in thy soul may'st know it, and that all the folk may know, _Send thou thy mother away, and bid her a wedding to gain_ _With whomso her father willeth, of whomso her heart may be fain_. It is at an end with the freedom of woman. If she leaves the house, she must veil herself not to awaken the desires of another man. In the Orient, where, due to the warm climate, sexual passion is strongest, this method of seclusion is carried even to-day to extreme lengths. Athens becomes in this a pattern for the ancient nations. Woman shares, indeed, her husband's bed, but not his table; she does not address him by name, but "Sir;" she is his maid-servant; she was allowed to appear nowhere openly; on the street she was ever veiled and clad with greatest simplicity. If she committed adultery, she paid for the trespass, according to the laws of Solon, with her life, or with her freedom. The husband could sell her for a slave. The position of the Greek woman at the time when Greece was rushing to the zenith of her development comes into plastic expression in the "Medea" of Euripedes. She complains: Ay, of all living and of all reasoning things Are women the most miserable race: Who first needs buy a husband at great price, To take him then for owner of our lives: For this ill is more keen than common ills. And of essays most perilous is this, Whether one good or evil do we take. For evil-famed to women is divorce, Nor can one spurn a husband. She, so brought Beneath new rule and wont, had surely need To be a prophetess, unless at home She learned the likeliest prospect with her spouse. And if, we having aptly searched out this, A husband house with us not savagely Drawing in the yoke, ours is an envied life; But if not, most to be desired is death. And if a man grow sick to herd indoors, He, going forth, stays his heart's weariness, Turning him to some friend or natural peer; But we perforce to one sole being look. But, say they, we, while they fight with the spear, Lead in our homes a life undangerous: Judging amiss; for I would liefer thrice Bear brunt of arms than once bring forth a child. Wholly otherwise stood matters for the men. Although with an eye to the begetting of legitimate heirs for his property, he imposed upon woman strict abstinence from other men, he was, nevertheless, not inclined to lay a corresponding abstinence upon himself. Hetairism sprang up. Women distinguished for their beauty and intellect, and who, as a rule, were aliens, preferred a free life in intimate intercourse with men, to the slavery of marriage. Nothing objectionable was seen in that. The names and fame of these hetairae, who held intimate intercourse with the leading men of Greece, and participated in their learned discourses, as well as in their revels, has come down to our own days; whereas the names of the legitimate wives are mostly forgotten and lost. Thus the handsome Aspasia was the intimate friend of the celebrated Pericles, who later made her his legitimate wife; the name of Phryne became in later days the generic designation of those women that were to be had for money. Phryne held intimate relations with Hyperides, and she stood for Praxiteles, one of the first sculptors of Greece, as the model for his Aphrodite. Danae was the sweetheart of Epicurus, Archeanassa that of Plato. Other celebrated hetairae, whose names have reached our days, were Lais of Corinth, Gnathanea, etc. There is no celebrated Greek, who had no intercourse with hetairae. It belonged to the style of life of distinguished Greeks. Demosthenes, the great orator, described in his oration against Neara, the sexual life of the rich men of Athens in these words: "_We marry a woman in order to obtain legitimate children, and to have a faithful warder in the house; we keep concubines for our service and daily care; and hetairae for the enjoyment of love._" The wife was, accordingly, only an apparatus for the production of children; a faithful dog, that watched the house. The master of the house, on the contrary, lived according to his _bon plaisir_, as he willed. In order to satisfy the demand for venal women, particularly with younger males, there arose that which was unknown under the rule of the mother-right,--_prostitution_. Prostitution distinguishes itself from the free sexual intercourse that customs and social institutions rendered a matter of course under primitive conditions, and, accordingly, freed from objectionableness, in that the woman sells her body, either to one man or to several, for material benefit. Prostitution, therefore, exists so soon as woman makes a trade of her charms. Solon, who formulated the new law for Athens, and is, consequently, esteemed the founder of the new legal status, was also the founder of the public houses for women, the "deikterion,"--official houses of prostitution--, and the price to all the customers was the same. According to Philemon it amounted to one obolus, about four cents of our money. Like the temples with the Greeks and Romans, and the Christian churches in Middle Ages, the deikterion was inviolable: it stood under the protection of the Government. Until about a hundred and fifty years before our reckoning, the Temple of Jerusalem also was the usual place of gathering for the _filles de joie_. For the benefit that Solon bestowed upon the Athenian male population, in founding the deikterion, he was praised in song by one of his contemporaries in these words: "Hail to you, Solon! You bought public women for the benefit of the city, for the benefit of the morality of a city that is full of vigorous young men, who, in the absence of your wise institution, would give themselves over to the disturbing annoyance of the better women." We shall see that, at the close of the nineteenth century, justification is sought for the regulation of houses of prostitution by Government, and for the necessity of prostitution itself, upon the identical grounds. Thus, actions, committed by men, were recognized by legislation as a natural right, while, committed by women, were held to be shameful, and a serious crime. As is well known, even to-day not few are the men who prefer the company of a pretty female sinner to that of their own wives, and who not infrequently belong to the "Props of the State," the "Pillars of Order," and are "guardians of the sanctity of marriage and the family." True enough, it seems, that the Greek women often revenged themselves upon their marital-lords for the yoke placed upon them. If prostitution is the supplement of monogamy, on the one side, adultery among women and the cuckoldry of men is its supplement, on the other. Among the Greek dramatic poets, Euripides is the woman-hater: he loved to make women the object of attacks in his dramas. What all he twitted them with appears best from the speech that a Greek woman flings at him in the "Thesmophoria" of Aristophanes. She says among other things: With what slanderous dirt does not he (Euripides) besmirch us? When does the slanderer's tongue hold its peace? In short: Wherever there is an audience, tragedies or choruses, There we are called corner-loafers, anglers for men, Fond of the wine-cup, treasonable arch-gossips, Not a good hair is left us; we are the plague of men. Therefore, soon as our husbands return to us home from the benches,[10] Eyes of suspicion upon us they cast, and look about Whether a place of concealment conceal not a rival. Whereupon, none of the things, at first by us done, Now is allowed us: Such stuff against us Does he in the men's heads stick, that, if a woman Is weaving a garland, she is held to be in love; or when, While hustling the household to keep, something drops, Forthwith the husband inquires: "Whom are those fragments meant for? Plainly, they are meant for the guest from Corinthos." We can understand that this ready-tongued Greek woman should serve the assailer of her sex in such manner; nevertheless, Euripides could not very well have made these accusations, nor could he have found credence with the men, if they knew not but too well that the accusations were justified. To judge by the concluding sentences of this address, the custom--met later in Germany and many other countries--had not yet been naturalized in Greece, that the host placed his own wife or daughter at the disposal of his guest for the night. Murner writes on this custom, prevalent in Holland as late as the fifteenth century, in these words: "It is the custom in the Netherlands, when the host has a dear guest, that he lets his wife sleep with him on faith."[11] The increasing struggles between the classes in the several states of Greece, and the sad state of many of the smaller communities, gave occasion for Plato to inquire into the best constitution and the best institutions for the State. In his "Republic," set up by him as ideal, he demands, at least for the first class of his citizens, the watchers, the complete equality of woman. Women are to participate in the exercises of arms, the same as the men, and are to fill the same duties as these, only they are to attend to the lighter ones, "owing to the weakness of the sex." He maintains that the natural inclinations are equally distributed among the two sexes, only that woman is in all matters weaker than man. Furthermore, the women are to be common to the men, and vice versa; likewise are the children to be common, "so that neither the father may know his child, nor the child his father."[12] Aristotle, in his "Politics," is satisfied with less. Woman should have a free hand in the selection of her husband, but she is to be subordinate to him; nevertheless, she should have the right "to give good advice." Thucydides expresses an opinion that meets with the applause of all modern Philistines. He says: "That wife deserves the highest praise of whom, outside of her home, neither good nor bad is heard." With such views, respect for woman was bound to sink to a low level; fear of over-population even led to the avoidance of intimate intercourse with her. Unnatural means of satisfying sexual desires were resorted to. The Greek states were cities with small territories, unable to supply the usual sustenance to a population in excess of a given number. Hence the fear of over-population caused Aristotle to recommend to the men abstinence from their wives, and pederasty, instead. Before him, Socrates had praised pederasty as the sign of a higher culture. In the end, the most promising men of Greece became adherents of this unnatural passion. Regard for women sank all the deeper. There were now houses for male prostitutes, as there were for female. In such a social atmosphere, it was natural for Thucydides to utter the saying that woman was worse than the storm-lashed ocean's wave, than the fire's glow, than the cascade of the wild mountain torrent. "If it is a God that invented woman, wherever, he may be, let him know, that he is the unhallowed cause of the greatest evil."[13] The male population of Greece having become addicted to pederasty, the female population fell into the opposite extreme: it took to the love of members of its own sex. This happened especially with the women of the island of Lesbos, whence this aberration was, and still continues to be named, "Lesbian love," for it has not yet died out: it survives among us. The poetess Sappho, "the Lesbian nightingale," who lived about six hundred years before our reckoning, is considered the leading representative of this form of love. Her passion is glowingly expressed in her hymn to Aphrodite, whom she implores: "Glittering-throned, undying Aphrodite, Wile-weaving daughter of high Zeus, I pray thee, Tame not my soul with heavy woe, dread mistress, Nay, nor with anguish." A still more passionate sensuousness is attested in her hymn to the handsome Atthis. While in Athens, along with the rest of Greece, the father-right ruled, Sparta, the rival for supremacy with Athens, still continued under the mother-right, a condition that had become wholly foreign to most Greeks. The story runs that one day a Greek asked a Spartan what punishment was meted out in Sparta to the adulterer. He answered: "Stranger, among us there are no adulterers." "But if there should be any?" "For punishment," the Spartan replied, sarcastically, "he must donate an ox, so large as to be able to reach over Taygetus with his head, and drink out of Eurotas." Upon the startled question, put by the stranger, "How can an ox be so large?" the Spartan answered laughing: "How is it possible that there could be an adulterer in Sparta?" At the same time the self-consciousness of the Spartan woman appears in the proud answer given a stranger by the wife of Leonidas. On his saying to her: "You female Lacedaemonians are the only women who rule over your men," she answered: "So are we the only women who bring men into the world." The free condition of women under the mother-right promoted her beauty, raised her pride, her dignity and her self-reliance. The judgment of all ancient writers is to the effect that, during the period of the gyneocracy, these qualities were highly developed among women. The constrained condition that later supervened, necessarily had its evil effect upon them. The difference appears even in the garb of the two periods. The garb of the Doric woman hung loose from her shoulders; it left the arms free, and thighs exposed: it is the garb of Diana, who is represented as free and bold in our museums. The Ionian garb, on the contrary, concealed the body and hampered its motion. The garb of woman to-day is, far more than usually realized, a sign of her dependence and helplessness. The style of woman's dress amongst most peoples, down to our own days, renders her awkward, forces on her a sense of weakness, and makes her timid; and this, finally, finds its expression in her attitude and character. The custom among the Spartans of letting the girls go naked until marriageable age--a custom that the climate allowed--contributed considerably, in the opinion of an ancient writer, to impart to them a taste for simplicity and for attention to decency. Nor was there in the custom, according to the views of those days, aught offensive to decorum, or inciting to lust. Furthermore, the girls participated in all the bodily exercises, just as the boys, and thus there was reared a vigorous, proud, self-conscious race, a race that was conscious of its own merit, as proved by the answer of Leonidas' wife to the stranger. In intimate connection with the mother-right, after it had ceased to be a ruling social principle, stood certain customs, which modern writers, ignorant of their meaning, designate as "prostitution." In Babylon, it was a religious duty with the maid, who had reached puberty, to appear once in the temple of Mylitta in order to offer her maidenhood as a sacrifice, by surrendering herself to some man. Similarly happened in the Serapeum of Memphis; in Armenia, in honor of the goddess Anaitis; in Cyprus; in Tyrus and Sidon, in honor of Astarte or Aphrodite. The festivals of Isis among the Egyptians served similar customs. This sacrifice of virginity was demanded in order to atone with the goddess for the exclusive surrender of woman to one man in marriage:--"Not that she may wilt in the arms of a single man is woman arrayed by nature with all the charms at its command."[14] The continued favor of the goddess had to be purchased by the sacrifice of virginity to a stranger. It was likewise in line with the old idea that the Lybian maids earned their dower by prostituting their bodies. In accord with the mother-right, these women were sexually free during their unmarried status; and the men saw so little objection in these pickings, that those were taken by them for wives who had been most in demand. It was thus also among the Thracians, in the days of Herodotus: "They do not watch the maidens, but leave them full freedom to associate with whom they please. The women, however, they watch strictly. They buy them from their parents for large sums." Celebrated were the Hierodulae of the temple of Aphrodite at Corinth, where always more than one thousand maidens were gathered, and constituted a chief point of attraction for the men of Greece. Of the daughter of King Cheops of Egypt, the legend relates that she had a pyramid built out of the proceeds of prostitution of her charms. Conditions, similar to these, prevail down to now, on the Mariana, the Philippine and the Polynesian islands; according to Waitz, also among several African tribes. Another custom, prevalent till late on the Balearic islands, and indicative of the right of all men to a woman, was that, on the wedding night, the male kin had access to the bride in order of seniority. The bridegroom came last; he then took her as wife into his own possession. This custom has been changed among other people so that the priest or the tribal chiefs (kings) exercise the privilege over the bride, as representatives of the men of the tribe. On Malabar, the Caimars hire patamars (priests) to deflower their wives.... The chief priest (Namburi) is in duty bound to render this service to the king (Zamorin) at his wedding, and the king rewards him with fifty gold pieces.[15] In Further India, and on several islands of the great ocean, it is sometimes the priests and sometimes the tribal chiefs who undertake the function.[16] The same happens in Senegambia, where the tribal chief exercises, as a duty of his office, the deflowering of maids, and receives therefor a present. Again, with other peoples, the custom was, and continues here and yonder, that the deflowering of a maid, sometimes even of a child only a few months old, is done by means of images of deities, fashioned expressly for this purpose. It may also be accepted as certain that the "jus primae noctis" (the right of the first night), prevalent in Germany and all Europe until late in the Middle Ages, owes its origin to the same tradition, as Frederick Engels observes. The landlord, who, as master of his dependents and serfs, looked upon himself as their chief, exercised the right of the head of the tribe, a right that he considered had passed over to himself as the arbiter of their lives and existence. Echoes of the mother-right are further detected in the singular custom among some South American tribes, that, instead of the lying-in woman, the man goes to bed, there acts like a woman in labor, and is tended by the wife. The custom implies that the father recognizes the new born child as his own. By imitating the pains of child-birth, the man fills the fiction that the birth is also his work; that he, therefore, has a right to the child, who, according to the former custom, belonged to the mother and the mother's gens, respectively. The custom is said to have also maintained itself among the Basques, who must be looked upon as a people of primitive usages and customs. Likewise is the custom said to prevail among several mountain tribes in China. It prevailed until not long since in Corsica. In Greece likewise did woman become an article of purchase. So soon as she stepped into the house of her marital lord, she ceased to exist for her family. This was symbolically expressed by burning before the door the handsomely decked wagon which took her to the house of her husband. Among the Ostiaks of Siberia, to this day, the father sells his daughter: he chaffers with the representative of the bridegroom about the price to be paid. Likewise among several African tribes, the same as in the days of Jacob, the custom is that a man who courts a maid, enters in the service of his future mother-in-law. Even with us, marriage by purchase has not died out: it prevails in bourgeois society worse than ever. Marriage for money, almost everywhere customary among the ruling classes, is nothing other than marriage by purchase. Indeed, the marriage gift, which in all civilized countries the bridegroom makes to the bride, is but a symbol of the purchase of the wife as property. Along with marriage by purchase, there was the custom of marriage by rape. The rape of women was a customary practice, not alone among the ancient Jews, but everywhere in antiquity. It is met with among almost all nations. The best known historic instance is the rape of the Sabine women by the Romans. The rape of women was an easy remedy where women ran short, as, according to the legend, happened to the early Romans; or where polygamy was the custom, as everywhere in the Orient. There it assumed large proportions during the supremacy of the Arabs, from the seventh to the twelfth century. Symbolically, the rape of woman still occurs, for instance among the Araucans of South Chile. While the friends of the bridegroom are negotiating with the father of the bride, the bridegroom steals with his horse into the neighborhood of the house, and seeks to capture the bride. So soon as he catches her, he throws her upon his horse, and makes off with her to the woods. The men, women and children thereupon raise a great hue and cry, and seek to prevent the escape. But when the bridegroom has reached the thick of the woods, the marriage is considered consummated. This holds good also when the abduction takes place against the will of the parents. Similar customs prevail among the peoples of Australia. Among ourselves, the custom of "wedding trips" still reminds us of the former rape of the wife: the bride is carried off from her domestic flock. On the other hand, the exchange of rings is a reminiscence of the subjection and enchainment of the woman to the man. The custom originated in Rome. The bride received an iron ring from her husband as a sign of her bondage to him. Later the ring was made of gold; much later the exchange of rings was introduced, as a sign of mutual union. The old family ties of the gens had, accordingly, lost their foundation through the development of the conditions of production, and through the rule of private property. Upon the abolition of the gens, grounded on mother-right, the gens, grounded on the father-right first took its place, although not for long, and with materially weakened functions. Its task was mainly to attend to the common religious affairs and to the ceremonial of funerals: to safeguard the mutual obligation of protection and of help against violence: to enforce the right, and, in certain cases, the duty of marrying in the gens, in cases when rich heiresses or female orphans were concerned. The gens, furthermore, administered the still existing common property. But the segmentation of handicraft from agriculture; the ever wider expansion of commerce; the founding of cities, rendered necessary by both of these; the conquest of booty and prisoners of war, the latter of which directly affected the household,--all of these tore to shreds the conditions and bonds of eld. Handicraft had gradually subdivided itself into a larger number of separate trades--weaving, pottery, iron-forging, the preparation of arms, house and shipbuilding, etc. Accordingly, it pushed toward another organization. The ever further introduction of slavery, the admittance of strangers into the community,--these were all so many new and additional elements that rendered the old constitution of society ever more impossible. Along with private property and the personal right of inheritance, class distinctions and class contrasts came into existence. Rich property-owners drew together against those who owned less, or nothing. The former sought to get into their own hands the public offices of the new commonwealth, and to make them hereditary. Money, now become necessary, created thitherto unknown forms of indebtedness. Wars against enemies from without, and conflicting interests within, as well as the various interests and relations which agriculture, handicraft and commerce mutually produced rendered necessary complicated rules of right, they demanded special organs to guard the orderly movement of the social machinery, and to settle disputes. The same held good for the relations of master and slave, creditor and debtor. A power, accordingly, became necessary to supervise, lead, regulate and harmonize all these relations, with authority to protect, and, when needed, to punish. _Thus rose the State, the product, accordingly of the conflicting interests that sprang up in the new social order._ Its administration naturally fell into the hands of those who had the liveliest interest in its establishment, and who, in virtue of their social power, possessed the greatest influence,--the rich. Aristocracy of property and democracy confronted each other, accordingly, even there where externally complete equality of political rights existed. Under the mother-right, there was no written law. The relations were simple, and custom was held sacred. Under the new, and much more complicated order, written law was one of the most important requirements; and special organs became necessary to administer it. In the measure that the legal relations and legal conditions gained in intricacy, a special class of people gathered shape, who made the study of the law their special vocation, and who finally had a special interest in rendering the law ever more complicated. Then arose the men learned in the laws, the jurists, who, due to the importance of the statutory law to the whole of society, rose to influential social rank. The new system of rights found in the course of time its classic expression in the Roman State, whence the influence that Roman law exercises down to the present. The institution of the State is, accordingly, the necessary result of a social order, that, standing upon the higher plane of the subdivision of labor, is broken up into a large number of occupations, animated by different, frequently conflicting, interests, and hence has the oppression of the weaker for a consequence. This fact was recognized even by an Arabian tribe, the Nabateans, who, according to Diodorus, established the regulation not to sow, not to plant, to drink no wine, and to build no houses, but to live in tents, because if those things were done, _they could be easily compelled to obey by a superior power_ (the power of the State). Likewise among the Rachebites, the descendants of the father-in-law of Moses, there existed similar prescriptions.[17] Aye, the whole Mosaic system of laws is aimed at _preventing the Jews from moving out of an agricultural state, because otherwise, so the legislators feared, their democratic-communistic society would go under_. Hence the selection of the "Promised Land" in a region bounded, on one side, by a not very accessible mountain range, the Lebanon; on the other side, South and East, by but slightly fertile stretches of land, partly by deserts;--a region, accordingly, that rendered isolation possible. Hence came the keeping of the Jews away from the sea, which favored commerce, colonization and the accumulation of wealth; hence the rigid laws concerning seclusion from other peoples, the severe regulations against foreign marriages, the poor laws, the agrarian laws, the jubileum,--all of them provisions calculated to prevent the accumulation of great wealth by the individual. The Jewish people were to be kept in permanent disability ever to become the builders of a real State. Hence it happens that the tribal organization, which rested upon the gentile order, remained in force with them till its complete dissolution, and continues to affect them even now. It seems that the Latin tribes, which took a hand in the founding of Rome, had long passed beyond the stage of the mother-right. Hence Rome was built from the start as a State. The women that they needed they captured, as the legend tells us, from the tribe of the Sabines, and they called themselves after their Sabine wives,--Quirites. Even in later years, the Roman citizens were addressed in the Forum as Quirites. "Populus Romanus" stood for the free population of Rome in general; but "Populus Romanus quiritium" expressed the ancestry and quality of the Roman citizen. The Roman gens was of father-right stamp. The children inherited as consanguineous heirs; if there were no children, the relatives of the male line inherited; were none of these in existence, then the property reverted to the gens. By marriage, woman lost her right to inherit her father's property and that of his brothers. She had stepped out of her gens: neither she nor her children could inherit from her father or his brothers: otherwise the inheritance would be lost to the paternal gens. The division in gentes, phratries and tribes constituted in Rome for centuries the foundation of the military organization, and also of the exercise of the rights of citizenship. But with the decay of the paternal gentes and the decline of their significance, conditions shaped themselves more favorably for woman. She could not only inherit, but had the right to administer her own fortune. She was, accordingly, far more favorably situated than her Greek sister. The freer position that, despite all legal impediments, she gradually knew how to conquer, caused the elder Cato, born 234 before our reckoning, to complain: "If, after the example of his ancestors, every head of a family kept his wife in proper subjection, we would not have so much public bother with the whole sex."[18] So long as the father lived, he held in Rome the guardianship over his daughter, even if she were married, unless he appointed another guardian himself. When the father died, the nearest male of kin, even though declared unqualified as an agnate, came in as guardian. The guardian had the right at any time to transfer the guardianship to any third person that he pleased. Accordingly, before the law, the Roman woman had no will of her own. The nuptial forms were various, and in the course of centuries underwent manifold alterations. The most solemn nuptials were celebrated before the High Priest, in the presence of at least ten witnesses. At the occasion, the bridal pair, in token of their union, partook together from a cake made of flour, salt and water. As will be noticed, a ceremony is here celebrated, that bears great resemblance to the breaking of the sacramental wafer at the Christian communion. A second form of nuptials consisted in possession. The marriage was considered accomplished if, with the consent of her father or guardian, a woman lived with the chosen man a whole year under one roof. A third form of nuptials was a sort of mutual purchase, both sides exchanging coins, and the promise to be man and wife. Already at the time of Cicero[19] free divorce for both sides was generally established; it was even debated whether the announcement of the divorce was necessary. The "lex Julia de adulteriis," however, prescribed that the divorce was to be solemnly proclaimed. This decree was made for the reason that women, who committed adultery, and were summoned to answer the charge, often claimed to have been divorced. Justinian, the Christian[20] forbade free divorce, unless both sides desired to retire to a monastery. His successor, Justinian II, however, found himself obliged to allow it again. With the growing power and rising wealth of Rome, mad-brained vices and excesses took the place of the former severity of manners. Rome became the center from which debauchery, riotous luxury and sensuous refinements radiated over the whole of the then civilized world. The excesses took--especially during the time of the Emperors, and, to a great extent, through the Emperors themselves--forms that only insanity could suggest. Men and women vied with one another in vice. The number of houses of prostitution became ever larger, and, hand in hand with these, the "Greek love" (pederasty) spread itself ever more among the male population. At times, the number of young men in Rome who prostituted themselves was larger than that of the female prostitutes. "The hetairae appeared, surrounded by their admirers, in great pomp on the streets, promenades, the circus and theatres, often carried by negroes upon litters, where, holding a mirror in their hands, and sparkling with ornaments and precious stones, they lay outstretched, nude, fan-carrying slaves standing by them, and surrounded by a swarm of boys, eunuchs and flute-players; grotesque dwarfs closed the procession." These excesses assumed such proportions in the Roman Empire that they became a danger to the Empire itself. The example of the men was followed by the women. There were women, Seneca reports, who counted the years, not as was the usage, after the consuls, but after the number of their husbands. Adultery was general; and, in order that the women might escape the severe punishments prescribed for the offense, they, and among them the leading dames of Rome, caused themselves to be entered in the registers of the Aediles as prostitutes. Hand in hand with these excesses, civil wars and the latifundia system, celibacy and childlessness increased in such measure that the number of Roman citizens and of patricians ran down considerably. Hence in the year 16 B. C., Augustus issued the so-called Julian Law,[21] which offered prizes for the birth of children, and imposed penalties for celibacy upon the Roman citizens and patricians. He who had children had precedence in rank over the childless and unmarried. Bachelors could accept no inheritance, except from their own nearest kin. The childless could only inherit one-half; the rest fell to the State. Women, who could be taxed with adultery, had to surrender one-half of their dower to the abused husband. Thereupon there were men who married out of speculation on the adultery of their wives. This caused Plutarch to observe: "The Romans marry, not to obtain heirs, but to inherit." Still later the Julian Law was made severer. Tiberius decreed that no woman, whose grandfather, father or husband had been or still was a Roman Knight, could prostitute herself for money. Married women, who caused themselves to be entered in the registers of prostitutes, were condemned to banishment from Italy as adulteresses. Of course, there were no such punishments for the men. Moreover, as Juvenal reports, even the murder of husbands by poison was a frequent occurrence in the Rome of his day--the first half of the first century before Christ. FOOTNOTES: [1] Bachofen's book appeared in 1861 under the title, "Das Mutterrecht" (Mother-right) "Eine Untersuchung ueber die Gynaekokratie der Alten Welt nach ihrer religioesen und rechtlichen Natur," Stuttgart, Krais & Hoffmann. Morgan's fundamental work, "Ancient Society," appeared in a German translation in 1891, J. H. W. Dietz, Stuttgart. From the same publisher there appeared in German: "The Origin of the Family, of Private Property and the State, in support of Lewis H. Morgan's Investigations," by Frederick Engels. Fourth enlarged edition, 1892. Also "Die Verwandtschafts-Organisationen der Australneger. Ein Beitrag zur Entwickelungsgeschichte der Familie," by Heinrich Cunow, 1894. [The perspective into which the Pleiades of distinguished names are thrown in the text just above is apt to convey an incorrect impression, and the impression is not materially corrected in the subsequent references to them. Neither Bachofen, nor yet Tylor, McLennan or Lubbock contributed to the principles that now are canons in ethnology. They were not even path-finders, valuable though their works are. Bachofen collected, in his work entitled "Das Mutterrecht," the gleanings of vast and tireless researches among the writings of the ancients, with an eye to female authority. Subsequently, and helping themselves more particularly to the more recent contributions to archeology, that partly dealt with living aborigines, Tylor, McLennan and Lubbock produced respectively, "Early History of Mankind;" "Primitive Marriage;" and "Pre-Historic Times" and "Origin of Civilization." These works, though partly theoretic, yet are mainly descriptive. By an effort of genius--like the wood-pecker, whose instinct tells it the desired worm is beneath the bark and who pecks at and round about it--all these men, Bachofen foremost, scented sense in the seeming nonsense of ancient traditions, or surmised significance in the more recently ascertained customs of living aborigines. But again, like the wood-pecker, that has struck a bark too thick for its bill, these men could not solve the problem they were at. They lacked the information to pick, and they had not, nor were they so situated as to furnish themselves with, the key to open the lock. Morgan furnished the key. Lewis Henry Morgan, born In Aurora, N. Y., November 21, 1818, and equipped with vast scholarship and archeological information, took up his residence among the Iroquois Indians, by whom, the Hawk gens of the Seneca tribe, he was eventually adopted. The fruit of his observations there and among other Indian tribes that he visited even west of the Mississippi, together with simultaneous information sent him by the American missionaries in the Sandwich Islands, was a series of epoch-making works, "The League of the Iroquois," "Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family," and "Ancient Society," which appeared in 1877. A last and not least valuable work was his "Houses and Houselife of the American Aborigines." A solid foundation was now laid for the science of ethnology and anthropology. The problem was substantially solved. The robust scientific mind of Karl Marx promptly absorbed the revelations made by Morgan, and he recast his own views accordingly. A serious ethnological error had crept into his great work, "Capital," two editions of which had been previously published in German between 1863-1873. A footnote by Frederick Engels (p. 344, Swan, Sonnenschein & Co., English edition, 1886) testifies to the revolution Morgan's works had wrought on the ethnological conceptions of the founder of Socialist economics and sociology. Subsequently, Frederick Engels, planted squarely on the principles established by Morgan, issued a series of brilliant monographs, in which, equipped with the key furnished by Morgan and which Engels' extensive economic and sociologic knowledge enabled him to wield with deftness, he explained interesting social phenomena among the ancients, and thereby greatly enriched the literature of social science. Finally, Heinrich Cunow, though imagining to perceive some minor flaws in some secondary parts of Morgan's theory, placed himself in absolute accord with the body of Morgan's real work, as stated later in the text in a quotation from Cunow; and, following closely in Morgan's footsteps, made and published interesting independent researches on the system of consanguinity among the Austral-Negros.--THE TRANSLATOR.] [2] In his book against us, Ziegler ridicules the idea of attributing to myths any significance whatever in the history of civilization. In that notion stands betrayed the superficial nature of so-called scientists. They do not recognize what they do not see. A deep significance lies at the bottom of myths. They have grown out of the people's soul; out of olden morals and customs that have gradually disappeared, and now continue to live only in the myth. When we strike facts that explain a myth we are in possession of solid ground for its interpretation. [3] Bachofen: "Das Mutterrecht." [4] Totem-group means generation-group. Each grade or generation has its own totem-animal. For instance: Opossum, emu, wolf, bear, etc., after which the group is named. The totem-animal frequently enjoys great honor. It is held sacred with the respective group, and its members may neither kill the animal, nor eat its flesh. The totem-animal has a similar significance to the patron saint of the guild in the Middle Ages. [5] In the oldest ward of the city of Prague, there is a small synagogue that comes down from the sixth century of our reckoning, and is said to be the oldest synagogue in Germany. If the visitor steps down about seven steps into the half-dark space, he discovers in the opposite wall several target-like openings that lead into a completely dark room. To the question, where these openings lead to our leader answered: "To the woman's compartment, whence they witness the service." The modern synagogues are much more cheerfully arranged, but the separation of the women from the men is preserved. [6] Frederick Engels, "The Origin of the Family." [7] Frederick Engels, _ubi supra_. [8] Book of Judges, 20, 21 and sequel. [9] Bachofen: "Das Mutterrecht." [10] Of the theater, to which women had no access. [11] Johann Scherr, "Deutsche Kultur-und Sittengeschichte:" Leipsic, 1887. Otto Wigand. As is known, Suderman deals with the same subject in his play, "Die Ehre." [12] Plato, "The Republic," Book V. [13] Leon Bichter, "La Femme Libre." [14] Bachofen. "Das Mutterrecht." [15] K. Kautsky, "Die Entstehung der Ehe und der Familie," Kosmos, 1883. [16] Montegazza, "L'Amour dans l'Humanite." [17] Joh. David Michaelis, "Mosaisches Recht," Reutlingen, 1793. [18] Karl Heinzen, "Ueber die Rechte und Stellung der Frauen." [19] Born 106 before our reckoning. [20] He lived from 527 to 565 of our reckoning. [21] Augustus, the son of Caesar by adoption, was of the Julian gens, hence the title "Julian" law. CHAPTER II. UNDER CHRISTIANITY. The opposite of polygamy,--as we have learned to know it among Oriental peoples, and as it still exists among them, but owing to the number of available women and the cost of their support, can be indulged in only by the privileged and the rich--is polyandry. The latter exists mainly among the highland people of Thibet, among the Garras on the Hindoo-Chinese frontier, among the Baigas in Godwana, the Nairs in the southern extremity of India; it is said to be found also among the Eskimos and Aleutians. Heredity is determined in the only way possible,--after the mother: the children belong to her. The husbands of a woman are usually brothers. When the elder brother marries, the other brothers likewise become the husbands of the woman; the woman, however, preserves the right to take other men besides. Conversely, the men also are said to have the right of taking a second, third, fourth, or more wives. To what circumstances polyandry owes its origin is not yet clear. Seeing that the polyandrous nations, without exception, live either on high mountain regions, or in the cold zone, polyandry probably owes its existence to a phenomenon that Tarnowsky comments on.[22] He learned from reliable travelers that a long sojourn at high elevations lowers the sensuous pleasures, and weakens erection, both of which return with new vigor by re-descension to lower altitudes. This lowering of the sexual powers, Tarnowsky is of the opinion, might partly account for the comparative slight increase of population on highland regions; and he is of the opinion that, when the debility is transmitted, it may become a source of degeneration that operates upon the perversity of the sexual sense. We may also add that a protracted domicile, together with the habits of life contracted on very high or cold regions, may have for a further result that polyandry lays no excessive demands upon a woman. The women themselves are correspondingly affected in their nature. That they are so is rendered probable by the circumstance that, among the Eskimo girls, menstruation sets in only with the nineteenth year, whereas in the warm zones it sets in as early as the tenth or eleventh, and in the temperate latitudes between the fourteenth and the sixteenth year. In view of the fact that warm climates, as universally recognized, exercise a strongly stimulating influence upon the sexual instinct,--whence polygamy finds its widest diffusion in warm countries--it is quite likely that cold regions--to which high mountains and plateaus belong, and where the thinner air may also contribute its share--may exercise materially a restringent effect upon the sexual instinct. It must, moreover, be noted that experience shows conception occurs rarer with women who cohabit with several men. The increase of population is, accordingly, slight under polyandry; and it fits in with the difficulty of securing subsistence, encountered in cold lands and mountain regions;--whereby additional proof is furnished that also, in this, to us so seemingly strange phenomenon of polyandry, production has its determining influence upon the relations of the sexes. Finally, it is to be ascertained whether among these peoples, who live on high mountains or in cold zones, the killing of girl babies is not a frequent practice, as is oft reported of the Mongolian tribes, on the highlands of China. Exactly the reverse of the custom among the Romans during the Empire, of allowing celibacy and childlessness to gain the upper hand, was the custom prevalent among the Jews. True enough, the Jewish woman had no right to choose; her father fixed upon the husband she was to wed; but marriage was a duty, that they religiously followed. The Talmud advises: "When your daughter is of marriageable age, give his freedom to one of your slaves and engage her to him." In the same sense the Jews followed strictly the command of their God: "Increase and multiply." Due to this, and despite all persecutions and oppression, they have diligently increased their numbers. The Jew is the sworn enemy of Malthusianism. Already Tacitus says of them: "Among themselves there is a stubborn holding together, and ready open-handedness; but, for all others, hostile hatred. Never do they eat, never do they sleep with foes; and, although greatly inclined to sensuousness, they abstain from procreation with foreign women. Nevertheless they strive to increase their people. Infanticide is held a sin with them; and the souls of those who die in battle or by execution they consider immortal. Hence the love of procreation beside their contempt of death." Tacitus hated and abhorred the Jews, because, in contempt of the religion of their fathers, they heaped up wealth and treasures. He called them the "worst set of people," an "ugly race."[23] Under the over-lordship of the Romans, the Jews drew ever closer together. Under the long period of sufferings, which, from that time on, they had to endure, almost throughout the whole of the Christian Middle Ages, grew that intimate family life that is to-day considered a sort of pattern by the modern bourgeois _regime_. On the other side, Roman society underwent the process of disintegration and dissolution, which led the Empire to its destruction. Upon the excesses, bordering on insanity, followed the other extreme,--the most rigid abstinence. As excess, in former days, now asceticism assumed religious forms. A dream-land-fanaticism made propaganda for it. The unbounded gluttony and luxury of the ruling classes stood in glaring contrast with the want and misery of the millions upon millions that conquering Rome dragged, from all the then known countries of the world, into Italy and slavery. Among these were also numberless women, who, separated from their domestic hearths, from their parents or their husbands, and torn from their children, felt their misery most keenly, and yearned for deliverance. A large number of Roman women, disgusted at that which happened all around them, found themselves in similar frame of mind; any change in their condition seemed to them a relief. A deep longing for a change, for deliverance, took possession of extensive social layers;--and the deliverer seemed to approach. The conquest of Jerusalem and of the Jewish kingdom by the Romans had for its consequence the destruction of all national independence, and begot among the ascetic sects of that country, dreamers, who announced the birth of a new kingdom, that was to bring freedom and happiness to all. Christ came, and Christianity arose. It embodied the opposition to the bestial materialism that reigned among the great and the rich of the Roman Empire; it represented the revolt against the contempt for and oppression of the masses. But originating in Judaism, which knew woman only as a being bereft of all rights, and biased by the Biblical conception which saw in her the source of all evil, Christianity preached contempt for woman. It also preached abstinence, the mortification of the flesh, then so sinful, and it pointed with its ambiguous phrases to a prospective kingdom, which some interpreted as of heaven, others as of earth, and which was to bring freedom and justice to all. With these doctrines it found fertile ground in the submerged bottom of the Roman Empire. Woman, hoping, along with all the miserable, for freedom and deliverance from her condition, joined readily and zealously. Down to our own days, never yet was a great and important movement achieved in the world without women also having been conspicuously active as combatants and martyrs. Those who praise Christianity as a great achievement of civilization should not forget that it was woman in particular to whom Christianity owes a great part of its success. Her proselyting zeal played a weighty _role_ in the Roman Empire, as well as among the barbarous peoples of the Middle Ages. The mightiest were by her converted to Christianity. It was Clotilde, for instance, who moved Clovis, the King of the Franks, to accept Christianity; it was, again, Bertha, Queen of Kent, and Gisela, Queen of Hungary, who introduced Christianity in their countries. To the influence of the women is due the conversion of many of the great. But Christianity requited woman ill. Its tenets breathe the same contempt for woman that is breathed in all the religions of the East. It orders her to be the obedient servant of her husband, and the vow of obedience she must, to this day, make to him at the altar. Let us hear the Bible and Christianity speak of woman and marriage. The ten commandments are addressed only to the men; in the tenth commandment woman is bracketed with servants and domestic animals. Man is warned not to covet his neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is his. Woman, accordingly, appears as an object, as a piece of property, that the man may not hanker after, if in another's possession. Jesus, who belonged to a sect--the sect which imposed upon itself strict asceticism and even self-emasculation[24]--being asked by his disciples whether it is good to marry, answers: "All men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given. For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother's womb; and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men; and there be eunuchs, _which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake_."[25] Emasculation is, according hereto, an act hallowed by God, and the renunciation of love and marriage a good deed. Paul, who, in a higher degree than even Jesus himself, may be called the founder of the Christian religion; Paul, who first impressed an international character upon this creed, and tore it away from the narrow sectarianism of the Jews, writes to the Corinthians: "Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote unto me: "It is good for a man not to touch a woman;" "he that giveth her in marriage doeth well; but he that giveth her not in marriage doeth better."[26] "Walk in the Spirit and fulfil not the lust of the flesh, for the flesh lusteth against the Spirit and the Spirit against the flesh;" "they that are Christ's have crucified the flesh, with the affections and lusts."" He followed his own precepts, and did not marry. This hatred of the flesh _is the hatred of woman, but also the fear of woman_, who--see the scene in Paradise--is represented as the seducer of man. In this spirit did the Apostles and the Fathers of the Church preach; in this spirit did the Church work throughout the whole of the Middle Ages, when it reared its cloisters, and introduced celibacy among the priesthood;--and to this day it works in the same spirit. According to Christianity, woman is the _unclean being_; the seducer, who introduced sin into the world and ruined man. Hence Apostles, and Fathers of the Church alike, have ever looked upon marriage as a necessary evil,--the same as is said to-day of prostitution. Tertulian exclaims: "Woman, thou should ever walk in mourning and rags, thy eyes full of tears, present the aspect of repentance to induce forgetfulness of your having ruined the human race. Woman, thou art the Gate of Hell!" Hieronymus says: "Marriage always is a vice; all that we can do is to excuse and cleanse it," hence it was made a sacrament of the Church. Origen declares: "Marriage is something unholy and unclean, a means for sensuality," and, in order to resist the temptation, he emasculated himself. Tertulian declares: "Celibacy is preferable, even if the human race goes to ground." Augustine teaches: "The celibates will shine in heaven like brilliant stars, while their parents (who brought them forth) are like dark stars." Eusebius and Hieronymus agree that the Biblical command, "Increase and multiply," no longer fits the times, and does not concern the Christians. Hundreds of other quotations from the most influential Fathers of the Church could be cited, all of which tend in the same direction. By means of their continuous teaching and preaching, they have spread those unnatural views touching sexual matters, and the intercourse of the sexes, _the latter of which, nevertheless, remains a commandment of nature, and obedience to which is one of the most important duties in the mission of life_. Modern society is still severely ailing from these teachings, and it is recovering but slowly. Peter calls out emphatically to women: "Ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands."[27] Paul writes to the Ephesians: "The husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the Church;"[28] and in Corinthians: "Man is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of the man."[29] According to which every sot of a man may hold himself better than the most distinguished woman;--indeed, it is so in practice to-day. Also against the higher education of women does Paul raise his weighty voice: "Let the woman learn in silence with all _subjection_. _But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, out to be in silence_;"[30] and again: "Let your women _keep silence_ in the churches; _for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience_, as also saith the law. And if they will learn anything, _let them ask their husbands at home; for it is a shame for women to speak in the church_."[31] Such doctrines are not peculiar to Christianity only. Christianity being a mixture of Judaism and Greek philosophy, and seeing that these, in turn, have their roots in the older civilization of the Egyptians, Babylonians, and Hindoos, the subordinate position that Christianity assigned to woman was one common in antiquity. In the Hindoo laws of Manu it is said regarding woman: "The source of dishonor is woman; the source of strife is woman; the source of earthly existence is woman; therefore avoid woman." Beside this degradation of woman, fear of her ever and anon reappears naively. Manu further sets forth: "Woman is by nature ever inclined to tempt man; hence a man should not sit in a secluded place even with his nearest female relative." Woman, accordingly, is, according to the Hindoo as well as the Old Testament and Christian view, everywhere the tempter. All masterhood implies the degradation of the mastered. The subordinate position of woman continues, to this day, even more in force in the backward civilization of the East than among the nations that enjoy a so-called Christian view-point. That which, in the so-called Christian world, gradually improved the situation of woman was, not Christianity, but _the advanced culture of the West struggling against the Christian doctrine_. Christianity is guiltless of woman's present improved position to what it was at the start of the era. Only reluctantly, and forced thereto, did Christianity become untrue to its true spirit with regard to woman. Those who rave about "the mission of Christianity to emancipate mankind," differ from us in this, as in other respects. They claim that Christianity freed woman from her previous low position, and they ground themselves upon the worship of Mary, the "mother of God,"--a cult, however, that sprang up only later in Christendom, but which they point to as a sign of regard for the whole sex. The Roman Catholic Church, which celebrates this cult, should be the last to lay claim to such a doctrine. The Saints and Fathers of the Church, cited above, and whose utterances could be easily multiplied--and they are the leading Church authorities--express themselves separately and collectively hostile to woman and to marriage. The Council of Macon, which, in the sixteenth century, discussed the question whether woman had a soul, and which decided with a majority of but one vote, that she had, likewise argues against the theory of such a friendly posture towards woman. The introduction of celibacy by Gregory VII[32]--although resorted to first of all and mainly with the end in view of holding in the unmarried priesthood a power that could not be alienated from the service of the Church through any family interests--was, nevertheless, possible only with such fundamental doctrines as the Church held touching the sinfulness of the lusts of the flesh; and it goes to confirm our theory. Neither did the Reformers, especially Calvin and the Scotch ministers, with their wrath at the "lusts of the flesh," entertain any doubt touching the hostile posture of Christianity towards woman.[33] By the introduction of the cult of Mary, the Roman Catholic Church shrewdly placed the worship of Mary in the place of that of the heathen goddesses, in vogue among _all_ the people over whom Christianity was then extending itself. _Mary_ took the place of the Cybele, the Mylitta, the Aphrodite, the Venus, the Ceres, etc., of the southern races; of the Freia, the Frigga, etc., of the Germanian tribes. She was a mere spiritually-Christian idealization. The primeval, physically robust, though rude yet uncorrupted races, that, during the first centuries of our reckoning, crowded down from the North and East like a gigantic ocean wave, and swamped the worn-out universal Empire of Rome, where Christianity had gradually been superimposing itself as master, resisted with all their might the ascetic doctrines of the Christian preachers. With good grace or bad, the latter were forced to reckon with these robust natures. With astonishment did the Romans perceive that the customs of those peoples were quite different from their own. Tacitus rendered to this fact the tribute of his acknowledgment, which, with regard to the Germans, he expressed in these words: "The matrimonial bond is, nevertheless, strict and severe among them; nor is there anything in their manners more commendable than this. Almost singly among the barbarians, they content themselves with one wife. Adultery is extremely rare among so numerous a people. Its punishment is instant, and at the pleasure of the husband. He cuts off the hair of the offender, strips her, and in the presence of her relations expels her from his house, and pursues her with stripes through the whole village. Nor is any indulgence shown to a prostitute. Neither beauty, youth, nor riches can procure her a husband; for none there looks on vice with a smile, or calls mutual seduction the way of the world. The youths partake late of the pleasures of love, and hence pass the age of puberty unexhausted; nor are the virgins hurried into marriage; the same maturity, the same full growth is required; the sexes unite equally matched, and robust; and the children inherit the vigor of their parents." With the object in view of holding up a pattern to the Romans, Tacitus painted the conjugal conditions of the old Germans with rather too rosy a hue. No doubt, the adulteress was severely punished among them; but the same did not hold good with regard to the adulterer. At the time of Tacitus, the gens was still in bloom among the Germans. He, to whom, living under the advanced Roman conditions, the old gentile constitution, together with its principles, was bound to seem strange and incomprehensible, narrates with astonishment that, with the Germans, the mother's brother, considered his nephew as an own son; aye, some looked upon the bond of consanguinity between the uncle on the mother's side and his nephew as more sacred and closer than that between father and son. So that, when hostages were demanded, the sister's son was considered a better guarantee than an own son. Engels adds hereto: "If an own son was given by the members of such a gens as a pledge for a treaty, and he fell a sacrifice through his own father's violation of the treaty, the latter had to settle accounts for himself. If, however, it was a sister's son who was sacrificed, then the old gentile right was violated. The nearest gentile relative, held before all others to safeguard the boy or lad, had caused his death; he either had no right to offer him as a pledge, or he was bound to observe the treaty."[34] For the rest, as Engels shows, the mother-right had already yielded to the father-right among the Germans, at the time of Tacitus. The children inherited from their father; in the absence of these, then the brothers and the uncle of the father on the mother's side. The admission of the mother's brother as an heir, although descent from the father determined the line of inheritance, is explained with the theory that the old right had only recently died away. It was only reminiscences of the old right that furnished the conditions, which enabled Tacitus to find a, to the Romans, incomprehensible regard for the female sex among the Germans. He also found that their courage was pricked to the utmost by the women. The thought that their women might fall into captivity or slavery was the most horrible that the old German could conceive of; it spurred him to utmost resistance. But the women also were animated by the spirit that possessed the men. When Marius refused the captured women of the Teutons to dedicate themselves as priestesses to Vesta (the goddess of maidenly chastity) they committed suicide. In the time of Tacitus, the Germans already acquired settled habitations. Yearly the division of land by lots took place. Besides that, there was common property in the woods, water and pasture grounds. Their lives were yet simple; their wealth principally cattle; their dress consisted of coarse woolen mantles, or skins of animals. Neither women nor chiefs wore under-clothing. The working of metals was in practice only among those tribes located too far away for the introduction of Roman products of industry. Justice was administered in minor affairs by the council of elders; on more important matters, by the assembly of the people. The chiefs were elected, generally out of the same family, but the transition of the father-right favored the heredity of office, and led finally to the establishment of a hereditary nobility, from which later sprang the kingdom. As in Greece and Rome, the German gens went to pieces with the rise of private property and the development of industries and trade, and through the commingling with members of strange tribes and peoples. The place of the gens was taken by the community, the mark, the democratic organization of free peasants, the latter of which, in the course of many centuries, constituted a firm bulwark in the struggles against the nobility, the Church and the Princes,--a bulwark that broke down by little and little, but that did not wholly crumble even after the feudal State had come to power, and the one-time free peasants were in droves reduced to the condition of serfs and dependents. The confederation of marks was represented by the heads of the families. Married women, daughters, daughters-in-law were excluded from council and administration. The time when women were conspicuous in the conduct of the affairs of the tribe--a circumstance that likewise astonished Tacitus in the highest degree, and which he reports in terms of contempt--were gone. The Salic law abolished in the fifth century of our reckoning the succession of the female sex to hereditary domains. Soon as he married, every member of a mark was entitled to a share in the common lands. As a rule, grand-parents, parents and children lived under one roof, in communal household. Hence, with a view of being allotted a further share, under-aged or unripe sons were not infrequently married by their father to some marriageable maiden; the father then filled the duties of husband, in the stead of his son.[35] Young married couples received a cart-load of beechwood, and timber for a block-house. If a daughter was born to the couple, they received one load of wood; if a son, two loads.[36] The female sex was considered worth only one-half. _Marriage was simple. A religious formality was unknown. Mutual declarations sufficed. As soon as a couple mounted the nuptial bed, the marriage was consummated._ The custom that marriage needs an act of the Church for its validity, came in only in the ninth century. Only in the sixteenth century, on decree of the Council of Trent, was marriage declared a sacrament of the Roman Catholic Church. With the rise of feudalism, the condition of a large number of the members of the free communities declined. The victorious army-commanders utilized their power to appropriate large territories unto themselves; they considered themselves masters of the common property, which they distributed among their devoted retinue--slaves, serfs, freedmen, generally of foreign descent,--for a term of years, or with the right of inheritance. They thus furnished themselves with a court and military nobility, in all things devoted to their will. The establishment of the large Empire of the Franks finally put an end to the last vestiges of the old gentile constitution. In the place of the former councils of chiefs, now stood the lieutenants of the army and of the newly formed nobility. Gradually, the mass of the freemen, members of the once free communities, lapsed into exhaustion and poverty, due to the continuous wars of conquest and the strifes among the great, whose burdens they had to bear. They could no longer meet the obligation of furnishing the army requisitions. In lieu thereof, Princes and high nobility secured servants, while the peasants placed themselves and their property under the protection of some temporal or spiritual lord--the Church had managed, within but few centuries, to become a great power--wherefor they paid rent and tribute. Thus the thitherto free peasant's estate was transformed into hired property; and this, with time, was burdened with ever more obligations. Once landed in this state of dependence, it was not long before the peasant lost his personal freedom also. In this way dependence and serfdom spread ever more. The landlord possessed the almost absolute right of disposal over his serfs and dependents. He had the right, as soon as a male reached his eighteenth year, or the female her fourteenth, to compel their marriage. He could assign a woman to a man, and a man to a woman. He enjoyed the same right over widows and widowers. In his attribute of lord over his subjects, he also considered the sexual use of his female serfs and dependents to be at his own disposal,--a power that finds its expression in the "jus primae noctis" (the right of the first night). This right also belonged to his representative, the stewart, unless, upon the payment of a tribute, the exercise of the right was renounced. The very names of the tribute betray its nature.[37] It is extensively disputed that this "right of the first night" ever existed. The "right of the first night" is quite a thorn in the side of certain folks, for the reason that the right was still exercised at an age, that they love to hold up as a model,--a genuine model of morality and piety. It has been pointed out how this "right of the first night" was the rudiment of a custom, that hung together with the age of the mother-right, when all the women were the wives of all the men of a class. With the disappearance of the old family organization, the custom survived in the surrender of the bride, on the wedding night, to the men of her own community. But, in the course of time, the right is ever more restricted, and finally falls to the chief of the tribe, or to the priest, as a religious act, to be exercised by them alone. The feudal lord assumes the right as a consequence of his power over the person who belongs to the land, and which is his property; and he exercises the right if he wills, or relinquishes it in lieu of a tribute in products or money. How real was the "right of the first night" appears from Jacob Grimm's "Weisthumer."[38] Sugenheim[39] says the "jus primae noctis," as a right appertaining to the landlords, originates in that his consent to marriage was necessary. Out of this right there arose in Bearn the usage that all the first-born of marriages, in which the "jus primae noctis" was exercised, were of free rank. Later, the right was generally redeemable by a tribute. According to Sugenheim, those who held most stubbornly to the right were the Bishops of Amiens; it lasted with them till the beginning of the fifteenth century. In Scotland the right was declared redeemable by King Malcolm III, towards the end of the eleventh century; in Germany, however, it continued in force much longer. According to the archives of a Swabian cloister, Adelberg, for the year 1496, the serfs, located at Boertlingen, had to redeem the right by the bridegroom's giving a cake of salt, and the bride paying one pound seven shillings, or with a pan, "in which she can sit with her buttocks." In other places the bridegrooms had to deliver to the landlord for ransom as much cheese or butter "as their buttocks were thick and heavy." In still other places they had to give a handsome cordovan tarbouret "that they could just fill."[40] According to the accounts given by the Bavarian Judge of the Supreme Court of Appeals, Welsch, the obligation to redeem the "jus primae noctis" existed in Bavaria as late as the eighteenth century.[41] Furthermore, Engels reports that, among the Welsh and the Scots, the "right of the first night" prevailed throughout the whole of the Middle Ages, with the difference only that, due to the continuance of the gentile organization, it was not the landlord, or his representative, but the chief of the clan, as the last representative of the one-time husbands in common, who exercised the right, in so far as it was not redeemed. There is, accordingly, no doubt whatever that the so-called "right of the first night" existed, not only during the whole of the Middle Ages, but continued even down to modern days, and played its _role_ under the code of feudalism. In Poland, the noblemen arrogated the right to deflower any maid they pleased, and a hundred lashes were given him who complained. That the sacrifice of maidenly honor seems even to-day a matter of course to landlords and their officials in the country, transpires, not only in Germany, oftener than one imagines, but it is a frequent occurrence all over the East and South of Europe, as is asserted by experts in countries and the peoples. In the days of feudalism, marriage was a matter of interest to the landlord. The children that sprang therefrom entered into the same relation of subjection to him as their parents; the labor-power at his disposal increased in numbers, his income rose. Hence _spiritual_ and _temporal_ landlords favored marriage among their vassals. The matter lay otherwise, particularly for the Church, if, by the prevention of marriage, the prospect existed of bringing land into the possession of the Church by testamentary bequests. This, however, occurred only with the lower ranks of freemen, whose condition, due to the circumstances already mentioned, became ever more precarious, and who, listening to religious suggestions and superstition, relinquished their property to the Church in order to find protection and peace behind the walls of a cloister. Others, again, placed themselves under the protection of the Church, in consideration of the payment of duties, and the rendering of services. Frequently their descendants fell on this route a prey to the very fate which their ancestors had sought to escape. They either gradually became Church dependents, or were turned into novices for the cloisters. The towns, which, since the eleventh century were springing up, then had at that time a lively interest in promoting the increase of population; settlement in them and marriage were made as easy as possible. The towns became especially asylums for countrymen, fleeing from unbearable oppression, and for fugitive serfs and dependents. Later, however, matters changed. So soon as the towns had acquired power, and contained a well-organized body of the trades, hostility arose against new immigrants, mostly propertyless peasants, who wanted to settle as handicraftsmen. Inconvenient competitors were scented in these. The barriers raised against immigration were multiplied. High settlement fees, expensive examinations, limitations of a trade to a certain number of masters and apprentices,--all this condemned thousands to pauperism, to a life of celibacy, and to vagabondage. When, in the course of the sixteenth century, and for reasons to be mentioned later, the flower-time of the towns was passing away, and their decline had set in, the narrow horizon of the time caused the impediments to settlement and independence to increase still more. Other circumstances also contributed their demoralizing effect. The tyranny of the landlords increased so mightily from decade to decade that many of the vassals preferred to exchange their sorrowful life for the trade of the tramp or the highwayman,--an occupation that was greatly aided by the thick woods and the poor condition of the roads. Or, invited by the many violent disturbances of the time, they became soldiers, who sold themselves where the price was highest, or the booty seemed most promising. An extensive male and female slum-proletariat came into existence, and became a plague to the land. The Church contributed faithfully to the general depravity. Already, in the celibatic state of the priesthood there was a main-spring for the fostering of sexual excesses; these were still further promoted through the continuous intercourse kept up with Italy and Rome. Rome was not merely the capital of Christendom, as the residence of the Papacy. True to its antecedents during the heathen days of the Empire, Rome had become the new Babel, the European High School of immorality; and the Papal court was its principal seat. With its downfall, the Roman Empire had bequeathed all its vices to Christian Europe. These vices were particularly nursed in Italy, whence, materially aided by the intercourse of the priesthood with Rome, they crowded into Germany. The uncommonly large number of priests, to a great extent vigorous men, whose sexual wants were intensified by a lazy and luxurious life, and who, through compulsory celibacy, were left to illegitimate or unnatural means of gratification, carried immorality into all circles of society. This priesthood became a sort of pest-like danger to the morals of the female sex in the towns and villages. Monasteries and nunneries--and their number was legion--were not infrequently distinguishable from public houses only in that the life led in them was more unbridled and lascivious, and in that numerous crimes, especially infanticide, could be more easily concealed, seeing that in the cloisters only they exercised the administration of justice who led in the wrong-doing. Often did peasants seek to safeguard wife and daughter from priestly seduction by accepting none as a spiritual shepherd who did not bind himself to keep a concubine;--a circumstance that led a Bishop of Constance to impose a "concubine tax" upon the priests of his diocese. Such a condition of things explains the historically attested fact, that during the Middle Ages--pictured to us by silly romanticists as so pious and moral--not less than 1500 strolling women turned up in 1414, at the Council of Constance. But these conditions came in by no means with the decline of the Middle Ages. They began early, and gave continuous occasion for complaints and decrees. In 802 Charles the Great issued one of these, which ran this wise: "The cloisters of nuns shall be strictly watched; the nuns may not roam about; they shall be kept with great diligence; neither shall they live in strife and quarrel with one another; they shall in no wise be disobedient to their Superiors or Abbesses, or cross the will of these. Wherever they are placed under the rules of a cloister they are to observe them throughout. Not whoring, not drunkenness, not covetousness shall they be the ministrants of, but in all ways lead just and sober lives. Neither shall any man enter their cloisters, except to attend mass, and he shall immediately depart." A regulation of the year 869 provided: "If priests keep several women, or shed the blood of Christians or heathens, or break the canonical law, they shall be deprived of their priesthood, because they are worse than laymen." The fact that the possession of several women was forbidden in those days only to the priests, indicates that marriage with several wives was no rare occurrence in the ninth century. In fact, there were no laws forbidding it. Aye, and even later, at the time of the Minnesaenger, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the possession of several wives was considered in order.[42] The position of woman was aggravated still more by the circumstance that, along with all the impediments which gradually made marriage and settlement harder, their number materially exceeded that of the men. As special reasons herefor are to be considered the numerous wars and feuds, together with the perilousness of commercial voyages of those days. Furthermore, mortality among men was higher, as the result of habitual excesses and drunkenness. The predisposition to sickness and death that flowed from such habits of life, manifested itself strongly in the numerous pest-like diseases that raged during the Middle Ages. In the interval between 1326 to 1400, there were thirty-two; from 1400 to 1500, forty-one; and from 1500 to 1600, thirty years of pestilence.[43] Swarms of women roamed along the highways as jugglers, singers and players in the company of strolling students and clericals; they flooded the fairs and markets; they were to be found wherever large crowds gathered, or festivals were celebrated. In the regiments of foot-soldiers they constituted separate divisions, with their own sergeants. There, and quite in keeping with the guild character of the age, they were assigned to different duties, according to looks and age; and, under severe penalties, were not allowed to prostitute themselves to any man outside of their own branch. In the camps, they had to fetch hay, straw and wood; fill up trenches and ponds; and attend to the cleaning of the place along with the baggage lads. In sieges, they had to fill up the ditches with brushwood, lumber and faggots in order to help the storming of the place. They assisted in placing the field pieces in position; and when these stuck in the bottomless roads, they had to give a hand in pulling them out again.[44] In order to counteract somewhat the misery of this crowd of helpless women, so-called "Bettinen houses" were instituted in many cities, and placed under municipal supervision. Sheltered in these establishments, the women were held to the observance of a decent life. But neither these establishments, nor the numerous nunneries, were able to receive all that applied for succor. The difficulties in the way of marriage; the tours undertaken by Princes, and by temporal and spiritual magnates, who with their retinues of knights and bondmen, visited the cities; even the male youth of the cities themselves, the married men not excluded, who, buoyant with life and unaffected by scruples, sought change in pleasures;--all this produced as early as in the Middle Ages the demand for prostitution. As every trade was in those days organized and regulated, and could not exist without a guild, it so was with prostitution also. In all large cities there were "houses of women"--municipal, prince or Church regalities--the net profits of which flowed into the corresponding treasuries. The women in these houses had a "head-mistress," elected by themselves, who was to keep discipline and order, and whose special duty it was to diligently watch that non-guild competitors, the "interlopers," did not injure the legitimate trade. When caught, these were condignly punished. The inmates of one of these houses for women, located in Nuerenberg, complained with the Magistrate, that "other inn-keepers also kept women, who walked the streets at night, and took in married and other men, and that these plied (the trade) to such an extent, and so much more brazenly, than they did themselves in the municipal (guild) girls-house, that it was a pity and a shame to see such things happen in this worthy city."[45] These "houses for women" enjoyed special protection; disturbances of the peace in their neighborhood were fined twice as heavily. The female guild members also had the right to take their place in the processions and festivals, at which, as is known, the guilds always assisted. Not infrequently were they also drawn in as guests at the tables of Princes and Municipal Councilmen. The "houses of women" were considered serviceable for the "protection of marriage and of the honor of the maidens,"--the identical reasoning with which State brothels were justified in Athens, and even to-day prostitution is excused. All the same, there were not wanting violent persecutions of the _filles de joie_, proceeding from the identical male circles who supported them with their custom and their money. The Emperor Charlemagne decreed that prostitutes shall be dragged naked to the market place and there whipped; and yet, he himself, "the Most Christian King and Emperor," had not less than six wives at a time; and neither were his daughters, who followed their father's example, by any means paragons of virtue. They prepared for him in the course of their lives many an unpleasant hour, and brought him home several illegitimate children. Alkuin, the friend and adviser of Charlemagne, warned his pupils against "the crowned doves, who flew at night over the palatinate," and he meant thereby the daughters of the Emperor. The identical communities, that officially organized the brothel system, that took it under their protection, and that granted all manner of privileges to the "priestesses of Venus," had the hardest and most cruel punishment in reserve for the poor and forsaken Magdalen. The female infanticide, who, driven by desperation, killed the fruit of her womb, was, as a rule, sentenced to suffer the most cruel death penalty; nobody bothered about the unconscionable seducer himself. Perchance he even sat on the Judge's bench, which decreed the sentence of death upon the poor victim. The same happens to-day.[46] Likewise was adultery by the wife punished most severely; she was certain of the pillory, at least; but over the adultery of the husband the mantle of Christian charity was thrown. In Wuerzburg, during the Middle Ages, the keeper of women swore before the Magistrate: "To be true and good to the city, and to procure women." Similarly in Nuerenberg, Ulm, Leipsic, Cologne, Frankfurt and elsewhere. In Ulm, where the "houses of women" were abolished in 1537, the guilds moved in 1551 that they be restored "in order to avoid worse disorders." Distinguished foreigners were provided with _filles de joie_ at the expense of the city. When King Ladislaus entered Vienna in 1452, the Magistrate sent to meet him a deputation of public girls, who, clad only in light gauze, revealed the handsomest shapes. At his entry into Brugges, the Emperor Charles V was likewise greeted by a deputation of naked girls. Such occurrences met not with objection in those days. Imaginative romancers, together with calculating people, have endeavored to represent the Middle Ages as particularly "moral," and animated with a veritable worship for woman. The period of the Minnesangers--from the twelfth to the fourteenth century--contributed in giving a color to the pretence. The knightly "Minnedienst" (service of love) which the French, Italian and German knights first became acquainted with among the Moriscos of Spain, is cited as evidence concerning the high degree of respect in which woman was held at that time. But there are several things to be kept in mind. In the first place, the knights constituted but a trifling percentage of the population, and, proportionately, the knights' women of the women in general; in the second place, only a very small portion of the knights exercised the so-called "Minnedienst;" thirdly, the true nature of this service is grossly misunderstood, or has been intentionally misrepresented. The age in which the "Minnedienst" flourished was at the same time the age of the grossest right-of-the-fist in Germany,--an age when all bonds of order were dissolved; and the knights indulged themselves without restraint in waylaying of travelers, robbery and incendiarism. Such days of brutal force are not the days in which mild and poetic sentiments are likely to prevail to any perceptible extent. The contrary is true. This period contributed to destroy whatever regard possibly existed for the female sex. The knights, both of country and town, consisted mainly of rough, dissolute fellows, whose principal passion, besides feuds and guzzling, was the unbridled gratification of sexual cravings. The chronicles of the time do not tire of telling about the deeds of rapine and violence, that the nobility was guilty of, particularly in the country, but in the cities also, where, appearing in patrician _role_, the nobility held in its hands the city regiment, down to the thirteenth, and partly even in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Nor did the wronged have any means of redress; in the city, the squires (yunker) controlled the judges' bench; in the country, the landlord, invested with criminal jurisdiction, was the knight, the Abbot or the Bishop. Accordingly, it is a violent exaggeration that, amid such morals and customs, the nobility and rulers had a particular respect for their wives and daughters, and carried them on their hands as a sort of higher beings, let alone that they cultivated such respect for the wives and daughters of the townsmen and peasants, for whom both the temporal and the spiritual masters entertained and proclaimed contempt only. A very small minority of knights consisted of sincere worshippers of female beauty, but their worship was by no means Platonic; it pursued quite material ends. And these material ends were pursued by those also with whom Christian mysticism, coupled with natural sensuousness, made a unique combination. Even that harlequin among the worshippers of "lovely women," Ulrich von Lichtenstein, of laughable memory, remained Platonic only so long as he had to. At bottom the "Minnedienst" was the apotheosis of the best beloved--at the expense of the own wife; _a sort of hetairism, carried over into Middle Age Christianity_, as it existed in Greece at the time of Pericles. In point of fact, during the Middle Ages, the mutual seduction of one another's wives was a "Minnedienst" strongly in vogue among the knights, just the same as, in certain circles of our own bourgeoisie, similar performances are now repeated. That much for the romanticism of the Middle Ages and their regard for women. There can be no doubt that, in the open recognition of the pleasures of the senses, there lay in that age the acknowledgment that the natural impulses, implanted in every healthy and ripe human being, are entitled to be satisfied. In so far there lay in the demonstration a victory of vigorous nature over the asceticism of Christianity. On the other hand, it must be noted that the recognition and satisfaction fell to the share of only one sex, while the other sex, on the contrary, was treated as if it could not and should not have the same impulses; the slightest transgression of the laws of morality prescribed by man, was severely punished. The narrow and limited horizon, within which moved the citizen of the Middle Ages, caused him to adopt narrow and limited measures also with respect to the position of woman. And, as a consequence of continued oppression and peculiar education, woman herself has so completely adapted herself to her master's habits and system of thought, that she finds her condition natural and proper. Do we not know that there have been millions of slaves who found slavery natural, and never would have freed themselves, had their liberators not risen from the midst of the class of the slave-holders? Did not Prussian peasants, when, as a result of the Stein laws, they were to be freed from serfdom, petition to be left as they were, "because who was to take care of them when they fell sick?" And is it not similarly with the modern Labor Movement? How many workingmen do not allow themselves to be influenced and led without a will of their own? The oppressed needs the stimulator and firer, because he lacks the independence and faculty for initiative. It was so with the modern proletarian movement; it is so also in the struggle for the emancipation of woman, which is intimately connected with that of the proletariat. Even in the instance of the comparatively favorably situated bourgeois of old, noble and clerical advocates broke the way open for him to conduct his battle for freedom. However numerous the shortcomings of the Middle Ages, there was then a healthy sensualism, that sprang from a rugged and happy native disposition among the people, and that Christianity was unable to suppress. The hypocritical prudery and bashfulness; the secret lustfulness, prevalent to-day, that hesitates and balks at calling things by their right name, and to speak about natural things in a natural way;--all that was foreign to the Middle Ages. Neither was that age familiar with the piquant double sense, in which, out of defective naturalness and out of a prudery that has become morality, things that may not be clearly uttered, are veiled, and are thereby rendered all the more harmful; such a language incites but does not satisfy; it suggests but does not speak out. Our social conversation, our novels and our theatres are full of these piquant equivoques,--and their effect is visible. This spiritualism, which is not the spiritualism of the transcendental philosopher, but that of the _roue_, and that hides itself behind the spiritualism of religion, has great power to-day. The healthy sensualism of the Middle Ages found in Luther its classic interpreter. We have here to do, not so much with the religious reformer, as with Luther the man. On the human side, Luther's robust primeval nature stepped forward unadulterated; it compelled him to express his appetite for love and enjoyment forcibly and without reserve. His position, as former Roman Catholic clergyman, had opened his eyes. By personal practice, so to speak, had he learned the unnaturalness of the life led by the monks and nuns. Hence the warmth with which he warred against clerical and monastic celibacy. His words hold good to this day, for all those who believe they may sin against nature, and imagine they can reconcile with their conceptions of morality and propriety, governmental and social institutions that prevent millions from fulfilling their natural mission. Luther says: "Woman, except as high and rare grace, can dispense with man as little as she can with food, sleep, water and other natural wants. Conversely, also, neither can man dispense with woman. The reason is this: It is as deeply implanted in nature to beget children as to eat and drink. Therefore did God furnish the body with members, veins, discharges and all that is needed therefor. He who will resist this, and prevent its going as Nature wills, what else does he but endeavor to resist Nature's being Nature, that fire burn, water wet, that man eat, drink or sleep?" And in his sermon on married life he says: "As little as it is in my power that I be not a man, just so little is it in your power to be without a man. For it is not a matter of free will or deliberation, but a necessary, natural matter that all that is male must have a wife, and what is female must have a husband." Luther did not speak in this energetic manner in behalf of married life and the necessity of sexual intercourse only; he also turns against the idea that marriage and Church have anything in common. In this he stood squarely on the ground of the olden days, which considered marriage an act of free will on the part of those who engaged in it, and that did not concern the Church. On this head he said: "Know, therefore, that marriage is an outside affair, as any other earthly act. The same as I am free to eat, drink, sleep, walk, ride, deal, speak and trade with a heathen, a Jew, a Turk or a heretic, _likewise am I free to enter into and remain in wedlock with one of them. Turn your back upon the fool laws that forbid such a thing_.... A heathen is a man and woman, created by God in perfect form, as well as St. Peter and St. Paul and St. Luke; be then silent for a loose and false Christian that you are." Luther, like other Reformers, pronounced himself against all limitation of marriage, and he was for also allowing the re-union of divorced couples, against which the Church was up in arms. He said: "As to the manner in which marriage and divorce are to be conducted among us, I claim that it should be made the business of the jurists, and placed under the jurisdiction of earthly concerns, because marriage is but an earthly and outside matter." It was in keeping with this view that, not until the close of the seventeenth century, was marriage by the Church made obligatory under Protestantism. Until then so-called "conscience marriage" held good, i. e., the simple mutual obligation to consider each other man and wife, and to mean to live in wedlock. Such a marriage was considered by German law to be legally entered into. Luther even went so far that he conceded to the unsatisfied party--even if that be the woman--the right to seek satisfaction outside of the marriage bonds "in order to satisfy nature, which cannot be crossed."[47] This conception of marriage is the same that prevailed in antiquity, and that came up later during the French Revolution. Luther here set up maxims that will arouse the strongest indignation of a large portion of our "respectable men and women," who, in their religious zeal, are so fond of appealing to him. In his treatise "On Married Life,"[48] he says: "If an impotent man falls to the lot of a hearty woman, and she still cannot openly take another, and does not wish to marry again, she shall say unto her husband: 'Lo, dear husband, thou shalt not be wronged by me. Thou hast deceived me and my young body, and hast therefore brought my honor and salvation into danger. There is no glory to God between us two. Grant me to cohabit secretly with thy brother or nearest friend, and thou shalt have the name, _so that thy property come not to strange heirs; and allow thyself to be, in turn, willingly deceived by me, as thou did deceive me without thy will_." The husband, Luther goes on to show, is in duty bound to grant the request. "If he declines, then has she the right to run away from him to another, and to woo elsewhere. Conversely, if a woman declines to exercise the conjugal duty, her husband has the right to cohabit with another, only he should tell her so beforehand."[49] It will be seen that these are wonderfully radical, and, in the eyes of our days, so rich in hypocritical prudery, even downright "immoral" views, that the great Reformer develops. Luther, however, expressed only that which, at the time, was the popular view.[50] The passages quoted from the writings and addresses of Luther on marriage, are of special importance for the reason that these views are in strong contradiction with those that prevail to-day in the Church. In the struggle that it latterly has had to conduct with the clerical fraternity, the Social Democracy can appeal with full right to Luther, who takes on the question of marriage a stand free from all prejudice. Luther and all the Reformers went even further in the marriage question, true enough, only for opportunist reasons, and out of complaisance towards the Princes whose strong support and permanent friendship they sought to secure and keep to the Reformation. The friendly Duke of Hessen, Philip I, had, besides his legitimate wife, a sweetheart, willing to yield to his wishes, but only under the condition that he marry her. It was a thorny problem. A divorce from the wife, in the absence of convincing reasons, would give great scandal; on the other hand, a marriage with two women at a time was an unheard of thing with a Christian Prince of modern days; it would give rise to no less a scandal. All this notwithstanding, Philip, in his passion, decided in favor of the latter step. The point was now to establish that the act did no violence to the Bible, and to secure the approval of the Reformers, especially of Luther and Melanchthon. The negotiations, set on foot by the Duke, began first with Butzer, who declared himself in favor of the plan, and promised to win over Luther and Melanchthon. Butzer justified his opinion with the argument: To possess several wives at once was not against the evangelium. St. Paul, who said much upon the subject of who was not to inherit the kingdom of God, made no mention of those who had two wives. St. Paul, on the contrary, said "that a Bishop was to have but one wife, the same with his servants; hence, if it had been compulsory that every man have but one wife he would have so ordered, and forbidden a plurality of wives." Luther and Melanchthon joined this reasoning, and gave their assent to double marriages, after the Duke's wife herself had consented to the marriage with the second wife under the condition "that he was to fulfil his marital duties towards her more than ever before."[51] The question of the justification of bigamy had before then--at the time when the issue was the consenting to the double marriage of Henry VIII of England--caused many a headache to Luther, as appears from a letter to the Chancellor of Saxony, Brink, dated January, 1524. Luther wrote to him that, _in point of principle, he could not reject bigamy_ because it ran not counter to Holy Writ;[52] but that he held it scandalous when the same happened among Christians, "who should leave alone even things that are permissible." After the wedding of the Duke, which actually took place in March, 1540, and in answer to a letter of acknowledgment from him, Luther wrote (April 10): "That your Grace is happy on the score of our opinion, _which we fain would see kept secret; else, even the rude peasants_ (in imitation of the Duke's example) might finally produce as strong, if not stronger, reasons, whereby we might then have much trouble on our hands." Upon Melanchthon, the consent to the double marriage of the Duke must have been less hard. Before that, he had written to Henry VIII "every Prince has the right to introduce polygamy in his domains." But the double marriage of the Duke made such a great and unpleasant sensation, that, in 1541, he circulated a treatise in which polygamy is defended as no transgression against Holy Writ.[53] People were not then living in the ninth or twelfth century, when polygamy was tolerated without shocking society. Social conditions had very materially changed in the meantime; in a great measure the mark had had to yield to the power of the nobility and the clergy; it had even extensively disappeared, and was further uprooted after the unhappy issue of the Peasant Wars. Private property had become the general foundation of society. Beside the rural population, that cultivated the soil, a strong, self-conscious handicraft element had arisen, and was dominated by the interests of its own station. Commerce had assumed large dimensions, and had produced a merchant class, which, what with the splendor of its outward position and its wealth, awoke the envy and hostility of a nobility that was sinking ever deeper into poverty and licentiousness. The burghers' system of private property had triumphed everywhere, as was evidenced by the then universal introduction of the Roman law; the contrasts between the classes were palpable, and everywhere did they bump against one another. Monogamy became, under such conditions, the natural basis for the sexual relations; a step such as taken by the Duke of Hessen now did violence to the ruling morals and customs, which, after all, are but the form of expression of the economic conditions that happen at the time to prevail. On the other hand, society came to terms with prostitution, as a necessary accompaniment of monogamy, and an institution supplemental thereto;--and tolerated it. In recognizing the gratification of the sexual impulses as a law of Nature, Luther but uttered what the whole male population thought, and openly claimed for itself. He, however, also contributed--through the Reformation, which carried through the abolition of celibacy among the clergy, and the removal of the cloisters from Protestant territories--that to hundreds of thousands the opportunity was offered to do justice to nature's impulses under legitimate forms. True again,--due to the existing order of property, and to the legislation that flowed therefrom,--hundreds of thousands of others continued to remain excluded. The Reformation was the first protest of the large-propertied bourgeois or capitalist class, then rising into being, against the restrictions imposed by feudalism in Church, State and society. It strove after freedom from the narrow bonds of the guild, the court and the judiciary; it strove after the centralization of the State, after the abolition of the numerous seats of idlers, the monasteries; and it demanded their use for practical production. The movement aimed at the abolition of the feudal form of property and production; it aimed at placing in its stead the free property of the capitalist, i. e., in the stead of the existing system of mutual protection in small and disconnected circles, there was to be unchained the free individual struggle of individual efforts in the competition for property. On the religious field, Luther was the representative of these bourgeois aspirations. When he took a stand for the freedom of marriage, the question could not be simply about civic marriage, which was realized in Germany only in our own age through the civil laws and the legislation therewith connected,--freedom to move, freedom of pursuit, and freedom of domicile. In how far the position of woman was thereby improved will be shown later. Meanwhile things had not matured so far at the time of the Reformation. If, through the regulations of the Reformation many were afforded the possibility to marry, the severe persecutions that followed later hampered the freedom of sexual intercourse. The Roman Catholic clergy having in its time displayed a certain degree of tolerance, and even laxity, towards sexual excesses, now the Protestant clergy, once itself was provided for, raged all the more violently against the practice. War was declared upon the public "houses of women;" they were closed as "Holes of Satan;" the prostitutes were persecuted as "daughters of the devil;" and every woman who slipped was placed on the pillory as a specimen of all sinfulness. Out of the once hearty small property-holding bourgeois of the Middle Ages, who lived and let live, now became a bigoted, straight-laced, dark-browed maw-worm, who "saved-up," to the end that his large property-holding bourgeois successor might live all the more lustily in the nineteenth century, and might be able to dissipate all the more. The respectable citizen, with his stiff necktie, his narrow horizon and his severe code of morals, was the prototype of society. The legitimate wife, who had not been particularly edified by the sensuality of the Middle Ages, tolerated in Roman Catholic days, was quite at one with the Puritanical spirit of Protestantism. But other circumstances supervened, that, affecting, as they did, unfavorably the general condition of things in Germany, joined in exercising in general an unfavorable influence upon the position of woman. The revolution--effected in production, money and trade, particularly as regarded Germany,--due to the discovery of America and the sea-route to the East Indies, produced, first of all, a great reaction on the social domain. Germany ceased to be the center of European traffic and commerce. Spain, Portugal, Holland, England, took successively the leadership, the latter keeping it until our own days. German industry and German commerce began to decline. At the same time, the religious Reformation had destroyed the political unity of the nation. The Reformation became the cloak under which the German principalities sought to emancipate themselves from the Imperial power. In their turn, the Princes brought the power of the nobility under their own control, and, in order to reach this end all the more easily, favored the cities, not a few of which, in sight of the ever more troubled times, placed themselves, of their own free will, under the rule of the Princes. The final effect was that the bourgeois or capitalist class, alarmed at the financial decline of its trade, raised ever higher barriers to protect itself against unpleasant competition. The ossification of conditions gained ground; and with it the impoverishment of the masses. Later, the Reformation had for a consequence the calling forth of the religious wars and persecutions--always, of course, as cloaks for the political and economic purposes of the Princes--that, with short interruptions, raged throughout Germany for over a century, and ended with the country's complete exhaustion, at the close of the Thirty Years' War in 1648. Germany had become an immense field of corpses and ruins; whole territories and provinces lay waste; hundreds of cities, thousands of villages had been partially or wholly burnt down; many of them have since disappeared forever from the face of the earth. In other places the population had sunk to a third, a fourth, a fifth, even to an eighth and tenth part. Such was the case, for instance, with cities like Neurenberg, and with the whole of Franconia. And now, at the hour of extreme need, and with the end in view of providing the depopulated cities and villages as quickly as possible with an increased number of people, the drastic measure was resorted to of "raising the law," and _allowing a man two wives_. The wars had carried off the men; of women there was an excess. On February 14, 1650, the Congress of Franconia, held in Nuerenberg, adopted the resolution that "men under sixty years of age shall not be admitted to the monasteries;" furthermore, it ordered "the priests and curates, if not ordained, and the canons of religious establishments, shall marry;" "moreover every male shall be allowed to marry two wives; and all and each males are earnestly reminded, and shall be often warned, _from the pulpit_ also, to so comport themselves in this matter; and care shall be taken that he shall fully and with becoming discretion diligently endeavor, so that, as a married man, to whom is granted that he take two wives, he not only take proper care of both wives, but avoid all misunderstanding among them." At that time, we see, matters that are to-day kept under strictest secrecy, were often discussed as of course from the pulpit itself. But not commerce alone was at a standstill. Traffic and industry had been extensively ruined during this protracted period; they could recover only by little and little. A large part of the population had become wild and demoralized, disused to all orderly occupations. During the wars, it was the robbing, plundering, despoiling and murdering armies of mercenaries, which crossed Germany from one end to the other, that burned and knocked down friend and foe alike; after the wars, it was countless robbers, beggars and swarms of vagabonds that threw the population into fear and terror, and impeded and destroyed commerce and traffic. For the female sex, in particular, a period of deep suffering had broken. Contempt for woman had made great progress during the times of license. The general lack of work weighed heaviest on their shoulders; by the thousands did these women, like the male vagabonds, infest the roads and woods, and filled the poorhouses and prisons of the Princes and the cities. On top of all these sufferings came the forcible ejectment of numerous peasant families by a land-hungry nobility. Compelled, since the Reformation, ever more to bend before the might of the Princes, and rendered ever more dependent upon these through court offices and military posts, the nobility now sought to recoup itself double and threefold with the robbery of peasant estates for the injury it had sustained at the hand of the Princes. The Reformation offered the Princes the desired pretext to appropriate the rich Church estates, which they swallowed in innumerable acres of land. The Elector August of Saxony, for instance, had turned not less than three hundred clergy estates from their original purpose, up to the close of the sixteenth century.[54] Similarly did his brothers and cousins, the other Protestant Princes, and, above all, the Princes of Brandenburg. The nobility only imitated the example by bagging peasant estates, that had lost their owners, by ejecting free as well as serf peasants from house and home, and enriching themselves with the goods of these. To this particular end, the miscarried peasant revolts of the sixteenth century furnished the best pretext. After the first attempts had succeeded, never after were reasons wanting to proceed further in equally violent style. With the aid of all manner of chicaneries, vexations and twistings of the law--whereto the in-the-meantime naturalized Roman law lent a convenient handle--the peasants were bought out at the lowest prices, or they were driven from their property in order to round up the estates of noblemen. Whole villages, the peasant homes of as much as half a province, were in this way wiped out. Thus--so as to give a few illustrations--out of 12,543 peasant homestead appanages of knightly houses, which Mecklenburg still possessed at the time of the Thirty Years' War, there were, in 1848, only 1,213 left. In Pommerania, since 1628, not less than 12,000 peasant homesteads disappeared. The change in peasant economy, that took place in the course of the seventeenth century, was a further incentive for the expropriation of the peasant homesteads, especially to turn the last rests of the commons into the property of the nobility. The system of rotation of crops was introduced. It provided for a rotation in cultivation within given spaces of time. Corn lands were periodically turned into meadows. This favored the raising of cattle, and made possible the reduction of the number of farm-hands. The crowd of beggars and tramps grew ever larger, and thus one decree followed close upon the heels of another to reduce, by the application of the severest punishments, the number of beggars and vagabonds. In the cities matters lay no better than in the country districts. Before then, women were active in very many trades in the capacity of working women as well as of employers. There were, for instance, female furriers in Frankfurt and in the cities of Sleswig; bakers, in the cities of the middle Rhine; embroiderers of coats of arms and beltmakers, in Cologne and Strassburg; strap-cutters, in Bremen; clothing-cutters in Frankfurt; tanners in Nuerenberg; gold spinners and beaters in Cologne.[55] Women were now crowded back. The abandonment of the pompous Roman Catholic worship alone, due to the Protestantizing of a large portion of Germany, either injured severely a number of trades, especially the artistic ones, or destroyed them altogether; and it was in just these trades that many working women were occupied. As, moreover, it ever happens when a social state of things is moving to its downfall, the wrongest methods are resorted to, and the evil is thereby aggravated. The sad economic condition of most of the German nations caused the decimated population to appear as _overpopulation_, and contributed greatly towards rendering a livelihood harder to earn, and towards prohibitions of marriage. Not until the eighteenth century did a slow improvement of matters set in. The absolute Princes had the liveliest interest, with the view of raising the standard abroad of their rule, to increase the population of their territories. They needed this, partly in order to obtain soldiers for their wars, partly also to gain taxpayers, who were to raise the sums needed either for the army, or for the extravagant indulgences of the court, or for both. Following the example of Louis XIV of France, the majority of the then extraordinarily numerous princely courts of Germany displayed great lavishness in all manner of show and tinsel. This was especially the case in the matter of the keeping of mistresses, which stood in inverse ratio to the size and capabilities of the realms and realmlets. The history of these courts during the eighteenth century belongs to the ugliest chapters of history. Libraries are filled with the chronicles of the scandals of that era. One potentate sought to surpass the other in hollow pretentiousness, insane lavishness and expensive military fooleries. Above all, the most incredible was achieved in the way of female excesses. It is hard to determine which of the many German courts the palm should be assigned to for extravagance and for a life that vitiated public morals. To-day it was this, to-morrow that court; no German State escaped the plague. The nobility aped the Princes, and the citizens in the residence cities aped the nobility. If the daughter of a citizen's family had the luck to please a gentleman high at court, perchance the Serenissimus himself, in nineteen cases out of twenty she felt highly blessed by such favor, and her family was ready to hand her over for a mistress to the nobleman or the Prince. The same was the case with most of the noble families if one of their daughters found favor with the Prince. Characterlessness and shamelessness ruled over wide circles. As bad as the worst stood matters in the two German capitals, Vienna and Berlin. In the Capua of Germany, Vienna, true enough, the strict Maria Theresa reigned through a large portion of the century, but she was impotent against the doings of a rich nobility, steeped in sensuous pleasures, and of the citizen circles that emulated the nobility. With the Chastity Commissions that she established, and in the aid of which an extensive spy-system was organized, she partly provoked bitterness, and partly made herself laughable. The success was zero. In frivolous Vienna, sayings like these made the rounds during the second half of the eighteenth century: "You must love your neighbor like yourself, that is to say, you must love your neighbor's wife as much as your own;" or "If the wife goes to the right, the husband may go to the left: if she takes an attendant, he takes a lady friend." In how frivolous a vein marriage and adultery were then taken, transpires from a letter of the poet Ew. Chr. von Kleist, addressed in 1751 to his friend Gleim. Among other things he there says: "You are already informed on the adventure of the Mark-Graf Heinrich. He sent his wife to his country seat and intends to divorce her because he found the Prince of Holstein in bed with her.... The Mark-Graf might have done better had he kept quiet about the affair, instead of now causing half Berlin and all the world to talk about him. Moreover, _such a natural thing should not be taken so ill_, all the more when, like the Mark-Graf, one is not so waterproof himself. Mutual repulsion, we all know, is unavoidable in married life: all husbands and wives are perforce unfaithful, due to _their illusions concerning other estimable persons. How can that be punished that one is forced to?_" On Berlin conditions, the English Ambassador, Lord Malmsbury, wrote in 1772: "Total corruption of morals pervades both sexes of all classes, whereto must be added the indigence, caused, partly through the taxes imposed by the present King, partly through the love of luxury that they took from his grandfather. The men lead a life of excesses with limited means, while the women are harpies, wholly bereft of shame. They yield themselves to him who pays best. Tenderness and true love are things unknown to them."[56] Things were at their worst in Berlin under Frederick II, who reigned from 1786 to 1796. He led with the worst example; and his court chaplain, Zoellner, even lowered himself to the point of marrying the King to the latter's mistress, Julie von Boss, as a second wife, and as she soon thereupon died in childbed, Zoellner again consented to marry the King to the Duchess Sophie of Doenhoff as a second wife by the side of the Queen. More soldiers and more taxpayers was the leading desire of the Princes. Louis XIV, after whose death France was entirely impoverished in money and men, set up pensions for parents who had ten children, and the pension was raised when they reached twelve children. His General, the Marshal of Saxony, even made to him the proposition to _allow marriages only for the term of five years_. Fifty years later, in 1741, Frederick the Great wrote, "I look upon men as a herd of deer in the zoological garden of a great lord, their only duty is to populate and fill the park."[57] Later, he extensively depopulated his "deer park" with his wars, and then took pains to "populate" it again with foreign immigration. The German multiplicity of States, that was in fullest bloom in the eighteenth century, presented a piebald map of the most different social conditions and legislative codes. While in the minority of the States efforts were made to improve the economic situation by promoting new industries, by making settlement easier and by changing the marriage laws in the direction of facilitating wedlock, the majority of the States and statelets remained true to their backward views, and intensified the unfavorable conditions of marriage and settlement for both men and women. Seeing, however, that human nature will not allow itself to be suppressed, all impediments and vexations notwithstanding, concubinage sprang up in large quantity, and the number of illegitimate children was at no time as large as in these days when the "paternal regiment" of the absolute Princes reigned in "Christian simplicity." The married woman of citizen rank lived in strict seclusion. The number of her tasks and occupations was so large that, as a conscientious housewife, she had to be at her post early and late in order to fulfil her duties, and even that was possible to her only with the aid of her daughters. Not only were there to be filled those daily household duties which to-day, too, the small middle class housewife has to attend to, but a number of others also, which the housewife of to-day is freed from through modern development. She had to spin, weave, bleach and sew the linen and clothes, prepare soap and candles, brew beer,--in short, she was the veriest Cinderella: her only recreation was Sunday's church. Marriage was contracted only within the same social circles; the strongest and most ludicrous spirit of caste dominated all relations, and tolerated no transgression. The daughters were brought up in the same spirit; they were held under strict home seclusion; their mental education did not go beyond the bounds of the narrowest home relations. On top of this, an empty and hollow formality, meant as a substitute for education and culture, turned existence, that of woman in particular, into a veritable treadmill. Thus the spirit of the Reformation degenerated into the worst pedantry, that sought to smother the natural desires of man, together with his pleasures in life under a confused mass of rules and usages that affected to be "worthy," but that benumbed the soul. Gradually, however, an economic change took place, that first seized Western Europe and then reached into Germany also. The discovery of America, the doubling of the Cape of Good Hope, the opening of the sea route of the East Indies, the further discoveries that hinged on these, and finally, the circumnavigation of the earth, revolutionized the life and views of the most advanced nations of Europe. The unthought-of rapid expansion of the world's commerce, called to life through the opening of ever newer markets for European industry and products, revolutionized the old system of handicraft. Manufacture arose, and thence flowed large production. Germany--so long held back in her material development by her religious wars and her political disintegration, which religious differences promoted,--was finally dragged into the stream of the general progress. In several quarters, large production developed under the form of manufacture: flax and wool-spinning and weaving, the manufacture of cloth, mining, the manufacture of iron, glass and porcelain, transportation, etc. Fresh labor power, female included, came into demand. But this newly rising form of industry met with the most violent opposition on the part of the craftsmen, ossified in the guild and medieval corporation system, who furiously fought every change in the method of production, and saw therein a mortal enemy. The French Revolution supervened. While casting aside the older order in France, the Revolution also carried into Germany a fresh current of air, which the old order could not for long resist. The French invasion hastened the downfall,--this side of the Rhine also--of the old, worn-out system. Whatever attempt was made, during the period of re-action after 1815, to turn back the wheels of time, the New had grown too strong, it finally remained victorious. The rise of machinery, the application of the natural sciences to the process of production, the new roads of commerce and traffic burst asunder the last vestiges of the old system. The guild privileges, the personal restrictions, the mark and jurisdictional rights, together with all that thereby hung, walked into the lumber room. The strongly increased need of labor-power did not rest content with the men, it demanded woman also as a cheaper article. The conditions that had become untenable, had to fall; and they fell. The time thereto,--long wished-for by the newly risen class, the bourgeoisie or capitalist class--arrived the moment Germany gained her political unity. The capitalist class demanded imperiously the unhampered development of all the social forces; it demanded this for the benefit of its own capitalist interests, that, at that time, and, to a certain degree, were also the interests of the large majority. Thus came about the liberty of trade, the liberty of emigration, the removal of the barriers to marriage,--in short, that whole system of legislation that designates itself "liberal." The old-time reactionists expected from these measures the smash-up of morality. The late Adolph Ketteler of Mainz moaned, already in 1865, accordingly, before the new social legislation had become general, "that the tearing down of the existing barriers to matrimony meant the dissolution of wedlock, it being now possible for the married to run away from each other at will." A pretty admission that the moral bonds of modern marriage are so weak, that only _compulsion_ can be relied on to hold the couple together. The circumstance, on the one hand, that the now naturally more numerous marriages effected a rapid increase of population, and, on the other, that the gigantically developing industry of the new era brought on many ills, never known of before, caused the spectre of "overpopulation" to rise anew. Conservative and liberal economists pull since then the same string. We shall show what this fear of so-called overpopulation means; we shall trace the feared phenomenon back to its legitimate source. Among those who suffer of the overpopulation fear, and who demand the restriction of freedom to marry, especially for workingmen, belong particularly Prof. Ad. Wagner. According to him, workingmen marry too early, in comparison with the middle class. He, along with others of this opinion, forget that the male members of the higher class, marry later only in order to wed "according to their station in life," a thing they can not do before they have obtained a certain position. For this abstinence, the males of the higher classes indemnify themselves with prostitution. Accordingly, it is to prostitution that the working class are referred, the moment marriage is made difficult for, or, under certain circumstances, is wholly forbidden to, them. But, then, let none wonder at the results, and let him not raise an outcry at the "decline of morality," if the women also, who have the same desires as the men, seek to satisfy in illegitimate relations the promptings of the strongest impulse of nature. Moreover, the views of Wagner are at fisticuffs with the interests of the capitalist class, which, oddly enough, shares his views: it needs many "hands," so as to own cheap labor-power that may fit it out for competition in the world's market. With such petty notions and measures, born of a near-sighted philistinism, the gigantic growing ills of the day are not to be healed. FOOTNOTES: [22] Tarnowsky. "Die krankhaften Erscheinungen des Geschlechtsinnes." Berlin, August Hirschwald. [23] Tacitus, "Histories," Book I. [24] Montegazza "L'Amour dans l'Humanite." [25] Matthew, ch. 19; 11 and 12. [26] I. Corinthians, ch. 7; 1 and 38. [27] Peter I., ch. 3; 1. [28] Paul: Ephesians, ch. 5; 23. [29] Paul: I. Corinthians, ch. 11; 7. [30] I. Timothy, ch. 2; 11 and 12. [31] I. Corinthians, ch. 14; 34 and 35. [32] This was a move that the parish priests of the diocese of Mainz, among others, complained against, expressing themselves this wise: "You Bishops and Abbots possess great wealth, a kingly table, and rich hunting equipages; we, poor, plain priests have for our comfort only a wife. Abstinence may be a handsome virtue, but, in point of fact, it is hard and difficult."--Yves-Guyot: "Les Theories Sociales du Christianisme." [33] Buckle, in his "History of Civilization in England," furnishes a large number of illustrations on this head. [34] Engels' "Der Ursprung der Familie." [35] The same thing happened under the rule of the muir in Russia. See Lavelaye: "Original Property." [36] "Eyn iglich gefurster man, der ein kindbette hat, ist sin kint eyn dochter, so mag eer eyn wagen vol bornholzes von urholz verkaufen of den samstag. Ist iz eyn sone, so mag he iz tun of den dinstag und of den samstag von ligenden holz oder von urholz und sal der frauwen davon kaufen, win und schon brod dyeweile sie kintes june lit,"--G. L. v. Maurer; "Geschichte der Markenverfassung in Deutschland." [37] "Bettmund," "Jungfernzins," "Hemdschilling," "Schuerzenzins," "Bunzengroschen." [38] "Aber sprechend die Holflüt, weller hie zu der helgen see kumbt, der sol einen meyer (Gutsverwalter) laden und ouch sin frowen, da sol der meyer lien dem brütigan ein haffen, da er wol mag ein schaff in geseyden, ouch sol der meyer bringen ein fuder holtz an das hochtzit, ouch sol ein meyer und sin frow bringen ein viertenteyl eines schwynsbachen, und so die hochtzit vergat, so sol der brütigan den meyer by sim wib lassen ligen die ersten nacht, oder er sol sy lösen mit 5 schilling 4 pfenning."--I., p. 43. [39] "History of the Abolition of Serfdom in Europe to the Middle of the 19th Century." St. Petersburg, 1861. [40] Memminger, Staelin and others. "Beschreibung der Wuertembergischen Aemter." Hormayr. "Die Bayern im Morgenlande." Also Sugenheim. [41] "Ueber Stetigung und Abloesung der baeuerlichen Grundlasten mit besonderer Ruecksicht auf Bayern, Wuertemberg, Baden, Hessen, Preussen und Oesterreich." Landshut, 1848. [42] A poem of Albrecht von Johansdorf, in the collection of "Minnesang-Fruehling" (Collection of Lachman and Moritz Haupt; Leipsic, 1857; S. Hirtel), has this passage: "waere ez niht unstaete der Zwein wiben wolte sin fur eigen jehen, bei diu tougenliche? sprechet, herre, wurre ez iht? (man sol ez den man erlouben und den vrouwen nicht.)" The openness, with which two distinct rights, according to sex, are here considered a matter of course, corresponds with views that are found in force even to this day. [43] Dr. Karl Buecher, "Die Frauenfrage im Mittelalter," Tuebingen. [44] Dr. Karl Buecher. [45] Joh. Scherr, "Geschichte der Deutschen Frauenwelt," Leipsic, 1879. [46] Leon Richter reports in "La Femme Libre" the case of a servant girl in Paris who was convicted of infanticide _by the father of the child himself_, a respected and religious lawyer, who sat on the jury. Aye, worse: _the lawyer in question was himself the murderer, and the mother was entirely guiltless, as, after her conviction, she herself declared in court_. [47] Dr. Karl Hagen, "Deutschlands Literarische und Religioese Verhaeltnisse im Reformationszeitalter." Frankfurt-on-the-Main, 1868. [48] II., 146, Jena, 1522. [49] Dr. Karl Hagen. [50] Jacob Grimm informs us ("Deutsche Rechtsalterthuemer. Weisthum aus dem Amte Blankenburg"): "Daer ein Man were, der sinen echten wive ver frowelik recht niet gedoin konde, der sall si sachtelik op sinen ruggen setten und draegen sie over negen erstnine und setten sie sachtelik neder sonder stoeten, slaen und werpen und sonder enig quaed woerd of oevel sehen, und roipen dae sine naebur aen, dat sie inne sines wives lives noet helpen weren, und of sine naebur dat niet doen wolden of kunden, so sall be si senden up die neiste kermisse daerbl gelegen und dat sie sik süverlik toe make und verzere und hangen ör einen buidel wail mit golde bestikt up die side, dat sie selft wat gewerven kunde: kumpt sie dannoch wider ungeholpen, so help ör dar der duifel." As appears from Grimm, the German peasant of the Middle Ages looked in marriage, first of all, for _heirs_. If he was unable himself to beget these, he then, as a practical man, left the pleasure, without special scruples, to some one else. The main thing was to gain his object. We repeat it: Man does not rule property, property rules him. [51] Johann Janssen, "Geschichte des Deutschen Volkes," 1525-1555, Freiburg. [52] Which is perfectly correct, and also explainable, seeing that the Bible appeared at a time when polygamy extended far and wide among the peoples of the Orient and the Occident. In the sixteenth century, however, it was in strong contradiction with the standard of morality. [53] Johann Janssen. [54] Johann Janssen. Vol. III. [55] Dr. Karl Buecher, "Die Frauenfrage im Mittelalter." [56] Johann Scherr: "Geschichte der Deutschen Frauenwelt." [57] Karl Kautsky, "Ueber den Einfluss der Volksvermehrung auf den Fortschritt der Gesellschaft." Vienna, 1880. PART II WOMAN IN THE PRESENT CHAPTER I. SEXUAL INSTINCTS, WEDLOCK, CHECKS AND OBSTRUCTIONS TO MARRIAGE. Plato thanked the gods for eight favors bestowed upon him. As the first, he took it that they had granted him to be born a freeman, and not a slave; the second was that he was created a man, and not a woman. A similar thought finds utterance in the morning prayer of the Jews. They pray: "Blessed be Thou, our God and Lord of Hosts, _who hast not created me a woman_;" the Jewish women, on the other hand, pray at the corresponding place: "_who hast created me after thy will_." The contrast in the position of the sexes can find no more forcible expression than it does in the saying of Plato, and in the different wording of the prayer among the Jews. The male is the real being, the master of the female. With the views of Plato and the Jews, the larger part of men agree, and many a woman also wishes that she had been born a man and not a woman. In this view lies reflected the condition of the female sex. Wholly irrespective of the question whether woman is oppressed as a female proletarian, as sex she is oppressed in the modern world of private property. A number of checks and obstructions, unknown to man, exist for her, and hem her in at every step. Much that is allowed to man is forbidden to her; a number of social rights and privileges, enjoyed by the former, are, if exercised by her, a blot or a crime. She suffers both as a social and a sex entity, and it is hard to say in which of the two respects she suffers more. Of all the natural impulses human beings are instinct with, along with that of eating and drinking, the sexual impulse is the strongest. The impulse to procreate the species is the most powerful expression of the "Will to Live." It is implanted most strongly in every normally developed human being. Upon maturity, its satisfaction is an actual necessity for man's physical and mental health. Luther was perfectly right when he said: "He who would resist the promptings of Nature, and prevent their going as Nature wills and must, _what else does he but endeavor to resist Nature's being Nature, that fire burn, water wet, that man eat, drink or sleep_?" These are words that should be graven in granite over the doors of our churches, in which the "sinful flesh" is so diligently preached against. More strikingly no physician or physiologist can describe the necessity for the satisfaction of the craving for love on the part of a healthy being,--a craving that finds its expression in sexual intercourse. It is a commandment of the human being to itself--a commandment that it must obey if it wishes to develop normally and in health--that it neglect the exercise of no member of its body, deny gratification to no natural impulse. Each member must fill the function, that it is intended for by Nature, on penalty of atrophy and disease. The laws of the physical development of man must be studied and observed, the same as those of mental development. The mental activity of the human being is the expression of the physiologic composition of its organs. The complete health of the former is intimately connected with the health of the latter. A disturbance of the one inevitably has a disturbing effect upon the other. Nor do the so-called animal desires take lower rank than the so-called mental ones. One set and the other are effects of the identical combined organism: the influence of the two upon each other is mutual and continuous. This holds good for man as for woman. It follows that, the knowledge of the properties of the sexual organs is just as needful as that of the organs which generate mental activity; and that man should bestow upon the cultivation of both an equal share of care. He should realize that organs and impulses, found implanted in every human being, and that constitute a very essential part of his nature, aye, that, at certain periods of his life control him absolutely, must not be objects of secrecy, of false shame and utter ignorance. It follows, furthermore, that a knowledge of the physiology and anatomy of the sexual organs, together with their functions, should be as general among men and women as any other branch of knowledge. Equipped with an accurate knowledge of our physical make-up, we would look upon many a condition in life with eyes different from those we now do. The question of removing existing evils would then, of itself, force itself upon those before whom society, to-day, passes by in silence and solemn bashfulness, notwithstanding these evils command attention within the precincts of every family. In all other matters, knowledge is held a virtue, the worthiest and most beautiful aim of human endeavor--only not knowledge in such matters that are in closest relation with the essence and health of our own _Ego_, as well as the basis of all social development. Kant says: "Man and woman only jointly constitute the complete being: one sex supplements the other." Schopenhauer declares: "The sexual impulse is the fullest utterance of the will to live, hence it is the concentration of all will-power;" again: "The affirmative declaration of the will in favor of life is concentrated in the act of generation, and that is its most decisive expression." In accord therewith says Mainlaender: "The center of gravity of human life lies in the sexual instinct: it alone secures life to the individual, which is that which above all else it wants.... To nothing else does man devote greater earnestness than to the work of procreation, and for the care of none other does he compress and concentrate the intensity of his will so demonstratively as for the act of procreation." Finally, and before all of these, Buddha said: "The sexual instinct is sharper than the hook wild elephants are tamed with; it is hotter than flames; it is like an arrow, shot into the spirit of man."[58] Such being the intensity of the sexual impulse, it is no wonder that sexual abstinence at the age of maturity affects the nervous system and the whole organism of man, with one sex as well as the other, in such a manner that it often leads to serious disturbances and manias; under certain conditions even to insanity and death. True enough, the sexual instinct does not assert itself with equal violence in all natures, and much can be done towards curbing it by education and self-control, especially by avoiding the excitation resulting upon certain conversations and reading. It is thought that, in general, the impulse manifests itself lighter with women than with men, and that the irritation is less potent with the former. It is even claimed that, with woman, there is a certain repugnance for the sexual act. The minority is small of those with whom physiologic and psychologic dispositions and conditions engender such a difference. "The union of the sexes is one of the great laws of living Nature; man and woman are subject to it the same as all other creatures, and can not transgress it, especially at a ripe age, without their organism suffering more or less in consequence."[59] Debay quotes among the diseases, caused by the inactivity of the sexual organs, satyriasis, nymphomania and hysteria; and he adds that celibacy exercises upon the intellectual powers, especially with woman, a highly injurious effect. On the subject of the harmfulness of sexual abstinence by woman, Busch says:[60] "Abstinence has in all ages been considered particularly harmful to woman; indeed it is a fact that excess, as well as abstinence, affects the female organism equally harmfully, and the effects show themselves more pronouncedly and intensively than with the male organism." It may, accordingly, be said that man--be the being male or female--is complete in the measure in which, both as to organic and spiritual culture, the impulses and manifestations of life utter themselves in the sexes, and in the measure that they assume character and expression. Each sex of itself reached its highest development. "With civilized man," says Klenke in his work "Woman as Wife," "the compulsion of procreation is placed under the direction of the moral principle, and that is guided by reason." This is true. Nevertheless, it were an impossible task, even with the highest degree of freedom, wholly to silence the imperative command for the preservation of the species,--a command that Nature planted in the normal, organic expression of the both sexes. Where healthy individuals, male or female, have failed in their life-time to honor this duty towards Nature, _it is not with them an instance of the free exercise of the will_, even when so given out, or when, in self-deception, it is believed to be such. _It is the result of social obstacles, together with the consequences which follow in their wake; they restricted the right of Nature_; they allowed the organs to wilt; allowed the stamp of decay and of sexual vexation--both in point of appearance and of character--to be placed upon the whole organism; and, finally, brought on--through nervous distempers--diseased inclinations and conditions both of body and of mind. The man becomes feminine, the woman masculine in shape and character. The sexual contrast not having reached realization in the plan of Nature, each human being _remained one-sided, never reached its supplement, never touched the acme of its existence_. In her work, "The Moral Education of the Young in Relation to Sex," Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell says: "The sexual impulse exists as an indispensable condition of life, and as the basis of society. It is the greatest force in human nature. Often undeveloped, not even an object of thought, but none the less the _central fire of life_, this inevitable instinct is the natural protector against any possibility of extinction." Science agrees, accordingly, with the opinion of the philosophers, and with Luther's healthy common sense. It follows that every human being has, not merely the right, but also the duty to satisfy the instincts, that are intimately connected with its inmost being, that, in fact, imply existence itself. Hindered therein, rendered impossible to him through social institutions or prejudices, the consequence is that man is checked in the development of his being, is left to a stunted life and retrogression. What the consequences thereof are, our physicians, hospitals, insane asylums and prisons can tell,--to say nothing of the thousands of tortured family lives. In a book that appeared in Leipsic, the author is of the opinion: "The sexual impulse is neither moral nor immoral; it is merely natural, like hunger and thirst: Nature knows nothing of morals;"[61] nevertheless bourgeois society is far from a general acceptance of this maxim. The opinion finds wide acceptance among physicians and physiologists that even a defectively equipped marriage is better than celibacy. Experience agrees therewith. In Bavaria there were, in 1858, not less than 4,899 lunatics, 2,576 (53 per cent.) of them men, 2,323 (47 per cent.) women. The men were, accordingly, more strongly represented than the women. Of the whole number, however, the _unmarried_ of both sexes ran up to 81 per cent., the married only to 17 per cent., while of 2 per cent. the conjugal status was unknown. As a mitigation of the shocking disproportion between the unmarried and the married, the circumstance may be taken into consideration that a not small number of the unmarried were insane from early childhood. In Hanover, in the year 1856, there was one lunatic to every 457 unmarried, 564 widowed, 1,316 married people. Most strikingly is the effect of unsatisfied sexual relations shown in the number of suicides among men and women. In general, the number of suicides is in all countries considerably higher among men than among women. To every 1,000 female suicides there were in:[62] England from 1872-76 2,861 men Sweden " 1870-74 3,310 " France " 1871-76 3,695 " Italy " 1872-77 4,000 " Prussia " 1871-78 4,239 " Austria " 1873-78 4,586 " But between the ages of 21 and 30, the figures for _female suicides is in all European countries higher than for males_, due, as Oettingen assumes, to sexual causes. In Prussia the percentages of suicides between the ages of 21 to 30 were on an average: Years. Males. Females. 1869-72 15.8 21.4 1873-78 15.7 21.5 In Saxony there were to every 1,000 suicides between the ages of 21 to 30 these averages: Years. Males. Females. 1854 14.95 18.64 1868 14.71 18.79 For widowed and divorced people also the percentage of suicides is larger than the average. In Saxony there are seven times as many suicides among divorced males, and three times as many among divorced females, as the average of suicides for males and females respectively. Again, suicide is more frequent among divorced and widowed men and women when they are childless. Of 491 widowed suicides in Prussia (119 males and 372 females) 353 were childless. Taking into further consideration that, among the unmarried women, who are driven to suicide between the ages of 21 and 30, many a one is to be found, who takes her life by reason of being betrayed, or because she can not bear the consequences of a "slip," the fact remains that sexual reasons play a decided _role_ in suicide at this age. Among female suicides, the figure is large also for those between the ages of 16 to 20, and the fact is probably likewise traceable to unsatisfied sexual instinct, disappointment in love, secret pregnancy, or betrayal. On the subject of the women of our days as sexual beings, Professor V. Krafft-Ebing expresses himself: "A not-to-be-underrated source of insanity with woman lies in her social position. Woman, by nature more prone than man to sexual needs, at least in the ideal sense of the term, knows no honorable means of gratifying the need other than marriage. At the same time marriage offers her the only support. Through unnumbered generations her character has been built in this direction. Already the little girl plays mother with her doll. Modern life, with its demands upon culture, offers ever slighter prospects of gratification through marriage. This holds especially with the upper classes, among whom marriage is contracted later and more rarely. While man--as the stronger, and thanks to his greater intellectual and physical powers, together with his social position--supplies himself easily with sexual gratification, or, taken up with some occupation, that engages all his energies, easily finds an equivalent, these paths are closed to single women. This leads, in the first place, consciously or unconsciously, to dissatisfaction with herself and the world, to morbid brooding. For a while, perhaps, relief is sought in religion; but in vain. Out of religious enthusiasm, there spring with or without masturbation, a host of nervous diseases, among which hysteria and insanity are not rare. Only thus is the fact explainable that insanity among single women occurs with greatest frequency between the ages of 25 and 35, that is to say, the time when the bloom of youth, and, along therewith, hope vanishes; while with men, insanity occurs generally between the ages of 35 and 50, the season of the strongest efforts in the struggle for existence. "It certainly is no accident that, hand in hand with increasing celibacy, the question of the emancipation of woman has come ever more on the order of the day. I would have the question looked upon as a danger signal, set up by the social position of woman in modern society--a position that grows ever more unbearable, due to increasing celibacy; I would have it looked upon as the danger signal of a justified demand, made upon modern society, to furnish woman some equivalent for that to which she is assigned by Nature, and which modern social conditions partly deny her."[63] And Dr. H. Plotz, in his work, "Woman in Nature and Ethnography,"[64] says in the course of his explanation of the results of ungratified sexual instincts upon unmarried women: "It is in the highest degree noteworthy, not for the physician only, but also for the anthropologist, that there is an effective and never-failing means to check this process of decay (with old maids), but even to cause the lost bloom to return, if not in all its former splendor yet in a not insignificant degree,--_pity only that our social conditions allow, or make its application possible only in rare instances_. The means consist in regular and systematic sexual intercourse. The sight is not infrequent with girls, who lost their bloom, or were not far from the withering point, yet, the opportunity to marry having been offered them, that, shortly after marriage, their shape began to round up again, the roses to return to their cheeks, and their eyes to recover their one-time brightness. _Marriage is, accordingly, the true fountain of youth for the female sex._ Thus Nature has her firm laws, that implacably demand their dues. No 'vita praeter naturam,' no unnatural life, no attempt at accommodation to incompatible conditions of life, passes without leaving noticeable traces of degeneration, upon the animal, as well as upon the human organism." As to the effect that marriage and celibacy exercise upon the mind, the following figures furnish testimony. In 1882, there were in Prussia, per 10,000 inhabitants of the same conjugal status, 33.2 unmarried male and 29.3 female lunatics, while the percentage of the married ones was 9.5 for men, and 9.5 for females, and of the widowed, 32.1 males, and 25.6 females. Social conditions can not be considered healthy, that hinder a normal satisfaction of the natural instincts, and lead to evils like those just mentioned. The question then rises: Has modern society met the demands for a natural life, especially as concerns the female sex? If the question is answered in the negative, this other rises: Can modern society meet the demands? If both questions must be answered in the negative, then this third arises: How can these demands be met? "Marriage and the family are the foundation of the State; consequently, he who attacks marriage and the family attacks society and the State, and undermines both"--thus cry the defenders of the present order. Unquestionably, monogamous marriage, which flows from the bourgeois system of production and property, is one of the most important cornerstones of bourgeois or capitalist society; whether, however, such marriage is in accord with natural wants and with a healthy development of human society, is another question. We shall prove that the marriage, founded upon bourgeois property relations, is more or less a marriage by compulsion, which leads numerous ills in its train, and which fails in its purpose quite extensively, if not altogether. We shall show, furthermore, that it is a social institution, beyond the reach of millions, and is by no means that marriage based upon love, which alone corresponds with the natural purpose, as its praise-singers maintain. With regard to modern marriage, John Stuart Mill exclaims: "_Marriage is the only form of slavery that the law recognizes._" In the opinion of Kant, man and woman constitute only jointly the full being. Upon the normal union of the sexes rests the healthy development of the human race. The natural gratification of the sexual instinct is a necessity for the thorough physical and mental development of both man and woman. But man is no animal. Mere physical satisfaction does not suffice for the full gratification of his energetic and vehement instinct. He requires also spiritual affinity and oneness with the being that he couples with. Is that not the case, then the blending of the sexes is a purely mechanical act: such a marriage is immoral. It does not answer the higher human demands. Only in the mutual attachment of two beings of opposite sexes can be conceived the spiritual ennobling of relations that rest upon purely physical laws. Civilized man demands that the mutual attraction continue beyond the accomplishment of the sexual act, and _that it prolong its purifying influence upon the home that flows from the mutual union_.[65] The fact that these demands can not be made upon numberless marriages in modern society is what led Barnhagen von Ense to say: "That which we saw with our own eyes, both with regard to contracted marriages and marriages yet to be contracted, was not calculated to give us a good opinion of such unions. On the contrary, the whole institution, which was to have only love and respect for its foundation, and which in all these instances (in Berlin) we saw founded on everything but that, seemed to us mean and contemptible, and we loudly joined in the saying of Frederick Schlegel which we read in the fragments of the 'Atheneum': Almost all marriages are concubinages, left-handed unions, or rather provisional attempts and distant resemblances at and of a true marriage, whose real feature consists, according to all spiritual and temporal laws, in that two persons become one."[66] Which is completely in the sense of Kant. The duty towards and pleasure in posterity make permanent the love relations of two persons, when such really exists. A couple that wishes to enter into matrimonial relations must, therefore, be first clear whether the physical and moral qualities of the two are fit for such a union. The answer should be arrived at uninfluenced; and that can happen only, first, _by keeping away all other interests_, that have nothing to do with the real object of the union,--the gratification of the natural instinct, and the transmission of one's being in the propagation of the race; secondly, by a certain degree of insight that curbs blind passion. Seeing, however, as we shall show, that _both conditions are, in innumerable cases, absent in modern society, it follows that modern marriage is frequently far from fulfilling its true purpose; hence that it is not just to represent it, as is done, in the light of an ideal institution_. How large the number is of the marriages, contracted with views wholly different from these, can, naturally, not be statistically given. The parties concerned are interested in having their marriage appear to the world different from what it is in fact. There is on this field a state of hypocrisy peculiar to no earlier social period. And the State, the political representative of this society, has no interest, for the sake of curiosity, in initiating inquiries, the result of which would be to place in dubious light the social system that is its very foundation. The maxims, which the State observes with respect to the marrying of large divisions of its own officials and servants, _do not suffer the principle to be applied that, ostensibly, is the basis of marriage_. Marriage--and herewith the bourgeois idealists also agree--should be a union that two persons enter into only out of mutual love, in order to accomplish their natural mission. This motive is, however, only rarely present in all its purity. With the large majority of women, matrimony is looked upon as a species of institution for support, which they must enter into at any price. Conversely, a large portion of the men look upon marriage from a purely business standpoint, and from material view-points all the advantages and disadvantages are accurately calculated. Even with those marriages, in which low egotistical motives did not turn the scales, raw reality brings along so much that disturbs and dissolves, that only in rare instances are the expectations verified which, in their youthful enthusiasm and ardor, the couple had looked forward to. And quite naturally. If wedlock is to offer the spouses a contented connubial life, it demands, together with mutual love and respect, _the assurance of material existence, the supply of that measure of the necessaries of life and comfort which the two consider requisite for themselves and their children_. The weight of cares, the hard struggle for existence--these are the first nails in the coffin of conjugal content and happiness. The cares become heavier the more fruitful the marriage proves itself, i. e., _in the measure in which the marriage fulfils its purpose_. The peasant, for instance, is pleased at every calf that his cow brings him; he counts with delight the number of young that his sow litters; and he communicates the event with pleasure to his neighbors. But the same peasant looks gloomy when his wife presents him with an increase to his own brood--and large this may never be--which he believes to be able to bring up without too much worry. His gloom is all the thicker if the new-born child is a _girl_. We shall now show how, everywhere, marriages and births are completely controlled by the economic conditions. This is most classically exemplified in France. There, the allotment system prevails generally in the country districts. Land, broken up beyond a certain limit, ceases to nourish a family. The unlimited division of land, legally permissible, the French peasant counteracts by his rarely giving life to more than two children,--hence the celebrated and notorious "two child system," that has grown into a social institution in France, and that, to the alarm of her statesmen, keeps the population stationary, in some provinces even registering considerable retrogression. The number of births is steadily on the decline in France; but not in France only, also in most of the civilized lands. Therein is found expressed a development in our social conditions, that should give the ruling classes cause to ponder. In 1881 there were 937,057 children born in France; in 1890, however, only 838,059; accordingly, the births in 1890 fell 98,998 behind the year 1881. Characteristic, however, is the circumstance that the number of _illegitimate_ births in France was 70,079 for the year 1881; that, during the period between 1881 and 1890, the number reached high-water mark in 1884, with 75,754; and that the number was still 71,086 strong in 1890. Accordingly, the whole of the decline of births fell exclusively upon the legitimate births. This decline in births, and, we may add, in marriages also, is, as will be shown, a characteristic feature, noticeable throughout the century. To every 10,000 French population, there were births in the years: 1801 333 1821 307 1831 303 1841 282 1851 270 1856 261 1868 269 1886 230 1890 219 This amounts to a decline of births in 1890, as against 1801, of 114 to every 10,000 inhabitants. It is imaginable that such figures cause serious headaches to the French statesmen and politicians. But France does not stand alone in this. For a long time Germany has been presenting a similar phenomenon. In Germany, to every 10,000 population there were births in the years: 1869 406 1876 403 1880 390 1883 358 1887 369.4 1890 357.6 Accordingly, Germany too reveals, in the space of only 21 years, a decline of 49 births to every 10,000 inhabitants. Similarly with the other States of Europe. To every 10,000 population there were live births: From From States. 1865-1867. 1886-1888. Decrease. Increase. Ireland 262 231 31 .. Scotland 353 313 40 .. England and Wales 353 314 39 .. Holland 388 344 44 .. Belgium 320 293 27 .. Switzerland 320 278 42 .. Austria 374 380 .. 6 Hungary 399 445 .. 46 Italy 378 371 7 .. Sweden 320 297 23 .. Norway 344 308 36 .. The decline in births is, accordingly, pretty general, only that, of all European States, it is strongest in France. Between 1886 and 1888, France had, to every 1,000 inhabitants, an average of 23.9 births, England 32.9, Prussia 41.27, and Russia 48.8. These facts show that the birth of a human being, the "image of God," as religious people express it, ranks generally much cheaper than new-born domestic animals. What this fact does reveal is the _unworthy_ condition that we find ourselves in,--and it is mainly the female sex which suffers thereunder. In many respects, modern views distinguish themselves but little from those of barbarous nations. Among the latter, new-born babes were frequently killed, and such a fate fell to the lot of girls mainly; many a half-wild race does so to this day. We no longer kill the girls; we are too civilized for that; but they are only too often treated like pariahs by society and the family. The stronger man crowds them everywhere back in the struggle for existence; and if, driven by the love for life, they still take up the battle, they are visited with hatred by the stronger sex, as unwelcome competitors. It is especially the men in the higher ranks of society who are bitterest against female competition, and oppose it most fiercely. That workingmen demand the exclusion of female labor on principle happens but rarely. A motion to that effect being made in 1877, at a French Labor Convention, the large majority declared against it. Since then, it is just with the class-conscious workingmen of all countries, that the principle, that working-women are beings with equal rights with themselves makes immense progress. This was shown especially by the resolutions of the International Labor Congress of Paris in 1889. The class-conscious workingman knows that the modern economic development forces woman to set herself up as a competitor with man; but he also knows that, to prohibit female labor, would be as senseless an act as the prohibition of the use of machinery. Hence he strives to enlighten woman on her position in society, and _to educate her into a fellow combatant in the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat from capitalism_. True enough,--due to the ever more widespread employment of female labor in agriculture, industry, commerce and the trades--the family life of the workingman is destroyed, and the degenerating effects of the double yoke of work for a living, and of household duties, makes rapid progress in the female sex. Hence the endeavor to keep women by legislative enactments, from occupations that are especially injurious to the female organism, and by means of protective laws to safeguard her as a mother and rearer of children. On the other hand, the struggle for existence forces women to turn in ever larger numbers to industrial occupations. It is _married woman_, more particularly, who is called upon to increase the meager earnings of her husband with her work,--and she is particularly welcome to the employer.[67] Modern society is without doubt more cultured than any previous one, and woman stands correspondingly higher. Nevertheless, the views concerning the relations of the two sexes have remained at bottom the same. Professor L. von Stein published a book,[68]--a work, be it said in passing, that corresponds ill with its title--in which he gives a poetically colored picture of modern marriage, as it supposedly is. Even in this picture the subaltern position of woman towards the "lion" man is made manifest. Stein says among other things: "Man deserves a being that not only loves, but also understands him. He deserves a person with whom not only the heart beats for him, but whose hand may also smooth his forehead, and whose presence radiates peace, rest, order, a quiet command over herself and the thousand and one things upon which he daily reverts: he wants someone who spreads over all these things that indescribable aroma of womanhood, one who is the life-giving warmth to the life of the house." In this song of praise of woman lies concealed her own degradation, and along therewith, the low egotism of man. The professor depicts woman as a vaporous being, that, nevertheless, shall be equipped with the necessary knowledge of practical arithmetic; know how to keep the balance between "must" and "can" in the household; and, for the rest, float zephyr-fashion, like sweet spring-tide, about the master of the house, the sovereign lion, in order to spy every wish from his eyes, and with her little soft hand unwrinkle the forehead, that he, "the master of the house," perchance himself crumpled, while brooding over his own stupidity. In short, the professor pictures a woman and a marriage such as, out of a hundred, hardly one is to be found, or, for that matter, can exist. Of the many thousand unhappy marriages; of the large number of women who never get so far as to wed; and also of the millions, who, like beasts of burden beside their husbands, have to drudge and wear themselves out from early morn till late to earn a bit of bread for the current day,--of all of these the learned gentleman knows nothing. With all these wretched beings, hard, raw reality wipes off the poetic coloring more easily than does the hand the colored dust of the wings of a butterfly. One look, cast by the professor at those unnumbered female sufferers, would have seriously disturbed his poetically colored picture, and spoiled his concept. The women, whom he sees, make up but a trifling minority, and that these stand upon the plane of our times is to be doubted. An oft-quoted sentence runs: "The best gauge of the culture of a people is the position which woman occupies." We grant that; but it will be shown that our so much vaunted culture has little to brag about. In his work, "The Subjection of Woman,"--the title is typical of the opinion that the author holds regarding the modern position of woman--John Stuart Mill says: "The lives of men have become more domestic, growing civilization lays them under more obligations towards women." This is only partly true. In so far as honorable conjugal relations may exist between husband and wife, Mill's statement is true; but it is doubtful whether the statement applies to even a strong minority. Every sensible man will consider it an advantage to himself if woman step forward into life out of the narrow circle of domestic activities, and become familiar with the currents of the times. The "chains" he thereby lays upon himself do not press him. On the other hand, the question arises whether modern life does not introduce into married life factors, that, to a higher degree than formerly, act destructively upon marriage. Monogamous marriage became, from the start, an object of material speculation. The man who marries endeavors to wed property, along with a wife, and this was one of the principal reasons why daughters, after being at first excluded from the right to inherit, when descent in the male line prevailed, soon again reacquired the right. But never in earlier days was marriage so cynically, in open market, so to speak, an object of speculation; a money transaction, as it is to-day. To-day trading in marriage is frequently conducted among the property classes--among the propertyless the practice has no sense--with such shamelessness, that the oft-repeated phrase concerning the "sanctity" of marriage is the merest mockery. This phenomenon, as everything else, has its ample foundation. At no previous period was it, as it is to-day, hard for the large majority of people to raise themselves into a condition of well-being, corresponding to the then general conceptions; nor was at any time the justified striving for an existence worthy of human beings so general as it is to-day. He who does not reach the goal, feels his failure all the more keenly, just because all believe to have an equal right to enjoyment. _Formally_, there are _no_ rank or class distinctions. Each wishes to obtain that which, according to his station, he considers a goal worth striving for, in order to come at fruition. But many are called and few are chosen. In order that one may live comfortably in capitalist society, twenty others must pine; and in order that one may wallow in all manner of enjoyment, hundreds, if not thousands, of others must renounce the happiness of life. But each wishes to be of that minority of favored ones, and seizes every means, that promise to take him to the desired goal, provided he does not compromise himself too deeply. One of the most convenient means, and, withal, nearest at hand, to reach the privileged social station, is the _money-marriage_. The desire, on the one hand, to obtain as much money as possible, and, on the other, the aspiration after rank, titles and honor thus find their mutual satisfaction in the so-called upper classes of society. There, marriage is generally considered a business transaction; it is a purely conventional bond, which both parties respect externally, while, for the rest, each often acts according to his or her own inclination. Marriage for political reasons, practiced in the higher classes, need here to be mentioned only for the sake of completeness. With these marriages also, as a rule, the privilege has tacitly existed--of course, again, for the husband to a much higher degree than for the wife--that the parties keep themselves scathless, _outside of the bonds of wedlock_, according as their whims may point, or their needs dictate. There have been periods in history when it was part of the _bon ton_ with a Prince to keep mistresses: it was one of the princely attributes. Thus, according to Scherr, did Frederick William I. of Prussia (1713-1740), otherwise with a reputation for steadiness, keep up, at least for the sake of appearances, relations with a General's wife. On the other hand, it is a matter of public notoriety that, for instance, August the Strong, King of Poland and Saxony, gave life to 300 illegitimate children; and Victor Emanuel of Italy, the _re galantuomo_, left behind 32 illegitimate children. There is still extant a romantically located little German residence city, in which are at least a dozen charming villas, that the corresponding "father of his country" had built as places of recreation for his resigned mistresses. On this head thick books could be written: as is well known, there is an extensive library on these piquant matters. The inside history of most of the German princely courts and noble families is to the informed an almost uninterrupted _chronique scandaleuse_, and not infrequently has it been stained with crimes of blackest dye. In sight of these facts, it certainly is imperative upon the sycophantic painters of history, not only to leave untouched the question of the "legitimacy" of the several successive "fathers and mothers of their country," but also to take pains to represent them as patterns of all virtues, as faithful husbands and good mothers. Not yet has the breed of the augurs died out; they still live, as did their Roman prototypes, on the ignorance of the masses. In every large town, there are certain places and days when the higher classes meet, mainly for the purpose of match-making. These gatherings are, accordingly, quite fitly termed "marriage exchanges." Just as on the exchanges, speculation and chaffer play here the leading _role_, nor are deception and swindle left out. Officers, loaded with debts, but who can hold out an old title of nobility; _roues_, broken down with debauchery, who seek to restore their ruined health in the haven of wedlock, and need a nurse; manufacturers, merchants, bankers, who face bankruptcy, not infrequently the penitentiary also, and wish to be saved; finally, all those who are after money and wealth, or a larger quantity thereof, government office-holders among them, with prospects of promotion, but meanwhile in financial straits;--all turn up as customers at these exchanges, and ply the matrimonial trade. Quite often, at such transactions, it is all one whether the prospective wife be young or old, handsome or ugly, straight or bent, educated or ignorant, religious or frivolous, Christian or Jew. Was it not a saying of a celebrated statesman: "The marriage of a Christian stallion with a Jewish mare is to be highly recommended"?[69] The figure, characteristically borrowed from the horse-fair, meets, as experience teaches, with loud applause from the higher circles of our society. Money makes up for all defects, and outweighs all vices. The German penal code punishes[70] the coupler with long terms of imprisonment; when, however, parents, guardians and relatives couple their children, wards or kin to a hated man or woman only for the sake of money, of profit, of rank, in short, for the sake of external benefits, there is no District Attorney ready to take charge, and yet a crime has been committed. There are numerous well organized matrimonial bureaus, with male and female panders of all degrees, out for prey, in search of the male and female candidates for the "holy bonds of matrimony." Such business is especially profitable when the "work" is done for the members of the upper classes. In 1878 there was a criminal trial in Vienna of a female pander on the charge of poisoning, and ended with her being sentenced to fifteen years in the penitentiary. At the trial it was established that the French Ambassador in Vienna, Count Bonneville, had paid the pander 12,000 florins for procuring his own wife. Other members of the high aristocracy were likewise highly compromised through the trial. Evidently, certain Government officials had left the woman to pursue her dark and criminal practices for many years. The "why" thereof is surely no secret. Similar stories are told from the capital of the German Empire. During recent years, it is the daughters and heirs of the rich American capitalist class, who, on their side, aspire after rank and honors, not to be had in their own American home, that have become a special subject of matrimonial trading for the needy noblemen of Europe. Upon these particular practices characteristic light is thrown by a series of articles that appeared in the fall of 1889 in a portion of the German press. According thereto, a _chevalier d'industry_ nobleman, domiciled in California, had recommended himself as a matrimonial agent in German and Austrian papers. The offers that he received amply betray the conception concerning the sanctity of marriage and its "ethical" side prevalent in the corresponding circles. Two Prussian officers of the Guards, both, as they say themselves, belonging to the oldest nobility of Prussia, declared that they were ready to enter into negotiations for marriage because, as they frankly confessed, they owed together 60,000 marks. In their letter to the pander they say literally: "It is understood that we shall pay no money in advance. You will receive your remuneration after the wedding trip. Recommend us only to ladies against whose families no objections can be raised. It is also very desirable to be introduced to ladies of attractive appearance. If demanded, we shall furnish, for discreet use, our own pictures to your agent, after he shall have given us the details, and shown us the pictures, etc. We consider the whole affair strictly confidential and as a matter of honor (?), and, of course, demand the same from you. We expect a speedy answer through your agent in this place, if you have one. Berlin, Friedrichstrasse 107, December 15, 1889. Baron v. M----, Arthur v. W----." An Austrian nobleman also, Karl Freiherr v. M---- of Goeding in Moravia, seized the opportunity to angle for a rich American bride, and to this end sent to the swindle-bureau the following letter: "According to a notice in the papers of this place, you are acquainted with American ladies who wish to marry. In this connection I place myself at your service, but must inform you that I have no fortune whatever. I am of very old noble stock (Baron), 34 years old, single, was a cavalry officer and am at present engaged in building railroads. I should be pleased to inspect one or more pictures, which, upon my word of honor, I shall return. Should you require my picture, I shall forward same to you. I also request you to give me fuller information. Expecting a speedy answer in this matter, I remain, very respectfully, your Karl Freiherr v. M----, Goeding, Moravia, Austria, November 29, 1889." A young German nobleman, Hans v. H----, wrote from London that he was 5 feet 10 tall, of an old noble family, and employed in the diplomatic service. He made the confession that his fortune had been greatly reduced through unsuccessful betting at the horse races, and hence found himself obliged to be on the lookout for a rich bride, so as to be able to cover his deficit. He was, furthermore, ready to undertake a trip to the United States forthwith. The _chevalier d'industry_ in question claimed that, besides several counts, barons, etc., three Princes and sixteen dukes had reported to him as candidates for marriage. But not noblemen only, bourgeois also longed for rich American women. An architect, Max W---- of Leipsic, demanded a bride who should possess not only money, but beauty and culture also. From Kehl on the Rhine, a young mill-owner, Robert D----, wrote that he would be satisfied with a bride who had but 400,000 marks, and he promised in advance to make her happy. But why look so far, when at hand the quarry is rich! A very patriotic-conservative Leipsic paper, which plumes itself very particularly upon its Christianity, contained in the spring of 1894 an advertisement, that ran thus: "A cavalry officer of the Guards, of large, handsome build, noble, 27 years of age, desires a financial marriage. Please address, Count v. W. I., Post Office General Delivery, Dresden." In comparison with the fellow who makes so cynical an offer, the street-walker, who, out of bitter necessity, plies her trade, is a paragon of decency and virtue. Similar advertisements are found almost every day in the papers of _all_ political parties--_except the Social Democratic_. A Social Democratic editor or manager, who would accept such or similar advertisements for his paper, would be expelled from his party as dishonorable. The capitalist press is not troubled at such advertisements: they bring in money: and it is of the mind of the Emperor Vespasian,--_non olet_, it does not smell. Yet all that does not hinder that same press from going rabid mad at "the marriage-undermining tendencies of Socialism." Never yet was there an age more hypocritical than the one we are living in. With the view to demonstrate the fact once more, the above instances were cited. Bureaus of information for marriage,--that's what the advertisement pages of most of the newspapers of our day are. Whosoever, be it male or female, finds near at hand nothing desirable, entrusts his or her heart's wants to the pious-conservative or moral-liberal press, that, in consideration of cash and without coaxing, sees to it that the kindred souls meet. With illustrations, taken on any one day from a number of large newspapers, whole pages, could be filled. Off and on the interesting fact also crops out that even clergymen are sought for husbands, and, _vice versa_, clergymen angle for wives, with the aid of advertisements. Occasionally, the suitors also offer to overlook a _slip_, provided the looked-for woman be rich. In short, the moral turpitude of certain social circles of our society can be pilloried no better than by this sort of courtship. State and Church play in such "holy matrimony" a by no means handsome _role_. Whether the civil magistrate or clergyman, on whom may devolve the duty to celebrate the marriage, be convinced that the bridal couple before him has been brought together by the vilest of practices; whether it be manifest that, neither in point of age nor that of bodily or mental qualities, the two are compatible with each other; whether, for instance, the bride be twenty and the bridegroom seventy years old, or the reverse; whether the bride be young, handsome and joyful, and the bridegroom old, ridden with disease and crabbed;--whatever the case, it concerns not the representative of the State or the Church; it is not for them to look into that. The marriage bond is "blessed,"--as a rule, blessed with all the greater solemnity in proportion to the size of the fee for the "holy office." When, later, such a marriage proves a most unfortunate one--as foreseen by everybody, by the ill-starred victim, in most instances the woman, herself,--and either party decides to separate, then, State and Church,--who never first inquire whether real love and natural, moral impulses, or only naked, obscene egotism tie the knot--now raise the greatest difficulties. At present, moral repulsion is but rarely recognized a sufficient ground for separation; at present, only palpable proofs, proofs that always dishonor or lower one of the parties in public esteem, are, as a rule, demanded; separation is not otherwise granted. That the Roman Catholic Church does not allow divorces,--except by special dispensation of the Pope, which is hard to obtain, and, at best, only from board and bed--only renders all the worse the conditions, under which all Catholic countries are suffering. Germany has the prospect of receiving, in the not too far distant future, a civil code that shall embrace the whole Empire. It is, therefore, a side-light upon our times that, although even the superficial observer must reach the conclusion that at no previous period have unhappy marriages been so numerous as now--a natural consequence of our whole social development--the new draft for a civil code still renders divorce materially difficult. It is but a fresh instance of the old experience,--a social system, in the throes of dissolution, seeks to keep itself up by artificial means and compulsion, and to deceive itself upon its actual state. In declining Rome, marriage and births were sought to be promoted by premiums: in the German Empire, whose social order stands under a constellation similar with that of the decaying Empire of the Caesars, it is now sought to prevent the ever more frequent desire for the dissolution of marriage by means of forcible constraints. Thus people remain against their will chained to each other through life. One party becomes the slave of the other, compelled to submit out of "conjugal duty" to that other's most intimate embraces, which, perhaps, it abhors worse than insult or ill-treatment. Fully justified is Montegazza's dictum:[71] "There is probably no worse torture than that which compels a human being to put up with the caresses of a person it does not love." We ask, Is such a marriage--and their number is infinite--not worse than prostitution? The prostitute has, to a certain degree, the freedom to withdraw from her disgraceful pursuit; moreover, she enjoys the privilege, if she does not live in a public house, to reject the purchase of the embraces of him who, for whatever reason, may be distasteful to her. But a sold married woman must submit to the embraces of her husband, even though she have a hundred reasons to hate and despise him. When in advance, and with the knowledge of both parties, marriage is contracted as a marriage for money or rank, then, as a rule, matters lie more favorably. The two accommodate themselves mutually, and a _modus vivendi_ is established. They want no scandal, and regard for their children compels them to avoid any, although it is the children who suffer most under a cold, loveless life on the part of their parents, even if such a life does not develop into enmity, quarrel and dissension. Often accommodation is reached in order to avoid material loss. As a rule it is the husband, whose conduct is the rock against which marriage is dashed. This appears from the actions for divorce. In virtue of his dominant position, he can indemnify himself elsewhere when the marriage is not pleasing to him, and he can not find satisfaction in it. The wife is not so free to step on side-roads, partly because, as the receiving sex, such action is, for physiologic reasons, a much more risky one on her part; then, also, because every infraction of conjugal fidelity is imputed a crime to her, which neither the husband nor society pardons. Woman alone makes a "slip"--be she wife, widow or maid; man, at worst, has acted "incorrectly." One and the same act is judged by society with wholly different standards, according as it be committed by a man or a woman. And, as a rule, women themselves judge a "fallen" sister most severely and pitilessly.[72] As a rule, only in cases of crassest infidelity or maltreatment, does the wife decide upon divorce. She is generally in a materially dependent position, and compelled to look upon marriage as a means of support: moreover, as a divorced wife, she finds herself socially in no enviable situation: unless special reasons render intercourse with her desirable, she is considered and treated by society as a neuter, so to speak. When, despite all this, most actions for divorce proceed from wives, the circumstance is an evidence of the heavy moral torture that they lie under. In France, even before the new divorce law came into effect (1884), by far the more numerous actions for separation from bed and board came from women. For an absolute divorce they could apply only if the husband took his concubine into the married home, against the will of his wife. Actions for separations from bed and board occurred:[73] Average Per Average Per Year Years. Year by Wives. by Husbands. 1856-1861 1729 184 1861-1866 2135 260 1866-1871 2591 330 But not only did women institute by far the larger number of actions; the figures show that these increased from period to period. Furthermore, so far as reliable information before us goes, it appears that actions for absolute divorce also proceed preponderatingly from wives. In the Kingdom of Saxony, during the period of 1860-1868, there were instituted, all told, 8,402 actions for divorce; of these, 3,537 (42 per cent.) were by men, 4,865 (58 per cent.) by wives. In the period from 1871 to 1878, there were actions for divorce in Saxony[74]: Year. By Husbands. By Wives. 1871 475 574 1872 576 698 1873 553 673 1874 643 697 1875 717 752 1876 722 839 1877 746 951 1878 754 994 ----- ----- Total 5,186 6,178 The fact that divorce, as a rule, hurts women more, did not restrain them in Saxony either from instituting most of the actions. The total actions for divorce increased, however, in Saxony, as in France, much faster than population. In Switzerland, during the year 1892, there were granted 1,036 applications for divorce. Of these, wives had instituted 493, husbands 229, and both parties 314. Statistics teach us, however, not alone that wives institute the larger number of actions for divorce; they also teach us that the number of divorces is in rapid increase. In France, divorce has been regulated anew by law since 1884. Since then, divorces have greatly increased from year to year. The number of divorces, and years they fell in, were as follows: 1884 1,657 1885 2,477 1886 2,950 1887 3,636 1888 4,708 1889 4,786 1890 5,457 In Vienna there were, from 1870 to 1871, 148 divorces; they increased from year to year; from 1878 to 1879 they ran up to 319 cases.[75] But in Vienna, being a preponderatingly Catholic city, divorce is hard to obtain. That notwithstanding, about the year 1885 a Vienna Judge made the remark: "Complaints on the ground of broken marriage vows are as frequent as complaints for broken window-panes." In England and Wales there was, in 1867, 1 divorce to every 1,378 marriages, but in 1877 there was 1 to every 652 marriages; and in 1886, 1 to as few as 527. In the United States the number of divorces for 1867 was 9,937, and for 1886 as many as 25,535. The total number of divorces in the United States between 1867 and 1886 was 328,716, and the fault fell in 216,176 cases upon the husband, in 112,540 upon the wife. Relatively speaking, the largest number of divorces occurs in the United States. The proportion between marriages and divorces during the period of 1867 to 1886 stood for those States in which an accurate record is kept: Marriages to Every One States. Marriages. Divorces. Divorce. Connecticut 96,737 8,542 11.32 Columbia 24,065 1,105 21.77 Massachusetts 308,195 9,853 31.28 Ohio 544,362 26,367 20.65 Rhode Island 49,593 4,462 11.10 Vermont 54,913 3,238 19.95 In the other States of the Union, from which less accurate returns are at hand, the proportion seems to be the same. The reasons why in the United States divorces are more frequent than in any other country, may be sought in the circumstance, first, that divorce is there more easily obtained than elsewhere; secondly, that _women occupy in the United States a far freer position than in any other country, hence are less inclined to allow themselves to be tyrannised by their marital lords_.[76] In Germany there was, by judicial decision, 1 dissolution of marriage-- In the Years To Population. To Marriages. 1881-1885 8,410 1,430 1886 7,585 1,283 1887 7,261 1,237 1888 6,966 1,179 1889 7,155 1,211 According to Dr. S. Wernicke, there were to every 1,000 marriages, divorces in: Years. Belgium. Sweden. France. 1841-1845 0.7 4.2 2.7 1846-1850 0.9 4.4 2.8 1851-1855 1.0 4.4 4.0 1856-1860 1.4 4.3 4.9 1861-1865 1.6 4.8 6.0 1866-1870 1.9 5.0 7.6 1871-1875 2.8 5.8 6.5 1876-1880 4.2 7.1 9.0 It would be an error to attempt to arrive at any conclusion touching the different conditions of morality, by deductions from the large discrepancy between the figures for the different countries cited above. No one will dare assert that the population of Sweden has more inclination or cause for divorce than that of Belgium. First of all must the legislation on the subject be kept in mind, which in one country makes divorce difficult, in another easier, more so in some, less in others. Only in the second instance does the condition of morality come into consideration, i. e., the average reasons that, now the husbands, then the wives, consider determining factors in applying for separation. But all these figures combine in establishing that divorces increase much faster than population; and that they _increase_ while marriages _decline_. About this, more later. On the question how the actions for divorce distribute themselves among the several strata of society, there is only one computation at our disposal, from Saxony, but which is from the year 1851.[77] At that time, to each 100,000 marriages, there were actions for divorce from the stratum of Domestic servants 289 or 1 application to 346 marriages Day laborers 324 or 1 application to 309 marriages Government employes 337 or 1 application to 289 marriages Craftsmen and merchants 354 or 1 application to 283 marriages Artists and scientists 485 or 1 application to 206 marriages Accordingly, the actions for divorce were at that period in Saxony 50 per cent. more frequent in the _higher_ than in the _lower_ social strata. The increasing number of divorces signifies that, in general, the marriage relations are becoming ever more unfavorable, and that the factors multiply which destroy marriage. On the other hand, they also furnish evidence that an ever larger number of spouses, women in particular, decide to shake off the unbearable oppressing yoke. But the evils of matrimony increase, and the corruption of marriage gains ground in the same measure as the struggle for existence waxes sharper, and marriage becomes ever more a money-match, or be it, marriage by purchase. The increasing difficulty, moreover, of supporting a family determines many to renounce marriage altogether; and thus the saying that woman's activity should be limited to the house, and that she should fill her calling as housewife and mother, becomes ever more _a senseless phrase_. On the other hand, the conditions can not choose but favor the gratification of sexual intercourse outside of wedlock. Hence the number of prostitutes increases, while the number of marriages decreases. Besides that, the number increases of those who suffer from unnatural gratification of the sexual instinct. Among the property classes, not infrequently the wife sinks, just as in old Greece, to the level of a mere apparatus for the procreation of legitimate offspring, of warder of the house, or of nurse to a husband, wrecked by debauchery. The husbands keep for their pleasure and physical desires hetairae--styled among us courtesans or mistresses--who live in elegant abodes, in the handsomest quarters of the city. Others, whose means do not allow them to keep mistresses, disport themselves, after marriage as before, with Phrynes, for whom their hearts beat stronger than for their own wives. With the Phrynes they amuse themselves; and quite a number of the husbands among the "property and cultured classes" is so corrupt that it considers these entertainments in order.[78] In the upper and middle classes of society, the money matches and matches for social position are the mainspring of the evils of married life; but, over and above that, marriage is made rank by the lives these classes lead. This holds good particularly with regard to the women, who frequently give themselves over to idleness or to corrupting pursuits. Their intellectual food often consists in the reading of equivocal romances and obscene literature, in seeing and hearing frivolous theatrical performances, and the fruition of sensuous music; in exhilarating nervous stimulants; in conversations on the pettiest subjects, or scandals about the dear fellow mortals. Along therewith, they rush from one enjoyment into another, from one banquet to another, and hasten in summer to the baths and summer retreats to recover from the excesses of the winter, and to find fresh subjects for talk. The _chronique scandaleuse_ recruits itself from this style of life: people seduce and are seduced. In the lower classes money-matches are unknown, as a rule, although they occasionally do play a role. No one can wholly withdraw himself from the influence of the society he lives in,--and the existing social conditions exercise a particularly depressing influence upon the circumstances of the lower classes. As a rule, the workingman weds out of inclination, but there is no lack of causes to disturb his marriage. A rich blessing of children brings on cares and troubles; but too often want sets in. Sickness and death are frequent guests in the workingman's family. Lack of work drives misery to its height. Many a circumstance pares off the worker's earnings, or temporarily robs him wholly of it. Commercial and industrial crises throw him out of work; the introduction of new machinery, or methods of work, casts him as superfluous on the sidewalk; wars, unfavorable tariffs and commercial treaties, the introduction of the new indirect taxes, disciplinary acts on the part of the employer in punishment for the exercise of his convictions, etc., destroy his existence, or seriously injure it. Now one thing, then another happens, whereby, sometimes for a shorter, sometimes for a longer period, he becomes an unemployed, i. e., a starving being. Uncertainty is the badge of his existence. When such blows of fortune happen, they at first produce dissatisfaction and bitterness, and in the home life this mood finds its first expression when daily, every hour, demands are made by wife and children for the most pressing needs, needs that the husband can not satisfy. Out of despair, he visits the saloon, and seeks comfort in bad liquor. The last penny is spent. Quarrel and dissension break out. The ruin of both marriage and the family is accomplished. Let us take up another picture. Both--husband and wife--go to work. The little ones are left to themselves, or to the care of older brothers and sisters, themselves in need of care and education. At noon, the so-called lunch is swallowed down in hot haste,--supposing that the parents have at all time to rush home, which, in thousands of cases is impossible, owing to the shortness of the hour of recess, and the distance of the shop from the home. Tired out and unstrung, both return home in the evening. Instead of a friendly, cheerful home, they find a narrow, unhealthy habitation, often lacking in light and air, generally also in the most necessary comforts. The increasing tenement plague, together with the horrible improprieties that flow therefrom, is one of the darkest sides of our social order, and leads to numerous evils, vices and crimes. Yet the plague increases from year to year in all cities and industrial regions, and it draws within the vortex of its evils ever new strata of society: small producers, public employes, teachers, small traders, etc. The workingman's wife, who reaches home in the evening tired and harassed, has now again her hands full. She must bestir herself at breakneck speed in order but to get ready the most necessary things in the household. The crying and noisy children are hurried off to bed; the wife sits up, and sews, and patches deep into the night. The so-much-needed mental intercourse and encouragement are absent. The husband is often uneducated and knows little, the wife still less; the little they have to say to each other is soon got through with. The husband goes to the saloon, and seeks there the entertainment that he lacks at home; he drinks; however little that be that he spends, for his means it is too much. At times he falls a prey to gambling, which, in the upper circles of society also, claims many victims, and he loses more than he spends in drink. The wife, in the meantime, sits at home and grumbles; she must work like a dray-horse; for her there is no rest or recreation; the husband avails himself of the freedom that accident gives him, of having been born a man. Thus disharmony arises. If, however, the wife is less true to duty, she seeks in the evening, after she has returned home tired, the rest she is entitled to; but then the household goes back, and misery is twice as great. Indeed, we live "in the best world possible." Through these and similar circumstances, marriage is shattered ever more among the working class also. Even favorable seasons of work exert their destructive influence: they compel him to work Sundays and overtime: they take from him the hours he still had left for his family. In many instances he has to travel hours to reach the shop; to utilize the noon recess for going home is an impossibility; he is up in the morning at the very earliest, when the children are still sound asleep, and returns home late, when they are again in the same condition. Thousands, especially those engaged in the building trades in the cities, remain away from home all week, owing to the vastness of the distance, and return only on Saturdays to their family. And yet it is expected of family life that it thrive under such circumstances. Moreover, female labor is ever on the increase, especially in the textile industry, whose thousands of steam weaving and spinning looms are served by cheap woman and children's hands. Here the relations of sex and age have been reversed. Wife and child go into the mill, the now breadless husband sits at home and attends to household duties. In the United States, that, due to its rapid large-capitalist development, produces all the evils of European industrial States in much larger dimensions, a characteristic name has been invented for the state of things brought on by such conditions. Industrial places that employ women mainly, while the husbands sit at home, are called "she-towns." The admission of women to all the manual trades is to-day conceded on all hands. Capitalist society, ever on the hunt for profit and gain, has long since recognized what an excellent subject for exploitation is woman--more docile and submissive, and less exacting woman--in comparison with man. Hence the number of trades and occupations, in which women are finding employment increases yearly. The extension and improvement of machinery, the simplification of the process of production through the ever minuter subdivision of labor, the intenser competition of capitalists among themselves, together with the competitive battle in the world's market among rival industrial countries,--all these continue to favor the ever further application of female labor. It is a phenomenon noticeable in all industrial countries alike. But in the same measure that the number of working-women increases, competition among the workingmen is thereby intensified. One branch of industry after another, one branch of work after the other, is being taken by working-women, who are ever more displacing the men. Numerous passages in the reports of factory inspectors, as well as in the statistical figures on the occupation of working-women, go to confirm the fact. The condition of the women is worst in the industrial branches in which they preponderate, for instance, the clothing and underwear industry, those branches, in general, in which work can be done at home. The inquiry into the condition of the working-women in the underwear and confectionery industries, ordered in 1886 by the Bundesrath, has revealed the fact that the wages of these working-women are often so miserable that they are compelled to prostitute their bodies for a side-source of income. A large number of the prostitutes are recruited from the strata of ill-paid working-women. Our "Christian" Government, whose Christianity, as a rule, is looked for in vain there where it should be applied, and is found where the same is superfluous and harmful,--this Christian Government acts exactly like the Christian capitalists, a fact that does not astonish him who knows that the Christian Government is but the agent of our Christian capitalists. The Government only with difficulty decides in favor of laws to limit woman-labor to a normal measure, or to wholly forbid child-labor;--on the same principle that that Government denies many of its own employes both the requisite Sunday rest and normal hours of work, and in that way materially disturbs their family life. Post Office, railroad, penitentiary and other Government employes often must perform their functions far beyond the time limit, and their salaries stand in inverse ratio to their work. That, however, is, to-day, the normal condition of things, still considered quite in order by the majority. Seeing, furthermore, that rent, in comparison to the wages and earnings of the workingmen, the lower Government employes and the small men included, is much too high, these must exert themselves to the utmost. Lodgers are taken into these homes, only males in some, females in others, often both. The young and the old live together in narrow quarters, without separating the sexes, and are crowded together even during the most private acts. How the sense of shame, or morality fares thereby, horrifying facts proclaim. The increasing brutalization of the youth, so extensively discussed, is due mainly to the conditions prevalent in our industrial system, with which the wretchedness of the home is closely connected. And, as to the children, what must be upon them the effect of industrial labor! The very worst imaginable, both physically and morally. The ever increasing industrial occupation of married women also is accompanied with fatal results. Especially is this the case in connection with pregnancy and child-birth, as also during the early life of the child when it depends upon the nourishment of the mother. A number of ailments arise during pregnancy that affect destructively both the fruit and the organism of the woman, and cause premature and still-born births, upon all of which more later. After the child is born, the mother is compelled to return as quickly as possible to the factory, lest her place be taken by a competitor. The inevitable results to the little ones are: neglected care, improper or total lack of nourishment. They are drugged with opiates to keep them quiet. The further results are: a vast mortality, or stunted development; in short, the degeneration of the race. The children often grow up without having enjoyed true motherly and fatherly love, or having on their part, felt filial affection. Thus is the proletariat born, thus does it live and die. And the "Christian" Government, this "Christian" society wonders that rudeness, immorality and crime cumulate. When, in the early sixties of last century, due to the American Civil War for the emancipation of the negroes, many thousands of workingmen in the English cotton industries were out of work, physicians made the remarkable discovery that, despite great want among the population, mortality among children had _declined_. The cause was simple. The children now enjoyed the mother's nourishment and better care than they had ever had during the best seasons of work. The same fact was attested by physicians during the crisis of the seventies in the United States, especially in New York and Massachusetts. The general lack of employment compelled the women to rest from labor, and left them time for the care of their children. Similar observations were also made by Dr. v. Recherberg during the inquiry into the condition of the weavers of the region of Zittau in Saxony, as shown by him in a work that he wrote during the summer of 1890. In the home-industries, which romantic economists love to represent as idyllic, conditions are no better. Here the wife is chained to her husband, at work early and late into the night, and the children are from an early age hitched on. Crowded into the narrowest space imaginable, husband, wife and family, boys and girls, live together, along with the waste of materials, amidst the most disagreeable dusts and odors, and without the necessary cleanliness. The bedrooms are of a piece with the sitting and working rooms: generally dark holes and without ventilation, they would be sufficiently unsanitary if they housed but a part of the people huddled into them. In short, the conditions of these places are such as to cause the skin to creep of anyone accustomed to a life worthy of a human being. The ever harder struggle for existence often also compels women and men to commit actions and tolerate indignities that, under other circumstances, would fill them with disgust. In 1877 it was authentically established in Munich that, among the prostitutes, registered by and under the surveillance of the police, there were not less than 203 wives of workingmen and artisans. And how many are not the married women, who, out of distress, prostitute themselves without submitting to a police control that deeply lacerates the sense of shame and dignity! But we have wandered somewhat from our subject. It was shown that the number of actions for divorce is on the increase in all countries of civilization, and that the majority of these actions proceed from wives. This steadily rising figure of actions for divorce is a sign of _the decay of bourgeois marriage, which is answering its purpose ever less_. But a still much worse sign of its decay is the circumstance that, simultaneously, the number of marriages is in almost all these countries steadily on the decline. Experience tells that high prices for corn in one single year have an unfavorable effect both upon the number of marriages and that of births. Long industrial crises, and increasing deterioration of the general economic condition must, accordingly, have a lasting evil effect. This is confirmed by the statistics of marriages for almost all countries in civilization. In France, marriages between 1881-1890 cast the following picture on the canvas. Marriages were contracted in-- 1881 282,079 1886 283,208 1882 281,060 1887 277,060 1883 284,519 1888 276,848 1884 289,555 1889 272,934 1885 283,170 1890 269,332 There is, accordingly, a considerable decrease of marriages. In the German Empire, the number of marriages was highest after the close of the war between Germany and France, during which they had stood still. In 1872 there were 423,900 marriages contracted, but in 1876 they numbered only 366,912, and during the worst year of the crisis, the year 1879, they dropped to 335,113. They have since risen again slowly, and numbered in 1882 350,457 1889 389,339 1886 372,326 1892 398,775 Although in the year 1892 the population of Germany was larger by 8,000,000 heads than in 1872, the number of marriages was not even as large as in 1874 when it amounted to 400,282. In the period between 1871-1880, there were, to an average of 1,000 inhabitants in Germany, 8.6 marriages; in the period between 1881-1888, only 7.8. In Prussia, to the average 10,000 inhabitants, there married-- Between 1831-35 1,849 Between 1866-70 1,605 Between 1871-75 1,896 Between 1881-85 1,529 And in 1888 1,624 A similar, partly even more unfavorable picture than in Germany, is furnished by the statistical tables for other European countries. Out of every 10,000 persons, there married-- Year Holland Switzerland Austria France Italy Belgium England 1873 171 152 188 178 159 156 176 1874 168 166 181 167 153 152 170 1875 167 179 171 164 168 145 167 1876 165 162 165 158 163 142 166 1877 162 157 150 150 154 149 157 1878 155 147 152 151 142 135 152 1879 153 138 155 152 150 136 144 1880 150 137 152 149 140 141 149 1881 146 136 160 150 162 142 151 1882 143 135 164 149 157 140 155 1883 142 136 157 150 161 136 154 1884 144 136 157 153 164 136 151 1885 139 138 152 149 158 136 144 1886 139 137 155 149 158 134 141 --- --- --- --- --- --- --- Average 153 147 161 155 156 141 156 Year Scotland Ireland Denmark Norway Sweden Hungary 1873 155 96 162 145 146 226 1874 152 92 164 153 145 214 1875 148 91 170 157 140 218 1876 150 99 171 154 141 198 1877 144 93 161 151 137 182 1878 134 95 148 146 129 187 1879 128 87 147 135 126 205 1880 132 78 152 133 126 182 1881 139 85 156 128 124 198 1882 140 86 154 134 127 203 1883 140 85 154 132 128 205 1884 135 91 156 137 131 201 1885 129 86 151 133 133 ... 1886 124 84 142 131 ... ... --- -- --- --- --- --- Average 139 89 156 141 133 202 These figures are interesting in more respects than one. In the first place, they prove that, in all the countries named, the number of marriages _declines_. Like Germany, all these countries show the highest frequency of marriage in the beginning of 1872, and then follows a drop in most of them. Hungary comes out best; Ireland, on the contrary, worst, showing the smallest figures of all. The ejectment of the Irish population from their lands, and the ever greater concentration of the same in the hands of the large landlords, express themselves clearly in the figures given.[79] Industrial conditions have a marked effect upon the number of marriages. As the former has, on an average, become ever more unfavorable since the middle of the seventies, the decline in marriages is not astonishing. But not the industrial conditions only, also the manner in which the property relations develop affects marriages in a high degree, as just seen in Ireland. The Year-Book of Schmoller for 1885, section 1, gives information on the statistics of population of the Kingdom of Wuertemberg, from which it appears strikingly that with the increase of large age _declines_, while the number of _unmarried_ men between the ages of 40 and 50 _rises_: Percentage of Males. Percentage of Landed Married Unmarried Property by of the of the Hectares. Age of Age of Districts. Up to 5. 5-20. Over 20. 25-30. 40-50. Upper Neurenburg 79.6 20.4 0.0 63.6 4.4 East of Stuttgart 78.9 17.7 3.4 51.3 8.1 South of Stuttgart 67.6 24.8 7.6 48.6 8.7 North of Stuttgart 56.5 34.8 8.8 50.0 10.0 Schwarzwald 50.2 42.2 7.6 48.6 10.1 Upper Neckar 43.6 40.3 16.1 44.3 10.8 Eastward 39.5 47.6 12.8 48.7 10.0 Northeast, except north of Hall 22.2 50.1 27.7 38.8 10.6 Swabian Alb 20.3 40.8 38.3 38.8 7.5 North Upper Swabia 19.7 48.0 32.3 32.5 9.7 From Hall eastward 15.5 50.0 34.5 32.5 13.8 Bodensee district 14.2 61.4 24.4 23.5 26.4 Middle and South Upper Swabia 12.6 41.1 46.3 30.0 19.1 There can be no doubt: small landed property favors marriages: it makes a living possible for a larger number of families, although the living be modest. Large landed property, on the contrary, works directly against marriage, and promotes celibacy. All the figures here quoted prove, accordingly, that, not _morals_, but purely _material_ causes are the determining factor. _The number of marriages, like the moral conditions of a commonwealth, depends upon its material foundations._ The fear of want, the mental worry lest the children be not educated up to their station,--these are further causes that drive the wives, in particular, of all ranks to actions that are out of keeping with nature, and still more so with the criminal code. Under this head belong the various means for the prevention of pregnancy, or, when, despite all care, this does set in, then the removal of the unripe fruit--_abortion_. It were an error to claim that these measures are resorted to only by heedless, unconscionable women. Often, rather, it is conscientious women, who wish to limit the number of children, in order to escape the dilemma of either having to deny themselves their husbands, or of driving them to paths that they are naturally inclined to. It often is such women who prefer to undergo the dangers of abortion. Besides these, there are other women, especially in the higher walks of life, who, in order to conceal a "slip," or out of aversion for the inconveniences of pregnancy, of child-birth and of nursing, perhaps, out of fear of sooner losing their charms, and then forfeiting their standing with either husband or male friends, incur such criminal acts, and, for hard cash, find ready medical and midwife support. To conclude from diverse indications, artificial abortion is coming ever more into practice; nor is the practice new. Artificial abortion was in frequent use among the ancient peoples, and is, to this day, from the most civilized down to the barbarous. According to Jules Roget,[80] the women of Rome took recourse to abortion for several reasons: They either sought to destroy the evidence of illicit relations--a reason that even to-day is often at its bottom; or they wished to be able to indulge their excesses without interruption. There were also other reasons: they wished to avoid the changes that pregnancy and child-birth work upon woman's physique. Among the Romans, a woman was old from twenty-five years to thirty. Accordingly, she sought to avoid all that might impair her charms. In the Middle Ages, abortion was punishable with severe bodily chastisement, often even with death; the free woman, guilty thereof, became a serf. At present, abortion is especially in use in the United States. In all large cities of the Union, there are institutions in which girls and women are prematurely delivered: many American papers contain the advertisements of such places: abortion is talked of there almost as freely as of a regular birth. In Germany and Europe, opinion on the subject is different: the German criminal code, for instance, makes the act of both the principal and the accessory a penitentiary offense.[81] Abortion is, in many cases, accompanied by the most serious results. The operation is dangerous; death not infrequently occurs; often the result is a permanent impairment of health. "The troubles of troublesome pregnancy and child-birth are infinitely less than the sufferings consequent upon artificial abortion."[82] Barrenness is one of its most common consequences. All that, notwithstanding, abortion is practiced also in Germany, ever more frequently, and for the reasons given. Between 1882-1888, the number of cases in Berlin, of which the criminal courts took cognizance, rose 155 per cent. The _chronique scandaleuse_ of the last years dealt frequently with cases of abortion, that caused great sensation, due to the circumstance that reputable physicians and women, prominent in society, played a _role_ in them. Furthermore, to judge from the rising number of announcements in our newspapers, the institutions and places increase in which married and unmarried women of the property class are offered an opportunity to await the results of a "slip" in perfect secrecy. The dread of a large increase of children--due to the smallness of means, and the cost of bringing up--has, among all classes and even peoples, developed the use of preventatives into a system, that here and yonder has grown into a public calamity. It is a generally known fact that, in all strata of French society, the "two-child system" is in force. In few countries of civilization are marriages relatively as numerous as in France, and in no country is the average number of children so small, and the increase of population so slow. The French capitalist, like the small-holder and allotment peasant, pursues the system; the French workingman follows suit. In many sections of Germany the special situation of the peasants seems to have led to similar conditions. We know a charming region in Southwest Germany, where, in the garden of every peasant, there stands the so-called "Sevenbaum," whose properties are applied to abortive purposes. In another district of the same country the regular two-child system prevails among the peasants: they do not wish to divide the places. Moreover, striking is the measure in which literature, that treats with and recommends the means of "facultative sterility," increases in Germany both in volume and demand,--of course, always under the colors of science, and in allusion to the alleged threatening danger of over-population. Along with abortion and the artificial prevention of conception, crime plays its _role_. In France, the murder of children and their exposure is perceptibly on the increase, both promoted by the provision of the French civil code that forbids all inquiry after the paternity of the child. Section 340 of the _Code Civil_ decrees: "_La recherche de la paternite est interdite_;" on the other hand, Section 314 provides: "_La recherche de la maternite est admise_." To inquire after the paternity of a child is forbidden, but is allowed after its maternity,--a law that glaringly brings out the injustice contemplated towards the seduced woman. The men of France are free to seduce as many women and girls as they are able to; they are free from all responsibility; they owe no support to the child. These provisions were instituted under the pretext that the female sex should be frightened against seducing the men. As you see, everywhere it is the weak man, this limb of the stronger sex, who is seduced, but never seduces. The result of Section 340 of the _Code Civil_ was Section 312, which provides: "_L'enfant conçu pendant le marriage a pour pere le mari._"[83] Inquiry after the paternity being forbidden, it is logical that the husband, crowned with horns, rest content with having the child, that his wife received from another, considered his own. Inconsistency, at any rate, can not be charged to the French capitalist class. All attempts to amend Section 340 have so far failed. Lately, February, 1895, the Socialist deputies in the French Chamber of Deputies presented a bill intended to put an end to the disfranchised position of the seduced or betrayed woman. Whether the attempt will be crowned with success is doubtful. On the other hand, the French capitalist class--sensible of the cruelty it committed in so framing the law as to make it impossible for the deceived woman to turn for support to the father of her child--sought to make up for its sins by establishing foundling asylums. According to our famous "morals," there is no paternal feeling towards the illegitimate child; that exists only for "legitimate heirs." Through the foundlings' asylums the mother also is taken from the new-born child. According to the French fiction, foundlings are orphans. In this way, the French capitalist class has its illegitimate children brought up, _at the expense of the State_, as "children of the fatherland." A charming arrangement. In Germany, things bid fair to be switched on the French track. The provisions in the bill for a civil code for the German Empire contain maxims on the legal status of illegitimate children, strongly in contrast with the humane law still in force. According to the bill, a dishonored girl--even if blameless, or seduced with the promise of subsequent marriage, or induced to consent to coition through some criminal act--has no claim against the seducer except as indemnity for the costs of delivery, and for support during the first six weeks after the birth of the child, and then only within the bounds of what is strictly necessary. Only in some of the cases of the worst crimes against morality, can a slight money indemnity be granted to the seduced girl, at the discretion of the court, and without the necessity of proving actual damages. The illegitimate child has no claim upon the seducer of his mother, except for the merest necessaries of life, and then only until its fourteenth year. All claims of the child on its father are, however, barred if, within pregnancy, any other man cohabit with its mother. The plaintiff child has, moreover, to prove that its mother has not accepted the embraces of any other man. Menger, the expositions in whose treatise[84] we here follow, justly raises against the bill the serious charge that it only accrues to the advantage of the well-to-do, immoral men, seducers of ignorant girls, often girls who sin through poverty, but leaves these fallen girls, together with their wholly guiltless children, entirely unprotected, aye, pushes them only deeper into misery and crime. Menger cites, in this connection, the provisions of the Prussian law. According thereto, an unmarried woman or widow of good character, who is made pregnant, is to be indemnified by the man according to his means. The indemnity shall, however, not exceed one-fourth of his property. An illegitimate child has a claim upon its father for support and education, regardless of whether his mother is a person of good character: the expenditure, however, shall be no higher than the education of a legitimate child would cost to people of the peasant or of ordinary citizen walks of life. If the illicit intercourse occurred under promise of future marriage, then, according to the further provisions of Prussian law, the Judge is duly to award the woman, pronounced innocent and a wife, the name, standing and rank of the man, together with all the rights of a divorced woman. The illegitimate child has, in such cases, all the rights of children born in wedlock. We may await with curiosity to see whether the provisions of this bill, so hostile to woman, will acquire the force of a civil code of law in Germany. But retrogression is the key-note in our legislation. Between the years of 1830-1880, there were 8,563 cases of infanticide before the French court of assizes, the figures rising from 471 in 1831, to 980 in 1880. During the same period, 1,032 cases of abortion were tried, 41 in 1831, and in 1880 over 100. Of course, only a small part of the abortions came to the knowledge of the criminal court; as a rule, only when followed by serious illness or death. In the cases of infanticide, the country population contributed 75 per cent., in the cases of abortion the cities 65 per cent. In the city, the women have more means at command to prevent normal birth; hence, the many cases of abortion and the small number of infanticides. It is the reverse in the country. Such is the composition of the picture presented by modern society in respect to its most intimate relations. The picture differs wide from that that poets and poetically doused phantasists love to paint it. Our picture, however, has this advantage,--it is true. And yet the picture still calls for several strokes of the brush to bring out its character in full. In general, there can be no difference of opinion touching the present and average mental inferiority of the female sex to the male. True enough, Balzac, by no means a woman-lover, claims: "The woman, who has received a male education, possesses in fact the most brilliant and fruitful qualities for the building of her own happiness and that of her husband;" and Goethe, who knew well both the men and women of his times, expresses himself in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (confessions of a pure soul): "Learned women were ridiculed, and also the educated ones were disliked, probably because it was considered impolite to put so many ignorant men to shame." We agree with both. Nevertheless, the fact is no wise altered that, in general, women stand intellectually behind the men. This difference is compulsory, because _woman is that which man, as her master, has made her_. The education of woman, more so than that of the working class, has been neglected since time immemorial; nor are latter-day improvements adequate. We live in days when the aspiration after exchange of thought grows in all circles, in the family also; and there the neglected education of woman is felt as a serious fault, and it avenges itself upon the husband. The object of the education of man--at least it is so claimed, although due to the mistaken methods, the object is often missed, perchance, also, is not meant to be reached--aims at the development of the intellect, the sharpening of the powers of thought, the broadening of the field of practical knowledge, and the invigoration of the will-power, in short, at the cultivation of the functions of the mind. With woman, on the contrary, education, so far as at all attended to in a higher degree, is mainly aimed at the intensification of her feelings, at formality and polite culture--music, belles-letters, art, poetry--all of which only screw her nervous sensitiveness and phantasy up to a higher pitch. This is a mistaken and unhealthy policy. In it the fact transpires that the powers, which determine the measure of woman's education, are guided only by their ingrained prejudices regarding the nature of the female character, and also by the cramped position of woman. The object must not be to develop still further the sentimental and imaginative side of woman, which would only tend to heighten her natural inclination to nervousness; neither should her education be limited to etiquette and polite literature. The object, with regard to her as to man, should be to develop their intellectual activity and acquaint them with the phenomena of practical life. It would be of greatest benefit to both sexes if, in lieu of a superfluity of sentiment, that often becomes positively uncanny, woman possessed a good share of sharpened wit and power for exact reasoning; if, in lieu of excessive nervous excitation and timidity, she possessed firmness of character and physical courage; in lieu of conventional, literary refinement, in so far as she at all has any, she had a knowledge of the world, of men and of the powers of Nature. Generally speaking, what is termed the feeling and spirituality of woman has hitherto been nurtured without stint, while her intellectual development has, on the contrary, been grossly neglected and kept under. As a consequence, she suffers of hypertrophy of feeling and spirituality, hence is prone to superstition and miracles,--a more than grateful soil for religious and other charlataneries, a pliant tool for all reaction. Blockish men often complain when she is thus affected, but they bring no relief, because often they are themselves steeped up to the ears in prejudices. By reason of woman's being almost generally as here sketched, she looks upon the world differently from man. Hence, again, a strong source of contrariety between the two sexes. Participation in public life is to-day one of the most essential duties of a man; that many men do not yet understand this does not alter the fact. Nevertheless, the number of those is ever increasing who realize that public institutions stand in intimate connection with the private lot of the individual; that his success or failure, together with that of his family, depend infinitely more upon the condition of public affairs than upon his own personal qualities and actions. The fact is beginning to receive recognition that the greatest efforts of the individual are powerless against evils that lie in the very condition of things, and that determine his state. On the other hand, the struggle for existence now requires much greater efforts than before. Demands are now made upon man that engage ever more his time and strength. The ignorant, indifferent wife stands dumb before him, and feels herself neglected. It may be even said that, the mental difference between man and woman is to-day greater than formerly, when the opportunities for both were slight and limited, and lay more within the reach of her restricted intellect. Furthermore, the handling of public affairs occupies to-day a large number of men to a degree before unknown; this widens their horizon; but it also withdraws them ever more from the mental sphere of their homes. The wife deems herself set back, and thus another source of friction is started. Only rarely does the husband know how to pacify his wife and convince her. When he does that, he has escaped a dangerous rock. As a rule the husband is of the opinion that what he wants does not concern his wife, she does not understand it. He takes no pains to enlighten her. "You don't understand such matters," is his stereotyped answer, the moment the wife complains that she is neglected. Lack of information on the part of wives is promoted by lack of sense on the part of most husbands. More favorable relations between husband and wife spring up in the rank of the working class in the measure that both realize they are tugging at the same rope, and that there is but one means towards satisfactory conditions for themselves and their family,--the radical reformation of society that shall make human beings of them all. In the measure that such insight gains ground among the wives of the proletariat, then, despite want and misery, their married life is _idealized_: both now have a common aim, after which they strive; and they have an inexhaustible source of mutual encouragement in the mutual interchange of views, whereto their joint battle leads them. The number of proletarian women who reach this insight is every year larger. Herein lies a movement, that is in process of development, and that is fraught with decisive significance for the future of mankind. In other social strata, the differences in education and views--easily overlooked at the beginning of married life, when passion still predominates--are felt ever more with ripening years. Sexual passion cools off, and its substitution with harmony of thought is all the more needful. But, leaving aside whether the husband has any idea of civic duties and attends to the same, he, at any rate, thanks to his occupation and constant intercourse with the outer world, comes into continuous touch with different elements and opinions, on all sorts of occasions, and thus floats into an intellectual atmosphere that broadens his horizon. As a rule, and in contrast with his wife, he finds himself in a state of intellectual molting, while she, on the contrary, due to her household duties, which engage her early and late, is robbed of leisure for further education, and, accordingly, becomes mentally stunted and soured. The domestic wretchedness in which the majority of wives live to-day, is correctly depicted by the bourgeois-minded Gerhard von Amyntor in his "Marginal Notes to the Book of Life."[85] In the chapter entitled "Deadly Gnat-bites" he says among other things: "Not the shocking events, that none remain unvisited by, and that bring, here the death of a husband, yonder the moral downfall of a beloved child; that lie, here in a long and serious illness, yonder in the wrecking of a warmly nursed plan;--not these undermine her (the housewife's) freshness and strength. It is the small, daily-recurring marrow and bone-gnawing cares.... How many millions of brave little house-mothers cook and scour away their vigor of life, their very cheeks and roguish dimples, in attending to domestic cares until they become crumpled, dried and broke-up mummies. The ever-recurring question, what shall be cooked to-day? the ever-recurring necessity of sweeping, and beating, and brushing, and dusting is the continuously falling drop that slowly, but surely, wears away mind and body. The kitchen-hearth is the place where the saddest balances are drawn up between income and expense, where the most depressing observations are forced upon the mind on the rising dearness of the necessaries of life, and on the ever increasing difficulty to earn the needed cash. On the flaming altar, where the soup kettle bubbles, youth and mental ease, beauty and good humor are sacrificed; and who recognizes in the old care-bent cook, the one-time blooming, overbearing, coy-coquette bride in the array of her myrtle crown? Already in antiquity the hearth was sacred, near it were placed the Lares and patron deities. Let us also hold sacred the hearth at which the dutiful German bourgeois house-wife dies a slow death, in order to keep the house comfortable, the table covered and the family in health." Such is the consolation offered in bourgeois society to the wife, who, under the present order of society, is miserably going to pieces. Those women, who, thanks to their social condition, find themselves in a freer state, have, as a rule, a one-sided, superficial education, that, combined with inherited female characteristics, manifests itself with force. They generally have a taste for mere superficialities; they think only about gew-gaws and dress; and thus they seek their mission in the satisfaction of a spoiled taste, and the indulgence of passions that demand their pay with usury. In their children and the education of these they have hardly any interest: they give them too much trouble and annoyance, hence are left to the nurses and servants, and are later passed on to the boarding-schools. At any rate their principal task is to raise their daughters as show-dolls, and their sons as pupils for the _jeunesse dore_ (gilded youth) out of which dudedom recruits its ranks--that despicable class of men that may be fairly put upon a level with procurers. This _jeunesse dore_ furnishes the chief contingent to the seducers of the daughters of the working class. They look upon idleness and squandering as a profession. FOOTNOTES: [58] Mainlaender, "Philosophie der Erlösung," Frankfort-on-the-Main, 1886, E. Koenitzer. [59] D. A. Debay, "Hygiene et Physiologue du Marriage," Paris, 1884. Quoted in "Im Freien Reich" by Ioma v. Troll-Borostyani, Zurich, 1884. [60] "Das Geschlechtsleben des Weibes, in physiologischer, pathologischer und therapeutischer Hinsicht dargestellt." [61] "Die Prostitution vor dem Gesetz," by Veritas. Leipsic, 1893. [62] V. Oettingen, "Moralstatistik." Erlangen, 1882. [63] "Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie," Vol. I, Stuttgart, 1883. [64] Vol. II. Leipsic, 1887. [65] "The moods and feelings in and which husband and wife approach each other, exercise, without a doubt, a definite influence upon the result of the sexual act, and transmit certain characteristics to the fruit." Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, "The Moral Education of the Young In Relation to Sex." See also Goethe's "Elective Affinities," where he sketches clearly the influence exerted by the feelings of two beings who approach each other for intimate intercourse. [66] "Denkwuerdigkeiten," Vol. I, p. 239, Leipsic, F. A. Brockhaus. [67] "Mr. E., a manufacturer ... informed me that he employed females exclusively, at his power-looms ... gives a decided preference to married females, especially those who have families at home dependent on them for support; they are attentive, docile, more so than unmarried females, and are compelled to use their utmost exertions to procure the necessities of life. Thus are the virtues, the peculiar virtues of the female character to be perverted to her injury--thus all that is most dutiful and tender in her nature is made a means of her bondage and suffering." Speech of Lord Ashley, March 15, 1884, on the Ten Hour Factory Bill. Marx's "Capital." [68] "Die Frau auf dem Gebiete der Nationaloekonomie." [69] See "Fuerst Bismarck und seine Leute," Von Busch. [70] Sections 180 and 181. [71] "The Physiology of Love." [72] Alexander Dumas says rightly, In "Monsieur Alfonse:" "Man has built two sorts of morals; one for himself, one for his wife; one that permits him love with all women, and one that, as indemnity for the liberty she has forfeited forever, permits her love with one man only." [73] L. Bridel, "La Puissance Maritale," Lausanne. 1879. [74] v. Oettingen, "Moralstatistik," Erlangen, 1882. [75] v. Oettingen, "Moralstatistik." [76] [According to the census of 1900, there were in the United States 198,914 divorced persons: males 84,237, females 114,677. The percentage of divorced to married persons was 0.7. The census warns, however, that "divorced persons are apt to be reported as single, and so the census returns in this respect should not be accepted as a correct measure of the prevalence of divorce throughout the country."--THE TRANSLATOR.] [77] v. Oettingen, "Moralstatistik." [78] In his work frequently cited by us, "Die Frauenfrage im Mittelalter," Buecher laments the decay of marriage and of family life; he condemns the increasing female labor in industry, and demands a "return" to the "real domain of woman," where she alone produces "values" in the house and the family. The endeavors of the modern friends of woman appear to him as "dilettanteism" and he hopes finally "that the movement may be switched on the right track," but he is obviously unable to point to a successful road. Neither is that possible from the bourgeois standpoint. The marriage conditions, like the condition of woman in general, have not been brought about arbitrarily. They are the natural product of our social development. But the social development of peoples does not cut capers, nor does it perpetrate any such false reasonings in a circle; it takes its course obedient to imminent laws. It is the mission of the student of civilization to discover these laws, and, planted upon them, to show the way for the removal of existing evils. [79] "Neue Zeit," Jahrgang 1888, p. 239. [80] "Etudes Medicales sur l'Ancienne Rome," Paris, 1859. [81] The above account of the United States, concerning the contrast between it and Europe, is incorrect. At the time in the nation's history when material conditions were easy, theoretically, the thought of abortion, let alone its execution, could not spring up; and it did not. All the reports of that time, not forgetting Washington Irving's humorous account of the custom of "bundling," confirm the fact. Births were numerous, families large. Subsequently, when conditions became less easy, and in the measure that the country entered increasingly into the sphere of the material hardships implied in advancing capitalism, theoretically, again, the thought of abortion, and, along with it, the deed, must be expected to have sprung up; and so they did. But the same development that carried the country into the material sphere of capitalism, also, and at the same time, carried its people into the sphere of capitalist affectation of morality and measuredness of language; in short, of hypocrisy. The being, that will commit the crimes of a higher civilization with the plain-spokenness of the barbarian, is a monstrosity. Capitalist United States is abreast of, and moves in even step with, capitalist Europe, not in the practice only of crime, but in the Pharisees of its condemnation and the severity of its punishment also.--THE TRANSLATOR. [82] "Geschichte und Gefahren der Fruchtabtreibung," Dr. Ed. Reich, Leipsic, 1893. [83] "The child conceived during marriage has the husband for father." [84] "Das buergerliche Recht und die besitzlosen Klassen," Tuebingen, 1890. [85] Sam. Lucas, Elberfeld. CHAPTER II. FURTHER CHECKS AND OBSTRUCTIONS TO MARRIAGE--NUMERICAL PROPORTION OF THE SEXES--ITS CAUSES AND EFFECTS. Cast in the mold of the conditions above described, many a feature of woman's character took shape, and they reached ever fuller development from generation to generation. On these features men love to dwell with predilection, but they forget that they are themselves the cause thereof, and have promoted with their conduct the defects they now make merry about, or censure. Among these widely censured female qualities, belong her dreaded readiness of tongue, and passion for gossip; her inclination to endless talk over trifles and unimportant things; her mental bent for purely external matters, such as dress, and her desire to please, together with a resulting proneness to all the follies of fashion; lastly, her easily arousable envy and jealousy of the other members of her sex. These qualities, though in different degrees, manifest themselves generally in the female sex from early childhood. They are qualities that are born under the pressure of social conditions, and are further developed by heredity, example and education. A being irrationally brought up, can not bring up others rationally. In order to be clear on the causes and development of good or bad qualities, whether with the sexes or with whole peoples, the same methods must be pursued that modern natural science applies in order to ascertain the formation and development of life according to genus and species, and to determine their qualities. They are the laws that flow from the material conditions for life, laws that life demands, that adapt themselves to it, and finally became its nature. Man forms no exception to that which holds good in Nature for all animate creation. Man does not stand outside of Nature: looked at physiologically, he is the most highly developed animal,--a fact, however, that some would deny. Thousands of years ago, although wholly ignorant of modern science, the ancients had on many matters affecting man, more rational views than the moderns; above all, they gave practical application to the views founded on experience. We praise with enthusiastic admiration the beauty and strength of the men and women of Greece; but the fact is overlooked that, not the happy climate, nor the bewitching nature of a territory that stretched along the bay-indented sea, but the physical culture and maxims of education, consistently enforced by the State, thus affected both the being and the development of the population. These measures were calculated to combine beauty, strength and suppleness of body with wit and elasticity of mind, both of which were transmitted to the descendants. True enough, even then, in comparison with man, woman was neglected in point of mental, but not of corporal culture.[86] In Sparta, that went furthest in the corporal culture of the two sexes, boys and girls went naked until the age of puberty, and participated in common in the exercises of the body, in games and in wrestling. The naked exposure of the human body, together with the natural treatment of natural things, had the advantage that sensuous excitement--to-day artificially cultivated by the separation of the sexes from early childhood--was then prevented. The corporal make-up of one sex, together with its distinctive organs, was no secret to the other. There, no play of equivocal words could arise. Nature was Nature. The one sex rejoiced at the beauty of the other. Mankind will have to return to Nature and to the natural intercourse of the sexes; it must cast off the now-ruling and unhealthy spiritual notions concerning man; it must do that by setting up methods of education that fit in with our own state of culture, and that may bring on the physical and mental regeneration of the race. Among us, and especially on the subject of female education, seriously erroneous conceptions are still prevalent. That woman also should have strength, courage and resolution, is considered heretical, "unwomanly," although none would dare deny that, equipped with such qualities, woman could protect herself against many ills and inconveniences. Conversely, woman is cramped in her physical, exactly as in her intellectual development. The irrationalness of her dress plays an important _role_ herein. It not only, unconscionably hampers her in her physique, it directly ruins her;--and yet, but few physicians dare take a stand against the abuse, accurately informed though they are on the injuriousness of her dress. The fear of displeasing the patient often causes them to hold their tongues, if they do not even flatter her insane notions. Modern dress hinders woman in the free use of her limbs, it injures her physical growth, and awakens in her a sense of impotence and weakness. Moreover, modern dress is a positive danger to her own and the health of those who surround her: in the house and on the street, woman is a walking raiser of dust. And likewise is the development of woman hampered by the strict separation of the sexes, both in social intercourse and at school--a method of education wholly in keeping with the spiritual ideas that Christianity has deeply implanted in us on all matters that regard the nature of man. The woman who does not reach the development of her faculties, who is crippled in her powers, who is held imprisoned in the narrowest circle of thought, and who comes into contact with hardly any but her own female relatives,--such a woman can not possibly raise herself above the routine of daily life and habits. Her intellectual horizon revolves only around the happenings in her own immediate surroundings, family affairs and what thereby hangs. Extensive conversations on utter trifles, the bent for gossip, are promoted with all might; of course her latent intellectual qualities strain after activity and exercise;--whereupon the husband, often involved thereby in trouble, and driven to desperation, utters imprecations upon qualities that he, the "chief of creation," has mainly upon his own conscience. With woman--whose face all our social and sexual relations turn toward marriage with every fibre of her being--marriage and matrimonial matters constitute, quite naturally, a leading portion of her conversation and aspirations. Moreover, to the physically weaker woman, subjected as she is to man by custom and laws, the tongue is her principal weapon against him, and, as a matter of course, she makes use thereof. Similarly with regard to her severely censured passion for dress and desire to please, which reach their frightful acme in the insanities of fashion, and often throw fathers and husbands into great straits and embarrassments. The explanation lies at hand. To man, woman is, first of all, an object of enjoyment. Economically and socially unfree, she is bound to see in marriage her means of support; accordingly, she depends upon man and becomes a piece of property to him. As a rule, her position is rendered still more unfavorable through the general excess of women over men,--a subject that will be treated more closely. The disparity intensifies the competition of women among themselves; and it is sharpened still more because, for a great variety of reasons, a number of men do not marry at all. Woman is, accordingly, forced to enter into competition for a husband with the members of her own sex, by means of the most favorable external presentation of her person possible. Let the long duration, through many generations, of these evils be taken into account. The wonder will cease that these manifestations, sprung from equally lasting causes, have reached their present extreme form. Furthermore, perhaps in no age was the competition of women for husbands as sharp as it is in this, due partly to reasons already given, and partly to others yet to be discussed. Finally, the difficulties of obtaining a competent livelihood, as well as the demands made by society, combine, more than ever before, to turn woman's face towards matrimony as an "institute for support." Men gladly accept such a state of things: they are its beneficiaries. It flatters their pride, their vanity, their interest to play the _role_ of the stronger and the master; and, like all other rulers, they are, in their _role_ of masters, difficult to reach by reason. It is, therefore, all the more in the interest of woman to warm towards the establishment of conditions that shall free her from so unworthy a position. Women should expect as little help from the men as workingmen do from the capitalist class. Observe the characteristics, developed in the struggle for the coveted place, on other fields, on the industrial field, for instance, so soon as the capitalists face each other. What despicable, even scampish, means of warfare are not resorted to! What hatred, envy and passion for calumny are not awakened!--observe that, and the explanation stands out why similar features turn up in the competition of women for a husband. Hence it happens that women, on the average, do not get along among themselves as well as men; that even the best female friends lightly fall out, if the question is their standing in a man's eye, or pleasingness of appearance. Hence also the observation that wherever women meet, be they ever such utter strangers, they usually look at one another as enemies. With one look they make the mutual discovery of ill-matched colors, or wrongly-pinned bows, or any other similar cardinal sin. In the look that they greet each other with, the judgment can be readily read that each has passed upon the other. It is as if each wished to inform the other: "I know better than you how to dress, and draw attention upon myself." On the other hand, woman is by nature more impulsive than man; she reflects less than he; she has more abnegation, is naiver, and hence is governed by stronger passions, as revealed by the truly heroic self-sacrifice with which she protects her child, or cares for relatives, and nurses them in sickness. In the fury, however, this passionateness finds its ugly expression. But the good as well as the bad sides, with man as well as woman, are influenced, first of all, by their social position; favored, or checked, or transfigured. The same impulse, that, under unfavorable circumstances, appears as a blemish, is, under favorable circumstances, a source of happiness for oneself and others. Fourier has the credit of having brilliantly demonstrated how the identical impulses of man produce, under different conditions, wholly opposite results. Running parallel with the effects of mistaken education, are the no less serious effects of mistaken or imperfect physical culture upon the purpose of Nature. All physicians are agreed that the preparation of woman for her calling as mother and rearer of children leaves almost everything to be wished. "Man exercises the soldier in the use of his weapons, and the artisan in the handling of his tools; every office requires special studies; even the monk has his novitiate. Woman alone is not trained for her serious duties of mother."[87] Nine-tenths of the maidens who marry enter matrimony with almost utter ignorance about motherhood and the duties of wedlock. The inexcusable shyness, even on the part of mothers, to speak with a grown-up daughter of such important sexual duties, leaves the latter in the greatest darkness touching her duties towards herself and her future husband. With her entrance upon married life, woman enters a territory that is wholly strange to her. She has drawn to herself a fancy-picture thereof--generally from novels that are not particularly to be commended--that does not accord with reality.[88] Her defective household knowledge, that, as things are to-day, is inevitable, even though many a function, formerly naturally belonging to the wife, has been removed from her, also furnishes many a cause for friction. Some know nothing whatever of household matters: They consider themselves too good to bother about them, and look upon them as matters that concern the servant girl; numerous others, from the ranks of the masses, are prevented, by the struggle for existence, from cultivating themselves for their calling as householders: they must be in the factory and at work early and late. It is becoming evident that, due to the development of social conditions, the separate household system is losing ground every day; and that it can be kept up only at the sacrifice of money and time, neither of which the great majority is able to expend. Yet another cause that destroys the object of marriage to not a few men is to be found in the physical debility of many women. Our food, housing, methods of work and support, in short, our whole form of life, affects us in more ways than one rather harmfully than otherwise. We can speak with perfect right of a "nervous age." Now, then, this nervousness goes hand in hand with physical degeneration. Anaemia and nervousness are spread to an enormous degree among the female sex: They are assuming the aspect of a social calamity, that, if it continue a few generations longer, as at present, and we fail to place our social organization on a normal footing, is urging the race towards its destruction.[89] With an eye to its sexual mission, the female organism requires particular care,--good food, and, at certain periods, the requisite rest. Both of these are lacking to the great majority of the female sex, at least in the cities and industrial neighborhoods, nor are they to be had under modern industrial conditions. Moreover, woman has so habituated herself to privation that, for instance, numberless women hold it a conjugal duty to keep the tid-bits for the man, and satisfy themselves with insufficient nourishment. Likewise are boys frequently given the preference over girls in matters of food. The opinion is general that woman can accommodate herself, not with less food only, but also with food of poorer quality. Hence the sad picture that our female youth, in particular, presents to the eyes of the expert. A large portion of our young women are bodily weak, anaemic, hypernervous. The consequences are difficulties in menstruation, and disease of the organs connected with the sexual purpose, the disease often assuming the magnitude of incapacity to give birth and to nurse the child, even of danger to life itself. "Should this degeneration of our women continue to increase in the same measure as before, the time may not be far away when it will become doubtful whether man is to be counted among the mammals or not."[90] Instead of a healthy, joyful companion, of a capable mother, of a wife attentive to her household duties, the husband has on his hands a sick, nervous wife, whose house the physician never quits, who can stand no draught, and can not bear the least noise. We shall not expatiate further on this subject. Every reader--and as often as in this book we speak of "reader," we mean, of course, the female as well as the male--can himself further fill the picture: he has illustrations enough among his own relatives and acquaintances. Experienced physicians maintain that the larger part of married women, in the cities especially, are in a more or less abnormal condition. According to the degree of the evil and the character of the couple, such unions can not choose but be unhappy, and, they give the husband the right, in public opinion, to allow himself freedoms outside of the marriage bed, the knowledge of which throws the wife into the most wretched of moods. Furthermore the, at times, very different sexual demands of one party or the other give occasion to serious friction, without the so much wished-for separation being possible. A great variety of considerations render that, in most cases, out of all question. Under this head the fact may not be suppressed that a _considerable number of husbands are themselves responsible for certain serious physical ailments of their wives, ailments that these are not infrequently smitten with in marriage_. As consequences of the excesses indulged in during bachelorship, a considerable number of men suffer of chronic sexual diseases, which, seeing these cause them no serious inconvenience, are taken lightly. Nevertheless, through sexual intercourse with the wife, these diseases bring upon her disagreeable, even fatal troubles of the womb, that set in, soon after marriage, and often develop to the point of rendering her unable to conceive or to give birth. The wretched woman usually has no idea of the cause of the sickness, that depresses her spirits, embitters her life, and uproots the purpose of marriage. She blames herself, and accepts blame for a condition, that the other party is alone responsible for. Thus many a blooming wife falls, barely married, a prey to chronic malady, unaccountable to either herself or her family. "As recent investigations have proved, this circumstance--that, as a result of gonorrhea, the male sperm no longer contains any seed-cells, and the man is, consequently, incapacitated for life from begetting children--_is a comparatively frequent cause of matrimonial barrenness, in contradiction to the old and convenient tradition of the lords of creation, who are ever ready to shift to the shoulder of the wife the responsibility for the absence of the blessing of children_."[91] Accordingly, a large number of causes are operative in preventing modern married life, in the large majority of instances, from being that which it should be:--a union of two beings of opposite sexes, who, out of mutual love and esteem, wish to belong to each other, and, in the striking sentence of Kant, mean, jointly, to constitute the complete human being. It is, therefore, a suggestion of doubtful value--made even by learned folks, who imagine thereby to dispose of woman's endeavors after emancipation--that she look to domestic duties, to marriage,--to marriage, that our economic conditions are ever turning into a viler caricature, and that answers its purpose ever less! The advice to woman that she seek her salvation in marriage, this being her real calling,--an advice that is thoughtlessly applauded by the majority of men--sounds like the merest mockery, when both the advisers and their _claqueurs_ do the opposite. Schopenhauer, the philosopher, has of woman only the conception of the philistine. He says: "Woman is not meant for much work. Her characteristicon is not action but _suffering_. She pays the debt of life with the pains of travail, anxiety for the child, _subjection to man_. The strongest utterances of life and sentiment are denied her. Her life is meant to be quieter and less important than man's. Woman is destined for nurse and educator of infancy, _being herself infant-like, and an infant for life_, a sort of intermediate stage between the child and the man, _who is the real being_.... Girls should be trained for domesticity and _subjection.... Women are the most thorough-paced and incurable Philistines._" In the same spirit as Schopenhauer, who, of course, is greatly quoted, is cast Lombroso and Ferrerro's work, "Woman as a Criminal and a Prostitute." We know no scientific work of equal size--it contains 590 pages--with such a dearth of valid evidence on the theme therein treated. The statistical matter, from which the bold conclusions are drawn, is mostly meager. Often a dozen instances suffice the joint authors to draw the weightiest deductions. The matter that may be considered the most valuable in the work is, typically enough, furnished by a woman,--Dr. Tarnowskaja. The influence of social conditions, of cultural development, is left almost wholly on one side. Everything is judged exclusively from the physiologico-psychologic view-point, while a large quantity of ethnographic items of information on various peoples is woven into the argument, without submitting these items to closer scrutiny. According to the authors, just as with Schopenhauer, woman is a grown child, a liar _par excellence_, weak of judgment, fickle in love, incapable of any deed truly heroic. They claim the inferiority of woman to man is manifest from a large number of bodily differences. "Love, with woman, is as a rule nothing but a secondary feature of maternity,--all the feelings of attachment that bind woman to man arise, not from sexual impulses, but from the instincts of subjection and resignation, acquired through habits of conformancy." How these "instincts" were acquired and "conformed" themselves, the joint authors fail to inquire into. They would then have had to inquire into the social position of woman in the course of thousands of years, and would have been compelled to find that it is that that made her what she now is. It is true, the joint authors describe partly the enslaved and dependent position of woman among the several peoples and under the several periods of civilization; but as Darwinians, with blinkers to their eyes, they draw all that from physiologic and psychologic, not from social and economic reasons, which affected in strongest manner the physiologic and psychologic development of woman. The joint authors also touch upon the vanity of woman, and set up the opinion that, among the peoples who stand on a lower stage of civilization, man is the vain sex, as is noticeable to-day in the New Hebrides and Madagascar, among the peoples of the Orinoco, and on many islands of the Polynesian archipelago, as also among a number of African peoples of the South Sea. With peoples standing on a higher plane, however, woman is the vain sex. But why and wherefor? To us the answer seems plain. Among the peoples of a lower civilization, mother-right conditions prevail generally, or have not yet been long overcome. The _role_ that woman there plays raises her above the necessity of seeking for the man, the man seeks her, and to this end, ornaments himself and grows vain. With the people of a higher grade, especially with all the nations of civilization, excepting here and there, not the man seeks the woman, but the woman him. It happens rarely that a woman openly takes the initiative, and offers herself to the man; so-called propriety forbids that. In point of fact, however, the offering is done by the manner of her appearance; by means of the beauty of dress and luxury, that she displays; by the manner in which she ornaments herself, and presents herself, and coquets in society. The excess of women, together with the social necessity of looking upon matrimony as an institute for support, or as an institution through which alone she can satisfy her sexual impulse and gain a standing in society, forces such conduct upon her. Here also, we notice again, it is purely economic and social causes that call forth, one time with man, another with woman, a quality that, until now, it was customary to look upon as wholly independent of social and economic causes. Hence the conclusion is justified, that so soon as society shall arrive at social conditions, under which all dependence of one sex upon another shall have ceased, and both are equally free, _ridiculous vanity and the folly of fashion will vanish, just as so many other vices that we consider to-day uneradicable, as supposedly inherent in man_. Schopenhauer, as a philosopher, judges woman as one-sidedly as most of our anthropologists and physicians, who see in her only the sexual, never the social, being. Schopenhauer was never married. He, accordingly, has not, on his part, contributed towards having one more woman pay the "debt of life" that he debits woman with. And this brings us to the other side of the medal, which is far from being the handsomer. Many women do not marry, simply because they cannot. Everybody knows that usage forbids woman to offer herself. She must allow herself to be wooed, i. e., chosen. She herself may not woo. Is there no wooer to be had, then she enters the large army of those poor beings who have missed the purpose of life, and, in view of the lack of safe material foundation, generally fall a prey to want and misery, and but too often to ridicule also. But few know what the discrepancy in numbers between the two sexes is due to; many are ready with the hasty answer: "There are too many girls born." Those who make the claim are wrongly informed, as will be shown. Others, again, who admit the unnaturalness of celibacy, conclude from the fact that women are more numerous than men in most countries of civilization, that polygamy should be allowed. But not only does polygamy do violence to our customs, it, moreover, degrades woman, a circumstance that, of course, does not restrain Schopenhauer, with his underestimation of and contempt for women, from declaring: "For the female sex, as a whole, polygamy is a benefit." Many men do not marry because they think they cannot support a wife, and the children that may come, according to their station. To support _two_ wives is, however, possible to a small minority only, and among these are many who now have two or more wives,--one legitimate and several illegitimate. These few, privileged by wealth, are not held back by anything from doing what they please. Even in the Orient, where polygamy exists for thousands of years by law and custom, comparatively few men have more than one wife. People talk of the demoralizing influence of Turkish harem life; but the fact is overlooked that this harem life is possible only to an insignificant fraction of the men, and then only in the ruling class, while the majority of the men live in monogamy. In the city of Algiers, there were, at the close of the sixties, out of 18,282 marriages, not less than 17,319 with one wife only; 888 were with two; and only 75 with more than two. Constantinople, the capital of the Turkish Empire, would show no materially different result. Among the country population in the Orient, the proportion is still more pronouncedly in favor of single marriages. In the Orient, exactly as with us, the most important factor in the calculation are the material conditions, and these compel most men to limit themselves to but one wife. If, on the other hand, material conditions were equally favorable to all men, polygamy would still not be practicable,--for want of women. _The almost equal number of the two sexes, prevalent under normal conditions, points everywhere to monogamy._ As proof of these statements, we cite the following tables, that Buecher published in an essay.[92] In these tables the distinction must be kept in mind between the enumerated and the estimated populations. In so far as the population was enumerated, the fact is expressly stated in the summary for the separate main divisions of the earth. The sexes divide themselves in the population of several divisions and countries as follows: 1. EUROPE. Females for Every Census 1,000 Countries. Year. Males. Females. Population. Men. Great Britain and Ireland 1891 18,388,756 19,499,397 37,888,153 1,060 Denmark and Faror 1890 1,065,447 1,119,712 2,185,159 1,052 Norway 1891 951,496 1,037,501 1,988,997 1,090 Sweden 1890 2,317,105 2,467,570 4,784,675 1,065 Finland 1889 1,152,111 1,186,293 2,338,404 1,030 Russia 1886 42,499,324 42,895,885 85,395,209 1,009 Poland 1886 3,977,406 4,279,156 8,256,562 1,076 German Empire 1890 24,231,832 25,189,232 49,421,064 1,039 Austria 1880 10,819,737 11,324,507 22,144,244 1,047 Hungary 1880 7,799,276 7,939,192 15,738,468 1,019 Liechtenstein 1886 4,897 4,696 9,593 959 Luxemburg 1890 105,419 105,669 211,088 1,002 Holland 1889 2,228,487 2,282,925 4,511,415 1,024 Belgium 1890 3,062,656 3,084,385 6,147,041 1,007 Switzerland 1888 1,427,377 1,506,680 2,934,057 1,055 France 1886 18,900,312 19,030,447 37,930,759 1,007 Spain and the Canary Islands 1887 8,608,532 8,950,776 17,559,308 1,039 Gibraltar (Civil population) 1890 9,201 9,326 18,527 1,013 Portugal 1878 2,175,829 2,374,870 4,550,699 1,091 Italy 1881 14,265,383 14,194,245 28,459,628 995 Bosnia and Herzegovina 1885 705,025 631,066 1,336,091 895 Servia 1890 1,110,731 1,052,028 2,162,759 947 Bulgaria 1881 1,519,953 1,462,996 2,982,949 962 Roumania 1860 2,276,558 2,148,403 4,424,961 944 Greece 1889 1,133,625 1,053,583 2,187,208 929 Malta 1890 82,086 83,576 165,662 1,018 ----------- ----------- ----------- ----- Total 170,818,561 174,914,119 345,732,680 1,024 2. AMERICA. Females for Every Census 1,000 Countries. Year. Males. Females. Population. Men. Danish Greenland 1888 4,838 5,383 10,221 1,112 British North America 1881 2,288,196 2,229,735 4,517,931 974 United States of North America 1880 25,518,820 24,636,963 50,155,783 965 Bermuda Islands 1890 7,767 8,117 15,884 1,046 Mexico 1882 5,072,054 5,375,920 10,447,974 1,060 ---------- ---------- ---------- ----- North America and Islands 32,891,675 32,256,118 65,147,793 981 Nicaragua 1883 136,249 146,591 282,845 1,076 British Honduras 1881 14,108 13,344 27,452 946 Cuba 1877 850,520 671,164 1,521,684 789 Porto Rico 1877 369,054 362,594 731,648 983 British West Indies 1881 589,012 624,132 1,213,144 1,060 French West Indies 1885 176,364 180,266 356,630 1,022 Danish Possessions 1880 14,889 18,874 33,763 1,263 Dutch Colony Curacao 1889 20,234 25,565 45,799 1,263 ----------- ---------- ---------- ----- Central America and the West Indies 2,170,430 2,042,530 4,212,965 941 British Guiana 1891 151,759 126,569 278,328 834 French Guiana 1885 15,767 10,735 26,502 681 Dutch Guiana 1889 30,187 28,764 58,951 953 Brazil 1872 5,123,869 4,806,609 9,930,478 938 Chili 1885 1,258,616 1,268,353 2,526,969 1,008 Falkland Islands 1890 1,086 703 1,789 647 ---------- ---------- ---------- ----- South America total 6,581,284 6,241,733 12,823,017 949 ---------- ---------- ---------- ----- Population of America 41,643,389 40,540,386 82,183,775 973 3. ASIA. Females for Every Census 1,000 Countries. Year. Males. Females. Population. Men. Russian Caucasia 1885 3,876,868 3,407,699 7,284,567 879 Siberia, minus Amur and Sachalin 1885 2,146,411 2,002,879 4,149,290 933 Province Uralsk 1885 263,915 263,686 527,601 999 General Province of the Prairies 1885 926,246 781,626 1,707,872 844 Province Fergana 1885 365,461 350,672 716,133 959 Province Samarkand 1885 335,530 305,616 641,146 911 ---------- ---------- ---------- ----- Russian Possessions, total 7,914,431 7,112,178 15,026,609 899 British India (immediate possessions) 1891 112,150,120 108,313,980 220,464,100 966 Tributary States (so far known) 1891 31,725,910 29,675,150 61,401,060 935 Hong Kong 1889 138,033 56,449 194,482 409 Ceylon 1881 1,473,515 1,290,469 2,763,984 876 Of the French Possessions: Cambodscha ? 392,383 422,371 814,754 1,076 Cochinchina 1889 944,146 932,543 1,876,689 988 Philippines (partly) 1877 2,796,174 2,762,846 5,559,020 988 Japan 1888 20,008,445 19,598,789 39,607,234 979 Cyprus 1891 104,887 104,404 209,291 995 ---------- ---------- ---------- ----- Total population in Asia 177,648,044 170,269,179 347,917,223 958 4. AUSTRALIA AND POLYNESIA. Females for Every Census 1,000 Countries. Year. Males. Females. Population. Men. Australia, New Zealand (1890) and Tasmania 1891 2,059,594 1,772,472 3,832,066 861 Fiji Islands 1890 67,902 57,780 125,682 851 French Possessions (Tahiti, Marquesas, etc.) 1889 11,589 10,293 21,882 888 Hawaii 1890 58,714 31,276 89,990 533 ---------- ---------- ---------- ----- Total 2,197,799 1,871,821 4,069,620 852 5. AFRICA. Females for Every Census 1,000 Countries. Year. Males. Females. Population. Men. Egypt 1882 3,401,498 3,415,767 6,817,265 1,004 Algeria (minus Sahara) 1886 2,014,013 1,791,671 3,805,684 889 Senegal 1889 70,504 76,014 146,518 1,078 Gambia 1881 7,215 6,935 14,150 961 Sierra Leone 1881 31,201 29,345 60,546 940 Lagos 1881 37,665 39,605 75,270 998 St. Helena 1890 2,020 2,202 4,222 1,090 Capeland 1890 766,598 759,141 1,525,739 990 Natal 1890 268,062 275,851 543,913 1,029 Orange Free State: White 1890 40,571 37,145 77,716 915 Black 1890 67,791 61,996 129,787 914 Republic: White 1890 66,498 52,630 119,128 791 Black 1890 115,589 144,045 259,634 1,246 Reunion 1889 94,430 71,485 165,915 757 Mayotte 1889 6,761 5,509 12,270 815 St. Marie de Madagascar 1888 3,648 4,019 7,667 1,102 ---------- ---------- ---------- ----- Total 6,994,064 6,771,360 13,765,424[93]968 Probably the result of this presentation will be astonishing to many. With the exception of Europe, where, on an average, there are 1,024 women to every 1,000 men, the reverse is the case everywhere else. If it is further considered that in the foreign divisions of the earth, and even there where actual enumeration was had, information upon the female sex is particularly defective--a fact that must be presumed with regard to all the countries of Mohammedan population, where the figures for the female population are probably below the reality--it stands pat that, apart from a few European nations, the female sex nowhere tangibly exceeds the male. It is otherwise in Europe, the country that interests us most. Here, with the exception of Italy and the southeast territories of Bosnia, Herzegovina, Servia, Bulgaria, Roumania and Greece, the female population is everywhere more strongly represented than the male. Of the large European countries, the disproportion is slightest in France--1,002 females to every 1,000 males; next in order is Russia, with 1,009 females to every 1,000 males. On the other hand, Portugal, Norway and Poland, with 1,076 females to every 1,000 males, present the strongest disproportion. Next to these stands Great Britain,--1,060 females to every 1,000 males. Germany and Austria lie in the middle: they have, respectively, 1,039 and 1,047 females to every 1,000 males. In the German Empire, the excess of the female over the male population, according to the census of December 1, 1890, was 957,400, against 988,376, according to the census of December 1, 1885. A principal cause of this disproportion is emigration, inasmuch as by far more men emigrate than women. This is clearly brought out by the opposite pole of Germany, the North American Union, which has about as large a deficit in women as Germany has a surplus. The United States is the principal country for European emigration, and this is mainly made up of males. A second cause is the larger number of accidents to men than to women in agriculture, the trades, the industries and transportation. Furthermore, there are more males than females temporarily abroad,--merchants, seamen, marines, etc. All this transpires clearly from the figures on the conjugal status. In 1890 there were 8,372,486 married men to 8,398,607 married women in Germany, i. e., 26,121 more of the latter. Another phenomenon, that statistics establish and that weigh heavily in the scales, is that, on an average, women reach a higher age than men: at the more advanced ages there are more women than men. According to the census of 1890 the relation of ages among the two sexes were these: Excess Excess of Males. Females. of Males. Females. Below ten years 5,993,681 5,966,226 27,455 ... 10 to 20 years 5,104,751 5,110,093 ... 5,342 20 to 30 years 3,947,324 4,055,321 ... 107,997 30 to 40 years 3,090,174 3,216,704 ... 126,530 40 to 50 years 2,471,617 2,659,609 ... 187,992 50 to 60 years 1,826,951 2,041,377 ... 214,426 60 to 70 years 1,177,142 1,391,227 ... 214,085 70 and up 619,192 757,081 ... 137,889 --------- --------- ------ ------- 24,230,832 25,197,638 27,455 994,261 This table shows that, up to the tenth year, the number of boys exceeds that of girls, due merely to the disproportion in births. Everywhere, there are more boys born than girls. In the German Empire, for instance,[94] there were born:-- In the year 1872 to 100 girls 106.2 boys In the year 1878 to 100 girls 105.9 boys In the year 1884 to 100 girls 106.2 boys In the year 1888 to 100 girls 106.0 boys In the year 1891 to 100 girls 106.2 boys But the male sex dies earlier than the female, and from early childhood more boys die than girls. Accordingly, the table shows that, between the ages of 10 to 20 the female sex exceeds the male. To each 100 females, there died, males:--[95] In 1872 107.0 In 1884 109.2 In 1878 110.5 In 1888 107.9 In 1891 107.5 The table shows, furthermore, that at the matrimonial age, proper, between the ages of 20 and 50, the female sex exceeds the male by 422,519, and that at the age from 50 to 70 and above, it exceeds the male by 566,400. A very strong disproportion between the sexes appears, furthermore, among the widowed. According to the census of 1890, there were:-- Widowers 774,967 Widows 2,154,870 --------- Excess of widows over widowers 1,382,903 Of these widowed people, according to age, there were:-- Age. Males. Females. 40-60 222,286 842,920 60 and over 506,319 1,158,712 The number of divorced persons was, in 1890: Males, 25,271; females, 49,601. According to age, they were distributed:-- Age. Males. Females. 40-60 13,825 24,842 60 and over 4,917 7,244 These figures tell us that _widows and divorced women are excluded from remarriage_, and at the fittest age for matrimony, at that; there being of the age of 15-40, 46,362 widowers and 156,235 widows, 6,519 divorced men and 17,515 divorced women. These figures furnish further proof of the injury that divorce entails to married women. In 1890, there were unmarried:--[96] Age. Males. Females. 15-40 5,845,933 5,191,453 40-60 375,881 503,406 60 and over 130,154 230,966 Accordingly, among the unmarried population between the ages of 15 and 40, the male sex is stronger by 654,480 than the female. This circumstance would seem to be favorable for the latter. But males between the ages of 15 and 21 are, with few exceptions, not in condition to marry. Of that age there were 3,590,622 males to 3,774,025 females. Likewise with the males of the age of 21-25, a large number are not in a position to start a family: we have but to keep in mind the males in the army, students, etc. On the other side, all women of this age period are marriageable. Taking further into consideration that for a great variety of reasons, many men do not marry at all--the number of unmarried males of 40 years of age and over alone amounted to 506,035, to which must be added also the widowed and divorced males, more than two million strong--it follows that the situation of the female sex with regard to marriage is decidedly unfavorable. Accordingly, a large number of women are, under present circumstances, forced to renounce the legitimate gratification of their sexual instincts, while the males seek and find solace in prostitution. The situation would instantaneously change for women with the removal of the obstacles that keep to-day many hundreds of thousands of men from setting up a married home, and from doing justice to their natural instincts in a legitimate manner. For that the existing social system must be upturned. As already observed, emigration across the seas is, in great part, responsible for the disproportion in the number of the sexes. In the years 1872-1886, on an average, more than 10,000 males left the country in excess of females. For a period of fifteen years, that runs up to 150,000 males, most of them in the very vigor of life. Military duties also drive abroad many young men, and the most vigorous, at that. In 1893, according to the report officially submitted to the Reichstag on the subject of substitutes in the army, 25,851 men were sentenced for emigrating without leave, and 14,522 more cases were under investigation on the same charge. Similar figures recur from year to year. The loss in men that Germany sustains from this unlawful emigration is considerable in the course of a century. Especially strong is emigration during the years that follow upon great wars. That appears from the figures after 1866 and between 1871 and 1874. We sustain, moreover, severe losses in male life from accidents. In the course of the years 1887 to 1892, the number of persons killed in the trades, agriculture, State and municipal undertakings, ran up to 30,568,[97] of whom only a small fraction were women. Furthermore, another and considerable number of persons engaged in these occupations are crippled for life by accidents, and are disabled from starting a family; others die early and leave their families behind in want and misery. Great loss in male life is also connected with navigation. In the period between 1882-1891, 1,485 ships were lost on the high seas, whereby 2,436 members of crews--with few exceptions males--and 747 passengers perished. Once the right appreciation of life is had, society will prevent the large majority of accidents, particularly in navigation; and such appreciation will touch its highest point under Socialist order. In numberless instances human life, or the safety of limb, is sacrificed to misplaced economy on the part of employers, who recoil before any outlay for protection; in many others the tired condition of the workman, or the hurry he must work in, is the cause. Human life is cheap; if one workingman goes to pieces, three others are at hand to take his place. On the domain of navigation especially, and aided by the difficulty of control, many unpardonable wrongs are committed. Through the revelations made during the seventies by Plimsoll in the British Parliament, the fact has become notorious that many shipowners, yielding to criminal greed, take out high insurances for vessels that are not seaworthy, and unconscionably expose them, together with their crews, to the slightest weather at sea,--all for the sake of the high insurance. These are the so-called "coffin-ships," not unknown in Germany, either. The steamer "Braunschweig," for instance, that sank in 1881 near Helgoland, and belonged to the firm Rocholl & Co., of Bremen, proved to have been put to sea in a wholly unseaworthy condition. The same fate befell, in 1889, the steamer "Leda" of the same firm; hardly out at sea, she went to the bottom. The boat was insured with the Russian Lloyd for 55,000 rubles; the prospect of 8,500 rubles were held out to the captain, if he took her safe to Odessa; and the captain, in turn, paid the pilot the comparatively high wage of 180 rubles a month. The verdict of the Court of Admiralty was that _the accident was due to the fact that the "Leda" was unseaworthy and unfit to be taken to Odessa_. The license was withdrawn from the captain. According to existing laws, the real guilty parties could not be reached. No year goes by without our Court of Admiralty having to pass upon a larger number of accidents at sea, to the effect that the accident was due to vessels being too old, or too heavily loaded, or in defective condition, or insufficiently equipped; sometimes to several of these causes combined. With a good many of the lost ships, the cause of accident can not be established: they have gone down in midocean, and no survivor remains to tell the tale. Likewise are the coast provisions for the saving of shipwrecked lives both defective and insufficient; they are dependent mainly upon private charity. The case is even more disconsolate along distant and foreign coasts. A commonwealth that makes the promotion of the well-being of all its highest mission will not fail to so improve navigation, and provide it with protective measures that these accidents would be of rare occurrence. But the modern economic system of rapine, that weighs men as it weighs figures, to the end of whacking out the largest possible amount of profit, not infrequently destroys a human life if thereby there be in it but the profit of a dollar. With the change of society in the Socialist sense, immigration, in its present shape, also would drop; the flight from military service would cease; suicide in the Army would be no more. The picture drawn from our political and economic life shows that woman also is deeply interested therein. Whether the period of military service be shortened or not; whether the Army be increased or not; whether the country pursues a policy of peace or one of war; whether the treatment allotted to the soldier be worthy or unworthy of human beings; and whether as a result thereof the number of suicides and desertions rise or drop;--_all of these are questions that concern woman as much as man_. Likewise with the economic and industrial conditions and in transportation, in all of which branches the female sex, furthermore, steps from year to year more numerously as working-women. Bad conditions, and unfavorable circumstances injure woman as a social and as a sexual being; favorable conditions and satisfactory circumstances benefit her. But there are still other momenta that go to make marriage difficult or impossible. A considerable number of men are kept from marriage by the State itself. People pucker up their brows at the celibacy imposed upon Roman Catholic clergymen; but these same people have not a word of condemnation for the much larger number of soldiers who also are condemned thereto. The officers not only require the consent of their superiors, they are also limited in the choice of a wife: the regulation prescribes that she shall have property to a certain, and not insignificant, amount. In this way the Austrian corps of officers, for instance, obtained a social "improvement" at the cost of the female sex. Captains rose by fully 8,000 guilders, if above thirty years of age, while the captains under thirty years of age were thenceforth hard to be had, in no case for a smaller dower than 30,000. "Now a 'Mrs. Captain,'" it was thus reported in the "Koelnische Zeitung" from Vienna, "who until now was often a subject of pity for her female colleagues in the administrative departments, can hold her head higher by a good deal; everybody now knows that she has wherewith to live. Despite the greatly increased requirements of personal excellence, culture and rank, the social status of the Austrian officer was until then rather indefinite, partly because very prominent gentlemen stuck fast to the Emperor's coat pocket; partly because many poor officers could not make a shift to live without humiliation, and many families of poor officers often played a pitiful _role_. Until then, the officer who wished to marry had, if the thirty-year line was crossed, to qualify in joint property to the amount of 12,000 guilders, or in a 600-guilder side income, and even at this insignificant income, hardly enough for decency, the magistrates often shut their eyes, and granted relief. The new marriage regulations are savagely severe, though the heart break. The captain under thirty must forthwith deposit 30,000 guilders; over thirty years of age, 20,000 guilders; from staff officers up to colonels, 16,000 guilders. Over and above this, only one-fourth of the officers may marry without special grace, while a spotless record and corresponding rank is demanded of the bride. This all holds good for officers of the line and army surgeons. For other military officials with the rank of officer, the new marriage regulations are milder; but for officers of the general staff still severer. The officer who is detailed to the captain of the general staff may not thereafter marry; the actual captain of the staff, if below thirty, is required to give security in 36,000 guilders, and later 24,000 more." In Germany and elsewhere, there are similar regulations. Also the corps of under-officers is subject to hampering regulations with regard to marriage, and require besides the consent of their superior officers. These are very drastic proofs of the _purely materialistic conception_ that the State has of marriage. In general, public opinion is agreed that marriage is not advisable for men under twenty-four or twenty-five years of age. Twenty-five is the marriageable age for men fixed by the civil code, with an eye to the civic independence that, as a rule, is not gained before that age. Only with persons who are in the agreeable position of not having to first conquer independence--with people of princely rank--does public opinion consider it proper when occasionally the men marry at the age of eighteen or nineteen, the girls at that of fifteen or sixteen. The Prince is declared of age with his eighteenth year, and considered capable to govern a vast empire and numerous people. Common mortals acquire the right to govern their possible property only at the age of twenty-one. The difference of opinion as to the age when marriage is desirable shows that public opinion judges by the social standing of the bride and bridegroom. Its reasons have nothing to do with the human being as a natural entity, or with its natural instincts. It happens, however, that Nature's impulses do not yoke themselves to social conditions, nor to the views and prejudices that spring from them. So soon as man has reached maturity, the sexual instincts assert themselves with force; indeed, they are the incarnation of the human being, and they demand satisfaction from the mature being, at the peril of severe physical and mental suffering. The age of sexual ripeness differs according to individuals, climate and habits of life. In the warm zone it sets in with the female sex, as a rule, at the age of eleven to twelve years, and not infrequently are women met with there, who, already at that age, carry offspring on their arms; but at their twenty-fifth or thirtieth year, these have lost their bloom. In the temperate zone, the rule with the female sex is from the fourteenth to the sixteenth year, in some cases later. Likewise is the age of puberty different between country and city women. With healthy, robust country girls, who move much in the open air and work vigorously, menstruation sets in later, on the average, than with our badly nourished, weak, hypernervous, ethereal city young ladies. Yonder, sexual maturity develops normally, with rare disturbances; here a normal development is the exception: all manner of illnesses set in, often driving the physician to desperation. How often are not physicians compelled to declare that, along with a change of life, the most radical cure is marriage. But how apply such a cure? Insuperable obstacles rise against the proposition. All this goes to show where the change must be looked for. In the first place, the point is to make possible a totally different education, one that takes into consideration the physical as well as the mental being; in the second place, to establish a wholly different system of life and of work. But both of these are, without exception, possible for all only under _wholly different social conditions_. Our social conditions have raised a violent contradiction between man, as a natural and sexual being, on the one hand, and man as a social being on the other. The contradiction has made itself felt at no period as strongly as at this; and it produces a number of diseases into whose nature we will go no further, but that affect mainly the female sex: in the first place, her organism depends, in much higher degree than that of man, upon her sexual mission, and is influenced thereby, as shown by the regular recurrence of her periods; in the second place, most of the obstacles to marriage lie in the way of women, preventing her from satisfying her strongest natural impulse in a natural manner. The contradiction between natural want and social compulsion goes against the grain of Nature; it leads to secret vices and excesses that undermine every organism but the strongest. Unnatural gratification, especially with the female sex, is often most shamelessly promoted. More or less underhandedly, certain preparations are praised, and they are recommended especially in the advertisements of most of the papers that penetrate into the family circle as especially devoted to its entertainment. These puffs are addressed mainly to the better situated portion of society, seeing the prices of the preparations are so high that a family of small means can hardly come by them. Side by side with these shameless advertisements are found the puffs--meant for the eyes of both sexes--of obscene pictures, especially of whole series of photographs, of poems and prose works of similar stripe, aimed at sexual incitation, and that call for the action of police and District Attorneys. But these gentlemen are too busy with the "civilization, marriage and family-destroying" Socialist movement to be able to devote full attention to such machinations. A part of our works of fiction labors in the same direction. The wonder would be if sexual excesses, artificially incited, besides, failed to manifest themselves in unhealthy and harmful ways, and to assume the proportions of a social disease. The idle, voluptuous life of many women in the property classes; their refined measures of nervous stimulants; their overfeeding with a certain kind of artificial sensation, cultivated in certain lines on the hothouse plan, and often considered the principal topic of conversation and sign of culture by that portion of the female sex that suffers of hypersensitiveness and nervous excitement;--all this incites still more the sexual senses, and naturally leads to excesses. Among the poor, it is certain exhausting occupations, especially of a sedentary nature, that promotes congestion of blood in the abdominal organs, and promotes sexual excitation. One of the most dangerous occupations in this direction is connected with the, at present, widely spread sewing machine. This occupation works such havoc that, with ten or twelve hours' daily work, the strongest organism is ruined within a few years. Excessive sexual excitement is also promoted by long hours of work in a steady high temperature, for instance, sugar refineries, bleacheries, cloth-pressing establishments, night work by gaslight in overcrowded rooms, especially when both sexes work together. A succession of further phenomena has been here unfolded, sharply illustrative of the irrationableness and unhealthiness of modern conditions. These are evils deeply rooted in our social state of things, and removable neither by the moral sermonizings nor the palliatives that religious quacks of the male and female sexes have so readily at hand. The axe must be laid to the root of the evil. The question is to bring about a natural system of education, together with healthy conditions of life and work, and to do this in amplest manner, to the end that the normal gratification of natural and healthy instincts be made possible for all. As to the male sex, a number of considerations are absent that are present with the female sex. Due to his position as master, and in so far as social barriers do not hinder him, there is on the side of man the free choice of love. On the other hand, the character of marriage as an institution for support, the excess of women, custom;--all these circumstances conspire to prevent woman from manifesting her will; they force her to wait till she is wanted. As a rule, she seizes gladly the opportunity, soon as offered, to reach the hand to the man who redeems her from the social ostracism and neglect, that is the lot of that poor waif, the "old maid." Often she looks down with contempt upon those of her sisters who have yet preserved their self-respect, and have not sold themselves into mental prostitution to the first comer, preferring to tread single the thorny path of life. On the other hand, social considerations tie down the man, who desires to reach by marriage the gratification of his life's requirements. He must put himself the question: Can you support a wife, and the children that may come, so that pressing cares, the destroyers of your happiness, may be kept away? The better his marital intentions are, the more ideally he conceives them, the more he is resolved to wed only out of love, all the more earnestly must he put the question to himself. To many, the affirmative answer is, under the present economic conditions, a matter of impossibility: they prefer to remain single. With other and less conscientious men, another set of considerations crowd upon the mind. Thousands of men reach an independent position, one in accord with their wants, only comparatively late. But they can keep a wife in a style suitable to their station only if she has large wealth. True enough, many young men have exaggerated notions on the requirements of a so-called life "suitable to one's station." Nevertheless, they can not be blamed--as a result of the false education above described, and of the social habits of a large number of women,--for not guarding against demands from that quarter that are far beyond their powers. Good women, modest in their demands, these men often never come to know. These women are retiring; they are not to be found there where such men have acquired the habit of looking for a wife; while those whom they meet are not infrequently such as seek to win a husband by means of their looks, and are intent, by external means, by show, to deceive him regarding their personal qualities and material conditions. The means of seduction of all sorts are plied all the more diligently in the measure that these ladies come on in years, when marriage becomes a matter of hot haste. Does any of these succeed in conquering a husband, she has become so habituated to show, jewelry, finery and expensive pleasures, that she is not inclined to forego them in marriage. The superficial nature of her being crops up in all directions, and therein an abyss is opened for the husband. Hence many prefer to leave alone the flower that blooms on the edge of the precipice, and that can be plucked only at the risk of breaking their necks. They go their ways alone, and seek company and pleasure under the protection of their freedom. Deception and swindle are practices everywhere in full swing in the business life of capitalist society: no wonder they are applied also in contracting marriage, and that, when they succeed, both parties are drawn into common sorrows. According to E. Ansell, the age of marriage among the cultured and independent males of England was, between 1840-1871, on an average 29.25 years. Since then the average has risen for many classes, by at least one year. For the different occupations, the average age of marriage, between 1880-1885, was as follows:-- Occupations. Age. Miners 23.56 Textile workers 23.88 Shoemakers and tailors 24.42 Skilled laborers 24.85 Day laborers 25.06 Clerks 25.75 Retailers 26.17 Farmers and their sons 28.73 Men of culture and men of independent means 30.72 These figures give striking proof of how social conditions and standing affect marriage. The number of men who, for several reasons, are kept from marrying is ever on the increase. It is especially in the so-called upper ranks and occupations that the men often do not marry, partly because the demands upon them are too great, partly because it is just the men of these social strata who seek and find pleasure and company elsewhere. On the other hand, conditions are particularly unfavorable to women in places where many pensionaries and their families, but few young men, have their homes. In such places, the number of women who cannot marry rises to 20 or 30 out of every 100. The deficit of candidates for marriage affects strongest those female strata that, through education and social position, make greater pretensions, and yet, outside of their persons, have nothing to offer the man who is looking for wealth. This concerns especially the female members of those numerous families that live upon fixed salaries, are considered socially "respectable," but are without means. The life of the female being in this stratum of society is, comparatively speaking, the saddest of all those of her fellow-sufferers. It is out of these strata that is mainly recruited the most dangerous competition for the working-women in the embroidering, seamstress, flower-making, millinery, glove and straw hat sewing; in short, all the branches of industry that the employer prefers to have carried on at the homes of the working-women. These ladies work for the lowest wages, seeing that, in many cases, the question with them is not to earn a full livelihood, but only something over and above that, or to earn the outlay for a better wardrobe and for luxury. Employers have a predilection for the competition of these ladies, so as to lower the earnings of the poor working-woman and squeeze the last drop of blood from her veins: it drives her to exert herself to the point of exhaustion. Also not a few wives of government employes, whose husbands are badly paid, and can not afford them a "life suitable to their rank," utilize their leisure moments in this vile competition that presses so heavily upon wide strata of the female working class. The activity on the part of the bourgeois associations of women for the abolition of female labor and for the admission of women to the higher professions, at present mainly, if not exclusively, appropriated by men, aims principally at procuring a position in life for women from the social circles just sketched. In order to secure for their efforts greater prospects of success, these associations have loved to place themselves under the protectorate of higher and leading ladies. The bourgeois females imitate herein the example of the bourgeois males, who likewise love such protectorates, and exert themselves in directions that can bring only _small_, never _large results_. A Sisyphus work is thus done with as much noise as possible, to the end of deceiving oneself and others on the score of the necessity for a radical change. The necessity is also felt to do all that is possible in order to suppress all doubts regarding the wisdom of the foundations of our social and political organization, and to prescribe them as treasonable. The conservative nature of these endeavors prevents bourgeois associations of women from being seized with so-called destructive tendencies. When, accordingly, at the Women's Convention of Berlin, in 1894, the opinion was expressed by a minority that the bourgeois women should go hand and hand with the working-women, i. e., with their Socialist citizens, a storm of indignation went up from the majority. But the bourgeois women will not succeed in pulling themselves out of the quagmire by their own topknots. How large the number is of women who, by reason of the causes herein cited, must renounce married life, is not accurately ascertainable. In Scotland, the number of unmarried women of the age of twenty years and over was, towards the close of the sixties, 43 per cent. of the female population, and there were 110 women to every 100 men. In England, outside of Wales, there lived at that time 1,407,228 more women than men of the age of 20 to 40, and 359,966 single women of over forty years of age. Of each 100 women 42 were unmarried. The surplus of women that Germany owns is very unevenly distributed in point of territories and age. According to the census of 1890, it stood:--[98] To Every 1,000 Males, Females of the Age of Divisions. Under 15. 15-40. 40-60. Over 60. Berlin 1,014 1,056 1,108 1,666 Kingdom of Saxony 1,020 1,032 1,112 1,326 Kingdom of Bavaria, on the right of the Rhine 1,022 1,040 1,081 1,155 On the left of the Rhine 986 1,024 1,065 1,175 Wurtemberg 1,021 1,076 1,135 1,158 Baden 1,006 1,027 1,099 1,175 Hamburg 1,003 967 1,042 1,522 Province of Brandenburg 986 981 1,085 1,261 Province of Pommern 984 1,053 1,126 1,191 Province of Rhineland 984 990 1,010 1,087 ----- ----- ----- ----- German Empire 995 1,027 1,094 1,196 Accordingly, of marriageable age proper, 15-40, the surplus of women in the German Empire amounts to 27 women to every 1,000 men. Seeing that, within these age periods, there are 9,429,720 male to 9,682,454 female inhabitants, there is a total female surplus of 252,734. In the same four age periods, the proportion of the sexes in other countries of Europe and outside of Europe stood as follows:--[99] To Every 1,000 Males, Females of the Age of 60 and Countries. Under 15. 15-40. 40-60. Over. Belgium (1890) 992 984 1,018 1,117 Bulgaria (1888) 950 1,068 837 947 Denmark (1890) 978 1,080 1,073 1,179 France (1886) 989 1,003 1,006 1,063 England and Wales (1891) 1,006 1,075 1,096 1,227 Scotland (1891) 973 1,073 1,165 1,389 Ireland (1891) 966 1,036 1,109 1,068 Italy (1881) 963 1,021 1,005 980 Luxemburg (1891) 996 997 1,004 1,042 Holland (1889) 990 1,022 1,035 1,154 Austria (1890) 1,005 1,046 1,079 1,130 Hungary (1890) 1,001 1,040 996 1,000 Sweden (1890) 975 1,062 1,140 1,242 Switzerland (1888) 999 1,059 1,103 1,148 Japan (1891) 978 962 951 1,146 Cape of Good Hope (1891) 989 1,008 939 1,019 It is seen that all countries of the same or similar economic structure reveal the identical conditions with regard to the distribution of the sexes according to ages. According thereto, and apart from all other causes already mentioned, a considerable number of women have in such countries no prospect of entering wedded life. The number of unmarried women is even still larger, because a large number of men prefer, for all sorts of reasons, to remain single. What say hereto those superficial folks, who oppose the endeavor of women after a more independent, equal-righted position in life, and who refer them to marriage and domestic life? The blame does not lie with the women that so many of them do not marry; and how matters stand with "conjugal happiness" has been sufficiently depicted. What becomes of the victims of our social conditions? The resentment of insulted and injured Nature expresses itself in the peculiar facial lines and characteristics whereby so-called old maids, the same as old ascetic bachelors, stamp themselves different from other human beings in all countries and all climates; and it gives testimony of the mighty and harmful effect of suppressed natural love. Nymphomania with women, and numerous kinds of hysteria, have their origin in that source; and also discontent in married life produces attacks of hysteria, and is responsible for barrenness. Such, in main outlines, is our modern married life and its effects. The conclusion is: _Modern marriage is an institution that is closely connected with the existing social condition, and stands or falls with it. But this marriage is in the course of dissolution and decay, exactly as capitalist society itself_,--because, as demonstrated under the several heads on the subject of marriage: 1. Relatively, the number of births declines, although population increases on the whole,--showing that the condition of the family deteriorates. 2. Actions for divorce increase in numbers, considerably more than does population, and, in the majority of cases, the plaintiffs are women, although, both economically and socially, they are the greatest sufferers thereunder,--showing that the unfavorable factors, that operate upon marriage, are on the increase, and marriage, accordingly, is dissolving and falling to pieces. 3. Relatively, the number of marriages is on the decline, although population increases,--showing again that marriage, in the eyes of many, no longer answers its social and moral purposes, and is considered worthless, or dangerous. 4. In almost all the countries of civilization there is a disproportion between the number of the sexes, and to the disadvantage of the female sex, and the disproportion is not caused by births--there are, on the average, more boys born than girls,--but is due to unfavorable social and political causes, that lie in the political and economic conditions. _Seeing that all these unnatural conditions, harmful to woman in particular, are grounded in the nature of capitalist society, and grow worse as this social system continues, the same proves itself unable to end the evil and emancipate woman. Another social order is, accordingly, requisite thereto._ FOOTNOTES: [86] Plato requires in his "Republic" that "the women be educated like the men," and he demands careful selection in breeding. He, accordingly, was thoroughly familiar with the effect of a careful selection on the development of man. Aristotle lays it down as a maxim of education that "First the body, then the mind must be built up," Aristotle's "Politics." With us, when thought is at all bestowed upon the matter, the body, the scaffolding for the intellect, is considered last. [87] "Die Mission unseres Jahrhunderts. Eine Studie zur Frauenfrage," Irma v. Troll-Borostyani; Pressburg and Leipsic. [88] In "Les Femmes Qui Tuent et les Femmes Qui Votent," Alexander Dumas, son, narrates: "A Catholic clergyman of high standing stated in the course of a conversation that, out of a hundred of his former female pupils, who married, after a month at least eighty came to him and said they were disillusioned and regretted having married." This sounds very probable. The Voltarian French bourgeoisie reconcile it with their conscience to allow their daughters to be educated in the cloisters. They proceed from the premises that an ignorant woman is more easy to lead than one who is posted. Conflicts and disappointment are inevitable. Laboulaye gives the flat-footed advice to keep woman in moderate ignorance, because "notre empire est detruit, si l'homme est reconnu" (our empire is over if man is found out). [89] According to observations made in the psychiatric clinic at Vienna, paralysis (softening of the brain) is making by far greater progress among women than among men. To 100 patients taken in, there were in the years: 1873-77: 15.7 male and 4.4 female paralytics. 1888-92: 19.7 male and 10.0 female paralytics. During the sixties there was, on the average, 1 female paralytic to 8 males; now there is 1 female paralytic to 3.49 males in Denmark, to 3.22 in middle and upper Italy, 2.89 in England, 2.77 in Belgium, and 2.40 in France.--"Wiener Arbeiter Zeitung," January 31, 1895. [90] Dr. F. B. Simon: "Die Gesundheitspflege des Weibes," Stuttgart, 1893, F. J. Dietz. [91] Dr. F. B. Simon. Simon devotes extensive consideration to this theme, together with that akin thereto,--why so many married women take sick shortly after marriage without knowing why; and he holds up the mirror to the men. [92] Karl Buecher: "Ueber die Vertheilung der beiden Geschlechter auf der Erde," "Allgemeines Statistisches Archiv," Tuebingen, 1892. [93] Besides 550,430 children without specification of sex. [94] "Statistisches Jahrbuch fuer das Deutsche Reich." Jahrgang 1893. [95] Ibidem. [96] "Statistik des Deutschen Reiches," 1890. [97] "Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich," 1889-1894. [98] "Statistik des Deutschen Reiches." [99] "Statistik des Deutschen Reiches." CHAPTER III. PROSTITUTION A NECESSARY SOCIAL INSTITUTION OF THE CAPITALIST WORLD. Marriage presents one side of the sexual life of the capitalist or bourgeois world; prostitution presents the other. Marriage is the obverse, prostitution the reverse of the medal. If men find no satisfaction in wedlock, then they usually seek the same in prostitution. Those men, who, for whatever reason, renounce married life, also usually seek satisfaction in prostitution. To those men, accordingly, who, whether out of their free will or out of compulsion, live in celibacy, as well as to those whom marriage does not offer what was expected of it, conditions are more favorable for the gratification of the sexual impulse than to women. Man ever has looked upon the use of prostitution as a privilege due him of right. All the harder and severer does he keep guard and pass sentence when a woman, who is no prostitute, commits a "slip." That woman is instinct with the same impulses as man, aye, that at given periods of her life (at menstruation) these impulses assert themselves more vehemently than at others,--that does not trouble him. In virtue of his position as master, he compels her to violently suppress her most powerful impulses, and he conditions both her character in society and her marriage upon her chastity. Nothing illustrates more drastically, and also revoltingly, the dependence of woman upon man than this radically different conception regarding the gratification of the identical natural impulse, and the radically different measure by which it is judged. To man, circumstances are particularly favorable. Nature has devolved upon woman the consequences of the act of generation: outside of the enjoyment, man has neither trouble nor responsibility. This advantageous position over against woman has promoted that unbridled license in sexual indulgence wherein a considerable part of men distinguish themselves. Seeing, however, that, as has been shown, a hundred causes lie in the way of the legitimate gratification of the sexual instinct, or prevent its full satisfaction, the consequence is frequent gratification, like beasts in the woods. _Prostitution thus becomes a social institution in the capitalist world, the same as the police, standing armies, the Church, and wage-mastership._ Nor is this an exaggeration. We shall prove it. We have told how the ancient world looked upon prostitution, and considered it necessary, aye, had it organized by the State, as well in Greece as in Rome. What views existed on the subject during the Middle Ages has likewise been described. Even St. Augustine, who, next to St. Paul, must be looked upon as the most important prop of Christendom, and who diligently preached asceticism, could not refrain from exclaiming: "Suppress the public girls, and the violence of passion will knock everything of a heap." The provincial Council of Milan, in 1665, expressed itself in similar sense. Let us hear the moderns: Dr. F. S. Huegel says:[100] "Advancing civilization will gradually drape prostitution in more pleasing forms, but only with the end of the world will it be wiped off the globe." A bold assertion; yet he who is not able to project himself beyond the capitalist form of society, he who does not realize that society will change so as to arrive at healthy and natural social conditions,--he must agree with Dr. Huegel. Hence also did Dr. Wichern, the late pious Director of the Rauhen House near Hamburg, Dr. Patton of Lyon, Dr. William Tait of Edinburg, and Dr. Parent-Duchatelet of Paris, celebrated through his investigations of the sexual diseases and prostitution, agree in declaring: "Prostitution is ineradicable _because it hangs together with the social institutions_," and all of them demanded its regulation by the State. Also Schmoelder writes: "Immorality as a trade has existed at all times and in all places, and, so far as the human eye can see, _it will remain a constant companion_ of the human race."[101] Seeing that the authorities cited stand, without exception, upon the ground of the modern social order, the thought occurs to none that, with the aid of another social order, the causes of prostitution, and, consequently, prostitution itself, might disappear; none of them seeks to fathom the causes. Indeed, upon one and another, engaged in this question, the fact at times dawns that the sorry social conditions, which numerous women suffer under, might be the chief reason why so many women sell their bodies; but the thought does not press itself through to its conclusion, to wit, that, therefore, the necessity arises of bringing about other social conditions. Among those who recognize that the economic conditions are the chief cause of prostitution belong Th. Bade, who declares:[102] "The causes of the bottomless moral depravity, out of which the prostitute girl is born, lie in the existing social conditions.... _It is the bourgeois dissolution of the middle classes and of their material existence, particularly of the class of the artisans_, only a small fraction of which carries on to-day an independent occupation as a trade." Bade closes his observations, saying: "Want for material existence, that has partly worn out the families of the middle class and will yet wear them out wholly, leads also to the moral ruin of the family, especially of the female sex." In fact, the statistical figures, gathered by the Police Department of Berlin, between 1871-1872, on the extraction of 2,224 enrolled prostitutes, show: Number. Per Cent. Father's Occupation. 1,015 47.9 Artisans 467 22.0 Millhands 305 14.4 Small office-holders 222 10.4 Merchants and railroad workers 87 4.1 Farmers 26 1.2 Military service Of 102 the father's occupation was not ascertainable. Specialists and experts rarely take up investigations of a deeper nature; they accept the facts that lie before them, and judge in the style of the "Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift," that writes in its No. 35, for the year 1863: "What else is there left to the large majority of willing and unwilling celibates, in order to satisfy their _natural wants_, than the forbidden fruit of the Venus Pandemos?" The paper is, accordingly, of the opinion that, for the sake of these celibates, prostitution is necessary, because what else, forsooth, are they to do in order to satisfy their sexual impulse? And it closes, saying: "Seeing that prostitution is necessary, it has the right to existence, to protection, and to immunity from the State." And Dr. Huegel declares himself in his work, mentioned above, in accord with this view. Man, accordingly, to whom celibacy is a horror and a martyrdom, is the only being considered; that there are also millions of women living in celibacy is well known; but they have to submit. What is right for man, is, accordingly, wrong for women; is in her case immorality and a crime. The Leipsic Police Doctor, Dr. J. Kuehn, says:[103] "Prostitution is not merely an evil that must be tolerated, _it is a necessary evil_, because it protects the wives from infidelity, [which only the husbands have the right to be guilty of] and virtue also [female virtue, of course, the husbands have no need of the commodity] from being assailed [sic.] and, therefore, from falling." These few words of Dr. Kuehn typify, in all its nakedness, the crass egoism of male creation. Kuehn takes the correct stand for a Police Doctor, who, by superintending prostitution, sacrifices himself, to the end of saving the men from disagreeable diseases. In the same sense with him did his successor, Dr. Eckstein, utter himself at the twelfth convention of the German Associations of House and City Real Estate Owners, held in Magdeburg in the summer of 1890. The honorable house-owners wished to know how they could prevent the numerous instances of prostitutes occupying their houses, and how to protect themselves against fines in case prostitutes are caught living in them. Dr. Eckstein lectured them on this head to the effect that prostitution was a "necessary evil," never absent from any people or religion. Another interesting gentleman is Dr. Fock, who in a treatise, entitled "Prostitution, in Its Ethical and Sanitary Respects," in the "Deutschen Vierteljahrschrift fuer offentliche Gesundheitspflege," vol. xx, No. 1, considers prostitution "an unenviable corollary of our civilized arrangements." He fears an over-production of people if all were to marry upon reaching the age of puberty; hence he considers important to have prostitution "regulated" by the State. He considers natural that the State supervise and regulate prostitution, and thereby assume the care of providing for the supply of girls that are free from syphilis. He pronounces himself in favor of the most rigid inspection of "all women, proven to lead an abandoned life;"--also when ladies of "an abandoned life" belong to the prominent classes? It is the old story. That in all logic and justice also those men should be held under surveillance who hunt up prostitutes, maintain them and make their existence possible,--of that no one thinks. Dr. Fock also demands the taxing of the prostitutes, and their concentration in given streets. In other words, the Christian State is to procure for itself a revenue out of prostitution, and, at the same time, organize and place prostitution under its protection for the benefit of male creation. What was it that the Emperor Vespasian said at a somewhat similar juncture? "_Non olet!_"--it smells not. Did we exaggerate when we said: Prostitution is to-day a necessary social institution just as the police, standing armies, the Church and wage-mastership? In the German Empire, prostitution is not, like in France, organized and superintended by the State; it is only tolerated. Official public houses are forbidden by law, and procuring is severely punishable. But that does not prevent that in a large number of German cities public houses continue to exist, and are winked at by the police. This establishes an incomprehensible state of things. The defiance of the law implied in such a state of things dawned even upon our statesmen and they bestirred themselves to remove the objection by legislative enactments. The German Criminal Code makes also the lodging of a prostitute a penal offense. On the other hand, however, the police are compelled to tolerate thousands of women as prostitutes, and, in a measure, to privilege them in their trade, provided they enter themselves as prostitutes on the Police Register, and submit to the Police regulations,--for instance, periodically recurring examinations by a physician. It follows, however, that, if the Government licenses the prostitute, and thereby protects the exercise of her trade, she must also have a habitation. Aye, it is even in the interest of public health and order that they have such a place to ply their trade in. What contradictions! On the one hand, the Government officially acknowledges that prostitution is necessary; on the other, it prosecutes and punishes the prostitute and the pimp. But it is out of contradictions that bourgeois society is put together. Moreover, the attitude of the Government is an avowal that prostitution is a Sphinx to modern society, the riddle which society can not solve: it considers necessary to tolerate and superintend prostitution in order to avoid greater evils. In other words, our social system, so boastful of its morality, its religiousness, its civilization and its culture, feels compelled to tolerate that immorality and corruption spread through its body like a stealthy poison. But this state of things betrays something else, besides _the admission by the Christian State that marriage is insufficient, and that the husband has the right to demand illegitimate gratification of his sexual instincts_. Woman counts with such a State in so far only as she is willing, as a sexual being, to yield to illegitimate male desires, i. e., become a prostitute. In keeping herewith, the supervision and control, exercised by the organs of the State over the registered prostitutes, do not fall upon the men also, those who seek the prostitute. Such a provision would be a matter of course if the sanitary police control was to be of any sense, and even of partial effect,--apart from the circumstance that a sense of justice would demand an even-handed application of the law to both sexes. No; "supervision and control" fall upon woman alone. This protection by the State of man and not woman, turns upside down the nature of things. _It looks as if men were the weaker vessel and women the stronger; as if woman were the seducer, and poor, weak man the seduced._ The seduction-myth between Adam and Eve in Paradise continues to operate in our opinions and laws, and it says to Christianity: "You are right; woman is the arch seductress, the vessel of iniquity." Men should be ashamed of such a sorry and unworthy _role_; but this _role_ of the "weak" and the "seduced" suits them;--_the more they are protected, all the more may they sin_. Wherever men assemble in large numbers, they seem unable to amuse themselves without prostitution. This was shown, among other instances of the kind, by the occurrences at the German Schuetzenfest, held in Berlin in the summer of 1890, which caused 2,300 women to express themselves as follows in a petition addressed to the Mayor of the German capital: "May it please your Honor to allow us to bring to your knowledge the matters that have reached the provinces, through the press and other means of communication, upon the German shooting matches, held at Pankow from the 6th to the 13th of July of this year. The reports of the matter, that we have seen with indignation and horror, represent the programme of that festival with the following announcements, among others: 'First German Herald, the Greatest Songstress of the World;' 'A Hundred Ladies and Forty Gentlemen:' Besides these smaller _cafes chantants_ and shooting galleries, in which importunate women forced themselves upon the men. Also a 'free concert,' whose gaily-clad waitresses, seductively smiling, brazenly and shamelessly invited the gymnasium students and the fathers of families, the youths and the grown men alike, to the 'shooting retreats.'... The barely dressed 'lady' who invited people to the booth of 'The Secrets of Hamburg, or a Night in St. Pauli,' should have been enough to justify her removal by the police. And then the shocking announcement, almost incredible of the much boasted about Imperial capital, and hardly to be believed by plain male and female citizens in the provinces, to the effect that the managers of the festival had consented to the employment, without pay, of 'young women' in large numbers, as bar-maids, instead of the waiters who applied for work.... We, German women, have thousands of occasions, as wives, mothers and as sisters, to send our husbands, children, daughters and brothers to Berlin in the service of the fatherland; we, consequently, pray to your Honor in all humbleness and in the confident expectation that, with the aid of the overpowering influence, which, as the chief magistrate of the Imperial capital, lies in your hand, you may institute such investigations of those disgraceful occurrences, or adopt such other measures as to your Honor may seem fit, to the end that a recurrence of those orgies may not have to be apprehended at the pending Sedan festival, for instance...." (!!) During the session of the Reichstag, from 1892 to 1893, the united Governments made an effort to put an end to the contradiction that governmental practice, on the one hand, and the Criminal Code on the other, find themselves in with regard to prostitution. They introduced a bill that was to empower the police to designate certain habitations to prostitutes. It was admitted that prostitution could not be suppressed, and that, therefore, the most practical thing was to tolerate the thing in certain localities, and to control it. The bill--upon that all minds were agreed--would, if it became a law, have called again to life the brothels that were officially abolished in Prussia about 1845. The bill caused a great uproar, and it evoked a number of protests in which the warning was raised against the State's setting itself up as the protector of prostitution, and thereby favoring the idea that the use of prostitution was not in violation of good morals, or that the trade of the prostitute was such that the State could allow and approve of. The bill, which met with the strongest opposition both on the floor of the Reichstag and in the committee, was pigeon-holed, and dared not again come into daylight. That, nevertheless, such a bill could at all take shape reveals the embarrassment that society is in. The administrative regulation of prostitution raises in the minds of men not only the belief that the State allows the use of prostitution, but also that such control protects them against disease. Indeed, this belief greatly promotes indulgence and recklessness on the part of men. Brothels do not reduce sexual diseases, they promote the same: _the men grow more careless and less cautious_. Experience has taught that neither the establishment of houses of prostitution, controlled by the police, nor the supervision and medical inspection, ordered by the police, afford the slightest guarantee against contagion. The nature of these diseases is frequently such that they are not to be easily or immediately detected. If there is to be any safety, the inspection would have to be held several times a day. That, however, is impossible in view of the number of women concerned, and also of the costs. Where thirty or forty prostitutes must be "done" in an hour, inspection is hardly more than a farce; moreover, one or two inspections a week is wholly inadequate. The success of these measures also suffers shipwreck in the circumstance that the men, who transmit the germs of disease from one woman to another, remain free from all official annoyance. A prostitute, just inspected and found healthy, may be infected that same hour by a diseased man, and she transmits the virus to other patrons, until the next inspection day, or until she has herself become aware of the disease. The control is not only illusory: These inspections, made at command, and conducted by male, instead of female physicians, hurt most deeply the sense of shame; and they contribute to its total ruination. This is a phenomenon confirmed by many physicians. Even the official report of the Berlin Police Department admits the fact by stating: "It may also be granted that _registration causes the moral sense of the prostitute to sink_ still lower."[104] Accordingly, the prostitutes try their utmost to escape this control. A further consequence of these police measures is that they make it extraordinarily difficult, even impossible, for the prostitute ever again to return to a decent trade. _A woman, that has fallen under police control, is lost to society; she generally goes down in misery within a few years._ Accurately and exhaustively did the fifth Congress at Geneva for Combatting Immorality utter itself against the police regulation of prostitutes, by declaring: "The compulsory medical inspection of prostitutes is an all the more cruel punishment to the woman, seeing that, by destroying the remnants of shame, still possible within even the most abandoned, such inspection drags down completely into depravity the wretched being that is subjected thereto. The State, that means to regulate prostitution with the police, forgets that it owes equal protection to both sexes; it demoralizes and degrades women. Every system for the official regulation of prostitution has police arbitrariness for its consequence, as well as the violation of civic guaranties that are safeguarded to every individual, even to the greatest criminal, against arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. Seeing this violation of right is exercised to the injury of woman only, the consequence is an inequality, shocking to nature, between her and man. Woman is degraded to the level of a mere means, and is no longer treated as a person. _She is placed outside of the pale of law._" Of how little use police control is, England furnishes a striking illustration. In the year 1866 a law was enacted on the subject for places in which soldiers and marines were garrisoned. Now, then, while from 1860 to 1866, without the law, the lighter cases of syphilis had declined from 32.68 to 24.73 per cent., after a six years' enforcement of the new law, the percentage of diseased in 1872 was still 24.26. In other words, it was not one-half per cent. lower in 1872 than in 1866; but the average for these six years was 1-16 per cent. higher than in 1866. In sight of this, a special Commission, appointed in 1873, to investigate the effect of that law, arrived at the unanimous conclusion that "the periodical inspection of the women who usually have sexual intercourse with the _personnel_ of the army and navy, _had, at best, not occasioned the slightest diminution in the number of cases_," and it _recommended the suspension_ of periodical inspections. The effects of the Act of Inspection on the women subjected thereto were, however, quite different from those on the troops. In 1866, there were, to every 1,000 prostitutes, 121 diseases; in 1868, after the law had been in force two years, there were 202. The number then gradually dropped, but, nevertheless, still exceeded in 1874 the figure for 1866 by 16 cases. Under the Act, deaths also increased frightfully among the prostitutes. In 1865 the proportion was 9.8 to every 1,000 prostitutes, whereas, in 1874 it had risen to 23. When, towards the close of the sixties, the English Government made the attempt to extend the Act of Inspection to all English cities, a storm of indignation arose from the women. The law was considered an affront to the whole sex. The Habeas Corpus Act,--that fundamental law, that protects the English citizen against police usurpation--would, such was the sentiment, be suspended for women: any brutal policeman, animated by revenge or any other base motive, would be free to seize any decent woman on the suspicion of her being a prostitute, whereas the licentiousness of the men would remain unmolested, aye, would be protected and fed, by just such a law. Although this intervention in behalf of the outcasts of their sex readily exposed the English women to misrepresentation and degrading remarks from the quarter of narrow-minded men, the women did not allow themselves to be held back from energetically opposing the introduction of the law that was an insult to their sex. In newspaper articles and pamphlets the "pros" and "cons" were discussed by men and women; in Parliament, the extension of the law was, first, prevented; its repeal followed later. The German police is vested with a similar power, and cases that have forced themselves into publicity from Berlin, Leipsic and other cities, prove that its abuse--or be it "mistakes" in its exercise--is easy; nevertheless, of an energetic opposition to such regulations naught is heard. Even in middle class Norway, brothels were forbidden in 1884; in 1888 the compulsory registration of the prostitutes and the inspection connected therewith were abolished in the capital, Christiania; and in January, 1893, the enactment was made general for the whole country. Very rightly does Mrs. Guillaume-Schack remark upon the "protective" measures adopted by the State in behalf of the men: "To what end do we teach our sons to respect virtue and morality if the State pronounces immorality a necessary evil; and if, before the young man has at all reached mental maturity, the State leads woman to him stamped by the authorities as a merchandise, as a toy for his passion?" Let a sexually diseased man, in his unbridled career of licentiousness, contaminate ever so many of these poor beings--who, to the honor of woman be it said, are mostly driven by bitter want or through seduction to ply their disgraceful trade,--the scurvy fellow remains unmolested. But woe to the woman who does not forthwith submit to inspection and treatment! The garrison cities, university towns, etc., with their congestion of vigorous, healthy men, are the chief centers of prostitution and of its dangerous diseases, that are carried thence into the remotest corners of the land, and everywhere spread infection. The same holds with the sea towns. What the moral qualifications are with a large number of our students the following utterance in a publication for the promotion of morality may give an idea of: "_With by far the larger number of students, the views entertained upon matters of morality are shockingly low, aye, they are downright unclean._"[105] And these are the circles--boastful of their "German breed," and "German morals"--from which our administrative officers, our District Attorneys and our Judges are in part recruited. "Thy sins shall be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation." This Bible sentence falls upon the dissipated and sexually diseased man in the fullest sense of the word, unhappily also upon the innocent woman. "Attacks of apoplexy with young men and also women, several manifestations of spinal debility and softening of the brains, all manner of nervous diseases, affections of the eyes, cariosity, inflammation of the intestines, sterility and atrophy, _frequently proceed from nothing else than chronic and neglected, and, often for special reasons, concealed syphilis_.... As things now are, ignorance and lightheadedness also contribute towards _turning blooming daughters of the land into anaemic, listless creatures_, who, under the burden of a chronic inflammation of the pelvis, _have to atone for the excesses committed by their husbands before and after marriage_."[106] In the same sense does Dr. Blaschke utter himself:[107] "Epidemics like cholera and smallpox, diphtheria and typhus, whose visible effects are, by reason of their suddenness, realized by all, although hardly equal to syphilis in point of virulence, and, in point of diffusion, not to be compared therewith, yet are they the terror of the population ... while before syphilis society stands, one feels inclined to say, with frightful indifference." The fault lies in the circumstance that it is considered "improper" to talk openly of such things. Did not even the German Reichstag stop short before a resolution to provide by law that sexual diseases, as well as all others, shall be treated by Sick-Benefit Associations? The syphilitic virus is in its effects the most tenacious and hardest poison to stamp out. Many years after an outbreak has been overcome, and the patient believes every trace to be wiped out, the sequels frequently crop up afresh in the wife or the new-born child;[108] and a swarm of ailments among wives and children trace their causes back, respectively, to marital and parental venereal diseases. With some who are born blind, the misfortune is due to the father's sins, the consequences of which transmitted themselves to the wife, and from her to the child. Weak-minded and idiotic children may frequently ascribe their infirmity to the same cause. Finally, what dire disaster may be achieved through vaccination by an insignificant drop of syphilitic blood, our own days can furnish crass illustrations of. In the measure that men, willingly or otherwise, renounce marriage, and seek the gratification of natural impulses through illegitimate channels, seductive allurements increase also. The great profits yielded by all undertakings that cater to immorality, attract numerous and unscrupulous business men, who spare no artifice of refinement to draw and keep customers. Account is taken of every demand, according to the rank and position of the custom, also of its means and readiness to bleed. If some of these "public houses" in our large cities were to blab out their secrets, the fact would appear that their female tenants--mostly of low extraction, without either culture or education, often unable to write their own names, but possessed of all the mere physical charms--stand in the most intimate relations with "leaders of society," with men of high intelligence and culture. There would be found among these Cabinet Ministers, high military dignitaries, Councillors, members of Legislatures, Judges, etc., going in and out, and side by side with representatives of the aristocracy of birth, of finance, of commerce and of industry,--all of them, who, by day and in society, strut about with grave and dignified mien as "representatives and guardians of morality, of order, of marriage, and of the family," and who stand at the head of the Christian charity societies and of societies for the "suppression of prostitution." Modern capitalist society resembles a huge carnival festival, at which all seek to deceive and fool one another. Each carries his official disguise with dignity, in order later, unofficially and with all the less restraint, to give a loose to his inclinations and passions. All the while, public life is running over with "Morality," "Religion" and "Propriety." In no age was there greater hypocrisy than in ours. The number of the augurs swells daily. The supply of women for purposes of lust rises even more rapidly than the demand. Our increasingly precarious social conditions--want, seduction, the love for an externally brilliant and apparently easy life--furnish the female candidates from all social strata. Quite typically does a novel of Hans Wachenhusen[109] depict the state of things in the capital of the German Empire. The author expresses himself on the purpose of his work in these words: "My book deals mainly with the victims of the female sex and its steady depreciation, due to the unnatural plight of our social and civic state, through its own fault, through neglect of education, through the craving of luxury and the increasing light-headed supply in the market of life. It speaks of this sex's increasing surplus, which renders daily more hopeless the new-born ones, more prospectless those that grow up.... I wrote much in the same way as the District Attorney puts together the past life of a criminal, in order to establish therefrom the measure of his guilt. Novels being generally considered works of fiction, permissible opposites of Truth, the following is, in that sense, no novel, but a true picture of life, without coloring." In Berlin, things are no better and no worse than in other large cities. Whether Greek-Orthodox St. Petersburg or Catholic Rome, Germanic-Christian Berlin or heathen Paris, puritanic London or gay Vienna, approach nearer to Babylon of old is hard to decide. "Prostitution possesses its written and its unwritten laws, its resources, its various resorts, from the poorest cottage to the most splendid palace, its numberless grades from the lowest to the most refined and cultivated; it has its special amusements and public places of meeting, its police, its hospitals, its prisons and its literature."[110] "We no longer celebrate the festival of Osiris, the Bacchanalia and the Indian orgies of the spring month; but in Paris and other large cities, under the black cloak of night, behind the walls of 'public' and 'private' houses, people give themselves over to orgies and Bacchanalia that the boldest pen dare not describe."[111] Under such conditions, the traffic in female flesh has assumed mammoth proportions. It is conducted on a most extensive scale, and is most admirably organized in the very midst of the seats of civilization and culture, rarely attracting the notice of the police. A swarm of brokers, agents, carriers, male and female, ply the trade with the same unconcern as if they dealt in any other merchandise. Birth certificates are forged, and bills of lading are drawn up with accurate descriptions of the qualifications of the several "articles," and are handed over to the carriers as directions for the purchasers. As with all merchandise, the price depends upon the quality, and the several categories are assorted and consigned, according to the taste and the requirements of the customers in different places and countries. The slyest manipulations are resorted to in order to evade the snares and escape the vigilance of the police; not infrequently large sums are used to shut the eyes of the guardians of the law. A number of such cases have been established, especially in Paris. Germany enjoys the sorry fame of being the woman market for half the world. The innate German migratory disposition seems to animate also a portion of the women. In larger numbers than those of any other people, the Austrian excepted, do they furnish their contingent to the supply of international prostitution. German women populate the harems of the Turks, as well as the public houses of central Siberia, and as far away as Bombay, Singapore, San Francisco and Chicago. In a book of travels,[112] the author, W. Joest, speaks as follows on the German trade in girls: "People so often grow warm in our moral Germany over the slave trade that some African negro Prince may be carrying on, or over conditions in Cuba and Brazil, but they should rather keep in mind the beam in their own eyes: _in no country is there such a trade with white female slaves, from no country is the export of this living merchandise as large as it is from Germany and Austria_. The road that these girls take can be accurately followed. From Hamburg they are shipped to South America; Bahia and Rio de Janeiro receive their quotas; the largest part is destined for Montevideo and Buenos Ayres, while a small rest goes through the Straits of Magellan as far as Valparaiso. Another stream is steered via England, or direct to North America, where, however, it can hold its own only with difficulty against the domestic product, and, consequently, splits up down the Mississippi as far as New Orleans and Texas, or westward to California. Thence, the coast is supplied as far south as Panama; while Cuba, the West Indies and Mexico draw their supplies from New Orleans. Under the title of "Bohemians," further droves of German girls are exported over the Alps to Italy and thence further south to Alexandria, Suez, Bombay, Calcutta and Singapore, aye, even to Hongkong and as far as Shanghai. The Dutch Indies and Eastern Asia, Japan, especially, are poor markets, seeing that Holland does not allow white girls of this kind in its colonies, while in Japan the daughters of the soil are themselves too pretty and cheap. American competition from San Francisco also tends to spoil the otherwise favorable chances. Russia is provided from East Prussia, Pomerania and Poland. The first station is usually Riga. Here the dealers from St. Petersburg and Moscow supply themselves, and ship their goods in large quantities to Nischni-Novgorod and beyond the Ural Mountains to Irbit and Krestofsky, aye as far as the interior of Siberia. I found, for instance, a German girl in Tschita who had been traded in this way. This wonderful trade is thoroughly organized, it is attended to by agents and commercial travelers. _If ever the Foreign Department of the German Empire were to demand of its consuls reports on this matter, quite interesting statistical tables could be put together._" This trade flourishes to this day at its fullest, as proved in the autumn of 1893 by a Social Democratic delegate to the German Reichstag. The number of prostitutes is hard to estimate; accurately it can not be at all given. The police can state approximately the number of women whose principal occupation is prostitution; but it can not do this with regard to the much larger number of those who resort to it as a side means of income. All the same, the figures approximately known are frightfully high. According to v. Oettingen, the number of prostitutes in London was, as early as the close of the sixties, estimated at 80,000. In Paris the number of registered prostitutes in 1892 was 4,700, but fully one-third escape police control. In all Paris, there were, in 1892, about sixty brothels, with 600 to 700 prostitutes, and the number of brothels is steadily on the decline. On the other hand, based upon an investigation, instituted by the Municipal Council of Paris, in 1889, the number of women who prostitute themselves is placed at the enormous figure of 120,000. In Berlin, the number of prostitutes, registered with the police, was:-- 1886 3,006 1887 3,063 1888 3,392 1889 3,703 1890 4,039 In 1890, there were six physicians employed, whose duty it was to devote two hours a day to inspection.[113] Since then the number of physicians has been increased. The prostitutes, registered with the police, constitute, however, in Berlin also, only a very small portion of the total. Expert sources estimate it at not less than 50,000. In the year 1890 alone, there were in 9,024 liquor saloons 2,022 bar-maids, almost all of whom yield to prostitution. Furthermore, the, from year to year, rising number of girls, arrested for disorderly conduct, shows that prostitution in Berlin is steadily on the increase. The numbers of these arrests were:-- 1881 10,878 1884 11,157 1887 13,358 1890 16,605 Of the 16,605 girls, arrested in 1890, there were 9,162 carried for sentence before the Judge. There were, accordingly, 30 of these at every session of the court, and 128 of them were placed under the police by judicial decree. Already in 1860, it was calculated in Hamburg that every ninth woman was a prostitute. Since then the proportion has become greatly worse. In Germany, the number of prostitutes probably runs up to 180,000. Accordingly, we here have to do with a large female army, that considers prostitution as a means of livelihood; and the number of victims, whom disease and death claim, is in proportion.[114] Tait calculates for Edinburg that the average life of the prostitute is 22 to 25 years. According to him, year in and year out, _every fourth aye, every third prostitute seeks to take her own life, and every twelfth actually succeeds in killing herself_. A truly shocking state of things. The majority of prostitutes are heartily tired of their way of living; aye, that they are disgusted thereat, is an experience admitted by all experts. But once fallen into prostitution, only to very few is the opportunity ever offered to escape. And yet the number of prostitutes increases in the same measure that does that of the women engaged as female labor in the various branches of industry and trade, and that are paid off with wages that are too high to die, and too low to live on. Prostitution is, furthermore, promoted by the industrial crises that have become a necessity of the capitalist world, that commence to become chronic, and that carry want and misery into hundreds and thousands of families. According to a letter of the Chief Constable of Bolton, October 31, 1865, to a Factory Inspector, the number of young prostitutes had increased more during the English cotton famine, consequent upon the North American war for the emancipation of the slaves, than during the previous twenty-five years.[115] But it is not only the working-women, who, through want, fall a prey to prostitution. Prostitution also finds its recruiting grounds in the higher walks of life. Lombroso and Ferrero quote Mace,[116] who says of Paris that "a governess certificate, whether of high or low degree, is not so much a draft upon bread, _as upon suicide, theft and prostitution_." Parent-Duchatelet made out in his time a statistical table, according to which, out of 5,000 prostitutes there were 1,440 who took to the occupation out of want and misery; 1,250 were orphaned and without support; 80 prostituted themselves in order to feed poor parents; 1,400 were concubines left by their keepers; 400 were girls whom officers and soldiers had seduced and dragged to Paris; 280 had been deserted by their lovers during pregnancy. These figures speak for themselves. They need no further explanation. Mrs. Butler, the zealous champion of the poorest and most wretched of her sex in England, says on the subject of prostitution: "Fortuitous circumstances, the death of a father, of a mother, lack of work, insufficient wages, misery, false promises, snares, have led them to sin." Instructive also is the information given by K. Schneidt[117] on the causes, that lead the Berlin bar-maids so often into the arms of prostitution. Shockingly large is the number of female servants that become barmaids, and that almost always means prostitutes. The answers that Schneidt received on his schedules of questions addressed to bar-maids, ran like this: "Because I got a child from my master and had to earn my living;" or "Because my book was spoiled;" or "Because with sewing shirts and the like too little is made;" or "Because I was discharged from the factory and could get no more work;" or "Because my father died, and there were four other little ones." That, particularly, servant girls, after they fall a prey to seduction by their masters, furnish a large contingent to the prostitutes, is a known fact. On the subject of the shockingly large number of seductions of servant girls by their masters or by the sons of these, Dr. Max Taude expresses himself reproachfully.[118] When, however, the upper classes furnish their quota to prostitution, it is not want but seduction and the inclination for an easy life, for dress and for pleasures. On that subject a certain work[119] utters itself this wise: "Cold with horror and dismay, many a staid citizen, many a parson, teacher, high official, high military dignitary, etc., learns that his daughter has secretly taken to prostitution. _Were it allowable to mention all these daughters by name, either a social revolution would take place on the spot, or the popular ideas concerning honor and virtue would be seriously damaged._" It is especially the finer prostitutes, the _haute volee_ among the prostitutes, that are recruited from these circles. Likewise do a large portion of actresses, whose wardrobe outlays alone stand in crass disproportion to their salaries, depend upon such unclean sources of revenue.[120] The same with numerous girls, engaged as sales-ladies, and in similar capacities. There are employers dishonorable enough to justify the low wages that they pay by referring their female employes to the aid of "friends." For instance: In 1889 the "Sachsische Arbeiter Zeitung" of Dresden published a notice that ran as follows: "A cultured young lady, long time out of work on account of lung troubles, looked, upon her recovery, for work of any sort. She was a governess. Nothing fit offered itself quickly, and she decided to accept the first job that came along, whatever it was. She first applied to Mr. ----. Seeing she spoke readily several languages, she was acceptable; but the 30 marks a month wages seemed to her too small to get along with. She stated to Mr. ----, and his answer was that most of his girls did not get even that much, but from 15 to 20 marks at most, and they all pulled through quite well, each having a 'good friend,' who helped along. Another gentleman, Mr. ----, expressed himself in the same sense. Of course, the lady accepted a place in neither of the two establishments." Seamstresses, female tailors, milliners, factory girls by the hundreds of thousands find themselves in similar plight. Employers and their subalterns--merchants, mill owners, landlords, etc.,--who keep female hands and employes, frequently consider it a sort of privilege to find these women handy to administer to their lusts. Our pious and conservative folks love to represent the rural districts as truly idyllic in point of morality, compared with the large cities and industrial centers. Everyone acquainted with the actual state of things knows that it is not so; and the fact was evidenced by the address, delivered by a baronial landlord of Saxony in the fall of 1889, reported as follows in the papers of the place: "GRIMMA.--Baron Dr. v. Waechter of Roecknitz, recently delivered an address, before a diocese meeting that took place here, upon the subject of 'Sexual Immorality in Our Rural Communities.' Local conditions were not presented by him in a rosy color. The speaker admitted with great candor that _employers_, even _married_ ones, are frequently in _very intimate relations_ with their female domestics, the consequences of which were either cancelled with _cash_, or were removed from the eyes of the world through a _crime_. The fact could, unfortunately, not be cloaked over, that immorality was nursed in these communities, not alone by girls, who, as nurses in cities, had taken in the poison, or by fellows, who made its acquaintance in the military service, but that, sad to say, also the _cultured classes_, through the stewards of manorial estates, and through the officers on the occasions of field manoeuvres, carried lax principles of morality into the country districts. According to Dr. v. Waechter, there are _actually here in the country few girls who reach the age of seventeen_ without having fallen." The open-hearted speaker's love of truth was answered with a social boycott, placed upon him by the officers who felt insulted. The _jus primae noctis_ of the medieval feudal lord continues in another form in these very days of ours. The majority of prostitutes are thrown into the arms of this occupation at a time when they can hardly be said to have arrived at the age of discretion. Of 2,582 girls, arrested in Paris for the secret practice of prostitution, 1,500 were minors; of 607 others, 487 had been deflowered under the age of twenty. In September, 1894, a scandal of first rank took the stage in Buda-Pest. It appeared that about 400 girls of from twelve to fifteen years fell prey to a band of rich rakes. The sons of our "property and cultured classes" generally consider it an attribute of their rank to seduce the daughters of the people, whom they then leave in the lurch. Only too readily do the trustful daughters of the people, untutored in life and experience, and generally joyless and friendless, fall a prey to the seduction that approaches them in brilliant and seductive guise. Disillusion, then sorrows, finally crime,--such are the sequels. Of 1,846,171 live births in Germany in 1891, 172,456 were illegitimate. Only conjure up the volume of worry and heartaches prepared for a great number of these mothers, by the birth of their illegitimate children, even if allowance is made for the many instances when the children are legitimatized by their fathers! _Suicide by women and infanticide_ are to a large extent traceable to the destitution and wretchedness in which the women are left when deserted. The trials for child murder cast a dark and instructive picture upon the canvas. To cite just one case, in the fall of 1894, a young girl, who, eight days after her delivery, had been turned out of the lying-in institute in Vienna and thrown upon the streets with her child and without means, and who, in her distress and desperation, killed the infant, _was sentenced to be hanged_ by a jury of Krems in Lower Austria. About the scamp of a father nothing was said. And how often do not similar instances occur! The seduced and outrageously deserted woman, cast helpless into the abyss of despair and shame, resorts to extreme measures: she kills the fruit of her womb, is dragged before the tribunals, is sentenced to penitentiary or the gallows. The unconscionable, and actual murderer,--he goes off scott-free; marries, perchance, shortly after, the daughter of a "respectable and honest" family, and becomes a much honored, upright man. There is many a gentleman, floating about in honors and distinctions, who has soiled his honor and his conscience in this manner. Had women a word to say in legislation, much would be otherwise in this direction. Most cruel of all, as already indicated, is the posture of French legislation, which forbids inquiry after the child's paternity, and, instead, sets up foundling asylums. The resolution on the subject, by the Convention of June 28, 1793, runs thus: "The nation takes charge of the physical and moral education of abandoned children. From that moment they will be designated only by the term of orphans. No other designation shall be allowed." Quite convenient for the men, who, thereby, shifted the obligation of the individual upon the collectivity, to the end of escaping exposure before the public and their wives. In all the provinces of the land, orphan and foundling asylums were set up. The number of orphans and foundlings ran up, in 1893, to 130,945, of which it was estimated that each tenth child was legitimate, but not wanted by its parents. But no particular care was taken of these children, and the mortality among them was, accordingly, great. In that year, fully 59 per cent., i. e., more than one-half died during the first year of their lives; 78 per cent. died twelve years of age and under. Accordingly, of every 100 only 22 reached the age of twelve years and over. It is claimed that matters have in the meantime improved in those establishments. In Austria and Italy also foundling asylums were established, and their support assumed by the State. "_Ici on fait mourir les enfants_" (Here children are killed) is the inscription that a certain King is said to have recommended as fit for foundling asylums. In Austria, they are gradually disappearing; there are now only eight of them left; also the treatment and care of the children has considerably improved to what it was. In 1888, there were 40,865 children cared for in Austria, including Galicia; of these 10,466 were placed in public institutions, 30,399 under private care, at a joint cost of 1,817,372 florins. Mortality was slighter among the children in the public institutions than among those placed under private care. This was especially the case in Galicia. There, 31.25 per cent. of the children died during the year 1888 in the public establishments, by far more than in the public establishments of other countries; but of those under private care, 84.21 per cent. died,--a veritable mass-assassination. It almost looks as though the Polish slaughterhouse system aimed at killing off these poor little worms as swiftly as possible. It is a generally accepted fact that the percentage of deaths among children born out of wedlock is far higher than among those born in wedlock. In Prussia there died, early in the sixties, during the first year of their lives 18.23 per cent. of children born in wedlock, and 33.11 per cent. of children born out of wedlock, accordingly twice as many of the latter. In Paris there died, 100 children born in wedlock to every 139 born out of wedlock, and in the country districts 215. Italian statistics throw up this picture: Out of every 10,000 live-births, there died-- Legitimate children: 1881. 1882. 1883. 1884. 1885. One month old 751 741 724 698 696 Two to twelve months 1,027 1,172 986 953 1,083 Illegitimate children: One month old 2,092 2,045 2,139 2,107 1,813 Two to twelve months 1,387 1,386 1,437 1,437 1,353 The difference in the mortality between legitimate and illegitimate children is especially noticeable during the first month of life. During that period, the mortality of children born out of wedlock is on an average three times as large as that of those born in wedlock. Improper attention during pregnancy, weak delivery and poor care afterwards, are the very simple causes. Likewise do maltreatment and the infamous practice and superstition of "making angels" increase the victims. The number of still-births is twice as large with illegitimate than with legitimate children, due, probably, mainly to the efforts of some of the mothers to bring on the death of the child during pregnancy. The illegitimate children who survive revenge themselves upon society for the wrong done them, by furnishing _an extraordinary large percentage of criminals of all degrees_. Yet another evil, frequently met, must also be shortly touched upon. Excessive sexual indulgence is infinitely more harmful than too little. A body, misused by excess, will go to pieces, even without venereal diseases. Impotence, barrenness, spinal affections, insanity, at least intellectual weakness, and many other diseases, are the usual consequences. _Temperance_ is as necessary in sexual intercourse as in eating and drinking, and all other human wants. But temperance seems difficult to youth. Hence the large number of "young old men," in the higher walks of life especially. The number of young and old _roues_ is enormous, and they require special irritants, excess having deadened and surfeited them. Many, accordingly, lapse into the unnatural practices of Greek days. The crime against nature is to-day much more general than most of us dream of: upon that subject the secret archives of many a Police Bureau could publish frightful information. But not among men only, among women also have the unnatural practices of old Greece come up again with force. Lesbian love, or Sapphism, is said to be quite general among married women in Paris; according to Taxal,[121] it is enormously in practice among the prominent ladies of that city. In Berlin, one-fourth of the prostitutes are said to practice "tribady;" but also in the circles of our leading dames there are not wanting disciples of Sappho. Still another unnatural gratification of the sexual instinct manifests itself in the violation of children, a practice that has increased greatly during the last thirty years. In France, during 1851-1875, 17,656 cases of this nature were tried. The colossal number of these crimes in France is intimately connected with the two-child system, and with the abstinence of husbands towards their wives. To the German population also we find people recommending Malthusianism, without stopping to think what the sequels will be. The so-called "liberal professions," to whom belong mainly the members of the upper classes, furnish in Germany about 5.6 per cent. of the ordinary criminals, but they furnish 13 per cent. of the criminals indicted for violation of children; and this latter percentage would be still higher were there not in those circles ample means to screen the criminals, so that, probably, the majority of cases remain undiscovered. The revelations made in the eighties by the "Pall Mall Gazette" on the violation of children in England, are still fresh in the public memory. The moral progress of this our best of all possible worlds is recorded in the below tables for England, the "leading country in civilization." In England there were:-- Immoral Acts Deaths from Year. of Violence. Syphilis. Insane. 1861 280 1,345 39,647 1871 315 1,995 56,755 1881 370 2,334 73,113 1882 466 2,478 74,842 1883 390 ... 76,765 1884 510 ... ... Increase since 1861 82 per cent. 84 per cent. 98 per cent. A frightful increase this is of the phenomena that point to the rising physical and moral ruin of English society. The best statistical record of venereal diseases and their increase is kept by Denmark, Copenhagen especially. Here venereal diseases, with special regard to syphilis, developed as follows:-- Venereal Of these, Year. Population. Diseases. Syphilis. 1874 196,000 5,505 836 1879 227,000 6,299 934 1885 290,000 9,325 1,866 Among the personnel of the navy in Copenhagen, the number of venereal diseases increased 1224 per cent. during the period mentioned; in the army and for the same period, 227 per cent.[122] And how stands it in Paris? From the year 1872 to the year 1888, the number of persons treated for venereal diseases in the hospitals Du Midi, de Lourcine and de St. Louis was 118,223, of which 60,438 suffered of syphilis and 57,795 of other venereal affections. Besides these, of the number of outside persons, who applied to the clinics of the said three hospitals, there was a yearly average of 16,385 venereals.[123] We have seen how, as a result of our social conditions, vice, excesses, wrongs and crimes of all sorts are bred. All society is kept in a state of unrest. Under such a state of things woman is the chief sufferer. Numerous women realize this and seek redress. They demand, first of all, economic self-support and independence; they demand that woman be admitted, as well as man, to all pursuits that her physical and mental powers and faculties qualify her for; they demand, especially, admission to the occupations that are designated with the term "liberal professions." Are the efforts in these directions justified? Are they practical? Would they mend matters? These are questions that now crowd forward. FOOTNOTES: [100] "Geschichte, Statistik und Regelung der Prostitution in Wien." [101] "Die Bestrafung und polizelliche Behaundlung der gewerbsmässigen Unzucht." [102] "Ueber Gelegenheitsmacherei und öffentliches Tanzvergnügen." [103] "Die Prostitution im 19. Jahrhundert vom sanitätspolizeilichen Standpunkt." [104] Zweiter Verwaltungsbericht des Königl. Polizei-Präsidiums von Berlin für die Jahre 1881-1890; pp. 351-359 [105] "Korrespondenzblatt zur Bekämpfung der öffentlichen Sittenlosigkeit," August 15, 1893. [106] "Die gesundheitschädliche Tragweite der Prostitution," Dr. Oskar Lassar. [107] "Die Behandlung der Geschlechtskrankheiten in Krankenkassen und Heilanstalten." [108] In the English hospitals, during 1875, fully 14 per cent. of the children under treatment were suffering of inherited venereal diseases. In London, there died of these diseases 1 man out of every 190 cases of death; in all England, 1 out of every 159 cases; in the poor-houses of France, 1 out of 160.5. [109] "Was die Strasse verschlingt." [110] Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, "The Moral Education." [111] Montegazza, "L'Amour dans l'Humanite." [112] "Aus Japan nach Deutschland durch Sibirien." [113] "Zweiter Verwaltungsbericht des Kgl. Polizei-Präsidiums von Berlin vom Jahre 1881-1890." [114] In the large trades union sick-benefit associations of Berlin the number of syphilitic diseases increased from 4326 in 1881 to 9420 in 1890. Dr. A. Blaschko, _ubi supra_. [115] Karl Marx, "Capital," p. 461, Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1896. [116] _Ubi supra._ [117] "Das Kellnerinnen-Elend In Berlin," Berlin, 1893. [118] Dr. Max Taube, "Der Schutz der unehelichen Kinder," Leipsic, 1893. [119] "Die gefallenen Mädchen und die Sittenpolizei," Wilh. Issleib, Berlin, 1889. [120] In a work, "Kapital und Presse," Berlin, 1891, Dr. F. Mehring proves that a by no means indifferent actress was engaged at a well known theater at a salary of 100 marks a month, and that her outlay for wardrobe alone ran up to 1000 marks a month. The deficit was covered by a "friend." [121] Lombroso and Ferrero, _ubi supra_. [122] "Die venerischen Krankheiten in Dänemark," Dr. Giesing. [123] Report of the Sanitary Commission on the organization of sanitation relative to prostitution in Paris, addressed to the Municipal Council of Paris, 1890. CHAPTER IV. WOMAN'S POSITION AS A BREADWINNER; HER INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES; DARWINISM AND THE CONDITION OF SOCIETY. The endeavor of woman to secure economic self-support and personal independence has, to a certain degree, been recognized as legitimate by bourgeois society, the same as the endeavor of the workingman after greater freedom of motion. The principal reason for such acquiescence lies in the class interests of the bourgeoisie itself. The bourgeoisie, or capitalist class, requires the free and unrestricted purveyance of male and female labor-power for the fullest development of production. In even tempo with the perfection of machinery, and technique; with the subdivision of labor into single acts requiring ever less technical experience and strength; with the sharpening of the competitive warfare between industry and industry, and between whole regions--country against country, continent against continent--the labor-power of woman comes into ever greater demand. The special causes, from which flows this ever increasing enlistment of woman in ever increasing numbers, have been detailed above _in extenso_. Woman is increasingly employed _along with man, or in his place, because her material demands are less than those of man_. A circumstance predicated upon her very nature as a sexual being, forces woman to proffer herself cheaper. More frequently, on an average, than man, woman is subject to physical derangements, that cause an interruption of work, and that, in view of the combination and organization of labor, in force to-day in large production, easily interfere with the steady course of production. Pregnancy and lying-in prolong such pauses. The employer turns the circumstance to advantage, and _recoups himself doubly for the inconveniences_, that these disturbances put him to, _with the payment of much lower wages_. Moreover--as may be judged from the quotation on page 90, taken from Marx's "Capital"--the work of married women has a particular fascination for the employer. The married woman is, as working-woman, much more "attentive and docile" than her unmarried sister. Thought of her children drives her to the utmost exertion of her powers, in order to earn the needed livelihood; accordingly, she submits to many an imposition that the unmarried woman does not. In general, the working-woman ventures only exceptionally to join her fellow-toilers in securing better conditions of work. That raises her value in the eyes of the employer; not infrequently she is even a trump card in his hands against refractory workingmen. Moreover, she is endowed with great patience, greater dexterity of fingers, a better developed artistic sense, the latter of which renders her fitter than man for many branches of work. These female "virtues" are fully appreciated by the virtuous capitalist, and thus, along with the development of industry, woman finds from year to year an ever wider field for her application--but, and this is the determining factor, _without tangible improvement to her social condition_. If woman labor is employed, it generally sets male labor free. The displaced male labor, however, wishes to live; it proffers itself for lower wages; and the proffer, in turn, re-acts depressingly upon the wages of the working-woman. The reduction of wages thus turns into an endless screw, that, due to the constant revolutions in the technique of the labor-process, is set rotating all the more swiftly, seeing that the said technical revolutions, through the savings of labor-power, set also female labor free,--all of which again increases the supply of hands. New industries somewhat counteract the constant supply of relatively superfluous labor-power, but are not strong enough to establish lasting improvement. Every rise of wages above a certain measure causes the employer to look to further improvements in his plant, calculated to substitute will-less, automatic mechanical devices for human hands and human brain. At the start of capitalist production, hardly any but male labor confronted male labor in the labor-market; now sex is played against sex, and, further along the line, age against age. Woman displaces man, and, in her turn, woman is displaced by younger folks and child-labor. Such is the "Moral Order" in modern industry. The endeavor, on the part of employers, to extend the hours of work, with the end in view of pumping more surplus values out of their employes, is made easier to them, thanks to the slighter power of resistance possessed by women. Hence the phenomenon that, in the textile industries, for instance, in which women frequently constitute far more than one-half of the total labor employed, the hours of work are everywhere longest. Accustomed from home to the idea that her work is "never done," woman allows the increased demands to be placed upon her without resistance. In other branches, as in the millinery trade, the manufacture of flowers, etc., wages and hours of work deteriorate through the taking home of extra tasks, at which the women sit till midnight, and even later, without realizing that they thereby only compete against themselves, and, as a result, earn in a sixteen-hour workday what they would have made in a regular ten-hour day.[124] In what measure female labor has increased in the leading industrial countries may appear from the below sets of tables. We shall start with the leading industrial country of Europe,--England. The last census furnishes this picture: Total Persons Year. Employed. Males. Females. 1871 11,593,466 8,270,186 3,323,280 1881 11,187,564 7,783,646 3,403,918 1891 12,898,484 8,883,254 4,016,230 Accordingly, within twenty years, the number of males employed increased 613,068, or 7.9 per cent.; the number of females, however, by 692,950, or 20.9 per cent. It is especially to be observed in this table that, in 1881, a year of crisis, the number of males employed fell off by 486,540, and the number of females increased by 80,638. The increase of female at the cost of male persons employed is thus emphatically brought to light. But within the increasing number of female employes itself a change is going on: _younger forces are displacing the older_. It transpired that in England, during the years 1881-1891, female labor-power of the age 10 to 45 had increased, while that above 45 had decreased. Industries in which female exceeded considerably the number of male labor, were mainly the following: Industries. Females. Males. Manufacture of woman's clothing 415,961 4,470 Cotton industry 332,784 213,231 Manufacture of worsted goods 69,629 40,482 Manufacture of shirts 52,943 2,153 Manufacture of hosiery 30,887 18,200 Lace industry 21,716 13,030 Tobacco industry 15,880 13,090 Bookbinding 14,249 11,487 Manufacture of gloves 9,199 2,756 Teachers 144,393 50,628 Again the wages of women are, in almost all branches, considerably lower than the wages of men _for the same hours_. In the year 1883, the wages in England were for men and women as follows, per week:-- Industries. Males. Females. Flax and jute factories 26 Marks 10-11 Marks Manufacture of glass 38 " 12 " Printing 32-36 " 10-12 " Carpet factories 29 " 15 " Weaving 26 " 16 " Shoemaking 29 " 15 " Dyeing 25-29 " 12-13 " Similar differences in wages for men and women are found in the Post Office service, in school teaching, etc. Only in the cotton industry in Lancashire did both sexes earn equal wages for equal hours of work in the tending of power looms. In the United States, according to the census of 1890, there were 2,652,157 women, of the age of ten years and over engaged in productive occupations:--594,510 in agriculture, 631,988 in manufacture, 59,364 in trade and transportation, and 1,366,235 in personal service, of whom 938,910 were servants. Besides that, there were 46,800 female farmers and planters, 5,135 Government employes, 155,000 school teachers, 13,182 teachers of music, 2,061 artists.[125] In the city of New York, 10,961 working-women participated in strikes during the year 1890, a sign that working-women in the United States, like their European fellow-female wage slaves, understand the class distinctions that exist between Capital and Labor. In what measure women are displacing the men in a number of industries in the United States also, is indicated by the following item from the "Levest. Journ." in 1893: "One of the _features_ of the factory towns of Maine is a class of men that may be termed 'housekeepers.' In almost every town, where much factory work is done, these men are to be found in large numbers. Whoever calls shortly before noon will find them, with aprons tied in front, washing dishes. At other hours of the day they can be seen scrubbing, making the beds, washing the children, tidying up the place, or cooking. Whether any of them attend to the sewing and mending of the family we are not quite sure. These men attend to the household for the simple reason that _their wives can earn more in the factory than they_, and it means a saving of money if the wife goes to work."[126] The closing sentence should read: "Because the women work for wages that the men can no longer work for, and the employer therefore prefers women,"--which happens in Germany also. The towns here described are the so-called "she-towns," already more fully referred to. In France, there were, in 1893, not less than 15,958 women engaged in the railroad service (in the offices and as ticket agents); in the provincial Post Office there were 5,383 women employed; as telegraphers and telephonists, 9,805; and in the State Savings Banks 425. Altogether the number of women in France engaged in gainful occupations, inclusive of agriculture and personal service, was, in 1893, in round figures 4,415,000. Of 3,858 decisions, rendered by the trades courts of Paris, not less than 1,674 concerned women. To what extent female labor was applied in the industries of Switzerland as early as 1886, is told by the following figures of the "Bund": Industries. Males. Females. Silk industry 11,771 51,352 Cotton industry 18,320 23,846 Linen and half-linen industry 5,553 5,232 Embroidery 15,724 21,000 Altogether, there were then in the textile industries, 103,452 women engaged, besides 52,838 men; and the "Bund" expressly declares that there is hardly an occupation in Switzerland in which women are not found. In Germany, according to the census of occupations of 1882, of the 7,340,789 persons engaged in gainful occupations, 1,506,743 were women; or 20.6 per cent. The proportions were, among others, these:-- Per Industries. Males. Females. Cent. Commercial occupations 536,221 181,286 25.2 Service and restaurants 172,841 141,407 45.0 Messengers and day laborers 9,212 3,265 26.2 Spinning 69,272 100,459 60.0 Weaving 336,400 155,396 32.0 Embroidery 42,819 31,010 42.0 Lace and crochet work 5,676 30,204 84.0 Lace manufacture 13,526 17,478 56.4 Bookbinding and paste-board box-making 31,312 10,409 25.0 Paper manufacture 37,685 20,847 35.6 Tobacco working 64,477 48,919 43.1 Clothes-making, etc. 279,978 440,870 61.2 To these must be added 2,248,909 women engaged in agriculture, 1,282,400 female servants, also school teachers, artists, Government office-holders, etc. According to the census of occupations for 1875-1882, the following was the result. There were employed in industrial occupations in the German Empire:-- Total Total Persons Employed. Persons Employed. In the Small Trades. In the Large Trades. Year. Males. Females. Males. Females. Males. Females. 1875 5,463,856 1,116,095 3,453,357 705,874 2,010,499 410,221 1882 5,815,039 1,506,743 3,487,073 989,422 2,327,966 514,321 --------- --------- --------- ------- --------- ------- Increase in 1882 351,183 390,648 33,716 283,548 317,966 107,100 or 6.4 or 35 or 1 or 40.2 or 15.8 or 26.1 per cent. per cent. per cent. per cent. per cent. per cent. According to these figures, not only did female labor increase by 35 per cent. during the period of 1875-1882, while male labor increased only by 6.4 per cent., but the great increase of female labor, especially in small industries, tells the tale that _only by dint of a strong application of female labor, with its correspondingly low wages, can small production keep itself afloat, for a while_. In 1882, there were to every 1,000 persons engaged in industry 176 women; in commerce and transportation, 190; in agriculture, 312. In 1892, the number of women, employed in the factories of Germany, were of the following ages: Number Age. Employed. 12-14 3,897 14-16 68,735 16-21 223,538 Over 21 337,499 Besides (for Reuss younger line without designation of ages) 6,197 ------- 639,866 In the Kingdom of Saxony, notedly the most industrial portion of Germany, the number of working-women employed in the factories was:-- Year. 16 Years and Over. 12 to 16. 1883 72,716 8,477 1892 110,555 13,333 ------- ------- Increase 37,839 4,856 52 per cent. 57 per cent. As a result of the new factory regulations, which limited the hours of female labor, between the ages of 14 to 16, to 10 a day, and wholly forbade factory work to children of school age, the number of working-women between the ages of 14 to 16 sank to 6,763, and of girls between the ages of 12 to 14, sank by 6,334. The strongest increase in the number of working-women, as far as we are informed, took place in the tobacco industry of Baden. According to the reports of the Baden Factory Inspector, Dr. Woerishoffer, the number of persons engaged in the said industry and their subdivisions by sexes; was as follows: Total Number Year. Employed. Males. Females. 1882 12,192 5,193 6,999 1892 24,056 7,932 16,124 ------ ----- ------ Increase 11,864 2,739 9,125 or 52.8 or 130 per cent. per cent. This increase in the number of female tobacco workers, denotes the sharpening competitive struggle, that has developed during the last ten years in the German tobacco as well as many other industries, and which compels the ever intenser engagement of the cheaper labor of woman. And, as in the rest of Germany, so likewise in Baden the industrial development in general shows a larger increase of female than of male workers. Within a year, it recorded the following changes:-- Year. Males. Females. 1892 79,218 35,598 1893 84,470 38,557 ------ ------ Increase 5,252 2,959 or 6.6 or 8.3 per cent. per cent. Of the working-women over 16 years of age, 28.27 were married. In the large ammunition factory at Spandau, there were, in 1893, 3,000 women out of a total of 3,700 employes. As in England, in Germany also, female labor is paid worse than male. According to the report of the Leipsic Chamber of Commerce for the year 1888, the weekly wage for equal hours were:-- Males. Females. Industries. Marks. Marks. Lace manufacture 20 --35 7 --15 Cloth glove manufacture 12 --30 6 --25 Linen and jute weaving 12 --27 5 --10 Wool-carding 15 --27 7.20--10.20 Sugar refinery 10.50--31 7.50--10 Leather and leather goods 12 --28 7 --18 Chemicals 8.50--25 7.50--10 Rubber fabrics 9 --28 6 --17 One factory of paper lanterns 16 --22 7.50--10 In an investigation of the wages earned by the factory hands of Mannheim in 1893, Dr. Woerishoffer divided the weekly earnings into three classes: one, the lowest, in which the wages reached 15 marks; one from 15 to 24; and the last and highest in which wages exceeded 24 marks. According to this subdivision, wages in Mannheim presented the following picture:-- Low. Medium. High. Both sexes 29.8 per cent. 49.8 per cent. 20.4 per cent. Males 20.9 per cent. 56.2 per cent. 22.9 per cent. Females 99.2 per cent. 0.7 per cent. 0.1 per cent. The working-women earned mostly veritable starvation wages. They received per week:-- Percentage Marks. of Females. Under 5 4.62 5--6 5.47 6--8 43.96 8--10 27.45 10--12 12.38 12--15 5.38 Over 15 0.74 In the Thüringer Wald district, in 1891, the workingmen engaged in the slate works received 2.10 marks a day; the women 0.70. In the spinning establishments, the men received 2 marks, the women from 0.90 to 1 mark. Worst of all are the earnings in the tenement industry, for men as well as for women, but for the women it is still more miserable than for the men. In this branch, hours of work are unlimited; when the season is on, they transcend imagination. Furthermore, it is here that the sweating system is generally in vogue, _i. e._, work given out by middlemen (contractors) who, in recompense for their irksome labor of superintendence, keep to themselves a large part of the wages paid by the principal. Under this system, women are also expected to submit to indignities of other nature. How miserably female labor is paid in the tenement industries, the following figures on Berlin conditions may indicate. Men's colored shirts, paid for in 1889 with from 2 marks to 2.50, the employer got in 1893 for 1 mark 50 pfennig. A seamstress of average skill must work from early till late if she means to make from 6 to 8 of these shirts. Her earnings for the week are 4 or 5 marks. An apron-maker earns from 2 marks 50 pfennig to 5 marks a week; a necktie-maker, 5 to 6 marks; a skilled blouse-maker, 6 marks; a very skilled female operator on boys' clothing, 8 to 9 marks; an expert jacket-maker, 5 to 6 marks. A very swift seamstress on men's shirts may, in the good season, and working from 5 in the morning to 10 at night, make as much as 12 marks. Millinery workers, who can copy patterns independently, make 30 marks a month. Quick trimmers, with years of experience, earn from 50 to 60 marks a month during the season. The season usually lasts five months. An umbrella-maker, working twelve hours a day, makes 6 to 7 marks. Such starvation wages force the working-women into prostitution: even with the very plainest wants, no working-women can live in Berlin on less than 8 or 9 marks a week. According to a statistical report on wages, ordered by the Chamber of Commerce of Reichenberg for its own district, 91 per cent. of all the working-women came under the wage category of from 2 to 5 guilders a week. Upon the enforcement in Austria of the law on sick insurance, the authorities discovered that in 116 districts (21.6 per cent. of all) the working-women earned at most 30 kreuzer a day, 90 guilders a year; and in 428 districts (78.4 per cent. of the total) from 30 to 50 kreuzer, or from 90 to 150 guilders a year. The young working-women, under 16 years of age, earned in 173 districts (30.9 per cent.) 20 kreuzer a day at the most, or at the most 60 guilders a year; and in 387 districts (69.1 per cent.) from 20 to 30 kreuzer, or from 60 to 90 guilders a year. Similar differences between the wages of male and female labor exist in all countries on earth. According to the report on Russian industry at the Chicago Exposition in 1893, a workingman made in cotton weaving 66 marks a month, a working-woman 18; a male cotton spinner 66 marks, a female 14. In the lace industry men earned up to 130 marks, women 26; in cloth manufacture, with the power loom, a working man made 90 marks, a working-woman 26 a month. These facts show that woman is increasingly torn from family life by modern developments. Marriage and the family, in the bourgeois sense, are undermined by this development, and dissolved. From the view point afforded by this fact also, it is an absurdity to direct women to a domestic life. That can be done only by such people, who thoughtlessly walk the path of life; who fail to see the facts that shape themselves all around, or do not wish to see them, because they have an interest in plying the trade of optimism. Facts furnish a very different picture from that presented by such gentlemen. In a large number of industries women are employed exclusively; in a larger number they constitute the majority; and in most of the others women are more or less numerously found. Their number steadily increases, and they crowd into ever newer occupations, that they had not previously engaged in. Finally, the working-woman is not merely paid worse than the working man; where she does as much as a man, her hours are, on an average, longer. The German factory ordinances of the year 1891 fixed a maximum of eleven hours for adult working-women. The same is, however, broken through by a mass of exceptions that the authorities are allowed to make. Nightwork also is forbidden for working-women in factories, but here also the Government can make exceptions in favor of factories where work is continuous, or for special seasons; in sugar refineries, for instance. German legislation has not yet been able to rise to the height of really effective measures for the protection of working-women; consequently, these are exploited by inhumanly long hours, and physically wrecked in the small factories, especially in the tenement house industry. Their exploitation is made all the easier to the employer through the circumstance that, until now, a small minority excepted, the women have not realized that, the same as the men, they must organize in their trades, and, there where also men are employed, they must organize jointly with them, in order to conquer for themselves better conditions of work. The ever stronger influx of women in industrial pursuits affects, however, not those occupations only that their correspondingly weaker physique especially fits them for, but it affects also all occupations in which the modern system of exploitation believes it can, with their aid, knock off larger profits. Under this latter head belong both the physically exhausting and the most disagreeable and dangerous occupations. Thus the fantastic pretence of seeing in woman only a tender, finely-strung being, such as poets and writers of fiction love to depict for the delectation of men, a being, that, if it exists at all exists only as an exception, is again reduced to its true value. Facts are obstinate things, and it is only they that concern us. They alone preserve us from false conclusions, and sentimental twaddle. These facts teach us that to-day we find women engaged in the following occupations, among others:--in cotton, linen and woolen weaving; in cloth and flannel making; in mechanical spinning, calico printing and dyeing; in steel pen and pin making; in the preparation of sugar, chocolate and cocoa; in manufacturing paper and bronzes; in making glass and porcelain and in glass painting; in the manufacture of faience, majolica and earthen ware; in making ink and preparing paints; making twine and paper bags; in preparing hops and manure and chemical disinfectants; in spinning and weaving silk and ribbons; in making soap, candles and rubber goods; in wadding and mat making; in carpet weaving; portfolio and cardboard making; in making lace and trimmings, and embroidering; making wall-paper, shoes and leather goods; in refining oil and lard and preparing chemicals of all sorts; in making jewelry and galvanoplastic goods; in the preparation of rags and refuse and bast; in wood carving, xylography and stone coloring; in straw hat making and cleaning; in making crockery, cigars and tobacco products; in making lime and gelatine fabrics; in making shoes; in furriery; in hat making; in making toys; in the flax, shoddy and hair industries; in watchmaking and housepainting; in the making of spring beds, pencils and wafers; in making looking-glasses, matches and gunpowder preparations; in dipping phosphorus match-sticks and preparing arsenic; in the tinning of iron; in the delicacy trade; in book printing and composition; in the preparation of precious stones; in lithography, photography, chromo-lithography and metachromotype, and also in the founding of types; in tile making, iron founding and in the preparation of metals generally; in the construction of houses and railroads; in electrical works; in book-binding, wood-carving and joining; in the making of footwear and clothing; file making; the making of knives and brass goods; in manufacturing combs, buttons, gold thread and gas implements; in the making of tanned goods and trunks; in making starch and chicory preparations; in metallurgy, wood-planing, umbrella making and fish manufacturing; the preservation of fruit, vegetables and meat; in the making of china buttons and fur goods; in mining above ground--in Belgium also underground after the women are 21 years old; in the natural oil and wax production; in slate making and stone breaking; in marble and granite polishing; in making cement; the transportation of barges and canal boats. Also in the wide field of horticulture, agriculture and cattle-breeding, and all that is therewith connected. Lastly, in the various industries in which they have long been considered to have the right of way: in the making of linen and woman's clothing, in the several branches of fashion, also as saleswomen, and more recently as clerks, teachers, kindergarten trainers, writers, artists of all sorts. Thousands upon thousands of women of the middle class are being utilized as slaves in the shops and in the markets, and are thereby withdrawn from all domestic functions, the training of children in particular. Finally, there is one occupation to be mentioned, in which young, especially pretty, girls are ever more in demand, to the great injury of their physical and moral development: it is the occupation in public resorts of all sorts as bar-maids, singers, dancers, etc., to attract men in quest of pleasure. This is a field in which impropriety runs riot, and the holders of white slaves lead the wildest orgies. Among the occupations mentioned, not a few are most dangerous. Dangerous, for instance, are the sulphuric and alkaline gases in the manufacturing and cleaning of straw hats; so is the inhalation of chlorine gases in the bleaching of vegetable materials; the danger of poisoning is imminent in the manufacture of colored paper, colored wafers and artificial flowers; in the preparation of metachromotype, poisons and chemicals; in the painting of leaden soldiers and leaden toys. The on-laying of looking-glasses with quicksilver is simply deadly to the fruit of pregnant women. If, of the live-births in Prussia, 22 per cent. on an average die during the first year, there die, according to Dr. Hirt, 65 per cent. of the live-births of female on-layers of quicksilver, 55 per cent. of those of female glass-polishers, 40 per cent. of those of female lead-makers. In 1890, out of 78 lying-in women, who had been occupied in the type foundries of the district of Wiesbaden, only 37 had a normal delivery. Furthermore, according to Dr. Hirt, the manufacture of colored paper and artificial flowers, the so-called powdering of Brussels lace with white lead, the preparation of decalcomania pictures, the on-laying of mirrors, the manufacture of rubber goods, in short, all occupations at which the working-women are exposed to the inhalation of carbonic acid gases, are especially dangerous from the second half of pregnancy onward. Highly dangerous is also the manufacture of phosphorus matches and work in the shoddy mills. According to the report of the Baden Trades Inspector for 1893, the yearly average of premature births with women engaged in industry rose from 1,039 in the years 1882-1886, to 1,244 in the years 1887-1891. The number of births that had to be aided by an operation averaged for the period of 1882-1886 the figures of 1,118 a year, and for the period of 1886-1891 it averaged 1,385. Facts much graver than any of these would come to light if similar investigations were held also in the more industrially developed countries and provinces of Germany. As a rule the Inspectors are satisfied with stating in their reports: "No specially injurious effects were discovered in the employment of women in the factories." How could they discover any, with their short visits and without drawing upon medical advice? That, moreover, there are great dangers to life and limb, especially in the textile industry, in the manufacture of explosives and in work with agricultural machinery, is an established fact. Even a glance at the above and quite incomplete list will tell every reader that a large number of these occupations are among the hardest and most exhausting even to men. Let people say as they please, this work or that is not suitable for woman; what boots the objection if no other and more suitable occupation is furnished her? Among the branches of industry, or special occupations in the same, that Dr. Hirt[127] considers girls should not be at all employed in, by reason of the danger to health, especially with an eye to their sexual functions, are: The preparation of bronze colors, of velvet and glazed paper, hat making, glass grinding, lithography, flax combing, horsehair twisting, fustian pulling, iron tinning, and work in the flax and shoddy mill. In the following trades, young girls should be occupied only when the necessary protective measures (ventilation, etc.) are properly provided for: The manufacture of paper matting, china ware, lead pencils, shot lead, etherial oils, alum, blood-lye, bromium, chinin, soda, paraffin and ultramarine (poisonous) colored paper, wafers that contain poison, metachromotypes, phosphorous matches, Schweinfurt green and artificial flowers. Also in the cutting and sorting of rags, sorting and coloring of tobacco leaf, cotton beating, wool and silk carding, cleaning of bed feathers, sorting pencil hairs, washing (sulphur) straw hats, vulcanizing and melting rubber, coloring and printing calico, painting lead soldiers, packing snuff, wire netting, on-laying of mirrors, grinding needles and steel pens. Truly, it is no inspiring sight to see women, and even pregnant ones, at the construction of railroads, pushing heavily laden wheelbarrows in competition with men; or to watch them as helpers, mixing mortar and cement or carrying heavy loads of stone at the construction of houses; or in the coal pits and iron works. All that is womanly is thereby rubbed off from woman, her womanliness is trodden under foot, the same as, conversely, all manly attributes are stripped from the men in hundreds of other occupations. Such are the sequels of social exploitation and of social war. Our corrupt social conditions turn things topsy-turvy. It is, accordingly, easy to understand that, considering the extent to which female labor now prevails, and threatens to make still further inroads in all fields of productive activity, the men, highly interested in the development, look on with eyes far from friendly, and that here and there the demand is heard for the suppression of female labor and its prohibition by law. Unquestionably, with the extension of female labor, the family life of the working class goes ever more to pieces, the dissolution of marriage and the family is a natural result, and immorality, demoralization, degeneration, diseases of all natures and child mortality increase at a shocking pace. According to the statistics of population of the Kingdom of Saxony, child mortality has greatly increased in all those cities that became genuine manufacturing places during the last 25 or 30 years. During the period 1880-1885 there died in the cities of Saxony, on an average, 28.5 per cent. of the live-births during the first year of life. In the period of 1886-1890, 45.0 of the live-births died in Ernsthal during the first year of their lives, 44.5 in Stolling, 40.4 in Zschopau, 38.9 in Lichtenstein, 38.3 in Thum, 38.2 in Meerane, 37.7 in Crimmitschau, 37.2 in Burgstaedt, 37.1 in Werdau, 36.5 in Ehrenfriedersdorf, 35.8 in Chemnitz, 35.5 in Frankenberg, 35.2 in Buchholz, 35.1 in Schneeberg, 34.7 in Lunzenau, 34.6 in Hartha, 34.5 in Geithaim, etc.[128] Worse yet stood things in the majority of the large factory villages, quite a number of whom registered a mortality of 40 to 50 per cent. Yet, all this notwithstanding, the social development, productive of such sad results, is progress,--precisely such progress as the freedom to choose a trade, freedom of emigration, freedom to marry, and the removal of all other barriers, thus promoting the development of capitalism on a large scale, but thereby also giving the death-blow to the middle class and preparing its downfall. The working class is not inclined to help the small producer, should he attempt the re-establishment of restrictions to the freedom to choose a trade and of emigration, or the restoration of the guild and corporation restrictions, contemplated with the end in view of artificially keeping dwarf-production alive for a little while longer,--more than that is beyond their power. As little is a return possible to the former state of things with regard to female labor, but that does not exclude stringent laws for the prevention of the excessive exploitation of female and child labor, and of children of school age. In this the interests of the working class coincides with the interests of the State, of humanity, in general, and of civilization. When we see the State compelled to lower the minimum requirements for military service--as happened several times during the last decades, the last time in 1893, when the army was to be further increased--and we see such lowering of the minimum requirements resorted to for the reason that, as a result of degenerating effects of our economic system, the number of young men unfit for military service becomes ever larger,--when we see that, then, forsooth, all are interested in protective measures. The ultimate aim must be to remove the ills, that progress--such as machinery, improved means of production and the whole modern system of labor--has called forth, while at the same time causing the enormous advantages, that such progress is instinct with for man, and the still greater advantages it is capable of, to accrue in full measure to all the members of society, by means of a corresponding organization of human labor.[129] It is an absurdity and a crying wrong that the improvements and conquests of civilization--the collective product of all--accrue to the benefit of those alone who, in virtue of their material power, are able to appropriate them to themselves, while, on the other hand, thousands of diligent workingmen are assailed with fear and worry when they learn that human genius has made yet another invention able to multiply many fold the product of manual labor, and thereby opening to them the prospect of being thrown as useless and superfluous upon the sidewalks. Thus, that which should be greeted with universal joy becomes an object of hostility, that in former years occasioned the storming of many a factory and the demolition of many a new machine. A similar hostile feeling exists to-day between man and woman as workers. This feeling also is unnatural. The point, consequently, is to seek to establish a social condition in which the _full equality of all without distinction of sex shall be the norm of conduct_. _The feat is feasible--the moment all the means of production become the property of society; when collective labor, by the application of all technical and scientific advantages and aids in the process of production, reaches the highest degree of fertility; and when the obligation lies upon all, capable of work, to furnish a certain measure of labor to society, necessary for the satisfaction of social wants, in exchange whereof society guarantees to each and all the means requisite for the development of his faculties and for the enjoyment of life._ Woman shall be like man, a productive and useful member of society, equal-righted with him. Precisely like man, she shall be placed in position to fully develop all her physical and mental faculties, to fulfil her duties, and to exercise her rights. A free being and the peer of man, she is safe against degradation. We shall point out how modern developments in society run out into such a state of things, and that it is these very crass and monstrous ills in modern development that compel the establishment of the New Order. Although the development of the position of woman, as above characterized, is palpable, is tangible to the sight of all who have eyes to see, the twaddle about the "natural calling" of woman is heard daily, assigning her to domestic duties and the family. The phrase is heard loudest there where woman endeavors to penetrate into the sphere of the so-called higher professions, as for instance, the higher departments of instruction and of the civil service, the medical or legal careers, and the pursuit of the natural sciences. The most laughable and absurd objections are fetched up, and are defended with the air of "learning." Gentlemen, who pass for learned, appeal, in this as in so many other things, to science in order to defend the most absurd and untenable propositions. Their chief trump card is that woman is inferior to man in mental powers and that it is folly to believe she could achieve aught of importance in the intellectual field. These objections, raised by the "learned," fit so well with the general prejudices entertained by men on the calling and faculties of woman that, whoever makes use of them can count upon the applause of the majority. New ideas will ever meet with stubborn opposition so long as general culture and knowledge continue at so low an ebb as at present, especially if it lies in the interest of the ruling classes to confine culture and knowledge as much as possible to their own ranks. Hence new ideas will at the start win over but a small minority, and this will be scoffed at, maligned and persecuted. But if these new ideas are good and sound, if they are born as the necessary consequence of existing conditions, then will they spread, and the one-time minority finally becomes a majority. So has it been with all new ideas in the course of history: the idea of establishing the complete emancipation of woman presents the same experience. Were not one time the believers in Christianity a small minority? Did not the Protestant Reformers and modern bourgeoisdom once face overpowering adversaries? And yet they triumphed. Was the Social Democracy crippled because gagged and pinioned by exclusion laws, so that it could not budge? Never was its triumph more assured than when it was thought to have been killed. The Social Democracy overcame the exclusion laws; it will overcome quite other obstacles besides. The claim regarding the "natural calling of woman," according whereto she should be housekeeper and nurse, is as unfounded as the claim that there will ever be kings because, since the start of history, there have been such somewhere. We know not where the first king sprang up, as little as we know where the first capitalist stepped upon the scene. This, however, we do know: Kingship has undergone material changes in the course of the centuries, and the tendency of development is to strip it ever more of its powers, until a time comes, no longer far away, when it will be found wholly superfluous. As with the kingship, so with all other social and political institutions; they are all subject to continuous changes and transformations, and to final and complete decay. We have seen, in the course of the preceding historic sketch, that the form of marriage, in force to-day, like the position of woman, was by no means such "eternally"; that, on the contrary, both were the product of a long process of development, which has by no means reached its acme, and can reach it only in the future. If 2,400 or 2,300 years ago Demosthenes could designate the "bringing forth of legitimate children and officiating as a faithful warder of the house" as the only occupation of woman, to-day we have traveled past that point. Who, to-day, would dare uphold such a position of woman as "natural" without exposing himself to the charge of belittling her? True enough, there are even to-day such sots, who share in silence the views of the old Athenian; but none dare proclaim publicly that which 2,300 years ago one of the most eminent orators dared proclaim frankly and openly as _natural_. Therein lies the great advance made. If, on the one hand, modern development, especially in industrial life, has wrecked millions of marriages, it, on the other hand, promoted favorably the development itself of marriage. Only a few decades ago, and it was a matter of course in every citizen's or peasant's house not only that woman sewed, knitted and washed--although even this has now extensively gone out of fashion--but she also baked the bread, spun, wove, bleached, brewed beer, boiled soap, made candles. To have a piece of wearing apparel made out of the house was looked upon as unutterable waste. Water-pipes, gaslight, gas and oil cooking ranges--to say nothing of the respective electric improvements--together with numberless others, were wholly unknown to the women of former times. Antiquated conditions exist even to-day, but they are the exception. The majority of women have discontinued many an occupation, formerly considered of course, the same being attended to in factory and shop better, more expeditiously and cheaper than the housewife could, whence, at least in the cities, all domestic requirements for them are wanting. Thus, in the period of a few decades, a great revolution for them has been accomplished within our family life, and we pay so little attention to the fact because we consider it a matter of course. Phenomena, that develop, so to speak, under the very eyes of man, are not noticed by him, unless they appear suddenly and disturb the even tenor of events. He bristles up, however, against new ideas that threaten to lead him out of the accustomed ruts. The revolution thus accomplished in our domestic life, and that progresses ever further, has altered the position of woman in the family, in other directions besides. Woman has become freer, more independent. Our grandmothers, if they were honest masters' wives, would not have dared, and, indeed the thought never crossed their minds, to keep their working people and apprentices from the table, and visiting, instead, the theatres, concerts and pleasure resorts, by day at that. Which of those good old women dared think of occupying her mind with public affairs, as is now done by many women? To-day they start societies for all manner of objects, establish papers, call conventions. As working-women they assemble in trades unions, they attend the meetings and join the organizations of men, and here and there--we are speaking of Germany--they have had the right of electing boards of labor arbitration, a right that the backward majority of the Reichstag took away again from them in the year of grace one thousand eight hundred and ninety. What sot would seek to annul the changes just described, although the fact is not to be gainsaid that, there are also dark sides to the bright sides of the picture, consequent upon our seething and decaying conditions? The bright sides, however, predominate. Women themselves, however conservative they are as a body, have no inclination to return to the old, narrow, patriarchal conditions of former times. In the United States society still stands, true enough, on bourgeois foundations; but it is forced to wrestle neither with old European prejudices nor with institutions that have survived their day. As a consequence American society is far readier to adopt new ideas and institutions that promise advantage. For some time the position of woman has been looked upon from a viewpoint different than ours. There, for instance, the idea has long taken hold that it is not merely troublesome and improper, but not even profitable to the purse, for the wife to bake bread and brew beer, but that it is unnecessary for her to cook in her own kitchen. The private kitchen is supplanted by co-operative cooking, with a large central kitchen and machinery. The women attend to the work by turns, and the meals generally come out cheaper, taste better, offer a greater variety, and give much less trouble. Our army officers, who are not decried as Socialists and Communists, act on a similar plan. They establish in their casinos a co-operative kitchen; appoint a steward, who attends to the supply of victuals on a large scale; the bill of fare is arranged in common; and the food is prepared in the steam kitchen of the barracks. They live much cheaper than in a hotel, and fare at least as well. Furthermore, thousands of the rich families live the whole year, or part of the year, in boarding-houses or hotels, without in any way missing the private kitchen. On the contrary, they consider it a great convenience to be rid of it. The aversion of especially well-to-do women towards all matters connected with the kitchen does not seem to indicate that this function either belongs to the category of the "natural calling" of woman. On the contrary, the circumstance that princely and other prominent families do like the hotels, and all of them engage male cooks for the preparation of their food, would rather indicate that cooking is a male occupation.--All of which is stated for the benefit of those people who are unable to picture to themselves a woman not brandishing a kitchen ladle. It is but a step to set up, beside the central kitchen, also the central laundry and corresponding steaming arrangements for public use--as already established in all large cities by rich private persons or speculators, and found highly profitable. With the central kitchen may also be connected central heating, warm water along with cold water pipes, whereby a number of bothersome and time-consuming labors are done away with. Large hotels, many private houses, hospitals, schools, barracks, etc., have now these and many other such arrangements, such as electric light and baths. The only fault to find is that only public establishments and the well-to-do classes enjoy these advantages. Placed within the reach of all, an enormous amount of time, trouble, labor and material could be saved, and the standard of life and the well-being of all raised considerably. In the summer of 1890, the papers published a description of the progress made in the United States in the matter of centralized heating and ventilation. It was there stated: "The recent attempts, made especially in North America, to effect the heating of whole blocks of houses or city wards from one place have to record no slight success. From the constructive point of view, they have been carried out so carefully and effectively that, in view of the favorable results and the financial advantages which they offer, their further extension may be confidently expected. More recently the attempt is being made to furnish from central locations not heat alone, but also fresh air, either warm or cool, to certain extensive but not too wide areas of the city. These plans are found in execution in the so-called Timby System, which, according to the central organ of the Department of Buildings, gathered from a report of the technical attaché in Washington, Government Architect Petri, has recently been thoroughly explained in Washington by the 'National Heating and Ventilating Company.' The said company originally planned to supply 50,000 people from one place. The difficulties presented by the requisite speed of transit and the size of the pneumatic machines, have, however, caused a limitation to 0.8 kilometers, and in instances of specially closely built business quarters, the building of a special central power place." What was then only projected, has since been in great part executed. Philistine narrowness in Germany lives to shrug its shoulders at these and such like schemes, although in Germany also we find ourselves just now in the midst of one of those technical revolutions, that render the private kitchen, together with a number of other occupations, hitherto appertaining to the household, as superfluous as handicraft has been rendered by machinery and modern technique. In the early days of the nineteenth century, Napoleon pronounced insane the idea of constructing a ship that could be set in motion by steam. The idea of building a railroad was declared silly by many folks who passed for sensible: nobody, it was argued, could remain alive on such a conveyance: the rapidity of motion would deprive the passengers of breath. Identical treatment is to-day accorded to a number of new ideas. He who sixty years ago would have made to our women the proposition of replacing the carrying of water with water-pipes, would have been exposed to the charge of trying to lead women and servants into idleness. Nevertheless the great revolution in technique is in full march on all fields; nothing can any longer hold it back; and bourgeois society, having conjured the same into life, has the historic mission of also carrying the revolution to perfection, and to promote on all fields the budding of the germs for radical transformations, _which a social order, built on new foundations, would only have to generalize on a large scale, and make common property_. The trend, accordingly, of our social life is not to banish woman back to the house and the hearth, as our "domestic life" fanatics prescribe, and after which they lust, like the Jews in the Desert after the fleshpots of Egypt. _On the contrary, the whole trend of society is to lead woman out of the narrow sphere of strictly domestic life to a full participation in the public life of the people_--a designation that will not then cover the male sex only--and in the task of _human civilization_. Laveleye fully recognized this when he wrote:[130] "In the measure that what we are in the habit of designating as civilization advances, the sentiments of piety and the family bonds weaken, and they exercise a decreasing influence upon the actions of men. This fact is so general that a law of social development may be recognized therein." Not only has the position of woman changed, but also the relation of son and daughter to the family, who have gradually attained a degree of independence unknown in former days,--a fact noticeable especially in the United States, where the self-dependent and independent education of the individual is carried on much further than with us. The dark sides that to-day accompany also this form of development, are not necessarily connected with it; they lie in the social conditions of our times. Capitalist society evokes no beneficent phenomenon unaccompanied with a dark side: as Fourier long ago pointed out with great perspicacity, capitalist society is in all its progressive steps double-faced and ambiguous. With Laveleye, Schaeffle also detects in the changed character of the family of our days the effect of social development. He says:[131] "It is true that the tendency described in Chapter II, to reduce and limit the family to its specific functions is traceable throughout history. The family relinquishes one provisional and temporary function after the other. In so far as it officiated only in a surrogate and gap-filling capacity it makes way to independent institutions for law, order, authority, divine service, education, technique, etc., as soon as these institutions take shape." Women are pressing even further, though as yet only in a minority, and only a fraction of these with clear aims. They aspire to measure their power with men, not on the industrial field alone; they aspire not only after a freer and more independent position in the family; they also aspire at turning their mental faculties to the higher walks of life. The favorite objection raised against them is that they are not fit for such pursuits, not being intended therefor by Nature. The question of engaging in the higher professional occupations concerns at present only a small number of women in modern society; it is, however, important in point of principle. The large majority of men believe in all seriousness that, mentally as well, woman must ever remain subordinate to them, and, hence, has no right to equality. They are, accordingly, the most determined opponents of woman's aspirations. The self-same men, who raise no objection whatever to the employment of woman in occupations, many of which are very exhausting, often dangerous, threaten the impairment of her feminine physique and violently compel her to sin against her duties as a mother,--these self-same men would exclude her from pursuits in which these obstacles and dangers are much slighter, and which are much better suited to her delicate frame. Among the learned men, who in Germany want to hear nothing of the admission of women to the higher studies, or who will yield only a qualified assent, and express themselves publicly on the subject are Prof. L. Bischoff, Dr. Ludwig Hirt, Prof. H. Sybel, L. von Buerenbach, Dr. E. Reich, and many others. Notedly has the livelier agitation, recently set on foot, for the admission of women to the Universities, incited a strong opposition against the plan in Germany. The opposition is mainly directed against woman's qualifications for the study of medicine. Among the opponents are found Pochhammer, Fehling, S. Binder, Waldeyer, Hegar, etc. Von Buerenbach is of the opinion that both the admission to and the fitness of woman for science can be disposed of with the argument that, until now, no genius has arisen among woman, and hence woman is manifestly unfit for philosophic studies. It seems the world has had quite enough of its male philosophers: it can, without injury to itself, well afford to dispense with female. Neither does the objection that the female sex has never yet produced a genius seem to us either to hold water, or to have the weight of a demonstration. Geniuses do not drop down from the skies; they must have opportunity to form and mature. This opportunity woman has lacked until now, as amply shown by our short historic sketch. For thousands of years she has been oppressed, and she has been deprived or stunted in the opportunity and possibility to unfold her mental faculties. It is as false to reason that the female sex is bereft of genius, by denying all spark of genius to the tolerably large number of great women, as it would be to maintain that there were no geniuses among the male sex other than the few who are considered such. Every village schoolmaster knows what a mass of aptitudes among his pupils never reach full growth, because the possibilities for their development are absent. Aye, there is not one, who, in his walk through life, has not become acquainted, some with more, others with fewer persons of whom it had to be said that, had they been able to mature under more favorable circumstances, they would have been ornaments to society, and men of genius. Unquestionably the number of men of talent and of genius is by far larger among the male sex than those that, until now, have been able to reveal themselves: social conditions did not allow the others to develop. Precisely so with the faculties of the female sex, a sex that for centuries has been held under, hampered and crippled, far worse than any other subject beings. We have absolutely no measure to-day by which to gauge the fullness of mental powers and faculties that will develop among men and women so soon as they shall be able to unfold amid natural conditions. It is with mankind as in the vegetable kingdom. Millions of valuable seeds never reach development because the ground on which they fall is unfavorable, or is taken up by weeds that rob the young and better plant of air, light and nourishment. The same laws of Nature hold good in human life. If a gardener or planter sought to maintain with regard to a given plant that it could not grow, although he made no trial, perhaps even hindered its growth by wrong treatment, such a man would be pronounced a fool by all his intelligent neighbors. Nor would he fare any better if he declined to cross one of his female domestic animals with, a male of higher breed, to the end of producing a better animal. There is no peasant in Germany to-day so ignorant as not to understand the advantage of such treatment of his trees or animals--provided always his means allow him to introduce the better method. Only with regard to human beings do even men of learning deny the force of that which with regard to all other matters, they consider an established law. And yet every one, even without being a naturalist, can make instructive observations in life. Whence comes it that the children of peasants differ from city children? It comes from the difference in their conditions of life and education. The one-sidedness, inherent in the education for one calling, stamps man with a peculiar character. A clergyman or a schoolmaster is generally and easily recognized by his carriage and mien; likewise an officer, even when in civilian dress. A shoe maker is easily told from a tailor, a joiner from a locksmith. Twin brothers, who closely resembled each other in youth, show in later years marked differences if their occupations are different, if one had hard manual work, for instance, as a smith, the other the study of philosophy for his duty. Heredity, on one side, adaptation on the other, play in the development of man, as well as of animals, a decisive _role_. Indeed, man is the most bending and pliable of all creatures. A few years of changed life and occupation often suffice to make quite a different being out of the same man. Nowhere does rapid external change show itself more strikingly than when a person is transferred from poor and reduced, to materially improved circumstances. It is in his mental make-up that such a person will be least able to deny his antecedents, but that is due to the circumstance that, with most of such people, after they have reached a certain age, the desire for intellectual improvement is rarely felt; neither do they need it. Such an upstart rarely suffers under this defect. In our days, that look to money and material means, people are far readier to bow _before the man with a large purse, than before a man of knowledge and great intellectual gifts, especially if he has the misfortune of being poor and rankless_. Instances of this sort are furnished every day. The worship of the golden calf stood in no age higher than in this,--whence it comes that we are living "in the best possible world." The strongest evidence of the effect exercised upon man by radically different conditions of life is furnished in our several industrial centers. In these centers employer and employe present externally such a contrast as if they belonged to different races. Although accustomed to the contrast, it struck us almost with the shock of a surprise on the occasion of a campaign mass meeting, that we addressed in the winter of 1877 in an industrial town of the Erzgebirge region. The meeting, at which a debate was to be held between a liberal professor and ourselves, was so arranged that both sides were equally represented. The front part of the hall was taken by our opponents,--almost without exception, healthy, strong, often large figures; in the rear of the hall and in the galleries stood workingmen and small tradesmen, nine-tenths of the former weavers,--mostly short, thin, shallow-chested, pale-faced figures, with whom worry and want looked out at every pore. One set represented the full-stomached virtue and solvent morality of bourgeois society; the other set, the working bees and beasts of burden, on the product of whose labor the gentlemen made so fine an appearance. _Let both be placed for one generation under equally favorable conditions, and the contrast will vanish with most; it certainly is blotted out in their descendants._ It is also evident that, in general, it is harder to determine the social standing of women than of men. Women adapt themselves more readily to new conditions; they acquire higher manners more quickly. Their power of accommodation is greater than that of more clumsy man. What to a plant are good soil, light and air, are to man healthy social conditions, that allow him to unfold his powers. The well known saying: "Man is what he eats," expresses the same thought, although somewhat one-sidedly: The question is not merely what man eats; it embraces his whole social posture, the social atmosphere in which he moves, that promotes or stunts his physical and mental development, that affects, favorably or unfavorably, his sense of feeling, of thought, and of action. Every day we see people, situated in favorable material conditions, going physically and morally to wreck, simply because, beyond the narrower sphere of their own domestic or personal surroundings, unfavorable circumstances of a social nature operate upon them, and gain such overpowering ascendency that they switch them on wrong tracks. The general conditions under which a man lives are even of far greater importance than those of the home and the family. If the conditions for social development are equal to both sexes, if to neither there stand any obstacles in the way, and if the social state of society is a healthy one, _then woman also will rise to a point of perfection in her being, such as we can have no full conception of, such conditions having hitherto been absent in the history of the development of the race_. That which some women are in the meantime achieving, leaves no doubt upon this head: these rise as high above the mass of their own sex as the male geniuses do above the mass of theirs. Measured with the scale usually applied to Princes, women have, on an average, displayed greater talent than men in the ruling of States. As illustrations, let Isabella and Blanche of Castile be quoted; Elizabeth of Hungary; Catharine Sforza, the Duchess of Milan and Imola; Elizabeth of England; Catharine of Russia; Maria Theresa, etc. Resting upon the fact that, in all races and all parts of the world, women have ruled with marked ability, even over the wildest and most turbulent hordes, Burbach makes the statement that, _in all probability, women are fitter for politics than men_.[132] For the rest, many a great man in history would shrink considerably, were it only known What he owes to himself, and what to others. Count Mirabeau, for instance, is described by German historians, von Sybel among them, as one of the greatest lights of the French Revolution: and now research has revealed the fact that this light was indebted for the concept of almost all of his speeches to the ready help of certain scholars, who worked for him in secret, and whom he understood to utilize. On the other hand, apparitions like those of a Sappho, a Diotima of the days of Socrates, a Hypatia of Alexander, a Madame Roland, Madame de Stael, George Sand, etc., deserve the greatest respect, and eclipse many a male star. The effect of women as mothers of great men is also known. Woman has achieved all that was possible to her under the, to her, as a whole, most unfavorable circumstances; all of which justifies the best hopes for the future. As a matter of fact, only the second half of the nineteenth century began to smooth the way for the admission of women in large numbers to the race with men on various fields; and quite satisfactory are the results attained. But suppose that, on an average, women are not as capable of higher development as men, that they cannot grow into geniuses and great philosophers, was this a criterion for men when, at least according to the letter of the law, they were placed on a footing of equality with "geniuses" and "philosophers?" The identical men of learning, who deny higher aptitudes to woman, are quite inclined to do the same to artisans and workingmen. When the nobility appeals to its "blue" blood and to its genealogical tree, these men of learning laugh in derision and shrug their shoulders; but as against the man of lower rank, they consider themselves an aristocracy, that owes what it is, not to more favorable conditions of life, but to its own talent alone. The same men who, on one field, are among the freest from prejudice, and who hold him lightly who does not think as liberally as themselves, are, on another field,--the moment the interests of their rank and class, or their vanity and self-esteem are concerned--found narrow to the point of stupidity, and hostile to the point of fanaticism. The men of the upper classes look down upon the lower; and so does almost the whole sex upon woman. The majority of men see in woman only an article of profit and pleasure; to acknowledge her an equal runs against the grain of their prejudices:--woman must be humble and modest; she must confine herself exclusively to the house and leave all else to the men, the "lords of creation," as their domain: woman must, to the utmost, bridle her own thoughts and inclinations, and quietly accept what her Providence on earth--father or husband--decrees. The nearer she approaches this standard, all the more is she praised as "sensible, modest and virtuous," even though, as the result of such constraint, she break down under the burden of physical and moral suffering. What absurdity is it not to speak of the "equality of all" and yet seek to keep one-half of the human race outside of the pale! Woman has the same right as man to unfold her faculties and to the free exercise of the same: she is human as well as he: like him, she should be free to dispose of herself as her own master. The accident of being born a woman, makes no difference. To exclude woman from equality on the ground that she was born female and not male--an accident for which man is as little responsible as she--is as inequitable, as would be to make rights and privileges dependent upon the accident of religion or political bias; and as senseless as that two human beings must look upon each other as enemies on the ground that the accident of birth makes them of different stock and nationality. Such views are unworthy of a truly free being. The progress of humanity lies in removing everything that holds one being, one class, one sex, in dependence and in subjection to another. _No inequality is justified other than that which Nature itself establishes in the differences between one individual and another, and for the fulfillment of the purpose of Nature. The natural boundaries no sex can overstep: it would thereby destroy its own natural purpose._ The adversaries of full equality for woman play as their trump card the claim that woman has a smaller brain than man, and that in other qualities, besides, she is behind man, hence her permanent inferiority (subordination) is demonstrated. It is certain that man and woman are beings of different sexes; that they are furnished with different organs, corresponding to the sex purpose of each; and that, owing to the functions that each sex must fill to accomplish the purpose of Nature, there are a series of other differences in their physiologic and psychic conditions. These are facts that none can deny and none will deny; nevertheless, they justify no distinction in the social and political rights of man and woman. The human race, society, consists of both sexes; both are indispensable to its existence and progress. Even the greatest male genius was born of a mother, to whom frequently he is indebted for the best part of himself. By what right can woman be refused equality with man? Based upon information furnished us by a medical friend, we shall here sketch with a few strokes the essential differences, that, according to leading authorities, manifest themselves in the physical and mental qualities of man and woman. The bodily size of man and woman stands, on an average, in the relation of 100 to 93.2. The bones of woman are shorter and thinner, the chest smaller, wider, deeper and flatter. Other differences depend directly upon the sex purpose. The muscles of woman are not as massive. The weight of the heart is 310 grains in man, 255 in woman. The composition of the blood in man and woman is as follows: Water, man, 77.19; woman, 79.11. Solid matter, man, 22.10; woman, 20.89. Blood corpuscles, man, 14.10; woman, 12.79. Number of blood corpuscles in a cubic millimeter of blood, man, 4½ to 5 millions; woman, 4 to 4½ millions. According to Meynert, the weight of the brain of man is from 1,018 to 1,925 grams; of woman, from 820 to 1,565; or in the relation of 100 to 90.93. LeBon and Bischoff agree that, while weight of brain corresponds with size of body, nevertheless short people have relatively larger brains. With woman, the smaller size of the heart, the narrower system of blood vessels and probably also the larger quantity of blood, has a lower degree of nourishment for its effect.[133] That, however, the larger skulls of larger persons, coupled with the quantitative changes occasioned by the size of the skull promote the vigor of the several sections of the brain is a matter that _cannot be asserted_.[134] Of 107 mentally healthy men and 148 women of the ages of 20 to 59, the weight of the brain per thousand was: Average Medulla Length in Sex. Oblongata. Cerebellum. Pons. Centimeters. Men 790 107.5 102 166.5 Women 787 110.0 103 156.0 The absolute and relative excess in the weight of the cerebellum of woman has an enormous significance. With animals that run immediately upon birth, the cerebellum is much more powerfully developed than with animals that are born blind, are helpless, and that learn to walk with difficulty. Accordingly, and in consequence of its connection with the cerebrum, subcortical center and the spinal cord, the cerebellum is a station of the muscular and of the chief nervous system, by means of both of which qualities we keep our equilibrium. The more massive cerebellum with woman, together with the comparative shortness and tenderness of her bones, explains her comparative quickness and easiness of motion, her quicker and higher co-ordination of the muscles for their functions, and her knack of quickly sizing up a situation, and finding her way in the midst of a confusion of associations. Woman is furthermore aided in the latter faculty through the greater excitability of her cerebral cortex. Meynert says:-- 1. All structural anomalies associated with anaemia of the blood--including also a small heart and narrow arteries--should be considered as subject structural defects. Upon this depends not only the ready exhaustibility of the cortex, but also the phenomena of irritability, named by Meynert, localized irritable weakness. 2. The branches of blood vessels, supplying the subcortical centers from the base, are short, thick, straight, palisade-like, while those on the surface of the brain, supplying the cortex, run in long tortuous lines. And it is because of that, since with the increased length of the blood vessels the resistance to the propulsive force of the heart is increased, that the subcortical centers, the moment fatigue supervenes, are better supplied with blood than the cortex, they are less readily fatigued than the more readily exhaustible cerebrum. 3. Because of this and because of the more watery character of woman's blood and great extent of subcortical centers in woman in comparison with cerebrum, the physical equilibrium of woman is more unstable than of man. 4. All nerves (except the optic and olfactory, which spread out directly in the cortex, save some of their filaments terminating in the subcortical centers) terminate in the subcortical center; the cortex of the cerebrum acts as a checking organ for the subcortical center; as the cerebral cortex in woman, as already stated, is at a disadvantage not only from the anatomical standpoint, but also in the quality of its blood supply, woman is not only more easily fatigued, but also more readily excitable (irritable, nervous). These facts explain, on the one hand, what is called the superior endowment of woman, and, on the other, her inclination to sudden changes of opinion, as well as to hallucinations and illusions. This state of unstable equilibrium between the _dura mater_ and the _pons_ becomes particularly normal during menstruation, pregnancy, lying-in, and at her climacteric. As a result of her physical organization, woman is more inclined to melancholy than man, and likewise is the inclination to mental derangement stronger with her; on the other hand, the male sex excels her in the number of cases of megalomania. Such, in substance, is the information furnished us by the authority whom we have been quoting. As a matter of course, in so far as the cited differences depend upon the nature of the sex-distinctions, they can not be changed; in how far these differences in the make-up of the blood and the brain may be modified by a change of life (nourishment, mental and physical gymnastics, occupation, etc.) is a matter that, for the present, lies beyond all accurate calculation. But this seems certain: _modern woman differs more markedly from man than primitive woman, or than the women of backward peoples, and the circumstance is easily explained by the social development that the last 1,000 or 1,500 years forced upon woman among the nations of civilization_. According to Lombroso and Ferrero, the mean capacity of the female skull, the male skull being assumed at 1,000, is as follows:-- Negro 984 Slav 903 Australian 967 Gipsy 875 Hindoo 944 Chinese 870 Italian 921 German 838-897 Hollander 919 (Tiedemann) Englishman 860 Hollander 883 (Davis) Parisian 858 The contradictory findings for Hollanders and Germans show that the measurements were made on very different quantitative and qualitative materials, and, consequently, are not absolutely reliable. One thing, however, is evident from the figures: Negro, Australian and Hindoo women have a considerably larger brain capacity than their German, English and Parisian sisters, and yet the latter are all more intelligent. The comparisons established in the weight of the brain of deceased men of note, reveal similar contradictions and peculiarities. According to Prof. Reclam, the brain of the naturalist Cuvier weighed 1,861 grams, of Byron 1,807, of the mathematician Dirichlet 1,520, of the celebrated mathematician Gauss 1,492, of the philologist Hermann 1,358, of the scientist Hausmann 1,226. The last of these had a brain below the average weight of that of women, which, according to Bischoff, weighs 1,250 grams. But a special irony of fate wills it that the brain of Prof. Bischoff himself, who died a few years ago in St. Petersburg, weighed only 1,245 grams, and Bischoff it was who most obstinately grounded his claim of woman's inferiority on the fact that woman, on the average, had 100 grams less brain than man. The brain of Gambetta also weighed considerably below the average female brain, it weighed only 1,180 grams, and Dante, too, is said to have had a brain below the average weight for men. Figures of the same sort are found in Dr. Havelock Ellis' work. According thereto, an every day person, whose brain Bischoff weighed, had 2,222 grams; the poet Turgeniew 2,012; while the third heaviest brain on the list belonged to an idiot of the duchy of Hants. The brain of a common workingman, also examined by Bischoff, weighed 1,925 grams. The heaviest woman's brains weighed 1,742 and 1,580 grams, two of which were of insane women. The conclusion is, accordingly, justified that as little as size of body justifies inferences as to strength of body, so little does the weight of the brain-mass warrant inferences as to mental powers. There are very small animals (ants, bees) that, in point of intelligence, greatly excel much larger ones (sheep, cows), just as men of large body are often found far behind others of smaller or unimposing stature. Accordingly, the important factor is not merely the quantity of brain matter, but _more especially the brain organization, and, not least of all, the exercise and use of the brain power_. The brain, if it is to fully develop its powers, must be diligently exercised, the same as any other organ, and also correspondingly fed. Where this is not done, or where the training is turned into wrong channels, instead of the sections of the understanding being developed, those are developed in which imagination has its seat. In such cases, _not only is the organ stunted, but even crippled. One section is developed at the expense of another._ No one, approximately familiar with the history of the development of woman, will deny that, for thousands of years, woman has been and continues to be sinned against in that direction. When Prof. Bischoff objects that woman could have trained her brain and intelligence as well as man did, he reveals unpardonable and unheard of ignorance on the subject. The sketch, drawn in this work, of the position of woman in the course of the progress of civilization, explains fully how the thousands of years of continued male supremacy over woman are mainly responsible for the great differences in the mental and physical development of the two sexes. Our naturalists should recognize that the laws of their science are applicable to man also, and to his evolution. The laws of evolution, of heredity, of adaptation, hold good with human beings as with all other creatures of nature. Seeing that man is no exception in nature, the law of evolution must be applied to him also: forthwith light is shed upon what otherwise remains confused and dark, and, as such, becomes the fit subject for scientific mysticism, or mystic science. The training of the brain took its course with the different sexes wholly in conformity with the difference in the education of the two--if such a term as "education" is at all allowable, with regard to woman in particular, during long stretches of the past, and the term "bringing up" is not the correcter. Physiologists are agreed that the organs of thought are located in the front part of the brain, and those especially of feeling and sentiment are to be looked for in the middle of the head. With man the front, with woman the middle of the head is more developed. _The ideal of beauty, male and female, shaped itself accordingly._ According to the Greek ideal, which is standard to this day, _woman has a narrow, man a high and, particularly, broad forehead_,--and this ideal an expression of their own degradation, is so stamped on their minds, that our women bewail a forehead that exceeds the average, as a deformity in their appearance, and seek to improve nature by art, drawing their hair over the sinning forehead, to make it look lower. In a polemic in Nos. 39 and 40 of the "Sozialdemokrat" for 1890, which appeared in London, Sophie Nadejde had two articles in which she sought to refute the charges concerning the great inferiority of woman. She says therein that Broca, a well known Parisian physiologist, measured the cubic contents of 115 skulls from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and got an average of 1,426 cubic centimeters. The measurements of 125 skulls from the eighteenth century gave, however, an average of 1,462 cubic centimeters. According to this, the conclusion would be that, in the course of a few centuries, the brain had grown considerably. A measurement by Broca of skulls from the Stone Age resulted, however, in an average of 1,606 cubic centimeters for the skulls of men, and 1,581 for the skulls of women,--accordingly, both considerably larger than those of the eleventh, twelfth and eighteenth centuries. Mrs. Nadejde concluded therefrom that Herbert Spencer was right when he claimed in his physiology that brain weight depended upon the amount of motion and the variety of motions. The lady furthermore emphasized the point that it depends a deal less on the brain-mass than on the proportion in the two sexes of the brain-weight to the weight of the body. Proceeding from these premises, it appeared that _the female brain was heavier than the male_. The argument on this head, Mrs. Nadejde presents in these words: "Let us compare the average weights of the bodies, and let us take, as the difference between man and woman only 8 kilograms, although many naturalists, among them Gay, whom Delaunay quotes, takes 11 kilograms. According to the average weights of 9,157 American soldiers: 64.4 kilograms (average weight of the male body): 56 kilograms (average weight of the female body) = 1,141 or 1.14, i. e., the average weight of woman being taken as 100, that of man is represented by 114. According to the average weights of 12,740 Bavarians: 65.5 kilograms (average for males): 57.5 (average for females) = 1,139 or 1.14 as above. Assuming the average weight of woman as 100, that of man is found to be 114. According to the average weights of 617 Englishmen, 68.8 (average for males): 60.8 (average for females) = 1,131, or 1.13; the average weight of woman being assumed as 100, that of man is found to be 113.[135] "Accordingly, it appears that, under otherwise equal conditions, women have ¼ per cent. of brain-mass in excess of men. That is to say, for every 100 grams of female brain-mass, men should have 113 or 114 grams; in reality, however, they only have from 110 to 112 grams. The fact can be put still more plastically: According to this calculation, _the male brain falls short 25 to 51 grams of brain-mass_.[136] "But L. Manouvrier proves more. He says:[137] 'The influence of the weight of the body strikes the eye when we note the figures among the vertebrates. The influence is equally manifest with man, and it is a wonder how so many naturalists have not yet recognized this truth, even after it was illustrated and treated by others. "'There are a number of facts that prove the influence of the size of the body upon the weight of the brain. The lower races and of high stature, not only have a larger average weight of brain than the European, but also is the number of large brains greater with them. We must not imagine that the intelligence of a race is determined by the number of large brains: the Patagonians, Polynesians and Indians of North America (and according to the figures given above the people of the Stone Age may be added) greatly surpass us Parisians and all races of Europe, not only in the number of large brains, but also in the large average capacity of the skull. "'The influence of the weight of the body upon the size of the brain is confirmed by the fact that the small skull capacities are found among races of slight stature, like the Bushmen, the Andamans, and the Hindoo pariahs.' "All scientists who have treated the brain question in a really scientific manner, have expressed themselves with greatest caution on the difference shown by the two sexes. Other writers, on the contrary, especially during the last years, have treated the question with such levity, that it has been compromised in the public esteem. If there be any intellectual difference between man and woman, it must, at any rate, be very slight, a physiologist like Stuart Mill having declared that he failed to find the difference. Size of body, strength of muscle, mass--all of these present decided differences. Due to these differences woman has been termed the defective sex; and authors who were not able to understand these manifest differences, presumed to establish a physiologic difference; to solve a much more difficult and complex question, they raised their voices in praise of their own sex! "It follows that the difference between the sexes in point of weight of brain and capacity of skull, considered scientifically, can not be scored to the disadvantage of woman. All the facts point to the conclusion that the difference depends upon the weight of the body. There is no anatomical reason to represent woman as a backward and, in point of intelligence, subordinate being, compared with man. I shall presently prove this. "The proportion between the weight of the brain and the height of the body is smaller with the female than with the male sex.[138] But the fact is easily explained. The height of the body does not actually express the development, or, rather, the weight of the body. "But when we compare the proportion of the brain-weights we find that women have more brain than men, in childhood as well as throughout life. The difference is not great, but it would be much more considerable, if we did not include in the weight of the body the fat, which is present in much larger quantity with women, and which, as an inert (inactive) mass, has no influence whatever upon the weight of the brain." Later, in 1883, L. Manouvrier published in the seventh number of the "Revue Scientifique" the following results of his investigations:-- "If we designate with 100 each the weight of the brain, thighbone, skull, and lower jawbone, we find the following weights for woman:-- Brain 88.9 Skull 85.8 Lower jawbone 78.7 Thighbone 62.5 "It is, furthermore, an established fact that the weight of the skeleton (without skull) differs as with the thighbone. Hence we may compare the weight of the brain with that of the thighbone. It follows from the figures given above, that women have, relatively, 26.4 per cent. more brain-mass. "Let us express the figures herein given somewhat more plastically. "If a man has 100 grams of brain-mass, woman should have, instead of 100, only 62.5 grams; but she has 88.9 grams,--an excess of 26.4 grams. It follows that if we accept 1,410 grams (according to Wagner) as the average weight of the male brain, the female brain should weigh only 961.25 grams, instead of 1,262: woman, accordingly, has 301.75 grams more brain-mass than the proportion demands. If we take the figures of Huschel we find an excess of 372 grams; finally, the figures of Broca give us an excess of 383 grams. _Under otherwise equal conditions woman has between 300 and 400 grams more brain-mass than man."_ Although it is by no means proven that, by reason of their brain-mass, women are inferior to men, it is no cause for wonder that, women are mentally such as we know them to-day. Darwin is certainly right when he says that a list of the most distinguished men in poetry, painting, sculpture, music, science and philosophy side by side with a similar list of the most distinguished women on the same fields will not bear comparison with each other. But are we to wonder at that? _Wonderful were it if it were otherwise._ For that reason Dr. Dodel-Zurich[139] says with perfect right that matters would stand otherwise if through a number of generations women and men were educated equally, and trained in the exercise of those arts and of mental discipline. On an average, woman is also weaker than man, which is by no means the case with many wild peoples.[140] What exercise and training from early youth are able to change in this matter, we may see in the circus women and female acrobats, who in courage, foolhardiness, dexterity and physical strength achieve marvelous feats. Seeing that such a development is a matter of the conditions of life and education--or, to express it in the naked language of science, of "breeding"--it may be taken for certain that the application of these laws to the physical and mental life of man would lead to the most brilliant results, _the moment man sets his hand to the work with full consciousness of his object and his aim_. As plants and animals depend upon the conditions for existence that they live under--promoted by favorable, checked by unfavorable ones--and as forcible conditions compel them to change their appearance and character, provided such conditions are not unfavorable enough to destroy them wholly, so it is with man. The manner in which a person makes his living influences not his external appearance only, it influences also his feelings, his thoughts and his actions.[141] If, accordingly, man's unfavorable conditions of life--defective social conditions--are the cause of defective individual development, it follows that _by changing his condition of life, man is himself changed_. The question, therefore, is so to change the social conditions that every human being shall be afforded the possibility for the full and unhampered development of his being; that the laws of evolution and adaptation, designated after Darwin as "Darwinian," be consciously rendered effective to humanity. But this is possible only under Socialism. As a thinking and intelligent being, _man must constantly, and conscious of his purpose, change, improve and perfect his social conditions, together with all that thereby hangs; and he must so proceed in this that equally favorable opportunities be open to all_. Every individual must be placed in a position to be able to develop his abilities and faculties to his own as well as to the advantage of the collectivity; but his may not be the power to injure either others or the collectivity. His own and the advantage of others must be mutual. _Harmony of interests_ must be brought about; it must substitute the existing _conflict of interests_ to the end that not even the thought may be conceived of ruling and injuring others. Darwinism, as all genuine science, is eminently democratic.[142] If any of its advocates holds a contrary view, he only proves himself unable to grasp its range. Its opponents, particularly the reverend clergy, who ever display a fine nose, the moment earthly benefits or injuries are imminent, have understood this well, and, consequently denounce Darwinism as Socialistic and Anarchistic. Also Prof. Virchow agrees with his sworn enemies in this. In 1877, at the convention of naturalists in Munich, he played the following trump declaration against Prof. Haeckel:[143] "The Darwinian theory leads to Socialism." Virchow sought to discredit Darwinism and to denounce it because Haeckel demanded the adoption of the theory of evolution in the schools. To teach natural science in our schools in the sense of Darwin and of recent investigations, that is an idea against which are up in arms all those who wish to cling to the present order of things. The revolutionary effect of these theories is known, hence the demand that they be taught only in the circles of the select. We, however, are of the opinion that if, as Virchow claims, the Darwinian theories lead to Socialism, the circumstance is not an argument against Darwin's theories, but in favor of Socialism. Never may a scientist inquire whether the conclusions from his science lead to this or that political system, to this or that social system, nor seek to justify the same. His is the duty to inquire whether the theory is right. _If it is that, then it must be accepted along with all its consequences._ He who acts otherwise, be it out of personal interest, be it out of a desire to curry favor from above, or be it out of class and party interests, _is guilty of a contemptible act, and is no honor to science_. Science as a guild so very much at home in our Universities, can only in rare instances lay claim to independence and character. The fear of losing their stipends, of forfeiting the favor of the ruler, of having to renounce titles, decorations and promotions cause most of the representatives of science to duck, to conceal their own convictions, or even to utter in public the reverse of what they believe and know. If, on the occasion of the festival of declaration of allegiance at the Berlin University, in 1870, a Dubois-Reymond exclaimed: "The Universities are the training places for the life-guards of the Hohenzollern," one may judge how the majority of the others, who stand both in knowledge and importance far below Dubois-Reymond,[144] think regarding the purpose of science. Science is degraded to a maid-servant of the ruling powers. We can understand how Prof. Haeckel and his disciples, such as Prof. O. Schmidt, v. Hellwald and others, defend themselves energetically against the charge that Darwinism plays into the hands of Socialism; and that they, in turn, maintain the contrary to be true: that Darwinism is aristocratic in that it teaches that everywhere in Nature the more highly developed and stronger organism dominates the lower. Seeing that, according to these gentlemen, the property and cultured classes represent these more highly developed and stronger organisms in society, they look upon the domination of these as a matter of course, being justified by nature. This wing among our Darwinians has not the faintest notion of the economic laws that sway capitalist society, whose blind will raises, without selecting either the best, or the ablest, or the most thorough, often the most scampish and corrupt; places him on top; and thus puts him in a position to make the conditions of life and development most favorable for his descendants, without these having as much as to turn their hands. Striking an average, under no economic system is the prospect poorer than under capitalism for individuals animated with good and noble qualities, to rise and remain above; and it may be added without exaggeration that the prospect grows darker in the measure that this economic system approaches its apogee. Recklessness and unscrupulousness in the choice and application of the means, are weapons infinitely more effective and promiseful of success than all human virtues put together. To consider a social system, built upon such a basis, a system of the "fittest and best" is a feat that only he can be capable of whose knowledge of the essence and nature of such a society equals zero; or who, swayed by dyed-in-the-wool bourgeois prejudices, has lost all power to think on the subject and to draw his conclusions. The struggle for existence is found with all organisms. Without a knowledge of the circumstances that force them thereto, the struggle is carried on unconsciously. Such a struggle for existence is found among men also, within all social systems in which the sense of solidarity has vanished, or has not yet come to the surface. This struggle changes according to the forms that the social relations of man to man assume in the course of social evolution. In the course of this evolution it takes on the form of a class struggle that is carried on upon an ever higher plane. But these struggles lead--and in this human beings differ from all other creatures--to an ever clearer understanding of the situation, and finally to the recognition of the laws that govern and control their evolution. _Man has in the end but to apply this knowledge to his social and political development, and to adapt the latter accordingly._ The difference between man and the brute is that _man may be called a thinking animal, the brute, however, is no thinking man_. It is this that a large portion of our Darwinians can not, in their one-sidedness, understand. Hence the vicious circle in which they move. A work from the pen of Prof. Enrico Ferri[145] proves, especially as against Haeckel, that Darwinism and Socialism are in perfect harmony, and that it is a fundamental error on the part of Haeckel to characterize, as he has done down to latest date, Darwinism as aristocratic. We are not at all points agreed with Ferri's work, and especially do we not share his views with regard to the qualities of woman, a matter in which he is substantially at one with Lombroso and Ferrero. Ellis has shown in his "Man and Woman" that while the qualities of man and woman are very different, still they are of _equal value_,--a confirmation of the Kantian sentence that man and woman only together constitute the human being. This notwithstanding, the work of Ferri comes quite _apropos_. Professor Haeckel and his followers, of course, also combat the claim that Darwinism leads to atheism, and we find them, after themselves having removed the Creator by all their scientific arguments and proofs, making hysterical efforts to smuggle him in again by the back door. To this particular end, they construct their own style of "Religion," which is then called "higher morality," "moral principles," etc. In 1882, at the convention of naturalists at Eisenach, and in the presence of the family of the Grand Duke of Weimar, Prof. Haeckel made the attempt not only to "save religion," but also to represent his master Darwin as "religious." The effort suffered shipwreck, as all will admit who read the essay and the letter of Darwin therein quoted. Darwin's letter expressed the reverse of that which Prof. Haeckel sought to make out, although in cautious words. Darwin was constrained to consider the "religious sentiments" of his countrymen, the English, hence he never dared to express his opinion openly upon religion. Privately, however, he did so to Dr. L. Buechner, as became known shortly after the Weimar convention, whom he frankly informed that _since his fortieth year_--that is to say, since 1849--_he believed nothing, not having been able to find any proof for his belief_. During the last years of his life Darwin supported an atheist paper published in New York. Woman is to take up the competitive struggle with man on the intellectual field also. She does not propose to wait till it please man to develop her brain functions and to clear the way for her. The movement is well under way. Already has woman brushed aside many an obstacle, and stepped upon the intellectual arena,--and quite successfully in more countries than one. The movement, ever more noticeable, among women for admission to the Universities and High Schools, as well as for admission to the functions that correspond to these studies, is, in the very nature of existing conditions, confined to the women of the bourgeois circles. The circles of the working-women are not directly interested therein: to them, these studies, together with the posts attainable through them, are shut off. Nevertheless, the movement and its success are of general interest, partly, because the matter concerns a question of principle, affecting the position in general of woman towards man, partly also because it will show what woman is capable of achieving, even now, under conditions highly unfavorable to her development. Finally, the female sex has a special interest herein, in cases of sickness, for instance, when they may confide their ailments more freely to a physician of their own than to one of the opposite sex. To a large number of women, female practitioners, are a positive benefit. The necessity of having to resort to male doctors in cases of illness, generally connected with physical disturbances that flow from their sex peculiarities, frequently deters women from seeking timely aid, or any aid at all. Hence arise a number of troubles, not infrequently serious ones, not to the wives alone, but to their husbands as well. There is hardly a physician who has no cause to complain of this frequently criminal diffidence on the part of women, and their objection to state their complaint freely. All this is easy to understand; irrational, however, is the posture of the men, and of several physicians among them, who will not admit the justice and necessity of the study of medicine, in particular, by women. Female doctors are no new sight. Among most of the ancient peoples, the old Germans in particular, it was upon woman that the healing cares devolved. There were female physicians and operators of great repute during the ninth and tenth centuries in the Arabian Kingdom, particularly among the Arabians (Moors) in Spain, where they studied at the University of Cordova. The pursuit by women of scientific studies at several Italian Universities--Bologna and Palermo, for instance,--was likewise due to Moorish influence. Later, when the "heathen" influence vanished from Italy, the practice was forbidden. In 1377 the faculty of the University of Bologna decreed: "And whereas woman is the fountain of sin, the weapon of the devil, the cause of man's banishment from Paradise and the ruin of the old laws; and whereas for these reasons all intercourse with her is to be diligently avoided; therefore do we interdict and expressly forbid that any one presume to introduce in the said college any woman whatsoever, however honorable she be. And if, this notwithstanding, any one should perpetrate such an act, he shall be severely punished by the Rector." Indeed, down to this day, Christian clergymen, of both Protestant and Catholic confession, are among the most zealous enemies of the pursuit of scientific studies by woman. The fact was shown in the debates of the German Reichstag on the admission of women to the study of medicine; it is furthermore shown by the reports of the Evangelical convention, held in the spring of 1894 in Frankfurt-on-the-Main, where clerical mouth-pieces protested sharply against allowing women equal rights in the discussions of the convention. The admission of women to the pursuit of University professions has, above all, the result of exercising a beneficent influence upon the industry of the male youth. As admitted from different quarters, the ambition of the male students leaves much to be wished for. That alone were a great gain. Their morals also would be greatly improved: the inclination to drunkenness and brawling, as well as habitual dissipations in taverns, so common among our students, would receive a severe blow: the institutions whence mainly proceed our political pilots, judges, district attorneys, higher police officers, clergymen and members of legislatures would acquire a tone better in keeping with the purpose for which these institutions are established and supported. According to the unanimous opinion of impartial people, qualified to judge, an improvement in this tone is a crying need of the hour. The number of the countries that admit women to the Universities and High Schools has been greatly on the increase during the last twenty years; nor can any country, that lays claim to being a member of civilization, shut its ears in the long run to the demand. Ahead of all went the United States; Russia followed--two political systems that present in all respects the strongest contrasts; that notwithstanding, both were guided by the identical views with regard to the equal rights of woman. In the North American Union, women are to-day admitted in all the States to University studies,--in Utah since 1850, Iowa since 1860, Kansas since 1866, Wisconsin since 1868, Minnesota since 1869, California and Missouri since 1870, Ohio, Illinois and Nebraska since 1871; since then all the other States followed in rapid succession. In keeping with the extension of female studies, woman conquered her place in the United States. According to the census of 1890, there were in the country 2,348 female physicians and surgeons, 2,136 female architects, 580 female journalists, 300 female writers, 165 female ministers, 110 female lawyers.[146] In Europe, Switzerland, principally, opened its Universities to women. There the number of female students grew, since 1887, as follows:-- Total Female Year. Students. Students. 1887 2,229 167 1888 2,339 206 1889 2,412 196 1890 2,552 248 1891 2,889 297 1892 3,076 318 1893 3,307 451 1893-94 (Winter course) 3,609 599 Accordingly, the participation of women in University studies increased considerably in the interval between 1887-1894. In 1887 the number of female students was 7.5 per cent. of the total number of students; in 1893-1894, however, it had risen to 16.6 per cent. In 1887, there were, among 744 medical students, 79 women, or 10.6 per cent.; in the winter course of 1893-1894, there were, of 1,073 medical students, 210 women, or 19.6 per cent. In the department of philosophy, in 1887, there were, of 530 students, 41 women, or 7.8 per cent.; in 1893-1894, there were, of 1,640 students, 381 women, or 23.2 per cent. The large majority of the female students in Switzerland are foreigners, among them many Germans, whose number increases almost yearly. The example of Switzerland was followed in the early seventies by Sweden; in 1874 by England, in so far as medical colleges for women have been established. Nevertheless, it was not until 1881 that Oxford, and 1884 that Cambridge decided to admit female students. Italy followed in 1876, then Norway, Belgium, France and Austria. In Paris, during 1891, there were 232 female students, mostly of medicine. Of these female students, 103 were Russian, 18 French, 6 English, 3 Roumanian, 2 Turk, and 1 each from America, Greece and Servia. In the department of philosophy there were 82 French female students and 15 foreigners matriculated. As it will have been noticed, even Turkey is represented among the female students. There, more than anywhere else, are female physicians needed, due to the position that custom and religion assign to woman as against man. The same reason caused Austria also to open Universities to female students, in order that the Mohammedan women of Bosnia and Herzegovina might enjoy medical attendance. Even Germany, whose "pig-tail" was thickest, i. e., where the disfavor towards admitting women to the Universities was most bitter, has been compelled to fall in line with progress. In the spring of 1894, the first female student passed her examination in Heidelberg for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, and a second one in the fall of the same year in Göttingen. In Karlsruhe and Berlin, High Schools were established to prepare women for the Universities; finally in the summer of 1894, the Prussian Minister of Public Worship issued regulations for the remodelling of the higher instruction of girls, looking for their preparation for the study of medicine. Also India has furnished a small contingent of female students. Obviously, there is progress everywhere. All medical authorities are agreed that women render the best service as nurses of the sick, aye, that they positively can not be got along without. In an address, delivered by Prof. Ziemssen a few years ago, he said: "Above all, see to it, gentlemen, in your practice that you have thorough, well trained, kind-hearted, characterful female nurses. Without them, all your sacrifices of time and effort are idle." In the September, 1892, issue of the "German Review", Prof. Virchow thus expressed himself in favor of female nurses: "That the post of real responsibility at the sick-bed shall fall to woman is, in my opinion, a principle that should be enforced in all our hospitals. In the hands of a cultivated, womanly, trained person the care of even a sick man is safer than in those of a man." If woman is fit for the extraordinarily difficult service of nurse, a service that places a heavy strain upon patience and self-sacrifice, why should she not be also fit for a physician? Above all, the idea must be resisted that women shall be educated for physicians by separate courses of study, i. e., separated from the male students,--a plan that Frau Mathilde Weber of Tübingen has declared herself satisfied with.[147] If the purpose be to degrade the female physicians, from the start, to the level of physicians of second or third rank, and to lower them in the eyes of their male colleagues, then, indeed, that is the best method. If it is no violation of "ethics" and "morality" that female nurses assist in the presence of male physicians at the performance of all possible operations upon male and female subjects, and on such occasions render most useful service; if it is "ethically" and "morally" permissible that dozens of young men, as students and for the sake of their studies, stand as observers at the bed of a woman in travail, or assist at the performance of operations on female patients, then it is absurd and laughable to deny such rights to female students. Such prudery in natural things is the rage, particularly in Germany, this big children's play-room. The English, discredited by reason of the same qualities, may, nevertheless, be our teachers in the treatment of natural things. In this direction, it is the United States, in particular, that furnish the example most worthy of imitation. There, and to the utter horror of our learned and unlearned old fogies of both sexes, High Schools have existed for decades, at which both sexes are educated in common. Let us hear with what result. President White of the University of Michigan declared as early as the middle of the seventies: "The best pupil in Greek, for several years, among 1,300 students, has been a young lady; the best pupil in mathematics in one of the strongest classes of our Institute is, likewise, a young lady; and several among the best pupils in natural science and the sciences in general are likewise young ladies." Dr. Fairchild, President of Oberlin College in Ohio, where over a thousand students of both sexes are instructed in common, said at about the same time: "During my incumbency of eight years as professor of ancient languages--Latin, Greek, and Hebrew--also in the ethical and philosophic studies, and during my incumbency of eleven years in abstract and applied mathematics, I have never noticed any difference in the two sexes except in the manner of reciting." Edward H. Machill, President of Swarthmore College in Delaware County, Pa., and author of a pamphlet,[148] from which these facts are taken, says that, after an experience of four years, he had arrived at the conclusion that, with an eye to both manners and morals, the education of the two sexes in common had given the best results. Many a pig-tail has yet to be cut off in Germany before common sense shall have broken its way through here. More recently, lively controversies have arisen in the literature of almost all countries of civilization on the question whether woman could achieve intellectually as much as man. While some, by dint of great acumen and with the aid of facts supposed to be proofs, deny that such is possible, others maintain that, on many fields, it undoubtedly is the case. It is claimed that, generally speaking, woman is endowed with qualities that man is deficient in, and _vice versa_: the male method of reasoning is reflective and vigorous, woman's, on the contrary, distinguishes itself by swiftness of perception and quickness of execution. Certain it is that woman finds her way more quickly in complicated situations, and has more tact than man. Ellis, who gathered vast materials upon this question, turned to a series of persons, who had male and female students under their guidance for many years, and questioned them on their opinion and experience. McBendrick of Glasgow answered him: "After having taught female students for twenty years, I would sum up my observations with the statement that many women accomplish as much as men in general, and that many men do not accomplish as much as the female average." Other opinions in Ellis' book are less favorable, but none is unfavorable. According to the Yearbook of Berlin for 1870, pp. 69-77, investigation showed girls to be stronger in the sense of space, boys at figures; the girls excelled in the telling of stories, the boys in the explaining of religious principles. Whatever the way these questions may be turned and twisted, the fact appears that the two sexes supplement each other; the one is superior on one, the other on some other field, while on a number of others there is no difference in point of sex, but only in point of individual. _It follows, furthermore, that there is no reason for confining one sex to a certain field, and prescribing to it the course of development that it shall pursue, nor that, based on differences in natural bent, in advantages and in defects, which mutually equalize themselves, privileges may be deducted for one sex, hindrances for another. Consequently--equality for all, and a free field for each, with a full swing according to their capacity and ability._ Based upon the experience made during the last decades in the higher studies of woman, there is no longer any valid reason against the same. The teacher can do much, by the manner in which he teaches, to affect the attitude of his male and female pupils. Women, who devote themselves to a science, are often animated with an earnestness and will-power in which they excel most other students. The zeal of the female students is, on an average, greater than that of the male. In reality, it is wholly different reasons that cause most professors of medicine, University teachers, in general, to take a hostile stand towards female students. They see in it a "degradation" of science, which might lose in the esteem of the narrow-minded masses, if the fact were to transpire that female brains also could grasp a science, which, until then, was confined to the select of the male sex only. All claims to the contrary notwithstanding, our Universities, along with our whole system of education, are in poor plight. As, at the public school, the child is robbed of valuable time by filling his brain with matters that accord neither with common sense nor scientific experience; as a mass of ballast is there dumped into him that he can not utilize in life, that, rather, hampers him in his progress and development; so likewise is it done in our higher schools. In the preparatory schools for the Universities a mass of dry, useless matter is pounded into the pupils. These matters, that the pupils are made to memorize, take up most of their time and engage their most precious brain-power; whereupon, at the University, the identical process is carried on further. They are there taught a mass of antiquated, stale, superfluous lore, along with comparatively little that is valuable. The lectures, once written, are reeled off by most of the professors year after year, course after course, the interlarded witticisms included. The high ministry of education becomes with many, an ordinary trade; nor need the students be endowed with great sagacity to find this out. Furthermore, tradition regarding University life sees to it that the young folks do not take their years of study too seriously, and many a youth, who would take them seriously, is repelled by the pedantic and unenjoyable style of the professors. The decline in the zeal to learn and to study is a fact generally noticed at all our Universities and higher schools, and is even cause for serious concern with those in authority. Intimately connected therewith is the "grafting" tendency, which, in these days of ours, so poor in character, makes great progress and grows ever ranker in the higher schools. To have "safe views" takes the place of knowledge, and the poison spreads. To be a "patriot," that is to say, a person without a mind of his own, who carefully takes his cue from above, sees how the wind blows there, and trims his sails accordingly, bends and crawls,--such a person is more considered than one of character and knowledge. When the time for examination approaches, the "grafter" crams for a few months what seems most indispensible, in order to squeeze through. When, finally, examination has been happily passed and an office or professional post is secured, most of these "ex-students" work along in a merely mechanical and journeyman style, and are then highly offended if one, who was not a "student," fails to greet them with the greatest respect, and to treat them as specimens of some other and higher race. The majority of the members of our so-called higher professions--district attorneys, judges, doctors, professors, Government officials, artists, etc.,--_are mere journeymen at their trades, who feel no need of further culture, but are happy to stand by the crib_. Only the industrious man discovers later, but only then, how much trash he has learned, often was not taught the very thing that he needed most, and has to begin to learn in good earnest. During the best time of his life he has been pestered with useless or even harmful stuff. He needs a second part of his life to rub all this off, and to work himself up to the height of his age. Only then can he become a useful member of society. Many do not arrive beyond the first stage; others are stranded in the second; only a few have the energy to reach the third. But "decorum" requires that the mediaeval trumpery and useless curriculum be retained; and, seeing, moreover, that women, as a consequence of their sex, are from the start excluded from the preparatory schools, the circumstance furnishes a convenient pretext to shut the doors of the University lecture rooms in their faces. In Leipsic, during the seventies, one of the most celebrated professors of medicine made the undisguised confession to a lady: _"The gymnasium (college) training is not necessary to the understanding of medicine. This is true. Nevertheless, it must be made a condition precedent for admission, in order that the dignity of science may not suffer."_ Gradually is the opposition to the necessity of a "classical" education for the study of medicine being felt in Germany also. The immense progress made in the natural sciences, together with their importance to life, require an early initiation. Collegiate education, with its preference for the classic languages, Greek and Latin, looks upon the natural sciences as subordinate and neglects them. Hence, the students are frequently devoid of the necessary and preparatory knowledge in natural science that are of decided importance in certain studies, medicine, for instance. Against such a one-sided system of education opposition begins to spring up even in the circles of teachers, as proven by a declaration published in the autumn of 1894 by about 400 teachers of the German High Schools. Abroad, in Switzerland, for instance, the leading place has long since been given to the studies in natural science, and any one, even without a so-called classic education, is admissible to the study of medicine, provided otherwise sufficiently equipped in natural science and mathematics. Similarly in Russia and the United States. In one of his writings, the late Pro. Bischoff gave "_the rudeness of the students_" as the reason why he did not recommend the study of medicine to women. He certainly was a good judge of that. In another place, and also quite characteristically, he says: "Why should not one (as professor) now and then allow some interesting, intelligent and handsome woman to attend a lecture upon some simple subject?"--an opinion that v. Sybel evidently shares and even expresses: "Some men there are who have rarely been able to refuse their assistance and help to a female pupil, greedy of knowledge and not uncomely." Pity the words spent in the refutal of such "reasons" and views! The time will come, when people will trouble themselves about the rudeness of the "cultured" as little as about the old fogyism and sensuous lusts of the learned, but will do what common sense and justice bid. In Russia, after much pressure, the Czar gave his consent in 1872 to the establishment of a female faculty in medicine. The medical courses were attended in the period of 1872-1882 by 959 female students. Up to 1882 there were 281 women who had filled the medical course; up to the beginning of 1884, there were 350; about 100 came from St. Petersburg. Of the female students who visited the faculty up to 1882, there were 71 (9.0 per cent.) married and 13 (1.6 per cent.) widows; of the rest, 116 (15.9 per cent.) married during their studies. Most of the female students, 214, came from the ranks of the nobility and government officials; 138 from the merchant and privileged bourgeois class; 107 from the military, 59 from the clergy, and 54 from the lower classes of the population. Of the 281 female physicians, who, up to 1882, had finished their studies, 62 were engaged by several Zemstvos; 54 found occupation in clinics; 12 worked as assistants at medical courses; and 46 took up private practice. It is noteworthy that, of these female students, more than 52 per cent. had learned neither Latin nor Greek, and yet they did as good work as the men. This notwithstanding, female study was far from being a favorite among the Russian Government circles, until the great services rendered by the female physicians on the theater of war in Turkey during the Russo-Turkish campaign of 1877-1878, broke the ice. At the beginning of the eighties, female studies took great increment in Russia: thousands of female pupils devoted themselves to several branches. Due thereto, and due especially to the fact that thereby free ideas were breaking through, threatening to endanger despotism, the female courses were suppressed by an imperial ukase of May 1, 1885, after the lives of the female students had for some time been made as hard as possible.[149] Since then, resolutions have been adopted at several Russian conventions of physicians to petition for the re-opening of the medical courses for women,--more than a German convention of physicians would do. As yet the attempt in Russia has remained unsuccessful. In Finland, a country that, although belonging to Russia, occupies an exceptionally privileged position in the Russian system, 105 female students were at the University of Helsingfors during the winter course of 1894-1895, as against 73 in the summer course of 1894. Of these 105 female students, 47 were entered in the faculty of philosophy of history and 45 in that of mathematics; 5 studied medicine, a strikingly small figure compared with elsewhere; 7 law; and 1 theology. Among the women who distinguished themselves in their studies, belong the late Mrs. v. Kowalewska, who received in 1887 from the Academy of Sciences in Paris the first prize for the solution of a mathematical problem, and since 1884 occupied a professorship of mathematics at the University of Stockholm. In Pisa, Italy, a lady occupies a professorship in pathology. Female physicians are found active in Algiers, Persia and India. In the United States there are about 100 female professors, and more than 70 who are superintendents of female hospitals. In Germany also the ice has been broken to the extent that in several cities--Berlin, Dresden, Leipsic, Frankfurt-on-the-Main, etc.,--female physicians, especially dentists, are in successful practice. With regard to energy and capacity in the scientific studies, England, in particular, can cite a series of handsome results. At the examinations in 1893, six women and six men held the highest marks. The examinations on art and on the theory and history of pedagogy were passed by nine women and not one man. At Cambridge, ten women sustained the severest test in mathematics. According to the sixteenth report of examinations of female students in Oxford, it appears that 62 women sustained the test of the first class, and 82 that of the second class; moreover the honorary examinations were sustained by more than one-half of the female candidates. Surely extraordinarily favorable results. Hostility to competition with women is particularly pronounced in Germany, because here the military turns out every year such a large number of mustered-out officers and under-officers as aspirants for the Civil Service, where there is little room for applicants from other sources. If, however, women are employed, and then at lower salaries, they appear to the already jealous men in a light that is doubly bad,--first, as cheap labor; then as lowerers of wages. An extensive field of activity have women gained as teachers, a field for which, on the whole, they are well fitted. This is particularly the case in the United States, where, in 1890, of 363,000 teachers, 238,000 were female.[150] In Berlin there were on January 1, 1892, along with 194 Rectors and 2,022 teachers, 1,024 pedagogically educated and 642 technical female teachers, inclusive of their helpers. In England, France and the United States there are, furthermore, since several years, women successfully engaged in the important service of Factory Inspectors, a move that, in view of the enormous proportions that female labor is assuming ever more in the trades and industries, is well justified and becomes everywhere a necessity. At the Chicago Exposition of 1893 women, furthermore, distinguished themselves in that, not only did female architects draw the plan and superintend the execution of the magnificent building for the exhibition of female products, but that women also appeared as independent operators in a number of products of art, which provoked general applause, and even astonishment. Also on the field of invention have women distinguished themselves, a subject on which, as early as 1884, a publication in the United States imparted information to the world by producing a list of female inventors. According to the list, the following inventions were made or improved by women: an improved spinning machine; a rotary loom, that produces three times as much as the ordinary loom; a chain elevator; a winch for screw steamers; a fire-escape; an apparatus for weighing wool, one of the most sensitive machines ever invented and of priceless value in the woolen industry; a portable water-reservoir to extinguish fires; a device for the application of petroleum in lieu of wood and coal as fuel on steamers; an improved catcher of sparks and cinders on locomotives; a signal for railroad crossings; a system for heating cars without fire; a lubricating felt to reduce friction on railroad cars; a writing machine; a signal rocket for the navy; a deep-sea telescope; a system for deadening noise on railroads; a smoke-consumer; a machine to fold paper bags, etc. Many improvements in the sewing machines are due to women, as for instance: an aid for the stretching of sails and heavy stuffs; an apparatus to wind up the thread while the machine is in motion; an improvement for the sewing of leather, etc. The last of these inventions was made by a woman who for years kept a saddle and harness shop in New York. The deep-sea telescope, invented by Mrs. Mather, and improved by her daughter, is an innovation of great importance: it makes possible the inspection of the keel of the largest ship, without bringing the same on the dry-dock. With the aid of this glass, sunken wrecks can be inspected from the deck of a ship, and search can be made for obstructions to navigation, torpedoes, etc. Along with these practical advantages, its application in science is full of promise. Among the machines, the extraordinary complexity and ingenuity of whose construction excited great admiration in America and Europe, is one for making paper bags. Many men, leading mechanics among them, had until then vainly sought to construct such a machine. A woman, Miss Maggie Knight, invented it. Since then, the lady invented also a machine to fold paper bags, that does the work of 30 persons. She herself superintends the construction of the machine in Amherst, Mass. That German women have made similar inventions is not yet known. The movement among women has spread even to Japan. In the autumn of 1892, the Japanese Parliament decided that it was forbidden to women to figure as publishers or editors of newspapers, also of such papers as are devoted to fashions, cooking, education of children, etc. In Japan, even the unheard-of sight has been seen of a woman becoming the publisher of a Socialist paper. That was a little too much for the Japanese legislators, and they issued the above stated decree. It is, however, not forbidden to women to act as reporters for newspapers. The Japanese Government will succeed as little in denying their rights to women as its European rivals of equal mental make-up. FOOTNOTES: [124] On this subject, the law for protection of working-women, adopted by the people of the canton of Zurich in August, 1894, with 49,909 votes against 12,531, contains an excellent provision. The law makes it a penal offence for working-women to take from the shop, where they are employed during the day, work to be done at home. This law goes further than any other known to us for the protection of working-women. It also prescribes an extra pay of 25 per cent. for the extra hours fixed by law: the most effective means to check the evil of overwork. [125] The census of 1890 gives 3,914,571 women of at least 10 years of age engaged in gainful occupations in the United States; that is 17.6 per cent. of the total population engaged in gainful occupations, and 12.7 per cent. of the total female population of the country. According to the census of 1900 there were 5,319,912 women of at least 10 years of age engaged in gainful occupations in the United States; that is 18.2 per cent. of the total population engaged in gainful occupations, and 14.3 per cent. of the total female population of the country. Classified by kinds of occupation, the census of 1900 shows: 977,336 women engaged in agricultural pursuits; 430,576 in professional service; 2,095,449 in domestic and personal service; 503,347 in trade and transportation; 1,313,204 in manufacturing and mechanical pursuits.--THE TRANSLATOR. [126] For the sake of verification, and especially with the view of avoiding any serious discrepancy that might arise from a translation back into English from a German translation of the original English, an attempt was made to secure a transcript of the original of the above interesting article. A serious difficulty was encountered. Besides the indefinite date, the abbreviated form, in which the German text gives the name of the Maine paper quoted from--"Levest. Journ."--and as reproduced in this translation, forced a recourse to guess work. The nearest that any Maine paper, given in the American Newspaper Directory, came to the abbreviation was the "Lewiston Evening Journal." The below correspondence tells its tale: "Daily People, 2, 4 and 6 New Reade street, "New York, May 18th, 1903. "Editor 'Lewiston Evening Journal,' Lewiston, Me.: "Dear Sir--The within is a translation from the German of what purports to be a German translation of an article, or part of an article, that appeared in the 'Journal.' The only date given is 1893. "I shall esteem it a favor if you will let me have an accurate transcript of the passage in the original. If the 'Journal' had such an article, the enclosed re-translation back into English may help to identify the article. Thanking you in advance, Yours truly, "D. DeLeon, "Ed. 'The People.'" "D. DeLeon, Esq., New York City: "My Dear Sir--I regret that I can not find the article of which the enclosed is a transcript. "I have no doubt of its correctness, for such is frequently the case in cities like these, where the woman is the six-loom weaver, and by her deftness is the better wage-earner. "Very truly yours, "Arthur G. Staples, "Managing Ed. 'Lewiston Journal.'" Though success was not complete, the letter of the managing editor of the "Lewiston Journal" is a corroboration of the substance of the passage quoted.--THE TRANSLATOR. [127] "Die gewerbliche Thätigkeit der Frauen." [128] Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Königreich Sachsen auf das Jahr, 1894. [129] Factory Inspector A. Redgrave delivered in the end of December, 1871 an address in Bradford, in the course of which he said: "I have been struck for some time past by the altered appearance of the wool factories. Formerly they were filled with women and children, now machinery seems to be doing all the work. On Inquiry a manufacturer gave me the following information; 'Under the old system I employed 63 persons; after the introduction of improved machinery I reduced my hands to 33, and, later, in consequence of new and extensive alterations, I was able to reduce them from 33 to 13.' Thus, within a few years, a reduction of labor, amounting to almost 80 per cent. took place, with an output at least as large as before." Many interesting items of information on this subject are found in Marx's "Capital." [130] "Original Property," chap. 20. [131] "Bau und Leben des sozialen Körpers," Tübingen, 1878. [132] "Husband and Wife," Dr. Havelock Ellis. [133] Possibly the opposite is the case. We repeat what we explained above more extensively, that it is a widely diffused fact that women and girls nourish themselves worse and are worse nourished than men and boys. There was a time when the fashion prevailed for woman to eat as little as possible; she was to have as "etherial" an appearance as possible; the conception of beauty in our upper class, even to-day, is to the effect that it is "vulgar" if a young girl or young woman have a blooming complexion, red cheeks and a vigorous frame. It is also known, that with numberless women, under otherwise equal social conditions with men, the food is greatly inferior. Out of ignorance and acquired prejudices, women expect incredible things of themselves, and the men encourage them therein. Such neglect and maltreatment of physical nutrition must have the very worst consequences, if carried on through many generations by the very sex that, by reason of the heavy monthly losses of blood and of the expenditure of energies, required by pregnancy, child-birth and nursing, has its physique heavily taxed. [134] "Men of genius are, as a rule, of inferior size and massive brain. These are also the leading features of the child, and the general facial expression as well as the temperament of such men recall the child."--Dr. Havelock Ellis, "Husband and Wife." [135] The corporal weights are taken from Taupinard's "Anthropologie." [136] If, with the authority quoted by Delaunay, we assume 11 kilograms as the difference in weight between men and women, we would have found 35 to 70 grams. [137] L. Manouvrier, "Revue Scientifique," No. 23, June 3, 1882. [138] Quatrefages found the proportion to be slightly larger with woman than with men. Thurman found the reverse, just as L. Manouvrier. [139] "Die neuere Schöpfungsgeschichte." [140] Dr. Havelock Ellis furnishes a number of proofs of this fact in his frequently quoted book. According thereto, woman, among wild and half-wild people, is not only equal to man in physical strength and size of body, but she is partly superior. On the other side, Ellis agrees with others that, in consequence of our progress in civilization, the difference in the capacity of the skull of the two sexes has steadily become more marked. [141] This is a discovery, first made by Karl Marx, and classically demonstrated by him in his works, especially in "Capital." The Communistic Manifesto, that appeared in 1848, and was composed by K. Marx and Frederick Engels, is grounded upon this fundamental principle, and must be considered, to this day, as the norm for all agitational work, and the most excellent of all. [142] "The Hall of science is the Temple of democracy," Buckle, "History of Civilization in England." [143] Ziegler, quoted above, denies that such is the meaning of Virchow's argument. His own quotation of Virchow's argument, however, confirms the interpretation. Virchow said: "Now, only picture to yourselves _how the theory of the descent of man presents itself in the head of a Socialist_! (Laughter.) Yes, gentlemen, that may seem funny to some; it is, however, a serious matter, and I hope that the theory of the descent of man _may not bring upon us all the horrors that similar theories have actually brought upon our neighboring country. At any rate, this theory, if consistently carried out, has a side of extraordinary gravity; and that Socialism has shown its sympathy therewith, will, it is to be hoped, not have escaped you. We must be perfectly clear upon that._" Now, then, we have simply done what Virchow feared: we have drawn the conclusions from the Darwinian theories, conclusions that Darwin himself and a large portion of his followers either did not draw at all, or drew falsely. And Virchow warned against the gravity of these theories, just because he foresaw that Socialism would _and was bound to draw the conclusions that are involved in them_. [144] Dubois-Reymond repeated this sentence in February, 1883, to the attacks directed upon him, on the occasion of the anniversary celebration of Frederick the Great. [145] "Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin-Spencer-Marx)." [146] According to the census of 1900, the figures for these respective occupations were: 7,387 female physicians and surgeons, 1,041 female architects, designers and draftsmen, 2,193 female journalists, 5,984 female literary and scientific persons, 3,373 female ministers, 2,193 female lawyers.--THE TRANSLATOR. [147] "Aerztinnen für Frauenkrankheiten, eine ethische und sanitäre Nothwendigkeit," Berlin, 1893. [148] "An Address upon the Co-education of the Sexes." [149] Neue Zelt, 1884, "Das Frauenstudium In Russland." [150] The census of 1900 gives 327,614 female teachers and professors in colleges, out of a total force of 446,133, leaving, accordingly, only 118,519 men on this field.--THE TRANSLATOR. CHAPTER V. WOMAN'S CIVIC AND POLITICAL STATUS. The social dependence of a rank or a class ever finds its expression in the laws and political institutions of a country. Laws are the mirror in which is reflected a country's social condition, to the extent that the same has been brought within definite rules. _Woman, as a subject and oppressed sex, constitutes no exception to the principle._ Laws are negative or positive. Negative in so far as they ignore the oppressed in the distribution of privileges and rights, as though he did not exist; positive, in so far as they expressly assign his dependent position to the oppressed, and specify possible exceptions in his favor. Our common law rests upon the Roman law, which, recognized persons only as property-holding beings. The old German law, which treated woman more worthily, has preserved its force only partially. In the French language, the human being and the man are designated by the same word, "_l'homme_"; likewise in the English language,--"_man_." French law knows the human being only as _man_; and so was it also until recently in England, where woman found herself in slavish dependence upon man. It was similarly in Rome. There were Roman citizens, and wives of Roman citizens, but no female citizens. Impossible were it to enumerate the numberless laws found on the motley map of German common rights. Let a few instances suffice. According to the common law of Germany, the wife is a minor towards her husband; the husband is her master, to whom she owes obedience. If the woman is "disobedient," then, according to the law of Prussia, the husband of "low" estate has the right of "moderate castigation." Men of "high" estate also there are said to be who arrogate such a right to themselves. Seeing that nowhere is the force or number of the blows prescribed, the husband is the sovereign judge. The old city law of Hamburg declares: "For the rest, the right of _moderate castigation of the wife by her husband_, of children by their parents, of pupils by their teachers, or servants by their masters and mistresses, is hereby adjudged just and permissible." Similar provisions are numerous in Germany. According to the law of Prussia, the husband may prescribe to the wife _how long she shall suckle her child_. In cases of disposing of the children, the father alone decides. If he dies, the wife is in most German States compelled to accept a guardian for her children: she herself is considered a minor, and is held unfit to attend to their education herself, even when she supports her children by her property or labor. As a rule, her husband administers her property, and, in cases of bankruptcy, the same is considered and disposed of as his own, unless a pre-marital contract secures the property to her. Wherever the right of primogeniture attaches to landed property, a woman, even if she be the first born, can not enter into possession if there be younger brothers. She can step in only when she has no brothers. In most German States, a married woman can contract only with the consent of her husband, unless she owns a business in her own name, such as, according to more recent law, she is allowed to start. She is shut off from all public function. The Prussian law on associations forbids pupils and apprentices under 18 years of age and women to join political organizations. Until a few decades ago, the attendance of women among the public at open trials was forbidden by several German codes of criminal procedure. If a woman gives birth to an illegitimate child, it has no claim to support from its father if its mother accepted any presents from him during her pregnancy. If a woman is divorced from her husband, she continues to carry his name as a lasting memento, unless she marry again. In Germany, hundreds of frequently contradictory laws are met with. According to the bill for the new civil laws of Germany, the administration of the wife's property falls to the husband, unless the wife has secured her property to herself by special contract. This is a reactionary attitude, long since discarded by many other countries. On the other hand, the wife is allowed to retain what she has earned by her own personal labor, and without assistance of her husband, or by the independent conduct of a business enterprise. In England, and down to 1870, the common law of the land gave to the husband all the personal property of the wife. Only with regard to real estate were her proprietary rights safeguarded; the husband, nevertheless, had the right of administration and of use. At the bar of law, the English woman was a zero: she could perform no legal act, not even execute a valid testament; she was a veritable serf of her husband. A crime committed by her in his presence, he was answerable for: she was at all points a minor. If she injured any one, damage was assessed as if done by a domestic animal: the husband was held. According to an address delivered in 1888 by Bishop J. N. Wood in the chapel of Westminster, as recently as a hundred years ago the wife was not allowed to eat at table or to speak before she was spoken to: above the bed hung a stout whip, that the husband was free to use when the wife displayed ill temper: only her daughters were subject to her orders: her sons saw in her merely a female servant. Since 1870 and 1882, the wife is not merely secured in the sole possession of the property that she brings with her, she is also the proprietor of all she earns, or receives by inheritance or gift. These rights can be altered only by special contract between the husband and wife. English legislation followed the example of the United States. Particularly backward is the civil law of France, of most of the Swiss cantons, of Belgium, etc., in the matter of woman's civic rights. According to the _Code Civil_, the husband could sue for divorce upon the adultery of the wife; she, however, could institute such an action only if the husband kept his concubine at his own home (Article 230). This provision has been repealed by the divorce law of July 27, 1884, but the difference continues in force in the French criminal code,--a characteristic manoeuvre on the part of the French legislator. If the wife is convicted of adultery, _she is punished with imprisonment for not less than two months nor more than three years. The husband is punished only when, according to the spirit of the former Article 230 of the Code Civil, he keeps a concubine under the domestic roof against the wish of his wife. If found guilty, he is merely fined not less than 100 and not more than 1,000 francs._ (Arts. 337 and 339 _Code Penal_.) Such inequality before the law were impossible if but one woman sat in the French Parliament. A similar law exists in Belgium. The punishment for adultery by the wife is the same as in France; the husband is liable only if the act of adultery is committed at the home of the married couple: he may then suffer imprisonment for not less than one month, or more than one year. Slightly juster is, accordingly, the law in Belgium than in France; nevertheless, in the one place as in the other, there are two different standards of right, one for the husband, another for the wife. Similar provisions exist, under the influence of French law, in Spain and Portugal. The civil law of Italy of 1865 enables the wife to obtain a divorce from her husband only if the husband keeps his concubine at his own home, or at such other place where the concubine's presence must be considered in the light of a grave insult to the wife. In France, Belgium and Switzerland, woman falls, as in Germany, under the guardianship of her husband, the moment she marries. According to section 215 of the _Code Civil_, she is not allowed to appear in Court without the consent of her husband and of two of her nearest male relations, not even if she conducts a public business. According to section 213 the husband must protect the wife, and she must yield obedience to him. There is a saying of Napoleon I. that typifies his idea concerning the status of woman: "One thing is utterly un-French--a woman that can do what she pleases."[151] In these countries, furthermore, woman may not appear as a witness in the execution of contracts, testaments or any notarial act. On the other hand--odd contradiction--she is allowed to act as a witness in all criminal trials, where her testimony may lead to the execution of a person. _Within the purview of the criminal code, she is on all hands considered of equal value, and she is measured for every crime or offense with the same yard-stick as man._ The contradiction, however, does not penetrate the wool of our legislators. As a widow, she may dispose of her property by testament; as witness to a testament, however, she is not admissible in a number of countries; all the same, according to Art. 1029 of the _Code Civil_, she may be appointed the executor of a will. In Italy, since 1877, woman is qualified to appear as a witness in civil actions also. According to the law of the canton of Zurich, the husband is the guardian of his wife; he administers her property; and he represents her before third parties. According to the _Code Civil_, the husband administers the property that the wife brings with her, he can sell her property, alienate it, load it with mortgages without requiring her consent, or signature. Similar provisions exist in several other cantons of Switzerland besides Zurich, in France, Belgium, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Denmark and also in a large part of Germany. Countries in which community of property may be excluded in marriage are, besides parts of Germany, and a large part of Switzerland, Austria, Poland and the Baltic provinces. Countries in which the absolute independence of married women exist with respect to their property are: Italy, Russia, Great Britain and Ireland. In Norway, a law of the year 1888, on the administration of the property of married persons, provides that a married woman has the same power to dispose of her property as unmarried women, only the law specifies a few exceptions. In this law the expression is used that _woman becomes un-free in marriage_. Who could blame her if, there also, as happens frequently in France, women are seen to waive formal matrimonial contracts? According to the law of Berne, what the married woman earns belongs to her husband. Similarly with most cantons of Switzerland, also in France and Belgium. The consequence is that the wife often finds herself in a state of virtual slavery: the husband squanders with lewd women or in the grog-shop what his wife makes: he incurs debts: gambles away his wife's earnings: leaves her and her children in want. He even has the right to demand from her employer the wages due her. By the law of December 11, 1874, Sweden secures to the married woman the right to dispose freely of that which she earns by her personal effort. Denmark has raised the same principle to the force of a law; nor can, according to Danish law, the property of the wife be seized to cover the debts of the husband. Similarly runs the law of Norway of 1888.[152] The right of educating the children and of deciding thereupon is, according to the legislation of most countries, the attribute of the father: here and there a subordinate co-operation is granted the mother. The old Roman maxim, that stood in sharp contradiction to the principles prevalent during the mother-right, and that clothed the father alone with rights and powers over the child, is to this day the key-note of legislation on the subject. Among the continental countries, woman holds the freest position in Russia,--due to the communistic institutions there still in existence, or to reminiscences of the same. In Russia, woman is the administrator of her property: she enjoys equal rights in the administration of the community. Communism is the most favorable social condition to woman. The fact transpired from the sketch of the age of the mother-right, given on previous pages.[153] In the United States women have conquered full civil equality; they have also prevented the introduction of the English and similar laws regulating prostitution. The civic inequality of woman has provoked among the more advanced members of the female sex demand for political rights, to the end of wielding the power of legislation in behalf of their civic equality. It is the identical thought that moved the working class everywhere to direct their agitation towards the conquest of the political powers. What is right for the working class can not be wrong for woman. Oppressed, disfranchised, relegated everywhere to the rear, woman has not the right only, she has the duty to defend herself, and to seize every means she may deem fit to conquer a more independent position for herself. Against these efforts also the reactionary mob, of course, bristles up. Let us see how. The great French Revolution, that, as is well known, started in 1789 and threw all old institutions out of joint, conjured up a freedom of spirits such as the world had never seen before. Woman also stepped upon the stage. During the previous decades immediately preceding the outbreak of the Revolution, many of them had taken part in the great intellectual struggle that then raged throughout French society. They flocked in swarms to the great scientific discussions, attended political and scientific meetings, and did their share in preparing the Revolution, where theory was to crystalize into fact. Most historians have noted only the excesses of the Revolution,--and as always happens when the object is to cast stones at the people and arouse horror against them--have enormously exaggerated these to the end of all the more readily extenuating the shameful transgressions of the ruling class. As a rule, these historians have belittled the heroism and greatness of soul, displayed also by many women in both camps. So long as the vanquishers remain the historians of the vanquished, it will ever be thus. In October, 1789, a number of women petitioned the National Assembly "that equality be restored between man and woman, work and occupation be given them free, places be left for them that their faculties were fit for." When in 1793 the Convention proclaimed "_le droit de l'homme_" (the Rights of Man), the more far-seeing women perceived that these were only the rights of males. Olympe de Gouges, Louise Lecombe and others paralleled these "Rights of Man" with 17 articles on the "Rights of Woman," which, on the 28th Brumaire (November 20, 1793) they defended before the Commune of Paris upon the principle: "If woman has the right to mount the scaffold, she must also have the right to mount the tribune." Their demands remained unheeded. When, subsequently, upon the march of monarchic Europe against the Republic, the Convention declared the "Fatherland in danger," and called upon all men, able to carry arms, to defend the Fatherland and the Republic, inspired Parisian women offered to do what twenty years later inspired Prussian women likewise did against the domination of Napoleon,--defend the Fatherland, arms in hand. The radical Chaumette rose against those Parisian women and addressed them, asking: "Since when is it allowed to women to renounce their sex and become men? Since when is it usage for them to abandon the sacred cares of their households, the cradles of their children, and to appear at public places, to speak from the tribunes, to step in the files of the troops,--in short, to fill duties that Nature has devolved upon man alone? Nature said to man: 'Be thou _man_! Racing, the chase, the cultivation of the fields, politics and violent labors of all sorts are thy _privilege_!' It said to woman: 'Be thou _woman_! The care of thy children, the details of thy household, the sweet inquietudes of motherhood,--that is thy _work_!' Unwise women, why wish you to become men? Is not mankind properly divided? What more can you want? In the name of Nature, remain what you are; and, far from envying us the perils of so stormy a life, rest satisfied to make us forget them in the lap of our families, by allowing our eyes to rest upon the fascinating spectacle of our children, made happy by your tender care." The women allowed themselves to be silenced, and went away. There can be no doubt that the radical Chaumette voiced the innermost sentiments of most of our men, who otherwise abhor him. We also hold that it is a proper division of work to leave to men the defense of the country, and to women the care of the home and the hearth. In Russia, late in the fall of the year and after they have tended the fields, the men of whole village districts move to distant factories, and leave to the women the administration of the commune and the house. For the rest, the oratorical gush of Chaumette is mere phrases. What he says concerning the labors of the men in the fields is not even correct: since time immemorial down to to-day, woman's was not the easy part in agriculture. The alleged labors of the chase and the race course are no "labors" at all: they are amusements of men; and, as to politics, it has perils for him only who swims _against_ the stream, otherwise it offers the men at least as much amusement as labor. It is the egoism of man that speaks in that speech. At about the same time when the French Revolution was under way, and engaged the attention of all Europe, a woman rose on the other side of the Channel also, in England, to labor publicly in behalf of equal rights for her sex. She was Mary Wollstoncraft, born in 1759, and who, in 1790, published a book against Edmund Burke, the most violent enemy of the French Revolution. She later, 1792, wrote a second book--"A Vindication of the Rights of Woman"--in which she took the stand for absolute equality of rights for her sex. In this book she demands the suffrage for women in the elections for the Lower House. But she met in England with even less response than did her sisters in France. Ridiculed and insulted by her contemporaries, she went under after trying ordeals. Before the Revolution it was the encyclopedist Condorcet who principally took the field for the equal rights of both sexes. To-day, matters lie somewhat differently. Since then, conditions have changed mightily,--the position of woman along with them. Whether married or unmarried, more than ever before woman now has a deep interest in social and political conditions. It can not be a matter of indifference to her whether the Government chains every year to the army hundreds of thousands of vigorous, healthy men; whether a policy is in force that favors wars, or does not; whether the necessaries of life are made dearer by taxes, that promote, besides, the adulteration of food, and are all the harder upon a family in the measure of its size, at a time, at that, in which the means of life are most stingily measured for the large majority. Moreover, woman pays direct and indirect taxes out of her support and her income. Again, the system of education is of highest interest to her: it goes far towards determining the position of her sex: as a mother, she has a double interest therein. Furthermore, as has been shown, there are to-day millions of women, in hundreds of pursuits, all of them with a lively personal interest in the manner that our laws are shaped. Questions concerning the hours of work; night, Sunday and child-labor; payment of wages and notice of discharge; safety appliances in factory and shop; etc.--all are political questions that concern them as well as the men. Workingmen know little or nothing about conditions in many branches of industry, where women are mainly, or exclusively, engaged. Employers have all the interest in the world to hush up evils that they are responsible for. Factory inspection frequently does not extend to branches of industry in which women are exclusively employed: such as it is, it is utterly inadequate: and yet these are the very branches in which protective measures frequently are most needed. It suffices to mention the workshops in which seamstresses, dressmakers, milliners, etc., are crowded together in our larger cities. From thence, hardly a complaint issues; thither no investigation has as yet penetrated. Finally, as a trader, woman is also interested in laws on commerce and tariffs. There can, accordingly, be no doubt that woman has an interest and a right to demand a hand in the shaping of things by legislation, as well as man. Her participation in public life would impart a strong stimulus thereto, and open manifold new vistas. Such demands, however, are met with the curt rebuff: "Women know nothing of politics, and most of them don't want to, either; neither do they know how to use the ballot." True, and not true. True enough, until now, very few women, in Germany at least, have ventured to demand political equality also. The first woman, who, as a writer, came out in its favor in Germany was, as far as we know, Frau Hedwig Dohm. More recently, it is mainly the Socialist working-women, who are vigorously agitating for the idea; and their number is ever larger. Nothing is proved with the argument that women have, until now, shown little interest in the political movement. The fact that, hitherto, women have troubled themselves little about politics, is no proof that they should continue in the same path. The same reasons, advanced to-day against female suffrage, were advanced during the first half of the sixties in Germany against manhood suffrage. Even as late as 1863, the author of this book himself was of those who opposed manhood suffrage; four years later he owed to it his election to the Reichstag. Thousands of others went through the same mill: from Sauls they became Pauls. Many are the men, who either do not care or do not know how to use their important political rights. And yet that fact was no reason to withhold the suffrage from them, and can be none to now deprive them of it. At the Reichstag elections in Germany, 25 to 30 per cent. of the qualified voters do not vote at all. These non-voters are recruited from _all_ classes: among them are scientists and laborers. Moreover, of the 70 to 75 per cent. of those who participate in the election, the majority, according to our judgment, vote in a way that they would not, if they realized their true interests. That as yet they have not realized them comes from defective political training, a training, however, that these 70 to 75 per cent. possess in a higher degree than the 25 to 30 per cent., who stay away altogether. Among the latter, those must be excepted who remain away from the hustings because they cannot, without danger, vote according to their convictions. Political education is not gained by keeping the masses from public affairs; it is gained by admitting them to the exercise of political rights. Practice makes perfect. The ruling classes have hitherto found their account in keeping the large majority of the people in political childhood. Hence it has ever been the task of a class-conscious minority to battle with energy and enthusiasm for the collective interest of society, and to shake up and drag the large inert mass after them. Thus has it been in all great Movements: it is neither astonishing nor discouraging that the experience made with the Movement of the working class is repeated in the Movement for the emancipation of woman. Previous successes prove that pains, labor and sacrifices are rewarded; the future brings triumph. The moment woman acquires equal rights with man, the sense of her duties will be quickened. Called upon to cast her ballot, she will ask, What for? Whom for? Immediately, emulation in many directions will set in between man and woman that, so far from injuring, will materially improve their mutual relations. The less posted woman will naturally turn to the better posted man. Interchange of ideas and mutual instruction follows,--a condition of things until now found most rarely between husband and wife: it will impart a fresh charm to life. The unhappy differences in education and view-points between the two sexes,--differences, that so frequently lead to dissensions between husband and wife, that place the husband at variance with his many-sided duties, and that injure the well-being of all, will be wiped out. Instead of a clog, the husband will gain a supporter in a compatible wife; whenever prevented by other duties from personal participation, she will spur her husband to fulfil his own. She will find it legitimate that a fraction of his earnings be spent in a newspaper, for agitational purposes, because the paper serves to educate and entertain her also, and because she realizes the necessity of the sacrifice, a sacrifice that helps to conquer that which she, her husband and her children lack,--an existence worthy of human beings. Thus, the joining of hands by husband and wife for the common weal, so closely connected with the weal of the individual, will exert a most ennobling influence. The very reverse is called into life of that which is claimed by near-sighted people, or by the foes of a commonwealth based upon the equality of all. Nor would it end there. The relation between the two sexes would be beautiful in the measure that the social institutions will liberate husband and wife from material cares and from excessive work. Practice and education will, here as in all other cases, give further aid. If I go not in the water, I shall never learn to swim; if I study no foreign language and do not practice it, I shall never learn to speak it. Everyone finds that natural; and yet many fail to realize that the same holds good in the affairs of government and society. Are our women unfitter than the far lower negroes, to whom full political equality was conceded in North America? And shall a highly intellectual woman be vested with lesser rights than the rudest, least cultured man,--an ignorant day-laborer of the backwoods of Pomerania, or an ultramontane canalman, for instance, and all because accident let these come into the world as men? The son has greater rights than his mother, from whom, perchance, he derives his best qualities, the very qualities that alone make him what he is. Truly wonderful! Moreover, we in Germany would no longer be running the risk of being the first to take the leap in the dark and the unknown. The United States, England and other countries have opened the way. In the State of Wyoming in the United States, woman suffrage has been tested since 1869. On November 12, 1872, writing from Laramie City, Wyo., on the subject, Judge Kingman says in the Chicago "Women's Journal": "Three years ago to-day women obtained the right of electing and of being elected to office in our Territory, in the same manner as the other electors. During this period they have voted and have been voted for; they have exercised the functions of jurors and arbiters; they have taken part in large numbers at our elections, and although I believe that some among us oppose the admission of women from motives of principle, no one, I think, can refuse to recognize that their influence on the elections has been an elevating one. It caused them to be conducted in a more peaceable and orderly manner, and at the same time enabled our courts of justice to discover and punish various kinds of crime that had until then remained unpunished. "For instance, when the Territory was first organized, there was scarcely a man who did not carry a revolver and make use of it in the slightest dispute. I cannot remember a single case in which a jury composed of men brought in a verdict of guilty against one of those who had shot with a revolver, but when two or three women were among them, they have invariably attended to the instructions of the Court." In what esteem woman suffrage was held in Wyoming twenty-five years after its introduction, may be gathered from the address issued on November 12, 1894, to the Parliaments of the world by the Legislature of that State. It says: "The possession and exercise of suffrage by the women in Wyoming for the past quarter of a century has wrought no harm and has done great good in many ways; it has largely aided in banishing crime, pauperism, and vice from this State, and that without any violent or oppressive legislation; it has secured peaceful and orderly elections, good government, and a remarkable degree of civilization and public order; and we point with pride to the facts that after nearly twenty-five years of Woman Suffrage not one county in Wyoming has a poorhouse, that our jails are almost empty, and crime, except that committed by strangers in the State, almost unknown; and as the result of experience we urge every civilized community on earth to enfranchise its women without delay."[154] While giving fullest credit to the political activity of the women of Wyoming, we cannot go to the extreme, reached by the enthusiastic defenders of woman suffrage in the Legislature of that State, of ascribing exclusively to the ballot in woman's hands the enviable conditions, which, according to the account of the address, Wyoming rejoices in. A number of social causes of other nature contribute thereto. Nevertheless, the fact is unquestionable that female suffrage has been accompanied by the most beneficent results for that State, and without one disadvantage. That is the most brilliant justification of its introduction. The example of Wyoming found followers. To-day there are a number of countries in which woman enjoys political rights to greater or less extent. In the United States, women obtained several years ago the ballot in Colorado, and in 1894 they elected a number of representatives; likewise in Arizona, and still more recently in Minnesota. In New Zealand, they took a lively part in the parliamentary elections of 1893, livelier, in fact, than the men, although they were only qualified to elect: only men were qualified to be elected. In March, 1894, the Prime Minister declared to a deputation of women that he would advocate their qualification to be elected. In 1893, there were twenty-two States in the North American Union where women were qualified both to elect and be elected for the School Boards. In Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Oregon, Arizona, Dakota, Idaho, Minnesota and Montana they are fully qualified electors for municipal officers, provided they are resident citizens. In Argonia, Kans., the wife of a physician was elected Mayor;[155] the same thing happened in Onehunga, New Zealand. Since more than ten years ago, women in Sweden have the suffrage for departmental and municipal elections, under the same restrictions as men. In England, the struggle, for woman's political rights has a regular history behind it. According to the old custom of the Middle Ages, women, seized of landed property, were also vested with the suffrage, and, as such also filled judicial functions. In the course of time they lost these rights. In the bill for Parliamentary Reform in 1832, the word "person" was used, a term that, according to English conceptions, includes the members of both sexes, men and women. This notwithstanding, the law was interpreted adversely to women and they were turned back wherever they made the effort to vote. In the electoral reform Act of 1867, the word "man" was substituted for the word "person." John Stuart Mill moved the re-insertion of "person" in place of "man," with the express purpose that women shall be vested with the suffrage under the same conditions as men. The motion was defeated by 196 votes against 83. Sixteen years later, 1883, the attempt was again made in the Lower House to grant women the suffrage. A motion to that effect was defeated by a majority of 16. A further attempt in 1884 was defeated in a fuller House by more than 136 votes. But the minority did not evacuate the field. In 1886 it succeeded in carrying to a second reading a motion to grant women the suffrage; but the dissolution of Parliament prevented a final vote being taken. Again, on April 27, 1892, the Lower House defeated with 175 votes against 152, the second reading of a motion on the subject presented by Sir A. Rollit, and which provided as follows: "Every woman who in Great Britain is registered or entitled to be registered as an elector for a Town Council or County Council or who in Ireland is a rate payer entitled to vote in the election of Guardians of the Poor, shall be entitled to be registered as a Parliamentary elector, and when registered, to vote at any Parliamentary election for the county, borough, or division wherein the qualifying property is situate." On November 29, 1888, Lord Salisbury held a speech in Edinburgh, in the course of which he said: "I earnestly hope that the day is not far distant when women also will bear their share in voting for members in the political world and in the determining the policy of the country." And Alfred Russell Wallace, celebrated as a naturalist and follower of Darwin, expressed himself upon the same question this wise: "When men and women shall have freedom to follow their best impulses, when both shall receive the best possible education, when no false restraints shall be imposed upon any human being by the reason of the accident of sex, and when public opinion shall be regulated by the wisest and best and shall be systematically impressed upon youth, then shall we find that a system of human selection will arise that is bound to have a reformed humanity for its result. So long as woman is compelled to regard marriage as a means by which to escape poverty and avoid neglect, she is and remains at a disadvantage with man. Hence, the first step in the emancipation of woman is the removal of all restraints that prevent her from competing with man on all the fields of industry and in all pursuits. But we must go further, and allow woman the exercise of her _political rights_. Many of the restraints, under which woman has suffered until now, would have been spared to her, had she had direct representation in Parliament." In most sections of England, married women have the same political rights as men in the elections for the School Boards and Guardians of the Poor, and in many places are themselves qualified for election. At the county elections, _unmarried_ women have the right to vote under the same restrictions as men, but are not themselves qualified for election. Likewise did all independent tax-paying women obtain the right to vote by the Reform Act of 1869, but are not qualified for election. _Married women_ are in virtue of a court decision, rendered in 1872, excluded from the suffrage, because _in English law woman loses her independence by marriage_--a decided encouragement for women to keep away from the legal formality of legitimate marriage. Seeing that also in other respects unmarried or divorced women in England and Scotland are clothed with rights denied to married women, the temptation is not slight for women to renounce legitimate unions. It is not exactly the part of wisdom for the male representatives of bourgeois society to degrade bourgeois marriage into a sort of slave status for woman.[156] In Austria, women who are landed proprietors, or conduct a business, to which the suffrage is attached, have the right to exercise the privilege _by attorney_. This holds both for local and Reichstag elections. If the woman is proprietor of a mercantile or industrial establishment, which gives the right to vote for the Chamber of Commerce, her franchise must be exercised by a business manager. In France, on the contrary, a woman who conducts a business, has a right to vote at the election of members for the tribunals of commerce, but she cannot herself be elected. According to the law of 1891 of the old Prussian provinces, women have the suffrage, if the landed property that belongs to them conveys the right to vote, nevertheless they must exercise the privilege through a male representative, neither are they eligible themselves. Likewise according to the laws of Hanover, Brunswick, Schleswig-Holstein, Sachsen-Weimar, Hamburg and Luebeck. In Saxony, the law allows women the suffrage if they are landed proprietors and are _unmarried_. If married, the woman's vote goes to her husband. In all these cases, accordingly, the right of suffrage does not attach to persons but to property--quite a light upon existing political and legal morality: Man, thou art zero if moneyless or propertyless; knowledge, intellect are secondary matters. Property decides. We see that the principle of denying woman the suffrage on the theory of her not being "of age" is broken through in fact; and yet objection is raised to granting her the right in full. It is said that to grant woman the suffrage is dangerous because she yields easily to religious prejudices, and is conservative. She is both only because she is ignorant. Let her be educated and taught where her interests lie. For the rest, the influence of religion on elections is exaggerated. Ultramontane agitation has hitherto been so successful in Germany only because it knew how to join _social with religious interests_. The ultramontane chaplains long vied with the Socialists in uncovering the social foulness. Hence their influence with the masses. With the close of the Kulturkampf, the influence of the Catholic clergymen upon the masses waned. The clergy is forced to discontinue its opposition to the Government; simultaneously therewith, the rising class struggle compels it to consider the Catholic capitalist class and Catholic nobility; it will, accordingly, be compelled to observe greater caution on the social field. Thus the clergy will forfeit its influence with the workingmen, especially at such critical junctures when considerations for the Government and the ruling classes drive it to approve of, or tolerate actions and laws directed against the interests of the working class. The same causes will, in the end, have their influence upon woman. When at public meetings, through newspapers and from personal observation she will have learned where her own interest lies, woman will emancipate herself from the clergy, the same as man has done. The fiercest opponent of female suffrage is the clergy, and it knows the reason why. Its rule and its domains are endangered. That the movement for the political rights of woman has not been promptly crowned with greater success is no reason to withhold the ballot from her. What would the workingmen say if the Liberals proposed abolishing manhood suffrage--and the same is very inconvenient to them--on the ground that it benefits the Socialists in particular? A good law does not become bad by reason of him who wields it not yet having learned its right use. Naturally, the right to be elected should go together with the right to elect. "A woman in the tribune of the Reichstag, that would be a spectacle!" we hear people exclaim. Our generation has grown accustomed to the sight of women in the speaker's tribune at their conventions and meetings; in the United States, also in the pulpit and the jury box--why not, then, also in the tribune of the Reichstag? The first woman elected to the Reichstag, would surely know how to impose respect. When the first workingmen entered the Reichstag it was also believed they could be laughed down, and it was claimed that the working class would soon realize the foolishness it had committed in electing such people. Its representatives, however, knew how to make themselves quickly respected; the fear to-day is lest there be too many of them. Frivolous witlings put in: "Just imagine a pregnant woman in the tribune of the Reichstag; how utterly unesthetic!" The identical gentlemen find it, however, quite in order that pregnant women work at the most unesthetic trades, at trades in which female dignity, health and decency are undermined. In the eyes of a Socialist, that man is a wretch who can crack jokes over a woman with child. The mere thought that his own mother once looked like that before she brought him into the world, should cause his cheeks to burn with shame; the thought that he, rude jester, expects from a similar condition on the part of his wife the fulfillment of his dearest wishes should cause him, furthermore, to hold his tongue in shame. _A woman who gives birth to children renders, at least, the same service to the commonwealth as the man who defends his country and his hearth with his life against a foe in search of conquests._ Moreover, the life of a woman trembles in the scales at child-birth. All our mothers have looked death in the face at our births, and many succumbed. _The number of women who die as a result of child-birth, or who as a consequence pine away in sickness, is greater than that of the men who fall on the field of battle, or are wounded._ In Prussia, between 1816-1876, not less than 321,791 women fell a prey to child-birth fever--a yearly average of 5,363. This is by far a larger figure than that of the Prussians, who, during the same period, were killed in war or died of their wounds. Nor must, at the contemplation of this enormous number of women who died of child-birth fever, the still larger number of those be lost sight of, who, as a consequence of child-birth, are permanently crippled in health, and die prematurely.[157] These are additional reasons for woman's equal rights with man--reasons to be held up especially to those, who play man's duty to defend the Fatherland as a decisive circumstance, entitling them to superior consideration to women. For the rest, in virtue of our military institutions, most men do not even fill this duty: to the majority of them it exists upon paper only. All these superficial objections to the public activity of woman would be unimaginable were the relations of the two sexes a natural one, and were there not an antagonism, artificially raised side by side with the relation of master and servant between the two. From early youth the two are separated in social intercourse and education. Above all, it is the antagonism, for which Christianity is responsible, that keeps the sexes steadily apart and the one in ignorance about the other, and that hinders free social intercourse, mutual confidence, a mutual supplementing of traits of character. One of the first and most important tasks of a rationally organized society must be to end this unhallowed split, and to reinstate Nature in its rights. The violence done to Nature starts at school: First, the separation of the sexes; next, mistaken, or no instruction whatever, in matters that concern the human being as a sexual entity. True enough, natural history is taught in every tolerably good school. The child learns that birds lay eggs and hatch them out: he also learns when the mating season begins: that males and females are needed: that both jointly assume the building of the nests, the hatching and the care of the young. He also learns that mammals bring forth live young: he learns about the rutting season and about the fights of the males for the females during the same: he learns the usual number of young, perhaps also the period of pregnancy. But on the subject of the origin and development of his own stock he remains in the dark; that is veiled in mystery. When, thereupon, the child seeks to satisfy his natural curiosity with questions addressed to his parents, to his mother in particular--he seldom ventures with them to his teacher--he is saddled with the silliest stories that cannot satisfy him, and that are all the more injurious when he some day does ascertain the truth. There are probably few children who have not made the discovery by the twelfth year of their age. In all small towns, in the country especially, children observe from earliest years the mating of birds, the copulation of domestic animals; they see this in closest proximity, in the yard, on the street, and when the cattle are turned loose. They see that the conditions under which the heat of the cattle is gratified, as well as the act of birth of the several domestic animals are made the subject of serious, thorough and undisguised discussion on the part of their parents, elder brothers and servants. All that awakens doubts in the child's mind on the accounts given him of his own entry into life. Finally the day of knowledge does come; but it comes in a way other than it would have come under a natural and rational education. The secret that the child discovers leads to estrangement between child and parents, particularly between child and mother. The reverse is obtained of that which was aimed at in folly and shortsightedness. He who recalls his own youth and that of his young companions knows what the results frequently are. An American woman says, among other things in a work written by her, that wishing to answer the repeated questions of her eight-year-old son on his origin, and unwilling to saddle him with nursery tales, she disclosed the truth to him. The child listened to her with great attention, and, from the day that he learned what cares and pains he had caused his mother, he clung to her with a tenderness and reverence not noticed in him before, and showed the same reverence toward other women also.[158] The authoress proceeds from the correct premises that only by means of a natural education can any real improvement--more respect and self-control on the part of the male toward the female sex--be expected. He who reasons free from prejudice will arrive at no other conclusion. Whatever be the point of departure in the _critique_ of our social conditions, the conclusion is ever the same--their _radical transformation_; thereby a radical transformation in the position of the sexes is inevitable. Woman, in order to arrive all the quicker at the goal, must look for allies whom, in the very nature of things, the movement of the working class steers in her direction. Since long has the class-conscious proletariat begun the storming of the fortress, the Class-State, which also upholds the present domination of one sex by the other. That fortress must be surrounded on all sides with trenches, and assailed to the point of surrender with artillery of all calibre. The besieging army finds its officers and munitions on all sides. Social and natural science, jointly with historical research, pedagogy, hygiene and statistics are advancing from all directions, and furnish ammunition and weapons to the movement. Nor does philosophy lag behind. In Mainlaender's "The Philosophy of Redemption,"[159] it announces the near-at-hand realization of the "Ideal State." The ultimate conquest of the Class-State and its transformation is rendered all the easier to us through the divisions in the ranks of its defenders, who, despite the oneness of their interests against the common enemy, are perpetually at war with one another in the strife for plunder. Further aid comes to us from the daily-growing mutiny in the ranks of the enemies, whose forces to a great extent are bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh--elements that, out of misunderstanding and misled, have hitherto fought against us and thus against themselves, but are gradually becoming clearsighted, and pass over to us. Finally we are aided by the desertion of the honorable elements from the ranks of the hitherto hostile men of thought, who have perceived the truth, and whose higher knowledge spurs them to leap their low class interests, and, following their ideal aspirations after justice, join the masses that are thirsting for freedom. Many do not yet realize the stage of dissolution that State and Society are in. Hence, and although the dark blotches have been frequently pointed out in the preceding chapters, a separate treatment of the subject is requisite. FOOTNOTES: [151] Louis Bridel, "La Puissance Maritale," Lausanne, 1879. [152] In the presentation of these civil rights we have merely followed Louis Bridel's work: "Le Droit des Femmes et le Marriage," Paris, 1893. [153] How correct this view is transpires also from the comedy of Aristophanes: "The Popular Assembly of Women." In that comedy, Aristophanes depicts how the Athenian government had reached the point when everything was going at sixes and sevens. The Prytaneum put the question to the popular assembly of the Athenian citizens: "How is the State to be saved?" Thereupon a woman, disguised as a man, made the proposition to entrust the helm of State to the women, and the proposition was accepted without opposition "because it was the only thing that had never before happened in Athens." The women seized the helm, and forthwith instituted _communism_. Of course, Aristophanes turns this condition into ridicule, but the significant point in the play is that, the moment the women had a decisive word in public affairs, they instituted communism as the only rational political and social condition from the standpoint of their own sex. Aristophanes little dreamed how he hit the truth while meaning to joke. [154] The above two paragraphs are left as they appear in the text, although they seem to be subject to corrections. A diligent search in the libraries of this city for the original of the above "Address to the Parliaments of the World," stated to have been issued by the Legislature of Wyoming in 1894, having proved vain, the Secretary of the State of Wyoming was written to. His answer was: The State of Wyoming, Office of the Secretary of State. Cheyenne, June 5, 1903. Mr. Daniel DeLeon, New York City: Dear Sir--Replying to your letter of June 1st, would say that the Legislature of Wyoming was not in session in 1894, and did not pass any resolutions on Woman Suffrage in 1893 or 1895. I enclose herewith the resolutions adopted by the Legislature of 1901, and also Senate and House resolutions adopted in 1903 on the subject of Woman Suffrage. Yours truly, F. Chatterton, Secretary of State. The resolutions enclosed in the above letter were these: [House Joint Resolution No. 8, adopted February, 1901.] Whereas, Wyoming was the first state to adopt equal suffrage and equal suffrage has been in operation since 1869; was adopted in the constitution of the State of Wyoming in 1890, during which time women have exercised the privilege as generally as men, with the result that better candidates have been selected for office, methods of election have been purified, the character of legislation improved, civic intelligence increased and womanhood developed to greater usefulness by political responsibility; Therefore, Resolved, by the House of Representatives, the Senate concurring, That, in view of these results, the enfranchisement of women in every state and territory of the American Union is hereby recommended as a measure tending to the advancement of a higher and better social order. That an authenticated copy of these resolutions be forwarded by the Governor of the state to the legislature of every state and territory, and that the press be requested to call public attention to these resolutions. Edward W. Stone, President of Senate. J. S. Atherly, Speaker of House. Approved February 13th, 1901. DeF. Richards, Governor. [Senate and House Resolution, Seventh Legislature, 1903.] Whereas, The question of equal suffrage is being seriously considered in many States of the Union; and, Whereas, Equal suffrage has been in operation in Wyoming ever since Territorial days in 1869, during which time women have exercised the privilege of voting generally and intelligently, with the result that a higher standard of candidates have usually been selected for office; elections have been made peaceful, orderly and dignified; the general character of legislation improved; intelligence in political, civic and social matters greatly increased; and, Whereas, Under the responsibilities incident to suffrage the women of Wyoming have not in any sense been deprived of any of their womanly qualities, but on the contrary the womanhood of Wyoming has developed to a broader usefulness; therefore, be it Resolved by the Senate of the Wyoming Legislature, That in view of the beneficence and practical results of equal suffrage for men and women in Wyoming, the enfranchisement of women is hereby endorsed as a great national reform and a measure that will improve and advance the political and social conditions of the country at large. Resolved, That copies of this resolution be transmitted to Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, President National Women Suffrage Association, 2008 American Tract Society Building, New York, and to Mrs. Harriet Taylor Upton, National Treasurer, Warren, Ohio. G. A. Guernsey, Approved February 19th, 1903. President of the Senate. DeF. Richards, Governor. J. S. Atherly, Speaker of the House. Agitational literature on woman suffrage, furnished by the Boston, Mass., "Woman's Journal," after the above note was in print, gives the address cited in the text, but not as issued by the Legislature of Wyoming, nor in 1894. The address was adopted in March, 1893, by the House of Representatives of the Wyoming Legislature, just before the final adjournment of the body, and was not acted upon by the Senate.--THE TRANSLATOR. [155] In Colorado, Idaho, Utah and Wyoming women have full suffrage, and vote for all officers, including Presidential electors. In Utah and Wyoming woman suffrage is a constitutional provision. In Indiana women may hold any office under the school laws, but can not vote for any such office. In Kansas women exercise the suffrage largely in municipal elections. In some form, mainly as to taxation or the selection of school officers, woman suffrage exists in a limited way in Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin.--THE TRANSLATOR. [156] On September 5, 1902, the Trades Union Congress of England--made up, of course, of the British style of Trades Unionism, known in America as "Pure and Simple" Trades Unionism--rejected a resolution introduced for the purpose of giving the franchise to women on the same terms as men.--THE TRANSLATOR. [157] "To every woman who to-day dies in child-bed, from 15 to 20 must be added who remain more or less seriously injured, and subject to womb troubles and general ill health, often for life."--Dr. H. B. Adams. [158] Isabella Beecher-Hooker, "Womanhood, Its Sanctities and Fidelities." [159] "Philosophie der Erlösung." CHAPTER VI. THE STATE AND SOCIETY. During the last few decades and in all countries of civilization, the economic life of society has assumed an uncommonly rapid pace of development, a development that every progress on any field of human activity adds swing to. Our social relations have thereby been thrown into a state of unrest, fermentation and dissolution never known before. The ruling classes no longer feel the ground safe under them, nor do existing institutions any longer possess the firmness requisite to breast the storm, that is approaching from all sides. A feeling of uneasiness, of insecurity and of dissatisfaction has seized upon all circles, high and low. The paroxysmal efforts put forth by the ruling classes to end this unbearable state of things by means of tinkering at the body social prove themselves vain and inadequate. The general sense of increasing insecurity, that comes from these failures, increases their uneasiness and discomfort. Hardly have they inserted a beam in the shape of some law into the rickety structure, than they discover ten other places where shoring is still more urgent. All along they are at perpetual strife among themselves and deeply rent by differences of opinion. What one set deems necessary, in order somewhat to calm and reconcile the increasingly discontented masses, the other considers as going too far, and unpardonable weakness and pliancy, only calculated to prick the longing after greater concessions. Striking evidences thereof are the debates in the 1894-5 sessions of the Reichstag, both on the floor of the house and in committee, on the so-called "revolutionary bill," as well as numerous other discussions in all parliaments. Within the ruling classes themselves there exist unbridgeable contrasts, and they sharpen the social conflicts. Governments--and not in Germany alone--are shaking like reeds in the wind. They must lean on something: without support they cannot exist: they now lean on this side, then on that. In no progressive country of Europe is there a Government with a lasting parliamentary majority, on which it can count with safety. Majorities are breaking up and dissolving; and the ever changing course, in Germany, especially, undermines the last vestige of confidence that the ruling class had in themselves. To-day one set is anvil, the other the hammer; to-morrow it is the other way. The one tears down what the other painfully builds up. The confusion is ever greater; the discontent ever more lasting; the causes of friction multiply and consume in a few months more energies than years did formerly. Along with all that, material sacrifices, called for by manifold taxes, swell beyond all measure. In the midst of all this, our sapient statesmen are lulling themselves in wondrous illusions. With an eye to sparing property and the rich, forms of taxation are selected that smite the needy classes heaviest, and they are decreed with the belief that, seeing a large portion of the masses have not yet discovered their real nature, neither will they be felt. This is an error. The masses to-day understand fully the nature of indirect imports and taxes upon the necessaries of life. Their growing political education and perspicuity disclose to them the gross injustice of the same; and they are all the more sensitive to these burdens by reason of the wretchedness of their economic conditions, especially where families are large. The rise of prices in the necessaries of life--due to indirect imposts, or to causes that bring on similar results, such as the premiums on brandy and sugar that, to the amount of dozens of millions, a part of the ruling class pockets yearly at the expense of the poor of the kingdom, and that it seeks to raise still higher--are realized to be a gross injustice, a heavy burden, measures that stand in odd contradiction with the nature of the so-called Christian State, the State of Social Reform. These measures extinguish the last spark of faith in the sense of justice of the ruling classes, to a degree that is serious to these. It changes nothing in the final effect of these measures that the draining is done in pennies. The increase in the expenditure is there, and is finally sensible to the feeling and the sight of all. Hundreds upon hundreds of millions cannot be squeezed out of practically empty pockets, without the owners of the pockets becoming aware of the lifting. The strong pressure of direct taxation, directs the dissatisfaction among the poor against the State; the still stronger indirect taxation, _directs the discontent against society also, the evil being felt to be of a social as well as political character_. In that there is progress. Him whom the gods would destroy, they first make blind. In the endeavor to do justice to the most opposed interests, laws are heaped upon laws; but no old one is thoroughly repealed, nor new one thoroughly enforced. Everything is done by halves, giving satisfaction in no direction. The requirements of civilization that spring from the life of the people, demand some attention, unless everything is to be risked; even the fractional way they are attended to, demands considerable sacrifice, all the more seeing that our public institutions are overrun by parasites. At the same time, not only are all the unproductive institutions, wholly at variance with the trend of civilization, continued in force, but, due to the existing conflicts of interests, they are rather enlarged, and thus they become all the more burdensome and oppressive in the measure that increasing popular intelligence ever more loudly pronounces them superfluous. Police, armies, courts of law, prisons, the whole administrative apparatus--all are enlarged ever more, and become ever more expensive. And yet neither external nor internal security is obtained. The reverse follows. A wholly unnatural state of things has gradually arisen in the international relations of the several nations. The relations between nation and nation multiply in the measure that the production of goods increases; that, thanks to improved transportation, the exchange of this mass of merchandise is facilitated; and that the economic and scientific achievements of each become the public possession of all. Treaties of commerce are concluded; expensive routes of traffic--Suez Canals, St. Gotthard Tunnels--are opened with international funds. Individual countries support with heavy subsidies steamship lines that help to promote intercourse between several nations. The Postal Union--a step of first rank in civilization--is established; international conventions are convoked for all imaginable practical and scientific purposes; the literary products of genius of any nation are spread abroad by translations into the leading languages. Thus the tendency is ever more strongly marked toward the internationalizing, the fraternizing of all peoples. Nevertheless, the political, the military state of the nations of Europe stands in strange contrast to this general development. The hatred of nation against nation, Chauvinism, is artificially nourished by all. The ruling classes seek everywhere to keep green the belief that it is the peoples who are hostilely inclined toward one another, and only wait for the moment when one of them may fall upon another and destroy it. The competitive struggle between the capitalists of several countries, together with their jealousy of one another, assume upon the international field the character of a struggle between the capitalists of one country against those of another, and, backed by the political blindness of the large masses, it conjures into existence a contest of military armaments such as the world has never seen before. This contest has brought forth armies of magnitudes that never were known; it produced implements of murder and destruction for land and naval warfare of such perfection as is possible only in an age of such advanced technique as ours. The contest drives these antagonisms to a head, it incites a development of means of destruction that finally destroy themselves. The support of the armies and navies demand sacrifices that yearly become larger, and that finally ruin the richest nation. Germany, for instance, had, according to the imperial budget of 1894-95, a regular army and navy outlay of nearly 700 million marks--inclusive of pensions and of interest on the national debt, which amounts in round figures to two milliards, incurred mainly for purposes of war. Under these war expenses, the appropriations for educational and other purposes of culture suffer severely; the most pressing needs in this direction are neglected; and that side of the State, devoted to so-called external defence, acquires a preponderance that undermines the original purpose of the State itself. The increasing armies absorb the healthiest and most vigorous portion of the nation; for their improvement all mental and physical forces are enlisted in a way as if education in mass-murder were the highest mission of our times. Furthermore, implements of war as of murder are continuously improved: they have attained--in point of swiftness, range and power--a perfection that renders them fearful to friend and foe. If some day this tremendous apparatus is set in operation--when the hostile forces of Europe will take the field with twelve or fourteen million men--the fact will appear that it has become uncontrollable. There is no general who could command such masses; there is no field vast enough to collect and set them up; no administrative apparatus that could nourish them for any length of time. If battles are delivered, hospitals would be lacking to shelter the wounded: the interment of the numerous dead would be an impossibility. When to all this is added the frightful disturbances and devastations, produced to-day by a European _war on the economic-field_, there is no exaggeration in the saying: "_the next war is the last war_." The number of bankruptcies will be unparalleled; export stops--and thereby thousands of factories are condemned to idleness; the supply of food ceases--and thereby the prices of the means of life rise enormously. The number of families whose breadwinner is in the field runs up into the millions, and most of them must be supported. Whence shall the means come for all that? The political and military state of Europe has taken a development that cannot choose but end in a catastrophe, which will drag capitalist society down to its ruin. Having reached the height of its development, it produces conditions that end with rendering its own existence impossible; it digs its own grave; it slays itself with the identical means that itself, as the most revolutionary of all previous social systems, has called into life. Gradually a large portion of our municipalities are arriving at a desperate pass: they hardly know how to meet the increasing demands upon themselves. It is more particularly upon our rapidly growing large cities, and upon the localities situated in industrial districts, that the quickened increase of population makes a mass of demands, which the generally poor communities can come up to only by raising taxes and incurring debts. The budgets leap upward from year to year for school buildings, and street paving, for lighting, draining and water works; for sanitary, public and educational purposes; for the police and the administration. At the same time, the favorably situated minority makes the most expensive demands upon the community. It demands higher institutions of education, theatres, the opening of particularly fine city quarters with lighting, pavement, etc., to match. However justly the majority may complain of the preference, it lies in the very nature of modern affairs. The minority has the power and uses it to satisfy its social wants as much as possible at the expense of the collectivity. In and of themselves nothing can be said against these heightened social wants: they denote progress; the fault is only that their satisfaction falls mainly to the lot of the property classes, while all others should share them. A further evil lies in that often the administration is not the best, and yet is expensive. The officials often are inadequate; they are not sufficiently equipped for the many-sided demands made upon them, demands that often presuppose thorough knowledge. The members of Aldermanic Boards have generally so much to do and to attend to in their own private affairs that they are unable to make the sacrifices demanded for the full exercise of these public duties. Often are these posts used for the promotion of private interests, to the serious injury of those of the community. The results fall upon the taxpayers. Modern society cannot think of undertaking a thorough change in these conditions. It is powerless and helpless. It would have to remove itself, and that, of course, it will not. Whatever the manner in which taxes be imposed, dissatisfaction increases steadily. In a few decades, most of our municipalities will be unable to satisfy their needs under their present form of administration and of raising revenues. On the municipal as well as on the national field, the need of a radical change is manifest: it is upon the municipalities that the largest social demands are made: it is society _in nuce_: it is the kernel from which, so soon as the will and the power shall be there, the social change will radiate. How can justice be done to-day, when private interests dominate and the interests of the commonweal are made subservient? Such, in short, is the state of things in the nation and in the municipality. They are both but the reflection of the economic life of society. * * * * * The struggle for existence in our economic life grows daily more gigantic. The war of all against all has broken out with virulence; it is conducted pitilessly, often regardless of the weapon used. The well-known French expression: "_ote-toi de la, que je m'y mette_." (Get away, that I may step in) is carried out in practice with vigorous elbowings, cuffings, and pinchings. The weaker must yield to the stronger. Where physical strength--which here is the power of money, of property--does not suffice, the most cunning and unworthy means are resorted to. Lying, swindle, deceit, forgery, perjury--the very blackest crimes are often committed in order to reach the coveted object. As in this struggle for existence one individual transgresses against the other, the same happens with class against class, sex against sex, age against age. Profit is the sole regulator of human feelings; all other considerations must yield. Thousands upon thousands of workingmen and working-women are, the moment profit demands it, thrown upon the sidewalk, and, after their last savings have been spent, turned to public charity or forced to emigrate. Workingmen travel, so to speak, in herds from place to place, criss-cross across the country, and are regarded by "decent" society with all the more fear and horror, seeing that the continuity of their enforced idleness deteriorates their external appearance, and, as a consequence, demoralizes them internally. Decent society has no inkling of what it means to be forced, for months at a stretch, to be denied the simplest exigencies of order and cleanliness, to wander from place to place with a hungry stomach, and to earn, generally, nothing but ill-concealed fear and contempt, especially from those quarters that are the very props of this system. The families of these wretches suffer all along utmost distress--a distress that not infrequently drives the parents, out of desperation, to frightful crimes upon their own children and themselves. The last years have furnished numerous shocking instances of whole families falling a prey to murder and suicide. Let one instance do for many. The private correspondent, S----, in Berlin, 45 years of age, with a still handsome wife 39 years old, and a daughter of 12, is without work and starving. The wife decides, with the consent of her husband, to turn prostitute. The police gets wind thereof. The wife is placed under moral control. The family, overcome with shame and desperate, agree, all three, to poison themselves, and carry out their resolve on March 1, 1883.[160] A few days before, the leading circles of Berlin celebrated great court festivities at which hundreds of thousands were squandered. Such are the shocking contrasts of modern society--and yet we live in "the best of all possible worlds." Berlin has since then often witnessed the holocaust of whole families due to material want. In 1894 the spectacle was frequent, to an extent that called forth general horror; nor are the instances few, reported from large and small towns within and without Germany. This murder and suicide of whole families is a phenomenon peculiar to modern times, and an eloquent sign of the sorry economic state that society is in. This general want also drives women and girls in increasing numbers into the arms of prostitution. Demoralization and crime are heaped up, and assume the most manifold forms. The only thing that prospers is the jails, penitentiaries and so-called houses of correction, no longer able to accommodate the mass that is sent to them. The crimes of all sorts and their increase are intimately connected with the economic state of society--a fact, however, that the latter will not have. Like the ostrich, it sticks its head in the sand, to avoid having to admit the incriminating state of things, and it lies to the point of deceiving itself into the belief that the fault lies with the laziness of the workingmen, with their love of pleasure, and with their irreligiousness. This is a self-deception of the most dangerous, or a hypocrisy of the most repulsive, sort. The more unfavorable the state of society is for the majority, all the more numerous and serious are the crimes committed. The struggle for existence assumes its rudest and most violent aspect: it transfers man into conditions where each sees a mortal enemy in the other. The social bonds become looser every day.[161] The ruling classes, who do not probe matters to the bottom, or do not like to, seek to meet the evil after their own fashion. If poverty and want, and, as a result therefrom, demoralization and crime increase, the source of the evil is not searched after, so that it may be stopped; no; the products of the conditions are punished. The more gigantic the evils grow, and the numbers of evil-doers multiply in proportion, proportionately severe penalties and persecutions are deemed necessary. It is sought to drive out the devil with Beelzebub. Prof. Haeckel also considers it proper to proceed against criminals with the severest punishments possible, and that capital punishment, in particular, be stringently applied.[162] By this stand the Professor places himself in sweet accord with the re-actionists of all shades, who otherwise are mortally opposed to him. Haeckel is of the opinion that incorrigible scape-graces must be uprooted like weeds that take from plants light, air and space. Had Haeckel turned his mind slightly toward social, instead of engaging it wholly with natural science, he would know that these criminals could, in most instances, be transformed into useful members of human society, provided society offered them the requisite conditions of existence. He would also find that the annihilation of individual criminals or the rendering of them harmless, prevents as little the commission of fresh crimes in society, as the removal of weeds on a field would prevent their returning if the roots and seeds are not likewise destroyed. Absolutely to prevent the forming of harmful organisms in Nature is a feat man never will be able to achieve but _to so improve his own social system, a system produced by himself, that it may afford favorable conditions of life for all, and furnish to each equal freedom to unfold, to the end that they no longer need suffer hunger, or be driven to satisfy their desire for property, or their ambition at the expense of others--that is possible_. Let the cause of the crimes be studied, and let that be removed; then will the crimes themselves be wiped out.[163] Those who would remove crimes by removing the causes thereof, cannot, as a matter of course, sympathize with a plan of brutal suppression. They cannot prevent society from protecting itself after its own fashion against the criminals, whom it cannot allow a free hand; but we demand all the more urgently the radical reformation of society, i. e., the removal of the causes of crime. The connection between social conditions, on the one hand, and evildoing and crimes, on the other, has been frequently established by statisticians and sociologists. One of the misdemeanors nearest at hand--one that, all Christian charitable tenets to the contrary notwithstanding, modern society regards as a misdemeanor--is begging, especially during hard times. On that subject, the statistics of the Kingdom of Saxony inform us that, in the measure in which the last industrial crisis increased--a crisis that began in Germany in 1890, and whose end is not yet in sight--the number of persons also increased who were punished for begging. In 1889, there were 8,566 persons punished for this crime in the Kingdom of Saxony; in 1890, there were 8,815; in 1891, there were 10,075; and in 1892 the figures rose to 13,120--quite an increase. Mass-impoverishment on one side, swelling affluence on the other--such is the sign-manual of our age. In Austria, in 1873, there was one pauper to every 724 persons; in 1882, to every 622 persons. Crimes and misdemeanors show similar tendency. In Austria-Hungary, in 1874, there were 308,605 persons sentenced in the criminal courts; in 1892, their number was 600,000. In the German Empire, in 1882, there were 329,968 persons sentenced for crimes and misdemeanors under the laws of the land; that is to say, to every 10,000 inhabitants of twelve years and over there were 103.2 criminals; in 1892, the number of criminals was 422,327, or 143.3--an increase of 39 per cent. Among the persons punished, there were, for crimes and misdemeanors against property:-- To Every 10,000 Inhabitants, 12 Years of Age Year. Total. and Over. 1882 169,334 53.0 1891 196,437 55.8 We think these figures speak volumes. They show how the deterioration of social conditions intensify and promote poverty, want, misdemeanors and crimes. The basis of our social state is the capitalist system of production. On it modern society rests. All social, all political institutions are results and fruits of that system. It is the ground from which the whole social and political superstructure, together with its bright and dark sides, have sprung up. It influences and dominates the thoughts and feelings and actions of the people who live under it. Capital is the leading power in the State and in Society: the capitalist is the ruler of the propertyless, whose labor-power he buys for his use, and at a price, that, like all other merchandise, is governed by supply and demand and oscillates now above, then below the cost of reproduction. But the capitalist does not buy labor-power out of "sweet charity," in order to do a favor to the workingmen, although he often so pretends. He buys it for the purpose of obtaining surplus wealth from the labor of the workingmen, which he then pockets under the name of profit, interest, house and ground rent. This surplus wealth, squeezed out of the workingmen, and which in so far as the capitalist does not squander it in dissipation, crystallizes in his hands into more capital, puts him in a condition to steadily enlarge his plant, improve the process of production, and occupy increased labor forces. That, at the same time, enables him to step up before his weaker competitors, like a mailed knight before an unarmed pedestrian, and to destroy them. This unequal struggle between large and small capital spreads amain, and, as the cheapest labor-power, next to that of children and lads, woman plays therein a _role_ of increasing importance. The result is the ever sharper division of a smaller minority of mighty capitalists and a mass of capital-less male and female lack-alls whose only resource is the daily sale of their labor-power. The middle class arrives hereby at a plight that grows ever graver. One field of industry after another, where small production still predominated, is seized and occupied to capitalist ends. The competition of capitalists among themselves compels them to explore ever newer fields of exploitation. Capital goes about "like a roaring lion, seeking whom it may devour." The smaller and weaker establishments are destroyed; if their owners fail to save themselves upon some new field--a feat that becomes ever harder and less possible--then they sink down into the class of the wage earners, or of Catilinarians. All efforts to prevent the downfall of handicraft and of the middle class by means of institutions and laws, borrowed from the lumber-room of the musty past, prove utterly ineffective. They may enable one or another to deceive himself on his actual condition; but soon the illusion vanishes under the heavy weight of facts. The process of absorption of the small by the large takes its course with all the power and pitilessness of a law of Nature, and the process is sensible to the feeling and the sight of all. In the period between 1875-1882, the number of small industries decreased in Prussia by 39,655,[164] although the population increased in this period by about two million heads. The number of workmen employed in small industries sank, during that time, from 57.6 per cent., to 54.9 per cent. The industrial statistics for 1895 will furnish much more drastic figures. The development of large production stands in close relation to the development of steam machine and steam horse-power. And what is the picture presented by these? Prussia had:-- 1878. 1893. Stationary steam boilers 32,411 53,024 + 63.6 per cent. Stationary steam engines 29,895 53,092 + 77.6 per cent. Movable machines 5,536 15,725 + 184 per cent. The Kingdom of Saxony had:-- 1861. 1891. Stationary steam engines 1,003 8,075 + 700 per cent. Horse-power 15,633 160,772 + 922 per cent. In 1861, a steam engine in Saxony had, on an average, a 15.5 horse-power; in 1891, it had 19. All Germany had in 1878 about three million horse-power in operation in industry; in 1894, about five million. Austria had in 1873 in round figures 336,000 horse-power; in 1888, about 2,150,000. Steam power spreads daily, and stronger steam machines drive out weaker ones--large production drives out small. The fact is shown emphatically in the industries in which steam has become the general power, the brewery industry, for instance. In the German brewery tax department, exclusive of Bavaria, Wuertemburg, Baden and Alsace-Lorraine, there were:-- Breweries Industrially Year. in Operation. Operated. Output. 1873 13,561 10,927 19,654,900 hl. 1891-2 8,460 7,571 33,171,100 hl. ------ ------ ---------- 5,101 3,356 13,516,200 hl. Decrease Decrease Increase = 38 per cent. = 31.1 per cent. = 68.8 per cent. The breweries in general, this table shows, had decreased during this period 38 per cent., the industrially operated ones 31.1 per cent.; the output, however, had increased 68.8 per cent. The giant concerns increased at the expense of the middle and small ones. The identical development is going on _in all countries of civilization, in all industries capitalistically operated_. Let us now take up the brandy distilleries. In all the eight provinces of Prussia, there were in operation:--[165] Consumed in Distillery, Year. Distilleries. Brandy (Double Quintal). 1831 13,806 1,736,458 5,418,217 1886-87 5,814 2,518,478 24,310,196 ------ --------- ---------- 7,992 782,020 18,891,979 Decrease Decrease Increase = 38 per cent. = 31.1 per cent. = 68 per cent. Similar results are revealed in the coal and the mineral mining industries of the German Empire. In the former, the number of leading concerns--623 in number between the years 1871-1875--dropped to 406 in 1889, but the output increased simultaneously from 34,485,400 tons to 67,342,200 tons, and the average number of employees rose from 172,074 to 239,954. In the latter, the average number of leading establishments between 1871-1875, was 3,034, with an average force of 277,878 hands, that turned out 51,056,900 tons; in 1889, the number of leading establishments had _dropped to 1,962, while the average force had risen to 368,896 hands, and the output to 99,414,100 tons_.[166] We see that in the coal mine industry the number of concerns decreased during that period 35 per cent., while the number of employees rose 40 per cent., and production as much as 95.2 per cent. Similarly in the mineral mining industry. Here the number of establishments decreased 35.3 per cent., while the number of workingmen employed rose 33 per cent., and production 94.7 per cent. A smaller but much richer number of employers now confronted a greatly swollen number of proletarians. Nor does this technical revolution proceed in industry alone: it is also going on in the department of transportation and communication. German commerce had upon the seas:-- Sailing Year. Vessels. Tonnage. Crews. 1871 4,372 900,361 34,739 1893 2,742 725,182 17,522 ----- ------- ------ 1,630 175,179 17,217 Decrease. Decrease. Decrease. Sail navigation, we see, declines perceptibly, but in so far as it continues to exist, _the tonnage of vessels increases, and the force of the crews decreases_. In 1871, there came to every one sailing vessel 205.9 tons and 7.9 crew; in 1893, however, the average tonnage per sailing vessel was 271.7 and only a crew 6.4 strong. A different picture is offered by the German ocean steamship navigation. Germany had:-- Year. Steamers. Tonnage. Crews. 1871 147 81,994 4,736 1893 986 786,397 24,113 --- ------- ------ Increase 839 704,403 19,377 We see that, not only did the number of steamers rise considerably, but that their tonnage increased still more; on the other hand, the force of the crews had relatively decreased. In 1871, steamers had on an average a 558 tonnage, with a 32.1 crew; in 1893 they had a 797.5 tonnage and only a 24.5 crew. It is an economic law that the number of workingmen _decreases_ everywhere with the concentration of industry, while, relatively to the whole population, wealth concentrates in ever fewer hands, and the number of employers, rendered unable to hold their own and driven into bankruptcy by the process of concentration, mounts ever higher. In the eight old provinces of Prussia, the population increased 42 per cent. during 1853-1890. But the incomes in the several grades rose in the following rates:--[167] Incomes. Increased Up to 3,000 marks 42 per cent. 3,000-- 36,000 marks 333 per cent. 36,000-- 60,000 marks 590 per cent. 60,000--120,000 marks 835 per cent. Over 120,000 marks 942 per cent. The number of incomes up to 3,000 marks increased exactly with the population; it would, however, have lagged behind it if, within the period of 1853-1890, there had not been an extraordinary increase of national, State, municipal and private officials, the large majority of whose incomes falls below 3,000 marks. On the other hand, the number of large incomes has risen beyond all proportion, although, during the period under consideration, there was not yet any provision in Prussia making the correct estimate of incomes obligatory. This was introduced in 1891. The actual increase of incomes was, accordingly, much larger than the figures indicate. As stated before, the concentration of wealth, on the one side, is paralleled with mass-proletarianization, on the other, and also with swelling figures of bankruptcy. During the period of 1880-1889, the number of bankruptcy cases, adjudicated by law, averaged, in Germany, 4,885 a year; it rose to 5,908 in 1890; to 7,234 in 1891; and to 7,358 in 1892. These figures do not include the large number of bankruptcies that did not reach the courts, the assets not being large enough to cover the costs; neither are included among them those that were settled out of court between the debtors and their creditors. The same picture that is presented by the economic development of Germany is presented by that of all industrial countries of the world. All nations of civilization are endeavoring to become industrial States. They wish to produce, not merely for the satisfaction of their own domestic wants, but also for exportation. Hence the absolute propriety of no longer speaking of "national" but of "international" economy. It is the world's market that now regulates the price of numberless products of industry and agriculture, and that controls the social position of nations. The productive domain, that, in the near future, will dominate the world's market is that of the United States--a quarter from which is now proceeding the principal impetus toward revolutionizing the relations of the world's market, and, along therewith, all bourgeois society. According to the census of 1890, the capital invested in industry in the United States has risen to 6,524 million dollars, as against 2,790 million in 1880, an increase of 136 per cent. The value of the industrial products rose during that period from 5,369 million dollars to 9,370 million, or 75 per cent. in round figures, while the population increased only 25 per cent.[168] The United States has reached a point of development where it must export a large mass of products in order to be able to continue producing in sufficient quantities. Instead of importing articles of industry from Europe, these will henceforth be exported in large volumes, thereby upsetting commercial relations everywhere. What pass has been reached there is indicated by the mammoth struggles between Capital and Labor, by the distress of the masses that has lasted years, and by the colossal increase of bankruptcy during the last crisis. In 1879, 1880 and 1881 the sum absorbed in bankruptcies ran up to 82 million dollars in round figures; in 1890 the amount was 190 million dollars, and in 1891 it rose to 331 million dollars. An instance will illustrate the gigantic measure of the concentration of capital in that country. In 1870, there were in the United States 2,819 woolen mills, in which 96 million dollars were invested as capital; in 1890 the number of these mills had sunk to 1,312, but the capital invested had risen to 136 million. In 1870, on an average, $34,000 sufficed to establish a woolen mill; in 1890, not less than $102,000 was requisite. The increased demands upon capital forces the building of stock corporations, which, in turn, promote the concentration still more. Where the powers of a single capitalist do not suffice, several of them join; they appoint technical overseers, who are well paid, and they pocket, in the form of dividends, the profits which the workingmen must raise. The restlessness of industry reaches its classic form in the stock corporation, which demonstrates how useless the person of the capitalist has become as a leader of industry. Seeing that this process of development and concentration is proceeding equally in all leading countries, the inevitable results of the anarchic method of production is "over-production," the stoppage of trade, the crisis. Accordingly, the crisis is a consequence of the absence of any means whatever whereby at any time the actual demand for certain goods can be gauged and controlled. There is no power in bourgeois society able to regulate production as a whole; the customers are spread over too vast an area; then also, their purchasing power, upon which depends their power of consumption, is affected by a number of causes, beyond the control of the individual producer. Moreover, along with each individual producer, are a number of others, whose productive powers and actual yield also are unknown to him. Each strives, with all the means at his command--cheap prices, advertisements, long credit, drummers, also secret and crafty detraction of the quality of the goods of his competitor, the last of which is a measure that flourishes particularly at critical moments--to drive all other competitors from the field. Production is wholly left to accident and to the judgment of individuals. Accident often is more unfavorable than otherwise. Every capitalist must produce a certain quantity of goods, in order that he may exist; he is, however, driven to increase his output, partly because his increase of revenues depends upon that, partly also because upon that depend his prospects of being able to overcome his competitors, and keep the field all to himself. For a while, the output is safe; the circumstance tends to expansion and increased production. But prosperous times do not tempt one capitalist alone; they tempt them all. Thus production rises far above demand, and suddenly the market is found overstocked. Sales stop; prices fall; and production is curtailed. The curtailment of production in any one branch implies a diminished demand for workingmen, the lowering of wages and a retrenchment of consumption in the ranks of labor. A further stoppage of production and business in other departments is the necessary consequence. Small producers of all sorts--trademen, saloonkeepers, bakers, butchers, etc.,--whose customers are chiefly workingmen, lose the profitable sale of their goods and likewise land in distress. The way in which such a crisis works appears from a census on the unemployed which the Social Democratic Party of Hamburg undertook on February 14, 1894. Of 53,756 workingmen who were interrogated, and of whom 34,647 were married, with an aggregate family dependence of 138,851, there were 18,422 who, during the last year, had been idle a total of 191,013 weeks; 5,084 persons had been idle from 1 to 5 weeks; 8,741 from 6 to 10 weeks; 1,446 from 11 to 15 weeks; 984 from 16 to 20 weeks; 2,167 more than 20 weeks. These are workingmen, who wished to work, but who, in this best of all possible worlds, could find no work. The sorry plight of these people may be imagined. Again, one industry furnishes its raw material to another; one depends upon the other; it follows that all must suffer and pay for the blows that fall upon any. The circle of participants and sufferers spreads ever wider. A number of obligations, assumed in the hope of a long continuance of prosperity, cannot be met, and thus new fuel is added to the conflagration of the crisis, whose flames rise higher from month to month. An enormous mass of stored-up goods, tools, machinery, becomes almost worthless. The goods are got rid of at great sacrifices. Not only their proprietor is thereby ruined, but also dozens of others who are thereby likewise forced to give up their goods under cost. During the crisis itself, the method of production is all along improved with the view of meeting future competition; but this only prepares the ground for new and still worse crises. After the crisis has lasted years, after the surplusage of goods has been gradually done away with through sales at ruinous prices, through retrenchment of production, and through the destruction of smaller concerns, society slowly begins to recover again. Demand rises, and production follows suit--slowly at first and cautious, but, with the continuance of prosperity, the old vertigo sets in anew. Everyone is anxious to recover what he lost, and expects to be under cover before the next crisis breaks in. Nevertheless, seeing that all capitalists foster the identical thought, and that each one improves his plant so as to head off the others, the catastrophe is soon brought on again and with all the more fatal effect. Innumerable establishments rise and fall like balls at a game, and out of such continuous ups and downs flows the wretched state of things that is witnessed at all crises. These crises crowd upon one another in the measure that large production increases, and the competitive struggle--not between individuals only, but between whole nations--becomes sharper. The scampering for customers, on a small scale, and for markets on a large one, gains in fierceness, and ends finally in great losses. Goods and implements are heaped mountain high, yet the masses of the people suffer hunger and want. The autumn of the year 1890 brought new proof of the correctness of this outline. After a long series of years of business depression, during which, however, large capitalist development was steadily progressing, an improvement in our economic life set in during 1887-8, stimulated in no slight degree by the extensive changes introduced in our army and navy systems. The upward movement continued during 1889 and up into the first quarter of 1890. During this period, a number of new establishments began to crop up everywhere in several fields of industry; a large number of others were enlarged and improved to the highest point of technical perfection, and their capacity greatly increased. In the same measure that this large capitalist development progressed, a larger and ever larger number of establishments passed from the hands of individual capitalists into stock corporations--a change that ever is more or less connected with an increase of production. The new issues, that, as a result of these combinations and due also to the increase of the public debt, were contracted in the international money market, ran up in 1887 to about 4,000 million marks; in 1888, to 5,500 million; and in 1889, to even 7,000 million. On the other hand, the capitalists of all countries were endeavoring to "regulate" prices and production by means of national and international agreements. Rings and Trusts sprang up like mushrooms over night. The majority, often all the capitalists concerned in the more important branches of production, formed syndicates, by means of which prices were fixed, and production was to be regulated by the light of accurate statistical information. Over-production was thus to be prevented. A marvelous monopolization of industry, such as had never been seen, was thus achieved in the interest of the capitalists and at the expense of the workingmen, and of the consumers in general. For a while it seemed as if capital had come into possession of the means that enabled it to control the market in all directions, to the injury of the public and to its own greater glory. But appearances deceived. The laws of capitalist production proved themselves stronger than the shrewdest representatives of the system who imagined they held in their hands the power to regulate it. The crisis set in. One of the largest international business houses of England fell and involved a number of others in its fall. All exchanges and markets--of London, Paris, Vienna and Berlin, as far as St. Petersburg, New York and Calcutta--shook and trembled. It had again been shown that the profoundest calculations prove deceptive, and that capitalist society cannot escape its fate. All this notwithstanding, capitalism proceeds on its course: it can be no other than it is. By means of the forms that its course dictates, it throws all the laws of capitalist economics overboard. "Free competition," the Alpha and Omega of bourgeois society, is to bring the fittest to the top of the enterprises; but the stock corporation removes all individuality, and places the crown upon that combination that has the longest purse and the strongest grip. The syndicates, Trusts and rings carry the point still further. Whole branches of industry are monopolized; the individual capitalist becomes but a pliant link in a chain, held by a capitalist committee. _A handful of monopolists set themselves up as lords of the world and dictate to it the price of goods, to the workingmen their wages and conditions of life._ The whole course of this development brings out how utterly superfluous the individual capitalist has become, and that production, conducted upon a national and international scale, is the goal toward which society steers--with this difference, that, in the end, this organized production will redound to the benefit, not of a class, but of the collectivity. The economic revolution just sketched, and which is driving bourgeois society with great swiftness to its apogee, becomes more pointed from year to year. While Europe finds itself pressed more and more in its foreign markets, and finally on its own territory, by the competition of the United States, latterly enemies have risen in the East also, rendering still more critical the plight of Europe, and at the same time threatening the United States also. This danger proceeds from the progress of English India toward becoming a great agricultural and industrial State--a progress that, in the first place, looks to the meeting of the wants of India's own two hundred million strong population, and, in the second place, develops into a mortal enemy of English and German industry in particular. And still another industrial State is beginning to rise in the East--_Japan_. According to the "Kreuzzeitung" of February 20, 1895, "during the last ten years, Japan has imported from Europe the best perfected machinery for setting up industrial plants, especially in cotton spinning. In 1889, she had only 35,000 spindles; now she has over 380,000. In 1889, Japan imported 31 million pounds of raw cotton; in 1891, she imported 67 million. She is steadily decreasing her importations of manufactured articles, and increasing her importations of raw material, which she then retransports in the shape of manufactures. During the last year Hongkong, a European colony, bought over two million marks of Japanese cotton goods. The Japanese are providing their own markets with goods that formerly were imported from Europe and the United States. They are also exporting to Oriental markets, that were formerly provided from western sources. They are exporting matches and soap; they are manufacturing clothing, felt hats and hosiery; they have glass-blowing establishments, breweries, tileries, tan-yards and rope-walks." The further expansion of Japan's industry steadily reduces importations from Europe and the United States, and simultaneously places it in condition to turn up in the world's market as a competitor. Should China also, as a result of the Japanese-Chinese war, be compelled to open her immense territory to European culture, then, in view of the great adaptability and marvelous unpretentiousness of the Chinese workingman, another competitive power will have risen, more dangerous than any that the world's market has yet had to reckon with. Truly, the future of bourgeois society is threatened from all sides with grave dangers, and there is no way to escape them. Thus _the crisis becomes permanent and international_. It is a result of all the markets being overstocked with goods. And yet, still more could be produced; but the large majority of people suffer want in the necessaries of life because they have no income wherewith to satisfy their wants by purchase. They lack clothing, underwear, furniture, homes, food for the body and mind, and means of enjoyment, all of which they could consume in large quantities. But all that does not exist to them. Hundreds of thousands of workingmen are even thrown upon the sidewalk, and rendered wholly unable to consume because their labor-power has become "_superfluous_" to the capitalists. Is it not obvious that our social system suffers of serious ailments? How could there be any "over-production" when there is no lack of capacity to consume, i. e., of wants that crave satisfaction? Obviously, it is not production, in and of itself, that breeds these unhallowed conditions and contradictions: _it is the system under which production is carried on, and the product is distributed_. * * * * * In human society, all its members are bound to one another by a thousand threads; and these threads are all the more numerous in proportion to a people's grade of culture. If disturbances set in, they are forthwith felt by all. Disturbances in production affect distribution and consumption; and _vice versa_. The feature of capitalist production is the concentration of property into ever fewer hands and into ever larger establishments. In distribution, on the contrary, an opposite current is noticeable. Whoever, due to the destructive effect of competition, is stricken from the list of independent producers, seeks, in nine cases out of ten, to squeeze himself as a dealer between the producer and the consumer, and thus to earn his livelihood. Hence the striking phenomenon of the increase of the middleman--dealers, shopkeepers, hucksters, commissioners, brokers, agents, saloonkeepers, etc. Most of these, among whom women are strongly represented, lead a life of worries and a needy existence. Many are compelled, in order to keep their heads above water, to speculate upon the lowest passions of man and to promote them in all manner of ways. Hence the marvelous swing of the most repulsive advertisements, particularly in all matters the object of which is the gratification of sexual pleasures. It is undeniable, and, viewed from a higher viewpoint, it is also cheering, that the current for a greater enjoyment of life runs deep in modern society. Man begins to understand that, in order to be human, a life worthy of human beings is requisite, and the feeling is expressed in such form as corresponds with the respective conceptions of the enjoyment of life. As far as the distribution of its wealth is concerned, society has become much more _aristocratic_ than at any previous period. Between the richest and the poorest, the chasm is wider to-day than ever before. On the other hand, with regard to its ideas and laws, society has become more _democratic_.[169] Hence the masses strive after greater equality; and, seeing that in their ignorance they know not yet the path by which to attain their wishes, they seek equality in the imitation of the upper classes by furnishing themselves with whatever pleasures are within their reach. All possible artificial means are resorted to in order to exploit this tendency; the consequences are often serious. The gratification of a justified desire thus leads in a number of cases to wrong paths, often to crime; and society intervenes in its own way, without thereby improving matters in the least. The increasing mass of the middlemen draws many evils in its wake. Although this class toils arduously and works under the load of heavy cares, _the majority are parasites, they are unproductively active, and they live upon the labors of others, just the same as the capitalist class_. Higher prices is the inevitable consequence of this industry. Food and other goods rise in price in such manner that they often cost twice or many times as much as the producer received for them.[170] If it is thought unadvisable or impossible to materially raise the price of the goods, lest consumption decline, they are artificially deteriorated, and recourse is had _to adulteration of food, and to false weights and measures_, in order to make the requisite profits. The chemist Chevalier reports that he knows, among the several adulterations of food, 32 for coffee, 30 for wine, 28 for chocolate, 24 for meal, 23 for brandy, 20 for bread, 19 for milk, 10 for butter, 9 for olive oil, 6 for sugar, etc. The Chamber of Commerce of Wesel reported in 1870 that an extensive system of swindle was practiced in the shops in the sale of ready-weighed articles: for 1 pound, 24 or 26 pennyweights were given, and in that way twice as much was gained as the difference in the price. Workingmen and small traders who get their goods on credit and who must, accordingly, submit, even when the fraud is obvious, fare worst of all. Grave abuses are also perpetrated in bakeries. Swindling and cheating are inseparable from our modern conditions, and certain government institutions, such as high indirect taxes, are direct incentives thereto. The laws against the adulteration of food alter matters but little. The struggle for existence compels the swindlers to resort to ever shrewder means, nor is there any thorough and strict inspection. Leading and influential circles of our ruling classes are even interested in the system of swindle. Under the pretext that, in order to discover adulterations a more comprehensive and more expensive administrative apparatus is required, and that "legitimate business" would suffer thereby, almost all inspection, worthy of the name, is lamed. If, however, laws and measures of inspection do actually intervene, they affect a considerable rise in the price of the unadulterated products, seeing that the lower price was made possible only by adulteration. With the view of avoiding these evils of trade, evils that, as ever and everywhere, are hardest on the masses, "Consumers' Associations" have been set up. In Germany, the "Consumers' Association" plan, especially among the military and civil service employees, reaches such a point that numerous business houses have been ruined, and many are not far from the same fate. These Associations demonstrate the superfluousness of trade in a differently organized society.[171] In that consists their principal merit. The material advantages are not great for the members; neither are the facilities that they offer enough to enable the members to discover any material improvement in their condition. Not infrequently is their administration poor, and the members must pay for it. In the hands of capitalists, these Associations even become an additional means to chain the workingman to the factory, and they are used as weapons to depress wages. The founding of these "Consumers' Associations" is, however, a symptom that the evils of trade and at least the superfluousness of the middlemen have been realized in wide circles. Society will reach that point of organization at which trade becomes wholly superfluous; the product will reach the consumer without the intervention of any middlemen other than those who attend to its transportation from place to place, and who are in the service of society. A natural demand, that flows from the collective procurement of food, _is its collective preparation for the table upon a large scale, whereby a further and enormous saving would be made of energy, space, material and all manner of expenditures_. * * * * * The economic revolution in industry and transportation has spread to agriculture also, and in no slight degree. Commercial and industrial crises are felt in the country as well. Many relatives of families located in the country are partially or even wholly engaged in industrial establishments in cities, and this sort of occupation is becoming more and more common because the large farmers find it convenient _to convert on their own farms a considerable portion of their produce_. They thereby save the high cost of transporting the raw product--potatoes that are used for spirits, beets for sugar, grain for flour or brandy or beer. Furthermore, they have on their own farms cheaper and more willing labor than can be got in the city, or in industrial districts. Factories and rent are considerably cheaper, taxes and licenses lower, seeing that, to a certain extent, the landed proprietors are themselves lawgivers and law officers: from their midst numerous representatives are sent to the Reichstag: not infrequently they also control the local administration and the police department. These are ample reasons for the phenomenon of increasing numbers of funnel-pipes in the country. Agriculture and industry step into ever closer interrelation with each other--an advantage that accrues mainly to the large landed estates. The point of capitalist development reached in Germany also by agriculture has partially called forth conditions similar to those found in England and the United States. As with the small and middle class industries, so likewise with the small and middle class farms, they are swallowed up by the large. A number of circumstances render the life of the small and middle class farmer ever harder, and ripen him for absorption by the large fellow. No longer do the one-time conditions, as they were still known a few decades ago, prevail in the country. Modern culture now pervades the country in the remotest corners. Contrary to its own purpose, militarism exercises a certain revolutionary influence. The enormous increase of the standing army weighs, in so far as the blood-tax is concerned, heaviest of all upon the country districts. The degeneration of industrial and city life compels the drawing of by far the larger portion of soldiers from the rural population. When the farmer's son, the day laborer, or the servant returns after two or three years from the atmosphere of the city and the barracks, an atmosphere not exactly impregnated with high moral principles;--when he returns as the carrier and spreader of venereal diseases, he has also become acquainted with a mass of new views and wants whose gratification he is not inclined to discontinue. Accordingly, he makes larger demands upon life, and wants higher wages; his frugality of old went to pieces in the city. Transportation, ever more extended and improved, also contributes toward the increase of wants in the country. Through intercourse with the city, the rustic becomes acquainted with the world from an entirely new and more seductive side: he is seized with new ideas: he learns of the wants of civilization, thitherto unknown to him. All that renders him discontented with his lot. On top of that, the increasing demands of the State, the province, the municipality hit both farmer and farmhand, and make them still more rebellious. True enough, many farm products have greatly risen in value during this period, but not in even measure with the taxes and the cost of living. On the other hand, transmarine competition in food materially contributes toward reducing prices: this reduces incomes: the same can be counterbalanced only by improved management: and nine-tenths of the farmers lack the means thereto. Moreover, the farmer does not get for his product the price paid by the city: he has to deal with the middlemen: and these hold him in their clutches. The broker or dealer, who at given seasons traverses the country and, as a rule, himself sells to other middlemen, wants to make his profits: the gathering of many small quantities gives him much more trouble than a large invoice from a single large holder: the small farmer receives, as a consequence, less for his goods than the large farmer. Moreover, the quality of the products from the small farmer is inferior: the primitive methods that are there generally pursued have that effect: and that again compels the small farmer to submit to lower prices. Again, the farm owner or tenant can often not afford to wait until the price of his goods rises. He has payments to meet--rent, interest, taxes; he has loans to cancel and debts to settle with the broker and his hands. These liabilities are due on fixed dates: he must sell however unfavorable the moment. In order to improve his land, to provide for co-heirs, children, etc., the farmer has contracted a mortgage: he has no choice of creditor: thus his plight is rendered all the worse. High interest and stated payments of arrears give him hard blows. An unfavorable crop, or a false calculation on the proper crop, for which he expected a high price, carry him to the very brink of ruin. Often the purchaser of the crop and the mortgagee are one and the same person. The farmers of whole villages and districts thus find themselves at the mercy of a few creditors. The farmers of hops, wine and tobacco in Southern Germany; the truck farmers on the Rhine; the small farmers in Central Germany--all are in that plight. The mortgagee sucks them dry; he leaves them, apparent owners of a field, that, in point of fact, is theirs no longer. The capitalist vampire often finds it more profitable to farm in this way than, by seizing the land itself and selling it, or himself doing the farming. Thus many thousand farmers are carried on the registers as proprietors, who, in fact, are no longer such. Thus, again, many a large farmer--unskilled in his trade, or visited by misfortune, or who came into possession under unfavorable circumstances--also falls a prey to the executioner's axe of the capitalist. The capitalist becomes lord of the land; with the view of making double gains he goes into the business of "butchering estates:" he parcels out the domain because he can thereby get a larger price than if he sold it in lump: then also he has better prospects of plying his usurious trade if the proprietors are many and small holders. It is well known that city houses with many small apartments yield the largest rent. A number of small holders join and buy a portion of the parcelled-out estate: the capitalist benefactor is ready at hand to pass larger tracts over to them on a small cash payment, securing the rest by mortgage bearing good interest. This is the milk in the cocoanut. If the small holder has luck and he succeeds, by utmost exertion, to extract a tolerable sum from the land, or to obtain an exceptionally cheap loan, then he can save himself; otherwise he fares as shown above. If a few heads of cattle die on the hands of the farm-owner or tenant, a serious misfortune has befallen him; if he has a daughter who marries, her outfit augments his debts, besides his losing a cheap labor-power; if a son marries, the youngster wants a piece of land or its equivalent in money. Often this farmer must neglect necessary improvements: if his cattle and household do not furnish him with sufficient manure--a not unusual circumstance--then the yield of the farm declines, because its owner cannot buy fertilizers: often he lacks the means to obtain better seed. The profitable application of machinery is denied him: a rotation of crops, in keeping with the chemical composition of his farm, is often not to be thought of. As little can he turn to profit the advantages that science and experience offer him in the conduct of his domestic animals: the want of proper food, the want of proper stabling and attention, the want of all other means and appliances prevent him. Innumerable, accordingly, are the causes that bear down upon the small and middle class farmer, drive him into debt, and his head into the noose of the capitalist or the large holder. The large landholders are generally intent upon buying up the small holdings, and thereby "rounding up" their estates. The large capitalist magnates have a predilection for investments in land, this being the safest form of property, one, moreover, that, with an increasing population, rises in value without effort on the part of the owners. England furnishes the most striking instance of this particular increase of value. Although due to international competition in agricultural products and cattle-raising, the yield of the land decreased during the last decades, nevertheless, seeing that in Scotland two million acres were converted into hunting grounds, that in Ireland four million acres lie almost waste, that in England the area of agriculture declined from 19,153,900 acres in 1831, to 15,651,605 in 1880, a loss of 3,484,385 acres, which have been converted into meadow lands, rent increased considerably. The aggregate rent from country estates amounted, in pounds sterling, to:-- Countries. 1857. 1875. 1880. Increase. England and Wales 41,177,200 50,125,000 52,179,381 11,002,181 Scotland 5,932,000 7,493,000 7,776,919 1,844,919 Ireland 8,747,000 9,293,000 10,543,000 1,796,700 ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- Total 55,856,200 67,911,000 70,499,300 14,643,800 Accordingly, an increase of 26.2 per cent. within 23 years, and that without any effort on the part of the owners. Although, since 1880, due to the ever sharper international competition in food, the agricultural conditions of England and Ireland have hardly improved, the large English landlords have not yet ventured upon such large demands upon the population as have the continental, the German large landlords in particular. England knows no agricultural tariffs; and the demand for a minimum price, fixed by government, of such nature that they have been styled "price raisers" and as the large landlords of the East Elbe region together with their train-bands in the German Reichstag are insisting on at the cost of the propertyless classes, would raise in England a storm of indignation. According to the agricultural statistics gathered in Germany on June 2, 1882, the farms fell into the following categories according to size:-- Percentage of Area. Farms. Total Farms. Under 1 hectare 2,323,316 44.03 1 to 5 hectares 1,719,922 32.54 5 to 10 hectares 554,174 10.50 10 to 20 hectares 372,431 7.06 20 to 50 hectares 239,887 4.50 50 to 100 hectares 41,623 0.80 100 to 200 hectares 11,033 0.21 200 to 500 hectares 9,814 0.18 500 to 1,000 hectares 3,629 0.07 1,000 hectares 515 0.01 --------- ----- Total 5,276,344 99.90 According to Koppe, a minimum of 6 hectares are requisite in Northern Germany for a farmer's family to barely beat itself through; in order to live in tolerable circumstances, 15 to 20 hectares are requisite. In the fertile districts of Southern Germany, 3 to 4 hectares are considered good ground to support a peasant family on. This minimum is reached in Germany by not four million farms, and only about 6 per cent. of the farmers have holdings large enough to enable them to get along in comfort. Not less than 3,222,270 farmers conduct industrial or commercial pursuits besides agriculture. It is a characteristic feature of the lands under cultivation that the farms of less than 50 hectares--5,200,000 in all--contained only 3,747,677 hectares of grain lands, whereas the farms of more than 50 hectares--66,000 in round figures--contained 9,636,246 hectares. One and a quarter per cent. of the farms contained 2½ times more grain land than the other 98-3/4 per cent. put together. And yet the picture presented by these statistics falls by far short of the reality. It has not been ascertained among how many owners these 5,276,344 farms are divided. The number of owners is far smaller than that of the farms themselves: many are the owners of dozens of farms: it is in the instance of large farms, in particular, that many are held by one proprietor. A knowledge of the concentration of land is of the highest socio-political importance, yet on this point the agricultural statistics of 1882 leave us greatly in the lurch. A few facts are, nevertheless, ascertained from other sources, and they give an approximate picture of the reality. The percentages of large landed property--over 100 hectares--to the aggregate agricultural property was as follows:-- Provinces. Percentage. Provinces. Percentage. Pomerania 64.87 Brandenburg 42.60 Posen 61.22 Silesia 42.14 West Prussia 54.41 Saxony 30.89 East Prussia 41.79 Schleswig-Holstein 18.03 According to the memorial of the Prussian Minister of Agriculture, published in the bulletin of the Prussian Bureau of Statistics, the number of middle class farms sank, from 354,610 with 35,260,084 acres, in 1816, to 344,737 with 33,498,433 acres, in 1859. The number of these farms had, accordingly, decreased within that period by 9,873, and peasant property had been wiped out to the volume of 1,711,641 acres. The inquiry extended only to the provinces of Prussia, Posen (from 1823 on), Pomerania, exclusive of Stralsund; Brandenburg, Saxony, Silesia, and Westphalia. What disappears as peasant property usually goes into large estates. In 1885, in the province of Pomerania, 62 proprietors held 118 estates; in 1891, however, the same number of proprietors held 203 estates with an area of 147,139 hectares. Altogether, there were in the province of Pomerania, in 1891, 1,353 noble and bourgeois landlords, owning 2,258 estates with 1,247,201 hectares.[172] The estates averaged 551 hectares in size. Our eastern provinces give this table of landlords for the year 1888:-- Prince of Hohenlohe-Oehringen 39,365 hectares Prince of Sigmaringen 29,611 " Prince of Thurn and Taxis 24,482 " Prince Bismarck 18,600 " Prince Radziwill 16,398 " Duke of Milzinski 13,933 " Representative Kennemann 10,482 " Duke Serg. v. Czarnecki 9,263 " v. Hansemann 7,734 " Etc., etc., etc. We see that we here have to do with owners of latifundia of first rank; and a portion of these gentlemen own also large estates in Southern Germany and Austria. According to Conrad,[173] there were in the year 1888, in East Prussia, 547 entails, of which 153 were instituted before the beginning of the nineteenth century. Entailed land is property that an heir can neither mortgage, divide nor alienate. The owner may go into bankruptcy through a dissolute life, but the entail and the income that flows therefrom remain unseizable. These entails, which only the very rich can institute, are steadily increasing in number since the last decades. The 547 entails in existence in the eastern provinces of Prussia in 1888, held by 529 persons, 20 of whom were bourgeois, embraced 1,408,860 hectares, or 2,454 hectares on an average. According to the statistical figures, submitted in the spring of 1894 by the Prussian Minister of Agriculture to the Agrarian Commission, the entails of Prussia embraced at that time 1,833,754 hectares with a net income of 22,992,000 marks. Estimating the holders of entails at 550, each has an unseizable income of 41,800 marks. Assuming, however, that these entails are concentrated in one province, it would mean that the whole province of Schleswig-Holstein, with an area of 1,890,000 hectares, belonged to 550 owners. In 1888 there were in the eastern provinces of Prussia 154 persons--among them 15 ruling Princes (the Kings of Prussia, Saxony, etc.); 89 Dukes, other Princes and Counts; 40 noblemen and 10 bourgeois--who alone owned 1,830 estates aggregating 1,768,648 hectares of land. Probably, the property of these persons has in the meantime increased considerably, seeing that a good portion of the net incomes from these estates is expended in acquiring new ones. The nobility of the first and second rank are the principal elements engaged in this gigantic concentration of landed property; but they are closely followed by the aristocracy of finance, who, with increasing predilection, invest their wealth in land, consisting mainly in magnificent woods, stocked with roe, deer and wild boar, that the owners may gratify their passion for the hunt. A large number of the baronial manors consist of the estates of dispossessed peasants, who were driven from their homes and reduced to day laborers. According to Neumann, in the provinces of East and West Prussia alone, there were from twelve to thirteen thousand small holdings appropriated in that way between 1825 to 1859. This process of dispossessing, proletarianizing the country population by the capitalist landlords, has the laying waste of the land as a natural consequence. The population emigrates, or moves to the cities and industrial centers. Woods and meadows gain upon cultivated lands, the remaining territories are operated with machinery, that render human labor superfluous, or that need such only for short periods during the plowing and sowing seasons, or when the crops are gathered. The rapidly increasing number of movable steam engines, already mentioned, consists mainly of engines employed in the cultivation of the land. The decrease of the rural population, resulting upon these and other causes of secondary nature, is sharply expressed in the statistics on population. Within the eight old provinces of Prussia, the proportion between the rural and the city population revealed, between 1867 and 1890, the following progression:-- Year. City Population. Country Population. 1867 7,452,000 16,568,000 1890 11,783,000 18,173,000 ---------- ---------- Increase 4,331,000 1,605,000 = 58 per cent. = 9.7 per cent. The rapidity is obvious with which the city is surpassing the country population. But the situation is still more unfavorable to the country if the fact is considered that 148 communities, with from 5,000 to 40,000 inhabitants, and aggregating a population of 1,281,000 strong, are included in the rural but really belong to the industrial districts. They are essentially proletarian villages, located near large cities. Furthermore, 647 communities, with from 2,000 to 5,000 inhabitants, and aggregating a population of 1,884,000, are likewise included in the rural, while, to a perceptible degree, they belong to the industrial districts. Similar conditions exist in Saxony and Southern Germany. In Baden and Wurtemberg also the population of many districts is on the decline. The small farmer can no longer hold his head above water; to thousands upon thousands of them the fate of a factory hand is inevitable; they enter the field of industry; and, with the help of their families, they cultivate during leisure hours the plot of land that may still be theirs. At the same time the large landlord's hunger for land knows no bounds; his appetite increases the more peasant lands he devours. As in Germany so are things developing in neighboring Austria, where large landed property has long ruled almost unchecked. The difference there is that the Catholic Church shares the land with the nobility and the bourgeoisie. The process of smoking-out the farmer is in full swing in Austria. All manner of efforts are put forth in order to push the peasants and mountaineers of Tyrol, Salzburg, Steiermark, Upper and Lower Austria, etc., off their inherited patrimony and to drive them to relinquish their property. The spectacle, once presented to the world by England and Scotland, is now on the boards of the most beautiful and charming regions of Austria. Enormous tracts of land are bought in lump by rich men, and what cannot be bought outright is leased. Access to the valleys, manors, hamlets and even houses is thus barred by these new masters, and stubborn owners of separate small holdings are driven by all manner of chicaneries to dispose of their property at any price to these wealthy owners of the woodlands. Old farmlands, on which numerous generations have been supported for thousands of years, are being transformed into wilderness, in which the roe and the deer house, while the mountains, that the noble or bourgeois capitalist calls his own, become the abode of large herds of chamois. Whole communities are pauperized, the turning of their cattle upon the Alpine pastures being made impossible to them, or their right to do so being even disputed. And who is it that thus raises his hand against the peasant's property and independence? Princes, noblemen and rich bourgeois. Side by side with Rothschild and Baron Mayer-Melnhof are found the Dukes of Koburg and Meiningen, the Princes of Hohenlohe, the Prince of Lichtenstein, the Duke of Braganza, Prince Rosenberg, Prince Pless, the Counts of Schoenfeld, Festetics, Schafgotsca, Trautmannsdorff, the hunting association of the Count of Karolysche, the hunting association of Baron Gustaedtsche, the noble hunting association of Bluehnbacher, etc. Large landed property is everywhere on the increase in Austria. The number of large landlords rose 9.5 per cent. from 1873 to 1891, and that means a considerable decrease of small holders: land cannot be increased. In Lower Austria, of a total area embracing 3,544,596 yokes, 521,603 were taken up by large estates (247 owners), and 94,882 yokes by the Church. Nine families alone owned, in the middle of the eighties, 157,000 yokes, among these owners was the Count of Hoyos, with 54,000 yokes. The area of Moravia is 2,222,190 hectares. Of these, the Church held 78,496, 3.53 per cent.; 145 private persons held 525,632, and one of these alone held 107,247 hectares. Of Austrian Silesia's area of 514,085 hectares, the Church owned 50,845, or 9.87 per cent.; 36 landlords owned 134,226, or 26.07 per cent. The area of Bohemia is 5,196,700 hectares: of these the clergy owned 103,459 hectares; 362 private persons owned 1,448,638. This number is distributed among Prince Colloredo-Mansfeld with 58,239 hectares; Prince Fuerstenberg with 39,814; Imperial Duke Waldstein with 37,989; Prince Lichtenstein with 37,937; the Count of Czerin with 32,277; the Count of Clam-Gallas with 31,691; Emperor Franz Joseph with 28,800; the Count von Harrach with 28,047; Prince von Lobkowitz with 27,684; Imperial Count Kinsky with 26,265; the Count of Buquoy with 25,645; the Prince of Thurn and Taxis with 24,777; Prince Schwarzenberg with 24,037; Prince Metternich-Winneburg with 20,002; Prince Auersperg with 19,960; Prince Windischgraetz with 19,920 hectares, etc.[174] The absorption by the large landlords of the small holdings in land frequently proceeds in "alarming manner." For instance, in the judicial district of Aflenz, community of St. Ilgen, an Alpine hill of over 5,000 yokes, with pasture ground for 300 head of cattle, and a contiguous peasant estate of 700 yokes, was all converted into a hunting ground. The same thing happened with Hoellaep, located in the community of Seewiesen, which had pasture land for 200 head of cattle. In the same judicial district of Aflenz, 47 other pieces of land, holding 840 head of cattle, were gradually absorbed and turned into hunting grounds. Similar doings are reported from all parts of the Alps. In Steiermark, a number of peasants find it more profitable to sell the hay to the lordly hunters as _feed for the game in winter_, than give it to their own cattle. In the neighborhood of Muerzzuschlag, some peasants no longer keep cattle, but sell all the feed for the support of the game. In the judicial district of Schwarz, 7, and in the judicial district of Zell, 16 Alpine hills, formerly used for pasture, were "cashiered" by the new landlords and converted into hunting grounds. The whole region of the Karwendel mountain has been closed to cattle. It is generally the high nobility of Austria and Germany, together with rich bourgeois upstarts, who bought up Alpine stretches of land of 70,000 yokes and more at a clip and had them arranged for hunting parks. Whole villages, hundreds upon hundreds of holdings are thus wiped out of existence; the inhabitants are crowded off; and in the place of human beings, together with cattle meet for their sustenance, roes, deer and chamois put in their appearance. Oddest of all, more than one of the men, who thus lay whole provinces waste, is seen rising in the parliaments and declaiming on the "distress of landed property," and abuses his power to secure the protection of Government in the shape of duties on corn, wood and meat, and premiums on brandy and sugar,--all at the expense of the propertyless masses. According to the census of the eighties, there were 8,547,285 farms in France; 2,993,450 farm owners had an average annual income of 300 francs, the aggregate income of these being 22.5 per cent. of the total income from farms; 1,095,850 farm owners had an average annual income of 1,730 francs, the aggregate income of these being 47 per cent. of the total income from farms; 65,525 large landlords, owning 109,285 farms, drew 25.4 per cent. of the total agricultural revenues:--_their possessions embraced more than one-half of the agricultural lands of France_. Large agricultural property is becoming the standard in all countries of civilization, and, in virtue of its political influence, it sways legislation without regard to the welfare of the commonwealth. Nevertheless, the tenure of agricultural land and its cultivation is of high importance to social development. Upon land and its productivity depends first of all the population and its subsistence. Land can not be multiplied at will, hence the question is of all the greater magnitude to everyone how the land is cultivated and exploited. Germany, whose population increases yearly by from 5,600,000 heads, needs a large supply of breadstuffs and meat, if the prices of the principal necessaries of life shall remain within the reach of the people. At this point an important antagonism arises between the industrial and the agricultural population. The industrial population, being independent of agriculture, has a vital interest in cheap food: the degree in which they are to thrive both as men and as workers depends upon that. Every rise in the price of food leads, either to further adulterations, or to a decline of exports, and thereby of wages as a consequence of increased difficulties of competition. The question is otherwise with the cultivator of the soil. As in the instance of the industrial producer, the farmer is bent upon making the largest gains possible out of his trade, whatever line that may be in. If the importation of corn and meat reduces the high prices for these articles and thereby lowers his profits, then he gives up raising corn and devotes his soil to some other product that may bring larger returns: he cultivates sugar-beet for the production of sugar, potatoes and grain for distilleries, instead of wheat and rye for bread. He devotes the most fertile tracts to tobacco instead of vegetables. In the same way, thousands of hectares are used as horse pastures because horses for soldiers and other purposes of war fetch good prices. On the other hand, extensive forests, that can be made fertile, are kept at present for the enjoyment of the hunting lords, and this often happens in neighborhoods where the dismantling of a few hectares of woodland and their conversion to agricultural purposes could be undertaken without thereby injuriously affecting the humidity of the neighborhood. Upon this particular point, forestry to-day denies the influence of woodlands upon moisture. Woods should be allowed in large masses only at such places where the nature of the soil permits no other form of cultivation, or where the purpose is to furnish mountain regions with a profitable vegetation, or with a check to the rapid running down of water in order to prevent freshets and the washing away of the land. From this point of view, thousands of square kilometers of fertile land could be reclaimed in Germany for agriculture. But such an alteration runs counter as well to the interests of the hierarchy of office-holders--foresters--as to the private and hunting interests of the large landlords, who are not inclined to forfeit their hunting grounds and pleasures of the chase. To what extent the process of rendering "hands" superfluous is progressing in agriculture and in the industries therewith connected has been shown in the palpable depopulation of the rural districts of Germany. It may, furthermore, be specified that in the period between 1885 and 1890, the decrease of the rural population in 74 districts east of the Elbe was above 2 per cent.; in 44 of these 74 districts it was even above 3 per cent. In western Prussia, a decrease was established of over 2 per cent. in 16 districts, in two of which the decrease exceeded 3 per cent. Especially high was the percentage of decrease in those neighborhoods where large landlords figure as special dispensations of Providence. In Wurtemberg, during the period between 1839 and 1885, the population of 22 peasant districts declined from 29,907 heads to 19,213,--not less than 35.7 per cent. In East and West Prignitz, the rural population declined during the period of 1868-1885 from 100,000 heads to 85,000,--15 per cent. The decrease of the rural working population is marked also in England where, as well known, latifundia property reigns supreme. The progression in the decrease of agricultural workers was there as follows:-- Sexes. 1861. 1871. Decrease. Males 1,833,652 1,328,151 505,501 Females 376,797 186,450 193,127 --------- --------- ------- Total 2,210,449 1,514,601 698,628 Since then the decrease has proceeded further. According to Dr. B. J. Brock, in the year 1885 there was the following yield per acre in bushels:-- Countries. Wheat. Barley. Great Britain 35.2 37.8 Germany 18.7 23.6 France 16.0 19.5 Austria 15.5 16.8 Hungary 11.7 16.0 The difference in productivity between Great Britain and the other countries is, we see, considerable, and it is attained through a more extensive operation of the soil. In Hungary also the number of persons engaged in agriculture has decreased considerably:-- 1870 4,417,514 1880 3,669,177 a decrease of 748,457, or more than 17 per cent. in ten years. The agricultural lands passed into the hands of large magnates and capitalists, who employed machines instead of human workers, and thus rendered the latter "superfluous." These phenomena manifest themselves everywhere in agriculture,--just as in large industrial production. The productivity of labor increases, and in the same measure a portion of the working class is promoted to the sidewalk. As a matter of course, this process has its evil consequences for woman also. Her prospects of being a proprietor and housewife decline, and the prospects increase of her becoming a servant, a cheap hand for the large landlord. As a sexual being she is more exposed even than in the city to the illicit wishes and cravings of the master or his lieutenants. More so than in industry, on the land proprietary rights in the labor-power frequently expand to proprietary rights over the whole person. Thus, in the very midst of "Christian" Europe a quasi Turkish harem system has developed. In the country, woman is isolated to a higher degree than in the city. The magistrate or a close friend of his is her employer: newspapers and a public opinion, to which she otherwise might look for protection, there are none: furthermore, male labor itself is generally in a disgraceful state of dependence. But "the heavens are away up, and the Tsar is away off." The census of occupation of 1882 established that, out of 5,273,344 farms, only 391,746, or 7½ per cent., employ machinery. Out of the 24,999 large farms, however, containing over 100 hectares of land, machinery was in use on 20,558, or 82¼ per cent. Naturally, it is the larger farms only that can utilize machinery. The application of machinery on a large surface, all of one product, engages labor only a comparatively short time, the number of male and female hands, absolutely needed on the place and for tending the cattle, is reduced, and after the field work is done, the day laborers are discharged. Thus with us, just as in England and in a still higher degree in the United States, a rural proletariat of grave aspect springs up. If, in view of the shortness of the season, these workingmen demand correspondingly high wages when they are needed, their impudence is denounced; if, upon their discharge, they roam about in hunger and idleness, they are called vagabonds, are abused, and not infrequently dogs are set upon them to chase them from the yards as "tramps," unwilling to work, and they are handed over to the constabulary for the workhouse. A pretty social "order." Capitalist exploitation of agriculture leads in all directions to capitalist conditions. One set of our farmers, for instance, has for years made enormous profits out of beet-root and the production of sugar therewith connected. Our system of taxation favored the exportation of sugar, and it was so framed that the tax on beets yielded but an infinitesimal revenue to the treasury of the Empire, the premium on the exportation of sugar being large enough to almost swallow the tax. The rebate allowed the sugar manufacturers per double quintal was actually higher than the tax paid by them on beets; and this premium enabled them to sell large quantities of sugar at the expense of the domestic tax-payers, and to extend ever more the cultivation of the sugar-beet. The profit that accrued from this system of taxation to about 400 sugar factories was estimated at over 30 million marks for 1889-1890: on an average 78,000 marks per factory. Several hundreds of thousands of hectares of land, previously devoted to raising grain, were turned into beet-root fields; factories upon factories were started, and are still being started; the inevitable consequence is an eventual crash. The large returns yielded by the beet-root cultivation affected favorably the price of land. It rose. The result was the buying up of the small farms, whose owners, seduced by the high prices, allowed themselves to be inveigled into selling. While the land was thus being used for industrial speculation, the raising of potatoes and grain was being confined to narrower fields, hence the increasing need of importation of food from abroad. The demand exceeds the supply. Thereupon, the large supply of foreign farm products and their cheaper transportation from Russia, the Danubian Principalities, North and South America, India, etc., finally leads to prices on which the domestic farmers--weighed down with mortgages and taxes, and hampered by the smallness of their farms, and their often faultily organized and deficiently conducted farming--can no longer exist. High duties are then placed upon importations; but these duties accrue only to the large farmer; the small fellow profits little by them, or none at all; and they become heavy burdens to the non-agricultural population. The advantage of the few becomes the injury of the many; small farming retrogresses; for it there is no balm in Gilead. That the condition of the small peasants in the tariff areas of Germany has been steadily deteriorating, will be generally admitted. The advantages to the large farmer from high duties, prohibitions of importations and measures of exclusion enable him all the more easily to buy out the small holder. The large number of those who do not produce in meat and bread what they consume themselves--and a glance at the statistics of occupation and division of the soil shows that these are by far the larger majority of the farmers--even suffers a direct injury from the increased prices resulting upon higher tariffs and indirect taxes. An unfavorable crop, that lowers still more the returns from the farm, not only aggravates the pressure, but also increases the number of the agriculturists who are compelled to become purchasers of farm products themselves. Tariffs and indirect taxes can not improve the economic condition of the majority of the farmers: he who has little or nothing to sell, what, to him, does the tariff boot, be it never so high! The incumbrance of the small farmer and his final ruin are thereby promoted rather than checked. For Baden--overwhelmingly a State of small farms--the increase of mortgage indebtedness during the period of 1884-1894 is estimated at 140 to 150 million marks. The mortgage indebtedness of the Bern peasants aggregated in round figures 200 million francs in 1860; in 1890 it aggregated 500 million francs. According to a report of the Bohemian representative Gustave Eim, made to his constituents in 1893, the indebtedness that weighed upon the farms of Bohemia stood as follows:-- 1879 2,716,641,754 guilders 1889 3,105,587,363 guilders We see that inside of that period the burden of indebtedness increased 14.13 per cent.--that of small holdings 13.29 per cent., while that of the large holdings increased only 3.77 per cent. The bulk of the increased indebtedness fell to the share of middle class property. How the cultivator of the soil operates his farm is--under the aegis of St. Private Property--his own business. His private interest decides. What cares he about the commonwealth and its well-being? He has to look out for himself: so, then, stand aside! Does not the industrialist proceed on that plan? He produces obscene pictures, turns out immoral books, sets up factories for adulterating food. These and many other occupations are harmful to society: they undermine morality and incite corruption. What does that matter! It brings in money, even more money than moral pictures, scientific books, and honest dealing in unadulterated food. The industrialist, greedy after profits, needs to concern himself only about escaping the too sharp eye of the police; he can quietly pursue his shameful trade, assured that the money he will thereby rake in will earn for him the envy and esteem of society. The Mammon character of our age is best typified by the Exchange and its doings. Land and industrial products; means of transportation; meteorologic and political conditions; scarcity and abundance; mass-misery and accidents; public debts, inventions and discoveries; the health, sickness and death of influential persons; war and rumors of war, often started for the express purpose;--all this and much more is made objects of speculation, for exploitation and mutual cheating. The matadors of capital attain decided influence upon society, and, favored by the powerful means at their disposal and their connections, they amass enormous fortunes. Cabinet ministers and whole Governments become puppets in their hands, compelled to act according as matadors of the Exchange pull the wires behind the scenes. Not the State has the Exchange, but the Exchange has the State in its power. Will he, nill he, a Minister is often forced to water the upas tree, which he might prefer to tear up by the roots, but that he now must aid in growing. All these facts, that, seeing the evils gain by the day in magnitude, daily force themselves with increasing importunity upon the consideration of everyone, demand speedy and radical help. But modern society stands bewildered before all these phenomena, just as certain animals are said to stand before a mountain;[175] it turns like a horse in the treadmill, constantly in a circle,--lost, helpless, the picture of distress and stupidity. Those who would bring help are yet too weak; those who should bring help still lack the necessary understanding; those who could bring help will not, they rely upon force; at best, they think with Madame Pompadour "_apres nous le deluge_" (after us the deluge). But how if the deluge were to come before their departure from life? The flood rises and is washing out the foundations upon which our State and Social structure rests. All feel that the ground shakes, and that only the strongest props can now stead. But these demand great sacrifices on the part of the ruling classes. There is the rub. Every proposition injurious to the material interests of the ruling classes, and that threatens their privileged position, is bitterly opposed and branded as a scheme looking to the overthrow of the modern political and social order. Neither is the sick world to be cured without any danger to the privileges and immunities of the ruling classes, nor without their final abolition by the abolition of the classes themselves. "The struggle for the emancipation of the working class is no struggle for privileges, but a struggle for equal rights and equal duties; it is a struggle for the abolition of all privileges"--thus runs the programme of the Socialist Movement. It follows that half-measures and small concessions are fruitless. Until now, the ruling classes regard their privileged position as quite natural and normal, as to the justice of which no doubt may be entertained. It is a matter of course, therefore, that they should object and resolutely oppose every attempt to shake their prerogatives. Even propositions and laws, that affect neither the fundamental principles of the existing social order nor the privileged position of the ruling classes, throw them into great commotion the moment their purses are or might be touched. Mountains of paper are filed in the parliaments full of speeches and printed matter, until the heaving mountains bring forth a ridiculous mouse. The simplest and most obvious questions regarding the protection of Labor are met by them with such a resistance as though the existence of society hinged on such concessions. After endless struggles a few concessions are finally wrung from them, and then they act as if they had sacrificed a large part of their fortunes. The same stubborn resistance do they display if the point is the formal recognition of the equality of the oppressed classes, to allow these, for instance, to have an equal voice with them in wage and other labor agreements. This resistance to the simplest matters and the most obvious demands confirms the old principle founded in experience, that no ruling class can be convinced by _reasoning_, until the force of circumstances drives them to sense and to submission. This force of circumstances lies in the development of society, and in the increasing intelligence awakened by this very development among the oppressed. The class-antagonism--the sketch of our social conditions has pointed them out--grow more pronounced, visible and sensible. Along therewith increases the understanding of the untenableness of the existing order among the oppressed and exploited classes; their indignation mounts higher, and, as a result thereof, also the imperious demand for a change and for improved conditions. By penetrating ever wider circles, such understanding of the situation finally conquers the vast majority of society, most directly interested in the change. In the same measure, however, as the popular understanding increases regarding the untenableness of the existing order and the necessity of its radical change, the power of resistance decreases on the part of the ruling classes, whose power rests upon ignorance and lack of intelligence on the part of the oppressed and exploited. This cross effect is evident; hence, everything that promotes it must be welcome. The progress made by large capitalization, on one side, is amply compensated, on the other, by the increasing perception by the proletariat of the contradiction in which the social order stands with the well-being of the enormous majority. The dissolution and abolition of the social antagonisms may cost extraordinary pains, sacrifices and efforts, it may depend upon factors that lie beyond the influence of the individual, or even of a class. Nevertheless, the solution is reached the moment these antagonisms have reached their acme,--a point towards which they are rushing. The measures to be adopted at the various phases of development depend upon the then conditions. It is impossible to foretell what measures may become necessary under given circumstances. No Government, no Minister, be he ever so powerful, can foresee what circumstances may require in the next few years. All the less is it possible to foretell measures, that will be influenced by circumstance, which elude all accurate calculation. The question of "measures" is a question of tactics in battle. These depend upon the enemy and upon the means at his disposal, and at mine. A measure that would be excellent to-day, may be harmful to-morrow, the circumstances that yesterday justified its application having changed to-day. With the goal in view, the means to attain it by depend upon time and tide; imperative is but the seizing of the most effective and thorough going ones that time and tide may allow. In forecasting the future, hypotheses alone are available: things must be supposed to exist that have not yet set in. _Accordingly, we suppose the arrival of a day when all the evils described will have reached such maturity that they will have become oppressingly sensible to the feeling as to the sight of the vast majority, to the extent of being no longer bearable; whereupon a general irresistible desire for a radical change will seize society, and then the quickest will be regarded the most effective remedy._ All social evils, without exception, have their source in that social order of things, which, as has been shown, rests upon capitalism, upon the capitalist system of production. Under this system, the capitalist class is the possessor of all instruments of labor--land, mines, quarries, raw material, tools, machines, means of transportation and communication--and it exploits and oppresses the vast majority of the people. The result of such abuses is an increased precariousness of livelihood, increased misery, oppression and degradation of the exploited classes. It is, consequently, necessary to convert this capitalist property into social property by means of a general expropriation. _Production for sale must be converted into socialist production, conducted for and by Society. Production on a large scale, and the increasing fertility of social labor,--until now a source of misery and of oppression for the exploited classes--must be turned into a source of highest well-being and of full and harmonious culture._ FOOTNOTES: [160] Let also one American instance be cited. It occurred on April 1, 1894, in Dolgeville, N. Y., where an employe of the "profit-sharing" concern of Alfred Dolge--at whose annual dinners Professor, now President George Gunton was regularly a star guest, and orator to the "dined" workingmen on the beauties of "profit-sharing,"--one of the workingmen, driven by the pinching poverty and incertitude inflicted upon him by the "profit-sharing" practice, killed his wife, four children and himself, and left a letter describing his plight. (See "The People," April 8, 1894)--THE TRANSLATOR. [161] As early as the days of Plato were the consequences of such conditions understood. He writes: "A nation in which classes exist, is not one, but two: one class is made up of the poor, the other of the rich, both living together, yet on the watch against each other.... In the end, the ruling class is unable to conduct a war, because it would then have to avail itself of the masses, whom, armed, it fears more than the enemy himself"; Plato, "The Republic." Aristotle says: "Widespread poverty is an evil, inasmuch as it is hardly possible to prevent such people from becoming inciters of sedition"; Aristotle, "Politics." [162] "Natuerliche Schoepfungsgeschichte." [163] Similarly Plato in "The Republic": "Crimes have their roots in want of culture, in bad education and bad social institutions." Evidently, Plato understood the nature of society better than one of his learned successors twenty-three hundred years later,--not a cheering contemplation. [164] In the sense of German industrial statistics, every employer is placed under the head of "small producer" who employs less than five persons. [165] Clemens Heiss: "Die grossen Einkommen in Deutschland." [166] Clemens Heiss, _ubi supra._ [167] Clemens Heiss: "Die grossen Einkommen in Deutschland." [168] According to the census of 1900, the capital invested in industry was 9,831 million dollars,--an increase over 1890 of 3,307 million; and the value of the industrial products was 13,010 million dollars,--an increase over 1890 of 3,640 millions.--THE TRANSLATOR. [169] Professor Adolf Wagner expresses the same thought in his first revised edition of Raus' "Lehrbuch der politischen Oekonomie." He says, p. 361: "The social question is the consciousness gained by the people of the contradiction between the economic development and the social principle of freedom and equality, that hovers over their minds as the ideal, and is realized in political life." [170] Dr. E. Sax says in his work "Die Hausindustrie in Thüringen," among other things, that in 1869 the production of 244¼ million slate pencils had given from 122,000 to 200,000 gilders in wages to the labor, but the final price paid by the consumer rose to 1,200,000 gilders; it was, accordingly, at least six times as much as the producer received. In the summer of 1888, there were 5 marks paid at first hand for 5 hundredweights of shellfish; the retailer paid the wholesale dealer 15 marks; and the public paid 125 marks. Moreover, large quantities of foodstuffs are destroyed because the prices will not pay for transportation. For instance, in years of great herring draughts, whole boatloads are turned to manure, while inland there are hundreds of thousands of people who can buy no herrings. It was likewise in 1892 with the large potato crops in California. And yet sense is claimed for such a state of things. [171] The industrial census of June 5, 1882, gives Germany 386,157 large and 154,474 small stores, a total of 531,631. In the large shops, there were 705,906 persons employed. [172] Dr. Rud. Meyer, "Das Sinken der Grundrente." [173] "Die Fideikommisse in den westlichen Provinzen Pruessens." [174] For further details see, "Das soziale Elend und die besitzenden Klassen in Oesterreich," T. W. Teisen. [175] A German idiom, expressive of dumb bewilderment, uses the simile: "Like oxen before a mountain."--THE TRANSLATOR. CHAPTER VII. THE SOCIALIZATION OF SOCIETY. The soon as possible general expropriation of all the means of production furnishes society with a new foundation. The conditions of life and labor--in manufacture, agriculture, transportation and communication, education, marriage, science, art and intercourse--are radically changed for both sexes. Human existence acquires a new sense. The present political organization gradually loses ground: the State vanishes: in a measure it abolishes itself. It was shown in the first part of this book why the State arose. It arises, as the product of a social growth, from a primitive form of society, that rested on communism and that dissolved in the measure that _private property_ developed. With the rise of private property, antagonistic interests take shape within society; in the course of its development these antagonisms lead to rank and class contrasts, and these, in turn, grow into enmities between the several groups of interests, and finally into rank and class struggles, that threaten the existence of the new social order. In order to keep down these rank and class struggles, and to protect the property-holders, an organization is requisite that parries the assaults on property, and that pronounces "legal and sacred" the property obtained under certain forms. _This organization and power, that guards and upholds property, is the State._ Through the enactment of laws it secures the owner in his ownership, and it steps as judge and avenger before him who assails the established order. By reason of its innermost being, the interest of a ruling property class, and of the Government therewith connected, is ever conservative. The organization of the State changes only when the interest of property so demands. The State is, accordingly, the _inevitably necessary_ organization of a social order that rests upon class rule. The moment class antagonisms fall through the abolition of private property, the State loses both the _necessity_ and the _possibility_ for its existence. With the removal of the conditions for rulership, the State gradually ceases to be, the same as creeds wane when the belief ceases in supernatural beings, or in transcendental powers gifted with reason. Words must have sense; if they lose that they cease to convey ideas. "Yes," interjects at this point a capitalist-minded reader, "that is all very well, but by what 'legal principle' can society justify such a change?" The legal principle is the same that ever prevailed, whenever it was the question of changes and reforms,--_public policy_. Not the State, but society is the source of right; the State is but the committee of Society, authorized to administer and dispense right. Hitherto, "Society" has been a small minority; yet it acted in the name of the whole community (the people) by pronouncing itself "Society," much as Louis XIV. pronounced himself the "State,"--"_L'état c'est moi_" (I am the State). When our newspapers announce: "The season begins; society is returning to the city," or "The season has closed; society is rushing to the country," they never mean the people, but only the upper ten thousand, who constitute "Society" as they constitute the "State." The masses are "plebs," "vile multitude," "canaille," "people." In keeping therewith, all that the State has done in the name of Society for the "public weal" has always been to the advantage and profit of the ruling class. It is in its interests that laws are framed. "_Salus reipublicae suprema lex esto_" (Let the public weal be the supreme law) is a well known legal principle of Old Rome. But who constituted the Roman Commonwealth? Did it consist of the subjugated peoples, the millions of slaves? No. A disproportionately small number of Roman citizens, foremost among these the Roman nobility, all of whom were supported by the subject class. When, in the Middle Ages, noblemen and Princes stole the common property, they did so "according to law," in the "interest of the public weal," and how drastically the common property and that of the helpless peasants was treated on the occasion we have sufficiently explained. The agrarian history of the last fifteen centuries is a narration of uninterrupted robbery perpetrated upon common and peasant property by the nobility and the Church in all the leading countries of Europe. When the French Revolution expropriated the estates of the nobility and the Church, it did so "in the name of the public weal"; and a large part of the seven million of landed estates, that are to-day the prop of modern bourgeois France, owe their existence to this expropriation. "In the name of the public weal," Spain more than once embargoed Church property, and Italy wholly confiscated the same,--both with the plaudits of the zealous defenders of "sacred property." The English nobility has for centuries been robbing the Irish and English people of their property, and, during the period of 1804-1832 made itself a present of not less than 3,511,710 acres of commons "in the interest of the public welfare." When during the great North American war for the emancipation of the negro, millions of slaves, the regular property of their masters, were declared free without indemnity to the latter, the thing was done "in the name of the public weal." Our whole capitalist development is an uninterrupted process of expropriation and confiscation, at which the manufacturer expropriates the workingman, the large landlord expropriates the peasant, the large merchant expropriates the small dealer, and finally one capitalist expropriates another, i. e., the larger expropriates and absorbs the smaller. To hear our bourgeoisie, all this happens in the interest of the "public weal," for the "good of society." The Napoleonites "saved Society" on the 18th Brumaire and 2d of December, and "Society" congratulated them. If hereafter Society shall save itself by resuming possession of the property that itself has produced, it will enact the most notable historic event--_it is not seeking to oppress some in the interest of others, but to afford to all the prerequisite for equality of existence, to make possible to each an existence worthy of human beings_. It will be morally the cleanest and most stupendous measure that human society has ever executed. In what manner this gigantic process of social expropriation will be achieved, and under what modality, eludes all surmise. Who can tell how general conditions will then be, and what the demands of public interest will be? In his fourth social letter to v. Kirchmann, entitled "Capital," Rodbertus says: "The dissolution of all capitalist property in land is no chimera; on the contrary, it is easily conceivable in national economy. It would, moreover, be the most radical aid to society, that, as might be put in a few words, is suffering of rent-rising--rent of land and capital. Hence the measure would be the only manner of abolishing property in land and capital, _a measure that would not even for a moment interrupt the commerce and progress of the nation_." What say our agrarians to this opinion of their former political co-religionist? In the contemplation of how matters will probably shape themselves along the principal lines of human activity, upon such a measure of general expropriation, there can be no question of establishing hard and fast lines, or rigid institutions. No one is able to forecast the detailed molds in which future generations may cast their social organizations, and how they will satisfy their wants. In Society as in Nature, everything is in constant flux and reflux; one thing rises, another wanes; what is old and sered is replaced with new and living forms. Inventions, discoveries and improvements, numerous and various, the bearing and significance of which often none can tell, are made from day to day, come into operation, and, each in its own way, they revolutionize and transform human life and all society. We can, accordingly, be concerned only with general principles, that flow inevitably from the preceding _expose_, and whose enforcement may be supervised, up to a certain point. If even hitherto society has been no automatic entity, leadable and guidable by an individual, much as appearances often pointed the other way; if even hitherto those who imagined they pushed were themselves pushed; if even hitherto society was an organism, that developed according to certain inherent laws;--if that was hitherto the case, in the future all guiding and leading after individual caprice is all the more out of question. Society will have discovered the secret of its own being, it will have discovered the laws of its own progress, and it will apply these consciously towards its own further development. So soon as society is in possession of all the means of production, _the duty to work, on the part of all able to work, without distinction of sex, becomes the organic law of socialized society_. Without work society can not exist. Hence, society has the right to demand that all, who wish to satisfy their wants, shall exert themselves, according to their physical and mental faculties, in the production of the requisite wealth. The silly claim that the Socialist does not wish to work, that he seeks to abolish work, is a matchless absurdity, which fits our adversaries alone. Non-workers, idlers, exist in capitalist society _only_. Socialism agrees with the Bible that "He who will not work, neither shall he eat." But work shall not be mere activity; it shall be useful, productive activity. The new social system will demand that each and all pursue some industrial, agricultural or other useful occupation, whereby to furnish a certain amount of work towards the satisfaction of existing wants. _Without work no pleasure, no pleasure without work._ All being obliged to work, all have an equal interest in seeing the following three conditions of work in force:-- First, that work shall be moderate, and shall overtax none; Second, that work shall be as agreeable and varied as possible; Third, that work shall be as productive as possible, seeing that both the hours of work and fruition hinge upon that. These three conditions hinge, in turn, upon the nature and the number of the productive powers that are available, and also upon the aspirations of society. But Socialist society does not come into existence for the purpose of living in proletarian style; _it comes into existence in order to abolish the proletarian style of life of the large majority of humanity_. It seeks to afford to each and all the fullest possible measure of the amenities of life. The question that does rise is, How high will the aspirations of society mount? In order to determine this, an administration is requisite that shall embrace all the fields of social activity. Our municipalities constitute an effective basis thereto: if they are too large to allow a ready supervision, they can be divided into wards. As in primitive society, all members of the community who are of age participate in the elections, _without distinction of sex_, and have a voice in the choice of the persons who are to be entrusted with the administration. At the head of all the local administrations stands the central administration--as will be noted, not a Government, with power to rule, but an executive college of administrative functions. Whether the central administration shall be chosen directly by popular vote or appointed by the local administration is immaterial. These questions will not then have the importance they have to-day: the question is then no longer one of filling posts that bestow special honor, or that vest the incumbent with greater power and influence, or that yield larger incomes: it is then a question of filling positions of trust, for which the fittest, whether male or female, are taken; and these may be recalled or re-elected as circumstances may demand, or the electors may deem preferable. All posts are for given terms. The incumbents are, accordingly, clothed with no special "official qualities"; the feature of continuity of office is absent, likewise a hierarchical order of promotion. Hence it is also immaterial to us whether there shall be middle stages, say provincial administrations, between the central and the local administrations. If they are deemed necessary, they are set up; if they are not deemed necessary, they are left alone. All such matters are decided by actual exigencies, as ascertained in practice. If the progress of society has rendered any old organization superfluous, it is abolished without further ado and dispute, there being no longer any personal interest in conflict; and new ones are similarly established. Obviously, _such an administration, resting upon the broadest democratic foundation, differs radically from what we have to-day_. What a battle of newspapers, what a war of tongues in our parliaments, what mountains of public documents in our bureaus, if but a trivial change is made in the administration or the Government! The principal thing to ascertain is the number and the nature of the forces that are available, the quantity and nature of the means of production,--the factories, workshops, means of transportation and communication, land--and also their productivity. The next thing to ascertain is the quantity of the supplies that are on hand and the extent to which these can satisfy the wants of society. As to-day the State and the several municipalities yearly cast up their budgets, the thing will then be done with an eye to all the wants of society, without thereby excluding changes that increased or new wants may demand. Statistics here play the chief _role_: they become the most important subsidiary science of the new order: they furnish the measure for all social activities. Statistics are extensively used to-day for similar purposes. The Imperial, State and municipal budgets are based upon a large amount of statistical reports, made yearly by the several administrative branches. Long experience and a certain degree of stability in the running wants facilitate their gathering. Every operator of a large factory, every merchant is, under normal conditions, able to determine accurately what he will need during the next three months, and how he should regulate his production and purchases. Unless excessive changes set in, his calculations will be found safe. The experience that crises are caused by blind, anarchic production, i. e., that production is carried on without a knowledge of the volume of supply, of sales and of demand of and for the several goods in the world's market, has, as indicated in previous passages, caused large manufacturers in several branches of industry to join in Trusts and rings, partly with the view of steadying prices, partly also for the purpose of regulating production by the light of previous experience and of the orders received. According to the capability of each establishment and to the probable demand, the output of each is determined for the next few months. Infractions are punished with heavy conventional mulcts, and even expulsion. The capitalists do not conclude these agreements for the benefit of the public, but to its injury and to their own profit. Their purpose is to utilize the power of combination in order to secure the greatest advantages to themselves. This regulation of production has for its object to enable the capitalist to demand from the public prices that could not be got if the competitive struggle was on between the several capitalists. These enrich themselves at the expense of the consumers who are forced to pay whatever price is demanded for the goods they need. As the consumer, so is the workingman injured by the Trusts. The artificial regulation of production throws a part of the working class out of work, and, in order that these may live, they underbid their fellows at work. Thus the employer derives a double advantage: he receives higher prices, and he pays lower wages. Such a regulation of production by combinations of capitalists _is exactly the reverse of that which will be practiced in Socialist society_. While to-day the interests of the capitalists is the determining factor, the interests of all will then be the guide. Production will then be carried on for the satisfaction of human wants, and not in order to obtain, through high prices, large profits for private individuals. Nevertheless, the best planned combination in capitalist society can not take in and control all the factors needed in the calculation: competition and speculation run wild despite all combinations: finally the discovery is made that the calculation had a leak, and the scheme breaks down. The same as production on a large scale, commerce also has extensive statistics. Every week the larger centers of commerce and the ports publish reports on the supply of petroleum, coffee, cotton, sugar, grain, etc. These statistics are frequently inaccurate, seeing that the owners of the goods frequently have a personal interest in concealing the truth. On the whole, however, the statistics are pretty safe and furnish to those interested, information on the condition of the market. But here also speculation steps in, upsets all calculations, and often renders all legitimate business impossible. Seeing how impossible is a general regulation of production in capitalist society, due to the existence of many thousands of private producers with conflicting interests, it will be obvious why the speculative nature of commerce, the number of merchants and their conflicting interests render equally impossible the regulation of distribution. Nevertheless, what is done in these directions indicates what could be done so soon as private interest were to drop out and the interests of all were alone dominant. A proof of this is furnished by the statistics of crops, that are yearly issued by the leading countries of civilization, and that enable certain general conclusions to be drawn upon the size of the crops, the extent that they will supply the demand, and the probable price. In a socialized society matters are fully regulated; society is held in fraternal bonds. Everything is done in order; there, it is an easy matter to gauge demand. With a little experience, the thing is easy as play. If, for instance, the demand is statistically established for bread, meat, shoes, linen, etc., and, on the other hand, the productivity of the respective plants is equally known, _the average daily amount of socially necessary labor is thereby ascertained. The figures would, furthermore, point out where more plants for the production of a certain article may be needed, or where such may be discontinued as superfluous, or turned to other purposes._ Everyone decides the pursuit he chooses: the large number of different fields of activity caters to the tastes of all. If on one field there is a surplus and on another a dearth of labor-power, the administration attends to the equalization of forces. To organize production, and to furnish the several powers with the opportunity to apply themselves at the right places will be the principal task of these functionaries. In the measure that the several forces are broken in, the wheels will move with greater smoothness. The several branches and divisions of labor choose their foremen, who superintend the work. These are no slave-drivers, like most foremen of to-day; they are fellow workers, who, instead of a productive, exercise an administrative function entrusted to them. The idea is by no means excluded that, with the attainment of higher perfection, both in point of organization and of individuals, these functions should alternate so that, within a certain time, and in certain order, they are filled by all _regardless of sex_. A system of labor, organized upon a plan of such absolute liberty and democratic equality, where each stands for all, and all stand for each, and where the sense of solidarity reigns supreme,--such a system would generate a spirit of industry and of emulation nowhere to be found in the modern economic system. Nor could such a spirit of industry fail to react both upon the productivity of labor and the quality of labor's product. Furthermore--seeing that all are mutually active--the interest becomes general in the best and most complete, as well as in the quickest possible production of goods, with the object of saving labor, and of gaining time for the production of further wealth, looking to the gratification of higher wants. _Such a common interest spurs all to bend their thoughts towards simplifying and quickening the process of labor. The ambition to invent and discover is stimulated to the highest pitch: each will seek to outdo the other in propositions and ideas._[176] Just the reverse will, accordingly, happen of which the adversaries of Socialism claim. How many are not the inventors and discoverers who go to pieces in the capitalist world! How many has it not exploited and then cast aside! If talent and intellect, instead of property, stood at the head of bourgeois society, _the larger part of the employers would have to make room for their workingmen, master mechanics, technical overseers, engineers, chemists, etc._ These are the men, who, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, make the inventions, discoveries and improvements, which the man with the money-bag exploits. How many thousands of discoverers and inventors have gone to pieces unable to find the man of means ready to provide the wherewithal for the execution of their thoughts; how many germs of inventions and discoveries have been and continue to be nipped by the social stress for bare existence, is a matter that eludes all calculation. Not the men of head and brain, but those of large wealth are to-day the masters of the world,--which, however, does not exclude the occasional and exceptional phenomenon of brains and wealth being united in one person. The exception only proves the rule. Everyone in practical life knows with what suspicion the workingman to-day regards every improvement, every invention introduced in the shop. And he is right. He rarely derives any advantage therefrom; it all accrues to the employer. The workingman is assailed with the fear lest the new machine, the new improvement cast him off to-morrow as superfluous. Instead of gladsome applause for an invention that does honor to man and is fraught with benefit for the race, he only has a malediction on his lips. We also know, from personal experience, how many an improvement perceived by the workingman, is not introduced: the workingman keeps silent, fearing to derive no benefit but only harm from it. Such are the natural consequences of an antagonism of interests.[177] This antagonism of interests is removed in Socialist society. Each unfolds his faculties in his own interest, and, by so doing, simultaneously benefits the commonweal. To-day personal gratification is generally antagonistic to the common weal; the two exclude each other. In the new Order, the antagonisms are removed: _The gratification of the ego and the promotion of the common weal harmonize, they supplement each other._[178] The marvelous effect of such a mental and moral condition is obvious. The productivity of labor will rise mightily, and such increased productivity makes possible the satisfaction of higher wants. Especially will the productivity of labor rise through the discontinuance of the present and enormous disintegration of labor, in hundreds of thousands, even millions of petty establishments, conducted with imperfect tools. According to the industrial census of the German Empire for the year 1882, there were 3,005,457 leading establishments, exclusive of commerce, transportation, hotels and inns, in which 6,396,465 persons were occupied. Of these leading establishments, 61.1 per cent. employed less than 5 persons, and 16.8 per cent. employed from 6 to 50 persons. The former are small concerns, the latter middle class ones. Through the concentration of the small and middle class establishments into large ones, equipped with all the advantages of modern technique, an enormous waste in power, time, material (light, heat, etc.) space, now incurred, would be avoided, and the productivity of labor would gain proportionally. What difference there is in the productivity of small, middle class and large establishments, even where modern technique is applied, may be illustrated by the census of manufactories of the State of Massachusetts for 1890. The establishments in ten leading industries were divided into three classes. Those that produced less than $40,000 worth of goods were placed in the lowest class; those that produced from $40,000 to $150,000 were placed in the middle class; and those that produced over $150,000 worth of goods were placed in the upper class. The result was this:-- Number of Percentage Productivity Percentage Establishments. of All of of Total Classes. Establishments. Each Class. Productivity. Lower 2,042 55.2 51,660,617 9.4 Middle 968 26.2 106,868,635 19.5 Upper 686 18.6 390,817,300 71.1 ----- ----- ----------- ----- 3,696 100.0 549,346,552 100.0 The more than twice as large number of small establishments turned out only 9.4 per cent. of the total product. But even the large establishments could, with hardly any exception, be conducted far more rationally than now, so that, under a system of collective production, aided by the most highly perfected technical process, an infinitely larger demand could be supplied. Upon the subject of the saving of time, possible under a system of production planted on a rational basis, Th. Hertzka of Vienna has made some interesting calculations.[179] He investigated the amount of labor-power and time requisite for the satisfaction of the wants of the 22 million inhabitants of Austria by means of production on a large scale. To this end Hertzka gathered information upon the capacity of large establishments in several fields, and he based his calculations upon the data thus ascertained. In Hertzka's calculation are included 10,500,000 hectares of agricultural and 3,000,000 hectares of pasture lands, that should suffice for the production of agricultural products and of meat for the said population. Hertzka also included in his computation the building of houses on the basis of a house of 150 square meters, 5 rooms and strong enough to last 50 years, to each family. The result was that, for agricultural, building, the production of flour, sugar, coal, iron, machinery, clothing and chemicals, only 615,000 workingmen were needed, at work the whole year and at the present average hours of daily labor. These 615,000 workingmen are, however, _only 12.3 per cent. of the population of Austria, capable to work, exclusive of all the women as well as the males under 16 and over 50 years of age_. If all the 5,000,000 men, and not merely the above figure of 615,000, were engaged, then, _each of them would need to work only 36.9 days--six weeks in round figures_--in order to produce the necessaries of life for 22 million people. Assuming 300 work days in the year, instead of 37, and 11 as the present daily hours of work, it follows that, under this new organization of labor, _only 1-3/8 hours a day would be needed to cover the most pressing needs of all_. Hertzka further computes the articles of luxury that the better situated demand, and he finds that the production of the same for 22 million people would require an additional 315,000 workingmen. Altogether, according to Hertzka, and making allowance for some industries that are not properly represented in Austria, one million in round figures, equal to 20 per cent. of the male population able to work, exclusive of those under 16 and above 50 years of age, would suffice to cover _all the needs of the population_ in 60 days. If, again, the whole male population able to work is made the basis of the computation, these would need to furnish but _two and a half hours work a day_.[180] This computation will surprise none who take a comprehensive view of things. Considering, then, that, at such moderate hours, even the men 50 years old--all the sick and invalid excepted--are able to work; furthermore, that also youths under 16 years of age could be partially active, as well as a large number of women, in so far as these are not otherwise engaged in the education of children, the preparation of food, etc.;--considering all that, it follows that even these hours could be considerably lowered, or the demand for wealth could be considerably increased. None will venture to claim that no more and unforeseen progress, and considerable progress, at that, is possible in the process of production, thus furnishing still greater advantages. But the issue now is to satisfy a mass of wants felt by all that to-day are satisfied only by a minority. With higher culture ever newer wants arise, and these too should be met. We repeat it: _the new Social order is not to live in proletarian style; it lives as a highly developed people demand to live, and it makes the demand in all its members from the first to the last_. But such a people can not rest content with satisfying merely its material wants. All its members are to be allowed fullest leisure for their development in the arts and sciences, as well as for their recreation. Also in other important respects will Socialist society differ from the bourgeois individualist system. The motto: "Cheap and bad"--which is and must be standard for a large portion of bourgeois production, seeing that the larger part of the customers can buy only cheap goods, that quickly wear out--likewise drops out. Only the best will be produced; it will last longer and will need replacing at only wider intervals. The follies and insanities of fashion, promoted by wastefulness and tastelessness, also cease. People will probably clothe themselves more properly and sightfully than to-day, when, be it said in passing, the fashions of the last hundred years, especially as to men, distinguish themselves by their utter tastelessness. No longer will a new fashion be introduced every three months, an act of folly that stands in intimate relation with the competitive struggle of women among themselves, with the ostentatiousness and vanity of society, and with the necessity for the display of wealth. To-day a mass of establishments and people live upon this folly of fashion, and are compelled by their own interests to stimulate and force it. Together with the folly of fashion in dress, falls the folly of fashion in the style of architecture. Eccentricity reaches here its worst expression. Styles of architecture that required centuries for their development and that sprang up among different peoples--we are no longer satisfied with European styles, we go to the Japanese, Indians and Chinese--are used up in a few decades and laid aside. Our poor professional artists no longer know whither and whereto they should turn with and for their samples and models. Hardly have they assorted themselves with one style, and expect to recover with ease the outlays they have made, when a new style breaks in upon them, and demands new sacrifices of time and money, of mental and physical powers. The nervousness of the age is best reflected in the rush from one fashion to the other, from one style to the other. No one will dare to claim any sense for such hurrying and scurrying, or the merit of its being a symptom of social health. _Socialism alone will re-introduce a greater stability in the habits of life._ It will make repose and enjoyment possible; it will be a liberator from hurry and excessive exertion. Nervousness, that scourge of our age, will disappear. But labor is also to be made pleasant. To that end practical and tastefully contrived workshops are required; the utmost precautions against danger; the removal of disagreeable odors, gases and smoke,--in short, of all sources of injury or discomfort to health. At the start, the new social system will carry on production with the old means, inherited from the old. But these are utterly inadequate. Numerous and unsuitable workshops, disintegrated in all directions; imperfect tools and machinery, running through all the stages of usefulness;--this heap is insufficient both for the number of the workers and for their demands of comfort and of pleasure. The establishment of a large number of spacious, light, airy, fully equipped and ornamented workshops is a pressing need. Art, technique, skill of head and hand immediately find a wide field of activity. All departments in the building of machinery, in the fashioning of tools, in architecture and in the branches of work connected with the internal equipment of houses have the amplest opportunity. Whatever human genius can invent with regard to comfortable and pleasant homes, proper ventilation, lighting and heating, mechanical and technical provisions and cleanliness is brought into application. The saving of motor power, heating, lighting, time, as well as the promotion of all that tends to render work and life agreeable, demand a suitable concentration of the fields of labor on certain spots. Habitations are separated from places of work and are freed from the disagreeable features of industrial and other manual work. These disagreeable features are, in their turn, reduced to the lowest measure possible by means of suitable arrangements and provisions of all sorts, until wholly removed. The present state of technique has now means enough at command to wholly free from danger the most dangerous occupations, such as mining and the preparation of chemicals, etc. But these means can not be applied in capitalist society because they are expensive, and there is no obligation to do more than what is absolutely necessary for the workingman. The discomforts attached to mining can be removed by means of a different sort of draining, of extensive ventilation, of electric lighting, of a material reduction of hours of work, and of frequent shifts. Nor does it require any particular cleverness to find such protective means as would render building accidents almost impossible, and transform work in that line into the most exhilarating of all. Ample protections against sun and rain are possible in the construction of the largest edifices. Furthermore, in a society with ample labor-power at its disposal, such as Socialist society would be, frequent shifts and the concentration of certain work upon certain seasons of the year and certain hours of day would be an easy matter. The problem of removing dust, smoke, soot and odors could likewise be completely solved by modern chemistry and technique; it is solved only partially or not at all, simply because the private employers care not to make the necessary sacrifice of funds. The work-places of the future, wherever located, whether above or under ground, will, accordingly, distinguish themselves most favorably from those of to-day. Many contrivances are, under the existing system of private enterprise, first of all, a question of money: can the business bear the expenditure? Will it pay? If the answer is in the negative, then let the workingmen go to pieces. Capital does not operate where there is no profit. Humanity is not an "issue" on the Exchange.[181] The question of "profit" has exhausted its _role_ in Socialist society: _in Socialist society the only consideration is the welfare of its members_. Whatever is beneficent to these and protects them must be introduced; whatever injures them must stop. None is forced to join in a dangerous game. If matters are undertaken that have dangers in prospect, volunteers will be numerous, all the more so seeing that the object can never be to the injury, but only to the promotion of civilization. The amplest application of motor powers and of the best machinery and implements, the utmost subdivision of labor, and the most efficient combinations of labor-power will, accordingly, carry production to such pitch that the hours of work can be materially reduced in the production of the necessaries of life. The capitalist lengthens the hours of labor, whenever he can, especially during crises, when the worker's power of resistance is broken, and by squeezing more surplus values out of him, prices may be lowered. In Socialist society, an increase of production accrues to the benefit of all: _The share of each rises with the productivity of labor and increased productivity again makes possible the reduction of the hours of work, socially determined as necessary._ Among the motor powers that are coming into application, electricity will, according to all appearances, take a decisive place.[182] Capitalist society is now everywhere engaged in harnessing it to its service. The more extensively this is done the better. The revolutionizing effect of this mightiest of all the powers of Nature will but all the sooner snap the bonds of bourgeois society, and open the doors to Socialism. But only in Socialist society will electricity attain its fullest and most widespread application. If the prospects now opened for its application are even but partially realized--and on that head there can be no doubt--electricity, as a motor power as well as a source of light and heat, will contribute immeasurably towards the improvement of the conditions of life. Electricity distinguishes itself from all other motor power in that, above all, its supply in Nature is abundant. Our water courses, the ebb and tide of the sea, the winds, the sun-light--all furnish innumerable horse-powers, the moment we know how to utilize them in full. Through the invention of accumulators it has been proved that large volumes of power, which can be appropriated only periodically, from the ebbs and tides, the winds and mountain streams, can be stored up and kept for use at any given place and any given time. All these inventions and discoveries are still in embryo: their full development may be surmised, but can not be forecast in detail. The progress expected from the application of electricity sounds like a fairy tale. Mr. Meems of Baltimore has planned an electric wagon able to travel 300 kilometers an hour--actually race with the wind. Nor does Mr. Meems stand alone. Prof. Elihu Thomson of Lynn, Mass., also believes it possible to construct electromotors of a velocity of 160 kilometers, and, with suitable strengthening of the rolling stock and improvement of the signal system, of a velocity of 260 kilometers; and he has given a plausible explanation of his system. The same scientist holds, and in this Werner Siemens, who expressed similar views at the Berlin Convention of Naturalists in 1887, agrees with him, that it is possible by means of electricity _to transform the chemical elements directly into food_--a revolution that would hoist capitalist society off its hinges. While in 1887 Werner Siemens was of the opinion that it was possible, though only in the remote future, to produce artificially a hydrate of carbon such as grape sugar and later the therewith closely related starch, whereby "bread could be made out of stone," the chemist Dr. B. Meyer claims that ligneous fibre could eventually be turned into a source of human food. Obviously, we are moving towards ever newer chemical and technical revolutions. In the meantime, the physiologist E. Eiseler has actually produced grape sugar artificially, and thus made a discovery that, in 1887, Werner Siemens considered possible only in the "remote future." In the spring of 1894, the French ex-Minister of Public Worship, Prof. Berthelot, delivered an address in Paris at the banquet of the Association of Chemical Manufacturers upon the significance of chemistry in the future. The address is interesting in more respects than one. Prof. Berthelot sketched the probable state of chemistry at about the year 2000. While his sketch contains many a droll exaggeration, it does contain so much that is serious and sound that we shall present it in extract. After describing the achievements of chemistry during the last few decades, Prof. Berthelot went on to say:-- "The manufacture of sulphuric acids and of soda, bleaching and coloring, beet sugar, therapeutic alkaloids, gas, gilding and silvering, etc.; then came electro-chemistry, whereby metallurgy was radically revolutionized; thermo-chemistry and the chemistry of explosives, whereby fresh energy was imparted to mining and to war; the wonders of organic chemistry in the production of colors, of flavors, of therapeutic and antiseptic means, etc. But all that is only a start: soon much more important problems are to be solved. About the year 2000 there will be no more agriculture and no more farmers: chemistry will have done away with the former cultivation of the soil. There will be no more coal-shafts, consequently, neither will there be any more miners' strikes. Fuel is produced by chemical and physical processes. Tariffs and wars are abolished: aerial navigation, that helped itself to chemicals as motor power, pronounced the sentence of death upon those obsolete habits. The whole problem of industry then consists in discovering sources of power, that are inexhaustible and resortable to with little labor. Until now we have produced steam through the chemical energy of burning mineral coal. But mineral coal is hard to get and its supply decreases daily. Attention must be turned towards utilizing the heat of the sun and of the earth's crust. The hope is justified that both sources will be drawn upon without limit. The boring of a shaft 3,000 to 4,000 meters deep does not exceed the power of modern, less yet it will exceed that of future engineers. The source of all heat and of all industry would be thus thrown open. Add water to that, and all imaginable machinery may be put in perpetual operation on earth: the source of this power would experience hardly any diminution in hundreds of years. "With the aid of the earth's heat, numerous chemical problems will become solvable, among these the greatest of all--_the chemical production of food_. In principle, the problem is solved now. The synthesis of fats and oils has been long known; likewise are sugar and hydrates of carbon known; nor will it be long before the secret of compounding azote is out. The food problem is a purely chemical one. The day when the corresponding cheap power shall have been obtained, food of all sort will be producable with carbon out of carbon oxides, and with hydrogen and acids out of water, and with nitrogen out of the atmosphere. What until now vegetation has done, industry will thenceforth perform, and more perfectly than Nature itself. The time will come when everyone will carry about him a little box of chemicals wherewith to provide his food supply of albumen, fat and hydrates of carbon, regardless of the hour of the day or the season of the year, regardless of rain or drought, of frost or hail, or insects. A revolution will then set in of which no conception is so far possible. Fields bearing fruit, wine-bearing mountain slopes and pastures for cattle will have vanished. Man will have gained in gentleness and morality seeing he no longer lives on the murder and destruction of living beings. Then also will the difference drop away between fertile and barren districts; perchance deserts may then become the favorite homes of man being healthier than the damp valleys and the swamp-infected plains. Then also will Art, together with all the beauties of human life reach full development. No longer will the face of earth be marred, so to speak, with geometrical figures, now entailed by agriculture: it will become a garden in which, at will, grass or flowers, bush or woods, can be allowed to grow, and in which the human race will live in plenty, in a Golden Age. Nor will man thereby sink into indolence and corruption. Work is requisite to happiness, and man will work as much as ever, because he will be working for himself aiming at the highest development of his mental, moral and esthetical powers." Every reader may accept what he please of this address of Prof. Berthelot; certain, however, is the prospect that in the future and in virtue of the progress of science, wealth--the volume and variety of products--will increase enormously, and that the pleasures of life of the coming generations will take undreamed of increment. An aspiration, deeply implanted in the nature of man, is that of freedom in the choice and change of occupation. As uninterrupted repetition renders the daintiest of dishes repulsive, so with a daily treadmill-like recurring occupation: it dulls and relaxes the senses. Man then does only mechanically what he must do; he does it without swing or enjoyment. There are latent in all men faculties and desires that need but to be awakened and developed to produce the most beautiful results. Only then does man become fully and truly man. Towards the satisfaction of this need of change, Socialist society offers, as will be shown, the fullest opportunity. The mighty increase of productive powers, coupled with an ever progressing simplification of the process of labor, not only enables a considerable lowering of hours of work, it also _facilitates the acquisition of skill in many directions_. The old apprentice system has survived its usefulness: it exists to-day only and is possible only in backward, old-fashioned forms of production, as represented by the small handicrafts. Seeing, however, that this vanishes from the new social Order, all the institutions and forms peculiar thereto vanish along with it. New ones step in. Every factory shows us to-day how few are its workingmen, still engaged at a work that they have been apprenticed in. The employes are of the most varied, heterogeneous trades; a short time suffices to train them in any sub-department of work, at which, in accord with the ruling system of exploitation, they are then kept at work longer hours, without change or regard to their inclinations, and, lashed to the machine, become themselves a machine.[183] Such a state of things has no place in a changed organization of society. There is ample time for the acquisition of dexterity of hand and the exercise of artistic skill. Spacious training schools, equipped with all necessary comforts and technical perfections will facilitate to young and old the acquisition of any trade. Chemical and physical laboratories, up to all the demands of these sciences, and furnished with ample staffs of instructors will be in existence. Only then will be appreciated to its full magnitude what a world of ambitions and faculties the capitalist system of production suppresses, or forces awry into mistaken paths.[184] It is not merely possible to have a regard for the need of change; it is the purpose of society to realize its satisfaction: the harmonious growth of man depends upon that. The professional physiognomies that modern society brings to the surface--whether the profession be in certain occupations of some sort or other, or in gluttony and idleness, or in compulsory tramping--will gradually vanish. There are to-day precious few people with any opportunity of change in their occupations, or who exercise the same. Occasionally, individuals are found who, favored by circumstances, withdraw from the routine of their daily pursuits and, after having paid their tribute to physical, recreate themselves with intellectual work; and conversely, brain workers are met off and on, who seek and find change in physical labors of some sort or other, handwork, gardening, etc. Every hygienist will confirm the invigorating effect of a pursuit that rests upon alternating physical and mental work; only such a pursuit is natural. The only qualification is that it be moderately indulged, and in proportion to the strength of the individual. Leo Tolstoi lashes the hypertrophic and unnatural character that art and science have assumed under the unnatural conditions of modern society.[185] He severely condemns the contempt for physical labor, entertained in modern society, and he recommends a return to natural conditions. Every being, who means to live according to the laws of nature and enjoy life, should divide the day between, first, physical field labor; secondly, hand work; thirdly, mental work; fourthly, cultured and companionable intercourse. More than eight hours' physical work should not be done. Tolstoi, who practices this system of life, and who, as he says, has felt himself human only since he put it into practice, perceives only what is possible to him, a rich, independent man, but wholly impossible to the large mass of mankind, under existing conditions. The person who must do hard physical work every day ten, twelve and more hours, to gain a meager existence, and who was brought up in ignorance, can not furnish himself with the Tolstoian system of life. Neither can they, who are on the firing line of business life and are compelled to submit to its exactions. The small minority who could imitate Tolstoi have, as a rule, no need to do so. It is one of the illusions that Tolstoi yields to, the belief that social systems can be changed by preaching and example. The experiences made by Tolstoi with his system of life prove how rational the same is; in order, however, to introduce such a system of life as a social custom, a social foundation is requisite other than the present. It requires a new society. _Future society will have such a foundation; it will have scientists and artists of all sorts in abundance; but all of them will work physically a part of the day, and devote the rest, according to their liking, to study, the arts or companionable intercourse._[186] The existing contrast between mental and manual labor--a contrast that the ruling classes seek to render as pronounced as possible with the view of securing for themselves also the intellectual means of sovereignty--will likewise be removed. It follows from the preceding arguments that crises and compulsory idleness are impossible phenomena in the new social Order. Crises arise from the circumstance that individualist, capitalist production--incited by profit and devoid of all reliable gauge with which to ascertain the actual demand--brings an overstocking of the world's market, and thus overproduction. The merchandise feature of the products under capitalism, of the products that their owners endeavor to exchange, makes the use of the product dependent upon the consumer's _capacity to buy_. The capacity to buy is, however, limited, in so far as the overwhelming majority are concerned, they being under-paid for their labor, or even wholly unable to sell the same if the capitalist does not happen to be able to squeeze a surplus value out of it. _The capacity to buy and the capacity to consume are two wholly distinct things in capitalist society._ Many millions of people are in want of clothes, shoes, furniture, linen, eatables and drinkables, but they have no money, and their wants, i. e., their capacity to consume, remains unsatisfied. The market is glutted with goods, but the masses suffer hunger; they are willing to work, but they find none to buy their labor-power because the holder of money sees nothing to "make" in the purchase. "Die, canaille; become vagabonds, criminals! I, the capitalist, can not help it. I have no use for goods that I have no purchaser to buy from me with corresponding profit." And, in a way, the man is right. In the new social Order this contradiction is wiped out. Socialist society produces not "merchandise," in order to "buy" and to "sell;" _it produces necessaries of life, that are used, consumed, and otherwise have no object_. In Socialist society, accordingly, the capacity to consume is not bounded, as in bourgeois society, by the individual's capacity to buy; _it is bounded by the collective capacity to produce_. If labor and instruments of labor are in existence, all wants can be satisfied; the social capacity to consume is bounded only by _the satisfaction of the consumers_. There being no "merchandise" in Socialist society, neither can there be any "money." Money is the visible contrast of merchandise; yet itself is merchandise! Money, though itself merchandise, is at the same time the social equivalent for all other articles of merchandise. But Socialist society produces no articles of merchandise, only articles of use and necessity, whose production requires a certain measure of social labor. The time, on an average requisite for the production of an article is the only standard by which it is measured for social use. Ten minutes social labor in one article are equal to ten minutes social labor in another--neither more nor less. Society is not "on the make"; it only seeks to effect among its members the exchange of articles of equal quality, equal utility. It need not even set up a standard of use value. It merely produces what it needs. If society finds that a three-hour work day is requisite for the production of all that is needed, it establishes such a term of work.[187] If the methods of production improve in such wise that the supply can be raised in two hours, the two-hour work day is established. If, on the contrary, society demands the gratification of higher wants than, despite the increase of forces and the improved productivity of the process of labor, can be satisfied with two or three hours work, then the four-hour day is introduced. Its will is law. How much social labor will be requisite for the production of any article is easily computed.[188] The relation of the part to the whole of the working time is measured accordingly. Any voucher--a printed piece of paper, gold or tin--certifies to the time spent in work, and enables its possessor to exchange it for articles of various kinds.[189] If he finds that his wants are smaller than what he receives for his labor, he then works proportionally shorter hours. If he wishes to give away what he does not consume, nothing hinders him. If he is disposed to work for another out of his own free will, so that the latter may revel in the _dolce far niente_,--if he chooses to be such a blockhead, nothing hinders him. But none can compel him to work for another; none can withhold from him a part of what is due him for labor performed. Everyone can satisfy all his legitimate desires--only not at the expense of others. He receives the equivalent of what he has rendered to society--neither more nor less, and he remains free from all exploitation by third parties. "But what becomes of the difference between the lazy and the industrious? between the intelligent and the stupid?" That is one of the principal questions from our opponents, and the answer gives them no slight headache. That this distinction between the "lazy" and the "industrious," the "intelligent" and the "stupid" is not made in our civil service hierarchy, but that the term of service decides in the matter of salary and generally of promotion also--these are facts that occur to none of these would-be puzzlers and wiseacres. The teachers, the professors--and as a rule the latter are the silliest questioners--move into their posts, not according to their own qualities, but according to the salaries that these posts bring. That promotions in the army and in the hierarchies of the civil service and the learned professions are often made, not according to worth, but according to birth, friendship and female influence, is a matter of public notoriety. That, however, wealth also is not measured by diligence and intelligence may be judged by the Berlin inn-keepers, bakers and butchers, to whom grammar often is a mystery, and who figure in the first of the three classes of the Prussian electorate, while the intellectuals of Berlin, the men of science, the highest magistrates of the Empire and the State, vote with the second class. There is not now any difference between the "lazy" and the "diligent," the "intelligent" and the "stupid" for the simple reason that what is understood by these terms exists no longer. A "lazy" fellow society only calls him who has been thrown out of work, is compelled to lead a vagabond's life and finally does become a vagabond, or who, grown up under improper training, sinks into vice. But to style "lazy fellow" the man who rolls in money and kills the day with idleness or debauchery, would be an insult: he is a "worthy and good man." How do matters stand in Socialist society? All develop under equal conditions, and each is active in that to which inclination and skill point him, whence differences in work will be but insignificant.[190] The intellectual and moral atmosphere of society, which stimulates all to excel one another, likewise aids in equalizing such differences. If any person finds that he cannot do as much as others on a certain field, he chooses another that corresponds with his strength and faculties. Whoever has worked with a large number of people in one establishment knows that men who prove themselves unfit and useless in a certain line, do excellent work in another. There is no normally constructed being who fails to meet the highest demands in one line or another, the moment he finds himself in the right place. By what right does any claim precedence over another? If any one has been treated so step-motherly by Nature that with the best will he can not do what others can, _Society has no right to punish him for the shortcomings of Nature_. If, on the contrary, a person has received from Nature gifts that raise him above others, _Society is not obliged to reward what is not his personal desert_. In Socialist society all enjoy equal conditions of life and opportunities for education; all are furnished the same opportunities to develop their knowledge and powers according to their respective capacities and inclinations. In this lies a further guarantee that not only will the standard of culture and powers be higher in Socialist than in bourgeois society, but also that both will be more equally distributed and yet be much more manifold. When, on a journey up the Rhine, Goethe studied the Cathedral of Cologne, he discovered in the archives that the old master-builders paid their workmen equal wages for equal time. They did so because they wished to get good and conscientious work. This looks like an anomaly to modern bourgeois society. It introduced the system of piece-work, that drives the workingmen to out-work one another, and thus aids the employer in underpaying and in reducing wages. As with manual, so with mental work. Man is the product of the time and circumstances that he lives in. A Goethe, born under equally favorable conditions in the fourth, instead of the eighteenth, century might have become, instead of a distinguished poet and naturalist, a great Father of the Church, who might have thrown St. Augustine into the shade. If, on the other hand, instead of being the son of a rich Frankfort patrician, Goethe had been born the son of a poor shoemaker of the same town, he never would have become the Minister of the Grand Duke of Weimar, but would probably have remained a shoemaker, and died an honorable member of the craft. Goethe himself recognized the advantage he had in being born in a materially and socially favorable station in order to reach his stage of development. It so appears in his "Wilhelm Meister." Were Napoleon I. born ten years later, he never would have been Emperor of France. Without the war of 1870-1871, Gambetta had never become what he did become. Place the naturally gifted child of intelligent parents among savages, and he becomes a savage. _Whatever a man is, society has made him._ Ideas are not creations that spring from the head of the individual out of nothing, or through inspiration from above; they are products of social life, of the _Spirit of the Age_, raised in the head of the individual. An Aristotle could not possibly have the ideas of a Darwin, and a Darwin could not choose but think otherwise than an Aristotle. Man thinks according as the Spirit of the Age, i. e., his surroundings and the phenomena that they present to him drive him to think. Hence the experience of different people often thinking simultaneously the same thing, of the same inventions and discoveries being made simultaneously in places far apart from each other. Hence also the fact that an idea, uttered fifty years too early, leaves the world cold; fifty years later, sets it ablaze. Emperor Sigismund could risk breaking his word to Huss in 1415 and order him burned in Constance; Charles V., although a more violent fanatic, was compelled to allow Luther to depart in peace from the Reichstag at Worms in 1521. Ideas are, accordingly, the product of combined social causes and social life. What is true of society in general, is true in particular of the several classes that, at given historic epochs, constitute society. As each class has its special interests, it also has its special ideas and views, that lead to those class struggles of which recorded history is full, and that reach their climax in the class antagonisms and class struggles of modern days. Hence, it depends not merely upon the age in which a man lives, but also upon the social stratum of a certain age in which he lived or lives, and whereby his feelings, thoughts and actions are determined. Without modern society, no modern ideas. That is obvious. With regard to the future social Order, it must be furthermore added that the means whereby the individual develops are the property of society. Society can, accordingly, not be bound to render special homage to what itself made possible and is its own product. So much on the qualification of manual and brain work. It follows that there can be no real distinction between "higher" and "lower" manual work, such as not infrequently a mechanic to-day affects towards the day-laborer, who performs work on the street, or the like. Society demands only socially necessary work; hence all work is of equal value to society. If work that is disagreeable and repulsive can not be performed mechanically or chemically and by some process converted into work that is agreeable--a prospect that may not be put in doubt, seeing the progress made on the fields of technique and chemistry--and if the necessary volunteer forces can not be raised, then the obligation lies upon each, as soon as is his turn, to do his part. False ideas of shame, absurd contempt for useful work, become obsolete conceptions. These exist only in our society of drones, where to do nothing is regarded as an enviable lot, and the worker is despised in proportion to the hardness and disagreeableness of his work, and in proportion to its social usefulness. To-day work is badly paid in proportion as it is disagreeable. The reason is that, due to the constant revolutionizing of the process of production, a permanent mass of superfluous labor lies on the street, and, in order to live, sells itself for such vile work, and at such prices that the introduction of machinery in these departments of labor does not "pay." Stone-breaking, for instance, is proverbially one of the worst paid and most disagreeable kinds of work. It were a trifling matter to have the stone-breaking done by machinery, as in the United States; but we have such a mass of cheap labor-power that the machine would not "pay."[191] Street and sewer cleaning, the carting away of refuse, underground work of all sorts, etc., could, with the aid of machinery and technical contrivances, even at our present state of development, be all done in such manner that no longer would any trace of disagreeableness attach to the work. Carefully considered, the workingman who cleans out a sewer and thereby protects people from miasmas, is a very useful member of society; whereas a professor who teaches falsified history in the interest of the ruling classes, or a theologian who seeks to befog the mind with supernatural and transcendental doctrines are highly injurious beings. The learned fraternity of to-day, clad in offices and dignities, to a large extent represents a guild intended and paid to defend and justify the rule of the leading classes with the authority of science; to make them appear good and necessary; and to prop up existing superstitions. In point of fact this guild is largely engaged in the trade of quackery and brain-poisoning--a work injurious to civilization, intellectual wage-labor in the interest of the capitalist class and its clients.[192] A social condition, that should make impossible the existence of such elements, would perform an act towards the liberation of humanity. Genuine science, on the other hand, is often connected with highly disagreeable and repulsive work, such, for instance, as when a physician examines a corpse in a state of decomposition, or operates on supurating wounds, or when a chemist makes experiments. These often are labors more repulsive than the most repulsive ones ever performed by day-laborers and untutored workingmen. Few recognize the fact. The difference lies in that the one requires extensive studies in order to perform it, whereas the other can be performed by anyone without preparatory studies. Hence the radical difference in the estimation of the two. But in a society where, in virtue of the amplest opportunities of education afforded to all, the present distinction between "cultured" and "uncultured" ceases to exist, the contrast is likewise bound to vanish between learned and unlearned work, all the more seeing that technical development knows no limits and manual labor may be likewise performed by machinery or technical contrivances. We need but look at the development of our art handicrafts--xylography and copper-etching, for instance. As it turns out that the most disagreeable kinds of work often are the most useful, so also is our conception regarding agreeable and disagreeable work, like so many other modern conceptions, utterly superficial; it is a conception that has an eye to externals only. * * * * * The moment production is carried on in Socialist society upon the lines traced above, it no longer produces "merchandise," but only articles of use for the direct demand of society. Commerce, accordingly, ceases, having its sense and reason for being only in a social system that rests upon the production of goods for sale. A large army of persons of both sexes is thus set free for productive work.[193] This large army, set free for production, not only increases the volume of wealth produced, but makes possible a reduction of the hours of work. These people are to-day more or less parasites: they are supported by the work of others: in many instances they must toil diligently in return for a meagre existence. In Socialist society they are superfluous as merchants, hosts, brokers and agents. In lieu of the dozens, hundreds and thousands of stores and commercial establishments of all sorts, that to-day every community holds in proportion to its size, large municipal stores step in, elegant bazaars, actual exhibitions, requiring a relatively small administrative personnel. This change in itself represents a revolution in all previous institutions. The tangled mass of modern commerce is transformed into a centralized and purely administrative department, with only the simplest of functions, that can not choose but grow still simpler through the progressive centralization of all social institutions. Likewise does the whole system of transportation and communication undergo a complete change. The telegraph, railroads, Post Office, river and ocean vessels, street railways--whatever the names of the vehicles and institutions may be that attend to the transportation and communication of capitalist society--now become _social_ property. Many of these institutions--Post Offices, telegraph and railroads generally--are now State institutions in Germany. Their transformation into social property presents no difficulties: there no private interests are left to hurt: if the State continues to develop in that direction, all the better. But these institutions, administered by the State, are no Socialist institutions, as they are mistakenly taken for. They are business plants, that are exploited as capitalistically as if they were in private hands. Neither the officers nor the workingmen have any special benefit from them. The State treats them just as any private capitalist. When, for instance, orders were issued not to engage any workingman over 40 years of age in the railway or marine service of the Empire, the measure carries on its brows the class stamp of the State of the exploiters, and is bound to raise the indignation of the working class. Such and similar measures that proceed from the State as an employer of labor are even worse than if they proceed from private employers. As against the State, the latter is but a small employer, and the occupation that this one denies another might grant. The State, on the contrary, being a monopolistic employer, can, at one stroke, cast thousands of people into misery with its regulations. That is not Socialist, it is capitalist conduct; and the Socialist guards against allowing the present State ownership being regarded as Socialism, or the realization of Socialist aspirations. In a Socialist institution there are no employers. The leader, chosen for the purpose, can only carry out the orders and superintend the execution of the disciplinary and other measures prescribed by the collectivity itself. As in the instance of the millions of private producers, dealers and middlemen of all sorts, large centralized establishments take their place, so does the whole system of transportation and communication assume new shape. The myriads of small shipments to as many consignees that consume a mass of powers and of time, now grow into large shipments to the municipal depots and the central places of production. Here also labor is simplified. The transportation of raw material to an establishment of a thousand workers is an infinitely simpler matter than to a thousand small and scattered establishments. Thus centralized localities of production and of transportation for whole communities, or divisions of the same, will introduce a great saving of time, of labor, of material, and of means both of production and distribution. The benefit accrues to the whole community, and to each individual therein. The physiognomy of our productive establishments, of our system of transportation and communication, especially also of our habitations, will be completely altered for the better. The nerve-racking noise, crowding and rushing of our large cities with their thousands of vehicles of all sorts ceases substantially: society assumes an aspect of greater repose. The opening of streets and their cleaning, the whole system of life and of intercourse acquires new character. Hygienic measures--possible to-day only at great cost and then only partially, not infrequently only in the quarters of the rich--can be introduced with ease everywhere. To-day "the common people" do not need them; they can wait till the funds are ready; and these never are. Such a system of communication and transportation can not then choose but reach a high grade of perfection. Who knows but aerial navigation may then become a chief means of travel. The lines of transportation and communication are the arteries that carry the exchange of products--circulation of the blood--throughout the whole body social, that effect personal and mental intercourse between man and man. They are, consequently, highly calculated to establish an equal level of well-being and culture throughout society. The extension and ramification of the most perfect means of transportation and communication into the remotest corners of the land is, accordingly, _a necessity and a matter of general social interest_. On this field there arise before the new social system tasks that go far beyond any that modern society can put to itself. Finally, such a perfected system of transportation and communication, will promote the decentralization of the mass of humanity that is to-day heaped up in the large cities. It will distribute the same over the country, and thus--in point of sanitation as well as of mental and material progress--it will assume a significance of inestimable value. * * * * * Among the means of production in industry and transportation, land holds a leading place, being the source of all human effort and the foundation of all human existence, hence, of Society itself. Society resumes at its advanced stage of civilization, what it originally possessed. Among all races on earth that reached a certain minimum degree of culture, we find community in land, and the system continues in force with such people wherever they are still in existence. Community in land constituted the foundation of all primitive association: the latter was impossible without the former. Not until the rise and development of private property and of the forms of rulership therewith connected, and then only under a running struggle, that extends deep into our own times, was the system of common ownership in land ended, and the land usurped as private property. The robbery of the land and its transformation into private property furnished, as we have seen, the first source of that bondage that, extending from chattel slavery to the "freedom" of the wage-earner of our own century, has run through all imaginable stages, until finally the enslaved, after a development of thousands of years re-convert the land into common property. The importance of land to human existence is such that in all social struggles the world has ever known--whether in India, China, Egypt, Greece (Cleomenes), Rome (the Gracchi), Christian Middle Ages (religious sects, Munzer, the Peasants War), in the empires of the Aztecs and of the Incas, or in the several upheavals of latter days--the possession of land is the principal aim of the combatants. And even to-day, the public ownership of land finds its justifiers in such men as Adolf Samter, Adolf Wagner, Dr. Schaeffle, who on other domains of the Social Question are ready to rest content with half-measures.[194] The well-being of the population depends first of all upon the proper cultivation of the land. To raise the same to the highest degree of perfection is eminently a matter of public concern. That the cultivation of the land can reach the necessary high degree of perfection neither under the large, nor the middle, least of all under the small landlord system, has been previously shown. The most profitable cultivation of land depends not merely upon the special care bestowed upon it. Elements come here into consideration that neither the largest private holder, nor the mightiest association of these is equal to cope with. These are elements that lap over, even beyond the reach of the State and require international treatment. Society must first of all consider the land as a whole--its topographical qualities, its mountains, plains, woods, lakes, rivers, ponds, heaths, swamps, moors, etc. The topography, together with the geographical location of land, both of which are unchangeable, exercises certain influences upon climate and the qualities of the soil. Here is an immense field on which a mass of experience is to be gathered and a mass of experiments to be made. What the State has done until now in this line is meager. What with the small means that it applies to these purposes, and what with the limitations imposed upon it by the large landlords, who even if the State were willing, would check it, little or nothing has been done. The State could do nothing on this field without greatly encroaching upon private property. Seeing, however, that its very existence is conditioned upon the safe-keeping and "sacredness" of private property, the large landlords are vital to it, and it is stripped of the power, even if it otherwise had the will, to move in that direction. Socialist society will have the task of undertaking vast improvements of the soil,--raising woods here, and dismantling others yonder, draining and irrigating, mixing and changing of soil, planting, etc., in order to raise the land to the highest point of productivity that it is capable of. An important question, connected with the improvement of the land, is the contrivance of an ample and systematically planned network of rivers and canals, conducted upon scientific principles. The question of "cheaper" transportation on the waterways--a question of such gravity to modern society--loses all importance in Socialist society, seeing that the conceptions "cheap" and "dear" are unknown to it. On the other hand, however, waterways, as comfortable means of transportation, that can, moreover, be utilized with but slight expenditure of strength and matter, deserve attention. Moreover river and canal systems play important _roles_ in the matter of climate, draining and irrigation, and the supply of fertilizers and other materials needed in the improvement of agricultural land. Experience teaches that poorly-watered regions suffer more severely from cold winters and hot summers than well-watered lands, whence coast regions are exempt from the extremes of temperature, or rarely undergo them. Extremes of temperature are favorable neither to plants nor man. An extensive system of canalization, in connection with the proper forestry regulations, would unquestionably exercise beneficent influences. Such a system of canalization, along with the building of large reservoirs, that will collect the water in cases of freshets through thaws or heavy rainfalls, would be of great usefulness. Freshets and their devastating results would be impossible. Wide expanses of water, together with their proportional evaporations, would also, in all probability, bring about a more regular rain-fall. Finally such institutions would facilitate the erection of works for an extensive system of irrigation whenever needed. Large tracts of land, until now wholly barren or almost so, could be transformed into fertile regions by means of artificial irrigation. Where now sheep can barely graze, and at best consumptive-looking pine trees raise their thin arms heavenward, rich crops could grow and a dense population find ample nutriment. It is merely a question of labor whether the vast sand tracts of the Mark, the "holy dust-box of the German Empire," shall be turned into an Eden. The fact was pointed out in an address delivered in the spring of 1894 on the occasion of the agricultural exposition in Berlin.[195] The requisite improvements, canals, provisions for irrigation, mixing of soil, etc., are matters, however, that can be undertaken neither by the small nor the large landlords of the Mark. Hence those vast tracts, lying at the very gates of the capital of the Empire, remain in a state of such backward cultivation that it will seem incredible to future generations. Again, a proper canalization would, by draining, reclaim for cultivation vast swamps and marshes in North as well as South Germany. These waterways could be furthermore utilized in raising fish; they could thus be vast sources of food; in neighborhoods where there are no rivers, they would furnish opportunity for commodious bath-houses. Let a few examples illustrate the effectiveness of irrigation. In the neighborhood of Weissensfels, 7½ hectares of well-watered meadows produced 480 cwt. of after-grass; 5 contiguous hectares of meadow land of the same quality, but not watered, yielded only 32 cwt. The former had, accordingly, a crop ten times as large as the latter. Near Reisa in Saxony, the irrigation of 65 acres of meadow lands raised their revenue from 5,850 marks to 11,100 marks. The expensive outlays paid. Besides the Mark there are in Germany other vast tracts, whose soil, consisting mainly of sand, yields but poor returns, even when the summer is wet. Crossed and irrigated by canals, and their soil improved, these lands would within a short time yield five and ten times as much. There are examples in Spain of the yield of well-irrigated lands exceeding thirty-seven fold that of others that are not irrigated. Let there but be water, and increased volumes of food are conjured into existence. Where are the private individuals, where the States, able to operate upon the requisite scale? When, after long decades of bitter experience, the State finally yields to the stormy demands of a population that has suffered from all manner of calamities, and only after millions of values have been destroyed, how slow, with what circumspection, how cautious does it proceed! It is so easy to do too much, and the State might by its precipitancy lose the means with which to build some new barracks for the accommodation of a few regiments. Then also, if one is helped "too much," others come along, and also want help. "Man, help yourself and God will help you," thus runs the bourgeois creed. Each for himself, none for all. And thus, hardly a year goes by without once, twice and oftener more or less serious freshets from brooks, rivers or streams occurring in several provinces and States: vast tracts of fertile lands are then devastated by the violence of the floods, and others are covered with sand, stone and all manner of debris; whole orchard plantations, that demanded tens of years for their growth, are uprooted; houses, bridges, dams are washed away; railroad tracks torn up; cattle, not infrequently human beings also, are drowned; soil improvements are carried off; crops ruined. Vast tracts, exposed to frequent inundations, are cultivated but slightly, lest the loss be double. On the other hand, unskilful corrections of the channels of large rivers and streams,--undertaken in one-sided interests, to which the State ever yields readily in the service of "trade and transportation"--increase the dangers of freshets. Extensive cutting down of forests, especially on highlands and for private profit, adds more grist to the flood mill. The marked deterioration of the climate and decreased productivity of the soil, noticeable in the provinces of Prussia, Pomerania, the Steuermark, Italy, France, Spain, etc., is imputed to this vandalic devastation of the woods, done in the interest of private parties. Frequent freshets are the consequence of the dismantling of mountain woodlands. The inundations of the Rhine, the Oder and the Vistula are ascribed mainly to the devastation of the woods in Switzerland, Galicia and Poland; and likewise in Italy with regard to the Po. Due to the baring of the Carnian Alps, the climate of Triest and Venice has materially deteriorated. Madeira, a large part of Spain, vast and once luxurious fields of Asia Minor have in a great measure forfeited their fertility through the same causes. It goes without saying that Socialist society will not be able to accomplish all these great tasks out-of-hand. But it can and will undertake them, with all possible promptness and with all the powers at its command, seeing that its sole mission is to solve problems of civilization and to tolerate no hindrance. Thus it will in the course of time solve problems and accomplish feats that modern society can give no thought to, and the very thought of which gives it the vertigo. The cultivation of the soil will, accordingly, be mightily improved in Socialist society, through these and similar measures. But other considerations, looking to the proper exploitation of the soil, are added to these. To-day, many square miles are planted with potatoes, which are to be applied mainly to the distilling of brandy, an article consumed almost exclusively by the poor classes of the population. Liquor is the only stimulant and "care-dispeller" that they are able to procure. The population of Socialist society needs none of that, hence the raising of potatoes and corn for that purpose, together with the labor therein expended, are set free for the production of healthy food.[196] The speculative purposes that our most fertile fields are put to in the matter of the sugar beet for the exportation of sugar, have been pointed out in a previous chapter. About 400,000 hectares of the best wheat fields are yearly devoted to the cultivation of sugar beet, in order to supply England, the United States and Northern Europe with sugar. The countries whose climate favors the growth of sugar cane succumb to this competition. Furthermore, our system of a standing army, the disintegration of production, the disintegration of the means of transportation and communication, the disintegration of agriculture, etc.,--all these demand hundreds of thousands of horses, with the corresponding fields to feed them and to raise colts. The completely transformed social and political conditions free the bulk of the lands that are now given up to these various purposes; and again large areas and rich labor-power are reclaimed for purposes of civilization. Latterly, extensive fields, covering many square kilometers, have been withdrawn from cultivation, being needed for the manoeuvering and exercising of army corps in the new methods of warfare and long distance firearms. All this falls away. The vast field of agriculture, forestry and irrigation has become the subject of an extensive scientific literature. No special branch has been left untouched: irrigation and drainage, forestry, the cultivation of cereals, of leguminous and tuberous plants, of vegetables, of fruit trees, of berries, of flowers and ornamental plants; fodder for cattle raising; meadows; rational methods of breeding cattle, fish and poultry and bees, and the utilization of their excrements; utilization of manure and refuse in agriculture and manufacture; chemical examinations of seeds and of the soil, to ascertain its fitness for this or that crop; investigations in the rotations of crops and in agricultural machinery and implements; the profitable construction of agricultural buildings of all nature; the weather;--all have been drawn within the circle of scientific treatment. Hardly a day goes by without some new discovery, some new experience being made towards improving and ennobling one or other of these several branches. With the work of J. v. Liebig, the cultivation of the soil has become a science, indeed, one of the foremost and most important of all, a science that since then has attained a vastness and significance unique in the domain of activity in material production. And yet, if we compare the fullness of the progress made in this direction with the actual conditions prevailing in agriculture to-day, _it must be admitted that, until now, only a small fraction of the private owners have been able to turn the progress to advantage_, and among these there naturally is none who did not proceed from the view point of his own private interests, acted accordingly, kept only that in mind, and gave no thought to the public weal. The large majority of our farmers and gardeners, we may say 98 per cent. of them, are in no wise in condition to utilize all the advances made and advantages that are possible: they lack either the means or the knowledge thereto, if not both: as to the others, they simply do as they please. Socialist society finds herein a theoretically and practically well prepared field of activity. It need but to fall to and organize in order to attain wonderful results. The highest possible concentration of productions affords, of itself, mighty advantages. Hedges, making boundary lines, wagon roads and footpaths between the broken-up holdings are removed, and yield some more available soil. The application of machinery is possible only on large fields: agricultural machinery of fullest development, backed by chemistry and physics could to-day transform unprofitable lands, of which there are not a few, into fertile ones. The application of accumulated electric power to agricultural machinery--plows, harrows, rollers, sowers, mowers, threshers, seed-assorters, chaff-cutters, etc.--is only a question of time. Likewise will the day come when electricity will move from the fields the wagons laden with the crops: draught cattle can be spared. A scientific system of fertilizing the fields, hand in hand with thorough management, irrigation and draining will materially increase the productivity of the land. A careful selection of seeds, proper protection against weeds--in itself a head much sinned against to-day--sends up the yield still higher. According to Ruhland, a successful war upon cereal diseases would of itself suffice to render superfluous the present importation of grain into Germany.[197] Seeding, planting and rotation of crops, being conducted with the sole end in view of raising the largest possible volume of food, the object is then obtainable. What may be possible even under present conditions is shown by the management of the Schnistenberg farm in the Rhenish Palatinate. In 1884 the same fell into the hand of a new tenant, who, in the course of eight years, raised three or four times as much as his predecessor.[198] The said property is situated 320 meters above the level of the sea, 286 acres in size, of which 18 are meadows, and has generally unfavorable soil, 30 acres being sandy, 60 stony, 55 sand loam and 123 hard loam. The new method of cultivation had astonishing results. The crops rose from year to year. The increase during the period of 1884-1892 was as follows per acre: Product. 1884. 1892. Rye 7.75 cwts. 19.50 cwts. Wheat 3.50 " 15.30 " Barley 12.00 " 18.85 " Oats 7.00 " 18.85 " The neighboring community of Kiegsfeld, the witness of this marvelous development, followed the example and reached similar results on its own ground. The yield per acre was on an average this: Product. 1884. 1892. Wheat 10 to 12 cwts. 13 to 18 cwts. Rye 12 to 15 " 15 to 20 " Oats 7 to 9 " 14 to 22 and even 24 Barley 9 to 11 " 18 to 22 cwts. Such results are eloquent enough. The cultivation of fruits, berries and garden vegetables will reach a development hardly thought possible. How unpardonably is being sinned at present in these respects, a look at our orchards will show. They are generally marked by a total absence of proper care. This is true of the cultivation of fruit trees even in countries that have a reputation for the excellence of these; Wurtemberg, for instance. The concentration of stables, depots for implements and manure and methods of feeding--towards which wonderful progress has been made, but which can to-day be applied only slightly--will, when generally introduced, materially increase the returns in raising cattle, and thereby facilitate the procurement of manure. Machinery and implements of all sorts will be there in abundance, very differently from the experience of ninety-nine one hundredths of our modern farmers. Animal products, such as milk, eggs, meat, honey, hair, wool, will be obtained and utilized scientifically. The improvements and advantages in the dairy industry reached by the large dairy associations is known to all experts, and ever new inventions and improvements are daily made. Many are the branches of agriculture in which the same and even better can be done. The preparation of the fields and the gathering of the crops are then attended to by large bodies of men, under skilful use of the weather, such as is to-day impossible. Large drying houses and sheds allow crops being gathered even in unfavorable weather, and save losses that are to-day unavoidable, and which, according to v. d. Goltz, often are so severe that, during a particularly rainy year, from eight to nine million marks worth of crops were ruined in Mecklenburg, and from twelve to fifteen in the district of Koenigsberg. Through the skilful application of artificial heat and moisture on a large scale in structures protected from bad weather, the raising of vegetables and all manner of fruit is possible at all seasons in large quantities. The flower stores of our large cities have in mid-winter floral exhibitions that vie with those of the summer. One of the most remarkable advances made in the artificial raising of fruit is exemplified by the artificial vineyard of Garden-Director Haupt in Brieg, Silesia, which has found a number of imitators, and was itself preceded long before by a number of others in other countries, England among them. The arrangements and the results obtained in this vineyard were so enticingly described in the "Vossische Zeitung" of September 27, 1890, that we have reproduced the account in extracts: "The glass-house is situated upon an approximately square field of 500 square meters, i. e., one-fifth of an acre. It is 4.5 to 5 meters high, and its walls face north, south, east and west. Twelve rows of double fruit walls run inside due north and south. They are 1.8 meters apart from each other and serve at the same time as supports to the flat roof. In a bed 1.25 meters deep, resting on a bank of earth 25 centimeters strong and which contains a net of drain and ventilation pipes,--a bed 'whose hard ground is rendered loose, permeable and fruitful through chalk, rubbish, sand, manure in a state of decomposition, bonedust and potash'--Herr Haupt planted against the walls three hundred and sixty grape vines of the kind which yields the noblest grape juice in the Rhinegau:--white and red Reissling and Tramine, white and blue Moscatelle and Burgundy. "The ventilation of the place is effected by means of large fans, twenty meters long, attached to the roof, besides several openings on the side-walls. The fans can be opened and shut by means of a lever, fastened on the roof provided with a spindle and winch, and they can be made safe against all weather. For the watering of the vines 26 sprinklers are used, which are fastened to rubber pipes 1.25 meters long, and that hang down from a water tank. Herr Haupt introduced, however, another ingenious contrivance for quickly and thoroughly watering his 'wine-hall' and his 'vineyard', to wit, an artificial rain producer. On high, under the roof, lie four long copper tubes, perforated at distances of one-half meter. The streams of water that spout upward through these openings strike small round sieves made of window gauze and, filtered through these, are scattered in fine spray. To thoroughly water the vines by means of the rubber pipes requires several hours. But only one faucet needs to be turned by this second contrivance and a gentle refreshing rain trickles down over the whole place upon the grape vines, the beds and the granite flags of the walks. The temperature can be raised from 8 to 10 degrees R. above the outside air without any artificial contrivance, and simply through the natural qualities of the glass-house. In order to protect the vines from that dangerous and destructive foe, the vine louse, should it show itself, it is enough to close the drain and open all the water pipes. The inundation of the vines, thus achieved, the enemy can not withstand. The glass roof and walls protect the vineyard from storms, cold, frost and superfluous rain; in cases of hail, a fine wire-netting is spread over the same; against drought the artificial rain system affords all the protection needed. The vine-dresser of such a vineyard is his own weather-maker, and he can laugh at all the dangers from the incalculable whims and caprices of indifferent and cruel Nature,--dangers that ever threaten with ruin the fruit of the vine cultivator. "What Herr Haupt expected happened. The vines thrived remarkably under the uniformly warm climate. The grapes ripened to their fullest, and as early as the fall of 1885 they yielded a juice not inferior to that generally obtained in the Rhinegau in point of richness of sugar and slightness of sourness. The grapes thrived equally the next year and even during the unfavorable year of 1887. On this space, when the vines have reached their full height of 5 meters, and are loaded with their burden of swollen grapes, 20 hectoliters of wine can be produced yearly, and the cost of a bottle of noble wine will not exceed 40 pennies. "There is no reason imaginable why this process should not be conducted upon a large scale like any other industry. Glass-houses of the nature of this one on one-fifth of an acre can be undoubtedly raised upon a whole acre with equal facilities of ventilation, watering, draining and rain-making. Vegetation will start there several weeks sooner than in the open, and the vine-shoots remain safe from May frosts, rain and cold while they blossom; from drought during the growth of the grapes; from pilfering birds and grape thieves and from dampness while they ripen; finally from the vine-louse during the whole year and can hang safely deep into November and December. In his address, held in 1888 to the Society for the Promotion of Horticulture, and from which I have taken many a technical expression in this description of the 'Vineyard', the inventor and founder of the same closed his words with this alluring perspective of the future: 'Seeing that this vine culture can be carried on all over Germany, especially on otherwise barren, sandy or stony ground, such as, for instance, the worst of the Mark, that can be made arable and watered, it follows that the great interests in the cultivation of the soil receive fresh vigor from "vineyards under glass." I would like to call this industry "the vineyard of the future".' "Just as Herr Haupt has furnished the practical proof that on this path an abundance of fine and healthy grapes can be drawn from the vine, he has also proved by his own pressing of the same what excellent wine they can yield. More thorough, more experienced, better experts and tried wine-drinkers and connoisseurs than myself have, after a severe test, bestowed enthusiastic praise upon the Reissling of the vintage of '88, upon the Tramine and Moscatelle of the vintage of '89, and upon the Burgundy of the vintage of '88, pressed from the grapes of this 'vineyard'. It should also be mentioned that this 'vineyard' also affords sufficient space for the cultivation of other side and twin plants. Herr Haupt raises between every two vines one rose bush, that blossoms richly in April and May; against the east and west walls he raises peaches, whose beauty of blossom must impart in April an appearance of truly fairy charm to this wine palace." The enthusiasm with which the reporter describes this artificial "vineyard" in a serious paper testifies to the deep impression made upon him by this extraordinary artificial cultivation. There is nothing to prevent similar establishments, on a much more stupendous scale and for other branches of vegetation. The luxury of a double crop is obtainable in many agricultural products. To-day all such undertakings are a question of money, and their products are accessible only to the privileged classes. A Socialist society knows no other question than that of sufficient labor-power. If that is in existence, the work is done in the interest of all. Another new invention on the field of food is that of Dr. Johann Hundhausen of Hamm in Westphalia, who succeeded in extracting the albumen of wheat--the secret of whose utilization in the legume was not yet known--in the shape of a thoroughly nutritive flour. This is a far-reaching invention. It is now possible to render the albumen of plants useful in substantial form for human food. The inventor erected a large factory which produces vegetal albumen or aleurone meal from 80 to 83 per cent. of albumen, and a second quality of about 50 per cent. That the so-called aleurone meal represents a very concentrated albuminous food appears from the following comparison with our best elements of nourishment: Carbon- Water Albumen Fat hydrate Cellulose Salt Aleurone meal 8.83 82.67 0.27 7.01 0.45 0.78 Hen's eggs 73.67 12.55 12.11 0.55 0.55 1.12 Beef 55.42 17.19 26.58 .... .... 1.08 Aleurone meal is not only eaten directly, it is also used as a condiment in all sorts of bakery products, as well as soups and vegetables. Aleurone meal substitutes in a high degree meat preserves in point of nutrition; moreover, it is by far the cheapest albumen obtainable to-day. One kilogram of albumen costs: In aleurone meal 1.45 marks In white bread or white flour 4 to 4.5 " In hen's eggs, according to the season 8 to 16 " In beef 12 to 13 " Beef, accordingly, is about eight times dearer, as albuminous food, than aleurone meal; eggs five times as dear; white bread or common white flour about three times as dear. Aleurone meal also has the advantage that, with the addition of about one-eighth of the weight of a potato, it not only furnishes a considerable quantity of albumen to the body, but produces a complete digestion of the starch contained in the potato. Dogs, that have a nose for albumen, eat aleurone meal with the same avidity as meat, even if they otherwise refuse bread, and they are then better able to stand hardships. Aleurone meal, as a dry vegetal albumen, is of great use as food on ships, in fortresses and in military hospitals during war. It renders large supplies of meat unnecessary. At present aleurone meal is a side product in starch factories. Within short, starch will become a side product of aleurone meal. A further result will be that the cultivation of cereals will crowd out that of potatoes and other less productive food plants; the volume of nutrition of a given field of wheat or rye is tripled or quadrupled at one stroke. Dr. Rudolf Meyer of Vienna, whose attention was called by us to the aleurone meal says[199] that he furnished himself with a quantity of it and had it examined on June 19, 1893, by the bureau of experiments of the Board of Soil Cultivation of the Kingdom of Bohemia. The examination fully confirmed our statements. For further details Meyer's work should be read. Meyer also calls attention to a discovery made by Otto Redemann of Bockenheim near Frankfort-on-the-Main. After granulating the peanut and removing its oil, he analyzed its component elements of nutrition. The analysis showed 47 per cent. of albumen, 19 of fat and 19 of starch--altogether 2,135 units of nutritious matter in one kilo. According to this analysis the peanut is one of the most nutritious vegetal products. The pharmacist Rud. Simpson of Mohrungen discovered a process by which to remove the bitterness from the lupine, which, as may be known, thrives best on sandy soil, and is used both as fodder and as a fertilizer; and he then produced from it a meal, which, according to expert authority, baked as bread tastes very good, is solid, is said to be more nutritious than rye-bread, and, besides all that, much cheaper. Even under present conditions a regular revolution is plowing its way in the matter of human food. _The utilization of all these discoveries is, however, slow, for the reason that mighty classes--the farmer element together with its social and political props--have the liveliest interest in suppressing them._ To our agrarians, a good crop is to-day a horror--although the same is prayed for in all the churches--because it lowers prices. Consequently, they are no wise anxious for a double and threefold nutritive power of their cereals; it would likewise tend to lower prices. Present society is everywhere at fisticuffs with its own development. The preservation of the soil in a state of fertility depends primarily upon fertilization. The obtaining of fertilizers is, accordingly, for future society also one of the principal tasks.[200] Manure is to the soil what food is to man, and just as every kind of food is not equally nourishing to man, neither is every kind of manure of equal benefit to the soil. The soil must receive back exactly the same chemical substances that it gave up through a crop; and the chemical substances especially needed by a certain vegetable must be given to the soil in larger quantities. Hence the study of chemistry and its practical application will experience a development unknown to-day. Animal and human excrements are particularly rich in the chemical elements that are fittest for the reproduction of human food. Hence the endeavor must be to secure the same in the fullest quantity and cause its proper distribution. On this head too modern society sins grievously. Cities and industrial centers, that receive large masses of foodstuffs, return to the soil but a slight part of their valuable offal.[201] The consequence is that the fields, situated at great distances from the cities and industrial centers, and which yearly send their products to the same, suffer greatly from a dearth of manure; the offal that these farms themselves yield is often not enough, because the men and beasts who live on them consume but a small part of the product. Thus frequently a soil-vandalism is practiced, that cripples the land and decreases the crops. All countries that export agricultural products mainly, but receive no manure back, inevitably go to ruin through the gradual impoverishment of the soil. This is the case with Hungary, Russia, the Danubian Principalities, North America, etc. Artificial fertilizers, guano in particular, indeed substitute the offal of men and beasts; but many farmers can not obtain the same in sufficient quantity; it is too dear; at any rate, it is an inversion of nature to import manure from great distances, while it is allowed to go to waste nearby. Several years since has the Thomas-slag been recognized as an eminently fit manure for certain soils. The manufacturers, however, who grind the Thomas-slag into flour and carry it to market, have built a ring, and, to the injury of the farming interests who make bitter complaints on that score, they keep the prices high. Thus every progress is crippled by greed in bourgeois society. Another and at present inexhaustable source of fertilizers is offered by the deposits of potash in the province of Saxony and contiguous regions. The Prussian State owns a number of potash works and it also made the attempt to monopolize the industry, to the end of raising the largest possible revenues for the Treasury. If the opinion of Julius Hensel on the subject of fertilizers proves correct, it will mean a revolution in the theory of fertilization, and a complete saving of the expenses now made for the importation of fertilizers, amounting for guano and Chile saltpeter to from 80 to 100 million marks a year.[202] Hensel makes the emphatic claim, and produces numerous proofs of the correctness of his views, that the mineral of our mountains contain an inexhaustible supply of the best fertilizing stuffs. Granite, porphyry, basalt, broken and ground up, spread upon the fields or vineyards and furnished with a sufficiency of water, furnished a fertilizer that excelled all others, even animal and human refuse.[203] These minerals, he claims, contain all the elements for the cultivation of plants: potash, chalk, magnesia, phosphoric, sulphuric and silicic acids, and also hydrochlorides. According to Hensel, the Sudeton, Riesen, Erz, Tichtel, Hartz, Rhone, Vogel, Taunus, Eisel and Weser mountains, the woods of Thuringen, Spessart and Oden had an inexhaustible supply of fertilizers. It will be literally possible to "make bread out of stones." The dust and dirt of our highways also are, according to Hensel, inexhaustible sources of the same blessing. In this matter we are laymen and can not test the correctness of Hensel's theories; a part of them, however, sound most plausible. Hensel charges the manufacturers of and dealers in artificial fertilizers with hostility to his discovery and with systematic opposition, because they would suffer great loss. According to Heider, a healthy adult secretes on an average 48.8 kilograms of solid and 438 of liquid matter a year. Estimated by the present standard of the prices of manure, and if utilized without loss by evaporation, etc., this offal represents a money value of 11.8 marks. Calculating the population of Germany to be 50,000,000 in round figures, and estimating the average value of the human offal at 8 marks, the sum of 400,000,000 marks is obtained, which now is almost totally lost to agriculture, owing to the present imperfect methods for utilizing it. The great difficulty in the way of a full utilization of these stuffs lies in the establishment of proper and extensive provisions for their collection, and in the cost of transportation. Relatively, this cost is now higher than the importation of guano from far-away transmarine deposits, which, however, decline in mass in the measure that the demand increases. Every living being, however, casts off regularly an annual supply of manure about enough for a field that yields food for one person. The enormous loss is obvious. A large portion of the city excrement runs out into our rivers and streams, and pollutes them. Likewise is the refuse from kitchens and factories, also serviceable as manure, recklessly squandered. Future society will find means and ways to stop this waste. What is done to-day in this direction is mere patchwork, and utterly inadequate. As an illustration of what could be done to-day, may be cited the canalization and the laying out of vast fields in the capital of the Empire, on whose value, however, experts are of divided opinion. Socialist society will solve the question more easily, due, in a great measure, to the fact that _large cities will gradually cease to exist, and population will decentralize_. No one will regard our modern rise of metropoles as a healthy phenomenon. The modern system of manufacture and production in general, steadily draws large masses of the population to the large cities.[204] There is the seat of manufacture and commerce; there the avenues of communication converge; there the owners of large wealth have their headquarters, the central authorities, the military staffs, the higher tribunals. There large institutions rear their heads--the academies of art, large pleasure resorts, exhibitions, museums, theaters, concert halls, etc. Hundreds are drawn thither by their professions, thousands by pleasure, and many more thousands by the hope of easier work and an agreeable life. But, speaking figuratively, the rise of metropolitan cities makes the impression of a person whose girth gains steadily in size, while his legs as steadily become thinner, and finally will be unable to carry the burden. All around, in the immediate vicinity of the cities, the villages also assume a city aspect, in which the proletariat is heaped up in large masses. The municipalities, generally out of funds, are forced to lay on taxes to the utmost, and still remain unable to meet the demand made upon them. When finally they have grown up to the large city and it up to them, they rush into and are absorbed by it, as happens with planets that have swung too close to the sun. But the fact does not improve the conditions of life. On the contrary, they grow worse through the crowding of people in already overcrowded spaces. These gatherings of masses--inevitable under modern development, and, to a certain extent, the raisers of revolutionary centers,--will have fulfilled their mission in Socialist society. Their gradual dissolution then becomes necessary: _the current will then run the other way: population will migrate from the cities to the country: it will there raise new municipalities corresponding with the altered conditions, and they will join their industrial with their agricultural activities_. So soon as--due to the complete remodeling and equipment of the means of communication and transportation, and of the productive establishments, etc., etc.--the city populations will be enabled to transfer to the country all their acquired habits of culture, to find there their museums, theaters, concert halls, reading rooms, libraries, etc.--just so soon will the migration thither set in. Life will then enjoy all the comforts of large cities, without their disadvantages. The population will be housed more comfortably and sanitarily. The rural population will join in manufacturing, the manufacturing population in agricultural pursuits,--a change of occupation enjoyed to-day by but few, and then often under conditions of excessive exertion. As on all other fields, bourgeois society is promoting this development also: every year new industrial undertakings are transferred to the country. The unfavorable conditions of large cities--high rents and high wages--drive many employers to this migration. At the same time, the large landlords are steadily becoming industrialists--manufacturers of sugar, distillers of liquor, beer brewers, manufacturers of cement, earthen wares, tiles, woodwork, paper goods, etc. In the new social order offal of all sorts will then be easily furnished to agriculture, especially through the concentration of production and the public kitchens. Each community will, in a way, constitute a zone of culture; it will, to a large extent, itself raise its necessaries of life. Horticulture, perhaps the most agreeable of all practical occupations, will then reach fullest bloom. The cultivation of vegetables, fruit trees and bushes of all nature, ornamental flowers and shrubs--all offer an inexhaustible field for human activity, a field, moreover, whose nature excludes machinery almost wholly. _Thanks to the decentralization of the population, the existing contrast and antagonism between the country and the city will also vanish._ The peasant, this Helot of modern times, hitherto cut off from all cultural development through his isolation in the country, now becomes a free being because he has fully become a limb of civilization.[205] The wish, once expressed by Prince Bismarck, that he might see the large cities destroyed, will be verified, but in a sense wholly different from that which he had in mind.[206] If the preceding arguments are rapidly passed in review, it will be seen that, with the abolition of private property in the means of production and their conversion into social property, the mass evils, that modern society reveals at every turn and which grow ever greater and more intolerable under its sway, will gradually disappear. The over-lordship of one class and its representatives ceases. Society applies its forces planfully and controls itself. As, with the abolition of the wage system the ground will be taken from under the exploitation of man by man, likewise will it be taken from under swindle and cheating--the adulteration of food, the stock exchange, etc.,--with the abolition of private capitalism. The halls in the Temples of Mammon will stand vacant; national bonds of indebtedness, stocks, pawn-tickets, mortgages, deeds, etc., will have become so much waste paper. The words of Schiller: "Let our book of indebtedness be annihilated, and the whole world reconciled" will have become reality, and the Biblical maxim: "In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread" will now come into force for the heroes of the stock exchange and the drones of capitalism as well. Yet the labor that, as equal members of society they will have to perform, will not oppress them: their bodily health will be materially improved. The worry of property--said to be, judging from the pathetic assurances of our employers and capitalists in general, harder to bear than the uncertain and needy lot of the workingman--will be forever removed from those gentlemen. The excitements of speculation, that breed so many diseases of the heart and bring on so many strokes of apoplexy among our exchange jobbers, and that render them nervous wrecks, will all be saved to them. A life free from mental worry will be their lot and that of our descendants; and in the end they will gladly accommodate themselves thereto. With the abolition of private property and of class antagonism, the State also gradually vanishes away;--it vanishes without being missed. "By converting the large majority of the population more and more into proletarians, the capitalist mode of production creates the power, that, under penalty of its own destruction, is forced to accomplish this revolution. By urging more and more the conversion of the large, already socialized means of production into State property, it points the path for the accomplishment of this revolution.... The State was the official representative of the whole society; it was the constitution of the latter into a visible body; but it was so only in so far as it was the State of that class which itself, at its time, represented the whole society; in antiquity, the State of slave-holding citizens; in the middle ages, the State of the feudal nobility; in our own days, the State of the capitalist class. By at last becoming actually the representative of the whole social body, it renders itself superfluous. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be kept down; as soon as, together with class rule and the individual struggle for life, founded in the previous anarchy of production, the conflicts and excesses that issued therefrom have been removed, there is nothing more to be repressed, and the State or Government, as a special power of repression, is no longer necessary. The first act, wherein the State appears as the real representative of the whole body social--the seizure of the means of production in the name of society--is also its last independent act as State. The interference of the State in social relations becomes superfluous in one domain after another, and falls of itself into desuetude. The place of a government over persons is taken by the administration of things and the conduct of the processes of production. The State is not 'abolished'--_it dies out!_"[207] Along with the State, die out its representatives--cabinet ministers, parliaments, standing armies, police and constables, courts, district attorneys, prison officials, tariff and tax collectors, in short, the whole political apparatus. Barracks, and such other military structures, palaces of law and of administration, prisons--all will now await better use. Ten thousand laws, decrees and regulations become so much rubbish; they have only historic value. The great and yet so petty parliamentary struggles, with which the men of tongue imagine they rule and guide the world, are no more, they will have made room for administrative colleges and delegations whose attention will be engaged in the best means of production and distribution, in ascertaining the volume of supplies needed, in introducing and applying effective improvements in art, in architecture, in intercourse, in the process of production, etc. These are all practical matters, visible and tangible, towards which everyone stands objectively, there being no personal interests hostile to society to affect their judgment. None has any interest other than the collectivity, and that interest consists in instituting and providing everything in the best, most effective and most profitable manner. The hundreds of thousands of former representatives of the State pass over into the various trades, and help with their intelligence and strength to increase the wealth and comforts of society. Henceforth there are known neither political crimes nor common ones. There are no more thieves, seeing that private property has ceased to be in the means of production, and everyone can now satisfy his wants with ease and comfort by work. Tramps and vagabonds likewise cease to be; they are the product of a social system based on private property; the former cease to be with the latter. And murder? Why? None can grow rich at the expense of another. Even murder out of hatred and revenge flows directly or indirectly from the modern social system. Perjury, false testimony, cheating, thefts of inheritance, fraudulent failures? There is no private property on and against which to commit these crimes. Arson? Who is to derive pleasure or satisfaction therefrom, seeing that society removes from him all sources of hatred? Counterfeiting? Why, money has become a chimera, love's labor would be lost. Contempt for religion? Nonsense. It is left to the "omnipotent and good God" to punish him who should offend Him--provided there be still controversies on the existence of God. Thus all the cornerstones of the present "order" become myths. Parents will tell their children stories on those heads, like legends from olden days. The narrations of the persecutions, that men with new ideas are to-day overwhelmed with, will sound to them just as the stories of the burning of heretics and witches sound to us to-day. The names of all the great men, who to-day distinguish themselves by their persecutions of the new ideas, and who are applauded by their narrow-minded contemporaries, are forgotten and blown over, and they are run across only by the historian who may happen to dive into the past. What remarks may escape him, we care not to tell, seeing that, unhappily, we do not yet live in an age where man is free to breathe. As with the State, so with "Religion."[208] It is not "abolished." God will not be "dethroned"; religion will not be "torn out of the hearts of people"; nor will any of the silly charges against the Socialists materialize. Such mistaken policies the Socialists leave to the Bourgeois ideologists, who resorted to such means in the French Revolution and, of course, suffered miserable shipwreck. Without any violence whatever, and without any manner of oppression of thought, religion will gradually vanish. Religion is the transcendental reflection of the social conditions of given epochs. In the measure that human development advances and society is transformed, religion is transformed along with it. It is, as Marx puts it, a popular striving after the illusory happiness that corresponds with a social condition which needs such an illusion.[209] The illusion wanes so soon as real happiness is descried, and the possibility of its realization penetrates the masses. The ruling classes endeavor, in their own interest, to prevent this popular conception. Hence they seek to turn religion into a means to preserve their domination. The purpose appears fully in their maxim: "The people must be held to religion." This particular business becomes an official function in a society that rests upon class rule. A caste is formed that assumes this function and that turns the whole acumen of their minds towards preserving, and enlarging such a social structure, seeing that thereby their own power and importance are increased. Starting in fetishism at low stages of civilization and primitive social conditions, religion becomes polytheism at a higher, and monotheism at a still higher stage. It is not the gods that create men, it is man who turns the gods into God. "In the image of himself (man) he created Him" (God), not the opposite way. Monotheism has also suffered changes. It has dissolved into a pantheism that embraces and permeates the universe--and it volatilizes day by day. Natural science reduced to myth the dogma of the creation of the earth in six days; astronomy, mathematics, physics have converted heaven into a structure of air, and the stars, once fastened to the roof of heaven in which angels had their abodes, into fixed stars and planets whose very composition excludes all angelic life. The ruling class, finding itself threatened in its existence, clings to religion as a prop of all authority, just as every ruling class has done heretofore.[210] The bourgeoisie or capitalist class itself believes in nothing. Itself, at every stage of its development and through the modern science that sprang from none but its own lap, has destroyed all faith in religion and authority. Its faith is only a pretence; and the Church accepts the help of this false friend because itself is in need of help. "Religion is necessary for the people." No such considerations animate Socialistic Society. Human progress and unadulterated science are its device. If any there be who has religious needs, he is free to please himself in the company of those who feel like him. It is a matter that does not concern society. Seeing that the clergyman's own mind will be improved by work, the day will dawn to him also when he will realize that _the highest aim is to be man_. Ethics and morality exist without organized religion. The contrary is asserted only by weak-minded people or hypocrites. Ethics and morality are the expression of conceptions that regulate the relations of man to man, and their mutual conduct. Religion embraces the relations of man with supernal beings. And, just as with religion, moral conceptions also are born of existing social conditions at given times. Cannibals regard the eating of human beings as highly moral; Greeks and Romans regarded slavery as moral; the feudal lord of the Middle Ages regarded serfdom as moral; and to-day the modern capitalist considers highly moral the institution of wage-slavery, the flaying of women with night work and the demoralization of children by factory labor.[211] Here we have four different social stages, and as many different conceptions of morality, and yet in none does the highest moral sense prevail. Undoubtedly the highest moral stage is that in which men stand to one another free and equal; that in which the principle: "What you do not wish to be done unto you, do not unto others" is observed inviolate throughout the relations of man to man. In the Middle Ages, the genealogical tree was the standard; to-day it is property; in future society, the standard of man is man. And the future is Socialism in practice. * * * * * The late Reichstag delegate, Dr. Lasker, delivered, in the seventies, an address in Berlin, in which he arrived at the conclusion that an equal level of education for all members of society was possible. Dr. Lasker was an anti-Socialist a rigid upholder of private property and of the capitalist system of production. The question of education is to-day, however, a question of money. Under such conditions, an equal level of education for all is an impossibility. Exceptional persons, situated in relatively favorable conditions, may, by dint of overcoming all difficulties and by the exertion of great energy, not given to everybody, succeed in acquiring a higher education. The masses never, so long as they live in a state of social oppression.[212] In the new social order, the conditions of existence are equal for all. Wants and inclinations differ, and, differences being grounded in the very nature of man, will continue so to be. Each member, however, can live and develop under the same favorable conditions that obtain for all. The uniformity, generally imputed to Socialism, is, as so many other things, false and nonsensical. Even if Socialism did so wish it, the wish were absurd; it would come in conflict with the nature of man; Socialism would have to give up the idea of seeing society develop according to its principles.[213] Aye, even if Socialism were to succeed in overpowering society and to force upon it unnatural conditions, it would not be long before such conditions, felt to be shackles, would be snapped, and Socialism would be done for. Society develops out of itself, according to laws latent in it, and it acts accordingly.[214] One of the principal tasks of the new social system will be the education of the rising generation in keeping with its improved opportunities. Every child that is born, be it male or female, is a welcome addition to society. Society sees therein the prospect of its own perpetuity, of its own further development. It, therefore, also realizes the duty of providing for the new being according to its best powers. The first object of its attention must, consequently, be the one that gives birth to the new being--the mother. A comfortable home; agreeable surroundings and provisions of all sorts, requisite to this stage of maternity; a careful nursing--such are the first requirements. The mother's breast must be preserved for the child as long as possible and necessary. This is obvious. Moleschott, Sonderegger, all hygienists and physicians are agreed that nothing can fully substitute the mother's nourishment. People who, like Eugen Richter, indignate at the idea of a young mother being placed in a lying-in establishment, where she is surrounded by all that to-day is possible only to the very wealthiest, and which even these cannot furnish in the fullness attainable at institutions especially equipped for the purpose--such people we wish to remind of the fact that, to-day, at least four-fifths of the population are born under the most primitive circumstances and conditions, that are a disgrace to our civilization. Of the remaining one-fifth of our mothers, only a minority is able to enjoy the nursing and comforts that should be bestowed upon a woman in that state. _The fact is that in cities with excellent provisions for child-birth--Berlin for instance, and all University cities--even to-day not a few women resort to such institutions as soon as they feel their time approaching, and await their delivery. Unfortunately, however, the expenses at such institutions are so high, that but few women can use them, while others are held back by prejudice._ Here again we have an instance of how everywhere bourgeois society carries in its own lap the germ of the future order. For the rest, maternity among the rich has a unique taste; the maternal duties are transferred as soon as possible to a _proletarian nurse_. As is well known, the Wendt Lausitz (Spreewald) is the region that the women of the Berlin bourgeoisie, who are unwilling or unable to nurse their own babies, draw their wet-nurses from. The "cultivation of nurses" is there carried on as a peculiar trade. It consists in the girls of the district causing themselves to be impregnated, with the end in view of being able, after the birth of their own children, to hire themselves out as nurses to rich Berlin families. Girls who give birth to three or four illegitimate children, so as to be able to go out as nurses, are no rarity; and they are sought after by the males of the Spreewald according to their earnings in this business. Such a system is utterly repellant from the view-point of bourgeois morality; from the view-point of the family interests of the bourgeoisie it is considered praiseworthy and desirable. So soon as in the society of the future the child has grown up, it falls in with the other children of its own age for play, and under common surveillance. All that can be furnished for its mental and physical culture is at hand, according to the measure of general intelligence. Whosoever has watched children knows that they are brought up best in the company of their equals, their sense of gregariousness and instinct of imitation being generally strong. The smaller are strongly inclined to take the older ones as example, and rather follow them than their own parents. These qualities can be turned to advantage in education.[215] The playgrounds and kindergartens are followed by a playful introduction into the preliminaries of knowledge and of the various manual occupations. This is followed up by agreeable mental and physical work, connected with gymnastic exercises and free play in the skating rink and swimming establishments; drills, wrestling, and exercises for both sexes follow and supplement one another. The aim is to raise a healthy, hardy, physically and mentally developed race. Step by step follows the induction of the youth in the various practical pursuits--manufacturing, horticulture, agriculture, the technique of the process of production, etc.; nor is the development of the mind neglected in the several branches of science. The same process of "dusting" and improvement observed in the system of production, is pursued in that of education; obsolete, superfluous and harmful methods and subjects are dropped. The knowledge of natural things, introduced in a natural way, will spur the desire for knowledge infinitely more than a system of education in which one subject is at odds with another, and each cancels the other, as, for instance, when "religion" is taught on one hand, and on the other natural sciences and natural history. The equipment of the school rooms and educational establishments is in keeping with the high degree of culture of the new social order. All the means of education and of study, clothing and support are furnished by society; no pupil is at a disadvantage with another.[216] That is another chapter at which our "men of law and order" bristle up indignantly.[217] "The school-house is to be turned into barracks; parents are to be deprived of all influence upon their children!" is the cry of our adversaries. All false! Seeing that in the future society parents will have infinitely more time at their disposal than is the case to-day with the large majority--we need but to call attention to the ten to fifteen hour day of many workingmen in the post office, the railroads, the prisons, the police department, and to the demands made upon the time of the industrial workers, the small farmers, merchants, soldiers, many physicians, etc.--it follows that they will be able to devote themselves to their children in a measure that is impossible to-day. _Moreover, the parents themselves have the regulation of education in their hands; it is they who determine the measures that shall be adopted and introduced. We are then living in a thoroughgoing democratic society. The Boards of Education, which will exist, of course, are made up of the parents themselves--men and women--and of those following the educational profession._ Does any one imagine they will act against their own interests? That happens only to-day when the State seeks but to enforce its own exclusive interests. Our opponents furthermore demean themselves as though to-day one of the greatest pleasures of parents was to have their children about them all day long, and to educate them. It is just the reverse in reality. What hardships and cares are to-day caused by the education of a child, even when a family has but one of them, those parents are best able to judge who are themselves so situated. Several children, in a manner, facilitate education, but then again they give rise to so much more trouble that their father and especially the mother, who is the one to bear the heaviest burden, is happy when the school hour arrives, and thus the house is rid of the children for a portion of the day. Most parents can afford but a very imperfect education to their children. The large majority of fathers and mothers lack time; the former have their business, the latter their household to attend to, and their time is furthermore taken up with social duties. Even when they actually have time, in innumerable instances they lack the ability. How many parents are able to follow the course of their children's education at school, and to take them under the arm in their schoolwork at home? Only few. The mother, who in most such cases has greater leisure at her disposal, lacks capacity; she has not herself received sufficient training. Moreover, the method and the courses of education change so frequently that these are strange to the parents. Again, the home facilities are generally so poor that the children enjoy neither the necessary comfort, nor order, nor quiet to do their schoolwork at home, or to find there the needed aid. Everything necessary is generally wanting. The home is narrow and overcrowded; small and grown-up brothers and sisters move about over that narrow space; the furniture is not what it should be, and furnishes no facilities to the child for study. Not infrequently light, also air and heat are wanting; the materials for study and work, if there be any of them, are poor; frequently even hunger gnaws at the stomach of the child and robs it of mind and pleasure for its work. As a supplement to this picture, the fact must be added that hundreds of thousands of children are put to all manner of work, domestic and industrial, that embitters their youth and disables them from fulfilling their educational task. Again, often do children have to overcome the resistance of narrow-minded parents when they try to take time for their schoolwork or for play. In short, the obstacles are so numerous that, if they are all taken into account, the wonder is the youth of the land is as well educated. It is an evidence of the health of human nature, and of its inherent ambition after progress and perfection. Bourgeois society itself recognizes some of these evils by the introduction of public education and by facilitating the same still more through the free supply, here and there, of school material--two things that, as late as about the year 1885 the then Minister of Education of Saxony designated as a "Social Democratic demand," and as such flung the designation in the face of the Socialist Representative in the Landtag. In France, where, after long neglect, popular education advanced so much more rapidly, progress has gone still further. At least in Paris, the school children are fed at public expense. The poor obtain food free, and the children of parents who are better circumstanced contribute thereto a slight tax toward the common treasury--a communistic arrangement that has proved satisfactory to parents and children alike. An evidence of the inadequacy of the present school system--it is unable to fulfil even the moderate demands made upon it--is the fact that thousands upon thousands of children _are unable to fulfil their school duties by reason of insufficient food_. In the winter of 1893-94, it was ascertained in Berlin that _in one school district alone 3,600 children went to school without breakfast_. In such shocking conditions there are hundreds of thousands of children in Germany to-day at certain seasons of the year. With millions of others the nourishment is utterly insufficient. For all these children public alimentation and clothing also would be a godsend. A commonwealth that pursued such a policy and thus, by the systematic nourishing and clothing of the children, would bring humanity home to them, is not likely to see the sight of "penitentiaries." Bourgeois society cannot deny the existence of such misery, which itself has called forth. Hence we see compassionate souls foregathering in the establishment of breakfast and soup houses, to the end of partially filling by means of charity what it were the duty of society to fill in full. Our conditions are wretched--_but still more wretched is the mental make-up of those who shut their eyes to such facts_. The system of reducing so-called home school work, and of having the same done at school under the supervision of a teacher is progressing; the inadequacy of home facilities is realized. Not only is the richer pupil at an advantage over the poorer by reason of his position, but also by reason of his having private teachers and such other assistance at his command. On the other hand, however, laziness and shiftlessness are promoted with the rich pupil by reason of the effects of wealth, luxury and superfluity; these make knowledge appear superfluous to him, and often they place before him such immoral sights that he easily slides into temptation. He who every day and every hour hears the praises sung of rank, position, money, property, and that they are all-essential, acquires abnormal conceptions regarding man and his duties, and regarding State and social institutions. Closely looked into, bourgeois society has no reason to feel indignant at the communistic education, which Socialists aim at. Bourgeois society has itself partly introduced such a system for the privileged classes, but only as a caricature of the original. Look at the cadet and alumni establishments, at the seminaries, at the schools for clergymen, and at the homes for military orphans. In them many thousands of children, partly from the so-called upper classes, are educated in a one-sided and wrongful manner, and in strict cloister seclusion; they are trained for certain specific occupations. And again, many members of the better situated classes, who live in the country or in small places as physicians, clergymen, government employes, factory owners, landlords, large farmers, etc., send their children to boarding schools in the large cities and barely get a glimpse of them, except possibly during vacations. There is, accordingly, an obvious contradiction between the indignation expressed by our adversaries at a communistic system of education and at "the estrangement of children from their parents," on the one hand, and their own conduct, on the other, in _introducing the identical system for their own children--only in a bungling, absolutely false and inadequate style_. In equal tempo with the increased opportunities for education must the number of teachers increase. In the matter of the education of the rising generations the new social order must proceed in a way similar to that which prevails in the army, in the drilling of soldiers. There is one "under-officer" to each eight or ten men. With one teacher to every eight or ten pupils, the future may expect the results that should be aimed at. The introduction of mechanical activities in the best equipped workshops, in garden and field work, will constitute a good part of the education of the youth. It will all be done with the proper change and without excessive exertion, to the end of reaching the most perfectly developed beings. Education must also be equal and in common for both sexes. Their separation is justifiable only in the cases where the difference in sex makes such separation absolutely necessary. In this manner of education the United States is far ahead of us. There education of the two sexes is in common from the primary schools up to the universities. Not only is education free, but also school materials, inclusive of the instruments needed in manual training and in cooking, as also in chemistry, physics, and the articles needed for experimenting and at bench-work. To many schools are attached gymnastic halls, bath houses, swimming basins and playgrounds. In the higher schools, the female sex is trained in gymnastics, swimming, rowing and marching.[218] The Socialist system of education, properly regulated and ordered and placed under the direction of a sufficient force, continues up to the age when society shall determine that its youth shall enter upon their majority. Both sexes are fully qualified to exercise all the rights and fill all the duties that society demands from its adult members. Society now enjoys the certainty of having brought up only thorough, fully developed members, human beings to whom nothing natural is strange, as familiar with their nature as with the nature and conditions of society which they join full-righted. The daily increasing excesses of our modern youth--all of them the inevitable consequences of the present tainted and decomposing state of society--will have vanished. Impropriety of conduct, disobedience, immorality and rude pleasure-seeking, such as is especially noticeable among the youth of our higher educational institutions--the gymnasia, polytechnics, universities, etc.--vices that are incited and promoted by the existing demoralization and unrest of domestic life, by the poisonous influence of social life such as the immoral literature that wealth procures--all these will likewise have vanished. In equal measure will disappear the evil effects of the modern factory system and of improper housing, that dissoluteness and self-assurance of youths at an age when the human being is most in need of reining and education in self-control. All these evils future society will escape without the need of coercive measures. The nature of the social institutions and of the mental atmosphere, that will spring from them and that will rule society itself, rendering impossible the breaking out of such evils; as in Nature disease and the destruction of organisms can appear only when there is a state of decay that invites disease; so likewise in society. No one will deny that our present system of instruction and of education suffers of serious defects--the higher schools and educational establishments even more so than the lower. The village school is a paragon of moral health compared with the college; common schools for the manual training of poor girls are paragons of morality compared with many leading boarding schools for girls. The reason is not far to seek. In the upper classes of society, every aspiration after higher human aims is smothered; _those classes no longer have any ideal_. As a consequence of the absence of ideals and of noble endeavor, an unbounded passion for physical indulgence and hankering after excesses spread their physical and moral gangrene in all directions. How else can the youth be that is brought up in such an atmosphere? Purely material indulgence, without stint and without bounds, is the only aim that it sees or knows of. Why exert themselves, if the wealth of their parents makes all effort seem superfluous? The maximum of education with a large majority of the sons of our bourgeoisie consists in passing the examinations for the one year's service in the army. Is this goal reached, then they imagine to have climbed Pelion and Ossa, and regard themselves at least as demi-gods. Have they a reserve officer's certificate in their pocket, then their pride and arrogance knows no limit. The influence exercised by this generation--a generation it has become by its numbers--weak in the character and knowledge of its members, but strong in their designs and the spirit of graft, characterizes the present period as the "Age of Reserve Officers." Its peculiarities are: Characterlessness and ignorance, but a strong will; servility upward, arrogance and brutality downward. The daughters of our bourgeoisie are trained as show-dolls, fools of fashion and drawingroom-ladies, on the chase after one enjoyment after another, until, finally, surfeited with _ennui_, they fall a prey to all imaginable real and supposed diseases. Grown old, they become devotees and beads-women, who turn up their eyes at the corruption of the world and preach asceticism. As regards the lower classes, the effort is on foot to lower still more the level of their education. The proletariat might become too knowing, it might get tired of its vassalage, and might rebel against its earthly gods. The more stupid the mass, all the easier is it to control and rule. And thus modern society stands before the question of instruction and education as bewildered as it stands before all other social questions. What does it? It calls for the rod; preaches "religion," that is, submission and contentment to those who are now but too submissive; teaches abstinence where, due to poverty, abstinence has become compulsory in the utmost necessaries of life. Those who in the rudeness of their nature rear up brutally are taken to "reformatories," that usually are controlled by pietistic influences;--and the pedagogic wisdom of modern society has about reached the end of its tether. From the moment that the rising generation in future society shall have reached its majority, all further growth is left to the individual: society will feel sure that each will seize the opportunity to unfold the germs that have been so far developed in him. Each does according as inclination and faculties serve him. Some choose one branch of the ever more brilliant natural sciences: anthropology, zoology, botany, mineralogy, geology, physics, chemistry, prehistoric sciences, etc.; others take to the science of history, philologic researches, art; others yet become musicians from special gifts, or painters, or sculptors, or actors. The future will have "guild artists" as little as "guild scientists" or "guild artisans." Thousands of brilliant talents, hitherto kept down, unfold and assert themselves and display their knowledge and ability wherever opportunity offers. No longer are there any musicians, actors, artists and scientists by profession; they will exist only by inspiration, talent and genius; and the achievements of these bid fair to excel modern achievements on these fields as vastly as the industrial, technical and agricultural achievements of future society are certain to excel those of to-day. An era of art and sciences will spring up such as the world never saw before; nor will its creations fail to correspond to such a _renaissance_. What transformation and new-birth science will experience when conditions shall have become worthy of the human race, no less a man than the late Richard Wagner foresaw and expressed as early as 1850 in his work "Art and Revolution." This work is all the more significant seeing that it made its appearance immediately after a revolution that had just been beaten down, that Wagner took part in, and by reason of which he had to flee from Dresden. In this book Wagner foretells what the future will bring on. He turns directly to the working class as the one called upon to emancipate true art. Among other things he says: "When, with the free human race of the future, the earning of a living shall no longer be the object of life; when, on the contrary, thanks to the rise of a new faith, or of higher knowledge, the gaining of a livelihood by means of compatible work shall be raised above all uncertainty;--in short, when industry shall no longer be our master but our servant, then will we place the object of life in the pleasure of life, and seek to make our children fit and worthy through education. An education that starts from the exercise of strength, from the care of the beauty of the body will, due to the undisturbed love for the child and to the joy experienced at the thriving of its charms, become purely artistic; and thus in some sense or another every being will be an artist in truth. The diversity of natural inclinations will develop the most manifold aptitudes into an unprecedented wealth of beauty!"--at all points a Socialist line of thought, and fully in keeping with the arguments herein made. * * * * * Social life in future will be ever more public. What the trend is may be gathered from the wholly changed position of woman, compared with former times. Domestic life will be confined to what is absolutely necessary, while the widest field will be opened to the gratification of the social instincts. Large gathering places for the holding of addresses and discussions, and for conferring upon all social questions, over which the collectivity has the sovereign word; play, meal and reading rooms; libraries, concert halls and theaters; museums and gymnastic institutions; parks, promenades, public baths, educational institutions of all sorts; laboratories, etc.;--all of these, erected in the best and equipped in the fittest manner possible, will afford richest opportunity for all manner of intercourse, of art and of science to achieve the highest. Likewise will the institutions for the nursing of the sick, the weak, the infirm through old age, meet the highest demands. How little will then our much boasted about age seem in comparison. This fawning for favor and sunshine from above; this cringing and dog-like frame of mind; this mutual struggle of enviousness, with the aid of the most hateful and vilest means, for the privileged place. All along the suppression of convictions; the veiling of good qualities, that might otherwise give offence; the emasculation of character; the affectation of opinions and feelings;--in short, all those qualities that may be summed up in words "cowardice and characterlessness" are now every day more pronounced. Whatever elevates and ennobles man--self-esteem, independence and incorruptibility of opinion and convictions, freedom of utterance--modern conditions generally turn into defects and crimes. Often do these qualities work the ruin of their owners, unless he suppresses them. Many do not even realize their degradation; they have grown accustomed thereto. The dog regards it a matter of course that he has a master, who, when out of temper, visits him with the whip. Such altered conditions in social life will impart a radically different aspect to literary productions. Theological literature, whose entries are at present most numerous in the yearly catalogues of literary works, drops out in company with its juridic cousin,--there is no more interest in the former, and no more use for the latter. All the literary productions that refer to the struggle over political institutions will be seen no more,--their subject-matter has ceased to be. The study of all such matters will belong to the history of civilization. The vast mass of inane productions--the evidences of a spoiled taste, often possible only through sacrifices at the altar of the author's vanity--are gone. Even speaking from the view-point of present conditions, it may be said without exaggeration that four-fifths of all literary productions could disappear from the market without loss to a single interest of civilization. Such is the vastness of the mass of superficial or harmful books, palpable trash, extant to-day on the field of literature. Belles-lettres and the press will be equally hit. There is nothing sorrier, more spiritless or superficial than the large majority of our newspaper literature. If our stage in civilization and scientific attainments were to be gauged by the contents of that set of papers, it would be low indeed. The actions of men and the condition of things are judged from a view-point that corresponds with centuries gone by, and that has been long since proved laughable and untenable by science. A considerable portion of our journalists are people who, as Bismarck once put it, "missed their calling," but whose education and standard of wages fit with bourgeois interests. Furthermore, these newspapers, as well as the majority of the belles-lettric magazines, have the mission of circulating impure advertisements; the interests of their purses are on this field the same as on the former: the material interests of their owners determine their contents. On an average, belles-lettric literature is not much superior to newspaper literature. Its forte is to cultivate sex excesses: it renders homage either to shallow enlightenment or to stale prejudices and superstitions. Its general purpose is to represent the capitalist order of society, all its shortcomings notwithstanding, which are conceded in trifles, as the best of all possible worlds. On this extensive and important field, future society will institute some thorough-going housecleaning. Science, truth, beauty, the contest of the intellect after the best will rule supreme. Everyone who achieves what is worthy will enjoy the opportunity to exercise his faculties. He no longer depends upon the favor of a publisher, moneyed considerations or prejudice, but only upon the impartial judgment of experts whom he himself joins in electing, and from whose unfavorable decision he can always appeal to the general vote of the whole community,--all of which is to-day against him or impossible. The childish notion that all contest of intellect would be held down in a Socialist society they alone can maintain who hold the bourgeois world to be the most perfect social system, and who, out of enmity to Socialism seek to slander and to belittle it. A society, that rests upon full democratic equality, neither knows nor tolerates oppression. Only the fullest freedom of thought makes uninterrupted progress possible, and this is the principle of life with society. Moreover, it is an act of deception to represent bourgeois society as the paladin of true freedom of thought. Parties that represent class interests will publish in the press only that which does not injure their class' own interests, and woe to him who would attempt the contrary. His social ruin would be sealed, as every one knows. In what manner publishers handle literary work that does not suit them, every writer almost could tell a tale of woe on. Finally, the German press and criminal laws betray the spirit that animates our ruling and leading classes. Actual freedom of thought is looked upon by them as the most dangerous of evils. * * * * * The individual is to develop himself fully. That must be the law of human association. Accordingly, the individual may not remain fettered to the soil on which the accident of birth first placed him. Men and the world should be known, not from books and papers only: personal observation, practical experience are also needed. Accordingly, future society must enable everyone to do what is now done by many, although in most instances it happens to-day under the whip that want cracks. The wish for change in all the relations of life is a craving strongly stamped in man. It springs from the instinct after perfection, inherent in all organic beings. The plant that stands in a dark room, stretches and strains, as though endowed with consciousness, towards the light that falls from some crevice. Just so with man. An instinct implanted in man, consequently a natural instinct, must be rationally gratified. The conditions of future society will not balk the instinct after change; on the contrary, they promote its gratification with all: it is facilitated by the highly developed system of intercommunication; it is demanded by international relations. In future days, infinitely more people will travel through the world, and for the most varied of purposes, than happens to-day. In order to meet all demands, society furthermore requires an ample provision of all the necessaries of life. Society regulates its hours of work accordingly. It makes them longer or shorter, according as its needs or the season of the year may suggest. It may turn its strength at one season mainly to agriculture, at another mainly to industrial and similar production. It directs its labor forces as occasion may require. Through the combination of numerous forces, equipped with the best technical provisions, it can carry through with swiftness, aye, playingly, undertakings that to-day seem impossible. As society assumes the care of its youth, so it does of its aged, sick or invalid members. It guards whoever, by whatever circumstance, has become unable to work. There is in this no question of _charity_, but of _duty_; not of an alms morsel, but of an assistance born of every possible consideration due him, who, during the time of his strength and ability to work, fulfilled his duties to the commonwealth. The setting sun of old age is beautiful with all that society can offer: everyone being buoyed up with the confidence that he will some day himself enjoy what now he affords to others. No longer are the aged now disturbed with the thought that others are awaiting their death in order to "inherit;" likewise has the fear vanished from the mind of man that, grown old and helpless, he will be cast off like a squeezed lemon. Man now feels himself left neither to the benevolence of his children, nor to the alms of the community. What the condition is in which most parents find themselves, who depend in old age upon the support of their children, is notorious. How demoralizing is not the effect of the hope of inheriting upon the children, and, in a still greater degree, upon relatives! What vile qualities are not awakened; and how many are not the crimes that such hopes have led to!--murder, forgery, perjury, extortion, etc. Capitalist society has no reason to be proud of its laws of inheritance; to them are ascribable part of the crimes that are committed every year; and yet the large majority of people have nothing to bequeath or to inherit.[219] The moral and physical condition of future society; the nature of its work, homes, food, clothing, its social life--everything will greatly contribute to avoid accidents, sickness, debility. Natural death by the decline of the vigor of life will become the rule. The conviction that "heaven" is on earth, and that to be dead means to be ended, will cause people to lead rational lives.[220] He enjoys most who enjoys longest. None know how to appreciate a long life better than the very clergy who prepare people for the "after world;" a life free from care makes it possible for these gentlemen to reach the highest age average.[221] Life requires, first of all, food and drink. Friends of the so-called "natural way of living" often ask why is Socialism indifferent to vegetarianism. The question causes us to take up the subject in a few lines. Vegetarianism, that is, the doctrine that prescribes an exclusive vegetal diet, found its first supporters in such circles as are in the agreeable position of being able to choose between a vegetal and an animal diet. To the large majority of people there is no such choice: they are forced to live according to their means, the meagerness of which in many instances keeps them almost exclusively to a vegetal diet, and to the least nutritive, at that. With our working class population in Silesia, Saxony, Thuringen, etc., the potato is the principal nourishment; even bread comes in only secondarily; meat, and then only of poor quality, is hardly ever seen on the table. Even the largest part of the rural population, although they are the raisers of cattle, rarely partake of meat: they must sell the cattle in order to satisfy other pressing wants with the money obtained therefor. For the innumerable people, who are compelled to live as vegetarians, an occasional solid beefsteak, or good leg of mutton, would be a decided improvement in the diet. When vegetarianism directs itself against the overrating of the nutrition contained in meat, it is right; it is wrong, however, when it combats the partaking of meat as harmful and fatal, mainly on sentimental grounds--such as "the nature of man forbids the killing of animals and to partake of a corpse." In order to live comfortably and undisturbed, we are compelled to declare war upon and destroy a large number of living beings in the shape of all manner of vermin; in order not to be ourselves eaten up, we must undertake the killing and extirpating of wild animals. The quiet toleration of those "good friends of man," the domestic animals, would increase the number of these "good friends" in a few decades so immensely that they would "devour" us by robbing us of food. Neither is the claim true that a vegetarian diet produces mildness of temperament. The "beast" was awakened even in the mild, vegetarian Hindoo when the severity of the Englishmen drove him to mutiny. In our opinion Sonderegger hits the nail on the head when he says: "There is no order of rank in the matter of the different kinds of food; but there is an unalterable law in the matter of combining their several nutritious qualities." It is true that no one can nourish himself on an exclusively meat diet, but that he can on an exclusively vegetal diet, provided always he can select to suit; but neither would any one be satisfied with one vegetable, let it be the most nutritive. Beans, for instance, peas, lentils, in short, the leguminosae, are the most nutritive of all food. Nevertheless, to be forced to feed exclusively on them--which is said to be possible--were a torture. Karl Marx mentions in "Capital" that the Chilian mine-owners compel their workingmen to eat beans year in and year out, because the food imparts to them great strength and enables them to carry burdens that they could not carry with any other diet. Despite its nutrition, the workingmen turn against such food, but get none other, and are thus obliged to rest content therewith. Under no circumstances do the happiness and well-being of people depend upon a certain diet, as is claimed by the fanatics among the vegetarians. Climate, custom, individual tastes are the determining factors. In the measure that civilization advances, a vegetal diet progressively takes the place of the exclusive meat diet, such as is indulged in by hunting and pastoral peoples. A many-sided agriculture is a sign of higher culture. On a given field, vegetal nutritive matter can be raised in larger quantities than could meat be obtained through cattle raising. This development imparts to vegetal nutrition an ever greater preponderance. The transportation of meat, that the modern vandalic economic system furnishes us with from foreign lands, especially from South America and Australia, has been very nearly exhausted within few decades. On the other hand, animals are raised, not merely for the sake of meat, but also for that of wool, hair, bristles, skin and hides, milk, eggs, etc., upon which many industries and human wants are dependent. Again offal of several kinds can be turned in no way to better advantage than through cattle raising. The seas will also in future be made to yield to man their wealth of animal food to a much larger extent than now. It will be in future a rare occurrence to see, as we do to-day, whole loads of fish turned to manure, because the facilities and costs of transportation, or the facilities of preservation prevent their being otherwise used. It follows that a purely vegetal diet is neither probable nor necessary in the future. In the matter of food, _quality_ rather than _quantity_ is to be considered. Quantity is of little use if not good. Quality is greatly improved by the manner of preparation. The preparation of food must be conducted as scientifically as any other function, if it is to reach the highest point of utility possible. Knowledge and equipment are thereto requisite. That our women, upon whom to-day mainly devolves the preparation of food, do not and can not possess this knowledge, needs no proof. They lack all the necessary equipments therefor. As every well equipped hotel kitchen, the steam kitchen of barracks or of hospitals and especially the cooking expositions teach us, the cooking apparatuses, together with many technical arrangements for all manner of food preparation, have reached a high degree of perfection and have been contrived upon scientific principles. That will in the future be the rule. The object aimed at must be to obtain the best results with the smallest expenditure of power, time and material. _The small private kitchen is, just like the workshop of the small master mechanic, a transition stage, an arrangement by which time, power and material are senselessly squandered and wasted._ The preparation of food also will in future society be a social establishment, conducted on the most improved plane, in proper and advantageous manner. The private kitchen disappears, as it has now disappeared in the instance of those families who, although they generally provide themselves through their own kitchen, always resort to hotel kitchens or to those of caterers, the moment the question is to provide for banquets or to procure dishes a knowledge of which both they and their domestics lack.[222] The Chicago Exposition of 1893 brought out a mass of interesting facts on the revolution that has taken place in the kitchen also, and in the preparation of food;--among other things a kitchen in which the heating and cooking was done wholly through electricity. Electricity not only furnished the light, but was also active in the washing of dishes, which thereupon required the aid of the human hand only in finishing up. In this kitchen of the future there was no hot air, no smoke, no vapors. Numberless apparatuses and subsidiary machinery performed a number of operations that until then had to be performed by human hands. This kitchen of the future resembled more a parlor than a kitchen that everyone who has nothing to do in, likes to stay away from. Work therein at the Chicago Exposition was pleasurable and free from all the unpleasantness that are features of the modern kitchen. Can a private kitchen be imagined even approximately equipped like that? And then, what a saving in all directions through such a central kitchen! Our women would seize the opportunity with both hands to exchange the present for the kitchen of the future. The nutritive value of food is heightened by its facility of assimilation. This is a determining factor.[223] A natural system of nourishment for all can be reached only by future society. Cato praises the Rome of before his days for having had experts in the art of healing, but, down to the sixth century of the city, no occupation for exclusive physicians. People lived so frugally and simply, that disease was rare, and death from old age was the usual form of decease. Not until gourmandizing and idleness--in short, license with some, want and excessive work with others--had permeated society, did matters change, and radically so. In future, gluttony and license will be impossible, and likewise want, misery and privation. There is enough, and an abundance, for all. More than fifty years ago Henrich Heine sang: Why, there grows down here abundance And a plentitude for all; Roses, myrtles, beauty and joy; Yes, and sugar beans withal-- Aye, sugar beans in bursting pods For everyone are here, But they're left to heaven's angels And the sparrows of the air. "He who eats little lives well"--that is, long, said the Italian Cornaro in the sixteenth century, as quoted by Niemeyer. In the end chemistry will be active in the preparation and improvement of nourishment to a degree thitherto unknown. To-day the science is greatly abused in the interest of adulterations and fraud. It is obvious that a chemically prepared food that has all the qualities of the natural product will accomplish the same purpose. The form of the preparation is of secondary importance, provided the product otherwise meets all requirements. As in the kitchen, the revolution will be accomplished throughout domestic life: it will remove numberless details of work that must be attended to to-day. As in the future the domestic kitchen is rendered wholly superfluous by the central institutions for the preparation of food, so likewise are all the former troubles of keeping ranges, lamps, etc., in working order, removed by the central heating and electric apparatuses for lighting. Warm and cold water supplies place bathing within the reach of all at pleasure, and without the aid of any person. The central laundries assume the washing, drying, etc., of clothes; the central cleaning establishments see to the dusting, etc., of clothing and carpets. In Chicago, carpet-cleaning machines were exhibited that did the work in so short a time as to call forth the admiration of the ladies who visited the Exposition. The electric door opens at a slight pressure of the finger, and shuts of itself. Electric contrivances deliver letters and newspapers on all the floors of the houses; electric elevators save the climbing of stairs. The inside arrangement of the houses--floorings, garnishing of the walls, furnitures--will be contrived with an eye to the facility of cleaning and to the prevention of the gathering of dust and bacteria. Dust, sweepings and offal of all sorts will be carried by pipes out of the houses as water, that has been used, is carried off to-day. In the United States, in many a European city--Zurich, for instance--there are to-day tenements, exquisitely equipped, in which numerous affluent families--others could not bear the expense--live and enjoy a large part of the conveniences just sketched. Here again we have an illustration of how capitalist society breaks the way in revolutionizing human affairs, in this instance in domestic life,--but only for its elect. Domestic life being thus radically transformed, the servant, this "slave of all the whims of the mistress," is no more,--and the mistress neither. "No servants, no culture!" cries the horrified Herr v. Treitschke with comic pathos. He can as little imagine society without servants as Aristotle could without slaves. The matter of surprise is that Herr v. Treitschke looks upon our servants as the "carriers of civilization." Treitschke, like Eugen Richter, is furthermore greatly worried by the shoe-polishing and clothes-dusting question, which neither is able to attend to personally. It so happens, however, that with nine-tenths of the people everyone sees to that himself, or the wife does for her husband, or a daughter or son for the family. We might answer that what the nine-tenths have hitherto done, the remnant tenth may also do. But there is another way out. Why should not in future society the youth of the land, without distinction of sex, be enlisted for such necessary work? Work does not dishonor, even if it consist in polishing boots. Many a member of the old nobility, and officers of the army at that, learned the lesson when, to escape their debts, they ran off to the United States, and there became servants, or shoe-polishers. Eugen Richter, in his pamphlets, goes even so far as to cause the downfall of the "Socialist Imperial Chancellor" on the "Shoe-polishing Question," and the consequent falling to pieces of the "Socialist State." The "Socialist Imperial Chancellor" refuses to polish his own shoes; hence his troubles. The bourgeoisie has hugely enjoyed this description of Richter, and it has thereby furnished evidence of the modesty of its demands upon a criticism of Socialism. But Eugen Richter lived to experience the sorrow of not only seeing one of his own party members in Nuerenberg invent a shoe-polishing machine soon after the appearance of that pamphlet, but of also learning that at the Chicago Exposition of 1893 an electric shoe-polishing machine was exhibited that did the work perfectly. Thus the principal objection, raised by Richter and Treitschke against Socialist society, has been practically thrown overboard by an invention made under the bourgeois social system itself. The revolutionary transformation, that radically changes all the relations of man, especially the position of woman, is, as we see, going on now under our own eyes. It is only a question of time when society will take the process into its own hands and upon a large scale, thus quickening and perfecting the change and affording to all, without exception, the opportunity to share its innumerable advantages. FOOTNOTES: [176] "The power of emulation, in exciting to the most strenuous exertions for the sake of the approbation and admiration of others, is borne witness to by experience in every situation in which human beings publicly compete with one another, even if it be in things frivolous, or from which the public derives no benefit. A contest, who can do most for the common good, is not the kind of competition which Socialists repudiate."--John Stuart Mill's "Principles of Political Economy." Every union, every association of people, who pursue equal aims, likewise furnishes numerous examples of greater effort with no material, but only an ideal, reward in view. The emulators are moved by the ambition to distinguish themselves, by the desire to serve the common cause. But this sort of ambition is no vice; it is a virtue; it is put forth in the interest of all; and the individual finds his satisfaction in that along with all others. Ambition is harmful and objectionable only when it is put forth to the injury of the whole, and at the expense of others. [177] Von Thuenen says in his "Der isolirte Staat": "The reason why the proletarians, on the one hand, and property classes, on the other, face each other permanently as enemies lies in the antagonism of their interests; and they will remain unreconciled _so long as this division of interests is not removed_. Not only the well-being of his wage-giver but--through discoveries in industry, the pavement of streets and building of railroads, the forming of new business connections--the revenues of the Nation also may increase. Under our present social order, however, the workingman is touched by none of these; his condition remains what it was, and _the whole increase of revenues accrues to the employers, the capitalists and the landlords_." This last sentence is an almost literal anticipation of the words of Gladstone in the English Parliament, when he declared in 1864 "this intoxicating increase of incomes and power" that England had experienced in the course of the previous twenty years, "has been confined exclusively to the possessing classes." Again on p. 207 of his work, v. Thuenen says: "The evil lies in the divorce of the workingman from his product." Morelly declares in his "Principles of Legislation": "Property divides us into two classes--Rich and Poor. The former love their property and care not to defend the State; the latter can not possibly love the Fatherland, seeing that it bestows upon them naught but misery. Under the system of Communism, however, all love the Fatherland, seeing that all receive from it life and happiness." [178] In weighing the advantages and the disadvantages of Communism, John Stuart Mill says in his "Principles of Political Economy": "No soil could be more favorable to the growth of such a feeling, than a Communist association, since all the ambition, and the bodily and mental activity, which are now exerted in the pursuit of separate and self-regarding interests, would require another sphere of employment, and would naturally find it in the pursuit of the general benefit of the community." [179] "Die Gesetze der sozialen Entwickelung." [180] What does Herr Eugene Richter say to this calculation? In his "Irrelehren" (False Doctrines) he makes merry over the enormous shortening of the hours of work that we have held out in this work as the result that would follow upon the obligation of all to work and upon the higher technical organization of the process of production. He seeks to minimize as much as possible the productivity of production on a large scale, and to enhance the importance of production on a small scale. He does so in order that he might claim that the expected increased production was not practicable. In order to make Socialism seem impossible, these defenders of the existing "order" are forced to discredit the merits of their own social system. [181] "Capital is said by a Quarterly Reviewer to fly turbulence and strife, and to be timid, which is very true; but this is very incompletely stating the question. Capital eschews no profit, or very small profit, just as Nature was formerly said to abhor a vacuum. With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 per cent. will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent. certain will produce eagerness; 50 per cent. positive audacity; 100 per cent. will made it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent., and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely encourage both. Smuggling and the slave-trade have amply proved all that is here stated." (P. J. Dunning, 1. c., p. 35.) Cited by Karl Marx in "Capital," p. 786, edition Swan-Sonnenscheim & Co., London, 1896. [182] A competitor with electricity, applied to lighting purposes, has recently arisen in the shape of the so-called acetylene gas, which was discovered in the United States, by means of an electrolytic process, similar to that used in the preparation of aluminum. A compound is made of calcium and carbon, called calcium-carbide, which, in touch with water, produces the acetylene gas. Its lighting power is fifteen times that of the ordinary illuminating gas, besides being much cheaper. [183] "The generality of laborers in this and most other countries, have as little choice of occupation or freedom of locomotion, are practically as dependent on fixed rules, and on the will of others, as they could be on any system short of actual slavery."--John Stuart Mill's "Principles of Political Economy." [184] "A French workman, on his return from San Francisco, writes as follows: 'I never could have believed that I was capable of working at the various occupations I was employed on in California. I was firmly convinced that I was fit for nothing but letter-press printing.... Once in the midst of this world of adventurers, who change their occupation as often as they do their shirt, egad, I did as the others. As mining did not turn out remunerative enough, I left it for the town, where in succession I became typographer, slater, plumber, etc. In consequence of this finding out that I am fit for any sort of work, I feel less of a mollusk and more of a man.'" (A. Courbou, "De l'Enseignement Professional," 2eme ed. p. 50.) Cited by Karl Marx in "Capital", p. 493, edition Swan-Sonnenschein Co., London, 1896. [185] Tolstoi's "The Significance of Science and Art." [186] What may be made of a man under favorable circumstances is illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci, who was a distinguished painter, celebrated sculptor, favorite architect and engineer, excellent builder of fortifications, musician and improvisator. Benvenuto Cellini was a celebrated goldsmith, excellent molder, good sculptor, leading builder of fortifications, first-rate soldier and thorough musician. Abraham Lincoln was a splitter of rails, agriculturist, boatman, shop-assistant and lawyer, until he was placed in the Presidential chair of the United States. It may be said without exaggerating, most people are engaged in occupations that do not correspond with their faculties, simply because, not freedom of choice, but the force of necessity dictated their career. Many a bad professor would do good work as a shoemaker, and many a good shoemaker could be a good professor as well. [187] It should always be kept in mind that production is then organized up to the highest point of technical perfection, and all the people are at work. It may thus happen that, under given circumstances, a three-hour day is rather longer, and not shorter, than necessary. Owen in his time--first quarter of the nineteenth century--considered two hours' work sufficient. [188] "It is not necessary to go a round-about way in order to ascertain the amount of social labor crystallized in a given product. Daily experience shows directly the requisite average. Society can easily calculate how many hours are contained in a steam engine, in a hectoliter of last year's wheat, in a hundred square meters of cloth of a certain quality. Society will, therefore, never dream of re-expressing these units of work,--crystallized in the products and known to it directly and absolutely--by a merely relative, varying and insufficient measure, formerly used by it as a make-shift that it could not get along without; a measure, moreover, which itself is a third product, instead of by their natural, adequate and absolute measure--time.... Society will have to organize the plan of production according to the means of production, under which category labor-power especially belongs. The various utilities of the several articles of use, balanced with one another and with the amount of labor necessary for their production, will in the end determine the plan. People settle matters a good deal more simply without the intervention of the celebrated 'money value.'"--Fr. Engels' "Herr Eugene Duehring's Umwaelzung der Wissensehaft." [189] Herr Eugene Richter is so astonished at the dropping away of money in Socialist society--abolished money will not be: with the abolition of the merchandise character from the products of labor, money drops away of itself--that he devotes to the subject a special chapter in his "Irrelehren." What is particularly hard for him to understand is the idea that it is immaterial whether the voucher for labor performance be a piece of paper, gold or tin. On this head he says: "With gold, the devil of the modern social order would re-enter the Social Democratic State"--that there could then be only a Socialist society, and not a Social Democratic State, Herr Richter stubbornly overlooks: he must, else a good portion of his polemic would fall through--"seeing that gold has an independent metal value, can be easily saved, and thus the possession of gold pieces would enable the heaping up of values wherewith to purchase escape from the obligation to work, and wherewith even to lay out money on interest." Herr Richter must take his readers for great blockheads to dare dish up such trash to them on the subject of our gold. Herr Richter, who can not rid himself of the concept of capital, can, of course, not understand that where there is no capital, neither is there any merchandise, nor can there be any "money"; and where there is no "capital" and no "money", neither could there be any "interest." Herr Richter is nailed so fast to the concept of capital that he is unable to conceive a world without "capital." We should like to know how a member of a Socialist society could "save up" his gold certificates of labor, or even loan them out to others and thereby rake in interest, when all other members possess what that one is offering them and--_on which he lives_. [190] "All people of average healthy build _are born with almost equal intellectual powers, but education, laws and circumstances alter them relatively_. The correctly understood interest of the individual is blended into one with the common or public interest."--Helvetius' "On Man and His Education." Helvetius is right with regard to the large majority of people; but that does not take away that the natural faculties of each are different for different occupations. [191] "If, therefore, the choice were to be made between Communism with all its chances, and the present state of society with all its sufferings and injustices; if the institution of private property necessarily carried with it as a consequence, that the produce of labor should be apportioned as we now see it, almost in an inverse ratio to the labor--the largest portions to those who have never worked at all, the next largest to those whose work is almost nominal, and so in a descending scale, the remuneration dwindling as the work grows harder and more disagreeable, until the most fatiguing and exhausting bodily labor cannot count with certainty on being able to earn even the necessaries of life; if this or Communism, were the alternative, all the difficulties, great or small, of Communism would be but as dust in the balance."--John Stuart Mill, "Principles of Political Economy." Mill strove diligently to "reform" the bourgeois world, and to "bring it to reason." Of course, in vain. And so it came about that he, like all clear-sighted men, became a Socialist. He dared not, however, admit the fact in his life time, but ordered that, after his death, his auto-biography be published, containing his Socialist confession of faith. It happened to him as with Darwin, who cared not to be known in his life as an atheist. The bourgeoisie affects loyalty, religion and faith in authority because through the acceptance of these "virtues" by the masses its own rule is safeguarded; in its own sleeves, however, it laughs at them. [192] "Scholarship is as often the hand-maid of ignorance as of progress."--Buckle's "History of Civilization in England." [193] According to the census of 1882 there were in Germany engaged in trade and transportation 1,570,318 persons, inclusive of those occupied in hotels and inns, and exclusive of 295,451 domestics. [Some opinion may be formed of the volume of useless labor, parasitism, in the United States, from the census figures for 1900. Under this head of "Trade and Transportation" alone come 4,766,964 persons. Among them, substantially useless, are the 241,162 agents, the 73,277 brokers, the 92,919 commercial travelers, the 76,649 hucksters and peddlers, the 790,886 merchants and dealers (except wholesale), the 42,293 merchants and dealers (wholesale), the 74,072 officials of banks and companies, the 33,656 livery stable keepers, the 71,622 messengers and errand and office boys, and the 59,545 packers and shippers--in all 1,556,081. Of the remaining 3,210,883--among whom are 254,880 bookkeepers and accountants, 632,127 clerks and copyists, 611,139 salesmen and women--fully two-thirds could be spared to-day under a rational social system. The proportion of wasteful forces, and even parasitism, is still larger under the heads of "Professional Service" and "Domestic and Personal Service," among which--to pick up only a few of the worst items--are 111,638 clergymen, 114,460 lawyers, 86,607 government officials, including officers of the United States army and navy, 33,844 saloon keepers, 1,560,721 servants and waiters, 43,235 soldiers, sailors and marines (U. S.), etc., etc.--THE TRANSLATOR.] [194] Even the Fathers of the Church, Bishops and Popes could not refrain from preaching in a communistic vein during those early centuries when community of property still prevailed, but its theft was assuming larger proportions. The Syllabus and the encyclicals of the nineteenth century have lost all recollection of this tone, and even the Roman Popes have been compelled to become subjects of capitalist society, and now pose as its zealous defenders against the Socialists. In contrast therewith Bishop Clemens I. (deceased 102 of our reckoning) said: "The use of all things in this world is to be common to all. It is an injustice to say: 'This is my property, this belongs to me, that belongs to another.' Hence the origin of contentions among men." Bishop Ambrose of Milan, who lived about 347, exclaimed: "Nature bestows all things on all men in common, for God has created all things that their enjoyment might be common to all, and that the earth might become the common possession of all. Common possession is, therefore, a right established by Nature, and only unjust usurpation (usurpatio) has created the right of private property." St. John Chrysostomus (deceased 407) declared in his homilies directed against the immorality and corruption of the population of Constantinople: "Let none call aught his own; we have received everything from God for enjoyment in common, and 'mine' and 'thine' are words of falsehood." St. Augustine (deceased 430) expressed himself thus: "Because private property exists there exists also law suits, enmities, dissensions, wars, rebellions, sins, injustice, murder. Whence proceed all these scourges? From property only. Let us then, my brothers, refrain from possessing anything as our property; at least let us refrain from loving it." Pope Gregory the Great declares about 600: "Let them know that the earth from which they spring and of which they are formed belongs to all men in common, and that therefore the fruits which the earth brings forth must belong to all without distinction." And one of the moderns, Zacharia, says in his "Forty Books on the State": "All the evils with which civilized nations have to contend, can be traced back to private property in land." All these authorities have recognized more or less accurately the nature of private property, which, since its existence, as St. Augustine correctly puts it, brought law suits, enmities, dissensions, wars, rebellions, injustice and murder into the world,--all of them evils that will disappear with its abolition. [195] "The employment of water in the cultivation of fruit as well as of vegetables is highly desirable; water associations with these ends in view could turn with us also deserts into paradises." Official report on the Chicago Exposition of 1893, rendered by the Imperial Commissioner, Berlin, 1894. [196] This prospect seems nearer realization and in a quite different manner than the most far-sighted could have imagined. The discovery of acetylene gas is the point of departure for a long line of products of organic chemistry, that, with proper treatment, can be drawn from it. Among the articles of enjoyment, that may be expected to be gained first of all on this path, is alcohol, the production of which promises to be the easiest of all and very cheap, and is expected in but few years. If this succeeds, a large part of the agriculture of the East Elbian district, which depends upon the production of alcohol, will be put in jeopardy. The circumstance will bring on a revolution in the respective agricultural interests that will play mightily into the hands of Socialism. Evidently, what Werner, Siemens and Berthelot held out, is approaching reality. [197] Dr. G. Ruhland, "Die Grundprinzipien aktueller Agrarpolitik." [198] A petition by Julius Zuns, which finally was not sent to the Reichstag, on the subject of an agrarian investigation. [199] Dr. Rudolf Meyer, "Der Kapitalismus fin de siècle." [200] "There is a prescription for securing the fertility of the fields and perpetual repetition of their produce. If this prescription be consistently carried out it will prove more remunerative than any which has ever been applied in agriculture. It is this: Let every farmer, like the Chinese coolie, who carries a sack of corn or a hundred weight of rape, or carrots or potatoes, etc., to town, bring back with him as much if possible or more of the ingredients of his field products as he took with him, and restore it to the field whence it came. He must not despise a potato paring or a straw, but remember that one of his potatoes still needs a skin, and one of his ears of corn a stalk. The expense for this importation is slight, the outlay secure; a savings bank is not securer, and no investment brings in a higher rate of interest. The returns of his fields will be doubled in ten years: he will produce more corn, more meat and more cheese without expending more time or labor, and he will not be driven by constant anxiety to seek for new and unknown means, which do not exist, to make his ground fertile in another manner.... Old bones, soot, ashes, whether washed out or not, and blood of animals and refuse of all kinds ought to be collected in storehouses, and prepared for distribution.... Governments and town police should take precautions for preventing the loss of these materials by a suitable arrangement of drains and closets."--Liebig's "Chemical Letters." [201] "Every coolie (in China) who carries his produce to market in the morning, brings home two buckets full of manure on a bamboo rod in the evening. The appreciation of manure goes so far that every one knows how much a man secretes in a day, a month and a year, and the Chinaman considers it more than rude if his guest leaves his house carrying with him a benefit to which his host thinks himself justly entitled as a return for his hospitality.... Every substance derived from plants or animals is carefully collected and used as manure by the Chinese.... To complete the idea of the importance attached to animal refuse, it will suffice to mention the fact that the barbers carefully collect and trade with the hairs cut from the heads and beards of the hundred millions of customers whom they daily shave. The Chinese are acquainted with the use of gypsum and chalk, and it not infrequently occurs that they renew the plaster in their kitchens merely for the purpose of using the old plaster as manure."--Liebig's "Chemical Letters." [202] Karl Schober, Address delivered on the agricultural, municipal and national economic significance of city refuse; Berlin, 1877. [203] "Life, Its Elements and the Means of Its Conservation." [204] According to the census of 1890, Germany had 26 large cities of over 100,000 inhabitants each. In 1871 it had only 8 of them. In 1871, Berlin had, in round figures, 826,000 inhabitants; in 1890 it had 1,578,794--it had almost doubled. A number of these large cities were compelled to take within their municipalities the contiguous industrial towns, that in themselves had populations large enough for cities. Through the process, the population of the former rose immediately. Thus, within the period of 1885 to 1890, Leipsic rose from 170,000 to 353,000; Cologne from 161,000 to 282,000; Madgeburg from 114,000 to 201,000; Munich from 270,000 to 345,000 inhabitants, etc. At the same time, most of the other cities that incorporated no contiguous towns increased considerably during that period. Breslau grew from 299,000 to 335,000; Dresden from 246,000 to 276,000; Frankfurt-on-Main from 154,000 to 180,000; Hanover from 140,000 to 163,000; Dusseldorf from 115,000 to 146,000; Nuerenberg from 115,000 to 142,000; Chemnitz from 111,000 to 139,000 inhabitants. Similar growths were also registered by many middle-sized cities of 50,000 to 100,000 inhabitants. [In the United States, the concentration of population in large cities has been marked. In 1790 only 3.4 per cent. of the total population lived in cities. The proportion of urban to the total population then grew from census year to census year (decade to decade) as follows: 4.0 in 1800; 4.9 in 1810; 4.9 in 1820; 6.7 in 1830; 8.5 in 1840; 12.5 in 1850; 16.1 in 1860; 20.9 in 1870; 22.6 in 1880; 29.2 in 1890; and 33.1 in 1900. According to the census of 1900 there live 14,208,347 of the population in cities of at least 100,000 inhabitants; 5,549,271 in cities of 25,000 to 100,000 inhabitants; 5,286,375 in cities of 8,000 to 25,000 inhabitants; 3,380,193 in cities of 4,000 to 8,000 inhabitants; and 2,214,136 in cities of 2,500 to 4,000 inhabitants. In country districts there live 45,573,846 of a total population of 76,212,168, including Alaska and Hawaii.--THE TRANSLATOR.] [205] Prof. Adolf Wagner says in his work "Lehrbuch der politischen Oekonomie von Rau": "Small private holdings in land constitute an economic basis, that can be substituted by no other institution for a most important part of the population--an independent, self-sustaining peasantry, together with its peculiar socio-political position and function." Where, for the sake of his conservative friends, the author does not enthuse _a tout prix_ for the small farmer, he is bound to regard this class as one of the poorest. Under existing circumstances, the small farmer is downright inaccessible to higher culture: he toils at hard labor from early dawn till late, and lives often worse than a dog. Meat, butter, eggs, milk, which he produces, he does not enjoy: he produces them for others: under present circumstances he can not raise himself into better conditions: he thus becomes an element that clogs civilization. He who loves retrogression, seeing he finds his account therein, may also find satisfaction in the continuance of such a social stratum. Human progress demands its disappearance. [206] At the Erfurt "Union Parliament" of 1850, Prince Bismarck thundered against the large cities as "the hot-beds of revolution," that should be razed to the ground. He was quite right: capitalist society produces its own "grave-diggers" in the modern proletariat. [207] Frederick Engels, "The Development of Socialism from Utopia to Science." [208] ["Religion" In English is not quite the same as "Die Religion" in German. For all their etymology is identical, custom and social institutions have imparted to the German term a meaning, or a shade of a meaning, that it lacks in English. "Die Religion" is in Germany a State institution; it is part of the curriculum of colleges; and it is there so utterly creedy, churchianic, and dogmatic that it is a positive abomination even to the students who mean to devote themselves to theology. That, however, even in the German language the word has a varying meaning may be gathered from the epigram of Schiller: "To what religion I belong? To none. Why? Out of religiousness"--literally in German, "out of religion." The reproduction in this translation of the idea conveyed by the term "Die Religion" presented its difficulties. As none could be found in English to convey its varying sense, the word "religion" has been preserved throughout as the nearest equivalent.--THE TRANSLATOR.] [209] Karl Marx: "Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechts-Philosophie." [210] How the ancients thought upon the subject appears from the following utterance of Aristotle: "A tyrant (the term applied to autocrats in Old Greece) must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do not easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side."--Aristotle's "Politics." Aristotle was born 384 B. C. at Stagira, whence he is frequently called "the Stagirite." "A prince, then, is to have particular care that nothing falls from his mouth but what is full of the five qualities aforesaid, and that to see and to hear him, he appears all goodness, integrity, humanity and religion, which last he ought to pretend to more than ordinarily because more men do judge by the eye than by the touch; for everybody sees, but few understand; everybody sees how you appear, but few know what in reality you are, and those few dare not oppose the opinion of the multitude who have the majesty of their prince to defend them; and in the actions of all men, especially princes, where no man has power to judge, every one looks to the end. Let a prince, therefore, do what he can to preserve his life, and continue his supremacy, the means which he uses shall be thought honorable, and be commended by everybody; because the people are always taken with the appearance and event of things, and, the greatest part of the world consists of the people; those few who are wise taking place when the multitude has nothing else to rely upon."--Macchiavelli in his celebrated work, "The Prince." Macchiavelli was born in Florence, 1469. [211] Whenever the modern bourgeois is at a loss for reasons to justify some enormity with, a thousand to one he falls back upon "morality." In the spring of 1894, it went so far that, at a meeting of the Evangelical Synod, a "liberal" member of the Berlin Chamber of the Exchequer pronounced it "moral" that only taxpayers should have the right to vote at Church meetings (!) [212] "A certain degree of well-being and culture is a necessary external condition for the development of the philosophic spirit.... Thence we find that people began to philosophize only in those nations, that had raised themselves to a considerable height of well-being and culture."--Tennemann, quoted by Buckle in a foot note, _ubi supra_. "Material and intellectual interests go hand in hand. The one can not exist without the other. Between the two there is the same connection as between body and soul: to separate them is to bring on death."--v. Thuenen's "Der Isolirte Staat." "The best life, as well for the individual in particular, as for the State in general, is that life in which virtue is decked out with _external_ goods also, sufficient to make possible an active indulgence in beautiful and good actions."--Aristotle's "Politics." [213] When Eugene Richter in his "Irrelehren" (False Doctrines) repeats the old wornout phrase about the Socialists aiming at a "Penitentiary State"--that the question is no longer about a "State" will have by this time become clear to our readers--he presupposes the existence of a "State" or social order _that will violate its own interests_. A new State or social order radically different from the preceding one can not possibly be produced at will; to imagine such a thing would be to ignore and deny all the laws of development, obedient to which State and Society have hitherto risen and developed. Eugen Richter and those who share his views may take comfort: if Socialism really implies the silly and unnatural aims imputed to it by them, it will go to pieces, and without the aid of the "Irrelehren" of Richter. But it happens that there is no political party that stands as squarely and logically upon the evolutionary field as the Social Democratic. Quite as unfounded as all the other objections are the remarks of Eugene Richter: "For a social condition, such as the Socialists want, the people must be angels." As is well known, there are no angels, nor do we need any. Partly are men influenced by conditions, and partly are conditions influenced by men, and the latter will be increasingly the case in the measure that men learn to know the nature of the social system that they themselves rear, and in the measure that the experience thus gathered is consciously applied by them by corresponding changes in their social organization,--and that is Socialism. What we need is not other people, but wiser and more intelligent people than most of them are to-day. It is with the end in view of making people wiser and more intelligent that we agitate, Herr Richter, and that we publish works like this one. [214] It is surprising that, considering the fathomless blockishness of our adversaries, none has yet claimed that in Socialist society everyone would receive an equal portion of food and an equal quantity of linen and clothing so as to "crown the work of uniformity." Such a claim is quite stupid enough to expect its being made by our opponents. [215] Fourier made this the subject of a brilliant argument, although he ran into utopianism in the elaboration of his ideas. [216] Condorcet demands in his plan of education: "Education must be free, equal, general, bodily, mental, industrial and political, and it must aim at real and actual equality." Likewise Rousseau in his "Political Economy": "Above all, education must be public, equal and mixed, for the purpose of raising men and citizens." Aristotle also demands: "Seeing the State has but one object, it must also provide one and the same education for all its members. The care hereof must be the concern of the State and not a private affair." [217] Eugene Richter among them, in his "Irrelehren." [218] "America's Bildungswesen," by Prof. Emil Hausknecht. [219] "The person who has led an honorable and active life until old age should not then have to live either on the charity of his children or of bourgeois society. An independent old age, free from cares or toil, is the natural reward for continuous exertions in the days of strength and health."--v. Thuenen's "Der Isolirte Staat." But how is it to-day in this bourgeois society? Millions look with dread towards the time when, having grown old, they are thrown upon the street. And our industrial system causes people to age prematurely. The very much boasted about old-age and invalid pensions in the German Empire afford but a very scanty substitute: even its most zealous defenders admit that. Their aids are still more inadequate than the pensions which the municipalities allow to the large majority of the officials whom they provide with pensions. [220] [It is a feature of theology to be positive, precise and emphatic in descriptions of what the describer knows nothing about. No less theologic, in this sense of the term, are negative assertions concerning matters that science has not yet illumined. Whether "to be dead means to be ended" or not, is no part either of the general question of Socialism, or the specific question of Woman. Nevertheless, while respecting the author's private opinion in the matter, and leaving his sentence untouched, the following phrasing would seem preferable, as free from the taint of what may be called the "theologic method," and also more in keeping with the mental posture of positive knowledge: "Whether to be dead means to be ended or not, is a matter on which man awaits the fiat of Science."--THE TRANSLATOR.] [221] [It is otherwise in the United States, where, as a rule, clergymen have to "hustle"--both to curry favor with their parishioners and to countermine the mines laid by their competitors for fatter "calls," or by their numerous unemployed "brothers of the cloth." According to the census of 1900, clergymen had the very highest death rate (23.5) among the professional occupations for the registration area,--and it was among the highest altogether. It was excelled only by the death rate of the coopers (23.8); of the millers, flour and grist, (26.6); of the sailors, pilots, fishermen and oystermen (27.7); and of the stock raisers, herders and drovers (32.1). The census also shows that the death rate of clergymen is on the increase--18.2 in 1890; now 23.5.--THE TRANSLATOR.] [222] Herr Eugen Richter in his "Irrelehren" is also raving mad over the idea of abolishing the private kitchen. As far as we know, Herr Richter is a bachelor. Obviously he does not miss his own kitchen: to judge from the rotundity of his body, he does not fare ill. If Herr Richter were a married man and possessed a wife, who had herself to administer the kitchen department and to perform in it the needed work, instead of leaving all that to servants, as is the fashion with the women of the property classes, then, a hundred to one his wife would nicely prove to him how happy she would be if she only could be freed from the bondage of the kitchen through the large and thoroughly equipped communal institute for meals. [223] Niemeyer, "Gesundheitslehre." PART III WOMAN IN THE FUTURE WOMAN IN THE FUTURE. This chapter can be condensed in few words. It only contains the conclusions that flow from what has been said, conclusions that the reader may draw for himself. The woman of future society is socially and economically independent; she is no longer subject to even a vestige of dominion and exploitation; she is free, the peer of man, mistress of her lot. Her education is the same as that of man, with such exceptions as the difference of sex and sexual functions demand. Living under natural conditions, she is able to unfold and exercise her mental powers and faculties. She chooses her occupation on such field as corresponds with her wishes, inclinations and natural abilities, and she works under conditions identical with man's. Even if engaged as a practical working-woman on some field or other, at other times of the day she may be educator, teacher or nurse, at yet others she may exercise herself in art, or cultivate some branch of science, and at yet others may be filling some administrative function. She joins in studies, enjoyments or social intercourse with either her sisters or with men,--as she may please or occasion may serve. In the choice of love, she is, like man, free and unhampered. She woos or is wooed, and closes the bond from no considerations other than her own inclinations. This bond is a private contract, celebrated without the intervention of any functionary--just as marriage was a private contract until deep in the Middle Ages. Socialism creates in this nothing new: it merely restores, at a higher level of civilization and under new social forms, that which prevailed at a more primitive social stage, and before private property began to rule society. Under the proviso that he inflict injury upon none, the individual shall himself oversee the satisfaction of his own instincts. _The satisfaction of the sexual instinct is as much a private concern as the satisfaction of any other natural instinct._ None is therefor accountable to others, and no unsolicited judge may interfere. How I shall eat, how I shall drink, how I shall sleep, how I shall clothe myself, is my private affair,--exactly so my intercourse with a person of the opposite sex. Intelligence and culture, perfect individual freedom--qualities that become normal through the education and the conditions of future society--will guard everyone against the commission of acts that will redound to his injury. Self-training and the knowledge of their own being are possessions of the men and the women of future society to a degree much above the present. The simple circumstance that all bashful prudery and affectation of secrecy regarding natural matters will have vanished is a guarantee of a more natural intercourse of the sexes than that which prevails to-day. If incompatibility, disenchantment, or repulsion set in between two persons that have come together, morality commands that the unnatural, and therefore immoral, bond be dissolved. Seeing, moreover, that all the circumstances and conditions, which until then condemned large numbers of women to celibacy and to prostitution, will have vanished, man can no longer superimpose himself. On the other hand, the completely changed social conditions will have removed the numerous inconveniences that to-day affect married life, that often prevent its favorable unfolding, or that even render it wholly impossible. The contradictions in and the unnatural features of the present position of woman are realized with ever increasing force in wide social circles. The sentiment finds lively utterance in the literature of the Social Question as well as in works of fiction,--often, it must be confessed, in wrongful manner. That the present form of marriage corresponds ever less with its purpose, no thinking person any longer denies. Thus is seen the phenomenon of the demand for freedom in the choice of love, and for the untrammeled dissolution of the marriage bond, when necessary, made by people who refuse to draw the requisite conclusions for the change of the present social system. They believe that the freedom of sexual intercourse must be asserted only in behalf of the privileged classes. In a polemic against Fanny Lewald's efforts in behalf of the emancipation of woman, Mathilde Reichhardt-Stromberg expresses herself this wise: "If you (Fanny Lewald) claim the complete equality of woman with man in social and political life, George Sand also must be right in her struggles for emancipation, which aim no further than at what man has long been in undisputed possession of. Indeed, there is no reasonable ground for admitting the head and not the heart of woman to this equality, to give and to take as freely as man. On the contrary, if woman has by nature the right, and, consequently, also the duty--for we should not bury the talent bestowed upon us--of exerting her brain tissue to the utmost in the race with the intellectual Titans of the opposite sex, she must then have precisely the same right to preserve her equilibrium by quickening the circulation of her heart's blood in whatever way it may seem good to her. Do we not all read without the slightest moral indignation how Goethe--to begin with the greatest as an illustration--again and again wasted the warmth of his heart and the enthusiasm of his great soul on a different woman? Reasonable people regard this as perfectly natural by the very reason of the greatness of his soul, and the difficulty of satisfying it. Only the narrow-minded moralist stops to condemn his conduct. Why, then, deride the 'great souls' among women!... Let us suppose that the whole female sex consisted of great souls like George Sand, that every woman were a Lucretia Floriani, whose children are all children of love and who brought up all these children with true motherly love and devotion, as well as with intelligence and good sense. What would become of the world? There can be no doubt that it could continue to exist and to progress, just as it does now; it might even feel exceptionally comfortable under the arrangement."[224] Accordingly, Mathilde Reichhardt-Stromberg is of the opinion that, if every woman were a Lucretia Floriani, that is, a great soul like George Sand, who draws her own picture in Lucretia Floriani, they should be free for the "preservation of their equilibrium to quicken the circulation of their heart's blood in whatever way it may seem good to them." But why should that be the privilege of the "great souls" only, and not of the others also, who are no "great souls," and can be none? No such difference exists to us. If a Goethe and a George Sand--to take these two from the many who have acted and are acting like them--live according to the inclinations of their hearts--and about Goethe's love affairs whole libraries are published that are devoured by his male and female admirers in wrapt ecstasy--why condemn in others that, which done by a Goethe or a George Sand, becomes the subject of ecstatic admiration? Indeed, such freedom in the choice of love is an impossibility in bourgeois society. This fact was the objective point in our preceding array of evidence. But place the whole community under social conditions similar to those enjoyed by the material and intellectual elect, and forthwith the opportunity is there of equal rights and freedom for all. In "Jacques," George Sand depicts a husband who judges the adulterous relations of his wife with another man in these words: "No human being can command love; and none is guilty if he feels, or goes without it. What degrades the woman is the lie: what constitutes her adultery is not the hour that she grants to her lover, but the night that she thereupon spends with her husband." Thanks to this view of the matter, Jacques feels obliged to yield the place to his rival, Borel, and he proceeds to philosophize: "Borel, in my place, would have quietly beaten his wife, and perhaps would not have blushed to receive her afterwards into his bed, debased by his blows and his kisses. There are men who cut the throat of an unfaithful wife without ceremony, after the fashion of the Orientals, because they consider her as legal property. Others fight with their rival, kill him or drive him away, and again seek the kisses of the woman they pretend to love, and who shrinks from them with horror, or resigns herself in despair. These, in cases of conjugal love, are the most common ways of acting, and I say that the love of the hogs is less vile and less gross than that of these men." Commenting on these passages, Brandes observes: "These truths, which are considered elemental with our cultured classes, were 'sophisms that cried to heaven' only fifty years ago." But the "property and cultured world" dare not to this day openly avow the principles of George Sand, although, in point of fact, it lives up to them in the main. As in morality and religion, the bourgeois is a hypocrite in marriage also. What Goethe and George Sand did, has been done and continues to be done by thousands of others, who are not to be compared with Goethe, yet without in the least losing the esteem and respect of society. All that is needed is a respectable position, the rest comes of itself. All this notwithstanding, the liberties of a Goethe and a George Sand are improper, judged from the standpoint of bourgeois morality, and stand in contradiction with the nature of its social principles. Compulsory marriage is the normal marriage of bourgeois society: it is the only "moral" union of the sexes: all other sexual union, by whomsoever entered into, is immoral. Bourgeois marriage--we have proved the point beyond cavil--is the result of bourgeois property relations. This marriage, which is intimately related with private property and the right of inheritance--demands "legitimate" children as heirs: it is entered into for the purpose of acquiring these: under the pressure of social conditions, it is forced even upon those who have nothing to bequeath:[225] it becomes a social law, the violation of which the State punishes by imprisoning for a term of years the men or women who live in adultery and have been divorced. In future society there is nothing to bequeath, unless the domestic equipment and personal inventory be regarded as inheritance: the modern form of marriage is thus devoid of foundation and collapses. The question of inheritance is thereby solved, and Socialism need not concern itself about abolishing the same. No right of inheritance can arise where there is no private property. Woman is, accordingly, free, and her children, where she has any, do not impair her freedom: they can only fill all the fuller the cup of her enjoyments and her pleasure in life. Nurses, teachers, female friends, the rising female generations--all these are ready at hand to help the mother when she needs help. It is possible that there may be men in the future who will say with Alexander von Humboldt: "I am not built for the father of a family. Moreover, I consider marriage a sin, and the begetting of children a crime." What of it? The power of natural instincts will restore the equilibrium. We are alarmed neither by a Humboldt's hostility to marriage nor by the philosophic pessimism of a Schopenhauer, a Mainlaender or a v. Hartmann, who raise to man the prospect of self-destruction in the "ideal State," In this matter we hold with Fr. Ratzel, who justly says: "Man may no longer look upon himself as an exception to the laws of Nature; he should rather begin at last to ascertain the law that underlies his own acts and thoughts, and to endeavor to live his life according to the laws of Nature. He will arrive at the point when he will arrange his social life with his fellows, that is, his family and the State, not after the precepts of far-back centuries, but after the rational principles of natural sense. Politics, morals, principles of justice--all of which are at present fed from all possible sources--will be determined according to the laws of Nature alone. An existence worthy of human beings, dreamed of for thousands of years, will finally become reality."[226] That day is approaching with giant strides. Human society has traversed, in the course of thousands of years, all the various phases of development, to arrive in the end where it started from,--communistic property and complete equality and fraternity, but no longer among congeners alone, but among the whole human race. In that does the great progress consist. What bourgeois society has vainly striven for, and at which it suffers and is bound to suffer shipwreck--the restoration of freedom, equality and fraternity among men--Socialism will accomplish. Bourgeois society could only set up the theory; here, as in so many other respects, their practice was at odds with their theories. It is for Socialism to harmonize the theory with the practice. Nevertheless, while man returns to the starting point in his development, the return is effected upon an infinitely higher social plane than that from which he started. Primitive society held property in common in the gens and clan, but only in the rawest and most undeveloped stage. The process of development that took place since, reduced, it is true, the common property to a small and insignificant vestige, broke up the gentes, and finally atomized the whole of society; but, simultaneously, it raised mightily the productivity of that society in its various phases and the manifoldness of social necessities, and it created out of the gentes and tribes nations and great States, although again it produced a condition of things that stood in violent contradiction with social requirements. The task of the future is to end the contradiction by the re-transformation upon the broadest basis, of property and productive powers into collective property. Society re-takes what once was its own, but, in accord with the newly created conditions of production, it places its whole mode of life upon the highest stage of culture, which enables all to enjoy what under more primitive circumstances was the privilege of individuals or of individual classes only. Now woman again fills the active _role_ that once was hers in primitive society. She does not become the mistress, she is the equal of man. "The end of social development resembles the beginning of human existence. The original equality returns. The mother-web of existence starts and rounds up the cycle of human affairs"--thus writes Bachofen, in his frequently quoted work "Das Mutterrecht," forecasting coming events. Like Bachofen, Morgan also passes judgment upon bourgeois society, a judgment that, without his having any particular information on Socialism, coincides essentially with our own. He says: "Since the advent of civilization, the outgrowth of property has been so immense, its forms so diversified, its uses so expanding and its _management so intelligent in the interests of its owners, that it has become, on the part of the people, an unmanageable power_. The human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation. The time will come, nevertheless, when human intelligence will rise to the mastery over property, and define the relations of the State to the property it protects, as well as the obligations and the limits of the rights of its owners. _The interests of society are paramount to individual interests, and the two must be brought into just and harmonious relations._ A mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind, if progress is to be the law of the future as it has been of the past. The time which has passed away since civilization began is but a fragment of the past duration of man's existence; and but a fragment of the ages yet to come. _The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim; because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction. Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending. It will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes._"[227] Thus we see how men, proceeding from different starting-points, are guided by their scientific investigations to the identical conclusions. The complete emancipation of woman, and her equality with man is the final goal of our social development, whose realization no power on earth can prevent;--and this realization is possible only by a social change that shall abolish the rule of man over man--hence also of capitalists over workingmen. Only then will the human race reach its highest development. The "Golden Age" that man has been dreaming of for thousands of years, and after which he has been longing, will have come at last. Class rule will have reached its end for all time, and, along with it, the rule of man over woman. FOOTNOTES: [224] "Frauenrecht und Frauenpflilcht. Eine Antwort auf Fanny Lewald's Briefe 'Fuer und wider die Frauen.'" [225] In his work "Bau und Leben des sozialen Koerpers" (The Structure and Life of the Social Body), Dr. Schaeffle says: "A loosening of the bonds of matrimony by the facilitation of divorce is certainly undesirable. It flies in the face of the moral objects of human pairing, and would be injurious to the preservation of the population as well as the education of the children." After what has been said herein it follows that we not only consider this view wrong, but are inclined to regard it as "immoral." Nevertheless, Dr. Schaeffle will allow that the idea of introducing and maintaining institutions that do violence to its own conceptions of morality, is simply unimaginable in a society of much higher culture than the present. [226] Quoted in Haeckel's "Natuerliche Schoepfungsgeschichte." [227] Morgan's "Ancient Society." PART IV INTERNATIONALITY INTERNATIONALITY. In the very nature of things, an existence worthy of human beings can never be the exclusive possession of a single privileged people. Isolated from all others, no nation could either raise or keep up such an establishment. The development that we have reached is the product of the co-operation of national and international forces and relations. Although with many the national idea still wholly sways the mind, and subserves the purpose of maintaining political and social dominations, possible only within national boundaries, the human race has reached far into internationalism. Treaties of commerce, of tariffs and of shipping, postal unions, international expositions, conventions on international law and on international systems of measurement, international scientific congresses and associations, international expeditions of discovery, our trade and intercommunication, especially the international congresses of workingmen, who are the carriers of the new social order and to whose moral influence was mainly due the international congress for factory legislation in the interest of the workingmen, assembled in Berlin in the spring of 1890 upon the invitation of the German Empire,--these and many other phenomena testify to the international character that, despite national demarcations, the relations between the various civilized nations have assumed. National boundary lines are being broken through. The term "world's economy" is taking the place of "national economy": an increasing significance is attaching to it, seeing that upon it depends the well-being and prosperity of individual nations. A large part of our own products is exchanged for those of foreign nations, without which we could no longer exist. As one branch of industry is injured when another suffers, so likewise does the production of one nation suffer materially when that of another is paralyzed. Despite all such transitory disturbances as wars and race persecutions, the relations of the several nations draw ever closer, because material interests, the strongest of all, dominate them. Each new highway, every improvement in the means of intercommunication, every invention or improvement in the process of production, whereby goods are made cheaper, strengthens these relations. The ease with which personal contact can be established between distantly located countries and peoples is a new and powerful link in the chain that draws and holds the nations together. Emigrations and colonizations are additional and powerful levers. One people learns from the other. Each seeks to excel. Along with the interchange of material products, the interchange of the products of the mind is going on, in the original tongue as well as in translations. To millions the learning of foreign living languages becomes a necessity. Next to material advantages, nothing contributes more towards removing antipathies than to penetrate into the language and the intellectual products of a foreign people. The effect of this process of drawing together, that is going on upon an international scale, is that the several nations are resembling one another ever more in their social conditions. With the most advanced, and therefore pace-setting nations, the resemblance is now such that he who has learned to understand the social structure of one, likewise knows that of all the others in essentials. It happens similarly as in Nature where, among animals of the same species the skeleton formation and organization is the same, and, if in possession of a part of such a skeleton, one can theoretically construct the whole animal. A further result is this, that where the same social foundations are found, their effects must be the same--the accumulation of vast wealth, and its opposite pole of mass-poverty, wage-slavery, dependence of the masses upon the machinery of production, their domination by the property-holding minority, and the rest of the long train of consequences. Indeed, we see that the class antagonisms and the class struggles, that rage throughout Germany, equally keep all Europe, the United States, Australia, etc., in commotion. In Europe, from Russia across to Portugal, from the Balkans, Hungary and Italy across to England and Ireland, the same spirit of discontent is prevalent, the identical symptoms of social fermentation, of general apprehension and of decomposition are noticeable. Externally unlike, according to the degree of development, the character of the people and their political organization, these movements are all essentially alike. Deep-reaching social antagonisms are their cause. Every year these antagonisms become more pronounced, the fermentation and discontent sinks deeper and spreads wider, until finally some provocation, possibly insignificant in seeming, brings on the explosion, that then spreads like lightning throughout the civilized world, and calls upon the people to take sides--pro or con. The battle is then on between New and Old Society. Masses of people step upon the stage; an abundance of intelligence is enlisted, such as the world never before saw engaged in any contest, and never again will see gathered for such a purpose. _It is the last social struggle of all._ Standing at the elevation of this century, the sight is obvious of the steady coming to a head of the forces for the struggle in which the New Ideas will triumph. The new social system will then rear itself upon an international basis. The peoples will fraternize; they will reach one another the hand, and they will endeavor to gradually extend the new conditions over all the races of the earth.[228] No people any longer approaches another as an enemy, bent upon oppression and exploitation; or as the representative of a strange creed that it seeks to impose upon others;--they will meet one another as friends, who seek to raise all human beings to the height of civilization. The labors of the new social order in its work of colonization and civilization will differ as essentially in both purpose and method from the present, as the two social orders are essentially different from each other. Neither powder nor lead, neither "firewater" (liquor) nor Bible will be used. The task of civilization is entered upon with the instruments of peace, which will present the civilizers to the savages, not as enemies, but as benefactors. Intelligent travelers and investigators have long learned to know how successful is that path. When the civilized peoples shall have reached the point of joining in a large federation, the time will have come when for evermore the storms of war shall have been lain. Perpetual peace is no dream, as the gentlemen who strut about in uniforms seek to make people believe. That day shall have come the moment the peoples shall have understood their true interests: these are not promoted by war and dissension, by armaments that bear down whole nations; they are promoted by peaceful, mutual understandings, and jointly laboring in the path of civilization. Moreover, as was shown on page 238, the ruling classes and their Governments are seeing to it that the military armaments and wars break their own backs by their own immensity. Thus the last weapons will wander into the museums of antiquity, as so many of their predecessors have done before, and serve as witnesses to future generations of the manner in which the generations gone by have for thousands of years frequently torn up one another like wild animals--until finally the human in them triumphed over the beast. National peculiarities are everywhere nourished by the ruling classes in order that, at a given conjuncture, a great war may furnish a drainage for dangerous tendencies at home. As a proof of the extent to which these national peculiarities engender wars, an utterance of the late General Fieldmarshal Moltke may here be quoted. In the last volume of his posthumous work, which deals with the German-French war of 1870-71, this passage occurs among others in the introductory observations: "So long as nations lead separate existences there will be dissensions that only strokes can arbitrate. In the interest of humanity, however, it is to be hoped that wars may become as much rarer as they have become more fearful." Now then, this national separate existence, that is, the hostile shutting off of one nation from another, will vanish. Thus future generations will be able to achieve without trouble tasks that gifted heads have long conceived, and unsuccessfully attempted to accomplish. Condorcet, among others, conceived the idea of an international language. The late Ulysses S. Grant, ex-President of the United States, uttered himself this wise on a public occasion: "Seeing that commerce, education and the rapid exchange of thought and of goods by telegraphy and steam have altered everything, I believe that God is preparing the world to become one nation, to speak one language and to reach a state of perfection in which armies and navies will no longer be needed." It is natural that with a full-blooded Yankee the leading _role_ be played by the "dear God," who, after all, is but the product of historic development. Hypocrisy, or perhaps also ignorance in matters that concern religion, is nowhere as stupendous as in the United States. The less the power of the State presses upon the masses, all the more must religion do the work. Hence the phenomenon that the bourgeoisie is most pious wherever the power of the State is laxest. Next to the United States, come England, Belgium and Switzerland in this matter. Even the revolutionary Robespierre, who played with the heads of aristocrats and priests as with nine-pin balls, was, as is known, very religious, whence he ceremoniously introduced the "Supreme Being," which shortly before had, with equal bad taste, been dethroned by the Convention. And seeing that the frivolous and idle aristocrats of France had been greatly bragging about their atheism, Robespierre regarded atheism as aristocratic, and denounced it in his speech to the Convention on the "Supreme Being" with these words: "Atheism is aristocratic. The idea of a Supreme Being, that watches over oppressed innocence and punishes triumphant crime, comes from the people. If there were no God, one would have to be invented." The virtuous Robespierre had his misgivings concerning the power of his virtuous republic to cancel the existing social antagonisms, hence his belief in a Supreme Being that wreaks vengeance and seeks to smooth the difficulties that the people of his time were unable to smooth. Hence also was such a belief a necessity to the first republic. One step in progress will bring another. Mankind will ever set new tasks to itself, and the accomplishment of the same will lead it to such a degree of social development that wars, religious quarrels and similar manifestations of barbarism will be unknown. FOOTNOTE: [228] "National and human interests stand to-day opposed to each other. At a higher stage of civilization these interests will coincide and become one."--v. Thuenen, "Der Isolirte Staat." PART V POPULATION _and_ OVER-POPULATION POPULATION AND OVER-POPULATION It has become quite fashionable with people who occupy themselves with the social question to consider the question of population as the most important and burning of all. They claim that we are threatened with "over-population;" aye, that the danger is upon us. This, more than any other division of the Social Question, must be treated from an international standpoint. The feeding and the distribution of the people have pre-eminently become international issues of fact. Since Malthus, the law underlying the increase of population has been the subject of extensive dispute. In his celebrated and now notorious "Essay on the Principles of Population," which Marx has characterized as a "school-boyish, superficial and pulpiteer piece of declamatory plagiarism on Sir James Stewart, Townsend, Franklin, Wallace and others" and which "contains not one original sentence," Malthus lays down the proposition that mankind has the tendency to increase in geometric progression (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc.), while food could increase only in arithmetic progression (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.); and that the consequence is a rapid disproportion between the numbers of the population and the supply of food, that inevitably leads to want and starvation. The final conclusion was the necessity of "abstinence" in the procreation of children, and abstinence from marriage without sufficient means for the support of a family, contrariwise there would be no place at "the banquet table of Nature" for the descendants. The fear of over-population is very old. It was touched upon in this work in connection with the social conditions of the Greeks and Romans, and at the close of the Middle Ages. Plato and Aristotle, the Romans, the small bourgeois of the Middle Ages were all swayed by it, and it even swayed Voltaire, who, in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, published a treatise on the subject. The fear ever turns up again--this circumstance must be emphasized--_at periods when the existing social conditions are disintegrating and breaking down_. Seeing on all sides privation and discontent at such periods, the privation and discontent are forthwith ascribed to the shortness of the supply of food, instead of to the manner in which the existing supply is distributed. All advanced social stages have hitherto rested upon class-rule, and the principal means of class-rule was the appropriation of the land. The land gradually slips from the hands of a large number of proprietors into those of a small number that utilize and cultivate it only partially. The large majority are rendered propertyless and are stripped of the means of existence; their share of food then depends upon the good will of their masters, for whom they now have to work. According to the social condition of things, the struggle for the land takes its form from period to period; the end, however, was that the land continued steadily to concentrate in the hands of the ruling class. If undeveloped means of transportation or political isolation impede the intercourse abroad of a community and interfere with the importation of food when the crops fail and provisions are dear, forthwith the belief springs up that there are too many people. Under such circumstances, every increase in the family is felt as a burden; the specter of over-population rises; and the terror that it spreads is in direct proportion to the concentration of the land in few hands, together with its train of evils--the partial cultivation of the soil, and its being turned to purposes of pleasure for its owners. Rome and Italy were poorest off for food at the time when the whole soil of Italy was held by about 3,000 latifundia owners. Hence the cry: "The latifundia are ruining Rome!" The soil was converted into vast hunting-grounds and wonderful pleasure-gardens; not infrequently it was allowed to be idle, seeing that its cultivation, even by slaves, came out dearer to the magnates than the grain imported from Sicily and Africa. It was a state of things that opened wide the doors for usury in grain, a practice in which the rich nobility likewise led. In consideration of this usury of grain the domestic soil was kept from cultivation. Thereupon the impoverished Roman citizen and the impoverished aristocracy resolved to renounce marriage and the begetting of children; hence the laws placing premiums on marriage and children in order to check the steady decrease of the ruling classes. The same phenomenon appeared towards the close of the Middle Ages, after the nobility and clergy had, in the course of centuries and with the aid of all the crafty and violent means at their command, robbed unnumbered peasants of their property and appropriated the common lands to themselves. When, thereupon, the peasants revolted and were beaten down, the robber-trade gained new impetus, and it was then also practiced upon the Church estates by the Princes of the Reformation. The number of thieves, beggars and vagabonds was never larger than immediately before and after the Reformation. The expropriated rural population rushed to the cities; but there, due to causes that have been described in previous pages, the conditions of life were likewise deteriorating,--hence "over-population" was felt all around. The appearance of Malthus coincides with that period of English industry when, due to the inventions of Hargreaves, Arkwright and Watt, powerful changes set in both in mechanism and technique, changes that affected, first of all, the cotton and linen industries, and rendered breadless the workingmen engaged in them. The concentration of capital and land assumed at the time large proportions in England: along with the rapid increase of wealth, on the one hand, there went the deepening misery of the masses, on the other. At such a juncture, the ruling classes, who have every reason to consider the existing world the "best of all possible worlds," were bound to seek an explanation for so contradictory a phenomenon as the pauperization of the masses in the midst of swelling wealth and flourishing industry. Nothing was easier than to throw the blame upon the too-rapid procreation of the workingmen, and not upon their having been rendered superfluous through the capitalist process of production, and the accumulation of the soil in the hands of landlords. With such circumstances for its setting, the "school-boyish, superficial and pulpiteer piece of declamatory plagiarism," that Malthus published, was a work that gave drastic utterance to the secret thoughts and wishes of the ruling class, and justified their misdeeds to the world. Hence the loud applause that it met from one side, and violent opposition from another. Malthus had spoken the right word at the right time for the English bourgeoisie; hence, although his essay "contained not one original sentence," he became a great and celebrated man, and his name a synonym for the doctrine.[229] Now, then, the conditions that caused Malthus thus to give his signal of alarm and proclaim his brutal doctrine--he addressed it to the working class, thus adding insult to injury--have since grown worse from decade to decade. They have grown worse, not alone in the fatherland of Malthus, Great Britain, but in all the countries of the world run by the capitalist system of production, whose consequences ever are the robbery of the soil and the dependence and subjugation of the masses through machinery and the factory. This system consists, as has been shown, in the separation of the workingman from his means of production--be these land or tools--and in the transfer of the latter to the capitalist class. That system produces ever new branches of industry, develops and concentrates them, and thereby throws ever larger masses of the people upon the street as "superfluous." On the field of agriculture it promotes, as the Rome of old, the latifundia ownership with all its sequences. Ireland, in this respect the classic land of Europe, and afflicted worst of all by the English system of land-grabbing, had in 1887 an area of 884.4 square miles of meadow and pasture land, but only 263.3 square miles of agricultural fields and the conversion of agricultural fields into meadows and pastures for sheep and cattle and into hunting grounds for the landlords makes every year further strides.[230] Moreover the agricultural fields of Ireland are, in great measure, in the hands of a large number of small tenants, who are not able to cultivate the land in the most profitable manner. Thus Ireland presents the aspect of a country that is retrogressing from an agricultural into a pastoral condition. The population, that at the beginning of the nineteenth century was over eight million strong, has declined to about five million, and still several millions are "in excess." Ireland's normal state of rebellion against England is thus easily explained; and yet the struggle of the "Home Ruler" aims only at the creation of an Irish landlord class and no wise carries the wished-for deliverance to the mass of the Irish people. The Irish people will perceive that so soon as the Home Ruler shall carry out his plans. Scotland presents a picture similar to that of Ireland with regard to the ownership and cultivation of its soil.[231] A similar development reappears in Hungary, a country that entered upon the modern field of development only recently. Hungary, a land in point of the fertility of her soil, as rich as few in Europe, is overloaded with debt, and her population, pauperized and in the hands of usurers, emigrates in large numbers. Hungary's soil is now concentrated in the hands of modern capitalist magnates, who carry on a ruinous system of cultivation in forest and field so that Hungary is not far from the time when it will have ceased to be a grain exporting country. It is quite similarly with Italy. In Italy, just as in Germany, the political unity of the nation has taken capitalist development powerfully under the arm; but the thrifty peasants of Piedmont and Lombardy, of Tuscany, Romagna and Sicily are ever more impoverished and go to ruin. Swamps and moors are reappearing on the sites occupied but recently by the well cultivated gardens and fields of small peasants. Before the very gates of Rome, in the so-called Campagna, a hundred thousand hectares of land lie fallow in a region that once was the "garden of Rome." Swamps cover the ground, and exhale their poisonous miasmas. If, with the application of the proper means the Campagna were thoroughly drained and properly irrigated, the population of Rome would have a fertile source of food. But Italy suffers of the ambition to become a "leading power:" she is ruining herself with military and naval armaments and with African colonization plans, and, consequently, has no funds left for such tasks as the reclaiming of the Campagna for cultivation. And as the Campagna, so are South Italy and particularly Sicily. The latter, once the granary of Rome, sinks ever more into deepening poverty. There is no more sucked-out, poverty-stricken and maltreated people in all Europe than the Sicilian. The easily-contented sons of the most beautiful region of all Europe overrun half Europe and the United States as lowerers of wages because they care not to starve to death upon the native soil that has ceased to be their property. Malaria, that frightful fever, is spreading over Italy to an extent that, frightened at the prospect, the government instituted in 1882 an investigation, which brought to light the deplorable fact that, of the 69 provinces of the country, 32 were severely afflicted by the disease, 32 were infected, and only 5 had so far remained free. The disease, once known only in the rural districts, penetrated the cities, where the urban, increased by the rural proletariat, constitutes a center of infection. These facts, together with what has been said touching the effects and results of the capitalist system of production, teach us that want and misery with the masses are not the results of insufficiency in the means of existence, but of an unequal distribution, that furnishes some with a superfluity and condemns others to privation. It causes the destruction and squandering of supplies, and, along with that, negligence in producing these. The Malthusian assertions have sense only from the standpoint of the system of capitalist production. Whoever stands on that principle has every reason to defend it, otherwise the ground would slip from under him. On the other side, however, the capitalist system itself favors the production of children, in so far as it needs cheap "hands" in the shape of such in its factories. The begetting of children, moreover, often becomes a matter of calculation with the proletariat. They cost the parents little or nothing: they soon earn their own support. In the house industries the proletarian is even obliged to have many children: they equip him all the better for the competitive struggle. It certainly is an abominable system: it conceals the pauperization of the workingman and it provokes his own rendering of himself superfluous through the children who work for the most miserable of wages. The immorality and harmfulness of this system are obvious, and they spread with the extension of capitalism. It is precisely for that reason that the bourgeois ideologists--and all bourgeois economists are that--defend the Malthusian theories. Hence in Germany also and in particular the notion of "over-production" ever finds support among the bourgeoisie. Capital is the innocent defendant, the workingman is the criminal. Unfortunately, however, for this theory Germany has "superfluity," not of proletarians only, but also of "intellectuals." Capital brings about not only an over-production of soil, goods, workingmen, women and children, but also of "officials and learning"--as we shall show. There is only one thing that is not "superfluous" in this capitalist world--capital and its owner, the capitalist. If the capitalist economists are Malthusians they are simply what their capitalist interests compel them to be. Only, they should not shift their bourgeois whims to the shoulders of Socialist society. John Stuart Mill says among other things: "But Communism is precisely the state of things in which opinion might be expected to declare itself with greatest intensity against this kind of selfish intemperance. An augmentation of numbers which diminished the comfort or increased the toil of the mass, would then cause (which now it does not) immediate and unmistakable inconvenience to every individual in the association; inconvenience which could not then be imputed to the avarice of employers, or the unjust privileges of the rich. In such altered circumstances, opinion could not fail to reprobate, and if reprobation did not suffice, to repress by penalties of some description, this or any other culpable self-indulgence at the expense of the community. The Communistic scheme, instead of being peculiarly open to the objection drawn from danger of over-population, has the recommendation of tending in an especial degree to the prevention of that evil." And Prof. Ad. Wagner says: "Least of all could freedom of marriage or freedom of procreation be tolerated in a Socialist community."[232] These authors proceed from the theory that the tendency towards over-population is one common to all social conditions, but both allow that Socialism is better able than any other social system to establish the equilibrium between population and food. The latter is true, not so the former. True enough, there were one time Socialists, who, tainted by the Malthusian theories, perceived the "imminent danger" of over-population. But these Socialist Malthusians have disappeared. A clearer insight into the nature of bourgeois society, together with the fact that, judging from the plaintive songs of our Agrarians, we produce not too little but too much food, and that the resulting low prices render the production of foodstuffs unprofitable, has enlightened them on the subject. A part of our Malthusians imagine--and the chorus of the mouth-pieces of the bourgeoisie parrot-like echo their utterances--that a Socialist society, in which there is freedom in the choice of love and ample provision for a livelihood worthy of human beings, must soon degenerate into a rabbit warren: it would succumb to excessive sexual indulgence and to excessive procreation. Exactly the reverse is most likely to happen, as certain observations go to prove. Until now the largest number of children were had, not by the best, but by the worst situated. It may even be said without being guilty of exaggeration: the poorer the condition of a proletarian stratum, the more numerous also is its average blessing of children, conceding exceptions here and there. Even Virchow confirms this. He says: "As the English workingman in his deepest degradation, in the utter vacancy of the mind, finally knows but two sources of enjoyment, drunkenness and coition, so did the population of Upper Silesia, until recent years, concentrate all its wishes, all its desires upon these two things. Liquor and the gratification of sexual cravings had become sovereign with it. Hence it is easy to understand that its population gained as rapidly in numbers as it lost in physical vigor and moral fibre." Karl Marx expresses himself similarly when he says in "Capital:" "As a matter of fact, not only the number of births and deaths but the absolute size of families is in reverse ratio to the height of wages, i. e., to the means of subsistence which the various categories of workmen have at their disposal. _This law of capitalist society would sound absurd among savages, or even civilized colonists._ It reminds us of the enormous power of reproduction among animals that are individually weak and much hunted down;" and Marx furthermore quotes Laing, who says: "If all the world were in comfortable circumstances, the earth would soon be depopulated." We see Laing's views are opposed to Malthus: he is of the opinion that a good living is not conducive to the increase but to the decrease of births. In the same vein says Herbert Spencer: "Always and everywhere progress and procreative capacity are opposed to each other. It follows that the higher development, that mankind looks forward to, will probably have as a result a decline in procreation." Thus we see men, who otherwise differ, absolutely at one on this head, and their views coincide wholly with ours. The whole question of population could be practically disposed of off hand with the observation that there is no danger of over-population within sight: we find ourselves in front of such a superabundance of food, which even threatens to increase, that the greatest worry, now afflicting the producers of means of subsistence, is to furnish this wealth of food at tolerable prices. A rapid increase of consumers would even be the most desirable thing for producers. But our Malthusians are tireless in the raising of objections: thus we are forced to meet these, lest they have the excuse that they can not be refuted. They claim that the danger of an over-population in a not-distant future lies in the law of a "decreasing yield of the soil." Our fields become "tired of cultivation;" increasing crops are no longer to be looked for; seeing that fields, fit for cultivation, become daily rarer, the danger of a scarcity of food is imminent, if the population continue to increase. We believe to have proved beyond doubt, in the passages on the agricultural utilization of the soil, what enormous progress mankind can make with respect to the acquisition of new masses of nutriment. But we shall give further illustrations. A very able landlord of wide acres and economist of acknowledged worth, a man, accordingly who excelled Malthus in both respects, said as early as 1850--a time when chemical agriculture was still in its swaddling clothes--on the subject of agricultural production: "The productivity of raw products, especially foodstuffs, will in future no longer lag behind the productivity of the factory and of transportation.... Chemical agriculture has only started in our days to open to agriculture prospects that will no doubt lead to many false roads, but that in the end will place the production of foodstuffs as fully in the power of society, as it lies now in its power to furnish yards of cloth, if but the requisite supply of wool is at hand."[233] Justus v. Liebig, the founder of chemical agriculture, holds that "if human labor and manure are available in sufficient quantity, the soil is inexhaustible, and can yield uninterruptedly the richest harvests." The "law of a decreasing yield of the soil" is a Malthusian notion, that had its justification at a time when agriculture was in an undeveloped state; the notion has long since been refuted by science and experience. The law is rather this: "The yield of a soil stands in direct ratio to the human labor expended (science and technique being included), and to the proper fertilizers applied to it." If it was possible for small-peasant France to more than quadruple the yield of her soil during the last ninety years, without the population even doubling, much better results are to be expected from a Socialist society. Our Malthusians, furthermore, overlook the fact that, under our existing conditions, not our soil merely is to be taken into account, but the soil of the whole earth, that is, to a great extent, territories whose fertility yields twenty, thirty and many more times as much as our corresponding fields of the same size. The earth is now extensively appropriated by man; nevertheless, a small fraction excepted, it is nowhere cultivated and utilized as it could be cultivated and utilized. Not Great Britain alone could, as has been shown, produce a much larger quantity of food than she does to-day, but France, Germany, Austria and to a still much greater extent the other countries of Europe also could do the same. In little Wurtemberg, with her 879,970 hectares of grain soil, the mere application of the steam plow would raise the average crop of 6,410,000 to 9,000,000 cwts. European Russia--measured by the present standard of the population of Germany--would be able to nourish, instead of her present population, of 90,000,000, one of 475,000,000 souls. To-day European Russia has about 1,000 inhabitants to the square mile, Saxony over 12,000. The objection that Russia contains vast stretches of territory, whose climate renders impossible any higher degree of cultivation, is true; on the other hand, however, she has to the south a climate and fertility of soil by far unknown in Germany. Then, again, due to the denseness of population and the improved cultivation of soil therewith connected, such as clearings of woods, draining, etc., changes, wholly unmeasureable to-day, will be brought on in climate. Wherever man aggregates in large numbers climatic changes are perceived. To-day we attach too little importance to this phenomenon; we are even unable to realize the same to its full extent, seeing that we have no occasion therefor, and, as things are to-day, lack the means to undertake the needed experiments on an adequate scale. Furthermore, all travelers are agreed that in the high latitudes of Northern Siberia, where spring, summer and autumn crowd together in rapid succession within a few months, an astonishing luxuriance of vegetation suddenly springs forth. Thus Sweden and Norway, to-day so sparsely populated, would, with their mammoth woods and positively inexhaustible mineral wealth, their numerous rivers and long stretch of coast lines, furnish rich sources of food for a dense population. The requisite means and appliances are not obtainable under present circumstances, and thus even that sparse population casts off its shoals of emigrants. What may be said of the north applies with still more force to the south of Europe--Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, the Danubian States, Hungary, Turkey, etc. A climate of surpassing quality, a soil so luxuriant and fertile as is hardly found in the best regions of the United States, will some day furnish an abundance of food to unnumbered people. The decrepit political and social conditions of those countries cause hundreds of thousands of our own people to prefer crossing the ocean rather than to settle in those much nearer and more comfortably located States. Soon as rational social conditions and international relations will prevail there, new millions of people will be needed to raise those large and fertile lands to a higher grade of civilization. In order to be able to reach materially higher rungs on the ladder of civilization we shall, for a long time to come, have in Europe, not a superfluity, but a dearth of people. Under such circumstances, it is an absurdity to yield to the fear of over-population. It must ever be kept in mind that the utilization of existing sources of food, by the application of science and labor, knows no limit: every day brings new discoveries and inventions which increase the yield of the sources of food. If we pass from Europe to the other parts of the earth, the lack of people and the excess of soil is still more glaring. The most luxuriant and fruitful lands of the earth still lie wholly or almost wholly idle: the work of bringing them under cultivation and turning them to use can not be undertaken with a few hundred or thousand people: it demands mass colonizations of many millions in order to be able to bring the but-too-luxuriant Nature under human control. Under this head belong, among others, Central and South America--a territory of hundreds of thousands of square miles. Argentina, for instance, had in 1892 about 5,000,000 hectares under cultivation, the country has, however, 96,000,000 hectares at its disposal. The soil of South America, fit for the cultivation of corn and lying fallow, is estimated at 200,000,000 hectares, at least. The United States, Austria-Hungary, Great Britain and Ireland, Germany and France have all together only about 105,000,000 hectares devoted to cereals. Carey maintains that the 360-mile long valley of the Orinoco alone could furnish enough food to supply the whole present human race. Let us halve the estimate, and there is still an abundance. At any rate, South America alone could feed the majority of the population now extant on earth. The nutritive value of a field planted with banana trees and one of equal size planted with wheat stands as 133 to 1. While our wheat yields in favorable soil 12 to 20 times its seed, rice in its home yields 80 to 100, maize 250 to 300 times as much. In many regions, the Philippine Islands among them, the productivity of rice is estimated at 400 times as much. The question with all these articles of food is to render them as nourishing as possible by the manner in which they are prepared. Chemistry has in this a boundless field for development. Central and South America, especially Brazil, which alone is almost as large as all Europe--Brazil has 152,000 square miles with about 15,000,000 inhabitants, as against Europe's 178,000 square miles and about 340,000,000 inhabitants--are big with a luxuriance and fertility that stir the astonishment and wonderment of all travelers, besides being inexhaustibly rich in minerals. Nevertheless, until now they are almost closed to the world because their population is indolent and stands, both in point of numbers and of culture, too low to overmaster the power of Nature. How matters look in Africa we have been enlightened on by the discoveries of recent years. Even if a good part of Central Africa never be fit for European agriculture, there are other regions of vast size that can be put to good use the moment rational principles of colonization are applied. On the other hand, there are in Asia not only vast and fertile territories, able to feed thousands of millions of people, but the past has also shown how in places that are there now sterile and almost desert, the mild climate once conjured up an abundance of food from the soil, provided only man knows how to lead to it the blessing-bestowing water. What with the destruction of the marvelous aqueducts and contrivances for irrigation in Asia Minor and in the regions of the Tigris and the Euphrates, with vandalic wars of conquest and the insane oppression of the people by the conquerors, fields, thousands of square miles wide, have been transformed into sandy deserts. Likewise in Northern Africa, Spain, Mexico and Peru. Let there be produced millions of civilized human beings, and inexhaustible sources of food will be unlocked. The fruit of the date tree thrives marvelously in Asia and Africa, and it takes up so little room that 200 trees can go on one acre of land. The durria bears in Egypt more than 3,000 fold, and yet the country is poor--not by reason of excessive population, but as the result of a robber system that accomplishes the feat of spreading the desert ever further from decade to decade. The marvelous results attainable in all these countries by the agriculture and horticulture of middle Europe is a matter that eludes all calculation. With the present state of agriculture, the United States could easily feed fifteen and twenty times its present population (63,000,000)--that is, 1,200,000,000 people. Under the same conditions, Canada could feed, instead of 5,000,000 people, 100,000,000 people. Then there are Australia, the numerous and in some instances large and extraordinarily fertile islands of the great Indian Ocean, etc. "Multiply!"--such, and not "Reduce your numbers!"--is the call that in the name of civilization reaches the human race. Everywhere, it is the social conditions--the existing method of production and distribution--that bring on privation and misery, not the number of people. A few rich crops in succession lower the prices of food in such manner that a considerable number of our cultivators of the soil are ruined. Instead of the condition of the cultivator being improved, it declines. A large number of farmers to-day look upon a good crop as a misfortune: it lowers prices so that the cost of production is barely covered. And this is called a rational state of things! With the view of keeping far away from us the abundance of the harvests of other countries, high duties are placed on grain: thus the entry of foreign grain is made difficult and the price of the domestic article is raised. We have no scarcity but a superabundance of food, the same as of industrial products. The same as millions of people need the yield of the factories, but can not satisfy their wants under the existing system of property and production, so are millions in want of food, being unable to pay for it, although the prices are low and the necessaries of life abundant. We ask again, Can this be called a rational state of things? The craziness and insanity of it all is obvious. Our speculators in corn often, when the crops are good, deliberately allow a large part to perish: they know the prices rise in the measure that the products are scarce. And yet we are told to look out for overpopulation! In Russia, southern Europe and many other countries of the world, hundreds of thousands of loads of grain perish yearly for want of proper storage and transportation. Many millions of hundredweights of food are yearly squandered because the provisions for gathering in the crops are inadequate, or there is a scarcity of hands at the right time. Many a corn field, many a filled barn, whole agricultural establishments are burned down, because the insurance fetches higher gains. Food and goods are destroyed for the same reason that ships are caused to go to the bottom with their whole crews.[234] A large part of the crops is yearly ruined by our military manoeuvres; the costs of manoeuvres that last only a few days run up to hundreds of thousands of marks; and there are many of them every year. Moreover, as stated before, large fields are taken from cultivation for these purposes. Nor must it be forgotten that there is the sea yet to be added to the means for increasing the volume of food. The area of water is as 18 to 7 to that of land,--two and a half times as large. Its enormous wealth of food still awaits a rational system of exploitation. The future opens a prospect to mankind, wholly different from the gloomy picture drawn by our Malthusians. Who can say where the line is to be drawn to our chemical, physical, physiologic knowledge? Who would venture to predict what giant undertakings--so considered from our modern standpoint--the people of future centuries will execute with the object in view of introducing material changes in the climates of the nations and in the methods of exploiting their soil? We see to-day, under the capitalist social system, undertakings executed that were thought impossible or insane a century ago. Wide isthmuses are cut through; tunnels, miles long and bored into the bowels of the earth, join peoples whom towering mountains separate; others are dug under the beds of seas to shorten distances, and avoid disturbances and dangers that otherwise the countries thus separated are exposed to. Where is the spot at which could be said: "So far and no farther?" If all these improvements were to be undertaken simultaneously, we would be found to have, not too many but too few people. The race must multiply considerably if it is to do justice to all the tasks that are waiting for it. Neither is the soil under cultivation utilized as it should be, nor are there people enough to cultivate three-fourths of its face. Our relative over-production, continuously produced by the capitalist system to the injury of the workingman and of society, will, at a higher grade of civilization, prove itself a benefit. Moreover, a population as large as possible is, even to-day, not an impediment to but a promoter of progress--on the same principle that the existing over-production of goods and food, the destruction of the family by the enlisting of women and children in the factories, and the expropriation of the handicrafts and the peasantry by capital have all shown themselves to be conditions precedent for a higher state of civilization. We now come to the other side of the question: Do people multiply indefinitely, and is that a necessity of their being? With the view of proving this great reproductive power of man, the Malthusians usually refer to the abnormal instances of exceptional families and peoples. Nothing is proven by that. As against these instances there are others where, under favorable conditions, complete sterility shortly sets in. The quickness with which often well situated families die out is surprising. Although the United States offer more favorable conditions than any other country for the increase of population, and yearly hundreds of thousands of people immigrate at the most vigorous age, its population doubles only every thirty years. There are nowhere instances on a large scale of the assertion concerning a doubling period of twelve or twenty years. As indicated by the quotations from Marx and Virchow, which may be considered to state the rule, population increases fastest where it is poorest because, as Virchow justly claims, next to drunkenness, sexual intercourse is their only enjoyment. When Gregory VII. forced celibacy upon the clergy, the priests of lower rank in the diocese of Mainz complained, as stated before, that differently from the upper prelates, they did not have all possible pleasures, and the only enjoyment left them was their wives. A lack of varying occupation may be the reason why the marriages of the rural clergy are, as a rule, so fruitful of children. It is also undeniable that our poorest districts in Germany--the Silesian Eulengebirge, the Lausitz, the Erzgebirge and Fichtelgebirge, the Thuringian Forest, the Harz, etc.,--are the centers of densest population, whose chief food are potatoes. It is also certain that sexual cravings are strong with consumptives, and these often beget children at a state of physical decline when such a thing would seem impossible. It is a law of Nature--hinted at in the quotations made from Herbert Spencer and Laing--that she supplies in quantity what she loses in quality. The animals of highest grade and strength--lions, elephants, camels, etc., our domestic animals such as mares, asses, cows,--bring few young ones into the world; while animals of lower organization increase in inverse ratio--all insects, most fishes, etc., the smaller mammals, such as hares, rats, mice, etc. Furthermore, Darwin established that certain wild animals, so soon as tamed, forfeit their fecundity. The elephant is an illustration. This proves that altered conditions of life, together with the consequent change in the mode of life, are the determining factors in reproductive powers. It happens, however, that it is the Darwinians who lead in the fear of over-population, and upon whom our modern Malthusians bank. Our Darwinians are everywhere infelicitous the moment they apply their theories to human conditions: their method then becomes roughly empirical, and they forget that, while man is the highest organic animal, he, being in contradistinction to animals acquainted with the laws of nature is able to direct and utilize these. The theory of the struggle for existence, the doctrine that the germs of new life exist in much larger numbers than are maintainable with the existing means of existence, would be wholly applicable to man if man, instead of straining his brains and enlisting the services of technical arts for exploiting air, land and water, grazed like cattle, or like monkeys indulged his sexual impulses with cynic shamelessness,--in short, if he reverted to the monkey order. In passing be it observed that the fact that, besides man, monkeys are the only beings with whom the sexual impulse is not fixed to certain periods, is a striking proof of the relationship between the two. But though closely related, they are not identical, and are not to be placed on one level and measured by one standard,--a fact that we commend to Ziegler, who, in his book herein frequently referred to, holds up the two together. The circumstance that, under the conditions of ownership and production that have hitherto prevailed, the struggle for existence existed and continues to exist for man also and many fail to find the conditions for life, is perfectly true. But these failed, not because of the scarcity of the means of existence, but because, due to social conditions, the means of existence, though in greatest abundance, were kept from them. False also is the conclusion that, because such has hitherto been the state of things, it is unchangeable and will ever be so. It is here that the Darwinians slide and fall: they study natural science and anthropology, but not sociology, and thoughtlessly fall in line with our bourgeois ideologists. Hence they drop into their false conclusions. The sexual instinct is perennial in man; it is his strongest instinct and demands satisfaction, lest his health suffer. Moreover, as a rule, this instinct is strong in proportion to man's health and normal development--just as a good appetite and a good digestion bespeak a healthy stomach, and are the first prerequisites for a healthy body. But gratification of the sexual instinct and begetting and conceiving are not the same thing. The most varied theories have been set up on the fecundity of the human race. On the whole, we are still groping in the dark on this important field, mainly because for a couple of thousand years a senseless shyness has stood in the way of man's occupying himself freely and naturally with the laws of his own origin, and to study thoroughly the laws of human procreation. That is gradually changing and must change much more. On one side the theory is set up that higher mental development and strenuous mental exertion, in short, higher nervous activity, exert a repressing influence upon the sexual impulse and weaken the procreative power. This is disputed by the other side. The fact is pointed to that the better situated classes have, on an average, fewer children and that this is not to be ascribed solely to preventive measures. Undoubtedly, intense mental occupation has a depressing influence upon the sexual impulse, but that such occupation is indulged in by the majority of our property classes is not so certain. On the other hand, an excess of physical labor also has a repressing influence. But all excessive effort is harmful, and therefore objectionable. Others, again, claim that the manner of life, especially the food eaten, coupled with certain physical conditions on the part of the woman, determine the power to beget and to conceive. The nature of food more than any other cause, this side argues, determines, as experience shows in the instance of animals also, the effectiveness of the act of procreation. Possibly, this is in fact, the determining factor. The influence of the nature of nourishment on the organism of certain animals manifests itself surprisingly with bees: they produce at will a queen by the administering of special food. Bees, accordingly, are further advanced in the knowledge of sexual development than men. They have not, probably, been sermonized for two thousand years that it is "indecent" and "immoral" to concern themselves with sexual matters. It is also known that plants raised on good soil and well manured, thrive luxuriantly, but yield no seed. That the nature of the food has its influence upon the composition of the male sperm, and upon the fecundity of the female egg with human beings also, is hardly to be doubted. Thus mayhap the procreative power of the population depends in a high degree upon the nature of the food it lives on. Other factors, whose nature is still but little understood, also play a role. It is a striking circumstance that a young couple may have no children after long years of married life, yet, having separated, and each having mated again, both new marriages are followed by healthy children. One factor is of leading importance in the question of population in the future--_the higher, freer position which all women will then occupy_. Leaving exceptions aside, intelligent and energetic women are not as a rule inclined to give life to a large number of children as "the gift of God," and to spend the best years of their own lives in pregnancy, or with a child at their breasts. This disinclination for numerous children, which even now is entertained by most women, may--all the solicitude notwithstanding that a Socialist society will bestow upon pregnant women and mothers--be rather strengthened than weakened. In our opinion, there lies in this the great probability that the increase of population will proceed slower than in bourgeois society. Our Malthusians need really not break their heads on the future of the human race. Until now nations have gone down through the decline, never through the increase of their population. In the last analysis, the number of population is regulated without harmful abstinence and without unnatural preventives, in a society that lives according to the laws of Nature. On this head also the future will vindicate Karl Marx. His theory also that every period of economic development carries with it its own law of population will prove true under the rule of Socialism. The author of the work "Die kuenstliche Beschraenkung der Kinderzahl" (The Artificial Limitation of Progeny)[235] claims that Socialism is playing a tricky manoeuvre by its opposition to Malthusianism: a rapid increase of population promotes mass proletarianization, and this, in turn, promotes discontent: if over-population is successfully checked, the spread of Socialism would be done for, and its Socialist State, together with all its glory, buried for all time. Thus we see one more weapon added to the arsenal to kill Socialism with--Malthusianism. The grandiose ignorance of the Socialist-killer Ferdy on Socialism, transpires strongest from the following sentence, which he perpetrates on page 40 of his work: "Socialism will go further than the Neo-Malthusians in its demands. It will demand that the minimum wage be so fixed that every workingman shall be able to produce as many children as possible under given social facilities for the acquisition of food.... The moment the ultimate deductions of Socialism are drawn, and private property is abolished, even the dullest will then say to himself: 'Why should I have to work long and hard for the simple reason that it pleases my neighbors to shove a dozen new members into society?'" It should seem that a critic should first acquaint himself with the A B C of Socialism before presuming to write upon the subject, and such preposterous stuff at that! In Socialist society, where alone mankind will be truly free and planted on its natural basis, it will direct its own development knowingly along the line of natural law. In all epochs hitherto, society handled the questions of production and distribution, as well as of the increase of population without the knowledge of the laws that underlie them,--hence, unconsciously. In the new social order, equipped with the knowledge of the laws of its own development, society will proceed consciously and planfully. SOCIALISM IS SCIENCE, APPLIED WITH FULL UNDERSTANDING TO ALL THE FIELDS OF HUMAN ACTIVITY. FOOTNOTES: [229] That Darwin and others also became devotees of Malthus only proves how the lack of economic knowledge leads to one-sided views. [230] Fred. Freiligrath sings in his fervid poem "Ireland": Thus naught the Irish landlord cares, While hart and ox by peasant's toil For him are raised--he leaves undried Great bogs and swamps on Erin's soil-- Extensive mirelands unreclaimed, Where sheaf by sheaf rich crops could wave; He vilely leaves--a wanton waste-- Where water-fowl and wild ducks lave. Four million acres feels his rod; A wilderness accursed of God. [231] "Two millions of acres ... totally laid waste, embracing within their area some of the most fertile lands of Scotland. The natural grass of Glen Tilt was among the most nutritive in the county of Perth. The deer forest of Ben Aulder was by far the best grazing ground in the wide district of Badenoch; a part of the Black Mount forest was the best pasture for black-faced sheep in Scotland. Some idea of the ground laid waste for purely sporting purposes in Scotland may be formed from the fact that it embraced an area larger than the whole county of Perth. The resources of the forest of Ben Aulder might give some idea of the loss sustained from the forced desolations. The ground would pasture 15,000 sheep, and as it was not more than one-thirtieth part of the old forest ground in Scotland.... It might, &c.... All that forest land is as totally unproductive.... It might thus as well have been submerged under the waters of the German Ocean."--From the London "Economist," July 2, 1866, cited by Karl Marx in "Capital," p. 757, edition Swan-Sonnenschein & Co., London, 1896. [232] Rau's "Lehrbuch der Politischen Oekonomie," p. 367. [233] Rodbertus: "Zur Beleuchtung der sozialen Frage." [234] Similar conditions must have existed at the time of St. Basil. He calls out to the rich: "Wretches that you are, what answer will you make to the divine Judge? You cover the nakedness of your walls with carpets, but do not cover the nakedness of human beings! You ornament your horses with costly and smooth coverlets, and you despise your brother who is covered with rags. You allow your corn to rot and be devoured in your barns and your fields, and you do not spare even a look for those who have no bread." Moral homiletics have since old done precious little good with the ruling class, and they will do no better in the future. Let the social conditions be changed so that none can act unjustly towards his fellowman; the world will then get along easy enough. [235] Hans Ferdy. PART VI CONCLUSION CONCLUSION. Our arguments have shown that, with Socialism, the issue is not an arbitrary tearing down and raising up, but a natural process of development. All the factors active in the process of destruction, on the one hand, and of construction, on the other, _are factors that operate in the manner that they are bound to operate_. Neither "statesmen of genius" nor "inflammatory demagogues" can direct events at will. They may imagine they push; but are themselves pushed. But we are near the time when "the hour has sounded." Due to her own peculiar development, Germany, more than any other country, seems designated as that which is to assume the leading _role_ in the pending revolution.[236] In the course of this work we often spoke of an over-production of goods, which brings on the crises. This is a phenomenon peculiar to the capitalist world only; it was seen at no previous period of human development. But the capitalist world yields not merely an over-production of goods and of men, it also yields _an over-production of intelligence_. Germany is the classic land in which this over-production of intelligence, which the bourgeois world no longer knows what to do with, is yielded on a large scale. A circumstance, that for centuries was a misfortune to Germany's development, has largely contributed to this state of things. It consisted in the multiplicity of small States and the check exercised by these political formations upon the development of upper capitalism. The multiplicity of small States decentralized the intellectual life of the nation: it raised numerous small centers of culture, and these exercised their influence upon the whole. In comparison with a large central government, the numerous small ones required an extraordinarily large administrative apparatus, whose members needed a certain degree of higher culture. Thus high schools and universities sprung up more numerous than in any other country of Europe. The jealousy and ambition of the several governments played in this no small _role_. The same thing repeated itself when some governments began introducing compulsory education for the people. The passion not to be left behind a neighboring State had here its good effect. The demand for intelligence rose when increasing culture, hand in hand with the material progress of the bourgeoisie, quickened the longing for political activity, popular representation and self-government on the part of municipalities. These were small governmental bodies for small countries and circles, nevertheless they contributed towards the general schooling, and caused the sons of the bourgeoisie to covet seats in them and to adapt their education accordingly. As science, so did art fare.--No country of Europe has, relatively speaking, so many painting and other art academies, technical schools, museums and art collections, as Germany. Other countries may be able to make better showings in their capitals, but none has such a distribution over its whole territory as Germany. In point of art, Italy is the only exception. While the bourgeoisie of England had conquered a controlling power over the State as early as the middle of the seventeenth, and the bourgeoisie of France towards the end of the eighteenth century, the bourgeoisie of Germany did not succeed until 1848 to secure for itself a comparatively moderate influence over the government. That was the birth year of the German bourgeoisie as a self-conscious class: it now stepped upon the stage as an independent political party, in the trappings of "liberalism." The peculiar development that Germany had undergone now manifested itself. It was not manufacturers, merchants, men of commerce and finance who came forward as leaders, but chiefly professors, squires of liberal proclivities, writers, jurists and doctors of all academic faculties. It was the German ideologists: And so was their work. After 1848 the German bourgeoisie was temporarily consigned to political silence; but they utilized the period of the sepulchral silence of the fifties in the promotion of their task. The breaking-out of the Austro-Italian war and the commencement of the Regency of Prussia, stirred the bourgeoisie anew to reach after political power. The "National Verein" (National Union) movement began. The bourgeoisie was now too far developed to tolerate within the numerous separate States the many political barriers, that were at the same time economic--barriers of taxation, barriers of communication. It assumed a revolutionary air. Herr von Bismarck understood the situation and turned it to account in his own manner so as to reconcile the interests of the bourgeoisie with those of the Prussian Kingdom, towards which the bourgeoisie never had been hostile, seeing it feared the revolution and the masses. The barriers finally came down that had hampered its material progress. Thanks to Germany's great wealth in coal and minerals, together with an intelligent and easily satisfied working class, the bourgeoisie made within few decades such gigantic progress as was made by the bourgeoisie of no other country, the United States excepted, within the same period. Thus did Germany reach the position of the second industrial and commercial State in Europe; and she covets the first. This rapid material development had its obverse. The system of mutual exclusion, that existed between the German States up to the establishment of German unity, had until then furnished a living to an uncommonly numerous class of artisans and small peasants. With the precipitous tearing down of all the protective barriers, these people suddenly found themselves face to face with an unbridled process of capitalist production and development. At first, the prosperity epoch of the early seventies caused the danger to seem slighter, but it raged all the more fearful when the crisis set in. The bourgeoisie had used the prosperity period to make marvelous progress, and thus now caused the distress to be felt ten-fold. From now on the chasm between the property-holding and the propertyless classes widened rapidly. This process of decomposition and of absorption, which--promoted by the growth of material power on the one hand, and the declining power of resistance on the other--proceeds with ever increasing rapidity, throws whole classes of the population into ever more straitened circumstances. They find themselves from day to day more powerfully threatened in their position and their condition of life; and they see themselves doomed with mathematical certainty. In this desperate struggle many seek possible safety in a change of profession. The old men can no longer make the change: only in the rarest instances are they able to bequeath an independence to their children: the last efforts are made, the last means applied towards placing sons and daughters in positions with fixed salaries, which require no capital to carry on. These are mainly the civil service offices in the Empire, States or municipalities--teacherships, the Post Office and railroad positions, and also the higher places in the service of the bourgeoisie in the counting rooms, stores and factories as managers, chemists, technical overseers, engineers, constructors, etc.; finally the so-called liberal professions: law, medicine, theology, journalism, art, architecture and lastly pedagogy. Thousands upon thousands, who had previously taken up a trade, now--the possibility of independence and of a tolerable livelihood having vanished--seek for any position in the said offices. The pressure is towards higher education and learning. High schools, gymnasiums, polytechnics, etc., spring up like mushrooms, and those in existence are filled to overflowing. In the same measure the number of students at the universities, at the chemical and physical laboratories, at the art schools, trade and commercial schools and the higher schools of all sorts for women are on the increase. In all departments, without exception, there is a tremendous overcrowding, and the stream still swells: fresh demands are constantly raised for the establishment of more gymnasiums and high schools to accommodate the large number of pupils and students.[237] From official and private sources warnings upon warnings are issued, now against the choice of one then against that of another career. Even theology, that a few decades ago threatened to dry up for want of candidates, now receives its spray from the superabundance, and again sees its livings filled. "I am ready to preach belief in ten thousand gods and devils, if required, only procure me a position that may support me"--that is the song that re-echoes from all corners. Occasionally, the corresponding Cabinet Minister refuses his consent to the establishment of new institutions of higher education "because those in existence amply supply the demand for candidates of all professions." This state of things is rendered all the more intolerable by the circumstance that the competitive and mutually destructive struggle of the bourgeoisie compels its own sons to seek for public places. Furthermore, the ever increasing standing army with its swarms of officers, whose promotion is seriously paralyzed after a long peace, leads to the placing of large numbers of men in the best years of their lives upon the pension lists, who thereupon, favored by the State, seek all manner of appointments. Another swarm of lower grade in the army, takes the bread from the mouths of the other stratas. Lastly, the still larger swarm of children of the Imperial, State and municipal officials of all degrees are and can not choose but be trained especially for such positions in the civil service. Social standing, culture and pretensions--all combine to keep the children of these classes away from the so-called low occupations, which, however, as a result of the capitalist system, are themselves overcrowded. The system of One Year Volunteers, which allows the reduction of the compulsory military service to one instead of two or three years for those who have obtained a certain degree of education and can make the material sacrifice, is another source from which the candidates for public office is swollen. Many sons of well-to-do peasants, who do not fancy a return to the village and to the pursuit of their fathers, come under this category. As a result of all these circumstances, Germany has an infinitely more numerous proletariat of scholars and artists than any other country, as also a strong proletariat in the so-called liberal professions. This proletariat is steadily on the increase, and carries the fermentation and discontent with existing conditions into the higher strata of society. This youth are roused and spurred to the criticism of the existing order, and they materially aid in hastening the general work of dissolution. Thus the existing condition of things is attacked and undermined from all sides. All these circumstances have contributed to cause the German Social Democratic party to take a hand in the leadership of the giant struggle of the future. It was German Socialists who discovered the motor laws of modern society, and who scientifically demonstrated Socialism to be the social form of the future. First of all Karl Marx and Frederick Engels; next to them and firing the masses with his agitation, Ferdinand Lassalle. Finally German Socialists are the chief pioneers of Socialist thought among the workingmen of all nations. Almost half a century ago--grounded on his studies of the German mind and culture--Buckle could say that, although Germany had a large number of the greatest thinkers, there was no country in which the chasm between the class of the scholars and the mass of the population was as wide. This is no longer true. It was so only so long as knowledge was confined to learned circles that stood aloof from practical life. Since Germany has been economically revolutionized, science was compelled to render itself useful to practical life. Science itself became practical. It was felt that science attained its full worth only when it became applicable to human life; and the development of large capitalist production compelled it thereto. All the tranches of science have been, accordingly, strongly democratized during the last decades. The large number of young men, educated for the higher professions, contributed to carry science among the people; then also the general schooling, higher to-day in Germany than in most European countries, facilitated the popular reception of a mass of intellectual products. But above all, the Socialist Movement--with its literature, its press, its unions and meetings, its parliamentary representation, and finally the incessant criticism thereby promoted on all the fields of public life--materially raised the mental level of the masses. The exclusion law against the Social Democratic party did not check this current. It somewhat hemmed in the Movement, and slightly reduced its tempo. But, on the other hand, it caused the roots of the Movement to sink deeper, and aroused an intense bitterness against the ruling classes and the government. The final abandonment of the exclusion law was but the consequence of the progress made by the Social Democratic party under that very law, together with the economic development of the nation. And thus the Movement goes marching onward, as march it must under existing conditions. As in Germany, the Socialist Movement has made unexpected progress in all European civilized nations, a fact eloquently attested to by the International Congresses of Labor, which, with intervals of two or three years, gather with ever increased representations. Thus with the close of the nineteenth century the great battle of minds is on in all the countries of civilization, and is conducted with fiery enthusiasm. Along with social science, the wide field of the natural sciences, hygiene, the history of civilization and even philosophy are the arsenals from which the weapons are drawn. The foundations of existing society are being assailed from all sides; heavy blows are being dealt to its props. Revolutionary ideas penetrate conservative circles and throw the ranks of our enemies into disorder. Artisans and scholars, farmers, and artists, merchants and government employes, here and there, even manufacturers and bankers, in short, men of all conditions, are joining the ranks of the workingmen, who constitute the bulk of the army, who combat for victory, and who will win it. All support and mutually supplement one another. To woman also in general, and as a female proletarian in particular, the summons goes out not to remain behind in this struggle in which her redemption and emancipation are at stake. It is for her to prove that she has comprehended her true place in the Movement and in the struggles of the present for a better future; and that she is resolved to join. It is the part of the men to aid her in ridding herself of all superstitions, and to step forward in their ranks. Let none underrate his own powers, and imagine that the issue does not depend upon him. None, be he the weakest, can be spared in the struggle for the progress of the human race. The unremitting dropping of little drops hollows in the end the hardest stone. Many drops make a brook, brooks make rivers, many rivers a stream, until finally no obstacle is strong enough to check it in its majestic flow. Just so with the career of mankind. Everywhere Nature is our instructress. If all who feel the call put their whole strength in this struggle, ultimate victory can not fail. And this victory will be all the greater the more zealously and self-sacrificingly each pursues the marked-out path. None may allow himself to be troubled with misgivings whether, despite all sacrifices, labor and pains he will live to see the beginning of the new and fairer period of civilization, whether he will yet taste the fruit of victory; least of all may such misgivings hold him back. We can foresee neither the duration nor the nature of the several phases of development that this struggle for the highest aims may traverse until final victory,--any more than we have any certainty on the duration of our own lives. Nevertheless, just as the pleasure in life rules us, so may we foster the hope of witnessing this victory. Are we not in an age that rushes forward, so to speak, with seven-mile boots, and therefore causes all the foes of a new and better world to tremble? Every day furnishes fresh proof of the rapid growth and spread of the ideas that we represent. On all fields there is tumult and push. The dawn of a fair day is drawing nigh with mighty stride. Let us then ever battle and strive forward, unconcerned as to "where" and "when" the boundary-posts of the new and better day for mankind will be raised. And if, in the course of this great battle for the emancipation of the human race, we should fall, those now in the rear will step forward; we shall fall with the consciousness of having done our duty as human beings, and with the conviction that the goal will be reached, however the powers hostile to humanity may struggle or strain in resistance. OURS IS THE WORLD, DESPITE ALL;--THAT IS, FOR THE WORKER AND FOR WOMAN. FINIS. FOOTNOTES: [236] [Aside from the contradiction implied between this sentence and that other, on page 247, in which the internationally overshadowing economic development of the United States is admitted, the forecast, though cautiously advanced, that Germany may take the lead in the accomplishment of the pending Social Revolution, is justified neither by her economic nor her social development, least of all by her geographic location. As to her economic development, Germany has made rapid and long strides during the last twenty years; so rapid and so long that the progress has caused the Socialists of Germany, in more instances than one, to realize--and to say so--that, what with her own progress, and with outside circumstances, Germany was distancing England economically. This is true. But the same reason that argues, and correctly argues, the economic scepter off the hands of England places it, not in those of Germany, but in the hands of the United States. As to her social development, Germany is almost half a revolutionary cycle behind. Her own bourgeois revolution was but half achieved. Without entering upon a long list of specifications, it is enough to indicate the fact that Germany is still quite extensively feudal in order to suggest to the mind robust feudal boulders, left untouched by the capitalist revolution, and strewing, aye, obstructing the path of the Socialist Movement in that country. The social phenomenon has been seen of an oppressed class skipping an intermediary stage of vassalage, and entering, at one bound, upon one higher up. It happened, for instance, with our negroes here in America. Without first stepping off at serfdom, they leaped from chattel slavery to wage slavery. What happened once may happen again. But in the instance cited and all the others that we can call to mind, it happened through outside intervention. Can Germany perform the same feat alone, unaided? Do events point in that direction? Or do they rather point in the direction that the work, now being realized there as demanding immediate attention, and alone possible and practicable, is the completion of the capitalist revolution, first of all? But even discounting both these objections--granting that both in point of economic and of social development Germany were ripe for the Socialist Revolution--her geographic location prevents her leadership. No one single State of the forty-four of the Union, not even the Empire State of New York, however ripe herself, could lead in the overthrow of capitalist rule in America unless the bulk of her sister States were themselves up to a certain minimum of ripeness. Contrariwise, any attempt by even such a State would be promptly smothered. What is true of any single State of the Union is true of any one country of Europe. It is, therefore, true of Germany. Whatever doubt there be as to Germany's ripeness, there can be none as to the utter unripeness of all the other European countries with the single exceptions of France and Belgium,--and surely none as to Russia, that ominous cloud to the East, well styled the modern Macedon to the modern Greek States of the nations of Western Europe. Though there is no "District of Columbia" in Europe, the masses would be mobilized from the surrounding hives of the Cimmerian Darkness of feudo-capitalism, and they would be marched convergently with as much precision and despatch upon the venturesome leader. And what is true as to Germany on this head is true of any other European country. Facts and their relations to one another must be ever kept in sight. 'Tis the only way to escape illusions--and their train of troubles. For the rest, not the sordid competitive spirit of the bourgeois world, but that noble and ennobling emulation, cited by the Author in a quotation from John Stuart Mill, animates the nations of the world that are now racing towards the overthrow of capitalist domination. Surely none will begrudge laurels due that one that shall be the first to scale the ramparts of the international burg of capitalism, strike the first blow, and give the signal for the final emancipation of the human race.--THE TRANSLATOR.] [237] The number of students at the German universities averaged as follows per six months: Protestant Catholic Quarter. Theology. Theology. Law. Medicine. Philosophy. Total. 1841-42--1846 2117 1027 3467 1943 3072 11626 1846-47--1851 1798 1297 4061 1827 3046 12029 1851-52--1856 1751 1300 4169 2291 2840 12351 1861-62--1866 2437 1153 2867 2435 4392 13284 1866-67--1871 2154 982 3011 2838 4626 13611 1871-72--1876 1780 836 4121 3491 5896 16124 1876-77--1881 1961 682 5134 3734 8057 19568 1881-82--1886 3880 952 5034 6869 9123 25838 1886-87 4546 1178 5239 8450 8666 27828 1887 4803 1232 5505 8685 8424 28455 1887-88 4632 1137 4810 8435 8450 28480 1888 4835 1174 6106 8915 8204 29275 1888-89 4642 1207 6304 8886 8255 29294 During the summer six months of 1893--notably the weaker of the two seasons--the total number of students, exclusive of the University of Brunswick, of which we had no returns, had risen to 31,976. Unfortunately we had no like classification of the students, and are hence prevented from inserting it in the above table. The table shows that from 1841-2 to 1871 the number of students increased little, and less than the population. From that date on the increase was by leaps and bounds, until 1886-7; from this date on the increase is again slow. From 1871 to 1888-9 the number of students increased more than 116 per cent. It is an interesting fact that the study of theology decreased steadily until 1881, but increased thereupon all the quicker until it reached high-water mark in 1888. The reason was that the excess of the supply for all the other posts increased in such measure that it was difficult to secure a place. People then turned to theology which had been neglected during the previous ten years. 
19150	----	The Red Conspiracy BY JOSEPH J. MERETO 1920 THE NATIONAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY 37 West 39th Street, New York This book proves the existence of the Red Peril. We publish it to warn America. We ask the help of every loyal American, organization and institution to put "The Red Conspiracy" in every home, school and library in the land. Price, cloth bound, $2.15 postpaid; in paper, $1.10 postpaid. Chapters of the book and parts of chapters can also be supplied in pamphlet and leaflet form for wide distribution. Write us for particulars. The National Historical Society 37 West 39th Street, New York _Copyright, 1920, by The National Historical Society_ INTRODUCTION As a mark of sincere gratitude for all that he owes to his Country from birth, the author of "The Red Conspiracy" hereby dedicates his work to his fellow-countrymen, trusting that it will prove a bulwark of defense for our Star-Spangled Banner and constitutional form of government, now so violently assailed by disloyal American citizens, as well as by Marxian rebels from abroad who have deceived many of the uneducated or trained them in ways of evil. While "The Red Conspiracy" will appeal strongly to all who are seeking a clear and comprehensive knowledge of Socialism, Bolshevism, Communism and I. W. W.'ism, it will be of special value to the workingmen of America, as it will enable them easily to understand the fallacies of the Revolutionists and at the same time make them realize the serious dangers that would result from the adoption of any of the various radical programs. Friendship, indeed, the "Knights of the Red Flag" profess for the laboring man. Such friendship, however, once it is understood will be spurned, for it is one which would plunge the sons of toil into a terrible abyss of injustice, deprivation and suffering--wrongs far greater than those endured from abuses of capitalism and partial corruption of some government officials. At the very beginning of this work, the author wishes to express his heartfelt sympathy for poor men and women who are treated unjustly by employers, as well as with all who receive too small a recompense for their wearisome labors. It is, indeed, a source of deep regret to us that in consequence of injustice and uncharitableness, there are to be found in this rich republic numbers of our fellow-countrymen, not merely men and women but even innocent little children, who can scarcely relieve the pangs of their hunger by the coarsest kinds of food and have naught but rags for clothes and huts for homes. Feeling deep concern for these poor people, and for all who suffer either from employers or from defects of government, we trust that "The Red Conspiracy" will not only help toward remedying many of the evils that now weigh heavily upon the working class, but help to avert the far more dreadful evils that would result from the adoption of Socialism, Bolshevism, Communism, and I. W. W.'ism. For many years the author has made a careful study of radicalism, and during that time has read not only many thousands of Socialist and I. W. W. papers, leaflets, pamphlets and books, but also most of the leading works against Socialism in the English language. We have sought to gather an illuminating collection of quotations, not merely from standard Marxian publications, but from the speeches of Socialists of unquestioned authority in the international movement. These open confessions of the Revolutionists cannot fail to interest the reader and will certainly arouse the deep indignation of every fair-minded person against a propaganda of deception which is working fast to wreck modern civilization. No doubt the readers of "The Red Conspiracy" will be interested to learn that many of the revelations made in this book are brought to light through purchase by the author himself of revolutionary papers and pamphlets on sale in the spring and summer of 1919 at the National Headquarters of the Socialist Party, the Chas. H. Kerr Socialist Publishing Company, and the National Headquarters of the I. W. W., all in Chicago, and also in leading Socialist bookstores of Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. The matter obtained in these centres of underworld corruption and anarchy could not have been procured had the author ransacked every public library in the United States. Though loyalty and patriotism should always inspire us to defend our country against its foes, we must concede to the Socialists that human government, whether national, state or municipal, is by no means free from serious defects; and we are bound to admit that representatives of the American people, as well as men engaged in business and commerce, have too often been guilty of dishonesty, injustice and cruelty to the suffering poor. Law-abiding citizens, while very much regretting that wrongs such as these should exist, confidently hope to reduce them to a reasonable minimum by methods of social reform still more effective than those that have already brought to an end not a few of the evils prevalent in days gone by. Prudence and charity suggest to true social reformers reasonable constitutional and lawful methods by which to correct abuses instead of adding to their number by adopting Socialism. We have already seen too much of the work of the "Reds" in Europe and in parts of Mexico, and we do not wish to behold our fellow-countrymen shedding more blood and suffering graver evils, under Socialism, than they did during the terrible World War. Loyal and patriotic citizens of America, judging from the progress that has been made in the past in matters of social reform, have every reason for looking forward confidently to the success of their efforts--unless, indeed, the Revolutionists, by greatly increasing their numbers, should divide the workingmen of our country into two big parties, comprising, respectively, the Socialists and the anti-Socialists, whose main purpose it would then be to fight each other instead of joining forces against social abuses. If the Revolutionists should gain very large numbers of recruits, there would be, on the one hand, a great party consisting of those whose object it would be to destroy our present form of government, as well as the entire industrial system, and, on the other, an opposition party, embracing good citizens and men of common sense and intelligence, who, because of their realization of the blessings which privately-owned industries and our constitutional form of government have bestowed upon the people of America, would be determined to shed the last drop of their blood in defense of them. The Socialists, however, are not satisfied with social reform, but are bent on the total destruction of our system of government and industry, holding the system itself, rather than the faults and shortcomings of men, to be by its very nature responsible for all the economic evils of the day. "Down with the Stars and Stripes" is their cry. "Abolish religion and the present form of marriage." "Atheism and free-love must reign supreme." Then, trusting that workingmen will admire anything, provided that it be adorned in sufficiently glowing colors, they paint such fabulous pictures of Socialism as the following: "Hundreds of thousands of former representatives of the state will enter various professions, and by their intelligence and strength will help to increase the wealth and comfort of society. Neither political nor common crimes will be known in the future. Thieves will have disappeared because private property will have disappeared, and in the new society everybody will be able to satisfy his wants easily and conveniently by work. Nor will there be tramps and vagabonds, for they are the product of a society founded on private property, and with the abolition of this institution they will cease to exist. Murder? Why? No one can enrich himself at the expense of others, and even murder for hatred or revenge is directly or indirectly connected with the social system. Perjury, false testimony, fraud, theft of inheritance, fraudulent failures? There will be no private property against which these crimes could be committed. Arson? Who should find satisfaction in committing arson when society has removed all cause for hatred? Counterfeiting? Money will be but a mere chimera, it would be love's labor lost! Blasphemy? Nonsense! It will be left to good Almighty God himself to punish whoever has offended him, provided that the existence of God is still a matter of controversy." ("Woman Under Socialism," by Bebel, page 436 of the 1910 edition in English.) As an immense number of American citizens would not be led astray by these foolish promises, or by others equally absurd--recalling how political and common crimes, theft, murder, arson, perjury, worthless currency, blasphemy and political corruption have ruined Socialist Russia and made it a hell on earth--a dreadful revolution would be necessary to compel our countrymen to surrender their cherished rights. The Socialists, if victorious, after having set up a new form of government, modeled on their own low ideas of morality, would not only substitute a free-love regime for the present form of marriage, but, going still further, would avail themselves of every opportunity for destroying religion. The evils, however, would by no means end here, for the new government, whose rapid decay would begin from the very day of its birth, would in a short time collapse and fall, and then the citizens of America would have neither a government to protect them from the ravages of criminals, whose number would be legion, nor yet any suitable system of organized industries for the employment of men and the production of the necessaries of life. Consequently, trials and sufferings incomparably greater than any of the present day would befall the people in the reign of anarchy that would ensue. It is to preserve our fellow-countrymen from ever having to endure such calamities that we have undertaken this work, in which it is proven conclusively that the "Reds," unless quickly thwarted, will overwhelm us with unspeakable horrors of crime, rebellion, anarchy and destitution. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION iii Scope of Book, iii; Value to Workingmen, iii; Sympathy for Labor, iii; Quotations from Socialist Authorities, iv; Revolutionists Set Back the Cause of Labor, v; Bebel's Fabulous Picture of Socialist Possibilities, v; Socialism Means War, vi. CHAPTER I SOCIALISM IN OTHER LANDS 1 Modern Socialism Dates from "Communist Manifesto," 1848, 1; Karl Marx, 1; Engels, 1; International Workingmen's Association, 1; "Capital" by Marx, the Socialist Bible, 2; Socialism in Germany, 2; in Bavaria, 4; in Russia, 4; Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, 5; Socialism in Austria-Hungary, 5; in France, 5; in Great Britain, 8; in Italy, 9; in Spain, 9; in Belgium, 10; in Holland, 10; in Bohemia, 10; in Sweden, 11; in Norway, 11; in Argentina, 11; in Canada, 12; in Bulgaria, 12; in Mexico, 12; in Other Foreign Lands, 12. CHAPTER II GROWTH OF SOCIALISM IN THE UNITED STATES 13 Introduced from Europe, 13; Workingmen's Party, 13; Socialist Labor Party, 13; Socialist Democracy of America, 13; Socialist Party of America, 13; Socialist Periodicals, 14; Socialist Party Strife and Bossism, 14; The Internatonal, 16; The First International, 16; The Second International, 16; International Socialist Bureau, 17; American Socialists and the International, 17; The Berne Conference, 18; The Third (Moscow) International, 18; Debs and American Socialists Recognized by Lenine, 20; American Socialists' Straddle Resolution on Berne and Moscow, 21. CHAPTER III THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF AMERICA DEVELOPS A LEFT WING 23 Revolution Camouflaged as Evolution, 23; "Yellows," "Reds," "Rights" and "Lefts," 23; Origin of the Left Wing, 24; Revolutionary Principles of the Left Wing, 24; Sympathy with Russian Bolshevism, 25; Industrial Unionism Advocated, 26; Mass Action and Strikes the Prelude to Armed Rebellion, 26; "Moderate" Socialism Rejected by American Revolutionists, 28; To Overthrow the United States Government, 30; Text of Call to Moscow International, 31; American Socialist Party for "Industrial Unionism," 34. CHAPTER IV THE FREE-FOR-ALL FIGHT BETWEEN THE RIGHT AND LEFT WINGS 35 Rowdies at Socialist Meetings, 35; Revolution in America "at Hand," 36; "Existence of the Party at Stake," 37; "The Steering Committee," 38; Hillquit Says Left Wing is Not "Too Radical," 40; "Friendly Separation," 41; The Left Wing Gets More "Dictatorship" Than It Wants, 42; The Rights Expel and Suspend Tens of Thousands, 42; The Socialists' "Immortal" Executive Committee, 42; Manifesto of the Third (Moscow) International, 45. CHAPTER V BIRTH OF THE COMMUNIST AND COMMUNIST LABOR PARTIES 52 Left Wing Conference, 52; Left Wingers Split, 52; Call for a Communist Convention, 53; Too Many Would-Be Lenines and Trotzkys, 54; The "Firing Squad," 55; National Emergency Convention, 55; Who Called the "Cops"? 57; A Convention on Each Floor, 57; The Communist and Communist Labor Parties Organize, 57; Their Principles, 58; "Reds" No Worse Than "Yellows," 58; Bolshevism of the Socialist Party, 59; Utterances at the Emergency Conference, 60; Revolutionary Character of the Socialist Party, 65; Trachtenberg on Affiliation with Moscow International, 68; Glassberg Letter, 69; Victor L. Berger, 70; American Socialists Join the Third International, 74; Hillquit Encourages the Communists, 74; The Socialist Party's Revolutionary Manifesto, 71-75. CHAPTER VI SOCIALISM IN THEORY 79 Socialist Office-holding is Not Socialism, 77, 85; Collective Ownership, 80; I. W. W. Point of View, 80; Socialism Explained Diversely by Its Leaders, 80; Hillquit's Notion, 81; Debs' Demand, 81; American Socialists to "Capture the Government," 82; Analysis of Collective Ownership, 82; All Women to Work, 84; Atheism and Free-Love, 85; Poetry from the "Call," 86; Don't Judge Socialism by Reform Planks in Platforms, 87; Socialists Attack Their Own Social Reform Program, 89; Unpatriotic Attitude of Socialists in the War, 92. CHAPTER VII SOCIALISM IN PRACTICE 94 Herron's Socialist Day Dream, 94; Communist Experiments in Russia and Hungary, 94; Socialism in Yucatan, 96; "Zapata, Great Socialist Leader of Southern Mexico," 97; Act of the Second: "Zapata, a Tyrant, Who Played a Huge Joke on 100,000 Confiding Workers Whom He Exploited," 101; Socialist Experiment in Russia, 103. CHAPTER VIII THE I. W. W. 105 A "Dangerous" Organization, 105; Its Origin, 105; Industrial Unionism Explained, 106; Organization by Industries, 107; I. W. W. Preamble, 107; Revolutionary Aims, 108; Conceptions of Right and Wrong, 108; Violent Tactics, 100; Revolution by Means of the "General Strike," 109; "Government Will Disappear," 110; Remuneration for Work and the "Man-Day," 111; Doctrine and Examples of Sabotage, 111. CHAPTER IX INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD IN ACTION 114 I. W. W. Trials and Socialist Support, 114; Revolutionary Threats, 115; Plotting Against the United States, 116; I. W. W. Publications, 116; Propaganda Among Foreigners, 117; The Paterson Strike, 117; The I. W. W. Atheistic and Anti-Religious, 118; Arousing the Negro, 119; Arousing the Chinese, 120; I. W. W. Songs, 120; Socialists Favor the I. W. W., 122; Pretended Anti-Sabotage Policy of the Socialist Party, 124; Gene Debs in Love with Bill Haywood, 126; I. W. W. Attitude Toward Bolshevism, 128; Drawing Together of Radicals, 129; "Left Wing" Socialists and the I. W. W., 131; I. W. W. Help in Establishing Russian Bolshevism, 133; Socialist Drift Toward I. W. W.'ism, 135; Growth of Syndicalism Throughout the World, 136. CHAPTER X BOLSHEVIST RULE IN RUSSIA 138 Rise of Russian Bolshevists, 138; Bolshevist Constitution, 139; Land Confiscation in Socialist Russia, 140; Peasant Warfare, 141; The Russian Soviets, 142; "Liberty" in Socialist Russia, 145; Justice in Bolsheviki-land, 146; Bolshevist Atheism and Religious Persecution, 146; Church and State "Separated," 147; Michigan Left Wing "Lets the Cat Out of the Bag," 149; Education Under Lenine's Government, 151. CHAPTER XI RUSSIA RED WITH BLOOD AND BLACK WITH CRIME 153 The Red Terror, 153-5; "Take Our Lives But Spare Our Children," 156; 500 Butchered in a Night, 157; Horrors of Bolshevik Prisons, 158; Atrocities and Tortures, 159; Petrograd, "City of the Dead," 160; 76 Uprisings, 161; "Criminal Element" in Office, 161; "A Lapse Into Barbarity," 162; Nationalization of Women, 163; "The Bureau of Free Love," 166; Forcible Abolition of Celibacy, 167; The "Call" Lauds Bolshevism, 168; "S. O. S., An Appeal to Humanity," 169; "Every Pore" of Russia's "Body Shedding Blood," 170; Lenine Working for World-Wide Bolshevism,[1] 170; Official Bolshevist[2] Organ in New York, 172; American Socialists Want Bolshevism, 173; Bolshevism's Economic Failure Revealed by Lincoln Eyre, 173; After Destroying "Capitalism" Lenine Seeks "Foreign Capital," 174; Bolshevism Has Sacrificed "the Health of Future Generations," 175; Trotzky Offers "Foreign Capitalists" a "Share of the Profits" from Russian Conscript Labor, 175. CHAPTER XII EUROPEAN SPARTACIDES AND COMMUNISTS 177 Spartacides of Germany, 177; Origin of Name, 177; Violent Principles, 177; Rowdies and Ruffians Approved by American Socialists, 177; Spartacan Terrorism, 178; Communists of Bavaria, 178; Terrorism in Munich, 179; The Peasants Rise While the Communists Plunder, 179; American Socialists Allied With the Scum of Bavaria, 179; Communists of Hungary, 180; Free-Lovers, 180; Churches Converted Into Music Halls, 180; Budapest Painted Red, 180; American Socialists Lined Up With European Thugs, 181. CHAPTER XIII THE BOLSHEVISM OF AMERICAN SOCIALISTS 182 Pink Booklet "About Russia," 182; Lenine Tells Why Bolshevism Requires "A World Revolution," 183; American Socialists "Greet" Bolshevist "Ambassador," 184; Poem on Liebknecht, 185; The "Call" Endorses Communism, Bolshevism and Spartacism, 186; Hillquit Hails Foreign Radicals, 188; American Socialist Papers Are Bolshevist, 188-93; Debs a "Bolshevik" and "Flaming Revolutionist," 194. CHAPTER XIV VIOLENCE, BLOODSHED AND ARMED REBELLION 196 Socialist Riots, 196; Trouble at Gary, 197; Haywood Says Socialists are Conspirators Against U. S. Government, 199; Jack London on the International "Fighting Organization," 200; Berger Says Socialists "Must Shoot," 201; "Blow Open the Vaults of the Banks," 202; Haywood and Bohn Say the Socialist "Does Not Hesitate to Break" the Laws, 203; "I am Law Abiding Under Protest," Says Debs, "and Bide My Time," 203; Scott Nearing "Wants War," 205. CHAPTER XV PATRIOTISM RIDICULED AND DESPISED 207 Socialists Against Patriotism, 207; American Flag Scouted, 207; "Honor the Uniform? No, Spit on It," 208; The "Call" Derides Our Soldiers Returning from France, 208; "I Spit Upon Your Flag! I Loathe the Stars and Stripes! To Hell With Your Flag! Down With the Stars and Stripes! Run Up the Red Flag!" 210; Debs Attacks the American Flag, 210. CHAPTER XVI THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST OUR COUNTRY 212 I. W. W. Conspirators, 213; "The Future of Socialism Lies in the General Strike, Armed Insurrection and Forcible Overthrow of All Existing Social Conditions," 213; Left Wing Socialists by Strikes and Industrial Unions to Establish "the Dictatorship of the Proletariat," 215; Government Raids, 215; Communist Parties for Overthrow of Government, 215-219; Socialist Party More Dangerous Than the Communists, 219-21; American Socialists Part of the "Invisible Empire," 222-4; Secret Resignations in the Socialist Party, 225-6; Socialist Party for "Mass Action," "General Strikes" and "Industrial Unionism" to Seize "the Industries and Control of the Government of the United States," 227-32; Winnipeg General Strike, 230-1; The Socialist Party Joins the Third (Moscow) International, 232-7; Imitates Moscow's Program and Methods, 237-40; Socialists Acclaim Debs, the Convict, 242-5; Hillquit Threatens the New York Legislature with a General Strike, 245-6; Socialists Disguise Their Principles at the New York Assembly Trial, 246-51; Walling Rejects Socialist Peace Pretensions, 251; The Russian Soviet Government Talks Peace While Its International Plots War, 252-7; Wholesale Law-Breaking of American Socialists Justified at the Assembly Trial, 257-62; Their Traitorous Principles and Propaganda, 263-66; Socialists "Enter the Government" to Destroy It, 266; Forewarned Is Forearmed, 266-7. CHAPTER XVII SOCIALISM A PERIL TO WORKINGMEN 268 Socialist Chaos and Anarchy, 268; Discontent in the Socialist State, 269; Perils of Confiscation, 270-2; Liberty Bonds and Insurance, 273; Unworkable Labor Schemes, 273-7; Forcing Women to Work, 277; Political Corruption, 277; Quarrels Over Religion and Free-Love, 278; Lincoln Eyre Reveals Socialism's Economic Failure in Russia, 279-91; "Lenine and Trotzky More Absolute Than Any Czar," 281; Starvation and Disease, 282-3; Military Confiscation of Russian Labor, 283-8; Lenine and Trotzky Invite "Foreign Capital" to Share the Profits from Exploiting the Wage-Slaves of Bolsheviki-land, 288-9; Death for Russian Wage-Slaves Who Strike Against Their Socialist Task-Masters, 290. CHAPTER XVIII THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST RELIGION ABROAD 292 Ingersoll Argument Refuted, 293; Economic Determinism, 293; Atheism of European Socialists, 294-5; "There Must Be War Between Socialism and the Church," 296; Socialists "All more or Less Avowed Atheists," 297; "No Man Can Be Consistently Both a Socialist and a Christian," 298; Socialism Persecutes Religion in Yucatan, 298. CHAPTER XIX THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST RELIGION IN AMERICA 301 Socialism Turns Ministers Into Atheists, 301-2; Spargo Says Socialism Cannot Tolerate Religious Schools, 302; Anti-Religious Poems in "Call," 303; The "Call" Has "No Use" for "Christ," 304; "Religion Spells Death to Socialism," as Socialism "Does to Religion," 305; "Socialism Logical Only When It Denies the Existence of God," 306; "Christmas Is a Crime," 307; Blasphemous Socialist Catechism for Children, 308; A Socialist Says "Socialism Is Anti-Christ," 309; Hypocrisy of Hillquit, Berger and Other Leaders in Concealing the Socialist Party's Irreligion to Get Votes, 310-15; Hillquit Says "Ninety-Nine Per Cent of Us" Are "Agnostic," 311. CHAPTER XX THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE FAMILY 317 Socialist Books Advocate Free-Love, 317; Socialists Dodge the Truth by Arguments About Prostitution, 318-19; The "Call's" Poem on "The Harlot," 320; Socialist Advocates of Free-Love, 320-2; Victor Berger's Milwaukee Company Sells Free-Love Literature, 322; Free-Love Stuff Sold by Kerr and Company and the National Office of the Socialist Party, 323-9. CHAPTER XXI THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE RACE 330 The "Call," chief Organ of the Socialist Party in New York, An Obscene Vehicle of Propaganda for Race-Suicide, Teaching "All Within Its Polluting Reach to Violate One of the Laws of the State of New York," 330-41. CHAPTER XXII SOCIALIST ORGANIZATION AND "BORING IN" 342 Organizing Activity of Socialists, 342; Dues-Paying Members, Locals and Branches, 342; 400 Socialist Periodicals in the United States, 343; Use of Books and Leaflets, 344; Financial Support by Rich Radicals, 345; Red Propaganda to Proselytize Labor and Promote Strikes, 346; Effect on the American Federation of Labor, 347; I. W. W.'s "Boring from Within," 348; William R. Foster, An I. W. W., Leads the A. F. of L. Steel Strike, 348-9. CHAPTER XXIII ENLISTING RECRUITS FOR THE CONSPIRACY 350 Socialist Sunday Schools, 350; "Catch Them Young," 351; Lesson 24 from the "Socialist Primer," 352; Socialist Propaganda Among School Children by Townley's Non-Partisan League, 353; The Teachers' Union of New York City, 354; The Inter-Collegiate Socialist Society, 355; Radical College Professors, 356; The Rand School, 357; Socialist Propaganda Among Immigrants, 358; Socialist Naturalization Bureau, 359; The Red Curse Among Women, 359; Among Soldiers and Sailors, 360; Socialist Cartoons and Movie Films, 360; Making Rebels of Negroes, 361. CHAPTER XXIV EXPERTS IN THE ART OF DECEPTION 363 Must Socialism Be Good Because Something Else Is Bad? 363; Socialist Party Platform Planks Unreliable, 365; Socialists Disagree on Land Ownership, 365-8; Government Ownership of Public Utilities Is Not Socialism, 369; Double-Faced Socialists, 370; The Burden of Proof Rests on the Socialist, 371; The "Lunatic" Sophistry, 372; Sophistry That Labor Earns All Wealth, 373; Vote-Getting by Advocating Popular Schemes, 375; Latest Dodge of Red Organizations to Hide from Prosecution by Changing Their Names, 375; The Socialist Party Not a Real Workingmen's Party, 376. CHAPTER XXV THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE REDS 377 High Time to Fight the Reds, 377; Read and Circulate Anti-Socialist Literature, 378; Warn Our School Children, 379; Quiz the Soap-Box Orators, 380; Expel Socialist School Teachers, 380; Tasks for the National Government, 381; Oppose Socialism in a Nation-Wide Campaign of Education, 382. INDEX 383 APPENDIX 391 Convention of the Socialist Party of the United States, May 8-14, 1920. CHAPTER I SOCIALISM IN OTHER LANDS Modern Socialism may be said to date from the year 1848 when Marx and Engels published their "Communist Manifesto," a pamphlet that has since been translated into almost all modern European languages and has to this day remained the classical exposition of international Socialism. Karl Marx, the chief founder of the movement, was born of Jewish parents at Treves, Germany, May 5, 1818. After studying at Jena, Bonn, and Berlin, he became a private professor in 1841, and about a year later assumed the editorship of the "Rhenish Gazette," a democratic-liberal organ of Cologne, that was soon suppressed for its radical utterances. In 1843 he moved to Paris where he became greatly interested in the study of political economy and of early Socialistic writings and where he subsequently made the acquaintance of Frederick Engels, his inseparable companion and life-long friend. Engels was born at Barmen, Rhenish Prussia, in 1820. He remained in Germany until he had completed his military service, and then moved to Manchester, England, where he engaged in the cotton business with his father. In 1884, while traveling, he met Karl Marx, and was banished with him from France in 1847, and expelled from Belgium in 1848, the very year that witnessed the appearance of the "Communist Manifesto." Not long after this, Marx and Engels returned to Germany, and were instrumental in fomenting a revolution in the Rhine Province in 1849. The revolt having been suppressed in the same year, both men sought refuge in England. Here Engels was the author of numerous German books on Socialism and became best known by editing, after Marx's death, the second and third volumes of the latter's works. While in England Marx took up his abode in London where he became the first president of the International Workingmen's Association, whose influence was not limited to England, but extended to France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, Poland, and even the United States of America. The active career of this association embraced a period of about eight years, from 1864 to 1872. Its six conventions were largely devoted to the discussion of social and labor problems and it produced a lasting effect upon the Socialist Movement by impressing upon it a harmonious and world-wide character. By 1876 the International Workingmen's Association was ruined by the quarrels that had taken place between the more moderate faction under the leadership of Marx, and the anarchistic element under Bakunin. It had, however, by this time contributed wonderfully towards the spread of Socialism, for it had taught the working classes of Europe the international nature both of their own grievances and of capitalism. Closely rivaling the success of the International Workingmen's Association in furthering the cause of Socialism was a book known as "Capital," an economic work the first volume of which was published in 1867 by Karl Marx. The author never lived to edit the second and third volumes, though after his death in London, March 14, 1883, they were published from his notes by Frederick Engels. This work, to which the Father of the Revolutionary Movement gave the German title "Das Kapital," has long been known as the Bible of Socialism. Its systematized philosophic and economic doctrines besides having supplied the various national branches of the party with a common theory and program, in the main still constitute the creed of the immense majority of the Socialists the world over. Though "Capital" has suffered severely from the criticism of economists of many schools, and though not a few of its doctrines have been rejected by present-day Socialists, its powerful influence still persists to a very marked degree. Supplementing this short historical sketch of the origin of the modern Socialist movement, short comments will be added concerning the Revolutionary organization in the different countries of the world. In Germany the Socialist movement first took shape in 1862 under the influence of Ferdinand Lassalle. It made comparatively slow progress until 1874 when the 450,000 Socialist voters returned ten members to the Reichstag. An attempt on the part of the German Government to suppress the movement failed, and henceforth the party under the leadership of August Bebel, Karl Kautsky, George Von Vollmar, and Wilhelm Liebknecht steadily continued to grow in strength. Shortly before the outbreak of the World War the Socialists, besides occupying 110 seats in the Reichstag out of a total of 397, polled about 4,252,000 votes and published 158 papers, but a faction under the leadership of Bernstein had made great progress in its endeavors to transform the Revolutionary organization into an opportunist party. Most of the German Socialists supported the war and the majority of their members in the Reichstag voted for the war credits. Some, however, like Karl Liebknecht, the son of Wilhelm Liebknecht, opposed the imperial government and were imprisoned. Pressure, however, finally forced the government to release Liebknecht, who then delivered impassioned speeches throughout the country, stirring up the people against Kaiserism and the war profiteers and urging the soldiers to turn their weapons against the imperial government itself. While Liebknecht was defying the authorities, the naval forces mutinied at Kiel. The Socialists then called a general strike for November 11, 1918, as a prelude to the revolution. Scheidemann and Ebert had been supporting the government of Prince Max of Baden, the successor of Von Hertling, as chancellor of the empire, and had deprecated the idea of a revolution. But when Scheidemann saw that the revolution was certainly coming and that he and his colleagues would probably be left stranded, he joined the movement with his powerful organization, stepped in and grasped the power. A national council of soldiers, sailors and workmen was formed at Berlin, but the provisional government was shaped by Scheidemann, Ebert and others of the majority Socialists by virtue of their excellent political machinery. The Ebert-Scheidemann government fought many a bitter struggle with growing radicalism. Their government represented the most moderate group of the Socialists and received the support of the Centerists and others because these were far more opposed to the Socialists of the extreme left, such as the Spartacan Communists. Several revolts engineered by the Spartacans were put down with considerable bloodshed. In January, 1919, soon after the defeat of the Spartacides in Berlin, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, their leaders, were put to death, and their minority party seemed to diminish in strength. In the latter part of May, 1919, the majority Socialists of the reactionary Ebert-Scheidemann group were at first opposed to the signing of the Treaty of Paris, whereas the Spartacans, and also the Independent Socialists under the leadership of Hugo Haase and Karl Kautsky, tried to force their opponents to sign it, so that the people of Germany might soon blame the "reactionaries" for the humiliation, and rise in rebellion to overthrow them. In Bavaria the anti-war sentiment spread rapidly, fostered by the efforts of Kurt Eisner. King Ludwig abdicated the throne on November 16, 1918, and Eisner took up the reins of power, forming a Socialist government. After a few weeks Eisner broke with the Ebert-Scheidemann government of Berlin, and soon after was assassinated. Not long after this the Bavarian communists imposed the Soviet form of government on the country, much to the dislike of many of the inhabitants, especially those living outside of Munich. The peasants of Bavaria rebelled against the communist-soviet government of Munich, which finally fell, after the Noske-Ebert-Scheidemann forces had marched against the city. Very many years ago Socialists began to spread their doctrines as best they could in the realms of the Czar. Many a Marxian was arrested for attempting to undermine the Russian government and sent into exile in Siberia. The World War having broken out, Russia suffered terribly, and this suffering, especially of the masses, caused great discontentment and made the people an easy prey to the revolutionary forces of Socialism. The bureaucratic Czarist regime finally broke down in March, 1917, as soon as the revolution started. Three main contending parties attempted to ride into power on the revolutionary tide; the Cadets, the Moderate Socialists (i.e., the Mensheviki, and Social Revolutionists) and the Bolsheviki or revolutionary Socialists. The Cadets were the first to gain the upper hand, but were soon swept away, for they strove to satisfy the soldiers, workers and peasants with abstract, political ideals. The Mensheviki and Social Revolutionists succeeded the Cadets. The demand for a Constitutent Assembly was one of the main aspirations of the Russian Revolution. It was on the eve of its realization that Bolsheviki, in November, 1917, by a _coup d'état_ seized the reins of power. The elections for the assembly took place after the Bolsheviki had gained the upper hand and the Bolsheviki were defeated. The Constituent Assembly was actually convened in Petrograd in January, 1918, but the Bolsheviki dispersed the parliament at the point of the bayonet. Russia was then ruled by Lenine, head of the soviet system of government. The government was a "dictatorship of the proletariat," characterized by injustice, violence, oppression, and bloodshed, the Soviets being little more than tribunals of punishment and execution, instruments of terror in the hands of the Autocrat Lenine. The Bolshevist government has met with continual opposition from the opposing groups of Socialists in Russia and has been attacked by the Allies, principally on the Archangel front and in the Gulf of Finland. The Finns, Lithuanians, Poles, Czecho-Slovaks, Rumanians, Ukranians, and especially Admiral Kolchak's Siberian forces waged a relentless warfare against the Bolsheviki tyranny either for political reasons or to rescue the countless millions of Russians who suffered so terribly from the Lenine system of dictatorship. By the latter part of February, 1920, the Lenine government seemed to be overcoming all military opposition.[A] The Socialists in Austria-Hungary as far back as 1907 could count 1,121,948 votes and 58 newspapers. Shortly before the end of the World War the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy fell. Austria and Hungary separated from each other and each became a republic. Count Karolyi was head of the new Hungarian government, socialistic in tendency. In the early spring of 1919, when Hungary was being invaded by Czecho-Slovak troops, Italians and Rumanians, and was threatened with an invasion from the Allies Count Karolyi fled and the government fell into the hands of the radical Socialist, Bela Kun, who soon established intimate relations with the Bolshevist government at Moscow. One difficulty after another, however, especially the attacks of the Rumanians, soon taxed the strength of the crimson-red government; and in the summer of 1919 it succumbed to pressure brought to bear on it by the Allies. Notwithstanding the Bolshevist propaganda carried on in Vienna, the Austrian government down to February, 1920, has resisted all inducements to adapt Bolshevism. Modern Socialism in France was rather inactive previous to the outbreak of the Commune in 1871. Then, after the victory of the government forces over the revolutionists, many leaders of the Commune declared for Anarchism, but subsequently abandoned it as impracticable and devoted themselves to the propaganda of Marxian Socialism. After Jules Guesde and other communards were permitted to return to France, by the amnesty of 1879, the party at first developed considerable strength, but soon split up into several factions, with Guesde as the leader of the more radical wing and Jaurés and Millerand at the head of the moderate parliamentarian group. In the election of May, 1914, the United Socialists under Jaurés polled 1,357,192 votes, while the Radical Socialists and their allies in the Caillaux combination cast 2,227,176 votes. During the World War most of the Socialists, especially those in parliament, supported the government. After the War the Longuet faction of the Socialist Party became the majority party, took over control of the great Paris Socialist daily L'Humanité and chose Cashin as editor. On April 6, 1919, a great demonstration took place in Paris in honor of Jaurés, the Socialist leader of France, who had been assassinated at the beginning of the World War. This and the decisions taken at the Socialist party congress of the Federation of the Seine on March 13th, demonstrated the decided turn to the left that the Socialist Party had taken since its previous congress in October, 1918. In the demonstration, consisting, perhaps, of 50,000 Socialists, cries of "Revolution!" "Down with the War!" "Down with Clemenceau!" "Long live the Soviet!" and "Long live Russia!" filled the air for three hours. "The Call," New York, May 19, 1919, thus comments: "The Socialist papers for several days appeared uncensored, though every line breathed revolution. Most startling of all, there were as many soldiers as civilians marching. "Seven days later the representatives of each Socialist local in the Department of the Seine met in convention to decide upon which of three resolutions they should recommend the coming national congress of the Socialist Party to adopt. The discussion was hot, and more or less revolved around the personalities of the three leaders, Albert Thomas, Right Socialist, Jean Longuet, Left Socialist, and F. Loriot, Communist or Bolshevist. Broadly speaking, the Thomas resolution based its faith upon present political action and future political power; the Longuet resolution advocated a third International, without indorsing the third International held in Moscow in March, and the Loriot resolution indorsed the Zimmerwald resolutions (against all wars) and recognized the existence of the Third International established by the Russian Bolshevik party. "Most of the discussion hinged upon affairs in Russia with hoots of derision at every uncomplimentary mention of Bolshevism, until the speaker either had to take his seat or qualify his criticism of the Soviet republic. "Both the Longuet and Loriot resolutions called the war the consequence of imperialistic anarchy and bourgeois ambition, both denounced the imposition upon Germany of an unjust, or Bismarckian, peace, such as was imposed upon France in 1871, and both mourned the assassination of Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, and Kurt Eisner. "The Longuet resolution was as strong in its declaration of solidarity with the Soviet republic of Russia as the Loriot resolution was in opposition to all annexation of the Sarre Valley by France." The National Congress of the Socialist parties of France was held from April 19 until April 22, 1919. A motion by M. Kienthaliens demanding the adhesion of French Socialists to the Internationale at Moscow, under the leadership of Premier Lenin of the Bolshevist government polled only 270 votes. This resolution failed to pass probably because the Longuet majority faction desired the union of all the French Socialist parties. The Congress adopted by a majority of 894 votes, a resolution offered by Jean Longuet to the effect that the French Socialists are willing to continue to form a part of the Second Internationale, provided that all those who are Socialists in name only shall be excluded. On May Day, 1919, the Socialists manoeuvered a general strike of all labor in Paris for twenty-four hours. The press dispatches informed us that the shut-down was virtually complete. Not a wheel was turning on any of the transportation systems and taxicabs and omnibuses kept off the streets. All restaurants and cafés were closed and guests in the hotels went hungry if they had not supplied themselves with food beforehand. Even the drug stores closed. Theatres, music halls, and other resorts did not open. No newspapers were published and periodic stoppages occurred in the postal and wire services throughout the day. Industry on all sides was in a state of complete inactivity, work being suspended by every class of labor. There was considerable disorder and very many policemen and civilians were injured. In the elections of November, 1919, the Socialist vote increased to 1,750,000, a gain of 40 per cent over that of 1914. On the 1914 basis of representation this would have given them 160 seats in the Chamber of Deputies; but their representation was actually reduced from 105 to 55, due to a new basis of representation and a new formation of districts. The French Syndicalists, of the Labor Confederation, had 600,000 members before the war and now claim 1,500,000. They were quiescent during the war, but their congresses of July, 1918, and September, 1919, showed a "tendency to return to the traditional revolutionary policy of French Syndicalism." In Great Britain it was not until 1884, when the Social Democratic Federation was organized by Henry M. Hyndman, that the Marxian movement displayed any notable activity. Its progress at first was extremely slow, but after the Independent Labor Party was formed in 1893 under the leadership of J. Keir Hardie with a view to carrying Socialism into politics, the revolutionary doctrines spread much more rapidly, "The Clarion" and "Labor Advocate," the two organs of the Independent Labor Party, helping wonderfully in the work. In 1883 the Fabian Society, an organization Socialistic in name and tendencies, was founded by a group of middle class students. It rejected the Marxian economies, and by means of lectures, pamphlets, and books advocated practical measures of social reform. Among the leading English Socialists of the more radical type have been Hyndman, Aveling, Blatchford, Bax, Quelch, Leathan and Morris; while Shaw, Pease and Webb were the leading members of the moderate Fabian Society. The vast majority of English Socialists supported the government in the World War, but the Labor Party, mostly Socialistic, during that time engineered great strikes of the coal miners, dock workers and railroad men. A press despatch dated London, April 21, 1919, says: "The first gun in the long advertised campaign of Bolshevism in Britain was fired at Sheffield, where the British Socialists' annual convention, at its opening session passed a resolution urging the establishment of a British soviet government. "The resolution expresses all admiration for the workings of the soviet system in Hungary and Bavaria. It declares war on the 'capitalist' system in Britain, attacks the policy of the peace conference toward Russia and favors the distribution of revolutionary propaganda in the British army and navy." During the summer and fall of 1919, Socialist and Bolshevist principles continued to gain an ever-increasing and very serious hold on the people of England and proved a serious menace to the government in the general railway strike in October. In Italy Socialism has been making steady progress for many years and since the end of the World War has increased wonderfully in strength. The party has greatly profited by the suffering and discontent due to the war and especially by the failure of Italy to secure coveted territory after all her sacrifices and the victory of the Allies. On April 10, 1919, the Italian Socialists manoeuvered a very successful general strike in Rome, but were prevented by the government forces from marching through the streets in any considerable numbers. About the same time disturbances were also engineered in many cities and towns of the country, especially in Florence[3] and Milan. In the latter part of April, 1919, the Executive Committee of the Socialist party of Italy resolved to sever its connection with the International Socialist Bureau and the Berne Conference, in which there were many reactionary Socialists, and to affiliate with the newly established Moscow International, consisting of the various National groups of Socialists giving whole-hearted support to Lenine and the Bolsheviki. On July 21, 1919, Italian Socialists conducted a general strike against the Russian blockade. Industrial prostration resulted in whole provinces stopping all traffic and communication while Soviets were set up in 240 towns and cities, including Genoa and Florence. In the November, 1919, elections the Socialists secured 159 Deputies in the Chamber, having had 44 previously. They cast over one-third of all votes cast, about 3,000,000, as against 883,409 in 1913. The membership of the Italian labor unions is now estimated at 1,000,000, an increase of about 300,000 since 1917. At a national conference, in April, 1919, the labor unions demanded a change of the national Parliament into a national Soviet. In Spain, especially in the big cities and notably in Barcelona, Socialism has made steady progress and the Marxians have taken part in several upheavals. In the early part of 1919 the eleventh national Congress, which met at Madrid, elected Pablo Iglesias president of the Executive Committee and adopted aggressive measures for extending Socialist propaganda, especially into the rural districts, and for establishing Socialist day schools and women's evening schools. The official organ of the party, "El Socialista," came in for a round of criticism because of its espousal of the Allied cause to the detriment, it was charged, of the International principles to which it should have adhered. In the latter part of April, 1913, the Belgian Socialists, under the leadership of Emil Vandervelde attracted the attention of the world by attempting to paralyze the entire industrial system of the country by a general strike. Shortly before the outbreak of the World War, Belgium, with its comparatively small population, had about half a million Socialist voters, constituting approximately half of the electorate of the country. During the war the Socialists supported the government and since the war down to the early fall of 1919 have not caused any serious trouble. On November 16, 1919, the Socialist vote rose to 644,499, with election of 70 Deputies and 20 Senators, an increase of 21 Deputies and 5 Senators. In March, 1919, out of the 100 members of the Second Chamber of Holland, there were four Communists or Socialists of the extreme left and 20 of more moderate tendencies. The Communists published a newspaper called "The Bolshevist" and maintained relations with the Russian Soviet Government and the German Sparticides. David Wynkoop, the leader of the Dutch Communists, is called "Holland's Little Liebknecht" and in a parliamentary speech openly threatened a general strike. There was a Bolshevist crisis in January, 1919. An assembly of international communists met at the Hague and Spartacide success in Germany was the only thing required to launch a revolutionary attempt, accompanied by a general strike and terrorism. The government then adopted stern measures. Civil guards were formed, and banks, newspaper offices and police bureaus were occupied by the military with machine guns, the banks and newspapers having been previously equipped with wireless against the cutting of telephone wires. Wynkoop, in the company of workingmen, visited soldiers in their barracks asking them to join the movement, but the soldiers fired, killing three and wounding several. Efforts to corrupt the cavalry and the navy by similar means were not a success. Shortly after the overthrow of the Austro-Hungarian Government, the three Socialist parties of Czecho-Slovakia, which had been divided principally over questions of nationality, got together and their leaders of moderate tendencies were very sanguine over the outlook for a general victory at the ballot box in the near future. It appears, however, that the party was afterwards split into pro and anti Bolshevist factions, with a consequent decrease in political strength. In speeches made by several leaders at the Bohemian Socialist conference at Prague in the early part of April, 1919, it was decided that the alliance with the Entente should be maintained because reconciliation with Berlin, Budapest and Moscow would mean danger for the Czecho-Slovak republic. Bolshevism was described as the suicide of the proletariat, and it was urged that the working people of Bohemia should differentiate between exaggeration and methodic reform. In Prague, Pressburg and other cities troops clashed with the Communists and Social Democrats. On March 7, 1919, at a mass meeting addressed by three leading agitators from Prague, 40,000 workers, mostly miners, cheered assertions that the revolution of October 28, 1918, had not turned out well for the proletariat which was still being oppressed; that the Government of Prague was as weak as under the old Austrian regime. Socialism, in recent years, has made considerable progress in Sweden. The majority of the Marxians seems to be of the moderate group, though the Left Socialist Party assisted the Lenine Government of Russia. Hjalmar Branting, the leader of the Moderate Socialists, addressing the French Socialist Congress in the Spring of 1919, bitterly assailed Bolshevism and issued a warning against it. Branting's Social-Democratic Labor Party has 86 seats in Parliament, while the radicals, who seceded to form the Socialist Party in 1917, have 12 seats. In this convention, in June, 1919, the Socialist Party voted to join the Third (Moscow) International, declared for the principle of the dictatorship of the proletariat, voted for "mass action" as the means of conquest and a Soviet organization of the workers. In the Socialist party of Norway the Bolshevist faction appears to be in control. After the revolution in Germany in the latter part of 1918, the Norwegian Socialists, in speeches and articles urged the laborers to organize revolutionary organizations similar to those in soviet Russia, provide themselves with arms and be ready for a revolutionary uprising to overthrow the government. The party congress in 1919 joined the Third (Moscow) International and adopted "mass action" as tactics and preparation for a general strike. The Socialists were very active in Argentina after the ending of the World War and were the back-bone of the serious and prolonged disturbances in Buenos Aires. In the latter part of April, 1919, the Pan-American Socialist Conference was held in the Argentine capital. Its purpose was to promote the amalgamation of all the Socialist and labor organizations of the Western Hemisphere into one body. In South America Socialism is best organized in Argentine, Chile and Peru, and weakest in Brazil and Colombia. In Canada, at least till the summer of 1919, the Marxian forces were gaining in strength daily. This was especially true of the western part of the Dominion, where the radical industrial union, generally called in Canada the "One Big Union," has become very influential. Serious strikes with Bolshevist tendencies took place throughout the Dominion, especially in Winnipeg in the spring of 1919. Bulgaria has two Socialist parties, the Moderates and the Communist Party, the latter affiliated with the Third (Moscow) International. In the August, 1919, election the Moderate Socialist members in the "Sobranie" or Chamber of Deputies decreased from 46 to 39, while the Communists increased their Deputies from 10 to 47. Mexico, on our southern border, has added "industrial unionism" to her Socialist movement. At the Socialist Party convention in the fall of 1919 a part of the organization seceded and reorganized as the Communist Party. Besides the many millions of Socialists in the countries already referred to, the Marxians are well organized and are making rapid strides in Serbia, Denmark, Greece, Switzerland, the Balkan States, Australia, New Zealand and even in South Africa and far distant Japan and China. CHAPTER II GROWTH OF SOCIALISM IN THE UNITED STATES Socialism was introduced into the United States about the year 1850 by immigrants who landed on our shores from Europe. The Marxians, who came from Germany, were principally responsible for the foundation of the Workingmen's Party in 1876, which in 1877 was called the Socialistic Labor Party, and, a few years later, the Socialist Labor Party, which was reorganized at Chicago in 1889, after having lost two sections by secession. One of these, called the Cincinnati Socialist Labor Party, in 1897 united with the Social Democracy of America, a combination of railroad men, followers of Eugene V. Debs, and of the populist followers of Victor L. Berger. The other seceders from the Socialist Labor Party, called the "kangaroos," united with the Social Democracy of Debs and Berger in 1900, the new combination then calling itself the Socialist Party of America. The minority of the old Socialist Labor Party, which refused to be amalgamated with the Social Democracy of America, is still known as the Socialist Labor Party; hence, since the year 1900, there have been two distinct revolutionary parties, the Socialist Party and the Socialist Labor Party. The former, under the leadership of Eugene V. Debs, Victor L. Berger and Morris Hillquit, with 109,586 dues-paying members in January, 1919, is by far the more powerful and influential, having steadily increased its vote to about 900,000 in the Presidential election of 1912, though in the year 1916 the vote dropped to less than 600,000. The Socialist Labor Party, under the guidance of Daniel De Leon until his death, in May, 1914, seems to be making little if any progress. Though both parties claim to be genuinely Socialistic and Marxian, each has decried the other as being a "fake" or "bogus" party. The Socialist Labor Party's main complaint is that its rival the Socialist Party is sacrificing the principles of Karl Marx in its endeavor to gain votes, while, on the other hand, the latter party retorts by stigmatizing its opponent as being a party of "scabs," the sole purpose of whose existence is to antagonize the Socialist Party. In recent years unsuccessful attempts have been made to unite the two. The Socialist Party, besides publishing two important dailies in English, "The Call," of New York City, and the "Milwaukee Leader," issues at least two in German, two in Bohemian, one in Polish and one in Yiddish. "Forward," the Jewish paper published in New York City in Yiddish, had a daily circulation[4] of over 150,000, according to a report in "The Call" April 6, 1919. Foremost for many years among the Socialist weeklies in English was the "Appeal to Reason," which was once extremely bitter and unrelenting in its attacks on the United States Government. Published at Girard, Kansas, its circulation reached nearly 1,000,000 copies a week during the fall of 1912, but since 1917 it has fallen into great disfavor among most Socialists because of its pro-war and moderate tendencies. In addition to the Socialist papers already referred to, there are in our country hundreds of others in English, German, Bohemian, Polish, Jewish, Slovac, Slavonic, Danish, Italian, Finnish, French, Hungarian, Lettish, Norwegian, Croatian, Russian, and Swedish. In a report to Congress in 1919, the Attorney-General of the United States stated that there were 416 radical newspapers in America. A strong impression that serious party strife and bossism prevail in the Socialist organization is gained by those who read the Marxian papers and magazines. William English Walling, for example, in the "International Socialist Review," Chicago, April, 1913, showed his sympathy with the so-called "reds," who then comprised the radical I. W. W. wing of the party, and at the same time attacked the "yellows," the advocates of political action. "Ever since the Socialist Party was formed," he wrote, "the party office-holders have been spending the larger part of their energies in endeavoring to hold their jobs and to fight down every element in the party that demanded any improvement or advance in any direction.... "A far greater danger is the new one, that has become serious only since we entered upon the present period of political success two years ago, namely the corruption of the party by those elected to public office.... "Only last year we had several mayors in the one state of Ohio either being forced to resign or deserting the party because they could not use it for their purpose.... "Next year we may elect a few congressmen and half a hundred legislators--if the reactionaries in the party will cease their underhand efforts to disrupt the organization and drive out the revolutionists.... "If then these office-holders continue to show the tendency towards bossism so common in the past, the Socialist Party will soon become an office-holders' machine, little different in character from the machine by which Gompers controls the Federation of Labor, or Murphy, Tammany Hall.... "The only possible way to avoid a split so openly and shamelessly advocated by some of the opportunist leaders of our party--Berger even threatened it in the last National Convention--is to have the system of proportional representation.... "Unless some such changes as these are made in the next four years, it does not take a prophet to see that there would be nothing left of what we now know as the Socialist Party. If we cannot control our own petty autocrats, how can we ever hope to control the infinitely more powerful and resourceful autocrats of the Capitalist system?" "The Communist," formerly the Left Wing organ of the Chicago Socialists, in its edition of April 1, 1919, bitterly assails Victor L. Berger of the Right Wing: "A vote for Berger is a vote of pitying contempt for our Bolsheviki and Spartacan comrades. A vote for Berger is a vote approving his repeated and uncalled-for condemnation of our class-war comrades of the I. W. W.--condemnation persistently offered to prove Berger's own eminent respectability. A vote for Berger is a vote of scoffery against the St. Louis platform--a vote of apology for the platform, dissipation of its meaning, and disavowal of its essential spirit. A vote for Berger is a vote for the International of German Majority Socialism. A vote for Berger is a vote for petty bourgeois progressivism as the essence of Socialism; it is a vote against identification of the Socialist Party with the revolutionary mass aspirations. A vote for Berger is a betrayal of all the efforts, sacrifices and dreams of those whose lives have gone into the socialist movement as torch-bearers of proletarian triumph over capitalist exploitation, from Marx to the humblest comrade fighting today in the ranks of the revolutionary class struggle. "As far as this election is concerned there is nothing to be considered about Victor Berger, past and present, except the ideal Socialism which has become unchangeably attached to his name. If the American Socialist Party is to be a party of Berger-Socialism, then indeed, the Socialist movement will not die in America. No, it is the Socialist Party that will die." As we shall see presently, these prophecies of disruption were soon fulfilled. The representatives of the Socialist organizations of the different countries of the world have from the time of Karl Marx met together at more or less regular intervals, being banded together in what is called the "International." The official organ of the National Office, Socialist Party, "The Eye Opener," in its issue of February, 1919, gives a detailed explanation of the "International": "It is an organization of Socialist Parties and labor organizations, meeting periodically in international conferences. In order to be eligible for membership, an organisation must meet the following test, adopted by the International Congress of Paris, 1900. "Those admitted to the International Socialist Congresses are: "1. All associations which adhere to the essential principles of Socialism; namely, Socialization of the means of production and exchange, international union, and action of the workers, conquest of public power by the proletariat, organized as a class party. "2. All the labor organizations which accept the principles of the class struggle and recognize the necessity of political action, legislative and parliamentary but do not participate directly in the political movement. "This definition includes every Socialist Party and propaganda organization in the world and it further takes in those enlightened unions that recognize the need for political action. It excludes conservative unions that do not yet admit the soundness of the principles of the class struggle." The First International was thoroughly Marxian and revolutionary. According to "The Revolutionary Age," April 12, 1919, it accepted the revolutionary struggle against capitalism and waged that struggle with all the means in its power. It considered its objective to be the conquest of power by the revolutionary proletariat, the annihilation of the bourgeois state, and the introduction of a new proletarian state, functioning temporarily as a dictatorship of the proletariat. The First International collapsed after the Franco-Prussian War. The Second International was formed at Paris in the year 1889. Its tendencies were much more moderate than those of its predecessor. "The Revolutionary Age," April 12, 1919, criticises it for being "conservative and petty bourgeois in spirit," and states that "it was part and parcel of the national liberal movement, not at all revolutionary, dominated by the conservative skilled elements of the working class and the small bourgeoisie. It was hesitant and compromising, expressing the demands of the 'petite bourgeoisie' for government ownership, reforms, etc." In 1900 an International Socialist Bureau was established at Brussels for the purpose of solidifying and strengthening the work of the Second International and for maintaining uninterrupted relations between the various national organizations. That the American Socialists were closely united with the Marxians the world over during the Second International, which continued till the World War, was especially evident from the fact that representatives from the United States met abroad in the international congresses every three years to discuss party policies. Far from denying the international character of the whole movement, the Revolutionists of the United States have ever rejoiced and gloried in it, trusting that it would result in the rapid spread of their doctrines and the ultimate victory of their cause. In confirmation of the intimate union existing between American and foreign Socialists, during the time of the second International, we have the declaration of the Socialist Party of the United States in its national platform of 1904, pledging itself to the principles of International Socialism, as embodied in the united thought and action of the Socialists of all nations. Moreover, Morris Hillquit informed us in "The Worker," March 23, 1907, that the International Socialist Movement, with its thirty million adherents and its organized parties in about twenty-five civilized countries in both hemispheres, was everywhere based on the same Marxian program and followed substantially the same methods of propaganda and action. Writing again, in "Everybody's," October, 1913, Hillquit declared that the dominant Socialist organizations of all countries were organically allied with one another, that by means of an International Socialist Bureau, supported at joint expense, the Socialist parties of the world maintained uninterrupted relations with one another, and that every three years they met in international conventions, whose conclusions were accepted by all constituent[5] national organizations. Commenting upon "The Collapse of the Second International," which is held to have taken place at the beginning of the World War, "The Revolutionary Age," March 22, 1919, says: "Great demonstrations were held in every European country by Socialists protesting against their government's declarations of war, and mobilizations for war. And we know that these demonstrations were rendered impotent by the complete surrender of the Socialist parliamentary leaders and the official Socialist press, with their 'justification' of 'defensive wars' and the safeguarding of 'democracy.' "Why the sudden change of front? Why did the Socialist leaders in the parliaments of the belligerents vote the war credits? Why did not Moderate Socialism carry out the policy of the Basle Manifesto, namely; the converting of an imperialistic war into a civil war--into a proletarian revolution? Why did it either openly favor the war or adopt a policy of petty-bourgeois pacifism?" At the conclusion of the World War Socialists and representatives of labor from many countries met at Berne, Switzerland, in what was known as the Berne Conference. This international Socialist conference was comparatively moderate in tendencies, while another Socialist congress, held shortly before it in Bolshevist Moscow, was far more radical. J. Ramsay MacDonald, commenting upon the Berne Conference in "Glasgow Forward," in the spring of 1919, said: "It declined to condemn the Bolshevists and declined to say that their revolution was Socialism.... "Moscow seems to be more thorough than Berne, though as a matter of fact Berne was far more thorough than Moscow. There is a glamour and a halo about Moscow; but there are substance and permanence about Berne. "That blessed word 'Soviet' has become a shibboleth. But Berne did not say anything about it. It declared its continuing belief in democracy and in representative institutions. I hope that the Soviet is not contrary to democracy; I know that it is a representative institution. But I know more. I know that beyond its primary stage it is a system of indirect representation--the representation of representatives--and that a few years ago there was not a single Socialist in the country that would have accepted such a form of representative government. For Socialists to pretend to prefer that system to one of direct responsibility is a mere pose. "Therefore, two Internationals will be the worst thing that could happen to the revolutions now going on and to the general Socialist movement. The duty of every Socialist--especially of those of us who are not in revolution--is to strive by might and by main to get a union of the two. We may have to suffer a time of internal trouble owing to the friction of conflicting conceptions of Socialist reconstruction, but I am quite certain that no one has yet said what is to be the last word on the subject, and to split on such a controversy as this is to advertise to the world how unready Socialism is to assume command." The Berne Conference, which had at first been called to meet at Lausanne, the Russian Bolshevik government of Lenine denounced in a manifesto which the "Chicago Socialist" of February 8, 1919, republished in part as follows: "The Central Committee of the Russian Communist Bolshevik Party in a manifesto on the proposal to call together an International Conference at Lausanne, declares that the project cannot be considered even as an attempt to revive the Second International. The latter ceased to exist during the first days of August, 1914, when the representatives of the majority of nearly all the Socialist parties passed over into the ranks of their imperialist governments. "The attempts made to revive this International, for which agitation has been carried on in all countries throughout the war, emanated from elements standing mid-way, which, whilst not recognizing openly Imperialist Socialism, nevertheless had no idea of creating a third revolutionary International. "The attempts made to go back to the pre-war situation regarding the labor movement crashed against the Imperialist policy of the official parties, which could not, at that time, admit the appearance of an attempt to restore the International, fearing, as they did, that this might tend to weaken the war policy of the government and the working class working in unison. "To counteract these attempts, the Imperialist Socialist parties undertook to change the conditions of representation of the national sections in the old International. The last so-called inter-Allied conference in the Entente countries made it clear that this change had been effected. "Great Britain was represented by a motley organization in which the Socialist parties could play no direct role. Italy was represented by men whose party never before belonged to the International and whose presence compelled the absence of the official Italian Socialist Party. America was represented by Gompers, representing associations which never had anything to do with the Socialists.... "As against the International of traitors and counter-revolutionaries, organizing themselves for the purpose of forming leagues against the proletarian revolutions the world over, the Communists of all countries must rapidly close their ranks around the third revolutionary International--already, in fact, existing. "This Third International has nothing in common with the avowed Socialist Imperialists, or with the pseudo-revolutionary Socialists, who in reality support the former when they refuse to break with them, and who do not recoil against participation in the conferences of falsely called Socialists. The Russian Communist Bolshevik Party refuses to take part in these conferences, which abuse the name of Socialism. It invites all those who desire that the Third Revolutionary International shall live to take the same line; the task of this Third International being to hasten the conquest of power by the working class. "The Communist parties of Finland, Esthonia, Lithuania, of White Russia, the Ukraine, Poland, and Holland are at one with the Russian Communist Party. "The latter also regards as its associates the Spartacus group in Germany, the Communist Party of German Austria and other revolutionary proletarian elements of the countries in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire; the Left Social Democrats of Sweden, the Revolutionary Social Democracy of Switzerland and Italy, the followers of Maclean in England, of Debs in America, of Loriot in France. In their persons the Third International, which is at the head of the World Revolution, already exists. "At the present moment when the Socialist Imperialists of the Entente who formerly hurled the most violent accusations against Scheidemann, are about to unite with him and to break the power of Socialism in all countries, the Communist Party considers that unity for the World Revolution is an indispensable condition for its success. "Its most dangerous enemy now is the Yellow International of the Socialist traitors--thanks to whom capitalism still succeeds in keeping a considerable portion of the working class under its influence. "For the conquest of power by the workers let us carry on an implacable struggle against those who are deceiving them--against the pseudo-Socialist traitors." At the end of May, 1919, the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party of the United States, probably on account of pressure brought to bear on it by the "Left Wing," stated that the party repudiated the Berne Conference, but, at the same time, was _not yet_ affiliated with the Communist Conference of the Bolshevists at Moscow. The phraseology of this ambiguous announcement is here given: "It recognizes the necessity of reorganizing the Socialist International along more harmonious and radical lines. The Socialist Party of the United States is not committed to the Berne Conference, which has shown itself retrograde on many vital points, and totally devoid of creative force. On account of the isolation of Russia, and the misunderstanding arising therefrom, it also is not affiliated with the Communist Congress of Moscow." This awkward straddle is explained by the fact that the American Socialist Party, under the pro-German leadership of Morris Hillquit of New York and Victor L. Berger of Milwaukee, had in its Congressional platform for 1918 expressly endorsed the Inter-Allied Socialist and Labor Conference, held at London that year. This is the conference which the Lenine government scoffs at in the manifesto quoted just above, styling it the "so-called inter-allied conference," in which "America was represented by Gompers, representing associations which never had anything to do with the Socialists." That the American Socialist Party had been led into the endorsement of the conference by Berger and Hillquit because the conference had recommended a meeting with German workingmen seems evident from the wording of the endorsement, taken from the official publication of the Socialist Party's 1918 Congressional Platform, pages 3-4: "In all that concerns the settlement of this war, the American Socialist Party is in general accord with the announced aims of the Inter-Allied Conference. We re-affirm the principles announced by the Socialist Party in the United States in 1915; adopted by the Socialist Republic of Russia in 1917; proclaimed by the Inter-Allied Labor Conference in 1918 and endorsed by both the majority and minority Socialists in the Central empires; no forcible annexations, no punitive indemnities and the free determination of all peoples. "The Socialist Party believes that the foundations for international understanding must be laid during the war, before the professional diplomats begin to dictate the world's future as they have in the past. "It therefore supports the demand of the Inter-Allied Conference for a meeting with the German workingmen, convinced that such a meeting will promote the cause of democracy, and will encourage the German people to throw off the military autocracy that now oppresses them. We join our pledge to that of the Inter-Allied Conference that, this done, as far as in our power, we shall not permit the German people to be made the victims of imperialistic designs." The phrases in the above endorsement, "Inter-Allied Conference," "majority ... Socialists in the Central empires," and "promote the cause of democracy," must have invoked the scorn of Lenine and Trotsky. Hence the wording of their manifesto, in which they acknowledged as "associates" the "followers ... of Debs in America," is an evident slap at Berger and Hillquit and their "followers" in the American Socialist Party. It was so understood by many in the party, and led to the rapid sprouting of a "Left Wing" and the ultimate secession of about 72,000 dues-paying members, leaving only about 40,000 with Berger and Hillquit. The story of this rupture will be found in the three chapters following, where it also appears that Berger and Hillquit attempted to hide their "Yellow" streak under a deeper daub of "Red." CHAPTER III THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF AMERICA DEVELOPS A LEFT WING Some years ago, when the people of the United States were beginning to suspect that the Socialists were plotting a revolution against our Constitutional form of government the hypocritical followers of Eugene V. Debs, fearing that their plot might be nipped in the bud, endeavored to conceal their conspiracy, and succeeded quite well, by assuring the American people that the word "revolution," so often used by them, was a harmless term and was to be taken in a broad sense, without the "r," signifying nothing more than "evolution." "Do not be alarmed," they told us, "we Socialists are striving to bring about reforms in the government, but solely by constitutional means and the use of the ballot."[B] Many proofs could be given to show that, even in the early days of the American Socialist Party, revolution, in the strictest sense of the word, was foremost in the minds of many of the Marxian leaders. With the advent of Bolshevism in Russia, and the successful overthrow of European governments by revolutionary Socialists abroad, the "Reds" in our own country became decidedly bolder, both in word and plot, against the Government of our country. The more outspoken, daring and impatient plotters in the Socialist Party of America lined up in a Left Wing faction, whereas the more hypocritical, hesitant, cautious and prudent revolutionists constituted the Right Wing. The former became known as the "Reds," the latter as the "Yellows." The "Reds" made a specialty of "direct action" or violence, had little confidence in victory through the ballot, and campaigned for a revolution at an early day. The "Yellows," of course, also rely on a final victory through rebellion, but in the meantime, during the period of revolutionary education and organization, insist on political action. The leaders in control of the executive machinery of the Socialist Party, wishing to retain their lucrative positions, and looking forward to the advantage of political office during the years which might elapse before the time would be ripe for rebellion, were nearly all Right Wingers, and have waged a bitter and unscrupulous fight against the Left Wing organization within the party. The Left Wing of the Socialist Party of America had its origin, probably, in the year 1916. According to the "International Socialist Review," of December of that year, this ultra-revolutionary faction took form in Boston. About the latter part of the year 1917 it began to develop more rapidly, its progress being more or less proportional to the spread of Bolshevism and the Socialist revolutions in Europe. Its success, of course, was at the expense of the political leaders of the Right. The Left Wing has certainly been more honest than the Right. The "Reds" comprising it favor direct action, that is, strikes and disturbances, rather than the use of the ballot, hoping thus to bring our country into such a critical condition that they may precipitate a rebellion, and then, though in a minority, assume control of the government by a sudden _coup d'état_, as the Bolsheviki did in Russia. The Left Wingers opposed the "immediate demands" in the Socialist Party platform, preferring to work for dictatorship rather than for social reforms. They despised the politicians of the Right Wing, calling them yellow, reactionary, hypocritical, capitalistic Socialists, and telling them that their place was with the newly formed Labor Party, which had already praised the Socialists and invited them to join its ranks. The Lefts expressed a fear that the leaders of the Right would, if our Government were overthrown, turn against them just as the Scheidemann-Ebert group turned against the German Spartacides. The fight between the two factions became severe about the beginning of the year 1919. "The Revolutionary Age," Boston, February 15, 1919, speaking of the disturbance in the Socialist Party, and explaining the fundamental principles of the Left Wing said: "The American Socialist Party is in a condition of feverish theoretical activity. Pressing problems are being met in a spirit of self-criticism. New forms of action in the social struggle are being accepted. Old methods, old tactics, old ideas, which in the test of war have proven incapable of furthering the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat, are being seriously analyzed and repudiated. "The membership of the Socialist Party, the majority, is instinctively class conscious and revolutionary. It was this membership that compelled our officials to acquiesce in the adoption of a radical declaration against war--which most of the officials sabotaged or converted into an innocuous policy of bourgeois pacificism. When the Bolsheviki conquered, the majority of our officials were either hostile or silent; some weeks before, the 'New York Call' had stigmatized the Bolsheviki as 'anarchists.' But the membership responded; they forced the hands of the officials, who became 'me too' Bolsheviki, but who did not draw the revolutionary implications of the Bolshevik policy. These officials and their machinery baffled the will of the membership; more, the membership baffled itself because it did not clearly understand the theory and the practice implied in its instinctive class consciousness and revolutionary spirit. "While our National Executive Committee accepts the Berne Congress and refuses to call an emergency National Convention, locals of the party are actively engaged in the great struggle, turning to the left, to revolutionary Socialism. Groups within the party are organizing and issuing proclamations, determined that the party shall conquer the party for revolutionary Socialism. Two of these proclamations were published in the last issue of 'The Revolutionary Age.' They deserve serious consideration and discussion. "The manifesto of the Communist Propaganda League of Chicago is a concise document. Its criticism of the party is summarized: "'The Party proceeds on too narrow an understanding of political action for a party of revolution, its programs and platforms have been reformist and petty bourgeois in character, instead of being definitely directed toward the goal of social revolution; the party has failed to achieve unity with the revolutionary movement on the industrial field.' "Its proposals for democratizing the party--mass action in the party--are excellent; it repudiates the old international and the Berne Congress, and asks: "'Identification of the Socialist Party with class conscious industrial unionism, unity of all kinds of proletarian action and protest forming part of the revolutionary class struggle; political action to include political strikes and demonstrations, no compromising with any groups not inherently committed to the revolutionary class struggle, such as Labor parties, People's Councils, Non-Partisan Leagues, Municipal Ownership Leagues and the like.'" In order clearly to understand the big fight that has disrupted the Socialist Party, further explanations of the principles of the Left Wing are necessary. "The Revolutionary Age," from which the above quotation was taken, was first published in Boston, its editor being Louis C. Fraina. In the summer of 1919 it combined with "The Communist," of New York City, and, still maintaining its former name, became the national organ of the Left Wing of the Socialist Party. In the article just quoted reference was made to "mass action." This, according to "The Revolutionary Age," is to be the main weapon used by the rebels in precipitating rebellion. The July 12, 1919, issue of the same paper explains mass action and shows how it is to be used. The article, written by Louis C. Fraina, reads in part as follows: "Socialism in its early activity as a general organized movement was compelled to emphasize the action of politics because of the immaturity of the proletariat.... "All propaganda, all electoral and parliamentary activity are insufficient for the overthrow of Capitalism, impotent when the ultimate test of the class struggle turns into a test of power. The power for the social revolution issues out of the actual struggles of the proletariat, out of its strikes, its industrial unions and mass action." Industrial unions of course means the union system of the I. W. W., and not the craft unions of the American Federation of Labor. The article continues: "The peaceful parliamentary conquest of the state is either sheer utopia or reaction.... "The revolution is an act of a minority, at first; of the most class conscious section of the industrial proletariat, which in a test of electoral strength, would be a minority, but which, being a solid, industrially indispensable class, can disperse and defeat all other classes through the annihilation of the fraudulent democracy of the parliamentary system implied in the dictatorship of the proletariat, imposed upon society by means of revolutionary mass action.... "Mass action is not a form of action as much as it is a process and synthesis of action. It is the unity of all forms of proletarian action, a means of throwing the proletariat, organized and unorganized, in a general struggle against Capitalism and the capitalist state.... "The great expressions of mass action in recent years, the New Zealand general strike, the Lawrence strike, the great strike of the British miners under which capitalist society reeled on the verge of collapse--all were mass actions organized and carried through in spite of the passive and active hostility of the dominant Socialist and labor organization. Under the impulse of mass action, the industrial proletariat senses its own power and acquires the force to act equally against capitalism and the conservatism of organizations. Indeed, a vital feature of mass action is precisely that it places in the hands of the proletariat the power to overcome the fetters of these organizations, to act in spite of their conservatism, and through proletarian mass action emphasize antagonisms between workers and capitalists, and conquer power. A determining phase of the proletarian revolution in Russia was its acting against the dominant Socialist organizations, sweeping these aside through its mass action before it could seize social supremacy.... "Mass action is the proletariat itself in action, dispensing with bureaucrats and intellectuals, acting through its own initiative; and it is precisely this circumstance that horrifies the soul of petty bourgeois Socialism. The masses are to act upon their own initiative and the impulse of their own struggles.... "Mass action organizes and develops into the political strike and demonstration, in which a general political issue is the source of the action.... "The class power of the proletariat arises out of the intensity of its struggles and revolutionary energy. It consists, moreover, of undermining the bases of the morale of the capitalist state, a process that requires extra parliamentary activity through mass action. Capitalism trembles when it meets the impact of a strike in a basic industry; Capitalism will more than tremble, it will actually verge on a collapse, when it meets the impact of a general mass action involving a number of correlated industries, and developing into revolutionary mass action against the whole capitalist regime. The value of this mass action is that it shows the proletariat its power, weakens capitalism, and compels the state largely to depend on the use of brute force in the struggle, either the physical force of the military or the force of legal terrorism; this emphasizes antagonisms between proletarian and capitalist, widening the scope and deepening the intensity of the proletarian struggle against capitalism.... "Mass action, being the proletariat itself in action, loosens its energy, develops enthusiasm, and unifies the action of the workers to its utmost measure.... "Moreover, mass action means the repudiation of bourgeois democracy. Socialism will come not through the peaceful, democratic parliamentary conquest of the state, but through the determined and revolutionary mass action of a proletarian minority. The fetish of democracy is a fetter upon the proletarian revolution; mass action smashes the fetish, emphasizing that the proletarian recognizes no limits to its action except the limits of its own power. The proletariat will never conquer unless it proceeds to struggle after struggle; its power is developed and its energy let loose only through action. Parliamentarism, in and of itself, fetters proletarian action; organizations are often equally fetters upon action; the proletariat must act and always act; through action it conquers.... "The great war has objectively brought Europe to the verge of revolution. Capitalist society at any moment may be thrust into the air by an upheaval of the proletariat--as in Russia. Whence will the impulse for the revolutionary struggle come? Surely not from the moderate Socialism and unionism, which are united solidly in favor of an imperialistic war; surely not from futile parliamentary rhetoric, even should it be revolutionary rhetoric. The impulse will come out of the mass action of the proletariat.... "Mass action is equally a process of revolution and the revolution itself in operation." The March 22, 1919, issue of "The Revolutionary Age" published the Manifesto of the Left Wing section of the Socialist Party of New York, from which several important quotations are hereby taken: "We are a very active and growing section of the Socialist Party who are attempting to reach the rank and file with our urgent message over the heads that be, who, through inertia or a lack of vision, cannot see the necessity for a critical analysis of the party's policies and tactics.... "In the latter part of the nineteenth century the Social-Democracies of Europe set out to 'legislate capitalism out of office.' The class struggle was to be won in the capitalist legislatures. Step by step concessions were to be wrested from the state; the working class and the Socialist parties were to be strengthened by means of 'constructive' reform and social legislation; each concession would act as a rung in the ladder of Social Revolution, upon which the workers could climb step by step, until finally, some bright sunny morning, the peoples would awaken to find the Cooperative Commonwealth functioning without disorder, confusion or hitch on the ruins of the capitalist state. "And what happened? When a few legislative seats had been secured, the thunderous denunciations of the Socialist legislators suddenly ceased. No more were the parliaments used as platforms from which the challenge of revolutionary Socialism was flung to all the corners of Europe. Another era had set in, the era of 'constructive' social reform legislation. Dominant Moderate Socialism accepted the bourgeois state as the basis of its action and strengthened that state. All power to shape the policies and tactics of the Socialist parties was entrusted to the parliamentary leaders. And these lost sight of Socialism's original purpose; their goal became 'constructive reforms' and cabinet portfolios--the 'cooperation of classes,' the policy of openly or tacitly declaring that the coming of Socialism was a concern 'of all the classes,' instead of emphasizing the Marxian policy that the construction of the Socialist system is the task of the revolutionary proletariat alone.... "The 'Moderates' emphasized petty-bourgeois reformism in order to attract tradesmen, shop-keepers and members of the professions, and, of course, the latter flocked to the Socialist movement in great numbers, seeking relief from the constant grinding between corporate capital and awakening labor.... "Dominant 'Moderate Socialism' forgot the teachings of the founders of scientific Socialism, forgot its function as a proletarian movement--'the most resolute and advanced section of the working class parties'--and permitted the bourgeois and self-seeking trade union elements to shape its policies and tactics. This was the condition in which the Social-Democracies of Europe found themselves at the outbreak of the war in 1914. Demoralized and confused by the cross-currents within their own parties, vacillating and compromising with the bourgeois state, they fell a prey to social-patriotism and nationalism. "But revolutionary Socialism was not destined to lie inert for long. In Germany, Karl Liebknecht, Franz Mehring, Rosa Luxemburg and Otto Rhule organized the Spartacus group. But their voices were drowned in the roar of cannon and the shriek of the dying and maimed. "Russia, however, was to be the first battle-ground where the 'moderate' and revolutionary Socialism should come to grips for the mastery of the state. The break-down of the corrupt, bureaucratic Czarist regime opened the floodgates of Revolution.... "'Moderate Socialism' was not prepared to seize the power for the workers during a revolution. 'Moderate Socialism' had a rigid formula--'constructive social reform legislation within the capitalist state,' and to that formula it clung.... "Revolutionary Socialists hold, with the founders of Scientific Socialism, that there are two dominant classes in society--the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; that between these two classes a struggle must go on, until the working class, through the seizure of the instruments of production and distribution, the abolition of the capitalist state, and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, creates a Socialist system. Revolutionary Socialists do not believe that they can be voted into power. They struggle for the conquest of power by the revolutionary proletariat.... "The 'moderate Socialist' proposes to use the bourgeois state with its fraudulent democracy, its illusory theory of 'unity of all the classes,' its standing army, police and bureaucracy oppressing and baffling the masses; the revolutionary Socialist maintains that the bourgeois state must be completely destroyed, and proposes the organization of a new state--the state of the organized producers--of the Federated Soviets--on the basis of which alone can Socialism be introduced. "Industrial Unionism, the organization of the proletariat in accordance with the integration of industry and for the overthrow of Capitalism, is a necessary phase of revolutionary Socialist agitation. Potentially, industrial unionism constructs the basis and develops the ideology of the industrial state of Socialism; but industrial unionism alone cannot perform the revolutionary act of seizure of the power of the state, since under the conditions of Capitalism it is impossible to organize the whole working class, or an overwhelming majority into industrial unionism. "It is the task of a revolutionary Socialist party to direct the struggles of the proletariat and provide a program for the culminating crisis." Julius Hammer, in a letter published in "The Call," April 4, 1919, speaking of the Left Wing, says: "Aside from the discussions as to the principles and tactics identifying the 'Left Wing' there is a great deal of acrimonious discussion and opposition to those in the 'Left Wing' organization. They are called 'separatists,' 'secessionists,' 'splitters of the party,' and this in spite of vehement denials that there is intention or desire to split the party. 'It is unnecessary,' say they, 'and superfluous; the party machinery is ample for the purpose now; organization within organization is injurious and wrong.' Some seem to go even further and fling epithets of 'disrupters,' 'traitors,' 'direct actionists,' 'anti-politicalists,' 'anarchists,' etc. And there seems to be quite a number who consider that the menace should be met with stern measures--nothing less than expulsion." In the Left Wing statements of principles and tactics the reader will observe a constant emphasis upon "direct action," or violence, and in favor of "industrial unionism" and the "identification of the Socialist Party with class conscious industrial unionism." Chapters VIII and IX of this work, which describe the principles and tactics of the I. W. W., will make the significance of the Left Wing movement perfectly apparent as an effort to combine Socialist Partyism and I. W. W.'ism or to place the latter under the political leadership of the former. In the Left Wing we see an enthusiastic consecration of the major part of the American Socialist Party to revolutionary violence--the direct application of anarchistic tactics to the overthrow of the Government and institutions of the United States. As we follow the Left Wing movement we shall see the principles and tactics of the I. W. W., as carried out in Russia, adopted as a program by the major part of the American Socialist party, which also finally succeeded in committing the minor part, the Right Wing, to the same principles. Needless to say, this movement was helped on by the various communications received from the Lenine dictatorship, and notably by the call for an international communist congress to meet at Moscow in March, 1919. The text of this call began to appear in the American radical publications in late March and April, and is here reproduced from "The One Big Union Monthly" for the latter month: "First Section "AIMS AND TACTICS "In our estimation, the acceptance of the following principles shall serve as a working program for the International: "1. The actual period is the period of the dissolution and collapse of the whole capitalist system; "2. The first task of the proletariat consists to-day of the immediate seizure of government power by the proletariat; "3. This new governmental apparatus must incorporate the dictatorship of the working class, and in some places, also, that of the poorer peasantry, together with hired farm labor, this dictatorship constituting the instrument of the systematic overthrow of the exploiting classes; "4. The dictatorship of the proletariat shall complete the immediate expropriation of Capitalism and the suppression of private property in the means of production, which includes, under Socialism, the suppression of private property and its transfer to a proletarian state under the Socialist administration of the working class, the abolition of capitalist agricultural production, the nationalization of the great business firms and financial trusts; "5. In order to insure the Social Revolution, the disarming of the bourgeoisie and its agents, and the general arming of the proletariat, is a prime necessity. "Second Section "ATTITUDE REGARDING SOCIALIST PARTIES "7. The fundamental condition of the struggle is the mass action of the proletariat, developing into open armed attack on the governmental powers of Capitalism; "8. The old International has broken into three principal groups: the avowed social-patriots, who, during the entire duration of the imperialistic war between the years 1914 and 1918, have supported their own bourgeoisie; the minority Socialists of the 'Center,' represented by leaders of the type of Karl Kautsky, and who constitute a group composed of ever-hesitating elements, unable to settle on any determined direction and who up to date have always acted as traitors; and the Revolutionary Left Wing. "9. As far as the social-patriots are concerned, who stood up everywhere in arms, in the most critical moments, against the revolution, a merciless fight is the alternative; in regard to the 'Center,' the tactics consist in separating from it the revolutionary elements, in criticizing pitilessly its leaders and in dividing systematically among them the number of their followers; these tactics are absolutely necessary when we reach a certain degree of development; "10. On the other hand it is necessary to proceed in a common movement with the revolutionary elements of the working class who, though hitherto not belonging to the party, yet adopt to-day in its entirety, the point of view of dictatorship of the proletariat, under the form of Soviet government, including the syndicalist elements of the labor movements; "11. It is also necessary to rally the groups and proletarian organizations, who, though not in the wake as yet of the revolutionary trend of the Left Wing, nevertheless have manifested and developed a tendency leading in that direction; "12. We propose that the representatives of parties and groups following these tendencies shall take part in the Congress as plenipotentiary members of the Workers' International and should belong to the following parties: "1. The Spartacus group (Germany); 2. The Bolsheviki or Communist Party (Russia); 3. Other Communist groups of; 3. German-Austria; 4. Hungary; 5. Finland; 6. Poland; 7. Esthonia; 8. Lettonia; 9. Lithuania; 10. White Russia; 11. Ukraine; 12. The Revolutionary elements of Czecho-Slovakia; 13. The Bulgarian Social-Democratic Party; 14. The Roumanian Social-Democrats; 15. The Left Wing of the Servian Social-Democracy; 16. The Left Wing of the Swedish Social-Democratic Party; 17. The Norwegian Social-Democratic Party; 18. The Danish groups of the class struggle; 19. The Dutch Communist Party; 20. The revolutionary elements of the Belgian Labor Party; 21-22. The groups and organizations in the midst of the French Socialist and syndicalist movements who are in solidarity with our aims; 23. The Left Wing of the Swiss Social-Democratic Party; 24. The Italian Socialist Party; 25. The left elements of the Spanish Socialist Party; 26. The left elements of the Portuguese Socialist Party; 27. The British Socialist Party (those nearer to us are the elements represented by MacLean); 28. I. S. P. R. (Great Britain); 29. S. L. P. (England); 30. I. W. W. (Great Britain); 31. The revolutionary elements of Shop-Stewards (Great Britain); 33. The S. L. P. (U. S. A.); 34. The elements of the Left Wings of American Socialist Propaganda (tendency represented by E. V. Debs and the Socialist Propaganda League); 35. I. W. W. (Industrial Workers of the World), America; 36. The Workers' International Industrial Union (U. S. A.); 37. I. W. W. of Australia; 38. The Socialist groups of Tokio and Samon, represented by Sen Katayama; 39. The Young Peoples' Socialist International Leagues. "Third Section "THE ORGANIZATION AND NAME OF THE PARTY "13. The Congress must be transformed into a common organ of combat in view of the permanent struggle and systematic direction of the movement, into a center of International Communism which will subordinate the Interests of the Revolution from an international point of view. "The concrete forms of organization, representation, etc., will be elaborated by the Congress." The testimony of Morris Hillquit in the Socialist case before the Assembly Judiciary Committee gave the preceding document an added interest which the reader will better appreciate further on. As will appear later in our narrative, on September 4, 1919, the Socialist Party adopted a manifesto strongly favoring the "industrial" unionizing of American labor for the purpose of reinforcing the political "demands" of the Socialist Party with "industrial action." On the stand at Albany, on February 19, 1920, Hillquit acknowledged the authorship of at least 90 per cent of the "industrial action" manifesto of his party, but declared that he had never read the Moscow manifesto when he wrote his, and so was not influenced by the Moscow recommendation of industrial action to bring about a revolution by violence. But the above "call" to the Moscow Conference urged "a common movement" with "syndicalist elements," or "industrial union" revolutionaries, as much as the Moscow manifesto did, and the reader will find at the end of our next chapter evidence that Morris Hillquit was familiar with and criticized the above Moscow "call" at least as early as July, 1919. CHAPTER IV THE FREE-FOR-ALL FIGHT BETWEEN THE RIGHT AND LEFT WINGS Emanuel Blumstein, a member of the Right Wing, in a letter published in "The Call," April 9, 1919, bitterly complained against the tactics of the Left Wingers--in trying to wrest control of the Socialist Party from the "Old Guard" of Berger and Hillquit, which had acquired the habit of domination: "The reason that the so-called Left Wingers are concentrating at meetings, making motions to recall delegates, and carry their motions through, is very simple. Anyone who attends the meetings can easily understand it. They shout down every honest thinking Socialist with slurs and abuse. They make it so intolerable that the meeting hall appears to be, instead of a Socialist meeting, a room frequented by rowdies of all types and descriptions. In this way they drive the most active Comrades out of the meeting hall, as these Comrades get disgusted with the tactics pursued and leave the meeting. Then they drag the meeting on to all hours of the night until those left, having no opposition, carry all their destructive actions through, and this they call democratic decision for the Comrades of the branch--deciding the policies for them." Morris Zucker, a member of the Left Wing, defends his faction in a letter that appeared in "The Call," New York, April 11, 1919: "In regard to Lee's objection that the Left Wing may bring about a premature revolt, the reply is that no real revolution, no social revolution, is ever manufactured. It must be spontaneous. It must be real. It must be an overwhelming, impulsive demonstration of the popular will. Revolutions may be manipulated but not manufactured. Trotzky shows in his 'From October to Brest-Litovsk' that the Bolshevist Revolution was not manufactured. "The problem is to manipulate the revolution, to guide it, to counsel it. And herein lies the importance of proper Socialist education, of knowledge and understanding, and from these of proper Socialist tactics. "The Left Wing believes it has the proper program. And it wants the Socialist Party to adopt its program. The Left Wing not only preaches revolutionary Socialism, it believes that the economic and social forces that have made half Europe Socialist, and threaten momentarily to engulf the other half are at work in America also. It believes that a revolutionary outbreak in America is not a matter of the far and distant future. And it desires to make that revolution as easy and as successful as it can possibly be. For that reason the Left Wing has evolved its manifesto and program, and now calls upon the Socialist Party to discuss it, perfect it, and adopt it." In April, 1919, the New York State Committee of the Socialist Party, by a vote of 24 against 17, resolved that it was "definitely opposed to the organization calling itself the Left Wing section of the Socialist Party, and to any group within the party organized for the same or similar purpose;" and it instructed "its executive committee to revoke the charter of any local affiliated with any such organization or that permits its subdivision or members to be affiliated." "The Call," April 23, 1919, publishes a long letter from F. Basky in which he defends the principles of the Left Wing and attacks the New York State Committee for the above resolutions. We quote a part: "Aside of these arguments the Left Wing is not a counter-organization to the Socialist Party. On the contrary, it is the only active force to save the party from going into decay and finally to the scrap heap as a tool not adapted to the task. If the Left Wing is the party, then and only then can we answer the criticism of the syndicalist that a political party is nothing else but a vote-catching machinery for middle-class politicians. If the principles enunciated in the manifesto will be the principles of the party, then it will enjoy the confidence of those who, through their bitter experience realized the fallacies of the Second International, led and dominated by the social-patriots, reformists of the German Social Democratic Party. If we follow the line of uncompromising revolutionary activity indicated by the Left Wingers, then we can rest assured that the party will be cleared of the would-be Scheidemanns, Eberts, Kerenskys, Brantenburgs, and the rest of the traitors of our principles and our class. "They will be eliminated anyway. The fight is on. And I welcome the attack of the state committee. We at least know some of those we would have to face in the critical hour. Might as well fight it out now; whether they or the Left Wing represents the party. Let us find out right now who is with us and who is against us." "The Call," April 30, 1919, published a resolution then recently passed by the Socialist Party of Essex County, New Jersey, which had adopted the Left Wing program. Part of the resolution is hereby quoted: "While the need for new orientation is clearly apparent, there is an element within the party which is either unwilling or unable to adjust itself to the new world conditions and the new tactics required by these conditions. Unfortunately, this element has controlled the party national executive committee and the party machinery, with the consequence that the national organization, in place of furnishing the leadership and urging the locals forward to take advantage of the present world crisis in building up the proletariat movement, has conspicuously lagged behind." By the early part of May, 1919, conditions in the Socialist Party became so serious that the Executive Committee of Local New York, according to "The Call," May 8, 1919, issued the following statement on the Left Wing: "To the Members of Local New York: "Comrades.--A critical situation has arisen within Local New York. Your executive committee is compelled to take unusual and vigorous measures to combat the disruptive efforts of an internal faction which seeks to dominate the party by undemocratic and unsocialistic methods. The executive committee addresses itself to you, the membership, to explain the gravity of the crisis and to urge your support in saving the organization which has been built up with so much sacrifice by thousands of Comrades. "The very existence of the party is at stake--its existence as the democratically self-governed party of the working class, laboring to awaken and educate the proletarian masses and to express their class interests on the political field.... "This organization, i.e., the Left Wing, is not open to all party members, nor even to all who accept the ideas set forth in its manifesto and program. Only such persons are admitted as can be counted on to set the authority of the 'Left Wing Section' above that of the party itself. Its meetings are held in secret, and their business is that of a permanent closed caucus to lay plans for controlling the action of the party branches and committees, and of obstructing their activities when it cannot control them. "Even within the 'Left Wing Section' itself democratic methods are not used. The admission of members, the choice of delegates to Left Wing conferences, and the framing of instructions to those delegates are intrusted to committees composing an inner circle. All members and adherents of the 'Left Wing Section' are called upon in their action as party members and as members of party committees, to give explicit obedience to orders issued by the inner circle. A sufficient sample of this is the appointment of a 'steering committee' for the Left Wingers in the central committee of the local, and the issuance of instructions to delegates affiliated with that section as follows: "'In all matters involving Left Wing tactics vote as a unit with the steering committee. Do not make motions, ask for divisions, further divisions, roll call, and appeals from the chair. The steering committee will attend to that.' "The Left Wing Section has not been able to command a majority in the central committee, notwithstanding the drastic methods used in their attempt to capture it. Unable to control they have practised systematic obstruction, and have openly declared that they will not permit the central committee to function so long as their group is in the minority there. Under the direction of their steering committee, the time is consumed with every species of parliamentary delay, with the aim and effect of preventing the central committee from transacting business and carrying on the normal work of the party. These dilatory tactics are supplemented by personal abuse directed against those who will not truckle to the 'Left Wing,' by insults and provocatory threats, and when necessary, by the creation of an uproar designed to attract the attention of the police and to break up the sessions.... "The Executive Committee has heretofore decided not to have a meeting of the central committee on May 13, and has appointed a committee to reorganize Local New York. This committee will begin with such branches as are affiliated with the 'Left Wing Section.' No one will be excluded because of his opinions, but no one can retain a double membership in the party and the so-called 'Left Wing Section.'" By about the middle of May, 1919, the Left Wing program had been adopted by the Socialist Party in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Kings and Queens Counties, N. Y., and Essex County, N. J. In Hudson County, N. J., the county committee referred it favorably to all the branches, and at the end of the month the New Jersey Convention of the party adopted it. In Chicago, J. Louis Engdahl, sentenced[C] to twenty years in Leavenworth prison, was reported to have been ousted from the organization, having been considered too conservative by the millionaire Socialist, William Bross Lloyd, and the latter's friends who controlled the Communist Propaganda League, the Left Wing faction of the local organization. "The Call," May 8, 1919, publishes an interesting letter from one of its correspondents: "It is not so much a question as to Left or Right Wing domination as it is a question of whether we are to have a united or divided party. "I am not a Centrist, if that means to be in the center of the party as it is today. We must move to the Left--that is understood by all thinking, class-conscious Comrades, but we must move together, not, perhaps, as far as some of the hot-heads would like to have us--they fail to understand what an American Socialist Party should be, for they seem to think of New York City as the whole thing. If they could take a trip to Chicago and back they might find themselves moving toward the Right. "No one wants to be where the stick-in-the-mud Rights are, either--that is, no one except them. The majority of us see the need for revolutionizing the party. What we don't see is any necessity of disrupting the party in the process. The master class would like to see that; in fact, they have been egging us on to fight among ourselves for the last two or three years, and we have blindly done the very thing that they want most we should do. They are laughing in their sleeves at us--poor boobs that we are." On May 15, 1919, following the open fight against the Left Wing inaugurated by the New York State Committee and its Executive Committee, the Left Wing Locals of Boston, Cleveland and New York joined in a call for a National Conference of the Left Wing to convene in New York on June 21. This call opened with the following paragraph: "The international situation and the crisis in the American Socialist Party; the sabotage the party bureaucracy has practised on the emergency national convention; the N. E. C. [National Executive Committee] aligning our party with the social-patriots at Berne, with the Congress of the Great Betrayal; the necessity of reconstructing our policy in accord with revolutionary events--all this and more, makes it necessary that the revolutionary forces in the Socialist Party get together for counsel and action." Apparently so many bitter letters were sent to "The Call" that it found it expedient to publish the following notice in its edition of May 16, 1919: "No letters dealing in personalities of any kind will be published in this column. All views and all arguments set forth must be confined strictly to the principles and tactics either defended or attacked. This ruling is by the unanimous vote of the Board of Managers of 'The Call.'" Morris Hillquit, member of the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party till September, 1919, and one of the principle leaders of the Right, published in his paper, "The Call," May 21, 1919, a long article in large type, covering half of the editorial page, under the caption, "The Socialist Task and Outlook." After speaking of the gloomy conditions in the Socialist Party abroad, he thus comments on conditions in the American branch of the international organization: "All the more unfortunate is it that the energies of the Socialist Party should at this time be dissipated in acrimonious and fruitless controversies brought on by the self-styled Left Wing movement. I am one of the last men in the party to ignore or misunderstand the sound revolutionary impulse which animates the rank and file of this new movement, but the specific form and direction which it has assumed, its program and tactics, spell disaster to our movement. I am opposed to it, not because it is too radical, but because it is essentially reactionary and non-Socialistic; not because it would lead us too far, but because it would lead us nowhere. To prate about the dictatorship of the proletariat and of workers' Soviets in the United States at this time is to deflect the Socialist propaganda from its realistic basis, and to advocate the abolition of all social reform planks in the party platform means to abandon the concrete class struggle as it presents itself from day to day. "The Left Wing movement, as I see it, is a purely emotional reflex of the situation in Russia. The cardinal vice of the movement is that it started as a wing, i.e., as a schismatic and disintegrating movement. Proceeding on the arbitrary assumption that they were the Left, the ingenuous leaders of the movement had to discover a Right, and since the European classification would not be fully reproduced without a Center, they also were bound to locate a center in the Socialist movement of America.[D] What matters it to our imaginative Left Wing leaders that the Socialist Party of America as a whole has stood in the forefront of Socialist radicalism ever since the outbreak of the war, that many of its officers and leaders have exposed their lives and liberties to imminent peril in defense of the principles of international Socialism, they are Right Wingers and Centrists because the exigencies of the Left Wing require it. The Left Wing movement is a sort of burlesque on the Russian revolution. Its leaders do not want to convert their Comrades in the party. They must capture and establish a sort of dictatorship of the proletariat(?) within the party. Hence the creation of their dual organization as a kind of Soviet, and their refusal to cooperate with the aforesaid stage Centrists and Right Wingers. "But the performance is too sad to be amusing. It seems perfectly clear that, so long as this movement persists in the party, the latter's activity will be wholly taken up by mutual quarrels and recriminations. Neither wing will have any time for the propaganda of Socialism. There is, as far as I can see, but one remedy. It would be futile to preach reconciliation and union where antagonism runs so high. Let the Comrades on both sides do the next best thing. Let them separate, honestly, freely and without rancor. Let each side organize and work in its own way, and make such contribution to the Socialist movement in America as it can. Better a hundred times to have two numerically small Socialist organizations, each homogeneous and harmonious within itself, than to have one big party torn by dissensions and squabbles, an impotent colossus on feet of clay. The time for action is near. Let us clear the decks." By the end of May, 1919, the Left Wing fight had become so serious that the National Executive Committee revoked the charter of the Socialist Party in Michigan and suspended the Russian, Lithuanian, Ukranian, Lettish, Polish, South Slavic and Hungarian branches, expelling or suspending considerably over 25,000 members out of a total dues-paying membership of about 100,000. "The Ohio Socialist," the party organ of Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia and New Mexico, in its issue of June 4, 1919, comments as follows on the expulsions: "Violating every principle of fair play and square dealing and disregarding every constitutional provision, the National Executive Committee at its session in Chicago, May 24 to 30, expelled without a trial the state organization of the Socialist Party of Michigan, constituting about 6,000 members, suspended the Russian, Lithuanian, Lettish, Polish, Hungarian, Ukrainian and South Slavic Federations of the party, constituting more than 30,000 members, and worst of all--and let it be said to their everlasting shame--are autocratically holding up the national membership referendum for the election of a new National Executive Committee, International Delegates, International Secretary, and the holding of a national convention. "Never before in the party's history have Socialist Party officials been so lost to all sense of decency and square dealing. A wilful group of seven members of the National Executive Committee usurped power which the constitution does not grant them and which the Socialist Party membership never intended any servants of the party to have. This despotic group of seven did not act as the party's servants, but as dictators and tyrants to defeat the expressed will of the party membership and to perpetuate itself in office. "Unbelievable as it may seem, seven officials of the party had the monumental effrontery to assume the right to expel and suspend 40,000 members. Think of it. That such a dastardly deed should ever be perpetrated upon the rank and file of our organization is almost beyond comprehension. And yet it was done--it was done by those whom you elected to serve you. Instead they are betraying you, disrupting the organization.... "The intention of these autocrats is plain as daylight. Like a tidal wave, the demand for a Socialism which stands true to the working class at all times has swept the party. The thousands of Comrades who are sincerely working to win the party to a more revolutionary position are known to the Left Wing. This Left Wing understands clearly that the Scheidemann brand of Socialism stands for the betrayal and defeat of the working class and that only the Socialism of Liebknecht and Lenine has within it the potentialities of victory and success.... "There was no trial, no opportunity for defense offered to the Michigan Comrades. A motion to allow Michigan a chance to interpret their action was voted down. The right to appear at a trial was denied.... "Expulsion meant throwing out over three thousand votes. On with the expulsion of Michigan.... "But the expulsion of Michigan was apparently not sufficient to decide the elections in favor of the reactionary moderates. At a subsequent session, accordingly, it was decided to destroy the whole election. "The National Executive Committee instructed the secretary not to tabulate the vote or make it public. They nullified the referendum vote, destroyed the will of the membership in order to retain control. Most of these National Executive Committee members are out for re-election, are interested parties, knowing that the referendum defeated them for re-election, are now, by this action, perpetuating themselves in office.... "The National Executive Committee's action is equivalent to stealing the elections. The party must act sternly to rebuke this official chicanery. "After this betrayal of the party the despotic seven seemed to fear the results of the National Convention, which has been called for August 30. A way had to be devised to control the convention. Happy thought: Suspend the federations that have endorsed the Left Wing, and we are safe. Another caucus held. Result: Suspension of the Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Lettish and South Slavic Federations from the Socialist Party--over thirty thousand members. A plain attempt to assure the election of reactionary delegates to the National Convention to approve the abominable actions of the National Executive Committee majority.... "In spite of all these dirty tactics the little group of reactionary autocrats did not feel themselves secure. They still fear that they will not be able to control the coming National Convention. So they formed a corporation, nearly all the directors of which are of the same stamp as the wilful seven, and into the hands of these directors is to be placed the entire property of the Socialist Party, including the new headquarters building upon which $10,000 has been paid. These directors cannot be recalled by the party membership as long as they retain membership in the party, and only four, a minority, can be removed in three years' time.... "They want the Left Wing to desert the party. They want us to leave the party machinery in their hands. They will be disappointed in this. We know their game. We shall not play into their hands. We will not quit. Every Left Winger will work night and day for the reinstatement of the nearly 40,000 members whom the reactionaries are trying to sever from the party in violation of the party's constitution. Every radical will work with might and main to get new members and build, build the Left Wing and the party. Every revolutionist will stick until victory is ours and the Socialist Party is completely won for revolutionary Socialism." Commenting on the referendum for a new National Executive Committee "The Revolutionary Age" in its May 24, 1919, issue says: "The moderates claim that the Left Wing represents only a small clique in the party: why, then, not allow the membership to make its decision through the referendum? Why disfranchise the revolutionary Socialists? Why steal votes away from the Left Wing candidates? These desperate tactics are understandable only on the theory that the moderates feel that the revolutionary Socialists are a majority, that they will meet defeat in the referendum votes and revolutionary Socialism will conquer the party." "The Revolutionary Age," July 12, 1919, informs us that the Massachusetts Comrades were also expelled and that others in other States were threatened: "Another State gone. Massachusetts is expelled for adopting the Left Wing program at its State Convention and for refusing to recognize the National Executive Committee's act of suspending the Federations. For this latter offense, Pennsylvania is now threatened with excommunication, and very likely Ohio will meet the same sad fate. "It is a race against time. Will there be anything left for the rump N. E. C. to expel by August 30th?" Relative to the success of the Left Wing in electing its members to the new National Executive Committee of fifteen, and to the meeting of this new committee, "The Revolutionary Age," July 19, 1919, comments as follows: "The election of Comrades Fraina, Hourwich, Harwood, Prevey, Ruthenberg, Lloyd, Keracher, Batt, Hogan, Millis, Nagle, Katterfeld, Wicks and Herman appears now to be certain, while there is still a question about the third choice in the First District, Comrade Lindgren leading without the New York vote. "There is no question, but that the final tally of the party elections is available at the National Office, but according to the action of the National Executive Committee this tally will not be made known till August 30. Meanwhile the State secretaries have published enough of the votes to leave no question of the outcome, except as above indicated.... "According to the party law the new N. E. C. is entitled to control beginning July 1st.... "There can be no legality by which a defunct Executive Committee can keep the newly elected committee from taking office. By such 'constitutionality' the old body could perpetuate itself indefinitely, let the members vote as they like. Stopping referendums is the method chosen to make sure that the members consent." Accusations and recriminations, charges and counter-charges, continued to fly back and forth between the two Wings, as the secretaries proceeded with the work of expulsion or suspension, carrying out the savage instructions of the Right Wing majority of the National Executive Committee, where Victor L. Berger, Morris Hillquit and Seymour Stedman were the dominating leaders. On the side of the Lefts little more could be done than to set up a howl against the "dictatorship of the proletariat" within the party which forced them to taste the medicine they would have preferred to prescribe for the rest of the country. During the summer the Left Wing movement was hastened on, dragging the Right Wing after it, by the publication in the radical papers of America of the manifesto issued in Moscow in March, 1919, by the Third or Communistic International in session there. Max Eastman, a Left Wing leader, in an article on "The New International" in "The Liberator," July, 1919, a Left Wing magazine, thus describes the Bolshevik International: "The Communist International, which met at Moscow on March 2d, 1919, comprised thirty-two _delegates with full power to act_, representing parties or groups in Germany, Russia, Hungary, Sweden, Norway, Bulgaria, Rumania, Finland, Ukrainia, Esthonia, Armenia, delegates from the 'Union of Socialists of Eastern Countries,' from the labor organizations of Germans in Russia, and from the Balkan 'Union of Revolutionary Socialists.' "There were also present _representatives with consultative powers_ from parties and groups in Switzerland, Holland, Bohemia, Jugo-Slavia, France, Great Britain, Turkey, Turkestan, Persia, Corea, China, and the United States (S. J. Rutgers, of the Socialist Propaganda League, now merged with the Left Wing section of the Socialist Party). A letter was read from Comrade Loriot, the leader of the Left Wing section of the French Party, repudiating the Berne Congress of the Second International. "The Russian Communist Party was represented by Comrades Lenine, Trotzky, Zinoviev, Kukharin and Stalin. This party contains many millions of organized class-conscious Socialists, more, perhaps, than are to be found in all the rest of the world." The Communist Manifesto of 1919, issued by this Moscow International, became the test of fellowship among the simon-pure "Reds" the world over, and since the campaign of the Left Wing grew into an attempt to force the Socialist Party of America to adopt this Bolshevik program, we here quote the salient parts of the Moscow Manifesto from the article by Eastman mentioned above: "_To the proletariat of all countries!_ "Seventy-two years have gone by since the Communist Party of the World proclaimed its program in the form of the Manifesto written by the great teachers of the proletarian revolution, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.... "We Communists, representatives of the revolutionary proletariat of the different countries of Europe, America and Asia, assembled in Soviet Moscow, feel and consider ourselves followers and fulfillers of the program proclaimed seventy-two years ago. It is our task now to sum up the practical revolutionary experience of the working class, to cleanse the movement of its admixtures of opportunism and social patriotism, and to gather together the forces of all the true revolutionary proletarian parties in order to further and hasten the complete victory of the Communist revolution. "The opportunists who, before the war, exhorted the workers, in the name of the gradual transition into Socialism, to be temperate; who, during the war, asked for submission in the name of 'civil peace' and defense of the Fatherland, now again demand of the workers self-abnegation to overcome the terrible consequences of the war. If this preaching were listened to by the workers, Capitalism would build out of the bones of several generations a new and still more formidable structure, leading to a new and inevitable world war. Fortunately for humanity, this is no longer possible.... "Only the Proletarian Dictatorship, which recognizes neither inherited privileges nor rights of property, but which arises from the needs of the hungering masses, can shorten the period of the present crisis; and for this purpose it mobilizes all materials and forces, introduces the universal duty to labor, establish the regime of industrial discipline, thus to heal in the course of a few years the open wounds caused by the war and also to raise humanity to new undreamed-of heights. "The whole bourgeois world accuses the Communists of destroying liberties and political democracy. This is not true. Having come into power the proletariat only asserts the absolute impossibility of applying the methods of bourgeois democracy, and it creates the conditions and forms of a higher _working class democracy_.... "The peasant of Bavaria and Baden who does not look beyond his church spire, the small French wine-grower who has been ruined by the adulterations practiced by the big capitalists, the small farmer of America plundered and betrayed by bankers and legislators--all these social ranks which have been shoved aside from the main road of development by Capitalism, are called on paper by the regime of political democracy to the administration of the State. In reality, however, the finance-oligarchy decides all important questions which determine the destinies of nations behind the back of parliamentary democracy.... "The proletarian State, like every State, is an organ of suppression, but it arrays itself against the enemies of the working class. It aims to break the opposition of the despoilers of labor, who are using every means in a desperate effort to stifle the revolution in blood, and to make impossible further opposition. The dictatorship of the proletariat, which gives it the favored position in the community, is only a provisional institution. As the opposition of the Bourgeoisie is broken, as it is expropriated and gradually absorbed into the working groups, the proletarian dictatorship disappears, until finally the State dies and there are no more class distinctions.... "In an empire of destruction where not only the means of production and transportation, but also the institutions of political democracy have become bloody ruins, the proletariat must create its own forms, to serve above all as a bond of unity for the working class and to enable it to accomplish a revolutionary intervention in the further development of mankind. Such apparatus is represented in the Workmen's Councils. The old parties, the old unions, have proved incapable, in person of their leaders, to understand, much less to carry out the task which the new epoch presents to them. The proletariat has created a new institution which embraces the entire working class without distinction of vocation or political maturity, an elastic form of organization capable of continually renewing itself, expanding, and of drawing into itself ever new elements, ready to open its doors to the working groups of city and village which are near to the proletariat. This indispensable autonomous organization of the working class in the present struggle and in the future conquests of different lands, tests the proletariat and constitutes the greatest inspiration and the mightiest weapon of the proletariat of our time. Wherever the masses are awakened to consciousness, Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Councils will be formed.... "The outcry of the bourgeois world against the civil war and the red terror is the most colossal hypocrisy of which the history of political struggles can boast. There would be no civil war if the exploiters who have carried mankind to the very brink of ruin had not prevented every forward step of the laboring masses, if they had not instigated plots and murders and called to their aid armed help from outside to maintain or restore their predatory privileges. Civil war is _forced upon_ the laboring classes by their arch-enemies. The working class must answer blow for blow, if it will not renounce its own object and its own future which is, at the same time, the future of all humanity. "The Communist parties, far from conjuring up civil war artificially, rather strive to shorten its duration as much as possible--in case it has become an iron necessity--to minimize the number of its victims, and, above all, to secure victory for the proletariat. This makes necessary the disarming of the bourgeoisie at the proper time, the arming of the laborer, and the formation of a communist army as the protector of the rule of the proletariat and the inviolability of the social structure. Such is the Red Army of Soviet Russia which arose to protect the achievements of the working class against every assault from within or without. The Soviet Army is inseparable from the Soviet State. "Seizure of political power by the proletariat means destruction of the political power of the bourgeoisie. The organized power of the bourgeoisie is in the civil State, with its capitalistic army under control of bourgeoisie-junker officers, its police and gendarmes, jailers and judges, its priests, government officials, etc. Conquest of the political power means not merely a change in the personnel of ministries, but annihilation of the enemy's apparatus of government; disarmament of the bourgeoisie of the counter-revolutionary officers, of the White Guard; arming of the proletariat, the revolutionary soldiers, the Red Guard of workingmen; displacement of all bourgeois judges and organization of proletarian courts; elimination of control by reactionary government officials and substitution of new organs of management of the proletariat.... Not until the proletariat has achieved this victory and broken the resistance of the bourgeoisie can the former enemies of the new order be made useful, by bringing them under control of the Communist system and gradually bringing them into accord with its work.... "The Dictatorship of the Proletariat does not in any way call for partition of the means of production and exchange; rather, on the contrary, its aim is further to centralize the forces of production and to subject all of production to a systematic plan. As the first steps--socialization of the great banks which now control production; the taking over by the power of the proletariat of all government-controlled economic utilities; the transferring of all communal enterprises; the socializing of the syndicated and trustified units of production, as well as all other branches of production in which the degree of concentration and centralization of capital makes this technically practicable; the socializing of agricultural estates and their conversion into co-operative establishments.... "As far as smaller enterprises are concerned, the proletariat must gradually unite them, according to the degree of their importance. It must be particularly emphasized that small properties will in no way be expropriated and that small property owners who are not exploiters of labor will not be forcibly dispossessed.... "The task of the Proletarian Dictatorship in the economic field can only be fulfilled to the extent that the proletariat is enabled to create centralized organs of management and to institute workers' control. To this end it must make use of its mass organizations which are in closest relation to the process of production.... "As in the field of production, so also in the field of distribution, all qualified technicians and specialists are to be made use of, provided their political resistance is broken and they are still capable of adapting themselves, not to the service of capital, but to the new system of production.... Besides expropriating the factories, mines, estates, etc., the proletariat must also abolish the exploitation of the people by capitalistic landlords, transfer the large mansions to the local workers' councils, and move the working people into the bourgeois dwellings.... "The capitalistic criminals asserted at the beginning of the World War that it was only in defense of the common Fatherland. But soon German Imperialism revealed its real brigand character by bloody deeds in Russia, in the Ukraine and Finland. Now the Entente States unmask themselves as world despoilers and murderers of the proletariat.... "Indescribable is the White Terror of the bourgeois cannibals. Incalculable are the sacrifices of the working class. Their best--Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg--they have lost. Against this the proletariat must defend itself, defend at any price. The Communist International calls the whole world proletariat to this final struggle. "Down with the imperialistic conspiracy of capital! "Long live the International Republic of the Proletarian Councils!" As will be seen when we study the I. W. W., the above is the program of the world-wide conspiracy of a single class, a minority of society, to carry out the cynical purpose of I. W. W.'ism--to "take possession of the earth and the machinery of production." Morris Hillquit, a Right Wing leader of the Socialist Party of America, declared that "The Communist Congress of Moscow made the mistake of attempting a sort of dictatorship of the Russian proletariat in the Socialist International and was conspicuously inept and unhappy in the choice of certain allies and in the exclusion of others."[E] Quoting this, Max Eastman, in the article from which we have taken so much, makes the following reply: "How can he expect them to be any more indefinite and generous in their invitation than they were? In every country where there was a doubt as to what groups had stood true to the revolutionary principle and the principle of Internationalism, they so indicated the alignment as to leave every Socialist free to consider himself their ally who seriously and courageously desired to. This was what they did in America. The S. L. P. (Socialist Labor Party), the Socialist Propaganda League, the I. W. W. and in the Socialist Party 'the followers of Debs!' Could they in a brief word open the door wider to American Socialists, unless they wished to admit prominent members of the Socialist Party who were known to have repudiated them, as Berger did, declaring his solidarity with the Mensheviks who were waging war on them?" CHAPTER V BIRTH OF THE COMMUNIST AND COMMUNIST-LABOR PARTIES On June 24, 1919, the Left Wing Conference assembled in New York City. The purpose of the Conference was for the first time to unite the forces of the Left Wing throughout the country and to decide upon a common plan of action against the Right. For some time there had been a growing desire among the members of the Left for the formation of a new party to be known as the Communist Party. The Michigan State organization and the different Russian-speaking federations, which had either been expelled or suspended, were particularly anxious for a new party. Then, too, many members of the Left Wing throughout the country believed that, even though they were more numerous than those of the Right, it would be useless to try to control the National Emergency Convention of the Socialist Party, called for August 30, 1919, in Chicago. They feared that the credentials of the still unsuspended and unexpelled Left Wing delegates would not be recognized by the party machine in the hands of the Right Wing, and, moreover, that even if they were, these Left Wing delegates would not be in the majority because so many other Left Wing delegates had been expelled from the Party. Almost at the beginning of the National Conference of the Left Wing the Michigan State delegates and the delegates of the foreign-language federations insisted on the immediate organization of a new party to be known as the Communist Party. The majority of the delegates, however, were opposed to immediate organization, claiming that it would be much more prudent to wait till the meeting of the National Emergency Convention, at the end of August, as many Left Wing Socialists would refuse to leave the mother party until it became evident that the Convention could not be captured by the Left Wing. The majority of the delegates decided to call a Communist Party Convention on September 1, 1919. The Michigan State delegates and the Russian-speaking federation delegates thereupon broke with the majority of the Left Wing, causing a serious split, which continued till about the end of July, 1919. In that month, however, most of the members of the National Council of the Left Wing who had been leading the faction of the Left Wing which had refused the call for the immediate formation of the Communist Party, went over to the minority faction, which included the Michigan State organization and the Russian-speaking federations. A compromise had been reached whereby the aforesaid members of the National Council agreed not to insist upon attendance at the National Emergency Convention of the Socialist Party, while the Michigan organization, together with the federations, were willing to wait till September 1, 1919, for the convention of the Communist Party. Even on these terms John Reed, Ben Gitlow and some other leading members of the Left Wing refused to go over to the Communist Party, having decided to fight for the rights of the Left Wingers in the National Emergency Convention of the Socialist Party. This group of Left Wingers later on, as will be seen, became the nucleus of a third party, the Communist Labor Party. Several statements from the joint call for the convention of the Communist Party, cited from "The Revolutionary Age," August 23, 1919, will interest the reader: "The party will be founded upon the following principles: "The present is the period of the dissolution and collapse of the whole capitalist world system, which will mean the collapse of world culture, if capitalism with its unsolvable contradictions is not replaced by Communism. "The problem of the proletariat consists in organizing and training itself for the conquest of the powers of the state.... "This new proletarian state must embody the dictatorship of the proletariat, both industrial and agricultural, this dictatorship constituting the instrument for the taking over of property used for exploiting the workers, and for the reorganization of society on a Communist basis.... "The dictatorship of the proletariat shall carry out the abolition of private property in the means of production and distribution, by transfer to the proletarian state under Socialist administration of the working class.... "The present world situation demands the closest relation between the revolutionary proletariat of all countries.... "We favor international alliance of the Communist Party of the United States only with the Communist groups of other countries, such as the Bolsheviki of Russia, Spartacans of Germany, etc.... "The party shall propagandize class-conscious industrial unionism, and shall carry on party activity in cooperation with industrial disputes that take on a revolutionary character." The national organ of the Communist Party was "The Communist" of Chicago. In its issue of August 23, 1919, it thus criticises the Socialist Party: "The majority of the readers of 'The Communist' are familiar with the form of organization of the old Socialist Party, with its state autonomy and its bureaucratic officialdom. Every state is practically organized as an Independent Socialist party. 'Official socialism' of Milwaukee is entirely different from[6] 'official socialism' in Ohio, both in regard to platforms and form of organization. Every state has a 'Socialism' of its own brand, and even dues are not uniform throughout the country. 'Official papers' of the party are in most cases organs of independent associations, not at all affiliated with the central party organizations. Such important weapons in the struggle of the proletariat are left in the hands of the petty bourgeois ideologists who, in reality, prostitute the labor press. As examples, we have, for instance, 'The Milwaukee Leader,' the 'New York Call,' the Jewish 'Daily Forward,' the 'Appeal to Reason,' and many others scattered throughout the United States, and each contradicting not only the others, but containing in each issue glaring contradictions that an intelligent person who reads them becomes disgusted with the whole muddled mess." The fight among the revolutionists was a fight to the finish. The leaders all wanted to become Trotzkys and Lenines, all wanted to be bosses. It seems reasonable to conclude that if Bolshevism were ever introduced into the United States, either by the mother Socialist Party or by its offspring, the Communist Party or the Communist Labor Party, the dictatorship of the proletariat, that wonderful piece of nonsense which we hear so much about, would be grasped at by an amazing number of competitors. In Russia Lenine and Trotzky seem to constitute the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. In the Socialist Party of the United States Berger and Hillquit, of the old National Executive Committee, constituted a first-class dictatorship. In the Communist Party, Dennis Batt, lately jailed, and Alexander Stoklitsky would surely give the Communist rank and file plenty to do--everything of course being done according to their wills. John Reed and Ben Gitlow would make an ideal "dictatorship of the proletariat," if the Communist Labor Party ever made Bolshevism the law of the land. "Truth," one of the organs of the Communist Labor Party, published in Duluth, Minn., in its issue of August 29, 1919, devotes nearly two of its eight pages to bitter attacks on the Communist Party. Two short quotations will suffice to show the spirit of envy that exists: "'Tis said that distance lends enchantment, and perhaps that is the reason why some of you in the East have responded to the cuckoo-call of Michigan-Federations. Frankly, we see nothing hopeful in the alignment presented by the Michigan-Federation combine. We are fearful of the consequence of such leadership. The so-called Communist Party, as it is now constituted and especially with the accretion of a part of the National Council, presents the prettiest bunch of 'eligibles' that man ever laid eyes upon. And as I gaze upon this august array of talent, I wonder where the working class is going to get off at. We of the left wing of Cook County are reluctant to join with an organization under the guidance of a few doctrinaires from Detroit and the would-be Lenine of the United States.[F] We do not consider that the welfare of the revolutionary movement would be zealously guarded in their hands." From "Truth," of the same date, we also quote an open letter to Louis C. Fraina, which reads in part as follows: "Do you know how the Russian Federation is being ruled? Do you know that a 'firing squad' is constantly on the job expelling members and branches from the Federation who dare to disagree on anything with the would-be bosses of the Russian Federation?... "Do you know that a regular secret service system is being employed by these 'bosses' to hunt down the undesirables? "Do you know that a worse than military censorship is being maintained in the domain of Stocklitzky (the Northwestern States), where it is prohibited to the branches to communicate with each other or to send out or receive any correspondence otherwise than through the hands of the censors, the Executive Committee, and that this censorship committee, like the imperialists in the world's war, are holding up the mail of these branches and do not deliver at all the 'undesirable' mail?" August 30, 1919, the day for the assembling of the National Emergency Convention of the Socialist Party, at last arrived. Delegates of the Right Wing, and many of the Left, including John Reed, I. E. Ferguson and Rose Pastor Stokes, were present. The Left Wing delegates, to the number of about 84, arrived early at the place of meeting, Machinists' Hall, 113 South Ashland Boulevard, Chicago. Trouble immediately began, for the seats being occupied by the Left Wingers, the members of the Right were crowded out. Germer and Gerber of the Right seem to have lost their heads. "The Chicago Herald and Examiner," of August 31, 1919, informs us that Adolph Germer, National Secretary of the Socialist Party and one of the leading members of the Right Wing, called in the police, who cleared the hall. "The Chicago Tribune" of the same day tells us that everybody was exchanging fisticuffs when the police arrived. Detective Sergeant Lawrence McDonough, head of the anarchist squad, with the aid of a dozen uniformed policemen, seems to have saved the day for the Right Wingers. John Reed, of the Left Wing, was furious, and "The Call," New York, August 31, 1919, tells us that he issued a statement which he addressed to the delegates of the Emergency Convention: "We address you to inform you of occurrences this morning which every Revolutionary Socialist on the floor of this convention will protest against. "Delegates from Illinois, Minnesota, Washington, Oregon, Ohio, Nebraska, California and other states entered the convention floor and took their seats in readiness for the opening of the convention. "At nearly 10 o'clock Gerber of New York and Goebel of New Jersey, who were at the door and attempted to refuse the above named delegates admission, called the police and these delegations were ejected from the hall by police power, many of them being roughly handled." Press reports inform us that after the belligerents had calmed down the meeting was again convened, and that Victor Berger, in referring to the Lefts, said: "They're just a lot of anarchists; we are the party." Berger did not say whether or not by the word "we" he meant the old National Executive Committee, which should have gone out of office in July,[G] but seemed to have given itself a "mandate" to run the National Emergency Convention. On August 31, 1919, the hot-heads and sore-heads again assembled, and a dispute arose as to who called the "cops." As a result the Left Wingers next met by themselves downstairs, on the first floor of the hall, while the Right Wingers remained higher up on the second floor. On the same day the Minnesota group was seated by the Convention, but was denied a vote. On September 1st the high climbers of the Right Wing purged the party still more by unseating the Washington State delegation and expelled Katterfield "for the good of the party." The California delegates then threw a bomb into the Right Wing Convention by announcing that they would not take their seats until all of the contested delegations were seated and the police were withdrawn from the hall. These delegates finally went down to the first floor and joined ranks with the Left Wingers there, this section henceforth being known as the Communist Labor Party. On the same day the Convention of the Communist Party assembled at Smolny Institute, 1221 Blue Island Avenue, Chicago. Red flags were displayed and Bolshevist songs were sung until the police of the anarchist squad finally demanded the removal of the blood-colored standards of revolt. "The Call" informs us that on the next day, September 2nd, the Communist Party, composed of the Michigan crowd, the Russian Federation and the former Left Wing National Council, nearly split in two when, at a concerted signal, there resigned from the emergency committee of the convention, Louis C. Fraina, C. E. Ruthenberg, I. E. Ferguson, Maximilian Cohen, S. Elbaum and A. Selakowich, and, from other offices, A. Paul of Queens and Fannie Horowitz. It seems that these members were anxious to have the Communist Party amalgamate with the Communist Labor Party, but that the foreign federations, fearing that they would be outnumbered by the English-speaking members, were very much opposed to the union. On this same day Dennis Batt, one of the principal leaders of the Communist Party, was jailed. Moreover, on the 2nd of September the Communist Labor Party--the group that had first met with the Right Wing, and, later on, down stairs on the first floor of the hall on South Ashland Boulevard--assembled at the I. W. W. Hall at 119 Throop street. This party, heart and soul, is in favor of the propagation of Bolshevism and I. W. W.'ism in the United States, and if not completely broken up by the Government, seems destined to become more numerous than either the rapidly disintegrating Socialist Party or the Communist Party, which is principally made up of foreigners who speak the various Russian languages. The principal leaders of the Communist Labor Party are John Reed, William Bross Lloyd, formerly known as the millionaire Socialist, and Benjamin Gitlow.[H] It seemed likely, too, that Fraina, Ferguson, Ruthenberg and Cohen, prominent "Reds," who resigned from the emergency committee of the Communist Party, would soon be found among the leaders of the Communist Labor Party. At the time of the convention no national organ of the Communist Labor Party had yet begun publication, but "The Voice of Labor," edited by Reed and Gitlow, and "Truth," formerly the Socialist paper of Duluth, were local organs. Both the Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party are strongly Bolshevist. The Communist Labor Party is decidedly more in favor of the I. W. W. than the Communist Party; but the main differences between these two parties seems to be a matter of race, language, and especially of personal jealousy and dislike among the leaders. For years the Socialist Party and the Socialist Labor Party have remained separated from each other, so that now, with the two new parties, the Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party, there are four parties of rebels, all plotting a revolution against our National Government, while the great body of the American people sleep and dream. Quite a number of educated people in the United States, including the editors of some of our leading dailies, seem to think that the remnant of the Socialist Party is not at all a Bolshevist organization and not at all revolutionary in character. They are very much deceived, having let the crafty, deceptive, hypocritical leaders of the Right Wing fool them badly. The Left Wingers have indeed been much more open in admitting their intentions to overthrow our government by force of arms. They are dangerous, but perhaps not nearly so much so as the slippery "Yellows," cunning weasels of the imported Russian Hillquit type, who, though they do not talk as openly as the "Reds," are spreading their subversive principles on every side, and especially among the less educated classes of our people, into whose minds they instil the spirit of hatred between employers and employees, while at the same time encouraging strikes, wherever they can, with the hope of overthrowing our Government when conditions become sufficiently critical. Both parties of the Socialists and both parties of the Communists, along with the I. W. W., are all revolutionary in the strictest sense, and the sooner the American people wake up to the fact and take some intelligent action to stamp them out, the better it will be. It is not yet too late, but soon may be. The Bolshevist Socialists of Russia and the two new parties of Socialists that at Chicago in September, 1919, seceded from the mother party, have all adopted the name, "Communist," which "The Call," New York, July 24, 1919, informs us was used by Marx and Engels, the founders of modern Socialism, adding that though the name is somewhat confusing, inasmuch as the word has another and a distinct meaning in English, still, "wherever it is used it means revolutionary Socialists as distinguished from Social patriots and mere parliamentary Socialists." Is this definition an alibi for Hillquit and Berger? Many persons have hastily assumed that the main reason why the Left and Right Wings of the Socialists fought each other like cats and dogs was that the Right Wing members of the party are opposed to Bolshevism. This is nonsense. The Socialist papers of the country, Right and Left, with the possible exception of the once powerful "Appeal to Reason," which in recent years has fallen into great discredit among Socialists because it favored our entrance into the World War--have been and still are advocating Bolshevism every day. If anyone has any doubt, let him read any of the rebel sheets. The Socialist Party of St. Louis, in its appeal for party unity, published in "The Call," July 19, 1919, informs us that the Socialist Party is whole-heartedly with the Russian Bolshevists and their cause: "Promptly, and notwithstanding all obstacles and persecution, the Socialist party hurried to the front in defense of the cause of our Russian Comrades. Mass meetings were held, demonstrations in behalf of Soviet Russia were arranged, our Socialist press gave all possible support to counteract the sinister work of the American capitalist press." Eugene V. Debs, many times the presidential candidate of the Socialists and the idol of "Reds" and "Yellows" alike, has all along been an ardent Bolshevist. Listen to these words of his in his article, "The Day of the People," published in many Socialist papers in the early part of 1919, and taken by us from the March number of "Party News," the official organ of the Socialist Party of Philadelphia: "In Russia and Germany our valiant Comrades are leading the proletarian revolution, which knows no race, no color, no sex and no boundary lines. They are setting the heroic example for world-wide emulation. Let us, like them, scorn and repudiate the cowardly compromisers within our ranks, challenge and defy the robber-class power, and fight it out on that line to victory or death! "From the crown of my head to the soles of my feet I am Bolshevik, and am proud of it." The report of the Right Wing majority of the old National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party, made to the National Emergency Convention, and here quoted from "The Call," September 3, 1919, contains the following defense of their Bolshevism, against the aspersions of the Left Wing leaders who had challenged the committee's attitude toward Russia: "Ever since the revolution in Russia, the party has hailed it as the first great gift of the International. At every meeting of the National Executive Committee held since the second revolution in Russia [the revolution which put Lenine and Trotzky in power] the committee has issued some ringing declaration in favor of the workers' and peasants' government in Russia.... "Rarely has a meeting been held under party auspices that our speakers have not taken advantage of it to present the claims and achievements of the Russian revolution. The party's position may be easily ascertained by consulting the party bulletins and the party press." The Executive Committeemen who signed this defense of the committee's Bolshevist complexion were Victor L. Berger, Seymour Stedman, James Oneal, A. Shiplacoff, Dan Hogan, John M. Work, Frederick Krafft and George H. Goebel. These, with Morris Hillquit, were the men who had violently expelled or suspended tens of thousands of members of the party without warrant of the party Constitution and without granting a trial or the right of self-defense to those thus dealt with; who had maintained themselves in office after July 1, 1919, in express violation of the party Constitution, having suppressed announcement of the result of the referendum vote by the rank and file to elect executive committeemen, by which vote Left Wing committeemen had been elected, as the report to the National Emergency Convention of the Right Wing committee appointed to investigate this referendum had to acknowledge; and who, by these devices and a similar high-handedness committed by themselves and friendly delegates had seized control of the National Emergency Convention and organized it in their own interest. In their report to the convention they further defended themselves against the Left Wing charge that this majority of the Executive Committee had allied itself with the Berne Conference. Under this head the above-mentioned committeemen say: "While no definite date may be set for the beginning of the present party dissension, it is certain that they began to be generally noticeable in January of this year [1919], when the National Executive Committee elected delegates to the Berne Conference owing to the fact that the delegates elected by referendum could not serve, and the assembling of the Berne Conference in March made necessary the election of delegates by the National Executive Committee. "The so-called Left Wing members of the National Executive Committee participated in the election, nominating and voting for candidates. None of their nominees were elected, and shortly after the election an organized attack was made against the international delegates by the Left Wing.... "The National Executive Committee, in session, decided that if our delegates arrived at Berne in time and the conference failed to take the position of the party on war and imperialism, we were to withdraw with any other elements favoring a genuine working-class International. It was agreed that we would not affiliate with any International that excluded the Russian Comrades, who were fighting world imperialism, or the Comrades opposed to the Ebert-Scheidemann regime in Germany. "Before our delegates could leave the country, the National Executive Committee learned that the Berne Conference had failed to respond to its opportunity.... Learning this, the National Executive Committee decided to send one delegate abroad to impart information to the Comrades in Europe, informing them of our attitude on international questions."[I].... "Yet, despite all this, a systematic campaign of falsehood has been waged against the party by a faction within the party. This faction has falsely claimed that the party is allied with the Berne Conference.... They have denounced the party and its officials as an organization of 'Scheidemanns' and 'Noskes,' asserting that if the party were intrusted with public power it would murder our own Comrades with machine guns and hand grenades.... "These slanders have been accompanied with a similar propaganda regarding Russia. The party and its officials, especially the members of the National Executive Committee, have been charged with being 'Kolchaks' and 'counter-revolutionists,' the implication being that the party has been committed to counter-revolution in Russia, allied intervention, and support of Kolchak in Siberia. "As in the case of Germany, so in the case of Russia, the National Executive Committee and the party in general have opposed intervention in Russia or support of Kolchak and have supported the Russian Comrades at the head of the Soviet power against a campaign of international lying. "There has never been a single utterance of the National Executive Committee quoted by the Left Wing to support these slanders. The Comrades may rest assured that this faction would quote the National Executive Committee if it could." It is technically true that the Left Wing writers were not able to quote the Executive Committee as such; but they could and did quote the dominating leaders of the Right Wing majority of the Executive Committee, Hillquit and Berger, through their organs, the "Call" and "Leader"--"The Call" as characterizing the Bolsheviki as "anarchists" and Berger as proclaiming his solidarity with the Mensheviki--and we have nowhere seen any evidence that these leaders could purge the record of these charges. That these leaders _were_ the Executive Committee, to all intents and purposes, seems abundantly shown by their ruthless use of it to smash the party, going so far as to cast out nearly two-thirds of the entire party membership to get rid of their accusers, the Left Wing leaders. This scandal and disaster to a cause they pretended to serve are logical outcomes of a double hypocrisy--an effort to fool the voting public and our Government officials by a pretense of moderation in papers and electioneering speeches, while at the same time fooling the dues-paying rank and file of their party with expressions of loyalty to radicalism. The significant facts in estimating the revolutionary character of the American Socialist Party, as recruited and indoctrinated by its double-faced leaders are two: the fact that as lately as September, 1919, some 70,000 of their pupils graduated into the open course of revolutionary violence adopted by the Communist Party of America and the Communist Labor Party, and the fact that the more manageable 40,000 remaining with these leaders were so much like their seceding Comrades that their leaders were compelled to defend their own radicalism in the fashion above shown, and were also compelled, as we shall soon see, to take an open stand for revolution and I. W. W.'ism in order to keep even the remnant of the party from deserting them. Thus a serious mistake has been made by the many who fancy that the "Yellow" Socialists--Hillquit's Right Wing which still constitutes the Socialist Party of America--are not plotters who work for a revolution to overthrow our Government. Of course they are, and any one who has read the Socialist papers and publications, even to a very limited degree, may easily see that these alleged "moderates" appear such only in contrast with the more rabid "Red" rebels of the Left; and that the one object of Right and Left alike is to stir up discontent and foment hatred of class against class precisely in order that a rebellion may some day break out. True it is that the crafty leaders of the Right do not act as imprudently as the hot-headed leaders of the Left, for they fear lest rashness should precipitate them in a premature and unsuccessful outbreak; yet they are sowing the seed of revolution as certainly as are the Communists, and perhaps with much more success, because they proceed more prudently. Once in a while, when they are off their guard, the "cat escapes from the bag." As an example we quote from an article that appeared in the May Day, 1919, issue of "The Call," the paper founded and controlled by Hillquit, the foxy leader of the Rights: "The world revolution, dreamed of as a thing of the distant future, has become a live reality, rising from the graves of the murdered millions and the misery and suffering of the surviving millions. It has taken form, it strikes forward, borne on by the despair of the masses and the shining example of the martyrs. Its spread is irrepressible. The bridges are burnt behind the old capitalist society and its path is forever cut off. Capitalist society is bankrupt, and the only salvation of humanity lies in the uprising of the masses, in the victory of the Socialist revolution, in the revolutionary forces of Socialism. "The World War, which is now about to be officially closed, has slid into a condition neither war nor peace. However the war of nations has been followed by the war of the classes. The class struggle is no longer fought by resolutions and demonstrations. Threateningly it marches through the streets of the great cities for life or death." Yet the Right Wing papers, on the whole, are much more reserved than those of the Left. As an example of the openness with which the Left Wing or Communist papers instigate rebellion, a quotation from "The Communist," Chicago, April 1, 1919, will interest the reader: "The Communist Propaganda League of Chicago came into existence on November 7, 1918, first anniversary of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic, and the very day of the German Revolution. "A group of Socialist Party officials and active party members came together for consultation as to ways and means for giving the American Socialist movement a revolutionary character in harmony with all the significance of November 7th, the most glorious date in all history. At the hour of that little meeting bedlam reigned in the streets of Chicago by premature celebration of peace. The calling of this meeting during the mass tumult of November 7th is prophetic of the revolutionary vision which brought these Comrades together. On that day the seething proletariat ruled Chicago by sheer force of numbers. One thing alone was needed to give this mass expression identity with the proletarian uprisings of Europe--one thing: the revolutionary idea! "The Communist Propaganda League is an organization for the propagation of the revolutionary idea. The civilization of tomorrow is with unorganized masses who greeted the news of peace and revolution in Germany with what may be safely described as the greatest spontaneous expression of mass sentiment ever witnessed in America. To give direction and inspiration to the advancing and irresistible army of the preletariat is the mission to which this League is dedicated." This League, with the millionaire Socialist, William Bross Lloyd, at its head, became part of the Communist Labor Party. The indications are that the Communist Labor Party, had it been left undisturbed by our Government, would soon have surpassed in numbers the remnant left in the old Socialist Party, whose dues-paying membership dwindled from 109,589 in January, 1919, to 39,750 by July of the same year. Evidently, when the Left Wing secession occurred, a few real rebels came out of the Socialist Party, which used to boast in election campaigns that it was merely a party of evolution, not of revolution. Those who still remain in the old party are rebels, too, but the rank and file is restrained by seasoned leaders, who are more prudent but less honest than the hot-headed Communists. The Socialists now have in the country four revolutionary organizations: the Socialist Party, the Socialist Labor Party, the Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party. The scum of the land, the wrecks and wreckers of civilization, deluded ignoramuses, thus find ample opportunity for selecting an organization of rebellion in which there is "no political corruption." The members of these parties find fault with everything under the Stars and Stripes, and yet hesitate to pass over to Russia and live under the bloody standard of Lenine and Trotzky. If these four rebel parties do not suffice for some of the rebels, there still remains the I. W. W. All are pretty much the same, their principal differences being the varying degrees of hypocrisy, boldness and lust for power of their leaders. The open and pronounced revolutionary character of the I. W. W., Communist Party and Communist Labor Party, evidenced in their inflammatory utterances and tactics, had established their criminal status with our National and State police and legal departments, while startling wholesale arrests, deportations and indictments of these three classes of law-breakers soon impressed a recognition of their criminal status upon the public mind. It is important to establish the further fact, if it be one, that the only difference between the rank and file of these organizations and the rank and file of the remnant still attached to the Socialist Party of America is the difference between tweedledee and tweedledum. The late inquiry into the qualifications of five suspended Socialists to sit as law-makers in the New York Assembly created an astonishing furore, disclosing amazing ignorance concerning American Socialism among our most intelligent citizens. The confusion of the public mind was still further increased by the Attorney-General of the United States, whose convincing characterization of the two Communist parties, given out on January 23, 1920, contained the following sentence: "Certainly such an organization as the Communist Party of America and also the Communist Labor Party cannot be construed to fall within the same category as the Socialist Party of America, which latter organization is pledged to the accomplishment of changes of the Government by lawful and rightful means." But can the facts so far brought out in this book "be construed" as indicating any substantial difference between the 39,000 or 40,000 Socialists who have kept their old party name and the 70,000 or 72,000 who separated from them in September, 1919? Up to the moment of separation were not all alike under the same "pledge" to use "lawful and rightful means?" But if this public profession of lawfulness meant nothing to 70,000 of them, why think it means more to the rest? We have the further striking evidence, shown above, that the leaders who had compromised their attitude toward Bolshevism felt compelled, in order to hold any of the rank and file, to argue that "the National Executive Committee and the party in general" had "supported the Russian Comrades at the head of the Soviet power." Yet in spite of this defense the old National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party was rebuked and kicked out of office during the Emergency Convention, even by delegates who were friendly to the compromised leaders. The "Call," September 5, 1919, gives some of the details: "The rebuke of the National Executive Committee was in the form of an amendment to the original motion to adopt its report. The amendment carried by 63 to 39.... "Perhaps Frederick Haller expressed the general sentiment of the convention when he said: "'We must endorse this supplemental report of the National Executive Committee, but we must go back to our constituents and tell them that we gave the National Executive Committee hell.'" These "constituents," the rank and file, determine the character of the party, and not the thimble-rigging games of their political leaders, who support themselves and have "made a good thing" out of Socialism by carrying water on one shoulder for gullible voters, and on the other for their credulous disciples. This is not the first time that self-serving, hypocritical teachers, in compassing sea and land to make proselytes, have made them twofold more the children of hell than themselves. The National Emergency Convention of 1919 affords still other evidence of the mind of the rank and file of the Socialist Party in the report of the committee which investigated the referendum vote of 1919 which the old National Executive Committee had suppressed. The "Call," September 1, 1919, says: "The report states that on the face of the returns, referendum B and D were carried by large majorities, and a National Executive Committee, consisting of Louis Fraina of New York, Charles E. Ruthenberg of Cleveland, Seymour Stedman of Chicago, Patrick S. Nagle of Oklahoma and L. E. Katterfeld of Cleveland was elected. The returns also showed on their face that John Reed and Louis Fraina had been elected as the party's international delegates and Kate Richards O'Hare its international secretary." Thus the party was "Red" or Left-Wingish "by large majorities," and was distinctly Bolshevist, as we learn from the "Call's" explanation of "referendum B and D," which "were carried by large majorities." "Referendum B put the question of holding a National Emergency Convention up to the membership. Referendum D asked the membership to decide whether the party should record itself as being opposed to entering any other international Socialist alignment than that of the Third National [International?] which held its first conference at Moscow early in March. "Its adoption means that the Socialist party will not take part in any international conference from which the Bolsheviki of Russia and the Spartacans of Germany are excluded, or in which they refuse to participate." Thus at the Emergency Convention of August-September, 1919, the Socialist Party of America was tied to the will of the Russian Bolshevists and the German Spartacides, who held the powers of approval and veto in deciding what internationals the members of the Socialist Party of America might associate with! A more anomalous product of the double-faced generalship of Berger and Hillquit it would be hard to imagine. But this is not all. The Moscow Manifesto of March, 1919, was before the Emergency Convention. This Russian Communistic Manifesto is addressed "To the proletariat of all countries" (see Chapter IV) and reads: "We Communists, representatives of the revolutionary proletariat of the different countries of Europe, America and Asia, assembled in Soviet Moscow." Would the Socialist Party of America accept its inclusion among those in "America" thus designated, or refuse? The committee which considered the matter split, bringing in majority and minority reports. The majority report, favored by Berger, considered the Third International as not yet constituted, thus hanging the Socialist Party of America in the air, without fellowship with Moscow, Berne or any other thing--a trapeze performance truly Bergeresque. The minority report, voted for even by a third of the machine delegates in the Emergency Convention, favored affiliation with the associates of the Moscow Conference as constituting the Third International. It was decided to submit both reports to a referendum vote of the party, which should have been taken in January or February, 1920, if the requirements of the party Constitution were followed. The concern of the Socialist Party managers to keep the facts from the general public, evidenced by their tactics in the case of the five suspended Socialist Assemblymen at Albany, might have led to another unconstitutional delay or manipulation of a referendum. But this was immaterial in determining the mind of the rank and file, as we have documentary evidence showing that the only opposition within the party to a clear-cut Bolshevik committal sprang out of fear either of legal prosecution or of the loss of votes through public condemnation. The following illuminating discussion is extracted from a letter of Alexander Trachtenberg, a conspicuous Socialist, as printed in the "Call" of November 26, 1919: "The members of the Socialist Party now have before them two referenda--Referendum E, consisting of the various changes in the party Constitution which were decided upon at the Chicago Convention, and Referendum F, on international Socialist relations.... "The question of international affiliation is at this moment probably the most important before the Socialist Party. The two reports which emanated from the convention, known as the majority and minority reports, will no doubt receive very careful consideration by the members.... "A close examination of the two reports reveals that the condition laid down for the International, with which the Socialist party cares to affiliate itself, are the same. Both reports agree that: "a. The Second International is dead. "b. The Berne International Conference hopelessly failed in its indeavor to reconstitute the International. "c. The New International must consist only of those parties: "1. Which have remained true to the revolutionary International Socialist movement during the war. "2. Which refused to co-operate with bourgeois parties and are opposed to all forms of coalition. "In short, _both_ reports agree that the Socialist Party will go only into such an International the component parties of which _conduct their struggle on revolutionary class lines_. The difference between the two reports is, that while the majority report leaves the matter of the reconstruction of the International hang in the air, the minority report has something tangible to offer. It also more specifically outlines the Socialist policy on the question of international affiliation, and gives several reasons for joining the Third (Moscow) International.... "The Socialist Party of America cannot afford to remain amorphous at the present stage of the building of the new International. It has refused to go with those elements who have either betrayed or were unwilling to remain true to their professions. It belongs among those parties which have remained true to International Socialism and who alone have the right to build the edifice of the new International. "By voting for the minority report the Comrades will give expression to _what they have professed and believed in_ during the past critical years in the life of the international Socialist movement." A letter on the same subject, by Benjamin Glassberg, appears in the "Call" of December 4, 1919, from which we take extracts showing the Bergeresque argument of Hoan, Berger's mayor of Milwaukee: "The most important question before the members of the Socialist Party just now is the referendum on the majority and minority reports on international relations. Comrade Trachtenberg has argued in the columns of 'The Call' in favor of the minority report, and Hoan of Milwaukee for the majority, and Comrade Warshow has argued against both. "A careful examination of the position taken by both Hoan and Warshow fails to reveal why the minority report should be voted down. Comrade Hoan is naturally very much concerned at the possibility that 'in the coming political battles the capitalistic henchmen will flaunt in your face that the above is the program of the Socialist Party' (referring to the statement in the governing rules of the Communist International that the revolutionary era compels the proletariat to make use of mass action). "The important thing, according to Hoan, is not whether the minority report is right or not, but rather what will the effect be at the next election. In this respect he is typical of the pure and simple political Socialist.... "In one breath Comrade Warshow calls for a new International to which shall be admitted all Socialist parties of the world who believe in the class struggle, and in the next he defends the Socialists supporting a coalition government. How can one subscribe to the doctrine of the class struggle and at the same time approve of Socialists joining in a coalition government, which of necessity will not be the agent of the workers but of the class with which the workers are at all times at war?.... "In all our official declarations, including the Chicago manifesto, we have voiced our support of the Bolsheviki. In our meetings and in our literature we have taken our stand solidly with our Russian Comrades, our friends, the Left Wingers to the contrary notwithstanding. "Why, then, hesitate to affiliate with them?" Thus, whether or not Berger's policy of dissimulation prevailed--and his wholesale slaughter of dues-payers with the ax of the Executive Committee had shown all who opposed him what they might expect--it remained true that identification with the Bolshevist principles and tactics of Lenine and Trotzky was what the present members of the Socialist Party in America "have professed and believed in during the past critical years" and was in accord with "all" their "official declarations," their "meetings" and their "literature." The base ingratitude of Berger toward those who have followed and supported him; the gross, incredible savagery of his egotism in turning to rend those he had discipled into revolutionaries the moment their allegiance to the principles he taught them stood in the way of his cowardice and ambition; his butcher insensibilities in making his party's Constitution a "scrap of paper" and the party a shambles for the hewing down of two-thirds of his "Comrades;" his burlesque effrontery in posing in the convention as a law-and-order man, railing at his own victims as "anarchists"--these daubs of color paint the cubist portrait of Wisconsin's mock hero, one of the meanest caricatures of human life that ever swaggered on a political arena. When the two Wings of the Convention raised the question, "Who called the cops?" Berger's pale and innocent figure rose with the trembling remark: "If they had not been here yesterday morning we would not be here now. The two-fisted Reed and the other two-fisted Left Wingers would be here." He took pains to have the delicate pathos of his martyrdom sketched into the Executive Committee report he signed, "Victor L. Berger, in addition to a sentence of 20 years, has four more indictments pending against him, besides being refused his seat in Congress. All the Socialist candidates for Congress in Wisconsin and the State Secretary also are under indictment. No mail whatever is permitted to be delivered to the 'Leader,' the party daily in Milwaukee," etc. On the other hand, against the terrible "anarchs" who had so outraged his own gentle spirit and sense of order, he even fulminated outside the Convention Hall, as in the interview which we take from the "Call" of September 4, 1919: "Ever since the Socialist movement has existed there have been two very distinct tendencies apparent--the Social Democratic tendency and the Anarcho-Syndicalist tendency.... "But the revolution in Russia and Hungary, which had been predicted by us, as well as in Germany, has had a peculiar psychological effect on many of the rank and file of the party, especially upon those who had come from Russia and Hungary. They really believe this revolt can be repeated today in America. "The revolution in Russia and the psychological effect of it penetrated into the foreign federations affiliated with the Socialist party of America and gave the Anarcho-Syndicalists, who have joined us in great numbers in the last six months, a chance to split up the Socialist party of America into three groups. "First, the old Socialist Party, which will remain longer to aid the old ideals of Social Democracy, even though there may be a change in tactics required by changed conditions. "Then there are the Communist Socialists, led by John Reed and a few hysterical men and women, who try to bring about a Russian revolution or God knows what other things, they themselves don't know tomorrow morning. "And, finally, there is the Communist Party, led by Louis Fraina, which consists mainly of Russians, Ukrainians[7], Slovenic races and other foreign federation members, who have been suspended for stuffing ballot boxes in the last referendum, and who also want revolution of some kind, the wherewith and howwith they haven't been able to explain so far." Do we exaggerate the humbuggery of leadership uncloaked in this Emergency Convention of the Socialist Party of America? Let the reader judge from the supreme example of it, the motive of which we present in the words of the organ of one of the chief conspirators, Hillquit's "Call." The issue of August 31, 1919, declared: "The convention will adopt a stand, expressed in a manifesto that is expected to satisfy all those in the Left Wing who are contending for what they believe to be revolutionary principles." In the issue of September 3 we read: "There will be a restatement of party principles which is expected to cut the ground from under the feet of the former members and organizations of the party who have read themselves out and will remain suspended in mid-air between the newly formed and still more newly revised Communist-Labor Party and the Communist Party." In the "Call" of September 5, which published the manifesto, we also have this comment on it by James Oneal: "The American movement can congratulate itself on having produced such a splendid document. It will tend to rally members who have been uncertain of the outcome of the convention, and will eventually bring to us many who are sick of the hypocrisies, the shams and the illusions that have held them in chains for nearly three tragic years." What hypocrisies, shams and illusions are referred to? Who were their authors? In another column of the same issue we are told: "With every delegate on his feet and cheering, the National Emergency Convention of the Socialist Party unanimously adopted its manifesto this afternoon. [September 4th.] It was the big moment of the convention. The document is regarded as the most revolutionary the party has ever drawn up, and one certain to bring back into the organization thousands of members temporarily outside of it, either because their local organizations were expelled or by reason of what Lenine has called 'the intoxication of the revolutionary phrase.'" Thus this manifesto was adopted by the wreckers of the Socialist Party to hold the "revolutionary" rank and file still left them and to draw back the revolutionary seceders--minus their leaders, of course. Nevertheless the manifesto is truly revolutionary--"most revolutionary"--the revolutionary creed of a revolutionary organization. It is, of course, carefully worded, so as to deceive if possible that public whose intelligence the cynical Socialists despise at the same time that they appeal to it for votes, and this careful wording we can understand from a comment in the "Call" of September 5, 1919: "Before reading the manifesto, Block told the convention the manifesto was largely based upon one suggested by Morris Hillquit, now ill at Saranac Lake, N. Y."[J] Seen through its mask of verbiage, however, the manifesto of the Emergency Convention of the Socialist Party of America joins with the famous Preamble of the I. W. W. and the manifestoes and programs of the Communist and Communist Labor Parties in advocating the plundering of mankind by proletarians, the elimination of the private ownership of natural wealth and the machinery of production, and the _wresting_ of "the industries and the control of the government of the United States" out of their present ownership and control so as "to place industry and government in the control of the workers." This revolutionary document incites "American labor" to "break away" from its present leadership, called "reactionary and futile," and "to join in the great emancipating movement of the more advanced revolutionary workers of the world"--the I. W. W.'s and Bolshevists. It is "the supreme task" of "the Socialist party of America," its "great task," to which its members "pledge all" their "energies and resources," to "win the American workers" from their "ineffective" leadership, "to educate them to an enlightened understanding of their own class interests, and to train and assist them to organize politically and industrially on class lines, in order _to effect their emancipation_," namely, "to _wrest_ the industries and the control of the government of the United States from the capitalists _and their retainers_" and "place industry _and government_ in the control of the workers." Furthermore, "to _insure_ the triumph of Socialism in the United States the bulk of American workers must be strongly organized politically as Socialists, in constant, clear-cut and _aggressive opposition to all parties of the possessing class_" and "must be strongly organized in the economic field on broad industrial lines, _as one powerful and harmonious class organization_, co-operating with the Socialist Party, and _ready in cases of emergency_ to _reinforce_ the _political_ demands of the working class _by industrial action_." (See, a few pages further on, the manifesto itself, from which we have quoted in the three last paragraphs.) Is this the thing which Berger and Hillquit have let loose--after blocking a much less compromising resolution of long-distance affiliation with Moscow? Does Berger think the people of Wisconsin such blockheads that they will shy at a word like Bolshevism, but are unable to understand the plain, bold English of a conspiracy to bring about industrial organization "to wrest the industries and the control of the government of the United States" out of the hands of the American people and into the hands of a special class? Indeed, if the "workers" take everything, what will become of the drones--the Socialist political hacks? While we reserve the details for Chapter XVI, we add here in passing that on February 10, 1920, it was acknowledged in testimony at the trial of the five Assemblymen at Albany that affiliation with the Third (Moscow) International had been carried by referendum vote in the Socialist Party of America with a large majority. Before giving the reader the text of that part of the Emergency Convention manifesto which we have been discussing we must call attention to another piece of evidence--Morris Hillquit's letter in his paper, the "New York Call," shortly after the Emergency Convention, in which he says: "The split in the ranks of American Socialism raises the question: What shall be the attitude of the Socialist Party toward the newly formed Communist organization?" His letter answering this important question was read out of the "Call" into the record of the New York Assembly's inquiry into the qualifications of the five suspended Socialists to act as law-makers and will be found in the "New York Herald" of January 29, 1920, from which we take it: "Any attempted solution of the problem must take into account the following fundamental facts: "First--The division was not created arbitrarily and deliberately by the recent convention in Chicago. It had become an accomplished fact months ago, and the Chicago gatherings did nothing more than recognize the fact. "Second--The division was not brought about by differences on vital questions of principles. It arose over disputes on methods and policy. "Third--The separation of the Socialist Party into three organizations need not necessarily mean a weakening of the Socialists. They are wrong in their estimate of American conditions, their theoretical conclusions and practical methods, but they have not deserted to the enemy. The bulk of their following is still good Socialist material. When the hour of the real Socialist fight strikes in this country we may find them again in our ranks. "Our quarrel is a family quarrel, and has no room in the columns of the capitalistic papers, where it can only give joy and comfort to the common enemy. The unpardonable offense of the Simons-Russell-Spargo crowd [which withdrew from the Socialist Party of America on account of its unpatriotic and un-American opposition to the people and Government of the United States at war, as expressed in the Socialist Party's St. Louis Convention utterances in April, 1917] was not so much their social-patriotic stand during the war as the fact that they rushed into the anti-Socialist press maliciously denouncing their former comrades as pro-German and deliberately added fuel to the sinister flame of mob violence and government persecution directed against the Socialist movement. "We have had our split. It was unfortunate but unavoidable, and now we are through with it. Legitimate constructive work of the Socialist movement is before us. Let us give it all of our time, energies and resources. Let us center our whole fight upon capitalism, and let us hope our Communist brethren will go and do likewise." Thus all three organizations, Socialist Party of America, Communist Party of America and Communist Labor Party, have merely had "a family quarrel" and are still one kin, one blood, one "family," without "fundamental" "differences on vital questions of principles," so that the Socialist Partyites and their "Communist brethren" can go on doing "likewise" against our present Government and institutions until, "when the hour of the _real_ Socialist fight"--the Great Rebellion--"strikes _in this country_" the members of the Socialist Party "may find" the members of the two Communist parties "again in" their "ranks." Thus by Hillquit, at least, all three parties can only "be construed" to be in one and the same "category." We end this chapter by reproducing from the "New York Call" of September 5, 1919, a considerable part of the Socialist Party's Emergency Convention manifesto. This offspring of Hillquit's brain declares "solidarity with the revolutionary workers of Russia" and "radical" Spartacides of Germany and Communists of Austria and Hungary. Let the reader carefully weigh this document's meanings, comparing them with the call for and manifesto of the Moscow Conference, the definition of "industrial unionism" and "mass action" in the Left Wingers' writings, the Communist and Communist Labor manifestoes and programs, and the principles and tactics of I. W. W.'ism as set forth elsewhere in this volume, and then ask himself if the latest official utterance of the Socialist Party of America can in any way "be construed" as placing that party in any "category" which does not also contain the Communist organizations and the I. W. W. The salient parts of the manifesto follow: "The capitalist class is now making its last stand in its history. It was intrusted with the government of the world. It is responsible for the prevailing chaos. The events of recent years have conclusively demonstrated that capitalism is bankrupt, and has become a dangerous impediment to progress and human welfare. The working class alone has the power to redeem and to save the world.... "It now becomes more than ever the immediate task of international Socialism to accelerate and organize the inevitable transfer of political and industrial power from the capitalist class to the workers. The workers must recognize the economic structure of human society by eliminating the institution of the private ownership of natural wealth and of the machinery of industry, the essence of the war-breeding system of international commercial rivalry. The workers of the world must recognize the economic structure of human society by making the natural wealth and the machinery of industry the collective property of all.... "The workers of Great Britain, France and Italy, the workers of the newly created nations, and the workers of the countries which remained neutral during the war, are all in a state of unprecedented unrest. In different ways and by different methods, either blindly impelled by the inexorable conditions which confront them, or clearly recognizing their revolutionary aims, they are abandoning their temporising programs of pre-war labor reform. They are determined to control the industries, which means control of the governments. "In the United States capitalism has emerged from the war more reactionary and aggressive, more insolent and oppressive than it has ever been.... "But even in the United States the symptoms of a rebellious spirit in the ranks of the working masses are rapidly multiplying. Widespread and extensive strikes for better labor conditions, the demand of the 2,000,000 railway workers to control their industry, sporadic formation of labor parties, apparently, though not fundamentally, in opposition to the political parties of the possessing class, are promising indications of a definite tendency on the part of American labor to break away from its reactionary and futile leadership and to join in the great emancipating movement of the more advanced revolutionary workers of the world. "Recognizing this crucial situation at home and abroad, the Socialist Party in the United States at its first national convention after the war, squarely takes its position with the uncompromising section of the international Socialist movement. We unreservedly reject the policy of those Socialists who supported their belligerent capitalist governments on the plea of 'national defense,' and who entered into demoralizing compacts for so-called civil peace with the exploiters of labor during the war and continued a political alliance with them after the war. "We, the organized Socialists of America, declare our solidarity with the revolutionary workers of Russia in the support of the government of their Soviets, with the radical Socialists of Germany, Austria and Hungary in their efforts to establish working class rule in their countries, and with those Socialist organizations in England, France, Italy and other countries, who, during the war as after the war, have remained true to the principles of uncompromising international Socialism.... "The great purpose of the Socialist Party is to wrest the industries and the control of the government of the United States from the capitalists and their retainers. It is our purpose to place industry and government in the control of the workers with hand and brain, to be administered for the benefit of the whole community. "To insure the triumph of Socialism in the United States the bulk of the American workers must be strongly organized politically as Socialists, in constant, clear-cut and aggressive opposition to all parties of the possessing class. They must be strongly organized in the economic field on broad industrial lines, as one powerful and harmonious class organization, cooperating with the Socialist Party, and ready in cases of emergency to reinforce the political demands of the working class by industrial action. "To win the American workers from their ineffective and demoralizing leadership, to educate them to an enlightened understanding of their own class interests, and to train and assist them to organize politically and industrially on class lines, in order to effect their emancipation, that is the supreme task confronting the Socialist Party of America. "To this great task, without deviation or compromise, we pledge all our energies and resources. For its accomplishment we call for the support and co-operation of the workers of America and of all other persons desirous of ending the insane rule of capitalism before it has had the opportunity to precipitate humanity into another cataclysm of blood and ruin. "Long live the International Socialist Revolution, the only hope of the suffering world!" CHAPTER VI SOCIALISM IN THEORY Morris Hillquit, a ring-leader among Socialists of the United States, writing in "Everybody's," October, 1913, page 487, informs us that the term Socialism is used indiscriminately to designate a certain philosophy, a scheme of social organization and an active political movement. Socialism, used to designate a certain philosophy, may better be distinguished by being called Socialism in theory. Socialism as an applied scheme of social organization may be termed Socialism in practice, and means nothing other than a form of government according to the principles of Socialist philosophy. Socialism, as an active political movement, means the Socialist Party. Thus, when we say that Socialism won several times in Milwaukee, we do not mean that the system of Socialist philosophy was voted upon and accepted by the majority, for most of the voters knew practically nothing about the philosophy of Socialism; nor do we mean that the form of government in accordance with the principles of Socialist philosophy was adopted at the polls, for, as a matter of fact, we know that the government of Milwaukee has never been in accordance with the Marxian principles; but we mean this, and only this, that the active political movement of the Socialists, in other words, the Socialist Party, elected its candidates. No doubt the victorious candidates would have ruled Milwaukee according to the philosophy of Socialism, applying the Marxian principles to their government, if they could have done so, but the Constitution of the United States as well as that of the State of Wisconsin would have stood in the way, as will be seen when Socialism is explained more in detail. The first form of Socialism to be explained in detail is Socialism in theory. There seem to be about 57 hundred times 57 hundred varieties of Socialists, owing to the conflicting views that members of the party hold on different subjects which they wish to include in Socialism, and also because of their different interpretations of the fundamental principle of Socialism. There is, however, one underlying principle that seems to be held quite generally by Marxians the world over. No matter what other radical measures individual Socialists may favor or wish to see included in the Socialist philosophy, and no matter how many different interpretations are given to the principle of Socialism, the basic principle that stands out above all others and is accepted generally by Socialists the world over may be said to be the demand for a government, democratic in form, under which all the citizens would collectively own and manage the principal means of production, transportation and communication. The Industrial Workers of the World form one of the few classes of Socialists who object to the generally accepted fundamental principle just mentioned. "The One Big Union Monthly," March, 1919, prefers to drop the words "democratic form of government," because the I. W. W.'s are not sure that ownership by the people as a whole would succeed better under a democratic form of government than under a dictatorship of the proletariat. "The Labour Leader," the organ of the Socialist Independent Labor Party, Manchester, England, February 6, 1919, declares that Socialism is "the complete ownership and control of the means of life by the people, and the development of industry and the distribution of its fruits under a genuine and absolute democracy." In explaining Socialism, it says that "it means that the land shall become the property of the people, not of private individuals. It means that the great industries shall become the property of the people. It means that the railways and the canals shall become the property of the people. It means that the shipping shall become the property of the people. In short it means that everything essential to the life of all shall become the property of all, and shall be administered not for the profit of the few, but for the use of all. And it demands intelligent control of public affairs by the people, women as well as men." Practically the same ideas are expressed in other words by Jaurés in "Studies in Socialism," page 32 of 1906 edition, translated by Minturn. This great leader of the French Socialists, who was assassinated at the beginning of the World War, and in whose honor there was a tremendous demonstration in Paris on April 6, 1919, prophesied that "the time is not far off when no one will be able to speak to the public about the preservation of private property without covering himself with ridicule and putting himself voluntarily into an inferior rank. That which reigns to-day under the name of private property is really class property, and those who wish for the establishment of democracy in the economic as well as the political world should give their best effort to the abolition and not to the maintenance of this class property." In "The Revolutionary Age," Boston, January 11, 1919, page 4, we read: "What is Socialism? It is the public ownership of all the wealth, the mills, the mines, the factories, the railroads and land. Things that are used in common, must be owned in common, by the people and for the people under democratic management by the people, instead of the present system of private ownership for profits." According to Morris Hillquit in "Everybody's," October, 1913, page 487: "The Socialist program advocates a reorganization of the existing industrial system on the basis of collective or national ownership of the social tools. It demands that the control of the machinery of wealth creation be taken from the individual capitalists and placed in the hands of the nation, to be organized and operated for the benefit of the whole people." Hillquit, in his various articles, has, of course, like many other Socialists, given his explanation of the detailed method of organization and operation of industries under a Socialist form of government. It reads very nicely and appears attractive, as his statements do till truth's searchlight falls on them, but it does not seem worth while to present his views, for very many of the leading Socialists of the world not only differ with each other as regards the method of organization and operation that they advocate for the Marxian state, but they are also very much at variance with the plan of organization and operation that Hillquit describes. Eugene V. Debs, in his "Daily Message from Moundsville Prison," published in "The Call," New York, April 21, 1919, tells us what Socialism is: "The earth for all the people! That is the demand. "The machinery of production and distribution for all the people! That is the demand. "The collective ownership and control of industry and its democratic management in the interest of all the people! That is the demand. "The elimination of rent, interest and profit and the production of wealth to satisfy the wants of all the people! That is the demand. "Co-operative industry in which we all shall work together in harmony as the basis of a new social order, a higher civilization, a real republic! That is the demand. "The end of class struggles and class rule, of master and slave, of ignorance and vice, of poverty and shame, of cruelty and crime--the birth of freedom, the dawn of brotherhood, the beginning of MAN! That is the demand. "This is Socialism!" In the Preamble to the American Socialist Party Platform, adopted by national referendum, July 24, 1917, we are told: "The theory of a democratic government is the greatest good to the greatest number. The working class far out-numbers the capitalist class. Here is the natural advantage of the working class. By uniting solidly in a political party of its own, it can capture the government and all its powers and use them in its own interests. "The Socialist Party aims to abolish this class war with all its evils and to substitute for capitalism a new order of co-operation, wherein the workers shall own and control all the economic factors of life. It calls upon all workers to unite, to strike as they vote and to vote as they strike, all against the master class. "Only through this combination of our powers can we establish the co-operative commonwealth, wherein the workers shall own their jobs and receive the full social value of their product. The necessities of life will then be produced, not for the profits of the few, but for the comfort and happiness of all who labor. Instead of privately owned industries with masters and slaves, there will be the common ownership of the means of life, and all the opportunities and resources of the world will be equal and free to all." The fundamental principle of Socialism, namely, a government, democratic in form, in which all the citizens would collectively own and manage the principal means of production, transportation and communication, will be more clearly understood if the several component parts of the basic principle are explained. A government, _democratic in form_, would, of course, require the overthrow of all limited monarchies as well as the annihilation of those that are despotic. Even a republican form of government, like that of the United States, is very far from being satisfactory to the Revolutionists, for they demand that the citizens have as direct a voice as possible, first in the election of all public officers, secondly in the framing of the laws, and thirdly in the management of the many industrial departments of the proposed government. By the citizens' _collective owning_ of the different things enumerated is meant that they would own them just as the citizens of the United States, as a body, to-day own the post-offices, arsenals, navy and public lands. Of course, collective ownership does not imply that, after the state should have taken over the things referred to, each citizen would be entitled to an equal share of them as his own private property, to be used by him according to his desires. _The management of the property_ of the Socialist state and the remuneration[8] for labor would not be in the hands of private individuals acting independently, but would be subject to the will of the majority of the citizens. By the _principal_ means of production, transportation and communication is meant any instrument of production, transportation or communication that would be used for purposes of exploitation, in other words, for making profit through the employment of hired labor. To illustrate this, several examples will be given. Mines, factories and mills of all kinds, large business houses and stores, together with those farms whose owners would employ hired labor for the production of goods to be sold at profit, would all be looked upon as being among the _principal means of production_. On the other hand, a sewing-machine used for family needs would not be included in the list. There are many Socialists who have held that their intended state would allow the private ownership of very small farms, provided that the products were raised without the employment of farm hands. But it seems likely that such a plan of private ownership would not be tolerated under a Socialist government, for, first of all, a very large number of Socialists are opposed to such a plan, and, secondly, the political actionists who have favored it either have sacrificed thereby the principles of their party, or else by advocating the private ownership of small farms, have done so with the intention of deceiving farmers and small land owners in order to win their votes. More will be said about this further on. Railroads, street car lines, express and steamship service would be among the _principal means of transportation_; while included in the list of _principal means of communication_ there would be the public telephone and telegraph systems. Automobiles, horses and carriages, if used without the assistance of hired labor, would not be considered as being principal means of transportation. So, too, under similar conditions, a private telephone or telegraph line running to the house of a friend would be excluded from the principal means of communication. The state would, of course, own all the goods produced in its mines, factories, shops, etc., until they were purchased with money or labor certificates. The people would then retain these goods as their own private property, and would not, according to the leading American Socialists, be compelled to divide them up with their fellow countrymen. The Socialist plan looks very nice on paper, allures many impoverished workingmen of the present day, appeals strongly to the uneducated, and offers great inducements to the "downs and outs" of society. It is, however, a deadly poison, and this will be proven conclusively in the chapter on "Socialism a Peril to Workingmen." There it will be shown not only that a Socialist state cannot possibly be a success, but that it would be a source of continued civil strife and discord, thoroughly unsatisfactory to workingmen, whom it would overwhelm with all the evils attendant on crime, strife, rebellion and chaos. In the Marxian state the industrial establishments, land, and business enterprises would be confiscated; neither interest, rent nor profit would be tolerated; the wage system would be abolished; no satisfactory plan could be devised for assigning so many millions of workingmen to the different positions, while at the same time satisfying them with remuneration for their daily toil; religions of all kinds would be the object of persecution; free-love would be legalized; and political corruption would be much more widespread than today. These are but several of the factors that would make a successful Socialist state an impossibility. It may interest the reader to know that Socialists of the highest authority inform us that in the new state women would be called upon to work. The late August Bebel, one of the foremost of German Socialists, says that as soon as society is in possession of all the means of production, "the duty to work, on the part of all able to work, without distinction of sex, becomes the organic law of socialized society." ["Woman Under Socialism," by Bebel, page 275 of the 1904 edition in English.] Frederick Engels, in his book, "Origin of the Family," teaches that the emancipation of women is primarily dependent on the reintroduction of the whole female sex into the public industries. ["Origin of the Family," by Engels, page 90 of Untermann's 1907 translation into English.] In "The Call," New York, February 27, 1910, it is stated that "the man who professes himself to be a Socialist, and then says that under Socialism men will provide for women, is wide of the mark." Keeping clearly before their minds the fundamental principle of Socialism, the people of America must be careful to distinguish between Socialists ruling under our present form of government, and Socialists ruling in a Socialist state. Possible success in the first case would by no means indicate success in the latter. If our citizens are cautious in this respect, the enemies of our country will not dare to boast of the so-called success of Socialism in those places in which the members of their party, elected to public office, may have given a good administration under our constitutional system of government. Though Socialism, in the strictest sense of the word, is concerned exclusively with economics, still this does not mean that those who profess it do not advocate, as part of their program, many pet projects not appertaining to economics. By a vast majority, the members of the Socialist Party either advocate atheism and opposition to religion, or at least do not oppose those Socialists who do. Most of them, too, in their cravings for what is base and low, are by no means adverse to seeing free-love reign supreme in their contemplated state. The word _Socialism_ is, therefore, frequently used in a broader sense, and is made to include not only the common doctrine advocating the democratic form of government under which the citizens would collectively own and manage the principal means of production, transportation and communication, but also those other doctrines that are taught or silently approved by the majority. It is in this broader sense, then, that the opponents of the Marxians justly claim that Socialism is atheistic, anti-religious, and immoral. We are told by Hillquit in "Everybody's," October, 1913, page 486, that "like all social theories and practical mass movements, Socialism produces certain divergent schools, bastard offshoots clustering around the main trunk of the tree, large in number and variety, but insignificant in size and strength. Thus we hear of State Socialism, Socialism of the Chair, Christian Socialism and even Catholic Socialism." Persons who call themselves Socialists may be divided into two classes, in the first of which are those who are Socialists merely in name, for they go no further than to vote the party ticket. It is in the second class that we find the real Socialists, men who besides severing all connections with the other political organizations and voting regularly for the Socialist candidates, have taken out membership cards which entitle them to vote on party policies by the payment of several dollars a year into the treasury of the party. Many of the first class are, of course, not guilty of propagating atheism, free-love, and other radical doctrines. In fact, it often happens that they scarcely know that such things are taught by Socialists, for the deceitful Revolutionary orators and writers, having blinded them with vivid pictures of their misfortunes, lead them to believe that the movement is morally upright, and that the contemplated state of the future will bring them every blessing under Heaven. But unless those who are Socialists merely in name sever their connection with the party of Karl Marx, it will not be long before many of them will lose all sense of honor, decency and morality. Indeed they often sink lower than the base character who composed the "poem" that takes up half a page of "The Call" of May 10, 1914. Though "The Call" seems to consider the "poem" an excellent specimen of literature, or else uses the large type that it does in order to attract the attention of its readers to the sublime virtues of the author, the quotation of but a small part of the production will suffice to bring out its real worth and at the same time show us the benign effects of Socialist teachings: "You who are exalted by pictures but not by people: you who worship a book and a god rather than hearts and men and women: I'd rather have my world and its flesh and its devil than your heaven and its spirit and its god:.... And while I don't blame man for being base or praise man for being noble, I embrace man as my brother for being man: And there you have the whole story, my man intoxication: I am drunk with man: you see how it is: You can have your bibles: I don't need your christs: your creeds would be an insult to me: I have man: I am drunk with man: That's the secret of secrets: that's the confession of confessions: that's the inside of the inside of me: I don't expect you to take it in: drunk with man: no: that's too much like mockery to you: you shudder at it: To you man always comes last: man never comes first: gods, mountains, laws--they come first: man can take his chances: That's the rule of precedence as you have fixed it: that's the up and down and around of your cosmos: But I say no: I who am drunk with man can't give up my faith for your blasphemy: you who are sober with god." The attention of the reader must now be drawn to something of vital importance. There is no doubt that "Knights of the Red Flag" have advocated many excellent social reforms, such as higher wages, shorter working hours and greater safety for laborers, legislation against trusts, and the prevention of child labor and political corruption. Great credit would they deserve if their real object were not to gain votes to secure the establishment of a Socialist form of government. It is probable that before long, voting with true social reformers, they will see the materialization of many of the immediate demands enumerated in their platform. But it is to be remembered that no matter how many beneficial reforms Socialists may help to procure under our present constitutional system, they thus in no way prove the superiority of a Socialistic government, democratic in form, in which the citizens would collectively own and manage the principal means of production, transportation, and communication. The reason is that our constitutional government would still be in vogue, and the contradictory fundamental principle of Socialism could not be applied by the ruling Marxians. Persons who judge the Socialist movement solely by the immediate demands of its political platform, or by social reforms instituted after a political victory, understand very little either about Socialism or the methods and purposes of the Marxians. Yet this was the short-sighted manner in which the press persistently, and for a long time, viewed the tactics of Socialist politicians. Only a revolutionary movement far enough advanced to neglect gradual transformation by means of immediate demands would be able to sweep away by force, at a single stroke, all the old conditions of production, together with our present form of government, and the existing order of society. The so-called "Immediate Demands" of the Socialists may be termed political campaign Socialism or vote-catching Socialism. They are the sugar coating of the poisonous pill of Socialism itself. Their object is to attract and interest the voter, and at the same time keep his mind off of the fallacies of Socialism proper. They keep him from asking too many unanswerable questions about the detailed method of organization under a Socialist form of government--for instance, how the millions upon millions of government employes would be assigned to positions that would suit them, and at the same time receive satisfactory remuneration for their labors. These same immediate demands also give the voter a chance to find fault with our present system of government and to criticise it, thereby rendering it less able to withstand successive Socialist assaults. The immediate demands are, of course, meant for the present day and even if they should materialize, under our present system, they could not be continued in a Socialist state, that would be necessarily weak, poverty-stricken, strife-ridden, politically corrupt and chaotic. It is one thing to make demands, quite another thing to be able to grant them. A highway robber can demand a million dollars from the person whom he attacks, but that doesn't make the one assaulted able to surrender the sum; nor would it prove that the robber himself could afford to pay a like amount if he should afterwards be held up for a million. The immediate demands of the 1918 Congressional Platform of the Socialist Party are entirely too many conveniently to enumerate. They are classed under A--International Reconstruction. Peace Aims. Federation of Peoples. B--Internal Reconstruction. Industrial Control. Railroads and Express Service. Steamships and Steamship Lines. Telegraph and Telephone. Large Power Scale Industry. Democratic Management. Demobilization. The Structure of Government (i.e., of the present system of government). Civil Liberties. Taxation. Credit. Agriculture. Conservation of Natural Resources. Labor Legislation. Prisons. The Negro. The immediate demands are so numerous as to require a booklet of 24 pages, published by the National Office, Socialist Party, Chicago, Ill. It is very hard to find a single reference to Socialism itself in the entire 24 pages of the Congressional Platform. In a letter of Moses Oppenheimer, published in "The Call," New York, April 14, 1919, we are told that under the opportunist leadership of men like Hillquit, Berger, Ghent, and Robert Hunter the struggle for reforms has gradually overshadowed and supplanted the demand for the abolition of wage slavery. The writer continues: "More and more it has resulted in petty tactics for vote catching. Berger's Old Age Pension bill was a glaring exhibit of opportunist incapacity. "Immediate demands are a tactical problem! Comrade Lee knows that the tactics change with changed conditions. There was a time when the opportunists expected to win the votes of the bulk of A. F. of L. workers. Hence the sugar coating of the Socialist pill and three years of Chester M. Wright in control of 'The Call.' "That is now ancient history. Lee could not repeat that chapter if he would. Nay, I believe he wouldn't if he could. "The powerful impulse from the movement in Europe makes itself felt over here. There is great need for reforming our front, for recasting our tactics. The old roar of opportunism led us nowhere, except to barren failure. If nothing else the experience with our Ten in Albany and our Seven in the City Hall should open our eyes. The time for picayune politics is irrevocably gone." In an article published in "The Proletarian," Detroit, April, 1919, page 4, Oakley Johnson thus criticises the Socialist policy of reformism as manifested in the immediate demands of the party platform: "Socialists have been dazed time and again by the glitter of reformism. In every country the question has been an ever-present one, and, as a result, the rainbows of reform have found many chasers in the ranks of the workers. The matter seemed, up to near the end of the war, to involve more an academic dispute on tactics than a principle of vital importance. There seemed too many good reasons why immediate demands for slight concessions should not be worked for, as a step in the direction of proletarian emancipation. "When, however, the Bolshevik revolution in Russia showed the stand taken by the reformist groups--a stand in defense of capitalism when capitalism was about to fall--the uncompromisingly revolutionary attitude of Marxian Socialists toward reform in the past was amply justified. And when, in the course of a few months, the reformistic Majority Socialists of Germany took exactly the same stand as the Kerensky crowd had taken, there could no longer be any doubt that the purpose of reform parties in capitalistic society is to function as the last obstacle to the victory of the proletariat.... "The fact is, there is a threefold objection to reformism as a working-class policy. In the first place it is a waste of effort, for the same zeal displayed by short-sighted reform-Socialists would, if applied in the propagation of straight Socialism, treble the strength of the movement in a few months' time. In the second place reformism obscures the real end in view, develops confusionists rather than revolutionists, gives capitalist political parties a chance to steal a few 'Socialist' planks and thus bid for the Socialist vote, and, worst of all, paves the way to such tragedies as are now occurring in Germany, where Liebknecht and Luxemberg have been murdered by their 'reform' comrades(?). And finally, in the third place, even if reform be the sole object in view, reformism is the poorest policy to follow to get it. A proletariat organized for revolutionary ends has no difficulty in securing reforms; it does not need to ask for them, for an awakened and apprehensive bourgeoisie will shower reforms upon them like the proverbial manna. If, indeed, workers want only reforms, why take the longest way around?" "The New Age," Buffalo, April 10, 1919, page 4, rejoices that the reformists of the Socialist Party, whose policy it is to pay more attention to the immediate demands than to the principles of Socialism, have now a serious rival in the New Labor Party: "Now that the New Labor Party is established (and in Chicago recently they polled more votes than the Socialists), we wonder what the old machine will do to combat this new octopus that threatens the big vote that used to belong to 'US.' Answer: Teach the working class real Socialism, the Socialism of Marx and Engels." The millionaire Socialist, William Bross Lloyd, of Chicago, has a very interesting article on "Socialist Platforms" in "The Communist," Chicago, April 1, 1919: "Confession is good for the soul. Let the Socialist Party of the World now stand up and confess that it bears a close resemblance to other political parties in that, like the others, its platforms are mostly bunk. "The difference between its platforms and others is that the others mean nothing while its platforms mean anything. The difference between Socialists and other politicians is that the Socialists mean what they think their platforms mean while the others mean only to get office. "This follows from the state of affairs we have had in the world since 1914, when Socialists became so diverse in words and deeds. Most of those on both sides are honest. The trouble is the vagueness of the words of the Socialist propaganda. "Socialist thought should be so clearly stated in its platforms that no one can doubt its meaning. This will eliminate from the party the reformers and compromisers who are such a source of weakness to the movement. It will also make clear to the workers that the movement really means something. "Take, for instance, the case of the party's attitude toward war. Socialists are said to be opposed to all wars--then come the exceptions: wars of 'defense,' 'invasion,' 'emancipation,' 'liberation,' and all the meaningless tribe. Confusion results. We have the German Majority Socialists, i.e., so-called Socialists, supporting their government in a war of 'defense' against 'invasion' and of the maintenance of their 'liberties'--God save the mark--against Russian autocracy.... "Without knowing the precise intention of those who drafted the St. Louis platform, I infer that it was partly written in the hope--if not belief--that the American workers would rise against their oppressors and the situation to which they have been subjected. It was a ringing declaration--a 'mass movement' of the delegates to the convention, later endorsed by the party membership. And as these delegates separated hot-foot for home, they got cold feet as they dispersed into the cold-footed isolation of the individual Socialist scattered here and there throughout this land. The platform contained no statement of individual duty, no individual program of action Each Socialist began to ask as his feet got colder and colder: 'Where are these "mass movements;" what are the others going to do?' The situation was made worse by the action of the National Executive Committee which told every Socialist to read the St. Louis platform and then act as his conscience dictated. Fine business for a revolutionary mass movement seeking to establish the co-operative commonwealth. No anarchist could be more individualistic. "The party's attitude toward war should be cleared up. It should definitely provide for mass action, and bind the individuals of the party as units of the party mass. This war platform should be followed by a Workers' Mobilization plan carefully worked out in detail and laying down action in response to each step taken in approach to war. For instance, on the introduction of the War Declaration in Congress, a one-day general strike just to show the rulers what was in store. On passage of the War Declaration a general strike, refusal to serve in the military forces, and such other measures as may be effective." "The Appeal to Reason" some years ago was the leading Socialist paper of the United States. In 1917 it came out in favor of war with the Central Powers. Either because of this, or because it violently assailed Bolshevism for a long while, it is now outlawed by the greater part of the Socialist Party. On the editorial page of "The Call," New York, April 24, 1919, we read: "Instead of the 'Appeal to Reason' asking for a pardon for Debs, it should ask a pardon from Debs." In "The Bulletin," Chicago, March 24, 1919, there appears on page 12 a bitter attack on "The Appeal" by no less a personage than Adolph Germer, National Secretary of the Socialist Party. In this official paper, issued by the National Office, Socialist Party, we read: "An Open Letter to 'The Appeal.' "_March_ 19, 1919. "Editor Appeal to Reason, "Girard, Kans.: "Sir.--In the issue of the 'Appeal to Reason,' March 15, 1919, you publish an appeal for $30,000 CASH, for an alleged 'Amnesty and Construction Fight.' "You give yourself credit for having 'won' the first skirmish in the amnesty fight and on the basis of this unfounded claim, you justify your appeal for $30,000 CASH. To make your appeal seem legitimate, you use such names as Eugene V. Debs, Kate Richards O'Hare, Rose Pastor Stokes and refer to 'many of our comrades.' I happen to be one of those who is facing a prison sentence and if you have included me in 'many of the comrades,' I want you to strike my name from your list. I loathe to be a 'comrade' of yours. You and your paper helped to create a hatred against the Socialist Party and you wilfully and maliciously lied about the National Executive Committee when it refused to follow a course that would put more of our members in prison. In other words, you and your paper must bear a part of the responsibility for the prosecution and persecution of the Socialists and it is rank hypocrisy for you to prate about your fight for amnesty. "Others may speak for themselves, but I scorn any effort that you make in my behalf. A thousand times would I rather spend the rest of my life behind prison bars than to have one word from you whom I hold responsible for the persecutions of which my colleagues and I are victims. "I look upon your appeal for $30,000 CASH, in the name of 'Amnesty,' as a sinister method of filling your own coffers. "You have lied to us and about us and betrayed us in the past and I resent your hypocritical prattle about amnesty. "Yours without respect, "Adolph Germer, "_National Secretary, Socialist Party_." Judging from the bitter attacks that Socialists are making upon each other, it would seem that there might be a little harmony in the party if their platforms were limited to the principles of Socialism and were not concerned with "immediate demands" to the almost total exclusion of Socialism itself. CHAPTER VII SOCIALISM IN PRACTICE Now that considerable has been said about Socialism in theory, we shall make the transition to Socialism in practice by quoting what may be called George Herron's dream of Socialist perfection. On page 28 of his booklet, "From Revolution to Revolution," we are told: "Perhaps we shall learn in time, before accentuated capitalism has intensified the universal misery of labor. Socialism is already on its way to the conquest of Europe. And it may be that we shall yet behold that glorious uprising of the universal peoples which is to begin man's real history, and the world's real creation--that united affirmation of the world's workers which Socialism foretells, knowing boundaries neither of nations nor sects nor factions, speaking one voice and working together as one man for one purpose, filling and cleansing the world with one glad revolutionary cry. When the peoples thus come, divine and omnipotent through co-operation, the raw materials of the world-life in their creative hands, no longer begging favors or reforms, no longer awed by the slave moralities or the slave religions that teach submission to their masters, but risen and regnant in the consciousness of their common inheritance and right in the earth and its fullness, of which they are the makers and preservers, then will the antagonisms and devastations of classes vanish forever, and the peace of good will become the universal fact." "Glorious," indeed, have been the uprisings of the Bolsheviki of Russia, the Communists of Hungary and Bavaria, and the Spartacans of Germany, all of whom are Socialists of the most pronounced type. These uprisings, instead of being the "beginnings of the world's real creation," are rather the beginnings of its destruction and ruination. The world's workers have been "wonderfully united" in Russia, Hungary, Bavaria and Germany since Socialism came into power--and no better proof need be given than the way in which they have been shooting each other down and trying to oust each other from office. Though the Socialists were not supposed to know "the boundaries of nations, sects or factions," but were to "speak one voice and work together as one man for one purpose," the Spartacans, it seems, would be better off if they had not only an imaginary boundary to separate barbarians of their type from the rest of civilization, but a barrier of mountains with heights towering in the clouds to divide Germany into two parts, in one of which the Spartacans could rest in peace, safe from the attacks of their beloved brethren of the Ebert-Scheidemann group. If the Communists of Bavaria had only built half a dozen Chinese walls around Munich, they might still be holding out against the Socialist army that besieged them and overcame them. Lenine's Government caused such rivers of blood to flow in Russia that it could well dispense with imaginary boundary lines to separate "Bolsheviki Land" from the domains of Socialist Siberia. "One glad revolutionary cry" was to go up from Socialists all over the world, but the cry is: "Workers in anti-Socialist countries, save us from our false, hypocritical, reactionary, murderous Marxian brethren!" Have the Socialist peoples the world over become truly "divine" by their attacks on God and all religions? Have they become "omnipotent" wherever they are in power--so omnipotent that law, order and decency are no longer needed? The "raw materials of the world were in their creative hands," and yet the Russian people were starving by the millions, and the longer the period since the world war, the worse things became in those vast domains once so famous for their natural resources, wheat, cattle, wool, minerals, oil and wood. The Socialist dream was one of "no submission to masters;" but, strange to say, the dictator, Lenine, rules "Bolsheviki-Land" just as he pleases; Bela Kun so ruled Hungary; while the supposedly democratic Soviets just issued decrees of murder or plunder, and no national representative body of all the Russians or of all the Hungarians ever seemed to meet. The Socialists of Russia, Hungary and Bavaria were indeed "regnant in the consciousness of their common inheritance," provided, of course, that by inheritance, confiscated property is meant. Yet although "antagonism and devastations of classes" were destined to "vanish forever, and the peace of good will become the universal fact," somehow or other certain "scientific reformers" forgot that there were such things as fools' paradises and overlooked the old saying that "all that glitters is not gold." In Chapters X and XI much more will be said about the Lenine-Trotzky dictatorship of Socialist Russia, the Bela Kun administration of Hungary, the criminal Socialist crew of Bavaria, and, of course, the fiery Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg group that at times in certain localities replaced the Ebert-Scheidemann government of Germany. In "The Call," New York, April 28, 1919, under the caption, "Socialist Government of Yucatan Grapples With the Binder Trust," we read: "We get vastly less news nowadays from our next-door neighbor, Mexico, than from Europe and Asia, therefore a 'Call' reporter, meeting a Comrade who has recently returned from the tropic peninsula, fell upon him and demanded news of the Socialist, labor and co-operative movements there. "'We are facing a very much tangled-up situation down there,' answered the man from Yucatan. He is W. Elkin Birch, a well-known American Socialist and business man, who has lived in Mexico several years. He came up to 'the States' on a business trip, and is returning to Yucatan, where he is prominent in the Socialist and co-operative movements. "'The forces of capitalism in Mexico are so strong, and the commercial system is so vicious,' he began, 'that I am not very optimistic about the future of Socialism in Yucatan.' "'But we thought that Alvarado had established almost a paradise down there,' cried the reporter. 'A year ago we learned that you had elected a complete Socialist administration in Yucatan; then, a few months since, we heard that it had not put any part of the Socialist program into effect. We wondered what was the reason, but hardly any news comes through now.' "'Alvarado did work a wonderful transformation, and much of the good he did remains. It is true, we have an administration of Socialists, but we find that that is a very different thing from a Socialist administration. Yucatan is still in the grip of the commercial interests, and the game is blocked at every move. As fast as the radicals devise some means of stopping the robbery of the people by special privilege, the privileged interests find a way of circumventing the radicals by apparently yielding, but really maintaining their domination. "'Alvarado took over the Reguladora, through which the henequem, Yucatan's principal product, is sold for export; he took over the railroads, and the line of steamships running to the States.... "'The government still controls the Reguladora, but, as I said, it is in a deadlock with the powers who control its market. We still have government-owned railroads in Yucatan, but government ownership merely takes the public utility out of the hands of private capital and places it under the control of a political organization. And private capital already has secured control of that political organization, and graft and robbery are running riot. Government ownership of railroads has increased the cost of operation 100 per cent. The payrolls are packed with friends of officials and friends of friends. If a man can control a few votes, they reason, why shouldn't he have a job? What's the railroad for, if not to provide jobs? The folks down there are very much like people in other countries, you see.'.... "'But why doesn't the Socialist administration take control of industry and commerce, and put the interests out of power?' demanded the reporter, determined to uphold the faith in the face of disappointing facts. "'Well, of course, that sounds easy; but Socialists are just people, after all, and when a Socialist gets into office he finds it quite as hard as ordinary folks to resist the subtle influences that surround officials. A man can't be sure that he is a real Socialist until he is put to the test of being a part of the government. The commercial interests offer him opportunities to make money; they give him and his family social advantages. He begins to see that capitalism has its good points, after all.' Mr. Birch smiled half-satirically, half-tolerantly. 'Some members of the Assembly have made fortunes during their year of office. One member, who handles concessions, illegal and otherwise, has cleared over a million pesos." The February, 1918, issue of the "International Socialist Review," Chicago, was suppressed by the authorities of the United States government, and, as a consequence, it is probable that not very many copies are in circulation. The author of "The Red Conspiracy," however, has in his possession a copy of this edition, in which there is a very interesting article, beginning on page 414, entitled, "Your Dream Come True." "A Land of practical Socialism in active operation. "Nearly 4,000,000 people without one cent of money in circulation; and where no man owns a foot of land or the tools of production--trades unionism, industrialism, single tax and socialism all rolled into one. "Ninety thousand square miles without a policeman; where gold rings are placed in the public markets in large baskets, to be had for the asking. "A work day of two hours for the strong; of play for the young, middle-aged and old. A land where there is plenty of candy for the kiddies, playgrounds for all; and from which the spectre of want has departed. "Land of peon-slaves awakened from centuries of capitalist misrule to the glories of co-operation, without master or landlord. "This is no dream, but an actualized verity right here in America--in southern Mexico. Shades of Thomas Moore, Edward Bellamy and William Morris arise and rejoice, for your wildest visions have become facts. "Across the miles I stretch my hand in fellowship with Mexico's great democrat--Zapata. Don't forget that name. The capitalist press has not told much about him--for obvious reasons. He is putting into practice the basic principles of co-operation. The golden rule is being translated into action. "General Zapata now absolutely controls 90,000 square miles, comprising parts of Morelo, Jalisco, Chapas, Quintana Roo and Tabasco. This land is well under cultivation. The population (on a rough estimate, without the advantages of a scientific census) is from three to four millions. The inhabitants are nearly all peons, who for centuries had existed in a degrading state of slavery. More than ninety-five per cent. can neither read nor write. "Zapata's control began in 1910, but only in the three years past has the co-operative system been placed on its present basis. The greatest development has been made during the past two years. "Methods of propaganda have been simple and effective. Direct action is the keynote. The people awoke to a knowledge of their slavery and the realization of their heritage--and took what belonged to them. The only message sent to the people was somewhat similar to the I. W. W. preamble, but much shorter than that classic document. "Having aroused the slaves to realize their status by saying in substance: the rich unjustly possess the land; we want all that is ours and are not willing that any man should possess that which is not his--Zapata would lead his army into some rich valley and simply dispossess the wealthy 'owners.' Then the peons on the land would be given the use of the land. Not one man in the ninety thousand square miles holds a title to one foot of land. After getting the new territory, the land was cultivated and the district organized. "When strong enough the army--the propaganda branch of the revolution--held another convention in some other fertile valley and benevolently assimilated some other opulent set of slave-driving usurpers of the land.... "Every citizen of each community is given a little brass citizenship tag. It is necessary to show this only in strange towns. It is his passport for whatever he needs for food, clothing and shelter. Each person goes into the stores and gets what he needs for the simple asking. "We have heard endless discussions as to the nature of the future medium of exchange. Many volumes have been written on the subject. Zapata isn't worrying over these problems. He is leaving them where they belong--to the philosophers. There isn't any medium of exchange in Zapata's land. Why should there be on a free earth? If a man wanted ten pairs of sandals or shoes he could have them, but why would he want them? He can always go--in Zapata's country--to any store and get a pair when he needs one. So with all other provisions. In practice, in the few years the plan has been in operation, the peons have not abused the privilege. They are producers, and realize it. Why rob themselves? There is not one idea of profit in all that 90,000 square miles, and human nature is just as it was when Adam delved and Eve spun. "Travelers are not being admitted freely just now, in these unsettled times, because of the lying reports carried away by spying emissaries of capitalism. But when one is given permission to visit the country, his route is marked out and listed on the passport given him. He pays the government and then is provided freely on all the travels over the designated route. "No women or children are to be found in any line of manual labor in mill, field or factory. "The young and middle aged men alone work. They work from one and one-half to three hours a day. Some will work more steadily for a week and then go away to some town for two or three weeks to enjoy their country. For the first time in history the workers have a country that is really theirs. Workers? Yes, for all are workers. There are no landlords or 'bosses' and overseers to prod them into exhausting toil. And these people are simple enough to believe that man should enjoy life--that all people should find pleasure in living. "Of course there are foremen and superintendents in the administration of industry. But they receive no wages, just what they need to live on, and every man, woman and child gets that. The men will work two hours and then go out to play hand-ball and other games in the plaza or courts. "When the fields need attention, men go from ranch to ranch wherever help is needed. In like manner all industry is carried on. "One example will show something of how matters are managed. One big sugar refinery formerly employed 2,500 men, working them fourteen hours a day. Employees now work two hours a day. The refinery still is in operation fourteen hours daily. There are seven shifts of workers. All told, there are 25,000 employees of that refinery. All are happy and have all of the food, clothing and shelter the land affords. The children have big sticks of candy as large as they can carry--and there is no talk of conservation of supplies anywhere. "Access to the land and co-operation did it. There isn't any regular freight and passenger service. The trains operate as required. Production for profit has ceased on 90,000 square miles of this planet and the mills and mines are run to manufacture products for use only. When goods are needed anywhere, the trains haul them. Occasionally a few hundred men, women and children will be taken into the mountains by the trainload for a few days' outing. It is all a part of living--no fares to pay.... "The churches are being used as schools, for lecture centers, as play houses and for similar useful purposes. There is no liquor sold. This is not the result of any decree or election. The people had so little desire for booze that they quit its manufacture.... "It is not to be inferred that Zapata has solved all of the problems of society. Everything can't be done at once, even by the magic wand of his propaganda. Still, his achievements make the genii of Alladin's lamp look pretty small and cheap. In three years every worker has been united into one industrial union; all titles to land and ownership of the tools of production swept away; labor's hours shortened to the minimum; the entire population fed, clothed and sheltered--all through cooperation on a free earth." This is the kind of "stuff" that is served up to the "learned," "scientific Socialists," who place so much confidence in the leaders who are supposed to be honest and worthy of leading them into the Marxian Paradise. This is the way they spoke of "Socialism" in Mexico some years ago, and today they are speaking of it in Russia in much the same way. Act the Second Scene--A large photo of Zapata--4 by 6 inches, in "The Call," the Socialist paper of New York City, April 24, 1919. Under the photo there is the following inscription: "General Emiliano Zapata, Mexico's apostle of terrorism, and recently officially reported to have been killed by Carranza's troops, was a former plantation stirrup-boy, who, at the zenith of his rebel power, gained temporary control of Mexico City. Twice since 1910, when he began his revolt in Morelos, he and his Indian followers took brief possession of the capital. For nine years he ravaged southern Mexico, co-operating for a time in 1914 with Villa. He was the most implacable enemy of peaceful reconstruction through several regimes. Poor, uneducated, primitive but magnetic, Zapata was the leader of Mexico's half-savage Indians, in whose power he planned to place control of the country. Toward the last he was little more than a hunted renegade, and is reported to have been killed by strategy of troops operating under General Pablo Gonzales in Morelos." The wood-cut of Zapata appears in connection with an article by Jack Neville, part of which is hereby quoted: "Cuautla, Mexico, April 23.--The death of Emiliano Zapata removes Mexico's most ruthless destructionist and implacable enemy of peaceful regeneration. "Now, on the wreckage of his empire, where the rebel chief laughed at civilization and played his huge joke on 100,000 confiding workers, General Pablo Gonzalez is placing firm underpinning for freedom and progress. "Here in the world's richest garden spot, where exploited humanity has been kept poorest, and where Zapata 'gave' his half-savage followers the land only to commandeer all crops--here the peon is for the first time in centuries enjoying the fruits of his toil and supporting instead of hating government." The next day, April 25th, 1919. "The Call" published another article of Neville's under the title, "Mexican Peons Rejoice in First Taste of Freedom." Only a small part of the article will be quoted: "I stepped into a pulque-reeking cantina. A group of former Zapatistas invited me to join them--to have a glass. It was the open sesame. They chattered like children. Presented me with cornhusk cigarettes; told me tales of Zapata; his perfidy, his ruthlessness. "'Not more than 800 rebels were yet in arms when Zapata was killed,' they said. These, they explained, had ousted Zapata from leadership because he had refused to divide the loot with them. They told me of Zapata's former army of 30,000, blood-letting surianos and ayetes (unarmed men carrying ropes) who formed the rear guard to carry away the loot.... "Alongside the old church, where the patriot Morelos had more than a century ago made a successful stand against the Spaniards, a train was disgorging families returning to their homes, now that Zapata was gone. "A little man stepped out--the bishop of Cuernavaca, coming back to his diocese under the conciliatory program of Don Pablo after eight years' exile. "I rode into the country with Colonel Sanchez Neira and talked with the workmen in the field. They crowded round to pose for pictures. "They laughed and sang while they worked. "We rode to the headquarters of one of the 2,000,000 acre haciendas. The gigantic sugar mill, formerly worth more than $1,000,000, was a shell filled with debris. We rode to another mill. The same! Thirty-seven of them. All ruined, wrecked wantonly under Zapata's rule. "In the village of Youtopec I drank lemonade with Gen. Pilar Sanchez, while Zapata's captured band serenaded us. We rode down the Inter-Oceanic railway and viewed the right of way, strewn with wrecked rolling stock. We saw utterly demolished villages, the work of Zapata and communism. "I saw a bridge where train after train was dynamited, where Zapatistas had ruthlessly executed more than three thousand peaceful men, women and children passengers." From these articles published in "The Call," the great Socialist paper of New York City, it seems that the poverty-stricken, perpetually begging staff of Hillquit's paper does not relish the Chicago brand of Socialism described so beautifully in the "International Socialist Review." The more "talented" and "progressive" "evolutionists" near the shore of Lake Michigan have many a year's hard work to perform before they can sufficiently develop the brains of their backward chums and brethren on the lower east side of New York City. It takes editors like Kerr, Haywood, the Marcys and all the Bohns on the staff of the "Review" to reveal the true glories of Socialism. As recently as February, 1920, it could safely be said that the principles of Socialism had never been put into full operation in any country. The nearest approach to a truly Socialist state is Bolshevist Russia, that strife-ridden land of crime and bloodshed. The penalty paid for the foolish attempt has already been a dreadful one. How much greater it will be, as time goes on, nobody knows. The Socialists of America have hailed Russian Bolshevism as true Socialism; but, no doubt, as the evil consequences of Lenine's Red rule become more widely known and more universally feared, or if, even on the low ground of materialistic economics, the attempt fails, the slippery Marxians will try to prove that Bolshevism was not Socialism after all, since the Russian government was a dictatorship, with the principles of Socialism never fully applied. We should add that even if the Russian dictatorship succeeds in realizing the mere economic success which seems to be the height of its ambition, this will not prove to be an argument in favor of Socialism, but a terrible indictment of it. For the road the dictatorship is now taking, which indeed offers it the only possible hope of even a passable economic success, is the barren, heartless, unspiritual, materialistic tyranny of machine-like "industrialism" which the I. W. W. represents. In the two chapters immediately following, VIII and IX, the reader will learn something of the loss of all moral standards and the cruel, lawless violence to which the atheistic, anarchistic materialism of I. W. W.'ism leads; and will also find that Bolshevism is already committed to this system as the only economic solution of its bloody experiment. Is it worth while? In Chapters X and XI the reader will face some of the appalling details of the blood, violence and despair which have been tyrannically imposed upon Russia's groaning millions for the sake of an experiment which leads to nothing but the pagan barbarism of I. W. W.'ism. Is it worth while? Even if at last they are able to produce and distribute enough to clothe and feed themselves, can human beings be happy in such a state? Is this the dream of the dreamer come true? Again, the hope of a bare economic solution of the question of bread and butter is possible in Russia only through such an absolute and tyrannous dictatorship as has been established, under which the reluctant and disorganized proletariat can be forced back to work, whether they wish or no, at the point of the bayonets of the Red Guard. Would the American working-man think this worth while in America? It has been said that the Lenine desperadoes are determined to win an economic success even at the cost of forcing Russian labor to toil under literal military conscription. If they do this, they may succeed--economically merely. But does American labor think such an experiment _here_ would be worth what it costs? Furthermore, in the Russian land of Socialistic experiment the people, left to themselves by the other nations, cannot find peace among themselves. Why should there be peace as long as any manhood is left in Russia to lift up its hand out of its despair against its Bolshevist oppressors? Is civil war worth while--for such a barren result? Finally, if the proletarian tyrants wear all Russia down until a spirit of resistance is left in no breast, still will there be no peace; for, as will be found quoted elsewhere in this book, Lenine declares that Socialism cannot endure in a world half Socialistic and half Capitalistic, so that his wretched Russian slaves seem likely to be dragged into a war against the rest of the world to help out the crazy experiment of domination by the proletariat. Is it worth while? CHAPTER VIII THE I. W. W. The I. W. W., or the so-called "Industrial Workers of the World," whose policy may be summed up in the words, "I Want to Wreck," and who in derision are termed the "I Won't Works," the "Imported Weary Willies" and the "Wobblies," enjoy the unenviable reputation of being classed among the most insurrectionary, impious and infamous workers of the world to-day. This industrial union, also known as the One Big Union, is the bitter rival of the American Federation of Labor. Joseph J. Ettor, in his I. W. W. pamphlet, "Industrial Unionism," page 5, speaking of the fear that people have of the I. W. W. says: "Yes, gentle reader, our ideas, our principles and object are certainly dangerous and menacing, applied by a united working class would shake society and certainly those who are now on top sumptuously feeding upon the good things they have not produced would feel the shock." The I. W. W. was organized at a secret conference in Chicago, January 2, 1905, attended by 26 of the most radical Socialists in the country, including Eugene V. Debs, William D. Haywood, William E. Trautman, Thomas J. Haggerty, Daniel MacDonald, Charles H. Moyer, Charles O. Sherman, Frank Bohn and A. M. Simons. Daniel De Leon was prominent at the first convention, June 27, 1905, and for three years afterward, the organization being founded on his theory that the Socialistic revolution would not come by voting but by a violent seizure of the industries of the country by Socialistic workmen industrially organized. "The One Big Union Monthly," March 1, 1919, page 4, referring to the hungry and desperate masses tells us: "In some countries these revolting, desperate masses may come out victorious, and establish a rule of their own, like the Russian Bolsheviki, only to find that they will have to keep on running society on private ownership basis, until industrial organization of the workers is so far advanced that it can take over the responsibility. There is no way in which the masses can escape industrial unionism. What they do not want to do now at our prompting, they will have to do later of their own initiative, driven by economic necessity. Our new society is bound to come. It will be firmly established in ten years if we are energetic. It will take longer if we are indifferent. We cannot stand still socially, because there is no footing before we reach the bottom. We cannot go back, any more than the butterfly can again become a larva. We must go forward to Industrial Democracy." On page 23 of the same issue of "The One Big Union Monthly" we are informed that Industrial Unionism is International: "Industrial unionism arises out of and is modeled after modern capitalism. Unlike trade unionism, it is not born of the capitalism of fifty years ago. Industrial unionism recognizes that capitalism is not only interindustrial, so to speak, but also international. That just as it binds industries together by means of machine processes and financial investments, so also does capitalism tend to bind nations together. Industrial unionism follows the same trend. It, too, is not only interindustrial but also international. Industrial unionism seeks to organize the industrial workers of the world just as capitalism seeks to exploit them. Industrial unionism is spreading wherever international capitalism exists. Like international capitalism, industrial unionism knows no boundaries, color, race, creed or sex. As international capitalism knows only profit, industrial unionism knows only the industrial exploitation by which profit is possible. Industrial unionism organizes to make industrial exploitation an impossibility. And capitalism is its most valued assistant." Ettor, in "Industrial Unionism," page 21, tells us, that the I. W. W. does not organize by trades, but by industries: "All the workers in any plant, factory, mine, mill or any given industry in a given locality organize in one Local Industrial Union. All the Local Industrial Unions of a given general industry are banded together in the National Industrial Union. The National Industrial Unions are banded again stronger in the Industrial Department and then all Departments, six in all, are brought under one head, the General Administration of the I. W. W. One Big Union of all workers, welded together in such a manner that, imbued with the war cry: 'an injury to one is an injury to all,' all its members can act together in fighting the common enemy." Explaining organization by industries rather than by trades, "The One Big Union Monthly," March 1, 1919, page 25, takes for instance the stockyards: "We do not know how many crafts there are in the stockyards, but there are many. According to the old style, these crafts would be organized each by itself, the carpenters belonging to the national union of carpenters, the engineers to the national union of engineers, the butchers to the national union of butchers, etc. It also belongs to old style unionism to leave the unskilled workers unorganized. Our method would be to organize all the workers in a plant, as a branch of the Stockyard Workers' Industrial Union. This would imply the cancelling of trade distinctions and craft lines. As against the employer we would face him not as butchers, laborers, carpenters or engineers, but as stockyard workers, no matter whether we are office clerks or laborers, or carpenters, or engineers. This is what we mean with industrial unionism. The various branches would combine into district organizations if necessary, and all of them together would form the Stockyard Workers' Industrial Union as part of the Industrial Workers of the World. By being thus organized we hope to be able to carry on the fight locally, or by districts, or on a national scale with better chance of success, than if we were split up in a great number of unions in each plant, with little or no contact with one another. The advantages of the one big union idea are so apparent that no honest worker will, in earnest, contradict us." The famous Preamble to the platform of the I. W. W. throws a startling light upon this revolutionary industrial union, which has, within recent years, been getting a very strong hold on immigrants from Europe: "The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people, and the few who make up the employing class have all the good things of life. "Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery of production and abolish the wage system. "We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever-growing power of the employing class. "These conditions can be changed and the interests of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one, an injury to all. "Instead of the conservative motto, 'A fair day's wages for a fair day's work,' we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, 'Abolition of the wage system.' "It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for the every-day struggle with the capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming a structure of the new society within the shell of the old." Giovannitti, editor of the New York City Italian Socialist publication, "Il Proletario," one of the official Socialist organs enumerated in the "Proceedings[9] of the 1910 National Congress of the Socialist Party," writing in the April 5, 1913, edition of his paper, says: "The aim of the Socialists and of the Syndicalists is precisely that of dispossessing the middle class by transferring property to the working class. "We shall take possession of the industries for three very simple reasons: because we need them, because we desire them, and because we have the power to take them. "Whether it is just or unjust, moral or immoral, it is no concern to us. We shall waste no time whatever in providing the validity of our legal titles, yet, if it will be necessary, after the dispossession will have been accomplished, we shall engage a couple of lawyers and judges to adjust the contracts and to render the act perfectly legal and respectable. So, too, if it will be necessary, we shall find a couple of most learned bishops to sanctify it. These matters can always be arranged--all that is strong and powerful becomes in time just and moral--and for this reason, we Syndicalists maintain that the social revolution is not a question of necessity and justice, but of necessity and strength." "The New Unionism," by Tridon, on page 112, informs us that Arturo Giovannitti was, in turn, a minter, a bookkeeper, a theological student, a mission preacher and a tramp. Ettor, in "Industrial Unionism," page 15, speaking of the I. W. W. principles of morality, says: "New conceptions of Right and Wrong must generate and permeate the workers. We must look on conduct and actions that advance the social and economic position of the working class as Right, ethically, legally, religiously, socially and by every other measurement. That conduct and those actions which aid, help to maintain and give comfort to the capitalist class, we must consider as Wrong by every standard." "The New Unionism," page 104, gives us Vincent St. John's statement of the methods and tactics employed by the I. W. W., of which he has been a prominent leader: "As a revolutionary organization the Industrial Workers of the World aims to use any and all tactics that will get the results sought with the least expenditure of time and energy. The tactics used are determined solely by the power of the organization to make good in their use. The question of 'right' and 'wrong' does not concern us. No terms made with an employer are final. All peace so long as the wage system lasts is but an armed truce. At any favorable opportunity the struggle for more control of industry is renewed.... "The organization does not allow any part to enter into time contracts with the employers. It aims where strikes are used, to paralyze all branches of the industry involved, when the employers can least afford a cessation of work--during the busy season and when there are rush orders to be filled." In the Socialist Labor Party paper, "Weekly People," New York, February 10, 1912, the following article by Arthur Giovannitti shows the part that the I. W. W. is expected to take in bringing about the Marxian rebellion through the instrumentality of a general strike: "The future of Socialism lies only in the general strike, not merely a quiet political strike, but one that once started should go fatally to its end, i.e., armed insurrection, and the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.... The task of revolution is not to construct the new society, but to demolish the old one, and, therefore, its first aim should be at the complete destruction of the existing state, so as to render it absolutely powerless to react and re-establish itself.... The I. W. W. must develop itself as the new legislature and the new executive body of the land, undermine the existing one, and gradually absorb the functions of the state until it can entirely substantiate it through the only means it has, the revolution." On May 1, 1919, plans for a nation-wide strike on July 4th were disclosed by I. W. W. orators at a mass meeting in the workingmen's hall, 119 South Throop Street, Chicago. It was Simms, a colored man, who gave the details of the strike plan: "The workmen will lay down their tools on July 4th, and on the morning of July 5th not one will take them up again.... "It will be the opening of the social revolution. Moreover, not one workman will take up his tools again until every prisoner of the workers now incarcerated in the capitalistic prisons is released." "The One Big Union Monthly," March 1, 1919, page 22, declares: "Socialism rears new institutions. It weaves a new fabric for our social life. In Russia it is the Soviets; in America it is the One Big Union. This fabric is proletarian only. Within its limits the Socialist Revolutionist halts. This new organism--this One Big Union--may, or may not seek Democracy. Democracy is merely a method of governing. If that method leads to Socialist goals it will be followed. Otherwise, we will seek further for our avenue. But the great end is proletarianism. It is the social ownership of the means of production. It is the creation of a society where all classes will be melted into one, and where the class war will soften into an all-race proletarianism." Another I. W. W. publication, "The Evolution of Industrial Democracy," page 40, speaking of government after the "Wobblies" get into power, goes still further: "Government, as now understood will disappear--there being no servile class to be held in subjection--but in its place will be an administration of affairs." Relative to property rights in the future, "The Evolution of Industrial Democracy," page 39, informs us: "Rights of inheritance would disappear with the right to hold private property in the lands, tools and machinery of production. Any accumulation by the individual that might be used for exploitation would pass to the collectivity at the death of the holder. Society would be the heir of the individual and, vice versa, the individuals would be the heirs of society. The right to freely function at the machines and enjoy the social value of his toil would guarantee the worker a full competence." As regards compensation for work in accordance with the I. W. W. plan, we are told on page 39: "Compensation in the industries would necessarily be upon the basis of the 'man-day'--the average production of an average man in an average day when working under average conditions--and in those industries not of an actual productive nature, such as 'public service,' etc., the man-day must prevail there also (being based upon the average production of all the industries served) for the reason that no man could be induced to serve for less than that average--to do so being to confess himself an inferior being--and to compel him to serve for less would be to set up a new slavery, which the moral sense of the new community could not endure." Giovannitti, in "Il Proletario," New York, April 5, 1913, gives a lesson in sabotage to the Italian Socialists and members of the I. W. W.: "We are not yet sufficiently strong to restore them [i.e., the instruments of production] to ourselves, it is true, but it is also true that we cannot allow any opportunity to escape of reaping any advantage from them. "Thus, if to-morrow we shall be justified in wrenching from capitalism all the industries, why, when it is a question of life or death for us to win or to lose a strike, is it not just to remove a screw, derange a wheel, break a thread, or commit, in any way whatever, an act of sabotage on a machine which otherwise would become the very beginning of our defeat in the hands of the scabs? "We cannot understand how it is still possible while we have a right to all the produce of our work, we have not an entire right to a part of it." Other illustrations of sabotage may be of interest to the reader. The following one is taken from the Chicago "Syndicalist," February 15, 1913: "A few drops of sulphuric acid placed on top of a pile of woolen or cotton goods never stops going down. "Two decks of cards in a grain separator cover the screen and cause the grain to vanish out of the blower. "A piece of iron dropped in a crucible full of glass will eat through it. Crucibles are made of graphite and cost $40. "A handful of salt in paint will allow a good-looking job for a day or two, but when dry will fall off in sheets. "Maclay Hoyne, Chicago's district attorney, is analyzing a spontaneous fire powder that allows the user to be miles away when it breaks forth. "Castor oil capsules dissolved in varnish destroy the ability of the latter to dry. The job must be washed down and started all over again. "The suffragettes of England have significantly notified their opponents that a fire in every shire was the way the word was flashed in days gone by." Pages 40 to 48 of "The New Unionism," by Tridon, furnish us with some more barbarous examples of sabotage: "We may distinguish three forms of sabotage: "1. Active sabotage which consists in the damaging of goods or machinery. "2. Open-mouthed sabotage, beneficial to the ultimate consumer, and which consists in exposing or defeating fraudulent commercial practices. "3. Obstructionism or passive sabotage, which consists in carrying out orders literally, regardless of consequences. "If you are an engineer you can, with two cents' worth of powdered stone or a pinch of sand, stall your machine, cause a loss of time or make expensive repairs necessary. If you are a joiner or woodworker, what is simpler than to ruin furniture without your boss noticing it, and thereby drive his customers away? A garment worker can easily spoil a suit or a bolt of cloth; if you are working in a department store, a few spots on a fabric cause it to be sold for next to nothing; a grocery clerk, by packing up goods carelessly, brings about a smashup; in the woolen or the haberdashery trade a few drops of acid on the goods you are wrapping will make a customer furious ... an agricultural laborer may sow bad seed in wheat fields," etc. "With two cents' worth of a certain stuff, used by one who knows, a locomotive can be made absolutely useless." "The first thing to do before going out on strike is to cripple all the machinery. Then the contest is even between employer and worker, for the cessation of work really stops all life in the capitalists' camp. Are bakery workers planning to go on strike? Let them pour in the ovens a few pints of petroleum or of any other greasy or pungent matter. After that, soldiers or scabs may come and bake bread. The smell will not come out of the tiles for three months. Is a strike in sight in steel mills? Pour sand or emery into the oil cups." "The electrical industry is one of the most important industries, as an interruption in the current means a lack of light and power in factories; it also means a reduction in the means of transportation and a stoppage of the telegraph and telephone systems. How can the power be cut off? By the curtailing in the mine the output of the coal necessary for feeding the machinery or stopping the coal cars on their way to the electrical plants. If the fuel reaches its destination what is simpler than to set the pockets on fire and have the coal burn in the yards instead of the furnaces? It is child's play to put out of work the elevators and other automatic devices which carry coal to the fire room. To put boilers out of order use explosives or silicates or a plain glass bottle which thrown on the glowing coals hinders the combustion and clogs up the smoke exhausts. You can also use acids to corrode boiler tubes; acid fumes will ruin cylinders and piston rods. A small quantity of some corrosive substance, a handful of emery will be the end of oil cups. When it comes to dynamos or transformers, short circuits and inversion of poles can be easily managed. Underground cables can be destroyed by fire, water or explosives," etc. "The New Unionism," the book from which the above quotations were taken and which was purchased by the author of "The Red Conspiracy" at the I. W. W. headquarters, 1001 West Madison Street, Chicago, in the latter part of the spring of 1919, also informs us on page 123: "As far as sabotage is concerned, all the I. W. W. speakers and the I. W. W. press countenance it although they steadily warn the workers against the indiscriminate and unsocial use of that weapon of warfare." CHAPTER IX INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD IN ACTION Members of the I. W. W. and Socialists who advocate sabotage or get into trouble in one way or another, especially in strikes, are often put into prison for their revolutionary talk or their violent methods. The One Big Industrial Union and, of course, the Socialist Party then proclaim their innocence, collect funds for their defense, and urge all the working men of our country to strike in behalf of amnesty for "poor, persecuted, noble protagonists of the cause of labor jailed because freedom of speech and liberty of action are no longer tolerated by the government." Thus on page 409 of the February, 1918, edition of the "International Socialist Review," which was suppressed by the United States Government, we read: "Socialists Demand Fair Trial for Indicted I. W. W.--In a declaration adopted by its National Executive Committee the Socialist Party calls for a fair and unprejudiced trial for the indicted members of the Industrial Workers of the World. The demand says: "'The Socialist Party repeats its declaration of support of all economic organizations of the working class and declares the lynching, deportation, prosecution and persecution of the Industrial Workers of the World is an attack upon every toiler in America, and we now call attention to the fact that the charges of incendiarism, the burning of crops and forests and of vicious destruction of property, made by the public press against the I. W. W., have been proven pure fabrications when put to legal test. The Socialist Party has always extended its aid, material and moral, to organized labor wherever and whenever it has been attacked by the capitalist class, and this without reference to form of organization or special policies; therefore we pledge our support to the Industrial Workers of the World now facing trial in Chicago and elsewhere, and demand for them a fair and unprejudiced trial and urge our members to use every effort to assist the Industrial Workers of the World by familiarizing the public with the real facts, to overcome the falsehoods and misinformation with which the capitalist press has poisoned and prejudiced the public mind and judgment against these workers, who are now singled out for destruction, just as other labor organizations and leaders have been singled out for destruction by the same capitalist forces in the past." The Socialist Party, in pledging its support to the Industrial Workers of the World, pledges its support to a revolutionary organization like itself. "The One Big Union Monthly," March 1, 1919, page 4, under the caption, "The Red Tidal Wave," says: "With great satisfaction we record the fact that the red revolutionary wave is encircling the globe, sweeping away the last remnants of feudal rubbish from the body social, and some of the capitalistic. The world war acted like a vigorous laxative on the stomach of the nations." "The Rebel Worker," an I. W. W. paper of New York City, in its issue of April 15, 1919, after printing the word, "Revolution" in the heaviest type all the way across the paper, publishes an article on the first page entitled "Terrible Days Ahead in the United States." "'The United States is in the grip of a bloody revolution! Thousands of workers are slaughtered by machine guns in New York City! Washington is on fire! Industry is at a standstill and thousands of workers are starving! The government is using the most brutal and repressive measures to put down the revolution! Disorganization, crime, chaos, rape, murder and arson are the order of the day--the inevitable results of social revolution!' "The above is what we may expect to see on the front pages of what few newspapers survive the upheaval. No one who has the interest of the working class at heart wants to see such a revolution. But whether those interested in the working class want to see such a revolution or not, there are powerful forces in the United States that are making for just such a catastrophe. The Industrial Workers of the World has in the past and is now using all of its energies to avert such a cataclysmic debacle. It is not yet too late to avoid this terrible and sanguinary strife--provided that the I. W. W. is allowed to carry out its program of organizing and educating the workers for the purpose of taking control of, and operating industry and giving to those who work the full social value of the product of their labor." "The New Solidarity," the Chicago organ of the I. W. W., in its edition of April 19, 1919, publishes on the editorial page an article entitled, "When We Are Ready," part of which is hereby quoted: "Frequently the question is asked how the proletariat is to know when they are ready for the revolution, how it would be possible to know a sufficient number were class conscious enough for the revolutionary change. This question is asked with the idea that there must be a periodical counting of noses, and that little or nothing may be done except educate until an absolute majority has been obtained.... "It matters not how many members of the working class do or do not stand up to be counted for or against capitalism, just as soon as the organized workers can overthrow that system of industry they will do it and not wait to be counted.... "To wait for majorities at all times is to enervate and emasculate the working class movement. To constantly attack, and attack for the purpose of taking and administering industry for the workers by action on the job and in the Union halls, is to strengthen and encourage the workers in their task, and is the plan that must ultimately win the age-long struggle against exploitation." On September 5, 1917, the I. W. W. headquarters, 1001 West Madison street, Chicago, and the Socialist headquarters were raided by the United States authorities. On March 10, 1919, Solicitor General Lamar of the Post Office Department submitted a memorandum to the Senate propaganda committee stating that the I. W. W., anarchists, socialists and others were "perfecting an amalgamation with one object--the overthrow of the government of the United States by means of a bloody revolution and the establishment of a Bolshevik Republic." Mr. Lamar said his conclusion was based upon information contained in seized mail matter. Accompanying the memorandum were several hundred excerpts from the mail matter. The solicitor named the following organs, published in the interest of the I. W. W. or Bolshevist movements: "The New Solidarity," English, weekly, Chicago; "One Big Union," English, monthly, Chicago; "Industrial Unionist," English, weekly, Seattle; "California Defense Bulletin," English, weekly, San Francisco; "The Rebel Worker," English, bi-monthly, New York; "La Neuva Solidaridad," Spanish, weekly, Chicago; "Golos Truzenta," Russian, weekly, Chicago; "Il Nuovo Proletario," Italian, weekly, Chicago; "Nya Varlden," Swedish, weekly, Chicago; "Der Industrialer Arbiter," Jewish, weekly, Chicago; "Probuda," Bulgarian, weekly, Chicago; "A. Fels Badulas," Hungarian, weekly, Chicago. After referring to the excerpts from the seized mail matter, the solicitor general's memorandum said in part: "This propaganda is being conducted with such regularity that its magnitude can be measured by the bold and outspoken statements contained in these publications and the efforts made therein to inaugurate a nation-wide reign of terror and overthrow of the government. "In classifying these statements, they are submitted in a major or general class as follows: I. W. W., anarchistic, radical-socialistic and socialist. It will be seen from these excerpts and it is indeed significant that this is the first time in the history of the so-called radical movement in the United States that the radical elements have found a common cause (Bolshevism) in which they can all unite. The I. W. W., anarchistic, socialists, radical and otherwise, in fact all dissatisfied elements, particularly the foreign element, are perfecting amalgamation with one object, and with one object in view, namely, the overthrow of the government of the United States by the means of a bloody revolution and the establishment of a Bolshevik republic. "The I. W. W. is perhaps most actively engaged in spreading this propaganda and has at its command a large field force known as recruiting agents, subscription agents, etc., who work unceasingly in the furtherance of 'the cause!' "This organization publishes at least five newspapers in the English language and nine in foreign languages. This list comprises only official papers of the organization and does not take into account the large number of free lance papers published in the interest of the above organization." In the April 19, 1913, edition of "Solidarity," the eastern organ of the I. W. W., we are informed that "among other diseases common to all nations and particularly prevalent in the United States is respect for law and order." The same edition of the paper extends greetings to "all Rebels" from its new home in Cleveland. During the 1913 Paterson strike, which was managed by the I. W. W., Quinlan, one of the leaders, declared on May 17th: "Paterson is a dangerous place to live in just at this time, no matter in what direction you are looking. The longer the strike lasts, the stronger and more bitter and the madder the workers are growing. Out of it all we want to build up an organization that will be able to fight efficiently, and fight to win--to fight to win, if necessary, by dying. "And we are going to win this strike or Paterson will be wiped off the map. If the strike is not won Paterson will be a howling wilderness and a graveyard industrially, because the workers will not stay there. We have had too long and bitter a fight to lay down what we have gained so far. Heaven might fall and hell might break loose, but the strike is going to be won." Boyd, another speaker, is reported as saying on the same day: "We are going to get what we want whether the courts want it or not. We are going to call a general strike, if it is necessary, to free our fellow-workers. We are going to cut off the lights in Paterson, and tie up the street car system. We shall reduce the city to a condition of absolute helplessness. We are going to paralyze Paterson, and we are going to win in Paterson just as we are going to win in New York City." Robert Plunkett, said to be a former Cornell student, who was introduced as a "fellow-worker," urged the strikers and their sympathizers to use every means to free their leaders, even if Paterson had to "starve or go naked." He said that the lights would be put out in Paterson, and that the street cars would be tied up, so that Paterson would become a dead city. Mohl, who also made his appearance at the silk mills strike in Paterson, declared on May 18, 1913: "The American flag is pretty to look at. Its colors are striking--red, white, and blue, with two or three twinkling stars here and there, but it is not good to eat." The I. W. W. is, of course, an atheistic and anti-religious organization. In the March 1, 1919, issue of "The One Big Union Monthly," page 40, we read under the caption, "Help Wanted, Male or Female:" "Priest or Minister to show the One Big Union family why our Solidarity Dogma is not superior to the ethical teachings of Jesus, Buddha or Mohammed, also to demonstrate the inside of the religious business, and where it is interwoven with Wall street." "The Call," New York, May 3, 1919, in an editorial on "The Bomb Plot," which had just aroused the whole nation, said: "The bomb and torch have not the slightest relation to any branch of the organized labor movement in this country, and the editors know it. Those who print such unfounded and slanderous insinuations place themselves in the same class as the would-be-assassin." This editorial was published the day after the following special dispatch was sent to "The New York Times:" "Sioux City, Iowa, May 2.--'We will blow the whole town to hell if you put Mayor Short out of office.' This was the threat on a postcard addressed to E. J. Stanson, who is trying to secure the recall of Mayor Short. The card was received today. It was signed 'I. W. W. Alliance for Short.' The police are rounding up all suspicious characters, and those known to have a leaning toward the Bolshevists of the I. W. W. Citizens are seeking to oust Short because he welcomed delegates to a recent 'wobblies' convention here." In the latter part of the spring of 1919 the author of "The Red Conspiracy" obtained at the I. W. W. headquarters in Chicago a leaflet entitled, "To Colored Workingmen and Women!" Part of it is hereby quoted: "To the black race, who, but recently, with the assistance of the white men of the northern states, broke their chains of bondage and ended chattel slavery, a prospect of further freedom, of Real Freedom, should be most appealing. "For it is a fact that the negro worker is no better off under the freedom he has gained than the slavery from which he has escaped. As chattel slaves we were the property of our masters, and as a piece of valuable property our masters were considerate of us and careful of our health and welfare. Today, as wage-workers, the boss may work us to death at the hardest and most hazardous labor, at the longest hours, at the lowest pay; we may quietly starve when out of work and the boss loses nothing by it and has no interest in us. To him the worker is but a machine for producing profits, and when you, as a slave who sells himself to the master on the installment plan, become old, or broken in health or strength or should you be killed while at work, the master merely gets another wage slave on the same terms. "We who have worked in the south know that conditions in lumber and turpentine camps, in the fields of cane, cotton and tobacco, in the mills and mines of Dixie, are such that the workers suffer a more miserable existence than ever prevailed among the chattel slaves before the great Civil War.... "The only problem, then, which the colored worker should consider, as a worker, is the problem of organizing with other workingmen in the labor organization that best expresses the interest of the whole working class against the slavery and oppression of the whole capitalist class. Such an organization is the I. W. W., the Industrial Workers of the World." "The One Big Union Monthly," March 1, 1919, page 6, publishes an article entitled, "The Chinese and the I. W. W.": "The Chinese workers in this country have discovered the I. W. W.... "Long enough have workers been divided along colored lines. The old, old misunderstanding created by our masters is fading away as we mutually discover that we are all condemned to slavery if divided, and that freedom is ours if we unite. The accessions of Chinese workers to our ranks fills us with great joy. May they also succeed in soon carrying the gospel of Working Class Solidarity and Industrial Organization to their native country. That hope takes the sadness out of the news of their possible deportation." "I. W. W. Songs," a Red booklet published at the Chicago headquarters, has already met with such popularity among the "Wobblies" that fourteen editions have been published. Several songs, showing the spirit of the Reds, are given here: The Preacher and the Slave By Joe Hill (Tune: "Sweet Bye and Bye") Long-haired preachers come out every night, Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right; But when asked how 'bout something to eat They will answer with voices so sweet: _Chorus_ You will eat, bye and bye, In that glorious land above the sky; Work and pray, live on hay, You'll get pie in the sky when you die. And the starvation army they play, And they sing and they clap and they pray. Till they get all your coin on the drum, Then they'll tell you when you're on the bum: Holy Rollers and jumpers come out, And they holler, they jump and they shout. "Give your money to Jesus," they say, "He will cure all diseases to-day." If you fight hard for children and wife-- Try to get something good in this life-- You're a sinner and bad man, they tell, When you die you will sure go to hell. Workingmen of all countries, unite, Side by side we for freedom will fight; When the world and its wealth we have gained To the grafters we'll sing this refrain: _Last Chorus_ You will eat, bye and bye, When you've learned how to cook and to fry, Chop some wood, 'twill do you good, And you'll eat in the sweet bye and bye. Tie 'Em Up! (Words and music by G. G. Allen) We have no fight with brothers of the old A. F. of L., But we ask you use your reason with the facts we have to tell. Your craft is but protection for a form of property, The skill that you are losing, don't you see. Improvements on machinery take your tool and skill away, And you'll be among the common slaves upon some fateful day. Now the things of which we're talking we are mighty sure about.-- So what's the use to strike the way you can't win out? _Chorus_ Tie 'em up! Tie 'em up! That's the way to win. Don't notify the bosses till hostilities begin. Don't furnish chance for gunmen, scabs and all their like; What you need is One Big Union and the One Big Strike. Why do you make agreements that divide you when you fight And let the bosses bluff you with the contract's "sacred right?" Why stay at work when other crafts are battling with the foe, You all must stick together, don't you know. The day when you begin to see the classes waging war You can join the biggest tie-up that was ever known before. When the strikes all o'er the country are united into one, Then the workers' One Big Union all the wheels shall run. Walking on the Grass (Tune: "The Wearing of the Green") In this blessed land of freedom where King Mammon wears the crown, There are many ways illegal now to hold the people down. When the dudes of state militia are slow to come to time, The law upholding Pinkertons are gathered from the slime. There are wisely framed injunctions that you must not leave your job, And a peaceable assemblage is declared to be a mob, And Congress passed a measure framed by some consummate ass, So they are clubbing men and women just for walking on the grass. In this year of slow starvation, when a fellow looks for work, The chances are a cop will grab his collar with a jerk; He will run him in for vagrancy, he is branded as a tramp, And all the well-to-do will shout: "It serves him right, the scamp!" So we let the ruling class maintain the dignity of law, When the court decides against us we are filled with wholesome awe, But we cannot stand the outrage without a little sauce When they're clubbing men and women just for walking on the grass. The papers said the union men were all but anarchist, So the job trust promised work for all who wouldn't enlist; But the next day when the hungry horde surrounded city hall, He hedged and said he didn't promise anything at all. So the powers that be are acting very queer to say the least-- They should go and read their Bible and all about Belshazzar's feast, And when mene tekel at length shall come to pass, They'll stop clubbing men and women just for walking on the grass. Although the I. W. W. does not yet officially constitute a part of the Socialist organization, still very many of its members are most active Socialists. Indeed, it may be said that the I. W. W. is related to the Socialist Party quite as closely as a child is to its mother, for not only does the I. W. W. owe its origin to the followers of Karl Marx, but they are its directors and leaders, and have assisted and encouraged it in not a few of its principal strikes, notably at Lawrence, Mass., and Paterson, N. J. Though we readily concede that quite a number of Socialists are individually antagonistic to the I. W. W., still they are opposed to it not because the I. W. W. differs in essential principles from the Socialist Party or even because this unfriendly minority of Socialists would oppose violent methods, if such were considered expedient, but because the "Yellow" Socialists prefer political action which is made light of by the I. W. W. direct actionists who are looked upon as enemies, for they seem to be doing harm to the Socialist political propaganda. In verification of this, an excellent proof is furnished by no less an authority than John Spargo, then a Socialist, and a most prolific writer, whose opposition to the Syndicalists and to the direct actionists of the Socialist Party was a well established fact even before the publication of his book, "Syndicalism, Industrial Unionism and Socialism." On page 172 of this work he writes: "If the class to which I belong could be set free from exploitation by violation of laws made by the master class, by open rebellion, by seizing the property of the rich, by setting the torch to a few buildings, or by the summary execution of a few members of the possessing class, I hope that the courage to share in the work would be mine." Spargo, in "Syndicalism, Industrial Unionism and Socialism," admits that the Socialists have continually and consistently given aid to the Industrial Workers of the World in their strikes. Yet notwithstanding this active support, many persons have been led to believe that the Socialists have repudiated the I. W. W. This incorrect opinion may be due to the fact that the Socialist Party did not endorse the I. W. W. at its 1912 National Convention, or else to the fact that William D. Haywood was subsequently removed by a referendum from the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party. But the 1912 Indianapolis Convention of the Socialist Party did not repudiate the Industrial Workers of the World. The representatives of the party only declared for a neutrality between this organization and the American Federation of Labor, and would in all probability have endorsed the I. W. W. and repudiated the American Federation of Labor if the Socialists had not nursed a hope of getting control of the latter organization and turning it into an industrial union similar to that of the Industrial Workers of the World. That the Socialist Party by no means repudiated the I. W. W., but on the contrary was still on the most friendly terms with it after the 1912 Convention, is evident from several facts. "The Call," May 17, 1912, affirms that the Convention decided for neutrality in affairs of unions. In the "Appeal to Reason," May 25, 1912, we read: "So after long weeks of discussion in the press, after days of apprehensions and fencing for advantage, the labor organization committee brought forth a unanimous report, which after a few speeches, all expressing the spirit of solidarity, was adopted without a dissenting vote. It was a compromise resolution. Each side declares itself completely satisfied with it. Each declares that it expresses its sentiments." William D. Haywood, who perhaps more than any other person had the interests of the I. W. W. at heart, declared, according to "The Call," May 17, 1912, that with the adoption of this declaration concerning the neutrality of the party towards the two rival labor unions he felt that he could go to the 8,000,000 workers of the nation and carry to them the message of Socialism. "This," he continues, "is the greatest step that has yet been taken by the Socialist Party." Although Haywood was for the time being removed from the National Executive Committee of the party, charged with favoring direct action rather than political action, he was never expelled from the party--which yet boasted so much of the constitutional clause adopted at the 1912 National Convention demanding that any member who opposes political action, or advocates crime, sabotage, or other methods of violence as a weapon of the working class, to aid in its emancipation, shall be expelled from membership in the party. "The New Unionism," page 119, points out some of the "merits" of the I. W. W., in comparison made with the Socialist Party, against which it was somewhat offended by the anti-sabotage and anti-direct action plank adopted at the 1912 National Convention: "There are vote-getters and politicians who waste their time coming into a community where ninety per cent. of the men have no vote, where the women are disfranchised 100 per cent., and where the boys and girls under age, of course, are not enfranchised. Still they will speak to these people about the power of the ballot, and they never mention a thing about the power of the general strike. They seem to lack the foresight, the penetration to interpret political power. They seem to lack the understanding that the broadest interpretation of political power comes through the industrial organization; that the industrial organization is capable not only of the general strike, but prevents the capitalists from disfranchising the worker; it gives the vote to women, it re-enfranchises the black man and places the ballot in the hands of every boy and girl employed in a shop, makes them eligible to take part in the general strike, makes them eligible to legislate for themselves where they are most interested in changing conditions, namely, in the place where they work." Again we read, on page 122 of "The New Unionism": "The politicians in the Socialist Party, who want offices in the government, fight the I. W. W. because we have no place in our ranks for them, and if our idea prevails, it will crowd them out and destroy their influence as 'saviors of the working class.' These politicians cater for votes to the middle class--to business men, farm owners and other small labor skinners--while the I. W. W. appeals only to wage-workers, and allows none but actual wage-workers to join our ranks. The Socialists can never get a majority of votes for a working class programme (if they had such a programme) because the majority of voters are middle class, since about ten million male wage-workers are disfranchised (being foreigners or floaters without long enough residence in one place to have votes). But the wage-workers are a big majority of the whole people, and produce nearly all wealth, so when they organize as the I. W. W. proposes, the working class will control the country, and with similar organizations in other countries will control the world. Foreigners, women, children and other non-voters at elections, have equal rights in the union, and take part in its activities, regardless of nationality, age, sex, or any other consideration except that they are wage-workers with common interests in opposition to those of the employers." It may come as a surprise to the reader to hear that at the 1917 St. Louis Convention of the Socialist Party the anti-sabotage and anti-direct action plank of the Constitution was dropped. The "International Socialist Review," May, 1917, page 669, commenting on the removal of the clause, says: "It has served its purpose, which was to guillotine and drive out most of the revolutionary workers from the party. The Constitution committee recommended that it be striken out by unanimous consent without going on the minutes or records. Ruthenberg opposed. He insisted that it be struck out and the minutes show the record of the action. It was carried almost unanimously." Further on we read in the same issue of "The International Socialist Review": "An industrial union plank to be inserted in the platform was defeated by a vote of 63 to 61. Had it been offered as a resolution it would have gone through by a big majority." Though most of the Convention favored the I. W. W., evidently a small majority feared to put the Socialist Party on record. In 1918 and 1919 the Socialist Party grew more and more friendly to the I. W. W. At present they seem to have fallen in love with each other. The American Federation of Labor is held in greatest contempt by the Socialist press, while the I. W. W. is lauded to the skies. Its meetings are advertised, sympathy and aid are extended to its imprisoned officials and everything is being done to help it along. Eugene V. Debs has all along been the sincere friend of the I. W. W. In the February, 1918, issue of the "International Socialist Review," page 395, he says: "Every plutocrat, every profiteering pirate, every food vulture, every exploiter of labor, every robber and oppressor of the poor, every hog under a silk tile, every vampire in human form will tell you that the A. F. of L. under Gompers is a great and patriotic organization and that the I. W. W. under Haywood is a gang of traitors in the pay of the bloody Kaiser. "Which of these, think you, Mr. Wage-Slave, is your friend and the friend of your class?.... "The war within the war and beyond the war in which the I. W. W. is fighting--the war of the workers of all countries against the exploiters of all countries--is our war, the war of humanity against its oppressors and despoilers, the holiest war ever waged since the race began." "The Call," New York, April 19, 1919, published at the top of its editorial page, "Debs' Daily Message from Moundsville Prison:" "Though Jailed, He Speaketh. "The clear voice of the awakened and dauntless few cannot be silenced. The new unionism is being heard. In trumpet tones it rings out its revolutionary shibboleth to all the workers of the earth: 'Our interests are identical--let us combine industrially and politically, assert our united power, achieve our freedom, enjoy the fruit of our labor, rid society of parasitism, abolish poverty and civilize the world!'.... "There can be no peace until the working class is triumphant in this struggle and the wage system is forever wiped from the earth." In the May Day issue of "The Call," May 1, 1919, there is a very long article on Debs' Imprisonment by David Karsner, staff correspondent. He tells us that on the afternoon of April 28 he sat talking with Debs in his little room in the prison hospital at Moundsville, West Virginia, and that the many-times presidential candidate of the Socialist Party among other things said, when told of an intended visit by Karsner to the Leavenworth Federal prison to see William D. Haywood and the other 93 I. W. W. prisoners: "I want you to take my love to Bill Haywood and all the other boys you see out there. We all stand shoulder to shoulder together." The staff correspondent then goes on to say: "The reference of Debs to Haywood and the I. W. W. brought vividly to my mind the little scene enacted between 'Gene' and 'Big Bill' in the corridor of Judge Landis' courtroom in Chicago last August during the I. W. W. trial. "'You and the boys are making a great and noble fight,' said Debs to Haywood at that time, patting the cheek of Big Bill. 'You are a born champion of the underdog.' Haywood clasped Debs' in his own great palm and said affectionately, 'You are the champion of the underdog, Gene, and you always will be.' There was something thrilling and inspiring in witnessing this friendly and comradely felicitation between two noble men, both of whom have never retreated one jot from their ideas of emancipation of the working class. "I recalled as I saw him this afternoon that seven years ago, or at the time of the Indianapolis Convention of the Socialist party, Debs pleaded for unity of the movement. He refused to be stampeded into any position that would compromise the noble work that confronted himself and the Socialist Party. Debs has always been for industrial unionism. His speeches and writings are filled with the spirit of organization and solidarity on the industrial field as well as on the political. But above everything else he has warned his fellow Socialists and industrialists that the thing to do is to keep united, to solidify their economic and political strength to the end that when our day comes we shall be ready to enjoy the fruits of our victory." "The One Big Union Monthly," March 1, 1919, pages 14, 19 and 21, gives us some very interesting information about the I. W. W. attitude toward Bolshevism and the two extreme groups of the Socialists: "We have long predicted the revolutionary cyclone that is now sweeping over the world, even though few people cared to believe us. We asked them to prepare for it by building up the framework of the new society within the shell of the old, in other words to see to it that we had the new house ready to move into, before we dynamited the old one.... "Personally we are convinced that Russia will never again return to the old order. The workers have control and they will not let go of it. As the days go by, they will gradually organize production and distribution on the lines of industrial unionism, as Lenine assures us, and that will be their salvation. "The plight of the Russian people is a warning to other peoples to immediately start building the new society, by building industrial unions right now, before the structure of the old society topples over. Industrial unions are the only social apparatus that will make abolishment of wage slavery possible.... "The Bolshevik Revolution has emphasized this sad fact. Socialism in Russia, facing for the first time in Socialist history, the problem of inaugurating a working class state, found itself paralyzed by the existence of a parliamentary form of Democracy. The Revolution was at stake. In order to destroy capitalism it was necessary to destroy parliamentary Democracy, and Lenine destroyed it. In its place he reared a new form of Democracy--the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which is Socialism. "And yet, so misled is the thinking of our European Socialists that in the very presence of a living, accomplished Socialist commonwealth, they hastened to repudiate it because it was not 'Democratic.' Plekhanov betrayed it. Kautsky reviled it. Albert Thomas called upon the capitalists of France to send their soldiers there and crush it. Mr. Walling, Mr. Spargo and Mr. Russell baptized themselves into a 'Socialist' crusade to destroy Socialism. Could idiocy be more abject? "The alternative is presented, to choose between Socialism or Democracy. Or perhaps it would be better to put it--between industrial Democracy and parliamentary Democracy. And our pitiable Spargos, duped by a stale phrase, abandon their Socialism because it is not 'Democratic.' "In America, it is this same issue of Democracy which has long been the dividing line between the Socialist Party and the I. W. W. Like the Bolshevists of Russia, the I. W. W. have championed Democracy but we have refused to allow the capitalist thinkers to define it for us. We have practiced Democracy in our organization and we have sublimated it into the most perfect of Democratic organizations. But always, it has been a Democracy only of proletarians. We have built the framework of a new society which says that those shall not vote who do not work. And this, indeed, is Socialism. "But the political Socialists have feared to draw this distinction. They have not built themselves upon the proletarian rock. Into their ranks they have admitted, not only the butcher, the baker and the candle-stick maker, but also the lawyer, the doctor, the merchant, the sky pilot, yes, and even the capitalists--known as millionaire Socialists. Out of such a medley, a medley philosophy was sprouted. Democracy, to the political Socialists, could not be rigidly proletarian, because the political Socialists, themselves, were not proletarians. And their ideals paled into evasion and compromise. "Again, the I. W. W. being proletarian, spurned a parliamentary action which would have drawn it together with the exploiting class. It realized, before Spargo took that fatal dodge, that, from parliamentary Socialism to parliamentary Democracy it was but a step. Hence we spurned politics and parliamentarism, and substituted a Democracy, grouped around unions, and not around parliaments. "But the political Socialists, immersed in parliamentary hack work, stifled the Socialist concept of Democracy by recognizing and participating in the capitalist form of Democracy. Entering the parliaments, they dreamed that they could transform these parliaments into Socialist republics. Only too soon they discovered that the parliaments had transformed them into 'Democratic' apologists. Like a poisoning strain, parliamentarism spread out over Socialism. And so, when Socialism came at last in Russia, without the aid of the foolish parliaments, deluded Socialists cried that Bolshevism was not Socialism." The year 1919 witnessed a very marked drawing together, in the United States and throughout the world, of I. W. W.'ism, or Syndicalism, and all the bodies of radical, revolutionary Socialism. The Moscow Bolshevists gave a great "boost" to the I. W. W. principle of industrial unionism by endorsing it and declaring that Russia was being reorganized economically along similar lines. Bolshevism in Russia, in fact, has had the help and counsel of I. W. W. experts from the United States, and I. W. W. leaders in America have naturally been elated. John Sandgren wrote in "The New Solidarity," April 12, 1919: "The immortal gains of Bolshevism for humanity lie on the political field. When it comes to economic reconstruction, the Bolsheviks are going to find that it cannot be made from the top through laws and regulations. Any attempt to make the people the real owners of the means of production and distribution must start with the industrial organization of the workers themselves as outlined in the I. W. W. program. In the meantime, let us hope that Bolshevism will sweep victoriously over all such parts of the world where it still has a mission to perform. After that, begins the I. W. W. period in human history." The April 1, 1919, issue of "The One Big Union Monthly," published the Russian Communist Party call and invitation to the Moscow Conference [see Chapter III for a copy of this document], remarking that "as to the general demand for the overthrow of Capitalism, the dis-establishment of private ownership and making the working-class the rulers of the world, there is apt to be little if any dissension." However, noting that "the I. W. W. of this and other countries" had been invited to the conference, it declared that "we have no reason to get excited over the invitation," since, "with the exception of the I. W. W., there is hardly any of the thirty-nine invited bodies who seriously endorse industrial unionism as the basis of a new society.... The proposed communist conference would consequently be a congress of radical political Socialists to consider the question of discontinuing the use of the ballot and adopting the methods used by the Russian communists in the past in overthrowing capitalist society." The I. W. W. world-scheme is then outlined: "The I. W. W. has given up all thought of using the machinery of the present state for its purposes. It proposes to create an entirely new machinery of administration in which not even a particle of the old shall enter as a constituent part. We propose to re-group all mankind on industrial lines in industrial organizations which we hope will make superfluous and crowd out the political groupings which constitute the state. We propose to make the unit of industry, the place of work, the shop, the mill, the field, the ship, the basis of our new social organization. These units will combine in two different manners. From a purely industrial standpoint, they will unite with other units into large industrial unions, calculated to embrace the whole world, each and every one of them. For the purpose of local administration, we propose that the local industrial units shall form a district industrial council or local administrative body to take care of local affairs. As we propose to order all branches of human activity along these lines and include them in a world scheme of industrial co-operation, we must conclude that our program, although fundamentally aiming at the same thing as the program of the Communist Party, somewhat differs from the program proposed as a basis of unity." An editorial in the same issue on "Soviet Government in the U. S." says: "The papers have informed us that the police and the secret service have unearthed a gigantic plot among the Socialists of this country to gather up all the radical elements with a view to establishing a Soviet government in this country.... We do not deny that this agitation is useful, for it stirs people to thought and excites contradiction, ... but when that is said, we have said all the good we can about it.... "The Russians made their revolution not because they had Soviets, but because the people willed it.... The I. W. W. has at least on paper an institution corresponding to the Soviet, namely, the District Industrial Council, ... a local representative body of the various industrial unions in each locality. So far, it lacks all practical significance because we are not numerous enough, but whenever there is to be a radical change in this country, the change will have to be made through these councils locally. They will take over the functions which were taken over by the Soviets in Russia." Another editorial in the same issue treats of the overtures of the Left Wing Socialists: "Of late we have noticed an ever-increasing tendency to hush us up in the name of unity. We are being told not to show up political Socialism; we are told not to attack Anarchism. We are asked to be more lenient toward the A. F. of L. [American Federation of Labor.] We mustn't touch on church and religion.... "It appears that political Socialists, anarchists and other labor elements feel that the bottom has fallen out of their programs and they want us to keep quiet about it, and as a reward we will secure their friendly services. The I. W. W. is not willing to enter into any such bargain." Another editorial gives further light on the "boring in" process begun by theoretical Socialists with an itch for revolution--paper soldiers anxious to get a-straddle of the great strike-conducting war-horse of I. W. W.'ism and ride into "the dictatorship of the proletariat." This is thus dealt with: "There is a large element in this country who want a radical change if not a revolution. This element would like to see the change made to suit them with the smallest possible cost to themselves. "The most insistent agitators belong to the upper-class radicals, and their object seems to be to stir the working masses into some sort of revolutionary activity, not clearly defined. It seems they built great hopes on the participation of the I. W. W. They know we are a compact mass of industrial workers, able to manipulate such great affairs as the general strikes in Seattle and Butte, the strike of the silk workers, the strike on the Mesaba Range, and so on, and we are just what they need for their purpose. "For this reason we have met with an unusual amount of courtesy and consideration of late, but we are sorry to say that we do not consider it disinterested. If these revolutionists were sincere in their friendship for us, they would throw everything aside and help us build up industrial unionism, but that is exactly what they are not doing to any considerable extent. Their activities are directed on aims that are strange and foreign to us. Some of their adherents in overalls are getting into our ranks because they work in the industries we have organized or because our recruiting unions are open to them, and their activity is frequently annoying to us, as it has little or nothing to do with the industrial organization of the workers." The same issue contains an article by a Left Winger, I. E. Ferguson, a "Little Corporal" ready to step to the front of I. W. W.'ism and lead it to glory. He complains: "The attempt to 'hog the market' of propagandizing the Russian Revolution in the United States for the I. W. W. is leading to excesses which ought to be checked right now, else these excesses will accomplish injury to the American Socialist movement. This does not mean to repudiate the claims of the I. W. W. to any extent, but to controvert the negative proposition that all of the American revolutionary socialist movement is and necessarily must be within the folds of the I. W. W.... "The I. W. W. is the livest thing in the American Socialist movement, therefore, truly, the Greatest Thing On Earth for the American working class. But ... when the same organization carries on the business of unionism and the business of revolution at the same time, it is more than likely, when it becomes overburdened, to throw overboard the more remote job in favor of the more immediate one. Revolution is a political proposition, or, if you please, anti-political. Its direct task is the overthrow of the capitalist state, the bulwark of capitalist industrialism. There is no question in the world but that the I. W. W. form of labor organization is the most powerful possible weapon for the overthrow of the capitalist state, because of its adaptability to great mass protests and mass movements of the proletariat. But only an organization with the sole aim of revolution can take the responsibility for leadership in this fight." Granting some truth in the above argument, it is not probable that a great practical organization like the I. W. W., which _does_ things, and very rough things, will invite theorists, non-working drones, to come in and take charge of it. Nor is it willing to be borrowed, and diverted into an engine to run toy revolutions. This is the substance of the reply to Ferguson made by Harold Lord Varney in the same magazine. We quote its pith: "Like the Left Wingers of the Socialist Party; like the editors and the writers of the Revolutionary Age and the Class Struggle; like the Eastmans, the Nearings and the Frainas of our American movement, my critic is obsessed with Russia. To him, the Bolshevists and their mass action revolutions are like dazzling, fiery suns which blind and obscure all rivals.... "As proletarians, I. W. W.'s rejoiced at the Lenine triumph. As proletarians, we have unwaveringly supported the Bolshevist regime in all our propaganda. Those of our members who happened to be in Russia when the October Revolution came (and there were thousands of them) were all found in the Bolshevist army. Bill Shatoff, Volodarsky, Martoff, Kornuk and others who have been leaders in the Bolshevist army were all old members of the I. W. W. In brief, then, were we in Russia, all I. W. W.'s would be Bolsheviki. But from this it does not necessarily follow that in America the I. W. W. must turn Bolshevist also.... "Mr. Ferguson's proposition is that after all these years of struggle we should now discard this One Big Union goal and unite with political Socialists to create an American Bolsheviki. And in that proposal he demonstrates the impractical artlessness of the Left Winger. The I. W. W. is a Socialist who is a materialist. The Left Winger is a Socialist who is an ideologist. The I. W. W. seeks for verities and for concrete, ponderable power. The Left Winger follows the intoxicating dreams of his own imagination.... "Of course, the I. W. W. wants unity. But we will have no unity with any who are not willing to accept the proletarian conception of Socialism. We will have no unity with any who do not belong to our class. And we will have no unity with any who flinch at the 'radicalism' of our program.... "The I. W. W. is not anti-political. Its members are free to be members of the Socialist Party and thousands of us, the writer included, do carry Socialist cards.... "The social revolution is not a thing of theories. It is merely the final act of working-class organization. It is the historic mission of the working class to mount to supreme power. They do this, not by debating nor by marching in the street; they do this by the slow process of organization. In their union halls, the workers learn class consciousness. In their union halls, the workers learn self-government. In their union halls, the workers are disciplined and solidified for the 'final conflict.' Every strike is a revolution in miniature. Every gain which organized workers make, by a conscious act of their own, weakens capitalism and is revolutionary. In short, the union movement is the schoolhouse of the new society.... "Mr. Ferguson is not correct in asserting that the I. W. W. does not have 'the sole aim of revolution.' In our Preamble, he will find the boldest revolutionary utterance which has ever been penned.... Even were we silent in revolutionary words, our very form of organization and mode of action stamp us as revolutionists. We are organized against capital. We are an army that is ever battling.... "The real I. W. W. is not to be read in books of the intellectuals. It does not flash in phrases. It is written in the hearts of strong silent men. It can be read in the ineffable tales of anguish which ring from the prisons of the land. It can be read in the tragic sacrifices of the Littles, the Joe Hills, the Barans, the Looneys, the Jonsons, the Rabinowitzes, the Gerlots, the Jack Whytes whom destiny has claimed from among us. Its chapters have been penned, not with words, but with the living dramas of Spokane and San Diego, Lawrence and Paterson, McKee's Rocks, Everett and Mesaba Range." This is indeed the spirit of the most dangerous organization of devoted fanatics in the world today, and if our present order of society hopes to survive its steady, unrelenting assault, it must take into its hands the weapons of truth and justice. We have given these quotations to show clearly both the difference and the bond of union between the I. W. W.'s and the other brands of Socialists. A Left Winger sums it up concisely ("The Communist," August 23, 1919): "The syndicalist and the Socialist have this in common: That they both strive for the reduction of the state to zero and the 'building of a new society within the shell of the old.' The fundamental difference between the two is that the syndicalist naively strives to build the new society while the capitalist class controls the coercive power, and the Socialist aims to destroy that power first and then begin the 'building' process." But I. W. W.'ism is the more logical, and, in conditions like those in the United States, much the more dangerous, because it is _revolution going on_ every day of the year, holding what it gets, be it much or little. Moreover, since I. W. W.'ism will not give up its position, Socialism in America has adopted the industrial unionism creed. This now is the backbone of all the recent Socialist platforms, including that of the Socialist Party of America. Even with the Left Winger's buoyant faith in a speedy overturn of the United States, he now sees that the One Big Union is the necessary steam-roller to accomplish it, and for months he has been at work, "boring from within," to get the forces of American labor industrially organized for revolutionary action. In short, there has been a general following of the advice which "Truth," Left Wing organ in the Northwest, gave in its issue of May 23, 1919, as its answer to the above-quoted challenge of Varney to Ferguson: "The Left Wing represents the revolutionary portion of the Socialist Party in opposition to the opportunism of the Right Wing. Therefore we must, in order to make the Socialist Party a revolutionary expression of the working class, join hands with the Left Wing.... "The I. W. W. represents the revolutionary section of the working class in opposition to the opportunism of Gompers et al. Therefore we must, in order to make working class organizations revolutionary, join hands with the I. W. W. "The resolutions and the manifestoes of the Left Wing are revolutionary expressions. But action counts for more than words. If all Left Wingers are sincere they will join in the I. W. W. and endeavor to make the I. W. W. the dominant working-class organization throughout the country. The times demand that we must make ready to enforce our demands. No pious resolutions will bring us freedom. Only POWER through organization on the job will bring us freedom. True it is that we have to resort to mass action. But the basis of our mass action must be organization on the job. The I. W. W. represents the highest form of industrial organization and therefore merits our support. So we trust that ALL Left Wingers will join with the I. W. W. This is not the time to indulge in hair-splitting. If you are enraptured by what has taken place in Russia, do your share here in America." This appeared in May, 1919. Six months later we open the December, 1919, "One Big Union Monthly" and read: "We need hardly repeat the now well known facts that the workers of western Canada and of Australia have in mass adopted our principles in the course of this year. Close upon these significant events came the news that the three fragments into which the Socialist Party was split endorsed industrial unionism, while two of them rather outspokenly favored the I. W. W. "Later we were able to state that the increase in our own membership in the course of the 12 months, September 1, 1918, to September 1, 1919, was about 50,000. Now we are able to inform our readers that the growth of the last three months has been unprecedented. Lumber workers, miners, construction workers, marine transport workers and many other unions report many thousands of new members. We are getting a footing in fields that we have never been able to touch before, such as the printing industry and building construction. Carpenters and painters are joining us by the thousand. On November 9th delegates of eight independent unions in different industries, representing something like 250,000 workers, met in New York City and took the first steps for an affiliation with the I. W. W.--in spite of jails and persecution. And let us not forget that the Negro workers of the U. S. are organizing on the basis of our program. "But the influence of our principles is not limited to the English-speaking people in America and Australia. Other races and countries are enthusiastically taking up our program and proudly announcing that they are with the I. W. W. Thus in Mexico our movement has taken form and been laid out on a national basis. In South America, where the labor movement always has been in sympathy with us, the workers are going one step further and have started organizing as an I. W. W. In Buenos Ayres there is already an organization of 2,800 marine transport workers in such an organization. "Furthermore it is to be noted that practically all the old trade unions on this continent prove to be honey-combed with friends of the I. W. W. "Over in Europe it is the same story. The rebuilding of production and distribution in Russia is said to be largely based on our principles. At last report there were about 3,500,000 industrial workers organized in industrial unions for the carrying on of production and distribution. The Russian people are taking possession of the industries through their industrial unions. "In Italy 'The Italian Syndicalist Union,' 300,000 strong, is forging ahead along the same lines as the I. W. W. In Spain our adherents are to be numbered by the hundreds of thousands. In France the proposition has recently been made in the organ of the Communist Party, 'L'Internationale Communiste,' to start reorganizing the French working class on our program, in opposition to the C. G. T. [Confédération Générale du Travail, or French Confederation of Labor]. In England there is a separate organization of the I. W. W. that is advancing rapidly, while the influence on the old trade unions is very noticeable in their changed attitude of late toward 'direct action.' ... "But the biggest surprise of the year we received from Germany. At least two separate calls have been issued by the German workers to organize exactly as the I. W. W. The recently formed 'Freie Arbeiter Union' is also a federation of industrial unions that endorse our principles. And, finally, from distant, unknown Greece we are receiving news that the One Big Union is the aim of all the organized workers of that country." Several very important facts have been proven in this and the preceding chapter: first, that the Industrial Workers of the World is a revolutionary organization in the strictest sense and has for its object the overthrow of the United States Government; secondly, that, like the Socialist Party, it is constantly seeking to stir up trouble whenever it can do so; thirdly, that it respects neither morality nor the law and appeals to the basest passions in man; and, finally, that all sections of the Socialist Party are on the strictest terms of friendship with it and are giving it full support. CHAPTER X BOLSHEVIST RULE IN RUSSIA Shortly after the Lenine-Trotzky government came into power in Russia, in the latter part of the year 1917, Bolshevism became very popular in America among the radicals, especially the Socialists. Among those who helped most to bring it into such high esteem was Albert Rhys Williams, who had spent but one year of his life in Russia, hardly spoke the Russian language, and while staying in that country was in the pay of the Bolsheviki, as he testified before the Senate Committee. The Bolsheviki came into power by violence and have sustained themselves in power by violence and terrorism. Their main support, the so-called Red Army, in which the Chinese and Letts have played a prominent part, is an army of mercenaries who are well paid and well fed, while thousands of civilians are dying from starvation in the cities and towns of Russia. The first success of the Bolsheviki was the dissolution by bayonets of the Constituent Assembly, which for forty years had been the goal of all Russians--even of the Bolsheviki up to the time when they found it overwhelmingly against them. Then they invented a new double name for their anti-democratic government: Soviets, or dictatorship of the proletariat. Next they dissolved all the democratic Municipal Councils and Zemstvos and proceeded to take away the various liberties won in the revolution against the regime of the Czar. The dictatorship of the proletariat led rapidly to an almost complete stoppage of industry. Governmental expenditures increased by leaps and bounds with the growing pauperization of the people; for the growing staffs of Bolshevist officials were utterly incompetent, a large army of mercenaries was required in order to keep down the ever-increasing number of insurrections and the ceaseless attacks from many foreign foes, enormous subsidies had to be paid to Bolshevist workingmen, regardless of the fact that the factories were producing sometimes little and sometimes nothing, and, finally, the Lenine government spent great sums in revolutionary propaganda in the different countries of the world. Political and economic slavery, moral corruption and the starvation of millions of people, are a few of the "blessings" bestowed upon Russia by Bolshevism. Catherine Breshkovsky, the "Grandmother of the Russian Revolution," herself a Socialist, speaking of the Bolsheviki, said: "In addition to the crimes in their foreign policy, which culminated in the treacherous Brest-Litovsk 'peace' with German militarists, the Bolsheviki have committed innumerable crimes in their internal policy. They have destroyed all civil liberties in Russia: freedom of speech, of the press, of assemblage and of organization; they have filled prisons through the country with their political adversaries, proclaiming 'enemies of the people' not only the Liberals, the Constitutional-Democratic Party, but also the party of the Socialists-Revolutionists and the Social-Democrats Mensheviki, that is, the parties of the Russian peasantry and proletariat. They have instituted a system of terror unequaled in cruelty, and while hundreds of innocent hostages would pay with their lives for the assassination or for the attempt to assassinate a Bolshevist commissaire, they did not punish the Red Guards who assassinated the two Ministers of the Provisional Government, Kokoshkin and Shingariev, while the latter were under Bolshevist arrest, lying sick in a hospital." The January, 1919, issue of "The Eye Opener," the official organ of the National Office, Socialist Party, publishes the full text of the Russian Bolshevist Constitution under the caption, "Here's Constitution of World's First Socialist Republic." Some quotations from the document will no doubt prove interesting as well as instructive: "For the purpose of realizing the socialization of land, all private property in land is abolished, and the entire land is declared to be national property and is to be apportioned among husbandmen without any compensation to the former owners, in the measure of each one's ability to till it. "All forests, treasures of the earth, and waters of general public utility, all implements whether animate or inanimate, model farms and agricultural enterprises are declared to be national property. "As a first step toward complete transfer of ownership to the Soviet Republic of all factories, mills, mines, railways and other means of production or transportation, the Soviet law, for the control by workmen and the establishment of the Supreme Soviet of National Economy is hereby confirmed, so as to assure the power of the workers over their exploiters.... "Universal obligation to work is introduced for the purpose of eliminating the parasitic strata of society and organizing the economic life of the country. "For the purpose of securing the working class in the possession of the complete power, and in order to eliminate all possibility of restoring the power of the exploiters, it is decreed that all toilers be armed, and that a Socialist Red Army be organized and the propertied class be disarmed.... "The Russian Republic is a free Socialist society of all the working people of Russia. The entire power, within the boundaries of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic, belongs to all the working people of Russia, united in urban and rural Soviets.... "The Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic considers work the duty of every citizen of the Republic, and proclaims as its motto: 'He shall not eat who does not work.' "The following persons enjoy neither the right to vote nor the right to be voted for, even though they belong to one of the categories enumerated above, namely: "Persons who employ hired labor in order to obtain from it an increase in profits. "Persons who have an income without doing any work, such as interest from capital, receipts from property, etc. "Private merchants, trade and commercial brokers. "Monks and clergy of all denominations." This Bolshevist Constitution shows that the Lenine government has decreed the socialization of all the land, factories, mills, mines and other means of production, as well as the railways and the various means of transportation. This program has been carried out, though as yet probably not completely. Conditions in Russia were deplorable under the regime of the Czar, but the Socialist government has made them a thousand times worse. Industry has been reduced to an almost negligible minimum, property has been destroyed on every side and possession made a crime. The country has been reduced to chaos, for no one cares to sow where others will reap; and unemployment is widespread, for employers are outlawed, and the government has not enough satisfactory positions to offer. The right to hold property is one of the binding forces that holds civilization together and supplies incentive to labor. Some of the evil effects of the confiscation and socialization of property in Russia are shown from the following articles, published by the Socialists-Revolutionists, a faction of the Marxians opposed to the Bolsheviki. Their paper, "Vlast Naroda," declares: "The village has taken away the land from the landlords, farmers, wealthy peasants and monasteries. It cannot, however, divide it peacefully, as was to be expected. "The more land there is, the greater the appetite for it; hence more quarrels, misunderstandings and fights. "In Oboyansk County, many villages refused to supply soldiers when the Soviet authorities were mobilizing an army. In their refusal they stated 'in the spring soldiers will be needed at home in the villages,' not to cultivate the land, but to protect it with arms against neighboring peasants. "In the Provinces of Kaluga, Kursk and Voronezh peasant meetings adopted the following resolution: "'All grown members of the peasant community have to be home in the spring. Whoever will then not return to the village or voluntarily stay away will be forever expelled from the community. "'These provisions are made for the purpose of having as great a force as possible in the spring when it comes to dividing the land.' ... "Some villages in the Nieshnov district, in the Province of Mohilev, have supplied themselves with machine guns. The village of Little Nieshnov, for instance, has decided to order fifteen machine guns and has organized a Red Army in order to be able better to defend a piece of land taken away from the landlord and, as they say, that 'the neighboring peasants should not come to cut our hay right in front of our windows, like last year.' When the neighboring peasants heard of the decision they also procured machine guns. They have formed an army and intend to go to Little Nieshnov to cut the hay on the meadows 'under the windows' of the disputed owners.... "Stubborn fights for meadows and forests are always going on. They often result in skirmishes and murder. There are similar happenings in other counties of the Province, for instance, in Petrov, Balashov and Arkhar. "In the Province of Simbirsk there is war between the community peasants and shopkeepers. The former have decided to do away with 'Stolypin heirs,' as they call the shopkeepers. The latter, however, have organized and are ready for a stubborn resistance. Combats have already taken place. The peasants demolish farms, and farmers set fire to towns, villages, thrashing floors, etc." Indeed, the results of confiscation and socialization were so bad from the very beginning that no less a personage than Lenine himself, in "A Letter to American Workingmen," published by the Socialist Publication Society of Brooklyn, New York, on pages 12 and 13, says: "Mistakes are being made by our peasants who, at one stroke, in the night from October 25 to October 26 (Russian Calendar), 1917, did away with all private ownership of land, and are now struggling, from month to month, under the greatest difficulties, to correct their own mistakes, trying to solve in practice the most difficult problems of organizing a new social state, fighting, against profiteers to secure the possession of the land, for the workers instead of for the speculator, to carry on agricultural production under a system of communist farming on a large scale. "Mistakes are being made by our workmen in their revolutionary activity, who, in a few short months, have placed practically all the large factories and workers under state ownership, and are now learning, from day to day, under the greatest difficulties, to conduct the management of entire industries, to reorganize industries already organized, to overcome the deadly resistance of laziness and middle-class reaction and egotism." The Socialists of the United States and other radical elements in our country, after the World War, began to laud to the skies the Russian Soviets as the most perfect form of government that the world had ever seen. They were held to far surpass parliaments, congress and other legislative bodies and to be the supreme accomplishments of a democratic form of government. The deputies of the soviets, according to the Bolshevist Constitution, were to be elected by the secret, direct and equal vote of all the working masses. Theoretically the soviets were very attractive, but in reality fall far short of the ideal. "Struggling Russia," a well-known weekly magazine published in New York City by one of the groups of Russian Socialists, has this to say about the Soviets in its issue of April 5, 1919: "In fact, there never was either a secret election in Soviet Russia, or one based on equal suffrage. Elections are usually conducted at a given factory or foundry at open meetings, by the raising of hands and always under the knowing eye of the chairman. The majority of the workers very frequently do not take part in these elections at all. The rights of a minority are never recognized, as proportional representation has been rejected. "As regards direct elections, it is again a mere phrase. The Central Executive Committee, which is supposed to embody the supreme administrative organ of the country, was actually being elected through a four-grade system. Local Soviets send their representatives to the Provincial Congress, the Provincial Congress is represented by delegates at the All-Russian Congress, and only this last body elects the Central Executive Committee. Often the delegates are not elected by the regular meetings of the Soviets at all, but are sent by the Executive Committees, cleverly handpicked by the Bolsheviki after the system of proportional representation was rejected.... "The exclusion from the Soviets of all who think differently from the Bolsheviki developed gradually. They 'cleansed' the Soviets in Perm and Ekaterinburg, in January 1918; in Ufa, Saratov, Samara, Kazan and Yaroslavl in December, 1917; in Moscow and Petrograd in February, 1918. They were excluding all Socialists-Revolutionists and the Mensheviki, to say nothing of the People's Socialists and members of the Labor Group. Often, when workers demanded new elections to the Soviet (as happened in Petrograd late in December of 1917, and early in January, 1918), and such elections did take place, the Bolsheviki would not permit the newly elected delegates to enter the building of the Soviet and frequently arrested them. Gradually only Bolsheviki and Socialists-Revolutionists of the Left remained in the Soviets. Soon, however, after the assassination in Moscow of Count Mirbach, the German Ambassador, and the attempt at rebellion in Moscow early in June, 1918, by the Socialists-Revolutionists of the Left, the Bolsheviki began to fill up the prisons with the latter just as they did with the Socialists-Revolutionists of the Right and the Menshiviki. "So, practically, there remained only Bolsheviki in the Soviets. And as there was no difference of opinion among them, regular meetings were soon abandoned altogether and the ostensible 'rule of the working masses' thus definitely disappeared. A few persons, often appointed from above (the Bolsheviki often had recourse to bayonets to support the fiction of Soviet rule: in Tumen the Executive Committee of a non-existent Soviet was brought from Ekaterinburg under a convoy of 800 Red Guards), would rule and lord it over the people, tired and weary of the war and a sterile revolution. "Occasional outbursts of popular wrath serve as indications of the depth of dissatisfaction which is engendered by the Soviets and their offshoots, the Military-Revolutionary Committee. Thus, in the Polevsky works, in Ekaterinburg County, a mob of peasants, armed with axes, scythes and sticks, fell upon the Soviets and beast-like tore into fragments fifty Bolsheviki. In the Neviansk works the insurrection of the workers against the Red Army lasted for three days, until reinforcements from Perm finally subdued this 'counter-revolutionary' revolt. In Okhansk County 2,000 peasants were shot down for demanding the abolition of the Soviets and the re-establishment of the rule of the people." In the April 19, 1919, issue of "Struggling Russia" we are told that "Vlast Naroda," in May, 1918, thus described the uprisings against the Soviets: "In Kleen, a crowd entered by force the building occupied by the Soviets with the intention of bringing the deputies before their own court of justice. The latter fled. The Financial Commisary committed suicide by shooting himself, in order to escape the infuriated crowd. "In Oriekhovo-Zooyevo, the deputies work in their offices, guarded by a most vigilant military force. Even on the streets they are accompanied by guards armed with rifles and bayonets. "In Penza, an attempt has been made on the lives of the Soviet members. One of the presiding officers has been wounded. The Soviet building is now surrounded with cannons and machine-guns. "In Svicherka, where the Bolsheviki had ordered a Bartholomew night, the deputies are hunted like wild animals.... "In Bielo, all members of the Soviets have been murdered. "In Soligalich, two of the most prominent members of the Soviets have literally been torn to pieces. Two others have been beaten half-dead. "In Atkarsk, several members of the Soviets have been killed." "Struggling Russia," May 31, 1919, informs us that the Petrograd Committee of the Socialists-Revolutionists of the Left, in the middle of March, 1919, issued the following proclamation condemning the Petrograd Soviet: "Shame to the Bolshevist Violators, Liars and 'Agents Provocateurs!' "The Petrograd Soviet does not express the will of the Workmen, Sailors and 'Reds.' "The Soviet was not elected. The elections were either pretenses or held under threats of shooting or starvation. This terrorism completely suffocated freedom of speech, the press and meetings of the laboring classes. "The Petrograd Soviet consists of self-appointed Bolsheviki. It is a blind tool in the hands of the 'agents-provacateurs,' hangmen and assassins of the Bolshevist regime.... "Where is the dictatorship of the proletariat and working peasantry? It has been supplanted by the dictatorship of the Central Committee of the Bolshevist Party, governing with the assistance of a swarm of extraordinary commissions and punitive detachments of imported soldiers." Though the Russian Socialists overthrew the government of the Czar in the hope of securing liberty, liberty, under the Bolshevist regime, is farther off than it was before. The British High Commissioner, R. H. Bruce-Lockhart, in a telegram sent to the British Foreign Office, November 10, 1918, among other things said: "The Bolsheviki have established a rule of force and oppression unequaled in the history of any autocracy. "Themselves the fiercest upholders of the right of free speech, they have suppressed, since coming into power, every newspaper which does not approve their policy. "The right of holding public meetings has been abolished. The vote has been taken away from everybody except the workmen in factories and the poorer servants, and even amongst the workmen those who dared to vote against the Bolsheviki are marked down by the Bolshevist police as counter-revolutionaries, and are fortunate if their worst fate is to be thrown into prison, of which in Russia today it may truly be said, 'many go in but few come out.'" V. M. Zenzinov, a member of the Central Committee of the Socialists-Revolutionists, in an article published in "Struggling Russia," April 12, 1919, speaking of absence of liberty under Bolshevism, says: "It was during my stay in Petrograd in April, 1918, that a conference of factory and industrial plant employees of Petrograd and vicinity was held, to which 100,000 Petrograd workingmen (out of a total of 132,000) sent delegates. The conference adopted a resolution sharply denouncing the Bolshevist regime. Following this conference an attempt was made, in May, to call together an All-Russian Congress of workmen's deputies in Moscow, but all the delegates were arrested by the Bolsheviki, and to this day I am ignorant of the fate that befell my comrades." Justice, as well as liberty, is a dead letter in the land of Lenine, and conscription is rigidly enforced by the Russian Socialist Government. R. H. Bruce-Lockhart, to whom reference has been made, in his telegram to the British Foreign Office, November 10, 1918, stated: "The Bolsheviki have abolished even the most primitive forms of justice. Thousands of men and women have been shot without even the mockery of a trial, and thousands more are left to rot in the prisons under conditions to find a parallel to which one must turn to the darkest annals of Indian or Chinese history.... "The Bolsheviki who destroyed the Russian army, and who have always been the avowed opponents of militarism, have forcibly mobilized officers who do not share their political views, but whose technical knowledge is indispensable, and by the threat of immediate execution have forced them to fight against their fellow-countrymen in a civil war of unparalleled horror." Concerning religious conditions in Russia, the Rev. Dr. George S. Simons, shortly after his return from that country, testified before the Senatorial Committee, which, in February, 1919, was investigating the nature of Russian Bolshevism: "The Bolshevik is not only an atheist, but he also seeks to make all religions impossible. They assert that all misery is due to the superstition that there is a God. One of their officials told me: "'We now propose to enlighten our children, and with this purpose in view, we are issuing a catechism on atheism for use in all the schools.' "The man who told me this was the Commissionaire of Enlightenment and Education." On February 7, 1919, an appeal was sent to Pope Benedict XV, by the Orthodox Greek clergy of that part of Russia which had not fallen a prey to the Bolsheviki. It was signed by Sylvester, Archbishop of Omsk, President of the Supreme Administration of the Orthodox Church, and by other members of the same administration. This letter implored the Holy Father to deign to take into consideration the conditions existing in Russia. It exposed a list of crimes and outrages, cities sacked, churches profaned and pillaged, more than twenty bishops and more than one hundred priests assassinated, the victims being of every kind. Some of them before they were put to death had their arms and legs cut off, while others were buried alive. Nuns were violated; the socialization of women was proclaimed; rein was given to unbridled passions; everywhere there was nothing but famine, death and misery. The following message is also noteworthy: "With deep grief, Venerable Father, we expose to you the unhappy conditions in which millions of Russians of true Russia are reduced. Relying on that unity which makes all mankind one, and on the strength of Christian fraternity, we hope, Venerable Father, that we may count on your compassion as representing the Christian Church, and trust that your flock will be informed of what is going on, and that in common with you they will offer fervent prayers to Him, in whose hands are both life and death, for those who in the northeast of Europe are being made, because of their love of Christ, Martyrs of the faith in the twentieth century." "Dyelo Naroda," an organ of the Socialists-Revolutionists of Russia, in April, 1918, stated that the situation of the church and clergy was horrible. "Everything pertaining to them is being spit upon and profaned. People, with rifles on their shoulders and their hats on, often enter the church and right there question the clergymen and arrest priests, at the same time mocking the religious feelings of the praying crowd. Many churches have been closed as a result of the edict concerning the separation of Church and State." "The New York Times," April 11, 1919, published the following special cable despatch concerning the religious persecution: "London, April 10.--The Chronicle publishes an article by R. Courtier Foster, a British Chaplain at Odessa and Russian ports of the Black Sea, describing the religious persecution practised by the Bolsheviki following upon their former capture of Odessa. He says: "'Committees were held on board the ships of the Black Sea Fleet, among the dockers in the port, in the towns and villages on every hand, which passed resolutions reading: "'"We abolish God." In Odessa Cathedral, when the Archbishop of Kherson was celebrating the Holy Mysteries, an uproar occurred with cries of "Down with the priests!" "Down with the Church!" At a fête in the town gardens one saw a soldier of the Red Army, amid the guffaws of his fellows, spit on the Russian holy picture of the face of Christ, then tear it into fragments and stamp it into the dust. "'The Bolshevist conception of religious toleration is considerably more elastic and far-reaching than the ideas of any mediæval inquisition. In this matter the Bolsheviki pride themselves on being far in advance of our effete western thought. They have murdered Vladimir, the Metropolitan of Kiev, twenty bishops, and many hundreds of priests. Before killing them they cut off the limbs of their victims, some of whom they buried alive in the Kremlin. The Cathedrals in Moscow and those in the towns of Yaroslav and Simferopol have been sacked. Many nuns were violated and churches defiled. "'The ancient and historical sacristies and famous libraries of Moscow and Petrograd were pillaged and countless sanctuaries profaned. In Cronstadt Cathedral the great figure of the Crucified Christ was torn down and removed, and a monstrous and appalling pagan form placed in its stead, symbolizing "Freedom of Mind." "'It is not against any one particular form of religion that the terrors of the new Freedom are hurled. Orthodox, Roman Catholics and Lutherans alike have been tortured, mutilated, and done to death under the aegis of the Holy Revolution which appeals to the proletariat of the whole world to join its forces. "'The Revolutionary Government is subjecting the Christian religion to persecutions as great and brutal as anything the world saw during the first three centuries of the Christian era. Moral disintegration and ruin spread their tentacles on every side. Any restraint on sinful impulse or covetous desire is laughed to scorn. The Bolsheviki publicly encourage outrage and looting. The propaganda for freedom of mind is essentially nihilistic. It is based on negation and denial of the existence of God, denial of the authority of any moral law, denial of all rights of conscience, denial of all religious liberty, denial of all freedom of the press, denial of any liberty of speech. "'One officer remarked despairingly to me: "In Russia now there is no God, no Czar, no law, no property, no money, no food--only freedom." And in that travesty of liberty, which the whole civilized world may well shudder at, all mercy, pity and toleration are alike scorned. And it is this new and wonderful equality of man which by means of torture, outrage and assassinations proclaims the "freedom of mind and body" to the devastated Russian nation.'" In an Associated Press despatch, from London, that appeared in "The New York Times" on April 19, 1919, we are informed that of the 300 priests in the Perm diocese, 46 have been killed; moreover, that two monasteries were pillaged. A very interesting and enlightening article on religion in Russia and the attitude of the Bolsheviki towards it appears in "The Proletarian," Detroit, April, 1919. The author is Ernest Greenburg and we shall quote the greater part of his article: "The resolution adopted by the Socialist Party of Michigan at its recent State Convention that, 'It shall be the duty of all agitators and organizers upon all occasions to avail themselves of the opportunity of explaining religion,' caused a storm of indignation to arise among certain 'Socialists.' Clinging to the old fallacy that religion should be left alone, they point to the Russian Constitution and the works of the Bolshevik leaders who say 'Religion is a private matter.' But they fail to understand that the interpretation of the term 'Religion is a private matter,' has a different meaning here than it has in Russia. "The slogan, 'Religion is a private matter,' is not of Russian origin. It has been and is one of the battle cries of the Revolutionary working class in all countries in which the Church and the State are combined. Different conditions account for different understandings of the terms 'Private Matter' here and in Russia. "Probably in no other country have religion and the church played such an important role in the affairs of the state as in Russia up to the very present time. Truly, it was not so much the force of arms as that of ignorance which kept up the Czardom for hundreds of years. The Feudal aristocracy realized the advantages to be derived from keeping the minds of its slaves in darkness and superstition. One of the most powerful weapons in the hands of aristocracy was the Church, whose noble duty it was to sow and to propagate ignorance. The Church was officially a part of the state. People were forced to go to church; school children[10] were taught the 'Holy Law of God,' attacks against the church were punished as attacks against the Czar. "Religious ignorance of the masses was the greatest enemy of the Socialists in their propaganda work; at every step they had to meet and to combat the authority of God, in whose name the church servants consecrated the yoke of the Czar and the landlords. It was necessary to pull this poisonous tooth out of the jaws of the state. Hence came the demand: 'Religion is a private matter,'--private as opposed to state. It meant that the Church should be separated from the state and be deprived from its protection. It was a demand which, put to the Czarist government, if granted would only facilitate the struggle against this very religion. "Similar demands have been put in the Socialist platforms of Germany, Austria, and other countries which were confronted with conditions like those in Russia. One of the immediate demands of the French revolutionists of the nineteenth century was of this nature. "The November Revolution put the Russian workers in possession of the machinery of the church. As a weapon of ignorance, it could not be used against the exploiters; nor could it be destroyed by force. Then the Russian workers declared religion a private matter, thereby depriving it of State protection and forcing it under the blows of scientific criticism, which will rapidly do away with the reminders of the decrepit superstitions. "In America religion always was 'a private matter.' It had never been officially related to the state, but just the same it is now being employed by the ruling class against the workers. If it is not yet as influential here as it was in Russia during the reign of the Czars--it is becoming so. Its destructive work cannot be neglected any longer. It must be fought.... "German Socialists understand that by destroying the holy alliance between the Church and the State their task would not be completed. After that 'We must wage unrelenting war against the Church,' says Bebel, 'because she foments civil war among the workers--because it is the only reactionary force which has any strength and which keeps us in voluntary slavery.' "By separating the Church from the State and thereby enforcing their demand, 'Religion is a private matter,' the French Socialists were not yet satisfied. They went on fighting religion, and their Belgian comrades worked in accord with them. Says E. Vandervelde, 'We are bound to admit that both in philosophy and in politics there must be war between Socialism and the Church.' "This attitude of the French and Belgian Socialists was approved by the international Congress at Amsterdam, 1904. "The position of the Russian Socialists is very clear. They fully understand that 'Religion is a private matter' signifies only the first stage in the war against mental slavery. 'Religion is a private matter,' says N. Boucharin (The Church and the School), 'but it does not mean that we must not fight it by persuasion.' Further on he emphasizes that it is a 'private matter' only as much as forceful protection or forceful destruction is concerned. Beyond the gates of the State's protection, religion is not considered to be a private matter in Russia. It is fought there in schools and educational institutions by 'Propaganda, explanation and education.' "In this question American Socialists must not be misled by the seeming contradiction in terms." In the April 19, 1919, number of "Struggling Russia," Dioneo gives some interesting information relative to the destruction of education under the Bolshevist regime: "The lower and secondary schools are ruined. The villages have their Soviets, their premises for meetings, but no lower schools. As regards secondary schools, the Bolshevist reformers are of the opinion that, in general, such institutions are not wanted and are just as unnecessary as the intermediate stage between nascent capitalism and the extreme form of communism. "The Bolsheviki have only acknowledged the universities. At first, the reformers made such experiments on the latter as, for instance, the appointment of a porter to the post of inspector of the Technological institute, or of a cook as head-mistress of the Higher Courses for Girls. Then the Bolsheviki decided that no certificates were necessary for matriculation at the university. Any half-educated person might become a student of any faculty. The professors were at a loss to know how to lecture on higher mathematics to students ignorant of the multiplication table, or how to explain spectral analysis to persons hardly able to read. Then the Bolsheviki decided that there was no necessity for the professor to have a diploma either. It was only necessary that he should be a supporter of the Bolshevist platform. That is all! And celebrated Professors were obliged to leave the universities which they had made famous.... "National education--elementary, secondary, and higher--has been completely ruined by the Bolsheviki. Lately, they have apparently decided that Bolshevism ought to give the world a new type of university, quite different from that of the bourgeoisie. And with that in mind, the Municipal Council of Voronezh has thought of a 'Street University.' This is how the 'Izvestia' describes this curious institution of higher education: 'Each of the principal thoroughfares of Voronezh is now a faculty--of law, economics, history, literature, science, etc. The walls of the houses are placarded with posters, containing portraits and brief biographies of men distinguished in one or another branch of knowledge and brief items of information concerning the respective subject.' Thus comments the organ of the Bolshevist Government: 'Every citizen, instead of spending years at a university, can pick up a general knowledge of the principal educational subjects as he goes along.' ... "Russia's school system is ruined. Education reforms exist only on paper. And at the same time the Bolsheviki, wishing to show that they value knowledge very highly, have announced that a geographical university such as the world has 'never yet seen' is going to be opened in Petrograd. It is interesting to know what professors will lecture in this new university, and who will form their audience?" CHAPTER XI RUSSIA RED WITH BLOOD AND BLACK WITH CRIME Socialists have for many years boasted of the perfect peace and harmony which would prevail when once they had established their state. Bloodshed, civil discord and strife of every kind would cease when the Marxian workers ruled the land, for, as they said, privately owned property, and exploitation of workers are the source of wars and the fundamental cause of the oppression of the people. Bolshevist Russia, however, the first Socialist country, appears to be an exception. Perhaps no nation has ever witnessed such scenes of violence, bloodshed, murder and cruelty, perpetrated by a government, not against a foreign foe, but against its own people, and this not after an existence of a hundred or several hundred years, but constantly from its very birth. So far only a few pages, comparatively speaking, of the history of the terrible outrages are opened to us, but from these we can form some slight idea of the dreadful condition of the land that is truly red, but red principally from the rivers of blood that flow in abundance over every section of the country. The "Izvestia," an official Bolshevist publication, on October 19, 1918, published the following news item under the heading, "The Conference of the Extraordinary Commission:" "Comrade Baky threw light on the work of the District Commission of Petrograd after the departure of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Moscow. The total number of people arrested by the Extraordinary Commission amounted to 6,220. Eight hundred people were shot." The "Northern Commune," another official Bolshevist publication, in its issue of September 10, 1918, stated: "In the whole of the Jaroslavl Government a strict registration of the bourgeoisie and its partisans has been organized. Manifestly anti-Soviet elements are being shot; suspected persons are being interned in concentration camps; non-working sections of the population are being subjected to compulsory labor." The same edition of the "Northern Commune" publishes the following despatch: "Tver, Sept. 9.--The Extraordinary Commission has arrested and sent to concentration camps over 130 hostages from among the bourgeoisie. The prisoners include members of the Cadet Party, Socialists-Revolutionists of the Right, former officers, well known members of the propertied class and policemen." From the September 18, 1918, edition of the "Northern Commune" we learn that in Perm, in retaliation for the assassination of Uritzky and for the attempt on Lenine, fifty hostages from among the bourgeois classes and the White Guards were shot. "Struggling Russia," March 22, 1919, supplies us with other details of Bolshevist rifle rule: "We know a great deal about the terror in Petrograd, and considerably less about Moscow. The reason is plain. We find the curtain dropped on the activities of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission which had its seat in Moscow. In a report of the meeting of the Executive Committee of the Moscow Soviet, which took place on October 16, we read: "'The report of the work of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission was read at a secret session of the Executive Committee. But the report and the discussion of it were held behind closed doors and will not be published.' ['Izvestia,' October 17, 1918.] "The kind of decisions adopted by the Moscow Bolsheviki behind closed doors and the mass terror practised in Moscow and all over Russia under the direction of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission are well illustrated by Eugene Trupp, a prominent Socialist-Revolutionist and a member of the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, who wrote the following in the Socialist-Revolutionary daily, 'Zemlia i Volia' (Land and Freedom) of October 3, 1918: "'After the murder of Uritzky in Petrograd, 1,500 people were arrested; 512, including 10 Socialists-Revolutionists, were shot. At the same time 800 people were arrested in Moscow. It is unknown, however, how many of these were shot. In Nizhni-Novgorod, 41 were shot; in Yaroslavl, 13; in Astrakhan, 12 Socialists-Revolutionists; in Sarapool, a member of the Central Committee of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionists, I. I. Teterkin; in Penza, about 40 officers; in Kooznetzk people are daily shot in masses; all this is only a drop in the ocean. I have no exact information as to the number of people shot in other cities.' ... "'Despite all these and other outrages, a demonstration of Red Guards took place in Moscow on September 6. Their main demands were "deeds for words" and "relentless red terror in the fight against the bourgeoisie." ... "'The last days of my stay Moscow and Soviet-Russia in general were filled with red terror. A gray, silent and dejected crowd, with pale, terrified faces and eyes full of excitement, was moving along the streets. "Such or such people have been arrested today." "This or that number has been shot." "Do not sleep at home, they are looking for you." "You are still alive?" "Why do you not go away from here?" were expressions hastily exchanged. "'No conversations were heard; only silent whispering in corners. All were trembling. All were filled with horror of the wild terror. Spies were all over. At the proper places you could see their familiar figures. "'These spies sneak about the stations, mingling with the crowds of Red Guards, in the trains, and in all dirty, warm corners always pushing forward. While traveling you feel that if your face or perhaps your attire, or your opinion, carelessly uttered, will not please them, you may be held up at any moment. You feel that every passenger is hiding something in himself. Keep silent; we will talk later when we have passed the spying cordons.'" In the September 18, 1918, evening issue of the "Northern Commune," there is a report of a meeting of the Soviet of the First District of Petrograd. After a report made by Kharitonoff, who emphasized the necessity of suppressing the bourgeois press, and after speeches by other members, the following resolution was passed: "The meeting welcomes the fact that mass terror is being used against the White Guards and higher bourgeois classes, and declares that every attempt on the life of our leaders will be answered by the proletariat by the shooting down not only of hundreds, as the case is now, but of thousands of White Guards, bankers, manufacturers, Cadets (Constitutional Democrats) and Socialists-Revolutionists of the Right." We are indebted to "Struggling Russia," March 29, 1919, for the following information as regards the Red rule of Lenine and the shooting of children: "The following quotation from a speech of one of the most active Bolshevist leaders, Zinoviev, printed in the 'Northern Commune' of September 19, 1918, fully expresses the spirit of the Bolshevist terrorism: "'To overcome our enemies we must have our own Socialist Militarism. We must win over to our side 90 millions out of the 100 millions of population of Russia under the Soviets. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them; they must be annihilated.' "The program of annihilating ten million of the opponents of Bolshevism in Russia (Mr. Zinoviev has considerably underestimated their number) began to be executed by the Bolsheviki from the first moment of their coming into power. In the beginning of March, 1918, they held mass executions in Rostov-on-the-Don, killing, among others, many youths. The Moscow 'Russkiya Viedomosti' (Russian News) in its issue of March 23, 1918, reported that the president of the Rostov Municipal Council and the Chairman of the Don Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Party, B. C. Vasiliev, the mayor of the city, P. Petrenko, the former Chairman of the Rostov-Nakhichevan Council of Workingmen's and Soldiers' Delegates, P. Melnikov, and even M. Smirnov, at that time Chairman of the Council, have handed in a petition to the Bolshevist War-Revolutionary Council asking them to shoot them 'instead of the innocent children who are executed without law and justice.' A group of women, horrified by what was going on, also asked that they be shot instead of the children. In their petition they wrote as follows: "'If, according to you, there is need of sacrifices in blood and life in order to establish a Socialistic state and to create new ways of life, take our lives, kill us, grown mothers and fathers, but let our children live. They have not yet had a chance to live; they are only growing and developing. Do not destroy young lives. Take our lives and our blood as ransom.... "'We, mothers, have served the country by giving our sons, husbands and brothers. Pray, take our last possession, our lives, but spare our children. Call us, one after the other, for execution, when our children are to be shot! Every one of us would gladly die in order to save the life of her children or that of other children. "'Citizens, members of the War Revolutionary Council, listen to the cries of the mothers. We cannot be kept silent!'" Charles Dumas, a French Socialist, on his return to France from Russia, wrote a book in which he warns his fellow-comrades on the dangers of Bolshevism, and among other things he says: "Upon my arrival in Petrograd I wanted, first of all, to meet three of my old Russian friends, but soon learned that my searches were in vain. Two of the poor fellows had lost their minds and the third had cut his own throat with a razor.... "The Sebastopol horrors of March, 1918, when the sailors of the port, inflamed to a high pitch of bestiality by the Bolshevist press decided to kill all the inhabitants of the principal streets, not sparing even children above the age of five, are still so fresh in your minds that I need not remind you of them.... "On March 18, 1918, the peasants of an adjoining village organized, in collusion with the Bolsheviki, a veritable St. Bartholomew night in the city of Kuklovo. About 500 bodies of the victims were found afterwards, most of them 'intellectuals.' All residences and stores were plundered and destroyed, the Jews being among the worst sufferers. Entire families were wiped out, and for three days the Bolsheviki would not permit the burial of the dead. "In May, 1918, the city of Korocha was the scene of a horrible massacre. Thirty officers, four priests, and 300 citizens were killed. The Peoples' Commissaries and the Soviets have, upon more than one occasion, made admissions that these horrors were part of their program. At the Congress of the Soviets the chairman of the Central Committee of the Soviets, Sverdlov, said: 'We invoke the Soviets not to relent, but to fortify the Terror, no matter how terrible it may be and what dimensions it may assume.'" An Associated Press despatch, dated Omsk, April 5, 1919, stated that the Bolsheviki had murdered 2,000 at or near Osa: "Indisputable evidence of the massacre by the Bolsheviki of more than 2,000 civilians in and near the town of Osa has been obtained by Messrs. Simmonds and Emerson and Dr. Rudolph Teusler of the American Red Cross, who have just returned from reoccupied Russian territory. Approximately 500 persons were killed at Osa and 1,500 in the surrounding districts." The same despatch shows the excessive cruelty of Lenine's gang of blood-thirsty Reds: "A blacksmith was shot because he could not pay 5,000 rubles. A man was shot because he lived in a brick house. All attorneys and jurists and doctors whose services were not required were killed. A woman was compelled to fetch a lamp and gaze upon her murdered sons for the amusement of the slayers. "The Soviet called a meeting and prepared lists of those to die. The houses prescribed were visited by squads, the doors were smashed in, the victims dragged to the edge of the town and forced to dig their own graves. A survivor testified that he had seen men thrown into a pit and buried alive. Priests were hunted unmercifully. The evidence showed that men were slain whose only offense was that they worked as sextons or caretakers of churches. In the Perm district everything of value was stolen from the churches, the monastery was looted and several priests were murdered." According to two more Associated Press despatches, even women and children were not excepted by the Bolsheviki who have been so much extolled by our American Socialists and recognized as their brethren: "Stockholm, April 17, 1919.--The Bolsheviki are carrying out a rapid and systematic annihilation of all the bourgeois elements in Riga, according to reports from Libau to 'Svenska Dagblast.' The victims of the Bolsheviki terror are taken to the Island of Hasen, in the Dvina river, and are said to number 70,000, including women and children. No one is permitted to take food or money to the island." "London, April 17, 1919.--Eighteen hundred persons, including 400 women, were murdered by the Bolsheviki at Ufa, according to a dispatch from Omsk, received in official quarters here." The "Northern Commune" published the following report in which the horrors of the Bolsheviki prisons were described by the Bolsheviki themselves: "The presiding officers of the Soviet of the Viborg district decided to send a delegation to the prisons of that district when they heard that terrible scenes were occurring there. The prisoners were starving. Many of them who had been held eight months had not yet been tried, for the Commission entrusted with the investigation of their cases had not yet been in session. "The delegation consisted of Dr. Petropavlovsky, the Military Commissionary, Vasilyevsky, and the President of the Soviet, Frilisser. The latter handed in the following report: 'Comrades, what we saw and heard in visiting the prisons of the Viborg district cannot be described.... "'The cells are repulsively dirty. There is neither clean linen nor pillows. The prisoners are being punished for the least offence. "'But what is most terrible is the scene we witnessed in the prison hospital. "'Comrades! We found there no people! We found there living ghosts who had no strength to talk, for they were starving. "'When somebody dies, the corpse remains for several hours with its living neighbors, who say: "That is nothing. We shall all soon die of hunger."'" "Dyelo Naroda," in its issue of April 26, 1918, thus describes the cruelties of the barbarous Bolshevists: "In Kirensk County the people's tribunal ordered a woman found guilty of extracting brandy, to be enclosed in a bag and repeatedly knocked against the ground until dead. "In the Province of Tver the people's tribunal had sentenced a young fellow to freeze to death for theft. In a rigid frost he was led out, clad only in a shirt, and water was poured on him until he turned into a piece of ice. Out of pity somebody cut his tortures short by shooting him." The British High Commissioner, R. H. Bruce-Lockhart, in his telegram to the British Foreign Office, November 10, 1918, thus describes one of the methods of torture and the taking of hostages as practiced by the followers of the "gentle" Lenine: "The Bolsheviki have restored the barbarous methods of torture. The examination of prisoners frequently takes place with a revolver at the unfortunate prisoner's head. "The Bolsheviki have established the odious practice of taking hostages. Still worse, they have struck at their political opponents through their woman folk. When recently a long list of hostages was published in Petrograd, the Bolsheviki seized the wives of those men whom they could not find and threw them into prison until their husbands should give themselves up." When the Bolsheviki were forced to evacuate Riga, in May, 1919, they left behind them in the [**] prisons 1,600 hostages who were found to be in a state of unspeakable misery and starvation. An Associated Press despatch of March 22, 1919, states that "a Russian girl of 19 years, who, in December, 1918, had been charged with espionage, was tortured by being pierced thirteen times in the same wound with a bayonet. She lived, however, and made an affidavit to these details." The same dispatch states that "an examination of dead bodies of persons alleged to have been killed by the Bolsheviki in the Perm district, shows a preponderance of bayonet wounds in the back, but in other instances mouths were slit, fingers and hands cut off, and the heads of the victims smashed." "Struggling Russia," in its issue of April 5, 1919, informs us that "officers have come out of Petrograd prisons with their nails torn off, and that prisoners after having been fed on herrings were given nothing to drink for two or three days." A dispatch from Warsaw, dated April 10, 1919, stated that fugitives from Russia were pouring into that city, each of them bringing fresh tales of Bolsheviki horrors. The people in Russia, it was said, were being shot on the least provocation. For instance, men who remained in bed during the cold weather to keep warm because they had no fuel were accused of "discontent" and dragged into the streets and shot. Dead bodies, it was claimed, were left lying in the streets in heaps. In order to maintain their popularity with the workingmen and with their hired mercenaries, the Bolsheviki paid their supporters enormous wages by means of an unchecked paper issue. In fact they have turned out so many tons of paper money, without financial guarantees of any sort, that today in Russia money has lost practically all its value. "Struggling Russia," March 22, 1919, publishes an appeal issued in Petrograd and signed by the following organizations: Committee for the Defence of Freedom of the Press; Central Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party; Central Committee of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionists; Central Committee of the Councils of Peasant Deputies and the Union of Workmen-Printers. Among other things the appeal says: "Civil war has inflamed the whole country. Cities are being destroyed. The war of brother against brother is consuming the strength of our revolutionary democracy. The cannons, secured to guard the conquests of our revolution, shatter monuments, homes, and shrines of art. The cities of Russia fall at the hands of her own citizens.... "The nation is being driven towards ruin. The people are deprived of all liberties won by the revolution." The April 26, 1919, issue of "Struggling Russia," under the caption, "City of the Dead," describes the deplorable condition of Petrograd as follows: "Vladimir Bourtzev published in his paper, 'Obscherye Dyelo,' (The Common Cause), appearing in Paris, an interview with a well known pedagogist and journalist, C. L. Avaliani, who recently arrived from Petrograd. Mr. Avaliani lived in Petrograd during the bright, early days of the revolution and has also witnessed the tragic period of the Bolshevist rule: "'That Petrograd that used to draw to itself the leading social and scientific forces is no more. That living spring that sent upward a spray of rainbow hues and colors has gradually died out and is now finally extinct. "'There is no scientific activity, no research work, no literary or artistic life. All is leveled down and compressed under one Bolshevist lid. The only burning question is the problem of food. The only blessed object of Bolshevist providence is the remaining bourgeois element, the only axis around which all their creative experiments revolve. On the one hand, those who toil,--and on the other the "parasites," and to the latter class all the members of the liberal professions, all the literateurs, the lawyers and the clergy were assigned. The sympathizers and upholders of the "rule of the Soviets" get a food ticket; all the others are sentenced to starvation. "'It is a rule that rests solely on bayonets! There is no popular confidence, no social support. It is all regarded as superfluous and a "burgeois" prejudice. The sole means of enlightenment and conviction are the bayonet and machine gun.... "'A real Kingdom of the Dead! Petrograd is empty. Many have been summarily shot, but still more have died from exhaustion and disease, and some have fled. From a population of three million only 976,000 remain.'" "Struggling Russia," on April 5, 1919, published a detailed list of 76 places or districts in which there were uprisings against the Bolsheviki in the year 1918. In the year 1919 the revolutionary outbreaks seem to have become far more numerous. Evidence as to the criminal nature of Russian Bolshevism was supplied by the Rev. Dr. George S. Simons, who, in February, 1919, testified before the Senatorial Committee as to his personal knowledge of the matter: "There is a large criminal element in the Bolshevist regime. The fact that the criminal has a big part in the movement is proven by the destruction in a public bonfire of court records, the destruction of prisons and the liberation of all criminals who are sympathetic with the cause. We know it to be a fact that some of the worst criminal characters in all Russia hold positions under the Bolshevist Government, while others are helping as agitators." A press dispatch dated Warsaw, April 10, 1919, states that it has been decided by the Bolsheviki regime that control of desire of impulse, even when self-imposed, is against the freedom of man, that as a consequence unbelievable orgies and indecencies take place, and that all restraint is at an end. The despatch states, futhermore[11], that the aristocrats remaining in Russia have lost all will and energy. They accept degradation or death with complete fatalism and do not even try to save their wives and daughters. The deplorable condition of that part of Russia under Bolshevist rule was described in the Declaration adopted by the Socialist groups in Omsk on February 23, 1919. The Declaration says in part: "The main prop of an agricultural country such as Russia principally is, the peasant population, is pauperized, starving and is being driven under the banners of the Red Armies by lash and rifle. The numerically small class of intellectuals is being shot down and exterminated. The cities have been handed over to the pillage and rule of Red Army troops. The prisons are overcrowded. The enemies of the people have carried out their destructive program to the very end, and given the people, in place of bread, peace and freedom--a new inter-Russian war, the complete exhaustion of all the productive forces of the land, economic, industrial and railroad desolation, unemployment, a terrorizing reign of disorder and a lapse into barbarity." The Council of the All-Siberian Co-operative Assemblies, in a Declaration brought to this country by C. A. Kovalsky, a prominent Russian writer and a member of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionists, says: "The All-Siberian Co-operative Movement--as the expression of the unity of the creative democratic elements--strives for the rehabilitation of the destroyed statehood of Russia.... "The immediate aims of our political activities must be--the support of the existing Omsk Government, which has proclaimed itself a democratic rule; the steering of its political course into democratic channels; the struggle with anti-democratic influences from the Right as well as with the destructive forces from the left; the strengthening of the ties between the rear and the fighting front, and the support of the army as the cultural force which is reconquering the violated rights of the people to the formation of a democratic state." The Russian Co-operative Unions, having a membership of over 20,000,000, and representing the strongest economic organization in Russia, reaching every little town and village, announced through its representatives in New York, on May 20, 1919, its opposition to the Lenine regime and its support of the Provisional Russian Government at Omsk, Siberia, headed by Admiral Kolchak: "When Russia fell under the Bolshevist Soviet rule, the representatives of the Co-operative Organizations, at the All-Russian Co-operative Congress in Moscow, April 18 to 24, 1918, rejected the principles and the methods of the Bolsheviki and declared the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, concluded by the Soviet authorities with the Austro-German, dishonorable and ruinous for Russia. In these terrible and trying times of bloody rule that our suffering and worn-out country is passing through, the Co-operative Organizations of Siberia and North Russia serve as a unifying link for all the honest, healthy and State-preserving elements of the Russian democracy. "The All-Siberian United Co-operatives are fully cognizant of the abnormal conditions in which the territories liberated from the Bolsheviki--the Ural, Siberia and the North Russian Provinces--find themselves, where in pain and anguish a new Russian Statehood is arising. Nevertheless, considering the unusual difficulties connected with the work of rebuilding and re-establishing legality and order in a land overburdened financially and economically, ravaged by civil war and hunger, and with a popular psychology corrupted by Bolshevism, the United Co-operatives recognize and support, until the formation of a new, ultimate government through the Constituent Assembly, the Provisional Russian Government formed on Siberian territory and headed by Admiral Kolchak.... "We have, on our side, State wisdom, equity and justice. Our adversaries oppose us with terror, violence and complete social and economic ruin." In the early part of the year 1919, the report reached America that the Bolshevist authorities were nationalizing women. The Socialists of our own country, who are far from being noted for their reliability and truthfulness, have, of course, denied the charge, in order that the Lenine regime, which they support and wish to see extended to our own land, might not have its already terribly sullied name dishonored still more. The Bolshevists are far from being saints, and a "few" of their "shortcomings" have been pointed out in this chapter. Certainly the Lenine Government is absolutely lax in matters appertaining to sex relations. It has fully legalized free love, as we learn from the No. 2 issue of the radical Los Angeles magazine, "More Truth About Russia." This magazine, of course, defends the Bolshevists, and on page 6 of the above-mentioned issue quotes several of the decrees of the Lenine Government on the matter of marriage and divorce. Among the decrees we read: "Marriage is annulled by the petition of both parties or even one of them." All that is necessary to annul a marriage is the expressed desire of either party. The party is, of course, then free to marry again and remain married till another partner is desired. Hence free love is legalized. A government that legalizes free love may be expected to nationalize those women who do not wish to marry or who are unable to secure partners by the time they have reached a certain age. "The Call," New York, April 2, 1919, on its editorial page reprinted an apology of the English publication, "New Europe," which in a previous issue had given as the authority for its charge of the nationalization of women in Russia an article in the Soviet paper "Izvestija:" "I have made particular inquiries among friends recently arrived from Russia," says Dr. Harold Williams, "New Europe's" collaborator, "as to the alleged nationalization of women, and they have all assured me positively that they have never heard or read of such a decree." Those "friends," whoever they were, were possibly Bolsheviki themselves, and are not said to have denied that the women were nationalized, but merely that they had never heard or read of the "decree." Lots of things are enforced by authorities without decrees. The Bolshevist authorities may have had no decrees for the murder of the many thousands of innocent citizens whom they tortured and put to death. Dr. Harold Williams states, moreover, that it is certain that "the Central Bolshevist Government has issued no order of the kind" (i.e., of nationalization), but he does not deny that in different places the local Bolshevist authorities may have nationalized women. Further on it is admitted that not the official national Soviet organ, but the local Vladimir Soviet organ, "Izvestija," was the Bolshevist paper which stated that the Bolshevists of Vladimir had nationalized women. The article in "New Europe," republished in "The Call," concludes with these words: "As this puts an entirely different complexion on the matter, and as the Central Moscow Government cannot be held responsible for the lucubrations of every local committee, we desire to withdraw unreservedly the imputation and to express our regret for the mistake." This article in the March 13, 1919, issue of "New Europe," which thus apologizes for the "mistake" that it claims it made in a previous issue, has been quoted far and wide by American Socialists and other radicals of our country. Yet witnesses who were questioned at the Senatorial investigation at Washington, in February, 1919, attested to the nationalization by the Bolshevists. On February 7, 1919, the Orthodox Greek Archbishop of Omsk and other clergy of the Russian Church sent a letter to Pope Benedict XV, mentioning, with other crimes and abuses of the Bolshevists, the socialization of women. A press despatch dated Warsaw, April 10, 1919, stated the following concerning the condition of women in Russia: "The nationalization of women is becoming quite general. The Bolsheviki have declared war on family life and consideration for one another's mother or sister is forbidden. All must be treated alike. The most terrible thing is that the women themselves have accepted this nationalization and very little protest is made. This applies to every class. In certain cases, however, a hitch has occurred. Even Bolshevism cannot master human nature, and it has been found that a masculine jealousy occasionally stands in a way. Certain men have refused to nationalize a particular woman and as a result Bolshevik has fought Bolshevik with considerable force." An Associated Press despatch from London, April 15, 1919, gives lengthy details regarding the nationalization of women, and even the opposition offered to it: "The law providing for the nationalization of women in Northeast Russia has been suspended in one province as a result of popular outcry, according to information reaching London today, from Stockholm. "The Commissary of Vladimir has, by decree, appointed a committee of women, who are to inquire into operations of the law and make a report with the least possible delay. His action has been approved by the local Soviet. "'The Krasnaya Gazeta' publishes an account of the results of nationalization. The system provides that every girl on reaching the age of eighteen must register her name in the Bureau of Free Love, after which she is compelled to select a partner from among men between the ages of 19 and 50 years old. The law led to lamentable confusion, says the 'Gazeta,' in judicial notions as to personal inviolability. "A few days after the Soviet's decree, which women very generally ignored, two men known to nobody, arrived in the town and seized the two daughters of a well-known non-bourgeois comrade, declaring they had chosen them as wives and that the girls without further ceremony must submit, as they had not observed the registration rule. "Comrades Yablonovski and Guriakin, who sat as judges on the claim, decided that the men were right, and the girls were carried off. They have not been heard of since by the village folk. "This, says the Gazeta, was done in the name of the nationalization of women. "Many other instances of the fantastic operation of the law, not to speak of its inhumanities, are cited by the Gazeta. Enthusiasts for nationalization, naturally all males, raid whole villages, seize young girls, and demand proof that they are not over 18. As this proof is difficult to give, many of the girls are carried off, and there have been suicides and murders as a result. "In the town of Kovrov, a campaign without parallel since the Trojan war was waged between the vengeful relatives of an abducted nationalized girl and her persecutors. "In this town the 'register of nationalized women' was opened on December 1, but up to February 1 last only two women, both over 40, and neither of whom had ever been married, registered themselves as willing to accept the first husband the state sent along. "On the committee which is now to revise the nationalization decree or to recommend its complete abrogation sits Mme. Vera Arkadieff, a Bolshevist enthusiast, who commanded a detachment of women soldiers during the recent operations against Admiral Kolchak's army at Perm. She has been twice wounded." "The Krasnaya Gazeta," translated, means the Red Gazette. It is a Bolshevist newspaper published in Petrograd. The following "Special Cable" to "The New York Times," dated Milan, April 24, 1919, published April 26, 1919, gives a Bolshevist's explanation of the Russian sex legislation: "A Bolshevist statesman, from whom the 'Journal Epoca' obtained a special interview respecting the Leninist legislation on the sex problem, complains that a vast amount of grotesque misrepresentation has appeared on the subject in the hostile or unsympathetic press. "'Abolition of celibacy has been adopted,' he stated, 'simply as a means toward class equality. Every woman, on attaining her eighteenth and every man on his twentieth year, is bound to inscribe his or her name in a special register kept at the Commissariat of Unions, and must then contract a union within the period of six months. Should they fail to do so, they are served with three warning notices at successive intervals of two months, before any step is taken in the way of coercive measures. Every bachelor and every spinster is bound to furnish a written explanation of their irregular condition, and the only reasons admitted as valid are serious ill-health or organic defects. "'When two lovers wish to marry they present themselves to the People's Commissary, who witnesses their marriage. The same course is followed as regards separating, only that the Commissary, after freeing the unhappy pair, inscribes the man afresh on the celibate list and the woman on the register of marriageable persons, notifying each of the obligation to find another partner within six months. In case children have been born from their union, they are either delivered to the custody of the particular parent desiring them or else divided between them. The Commissariat of Unions aids the youth of either sex in their quest of a mate by promoting all healthy forms of social intercourse and facilitating introductions among families of every type.'" The above despatch was published in the April 26, 1919, issue of "The New York Times." On April 28, 1919, the following very apt comment was made on it and appeared on the editorial page of the "New York Times": "As explained by somebody whom a Milan paper calls a 'Bolshevist statesman,' marriage as regulated by the great and good Lenine is not at all the dreadful thing described recently by the mendacious enemies of his Socialistic paradise. As pictured by his friends, nothing worse has been done than to exert a gentle pressure on the marriageable unmarried to the end that they may do their duty to the Bolshevist State and provide it as soon as may be with new sons and daughters to take the place of those recently 'removed' by a benevolent terrorism. "Bachelorhood and spinsterhood are to be regarded as 'irregular'--conditions that must be explained in writing to the proper authorities. For the well disposed a simple civil marriage ceremony is provided; also a simple divorce ceremony in case the union proves wearisome. And that is all there is to the Bolshevist marriage system, the statesman says. "But one notices that he does not disclose what is done to those who fail to find pleasing mates in the six months allowed after notification for the making of a choice. Apparently it is then that the so-called nationalization of women comes in, and the statesman forgot to say a word about the only peculiarity of the system that has evolved any serious criticism." Commenting on Bolshevism, Mr. Eber Cole Byam, in the April 26, 1919, issue of "America," very aptly says: "As the Roman world was reduced to barbarism by the barbarians so now the modern world is threatened with reduction to Bolshevism by the Bolsheviki. Whatever the word Bolshevism may have meant originally it has come to mean fiendish treatment of women, the savage murder and mutilation of men and the wanton destruction of the accumulated labors of generations. The Bolshevik is a Socialist, not the armchair theorist dreaming fantastic fancies. The Bolshevik is the real Socialist, the Socialist of practice." The following encomium on Bolshevism appeared in "The Call," New York, April 26, 1919, and shows what strange inclinations the Socialists have towards barbarism: "For the first time in Russia's history law has been established based on the direct will of the population, established through the most democratic franchise in the world. Under Czarism, law was merely the promulgation of autocratic tyranny.... "For the first time in Russia's history, perfect freedom of religion is guaranteed to Christian, Moslem and Jew alike. After the American pattern, no church may control the state.... "For the first time, millions of Russian workers and peasants find themselves with decent homes. For the first time, women have equal social rights with men. For the first time, a real educational system has been inaugurated for the children.... "The recent official American investigators sent to Russia found a great change in the life of the cities from of old. They described the life as puritanical. Russians explained the change to them by the fact that vice and debauchery had been confined mostly to the idle ruling class, the old aristocracy, and these things had passed with the passing of that class." Listen now to the words of the Russian Socialist author, Leonoid Andréiev, who has seen quite enough of the "blessings" of Bolshevism. They appear in the April 26, 1919, issue of "Struggling Russia," under the caption, "S. O. S., An Appeal to Humanity": "One must, indeed, be insane not to understand the palpable and simple acts of Bolshevism! One must be sightless, stark-blind or have eyes that see not, to fail to observe on the face of the great mutilated Russia murder without end, ruins, miles of cemeteries, dungeons and insane asylums; not to perceive what hunger and terror have done to Petrograd, and, alas, to many other cities! "One must be earless, stone-deaf, or have ears that hear not, to remain callous to the sobs, the sighs and the wailing of women, the heart-rending cries of the children, the death-rattle of strangled men, the cracking of the assassins' rifles, the only music that has filled the air of Russia for the last eighteen months!... "As the wireless operator on a sinking vessel, in the thick blackness of the night, sends out his last appeal, 'Help, quick, we are sinking, save us!' so I, moved by my faith in the goodness of man, am sending out into distance and darkness my prayer for my people who are sinking. "If you only knew how dark is the night around us, if my words could only convey its density and depth! Whom am I calling? I know not. Does the wireless operator know who may intercept his call? For thousands of miles around the ocean may be deserted and not a living soul may overhear his appeal. "The night is dark. The sea is frightful. But the operator has not lost his faith, and he calls persistently, to the very last minute, until the last light is gone and his apparatus is silenced forever. "What does he trust in? He trusts in humanity, and so do I. He trusts in the law of human love and life. It is impossible that one human being will deny help to another in his hour of perdition. It is impossible that one human being will abandon another to perish without attempting to help. It is impossible that such an appeal for help will not receive any response!... "Friend! I do not even attempt to tell you how frightful life is in Russia at present, in our tormented Petrograd. Others have told enough, and new words cannot be coined by the human tongue. "It is frightful when children starve and perish, and assassins are well-fed and Trotzky is pouring down his throat the last bottle of milk. It is frightful when the cemeteries of Petrograd have no more room for the dead, and the murderers have a free road not only to the Princess Islands, but to all the ends of the world, and the wealth they have stolen will enable them to live in balmy lands and in the most attractive corners of our mercenary globe." Catherine Breshkovsky, the Socialist "Grandmother of the Russian Revolution," though now an aged woman, lived long enough to bewail the fate of her country. Speaking of her native land, now reaping the harvest from the Marxian seed first sown many years ago, she says in her "Message to the American People": "Flooded with tears and blood, Russia moans and cries out to the world. She is a living body, and her tortures cannot be looked upon cold-bloodedly as an extraordinary, never-before-witnessed experiments in social evolution. She is alive and every pore of her body is shedding blood." Let the "scientific" American Socialists continue to take their information from "The Call." They are far too learned to be deceived by Russians such as Andréiev or the "Grandmother of the Russian Revolution." "The capitalist press is lying about the conditions in Russia." "The Call" alone speaks the truth, for it is a proletarian sheet. Not satisfied with ruining his own country, Lenine would have Bolshevism spread to all other nations. He longs for their workingmen to rise in revolt against their present systems of government. Listen to his words in his "Letter to American Workingmen," published by the Socialist Publication Society, 431 Pulaski street, Brooklyn, New York: "We know that it may take a long time before help can come from you, Comrades, American Workingmen, for the development of the revolution in the different countries proceeds along various paths, with various rapidity (how could it be otherwise!) We know full well that the outbreak of the European proletarian revolution may take many weeks to come, quickly as it is ripening in these days. We are counting on the inevitability of the international revolution. But that does not mean that we count on its coming at some definite date. We have experienced two great revolutions in our own country, that of 1905 and that of 1917, and we know that revolutions cannot come either at word of command nor according to prearranged plans. We know that circumstances alone have pushed us, the proletariat of Russia, forward, that we have reached this new stage in the social life of the world not because of our superiority but because of the peculiarly reactionary character of Russia. But until the outbreak of the international revolution, revolutions in individual countries may still meet with a number of setbacks and serious overthrows.... "We are in a beleaguered fortress, so long as no other international Socialist revolution comes to our assistance with its armies. But these armies exist, they are stronger than ours, they grow, they strive, they become more invincible the longer imperialism, with its brutalities, continues. Workingmen the world over are breaking with their betrayers, with their Gompers and their Scheidemanns. Inevitably labor is approaching communistic Bolshevistic tactics, is preparing for the proletarian revolution that alone is capable of preserving culture and humanity from destruction. We are invincible, for invincible is the Proletarian Revolution." The above words of the dictator Lenine may throw some light on the Socialists' demand for "justice" to Russia, and their campaign in behalf of the recognition of the Soviet Government of that country. The Socialist Publication Society of Brooklyn at the end of the World War issued a large pamphlet entitled, "One Year of Revolution," celebrating the first anniversary of the founding of the Russian Soviet Republic. On the cover page, under the caption, "The Spirit of Revolutionary Russia," and the subtitle, "To the Oppressed of All Countries," we read the summons to a Socialist world-wide revolution: "And this life and death struggle with our own oppressors gives us the right to appeal to you, proletarians of all countries, with a strong voice, with the voice of those who look into the eyes of death in the revolt against the exploiters. "Break the chains, you who are oppressed! Rise in revolt! "We have nothing to lose but our chains! "We believe in the victory of the revolution, we are full of this belief. "We know that our Comrades in the Revolution will fulfill their duty on the barricades to the bitter end. "We know that decisive moments are coming. "A gigantic struggle will set the world afire. On the horizon the fires of the revolt of all oppressed peoples are already glowing and taking definite shape. "At the moment that the waters of the Baltic will become red with the blood of our Comrades, will close forever over their bodies, at this moment we call upon you. "Already in the clutch of death, we send our warm greetings and appeal to you. "Proletarians of the world, all, unite! "Rise in revolt, you who are oppressed. "All hail, the International Revolution! "Long live Socialism!" In the spring of 1919 reports reached the United States that the Bolsheviki had been inciting our troops in the Archangel District of Russia to disloyalty against our government. An Associated Press dispatch, dated Vienna, April 24, 1919, shows how the Bolshevists carried on their campaign in the Ukraine: "The Bolsheviki penetrated the country in four sections. First came agitators and next marauding bands to strike terror. These were followed by larger bodies of troops, made up of foreign elements. Last came Soviet troops, headed by Bolshevist commissioners. Iron discipline was maintained by Chinese assassins, who executed all soldiers who revolted against orders." On May 26, 1919, the "New York Times" announced that a Bolshevist weekly paper would be issued in that city: "Nicholai Lenine, the Premier, and Leon Trotzky, the Minister of War, together with other officials of the Russian Bolshevist Government, will begin next Monday the publication in this city of a sixteen page weekly newspaper, the purpose of which will be to spread propaganda favorable to the Bolsheviki. This announcement is made in today's issue of the propaganda sheet issued weekly from the headquarters of Ludwig C. A. K. Martens, the unrecognized 'Bolshevist Ambassador' to the United States. The paper is to be known as 'Soviet Russia.'" "'Every friend of Russia, as well as every person interested in international affairs,' says the announcement, 'will subscribe to this weekly.' 'Soviet Russia' will contain news items, editorials, original articles, and unpublished documents." The American Socialist Party acknowledges the Bolshevist regime of murder and starvation to be a Socialist regime and states that it upholds the lofty, international proletarian ideals. Debs and the American Socialist press, at the present writing, acknowledge the Bolsheviki to be real Socialists, not reactionaries or Socialists merely in name, like the Ebert-Scheidemann group in Germany. They want Bolshevism in America. They welcome it, laud it, love it. At least this is the case just now. Will they presently be offering arguments to prove that the Bolshevists were not Socialists at all, but traitors to the whole Marxian movement? Meantime the American Socialists spread all kinds of lies about the "wonders" of the Soviet Government while claiming that "the press" is lying about the Lenine system to save the capitalists from the demands of the laboring class. Let us sincerely hope that no more Bolshevists from Russia will land on our shores. We have enough rebellious, hypocritical Reds here already, and need no more of them to teach us how to run our government. Congress should pass strict laws allowing no immigrants to land here who are Bolshevists. It is to be hoped, too, that the leaders of the Illinois Labor Party who secured the adoption in their platform of a pro-Soviet plank in the spring of 1919 will take a few hours off and learn something about the Russian system before trying to "work it off" on our country. There has been a great deal of "pussy-footing" talk in the American press about Bolshevism and Socialism, implying that there is no connection between the two. Yet Bolshevism is nothing but a form of Socialism. It is Socialism applied, though not yet as completely applied as the teachings of Karl Marx require. If an incomplete application of the principles of Socialism reduces a country to such an awful condition as Russia reveals, what may be expected from the full dose of Socialism? At the last moment, with this book in type, a cry from the Bolshevik dictatorship comes out of Russia through interviews given by Lenine and Trotzky to the "New York World's" European correspondent, Lincoln Eyre. "I had an hour's talk with Lenine in the Kremlin at Moscow," Eyre writes in a dispatch headed, "Riga (by courier to Berlin), Feb. 20, 1920," and printed in the "World" of February 21, 1920. Lenine turned the interview into an argument for the lifting of the Allied blockade of Russia, and gave more than a hint that Russia's economic condition is desperate. According to Mr. Eyre's cable to the "New York World" of February 21, 1920, Lenine said, speaking in English: "Russia's present economic distress is simply a part of the world's economic distress. Until the economic problem is faced from a world standpoint and not merely from the standpoint of certain nations or groups of nations, a solution is impossible.... Not only Russia but all Europe is going to pieces, and the [Allied] Supreme Council still indulges in tergiversation. Russia can be saved from utter ruin and Europe, too, but it must be done soon and quickly." By insinuating that "all Europe is going to pieces" with Russia, and faces the same "utter ruin," Lenine covers his plea for Russia under an appeal to the self-interest of other nations. Yet his confession that Russia is "going to pieces" and trembles on the brink of "utter ruin" is plain enough, making his whole argument a cry to the "capitalistic" nations to help Socialistic Russia. Indeed, in other parts of the same interview, as reported by Mr. Eyre in the "World" of February 21, 1920, Lenine appeals to "foreign capital" and the "capitalistic countries" in the baldest terms, as follows: "We have reiterated and reiterated our desire for peace, our need for peace and our readiness to give foreign capital the most generous concessions and guarantees.... I know of no reason why a Socialistic commonwealth like ours cannot do business indefinitely with capitalistic countries. We don't mind taking their capitalistic locomotives and farming machinery, so why should they mind taking our Socialistic wheat, flax and platinum?" Having waded through blood and violence to exterminate "capitalism" and cancel all "concessions" and "guarantees" in Russia, has "the dictatorship of the proletariat" emerged out of its nightmare of destruction simply to coax "foreign capital" back into Socialistic Russia by bribing offers of "the most generous concessions and guarantees?" After two years of a reign of terror to make an earthly paradise by destroying "capitalism" and the whole machinery of "capitalistic countries," this hungry reaching out by Lenine after "capital" and "capitalistic" things is almost too ludicrous for belief! Eyre's interview with Trotzky, sent from "Riga (by courier to Berlin, Feb. 23)" and printed in the "New York World" of February 25, 1920, simply reenforces Lenine's appeal to "foreign capital" and the wicked "capitalistic countries." According to Eyre in the "World" of February 25, Trotzky spoke of "Russia, bankrupt, bleeding and starved," and said in part: "Our military successes have not blinded us to our need of peace. We require peace for the re-establishment of economic stabilization.... We have had to sacrifice the welfare of our people and the health of future generations to the desperate needs of the hour." And for what? Apparently only to substitute the autocracy of a new proletarian aristocracy for the autocracy of the old regime, and the czardom of Lenine and Trotzky for that of the Romanoffs. And the new tyranny not only re-establishes the old partnership between "capital" and labor, but puts the burden of militarism on labor more exclusively than before. This seems to be the program of Trotzky, "the People's Commissary for Military Affairs," according to Eyre's report of Trotzky's words in the "New York World" of February 25, 1920. His words are as follows: "We recognize our need for outside aid in setting this country on its feet industrially and economically. It is a tremendous enterprise, one that will take two, five, perhaps ten years to carry out, but through the indomitable spirit of our proletariat it will be accomplished with a speed and competency that will amaze our foemen.... And once again I say that the people who help us gain peace will share in the profits, the very considerable profits, resultant from the aid they will have extended to us.... "Foreign capitalists who invest their money in Russian enterprises or who supply us with merchandise we require will receive material guarantees of amply adequate character. They need have no fears on that score.... It is obvious that we must look to the victorious nations, to Great Britain or, still better, to America for machinery, agricultural tools and other imports which Russia's economic renaissance demands." Thus the old partnership of capital and labor is to be resumed. But what of the Russian workers? Having fought and toiled to put Lenine and Trotzky on the proletarian throne they must keep up military training to keep them there, and must toil hard to produce "the very considerable profits" which Lenine and Trotzky are going to share with the "foreign capitalists" who help them. But let Trotzky explain the destiny of the Russian workers in his own words, as reported by Eyre in the "World" of February 25, 1920: "The workers and peasants will insist, once the revolution is no longer in peril, on returning to their factories and farms and making Russia a fit land to live in. Frontier guards will be maintained, of course. The framework of our (military) organization must also be preserved in order that with the experience they have received in the past eighteen months our proletarian fighting men can be remodelled in two or three months if the need arises. There will also be some form of military training for the working class, that it may always be ready to defend itself against the bourgeoisie." Will not this be "militarism?" Of course not; for, in Trotzky's words in the same interview, "Militarism, striking as it does at the very roots of Communism, cannot possibly exist in Soviet Russia, the only truly pacific country in the world!" Thus facts disappear behind words. Conscription was militaristic under the Czar, but it cannot be under a Trotzky, for he has labeled his system a Soviet Republic and since Soviets are never military their military arrangements, though apparently more severe than the other kind, are really only a form of pacifism! Thus the happy Russian workers must serve as "frontier guards," keep up the framework of their military organization, and submit to "some form of military training," but may whistle as they groan, knowing that the yoke they bear "cannot exist." Other contradictions in these interviews will be discussed later in this book. For example, we shall find, in Chapter XVI, that the Soviet Republic at Moscow can make peace with "capitalistic countries" and form partnerships with "foreign capital" while at the same time the Third International at Moscow carries on a world-wide conspiracy to destroy "capitalism" and overthrow the governments and institutions of "capitalistic countries." CHAPTER XII EUROPEAN SPARTACIDES AND COMMUNISTS In Berlin, shortly after the Revolution against the Imperial Government, Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg and their group of Socialists of the extreme Left were raising a merry riot almost every day in the hope of overcoming the ultra-conservative Socialist government and introducing the radical Bolshevist program. The constant disorder occasioned by these Spartacans or Spartacides of the Left provoked the opposition parties very much, annoying them to such an extent that many Germans wished to remove the capital of the country from Berlin to some more orderly city. The name "Spartacides" or "Spartacans" came from the fact that early in the World War Karl Liebknecht, their leader, issued a number of anti-war pamphlets bearing the pseudonym, "Spartacus." The Spartacides are the reddest of the Reds, the real Socialists of Germany. They differ very much from the Ebert-Scheidemann group, for the Spartacans want the principles of Socialism applied immediately, whereas Ebert and other members of his government warned their followers that though they held Socialist theories, the application of Socialism must be postponed to the distant future. The Ebert-Scheidemann Majority Socialists are regarded by the others as Socialists only in name, being really social reformers, or, at the most, weak-kneed Socialists who sought power, but fully realized that the application of the Marxian principles would be doomed to absolute failure. The Spartacans, however, still have confidence in Socialism; they agree heart and soul with the Russian Bolsheviki; they are the rowdies and ruffians of Germany, always looking for trouble. Strikes, riots and civil discord are their weapons, and the American Socialists are among their particular friends. Indeed, the Socialist Party of Eugene V. Debs has no use whatever for the Ebert-Scheidemann group, who are looked upon as reactionaries, hypocrites, murderers and traitors to Socialism. In the latter part of 1918, the Berlin correspondent of the "Kölnische Zeitung" drew a graphic picture of the terrorism exercised in Berlin by the Spartacan gangs: "Dr. Liebknecht himself, whose imprisonment has obviously clouded his formerly keen intelligence and probably turned his brain, spends his time in visiting barracks in Berlin, Spandau and elsewhere, and inciting the men to refuse to allow any distinctions even of non-commissioned rank or to accept anything resembling orders from officers or to admit them to the local councils. His chief of staff, Dr. Levy, who before the war was his business partner in his law office, is preaching fanaticism in Berlin to all and sundry. "The word Spartacus goes through the city like a bogy. Civilians, soldiers, employees, capitalists, all feel themselves equally threatened. A sitting of the Prussian Lower House had to be adjourned because it was feared that the Spartacus gang was going to seize the building. "'The Lokal Anzeiger' has several times failed to appear, as the result of repeated efforts of the Spartacus gang to seize it. Careful burghers chain up the house doors, and it would be well if the steadier elements of our workmen and soldiers would chain up the door of their hearts against the murderous and suicidal ideas of the Spartacus gang." The Spartacides made a practice of terrorizing German newspapers into supporting them. In the early part of 1919, they tried to prevent the Constituent Assembly from coming together, and later on engineered many a revolt in the various cities of Germany. Since their leaders, the fiery Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, were assassinated, the orderly elements of the German people have succeeded more and more in weakening the power and influence of the Spartacans. Kurt Eisner, of Bavaria, after the overthrow of the German Imperial Government, sought to establish a federation of German republics under the head of Bavaria. It was not very long before the first step was taken, Bavaria declaring itself a republic independent of the Berlin Government. After the assassination of Eisner, Bavaria, and especially its capital, Munich, came more and more under the control of the extreme radical group of Socialists known as the Communists. About the end of March, 1919, Bela Kun, the Foreign Minister of the newly established Communist Government of Hungary and one of the most active propagandists of Russian Bolshevism, arrived at Munich to confer with the leaders of the Bavarian Government. Shortly afterwards, in the early part of April, a Soviet Republic was proclaimed at Munich. The socialization of industry began. That part of the press that favored the new regime was upheld by the Government, which suppressed unfriendly organs. Members of the Christian Textile Workers' Association were forced, on pain of being deprived of work, to join the Social-Democratic Union. Various other measures of "freedom, equality, and justice" were also bestowed upon the people, and the hope was expressed by the Red Socialists of Munich that the proclamation of a Bavarian Soviet would have its effect throughout Germany and result in a world revolution. Towards the middle of April, 1919, press dispatches stated that the Munich Communists had elected a council, consisting of five workmen and five soldiers, with Herr Klatz, a bricklayer, as president; that the police was disarmed; that eleven hostages were taken from the ranks of the trade-union leaders; that revolutionary tribunals were established at Munich, where twenty-eight judges continued, in relays of seven, to pass sentences day and night, and, finally, that a decree was issued by the Communist government confiscating all dwellings. Shortly after these reports reached America, the peasants of Bavaria rose up against the revolutionary government in Munich and declared an effective ban on the shipment of food to that city. No attacks were made upon Munich by the troops of the moderate Hoffman government of Bavaria which had been ousted by the Communists, for it was feared that the whole country might thus be plunged into civil war. The only strategic movement of these troops was to cut off the supplies of food. Discord soon sprang up among the Soviet leaders themselves, who engaged in open street fights against each other. Before the end of April, 1919, the Central Council had been dissolved and the Communist mob had turned to plundering. Food ration cards were taken away from the bourgeoisie, and barricades were erected around the city to defend it from Noske's army, sent to attack it by the Ebert-Scheidemann moderate Socialist Government of Berlin. In the early part of May, 1919, the Communist rabble of the Bavarian capital was finally overcome by the artillery fire of Noske's troops, and Hoffman was once more put in control. The American Socialists look upon the ousted Communists of Bavaria as the upholders of the Marxian doctrine, and consider them, along with the Russian Bolsheviki and the Hungarian Communists, as Socialist brethren worthy of their respect and imitation. In Hungary the "100 per cent" Socialists, the Communists, under the leadership of Bela Kun, came into power in the early part of the year 1919. Press despatches, at the end of March, stated that all villas, industries and building had been declared the property of the state; that each factory was controlled by a Council of Laborers; that free-love was legalized as in Russia; that all clergymen and nuns were removed from the hospitals, excepting those who acted in the capacity of nurses, and the religious, tuition schools were abolished. A press dispatch dated Buda-Pest, April 4, 1919, said that "in Transylvania, following the practice in Moscow, the churches have been converted into music halls, the best seats being reserved for the proletariat. The government officials do not pay house rent and have priority on foodstuffs and clothing." The American Socialists boasted about the absence of bloodshed in Hungary during the early part of Bela Kun's regime. Whether or not he had been cautioned by Lenine not to wear out too many rifles in the beginning, lest there be a dearth later on, we do not know. At any rate, by the latter part of May, 1919, the Hungarian Communists also began to manifest their true color. They were not satisfied with "painting everything red" in Buda-Pest, but also wanted to see red blood flowing in the gutters. In confirmation of this we have the following Associated Press report, dated Vienna, May 20, but not appearing in the "New York Times" till May 23: "Many persons accused of being counter-revolutionists are being executed by the Hungarian Communists, according to despatches received here. The victims are usually shot in front of the Hungarian Parliament House in the daytime or in the school-yard in the Markostrasse at night. "Among those who are said to have been executed are Herr Holan, manager of the Kaschau-Oderberg Railway; Bishop Balthasar, a hostage from Debreczen, and Colonel Dormany of the General Staff, who was taken from a hospital. Several girls, who were accused of making tri-color rosettes for the counter-revolutionists, also were executed. The presiding Judge of the Revolutionary tribunal, which orders the executions, it is said, is a former locksmith, 22 years of age. "Many bodies of men and women and girls of the better classes have been found on the shores of islands in the Danube below the city. It is reported that they were arrested in the residential quarter of Buda and thrown into the Danube by guards who were taking them to prisons in Pest." In the summer of 1919 the Hungarian Communists lost control of the country. Not only had internal dissensions broken out at home, but they had been attacked for a long time by the Rumanians, who had caused them endless trouble. If they had succeeded in remaining in power long enough, they would, no doubt, in time have shown themselves proficient in murdering their fellow-countrymen and as skilled in the use of the rifle as the Bolsheviki in Russia, the Spartacides in Germany and the Communists in Bavaria. These four groups of European Socialists of the extreme Left--ruffians, brutes, murderous thugs, half barbarous savages, slayers even of their own Socialist brethren--have long been in a "position" to teach the "gentle art" of plunder and murder to their admiring comrades on this side of the Atlantic, that "poor," "persecuted," "workingman," Eugene V. Debs, and his crowd of "honest," "scientific," "evolutionists." With these European thugs Berger and Hillquit deliberately "lined up" the Socialist Party of America in the words of their Chicago manifesto of September 4, 1919: "The Socialist Party of the United States at its first national convention after the war, squarely takes its position with the uncompromising section of the international Socialist Movement. We unreservedly reject the policy of those Socialists who supported their belligerent capitalist governments on the plea of 'national defense,'" etc. There is no breath of patriotism in these dogs. The above "line up" was confirmed by the rank and file of the Socialist Party of America in their referendum vote identifying their party with the Revolutionary Third (Moscow) International. (See Chapters V and XVI.) CHAPTER XIII THE BOLSHEVISM OF AMERICAN SOCIALISTS To accuse American Socialists of conspiring against our fair land may at first startle the reader. Brand as traitors to the common welfare men who boast so loudly of being the only friends of the oppressed laborer! Call the followers of Karl Marx the enemies of our country after they have lavished so much precious time on exposures of those who defraud American workingmen of an honest wage! Yet, as our investigation moves along, telling evidence uncovers the existence of an alarmingly widespread conspiracy. Our Chapters VIII and IX have clearly revealed the I. W. W. as a purely revolutionary organization, enrolling under its red flag discontented workingmen, even negroes and Chinese, pledged to overthrow our Government, while meanwhile, with anarchistic contempt for law and morality, they do what damage they can through strikes and sabotage. The same chapters proved that the Socialists are co-operating heart and soul with the Industrial Workers of the World. Chapters X, XI and XII gave the reader evidence of some of the terrible results of Bolshevism in Russia, Communism in Hungary and Bavaria, and Spartacism in Germany. Yet far from being dismayed by these horrors, the Socialists of the United States proclaim themselves of the same breed as the Bolshevists, Communists and Spartacans abroad, whose torch of incendiarism they would apply to the United States. The Socialist Party of Buffalo, New York, published a pink booklet entitled, "The Truth About Russia," in which reference is made to the Russian call to a world-wide Socialist revolution. On page 41, at the conclusion of the articles of the Bolshevik Constitution concerning rights and duties, we read: "In proclaiming these rights and duties the Russian Socialist Republic of the Soviets calls upon the working classes of the entire world to accomplish their task to the very end, and in the faith that the Socialist ideal will soon be achieved to write upon their flags the old battle cry of the working people: "'Proletarians of all lands, unite! "'Long live the Socialistic world revolution!'" The plan is for Socialists in countries outside of Russia to be helped in their revolts against their governments by their Bolshevist comrades. In the "Labor Scrap Book," published by Chas. H. Kerr and Co., there is a long article by Nicholas Lenine, the Russian dictator. Several quotations are here given: "Russia's revolution is not a domestic revolution, but essentially a world revolution.... "The Bolsheviki follow a consistent policy. They realized long ago that the revolution, though primarily political, must become economic and socialist. They know that economy and socialism have nothing to do with racial or political boundaries and that the future of our revolution must, therefore, be international. The revolution must pass over all political and racial frontiers and crush opposing economic ideas. They know that a state organized on Socialist and pacifist lines cannot exist if hemmed in by capitalistic and militarist states. Russia's revolution must follow the law of all healthy organisms. It must increase. If it does not increase it will decline.... "Russia will continue to propagandize unshrinkingly in all countries. "We may be left temporarily in peace to enjoy our revolutionary social and economic system while the rest of Europe continues to groan under a capitalism and monarchism which, perhaps, for the time being, will be purged of a too dangerous imperialism. "What will Russia do if this be so? "Short-sighted men reply: 'Cherish your own revolution; thank Heaven that you are better off than the rest of the world; and let the rest of the world do what it likes.' "But we Bolsheviki are against such a policy. Short of armed pressure against any European country, we shall not shrink from measures necessary for spreading our revolution in the world. "The motives why every Bolshevik must approve of this policy are overwhelming. The first is that a peace between the ideas of revolutionary Russia and the ideas of non-revolutionary Europe could at best be a truce.... "Each side would foster its ideas and prepare for a future struggle, and since non-revolutionary Europe will always be better armed than pacifist Russia, the European despots (as soon as they have recovered from their present bitter lesson of the meaning of war) undoubtedly would hurl themselves upon Russia in order to wipe away the one revolutionary plague-spot. "For that reason our revolution cannot rest until it has established full revolution in all neighbor lands. "The second reason why Russia must incite Europe to revolt is that by its very nature, the revolution cannot live in isolation. Europe must be organized, either on a capitalistic basis or a proletarian, anti-capitalistic basis. The dual system is inconceivable. It is impossible for Russia to exist without capitalistic banks and industries, if she has to trade with countries which have capitalistic banks and industries.... "In its own defense the revolution must propagandize and convert. It must incite and urge on the masses against their present rulers in all countries, and it must do this unshrinkingly, without fear of consequences, or consideration for the feelings and interests of the foreign affected parties." The question may now be asked, What means is the Russian Bolshevist government using to incite revolution in America? We have not, of course, much definite information as yet; but we know that Lenine's government has lots of money which it can use for foreign revolutionary propaganda, and that a certain Ludwig C. A. K. Martens has been in our country for some time claiming to represent the Soviet government and boasting that he is able to deposit in our banks for commercial purposes hundreds of millions of Russian gold. He is very active, has been assisted by Morris Hillquit of "The Call," the Socialist daily of New York City, goes about visiting different Socialist organizations, and in return is entertained by them. During the months of April and May, 1919, many notices of such receptions were published in "The Call." One example will suffice. Under the caption, "Official Socialist News," in the issue of March 31, 1919, we read: "The central committee of Local New York, Socialist Party, greets Comrade L. C. A. K. Martens, recently appointed the representative of the Russian Soviet government in the United States and in his name the victorious Russian proletariat. "We sincerely hope that his work in behalf of the Socialist government of Russia will be crowned with success. We pledge him our aid, and promise that we shall not rest until the government of the United States has ceased to be a party to the economic and political isolation of Russia and the military occupation of territory of the Soviet republic." In the latter part of March, 1919, Martens shared offices with Santeri Nuorteva, also a great friend of the American Socialists. Nuorteva was head of the Bolshevist propaganda in this country and from his office mailed the "Weekly Bulletin of the Bureau of Information on Soviet Russia." Nuorteva denied that these large sheets, which are about the same size as the propaganda sheets issued in the first months of the war by the German Information Service, constitute propaganda. Like the German Information Service sheets, each contains from six to ten articles. All paint conditions in Russia under Trotzky and Lenine as steadily improving and show those men and their aids as gentle, kind-hearted individuals whose only sin is the betterment of mankind. Among labor unions Bolshevism has made great headway. The New Labor Party of Illinois in 1919 not only supported Soviet Russia but favored the Soviet system in our own country. Sensible workingmen in the American Federation of Labor and conservative members of the new Labor Party had good reason for being alarmed and for suspecting that American propagators of Bolshevism received Russian gold from some one, possibly from Martens. The Socialist papers of the United States approve of Bolshevism, Spartacism and Communism, and would gladly welcome it to our country. "The Call," New York, March 31, 1919, on its editorial page says: "The red in the East is the dawning of a new day." On April 1, 1919, the same paper contained a long article on the first page, entitled, "Forces of Darkness Open Their Campaign to End Bolshevism." On April 11, 1919, in an editorial on the impending capture of Odessa by the Bolsheviki, it says: "The evacuation of the Black Sea port of Odessa by foreign troops that have been holding it for many months is news of great significance.... "Like the German forces hurled against Soviet Russia by the mailed fist of the Kaiser, the French, Greek and Rumanian soldiers go out in a different mind and temper than they had going in. Wherever they go, they will spread the ideas of human liberty and co-operative development that they were sent to crush." On April 13, 1919, "The Call" printed a poem on the assassinated Spartacan leader, Karl Liebknecht: "Liebknecht "Liebknecht, your lonely, bitter course is run! While we, with cautious feet, pursue the goal-- 'Tis not in pity's name that we make moan-- Nay! 'tis in envy of your martyrdom! The mirror of your flaming soul Has caught our poverty and gloom, In that fierce light our virtues shown Petty, distorted, wan! Then, hail! O martyr, in our day of doom! Hail, fiery heart, receive the victor's crown! Our heart a charnel house has grown For our vast dead! Yet we make room For freedom's slain. Shall not the tomb Yield heavy harvest where such seed is sown?" "The Call," April 15, 1919, published the following endorsement of Hungarian Communism by the New York State Committee of the Socialist Party: "Whereas, the working class of Hungary have seized political power and are using the same for the purpose of socializing industry and as an instrument for the complete emancipation of labor, therefore be it "Resolved, that we, the State Committee of the Socialist Party of the State of New York, in meeting assembled congratulate the Socialist movement and the working class of Hungary on the success of the revolution and on the position that the Hungarian Socialist Republic has taken in defiance of the capitalist imperialists of all lands." In the April 24, 1919, edition of "The Call" we read: "A new period in the evolution of the social and economic structure of the world is at hand. A new day for those who toil. A new day which will mean economic and political liberty based on justice for those who toil. Some call it revolution. Well, if that be the word, so be it. And woe be to those who in their blind folly throw themselves in the way to stop its onward sweep throughout the civilized world, for they shall be as grass before the sickle! Hail, all hail, the new day!" Again, in its issue of April 30, 1919, "The Call" favors the Hungarian Communist regime of Bela Kun: "'There is reason to believe,' says a dispatch from Budapest, 'that the present Hungarian government has been unofficially approached by the Entente with the suggestion that military invasion might be arrested if the extremist members were replaced by more moderate Socialists.' Making all allowance for the unreliability of the dispatch, it is hard to say which cuts the more contemptible figure, the Entente or the 'Moderate Socialists.'" In its 1919 May Day edition, "The Call," under the caption, "All Attacks on Russian Revolution Have Recoiled," shows its sympathy for Bolshevism and Spartacism: "Every attack of world reaction upon Soviet Russia, the center of the world revolution, has remained fruitless. The internal strength and the external power of the Russian Workers' and Peasants' Republic is growing daily into a power that will successfully withstand the onslaughts of capitalism. The possibilities of subduing the Russian revolution by force from without decrease constantly as the governments of the different countries are ever more forcibly threatened by the fermentation among their own peoples which they must combat. "At present the second, the Socialist revolution, has come upon the scene in Germany, which, driven to the edge of starvation, bleeding and drained to the marrow by Kaiserism and militarism, is now being held in the grip of Entente capitalism. There at this moment the courageous and steadfast Socialists stand under the flag of Spartacus, first on the barricades under the sign of the general strike and street battles.... "The German Socialists of the Right have soiled the name of Socialism by being inimical to the Russian revolution; by failing to communicate with the radical English elements in the English strike movements, which are also spontaneous expressions of proletarian unrest; by acting as the lackeys of Kaiserism and capitalism in opposing the November revolution to the last hour before its outbreak; and, finally, by their unspeakable mass murders of starving, demonstrating and striking proletarians. "In this struggle between the revolution and the social-patriotic bourgeois reaction which now enters into a decisive phase, two of the noblest pioneers of the international, Dr. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, were murdered by the hate-filled bourgeois mob and the degenerate Scheidemann-Noske henchmen. Another victim of the treacherous reaction was Kurt Eisner, Socialist premier of Bavaria. One need but be an honest, fearless Socialist to be in danger of one's life under the hypocritical, false, brutal and murderous regime of Ebert-Scheidemann-Noske. This regime revives the worst methods of Kaiserism and holds its protecting hand over the bourgeois and capitalists of Germany. But this blood and the blood of our martyrs will only urge the masses to continuous unconquerable struggle, till the criminal Ebert-Scheidemann-Noske reaction, together with the criminals and conspirators of the old empire, yield to the power of the revolutionary justice of the masses." In the May 1, 1919, issue of "The Call," the May Day Manifesto is made public by Morris Hillquit, International Secretary of the Socialist Party of the United States. Only part of it is hereby quoted: "We send fraternal greetings and vows of whole-hearted sympathy to the Socialist Soviet Republic of Russia, which is so valiantly upholding the lofty international proletarian ideals in the face of the combining military economic and political attacks of reactionary powers, and in spite of the systematic campaign of libelous misrepresentation on the part of the lying capitalist press of the world. We send congratulations and fraternal good wishes to the workers of Hungary on the establishment of a free Communistic Workers' Republic, upon the ruins of the predatory monarchy of their exploiting and land-monopolizing rulers. We extend the hand of comradeship and solidarity to the revolutionary Socialists of Germany and Russia, now engaged in a life-and-death struggle to secure for the working masses of their countries the full fruit of their victorious revolutions; to the workers of England in their efforts to wrest the control of the industries from the parasites in their country, and to the Socialists of France, Italy and all other countries of Europe in their fights against their revolutionary governments." "The New Age," the Socialist paper of Buffalo, April 10, 1919, published a "Greeting to the Soviet Republic of Hungary": "The proletariat of Hungary has taken all power in its own hands. Like a bolt from the blue the workers, soldiers and peasants of 'conquered' Hungary proclaim their intervention in the arena of world politics--and the diplomats of capitalism are thrown into a flurry of mingled rage and fear. "While the wires were still hot with the news of the resignation of Count Karolyi, president of the provisional government of Hungary, as a protest against the peace terms of the Paris Conference, came word of the complete triumph of revolutionary Socialism and the establishment of the second Soviet Republic in the world. "With little or no resistance, with no intervening period of Socialist compromise, the Hungarian Soviet Republic rises to power and in its initial proclamation ushers in the dictatorship of the proletariat, decrees the socialization of the large estates, mines, big industries, banks and lines of transportation, declares its oneness of purpose with the revolutionary proletariat of Russia and its readiness to form an armed alliance with the federated Soviet Republic. All over the country Workmen's, Soldiers' and Peasants' Councils are in action and take over the functions of government." "The Revolutionary Age," then a Socialist paper of Boston, on March 29, 1919, showed its complete sympathy for the Bolshevists, Communists and Spartacans: "So the Hungarian workers set about their task and the eastern sky is brightening. "Already the two Soviet governments have issued an appeal to the workers of all countries to sweep away the old system. The bourgeois press tells of the spread of Bolshevism throughout central Europe and the diplomats of Capitalism are turning this way and that to avert fresh outbreaks. But they are powerless. Every new move brings new complications, every award of territory here brings discontent and adds to the 'menace' there. "Next! "The fear that weighs upon the world of Capitalism and the diplomats in Paris is: Who next? The proclamation of a Soviet Republic in Hungary is to them not a fact, but a symbol--a symbol of the onward sweep of the proletarian revolution, which may break loose in other nations. "Through this symbol looms Soviet Russia--gigantic, mysterious and implacable. Despised by the world of Capitalism, intrigued against and vilified, isolated in the spaces of its own territory, attacked by the soldiers of the Allies--Soviet Russia, through the flaming energy of its proletariat and Socialism has conquered in spite of all. The Allies, their Capitalism and Imperialism, are no longer a menace to Soviet Russia; it is now Soviet Russia that menaces the Allies through its own gigantic strength and the threat of the international proletarian revolution.... "And this revolutionary army of Soviet Russia, massed at the frontier, is prepared to march into Hungary or Poland or Germany to co-operate with the revolutionary masses in any war that may be necessary against international Imperialism and for the proletarian revolution. "The situation in Germany is critical and crucial. The conquest of power by the revolutionary proletariat in Germany will assure the world revolution. The recent butchery of the Spartacans by the Government of 'Socialist' assassins has not crushed the revolutionary masses; on the contrary, the masses have been aroused, the Ebert-Scheidemann government depending more and more upon the worst elements of the old regime; it is being isolated, and the workers are rallying to the Soviets." "The Ohio Socialist," published in Cleveland, and claiming to be the "Official Organ of the Socialist Parties of Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia and New Mexico," in the spring of 1919 gave its unlimited support to Bolshevism. "The Proletarian," then a Socialist paper of Detroit, was in thorough accord with Bolshevists, Spartacists and Communists, of Russia, Germany and Hungary respectively. The following quotations are taken from the April, 1919, edition: "In order to be a good American, according to the view of the powers that be, it is necessary to repeat and believe the stories written in the capitalist press about the Bolsheviki. But we, who know what is going on, and do not believe them, maintain that a person can be truthful, and still be an American. That he can be a good, pure, unadulterated American, and still lend his sympathies to the Bolsheviki. "In revolutionary Germany the struggle between the defenders of capitalism and the champions of working class emanicipation--the Spartacides and their adherents--continues almost unceasingly. The 'democratic' government has taken desperate steps to crush the revolution; there have been wholesale executions and other repressive acts.... "The final conflict is now on. 'Ruthless slaughter' is the governmental decree with Gustav Noske, 'minister of defense,' in charge of the butchering. And what is it that Noske and his 'Socialist' colleagues are defending? The interests of the German capitalists. Sacred private property rights are in danger; the stronghold of capitalism is being assailed. The expropriation of the capitalists is the aim of the proletarian revolutionists.... "All the old friends of Kaiserism--Hoffman, Hindenberg and the rest--are lined up against the Spartacans. Although these elements of reaction have gained temporary victory, the workers are undismayed." "The Proletarian," in this same issue, referring to the Bela Kun dictatorship of Hungary, says: "On Sunday, March 23d, the news was flashed across America that Hungary had swung into the ranks of the revolutionary proletarian dictatorships.... "A note from the Paris Conference seems to have been the last straw that 'broke the camel's back' of the middle course government, causing President, Cabinet and all, to resign. This allowed the political power to fall into the hands of those who are alone capable of handling the situation--the revolutionary proletariat." "The Chicago Socialist" is also pro-Bolshevist. In the April 1, 1919, edition each of the three following lines extends across the top of the front page of the paper: "How Many Bolshevists in Chicago? "The Vote Today Will Tell. "Vote The Socialist Ticket." At the bottom of the first page of this April election day issue of "The Chicago Socialist," the following notice is given to voters: "Vote for the great change, TODAY, by casting a Socialist ballot. Stand up and be counted for a Soviet Republic, not only in Russia, or in Hungary, not only in the United States or in some other land; but stand up and be counted for the Soviet Republic of the world." The Socialist paper of Duluth, like the other Marxian papers of the United States, also favored Spartacism and Bolshevism, for in the March 7, 1919, issue of "The Truth" we read: "We can honestly say that the position in Germany is very promising. The Spartacides are now coming into their own and ere long we shall see Bolshevism firmly established in Germany." The pink booklet published by the Socialist Party, Buffalo, New York, entitled, "The Truth About Russia," contains the text of the Bolshevik Constitution, and on page 2 appears the following introduction: "This little booklet is published by Local Buffalo, Socialist Party, Erie County, with the object in view of giving information to those who desire to grasp the true situation and understand the struggle now going on in Eastern Europe between the reactionary elements allied with German imperialism and other imperialists against the Workers' Republic of Russia in their struggle for true democracy." On the back cover sheet of "The Crisis in the German Social Democracy," written by Karl Leibknecht, Rosa Luxemburg and Franz Mehring, and published by the Socialist Publication Society of Brooklyn, New York, there is an advertisement of "The Class Struggle," "a bi-monthly magazine devoted to International Socialism." This bi-monthly "does not exploit the ephemeral, but gives serious studies of the international movement from the pens of comrades in all parts of the world. Among the recent contributors are: Lenine, Trotzky, Lunacharsky, Franz Mehring, Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Friedrich Adler, Santeri Nuorteva" So the advertisement reads. "The Bulletin," issued March 24, 1919, by the National Office, Socialist Party, page 11, volunteers information which shows one phase of Bolshevist propaganda carried on by that Party in the United States: "The striking effective leaflet, 'The Great and Growing Fear--No Work,' is accomplishing a double purpose and is being snapped up eagerly and distributed by the hundreds of thousands by state and local organizations and by individual hustlers. Two hundred thousand copies have been sold and it will shortly go to its third printing. Orders indicate a million edition of this powerful leaflet. The Russian Constitution, an article and thought-compelling cartoons on unemployment, that this leaflet carries, make it the Socialist literature triumph of the month. Send for sample copy and order early. "From the hustling 'Red' town of Hamilton, Ohio, comes an order for 8,000 'Great Fear' leaflets to put the truth about the Russian Soviet Constitution in the homes of the workers of that community." "The Eye Opener," the official national organ of the Socialist Party of America, in its issue of January, 1919, shows its sympathy for the Spartacans by the following article: "'You Did Not Die In Vain!' "American Socialist Party to "_Liebknecht and Luxembourg_. "The Socialist Party executive committee has adopted a resolution on the death of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg, Germany's two most uncompromising foes of Kaiserism and imperialism. It is as follows: "'The National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party of the United States of America, has learned of the deaths of our beloved comrades, Dr. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg, who are reported assassinated by the agents of the reactionary forces of Germany, who are now conspiring to deprive the workers of that country of the opportunity to establish a free government there. "'These comrades, always true to the principles of revolutionary Socialism, in the face of unqualified opposition before, during and after the great war, commanded the love and admiration of all the lovers of international liberty, and have, by their incomparable devotion to this great cause, made their names immortal in the history of working class liberation.'" From the "New York Times," November 18, 1918, we learn that the Chicago Socialists endorsed Bolshevism. A despatch by the International News Service from Cleveland, Ohio, March 31, 1919, informs us that C.E. Ruthenberg, leading Socialist of that city, after a meeting of the Cleveland Socialists on March 30, announced that the members of the party had just voted in favor of the adoption of the Bolshevik doctrine of Lenine and Trotzky for the further direction of the Cleveland party and that the action of the members was practically unanimous. "The Call," New York, April 3, 1919, gave notice of a pro-Bolshevist meeting to be held by the Socialists on the following Saturday afternoon at Park Circle, New York City: "This is the first of a series that the Socialist Party of Harlem proposes to hold, inspired by the success of the Debs meeting two weeks ago at the same place, when 15,000 people attended. "The assemblage on Saturday, besides demanding that the United States recognize Soviet Russia, will also give a welcome to the Soviet Republic of Hungary." In its issue of April 10, 1919, "The Call" recorded the approval by the Queen's County, New York, Socialists of the Bolsheviki and Spartacans: "We desire to clearly place ourselves on record for, and openly and actively sign ourselves with the revolutionary proletariat the world over, as at present expressed by the policies and tactics of the Communist Party of Russia (Bolsheviki), the Communist Labor Party in Germany (Spartacans) and other parties in harmony with them." On May 31, 1919, "The Call" published the declaration of the National Executive Committee of the party in favor of Bolshevism, Communism and Spartacism: The Socialist Party of the United States "supports whole-heartedly the Soviet Republic of Russia and the Communist government of Hungary.... In Germany, Austria and countries similarly situated, its sympathies are with the more advanced Socialist groups." In "The Call," May 17, 1919, Martens, the representative in the United States of the Russian Soviet Government, is quoted as saying: "Russian workers, whom I represent, acknowledge with gratitude the sympathy toward the struggles of Soviet Russia evinced by the Socialist Party of America, as well as by the Socialist Labor Party, the I. W. W. and other organizations of the working class, and they return the sympathy without discrimination." "The Call," March 30, 1919, informs its readers that Cleveland Socialists were organizing a Workers' and Soldiers' Soviet, and again, on April 1, 1919, that soviets had been established in Seattle, Portland and San Francisco. Eugene V. Debs, in an article written by him in "The Class Struggle," said: "From the crown of my head to the soles of my feet I am Bolshevik and proud of it." "The Call," April 14, 1919, published Debs' "Last Minute Message to All New York Socialists": "As I am about to enter the prison doors, I wish to send to the Socialists of New York who have loyally stood by me since my first arrest, this little message of love and cheer. These are pregnant and promising days. We are all on the threshold of tremendous changes. The workers of the world are awakening and bestirring themselves as never before. All the forces that are playing upon the modern world are making for the overthrow of despotism in all its forms and for the emancipation of the masses of mankind. I shall be in prison in the days to come, but my revolutionary spirit will be abroad, and I shall not be inactive. Let us all, in the supreme hour, measure up to our full stature and work together as one for the great cause that means emancipation for us all. Love to all my Comrades, and all hail to the Revolution.--Eugene Victor Debs." From the same issue of "The Call" we learn that Debs, on leaving Wheeling, West Virginia, for the Moundsville prison, gave the following statement to David Karsner, staff correspondent: "I enter the prison doors a flaming revolutionist--my head erect, my spirit untamed, and my soul unconquered." A press despatch from Toledo, Ohio, March 31, 1919, describes the serious socialist riot which took place that afternoon as a protest against the then impending imprisonment of Debs, the self-styled "flaming revolutionist": "Toledo, Ohio, March 31.--When they were refused admission by city officials to Memorial Hall, a city building where Eugene V. Debs was scheduled to speak, 5,000 persons stormed the place, broke windows and doors, and then paraded the streets crying, 'To hell with the mayor.' ... "Announcement that Debs would not be permitted to speak was made late Saturday night, after the Socialists here had prepared to handle an overflow crowd. The announcement appeared in the morning papers, and was the first notice the Socialists had that their meeting could not be held. "When the hour for Debs to speak arrived there were at least 6,000 men and women congregated about the William McKinley monument in Courthouse Park, across the street from Memorial hall. "A man mounted the base of the monument. 'We'll use Memorial Hall this afternoon if we have to wade through blood to do it!' he shouted. A policeman grabbed him and he was thrown unceremoniously into a patrol wagon. The man who essayed to speak next also was arrested. "As the crowd sensed what was occurring the radicals began to hoot and boo the officers. Clubs were drawn and the crowd was made to move. Then came the parade through the streets and cries of 'Down with the mayor!' 'Hang him!' 'To hell with the police!' and others of a similar nature. "It was after five o'clock before the police were able to disperse the crowd. Fist fights by the dozens occurred on corners. Hotel lobbies were invaded by the malcontents. Street cars were held up and threats of serious outbreaks were to be heard on every hand.... "More than seventy-five men were arrested, including Thomas Devine, Socialist member of the city council." CHAPTER XIV VIOLENCE, BLOODSHED AND ARMED REBELLION Every year on May Day the Socialists are in the habit of publishing articles and making speeches of a more than usual revolutionary character. They are also fond of parading on that day to incite riot, and of holding meetings to stir up discontent and to foment rebellion among the laboring classes. May Day, 1919, was an especially serious one in several cities of the United States and will long be remembered, because the Socialist riots occurred while the whole country was excited over the unsuccessful mailing of bombs to a score or so of eminent citizens. The most serious Marxian riots took place in Cleveland, Ohio, and were described in part in the "Chicago Tribune" as follows: "Cleveland, Ohio, May 1.--An unidentified man was killed by a detective's bullet, eleven policemen were shot or badly beaten, and about 100 persons wounded, many seriously, in general rioting which brought a dramatic finale this afternoon to a Socialist May Day demonstration here. "About thirty persons, seriously injured, are in hospitals to-night, while scores of others, including women, were trampled by rioters or clubbed by police. "Socialist headquarters was totally wrecked by angry civilians bent on putting an end to the demonstration.... "A mob of several hundred threatened police headquarters when C. E. Ruthenberg, Socialist leader and former Socialist candidate for mayor, was arrested and for more than an hour the entire downtown section of the city was a warring mass of Socialists, police, civilians and soldiers, the latter riding down the rioters in army trucks and tanks. "Dozens of shots were fired in Public square, where more than 20,000 Socialists and sympathizers assembled for a May Day rally and to protest against the convictions of Eugene V. Debs and Thomas J. Mooney. "The trouble started in Superior Avenue, near East Ninth Street, when the head of one of the five Socialist parades, scheduled to meet in a mass meeting at Public square, was stopped, and Liberty Loan workers and an army lieutenant tore a red flag from a man at the head of the marchers, practically every one of whom were carrying red flags. "In less than ten minutes riots had developed at several other points, mounted and foot policemen being switched from one location to another to quell the fighting. "The trouble in the public square started when Lieut. H. S. Bergen, who served with the 80th Division overseas, demanded that several soldiers among the Socialists on the platform remove their uniforms or the red flags they wore on their breasts. "The soldiers refused, and C. E. Ruthenberg, scheduled as the principal Socialist speaker, interceded for the Socialists. "Lieut. Bergen, followed by Lieut. John Hardy of Detroit, thereupon mounted the platform and tore the red insignia from the khaki uniforms. The act was the signal for a grand rush by thousands of Socialist sympathizers." On Sunday, May 4, 1919, serious trouble with the Socialist-Bolshevist element of Gary, Indiana, was narrowly averted. The account, as published in the "Chicago Tribune" on the next day, reads in part as follows: "There was no 'Red' parade in Gary yesterday.... "Fifty policemen, wearing revolvers on their belts and reinforced by a special shotgun squad of sixteen, a company of state militia, thirty deputy sheriffs, a group of secret service men from Chicago and hundreds of citizen volunteers, prevented the parade after the Russian Socialists flouted an order of Mayor W.H. Hodges prohibiting the march and declared they would proceed despite the authorities.... "Yesterday's demonstration was the result of a carefully planned plot matured for nearly a month by the foreign radical element of Lake County, Indiana. Its stated purpose was to protest against the conviction of Eugene V. Debs and Kate Richards O'Hare. An undercurrent of rumor among the radicals gave it a more significant meaning, however. "On Thursday secret service men obtained copies of pamphlets printed in Russian, containing a formula for the manufacture of explosives. More literature calling for the overthrow of the government was circulated. A third series of pamphlets contained the Constitution of the Russian Soviet Republic. "Friday Morris Lieberman, head of the Socialists, called on Mayor Hodges for a permit to parade. It was refused with the explanation that riots such as caused two deaths in Cleveland were feared.... "Early yesterday morning radicals began to arrive in Gary. Cars from Indiana Harbor, Whiting, Hammond, Crown Point, and trains from Chicago brought them by the dozens. "By noon several thousand had gathered in and near the Socialist headquarters, a mile south of the business district of Gary. Under portraits of Trotzky and Lenine they sang Russian songs and gathered about in knots waiting for 'zero hour'--one o'clock. "Lieberman, fearing bloodshed, decided to counsel his followers against a parade. They howled him down, however, and hotter heads took charge of the meeting. A dozen girls, with rolls of red ribbon, pinned a scarlet strip on the lapel of each man's coat as he entered the meeting hall. Red neckties were abundant. Red hat bands made their appearance. Many wore scarlet carnations." Judge Haas of the Municipal Court of Gary thus commented on those arrested in the demonstration: "All except Capolitto have failed to become citizens. All except him and one other tried to evade war service in our army, endeavoring to sneak out on the ground of not being citizens of this country. All they seem to want is to come over here and make trouble--out of twenty-one gun-toters who have been brought before me, nineteen have been foreigners and not even citizens." The leaders of the Marxian movement, both in the United States and abroad, testify that to be a Socialist is to be a plotter against all existing forms of government. Marx and Engels, for instance, confess the truth of this in their celebrated "Communist Manifesto," which they addressed to their followers over half a century ago, and which is looked upon even today by the rank and file of the party as embodying the fundamental principles of International Socialism. "The Communists," we are told, "everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things" and "disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be obtained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution." We are indebted to the late August Bebel, the leader of the Socialists of Germany, for the confession that "along with the state die out its representatives--cabinet ministers, parliaments, standing armies, police and constables, courts, attorneys, prison officials, tariff and tax collectors, in short the whole political apparatus. Barracks and other such military structures, palaces of law and of administration, prisons--all will now await better use. Ten thousand laws, decrees and regulations become so much rubbish; they have only historic value." ["Women Under Socialism," by Bebel, page 319, of the 1904 edition in English.] "The People," New York, May 13, 1900, in speaking of the relation of Socialism to existing forms of government, including our own, affirms that "while there is a very general idea that Socialism means an extension of the powers and functions of government, still this is a very natural and dangerous misconception, and one that ought to be guarded against." "Socialism," it adds, "does not mean the extension of government, but on the contrary it means the end, the elimination of government." The "International Socialist Review," Chicago, February, 1912, together with many other magazines and papers current at the time, called attention to the fact that William D. Haywood, who for a long time had been before the eyes of the public on account of his revolutionary utterances and writings, declared in a speech at Cooper Union, in New York City, that the Socialists were conspirators against the United States Government. "The Call," April 1, 1919, in an editorial note says that "the whole system of government in the United States, Federal, State and Municipal, seems to be out of date." Though the men who march behind the red flag, singing the Marseillaise of the French Revolution, usually deny to the general public, for reasons of political expediency, that the Socialist movement is a violent and revolutionary one, it is evident to those who have read their books, magazines, and papers, that the use of the ballot and education are not the means on which they rely finally for the establishment of their visionary commonwealth. Violence is advocated and habitually practised by the Socialists who constitute the Industrial Workers of the World, whose banner with the inscription, "No God, No Master," has brought them into disrepute all over the country. Jack London, a Socialist widely known in the United States and England as a novelist, furnishes us with excellent reasons for believing that the International Socialist Party approves of violence and assassination, and thereby reaffirms its allegiance to the base principles of the French Commune. Writing in the "International Socialist Review" of August, 1909, Jack London made the following comment on the progress of Socialism in Russia: "Our comrades in Russia have formed what they call 'THE FIGHTING ORGANIZATION.' This FIGHTING ORGANIZATION accused, tried, found guilty and condemned to death one Sipiaguin, Minister of the Interior. On April 2, he was shot and killed in the Maryinsky Palace. Two years later the FIGHTING ORGANIZATION condemned to death and executed another Minister of the Interior, Von Plehve. Having done so it issued a document, dated July 29, 1904, setting forth the counts of its indictment of Von Plehve and its responsibility for the assassination. Now, and to the point, this document was sent out to the Socialists of the world, and by them was published everywhere in the magazines and newspapers. The point is, not that the Socialists of the world were unafraid to do it, but that they did it as a matter of routine, giving publication to what might be called an official document of International Revolutionary Movement." August Bebel in "Unsere Ziele," page 44, expresses his sentiments on the subject of violence quite as frankly as Jack London. "We must not shudder," he tells us, "at the thought of the possible employment of violence; we must not raise an alarm cry at the suppression of existing rights, at violent expropriation, etc. History teaches that at all times new ideas, as a rule, were realized by a violent conflict with the defenders of the past, and that the combatants for new ideas struck blows as deadly as possible at the defenders of antiquity. Not without reason does Karl Marx, in his work on 'Capital' exclaim: 'Violence is the obstetrician that waits on every ancient society which is about to give birth to a new one; violence is in itself a social factor.'" As reference has just been made to Karl Marx, it will be well to call attention to the fact that the Father of modern Socialism, in "The Civil War in France," page 78, claims that "the workingmen's Paris, with its Commune, will forever be celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society." The Commune, then, whose anniversary is celebrated on the 18th of March, every year, by the Socialists all over the world, has been, and still is considered the precursor of their contemplated state. The reign of terror and rebellion in which tens of thousands of Frenchmen met their death, while public buildings and priceless works of art were being burned or destroyed and many beautiful churches pillaged, is the boast of the Socialistic champions of universal peace. The Parisian mob of criminals and revolutionists, which was finally subdued by 150,000 French troops, after men and women had run about the streets with petroleum cans, firing public buildings and private houses and seizing many victims whom they hurried off to death, is, therefore, considered by the Socialists as one of the most illustrious gatherings of persons recorded in history, and one worthy of special memory, honor and respect. Victor Berger of Wisconsin, speaking in the 1908 National Convention of the Socialist Party in favor of an amendment to the party constitution, proposed by Delegate Hazlett, to the effect that any person opposing political action should be expelled from the party, shows how little difference there is between the advocates of "political action," who are supposed to favor the use of the ballot, and the "direct actionists," who admit their preference for violence. "I have heard it pleaded," said Berger, "many a time right in our own meetings by speakers that come to our meetings, that the only salvation for the proletariat of America is direct action, that the ballot box is simply a humbug. Now I don't know how this question is going to be solved. I have no doubt that in the last analysis we must shoot, and when it comes to shooting, Wisconsin will be there. We always make good.... In order to be able to shoot even some day we must have the powers of political government in our hands, at least to a great extent. I want that understood. So everybody who is talking to you about direct action and so on, and about political action being a humbug, is your enemy today, because he keeps you from getting the powers of political government." ["Proceedings of the 1908 National Convention of the Socialist Party," page 241.] On July 31, 1909, we find Victor Berger, who posed as the special exponent of "political action," against the "anarchistic" element in his party, writing as follows in the "Social Democratic Herald" of Milwaukee: "No one will claim that I am given to the reciting of revolutionary phrases. On the contrary I am known to be a constructive Socialist. However, in view of the plutocratic law making of the present day, it is easy to predict that the safety and hope of this country will finally lie in one direction only, that of a violent and bloody revolution. Therefore, I say, each of the 500,000 Socialist voters and of the 2,000,000 workingmen who instinctively incline our way, should, besides doing much reading and still more thinking, also have a good rifle and the necessary rounds of ammunition in his home, and be prepared to back up his ballot with his bullets if necessary. This may look like a startling statement. Yet I can see nothing else for the American masses today." In the "Social Democratic Herald," August 14, 1909, Victor Berger drops a few more words on the same subject in an article entitled: "IF THIS BE TREASON, MAKE THE BEST OF IT." "There are two ways," says he, "of effecting great social changes in a republic--the ballot and the bullet. If our people are not wise--if they are otherwise--then we may have use for both of them." Now, if Berger is a specimen of the extreme "political actionist," a conservative, the enemy of "direct action," who can imagine the treasonable intentions and bloody thoughts of the immense number of "direct actionists" who throng the ranks of these national conspirators? It is not flattering to the State of Wisconsin to realize that Berger has several times been chosen to represent one of its Congressional districts in the United States House of Representatives. Yet Berger has apt pupils. On January 12, 1919, Mayor Hoan of Milwaukee presided at a Milwaukee meeting of 8,000 "Reds" to protest against the conviction, under the Espionage Law, of Victor L. Berger and four co-conspirators, and prolonged cheering and waving of "Red" insignia answered the following words spoken by William Bross Lloyd (_Testimony, Socialist Trial, Albany, page 1623_): "What we want is revolutionary preparedness. We want to organize.... We want a mobilization plan and an organization for the revolution. We want to get rifles, machine guns, field artillery, and the ammunition for it. You want to get dynamite. You want to tell off the men for the revolution when it starts here. You want to tell off the men who are to take the dynamite to the armory doors and blow them in and capture the guns and ammunition there so that the capitalists won't have any. You want to tell off the men to dynamite the doors of the banks to get the money to finance the revolution." William D. Haywood and Frank Bohn are the joint authors of a pamphlet entitled, "Industrial Socialism," the revolutionary tenor of which may be gathered from the following lines: "When the worker, either through experience or a study of Socialism, comes to know this truth [i.e., economic determinism], he acts accordingly. He retains absolutely no respect for the property rights of the profit takers. He will use any weapon which will win his fight. He knows that the present laws of property are made by and for the capitalists. Therefore he does not hesitate to break them." Since Haywood and Bohn evidently had no intention of using paper-cap pistols and pop-guns as their weapons, and since they certainly did not mean to shoot at stone walls and forest trees, it seems strange that the Socialist Party, if it does not advocate such doctrines of violence, should sell these pamphlets at $6 per 100, according to a price list of its national office in Chicago. To make matters still worse for the apologists of the Socialist Party of America, no less a personage than Eugene V. Debs commented as follows, in the "International Socialist Review," February, 1912, on the doctrines of Haywood and Bohn just referred to: "We have here a matter of tactics upon which a number of comrades of ability and prominence have sharply disagreed. For my part, I believe the paragraph to be entirely sound. Certainly all Socialists knowing how and to what end capitalist property rights are established, must hold such rights in contempt.... As a revolutionist I can have no respect for capitalist property laws, nor the least scruple about violating them. I hold all such laws to have been enacted through chicanery, fraud and corruption, with the sole end in view of dispossessing, robbing and enslaving the working class. But this does not imply that I propose making an individual law breaker of myself, and butting my head against the stone wall of existing property laws. That might be called force, but it would not be that. It would be mere weakness and folly. If I had the force to overthrow these despotic laws, I would use it without an instant's hesitation or delay, but I haven't got it, so I am law abiding under protest--not from scruple--and bide my time." In the "Appeal to Reason," Girard, Kansas, September 2, 1911, there is an excellent specimen of one of Debs' revolutionary articles, which reads in part as follows: "Let us arouse the working class and invoke their power to smite the conspirators and set our brothers [the McNamaras] free. They can be saved in no other way. The lawyers will plead for them to deaf ears; organized labor will protest against their taking off in vain. We are confronted by a heartless, soulless plutocracy. Let us buckle on our armor and fight!... Let us marshal our forces and develop our power for the revolt! Let us develop without delay all the power we have, and prepare to strike in every way we know how. With a general strike we can paralyze the plutocracy from coast to coast. Hundreds of thousands will join eagerly and serve loyally in the fight. We can stop the wheels, cut off the food supply, and compel the plutocrats in sheer terror to sue for peace.... A few men may be needed who are not afraid to die. Be ye also ready.... Let us swear that we will fight to the last ditch, that we will strike blow for blow, that we will use every weapon at our command, and that we will never surrender! Roll up a united Socialist vote in California that will shake the Pacific Coast like an earthquake, and back it up with a general strike that will paralyze the continent.... Let the sturdy toilers of the Pacific Coast raise the Red standard of revolt." It was no other than this same Eugene V. Debs, the advocate of violence and revolution, who on May 17, 1912, was nominated as the presidential standard bearer of the Socialist Party. If ever elected, what a fine president he would make, this "poor," "persecuted," self-styled "flaming-revolutionist," now in jail! What an honorable party it must be that nominated such a man for the fourth successive time to fill the office of the presidency of our country! Indeed it was on the very same day that the followers of Karl Marx chose Debs as their candidate to rule the United States that they also declared, in the constitution of their party, that any member who should advocate crime, sabotage or other methods of violence, as a weapon of the working class to aid it in its emancipation, should be expelled from membership in the party! Never can political Socialists convince the American people of their sincerity and honesty while they nominate for office men like Debs, send to Congress representatives like Victor Berger, and choose as members of their national executive committee persons of the stamp of William D. Haywood. There was no better way for Socialists to convict themselves of hypocrisy than by retaining in their constitution the clause against sabotage, referred to above, while at the same time selling at their National Office books like "Industrial Socialism" and publishing in their papers and magazines articles advocating and approving "direct action." By their deeds we judge them, and not by their hypocritical words. "The Call," on April 28, 1919, introduces with the following headlines the long comment that it makes on the Hart-Nearing debate of April 27th in New York City: "Revolution Is Only Solution of World-Wide Unrest, Says Nearing." In the course of the article Scott Nearing's suggestion of revolt is mentioned: "As against Professor Hart's proposal of a League of Nations, I suggest revolution." The "New York Times," April 28, 1919, commented in part on the debate as follows: "'Who wants war?' asked Professor Hart. 'Scott Nearing wants war and the people who think as he does, want war. Revolution is nothing but civil war and we see its result in the Russian revolution. Russia passed through three revolutions and is that the kind of result we want in order to overthrow what he calls this robber nation?' "A whirlwind of applause marked this and through the applause was heard a chorus of voices shouting 'yes.' The meeting cheered Nearing's frequent references to 'revolution,' to the Russian Soviet Republic and applauded his radical utterances, although he had requested that he be permitted to speak without interruption. The theatre contained about 3,000 persons who filled all the seats, the stage and stood in the aisles, after paying from 25 cents to $1.50 admission. "Judging from the manifestations of approval of Nearing's remarks, the large audience appeared to be overwhelmingly composed of revolutionary Socialists, and when the speaker declared he believed in a League of Socialist Nations the crowd vigorously applauded in a way that left no doubt of its sentiment." "The Call" in its May Day issue, 1919, published an article on present-day revolutionary tactics of the Socialists: "The world revolution, dreamed of as a thing of the distant future, has become a live reality, rising from the graves of the murdered millions and the misery and suffering of the surviving millions. It has taken form, it strikes forward, borne on by the despair of the masses and the shining example of the martyrs. Its spread is irrepressible. The bridges are burnt behind the old capitalist society and its path is forever cut off. Capitalist society is bankrupt and the only salvation of humanity lies in the uprising of the masses, in the victory of the Socialist revolution, in the renovating forces of Socialism. "The world war which is now about to be officially closed has slid into a condition neither war nor peace. However, the war of the nations has been followed by the war of the classes. The class struggle is no longer fought by resolutions and demonstrations. Threateningly it marches through the streets of the great cities for life or death." CHAPTER XV PATRIOTISM RIDICULED AND DESPISED Though it is evident that there can be no patriotism in men who are doing their utmost to overthrow our government by stirring up class-hatred and inciting rebellion, still most of the citizens of our country have never realized the extent to which Socialists ridicule and despise patriotism and abhor its very name. "The Call," September 25, 1912, in answering the charge that Socialism undermines patriotism, says: "So it does, and is proud of it, if by patriotism is meant that mawkish sentiment which causes a man, for the sum of $15 a month, to go out and get himself killed in defense of a country of which he owns not a single foot and can never hope to own any. If a wage slave is paid only enough to live on, anyhow, what difference to him does it make whether his boss is a Britisher or a Chinaman?" The Socialists often succeed in stirring up violence during strikes to develop the spirit of revolt; then, when it becomes necessary for the state to protect the lives and property of its citizens, the lovers of rebellion and disorder do their utmost to incite hatred and contempt against the soldiers who are sent to preserve order. On February 10, 1912, there appeared in "The Call" an article which reads as follows: "The capitalist class, alarmed at the amazingly rapid growth of anti-militarism in this country, is endeavoring, through church and government, to combat this just sentiment, and by law and precept to create an artificial respect and love for the soldiers' uniform and the American flag. "'Respect the uniform, honor the flag,' is their cry, and they are foolish enough to believe that if they raise their voices loud enough, we, the workers, will become infected by their fictitious enthusiasm, and shout with them. "'Honor the uniform!' Oh, surely! Honor the trappings and gold lace with which they are dressing up their weak-minded scabs! Honor the uniform which has the power to transform a decent but ignorant boy of the working class into an unthinking savage, who would, if ordered to do so by a superior in rank, shoot down his aged father or kill his sister's unborn child with a bayonet thrust, should they happen to be on strike and crying aloud for a little more bread, warmer clothing and better shelter. Honor the uniform? No, spit on it! Make it a shame and a reproach until a worker who wears it will not dare to show his face among decent working people. Honor the uniform! Honor that which gives a free license to kill, if the victim happens to be a worker? Honor that which stands for oppression, for the loafer against the worker, for the master against the slave? Honor that which causes a worker to become a traitor to his class, to forget his ties of blood, and for pay to deliver himself over body and soul to his natural enemy, the capitalist class? Honor the Judases, the Benedict Arnolds of the working class? Our masters insult us by even asking such a thing. "Shall we honor the Massachusetts militiamen who, without the slightest provocation, murdered a young worker? Is that what you want us to do, you capitalists, you cardinals and presidents? You ask too late, for we already despise and loathe your decorated hirelings, and are, as time passes, making it more difficult for you to recruit our decent boys and transform them into loathsome parasites." On May 6, 1919, millions of New Yorkers enthusiastically welcomed the 77th Division of our soldier boys on their return home from the battle-fields of Europe. Glowing descriptions of the celebration appeared in nearly all the papers of the Metropolis. A contemptible account, however, was published the next day in "The Call," showing the scornful spirit of the Socialists toward the millions of American troops who made so many sacrifices for their country in the late war. The article in "The Call" runs as follows: "Rows and Rows and Rows and Rows and Rows of 'Em March "_Folks Cheered 77th Division which Finally Changed From Toys Into Folks, Too._ "A row of mounted police rode up Fifth avenue yesterday. "A man carrying a banner on which were the words and figures, '77th Division,' marched up Fifth avenue yesterday. "A band played all the way up Fifth avenue yesterday. "A line of soldiers walked up Fifth avenue yesterday. "A second line of soldiers walked up Fifth avenue yesterday. "A third line of soldiers walked up Fifth avenue yesterday. "A fourth line of soldiers walked up Fifth avenue yesterday. * * * * * "A soldier carrying a service flag walked up Fifth avenue yesterday. * * * * * "One soldier wore khaki and carried a steel helmet on his shoulder. "A second soldier wore khaki and carried a steel helmet on his shoulder. "A third soldier wore khaki and carried a steel helmet on his shoulder. "A fourth soldier wore khaki and carried a steel helmet on his shoulder. * * * * * "They marched precisely. "They marched steadily. "They marched firmly. "They marched in silence. * * * * * "The crowds cheered. "The crowds waved flags. "The crowds did not fill the stands. "The crowds applauded. * * * * * "The police kept the waves of humanity back. "The police did not have much trouble. "The police permitted the crowd to cheer. "The police permitted the crowds to wave flags. * * * * * "Soldiers of the 77th Division marched up Fifth avenue yesterday, and when they had done marching they broke ranks and greeted their friends and relatives who had not seen them since they went to war. * * * * * "A mother greeted her son with kisses and tears. "A mother greeted her son with kisses and tears. "A mother greeted her son with kisses and tears. "Change the word 'mother' to sweetheart, brother, sister, and keep on repeating until 'father' is reached and then change 'kisses and tears' to 'smiles and cheers.'" The hypocritical Socialists at one moment plead for universal peace, the desire of nations, and at the next for class hatred. They are trying to ruin our domestic peace and to expose us to the ravages of lawlessness and crime. By fostering contempt for soldiers and other guardians of the peace, they not only make it harder for them to fulfil their duties, but prevent many from joining the army and navy for the defense of our country against foreign and domestic foes. Our country at present is well able to defend itself against foreign attacks, but if our domestic enemies continue to sow the seeds of discord and class hatred among our fellow citizens, it will surely fall, for no nation that is divided against itself can stand. From the very fact that "The Call" of February 10, 1912, dared to publish the following article, showing the intense hatred of its author for the Stars and Stripes, our national emblem, the reader can judge for himself whether the thousands of unoffended subscribers have the faintest spark of patriotism in their hearts: "'At least honor the flag!' they cry in desperation. 'Honor the flag which stands for freedom, equality and fraternity!' "What flag? The American flag? The Stars and Stripes? The flag which floats over every hellhole of mine and mill and prison? The flag which floats over station house and barracks whence issue police and soldiers to batter down and murder workers exercising their constitutional rights of free speech and free assemblage? Honor the flag which you, our masters, have changed from a flag of liberty into a symbol of the cruelest exploitation and vilest oppression of the new civilization? "If I had been Samuel Gompers when he was reproached by the capitalists for placing his foot on the American flag, I should have answered: 'Yes, I trampled on it, and, more than that, I spit upon your flag, not mine; I loathe the Stars and Stripes, once the symbol of liberty for all, but now the stripes represent the bloody stripes left by your lash on the back of the worker, and the stars, the bullet and bayonet wounds in his breast. To hell with your flag!... "Down with the Stars and Stripes! Run up the red flag of humanity." Not alone do the members of the rank and file of the Socialist Party attack the Star Spangled Banner, but even its foremost leaders are guilty of the same offense. "The Comrade," July, 1904, furnishes us with an attack made upon our country's flag by no less a personage than Eugene V. Debs: "Have you a drop of blood in your veins? Has your manhood rotted into cowardice? Wake up and take your place in the class struggle. For the desecration of the flag your leader is in jail. What flag? The flag of the capitalist class--the flag that floats over the bull pens of Colorado. The wholesome truths he stamped upon its stripes are your shame and your masters' crime. Rally to the red flag of international Socialism, the symbol of the proletarian revolt." CHAPTER XVI THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST OUR COUNTRY This chapter is the center of our book, the hub where all the spokes of evidence focus and unite, clearly revealing the unity, power and purpose of the Wheel of Revolution which now is rolling through the minds and wills of American radicals. To make this complex plot simple, it has been analyzed into its parts in the other chapters of "The Red Conspiracy," so that each element may be weighed by itself. In the present chapter the results of this analysis are gathered up again, to show how all the parts fit into one mechanism; and, with the whole thus seen as one contrivance, the working of each part being understood, the plan and purpose of the entire invention stands out as clear as day. But if this chapter is the center of our explanation of "The Red Conspiracy," the center of the thing itself lies elsewhere. The Great Red Wheel of Proletarian Revolution is an International Wheel, and both the hub which unites it and the turning power which moves it are centered in the old Russian town of Moscow. Frequently in preceding chapters the reader has been impressed by the fact that the "Reds" are guilty of conspiracy against all governments, including that of the United States of America. In the present chapter we shall discuss this matter of conspiracy much more in detail and assemble the proofs in such order and strength that no reasonable man can deny the existence of the widespread plot now fast undermining the pillars of our country. The "Reds" under one name or another have in the long run proven to be far more than evolutionists in the various countries of Europe. Actual rebellions have shown them to be revolutionists by violence in the strictest sense of the word in Russia, Germany, Bavaria, Hungary and even on one of the islands of far distant Japan. Their activities in England, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Holland, Bulgaria and many another foreign land bid fair to give us still further proofs in the near future that the "Reds" do not intend to wait for success by the ballot, but that, as soon as they consider themselves a sufficiently strong and united minority, they will throw off their masks, use rifles in place of hypocritical words, and work behind barricades instead of behind closed meeting doors. The Italian Socialists were about to begin their rebellion when, quite recently, the word came from the Moscow headquarters of the International conspirators to wait for a more opportune moment. It seems quite incredible that the "Reds" of our own country, whether they be I. W. W.'s, Communists, members of the Communist Labor Party, or Socialists, should be merely evolutionists, harmless parliamentarians, when their brethren abroad, with whom they so much sympathize, and upon whom they look as the saviors of the world and the highest types of advanced civilization, are either avowedly attempting to overthrow their governments or else have already done so, and in not a single instance by means of the ballot. There is an old saying to the effect that we are known by the company we keep. Since the American "Reds" keep company with foreign rebels, it is not to be presumed that the latter are demons and the former saints. Few specific proofs need be given in this chapter to show that the I. W. W.'s are guilty of conspiracy against the United States Government, for a great part of them, especially those most active, belong either to the Communist, Communist Labor or the Socialist Party, and an abundance of proofs will be given that these latter organizations are far from being harmless and innocent political parties. Moreover, the I. W. W.'s, in their revolutionary "Preamble" and by the many utterances of their leaders, are openly committed to a conspiracy of violence against our Government. Relative to the I. W. W. and its underhand activities, the reader will remember the words of Arturo Giovannitti, quoted in a previous chapter, from the Socialist Labor Party paper, "Weekly People," New York, February 10, 1912. That writer, with all his experience as a leader of the "Wobblies," certainly knew their plans, and makes this astounding admission relative to the part that the I. W. W. is expected to take in bringing about the Marxian rebellion: "The future of Socialism lies only in the general strike, not merely a quiet political strike, but one that once started should go fatally to its end, i.e., armed insurrection, and the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.... The task of revolution is not to construct the new society, but to demolish the old one, therefore, its first aim should be at the complete destruction of the existing state, so as to render it absolutely powerless to react and re-establish itself.... The I. W. W. must develop itself as the new legislature and the new executive body of the land, undermine the existing one, and gradually absorb the functions of the state until it can entirely substantiate it through the only means it has, the revolution." During the year 1919 a very excellent example of how the One Big Union tried to develop a strike into a rebellion was given in Winnipeg, Canada. Some time previously we had in our own country an example in the great strike at Seattle, Washington. Cases of sabotage, murder and arson are but minor activities of the I. W. W., and mere circumstances to aid in bringing about the contemplated rebellion. Government raids in recent years, and the seizure of hundreds of tons of inflammatory literature, from which extensive quotations were made in the daily press, have furnished us with ample proofs that the I. W. W.'s are national conspirators. The reader will remember the vivid picture of the contemplated rebellion in the mind of the "Wobbly" who wrote in "The Rebel Worker," April 15, 1919: "The United States is in the grip of a bloody revolution! Thousands of workers are slaughtered by machine guns in New York City! Washington is on fire! Industry is at a standstill and thousands of workers are starving! The government is using the most brutal and repressive measures to put down the revolution! Disorganization, crime, chaos, rape, murder and arson are the order of the day--the inevitable results of social revolution!" The I. W. W.'s are certainly conspirators, and seek the overthrow of our Government by industrial violence, and we were told by "The Evolution of Industrial Democracy," page 40, that "Government, as now understood, will disappear--there being no servile class to be held in subjection--but in its place will be an administration of affairs." The spirit of armed rebellion against our Government was foremost in the minds of the Left Wing members of the Socialist Party who afterwards formed the Communist and the Communist Labor Parties. We shall recall some of the words of Louis C. Fraina during the great struggle between the Rights and Lefts: "All propaganda, all electoral and parliamentary activity are insufficient for the overthrow of Capitalism, impotent when the ultimate test of the class struggle turns into a test of power. The power for the social revolution issues out of the actual struggles of the proletariat, out of its strikes, its industrial unions and mass action."--"The Revolutionary Age," July 12, 1919. "Socialism will come not through the peaceful, democratic parliamentary conquest of the state, but through the determined and revolutionary mass action of a proletarian minority."--"The Revolutionary Age," July 12, 1919. "Revolutionary Socialists hold, with the founders of Scientific Socialism, that there are two dominant classes in society--the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; that between these two classes a struggle must go on until the working class, through the seizure of the instruments of production and distribution, the abolition of the capitalist state, and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, creates a Socialistic system. Revolutionary Socialists do not believe that they can be voted into power. They struggle for the conquest of power by the revolutionary proletariat."--"The Revolutionary Age," March 22, 1919. "The Communist," of Chicago, April 1, 1919, it will be remembered, in speaking of November 7, 1919, the day on which the armistice was signed, said: "On that day the seething proletariat ruled Chicago by sheer force of numbers. One thing alone was needed to give this mass expression identity with the proletarian uprisings in Europe--one thing, the revolutionary idea." After the formation of the Communist and Communist Labor parties, in September, 1919, both made great progress in winning recruits to the cause of armed rebellion. On January 2, 1920, government agents all over the country suddenly descended upon the conspirators and took thousands of them prisoners. Bombs, rifles and other weapons were captured by the department agents. In Newark 25 rifles and a large number of bombs were taken, many tons of violent literature were seized and innumerable quotations from it appeared in the daily press, showing beyond the shadow of a doubt the evil intentions of these "Reds" against the land that we love. The Communist Party of America and the Communist Labor Party have the same purposes and aims as the Communist Party of Russia. They are joined with the latter in advocating and supporting the manifesto of the Third International, which openly urges an armed revolution to bring about the overthrow of the Government of the United States. Both parties have conducted effective propaganda work through newspapers, books, pamphlets and other means. The Communist Party alone had twenty-five newspapers printed in several languages, actively supporting its cause. This number was being increased weekly, papers which were formerly Socialist Party organs going over to its support. The alien editors of most of these papers were taken by the Department of Justice agents in the raids. The Department of Justice naturally was most vitally interested in the promises of violence against the United States Government contained in the manifesto of the Communists of the Third International, which was held at Moscow, March 2 to 6, 1919. Among the passages in the Moscow manifesto which most interested the Department of Justice were the following: "Socialist criticism has sufficiently stigmatized the bourgeois world order. The task of the International Communist Party is now to overthrow this order and to erect in its place the structure of the Socialist world order. We urge the workingmen and women of all countries to unite under the Communist banner, the emblem under which the first victories have already been won. "Proletarians of all lands! In the war against imperialistic barbarity, against monarchy, against the privileged classes, against the bourgeois state and bourgeois property, against all forms and varieties of social and national oppression--unite! "Under the standard of the Workingmen's Councils under the banner of the Third International, in the revolutionary struggle for power and the dictatorship of the proletariat, proletarians of all countries--unite!" The manifesto is signed by Lenine, Trotzky and other revolutionaries. Several references are made to the United States, indicating this country as one of the objectives of the revolutionaries. Describing the methods to be used, the manifesto says: "Civil war is forced upon the laboring classes by their arch enemies. The working class must answer blow for blow, if it will not renounce its own object and its own future, which is at the same time the future of all humanity. "The Communist parties, far from conjuring up civil war, artificially, rather strive to shorten its duration as much as possible--in case it has become an iron necessity--to minimize the number of its victims, and above all to secure victory for the proletariat." Under the caption, "The Way to Victory," the manifesto says: "The revolutionary era compels the proletariat to make use of the means of battle which will concentrate its entire energies, namely, mass action, with its logical resultant, direct conflict with the governmental machinery in open combat. All other methods, such as revolutionary use of bourgeoisie parliamentarism, will be of only secondary significance." The principles of the American Communist Party set forth in their seized records and made public by the Department of Justice, are: "The Communist Party of America is the party of the working class. The Communists of America propose to end capitalism and organize a workers' industrial republic. The workers must control industry and dispose of the products of industry. "The Communist Party is a party realizing the limitations of all existing workers' organizations and purposes to develop the revolutionary movement necessary to free the workers from the oppression of capitalism. The Communist Party insists that the problems of the American worker are identical with the problems of the workers of the world. "The Communist Party is the conscious expression of the class struggle of the workers against capitalism. Its aim is to direct this struggle to the conquest of political power, the overthrow of capitalism and the destruction of the bourgeois state. "The Communist Party prepares itself for the revolution in the measure that it develops a program of immediate action expressing the mass struggles of the proletariat. These struggles must be inspired with revolutionary spirit and purposes. "The Communist Party is fundamentally a party of action. It brings to the workers a consciousness of their oppression, of the impossibility of improving their condition under capitalism. The Communist Party directs the workers' struggle against capitalism, developing fuller forms and purposes in this struggle, culminating in the mass action of the revolution. "The negro problem is a political and economic problem. The racial oppression of the negro is simply the expression of his economic bondage and oppression, each intensifying the other. This complicates the negro problem, but does not alter its proletarian character. The Communist Party will carry on agitation among the negro workers to unite them with all class conscious workers." Little need be added concerning the Communist Labor Party. As its manifesto and program are practically identical with those of the Communist Party of America, while all its members are likewise affiliated with the Third or Moscow International, the foregoing characterization of the Communist Party applies without essential modification to the Communist Labor Party. The identical character of these two parties was asserted by A. Mitchell Palmer, Attorney-General of the United States, in a statement given out January 23, 1920, and printed in the "New York Times" of the next day, as follows: "These two organizations are identical in aim and tactics, the cause for their separate existence being due to the desire of certain individuals connected with the so-called Left Wing elements of the Socialist Party to be leaders. For the sake of convenience I shall refer to members of the Communist Party of America and the Communist Labor Party as 'Communists.'" Attorney-General Palmer then quotes from the manifesto of the Third International, adopted March 6, 1919, at Moscow, to show, as he says, "that their sole and intimate aim was to accomplish not only the conquest but the destruction of the idea of the 'State,' as understood by loyal American citizens," and that "this destruction was not to be accomplished by parliamentary action, for it is specifically stated that it is to be by armed conflict with governmental authority." The Attorney-General's statement then continues: "It is this manifesto which was adopted by the Communist parties in the United States as their program of action.... "In the program of the Communists in the United States we find such statements as the following: "'Communism rejects the conception of the State; it rejects the idea of class reconstruction and the parliamentary conquest of capitalism.... "'The objective is the conquest by the proletariat of the power of the State. Communism does not propose to capture the bourgeois parliament of any State, but to conquer and destroy it.' "We thus find stated in very clear and plain language the fact that the aim of the Communists of America is for the destruction of the government. This shows clearly that the organizations of Communists in this country aim, not at the change of government of the United States by parliamentary or political methods, but in the overthrow and the destruction of the same by mass and direct action, by force and violence. "Another point of particular significance to which I feel I should call your attention, is the fact that the organizations of Communists in the United States are pledged to destroy the great and loyal labor organization of America, namely, the American Federation of Labor, which, according to the Communist Party of America is considered to be reactionary and a bulwark of capitalism. Another particularly significant pledge of the Communists of America is to carry on agitation of the negro workers of America." The I. W. W.'s and the members of the Communist and Communist Labor parties are all openly confessed conspirators against the United States Government. The members of the Socialist Party are just as bad, and worse, for they are hypocrites, besides being conspirators. The Socialists, as we have seen in a former chapter, have for many years given unlimited support to the I. W. W., knowing full well that it was an organization pledged to revolution by violence. The Socialists, moreover, are heart and soul in favor of the Bolsheviki of Russia, who have issued the manifesto of their International expressly to stir up revolutions by violence in all countries, including our own. The Socialists of the United States call themselves Bolsheviki, are spreading the doctrines of the Bolshevists of Russia and openly admit that Bolshevism and Socialism are identical. Until very recently the Socialist Party nursed within its bosom about 70,000 dues-paying members, out of 109,586, who went over to the Communist and Communist Labor parties. Hence, at least till lately, nearly two-thirds of its membership consisted of avowed rebels. Has it changed since the break with the Communists? No, not at all. It is just as bad as ever, only more hypocritical, more prudent and biding its time so as not to start a premature revolt. After the wholesale arrests of the members of the Communist and the Communist Labor parties on January 2, 1920, the Publicity Department of the Socialist Party, 220 South Ashland Boulevard, Chicago, said: "The Socialist Party herewith raises its voice in emphatic and solemn protest against these activities on the part of the hot-headed and overzealous guardians of the safety of the United States." Now listen once more to the words of Morris Hillquit, who poses before the public as in a different class from the American Communists and Communist Laborites. In "The Call," May 21, 1919, in a long article in large type covering half the editorial page, Morris Hillquit said of the "Left Wing" movement: "I am one of the last men in the party to ignore or misunderstand _the sound revolutionary impulse_ which animates the rank and file of this new movement, but the specific form and direction which it has assumed, its program and tactics, spell disaster to our movement. I am opposed to it, _not because it is too radical_, but because it is _essentially reactionary_ and non-Socialistic; _not because it would lead us too far_, but because it would lead us nowhere. To prate about the dictatorship of the proletariat and of workers' Soviets in the United States _at this time_ is to deflect the Socialistic propaganda from its realistic basis, and to advocate the abolition of all social reform planks in the party platform means to abandon _the concrete class struggle_ as it presents itself from day to day." (Italics mine.) The wisdom of this crafty, go-slow policy is now apparent, with the "Left Wing" leaders in jail, and Hillquit's chameleons now posing as angels of light, the saviors of "representative government" in America. The fact that the Socialist Party of America "goes into politics" does not make it less dangerous than the other revolutionary bodies, but more dangerous, for it thus expects to have men in political positions to seize the reins of government when the hour of blood and violence arrives. That this is its definite policy, the meaning of its political activity, was apparent as far back as its National Convention of 1908, when, in opposing those who would dismiss the use of the ballot in favor of "direct action"--violence--exclusively, Victor L. Berger said: "I have no doubt that in the last analysis we must shoot, and when it comes to shooting, Wisconsin will be there.... In order to be able to shoot even some day we must have the powers of political government in our hands, at least to a great extent. I want that understood. So everybody who is talking to you about direct action and so on, and about political action being a humbug, is your enemy today, because he keeps you from getting the powers of political government." ("Proceedings of the 1908 National Convention of the Socialist Party," page 241.) In the "Social Democratic Herald" of Milwaukee, July 31, 1909, Berger wrote: "It is easy to predict that the safety and hope of this country will finally lie in one direction only, that of a violent and bloody revolution. Therefore, I say, each of the 500,000 Socialist voters and of the 2,000,000 workingmen who instinctively incline our way, should, besides doing much reading and still more thinking, also have a good rifle and the necessary rounds of ammunition in his home, and be prepared to back up his ballot with his bullets if necessary. This may look like a startling statement. Yet I can see nothing else for the American masses today." In the same paper, August 14, 1909, he wrote: "We should be grateful if the social revolution, if the freeing of 75,000,000 whites, would not cost more blood than the freeing of 4,000,000 negroes in 1861." Thus the Socialist Party of America, under the tutelage and control of far-seeing and deep-witted leaders like Hillquit and Berger, is by far the most dangerous band of conspirators in the United States. No "revolutionary impulse" is too extreme for Hillquit, no movement is "too radical;" but its "program and tactics" must be deep-laid, deceptive, seizing every present political advantage so that the central power can be grasped by astute leadership in one lurch when the hour of "shooting" arrives. The dramatic violence of Lenine and Trotzky passed through all the radical bodies in America like an electric shock, and the enthusiasts wished to start a ruction right away. But Morris Hillquit was not carried off his feet. If the boys were so senseless as to try to seize the reins of party government, Hillquit would dismiss them with a friendly wave, as in his article, quoted above, in which he also says: "There is, as far as I can see, but one remedy. It would be futile to preach reconciliation and union where antagonism runs so high. Let the Comrades on both sides do the next best thing. Let them separate, honestly, freely, and without rancor. Let each side organize and work in its own way, and make such contribution to the Socialist movement in America as it can." If the "contribution" of the boys should really turn out to be a successful general strike and overturn, who would be better able to grasp the power than an astute leader like Hillquit? This book was written before the Judiciary Committee of the New York Assembly began its inquiry, in January, 1920, into the fitness of five Socialist Assemblymen to act as law-makers, and since then has only received the addition of some important facts and testimony. It is remarkable, therefore, that all the evidence independently sifted in that investigation overwhelmingly points to the same conclusions arrived at in this volume. On January 21, 1920, at the second day's hearing at Albany, as reported in the "New York Times" of January 22, John B. Stanchfield and Martin W. Littleton, of counsel for the Judiciary Committee, stated the fundamental nature of the charges brought against the five suspended Socialists--charges based, as is well known, on the results of raids and investigations of radicalism by the New York State Legislative Committee, Senator Lusk, Chairman. Said Mr. Stanchfield: "When the Chairman read from the statement yesterday that the charge against these men was disloyalty, and that they had affiliated themselves with a party whose platform and program call for an overthrow of this Government by violence, he added that we will prove this beyond the shadow of a doubt. "We are not upon this investigation engaged in a discussion of the philosophy of Socialism or its economics. We are engaged in an investigation of its tactics, its methods, its practical program, and these tactics, these methods, and that program called for the overturn of the power of this State and its annihilation, its utter and complete annihilation." Mr. Littleton said: "The representation with reference to what these five men did and what they profess and what they engaged to do stands out as plainly as any thing can stand out--that they gave their allegiance wholly and solely to an alien and invisible empire known as the Internationale. It stands out that they are the citizens, not in reality of the country which sustains and maintains them, but they are citizens of this invisible empire which projects itself as a revolutionary force into every country, menacing its institutions and threatening its overthrow. Their allegiance before they ever entered upon the threshold of this chamber was given to this empire, which masquerades at one time with the softness of parliamentary reform and which declares itself in favor of revolution with force, according to the place and time where it may so declare. "It is that alien state, people of alien races--pledged to the destruction of this Government and its institutions--that the charges say that these men belong to and act with.... "Perhaps at a later day in this proceeding we will ascertain the specific program to which they pledged themselves, the program of Mr. Lenine and Mr. Trotzky, not to reform Russia--that is a misconception and a misdirection; it is not that Lenine and Trotzky are trying to reform Russia or change Russia, it is that Lenine and Trotzky, acting through these agencies, are proposing the installation of the same kind of government in constitutional America that they have inaugurated in Russia, and these are the agents and the instructors, according to the charge, to carry out that program. "It is quite a different thing from expressing your sympathy in a convention for downtrodden Russia. It is a little different program, Mr. Chairman, and the evidence in this case will disclose that these members, in conjunction with that party, have tied themselves irrevocably to the program. "So that charge involves, I should say, a grave question as to whether these men, pledged to an alien empire to carry out an alien policy and to do it masquerading as a political party, shall be members of that Assembly and can take the oath of office. "Our ideals are the embodiment of the Constitution which these men ought to have been able to take the oath to and support. No alien, invisible empire, having one corner of it resting in the heart of Soviet Russia, another corner of it resting upon the shoulders of the Spartacides in Germany, and another resting somewhere else, you swore allegiance to, but to this country and this standard and no other country or standard--that is the ideal which we take the oath for and undertake to support. "Now, with that situation, here is an Assembly organized under the ideals of that country and under its Constitution, and the question here is, Can that Assembly inquire into whether or not five of its members are disloyal to the country have foresworn themselves and given their allegiance to an alien and an invisible empire, and placed themselves in the hands of a master who can withdraw them from this Assembly when he chooses? Can such a deliberative body as this make that inquiry, and, finding the fact out, can it expel that agency from this body before the poison has contaminated the system?" Mr. Littleton here took up the charge that the five Socialist Assemblymen, before taking office, had placed their resignations in the hands of their party leaders, or their local organizations, to be used to withdraw them from office should they fail to carry out their party's behest. He continued: "What is the charge here? That these men, belonging to the invisible empire of the Internationale, whose agents may be violent or peaceable, according as the law allows, and according as they may escape, are here acting as agents of Lenine and Trotzky, not to establish a Soviet Republic under the rotten ruins of an infamous democracy, but to establish a Soviet Republic on the ruins of a Constitution to which every man is pledged by every ounce of his blood and by that solemn vow which he registered in heaven when he entered on the duties of his office. "Mr. Chairman, before this investigation is over and before the waves which have been stirred, the waves of public opinion, have subsided, I make no threat, but I make a prediction, that this country will understand that this so-called political party, masquerading as a political party, is the agent and the co-conspirator with the dark forces of this invisible empire whose object is the forcible destruction of constitutional government in America. "I say this question, before it is over, will arouse this country. It will not be a tempest in the teapot. It will be a question as to whether they can hypocritically masquerade as a political party, and strike hands with every agency of force and revolution, and still make simple American people understand they are not sworn enemies of their country and ready to overthrow it." The power of the "invisible empire" established by Lenine and Trotzky can be traced in the quotations in this book as a great dramatic energy which has seized and dragged into its vortex one after another of the radical organizations in the United States until none are now left out, and some even of the comparatively conservative trades union bodies appear to be trembling on the verge of peril. The evil fascination of the blood-reign of Lenine and Trotzky has been most remarkably evident in the Socialist Party of America, and precisely so because an element in this organization developed a strong power of resistance--only to succumb at last. The story of this struggle is told in Chapters III to V of this work, where we see the Moscow Magnet dragging one section so much more rapidly than the rest moved that the Socialist Party at first stretched out into two wings, the Left and the Right, and then exploded into three parts, the Communist Labor Party, the Communist Party of America and that which still calls itself the Socialist Party of America. We cannot forget the significant statement by Morris Hillquit in the "New York Call" after the Chicago Emergency Convention of September, 1919. This was put in evidence against the Socialist Party of America during the trial before the New York Assembly's Judiciary Committee and appeared in the "New York Herald" of January 29, 1920. Hillquit's letter in the "Call" raised the question, "What shall be the attitude of the Socialist Party toward the newly formed Communist organization?" In answering this question Hillquit used the following remarkable expressions: "The division _was not brought about by differences on vital questions of principles_. It arose over disputes on methods and policy. The separation of the Socialist Party into three organizations _need not necessarily mean a weakening of the Socialists_.... Our quarrel is a _family_ quarrel, and has no room in the columns of the capitalistic papers.... We have had our split.... Now we are through with it. Legitimate constructive work of the Socialist movement is before us. Let us give it all of our time, energies and resources. Let us center our whole fight upon capitalism, and let us hope _our Communist brethren_ will go and do likewise." (Italics mine.) The difference, then, is not at all one of "principles," but only one of "methods and policy," that is, of cunning in putting on disguises; and in this we concede that the Socialist Party of America is greatly superior to its "Communist brethren." Another evidence of this cunning, brought out at the trial of the Socialist Assemblymen in January, 1920, bears directly upon the conspiratory character of the Socialist Party's policy of "political action." According to the "New York Evening Sun," January 22, 1920, the following from the Socialist Party's New York State Constitution was put in evidence: "All candidates or appointees to public office selected by the dues-paying membership of the Socialist Party of the State of New York, or any of its subdivisions, shall sign the final resignation blank before nomination is made official or appointment is made final." The form of resignation, also put in evidence, is here reproduced from the same issue of the "Evening Sun": "To the end that my official acts may at all times be under the direction and control of the party membership, I hereby sign and place in the hands of Local (........) my resignation to any office to which I may be elected (or appointed), such resignation to become effective whenever a majority of the local shall so vote. I sign this resignation voluntarily as a condition of receiving said nomination, and pledge my honor as a man and Socialist to abide by it." One of the by-laws of the New York County organization put in evidence also reads: "On accepting a nomination of the party for public office, the candidate shall at once give to the executive committee a signed resignation of the office for which he is nominated, and shall assent in writing to its being filed with the proper authority, if, in case of election, he proves disloyal to the party." A protest had been made to the New York Assembly claiming that "the fundamental principles of representative government" would be violated in refusing to seat the five suspended Socialist Assemblymen. But it is plain that men controlled in office by such a secret device would not really represent their districts, nor those who voted for them, but only the members of the dues-paying locals or the executive committee holding their resignations; and in cases of some of the suspended Socialists it was said that of the votes they received not one in ten nor even one in twenty had been cast by a dues-paying Socialist. At the trial Morris Hillquit, of counsel for the defense, tried to break the force of this damaging evidence by getting in testimony "that this provision of the State Constitution has been a dead letter since its inception." (New York "Evening Sun," January 22, 1920.) But this hypocrisy was thoroughly exposed by the testimony given on January 28, 1920, by George R. Lunn, Democratic Mayor of Schenectady, who had been a candidate for that office three times as a Socialist. The following summary of his testimony is from the "New York Sun" of January 29, 1920: "The outstanding features of Mayor's Lunn's testimony were his statements that on the night before election in 1911, when he was running for Mayor on the Socialist ticket, two members of the party went to his home and presented a blank resignation for his signature. This, he said, he signed in order to 'avoid a squabble,' although he considered it 'child's play and illegal.' He refused, he said, in 1913 to sign the required resignation before the election. This time he was defeated. In 1915, he testified, he was again nominated and elected, after repudiating that part of the Socialist Constitution which bound him to follow the dictates of his party leaders. The result, he said, was that the State organization revoked the charter of the entire Schenectady local in order to discipline him." In a ninety-page brief, submitted to members of the New York Assembly on February 12, 1920, by counsel of the Judiciary Committee, after five weeks of investigating the qualifications of the suspended Socialist Assemblymen, Attorney-General Charles D. Newton and the other signers said that the five Socialists by "their promise ... to place their resignations in the hands of the dues-paying members ... abdicated their functions as Assemblymen and disqualified themselves from taking the oath of office and rendered their oath false." ("New York Times," February 13, 1920.) The same brief, according to the "Times" of above date, says: "A decent regard for the Assembly as the popular representative house of the State requires that these five Assemblymen be excluded from their seats. They have taken a false oath to secure seats which they cannot occupy as gentlemen, patriots, loyal citizens or Assemblymen. They come here under the false pretense of being loyal to their Government, when in fact they are really citizens of the Internationale, and desire above all things the destruction of this Government." The Socialist Party of America is also denounced by the same brief on three other counts, which the "New York Times" of February 13, 1920, thus summarizes: "The Socialist Party is a revolutionary party, having the single purpose of destroying our institutions and Government, which they abhor, and substituting the Russian Soviet Government or the proletariat Government instead to be controlled by themselves. This appears from their platforms and propaganda. "The Socialist Party is not a national party, like the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, whose aim is to conserve and preserve the nation. The Socialist Party is an anti-national party whose allegiance is given to the Internationale and not to the United States, whose Government and institutions it would destroy. "'Mass action' and the 'general strike' are advocated and urged by the Socialist Party as a part of the plan to bring about conditions favorable to revolution, and as instruments of revolution, and not to remedy industrial evils. The revolutionary purpose and non-political character of such acts make them treasonable, and, whether criminal or not in the absence of such purpose, treasonable with it." This last point, the attitude of the Socialist Party of America toward "mass action" and the "general strike," is of the utmost importance as evidence that the Socialist Party stands for seizure of the Government of the United States by revolutionary violence; for the reader will recall abundant proof in this book that it is precisely by means of "mass action" and the "general strike" that both of the Communist parties in this country expect to destroy our existing Government, these "instruments of revolution" being also the very ones recommended by the Communist manifesto of the Third (Moscow) International, and the ones employed by the I. W. W. in its industrial battles. The Moscow Manifesto, as cited from the copy of it in the "New York Call" of July 24, 1919, gives the Third International's plan of action for world revolution in a nutshell: "The revolutionary epoch demands that the proletariat should employ such fighting methods as will concentrate its entire energy, viz., the method of mass action, and lead to its logical consequence--the direct collision with the capitalist state machine in an open combat. All other methods, e.g., revolutionary use of bourgeois parliamentarism will in the revolution have only a subordinate value." It is very significant, therefore, that the Socialist Party of America definitely committed itself to these tactics in the manifesto it adopted at the Chicago Emergency Convention on September 4, 1919. As given in the "Call" of September 5, 1919, the manifesto of the Socialist Party of the United States says on this point: "The great purpose of the Socialist Party is to wrest the industries and the control of the Government of the United States from the capitalists and their retainers. It is our purpose to place industry and government in the control of the workers with hand and brain, to be administered for the benefit of the whole community. "To insure the triumph of Socialism in the United States the bulk of the American workers must be strongly organized politically as Socialists, in constant, clear-cut and aggressive opposition to all parties of the possessing class. They must be strongly organized in the economic field on broad industrial lines, as one powerful and harmonious class organization, co-operating with the Socialist Party, and ready in cases of emergency to reinforce the political demands of the working class by industrial action. "To win the American workers from their ineffective and demoralizing leadership, to educate them to an enlightened understanding of their own class interests, and to train and assist them to organize politically and industrially on class lines, in order to effect their emancipation, that is the supreme task confronting the Socialist Party in America. "To this great task, without deviation or compromise, we pledge all our energies and resources. For its accomplishment we call for the support and co-operation of the workers of America and of all other persons desirous of ending the insane rule of capitalism before it has had the opportunity to precipitate humanity into another cataclysm of blood and ruin. "Long live the International Socialist Revolution, the only hope of the suffering world!" So culminates and ends this 1919 national convention manifesto of the Socialist Party of America. This dedication of that party to the "supreme task" of "strongly organizing" the "bulk of the American workers" into "one powerful and harmonious class organization" in order that "industrial action" may "reinforce the political demands of the working class," adds greatly to the significance of some testimony by leading Socialists in the inquiry of the New York Assembly's Judiciary Committee at Albany. On January 30, 1920, Algernon Lee, educational director of the Rand School and secretary of the New York County Committee of the Socialist Party, was sworn and testified as follows, according to the "New York Herald" of January 31, 1920: "Mr. Lee ... described at length what Socialists mean by direct mass action and the general strike. He said the general strike had been used with some degree of success in Russia and Belgium.... 'The general strike is often used to back up political action,' the witness said. He justified combining economic strikes as a political weapon.... "'Let us assume for the moment,' said Mr. Conboy, 'that these five gentlemen whose seats are in question ... should present a political program here in the shape of proposed legislation, and they were reinforced by the combination in industrial action, including within its weapons the general strike. It would be possible for them, would it not, in the event that the Legislature of this State refused to adopt the movement which they presented for adoption by the Legislature, to cripple the industries of the State and to starve the people thereof?' "'I think you are assuming, I may almost say, an impossible condition,' replied Mr. Lee, 'that the people should elect an overwhelming majority upon one side and then be so overwhelmingly organized as to be able to use industrial action on the other side.'" But here Mr. Lee simply concealed the truth behind hypocritical camouflage by using the term, "the people," ambiguously. For our people might go on as now, conducting constitutional government by representatives in all their legislatures elected by "an overwhelming majority upon one side," while at the same time the underground work might go on of "strongly organizing" "the bulk of the American workers" into "one powerful and harmonious class organization" ready for "industrial action." In that case, a "general strike" would absolutely paralyze the whole country, and "the people" and all their legislatures alike would have to surrender absolutely to any demands made upon them, or would have to engage instantly in such a civil war as the world has not yet seen, carried on under conditions of indescribable chaos. Moreover the underground work of revolutionary "industrial organization" need be only partial, need, in fact, be carried on only a little beyond conditions already actually existing, in order to establish a "dictatorship of the proletariat," or else terrible civil war, in many of our American cities by the simple process of calling general strikes. The reader who questions this should learn the facts about the Winnipeg general strike of May 1-June 15, 1919, "the culmination of the development of the One Big Union movement in Canada" (page 333 of "The American Labor Year Book, 1919-1920, edited by Alexander Trachtenberg, Director, Department of Labor Research, Rand School of Social Science"), which held a city of 200,000 terrorized for six weeks under the absolute dictatorship of a Strike Committee elected by the strikers, while "many cities, including Calgary, Edmonton and Toronto, meanwhile joined the general strike in sympathy with Winnipeg." (Ibid., page 334.) The strikers included the employees of the fire, water supply, health, street cleaning, light and power, transportation, telegraph, telephone and postal departments of the city, together with the janitors of buildings, elevator men, wholesale and retail clerks and the carters and deliverers of the stores, railways and express companies, thus cutting off the city from the rest of the world and even from the supplies and facilities within its own bounds except only as the Strike Committee made concessions. "I could have a glass of milk or lunch if I had a ticket from the Strike Committee. Otherwise I couldn't." This was the testimony of Mr. Robert McKay, of Winnipeg, February 10, 1920, and printed in the Albany "Knickerbocker Press" of February 11, 1920, from which we take the facts. Even the Winnipeg newspapers failed to appear after the first three days of the strike, while the city police also voted to strike, but continued on duty under command of the Strike Committee. At length a Citizens' Committee was organized, 100 men at first, which grew to 1,000, and even 10,000, Mr. McKay says. "The regular police was replaced by 1,500 special police, assisted by mounted police and militia," and "during the last two weeks there were two riots, in which two persons were shot by the mounted police." (Account in Trachtenberg's "Year Book," above quoted, page 334.) In other words, Winnipeg was only delivered by means of rescue from outside and by incipient civil war, the ringleaders of the dictatorship being arrested and indicted for trial. Yet are there some Americans still so blinded by foolish optimism as to think we are in no danger--even at a time when all the "Reds" of America, inflamed by the Third International, are uniting in feverish haste to carry "industrial organization" to a sufficient state to make it an instrument for holding up the whole American people? If the false prophets of optimism pooh-pooh the peril and label intelligent warnings as "hysteria," will it be the first time in history that this was done by men of weight and influence in the very shadow of a great, impending rebellion and down to the very hour of its outbreak? Mr. Lee's testimony on January 30, 1920, as quoted above, was voluntarily supplemented by a statement by Seymour Stedman, of counsel for the five Socialist Assemblymen and a prominent Socialist himself, one of the National Executive Committeemen who fought the Left Wing to keep the control of the party in 1919. We quote from the report of the trial in the "New York Times" of January 31, 1920: "Mr. Lee was next asked to explain what was meant by the pledge of the Socialist anti-war faction to support 'mass action' against conscription. He answered that the general strike was included in the term 'mass action,' but that the word contemplated other methods as well. "'Is it part of the Socialist Party plans to use the general strike to back up political action?' "'If the circumstances should exist which made that necessary, I take it that it would be construed so,' said the witness. "Mr. Conboy was unable to pin the witness down to a definition of what circumstances would make the Socialists resort to direct action. Mr. Stedman interrupted: "'There was a bill to nationalize the railroads,' he said. 'The men went on strike to reinforce their demands. I can see the miners and the whole working class going on a strike protesting against the Government paralyzing them rather than taking the mine owners by the collar. That will be general. If the working class made such a demand to reinforce a general political demand for the relaxation of such an injunction, the Socialists would stand side by side with them everywhere. Personally, I think the mining situation was an instance where there should have been a general strike.'" It is important to emphasize the proofs that the Socialist Party of America has openly committed itself to the sanction and advocacy of "industrial" violence in furtherance of its avowed intention "to wrest industry and the control of the government of the United States" from the whole American people and place them in the hands of a special class. For since the wholesale arrests of "Reds" by the Department of Justice were made, followed by the institution of the inquiry into the qualifications of the five Socialist Assemblymen at Albany, a new, general movement became discernible among the radicals, a movement to disguise their real principles, camouflage their plan of action and carry their propaganda "under ground." Hillquit, Victor L. Berger and the other shrewd leaders of the Socialist Party realized early in 1919 that the programs of violence against this country, flaunted openly by the Left Wing leaders, would bring down the hand of the Government upon the conspirators. As early as April 19, 1919, Julius Gerber, Executive Secretary of the New York Local of the Socialist Party, in a private letter which we quote from the Left Wing "New York Communist." May 1, 1919, stated that "the control of the party by these irresponsible people will make the party an outlaw organization, and break up the organization." Yet the call for the Third (Moscow) International had cunningly classified the Socialists of the world into three groups, a Right, a Center and "the Revolutionary Left Wing." This last group included the friends of Moscow, the elements of the Third International; and those credited to it in America, who received invitations to the Moscow Conference of March 2-6, were the Socialist Labor Party, the I. W. W., the Workers' International Industrial Union and "the elements of the Left Wings of American Socialist Propaganda (tendency represented by E. V. Debs and the Socialist Propaganda League)." The group of the Right, the other extreme, was completely condemned by the Moscow call as "avowed social-patriots who, during the entire duration of the imperialistic war between the years 1914 and 1918 have supported their own bourgeoisie." But the "Center" was described as "represented by leaders of the type of Karl Kautsky, and who constitute a group composed of ever-hesitating elements, unable to settle on any determined direction and who up to date have always acted as traitors." "In regard to the 'Center,'" the call continues, "the tactics consist in separating from it the revolutionary elements, in criticizing pitilessly its leaders and in dividing systematically among them the number of their followers." The Left Wing leaders in America, however, ignoring the recognition of a "Center" in this country, lumped together and designated as the "Right" all their Socialist opponents, the special followers of Hillquit, Victor L. Berger and the other "bosses" of the Socialist Party; but they certainly followed the tactics of "criticizing pitilessly its leaders." (See the Moscow call in Chapter III and the details of the Left Wing fight in Chapters III, IV and V.) These facts explain the course pursued by Hillquit and his fellow-leaders. In the first place they had to get rid of the Left Wing leaders whose "control of the party" would make it "an outlaw organization and break up the organization." This they accomplished by wholesale expulsions and suspensions, as we have seen in earlier chapters. But in the second place they had to prepare a sufficiently strong public declaration of the real revolutionary principles of their party and a sufficiently explicit identification of the party with the Moscow International to satisfy both the rank and file of their followers and Lenine and Trotzky in Russia, while yet not going far enough to incriminate themselves with the awakening suspicions of our National and State Governments. As a result we have the utterances of the Emergency Convention of August-September, 1919, where every compromising word was still only a hint of the principles and plan of action carefully concealed behind it. Even so, the leaders soon realized that they had revealed too much of the truth for their safety; while the wholesale arrests, indictments and deportations of radicals evidently convinced these cunning plotters that the old-time disguises and hypocrisies of Hillquit, Victor Berger and the other foxes of the party were the only safe tactics for revolutionists in America. Thus Ludwig C. A. K. Martens, the Bolshevist "ambassador," himself led the retreat in his smooth lies to the United States Senate Foreign Sub-Committee, to the effect that the dictatorship in Russia no longer regarded it as necessary to urge those affiliated with it in other countries to overthrow the existing governments. Undoubtedly he had made the American situation perfectly clear to Lenine and Trotzky. The reappearance of Morris Hillquit in the Assembly case at Albany, on February 17, 1920, and his appearance on the witness-stand as "an expert on Socialism," was a similar attempt to repair the breaches with camouflage. It was his part with an amused smile to show that "industrial organization," "industrial action," "mass action" and "general strikes" really mean nothing in the Socialist Party's manifestoes, platforms and programs, and that his party's affiliation with the Third (Moscow) International was a mere meaningless, friendly gesture. But these party utterances and acts meant all and even more than they said to the party's rank and file and confederates. It was brought out in the testimony at Albany on February 10, 1920, that the minority report of the Emergency Convention, decreeing affiliation with the Moscow International, had been adopted by a referendum vote of the party's rank and file, 3,495 votes for to 1,449 against. The wording of this report, here given in part from Trachtenberg's 1919-20 Labor Year Book, page 411, is another of those brilliant attempts at camouflage for which the "Yellow" Socialists are famous: "Any International, to be effective in this crisis, must contain only those elements who take their stand unreservedly upon the basis of the class struggle, and their adherence to this principle is not mere lip loyalty.... "The Socialist Party of the United States, in principle and in its past history, has always stood with those elements of other countries that remained true to their principles. The manifestoes adopted in national convention at St. Louis (1917) and Chicago (1919), as well as Referendum 'D,' 1919, unequivocally affirm this stand.[K] These parties, the majority parties of Russia, Italy, Switzerland, Norway, Bulgaria and Greece, and growing minorities in every land, are uniting on the basis of the preliminary convocation, at Moscow, of the Third International. As in the past, so in this extreme crisis, we must take our stand with them. "The Socialist Party of the United States, therefore, declares itself in support of the Third (Moscow) International, not so much because it supports the 'Moscow' programs and methods, but because: "(a) 'Moscow' is doing something which is already challenging world imperialism. "(b) 'Moscow' is threatened by the combined capitalist forces of the world simply because it is proletarian. "(c) Under these circumstances, whatever we may have to say to 'Moscow' afterwards, it is the duty of Socialists to stand by it now because its fall will mean the fall of Socialist republics in Europe, and also the disappearance of Socialist hopes for many years to come." If Moscow's "programs and methods" are only the minor reason for supporting Moscow, what is the major reason for this "support?" What is the Third (Moscow) International "doing" which "is really challenging" the "world," arraying the "forces of the world" against it and thus making its own "fall" a serious possibility? We examine (see Chapters III and IV and the present chapter) the Third (Moscow) International's call to the March, 1919, Conference and the manifesto sent out from it, and we see what it has done in challenge of the rest of the world. It has declared war against the rest of the world and its existing governments, the "Entente Powers," "The White Terror of the bourgeoisie," as it calls them in the "Manifesto of the Moscow International" published in the "New York Call" of July 24, 1919, from which we here quote; and against these "Entente Powers," "The White Terror," the manifesto continues, "Against this the proletariat must defend itself--defend itself at all costs! The Communist International calls the whole world-proletariat to this, the final struggle! Down with the imperialist conspiracy of capital! Long live the International Republic of Proletarian Soviet!" (Ibid.) Thus complete identification with this proletarian declaration of war against the "Entente Powers" was the major aim of the Socialist Party of the United States in voting for affiliation with Moscow. This is the principal ground on which it "declares itself in support of the Third (Moscow) International" and proclaims it to be "the duty of Socialists to stand by it now." Just as Hillquit differed from the Left Wingers, now his "communist brethren," not "on vital questions of principles," but only "on methods and policy," opposing their "movement" "not because" it was "too radical" or "would lead us too far," but simply because its "specific form and direction, ... its program and tactics," would "spell disaster," so Hillquit's Party supported the Third (Moscow) International "not so much because" of its "programs and methods" as because what it was "doing," its war-declaration and marshaling of the world's proletarian forces against the "Entente Powers," was "really challenging world imperialism." Is not one mind, one aim, one intent, one purpose and hatred consistently evident in all these utterances? And thus we understand the vehemence of the Chicago Manifesto of September 4, 1919, "largely based upon one suggested by Morris Hillquit," as the "Call," New York, of September 5, 1919, says. The following quotation from the Chicago Manifesto, as printed in the "New York Call" of September 5, 1919, and also in Trachtenberg's Labor Year Book, 1919-1920, pages 413-14, shows that the Socialist Party of America completely repudiates the so-called "Moderate" Socialists, and supports the Bolshevist and Communist violent revolutionists: "The Socialist Party of the United States at its first national convention after the war, squarely takes its position with the uncompromising section of the international Socialist movement. We unreservedly reject the policy of those Socialists who supported their belligerent capitalist governments on the plea of 'national defense,' and who entered into demoralizing compacts for so-called civil peace with the exploiters of labor during the war and continued a political alliance with them after the war. We, the organized Socialists of America, pledge our support to the revolutionary workers of Russia in the maintenance of their Soviet Government, to the radical Socialists of Germany, Austria and Hungary in their efforts to establish working-class rule in their countries, and to those Socialist organizations in England, Italy and other countries who during the war, as after the war, have remained true to the principles of uncompromising international Socialism." Just as the Moscow Manifesto cries out, "Long live the International Republic of Proletarian Soviet!" so does Hillquit's manifesto, adopted September 4, 1919, by the Socialist Party, "hold out to the world the ideal of a federation of free and equal Socialist nations." A common zeal for the violent overthrow of the world's existing non-Socialist governments, in order to set up a world-empire of Socialism, is the major feature of the Socialist Party's unity with the Moscow plotters and incendiaries. But while Moscow's "programs and methods" are "not so much" the concern of the American Socialist Party as the "federation of ... Socialist nations," yet these Moscow "programs and methods" are themselves also distinctly adopted and enthusiastically followed by the American Socialists. The Moscow Manifesto ("New York Call," July 24, 1919) lays down two great principles of action, one of _method_, the other of _means_. Here is the method: "The revolutionary epoch demands that the proletariat should employ such fighting methods as will concentrate its entire energy, viz., the method of mass action, and lead to its logical consequence--the direct collision with the capitalist state machine in an open combat. All other methods, e.g., revolutionary use of bourgeois parliamentarism, will in the revolution have only a subordinate value." Here is the means: "A coalition is necessary with those elements of the revolutionary workers' movement who, though they did not previously belong to the Socialist Party, now, on the whole, take up the standpoint of the proletarian dictatorship in the form of the power of Soviets, e.g., _some of the sections among the Syndicalists_." (Ibid.) The American "Syndicalists" are the I. W. W.'s, and their methods are those of "industrial action" by means of industrial unionism. In other words, they are seeking to organize "One Big Union" in order, as the "Preamble" to their Constitution asserts, to "take possession of the earth and the machinery of production." These are the methods and means recommended by the Moscow International to the rabid Socialists affiliated with it all over the world. These methods and means, urged by the Moscow Manifesto, were evidently adopted in Hillquit's manifesto, which led, by the party's adoption of it, to the American Socialist Party's strong commitment of itself at Chicago to "strongly organize" on "industrial lines" the "bulk of the American workers" into "one powerful and harmonious class organization" ready for "industrial action." The preamble to the Constitution, also adopted at the Emergency Convention of 1919, according to Trachtenberg's Labor Year Book, 1919-1920, page 410, stresses the same thing: "The Socialist Party seeks to organize the working-class for independent _action_ on the political field, not merely for the betterment of their conditions, _but also and above all with the revolutionary aim_ of putting an end to exploitation and class rule." And it adds: "To accomplish this aim, it is necessary that the working-class be powerfully and solidly organized also on the economic field _to struggle for the same revolutionary goal_." Trachtenberg's 1919-1920 Year Book, page 409, tells us, too, that the party at its Emergency Convention "adopted a series of resolutions," including two described as follows: "_Co-operatives._--Favoring the establishment of co-operatives and recommending that literature be distributed on the subject." "_Economic Organization._--Favoring industrial unionism and establishing a labor department in the party for the preparation of literature and more active work among the labor unions." We know what the last-mentioned resolution means; and the meaning of the propaganda for "co-operatives" becomes plain when we read in Trachtenberg's same Year Book, page 393, that this co-operative movement has been defined as "The state within a state." Indeed, these two resolutions, favoring propaganda for "co-operatives" and "industrial unionism," seem to be explained in the "Preamble to the Constitution of the Socialist Party," adopted at Chicago on September 6, 1919. A single sentence in this Preamble, which we quote from Trachtenberg's Labor Year Book, 1919-1920, page 410, tells us what the Socialist Party wants and the means by which it hopes to get it. Here is the sentence: "The workers must wrest the control of the government from the hands of the masters and use its powers in this upbuilding of the new social order, the Co-operative Commonwealth." Naturally "co-operatives" are favored as a step toward the "Co-operative Commonwealth," which is what the Socialist dreamers want. But in order to set up this new state, the Socialists want "the workers" to do a big job for them, namely, to "wrest the control of" the present Government of the United States and get it out of the way. Thus "the workers" are the means, the tool, which the hair-brained Socialists hope to use, while the proposed method of using these "workers" is to make Socialists of them and line them up in one big "industrial union" ready for "industrial action" when the Socialists crack the whip. We do not think America's "workers" intend to burn their fingers in pulling Hillquit's chestnuts out of the fire; but the lazy drones, the Socialist "intellectuals," as the Hillquitites love to style themselves, certainly hope to ride into power on the back of American labor just as the Bolshevist "dictators," Lenine and Trotzky, rode into power and are still riding on the galled back of the labor slaves of Russia. It appears, then, that the Socialist Party of America is not merely affiliated with Moscow's "programs and methods" by a referendum vote, but has adopted a similar program and method for its own "supreme task." The only difference is that the Bolsheviks have made their revolution, while the American Socialists are forging the weapon for theirs. Debs' motto is their motto: "I am law abiding under protest--not from scruple--and bide my time." Perceiving the peril of his party, Hillquit, on the witness stand in the Judiciary Committee's inquiry at Albany, sought in every way to belittle the significance of his and his party's Chicago Manifesto, the Moscow Manifesto, and the evident connection between the two, belittling, also, his party's affiliation with the Third (Moscow) International. How unscrupulous and hypocritical his testimony seems in the light of all the facts! In his testimony at Albany on February 19, 1920, Hillquit acknowledged the Chicago Manifesto, adopted September 4, 1919, as his own child. "At least ninety per cent of it is my authorship," he proudly said. Having himself imprudently led his party to make open confession, by manifesto, of its plot "to wrest the industries and the control of the government of the United States" out of their present keeping and so completely into the hands of the Socialist Party that it would be able "to place" them "in the control of" a special class, did Hillquit feel that he would be justified on the witness stand in using any extreme of craft which might help to bury the plot out of sight again? In spite of the fact that the Party Manifesto Hillquit wrote sounds astonishingly like the echo of the Moscow Manifesto, Hillquit, on February 19, 1920, swore that he had never read the Moscow Manifesto when he wrote his ninety per cent or more of the Chicago Manifesto. To this he held even when reminded by Mr. Conboy that all of the Moscow Manifesto but the preamble had appeared in the "New York Call" of July 24, 1919. And he still sought to convey the notion that the Moscow Manifesto had not made any particular impression upon the members of his party prior to the Emergency Convention of September, 1919, in spite of the letter read to him by Mr. Conboy, of which the following is an extract: "SOCIALIST PARTY "National Office "Executive Secretary: Adolph Germer "803 West Madison Street "Chicago, Ill., 5/12/1919. "Local Rochester, C. M. O'Brien, "580 St. Paul St., Rochester, N. Y.: "Dear Comrade.--I am pleased to announce the publication of two vital documents in pamphlet form, namely, 'The Manifesto Communist International,' issued 1919 by the Soviets of Russia at Moscow to the toiling masses of the world. This is undoubtedly the greatest declaration ever issued from any working class tribunal since the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels ... the second is 'The Constitution World's First Socialist Republic.... [Signed] "Edwin Firth, "Literature Dept." But Hillquit, the great "expert on Socialism," missed reading this "vital" manifesto all the summer of 1919, when the Socialist papers were full of it; and yet, by some wild chance, himself composed a close echo of it! The cowardly "Reds," as we have seen, want a violent revolution and constantly preach it to the discontented as boldly and openly as they dare. But they want America's workingmen to take all the risk and do all the work, and they go on with their frantic agitation in the hope that American labor will some day organize a great "general strike" and try to turn it into a revolution to overthrow the United States Government. Naturally, therefore, the Socialists get excited whenever any great labor strike is on, and they stand as tempters whispering the word "revolution" into the ears of the strikers. Sometimes they get their suggestion that the strike be turned into a revolution before the strikers' minds by a hypocritical pretense that they are afraid that what they so much long for is likely to happen. Debs, the Socialist Party's presidential standard-bearer, is a past master in this art of suggestion through a pretense of feeling concern, and during the steel strike of 1919 he even tried to "start something" of this kind from behind the bars of his jail. Thus in the form of an interview, sent as a "special to the 'New York Times,'" which published it September 24, 1919, he got off the following hypocritically inflammatory comment on the steel strike from his place in the Atlanta Federal Prison: "'I fear that much violence will result from the strike. Then we have the potentiality of other unions to consider, for many of them, including the miners, who have a crisis coming within a short time themselves, as well as the railroad men of the country, who have already made demands--these workers and others may be drawn into the great steel struggle before it is over, and while I do not believe that a prearranged general strike will be called, yet I fear the results of great excitement over possible killings like those we read about in the papers of today, and it is possible that in the heat of passion men may lay down their work and be swept into a revolution with cyclonic fury. "'Anything is possible as an outcome of the present situation,' continued the prisoner, 'and should a general strike or revolution occur it would be the outcome of too great pressure being brought to bear upon the men who, in a state of unrest and industrial uncertainty, have reached a highly inflammable condition that might burst out spontaneously.'" "Honest" Bill Haywood, one of the foremost Socialists of the time, admitted as far back as the early part of 1912, in a speech at Cooper Union, New York City, that the Socialists were conspirators against the United States Government. The Socialist Party of America, ever since its birth, has been reviling and attacking the Government of the United States with a view to overthrowing and destroying it. Is it possible that such an organization is not engaged in a conspiracy against our country? The American Socialists have been thoroughly unpatriotic. "To hell with the American flag!" "Down with the Stars and Stripes!" "I would spit upon your flag!" These are a few of their expressions of contempt. The United States uniform and the soldiers alike are scorned and ridiculed. The article in "The Call," "Rows and Rows and Rows of 'em march," which has been quoted in a previous chapter, shows the reader the real spirit and intention of Debs' gang, who have been so zealous in stirring up strikes with a view to the final ruin of our present form of government. Debs, four times the standard-bearer of the Socialists in presidential campaigns, has revealed himself, as we have shown, in such utterances as these: "As a revolutionist, I have no respect for capitalist property laws, nor the least scruple about violating them.... I am law abiding under protest--not from scruple--and bide my time." "Let the sturdy toilers of the Pacific Coast raise the Red standard of revolt." "All hail to the revolution." "I enter the prison doors a flaming revolutionist, my head erect, my spirit untamed, and my soul unconquered." "In Russia and Germany our valiant comrades are leading the proletarian revolution.... They are setting the heroic example for world-wide emulation. Let us, like them, scorn and repudiate the cowardly compromisers within our ranks, challenge and defy the robber-class power, and fight it out on that line to victory or death." This favorite leader of the radicals of America was convicted by jury of violation of the Espionage Law on September 12, 1918, and two days later sentenced to serve ten years in the penitentiary. The case was appealed on the ground that the Espionage Act was an unconstitutional abridgment of the right of free speech. The decision of the United States Supreme Court was handed down on March 10, 1919. In the words of a Socialist work, Trachtenberg's Labor Year Book, 1919-1920, page 102, "The Court held that the law was not contrary to the Constitution and affirmed the sentence imposed upon Debs by the lower court. The decision was unanimous that the nature and intended effect of his speech was to obstruct recruiting and enlistment in the army." Yet this same Year Book, in its account of "The Emergency Convention of the Socialist Party" at Chicago in August-September, 1919, says, page 409: "The Convention went on record offering the presidential nomination of the party to Eugene V. Debs, the nomination to be ratified at the 1920 Convention." On March 5, 1920, at Albany, in the final argument for the five suspended Socialist Assemblymen, according to the "New York Times" of March 6, 1920, Seymour Stedman said of Debs: "He represents in a sense the Socialist movement. Perhaps he represents it more completely than any other man in this country." In order that the reader may understand the extreme way in which lawbreakers like Debs and Victor L. Berger were justified by those defending the five suspended Socialists at Albany, we give an extract from the testimony of Morris Hillquit on February 19, 1920, as reported in the "New York Times" of the next day: "The testimony leading up to Mr. Hillquit's admissions was given after Martin Conboy of counsel for the Judiciary Committee had read into the record a speech and a signed article by Victor L. Berger. In the speech, delivered at the Socialist National Convention in 1908, Mr. Berger said: "'I have no doubt that in the last analysis we must shoot, and when it comes to shooting, Wisconsin will be there.' "In the signed article which appeared in a Socialist newspaper published in Milwaukee the following year, he wrote: "'Socialists and workingmen should ... have rifles and the necessary rounds of ammunition ... and be prepared to back up their ballots with their bullets.'" In reply, according to the "New York Times" of February 20, 1920, putting his own far-fetched construction on Victor L. Berger's words, Morris Hillquit himself advanced the doctrine of "a little shooting" in the following statement: "'History ... has shown that when the privileged minority is about to lose its privileges ... it tries to destroy reform or lawful revolutionary movements by force, ... and in a case of this kind it may come to shooting. "'It is not at all impossible that, even in this country, when the majority of the people will be ready to introduce substantial reform and take away the privileges of the profiteering class by constitutional, legal methods, these self-same profiteering interests will take offense and try to play some trick upon the people, and in that case it is possible--as a matter of prophecy, not as a matter of program, so far as we are concerned--that the people of this country will be compelled to supplement their political action by a little shooting.'" Testifying the same day, Hillquit endorsed Debs as follows, according to the "New York Times" of February 20, 1920: "When asked if Debs is a candidate of the Socialist Party for President, Mr. Hillquit replied: "'If any voice or influence of mine could accomplish anything, he certainly will be nominated at the next convention.' "'The Supreme Court has passed upon the conviction of Debs and affirmed it,' said ex-Judge Sutherland, of counsel. 'Notwithstanding this judgment, you still declare that Mr. Debs represents and personifies the attitude of the Socialist Party on the subject of loyalty to the United States Government?' "'I do not say that he represents the attitude of the Socialist Party. I think I said that he represents the highest and noblest sentiments of United States citizenship and American loyalty.... Debs was convicted only for saying things, not for doing things. I do not for a moment doubt he said the things he is charged with having said.' ... "'Do you uphold and approve of, as a leader of the Socialist Party, the words that Mr. Debs pronounced, and for which he was convicted?' "'I haven't got his complete speech before me. I do not want to commit the Party in this general way to every statement. I will say, as a whole, I read his speech at the time and my impression was that it was a perfectly innocent, honest expression of opposition to war for very good and patriotic motives.' ... "'Have you any respect at all for the decision of the tribunal to the contrary?' "'I have respect to this effect: that I know that it is final and binding and in practice will go. I do not have respect in the sense of believing that it is just, impartial, and well-reasoned out.' ... "'Mr. Hillquit, do you wish to be understood as saying that you approve of the words spoken by Mr. Debs for which he was convicted?' "'Are you trying to get me a little conviction, also, Judge?' asked the witness. "'I am not in a position to indorse every word and every phrase because I have not the speech before me,' he continued. 'As a rule, I fully indorsed his statements on the subject of the war, expressed, I suppose, in that speech and in other speeches.... I share with all my comrades the greatest respect for Debs, and cannot think any compliment too high for him.' "'And you think it was that largeness of view, do you, that led Mr. Debs to say the things which brought him into conflict with the law of the United States?' "'Absolutely, just in the same way as it once happened to one Jesus of Nazareth.'" "'And you say that notwithstanding the highest judicial authority known under the Constitution has declared him guilty of doing that, and in contempt of that authority, notwithstanding that authority, you say that he is the man that should be placed in the President's chair by the votes of the Socialist Party?' "'I do.' "'If Mr. Debs were elected in 1920, how would you proceed to inaugurate[12] him, as he is serving a twenty-year sentence?' asked Assemblyman Jenks. "'The chances are that prior to the time he would be called upon to occupy the chair the powers that be would sober up enough to know that the present conviction is an improper and inhuman act and liberate him.'" On several occasions at the trial, in spite of Hillquit's studied effort to cast an air of innocency over his party, menacing words escaped from this crafty leader. He could not restrain them even at the end, on March 3, 1920, when summing up the case for the Socialist defendants at Albany, according to the following account in the "Sun and New York Herald" of March 4, 1920: "Justifying the general strike as an emergency weapon, Mr. Hillquit made this startling statement interpreted in some quarters as an open threat: "'The workers of this country have the right "to call a general strike" and it is well that they should at least hold it in abeyance as a possible instrument in some cases, in very exceptional emergencies. I will say that the general strike has been used abroad for the purpose of enforcing political action.' "'A labor party is being formed,' Mr. Hillquit said, 'in some parts of the country. Suppose it should elect representatives to the Legislature and a capitalist in that Legislature should get up and say "I don't approve of your programme; get out of my Legislature." "'I say this would be eminently a case where the workers would be justified in declaring a general strike until such time as their constitutional rights are actually accorded to them.'" To this "veiled threat" Martin Conboy, counsel for the Judiciary Committee, replied the next day in summing up for the prosecution. We quote his words from the "Sun and New York Herald" of March 5, 1920: "'Under the veil of a simile a threat was employed that if you gentlemen concluded that these five Socialist Assemblymen should not sit in this chamber as members of this Assembly a general strike might be called. In the whole history devoted to the development of this idea there has been no more frank exposition of the doctrine than that. It is proof, sufficient and satisfactory to the point of a demonstration of the charge that has been made in this case. "'The threat carries itself further. You must not only admit them, but you must take their legislative programme and exact it into law; otherwise the general strike will again be employed. "'No opportunity is lost by the leaders of the Socialist Party to impress upon the rank and file that it is impossible to achieve ultimate triumph by political action. For this reason the American Federation of Labor is subjected to continuous attacks and misrepresentation. For this reason Debs, originally an ardent trade unionist, abandoned and repudiated his former associates after joining the Socialist Party.'" The hypocritical defense made by the Socialists at Albany, through which the unchanged character of the unrepentant plotters has constantly revealed itself, should put us on our guard. Brought into the light by wholesale arrests and deportations, all branches of radicalism, in this country and at Moscow, have adopted new tactics of deception. They profess peace and a return to peaceful methods, claim the liberties which belong only to the law-abiding, and hide behind the sympathies of those who are easily taken in. Yet they justify all their misdeeds, and withdraw none of their evil principles, but rather reaffirm them, with subtlety. What does this mean? It means that the old conspirators, whose overt acts have lately crowded our law-courts, hope to fool the American people into letting them continue their propaganda unto lawlessness under a thin mask of conformity to the very laws they seek to destroy. Although the "Red" conspiracy, as a result of government prosecution, has taken on disguises and gone under ground, it is not, thus, less virulent and dangerous, but more so. Evidence of deceit appeared in the "One Big Union Monthly" for February, 1920, to which lack of space prevents more than a mere allusion. That issue contained articles showing even the I. W. W. preparing an alibi and a disguise. They argued that their organization was not "illegal," and that its famous Preamble meant "evolution" and not "revolution." Another article urged the I. W. W. to give up its name and amalgamate with other industrial unions in a new organization to be known as The One Big Union. Still more significant, the same magazine for February, 1920, published a new incitement to revolution by Leon Trotzky, together with a "Call for Proletarian International" signed by "The Bureau of the Central All-Russian Council of Industrial Unions" and an "Appeal of the Russian Industrial Unions to the Workers of the Allied Countries" signed by "The Bureau of the All-Russian Council of Industrial Union." The "call" reads: "The Central All-Russian Council of Industrial Unions invites all economic organizations based on the real and revolutionary class struggle for the liberation of labor through the proletarian dictatorship to solidify anew their ranks against the international league of brigands, to break with the international of conciliators, and to proceed in unison with the Central All-Russian Council of Industrial Unions toward the organization of a truly international conference of all Socialistic labor unions and veritable revolutionary workers' syndicates. "We beg all economic labor organizations that accept the program of the revolutionary class struggle to respond to our call and enter in a direct touch with us." The accompanying I. W. W. comment was, "We are sure that our organization will be there." Thus, if it be under ground, the mole still works. Moscow still inflames, unifies and directs the great world-conspiracy against the "Entente Powers" and all the nations that have been looking toward peace. The "Appeal," accompanying the "call," says in part: "Can it be true, that you, the workers of England, France, Italy and the United States, will much longer support your governments and permit your blood to quench the spreading conflagration of the social revolution? Can it be that the international bandits of the League of Nations and the thrice-branded Versailles shall be allowed unhampered to weave their nets for the strangling of the world proletarian revolution?... "Down with the bandits of imperialism! "Long live the World Proletarian Revolution! "Long live the International Soviet Republic!" Near the end of his article Trotzky says, according to "The One Big Union Monthly," for February, 1920, page 21, "By thrusting the bourgeoisie away from the helm of state, by taking power into its own hands, the working class is preparing for the creation of Federation of Soviet Republics of Europe and the whole world.... War was and will remain a form of armed exploitation or armed struggle against exploitation." An editorial note on the same page, immediately below the article of Trotzky, says: "The above article and the APPEAL OF THE RUSSIAN INDUSTRIAL UNIONS TO THE WORKERS OF THE ALLIED COUNTRIES are taken from documents on Russia of the working class, written by members of the Soviet Government.... These materials were sent to Fellow Worker Wm. D. Haywood by Comrade Leon Trotzky, the valiant Commissary for War of the victorious Workers' Commonwealth. We are happy to announce that the I. W. W. will be the first to publish these latest documents on peasant and industrial life in Bolshevikland." Did Martens and Hillquit advise Lenine and Trotzky to disguise their American propaganda by using the Industrial Unions of Russia as their cat's-paw? We ask this because Hillquit has long been "Councillor" in America to the Russian Soviet Republic,[L] while the above method of inflaming American labor unions has been the secret method of the Socialist Party's Rand School of Science for some years--since 1916, at least. These are facts established by documents obtained in the summer of 1919 by raids of the Rand School, put in evidence before the New York State Legislative Committee, Senator Clayton R. Lusk, Chairman, and referred to in the July 30, 1919, issue of "The National Civic Federation Review," from which we quote the following: "One David P. Berenberg is director of the correspondence department of the Rand School. From the letter-files seized there, evidence was produced showing the kind of propaganda conducted through Berenberg's department. In a carbon copy of a letter to Harry L. Perkins, of San Diego, Cal., dated June 7, 1916, the statement was made: "'When we read of 'preparedness' that is in full force in the camps of the capitalists, we realize that unless we organize and fit ourselves to resist, and to take over the government, we will one day find ourselves where our French and German brothers are today, dead or maimed in the fray.' "'In other words,' commented Chairman Lusk, 'for over two years this Rand School has been advocating armed preparedness to take over the government.' "A letter--obviously after a form letter sent to correspondents generally--dated October 3, 1916, addressed to M. E. Rabb, Xenia, Ohio, offered as evidence, contained the following: "'What are you doing when the State robs you and your union and so makes you helpless to strike? There is only one thing to do: take over the State. "'Are the members of your local prepared to take over and conduct wisely and well the affairs of your town and county? Are you prepared to meet the militia when the powers of the State and courts are against you? Are you arming yourself with the knowledge of the foundations of our society so that when these crises come to you, you will have an organization strong enough to have foreseen and forestalled them? Are you training your members in scientific Socialism?' "This same adroitly phrased incitement was found in other correspondence." This pest-house of treason and lawlessness, the Rand School, Hillquit's pet university of Socialism, ought to be dug up by the roots. And what shall we say of such evidence? Why should the Socialist Party of America hesitate to affiliate with the Third (Moscow) International and approve its "programs and methods" when Hillquit's illegitimate offspring, the Rand School, was teaching such "methods" a year before the Bolsheviki seized Petrograd and the dictatorship? Is Hillquit Lenine's pupil or Lenine's teacher? Is Hillquit, backer of the Rand School propaganda, the same gentle Morris Hillquit who as an "expert on Socialism" testified before the Assembly Judiciary Committee on February 17, 1920: "The word 'revolution' does not have for us the romantic significance of barricade fights or other acts of violence that it has for most of our newspaper writers and school boys." ("Sun and New York Herald," February 18, 1920.) Can this be the same Hillquit who earlier in the trial broke out in the angry threat: "What we say to you, gentlemen: the contemplated act of this Assembly, if consummated, _will ... loosen the violent revolution_." ("New York Evening Sun," January 21, 1920.) Did he allude to some pink tea party? And perhaps the "school boys" Hillquit referred to are those by his pet institution poisoned and turned into degenerates in the bud of manhood, like poor Oscar Edelman, whose valedictory speech on graduating from a course in the Rand School of Social Science ran thus: "For us as students, Socialists and Labor Unionists, our work is laid out. We must help educate the workers of America so that their slogan, 'a fair day's wage for a fair day's work' be replaced by the revolutionary slogan, 'abolition of the wage system.' ... In the great world-struggle which is taking place today, we must take active part.... The ideals which today inspire Debs and Lenine are the ideals which inspire us." (Lusk Committee evidence, quoted from "The National Civic Federation Review," July 30, 1919.) But of all the sublime performances of Hillquit, that which lays the brightest crown on his veracity was the answer he gave at Albany on February 17, 1920, to the long hypothetical question concerning the attitude of the Socialists should their friends of the Third International, the Bolsheviki, invade the United States. At this question the redoubtable Mr. Hillquit, according to the "New York Times" of February 18, 1920, "settled back in his chair and smiled" and said: "I should say that the Socialists of the United States would have no hesitancy whatsoever in joining forces with the rest of their countrymen to repel the Bolsheviki who would try to invade our country _and force a form of government upon our people which our people were not ready for and did not desire_." (Italics mine.) Had Hillquit stopped where the italics began he would have stretched our credulity to the utmost. But if "our people" meant to him American Socialists, we readily believe that invading Bolsheviki, coming to wrest the American dictatorship from our native talent, would find themselves and their undesirable "form of government" pitched into the sea by Hillquit and his crowd. Majority Socialist against Spartacide and Bolshevik against Menshivik--we have seen how one Socialist group repels the "form of government" forced by another. When we think of the heroic exploits of Hillquit in repelling foreign invaders from America about 1917-18, can we not imagine him hurling one of his deadly manifestoes at his Bolsheviki friends? No doubt when Comrade Martens, the vanguard of the invading Bolsheviki, stormed Hillquit's castle on Riverside Drive with a fee and a commission as "Councillor," the outraged patriot crashed a receipt in full against the invader's outstretched paw. As we think of Hillquit's love for peaceful "political action"--on the witness stand--those words from his foundling, the "New York Call" of May 1, 1919, return to our minds: "The world revolution, dreamed of as a thing of the distant future, has become a live reality, rising from the graves of the murdered millions and the misery and suffering of the surviving millions. It has taken form, it strikes forward, borne on by the despair of the masses and the shining example of the martyrs: its spread is irrepressible.... "The war of the nations has been followed by the war of the classes. The class struggle is no longer fought by resolutions and demonstrations. Threateningly it marches through the streets of the great cities for life or death." Mr. William English Walling, in an article published in the "New York Times," January 20, 1920, asks a pertinent question about the revolutionary activities of the American Socialist Party: "The 'American Socialist Party,' finds itself compelled, precisely like Lenine, to pretend to be a peace-loving organization, loyally accepting constitutional democracy and opposed to violence. Are we to take it at its own word? Is it possible that a few pious phrases offered on occasion can deceive the American people as to the nature of a propaganda organization that is shouting from the housetops in every corner of the country and every day of the year? "The only imaginable reason why the public has paid any attention is that there are two or three organizations more wholly given over to violence, whereas the Socialist organization gives a share of its attention to party politics. It was said until recently, 'Oh, the anarchists are for violence, but the Socialists are for law and order.' Last August it was found that a large part of the Socialists were for immediate revolution. Then it was said that the Communists are revolutionary, but the Socialists are for law and order. The reasoning was that if the Left Wing was for immediate revolution, then the Right Wing must be for law and order!" Mr. Walling expresses an expert opinion, having been a prominent member of Hillquit's party until this organization, at St. Louis in 1917, began the openly lawless course which led to the conviction of a large number of its leaders under the Espionage Law. Moreover, since January, 1920, when Mr. Walling recorded the above opinion, evidence has come to light which shows he was exactly right in saying that the American Socialist Party acted "precisely like Lenine" in pretending "to be a peace-loving organization" because it found "itself compelled" to do so. The tactics of Lenine, Trotzky and Zinovieff, the Bolshevist "triumvirate" of Russia, and of Ludwig C. A. K. Martens and Morris Hillquit in America, are so similar that the evidence brought by Lincoln Eyre out of Russia perfectly interprets the "weasel words" of Martens and Hillquit on the witness stand at Washington and Albany, respectively. Hillquit, the connecting link, according to his testimony at Albany, February 19, 1920, was born at Riga, Russia; came to America a boy, like so many Russian immigrants; attended New York's public schools; and under the protection of the Stars and Stripes, which he would drag down, has made himself so emphatically one of the "capitalists," whom he hates, that he resides on New York's famous "Riverside Drive," and was able to testify with a smirk, "I flatter myself that I am not a failure." (See printed "Testimony" of the trial of the five Assemblymen for the details.) A moral failure, without extenuation, most Americans will regard Morris Hillquit. For out of thirty-five years, spent by him on our hospitable shores in getting rich under the protection of our Government, institutions and people, he has used at least twenty in trying to destroy the benefactor that nursed him. See the "New York Evening Telegram" of February 17, 1920, as follows: "Mr. Hillquit was called to the stand as the first witness for the five Assemblymen. He gave his residence as No. 214 Riverside Drive, New York City. Mr. Hillquit said he had lived in this country thirty-five years, and had been a Socialist since the party was organized, in 1900." This is the man who in 1917 and 1918 backed his organization, so far as he dared, to cripple the people of the United States while they were engaged in a desperate war; and who since has been Lenine's brain in America in trying to set fire to the house of government in which the American people live. Notice his intelligence in the hypocritical Bolshevist refinement of separating the Moscow Soviet Government from the Moscow International, so that one of these may offer our people peace while the other continues to plot our destruction. This distinction was made, with its significance concealed, in Hillquit's testimony at Albany on February 18, 1920, which the Albany "Knickerbocker Press" of the next day, February 19, thus summarized: "Mr. Hillquit testified at length concerning Soviet Russia.... Mr. Hillquit also testified that there were differences between Soviet Government, Bolshevists and the Moscow International. _The latter_, he said, _did not represent Soviet Russia_, and the Bolshevists, he said, were merely a national party of Russia." (Italics mine.) In a cabled account of an interview with Zinovieff, sent by Lincoln Eyre from Russia to the "World," headed, "Riga (by courier via Berlin), Feb. 24," and printed in the "New York World" of February 26, 1920, we have a flood of light showing that the central plot of the Socialist international conspiracy hinges precisely on the distinction which Hillquit had made at Albany a few days before, namely, that the Moscow International does "not represent Soviet Russia." Through the courtesy of the "New York World" we quote from its issue of February 26, 1920, the essential parts of Eyre's statement as follows: "Bolshevik propaganda abroad, though still as active and insidious as it has ever been has undergone a radical change of late. That conclusion was arrived at by a close study of the subject, which I pursued in Moscow and Petrograd, reinforced by an interview with C. S. Zinovieff, ruler of the latter city, also President of the Executive Committee of the Third Internationale and firebrand of the revolution. "The Russian Communist Party, which is the Bolsheviki's official political title, no longer exports agitators chosen from among members to kindle the flames of revolt in foreign lands. They are too wise for that antiquated process nowadays. What they do in these scientific times is to import from the country of his birth the crudely fashioned product of his own domestic Bolshevism, subject him to certain finishing processes (including perhaps a gold lining) and ship him back home again complete in every detail, smooth running and highly inflammable. That is one of the reasons why the Soviet Government is prepared to promise and to keep its promise to refrain from sending forth agents charged with spreading the gospel of capitalistic annihilation.... "Another reason for the Soviet's willingness to quit propagandizing abroad is that it has already turned over to the Third Internationale all business of that kind.... Now, the Third Internationale has no official connection with the Soviet Government. It is supposed to be a separate institution. Yet all its leaders hold office under the Soviets and its funds, which are considerable, must be derived from Soviet sources. Nevertheless it is technically, indeed legally, non-governmental, wherefore the Moscow Cabinet is justified in pledging itself to leave propaganda to 'friendly' foreign states alone. "The moving spirit of the Third Internationale is Zinovieff, who, with Lenine and Trotzky, forms the triumvirate on which Bolshevism today rests, although he is by no means as big a man as the other two. Zinovieff is not a member of the Council of Peoples' Commissaries (the Cabinet), but merely of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, from which the former body derives its powers, and which itself is subordinate to the supreme executive legislative judicial organ, the All-Russian Convention of Soviets. Thus, while the role allotted to him on the administrative stage is really as prominent as that of any of his fellows, short of Lenine and Trotzky, Zinovieff can legitimately claim to be without voice in the actual administration of the Soviet Republic.... "The first point that Zinovieff made clear to me in our talk was that the Third Internationale is not comparable to the League of Nations.... The Overlord of Petrograd affirmed, ... 'The Third Internationale ... is a purely political group. It is a confederation of the world's Communists, an international coalition of the Communist Parties already existing in their respective countries.... The Third Internationale is a going concern, with some 8,000,000 members.' ... "'But,' I asked, 'how is your aim of a European world republic of Soviets to be realized unless there is some international governmental machine?' "'There will be some such machine,' Zinovieff replied, 'but probably it will take the form of a new organization along Soviet lines. In my view, the revolution will follow the same general channels it has taken in Russia, with alterations of detail, of course. Should France overthrow capitalism, for instance, she will at first establish Sovietism, and subsequently combine with us. To foresee the mechanical angles of such combination, however, is too early.' "'And your propaganda programme,' I ventured, 'is as strong and far-reaching as ever?' "The prompt reply was: 'The Third Internationale is primarily an instrument of revolution. It reunites at Moscow the intelligence and energy of all the Communist groups the world over. Delegates from the various national organizations come to us and give and take knowledge about the cause and return to their respective home countries refreshed and invigorated. This work will be continued, no matter what happens, legally or illegally. The Soviet Government may pledge itself to refrain from propaganda abroad, but the Third Internationale--never!'" Let us ponder this description of the Third International by its manager and greatest living expert: its scope, a confederation of the world's Communists, a coalition of the Communist parties of all countries; its size, 8,000,000 members, perhaps greatly exaggerated; its nature, "an instrument of revolution;" and its determination, to carry on propaganda, for the violent seizure of every land by a dictatorship, "no matter what happens, legally or illegally." Let us reflect that it is with this Third International, and not the Russian Soviet Government, that Hillquit's Party in America is affiliated, according to the testimony of the Socialists themselves at Albany. Finally, with these facts for a plummet, let us try to find the bottom of Hillquit's hypocrisy in pretending at Albany that he and his disciples do not believe in "revolution" but only in "evolution." Before passing from Lincoln Eyre's testimony, we further quote from his cable in the "World" of February 26, 1920, what we may call his description of "the Third International at work," as follows: "Zinovieff ... is that combination of idealistic Hotspur and practical executive which is characteristic of many Bolshevist leaders. Despite his long years in exile with Lenine, to whose Doctor Johnson he played Boswell ably and loyally, this shock-haired enthusiastic young Jew--he is to-day scarcely forty--was able to run Petrograd.... Petrograd is still underfed, underheated, dirty and desolate, but it continues to live.... For this Zinovieff, as all-mighty controller of the city's destinies, ... deserves credit.... "Besides having a hand in everything that concerns local administration, and most things which have to do with national government, he personally edits and writes many pages of the Third Internationale's organ, 'The Internationale Communist,' a monthly magazine of some 250 pages printed simultaneously in Russian, English, French and German. Moreover, he passes upon all important printed matter emanating from the Internationale's press. Every foreign Communist coming to Moscow or Petrograd sees Zinovieff and gets pointers from him how to propagate Bolshevism. "In the seven weeks I spent in Moscow, three delegates arrived from the United States and literally scores from Germany, Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, Scandinavia, Roumania, Bulgaria, Italy, China, Japan, Corea, India, Afghanistan and Asia Minor countries. The only important states from which few Communistic envoys come are Britain and France. Practically all these missionaries are obliged to travel illegally, that is, with false passports or without any. They slip across the fighting fronts that encircle the Soviet Republic in astonishing ways, risking death and all forms of hardship to reach Moscow. The one-time seat of Moscow's Emperors has become to Communists the world over what Mecca is to the Mohammedan pilgrims. "A youthful emissary of the I. W. W. said to me: 'We come here to drink of the fountain of revolutionary youth.' I asked him what he thought would happen when Russia's frontiers were opened. 'We shall come as we come now, but in greater numbers and with greater ease,' he replied. "'But won't the Third Internationale send its Russian agitators abroad then, thus making it unnecessary for you to come here?' 'What for?' he retorted. 'There is no use sending Russians to talk to American workmen. Americans will close their ears to a foreigner where they will open them wide to one of their own countrymen. The Third Internationale is a realistic organization. It has learned long ago that racial and national prejudices, however misguided they may be, are deep seated and cannot be overcome in a day. It aims to get results, and so it lets Americans talk to Americans.' ... "The Bolsheviki are as eager to precipitate a world revolution as ever. But at the moment they are even more eager to establish relations with the markets of the world, so that Russia may be saved from economic catastrophe.... The Kremlin realizes full well that it cannot hope to spread Bolshevism by means of its own people. And with the Third Internationale headed by Zinovieff, operating in close contact with the National Communist groups, it knows it does not have to." Thus the overtures of peace and promises of good behavior made by the Russian Soviet Government to the other Powers are pure humbug; and equally false are the professions of peace in America which Hillquit's branch of the Third International has made to lull the fears of the American people. To get the full force of this parallelism we have only to place the law-breaking Socialist Party of America since 1917 in juxta position with the hypocritical Socialist professions and principles brought out in 1920 during the trial of the Assemblymen at Albany. As the long record of jury convictions of officials and members of the Socialist Party of America is the real foundation of the case against the five New York Assemblymen, exposing the character of the organization they serve, we quote for the reader's information a press summary of the facts, submitted by a citizens' "Committee on Publicity," March 2, 1920, "for the approval of the People of the State of New York." According to the Albany "Knickerbocker[13] Press" of March 3, 1920, this Committee's statement, after referring to "the procedure of the New York Assembly in January, 1920," in "temporarily suspending the five Socialist Assemblymen while instituting a judicial inquiry into their qualifications to serve as law-makers," continues as follows: "We believe the Assembly was misjudged in the minds of many who reasoned: 'Socialists elected to previous Assemblies were seated without objection, why then suspend the five Socialist Assemblymen this year and investigate them?' "We offer what we believe to be a complete answer to the question. We believe the Assembly had a compelling warrant for its procedure in serious facts and charges not known to previous Legislatures. These include: "First--Court records showing that most of the principal leaders of the Socialist 'Party' were convicted lawbreakers. "Second--the revelations of the Lusk Committee. "Under the first head may be mentioned the conviction and twenty-year sentence, on January 8, 1919, of Victor L. Berger, National Executive Committeeman of the so-called Socialist Party; the conviction of Eugene V. Debs, four times Presidential candidate of the party, whose ten-year sentence was affirmed by the United States Supreme Court March 10, 1919; and other convictions in 1919, including, Adolph Germer, National Executive Secretary; J. Louis Engdahl, editor of the Socialist Party's official publications; Irwin St. John Tucker, head of its literature department, and William F. Kruse, Secretary of the Young People's Socialist organization. In addition, twenty of the Socialist Party's lesser leaders and scores of its rank and file had been convicted of disloyal acts and utterances, while nineteen of the chief Socialist organs had their second-class mail privileges canceled for disloyalty. "Under the second head may be mentioned the fact that the investigations of the Lusk Committee showed that the Socialist incitement to lawlessness prevalent throughout the country was largely due to the propaganda of the Rand School of Socialism, a New York Corporation of which two of the Socialist Assemblymen were members. Furthermore, the American Socialist Society, the corporation that owns and conducts the Rand School, had been convicted under the Espionage Act before the United States District Court and heavily fined by Judge Julius M. Mayer. "These were some of the facts and charges which were matters of public record and public knowledge when the Assembly of 1920 convened. We submit, therefore, that if the Assembly had not taken action as it did, it would have been derelict in its duty. "We therefore recommend: "1. That all loyal organizations pass, publish and file with this Committee resolutions in acknowledgment of the service rendered by the New York Assembly and in encouragement of similar action by the Legislatures of other states. "2. That individuals affirm this judgment in suitable ways, and particularly by letters to the press in their localities. "3. That all loyal individuals and organizations co-operate to give the whole American people the exact facts concerning the conspiracy of radicals against our Government and institutions. "To this end we propose to continue the work of education by permanent organization under the name of 'Publicity Committee Against Socialism.'"[M] The above list of Socialist convictions for lawbreaking will be found completely confirmed, on Socialist authority, in Trachtenberg's Labor Year Book, 1919-1920, pages 92-103. Was this record questioned by the Socialist defense at Albany? In no wise; it could not be. Was the record faced, the guilt of the lawbreakers confessed, and their transgressions deplored as acts of disloyalty which the Socialist Party now condemns and repudiates? Not at all. These acts were freshly confirmed, and taken anew upon the Socialist Party, by brazen justification of them at Albany and condemnation of the laws, juries and courts of the American people. We have seen how Hillquit on the witness stand justified the disloyal and violently revolutionary utterances of two of the chief offenders, Debs and Victor L. Berger, identifying himself with their sentiments and proclaiming Debs as the highest type of American citizen, the man most fit for President of the United States. We have also seen that the whole Socialist Party was in 1919 committed to the nomination of Debs as its Presidential candidate in 1920; while it is a well known fact that when Congress excluded Victor L. Berger from that body because of his conviction as a lawbreaker, the lawless Socialist Party at once re-elected him to show its contempt for law and order under our institutions. The testimony piled up by the prosecution at Albany showed that, instead of judging the wholesale lawbreaking by its leaders and members in 1917 and 1918, the Socialist Party had in 1919 and 1920 involved itself in a still deeper guilt, adding treason to disloyalty by affiliating itself with the open enemies of our Government in Russia and other foreign lands. Was this denied by the Socialist defense at Albany? No, the fact of affiliation with the Third (Moscow) Internationale was admitted, reducing the defense to the false principle that the five Socialist Assemblymen should not be excluded on account of their signed pledge of obedience to a lawless organization, no matter how lawless it might be. Thus in summing up for the defense, on March 3, 1920, Morris Hillquit, according to the "New York Times" of March 4, 1920, made the following excellent summary of the evidence against his party: "First--That the Socialist Party is a revolutionary organization. "Second--That it seeks to attain its ends by means of violence. "Third--That it does not sincerely believe in political action, and that its politics is only a blind or camouflage. "Fourth--That it is unpatriotic and disloyal. "Fifth--That it is unduly controlled--or that it unduly controls public officials elected on its ticket. "Sixth--That it owes allegiance to a foreign power known as the Internationale. "Seventh--That it approves of the Soviet Government of Russia, and seeks to introduce a similar regime in the United States; and, finally, "Eighth--That the Assemblymen personally opposed prosecution of the war and gave aid and comfort to the enemy. "'All of these charges,' Mr. Hillquit said, 'are distinctly charges against the Socialist Party as such. In other words, it is the Socialist Party of the United States that is on trial before you.' ... "'I think, perhaps, the most telling point is the charge that the Socialist Party is unpatriotic and disloyal--at least it has been emphasized more than any other,' said the lawyer. 'We opposed the war.... If similar conditions again arise I am sure we will take the same position.'" Similarly, Seymour Stedman, summing up for the Socialists on March 5, 1920, not being able to deny the many convictions of leaders and members of the Socialist Party under the Espionage Law, openly attacked the law itself, according to the following account in the "New York Evening Sun" of March 5, 1920: "Albany, March 5.--A bitter attack on the Espionage Act was made by Seymour Stedman in his final summing up for the five suspended Socialists before the Judiciary Committee of the Assembly today. "'Because of that act, you don't know the truth about this war; you cannot know the truth about this war until the Espionage Act is dead,' he asserted.... "Mr. Stedman admitted that the St. Louis war platform of the Socialist Party was drawn 'in lurid language to meet a situation in high flame,' but said no meeting could be called to consider amending it because those who favored it might have been convicted under the Espionage Act.... "Mr. Stedman contended that, of course, the Socialists took their oath to uphold the Constitution of New York State and the United States with the idea that they could interpret for themselves what the Constitution means. "'Each public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others.'" According to the "New York World" of March 6, 1920, Stedman, in his speech of the preceding day, justified Eugene V. Debs' lawbreaking with the disgusting remark, "He had no conception of Jesus with a dagger in his teeth;" and justified the lawbreaking for which Rose Pastor Stokes was convicted with the sentence, "She had a right to disagree with the war aims." She, of course, was not convicted for "disagreement" but for wilfully interfering with the "recruiting service" of the United States Government. The "New York World" of March 6, 1920, also gives the following specimen of Stedman's reasoning: "Answering the charge that Socialists generally were guilty of law violations, he exclaimed: 'Go down to the penitentiaries and get the histories of the birds there and you won't find any Socialists. "'We are quite willing to say that if 2,000 Socialists had been arrested during the war, we are guilty.'" It is difficult to follow this logic. After telling us that we wouldn't "find any Socialists" in the penitentiaries, did Stedman suddenly bethink himself of the scores convicted, and then, on the spur of the moment, fix 2,000 as the number of "arrests" necessary to wring from Socialists the confession, "We are guilty"? From a Socialist work, Trachtenberg's Labor Year Book, 1919-1920, page 92, we quote the following figures for Stedman's edification: "The total number of prosecutions for violation of the Espionage Act from June 15, 1917, to July 1, 1918, were 988. Of these, 197 pleaded guilty and were sent to prison, 166 others were convicted (a large number appealing), and 497 cases were pending for trial July 1st, while 128 had been acquitted or dismissed up to that time. The act has been enforced _with increasing vigor since that date_, but no official figures subsequent thereto are available." According to Trachtenberg, pages 93 and 94, the above cases do not include about 450 cases of "conspiracy to obstruct draft" under the Penal Code and Draft Act, 30 prosecutions for threats against the President, others under the treason statutes, and prosecutions under state statutes and city ordinances, in "number," says Trachtenberg, "doubtless _greatly in excess_ of the federal prosecutions," including "in New York City alone scores of cases." A flock of 27 Socialists was convicted at Sioux Falls, S.D. (Trachtenberg, page 92), and at Chicago a herd of 166 I. W. W.'s, first cousins to the Socialists; while these first cousins were also indicted in various places in batches of 47, 38, 27, 28, etc. (Ibid.) Nor do any of the foregoing figures include the "arrests" of _two or three thousand "Communists" who were members of Stedman's party prior to September, 1919_. In short, even accepting Stedman's extraordinary dictum that "2,000 Socialists ... arrested" is the minimum necessary to force Socialists to confess themselves "guilty," that test is more than met by the arrests already known. Martin Conboy, in summing up for the State in the proceedings before the New York Assembly Judiciary Committee, on March 4, 1920, according to the "New York Times" of March 5, 1920, accused the Socialist counsel and witnesses of "evasive and hypocritical sentiments, expressed on the witness stand, to throw the dust of political, parliamentary and inoffensive acts into the eyes of this Committee and the correspondents of the newspapers." On the other hand, he said, "the leaders of the Socialist Party" lost "no opportunity" to "impress upon the rank and file of that organization that it is impossible to achieve the ultimate triumph of their cause by political action," in support of which he cited the testimony in evidence as follows: "Every manifesto, every platform, almost every utterance of the Socialist orator carries with it the party mandate that the workers of America should be organized industrially so as to be submissive to the command of a revolutionary leadership. "In adopting a programme of industrial action, involving the use of the general strike, the Socialist Party has stripped itself of the mask of political action and stands revealed as a radical revolutionary propaganda organization.'" Another part of Mr. Conboy's address we cite from the "Sun and New York Herald" of March 5, 1920: "The danger of revolution is more real than the nation realizes, Mr. Conboy charged, saying that the Socialist Party seeks to set up its rule here by the following 'unlawful methods': "'Obstruction of the Federal and State governments in all measures relating to defense, thereby rendering the nation defenseless against the attack of enemies from without and within. "'Destruction of government by mass action and insisting in all teachings that political action must be backed by force. "'By making its members and those elected to office responsible only to its dues-paying members, thereby relieving its agents of obligation to established government. "'We are confronted with the necessity of determining how we shall treat this group of persons who are in the United States but not of it; who, while accepting the benefits of our laws and constitutions and the sacrifices of blood and treasure given to support them, refuse their support to them; who take all they can get but will not give a life or a dollar to preserve, defend and perpetuate the Government that is their sole and only guaranty of life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness,' said Mr. Conboy. "'It is the first time since the rebellion of 1861 that notice has been plainly and explicitly served upon the Government of the United States by a group of men residing within its borders that they will not support or defend it, but that they will by all means obstruct and resist its effort to maintain in time of stress its national honor and existence. "'The Socialist Party of America is not a loyal organization disgraced occasionally by the traitorous act of a member, but a disloyal party composed of perpetual traitors.'" Again, in a part of his address reported in the "New York Evening Sun" of March 4, 1920, Mr. Conboy mentioned the fact that "at the National Convention of the Socialist Party of America held in St. Louis," in April, 1917, "its members were directed to deny and repudiate allegiance to this Government," and added: "The explanation of the anti-American attitude of the Socialist Party of America during the war lies in the anti-national and pro-international character of its programme. Its members are not occasional but perpetual traitors, in constant conflict not merely with the purposes of any temporary administration of the affairs of this Government, but with the very institutions and fundamental laws. They are citizens not of the United States, but subjects of the Internationale, whose pronouncements are to be given their moral support, a support which they not only withhold from but deny to the Government of the United States. "The principal exponent of this party, who appears here in the dual capacity of witness in chief and counsel in chief, is the international secretary for America of the International Socialist Bureau." To complete our information concerning the Moscow International, we add here some details concerning its Executive Committee, and the right of representation on it enjoyed by the affiliated "Parties" in other lands than Russia, including, no doubt, the Socialist Party of America. Trachtenberg's Labor Year Book, 1919-1920, in its article, "The Moscow International Communist Conference" (held at Moscow, March 2-6, 1919), says, page 312: "The Conference ... perfected the organization of the new International and entrusted the direction of the work to an Executive Committee consisting of one representative from the Communist parties of the more important countries. The parties in Russia, Germany, German-Austria, Hungary, Switzerland, Sweden and the Balkan Federation, were directed to send members to the Executive Committee. Parties which have declared their adherence to the new International will be given seats in the Executive Committee, pending the arrival of delegates from other countries. The members of the Committee from the country in which the Executive Committee has its seat [Russia] were empowered to plan the work of the new organization. The Executive Committee was authorized to elect a bureau consisting of five members to do the actual work of the Committee." Has the Socialist Party of America contributed its Executive Committeeman to this revolutionary machine? Even so, the orders, or "suggestions," evidently come from the Bolshevist Bureau of Five who "do the actual work of the Committee." Are these the Russian power that, according to correspondence found in a raid of the Lusk Committee, has already appointed Eugene V. Debs to reign over us "as 'Proletarian Dictator' of the United States" as soon as the plotted revolution is pulled off in this country? (See "The National Civic Federation Review" for July 30, 1919.) Are these the power, too, according to report, that induced the Italian Socialists and Syndicalists to postpone their proposed revolution to a more convenient season? And was this to give Soviet Russia a chance to put through a temporary peace or truce with Europe to stave off "economic catastrophe?" If so, the twitching revolutionaries in other lands must evidently train their toes to dance at Moscow's convenience. Meanwhile, under the International, the diabolical work of getting the immoral elements ready for violence goes on in every land, including the United States. Let Hillquit excuse, extenuate, deny and palaver as he may, it remains true that the Socialist Party of America teaches the same treasonable doctrines of violence and insurrection as the Russian Bolshevists, but in a more covert way. We have a sample in the pamphlet, "The Dictatorship of the Proletariat," put in evidence on January 27, 1920, in the inquiry of the Judiciary Committee at Albany. It is published by the Jewish Socialist Federation of America, New York City, a part of the Socialist Party of America. It says in part: "Socialism does not believe in the State, wants to annihilate it entirely. It holds that the task of the State has always been to oppress the country in the interests of one class. So long as there are classes in society which seek supremacy, the mastery, there must be a State. But as soon as classes are eliminated the State will have no justification for existence, and it will disappear of itself. "The Socialist movement rouses the workingmen to revolution. It preaches to them the class struggle, awakens within them class-consciousness, makes all necessary preparations for Socialistic order. When society is ready for the overturn, when the Socialistic organization feels that the moment has come, it will make the revolution. "The dictatorship will be employed for the one thing, to eliminate capitalism by force, take away by force the capital from private owners and transfer it to the ownership of the community. The industries will be managed by the workingmen through their soviets. "Let the true Socialists stand as sentinels; let them see that the Socialist programs strike with hot, revolutionary blood. The great task of the Socialist movement is to create an army in this country which should be ready to make the Socialist revolution when the suitable moment arrives. This army must know its aims and the method of attaining these aims, must be an intelligent army. Every soldier in it must himself know the way, the plans, the strategy." In the "Outline of the Evidence Taken Before the Judiciary Committee to and Including February 5, 1920," issued by counsel for the State, they quote from the Yiddish book, cited above, referring to the printed "Testimony," pages 199, 204 and 207, in proof that the Jewish Socialist Federation, which published the book, is "part of the Socialist Party," and introducing their citations from the book with the very significant remark, "Published in Yiddish the principles of Socialism were not camouflaged as they frequently are in English." Bearing this in mind, let us note how this plain-spoken book, which we cite from the State counsel's "Outline," pages 31-34, gives the lie to Hillquit's camouflage about "revolution" being "evolution." The book says: "History teaches us that through evolution, through natural developments alone, no ruling class in society has ever been deposed from its power.... Workingmen cannot depend on '_peaceful_ evolution'; they must prepare for a revolution, and class-dictatorship.... "To the Socialist at present, the meaning of class struggle, Internationale and Dictatorship of the Proletariat, must be clear. He must understand that Socialism is not a reform movement. He must know that Socialism is a Revolutionary world-perspective, and that the Socialist movement is a Revolutionary movement.... He must cease to be a moral preacher and become a fighter. He must know that the Socialist movement is a red movement, a movement with blood in the veins, which knows that nothing in life can be won without a struggle." This is the real stuff, hid in a foreign tongue, with which Hillquit's gang poisons the East Side of New York City, while the gang's leaders lie to the American people. Yet if the real plan is not to give us Socialism by "peaceful evolution" but to impose it on us by "a revolution, and class-dictatorship," what is the real object of the "political action" carried on meantime by these hypocrites? Again the Yiddish book gives us the real thing: "So long as the State is ... a tool in the hands of the bourgeoisie in the fight against the proletariat, ... why do the Socialists seek to send their representatives there? Where do Socialists fit into the State? What can they do there? "Socialists seek to enter into the government for two reasons, first, to be nearer to the doors of the chambers, where dictatorship sits, and second to hinder the dictatorial work in any way possible. The first reason is the most important. Sitting in Parliament or in Congress, being inside of the government ranks, affords Socialists an opportunity to find out the plans, the strategy of the State. And knowing this, they can carry out the propaganda the better." If this is not treason--wickedness using "political party" methods both as a mask and a blackjack to destroy the State--what is it? To be forewarned is to be forearmed. Ample proof has been given in this chapter to show that there is a nation-wide conspiracy to destroy our government and institutions and replace the Stars and Stripes by the red flag. I. W. W.'s, Communists, Communist Laborites, Socialists and Socialist Laborites have united under the leadership of the Bolshevist Government of Russia. Their agents are everywhere, everywhere hypocritically protesting that in our land freedom, of speech and freedom of assemblage are no longer tolerated. Unless our loyal citizens promptly rally to the defense of America, disorder, strife and rebellion will be seething everywhere, the foundations of the glorious nation that sprang from the blood of the brave soldiers of '76 will be completely undermined, our country will be afflicted with evils far more grave than those averted by the heroes who fought and died in 1812, and the land that we love will fall a prey to the terrible ravages of crime, lawlessness and anarchy. We must save our country, and save it now. Now is the time to act--now, before it is too late; and we must act so effectively and so vigorously that the Socialists and all their allied, criminal, revolutionary crews will wish that they never had seen a red flag or left their homes abroad. They are conspiring enemies of our country. They are traitors to the flag under which Washington and his soldiers fought for the independence of America; traitors to the flag to whose defense the brave men of 1812 rallied; traitors to the flag for which a million soldiers suffered or died in our great Civil War. They are traitors to the flag that symbolizes the union of countless happy homes under a democratic government held in honor, respect and veneration. Traitors they are to the flag that stands for freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and for the protection of individual as well as of family rights. They are traitors to the flag of a much slandered and calumniated government, which, though imperfect, like all things on this earth, extends its blessings to all, not even excepting ungrateful Socialists and other radicals. Fellow citizens and fellow countrymen, rally to the defense of the flag that you love! Denounce, to the north, south, east and west, the evil teachings and deceptions of the Red conspirators; for there is nothing that will more quickly ruin the parties of Reds than to reveal to the world their professed and secret teachings. "Immortal patriots, rise once more! Defend your rights, defend your shore! Let no rude foe with impious hand, Invade the shrine where sacred lies Of toil and blood the well earned prize. While off'ring peace, sincere and just, In heav'n we place a manly trust, That truth and justice shall prevail, And every scheme of bondage fail." CHAPTER XVII SOCIALISM A PERIL TO WORKINGMEN In glowing colors the imaginations of Socialists have beautifully pictured their utopian state for the benefit of the credulous and oppressed. Unfortunately, however, for the followers of Karl Marx, a little reasoning and common sense show that their visionary state, instead of being a heavenly paradise, would in reality be a descent into chaos and anarchy. Domestic peace would be a blessing of the past. Discontent, wrangles, fights, riots, civil discord and sabotage would be the order of the day till irrepressible rebellion had sounded the death-knell of Socialism. There is every indication that the Revolutionists would not destroy our present system of government without having recourse to arms. Besides the many convincing proofs given in the preceding chapter, we learn from "The Call," New York, January 28, 1912, that the celebrated Socialist novelist, Jack London, scouted the idea that the social revolution would be realized without force. Then, again, Victor Berger--who was Socialist Congressman from Wisconsin, and who, like Debs, was one of the "innocents" whom the "poor," "persecuted" Reds have been trying to save from a long imprisonment by a nationwide agitation for amnesty--writing in the "Social Democratic Herald" of Milwaukee, on August 14, 1909, said: "We should be grateful if the social revolution, if the freeing of 75,000,000 whites would not cost more blood than the freeing of 4,000,000 negroes in 1861." Roland Sawyer, the Socialist candidate for governor of Massachusetts in 1912, writing in "The Call," New York, October 1, 1911, dares to confess that "the conceptions of modern Socialism are all found in a cruder form on the streets of Paris during the Revolution." Finally, as we have seen, Eugene V. Debs, who on four different occasions was the Socialist candidate for the presidency of the United States, in the "Appeal to Reason," Girard, Kansas, September 2, 1911, said: "Let us marshal our forces and develop our power for the revolt.... A few men may be needed who are not afraid to die. Be ye also ready.... Let us swear that we will fight to the last ditch, that we will strike blow for blow, that we will use every weapon at our command, that we will never surrender." It is evident that if, after a bloody rebellion, the Socialists should overthrow the United States Government, the many millions of defeated patriotic Americans would continue to be the enemies of the new regime. But even if no rebellion took place, and the present system of government were overthrown merely by the ballot, the new state would begin life with millions of enemies, those, namely, who for one reason or another had been radically opposed to Socialism. When the Marxians come into power, several large factions of them usually rebel against the government of the Socialists, as in Russia, Germany and Bavaria. The Socialists, in most cases, gain control of a country after a foreign war, at a time when it is most difficult for even the wisest and most experienced statesmen to solve the serious problems of the hour. Great discontent should, therefore, be expected from the failure of inexperienced agitators after coming into power, because of their inability to solve an almost endless number of serious difficulties. Foremost among these would probably be food difficulties, which, as in Russia, Germany, and Hungary, have resulted in widespread opposition to the newly established regimes. The Socialists have never yet made known to the people of America the detailed working plan of their proposed state. They have, of course, made lots of very general statements, which do not stand the test of accurate criticism, but they have utterly failed to offer solutions of the grave difficulties that they know would confront them. They prefer to let the future work out the solution, and, in the meantime, invite us to ruin our present form of government and industry, imagining that we Americans are a lot of ignorant children who will entrust our destinies to a pack of wild theorists with nothing but a vague hope of a propitious future. Think of the discontent which would result if our people tore down the old structure, to find no structure whatever into which to move. They would be in the same predicament as the people of San Francisco in the days after the earthquake and fire, when they had to camp out in the open with an insufficient food supply, exposed to the inclemency of the weather. In fact, they would be far worse off. A big-hearted world rushed supplies to the San Franciscans and soon helped them to surmount their difficulties. But the new Socialist state would be attacked from within and without, by citizens hoping to destroy the hated form of government, and by foreign nations dreading the spread of anarchy, just as the United States, England and France blockaded Socialist Russia, causing untold trouble to the Bolshevist government. In the midst of embarrassments like these the inexperienced Marxian agitators must attempt to solve ten thousand times ten thousand problems which require skill in the extreme and years of careful thought. Would not this result in widespread discontent? Or would the citizens of the United States, who just before the dawn of Socialism had been taught by Debs and his crew to find fault with everything under the sun, suddenly learn patience and remain as meek as lambs merely because the Socialists had raised the Red flag in place of the Star Spangled Banner? No sooner would the all-perfect Socialists take control at Washington than the endeavors of the new state to settle the serious difficulties confronting it would occasion so much discontent and strife as seriously to threaten, if not actually bring to an end, the very existence of the new government. For, first of all, the people would have to determine whether the immense number of property owners, whose goods must be taken over by the state, should receive full payment, partial payment, or no payment at all. The famous Belgian Socialist, Vandervelde, informs us that we may group into three categories the plans of socialization proposed by different schools, according to their aiming at the expropriation of the means of production without indemnity, with complete indemnity, or with limited indemnity. ["Collectivism and Industrial Evolution," by Vandervelde, page 152 of the 1904 translation into English.--Chas. H. Kerr and Company.] If full compensation were granted, millions of Socialists would become exceedingly disgusted and discontented, for not only would the new state from the very beginning of its existence be burdened with a tremendous debt through having to borrow many billions of dollars, if such a thing were possible, in order to make the purchases, but--which would make matters much worse--many of the property owners, who even now are hated and detested by the Socialists, could, after receiving payment, either sit down for the rest of their lives and watch the Revolutionists labor and toil, or else, while doing some work themselves, could use their wealth in bribing the Socialist officials to bestow on them all kinds of privileges and favors. If no compensation whatever were granted, then, in addition to the hatred and disgust for the new system, which would prevail among the millions who would be dispossessed of their property, after long years of work and careful saving in order to purchase it, there would also be boundless dissatisfaction on the part of persons who, still respecting God's Commandments and the sense of right in natural conscience, would want to see justice and honesty reign throughout America. Finally, if partial payment were made, both those opposed to full compensation and those in favor of it would be displeased because of the reasons given, which would still influence them very decidedly. If the indemnity paid were very small, the former property owners and all honest citizens would be those especially offended. If the amount paid were large, dishonest Socialists would take offense. Therefore, no matter which plan of expropriation were adopted, the state would make a great number of new enemies. Though we learn from page 186 of the "Proceedings of the 1908 National Convention of the Socialist Party" that the delegates to the convention, after a factional dispute on party principles, declared by a vote of 102 to 33 for the collective ownership of _all_ the land, and thus determined that the state should take over all the farms of the country, still it cannot be denied that a great number of Revolutionists have claimed, especially of late years, that the government should not dispossess the small farmers of their properties. On account of the rival theories of the two contending factions, the Socialist state might have to pass through a serious ordeal before either plan was adopted. Should the new government finally determine to take possession of such property, millions of farmers and their families would become exceedingly hostile to the government. Should the state allow former owners to cultivate the fields about their old homesteads, the discontent would be but partially lessened, for strict obedience to the commands of government bosses would replace the freedom of action once enjoyed by the farmer's family. Pages 167 to 190 of the "Proceedings of the 1908 National Convention of the Socialist Party," and pages 220 to 235 of the "Proceedings of the 1910 National Congress of the Socialist Party," convinced us that very many of the Revolutionists who oppose government ownership of _all_ land do so in order to gain votes. It seems highly probable, therefore, that if Socialism became the law of America many of the apparently moderate Revolutionists would throw off their masks and unhesitatingly declare for the most radical plan of government ownership. Yet even if the contemplated state should permit the private ownership of small farms, their owners would be displeased because they would no longer be allowed to hire laborers for working the fields. Some conservative Socialists, indeed, profess willingness to tolerate the employment of one or two farm hands. But not alone do the 1908 National Platform and the amendment adopted by party referendum on September 7, 1909, oppose exploitation, or the employment of hired labor in the production of goods, but innumerable articles in Socialist papers, books and reviews denounce exploitation most emphatically. Hence, if the Socialist state allowed farmers in good standing with the government to own little farms, they could not hire labor to operate them. If the farmer should fall sick, his crops would go to ruin. Advantage could not be taken of some of the great inventions helpful to agriculture, nor scientific methods of work and management. The individual farmer, thus handicapped, might feed himself, his wife, his children, his horse, his cow, his pig, but very little more. In the Socialist state great discontent would arise from either the toleration or prohibition of small business enterprises. If permitted, without power to hire labor, they must compete with the government. If forbidden, large numbers of persons would be obliged to work for the government, after losing little stores or shops in which for years they had been interested. In its issue of March 30, 1912, the "Appeal to Reason," then the leading Socialist weekly of the United States, declared that under Socialism John D. Rockefeller would be allowed to retain his money and decide what to do with it. Were this the case, and every person of wealth allowed to retain his money, it is difficult to see how Socialists who hate and detest the rich could endure such a condition, any more than they could tolerate the granting of full or partial indemnity to property owners. The attempt to leave the rich in possession of their wealth would probably incite Socialists to rise in arms against the state they had founded. On the other hand, if wealth were confiscated, the wealthy and the honest poor alike would be discontented with a dishonest government. Moreover, where would the Socialists draw the line of lawful possession? At $1,000,000, $10,000, $1,000, or $100? Would the decision be reached peaceably? Would the use and possession of government bonds be allowed? As the desire to acquire is one of the strongest passions, bitter hatred would assail the Socialist state, which, Debs tells us, would prohibit business profits, rent and interest. ["Socialism and Unionism," by Eugene V. Debs.] How could insurance companies, in which the American people have invested so much, and which depend on interest, exist under Socialism? Socialism having ruined the insurance companies, would the millions of policyholders just sit down and have a good, hearty laugh over their losses? The real crux of Socialism is the inability of the Marxians to determine upon a system of employment and a scale of wages or remuneration satisfactory both to the government and the working classes. Remuneration must either be in the form of money, or of goods or labor certificates entitling the holder to receive goods from the government stores. As labor certificates would be like money, we shall class them as "money" when speaking of wages. Different schemes of employment have been proposed by Socialists. One of the oldest allows each individual to select the occupation he desires, provided he can do the work. All citizens, under this system, receive equal pay or equal supplies for their services. Such a system is absurd. The more repugnant occupations, no matter how important for the welfare of the nation, would be neglected. All would want easy, clean jobs. Bootblacks might prefer to become artistic decorators; street-cleaners would ask to be put in charge of big factories; night-workers would prefer day-work. The result would be endless discontent, jealousy and disorder. As everybody would receive equal recompense, the system would set a premium on sloth and inefficiency, and entail state bankruptcy. One of the most serious objections would be the discontent among skilled workingmen, who would want skill to be a determining factor in the wage scale. Yet should their system of equal remuneration not prevail, unskilled laborers, led by agitators to believe that equal wages would be paid to all, would become the sworn enemies of the government. A second system, favored by many Socialists would permit all citizens to choose their occupations and allow each individual to draw upon the national storehouses _according to his needs_. [Gotha Programme of the Socialists of Germany.] This scheme, like the first, is absolutely absurd. It would permit all to demand more than they needed, would encourage sloth, would bankrupt the state, and would occasion discontent among skilled workingmen. Under this system, too, the entire population would neglect the more distasteful occupations, and ill-feeling and jealousy would arise in the hearts of those failing to obtain congenial positions. As diligence should be a determining factor in the arrangement of the wage scale, in considering the remaining systems we shall assume that the wages are those for men whose diligence may be termed first class. Many Socialists, foreseeing the evils of a mad rush to obtain the attractive positions, yet realizing how intolerable it would be for the state to drive its citizens into uncongenial occupations, have endeavored to find a way out. Several solutions have been proposed, among which is the one we shall call the third system. In the third system, occupations may be chosen by those qualified to do the work. The recompense would be the same for all, but with the hours of toil lessened in proportion to the disagreeableness of the work. ["Looking Backward," by Bellamy, Chapter 7, Social Democratic Publishing Company of Milwaukee.] But such a system would give more reason than ever for jealousy and discontent on the part of skilled workingmen, who would be terribly incensed at seeing street cleaners and garbage collectors for example receive salaries equal to their own and at the same time enjoy shorter hours. This system would put a premium on such occupations as sewer-cleaning and dish-washing, and would discourage persons from pursuing occupations of the highest importance to the country. Morris Hillquit, writing in "Everybody's," December, 1913, page 826, tells us that "the national government might well own and operate all means of interstate transportations and communication, such as railroad systems, telegraph and telephone lines; all sources of general and national wealth, such as mines, forests, oil-wells; and all monopolized or trustified industries already organized on a basis of national operation. "Similarly the state government might assume the few industries confined within state limits; while the municipal government would logically undertake the management of the much wider range of peculiarly local business, such as street transportation and the supply of water, light, heat and power. "Still other local industries, too insignificant or unorganized even for municipal operation, might be left to voluntary co-operative enterprises." On page 829 of the same issue of "Everybody's," Hillquit adds that "under a system of Socialism each worker will be a partner in the industrial enterprise in which he will be employed, sharing in its prosperity and losses alike." At first sight this fourth plan seems attractive, but upon examination we notice that nothing is said as to how the millions of persons to be employed by the national, state or municipal governments will be assigned to the different enterprises. Will the people be forced to labor at repugnant tasks? That will make endless turmoil and trouble in the Marxian state. But if all persons enjoy equal rights under the Socialist government there would be a grand rush for the most congenial occupations, and especially for the most lucrative. The result would be an immense amount of discontent and jealousy in those who failed to secure the positions they desired. True, these objections might not hold for well-to-do persons like Hillquit, founder of the "New York Call," for he and other Socialist politicians who have become wealthy by always remaining leaders of their dues-paying comrades might, perhaps, invest their money in co-operative enterprises. But such persons constitute only a small part of the population of the country. The many objections brought against these four systems could not be obviated by the adoption of a fifth, in which all would be free to choose their occupations, and would for the same number of hours of work receive as recompense an amount determined by all the factors which should be taken into consideration, such as skill, the physical difficulty of the labor, danger, disagreeableness of the work and the increased value added to the raw material. In trying to arrange the details of such a system, innumerable difficulties would arise. Unskilled laborers would want physical labor rather than skill or talent made the principal factor in determining the scale; for they would recall the promises of Socialist orators that in the new state all should enjoy equal rights, and they would consider it a grave injustice to work as hard or even harder than skilled laborers and yet receive lower wages through want of skill and talent due to no fault of theirs. Should the plea of these millions of unskilled laborers go unheeded, the new state could count them among its most bitter enemies. On the other hand, skilled laborers would want skill and talent to be the main factors in determining wages, arguing that they had worked hard to become proficient and that their talent and skill made the work more valuable to the state. They would protest that they should not suffer simply because unskilled laborers lacked their skill and talent. Should the skilled workingmen not be heard, the new state would have another throng of enemies. Compromises might be attempted by different adjustments of talent and skill to physical labor in determining the wage schedule; but in each case the new regime would only be at the beginning of troubles. What bitter disputes among the skilled workingmen in different trades! There would be conflicting views of every sort regarding the exact amount of skill and of physical labor required in the different trades, and regarding the difficulties, disagreeableness of work, dangers to health and life, and increased value added to the raw material in each line. But what would happen even if the ship of state under the red flag and its mast could weather the wage-storm and come safely into port with some working system? The people, we are told, would enjoy equal rights. The government could not refuse to grant work to any qualified person applying for it. Suppose the members of some trade, the carpenters, for example, displeased with the wages they were getting, should apply for other work and stick to it until the government was forced to grant their demands. Other craftsmen, seeing how easily the carpenters had won their strike, would imitate their example. Thus would occur derangements of the intricate wage scale--which had occupied the attention of the country for so long a time and been adopted only after the greatest difficulty--causing great discontent and jealousy, while the economic losses through successful strikes would raise the prices of commodities, bringing on a general fever of discontent. A further source of trouble would be the problem of determining what wages should be paid to shirkers and those incapable of working with efficiency. Would wage courts decide the value of their services? If so, how many thousands of such courts would be required? If not, would state officials or politicians decide the cases? The wages of such persons, no matter how determined, would cause discontent. It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to determine justly and accurately the wages of eminent specialists, physicians and persons whose important services the state could not afford to lose. If very high wages were awarded them, the poorer classes would take offence at the prospect of a rich class once more rising with power to suppress them, as many do at the present time. If low wages were paid to eminent specialists, they would neglect important pursuits and vocations to the detriment of the nation's welfare. Even if they received moderately high wages, other persons of the same profession would become offended at the government's refusal to grant them like salaries and would line up with the enemies of the Socialist state. Even under the most favorable circumstances, the fifth wage-system would produce two classes, the comparatively rich, and the comparatively poor, a condition repugnant to Socialists. The forcing of women to work, in accordance with Socialistic doctrines, would arouse opposition to the new government. The husbands, fathers and sons of the women would be displeased with the wretched way in which their homes would be kept and their meals prepared. A further source of tremendous discontent in the Socialist state would be the prevalence[14] of political corruption to a far greater extent than under the present system. For there would be a far greater throng of state employes than now, and there would be an immense number of people trying to get permissions, privileges and exemptions of every description. With human nature unchanged, but with the opportunities for deals and bribery greatly multiplied, political corruption would greatly increase. Another important cause would be in operation. Socialism is spreading anti-religious and atheistic doctrines, loosing men and women from their moral restraints. With dishonesty thus increasing, acceptors of bribes would not only be more common in the Marxian state, but the average number of their offences would increase; for since opportunities of collecting large single sums would be rarer than at present, owing to abolition of the capitalist system and the small amount of wealth possessed by individuals, dishonest politicians would naturally endeavor to enrich themselves by granting corrupt favors to a larger number of people. The reader himself can picture the condition of affairs in the Socialist state when large numbers of its citizens were its declared enemies because of a vast and hopeless system of political corruption. The Socialist state would contain many persons who by soapbox orators and revolutionary authors were led to believe that police, soldiers and courts would disappear. These persons would be greatly discontented when the Socialist government still hedged them in by retaining the old system for the preservation of law and order, or, as in Russia, greatly increased the restraint on their liberty by means of immense numbers of Red Guards, heavily armed and noted for cruelty. Or if these were taken away, the state would feel the enmity of all its better citizens who realized the need for guardians, police, soldiers and courts, to protect them from the crimes of the lawless. Under the Socialist regime there would be atheists, fighting as in Russia, Mexico, France, Italy and Portugal for the propagation of their doctrines, while in opposition to them would be millions of believers, defending themselves from the attacks of the enemies of God. Any concession granted by the state to one of these parties would arouse the enmity of the other. So, too, there would be a rapidly growing faction in favor of free-love, as well as one opposed to it, and as each party would be extremely powerful, and use every effort to defeat its opponents, there would be great strife and discontent. The Socialists in power in Europe, whether "moderate" or extremely radical, have made millions of enemies by imprisonments, executions, suppression of free speech, the gagging of the press, the withholding food, etc. Would these things happen in our country if the Reds gained control? There is every reason to believe that the Socialist Government would become exceedingly unpopular here as in Russia, owing to a great increase in crime; for to say nothing of the criminal offences occasioned by the prevalent discontent of the citizens, the atheistical and anti-religious doctrines of the Revolutionists, by continuing to undermine the faith of the people in the existence of God and by leading them to disbelieve in the rewards of heaven and the punishments of hell, would very seriously interfere with the beneficent effects of several of the most excellent preventives of crime. With discontent, jealousy and crime reigning supreme in the state from its very birth, many who had hoped for the success of Socialism would become utterly disgusted with its absolute failure and would long for the re-establishment of the old order. As the leaders of the Marxian movement now make the most extravagant promises concerning perfections of their prospective state, their government, should it come, would suffer the hatred of all who discovered that they had been cruelly deceived. We must remember, too, that the very persons who would discover that they had been deceived by their Socialist teachers would be the very same people who are now taught by the same teachers to find fault with everything under the sun. It would, therefore, be a terrible day for the new state when the embittered rank and file of the Revolutionary Party fully realized the total failure of Socialism. The Socialist state would then have millions of enemies, recruited from the Socialist Party itself, as well as from the ranks of those who had always opposed Socialism. Not alone would these enemies be far more numerous than those who oppose our present form of government, but their wrath and anger, wrought to fever heat by the many causes we have enumerated, as well as by the mistakes of the Marxian rulers, would urge them to commit deeds of violence that have never yet been conceived even by the "bomb squad" of the revolutionary I. W. W. Rebellion against the new government would be the order of the day, and the Socialist state would not long endure. It would crumble to pieces, and the poor workingman, in the midst of anarchy and the total destruction of industry, would deeply regret having listened to the crazed imaginations of silver-tongued fanatics. * * * * * Lincoln Eyre's cables from Russia, received by the "New York World" when this book was in type, more than corroborate the picture drawn in this chapter of the "perils to workingmen" from any attempt to put the economic fallacies of Socialism into practice. In the first place, according to Eyre's cable of February 26, 1920, printed in the "World" of February 28, 1920, all the blood and violence inflicted on Russia have failed to establish real Communism there. Through courtesy of the "World" we give, in part, Eyre's statement as to this, from the cable just mentioned: "In wartime France, England or Germany no man could obtain for love or money more than a specified maximum of food, fuel or the household requirements. In wartime revolutionary Russia, ruled by a communist dictatorship, any man with enough thousand ruble notes can buy all the food and warmth he desires. Throughout the war dwellers in London, Paris or Berlin affected by war conditions (and that meant practically everybody) were freed of paying rent by a moratorium. Residents of Moscow and Petrograd are still obliged to pay rent and at a higher figure than in pre-war days. These two incontrovertible facts are evidence that an all-powerful Bolshevik in the Communist Government has in two years installed a lesser measure of Communism in actual practice than existed in the belligerent European countries during the war years. To my mind this is one of the severest, albeit the most rarely mentioned, indictments of the Bolsheviks' vast communistic programme, since it reveals their impotency to attain their initial aim--the abolition of classes." In the second place, not alone has there been failure to destroy capitalism and equalize possessions, but new class distinctions and "new aristocracies" have arisen. We quote Eyre on this point from the same issue of the "World," February 28, 1920: "While capitalism in the larger sense of the term has been destroyed, together with private ownership on a large scale, capital continues to be accumulated and to make its influence felt. One man may still possess more than another in worldly goods and receive higher pay for his work. Equality of material possessions is as non-existent in the Russian social republic as it is in the American 'bourgeois' republic. Hence there are coming into existence new groupings of Russian population, new lines of economic demarcation, new forms of social standing and of wealth. The beginning of two new aristocracies are detectable. One is found in the governmental hierarchy, the other in the ever-increasing speculator class.... The Soviets ... cannot do without the speculators (which means all persons engaged in private trading)." Thirdly, "Communist" Russia already has her "ruling class," as privileged and as distinctly marked off from the ordinary day-laborer as in any "bourgeois" republic. We quote Eyre as to this from the same article: "Governmental aristocracy has its boots imbedded in the Kremlin, that ancient Moscow citadel.... In Soviet Russia today one speaks of the Kremlin as one spoke of Versailles in the magnificent days of Louis XIV.... Only the most eminent commissaries of the people and a few other Soviet stars of the first magnitude are domiciled there in the grandiose palaces that once housed the most famous figures of Muscovite history. "Protected behind numerous barriers of bayonets and machine guns, the Bolshevik chieftains have made this barbarically gorgeous nesting place of Oriental autocracy the throbbing nerve centre of world revolution.... And from its frowning gates they sally forth in their high power limousines on affairs of state even as the Czars in their day went forth to superintend the administration of their colossal heritage. "Bolshevism's upper ten are in the Kremlin. The lesser lights of the Bolshevik aristocracy must content themselves with quarters in the 'Soviet houses,' which were the city's leading hotels, and are now nationalized habitations reserved for prominent Soviet officials. These buildings, like the Kremlin, are better heated and generally cared for than most other domiciles and the food served in them is slightly more abundant. Sentries guard the doors to prevent unauthorized visitors from gaining admission.... "The fact that some individuals ride to the opera in limousines while the rest walk is necessarily productive of class division. Already there is a slang term for the former--the proletarian bourgeoisie, they are called." The observant reader will also have gathered from the extract just given that, fourthly, the "ruling class" of Communist Russia is much more distrustful of the "common people" than any class in the United States, Great Britain or France would think of being. Thus the lords and lordlings of the "proletarian dictatorship" barricade themselves in "citadels," behind "barriers of bayonets and machine guns," while "sentries guard the doors" to keep out "visitors." What would we poor "bourgeois" Americans think if our wealthier inhabitants and public officials kept "common citizens" out of range by such a display of infantry and artillery? Fifthly, despite all the gush about a "workingmen's" republic in Russia, that country is now absolutely helpless under the yoke of the most absolute autocracy the world has seen in a long while. As to this we quote Lincoln Eyre's cable, dated February 25, 1920, and published in the "New York World" of February 27, 1920. Eyre says: "Lenine ... and Trotzky ... wield a more absolute power than any Czar.... They are the only really strong men detectable among the Bolsheviki or anywhere else in Russia. That their strength is greater than ever is demonstrated by the amazing program for the militarization of labor that they have just entered upon; a programme which when first proposed aroused the Communist Party's instant antagonism, but which in a few days the dictators easily persuaded their disciples to support." We shall return to this astounding conscription of labor a little further on. It is referred to here merely to show who actually does the "ruling" in the widely advertised "labor" government of Russia. Eyre continues: "There is iron law and order all over Russia, neither anarchy nor chaos being visible.... With the recent abolition of the death penalty the Red terror, long since bleached to pale pink, came to a definite end. Such is the omnipotence of the Soviets that it is no longer necessary for them to terrorize their opponents into obedience." Thus horrible butcheries are no longer necessary because no one longer dares to resist. All liberty, all self-government, all self-initiative have been crushed in the iron vise of dictated policy. This is the case, as Eyre says, "twenty-seven months after the social revolution gripped the nation in a clutch of steel that never has been relaxed since." Is not such mental, moral and spiritual death a greater calamity than physical death? Sixthly, the common people, crushed under this experimental Socialist Juggernaut, are starving to death. In the article last cited, in the "World" of February 27, 1920, Eyre says: "The food problem is hideously acute, yet not quite so critical as at the outset of the winter. In Moscow, Petrograd and other industrial centres some 8,000,000 human beings, of whom only a tiny fraction are Bolsheviki, are slowly but surely starving to death. There are abundant food stocks in the south and east, but they cannot be carried in sufficient quantity over the semi-paralyzed railroads.... "Trotzky himself defined the industrial situation as a race between economic reconstruction and reversion to savagery." Seventhly, craving for food is one of the things which make it impossible to shut out the food speculator, whose extortion at least helps to prolong life. As Eyre says: "City and country food speculation, which the dictatorship thus far confesses its inability to suppress or even control, is fast developing a new capitalist class right under the Communists' noses. One of the most painful sights in Russia is some pale, thin, tottering old woman paying out more than she earns in a week for a few lumps of sugar bought from a well-fed trader from the country in the Sukfarevka, Moscow's open air market place." Eighthly, the common people are nearly as cold as they are hungry. In the cable printed in the "World" of February 27, 1920, Eyre says: "Fuel is slightly less scarce than it was two months ago. The lack of heat, however, is helping the food shortage to increase the mortality rate, which is likely to attain 30 per cent in Moscow before spring." In the ninth place, disease stalks through the land, hand in hand with cold and famine. The article just cited contains the following by Eyre: "Disease is rampant, and the typhus epidemic in Siberia, where Kolchak left many tens of thousands of victims behind him in his retreat, is spreading swiftly westward. Owing to the absence of medical supplies, the epidemic can be combated only by quarantine." In the tenth place, "labor" in Russia, the real "working class," is conscripted, enslaved under military discipline, and "exploited" under an incredible system of military court martial--a degradation of workingmen by the Socialist tyrants of Russia which no form of modern "capitalism" has dreamed of since human slavery was abolished. On this subject Eyre says, in the "World" of February 27, 1920: "Four of Trotzky's sixteen armies have been turned into 'labor armies,' which means that soldiers fresh from victories on military fronts are being obliged to work, still under military command and discipline, on the 'economic front.' They are used chiefly for building up the transport system and assuring shipment of food and fuel from the country to the city.... "Labor generally is being militarized to an amazing extent. Discipline is being imposed upon factory workers by the establishment of special tribunals with powers of courts martial. Communist commissaries, no longer required at the front, are being detached from their regiments and sent to stimulate production endeavor in industries and railroads." Is this the kind of thing which Hillquit's Socialist gang of would-be labor "exploiters" would lure America's liberty-loving workingmen into by calling them "slaves" in their present dignified situation as self-governed and self-reliant freemen? On December 13, 1919, the presidents and secretaries of the 113 national and international unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor met at Washington, D. C., with the heads of the four railway brotherhoods and several farmers' organizations, and are to be congratulated for having passed the following resolution, which the late information from Russia overwhelmingly vindicates: "Whereas, the American Federation of Labor is an American institution, believing in American principles and ideas, and "Whereas, an attempt is being made to inject the spirit of Bolshevism and I. W. W.'ism into the affairs of the American Federation of Labor, and "Whereas, the American Federation of Labor is opposed to Bolshevism, I. W. W.'ism and the irresponsible leadership which encouraged such a policy, therefore be it "Resolved, that the conference of representatives of trades unions affiliated with the A. F. of L., and other organizations associated in this conference, repudiate and condemn the policy of Bolshevism and I. W. W.'ism as being destructive of American ideals and impracticable in application; be it further "Resolved, that this conference reiterate the action of the conventions of the American Federation of Labor, and the advocacy of the principles of conciliation and voluntary arbitration and collective bargaining." We cite this here to put the freedom of self-determination, practiced by the great progressive body of American labor, in vivid contrast with the abject slavery which the Socialists of Russia are now imposing upon the labor of that country. Lincoln Eyre's statement of the labor situation in Russia is confirmed by Trotzky himself, as we learn from the "New York World" of February 28, 1920, as follows: "London, February 27.--Leon Trotzky, Minister of War of Soviet Russia, addressing the third Russian Congress, held in Moscow January 25 last, outlined the Bolshevist plan for converting the Red Army into an army of labor. According to reports of his speech reaching here he said: "'There is still one way open to the reorganization of national economy--the way of uniting the army and labor and changing the military detachments of the army into detachments of a labor army. "'Many in the army have already accomplished their military task but they cannot be demobilized as yet. Now that they have been released from their military duties, they must fight against economic ruin and against hunger; they must work to obtain fuel, peat and other heat-producing products; they must take part in building, in clearing the lines of snow, in repairing roads, building sheds, grinding flour, etc. "'We have already organized several of these armies and they have been allotted their tasks. One army must obtain foodstuffs for the workmen of the districts in which it was formerly stationed and it also will cut wood, cart it to the railways and repair engines. Another army will help in the laying down of railway lines for the transport of crude oil. A third labor army will be used in repairing agricultural implements and machines, and, in the spring, will take part in the working of the land.... "'Trade unions must register qualified workmen in the villages. Only in those localities where trade union methods are inadequate other methods must be introduced, in particular that of compulsion, because labor conscription gives the state the right to tell the qualified workmen who is employed on some unimportant work in his village, "You are obliged to leave your present employment and go to Sormovo or Kolomna, because there your work is required." "'Labor conscription means that the qualified workmen who leave the army must proceed to places where they are required, where their presence is necessary to the economic system of the country. We must feed these workmen and guarantee them the minimum food ration.'" No doubt these "qualified workmen" are what we call "skilled workmen." Here we have, in its naked reality, the "deliverance" from "wage-slavery" which the crazy Socialists of all schools have so long been preaching to the laboring freemen of America. How would the millions of labor's noblemen in the American Federation of Labor like to see Debs, Hillquit and Victor L. Berger cracking the whip over them after the fashion of Lenine, Trotzky and Zinovieff in Russia? Notice the "capitalistic" language of Trotzky: "_We_"--the tyrannical, exploiting drones in the Kremlin--"must feed these workmen and guarantee them the _minimum_ food ration." Do not the "workmen" produce the food? Then why do they not take it and cut the throats of these drones? Is not this the Socialist doctrine we are taught by our American theorists, who froth at the mouth over the alleged "wage-slavery" of American workmen who rear intelligent families in comfortable homes and maintain the independence and self-initiative of American freemen? In the eleventh place, we notice that the workmen of Russia, as a reward for complete slavery under military conscription and courts martial tribunals, are guaranteed nothing but this "minimum food ration" and a possibility of being able to buy enough additional food out of their wages to postpone starvation. The last-mentioned possibility is described for us by Lincoln Eyre in his cable in the "New York World" of February 27, 1920, where, it must be remembered, he is speaking of the most-favored workmen, in the big cities. He says: "Nobody in Russia relying wholly upon 'Sovietsky' food--food handed out through official agencies--gets enough to eat except soldiers, a small percentage of heavy workers and high Soviet officials. Ordinary factory workers seldom receive as much as 60 per cent of their alimentary requirements through the Government. The remainder they must buy at fantastically high prices from speculators. And though they themselves, in collaboration with central dictatorship, fix their own wages, they never earn enough to cover the swift-climbing cost of living. If this is the plight of the workers, that is, of the ruling class, the ghastliness of the situation confronting the less favored elements of the population may well be imagined." Is it in irony that Eyre speaks of these "workers" as "the ruling class"? What are the real workmen in Russia but victims of this cruel experiment of tyrannizing Socialist "intellectuals"? We remark next, in the twelfth place, that the Soviet system of food distribution, wholly unequal and thus anti-communistic, has resulted in dividing the Russians into eight classes, each category having a special card defining its special ration. The account of this is given by Lincoln Eyre in a cable dated March 9, 1920, and published in the "New York World" of March 10, 1920, from which we take two sentences: "The commissariat of food control has gradually built up no less than eight distinct classes.... Special cards also are provided for children from one, two to five and from five to sixteen. It will be seen that this totals eight distinct varieties of card." The affect of these distinctions may be gathered from the following instance given in the article just cited: "In the month of November there was distributed by the Petrograd Soviet altogether 13,631,480 pounds of bread.... Had all the bread been divided evenly among the whole population, each person would have had about one-half a pound a a day, whereas, in fact, one category got much less than that amount daily and the third category none at all." In the thirteenth place, we note that the Russian Socialist tyrants give the workmen, in exchange for their labor, pieces of paper run off from printing presses which seem almost to have solved the problem of perpetual motion. The workmen are wise if they spend this fiat money daily for whatever it will bring in food, for its value will collapse utterly when the dictatorship bursts, leaving the country financially prostrate, without credit or means of exchange. This is one of the greatest bunco games ever practiced upon workingmen. Eyre describes it in a cable dated March 3, 1920, and published in the "New York World" of March 4, 1920, from which we quote: "In 'the Socialist Federative Republic of Soviets of Russia,' to give the Bolshevik land its official title, no mention has been made of finance. The reason for this is simple. There is no finance, in the European or American sense of the word, in present Russia. The Soviet Government pays its own people what it has to pay in paper money, of which it prints unlimited quantities. Being determined eventually to abolish money altogether in favor of Communistic exchange of products, it is not worried about depreciation in the value of its currency. It possesses about 1,000,000,000 rubles--the exact amount is kept very secret--in gold, with which it intends to pay for goods purchased abroad until it can establish a system of barter with foreign commercial interests. From the capitalistic viewpoint its budgetary expenditures are chaotic, but in Communistic eyes they are both sane and logical." Only to minds financially insane or criminally degenerate could such a system seem "sane and logical." Their carefully kept store of gold shows that the Bolshevist dictators are not insane but criminal. They understand their game, which is that of bunco-steering to "exploit" labor on the largest scale the world has ever seen. Honest paper money is a promise to pay, for value received, in gold, silver or good merchandise. If this form is used by these frauds, it is with the deliberate intention of repudiation, the possibility of payment being also destroyed by the floods of the stuff turned out. If the paper given is not a promise to pay, it is circulated simply through the tyranny of men who by threat of punishment or starvation force workingmen to exchange a day's labor for a bit of food and a piece of paper. In either case the labor exploiters in the Kremlin exact from Russia's workingmen, in exchange for a little food and a wad of paper, a genuine value, the product of hard labor, which these get-rich-quick Wallingfords can turn into gold, or exchange with the world for anything they want. All that Russian workingmen get is semi-starvation and the temporary delusion, conveyed to them in fine speeches, that they are "in the game," whereas they are only its dupes. The worthless character of the paper money, which the workmen nevertheless have to take and spend to keep soul and body together, is shown by the fact that the peasants refuse it. In his cable printed in the "New York World" of February 27, 1920, Eyre says that "the peasant twenty miles outside of Moscow ... has more food than he can eat, more clothes than he can wear," yet "refuses to sell his products for money except that proportion of them that he is compelled to turn over to the Soviets at a fixed price. In private trading," Eyre continues, "he will take in exchange for his foodstuffs only manufactured articles, clothing and other things he needs." Thus the peasant is fortunate in that he lives on land where he can at least raise enough to eat; whereas the "proletarian," in whose behalf the Socialists pretend to have made the Russian revolution, is most of all victimized by it. The reason why the Bolshevist dictators are now conscripting Russian labor seems evident. These pick-pockets have finished exploiting the Russian aristocracy and "bourgeoisie," squeezed them dry, and squandered what they stole. The only game left to them now is to exploit labor to the limit and appropriate the profits. Two other features of this thimble-rigging arrangement complete the exposure of the most inhuman scheme to exploit labor which the world has seen for centuries. One of these shows us, in the fourteenth place, that the rascals Lenine and Trotzky, are actually inviting "foreign capital" to form a partnership with them in their exploitation of Russian labor, under promise to turn over to this outside "capital" a good share of the "profits" to be wrung by labor conscription out of the sweat of Russia's brow. The invitation to "foreign capital" to join hands with the Bolshevist dictatorship, under promise of good profits and guarantees of security was made by both Lenine and Trotzky through interviews granted to Lincoln Eyre. Through courtesy of the "New York World" we have quoted the propositions of these "friends" of Russian labor near the close of Chapter XV of this book, as the reader doubtless remembers, and we merely recall the facts here to put them in line with the other features of Bolshevist labor oppression which we have just been considering. Who could have imagined that within a little more than two years after beginning their barbarous Socialist experiment with Russian industries the brazen dictatorship would be urging "foreign capital" to join in a scheme to squeeze both a domestic and a foreign profit out of the toil of Russian workingmen conscripted by Socialist task-masters and held in wage-slavery under fear of death by court martial? In the fifteenth place, we have the dreadful fact that Russian labor is enslaved by a Socialist autocracy not for the sake of promoting peace but for the sake of promoting war. In our last chapter we quoted the statements of Zinovieff to Lincoln Eyre that the Third Internationale would never give up its purpose to make the whole world Bolshevist. Eyre also found the belief general in Russia that so long as the Socialists retain power, any peace made by them with the outside world will only be a short truce in which to prepare for another war. He says, in his cable printed in the "New York World" of February 27, 1920: "All, Bolsheviki included, feel that as long as the Soviets remain in power in Russia and Bolshevism does not spread to other lands, peace cannot be more than a truce in the international class warfare." Again, in his cable printed in the "New York World" of March 4, 1920, Lincoln Eyre says: "The Red Army's victories against Kolchak, Yudenitch and Denikine are in themselves paradoxical, in that they serve to increase the Russian need for peace.... Every advance recorded in Siberia or the Crimea brings the front line further from the base and complicates the task of supplying munitions, food and equipment. Thus it becomes increasingly evident to all Russians, whatever their political leanings may be, that Russia must have peace in order to survive economically. And yet--another paradox--all feel that any peace established now between Soviet authority and Governments of the bourgeois and democratics cannot be more than a brief truce because Socialism and capitalism cannot abide side by side, and because neither can be suppressed without warfare. The Bolshevik faith in the ultimate appearance of a world revolution has not waned, but their hope of its speedy coming has lessened considerably." Who but the long-suffering Russians would endure the hopeless fate imposed by Socialism on Russian labor? The workingmen were conscripted by Trotzky's armies. They won victories, but these have not freed them. Returning from the front they are conscripted for labor armies, to work as they fought, under military discipline, subject to court martial and death if they rebel. Yet this military toil will not free them. They slave under the pistols of the commissaries only to get themselves economically equipped for a new war against their "capitalistic" neighbors, and in this war the workingman, if he can still walk, will be conscripted to go to the front again. Should he survive this, must he begin the same round over again? But why not strike against this slavery? Russian labor does not dare to strike. Tender-hearted Socialism has made the labor strike a crime in Russia. Says Lincoln Eyre, in a cable dated March 11, 1920, and printed in the "New York World" of March 13, 1920: "The unions, of course, lost their former principal weapon--the strike. Today any body of workers that would venture out on strike would be considered, to quote President Melnitchansky of the Moscow unions, as traitors to their Socialist fatherland and as such would doubtless be shot." With this utter collapse of Socialist theories and professions in Bolshevikiland, we need not wonder that, according to a cable in the "New York Times" of March 2, 1920, the French National Socialist Congress adjourned at Strasbourg, March 1, 1920, "after voting down by more than 2 to 1 a motion to ally the Socialists of France with Lenine and Trotzky." According to the same cable, "The pleaders for the Third Internationale, formed at Moscow, were answered by the reply that the beautiful doctrines enunciated there had been thrown aside by Lenine and Trotzky and that any one who believed in real Socialism would be a fool to get behind the leaders of Soviet Russia." Is it now in order for our American Bolshevists, Gene Debs, Morris Hillquit (_alias_ Hilkovitz) and Vic Berger, solemnly to inform us that Russian Bolshevism never was Socialism, nor anything like it, but only a base counterfeit? And will they also inform us that Lenine and Trotzky are unprincipled adventurers and cold-blooded blackguards who have hidden behind the mask of Socialism to blackjack a great people and filch a wealth they never did a day's work to accumulate? When our American wavers of the Red Flag try to hide their shipwrecked theories behind a repudiation of Bolshevikiland, we shall have to remind them of their many, many utterances jubilantly assuring us that "Bolshevism is Socialism in practice." A specimen will do, taken from one of the books published by the Jewish Socialist Federation of America, a "part of the Socialist Party" of the United States piloted by Debs, Hilkovitz and Berger, which we quote as cited on page 34 of the "Outline of the Evidence Taken Before the Judiciary Committee" of the New York Assembly: "Bolshevism is not a new Socialist theory, but the practical carrying out in life of the old Socialist theory. "Bolshevism especially is not a theory. Bolshevism is a method of how to establish Socialism in life. "Bolshevism is practical Socialism, the Socialism of today, and not of the remote future day." CHAPTER XVIII THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST RELIGION ABROAD It is but proper to begin this chapter by conceding that there are many church-going members among those who vote the Marxian ticket--not as an indorsement of the teachings of international Socialism, but merely as a protest against political corruption and the abuses of capitalism. Justice, moreover, demands that we acknowledge the existence of a small minority of dues-paying members of the Socialist Party who neither attack religion nor tacitly approve of the atheistic propaganda carried on in the official Marxian press, as well as in the books, pamphlets and magazines on sale not only in the leading Socialist book-stores of America, but even at the National Office of the party in Chicago. In most countries of Europe, where the war against religion is much more open and widespread than in America, the Socialists are frank in confessing that their movement is atheistic and anti-religious. In our own country some of the more violent Socialistic enemies of the church admit both in their speeches and in their writings that they would be extremely happy to see the very idea of God become a matter of ancient history. Christian Socialists of the old Carr faction, who constitute a minority of far less than one per cent of the Socialist Party of the United States, have not only conceded the existence of an atheistic propaganda within the ranks, but have attacked it and utterly failed to suppress it. Apart from these two classes of American Socialists, who admit the existence of a campaign in favor of atheism, most Socialists in our country, because they fear that votes will be lost if our people are convinced of the anti-religious character of the party, steadfastly deny that they are conspiring against religion. Indeed they are quite cunning and crafty in their effort to beguile the unwary. If the person hesitates joining the party, owing to his conviction that nearly all the Socialist leaders have been the enemies of religion, he is informed that it would be just as foolish for him not to be a Revolutionist for this reason, as it would be for one not to become a Republican because Robert Ingersoll did not believe in God and even propagated atheism. As the conspirators against religion have, by this plausible argument, involving the name of Ingersoll, removed the prejudices that many persons formerly had against Socialism on account of the atheistic teachings of its leaders, it seems but fitting to give a short refutation of the deceptive argument and to point out the absurdity of the comparison just mentioned. In the first place, although Robert Ingersoll was an atheist, he never stated that Republicanism was anti-religious. On the other hand, very many of the highest authorities in the Marxian Party, whose extensive knowledge of Socialism justifies our belief that they know but too well the policy of the revolutionary movement, admit that Socialism postulates atheism and war against religious beliefs. Ingersoll, moreover, never attacked religion nor taught atheism with a view to furthering the cause of Republicanism. But a very large number of the Socialists, whether Europeans or Americans, in their endeavor to promote what they consider to be the best interests of their party, have in their books, magazines, pamphlets and papers been waging a relentless war against religion. The atheistical works of Robert Ingersoll were not purchased by the rank and file of the Republican Party for purposes of party propaganda, but the rank and file of the Revolutionary Party spend large sums of money on publications in which their avowed leaders teach atheism as part of the Socialist program. Not content even with this, the members do their utmost to increase the circulation of anti-religious Socialist books, magazines, pamphlets and papers. Before producing the evidence that will convict the Socialist leaders and the rank and file of the party of openly advocating atheism and hostility to religion, or at least of tacitly approving of such a propaganda, a few words must be said relative to the materialistic conception of history, or of economic determinism, as it is often called. According to this doctrine, which is one of the fundamental teachings of the Socialists, the whole history of mankind, including its political, intellectual and religious development, is nothing more than a process of evolution, the guiding principle of which is the prevailing economic conditions and their resultant class struggles. Consequently, the Socialists who believe this doctrine deny the intervention of God in the development and spread of the Christian religion; for economic determinism teaches that the development of the church is not the work of Divine Providence, but of the economic conditions and class struggles of society. W. D. P. Bliss, the Socialist editor of the "New Encyclopedia of Social Reform," in an article on page 1135 of his work, admits that it is perfectly true that the large majority of avowed Socialists are divorced from recognized religion and the church, and that this leads many of them to extreme radicalism on all questions of ethics, money and the family. Frederick Engels, one of the renowned founders of modern Socialism, taught that "nowadays in our evolutionary conception of the universe, there is absolutely no room for either a Creator or a ruler." ("Socialism, Utopian and Scientific," by Frederick Engels, page 17 of the Introduction to the 1901 edition in English--New York Labor News Co.) Wilhelm Liebknecht, who until shortly before his death in 1900 was one of the foremost leaders of the Socialist Party in Germany, addressing the Halle Convention, said: "As regards my own self, I had done with religion at an early age.... I am an atheist, I do not believe in God.... We may peacefully take our stand upon the ground of Socialism, and thus conquer the stupidity of the masses in so far as stupidity reveals itself in religious forms and dogmas." The same German Socialist and atheist taught in his book, "Materialist Basis of History": "It is our duty as Socialists to root out the faith in God with all our zeal, nor is anyone worthy the name, who does not consecrate himself to the spread of atheism." August Bebel, who before his death in August, 1913, was the leader of the Socialists of Germany, gave many proofs of the intimate relation existing between Socialism and atheism. On September 16, 1878, he declared in the Reichstag: "Gentlemen, you attack our views on religion because they are atheistic and materialistic. I acknowledge the correctness of the impeachment. I am firmly convinced that Socialism finally leads to atheism." In the Reichstag, on December 31, 1881, he made the following profession of faith: "In politics we profess Republicanism, in economics Socialism, in religion atheism." According to the 1903 platform of the German Socialists, adopted at Dresden, "No religious instructions of any kind shall be given to children under the age of sixteen; after that they can select their own religious tenets and teachings, as they please. Superstitious religious notions that are current among the less educated classes are to be eradicated through proper instructions." "The Comrade," September, 1904, confesses that the satirical weekly "L'Asino," published by the Socialists of Italy, and known throughout the world for its attacks on religion, carries on a bitter fight against the Catholic Church. In the early part of 1913, "L'Asino," speaking of the coming Italian election, boasted that the Socialists would proclaim their anti-clericalism and atheism in the public meetings. The Austrian Socialists in convention at Linz, May 30, 1898, passed a resolution proposed by Pernerstorfer to the effect that "Socialism is directly contradictory to Roman clericalism, which is enslaved to unyielding authority, immutable dogmas, and absolute intellectual thralldom. We doubt all authority, we know of no immutable dogma, we are the champions of right, liberty and conscience." [Reported in "Vorwärts," 1898, no. 126, suppl.] The bitter persecution that has for years been waged against the church in France is too well known to require much comment. The representatives of the French Socialist Party at Tours in March, 1903, voted upon a program from which several clauses will be cited: "The Socialist Party needs to organize a new world, free minds emancipated from superstition and prejudices. It asks for and guarantees every human being, every individual, absolute freedom of thinking, and writing and affirming their beliefs. Over against all religious dogmas and churches as well as over against the class conceptions of the bourgeoisie, it sets the unlimited right of free thought, the scientific conception of the universe, and a system of public education based exclusively on science and reason. Thus accustomed to free thought and reflection, citizens will be protected against the sophistries of the capitalistic and clerical reaction." The program also declares for the "abolition of the congregations, nationalization of property in mortmain of every kind belonging to them, and appropriation of it for works of social insurance and solidarity." In the Tours program, therefore, we have the open confession of the Socialist Party of France that it is anti-religious and that it favors the disgraceful robbery of the church that has for many years been going on in that country. The Belgian Socialists are quite as violent as the French in their hatred of the church, for in addition to the large number of vile anti-religious pamphlets distributed during the campaign that preceded the elections of 1912, we have the testimony of no less an authority than the Socialist leader, Emile Vandervelde, in the "Social Democrat," England, January, 1903: "In the end the question to be solved is: what is the essential aim of Socialism? There is not a Socialist who would hesitate to say that it is the emancipation of the workers, the freedom of the proletariat--and by this freedom we mean its complete freedom, the abolition of all slavery in the spiritual sphere as well as in the material sphere.... Can a sincere believer follow the church's teachings and yet be a Socialist? We are bound to admit that both in philosophy and in politics there must be war between Socialism and the Church." In England, too, the Socialists are the avowed enemies of religion. Blatchford, who is well known to his comrades for his extreme work in propagating Socialism by the pen, wrote in the "Clarion," October 4, 1907: "Believing that the Christian religion was untrue, and believing that all supernatural religions were inimical to human progress, and foreseeing that a conflict between Socialism and religion was inevitable, I attacked the Christian religion. I am working for Socialism when I attack religion which is hindering it." Again in his book, "God and My Neighbor," Blatchford utters the following blasphemies: "I am an easiful old pagan, and I am not angry with you at all--you funny little champion of the Most High.... "This is the God of Heaven? This is the Father of Christ? This is the Creator of the Milky Way? No! He will not do. He is not big enough. He is not good enough. He is not clean enough. He is a spiritual nightmare, a bad dream born in the savage minds of terror and ignorance and a tigerish lust for blood.... "Is this unspeakable monster the Father of Christ? Is he the God who inspireth Buddha and Shakespeare and Beethoven and Darwin and Plato? No, not he. But in warfare and massacre, in rapine and rape, in black revenge and in deadly malice, in slavery and polygamy, and the debasement of women, and in the pomps, vanities and greeds of royalty, of clericalism, and of usury and barter--we may easily discern the influence of his ferocious and abominable personality." This book, which teaches atheism from cover to cover, could be bought for a dollar a copy in 1912 at the National Office of the Socialist Party in Chicago, Ill. In the May, 1917, issue of the "International Socialist Review," "God and My Neighbor," by Blatchford, is thus advertised: "Is the Bible true? This is the chief subject of debate today between Christians and Scientists the world over. Robert Blatchford says: 'Is the Bible a holy and inspired book and the Word of God to man, or is it an incongruous and contradictory collection of tribal tradition and ancient fables, written by men of genius and imaginations? Mr. Blatchford believes religions are not revealed, they are evolved. "'We cannot accept as the God of Creation,' he writes, 'this savage idol, Jehovah, of an obscure tribe, and we have renounced him and are ashamed of him, not because of any later divine revelation, but because mankind have become too enlightened to tolerate Jehovah.'" Ernest Bax, an Englishman, one of the greatest authorities in the world on Socialism, an author who, even in America, has been styled "the most accomplished writer on behalf of Socialism in this and perhaps in any country," in his book, "Religion of Socialism," thus testifies to the relation existing between Socialism and religion: "In what sense Socialism is not religious will now be clear. It utterly despises the other world with all its stage properties--that is, the present objects of religion." ["Religion of Socialism," by Ernest Belfort Bax, page 52 of 1891 edition.] Who could imagine any more convincing testimony of the atheistic and anti-religious nature of the Socialist movement than the following words of the English Socialist, James Leathan, in "Socialism and Character": "At the present moment I cannot remember a single instance of a person who is at one and the same time a really earnest and intelligent Socialist and an orthodox Christian. Those who do not openly attack the church and the fabric of Christianity, show but scant respect to either the one or the other in private.... And while all of us are thus indifferent to the church, many of us are frankly hostile to her. Marx, Lassalle and Engels among earlier Socialists; Morris, Bax, Hyndman, Guesde and Bebel among present-day Socialists--are all more or less avowed atheists; and what is true of the more notable men of the party is almost equally true of the rank and file the world over." In 1910 a pamphlet entitled "Socialism and Religion" was issued by the Revolutionists of Great Britain. One quotation from it will amply suffice to show the utter contempt of the English[15] Socialist for religion: "If a man supports the church, or in any respect allows religious ideas to stand in the way of principles of Socialism, or activity of the party, he proves thereby that he does not accept Socialism as fundamentally true and of the first importance, and his place is outside. No man can be consistently both a Socialist and a Christian. It must either be the Socialist or the religious principle that is supreme, for the attempt to couple them equally together betrays charlatanism or lack of thought. There is, therefore, no need for a specifically anti-religious test. So surely does the acceptance of Socialism lead to the exclusion of the supernatural, that the Socialist has little need for such terms as atheist, freethinker or even materialist, for the word Socialist, rightly understood, implies one who (on all such questions) takes his stand on positive science, explaining all things by purely natural causation--Socialism being not merely a politico-economic creed, but an integral part of a consistent world philosophy." "The Western Clarion," a publication of the Canadian Socialists, declared in its issue of May 23, 1914, that the Socialist Party of Canada would have "no compromise with advocates of Christianity." Alvarado, the governor of Yucatan, and his criminal sustainers several years ago drove the clergy from the country, turned the churches into I. W. W. meeting houses, and turned some, as in the case of the Cathedral of Merida, even into warehouses. Religion was outlawed and an atheist tyranny established. Alvarado is an ardent I. W. W. Socialist of the most violent sort. His advent into Yucatan from the lawless northern part of Mexico was marked by wholesale confiscation of property, by robbery and outrage. His vile subordinates, of like origin with himself, committed loathsome crimes, unspeakable and without number, and no opportunity was overlooked to persecute the unhappy people whose accumulations by thrift and industry and whose steadfast adherence to their religion marked them as certain victims of robbery, murder and outrage. "The Call," New York, April 9, 1919, informs us that the workers in Yucatan have elected a succession of Socialist governors, and in its issue of April 14, 1919, under the caption, "Up to the Minute Official Socialist News," we read the following: "Felipe Carrillo, president of the Socialist Party of Yucatan, Mexico, spoke on conditions in Yucatan. Among other things he said: 'The Socialist Party of America should do everything possible against intervention in Mexico.... All the public officials, from the highest to the lowest, are members of the Socialist party.... There is no middle class in Yucatan.... The Socialist Party of Yucatan has been in power three years.' "A rising vote was taken, expressing our fraternal greetings to Felipe Carrillo and the Comrades of Yucatan." The April 9, 1919, issue of "The Call" informs us that Alvardo in 1915 organized the Socialist Party of Yucatan, 62,700 members of which belong to the League of Resistance, an organization which, we are told, is purely economic in its activities. What a strange name for an economic league, especially in Mexico, where economics have for some years been taught by the torch, bomb, dagger! The March, 1919, edition of "The Eye Opener," the official organ of the Socialist Party of the United States, throws a little light on this economic league of "the knights of the red flag." On page 4 of that issue we are told that among the principles of the League of Resistance are the following: "The Land is Mother, and Labor is the Father of Humanity. Attack no one without motive, but never present the other cheek to any who has struck one. Fly from the religions, principally the Catholic religion, as from the plagues." The article on the economic League of Resistance ends with the call of Yucatan to the rest of the continent: "Workers of the world, unite." Carillo is then quoted as saying: "Never will labor conquer until it understands solidarity. Political action, economic action, perhaps military action--todos metodos necesitamos. En todas las epocas del mundo, rifley dynamita sean necesarios; pero siempre y sobre todo, solidaridad." The words, "rifley dynamita" mean nothing and are evidently a misprint for "rifle y dynamita." There was good reason for letting the words remain in the Spanish in the official organ of the Socialist Party of the United States, for if "rifle y dynamita" were the Spanish words meant, their translation would be: "We need all means. In all periods of the world's history, the rifle and dynamite may be necessary, but always and above all solidarity." So much for the _economic_ League of Resistance of the Socialists of Yucatan, which has been destroying both religion and civilization alike! Carrillo, its president, has been greeted throughout our country by the Socialists, who have been extending their fraternal greetings also to the rest of their "Comrades in Yucatan." CHAPTER XIX THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST RELIGION IN AMERICA Much more testimony than has already been given could easily be furnished for proving that the Socialist movement in foreign lands is atheistic and anti-religious, but as sufficient has been given, let us dwell more on the anti-religious activities of the Revolutionists in our own country. In answer to a possible objection, namely, that the American Socialists should in no way be held responsible for the anti-religious and atheistic teachings of their comrades abroad, the attention of the reader is called to the fact that the Socialist movement is an international one, and that nearly all the Marxian leaders in Europe are considered by the American Socialists as first class authorities on Socialism. Moreover the books and writings of these foreign protagonists form a very considerable part of the Socialistic literature of the United States and are considered as standard works on the subject. But in addition to the fact that the American Socialists thus share the responsibility of their European comrades, the Revolutionists of our own country will now come forward with more than enough testimony to prove that they are just as guilty as their foreign comrades of propagating atheistic and anti-religious doctrines. Rev. William T. Brown, formerly the pastor of Plymouth Church, Rochester, New York, after becoming a Socialist, wrote the following in the May, 1902, number of "Wilshire's Magazine": "For myself, I do not recognize any existing church or state as complete in itself or founded by God. There is absolutely nothing in church or state that cannot be traced to a perfectly natural origin.... Instead of the religious idea that God breathed into clay the breath of life, and so man came into existence in the image of God, we know beyond question that man's ancestors were animals, and he is the image of his animal parentage.... Singing hymns, saying prayers, learning catechism, attending the services of a place miscalled a sanctuary will do nothing whatever to effect the ends for which men are striving.... The church will attract its own, and the Socialist cause will draw those who belong to it. People who are interested in fossils and relics and curios will find a congenial place in the church as will also the ignorant and deluded masses." George D. Herron, who, like William T. Brown, had once been a minister, on becoming a Socialist expressed his atheistic sentiments by writing in the "International Socialist Review," Chicago, August, 1901: "When the gods are dead to rise no more, man will begin to live. After the end of the gods, when there is nothing else to which we may turn, nothing left outside of ourselves, we shall turn to one another for fellowship, and behold! the heart of all worship is exposed and we have omnipotence in our hands.... "There will be no more priests, no rulers, no judges, when fellowship comes and the gods are gone. And when there are neither priests, nor rulers, nor judges, there will be no evil on earth, nor none called good, to stand over against others called evil." John Spargo, a former Socialist of considerable renown in the United States, and until recently very popular with the party, speaking of education in "Socialism, A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles," touches upon the question of parochial schools in the Marxian commonwealth: "Whether the Socialist regime could tolerate the existence of elementary schools other than its own, such as privately conducted kindergartens and schools, religious schools, and so on, is questionable. Probably not. It would probably not content itself with refusing to permit religious doctrines or ideas to be taught in its schools, but would go farther, and as the natural protector of the child, guard its independence of thought in later life as far as possible by forbidding religious teaching of any kind in schools for children up to a certain age.... "This restriction of religious education to the years of judgment and discretion implies no hostility to religion on the part of the state, but neutrality[16]." ["Socialism, A Summary and Interpretaion[17] of Socialist Principles," by John Spargo, page 238 of 1906 edition.] "The Call" does not fail to publish among its many poems those that are violently anti-religious. In confirmation of this we shall transcribe several, all of which furnish excellent proofs of the existence of the conspiracy against religion. The first poem that will be quoted appeared in the November 19, 1911, edition, and reads as follows: "When all the choric peal shall end; That through the fanes hath rung; When the long lauds no more ascend From man's adoring tongue; When overwhelmed are altar, priest and creed; When all the faiths have passed; Perhaps from darkening incense freed, God may emerge at last." The following poem, entitled, "To the Religionist," appeared on the same day: "You bid us spare your vision; Put faith in a life after death, Strive on toward some realm Elysian And heed all that one Book saith. "You will pray to a power celestial, To direct us in all our ways, Lest we fall to a region bestial And lose ourselves in its maze. "You speak of the Crucifixion Of one on Calvary As if his benediction Was a rank monopoly. "Shall we pray to a power not human For guidance miraculous When the nearest man or woman Will give help, and without that fuss? "When the glorious future people Have realized our dream, Then the cross upon the steeple No longer shall blaspheme. "The godhood of the lowly Their sacrifice unknown; Of the temple once held holy There shall not last one stone." Only two stanzas of a poem which appeared in "The Call," March 17, 1912, are hereby given: "The Gods are dead; Dead lies their Heaven, their Hell. The Gods are dead, With all their terrors! Well! "Man now unmakes them, Who made them in his youth; He boldly breakes them With shattering blows of truth." Editorials and articles attacking religion are of very common occurrence in "The Call." Several illustrations will suffice. In the May 1, 1912, edition we read: "In our combat with the natural forces we have been taught by science to seek the cause and effect not in anything supernatural; we have gotten rid of superstition[18] and fear of revengeful gods." The following short article appeared on November 19, 1911, in the same paper: "Our exploiters might as well understand now that we have no use for the distorted and mystical figure that they present as Christ, a conservative member of the Property Defence League, a thing neither man nor woman, but a third sex--not understood of us except as a rightful object of suspicion; we have no use for this rant, cant and fustian of his holiness and immaculate qualities. That presentation has always been repellent to us and always will be, no matter how much he may be proclaimed as the friend of the workingman.... Christ, the democrat, the agitator, the revolutionary, the rebel, the bearer of the red flag, yes we can understand that figure." Under the caption, "The Old Year and The New," an editorial, part of which is here given, was published in "The Call," January 1, 1912: "Interesting is it to see these clerical reactionists trying to kindle into flame the dying embers and ashes of the religious enthusiasm of past ages, now on the point of flickering out, and marshalling the remnants of fear and ignorance against the inexorable march of humanity and social progress. "We have no verbal answer to expend upon them. They are not worth it. Well do we know that their show of attack is but a defensive movement. The only answer they need expect from us will be given in the steady continuance of our work. For we can put a thousand workers into the field for their one, and despite all they may do, we will take from them thousands and hundreds of thousands of those who now follow them, and in whose ignorance alone lies their defensive strength. Economic conditions fight on our side. Their capitalist Christ cannot feed the multitude. We can teach the multitude how to feed themselves." "The Proletarian," the Socialist paper of Detroit, in its April, 1919, edition tells us that "Socialism is not a religion, it explains the causes and fallacies underlying all religions." In the "International Socialist Review," August, 1908, a notable confession is made relative to religion: "Religion spells death to Socialism, just as Socialism to religion. The moment Socialism turns into a religion it loses all its progressiveness, it ossifies and turns into a superstition of fanatics, who never forget and never learn anything. Socialism is essentially, although not apparently, a free-thought movement. The thinking Socialists are all free-thinkers." In the "International Socialist Review" not only are there many articles and editorials attacking religion, but also many advertisements of atheistical and anti-religious books. For instance, in the February, 1912, edition, among the many works advertised on page 512 the following are listed under the heading, "Free-Thought Pamphlets": "Holy Smoke in Holy Land. Myth of the Great Deluge. Revelation Under the Microscope of Evolution. Chas. Darwin, What He Accomplished. Jehovah Interviewed. Church and State--by Jefferson. Mistakes of Moses--by Ingersoll. Ingersolia: Gems from R. G. Ingersoll. Age of Reason--by Thos. Paine. Ingersoll--44 Lectures. Ingersoll's Famous Speeches." In the April, 1912, edition of the "International Socialist Review" the subsequent additions are made to the advertisements already mentioned: "Voltaire. Confessions of a Nun. Merry Tales of the Monks. Secrets of Black Nunnery." Surely such books as these would not be extensively advertised in the "Review" and in the Socialist papers, nor would money be spent in this way by their publishers, unless the atheistic and anti-religious works found many purchasers among those who inserted a plank in their party platform stating that the Socialist movement was primarily an economic one and was not concerned with matters of religious belief. The following is part of an editorial taken from the "Comrade," New York, January, 1904, on the death of Herbert Spencer: "Dying at 84 years of age, Herbert Spencer leaves behind him an enduring monument such as few men have been able to build for themselves. He helped to rid the world of superstition and to destroy priestcraft; he put the idea of a God-direction of the world, and its counterpart, the eternal subjection and the dependence of man, into the waste paper basket of history. He cleared the way for the feet of the army of progress." In the propagation of atheism, the German Socialist papers of the United States are worthy imitators of those that are published in English. The "New Yorker Volkszeitung," October 9, 1901, thus acknowledges the atheistic and anti-religious attitude of the revolutionary movement: "Socialism and belief in the Divinity as taught by Christianity and its representatives do not agree, cannot agree, are diametrically opposed to one another. Socialism is logical only when it denies the existence of God, when it maintains that we do not need the so-called assistance of God, since we are able to help ourselves. Only he who has no faith begins to feel that he can accomplish something. The laborer who places confidence in God, and who, with Christian resignation, thinks that all is done by God is well done--how can that laborer develop revolutionary forces for the overthrow of authority and social order, both of which, according to his faith, are instituted by God? As long as he clings to this belief he will not be able to acquire a genuinely revolutionary spirit." In the May 10, 1902, edition of "Vorwärts," a weekly supplement of the "New Yorker Volkeszeitung," we read: "New York, May 6.--Archbishop Corrigan died last night after a protracted illness. Preparations are going on for a grand funeral with the usual paraphernalia. The soul of the prelate whizzed out of his mortal remains straight up into the seventh heaven, and now the bishop is staying there with lovely little angels and other beautiful beings hovering about him. Let him who is fool enough, believe it." We are informed by "The Call," April 5, 1911, that at Utica, New York, on April 4, 1911, churches of all denominations were placed under the ban of the Italian Socialist Federation of the United States at the closing session of its National Congress, which had been in session for the last three days in that city and that strongly worded resolutions charging all churches with being against the emancipation of the working class and for the protection and perpetuation of capitalism and moral and economic slavery were unanimously adopted amid vociferous applause; finally that by the adoption of these resolutions, all members of the federation must sever their affiliations with any and all existing churches and religious organizations and refrain from all religious practices and rites. Some information regarding the atheistic teachings of the New York "Il Proletario," the official organ of the Italian Socialist Federation of the United States, will be of interest to the reader. In the edition of December 23, 1910, there are several attacks on Christianity. One of these entitled "Christmas Is Here" is translated as follows: "Christmas is a fib, Christmas is a fraud, Christmas is a crime wanted and continued by the powerful to delude their servants and to make them believe that there is really happiness, justice and love on this earth.... There is no everlasting joy. How long, O poor and exhausted workingmen of the world, will the shameful comedy continue? When will you finally perceive that not from a false and unexisting God, not from a mystical and epileptic crucified man, who died without rebellion and without protest, will come your redemption? When will you open your eyes to the truth of Socialism, and realize that finally upon you alone depends your salvation?" In the same edition of "Il Proletario" there is a detailed list of 170 books and pamphlets that are advertised as being on sale at the book-store of the Italian Socialist Federation. The first part of the list, under the heading "Anti-religious Pamphlets," includes 22 works, whose prices range from 5 cents to 30 cents. Among them are to be found: "The Religious Pest--5 cents. The Crimes of God--5 cents. The Sins of My Lady Penitents--8 cents. The Last Religious Lie--5 cents. Neither God Nor Soul--15 cents." Near the end of the detailed list 22 more works are advertised as anti-clerical novels. On May 1, 1912, while its editor, Arturo M. Giovannitti, was in prison at Lawrence, Massachusetts, "Il Proletario" published an article under the caption, "The Priest": "Now at last the nations have understood that God is a monstrous fable, and that hell, heaven, immortality, and all the other devilish things are states created by rascals to despoil and oppress the people." We are very much indebted to the Social Reform Press for favoring us with the translation of "The Little Catechism," edited by Bartos Bittner, whose dead and corrupt body was found by neighbors in his lodging in Chicago. This blasphemous Catechism, from which quotations are to be given, was published for the use of the children of the Bohemian-American Socialists: "Question. What is God? Answer. God is a word used to designate an imaginary being which people of themselves have devised. Q. Is it true that God has never been revealed? A. As there is no God, He could not reveal himself. Q. What is heaven? A. Heaven is an imaginary place which churches have devised as a charm to entice their believers. Q. How did man originate? A. Just as did animals; by evolution from their lower kinds. Q. Has man an immortal soul as Christianity teaches? A. Man has no soul; it is only an imagination. Q. Who is Jesus Christ? A. Jesus Christ is the son of a Jewish girl called Mary. Q. Is he the son of God? A. There is no God, therefore there can be no God's son. Q. Did Christ rise from the dead as Christianity teaches? A. The report about Christ rising from the dead is a fable. Q. Is it true that after Christ's death the Apostles received the Holy Ghost? A. It is not; the Apostles had imbibed too freely of wine and their dizzy heads imagined all sorts of queer things. Q. Did Christ ascend into heaven? A. He did not; what the church teaches is a nonsensical fable, because there is no heaven, and there was no place to ascend to. Q. Will Christ come to this earth? A. He will not because no dead person can come back. Q. Will Christ return on judgment day? A. There will be no judgment day; that is all a fable so that preachers could scare people and hold them in their grasp. Man has no soul, neither had Christ a soul. All these things have been invented by the church. Q. What is the Holy Spirit? A. The Holy Spirit is an imagination existing only in the minds of crazy religious people. Q. Is Christianity desirable? A. Christianity is not advantageous to us, but is harmful, because it makes us spiritual cripples. By its teachings of bliss after death it deceives the people. Christianity is the greatest obstacle to the progress of mankind, therefore it is the duty of every citizen to help wipe out Christianity. All churches are impudent humbugs. Q. Is there communion of saints? A. No, because there is no God, no saints, no soul, and therefore our prayers are wholly useless, and only a waste of time, which should be spent in more useful things. Q. What is our duty when we have learned that there is no God? A. We should teach this knowledge to others. Q. Should we take the name of God in vain? A. Yes, because the name of God has no meaning." Isador Ladoff, a Socialist of Cleveland, Ohio, and a candidate for office in 1911, speaks very frankly about religion on page 11 of his pamphlet, "Socialism, The Anti-Christ": "The church knows that Socialism in spite of the declaration of neutrality of the latter in religious matters, undermines the very foundation of the former. The church realizes that Socialism is anti-Christ. For the church it is a question of life and death, a struggle for existence. Why, then, should the Socialists not engage in an open aggressive campaign against the church? Would not an honest war between Christ and anti-Christ be more dignified, more wise and more effective, than a false pretence of neutrality and a defensive attitude toward the attacks of the church? Let us have the courage of our convictions, not only in matters of social and economic significance, but in all things affecting the interests of the toiling masses of humanity, including religious institutions." Rev. E. E. Carr, writing in the "Christian Socialist," Chicago, May 15, 1907, informs us that, "The Christian Socialists do not ask or desire that the party declare for religion. Strictly speaking, Socialism is a purely economic proposition.... We demand absolute freedom of religious opinion in the party, and that officials of the party cease teaching anti-religious dogma as an essential part of Socialist philosophy." Dishonest Socialists, when arguing that their party does not advocate atheism as the "religion" of their contemplated state, frequently appeal to the religious plank of their 1908 National Platform, which declares that the Socialist Party is not concerned with matters of religious belief. Though this deceitful appeal of the "Knights of the Red Flag" has been exposed time and again, still it seems expedient that the underhand methods of the party which boasts of being the only one sufficiently honest and upright to fight for the rights of poor and oppressed workingmen, be better known to the American people, and that the more important parts of the indoor convention speeches be presented in greater detail. Pages 191 to 205 of the "Proceedings of the 1908 National Convention of the Socialist Party," edited by John M. Work, published by the Socialist Party[19], and sold at 50 cents a copy at the National Office of the party, Chicago, Illinois, bear the following ample testimony to the hypocrisy of the Revolutionists. When Delegate Simons had finished reading the proposal of the platform committee "that religion be treated as a private matter--a question of individual conscience," Arthur M. Lewis, a delegate from Illinois rose and moved its rejection, saying: "I am among those who sincerely hoped the question of religion would not be raised at this convention. I am willing to concede so far that we shall let sleeping dogs lie. I know that the Socialist position in philosophy on the question of religion does not make a good campaign subject. It is not useful in the propaganda of a presidential campaign, and therefore I am willing that we should be silent about it. But if we must speak, I propose that we shall go before this country with the truth and not with a lie.... Now I do not propose to state in this platform the truth about religion from the point of view of the Socialist philosophy as it is stated in almost every book of Standard Socialist literature; but if we do not do that, let us at least have the good grace to be silent about it, and not make hypocrites of ourselves.... I say, let us either tell the truth or have the good grace and the common sense and the stamina and the manhood and the self-respect to keep our mouths shut about it. Therefore I move this be stricken from the platform." Delegate Hillquit of New York urged the following amendment as a substitute for the one the ratification of which Lewis had tried to prevent: "The Socialist movement is primarily an economic and political movement. It is not concerned with the institutions of marriage or religion." Hillquit then went on to say: "The fact that Comrade Lewis as a scholar, as a student of psychology, of history, of ethics and of everything else, has in the domain of religion come to the position of an agnostic, and that ninety-nine per cent of us have landed in the same spot, does not make Socialism agnostic, nor is Socialism Christian, nor is Socialism Jewish, Socialism hasn't anything to do with that side of our existence at all. I say to you, Comrades, if we are to follow Comrade Lewis's advise, and to say in our platform and declaration of principles what is true, let us not be afraid to insert in it the things we are advocating day after day and on all occasions." Delegate Unterman of Idaho, speaking in favor of the adoption of the religious plank as originally proposed by the platform committee and read by Simons, added: "Comrades, no one will accuse me with any sympathy with Christianity, either as a church or as a religion. I am known in the United States as a materialist of the most uncompromising order. But I want it clearly understood that my materialist philosophy does not permit me to strike this plank out of the platform. I want it understood that my materialist dialectics do not permit me to forget the exigencies of the moment for our ideals in the far future.... Would you expect to go out among the people of this country, people of different churches, of many different religious factions, and tell them that they must become atheists before they can become Socialists? That would be nonsense. We must first get these men convinced of the rationality of our economic and political program, and then after we have made Socialists of them and members of the Socialist Party, we can talk to them inside of our ranks, talk of the higher philosophy and of the logical consequences of our explanation of society and nature.... We should not go out in our propaganda among people that are as yet unconvinced and are still groping in ignorance and obscurity, and tell them that they first must become materialists before they can become members of the Socialist Party. No. This declaration that religion is a private matter does not mean that it is not a social matter or class matter at the same time. It merely means that we shall bide our good time and wait till the individual is ready, through his own individual evolution, to accept our philosophy. It means that we shall give him plenty of time to grow gradually to the things that are necessary to him, and those material things that affect his material welfare, the economic and political question of Socialism. After he has grown into them, it will be so much easier to approach him with the full consequences of the Socialist philosophy. Therefore I ask you to retain this plank in our platform." Delegate Stirton gave the following reason for his opposition to the adoption of any religious plank in the party platform: "If this statement is true that religion is no concern of our movement, as stated in the amendment, or in the original recommendation that it is a private matter--if that is a true statement, then we don't need it. If it is a lie, then we don't want it." It will be remembered that Delegate Lewis at an earlier session of the convention had said: "Let us either tell the truth or have the good grace and the common sense and stamina and the manhood to keep our mouths shut about it" (i.e., religion from the viewpoint of Socialist philosophy). To show the insincerity of Lewis, we shall now quote parts of a second speech made by him in the evening of the same day on which he had spoken so eloquently in behalf of asserting the truth and not telling a lie: "I have gone into conference," he says, "between the afternoon session and the evening session with most of the members of the platform committee, and I have reached an agreement with them which I am sure the convention would be glad to hear, and it will dispose of this question, I think, amicably to all concerned.... I consider myself and every other delegate on this floor as being present at this convention for the sole purpose of promoting the best interests of the Socialist Party. I am willing to waive any personal views of mine, and I believe the members of the platform committee are in the same position, to promote those interests.... While it may not harmonize with my personal opinion to have this plank remain in the platform, I am willing to sink those personal opinions rather than put the Socialist movement in America in a false position and lay it open to the attacks of our enemies." Victor Berger of Wisconsin mentioned expediency as his reason for favoring the adoption of a religious plank and argued: "In the first place, a plank of this kind you will find in every platform or program of every other civilized nation in the world. Yet in no country do they have as much reason for it as in this country. There is not a race in the world that is as thoroughly religious as the Anglo-Saxon race. If you want a party made up of free-thinkers only, then I can tell you right now how many you are going to have. If you want to wait with our co-operative commonwealth, until you have made a majority of the people into free-thinkers, I am afraid we will have to wait a long while. I say this, although I am known, not only in Milwaukee, but wherever our papers are read, as a pronounced agnostic.... You can hardly find a paper in which we are not denounced as men who want to abolish all religion and abolish God. Something must be done in order to enable us to show that Socialism, being an economic theory--or rather the name for an epoch of civilization--has nothing to do with religion either way, neither pro nor con." What reader, who elsewhere in this book has followed the evidence linking together the cunning craft of Morris Hillquit and Victor L. Berger in committing their party and followers to deceit and hypocrisy to obtain votes under false pretenses, will be surprised to find them thus also in the 1908 convention uniting the tongues of two old foxes to put through Hillquit's hypocrisy-plank on marriage and religion? These are the two whose deceit and violence have now reduced the Socialist Party of America to little more than a hollow echo of two lying hearts. Delegate Vander Porten opposed the adoption of the plank as originally read by Simons and urged the adoption of Morris Hillquit's amendment: "Nobody regrets more than I do that this question has arisen in this convention, but as long as it occupies the position that it does, I believe that there is to be an expression upon it, that expression should be the truth and not a lie.... When we talk of educating mankind and when we talk of raising mankind above the level in which he is, then we have got to throw from his arms those crutches that bind him to his slavery, and religion is one of them. Let it be understood that the moment the Socialist Party's whole aim and object is to get votes, we can get them more quickly by trying to please the religionists and those whose only ambition is to pray God and crush mankind.... Let us say nothing or say the truth. To spread forth to the world that religion is the individual's affair, and that religion has no part in the subjection of the human race, we lie when we say it." After several other delegates had spoken, the "Proceedings of the 1908 National Convention" inform us that the chairman put the question on the acceptance of the substitute offered by Delegate Hillquit, and the result being in doubt, a show of hands was called for, and the vote resulted in 79 for the substitute, and 78 against it. Those who honestly voted against the plank admitted thereby that the Socialist Party was very much concerned with matters of religious belief and that the Revolutionists were then, just as they are today, the bitter enemies of religion. The 79 who voted for the plank did so, not because they had any love for religion, for this is evident from their speeches and from their method of procedure, but because they considered that a great deal of prejudice against Socialism would be removed by the adoption of a plank stating that the Socialist Party is primarily an economic and political movement, and that it is not concerned with matters of religious belief. On one single plank therefore there were 79 liars in the Socialist National Convention out of a possible 157. Quite an unenviable record for the party which is so fond of accusing its opponents of lies and falsehoods! When speeches against religion, such as the ones quoted, can be delivered at the national convention of a political party, without arousing anything like serious opposition among the delegates present, or among the rank and file of the party who afterwards read them, the only reasonable conclusion to be drawn is that the vast majority of the members of the party either advocate atheism or else are in sympathy with those who do. For four long years the Socialists all over the country appealed to the religious plank of their 1908 platform to prove that their party was not opposed to religion; and although they were aware that the plank was a lie, they were not sufficiently honest to have it removed by referendum, as could have been done at any time. The plank was finally dropped by the National Convention of 1912 and has not since then been readopted. This, however, was not because the Socialists as a body had become more upright through their adherence to atheism, but because their lies concerning religion had become pretty well known all over the United States. No doubt the reader will be interested in the following quotation taken from "The Communist," the Left Wing Socialist paper of Chicago. In the April, 1919, edition there is an article by John R. Ball, entitled, "Challenge of the S. P. [i.e., the Socialist Party] of Michigan": "When the delegates to a State Socialist Convention gathered in Grand Rapids, Michigan, February 24, 1919, to nominate candidates for the coming State Elections, they were determined to do much more than to go through the mere formalities of complying with State Election Laws.... "There were many striking features about the personnel of the delegates: not only were the preachers entirely absent, but their following also. A Christian Socialist would have felt lonesome indeed, with no one to act as a listener for him.... "Fearless and unashamed, in true Bolshevik fashion, the delegation paid no heed to the prejudice of some, but adopted, with one opposing vote, an additional constitutional amendment, guided solely by historic facts and scientific data. A Socialist who understands the Materialistic Conception of History cannot have faith in superstitions of any kind. In other words, a 'religious' or 'Christian' Socialist is a contradiction of terms, and the statement that 'religion is a private matter' is a lie. The belief in a supreme being or beings is a social phenomenon which can be explained on the materialistic basis, just as all economic phenomena can be explained. With persistent adherence to honesty, the convention adopted a resolution and a constitutional amendment declaring religion to be a social phenomenon and instructing all organizers and speakers to explain religion upon its materialistic basis. "Here again, the Socialist Party of Michigan issued a direct challenge to the National Organization. This time it is not a challenge in regard to tactics, but we challenge the honesty of the National Organization in declaring that 'religion is a private matter.'" Now listen to the words of Eugene V. Debs, published on the editorial page of "The Call," New York, July 21, 1919, and see what a fraud and hypocrite the leader of the Socialists of the United States is: "If you have not already done so, read the platform of the Socialist Party, and then let us know what you find in it to warrant the lying charge of the sleek and fat leeches and parasites and their degenerates, tools and hirelings that Socialism is atheism and free-love(?) and that it will tear up the family by the roots, smash up the home and turn society into a raging bedlam." Sufficient evidence has now been given to prove that the Socialists are the declared enemies of the church. They are conspiring to destroy an institution which, apart from the supernatural blessings that it has conferred upon mankind, has done wonders to promote the happiness of nations. To the church many countries owe their civilization and their conversion from heathenism. She has preserved for us the priceless treasures of art and learning that would otherwise have fallen a prey to the ravages of the barbarians. For centuries she has trained untold millions to observe the Commandments of God, and has thus been instrumental in the prevention of innumerable crimes and sins from which the human race would have suffered. Not only has she taught the people the virtues of charity, justice, temperance, humility, liberality, purity, meekness and forgiveness of enemies, and been a source of immense consolation to the poor and oppressed, the sick and the injured, but she has comforted millions of the dying, who, when they realized that no earthly joys remained, took hope and delight at the thought of an eternal reward in heaven. It is this glorious institution, then, founded by Almighty God Himself, that the Socialists hate with all their hearts, and would destroy forever, because it prevents the spread of their revolutionary doctrines by teaching respect for law, order and authority, and by exposing to all the world the deceptions, frauds and empty promises of the conspirators against religion. CHAPTER XX THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE FAMILY Most of the Marxians in America, when confronted with the charge that they advocate free-love, deny the truth of the accusation, claiming that it is a base calumny. False and calumnious, indeed, would the charge be, if it were directed against each individual among the Revolutionists, or if from its universality exceptions were not made for many, who, not having as yet accepted the full consequences of International Socialism, go no further than to cast their votes for the party candidates. For would it be fair to except no others from condemnation, for among the dues-paying members of the party are many who are extremely averse to the system of loose morals that their comrades propose to substitute for the monogamous form of marriage now in vogue. Books advocating free-love are advertised in the Socialist press and receive favorable notice in editorial columns. They have long been on sale at the leading Socialist book-stores of the country and even at the National Office of the Socialist Party in Chicago. Finally, the Revolutionary clubs and locals all over the United States have in their libraries books on free-love that are standard works on Socialism. The Marxians, in their endeavors to offset the charge that a free-love propaganda exists within their party, frequently argue that prostitution, now so prevalent throughout the world, will under Socialism no longer remain the dreadful menace to society that it is today. They attribute the prevalence of this vice principally to poverty, and argue that in the new state, all persons will be abundantly supplied with the goods of this world, and consequently no one will be obliged to indulge in this sin for obtaining a livelihood. The Reds, therefore, try to dodge the question at issue by leading their opponents off on a tangent. The real question, free-love, will, however, by no means be forgotten by us until the Socialists have been shown up thoroughly. Since the conspirators against family life are so fond of harping on the matter of prostitution, with a view to drawing critics away from attacking their doctrine of free-love, the reader will be shown that even prostitution, instead of decreasing in the Socialist state, would, together with immorality of every sort, become far more prevalent under Marxian rule than it is today. Prostitution and impurities of every sort may, of course, be due to many different causes. First, let us consider prostitution in connection with poverty and destitution. The Socialists claim that there will be far less prostitution in their state since the people, as a whole, will be supplied more abundantly with the needs of life. This talk about greater supplies for all in the Socialist state is mere assertion. The Marxians have never proven that such would actually be the case. If so, where is their proof? Can they give any convincing argument? Can they name any country, state or city, where they have ever ruled, in which the people, as a whole, were better supplied with the needs of life under the red flag than they were before the Socialist rule began? The fact is just the contrary. Look at any part of Europe over which the Socialists have ruled and you will see far greater destitution under Socialism than there was before. As for places that have never yet tried Socialism, enough arguments were given in the chapter, "Socialism a Peril to Workingmen," to show that there would be so many upheavals, so much turmoil, discontent and strife in a Socialist state, that production would be at a minimum and entirely insufficient to supply the needs of the people. We concede that poverty often leads to prostitution, and this is one reason out of many for sincerely wishing that our poor people were better supplied than they now are with the necessities of life. Still it must not be forgotten that poverty and want are often greater factors in preventing prostitution than in helping it. Think of the millions of poor people whose very poverty indirectly makes prostitution and vice in general less likely by keeping them from immoral theatres, movies, dances and cabarets and association with bad companions of greater means who would be attracted by better clothes and greater wealth if these poor people had them. Do the Socialists claim that the average poor woman is less moral than the average rich one? Do not the Marxians know that poverty, rather than wealth, fosters religion and piety, the greatest of all factors in keeping persons pure? Do the Reds deny that millions and millions of the very poorest are chaste? If these souls can remain pure, notwithstanding their poverty, so, too, can others; and when these others do not remain pure, usually something other than poverty is the cause, _e.g._, irreligion, lawlessness or disregard of authority, all of which the Socialists are advocating, day after day, in their books, pamphlets, papers and speeches. Again, Debs and his followers, by having a separate party for workingmen, are dividing the laboring class against itself, knowing full well that millions upon millions of decent, honest workingmen will never join them. And since Socialists are making unjust and impossible demands, and injecting into labor organizations radical leaders who cause general distrust and fear, labor cannot succeed in its battles against the abuses of capitalism nearly as well as it would if all were united. Hence, because of the existence of the Socialist Party, low wages still prevail in many cases, with extreme poverty which often leads to prostitution. If the Socialists ever gain control of our country they will probably do so through a revolution. Or they will come into power gradually, by an increased vote at each election. In the meantime, as victory came near, there would be business failures by the thousands, owing to the impending destruction of the existing system of industry and government. In either case there would be terrible destitution and a great dearth of the necessities of life. This, according to the Socialists' own argument, would mean a great increase in prostitution. It has been proven theoretically in the chapter entitled, "Socialism, a Peril to Workingmen," and actually by events in Europe, that a Socialist state, even should it endure, cannot be a success. Hence, were the Marxian argument about prostitution as strong as the Socialists claim, picture the immorality among the people where a Socialist government plunges the industries and sources of production and distribution into total chaos. With this refutation of the claim that prostitution would become a very rare thing under Socialism, the national conspirators must confess that the same argument they have for years been using to further the interests of their cause, can with telling effect be turned against them. Not alone are the Socialists defeated in their argument that prostitution would be less prevalent in the Marxian state, but they are hypocrites in using the argument they do. "The Call," for instance, which frequently uses the argument which has been refuted, in the magazine section of its issue of June 8, 1919, published a poem entitled, "The Harlot," to satisfy its lustful patrons: "I do not understand you-- I cannot see How you can lie passive in my arms When such a passion swells in me.... You lie in my arms-- Your face is close to mine. I look into your eyes, Revelation! And you Look into mine Unmoved." We now return to the question of free-love--we have not forgotten it, though no doubt the Reds wish we had. Socialists who deny that an active free-love propaganda exists within their ranks must either confess their ignorance of what is going on, or plead guilty to the base charge of deceiving the American people. The "New Encyclopedia of Social Reform," edited by the Socialist, W. D. P. Bliss, on page 484 contains an article on the family which reads in part as follows: "We then come to the third form of free-love, the free-love theory par excellence, which is held today by many Socialists, and an increasing number of radical men and women of various schools of thought. According to these neither the state nor organized religion should have aught to do with the control of the family or of the sexual relation. They would make free-love supreme. They would have it unfettered by any tie whatsoever. They argue that compulsory love is not love; that all marriage save from love is sin; that when love ends, marriage ends." In another article, on page 1135, under the caption, "Socialism," Bliss informs us that it is perfectly true that Deville, a French Socialist, said that "marriage is a regulation of property.... When marriage is transformed, and only after that transformation marriage will lose its reason for existence, and boys and girls may then freely and without fear of censure listen to the wants and promptings of their nature.... The support of the children will no longer depend on the chance of birth. Like their instruction it will become a charge of society. There will be no room for prostitution or for marriage, which is in sum nothing more than prostitution before the mayor." On page 897 of the old 1897 edition of the "Encyclopedia of Social Reform," an earlier work edited by W. D. P. Bliss, we are informed that Socialism would allow all to live in permanent monogamy, but would not force people to remain married if they were unwilling to do so. "The Communist Manifesto," the work that made Marx and Engels famous among Socialists the world over, thus answers the charge made against the Revolutionists regarding their opposition to monogamy: "What the communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalized community of women." Jules Guesde, a French Socialist, affirms in "Le Catéchisme Socialiste" that "the family is now only an odious form of property and must be transformed or abolished." The French Socialist leader, Jaurés, in a parliamentary speech said that "They [_i.e._, married men and women] were free to make the marriage and should in the same way be free to unmake it. In fact, just as the will of one of the parties could have prevented the marriage, so the will of one should be able to end it. The power to annul should, of course, be all the stronger when both parties desire it." It need scarcely be added that free-love would in most cases begin with the voluntary dissolution of the marriage ties. While the program of the French Socialist Party, adopted at Tours in 1902, does not explicitly advocate free-love, still it calls for "the most liberal legislation on divorce." Ernest Belfort Bax, a prominent English Socialist, in "Outlooks From a New Standpoint," affirms that "a man may justly reject the dominant sexual morality; he may condemn the monogamic marriage system which obtains today; he may claim the right of free union between men and women; he may contend he is perfectly at liberty to join himself, either temporarily or permanently with a woman; and that the mere legal form of marriage has no binding force with him." ["Outlooks From a New Standpoint," by Ernest Belfort Bax, page 114 of the 1891 edition.] "Prostitution for private gain is morally repellent. But the same outward act done for a cause transcending individual interest loses its character of prostitution." [Ibid., page 123.] "There are few points on which advanced radicals and Socialists are more completely in accord than their hostility to the modern legal monogamic marriage." [Ibid., page 151.] "There are excellent men and women, possibly the majority, born with dispositions for whom a permanent union is doubtless just the right thing; there are other excellent men and women born with lively imaginations and Bohemian temperaments for whom it is not precisely the right thing." [Ibid., page 157.] "Herein we have an instance of the distinction between bourgeois morality and Socialist morality. To the first it is immoral to live in a marital relation without having previously subscribed to certain legal formalities.... To the second ... to live in a state of unlegalized marriage defileth not a man, nor woman." [Ibid., page 158.] "Socialism will strike at the root at once of compulsory monogamy." [Ibid., page 159.] Quotations from this base free-love book will end with the following: "If it be asked 'is marriage a failure?' the answer of any impartial person must be 'monogamic marriage is a failure'--the rest is silence. We know not what the new form of the family, the society of the future in which men and women will be alike economically free, may involve, and which may be generally adopted therein. Meanwhile we ought to combat by every means within our power the metaphysical dogma of the inherent sanctity of the monogamic principle." ["Outlooks From a New Standpoint," by Ernest Belfort Bax, page 160 of the 1891 edition.] "Outlooks From a New Standpoint," from which these quotations have been taken, was advertised in the price list of the Social Democratic Publishing Company of Milwaukee; and though it was sold for a dollar a copy at Victor Berger's establishment, it has never been used by the Socialists of America to prove to the world that they do not advocate free-love. In view of the fact that "Outlooks From a New Standpoint" was sold at Berger's own publishing company, it is somewhat surprising to see him, in the August 10, 1912, edition of his paper, the Milwaukee "Social Democratic Herald," attacking, in a party squabble, "the men in control of the 'International Socialist Review,' ... who publish books in defense of what our enemies call free-love." Further on in the factional quarrel he writes: "I shall leave out the Christian Socialists entirely. Many of them are honest in this fight. But these Christian Socialists--who are only a handful--are being used by cowardly assassins and practical free-lovers as a cat's paw." Perhaps the Socialist publishers would be a little more free with their love for each other, if there was less competition for the silver dollar. Ernest Belfort Bax in another book, "Religion of Socialism," thus denounces the present form of family life: "We defy any human being to point to a single reality, good or bad, in the composition of the bourgeois family. It has the merit of being the most perfect specimen of complete sham that history has presented to the world." ["Religion of Socialism," by Ernest Belfort Bax, page 141 of the 1891 edition.] "Socialism, Its Growth and Outcome," edited by Ernest Belfort Bax and William Morris, also advocates free-love, for its authors tell us that under Socialism "property in children would cease to exist, and every infant that came into the world would be born into full citizenship, and would enjoy all its advantages, whatever the conduct of its parents might be. Thus a new development of the family would take place, on the basis, not of a predetermined life-long business arrangement, to be formally and nominally held to irrespective of circumstances, but on mutual inclination and affection, an association terminable at the will of either party.... There would be no vestige of reprobation weighing on the dissolution of one tie and the formation of another." ["Socialism, Its Growth and Outcome," by Ernest Belfort Bax and William Morris, pages 299 and 300 of the 1893 edition.] The "International Socialist Review," December, 1908, states that "Socialism, Its Growth and Outcome," by William Morris and Ernest Belfort Bax, is "a standard historical work long recognized as being of the utmost value to Socialists." According to the price list sent out from the National Office of the Socialist Party this work on free-love was on sale there for fifty cents a copy. Chas H. Kerr and Company, the Socialist publishing company of Chicago, in their catalogue advertised the same book as being one of the most important works in the whole literature of Socialism, by the two strongest Socialist writers of England. From these facts the reader may judge for himself whether or not the Revolutionists of America tell the truth when they claim that they are not the enemies of the family. In a speech delivered on November 12, 1907, Henry Quelch, editor of the Socialist paper, "London Justice," made the following statement: "I do want to abolish marriage. I do want to see the whole system of society, as at present constituted, swept away. We want no marriage bonds. We want no bonds at all. We want free-love." Edward Carpenter in his book, "Love's Coming of Age," tells us that "marriage relations are raised to a much higher plane by a continual change of partners until a permanent mate and equal is found." That this work on free-love might find a ready market among Socialists, Chas. H. Kerr and Company advertised it as follows in the "International Socialist Review," Chicago, December, 1902: "He [i.e., Carpenter] faces bravely the questions that prudes of both sexes shrink from, and he offers a solution that deserves the attention of the ablest leaders of popular thought, while his charmingly simple style makes the book easy reading matter for any one who is looking for new light on the present and future of men and women in their relations to each other." In a 1912 catalogue the same publishing company volunteered the information that "'Love's Coming of Age' is one of the best Socialist books yet written on the relations of the sexes." In a 1917 booklet it was advertised by the company as being "by far the most satisfactory book on the relations of the sexes in the coming social order." Carpenter's work was sold for a dollar a copy at the National Office of the Socialist Party in Chicago, and yet the Revolutionists persist in telling us that they do not advocate free-love. August Bebel, the late leader of the German Socialists, was the author of a book entitled, "Woman Under Socialism." This work, however, is better known by the simple appellation, "Woman." A simple quotation will suffice to show that Bebel, like many other excellent Socialist authorities, advocates free-love: "If incompatibility, disenchantment or repulsion set in between two persons that have come together, morality commands that the unnatural and therefore immoral bond be dissolved." ["Woman Under Socialism," by Bebel, page 344 of the 1904 edition in English.] Bebel's book has had an immense circulation. Over thirty editions have been issued, and translations have been made into nearly all the European languages. Before his death in August, 1913, he was the admiration of millions of the Revolutionists the world over. His book is considered everywhere as a standard work on International Socialism and is, of course, on sale with the other free-love publications at the National Office of the Socialist Party. Chas H. Kerr and Company in 1917 advertised Bebel's work as being one of the greatest Socialist books ever written. Frederick Engel's "Origin of the Family," a work that has made its author famous among Socialists on both sides of the Atlantic, contains the following statement relative to free-love: "These peculiarities that were stamped upon the face of monogamy by its rise through property relations will decidedly vanish, namely the supremacy of men and the indissolubility of marriage.... If marriage founded on love is alone moral, then it follows that marriage is moral only as long as love lasts. The duration of an attack of individual sex love varies considerably according to individual disposition, especially in men. A positive cessation of fondness or its replacement by a new passionate love makes a separation a blessing for both parties and for society. But humanity will be spared the useless wading through the mire of a divorce case." ["The Origin of the Family," by Fredrick Engels, page 99 of the 1907 translation into English by Untermann.] "The Comrade," New York, November, 1902, thus commends Engel's book: "One of the most important issues of that excellent Standard Socialist Series published by Chas. H. Kerr and Company is 'The Origin of the Family,' by Fredrick Engels, now for the first time translated into English by Ernest Untermann. This book, first published in 1884, has been translated into almost every European language and has long been regarded as one of the classics of Socialist philosophical literature." "The Call," New York, February 27, 1910, deems "The Origin of the Family" worthy of editorial comment: "The one book that contains in small compass what every woman ought to know is Fredrick Engel's 'The Origin of the Family.' Every Socialist woman should become a book agent to sell this book." "The International Socialist Review," October, 1902, expressed its admiration of Engel's work by stating that "this book has long been known as one of the great Socialist classics and has been translated into almost every other language than English.... The book is really one of the two or three great Socialist classics; and now that it is in English, it must find a place in the library of everyone who hopes to master the real fundamental philosophy underlying Socialism." "The Origin of the Family," notwithstanding[20] the fact that it contains matter too foul to comment on, for example a certain comparison that is made on page 39, was listed with the books sold at the National Office of the Socialist Party, and at Chas. H. Kerr and Company, the largest Socialist publishing company in the United States. Ernest Untermann, the American Socialist who translated Engel's work into English, writes on page 7 of the preface of the 1907 edition: "The monogamic family, so far from being a divinely instituted union of souls, is seen to be the product of a series of material, and in the last analysis, of the most sordid motives." Rives La Monte, in "Socialism Positive and Negative," tells his readers that "from the point of view of this Socialist materialism, the monogamous family, the present economic unit of society, ceases to be a divine institution, and becomes the historical product of certain definite economic conditions. In the judgment of such Socialists as Fredrick Engels and August Bebel, we shall probably remain monogamous, but monogamy will cease to be compulsorily permanent." ["Socialism, Positive and Negative," by Rives La Monte, page 98 of the 1907 edition.] In the "International Socialist Review," February, 1909, there appears on page 628 a notice which reads as follows: "The 'Review' lately returned to a contributor a clever and readable article in which he emphasized certain absurdities and miseries of the present marriage system. His letter in the reply to us raises some interesting questions, and we are glad to publish it: ... 'It is disappointing to be advised to frankly discuss subjects of such importance as religion and marriage only in hushed whispers behind closed doors. In the fear of offending conservative prejudice on these topics, some Socialists become more conservative than the bourgeois themselves.... Of course, the main stream and most important phase of Socialism is the political-economic agitation, but at the same time the Socialist movement inevitably brings into being, at least for a great part of its adherents, a new culture, a new literature, a new art, a new attitude toward sex relations and religion and individual freedom, a new conception of life as a whole. In face of this fact it is sickening to see individuals, whom one knows to be atheists, defending Socialism as the will of God and the fulfilment of Christianity; and other individuals, whom one knows to be free-lovers, going out of their way to defend the home and family against the inroads of capitalism. Nevertheless such things are seen.... There are thousands of women who are worn out with the bearing of unwelcome children on account of ignorance of proper ways of preventing conception.... If sex life, the personal heart life, of revolutionists were more free and joyous, if they breathed an atmosphere of liberty and spontaneity, free from religious and moral superstitions, if they became now as much like the free people of the future as possible, would they not be that much more ardent and joyous and unceasing workers of the Great Revolution? And if former non-Socialists, especially women who had suffered grievously from the evils of the marriage system, or been intellectually blindfolded by religious teaching, were first led into the light of more emancipated ideas by some of us Socialists, would not they serve and glorify Socialism forever?... If the Christian Socialists have a right to their God, and monogamists to their eternal marriage, then surely in a revolutionary movement like ours, the complete revolutionists have, to say the least, an equal right to their agnosticism and their free union." Clarence M. Meily, before speaking explicitly of free-love, praises lust and sensuality in the highest terms on page 129 of his book, "Puritanism": "Freed from the privation of millenniums of unrequited toil, with the wealth and wonders of the world at its command, it is fairly certain that the emancipated working class, still wan from its centuries of service and sacrifice, will take great joy in repudiating, finally and forever, the fallacies and aberration of asceticism.... Not the denial of life, but the laudation and triumph of life, will be the keynote of the new ethics. The lusts of the flesh, the lusts of the eye, the pride of life, will become new formulas, holy and pure in the light of the perfect development of the whole man, and of all men, to which the race will dedicate itself." Meily then approaches the marriage question and says: "The question of the status of marriage in the new society is one of extreme importance, since it is here that reactionaries of all sorts center their opposition to social reconstruction. It is both idle and disingenuous to assert that marriage as a legal and civil institution is not likely to undergo profound modification.... The artificial perpetuation of the marriage tie, in the face of the disinclination of the parties involved to continue the relation, will cease to be a matter of public concern, or the occasion of state interference. The dissolution of the marriage relation will become as purely a personal and private affair as is the assumption of the relation now. Some sort of registration may be required for the purpose of vital statistics." In July 2, 1901, "The Haverhill Social Democrat," apparently without fear of offending its subscribers, asked: "What is there sacred in the modern home? Can anything be sacred which is based on a lie or on impurity, or on ignorance? The marriage system today is based on impurity, on ignorance and on a big lie." "The Call," New York, December 4, 1910, tells its readers to "give all women the vote, and they will strike off the rusty chains that hold them still in marriage as the property of the man." That the same paper is very lax as regards the divorce evil, so closely allied to free-love, is evidenced from the following quotation taken from the edition of March 30, 1913: "Among the many encouraging signs of woman's growing strength--of her determination to be at last the captain of her soul and the master of her faith--are recent divorce statistics.... "Far from being a sign of moral decadence, the large number of divorces granted to women is one of the healthiest portents of the regeneration of the body social.... "The divorced woman is today the connecting link between the non-resisting, ignorant victim of the past and the self-reliant, enlightened, eugenically minded woman of the future. The divorce statistics of the present are perfectly logical and the divorced woman is a cheering omen, as she fulfils her historic mission." "The Little Catechism" for the use of the children of Bohemian Socialists, a book from which we have already had occasion to quote in the previous chapter, shows us the exceedingly low standard of morality that is taught to the youthful Revolutionists; for in answer to the question, "Is adultery a sin?" we are astounded by the boldness of the reply, "It is not a sin." We shall finally corroborate our charge that the Revolutionists advocate free-love by quoting the words of no less an authority than Morris Hillquit, who concedes in "Everybody's," February, 1914, page 233, that "Most Socialists stand for dissolubility of the marriage ties at the pleasure of the contracting parties." As many Socialist books on free-love have attained a high circulation, and as they have not been repudiated by the party, but have been praised and advertised in its newspapers, and, moreover, since these very books have been sold as standard works both at the National Office of the party and at the leading Socialist book-stores of America, the only reasonable conclusion to be drawn is that the number of party members who openly advocate free-love, or at least tacitly approve of its propaganda, must be in the majority, for otherwise the party would never tolerate such a condition of affairs within its ranks. Once the Socialists gain control of a country, as in the case of Russia, laws legalizing free-love are very soon passed. In the No. 2 edition of the Los Angeles magazine, "More Truth About Russia," its radical editor mentions many of the Bolshevist laws on marriage, divorce, etc., in vogue in Russia. Among them is one fully legalizing free-love, making it possible for married parties to change partners whenever they wish and for no other reason than their mutual or individual desire to do so: "1. Marriage is annulled by the petition of both parties or even one of them. "2. The petition is submitted, according to the rules of local jurisdiction, to the local court. "Note: A declaration of annulment of marriage by mutual consent may be filed directly with the department of registration of marriages in which a record of that marriage is kept, which department makes an entry of the annulment of the marriage in the record and issues a certificate. "3. On the day appointed for the examination of the petition for the annulment of marriage, the local judge summons both parties or their solicitors. "4. Having convinced himself that the petition for the annulment of the marriage really comes from both parties or from one of them, the judge personally and singly renders the decision of the annulment of the marriage and issues a certificate thereof to the parties." This chapter shows that free-love filth, to corrupt and demoralize our people, is being propagated by the Socialist Party of America through its National Headquarters in Chicago, Berger's publication company in Milwaukee, Hillquit's "New York Call," and other publishing houses and papers affiliated with the party. Yet, because the question of the qualifications of five representatives of this system of abomination to make laws for the State of New York was so much as raised by a judicial inquiry in the New York Assembly, that body of legislators has been assailed and falsely charged with undermining the fundamental principles of representative government. The ignorance concerning the true character of the Socialist Party of America is startling. Is it not time for the American people to awake? Should not every decent American petition all our legislative bodies, state and national, to outlaw the Socialist Party of America and curb its iniquitous propaganda? CHAPTER XXI THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE RACE To most persons it will certainly be a surprise to hear that race suicide has been openly advocated in the columns of leading Socialist publications. True it is that the number of individuals endeavoring to spread this practice by their writings is comparatively[21] small; still, as the articles have continued to appear for years at more or less regular intervals, without exciting anything like serious opposition, we are forced to conclude that advocacy of race suicide is looked upon by a very large number of the Revolutionists as one of their characteristic virtues. Though many vile articles advocating race suicide were published in the 1910 and the 1911 editions of "The New York Call," we shall pass them over, and discuss those of a more recent date. In the Sunday editions of "The Call," Anita C. Block has for years been editing a page called "Woman's Sphere." This section of the paper on the 24th of March, 1912, contained an editorial comment under the caption "Enforced Motherhood and the Law," in which the practice of base and criminal race suicide is encouraged: "Within a space covering not much more than a month, six letters have been received by us, containing in substance about what is contained in the following letter: "'Mrs. A. C. Block, New York City: "'Dear Comrade Block.--I have been a reader of "The Call" since December 1, 1911. I do not know whether you can give me any information as to what I wish to know.... "'I have three children, 3½ years, 2¼ years, and a baby 9 months. Now, you cannot blame me if I do not care for more for some time to come.... "'Could you give any information? Dr.... in "..." [We suppress the author's name and the title of his work.] and "..." by ... contain the sentence, "Every woman should know prevention of conception." I should be thankful for any advice. "'Yours for the Co-operative Commonwealth.'" The editorial comment then goes on to say: "Four of these letters we answered personally, stating the impossibility of imparting this information under our present laws. But when letters continued to come, we felt that any subject that indeed meant everything in the world to the wives of the working class, was entitled to publicity in these columns. "These women ought to know exactly what the laws are that make the giving of this terribly needed information--A Felony. And so we print below the Federal or United States law on this subject." The law is then given in all its details, after which the New York State law on the same subject is also quoted. We are then told that "such are some of the laws on this grave subject, and, of course, no sane person would endeavor to violate them, openly at any rate. But as Dr.... states elsewhere in this page, we cannot be prevented from agitating for their repeal. Nor can we be prevented from educating the people wherever possible to an understanding that a knowledge of the means of preventing conception is a knowledge of one of the means of regenerating the race. "Moreover even under Socialism, where economic conditions will be such that every woman can support a dozen children in comfort if she wants to, the volitional limitation of offspring will be completely justifiable. For even parents in the most comfortable circumstances should have the right to determine how many children they want. Of all things in the world this is a matter for the individual and not for society to determine." Dr...., to whom reference was made in the above editorial comment, is also the author of another work advertised as follows in "Woman's Sphere" of "The Call," March 24, 1912: "The three most important measures for the improvement of the human race from a eugenic standpoint. What are they? I suppose everybody who has given the subject any thought has his remedies. I have studied the subject for years and my answer is: "1. Teaching the people the proper means of the prevention of conception so that the people may have only as many children as they can afford to have, and to have them when they want to have them. "2..... "3..... "Of the three measures the first one is the most important and still it will be the last one to come, because our prudes think it would lead to immorality. And nevertheless I will repeat what I said several times before, that there is no single measure that would so positively, so immediately contribute toward the happiness and progress of the human race as teaching the people the proper means of regulating reproduction. This has been my sincerest and deepest conviction since I have learned to think rationally. It is the conviction of thousands of others, but they are too careful of their standing to express it in public. I am happy, however, to be able to state that my teachings have converted thousands; many of our readers who were at first shocked by our plain talk on this important subject are now expressing their full agreement with our ideas. And Congress may pass draconian laws, the discussion of this subject cannot, must not, be stopped." On April 13, 1913, another article on the subject of race suicide, by Clara G. Stillman, appeared in "Woman's Sphere" of "The Call" under the caption, "The Right to Prevent Conception." Only part of the foul composition is here given: "Those who are convinced that the voluntary prevention of conception is a most important weapon in the modern fight with poverty, disease and racial deterioration, will find their position only strengthened by survey of their opponents' objections. These objections are mainly of three kinds--and might be classed as the pseudo-religious, the pseudo-moral and the pseudo-scientific, because all are based on conceptions which our present state of knowledge and social development have enabled us to outgrow.... "Prevention of conception is already an accepted principle among the educated classes of every civilized country. According as the opposition of the law and public opinion are more or less stringent, it is practised with more or less secrecy; but secret or open, the practice is here to stay, and it is spreading. The fear of most of its opponents is, therefore, not nearly so much that the human race will become extinct as that its best elements will gradually be replaced by the worst. At first this may seem plausible. Granting our opponents' premise temporarily, the conclusion is logically unavoidable that in order to restore a normal relation between the so-called more and less intelligent or desirable classes of society, we must put into the hands of all the methods of restricting their increase, now utilized only by the few." On June 1, 1913, "Woman's Sphere" of "The Call" contained a four-column article on race suicide, entitled, "Musings of a Socialist Woman." The author, Antoinette F. Konikow, who was a delegate to the Socialist National Conventions of 1908 and 1912, thus expresses her views: "I consider the question of the prevention of conception to be of greater value to women than even the knowledge of sexual diseases.... "After meeting hundreds of women and girls in heart to heart talks, I came to the sincere conviction that lectures on sex hygiene which do not give a thorough understanding of conception in its definite bearings on practical life and also of its possibilities of prevention--that such lectures miss their main aim in bringing help to distressed humanity.... "Instead of meeting every need and demand of the worker, we are so hampered by the fear of getting a bad reputation among our enemies that we express our support to a new tendency only after it has acquired a certain respectability in society.... "Do the daring words of Comrade Clara G. Stillman or Dr....'s article not hurt the feelings of some of our Comrades? No doubt some readers felt dissatisfied but not more so than others who had to read the conservative statement of Comrade Carey in 'The Leader,' that he considers Bebel's conception of the family un-Socialistic and anti-Socialistic.... "Do our morals stand on a higher plane, thanks to the careful guardianship of our laws?... "It is high time then to serve notice upon all our benevolent censors and upholders of such laws, and declare ourselves fit to get along without their superior guidance. It is time to open a crusade against this hypocritical suppression of knowledge, which leads to endless and needless suffering. It is time to emphatically declare the right of the mother to control the functions of her own body for her own good and the welfare of her offspring." The disastrous consequences of such a crusade to further the cause of race suicide are very forcibly brought home to us by an article which appeared in "The Call," May 10, 1914, on "The Conscious Limitation of Offspring in Holland": "Our headquarters at The Hague and our subdivisions in all our greater towns are spreading theoretical leaflets and pamphlets; but the special pamphlet giving practical information in the prevention of conception, is only given to married people when asked. We are lecturing everywhere. But the essential missionary work is done privately and modestly, often unconsciously by showing the happy results in their own families, by the nearly 5,000 members of our league spread over the whole country, among whom are physicians, clergymen and teachers, etc. Every day information is asked by letters and still more by our printed postcards; all information is given cost-free and post-free. Almost all younger doctors and midwives are giving information, and are helping mothers in the cases when it is wanted on account of pathological indications. Moreover special nurses are instructed in helping poor women. Harmless preventive means are more and more taking the place of dangerous abortion. So, merely by our freedom of giving information, we have reached the desirable results proved most brilliantly by the statistical figures of our country." On May 21, 1914, "Woman's Sphere" of "The Call" devoted two more of its columns to the race suicide propaganda in the form of an article by Sonia Ureles under the caption, "Hats Off, Gentlemen, The Law!" Since many parts of the production are too foul to permit our quoting them, we shall give but a few short passages: "But the doctors only scowled, and the nurse told her gently that the law did not permit poor people to regulate the birth of their offspring.... "To the thought of a private practitioner she gave no heed; it was to her a luxury undreamed of.... "The nurse, a well-meaning honest creature, writhed uncomfortably under her gaze. 'It's--it's against the law to give out such information,' she stammered. "'I don't care about the law,' came the stubborn reply. 'You promised. Now tell me.' Nevertheless she left the hospital without the information.... "She applied to the women of her neighborhood for information. They told her things they thought they knew, and things they thought they ought to know. And her health was the price she paid.... "They who knew, but would not tell, left her one alternative. She chose it. And so, "'Hats off, gentlemen--the law!'" In this same issue of "The Call," May 24, 1914, there is an editorial comment that promised the base devotees of race suicide an abundance of filthy reading matter for the future: "If unwelcome motherhood is not in accordance with a constructive eugenic program, then the free imparting of information concerning the prevention of involuntary motherhood must be. But as has been pointed out in these columns again and again, to make this part of a constructive eugenic program is to run up against vicious and barbarous state and federal laws which make the giving of necessary information a crime, punishable by imprisonment. "In connection with this entire subject we call the attention of our readers to the grim sketch by Sonia Ureles, appearing elsewhere on this page today. "This is the first of a series of stories on the same subject which Miss Ureles is writing for 'Woman's Sphere.' All who know the vivid reality of this writer's work will look forward to them with keen anticipation." Let it not be thought for a moment that "The Call" has yet given up its propaganda of race suicide. As recently as May 25, 1919, there appeared in the magazine section of that vile Socialist daily of New York City an article on the subject entitled, "Birth Control and the War," the article being no less than twelve columns long. Several quotations are hereby given: "Everywhere the feudal-minded ones act upon substantially the same impulse. Everywhere they impel and, to a large extent, though by indirection, they compel, prolific breeding among the less intelligent persons. These latter are also the victims of the prevailing religious, political, economic and industrial systems and superstitions. The feudalistic ones proclaim fecundity as a religious duty to God and a moral duty to the state. By psychologic tricks a vanity of the unfortunate classes is encouraged so as to make even the fools believe, or, at least, feel that they, too, have a place in the sun.... "By the uniform activities and lingering dominance of the feudal mind we have remained in a state of development in which we compete, like the stock-raiser, for an international and intercredal supremacy in and through breeding.... "As yet we have had no very urgent need for territorial expansion. Our turn is coming and is coming soon, if only we will heed our own feudal-minded ones, and will breed fast enough. But, without being aggressors in this sense, we are yet unavoidably drawn into the vortex of a world war inaugurated by the feudal-minded of other nations and unconsciously promoted to a small degree by our own feudal-minded ones by education for feudal-mindedness and for prolific breeding in our people.... "The next world war may possibly be one in which the disadvantaged of all nations will fight the feudal-minded of all nations. Something quite near to such an invitation already has come from Russia. Shall we hasten such a conflict by continuing to preach the sacredness of fecundity and of war? Or shall intelligent restraint of the feudalistic compulsion help us toward a more perfect and peaceful adjustment with the processes that make for the democratization of welfare, with and by intelligent family limitation as one means?" "The Call" is one of the official papers recognized by the Socialists of America. In 1914, while the race suicide propaganda was being carried on in its columns, lectures to be delivered for its benefit by Eugene V. Debs in many of the cities of New Jersey were advertised in its columns. It is most likely, therefore, that such a splendidly informed leader of the Revolutionists as Debs, like many thousands of members of the rank and file of the party, read some of the articles favoring race suicide. As we have never yet heard of Debs or a single Socialist complaining against the race suicide propaganda so long carried on in the columns of "The Call," we shall, unless the Marxians repudiate this form of immorality of their paper, be forced to conclude that their leader as well as a very large number of his followers intend legalizing this vice if they ever gain control of our country. In April, 1919, a vile, crimson pamphlet was on sale in the radical book-stores of the middle west. We shall not give the title, for it is too foul and indecent. On page 4 it warns its readers "not to forget this fact, celibacy, absolute continence from want of desire congenial or acquired, monkish asceticism are pathological states, diseased states of mind or body." Further on, we read, on page 10: "Do not be a suffering Jesus. Do not take him as an example. Do not whine or snuffle, but get ahead in the world while you can. Get lands, property and independence somehow.... "The teachings of Christianity were designed for the castration of the human soul. Christ would make you, not a free man, a hero, and a warrior, but a hireling, a submissive beast of burden, a helot, a nobody. Christianity is cowardice institutionalized and peace-on-earth is the philosophy of the tax gatherer, the usurer, and the international exploiter." On the inner side of the back cover of the foul pamphlet a book is advertised by the "International Socialist Control Association of Chicago," which seems also to publish the crimson pamphlet from which the above quotation was taken. The advertisement of the book is hereby given in part: "MOTHERS AND FATHERS, ATTENTION. "The welfare of the world depends upon the bringing up of children. "Everything depends upon the right start, hence it is your highest duty to see that your children are started right. "Foremost men say and statistics show the stupendous peril of our political, religious, and educational system. The root of education is not merely knowing how to read and write, but knowing men analytically and scientifically. "Anything is possible to the man who knows how and why. We develop and plan out your life according to your adaptions and inclinations--no guess work but cold, hard, mathematical facts. We show you how to control, manage, and handle humanity and make it your business to shape men's minds as easily as clay. "Misery, superstition and poverty must go." On the back cover sheet of the pamphlet it is stated that the International Socialist Control Association of Chicago is "An organization that teaches the suppressed and downtrodden truth, long controlled by the political and religious machine. The only organization that places health, happiness and marriage upon solid, scientific principles." In the summer of 1919, "The Call" of New York City, Morris Hillquit's vile publication, became more bold than ever in favoring race suicide. On June 29, 1919, for instance, there appeared a three-column article in the magazine section of the paper, entitled, "The ... League." Parts of the article are hereby quoted: "Many readers of 'Woman's Sphere' have expressed themselves as eager to know the raison d'etre of The ... League, which is the latest development in the birth control movement. "The answer is that this new league is started to speed up the birth control movement. Its first aim is to take the question straight to Congress and repeal the Federal statute which prohibits the circulation of contraceptive knowledge. All the restrictive state laws are modeled on this Federal obscenity statute. If that is repealed, the state laws can easily be made to follow suit.... "The repeal of this obnoxious out-of-date legislation is the longest single step toward that end. "The next step is to get the subject taught in the medical schools, and to have the best possible scientific information wisely and well distributed. Every health agency in the country should have it for the benefit of all who are in need. It should be available at hospitals, clinics, dispensaries, maternity centers, charity organizations and, most of all, through the Federal Health Service and the National Children's Bureau.... "Most Socialists are already convinced of the rightness of birth regulation, but not all of them see the need for working now to free the information. Some say, 'Oh, just work to achieve Socialism and when we have that, things like birth control will come without effort.' ... "Birth control is a necessary tool for the struggle after social justice. Therefore, Socialists should insist upon it right now, and not be content to wait for the Co-operative Commonwealth to bring it to them, also they should not hesitate to co-operate with non-Socialists to get it. Birth control is a blessing to humanity as a whole. Everybody needs it." On July 13, 1919, "The Call" published an editorial on Dr. Abraham Jacobi who had recently died. In the course of the editorial the following statement is made: "Many honors have been showered upon Dr. Jacobi, but probably none will be more brilliant than the fact that he was one of the first to fearlessly discuss the question of birth control." On July 15, 1919, there appeared in "The Call" the letter of the director of the birth control league similarly praising the late Dr. Jacobi: "...He did not wait till the baby was born, nor did he limit himself to what is ordinarily known as the prenatal care. He again and again proved his sincere belief that the only way to give babies a fair chance in this world is for the parents to know how to regulate the family birth rate." "The Call" on July 14, 1919, advertised seven birth control meetings to be held during the week in New York City. Two days later, on July 16, it advertised an open air birth control rally. In "Woman's Sphere" of the magazine section of "The Call," July 27, 1919, there appears another three-column article favoring race suicide, entitled, "How Shall We Change the Law?" We shall quote briefly: "Once it is no longer on the statute books that it is unlawful to impart information on the prevention of conception, then people may freely help each other to attain the precious information so urgently needed. The 'limited' bill would give this right only to doctors and possibly to nurses and midwives.... "And while we would not be so unscientific as to deny for a moment that it would be better for every woman to get her advice and instruction concerning the use of contraceptive directly from a doctor, nevertheless it is impossible to overestimate the help men and women could give each other were the free exchange of information on methods of birth control legal instead of illegal.... "We feel quite sure that women will get infinitely more sympathetic help and advice from each other than they will ever get from any free clinic doctors." "The Call" on July 26, 1919, announced that Anita C. Block, editress of "Woman's Sphere" of the paper, had accepted nomination as a delegate to the August 30, 1919, convention of the Socialist Party in Chicago. The September 2, 1919, issue of "The Call" states that it received the congratulations of the National Convention of the party then assembled at Chicago. There is, however, no record of any Socialist complaint against its continued race suicide propaganda. We can, therefore, draw our conclusions as to whether the Socialists approve of propagating race suicide. Away down in Mexico there lives a certain Linn A. E. Gale, a young Socialist who fled to that country from the United States to escape conscription. He is a "brave" fellow, for not only did he shirk his duties as a soldier and flee from his native land to escape jail, but he publishes a Socialist magazine in Mexico City in which he seeks to deprive of life those who have as much right to it as he himself has; in other words he is carrying on a campaign for race suicide. We quote from the August, 1919, issue of his Socialist publication, known as "Gale's Magazine": "Mr. Felix F. Palavinci, "Manager of El Universal, "Mexico City, D. F. Mexico: "Sir.--It is generally believed that you inspired the recent act of the health department of this city in having confiscated copies of a Spanish translation of ...'s famous book on how to practise birth control, and in sentencing me to the penitentiary when I refused to pay a $500 fine for publishing the said translation, which outrageous and malicious penalty was revoked by order of Mexico's Secretary of State, Manuel Aguirre Berlanga. "It is hard to believe that a man of your intelligence and supposed progressive ideas would be guilty of such a contemptible act. Yet facts are facts and the facts leave little room for doubt that you were to a large extent, if not almost entirely, responsible. The persistent series of bitter and abusive articles published by your newspaper, El Universal, against birth control and against me personally, constitute convincing proof of your interest in preventing contraceptive information from being diffused among the Mexican people...." In the same issue of Gale's Mexican Socialist magazine there appears an article entitled, "First Congress of the National Socialist Party of Mexico." Speaking of the party platform to be adopted, Gale says in part: "Another clause should put the party squarely on record as opposing the recent tyrannical and illegal effort of the Mexico City health department to prevent the dissemination of scientific birth control information among the poorer classes." Hysterical critics of the New York Assembly have accused the Judiciary Committee of that body of accepting as evidence against the five suspended Socialist Assemblymen every conceivable reproach against the Socialist Party of America which could be scraped together out of its entire history. An inquiry to ascertain the qualifications of Socialists to make the laws of the land assuredly would be justified in searching every possible source of information. But, as a matter of fact, the Judiciary Committee confined its investigation to evidence bearing directly upon the political and governmental aspects of the case. Had the Judiciary Committee wished to bring out what would most surely and deeply shock the moral sense of the American people--the organized propagation of immorality with which the five suspended Assemblymen were linked--the facts given in this and the preceding chapter show that no difficulty would have been found in digging up overwhelming evidence. The preceding chapter shows the propagation of free-love doctrines through all the publicity departments of the Socialist Party of America. The present chapter shows that the "New York Call," the chief political organ of the New York State branch of the Socialist Party of America, with which the five suspended Assemblymen were most intimately linked, has for years carried on an unclean and indecent propaganda to teach all within its polluting reach to violate one of the laws of the State of New York. CHAPTER XXII SOCIALIST ORGANIZATION AND "BORING IN" The avowed enemies of our constitutional government have within recent years met with stupendous success in persuading the credulous to rely on their extravagant promises and to look forward to the golden era of Socialism with the same bright hopes that little children do to the candies and toys in kidnappers' homes. If it be asked why the conspirators against our country, religion, family and everything dear to us are so successful in their efforts to undermine the foundations of a grand and glorious nation like our own, the answer is that their astounding progress is due, first, to an exceptional zeal in the propagation of their doctrines, and, secondly, to the deceptive and specious arguments used for gaining recruits. The extraordinary activity that has secured for the Socialists of the United States by far the greater part of a million votes in several presidential elections, and the acceptance of their revolutionary doctrines by a much larger number of radicals, who for one reason or another do not vote the Marxian ticket, is manifested under many different aspects. The Socialist Party of the United States in the early part of 1919 contained a little more than 100,000 dues-paying members, enrolled in approximately 7,000 locals and branches. The members of these locals and branches frequently meet to devise means for spreading the doctrines of Karl Marx and for overthrowing the government of our country. It is almost needless to add that their zeal would do great credit to men engaged in a truly noble cause. The American people would be astounded at their activity, should they carefully read, from the first to the last page, a single copy of one of the foremost Socialist papers such as the "New York Call." Socialists are working by the tens of thousands every day, from January 1st to December 31st, endeavoring to undermine our government. They have been doing this for years, and only recently have the American people begun to wake up. Waking up, however, will not suffice. We must act, act quickly and vigorously, before it is too late and before the forces of destruction become too numerous to control. Supplementing the indoor work of the locals and branches, one cannot but notice the so-called soap-box orators, found on the street corners of nearly every city of importance in the country. The specialty of these men is to preach class hatred and arouse dissatisfaction in their audiences with the present system of government and industry, and after this to assert, but never to prove, that Socialism is the sole remedy for the evils of our time. It will be well to remember that the revolutionary Socialist Party, even as far back as 1913, published in the United States some 200 or more papers and periodicals in English, German, Bohemian, Polish, Jewish, Slovac, Slavonic, Danish, Italian, Finnish, French, Hungarian, Lettish, Norwegian, Croatian, Russian and Swedish. Attorney General Palmer made the number over 400 in 1919. Among the papers are two important dailies in English, "The Call" of New York City and the "Milwaukee Leader," two dailies[22] in German, two in Bohemian, one in Polish, and one in Yiddish, the "Forward," which in the spring of 1919 had a circulation of about 150,000. The "Appeal to Reason" was once the greatest Socialist weekly in the country having had, in the fall of 1912, a circulation of nearly a million copies. About the latter part of 1917 it became lukewarm in upholding Socialist anti-war principles. As a consequence it lost most of its circulation, and in March, 1920, was still looked upon contemptuously by most members of the Socialist Party. By the vivid pictures which the revolutionary papers and periodicals draw of the abuses, corruptions and wrongs of our age, they succeed in blinding many American citizens to such an extent that the latter do not realize that they have been caught in the snares of a deceitful and dangerous enemy. Like the soap-box orators, these publications, besides criticising real present-day abuses, frequently lie and exaggerate, and either assert that in the Marxian state man would enjoy the choicest blessings under heaven, or else arrive at this same conclusion by arguing from false and unproven assertions as premises. The Socialist papers and periodicals, notwithstanding their beautifully painted pictures of the visionary state, should in no way incline us towards enlisting under the red flag. For to say nothing of their lies and exaggerations, neither their criticisms of actual present-day wrongs, their unproven assertions of the benefits of Socialism, nor their conclusions drawn from false and unfounded premises, show in any wise that the Marxian state would remedy existing evils and be a source of blessings to our people. Indeed, it would be just as foolish for us to trust in these revolutionary publications as it would be to confide in quacks who should ask us to purchase their so-called remedies merely because they had pointed out the harmful effects of a few drugs sold by a certain apothecary, or because they had claimed excellent healing properties for their own potions. Not only do the Marxians exert great influence through the papers which they publish, but they help their cause to a great extent by articles published in non-Socialist papers and magazines of the United States. Another way in which they have distinguished themselves for their activity is by the immense number of books, novels and pamphlets they have written, large numbers of which are in circulation throughout our country and are rapidly undermining the very foundations of our National Government. As these works are found in abundance and are available to all classes of persons in public libraries, our country's library system is supplying its enemies with well-stocked arsenals wherein weapons are kept for the use of those who will one day join the ranks of these national conspirators. The leaflet campaign of the Socialists has long since reached alarming proportions. To show what progress has been made by the arch enemies of our country, two quotations are hereby presented to the reader. The first is a letter which appeared in "The Call," New York, March 31, 1919, and reads as follows: "Editor of 'The Call': "We are living in the days of big events. The revolution in Russia has taught us some things that we ought to follow. One of them is the distribution of literature. In the past we have been climbing up four or five flights of stairs, standing on the street corners handing out leaflets, wearing out our strength and patience. I took a leaf out of the way the thing is done in Germany at present. All over the city there are any number of large window sills, at the top or very near the exits of the subway and elevated stations, the window sills of large stores. These window sills will hold a large amount of literature. Comrades going to work in the morning could very easily place the leaflets on them; it would take only a few seconds, the workers coming after them will pick them up. There is also, in the downtown districts, quite a few empty newsstands that are not used in the morning. These newsstands are generally at the very mouth of the subway stations. Then there are a number of benches in and on the stations that can be used. Our overcoat pockets will easily hold 100 or 200 pieces of literature. The time it takes to transfer the literature from our pockets to the window sills, newsstand or bench is about two seconds. I have been on the job for the last three weeks and the results have been astonishing. What are not picked up by the workers are in a few hours read by a large number of those out of work. We have got to come to it in the very near future. The halls are closed to us; let's get busy. "Very cold, windy and rainy mornings are not very good ones. The one big drawback is to get some Comrade to write the leaflets. The leaflet I have used is one taken from 'The Call,' issued by local Kings, entitled 'Hell in Russia.' The way the workers grab it does your heart good. "Yours for the education of the workers, "Andrew B. DeMilt. "P. S.--The above-named places are also good for that 'Call' you have laying around the house." In the April 24, 1919, edition of "The Call," under the caption, "Official Socialist News," and the subheading, "Queens" (County, New York), we read: "100 Socialists Wanted "One hundred are required tonight to aid in distributing Socialist literature throughout the Ridgewood section. Those who are able and willing to help should call this evening at the Queens County Labor Lyceum, Myrtle and Cypress Avenues." The number of revolutionary books, pamphlets and papers on the market is really astounding, and all out of proportion to the number of Socialists, Communists and I. W. W.'s who could possibly support them. Money for their publication must be forthcoming from other interested parties of considerable means. In fact, Deputy State Attorney General Samuel A. Berger, in a statement published in the "New York Times" on October 18, 1919, declared that rich radicals of the metropolis were the means of support for all but two of the forty or fifty extremely radical publications which reach 3,000,000 readers from New York City as a center. The same public official added that he did not have the authority to make known the names of the well-to-do men and women engaged thus in financing the plot to overthrow our National Government. Not only are the Reds rapidly undermining our institutions by means of literature, but also through the forces of organized labor. Enough has already been said in a previous chapter relative to the I. W. W. itself; but it will not be out of place to comment on the revolutionary influence which the I. W. W. and many Socialist labor leaders as, for example, Maurer of Pennsylvania, are bringing to bear upon the American Federation of Labor. The members of the I. W. W., as well as the Socialists and Communists throughout the country, have all along made every endeavor to fan the flames of class hatred between rich and poor, the employer and employee. They have, moreover, left nothing undone to promote discontent and strikes on as large a scale as possible with a view to finally ruining our present system of industry and the Government itself. Read any of the radical papers and you will be convinced that the "Red" rebels now place the greatest hopes for their rise to power in the strikes they are fomenting wherever and whenever an opportunity is offered. The Marxian leaders realize that the high cost of living is constantly gaining recruits for their cause, and that the greater the number of strikes and the greater the number of persons involved, the longer it will take to reduce the cost of the necessaries of life. They know that if the working class secures a six-hour day, a five-day week and, in addition, an immense increase in wages, production will fall far short of the demand, the cost of living will go up by leaps and bounds, and business men will be ruined. Workingmen will then lose their positions and discontent will be far more prevalent than ever. Again, if laboring men can only be made to break their wage contracts soon after every victorious strike, the industries of the whole country will soon be "topsy-turvy." What will bring on strikes more readily than to teach rebellion against all conservative labor leaders who would oppose uncalled-for walk-outs? It is much easier to get men to strike by having labor agitators harangue and deceive them, than it would be to have the workingmen quietly discuss both sides of the question honestly and fairly and then vote pro or con. Sympathetic strikes are well calculated to bring on a general strike, which might easily lead to the rebellion that the Reds so much desire. Strikes very often induce the action of courts against the workers involved and frequently demand the use of police and the calling out of troops, and thus the rebel "Reds" obtain other arguments, sound or otherwise, to win more of the working-class to their diabolical cause. If the Socialist strike leaders are imprisoned, justly or not, Socialists do not fail to start nation-wide agitations for amnesty. Strikes, therefore, excessive demands, the breaking of wage contracts, revolts against conservative labor leaders, and impassioned class-conscious strike agitators are among the leading assets of the Marxian rebels for starting a bloody rebellion. Many of the laboring class, especially newly arrived immigrants, cannot see the ultimate aim of the radical leaders and never dream of the terrible times that will soon overwhelm them if the cost of living continues to rise, business is ruined, and a terrible rebellion drenches our fair land with rivers of blood, leaving in its trail anarchy, crime and evils without end. Of what use are higher wages won by strikes, if the cost of living ascends still more rapidly? Of what use are higher wages for a short time if all industries and our Government with them are to be ruined through continual strikes and unreasonable demands suggested and agitated by men who have never yet given a single proof that their Socialistic scheme would not fall a prey to anarchy and war? The Reds, no matter of what type they are, have never proven that their state would be a success, or that it would not have a million times as many defects as our present system. Their empty assertions prove nothing but the empty-mindedness and ignorance of their illogical rank and file. Yes, Socialist, Communist and I. W. W. influence is making itself felt even in the American Federation of Labor. During 1919 many an unauthorized strike took place against the will of the lawful labor leaders. The printers' strike and longshoremen's strikes in New York City are examples. "Red" labor leaders and revolutionary propaganda ruined the cause of the steel strikers. The American Federation of Labor cannot afford to harbor Socialists and members of the I. W. W. It is doomed to shipwreck if it does not rid itself of Marxian agitators. The vast majority of the American people will not tolerate a revolutionary American Federation of Labor any more than they will tolerate a revolutionary I. W. W. If the principles of the American Federation of Labor become radical like those of the I. W. W., the Socialists, Communists and the Bolsheviki, the name "American" and past conservatism will never save our greatest labor organization from ruin. The greater part of the country is rapidly lining up against unreasonable demands made in the name of organized labor, millions of farmers taking the lead. Extreme advantages to city workingmen would spell ruin to the farmers. Millions of others of the middle class in our cities will also soon unite with the farmers, for they are getting tired of the endless and costly series of unreasonable strikes. The Socialists and agents of the I. W. W. have for years been "boring from within" the A. F. of L. In other words, these Marxians, though members of the A. F. of L., are undermining its conservatism, discrediting and seeking to displace its less radical leaders, changing its policy of co-operation between capital and labor into one of class hatred between employee and employer, and attempting to reorganize it along industrial lines, rather than along those of the various craft divisions of each industry, with a view to making strikes more widespread and dangerous for our Government. In a word, they are seeking to turn the A. F. of L. into a second I. W. W., destined to join forces with Haywood's discredited industrial union of rebels. William Z. Foster, national leader of the steel strikers in the fall of 1919, affords us an example of an I. W. W. agent "boring from within" the A. F. of L. Mr. Carl W. Ackerman informs us in the "Boston Evening Transcript," September 24, 1919, that the first appearance of Foster as a radical was in 1910, when, as a reporter for the "Seattle Call," a Socialist paper at that time, he was sent along the Pacific Coast to report a number of so-called free speech fights. "From this," continues Mr. Ackerman, "he appears to have developed into a general agitator. As a result of his tour of the west he joined the I. W. W. and in this capacity he began to advocate sabotage.... "In 1911, while a member of the I. W. W., Foster went to Europe and visited France, Germany and Hungary as a correspondent of 'Solidarity,' the official organ of the I. W. W. in America, at that time published at New Castle, Pa. He wrote many articles for this publication, some of them signed, 'Yours for the I. W. W., W. Z. Foster,' and others, 'Yours for the revolution, W. Z. Foster.'" In a letter written by Foster in 1911 and on file in the office of the United States District Attorney in Chicago, Foster said: "I am satisfied from my observation that the only way for an I. W. W. to have the workers adopt and practice the principles of revolutionary unionism, which I take it is its mission, is to give up the attempt to create a new labor movement, turn itself into a propaganda league, get into the organized labor movement, and by building up better fighting machinery within the old unions than these possessed by our reactionary enemies, revolutionize these unions, even as our French syndicalist fellow-workers have so successfully done." This letter, showing Foster's plan of "boring from within" the A. F. of L., was signed, "Yours for the revolution." As late as 1915 Foster brought out a book entitled, "Trade Unionism, the Road to Freedom." Several excerpts taken from the sixth chapter show the true frame of mind of this leader, who has recently gained such a following in the A. F. of L.: "Under the new order as pictured above, government, such as we know it, would gradually disappear. In an era of science and justice this makeshift institution, having lost its usefulness, would shrivel and die.... "Criminal courts, police, jails and the like would go also. Crime is due almost wholly to poverty. In a reign of plenty for all, it would practically disappear.... People would no longer have to wrangle over property rights. The industries now in the hands of national, state and municipal governments would be given over completely into the care of the workers engaged in them.... With war, crime, class antagonisms and property squabbles obliterated, and the management of industry taken from its care, little or no excuse would exist for government." The November 8, 1919, report of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor, in its investigation of the nation-wide steel strike, commented as follows on Foster: "Such men are dangerous to the country and they are dangerous to the cause of union labor. It is unfair to men who may be struggling for their rights to be represented by such leaders. It prevents them from securing proper hearing for their cause. If Mr. Foster has the real interest of the laboring man at heart he should remove himself from any leadership. His leadership injures instead of helping. If he will not remove himself from leadership the American Federation of Labor should purge itself of such leadership in order to sustain the confidence which the country has had in it under the leadership of Mr. Gompers." CHAPTER XXIII ENLISTING RECRUITS FOR THE CONSPIRACY The success or failure of the Marxian movement will, to a great extent, depend upon the ability of the revolutionists to gain control of the schools, colleges and universities of the United States. That they have been long active in spreading their pernicious doctrines among the young is evident to all who are closely in touch with Socialist activities. In our country there exist what are known as Socialist Sunday schools. The revolutionists themselves tell us that the aim and purpose of these schools is the destructive work of tearing down old superstitious ideas of territorial patriotism, and that such schools should be founded in as many places as possible, to counteract the influences of churches, synagogues and public schools. Page 68 of the "Proceedings of the 1910 National Congress of the Socialist Party," clearly indicates the exceptional importance which Marxians attach to their training of the young: "Among the special fields of Socialistic propaganda the education of our boys and girls to an understanding of the Socialist philosophy is one of the most important. The ultimate battles of Socialism will largely be fought by the growing generation, and we must begin early to train the latter for its part. The Socialists of Europe have long appreciated the importance of the task, and in almost every country they have built up a strong organization of young people. The Socialists of America are just beginning to turn their attention to the problem.... "The teaching of infants is a task which requires a good deal of professional training, and no Socialist 'Sunday schools' for very young children should be established where we do not have experienced and reliable teachers to conduct them.... "It is quite otherwise with children of the maturer age of, say, fourteen years and upward. Young people of that age normally possess sufficient strength of mind to grasp the main philosophy and aims of our movement intelligently, and their training into the Socialist mode of thought and action cannot be conducted with too much zeal and energy. Young people's clubs, societies for the study of Socialism should be formed all over the country as regular adjuncts to our party organization, and very serious consideration should be given to them by the adult Socialists. But they should remain primarily study clubs, and should not be encouraged to engage in practical political activity, which can do but little good to our movement, and may tend to arrest the intelligent growth of the youthful enthusiasts. When they will reach a maturer age they will be better and more efficient workers in the movement for having made a more thorough study of its theory and methods." "The Call," New York, March 30, 1913, commenting on teaching Socialism to the young, adds: "Up to the present time only men vote in most of the states, and they do not use the ballot until they are 21 years of age. It stands to reason that for the intelligent use of the ballot there must be proper preparation and education. We cannot expect people to vote right unless they are trained right.... "If you want or expect men and women to be good and intelligent voters at the age of 21, then something most vital must be done with them before they reach that age. From 5 to 21, that's a long road. That's the impressionable period. That's the time at which the people are prepared to become good Socialists or good opponents of Socialism. And the latter quite as readily as the former.... "Catch them young! That's it. But how? In lots of ways. Get them coming our way. Let them lose their fear of us. Have them come to a dance and find out that we are human. It surprises them sometimes. When they realize that, they are partly won. "Educating the young to Socialism is a matter of 'indirect' action rather than 'direct' action. It would be the height of folly to try to cram Karl Marx down these new young throats. That will come in time. Start them on something easier, something less drastic. Sugar coat your bitter pills a little." It is possible, in conformity with this last suggestion, that after the parade of Socialist children of New York City, on May Day, 1913, they were to be treated, as we are informed in "The Call" on the same day, to a feast of ice cream and cake and a series of thrilling moving pictures of the struggles between the police and the strikers at Lawrence and Little Falls. With this short diversion, we shall return to the article in "The Call" of March 30, 1913, which goes on to say that "the young people should be gradually educated to rebellion and revolution. Songs will help. Plays will help. Casual talk here and there will aid. It must soak in. You can't flood them with stuff in two days. Rebels that are made in two days may stick in a crisis, but I don't believe they will." It certainly is interesting to read "Lesson 24," taken from the "Socialist Primer," a little book which a man named Klein has prepared for the use of children attending the Socialist Sunday schools: "Here is a man with a gun; he is in the troop. You see he has a nice suit on. Does he work? No, the man with the gun does no work. His work is to shoot men who do work. Is it nice to shoot men? Would you like to shoot a man? This man eats, drinks, wears clothes, but does no work. Do you think that is nice? Yes, this is nice for the fat man, but bad for the thin; so he owns the man with the gun. When the thin man will have the law on his side, there will be no more men with guns. Who makes the gun? The man who works. Who makes the nice suit? The man who works. Who gets shot with the gun? The man who works. Who gets the bad clothes? The man who works. Is this right? No, this is wrong!" In "The Call," New York, April 17, 1919, there appeared the following advertisement of a coming entertainment to be given by a Socialist Sunday school of the Brownsville section of Brooklyn: "Sunday School Gives Concert in Brownsville "The annual entertainment and concert of the Brownsville Socialist Sunday school will take place tomorrow evening at the Brownsville Labor Lyceum. The capitalist press has lately discovered that there are Socialist Sunday schools in the city. They even send their reporters to discover what awful things Socialist children are taught there. The American Defence Society has just undertaken a vigorous nation-wide fight against Bolshevism in general and Socialist Sunday schools in particular. All school children and the parochial schools are to be enlisted in this glorious work. The Protestant churches, not to be outdone, are also organizing to save the children from Socialism. The growth of the Socialist schools is throwing fear into the hearts of the capitalists. Brownsville parents can do no better than to help make this school, now one of the largest in the country, even better and stronger than it is. A splendid musical program has been arranged and, in addition, the children will sing, dance and recite. Tickets may be bought at the Lyceum." Every parent will understand the subtle, insidious poison of rebellion against parental authority and guidance instilled into young minds by such items as the following, from the "New York Call" of July 16, 1919: "Independence is one of the finest qualities of youth. In an inspiring postal card to her mother (copies of which might well be put into the hands of young children everywhere), Hilda Stydocker, 14, of 3 Washington Avenue, West Orange, states that she is going to 'earn her own living and take care of herself.' Previously gossip had been circulated to the effect that Hilda had been kidnapped." In a previous issue of "The Call," April 4, 1919, part of a speech given by H. B. Shaen, president of the Brooklyn Sunday School Union, is quoted: "It is a question of great moment," President Shaen said yesterday. "It must be dealt with drastically, effectively and immediately. Bolshevism is a greater menace than we like to believe. The proposed establishment of 3,000 so-called Socialist schools in this city will be a blow at religion, at government, at decency. It might be a fatal error to underestimate the pernicious influence of this organization that seeks to sow disquieting seeds by deceiving young America with false beliefs." Mr. Woodworth Clum, of the Greater Iowa Association, in volume 4, number 1, of "The Iowa Magazine," gives the following shocking account of Socialistic propaganda among school children carried on in the northwest by Townley's Non-Partisan League: "The Non-Partisan League, under direction of Townley and Le Seur, has taken possession of the schools of North Dakota--and may get control of the schools of Minnesota.... Radical doctrines are becoming part of the regular curricula. I have a statement from O. B. Burtness, representative in the North Dakota Legislature from Grand Forks. Here it is: "'The board of administration has placed in charge of the state library, to select the reading for our schools, C. E. Strangeland. He is telling our school children what to read. I found in our state library, the other day, a bundle of books, all ready to be sent to one of our country schools--a circulating library. If the farmers of North Dakota could have seen what I saw, they would have come to Bismarck and cleaned out the whole Socialist gang. Here are the titles of some of those books I saw: "'"Socialism and Modern Science," Ferri. "'"Evolution and Property," La Farge. "'"Not Guilty," Blatchford. "'"Love and Marriage," Ellen Key. "'"Love and Ethics," Ellen Key. "'"The Bolshevik and World Peace," Leon Trotzky. "'"The History of the Supreme Court," Meyers. "'"The Profits of Religion," Sinclair. "'"Anarchism and Socialism," Harris.' "Ellen Key is a pronounced advocate of free-love and the dissolution of marriage." In high schools, especially those of New York City, many teachers have been using every opportunity for advocating Socialism and other radical doctrines in the classroom and out of it. Students, in order to win favor with some of these teachers, at times show zeal for Socialistic tenets both in oral and written composition. Quite a number of the teachers are Socialists themselves, have become known as such throughout the schools and use their influence to win over others. Many books given by these teachers for outside reading are by Socialist or radical authors. On the editorial page of "The New York Times," April 9, 1919, there is an article against the "Teachers' Union," a Socialist and radical organization of many of the teachers of New York City. Under the title, "Forbidden to Preach Sedition," we read: "There will be, presumably, much excited denunciation of the Board of Education for closing the public schools to meetings of the Teachers' Union. The familiar complaints about infringing the right of free speech will be heard, and--well, the complaints will be as ill-based as they usually are. "In the first place, while speech is free in this country, it is not, any more than it is or can be, anywhere, free to the extent that anybody is free to say anything at any time and any place. Restrictions of several kinds there are and must be, including those by which decency and the safety of our institutions are protected. On the other hand, the members of the Teachers' Union have not been reduced--as yet--to silence. They have simply been told that they cannot use the city's property in the campaign which they have undertaken against an important branch of the City Government. They are still privileged to hire as many halls as they please in which to accuse the Board of Education of tyranny, and to protest against the enforcement of discipline against teachers with a leaning toward Bolshevism, and a tendency to mingle Socialistic and pro-German propaganda with instruction in the three R's. "In this instance, as in so many others, the use of schoolhouses for meetings of adults with opinions to express and doctrines to preach has resulted unhappily. The adults who gather seem always, or almost always, to be, not average, well-disposed citizens, but a more or less incendiary minority who want to change things--and to change them a lot and very quickly. That aspiration is not wholly indefensible, for a good many things would be the better for changing, but real light and leading have not often been found on top at meetings in schoolhouses, and experience has proved that the Teachers' Union has neither to offer." The following is from the "New York World" of November 20, 1919: "Fifteen teachers in city schools will appear before Deputy Attorney General Berger tomorrow afternoon to be questioned to determine if they are dangerous radicals. Examination of the records of the Communist Party seized in recent raids has resulted in evidence indicating that each of the teachers is a member of that organization.... "Superintendent of Schools Ettinger revoked the license, yesterday, of Sonia Ginsberg, a teacher in School No. 170 in Brooklyn, who admitted she would like to see the United States Government displaced by one similar to the Bolshevist regime in Russia. Miss Ginsberg, born in Russia, was naturalized as a citizen last June." For many years the Intercollegiate Socialist Society has been winning college and university students to the doctrines of the Social Revolution through the medium of the various branches that it establishes in such institutions. The Intercollegiate Socialist Society sometime ago had, in the different colleges and universities of our country, between 60 and 70 chapters, or Socialist local societies, with Socialist libraries, and lecturers in frequent attendance. Every year chapter-delegates are sent to an intercollegiate convention from nearly all the important American universities, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Barnard, Amherst, Brown, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Kansas, Missouri, and Chicago. Even Vassar, which had 86 members in the first year in which the Intercollegiate was organized, is included in the long list. Harry W. Laidler, organizer of the Socialist chapters and secretary of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, claims that all the universities now throw open their large assembly rooms for addresses by the visiting lecturers, give quarters in the college buildings to the Socialist chapters, and permit the use of the college publications in the dissemination of propagandist literature, if it is written by bona fide students. We shall reproduce a letter which shows what is going on in our colleges and universities. The identification of the writer, person addressed, and others mentioned in the letter, is made on the authority of Mr. Woodworth Clum, of the Greater Iowa Association, Davenport, Iowa. The letter was written July 29, 1919, by Arthur W. Calhoun, then instructor in sociology and political economy at Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. It was written to Professor Zeuch, then instructor at the University of Minnesota, now an instructor at Cornell University. "Gras," mentioned in the letter, is Professor N. S. B. Gras, a member of the Faculty of the University of Minnesota. The letter also mentions E. C. Hayes, who is professor of sociology at the University of Illinois, President Grose of DePauw University, Greencastle, Indiana, and E. A. Ross, professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin and Advisory Editor of the American Journal of Sociology. The "Beals" mentioned in the letter, says Mr. Clum, "was formerly a university professor and old friend of Calhoun's. He is now openly advocating Bolshevism." Toward the end of the letter, Calhoun says: "Greencastle is too small to do much with the co-op." This "co-op" is the Tri-State Co-operative Society of Pittsburg, and, says Mr. Clum, "the society's business is the production and distribution of vicious 'red' propaganda." Calhoun is or was one of its directors. The letter, copied from a fac-simile of the original in volume 4, number 1, of "The Iowa Magazine," Davenport, Iowa, is as follows: "55 E. Norwich Av., Columbus, O., _July 29._ "Dear Zeuch:-- "I think I accept all you say about the condition of the proletariat and the impossibility of the immediate revolution. But I am less interested in the verbiage of the Left Wing than in the idea of keeping ultimates everlastingly in the center of attention to the exclusion of mere puttering reforms. One of the things that will hasten the revolution is to spread the notion that it _can_ come soon. If the Left Wing adopts impossibilist methods of campaign, I shall stand aloof, but if they push for Confiscation, Equality of Economic Status, and the speedy elimination of class privilege, and keep their heads, I shall go with them rather than the yellows. "If Gras is doing what he says and I am doing what he says, he is right in saying that he is doing the better job. I wonder, however, how many of his students draw the 'necessary' conclusions: and I wonder whether I do all my students' thinking for them. "Ellery is feeling at Columbus and also at Illinois. I had a letter from Hayes about him. "I have accepted the professorship of Sociology at De Pauw University. The job pays $2200 this year with assurance of $2400 if I stay a second year. The president has been here three times and had long interviews with me. Besides we have written a lot. I told him I belong to the radical Socialists. I expounded my general principles on all important points. He knows also of the circumstances of my leaving Clark and Kentucky. He says he is in substantial agreement with most of what I have said and that he sees no reason why I can not get along at De Pauw. He says he feels confident it will be a permanency. Ross had some hand in the game. Pres. Grose interviewed him at Madison last week and Ross wrote encouraging me to take the place. I did not make any great effort. Grose knew that I did not care much one way or the other. He took the initiative almost from the start and I sat back and waited. I'm afraid Greencastle is too small to do much with the co-op. Population 4000, 30 miles north of Bloomington. 800 students, mostly in college, a few in School of Music, a few graduate students. Hudson is prof. of Ec. there. "Beals was here last week. He is pushing the 'Nation.' Says the circulation has quadrupled since they became Bolshevist. "As ever, "AWC" The Rand School, in New York City, is known as the University of Socialism and is said to have had 5,000 attending its lectures in the year 1918. The purpose of the school, as originally conceived, and as adhered to throughout, is twofold, first, to offer to the general public facilities for the study of Socialism and related subjects. This is done by its reference library and reading-room and by its large book store, in which are sold not only Socialist books, but books on atheism as well; not only the more conservative Socialist papers, but ultra revolutionary papers such as "The Revolutionary Age," "The Proletarian," many Bolshevist publications, and "The Rebel Worker" and "The New Solidarity," the latter two being I. W. W. papers. The last time the author of "The Red Conspiracy" visited the Rand School book store, there was on sale a pile of Birth Control Reviews several feet high, "The One Big Union Monthly," the I. W. W. organ, and enough foul and revolutionary matter to satisfy the filthiest or most blood-thirsty wretch in the United States. The second purpose of the Rand School is to offer to Socialists such instruction and training as may make them more efficient workers for the Socialist movement. This is done by means of lectures, some 5,000 students attending, on an average, 20 lectures each in the year 1918. The school also directs extension classes in outlying parts of the city and neighboring places and correspondence courses for study classes and individual students in all parts of the country. It conducts a bureau to provide lectures on Socialism for clubs, trade unions, forums and other organizations not otherwise connected with the school. For years this school, which was raided under the direction of the Lusk Committee, has been sowing the seeds of class hatred and class discrimination, now everywhere springing up round about us. The laws have been too tolerant, and it has been permitted to go on without interference far too long. In referring to documents seized in the raids in the summer of 1919, Deputy Attorney General Conklin said that the papers "are so carefully and cleverly phrased" that no single sentence can be picked out as in violation of the law. "Yet," he adds, "taken as a whole, the documents are seditious, in my opinion." They were made a matter of record, awaiting the disposition of the District Attorney of New York. These facts speak for themselves. It scarcely need be said that unless this propaganda is checked, the power and strength of the Socialist Party will soon assume tremendous proportions, imperilling the existence of our nation. Another field of work to which the enemies of our country have been devoting special attention is the propagation of revolutionary doctrines among the non-English speaking residents of the United States. Page 69 of the "Proceedings of the 1910 National Congress of the Socialist Party" informs us that "the American people are, after all, a nation of immigrants. We count our Americanism by a very few generations, and the foreign population has always played an important part in the industrial and political life of the country. At this time there are over ten million foreign born persons in the United States. Most of them are workers, and most of them still speak, write and read in their native tongues. "The powers of capital, through their political and so-called educational agencies, and often with the aid of the churches, are constantly at work prejudicing them against Socialism and arraying them against organized labor. "The Socialists must make energetic efforts to counteract these baneful influences and to reach the foreign workers with their propaganda. "The Socialist Party has branch organizations among all, or almost all, of these nationalities, and a few of these organizations have reached a high degree of strength and a large measure of influence among the people of their nationalities.... "These organizations work under conditions different from those of the party as a whole. In each case they deal with a special type of persons, of a psychology and of economic conditions peculiarly their own, and they are the most competent judges of the methods of propaganda best suitable to their own countrymen. The party should allow such non-English speaking organizations the greatest freedom of action, and should assist them in every way in their special work of Socialist propaganda." It may interest the reader to learn that the Socialist Party is so much concerned with its propaganda among foreigners, that in its 1913 May Day parade in New York City pink leaflets headed "WOMEN, BECOME CITIZENS," were distributed. They read: "If you hope to be a voter, remember that you must be a citizen! Don't delay! Come to the NATURALIZATION BUREAU of the SOCIALIST PARTY next Tuesday evening, and let us help you to become naturalized." It was, of course, an understood fact that the Socialist Party would, besides helping such women to become naturalized, also help them to become Revolutionists. On May 18, 1912, May Wood-Simons reported to the National Convention of the Socialist Party the recommendations of the Woman's National Committee, urging the carrying of the propaganda of Socialism to the housewife, the woman on the farm, to teachers, foreign speaking women and women in industry. ("The Call," New York, May 19, 1912.) Though the zeal of the national foe in its propaganda of revolutionary principles is manifested in many other ways, only a few more illustrations will be given. Many thousands of copies of the "Appeal to Reason," when it was the foremost American Socialist paper, found their way into the camps and upon the battleships of our country. At the Socialist National Convention of 1912, held in Indianapolis, Delegate Kate Sadler pointed out how Socialist locals had been organized on various battleships in the navy and how she was accustomed to hold meetings on Sunday afternoons on the men-of-war at the navy yard, Bremerton, Washington. "We'll get the boys organized into the Socialist Party," she declared, and the Socialist Convention voted to adopt the resolution. ("The Call," New York, May 17, 1912.) During recent years no one who has carefully read the public press could have failed to notice that the Socialists have been carrying on an active campaign of lies and deceptions in the form of letters which they have sent to the editors of the daily papers, with the request that the same be published for the enlightenment of the public regarding the general excellency of the Socialist movement. In "The Call," New York, March 23, 1913, it is said that "the man or woman who can convey the message of Socialism through speaking is fortunate, and when it can be done through speaking and writing, the Comrade is doubly lucky. But Ryan Walker can do it through speaking and writing and the cartoon that makes you laugh or makes you mad.... The cartoons that Walker has been putting over in 'The Call,' 'The Coming Nation' and the 'Appeal to Reason' have been copied in Socialist papers all over the world, in England, Scotland, Germany, Australia, and they are doing their work in these countries the same as they do it here. The Socialist cartoonists have been accomplishing some of the biggest propaganda work that is done by any one of our active members, and while they are getting the laugh on capitalism, and getting the laugh on the fool workingman, they are arousing the worker to cast aside his foolishness, and at the same time cast aside the foolishness of the capitalist. Getting the laugh on the capitalist, showing how ridiculous and weak he is, is a great preliminary to getting rid of him." The Socialists are inspired with such an ardent desire for the success of their movement, that they have written theatrical plays and have even had moving picture films made, so that by representing in a most vivid manner the evils and abuses of our day, they may persuade the unwary that Socialism would mean the absence of sufferings and wrongs of every description. We elsewhere have called attention to I. W. W. effort to organize the negroes of America. The work of making rebels of the negroes is also carried on assiduously by the Socialist Party of America. Says "The National Civic Federation Review," July 30, 1919: "Among the propaganda material found on sale by agents of the Lusk Committee in the Rand School book store were copies of 'The Messenger,' on the front page of which it is called, 'The Only Radical Negro Magazine in America,' of which Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph are editors.... "Both of the editors of this magazine, who are negroes, are instructors at the Rand School of Social Science." In "The Open Forum" of the September, 1919, issue of "The Messenger" three letters are given as follows: "Dear Comrade Owen: "I enclose a check for $25.00 as a contribution to the organization fund being raised by 'The Messenger.' I know of no more important and vital work in the field of American Socialism and Labor today than the effort of your group to incorporate the large masses of Negro workers in the ranks of the advanced and class-conscious white workers in the industrial and political fields. "My heartiest wishes for the success of your movement. "Sincerely and fraternally yours, "Morris Hillquit." "To the Editors of 'The Messenger': "Dear Comrades.--The work which you are doing is vital. Your people constitute more than a tenth of the total population of the United States. We are all native born Americans. If there is to be progress made, particularly in the great Southland, by the Socialist Movement, it must be made by and through colored people. Enclosed is my check for Five Dollars, for the first share of stock in 'The Messenger.' With it goes my heart good wishes for the success of your work. "Yours truly, "Scott Nearing." "Dear Sir and Brother: "Enclosed please find check for the amount of $100.00 in reply to the appeal presented by you at the last meeting of our Board of Directors for support to enable you to continue the noble work you have undertaken to enlighten the colored worker in this country upon his being exploited by the master class. "We wish you success in the work you are conducting on this field and you can rely upon the assurance of our organization for all possible assistance in the future. "Fraternally yours, "P. Monat." In view of the frightful character of the very active propaganda that is being carried on by the enemies of our country, does it not behoove every loyal and patriotic American to rise in his power and wipe out the Red plague that is rapidly disseminating its destructive germs throughout the United States? CHAPTER XXIV EXPERTS IN THE ART OF DECEPTION It remains to be shown that the rapid spread of Socialism, besides being due to the extraordinary zeal of the Revolutionists, is largely the result of artful deception. The Marxians, who are fond of being called "scientific" Socialists, may very aptly be compared to little boys who might try to prove to their teacher that the solution of a certain problem in mathematics was correct, because that of another problem of an entirely different nature was wrong. Or, better still, they may be likened to an egg dealer who would attempt to prove to a customer that every egg in one crate was good, because a few in another were unfit for use. The appropriateness of comparing the "scientific" Socialists to the amusing youngsters, or to the illogical egg dealer, will be evident to the reader when he reflects that the revolutionists, north, south, east and west, from the first day of January till the last of December, condemn the present system of government and industry, endeavoring thereby to persuade the people that Socialism is the only remedy for the evils from which they are suffering. Most of the speeches and writings of the "Knights of the Red Flag" consist in severely criticising prevalent evils. By attacking the present system of government and industry they hope to have the workingmen conclude that the Socialist Party alone can save mankind from complete ruin. This, then, is the way in which "scientific" Socialism leads unreflecting laborers to believe that the contemplated state would be the most perfect institution under heaven, replete with countless blessings and free from every evil. It often happens that the revolutionists dazzle the eyes of the weary with the vivid pictures that they draw of intolerable civil and economic conditions, whether these be true, false or imaginary. The result is that the poor people frequently brood over the wrongs from which they happen to be suffering. They become so thoroughly discontented and blinded with class hatred that they are no longer able to see the advantage of reforming the present system by constitutional and lawful methods. Finally, when they have almost lost their reason and can no longer realize that the drug offered them has never been proven capable of remedying the evils that weigh heavily upon them, they accept and swallow the poisonous dose of Socialism and become a thousand times more wretched than they were before. The very potion they drink, with a view to being cured, makes them most unhappy for the rest of their lives, and in many cases for all eternity. If there is anything that non-Socialists should be on their guard against it is this base form of tactics by which the revolutionists have been eminently successful in gaining new recruits. If those whose party emblem is a flaming torch could even prove that everything without exception in the present system of industry is worthy of condemnation, and that the entire government is corrupt to its very core, it would no more follow from this that Socialism was the remedy than it would follow that the solution of one problem in mathematics must be correct because another solution of an entirely different nature was wrong, or that all the eggs in one crate must be good because there were some in a second crate unfit for use. It is very common for Socialists to assume that certain fundamental principles have been proven to be true, whereas the fact is that these very premises, from which they draw their conclusions, are often false and without the slightest foundation. An excellent illustration of this has already been given in preceding pages, where it was shown that the Socialists incorrectly assumed that there would be no poverty in their state, and argued from this that there would be very little prostitution. It is evident, therefore, that unless those who listen to the Marxians are on their guard and demand that the premises be proven the Socialists may deduce from incorrect premises conclusions which will make it appear that their intended state will bestow heaven's choicest blessings upon mankind. Though examples of deceit have already been given, the attention of the reader will be called to the testimony of no less an authority than Eugene V. Debs, who in the following article, published in the "International Socialist Review," Chicago, January, 1911, will be seen to substantiate our charge: "The truth is that we have not a few members who regard vote getting as a supreme importance, no matter by what methods the votes may be secured, and this leads them to hold out inducements, and make representations which are not at all compatible with the stern and uncomprising principles of a revolutionary party. They seek to make the Socialist propaganda so attractive--eliminating whatever may give offence--to bourgeois sensibilities--that it serves as a bait for votes, rather than as a means for education, and votes thus secured do not properly belong to us." It is not unfrequently that we hear Socialists appealing to this or that plank of their party platform as proof sufficient that their organization favors or opposes a certain policy. An argument of this sort should have very little weight with careful thinking men, once their attention has been called to the fact that the Socialists have been proven guilty of a base lie by stating in their 1908 platform that the party is not concerned with matters of religious belief. But even if the revolutionists had never inserted in their platform a statement that was untrue, nevertheless the following facts show that their platform planks are very far from being reliable. The delegates of the party assembled in national convention on May 15, 1908, by a vote of 102 to 33 passed a plank declaring for the _collective ownership of all the land_. ("Proceedings of 1908 National Convention of the Socialist Party," page 186.) It was on September 7, 1909, less than a year and four months after the adjournment of the convention of 1908, that the words declaring for the _collective ownership of all the land_ were, by a referendum, _stricken from the party platform_, while by another referendum it was decided to insert among the principles of the platform that the party was _not opposed to the occupation and possession of land by those using it in a useful and bona fide manner without exploitation_. ("Proceedings of the 1910 National Congress of the Socialist Party," page 25.) About eight months after the adoption of this substitute plank, a bitter contest concerning the ownership of "all" the land took place in the National Congress of the party, which was held in Chicago from May 15, 1910, till May 21, 1910. ("Proceedings of the 1910 National Congress of the Socialist Party," pages 220 to 235.) Thus, during the 1910 Congress, notwithstanding the fact that there existed at that time a plank in the party platform guaranteeing the possession of land to persons who would use it in a bona fide manner, _the representatives of the party in national congress assembled, being unable to decide whether or not it was to the best interests of the party to abide by this plank, referred the matter to the next convention_. ("Proceedings of 1908 National Convention of the Socialist Party," page 235.) Then, when the 1912 Convention met, it made another change, and declared for _the collective ownership of land wherever practicable_. ("The 1912 Platform of the Socialist Party"--Cf. "The Call," May 19, 1912.) In addition to this, it stated that _occupancy and use shall be the sole title to land_. ("The 1912 Platform of the Socialist Party"--Cf. "The Call," May 19, 1912.) It is noteworthy that the Convention of 1908 had previously voted down this proposition to make occupancy and use the sole title to land, after the proposition had been denounced as being anarchistic, unsocialistic, nonsensical, foolish, and a dream ("Proceedings of 1908 National Convention of the Socialist Party," pages 188, 189 and 191.) One of the foremost opponents of the proposition was Delegate Morris Hillquit, who asked: "What does the amendment mean? Occupancy and use the basis of title to land. How do we know whether the co-operative commonwealth will infer and arrange it in that way? Aren't we taking a long excursion into the domain of the future and into the domain of speculation? It may be true that the dream of the dreamer may become a reality, if this dream is the dream of the nation. But we have not come here to dream dreams and leave it to the future to realize them or to show them to be just mere pipe dreams.... The Socialist state may just as well decide on an entirely different basis for the distribution of land. It may not at all be bound to our resolution here today that occupation forms a title." ("Proceedings of 1908 National Convention of the Socialist Party," page 189.) When the Marxians are brought face to face with the charge of adopting a program today, rejecting it tomorrow, hesitating about it on the next day and compromising it on the fourth, as they did in respect to the collective ownership of "all" the land, let them not argue that such changes are to be expected in the evolution of Socialism. They should be forced to confess that they acted in such a way solely to gain votes. Confront them with the speeches delivered in their National Convention of 1908 and in their National Congress of 1910, both by the delegates who advocated the collective ownership of "all" the land and by those who opposed it. For the convenience of the reader passages from some of these speeches will now be given: Delegate Cannon of Arizona: "I contend that the public ownership of all machinery and land is one of the things for which the Socialist Party is working. If some of the Comrades get up and tell us in Germany they are not working for that, I move that we inform the German Comrades that they are behind the times. The idea of not including the land is nothing more or less than political expediency." ("Proceedings of 1908 National Convention of the Socialist Party," page 175.) Delegate Payne of Texas: "I want to know if this convention of this movement which we call the great revolutionary movement is going to go down in history as catering to a small middle class of land owners, or are you going to stand for the great proletarian farming class?" ("Proceedings of 1908 National Convention on the Socialist Party," page 181.) Delegate Morrison of Arizona: "Is it possible that we have so far forgotten ourselves, that we will attempt to curry favor with a few capitalist farmers? Why is this resolution here? What is the object of it? What is the purpose of it? Is it to secure votes? Do you hope to deceive some one as to the actual, real program of scientific Socialism? Or are you, in other words, going to lie to the farmers of this country in order to secure their suffrage? Are you going to present something to them that you know is not contained in the Socialist program? Can you afford, as representatives of this great revolutionary party, to do that which in a few years you will be ashamed of? I say no." ("Proceedings of 1908 National Convention of the Socialist Party," page 184.) Delegate Goaziou of Pennsylvania: "I know we have in this country a growing movement among Socialists who are wanting votes no matter how they will get them. They are willing to put in appeals to the farmers, appeals to the middle class and appeals to everybody, so that they can get votes." ("Proceedings of 1908 National Convention of the Socialist Party," page 209.) Delegate Thompson of Wisconsin: "We know that there is a very large portion of votes of this country on the farm, under agricultural conditions and environment, over forty per cent. Less than thirty per cent of the votes of this country are under industrial conditions. When we get to the point where we want to do something, we must have some way or other of getting these two forces welded together. We can never win out with thirty per cent of the vote. We will have to have at least a substantial majority, and that we cannot have without the farmers." ("Proceedings of 1908 National Convention of the Socialist Party," page 185.) Delegate Victor Berger of Wisconsin: "We cannot have Socialism in this country, if we don't get the farmers in some way. If you try to take away the farms of twelve millions of farmers of this country, you will have a big job on your hands. You might as well try to reach down the moon.... You remember how much effort and how many men it cost England to conquer 30,000 farmers, Boers--Boers, mind you--and now try to take the farms from these 12,000,000 American farmers and you will have about a million times harder job. Besides, they don't need to fight. All they have to do is to stop bringing food to Chicago for six weeks, and Comrade Morgan and the rest of Chicago would be knocked out." ("Proceedings of the 1910 National Congress of the Socialist Party," page 230.) Delegate Simmons of Illinois: "There is just one thing on earth that I will toady to and that is a fact. And when I meet a fact so big as the farmer question in America, a fact that has in it the future of 12,000,000 of people of the producing classes, without whom we stand no more chance of a Socialist victory in this country than we do of changing the orbit of a comet, and when I face a fact as big as that, I don't try to stand in front of it, and howl empty phrases, in the hope that the fact will get out of the way." ("Proceedings of the 1910 National Congress of the Socialist Party," page 231.) Since the revolutionists, to win votes, frequently point to the reforms they have proposed or in some cases accomplished, we should all be on our guard lest, being allured by these reforms, we be led into the Socialist camp, and later on suffer the dreadful evils that have been shown would result from the adoption of the Marxian system of government. Those who vote the Socialist ticket insist on calling the attention of non-Socialists to the immediate demands enumerated in their party platform, many of which are excellent. Workingmen, however, should remember, first, that many of them are only meant for the time our present Government is still in power; moreover, that a crime-ridden, anarchical and bankrupt state could not grant them, and, furthermore, that there is no reason why our Government, in its present form, could not grant all the Marxian demands that are really advantageous. The Socialists often argue from some successful results in government ownership of public utilities to the success of Socialism itself. Though it cannot be denied that government ownership of public utilities has in some instances been a success, still anti-Socialists can just as well argue the failure of Socialism from failures in government ownership, which are entirely too numerous to require comment. If in the future it should become evident that great benefits would accrue from the national, state, or municipal ownership of certain public utilities, which are now privately owned, our present form of government, without becoming Socialistic, could take them over, just as many of our cities have already taken over water, gas and power plants. But the number would have to be limited, for it has already been shown in Chapter XVII what terrible consequences would follow from adopting the scheme of Socialism, whereby the people would collectively own and manage all the principle means of production, transportation and communication. Public ownership on such a large scale, so as to conform with the plans of the revolutionists, implies that the vast majority of workingmen would be government employees. The result, as has been shown, would be a terrible reign of discontent, strife, crime, revolution and chaos; whereas the prudent purchase of a small number of public utilities, under the present system of government, would entail none of these evils, since most workingmen could refuse positions that they did not care for or where the wages would not satisfy them, and do this without injuring the government. The Socialists, especially when they appeal to the less educated, frequently argue that since their party platform says nothing concerning the teaching of a certain doctrine, for instance free-love, it is evident that the party does not advocate it. Such a method of reasoning is, of course, absurd and utterly unworthy of men who style themselves scientific; for by arguing in exactly the same way, it would follow that their flag is not the red flag because there is no plank in their party platform stating that it is. Although many Socialists have written an abundance of anti-religious literature, other members of the party have composed books, pamphlets and articles that in no way attack the church. Some of the revolutionists, in their endeavors to make their movement attractive to Christians, go so far as to claim that even Christ was a Socialist. Since, therefore, the enemies of our country have at their disposal writings which attack religion, as well as those that are in no way hostile to it, they are well able to supply with attractive reading matter not only atheists who are opposed to all forms of religion, but Christians, no matter to what denomination they may chance to belong. In like manner there are to be found within the Socialist Party writers who advocate free-love and others who are opposed to its propagation, either through a personal repugnance to legalized sin, or else because they think that by teaching loose morals the party would alienate many prospective members. Hence, the Socialists can satisfy the depraved by recommending to them the different works on free-love, and at the same time they can give satisfaction to those who are opposed to the base doctrine by referring them to books which not only do not advocate it but even condemn it in the most emphatic way. In this double-dealing party there is a very strong faction whose members advocate direct action, in other words, violence, as a means for bringing about the downfall of our Government and of the entire industrial system. Opposed to these men, who are frequently termed the "Reds," there is a rapidly disappearing faction of so-called "Yellows," who rely upon the use of the ballot, and decry direct action, either through personal repugnance to violence, or, as seems most likely, because they deem peaceful methods more prolific of votes, and consequently of future political advantage to themselves. The direct actionists by their inflammatory speeches and writings are especially successful in gaining recruits from among the more disorderly elements of society, whereas the political actionists appeal rather to those persons who are opposed to the destruction of life and property. It is by no means uncommon for the revolutionists to avoid as far as possible the discussion of knotty problems relative to the working details of their contemplated state. They often do this by telling us that the people of the future will be the ones to solve the problem in question. In illustration two examples will be given, the first of which is taken from the "Appeal to Reason," January 6, 1912: "Do Socialists think all men should be paid alike--the man with the pick the same wages as the lawyer or doctor?" "Socialists differ on this proposition. Whatever a majority of the people may decide will prevail." Again we read, in the April 6, 1912, edition of the same paper: "Will producers get paid for the number of hours worked, or for the amount of production?" "No one knows just how the returns will be regulated, for the reason that they are to be regulated according to the will of the whole people and not according to the scheme of the 'Appeal to Reason.' It is possible that both methods may be tried, and the best prevail." A subterfuge that often meets with success, and which for this very reason is a favorite one among the revolutionists when they are on the point of being defeated in an argument, consists in this, that they do their best to dodge the question at issue by leading their opponents off on some side topic, such as the evils and abuses of the present day. Every anti-Socialist ought, therefore, to be on his guard, and as soon as he notices the national enemy trying to draw him off on a tangent, he should steadfastly refuse to take up the new line of argumentation, but should compel the evader to stick to the question at issue. It happens, too, and not unfrequently, that in the course of a dispute, when a Socialist is being defeated, he will ask the non-Socialist to prove that the present system is superior to that which is pictured in such beautiful colors by the followers of Karl Marx. Now, in the first place, the burden of proof rests with the Socialist, for if he wishes to lead another into his camp, it is his task to prove to him that everything there is congenial and attractive. The non-Socialist would indeed act very imprudently if he should attempt to prove that the present system offers more attractions than the Socialist Utopia whose perfections exist only in the imaginations of the revolutionists. What he might do, however, would be to show that the present system of government and industry, even in its unreformed state, is far superior to the condition of affairs that would actually exist if our constitutional government should ever have to give way to the regime of the revolutionists. On reading Socialist literature or listening to the speeches of the revolutionists one is impressed with all the wonderful benefits that the party proposes to confer upon our citizens if it should ever rule the land. Of course very many of the proposals are made solely on the authority of the speaker or writer. But even if they have the approval of the Party, we must not forget that it is one thing to propose to grant a favor and quite another thing actually to grant it. There are lots of things that men say they propose to do, without ever intending to do them. And it frequently happens that after having had the best intentions, they change their minds or else are utterly unable to carry out their plans. Karl Marx about half a century ago taught the absurd doctrine that as all wealth is produced by labor, to the laborers all wealth is due. He held, on the one hand, that all the profits arising from the sale of goods should accrue to the workingmen in virtue of the labor required for their production, and, on the other, that the capitalists who had not performed any work should not be entitled to a share in the profits. This old doctrine, unreasonable as it is, is still taught at the present day not only by European Socialists but also by the revolutionists of our own country. During the May Day parade in New York City on May 1, 1912, when some 50,000 men marched behind red flags, great numbers of leaflets, entitled, "The Issue," were distributed among the spectators. These leaflets had been published by the Socialist Party of New York City and openly advocated the old doctrine of Karl Marx, the Father of modern Socialism, for on the third page appeared "A Parable," from which we quote the following: "A man was once engaged in making bricks just outside the wall of a lunatic asylum. Presently a lunatic looked over the fence and asked: "'What are you doing?' "'Making bricks.' "'What are the bricks for?' "'I don't know. What does it matter to me?' "'But why do you make them, if you don't intend to use them for anything?' "'Why? Well it's my work.' "'But I don't see why you should work for no object. If you don't use the bricks, who will?' "'How should I know? It's nothing to do with me.' "'Don't know what you are going to do with your own bricks?' "'They are not my bricks. They belong to the boss.' "'But didn't you make them?' "'Yes.' "'Then how comes it that the boss owns them?' "'It's his brick kiln and his clay hole.' "'Oh, didn't he make the kiln?' "'No; the bricklayers built them.' "'Did he dig the clay hole?' "'No; those men over there dug it.' "'Why do they dig clay holes?' "'It's their work. The boss pays them to do it.' "'Oh! does he pay you, too, to make these bricks?' "'Yes.' "'But where does he get the money to pay you with?' "'He sells bricks.' "'And you made those bricks he sold?' "'Yes.' "'Don't you think you'd better come inside?... "'But I say, how much will the boss sell those bricks for?' "'Oh! about $500.' "'How long will it take you to make them?' "'About ten weeks.' "'How much does the boss pay you for working so hard?' "'Two dollars and fifty cents a day.' "'That will be $150 in ten weeks. Ha! ha! ha! aha! he! he! he!' "'I don't see (wiping the sweat from his brow) the joke, you confounded ass.' "'You must come inside. He! he! he!!!'" American Socialists, therefore, as well as the early German revolutionists, teach that to the laborer all wealth is due. Though the low wages that many workingmen receive is a disgrace to our civilization and an abuse that cries to heaven for vengeance, still it is absurd to hold that wages should be so much increased as to leave nothing for the capitalists. For, in the first place, if the workingmen should enjoy the entire profits of their firms or industries all the owners would soon become bankrupt and fail, and, in the upheavals due to unemployment and the impossibility of supplying the necessaries of life, the present system of our Government would certainly fall a prey to revolution, the Socialists would come into power and then would follow the terrible disturbances shown in Chapter XVII, "Socialism, a Peril to Workingmen." We have no defence whatsoever to offer for dishonest capitalists, but maintain that honest capitalists are entitled to a reasonable share in the profits arising from their investments. For, in the first place, if it were not for the capital in the possession of honest capitalists, millions of workingmen would be terribly handicapped in earning a living. If this fact is not immediately evident to the reader it will become so when he reflects that many farm, mill and factory workers, and the employes of many big business houses would have to seek other positions if the capital required for the industries was not supplied by the owners. The buildings, machinery, raw materials, etc., in most cases are not and cannot be supplied by the laborers and workingmen, but are furnished by the capitalists who, if they wished, could sell them and spend the money obtained from the sale for their own personal enjoyment. For this reason, and also because the capitalists referred to are subject to many financial worries, assume great responsibilities, run the risk of incurring serious losses of one kind or another, including business failure and bankruptcy, it is only just that they should receive a reasonable recompense for their share in the production of the goods. From what has been said regarding the falsity of the Marxian doctrine, that to the laborer all wealth is due, it follows that the Socialists, by teaching this false principle, have been misleading the laborers and workingmen for over half a century. Some of the best known American Socialists, when confronted with the evident fallacy of the Marxian doctrine concede that Marx was mistaken and that they do not approve of his teachings on this subject. Now, if these leaders and their followers are in the majority, they should long ago have compelled the minority in the party to stop deceiving the uneducated. On the other hand, if they themselves constitute the minority, their own personal opinions amount to little, since the majority of the members of the Socialist Party would in that case be guilty of advocating foolish and absurd doctrine. The attractive and popular motto, "Workingmen of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains," has moved many a poor workingman to enlist in the revolutionary cause. Very little reflection, however, is needed to expose the absurdity that is found in the second part of the motto. For no matter how badly off men may be financially, it has been shown that they not only would not lose their chains by uniting under the red flag of Karl Marx but would be completely crushed by the much heavier ones of bloody revolution and a wretched form of government which would bring with it a religious prosecution and widespread lawlessness, crime and chaos. Realizing that the police would do much to help the revolutionary movement, if they could be made friendly to it, some Socialists have been extremely anxious to win them over. To certify this statement we shall quote part of an article which appeared in "The Call," New York, April 25, 1911, urging Socialists to get control of the police force: "A policeman's vote, like any other person's vote, counts one. Policemen are wage-earners, who, like other wage-earners, are eager to improve their circumstances. Policemen will vote the Socialist ticket when they realize that the Socialists in office will insist upon their receiving more pay, more leisure, more sick and old age benefits, more privileges.... Adopt constructive resolutions demanding that constables be paid higher wages, that they be granted shorter hours, that they be given more days off each week, that they be exempted from paying part of their wages into the superannuation fund, that they be accorded the right of combination, that a more generous system of sick benefits be drawn up, that they have the right of appeal against dismissal and abuse to a representative committee of citizens." The revolutionists are leaving nothing undone in their extraordinary efforts to gain recruits for the overthrow of our National Government. This is evidenced by the appearance in their papers of articles like the following, entitled, "The Pure Water Problem," which was published in "The Call," April 30, 1912: "As a political organization, the Socialist Party must address itself to every question that interests the electorate. And in each case it must offer the public a carefully thought out solution instead of mere generalities and hackneyed phrases. Otherwise it will not succeed in winning the confidence of the majority of voters. Now almost every city in America is confronted with a pure water and sewage disposal problem.... If the Socialist Party steps into the arena with clear-cut proposals that deal in a radical, constructive and common sense way with this problem, it will not only help to secure pure drinking water for citizens, but it will break down considerable prejudice against the Socialist movement, and cause people to study the more revolutionary features of our own official platform." Information comes to us that on account of recent Government raids the Red organizations are assuming a variety of aliases. The Communist Party has taken the innocuous title of "The International Publishing Company," alias "The International League of Defense." The I. W. W. operates under any local name which comes handy. Individual Reds often spread their doctrines, and incite workingmen to take part in outlaw strikes, while professing to be members of no radical organization. The Young People's Socialist League, closely affiliated with the Socialist Party, planned to use disguises, if necessary, after the Socialist Party adopted its anti-war program in 1917. Thus in "Outlines of the Evidence Taken Before the Judiciary Committee of the Assembly of New York," pages 608-9, appears a letter of William F. Kruse, National Secretary of the Young People's Socialist League, written to the secretaries of its different branches, in which he urged them to have an "unofficial emergency committee," have "several copies of your most important records and especially your mailing list stowed away in various safe and secluded places," and have "three trustworthy officers broken in for each important job." "At least one of these officers should be a girl," he continued, "so that if our boys are jailed for refusal to serve, the girls can keep the League going." He added: "If ever the Y. P. S. L. is suppressed you will immediately get together all its members as quietly as possible under the name of some athletic club, dance society or pleasure club. The name of this organization should have nothing in common with Socialism." In concluding this chapter the attention of the reader is called to the fact that the Socialists are trying their best to make it appear that the interests of the American workingmen in general are jeopardized when a member of their party is put in jail or is on trial. This is rank hypocrisy. Even if the Socialist Party was a real workingman's party, this fact would not give it the right to set up its justly condemned bomb throwers, its preachers of Bolshevist revolution, its teachers of race suicide, etc., as working-class martyrs and protagonists of free speech, which they claim is no longer allowed in our country. There are millions of workingmen in the great Republican, Democratic, and other American parties who don't need and don't want bomb-throwers, imported Marxian revolutionists, race suiciders, free-lovers, atheists, hypocrites, professional liars and deceivers to petition the Government in their name for the release of imprisoned Socialists on the plea that these are being prosecuted because they are leaders of the working-class. First of all, Debs, Haywood and their crews are leaders of blood-thirsty revolutionists, and not the leaders of the law-abiding workingmen who maintain the Democratic and Republican parties. They are the enemies of the latter, and the real object of the Socialists is to stir up trouble in our country by endeavoring to procure amnesty for a set of scoundrels who, after their release, would, by their subversive and dangerous doctrines, try to plunge the country we love and all honest labor into a much more terrible abyss than that into which the Bolsheviki have plunged Socialist Russia. CHAPTER XXV THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE REDS It has been shown in the preceding chapters that the base doctrines propagated on every side by the revolutionists are among the gravest evils threatening the welfare of our nation. No doubt the reader perceives that unless this conspiracy against our country, religion and family is checked, the Socialists will soon overwhelm us with a bloody rebellion and establish a government that will mean nothing less than a reign of terror and a widespread prevalence of discontent, strife and crime, finally terminating in chaos or anarchy. Provisions must, therefore, be made for averting the dire calamities that would attend the unfurling of the red flag over Washington in place of the Star-Spangled Banner. Measures of defense must quickly be taken and an army of attack must immediately be set in motion. In this way alone can we hope to prevent the success of the revolutionary propaganda that is characterized by a marvelous activity and an ever-increasing popularity among the unwary and uneducated. The country we love and the Government which has bestowed upon us innumerable blessings, notwithstanding abuses, call upon us for help in the hour of need. True patriotism bids us take up suitable weapons and wage relentless war against that which would destroy our present constitutional form of government. Who can turn a deaf ear to the call? In our heroic work we shall be helped by millions of patriotic citizens whose devotion to their country has already rallied them to the defense of the Stars and Stripes. All that we need do, to fan into flame the fire of patriotism already glowing in their hearts, is to arouse them to a full realization of the dangers that threaten the very existence of our nation. Now is the time to act, before we hear the cry "Too late!" The great weapon must be education and the ones to be enlightened on the evils of Socialism are not merely scholars, professors and teachers, but the great masses of the people. If we wish to bring home to the American people a clear realization of the threatening calamity, we ourselves must not only be thoroughly equipped with knowledge of the Socialistic teachings and their evil consequences, but must also be able to refute the alluring and deceptive arguments of the revolutionists. We must acquire a thorough knowledge of Socialism. But to do this, it almost goes without saying that we should carefully read and study the excellent and thoroughly up-to-date anti-Socialistic works that can be had at a moderate price or readily obtained in the public libraries. Among the best anti-Socialistic books in the English language may be mentioned "Socialism, the Nation of Fatherless Children," edited by Goldstein and Avery. This book, whose authors were once Socialists, contains hundreds of very strong and useful quotations and is of the highest value to every student who is studying the evils and dangers of the revolutionary movement. Published by T. J. Flynn & Co., 62 Essex Street, Boston, Mass. "Socialism," by Cathrein and Gettelman, a very scholarly and learned work, admirably explains and refutes the various Marxian doctrines. It is published by Benziger Bros., New York City. A third book of recent publication, and of great value to the anti-Socialist student is "The World Problem," by Rev. Joseph Husslein, S. J., published by The America Press, 175 East 83rd Street, New York, N. Y. One who is truly interested in the fight against the national enemy should not content himself with the reading of anti-Socialist literature, but should pass the matter on to others who may become interested in the battle against the enemies of our country. Business men and persons of wealth should not only urge their friends to read anti-Socialist works that have appealed to themselves, but should show their patriotism and generosity by extensively purchasing anti-Socialist literature, whether in the form of books, pamphlets or leaflets, to be sent to public libraries, clubs, high schools, colleges and universities, and reading-rooms, and placed within easy reach of their employes and customers. The workingmen of our country, to whom the Socialists are especially appealing, often fall an easy prey to the deceptive arguments of the "Reds." Many of them do not weigh matters carefully and do not realize how far the acceptance of radical doctrines may lead them. The men who started the Russian revolution did not know how far it would go. The party of Lvoff and Miliukoff did not foresee Kerensky. The followers of Kerensky did not foresee Lenine and Trotzky; and probably few of the followers of Lenine and Trotzky dreamed of the abyss of barbarism into which they in turn have plunged bleeding Russia. The Socialists of the United States use pamphlets and leaflets, much more than books, in appealing to workingmen. Books are more expensive and require more time to read. Leaflets are attractive, short, to the point, easily remembered and almost costless. Anti-Socialist leaflets, distributed by the millions, would do untold good and would soon start a tremendous opposition among laborers to the Red Flag movement. Since the foreigners in our country, especially Russians, Italians and Jews, take to Socialism very readily, something should be done to protect them by native Americans who are especially able to do so. Patriotic persons and organizations should have immense numbers of anti-Socialist books, pamphlets and leaflets published in the different languages and distributed free of charge to foreigners who are not yet acquainted with English. Socialism has made terrible inroads among the Jews. To give one example, "The Forward," a Yiddish daily of New York City, has a circulation of about 150,000 copies. This paper should be watched very carefully by the government, for it has been doing some very dangerous work in the line of revolutionary propaganda without English-speaking people being aware of the doctrines it is advocating. In order to counteract Socialist propaganda among girls and boys, a simple and limited knowledge of the evil plottings of the "Reds" ought to be imparted in all the grammar and high schools of our country. With a view to this, text-books should be prepared. The boards of education in the different cities should see to it that anti-Socialist instruction be given to the children. Editors who have a good understanding of the evil consequences of Socialism have a fine field rapidly opening up to them. Since the Marxian principles are spreading, there is a rapidly growing demand for articles to refute and combat them; yet many on the editorial staffs seem to have little definite knowledge concerning the teachings of the revolutionists. All patriotic citizens who understand Socialism and the tactics of the "Knights of the Red Flag" should expose them, violently attacking them in their conversations with others, so that it may no longer be said that the revolutionaries are more zealous in trying to ruin our country and overthrow out government than loyal Americans are to save them. Attention should be paid to the men who are advocating Socialism in the mills, factories, shops, stores, mines, etc. A thorough exposure of their unsound doctrines will be prolific of much good. The ardor and zeal of the anti-Socialist should go still further, and the illogical revolutionary orators should be driven from their soap boxes, not by violence nor by physical force--for this would only give them another opportunity for complaining and enable them to win the support of sympathizers--but by arguments with them so effective as to compel them to step down and walk off in disgrace under the jeers of their audiences. In arguing with the visionaries, proofs for the truth of their statements should be demanded and the fact ought always to be insisted upon that, even if they could show that the present system of government and industry was corrupt and useless, it would in no way follow from this that the Socialists' regime--however magnificently pictured by an unbridled imagination--would provide a true remedy for any of the evils and abuses of our day. The letters that Socialists send to the daily papers for publication, to further their cause, can, as a rule, easily be refuted. All that is required, in most instances, after a brief introduction of the question at issue, is to connect, by a few short sentences, several of the damaging quotations that can be found, for example, in the present volume. Men who have talent for public speaking can make good use of their eloquence in the warfare against our nation's foes by giving lectures and delivering speeches. Good writers should devote their talents to the preparation of books, pamphlets and leaflets against the revolutionists, and should furnish suitable articles for the newspapers and magazines. The follies of Socialism also afford an abundance of suggestions for dramatists and cartoonists. Socialist school teachers and principals, because of the revolutionary doctrines that they gradually instill into the minds of the young, should be eliminated from the school-room. Students of colleges and universities, in which the Intercollegiate Socialist Society is organized, could give a noble example of patriotism and loyalty to our country by forming clubs to oppose the influence of the Socialist chapters and offset the great harm they are doing. Patriotic members of the American Federation of Labor should attend as many of its meetings as possible in order to prevent the Marxians and radicals from gaining the upper hand in the organization, endorsing the Socialist Party, or adopting revolutionary principles of any kind. As Socialist women are trying to destroy our Federal Government, the women who are opposed to Socialism should give ample proofs of their loyalty and devotion by taking an active part in the defense of their country. Anti-Socialist clubs should be formed throughout the country to study Socialism and to devise means for combating the zealous propaganda carried on by the thousands of Socialist locals and branches. Influential members of the anti-Socialist clubs should see to it that the public libraries were well stocked with anti-Socialist literature and that Socialist publications are kept only for legitimate purposes of reference. Several very important works of defence remain to be undertaken by our National Government, if the conspirators are to be prevented from destroying it. Socialism has already struck deep roots into the soil of America. Consequently, the Government of the United States, in leaving to individuals the defence of the nation against the well organized forces of the revolutionists, is running a risk almost as great as if it were to entrust the suppression of an armed insurrection to individual action. The Socialists availing themselves of every opportunity for spreading their propaganda among foreigners, have already gained many recruits from the immigrant class. With this serious condition of affairs confronting it, the National Government should employ strenuous measures to break the grip that Socialism already has on the nation, and to prevent the immigrants who are landing on our shores from becoming a menace. A law should be passed by Congress forbidding the publication or circulation of any paper, magazine or book which advocates the unlawful destruction of our present form of government. The officers of the army and navy should take precautions for preventing the spread of such publications among soldiers and sailors. So far we have spoken only of the negative measures that the United States Government should adopt for its defence. It remains to add a few words concerning a positive campaign against the conspirators. If the Government neglects to stem the rising tide of Socialism it will not be long before a disastrous insurrections[23] will be upon us. Millions of dollars a day would then be spent in defraying the expenses of what might turn out to be an unsuccessful campaign. Congress should now appropriate the sums of money necessary to suppress the Marxian uprising and entirely uproot Socialism out of the United States. The American people as a body will never tolerate Socialism, once they have been made to realize its full meaning and ruinous consequences. This knowledge could be brought home to them most effectively by means of anti-Socialist information issued periodically under the direction of one of the departments of the Government and furnished to the press of the country. Such material should also be distributed to all labor organizations and every public library in the country, and to clubs, societies, clergymen, legislators, judges, and men and women of influence. If such a plan were adopted, the forces arrayed in the line of battle against the Socialists would become tremendously strong and the danger now seriously threatening our nation would presently disappear. Surely the Government could afford to spend a few million dollars a year against revolutionists who are already undermining its very foundations and whose activities, if unopposed, will bring upon us evils incomparably greater than those coming from a foreign foe. Orators attacking Socialism could be recruited by the Government to speak all over the country for five or ten minutes at a time, after the fashion of the Four Minute Men. Those who have read this book have seen that the principles of the revolutionists are logically unsound and would deluge the land we love with rivers of blood and plunge us into an abyss of discontent, strife, crime and chaos. It has been shown that the Socialist Party is an organization controlled by bosses and politicians with the avowed object of gaining votes by the most unscrupulous methods. Notwithstanding their pretentions to honesty and sincerity, evidence has been cited time and again of the deceitfulness of their propaganda, and of their plottings to overthrow our constitutional form of government, destroy religion and ruin family life. We, however, who sincerely love America, will never tear down the Star-Spangled Banner and in its place fling to the breezes the blood-stained flag of Karl Marx. INDEX A Absolutism in Russia, 281-2, 286, 290. Action, See Direct Action and Mass Action. A. E. F. ridiculed by N. Y. "Call," 208-9. Albany Trial, See N.Y. State Socialist Assemblymen. Aliases of "Reds," 376. Allaben, Frank, 258. Alvarado, 96, 298-9. American Federation of Labor, 381; against Bolshevism and I. W. W.'ism, 283-4; "Boring in," 346-9; Opposed by Socialists, 126, 219. American Flag, 118. American Soldiers ridiculed, 207-9. Amnesty, Agitations for, 347, 376. Anarchy, Danger of, 279. Andreiev's S. O. S., 168-9. Anti-"Red" Campaign among foreign-born, 379. Anti-Socialist authorities, 378; Letters, 380; Literature, 378-9; Speeches, 380. "Appeal to Reason," 343, 359. Argentina, Socialism in, 11, 12. Aristocracy in Bolshevist Russia, 280-1. Assemblymen, Socialist, on trial, See N. Y. State Socialist Assemblymen. Atheism of Socialists, 293, 301-16; in Austria, 295; Belgium, 295-6; Canada, 298; England, 296-8; France, 295; Germany, 294; Italy, 295; Mexico, 298-9, 300; United States, 292-3, 297. Atheistic Catechism, 308-9; Poems, 302-4; Works on sale, 297, 305, 307. Austria-Hungary, Socialism in, 5. Aveling, 8. B Bavaria, Socialism in, 4, 178-9. Basle Manifesto, 18. Bax, Ernest Belfort, 297, 321-3. Bebel, August, 2, 198, 200, 294, 324. Bela Kun, 75, 178, 180, 190. Belgium, Socialism in, 10. Berger, Victor L., 13, 15, 51, 54, 56, 62, 67, 69, 70-1, 89, 201-2, 220-1, 232-3, 242-3, 290, 313, 322, 368; "We must shoot," 201; "rifles" and "bullets," 202. Berne Conference, 9, 18-21, 25, 46, 61, 68. Bernstein, 3. Bible, attacked by Socialists, 297, 303. Blasphemies of Socialists, 296-7, 303-5, 307-9. Blatchford, 8, 296. Bolsheviki, Russian, Advocacy of rebellion in other lands, 171-2; Criticised by Catherine Breshkovsky, 139; Disperse parliament, 4, 138; Educational System, 151; Freeing of criminals, 161; Murder women, 158; Opposed to liberty, 145; Rise to power, 4, 138; Shooting of children, 155-7; Uprisings against, 161; Victories, 5. Bolshevism, Advocated by American Socialist Party, 59, 60-2, 68, 70, 72, 74-5, 77, 142, 168, 171-3, 184-5, 187-94, 198, 205, 234-6, 238, 248, 250, 255; identical with Socialism, 291; in America, 185; in Russia, Against freedom of speech, of the press and of voting, 145, 155; Against justice, 146, 154; liberty, 145; religion, 146-51; An economic failure, 174-5; Starvation under, 282-3, 286. Bolshevist Constitution, 139-40; propaganda, 256. Bolshevist reign of terror, 141, 143, 145-8, 153, 154-63. Bomb plot, 118-19. Bonds, under Socialism, 273. Books, anti-Socialist, 378. "Boring in," 348-9. Bossism in Socialist Party, 14, 15. Bourgeoisie, 30. Branting, Hjalmar, 11. Breshkovsky, Catherine, 139, 170. Bulgaria, Socialism in, 12. Bureau, International Socialist, 17. Business under Socialism, 83, 272-3. C Cadets of Russia, 4. Calhoun, Arthur W., 356-7. Call for Moscow International, 31-3. Call for Proletarian International, 247. Campaign against the Reds, 377-82. Canada, Socialism in, 12. Capital invited back by Socialist Russia, 288. Capitalism, 76, 106, 174, 373. Carillo, Felipe, 299. Cartoons, Socialist, 360; anti-Socialist, 380. Children, anti-Socialist instruction for, 379; Deprived of religious education under Socialism, 302; shot in Bolshevist Russia, 155-7. Chinese and the I. W. W., 120. Christ ridiculed by Socialists, 303-5, 307-8. Christian Socialists, 292, 310, 315, 322. Christianity attacked by Socialists, 292-316. Citizenship tags, 99. Civil discord under Socialism, 269-79. Class consciousness, 265. Class hatred, 63, 107, 346, 348, 352, 363-4, 372-3. Class struggle explained, 30, 107-8, 265. Clubs, anti-Socialist, 381. Committee against Socialism, Publicity, 257-8. Compensation, I. W. W. plan, 111. Commune, Paris, 200-1. Communism, in Bavaria, 4, 178-9; in Russia, See Bolshevism and Bolshevist reign of terror. Communist, the name, 59. Communist Labor Party of America, Chicago Convention, 55-8; Conspiracy against U. S. Government, 214-19; Origin, 52-3, 64; Principles, 53-4, 58, 74, 218-19, 225; Socialist Party's attitude toward, 74-5. Communist Labor Party of Germany, See Spartacans. Communist Manifesto, 1, 46, 198, 321. Communist Party of America, Chicago Convention, 55-8; Conspiracy against U. S. Government, 214-19; Origin, 52-3; Plan to organize Negroes, 217-18; Principles, 53-4, 58, 74-5, 217-19, 224; Socialist Party's attitude toward, 74-5, 225. Communist Propaganda League, 25, 64. Communists of Hungary, 180-91; Favored by American Socialists, 180, 186, 188-93. Conscription of labor in Socialist Russia, 281-5. Conspiracy against our country, 212-67; against the family, 317-29; against the race, 330-41; against religion, 292-316. Constituent Assembly, Russia, 4. Convention, Socialist Party, 75, 91-3. Co-operative organizations, Russian and Siberian, 162-3. Corruption, political, among Socialists, 97, 277-8. Criminals freed in Bolshevist Russia, 161. Czecho-Slovakia, Socialism in, 10-11. D Debs, Eugene V., 59, 81, 92, 105, 126-7, 194-7, 203-4, 210-11, 239-45, 264, 290, 315-16, 336. De Leon, Daniel, 13, 105. Demands of Socialist Platforms, Immediate, 368. Determinism, Economic, 293. Dictatorship of the Proletariat, 4, 47, 49-50, 53-4, 128, 145, 189, 220. Direct action, 24, 31, 98, 124-5, 201, 370. Discontent, Socialist apostles of, 343, 346-8. Divorce in Bolshevist Russia, 164, 167, 329. "Dope" of "Scientific Socialists," 96-102, 363-4. "Down with the Stars and Stripes," 210. "Drunk with man," a Socialist masterpiece, 87. Dynamite, use advocated, 299-300. E Ebert, 3, 177, 179, 187-90. Economic conditions in Bolshevist Russia, 174-5. Economic determinism, 293. Education in Bolshevist Russia, 151. Eisner, Kurt, 4, 7, 178, 187. Emergency Convention, Socialist Party, 242. Employment schemes in Socialist state, 273. Engels, Frederick, 1-2, 294, 325-6. Ettor, Jos. J., 105-6. Exploitation, 49-50, 83, 106, 110, 272, 365. Expropriation, 49, 50, 53, 98-9, 108, 123, 143, 179-80, 189-90, 270-1. Expulsion, Michigan organization, from Socialist Party, 42. "Eye Opener, The," 192. Eyre, Lincoln, interview with Lenine, 173-4; with Trotzky, 174-6; with Zinovieff, 253-5; on Bolshevist Russia, 253-6, 279-84, 286-90. F Fabian Society, 8. Failure of Socialism, in Mexico, 101-2; in Bolshevist Russia, 2, 279-90; in Yucatan, 101-2. Farming under Socialism, 32, 49, 83, 271-2. Ferguson, I. E., 133-4. Fighting the "Reds," 377-82. Financial conditions in Socialist Russia, 287-8. "Flag, to hell with the," 210. Foreign language papers of Socialist Party, 343. Foster, William Z., 348-9. Fraina, Louis C., 26, 55, 214-15. France, Socialism in, 5, 7-8. Freedom of Speech, 114, 242, 354; in Bolshevist Russia, 145. Free love, advocated by Socialists, 317-29; Hypocricy of Socialists regarding, 370; in Socialist Russia, 164, 166, 329; Socialist books on, 317, 321-26, 329. G Gale, Linn A. E., 339-340. Germany, Socialism in, 2, 3. Germer, Adolph, letter to "Appeal," 92-3. Giovannitti, Arturo, 108-9, 111, 308. Government ownership of public utilities, 368-9. "Grandmother of the Russian Revolution," See Breshkovsky, Catherine. Great Britain, Socialism in, 8-9. Guesde, Jules, 6, 321. H Haase, Hugo, 3. Hardie, J. Keir, 8. Haywood, William D., 123-4, 127, 199, 241, 248. Herron, George D., 302; day dream of, 94, 95. High Schools, Socialism taught in, 354. Hillquit, Morris, 13, 17, 23, 34, 40-1, 50-1, 54, 62-3, 73-5, 79, 81, 85, 89, 184, 188, 220-1, 224-6, 232-4, 236-7, 239-40, 243-5, 248-53, 255, 259-60, 263-6, 274-5, 290, 311, 313-14, 328, 337, 361, 366. Hoan, Mayor of Milwaukee, 69, 202. Holland, Socialism in, 10. Hostages in Bolshevist Russia, 154, 159. Hypocrisy of the I. W. W., 246. Hypocrisy of Socialists, 204-5, 210, 219-21, 225, 233-6, 239-40, 246, 252-4, 266, 363-71, 375-6; On religion, 292, 309-16, 326; On free love, 317, 319-20, 322-4, 326. Hyndman, Henry M., 8. I Iglesias, Pablo, 9. Immediate demands of Socialist Party platforms, 24, 87, 91, 368. Immorality under Socialism, 317-41. Independent Labor Party of Great Britain, 8. Ingersoll argument of Socialists, 293. Inheritance, rights of, 110. Industrial action, 77, 228-9, 234, 237-8. Industrial Unionism, Endorsed by Communists and Communist Laborites of America, 54; by Socialist Party, 238; I. W. W., 107-8. Insurance policies under Socialism, 273. Inter-allied[24], Socialist and Labor Conference, 21-2. Intercollegiate Socialist Society, 355-6, 380. International, First, 16; Second, 7, 16, 17-19, 32, 68; Third, 6-7, 9, 11-12, 18, 20-1, 33, 45-50, 61, 67-9, 74-5, 216, 218, 228, 233-6, 239, 252-6. International character of Socialism, 17. International Congresses, 17. International Socialist Bureau, 17. International Workingmen's Association, 1, 2. "Internationale Communist," organ of Moscow International, 255-6. Irreligious poems of Socialists, 302-4. Italian labor unions, 9. Italy, Socialism in, 9. I. W. W., Advocates rebellion, 109, 115-17; Affiliated with Moscow Bolshevists, 247-8; Atheistic and anti-religious, 118; Bomb threat, 119; Chinese to be organized, 120; Encouraged by Socialist Party, 114-15; Growth, 136; Industrial unionism, 107-8; In foreign lands, 136-7; Method of organization, 106-7; Negroes to be organized, 119; Organized by Socialists, 105; Paterson strike, 117-18; Plans destruction of society, 109; Preamble to platform, 107; Principles, 105-13, 115, 125, 130-1; Publications, 116-17; Relations with Socialist Party, 105, 108, 114-15, 122-7, 129, 131-6; Songs, 120-2; Tactics, 109; Terrorism, 118; Views on Bolshevism, 128-33. J Jaurés, 6, 321. K Kautsky, Karl, 2, 233. L Labor certificates, 273. Labor Conference, Inter-allied, 21. Labor conscription in Socialist Russia, 281-5. Labor Party of Illinois, 173. Labor under Socialism, 273-7. Land ownership under Bolshevism, 139; under Socialism, 271-2, 365-8. Lassalle, Ferdinand, 2. Law and order in Socialist Russia, 282, 290. Leaflet campaign of Socialists, 192, 344-5. Leaflets, anti-Socialist, 378-9. League of Resistance, 299, 300. Leathan, 8. Lectures, anti-Socialist, 380. Left Wing, Conference, 52; Criticises the Right, 25, 28-9, 36, 37; Defined, 23; Development, 24, 39, 45; Directed by Russian Bolsheviki, 31-3; Expulsions and suspensions, 42-5; Merges into Communist and Communist Labor Parties, chapter 5; Opposed by Socialist Party bosses, 36-7; Origin, 24; Principles, 24-31, 36; Relations with I. W. W., 135-6; Tactics at party meetings, 35, 37, 38. Legion, Loyal, rediculed by Socialists, 208-9. Lenine or Lenin, Nicolai, Autocrat of Russia, 5; Letter to American workingmen, 142, 170, 174, 183-4, 216, 223-4. Lesson 24, Socialist Primer, 352. Liebknecht, Karl, 3, 7, 30, 177-8, 185-7, 191-3. Liebknecht, Wilhelm, 2, 294. Longuet, Jean, 6. London, Jack, 199, 200, 268. Looters, Socialist, 102. Loriot, F., 6. Love, See Free-love. Lusk Committee evidence, 248-50, 264, 358, 361. Luxemburg, Rosa, 3, 7, 30, 177-8, 187, 191-3. M MacDonald, J. Ramsay, 18-19. Manifesto, See Communist Manifesto; of Left Wing, 28; of Moscow, See Moscow Manifesto; of National Emergency Convention of Socialist Party, 72-8, 181, 228-9, 236-7, 239. Marriage in Bolshevist Russia, 164. Martens, Ludwig C. A. K., 172, 184-5, 194, 233-4, 248, 251. Marx, Karl, 2, 198, 200, 372. Mass Action, 11, 26-8, 32, 69, 92, 217, 227, 228-9, 231, 234, 237, 262. Materialistic conception of history, 293, 315. May Day riots, 196-7. Mensheviki of Russia, 4. Mexico, Socialism in, 12, 96. Militarism in Bolshevist Russia, 176. Millerand, 6. Money situation in Bolshevist Russia, 287. Money under Socialism, 272-3. Morris, 8. Moscow Conference, call to, 233. Moscow International, See Third International. Moscow Manifesto, 46-9, 67, 216-18, 228, 235, 237, 239-40. Moscow propaganda methods, 253-4, 256. Moving pictures, Socialist, 351. N National Emergency Convention, Socialist Party, 43, 55-7, 66-7, 69-72, 76-8; Manifesto of, 72-8. Nationalization of women, 163-8. Nearing, Scott, 205, 361. Negroes, organized by I. W. W., 119; by Socialist Party, 361. Newspapers in Bolshevist Russia, 145. "New Unionism, The," 108. New York State Socialist Assemblymen on trial at Albany, 34, 74-5, 221-7, 232, 234, 239, 242-6, 249-50, 252-3, 255, 257-65, 329, 340-1. Norway, Socialism in, 11. O Oaths, Socialist, 260. Old Age Pension, Berger's, 89. One Big Union, See I. W. W. "One Big Union Monthly," 105. Origin of modern Socialism, 1. Ownership, Government, 368-9. P Papers, Socialist, of the U. S., 14. Parental authority undermined by Socialists, 353. Paris Commune, 200-1. Parochial schools under Socialism, 302. Parties affiliated with the Third (Moscow) International, 33. Paterson, N. J., strike of 1913, 117-18. Petrograd under Bolshevist rule, 161. Platform planks of Socialists utterly unreliable, 365-8. Poems, anti-religious Socialist, 302-4. Political action, 24, 26, 201. Political corruption among Socialists, 97, 277-8. Primer, Socialist, Lesson 24, 352. Private business under Socialism, 83. Private ownership of land in Socialist state, 271-2. Private property, 32, 47, 53, 76, 80-3, 110, 365-8. Private property under Bolshevist rule, 139. Private schools under Socialism, 302. Profit under Socialism, 82, 273. Proletarian International, call for, 247. Proletariat, 30. Promises, golden, of Socialists, 342-4, 349, 371. Propaganda, Socialist, 192, 342-61, 363-5, 368-76. Prostitution under Socialism, 318-21. Publications, of I. W. W., 116-17. Publications of Socialist Party, 343-5. Publicity Committee against Socialism, 257-8. Q Quelch, 8. R Race suicide, 326-7. Raids, Government, on Communist and Communist Labor Parties, 215. Raids on I. W. W., 116. Rand School, 248-50, 357, 361. Rebellion advocated by Socialists, 47-50, 63-4, 71-2, 75, 78, 109, 115-17, 123, 128, 131, 134, 170-2, 183-4, 186, 189, 197-9, 201-2, 204-5, 212-20, 222, 227-9, 234-5, 237, 240-1, 243, 247, 249, 251, 254, 255-6, 262, 265, 266, 269, 270, 351, 356. "Reds" and "Yellows," 23, 24. Reed, John, 55. Refinery, sugar, 100, 102. Religion, conspiracy against, 292-316. Religion in Bolshevist Russia, 146-51, 168. Remuneration for work under Socialism, 83, 273-7. Rents under Socialism, 82, 273. Resistance, League of, 299, 300. Revolution without the "r," 23. Right and Left Wings, 23. Riots, Socialist, 194-5, 196-8. "Rows and Rows of 'em march," 208-9. "Russia going to pieces," 174. Russia, Socialism in, 4; See Bolsheviki, Bolshevism and Bolshevist. Russian Industrial Unions appeal to workers in Allied countries, 247-8. S Sabotage, 111-13. Scheidemann, 3, 177, 179, 187-8, 190. Schools under Socialism, 302. School teachers, Socialist, 380. Seventy-seventh Division, A. E. F., 208. Shaw, 8. Soap box orators, 343, 363-5, 368-71, 380. Social Democratic Federation of Great Britain, 8. Social reforms hypocritically advocated by Socialists, 87-91, 368-9. Socialism a peril, 268-84, 286-90, 347; Explained, 76, 79-93, 198-9, 270-8, 349, 365-8, 372-3; Fails in Yucatan, 101-2. Socialist beggars, 92. Socialist blasphemies, 296-7, 303-5, 307-9. Socialist legislators, criticism of, 29. Socialist oaths, 260. Socialist papers of the U. S., 14. Socialist school teachers, 380. Socialists and the I. W. W., 105, 108, 114-15, 122-7, 129, 131-6. Socialists, varieties of, See Varieties. Soldiers and Sailors proselytized by Socialists, 359-60. Soldiers of America ridiculed by Socialists, 207-9. Songs, I. W. W., 120-2; Socialist, 351. Soviets of Russia, 18, 138, 142-3, 157-8; Origin, 4; Uprisings against, 143-5. "Soviet Russia," magazine, 172. Spain, Socialism in, 9, 10. Spargo, John, 123, 303. Spartacans, 3, 30, 53, 177-8, 190; Favored by American Socialists, 177, 187-93. Spartacides, See Spartacans. Speculators in Socialist Russia, 282, 286. "Stars and Stripes," down with, 210. Starvation in Socialist Russia, 282-3, 286. St. Louis platform of Socialists, 75, 91-2, 125. Stokes, Rose Pastor, 55. Strikes, Bring death in Socialist Russia, 290; in Belgium, 10; Paris, 7; Prelude to armed rebellion, 26-8, 32, 109-10, 241, 346-8; in Rome, 9; Sympathetic, 108, 109, 346; Under a Socialist form of government, 276; Winnipeg, 125, 229-30, 245-6. Struggle, See Class struggle. "Struggling Russia," magazine, 142. Students' warfare against Socialism, 380. Sugar refinery in Yucatan, 100, 102. Suicide, See Race suicide. Sunday schools, Socialist, 350-3. Sweden, Socialism in, 11. T Tactics of the Left Wing, 35. Teachers of public schools, Communists, 355. Teachers' Union of New York City, 354-5. Terrorism of I. W. W., 118. Theatrical plays, Socialist, 351, 360. Thomas, Albert, 6. Trial at Albany of Socialist Assemblymen, See New York State Socialist Assemblymen. U Underground, "Reds" working, 375-6. "Uniform, spit on it," 208. Union among Socialists of all nations, 17. Unionism, Industrial, See Industrial Unionism. United States, Socialism in, 13. V Vandervelde, Emil, 10, 270, 296. Varieties of Socialists, 79. Voting in Bolshevist Russia, 140, 145. W Wage courts under Socialism, 276-7. Wage system, abolition of, 107, 108. Wages under Socialism, 273-7. Walling's criticism of Socialist Party, 251. War, Socialist opposition to, 91-3. Wings, Right and Left, 23. Winnipeg general strike, 230-1. Work, assignment to, under Socialism, 273-7. Works, anti-Socialist, 378. Workingmen, beware of the Reds, 375-6, 378-9, 382. Women must work under Socialism, 84-5, 277. Wreckage resulting from Socialism, 101-2. Wynkoop, David, 10. Y "Yellow" Socialists, 63. "Yellows" and "Reds," 23-4, 58, 66. Young People's Socialist clubs, 350-1. Young, Teaching Socialism to, 350-5. Yucatan, Atheism of Socialists in, 298-9. Yucatan, Socialism in, 96. Z Zapata, Emiliano, 98, 101-2. Zeuch, letter to by Socialist professor, 356-7. Zimmerwald resolutions, 6. Zinovieff, 252-5. APPENDIX THE NATIONAL CONVENTION OF THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF THE UNITED STATES, MAY 8-14, 1920 After "The Red Conspiracy" went to press, this Convention was held at Finnish Hall, New York City. Of its 156 delegates, sixty were of foreign birth. By some newspapers the Convention was incorrectly styled "mild" and "conservative," so well were the avowed revolutionary designs of the Socialists camouflaged behind seemingly harmless innocuous phrases for the deception of the uninformed. "Vote-catching" was the key-note of the proceedings. As this book shows, the Socialist Party in 1919 lost the vast majority of its members to the Communists and the Communist Laborites and had, therefore, to seek new members. These, however, could be won only by concealing for the time being the true revolutionary objects of the Socialist Party. This covering-up of its conspiracy against the United States, and the resultant gathering into the conspirators' net of the timid halfway Socialists as yet members of other political Parties, could be accomplished only by the lure of a Convention Platform so worded as to convince the unwary that the Socialists as a Party had discarded their ultra radicalism and blatant un-Americanism. The Convention of May, 1920, therefore, was guided, under the adroit management of Morris Hillquit and Victor L. Berger, toward a Platform worded more mildly and conservatively than might have been expected. No thinking person, however, Socialist or decent American, will be deceived into believing that the beast of prey has changed its ugly spots because a gauzy veil of lies has been thrown over them. "The Red Conspiracy" has proven that the Socialists in the United States have been, almost to a man, in thorough accord with the principles and workings of the blackest Bolshevism. They have consistently and completely supported the I. W. W. They are avowed foes of the American Federation of Labor, though willing enough to use this organization by sending traitors to join it and to bore their rat-holes of corruption from within its respectable membership. One of the delegates to the Socialist Convention of May, 1920, George Bauer, of New Jersey, said: "We must remember that there are four or five million men in the A. F. of L., and I don't believe we can establish a co-operative commonwealth without them." The Convention, following this argument of expediency, adopted a resolution stating that the Socialist Party did not intend to interfere with the internal affairs of labor unions; but added a statement that the Party favored the organization of workers along the line of industrial unionism, acting as one organized working-class body. The I. W. W. is, of course, the leading industrial union in America, and the Convention's resolution set another seal to the sympathetic bond between Socialism and I. W. W.'ism, with the added encouragement of the Socialist Party's support of the less powerful industrial unions now within the American Federation of Labor. The Camouflagists at the Convention politely declared that the Socialist Party did not seek to interfere with the institution of the family. But Hilkovitz whitewash is not white enough to obscure the lurid red of the free-love and race-suicide propaganda carried on in the Socialist press, Hillquit's favorite sheet, "The New York Call," being one of the chief offenders. A visit to the Rand School in New York City and examination of the books for sale on its book-store shelves and the periodicals and pamphlets there for sale will present appalling and convincing evidence of the Socialist efforts to destroy elementary decency as well as the institutions of marriage and the family. Another declaration of the Camouflagists at the Socialist Convention of May, 1920, stated that the Socialist Party "recognizes the right of voluntary communities of citizens to maintain religious institutions and to worship freely according to the dictates of their conscience." As August Claessens warned the Convention: "Cry out against that which men cherish as holy, and you rouse an antagonism which no argument can defeat." This counsel of discretion is interesting side by side with another Convention statement, made by William Karlin of New York: "If the churches do stand for the old order, it will be a bad day for them when the new order comes, because the churches will go down with the old order." Mr. Karlin, however, accepting discretion as valor's better part, admitted that "There are many people to whom we can appeal if we don't arouse their religious prejudice;" while Delegate McIntyre, of the District of Columbia, prudently advised the members of the Convention to "get the voters first and talk religion out of them afterward." Again, a visit to the book-shop of the Rand School is suggested if proof is desired of the Socialist propaganda of atheism, sacrilege, and, specifically, hatred of Christianity. The reader of "The Red Conspiracy" will have noted enough of the Socialists' blasphemies to prevent the Convention Camouflagists' hedging on this subject from having any effect but added disgust at hypocrisy. The Convention declared in favor of political action for the attainment of the Socialists' ends. Exactly! Chapter XVI of this book, "The Conspiracy Against Our Country," has shown for what purposes political action and political power are to be used. Get traitors in office and when the Revolution comes the forces to coerce the American people and destroy the American Government will be in the traitors' control. Camouflagists[25] and their opponents of the Convention united in the nomination of Eugene V. Debs, convicted criminal, for President of the United States. Let us hear the words of this man whom Morris Hillquit stated resembles "the Nazarene," and who styles himself "a flaming revolutionist." A press report, from Atlanta, Georgia, dated May 14, 1920, quotes him as saying: "Personally I am a radical. I have always been one. My only fear has always been that I might not be radical enough. In my own party I always led the minority, but I hope to lead a united Socialist Party to the polls this Fall. They are fighting within my own party today. It is a good healthy sign. The radicals keep the conservatives from giving away too much to popularize the movement. That is what killed the Populist Party. The leaders sought to popularize its political propaganda by pandering to more conservative elements. They lost the radical support of their party, which became the Socialist Party, and naturally the conservatives had no further use for them. To begin to placate your enemies is to invite decay." The radical minority in the Socialist Party formerly comprised the Left Wing members who later on became Communists and Communist Laborites. J. Louis Engdahl of Chicago at present leads a new Left Wing radical minority within the Party. The American public may at times be gullible, but hardly sufficiently so as to believe in the sincerity of Hillquit and Victor L. Berger, who filled the air at the Convention with phrases of moderation and disclaim of treason and revolution, following their gentle verbiage by nominating Debs who scores those who "sought to popularize" "political propaganda by pandering to more conservative elements." "Panderer" is not a pretty thing to be called, but the pleasant Messrs. Hilkovitz and Berger swallow it. That their conservative phraseology would fool no one was recognized at the Convention by Irwin St. John Tucker, who said: "You can disguise yourself by sprouting pink whiskers." Mr. Tucker, however, would not join the Camouflagists, remarking: "It may be that the American people are not yet ready to accept Socialist principles, but I would rather lose an election than lose those principles." Hillquit himself said in the Convention, on May 13, 1920, that the nomination of Debs "proves that we have not receded from our position of revolutionary Socialism and that we will be more effective and still more revolutionary than ever before." J. Louis Engdahl may be an enemy to the United States and to society in general, but he is man enough to say boldly what he really thinks. At the Convention he declared: "I say that it is time to inaugurate the revolution immediately. The time to prepare for victory is now.... We can't fool anybody here by decorating the walls with the flag of Wall St." Delegate Oneal, one of Hillquit's own faction of political actionists, volunteered to furnish a reason why camouflage was a useful policy for the Socialists to adopt until "The Day" arrived,--the black day when the United States of America should be gasping in the throes of death-agony, like wretched Russia. Oneal sapiently remarked at the Convention: "The time and conditions which favored the Russian revolution must be studied before we attempt to adopt them here." But the Camouflagists of the Convention did not sever and did not wish to sever the close bond of union between the Socialist Party of the United States and the Third or Moscow International, the Convention, in its majority report, stating that "The Moscow organization is virile and aggressive, inspired as it is by the militant idealism of the Russian revolution," the majority report further stating that the Socialist Party of the United States, "retaining its adherence to the Third International," "instructs its executive committee, its international secretary and international delegates to be elected" "To participate in movements looking to the union of all true Socialist forces in the world into one International and to initiate and further such movements whenever the opportunity is presented." The said majority report follows, as reported in "The New York Call," May 15, 1920: "The international organization of Socialism has been disrupted as a result of the world war. "The old Second International is represented principally by the majority party of Germany, the Socialist parties of the countries carved out from the former Austro-Hungarian empire, and of most of the countries of Europe that remained neutral during the war. "The parties affiliated with this organization have largely abandoned the revolutionary character and the militant methods of working class Socialism. As a rule, they co-operate with the middle class reform parties of their countries. "The Third or Moscow International was organized by the Communist party of Russia with the co-operation of several other Communist organizations recruited in the main from the countries split off from the former Russian empire and some Scandinavian and Balkan countries. The Third International also includes the Labor party of Norway and the Communist Labor party of Poland. Of the other important countries, the Socialist parties of Switzerland, Italy and the United States, and the British Socialist party have expressed their intention to affiliate with it. "The Moscow organization is virile and aggressive, inspired as it is by the militant idealism of the Russian revolution. It is, however, at this time only a nucleus of a Socialist International, and its progress is largely impeded by the attitude of its present governing committee, which seems inclined to impose upon all affiliated bodies the formula of the Russian revolution 'The dictatorship of the proletariat in the form of Soviet power.' "The Independent Socialist party of Germany, the Socialist party of France and the Independent Labor party of Great Britain are unaffiliated. They have initiated a movement to unite all truly Socialist parties of the world, including those represented in the Moscow organization, into one International. "At no time was an active and effective organization of a Socialist International more vitally necessary for the success of Socialism than at this crucial period of the world's history. Socialism is in complete control in the great country of Russia. It is represented in the bourgeois governments of several important countries of Europe. The Socialists constitute the leading opposition parties in most of the remaining modern countries. It should be the task of the Socialist International to aid our Comrades in Russia to maintain and fortify their political control and to improve and stabilize the economic and social conditions of their country by forcing the great powers of Europe and America to abandon the dastardly policy of intrigue, war and starvation blockade against Soviet Russia. It should be its task to help the Socialists in countries of divided political control to institute full and true Socialist governments, and to support the struggles of the Socialists in the capitalist-controlled countries, so that they may more speedily secure victory for the workers in their countries. "But above all a true Socialist International would at this time fulfill the all-important function of serving as the framework of the coming world parliament. "To accomplish these great tasks the International of Socialism must be truly international. "It cannot be truly Socialist if it is not based upon the program of complete socialization of the industries, and upon the principles of class struggle and uncompromising working class politics. It cannot be truly international unless it accords to its affiliated bodies full freedom in matters of policy and forms of struggle on the basis of such program and principles, so that the Socialists of each country may work out their problems in the light of their own peculiar economic, political and social conditions as well as the historic traditions. "In view of the above considerations the Socialist party of the United States, while retaining its adherence to the Third International, instructs its executive committee, its international secretary and international delegates to be elected "(a) To insist that no formula such as 'the dictatorship of the proletariat in the form of soviets' or any other formula for the attainment of the Socialist commonwealth be imposed or exacted as condition of affiliation with the Third International. "(b) To participate in movements looking to the union of all true Socialist forces in the world into one International, and to initiate and further such movements whenever the opportunity is presented." The brotherly sympathy between the Socialist Party of the United States and the Red Vandals of Soviet Russia is exhibited by the following, also from "The New York Call," May 15, 1920, reporting the proceedings of the Socialist Convention in Finnish Hall: "A mission of three members was provided for to carry fraternal greetings to Soviet Russia and to investigate and report on conditions in the first working class republic, and the international delegates were further instructed to get into communication with Socialist organizations in North and South America for the purpose of creating Socialist Pan-American congresses." The majority reporters, or discreet Camouflagists, despite the prudent efforts of careful Mr. Hillquit to separate the Socialist Party of the United States from the Communists and other out-in-the-open enemies of our Country, evidently believed it wise to throw out a beckoning hand to all radicals in general, especially to the Red Left Wing Socialists who left the Party to become Communists and Communist Laborites in the fall of 1919. At the Convention of May, 1920, the following resolution was adopted: "Resolved, that we, the national convention of the Socialist party, in order to carry into effect this desire for unity, make the following proposals: "That any individual, branch, local or state or language federation that left the party last fall because of tactical differences and now desires to re-enter on the basis of the Socialist party platform and constitution, be welcomed to return. "That where Socialist party locals and other groups of the labor movement exist side by side in the same locality, we propose the creation of joint campaign committees for the management of a working class electoral campaign upon the basis of our platform. "That after the campaign is over, whenever the situation promises practical results, steps be taken to confer with representatives of other factions of the movement with a view to establishing possible basis for organization unity. "That a national advisory council of all working class organizations for the purpose of combatting the reactionary forces be formed so that wherever possible there be voluntary united action by all political and economic organizations who take their stand on the basis of the class struggle." There was a family fuss over a proposed clause, finally stricken out, that "due stamps or other evidence of membership in the groups formed by the split in the party shall be recognized as evidence of good standing" in the Socialist Party. In this connection, William Kruse of Illinois, who is far from a Camouflagist, said: "Debs believes that the Communist and Communist Labor members are as good Socialists as any." The authorities of our Nation have condemned membership in the Communist organization as illegal and have proven Debs a criminal. The Socialists welcome the Communists and Communist Laborites, "whenever the situation promises practical results" (when the time for "shooting," for "bullets" rather than "ballots," has arrived?), and the Socialists, Camouflagists as enthusiastically as their opponents, acclaim Debs the criminal, Debs the convicted enemy of the United States of America, and nominate this criminal enemy for President of the United States of America! The entire record of the May, 1920, Socialist Convention is a series of insincere, futile, clever attempts to whitewash the blood-red of the known and proved Socialist principles and aims, these attempts in turn combated by the more honest delegates, and the net result being the re-affirmation in tangible and important matters of these same menacing principles and aims, though set forth in wilier and more guarded language than has been heretofore the case. The Red Conspiracy has been proven, and every new move of the Socialists but confirms, in the minds of sane and loyal Americans, the extent and peril of the conspiracy, and intensifies our will to combat this evil thing in our midst until righteous combat has fought to glorious victory. Down with the Red Flag of Socialism, Communism, Bolshevism, I. W. W.'ism, and Anarchy! Victory and glory to the Stars and Stripes of our beloved Country! FOOTNOTES [A] "The Bolsheviks--formerly a faction within the Social-Democratic Labor Party--have recently changed their name to Communist party to distinguish themselves from the other Social-Democratic groups. "The term Bolsheviks and Mensheviks date back to 1903, when at a congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party a difference arose on a seemingly unimportant question (editorial supervision of the party organ), when upon a vote which decided the question there naturally was a majority and minority. Those who were with the majority were nicknamed Bolsheviks and those with the minority Mensheviks, deriving their names from the Russian words Bolshinstvo and Menshinstvo, meaning majority and minority respectively." _"The Soviets at Work," by Nicolai Lenin, published, with foreword and footnotes by Alexander Trachtenberg, by the Rand School of Social Science._ [B] It is a notable fact that throughout his three days' testimony on the witness stand at Albany, February 17, 18 and 19, 1920, in the case of the five suspended Socialist Assemblymen before the Judiciary Committee of the New York Assembly, Morris Hillquit, illustrious leader of the Red Rebels' Whitewash Squad, tried to save the five suspended Socialist Assemblymen and the damaged reputation of their organization, the Socialist Party of the United States, by tremendous applications of Debs' old recipe of quicklime and water, the special formula of which is to spell revolution and rifles without the "r," pistols without the "p" and bombs without the "b." [C] Engdahl was indicted at Chicago, February 2, 1918, as Editor of the Socialist Party's official publications, brought to trial before Judge Landis, December 9, 1918, and convicted on January 8, 1919. The four indicted, convicted and sentenced with him, each for twenty years, were Victor L. Berger, member of the Socialist Party's National Executive Committee; Adolph Germer, the Party's National Executive Secretary; William F. Kruse, Secretary of the Young People's Socialist League, and Irwin St. John Tucker, former head of the Party's Literature Department. [D] This reference to Left, Right and Center bears every earmark of familiarity with the use of these terms in the call to the Moscow Conference. [E] Thus Hillquit seems to have had his eye on the "call" to the Moscow Conference, although he swore on the stand at Albany, in February, 1920, that he had not read the Moscow manifesto when he wrote 90 per cent. or more of his Party's Chicago manifesto of September, 1919. [F] The reference is to Alexander Stoklitzky. [G] Article 3, Section 3 (a), of the "National Convention and Platform of the Socialist Party, 1917," as officially published, reads: "The call for the regular election of members of the National Executive Committee shall be issued on the first day of January, 1918, and on January first of each odd numbered year thereafter. _Members elected in 1918 shall retire July first, 1919._" But why should their own Constitution bother plotters who wish to dynamite that of the United States? [H] Gitlow was tried, convicted and sentenced in New York City early in 1920, for inciting to anarchy. [I] The report brought back by this delegate, James Oneal, was the basis of the straddle resolution then adopted by a majority of the Executive Committee, the text of which we have given near the close of Chapter II. [J] As we have seen, the testimony of Morris Hillquit, February 19, 1920, at the trial of the five Assemblymen at Albany, was, "At least ninety per cent. of the manifesto is my authorship." [K] See Chapter V of this book for an account of Referendum D, carried by a large majority in the spring or summer of 1919, by which the rank and file of the Socialist Party opposed its entrance into any international Socialist alignment except that of the Third (Moscow) International. [L] In its article on "The Russian Soviet Government Bureau in the United States" Trachtenberg's Labor Year Book, 1919-1920, pages 384-5, says: "The Legal Department, under the supervision of Morris Hillquit, advises the Bureau so that its actions may at all times conform to the laws of the United States.... The raid upon the Soviet Bureau by local authorities engaged the attention of the Legal Department." Again, the "Albany Argus" of February 19, 1920, describing Hillquit's testimony in the Socialist case on the preceding day, February 18, says: "It was brought out in cross-examination that Mr. Hillquit had acted as counsel for the Russian Soviet Bureau in this country.... The witness testified that he had advised Ludwig C. A. K. Martens to file his credentials with the Secretary of State; had aided him in the preparation of his statement and advised him generally in the organization of his office and in every effort undertaken by him for the establishment of trade connection with the United States." [M] Those willing to co-operate with the Committee should communicate with its Chairman, Mr. Frank Allaben, President of The National Historical Society, publishers of this book, 37 West 39th street, New York City. TRANSCRIBER NOTES [1] Changed "Bolshevissm" to "Bolshevism". [2] Changed "Bolhevist" to "Bolshevist". [3] Changed "Forence" to "Florence". [4] Changed "circulaton" to "circulation". [5] Changed "constitutent" to "constituent". [6] Changed "form" to "from". [7] Changed "Ukrainains" to "Ukrainians". [8] Changed "renumeration" to "remuneration". [9] Changed "Procedings" to "Proceedings". [10] Changed "chidren" to "children". [11] Changed "futhermore" to "furthermore". [12] Changed "inauguarate" to "inaugurate". [13] Changed "Knickerobcker" to "Knickerbocker". [14] Changed "prevalance" to "prevalence". [15] Changed "Englisn" to "English". [16] Changed "neutriality" to "neutrality". [17] Changed "Interpretaion" to "Interpretation". [18] Changed "superstitution" to "superstition". [19] Changed "Pary" to "Party". [20] Changed "nowithstanding" to "notwithstanding". [21] Changed "camparatively" to "comparatively". [22] Changed "dailes" to "dailies". [23] Changed "insurrections" to "insurrection". [24] Changed "alied" to "allied". [25] Changed "Canouflagists" to "Camouflagists". 
34012	----	+-------------------------------------------------+ |Transcriber's note: | | | |Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.| | | |The Table of Contents is at the end of the text. | | | +-------------------------------------------------+ Labor and Freedom The Voice and Pen of Eugene V. Debs While there is a lower class I am in it; While there is a criminal class I am of it; While there is a soul in prison I am not free. Published by PHIL WAGNER St. Louis 1916 [Illustration: Logo. 115] _Introduction_ _I think if I had been asked to name this work that comes to us from the rare mind and tender heart of 'Gene Debs, I would have called it "The Old Umbrella Mender." It was this tragic, touching tale that I first read in the manuscript; and it is the memory of this that will always return to me when I think of the book. It is the perfect painting from the artist's brush--the sculptured monument from the master's chisel--that makes one lowly, loyal soul to live forever in the hearts of humanity's lovers._ _Not but that every line in the book is a treasure, and every sentiment brought forth an appeal to all that makes for justice, and equality, and freedom; nor will it detract from, but rather add to, the beauty and inestimable value of the entire collection if others, likewise, carry with them the image and memory of the old umbrella mender, as they travel with Debs the struggling, storm-tossed way of Labor and Freedom._ HENRY M. TICHENOR. St. Louis, March 1, 1916. MISCELLANY THE OLD UMBRELLA MENDER. Coming Nation, March 1, 1913. It was on a cold morning late in November last, just after the national election, and I was walking briskly toward my office. A stiff wind was blowing and a drizzling rain was falling. The threads in one of the ribs of my umbrella snapped asunder and the cover flew upward, as it has a way of doing, and I was about to lower my disabled shower-stick when I ran slapdash into an old itinerant umbrella mender with his outfit slung across his back and shuffling along in the opposite direction. He had noticed the ill-behavior of my umbrella. It snapped from its bearing even as he had his eyes upon it. Perhaps it understood. Anyway he had not a cent in his pocket and he had not yet breakfasted that cold and wet November morning. He was about 65. His clothes had evidently weathered many a storm and besides being worn and shabby were too light for that season. Overcoat he had none. Nor gloves, nor overshoes. Mine embarrassed me. His hat had been brushed to a standstill. His shoes were making their last stand and a protruding toe, red with the cold, seemed to have been shoved out as a signal of distress. The outfit of the old fellow, carried on his back, was sorry enough to fit his general makeup, and if he had offered himself for sale just as he stood, including his earthly belongings and his immortal soul, he would have found no bidder nor brought a cent. The face of the old umbrella mender lighted up with a kindly smile as he commented on the strange conduct of my umbrella in slipping a cog just as he happened to come along. I asked him by what evil magic he did the trick and he laughed in a half-hearted way just to be polite, but it was plain that he had long since forgotten how to laugh. As we stepped into the shelter of an adjoining store he sat down on the steps and drawing a threaded needle from beneath the lapel of his thin and faded coat, he began to sew the cover back into its proper place. His fingers were red and numb. A discolored nail partly hid a badly bruised thumb. He had difficulty in doing this bit of sewing, and it plainly distressed him. His eyesight was failing and his fingers were stiff in the joints. Yet he strove eagerly and intently to master their dumb protest. And he hoped, as he remarked, that he would be able to make an extra bit of money to provide himself with a pair of spectacles, now that favorable weather had set in for his trade. Poor human soul, I thought to myself, as I looked down upon the weatherbeaten brother at my feet! A vagabond dog among his kind would fare better than this worn-out old umbrella mender in a civilized human community. The warm clothes I had on made me uncomfortable as I saw him sitting there in rags mending my umbrella. The overcoat I wore made me ashamed of myself. Every time the umbrella mender looked up out of his rags I winced. What crime had he committed that condemned him to go through the world in tatters to be lashed by the merciless blasts of winter and tormented by hunger-pangs, and of what rare virtue was I possessed that entitled me to wear the best of clothes and eat the choicest food! Dared I call him brother? And could I call him brother without insulting him? These were the reflections that agitated my mind and troubled my heart. "Good morning!" was the cheery greeting of a man who passed on the sidewalk, calling me by name. The old umbrella mender fairly started at the mention of my name. He had just completed his bit of sewing and the threaded needle fell from his fingers. "Excuse me!" he said timidly, "is this Mr. Debs?" "Yes," I answered. "Eugene V. Debs?" "Yes, brother." "Thank God," exclaimed the old umbrella mender as he fairly bounded to his feet and seized my extended hand with both of his. There were tears in his eyes and his face was flushed. "Of course I know you now," he went on. "This is your home and I have often seen your picture. But this is the first time I have ever seen you and if it hadn't been for your umbrella snapping just as I came along, I would have passed you by and the chances are that I never would have seen you. God must have tipped off your umbrella to give me a stop-signal." "Say, Gene," he continued, still holding me with both hands, "I am pretty well down, ain't I? About all in and making my last stand before shuffling off." "But say, Gene, I never scabbed. Look at these hands! I'm an old rail and I followed the business for twenty-seven years. I broke and ran a freight train most of that time. Never got a passenger run because I was too active on grievance committees and called a firebrand by the officials. I wouldn't stand for any of their dirty work. If I'd been like some of 'em I'd had a passenger train years ago and been saved lots of grief. But I'd rather be a broken down old umbrella-fixer without a friend than to be a scab and worth a million." A gleam of triumph lighted up his seamed and weatherbeaten countenance. "Did you belong to the A. R. U.?" I asked. "Did I?" he answered with peculiar and assuring emphasis. "I was the first man on our division to sign the list, and my name was first on the charter. Look it up and you'll find me there. My card I lost in Ohio where I was run in as a vag. The deputy that searched me at the jail took my card from my pocket and I never saw it again. It was all I had left. I raised a row about it and they threatened to lock me up again. I was told afterwards that the deputy had scabbed in the A. R. U. strike." "Did I belong to the A. R. U.? Well, I should say I did and I am proud of it even if they did put me on the hummer and pull me down to where I am today. But I never scabbed. And when I cross the big divide I can walk straight up to the bar of judgment and look God in the face without a flicker." "We had the railroads whipped to a standstill," he said, warming up, "but the soldiers, the courts and the army of deputy United States marshals that scabbed our jobs were too much for us. It was the government and not the railroads that put us out, and it was a sorry day for the railroad men of this country. Mark what I tell you, the time will come when they will have to reorganize the A. R. U. It was the only union that all could join and in which all got a square deal, and it was the only union the railroad managers ever feared." And then he told me the melancholy story of his own persecution and suffering after the strike. His job was gone and his name was on the blacklist. Five jobs he secured under assumed names were lost to him as soon as he was found out. Poverty began to harass him. He picked up odd jobs and when he managed to get a dollar ahead he sent it to his family. His aged mother died of privation and worry and his wife soon followed her to the grave. Two boys were left, but whatever became of them and whether they are now alive or dead, he could never learn. The old fellow grew serious and a melancholy sigh escaped him. But he was not bitter. He bore no malice toward any one. He had suffered much, but he had kept the faith, and his regrets were at least free from reproach. He was a broken down old veteran of the industrial army. He had paid the penalties of his protest against privately owned industry and the slavery of his class, and now in his old age he was shuffling along in his rags toward a nameless grave in the pottersfield. Had he been an obedient corporation lackey; had he scabbed on his fellow-workers; had he been mean and selfish and cold-blooded, he would have been promoted instead of blacklisted by the corporation and honored instead of hounded by society. His manhood and self-respect cost him dearly, but he paid the price to the last farthing. His right to work and live, his home, his family and his friends were all swept away because he refused to scab on his fellowmen. The old umbrella mender stood before me proud and erect and looked me straight in the eyes as he finished his pathetic story. The shabby clothes he wore were to him capitalist society's reward of manhood and badge of honor. There was something peculiarly grand about the scarred old veteran of the industrial battlefield. His shabbiness was all on the outside, and he seemed transfigured to me and clad in garments of glory. He loomed before me like a forest-monarch the tempests had riven and denuded of its foliage but could not lay low. _He had kept the faith and had never scabbed!_ THE SECRET OF EFFICIENT EXPRESSION. Coming Nation, July 8, 1911. _The following was written for the Department of Education of the University of Wisconsin, under whose direction there is being conducted an investigation of the subject of "Distinguished Contemporary Orators or Lecturers--With special reference to fertility and efficiency of expression. What is the key to their ability as masters of language? What school subjects, or what kinds of training have entered into their lives that have given them power to express themselves effectively?"_ The secret of efficient expression in oratory--if secret it can properly be called--is in having something efficient to express and being so filled with it that it expresses itself. The choice of words is not important since efficient expression, the result of efficient thinking, chooses its own words, moulds and fashions its own sentences, and creates a diction suited to its own purposes. In my own case the power of expression is not due to education or to training. I had no time for either and have often felt the lack of both. The schools I attended were primitive and when I left them at fourteen to go to work I could hardly write a grammatical sentence; and to be frank I am not quite sure that I can do so now. But I had a retentive memory and was fond of committing and declaiming such orations and poems as appealed to me. Patrick Henry's revolutionary speech had first place. Robert Emmet's immortal oration was a great favorite and moved me deeply. Drake's "American Flag" stirred my blood as did also Schiller's "Burgschaft." Often I felt myself thrilled under the spell of these, recited to myself, inaudibly at times, and at others declaimed boldly and dramatically, when no one else was listening. Everything that was revolutionary appealed to me and it was this that made Patrick Henry one of my first heroes; and my passion for his eloquent and burning defiance of King George inspired the first speech I ever attempted in public, with Patrick himself as the theme. This was before the Occidental Literary Club of Terre Haute, Ind., of which I was then a member, and I still shudder as I recall the crowded little club-room which greeted me, and feel again the big drops of cold sweat standing out all over me as I realized the plight I was in and the utter hopelessness of escape. The spectacle I made of myself that evening will never be effaced from my memory, and the sympathetic assurances of my friends at the close of the exhibition did not relieve the keen sense of humiliation and shame I felt for the disgrace I had brought upon myself and my patron saint. The speech could not possibly have been worse and my mortification was complete. In my heart I hoped most earnestly that my hero's spiritual ears were not attuned to the affairs of this earth, at least that evening. It was then I realized and sorely felt the need of the education and training I had missed and then and there I resolved to make up for it as best I could. I set to work in earnest to learn what I so much needed to know. While firing a switch-engine at night I attended a private school half a day each day, sleeping in the morning and attending school in the afternoon. I bought an encyclopedia on the installment plan, one volume each month, and began to read and study history and literature and to devote myself to grammar and composition. The revolutionary history of the United States and France stirred me deeply and its heroes and martyrs became my idols. Thomas Paine towered above them all. A thousand times since then I have found inspiration and strength in the thrilling words, "These are the times that try men's souls." Here I should say, for the purpose of this writing, that from the time I began to read with a serious mind, feeling keenly as I did my lack of knowledge, especially the power of proper expression, both oral and written, I observed the structure and studied the composition of every paragraph and every sentence, and when one appeared striking to me, owing to its perfection of style or phrasing, I read it a second time or perhaps committed it to memory, and this became a fixed habit which I retain to this day, and if I have any unusual command of language it is because I have made it a life-long practice to cultivate the art of expression in a sub-conscious study of the structure and phrasing of every paragraph in my readings. It was while serving an apprenticeship in a railroad shop and in later years as a locomotive fireman and as a wage worker in other capacities that I came to realize the oppressions and sufferings of the working class and to understand something of the labor question. The wrongs existing here I knew from having experienced them, and the irresistible appeal of these wrongs to be righted determined my destiny. I joined a labor union and from that time to this the high ambition, the controlling purpose of my life has been the education, organization and emancipation of the working class. It was this passionate sympathy with my class that gave me all the power I have to serve it. I felt their suffering because I was one of them and I began to speak and write for them for the same reason. In this there was no altruism, no self-sacrifice, only duty. I could not have done otherwise. Had I attempted it I should have failed. Such as I have been and am, I had to be. I abhorred slavery in every form. I yearned to see all men and all women free. I detested the idea of some men being ruled by others, and of women being ruled by men. I believed that women should have all the rights men have, and I looked upon child labor as a crime. And so I became an agitator and this ruling passion of my life found larger expression. In the clash of conflict which followed and the trials incident to it I grew stronger. The notoriety which came in consequence enlarged my hearing with the people and this in turn demanded more efficient means of expression. The cause that was sacred to me was assailed. My very life and honor were on trial. Falsehood and calumny played their part. I was denounced and vilified. Everything was at stake. I simply had to speak and make the people understand, and that is how I got my training in oratory, and all the secret there is in whatever power of expression I may have. In reading the history of slavery I studied the character of John Brown and he became my hero. I read the speeches of Wendell Phillips and was profoundly stirred by his marvelous powers. Once I heard him and was enthralled by his indescribable eloquence. He was far advanced in years, but I could see in his commanding presence and mellow and subdued tones how he must have blazed and flashed in the meridian of his powers. At about the same time I first heard Robert G. Ingersoll. He was in my opinion the perfect master of the art of human speech. He combined all the graces, gifts and powers of expression, and stood upon the highest pinnacle of oratorical achievement. Robert G. Ingersoll and Wendell Phillips were the two greatest orators of their time, and probably of all time. Their power sprang from their passion for freedom, for truth, for justice, for a world filled with light and with happy human beings. But for this divine passion neither would have scaled the sublime heights of immortal achievement. The sacred fire burned within them and when they were aroused it flashed from their eyes and rolled from their inspired lips in torrents of eloquence. No man ever made a great speech on a mean subject. Slavery never inspired an immortal thought or utterance. Selfishness is dead to every art. The love of truth and the passion to serve it light every torch of real eloquence. Had Ingersoll and Phillips devoted their lives to the practice of law for pay the divine fire within them would have burned to ashes and they would have died in mediocrity. The highest there is in oratory is the highest there is in truth, in honesty, in morality. All the virtues combine in expressing themselves in beautiful words, poetic phrases, glowing periods, and moving eloquence. The loftiest peaks rise from the lowest depths and their shining summits glorify their hidden foundations. The highest eloquence springs from the lowliest sources and pleads trumpet-tongued for the children of the abyss. Wendell Phillips was inspired by the scarred back, the pleading eyes, and the mute lips of chattel slavery and his tongue, eloquent with the lightning of Jehovah's wrath, became an avenging flame to scourge the horror of slavery from the earth. Denial of one's better self seals the lips or pollutes them. Fidelity to conviction opens them and truth blossoms in eloquence. The tongue is tipped with the flame that leaps from the altar-fire of the soul. Ingersoll and Phillips were absolutely true to their convictions. They attacked monstrous evils and were hated and denounced. Had they yielded to the furies which assailed them they would have perished. But the fiercer the attacks upon them the stauncher they stood and the more eloquent and powerful they became. The truth fired their souls, flashed from their eyes, and inspired their lips. There is no inspiration in evil and no power except for its own destruction. He who aspires to master the art of expression must first of all consecrate himself completely to some great cause, and the greatest cause of all is the cause of humanity. He must learn to feel deeply and think clearly to express himself eloquently. He must be absolutely true to the best there is in him, if he has to stand alone. Such natural powers as he may have should be cultivated by the study of history, science and literature. He must not only keep close to the people but remember that he is one of them, and not above the meanest. He must feel the wrongs of others so keenly that he forgets his own, and resolve to combat these wrongs with all the power at his command. The most thrilling and inspiring oratory, the most powerful and impressive eloquence is the voice of the disinherited, the oppressed, the suffering and submerged; it is the voice of poverty and misery, of rags and crusts, of wretchedness and despair; the voice of humanity crying to the infinite; the voice that resounds throughout the earth and reaches heaven; the voice that awakens the conscience of the race and proclaims the truths that fill the world with light and liberty and love. JESUS, THE SUPREME LEADER. Coming Nation (Formerly Progressive Woman), March, 1914. It matters little whether Jesus was born at Nazareth or Bethlehem. The accounts conflict, but the point is of no consequence. It is of consequence, however, that He was born in a stable and cradled in a manger. This fact of itself, about which there is no question, certifies conclusively the proletarian character of Jesus Christ. Had His parents been other than poor working people--money-changers, usurers, merchants, lawyers, scribes, priests or other parasites--He would not have been delivered from His mother's womb on a bed of straw in a stable among asses and other animals. Was Jesus divinely begotten? Yes, the same as every other babe ever born into the world. He was of miraculous origin the same as all the rest of mankind. The scriptural account of his "immaculate conception" is a beautiful myth, but scarcely more of a miracle than the conception of all other babes. Jesus was not divine because he was less human than his fellowmen but for the opposite reason that he was supremely human, and it is this of which his divinity consists, the fullness and perfection of him as an intellectual, moral and spiritual human being. The chronicles of his time and of later days are filled with contradictory and absurd stories about him and he has been disfigured and distorted by cunning priests to serve their knavish ends and by ignorant idolaters to give godly sanction to their blind bigotry and savage superstition, but there is no impenetrable myth surrounding the personality of Jesus Christ. He was not a legendary being or an allegorical figure, but as Bouck White and others have shown us, a flesh and blood Man in the fulness of his matchless powers and the completeness of his transcendent consecration. To me Jesus Christ is as real, as palpitant and pervasive as a historic character as John Brown, Abraham Lincoln or Karl Marx. He has persisted in spite of two thousand years of theological emasculation to destroy his revolutionary personality, and is today the greatest moral force in the world. The vain attempt persisted in through twenty centuries of ruling class interpolation, interpretation and falsification to make Jesus appear the divinely commissioned conservator of the peace and soother of the oppressed, instead of the master proletarian revolutionist and sower of the social whirlwind--the vain attempt to prostitute the name and teachings and example of the martyred Christ to the power of Mammon, the very power which had murdered him in cold blood, vindicates his transcendent genius and proclaims the immortality of his work. Nothing is known of Jesus Christ as a lad except that at twelve his parents took him to Jerusalem, where he confounded the learned doctors by the questions he asked them. We have no knowledge as to what these questions were, but taking his lowly birth, his poverty and suffering into account, in contrast with the riches of Jerusalem which now dazzled his vision, and in the light of his subsequent career we are not left to conjecture as to the nature of the interrogation to which the inquisitive lad subjected the smug doctors in the temple. There are but meagre accounts of the doings of Jesus until at a trifle over thirty he entered upon his public "ministry" and began the campaign of agitation and revolt he had been planning and dreaming through all the years of his yearning and burning adolescence. He was of the working class and loyal to it in every drop of his hot blood to the very hour of his death. He hated and denounced the rich and cruel exploiter as passionately as he loved and sympathized with his poor and suffering victims. "I speak not of you all; I know whom I have chosen," was his class-conscious announcement to his disciples, all of whom were of the proletariat, not an exploiter or desirable citizen among them. No, not one! It was a working class movement he was organizing and a working class revolution he was preparing the way for. "A new commandment I give unto you: That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another." This was the pith and core of all his pleading, all his preaching, and all his teaching--love one another, be brethren, make common cause, stand together, ye who labor to enrich the parasites and are yourselves in chains, and ye shall be free! These words were addressed by Jesus not to the money-changers, the scribes and pharisees, the rich and respectable, but to the ragged undesirables of his own enslaved and suffering class. This appeal was to their class spirit, their class loyalty and their class solidarity. Centuries later Karl Marx embodies the appeal in his famous manifesto and today it blazes forth in letters of fire as the watchword of the world-wide revolution: "_Workers of all countries unite: you have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to gain._" During the brief span of three years, embracing the whole period of his active life, from the time he began to stir up the people until "the scarlet robe and crown of thorns were put on him and he was crucified between two thieves," Jesus devoted all his time and all his matchless ability and energies to the suffering poor, and it would have been passing strange if they had not "heard him gladly." He himself had no fixed abode and like the wretched, motley throng to whom he preached and poured out his great and loving heart, he was a poor wanderer on the face of the earth and "had not where to lay his head." Pure communism was the economic and social gospel preached by Jesus Christ, and every act and utterance which may properly be ascribed to him conclusively affirms it. Private property was to his elevated mind and exalted soul a sacrilege and a horror; an insult to God and a crime against man. The economic basis of his doctrine of brotherhood, and love is clearly demonstrated in the fact that under his leadership and teaching all his disciples "sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, _as every man had need_," and that they "had all things in common." "And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart." This was the beginning of the mighty movement Jesus had launched for the overthrow of the empire of the Caesars and the emancipation of the crushed and miserable masses from the bestial misrule of the Roman tyrants. It was above all a working class movement and was conceived and brought forth for no other purpose than to destroy class rule and set up the common people as the sole and rightful inheritors of the earth. "Happy are the lowly for they shall inherit the earth." Three short years of agitation by the incomparable Jesus was sufficient to stamp the proletarian movement he had inaugurated as the most formidable and portentous revolution in the annals of time. The ill-fated author could not long survive his stupendous mischief. The aim and inevitable outcome of this madman's teaching and agitation was too clearly manifest to longer admit of doubt. The sodden lords of misrule trembled in their stolen finery, and then the word went forth that they must "get" the vagabond who had stirred up the people against them. The prototypes of Peabody, McPartland, Harry Orchard, et. al., were all ready for their base and treacherous performance and their thirty pieces of blood-stained silver. The priest of the Mammon worshipers gave it out that the Nazarene was spreading a false religion and that his pernicious teachings would corrupt the people, destroy the church, uproot the old faith, disrupt the family, break up the home, and overthrow society. The lineal descendants of Caiaphas and Judas and the pharisees and money-changers of old are still parroting the same miserable falsehood to serve the same miserable ends, the only difference being that the brood of pious perverts now practice their degeneracy in the name of the Christ they betrayed and sold into crucifixion twenty centuries ago. Jesus, after the most farcical trial and the most shocking travesty upon justice, was spiked to the cross at the gates of Jerusalem and his followers subjected to persecution, torture, exile and death. The movement he had inaugurated, fired by his unconquerable revolutionary spirit, persisted, however, through fire and slaughter, for three centuries and until the master class, realizing the futility of their efforts to stamp it out, basely betrayed it by pretending conversion to its teachings and reverence for its murdered founder, and from that time forth Christianity became the religion, so-called, of the pagan ruling class and the dead Christ was metamorphosed from the master revolutionist who was ignominiously slain, a martyr to his class, into the pious abstraction, the harmless theological divinity who died that John Pierpont Morgan could be "washed in the blood of the lamb" and countless generations of betrayed and deluded slaves kept blinded by superstition and content in their poverty and degradation. Jesus was the grandest and loftiest of human souls--sun-crowned and God-inspired; a full-statured man, red-blooded and lion-hearted, yet sweet and gentle as the noble mother who had given him birth. He had the majesty and poise of a god, the prophetic vision of a seer, the great, loving heart of a woman, and the unaffected innocence and simplicity of a child. This was and is the martyred Christ of the working class, the inspired evangel of the downtrodden masses, the world's supreme revolutionary leader, whose love for the poor and the children of the poor hallowed all the days of his consecrated life, lighted up and made forever holy the dark tragedy of his death, and gave to the ages his divine inspiration and his deathless name. SUSAN B. ANTHONY: A REMINISCENCE Socialist Woman, January, 1909. Twice only did I personally meet Susan B. Anthony, although I knew her well. The first time was at Terre Haute, Indiana, my home, in 1880, and the last time shortly before her death at her home at Rochester, New York. I can never forget the first time I met her. She impressed me as being a wonderfully strong character, self-reliant, thoroughly in earnest, and utterly indifferent to criticism. There was never a time in my life when I was opposed to the equal suffrage of the sexes. I could never understand why woman was denied any right or opportunity that man enjoyed. Quite early, therefore, I was attracted to the woman suffrage movement. I had of course read of Susan B. Anthony and from the ridicule and contempt with which she was treated I concluded that she must be a strong advocate of, and doing effective work for, the rights of her sex. It was then that I determined, with the aid of Mrs. Ida Husted Harper, the brilliant writer, who afterward became her biographer, to arrange a series of meetings for Miss Anthony at Terre Haute. In due course of time I received a telegram from Miss Anthony from Lafayette announcing the time of her arrival at Terre Haute and asking me to meet her at the station. I recognized the distinguished lady or, to be more exact, the notorious woman, the instant she stepped from the train. She was accompanied by Lily Devereaux Blake and other woman suffrage agitators and I proceeded to escort them to the hotel where I had arranged for their reception. I can still see the aversion so unfeelingly expressed for this magnificent woman. Even my friends were disgusted with me for piloting such an "undesirable citizen" into the community. It is hard to understand, after all these years, how bitter and implacable the people were, especially the women, toward the leaders of this movement. As we walked along the street I was painfully aware that Miss Anthony was an object of derision and contempt, and in my heart I resented it and later I had often to defend my position, which, of course, I was ever ready to do. The meetings of Miss Anthony and her co-workers were but poorly attended and all but barren of results. Such was the loathing of the community for a woman who dared to talk in public about "woman's rights" that people would not go to see her even to satisfy their curiosity. She was simply not to be tolerated and it would not have required any great amount of egging-on to have excited the people to drive her from the community. To all of this Miss Anthony, to all appearance, was entirely oblivious. She could not have helped noticing it for there were those who thrust their insults upon her but she gave no sign and bore no resentment. I can see her still as she walked along, neatly but carelessly attired, her bonnet somewhat awry, mere trifles which were scarcely noticed, if at all, in the presence of her splendid womanhood. She seemed absorbed completely in her mission. She could scarcely speak of anything else. The rights and wrongs of her sex seemed to completely possess her and to dominate all her thoughts and acts. On the platform she spoke with characteristic earnestness and at times with such intensity as to awe her audience, if not compel conviction. She had an inexhaustible fund of information in regard to current affairs, and dates and data for all things. She spoke with great rapidity and forcefulness; her command of language was remarkable and her periods were all well-rounded and eloquently delivered. No thoughtful person could hear her without being convinced of her honesty and the purity of her motive. Her face fairly glowed with the spirit of her message and her soul was in her speech. But the superb quality, the crowning virtue she possessed, was her moral heroism. Susan B. Anthony had this quality in an eminent degree. She fearlessly faced the ignorant multitude or walked unafraid among those who scorned her. She had the dignity of perfect self-reliance without a shadow of conceit to mar it. She was a stern character, an uncompromising personality, but she had the heart of a woman and none more tender ever throbbed for the weak and the oppressed of earth. No leader of any crusade was ever more fearless, loyal or uncompromising than Susan B. Anthony and not one ever wrought more unselfishly or under greater difficulties for the good of her kind and for the progress of the race. I did not see Miss Anthony again until I shook hands with her at the close of my address in Rochester, but a short time before she passed to other realms. She was the same magnificent woman, but her locks had whitened and her kindly features bore the traces of age and infirmity. Her life-work was done and her sun was setting! How beautiful she seemed in the quiet serenity of her sunset! Twenty-five years before she drank to its dregs the bitter cup of persecution, but now she stood upon the heights, a sad smile lighting her sweet face, amidst the acclaims of her neighbors and the plaudits of the world. Susan B. Anthony freely consecrated herself to the service of humanity; she was a heroine in the highest sense and her name deserves a place among the highest on the scroll of the immortals. LOUIS TIKAS--LUDLOW'S HERO AND MARTYR. Appeal to Reason, September 4, 1915. "And now that the cloud settled upon Saint Antoine which a momentary gleam had driven from his sacred countenance, the darkness of it was heavy--cold, dirt, sickness, ignorance and want, were the lords in waiting on the saintly presence--nobles of great power all of them; but most especially the last. Samples of a people that had undergone a terrible grinding and regrinding in the mill, and certainly not in the fabulous mill which ground old people young, shivered at every corner.... The mill which had worked them down was the mill that grinds young people old; the children had ancient faces and grave voices; and upon them, and upon the grown faces, and plowed into every furrow of age and coming up afresh, was the sign, Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere. Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses, in the wretched clothing that hung upon the poles and lines; hunger was patched into them with straw and rags and wood and paper; hunger was repeated in every modicum of fire-wood that the man sawed off; hunger stared down from the smokeless chimneys, and started up from the filthy street that had no offal, among its refuse, of anything to eat. Hunger was the inscription on the baker's shelves, written in every small loaf of his scanty stock of bad bread; at the sausage-shop, in every dead-dog preparation that was offered for sale. Hunger rattled its dry bones among the roasting chestnuts in the turned cylinder; hunger was shred into atoms in every farthing of husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil. "Its abiding place was in all things fitted to it. A narrow winding street, full of offense and stench, with other narrow winding streets diverging, all peopled by rags and nightcaps, and all smelling of rags and nightcaps, and all visible things with a brooding look upon them that looked ill. In the hunted air of the people there was yet some wild-beast thought of the possibility of turning at bay. Depressed and slinking though they were, eyes of fire were not wanting among them; nor compressed lips, white with what they suppressed; nor foreheads knitted into the likeness of the gallows-rope they mused about enduring or inflicting."--_A Tale of Two Cities._ * * * * * In these ghastly colors Charles Dickens painted the picture of poverty and its starving victims in France on the eve of the French revolution, and yet, "every wind that blew over France shook the rags of the scarecrows in vain, for the birds, fine of song and feather took no warning." Then the storm broke and the pent-up furies were unleashed; the day of reckoning had come at last and the crimes of the centuries, inflicted without mercy upon the long-suffering people, were wiped out in the hearts' blood of their aristocratic and profligate oppressors and despoilers. The bloody revolution of a century and a quarter ago in France fills uncounted pages in the world's history, but its terrible warning to the lords of misrule and despoilers of the people has been in vain. Today as ever the greed and avarice of the ruling class blind them to their impending fate and drive them to their inevitable doom. In the state of Colorado in "our own free America" the conditions that make for savage and bloody revolution are ripening with incredible rapidity and the lurid handwriting of fate is already upon the wall, but the Rockefellers and their capitalist cohorts, stricken blind as the penalty of their insatiate greed, are unable to see it. That the monstrous crime of Ludlow, the fiendish destruction of the tented village, the wanton killing of the homeless, hunted, hopeless victims--half-clad, famishing, terror-stricken and defenseless--bludgeoned, bullied, shot down like dogs, and their wives and suckling babes roasted in pits before their eyes--that this appalling massacre, without a parallel in history, did not infuriate the suffering and persecuted victims of capitalism's worse than satanic ferocity, fire their blood with the tiger-thirst for revenge, and drench the despotic and shameless state with blood is one of the miracles of patience and submissiveness of the exploited, downtrodden, suffering masses. The tragic story of Ludlow, the hideous nightmare of the infernal regions of the Rocky(feller) Mountains--written in the violated wombs of shrieking mothers and the spattered life-drops of their murdered babes--has yet to be traced on history's ineffaceable pages. The blood of the twenty-three innocents who perished there will be the holy fount of the writer's inspiration whose fire-tipped pen will give to the world this tragic and thrilling epic of the embattled miners in the mountain ramparts of Rockefellerado. In the story of Ludlow, Louis Tikas, the intrepid leader, the loyal comrade, the noble-hearted Greek who fell the victim of gunmen-brutes in military uniform while pleading that the women and children be spared, takes on the robes of deity and joins the martyrs and heroes of history. The rifle-butt that crushed his noble head and silenced his brave and tender heart gave his soul to the cause he loved and his name to the ages. The lion-hearted Greek is at rest, but the cause he lived and died for goes on forever! Louis Tikas was educated, cultured and refined, a graduate of the University of Athens; yea, he was more than that, he was a MAN! His heart was true as his brain was clear; he followed the truth and he loved justice; he sided with the weak and ministered to the suffering, even as his elder brother had in the days when other pharisees crucified the Son of Man for loving his despoiled and despised fellow-men. _Louis Tikas made Ludlow holy as Jesus Christ made Calvary!_ He was the loyal leader of the persecuted colony; the trusted keeper of the tented village. He was loved by every man, woman and child, and feared only by the fanged wolves and hyenas that threatened to ravage the flock. Strong as a giant yet gentle as a child; utterly fearless yet without bravado, this great and loving soul cast his lot with the exiled slaves of the pits and kept his vigil over the defenseless women and children of the village as a loving mother might over the fledglings of her brood. Is it strange that they loved him, trusted him, and that in the hour of their deadly peril they looked to him to shield them from their brutish ravishers? In this tragic hour Louis Tikas measured up to the supreme stature of his noble manhood. He knew his time had come and with a smile upon his lips and without a tremor in his sinews, he faced his cruel fate. He asked no quarter for himself, but only begged that mothers and babes be spared; and with this touching plea upon his lips and the love of his people in his soul and beaming from his eyes, he was struck down by the hired assassins of the Arch-Pharisee and passed to martyrdom and immortality. THE LITTLE LORDS OF LOVE. Progressive Woman, December, 1910. The children are to me a perpetual source of wonder and delight. How keen they are, how alert, and how comprehending! The sweet children of the Socialist movement--the little lords of light and love--keep my heart warm and my purpose true. The raggedest and dirtiest of them all is to me an angel of light. I have seen them, the proletarian little folks, swarming up out of the sub-cellars and down from the garrets of the tenements and I have watched them with my heart filled with pity and my eyes overflowing with tears. Their very glee seemed tragic beyond words. Born within the roar of the ocean their tiny feet are never kissed by the eager surf, nor their wan cheeks made ruddy by the vitalizing breezes of the sea. Not for them--the flotsam and jetsam upon the social tides--are the rosy hours of babyhood, the sweet, sweet joys of childhood. They are the heirs of the social filth and disease of capitalism and death marks them at what should be the dewy dawn of birth, and they wither and die--without having been born. Their cradle is their coffin and their birth robe their winding sheet. The Socialist movement is the first in all history to come to the rescue of childhood and to set free the millions of little captives. And they realize it and incarnate the very spirit of the movement and shout aloud their joy as it marches on to victory. The little revolutionists in Socialist parades know what they are there for, and in our audiences they are wide awake to the very last word. They know, too, when to applaud, and the speaker who fails to enthuse them is surely lacking in some vital element of his speech. At the close of a recent meeting in a western state the stage was crowded with eager comrades shaking hands and offering congratulations. My hand was suddenly gripped from below. I glanced down and a little comrade just about big enough to stand alone looked straight up into my eyes and said with all the frankness and sincerity of a child: "That was a great speech you made and I love you; keep this to remember me by." And he handed me a little nickle-plated whistle, his sole tangible possession, and with it all the wealth of his pure and unpolluted child-love, which filled my heart and moved me to tears. In just that moment that tiny proletaire filled my measure to overflowing and consecrated me with increased strength and devotion to the great movement that is destined to rescue the countless millions of disinherited babes and give them the earth and all the fulness thereof as their patrimony forever. The sweetest, tenderest, most pregnant words uttered by the proletaire of Galilee were: "Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me; for of such is the kingdom of heaven." THE COPPOCK BROTHERS: HEROES OF HARPER'S FERRY. Appeal to Reason, May 23, 1914. "O, patience, felon of the hour! Over thy ghastly gallows-tree Shall climb the vine of Liberty, With ripened fruit and fragrant flower." So wrote William Dean Howells, then a rising young poet and author in Columbus, Ohio, in November, 1859, on the eve of John Brown's execution at Charleston, Va. In the month before, on the night of October 16th, John Brown, at the head of twenty-one men, sixteen of whom were white and five black, marched on Harper's Ferry and delivered the attack that sent his body to the gallows and his soul to immortal glory. The heroic blood of old Brown himself flowed in the veins of all his twenty-one intrepid young followers. There was not a coward among them. Three of them were Brown's own sons and two others were near relatives. Brown was fifty-nine; his adjutant general twenty-four. All his followers were young men, some of them barely of age. When Colonel Richard J. Hinton, who followed John Brown in Kansas, heard of the intended raid on Harper's Ferry, he said to Kagi, the stripling adjutant general: "You'll all be killed." "Yes, I know it, Hinton," was the ready reply, "but the result will be worth the sacrifice." Kagi was said to resemble "a divinity student rather than a warrior," and when taunted by an adversary, he answered, "We will endure the shadow of dishonor, but not the stain of guilt." "These words of John Henry Kagi," wrote Hinton, "expressed the spirit of John Brown's men and, in an especial sense, the character of the young and brilliant man who fell riddled with bullets into the Shenandoah. Thirty miles below, the blood-tinged stream flowed through the lands of his father's family." Spartan souls were these who marched on Harper's Ferry that fateful night, there to strike a blow at the cost of their lives that was destined to make Harper's Ferry more famed than Waterloo--a blow that was to emancipate a race and change abruptly the whole current of American history. "Down the still road, dim white in the moonlight, and amid the chill of the October night, went the little band, silent and sober." The twenty-one young heroes who followed old John Brown on that historic night were of the exalted type that Emerson described: "When souls reach a certain clearness of perception, they accept a knowledge and motive without selfishness." It is related that when Garibaldi was organizing his army of liberation in Italy, he was asked what inducements he had to offer to new recruits. Promptly the rebel chieftain answered: "Poverty, hardships, battles, wounds, and--victory!" That was all Captain Brown had to offer his devoted followers, with crushing defeat instead of victory at the end, and yet they enlisted with a zeal that could not have been surpassed if the world's most coveted prizes had been their promised reward. Think of the utter abnegation, unselfishness and loftiness of purpose of that valiant little band who marched deliberately into the jaws of hell that October night to break the fetters of a despised and alien race! How many of their detractors and persecutors were animated by motives so pure and exalted? No wonder that Victor Hugo protested so eloquently, albeit in vain, against John Brown's execution. "Think of a republic," he indignantly exclaimed, "murdering a liberator!" and when the bloody deed was done the illustrious Frenchman flung back the prophetic challenge: "The time will come when your John Brown will be greater than your George Washington." Among Brown's men in the attack on Harper's Ferry there were two Quaker brothers, Edwin and Barclay Coppock, stalwart young abolitionists from Iowa, whose unfaltering devotion to the cause, heroic self-sacrifice and tragic death constitute one of the most thrilling and inspiring chapters in American history. Edwin, the elder brother, was captured with his leader and shared his fate on the gallows. Barclay made good his escape with Owen Brown, to be killed later as a lieutenant, while recruiting a regiment for the war which had then actually begun. Edwin and Barclay Coppock were born of Quaker parents near Salem, Ohio, Edwin on June 30, 1835, and Barclay on January 4, 1839, so that Edwin was 24 and Barclay not quite 21 when the attack was made on Harper's Ferry. Salem was at that time the center of abolitionism in that section. It was settled by Quakers and they were strongly anti-slavery in sentiment. The headquarters of the "Western Anti-Slavery Society" was located here, and here also was published the "Anti-Slavery Bugle," official organ of the movement, of which Benjamin S. Jones, Oliver Johnson and Warren R. Robertson were editors. They waged uncompromising warfare against slavery, attacked the United States constitution as it was then being interpreted, and denounced the churches that would not come out openly in favor of abolition. They were called "Disunion Abolitionists," "Covenanters" and "Infidels." But nothing daunted, they demanded the unconditional surrender of the slave power. During one of the annual conventions held at the Hicksite Friends' church in Salem and in the midst of a violent speech that was being delivered against the encroachments of slavery on Northern soil under the fugitive slave law, an excited man entered with a telegram in his hand and announced breathlessly that the four o'clock train, due in thirty minutes, had aboard of it a southern man and his wife and a colored slave girl as a nurse. It was at once proposed that they proceed to the depot in a body and meet the train on arrival. The meeting was hastily adjourned. Intense enthusiasm prevailed. They marched to the depot cheering as they went and when the train pulled in they boarded it, took the slave girl without protest from her master and mistress and marched back to the hall with her in triumph. The liberated girl was christened Abby Kelly Salem, in honor of Abby Kelly Foster, one of the speakers at the convention, and the city of Salem. The girl grew up to splendid womanhood and was highly esteemed by all who knew her. The old town hall, still standing, is where many an anti-slavery meeting was held in that day. The most stirring and eloquent appeals were made in this old meeting house by such noted abolitionists as William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Susan B. Anthony, Parker Pillsbury, Horace Mann, John Pierpont, Gerrit Smith, Fred Douglas, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Owen Lovejoy, Abby Kelly Foster, George Thompson of England, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Collyer, John P. Hale and many others. The walls of the old town hall resounded daily and nightly with the patriotism and love of freedom of Quaker Salem. It was in this atmosphere and under the influence of these impassioned teachings that the Coppock brothers, sons of a nearby Quaker farmer, grew up to young manhood. It had been ingrained into their very nature that all men were created equal and that slavery was a crime against God and man, and with this conviction they resolved to shoulder their muskets and go out and fight to liberate the slaves. The family moved to Iowa in the meantime and it was here that these young Quaker enthusiasts first met John Brown, who was then waging his warfare against slavery in the free soil conflict in that state. From now on their die was cast. They would follow the grim old chief to victory or death. It proved to be death for them both and when it came they met it with a calmness and resignation possible only to the loftiest heroism. Barclay Coppock was barely twenty years of age at the time of the attack on Harper's Ferry. His escape was almost a miracle. A heavy reward was offered for him dead or alive. After weeks of the most intense privation and suffering, lying concealed in the brush during the day and moving chiefly by night, he picked his way back to the family home at Springdale, Iowa. The governor of Virginia issued a requisition for his return, which was not granted. The young men at Springdale and that vicinity organized to protect young Coppock and served notice on the Virginia officers who were on his track that "Springdale is in arms and is prepared at a half hour's notice to give them a reception of 200 shots." In the following spring Barclay returned to Salem and here again the Virginia authorities renewed their efforts to capture him. But Barclay, now among his old neighbors and friends, defied them. He sent word to the officers in pursuit of him as to where he might be found, but they wisely refrained from attempting to take him. It was at this time that Barclay was a guest of the Bonsall family of Salem, the elder Bonsall being one of the leading abolitionists of that day. Charles Bonsall, his son, who still lives at Salem, knew the Coppock brothers well and has a distinct recollection of Barclay's stay at his father's home. "During Barclay's sojourn at our home," writes Charles Bonsall in a personal letter, "a detective of Salem heard of his being in our neighborhood and boasted of his intention to arrest Barclay and secure the reward there was on his head. Barclay heard of the boast and wrote a letter to the detective informing him that he might select five other men and he would meet them all single-handed and alone at any point outside the city that he might name, and they could have the privilege of capturing him and securing the reward. The detective did not undertake the job.... Barclay Coppock never knew what fear was. When a boy in his teens he often went to the woods and slept alone all night on the ground, under the trees, from the sheer love of adventure. He was the best shot with his eight-inch Colt I ever saw. On one occasion, in his uncle's woods south of Salem, with his revolver, he shot a grey squirrel from a big oak tree and put two more balls through its body before it reached the ground. His nerves were as calm and steady in a fight as in his sleep, and while with us his trusted "navy" was always strapped under his coat, while in his coat-pocket he carried a small pistol ready for any emergency at close quarters. It would have been impossible to capture him alive." Barclay Coppock's escape and the execution of his brother but intensified his hatred and horror of slavery. He was now thoroughly aroused and intent upon plunging anew into the fight. Returning to Iowa, and convinced that civil war was now inevitable, he prepared actively for the conflict. "Now comes one of those remarkable facts of super-epochal history," continues Bonsall, "which go to show that when revolutionary periods focalize, revolutions in public sentiment are brought about in almost a twinkling. In the spring of 1861, just about one year from the time the United States Government was offering a reward of one thousand dollars for Barclay Coppock, dead or alive, the same government lifted its hat and humbly bowed to him, and begged him to accept a first lieutenant's commission in Company C, Third Kansas volunteers. He accepted the commission and at once proceeded to organize his company. Captain Allen of Ashtabula of the same company, came to Salem to recruit volunteers and the writer, together with half a score of other abolition boys, enlisted in Coppock's company.... Soon after Lieutenant Coppock was on his way from Springdale to Fort Leavenworth to join his regiment there. The rebels in Missouri, hearing of his coming, burned the railroad bridge across the Little Platte river near St. Joseph, and the train carrying the troops was precipitated into the river in the darkness of night and brave Lieutenant Coppock was killed in the wreck." Thus perished, still in his boyhood, as heroic a heart, as noble a soul, as ever gave up his life in the cause of freedom. Had he been spared he would without doubt have become one of the famed heroes of the war of the rebellion. Edwin Coppock was executed from the same gallows as his old chief, but two weeks later. His trial, like that of Brown, was a farce. Conviction, sentence and execution of all of Brown's men that were captured was a foregone conclusion. While awaiting the execution of his sentence, Edwin wrote to Mrs. Brown, wife of his dead leader: "I was with your sons when they fell. Oliver lived but a very few moments after he was shot. He spoke no word, but yielded calmly to his fate. Watson was shot at ten o'clock Monday morning and died about three o'clock Monday afternoon.... After we were taken prisoners he was placed in the guardhouse with me. He complained of the hardness of the bench on which he was lying. I begged hard for a bed for him, or even a blanket, but could obtain none. I took off my coat and placed it under him and held his head in my lap, in which position he died without a groan or struggle." In a letter to friends in Iowa, under date of November 22d, three weeks before his execution, he wrote: "Eleven of our little band are sleeping now in their bloody garments with the cold earth above them. Braver men never lived; truer men to their plighted word never banded together." Rigidly true to their convictions were all these young heroes. Not one showed the white feather in the last hour. Serenely and without a quiver each of them met his cruel fate. John Brown had trained up his men in the strictest discipline. Not a drop of liquor was allowed in his camp. Tobacco was tabooed. Profane language was forbidden. These men were in deadly earnest and their asceticism attested their single-hearted fidelity to their cause. They were profoundly convinced that slavery was a national crime and that it was their patriotic duty, at whatever cost, to wipe that insufferable stigma from the land. And who shall say that they were not right; or that they forfeited their brave lives in vain? A few days before the gallows claimed him, John Brown wrote to his family, "I feel no consciousness of guilt and I am perfectly certain that very soon no member of the family will feel any possible disposition to blush on my account." The Coppock brothers were typical of all the brave young abolitionists who banded together to strike a blow that rocked this nation as if Jehovah in his wrath had laid hold on it. Quaker lads, "grave, quiet, reserved, even rustic in their ways," they lived bravely up to their convictions and sealed their devotion to the cause of freedom with their precious young life blood. The noble character of Edwin Coppock is revealed in the following pathetic letter written to his uncle on the eve of his execution. There is no bitterness in his heart at the last hour. Like the great Galilean who also perished for sympathizing with the lowly and oppressed, he was calm and resigned in the presence of his fate. Like all such souls he was gifted with prophetic vision, as his letter shows: Charleston, December 13, 1859. Joshua Coppock: My Dear Uncle--I seat myself by the stand to write for the first and last time to thee and thy dear family. Though far from home and overtaken by misfortune, I have not forgotten you. Your generous hospitality towards me, during my short stay with you last spring, is stamped indelibly upon my heart, and also the generosity bestowed upon my brother who now wanders, an outcast from his native land. But thank God, he is free. I am thankful it is I who has to suffer instead of him. The time may come when he will remember me. And the time may come when he may still further remember the cause in which I die. Thank God the principles of the cause in which we were engaged will not die with me and my brave comrades. They will spread wider and wider and gather strength with each hour that passes. The voice of truth will echo through our land, bringing conviction to the erring and adding members to the glorious army who will follow its banner. The cause of everlasting truth and justice will go on conquering and to conquer until our broad and beautiful land shall rest beneath the banner of freedom. I had fondly hoped to live to see the principles of the Declaration of Independence fully realized. I had hoped to see the dark stain of slavery blotted from our land, and the libel of our boasted freedom erased, when we can say in truth that our beloved country is the land of the free and the home of the brave; but that cannot be. I have heard my sentence passed; my doom is sealed. But two more short days remains for me to fulfill my earthly destiny. But two brief days between me and eternity. At the expiration of those two days I shall stand upon the scaffold to take my last look of earthly scenes. But that scaffold has but little dread for me, for I honestly believe I am innocent of any crime justifying such punishment. But by the taking of my life and the lives of my comrades, Virginia is but hastening on that glorious day, when the slave will rejoice in his freedom and say, "I, too, am a man, and am groaning no more under the yoke of oppression." But I must now close. Accept this short scrawl as a remembrance of me. Give my love to all the family. Kiss little Joey for me. Remember me to all my relatives and friends. And now farewell for the last time. From thy nephew, EDWIN COPPOCK. Two days later the slave state of Virginia hung Edwin Coppock by the neck until he was dead. The gallant John E. Cook went to the scaffold with him. The account says: "After the cap had been placed on their heads, Coppock turned toward Cook and stretched forward his hand as far as possible. At the same time Cook said, 'Stop a minute--where is Edwin's hand?' They then shook hands cordially and Cook said, 'God bless you.' The calm and collected manner of both was very marked.... They both exhibited the most unflinching firmness, saying nothing, with the exception of bidding farewell to the ministers and the sheriff." More than half a century has passed since John Brown and his faithful followers gave up their lives to set the black men free, but history has yet to do them justice. Some day the hatred and prejudice will all have died away and then these men, summoned to the bar of enlightened judgment, will be crowned as the greatest heroes in American history. THE SOCIAL SPIRIT. Appeal to Reason. We need to grow out of the selfish, sordid, brutal spirit of individualism which still lurks even in Socialists and is responsible for the strife and contention which prevail where there should be concord and good will. The social spirit and the social conscience must be developed and govern our social relations before we shall have any social revolution. If there are any among whom the social spirit should find its highest expression and who should be bound fast in its comradely embrace and give to the world the example of its elevating and humanizing influence, it is the Socialists. They of all others have come to realize the hardening and brutalizing effect of capitalist individualism in the awful struggle for existence and it is to them a cause of unceasing rejoicing that they live at a time in the world's historic development when the very conditions which resulted from this age-long struggle forbid its continuance and proclaim its approaching termination. The rule of individualism which has governed society since the days of primitive communism has effectually restrained the moral and spiritual development of the race. It has brought out the baser side of men's nature and set them against each other as if the plan of creation had designed them to be mortal enemies. * * * * * Typical capitalists are barren of the social spirit. The very nature of the catch-as-catch-can encounter in which they are engaged makes them wary and suspicious, if not downright hateful of each other, and the latent good that is in them dies for the want of incentive to express itself. The other day I saw two such capitalists shake hands. It was pitiable. Their hearts had no part in the purely perfunctory ceremony. They happened to meet and could not avoid each other. And so they mechanically touched each other's reluctant hands, standing at right angles to each other for a moment--not face to face--and then passing on without either looking the other in the eyes. This cold and heartless ceremony typified the relation begotten of capitalist individualism in which men's interests are competitive and antagonistic and in which each instinctively looks out for himself and is on the alert to take every possible advantage of his fellow-man. The result of this system is inevitably a race of Ishmaelites. How differently two Socialist comrades shake hands! Their hearts are in their palms and the joy of greeting is in their eyes. They have the social spirit. Their interests are mutual and their aspirations kindred. If one happens to be strong and the other weak, the stronger shares the weakness and the weaker shares the strength of his comrade. The base thought of taking a mean advantage, one of the other, does not darken their minds or harden their hearts. They are joined together in the humanizing bonds of fellowship. They multiply each other and they rejoice in their comradely kinship. The best there is in each, and not the worst, as in the contact of individualism, is appealed to and brought forth for the benefit of both. What an elevating, enlarging and satisfying relation! And this is the "dead level" of mediocrity and servitude to which we are to sink when this relation becomes universal among men as it will in the International Socialist Republic! So at least we are told by those who in the present system have acquired the instincts and impulses of animals of prey in the development of their imagined superiority by draining the veins and wrecking the lives of their vanquished competitors, but we are not impressed by the virtues of the system of which they stand as the shining examples. * * * * * Thru all the ages past men, civilized men, so-called, have been at each other's throats in the struggle for existence, and the spirit of individualism this struggle has begotten, the spirit of hard, sordid, brutal selfishness, has filled this world with unutterable anguish and woe. But at last the end of the reign of anarchistic individualism is in sight. The social forces at work are undermining and destroying it and soon its knell will be sounded to the infinite joy of an emancipated world. The largest possible expression of the social spirit should be fostered and encouraged in the Socialist movement and among Socialists themselves. In spite of the hindrances which beset us in our present environments and relations, we may yet cultivate this spirit assiduously to our increasing mutual good and to the good of our great movement. In our propaganda, in the discussion of our tactical and other differences and in all our other activities, the larger faith that true comradeship inspires should prevail between us. We need to be more patient, more kindly, more tolerant, more sympathetic, helpful and encouraging to one another, and less suspicious, less envious, and less contentious, if we are to educate and impress the people by our example, and by the effect of our teachings upon ourselves win them to our movement, and realize our dream of universal freedom and social righteousness. ROOSEVELT AND HIS REGIME. Appeal to Reason, April 20, 1907. The only time in my life I ever saw Theodore Roosevelt was years before he became president of the United States. I was aboard of a train in the far west, where Roosevelt was then said to be following ranch life, and as he and several companions in cowboy costume entered the car at a station stop, he was pointed out to me. I did not like him. The years since have not altered that feeling of aversion except to accentuate it. I have since seen the nation mad with hero worship over this man Roosevelt, but I have not been impressed by it. Very "great" men sometimes shrivel into very small ones and finally vanish in oblivion in the short space of a single generation. The American people are more idolatrous than any "heathen" nation on earth. They worship their popular "heroes," while they last, with passionate frenzy, and with equal madness do they hunt down the sane "fools" who vainly try to teach them sense. Theodore Roosevelt and George Dewey as "heroes" and Wendell Phillips and John Brown as "fools" are notable illustrations. American history is filled with them. But my personal dislike of the cowboy in imitation who has since become president, however justifiable, would scarcely warrant a public attack upon his official character, and this review, being of such a nature, is inspired, as will appear, by entirely different motives. There are those, and they constitute a great majority of the American people, who stand in awe of their president, supposedly their servant, but in fact their master; they speak of him with a kind of reverential adulation as a lordly personage, a superior being to be looked up to and worshiped rather than a fellowman to be respected and loved. There are others who betray equal ignorance in a more vulgar fashion by coarse tirades for which there is often as little excuse as there is for the extreme adulation. Regarding the president of the United States, as I do, simply as a citizen and fellowman, the same as any other, I shall speak of him and his acts free alike from awe and malice, and if I place him in the public pillory, where he has placed so many others, to be seen and despised of men, it will be from a sense that his official acts, so often in flat denial of his profession, merit the execration of honest men. In arraigning President Roosevelt and his administration I have no private spite nor personal grudge to satisfy, but an obligation to redeem and a principle to vindicate. I shall go about it as I would any other moral duty, asking no favors and prepared to accept all consequences. In the first place, I charge President Roosevelt with being a hypocrite, the most consummate that ever occupied the executive seat of the nation. His profession of pure politics is false, his boasted moral courage the bluff of a bully and his "square deal" a delusion and a sham. Theodore Roosevelt is mainly for Theodore Roosevelt and incidentally for such others as are also for the same distinguished gentleman, first, last and all the time. He is a smooth and slippery politician, swollen purple with self-conceit; he is shrewd enough to gauge the stupidity of the masses and unscrupulous enough to turn it into hero worship. This constitutes the demagogue, and he is that in superlative degree. Only a few days ago he appeared in a characteristic role. Rushing into the limelight, as necessary to him as breath, he shrieked that he and "Root" were "horrified" because of certain scandalous and revolting charges made by one of his own former political chums. Of course, he and "Root" of Tweed fame, the foxiest "fixer" of them all, were "horrified" because of the shock to their political virtue, but it so happened that the horror took effect only when they found themselves uncovered. The taking of Harriman's boodle for corruptly electing him president and the use of the stolen insurance funds for the same criminal purpose did not "horrify" the president and "Root," nor would they be "horrified" yet if they had not been caught red-handed in the act with the booty upon their persons. The cry of the exposed malefactor and all his pack of yelpers that he is the victim of a "plot" by his own friends and supporters, the very gentlemen (sic) who furnished him with free special trains, paid his campaign expenses and in fact bought the presidency for him, is so palpably false as to be absolutely ridiculous and only brings into bolder relief the hypocrisy and fraud it was designed to conceal. This much is preliminary to the extraordinary official conduct of the president which has "horrified" not only its victims but millions of others, and now prompts this review and protest. Something over a year ago Charles Moyer, William Haywood and George Pettibone, of Colorado, leading officials of the Western Federation of Miners, were overpowered and kidnaped by a gang of thugs and torn from their families at night by conspiracy of two degenerate governors and another notorious criminal acting for the Mine and Smelter Trust, one of the most stupendous aggregations of force and plunder in all America. Every decent man and woman was "horrified" by this infamy and the whole working class of the nation cried out against it. Was Roosevelt also "horrified"? Yes! Because the Mine and Smelter Trust had kidnaped three citizens of the republic? Oh, no! The three citizens were only working cattle and he never had any other conception of them. He was "horrified" because the Mine and Smelter Trust, unclean birds that feather their nests, especially in Colorado, with legislatures and United States senatorships, had not killed instead of kidnaping their victims. Then and there Theodore Roosevelt disgraced himself and his high office, and his cruel and cowardly act will load his name with odium as long as it is remembered. The Mine and Smelter Trust had put up the funds and used its vast machinery for Roosevelt, and now Roosevelt must serve it even to the extent of upholding criminals, approving kidnaping and murdering its helpless victims. When Roosevelt stepped out of the White House and called Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone _murderers_, men he had never seen and did not know; men who had never been tried, never convicted and whom every law of the land presumed innocent until proven guilty, he fell a million miles beneath where Lincoln stood, and there he grovels today with his political crimes, one after another, finding him out and pointing at him their accusing fingers. No president of the United States has ever descended to such depths as has Roosevelt to serve his law-defying and crime-inciting masters. The act is simply scandalous and without a parallel in American history. What right has Theodore Roosevelt to prejudge American citizens, pronounce their guilt and hand them over to the hangman? In a pettifogging lawyer such an act would be infamous; in the president of the nation it becomes monstrous and staggers belief. All that Roosevelt knows about Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone he knows from his friends, their kidnapers. The millions of working men and women, embracing practically every labor union in America, count for nothing with him. He is not now standing for their votes. He is fulfilling his obligation to the gentlemen (!) who put up the coin that elected him; paying off the mortgage they hold upon his administration. Theodore Roosevelt is swift to brand other men who even venture to disagree with him as liars. He, according to himself, is immaculate and infallible. The greatest liar is he who sees only liars in others. _When Theodore Roosevelt, president of the United States, denounced Charles Moyer, William Haywood and George Pettibone as murderers, he uttered a lie as black and damnable, a calumny as foul and atrocious as ever issued from a human throat. The men he thus traduced and vilified, sitting in their prison cells for having dutifully served their fellow-workers and having spurned the bribes of their masters, transcend immeasurably the man in the White House, who, with the cruel malevolence of a barbarian, has pronounced their doom._ A thousand times rather would I be one of those men in Ada county jail than Theodore Roosevelt in the White House at Washington. Had these men accepted, with but a shadow of the eagerness Roosevelt displayed, the debauching funds of the trust pirates, they would not now languish in felons' cells. The same brazen robbers of the people and corrupters of the body politic who put Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone in jail, also put Theodore Roosevelt in the White House. This accounts for his prostituting the high office Lincoln honored and resorting to methods that would shame a Bowery ward-heeler. Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone are not murderers; it is a ghastly lie, and I denounce it in the name of law and in the name of justice. I know these men, these sons of toil; I know their hearts, their guileless nature and their rugged honesty. I love and honor them and shall fight for them while there is breath in my body. Here and now I challenge Theodore Roosevelt. He is guilty of high crimes and deserves impeachment. Let him do his worst. I denounce him and defy him. During my recent visit at Washington I learned from those who know him what they think of Roosevelt. Among newspaper men he is literally despised. Their true feeling is not apparent in what they write, for they know that the slightest offense to the president is _lese majeste_ and means instantaneous decapitation. For the second time, Theodore Roosevelt, president of the United States, has now publicly convicted Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone. He has not pronounced condemnation upon Harry Thaw, or any rich man charged with murder. He has, however, made a postmaster of a man at Chicago charged by the Chicago _Tribune_ with having shot another man in a midnight brawl over disreputable women, and then used his influence to make the same man mayor of that city. Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone, the three workingmen kidnaped by the Mine and Smelter Trust, have now been in jail fourteen months; they have not been tried, but twice condemned by President Roosevelt, the last time but a few days ago, in connection with Harriman, his former political pal and financial backer. These men are in prison cells, their bodies in manacles and their lips sealed. They cannot speak for themselves. They are voiceless and at the mercy of calumny. No matter how grossly outraged, they must submit. For a man clothed with the almost absolute power of a president to strike down men gagged and bound, as these men are, he must have an unspeakably brutal and cowardly nature, just such a nature as the governor of an empire state must have to turn a deaf ear to the agonizing entreaties of a shrieking, shuddering woman and see her dragged into the horrors of electrocution. The true character of this man is being gradually revealed to the American people. He has never been anything but an enemy of the working class. He joined a labor organization purely as a demagogue. In all his life he never associated with working people. His writings, before he became a politician, show that he held them in contempt. When he entered political life he soon learned how to shake hands with a fireman for the camera and have his press agent do the rest, and it was this species of demagoguery, the very basest conceivable, that idolized him with the ignorant mass and gave him the votes of the millions he in his heart despised as an inferior race. In his book on "Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail," page 10, written long before he entered politics, Roosevelt reveals his innate contempt for those who toil. After describing cowboys when "drunk on the villainous whiskey of the frontier towns," he closes with this comparison, which needs no comment: "They are much better fellows and pleasanter companions than small farmers or agricultural laborers; nor are the mechanics and workmen of a great city to be mentioned in the same breath." The pretended friendship for the great body of workingmen who are not to be compared to drunken cowboys has served its demagogical purpose, but the final chapter is not yet written. There will be an awakening, and every official act of Theodore Roosevelt will be subjected to its searching scrutiny. He has always been on the side of capital wholly, while pretending the impossible feat of serving both capital and labor with equal fidelity, and only the deplorable ignorance of his dupes has applauded him in that hypocritical role. The anthracite miners, or their children at least, will some day know that it was President Theodore Roosevelt who handed them over to the coal trust with a gold brick for a souvenir, labeled "Arbitration." Theodore Roosevelt is an aristocrat and an autocrat. His affected democracy is spurious and easily detected. He belongs to the "upper crust" and at the very best he can conceive of the working class only as contented wage-slaves. And no one knows better than he how easily these slaves are duped and how madly they will cheer and follow a cheap and showy "hero." The simple fact is that Theodore Roosevelt was made president by the industrial captains and the robbers in general of the working class. They picked him for a winner and he has not failed them. Elected by the trusts and surrounded by trust attorneys as cabinet advisers, Roosevelt is essentially the monarch of a trust administration. If this be denied, Roosevelt is challenged to answer if it was not the railroad trust that furnished him gratuitously with the special trains that bore him in royal splendor over all the railways of the nation. He is challenged to publish the list of contributors to his political sewer funds, amounting to millions of dollars, and freely used to buy the votes that made him president. Did, or did not, the men known as trust magnates put up this boodle? Boodle drawn from the veins of labor? Will Mr. Roosevelt deny it? Did he not know at the time that his man Cortelyou was holding up the trusts for all they would "cough up" for his election? Will he dare plead ignorance to intelligent persons as to who put up the money that debauched the voters of the nation? It is true that a spasm of virtuous indignation seized him when he found that the trusts had slipped the lucre into his slush funds when he was not looking, but this was only after he saw the people looking behind the curtain. Then he bounded to the foot-lights and denounced Alton B. Parker as a liar for charging that the trusts were furnishing the boodle to make him president, but no man not feeble-minded was deceived as to who was the liar. Read the Washington press dispatch in the Kansas City _Journal_ of April 4th: "It was declared in banking circles that light could be shed on the question of campaign contributions in 1904 if the books of the national Republican committee were thrown open." The books will not be thrown open. Roosevelt will not allow it; he knows they contain the damning evidence of his guilt. The case is clearly stated in the platform of the Democratic state convention of Missouri, adopted in 1906, which reads as follows: "We believe Theodore Roosevelt insincere. Pretending to inveigh against the crimes of trusts and corporations, he openly defended Paul Morton, when, as manager of the Santa Fe railroad, he was compelled to confess enormous rebates to the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. It was Roosevelt who advanced the pernicious doctrine that you must punish the corporation, not its officials who cause it to commit crime. It was Roosevelt who denounced large campaign contributions, while his secretary of commerce and labor was fleecing the corporations out of _one of the biggest slush funds ever known in the history of American politics_." President Roosevelt may shout "liar" until he turns as black in the face as are the cracksmen at heart who burglarized the safes of the New York insurance companies to land him in the White House, while he was toying with the names of "Jimmy" Hyde and Chauncey Depew as pawns in the corrupt game, but the "damned spot" will not out until the whole truth is known and the whole crime expiated. The publication of the Roosevelt-Harriman correspondence places the president in his true colors before the American people. It explains his hot haste in condemning Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone to the gallows and sending Taft to Idaho to assure the smelter trust and warn the protesting people that the kidnaping of the workingmen was sanctioned by the White House and would have the support of the national administration. A more shameful perversion of public power never blackened the pages of history. This national scandal shows up the president's two-faced character so clearly and convincingly that it leaves not so much as a pin-hole for escape. It is a damning indictment of not only the president, but the whole brood of plutocrats, promoters and grafting politicians who have been looting this nation for years. There is one among these illuminating epistles which I want to burn in the minds of the working class dupes who have been bowing in the dust before this blustering bully of the White House: "Personal. "October 1, 1904.--My Dear Mr. Harriman: A suggestion has come to me in a round-about way that you do not think it wise to come to see me in these closing weeks of the campaign, but that you are reluctant to refuse, inasmuch as I have asked you. Now, my dear sir, you and I are practical men, and you are on the ground and know the conditions better than I do. "If you think there is any danger of your visit to me causing trouble, or if you think there is nothing special I should be informed about, or any matter in which I could give aid, why, of course, give up the visit for the time being, and then, a few weeks hence, before I write my message, I shall get you to come down to discuss certain government matters not connected with the campaign. With great regards, sincerely yours, (Signed) "THEODORE ROOSEVELT." Does not this brand the president with the duplicity of a Tweed and the cunning of a Quay? Would a president who is honest with the people clandestinely consort with the villain he characterizes as a liar and all that is vicious? The disclosures made in the secret correspondence strip the president of the last shred of deception with which to cloak his perfidy. The mask is lifted and the exposure is complete. It is in the president's own handwriting in a letter to Harriman that would never have seen the light had not circumstances forced it upon the attention of a betrayed people. It is adroitly phrased, but its meaning is not in doubt. He knew Harriman then as he knows him now; wanted his boodle and insinuatingly coaxed him to sneak to the White House when no one was looking, and only after he was discovered did he denounce Harriman as a liar and fall into his usual fit of moral epilepsy. From now on there will be a sharp decline in the stock of Theodore Roosevelt. The capitalist papers may continue to boom him as the only savior and his corps of press agents at the White House may continue to grind out three-column stories about the awful conspiracy of his "trusty" friends to ruin him, but his bubble is pricked and the cheap glory in which he reveled is departing forever. The people have been sadly deceived for a time, but the march of events is opening their eyes. Only the very ignorant and foolish believe that a president who has surrounded himself with Wall Street darlings as cabinet ministers has any serious designs on the trusts. The Ryan, Root and Roosevelt combination is ideal. It speaks for itself, and with such shining lights as Taft, Cortelyou, Knox and Paul Morton surrounding it, all lingering doubt is removed, and the fools' paradise is in the full blaze of its glory. Space will not permit a review of the personnel of the president's official family, at least two of whom, had the law been enforced, would now be in penitentiary. The story of President Roosevelt and Paul Morton, if truthfully told, would make a luminous chapter in railroad rascality and political jobbery. It was to this notorious strike-breaker and self-confessed criminal that Roosevelt issued a bill of moral rectitude long as Pope's essay that landed him into the eighty-thousand-dollars-a-year insurance graft he now holds down. There is in this "promotion" the very climax of the irony of boodle. Paul Morton, who began as a strike-breaker on the C. B. & Q., and reared a monument to theft at Hutchinson, Kan., and left his trail of crime all the way from the Mississippi to the Pacific, is fit, indeed, to be the cabinet associate and confidential chum of a president who puts him at the head of the company whose funds were stolen to buy his election. William H. Taft is another of the elect, and it is easy to understand why Roosevelt has decided to make this illustrious son his successor as president of the United States and is now grooming him with the patronage of the national administration. Taft is a man after Roosevelt's own heart. Among his early acts as a judge he fined the bricklayers of Cincinnati two thousand dollars for going on a strike; he was next whirled to Toledo by special train and ordered by the Toledo, Ann Arbor and North Michigan railroad to issue an injunction binding and gagging its striking engineers and firemen and locking their leader up in jail and he complied with alacrity. From that time on it has been smooth sailing for the accommodating judge and there is not a bloated plutocrat in the land who would not hail with joy the election of William Taft as president; he would be almost as acceptable to these vultures as Roosevelt himself. The manner in which President Roosevelt manipulates the supreme court by bestowing lucrative offices upon the sons and other relatives and friends of its dignitaries can only be hinted at here, but will receive due attention later on. The case of ex-Senator Burton is an instance in point. Other senators had taken thousands in similar cases to Burton's paltry few hundred dollars, but Burton was marked by Roosevelt for refusing to crook the knee to the sugar trust and pursued with merciless ferocity until he was lodged behind prison bars. The president did not have a call to "go after" his old friends, Chauncey Depew and Thomas Platt, with the same virtuous passion to see crime punished and criminals jailed. When Roosevelt was making his continental campaign in the palatial special trains furnished free by the railroad trust he stopped at Abilene, Kan., the home of the then Senator Burton, and opened his speech there in these words: "I am glad to be at the home of the senior senator from Kansas and am delighted to meet and greet his neighbors and friends. I want to say that no man in this world has done more, and I had almost said, as much, to place me where I am now, than your distinguished senator." Fine way the president had of showing his gratitude. Burton should have known better and taken warning. Whenever Roosevelt gets that near to a man something is going to happen. "My dear" is then due to be metamorphosed with startling suddenness into an "atrocious liar." Roosevelt can brook no rivalry. He is the self-appointed central luminary in the solar system. All others must be contented with being fire-flies. He must violate all traditions and smash all precedents. He is spectacular beyond the wildest dreams. He must have the center of the stage and hold the undivided attention of the audience. Any stunt will do when the interest lags. A familiar turn with a prize-fighter or a "gun-man" is always good for an encore. Nothing is overlooked. A dash to Panama with a fleet of battle-ships and a battery of cameras and a squad of artists and reporters is good for thousands of columns about the marvelous virility and fertility of the greatest president since Washington. He is followed with minute and eager details as he darts from cellar to roof, inspects every shingle, wears a solemn expression, throws a shovelful of coal into the furnace, snatches a bite from a workingman's pail, shakes hands with a startled section man and is off like a flash to look after some other section of the planet that it may not drop out of its shining orbit. Mighty savior of the human race! Such is Theodore Roosevelt, the president who condemns workingmen as murderers when they are objectionable to the trusts that control his administration. Archbishop Ireland, the plutocratic prelate, will cheerfully certify to Roosevelt as the anointed of the Lord. And this will make another interesting chapter for a later review; a chapter that will deal with Ireland as the political as well as spiritual adviser of "Jim" Hill and the Great Northern, and of court decisions awarding him thousands of acres of land and making of the alleged follower of the Tramp of Galilee a multi-millionaire; a chapter that will tell of a high priest sounding the political keynote to his benighted followers in exchange for a promised voucher for a red hat to be worn in a land of freedom in which the state and church are absolutely divorced. Only a few of the facts about Roosevelt and his regime have been here stated, but enough to satisfy all honest men that _Theodore Roosevelt is the Friend of the Enemies and the Enemy of the Friends of this Republic_. INDUSTRIAL AND SOCIAL DEMOCRACY. American Socialist, May 27, 1915. First of all, allow me to quote with approval the following paragraph from "An Introduction to Sociology" by Arthur Morrow Lewis: " * * * the greatest single achievement of the science of sociology is the concept of society, not as a collection of institutions, and sociology as an explanatory catalog or inventory--after the fashion of Spencer, but as a process of development, and the science of sociology as the analysis and explanation of the process." Also the following from an essay on Revolution by George D. Herron: "Every revolution or true reform, every new and commanding faith, is in the direction of man's becoming his own evolver and creator. Every uplifting light or law perforces, in the place of the evolution that is blind and chanceful, an evolution that is chosen and humanly directed." There is still room for reform and betterment in the present social system, but this is of minor consequence compared to the world's crying need for industrial and social reorganization. * * * * * The next great change in history will be, must be, the socialization of the means of our common life. Privately owned industry and production for individual profit are no longer compatible with social progress and have ceased to work out to humane and civilized ends. With all its marvelous progress through invention and discovery and all its monumental achievements in the arts and sciences, this poor world of ours has not yet learned how to feed itself. That is the problem of problems now confronting us more and more insistently and until that is solved the world is halted and it will either resume its march toward industrial and social democracy or be shaken to its foundations and into possible chaos by violent explosion. There is no longer the shadow of an excuse for a hungry being. All the laws, all the materials and all the forces are at hand and easily available for the production of all things needed to provide food, raiment and shelter for every man, woman and child, thus putting an end to the poverty and misery, widespread and appalling, which now shock and sicken humanity and impeach our vaunted civilization. But these tools and materials and forces must be released from private ownership and control, socialized, democratized, and set in operation for the common good of all instead of the private profit of the few. * * * * * It is well stated, "that civilization is at present rudimentary, and that it is to develop indefinitely." Now, in view of the fact that the crops this year (1914) are the most abundant ever produced, that there is no market for the almost sixteen million bales of cotton lying in the warehouses, while at the same time there are millions of unemployed in the land who are without food and without clothing and who, with their wives and children, are doomed to indescribable suffering; in view of this solemn and indisputable fact it would seem that there could be but one opinion among students and thinkers as to the one great, vital and essential thing to do for the relief of our common humanity and for the promotion of the world's progress and civilization, and that that one thing is the one to be emphasized with all the power at our command. A privately owned world can never be a free world and a society based upon warring classes cannot stand. Such a world is a world of strife and hate and such a society can exist only by means of militarism and physical force. * * * * * The education of the people, not the few alone, but the entire mass in the principles of industrial democracy and along the lines of social development is the task of the people to be emphasized and that task--let it be impressed upon them--can be performed only by themselves. The cultured few can never educate the uncultured many. All history attests the fact that all the few have ever done for the many is to keep them in ignorance and servitude and live out of their labor. To stir the masses, to appeal to their higher, better selves, to set them thinking for themselves, and to hold ever before them the ideal of mutual kindness and good will, based upon mutual interests, is to render real service to the cause of humanity. To quote Herron once more: "Socialism is a deliberate proposal to lay the will of man upon the unfolding processes and ends of nature and history. It invokes the faith that shall be equal to the acceptance of its proposal--of its supreme challenge to the universe." A MESSAGE TO THE CHILDREN. Campaign Leaflet, National Campaign, 1912. The Socialist party is the only party that has the children at heart; the only party that takes them into its confidence; the only party that has a message for them in a campaign year. In my travels about the country I have met many thousands of little children and their fresh and eager faces have always given me joy and their merry voices have filled me with delight and made me stronger for my work. These children are not yet old enough to join the Socialist party and have an active part in its great work, but they are old enough to understand why their parents belong to it, and why they are proud of their card of membership, and of the red button they wear, to show that they are socialists and that as socialists they are working hand in hand with thousands and thousands of others to change things so that this world may be a better, kinder and sweeter world for us all to live in. Now let me talk directly as I may to the more than thirty millions of children and young folks in our country who are less than eighteen years of age. I fancy I can see them all spread out in all directions, far as the eye can reach, and farther and farther still to the very shores of the seas and lakes and gulf that bound our western continent. What a wonderful audience I am about to address! Not a grown person in it. Only children. Millions of them and all eager to hear the message that socialism has to offer to the child-world. My dear little children, I am sure you will understand me when I say that in speaking to you of socialism I feel very near to all of you and I know you will believe me when I tell you that I would if I could make you all happy and keep you sweet and loving toward each other all your lives. Most of you are the children of the poor, some of the well-to-do, and a few of the rich, but all of you are the children of the same Father and all of you are sisters and brothers in the same great family of humankind. If any of you feel that you are better than others because you wear better clothes or live in better houses or go in what you think is "better society," it is because your young minds and hearts have been tainted by wrong example and wrong education. It is this wicked feeling that corrupts the conscience and hardens the heart and begets the envy and hate of our fellow-beings, instead of their love and good will. When that best friend the children ever had on earth said, "Suffer little children and forbid them not, to come unto me; for such is the kingdom of heaven" he meant all children, poor and rich, but especially the poor. He loved and pitied them because of their poverty and suffering. He himself had been born in a manger and when he was grown up he said sorrowfully that "he had not where to lay his head." He did not despise little children because they were poor and neglected and shabbily dressed but he loved them all the more; and as he looked down upon them his heart melted with compassion and the tears of tenderness filled his eyes; and then he became grave and his fair brow grew dark with wrath as he thought of those who sat in rich church pews and piously thanked the Lord that they were not as other people. He denounced them as hypocrites for pretending to be religious while they robbed the poor and turned the little children into the street to suffer hunger and fall into evil ways. Nearly twenty centuries have passed since the suffering poor heard with gladness the message of the Lowly Nazarene and since he was moved to tears by the sight of the little children of the street, but the world has not yet learned the meaning of his tender and touching words, "Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me; for of such is the kingdom of heaven." If he were to walk the streets of New York or Chicago, or Lawrence, Massachusetts, or any of the cities where the mills and sweatshops are filled with child slaves--as he once walked the streets of Jerusalem--he would grow sick at heart as he saw the little ones he so loved, pale and wan and worn, harnessed to monstrous machines and slowly put to death to swell the profits of the greedy mill owners who sit in the rich pews of the synagogue, as did the pharisees he scourged without mercy twenty centuries ago. The children of the working people have always been poor because the world has never been just. For ages and ages those who have builded the houses, cultivated the fields, raised the crops, spun the wool, woven the cloth, supplied the food we eat and the clothes we wear, and furnished the homes we live in, have been the poor and despised, while those who profited by their labor and consumed the good things they produced, have been the rich and respectable. Jesus himself was a carpenter's son and suffered the poverty of his class and when he grew up it was not the rich and respectable, but the poor and despised who loved him, and opened their arms to receive him, and heard gladly his tender and comforting ministrations. He was one of them in poverty and suffering and in all his loving and self-denying life he never forgot them. Had he deserted the poor from whom he sprang, had he gone over to the rich as their preacher, or their judge, or their lawyer or teacher or scribe--as so many of his pretended followers have done and are still doing--he never would have been crucified, nor would the world today know that he had ever lived. It was because, and only because, Jesus loved and served the poor and rebuked the rich who robbed them, and threatened to array them against their rich despoilers, that he was condemned to die and that the cruel nails were driven into his hands and feet on the cross at Calvary. Jesus taught that the earth and the air and the sea and sky and all the beauty and fulness thereof were for all the children of men; that they should all equally enjoy the riches of nature and dwell together in peace, bear one another's burdens and love one another, and that is what socialism teaches and why the rich thieves who have laid hold of the earth and its bounties would crucify the socialists as those other robbers of the poor crucified Jesus two thousand years ago. Now let us see what message the Socialist party has for the children and why all children should be socialists and help to speed the day when the brotherhood of socialism shall prevail throughout the earth. But first let me say that the Socialist party has reason to know that the children have great influence when they become interested in a given work and set their hearts on doing that work. The Socialist party knows better than to ignore the children as if they were china dolls or stuffed teddy bears, as all the other parties do, for it knows by what they have already done that when once they get fairly started they will make the air hum like swarms of bees with the glad tidings of socialism. The little boys and girls who have already become socialists are among the busiest workers for our party and they love so well to work for socialism that it is play to them and fills their hearts with joy. They wear the red button and they know why it is red and what its meaning is; they tack up bills and distribute dodgers advertising our meetings; they sell tickets, take up collections, act as ushers, provide the soap-box for the corner speaker, carry chairs for the women so they may sit in comfort after their day's work, go around among the neighbors and remind them of the meeting and not to forget to attend, sell socialist books, papers and pamphlets, and do a score of other things which are just as useful in their way as the speech of the orator that wins the applause of the people. Now the Socialist party is the only party in the world that wants to put an end once and forever to all kinds of child labor and to have it so that all children, white and black, without a single exception, shall be allowed to grow up in the free air, with plenty of time for mirth and play; that they shall all have decent homes to live in, comfortable beds to sleep in, plenty of good food to eat, plenty of good clothes to wear and that when they reach the proper age they shall go to school and college and continue their course until they have obtained a sound and practical education. Then they will have strong, healthy bodies, trained minds and skilled hands, and not only enter cheerfully upon the duties of life, but be certain of making it a success. If you listen to the old fogies who still belong to the parties their grandfathers did and who have not moved an inch from their grandfathers' graves, they will tell you that socialists are foolish people and that what they propose never can be done. That is what the fogies of every age have always said. They are the "wise" people who do things in the same way that their dead grandparents did before them, who never change their minds, never accept a new idea, never grow, and who are always dead long before they are buried and forgotten the day after the funeral. Whatever you may be I beg of you not to be a fogy, nor to follow a fogy's solemn advice. His brain has ceased to work--if it ever did work. He is mentally stagnant and moss-covered and votes the same old ticket with no more idea of what he is voting for than a wooden Indian. The Socialist party says there have got to be some changes and has set about making them, or at least getting ready to make them. It says that the world is big enough for all the people that are in it, with plenty of room to spare for groves and parks and playgrounds; that there is land enough to go around without crowding; that there are farms enough, or can be easily provided, to raise all we can eat, so that no child in all the world need to go hungry; that there is plenty of coal and iron, oil and gas, gold and silver and other minerals and metals, stored in the earth; that there are forests and mountains and water courses galore; that there are mills and mines and factories and ships and railways and telegraphs, and the power supplied free by nature to run them all; that there are millions of men and women ready to do all the work that may be required to build homes, raise crops, bake bread--and cake too--weave cloth, make clothes and everything else that is necessary for everybody, and have time enough besides to build schools and provide playgrounds for every last one of the children, with plenty of toys thrown in to make this earth a children's paradise. Now why should not just these things come to pass and why should not you children help us speed the day when they _shall_ come to pass? Everything you can possibly think of to make this earth sweet and beautiful and to make life a blessed joy for us all is within our reach. The raw materials are at our feet; the forces to fashion them into forms of beauty and use are at our finger tips. We have but to put ourselves in harmony with nature and with one another to spread far and wide the gospel of life and love and once more hear "the sons of God shout for joy." Socialists not only dream of the good day coming when the world shall know that men are brothers and that women are sisters to each other, but they are at work with all their hearts and all their heads and hands to make that dream come true. If you want to know what the plans of the socialists are in detail read their platform, attend their lectures and study their literature. Socialism is the greatest thing in all the world today and the boys and girls of this generation who will be remembered in the next are those who are clear-eyed enough to see that socialism is coming and are at the battle-front fighting bravely to overcome the prejudice against it and to pave the way for it so that it may come soon and in peace and order. Many of us who have been long in service will not be here when the bells peal forth the joyous tidings that socialism has triumphed and that the people are free, but the children that now are will live to see it and in the day of their rejoicing they will not forget those who toiled without recompense that they might live without dread of poverty or fear of want. As we look about us today we see that the world is filled with suffering and despair and when we come to look into the cause of it we find that it is a reproach to us all. As I write the news comes of the fierce battle that is being fought between ten thousand hungry miners in West Virginia and the thugs and ex-convicts and murderers armed by the coal corporations to force the strikers back into their dismal and hopeless pits. The battle has already lasted two days. Many on both sides have been killed, but the capitalist papers are doing all they can to hush it up. Long ago the miners were evicted from the company's wretched hovels. They and their wives and children live in tented fields and the brutal guards have even driven the women and children from there into the wilderness to starve that the strike may be broken and the miners compelled to go back to work at the terms of their greedy and heartless masters. And why is this awful battle raging and human beings murdering each other as if they were wild beasts? Because a few gluttonous slave owners like Henry Gassaway Davis and the Watsons and Elkinses who dwell in gorgeous palaces on vast estates occupying whole mountain ranges, privately own the mines and minerals which were intended for all, and consequently the thousands of miners and their wives and children are at their mercy, and when they meekly asked for five per cent more wages so their families would not suffer for bread the brutal lords of the mines sent out their private army of assassins to hunt them down and kill them as if they were mad dogs. The Socialist party says that those mines should be owned by all the people and that is what will come to pass when the socialists get into power, and then the green hills of West Virginia and other states will no longer echo with the rifle shots of corporation assassins, nor run red with the blood of honest workingmen slain to appease the greed of their soulless masters. In February last, four boys were hanged in Chicago. The oldest was twenty-one, the youngest barely out of his childhood. They had held up and robbed and murdered a poor truck farmer for the little money he had on his person. Not one of these boys ever had a decent home. They were born in poverty, reared in ignorance, and surrounded by vice and filth. This is cultivating crime and reaping the harvest. We socialists weep as we think of the cruel fate of those four poor, friendless boys who died on the gallows while they were still in their childhood, because the world has not yet learned that there is greater profit in raising children than there is in raising hogs. The frightful stories of the little children in the mills of Lawrence and the cruel suffering they endured is still fresh in the public memory. When the poor and despairing mothers, their hearts wrung with agony and their eyes blinded with tears, attempted to save their children from starvation by placing them in the keeping of sympathizing friends, they were beaten, insulted, and with babies at their breasts thrown into jail, bleeding and stunned, by the brutal police acting under orders from the far more brutal mill owners. The world will never know the suffering and terror these poor working people--especially the women and children--had to endure for daring to ask the millionaire mill owners for a pittance more in return for their labor to keep the wolf of hunger from their gloomy hovels. When the Socialist party gets into power those mills at Lawrence and all others like them will be taken over by the people and operated for the good of all, and then the workers will keep the wealth they produce for themselves, instead of turning it over to the greedy mill bosses; they will have decent homes to live in, food in plenty on their tables, and their children will go to school to be properly educated instead of to the mills to be ground into profits to gorge their idle owners. In March last, Mrs. L. F. Jellson of Salem, Oregon, gave poison to each of her four little children, her own offspring, because they were starving and she was poor and had no way to get them bread. She then poisoned herself and all she asked in the note she left was that she and her darling children be buried together. This poor heart-broken soul was driven to destroy herself and her precious babes because the world as it now is would not allow them to live. Think for just a moment of all the food there is in the world and all there might be and then tell me if socialists are wrong and foolish and wicked for saying that the self-murder of this poor woman and the murder of her children is a terrible crime of which society is guilty and for which there is no excuse on earth or in heaven. A recent investigation showed that in the City of St. Louis there are 16,000 young women who receive as wage-earners less than $8 per week and over 3,000 who receive from $3 to $4 per week. It is easy to see from this why so many little girls and younger women are forced to enter upon the path which leads to shame and sorrow and which seldom bears the impress of returning footsteps. When the giant Titanic met her fate, fifty little bellboys went down with her to the bottom of the sea. They were ordered, according to the account, to their regular posts in the main cabin and warned by their captain not to get into the way of the escaping passengers. James Humphries, as quartermaster and eye witness said, "throughout the first hour of confusion and terror these lads sat quietly on their benches. Not one of them attempted to enter a lifeboat. Not one of them was saved." Can you read this without being moved to tears? Brave, noble little lads! I almost feel as if it had been a privilege to go down with these great little souls to their watery grave. The little boys who perished here were poor boys, many of them without fathers, and others obliged to support widowed mothers and little brothers and sisters younger than themselves. What a lesson this touching, deeply pathetic incident teaches and what a world of meaning there is in the sad circumstances of their tragic death! Had they not been poor children, little waifs, they would not have been locked in the cabin to perish like rats. They would not, in fact, have been there at all, and had it not been for the pride and pomp, the greed and luxury that paraded the upper deck, the Titanic never would have gone to the bottom of the sea. And now, my children, I must come to a close. I have taken up much of your time, but I have only been able to trace in barest outline what the Socialist party is organized for, what it aims to do, and will do, and why the children, above all, should vie with each other in helping it to grow and speeding the happy day of its success. When that day comes the rejoicing people will realize that the kingdom of heaven, so long prayed for, has been set up here on earth in the social brotherhood of all mankind. SOCIAL REFORM. While there is a lower class I am in it; While there is a criminal class I am of it; While there is a soul in prison I am not free. DANGER AHEAD. International Socialist Review, January, 1911. The large increase in the Socialist vote in the late national and state elections is quite naturally hailed with elation and rejoicing by party members, but I feel prompted to remark, in the light of some personal observations made during the campaign, that it is not entirely a matter of jubilation. I am not given to pessimism, or captious criticism, and yet I cannot but feel that some of the votes placed to our credit this year were obtained by methods not consistent with the principles of a revolutionary party, and in the long run will do more harm than good. I yield to no one in my desire to see the party grow and the vote increase, but in my zeal I do not lose sight of the fact that healthy growth and a substantial vote depend upon efficient organization, the self-education and self-discipline of the membership, and that where these are lacking, an inflated vote secured by compromising methods, can only be hurtful to the movement. The danger I see ahead is that the Socialist party at this stage, and under existing conditions, is apt to attract elements which it cannot assimilate, and that it may be either weighted down, or torn asunder with internal strife, or that it may become permeated and corrupted with the spirit of bourgeois reform to an extent that will practically destroy its virility and efficiency as a revolutionary organization. To my mind the working class character and the revolutionary integrity of the Socialist party are of first importance. All the votes of the people would do us no good if our party ceased to be a revolutionary party, or came to be only incidentally so, while yielding more and more to the pressure to modify the principles and program of the party for the sake of swelling the vote and hastening the day of its expected triumph. It is precisely this policy and the alluring promise it holds out to new members with more zeal than knowledge of working class economics, that constitutes the danger we should guard against in preparing for the next campaign. The truth is that we have not a few members who regard vote-getting as of supreme importance, no matter by what method the votes may be secured, and this leads them to hold out inducements and make representations which are not at all compatible with the stern and uncompromising principles of a revolutionary party. They seek to make the Socialist propaganda so attractive--eliminating whatever may give offense to bourgeois sensibilities--that it serves as a bait for votes rather than as a means of education, and votes thus secured do not properly belong to us and do injustice to our party as well as to those who cast them. These votes do not express socialism and in the next ensuing election are quite as apt to be turned against us, and it is better that they be not cast for the Socialist party, registering a degree of progress the party is not entitled to and indicating a political position the party is unable to sustain. Socialism is a matter of growth, of evolution, which can be advanced by wise methods, but never by obtaining for it a fictitious vote. We should seek only to register the actual vote of socialism, no more and no less. In our propaganda we should state our principles clearly, speak the truth fearlessly, seeking neither to flatter nor to offend, but only to convince those who should be with us and win them to our cause through an intelligent understanding of its mission. There is also a disposition on the part of some to join hands with reactionary trade-unionists in local emergencies and in certain temporary situations to effect some specific purpose, which may or may not be in harmony with our revolutionary program. No possible good can come from any kind of a political alliance, express or implied, with trade-unions or the leaders of trade unions who are opposed to socialism and only turn to it for use in some extremity, the fruit of their own reactionary policy. Of course we want the support of trade-unionists, but only of those who believe in socialism and are ready to vote and work with us for the overthrow of capitalism. The American Federation of Labor, as an organization, with its Civic federation to determine its attitude and control its course, is deadly hostile to the Socialist party and to any and every revolutionary movement of the working class. To kowtow to this organization and to join hands with its leaders to secure political favors can only result in compromising our principles and bringing disaster to the party. Not for all the vote of the American Federation of Labor and its labor-dividing and corruption breeding craft-unions should we compromise one jot of our revolutionary principles; and if we do we shall be visited with the contempt we deserve by all real Socialists, who will scorn to remain in a party professing to be a revolutionary party of the working class while employing the crooked and disreputable methods of ward-heeling politicians to attain their ends. Of far greater importance than increasing the vote of the Socialist party is the economic organization of the working class. To the extent, and only to the extent, that the workers are organized and disciplined in their respective industries can the Socialist movement advance and the Socialist party hold what is registered by the ballot. The election of legislative and administrative officers, here and there, where the party is still in a crude state and the members economically and politically unfit to assume the responsibilities thrust upon them as the result of popular discontent, will inevitably bring trouble and set the party back, instead of advancing it, and while this is to be expected and is to an extent unavoidable, we should court no more of that kind of experience than is necessary to avoid a repetition of it. The Socialist party has already achieved some victories of this kind which proved to be defeats, crushing and humiliating, and from which the party has not even now, after many years, entirely recovered. We have just so much socialism that is stable and dependable, because securely grounded in economics, in discipline and all else that expresses class-conscious solidarity, and this must be augmented steadily through economic and political organization, but no amount of mere votes can accomplish this in even the slightest degree. A vote for socialism is not socialism any more than a menu is a meal. Socialism must be organized, drilled, equipped, and the place to begin is in the industries where the workers are employed. Their economic power has got to be developed through efficient organization, or their political power, even if it could be developed, would but react upon them, thwart their plans, blast their hopes, and all but destroy them. Such organization to be effective must be expressed in terms of industrial unionism. Each industry must be organized in its entirety, embracing all the workers, and all working together in the interests of all, in the true spirit of solidarity, thus laying the foundation and developing the superstructure of the new system within the old, from which it is evolving, and systematically fitting the workers, step by step, to assume entire control of the productive forces when the hour strikes for the impending organic change. Without such economic organization and the economic power with which it is clothed, and without the industrial co-operative training, discipline and efficiency which are its corollaries, the fruit of any political victories the workers may achieve will turn to ashes on their lips. Now that the capitalist system is so palpably breaking down, and in consequence its political parties breaking up, the disintegrating elements with vague reform ideas and radical bourgeois tendencies will head in increasing numbers toward the Socialist party, especially since the greatly enlarged vote of this year has been announced and the party is looming up as a possible dispenser of the spoils of office. There is danger, I believe, that the party may be swamped by such an exodus and the best possible means--and, in fact, the only effectual means--of securing the party against such a fatality is the economic power of the industrially-organized workers. The votes will come rapidly enough from now on without seeking them and we should make it clear that the Socialist party wants the votes only of those who want socialism, and that, above all, as a revolutionary party of the working class, it discountenances vote-seeking for the sake of votes and holds in contempt office-seeking for the sake of office. These belong entirely to capitalist parties with their bosses and their boodle and have no place in a party whose shibboleth is emancipation. With the workers efficiently organized industrially, bound together by the common tie of their enlightened self-interest, they will just as naturally and inevitably express their economic solidarity in political terms and cast a united vote for the party of their class as the forces of nature express obedience to the law of gravitation. PIONEER WOMEN IN AMERICA. Progressive Woman, April, 1912. In looking over some old letters a day or two ago I found a postal card which Susan B. Anthony had written to me over thirty years ago, and, strangely enough, it was held fast by a letter that was written to me about the same time by Wendell Phillips, as if these two epistles had been attracted to each other and held together in the bonds of mutualism as were the great souls who had written them in their heroic struggle for human enfranchisement. The faded and time-worn old card carried me back to the day I met Miss Anthony at the depot on her arrival at Terre Haute, where she was to speak in public for her sex. At that time Mrs. Ida Husted Harper, who afterward became Miss Anthony's confidential friend and authorized biographer, and I, and two or three others, were about the only people in Terre Haute who believed that woman was a human being and entitled to the rights of citizenship. We had arranged these meetings for Miss Anthony and her three active coadjutors in woman's cause at that time, and they arrived according to the schedule. I shall never forget how Miss Anthony impressed me. She had all the charm of a real woman and all the strength of a perfect man. Style, personal adornment, she did not know; vanity found no lodgment in her great soul. She was born with a heroic purpose, and she set out in fulfillment of that purpose with a spirit of dauntless valor and determination which knew "no variableness or shadow of turning" to the day that ended her consecrated life and she passed from the scenes of men. The trials, privations, insults borne by this grand old pioneer will never be known by those who are in the ranks today. An event characteristic of the struggle in which she engaged almost single-handed for so many years was her arrest and trial for voting in the presidential election of 1872. A fine of one hundred dollars and costs was imposed upon her, which she vowed she would not pay, even if she were sent to jail. When Miss Anthony said a thing she meant it. That fine was never paid. It was, after all, a stroke of good fortune that Miss Anthony was the victim of this barbarous indignity. It inspired one of the greatest speeches of her life. In opening this dramatic plea and protest she said: "Friends and Fellow-Citizens: I stand before you tonight under indictment for the alleged crime of having voted at the last presidential election, without having a lawful right to vote. It shall be my work this evening to prove to you that in thus voting I not only committed no crime, but, instead, simply exercised my citizen's rights, guaranteed to me and all United States citizens by the National Constitution, beyond the power of any State to deny." She then quoted from the preamble of the Federal Constitution: "We, the _people_ of the United States," etc., and proceeded: "It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we the male citizens; but, we the whole people, who formed the union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people--women as well as men. And it is a downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government--the ballot. The early journals of Congress show that when the committee reported to that body the original articles of confederation, the very first article which became the subject of discussion was that respecting equality of suffrage. Article 4 said: 'The better to secure and perpetuate mutual friendship and intercourse between the people of the different States of the Union, the free inhabitants of each of the States (paupers, vagabonds and fugitives from justice excepted) shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of the free citizen, of the several States.' "Thus, at the very beginning did the fathers see the necessity of the universal application of the great principle of equal rights to all, in order to produce the desired results--a harmonious union and a homogeneous people." Miss Anthony then quoted the New York State Constitution: "No member of this State shall be disfranchised or deprived of the rights or privileges secured to any citizen thereof, unless by the law of the land or the judgment of its peers." She then proceeded with her argument, which has never been and never will be answered. It is to be regretted that space forbids more ample quotation in this article. Here is a glowing paragraph from her impassioned plea which is characteristic of the entire address: "To them (women) this government has no just powers derived from the consent of the governed. To them this government is not a democracy. It is not a republic. It is an odious aristocracy; a hateful oligarchy of sex; the most hateful aristocracy ever established on the face of the globe; an oligarchy of wealth, where the rich govern the poor. An oligarchy of learning, where the educated govern the ignorant, or even an oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this oligarchy of sex, which makes father, brothers, husband, sons the oligarch over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of every household; which ordains all men sovereigns, all women subjects; carries dissension, discord and rebellion into every home of the nation." There has never been a more logical unanswerable argument for the political enfranchisement of women than was here made by Miss Anthony. And yet only a very few of the people were fair enough to listen, intelligent enough to understand, or candid enough to give approval, if they did. Susan B. Anthony's whole career was one tempestuous struggle for the rights of her sex. She never wavered and she never wearied in the conflict. She had the moral courage of a martyr, and such she was as certainly as any that ever perished at the stake. On my visit to Johnstown, N. Y., recently, the comrades pointed out the spot where Elizabeth Cady Stanton, another pioneer heroine of the movement, was born. Mrs. Stanton has long since been gathered to her fathers, but her work remains an imperishable monument in memory of her achievements. It was at the first Woman's Rights convention ever held in the United States, July 19, 1848, that Mrs. Stanton delivered an oration that will forever have a place in the literature of woman's struggle for freedom. The doctrine she advocated was at that time little less than treason, but she knew it was _true_, and she boldly took her stand and maintained it to the end. In her speech at this first convention she said: "Now is the time for the women of this country, if they would save our free institutions, to defend the right, to buckle on the armor that can best resist the keenest weapons of the enemy--contempt and ridicule. The same religious enthusiasm that nerved Joan of Arc to her work nerves us to ours. In every generation God calls some men and women for the utterance of the truth, a heroic action, and our work today is the fulfilling of what has long since been foretold by the prophet. * * * We do not expect our path will be strewn with the flowers of popular applause, but over the thorns of bigotry and prejudice will be our way, and on our banner will beat dark storm-clouds of opposition from those who have entrenched themselves behind the stormy bulwarks of custom and authority, and who have fortified their position by every means, holy and unholy. But we will steadfastly abide the result. Unmoved we will bear it aloft. Undauntedly we will unfurl it to the gale, for we know that the storm cannot rend from it a shred, that the electric flash will but more clearly show to us the glorious words inscribed upon it: 'Equality of Rights.'" There was thrilling power in the burning eloquence of Mrs. Stanton, but only they who had a part in the struggle at that time could have any conception of what bitter hatred, blind prejudice and malign persecution there were to overcome. In February, 1854, Mrs. Stanton made a notable plea for the political rights of women to the legislature of New York. In mentally invoicing an average legislature today one gets some idea of the self-imposed task of this brave old pioneer, and the indomitable spirit required to undertake it, of arousing a body of sodden bourgeois legislators, ward politicians, to recognize the right of women to breathe the air of civilized citizenship and belong to themselves. In this thoroughly militant and inspiring appeal she said: "The tyrant, Custom, has been summoned before the bar of Common Sense. His majesty no longer awes the multitude; his scepter is broken; his crown is trampled in the dust; the sentence of death is pronounced upon him. All nations, ranks and classes have, in turn, questioned and repudiated his authority; and now, that the monster is chained and caged, timid woman, on tiptoe, comes to look him in the face, and to demand of her brave sires and sons, who have struck stout blows for liberty, if, in this change of dynasty, she, too, shall find relief. * * * "We demand the full recognition of all our rights as citizens of the Empire State. We are persons; natives, free-born citizens; property holders, taxpayers, yet we are denied the exercise of our right to the elective franchise. We support ourselves, and, in part, your schools, colleges, churches, your poor-houses, jails, prisons, the army, the navy, the whole machinery of government, and yet we have no voice in your councils. We have every qualification required by the constitution necessary to the legal voter but the one of sex. We are moral, virtuous and intelligent, and in all respects quite equal to the proud white man himself, and yet by your laws we are classed with idiots, lunatics and negroes." These two sturdy pioneers in woman's struggle present a magnificent picture in the perspective. They did not know the meaning of discouragement. They were strangers to weakness and fear. Both were of heroic mould. Both were born and endowed for great service and both made their names synonymous with the struggle of their sex to shake off the fetters of the centuries. Mrs. Stanton was born in 1815, ante-dating Miss Anthony by five years. They were inseparable friends, and they who saw them together say that their love and fealty toward each other was so beautiful and touching that it was an inspiration to all their co-workers and shamed to silence all their bickerings and petty jealousies. They both lived to be over eighty years. After full half a century of unrelaxing fidelity to their principles and unceasing battle for their cause they saw but the beginning of the glorious fruition of their consecrated service. Such has been the fate of all who, like these great souls, loved principle better than popularity and humanity more than themselves. The women who are in the ranks today may well rejoice that these grand women and others who shared in their bitter persecution blazed the way through the dense wilderness of ignorance, prejudice and hatred for what is now a world movement, with millions proudly bearing its banner, inscribed with the conquering shibboleth: Equal Freedom and Equal Opportunities for All Mankind. SPEECHES UNITY AND VICTORY. Speech Before State Convention of American Federation of Labor, Pittsburg, Kansas, August 12, 1908. * * * * * Introduction by Chairman Cable. Gentlemen of the Convention: I assure you it is a great privilege on my part to present to you at this time a gentleman who needs no introduction at my hands; a gentleman who is known to you and who is known to the workingmen throughout the length and breadth of this country as a true and tried trade unionist and the candidate of the Socialist party for President of the United States. I, therefore, take great pleasure in presenting to you Brother Eugene V. Debs. Mr. Chairman, Delegates and Fellow Workers: It is with pleasure, I assure you, that I embrace this opportunity to exchange greetings with you in the councils of labor. I have prepared no formal address, nor is any necessary at this time. You have met here as the representatives of organized labor and if I can do anything to assist you in the work you have been delegated to do I shall render that assistance with great pleasure. To serve the working class is to me always a duty of love. Thirty-three years ago I first became a member of a trade union. I can remember quite well under what difficulties meetings were held and with what contempt organized labor was treated at that time. There has been a decided change. The small and insignificant trade union has expanded to the proportions of a great national organization. The few hundreds now number millions and organized labor has become a recognized factor in the economics and politics of the nation. There has been a great evolution during that time and while the power of the organized workers has increased there has been an industrial development which makes that power more necessary than ever before in all the history of the working class movement. This is an age of organization. The small employer of a quarter of a century ago has practically disappeared. The workingman of today is confronted by the great corporation which has its ironclad rules and regulations, and if they don't suit he can quit. In the presence of this great power, workingmen are compelled to organize or be ground to atoms. They have organized. They have the numbers. They have had some bitter experience. They have suffered beyond the power of language to describe, but they have not yet developed their latent power to a degree that they can cope successfully with the great power that exploits and oppresses them. Upon this question of organization, my brothers, you and I may differ widely, but as we are reasonable men, we can discuss these differences candidly until we find common ground upon which we can stand side by side in the true spirit of solidarity--and work together for the emancipation of our class. Until quite recently the average trade unionist was opposed to having politics even mentioned in the meeting of his union. The reason for this is self-evident. Workingmen have not until now keenly felt the necessity for independent working class political action. They have been divided between the two capitalist parties and the very suggestion that the union was to be used in the interest of the one or the other was in itself sufficient to sow the seed of disruption. So it isn't strange that the average trade unionist guarded carefully against the introduction of political questions in his union. But within the past two or three years there have been such changes that workingmen have been compelled to take notice of the fact that the labor question is essentially a political question, and that if they would protect themselves against the greed and rapacity of the capitalist class they must develop their political power as well as their economic power, and use both in their own interest. Workingmen have developed sufficient intelligence to understand the necessity for unity upon the economic field. All now recognize the need for thorough organization. But organization of numbers of itself is not sufficient. You might have all the workers of the country embraced in some vast organization and yet they would be very weak if they were not organized upon correct principles; if they did not understand, and understand clearly, what they were organized for, and what their organization expected to accomplish. I am of those who believe that an organization of workingmen, to be efficient, to meet the demands of this hour, must be organized upon a revolutionary basis; must have for its definite object not only the betterment of the condition of workingmen in the wage system, but the absolute overthrow of wage slavery that the workingman may be emancipated and stand forth clothed with the dignity and all other attributes of true manhood. Now let me briefly discuss the existing condition. We have been organizing all these years, and there are now approximately three millions of American workingmen who wear union badges, who keep step to union progress. At this very time, and in spite of all that organized labor can do to the contrary, there is a condition that prevails all over this country that is well calculated to challenge the serious consideration of every workingman. To begin with, according to the reports furnished us, twenty per cent of the workingmen of this country are now out of employment. I have here a copy of the New York World containing a report of the labor commissioner of the State of New York who shows that during the quarter ending June 30 there were in that state an army of union men out of employment approximating thirty-five per cent of the entire number; that is to say, in the State of New York today, out of every one hundred union men (these reports are received from the unions themselves, verified by their own officers, so there can be no question in regard to them), out of every 100 union men in New York, 35 are out of employment. The percentage may not be so large in these western states where the industrial development has not reached the same point, but go where you may, east or west, north or south, you will find men, union men, who are begging for the opportunity to work for just enough to keep their suffering souls within their famished bodies. A system in which such a condition as this is possible has fulfilled its mission, stands condemned, and ought to be abolished. According to the Declaration of Independence, man has the inalienable right to life. If that be true it follows that he has also the inalienable right to work. If you have no right to work you have no right to life because you can only live by work. And if you live in a system that deprives you of the right to work, that system denies you the right to live. Now man has a right to life because he is here. That is sufficient proof, and if he has the right to life, it follows that he has the right to all the means that sustain life. But how is it in this outgrown capitalist system? A workingman can only work on condition that he finds somebody who will give him permission to work for just enough of what his labor produces to keep him in working order. No matter whether you have studied this economic question or not, you cannot have failed to observe that during the past half century society has been sharply divided into classes--into a capitalist class upon the one hand, into a working class upon the other hand. I shall not take the time to trace this evolution. I shall simply call your attention to the fact that half a century ago all a man needed was a trade and having this he could supply himself with the simple tools then used, produce what he needed and enjoy the fruit of his labor. But this has been completely changed. The simple tool has disappeared and the great machine has taken its place. The little shop is gone and the great factory has come in its stead. The worker can no longer work by and for himself. He has been recruited into regiments, battalions and armies and work has been subdivided and specialized; and now hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of workingmen work together co-operatively and produce in great abundance, not for themselves, however, for they no longer own the tools they work with. What they produce belongs to the capitalist class who own the tools with which they work. A man fifty years ago who made a shoe owned it. Today it is possible for that same worker, if still alive, to make a hundred times as many shoes, but he doesn't own them now. He works today with modern machinery which is the property of some capitalist who lives perhaps a thousand miles from where the factory is located and who owns all the product because he owns the machinery. I have stated that society has been divided into two warring classes. The capitalist owns the tool in modern industry, but he has nothing to do with its operation. By virtue of such ownership he has the economic power to appropriate to himself the wealth produced by the use of that tool. This accounts for the fact that the capitalist becomes rich. But how about the working class? In the first place they have to compete with each other for the privilege of operating the capitalist's tool of production. The bigger the tool and the more generally it is applied, the more it produces, the sharper competition grows between the workers for the privilege of using it and the more are thrown out of employment. Every few years, no matter what party is in power, no matter what our domestic policy is, how high the tariff or what the money standard, every few years the cry goes up about "over-production" and the working class is discharged by the thousands and thousands, and are idle, just as the miners have been in this field for many weary months. No work, no food, and after a while, no credit, and all this in the shadow of the abundance these very workers have created. Don't you agree with me, my brothers, that this condition is an intolerable and indefensible one, and that whatever may be said of the past, this system no longer answers the demands of this time? Why should any workingman need to beg for work? Why forced to surrender to anybody any part of what his labor produces? Now, I ask this question, and it applies to the whole field of industry: If a hundred men work in a mine and produce a hundred tons of coal, how much of that coal are they entitled to? Are they not entitled to all of it? And if not, who is entitled to any part of it? If the man who produces wealth is not entitled to it, who is? You say the capitalist is necessary and I deny it. The capitalist has become a profit-taking parasite. Industry is now concentrated and operated on a very large scale; it is co-operative and therefore self-operative. The capitalists hire superintendents, managers and workingmen to operate their plants and produce wealth. The capitalists are absolutely unnecessary; they have no part in the process of production--not the slightest. Now I insist that it is the workingman's duty to so organize economically and politically as to put an end to this system; as to take possession in his collective capacity of the machinery of production and operate it, not to create millionaires and multi-millionaires, but to produce wealth in plenty for all. That is why the labor question is also a political question. It makes no difference what you do on the economic field to better your condition, so long as the tools of production are privately owned, so long as they are operated for the private profit of the capitalist, the working class will be exploited, they will be in enforced idleness, thousands of them will be reduced to want, some of them to vagabonds and criminals, and this condition will prevail in spite of anything that organized labor can do to the contrary. The most important thing for the workingman to recognize is the class struggle. Every capitalist, every capitalist newspaper, every capitalist attorney and retainer will insist that we have no classes in this country and that there is no class struggle. President Roosevelt himself has declared that class-consciousness is a foul and evil thing. Now, what is class-consciousness? It is simply a recognition of the fact on the part of the workingman that his interest is identical with the interest of every other workingman. Class-consciousness points out the necessity for working-class action, economic and political. What is it that keeps the working class in subjection? What is it that is responsible for their exploitation and for all of the ills they suffer? Just one thing; it can be stated in a single word. It is _Ignorance_. The working class have not yet learned how to unite and act together. There are relatively but few capitalists in this country; there are perhaps twenty millions of wage workers, but the capitalists and their retainers have contrived during all these years to keep the working class divided, and as long as the working class is divided it will be helpless. It is only when the working class learn--and they are learning daily and by very bitter experience--to unite and to act together, especially on election day, that there is any hope for emancipation. The workingmen you represent, my brothers, are in an overwhelming majority in every township, county and state of this nation. You declare you are in favor of united action, but still you don't unite. You unite under certain conditions within your union, you get together upon the economic field to a limited extent, but you have yet to learn that before you can really accomplish anything you have got to unite in fact as well as in name. The time is coming when workingmen will be forced into one general organization. The time is coming when they will be compelled to organize on the basis of industrial unionism. At this very hour there is a strike on the Canadian Pacific. Eight thousand workingmen who are more or less organized and who have been wronged in many ways, have finally gone out on strike. There are other thousands remaining at their posts and non-union men flowing in there will be hauled to their destination by union men, and union men will continue to work until their eight thousand brothers have lost their jobs and many of them have become tramps. That is called organization, but it is not so in fact. It is at best organization of a very weak and defective character. Now, the right kind of organization on the Canadian Pacific would embrace all the workers. They should all be included within the same organization and then have one general working agreement with the company so that if there was a violation of it, it would concern every man in the service. But how is it at present? The engineers, conductors, trainmen and switchmen are in separate unions and after they have been signed up, the company can treat the rest just as they please, for they know that if they strike and the others remain in their service, as they are bound to do under their agreement, they can very easily supplant them and remain in perfect control of the system. We have had enough of that kind of experience and we ought to profit by it. We ought to realize that there is but one form of organization that answers completely, one in which all subscribe to the same rules and act together in all things, and you will have to organize upon that basis or see your unions become practically worthless. Now let us consider another line briefly for the benefit of those who have opposed political action. We are all aware of the trend of the decisions recently rendered by the United States supreme court. Three decisions have been rendered in rapid succession which strike down the rights of labor and virtually strip organized labor of its power. Under these decisions organized labor has been outlawed, and while upon this question I want to suggest that this body at the proper time in its deliberations put the following questions to the candidates for the United States senate and house of representatives in the State of Kansas and request them to answer: In view of the fact that the United States supreme court has rendered a number of decisions placing the working class at a tremendous disadvantage in its struggle with the employing class for better conditions, we respectfully submit to the candidates for the United States senate and house of representatives the following questions: 1. Are you in favor of issuing injunctions against trade union members because they refuse to patronize a non-union employer and advise their friends to do likewise? 2. Will you introduce and vote for a measure setting aside the decision of the supreme court of the District of Columbia in the case of Buck Stove and Range Company against officers of the A. F. of L., making it a criminal act for a labor union to place an employer on its unfair list? 3. Are you in favor of classifying trade unions as "trusts in restraint of trade," as was done by the supreme court in the case of Lowe vs. Lawler, and will you introduce a measure, should you be elected, providing for the exemption of trade unions from the operation of the anti-trust law under this court decision? 4. Do you endorse the supreme court decision making it lawful for a corporation to discharge a man because of his membership in a labor union? If you do not, will you introduce and vote for a bill setting aside this decision of the supreme court and making it unlawful for a corporation to discharge a man because he is a member of a trade union? Here are these candidates in the State of Kansas for the United States senate and house of representatives and if they are elected they will have the power to control legislation, and it is perfectly proper that you, as the representatives of the workers, should put these questions squarely to these candidates and demand that they answer them. They are very simple questions. The United States court has rendered a decision to the effect that a trade union is a trust and that if it exercises its legitimate powers it is a criminal conspiracy in restraint of trade. That decision of the court congress has the power to set aside, and if a man stands as a candidate for congress, in the upper or lower branch, and appeals to you for your vote--and bear in mind he can only be elected by your vote--it is right and proper that you should know if he is in favor of the decision or opposed to it. And if he is in favor of this decision he is your enemy. Now, these candidates are trying to carry water on both shoulders. They declare they will give both labor and capital a square deal, and I want to say that is impossible. No man can be for labor without being against capital. No man can be for capital without being against labor. Here is the capitalist; here are the workers. Here is the capitalist who owns the mines; here are the miners who work in the mines. There is so much coal produced. There is a quarrel between them over a division of the product. Each wants all he can get. Here we have the class struggle. Now, is it possible to be for the capitalist without being against the worker? Are their interest not diametrically opposite? If you increase the share of the capitalist don't you decrease the share of the workers? Can a door be both open and shut at the same time? Can you increase both the workers' and the capitalist's share at the same time? There is just so much produced, and in the present system it has to be divided between the capitalists and the workers, and both sides are fighting for all they can get, and this is the historic class struggle. We have now no revolutionary organization of the workers along the lines of this class struggle, and that is the demand of this time. The pure and simple trade union will no longer answer. I would not take from it the least credit that belongs to it. I have fought under its banner for thirty years. I have followed it through victory and defeat, generally defeat. I realize today more than ever before in my life the necessity for thorough economic organization. It must be made complete. Organization, like everything else, is subject to the laws of evolution. Everything changes, my brothers. The tool you worked with twenty-five years ago will no longer do. It would do then; it will not do now. The capitalists are combined against you. They are reducing wages. They have control of the courts. They are doing everything they can to destroy your power. You have got to follow their example. You have got to unify your forces. You have got to stand together shoulder to shoulder on the economic and political fields and then you will make substantial progress toward emancipation. I am not here, my brothers, to ask you, as an economic organization, to go into politics. Not at all. If I could have you pass a resolution to go into politics I would not do it. If you were inclined to go into active politics as an organization I would prevent such action if I could. You represent the economic organization of the working class and this organization has its own clearly defined functions. Your economic organization can never become a political machine, but your economic organization must recognize and proclaim the necessity for a united political party. You ought to pass a resolution recognizing the class struggle, declaring your opposition to the capitalist system of private ownership of the means of production, and urging upon the working class the necessity for working class political action. That is as far as the economic organization need to go. If you were to use your economic organization for political purposes you would disrupt it, you would wreck it. But I would not have you renounce politics, nor be afraid to discuss anything. Who is it that is so fearful you will discuss politics? It is the ward-heeling politician, and isn't it because he knows very well that if you ever get into politics in the right way he will be out of a job? He is afraid you will get your eyes open. Why should a union man be afraid to discuss politics? He belongs to a certain party; his father belonged to that party and his grandfather belonged to that party, and perhaps his great-grandfather belonged to the same party, and that is probably the only reason he can give for belonging to that party. He don't want anybody to suggest to him the possibility of being lifted out of that party and into some other. Parties change. The party that was good forty years ago is completely outgrown and corrupt and has now no purpose but the promotion of graft and other vicious practices. Workingmen in their organized capacity must recognize the necessity for both economic and political action. I would not have you declare in favor of any particular political party. That would be another mistake which would have disastrous results. If I could have you pass a resolution to support the Socialist party I would not do it. You can't make Socialists by passing resolutions. Men have to become Socialists by study and experience, and they are getting the experience every day. There is one fact, and a very important one, that I would impress upon you, and that is the necessity for revolutionary working class political action. No one will attempt to dispute the fact that our interests as workers are identical. If our interests are identical, then we ought to unite. We ought to unite within the same organization, and if there is a strike we should all strike, and if there is a boycott all of us ought to engage in it. If our interests are identical, it follows that we ought to belong to the same party as well as to the same economic organization. What is politics? It is simply the reflex of economics. What is a party? It is the expression politically of certain material class interests. You belong to that party that you believe will promote your material welfare. Is not that a fact? If you find yourself in a party that attacks your pocket do you not quit that party? Now, if you are in a party that opposes your interests it is because you don't have intelligence enough to understand your interests. That is where the capitalists have the better of you. As a rule, they are intelligent, and shrewd. They understand their material interests and how to protect them. You find the capitalists as a rule belonging only to capitalist parties. They don't join a working-class party and they don't vote the Socialist ticket. They know enough to know that Socialism is opposed to their economic interests. Now, both republican and democratic parties are capitalist parties. There is not the slightest doubt about it. It can be proved in a hundred different ways. You know how the republican party treated the demands of labor in its recent national convention. You know, or ought to know, what has taken place under the present administration. You know, or ought to know, something about the democratic party, national, state and municipal. If there are those who say that the democratic party is more favorable to labor than the republican party it is only necessary to point to the southern states where it has ruled for a century. In no other part of the nation are workingmen in so wretched a condition. In no other part are working people so miserably housed, so wretchedly treated as they are in the southern states where the democratic party rules supreme. At this very hour miners in Alabama are on strike under a democratic administration. I know the condition there, for I have been in the mines. I know many of those men personally. I know under what conditions they have had to work. I have been in the shacks in which they live and have seen their unhappy wives and ill-fed children. I know whereof I speak. Only in the last extremity have those men gone out on strike. They bore all these cruel wrongs for years and were finally forced out on strike. And then what happened? The very first thing the democratic governor did was to send the soldiers to scab the mines. It doesn't make any difference to you, if workingmen are starved and shot down, which party is in power. It occurs under both republican and democratic administration. There will be no change as long as you continue to support the prevailing capitalist system, based upon the private ownership of the tools with which workingmen work and without which they are doomed to slavery and starvation. Now, I repeat that this body should declare against this system of private ownership and in favor of the collective ownership by the workers of the tools of production. This will give you a clear aim and definite object. This will make your movement revolutionary in its ultimate purpose, as it ought to be, and as for immediate concessions in the way of legislation by capitalist representatives and more favorable working conditions, you workingmen have only to poll two million Socialist votes this fall, and you will get those concessions freely and you will not get them in any other way. You will not frighten, you will not move the great corporations by dividing your votes between the republican and democratic parties. It doesn't make any difference which of these two parties wins, you lose! They are both capitalist parties and I don't ask you to take my mere word for it. I simply ask, my brothers, that you read and study the platforms for yourself. I beg of you not to have an ignorant, superstitious reverence for any political party. It is your misfortune if you are the blind follower of any political leader, or any other leader. It is your duty as a workingman, your duty to yourself, your family, to quit a party the very instant you find that that party no longer serves you; and if you continue to adhere to a party that antagonizes your interests, if you continue to support a system in which you are degraded, then you have no right to complain. You must submit to what comes, for you yourself are responsible. Let me impress this fact upon your minds: the labor question, which is really the question of all humanity, will never be solved until it is solved by the working class. It will never be solved for you by the capitalists. It will never be solved for you by the politicians. It will remain unsolved until you yourselves solve it. As long as you can stand and are willing to stand these conditions, these conditions will remain; but when you unite all over the land, when you present a solid class-conscious phalanx, economically and politically, there is no power on this earth that can stand between you and complete emancipation. As individuals you are helpless, but united you represent an irresistible power. Is there any doubt in the mind of any thinking workingman that we are in the midst of a class struggle? Is there any doubt that the workingman ought to own the tool he works with? You will never own the tool you work with under the present system. This whole system is based upon the private ownership by the capitalist of the tools and the wage-slavery of the working class, and as long as the tools are privately owned by the capitalists the great mass of workers will be wage-slaves. You may, at times, temporarily better your condition within certain limitations, but you will still remain wage-slaves, and why wage-slaves? For just one reason and no other--you have got to work. To work you have got to have tools, and if you have no tools you have to beg for work, and if you have got to beg for work the man who owns the tools you use will determine the conditions under which you shall work. As long as he owns your tools he owns your job, and if he owns your job he is the master of your fate. You are in no sense a free man. You are subject to his interest and to his will. He decides whether you shall work or not. Therefore, he decides whether you shall live or die. And in that humiliating position any one who tries to persuade you that you are a free man is guilty of insulting your intelligence. You will never be free, you will never stand erect in your own manly self-reliance until you are the master of the tools you work with, and when you are you can freely work without the consent of any master, and when you do work you will get all your labor produces. As it is now the lion's share goes to the capitalist for which he does nothing, while you get a small fraction to feed, clothe and shelter yourself, and reproduce yourself in the form of labor power. That is all you get out of it and all you ever will get in the capitalist system. Oh, my brothers, can you be satisfied with your lot? Will you insist that life shall continue a mere struggle for existence and one prolonged misery to which death comes as a blessed relief? How is it with the average workingman today? I am not referring to the few who have been favored and who have fared better than the great mass, but I am asking how it is with the average workingman in this system? Admit that he has a job. What assurance has he that it is his in twenty-four hours? I have a letter from an expert glass worker saying that the new glass machine which has recently been tested, has proven conclusively that bottles can be made without a glass blower. Five or six boys with these machines can make as many bottles as ten expert blowers could make. Machinery is conquering every department of activity. It is displacing more and more workingmen and making the lot of those who have employment more and more insecure. Admit that a man has a job. What assurance has he that he is going to keep it? A machine may be invented. He may offend the boss. He may engage in a little agitation in the interest of his class. He is marked as an agitator, he is discharged, and then what is his status? The minute he is discharged he has to hunt for a new buyer for his labor power. He owns no tools; the tools are great machines. He can't compete against them with his bare hands. He has got to work. There is only one condition under which he can work and that is when he sells his labor power, his energy, his very life currents, and thus disposes of himself in daily installments. He is not sold from the block, as was the chattel slave. He sells ten hours of himself every day in exchange for just enough to keep himself in that same slavish condition. The machine he works with has to be oiled, and he has to be fed, and the oil sustains the same relation to the machine that food does to him. If he could work without food his wage would be reduced to the vanishing point. That is the status of the workingman today. What can the present economic organization do to improve the condition of the workingman? Very little, if anything. If you have a wife and two or three children, and you take the possibilities into consideration, this question ought to give you grave concern. You know that it is the sons of workingmen who become vagabonds and tramps, and who are sent to jail, and it is the daughters of workingmen who are forced into houses of shame. You are a workingman, you live in capitalism, and you have nothing but your labor power, and you don't know whether you are going to find a buyer or not. But even if you do find a master, if you have a job, can you boast of being a man among men? No man can rightly claim to be a man unless he is free. There is something godlike about manhood. Manhood doesn't admit of ownership. Manhood scorns to be regarded as property. Do you know whether you have a job or not? Do you know how long you are going to have one? And when you are out of a job what can your union do for you? I was down at Coalgate, Oklahoma, on the Fourth of July last, where six hundred miners have been out of work for four long months. They are all organized. There are the mines and machinery, and the miners are eager to work. But not a tap of work is being done, and the miners and their families are suffering, and most of them live in houses that are unfit for habitation. This awful condition is never going to be changed in capitalism. There is one way only and that is to wipe out capitalism, and to do that we have to get together, and when we do that we will find the way to emancipation. You may not agree with me now, but make note of what I am saying. The time is near when you will be forced into economic and political solidarity. The republican and democratic parties are alike capitalist parties. Some of you may think that Mr. Bryan, if elected, will do great things for the workers. Conditions will remain substantially the same. We will still be under capitalism. It will not matter how you may tinker with the tariff or the currency. The tools are still the property of the capitalists and you are still at their mercy. Now let me show you that Mr. Bryan is no more your friend than is Mr. Taft. You remember when the officials of the Western Federation of Miners were kidnaped in Colorado, and when it was said they should never leave Idaho alive. It was the determination of the Mine Owners' Association that these brave and loyal union leaders should be foully murdered. When these brothers of ours were brutally kidnaped by the collusion of the capitalist governors of two states, every true friend of the working class cried out in protest. Did Mr. Bryan utter a word? Mr. Bryan was the recognized champion of the working class. He was in a position to be heard. A protest from him would have tremendous weight with the American people. But his labor friends could not unlock his lips. Not one word would he speak. Not one. Organized labor, however, throughout the length and breadth of the land, took the matter in hand promptly and registered its protest in a way that made the nation quake. The Mine Owners' Association took to the tall timber. Our brother unionists were acquitted, vindicated, and stood forth without a blemish upon their honor, and after they were free once more, Mr. Bryan said, "I felt all the time that they were not guilty." Now if your faithful leaders are kidnaped and threatened to be hanged, and you call upon a man who claims to be your friend, to come to the rescue and he refuses to say a word, to give the least help, do you still think he is your friend? Mr. Bryan had his chance to prove his friendship at a time when labor sorely needed friends, when organized labor cried out in agony and distress. But not a word escaped his lips. Why did not Mr. Byran speak? He did not dare. Mr. Bryan knew very well that the kidnapers of those men were his personal friends, the association of rich mine owners, who had largely furnished his campaign funds. For Mr. Bryan personally I have always had a high regard. I am not attacking him in any personal sense at all. But the extremity to which a man is driven who tries to serve both capital and labor! It can't be done. Mr. Bryan did not dare to speak for labor because if he had he would have turned the mine owning capitalists against him. He is afraid to speak out very loudly for capitalists for fear the workers will get after him. He has compromised all around for the sake of being president. You have heard him denounce Roger Sullivan. Mr. Bryan, four years ago, in denouncing this corruptionist, at the time of the nomination of Alton B. Parker, said he was totally destitute of honor and compared him to a train robber. Notwithstanding this fact, Mr. Bryan recently invited Sullivan to his home in Lincoln, took him by the hand and introduced him to his family. Mr. Bryan also invited Charley Murphy, the inexpressibly rotten Tammany heeler of New York. Mr. Bryan had him come to Lincoln so as to conciliate Tammany, and they were photographed together shaking hands. No man can serve both capital and labor at the same time. You don't admit the capitalists to your union. They organize their union to fight you. You organize your union to fight them. Their union consists wholly of capitalists; your union consists wholly of workingmen. It is along the same line that you have got to organize politically. You don't unite with capitalists on the economic field; why should you politically? You have got to extend your class line. You can declare yourselves in this convention and make your position clear to the world. You can give hope and inspire confidence throughout the state. And now in closing, I wish to thank you, each of you, from my heart, for your kindness. I appreciate the opportunity you have given me to address you and whether you agree with me or not, I leave you wishing you success in your deliberations and hoping for the early triumph of the labor movement. * * * * * The convention passed a unanimous rising vote of thanks at the close of the address. POLITICAL APPEAL TO AMERICAN WORKERS. Opening Speech of National Campaign, Riverview Park, Chicago, June 16, 1912. Friends, Comrades and Fellow-Workers: We are today entering upon a national campaign of the profoundest interest to the working class and the country. In this campaign there are but two parties and but one issue. There is no longer even the pretense of difference between the so-called Republican and Democratic parties. They are substantially one in what they stand for. They are opposed to each other on no question of principle but purely in a contest for the spoils of office. To the workers of the country these two parties in name are one in fact. They, or rather, it, stands for capitalism, for the private ownership of the means of subsistence, for the exploitation of the workers, and for wage-slavery. Both of these old capitalist class machines are going to pieces. Having outlived their time they have become corrupt and worse than useless and now present a spectacle of political degeneracy never before witnessed in this or any other country. Both are torn by dissension and rife with disintegration. The evolution of the forces underlying them is tearing them from their foundations and sweeping them to inevitable destruction. We have before us in this city at this hour an exhibition of capitalist machine politics which lays bare the true inwardness of the situation in the capitalist camp. Nothing that any Socialist has ever charged in the way of corruption is to be compared with what Taft and Roosevelt have charged and proven upon one another. They are both good Republicans, just as Harmon and Bryan are both good Democrats--and they are all agreed that Socialism would be the ruination of the country. _Puppets of the Ruling Class._ Taft and Roosevelt in the exploitation of their boasted individualism and their mad fight for official spoils have been forced to expose the whole game of capitalist class politics and reveal themselves and the whole brood of capitalist politicians in their true role before the American people. They are all the mere puppets of the ruling class. They are literally bought, paid for and owned, body and soul, by the powers that are exploiting this nation and enslaving and robbing its toilers. What difference is there, judged by what they stand for, between Taft, Roosevelt, La Follette, Harmon, Wilson, Clark and Bryan? Do they not all alike stand for the private ownership of industry and the wage-slavery of the working class? What earthly difference can it make to the millions of workers whether the Republican or Democratic political machine of capitalism is in commission? That these two parties differ in name only and are one in fact is demonstrated beyond cavil whenever and wherever the Socialist party constitutes a menace to their misrule. Milwaukee is a case in point and there are many others. Confronted by the Socialists these long pretended foes are forced to drop their masks and fly into each other's arms. _Twin Agencies of Wall Street._ The baseness, hypocrisy and corruption of these twin political agencies of Wall Street and the ruling class cannot be expressed in words. The imagination is taxed in contemplating their crimes. There is no depth of dishonor to which they have not descended--no depth of depravity they have not sounded. To the extent that they control elections the franchise is corrupted and the electorate debauched, and when they succeed in power it is but to execute the will of the Wall Street interests which finance and control them. The police, the militia, the regular army, the courts and all the powers lodged in class government are all freely at the service of the ruling class, especially in suppressing discontent among the slaves of the factories, mills and mines, and keeping them safely in subjugation to their masters. How can any intelligent, self-respecting wage-worker give his support to either of these corrupt capitalist parties? The emblem of a capitalist party on a working man is the badge of his ignorance, his servility and shame. Marshalled in battle array, against these corrupt capitalist parties is the young, virile, revolutionary Socialist party, the party of the awakening working class, whose red banners, inscribed with the inspiring shibboleth of class-conscious solidarity, proclaim the coming triumph of international Socialism and the emancipation of the workers of the world. _The Two Political Forces._ Contrast these two political forces and the parties through which these forces find concrete expression! On the one side are the trusts, the corporations, the banks, the railroads, the plutocrats, the politicians, the bribe-givers, the ballot-box stuffers, the repeaters, the parasites, retainers and job-hunters of all descriptions; the corruption funds, the filth, slime and debauchery of ruling class politics; the press and pulpit and college, all wearing capitalism's collar, and all in concert applauding its "patriotism" and glorifying in its plundering and profligate regime. On the other side are the workers and producers of the nation coming into consciousness of their interests and their power as a class, filled with the spirit of solidarity and thrilled with the new-born power that throbs within them; scorning further affiliation with the parties that so long used them to their own degradation and looking trustfully to themselves and to each other for relief from oppression and for emancipation from the power which has so long enslaved them. Honest toil, useful labor, against industrial robbery and political rottenness! These are the two forces which are arrayed against each other in deadly and uncompromising hostility in the present campaign. _Corrupt Capitalist Politics._ We are not here to play the filthy game of capitalist politics. There is the same relative difference between capitalist class politics and working class politics that there is between capitalism and Socialism. Capitalism, having its foundation in the slavery and exploitation of the masses, can only rule by corrupt means and its politics are essentially the reflex of its low and debasing economic character. The Socialist party as the party of the working class stands squarely upon its principles in making its appeal to the workers of the nation. It is not begging for votes, nor seeking for votes, nor bargaining for votes. It is not in the vote market. It wants votes, but only of those who want it--those who recognize it as their party and come to it of their own free will. If, as the Socialist candidate for president, I were seeking office and the spoils of office I would be a traitor to the Socialist party and a disgrace to the working class. To be sure we want all the votes we can get and all that are coming to us but only as a means of developing the political power of the working class in the struggle for industrial freedom, and not that we may revel in the spoils of office. _Political Power._ The workers have never yet developed or made use of their political power. They have played the game of their masters for the benefit of the master class--and now many of them, disgusted with their own blind and stupid performance, are renouncing politics and refusing to see any difference between the capitalist parties financed by the ruling class to perpetuate class rule and the Socialist party organized and financed by the workers themselves as a means of wresting the control of government and of industry from the capitalists and making the working class the ruling class of the nation and the world. The Socialist party enters this campaign under conditions that could scarcely be more favorable to the cause it represents. For the first time every state in the union is now organized and represented in the national party, and every state will have a full ticket in the field; and for the first time the Socialists of the United States have a party which takes its rightful place in the great revolutionary working class movement of the world. Four years ago with a membership of scarcely forty thousand we succeeded in polling nearly half a million votes; this year when the campaign is fairly opened we shall have a hundred and fifty thousand dues-paying members and an organization in all regards incalculably superior to that we had in the last campaign. We are united, militant, aggressive, enthusiastic as never before. From the Eastern coast to the Pacific shore and from the Canadian line to the Mexican gulf the red banner of the proletarian revolution floats unchallenged and the exultant shouts of the advancing hosts of labor are borne on all the breezes. _There Is But One Issue._ There is but one issue that appeals to this conquering army--the unconditional surrender of the capitalist class. To be sure this cannot be achieved in a day and in the meantime the party enforces to the extent of its power its immediate demands and presses steadily onward toward the goal. It has its constructive program by means of which it develops its power and its capacity, step by step, seizing upon every bit of vantage to advance and strengthen its position, but never for a moment mistaking reform for revolution and never losing sight of the ultimate goal. Socialist reform must not be confounded with so-called capitalist reform. The latter is shrewdly designed to buttress capitalism; the former to overthrow it. Socialist reform vitalizes and promotes the social revolution. _The National Convention._ The national convention of the Socialist party recently held at Indianapolis was in all respects the greatest gathering of representative Socialists ever held in the United States. The delegates there assembled demonstrated their ability to deal efficiently with all the vital problems which confront the party. The convention was permeated in every fiber with the class-conscious, revolutionary spirit and was thoroughly representative of the working class. Every question that came before that body was considered and disposed of in accordance with the principles and program of the international movement and on the basis of its relation to and effect upon the working class. The platform adopted by the convention is a clear and cogent enunciation of the party's principles and a frank and forceful statement of the party's mission. This platform embodies labor's indictment of the capitalist system and demands the abolition of that system. It proclaims the identity of interests of all workers and appeals to them in clarion tones to unite for their emancipation. It points out the class struggle and emphasizes the need of the economic and political unity of the workers to wage that struggle to a successful issue. It declares relentless war upon the entire capitalist regime in the name of the rising working class and demands in uncompromising terms the overthrow of wage-slavery and the inauguration of industrial democracy. In this platform of the Socialist party the historic development of society is clearly stated and the fact made manifest that the time has come for the workers of the world to shake off their oppressors and exploiters, put an end to their age-long servitude, and make themselves the masters of the world. To this end the Socialist party has been organized; to this end it is bending all its energies and taxing all its resources; to this end it makes its appeal to the workers and their sympathizers throughout the nation. _The Capitalist System Condemned._ In the name of the workers the Socialist party condemns the capitalist system. In the name of freedom it condemns wage-slavery. In the name of modern industry it condemns poverty, idleness and famine. In the name of peace it condemns war. In the name of civilization it condemns the murder of little children. In the name of enlightenment it condemns ignorance and superstition. In the name of the future it arraigns the past at the bar of the present, and in the name of humanity it demands social justice for every man, woman and child. The Socialist party knows neither color, creed, sex, nor race. It knows no aliens among the oppressed and down-trodden. It is first and last the party of the workers, regardless of their nationality, proclaiming their interests, voicing their aspirations, and fighting their battles. It matters not where the slaves of the earth lift their bowed bodies from the dust and seek to shake off their fetters, or lighten the burden that oppresses them, the Socialist party is pledged to encourage and support them to the full extent of its power. It matters not to what union they belong, or if they belong to any union, the Socialist party which sprang from their struggle, their oppression, and their aspiration, is with them through good and evil report, in trial and defeat, until at last victory is inscribed upon their banner. _Fighting Labor's Battles._ Whether it be in the textile mills of Lawrence and other mills of New England where men, women and children are ground into dividends to gorge a heartless, mill-owning plutocracy; or whether it be in the lumber and railroad camps of the far Northwest where men are herded like cattle and insulted, beaten and deported for peaceably asserting the legal right to organize; or in the conflict with the civilized savages of San Diego where men who dare be known as members of the Industrial Workers of the World are kidnaped, tortured and murdered in cold blood in the name of law and order; or in the city of Chicago where that gorgon of capitalism, the newspaper trust, is bent upon crushing and exterminating the pressmen's union; or along the Harriman lines of railroad where the slaves of the shops have been driven to the alternative of striking or sacrificing the last vestige of their manhood and self-respect, in all these battles of the workers against their capitalist oppressors the Socialist party has the most vital concern and is freely pledged to render them all the assistance in its power. These are the battles of the workers in the war of the classes and the battles of the workers, wherever and however fought, are always and everywhere the battles of the Socialist party. When Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone were seized by the brutal mine owners of the western states and by their prostitute press consigned to the gallows, the Socialist party lost not an hour in going to the rescue, and but for its prompt and vigorous action and the resolute work of its press another monstrous crime against the working class would have blackened the pages of American history. _Persecution of Loyal Leaders._ In the unceasing struggle of the workers with their exploiters the truly loyal leaders are always marked for persecution. Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti would not now be in jail awaiting trial for murder had they betrayed the slaves of the Lawrence mills. They were staunch and true; their leadership made for industrial unity and victory, and for this reason alone the enraged and defeated mill-owners are now bent upon sending them to the electric chair. These fellow-workers of ours who are now on trial for murder are not one whit more guilty of the crime with which they are charged than I am. The man who committed the murder was a policeman, an officer of the law; the victim of the crime was as usual a striker, a wage-slave, a poor working girl. Ettor and Giovannitti were two miles from the scene at the time and when the news came to them they broke into tears--and these two workingmen who would have protected that poor girl's life with their own are now to be tried for her murder. Was ever anything in all the annals of heartless persecution more monstrous than this? Have the mill-owners gone stark mad? Have they in their brutal rage become stone-blind? Whatever the answer may be, it is certain that the Socialist party and organized labor in general will never see these two innocent workers murdered in cold blood, nor will their agitation and protest cease until they have been given their freedom. _The Campaign Now Opening._ In the great campaign now pending the people, especially the toilers and producers, will be far more receptive to the truths of Socialism than ever before. Since the last national campaign they have had four years more of capitalism, of political corruption, industrial stagnation, low wages and high prices, and many, very many of them have come to realize that these conditions are inherent in the capitalist system and that it is vain and foolish to hope for relief through the political parties of that system. These people have had their eyes opened in spite of themselves. They have been made to see what the present system means to them and to their children, and they have been forced to turn against it by the sheer instinct of self-preservation. They look abroad and they see this fair land being rapidly converted into the private preserves of a plutocracy as brutal and defiant as any privileged class that ever ruled in a foreign despotism; they see machinery and misery go hand in hand; they see thousands idle and poverty-stricken all about them while a few are glutted to degeneracy; they see troops of child-slaves ground into luxuries for the rich while their fathers have become a drug on the labor market; they see parasites in palaces and automobiles and honest workers in hovels or tramping the ties; they see the politics of the ruling corporations dripping with corruption and putridity; they see vice and crime rampant, prostitution eating like a cancer, and insanity and disease sapping the mental and physical powers of the body social, and involuntarily they cry out in horror and protest, THIS IS ENOUGH! THERE MUST BE A CHANGE! And they turn with loathing and disgust from the Republican and Democratic parties under whose joint and several maladministration these appalling conditions have been brought upon the country. The message of Socialism, which a few years ago was spurned by these people, falls today upon eager ears and receptive minds. Their prejudice has melted away. They are now prepared to cast their fortunes with the only political party that proposes a change of system and the only party that has a right to appeal to the intelligence of the people. _First Socialist Congressman._ The political beginning of the Socialist party in this country is now distinctly recognized by its most implacable enemies. A single Socialist congressman has been sufficient to arouse the whole nation to the vital issue of Socialism which confronts it. Victor L. Berger as the first and until now the only representative of labor, has had the power, single-handed and alone, to compel the respectful consideration of the American congress, for the first time in its history, of the rights and interests of the working class. To be sure the capitalists do not relish this and so they have consolidated the Republican and Democratic forces in Berger's district to defeat him, but the rising tide of Socialism will overwhelm them both and not only triumphantly re-elect Berger but a score of others to make the next congress resound with the demands of the working class. Now is the time for the workers of this nation to develop and assert their political as well as their economic power, to demonstrate their unity and solidarity. Back up the economic victory at Lawrence with an overwhelming victory at the ballot box! Sweep the minions of the mill-owners from power and fill every office from the ranks of the workers! Deliver a crushing rebuke to the hireling-officials of San Diego by a united vote of the workers that will rescue the city from the rule of the degenerates and place it forever under a working class administration. _The Only Democratic Party._ The Socialist party is the only party of the people, the only party opposed to the rule of the plutocracy, the only truly democratic party in the world. It is the only party in which women have equal rights with men, the only party which denies membership to a man who refuses to recognize woman as his political equal, the only party that is pledged to strike the fetters of economic and political slavery from womanhood and pave the way for a race of free women. The Socialist party is the only party that stands a living protest against the monstrous crime of child labor. It is the only party whose triumph will sound once and forever the knell of child slavery. There is no hope under the present decaying system. The worker who votes the Republican or Democratic ticket does worse than throw his vote away. He is a deserter of his class and his own worst enemy, though he may be in blissful ignorance of the fact that he is false to himself and his fellow-workers and that sooner or later he must reap what he has sown. _Wages and Cost of Living._ The latest census reports, covering the year 1909, show that the 6,615,046 workers in manufactories in the United States were paid an average wage of $519 for the year, an increase of not quite 9 per cent in five years, and an increase of 21 per cent in ten years, but the average cost of living increased more than 40 per cent during the same time, so that in point of fact the wages of these workers have been and are being steadily reduced in the progressive development of production under the capitalist system, and this in spite of all the resistance that has been or can be brought to bear by the federated craft unions. Here we are brought face to face with the imperative need of the revolutionary industrial union, embracing all the workers and fighting every battle for increased wages, shorter hours and better conditions with a solid and united front, while at the same time pressing steadily forward in harmonious co-operation and under the restraints of self-discipline, developing the latent abilities of the workers, increasing their knowledge, and fitting them for the mastery and control of industry when the victorious hosts of labor conquer the public powers and transfer the title-deeds of the mines and mills and factories from the idle plutocrats to the industrial workers to be operated for the common good. _Industrial Unity._ If the printing trades were organized on the basis of industrial unionism the spectacle of local unions in the same crafts pitted against each other to their mutual destruction would not be presented to us in the City of Chicago, and the capitalist newspaper trust would not now have its heel upon the neck of the union pressmen. For this lamentable state of affairs the craft union and William Randolph Hearst, its chief patron and promoter, are entirely responsible. The Socialist party presents the farm workers as well as the industrial workers with a platform and program which must appeal to their intelligence and command their support. It points out to them clearly why their situation is hopeless under capitalism, how they are robbed and exploited, and why they are bound to make common cause with the industrial workers in the mills and factories of the cities, along the railways and in the mines in the struggle for emancipation. The education, organization and co-operation of the workers, the entire body of them, is the conscious aim and the self-imposed task of the Socialist party. Persistently, unceasingly and enthusiastically this great work is being accomplished. It is the working class coming into consciousness of itself, and no power on earth can prevail against it in the hour of its complete awakening. _Socialism Is Inevitable._ The laws of evolution have decreed the downfall of the capitalist system. The handwriting is upon the wall in letters of fire. The trusts are transforming industry and next will come the transformation of the trusts by the people. Socialism is inevitable. Capitalism is breaking down and the new order evolving from it is clearly the Socialist commonwealth. The present evolution can only culminate in industrial and social democracy, and in alliance therewith and preparing the way for the peaceable reception of the new order, is the Socialist movement, arousing the workers and educating and fitting them to take possession of their own when at last the struggle of the centuries has been crowned with triumph. In the coming social order, based upon the social ownership of the means of life and the production of wealth for the use of all instead of the private profit of the few, for which the Socialist party stands in this and every other campaign, peace will prevail and plenty for all will abound in the land. The brute struggle for existence will have ended, and the millions of exploited poor will be rescued from the skeleton clutches of poverty and famine. Prostitution and the white slave traffic, fostered and protected under the old order, will be a horror of the past. The social conscience and the social spirit will prevail. Society will have a new birth, and the race a new destiny. There will be work for all, leisure for all, and the joys of life for all. Competition there will be, not in the struggle for existence, but to excel in good work and in social service. Every child will then have an equal chance to grow up in health and vigor of body and mind and an equal chance to rise to its full stature and achieve success in life. _Socialist Ideals._ These are the ideals of the Socialist party and to these ideals it has consecrated all its energies and all its powers. The members of the Socialist party _are_ the party and their collective will is the supreme law. The Socialist party is organized and ruled from the bottom up. There is no boss and there never can be unless the party deserts its principles and ceases to be a Socialist party. The party is supported by a dues-paying membership. It is the only political party that is so supported. Each member has not only an equal voice but is urged to take an active part in all the party councils. Each local meeting place is an educational center. The party relies wholly upon the power of education, knowledge, and mutual understanding. It buys no votes and it makes no canvass in the red-light districts. The press of the party is the most vital factor in its educational propaganda and the workers are everywhere being aroused to the necessity of building up a working class press to champion their cause and to discuss current issues from their point of view for the enlightenment of the masses. _This Is Our Year._ Comrades and friends, the campaign before us gives us our supreme opportunity to reach the American people. They have but to know the true meaning of Socialism to accept its philosophy and the true mission of the Socialist party to give it their support. Let us all unite as we never have before to place the issue of Socialism squarely before the masses. For years they have been deceived, misled and betrayed, and they are now hungering for the true gospel of relief and the true message of emancipation. This is our year in the United States! Socialism is in the very air we breathe. It is the grandest shibboleth that ever inspired men and women to action in this world. In the horizon of labor it shines as a new-risen sun and it is the hope of all humanity. Onward, comrades, onward in the struggle, until Triumphant Socialism proclaims an Emancipated Race and a New World! THE FIGHT FOR FREEDOM. Campaign Speech, Pabst Park, Milwaukee, Wis., July 21, 1912. Friends, Fellow-Socialists and Fellow-Workers: The existing order of things is breaking down. The great forces underlying society are steadily at work. The old order has had its day and all the signs point to an impending change. Society is at once being destroyed and re-created. The struggle in which we are engaged today is a struggle of economic classes. The supremacy is now held by the capitalist class, who are combined in trusts and control the powers of government. The middle class is struggling desperately to hold its ground against the inroads of its trustified and triumphant competitors. This war between the great capitalists who are organized in trusts and fortified by the powers of government and the smaller capitalists who constitute the middle class, is one of extermination. The fittest, that is to say the most powerful, will survive. This war gives rise to a variety of issues of which the tariff is the principal one, and these issues are defined in the platforms of the Republican and Democratic parties. With this war between capitalists for supremacy in their own class and the issues arising from it, the working class have nothing to do, and if they are foolish enough to allow themselves to be drawn into these battles of their masters, as they have so often done in the past, they must continue to suffer the consequences of their folly. _Parties Express Economic Interests._ Let us clearly recognize the forces that are undermining both of the old capitalist parties, creating a new issue, and driving the working class into a party of their own to do battle with their oppressors in the struggle for existence. Parties but express in political terms the economic interests of those who compose them. This is the rule. The Republican party represents the capitalist class, the Democratic party the middle class and the Socialist party the working class. There is no fundamental difference between the Republican and Democratic parties. Their principles are identical. They are both capitalist parties and both stand for the capitalist system, and such differences as there are between them involve no principle but are the outgrowth of the conflicting interests of large and small capitalists. The Republican and Democratic parties are alike threatened with destruction. Their day of usefulness is past and they among them who see the handwriting on the wall and call themselves "Progressives" and "Insurgents," are struggling in vain to adjust these old parties to the new conditions. _Two Economic Classes._ Broadly speaking, there are but two economic classes and the ultimate struggle will narrow down to two political parties. To the extent that the workers unite in their own party, the Socialist party, the capitalists, large and small, are driven into one and the same party. This has happened already in a number of local instances, notably in the City of Milwaukee. Here there is no longer a Republican or Democratic party. These have merged in the same party and it is a capitalist party, by whatever name it may be known. Temporarily this united capitalist party, composed of the two old ones, may stem the tide of Socialist advance, but nothing more clearly reveals the capitalist class character of the Republican and Democratic parties to their own undoing and the undoing of the capitalist system they represent. The great capitalists are all conservatives, "standpatters"; they have a strangle-hold upon the situation with no intention of relaxing their grip. Taft and Roosevelt are their candidates. It may be objected that Roosevelt is a "Progressive." That is sheer buncombe. Roosevelt was president almost eight years and his record is known. When he was in office and had the power, he did none of the things, nor attempted to do any of the things he is now talking about so wildly. On the contrary, a more servile functionary to the trusts than Theodore Roosevelt never sat in the presidential chair. _La Follette vs. Roosevelt._ Senator La Follette now makes substantially this same charge against Roosevelt, but by some strange oversight the senator did not discover that Roosevelt's presidential record was a trust record until after Roosevelt threw him down in the "Progressive" scramble for the Republican nomination. When Senator La Follette supposed he had Roosevelt's backing, he pronounced him "the greatest man in the world," and it was only after he fell victim to Roosevelt's duplicity that he made the discovery that Roosevelt had always been the tool of the trusts and the enemy of the people. _Test of Parties._ There is one infallible test that fixes the status of a political party and its candidates. Who finances them? With this test applied to Theodore Roosevelt we have no trouble in locating him. He is above all "a practical man." He was practical in allowing the steel trust to raid the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company; he was practical when he legalized the notorious "Alton Steal"; he was practical when he had Harriman raise $240,000 for his campaign fund, and he is practical now in having the steel trust and the harvester trust, who made an anteroom of the White House when he was president, pour out their slush funds by millions to put him back in the White House and keep him there. _Financed by the Trusts._ Taft and Roosevelt, and the Republican party of which they are the candidates, are all financed by the trusts, and is it necessary to add that the trusts also consist of practical men and that they do not finance a candidate or a party they do not control? Is the man not foolish, to the verge of being feeble-minded, who imagines that great trust magnates, such as Perkins, McCormick and Munsey, are flooding the country with Roosevelt money because he is the champion of progressive principles and the friend of the common people? The truth is that if the Bull Moose candidate dared to permit an itemized publication of his campaign contributions in his present mad and disgraceful pursuit of the presidency, as he has been so often challenged to do by Senator La Follette, it would paralyze him and scandalize the nation. Roosevelt must stand upon the record he made when he was president and had the power, and not upon his empty promises as a ranting demagogue and a vote-seeking politician. For the very reason that the trusts are pouring out their millions to literally buy his nomination and election and force him into the White House for a third term, and if possible for life, the people should rise in their might and repudiate him as they never have repudiated a recreant official who betrayed his trust. So much for the Republican party, led by Lincoln half a century ago as the party of the people in the struggle for the overthrow of chattel slavery, and now being scuttled by Taft and Roosevelt in base servility to the plutocracy. _The Democratic Party._ The Democratic party, like its Republican ally, is a capitalist party, the only difference being that it represents the minor divisions of the capitalist class. It is true that there are some plutocrats and trust magnates in the Democratic party, but as a rule it is composed of the smaller capitalists who have been worsted by the larger ones and are now demanding that the trusts be destroyed and, in effect, that the laws of industrial evolution be suspended. The Democratic party, like the Republican party, is financed by the capitalist class. Belmont, Ryan, Roger Sullivan, Taggart and Hinky Dink are liberal contributors to its fund. The Tammany organization in New York, notorious for its corruption and for its subserviency to the powers that rule in capitalist society, is one of the controlling factors in the Democratic party. Woodrow Wilson is the candidate of the Democratic party for president. He was seized upon as a "progressive"; as a man who would appeal to the common people, but he never could have been nominated without the votes controlled by Tammany and the "predatory interests" so fiercely denounced in the convention by William Jennings Bryan. It is true that Woodrow Wilson was not the first choice of Belmont, Ryan, Murphy and the Tammany corruptionists, but he was nevertheless satisfactory to them or they would not have agreed to his nomination, and since the convention it is quite apparent that Wilson has a working agreement and a perfect understanding with the predatory interests which Bryan sought to scourge from the convention. _Bryan and Wilson._ In his speech before the delegates denouncing Ryan, Belmont and Murphy, Bryan solemnly declared that no candidate receiving their votes and the votes of Murphy's "ninety wax figures" could have his support. Woodrow Wilson received these votes and without these and other votes controlled by "the interests" he could not have been nominated, and if Bryan now supports him he simply stultifies himself before the American people. Mr. Wilson is no more the candidate of the working class than is Mr. Taft or Mr. Roosevelt. Neither one of them has ever been identified with the working class, has ever associated with the working class, except when their votes were wanted, or would dare to avow himself the candidate of the working class. When the recent strikes occurred at Perth Amboy and other industrial centers in New Jersey, Governor Woodrow Wilson ordered the militia out to shoot down the strikers just as Governor Theodore Roosevelt ordered out the soldiers to murder the strikers at Croton Dam, N. Y., for demanding the enforcement of the state laws against the contractors. _They Reek With Corruption._ Both the Republican and Democratic parties reek with corruption in their servility to the capitalist class, and both are torn with strife in their mad scramble for the spoils of office. The Democratic party has had little excuse for existence since the Civil War, and its utter impotency to deal with present conditions was made glaringly manifest during its brief lease of power under the Cleveland administration. Should this party succeed to national power once more, seething as it is with conflicting elements which are held together by the prospect of official spoils, its career as a national party would be brought to an early close by self-destruction. The Republican convention at Chicago and the Democratic convention at Baltimore were composed of professional politicians, office-holders, office-seekers, capitalists, retainers, and swarms of parasites and mercenaries of all descriptions. There were no workingmen in either convention. They were not fit to be there. All they are fit for is to march in the mud, yell themselves hoarse, and ratify the choice of their masters on election day. The working class was not represented in the Republican convention at Chicago or the Democratic convention at Baltimore. Those were the political conventions of the capitalist class and the few flattering platform phrases in reference to labor were incorporated for the sole purpose of catching the votes of the working class. Let the American workers remember that they are not fit to sit as delegates in a Republican or Democratic national convention; that they are not fit to write a Republican or Democratic national platform; that all they are fit for is to elect the candidates of their masters to office so that when they go out on strike against starvation they may be shot dead in their tracks as the reward of their servility to their masters and their treason to themselves. _Vital Issue Ignored._ The vital issue before the country and the world is not touched, nor even mentioned in the Republican or Democratic platforms. Wage-slavery under capitalism, the legalized robbery of the workers of what is produced by their labor, is the fundamental crime against modern humanity, but there is no room for the mention of this vital fact, this living issue in the platforms of the Republican and Democratic parties. They continue to babble about the tariff and other inconsequential matters to obscure the real issue and wheedle the workers into voting them into power once more. These parties have been in power all these years, why have they not settled the tariff and the currency and such other matters as make up their platform pledges? _Let Them Act Now._ While the Republican convention was in session at Chicago and while the Democratic convention was in session at Baltimore, the Republican and Democratic congress was also in session at Washington. These parties already have the power to make good their promises, then why do they not exercise that power to redeem their pledges and afford relief to the people? In other words, why do not the Republican and Democratic parties perform at Washington instead of promising at Chicago and Baltimore? How many more years of power do they require to demonstrate that they are the parties of the capitalist class and that they never intend to legislate in the interest of the working class, or provide relief for the suffering people. The Republican and Democratic platforms are filled with empty platitudes and meaningless phrases, but they are discreetly silent about the millions of unemployed, about the starvation wages of factory slaves, about the women and children who are crushed, debased and slowly tortured to death by the moloch of capitalism, about the white slave traffic, about the bitter poverty of the masses and their hopeless future, and about every other vital question which is worthy of an instant's consideration by any intelligent human being. _The Socialist Party._ In contrast with these impotent, corrupt and senile capitalist parties, without principles and without ideals, stands the virile young working class party, the international Socialist party of the world. The convention which nominated its candidates and wrote its platform at Indianapolis was a working class convention. The Socialist party is the only party which honestly represents the working class in this campaign and the only party that has a moral right to appeal to the allegiance and support of the workers and producers of the nation. I am not asking you to give your votes to this party but only that you read its platform, study its program, and satisfy yourselves as to what its principles are, what it stands for, and what it expects to accomplish. The Socialist party being the political expression of the rising working class stands for the absolute overthrow of the existing capitalist system and for the reorganization of society into an industrial and social democracy. _Death to Wage-Slavery._ This will mean an end to the private ownership of the means of life; it will mean an end to wage-slavery; it will mean an end to the army of the unemployed; it will mean an end to the poverty of the masses, the prostitution of womanhood, and the murder of childhood. It will mean the beginning of a new era of civilization; the dawn of a happier day for the children of men. It will mean that this earth is for those who inhabit it and wealth for those who produce it. If will mean society organized upon a co-operative basis, collectively owning the sources of wealth and the means of production, and producing wealth to satisfy human wants and not to gorge a privileged few. It will mean that there shall be work for the workers and that all shall be workers, and it will also mean that there shall be leisure for the workers and that all shall enjoy it. It will mean that women shall be the comrades and equals of men, sharing with them on equal terms the opportunities as well as the responsibilities, the benefits as well as the burdens of civilized life. The Socialist party, the first and only international party, is rising grandly to power all around the world. In every land beneath the sun it is the party of the dispossessed, the impoverished and the heavy-laden. It is the twentieth century party of human emancipation. It stands for a world-wide democracy, for the freedom of every man, woman and child, and for the civilization of all mankind. The Socialist party buys no votes. It scorns to traffic in ignorance. It realizes that education, knowledge and the powers these confer are the only means of achieving a decided and permanent victory for the people. _A Clean Campaign._ The campaign of the Socialist party is a clean campaign; it is essentially educational; an appeal to intelligence, to manliness, to womanliness, and to all things of good report. The workers are opening their eyes at last. They are beginning to see the light. They are taking heart of hope because they are becoming conscious of their power. They are rallying to the standard of the Socialist party because they know that this is their party and that here they are master, and here they sit at their own political hearthstone and fireside. No longer can the workers be pitted against each other in capitalist parties by designing politicians to their mutual undoing. They have made the discovery that they have brains as well as hands, that they can think as well as work, and that they do not need politicians to advise them how to vote, nor masters to rob them of the fruits of their labor. Slowly but surely there is being established the economic and political unity and solidarity of the workers of the world. The Socialist party is the political expression of that unity and solidarity. _Unity the Keynote._ I appeal to the workers assembled here today in the name of the Socialist party. I appeal to you as one of you to unite and make common cause in this great struggle. To the extent that you have made progress, to the extent that you have developed power, and to the extent that you have achieved victory, to that extent you are indebted to your own class-conscious efforts and your own industrial and political organization. To the extent that you lack power, to the extent that you are defeated and kept in bondage, to that extent you lack in economic and political solidarity. Rightly organized and soundly disciplined on both the economic and political fields, the working class can prevail against the world. The economic organization and the political party of the working class must both be revolutionary and they must work together hand in hand. Industrial unionism means industrial solidarity, but craft unionism means division and disaster. The printing trades pitted against each other in Chicago in their struggle with the newspaper trust furnish a fatal illustration of the weakness and treachery of craft division in the present industrial conflict. _The Workers of Milwaukee._ The workers of Milwaukee have to an exceptional extent overcome the obstacles to unity and have worked together with signal success on both the economic and political fields. I appeal to them in the name of the future to get closer and closer together in the bonds of economic and political solidarity. If they do this their complete and final victory is assured. The Socialist party of Milwaukee has marched steadily to the front since it first began its career. Its latest defeat was its greatest victory. It forced the Republicans and Democrats to unmask and to fly into each other's arms. There is no Republican or Democratic party in Milwaukee. They are dead, and in the coming election their remains, masquerading as a party of the people, will be buried by the Socialist party. _The First Congressman._ The Socialists of Milwaukee will always have the distinction of having elected the first representative of the working class to the congress of the United States. Victor L. Berger has made good at Washington. For the first time since he is a member the voice of labor has been distinctly heard on the floors of congress, and in every emergency when the working class needed a champion at the seat of power, they found him ready and eager to espouse their cause and defend their interests. It was to defeat Berger's re-election that the Republicans and Democrats in Milwaukee combined, just as they did to defeat Emil Seidel for mayor and drive the Socialist administration from power. But Berger is making a record at Washington and the Socialist administration made a record in Milwaukee that will stand the test of time, and if the workers now rally their forces in support of Berger, he will be triumphantly re-elected against the combined opposition of the old parties, and in the next municipal election the City of Milwaukee will be permanently restored to a Socialist administration. Comrades, you are face to face with the greatest struggle you have ever had since the Socialist party was organized. You are now to be tested in every fiber as to your fitness to hold the ground you have gained and to press on to greater victories. May you be permeated to the core with the spirit of the Socialist movement and enter the fray resolved that victory shall be inscribed upon your banners. _Ettor and Giovannitti._ I must not fail in the presence of all these workers to speak of Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti, the leaders of the Lawrence strike, who are in prison and soon to be tried upon the charge of murder, of which they are as innocent as if they had never been born. This infamous charge has been trumped up against them by the defeated mill owners for no other reason than that they stood up bravely and fought successfully against great odds, the battles of the wage-slaves of the mills. Unless the workers unite in support of these two leaders they may be sent to the electric chair. Should we suffer these brave comrades to fall victims to such a monstrous crime, it would be a foul and indelible blot upon the whole labor movement. Let us arouse the workers of the nation in their behalf and prove to them when their trial takes place that we are as true to them as they were to the wage-slaves in the industrial battle at Lawrence. _Comrades, this is our year!_ Let us rise to our full stature, summon our united powers, and strike a blow for freedom that will be felt around the world! CAPITALISM AND SOCIALISM. Campaign Speech, Lyceum Theatre, Fergus Falls, Minn., August 27, 1912. Friends and Fellow-Workers: The spirit of our time is revolutionary and growing, more so every day. A new social order is struggling into existence. The old economic foundation of society is breaking up and the social fabric is beginning to totter. The capitalist system is doomed. The signs of change confront us upon every hand. Social changes are preceded by agitation and unrest among the masses. We are today in the transition period between decaying capitalism and growing Socialism. The old system is being shaken to its foundations by the forces underlying it and its passing is but a question of time. The new system that is to succeed the old is developing within the old and its outline is clearly revealed in its spirit of mutualism and its co-operative manifestations. For countless ages the world has been a vast battlefield and the struggle for existence a perpetual conflict. Primitive peoples were compelled to fight nature to extort from her the means of livelihood. Since the forces of nature have been conquered and nations have become civilized the struggle of men is no longer to overcome nature but with one another for existence. In this struggle which has appealed to the basest and not to the best in man the cunning few have triumphed and now have the masses at their mercy. These few are closely allied in, their economic mastery as they are also in their control of the political machinery. Their money and their mercenaries controlled the Republican convention at Chicago, wrote its platform and dictated its nominees, and the same is true of the Democratic convention at Baltimore. As for the so-called Progressive convention, it is sufficient to say that there is no attempt to conceal the fact that it was financed and controlled by three conspicuous representatives of the plutocracy which largely owns and rules the land. Political parties are responsive to the interests of those who finance them. This is the infallible test of their character and applied to the Republican, Democratic and Progressive parties, these parties stand forth as the several political expressions of the several divisions of the capitalist class. The funds of all these parties are furnished by the capitalist class for the reason, and only for the reason, that they represent the interests of that class. Professional politicians of whatever party are very much alike and in one respect at least they are like workingmen, they serve the interests of their masters, and for the same reason. The patriotism of professional politicians is reflected in the material interests of the master class and this fact has become so apparent that their noisy theatricals have lost their magic and now excite but the scorn and derision of intelligent working men and women. The Republican, Democratic and Progressive conventions were composed in the main and controlled entirely by professional politicians in the service of the ruling class. There were no working men and no working women at the Republican convention, the Democratic convention, or the Progressive convention. These were clearly not working class conventions. Ladies and gentlemen of leisure were in evidence at them all. Wage-slaves would not have been tolerated in their company. They represented the wealth and culture and refinement of society and they were there to applaud and smile approval upon the professional politicians and patriots who were doing their work. But there was a fourth convention held this year which did not attract the wealthy and leisure classes. It was a convention great in purpose, though not big in numbers. This convention was held at Indianapolis and represented the working class. The delegates who composed this convention were chosen by the workers and paid by the workers to represent the interest of the workers and to clear the way for the workers in the present campaign. The Socialist convention was the only democratic convention and the only progressive convention held this year; the only convention that represented a dues-paying party membership and whose acts before becoming effective must be ratified by a referendum vote of the party. The Socialist party is the only party in this campaign that stands against the present system and for the rule of the people; the only party that boldly avows itself the party of the working class and its purpose the overthrow of wage-slavery. So long as the present system of capitalism prevails and the few are allowed to own the nation's industries, the toiling masses will be struggling in the hell of poverty as they are today. To tell them that juggling with the tariff will change this beastly and disgraceful condition is to insult their intelligence. The professional politicians who have been harping upon this string since infant industries have become giant monopolies know better. Their stock in trade is the credulity of the masses. The exploited wage-slaves of free trade England and of the highly protected United States are the victims of the same capitalism; in England the politicians tell them they are suffering because they have no protective tariff and in the United States they tell them that the tariff is the cause of their poverty. And this is the kind of a confidence game the professional politicians have been playing with the workers of all nations all these years. To keep them in subjection by playing upon their ignorance is the rule that governs their campaigns for votes among the workers. The "issues" upon which they keep the workers divided into hostile camps are of their own making. Since the foundation of the government one or the other of these capitalist parties has been in power and under their administration the working and producing millions have been reduced to poverty and slavery. Professor Scott Nearing has shown in his work on the wages of American workers that half of the adult males of the United States are earning less than $500; that three-quarters of them are earning less than $600 a year; that nine-tenths of them are receiving less than $900 a year, while 10 per cent only receive more than that figure. Professor Nearing also shows the starvation wages for which women are compelled to work in the present system. One-fifth of the whole number of women workers receive less than $200 per year; three-fifths receive less than $325; nine-tenths receive less than $500. Only one-twentieth of the women employed are paid more than $600 per year. These figures bear out the report of the Chicago vice commission to the effect that the low wages of women and girls go hand in hand with prostitution. Despite all attempts to control the white slave traffic, which is now organized as one of the great profit-extorting trusts, along with the rest of the trusts, prostitution, like a terrible cancer, is eating out the very heart of our civilization. And in the presence of this appalling condition the professional politicians prattle about tariff revision and indulge in silly twaddle about currency reform and regulation of the trusts. The Socialist party is absolutely the only party which faces conditions as they are and declares unhesitatingly that it has a definite and concrete plan and program for dealing with these conditions. The Socialist party as the party of the exploited workers in the mills and mines, on the railways and on the farms, the workers of both sexes and all races and colors, the working class in a word, constituting a great majority of the people and in fact THE PEOPLE, demands that the nation's industries shall be taken over by the nation and that the nation's workers shall operate them for the benefit of the whole people. Private ownership and competition have had their day. The Socialist party stands for social ownership and co-operation. The one is Capitalism; the other Socialism. The one industrial despotism, the other industrial democracy. The Republican, Democratic and Progressive parties all stand for private ownership and competition. The Socialist party alone stands for social ownership and co-operation. The Republican, Democratic and Progressive parties believe in regulating the trusts; the Socialist party believes in owning them, so that all the people may get the benefit of them instead of a few being made plutocrats and the masses impoverished. The Republican, Democratic and Progressive parties uphold the wage system; the Socialist party demands its overthrow. It is under the wage system that the 22,000 operatives in the cotton and woolen mills at Lawrence, Massachusetts, have been compelled to work, or slave rather, according to Commissioner Neill, for an average of $8.76 per family. To earn this average wage, according to the commissioner's official report, requires the combined service of father, mother and three children. This is slavery with a vengeance. The mill is a sweat-hole; the hovel a breeding-pen. Home there is none. And there never will be under the wage system. What have the Republican, Democratic and Progressive parties to offer to the wage-slaves of Lawrence, to the wage-slaves of the steel trust, to the wage-slaves of the mines, to the wage-slaves of the lumber and turpentine camps of the South, the wage-slaves of the railroads, the millions of them, male and female, black and white and yellow and brown, who produce all this nation's wealth, support its government and conserve its civilization, and without whom industry would be paralyzed and the nation helpless? What, I ask, has any of these capitalist parties, or all of them combined, for the working and producing class in this campaign? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. These parties are bidding stronger than ever for the labor vote this year. That vote is now not so easily delivered as in the past. The competition for the votes of the wage-workers is the distinguishing feature of the present campaign. Thousands of workers are now doing their own thinking. They have discovered that workers are as much out of place in a capitalist party as capitalists are in a workers' party. They have also found that politics express class interests and that the interests of those who make the wealth and those who take it are not identical. That is where the Socialist party comes in and where the workers come in the Socialist party. The working class is in politics this year. It has always been in politics for its master; this year it is in politics for itself. The most promising fact in the world today is the fact that labor is organizing its power; its economic power and its political power. The workers who have made the world and who support the world, are preparing to take possession of the world. This is the meaning of Socialism and is what the Socialist party stands for in this campaign. We demand the machinery of production in the name of the workers and the control of society in the name of the people. We demand the abolition of capitalism and wage-slavery and the surrender of the capitalist class. We demand the complete enfranchisement of women and the equal rights of all the people regardless of race, color, creed or nationality. We demand that child labor shall cease once and forever and that all children born into the world shall have equal opportunity to grow up, to be educated, to have healthy bodies and trained minds, and to develop and freely express the best there is in them in mental, moral and physical achievement. We demand complete control of industry by the workers; we demand all the wealth they produce for their own enjoyment, and we demand the earth for all the people. CONTENTS MISCELLANY Page The Old Umbrella Mender 9 The Secret of Efficient Expression 15 Jesus, the Supreme Leader 22 Susan B. Anthony 29 Louis Tikas 33 The Little Lords of Love 37 The Coppock Bros 39 The Social Spirit 51 Roosevelt and His Regime 55 Industrial and Social Democracy 73 A Message to the Children 76 Social Reform 89 Danger Ahead 89 Pioneer Women in America 95 SPEECHES Unity and Victory 107 Political Appeal to American Workers 132 The Fight for Freedom 152 Capitalism and Socialism 167 
34534	----	BRITAIN FOR THE BRITISH BY _ROBERT BLATCHFORD_ EDITOR OF THE CLARION [Illustration: Logo] LONDON CLARION PRESS, 72 FLEET STREET, E. C. CHICAGO CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY 56 FIFTH AVENUE Copyright, 1902, BY CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY. Printed in the United States. DEDICATED TO A. M. THOMPSON AND THE CLARION FELLOWSHIP CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE THE TITLE, PURPOSE, AND METHOD OF THIS BOOK 1 FOREWORDS 6 I. THE UNEQUAL DIVISION OF WEALTH 10 II. WHAT IS WEALTH? WHERE DOES IT COME FROM? WHO CREATES IT? 26 III. HOW THE FEW GET RICH AND KEEP THE MANY POOR 33 IV. THE BRAIN-WORKER, OR INVENTOR 45 V. THE LANDLORD'S RIGHTS AND THE PEOPLE'S RIGHTS 51 VI. LUXURY AND THE GREAT USEFUL EMPLOYMENT FRAUD 63 VII. WHAT SOCIALISM IS NOT 74 VIII. WHAT SOCIALISM IS 82 IX. COMPETITION _v._ CO-OPERATION 90 X. FOREIGN TRADE AND FOREIGN FOOD 97 XI. HOW TO KEEP FOREIGN TRADE 102 XII. CAN BRITAIN FEED HERSELF? 110 XIII. THE SUCCESSFUL MAN 119 XIV. TEMPERANCE AND THRIFT 127 XV. THE SURPLUS LABOUR MISTAKE 135 XVI. IS SOCIALISM POSSIBLE, AND WILL IT PAY? 141 XVII. THE NEED FOR A LABOUR PARTY 148 XVIII. WHY THE OLD PARTIES WILL NOT DO 156 XIX. TO-DAY'S WORK 166 WHAT TO READ 174 THE TITLE OF THIS BOOK The motto of this book is expressed in its title: BRITAIN FOR THE BRITISH. At present Britain does not belong to the British: it belongs to a few of the British, who employ the bulk of the population as servants or as workers. It is because Britain does not belong to the British that a few are very rich and the many are very poor. It is because Britain does not belong to the British that we find amongst the _owning_ class a state of useless luxury and pernicious idleness, and amongst the _working_ classes a state of drudging toil, of wearing poverty and anxious care. This state of affairs is contrary to Christianity, is contrary to justice, and contrary to reason. It is bad for the rich, it is bad for the poor; it is against the best interests of the British nation and the human race. The remedy for this evil state of things--the _only_ remedy yet suggested--is _Socialism_. And _Socialism_ is broadly expressed in the title and motto of this book: BRITAIN FOR THE BRITISH. THE PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK The purpose of this book is to convert the reader to _Socialism_: to convince him that the present system--political, industrial, and social--is bad; to explain to him why it is bad, and to prove to him that Socialism is the only true remedy. FOR WHOM THIS BOOK IS INTENDED This book is intended for any person who does not understand, or has, so far, refused to accept the principles of _Socialism_. But it is especially addressed, as my previous book, _Merrie England_, was addressed, to JOHN SMITH, a typical British working man, not yet converted to _Socialism_. I hope this book will be read by every opponent of _Socialism_; and I hope it will be read by all those good folks who, though not yet _Socialists_, are anxious to help their fellow-creatures, to do some good in their own day and generation, and to leave the world a little better than they found it. I hope that all lovers of justice and of truth will read this book, and that many of them will be thereby led to a fuller study of _Socialism_. To the Tory and the Radical; to the Roman Catholic, the Anglican, and the Nonconformist; to the workman and the employer; to the scholar and the peer; to the labourer's wife, the housemaid, and the duchess; to the advocates of Temperance and of Co-operation; to the Trade Unionist and the non-Unionist; to the potman, the bishop, and the brewer; to the artist and the merchant; to the poet and the navvy; to the Idealist and the Materialist; to the poor clerk, the rich financier, the great scientist, and the little child, I commend the following beautiful prayer from the Litany of the Church of England:-- That it may please thee to bring into the way of truth _all_ such as have erred, and are deceived. That it may please thee to strengthen such as do stand; and to comfort and help the weak-hearted; and to raise up them that fall; and finally to beat down Satan under our feet. That it may please thee to succour, help, and comfort _all_ that are in danger, necessity, and tribulation. That it may please thee to preserve _all_ that travel by land or by water, _all_ women labouring of child, _all_ sick persons, and young children; and to shew thy pity upon _all_ prisoners and captives. That it may please thee to defend, and provide for, the fatherless children, and widows, and _all_ that are desolate and oppressed. That it may please thee to have mercy upon _all_ men. That it may please thee to forgive our enemies, persecutors, and slanderers, and to turn their hearts. That it may please thee to give and preserve to our use the kindly fruits of the earth, so as in due time we may enjoy them. _We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord._ I have italicised the word "all" in that prayer to emphasise the fact that mercy, succour, comfort, and pardon are here asked for _all_, and not for a few. I now ask the reader of this book, with those words of broad charity and sweet kindliness still fresh in mind, to remember the unmerited miseries, the ill-requited labour, the gnawing penury, and the loveless and unhonoured lives to which an evil system dooms millions of British men and women. I ask the reader to discover for himself how much pity we bestow upon our "prisoners and captives," how much provision we make for the "fatherless children and widows," what nature and amount of "succour, help, and comfort" we vouchsafe to "all who are in danger, necessity, and tribulation." I ask him to consider, with regard to those "kindly fruits of the earth," who produces, and who enjoys them; and I beg him next to proceed in a judicial spirit, by means of candour and right reason, to examine fairly and weigh justly the means proposed by Socialists for abolishing poverty and oppression, and for conferring prosperity, knowledge, and freedom upon _all_ men. BRITAIN FOR THE BRITISH: that is our motto. We ask for a fair and open trial. We solicit an impartial hearing of the case for _Socialism_. Listen patiently to our statements; consider our arguments; accord to us a fair field and no favour; and may the truth prevail. THE METHOD OF THIS BOOK As to the method of this book, I shall begin by calling attention to some of the evils of the present industrial, social, and political system. I shall next try to show the sources of those evils, the causes from which they arise. I shall go on to explain what _Socialism_ is, and what _Socialism_ is not. I shall answer the principal objections commonly urged against _Socialism_. And I shall, in conclusion, point out the chief ways in which I think the reader of this book may help the cause of _Socialism_ if he believes that cause to be just and wise. FOREWORDS Years ago, before _Socialism_ had gained a footing in this country, some of us democrats used often to wonder how any working man could be a Tory. To-day we Socialists are still more puzzled by the fact that the majority of our working men are not Socialists. How is it that middle class and even wealthy people often accept _Socialism_ more readily than do the workers? Perhaps it is because the men and women of the middle and upper classes are more in the habit of reading and thinking for themselves, whereas the workers take most of their opinions at second-hand from priests, parsons, journalists, employers, and members of Parliament, whose little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and whose interests lie in bolstering up class privilege by darkening counsel with a multitude of words. I have been engaged for more than a dozen years in studying political economy and _Socialism_, and in trying, as a Socialist, pressman, and author, to explain _Socialism_ and to confute the arguments and answer the objections of non-Socialists, and I say, without any hesitation, that I have never yet come across a single argument against practical _Socialism_ that will hold water. I do not believe that any person of fair intelligence and education, who will take the trouble to study _Socialism_ fairly and thoroughly, will be able to avoid the conclusion that _Socialism_ is just and wise. I defy any man, of any nation, how learned, eminent, and intellectual soever, to shake the case for practical _Socialism_, or to refute the reasoning contained in this book. And now I will address myself to Mr. John Smith, a typical British workman, not yet converted to _Socialism_. Dear Mr. Smith, I assume that you are opposed to _Socialism_, and I assume that you would say that you are opposed to it for one or more of the following reasons:-- 1. Because you think _Socialism_ is unjust. 2. Because you think _Socialism_ is unpractical. 3. Because you think that to establish _Socialism_ is not possible. But I suspect that the real reason for your opposition to _Socialism_ is simply that you do not understand it. The reasons you generally give for opposing _Socialism_ are reasons suggested to you by pressmen or politicians who know very little about it, or are interested in its rejection. I am strongly inclined to believe that the _Socialism_ to which you are opposed is not _Socialism_ at all, but only a bogey erected by the enemies of _Socialism_ to scare you away from the genuine _Socialism_, which it would be so much to your advantage to discover. Now you would not take your opinions of Trade Unionism from non-Unionists, and why, then, should you take your opinions of _Socialism_ from non-Socialists? If you will be good enough to read this book you will find out what _Socialism_ really is, and what it is not. If after reading this book you remain opposed to _Socialism_, I must leave it for some Socialist more able than I to convert you. When it pleases those who call themselves your "betters" to flatter you, Mr. Smith (which happens oftener at election times than during strikes or lock-outs), you hear that you are a "shrewd, hard-headed, practical man." I hope that is true, whether your "betters" believe it or not. I am a practical man myself, and shall offer you in this book nothing but hard fact and cold reason. I assume, Mr. Smith, that you, as a hard-headed, practical man, would rather be well off than badly off, and that with regard to your own earnings you would rather be paid twenty shillings in the pound than five shillings or even nineteen shillings and elevenpence in the pound. And I assume that as a family man you would rather live in a comfortable and healthy house than in an uncomfortable and unhealthy house; that you would be glad if you could buy beef, bread, gas, coal, water, tea, sugar, clothes, boots, and furniture for less money than you now pay for them; and that you would think it a good thing, and not a bad thing, if your wife had less work and more leisure, fewer worries and more nice dresses, and if your children had more sports, and better health, and better education. And I assume that you would like to pay lower rents, even if some rich landlord had to keep fewer race-horses. And I assume that as a humane man you would prefer that other men and women and their children should not suffer if their sufferings could be prevented. If, then, I assure you that you are paying too much and are being paid too little, and that many other Britons, especially weak women and young children, are enduring much preventible misery; and if I assert, further, that I know of a means whereby you might secure more ease and comfort, and they might secure more justice, you will, surely, as a kind and sensible man, consent to listen to the arguments and statements I propose to place before you. Suppose a stranger came to tell you where you could get a better house at a lower rent, and suppose your present landlord assured you that the man who offered the information was a fool or a rogue, would you take the landlord's word without investigation? Would it not be more practical and hard-headed to hear first what the bringer of such good news had to tell? Well, the Socialist brings you better news than that of a lower rent. Will you not hear him? Will you turn your back on him for no better reason than because he is denounced as a fraud by the rich men whose wealth depends upon the continuation of the present system? Your "betters" tell you that you always display a wise distrust of new ideas. But to reject an idea because it is new is not a proof of shrewdness and good sense; it is a sign of bigotry and ignorance. Trade Unionism was new not so long ago, and was denounced, and is still denounced, by the very same persons who now denounce _Socialism_. If you find a newspaper or an employer to be wrong when he denounces Trade Unionism, which you do understand, why should you assume that the same authority is right in denouncing _Socialism_, which you do not understand? You know that in attacking Trade Unionism the employer and the pressman are speaking in their own interest and against yours; why, then, should you be ready to believe that in counselling you against _Socialism_ the same men are speaking in your interest and not in their own? I ask you, as a practical man, to forget both the Socialist and the non-Socialist, and to consider the case for and against _Socialism_ on its merits. As I said in _Merrie England_-- Forget that you are a joiner or a spinner, a Catholic or a Freethinker, a Liberal or a Tory, a moderate drinker or a teetotaler, and consider the problem as a _man_. If you had to do a problem in arithmetic, or if you were cast adrift in an open boat at sea, you would not set to work as a Wesleyan, or a Liberal Unionist; but you would tackle the sum by the rules of arithmetic, and would row the boat by the strength of your own manhood, and keep a lookout for passing ships under _any_ flag. I ask you, then, Mr. Smith, to hear what I have to say, and to decide by your own judgment whether I am right or wrong. I was once opposed to _Socialism_ myself; but it was before I understood it. When you understand it you will, I feel sure, agree with me that it is perfectly logical, and just, and practical; and you will, I hope, yourself become a _Socialist_, and will help to abolish poverty and wrong by securing BRITAIN FOR THE BRITISH. CHAPTER I THE UNEQUAL DIVISION OF WEALTH _Section A: the Rich_ Non-socialists say that self-interest is the strongest motive in human nature. Let us take them at their word. Self-interest being the universal ruling motive, it behoves you, Mr. Smith, to do the best you can for yourself and family. Self-interest being the universal ruling motive, it is evident that the rich man will look out for his own advantage, and not for yours. Therefore as a selfish man, alive to your own interests, it is clear that you will not trust the rich man, nor believe in the unselfishness of his motives. As a selfish man you will look out first for yourself. If you can get more wages for the work you do, if you can get the same pay for fewer hours and lighter work, self-interest tells you that you would be a fool to go on as you are. If you can get cheaper houses, cheaper clothes, food, travelling, and amusement than you now get, self-interest tells you that you would be a fool to go on paying present prices. Your landlord, your employer, your tradesman will not take less work or money from you if he can get more. Self-interest counsels you not to pay a high price if you can get what you want at a lower price. Your employer will not employ you unless you are useful to him, nor will he employ you if he can get another man as useful to him as you at a lower wage. Such persons as landlords, capitalists, employers, and contractors will tell you that they are useful, and even necessary, to the working class, of which class you are one. Self-interest will counsel you, firstly, that if these persons are really useful or necessary to you, it is to your interest to secure their services at the lowest possible price; and, secondly, that if you can replace them by other persons more useful or less costly, you will be justified in dispensing with their services. Now, the Socialist claims that it is cheaper and better for the people to manage their own affairs than to pay landlords, capitalists, employers, and contractors to manage their affairs for them. That is to say, that as it is cheaper and better for a city to make its own gas, or to provide its own water, or to lay its own roads, so it would be cheaper and better for the nation to own its own land, its own mines, its own railways, houses, factories, ships, and workshops, and to manage them as the corporation tramways, gasworks, and waterworks are now owned and managed. Your "betters," Mr. Smith, will tell you that you might be worse off than you are now. That is not the question. The question is, Might you be better off than you are now? They will tell you that the working man is better off now than he was a hundred years ago. That is not the question. The question is, Are the workers as well off now as they ought to be and might be? They will tell you that the British workers are better off than the workers of any other nation. That is not the question. The question is, Are the British workers as well off as they ought to be and might be? They will tell you that Socialists are discontented agitators, and that they exaggerate the evils of the present time. That is not the question. The question is, Do evils exist at all to-day, and if so, is no remedy available? Your "betters" have admitted, and do admit, as I will show you presently, that evils do exist; but they have no remedy to propose. The Socialist tells you that your "betters" are deceived or are deceiving you, and that _Socialism_ is a remedy, and the only one possible. Self-interest will counsel you to secure the best conditions you can for yourself, and will warn you not to expect unselfish service from selfish men. Ask yourself, then, whether, since self-interest is the universal motive, it would not be wise for you to make some inquiry as to whether the persons intrusted by you with the management of your affairs are managing your affairs to your advantage or to their own. As a selfish man, is it sensible to elect selfish men, or to accept selfish men, to govern you, to make your laws, to manage your business, and to affix your taxes, prices, and wages? The mild Hindoo has a proverb which you might well remember in this connection. It is this-- The wise man is united in this life with that with which it is proper he should be united. I am bread; thou art the eater: how can harmony exist between us? Appealing, then, entirely to your self-interest, I ask you to consider whether the workers of Britain to-day are making the best bargain possible with the other classes of society. Do the workers receive their full due? Do evils exist in this country to-day? and if so, is there a remedy? and if there is a remedy, what is it? The first charge brought by Socialists against the present system is the charge of the unjust distribution of wealth. The rich obtain wealth beyond their need, and beyond their deserving; the workers are, for the most part, condemned to lead laborious, anxious, and penurious lives. Nearly all the wealth of the nation is produced by the workers; most of it is consumed by the rich, who squander it in useless or harmful luxury, leaving the majority of those who produced it, not enough for human comfort, decency, and health. If you wish for a plain and clear statement of the unequal distribution of wealth in this country, get Fabian Tract No. 5, price one penny, and study it well. According to that tract, the total value of the wealth produced in this country is £1,700,000,000. Of this total £275,000,000 is paid in rent, £340,000,000 is paid in interest, £435,000,000 is paid in profits and salaries. That makes a total of £1,050,000,000 in rent, interest, profits, and salaries, nearly the whole of which goes to about 5,000,000 of people comprising the middle and upper classes. The balance of £650,000,000 is paid in wages to the remaining 35,000,000 of people comprising the working classes. Roughly, then, two-thirds of the national wealth goes to 5,000,000 of persons, quite half of whom are idle, and one-third is _shared_ by seven times as many people, nearly half of whom are workers. These figures have been before the public for many years, and so far as I know have never been questioned. There are, say the Fabian tracts, more than 2,000,000 of men, women, and children living without any kind of occupation: that is, they live without working. Ten-elevenths of all the land in the British Islands belong to 176,520 persons. The rest of the 40,000,000 own the other eleventh. Or, dividing Britain into eleven parts, you may say that one two-hundredth part of the population owns ten-elevenths of Britain, while the other one hundred and ninety-nine two-hundredths of the population own one-eleventh of Britain. That is as though a cake were divided amongst 200 persons by giving to one person ten slices, and dividing one slice amongst 199 persons. I told you just now that Britain does not belong to the British, but only to a few of the British. In Fabian Tract No. 7 I read-- One-half of the _wealth_ of the kingdom is held by persons who leave at death at least £20,000, exclusive of land and houses. _These persons form a class somewhat over 25,000 in number._ Half the wealth of Britain, then, is held by one fifteen-hundredth part of the population. It is as if a cake were cut in half, one half being given to one man and the other half being divided amongst 1499 men. How much cake does a working mechanic get? In 1898 the estates of seven persons were proved at over £45,000,000. That is to say, those seven left £45,000,000 when they died. Putting a workman's wages at £75 a year, and his working life at twenty years, it would take 30,000 workmen all their lives to _earn_ (not to _save_) the money left by those seven rich men. Many rich men have incomes of £150,000 a year. The skilled worker draws about £75 a year in wages. Therefore one man with £150,000 a year gets more than 2000 skilled workmen, and the workmen have to do more than 600,000 days' work for their wages, while the rich man does _nothing_. One of our richest dukes gets as much money in one year for doing nothing, as a skilled workman would get for 14,000 years of hard and useful work. A landowner is a millionaire. He has £1,000,000. It would take an agricultural labourer, at 10s. a week wages, nearly 40,000 years to earn £1,000,000. I need not burden you with figures. Look about you and you will see evidences of wealth on every side. Go through the suburbs of London, or any large town, and notice the large districts composed of villas and mansions, at rentals of from £100 to £1000 a year. Go through the streets of a big city, and observe the miles of great shops stored with flaming jewels, costly gold and silver plate, rich furs, silks, pictures, velvets, furniture, and upholsteries. Who buys all these expensive luxuries? They are not for you, nor for your wife, nor for your children. You do not live in a £200 flat. Your floor is not covered with a £50 Persian rug; your wife does not wear diamond rings, nor silk underclothing, nor gowns of brocaded silk, nor sable collars, nor Maltese lace cuffs worth many guineas. She does not sit in the stalls at the opera, nor ride home in a brougham, nor sup on oysters and champagne, nor go, during the heat of the summer, on a yachting cruise in the Mediterranean. And is not your wife as much to you as the duchess to the duke? And now let us go on to the next section, and see how it fares with the poor. _Section B: The Poor_ At present the average age at death among the nobility, gentry, and professional classes in England and Wales is fifty-five years; but among the artisan classes of Lambeth it only amounts to twenty-nine years; and whilst the infantile death-rate among the well-to-do classes is such that only 8 children die in the first year of life out of 100 born, as many as 30 per cent. succumb at that age among the children of the poor in some districts of our large cities. Dr. Playfair says that amongst the upper class 18 per cent. of the children die before they reach five years of age; of the tradesman class 36 per cent., and of the working class 55 per cent, of the children die before they reach five years of age. Out of every 1000 persons 939 die without leaving any property at all worth mentioning. About 8,000,000 persons exist always on the borders of starvation. About 20,000,000 are poor. More than half the national wealth belongs to about 25,000 people; the remaining 39,000,000 share the other half unequally amongst them. About 30,000 persons own fifty-five fifty-sixths of the land and capital of the nation; but of the 39,000,000 of other persons only 1,500,000 earn (or receive) as much as £3 a week. In London 1,292,737 persons, or 37.8 per cent. of the whole population, get less than a guinea a week _per family_. The number of persons in receipt of poor-law relief on any one day in the British Islands is over 1,000,000; but 2,360,000 persons receive poor-law relief during one year, or one in eleven of the whole manual labouring class. In England and Wales alone 72,000 persons die each year in workhouse hospitals, infirmaries, or asylums. In London alone there are 99,830 persons in workhorses, hospitals, prisons, or industrial schools. In London one person out of every four will die in a workhouse, hospital, or lunatic asylum. It is estimated that 3,225,000 persons in the British Islands live in overcrowded dwellings, with an average of three persons in each room. There are 30,000 persons in London alone whose _home_ is a common lodging-house. In London alone 1100 persons sleep every night in casual wards. From Fabian Tract No. 75 I quote-- Much has been done in the way of improvement in various parts of Scotland, but 22 per cent. of Scottish families still dwell in a single room each, and the proportion in the case of Glasgow rises to 33 per cent. The little town of Kilmarnock, with only 28,447 inhabitants, huddles even a slightly larger proportion of its families into single-room tenements. Altogether, there are in Glasgow over 120,000, and in all Scotland 560,000 persons (more than one-eighth of the whole population), who do not know the decency of even a two-roomed home. A similar state of things exists in nearly all our large towns, the colliery districts being amongst the worst. _The working class._--The great bulk of the British people are overworked, underpaid, badly housed, unfairly taxed but besides all that, they are exposed to serious risks. Read _The Tragedy of Toil_, by John Burns, M.P. (Clarion Press, 1d.). In sixty years 60,000 colliers have been accidentally killed. In the South Wales coalfield in 1896, 232 were killed out of 71,000. In 1897, out of 76,000 no less than 10,230 were injured. In 1897, of the men employed in railway shunting, 1 in 203 was killed and 1 in 12 was injured. In 1897, out of 465,112 railway workers, 510 were killed, 828 were permanently disabled, and 67,000 were temporarily disabled. John Burns says-- This we do know, that 60 per cent. of the common labourers engaged on the Panama Canal were either killed, injured, or died from disease every year, whilst 80 per cent. of the Europeans died. Out of 70 French engineers, 45 died, and only 10 of the remainder were fit for subsequent work. The men engaged on the Manchester Ship Canal claim that 1000 to 1100 men were killed and 1700 men were severely injured, whilst 2500 were temporarily disabled. Again-- Taking mechanics first, and selecting one firm--Armstrong's, at Elswick--we find that in 1892 there were 588 accidents, or 7.9 per cent. of men engaged. They have steadily risen to 1512, or 13.9 per cent. of men engaged in 1897. In some departments, notably the blast furnace, 43 per cent. of the men employed were injured in 1897 The steel works had 296 injured, or 24.4 per cent. of its number. Of sailors John Burns says-- The last thirteen years, 1884-85 to 1896-97, show a loss of 28,302 from wreck, casualties, and accidents, or an average of 2177 from the industrial risks of the sailor's life. But the most startling statement is to come-- Sir A. Forwood has recently indicated, and recent facts confirm this general view, that 1 of every 1400 workmen is killed annually. " " 2500 " is totally disabled. " " 300 " is permanently partially disabled. 125 per 1000 are temporarily disabled for three or four weeks. One workman in 1400 is killed annually. Let us say there are 6,000,000 workmen in the British Islands, and we shall find that no less than 4280 are killed, and 20,000 permanently or partially disabled. That is as high as the average year's casualties in the Boer war. But the high death-rate from accidents amongst the workers is not nearly the greatest evil to which the poor are exposed. In the poorest districts of the great towns the children die like flies, and diseases caused by overcrowding, insufficient or improper food, exposure, dirt, neglect, and want of fuel and clothing, play havoc with the infants, the weakly, and the old. What are the chief diseases almost wholly due to the surroundings of poverty? They are consumption, bronchitis, rheumatism, epilepsy, fevers, smallpox, and cancer. Add to those the evil influences with which some trades are cursed, such as rupture, lead and phosphorous poisoning, and irritation of the lungs by dust, and you have a whole arsenal of deadly weapons aimed at the lives of the laborious poor. The average death-rate amongst the well-to-do classes is less than 10 in the thousand. Amongst the poorer workers it is often as high as 70 and seldom as low as 20. Put the average at 25 in the thousand amongst the poor: put the numbers of the poor at 10,000,000. We shall find that the difference between the death-rates of the poor and the well-to-do, is 15 to the thousand or 15,000 to the million. We may say, then, that the 10,000,000 of poor workers lose every year 150,000 lives from accidents and diseases due to poverty and to labour. Taking the entire population of the British Islands, I dare assert that the excess death-rate over the normal death-rate, will show that every year 300,000 lives are sacrificed to the ignorance and the injustice of the inhuman chaos which we call British civilisation. Some have cynically said that these lives are not worth saving, that the death-rate shows the defeat of the unfit, and that if all survived there would not be enough for them to live on. But except in the worst cases--where sots and criminals have bred human weeds--no man is wise enough to select the "fit" from the "unfit" amongst the children. The thin, pale child killed by cold, by hunger, by smallpox, or by fever, may be a seedling Stephenson, or Herschel, or Wesley; and I take it that in the West End the parents would not be consoled for the sacrifice of their most delicate child by the brutal suggestion that it was one of the "unfit." The "fit" may be a hooligan, a sweater, a fraudulent millionaire, a dissolute peer, or a fool. But there are two sides to this question of physical fitness. To excuse the evils of society on the ground that they weed out the unfit, is as foolish as to excuse bad drainage on the same plea. In a low-lying district where the soil is marshy the population will be weeded swiftly; but who would offer that as a reason why the land should not be drained? This heartless, fatuous talk about the survival of the fittest is only another example of the insults to which the poor are subjected. It fills one with despair to think that working men--fathers and husbands--will read or hear such things said of their own class, and not resent them. It is the duty of every working man to fight against such pitiless savagery, and to make every effort to win for his class and his family, respect and human conditions of life. Moreover, the shoddy science which talks so glibly about the "weeding out" of little helpless children is too blear-eyed to perceive that the same conditions of inhuman life which destroy the "weeds," _breed_ the weeds. Children born of healthy parents in healthy surroundings are not weeds. But to-day the British race is deteriorating, and the nation is in danger because of the greed of money-seekers and the folly of rulers and of those who claim to teach. The nation that gives itself up to the worship of luxury, wealth, and ease, is doomed. Nothing can save the British race but an awakening of the workers to the dangerous pass to which they have been brought by those who affect to guide and to govern them. But the workers, besides being underpaid, over-taxed, badly housed, and exposed to all manner of hardship, poverty, danger, and anxiety of mind, are also, by those who live upon them, denied respect. Do you doubt this? Do not the "better classes," as they call themselves, allude to the workers as "the lower orders," and "the great unwashed"? Does not the employer commonly speak of the workers as "hands"? Does the fine gentleman, who raises his hat and airs his nicest manners for a "lady," extend his chivalry and politeness to a "woman"? Do not the silk hats and the black coats and the white collars treat the caps and the overalls and the smocks as inferiors? Do not the men of the "better class" address each other as "sir"? And when did you last hear a "gentleman" say "sir" to a train-guard, to a railway porter, or to the "man" who has come to mend the drawing-room stove? Man cannot live by bread alone; neither can woman or child. And how much honour, culture, pleasure, rest, or love falls to the lot of the wives and children of the poor? Do not think I wish to breed class hatred. I do not. Doubtless the "better class" are graceful, amiable, honourable, and well-meaning folks. Doubtless they honestly believe they have a just claim to all their wealth and privileges. Doubtless they are no more selfish, no more arrogant, no more covetous nor idle than any working man would be in their place. What of that? It is nothing at all to you. They may be the finest people in the world. But does their fineness help you to pay your rent, or your wife to mend the clothes? or does it give you more wages, or her more rest? or does it in any way help to educate, and feed, and make happy your children? It does not. Nor do all the graces and superiorities of the West End make the lot of the East less bitter, less anxious, or more human. If self-interest be the ruling motive of mankind, why do not the working men transfer their honour and their service from the fine ladies and fine gentlemen to their own wives and children? These need every atom of love and respect the men can give them. Why should the many be poor, be ignorant, despised? Why should the rich monopolise the knowledge and the culture, the graces and elegancies of life, as well as the wealth? Ignorance is a curse: it is a deadlier curse than poverty. Indeed, but for ignorance, poverty and wealth could not continue to exist side by side; for only ignorance permits the rich to uphold and the poor to endure the injustices and the criminal follies of British society, as now to our shame and grief they environ us, like some loathly vision beheld with horror under nightmare. Is it needful to tell you more, Mr. Smith, you who are yourself a worker? Have you not witnessed, perhaps suffered, many of these evils? Yes; perhaps you yourself have smarted under "the insolence of office, and the spurns which patient merit of the unworthy takes"; perhaps you have borne the tortures of long suspense as one of the unemployed; perhaps on some weary tramp after work you have learned what it is to be a stranger in your own land; perhaps you have seen some old veteran worker, long known to you, now broken in health and stricken in years, compelled to seek the shameful shelter of a workhouse; perhaps you have had comrades of your own or other trades, who have been laid low by sickness, sickness caused by exposure or overstrain, and have died what coroners' juries call "natural deaths," or, in plain English, have been killed by overwork; perhaps you have known widows and little children, left behind by those unfortunate men, and can remember how much succour and compassion they received in this Christian country; perhaps as you think of the grim prophecy that one worker in four must die in a workhouse, you may yourself, despite your strength and your skill, glance anxiously towards the future, as a bold sailor glances towards a stormy horizon. Well, Mr. Smith, will you look through a book of mine called _Dismal England_, and there read how men and women and children of your class are treated in the workhouse, in the workhouse school, in the police court, in the chain works, on the canals, in the chemical hells, and in the poor and gloomy districts known as slums? I would quote some passages from _Dismal England_ now, but space forbids. Or, maybe, you would prefer the evidence of men of wealth and eminence who are not Socialists. If so, please read the testimony given in the next section. _Section C: Reliable Evidence_ The Salvation Army see a great deal of the poor. Here is the evidence of General Booth-- 444 persons are reported by the police to have attempted to commit suicide in London last year, and probably as many more succeeded in doing so. 200 persons died from starvation in the same period. We have in this one city about 100,000 paupers, 30,000 prostitutes, 33,000 homeless adults, and 35,000 wandering children of the slums. There is a standing army of out-of-works numbering 80,000, which is often increased in special periods of commercial depression or trade disputes to 100,000. 12,000 criminals are always inside Her Majesty's prisons, and about 15,000 are outside. 70,000 charges for petty offences are dealt with by the London magistrates every year. The best authorities estimate that 10,000 new criminals are manufactured per annum. We have tens of thousands of dwellings known to be overcrowded, unsanitary, or dangerous. Here is the evidence of a man of letters, Mr. Frederic Harrison-- To me, at least, it would be enough to condemn modern society as hardly an advance on slavery or serfdom, if the permanent condition of industry were to be that which we behold, that 90 per cent. of the actual producers of wealth have no home that they can call their own beyond the end of the week; have no bit of soil, or so much as a room that belongs to them; have nothing of value of any kind except as much old furniture as will go in a cart; have the precarious chance of weekly wages which barely suffice to keep them in health; are housed for the most part in places that no man thinks fit for his horse; are separated by so narrow a margin from destitution, that a month of bad trade, sickness, or unexpected loss brings them face to face with hunger and pauperism.... This is the normal state of the average workman in town or country. Here is the evidence of a man of science, Professor Huxley-- Anyone who is acquainted with the state of the population of all great industrial centres, whether in this or other countries, is aware that amidst a large and increasing body of that population there reigns supreme ... that condition which the French call _la misère_, a word for which I do not think there is any exact English equivalent. It is a condition in which the food, warmth, and clothing which are necessary for the mere maintenance of the functions of the body in their normal state cannot be obtained; in which men, women, and children are forced to crowd into dens wherein decency is abolished, and the most ordinary conditions of healthful existence are impossible of attainment; in which the pleasures within reach are reduced to brutality and drunkenness; in which the pains accumulate at compound interest in the shape of starvation, disease, stunted development, and moral degradation; in which the prospect of even steady and honest industry is a life of unsuccessful battling with hunger, rounded by a pauper's grave.... When the organisation of society, instead of mitigating this tendency, tends to continue and intensify it; when a given social order plainly makes for evil and not for good, men naturally enough begin to think it high time to try a fresh experiment. I take it to be a mere plain truth that throughout industrial Europe there is not a single large manufacturing city which is free from a vast mass of people whose condition is exactly that described, and from a still greater mass who, living just on the edge of the social swamp, are liable to be precipitated into it. Here is the evidence of a British peer, Lord Durham-- There was still more sympathy and no reproach whatever to be bestowed upon the children--perhaps waifs and strays in their earliest days--of parents destitute, very likely deserving, possibly criminal, who had had to leave these poor children to fight their way in life alone. What did these children know or care for the civilisation or the wealth of their native land? _What example, what incentive had they ever had to lead good and honest lives?_ Possibly from the moment of their birth they had never known contentment, what it had been to feel bodily comfort. They were cast into that world, and looked upon it as a cruel and heartless world, with no guidance, no benign influence to guide them in their way, and _thus they were naturally prone to fall into any vicious or criminal habits which would procure them a bare subsistence_. Here is the evidence of a Tory Minister, Sir John Gorst-- I do not think there is any doubt as to the reality of the evil; that is to say, that there are in our civilisation men able and willing to work who can't find work to do.... Work will have to be found for them.... What are usually called relief works may be a palliative for acute temporary distress, but they are no remedy for the unemployed evil in the long-run. Not only so; they tend to aggravate it.... If you can set 100 unemployed men to produce food, they are not taking bread out of other people's mouths. Men so employed would be producing what is now imported from abroad and what they themselves would consume. An unemployed man--_whether he is a duke or a docker_--is living on the community. If you set him to grow food he is enriching the community by what he produces. Therefore, my idea is that the direction in which a remedy for the unemployed evil is to be sought is in the production of food. Here is the evidence of the Tory Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury-- They looked around them and saw a _growing_ mass of _poverty_ and _want of employment_, and of course the one object which every statesman who loved his country should desire to attain, was that there might be the largest amount of profitable employment for the mass of the people. He did not say that he had any patent or certain remedy for _the terrible evils which beset us on all sides_, but he did say that it was time they left off mending the constitution of Parliament, and that they turned all the wisdom and energy Parliament could combine together in order to remedy the _sufferings_ under which so _many_ of their countrymen laboured. Here is the evidence of the Colonial Secretary, the Right Hon. Joseph Chamberlain, M.P.-- The rights of property have been so much extended that the rights of the community have almost altogether disappeared, and it is hardly too much to say that the prosperity and the comfort and the liberties of a great proportion of the population have been laid at the feet of a small number of proprietors, who "neither toil nor spin." And here is further evidence from Mr. Chamberlain-- For my part neither sneers, nor abuse, nor opposition shall induce me to accept as the will of the Almighty, and the unalterable dispensation of His providence, a state of things under which _millions lead sordid, hopeless, and monotonous lives, without pleasure in the present, and without prospect for the future_. And here is still stronger testimony from Mr. Chamberlain-- The ordinary conditions of life among a large proportion of the population are such that common decency is absolutely impossible; and all this goes on in sight of the mansions of the rich, where undoubtedly there are people who would gladly remedy it if they could. It goes on in presence of wasteful extravagance and luxury, which bring but little pleasure to those who indulge in them; and private charity is powerless, religious organisations can do nothing, to remedy the evils which are so deep-seated in our social system. You have read what these eminent men have said, Mr. Smith, as to the evils of the present time. Well, Mr. Atkinson, a well-known American statistical authority, has said-- Four or five men can produce the bread for a thousand. With the best machinery one workman can produce cotton cloth for 250 people, woollens for 300, or boots and shoes for 1000. How is it, friend John Smith, that with all our energy, all our industry, all our genius, and all our machinery, there are 8,000,000 of hungry poor in this country? If five men can produce bread for a thousand, and one man can produce shoes for a thousand, how is it we have so many British citizens suffering from hunger and bare feet? That, Mr. Smith, is the question I shall endeavour in this book to answer. Meanwhile, if you have any doubts as to the verity of my statements of the sufferings of the poor, or as to the urgent need for your immediate and earnest aid, read the following books, and form your own opinion:-- _Labour and Life of the People._ Charles Booth. To be seen at most free libraries. _Poverty: A Study of Town Life._ By B. S. Rountree. Macmillan. 10s. 6d. _Dismal England._ By R. Blatchford, 72 Fleet Street, E.C. 2s. 6d. and 1s. _No Room to Live._ By G. Haw, 72 Fleet Street, E.C. 1s. _The White Slaves of England._ By R. Sherard. London, James Bowden. 1s. _Pictures and Problems from the Police Courts._ By T. Holmes. Ed. Arnold, Bedford Street, W.C. And the Fabian Tracts, especially No. 5 and No. 7. These are 1d. each. CHAPTER II WHAT IS WEALTH? WHERE DOES IT COME FROM? WHO CREATES IT? Those who have read anything about political economy or _Socialism_ must often have found such thoughts as these rise up in their minds-- How is it some are rich and others poor? How is it some who are able and willing to work can get no work to do? How is it that some who work very hard are so poorly paid? How is it that others who do not work at all have more money than they need? Why is one man born to pay rent and another to spend it? Let us first face the question of why there is so much poverty. This question has been answered in many strange ways. It has been said that poverty is due to drink. But that is not true, for we find many sober people poor, and we find awful poverty in countries where drunkenness is almost unknown. Drink does not cause the poverty of the sober Hindoos. Drink does not cause the poverty of our English women workers. It has been said that poverty is due to "over-production," and it has been said that it is due to "under-consumption." Let us see what these phrases mean. First, over-production. Poverty is due to over-production--of _what_? Of wealth. So we are to believe that the people are poor because they make too much wealth, that they are hungry because they produce too much food, naked because they make too many clothes, cold because they get too much coal, homeless because they build too many houses! Next, under-consumption. We are told that poverty is due to under-consumption--under-consumption of _what_? Of wealth. The people are poor because they do not destroy enough wealth. The way for them to grow rich is by consuming riches. They are to make their cake larger by eating it. Alas! the trouble is that they can get no cake to eat; they can get no wealth to consume. But I think the economists mean that the poor will grow richer if the rich consume more wealth. A rich man has two slaves. The slaves grow corn and make bread. The rich man takes half the bread and eats it. The slaves have only one man's share between two. Will it mend matters here if the rich man "consumes more"? Will it be better for the two slaves if the master takes half the bread left to them, and eats that as well as the bread he has already taken? See what a pretty mess the economists have led us into. The rich have too much and the poor too little. The economist says, let the poor produce less and the rich consume more, and all will be well! Wonderful! But if the poor produce less, there will be less to eat; and if the rich eat more, the share of the poor will be smaller than ever. Let us try another way. Suppose the poor produce more and the rich consume less! Does it not seem likely that then the share of the poor would be bigger? Well, then, we must turn the wisdom of the economists the other way up. We must say over-production of wealth _cannot_ make poverty, for that means that the more of a thing is produced the less of that thing there is; and we must say that under-consumption _cannot_ cause poverty, for that means that the more of a loaf you eat the more you will have left. Such rubbish as that may do for statesmen and editors, but it is of no use to sensible men and women. Let us see if we cannot think a little better for ourselves than these very superior persons have thought for us. I think that we, without being at all clever or learned, may get nearer to the truth than some of those who pass for great men. Now, what is it we have to find out? We want to know how the British people may make the best of their country and themselves. We know they are not making the best of either at present. There must, therefore, be something wrong. Our business is to find out what is wrong, and how it may be righted. We will begin by asking ourselves three questions, and by trying to answer them. These questions are-- 1. What is wealth? 2. Where does wealth come from? 3. Where does wealth go to? First, then, what _is_ wealth? There is no need to go into long and confusing explanations; there is no use in splitting hairs. We want an answer that is short and simple, and at the same time good enough for the purpose. I should say, then, that wealth is all those things which we use. Mr. Ruskin uses two words, "wealth" and "illth." He divides the things which it is good for us to have from the things which it is not good for us to have, and he calls the good things "wealth" and the bad things "illth"--or ill things. Thus opium prepared for smoking is illth, because it does harm or works "ill" to all who smoke it; but opium prepared as medicine is wealth, because it saves life or stays pain. A dynamite bomb is "illth," for it is used to destroy life, but a dynamite cartridge is wealth, for it is used in getting slate or coal. Mr. Ruskin is right, and if we are to make the best of our country and of ourselves, we ought clearly to give up producing bad things, or "illth," and produce more good things, or wealth. But, for our purpose, it will be simpler and shorter to call all things we use wealth. Thus a good book is wealth and a bad book "illth"; but as it is not easy to agree as to which books are good, which bad, and which indifferent, we had better call all books wealth. By this word wealth, then, when we use it in this book, we shall mean all the things we use. Thus we shall put down as wealth all such things as food, clothing, fuel, houses, ornaments, musical instruments, arms, tools, machinery, books, horses, dogs, medicines, toys, ships, trains, coaches, tobacco, churches, hospitals, lighthouses, theatres, shops, and all other things that we _use_. Now comes our second question: Where does wealth come from? This question we must make into two questions-- 1. Where does wealth come from? 2. Who produces wealth? Because the question, "Where does wealth come from?" really means, "How is wealth produced?" _All_ wealth comes from the land. All food comes from the land--all flesh is grass. Vegetable food comes directly from the land; animal food comes indirectly from the land, all animals being fed on the land. So the stuff of which we make our clothing, our houses, our fuel, our tools, arms, ships, engines, toys, ornaments, is all got from the land. For the land yields timber, metals, vegetables, and the food on which feed the animals from which we get feathers, fur, meat, milk, leather, ivory, bone, glue, and many other things. Even in the case of the things that come from the sea, as sealskin, whale oil, fish, iodine, shells, pearls, and other things, we are to remember that we need boats, or nets, or tools to get them with, and that boats, nets, and tools are made from minerals and vegetables got from the land. We may say, then, that all wealth comes from the land. This brings us to the second part of our question: "Who produces wealth?" or "How is wealth produced?" Wealth is produced by human beings. It is the people of a country who produce the wealth of that country. Wealth is produced by labour. Wealth cannot be produced by any other means or in any other way. _All_ wealth is produced _from_ the LAND _by_ human LABOUR. A coal seam is not wealth; but a coalmine is wealth. Coal is not wealth while it is in the bowels of the earth; but coal is wealth as soon as it is brought up out of the pit and made available for use. A whale or a seal is not wealth until it is caught. In a country without inhabitants there would be no wealth. Land is not wealth. To produce wealth you must have land and human beings. There can be no wealth without labour. And now we come to the first error of the economists. There are some economists who tell us that wealth is not produced by labour, but by "capital." There is neither truth nor reason in this assertion. What is "capital"? "Capital" is only another word for _stores_. Adam Smith calls capital "stock." Capital is any tools, machinery, or other stores used in producing wealth. Capital is any food, fuel, shelter, clothing supplied to those engaged in producing wealth. The hunter, before he can shoot game, needs weapons. His weapons are "capital." The farmer has to wait for his wheat and potatoes to ripen before he can use them as food. The stock of food and the tools he uses to produce the wheat or potatoes, and to live on while they ripen, are "capital." Robinson Crusoe's capital was the arms, food, and tools he saved from the wreck. On these he lived until he had planted corn, and tamed goats and built a hut, and made skin clothing and vessels of wood and clay. Capital, then, is stores. Now, where do the stores come from? Stores are wealth. Stores, whether they be food or tools, come from the land, and are made or produced by human labour. There is not an atom of capital in the world that has not been produced by labour. Every spade, every plough, every hammer, every loom, every cart, barrow, loaf, bottle, ham, haddock, pot of tea, barrel of ale, pair of boots, gold or silver coin, railway sleeper or rail, boat, road, canal, every kind of tools and stores has been produced by labour from the land. It is evident, then, that if there were no labour there would be no capital. Labour is _before_ capital, for labour _makes_ capital. Now, what folly it is to say that capital produces wealth. Capital is used by labour in the production of wealth, but capital itself is incapable of motion and can produce nothing. A spade is "capital." Is it true, then, to say that it is not the navvy but the spade that makes the trench? A plough is capital. Is it true to say that not the ploughman but the plough makes the furrow? A loom is capital. Is it true to say that the loom makes the cloth? It is the weaver who weaves the cloth. He _uses_ the loom, and the loom was made by the miner, the smith, the joiner, and the engineer. There are wood and iron and brass in the loom. But you would not say that the cloth was produced by the iron-mine and the forest! It is produced by miners, engineers, sheep farmers, wool-combers, sailors, spinners, weavers, and other workers. It is produced entirely by labour, and could not be produced in any other way. How can capital produce wealth? Take a steam plough, a patent harrow, a sack of wheat, a bankbook, a dozen horses, enough food and clothing to last a hundred men a year; put all that capital down in a forty-acre field, and it will not produce a single ear of corn in fifty years unless you send a _man_ to _labour_. But give a boy a forked stick, a rood of soil, and a bag of seed, and he will raise a crop for you. If he is a smart boy, and has the run of the woods and streams, he will also contrive to find food to live on till the crop is ready. We find, then, that all wealth is produced _from_ the land _by_ labour, and that capital is only a part of wealth, that it has been produced by labour, stored by labour, and is finally used by labour in the production of more wealth. Our third question asks, "What becomes of the wealth?" This is not easy to answer. But we may say that the wealth is divided into three parts--not _equal_ parts--called Rent, Interest, and Wages. Rent is wealth paid to the landlords for the use of the land. Interest is wealth paid to the capitalists (the owners of tools and stores) for the use of the "capital." Wages is wealth paid to the workers for their labour in producing _all_ the wealth. There are but a few landlords, but they take a large share of the wealth. There are but a few capitalists, but _they_ take a large share of the wealth. There are very many workers, but they do not get much more than a third share of the wealth they produce. The landlord produces _nothing_. He takes part of the wealth for allowing the workers to use the land. The capitalist produces nothing. He takes part of the wealth for allowing the workers to use the capital. The workers produce _all_ the wealth, and are obliged to give a great deal of it to the landlords and capitalists who produce nothing. Socialists claim that the landlord is useless under _any_ form of society, that the capitalist is not needed in a properly ordered society, and that the people should become their own landlords and their own capitalists. If the people were their own landlords and capitalists, _all_ the wealth would belong to the workers by whom it is all produced. Now, a word of caution. We say that _all_ wealth is produced by labour. _What is labour?_ Labour is work. Work is said to be of two kinds: hand work and brain work. But really work is of one kind--the labour of hand and brain together; for there is hardly any head work wherein the hand has no share, and there is no hand work wherein the head has no share. The hand is really a part of the brain, and can do nothing without the brain's direction. So when we say that all wealth is produced by labour, we mean by the labour of hand and brain. I want to make this quite plain, because you will find, if you come to deal with the economists, that attempts have been made to use the word labour as meaning chiefly hand labour. When we say labour produces all wealth, we do not mean that all wealth is produced by farm labourers, mechanics, and navvies, but that it is all produced by _workers_--that is, by thinkers as well as doers; by inventors and directors as well as by the man with the hammer, the file, or the spade. CHAPTER III HOW THE FEW GET RICH AND KEEP THE MANY POOR We have already seen that most of the wealth produced by labour goes into the pockets of a few rich men: we have now to find out how it gets there. By what means do the landlords and the capitalists get the meat and leave the workers the bones? Let us deal first with the land, and next with the capital. A landlord is one who owns land. Rent is a price paid to the landlord for permission to use or occupy land. Here is a diagram of a square piece of land-- +----------+ | | | | | *L | W | | | | +----------+ Fig. 1 In the centre stands the landlord (L), outside stands a labourer (W). The landlord owns the land, the labourer owns no land. The labourer cannot get food except from the land. The landlord will not allow him to use the land unless he pays rent. The labourer has no money. How can he pay rent? He must first raise a crop from the land, and then give a part of the crop to the landlord as rent; or he may sell the crop and give to the landlord, as rent, part of the money for which the crop is sold. We find, then, that the labourer cannot get food without working, and cannot work without land, and that, as he has no land, he must pay rent for the use of land owned by some other person--a landlord. We find that the labourer produces the whole of the crop, and that the landlord produces nothing; and we find that, when the crop is produced, some of it has to be given to the landlord. Thus it is clear that where one man owns land, and another man owns no land, the landless man is dependent upon the landed man for permission to work and to live, while the landed man is able to live without working. Let us go into this more fully. Here (Fig. 2) are two squares of land-- _a_ _b_ +----------+ +----------+ | | | | | *W | | | | | | | +----------+ | * * | | | | W W | | *W | | | | | | | +----------+ +----------+ Fig. 2 Each piece of land is owned and worked by two men. The field _a_ is divided into two equal parts, each part owned and worked by one man. The field _b_ is owned and worked by two men jointly. In the case of field _a_ each man has what he produces, and _all_ he produces. In the case of field _b_ each man takes half of _all_ that _both_ produce. These men in both cases are their own landlords. They own the land they use. But now suppose that field _b_ does not belong to two men, but to one man. The same piece of land will be there, but only one man will be working on it. The other does not work: he lives by charging rent. Therefore if the remaining labourer, now a _tenant_, is to live as well as he did when he was part owner, and pay the rent, he must work twice as hard as he did before. Take the field _a_ (Fig. 2). It is divided into two equal parts, and one man tills each half. Remove one man and compel the other to pay half the produce in rent, and you will find that the man who has become landlord now gets as much without working as he got when he tilled half the field, and that the man left as tenant now has to till the whole field for the same amount of produce as he got formerly for tilling half of it. We see, then, that the landlord is a useless and idle burden upon the worker, and that he takes a part of what the worker alone produces, and calls it rent. The defence set up for the landlord is (1) that he has a right to the land, and (2) that he spends his wealth for the public advantage. I shall show you in later chapters that both these statements are untrue. Let us now turn to the capitalist. What is a capitalist? He is really a money-lender. He lends money, or machinery, and he charges interest on it. Suppose Brown wants to dig, but has no spade. He borrows a spade of Jones, who charges him a price for the use of the spade. Then Jones is a capitalist: he takes part of the wealth Brown produces, and calls it _interest_. Suppose Jones owns a factory and machinery, and suppose Brown is a spinner, who owns nothing but his strength and skill. In that case Brown the spinner stands in the same relation to Jones the capitalist as the landless labourer stands in to the landlord. That is to say, the spinner cannot get food without money, and he can only get money by working as a spinner for the man who owns the factory. Therefore Brown the spinner goes to Jones the capitalist, who engages him as a spinner, and pays him wages. There are many other spinners in the same position. They work for Jones, who pays them wages. They spin yarn, and Jones sells it. Does Jones spin any of the yarn? Not a thread: the spinners spin it all. Do the spinners get all the money the yarn is sold for? No. How is the money divided? It is divided in this way-- A quantity of yarn is sold for twenty shillings, but of that twenty shillings the factory owner pays the cost of the raw material, the wages of the spinners, the cost of rent, repairs to machinery, fuel and oil, and the salaries and commissions of clerks, travellers, and managers. What remains of the twenty shillings he takes for himself as _profit_. This "profit," then, is the difference between the cost price of the yarn and the sale price. If a certain weight of yarn costs nineteen shillings to produce, and sells for twenty shillings, there is a profit of one shilling. If yarn which cost £9000 to produce is sold for £10,000, the profit is £1000. This profit the factory owner, Jones the capitalist, claims as interest on his capital. It is then a kind of rent charged by him for the use of his money, his factory, and his machinery. Now we must be careful here not to confuse the landlord with the farmer, nor the capitalist with the manager. I am, so far, dealing only with those who _own_ and _let_ land or capital, and not with those who manage them. A capitalist is one who lends capital. A capitalist may use capital, but in so far as he uses capital he is a worker. So a landlord may farm land, but in so far as he farms land he is a farmer, and therefore a worker. The man who finds the capital for a factory, and manages the business himself, is a capitalist, for he lends his factory and machines to the men who work for him. But he is also a worker, since he conducts the manufacture and the sale of goods. As a capitalist he claims interest, as a worker he claims salary. And he is as much a worker as a general is a soldier or an admiral a sailor. Well, the _idle_ landlord and the _idle_ capitalist charge rent or interest for the use of their land or capital. The landlord justifies himself by saying that the land is _his_, and that he has a right to charge for it the highest rent he can get. The capitalist justifies himself by saying that the capital is _his_, and that he has a right to charge for it the highest rate of interest he can get. Both claim that it is better for the nation that the land and the capital should remain in their hands; both tell us that the nation will go headlong to ruin if we try to dispense with their valuable services. I am not going to denounce either landlord or capitalist as a tyrant, a usurer, or a robber. Landlords and capitalists may be, and very often are, upright and well-meaning men. As such let us respect them. Neither shall I enter into a long argument as to whether it is right or wrong to charge interest on money lent or capital let, or as to whether it is right or wrong to "buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest." The non-Socialist will claim that as the capital belongs to the capitalist he has a right to ask what interest he pleases for its use, and that he has also a perfect right to get as much for the goods he sells as the buyer will give, and to pay as little wages as the workers will accept. Let us concede all that, and save talk. But those claims being granted to the capitalist, the counter-claims of the worker and the buyer--the producer and the consumer--must be recognised as equally valid. If the capitalist is justified in paying the lowest wages the worker will take, the worker is justified in paying the lowest interest the capitalist will take. If the seller is justified in asking the highest price for goods, the buyer is justified in offering the lowest. If a capitalist manager is justified in demanding a big salary for his services of management, the worker and the consumer are justified in getting another capitalist or another manager at a lower price, if they can. Surely that is just and reasonable. And that is what Socialists advise. A capitalist owns a large factory and manages it. He pays his spinners fifteen shillings a week; he sells his goods to the public at the best price he can get; and he makes an income of £10,000 a year. He makes his money fairly and lawfully. But if the workers and the users of yarn can find their own capital, build their own factory, and spin their own yarn, they have a perfect right to set up on their own account. And if by so doing they can pay the workers better wages, sell the yarn to the public at a lower price, and have a profit left to build other factories with, no one can accuse them of doing wrong, nor can anyone deny that the workers and the users have proved that they, the producers and consumers, have done better without the capitalist (or middleman) than with him. But there is another kind of capitalist--the shareholder. A company is formed to manufacture mouse-traps. The capital is £100,000. There are ten shareholders, each holding £10,000 worth of shares. The company makes a profit of 10 per cent. The dividend at 10 per cent. paid to each shareholder will be £1000 a year. The shareholders do no more than find the capital. They do not manage the business, nor get the orders, nor conduct the sales, nor make the mouse-traps. The business is managed by a paid manager, the sales are conducted by paid travellers, and the mouse-traps are made by paid workmen. Let us now see how it fares with any one of these shareholders. He lends to the company £10,000. He receives from the company 10 per cent. dividend, or £1000 a year. In ten years he gets back the whole of his £10,000, but he still owns the shares, and he still draws a dividend of £1000 a year. If the company go on working and making 10 per cent. for a hundred years they will still be paying £1000 a year for the loan of the £10,000. It will be quite evident, then, that in twenty years this shareholder will have received his money twice over; that is to say, his £10,000 will have become £20,000 without his having done a stroke of work or even knowing anything about the business. On the other hand, the manager, the salesman, and the workman, who have done all the work and earned all the profits, will receive no dividend at all. They are paid their weekly wages, and no more. A man who starts at a pound a week will at the end of twenty years be still working for a pound a week. The non-Socialist will claim that this is quite right; that the shareholder is as much entitled to rent on his money as the worker is entitled to wages for his work. We need not contradict him. Let us keep to simple facts. Suppose the mouse-trap makers started a factory of their own. Suppose they fixed the wages of the workers at the usual rate. Suppose they borrowed the capital to carry on the business. Suppose they borrowed £100,000. They would not have to pay 10 per cent. for the loan, they would not have to pay 5 per cent. for the loan. But fix it at 5 per cent. interest, and suppose that, as in the case of the company, the mouse-trap makers made a profit of 10 per cent. That would give them a profit of £10,000 a year. In twenty years they would have made a profit of £200,000. The interest on the loan at 5 per cent. for twenty years would be £100,000. The amount of the loan is £100,000. Therefore after working twenty years they would have paid off the whole of the money borrowed, and the business, factory, and machinery would be their own. Thus, instead of being in the position of the men who had worked twenty years for the mouse-trap company, these men, after receiving the same wages as the others for twenty years, would now be in possession of the business paying them £10,000 a year over and above their wages. But, the non-Socialist will object, these working men could not borrow £100,000, as they would have no security. That is quite true; but the Corporation of Manchester or Birmingham could borrow the money to start such a work, and could borrow it at 3 per cent. And by making their own mouse-traps, or gas, or bread, instead of buying them from a private maker or a company, and paying the said company or maker £10,000 a year for ever and ever amen, they would, in less than twenty years, become possessors of their own works and machinery, and be in a position to save £10,000 a year on the cost of mouse-traps or gas or bread. This is what the Socialist means by saying that the capitalist is unnecessary, and is paid too much for the use of his capital. Against the capitalist or landlord worker or manager the same complaint holds good; the large profits taken by these men as payment for management or direction are out of all proportion to the value of their work. These profits, or salaries, called by economists "the wages of ability," are in excess of any salary that would be paid to a farmer, engineer, or director of any factory either by Government, by the County Council, by a Municipality, or by any capitalist or company engaging such a person at a fixed rate for services. That is to say, the capitalist or landlord director is paid very much above the market value of the "wages of ability." These facts generally escape the notice of the worker. As a rule his attention is confined to his own wages, and he thinks himself well off or ill off as his wages are what he considers high or low. But there are two sides to the question of wages. It is not only the amount of wages received that matters, but it is also the amount of commodities the wages will buy. The worker has to consider how much he spends as well as how much he gets; and if he can got as much for 15s. as he used to get for £1, he is as much better off as he would be were his wages raised 25 per cent. Now on every article the workman uses there is one profit or a dozen; one charge or many charges placed upon his food, clothing, house, fuel, light, travelling, and everything he requires by the landlord, the capitalist, or the shareholders. Take the case of the coal bought by a poor London clerk at 30s. a ton. It pays a royalty to the royalty owner, it pays a profit to the mine owner, it pays a profit to the coal merchant, it pays a profit to the railway company, and these profits are over and above the cost in wages and wear and tear of machinery. Yet this same London clerk is very likely a Tory, who says many bitter things against _Socialism_, but never thinks of resenting the heavy taxes levied on his small income by landlords, railway companies, water companies, building companies, ship companies, and all the other companies and private firms who live upon him. Imagine this poor London clerk, whose house stands on land owned by a peer worth £300,000 a year, whose "boss" makes £50,000 a year out of timber or coals, whose pipe pays four shillings taxes on every shilling's worth of tobacco (while the rich man's cigar pays a tax of five shillings in the pound), whose children go to the board school, while those of the coalowner, the company promoter, the railway director, and the landlord go to the university. Imagine this man, anxious, worried, overworked, poor, and bled by a horde of rich parasites. Imagine him standing in a well-dressed crowd, amongst the diamond shops, fur shops, and costly furniture shops of Regent Street, and asking with a bitter sneer where John Burns got his new suit of clothes. Is it not marvellous? He does not ask who gets the 4s. on his pound of smoking mixture! Nor why he pays 4s. a thousand for bad gas (as I did in Finchley) while the Manchester clerk gets good gas for 2s. 2d.! Nor does he ask why the Duke of Bedford should put a tax on his wife's apple pudding or his children's bananas! He does not even ask what became of the £80,000,000 which the coal-owners wrung out of the public when he, the poor clerk, was paying 2s. per cwt. for coal for his tiny parlour grate! No. The question he asks is: Where Ben Tillett got his new straw hat! How the Duke, and the Coalowner, and the Money-lender, and the Jerry-builder must laugh! Yet so it is. It is not the landlord, the company promoter, the coalowner, the jerry-builder, and all the other useless rich who prey upon his wife and his children whom he mistrusts. His enemies, poor man, are the Socialists; the men and women who work for him, teach him, sacrifice their health, their time, their money, and their prospects to awaken his manhood, to sting his pride, to drive the mists of prejudice from his worried mind and give his common sense a chance. _These_ are the men and women he despises and mistrusts. And he reads the _Daily Mail_, and shudders at the name of the _Clarion_; and he votes for Mr. Facing-both-ways and Lord Plausible, and is filled with bitterness because of honest John's summer trousers. Again I tell you, Mr. Smith, that I do not wish to stir up class hatred. Lady Dedlock, wife of the great ground landlord, is a charming lady, handsome, clever, and very kind to the poor. But if I were a docker, and if my wife had to go out in leaky boots, or if my delicate child could not get sea air and nourishing food, I should be apt to ask whether his lordship, the great ground landlord, could not do with less rent and his sweet wife with fewer pearls. I should ask that. I should not think myself a man if I did not ask it; nor should I feel happy if I did not strain every nerve to get an answer. Non-Socialists often reproach Socialists for sentimentality. But surely it is sentimentality to talk as the non-Socialist does about the personal excellences of the aristocracy. What have Lady Dedlock's amiability and beauty to do with the practical questions of gas rates and wages? I am "setting class against class." Quite right, too, so long as one class oppresses another. But let us reverse the position. Suppose you go to the Duke of Hebden Bridge and ask for an engagement as clerk in his Grace's colliery at a salary of £5000 a year. Will the duke give it to you because your wife is pretty and your daughter thinks you are a great man? Not at all. His Grace would say, "My dear sir, you are doubtless an excellent citizen, husband, and father; but I can get a better clerk at a pound a week, sir; and I cannot afford to pay more, sir." The duke would be quite correct. He could get a better clerk for £1 a week. And as for the amiability of your family, or your own personal merits, what have they to do with business? As a business man the duke will not pay £2 a week to a clerk if he can get a man as good for £1 a week. Then why should the clerk pay 4s. a thousand for his gas if he can get it for 2s. 2d.? Or why should the docker pay the duke 5s. rent if he can get a house for 2s. 6d.? Should I be offended with the duke for refusing to pay me more than I am worth? Should I accuse him of class hatred? Not at all. Then why should I be blamed for suggesting that it is folly to pay a duke more than he is worth? Or why should the duke mutter about class hatred if I suggest that we can get a colliery director at a lower salary than his Grace? Talk about sentimentality! Are we to pay a guinea each for dukes if we can get them three a penny? It is not business. I grudge no man his wealth nor his fortune. I want nothing that is his. I do not hate the rich: I pity the poor. It is of the women and children of the poor I think when I am agitating for _Socialism_, not of the coffers of the wealthy. I believe in universal brotherhood; nay, I go even further, for I maintain that the sole difference between the worst man and the best is a difference of opportunity--that is to say, that since heredity and environment make one man amiable and another churlish, one generous and another mean, one faithful and another treacherous, one wise and another foolish, one strong and another weak, one vile and another pure, therefore the bishop and the hooligan, the poet and the boor, the idiot, the philosopher, the thief, the hero, and the brutalised drab in the kennel _are all equal in the sight of God and of justice_, and that every word of censure uttered by man is a word of error, growing out of ignorance. As the sun shines alike upon the evil and the good, so must we give love and mercy to all our fellow-creatures. "Judgment is mine, saith the Lord." But that does not prevent me from defending a brother of the East End against a brother of the West End. Truly we should love all men. Let us, then, begin by loving the weakest and the worst, for they have so little love and counsel, while the rich and the good have so much. We will not, Mr. Smith, accuse the capitalist of base conduct. But we will say that as a money-lender his rate of interest is too high, and that as a manager his salary is too large. And we will say that if by combining we can, as workers, get better wages, and as buyers get cheaper goods, we shall do well and wisely to combine. For it is to our interest in the one case, as it is to the interest of the capitalist in the other case, to "buy in the cheapest market and to sell in the dearest." So much for the capitalist; but, before we deal with the landlord, we have to consider another very important person, and that is the inventor, or brain-worker. CHAPTER IV THE BRAIN WORKER, OR INVENTOR It has, I think, never been denied that much wealth goes to the capitalist, but it has been claimed that the capitalist deserves all he gets because wealth is produced by capital. And although this is as foolish as to say that the tool does the work and not the hand that wields it, yet books have been written to convince the people that it is true. Some of these books try to deceive us into supposing that capital and ability are interchangeable terms. That is to say, that "capital," which means "stock," is the same thing as "ability," which means cleverness or skill. We might as well believe that a machine is the same thing as the brain that invented it. But there is a trick in it. The trick lies in first declaring that the bulk of the national wealth is produced by "ability," and then confusing the word "ability" with the word "capital." But it is one thing to say that wealth is due to the man who _invented_ a machine, and it is quite another thing to say that wealth is due to the man who _owns_ the machine. In his book called _Labour and the Popular Welfare_, Mr. Mallock assures us that ability produces more wealth than is produced by labour. He says that two-thirds of the national wealth are due to ability and only one-third to labour. A hundred years ago, Mr. Mallock says, the population of this country was 10,000,000 and the wealth produced yearly; £140,000,000, giving an average of £14 a head. The recent production is £350,000,000 for every 10,000,000 of the population, or £35 a head. The argument is that _labour_ is only able to produce as much now as it could produce a hundred years ago, for labour does not vary. Therefore, the increase from £14 a head to £35 a head is not due to labour but to machinery. Now, we owe this machinery, not to labour, but to invention. Therefore the various inventors have enabled the people to produce more than twice as much as they produced a century back. Therefore, according to Mr. Mallock, all the extra wealth, amounting to £800,000,000 a year, is earned by the _machines_, and ought to be paid to the men who _own_ the machines. Pretty reasoning, isn't it? And Mr. Mallock is one of those who talk about the inaccurate thinking of Socialists. Let us see what it comes to. John Smith invents a machine which makes three yards of calico where one was made by hand. Tom Jones buys the machine, or the patent, to make calico. Which of these men is the cause of the calico output being multiplied by three? Is it the man who owns the patent, or the man who invented the machine? It is the man who invented the machine. It is the ability of John Smith which caused the increase in the calico output. It is, therefore, the ability of John Smith which earns the extra wealth. Tom Jones, who bought the machines, is no more the producer of that _extra_ wealth than are the spinners and weavers he employs. To whom, then, should the extra wealth belong? To the man who creates it? or to the man who does not create it? Clearly the wealth should belong to the man who creates it. Therefore, the whole of the extra wealth should go to the inventor, to whose ability it is due, and _not_ to the mere capitalist, who only uses the machine. "But," you may say, "Jones bought the patent from Smith." He did. And he also buys their labour and skill from the spinners and weavers who work for him, and in all three cases he pays less than the thing he buys is worth. Mr. Mallock makes a great point of telling us that men are not equally clever, that cleverness produces more wealth than labour produces, and that one man is worth more than another to the nation. Labour, he says, is common to all men, but ability is the monopoly of the few. The bulk of the wealth is produced by the few, and ought by them to be enjoyed. But I don't think any Socialist ever claimed that all men were of equal value to the nation, nor that any one man could produce just as much wealth as any other. We know that one man is stronger than another, that one is cleverer than another, and that an inventor or thinker may design or invent some machine or process which will enable the workers to produce more wealth in one year than they could by their own methods produce in twenty. Now, before we go into the matter of the inventor, or of the value of genius to the nation, let us test these ideas of Mr. W. H. Mallock's and see what they lead to. A man invents a machine which does the work of ten handloom weavers. He is therefore worth more, as a weaver, than the ordinary weaver who invents nothing. How much more? If his machine does the work of ten men, you might think he was worth ten men. But he is worth very much more. Suppose there are 10,000 weavers, and all of them use his machine. They will produce not 10,000 men's work, but 100,000 men's work. Here, then, our inventor is equal to 90,000 weavers. That is to say, that his thought, his idea, his labour _produces_ as much wealth as could be produced by 100,000 weavers without it. On no theory of value, and on no grounds of reason that I know, can we claim that this inventor is of no more value, as a producer, than an ordinary, average handloom weaver. Granting the claim of the non-Socialist, that every man belongs to himself; and granting the claim of Mr. Mallock, that two-thirds of our national wealth are produced by inventors; and granting the demand of exact mathematical justice, that every man shall receive the exact value of the wealth he produces; it would follow that two-thirds of the wealth of this nation would be paid yearly to the inventors, or to their heirs or assigns. The wealth is _not_ to be paid to labour; that is Mr. Mallock's claim. And it is not to be paid to labour because it has been earned by ability. And Mr. Mallock tells us that labour does not vary nor increase in its productive power. Good. Neither does the landlord nor the capitalist increase his productive power. Therefore it is not the landlord nor the capitalist who earns--or produces--this extra wealth; it is the inventor. And since the labourer is not to have the wealth, because he does not produce it, neither should the landlord or capitalist have it, because he does not produce it. So much for the _right_ of the thing. Mr. Mallock shows that the inventor creates all this extra wealth; he shows that the inventor ought to have it. Good. Now, how is it that the inventor does _not_ get it, and how is it that the landlord and the capitalist _do_ get it? Just because the laws, which have been made by landlords and capitalists, enable these men to rob the inventor and the labourer with impunity. Thus: A man owns a piece of land in a town. As the town increases its business and population, the owner of the land raises the rent. He can get double the rent because the town has doubled its trade, and the land is worth more for business purposes or for houses. Has the landlord increased the value? Not at all. He has done nothing but draw the rent. The increase of value is due to the industry or ability of the people who live and work in the town, chiefly, as Mr. Mallock claims, to different inventors. Do these inventors get the increased rent? No. Do the workers in the town get it? No. The landlord demands this extra rent, and the law empowers him to evict if the rent is not paid. Next, let us see how the inventor is treated. If a man invents a machine and patents it, the law allows him to charge a royalty for its use for the space of fourteen years. At the end of that time the patent lapses, and the invention may be worked by anyone. Observe here the difference of the treatment given to the inventor and the landlord. The landlord does not make the land, he does not till the land, he does not improve the land; he only draws the rent, and he draws that _for ever_. _His_ patent never lapses; and the harder the workers work, and the more wealth inventors and workers produce, the more rent he draws--for nothing. The inventor _does_ make his invention. He is, upon Mr. Mallock's showing, the creator of immense wealth. And, even if he is lucky, he can only draw rent on his ability for fourteen years. But suppose the inventor is a poor man--and a great many inventors are poor men--his chance of getting paid for his ability is very small. Because, to begin with, he has to pay a good deal to patent his invention, and then, often enough, he needs capital to work the patent, and has none. What is he to do? He must find a capitalist to work the patent for him, or he must find a man rich enough to buy it from him. And it very commonly happens, either that the poor man cannot pay the renewal fees for his patent, and so loses it entirely, or that the capitalist buys it out and out for an old song, or that the capitalist obliges him to accept terms which give a huge profit to the capitalist and a small royalty to the inventor. The patent laws are so constructed as to make the poor inventor an easy prey to the capitalist. Many inventors die poor, many are robbed by agents or capitalists, many lose their patents because they cannot pay the renewal fees. Even when an inventor is lucky he can only draw rent for fourteen years. We see, then, that the men who make most of the wealth are hindered and robbed by the law, and we know that the law has been made by capitalists and landlords. Apply the same law to land that is applied to patents, and the whole land of England would be public property in fourteen years. Apply the same law to patents that is applied to land, and every article we use would be increased in price, and we should still be paying royalties to the descendants, or to their assigns, of James Watt, George Stephenson, and ten thousand other inventors. And now will some non-Socialist, Mr. Mallock or another, write a nice new book, and explain to us upon what rules of justice or of reason the present unequal treatment of the useless, idle landlord and the valuable and industrious inventor can be defended? CHAPTER V THE LANDLORD'S RIGHTS AND THE PEOPLE'S RIGHTS Socialists are often accused of being advocates of violence and plunder. You will be told, no doubt, that Socialists wish to take the land from its present owners, by force, and "share it out" amongst the landless. Socialists have no more idea of taking the land from its present holders and "sharing it out" amongst the poor than they have of taking the railways from the railway companies and sharing the carriages and engines amongst the passengers. When the London County Council municipalised the tram service they did not rob the companies, nor did they share out the cars amongst the people. _Socialism_ does not mean the "sharing out" of property; on the contrary, it means the collective ownership of property. "Britain for the British" does not mean one acre and half a cow for each subject; it means that Britain shall be owned intact by the whole people, and shall be governed and worked by the whole people, for the benefit of the whole people. Just as the Glasgow tram service, the Manchester gas service, and the general postal service are owned, managed, and used by the citizens of Manchester and Glasgow, or by the people of Britain, for the general advantage. You will be told that the present holders of the land have as much right to the land as you have to your hat or your boots. Now, as a matter of law and of right, the present holders of the land have no fixed title to the land. But moderation, it has been well said, is the common sense of politics, and if we all got bare justice, "who," as Shakespeare asks, "would 'scape whipping?" Socialists propose, then, to act moderately and to temper justice with amity. They do not suggest the "confiscation" of the land. They do suggest that the land should be taken over by the nation, at a fair price. But what is a fair price? The landlord, standing upon his alleged rights, may demand a price out of all reason and beyond all possibility. Therefore I propose here to examine the nature of those alleged rights, and to compare the claims of the landholders with the practice of law as it is applied to holders of property in brains; that is to say, as it is applied to authors and to inventors. Private ownership of land rests always on one of three pleas-- 1. The right of conquest: the land has been stolen or "won" by the owner or his ancestors. 2. The right of gift: the land has been received as a gift, bequest, or grant. 3. The right of purchase: the land has been bought and paid for. Let us deal first with the rights of gift and purchase. It is manifest that no man can have a moral right to anything given or sold to him by another person who had no right to the thing given or sold. He who buys a watch, a horse, a house, or any other article from one who has no right to the horse, or house, or watch, must render up the article to the rightful owner, and lose the price or recover it from the seller. If a man has no moral right to own land, he can have no moral right to sell or give land. If a man has no moral right to sell or to give land, then another man can have no moral right to keep land bought or received in gift from him. So that to test the right of a man to land bought by or given to him, we must trace the land back to its original title. Now, the original titles of most land rest upon conquest or theft. Either the land was won from the Saxons by William the Conqueror, and by him given in fief to his barons, or it has been stolen from the common right and "enclosed" by some lord of the manor or other brigand. I am sorry to use the word brigand, but what would you call a man who stole your horse or watch; and it is a far greater crime to steal land. Now, stolen land carries no title, except one devised by landlords. That is, there is no _moral_ title. So we come to the land "won" from the Saxons. The title of this land is the title of conquest, and only by that title can it be held, and only with that title can it be sold. What the sword has won the sword must hold. He who has taken land by force has a title to it only so long as he can hold it by force. This point is neatly expressed in a story told by Henry George-- A nobleman stops a tramp, who is crossing his park, and orders him off _his_ land. The tramp asks him how came the land to be his? The noble replies that he inherited it from his father. "How did _he_ get it?" asks the tramp. "From his father," is the reply; and so the lord is driven back to the proud days of his origin--the Conquest. "And how did your great, great, great, etc., grandfather get it?" asks the tramp. The nobleman draws himself up, and replies, "He fought for it and won it." "Then," says the unabashed vagrant, beginning to remove his coat, "I will fight _you_ for it." The tramp was quite logical. Land won by the sword may be rewon by the sword, and the right of conquest implies the right of any party strong enough for the task to take the conquered land from its original conqueror. And yet the very men who claim the land as theirs by right of ancient conquest would be the first to deny the right of conquest to others. They claim the land as theirs because eight hundred years ago their fathers took it from the English people, but they deny the right of the English people to take it back from them. A duke holds lands taken by the Normans under William. He holds them by right of the fact that his ancestor stole them, or, as the duke would say, "won" them. But let a party of revolutionaries propose to-day to win these lands back from him in the same manner, and the duke would cry out, "Thief! thief! thief!" and call for the protection of the law. It would be "immoral" and "illegal," the duke would say, for the British people to seize his estates. Should such a proposal be made, the modern duke would not defend himself, as his ancestors did, by force of arms, but would appeal to the law. Who made the law? The law was made by the same gentlemen who appropriated and held the land. As the Right Hon. Joseph Chamberlain said in his speech at Denbigh in 1884-- The House of Lords, that club of Tory landlords, in its gilded chamber, has disposed of the welfare of the people with almost exclusive regard to the interests of a class. Or, as the same statesman said at Hull in 1885-- The rights of property have been so much extended that the rights of the community have almost altogether disappeared, and it is hardly too much to say that the prosperity and the comfort and the liberties of a great proportion of the population have been laid at the feet of a small number of proprietors, who neither toil nor spin. Well, then, the duke may defend his right by duke-made law. We do not object to that, for it justifies us in attacking him by Parliament-made law: by new law, made by a Parliament of the people. Is there any law of equity which says it is unjust to take by force from a robber what the robber took by force from another robber? Or is there any law of equity which says it is unjust that a law made by a Parliament of landlords should not be reversed by another law made by a Parliament of the people? The landlords will call this an "immoral" proposal. It is based upon the claim that the land is wanted for the use and advantage of the nation. Their lordships may ask for precedent. I will provide them with one. A landlord does not make the land; he holds it. But if a man invent a new machine or a new process, or if he write a poem or a book, he may claim to have made the invention or the book, and may justly claim payment for the use of them by other men. An inventor or an author has, therefore, a better claim to payment for his work than a landlord has to payment for the use of the land he calls his. Now, how does the law act towards these men? The landlord may call the land his all the days of his life, and at his death may bequeath it to his heirs. For a thousand years the owners of an estate may charge rent for it, and at the end of the thousand years the estate will still be theirs, and the rent will still be running on and growing ever larger and larger. And at any suggestion that the estate should lapse from the possession of the owners and become the property of the people, the said owners will lustily raise the cry of "Confiscation." The patentee of an invention may call the invention his own, and may charge royalties upon its use for _a space of fourteen years_. At the end of that time his patent lapses and becomes public property, without any talk of compensation or any cry of confiscation. Thus the law holds that an inventor is well paid by fourteen years' rent for a thing he made himself, while the landlord is _never_ paid for the land he did not make. The author of a book holds the copyright of the book for a period of forty-four years, or for his own life and seven years after, whichever period be the longer. At the expiration of that time the book becomes public property. Thus the law holds that an author is well paid by forty-four years' rent for a book which he has made, but that the landlord is _never_ paid for the land which he did not make. If the same law that applies to the land applied to books and to inventions, the inheritors of the rights of Caxton and Shakespeare would still be able to charge, the one a royalty on every printing press in use, and the other a royalty on every copy of Shakespeare's poems sold. Then there would be royalties on all the looms, engines, and other machines, and upon all the books, music, engravings, and what not; so that the cost of education, recreation, travel, clothing, and nearly everything else we use would be enhanced enormously. But, thanks to a very wise and fair arrangement an author or an inventor has a good chance to be well paid, and after that the people have a chance to enjoy the benefits of his genius. Now, if it is right and expedient thus to deprive the inventor or the author of his own production after a time, and to give the use thereof to the public, what sense or justice is there in allowing a landowner to hold land and to draw an ever-swelling rent to the exclusion, inconvenience, and expense of the people for ever? And by what process of reasoning can a landlord charge me, an author, with immorality or confiscation for suggesting that the same law should apply to the land he did not make, that I myself cheerfully allow to be applied to the books I do make? For the landlord to speak of confiscation in the face of the laws of patent and of copyright seems to me the coolest impudence. But there is something else to be said of the landlord's title to the land. He claims the right to hold the land, and to exact rent for the land, on the ground that the land is lawfully his. The land is _not_ his. There is no such thing, and there never was any such thing, in English law as private ownership of land. In English law the land belongs to the Crown, and can only be held in trust by any subject. Allow me to give legal warranty for this statement. The great lawyer, Sir William Blackstone, says-- Accurately and strictly speaking, there is no foundation in nature or in natural law why a set of words on parchment should convey the dominion of land. Allodial (absolute) property no subject in England now has; it being a received and now undeniable principle in law, that all lands in England are holden mediately or immediately of the King. Sir Edward Coke says-- All lands or tenements in England in the hands of subjects, are holden mediately or immediately of the King. For, in the law of England, we have not any subject's land that is not holden. And Sir Frederick Pollock, in _English Land Lords_, says-- No absolute ownership of land is recognised by our law books, except in the Crown. All lands are supposed to be held immediately or mediately of the Crown, though no rent or service may be payable and no grant from the Crown on record. I explained at first that I do not suggest confiscation. Really the land is the King's, and by him can be claimed; but we will let that pass. Here we will speak only of what is reasonable and fair. Let me give a more definite idea of the hardships imposed upon the nation by the landlords. We all know how the landlord takes a part of the wealth produced by labour and calls it "rent." But that is only simple rent. There is a worse kind of rent, which I will call "compound rent." It is known to economists as "unearned increment." I need hardly remind you that rents are higher in large towns than in small villages. Why? Because land is more "valuable." Why is it more valuable? Because there is more trade done. Thus a plot of land in the city of London will bring in a hundredfold more rent than a plot of the same size in some Scottish valley. For people must have lodgings, and shops, and offices, and works in the places where their business lies. Cases have been known in which land bought for a few shillings an acre has increased within a man's lifetime to a value of many guineas a yard. This increase in value is not due to any exertion, genius, or enterprise on the part of the landowner. It is entirely due to the energy and intelligence of those who made the trade and industry of the town. The landowner sits idle while the Edisons, the Stephensons, the Jacquards, Mawdsleys, Bessemers, and the thousands of skilled workers expand a sleepy village into a thriving town; but when the town is built, and the trade is flourishing, he steps in to reap the harvest. He raises the rent. He raises the rent, and evermore raises the rent, so that the harder the townsfolk work, and the more the town prospers, the greater is the price he charges for the use of his land. This extortionate rent is really a fine inflicted by idleness on industry. It is simple _plunder_, and is known by the technical name of unearned increment. It is unearned increment which condemns so many of the workers in our British towns to live in narrow streets, in back-to-back cottages, in hideous tenements. It is unearned increment which forces up the death-rate and fosters all manner of disease and vice. It is unearned increment which keeps vast areas of London, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, and all our large towns ugly, squalid, unhealthy, and vile. And unearned increment is an inevitable outcome and an invariable characteristic of the private ownership of land. On this subject Professor Thorold Rogers said-- Every permanent improvement of the soil, every railway and road, every bettering of the general condition of society, every facility given for production, every stimulus applied to consumption, _raises rent_. The landowner sleeps, but thrives. The volume of this unearned increment is tremendous. Mr. H. B. Haldane, M.P., speaking at Stepney in 1894, declared that the land upon which London stands would be worth, apart from its population and special industries, "at the outside not more than £16,000 a year." Instead of which "the people pay in rent for the land alone £16,000,000, and, with the buildings, £40,000,000 a year." Those £16,000,000 constitute a fine levied upon the workers of London by landlords. A similar state of affairs exists in the country, where the farms are let chiefly on short leases. Here the tenant having improved his land has often lost his improvements, or, for fear of losing the improvements, has not improved his land nor even farmed it properly. In either case the landlord has been enriched while the tenant or the public has suffered. A landlord has an estate which no farmer can make pay. A number of labourers take small plots at £5 an acre, and go in for flower culture. They work so hard, and become so skilful, that they get £50 an acre for their produce. And the landlord raises the rent to £40 an acre. That is "unearned increment," or "compound rent." The landlord could not make the estate pay, the farmer could not make it pay. The labourer, by his own skill and industry, does make it pay, and the landlord takes the proceeds. And these are the men who talk about confiscation and robbery! Do I blame the landlord? Not very much. But I blame the people for allowing him to deprive their wives and children of the necessaries, the decencies, and the joys of life. But if you wish to know more about the treatment of tenants by landlords in England, Scotland, and Ireland, get a book called _Land Nationalisation_, by Dr. Alfred Russell Wallace, published by Swan Sonnenschein, at 1s. That private landowners should be allowed to take millions out of the pockets of the workers is neither just nor reasonable. There is no argument in favour of landlordism that would not hold good in the case of a private claim to the sea and the air. Imagine a King or Parliament granting to an individual the exclusive ownership of the Bristol Channel or the air of Cornwall! Such a grant would rouse the ridicule of the whole nation. The attempt to enforce such a grant would cause a revolution. But in what way is such a grant more iniquitous or absurd than is the claim of a private citizen to the possession of Monsall Dale, or Sherwood Forest, or Covent Garden Market, or the corn lands of Essex, or the iron ore of Cumberland? The Bristol Channel, the river Thames, all our high roads, and most of our bridges are public property, free for the use of all. No power in the kingdom could wrest a yard of the highway nor an acre of green sea from the possession of the nation. It is right that the road and the river, the sea and the air should be the property of the people; it is expedient that they should be the property of the people. Then by what right or by what reason can it be held that the land--Britain herself--should belong to any man, or by any man be withheld from the people--who are the British nation? But it may be thought, because I am a Socialist, and neither rich nor influential, that my opinion should be regarded with suspicion. Allow me to offer the authority of more eminent men. The late Lord Chief-Justice Coleridge said, in 1887-- These (our land laws) might be for the general advantage, and if they could be shown to be so, by all means they should be maintained; but if not, does any man, with what he is pleased to call his mind, deny that a state of law under which such mischief could exist, under which the country itself would exist, not for its people, but for a mere handful of them, ought to be instantly and absolutely set aside? Two years later, in 1889, the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone said-- Those persons who possess large portions of the earth's space are not altogether in the same position as possessors of mere personality. Personality does not impose limitations on the action and industry of man and the well-being of the community as possession of land does, and therefore _I freely own that compulsory expropriation is a thing which is admissible, and even sound in principle_. Speaking at Hull, in August 1885, the Right Hon. Joseph Chamberlain said-- The soil of every country originally belonged to its inhabitants, and if it has been thought expedient to create private ownership in place of common rights, at least that private ownership must be considered as a trust, and subject to the conditions of a trust. And again, at Inverness, in September 1885, Mr. Chamberlain said-- When an exorbitant rent is demanded, which takes from a tenant the savings of his life, and turns him out at the end of his lease stripped of all his earnings, when a man is taxed for his own improvements, that is confiscation, and it is none the less reprehensible because it is sanctioned by the law. These views of the land question are not merely the views of ignorant demagogues, but are fully indorsed by great lawyers, great statesmen, great authors, great divines, and great economists. What is the principle which these eminent men teach? It is the principle enforced in the patent law, in the income tax, and in the law of copyright, that the privileges and claims, even the _rights_ of the few, must give way to the needs of the many and the welfare of the whole. What, then, do we propose to do? I think there are very few Socialists who wish to confiscate the land without any kind of compensation. But all Socialists demand that the land shall return to the possession of the people. Britain for the British! What could be more just? How are the people to get the land? There are many suggestions. Perhaps the fairest would be to allow the landowner the same latitude that is allowed to the inventor, who, as Mr. Mallock claims, is really the creator of two-thirds of our wealth. We allow the inventor to draw rent on his patent for fourteen years. Why not limit the private possession of land to the same term? Pay the present owners of land the full rent for fourteen or, say, twenty years, or, in a case where land has been bought in good faith, within the past fifty years, allow the owner the full rent for thirty years. This would be more than we grant our inventors, though they _add_ to the national wealth, whereas the landlord simply takes wealth away from the national store. The method I here advise would require a "Compulsory Purchase Act" to compel landowners to sell their land at a fair price to the nation when and wherever the public convenience required it. This view is expressed clearly in a speech made by the Right Hon. Joseph Chamberlain at Trowbridge in 1885-- We propose that local authorities shall have power in every case to take land by compulsion at a fair price for every public purpose, and that they should be able to let the land again, with absolute security of tenure, for allotments and for small holdings. Others, again, recommend a land tax, and with perfect justice. If the City Council improves a street, at the cost of the ratepayer, the landlord raises his rent. What does that mean? It means that the ratepayer has increased the value of the landlord's property at the cost of the rates. It would only be just, then, that the whole increase should be taken back from the landlord by the city. Therefore, it would be quite just to tax the landlords to the full extent of their "unearned increment." In _Progress and Poverty_, and in the book on _Land Nationalisation_ by Dr. Alfred Russell Wallace, you will find these subjects of the taxation and the purchase of land fully and clearly treated. My object is to show that it is to the interest of the nation that the private ownership of land should cease. _Books to Read on the Land_:-- _Progress and Poverty._ By Henry George, 1s. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Co. _Land Nationalisation._ By Alfred Russell Wallace, 1s. Swan Sonnenschein. _Five Precursors of Henry George._ By J. Morrison Davidson. London, Labour Leader Office, 1s. CHAPTER VI LUXURY AND THE GREAT USEFUL EMPLOYMENT FRAUD There is one excuse which is still too often made for the extravagance of the rich, and that is the excuse that "_The consumption of luxuries by the rich finds useful employment for the poor_." It is a ridiculous excuse, and there is no eminent economist in the world who does not laugh at it; but the capitalist, the landlord, and many pressmen still think it is good enough to mislead or silence the people with. As it is the _only_ excuse the rich have to offer for their wasteful expenditure and costly idleness, it is worth while taking pains to convince the workers that it is no excuse at all. It is a mere error or falsehood, of course, but it is such an old-established error, such a plausible lie, and is repeated so often and so loudly by non-Socialists, that its disproof is essential. Indeed, I regard it as a matter of great importance that this subject of luxury and labour should be thoroughly understanded of the people. Here is this rich man's excuse, or defence, as it was stated by the Duke of Argyll about a dozen years ago. So slowly do the people learn, and so ignorant or dishonest does the Press remain, that the foolish statement is still quite up to date-- But there are at least some things to be seen which are in the nature of facts and not at all in the nature of speculation or mere opinion. Amongst these some become clear from the mere clearing up of the meaning of words such as "the unemployed." Employment in this sense is the hiring of manual labour for the supply of human wants. _The more these wants are stimulated and multiplied the more widespread will be the inducement to hire. Therefore all outcries and prejudices against the progress of wealth and of what is called "luxury" are nothing but outcries of prejudice against the very sources and fountains of all employment._ This conclusion is absolutely certain. I have no doubt at all that the duke honestly believed that statement, and I daresay there are hundreds of eminent persons still alive who are no wiser than he. The duke is quite correct in saying that "the more the wants of the rich are stimulated" the more employment there will be for the people. But after all, that only means that the more the rich waste, the harder the poor must work. The fact is, the duke has omitted the most essential factor from the sum: he does not say how the rich man gets his money, nor from _whom_ he gets his money. A ducal landlord draws, say, £100,000 a year in rent from his estates. Who pays the rent? The farmers. Who earns the rent? The farmers and the labourers. These men earn and pay the rent, and the ducal landlord takes it. What does the duke do with the rent? He spends it. We are told that he spends it in finding useful employment for the poor, and one intelligent newspaper says-- A rich man cannot spend his money without finding employment for vast numbers of people who, without him, would starve. That implies that the poor live on the rich. Now, I maintain that the rich live on the poor. Let us see. The duke buys food, clothing, and lodging for himself, for his family, and for his servants. He buys, let us say, a suit of clothes for himself. That finds work for a tailor. And we are told that but for the duke the tailor must starve. _Why?_ The agricultural labourer is badly in want of clothes; cannot _he_ find the tailor work? No. The labourer wants clothes, but he has no money. _Why_ has he no money? _Because the duke has taken his clothing money for rent!_ Then in the first place it is because the duke has taken the labourer's money that the tailor has no work. Then if the duke did not take the labourer's money the labourer could buy clothes? Yes. Then if the duke did not take the labourer's money the tailor _would_ have work? Yes. Then it is not the duke's money, but the labourer's money, which keeps the tailor from starving? Yes. Then in this case the duke is no use? He is worse than useless. The labourer, who _earns_ the money, has no clothes, and the idle duke has clothes. So that what the duke really does is to take the earnings of the labourer and spend them on clothes for _himself_. Well, suppose I said to a farmer, "You give me five shillings a week out of your earnings, and I will find employment for a man to make cigars, _I_ will smoke the cigars." What would the farmer say? Would he not say, "Why should I employ you to smoke cigars which I pay for? If the cigar maker needs work, why should I not employ him myself, and smoke the cigars myself, since I am to pay for them?" Would not the farmer speak sense? And would not the labourer speak sense if he said to the duke, "Why should I employ you to wear out breeches which I pay for?" My offer to smoke the farmer's cigars is no more impudent than the assertion of the Duke of Argyll, that he, the duke, finds employment for a tailor by wearing out clothes for which the farmer has to pay. If the farmer paid no rent, _he_ could employ the tailor, and he would have the clothes. The duke does nothing more than deprive the farmer of his clothes. But this is not the whole case against the duke. The duke does not spend _all_ the rent in finding work for the poor. He spends a good deal of it on food and drink for himself and his dependants. This wealth is consumed--it is _wasted_, for it is consumed by men who produce nothing. And it all comes from the earnings of the men who pay the rent. Therefore, if the farmer and his men, instead of giving the money to the duke for rent, could spend it on themselves, they would find more employment for the poor than the duke can, because they would be able to spend all that the duke and his enormous retinue of servants waste. Although the duke (with the labourer's money) does find work for some tailors, milliners, builders, bootmakers, and others, yet he does not find work for them all. There are always some tailors, bootmakers, and builders out of work. Now, I understand that in this country about £14,000,000 a year are spent on horse-racing and hunting. This is spent by the rich. If it were not spent on horse-racing and hunting, it could be spent on useful things, and then, perhaps, there would be fewer tailors and other working men out of work. But you may say, "What then would become of the huntsmen, jockeys, servants, and others who now live on hunting and on racing?" A very natural question. Allow me to explain the difference between necessaries and luxuries. All the things made or used by man may be divided into two classes, under the heads of necessaries and luxuries. I should count as necessaries all those things which are essential to the highest form of human life. All those things which are not necessary to the highest form of human life I should call luxuries, or superfluities. For instance, I should call food, clothing, houses, fuel, books, pictures, and musical instruments, necessaries; and I should call diamond ear-rings, racehorses, and broughams luxuries. Now it is evident that all those things, whether luxuries or necessaries, are made by labour. Diamond rings, loaves of bread, grand pianos, and flat irons do not grow on trees; they must be made by the labour of the people. And it is very clear that the more luxuries a people produce, the fewer necessaries they will produce. If a community consists of 10,000 people, and if 9000 people are making bread and 1000 are making jewellery, it is evident that there will be more bread than jewellery. If in the same community 9000 make jewellery and only 1000 make bread, there will be more jewellery than bread. In the first case there will be food enough for all, though jewels be scarce. In the second case the people must starve, although they wear diamond rings on all their fingers. In a well-ordered State no luxuries would be produced until there were enough necessaries for all. Robinson Crusoe's first care was to secure food and shelter. Had he neglected his goats and his raisins, and spent his time in making shell-boxes, he would have starved. Under those circumstances he would have been a fool. But what are we to call the delicate and refined ladies who wear satin and pearls, while the people who earn them lack bread? Take a community of two men. They work upon a plot of land and grow grain for food. By each working six hours a day they produce enough food for both. Now take one of those men away from the cultivation of the land, and set him to work for six hours a day at the making of bead necklaces. What happens? This happens--that the man who is left upon the land must now work twelve hours a day. Why? Because although his companion has ceased to grow grain he has not ceased to _eat bread_. Therefore the man who grows the grain must now grow grain enough for two. That is to say, that the more men are set to the making of luxuries, the heavier will be the burden of the men who produce necessaries. But in this case, you see, the farmer does get some return for his extra labour. That is to say, he gets half the necklaces in exchange for half his grain; for there is no rich man. Suppose next a community of three--one of whom is a landlord, while the other two are farmers. The landlord takes half the produce of the land in rent, but does no work. What happens? We saw just now that the two workers could produce enough grain in six hours to feed two men for one day. Of this the landlord takes half. Therefore, the two men must now produce four men's food in one day, of which the landlord will take two, leaving the workers each one. Well, if it takes a man six hours to produce a day's keep for one, it will take him twelve hours to produce a day's keep for two. So that our two farmers must now work twice as long as before. But now the landlord has got twice as much grain as he can eat. He therefore proceeds to _spend_ it, and in spending it he "finds useful employment" for one of the farmers. That is to say, he takes one of the farmers off the land and sets him to building a house for the landlord. What is the effect of this? The effect of it is that the one man left upon the land has now to find food for all three, and in return gets nothing. Consider this carefully. All men must eat, and here are two men who do not produce food. To produce food for one man takes one man six hours. To produce food for three men takes one man eighteen hours. The one man left on the land has, therefore, to work three times as long, or three times as hard, as he did at first. In the case of the two men, we saw that the farmer did get his share of the bead necklaces, but in the case of the three men the farmer gets nothing. The luxuries produced by the man taken from the land are enjoyed by the rich man. The landlord takes from the farmer two-thirds of his produce, and employs another man to help him to spend it. We have here three classes-- 1. The landlord, who does no work. 2. The landlord's servant, who does work for the benefit of the landlord. 3. The farmer, who produces food for himself and the other two. Now, all the peoples of Europe, if not of the world, are divided into those three classes. And it is _most important_ that you should thoroughly understand those three classes, never forget them, and never allow the rich man, nor the champions of the rich man, to forget them. The jockeys, huntsmen, and flunkeys alluded to just now, belong to the class who work, but whose work is all done for the benefit of the idle. Do not be deceived into supposing that there are but _two_ classes: there are _three_. Do not believe that the people may be divided into workers and idlers: they must be divided into (1) idlers, (2) workers who work for the idlers, and (3) workers who support the idlers and those who work for the idlers. These three classes are a relic of the feudal times: they represent the barons, the vassals, and the retainers. The rich man is the baron, who draws his wealth from the workers; the jockeys, milliners, flunkeys, upholsterers, designers, musicians, and others who serve the rich man, and live upon his custom and employment, are the retainers; the workers, who earn the money upon which the rich man and his following exist, are the vassals. Remember the _three_ classes: the rich, who produce nothing; the employees of the rich, who produce luxuries for the rich; and the workers, who find everything for themselves and all the wealth for the other two classes. It is like two men on one donkey. The duke rides the donkey, and boasts that he carries the flunkey on his back. So he does. But the donkey carries both flunkey and duke. Clearly, then, the duke confers no favour on the agricultural labourer by employing jockeys and servants, for the labourer has to pay for them, and the duke gets the benefit of their services. But the duke confers a benefit on the men he employs as huntsmen and servants, and without the duke they would starve? No; without him they would not starve, for the wealth which supports them would still exist, and they could be found other work, and could even add to the general store of wealth by producing some by their own labour. The same remark applies to all those of the second class, from the fashionable portrait-painter and the diamond-cutter down to the scullery-maid and the stable-boy. Compare the position of an author of to-day with the position of an author in the time of Dr. Johnson. In Johnson's day the man of genius was poor and despised, dependent on rich patrons: in our day the man of genius writes for the public, and the rich patron is unknown. The best patron is the People; the best employer is the People; the proper person to enjoy luxuries is the man who works for and creates them. My Lady Dedlock finds useful employment for Mrs. Jones. She employs Mrs. Jones to make her ladyship a ball-dress. Where does my lady get her money? She gets it from her husband, Sir Leicester Dedlock, who gets it from his tenant farmer, who gets it from the agricultural labourer, Hodge. Then her ladyship orders the ball-dress of Mrs. Jones, and pays her with Hodge's money. But if Mrs. Jones were not employed making the ball-dress for my Lady Dedlock, she could be making gowns for Mrs. Hodge, or frocks for Hodge's girls. Whereas now Hodge cannot buy frocks for his children, and his wife is a dowdy, because Sir Leicester Dedlock has taken Hodge's earnings and given them to his lady to buy ball costumes. Take a larger instance. There are many yachts which, in building and decoration, have cost a quarter of a million. Average the wages of all the men engaged in the erection and fitting of such a vessel at 30s. a week. We shall find that the yacht has "found employment" for 160 men for twenty years. Now, while those men were engaged on that work they produced no necessaries for themselves. But they _consumed_ necessaries, and those necessaries were produced by the same people who found the money for the owner of the yacht to spend. That is to say, that the builders were kept by the producers of necessaries, and the producers of necessaries were paid for the builders' keep, with money which they, the producers of necessaries, had earned for the owner of the yacht. The conclusion of this sum being that the producers of necessaries had been compelled to support 160 men, and their wives and children, for twenty years; and for what? That they might build _one yacht_ for the pleasure of _one idle man_. Would those yacht builders have starved without the rich man? Not at all. But for the rich man, the other workers would have had more money, could afford more holidays, and that quarter of a million spent on the one yacht would have built a whole fleet of pleasure boats. And note also that the pleasure boats would find more employment than the yacht, for there would be more to spend on labour and less on costly materials. So with other dependants of the rich. The duke's gardeners could find work in public parks for the people; the artists, who now sell their pictures to private collections, could sell them to public galleries; and some of the decorators and upholsterers who now work on the rich men's palaces might turn their talents to our town halls and hospitals and public pavilions. And that reminds me of a quotation from Mr. Mallock, cited in _Merrie England_. Mr. Mallock said-- Let us take, for instance, a large and beautiful cabinet, for which a rich man of taste pays £2000. The cabinet is of value to him for reasons which we will consider presently; as possessed by him it constitutes a portion of his wealth. But how could such a piece of wealth be distributed? Not only is it incapable of physical partition and distribution, but, if taken from the rich man and given to the poor man, the latter is not the least enriched by it. Put a priceless buhl cabinet into an Irish labourer's cottage, and it will probably only add to his discomforts; or, if he finds it useful, it will only be because he keeps his pigs in it. A picture by Titian, again, may be worth thousands, but it is worth thousands only to the man who can enjoy it. Now, isn't that a precious piece of nonsense? There are two things to be said about that rich man's cabinet. The first is, that it was made by some workman who, if he had not been so employed, might have been producing what _would_ be useful to the poor. So that the cabinet has cost the poor something. The second is, that a priceless buhl cabinet _can_ be divided. Of course, it would be folly to hack it into shavings and serve them out amongst the mob; but if that cabinet is a thing of beauty and worth the seeing, it ought to be taken from the rich benefactor, whose benefaction consists in his having plundered it from the poor, and it ought to be put into a public museum where thousands could see it, and where the rich man could see it also if he chose. This, indeed, is the proper way to deal with all works of art, and this is one of the rich man's greatest crimes--that he keeps hoarded up in his house a number of things that ought to be the common heritage of the people. Every article of luxury has to be paid for not in _money_, but in _labour_. Every glass of wine drunk by my lord, and every diamond star worn by my lady, has to be paid for with the sweat and the tears of the poorest of our people. I believe it is a literal fact that many of the artificial flowers worn at Court are actually stained with the tears of the famished and exhausted girls who make them. To say that the extravagance of the rich finds useful employment for the poor, is more foolish than to say that the drunkard finds useful employment for the brewers. The drunkard may have a better defence than the duke, because he may perhaps have produced, or earned, the money he spends in beer, whereas the duke's rents are not produced by the duke nor earned by him. That is clear, is it not? And yet a few weeks since I saw an article in a London weekly paper in which we were told that the thief was an indispensable member of society, because he found employment for policemen, gaolers, builders of gaols, and other persons. The excuse for the thief is as valid as the excuse for the duke. The thief finds plenty of employment for the people. But who _pays_ the persons employed? The police, the gaolers, and all the other persons employed in catching, holding, and feeding the thief, are paid out of the rates and taxes. Who pays the taxes? The British public. Then the British public have to support not only the police and the rest, but the thief as well. What do the police, the thief, and the gaoler produce? Do they produce any wealth? No. They consume wealth, and the thief is so useful that if he died out for ever, it would pay us better to feed the gaolers and police for doing nothing than to fetch the thief back again to feed him as well. Work is useless unless it be productive work. It would be work for a man to dig a hole and then fill it up again; but the work would be of no benefit to the nation. It would be work for a man to grow strawberries to feed the Duke of Argyll's donkey on, but it would be useless work, because it would add nothing to the general store of wealth. Policemen and gaolers are men withdrawn from the work of producing wealth to wait upon useless criminals. They, like soldiers and many others, do not produce wealth, but they consume it, and the greater the number of producers and the smaller the number of consumers the richer the State must be. For which family would be the better off--the family wherein ten earned wages and none wasted them, or the family in which two earned wages and eight spent them? Do not imagine, as some do, that increased consumption is a blessing. It is the amount of wealth you produce that makes a nation prosperous; and the idle rich man, who produces nothing, only makes his crime worse by spending a great deal. The great mass of the workers lead mean, penurious, and joyless lives; they crowd into small and inconvenient houses; they occupy the darkest, narrowest, and dirtiest streets; they eat coarse and cheap food, when they do not go hungry; they drink adulterated beer and spirits; they wear shabby and ill-made clothes; they ride in third-class carriages, sit in the worst seats of the churches and theatres; and they stint their wives of rest, their children of education, and themselves of comfort and of honour, that they may pay rent, and interest, and profits for the idle rich to spend in luxury and folly. And if the workers complain, or display any signs of suspicion or discontent, they are told that the rich are keeping them. That is not _true_. It is the workers who are keeping the rich. CHAPTER VII WHAT SOCIALISM IS NOT It is no use telling you what _Socialism_ is until I have told you what it is not. Those who do not wish you to be Socialists have given you very false notions about _Socialism_, in the hope of setting you against it. They have brought many false charges against Socialists, in the hope of setting you against them. So you have come to think of _Socialism_ as a thing foolish, or vile, and when it is spoken of, you turn up your noses (instead of trying to see beyond them) and turn your backs on it. A friend offers to give you a good house-dog; but someone tells you it is mad. Your friend will be wise to satisfy you that the dog is _not_ mad before he begins to tell you how well it can guard a house. Because, as long as you think the dog will bite you, you are not in the frame of mind to hear about its usefulness. A sailor is offering to sell an African chief a telescope; but the chief has been told that the thing is a gun. Then before the sailor shows the chief what the glass is good for, he will be wise to prove to him that it will not go off at half-cock and blow his eye out. So with _Socialism_: before I try to show you what it really is, I must try to clear your mind of the prejudice which has been sown there by those who wish to make you hate Socialism because they fear it. As a rule, my friends, it will be wise for you to look very carefully and hopefully at anything which Parliament men, or employers, or pressmen, call bad or foolish, because what helps you hinders them, and the stronger you grow the weaker they become. Well, the men who have tried to smash your unions, who have written against you, and spoken against you, and acted against you in all great strikes and lock-outs, are the same men who speak and write against _Socialism_. And what have they told you? Let us take their commonest statements, and see what they are made of. They say that Socialists want to get up a revolution, to turn the country upside down by force, to seize all property, and to divide it equally amongst the whole people. We will take these charges one at a time. As to _Revolution_. I think I shall be right if I say that not one Socialist in fifty, at this day, expects or wishes to get _Socialism_ by force of arms. In the early days of _Socialism_, when there were very few Socialists, and some of those rash, or angry, men, it may have been true that _Socialism_ implied revolution and violence. But to-day there are very few Socialists who believe in brute force, or who think a revolution possible or desirable. The bulk of our Socialists are for peaceful and lawful means. Some of them hope to bring _Socialism_ to pass by means of a reformed Parliament; others hope to bring it to pass by means of a newer, wiser, and juster public opinion. I have always been dead against the idea of revolution, for many reasons. I do not think a revolution is _possible_ in Britain. Firstly, because the people have too much sense; secondly, because the people are by nature patient and kindly; thirdly, because the people are too _free_ to make force needful. I do not think a revolution is _advisable_. Because, firstly, it would be almost sure to fail; secondly, if it did not fail it would put the worst kind of men into power, and would destroy order and method before it was ready to replace them; thirdly, because a State built up on force is very likely to succumb to fraud; so that after great bloodshed, trouble, labour, and loss the people would almost surely slip down into worse evils than those against which they had fought, and would find that they had suffered and sinned in vain. I do not believe in force, and I do not believe in haste. What we want is _reason_ and _right_; and we can only hope to get reason and right by right and reasonable means. The men who would come to the top in a civil war would be fighters and strivers; they would not be the kind of men to wisely model and patiently and justly rule or lead a new State. Your barricade man may be very useful--at the barricades; but when the fighting is over, and his work is done, he may be a great danger, for he is not the man, usually, to stand aside and make way for the builders to replace by right laws the wrong laws which his arms have destroyed. Revolution by force of arms is not desirable nor feasible; but there is another kind of revolution from which we hope great things. This is a revolution of _thought_. Let us once get the people, or a big majority of the people, to understand _Socialism_, to believe in _Socialism_, and to work for _Socialism_, and the _real_ revolution is accomplished. In a free country, such as ours, the almighty voice is the voice of public opinion. What the public _believe in_ and _demand_ has got to be given. Who is to refuse? Neither King nor Parliament can stand against a united and resolute British people. And do not suppose, either, that brute force, which is powerless to get good or to keep it, has power to resist it or destroy it. Neither truncheons nor bayonets can kill a truth. The sword and the cannon are impotent against the pen and the tongue. Believe me, we can overcome the constable, the soldier, the Parliament man, the landlord, and the man of wealth, without shedding one drop of blood, or breaking one pane of glass, or losing one day's work. Our real task is to win the trust and help of the _people_ (I don't mean the workers only, but the British people), and the first thing to be done is to educate them--to teach them and tell them what we mean; to make quite clear to them what _Socialism_ is, and what it is _not_. One of the things it is not, is British imitation of the French Revolution. Our method is persuasion; our cause is justice; our weapons are the tongue and the pen. Next: As to seizing the wealth of the country and sharing it out amongst the people. First, we do not propose to _seize_ anything. We do propose to get some things,--the land, for instance,--and to make them the property of the whole nation; but we mean that to be done by Act of Parliament, and by purchase. Second, we have no idea of "sharing out" the land, nor the railways, nor the money, nor any other kind of wealth or property, equally amongst the people. To share these things out--if they _could_ be shared, which they could not be--would be to make them _private_ property, whereas we want them to be _public_ property, the property of the British _nation_. Yet, how often have you been told that Socialists want to have the wealth equally divided amongst all? And how often have you been told that if you divided the wealth in that way it would soon cease to be equally divided, because some would waste and some would save? "Make all men equal in possessions," cry the non-Socialists, "and in a very short time there would be rich and poor, as before." This is no argument against _Socialism_, for Socialists do not seek any such division. But I want to point out to you that though it _looks_ true, it is _not_ true. It is quite true that, did we divide all wealth equally to-morrow, there would in a short time be many penniless, and a few in a way of getting rich; but it is only true if we suppose that after the sharing we allowed private ownership of land and the old system of trade and competition to go on as before. Change those things: do away with the bad system which leads to poverty and to wealth, and we should have no more rich and poor. _Destroy_ all the wealth of England to-morrow--we will not talk of "sharing" it out, but _destroy_ it--and establish _Socialism_ on the ruins and the bareness, and in a few years we should have a prosperous, a powerful, and a contented nation. There would be no rich and there would be no poor. But the nation would be richer and happier than it ever has been. Another charge against Socialists is that they are _Atheists_, whose aim is to destroy all religion and all morality. This is not true. It is true that some Socialists are Agnostics and some are Atheists. But Atheism is no more a part of Socialism than it is a part of Toryism, or of Radicalism, or of Liberalism. Many prominent Socialists are Christians, not a few are clergymen. Many Liberal and Tory leaders are Agnostics or Atheists. Mr. Bradlaugh was a Radical, and an Atheist; Prof. Huxley was an opponent of Socialism, and an Agnostic. Socialism does not touch religion at any point. It deals with laws, and with _industrial_ and _political_ government. It is not sense to say, because some Atheists are Socialists, that all Socialists are Atheists. Christ's teaching is often said to be socialistic. It is not socialistic; but it is communistic, and Communism is the most advanced form of the policy generally known as _Socialism_. The charge of _Immorality_ is absurd. Socialists demand a higher morality than any now to be found. They demand perfect _honesty_. Indeed, it is just the stern morality of _Socialism_ which causes ambitious and greedy men to hate _Socialism_ and resist it. Another charge against Socialists is the charge of desiring _Free Love_. Socialists, it has been said, want to destroy home life, to abolish marriage, to take the children from their parents, and to establish "Free _Love_." "Free Love," I may say, means that all men and women shall be free to love as they please, and to live with whom they please. Therefore, that they shall be free to live as "man and wife" without marriage, to part when they please without divorce, and to take other partners as they please without shame or penalty. Now, I say of this charge, as I have said of the others, that there may be some Socialists in favour of free love, just as there are some Socialists in favour of revolution, and some who are not Christians; but I say also that a big majority of Socialists are not in favour of free love, and that in any case free love is no more a part of _Socialism_ than it is a part of Toryism or of Liberalism. It is not sense to say, because some Free-Lovers are Socialists, that all Socialists are Free-Lovers. I believe there is not one English Socialist in a hundred who would vote for doing away with marriage, or for handing over the children to the State. I for one would see the State farther before I would part with a child of mine. And I think you will generally find that those who are really eager to have all children given up to the State are men and women who have no children of their own. Now, I submit that a childless man is not the right man to make laws about children. As for the questions of free love and legal marriage, they are very hard to deal with, and this is not the time to deal with them. But I shall say here that many of those who talk the loudest about free love do not even know what love _is_, or have not sense enough to see that just as love and lust are two very different things, so are free love and free lust very different things. Again, you are not to fall into the error of supposing that the relations of the sexes are all they should be at present. Free _love_, it is true, is not countenanced; but free _lust_ is very common. And although some Socialists may be in favour of free _love_, I never heard of a Socialist who had a word to say in favour of prostitution. It may be a very wicked thing to enable a free woman to _give_ her love freely; but it is a much worse thing to allow, and even at times compel (for it amounts to that, by force of hunger) a free woman to _sell_ her love--no, not her _love_, poor creature; the vilest never sold that--but to sell her honour, her body, and her soul. I would do a great deal for _Socialism_ if it were only to do that one good act of wiping out for ever the shameful sin of prostitution. This thing, indeed, is so horrible that I never think of it without feeling tempted to apologise for calling myself a man in a country where it is so common as it is in moral Britain. There are several other common charges against Socialists; as that they are poor and envious--what we may call Have-nots-on-the-Have; that they are ignorant and incapable men, who know nothing, and cannot think; that, in short, they are failures and wasters, fools and knaves. These charges are as true and as false as the others. There may be some Socialists who are ignorant and stupid; there may be some who are poor _and_ envious; there may be some who are Socialists because they like cakes and ale better than work; and there may be some who are clever, but not too good--men who will feather their nests if they can find any geese for the plucking. But I don't think that _all_ Tories and Liberals are wise, learned, pure, unselfish, and clever men, eager to devote their talents to the good of their fellows, and unwilling to be paid, or thanked, or praised, for what they do. I think there are fools and knaves,--even in Parliament,--and that some of the "Bounders-on-the-Bounce" find it pays a great deal better to toady to the "Haves" than to sacrifice themselves to the "Have-nots." And I think I may claim that Socialists are in the main honest and sensible men, who work for _Socialism_ because they believe in it, and not because it pays; for its advocacy seldom pays at all, and it never pays well; and I am sure that _Socialism_ makes quicker progress amongst the educated than amongst the ignorant, and amongst the intelligent than amongst the dull. As for brains: I hope such men as William Morris, Karl Marx, and Liebknecht are as well endowed with brains as--well, let us be modest, and say as the average Tory or Liberal leader. But most of the charges and arguments I have quoted are not aimed at _Socialism_ at all, but at Socialists. Now, to prove that some of the men who espouse a cause are unworthy, is not the same thing as proving that the cause is bad. Some parsons are foolish, some are insincere; but we do not therefore say that Christianity is unwise or untrue. Even if _most_ parsons were really bad men we should only despise and condemn the clergy, and not the religion they dishonoured and misrepresented. The question is not whether all Socialists are as wise as Mr. Samuel Woods, M.P., or as honest as Jabez Balfour; _the_ question is whether _Socialism_ is a thing in itself just, and wise, and _possible_. If you find a Socialist who is foolish, laugh at him; it you find one who is a rogue, don't trust him; if you find one "on the make," stop his making. But as for _Socialism_, if it be good, accept it; if it be bad, reject it. Here allow me to quote a few lines from _Merrie England_-- Half our time as champions of Socialism is wasted in denials of false descriptions of Socialism; and to a large extent the anger, the ridicule, and the argument of the opponents of Socialism are hurled against a Socialism which has no existence except in their own heated minds. Socialism does not consist in violently seizing upon the property of the rich and sharing it out amongst the poor. Socialism is not a wild dream of a happy land where the apples will drop off the trees into our open mouths, the fish come out of the rivers and fry themselves for dinner, and the looms turn out ready-made suits of velvet with golden buttons without the trouble of coaling the engine. Neither is it a dream of a nation of stained-glass angels, who never say damn, who always love their neighbours better than themselves, and who never need to work unless they wish to. And now, having told you what _Socialism is not_, it remains for me to tell you what _Socialism is_. CHAPTER VIII WHAT SOCIALISM IS To those who are writing about such things as _Socialism_ or Political Economy, one of the stumbling-blocks is in the hard or uncommon words, and another in the tediousness--the "dryness"--of the arguments and explanations. It is not easy to say what has to be said so that anybody may see quite clearly what is meant, and it is still harder to say it so as to hold the attention and arouse the interest of men and women who are not used to reading or thinking about matters outside the daily round of their work and their play. As I want this book to be plain to all kinds of workers, even to those who have no "book-learning" and to whom a "hard word" is a "boggart," and a "dry" description or a long argument a weariness of the flesh, I must beg those of you who are more used to bookish talk and scientific terms (or names) to bear with me when I stop to show the meaning of things that to you are quite clear. If I can make my meaning plain to members of Parliament, bishops, editors, and other half-educated persons, and to labouring men and women who have had but little schooling, and have never been used to think or care about _Socialism_, or Economics, or Politics, or "any such dry rot"--as they would call them--if I can catch the ear of the heedless and the untaught, the rest of you cannot fail to follow. The terms, or names, used in speaking of Socialism--that is to say, the names given to ideas, or "thoughts," or to kinds of ideas, or "schools" of thought, are not easy to put into the plain words of common speech. To an untaught labourer _Socialism_ is a hard word, so is _Co-operation_; and such a phrase, or name, as _Political Economy_ is enough to clear a taproom, or break up a meeting, or close a book. So I want to steer clear of "hard words," and "dry talk," and long-windedness, and I want to tell my tale, if I can, in "tinker's English." _What is Socialism?_ There is more than one kind of _Socialism_, for we hear of State _Socialism_, of Practical _Socialism_, of Communal _Socialism_; and these kinds differ from each other, though they are all _Socialism_. So you have different kinds of Liberals. There are old-school Whigs, and advanced Whigs, and Liberals, and Radicals, and advanced Radicals; but they are all _Liberals_. So you have horse soldiers, foot soldiers, riflemen, artillery, and engineers; but they are all _soldiers_. Amongst the Liberals are men of many minds: there are Churchmen, Nonconformists, Atheists; there are teetotalers and there are drinkers; there are Trade Union leaders, and there are leaders of the Masters' Federation. These men differ on many points, but they all agree upon _one_ point. Amongst the Socialists are many men of many minds: there are parsons, atheists, labourers, employers, men of peace, and men of force. These men differ on many points, but they all agree upon _one_ point. Now, this point on which men of different views agree is called a _principle_. A principle is a main idea, or main thought. It is like the keelson of a ship or the backbone of a fish--it is the foundation on which the thing is built. Thus, the _principle_ of Trade Unionism is "combination," the combining, or joining together, of a number of workers, for the general good of all. The _principle_ of Democratic (or Popular) Government is the law that the will of the majority shall rule. Do away with the "right of combination," and Trade Unionism is destroyed. Do away with majority rule, and Popular Government is destroyed. So if we can find the _principle_ of _Socialism_, if we can find the one point on which all kinds of Socialists agree, we shall be able to see what _Socialism_ really is. Now, here in plain words is the _principle_, or root idea, on which _all_ Socialists agree-- That the country, and all the machinery of production in the country, shall belong to the whole people (the nation), and shall be used _by_ the people and _for_ the people. That "principle," the root idea of Socialism, means two things-- 1. That the land and all the machines, tools, and buildings used in making needful things, together with all the canals, rivers, roads, railways, ships, and trains used in moving, sharing (distributing) needful things, and all the shops, markets, scales, weights, and money used in selling or dividing needful things, shall be the property of (belong to) the whole people (the nation). 2. That the land, tools, machines, trains, rivers, shops, scales, money, and all the other things belonging to the people, shall be worked, managed, divided, and used by the whole people in such a way as the greater number of the whole people shall deem best. This is the principle of collective, or national, ownership, and co-operative, or national, use and control. Socialism may, you see, be summed up in one line, in four words, as really meaning BRITAIN FOR THE BRITISH. I will make all this as plain as the nose on your face directly. Let us now look at the _other_ side. To-day Britain does _not_ belong to the British; it belongs to a few of the British. There are bits of it which belong to the whole people, as Wimbledon Common, Portland Gaol, the highroads; but most of it is "private property." Now, as there are Liberals and Tories, Catholics and Protestants, Dockers' Unions and Shipping Federations in England; so there are Socialists and non-Socialists. And as there are different kinds of Socialists, so there are different kinds of non-Socialists. As there is one point, or _principle_, on which all kinds of Socialists agree; so there is one point, or _principle_, on which all kinds of non-Socialists agree. Amongst the non-Socialists there are Liberals and Tories, Catholics and Protestants, masters and workmen, rich and poor, lords and labourers, publicans and teetotalers; and these folks, as you know, differ in their ideas, and quarrel with and go against each other; but they are all non-Socialists, they are all against _Socialism_, and they all agree upon _one point_. So, if we can find the one point on which all kinds of non-Socialists agree, we shall find the _principle_, or root idea, of non-Socialism. Well, the "principle" of non-Socialism is just the opposite of the "principle" of _Socialism_. As the "principle" of _Socialism_ is national ownership, so the "principle" of non-Socialism is _private_ ownership. As the principle of _Socialism_ is _Britain for the British_, so the principle of non-Socialism is _Every Briton for Himself_. Again, as the principle of _Socialism_ means two things, so does the principle of non-Socialism mean two things. As the principle of _Socialism_ means national ownership and co-operative national management, so the principle of non-Socialism means _private ownership_ and _private management_. _Socialism_ says that Britain shall be owned and managed _by_ the people _for_ the people. Non-Socialism says Britain shall be owned and managed _by_ some persons _for_ some persons. Under _Socialism_ you would have _all_ the people working _together_ for the good of _all_. Under non-Socialism you have all the _persons_ working _separately_ (and mostly _against_ each other), each for the good of _himself_. So we find _Socialism_ means _Co-operation_, and non-Socialism means _Competition_. Co-operation, as here used, means operating or working together for a common end or purpose. Competition means competing or vying with each other for personal ends or gain. I'm afraid that is all as "dry" as bran, and as sad as a half-boiled dumpling; but I want to make it quite plain. And now we will run over it all again in a more homely and lively way. You know that to-day most of the land in Britain belongs to landlords, who let it to farmers or builders, and charge _rent_ for it. Socialists (_all_ Socialists) say that _all_ the land should belong to the British people, to the nation. You know that the railways belong to railway companies, who carry goods and passengers, and charge fares and rates, to make _profit_. Socialists _all_ say that the railways should be bought by the people. Some say that fares should be charged, some that the railways should be free--just as the roads, rivers, and bridges now are; but all agree that any profit made by the railways should belong to the whole nation. Just as do the profits now made by the post office and the telegraphs. You know that cotton mills, coalmines, and breweries now belong to rich men, or to companies, who sell the coal, the calico, or the beer, for profit. Socialists say that all mines, mills, breweries, shops, works, ships, and farms should belong to the whole people, and should be managed by persons chosen by the people, or chosen by officials elected by the people, and that all the bread, beer, calico, coal, and other goods should be either _sold_ to the people, or _given_ to the people, or sold to foreign buyers for the benefit of the British nation. Some Socialists would _give_ the goods to the people, some would _sell_ them; but _all_ agree that any profit on such sales should belong to the whole people--just as any profit made on the sale of gas by the Manchester Corporation goes to the credit of the city. Now you will begin to see what is meant by Socialism. To-day the nation owns _some_ things; under Socialism the nation would own _all_ things. To-day the nation owns the ships of the navy, the forts, arsenals, public buildings, Government factories, and some other things. To-day the Government, _for the nation_, manages the post office and telegraphs, makes some of the clothes and food and arms for the army and navy, builds some of the warships, and oversees the Church, the prisons, and the schools. Socialists want the nation to own _all_ the buildings, factories, lands, rivers, ships, schools, machines, and goods, and to manage _all_ their business and work, and to buy and sell and make and use _all_ goods for themselves. To-day some cities (as Manchester and Glasgow) make gas, and supply gas and water to the citizens. Some cities (as London) let their citizens buy their gas and water from gas and water companies. Socialists want _all_ the gas and water to be supplied to the people by their own officials, as in Glasgow and Manchester. Under _Socialism_ all the work of the nation would be _organised_--that is to say, it would be "ordered," or "arranged," so that no one need be out of work, and so that no useless work need be done, and so that no work need be done twice where once would serve. At present the work is _not_ organised, except in the post office and in the various works of the Corporations. Let us take a look at the state of things in England to-day. To-day the industries of England are not ordered nor arranged, but are left to be disordered by chance and by the ups and downs of trade. So we have at one and the same time, and in one and the same trade, and, often enough, in one and the same town, some men working overtime and other men out of work. We have at one time the cotton mills making more goods than they can sell, and at another time we have them unable to fulfil their orders. We have in one street a dozen small shops all selling the same kind of goods, and so spending in rent, in fittings, in wages of servants, and other ways, about four times as much as would be spent if all the work were done in one big shop. We have one contractor sending men and tools and bricks and wood from north London to build a house in south London, and another contractor in south London going to the same trouble and expense to build a house in north London. We have in Essex and other parts of England thousands of acres of good land lying idle because it does not _pay_ to till it, and at the same time we have thousands of labourers out of work who would be only too glad to till it. So in one part of a city you may see hundreds of houses standing empty, and in another part of the same city you may see hard-working people living three and four families in a small cottage. Then, under competition, where there are many firms in the same trade, and where each firm wants to get as much trade as it can, a great deal of money is spent by these firms in trying to get the trade from each other. Thus all the cost of advertisements, of travellers' wages, and a lot of the cost of book-keeping, arise from the fact that there are many firms all trying to snatch the trade from each other. Non-Socialists claim that this clumsy and costly way of going to work is really the best way there is. They say that competition gets the work done by the best men and at the lowest rate. Perhaps some of them believe this; but it is not true. The mistake is caused by the fact that _competition_ is better than _monopoly_. That is to say, if there is only one tram company in a town the fares will be higher than if there are two; because when there are two one tries to undersell the other. But take a town where there are two tram companies undercutting and working against each other, and hand the trams over to the Corporation, and you will find that the work is done better, is done cheaper, and the men are better paid than under competition. This is because the Corporation is at less cost, has less waste, and does not want _profits_. Well, under _Socialism_ all the work of the nation would be managed by the nation--or perhaps I had better say by "the people," for some of the work would be _local_ and some would be _national_. I will show you what I mean. It might be better for each town to manage its own gas and water, to bake its own bread and brew its own beer. But it would be better for the post office to be managed by the nation, because that has to do with _all_ the towns. So we should find that some kinds of work were best done locally--that is, by each town or county--and that some were best done nationally, that is, by a body of officials acting for the nation. For instance, tramways would be local and railways national; gas and water would be local and collieries national; police would be local and the army and navy national. The kind of _Socialism_ I am advocating here is Collectivism, or _Practical Socialism_. Motto: Britain for the British, the land and all the instruments of production, distribution, and exchange to be the property of the nation, and to be managed _by_ the nation _for_ the nation. The land and railways, collieries, etc., to be _bought_ from the present owners, but not at fancy prices. Wages to be paid, and goods to be sold. Thus, you see, Collectivism is really an extension of the _principles_, or ideas, of local government, and of the various corporation and civil services. And now I tell you that is Socialism, and I ask you what is there in it to prevent any man from being a Christian, or from attending a place of worship, or from marrying, or being faithful to his wife, or from keeping and bringing up his children at home? There is nothing in it to destroy religion, and there is nothing in it to destroy the home, and there is nothing in it to foster vice. But there _is_ something in it to kill ignorance and to destroy vice. There is something in it to shut up the gaols, to do away with prostitution, to reduce crime and drunkenness, and wipe out for ever the sweater and the slums, the beggars and the idle rich, the useless fine ladies and lords, and to make it possible for sober and willing workers to live healthy and happy and honourable lives. For Socialism would teach and train all children wisely; it would foster genius and devotion to the common good; it would kill scamping and loafing and jerrymandering; it would give us better health, better homes, better work, better food, better lives, and better men and women. CHAPTER IX COMPETITION _v._ CO-OPERATION A comparison of competition with co-operation is a comparison of non-Socialism with Socialism. For the principle of non-Socialism is competition, and the principle of Socialism is co-operation. Non-Socialists tell us that competition is to the general advantage, because it lowers prices in favour of the consumer. But competition in trade only seems desirable when we contrast it with private monopoly. When we compare the effects of trade competition with the effects of State or Municipal co-operation, we find that competition is badly beaten. Let us try to find the reasons of this. The claim for the superior cheapness of competition rests on the theory that where two sellers compete against each other for trade each tries to undersell the other. This sounds plausible, but, like many other plausible things, it is untrue. It is a theory, but the theory is incomplete. If business men were fools the theory would work with mathematical precision, to the great joy and profit of the consumer; but business men are not built on those lines. The seller of any article does not trade for trading's sake; he trades for profit. It is a mistake to suppose that undercutting each other's prices is the only method of competing between rival firms in trade. There are other ways. A trader, in order to defeat a rival, may 1. Give better quality at the same price, which is equal to giving more for the money, and is therefore a form of underselling; or 2. He may give the same quantity and quality at a lower price; or 3. He may balance the lowering of his price by resorting to adulteration or the use of inferior workmanship or material; or 4. He may try to overreach his rival by employing more travellers or by advertising more extensively. As to underselling. This is not carried on to such extremes as the theorists would have us believe. The object of a trader is to make money. He only desires increased trade if it brings more money. Brown and Jones make soap for sale. Each desires to get as much of the trade as he can, consistently with profits. It will pay Brown better to sell 1000 boxes of soap at a profit of sixpence on each box than to sell 2000 boxes at a profit of twopence a box, and it will pay him better to sell 4000 boxes at a profit of twopence each than it will to sell 1000 boxes at a profit of sixpence each. Now, suppose there is a demand for 20,000 boxes of soap in a week. If Brown and Jones are content to divide the trade, each may sell 10,000 boxes at a profit of sixpence, and so may clear a total profit of £250. If, by repeated undercutting, the profit falls to a penny a box, Brown and Jones will have very little more than £80 to divide between them. And it is clear that it will pay them better to divide the trade, for it would pay either of them better to take half the trade at even a threepenny profit than to secure it all at a profit of one penny. Well, Brown and Jones have the full use of their faculties, and are well aware of the number of beans that make five. Therefore they will not compete beyond the point at which competition will increase their gross profits. And so we shall find in most businesses, from great railways down to tooth brushes, that the difference in prices, quality being equal, is not very great amongst native traders, and that a margin of profit is always left. At the same time, so far as competition _does_ lower prices without lowering quality, the benefit is to the consumer, and that much is to be put to the credit of competition. But even there, on its strongest line, competition is beaten by State or Municipal co-operation. Because, assuming that the State or Municipality can produce any article as cheaply as a private firm, the State or the Municipality can always beat the private trader in price to the extent of the trader's profit. For no trader will continue to trade unless he makes some profit, whereas the State or Municipality wants no profit, but works for use or for service. Therefore, if a private trader sells soap at a profit of one farthing a box, the State or Municipality can sell soap one farthing a box cheaper, other things being equal. It is evident, then, that the trader must be beaten unless he can produce more cheaply than the State or Municipality. Can he produce more cheaply? No. The State or Municipality can always produce more cheaply than the private trader, under equal conditions. Why? For the same reason that a large firm can beat a small one, or a trust can beat a number of large firms. Suppose there are three separate firms making soap. Each firm must have its separate factory, its separate offices, its separate management, its separate power, its separate profits, and its separate plant. But if one firm made all the soap, it would save a great deal of expense; for one large factory is cheaper than two of half its size, and one manager costs less than three. If the London County Council made all the soap for London, it could make soap more cheaply than any one of a dozen private firms; because it would save so largely in rent, plant, and management. Thus the State or Municipality scores over the private firm, and co-operation scores over competition in two ways: first, it cuts off the profit; and, second, it reduces the cost of production. But that does not exhaust the advantages of co-operation over competition. There are two other forms of competition still to examine: these are adulteration and advertisement. We all know the meaning of the phrase "cheap and nasty." We can get pianos, bicycles, houses, boots, tea, and many other things at various prices, and we find that many of the cheap pianos will not keep in tune, that the bicycles are always out of repair, that the houses fall down, the boots let in water, and the tea tastes like what it _is_--a mixture of dried tea leaves and rubbish. Adulteration, as John Bright frankly declared, is a form of competition. It is also a form of rascality and fraud. It is a device for retaining profits for the seller, but it is seriously to the disadvantage of the consumer. This form of competition, then, has to be put to the debit of competition. And the absence of this form of competition has to be put to the credit of the State or the Municipal supply. For since the State or Municipality has no competitor to displace, it never descends to the baseness of adulteration. The London County Council would not build jerry houses for the citizens, nor supply them with tea leaves for tea, nor logwood and water for port wine. The sale of wooden nutmegs is a species of enterprise confined exclusively to the private trader. It is a form of competition, but never of commercial co-operation. It is peculiar to non-Socialism: Socialists would abolish it entirely. We come now to the third device of the private trader in competition: the employment of commercial travellers and advertisement. Of two firms selling similar goods, of equal quality, at equal prices, that firm will do the larger trade which keeps the greater number of commercial travellers and spends the greater sum upon advertisement. But travellers cost money, and advertising costs money. And so we find that travellers and advertisements add to the cost of distribution. Therefore competition, although by underbidding it has a limited tendency to lower the prices of goods, has also a tendency to increase the price in another way. If Brown lowers the price of his soap the user of soap is the gainer. But if Brown increases the cost of his advertisements and his staff of travellers, the user is the loser, because the extra cost has to be paid for in the price of soap. Now, if the London County Council made soap for all London, there would be 1. A saving in cost of rent, plant, and management. 2. A saving of profits by selling at cost price. 3. A saving of the whole cost of advertising. 4. A saving of the wages of the commercial travellers. Under a system of trade competition all those four items (plus the effects of adulteration) have to be paid for by the consumer, that is to say, by the users of soap. And what is true of soap is true of most other things. That is why co-operation for use beats competition for sale and profit. That is why the Municipal gas, water, and tram services are better and cheaper than the same services under the management of private companies. That is _one_ reason why Socialism is better than non-Socialism. As an example of the difference between private and Municipal works, let us take the case of the gas supply in Liverpool and Manchester. These cities are both commercial, both large, both near the coalfields. The gas service in Liverpool is a private monopoly, for profit; that of Manchester is a co-operative monopoly, for service. In Liverpool (figures of 1897) the price of gas was 2s. 9d. per thousand feet. In Manchester the price of gas was 2s. 3d. In Liverpool the profit on gas was 8½d. per thousand feet. In Manchester the profit was 7½d. per thousand feet. In Liverpool the profits went to the company. In Manchester the profits went to the ratepayers. Thus the Manchester ratepayer was getting his gas for 2s. 3d. less 7½d., which means that he was getting it at 1s. 7½d., while the Liverpool ratepayer was being charged 2s. 9d. The public monopoly of Manchester was, therefore, beating the private monopoly of Liverpool by 1s. 1½d. per thousand feet in the price of gas. In _To-day's Work_, by George Haw, and in _Does Municipal Management Pay?_ by R. B. Suthers, you will find many examples as striking and conclusive as the one I have suggested above. The waste incidental to private traders' competition is enormous. Take the one item of advertisement alone. There are draughtsmen, paper-makers, printers, billposters, painters, carpenters, gilders, mechanics, and a perfect army of other people all employed in making advertisement bills, pictures, hoardings, and other abominations--for _what_? Not to benefit the consumer, but to enable one private dealer to sell more of his wares than another. In _Merrie England_ I dealt with this question, and I quoted from an excellent pamphlet by Mr. Washington, a man of splendid talents, whose death we have unfortunately to deplore. Mr. Washington, who was an inventor and a thoroughly practical man of business, spoke as follows:-- Taking soap as an example, it requires a purchaser of this commodity to expend a shilling in obtaining sixpennyworth of it, the additional sixpence being requisite to cover the cost of advertising, travelling, etc. It requires him to expend 1s. 1½d. to obtain twopennyworth of pills for the same reason. For a sewing machine he must, if spending £7 on it, part with £4 of this amount on account of unnecessary cost; and so on in the case of all widely advertised articles. In the price of less-advertised commodities there is, in like manner, included as unnecessary cost a long string of middlemen's profits and expenses. It may be necessary to treat of these later, but for the present suffice it to say that in the price of goods as sold by retail the margin of unnecessary cost ranges from threepence to tenpence in the shilling, and taking an average of one thing with another, it may be safely stated that one-half of the price paid is rendered necessary simply through the foolish and inconvenient manner in which the business is carried on. All this expense would be saved by State or Municipal production for use. The New York Milk Trust, I understand, on its formation dispensed with the services of 15,000 men. You may ask what is to become of these men, and of the immense numbers of other men, now uselessly employed, who would not be needed under Socialism. Well! What are these men now doing? Are they adding to the wealth of the nation? No. Are they not doing work that is unnecessary to the nation? Yes. Are they not now being paid wages? Yes. Then, since their work is useless, and since they are now being paid, is it not evident that under Socialism we could actually pay them their full wages for doing _nothing_, and still be as well off as we are now? But I think under Socialism we could, and should, find a very great many of them congenial and useful work. Under the "Trusts" they will be thrown out of work, and it will be nobody's business to see that they do not starve. Yes: Socialism would displace labour. But does not non-Socialism displace labour? Why was the linotype machine adopted? Because it was a saving of cost. What became of the compositors? They were thrown out of work. Did anybody help them? Well, Socialism would save cost. If it displaces labour, as the machine does, should that prevent us from adopting Socialism? Socialism would organise labour, and leave no man to starve. But will the Trusts do that? No. And the Trusts are coming; the Trusts which will swallow up the small firms and destroy competition; the Trusts which will use their monopolies not to lower prices, but to make profits. You will have your choice, then, between the grasping and grinding Trust and the beneficent Municipality. Can any reasonable, practical, hard-headed man hesitate for one moment over his choice? CHAPTER X FOREIGN TRADE AND FOREIGN FOOD We have heard a great deal lately about the danger of losing our foreign trade, and it has been very openly suggested that the only hope of keeping our foreign trade lies in reducing the wages of our British workers. Sometimes this idea is wrapped up, and called "reducing the cost of production." Now, if we must have foreign trade, and as much of it as we have now, and if we can only keep it by competing against foreign dealers in price, then it is true that we must try to reduce the cost of production. But as there are more ways of killing a dog besides that of choking him with butter, so there are other ways of reducing the cost of production besides that of reducing the wages of our British workers. But on that question I will speak in the next chapter. Here I want to deal with foreign trade and foreign food. It is very important that every worker in the kingdom should understand the relations of our foreign trade and our native agriculture. The creed of the commercial school is that manufactures _pay_ us better than agriculture; so that by making goods for export and buying food from abroad we are doing good business. The idea is, that if by making cloth, cutlery, and other goods, we can buy more food than we can produce at home with the same amount of labour, it _pays_ us to let the land go out of cultivation and make Britain the "workshop of the world." Now, assuming that we _can_ keep our foreign trade, and assuming that we can get more food by foreign trade than we could produce by the same amount of work, is it quite certain that we are making a good bargain when we desert our fields for our factories? Suppose men _can_ earn more in the big towns than they _could_ earn in the fields, is the difference _all_ gain? Rents and prices are higher in the towns; the life is less healthy, less pleasant. It is a fact that the death-rates in the towns are higher, that the duration of life is shorter, and that the stamina and physique of the workers are lowered by town life and by employment in the factories. And there is another very serious evil attached to the commercial policy of allowing our British agriculture to decay, and that is the evil of our dependence upon foreign countries for our food. Of every 30 bushels of wheat we require in Britain, more than 23 bushels come from abroad. Of these 23 bushels 19 bushels come from America, and nearly all the rest from Russia. You are told at intervals--when more money is wanted for battle-ships--that unless we have a strong fleet we shall, in time of war, be starved into surrender. But the plain and terrible truth is that even if we have a perfect fleet, and keep entire control of the seas, we shall still be exposed to the risk of almost certain starvation during a European war. Nearly four-fifths of our bread come from Russia and America. Suppose we are at war with France and Russia. What will happen? Will not the corn dealers in America put up the price? Will not the Russians stop the export of corn from their ports? Will not the French and Russian Governments try to corner the American wheat? Then one-seventh of our wheat would be stopped at Russian ports, and the American supply, even if it could be safely guarded to our shores, would be raised to double or treble the present price. What would our millions of poor workers do if wheat went up to 75s. or 100s. a quarter? And every other article of food would go up in price at the same time: tea, coffee, sugar, meat, canned goods, cheese, would all double their prices. And we must not forget that we import millions of pounds' worth of eggs, butter, and cheese from France, all of which would be stopped. Nor is that all. Do we not pay for our imported food in exported goods? Well, besides the risk and cost of carrying raw material to this country and manufactured goods to other countries across the seas, we should lose at one blow all our French and Russian trade. That means that with food at famine prices many of our workers would be out of work or on short time. The result would be that in less than half a year there would be 1,000,000 unemployed, and ten times that number on the borders of starvation. And all these horrors might come upon us without a single shot being fired by our enemies. Talk about invasion! In a big European war we should be half beaten before we could strike a blow, and even if our fleets were victorious in a dozen battles we must starve or make peace. Or suppose such a calamity as war with America! The Americans could close their ports to food and raw material, and stop half our food and a large part of our trade at one blow. And so we should be half beaten before a sword was drawn. All these dangers are due to the commercial plan of sacrificing agriculture to trade. All these dangers must be placed to the debit side of our foreign trade account. But apart from the dangers of starvation in time of war, and apart from all the evils of the factory system and the bad effects of overcrowding in the towns, it has still to be said that foreign trade only beats agriculture as long as it pays so well that we can buy more food with our earnings than we could ourselves produce with the same amount of labour. Are we quite sure that it pays us as well as that _now_? And if it does pay as well as that now, can we hope that it will go on paying as well for any length of time. In the early days of our great trade the commercial school wished Britain to be the "workshop of the world"; and for a good while she was the workshop of the world. But now a change is coming. Other nations have opened world-workshops, and we have to face competition. France, Germany, Holland, Belgium, and America are all eager to take our coveted place as general factory, and China and Japan are changing swiftly from customers into rival dealers. Is it likely, then, that we can keep all our foreign trade, or that what we keep will be as profitable as it is at present? During the last few years there have emanated from the Press and from Chambers of Commerce certain ominous growlings about the evils of Trade Unionism. What do these growls portend? Much the same thing as the mutterings about the need for lowering wages. Do we not remember how, when the colliers were struggling for a "living wage," the Press scolded them for their "selfishness"? The Press declared that if the colliers persisted in having a living wage we should be beaten by foreign competitors and must lose our foreign trade. That is what is hanging over us now. A demand for a general reduction of wages. That is the end of the fine talk about big profits, national prosperity, and the "workshop of the world." The British workers are to emulate the thrift of the Japanese, the Hindoos, and the Chinese, and learn to live on boiled rice and water. Why? So that they can accept lower wages and retain our precious foreign trade. Yes; that is the latest idea. With brutal frankness the workers of Britain have been told again and again that "if we are to keep our foreign trade the British workers must accept the conditions of their foreign rivals." And that is the result of our commercial glory! For that we have sacrificed our agriculture and endangered the safety of our empire. Let us put the two statements of the commercial school side by side. They tell us first that the workers must abandon the land and go into the factories, because there they can earn a better living. They tell us now that the British worker must be content with the wages of a coolie, because foreign trade will pay no more. We are to give up agriculture because we can buy more food with exported goods than we can grow; and we must learn to live on next to nothing, or lose our foreign trade. Well, since we left the land in the hope that the factories would feed us better, why not go back to the land if the factories fail to feed us at all? Ah! but the commercial school have another string to their bow: "You cannot go back to the land, for it will not feed you all. This country will not produce enough food for its people to live upon." So the position in which the workers are placed, according to the commercial school, is this: You cannot produce your own food; therefore you must buy it by export trade. But you will lose your export trade unless you work for lower wages. Well, Mr. Smith, I for one do not believe those things. I believe-- 1. That we can produce most of our food. 2. That we can keep as much of our trade as we need, and 3. That we can keep the trade without reducing the wages of the workers. In my next chapter I will deal with the question of foreign trade and the workers' wages. We will then go on to consider the question of the food supply. For the argument as to our defencelessness in time of war through the inevitable rise in the price of corn, I am indebted to a pamphlet by Captain Stewart L. Murray of the Gordon Highlanders. I strongly recommend all working men and women to read that pamphlet. It is entitled _Our Food Supply in Time of War_, and can be ordered through the _Clarion_. The price is 6d. CHAPTER XI HOW TO KEEP FOREIGN TRADE The problem is how to keep our foreign export trade. We are told that unless we can compete in price with foreign nations we must lose our foreign trade; and we are told that the only means of competing with foreign nations in price is to lower the wages of the British worker. We will test these statements by looking into the conditions of one of our great industries, an industry upon which many other industries more or less depend: I mean the coal trade. At the time of the great coal strike the colliers were asked to accept a reduction of wages because their employers could not get the price they were asking for coal. The colliers refused, and demanded a "living wage." And they were severely censured by the Press for their "selfishness" in "keeping up the price of coal," and thereby preventing other trades, in which coal was largely used, from earning a living. They were reproached also with keeping the price of coal so high that the poor could not afford fires. Now, if those other trades which used coal, as the iron and the cotton trades, could not carry on their business with coal at the price it was then at, and if those trades had no other ways and means of reducing expenses, and if the only factor in the price of coal had been the wages of the collier, there might have been some ground for the arguments of the Press against the colliers. But in the iron trade one item of the cost of production is the _royalty_ on the iron. Royalty is a kind of rent paid to the landlord for getting the iron from his land. Now, I want to ask about the iron trade, Would it not be as just and as possible to reduce the royalty on iron in order to compete with foreign iron dealers as to reduce the wages of the iron-worker or the collier? The collier and the iron-worker work, and work hard, but the royalty owner does nothing. The twenty-five per cent. reduction in the colliers' wages demanded before the great strike would not have made a difference of sixpence a ton in the cost of coal. Now the royalties charged upon a ton of manufactured pig iron in Cumberland at that time amounted to 6s. 3d.; whereas the royalties on a ton of manufactured pig iron in Germany were 6d., in France 8d., in Belgium 1s. 3d. Now read this-- In 1885 a firm in West Cumberland had half their furnaces idle, not because the firm had no work, but simply owing to the high royalties demanded by the landowner. This company had to import iron from Belgium to fulfil their contract with the Indian Government. With a furnace turning out about 600 tons of pig iron per week the royalties amounted to £202, while the wages to everyone, from the manager downwards, amounted to only £95. This very company is now amongst our foreign competitors. The royalties were more than twice the amount of the wages, and yet we are to believe that we can only keep our iron trade by lowering the wages. The fact is that in the iron trade our export goods are taxed by the idle royalty owner to an amount varying from five to twelve times that of the royalty paid by our French, German, and Belgian competitors. Now think over the iron and cotton and other trades, and remember the analysis we made of the cost of production, and tell me why, since the rich landlord gets his rent, and since the rich capitalist gets his interest or profits out of cotton, wool, or iron, the invariable suggestion of those who would retain our foreign trade by reducing the cost of production amounts to no more nor less than a reduction of the poor workers' wages. Let us go back to the coal trade. The collier was called selfish because his demand for a living wage kept up the price of coal. The reduction asked would not have come to 6d. a ton. Could not that sixpence have been saved from the rents, or interest, or profits, or royalties paid at the cost of the production of other goods? I think you will find that it could. But leave that point, and let us see whether there are not other factors in the cost of coal which could more fairly be reduced than could the wages of the collier. Coals sells at prices from 10s. to 30s. a ton. The wages of the collier do not add up to more than 2s. 6d. a ton. In the year before the last great coal strike 300,000 miners were paid £15,000,000, and in the same time £6,000,000 were paid in royalties. Sir G. Elliot's estimate of coal owners' _profits_ for the same year was £11,000,000. This, with the £6,000,000 paid in royalties, made £17,000,000 taken by royalty owners and mine owners out of the coal trade in one year. So there are other items in the price of coal besides the wages of the colliers. What are they? They may be divided into nine parts, thus-- 1. Rent. 2. Royalties. 3. Coal masters' profits. 4. Profits of railway companies and other carriers. 5. Wages of railway servants and other carriers' labourers. 6. Profits of merchants and other "middlemen." 7. Profits of retailers. 8. Wages of agents, travellers, and other salesmen. 9. The wages of the colliers. The prices of coal fluctuate (vary), and the changes in the prices of coal cause now a rise and now a fall in the wages and profits of coal masters, railway shareholders, merchants, and retailers. But the fluctuations in the prices of coal cause very little fluctuation in rent and _none_ in royalties. Again, no matter how low the price of coal may be, the agents, travellers, and other salesmen always get a living wage, and the coal owners, railway shareholders, merchants, landlords, and royalty owners always get a great deal more than a living wage. But what about the colliers and the carriers' labourers, such as railway men, dischargers, and carters? These men perform nearly all the work of production and of distribution. They get the coal, and they carry the coal. Their wages are lower than those of any of the other seven classes engaged in the coal trade. They work harder, they work longer hours, and they run more risk to life and limb than any other class in the trade; and yet!---- And yet the only means of reducing the price of coal is said to be _a reduction in the collier's wage_. Now, I say that in reducing the price of coal the _last_ thing we should touch is the collier's wage. If we _must_ reduce the price of coal, we should begin with the owners of royalties. As to the "right" of the royalty owner to exact a fine from labour, I will content myself with making two claims-- 1. That even if the royalty owner has a "right" to _a_ royalty, yet there is no reason why he, of all the nine classes engaged in the coal trade, should be the only one whose receipts from the sale of coal shall never be lessened, no matter how the price of coal may fall. 2. Since the royalty owner and the landlord are the only persons engaged in the trade who cannot make even a pretence of doing anything for their money, and since the price of coal must be lowered, they should be the first to bear a reduction in the amount they charge on the sale of it. Next to the landlords and royalty owners I should place the railway companies. The prices charged for the carriage of coal are very high, and if the price of coal must be reduced, the profits made on the carriage should be reduced. Third in order come the coal owners, with what they call "a fair rate of interest on invested capital." How is it that the Press never reproaches any of those four idle and overpaid classes with selfishness in causing the poor workers of other trades to go short of fuel? How is it that the Press never chides these men for their folly in trying to keep up profits, royalties, and interest in a "falling market"? It looks as if the "immutable laws" of political economy resemble the laws of the land. It looks as if there is one economic law for the rich and another for the poor. The merchants, commission agents, and other middlemen I leave out of the question. These men are worse than worthless--they are harmful. They thwart; and hinder, and disorder the trade, and live on the colliers, the coal masters, and the public. There is no excuse, economic or moral, for their existence. But there is only one cure for the evil they do, and that is to drive them right out of the trade. I claim, then, that if the price of coal must be reduced, the sums paid to the above-named three classes should be cut down first, because they get a great deal more, and do a great deal less, than the carriers' labourers and the colliers. First as to the coal owners and the royalty owners. We see that the _whole sum_ of the wages of the colliers for a year was only £6,000,000, while the royalty owners and the coal owners took £17,000,000, or nearly three times as much. And yet we were told that the _miners_, the men who _work_, were "selfish" for refusing to have their wages reduced. Nationalise the land and the mines, and you at once save £17,000,000, and all that on the one trade. So with the railways. Nationalise the railways, and you may reduce the cost of the carriage of coal (and of all goods and passengers) by the amount of the profits now made by the railway companies, plus a good deal of the expense of management. For if the Municipalities can give you better trams, pay the guards and drivers better wages for shorter hours, and reduce penny fares to halfpenny fares, and still clear a big profit, is it not likely that the State could lower the freights of the railways, and so reduce the cost of carrying foods and manufactured goods and raw material? Our foreign trade, and our home industries also, are taxed and handicapped in their competition by every shilling paid in royalties, in rents, in interest, in profits, and in dividends to persons who do no work and produce no wealth; they are handicapped further by the salaries and commissions of all the superfluous managers, canvassers, agents, travellers, clerks, merchants, small dealers, and other middlemen who now live upon the producer and consumer. Socialism would abolish all these rents, taxes, royalties, salaries, commissions, profits, and interests, and thereby so greatly reduce the cost of production and of carriage that in the open market we should be able to offer our goods at such prices as to defy the competition of any but a Socialist State. But there is another way in which British trade is handicapped in competition with the trade of other nations. It is instructive to notice that our most dangerous rival is America, where wages are higher and all the conditions of the worker better than in this country. How, then, do the Americans contrive so often to beat us? Is it not notorious that the reason given for America's success is the superior energy and acuteness of the American over the British manager and employer? American firms are more pushing, more up-to-date. They seek new markets, and study the desires of consumers; they use more modern machinery, and they produce more new inventions. Are the paucity of our invention and the conservatism of our management due to the "invincible ignorance" or restrictive policy of the British working man? They are due to quite other causes. The conservatism and sluggishness of our firms are due to British conceit: to the belief that when "Britain first at Heaven's command arose from out the azure main" she was invested with an eternal and unquestionable charter to act henceforth and for ever as the "workshop of the world"; and say what they will in their inmost hearts, her manufacturers still have unshaken faith in their destiny, and think scorn of any foreigner who presumes to cross their path. Therefore the British manufacturer remains conservative, and gets left by more enterprising rivals. A word as to the superior inventiveness of the Americans. There are two great reasons why America produces more new and valuable patents. The first cause is the eagerness of the American manufacturer to secure the newest and the best machinery, and the apathetic contentment of the British manufacturer with old and cheap methods of production. There is a better market in America for inventions. The second cause is the superiority of the American patent law and patent office. In England a patentee has to pay £99 for a fourteen years' patent, and even then gets no guarantee of validity. In America the patentee gets a seventeen years' patent for £7. In England, out of 56,000 patents more than 54,000 were voided and less than 2000 survived. In America there is no voiding. One of the consequences of this is that American firms have a choice of thirty-two patents where our firms have _one_. According to the American patent office report for 1897, the American patents had, in seventeen years, found employment for 1,776,152 persons, besides raising wages in many cases as much as 173 per cent. These few figures only give a view of part of the disadvantage under which British inventors and British manufacturers suffer. I suggest, as the lawyers say, that British commercial conservatism and the British patent law have as much to do with the success of our clever and energetic American rivals as has what the _Times_ calls the "invincible ignorance" of the British workman who declines to sacrifice his Union to atone by longer hours and lower wages for the apathy of his employers and the folly of his laws. I submit, then, that the remedy is not the destruction of the Trade Unions, nor the lowering of wages, nor the lengthening of hours, but the nationalisation of the land, the abolition of royalties, the restoration of agriculture, and the municipalisation or the nationalisation of the collieries, the iron mines, the steel works, and the railways. The trade of this country _is_ handicapped; but it is not handicapped by the poor workers, but by the rich idlers, whose enormous rents and profits make it impossible for England to retain the foremost place in the markets of the world. So I submit to the British workman that, since the Press, with some few exceptions, finds no remedy for loss of trade but in a reduction of his wages, he would do well to look upon the Press with suspicion, and, better still, to study these questions for himself. CHAPTER XII CAN BRITAIN FEED HERSELF? Is it impossible for this nation to produce food for 40,000,000 of people? We cannot produce _all_ our food. We cannot produce our own tea, coffee, cocoa, oranges, lemons, currants, raisins, figs, dates, bananas, treacle, tobacco, sugar, and many other things not suitable to our climate. But at a pinch, as during a war, we could do without most of these. Can we produce our own bread, meat, and vegetables? Can we produce all, or nearly all, our butter, milk, eggs, cheese, and fruit? And will it _pay_ to produce these things if we are able to produce them at all? The great essential is bread. Can we grow our own wheat? On this point I do not see how there can be any doubt whatever. In 1841 Britain grew wheat for 24,000,000 of people, and at that time not nearly all her land was in use, nor was her farming of the best. Now we have to find food, or at any rate bread and meat and vegetables, for 40,000,000. Wheat, then, for 40,000,000. At present we consume 29,000,000 quarters. Can we grow 29,000,000 quarters in our own country? Certainly we can. The _average_ yield per acre in Britain is 28 bushels, or 3½ quarters. That is the _average_ yield on British farms. It can be increased; but let us take it first upon that basis. At 3½ quarters to the acre, 8,000,000 acres would produce 28,000,000 quarters; 9,000,000 acres would produce 31,500,000 quarters. Therefore we require less than 9,000,000 acres of wheat land to grow a year's supply of wheat for 40,000,000 persons. Now we have in Great Britain and Ireland about 33,000,000 acres of cultivatable land. Deduct 9,000,000 for wheat, and we have 24,000,000 acres left for vegetables, fruit, cattle, sheep, pigs, and poultry. Can any man say, in the face of these figures, that we are incapable of growing our own wheat? Suppose the average is put too high. Suppose we could only average a yield of 20 bushels to the acre, or 2½ quarters, we could still grow 29,000,000 quarters on less than 12,000,000 acres. It is evident, then, that we can at anyrate grow our own wheat. Here I shall quote from an excellent book, _Fields, Factories, and Workshops_, by Prince Kropotkin. Having gone very carefully into the facts, the Prince has arrived at the following conclusions:-- 1. If the soil of the United Kingdom were cultivated only as it _was_ thirty-five years ago, 24,000,000 people could live on home-grown food. 2. If the cultivatable soil of the United Kingdom were cultivated as the soil is cultivated _on the average_ in Belgium, the United Kingdom would have food for at least 37,000,000 inhabitants. 3. If the population of this country came to be doubled, all that would be required for producing food for 80,000,000 inhabitants would be to cultivate the soil as it is _now_ cultivated in the best farms of this country, in Lombardy, and in Flanders. Why, indeed, should we not be able to raise 29,000,000 quarters of wheat? We have plenty of land. Other European countries can produce, and do produce, their own food. Take the example of Belgium. In Belgium the people produce their own food. Yet their soil is no better than ours, and their country is more densely populated, the figures being: Great Britain, per square mile, 378 persons; Belgium, per square mile, 544 persons. Does that silence the commercial school? No. They have still one argument left. They say that even if we can grow our own wheat we cannot grow it as cheaply as we can buy it. Suppose we cannot. Suppose it will cost us 2s. a quarter more to grow it than to buy it. On the 23,000,000 quarters we now import we should be saving £2,000,000 a year. Is that a very high price to pay for security against defeat by starvation in time of war? A battle-ship costs £1,000,000. If we build two extra battle-ships in a year to protect our food supply we spend nearly all we gain by importing our wheat, even supposing that it costs us 2s. a quarter more to grow than to buy it. But is it true that we cannot grow wheat as cheaply as we can buy it? If it is true, the fact may doubtless be put down to two causes. First, that we do not go to work in the best way, nor with the best machinery; second, that the farmer is handicapped by rent. Of course if we have to pay rent to private persons for the use of our own land, that adds to the cost of the rent. One acre yields 28 bushels, or 3½ quarters of wheat in a year. If the land be rented at 21s. an acre that will add 6s. a quarter to the cost of wheat. In the _Industrial History of England_ I find the question of why the English farmer is undersold answered in this way-- The answer is simple. His capital has been filched from him surely, but not always slowly, by a tremendous increase in his rent. The landlords of the eighteenth century made the English farmer the foremost agriculturist in the world, but their successors of the nineteenth have ruined him by their extortions.... In 1799 we find land paying nearly 20s. an acre.... By 1850 it had risen to 38s. 6d.... £2 an acre was not an uncommon rent for land a few years ago, the average increase of English rents being no less than 26½ per cent. between 1854 and 1879.... The result has been that the average capital per acre now employed in agriculture is only about £4 or £5, instead of at least £10, as it ought to be. If the rents were as high as £2 an acre when our poor farmers were struggling to make both ends meet, it is little wonder they failed. A rent of £2 an acre means a land tax of more than 11s. a quarter on wheat. The price of wheat in the market at present is about 25s. a quarter. A rent charge of 21s. per acre would amount to more than £10,000,000 on the 9,000,000 we should need to grow all our wheat. A rent charge of £2 an acre would amount to £18,000,000. That would be a heavy sum for our farmers to lift before they went to market. Moreover, agriculture has been neglected because all the mechanical and chemical skill, and all the capital and energy of man, have been thrown into the struggle for trade profits and manufacturing pre-eminence. We want a few Faradays, Watts, Stephensons, and Cobdens to devote their genius and industry to the great food question. Once let the public interest and the public genius be concentrated upon the agriculture of England, and we shall soon get silenced the croakers who talk about the impossibility of the country feeding her people. But is it true that under fair conditions wheat can be brought from the other side of the world and sold here at a price with which we cannot compete? Prince Kropotkin thinks not. He says the French can produce their food more cheaply than they can buy it; and if the French can do this, why cannot we? But in case it should be thought that I am prejudiced in favour of Prince Kropotkin's book or against the factory system, I will here print a quotation from a criticism of the book which appeared in the _Times_ newspaper, which paper can hardly be suspected of any leanings towards Prince Kropotkin, or of any eagerness to acknowledge that the present industrial system possesses "acknowledged evils." Seriously, Prince Kropotkin has a great deal to say for his theories.... He has the genuine scientific temper, and nobody can say that he does not extend his observations widely enough, for he seems to have been everywhere and to have read everything.... Perhaps his chief fault is that he does not allow sufficiently for the ingrained conservatism of human nature and for the tenacity of vested interests. But that is no reason why people should not read his book, which will certainly set them thinking, and may lead a few of them to try, by practical experiments, to lessen some of the acknowledged evils of the present industrial system. Just notice what the Tory _Times_ says about "the tenacity of _vested interests_" and the "_acknowledged evils_ of the present industrial system." It is a great deal for the _Times_ to say. But what about the meat? Prince Kropotkin deals as satisfactorily with the question of meat-growing as with that of growing wheat, and his conclusion is this-- Our means of obtaining from the soil whatever we want, under _any_ climate and upon _any_ soil, have lately improved at such a rate that we cannot foresee yet what is the limit of productivity of a few acres of land. The limit vanishes in proportion to our better study of the subject, and every year makes it vanish farther and farther from our sight. I have, I think, quoted enough to show that there is no natural obstacle to our production in this country of all the food our people need. Britain _can_ feed herself, and therefore, upon the ground of her use for foreign-grown food, the factory system is not necessary. But I hope my readers will buy this book of Prince Kropotkin, and read it. For it is a very fine book, a much better book than I can write. It can be ordered from the _Clarion_ Office, 72 Fleet Street, and the price is 1s. 3d. post free. As to the vegetables and the fruit, I must refer you to the Prince's book; but I shall quote a few passages just to give an idea of what _can_ be done, and _is being done_, in other countries in the way of intensive cultivation of vegetables and fruit. Prince Kropotkin says that the question of soil is a common stumbling-block to those who write about agriculture. Soil, he says, does not matter now, nor climate very much. There is a quite new science of agriculture which _makes_ its own soil and modifies its climate. Corn and fruit can be grown on _any_ soil--on rock, on sand, on clay. Man, not Nature, has given to the Belgian soil its present productivity. And now read this-- While science devotes its chief attention to industrial pursuits, a limited number of lovers of Nature, and a legion of workers whose very names will remain unknown to posterity, have created of late quite a new agriculture, as superior to modern farming as modern farming is superior to the old three-fields system of our ancestors.... Science seldom has guided them; they proceeded in the empirical way; but like the cattle-growers who opened new horizons to biology, they have opened a new field of experimental research for the physiology of plants. They have created a totally new agriculture. They smile when we boast about the rotation system having permitted us to take from the field one crop every year, or four crops each three years, because their ambition is to have six and nine crops from the very same plot of land during the twelve months. They do not understand our talk about good and bad soils, because they make the soil themselves, and make it in such quantities as to be compelled yearly to sell some of it: otherwise it would raise up the level of their gardens by half an inch every year. They aim at cropping, not five or six tons of grass on the acre, as we do, but from fifty to a hundred tons of vegetables on the same space; not £5 worth of hay, but £100 worth of vegetables of the plainest description--cabbage and carrots. Look now at these figures from America-- At a recent competition, in which hundreds of farmers took part, the first ten prizes were awarded to ten farmers who had grown, on three acres each, from 262 to 346¾ bushels of Indian corn; in other words, _from 87 to 115 bushels to the acre_. In Minnesota the prizes were given for crops of 300 to 1120 bushels of potatoes to the acre, _i.e._ from 8¼ to 31 tons to the acre, while the average potato crop in Great Britain is only 6 tons. These are _facts_, not theories. Here is another quotation from Prince Kropotkin's book. It also relates to America-- The crop from each acre was small, but the machinery was so perfected that in this way 300 days of one man's labour produced from 200 to 300 quarters of wheat; in other words, the areas of land being of no account, every man produced in one day his yearly bread food. I shall only make one more quotation. It alludes to the intensive wheat-growing on Major Hallett's method in France, and is as follows:-- In fact, the 8½ bushels required for one man's annual food were actually grown at the Tomblaine station on a surface of 2250 square feet, or 47 feet square, _i.e._ on very nearly one-twentieth of an acre. Now remember that our agricultural labourers crowd into the towns and compete with the town labourers for work. Remember that we have millions of acres of land lying idle, and generally from a quarter to three-quarters of a million of men unemployed. Then consider this position. Here we have a million acres of good land producing nothing, and half a million men also producing nothing. Land and labour, the two factors of wealth production, both idle. Could we not set the men to work? Of course we could. Would it pay? To be sure it would pay. In America, on soil no better than ours, one man can by one day's labour produce one man's year's bread. That is, 8½ bushels of wheat. Suppose we organise our out-of-works under skilled farmers, and give them the best machinery. Suppose they only produce one-half the American product. They will still be earning more than their keep. Or set them to work, under skilled directors, on the French or the Belgian plan, at the intensive cultivation of vegetables. Let them grow huge crops of potatoes, carrots, beans, peas, onions; and in the coal counties, where fuel is cheap, let them raise tomatoes and grapes, under glass, and they will produce wealth, and be no longer starvelings or paupers. Another good plan would be to allow a Municipality to obtain land, under a Compulsory Purchase Act, at a fair rent and near a town, and to relet the land to gardeners and small farmers, to work on the French and Belgian systems. Let the local Corporation find the capital to make soil and lay down heating and draining pipes. Let the Corporation charge rent and interest, buy the produce from the growers and resell it to the citizens, and let the tenant gardeners be granted fixity of tenure and fair payment for improvements, and we shall increase and improve our food supply, lessen the overcrowding in our towns, and reduce the unemployed to the small number of lazy men who _will_ not work. It is the imperative duty of every British citizen to insist upon the Government doing everything that can be done to restore the national agriculture and to remove the dreadful danger of famine in time of war. National granaries should be formed at once, and at least a year's supply of wheat should be kept in stock. What are the Government doing in this way? Nothing at all. The only remedy they have to suggest is _Protection_! What is Protection? It is a tax on foreign wheat. What would be the result of Protection? The result would be that the landowner would get higher rents and the people would get dearer bread. How true is Tolstoy's gibe, that "the rich man will do anything for the poor man--except get off his back." "Our agriculture," the Tory protectionist shrieks, "is perishing. Our farmers cannot make a living. Our landlords cannot let their farms. The remedy is Protection." A truly practical Tory suggestion. "The farmers cannot pay our rents. British agriculture is dying out. Let us put a tax upon the poor man's bread." Yes; Protection is a remedy, but it must be the protection of the farmer against the landlord. Give our farmers fixity of tenure, compensation for improvements, and prevent the landlord from taxing the industry and brains of the farmer by increase of rent, and British agriculture will soon rear its head again. Quite recently we have had an example of Protection. The coal owners combined and raised the price of coal some 6s. to 10s. a ton. It is said they cleared more than £60,000,000 sterling on the deal. What good did that do the workers? Did the colliers get any of the spoil in wages? No; that money is lying up ready to crush the colliers when they next strike. It is the same story over and over again. We cannot have cheap coal because the rich owners demand big fortunes; we cannot have cheap houses or decent homes because the landlords raise the rents faster than the people can increase our trade; we cannot grow our food as cheaply as we can buy it because the rich owners of the land squeeze the farmer dry and make it impossible for him to live. And the harder the collier, the weaver, the farmer, and the mechanic work, the harder the landlord and the capitalist squeeze. The industry, skill, and perseverance of the workers avail nothing but to make a few rich and idle men richer and more idle. As I have repeatedly pointed out before, we have by sacrificing our agriculture destroyed our insular position. As an island we may be, or _should be_, free from serious danger of invasion. But of what avail is our vaunted silver shield of the sea if we depend upon other nations for our food? We are helpless in case of a great war. It is not necessary to invade England in order to conquer her. Once our food supply is stopped we are shut up like a beleagured city to starve or to surrender. Stop the import of food into England for three months, and we shall be obliged to surrender at discretion. And our agriculture is to be ruined, and the safety and honour of the Empire are to be endangered, that a few landlords, coal owners, and money-lenders may wax fat upon the vitals of the nation. So, I say, we do need Protection; but it is the protection of our farmers and colliers, our weavers and our mechanics, our homes, our health, our food, our cities, our children and women, yes, our national existence--against the rapacity of the rich lords, employers, and money-lenders, who impudently pose as the champions of patriotism and the expansion of the Empire. Again, I recommend every Socialist to read the new edition of Prince Kropotkin's _Fields, Factories, and Workshops_. CHAPTER XIII THE SUCCESSFUL MAN There are many who believe that if all the workers became abstainers, worked harder, lived sparely, and saved every penny they could; and that if they avoided early marriages and large families, they would all be happy and prosperous without Socialism. And, of course, these same persons believe that the bulk of the suffering and poverty of the poor is due to drink, to thriftlessness, and to imprudent marriages. I know that many, very many, do believe these things, because I used to meet such persons when I went out lecturing. Now I know that belief to be wrong. I know that if every working man and woman in England turned teetotaler to-morrow, if they all remained single, if they all worked like niggers, if they all worked for twelve hours a day, if they lived on oatmeal and water, and if they saved every farthing they could spare, they would, at the end of twenty years, be a great deal worse off than they are to-day. Sobriety, thrift, industry, skill, self-denial, holiness, are all good things; but they would, if adopted by _all_ the workers, simply enrich the idle and the wicked, and reduce the industrious and the righteous to slavery. Teetotalism will not do; industry will not do; saving will not do; increased skill will not do; keeping single will not do; reducing the population will not do. Nothing _will_ do but _Socialism_. I mean to make these things plain to you if I can. I will begin by answering a statement made by a Tory M.P. As reported in the Press, the M.P. said, "There was nothing to prevent the son of a crossing-sweeper from rising to be Lord Chancellor of England." This, at first sight, would seem to have nothing to do with the theories regarding thrift, temperance, and prudent marriages. But we shall find that it arises from the same error. This error has two faces. On one face it says that any man may do well if he will try, and on the other face it says that those who do not do well have no one but themselves to blame. The error rises from a slight confusion of thought. Men know that a man may rise from the lowest place in life to almost the highest, and they suppose that because one man can do it, _all_ men can do it; they know that if one man works hard, saves, keeps sober, and remains single, he will get more money than other men who drink and spend and take life easily, and they suppose because thrift, single life, industry, and temperance spell success to one man, they would spell success to _all_. I will show you that this is a mistake, and I will show you why it is a mistake. Let us begin with the crossing-sweeper. We are told that "_there is nothing to prevent_ the son of _a_ crossing-sweeper from becoming Lord Chancellor of England." But our M.P. does not mean that there is nothing to prevent the son of some one particular crossing-sweeper from becoming Chancellor; he means that there is nothing to prevent _any_ son of _any_ crossing-sweeper, or the son of _any_ very poor man, from becoming rich and famous. Now, let me show you what nonsense this is. There are in all England, let us say, some 2,000,000 of poor and friendless and untaught boys. And there is _one_ Lord Chancellor. Now, it is just possible for _one_ boy out of the 2,000,000 to become Lord Chancellor; but it is quite impossible for _all_ the boys, or even for one boy in 1000, or for one boy in 10,000, to become Lord Chancellor. Our M.P. means that if a boy is clever and industrious he may become Lord Chancellor. But suppose _all_ the boys are as clever and as industrious as he is, they cannot _all_ become chancellors. The one boy can only succeed because he is stronger, cleverer, more pushing, more persistent, or more _lucky_ than any other boy. In my story, _Bob's Fairy_, this very point is raised. I will quote it for you here. Bob, who is a boy, is much troubled about the poor; his father, who is a self-made man and mayor of his native town, tells Bob that the poor are suffering because of their own faults. The parson then tries to make Bob understand-- "Come, come, come," said the reverend gentleman, "you are too young for such questions. Ah--let me try to--ah--explain it to you. Here is your father. He is wealthy. He is honoured. He is mayor of his native town. Now, how did he make his way?" Mr. Toppinroyd smiled, and poured himself out another glass of wine. His wife nodded her head approvingly at the minister. "Your father," continued the minister, "made himself what he is by industry, thrift, and talent." "If another man was as clever, and as industrious and thrifty as father," said Bob, "could he get on as well?" "Of course he could," replied Mr. Toppinroyd. "Then the poor are not like that?" asked Bob. "I regret to say," said the parson, "that--ah--they are not." "But if they were like father, they could do what he has done?" Bob said. "Of course, you silly," exclaimed his mother. Ned chuckled behind his paper. Kate turned to the piano. Bob nodded and smiled. "How droll!" said he. "What's droll?" his father asked sharply. "Why," said Bob, "how funny it would be if all the people were industrious, and clever, and steady!" "Funny?" ejaculated the parson. "Funny?" repeated Mr. Toppinroyd. "What do you mean, dear?" inquired Mrs. Toppinroyd mildly. "If all the men in Loomborough were as clever and as good as father," said Bob simply, "there would be 50,000 rich mill-owners, and they would all be mayor of the same town." Mr. Toppinroyd gave a sharp glance at his son, then leaned forward, boxed his ears, and said-- "Get to bed, you young monkey. Go!" Do you see the idea? The poor cannot _all_ be mayors and chancellors and millionaires, because there are too many of them and not enough high places. But they can all be asses, and they will be asses, if they listen to such rubbish as that uttered by this Tory M.P. You have twenty men starting for a race. You may say, "There is nothing to prevent any man from winning the race," but you mean any one man who is luckier or swifter than the rest. You would never be foolish enough to believe that _all_ the men could win. You know that nineteen of the men _must lose_. So we know that in a race for the Chancellorship _only one_ boy can win, and the other 1,999,999 _must lose_. It is the same thing with temperance, industry, and cleverness. Of 10,000 mechanics one is steadier, more industrious, and more skilful than the others. Therefore he will get work where the others cannot. But _why_? Because he is worth more as a workman. But don't you see that if all the others were as good as he, he would _not_ be worth more? Then you see that to tell 1,000,000 men that they will get more work or more wages if they are cleverer, or soberer, or more industrious, is as foolish as to tell the twenty men starting for a race that they can all win if they will all try. If all the men were just as fast as the winner, the race would end in a dead heat. There is a fire panic in a big hall. The hall is full of people, and there is only one door. A rush is made for that door. Some of the crowd get out, some are trampled to death, some are injured, some are burned. Now, of that crowd of people, who are most likely to escape? Those nearest to the door have a better chance than those farthest, have they not? Then the strong have a better chance than the weak, have they not? And the men have a better chance than the women, and the children the worst chance of all. Is it not so? Then, again, which is most likely to be saved--the selfish man who fights and drags others down, who stands upon the fallen bodies of women and children, and wins his way by force; or the brave and gentle man who tries to help the women and the children, and will not trample upon the wounded? Don't you know that the noble and brave man stands a poor chance of escape, and that the selfish, brutal man stands a good chance of escape? Well, now, suppose a man to have got out, perhaps because he was near the door, or perhaps because he was very strong, or perhaps because he was very lucky, or perhaps because he did not stop to help the women and children, and suppose him to stand outside the door, and cry out to the struggling and dying creatures in the burning hall, "Serves you jolly well right if you _do_ suffer. Why don't you get out? _I_ got out. You can get out if you _try_. _There is nothing to prevent any one of you from getting out._" Suppose a man talked like that, what would you say of him? Would you call him a sensible man? Would you call him a Christian? Would you call him a gentleman? You will say I am severe. I am. Every time a successful man talks as this M.P. talks he inflicts a brutal insult upon the unsuccessful, many thousands of whom, both men and women, are worthier and better than himself. But let us go back to our subject. That fire panic in the big hall is a picture of _life_ as it is to-day. It is a scramble of a big crowd to get through a small door. Those who get through are cheered and rewarded, and few questions are asked as to _how_ they got through. Now, Socialists say that there should be more doors, and no scramble. But let me use this example of the hall and the panic more fully. Suppose the hall to be divided into three parts. First the stalls, then the pit stalls, then the pit. Suppose the only door is the door in the stalls. Suppose the people in the pit stalls have to climb a high barrier to get to the stalls. Suppose those in the pit have to climb a high barrier to get to the pit stalls, and then the high barrier that parts the pit stalls from the stalls. Suppose there is, right at the back of the pit, a small, weak boy. Now, I ask you, as sensible men, is there "nothing to prevent" that boy from getting through that door? You know the boy has only the smallest of chances of getting out of that hall. But he has a thousand times a better chance of getting safely out of that door than the son of a crossing-sweeper has of becoming Lord Chancellor of England. In our hall the upper classes would sit in the stalls, the middle classes in the pit stalls, and the workers in the pit. _Whose son would have the best chance for the door?_ I compared the race for the Chancellorship just now to a foot-race of twenty men; and I showed you that if all the runners were as fleet as greyhounds only one could win, and nineteen _must_ lose. But the M.P.'s crossing-sweeper's son has to enter a race where there are millions of starters, and where the race is a _handicap_ in which he is on scratch, with thousands of men more than half the course in front of him. For don't you see that this race which the lucky or successful men tell us we can _all_ win is not a fair race? The son of the crossing-sweeper has terrible odds against him. The son of the gentleman has a long start, and carries less weight. What are the qualities needed in a race for the Chancellorship? The boy who means to win must be marvellously strong, clever, brave, and persevering. Now, will he be likely to be strong? He _may_ be, but the odds are against him. His father may not be strong nor his mother, for they may have worked hard, and they may not have been well fed, nor well nursed, nor well doctored. They probably live in a slum, and they cannot train, nor teach, nor feed their son in a healthy and proper way, because they are ignorant and poor. And the boy gets a few years at a board school, and then goes to work. But the gentleman's son is well bred, well fed, well nursed, well trained, and lives in a healthy place. He goes to good schools, and from school to college. And when he leaves college he has money to pay fees, and he has a name, and he has education; and I ask you, what are the odds against the son of a crossing-sweeper in a race like that? Well, there is not a single case where men are striving for wealth or for place where the sons of the workers are not handicapped in the same way. Now and again a worker's son wins. He may win because he is a genius like Stephenson or Sir William Herschel; or he may win because he is cruel and unscrupulous, like Jay Gould; or he may win because he is lucky. But it is folly to say that there is "nothing to prevent him" from winning. There is almost everything to prevent him. To begin with, his chances of dying before he's five years old are about ten times as numerous as the chances of a rich man's son. Look at Lord Salisbury. He is Prime Minister of England. Had he been born the son of a crossing-sweeper do you think he would have been Prime Minister? I would undertake to find a hundred better minds than Lord Salisbury's in any English town of 10,000 inhabitants. But will any one of the boys I should select become Prime Minister of England? You know they will not. But yet they ought to, if "there is nothing to prevent them." But there is something to prevent them. There is poverty to prevent them, there is privilege to prevent them, there is snobbery to prevent them, there is class feeling to prevent them, there are hundreds of other things to prevent them, and amongst those hundreds of other things to prevent them from becoming Prime Ministers I hope that their own honesty and goodness and wisdom may be counted; for honesty and goodness and true wisdom are things which will often prevent a poor boy who is lucky enough to possess them from ever becoming what the world of politics and commerce considers a "successful man." Do not believe the doctrine that the rich and poor, the successful and the unsuccessful, get what they deserve. If that were true we should find intelligence and virtue keeping level with income. Then the mechanic at 30s. a week would be half as good again as the labourer at 20s. a week; the small merchant, making £200 a year, would be a far better man than one mechanic; the large merchant, making £2000 a year, would be ten times as good as the small merchant; and the millionaire would be too intellectual, too noble, and too righteous for this sinful world. But don't you know that there are stupid and drunken mechanics, and steady and intelligent labourers? And don't you know that some successful men are rascals, and that some very wealthy men are fools? Take the story of Jacob and Esau. After Jacob cheated his hungry brother into selling his birthright for a mess of pottage, Jacob was rich and Esau poor. Did each get what he deserved? Was Jacob the better man? Christ lived poor, a homeless wanderer, and died the death of a felon. Jay Gould made millions of money, and died one of the wealthiest men in the world. Did each get what he deserved? Did the wealth of Gould and the poverty of Christ indicate the intellectual and moral merits of those two sons of men? Some of us would get whipped if all of us got our deserts; but who would deserve applause and wealth and a crown? In a sporting handicap the weakest have the most start: in real life the strongest have the start and the weakest are put on scratch. And I _have_ heard it hinted that the man who runs the straightest does not always win. CHAPTER XIV TEMPERANCE AND THRIFT I said in the previous chapter that if _all_ the workers were very thrifty, sober, industrious, and abstemious they would be worse off in the matter of wages than they are now. This, at first sight, seems strange, because we know that the sober and thrifty workman is generally better off than the workman who drinks or wastes his money. But why is he better off? He is better off because, being a steady man, he can often get work when an unsteady man cannot. He is better off because he buys things that add to his comfort, or he saves money, and so grows more independent. And he is able to save money, and to make his home more cosy, because, while he is more regularly employed than the unsteady men, his wages remain the same, or, perhaps, are something higher than theirs. That is to say, he benefits by his own steadiness and thrift because his steadiness makes him a more reliable, and therefore a more valuable, workman than one who is not steady. But, you see, he is only more valuable because other men are less steady. If all the other workmen were as steady as he is he would be no more valuable than they are. Not being more valuable than they are, he would not be more certain of getting work. That is to say, if all the workers were sober and thrifty, they would all be of equal value to the employer. But you may say they would still be better off than if they drank and wasted their wages. They would have better health, and they would have happier lives and more comfortable homes. Yes, so long as their wages were as high as before. But their wages would _not_ be as high as before. You must know that as things now are, where all the work is in the gift of private employers, and where wages and prices are ruled by competition, and where new inventions of machinery are continually throwing men out of work, and where farm labourers are always drifting to the towns, there are more men in need of work than work can be found for. Therefore, there is always a large number of workers out of work. Now, under competition, where two men offer themselves for one place, you know that the place will be given to the man who will take the lower wage. And you know that the thrifty and the sober man can live on less than the thriftless man. And you know that where two or more employers are offering their goods against each other for sale in the open market, the one who sells his goods the cheapest will get the trade. And you know that in order to sell their goods at a cheaper rate than other dealers, the employers will try to _get_ their goods at the cheapest rate possible. And you know that with most goods the chief cost is the cost of the labour used in the making--that is to say, the wages of the workers. Very well, you have more workers than are needed, so that there is competition amongst those workers as to who shall be employed. And those will be employed who are the cheapest. And those who can live upon least can afford to work for least. And all the workers being sober and thrifty, they can all live on less than when many of them were wasteful and fond of drink. Then, on the other hand, all the employers are competing for the trade, and so are all wanting cheap labour; and so are eager to lower wages. Therefore wages will come down, and the general thrift and steadiness of the workers will make them poorer. Do you doubt this? What is that tale the masters so often tell you? Do they not tell you that England depends upon her foreign trade for her food? And do they not tell you that foreign traders are stealing the trade from the English traders? And do they not tell you that the foreign traders can undersell us in the world's markets because their labour is cheaper? And do they not say that if the British workers wish to keep the foreign trade they will have to be as thrifty and as industrious and as sober as the foreign workers? Well, what does that mean? It means that if the British workers were as thrifty and sober and industrious as the foreign workers, they could live on less than they now need. It means that if you were all teetotalers and all thrifty, you could work for less wages than they now pay, and so they would be able to sell their goods at a lower price than they can now; and thus they would keep the foreign trade. Is not that all quite clear and plain? And is it not true that in France, in Germany, and all other countries where the workers live more sparely, and are more temperate than the workers are in England, the wages are lower and the hours of work longer? And is it not true that the Chinese and the Hindoos, who are the most temperate and the most thrifty people in the world, are always the worst paid? And do you not know very well that the "Greeners"--the foreign Jews who come to England for work and shelter--are very sober and very thrifty and very industrious men, and that they are about the worst-paid workers in this country? Take now, as an example, the case of the cotton trade. The masters tell you that they find it hard to compete against the Indian factories, and they say if Lancashire wants to keep the trade the Lancashire workers must accept the conditions of the Indian workers. The Indian workers live chiefly on rice and water, and work far longer hours than do the English workers. And don't you see that if the Lancashire workers would live upon rice and water, the masters would soon have their wages down to rice and water point? And then the Indians would have to live on less, or work still longer hours, and so the game would go on. And who would reap the benefit? The English masters and the Indian masters (who are often one and the same) would still take a large share, but the chief benefit of the fall in price would go to the buyers--or users, or "consumers"--of the goods. That is to say, that the workers of India and of England would be starved and sweated, so that the natives of other countries could have cheap clothing. If you doubt what I say, look at the employers' speeches, read the newspapers which are in the employers' pay, add two and two together, and you will find it all out for yourselves. To return to the question of temperance and thrift. You see, I hope, that if _all_ the people were sober and thrifty they would be really worse off than they now are. This is because the workers must have work, must ask the employers to give them work, and must ask employers who, being in competition with each other, are always trying to get the work done at the lowest price. And the lowest price is always the price which the bulk of the workers are content to live upon. In all foreign nations where the standard of living is lower than in England, you will find that the wages are lower also. Have we not often heard our manufacturers declare that if the British workers would emulate the thrift and sobriety of the foreigner they might successfully compete against foreign competition in the foreign market? What does that mean, but that thrift would enable our people to live on less, and so to accept less wages? Why are wages of women in the shirt trade low? It is because capitalism always keeps the wages down to the lowest standard of subsistence which the people will accept. So long as our English women will consent to work long hours, and live on tea and bread, the "law of supply and demand" will maintain the present condition of sweating in the shirt trade. If all our women became firmly convinced that they could not exist without chops and bottled stout, the wages _must_ go up to a price to pay for those things. _Because there would be no women offering to live on tea and bread_; and shirts _must_ be had. But what is the result of the abstinence of these poor sisters of ours? Low wages for themselves, and, for others?---- A young merchant wants a dozen shirts. He pays 10s. each for them. He meets a friend who only gave 8s. for his. He goes to the 8s. shop and saves 2s. This is clear profit, and he spends it in cigars, or champagne, or in some other luxury; _and the poor seamstress lives on toast and tea._ But although I say that sobriety and thrift, if adopted by _all_ the workers, would result in lower wages, you are not to suppose that I advise you all to be drunkards and spendthrifts. No. The proper thing is to do away with competition. At present the employers, in the scramble to undersell each other, actually fine you for your virtue and self-denial by lowering your wages, just as the landlords fine a tenant for improving his land or enlarging his house or extending his business--fine him by raising his rent. And now we may, I think, come to the question of imprudent marriages. The idea seems to be that a man should not marry until he is "in a position to keep a wife." And it is a very common thing for employers, and other well-to-do persons, to tell working men that they "have no right to bring children into the world until they are able to provide for them." Now let us clear the ground a little before we begin to deal with this question on its economic side--that is, as it affects wages. It is bad for men and women to marry too young. It is bad for two reasons. Firstly, because the body is not mature; and secondly, because the mind is not settled. That is to say, an over-early marriage has a bad effect on the health; and since young people must, in the nature of things, change very much as they grow older, an over-early marriage is often unhappy. I think a woman would be wise not to marry before she is about four-and-twenty; and I think it is better that the husband should be from five to ten years older than the wife. Then it is very bad for a woman to have many children; and not only is it bad for her health, but it destroys nearly all the pleasure of her life, so that she is an enfeebled and weary drudge through her best years, and is old before her time. That much conceded, I ask you, Mr. John Smith, what do you think of the request that you shall work hard, live spare, and give up a man's right to love, to a home, to children, in order that you may be able to "make a living"? Such a living is not worth working for. It would be a manlier and a happier lot to die. Here is the idea as it has been expressed by a working man-- Up to now I had thought that the object of life was to live, and that the object of love was to love. But the economists have changed all that. There is neither love nor life, sentiment nor affection. The earth is merely a vast workshop, where all is figured by debit and credit, and where supply and demand regulates everything. You have no right to live unless the industrial market demands hands; a woman has no business to bring forth a child unless the capitalist requires live stock. I cannot really understand a _man_ selling his love and his manhood, and talking like a coward or a slave about "imprudent marriages"; and all for permission to drudge at an unwelcome task, and to eat and sleep for a few lonely and dishonourable years in a loveless and childless world. You don't think _that_ is going to save you, men, do you? You don't think you are going to make the best of life by selling for the sake of drudgery and bread and butter your proud man's right to work for, fight for, and die for the woman you love? For, having sold your love for permission to work, how long will you be before you sell your honour? Nay, is it not true that many of you have sold it already? For every man who works at jerry work, or takes a part in any kind of adulteration, scampery, or trade rascality, is selling his honour for wages, and is just as big a scamp and a good deal more of a coward than a burglar or a highwayman. And the commercial travellers and the canvassers and the agents who get their living by telling lies,--as some of them do,--do you call those _men_? And the gentlemen of the Press who write against their convictions for a salary, and for the sake of a suburban villa, a silk hat, and some cheap claret, devote their energies and talents to the perpetuation of falsehood and wrong--do you call _those_ men? If we cannot keep our foreign trade without giving up our love and our manhood and our honour, it is time the foreign trade went to the devil and took the British employers with it. If the state of things in England to-day makes it impossible for men and women to love and marry, then the state of things in England to-day will not do. Well, do you still think that single life, a crust of bread, and rags, will alone enable you to hold your own and to keep your foreign trade? And do you still think that poverty is a mark of unworthiness, and wealth the sure proof of merit? If so, just read these few lines from an article by a Tory Minister, Sir John Gorst-- The "won't-works" are very few in number, but the section of the population who cannot earn enough wages all the year round to live decently is very large. Professional criminals are not generally poor, for when out of gaol they live very comfortably as a rule. There are wastrels, of course, who have sunk so low as to have a positive aversion to work, and it is people of this kind who are most noisy in parading their poverty. The industrious poor, on the other hand, shrink from exposing their wretchedness to the world, and strive as far as possible to keep it out of sight. Now, contrast those sensible and kindly words with the following quotation from a mercantile journal:-- The talk about every man having a right to work is fallacious, for he can only have the right of every free man to do work if he can get it. Yes! But he has other "rights." He has the right to combine to defeat attempts to rob him of work or to lower his wages; he has the right to vote for parliamentary and municipal candidates who will alter the laws and the conditions of society which enable a few greedy and heartless men to disorganise the industries of the nation, to keep the Briton off the land which is his birthright, to exploit the brain and the sinew of the people, and to condemn millions of innocent and helpless women and children to poverty, suffering, ignorance, and too often to disgrace or early death. A man, John Smith, has the right to _be a man_, and, if he is a Briton, has a right to be a free man. It is to persuade every man in Britain to exercise this right, and to do his duty to the children and the women of his class and family, that I am publishing this book. "The right to do work if he can get it," John, and to starve if he cannot get it. How long will you allow these insolent market-men to insult you? How long will you allow a mob of money-lending, bargain-driving, dividend-snatching parasites to live on you, to scorn you, and to treat you as "live stock"? How long? How long? I shall have to write a book for the women, John. CHAPTER XV THE SURPLUS LABOUR MISTAKE Many non-Socialists believe that the cause of poverty is "surplus labour," or over-population, and they tell us that if we could reduce our population we should have no poor. If this were true, we should find that in thinly populated countries the workers fare better than in countries where the population is more dense. But we do not find anything of the kind. The population of Ireland is thin. There are more people in London than in all Ireland. Yet the working people of Ireland are worse off than the working people of England. The population of Scotland is thinner than that of England, but wages rule higher in England. In Australia there is a large country and a small population, but there is plenty of poverty. In the Middle Ages the entire population of England would only be a few millions--say four or five millions--whereas it is now nearly thirty millions. Yet the working classes are very much better off to-day than they were in the eighth and ninth centuries. Reduce the population of Britain to one million and the workers would be in no better case than they are now. Increase the population to sixty millions and the workers will be no worse off--at least so far as wages are concerned. I will give you the reason for this in a few words, using an illustration which used to serve me for the same purpose in one of my lectures. No one will deny that all wealth--whether food, tools, clothing, furniture, machines, arms, or houses--comes from _the land_. For we feed our cattle and poultry on the land, and get from the land corn, malt, hops, iron, timber, and every other thing we use, except fish and a few sea-drugs; and we could not get fish without nets and boats, nor make nets and boats without fibre and wood and metals. Stand a decanter and a tumbler on a bare table. Call the table Britain, call the decanter a landlord, and call the tumbler a labourer. Now no man can produce wealth without land. If, then, Lord de Canter owns all the land, and Tommy Tumbler owns none, how is Tommy Tumbler to get his living? He will have to work for Lord de Canter, and he will have to take the wage his lordship offers him. Now you cannot say that Britain is over-populated with only two men, nor that it is suffering from a superfluity of labour when there is only one labourer. And yet you observe that with only two men in the country one is rich and the other poor. How, then, will a reduction of the population prevent poverty? Look at this diagram. A square board, with two men on it; one is black and one is white. [Illustration: Fig. 3.] Call the board England, the black pawn a landlord, and the white pawn a labourer. Let me repeat that every useful thing comes out of the land, and then ask this simple question: If _all_ the land--the whole of England--belongs to the black man, how is the white man going to get his living? You see, although the population of England consists of only two men, if one of these men owns _all_ the land, the other man must starve, or steal, or beg, or work for wages. Now, suppose our white man works for wages--works for the black man--what is going to regulate the wages? Will the fact that there is only one beggar make that beggar any richer? If there were ten white men, and _all_ the land belonged to the black man, the ten whites would be as well off as the one white was, for the landowner could find them all work, and could get them to work for just as much as they could live on. No: that idea of raising wages by reducing the population is a mistake. Do not the workers _make_ the wealth? They do. And is it not odd to say that we will increase the wealth by reducing the number of the wealth makers? But perhaps you think the workers might get a bigger _share_ of the wealth if there were fewer of them. How? Our black man owns all England. He has 100 whites working for him at wages just big enough to keep them alive. Of those 100 whites 50 die. Will the black man raise the wages of the remaining 50? Why should he? There is no reason why he should. But there is this reason why he should not, viz. that as he has now only 50 men working for him, he will only be half as rich as he was when he had 100 men working for him. But the land is still his, and the whites are still in his power. He will still pay them just as much as they can live on, and no more. But you may say that if the workers decreased and the masters did not decrease in numbers, wages must rise. Suppose you have in the export cotton trade 100 masters and 100,000 workers. Half the workers die. You have now 100 masters and 50,000 workers. Then you may say that, as foreign countries would still want the work of 100,000 workers, the 100 masters would compete as to which got the biggest orders, and so wages would rise. But bear in mind two things. First, if the foreign workers were as numerous as before, the English masters could import hands; second, if the foreign workers died out as fast as the English, there would only be half as many foreigners needing shirts, and so the trade would keep pace with the decrease in workers, and the wages would remain as they were. To improve the wages of the English workers the price of cotton goods must rise or the profits of the masters must be cut down. Neither of these things depends on the number of the population. But now go back to our England with the three men in it. Here is the black landlord, rich and idle; and the two white workers, poor and industrious. One of the workers dies. The landlord gets less money, but the remaining worker gets no more. _There are only two men in all England, and one of them is poor._ But suppose we have one black landlord and 100 white workers, and the workers adopt Socialism. Then every man of the 101 will have just what he earns, and _all_ that he earns, and all will be free men. Thus you see that under Socialism a big population will be better off than the smallest population can be under non-Socialism. But, the non-Socialist objects, wages are ruled by competition, and must fall when the supply of labour exceeds the demand; and when that happens it is because the country is over-populated. I admit that the supply of labour often exceeds the demand, and that when it does, wages may come down. But I deny that an excess of labour over the demand for labour proves the country to be over-populated. What it does prove is that the country is badly governed and under-cultivated. A country is over-populated when its soil cannot yield food for its people. At present our population is about 40,000,000 and our soil would support more than double the number. The country, then, is not over-populated; it is badly governed. There are, let us say, more shoemakers and tailors than there is employment for. But are there no bare feet and ill-clothed backs? Certainly. The bulk of our workers are not properly shod or clothed. It is not, then, true to say that we have more tailors and shoemakers than we require; but we ought to say instead that our tailors and shoemakers cannot live by their trades because the rest of the workers are too poor to pay them. Now, why are the rest of the workers too poor to buy boots and clothing? Is it because there are too many of them? Let us take an instance: the farm labourer. He cannot afford boots. Why? He is too poor. Why? Not because there are too many farm labourers,--for there are too few,--but because the wages of farm labourers are low. Why are they low? Because agriculture is neglected, and because rents are high. So we come back to my original statement, that the evil is due to the private ownership of land. The many are poor because the few are rich. But, again, it may be asserted that we have always about half a million of men unemployed, and that these men prove the existence of superfluous labour. Not at all. There are half a million of men out of work, but there are many millions of acres idle. Abolish private ownership of land, and the nation, being now owner of _all_ land, can at once find work for that so-called "superfluous labour." All wealth comes from the land. All wealth must be got from the land by labour. Given a sufficient quantity of land, one man can produce from the land more wealth than one man can consume. Therefore, as long as there is a sufficiency of land there can be no such thing as "superfluous labour," and no such thing as over-population. Given machinery and combination, and probably one man can produce from the land enough wealth for ten to consume. Why, then, should there be any such thing as poverty? One fundamental truth of economics is that every able-bodied and willing worker is worth more than his keep. There is such a thing as locked-out labour, but there is no such thing in this country as useless labour. While we have land lying idle, and while we have to import our food, how can we be so foolish as to call a man who is excluded from the land superfluous? He is one of the factors of wealth, and land is the other. Set the man on the land and he will produce wealth. At present he is out of work and the land out of use. But are either of them superfluous? No; we need both. CHAPTER XVI IS SOCIALISM POSSIBLE, AND WILL IT PAY? Non-Socialists assert with the utmost confidence that Socialism is impossible. Let us consider this statement in a practical way. We are told that Socialism is impossible. That means that the people have not the ability to manage their own affairs, and must, perforce, give nearly all the wealth they produce to the superior persons who at present are kind enough to own, to govern, and to manage Britain for the British. A bold statement! The people _cannot_ manage their own business: it is _impossible_. They cannot farm the land, and build the factories, and weave the cloth, and feed and clothe and house themselves; they are not able to do it. They must have landlords and masters to do it for them. But the joke is that these landlords and masters do _not_ do it for the people. The people do it for the landlords and masters; and the latter gentlemen make the people pay them for allowing the people to work. But the people can only produce wealth under supervision; they must have superior persons to direct them. So the non-Socialist declares. Another bold assertion, which is not true. For nearly all those things which the non-Socialist tells us are impossible _are being done_. Nearly all those matters of management, of which the people are said to be incapable, are being accomplished by the people _now_. For if the nation can build warships, why can they not build cargo ships? If they can make rifles, why not sewing machines or ploughs? If they can build forts, why not houses? If they can make policemen's boots and soldiers' coats, why not make ladies' hats and mechanics' trousers? If they can pickle beef for the navy, why should they not make jam for the household? If they can run a railway across the African desert, why should they not run one from London to York? Look at the Co-operative Societies. They own and run cargo ships. They import and export goods. They make boots and foods. They build their own shops and factories. They buy and sell vast quantities of useful things. Well, these places were started by working men, and are owned by working men. Look at the post office. If the nation can carry its own letters, why not its own coals? If it can manage its telegraphs, why not its railways, its trams, its cabs, its factories? Look at the London County Council and the Glasgow and Manchester Corporations. If these bodies of public servants can build dwelling-houses, make roads, tunnels, and sewers, carry water from Thirlmere to Manchester, manage the Ship Canal, make and supply gas, own and work tramways, and take charge of art galleries, baths, wash-houses, and technical schools, what is there that landlords or masters do, or get done, which the cities and towns cannot do better and more cheaply for themselves? What sense is there in pretending that the colliers could not get coal unless they paid rent to a lord, or that the railways could not carry coal unless they paid dividends to a company, or that the weaver could not make shirtings, nor the milliners bonnets, nor the cutlers blades, just as well for the nation as for Mr. Bounderby or my Lord Tomnoddy? "But," the "Impossibles" will say, "you have not got the capital." Do not believe them. You _have_ got the capital. Where? In your brains and in your arms, where _all_ the capital comes from. Why, if what the "Impossibles" tell us be true--if the people are not able to do anything for themselves as well as the private dealers or makers can do it for them--the gas and water companies ought to have no fear of being cut out in price and quality by any County Council or Corporation. But the "Impossibles" know very well that, directly the people set up on their own account, the private trader or maker is beaten. Let one district of London begin to make its own gas, and see what will happen in the other districts. Twenty years ago this cry of "Impossible" was not so easy to dispose of, but to-day it can be silenced by the logic of accomplished facts. For within the last score of years the Municipalities of London, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Bradford, Birmingham, Bolton, Leicester, and other large towns have _proved_ that the Municipalities can manage large and small enterprises efficiently, and that in all cases it is to the advantage of the ratepayers, of the consumers, and of the workers that private management should be displaced by management under the Municipality. Impossible? Why, the capital already invested in municipal works amounts to nearly £100,000,000. And the money is well invested, and all the work is prosperous. Municipalities own and manage waterworks, gasworks, tramways, telephones, electric lighting, markets, baths, piers, docks, parks, farms, dwelling-houses, abattoirs, cemeteries, crematoriums, libraries, schools, art galleries, hotels, dairies, colleges, and technical schools. Many of the Municipalities also provide concerts, open-air music, science classes, and lectures; and quite recently the Alexandra Palace has been municipalised, and is now being successfully run by the people and for the people. How, then, can _Socialism_ be called impossible? As a matter of fact _Socialism_ is only a method of extending State management, as in the Post Office, and Municipal management, as in the cases above named, until State and Municipal management becomes universal all through the kingdom. Where is the impossibility of that? If a Corporation can manage trams, gas, and water, why can it not manage bread, milk, meat, and beer supplies? If Bradford can manage one hotel, why not more than one? If Bradford can manage more than one hotel, why cannot London, Glasgow, Leeds, and Portsmouth do the same? If the German, Austrian, French, Italian, Belgian, and other Governments can manage the railway systems of their countries, why cannot the British Government manage theirs? If the Government can manage a fleet of war vessels, why not fleets of liners and traders? If the Government can manage post and telegraph services, why not telephones and coalmines? The answer to all these questions is that the Government and the Municipalities have proved that they can manage vast and intricate businesses, and can manage them more cheaply, more efficiently, and more to the advantage and satisfaction of the public than the same class of business has ever been managed by private firms. How can it be maintained, then, that _Socialism_ is impossible? But, will it _pay_? What! _Will_ it pay? It _does_ pay. Read _To-Day's Work_, by George Haw, Clarion Press, 2s. 6d., and _Does Municipal Management Pay_? by R. B. Suthers, Clarion Press, 6d., and you will be surprised to find how well these large and numerous Municipal experiments in _Socialism_ do pay. From the book on Municipal Management, by R. B. Suthers, above mentioned, I will quote a few comparisons between Municipal and private tram and water services. WATER "In Glasgow they devote all profits to making the services cheaper and to paying off capital borrowed. "Thus, since the Glasgow Municipality took control of the water supply, forty years ago, they have reduced the price of water from 1s. 2d. in the pound rental to 5d. in the pound rental for domestic supply. "Compare that with the price paid by the London consumer under private enterprise. "On a £30 house in Glasgow the water rate amounts to 12s. 6d. "On a £30 house in Chelsea the water rate amounts to 30s. "On a £30 house in Lambeth the water rate is £2, 16s. "On a £30 house in Southwark the water rate is 32s. "And so on. The London consumer pays from two to five times as much as the Glasgow consumer. He does not get as much water, he does not get as good water, and a large part of the money he pays goes into the pockets of the water lords. "Last year the water companies took just over a million in profits from the intelligent electors of the Metropolis. "In Glasgow a part of the 5d. in the pound goes to paying off the capital borrowed to provide the waterworks. £2,350,000 has been so spent, and over one million of this has been paid back. "_Does_ Municipal management pay? "Look at Liverpool. The private companies did not give an adequate supply, so the Municipality took the matter in hand. What is the result? "The charge for water in Liverpool is a fixed rate of 3d. in the pound and a water rate of 7½d. in the pound. "For this comparatively small amount the citizen of Liverpool, as Sir Thomas Hughes said, "can have as many baths and as many water closets as he likes, and the same with regard to water for his garden." "In London the water companies make high charges for every separate bath and water closet." TRAMWAYS "In Glasgow from 1871 to 1894 a private company had a lease of the tramways from the Corporation. "When the lease was about to expire the Corporation tried to arrange terms with the company for a renewal, but the company would not accept the terms offered. "Moreover, there was a strong public feeling in favour of the Corporation working the tramways. The company service was not efficient; it was dear, and their bad treatment of their employees had roused general indignation. "So the Corporation decided to manage the tramways, and the day after the company's lease expired they placed on the streets an entirely new service of cars, cleaner, handsomer, and more comfortable in every way than their predecessors'. "The result of the first eleven months' working was a triumph for Municipal management. "The Corporation had many difficulties to contend with. Their horses were new and untrained, their staff was larger and new to the work, and the old company flooded the routes with 'buses to compete with the trams. "Notwithstanding these difficulties, they introduced halfpenny fares, they lengthened the distance for a penny, they raised the wages of the men and shortened their hours, they refused to disfigure the cars with advertisements, thus losing a handsome revenue, and in the end were able to show a profit of £24,000, which was devoted to the common-good fund and to depreciation account. "Since that time the success of the enterprise has been still more wonderful. "The private company during the last four weeks of their reign carried 4,428,518 passengers. "The Corporation in the corresponding four weeks of 1895 carried 6,114,789. In the year 1895-6 the Corporation carried 87,000,000 In the year 1899-1900 127,000,000 In the year 1900-1 132,000,000 In 1895-6 the receipts were £222,121 In 1899-1900 the receipts were £464,886 In 1900-1 the receipts were £484,872 In 1895 there were 31 miles of tramway In 1901 there were 44½ " " In 1895 the number of cars was 170 In 1901 " " was 322 "The citizens of Glasgow have a much better service than the private company provided, the fares are from 30 to 50 per cent. lower, the men work four hours a day less, and get from 5s. a week more wages, and free uniforms, and the capital expended is being gradually wiped out. "In thirty-three years the capital borrowed will be paid back from a sinking fund provided out of the receipts. "The gross capital expenditure to May 1901 was £1,947,730. "The sinking fund amounts to £75,063. "But the Corporation have, in addition, written off £153,796 for depreciation, they have placed £91,350 to a Permanent Way Renewal Fund, and they have piled up a general reserve fund of £183,428. "Under a private company £100,000 would have gone into the pockets of a few shareholders _on last year's working_--even if the private company had charged the same fares and paid the same wages as the Corporation did, which is an unlikely assumption." If you will read the two books I have mentioned, by Messrs. Haw and Suthers, you will be convinced by _facts_ that _Socialism_ is possible, and that it _will_ pay. Bear in mind, also, that in all cases where the Municipality has taken over some department of public service and supply, the decrease in cost and the improvement in service which the ratepayers have secured are not the only improvements upon the management of the same work by private companies. Invariably the wages, hours, and conditions of men employed on Municipal work are superior to those of men employed by companies. Another thing should be well remembered. The private trader thinks only of profit. The Municipality considers the health and comfort of the citizens and the beauty and convenience of the city. Look about and see what the County Council have done and are doing for London; and all their improvements have to be carried out in the face of opposition from interested and privileged parties. They have to improve and beautify London almost by force of arms, working, as one might say, under the guns of the enemy. But if the citizens were all united, if the city had one will to work for the general boon, as under _Socialism_ happily it should be, London would in a score of years be the richest, the healthiest, and the most beautiful city in the world. _Socialism_, Mr. Smith, is quite possible, and will not only pay but bless the nation that has the wisdom to afford full scope to its beneficence. CHAPTER XVII THE NEED FOR A LABOUR PARTY I am now to persuade you, Mr. John Smith, a British workman, that you need a Labour Party. It is a queer task for a bookish man, a literary student, and an easy lounger through life, who takes no interest in politics and needs no party at all. To persuade you, a worker, that you need a worker's party, is like persuading you that you need food, shelter, love, and liberty. It is like persuading a soldier that he needs arms, a scholar that he needs books, a woman that she needs a home. Yet my chief object in writing this book has been to persuade you that you need a Labour Party. Why should Labour have a Labour Party? I will put the answer first into the words of the anti-Socialist, and say, Because "self-interest is the strongest motive of mankind." That covers the whole ground, and includes all the arguments that I shall advance in favour of a Labour Party. For if self-interest be the leading motive of human nature, does it not follow that when a man wants a thing done for his own advantage he will be wise to do it himself. An upper-class party may be expected to attend to the interests of the upper class. And you will find that such a party has always done what might be expected. A middle-class party may be expected to attend to the interests of the middle class. And history and the logic of current events prove that the middle class has done what might have been expected. And if you wish the interests of the working class to be attended to, you will take to heart the lesson contained in those examples, and will form a working-class party. Liberals will declare, and do declare, in most pathetic tones, that they have done more, and will do more, for the workers than the Tories have done or will do. And Liberals will assure you that they are really more anxious to help the workers than we Socialists believe. But those are side issues. The main thing to remember is, that even if the Liberals are all they claim to be, they will never do as much for Labour as Labour could do for itself. Is not self-interest the ruling passion in the human heart? Then how should _any_ party be so true to Labour and so diligent in Labour's service as a Labour Party would be? What is a Trade Union? It is a combination of workers to defend their own interests from the encroachments of the employers. Well, a Labour Party is a combination of workers to defend their own interests from the encroachments of the employers, or their representatives in Parliament and on Municipal bodies. Do you elect your employers as officials of your Trade Unions? Do you send employers as delegates to your Trade Union Congress? You would laugh at the suggestion. You know that the employer _could_ not attend to your interests in the Trade Union, which is formed as a defence against him. Do you think the employer is likely to be more useful or more disinterested in Parliament or the County Council than in the Trade Union? Whether he be in Parliament or in his own office, he is an employer, and he puts his own interest first and the interests of Labour behind. Yet these men whom as Trade Unionists you mistrust, you actually send as politicians to "represent" you. A Labour Party is a kind of political Trade Union, and to defend Trade Unionism is to defend Labour representation. If a Liberal or a Tory can be trusted as a parliamentary representative, why cannot he be trusted as an employer? If an employer's interests are opposed to your interests in business, what reason have you for supposing that his interests and yours are not opposed in politics? Am I to persuade you to join a Labour Party? Then why should I not persuade you to join a Trade Union? Trade Union and Labour Party are both class defences against class aggression. If you oppose a man as an employer, why do you vote for him as a Member of Parliament? His calling himself a Liberal or a Tory does not alter the fact that he is an employer. To be a Trade Unionist and fight for your class during a strike, and to be a Tory or a Liberal and fight against your class at an election, is folly. During a strike there are no Tories or Liberals amongst the strikers; they are all workers. At election times there are no workers; only Liberals and Tories. During an election there are Tory and Liberal capitalists, and all of them are friends of the workers. During a strike there are no Tories and no Liberals amongst the employers. They are all capitalists and enemies of the workers. Is there any logic in you workers? Is there any perception in you? Is there any _sense_ in you? As I said just now, you never elect an employer as president of a Trades' Council, or a chairman of a Trade Union Congress, or as a member of a Trade Union. You never ask an employer to lead you during a strike. But at election times, when you ought to stand by your class, the whole body of Trade Union workers turn into black-legs, and fight for the capitalist and against the workers. Even some of your Labour Members of Parliament go and help the candidature of employers against candidates standing for Labour. That is a form of political black-legging which I am surprised to find you allow. But besides the conflict of personal interests, there are other reasons why the Liberal and Tory parties are useless to Labour. One of these reasons is that the reform programmes of the old parties, such as they are, consist almost entirely of political reforms. But the improvement of the workers' condition depends more upon industrial reform. The nationalisation of the railways and the coalmines, the taxation of the land, and the handing over of all the gas, water, and food supplies, and all the tramway systems, to Municipal control, would do more good for the workers than extension of the franchise or payment of members. The old political struggles have mostly been fought for political reforms or for changes of taxation. The coming struggle will be for industrial reform. We want Britain for the British. We want the fruits of labour for those who produce them. We want a human life for all. The issue is not one between Liberals and Tories; it is an issue between the privileged classes and the workers. Neither of the political parties is of any use to the workers, because both the political parties are paid, officered, and led by capitalists whose interests are opposed to the interests of the workers. The Socialist laughs at the pretended friendship of Liberal and Tory leaders for the workers. These party politicians do not in the least understand what the rights, the interests, or the desires of the workers are; if they did understand, they would oppose them implacably. The demand of the Socialist is a demand for the nationalisation of the land and all other instruments of production and distribution. The party leaders will not hear of such a thing. If you want to get an idea how utterly destitute of sympathy with Labour the privileged classes really are, read carefully the papers which express their views. Read the organs of the landlords, the capitalists, and the employers; or read the Liberal and the Tory papers during a big strike, or during some bye-election when a Labour candidate is standing against a Tory and a Liberal. It is a very common thing to hear a party leader deprecate the increase of "class representation." What does that mean? It means Labour representation. But the "class" concerned in Labour representation is the working class, a "class" of thirty millions of people. Observe the calm effrontery of this sneer at "class representation." The thirty millions of workers are not represented by more than a dozen members. The other classes--the landlords, the capitalists, the military, the law, the brewers, and idle gentlemen--are represented by something like six hundred members. This is class representation with a vengeance. It is colossal _impudence_ for a party paper to talk against "class representation." Every class is over-represented--except the great working class. The mines, the railways, the drink trade, the land, finance, the army (officers), the navy (officers), the church, the law, and most of the big industries (employers), are represented largely in the House of Commons. And nearly thirty millions of the working classes are represented by about a dozen men, most of whom are palsied by their allegiance to the Liberal Party. And, mind you, this disproportion exists not only in Parliament, but in all County and Municipal institutions. How many working men are there on the County Councils, the Boards of Guardians, the School Boards, and the Town Councils? The capitalists, and their hangers-on, not only make the laws--they administer them. Is it any wonder, then, that laws are made and administered in the interests of the capitalist? And does it not seem reasonable to suppose that if the laws were made and administered by workers, they would be made and administered to the advantage of Labour? Well, my advice to working men is to return working men representatives, with definite and imperative instructions, to Parliament and to all other governing bodies. Some of the old Trade Unionists will tell you that there is no need for parliamentary interference in Labour matters. The Socialist does not ask for "parliamentary interference"; he asks for Government by the people and for the people. The older Unionists think that Trade Unionism is strong enough in itself to secure the rights of the worker. This is a great mistake. The rights of the worker are the whole of the produce of his labour. Trade Unionism not only cannot secure that, but has never even tried to secure that. The most that Trade Unionism has secured, or can ever hope to secure, for the workers, is a comfortable subsistence wage. They have not always secured even that much, and, when they have secured it, the cost has been serious. For the great weapon of Unionism is a strike, and a strike is at best a bitter, a painful, and a costly thing. Do not think that I am opposed to Trade Unionism. It is a good thing; it has long been the only defence of the workers against robbery and oppression; were it not for the Trade Unionism of the past and of the present, the condition of the British industrial classes would be one of abject slavery. But Trade Unionism, although some defence, is not sufficient defence. You must remember, also, that the employers have copied the methods of Trade Unionism. They also have organised and united, and, in the future, strikes will be more terrible and more costly than ever. The capitalist is the stronger. He holds the better strategic position. He can always outlast the worker, for the worker has to starve and see his children starve, and the capitalist never gets to that pass. Besides, capital is more mobile than labour. A stroke of the pen will divert wealth and trade from one end of the country to the other; but the workers cannot move their forces so readily. One difference between Socialism and Trade Unionism is, that whereas the Unions can only marshal and arm the workers for a desperate trial of endurance, Socialism can get rid of the capitalist altogether. The former helps you to resist the enemy, the latter destroys him. I suggest that you should join a Socialist Society and help to get others to join, and that you should send Socialist workers to sit upon all representative bodies. The Socialist tells you that you are men, with men's rights and with men's capacities for all that is good and great--and you hoot him, and call him a liar and a fool. The Politician despises you, declares that all your sufferings are due to your own vices, that you are incapable of managing your own affairs, and that if you were intrusted with freedom and the use of the wealth you create you would degenerate into a lawless mob of drunken loafers; and you cheer him until you are hoarse. The Politician tells you that _his_ party is the people's party, and that _he_ is the man to defend your interests; and in spite of all you know of his conduct in the past, you believe him. The Socialist begs you to form a party of your own, and to do your work yourselves; and you call him a _dreamer_. I do not know whether the working man is a dreamer, but he seems to me to spend a good deal of his time asleep. Still, there are hopeful signs of an awakening. The recent decision of the miners to pay one shilling each a year into a fund for securing parliamentary and other representation, is one of the most hopeful signs I have yet seen. The matter is really a simple one. The workers have enough votes, and they can easily find enough money. The 2,000,000 of Trade Unionists could alone find the money to elect and support more than a hundred labour representatives. Say that election expenses for each candidate were £500. A hundred candidates at £500 would cost £50,000. Pay for each representative at £200 a year would cost for a hundred M.P.s £20,000. If 2,000,000 Unionists gave 1s. a year each, the sum would be £100,000. That would pay for the election of 100 members, keep them for a year, and leave a balance of £30,000. With a hundred Labour Members in Parliament, and a proportionate representation of Labour on all County Councils, City, Borough, and Parish Councils, School Boards and Boards of Guardians, the interests of the workers would begin, for the first time in our history, to receive some real and valuable attention. But not only is it desirable that the workers should strive for solid reforms, but it is also imperative that they should prepare to defend the liberties and rights they have already won. A man must be very careless or very obtuse if he does not perceive that the classes are preparing to drive the workers back from the positions they now hold. Two ominous words, "Conscription" and "Protection" are being freely bandied about, and attacks, open or covert, are being made upon Trade Unionism and Education. If the workers mean to hold their own they must attack as well as defend. And to attack they need a strong and united Labour Party, that will fight for Labour in and out of Parliament, and will stand for Labour apart from the Liberal and the Tory parties. And now let us see what the Liberal and Tory parties offer the worker, and why they are not to be trusted. CHAPTER XVIII WHY THE OLD PARTIES WILL NOT DO The old parties are no use to Labour for two reasons:-- 1. Because their interests are mostly opposed to the interests of Labour. 2. Because such reform as they promise is mostly political, and the kind of reform needed by Labour is industrial and social reform. Liberal and Tory politicians call us Socialists _dreamers_. They claim to be practical men. They say theories are no use, that reform can only be secured by practical men and practical means, and for practical men and practical means you must look to the great parties. Being anxious to catch even the faintest streak of dawn in the dreary political sky, we _do_ look to the great parties. I have been looking to them for quite twenty years. And nothing has come of it. What _can_ come of it? What are the "practical" reforms about which we hear so much? Putting the broadest construction upon them, it may be said that the practical politics of both parties are within the lines of the following programme:-- 1. Manhood Suffrage. 2. Payment of Members of Parliament. 3. Payment of Election Expenses. 4. The Second Ballot. 5. Abolition of Dual Voting. 6. Disestablishment of the Church. 7. Abolition of the House of Lords. And it is alleged by large numbers of people, all of them, for some inexplicable reason, proud of their hard common sense, that the passing of this programme into law would, in some manner yet to be expounded, make miserable England into merry England, and silence the visionaries and agitators for ever. Now, with all deference and in all humility, I say to these practical politicians that the above programme, if it became law to-morrow, would not, for any practical purpose, be worth the paper it was printed on. There are seven items, and not one of them would produce the smallest effect upon the mass of misery and injustice which is now crushing the life out of this nation. No. All those planks are political planks, and they all amount to the same thing--the shifting of political power from the classes to the masses. The idea being that when the people have the political power they will use it to their own advantage. A false idea. The people would not know _how_ to use the power, and if they did know how to use it, it by no means follows that they would use it. Some of the _real_ evils of the time, the real causes of England's distress, are:-- 1. The unjust monopoly of the land. 2. The unjust extortion of interest. 3. The universal system of suicidal competition. 4. The baseness of popular ideals. 5. The disorganisation of the forces for the production of wealth. 6. The unjust distribution of wealth. 7. The confusions and contradictions of the moral ethics of the nation, with resultant unjust laws and unfair conditions of life. There I will stop. Against the seven remedies I will put seven evils, and I say that not one of the remedies can cure any one of the evils. The seven remedies will give increased political power to the people. So. But, assuming that political power is the one thing needful, I say the people have it now. Supposing the masses in Manchester were determined to return to Parliament ten working men. They have an immense preponderance of votes. They could carry the day at every poll? But _do_ they? If not, why not? Then, as to expenses. Assuming the cost to be £200 a member, that would make a gross sum of £2000 for ten members, which sum would not amount to quite fivepence a head for 100,000 voters. But do voters find this money? If not, why not? Then, as to maintenance. Allowing each member £200 a year, that would mean another fivepence a year for the 100,000 men. So that it is not too much to say that, without passing one of the Acts in the seven-branched programme, the workers of Manchester could, at a cost of less than one penny a month per man, return and maintain ten working men Members of Parliament? Now, my practical friends, how many working-class members sit for Manchester to-day? And if the people, having so much power now, make no use of it, why are we to assume that all they need is a little more power to make them healthy, and wealthy, and wise? But allow me to offer a still more striking example--the example of America. In the first place, I assume that in America the electoral power of the people is much greater than it is here. I will give one or two examples. In America, I understand, they have:-- 1. No Established Church. 2. No House of Lords. 3. Members of the Legislature are paid. 4. The people have Universal Suffrage. There are four out of the seven branches of the practical politicians' programme in actual existence. For the other three-- The Abolition of Dual Voting; The Payment of Election Expenses; and The Second Ballot-- I cannot answer; but these do not seem to have done quite as much for France as our practical men expect them to do for England. Very well, America has nearly all that our practical politicians promise us. Is America, therefore, so much better off as to justify us in accepting the seven-branched programme as salvation? Some years ago I read a book called _How the Other Half Lives_, written by an American citizen, and dealing with the conditions of the poor in New York. We should probably be justified in assuming that just as London is a somewhat intensified epitome of England, so is New York of America; but we will not assume that much. We will look at this book together, and we will select a few facts as to the state of the people in New York, and then I will ask you to consider this proposition:-- 1. That in New York the people already enjoy all the advantages of practical politics, as understood in England. 2. That, nevertheless, New York is a more miserable and vicious city than London. 3. That this seems to me to indicate that practical politics are hopeless, and that practical politicians are--not quite so wise as they imagine. About thirty years ago there was a committee appointed in New York to investigate the "great increase in crime." The Secretary of the New York Prison Association, giving evidence, said:-- Eighty per cent. at least of the crimes against property and against the person are perpetrated by individuals who have either lost connection with home life or never had any, or whose homes have ceased to be sufficiently separate, decent, and desirable to afford what are regarded as ordinary wholesome influences of home and family. The younger criminals seem to come almost exclusively from the worst tenement-house districts. These tenements, it seems, are slums. Of the evil of these places, of the miseries of them, we shall hear more presently. Our author, Mr. Jacob A. Riis, asserts again and again that the slums make the disease, the crime, and the wretchedness of New York:-- In the tenements all the influences make for evil, because they are the hot-beds that carry death to rich and poor alike; the nurseries of pauperism and crime, that fill our gaols and police-courts; that throw off a scum of forty thousand human wrecks to the island asylums and workhouses year by year; that turned out, in the last eight years, a round half-million of beggars to prey upon our charities; that maintain a standing army of ten thousand tramps, with all that that implies; because, above all, they touch the family life with moral contagion. Well, that is what the American writer thinks of the tenement system--of the New York slums. _Now_ comes the important question, What is the extent of these slums? And on this point Mr. Riis declares more than once that the extent is enormous:-- To-day (1891) three-fourths of New York's people live in the tenements, and the nineteenth century drift of the population to the cities is sending ever-increasing multitudes to crowd them. Where are the tenements of to-day? Say, rather, where are they not? In fifty years they have crept up from the Fourth Ward Slums and the Fifth Points, the whole length of the island, and have polluted the annexed district to the Westchester line. Crowding all the lower wards, where business leaves a foot of ground unclaimed; strung along both rivers, like ball and chain tied to the foot of every street, and filling up Harlem with their restless, pent-up multitudes, they hold within their clutch the wealth and business of New York--hold them at their mercy, in the day of mob-rule and wrath. So much, then, for the extent of these slums. Now for the nature of them. A New York doctor said of some of them-- If we could see the air breathed by these poor creatures in their tenements, it would show itself to be fouler than the mud of the gutters. And Mr. Riis goes on to tell of the police finding 101 adults and 91 children in one Crosby Street House, 150 "lodgers" sleeping "on filthy floors in two buildings." But the most striking illustration I can give you of the state of the working-class dwellings in New York is by placing side by side the figures of the population per acre in the slums of New York and Manchester. The Manchester slums are bad--disgracefully, sinfully bad--and the overcrowding is terrible. But referring to the figures I took from various official documents when I was writing on the Manchester slums a few years ago, I find the worst cases of overcrowding to be:-- District. Pop. per Acre. Ancoats No. 3 256 Deansgate No. 2 266 London Road No. 3 267 Hulme No. 3 270 St. George's No. 6 274 These are the worst cases from some of the worst English slums. Now let us look at the figures for New York-- DENSITY OF POPULATION PER ACRE IN 1890 Tenth Ward 522 Eleventh Ward 386 Thirteenth Ward 428 The population of these three wards in the same year was over 179,000. The population of New York in 1890 was 1,513,501. In 1888 there were in New York 1,093,701 persons living in tenement houses. Then, in 1889, there died in New York hospitals 6102; in lunatic asylums, 448; while the number of pauper funerals was 3815. In 1890 there were in New York 37,316 tenements, with a gross population of 1,250,000. These things are facts, and our practical politicians love facts. But these are not all the facts. No. In this book about New York I find careful plans and drawings of the slums, and I can assure you we have nothing so horrible in all England. Nor do the revelations of Mr. Riis stop there. We have full details of the sweating shops, the men and women crowded together in filthy and noisome dens, working at starvation prices, from morning until late on in the night, "until brain and muscle break down together." We have pictures of the beggars, the tramps, the seamstresses, the unemployed, the thieves, the desperadoes, the lost women, the street arabs, the vile drinking and opium dens, and we have facts and figures to prove that this great capital of the great Republic is growing worse; and all this, my practical friends, in spite of the fact that in America they have Manhood Suffrage; Payment of Members; No House of Peers; No State Church; and Free Education; which is more than our most advanced politicians claim as the full extent to which England can be taken by means of practical politics--as understood by the two great parties. Now, I want to know, and I shall be glad if some practical friend will tell me, whether a programme of practical politics which leaves the metropolis of a free and democratic nation a nest of poverty, commercial slavery, vice, crime, insanity, and disease, is likely to make the English people healthy, and wealthy, and wise? And I ask you to consider whether this seven-branched programme is worth fighting for, if it is to result in a density of slum population nearly twice as great as that of the worst districts of the worst slums of Manchester? It seems to me, as an unpractical man, that a practical programme which results in 522 persons to the acre, 18 hours a day for bread and butter, and nearly 4000 pauper funerals a year in one city, is a programme which only _very_ practical men would be fools enough to fight for. At anyrate, I for one will have nothing to say to such a despicable sham. A programme which does not touch the sweater nor the slum; which does not hinder the system of fraud and murder called free competition; which does not give back to the English people their own country or their own earnings, may be good enough for politicians, but it is no use to men and women. No, my lads, there is no system of economics, politics, or ethics whereby it shall be made just or expedient to take that which you have not earned, or to take that which another man has earned; there can be no health, no hope in a nation where everyone is trying to get more than he has earned, and is hocussing his conscience with platitudes about God's Providence having endowed men with different degrees of intellect and virtue. How many years is it since the Newcastle programme was issued? What did it _promise_ that the poor workers of America and France have not already obtained? What good would it do you if you got it? _And when do you think you are likely to get it?_ Is it any nearer now than it was seven years ago? Will it be any nearer ten years hence than it is now if you wait for the practical politicians of the old parties to give it to you? One of the great stumbling-blocks in the way of all progress for Labour is the lingering belief of the working man in the Liberal Party. In the past the Liberals were regarded as the party of progress. They won many fiscal and political reforms for the people. And now, when they will not, or cannot, go any farther, their leaders talk about "ingratitude" if the worker is advised to leave them and form a Labour Party. But when John Bright refused to go any farther, when he refused to go as far as Home Rule, did the Liberal Party think of gratitude to one of their greatest men? No. They dropped John Bright, and they blamed _him_ because he had halted. They why should they demand that you shall stay with them out of gratitude now they have halted? The Liberal Party claim to be the workers' friends. What have they done for him during the last ten years? What are they willing to do for him now, or when they get office? Here is a quotation from a speech made some years ago by Sir William Harcourt-- An attempt is being sedulously made to identify the Liberal Government and the Liberal Party with dreamers of dreams, with wild, anarchical ideas, and anti-social projects. Gentlemen, I say, if I have a right to speak on behalf of the Liberal Party, that we have no sympathy with these mischief-makers at all. The Liberal Party has no share in them; their policy is a constructive policy; they have no revolutionary schemes either in politics, in society, or in trade. You may say that is old. Try this new one. It is from the lips of Mr. Harmsworth, the "official Liberal candidate" at the last by-election in North-East Lanark-- My own opinion is that a _modus vivendi_ should be arrived at between the official Liberal Party and such Labour organisations as desire parliamentary representation, provided, of course, that they are not _tainted with Socialist doctrines_. It should not be difficult to come to something like an amicable settlement. I must say that it came upon me with something of a shock to find that amongst those who sent messages to the Socialist candidate wishing success to him in his propaganda were two Members of Parliament who profess allegiance to the Liberal Party. Provided, "of course," that _they are not tainted with Socialist doctrines_. With Socialist doctrines Sir William Harcourt and Mr. Harmsworth will have no dealings. Now, if you read what I have written in this book you will see that there is no possible reform that can do the workers any real or lasting good unless that reform is _tainted with Socialist doctrines_. Only legislation of a socialistic nature can benefit the working class. And that kind of legislation the Liberals will not touch. It is true there are some individual members amongst the Radicals who are prepared to go a good way with the Socialists. But what can they do? In the House they must obey the Party Whip, and the Party Whip never cracks for socialistic measures. I wonder how many Labour seats have been lost through Home Rule. Time after time good Labour candidates have been defeated because Liberal working men feared to lose a Home Rule vote in the House. And what has Labour got from the Home Rule Liberals it has elected? And where is Home Rule to-day? Let me give you a typical case. A Liberal Unionist lost his seat. He at once became a Home Ruler, and was adopted as Liberal candidate to stand against a Labour candidate and against a Tory. The Labour candidate was a Home Ruler, and had been a Home Ruler when the Liberal candidate was a Unionist. But the Liberal working men would not vote for the Labour man. Why? Because they were afraid he would not get in. If he did not get in the Tory would get in, and the Home Rule vote would be one less in the House. They voted for the Liberal, and he was returned. That is ten years ago. What good has that M.P. done for Home Rule, and what has he done for Labour? The Labour man could have done no more for Home Rule, but he would have worked hard for Labour, and no Party Whip would have checked him. Well, during those ten years it is not too much to say that fifty Labour candidates have been sacrificed in the same way to Home Rule. In ten years those men would have done good service. _And they were all Home Rulers._ Such is the wisdom of the working men who cling to the tails of the Liberal Party. Return a hundred Labour men to the House of Commons, and the Liberal Party will be stronger than if a hundred Liberals were sent in their place, for there is not a sound plank in the Liberal programme which the Labour M.P. would wish removed. But do you doubt for a moment that the presence in the House of a hundred Labour members would do no more for Labour than the presence in their stead of a hundred Liberals? A working man must be very dull if he believes that. That is my case against the old parties. I could say no more if I tried. If you want to benefit your own class, if you want to hasten reform, if you want to frighten the Tories and wake up the Liberals, put your hands in your pockets, find a _farthing a week_ for election and for parliamentary expenses, send a hundred Labour men to the House, and watch the effects. I think you will be more than satisfied. And _that_ is what _I_ call "practical politics." Finally, to end as I began, if self-interest is the strongest motive in human nature, the man who wants his own advantage secured will be wise to attend to it himself. The Liberal Party may be a better party than the Tory Party, but the _best_ party for Labour is a _Labour_ Party. CHAPTER XIX TO-DAY'S WORK Self-interest being the strongest motive in human nature, he who wishes his interests to be served will be wise to attend to them himself. If you, Mr. Smith, as a working man, wish to have better wages, shorter hours, more holidays, and cheaper living, you had better take a hand in the class war by becoming a recruit in the army of Labour. The first line of the Labour army is the Trade Unions. The second line is the Municipality. The third line is Parliament. If working men desire to improve their conditions they will be wise to serve their own interests by using the Trade Unions, the Municipalities, and the House of Commons for all they are worth; and they are worth a lot. Votes you have in plenty, for all practical purposes, and of money you can yourselves raise more than you need, without either hurting yourselves or incurring obligations to men of other classes. One penny a week from 4,000,000 of working men would mean a yearly income of £866,000. We are always hearing that the working classes cannot find enough money to pay the election expenses of their own parliamentary candidates nor to keep their own Labour members if elected. If 4,000,000 workers paid one penny a week (the price of a Sunday paper, or of one glass of cheap beer) they would have £866,000 at the end of a year. Election expenses of 200 Labour candidates at £500 each would be £100,000. Pay of 200 Labour members at £200 a year would be £40,000. Total, £140,000: leaving a balance in hand of £726,000. Election expenses of 2000 candidates for School Board, Municipal Councils, and Boards of Guardians at £50 per man would be £100,000. Leaving a balance of £626,000. Now the cause of Labour has very few friends amongst the newspapers. As I have said before, at times of strikes and other industrial crises, the Press goes almost wholly against the workers. The 4,000,000 men I have supposed to wake up to their own interest could establish weekly and daily papers of _their own_ at a cost of £50,000 for each paper. Say one weekly paper at a penny, one daily paper at a penny, or one morning and one evening paper at a halfpenny each. These papers would have a ready-made circulation amongst the men who owned them. They could be managed, edited, and written by trained journalists engaged for the work, and could contain all the best features of the political papers now bought by working men. Say, then, that the weekly paper cost £50,000 to start, and that the morning and evening papers cost the same. That would be £150,000, and the papers would pay in less than a year. You see, then, that 4,000,000 of men could finance 3 newspapers, 200 parliamentary and 2000 local elections, and pay one year's salary to 200 Members of Parliament for £390,000, or less than _one halfpenny_ a week for one year. If you paid the full penny a week for one year you could do all I have said and have a balance in hand of £476,000. Surely, then, it is nonsense to talk about the difficulty of finding money for election expenses. But you might not be able to get 4,000,000 of men to pay even one penny. Then you could produce the same result if _one_ million (half your present Trade Union membership) pay twopence a week. And even at a cost of twopence a week do you not think the result would be worth the cost? Imagine the effect on the Press, and on Parliament, and on the employers, and on public opinion of your fighting 200 parliamentary and 2000 municipal elections, and founding three newspapers. Then the moral effect of the work the newspapers would do would be sure to result in an increase of the Trade Union membership. A penny looks such a poor, contemptible coin, and even the poor labourer often wastes one. But remember that union is strength, and pennies make pounds. 1000 pennies make more than £4; 100,000 pennies come to more than £400; 1,000,000 pennies come to £4000; 1,000,000 pennies a week for a year give you the enormous sum of £210,000. We _Clarion_ men founded a paper called the _Clarion_ with less than £400 capital, and with no friends or backers, and although we have never given gambling news, nor general news, and had no Trade Unions behind us, we have carried our paper on for ten years, and it is stronger now than ever. Why, then, should the working classes, and especially the Trade Unions, submit to the insults and misrepresentations of newspapers run by capitalists, when they can have better papers of their own to plead their own cause? Suppose it cost £100,000 to start a first-class daily Trade Union organ. How much would that mean to 2,000,000 of Unionists? If it cost £100,000 to start the paper, and if it lost £100,000 a year, it would only mean one halfpenny a week for the first year, and one farthing a week for the next. But I am quite confident that if the Unions did the thing in earnest they could start a paper for £50,000, and run it at a profit after the first six months. Do not forget the power of the penny. If 10,000,000 of working men and women gave _one penny a year_ it would reach a yearly income of _forty thousand pounds_. A good deal may be done with £40,000, Mr. Smith. Now a few words as to the three lines of operations. You have your Trade Unions, and you have a very modest kind of Federation. If your 2,000,000 Unionists were federated at a weekly subscription of one penny per man, your yearly income would be nearly half a million: a very useful kind of fund. I should strongly advise you to strengthen your Trades Federation. Next as to Municipal affairs. These are of more importance to you than Parliament. Let me give you an idea. Suppose, as in the case of Manchester and Liverpool, the difference between a private gas company and a Municipal gas supply amounts to more than a shilling on each 1000 feet of gas. Setting the average workman's gas consumption at 4000 feet per quarter, that means a saving to each Manchester working man of sixteen shillings a year, or just about fourpence a week. Suppose a tram company carries a man to his work and back at one penny, and the Corporation carries him at one halfpenny. The man saves a penny a day, or 25s. a year. Now if 100,000 men piled up their tram savings for one year as a labour fund it would come to £125,000. All that money those men are now giving to tram companies _for nothing_. Is that practical? You may apply the same process of thought to all the other things you use. Just figure out what you would save if you had Municipal or State managed Railways Coalmines Tramways Omnibuses Gas Water Milk Bread Meat Butter and cheese Vegetables Beer Houses Shops Boots Clothing and other necessaries. On all those needful things you are now paying big percentages of profit to private dealers, all of which the Municipality would save you. And you can municipalise all those things and save all that money by sticking together as a Labour Party, and by paying _one penny a week_. Again I advise you to read those books by George Haw and R. B. Suthers. Read them, and give them to other workers to read. And then set about making a Labour Party _at once_. Next as to Parliament. You ought to put at least 200 Labour members into the House. Never mind Liberalism and Toryism. Mr. Morley said in January that what puzzled him was to "find any difference between the new Liberalism and the new Conservatism." Do not try to find a difference, John. Have a Labour Party. "Self-interest is the strongest motive in human nature." Take care of your own interests and stand by your own class. You will ask, perhaps, what these 200 Labour representatives are to do. They should do anything and everything they can do in the House of Commons for the interests of the working class. But if you want programmes and lists of measures, get the Fabian Parliamentary and Municipal programmes, and study them. You will find the particulars as to price, etc., at the end of this book. But here are some measures which you might be pushing and helping whenever a chance presents itself, in Parliament or out of Parliament. Removal of taxation from articles used by the workers, such as tea and tobacco, and increase of taxation on large incomes and on land. Compulsory sale of land for the purpose of Municipal houses, works, farms, and gardens. Nationalisation of railways and mines. Taxation to extinction of all mineral royalties. Vastly improved education for the working classes. Old age pensions. Adoption of the Initiative and Referendum. Universal adult suffrage. Eight hours' day and standard rates of wages in all Government and Municipal works. Establishment of a Department of Agriculture. State insurance of life. Nationalisation of all banks. The second ballot. Abolition of property votes. Formation of a citizen army for home defence. Abolition of workhouses. Solid legislation on the housing question. Government inquiry into the food question, with a view to restore British agriculture. Those are a few steps towards the desired goal of _Socialism_. You may perhaps wonder why I do not ask you to found a Socialist Party. I do not think the workers are ready for it. And I feel that if you found a Labour Party every step you take towards the emancipation of Labour will be a step towards _Socialism_. But I should like to think that many workers will become Socialists at once, and more as they live and learn. The fact is, Mr. Smith, I do not want to ask too much of the mass of working folks, who have been taught little, and mostly taught wrong, and whose opportunities of getting knowledge have been but poor. I am not asking working men to be plaster saints nor stained-glass angels, but only to be really what their flatterers are so fond of telling them they are now: shrewd, hard-headed men, distrusting theories and believing in facts. For the statement that private trading and private management of production and distribution are the best, and the only "possible," ways of carrying on the business of the nation is only a _theory_, Mr. Smith; but the superiority of Municipal management in cheapness, in efficiency, in health, in comfort, and in pleasantness is a solid _fact_, Mr. Smith, which has been demonstrated just as often as Municipal and private management have been contrasted in their action. One other question I may anticipate. How are the workers to form a Labour Party? There are already two Labour parties formed. One is the Trade Union body, the other is the Independent Labour Party. The Trade Unions are numerous, but not politically organised nor united. The Independent Labour Party is organised and united, but is weak in numbers and poor in funds. I should like to see the Trade Unions fully federated, and formed into a political as well as an Industrial Labour Party on lines similar to those of the Independent Labour Party. Or I should like to see the whole of your 2,000,000 of Trade Unionists join the Independent Labour Party. Or, best of all, I should like to see the Unions, the Independent Labour Party, and the great and growing body of unorganised and unattached Socialists formed into one grand Socialist Party. But I do not want to ask too much. Meanwhile, I ask you, as a reader of this book, not to sit down in despair with the feeling that the workers will not move, but to try to move them. Be you _one_, John Smith. Be you the first. Then you shall surely win a few, and each of those few shall win a few, and so are multitudes composed. Let us make a long story short. I have here given you, as briefly and as plainly as I can, the best advice of which I am capable, after a dozen years' study and experience of Labour politics and economics and the lives of working men and women. If you approve of this little book I shall be glad if you will recommend it to your friends. You will find Labour matters treated of every week in the _Clarion_, which is a penny paper, published every Friday, and obtainable at 72 Fleet Street, London, E.C., and of all newsagents. Heaven, friend John Smith, helps those who help themselves; but Heaven also helps those who try to help their fellow-creatures. If you are shrewd and strong and skilful, think a little and work a little for the millions of your own class who are ignorant and weak and friendless. If you have a wife and children whom you love, remember the many poor and wretched women and children who are robbed of love, of leisure, of sunshine and sweet air, of knowledge and of hope, in the pent and dismal districts of our big, misgoverned towns. If you as a Briton are proud of your country and your race, if you as a man have any pride of manhood, or as a worker have any pride of class, come over to us and help in the just and wise policy of winning Britain for the British, manhood for _all_ men, womanhood for _all_ women, and love to-day and hope to-morrow for the children whom Christ loved, but who by many Christians have unhappily been forgotten. That it may please thee to succour, help, and comfort _all_ that are in danger, necessity, and tribulation. That it may please thee to defend, and provide for, the fatherless children, and widows, and _all_ that are desolate and oppressed. That it may please thee to have mercy upon _all_ men. I end as I began, by quoting those beautiful words from the Litany. If we would realise the prayer they utter, we must turn to _Socialism_; if we would win defence for the fatherless children and the widows, succour, help, and comfort for _all_ that are in danger, necessity, or tribulation, and mercy for _all_ men, we must win Britain for the British. Without the workers we cannot win, with the workers we cannot fail. Will you be one to help us--_now_? WHAT TO READ The following books and pamphlets treat more fully the various subjects dealt with in _Britain for the British_. TO-DAY'S WORK. G. Haw. Clarion Press, 72 Fleet Street. 2s. 6d. DOES MUNICIPAL MANAGEMENT PAY? By R. B. Suthers. 6d. Clarion Press, 72 Fleet Street. LAND NATIONALISATION. A. R. Wallace. 1s. London, Swan Sonnenschein. FIVE PRECURSORS OF HENRY GEORGE. By J. Morrison Davidson. 1s. _Labour Leader_ Office, 53 Fleet Street, E.C. DISMAL ENGLAND. By R. Blatchford. Clarion Press, 72 Fleet Street, E.C. 1s. THE WHITE SLAVES OF ENGLAND. By R. Sherard. London, James Bowden. 1s. NO ROOM TO LIVE. By G. Haw. 2s. 6d. FIELDS, FACTORIES, AND WORKSHOPS. By Prince Kropotkin. 1s. _Clarion_ Office, 72 Fleet Street, E.C. THE FABIAN TRACTS, especially No. 5, No. 12, and Nos. 30-37. One penny each. Fabian Society, 3 Clement's Inn, Strand, or _Clarion_ Office, 72 Fleet Street, E.C. OUR FOOD SUPPLY IN TIME OF WAR. By Captain Stewart L. Murray. 6d. _Clarion_ Office, 72 Fleet Street, E.C. THE CLARION. A newspaper for Socialists and Working Men. One penny weekly. Office, 72 Fleet Street, E.C. The _Clarion_ can be ordered of all newsagents APPENDIX. The American workingman will not find it very hard to see that the lesson of "Britain for the British" applies with even greater force to the conditions in his own country. American railroads, mines, and factories exploit, cripple and kill American laborers on an even larger scale than the British ones. We have even less laws for the protection of the workers and their children and what we have are not so well enforced. No one will deny the ability of America to feed herself. She feeds the world to-day save that some American workers and their families are rather poorly fed. The great problem with American capitalists is how to get rid of the wealth produced and given to them by American laborers. Where Liberal and Conservative parties are mentioned every American reader will find himself unconsciously substituting Democratic and Republican. It will do the average American good to "see himself as others see him" and to know that manhood suffrage, freedom from established Church and Republican institutions do not prevent his becoming an economic slave and living in a slum. But we fear that some American readers will be shrewd enough to call attention to the fact that municipal ownership has not abolished, or to any great extent improved the slums of London, Glasgow and Birmingham. It is certain some of the thousands of German laborers who are living in America would be quick to point out that although Bismark has nationalized the railroads and telegraphs of Germany this has not altered the fact of the exploitation of German workingmen. Worst of all, it would be hard to explain to the multitude of Russian exiles now living in America that they would have been better off had they remained at home, because the Czar has made more industries government property than belong to any other nation in the world. Even native Americans would find it somewhat hard to understand how matters would be improved by transferring the ownership of the coal mines, for example, from a Hanna-controlled corporation to a Hanna-directed government. There would be one or two different links in the chain of connection uniting Hanna to the mines and the miners but they would be as well forged and as capable of holding the laborer in slavery as the present ones. Happily the chapter on "Why the old Parties will not do" gives us a clue to the way out. While the government is controlled by capitalist parties government ownership of industries does little more than simplify the process of reorganization to be performed when a real labor party shall gain control. The victory of such a party will for the first time mean that government-owned industries will be owned and controlled by all the workers (who will also be all the people, since idlers will have disappeared). American workers are fortunate in that there is a political party already in the field which exactly meets the ideal described in the last three chapters. The Socialist Party is a trade-union party, a labor party and the political expression of all the workers in America who have become intelligent enough to understand their own self-interest. Those who feel that they wish to lend a hand in securing the triumph of the ideas set forth in "Britain for the British" should at once join that party and work for its success. A. M. SIMONS. BOOKS BY ROBERT BLATCHFORD ("NUNQUAM.") +MERRIE ENGLAND.+--Cloth, crown 8vo, 2s, 6d., by Robert Blatchford. A book on sociology. Called by the Review of Reviews: "The Poor Man's Plato." Over a million copies sold. Translated into Welsh, Dutch, French, Spanish, German, Hebrew, Norwegian, and Swedish. +TALES FOR THE MARINES.+--A New Book of Soldier Stories. By Nunquam. The Daily Chronicle says: "This volume contains a batch of stories ('cuffers,' we understand is the correct technical term) supposed to be told by soldiers in the barrack-room after lights are out; and capital stories they are. If we were to call them 'rattling' and also 'ripping' we should not be saying a word too much. For our own part we never want to see a better fight than that between the bayonet and the sword in 'The Mousetrap,' or to read a sounder lecture on social philosophy than that delivered by Sergeant Wren in 'Dear Lady Disdain.' Mr. Blatchford knows the barrack-room from the inside, and obviously from the inside has learned to love and to enjoy it." +JULIE.+--A Study of a Girl by a Man. Nunquam's Story of Slum Life. Price 2/6; by post, 2/8. The Liverpool Review says: "'Julie,' unlike 'The Master Christian,' is beautiful inside as well as out. Nunquam, like Corelli, has a mission to perform--to utilize romance as a finger-post to indicate social wrongs; but, unlike Corelli, he succeeds in his purpose. And why does he succeed where she fails? Because he goes at his task sympathetically, with a warm heart; whereas she goes at it sourly, with a pen dipped in gall. It is all a question of temperament. If you want an object-lesson in the effect which temperament has upon artistic achievement, read 'The Master Christian' and follow it up with 'Julie.'" +THE BOUNDER.+--The Story of a Man by his Friend. By Nunquam. Price 2/6; by post, 2/8. All who loved the Bounder and admired his work should avail themselves of the opportunity to possess this record of both, before the edition is exhausted. +A BOHEMIAN GIRL.+--A Theatrical Novel. By Nunquam. Price 2/6; by post, 2/8. Manchester City News: "The swift interchange of thought and repartee in the conversations remind one of the brilliant 'Dolly Dialogues'; but there is an underlying earnestness and a deeper meaning in Mr. McGinnis's seemingly careless story than in Mr. Anthony Hope's society pictures." +MY FAVORITE BOOKS.+--By Nunquam. Price 2/6; by post, 2/8. With Portrait of the Author. The Christian Globe says: "Instinct with generous and eloquent appreciation of what is brightest and best in our literature, we have only to complain that there is so little of it after all. Again we feel the spell of old times in the charmed garden; the breeze blows fresh, sweet is the odor of the roses, and we wander with our guide wherever it pleases him to lead us. We can give the author no higher praise. May his book prosper as it deserves." +TOMMY ATKINS.+--By Nunquam. Price 2/6; by post, 2/8. Paper, 1/-; by post, 1/3. A soldier story of great popularity which has already gone through several editions, and was long ago pronounced by Sir Evelyn Wood, and other great authorities on the army, to be the best story on army life ever written. +DISMAL ENGLAND.+--By Nunquam. Price 2/6; by post, 2/8. Paper, 1/-; by post, 1/2. A thrilling and life-like series of sketches of life in its darker phases. +PINK DIAMONDS.+--A Wild Story. By Nunquam. Cloth, 2/-; by post, 2/2. Paper, 6d.; by post, 8d. A capital antidote to the dumps; full of rollicking action and wild humor. +THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.+--2/-; by post, 2/2. Some of Nunquam's best articles and sketches. +FANTASIAS.+--By Nunquam. Cloth, 2/-; by post, 2/2. Paper, 6d.; by post, 8d. Tales and essays of graphic, humorous and pathetic interest. +A MAN, A WOMAN, AND A DOG.+--By The Whatnot. Cloth and gold, 2/6; by post, 2/8. +TO-DAY'S WORK.+--Municipal Government the Hope of Democracy. By George Haw, author of "No Room to Live." Price 2/6; by post, 2/8. A reprint, with revisions and additional chapters, of The Outlaw's articles on Local Government, published in the Clarion under the heading, "What we can do to-day." +THE ART OF HAPPINESS.+--By Mont Bloug. With portrait of the Author. Cloth, 2/-; by post, 2/2. A mixture of fun and philosophy, of which the large edition is nearly exhausted, and is not likely to be reprinted. Those who have neglected to get it should do so while there is yet time. It is a book that any reader will be thankful for. +DANGLE'S MIXTURE.+--By A. M. Thompson. Cloth, 1/6; by post, 1/8. +DANGLE'S ROUGH CUT.+--By A. M. Thompson. Cloth, 1/6; by post, 1/8. Capital examples of Dangular humor, of which it can be truthfully said that each is better than the other, while both are amusing enough to bring out a cheerful smile upon the glummest face. CLARION PRESS, 72 Fleet Street, London, E. C. Read _The Clarion_ The Pioneer Journal of Social Reform. Edited by ROBERT BLATCHFORD, _Author of "Merrie England," "Britain for the British," etc._ EVERY FRIDAY. PRICE ONE PENNY. Send for Specimen Copy to the Clarion Office, 72, Fleet St., London, E. C. W. Wilfred Head and Co., Ltd., "Dr. Johnson Press," Fleet Lane, Old Bailey, London, E. C. 
35232	----	A LETTER TO AMERICAN WORKINGMEN _From the Socialist Soviet Republic of Russia_ By N. LENIN Reprinted from THE CLASS STRUGGLE December, 1918 Price--5 Cents NEW YORK THE SOCIALIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY 431 PULASKI ST., BROOKLYN, N. Y. December, 1918 [Illustration] A Letter to American Workingmen By N. Lenin. Moscow, August 20, 1918. Comrades: A Russian Bolshevik who participated in the Revolution of 1905 and for many years afterwards lived in your country has offered to transmit this letter to you. I have grasped this opportunity joyfully for the revolutionary proletariat of America--insofar as it is the enemy of American imperialism--is destined to perform an important task at this time. The history of modern civilized America opens with one of those really revolutionary wars of liberation of which there have been so few compared with the enormous number of wars of conquest that were caused, like the present imperialistic war, by squabbles among kings, landholders and capitalists over the division of ill-gotten lands and profits. It was a war of the American people against the English who despoiled America of its resources and held in colonial subjection, just as their "civilized" descendants are draining the life-blood of hundreds of millions of human beings in India, Egypt and all corners and ends of the world to keep them in subjection. Since that war 150 years have passed. Bourgeois civilization has born its most luxuriant fruit. By developing the productive forces of organized human labor, by utilizing machines and all the wonders of technique America has taken the first place among free and civilized nations. But at the same time America, like a few other nations, has become characteristic for the depth of the abyss that divide a handful of brutal millionaires who are stagnating in a mire of luxury, and millions of laboring starving men and women who are always staring want in the face. Four years of imperialistic slaughter have left their trace. Irrefutably and clearly events have shown to the people that both imperialistic groups, the English as well as the German, have been playing false. The four years of war have shown in their effects the great law of capitalism in all wars; that he who is richest and mightiest profits the most, takes the greatest share of the spoils while he who is weakest is exploited, martyred, oppressed and outraged to the utmost. In the number of its colonial possessions, English imperialism has always been more powerful than any of the other countries. England has lost not a span of its "acquired" land. On the other hand it has acquired control of all German colonies in Africa, has occupied Mesopotamia and Palestine. German imperialism was stronger because of the wonderful organization and ruthless discipline of "its" armies, but as far as colonies are concerned, is much weaker than its opponent. It has now lost all of its colonies, but has robbed half of Europe and throttled most of the small countries and weaker peoples. What a high conception of "liberation" on either side! How well they have defended their fatherlands, these "gentlemen" of both groups, the Anglo-French and the German capitalists together with their lackeys, the Social-Patriots. American plutocrats are wealthier than those of any other country partly because they are geographically more favorably situated. They have made the greatest profits. They have made all, even the weakest countries, their debtors. They have amassed gigantic fortunes during the war. And every dollar is stained with the blood that was shed by millions of murdered and crippled men, shed in the high, honorable and holy war of freedom. Had the Anglo-French and American bourgeoisie accepted the Soviet invitation to participate in peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, instead of leaving Russia to the mercy of brutal Germany a just peace without annexations and indemnities, a peace based upon complete equality could have been forced upon Germany, and millions of lives might have been saved. Because they hoped to reestablish the Eastern Front by once more drawing us into the whirlpool of warfare, they refused to attend peace negotiations and gave Germany a free hand to cram its shameful terms down the throat of the Russian people. It lay in the power of the Allied countries to make the Brest-Litovsk negotiations the forerunner of a general peace. It ill becomes them to throw the blame for the Russo-German peace upon our shoulders! The workers of the whole world, in whatever country they may live, rejoice with us and sympathize with us, applaud us for having burst the iron ring of imperialistic agreements and treaties, for having dreaded no sacrifice, however great, to free ourselves, for having established ourselves as a socialist republic, even so rent asunder and plundered by German imperialists, for having raised the banner of peace, the banner of Socialism over the world. What wonder that we are hated by the capitalist class the world over. But this hatred of imperialism and the sympathy of the class-conscious workers of all countries give us assurance of the righteousness of our cause. He is no Socialist who cannot understand that one cannot and must not hesitate to bring even that greatest of sacrifice, the sacrifice of territory, that one must be ready to accept even military defeat at the hands of imperialism in the interests of victory over the bourgeoisie, in the interests of a transfer of power to the working-class. For the sake of "their" cause, that is for the conquest of world-power, the imperialists of England and Germany have not hesitated to ruin a whole of row of nations, from Belgium and Servia to Palestine and Mesopotamia. Shall we then hesitate to act in the name of the liberation of the workers of the world from the yoke of capitalism, in the name of a general honorable peace; shall we wait until we can find a way that entails no sacrifice; shall we be afraid to begin the fight until an easy victory is assured; shall we place the integrity and safety of this "fatherland" created by the bourgeoisie over the interests of the international socialist revolution? We have been attacked for coming to terms with German militarism. Is there no difference between a pact entered upon by Socialists and a bourgeoisie (native or foreign) against the working-class, against labor, and an agreement that is made between a working-class that has overthrown its own bourgeoisie and a bourgeoisie of one side against a bourgeoisie of another nationality for the protection of the proletariat? Shall we not exploit the antagonism that exists between the various groups of the bourgeoisie. In reality every European understands this difference, and the American people, as I will presently show, have had a very similar experience in its own history. There are agreements and agreements, fagots et fagots, as the Frenchman says. When the robber-barons of German imperialism threw their armies into defenseless, demobilized Russia in February 1918 when Russia had staked its hopes upon the international solidarity of the proletariat before the international revolution had completely ripened, I did not hesitate for a moment to come to certain agreements with French Monarchists. The French captain Sadoul, who sympathized in words with the Bolsheviki while in deeds he was the faithful servant of French imperialism, brought the French officer de Lubersac to me. "I am a Monarchist. My only purpose is the overthrow of Germany," de Lubersac declared to me. "That is self understood (cela va sans dire)," I replied. But this by no means prevented me from coming to an understanding with de Lubersac concerning certain services that French experts in explosives were ready to render in order to hold up the German advance by the destruction of railroad lines. This is an example of the kind of agreement that every class-conscious worker must be ready to adopt, an agreement in the interest of Socialism. We shook hands with the French Monarchists although we knew that each one of us would rather have seen the other hang. But temporarily our interests were identical. To throw back the rapacious advancing German army we made use of the equally greedy interests of their opponents, thereby serving the interests of the Russian and the international socialist revolution. In this way we furthered the cause of the working-class of Russia and of other countries; in this way we strengthened the proletariat and weakened the bourgeoisie of the world by making use of the usual and absolutely legal practice of manoevering, shifting and waiting for the moment the rapidly growing proletarian revolution in the more highly developed nations had ripened. Long ago the American people used these tactics to the advantage of its revolution. When America waged its great war of liberation against the English oppressors, it likewise entered into negotiations with other oppressors, with the French and the Spaniards who at that time owned a considerable portion of what is now the United States. In its desperate struggle for freedom the American people made "agreements" with one group of oppressors against the other for the purpose of weakening all oppressors and strengthening those who were struggling against tyranny. The American people utilized the antagonism that existed between the English and the French, at times even fighting side by side with the armies of one group of oppressors, the French and the Spanish against the others, the English. Thus it vanquished first the English and then freed itself (partly by purchase) from the dangerous proximity of the French and Spanish possessions. The great Russian revolutionist Tchernychewski once said: Political activity is not as smooth as the pavement of the Nevski Prospect. He is no revolutionist who would have the revolution of the proletariat only under the "condition" that it proceed smoothly and in an orderly manner, that guarantees against defeat be given beforehand, that the revolution go forward along the broad, free, straight path to victory, that there shall not be here and there the heaviest sacrifices, that we shall not have to lie in wait in besieged fortresses, shall not have to climb up along the narrowest path, the most impassible, winding, dangerous mountain roads. He is no revolutionist, he has not yet freed himself from the pedantry of bourgeois intellectualism, he will fall back, again and again, into the camp of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie. They are little more than imitators of the bourgeoisie, these gentlemen who delight in holding up to us the "chaos" of revolution, the "destruction" of industry, the unemployment, the lack of food. Can there be anything more hypocritical than such accusations from people who greeted and supported the imperialistic war and made common cause with Kerensky when he continued the war? Is not this imperialistic war the cause of all our misfortune? The revolution that was born by the war must necessarily go on through the terrible difficulties and sufferings that war created, through this heritage of destruction and reactionary mass murder. To accuse us of "destruction" of industries and "terror" is hypocrisy or clumsy pedantry, shows an incapability of understanding the most elemental fundamentals of the raging, climatic force of the class struggle, called Revolution. In words our accusers "recognize" this kind of class struggle, in deeds they revert again and again to the middle class utopia of "class-harmony" and the mutual "interdependence" of classes upon one another. In reality the class struggle in revolutionary times has always inevitably taken on the form of civil war, and civil war is unthinkable without the worst kind of destruction, without terror and limitations of form of democracy in the interests of the war. One must be a sickly sentimentalist not to be able to see, to understand and appreciate this necessity. Only the Tchechov type of the lifeless "Man in the Box" can denounce the Revolution for this reason instead of throwing himself into the fight with the whole vehemence and decision of his soul at a moment when history demands that the highest problems of humanity be solved by struggle and war. The best representatives of the American proletariat--those representatives who have repeatedly given expression to their full solidarity with us, the Bolsheviki, are the expression of this revolutionary tradition in the life of the American people. This tradition originated in the war of liberation against the English in the 18th and the Civil War in the 19th century. Industry and commerce in 1870 were in a much worse position than in 1860. But where can you find an American so pedantic, so absolutely idiotic who would deny the revolutionary and progressive significance of the American Civil War of 1860-1865? The representatives of the bourgeoisie understand very well that the overthrow of slavery was well worth the three years of Civil War, the depth of destruction, devastation and terror that were its accompaniment. But these same gentlemen and the reform socialists who have allowed themselves to be cowed by the bourgeoisie and tremble at the thought of a revolution, cannot, nay will not, see the necessity and righteousness of a civil war in Russia, though it is facing a far greater task, the work of abolishing capitalist wage slavery and overthrowing the rule of the bourgeoisie. The American working class will not follow the lead of its bourgeoisie. It will go with us against the bourgeoisie. The whole history of the American people gives me this confidence, this conviction. I recall with pride the words of one of the best loved leaders of the American proletariat, Eugene V. Debs, who said in the "Appeal to Reason" at the end of 1915, when it was still a socialist paper, in an article entitled "Why Should I Fight?" that he would rather be shot than vote for war credits to support the present criminal and reactionary war, that he knows only one war that is sanctified and justified from the standpoint of the proletariat: the war against the capitalist class, the war for the liberation of mankind from wage slavery. I am not surprised that this fearless man was thrown into prison by the American bourgeoisie. Let them brutalize true internationalists, the real representatives of the revolutionary proletariat. The greater the bitterness and brutality they sow, the nearer is the day of the victorious proletarian revolution. We are accused of having brought devastation upon Russia. Who is it that makes these accusations? The train-bearers of the bourgeoisie, of that same bourgeoisie that almost completely destroyed the culture of Europe, that has dragged the whole continent back to barbarism, that has brought hunger and destruction to the world. This bourgeoisie now demands that we find a different basis for our Revolution than that of destruction, that we shall not build it up upon the ruins of war, with human beings degraded and brutalized by years of warfare. O, how human, how just is this bourgeoisie! Its servants charge us with the use of terroristic methods.--Have the English forgotten their 1649, the French their 1793? Terror was just and justified when it was employed by the bourgeoisie for its own purposes against feudal domination. But terror becomes criminal when workingmen and poverty stricken peasants dare to use it against the bourgeoisie. Terror was just and justified when it was used to put one exploiting minority in the place of another. But terror becomes horrible and criminal when it is used to abolish all exploiting minorities, when it is employed in the cause of the actual majority, in the cause of the proletariat and the semi-proletariat, of the working-class and the poor peasantry. The bourgeoisie of international imperialism has succeeded in slaughtering 10 millions, in crippling 20 millions in its war. Should our war, the war of the oppressed and the exploited, against oppressors and exploiters cost a half or a whole million victims in all countries, the bourgeoisie would still maintain that the victims of the world war died a righteous death, that those of the civil war were sacrificed for a criminal cause. But the proletariat, even now, in the midst of the horrors of war, is learning the great truth that all revolutions teach, the truth that has been handed down to us by our best teachers, the founders of modern Socialism. From them we have learned that a successful revolution is inconceivable unless it breaks the resistance of the exploiting class. When the workers and the laboring peasants took hold of the powers of state, it became our duty to quell the resistance of the exploiting class. We are proud that we have done it, that we are doing it. We only regret that we did not do it, at the beginning, with sufficient firmness and decision. We realize that the mad resistance of the bourgeoisie against the socialist revolution in all countries is unavoidable. We know too, that with the development of this revolution, this resistance will grow. But the proletariat will break down this resistance and in the course of its struggle against the bourgeoisie the proletariat will finally become ripe for victory and power. Let the corrupt bourgeois press trumpet every mistake that is made by our Revolution out into the world. We are not afraid of our mistakes. The beginning of the revolution has not sanctified humanity. It is not to be expected that the working classes who have been exploited and forcibly held down by the clutches of want, of ignorance and degradation for centuries should conduct its revolution without mistakes. The dead body of bourgeois society cannot simply be put into a coffin and buried. It rots in our midst, poisons the air we breathe, pollutes our lives, clings to the new, the fresh, the living with a thousand threads and tendrils of old customs, of death and decay. But for every hundred of our mistakes that are heralded into the world by the bourgeoisie and its sycophants, there are ten thousand great deeds of heroism, greater and more heroic because they seem so simple and unpretentious, because they take place in the everyday life of the factory districts or in secluded villages, because they are the deeds of people who are not in the habit of proclaiming their every success to the world, who have no opportunity to do so. But even if the contrary were true,--I know, of course, that this is not so--but even if we had committed 10,000 mistakes to every 100 wise and righteous deeds, yes, even then our revolution would be great and invincible. And it will go down in the history of the world as unconquerable. For the first time in the history of the world not the minority, not alone the rich and the educated, but the real masses, the huge majority of the working-class itself, are building up a new world, are deciding the most difficult questions of social organization from out of their own experience. Every mistake that is made in this work, in this honestly conscientious cooperation of ten million plain workingmen and peasants in the re-creation of their entire lives--every such mistake is worth thousands and millions of "faultless" successes of the exploiting minority, in outwitting and taking advantage of the laboring masses. For only through these mistakes can the workers and peasants learn to organize their new existence, to get along without the capitalist class. Only thus will they be able to blaze their way, through thousands of hindrances to victorious socialism. Mistakes are being made by our peasants who, at one stroke in the night from October 25 to October 26, (Russian Calendar) 1917, did away with all private ownership of land, and are now struggling, from month to month, under the greatest difficulties, to correct their own mistakes, trying to solve in practice the most difficult problems of organizing a new social state, fighting against profiteers to secure the possession of the land for the worker instead of for the speculator, to carry on agricultural production under a system of communist farming on a large scale. Mistakes are being made by our workmen in their revolutionary activity, who, in a few short months, have placed practically all of the larger factories and workers under state ownership, and are now learning, from day to day, under the greatest difficulties, to conduct the management of entire industries, to reorganize industries already organized, to overcome the deadly resistance of laziness and middle-class reaction and egotism. Stone upon stone they are building the foundation for a new social community, the self-discipline of labor, the new rule of the labor organizations of the working-class over their members. Mistakes are being made in their revolutionary activity by the Soviets which were first created in 1905 by the gigantic upheaval of the masses. The Workmen's and Peasant's Soviets are a new type of state, a new highest form of Democracy, a particular form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, a mode of conducting the business of the state without the bourgeoisie and against the bourgeoisie. For the first time democracy is placed at the service of the masses, of the workers, and ceases to be a democracy for the rich, as it is, in the last analysis, in all capitalist, yes, in all democratic republics. For the first time the masses of the people, in a nation of hundreds of millions, are fulfilling the task of realizing the dictatorship of the proletariat and the semi-proletariat, without which socialism is not to be thought of. Let incurable pedants, crammed full of bourgeois democratic and parliamentary prejudices, shake their heads gravely over our Soviets, let them deplore the fact that we have no direct elections. These people have forgotten nothing, have learned nothing in the great upheaval of 1914-1918. The combination of the dictatorship of the proletariat with the new democracy of the proletariat, of civil war with the widest application of the masses to political problems, such a combination cannot be achieved in a day, cannot be forced into the battered forms of formal parliamentary democratism. In the Soviet Republic there arises before us a new world, the world of Socialism. Such a world cannot be materialized as if by magic, complete in every detail, as Minerva sprang from Jupiter's head. While the old bourgeoisie democratic constitutions, for instance, proclaimed formal equality and the right of free assemblage, the constitution of the Soviet Republic repudiates the hypocrisy of a formal equality of all human beings. When the bourgeoisie republicans overturned feudal thrones, they did not recognize the rules of formal equality of monarchists. Since we here are concerned with the task of overthrowing the bourgeoisie, only fools or traitors will insist on the formal equality of the bourgeoisie. The right of free assemblage is not worth an iota to the workman and to the peasant when all better meeting places are in the hands of the bourgeoisie. Our Soviets have taken over all usable buildings in the cities and towns out of the hands of the rich and have placed them at the disposal of the workmen and peasants for meeting and organization purposes. That is how our right of assemblage looks--for the workers. That is the meaning and content of our Soviet, of our socialist constitution. And for this reason we are all firmly convinced that the Soviet Republic, whatever misfortune may still lie in store for it, is unconquerable. It is unconquerable because every blow that comes from the powers of madly raging imperialism, every new attack by the international bourgeoisie will bring new, and hitherto unaffected strata of workingmen and peasants into the fight, will educate them at the cost of the greatest sacrifice, making them hard as steel, awakening a new heroism in the masses. We know that it may take a long time before help can come from you, comrades, American Workingmen, for the development of the revolution in the different countries proceeds along various paths, with varying rapidity (how could it be otherwise!) We know full well that the outbreak of the European proletarian revolution may take many weeks to come, quickly as it is ripening in these days. We are counting on the inevitability of the international revolution. But that does not mean that we count upon its coming at some definite, nearby date. We have experienced two great revolutions in our own country, that of 1905 and that of 1917, and we know that revolutions cannot come neither at a word of command nor according to prearranged plans. We know that circumstances alone have pushed us, the proletariat of Russia, forward, that we have reached this new stage in the social life of the world not because of our superiority but because of the peculiarly reactionary character of Russia. But until the outbreak of the international revolution, revolutions in individual countries may still meet with a number of serious setbacks and overthrows. And yet we are certain that we are invincible, for if humanity will not emerge from this imperialistic massacre broken in spirit, it will triumph. Ours was the first country to break the chains of imperialistic warfare. We broke them with the greatest sacrifice, but they are broken. We stand outside of imperialistic duties and considerations, we have raised the banner of the fight for the complete overthrow of imperialism for the world. We are in a beleaguered fortress, so long as no other international socialist revolution comes to our assistance with its armies. But these armies exist, they are stronger than ours, they grow, they strive, they become more invincible the longer imperialism with its brutalities continues. Workingmen the world over are breaking with their betrayers, with their Gompers and their Scheidemanns. Inevitably labor is approaching communistic Bolshevistic tactics, is preparing for the proletarian revolution that alone is capable of preserving culture and humanity from destruction. We are invincible, for invincible is the Proletarian Revolution. The Class Struggle Devoted to International Socialism EDITED BY LOUIS C. FRAINA and LUDWIG LORE Articles have been contributed by Lenin, Trotzky, Litvinoff, Katayama, Franz Mehring, Friedrich Adler, Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Santeri Nuorteva, and others. $1.50 per year; 25 cents a copy. We have also on hand the following pamphlets, some of which are reprints from The Class Struggle: An Open Letter to American Liberals, by S. Nuorteva 5 cents The Crisis in the German Social-Democracy, by K. Liebknecht, F. Mehring, and R. Luxemburg 35 " J'Accuse, by Friedrich Adler 15 " Revolutionary Socialism, by Louis C. Fraina 60 " Special Rates to Agents and Socialist Locals The Socialist Publication Society 431 PULASKI ST., BROOKLYN, N. Y. [Illustration] The Co Operative Press, 15 Spruce St., New York 
35447	----	* * * * * +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Note: | | | | Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has | | been preserved. | | | | Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For | | a complete list, please see the end of this document. | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------+ * * * * * Comrades [Illustration] Thomas Dixon JR. [Illustration: NORMAN CLASPED HER IN HIS ARMS.] COMRADES _A STORY OF SOCIAL ADVENTURE IN CALIFORNIA_ BY THOMAS DIXON, Jr. Illustrated by C.D. WILLIAMS [Illustration] GROSSET & DUNLAP Publishers :: New York ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY THOMAS DIXON, JR. PUBLISHED, JANUARY, 1909 DEDICATED TO THE DEAREST LITTLE GIRL IN THE WORLD, MY DAUGHTER LOUISE CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. The Woman in Red 3 II. A New Joan of Arc 19 III. The Birth of a Man 31 IV. Among the Shadows 37 V. The Island of Ventura 48 VI. The Red Flag 56 VII. Father and Son 73 VIII. Through the Eyes of Love 85 IX. A Faded Picture 90 X. Son and Father 93 XI. The Way of a Woman 103 XII. A Royal Gift 105 XIII. The Burning of the Bridges 110 XIV. The New World 118 XV. For the Cause 123 XVI. Barbara Chooses a Profession 130 XVII. A Call for Heroes 134 XVIII. A New Aristocracy 151 XIX. Some Troubles in Heaven 166 XX. The Unconventional 181 XXI. A Pair of Cold Gray Eyes 186 XXII. The Fighting Instinct 192 XXIII. The Cords Tighten 207 XXIV. Some Interrogation Points 212 XXV. The Master Hand 224 XXVI. At the Parting of the Ways 235 XXVII. The Fruits of Patience 246 XXVIII. The New Master 257 XXIX. A Test of Strength 269 XXX. A Vision from the Hilltop 274 XXXI. In Love and War 283 XXXII. A Primitive Lover 291 XXXIII. Equality 295 XXXIV. A Brother to the Beast 306 XXXV. Love and Locksmiths 313 XXXVI. The Shining Emblem 318 LEADING CHARACTERS OF THE STORY _Scene_: California. _Time_: 1898-1901 NORMAN WORTH An Amateur Socialist COLONEL WORTH His Father ELENA STOCKTON The Colonel's Ward HERMAN WOLF A Socialist Leader CATHERINE His Affinity Wife BARBARA BOZENTA A New Joan of Arc METHODIST JOHN A Pauper TOM MOONEY A Miner JOHN DIGGS A Truth Seeker ROLAND ADAIR Bard of Ramcat ILLUSTRATIONS "Norman clasped her in his arms" _Frontispiece_ FACING PAGE "'Lift the flag back to its place!'" 72 Barbara 214 "Wolf grasped her" 292 COMRADES COMRADES CHAPTER I THE WOMAN IN RED "Fools and fanatics!" Colonel Worth crumpled the morning paper with a gesture of rage and walked to the window. Elena followed softly and laid her hand on his arm. "What is it, Guardie? I thought you were supremely happy this morning over the news that Dewey has smashed the Spanish fleet?" "And so I am, little girl," was the gentle reply, "or was until my eye fell on this call of the Socialists for a meeting to-night to denounce the war--denounce the men who are dying for the flag. Read their summons." He opened the crumpled sheet and pointed to its head lines: "Down with the Stars and Stripes--up with the Red Flag of Revolution--the symbol of universal human brotherhood! Come and bring your friends. A big surprise for all!" The Colonel's jaws snapped suddenly. "I'd like to give them the surprise they need to-night." "What?" Elena asked. "A serenade." "A serenade?" "Yes, with Mauser rifles and Gatling guns. I'd mow them down as I would a herd of wild beasts loose in the streets of San Francisco." "Merely for a difference of opinion, Governor?" lazily broke in a voice from the depths of a heavy armchair. "If you want to put it so, Norman, yes. Opinions, my boy, are the essence of life--they may lead to heaven or hell. Opinions make cowards or heroes, patriots or traitors, criminals or saints." "But you believe in free speech?" persisted the boy. "Yes. And that's more than any Socialist can say. I don't deny their right to speak their message. What I can't understand is how the people who have been hounded from the tyrant-ridden countries of the old world and found shelter and protection beneath our flag should turn thus to curse the hand that shields them." "But if they propose to give you a better flag, Governor?" drawled the lazy voice. "Why not consider?" "Look, Elena! Did the sun ever shine on anything more beautiful? See it fluttering from a thousand house-tops--the proud emblem of human freedom and human progress! Dewey has lifted it this morning on the foulest slave-pen of the Orient--the flag that has never met defeat. The one big faith in me is the belief that Almighty God inspired our fathers to build this Republic--the noblest dream yet conceived by the mind of man. Dewey has sunk a tyrant fleet and conquered an empire of slaves without the loss of a single man. The God of our fathers was with him. We have a message for the swarming millions of the East----" "Pardon the interruption, Governor, but I must hold the mirror up to nature just a moment--your portrait sketched by the poet-laureate of the English-speaking world. He speaks of the American: "Enslaved, illogical, elate. He greets the embarrassed gods, nor fears To shake the iron hand of Fate Or match with Destiny for beers. "Lo! imperturbable he rules, Unkempt, disreputable, vast-- And in the teeth of all the schools I--I shall save him at the last!" The Colonel smiled. "How do you like the picture?" "Not bad for an Englishman, Norman. You know we licked England twice----" "And we kin do it again, b' gosh, can't we?" blustered the younger man with mock heroics. "You can bet we can, my son!" continued the Colonel, quietly. "The roar of Dewey's guns are echoing round the world this morning. The lesson will not be lost. You will observe that even your English poet foresees at last our salvation. "'And in the teeth of all the schools I--I shall save him at the last!'" "Even in spite of the Socialists?" queried the boy, with a grin. "In spite of every foe--even those within our own household. War is the searchlight of history, the great revealer of national life, of hidden strength and unexpected weakness. I saw it in the Civil conflict--I've seen it in this little struggle----" "Then you do acknowledge it's not the greatest struggle in history--that's something to be thankful for in these days of patriotism," exclaimed Norman, rising and stretching himself before the open fire while he winked mischievously at Elena. "It's big enough, my boy, to show us the truth about our nation. Our old problems are no longer real. The Union our fathers dreamed has come at last. We are one people--one out of many--and we can whip Spain before breakfast----" "With one hand tied behind our back!" laughed the boy. "Yes, and blindfolded. It will be easy. But the next serious job will be to bury a half million deluded fools in this country who call themselves Socialists." The Colonel paused and a look of foreboding clouded his face as he gazed from the window of his house on Nob Hill over the city of San Francisco, which he loved with a devotion second only to his passionate enthusiasm for the Union. Elena sat watching him in silent sympathy. He was the one perfect man of her life dreams, the biggest, strongest, tenderest soul she had ever known. Since the day she crept into his arms a lonely little orphan ten years old she had worshipped him as father, mother, guardian, lover, friend--all in one. She had accepted Norman's love and promised to be his wife more to please his father than from any overwhelming passion for the handsome, lazy young athlete. It had come about as a matter of course because Colonel Worth wished it. The Colonel turned from the window, and his eyes rested on Elena's upturned face. "It will be bloody work--but we've got to do it----" Elena sprang to her feet with a start and a laugh. "Do what, Guardie? I forgot what you were talking about." "Then don't worry your pretty head about it, dear. It's a job we men will look after in due time." He stooped and kissed her forehead. "By-by until to-night--I'll drop down to the club and hear the latest from the front." With the firm, swinging stride of a man who lives in the open the Colonel passed through the door of the library. "Norman, I can't realize that you two are father and son--he looks more like your brother." "At least my older brother----" "Yes, of course, but you would never take him for a man of forty-eight. I like the touch of gray in his hair. It means dignity, strength, experience. I've always hated sap-headed youngsters." "Say, Elena, for heaven's sake, who are you in love with anyhow--with me or the Governor?" A smile flickered around the corners of the girl's eyes and mouth before she slowly answered: "I sometimes think I really love you both, Norman--but there are times when I have doubts about you." "Thanks. I suppose I must be duly grateful for small favours, or else resign myself to call you 'Mother.'" "Would such a fate be intolerable?" Elena drew her magnificent figure to its full height and looked into the young athlete's face with laughing audacity. "By George, Elena, if I'm honest with you, I'd have to say no. You are tall, stately, dignified, beautiful from the crown of your black hair to the tip of your dainty toe--the most stunning-looking woman I ever saw. I never think of you as a girl just out of school. You always remind me of a glorious royal figure in some old romance of the Middle Ages----" "Now I'm sure I love you, Norman--for the moment at least." "Then promise to go with me on a lark to-night," he suddenly cried. "A lark?" Elena's gray-blue eyes danced beneath their black lashes. "Yes, a real lark, daring, adventurous, dangerous, audacious." "What is it--what is it? Tell me quick." The girl seized Norman's arm with eager, childish glee. "Let's go to that Socialist meeting and beard the lion in his den." Elena drew back. "No. Guardie will be furious!" "Ah, who's afraid? Guardie be hanged!" "Go by yourself." "No, you've got to go with me." "I won't do it. You just want to worry your father and then hide behind my skirts." "You can see yourself that's the easiest way to manage it. If he has a fit, I can just say that your curiosity was excited and I had to go with you." "But it's not excited." "For the purposes of the lark I tell you that it is excited. There's too much patriotism in the air. It's giving me nervous prostration. I want something to brace me up. I think those fellows can give me some good points to tease the Governor with." "Tease the Governor! You flatter yourself, Norman. He doesn't pay any more attention to your talk than he would to the bark of a six weeks' old puppy." "That's what riles me. The Governor's so cocksure of himself. I don't know how to answer him, but I know he's wrong. The fury with which he hates the Socialists rouses my curiosity. I've always found that the good things in life are forbidden. All respectable people are positively forbidden to attend a Socialist--traitors'--meeting. For that reason let's go." "No." "Ah, come on. Don't be a chump. Be a sport!" "I'd like the lark, but I won't hurt Guardie's feelings; so that's the end of it." "Going to be a surprise, they say." "What kind of a surprise?" "Going to spring a big sensation." Elena's eyes began to dance again. "The woman called the Scarlet Nun is going to speak, and Herman Wolf, the famous 'blond beast' of Socialism, will preside. They are mates--affinities." "Married?" "God knows. A hundred weird stories about them circulate in the under-world." "I won't go! Don't you say another word!" Elena snapped. Norman was silent. "Are you sure it would be perfectly safe, Norman?" the girl softly asked. "Perfectly. I know every inch of that quarter of the city--went there a hundred times the year I was a reporter." "I won't go!" "It's the wickedest street in town. They say it's the worst block in America." "I don't want to see it." Elena laughed. "And the hall is a famous red-light dancing dive in the heart of Hell's Half Acre." "Hush! Hush! I tell you I won't--_I won't_ go! But--but if I _do_--you promise to hold my hand every minute, Norman?" "And keep my arm around your waist, if you like." Elena's cheeks flushed and her voice quivered with excitement as she paused in the doorway. "I'll be ready in twenty minutes after dinner." "Bully for my chum! I'll tell the Governor we've gone for a stroll." As the shadows slowly fell over the city, Norman led Elena down the marble steps of his father's palatial home and paused for a moment on the edge of the hill on which were perched the seats of the mighty. Elena fumbled with a new glove. "Are you ready to descend with me to the depths, my princess in disguise?" he gaily asked. "Did you ever know me to flunk when I gave my word?" "No, you're a brick, Elena." Norman seized her arm and strode down the steep hillside with sure, firm step, the girl accompanying his every movement with responsive joy. "You're awfully wicked to get me into a scrape of this kind, Norman," she cried, with bantering laughter. "You know I was dying to go slumming, and Guardie wouldn't let me. It's awfully mean of you to take advantage of me like this." He stopped suddenly and looked gravely into her flushed face. "Let's go back, then." "No! I won't." Norman broke into a laugh. "Then away with vain regrets! And remember the fate of Lot's wife." Elena pressed his hand close to her side and whispered: "You are with me. The big handsome captain of last year's football team. Very young and very vain and very foolish and very lazy--but I do think you'd stand by me in a scrap, Norman. Wouldn't you?" "Well, I rather think!" was the deep answer, half whispered, as they suddenly turned a corner and plunged into the red-light district. His strong hand gripped her wrist with unusual tenderness. "So who's afraid?" she cried, looking up into his face just as a drunken blear-eyed woman staggered through an open door and lurched against her. A low scream of terror came from Elena as she sprang back, and the woman's head struck the pavement with a dull whack. Norman bent over her and started to lift the heavy figure, when her fist suddenly shot into his face. "Go ter hell--I can take care o' myself!" "Evidently," he laughed. Elena's hand suddenly gripped his. "Let's go back, Norman." "Nonsense--who's afraid?" "I am. I don't mind saying it. This is more than I bargained for." The woman scrambled to her feet and limped back into the doorway. Elena shivered. "I didn't know such women lived on this earth." "To say nothing of living but a stone's throw from your own door," he continued. "Let's go back," she pleaded. "No. A thing like this is merely one more reason why we should keep on. This only shows that the world we live in isn't quite perfect, as the Governor seems to think. These Socialists may be right after all. Now that we've started let's hear their side of it. Come on! Don't be a quitter!" Norman seized her arm and hurried through the swiftly moving throng of the under-world--gambling touts, thieves, cut-throats, pick-pockets, opium fiends, drunkards, thugs, carousing miners, and sailors--but above all, everywhere, omnipresent, the abandoned woman--painted, bedizened, lurching through the streets, hanging in doorways, clinging to men on the sidewalks, beckoning from windows, singing vulgar songs on crude platforms among throngs of half-drunken men, whirling past doors and windows in dance-halls, their cracked voices shrill and rasping above the din of cheap music. Elena stopped suddenly and clung heavily to Norman's arm. "Please, Norman, let's go back. I can't endure this." "And you're my chum that never flunked when she gave her word?" he asked with scorn. "We are only a few feet from the hall now." "Where is it?" "Right there in the middle of the block where you see that sign with the blazing red torch." "Come on, then," Elena said, with a shudder. They walked quickly through the long, dimly lighted passage to the entrance of the hall. It was densely packed with a crowd of five hundred. Elena closed her eyes and allowed Norman to lead her through the mob that blocked the space inside the door. At the entrance to the centre aisle he encountered an usher who stared with bulging eyes at his towering figure. Norman leaned close and whispered: "My boy, can you possibly get us two seats?" "Can I git de captain er de football team two seats? Well, des watch me!" The boy darted up the aisle, dived under the platform, drew out two folding-chairs, placed them in the aisle on the front row, darted back, and bowed with grave courtesy. "Dis way, sir!" Norman followed with Elena clinging timidly and blindly to his arm. In a moment they were seated. He offered the boy a dollar. The youngster bowed again. "De honour is all mine, sir. But you can give it to the Cause when they pass the box." Norman turned to Elena. "Well, doesn't that jar you? A sixteen-year-old boy declines a tip, and says give it to the Cause!" The boy darted up the steps of the platform and whispered to the chairman: "Git on to his curves! Dat's de captain o' de football--de bloke dat's worth millions, an' don't give a doggone!" A woman dressed in deep red who sat beside the chairman leaned close and asked with quiet intensity: "You mean young Worth, the millionaire of Nob Hill?" "Bet yer life! Dat's him!" The woman in red whispered to the chairman, who nodded, while his keen gray eyes flashed a ray of light from his heavy brows as he turned toward Norman. The woman wheeled suddenly in her chair, and with her back to the audience bent over a girl who was evidently hiding behind her. "Outdo yourself to-night, Barbara. Young Norman Worth, the son of our multi-millionaire nabob, is sitting in the aisle just in front of you. Win him for the Cause and I'll give you the half of our kingdom." "How can I know him?" the girl asked excitedly. "He's not ten feet from the platform in the centre aisle--front row--clean shaven--a young giant of twenty-three--the handsomest man in the house. Put your soul _and_ your body in every word you utter, every breath you breathe--and _win_ him!" "I'll try," was the low reply. CHAPTER II A NEW JOAN OF ARC The woman in scarlet rose, lifted her hand, and the crowd sprang to their feet to the music of the most stirring song of revolution ever written. Norman and Elena were both swept from their seats in spite of themselves. Elena's eyes flashed with excitement. "What on earth is that they are singing, Norman?" she whispered. "The Marseillaise hymn." "Isn't it thrilling?" she gasped. "It makes your heart leap, doesn't it?" "And, heavens, how they sing it!" she exclaimed. Norman turned and looked over the crowd of eager faces--every man and woman singing with the passionate enthusiasm of religious fanatics--an enthusiasm electric, contagious, overwhelming. In spite of himself he felt his heart beat with quickened sympathy. He was amazed at the character of the audience. He had expected to see a throng of low-browed brutes. The first shock he received was the feeling that this crowd was distinctly an intellectual one. They might be fanatics. They certainly were not fools. The stamp of personality was clean cut on almost every face. They were fighters. They meant business and they didn't care who knew it. Some of them wore dirty clothes, but their faces were stamped with the power of free, rebellious thought--a power that always commands respect in spite of shabby clothes. He looked in vain for a single joyous face. Not a smile. Deep, dark eyes, shining with the light of purpose, mouths firm, headstrong, merciless, and bitter, but nowhere the glimmer of a ray of sunlight! He felt with a sense of awe the uncanny presence of Tragedy. And to his amazement he noticed a lot of men he knew in the crowd--three or four authors, a newspaper reporter evidently off duty, two college professors, a clergyman, three artists, a priest, and a street preacher. The hymn died away into a low sigh, like the sob of the wind after a storm. The crowd sank to their seats so quietly with the dying of the music that Norman and Elena were standing alone for an instant. They awoke from the spell, and dropped into their seats with evident embarrassment. A boy of sixteen stepped briskly to the front in answer to a nod from the chairman, and recited a Socialist poem. After the first stanza, which was crude and stilted, Norman's eye rested on the heavy figure of the chairman. He was surprised at the power of his rugged face. Through its brute strength flashed the keenest sense of alert intelligence--an intelligence which seemed to lurk behind the big, shaggy eyebrows as if about to spring on its victim. His heavy-set face was covered with a thick, reddish blond beard and his short hair stood up straight on his head, like the bristles of a wild boar. Of medium height and heavy build, with arms and legs of extraordinary muscle and big, coarse short fingers evidently gnarled and knotted, by the coarsest labor in youth, he looked like a blacksmith who had taken a college course by the light of his forge at night. There was something about the way he sat crouching low in his seat, watching with his keen gray eyes everything that passed, that bespoke the man of reserve power--the man who was quietly waiting his hour. "By George, a pretty good pet name they've given him--'The Blond Beast,'" Norman muttered. "I shouldn't like to tackle him in the dark." The woman in red leaned toward the chairman and said something in low tones. He nodded his massive head, smiled, and looked back over his shoulder at the girl sitting behind them. The movement showed for the first time a long ugly scar on the side of his great neck. "Look at that fellow's neck!" whispered Elena. "Yes. He had a close call that time," Norman answered. "But I'll bet the other one never lived to tell the story----" "Sh! 'The Scarlet Nun' is going to speak." The woman in red rose and walked to the edge of the platform. She stood silent for a moment, her tall, graceful, willowy figure erect and tense. The crowd burst into a tumult of applause. She smiled, bowed, and lifted her slender hand with a quick, imperious gesture for silence. Norman was struck by the note of religious fervour which her whole personality seemed to radiate. The peculiar scarlet robe she wore accented this impression perhaps, and its strangeness added a touch of awe. The dress gave one the impression of a nun's garb except that its long folds were so arranged that they revealed rather than concealed the beautiful lines of her graceful figure. The colour was the deep, warm red of the Socialist flag--the colour of human blood, chosen as the symbol of the universal brotherhood of man. The effect of a nun's cowl was given by a thin scarlet mantilla thrown over the head, the silken meshes of its long fringe mingling with the waves of her thick black hair. Her face was that of a madonna of the slender type, except that the lips were too full, round, and sensuous and her long eyelashes drooped slightly over dark, lustrous eyes. "Comrades," she began, in slow, measured tones, "after to-night I retire from the platform to take up work for which I am better fitted. I promised you a big surprise this evening, and you shall not be disappointed----" A murmur rippled the audience and she paused, smiling into Norman's face with a curious look. She spoke with a decided foreign accent with little moments of coquettish hesitation as though feeling for words. Norman felt an almost irresistible impulse to help her. "I am going to in-tro-duce to you to-night," she continued, "a new leader, whose tongue the God of the poor and the outcast and the dis-in-herited has touched with divine fire. She is no stran-ger. Twenty years ago she was born beneath the bright skies of Cal-i-for-nia at Anaheim, in the little Socialist colony of Polish dreamers led by Madame Modjeska, Count Bozenta, and Henry Sienkiewicz, the distin-guished author of 'Quo Vadis.' As you know, the colony failed. Her mother died in poverty and she was placed in an orphan asylum until eight years of age, when she was taken back to Poland by her foolish kins-men. Four years later I found her, a ragged, homeless waif, in the streets of Warsaw, alone and star-ving. Since then she has been mine. Amid the squalor and misery of the old world her busy little tongue never tired telling of the glories of Cali-for-nia! Always she sighed for its groves of oranges and olives, its dazzling flowers, its luscious grapes, its rich valleys, its cloud-kissed, snow-clad mountains and the mur-mur of its mighty seas! It was her tiny hand that led me across the ocean to you. I have sent her to school in one of your Western colleges where a great Socialist professor has taught her history and e-con-omics. I have the high honour, comrades, of intro-ducing to you the child of genius who from to-night will be the Joan of Arc of our Cause, Comrade Barbara Bozenta!" She quickly turned and drew forward a trembling slip of a girl whose big brown eyes were swimming in tears of excitement. A moment of intense silence, and the crowd burst into cheers as the dazzling beauty of their new champion slowly dawned on their understanding. The woman in red resumed her seat, and the girl stood bowing, trembling, and smiling. The young athlete watched her keenly. Never had he seen such a bundle of quivering, pulsing, nervous, ravishing beauty. He could have sworn he saw electric sparks flash from the tips of every eyelash, from every strand of the mass of brown curls that circled her face and fell in rich profusion on her shoulders and across her heaving bosom. He felt before she had uttered a word--felt, rather than saw--the remarkable effectiveness of the simple, girlish dress which enhanced her dark beauty. She wore the same deep red as the older woman, but the bottom of the skirt was relieved by a row of ruffles edged with white lace. A scarf of white embroidered at the ends with scarlet flowers, was thrown gracefully around her shoulders and hung below the knees. Her round young arms were bare to the elbows, her throat and neck bare to the upper edge of the full bust. The girl's eyes sought Norman's for an imperceptible instant and a smile flashed from her trembling lips. The cheering ceased and she began to speak. He watched her with breathless intensity, and listened with steadily increasing fascination. Her voice at first was low, yet every word fell clear and distinct. Never had he heard a voice so tender and full of expressive feeling--soft and mellow, sweet like the notes of a flute. There was something in its tone quality that compelled sympathy, that stole into the inner depths of the soul of the listener, and led reason a willing captive. In simple yet burning words she told of the darkness and poverty, the crime and shame, hunger and cruelty of the old world in which she had spent four years of her childhood. And then in a flight of poetic eloquence, came the story of her dreams of California, the Golden West, the land of eternal sunshine and flowers. And then, in a voice quivering and choking with emotion, she drew the picture of what she found--of Hell's Half Acre, in which she stood, with its brazen vice, its crime, its hopeless misery, its want and despair. With bold and fierce invective she charged modern civilization with this infamy. "Why do strong men go forth to war?" she cried, looking into the depths of Norman's soul. "Here is the enemy at your door, gripping the soft, white throats of your girls. Watch them sink into the mire at your feet and then down, down into the black sewers of the under-world never to rise again! I, too, call for volunteers. For heroes and heroines--not to fight another--I call you to a nobler warfare. I call you to the salvation of a world. Will you come? I offer you stones for bread, the sky for your canopy, the earth for your bed, and for your wages death! None may enter but the brave. Will you come----?" The last words of her appeal rang through Norman's heart with resistless power. Her round, soft arms seemed about his neck and his soul went out to her in passionate yearning. He gripped the chair to hold himself back from shouting: "Yes! I'm coming!" She sank to her seat before the crowd realized that she had stopped. A shout of triumph shook the building--wave after wave, rising and falling in ever-increasing intensity. At its height the Scarlet Nun sprang to her feet, with a graceful leap reached the edge of the platform, and again lifted her hand. A sudden hush fell on the crowd. "Now, comrades, the battle-hymn of the Republic set to new music! Mark its words, and remember that we sing it not as a mem-ory, but as a proph-esy of the day our streets may run red with the blood of the last struggle of Man to break his chains of Slav-ery--a proph-esy, remember, not a mem-ory! Read it Barbara!" The girl was by her side in an instant, and read from memory, her clear sweet voice tremulous with passion: "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He has loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword: His truth is marching on! I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps; They have builded Him an altar in the evening's dews and damps; I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps: His day is marching on! He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat; He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment seat; Oh! be swift, my soul, to answer them, be jubilant my feet! Our God is marching on!" The crowd burst again into triumphant song, and Norman looked at their faces with increasing amazement. The immense vitality of their faith, the rush of its forward movement, the grandeur and audacity of their programme struck him as a revelation. They proposed no half-way measures. They meant to uproot the foundations of modern society and build a new world on its ruins. Their leaders were fanatics--yes. But fanatics were the only kind of people who would dare such things and do them. Here was a movement, which at least meant something--something big, heroic, daring. His face suddenly flushed and his heart leaped with an impulse. "In heaven's name, Norman, what's the matter?" Elena asked. The young poet-athlete looked at her in a dazed sort of way and stammered: "Did you ever see anything like it?" "No, and I don't want to again," she replied with a frown. "Let's go home." "Wait, they are taking up a collection. At least we must pay for our seats." When the usher passed he emptied the contents of his pocket in the collection-box. As the meeting broke up, the boy who placed their seats touched Norman on the arm. "Let me introduce ye to her. I wants ter tell 'er ye er my friend--I've yelled my head off for ye many a day on de football ground. Jest er minute. I'll fetch 'er right down." The boy darted up on the platform, and Norman turned to Elena: "Shall we please the boy?" "You mean yourself," she replied. "I decline the honour." She turned away into the crowd as the boy returned leading Barbara. Norman hastened to meet them at the foot of the platform steps. "Dis is me friend, Worth, de captain of de football team, Miss Barbara," proudly exclaimed the boy. Barbara extended her soft hand with a warm, friendly smile, and Norman clasped it while his heart throbbed. "I congratulate you," he said, "on your wonderful triumph to-night." "You were interested?" she asked, quietly. "More than I can tell you," was the quick response. "Then join our club and help me in my work among the poor," she urged, with frank eagerness. "We meet to-morrow afternoon at three o'clock. Won't you come?" A long, deep look into her brown eyes--his face flushed and his heart leaped with sudden resolution. "Thank you, I will," he slowly answered. He joined Elena at the door and they walked home in brooding silence. CHAPTER III THE BIRTH OF A MAN Norman stood silent and thoughtful before the fire in the dining-room, the morning after the meeting of the Socialists. His sleep had been feverish and a hundred half-formed dreams had haunted the moments in which he had lost consciousness with always the shining face of Barbara smiling and beckoning him on. Elena silently entered and watched him a moment before he saw her. "Still dreaming of the New Joan of Arc, Norman?" she asked with playful banter. "I'm going to do it, Elena," he said, with slow, thoughtful emphasis. "What? Marry her without even giving me the usual two weeks' notice?" Elena laughed. "Now, isn't that like a woman! I wasn't even thinking of the girl----" "Of course not." Norman laughed. "By Jove, you're jealous at last, Elena." "You flatter yourself." "Honestly, I wasn't thinking of the girl----" "Well, I've been thinking of her. She haunts me. I like her and I hate her. I feel that she's charming and vicious, of the spirit and flesh, and yet I can't help believing that she's good. The woman who introduced her is a she-devil, and the man who presided over that meeting is a brute. It's a pity she's mixed up with them. What are you going to do--play the hero and rescue her from their clutches?" "Nonsense. The girl is nothing to me, except as the symbol of a great idea. It stirs my blood. I'm going to join the Socialist Club." "Of which the fair Barbara is secretary." "Come with me, and join too. We'll go together to every meeting." "Have you gone mad?" Elena asked, with deep seriousness. "I'm in dead earnest." "And you think your father will stand for it?" "That remains to be seen. I'm going to tackle him as soon as he comes down to breakfast." "Well, if I never see you again, good-bye, old pal." She extended her hand in mock gravity. "I'm not afraid of him." "No, of course not!" "You're a coward, or you'd stand by me. Wait, Elena, he's coming now." "Why stand by? You're not afraid? I'll return in time for the inquest. Brace up! Remember Barbara. Be a hero!" With a ripple of laughter she disappeared as the Colonel's footsteps were heard at the door. Norman braced himself for the ordeal. He had never before dared to test his father's iron will. He had grown accustomed to see strong men bow and cringe before him, and felt a secret contempt for them all. They were bowing to his millions. And yet the boy knew with intuitive certainty that beneath the mask of quiet dignity and polished military bearing of the man he facetiously called "the Governor" there slumbered a will unique, powerful, and overbearing. More than once he had resented the silent pressure of his positive and aggressive personality. His own budding manhood had begun instinctively to bristle at its approach. The Colonel started on seeing Norman, and looked at him with a quizzical expression. "Was there an earthquake this morning, Norman?" "I didn't feel it, sir--why?" "You're downstairs rather early." Norman smiled. "I've been a little lazy, I'm afraid, Governor. But you know I wasn't consulted as to whether I wished to be born. You assumed a fearful responsibility. You see the results." The Colonel dropped his paper and looked at Norman a moment. "Well, upon my word!" he exclaimed. "What's happened?" "The biggest thing that ever came into my life, Governor," was the low, serious answer. "What?" "The decision that hereafter I'd rather be than seem to be, that I'm going to do some thinking for myself." "And what brought you to this decision?" the father quietly asked. "I went last night to that Socialist meeting." "Indeed!" "Yes," he went on, impetuously, "and I heard the most wonderful appeal to which I ever listened--an appeal which stirred me to the deepest depths of my being. I think it's the biggest movement of the century. I'm going to study it. I'm going to see what it means. What do you say to it?" The boy lifted his tall figure with instinctive dignity, and his eyes met his father's in a straight, deep man's gaze. The faintest smile played about the corners of the Colonel's mouth as he suddenly extended his hand. "I congratulate you!" "Congratulate me?" Norman stammered. "Upon the attainment of your majority. Up to date you have written a few verses and played football. But this is the first evidence you have ever shown of conscious personality. You're in the grub-worm stage as yet, but you're on the move. You're a human being. You have developed the germ of character. And that's the only thing in this world that's worth the candle, my boy. It's funny to hear you say that the appeal of Socialism has worked this miracle. For character is the one thing the scheme of Socialism leaves out of account. A character is the one thing a machine-made society could never produce if given a million years in which to develop the experiment." "And you don't object?" Norman asked with increasing amazement. "Certainly not. Study Socialism to your heart's content. Go to the bottom of it. Don't slop over it. Don't accept sentimental mush for facts. Find out for yourself. Read, think, and learn to know your fellow man. When you've picked up a few first principles, and know enough to talk intelligently, I've something to say to you--something I've learned for myself." The boy looked at his father steadily and spoke with a slight tremor in his voice. "Governor, you're a bigger man than I thought you were. I like you--even if you are my father." "Thanks, my boy," the Colonel gravely replied, "I trust we may know each other still better in the future." CHAPTER IV AMONG THE SHADOWS Under the tutelage of Barbara, the young millionaire plunged into the study of Socialism with the zeal of the fresh convert to a holy crusade. At first he had listened to her stories of the sufferings of the poor and the unemployed with mild incredulity. She laid her warm little hand on his and said: "Come and see. If you think that Socialism is a dream, I'll show you that capitalism is a nightmare." He followed her down the ugly pavements of a squalid street into the poorest quarter of the city. She entered a dingy hall and pushed her way through a swarm of filthy children to the rear room. On a bed of rags lay the body of a suicide--a working-man who had shot himself the day before. The wife sat crouching on a broken chair, with eyes staring out of the window at the sunlit skies of a May morning in California. Her body seemed to have turned to stone and her eyes to have frozen in their sockets. Her hands lay limp in her lap, her shoulders drooped, her mouth hung hopelessly open. She was as dead to every sight and sound of earth as though shrouded and buried in six feet of clay instead of sunlight. Barbara touched her shoulder, but she did not move. "Have you been sitting there all night, Mrs. Nelson?" she asked, gently. The woman turned her weak eyes toward the speaker and stared without reply. "You haven't tasted the food I brought you," Barbara continued. The drooping figure stirred with sudden energy, as if the realization of the question first asked had begun to stir her intelligence. "Yes. I set up all night with Jim. He'd a-done as much fer me. There's nobody else that cared enough to come. Ye know it ain't respectful to leave your dead alone----" "But you must eat something," Barbara urged. "I can't eat--it chokes me." She paused a moment, and looked at Norman in a dazed sort of way. "I tried to eat and something choked me--what was it? O God, I remember now!" she cried, with strangling emotion. "They are going to bury him in the potter's field unless we can save him, and I know we can't. He's got an old mother way back East that thinks he's doing well out here. Hit'll kill her dead when she finds out he wuz buried by the city." "He shan't go to the potter's field," Norman interrupted, looking out of the window. The woman rose, and tried to speak, but sank sobbing: "Thank God! Thank God! Thank God!" When the first flood of grateful emotion had spent itself, she looked up at Norman and said: "You see, sir, he wasn't strong, and kept losin' his job in Chicago. We'd heard about California all our lives. We sold out everything and got enough to come. For two years we've made a hard fight, but it was no use. Jim couldn't git work. I tried and I couldn't. Folks have helped us, but he was proud. He wouldn't beg and he wouldn't let me. He wouldn't sell his gun. I think he always meant to use it that way when he got to the end, and it come yesterday when they give us notice to git out." She staggered over to the bed and fell across the body, sobbing: "My poor old boy. He loved me. He was always good to me. I tried to go with him. But I couldn't pull the trigger! I was afraid! I was afraid!" When they reached the street, Barbara lifted her brown eyes to Norman's face and asked: "What do you think of a social system that drives thousands of men to kill themselves like that?" "To tell you the truth I never thought of it at all before." "He would have been buried in a pauper's grave but for your help. I brought you here this morning because I knew you would save her that anguish when you understood." "You knew I would?" he softly asked. "I wouldn't have let you come with me if I hadn't known it," she answered, earnestly. "It's funny how many of us live in this world without knowing anything about it," he said, musingly. "It would be funny were it not a tragedy," she answered, turning across the street to the next block. They paused at the entrance of another narrow hallway. "My work as secretary of the club includes, as you see, a wide range of calls. I'm a dispenser of alms, the pastor of a great parish, the friend, adviser, and champion of a lost world, and you have no idea what a big world it is." "I'm beginning to understand. What's the trouble here? Another suicide?" "No--something worse, I think. A man who was afraid to die and took to drink. That's the way with most of them. None but the brave can look into the face of Death. This man is good to his family until he's drunk. Drink is the only thing that makes life worth the candle to him. But when he's under the influence of liquor he's a fiend. Last night he beat his wife into insensibility. This morning he sent one of the children for me." They climbed two flights of rickety stairs and entered a room littered with broken furniture. Every chair was smashed, the table lay in splinters, pieces of crockery scattered everywhere, and the stove broken into fragments. Two blear-eyed children with the look of hunted rabbits crouched in a corner. A man was bending over the bed, where the form of a woman lay still and white. "For God's sake, brace up, Mary!" he was saying. "Ye mustn't die! Ye mustn't, I tell ye! Your white face will haunt me and drive me into hell a raving maniac. I didn't know what I was doin', old gal. I was crazy. I wouldn't 'a' hurt a hair of your head if I'd 'a' knowed what I was doin'!" He bowed his face in his coarse, bloated hands and sobbed. The thin white hand of the wife stroked his hair feebly. "It's all right, Sam. I know ye didn't mean it," she sighed. Norman sent for a doctor, and left some money. With each new glimpse of the under-world of pain and despair the conviction grew in Norman's mind that he had not lived, and the determination deepened that he would get acquainted with his fellow men and the place he called his home. "You are not tired?" Barbara asked, as they hurried into the street. "No, I'm just beginning to live," he answered, soberly. "Good. Then you shall be allowed the honour of accompanying me to the county jail, to the poorhouse, to the hospital, and to the morgue--the four greatest institutions of modern civilization. We must hurry. I've another sadder visit after these." As they hurried through the streets, Norman began to study with increasing intensity the phenomena presented in the development of Barbara's character. The more he saw of her, the more he realized the lofty ideals of her life, the more puerile and contemptible his own past seemed. At the jail they found a boy who had been convicted of stealing and sentenced to the penitentiary. His old mother was ill. Barbara bore her last message of love. They stopped at the poorhouse to see a curious old pauper who had become a regular attendant on the Socialists' meetings. He was called "Methodist John," because he was forever shouting "Glory, Hallelujah!" and interrupting the speakers. Barbara was the bearer of a painful message to John. Wolf had instructed her to keep him out of the meetings. She had decided to try a gentler way--to warn him against yelling "Glory" again under penalty of being deprived of a dish of soup of which he was particularly fond. The Socialist Club served this simple, wholesome meal to all who asked for it after its weekly meetings. John promised Barbara faithfully to stop shouting. "Remember, John," she warned him finally, "shout--no soup! No shout--soup!" "I understand, Miss Barbara," he answered, solemnly. "You see, sir," he said, apologetically, turning to Norman, "I get along all right till she begins ter speak, and when I hears her soft, sweet voice it seems ter run all down my back in little ticklin' waves clean down ter my toes, an' I holler 'Glory' before I can stop it!" Norman laughed. "I understand, old man." "You feel that way yerself, don't ye, now, when she looks down into yer soul with them big, soft eyes o' hern, an' her voice comes a-stealin' inter yer heart like the music of the angels----" Barbara's face lighted, and a slight blush suffused her cheeks as she caught the look of admiring assent in Norman's expression. "That will do, John," she said, firmly. "Mr. Wolf was very angry with you yesterday." "I'll remember, Miss Barbara," he repeated. "And God bless your dear heart fer comin' by ter tell me." "I suppose he has no people living who are interested in him?" Norman asked, as they turned toward the Socialist hall. "No. He came from a big mill town in the East. His children all died before they were grown, and he landed here with his wife ten years ago. When she died, he was sent to the poorhouse. He hasn't much mind, but there's enough left to burst into flame at the memory of his children being slowly ground to death by the wheels of those mills. I've seen his dead soul start to life more than once as I've looked into his face from our platform. What an awful thing to see dead men walking about!" "Yes. People who are dead and don't know it. I never thought of it before." Norman exclaimed. They stopped in front of a house with a scarlet light in the hall, which threw its rays through a red-glass transom over a door of coloured leaded glass. The shadows of evening had begun to fall, and for the first time the girl showed a sign of hesitation and embarrassment. "I hate to ask you to go in here with me, and I'd hate worse to have you see me go alone. Yet I have to do it. My work leads me." "I'm going with you, whether you ask it or not," he firmly replied. "Then words are useless," she said, simply, as she rang the bell. A Negro maid opened the door, and smiled a look of recognition. "She ain't no better, miss. She's been crying for you all day." Barbara led the way up two flights of stairs to a small room in the rear, and entered without knocking. With a bound she was beside the bed on which lay a slender girl of nineteen. A mass of golden blond hair was piled in confusion on the pillow, and a pair of big, childish-looking blue eyes blinked at her through her tears. "Oh! you've come at last! I'm so glad. It makes me strong to see you. Your face shines so, Barbara! They say I can't live, but it's not so. I shall live! I'm feeling better every day. It's nonsense. The doctors haven't got any sense. I wish you'd get me one that knows something. Won't you, dear?" "My friend, Mr. Worth, who has called with me, has kindly agreed to send you another doctor, little sister--that's why I brought him to see you." Norman extended his hand, and grasped the thin, cold one the girl extended. He felt the chill of death in its icy touch as he stammered: "I'll send him right away." "Thank you," the girl replied, as a smile flitted about her weak mouth. She turned to Barbara with a look of infinite tenderness. "I knew you'd come, and I knew you'd save me. You're my angel! When I dream at night, you're always hovering over me." "I'll come again to-morrow, dearie, when the new doctor has seen you," Barbara answered, as she pressed her hand good-bye. When they reached the street, Norman asked: "You knew her before she fell into evil ways?" "Yes," Barbara answered, with feeling. "She was just a little child of joy and sunlight. She couldn't endure the darkness. She loved flowers and music, beauty and love. She hated drudgery and poverty. She tried to work, and gave up in despair. A man came into her life at a critical moment and she broke with the world. She's been sending all the money she could make the past two years to her mother and four little kids. Her father was killed at work in a mine for a great corporation." "She can't live, can she?" Norman asked. "Of course not. I only did this to humour her. She has developed acute consumption--she may not live a month." Barbara paused. "I must leave you now--I'm very tired, and I must sleep a while before I attend the meeting to-night. It has been a great strain on me to-day, this trip with you. How do you like our boasted civilization? Do you think it perfect? Are you satisfied with a system which drives hundreds of thousands of such girls into a life of shame? Are you content with a system which produces three million paupers in a land flowing with milk and honey? Do you like a system which drives thousands to the madness of drink and suicide every year?" "And to think," responded Norman, dreamily, "that for the past two years of my manhood I've been writing verses and playing football! Great God!" "Then from to-day we are comrades in the cause of humanity?" she asked tenderly, extending her hand. His own clasped hers with firm grasp. "Comrades!" CHAPTER V THE ISLAND OF VENTURA Norman had never been a boy to do things by halves. In college, when he went in for football, he made it the one supreme end of life--and won. He incidentally managed to pull through a course in mining engineering. He knew mining by instinct and inheritance from his father. It came easy. When he had a three months' vacation from football he took up the modelling of a dredge for mining gold from the sands of the beaches. The thing had never been perfected, but after three months' experiment and study he was just on the point of making the castings for the machinery when the football season opened and he dropped such trifling matters for the more serious work of training his men for a successful season. He won the championship and forgot the dredge. Into the new movement of Socialism he naturally threw his whole personality without reservation. Its daring programme thrilled him. The audacity of its leaders and their refusal to discuss anything less than the salvation of man appealed to every instinct of his nature. He devoured every book on the subject he could find, and in his new-found enthusiasm for humanity accepted as the inspired voice of God their wildest visions of social regeneration. In his work of charity and organization with Barbara he found everything to confirm and nothing to shake his faith in these theories. When once he caught the idea that all the ills of modern civilization were due directly to the fiendish system of "capitalism" and its "iron law of wages," it was the key which unlocked every mystery of Pain and every tragedy of the Soul. All sin and crime and shame and suffering became the incidents of a social system whose movements were as inexorable as Fate, as merciless as Death. There was but one thing worth talking about, and that was how to destroy modern society, root and branch, and do it quickly, thoroughly and without compromise. The same daring enthusiasm and capacity for leadership which made him the captain of his football team brought him at once to the front as a Socialist leader. He would have gained this leadership had he been the poorest man among them. It was a gift as his birthright. But, added to this capacity for daring and successful action, was his wealth and social prestige. He had cast his lot with a class whose avowed purpose was to destroy all social distinctions, to level all wealth to a common standard. And for this reason in particular he was conspicuous and heroic in the eyes of his Socialist comrades. He found soon after his entrance into their active councils that the woman known to the world as "The Scarlet Nun," to her associates as "Sister Catherine," was the inspiring brain of their movement in the West. This remarkable woman interested him deeply from their first hour's talk. Born in Poland and educated in Germany, she spoke fluently the Russian, German, French, and English languages. She had led two great strikes of women workers in New York and had been arrested, convicted, and sentenced twice to the penitentiary for exciting riots. To her associates she had always remained a saint and a martyr for their cause. She had been married before her association with Wolf had begun, ten years ago. Her first husband had been divorced, and her marriage to Wolf had been merely "announced" at a Socialist meeting. And yet the young millionaire had never questioned the sincerity of their devotion or the apparent happiness of their union. He was amazed at her learning, her grasp of affairs, the simplicity and refinement of her manners, and the charm of her conversation. Wolf he found to be a man of wide reading and deep convictions. As he came in daily contact with these two powerful personalities, and watched the singular zeal with which they devoted themselves to their self-appointed task of destroying modern society, he could not divest himself of the impression that they belonged to a religious order and were leading a crusade, as the monks of the Middle Ages led men and women to die to rescue the tomb of Christ from the desecration of Turk and Saracen. The woman in particular gave him this impression of religious fanaticism. The apparent simplicity and austerity of her life, the tireless zeal with which she planned and worked for the spread of the gospel of Socialism, to his mind gave the lie emphatically to all the stories he had read of her affairs with men. The only moments of suspicion about her which ever clouded his mind came with the accidental discovery that she had skilfully managed to throw him and Barbara together for a day. It seemed just a little like the old habit of a scheming mamma angling for the rich young man, and deliberately using the beauty of her daughter as the bait with which to land him in the household. Yet, when he found himself with Barbara he had always dismissed the thought as absurd. Whatever might be the dimly formed design in the back of the older woman's fancy, her brilliant protégé gave no sign of being her accomplice. Norman had found Barbara a charming but baffling enigma. She walked through a world of sin and shame, filth and mire, with never a speck on the white of her soul or body. She spoke in the simplest and most direct way of things about which the ordinary girl in society would never dare to utter a word, and yet he took it as a matter of course. He grew to feel that she was a mysterious messenger from the spirit world. Yet when he took her arm and felt its warm round lines soft and thrilling against his own, or the warmth of her lithe body pressing close to his side in some lonely or dangerous spot on their rounds of work, he was brought up sharply against the fact that she was both flesh and spirit. Yet the moment he tried to draw nearer to her inner thoughts, he found her a skilful little fencer, an adept in all the arts of the most delicate and subtle coquetry. He grew at last, however, to know, with unerring masculine instinct, that with all her brave and frank talk about her "fallen" sisters, she hadn't an idea of what their fall really meant. She was as innocent as a child, and when at last she caught the young athlete smiling at one of her apparently frank and learned discussions of the modern degradation of woman, she blushed and became silent. Whereat he laughed, and she became so angry they parted in silence. Baffled in his efforts to approach Barbara's heart, he threw himself with zeal into the Cause. When two months had been spent in mastering the details of the Socialist programme, in studying its history and the condition of its movement, he called a meeting of the council of the Socialist Club, and fairly took away the breath of the Wolfs and Barbara by the magnitude and audacity of a scheme which he proposed to launch immediately. He had secured, without consulting any of his associates, an option on a rich, beautiful, and fertile island off the coast of Southern California. It was owned by a corporation which had invested more than a million dollars in its improvement. The enterprise had failed for two reasons--the money had been expended recklessly in the days of the famous land boom, and it had been found impossible to induce labourers to isolate themselves on this lonely spot, sixty miles from the coast of Santa Barbara, with no means of regular connection with the outside world. His eyes flashing with enthusiasm and his voice ringing with conviction, Norman closed his description of the island of Ventura with a demand for its immediate purchase by the Socialists. "It can be bought," he declared impetuously, "for $200,000. A million dollars' worth of improvements are already there. I propose that we immediately raise $500,000, buy this island, establish a steamship line, plant a colony of ten thousand Socialists, found the Brotherhood of Man, build a model city, and create a vast fund for the propaganda of our faith." Barbara's brown eyes danced with excitement, her cheeks flushed, while her little hands clapped approval. "Good! Good! It's great! It's beautiful! We must do it!" she cried. Wolf grimly shook his head. "The idea has failed a hundred times. We must conquer the world by political action--we have the weapon in our hand--manhood suffrage. All colonies fail sooner or later. They are corrupted from outside----" "Just so!" Norman interrupted. "But this one you can't reach from the outside. We will own the only means of communication. We will inherit all the advantages of modern civilization with none of its drawbacks. We can demonstrate the truths we hold and from our impregnable Gibraltar send out our missionaries to conquer the world. We will not merely dream dreams and see visions; we will make history. We will prove the God that's in man and establish the fact of his universal brotherhood." "It's a wonderful idea, comrade!" Catherine exclaimed, with enthusiasm. "I congratulate you! We will accept your plan, and I move that we appoint you our agent vested with full power to collect this fund from the enemy!" The motion was put and carried unanimously, even Wolf voting for it. Barbara sprang to Norman's side, and grasped his hand: "Our feud is over! I forgive you for laughing at me. You are a born leader. You've won your spurs to-night. You will raise this money?" "As sure as I'm living!" was the firm reply. CHAPTER VI THE RED FLAG Norman lost no time in springing his scheme for the establishment of the Socialist colony and headquarters for the propaganda of the new social religion on the island of Ventura. The season he had spent as a reporter gave him the key to the proper launching of a press story which created a profound sensation. It appeared simultaneously in the Sunday editions of all the leading dailies of the Pacific coast, and in forty-eight hours his mail had grown to such proportions that he required two secretaries to assist him in answering it. He called for a thousand volunteers to join the advance-guard of the coming Brotherhood of Man, each contributing a thousand dollars. He announced a mass meeting and picnic for the Fourth of July, to be held on the big lawn of the Worth country house on the outskirts of Berkeley. Colonel Worth had readily given his consent to the use of the lawn. He had not tried in any way to interfere with his son's association with the Socialists. He felt sure that in time he would tire of the fad, as he had of football, and in a fatherly way he began to admire the dash and audacity of the boy's plans. On the morning of the picnic, when Elena expressed her fears of the outcome, the Colonel laughed. "Don't worry, Elena. He'll come to his senses. It's like a fever. It must run its course. I'm rather proud of the extravagance of his foolishness. A boy who can forget his games and give his life to destroy the foundations of human society and try to rebuild a new world on its ruins--well, there's good stuff in him." "But if he does something rash?" Elena persisted. "He won't. With all his extravagance and enthusiasm he's not a fool. I, too, saw visions like that once." "You, Guardie?" "Yes, when I was very, very young--a mere boy of thirteen--I joined a colony of Communists." "I wish I could have seen you at thirteen," Elena cried, with a joyous laugh. The laugh died suddenly and a frown overspread her face as Norman appeared. "I want you and Elena to hear our orator to-day, Governor," Norman said, with enthusiasm. "We are going to make it a great day." "It's already great, my boy--I've just got the news." "What news?" The Colonel drew a telegram from his pocket. "A message from Washington. Sampson and Schley have annihilated the Spanish fleet. Admiral Cervera is a prisoner on board the flagship, and the army is rapidly closing in on the doomed city of Santiago." He handed the telegram to Norman, who glanced at it in silence and returned it to his father. "Come to our meeting on the lawn at noon, Governor. We've bigger news than that for you." "Bigger news?" the older man asked with a quizzical look. "Yes. A message announcing the dawn of a day when every gun on earth shall be broken to pieces and melted into ploughshares." The Colonel looked at Norman a moment, smiled, and slowly said: "I love the young--because I live myself over again in them." "Then you'll join us to-day?" "Thanks--no--Elena and I are going to shoot firecrackers--but we won't disturb your crowd. Let them speak to their hearts' content." The Colonel turned with Elena, and entered the house, which crowned an eminence overlooking the distant bay and city, while Norman hurried down the green sloping lawn to finish the decorations of the speakers' stand. The crowd had already begun to pour in from Oakland and San Francisco, and more than a hundred delegates from Socialist locals in other cities were expected. On a little headland which jutted out from the long sloping mountain side on which the lawn was laid out, Colonel Worth had erected a tall steel flag-pole. The big flag which flew from its peak could be seen by every ship that entered or left the bay and for miles on shore in almost every direction. Around this flag-pole Norman had built the speakers' platform, with every inch of its boards covered with the deep-red bunting symbolic of the Socialist cause. Behind the stand toward the mountains rose a smooth grass-carpeted hillside in semi-circular form, making a natural amphitheatre on which five thousand people might sit in tiers one above the other and distinctly hear every word uttered on the platform. By noon every inch of this space was packed with a dense crowd of Socialists, their friends, and the curious who had come, drawn by the sensational announcement of the launching of the Socialist colony on the island of Ventura. In the front row, packed close against the platform, were a number of famous people--conspicuous among whom was an author whose impassioned stories of the coming social upheaval had resulted in fame for himself and a divorce-suit by his first wife. His new wife, the "affinity" who caused the disturbance, sat by his side. On his left sat a solemn looking poet with bushy, unkempt hair. He had deliberately chosen the title "The Bard of Ramcat." The name Ramcat had been long applied to a shabby section of the outskirts of San Francisco. Here the poet had chosen to dwell and sing of social horrors which existed only in his fertile imagination. He had won wide fame, however, as the supreme exponent of the "affinity" theory which has always been epidemic among thoughtful Socialists. He coolly informed his wife that he had discovered his true "affinity" in a woman he had installed as her guest. The two affinities accompanied the wife and her child to a steamer for Europe with instructions to obtain a divorce. The poet married the affinity, and on the birth of a new son and heir acquired the habit of beating her as a form of relaxation from the strain of work. Considerable trouble followed, and he spent a portion of his time in jail. He had once gone barefooted and bareheaded. But since his "affinity" marriage he had been compelled for reasons best known to himself to resume shoe-leather and to buy a hat. Nevertheless he was still a striking-looking figure, seated beside his new wife whose strong, intellectual face won the sympathy of all who saw her. Just behind him sat an ex-clergyman with whom a rich young woman in his congregation had fallen in love. To avoid trouble, the woman of wealth got him to leave the ministry, and bought him from his wife for a good round sum. He became an apostle of the new gospel of Socialism, and secured a position as a professor of economics. When finally he lost this position by his vagaries, his wife hired a hall and set him up in business as an inspired leader of new thought emancipated from the chains of capitalistic tyranny. Beside the distinguished ex-clergyman Socialistic apostle sat Professor Otto Schmitt, a famous teacher of economics at a Western university. His supreme passion was hatred of women. His one big book was written to prove that woman has no soul, that she is the mere matter on which man by his will acts, that she is not immoral, but merely non-moral, having never possessed even the rudiments of a moral nature. Schmitt had, therefore, maintained that the entrance of women into competition in the economic world presaged the downfall of man and the utter extinction of humanity. For this reason he had joined the Socialists. Not three feet away from him sat a thoughtful, elderly, short-haired woman who had written a book on the evolution of woman to prove that woman alone is the original unit of creation, man a superfluous and temporary addition, merely the missing link between woman and the monkey, and in the process of human development the male biped would be eliminated. She demanded equal rights with man, and more besides, and she, too, had joined the Socialists. Yet through all these ludicrous incongruities there ran the single scarlet thread of social discontent which made them one. In every soul rang the stirring cry: "Down with civilization! Up with the Red Flag!" A more remarkable group of men and women could scarcely be gathered together on the face of the earth. But the one mark they all bore, distinctly cut deep in the lines of every face on which character had set its seal, and written large in the restless, nervous personality of the young--they all had a grievance, and though their troubles might come from as many different causes as there were men and women present, they united in one thought: "Modern civilization must be destroyed!" Every heart beat with this fiery resolution, and every incongruity melted and faded into insignificance before this consuming belief. And they had gone about this purpose with a deadly earnestness which meant business. Their political campaigns were merely moments when the captain of their ship cast the lead-line to feel the bottom and find his position with certainty before signalling full speed ahead. They worked all the year round and every day in every year, from one election to the next. They were mastering the tricks of the demagogue in their appeal to the masses, and they kept everlastingly at it. No man is too high, no man too low, for them to reach for him. They couldn't be beaten for they had accepted defeat before they began to fight, and began the next fight before they got up from the ground where they had been knocked down. They had become the one element in American politics to which it was utterly useless to direct any argument of expediency. The Fourth of July, the Nation's birthday, they were now using to demand its extinction. The fact that our army and navy had just torn the flag of Spain from its last masthead in the Western hemisphere and startled the old world with our sudden advent among the great powers of the earth, stirred in their hearts no emotion save that of contempt. While the souls of millions beat with patriotic pride, they had met to uproot the very ideas from whose soil patriotism sprang into life. There was no question as to who should be the orator of the day. The fame of Barbara Bozenta had become national from the day of her first speech in San Francisco. Her beauty and eloquence were sufficient to pack any hall at twenty-four hours' notice. Her delicate face was radiant to-day with unusual elation. She walked with a quick, nervous energy that seemed to lift her whole body into the air. As she ascended the platform and bowed to the tumult of applause, she trembled from head to foot with intensest excitement. As she stood looking over the inspiring scene for a moment, her sensitive nostrils dilated, her brown eyes flashed, and her heart beat with a great throb of personal pride. She had never before faced such an immense throng of excited men and women, and the secret consciousness that she had within her soul the message which would sweep their heartstrings as she willed, lifted her into the clouds. She felt for the moment that the whole scene was a tribute to her power. The magnificent house whose windows flashed in the sunlight, the vast lawn carpeted with green and set in dazzling flowers, the emerald waters of the bay, and the spires and domes of the distant city set on its proud hills beyond--all were hers to-day! Her voice had called to their standard the young millionaire whose name was now on every lip. Her voice had inspired his dream of the experiment to be made on the island of Ventura which had called this host together. For one big moment she felt the thrill of conscious creative genius, the pain, the joy, the glory of a positive achievement. Her eyes suddenly filled with tears, and she sank to her seat with a suppressed sob. When at last she rose to speak, her whole personality was a quivering battery of resistless emotion. Her voice, low and pulsing with magnetic waves of suppressed feeling, caught and chained the attention of the farthest straggler on the edge of the throng. Instinctively they moved closer. Resistlessly she drew them. She had not spoken two minutes before she was sweeping the hearts of her hearers. Men and women who had come to laugh or scoff, as well as the young and thoughtless who had drifted with the crowd, were all alike caught in the spell and hung breathless on her words. Every trick and art of persuasive speech were hers without effort. Scorn, pathos, humour, passion, were of the breath she breathed. At times her eloquence reached the highest conception of its might. It was simple thought packed until it took fire. At such moments scores of men leaped to their feet and shouted. Nothing disconcerted her or changed the swift current of her ideas. She was a master-musician whose hands swept a harp of a thousand strings--every string a throbbing human soul. What matter if her appeal was to the emotions and not to the intellect? Her purpose was to persuade her hearers. And she did it. Her courage, her beauty, her skill, her utter sincerity, commanded the respect of the strongest man who listened. If their intellects were not convinced, no matter--she carried them with her on a storm of resistless emotion. Suddenly a thing happened which would have destroyed the total impression of the average speech. Old Methodist John, her pauper protégé, had listened with increasing torture, choking down a hundred "Glorys" as they leaped from his soul until at last he could endure no more. At the climax of one of her impassioned appeals the old man leaped to his feet, rushed in front of the speakers' stand and shouted into the face of the chairman: "Look here! Look here, now, Wolf! Soup or no soup--Glory hallelujah!" Barbara alone smiled. The crowd took up his shout, and a thousand voices made the heavens ring with its wild music. Norman whispered to the old man, who sat down, and Barbara swept on in her impetuous triumph without the lapse of a moment's power. She seized the instant's hush which followed the storm of cheering to fire into the minds of her hearers some of the solid shot of the revolutionary programme. In a voice which swelled to the clarion note of a trumpet she cried: "The earth for all the people! This is our demand! "The machinery of all production and distribution for all the people! This is our demand! "The collective ownership and control of all industry! This is our demand! "The elimination of rent, interest, and profit! This is our demand! "A new social order, a higher civilization, a real republic! This is our demand! "The end of the hell called war, of poverty and shame, of cruelty and crime, the birth of freedom, the dawn of brotherhood, the beginning of man! These are our demands! This is Socialism! Is this an idle dream? Have you no faith in your fellow man? "In the grim prison beyond the bay I found one day a woman convict who was little removed from a fiend. I got permission to hang a beautiful picture in her cell--a picture that set her soul to dreaming, that melted her at last to tears, and transformed the beast within her to a gentle, loving, beautiful, human character. "I believe in man because he alone possesses this power to look through the window of the soul into the infinite and eternal. Here the world's real battles are fought. Here the world's real work is done. Here cowards run and the brave die. This power to recreate the earth, people it with beauty, and fill it with harmony is your birthright. "Lo, the day of humanity dawns! "I preach class consciousness that we may destroy all classes. Class must perish and Man be glorified. Man, whose inhumanity to his fellow man has filled the ages with ashes and tears, is coming forth at last purified by suffering, and we shall see his tears turned to smiles upon the faces of a nobler race. "Why should we rejoice to-day in the death of our fellow man? Nations are but the dung-heaps out of which the fair flower of a world-democracy is slowly growing. Truth is not national, it is infinite. France may fight Germany because two titled fools insult each other, but there can be no war between the laboratories of Pasteur and of Koch. Their work is the common heritage of humanity. Who asks if Humboldt was German or English, whether Spinoza was Jew or Gentile, Darwin English or French? A German wrote 'Faust,' a Frenchman set it to immortal music, and an American girl sang it into the hearts of millions. Who cares to know nationalities? The great belong to the democracy of the world. And I swear that your children will still laugh with the soul of Cervantes in spite of the Fourth of July, Santiago, and Manila! "Why should you fight one another? When called to war by your rulers, let the liberty-loving spirits of the modern world say to their masters: "'Go and do your own killing--you who have separated us from our brothers and made the earth a slaughter-pen.' "If you are court-martialed and shot for this act of heroism remember: "'They never fail who die In a great cause: the block may soak their gore: Their heads may sodden in the sun: their limbs Be strung to city gates and castle walls-- But still their spirit walks abroad. Though years Elapse and others share as dark a doom, They but augment the deep and sweeping thoughts Which overpower all others, and conduct The world at last to freedom!'" A shout of wild applause rent the air as the last note of Byron's immortal song fell from her beautiful lips. And then, in a low, intense voice, she closed her speech with a thrilling appeal for human brotherhood. To Norman, who hung on her lips, the slight girlish figure seemed transformed before their eyes into a radiant messenger of the spirit. And when the sweet womanly tones at last broke and choked into deep-drawn sobs, his soul and body seemed no longer his own. As her last words sank into his heart: "From to-day let each of us swear allegiance to but one flag, the deep-red emblem of human blood, God's sign of universal brotherhood!" Norman leaped to his feet, sprang on the platform, and while the crowd swayed in a frenzy of applause, hauled down the Stars and Stripes and quickly raised the big red standard of Socialism which was thrown across the speaker's table. And then the great crowd seemed to go mad. Wave after wave of cheering rose and fell, rose and fell, in apparently unending power. Catherine threw her arms around Barbara in a paroxysm of emotion, while the big figure of Wolf towered above them both, shouting and gesturing like a madman. Barbara at last lifted her hand and, as the storm subsided, began the Marseillaise hymn. The first stirring notes had just swept the audience when the stalwart figure of Colonel Worth suddenly appeared on the platform, his face a blaze of anger, his magnificent figure erect, every nerve and muscle drawn to the highest tension. He stepped to the edge of the stand, lifted his head, and his voice rang over the crowd like the sudden boom of a cannon: "Silence!" He didn't repeat the word. The singing stopped, and every eye was riveted on the group that stood on the platform. The Colonel confronted Wolf, and shot his words at him as though from a machine-gun. "Who lowered that flag?" A moment of silence followed. The Colonel spoke with increasing rapidity. "Who lowered that flag? The man who did it must answer to me!" Some one behind him moved, and the Colonel turned, confronting Norman. "I did it, Governor," was the quiet answer. "You?" the father gasped. "Yes," said the even, firm voice. "Haul that red rag down and raise the flag back to its place!" The Colonel's voice was low and thick with rage. Elena put her hand on his arm and said gently: "Guardie!" "Will you do it?" he firmly asked, ignoring Elena, and holding Norman with his gaze. The young man hesitated an instant, met his father's look with a deadly straight stare, and slowly replied: "I will not." A smothered cry from Barbara, half joy, half pain, was the only sound that followed, until the Colonel said: "Then I'll do it for you." Amid a dead silence he hauled down the red flag, threw it on the floor, boldly stamped on it, made fast the Stars and Stripes, and quickly raised it to the top of its staff. He turned to the crowd, and in clear-cut, sharp tones of command shouted: "This is my flag, my house, my lawn. Get off it! And do it quick!" As the crowd hastened away, he turned to Norman: "You and I must come to an understanding at once, young man," he said, with angry emphasis. "I'll meet you in the library in thirty minutes," was Norman's firm reply as he led Barbara from the platform and joined the retreating throng. [Illustration: "LIFT THE FLAG BACK TO ITS PLACE."] CHAPTER VII FATHER AND SON The Colonel paced the floor of his library with increasing anger as he waited the return of Norman. Never in his life had his whole being been so abandoned to incontrollable rage. He had always been a man of fiery temper, but an iron will had held his temper in control. His most intimate business associates had always found him suave, persuasive, and genial in every hour of trial. Never once had they heard a threat or an idle boast fall from his lips. He had the rare faculty of beating his enemies in a fight in which no quarter was asked or given, and coming out of it with his bitterest foe turned into a friend. This was one of the secrets of his fortune--an instinctive leadership among powerful men. For the first time he realized that he had challenged the one man in all his personal acquaintance about whose character he knew nothing--his own son. For the first time he realized that they were strangers. He had been absorbed in the big affairs of life. He had taken the boy for granted. Since the death of his mother twelve years ago, Norman had spent most of his time at school. The Colonel had always been in command. His word had been law for so many years, it brought him up with a disagreeable start to find that the one man with whom his life was bound, and in whom his hopes centred, could dare thus to defy and flaunt his wishes. It was the most disgusting, enraging fact he had ever encountered. The longer he confronted the situation the more furious and blind his anger became. Elena had timidly entered the room, and stood watching him gravely before she spoke. "Has he returned from that woman yet?" the Colonel asked with sudden energy. "No, and I hope he will stay all day," she answered slowly. "But he won't," the father snapped. "I'm sure he will not," the girl sighed. "I don't like you to-day, Guardie." "You, too, side with these fanatics then?" "No. I hate them--hate everything they say and do and stand for. I loathe the very sight of them. But you were unfair to Norman." "Unfair? How?" "You allowed him the widest liberty to do as he pleased, think as he pleased, associate with whom he pleased, and then all of a sudden you sprang on that platform and insulted him before his invited guests." "How could I dream that he would commit such an act of insane treason before my very eyes?" "You make no allowance for the spell of Barbara Bozenta's eloquence. I don't like her, but she's a wonderful little woman, and I envy her her power over men." "I'll end this folly to-day," was the Colonel's firm announcement. "I'm not so sure," Elena warned. "I'll show you!" She came close and laid her hand on the Colonel's arm. "Will you promise me one thing, Guardie?" she asked, tenderly. The anger faded from the strong face, and his voice sank low. "I'm afraid I've never been able to refuse you anything, child. It's on your account, I think, I'm most angry with Norman to-day." "You promise?" she repeated. "Yes, what is it?" he said, bending to kiss her smooth, white forehead. "Promise to put all anger out of your heart and talk to Norman as a father, not as an enemy--won't you?" "An enemy?" the Colonel slowly asked. "Yes. I thought you were going to strike him once. It would have been horrible. I never could have forgiven you for that. You've always been my hero, Guardie--I never saw you give way to anger before. I don't like it. You'll talk to him lovingly and tenderly as a father, won't you?" "Yes, dear, for your sake, I will," he answered. "Then I'll tell him to come. I asked him to wait outside until I saw you." She turned and quickly left the room. In a moment Norman entered and stood facing his father. The Colonel flushed with anger at sight of the insolence with which the younger man calmly surveyed him. "Well, sir," the father said, at length, "have you nothing to say to me after what has occurred to-day?" "I was under the impression that you had something to say to me," was the cool answer. By an effort of will the older man crushed back an angry retort, smiled, and said: "Sit down, please--I've a good deal to say to you." Norman threw himself lazily into a chair, and continued to watch his father with a curious expression of half-amused contempt. The Colonel stood in silence, evidently struggling with his emotions, and feeling for the right word with which to begin. Norman anticipated him. "Honestly, now, Governor, just between us, don't you think you were a little bit absurd to-day?" "Absurd?" his father broke in with rising accent. "Just a little childish about a piece of red, white, and blue cloth?" "Perhaps so, my boy," was the answer. "Just about as absurd as you were over the red rag you lifted in its place. Why did you do it?" "On the impulse of the moment, to express my feeling of contempt for war, and my faith in my fellow man." "Exactly. So I acted on the impulse of the moment to express my contempt for that crowd of fools and fanatics--my loyalty and faith in my country." "I can't understand how a man of your age, poise and pride, culture and power, could be so foolish. A sixteen-year-old school-boy on the Fourth of July, yes! But you----" "Norman," the Colonel interrupted, in even tones, "I'm sorry I've been too busy for us to get acquainted. It's time we began. It may interest you to know that I, too, hate war--learned to hate it long before your Socialist orator was born--learned it in the grim University of Hell--war itself. Socialism has no patent on the hope of universal peace. I am a member of a peace society. I have always believed the Civil War should have been prevented. All the Negroes on this earth are not worth the blood and tears of one year of that struggle. Whether it could have been prevented God alone knows. When it came I volunteered--a drummer-boy at fourteen--and marched to the front beneath the flag you tore down to-day." "I never thought of that, Governor--honestly, I never did!" the boy exclaimed. "I went in," the Colonel continued, "with my head full of silly rubbish about the glory of war. When I beat the call to my first charge, and saw the men I knew and loved shot to pieces, and heard their groans and cries for water, I had no more delusions. I worked on the field that night until twelve o'clock, helping the men who were wounded--enemies as well as comrades. I learned the brotherhood of man and the meaning of red blood in the big, tragic school of life, my son. Many a boy in gray, whom I had fought, died in my arms while my heart ached for his loved ones in some far-away Southern home. "But I knew the war had to be when once it was begun. I was fighting for the flag I loved--and I grew to love it better than life. To you it may be a bit of red, white, and blue bunting; to me it is the symbol of truth and right, liberty and human progress. "My people in western North Carolina were all slave-holders and loyal to their state, except my father. He hated slavery, loved the Union, and moved on westward before the war. I saw them bury him in the flag you tore down to-day, my boy. "Many a night I've lain on the ground looking up at the stars before the dawn of a day of battle and seen visions of that flag flying triumphant in the sky. I've seen the men who carried it shot down again and again, and another snatch it from their dying grasp and bear it on to victory. "I grew not only to love it, but to believe in it with all the passionate faith of my soul. I believe in its destiny, in its sublime mission to humanity. The older I've grown and the more I've seen of my fellow man, the wider I've travelled in foreign lands, the deeper has become my conviction that our flag symbolizes the noblest, freest ideal ever born in the soul of man; that we have but to live up to its standard of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, and the kingdom of human brotherhood is already here. "After the war, I joined the regular army, not because I loved war, but because there seemed nothing else for me to do at the time. I was absolutely alone in the world. At twenty-five I was in command of a company on the frontier. I had not been in battle since the end of the Civil War, when suddenly I found myself surrounded by a horde of hostile Indians, and I had to turn my machine guns on them and mow them down. The slaughter was something terrific. As the last charge was made I saw a young squaw retreat in the face of a withering fire, walk backward facing our men, holding a bundle of something behind her body. She fell at last, riddled with bullets. I rode up where she lay, and found the bundle to be a little Indian baby boy. He was unhurt, and stretched out his hand to me in friendly baby greeting. I found the squaw quite dead, and discovered the child was not her own. She was simply trying to save it for the tribe. I took the child and educated him. But he went back to the free life of the plains. I found him again, and made him the gamekeeper of our mountain preserves." "You mean Saka?" Norman asked. "Yes. That night as I lay in my tent I saw war as it is--a hideous, savage nightmare. From that moment I hated the service, hated its iron laws of discipline, its cruel machinery devised for suppressing the individuality of its members. I saw that night a larger vision of life. I made up my mind to create, not to kill--to build up, not to tear down. I left the army and mastered mining. "Your leather-lunged agitators say that I stole my millions from the earnings of the men who worked for me. A more stupid lie was never uttered. I invented improved mining machinery. I made deserts blossom and gave employment to thousands of men who couldn't think for themselves. I did their thinking for them, and set their tasks. I have made millions, and have added tens of millions to the wealth of the West." "If labour is the creator of all wealth can one man ever earn a million dollars?" Norman interrupted. "Manual labour is not the creator of wealth. The brain which conceives is the creator of wealth. The hand which executes these plans is merely the automaton moved by a superior power." "Yet nothing could be accomplished without it," persisted Norman. His father lifted his hand with a gesture of command. "We'll not discuss the theory of Socialism to-day, my boy. I grant you have plausible arguments which skilful demagogues are using with more and more efficiency. I don't object to your study of this subject. I'm rather pleased at the serious turn your energies have taken. What I do object to is your continued association with the kind of people who made up that crowd to-day--people who make the agitation of the revolutionary programme of the Socialists a daily profession, people who are seeking to destroy modern civilization itself." "You will have to come down to earth, Governor," Norman said, "in your indictment of these people. The time has gone by when you can scare anybody with a few high-sounding phrases. If modern civilization is rotten, it ought to be destroyed, and who cares if it is?" "The issue between us, my boy," the Colonel continued, gravely, "is not an academic one. It is not open to discussion. Some of the people you are associating with have criminal records. If they continue their present wild harangues they will be shot down like dogs in the streets. I cannot afford to have my name even under the suspicion of sympathy for them, through you. Do you understand me?" "I think I do," Norman replied, holding his father's steady gaze. "You are my son and the heir of my fortune. But you must remember that I am the master of this establishment." "I am aware of that fact, sir," the boy replied, in cold tones. "I trust that it will not be necessary, then, for me to repeat to you my first positive order--that you will immediately sever your connection with the Socialist Club, and never again appear in public or private with the three people who were on that platform to-day." "It will not be necessary for you to repeat your order," the young athlete replied, with a curious smile and a slight tightening of the lips. "I thought as much." Norman laughed, and the Colonel's eyes began to blaze. "What do you mean, sir?" he sternly asked. "That it will be unnecessary for you to repeat your order, for the very simple reason that I'm a man. I've the right to do my own thinking, and I propose to do it." With a quick stride the Colonel confronted the young rebel, his breath quick and laboured, his face aflame with unbridled rage. "You dare thus to defy my wishes?" "If you put it that way, yes." The Colonel stepped to the door and opened it. "You will obey my order or get out of this house never to enter it again. Take your choice!" "You mean it?" the younger man asked, with sullen emphasis. "Exactly what I say," was the cold reply. Norman turned without a word, seized his hat, and left the room. As he reached the end of the corridor, and placed his hand on the front door, his father's voice rang out suddenly: "Norman!" He paused, and looked back without taking his hand from the knob. "You can't be such a fool!" the Colonel cried. "It looks that way, Governor!" He opened the door, softly closed it, and was gone. CHAPTER VIII THROUGH THE EYES OF LOVE Norman's break with his father created a sensation. The flag episode, coming on the Fourth of July and at the very hour when the guns of the forts were thundering their celebration of the fleet's victory at Santiago, presented the dramatic contrast which stirred the indignation of the public to unusual depths. The morning papers devoted from four to five columns to the story. The remarkable speech of Barbara Bozenta was reported in full, with a sketch of her life, interspersed with portraits of the Wolfs, of Norman, Elena, his father, the palatial home on Nob Hill, and the country estate where the stirring little drama had been played. The Socialist cause received a tremendous impetus. The very violence of the editorial assaults on their programme reacted in their favour. Thousands of men who did not know the meaning of the word Socialism began to read and think and discuss its principles. Their meetings were crowded, and the fame of the little brown-eyed Joan of Arc became so great it was no longer possible for her to pass through the streets without an escort. All sorts of stories about the relations of the famous millionaire and his son filled the air. Some were printed, others were vague rumours. A sensational paper published the story that they had actually come to blows, and had fought a duel in the big library which might have ended fatally for one or both but for the timely interference of Colonel Worth's ward, Elena Stockton. Norman became at once the hero of the Socialist's cause. His appearance at a meeting was the signal for pandemonium to break loose. He secured employment on a sensational daily paper, and his signed articles were made a feature. Colonel Worth was so enraged over the vulgar notoriety with which the incident had overwhelmed him that he denied himself to all callers, refused to speak to a reporter or to allow a word to be uttered in confirmation or denial of any stories printed or rumoured. He issued orders that Norman's name should never again be spoken in his house. When he made this announcement to Elena her full, red lips, quivered and she looked at him reproachfully. "I mean it, Elena," he said, sternly. The girl spoke in tenderness. "I don't believe you, Guardie. It isn't like you at all. I'll not mention his name to a servant, but I will to you." "I don't want to hear it!" "That's because you know you've done a great wrong." "I accept the responsibility. It's done, and that's the end of it." "Nothing ends until it ends right, Guardie," spoke the soft, even voice. "I know it's hard on you, dear," the Colonel responded, with feeling. "It was for your sake I made the issue. If he has turned from you for a loud-mouthed vulgar agitator, he's not worth a thought. Forget that he lives. I'm going to leave my fortune to you." "I don't want it at the price, Guardie," she replied, slipping her arm around his neck and resting her head on his shoulder. "I couldn't be happy with such a fortune. What you've done hurts me more than it hurts Norman." "Yes, yes. I know that you love him, child, but your happiness could not be found among a crowd of criminals and revolutionists." "I'm not thinking of myself," was the low response as she withdrew from his arms, "I was thinking of you." "Of me?" "Yes. You've broken my idol. To me you were the one perfect man in the world. I didn't know you. I didn't know that you were hard and cold and cruel and selfish and proud." "I'm not, Elena." "You allowed Norman to drift into any crazy theory that might strike his fancy. And the moment he fails to agree with your views you turn like a madman and drive him into the streets." "He went of his own accord. I gave him his choice." "And I admire his pluck. It was a manly thing to do." "It was the act of a fool." "Yet, you know, Guardie, in your heart of hearts you admire him for it. He showed you that he was made of the same stuff as his father." The Colonel scowled, and the girl took courage. "I'm going to meet him this evening----" "I forbid it!" "You can't help it," she cried, as the tears slowly gathered. "I'm going to tell him you wish to see and talk with him again." "On one condition only--his absolute obedience to my wishes." "I love him all the more for defying you--love him better than I ever did in my life. And--and, Guardie--I don't love you any more. You are cruel and unjust." With a sob she turned and left the room. CHAPTER IX A FADED PICTURE Elena's tears had shaken the Colonel's confidence in his position as nothing else could possibly have done. Since she had finished her course in college two years before, and he had come in daily contact with her strong personality, a most intimate and perfect sympathy had grown between them. He had never before known her intuitive judgment to be wrong. Her impressions of character especially he had found singularly accurate, her sense of right and her good taste nearly perfect. He retired to his room at night with a deep sense of uneasiness. His anger had cooled, and in its stead a feeling of depression slowly settled. From every nook and corner came memories of the boy he had driven from his door. His pictures hung on the walls and stared at him from every piece of furniture on which a frame could be placed. He had learned photography as a pastime years before the kodak was invented, and most of the pictures he had taken himself. One photograph in particular, which stood by the clock on the mantel, set in a heavy frame of hammered gold, which he had made himself from the product of his first mine, riveted and held his attention. His first impulse was to tear these pictures all down and throw them in the fire. He had picked this one up first, to carry out his furious impulse, but something held his hand and he placed it back in its old place with the grim exclamation: "No! It's the act of a coward. I've got to live with my memories--or surrender at once." Again and again his eye came back to this picture. He had taken it twenty-three years ago in a little bedroom in a dirty hotel of a desolate, God-forsaken mining town in Nevada. How well he remembered it! He was poor then, and had just begun the first big fight of his life for wealth and power. The boy was four weeks old, and he had insisted on taking the picture of the mother with the baby in her arms. He had carefully posed her, standing by the window looking down into the child's upturned face. It had turned out a remarkable likeness of both--the young mother's face wreathed in smiles, tender and frail and happy, with the great joy of the dawn of motherhood shining in her eyes. He looked at it long and tenderly. And, as a thousand memories of life crowded his soul, he suddenly exclaimed: "God in heaven! What does she say to-day if she knows what I've done?" His eyes blinked, and the tears blinded them. He kissed the picture and buried his face in his hands as a sob of anguish shook his frame. "The girl's right. My boy's my boy after all. I'm wrong!" CHAPTER X SON AND FATHER When the Colonel had greeted Elena at breakfast next morning he quietly asked: "You met Norman?" "Yes." "I shall be glad to see him when he comes." Elena threw her arms impulsively around his neck. "Now you're a darling! Now you're big and strong and good and great again--and I love you." The Colonel stroked her hair slowly, and asked with a smile: "What time is he coming?" "He's not coming." Elena laughed. "Not coming?" the colonel repeated blankly. "No. You're going to see him." "Indeed!" "You see, Guardie, he is a chip off the old block." "It begins to look like he's the whole block," the Colonel remarked, dryly. "Can you blame him after the way you acted?" "I can't say I do, much. I like a boy of spirit----" "And individuality--that's your own pet idea Guardie." The Colonel was silent a moment. "Yes. I like his grit. Where will I find him?" "At his desk at work in the newspaper office." "I'll call him up and make an appointment." The Colonel seized the telephone, called the newspaper office, and asked for Norman. He waited for several minutes before any one reached the 'phone. He scarcely recognized the short, sharp business accent of Norman's voice: "Well, well, what is it?" The Colonel cleared his throat. "Here! Here! Get a move on you--what's the matter--I'm in a hurry!" "This is your father, Norman----" "Get off the wire or quit your kiddin'--what do you want?" His father laughed. "I beg your pardon, Governor, honestly I didn't recognize your voice until you laughed. I'm awfully glad to hear it again. What can I do for you?" "Well, I must say I like your impudence. What can _you_ do for me? I want to see you right away. Shall I call at your office?" A pause ensued, followed by audible smiles at both ends of the wire. "Of course not, sir. It seems a long time since I left home but I've not forgotten the way. I'll come over as soon as I can leave my desk." Two hours later he entered the library with a boyish laugh and grasped his father's hand. The Colonel pressed it with deep tenderness. "You must forgive me, boy. I wasn't fair to you the other day." Norman tried to laugh, and stammered awkwardly: "Well, when I hear a man of your age and experience say a thing like that, Governor, I begin to fear I'm not quite as big as I thought I was." "Then we're both in the right mind now, to begin all over again, are we not?" "It's with you, sir," was the quick reply. "Suppose I can convince you that you have entered on a mistaken mission--that your programme is foolish, impossible, and dangerous?" "Do it, and I'll join you in trying to put an end to Socialism." "Before I begin, let me ask you a very personal question." "As many as you like, Governor," was the frank response. "Are you mixed up in any way personally with the young woman who spoke here that day?" "We're comrades in the cause of humanity--that's all." "You're sure that it is not her personal influence over you that has made you a Socialist?" "Only in so far as she has made me think and feel." "You have not made love to her?" "Certainly not. I'm engaged to Elena." "Then it ought to be easy for us to understand each other. Come down out of the clouds of theory now, and tell me exactly how you are going to save humanity, and let's see if we can't work together for the same end. A great purpose like yours ought not to separate father and son--you can't defend such platitudes as this, for example, which one of your orators got off last night--listen!" The Colonel took the morning paper from the table and read: "Remember in this supreme hour that capitalism has you and your loved ones by the throats, is stealing your substance, draining your veins, and reducing you inch by inch to the potter's field. Every sweating den cries out to you as from the depths of hell to gird up your loins and march forth in one solid phalanx to strike the blow that shall sound the knell of capitalistic despotism, and set the star of hope in the skies of the despairing and dying thousands of your class who are at the mercy of the vampires of soulless wealth. How long shall capitalism be allowed to work its devastation, spread its blighting curse, destroy manhood, debauch womanhood, and grind the flesh and blood and bone of childhood into food for Mammon?" The Colonel paused. "Such appeals to passion can only end in riot, bloodshed, and prison bars. You don't write such rot as that yourself, and yet the men you are following preach it." "I'm not following just now, Governor--I'm trying to direct this tremendous impulse, this enthusiasm for humanity, called Socialism, into a practical experiment that will demonstrate the truths of their faith, and from this white city of a glorified human life send out our missionaries to conquer the world. Give me ten thousand earnest men and women on the island of Ventura, isolated from contact with the corruption of the outside, and I'll show you a miracle more wonderful than if they had risen from the dead." "And what are the foundations on which you propose to build this heaven on earth?" "Squarely on these principles: From every man according to his ability; to every man according to his needs; and to every child born the right to laugh and play and grow to a strong manhood and womanhood. We are not civilized so long as there is one child sobbing to be freed from the tomb of the modern workshop, so long as there is one man willing to work and not able to find it, so long as there is one soul striving upward who is crushed to earth, so long as one man lives in idleness and luxury while his neighbour starves, so long as there's one spot of this earth on which a man lives by tearing the bread from the lips of another." "Hasn't your imagination been caught by beautiful phrases, my boy?" asked the father. "In your new State of Ventura you will give to each man according to his needs?" "Yes." "And who will decide how much each one needs--the man who feels the need or the state?" "The state, in the last resort." "Exactly. And who will determine how large the service required of each man? Who will decide the question of ability?" "The state, of course." "Are you not cutting out a pretty big job for the state, remembering that the state is nothing more or less than a lot of ordinary second-rate politicians named Tom, Dick, and Harry, who individually or collectively haven't as much sense as you or I?" "In the new world it will be different." "Then you are going to import a new breed of men and women?" "No, we will simply give the God in man a chance to be." "But how about the beast that's in man--the elemental instinct to fight and kill--to take the woman he desires by the force of his hands and muscle?" "When man is free and strong and happy he can have no motive to kill or play the beast." "That remains to be seen, my boy! Your assertion does not change the nature of man. Another problem in your scheme I can't solve is wages." "We will abolish wage slavery." "Yes, yes, I know; but man must work--all men must work in your new state?" "Certainly." "And the man who refuses to work?" "Will be made to work according to his ability." "Just so. We live under the wage system now--the system of free contract by which labourer and employer agree. Under your system contract would be abolished, and men would do what they are _told_ to do--a system of _command_ instead of _contract_--is it not so?" "I should say just the opposite. Men are forced to work now at tasks they loathe and for pay that is insufficient. Under our state they would be free to choose the work for which they are fitted." "And suppose they all choose one job?" "The state would assign their work in the last resort." "There you are, once more, bowing down to the same Tom, Dick, and Harry. And you cannot see that Socialism would impose on man the most colossal system of slavery, the most merciless because the most impersonal, the world ever saw?" "No, I cannot. Give me a chance on one spot of earth free from the corruption of your present system, and I'll show you that man is a child of God, that deep in every human soul is planted the sense of brotherhood, justice, and human fellowship." "And you will abolish private property?" "Except what each man earns or makes for himself." The Colonel laughed aloud. "Can he earn a wife, or make one for himself?" "No; nor own one as a slave." "You can never abolish private property, my boy, so long as any man has the right to say, 'This woman is mine.' The home is the basis of modern civilization. If you destroy it the home will not survive. If the home survives it will kill Socialism. The two things can't mix." Norman laughed. "And you think capitalism is building ideal homes with its drudgery that kills woman--its poverty that starves the man and drives the girl to a life of shame?" "Our conditions are not ideal, my son. But they are growing better with each generation. Because all homes are not ideal, you propose to abolish the institution. There are ten million homes in America. Perhaps a million of them are unhappy. Can we mend matters by destroying them all?" "Socialism proposes to build the highest ideal of home ever seen on earth, founded on love--and only love." The Colonel smiled sadly. "I see I'm too late. You've got it bad. Socialism is a contagious disease, imported from the old world--a brain disease, the result of centuries of wrong and oppression. Its reasons for existence in this country are purely imaginary. If it were possible for you to build the new State of Ventura of which you dream----" "Dream! We are going to do it, I tell you, Governor! We have a hundred thousand dollars already pledged. We hold to-morrow night a great mass-meeting at which five thousand Socialists will be present. Four hundred thousand dollars more will buy the island and give a capital of three hundred thousand with which to begin." "Then I can't persuade you to give up this madness?" the Colonel asked, tenderly. "It's my life," Norman answered firmly. The father slipped his arm around the tall, strong figure. "All right! Remember now, from this moment on, one thing is settled for good and all. My boy's my boy, right or wrong, good or bad, wise or foolish----" The Colonel's voice broke, and his grip tightened. Norman looked out of the window, blinked his eyes, and said in low tones: "I understand, sir!" CHAPTER XI THE WAY OF A WOMAN As Elena entered the library the two men fell suddenly apart as though ashamed of the weakness of affection before a woman. The girl pretended not to have seen, but her face was radiant. The Colonel paused as he turned to leave the room: "You will keep up your newspaper grind, my boy?" he asked. "No. I'll jump at the chance to do the big thing. I'll give my whole time to it." "Well, I suppose you're right. The way to do a thing is to do it." As the father passed Elena he softly whispered: "Your face shines like an angel's!" "I am very happy," was the low answer. Norman hastened to her side, and seized both her hands. "I owe this to you, my stately queen." "He would have come to the same conclusion himself. I only hastened it a little by a suggestion," she replied. "I have my own idea about the way you expressed it," he said with a jolly laugh. "Look here, Elena, I hope you don't believe that I have been disloyal to you in my association with Barbara Bozenta?" The girl straightened her superb figure, and broke into a laugh of mingled humour and irony. "Well, I've a confession to make, Norman. I've been disloyal to you." "You--disloyal--to me!" he gasped. "Yes. I've felt of late as though you were a big, sick baby on my hands, and I've grown tired of the charge." "Well, upon my soul!" he exclaimed. "Our engagement is at an end." "Elena!" "I'll keep your beautiful ring"--she touched it affectionately--"for the memories that will always bind us as brother and sister. Besides, it will deceive your father for a while. He has enough to worry him just now." Before Norman could pull himself together, or utter a protest, she had turned and left him gasping with astonishment. CHAPTER XII A ROYAL GIFT Norman resumed his place in his father's home and began a systematic, persistent, and enthusiastic campaign to raise the funds to purchase the island of Ventura and establish the ideal Commonwealth of Man. On the day of the big mass-meeting of Socialists, who had gathered from every state of the Golden West, Elena found her guardian seated alone on the broad veranda overlooking the Bay of San Francisco. A look of deep trouble clouded his strong face. "You are worried?" she said, seating herself by his side. "Yes, dearie," was the moody answer. "Over Norman's meeting?" "Yes. The boy's set his heart on this big foolish enterprise. His failure is a certainty. I don't know what may follow." "You are sure he can't raise the money?" "Absolutely. The disappointment will be a stunning blow to his pride." "You know that if he did succeed in raising the money, and establishing his brotherhood of man, the scheme would end in failure?" "As clearly as I know I am living." "Would you be sorry if the dream should be realized?" "On the other hand, I'd shout for joy to find the human race capable of such a miracle." Elena gently touched his hand. "Then, Guardie, there's but one thing to do," she said, with a deep, spiritual look in her blue eyes. "What?" "Give Norman a round million dollars to make the experiment." The Colonel looked at her in amazement, and suddenly sprang to his feet, pacing the floor with feverish steps. He stopped at last before the girl and studied her. "Don't let Norman know who gave the money," she continued. "It will be a big, noble, beautiful thing to do--and--it will save him." "What a wonderful woman you are, Elena!" He paused and looked at her steadily. "I'm going to do it!" * * * * * When Norman returned at midnight from the mass-meeting his face was flushed and his eyes sparkled. "It's done, Governor! It's done!" he fairly shouted. "You mean the half million was subscribed?" the Colonel asked. "Yes, and more!" he went on, excitedly. "We have succeeded beyond my wildest hopes. We had subscriptions for a hundred thousand. Fifty thousand more was subscribed at the meeting by the delegates, and just as we were about to adjourn Judge Clark, a famous lawyer, rose and announced the gift of a round million to the cause by a group of friends whose names he refused to make known." "And what happened?" Elena asked. "It's hard to tell exactly. The first thing I did was to jump over three rows of seats, grab the lawyer, and yell like a maniac. We carried him around the room, and shouted and screamed until we were hoarse. The scene was indescribable. Strong men fell into each other's arms and cried like children." "And you could get no hint of the identity of the men who gave the money?" Elena inquired. "Not the slightest. The deed of gift was made to me through the lawyer as trustee. I don't like one or two conditions, exactly, but it was no time to haggle over details." "What were the conditions?" Elena interrupted, with a glance at the Colonel. "That the title to the island of Ventura should be vested in me personally for two years. And five hundred thousand dollars should remain a fund in my hands as trustee to administer its income for the same period. At the end of one year, or of two, I may transfer the whole to the Brotherhood, or reconvey it to the original donors. I think it gives too much power into one man's hands--but I'll hold it a sacred trust." The young enthusiast's face glowed with thrilling purpose, and his eyes were shining with unshed tears, as he laid his hand on his father's shoulder and exclaimed: "Ah! Governor, you didn't have faith enough in your fellow man! You said it couldn't be done!" "I congratulate you, my son," the Colonel gravely said, "and I wish for you the noblest success." "There's no such word as fail." Norman cried. "No sleep for me to-night! I return to the Socialist Club for a celebration. I just came to tell you personally of our triumph. The deed is done, and the Brotherhood of Man is a thrilling fact!" With swift, joyous stride he threw himself into the hall and bounded down the steps. "Suppose after all, Guardie, he should succeed?" Elena exclaimed. "They'll start with many things in their favour," the Colonel responded. "The island of Ventura is said to be the most fertile and beautiful spot of earth in the West. No adverse influences can reach them from without. Five thousand men and women, inspired by a sublime faith in themselves, may under such conditions surprise us. If Socialism is possible on an island of a hundred thousand acres, it's possible on a hundred thousand square miles, and its faith will conquer the world. We'll give them two years before we visit them, and see what happens." "Suppose they do succeed!" Elena repeated, musingly. CHAPTER XIII THE BURNING OF THE BRIDGES The success which attended the launching of the new Brotherhood of Man with its million-dollar endowment fund was phenomenal. The announcement that the books were ready for the enrollment of the pioneer group of two thousand who should locate the enterprise on the island of Ventura brought twenty-five thousand applicants. The first shock Norman's faith in man received was to collide with the army of cranks who came in troops to join. Every creed of Christendom, every cult of the heathen world, every ism of all the philosophies of the past and the present came in droves. They got into arguments with one another in the waiting-rooms of the Socialist headquarters, and sometimes came to blows. Each conceived the hour for establishing his own particular patent for saving the human race had come. It was an appalling revelation to Norman to find how many of these schemes were at work in the brains of people who were evidently incapable of taking care of themselves. The first week he attempted to hear each one with courtesy and sympathy. But after wasting six days in idiotic discussions of preposterous schemes he was compelled to call on the Wolfs for advice. Both Wolf and his wife had begun to call Norman "Chief" from the moment of their first burst of enthusiasm over the gift of the million. At times the young dreamer looked at the massive face of the older man with a touch of suspicion at this sudden acceptance of his premiership. And yet both Wolf and Catherine (she insisted that he call her Catherine) seemed so utterly sincere in their admiration, so enthusiastic in their faith in his ability, they always disarmed suspicion. Catherine's repeated explanation of this faith when Norman halted or hesitated was always flattering to his vanity, and yet perfectly reasonable. "My boy, we take off our hats to you! A man can't do the impossible unless he tries. We didn't try. You did. The trouble with Herman, and with every man of forty, is that he loses faith in himself. We get careful and conservative. We lack the dash and fire and daring of youth. I envy you. I salute you as the inspired leader of our Cause--you've done the impossible! And you've just begun. We can only hope to help you with our larger experience." At the end of a week of futile and exhausting palaver with this army of cranks who infest the West, Wolf, carefully watching his opportunity, turned to Norman and said: "I've been waiting for you to see things a little more clearly before I say something to you--I think it's time." "What is it?" the young leader asked. Wolf hesitated a moment as if feeling his way. "Something he should have said sooner," exclaimed Catherine. "There's but one way, comrade. Kick these fools into the street!" "But don't we begin to weaken the moment we do a thing like that? We accept the brotherhood of man----" "Of man, yes," the old leader broke in, "but these are not men--they are what might have been had they lived in a sane world. They are the results of the nightmare we call civilization. The kindest thing you can do for a crank is to kill him. You are trying to do what God Almighty never undertook--to make something out of nothing. You know, when he made Adam he had a ball of mud to start with." "I'm afraid you're right," Norman agreed. "When the Brotherhood is established with picked men," Catherine added, "we can take in new members with less care. Now it is of the utmost importance that we select the pioneer group of the best blood in the Socialist ranks--trained men and women who believe with passionate faith what you and I believe." "Then do it," Norman said, with emphasis. "I put you and Wolf in charge of this first roll. I've more important work to do in organizing the business details of the enterprise." A look of joy flashed from Wolf's gray eyes into the woman's as he calmly but quickly replied: "I'll do the best I can." "You ought to know by name every true Socialist on the Coast," Norman added. "I do, comrade, and I'll guarantee the pioneer group." "Let all applicants for membership hereafter pass your scrutiny," were his final orders. He rose from his desk with a sigh of relief as Barbara entered the room, her cheeks flushed with joy, her eyes sparkling with excitement from the ovation she had just received from the crowd which packed the corridor. His first impulse was to ask her to accompany him to the country, rest and play for a day. His heart beat more quickly at the thought, but as the question trembled on his lips, his eyes rested on Wolf's shaggy head bending over the piles of papers on his desk, and a grim fear shadowed his imagination. Elena's laughter suddenly echoed through his memory. He recalled his father's questions. A frown slowly settled on his brow, and a firm resolution took shape in his mind. "No woman's spell to blind your senses! Clear thinking, my boy! You're on trial before the man who gave you life. You're on trial before the men whose faith gave you a million dollars to put you to the test. Success first, and then, perhaps, the joy of living!" Barbara felt the chill of a sudden barrier between them, and looked at him with a little touch of wounded pride. He merely nodded pleasantly and hurried from the room. He gave his whole energies at once to the larger business of the enterprise. The title to the property was searched with the utmost thoroughness and found to be perfect. Enormous sums of money had been spent on the island by the bankrupt wild-cat real-estate company which had bought it in for improvement and exploitation. They had built a magnificent hotel with accommodations for one thousand five hundred guests, had planted vineyards, established a winery planted vast orchards of plums, apricots, olives, peaches, and oranges, built flour mills, an ice factory, and had started a number of mining and manufacturing enterprises. When the bubble burst the company was bankrupt and the lawyers got the rest. A careful inventory showed to Norman that they had acquired a property of enormous value. The improvements alone had cost $1,250,000, and they were worth twice that sum now to the colony. He chartered a corporate society, known as "The Brotherhood of Man," for the purpose of legalizing the new social State of Ventura when it had passed the experimental stage and he could surrender to it the title and money held in trust under the deed of gift. Two hundred thousand dollars was paid in cash for the island, and the remaining capital held for work. A steamer was purchased to serve the colony by plying between the island, Santa Barbara, and San Francisco. The Wolfs advised Norman that no mail service be asked or permitted. "The reasons are many, comrade," the old leader urged. "The first condition of success in this work is the complete isolation of the colony from outside influences. If modern civilization is hell, you can't build a heaven with daily communication between the two places." "Every man and woman who enters," Catherine added, "must sign a solemn contract to remain five years, enlist as soldier, and communicate with the outside world only by permission of the authority of the Brotherhood." "I see," laughed Norman. "I must have the Czar's power to examine suspected mail if treason or rebellion threatens." "Exactly," cried Wolf. "A large power to put in one man's hands!" Norman protested. "There's not a man or woman going to that island who wouldn't trust you with life, to say nothing of a mail pouch," Catherine declared, with a look of genuine admiration. "You think such drastic measures to prevent communication with the outside world will be needed?" Norman argued. "Let us hope not," Wolf quickly replied. "But it's better to be on the safe side. The history of every experiment made in Socialism by the heroes and pioneers of the cause in the past shows that failure came in every case from just this source. We will start under the most favourable conditions ever tried. Our island will be a little world within itself. Cut every line of possible communication with modern competitive society, and we can prove the brotherhood of man a living fact. Open our experiment to the lies and slanders of our enemies from without, and they can destroy us before the work is fairly begun. Our colony would be overrun with hostile reporters from the capitalist press, for example----" "You're right," exclaimed Norman. "Let every volunteer enlist in the service of humanity for five years," repeated Catherine, "agreeing to hold no communication with the world. Make that agreement one impossible for them to break, and our success is as sure as that man is made in the image of God. All we ask is a chance to prove it without interference." "I agree with you," cried Norman, at last. "Five years' service, with every bridge burned behind us--we'll fight it out on that line." A look of triumph came from beneath Wolf's shaggy brows as his eyes rested again on the smiling madonna-like face of the woman by his side. CHAPTER XIV THE NEW WORLD On a beautiful Sunday morning in May, 1899, the steamship _Comrade_ slowly swept through the Golden Gate with two thousand enthusiastic Socialists crowding her decks, shouting, cheering, laughing, crying, singing their joy and faith in the new world of human brotherhood for which they had set sail. The flag of the republic flew from her stern because the law of the port of entry required it. But from her huge prow rose a slender steel staff, above the tips of her funnels and masts, on which flew the blood-red ensign of Socialism, while from every masthead huge red steamers fluttered in the sky. At noon on the following day the eager eyes of the pioneers sighted the island of Ventura. At first a tiny white and blue spot on the horizon, and then slowly out of the sea rose its majestic outlines, until at last the ship drew in so close to the towering mountains of its shore line the colonists could almost touch the stone walls with their hands. The captain was evidently at home in the sparkling blue waters which rolled lazily against the perpendicular cliffs. Norman had climbed over the piles of freight, cordage, and anchors, and taken his stand beside the flagstaff on the ship's prow, his soul enraptured with the thrilling adventure on which he had embarked. He had made two trips to the island before, but never had he seen it rise from the sea in such matchless glory as to-day. Far up in the sky loomed the mountain peaks still covered with snow, while the rich hills and valleys to the southward rolled laughingly in their robes of green. Five miles down the coast the ship turned her nose inshore, and slowly ploughed her way through a narrow channel which opened between two hills. She quickly cleared the channel and rounded another headland, when a shout rang from her decks. Straight before them, across a beautiful landlocked bay, which formed a perfect harbour, rose the huge hotel, the home of the Brotherhood. The central building was crowned by two tall towers, and the long wings which stretched toward the sea pierced the skyline with a dozen minarets of quaint Moorish pattern. From the flagpole on the lawn, from each graceful tower and each shining sun-kissed minaret, flew the scarlet ensign of Socialism. When the ship swept in alongside the pier the building loomed from its hilltop higher apparently than the mountain range behind it. Barbara clapped her hands as she ran to Norman's side. "Look! Look at those flags! Aren't they glorious? Nobody will haul them down here, will they?" Norman lifted his eyes and looked in silence for a moment. A stiff breeze was blowing from the southeast, and the two huge banners of scarlet stood straight from their staffs on the towers and seemed to fill the sky with quivering flame. "Glorious!" he said, at last. "They speak the end of strife, the dawn of love and human brotherhood!" The Wolfs had preceded them to the colony with a select band of enthusiasts, stored the first supplies, and set the place in order to receive as welcome guests the first shipload of pioneers. When the throng of joyous, excited comrades had landed, they formed in line and marched up from the pier. The wide, white, smooth road led through a wilderness of flowers which had grown in wild profusion since they had been abandoned two years before. The Wolfs led the procession, with Barbara and Norman by their side. When they reached the big circle of scarlet geraniums in the centre of the floral court between the two wings of the great building they stopped, and Catherine began in her clear, thrilling soprano voice the Marseillaise hymn. The pioneers crowded around her tall, commanding figure and sang with inspired emotion. Every heart beat with high resolve. The heaven of which they had dreamed was no longer a dream. They were walking its white, shining streets. Their souls were crying for joy in its dazzling court of honour. The old world, with its sin and shame, its crime and misery, its hunger and cold, its greed and lust, its cruelty and insanity, had passed away, and lo! all things were new. The very air was charged with faith and hope and love. A wave of religious ecstasy swept the crowd. They called each by their first names. Strong men embraced, crying "Comrade!" through their tears. The older ones had made allowances for the glowing accounts of the island. They expected some disillusioning at first. Yet their wildest expectations were far surpassed. Such beauty, such grandeur, such wealth of nature, such magnificence of equipment, were too good to be true, and yet they were facts. The island of Ventura was enchanted. The impression it gave each heart of the certainty of success was the biggest asset of real wealth with which the colony began its history. CHAPTER XV FOR THE CAUSE During the first enchanted days every man woman and child entered the strange new system with a determination to see only its beauty, its truth, its sure success. Service was the order of the day. Men who had never before worked with their hands asked the privilege of the hardest tasks. The whole colony swarmed to unload the ship. They refused to allow the crew to touch a piece of freight or handle a piece of baggage. The only difficulty Norman found was to systematize their work under the captain's direction. The day following they "swarmed" again to clear the lawn of weeds and restore the labyrinth of walks and beds of flowers in the great court. Merchants exchanged the yardstick for the rake and hoe. Preachers laid aside their sermons to wield a spade, and returned from their tasks in the evening with song and laughter. Among the women the spirit of sacrifice and enthusiastic service was even higher. Many who loved flowers begged the privilege of using the pruning-knife and some even seized a hoe and worked with unwearied zeal. Others, who had never seen the inside of their own kitchens, rolled up their sleeves, donned white aprons, entered the great cooking-room of the hotel, and made pots and kettles fly. Beautiful girls who had spent lives of comparative ease took turns in waiting on the tables, and all worked with a spirit of joy which robbed labour of its weariness. By common consent Norman had assumed the general directorship of the colony, and by common consent the Wolfs were accepted as his chief advisers. This arrangement was formally voted on and unanimously approved at the first night's assembly of the Brotherhood in the big dining-hall of the building, which they now christened the "Mission House of the Brotherhood of Man." On accepting the position of general manager of the Brotherhood the young leader rose and faced the people with deep emotion. "Comrades," he began, in trembling tones, "I thank you for the confidence you have shown in me. I shall strive to prove myself worthy of your faith, and I hope within a year that we shall make such progress in the development of our new social system that I shall be able to convey then the full title to this glorious island to your permanent organization." A round of applause greeted this announcement. "I'm sure our preliminary work will be completed within a single year. I am not a man of many words, but I hope to prove myself a man of deeds. I shall consult you in every important step to be taken, and for this purpose the General Assembly of the Brotherhood will be held in this hall every Friday evening. On Monday evening a ball will be given for the pleasure of our young people, and every Wednesday evening a social reception. Let us make these three evenings the source of inspiration for our daily tasks." Norman closed his brief speech in a burst of genuine enthusiasm. Scores of young men and women crowded to the platform and grasped his hand. When the last echoes of the evening's celebration had died away, Catherine led Barbara into her room. Wolf sat quietly smoking by the window. "What on earth's the matter?" the girl asked. "You drag me to your room half dressed, in the dead of night, and speak in whispers. I thought we'd done with the dark and scheming ways of the world." "And so we have, my child," laughed Wolf. His cold gray eyes lighted with sudden warmth as they rested on Barbara's dainty little figure. Its exquisite lines could be plainly seen through the silk kimono as she walked with languid grace and threw the mass of dishevelled curls back from her shoulders. "Sit down, dear," Catherine said, with a smile. "We have something of the utmost importance to say to you." "I am to go abroad as an ambassador to some foreign court. Don't say that--I like it here." "No. We are going to propose that you establish a court here," Wolf interrupted. "Establish a court!" Barbara exclaimed. "How romantic!" "In short, my child, it's absolutely necessary for you to become, not merely the power behind the throne with our young Comrade Chief, you must assume the throne itself." "But how?" the girl asked. "As if you didn't know!" "I honestly don't. My eloquence is of little use here. We are all persuaded. Besides, our Comrade Chief has acquired the habit of thinking for himself." "Just so," observed Wolf. "And we want you to do his thinking for him." "What do you mean, Catherine?" Barbara asked, her brow suddenly clouding, as she looked straight into her foster-mother's eyes. "That you must win young Worth." "Deliberately set out to make him love me?" the girl exclaimed with scorn. "I'll do nothing of the kind." "You must, my dear," Wolf pleaded earnestly. "It's all for the Cause. It's in this boy's power to make or wreck this great enterprise. We have a kingdom here whose wealth and power may become the wonder of the world. It may be wrecked by the whim of one man. A thousand difficulties must be faced before we can have smooth sailing. The one thing above all to be done is to secure from young Worth the deed to this island. He must be convinced of the success of the scheme, and he must be convinced before he faces some of the most serious problems that are sure to arise--problems which will demand a strong arm and a cool, clear head to handle. The boy means well, but he can never meet these issues. Win his love and everything will be easy. Slowly and patiently I will perfect the organization we must have to succeed." "I fail to see the necessity of such a shameless act on my part. No man here is so enthusiastic as our young leader. He is sure to make the deed. You heard his promise to-night." "He intends to do it, I grant," Catherine argued. "But what Herman and I clearly see is that he will sooner or later be overwhelmed with difficulties. He may quit in disgust at the very moment when a strong policy could save the Cause. We want to be sure. He is a new convert. His enthusiasm is now at white heat. We are afraid of what may happen when it cools." "With your great brown eyes looking into his," Wolf broke in, "and your little hand in his, it can't cool!" "I don't think he cares for me in that way at all," the girl protested. "He has held himself quite aloof from me of late." "All the more reason why your woman's pride should be piqued to make the conquest," urged Wolf. "I have no such vulgar ambitions," was the short answer. "Of course you haven't, child," Wolf said in serious tones. "We understand that. But we ask this of you as a brave little soldier of the Cause. It's the one big, brave thing you can do." "I might have to let him kiss me," she said, with a frown. "Well, he's a handsome youngster--it wouldn't poison you," laughed Catherine. "I hate it! I think I hate every man on earth sometimes," she answered. Wolf laughed and looked at her with quiet intensity. "Come, dear, you can do this for the Cause we both love," Catherine urged. "I might have to let him put his arm around me----." Catherine seized her hand, looked at her steadily for a moment, and slowly said: "The woman who would not give both her body and her soul for the Cause of Humanity, if called on to make the sacrifice, is not worthy to live in the big world of which we've dreamed." Barbara's face flushed and her eyes sparkled. "You believe this?" she asked, sternly. "With all my soul," was the fierce answer. Barbara hesitated a moment, and firmly said: "Then I'll do it!" CHAPTER XVI BARBARA CHOOSES A PROFESSION When Norman came down to the office next morning, the clerk handed him a note. A glance at the smooth, perfect handwriting told him at once it was from Barbara. He opened it with a smile of pleasant surprise and read with increasing astonishment: "You are to take breakfast with me this morning in the rose bower of the floral court. "By order of "BARBARA BOZENTA, "_Secretary to the General Manager_." Norman found her alone, seated beside a little table in the bower, her face wreathed in mischievous smiles. She rose and extended her hand: "Permit me to introduce you to your new secretary." "I assure you my delight is only equalled by my surprise," he answered, with boyish banter. "Yes, I thought it best to take you by surprise. Now that it's all settled, I trust we will get on well." She looked at him with demure and charming impudence. Norman burst into laughter. "I'm sure we will!" he answered. "All I require is industry, patience, wisdom, tact, knowledge, sacrifice, absolute obedience, and a joyous desire to assume full responsibility for my mistakes!" "All of which will come to me," she responded, with mock gravity. "Permit me!" She led him to the chair she had placed beside the table, and poured a cup of coffee for him. Norman watched her with keen enjoyment. "I've never seen you in this mood before," he said, quietly. "You like it?" "Beyond words! I'm afraid I'll wake up directly and find I'm dreaming. I'm sure now, when I look into your eyes, sparkling with fun, that you are a flower nymph, and that your home has always been a rose bower on the sunny slope of a southern hillside." "Perhaps I'm just teasing you. Perhaps I won't work," she said, glancing at him from the corners of her brown eyes. "Then you'll find it a serious joke," he answered, firmly. "Resignations are not in order. You have chosen your profession. As general manager I have given my approval. That settles it, doesn't it?" "If you are pleased, yes," she answered, gravely. "I am more than pleased. I've been afraid to ask you to do this work for me--though I've had it in mind." "Why afraid?" "I don't know. I somehow got the impression lately that you didn't like me personally." "How could you think such a thing!" she protested. "Just a vague impression--caught, perhaps, from little gestures you sometimes made, little frowns that sometimes came to your brow, little flashes of hostility from your eyes." "I didn't mean it, comrade!" she said, demurely, while her eyes danced and her mouth twitched playfully. "And you've fully weighed the cost?" "Fully." "You know that you will be forced to spend most of your time in my office?" "I'll try to endure it," she laughed. "Without a frown or a hostile look?" "Unless you provoke it." Norman ate in silence for five minutes, listening to Barbara's girlish chatter while she bubbled over with the spirit of pure joy. Her whole being radiated fun and laughter as the sun pours forth heat and light. He wondered where this magic secret of joyous womanhood had been hidden in the past. "What a revelation you've been to me this morning," he said, musingly, as he rose from the table. "How?" she asked. "I thought you were all seriousness and tragedy, eloquence and pathos." "We're in paradise now. The shadows have lifted." "And I find you a little ray of dancing sunlight." "So every girl would be if she had the chance." "And we're going to give them the chance here, little comrade!" he cried, with enthusiasm. "I'll help you!" she earnestly responded, extending her hand with a tender look into the depth of Norman's soul. CHAPTER XVII A CALL FOR HEROES The first business before the Assembly of the Brotherhood was the permanent assignment of work. The enthusiasm which swept the Socialists through the first week of joyous life could not last. No one expected it. The novelty of their surroundings, the surprise and elation of every one over the beauty and richness of their newly acquired empire, carried the pioneers over the opening days as in a dream. It all seemed like a great picnic--like the long-hoped-for holidays in life of which they had dreamed and never realized, yet which somehow had come to pass. But the time was at hand to face the first big, sober reality of the new social system. The dining-hall was packed. Every member of the Brotherhood was present. The orchestra played a lively air in a vain effort to revive the spirit of festivity with which every meeting had hitherto buzzed. But an evil spirit had entered the Garden of Eden, and joy had fled. Over every heart hovered a brood of solemn questions. What will be my lot? Will I be allowed to choose my work? Or will they tell me what to do? Will it be dirty and disagreeable, or pleasant and inspiring? Norman sat in his chair of state as presiding officer, bending over a mass of papers which Barbara had spread before him. She leaned close, and a stray hair from one of her brown curls touched his forehead. He trembled and stared blankly at the papers, seeing only a beautiful face. "You understand?" she asked. "I've placed under each department the number of workers needed." "Yes, yes, I understand!" he repeated, looking at her, blankly. "I don't believe you've heard a word I've spoken to you," she said, reproachfully. He was about to answer when the music stopped. Norman lifted his head with a start, rose quickly and faced the crowd. "Comrades," he began, "the time has come for us to make good our faith in one another. You have proven yourselves brave and faithful in our struggle with the infamies of the system of capitalism. We call now for the heroes and heroines of actual work. We are entering, under the most favourable auspices, on the most important experiment yet made in the social history of the world. We are going to prove that mankind is one vast brotherhood--that love, not greed, can rule this earth. "In our temporary organization we wish to outline the forms on which we will later found the permanent State of Ventura. At present we will organize four departments--Production, Distribution, Domestic Service, and Education. "I am going to ask each one of you, by secret ballot, to choose your permanent work." A cheer shook the building. Norman flushed with pleasure, and continued quickly: "It shall be my constant aim as your general manager under our temporary organization to give you the widest personal liberty consistent with the success of our enterprise. "Before preparing your ballots for choice of your work, I shall have to ask that each head of a family and each unmarried man and woman first pass by the platform and draw lots for the assignment of your rooms in our Mission House. There have been some complaints already, I'm sorry to say, on this question. Some wish to live on the first floor, some on the top, but everybody wants to live on the south side of the house with the glorious views of the sea, and nobody wishes to live on the north side. There is but one way to determine such a question in our ideal state. Fate must decide. "The numbers of each room and suite are in the basket. The bachelors will be assigned to the right wing, the girls to the left wing, the married ones to the centre of the building. "Please form in line on the left and march toward the right aisle past the platform." "Mr. Chairman!" called Roland Adair, the Bard of Ramcat. Norman rapped for silence, and those who had risen resumed their seats. "I protest, Mr. Chairman," continued the poet, "against the cruelty of such a process. The weak and the aged should be given their choice first." "We left them all behind us!" Norman cried, with a wave of his hand. "There are no weak and aged in this crowd. We belong to the elect. We have found the secret of eternal youth." Another cheer swept the crowd, the poet subsided with a sigh of contempt, and the people quickly filed past the platform and drew their lots for permanent rooms in the building. The larger suites had been subdivided, so that the entire pioneer colony of two thousand found accommodations under one roof. When the crowd had resumed their seats, and the last cry of triumph over a successful draw and the last groan of disappointment over an unlucky lot had subsided, Norman rose and made the most momentous announcement the Brotherhood had yet heard: "In the Department of Production we need hod-carriers, bricklayers, carpenters, architects, teamsters, and skilled mechanics for the foundry and machine-shops, saw-mill, and flour mills. On the farm and orchard we need ploughmen and harvesters for grain and hay, gardeners, stablemen, and ditchers. "In our Department of Domestic Service we need cooks, seamstresses, washerwomen, scrubbers and cleaners, waiters, porters, bell-boys, telephone girls, steamfitters, plumbers, chimney-sweeps, and sewer cleaners. "In the Department of Education we need artists and artisans, teachers, nurses, printers and binders, pressmen and compositors, one editor, scientists and lecturers, missionaries, actors, singers, and authors. "Now you each of you know what you can do best. Choose the work in which you can render your comrades the highest service of which you are capable and best advance the cause of humanity. Write your name and your choice of work on the blanks which have been furnished you." The orchestra played while the ballots were being cast and counted. The chairman at length rose with the tabulated sheet in his hand and faced his audience. "Comrades," he said, with a twinkle in his eye, "that old saying I'll have to repeat, 'If at first you don't succeed, try, try again!' Beyond the shadow of a doubt we shall have to try this election again. If I didn't know by the serious look on your faces that you mean it I'd say off-hand that you were trying to put up a joke on me." He paused, and a painful silence followed. "Give us the ballot!" growled the Bard. Norman looked at the list he held, and in spite of himself, as he caught the gleam of mischief in Barbara's eye, burst into laughter and sat down. Wolf ascended the platform, glanced over the list and whispered: "It's a waste of time. Call for the election of an executive council with full powers." "We'll try once more," Norman insisted, quickly rising. "Comrades, I'm sorry to say there is no election. We must proceed to another ballot, and if the industries absolutely necessary to the existence of any society are not voted into operation, we must then choose an executive council with full power to act. I appeal to your sense of heroism and self-sacrifice----" "Give us the ballot! Read it!" thundered the offended poet. "Yes, read it!" "Read it!" The shouts came from all parts of the hall. The crowd was in dead earnest and couldn't see the joke. Once more the young chairman raised the fateful record of human frailty before his eyes, paused, and then solemnly began: "In the first place, comrades, more than six hundred ballots out of the two thousand cast are invalid. They have been cast for work not asked for. They must be thrown out at once. "Three hundred and sixty five able-bodied men choose hunting as their occupation. I grant you that game is plentiful on the island, but we can't spare you, gentlemen! "Two hundred and thirty-five men want to fish! The waters abound in fish, but we have a pound-net which supplies us with all we can eat. "Thirty-two men and forty-six women wish to preach. "We do not need at present hunters, fishermen, or preachers, and have not called for volunteers in these departments of labour. "Three hundred and fifty-six women wish to go on the stage, and one hundred and ninety-five of them choose musical comedy and light opera. I think this includes most of our female population between the ages of fourteen and thirty-five!" A murmur of excitement swept the feminine portion of the audience. "Allow me to say," he went on, "that the most urgent need of the colony at this moment cannot be met by organizing a chorus, however beautiful and pleasing its performances would be. We need, and we must have, waitresses and milkmaids. The chorus can wait, the cows cannot. "I asked for one editor. One hundred and seventy-five men and sixty-three women have chosen that field. Seventy-five men and thirty-two women wish to be musicians." "We have looked in vain among the ballots for a single hod-carrier, or ploughman, ditcher, cook, seamstress, washerman or washerwoman, stableman, scrubber, or cleaner. The Brotherhood cannot live a day without them. Remember, comrades, we are to make the great experiment on which the future happiness of the race may depend. Let us forget our selfish preferences and think only of our fellow men. I call for heroes of the hod, heroines of the washtub and the scrubbing-brush and milk-pail, knights of the pitchfork, spade, and shovel. Let hunters, fishermen, preachers, and chorus-girls forget they live for the present. "This is not a joke, comrades, though I have laughed. It's one of the gravest problems we must face. It has been suggested that we hire outside labour to do this disagreeable work for a generation or two. The moment we dare make such a compromise we are lost forever. We must solve this problem or quit. A second ballot is ordered at once." Again the orchestra played, the ushers passed the boxes, the vote was taken, and all for naught. Not a single hero of the hod appeared. Not a single heroine of the washtub, the scrubbing-brush, or the milk-pail. The young chairman's face was very grave when Barbara handed him the results. She bent and whispered: "Away with frowns and doubts and fears! There's a better way. A leader must lead. Their business is to follow." Norman's face brightened. He turned to the crowd, and in tones of clear, ringing command announced: "Comrades, I had hoped you could choose your work of your own accord. The attempt has failed. Six divisions of labour, each of them absolutely essential to the existence of society in any form above the primitive savage, have not a single man or woman in them." "We must elect an executive council of four who shall sit as a court of last resort in settling the question of the ability of each comrade and the work to which he shall be assigned. Under our temporary charter the general manager will preside over this court and cast the deciding vote. Nominations are in order for the other four. We want two men and two women in this council. In all our deliberations woman shall have equal voice with man." The Bard made a speech of protest against the action about to be taken, in the sacred name of liberty. "This act is the first step on the road to a tyranny more monstrous than any ever devised by capitalism!" he shouted, with hands uplifted, his long hair flying in wild disorder. Tom Mooney, an old miner, who had met Norman and become his friend during a visit to one of his father's mines, sprang to his feet and made a rush for the excited poet. Confronting him a moment, Tom inquired: "Kin I ax ye a few questions?" "Certainly. As many as you like." "Kin ye cook?" "I cannot." "Kin ye wash?" "No!" "Kin ye scrub?" "No, sir." "Ever swing a hod?" "I have not." "Ever milk a cow?" "No!" "Are ye willin' to learn them things?" "I didn't come here for that purpose." "Then, what t' 'ell ye kickin' about?" Tom cried, and, glaring at the poet, he thundered fiercely: "Set down!" The man of song was so disconcerted by this unexpected onslaught, and by the roars of laughter which greeted Tom's final order, that he dropped into his seat, muttering incoherent protests, and the balloting for the executive council proceeded at once amid universal good humour. A dozen names were proposed as candidates, and the four receiving the highest votes were declared duly elected. The election resulted in the choice of Herman Wolf, Catherine, Barbara Bozenta, and Thomas Mooney. Tom was amazed at his sudden promotion to high office, and insisted on resigning in favour of a man of better education. Norman caught his big horny hand and pressed it. "Not on your life, Tom. You've made a hit. The people like your hard horse-sense. You will make a good judge. Besides, I need you. You're a man I can depend on every day in the year." "I'll stick ef you need me, boy--but I hain't fitten, I tell ye." "I'll vouch for your fitness--sit down!" The last command Norman thundered into Tom's ears in imitation of his order to the poet, and the old miner, with a grin, dropped into his seat. As Norman was about to declare the meeting adjourned, the steward ascended the platform and whispered a message. The young leader turned to the crowd and lifted his hand for silence. "Comrades, a prosaic but very important announcement I have to make. I have just been informed that there is no milk for supper. The cows have been neglected. They must be milked. I call for a dozen volunteer milkmaids until this adjustment can be made. Come, now!--and a dozen young men to assist them. Let's make this a test of your loyalty to the cause. All labour is equally honourable. Labour is the service of your fellow man. Who will be the first heroine to fill this breach in the walls of our defence?" Barbara sprang forward, with uplifted head, laughing. "I will!" "And I'll help you!" Norman cried, with a laugh. "Who will join us now? Come, you pretty chorus-girls! You wouldn't mind if you carried these milk-pails on the stage in a play. Well, this is the biggest stage you will ever appear on, and all the millions of the civilized world are watching." A pretty, rosy-cheeked girl joined Barbara. An admirer followed, and in a moment a dozen girls and their escorts had volunteered. They formed in line and marched to the cow lot with Norman and Barbara leading, singing and laughing and swinging their milk-pails like a crowd of rollicking children. When they reached the pasture where the cows were herded, Norman asked Barbara, with some misgivings: "Honestly, did you ever milk a cow?" "Of course I have," she promptly replied. "I spent two years on a farm once. Do you think I'd make a fool of myself trying before all these kids if I hadn't?" "I didn't know but that you made a bluff at it to lead the others on. What can I do, for heaven's sake?" Norman looked at her in a helpless sort of way while Barbara rolled up her sleeves. For the first time he saw her beautifully rounded bare arm to its full length. He stood with open-eyed admiration. Never had he seen anything so white and round and soft, so subtly and seductively suggestive of tenderness and love. "For heaven's sake, what do I do?" he repeated, blankly. "Get some meal in that bucket for my cow, and see that her calf don't get to her--I'll do the rest." Norman hustled to the barn with the other boys, got his bucket of meal, placed it in front of the cow Barbara had selected, and stood watching with admiration the skill with which her deft little hands pressed two streams of white milk into the bucket at her feet. "Goodness, you're a wonder," he cried, admiringly. "But where's the calf I'm supposed to be watching?" "I think that's the one standing close to the gate in the next lot watching me with envy. The first time the gate's opened he'll jump through if he gets half a chance--so look out!" "I'll watch him," Norman promised, without lifting his eyes from the rhythmic movement of the bare white arms. He had scarcely spoken when a careless boy swung the gate wide open, and the lusty calf, whose soft eyes had been watching Barbara through the fence, made a break for his mother. In a swift, silent rush he planted one foot in Barbara's milk-pail, knocked her over with the other, switched his tail, and fell to work on his own account without further concern. It was all done so suddenly it took Norman's breath. He sprang to Barbara's side and helped her to her feet. Norman grabbed the calf by the ear with one hand and by the tail with the other, and started toward the gate. The animal suddenly ducked his head, plunged forward, jerked Norman to his knees, and dragged him ten yards before he could regain his feet. The young leader rose, tightened his grip, and started with a rush toward the gate, but the calf swerved in time to avoid it, gaining speed with each step, and started off with his escort in a mad race around the lot, galloping at a terrific speed, bellowing and snorting at every jump. The others stopped their work to laugh and cheer as round and round the maddened little brute flew with the tall, heroic leader galloping by his side. Norman had no time to call for help. He couldn't let go and he couldn't stop the calf. As he made the second round of the lot, upsetting buckets, smashing milk-pails, and stampeding peaceful cows, a boy yelled through the roars of laughter: "Twist his tail! Twist his tail an' he'll go the way you want him!" Norman misunderstood the order, loosened the head and grabbed the tail with both hands. With a loud bellow the calf plunged into a wilder race around the lot, dragging his tormentor now with regular, graceful easy jumps. He made the rounds twice thus, single file, amid screams of laughter, suddenly turned and plunged headlong through an osage hedge, and left Norman sitting in a dusty heap on the ground among the thorns. He rose, brushed his clothes sheepishly, and looked through the hedge at the calf which had turned and stood eyeing him now with an expression of injured innocence. Barbara came up, wiping the tears of laughter from her eyes. "I've learned something new," Norman quietly observed. "All labour may be equally honourable. It's not equally expedient. I wish you'd look at that beast eyeing me through the fence! It's positively uncanny. I believe he's possessed of the devil. I don't wonder at that belief of the ancients. I've tackled many a brute on the football field--but this is one on me!" The brilliant young leader of the new moral world led the procession of milkmaids back to the house as the shadows of evening fell, a sadder but wiser man for the day's experience. CHAPTER XVIII A NEW ARISTOCRACY Three members of the executive council, Norman, Barbara, and Tom, began at once the task of assigning work. The problems which immediately faced the council were overwhelming, but they were urgent and could admit of no delay. The absolute refusal of every member of the Brotherhood to do the dirty and disagreeable work brought at once two issues to a crisis. Either labour must be voluntary or involuntary. The people who did this work must be induced to agree to perform it or they must be forced to do it by a superior authority without their consent. They could only be led to choose this work by inducements of an extraordinary nature--the payment of enormously high wages and the shortening of each day's work to a ridiculous minimum. If wages were made unequal, the old problem of inequality would remain unsolved. For equal wages no man would lift his hand. Confronted by this dilemma the executive council decided at once to fix wages on an unequal basis rather than reduce its unwilling members to a condition of involuntary labour, which is merely a long way to spell slavery. When this decision was announced, Roland Adair, the Bard of Ramcat, once more lifted his voice in solemn protest: "I denounce this act in the name of every principle which has brought us together," he cried, with solemn warning. "You have established a system far more infamous than the unequal wages of the old society where the law of the survival of the fittest is the court of last resort. You have opened the door of fathomless corruption by substituting the whim of an executive council for the law of nature. It is the beginning of jealousy, strife, favouritism, jobbery, and injustice." "Then what's a better way?" Old Tom asked, with a sneer. "It's your business to find a better way," cried the man of visions. Tom glared at the poet with a look of fury and Norman whispered to the old miner: "Remember, Tom, you're sitting as a judge in the Supreme Court of State!" "Can't help it. I never did have no use for a fool. Ef he can't tell us a better way, let 'im shet up." Barbara pressed Tom's arm, and he subsided. The court at once entered into the question of wages for domestic service. It had been agreed, at the suggestion of the Wolfs, that they should spend their time in quietly investigating the qualifications of each member of the Brotherhood for the work to be assigned, and make their reports in secret to the majority of the court, which should sit continuously until all had been decided. Neither Norman, Barbara, nor the old miner suspected for a moment the deeper motive which Wolf concealed behind this withdrawal from the decision of these cases. They found out in a very startling way later. The chief cook demanded a hundred dollars a month. Old Tom snorted with contempt. Norman smiled and spoke kindly: "Remember, Louis, you only received $75 a month in San Francisco. Here the Brotherhood provides every man with his food, his clothes, and his house. Wages are merely the inducement used to satisfy each individual that labour may still be done by free contract, not by force." "Well, it'll take a hundred a month to satisfy me," was the stolid reply. "I didn't come here to cook. I could do that in the old hell we lived in. I came here to do better and bigger things. I can do them, too----" "But we've fixed the salary of the general manager at only seventy-five dollars a month, and you demand a hundred?" "I do, and if the general manager prefers my job, I'll trade with you and guarantee to do your work better than it's being done." "Yes, you will!" old Tom growled, as he leaned over Barbara and whispered to Norman. "Make it thirty dollars a month, and if he don't go to work--leave him to me, I'll beat him till he does it." "No, we can't manage it that way, Tom. We must try to satisfy him." "Hit's a hold-up, I tell ye--highway robbery--the triflin' son of a gun! Don't you say so, miss?" Tom appealed earnestly to Barbara. "We must have cooks, Tom--and we want everybody to be happy." "Make him cook, make him--that's his business--I'd do it if I knowed how. He's got to take what we give 'im. He can't git off this island. He enlisted for five years. If he deserts, court-martial and shoot him." In spite of old Tom's bitter protest, Norman and Barbara succeeded in persuading the chief cook to accept eighty-five dollars a month--an advance of ten dollars over the highest wages he had ever received before. When the eighteen assistant cooks lined up for the settlement of their wages a new problem of unexpected proportions was presented. They had listened attentively to the case of the chef, and their chosen orator presented his argument in brief but emphatic words: "We demand the exact wages you have voted the chef." "Well, what do ye think er that?" old Tom groaned to Norman. "Hit's jist like I told ye. Hit's a hold-up." "We must persuade them, Tom," the young leader replied. "Let me persuade 'em!" the old miner pleaded. "How?" Barbara asked, with a twinkle in her brown eyes. "I'll line 'em up agin that wall and trim their hair with my six-shooter. I won't hurt 'em. But when I finish the job I'll guarantee they'll do what I tell 'em without any back talk. You folks take a walk and make me Chief Justice fer an hour, and when you come back we'll have peace and plenty. Jest try it now, and don't you butt in. Let me persuade 'em!" Norman shook his head. "Keep still, Tom! We must reason with them." "Ye 're wastin' yer breath," the miner drawled in disgust. "Don't you think, comrades," Norman began, in persuasive tones, "that your demands are rather high?" "Certainly not," was the prompt reply. "We come here to get equal rights. We don't want to cook. I'm a born actor, myself. I expected to play in Shakespeare when I joined the Brotherhood. Anybody that wants this job can have it. If we do your hot, dirty, disgusting, disagreeable work while the others play in the shade we are going to get something for it." "Even so," the young leader responded, "is it fair that an assistant cook should receive equal wages with the chef?" "And why not? Labour creates all value. The chef's a fakir. We do all the work. He never lifts his hand to a pot or pan. He struts and loafs through the kitchen and lords it over the men. Let him try to run the kitchen without us, and see how much you get to eat! We stand on the equal rights of man!" "But my dear comrade----" "Don't use them words," old Tom pleaded, "jest let me make a few remarks----" Barbara pinched Tom's arm and he subsided. "Can't you see," Norman went on, "that we are paying the chef for his directive ability, for his inventive genius in creating new dishes and making old ones more delicious? You but execute his orders." "We stand square on our principles. Labour creates all values. The chef never works. We make every dish that goes to the table. If it has any value we make it. We demand our rights!" The court agreed on fifty dollars a month, and the men refused to consider it. "We prefer to work in the fields, the foundry, the machine-shop, the mills, the forests, anywhere you like except the kitchen. Let the chef do your work. Good day!" They turned and marched out in a body and sat down in the sunshine. In vain Norman argued and pleaded. They stood their ground with sullen determination. A final clincher which the young leader could not evade always ended the argument. The spokesman came back to it with dogged persistence: "What did you mean, then, when you've been drumming into our ears that labour creates all value? We do all the work, don't we?" The upshot of it was the eighteen assistant cooks marched back into the hall, stood before the judges, and all were granted equal wages with the chef. Whereupon the chef sprang to his feet and faced the court with blazing eyes. "You grant these chumps--these idiots--wages equal to mine? Not one of them has brains enough to cook an egg if I didn't tell him how. Their wages equal to mine. I resign!" Tom spoke vigorously: "Now will ye leave him to me?" Norman and Barbara looked at each other in angry and helpless amazement. The old miner leaped to his feet, made his way down from the platform, and with two swift strides reached the chef. He leaned close and whispered something in the rebel's ear. There was a moment's hesitation and the chef turned, signalled to his assistants, and amid cheers marched to the kitchen. Tom resumed his seat beside Barbara with a smile, quietly saying: "That's the way to do business, ladies and gentlemen!" "What did you say to him?" Barbara asked. "Oh, nothin' much," was the careless answer. "I hope you didn't threaten him, Tom?" Norman asked with some misgiving. "Na--I didn't threaten him. I spoke quiet and peaceable." "But what did you tell him?" the young leader persisted. "I jest told him I'd give him two minutes ter git back ter the kitchen or I'd blow his head off!" "I'm afraid our table will feel the effects of that remark, Tom," Barbara said, doubtfully. Next to the question of cooks the most urgent issue to be settled was the case of the scrubbers, cleaners, and drainmen. The women who had been assigned to the tasks of scrubbing the floors, washing the windows and dishes, had watched the triumphs of the cooks with keen appreciation of their own power. It was easy to see that the more disagreeable and disgusting the character of the work, the more extravagant the demands which could be made and enforced. The scrubbers and dishwashers boldly demanded one hundred dollars a month and six hours for a working day, and refused with sullen determination to argue the question. To Barbara's mild and gentle protest their answer was complete and stunning: "You have assigned us this dirty job. Do you want it at any price?" asked their orator. "I'll take yours without wages and jump at the chance." Tom lost all interest in the proceedings and drew himself up in a knot in his chair. Now and then a growl came from the depths of his throat. Once he was heard to distinctly articulate: "This makes me tired." The court begged and pleaded, cajoled, argued in vain with the stubborn scrubwomen. Not an inch would they move in their demands. The floors were becoming unspeakably filthy. They had not been scrubbed since the arrival of the colony. Norman turned to Barbara. "Put the question solemnly to ourselves--we don't want the job at any price, do we?" "I couldn't do it!" she admitted, frankly. "Then what's the use? We must be fair. It's worth what they ask." The court granted the demands and the scrubwomen and dishwashers marched to the kitchen and once more the chef tore his hair and cursed the fate which brought him to such disgrace as to work with stupid subordinates at equal wages and gaze on dishwashers and scrubwomen whose wages exceeded his own. The climax of all demands was reached when the drainman demanded a hundred and fifty dollars a month and four hours for each working day. Norman looked at him in dumb confusion. He knew what he was going to say before he opened his mouth and he had no answer. The drainman bowed low in mock humility, but the proud wave of his hand belied his words. "My calling was a humble one in the old world, Comrade Judges," he said. "I came here to climb mountain heights and find my way among the stars. You have sent me back to the sewers. I always felt that I had missed my true calling. I've always wanted to be a poet----" The Bard shook his mane and groaned. "I don't want this job at any price. But the sewers are choked. They have not been cleaned for two years. It must be done. I've named my price. I'll gladly yield to any man who envies my luck. If such a man is here let him speak--or forever hereafter hold his peace." With a grandiloquent gesture the drainman swept the crowd with his eye, but no man responded. The court granted his demand. The Bard leaped once more to his feet and entered his protest. This time old Tom listened with interest. His concluding sentence rang with bitter irony: "Against these absurd decisions I lift my voice once more in solemn protest. We came to this charmed island to abolish all class distinctions. You have destroyed the old classes based on culture, achievement, genius, wealth, and power. You have created a new aristocracy on whose shield is emblazoned--a dish-rag and scrubbing-brush encircled by a sewer pipe! I make my most humble bow to our new king--the drainman! I hail the apotheosis of the scrubwoman!" "Say, you give me a pain--shut up" thundered Tom. The singer collapsed with a sigh and the crowd laughed. The foreman of the farm brought two men before the court and asked for important instructions. "Comrade Judges," he began, "I had two men assigned to me a week ago whom I don't want and won't have at any price. I return them to the Brotherhood with thanks. You can do what you please with them." "What's the matter?" Norman asked, with some irritation. The foreman shoved and kicked a man in front of the judges. "This fool----" "You must not use such language, Mr. Foreman," Barbara interrupted. "I beg your pardon, Comrade Judges," he apologized. "This coyote I put on a mowing-machine yesterday. He said he knew how to run it. He broke it on a smooth piece of ground the first hour. I gave him another and he wrecked it before noon. It will take the labour of five men two days to repair the damage he has done. I don't want him at any price." "What have you to say?" Norman asked the accused. "It wasn't my fault. The thing broke itself." "But how did it happen twice the same day, sonny?" Tom asked. "I dunno. Hit jist happened," was the dogged answer. "I've another scoundrel----" "You must not use such language," Barbara broke in. "Again begging the pardon of Comrade Judges," the foreman continued: "This dog"--he kicked another slovenly looking lout before the judges--"tore to pieces the shoulders of two pairs of horses with careless harnessing before I found him and kicked him out of the stables. Those four horses can't work for a month. We'll have to pay at least $500 for two teams right away to take their places, or lose a crop of hay." Tom glared at the culprit. "What did ye ruin them horses' shoulders fer?" "I didn't know it," was the sulking answer. "He's a liar!" cried the foreman. "He put the same collars on their galled necks three days in succession and beat them unmercifully when they couldn't pull the load." "What do you say, Tom?" Norman asked. The old miner glared at the last culprit and his grim mouth tightened: "Wall, you kin do as ye please, but any man that'll abuse a hoss will commit murder. I'd put the fust one in the cow lot to shovellin' compost. This one I'd quietly lynch--no public rumpus about it--jest take 'im down by the beach, hang 'im to one of them posts on the pier, shoot 'im full of holes, and drop 'im into the sea to be sure he don't come back to life." Norman conferred with Barbara a moment and rendered the decision: "Mr. Foreman, the first man is transferred from the field machinery to the compost-heap in the barnyard. The second man who disabled the horses will assist in cleaning the sewers. Their wages will remain the same as before." A round of applause greeted this decision. The Bard renewed his attack with unusual zeal. Standing before the court and shaking his long hair he cried: "At last the climax of tyranny! Two comrades condemned without a jury and without defense! I congratulate you. In one day you have established an aristocracy of filth and created a penal colony without a hearing or appeal. We are making progress." The old miner grunted, Barbara smiled tenderly at Norman, and the court adjourned. CHAPTER XIX SOME TROUBLES IN HEAVEN Norman found it necessary for the executive council to sit continuously for the adjustment of disputes and the settlement of new problems which arose at every step of progress in the new moral world. He had condemned the sins of the old world of capitalism with cocksure certainty. Now that he had been made a supreme judge with power to adjust the rights and wrongs of his fellow man, he was appalled at the magnitude of the task of substituting an ideal for the reign of natural law under which civilization had been slowly evolved. There were two men in the Brotherhood whom he grew early to hate with cordial, thorough, murderous hatred--Roland Adair, the Bard of Ramcat, who always denounced every decision as unjust, and a tall, hooked-nosed, stoop-shouldered, scholarly looking man named Diggs, who invariably sat near him and at every conceivable opportunity asked questions. These questions were always put in an innocent, friendly way, but when Diggs looked at him through his gleaming spectacles Norman always got the impression that an imp of the devil had suddenly popped up through the floor. The first day after the general assignment of work Diggs rose before the council, adjusted his glasses, and drew a piece of paper from his pocket. Norman knew before he spoke that the document bristled with questions. Diggs's glasses had always fascinated him, but to-day they seemed of unusual thickness and enormous size, and their concave surfaces seemed to flash light from a thousand angles. Diggs adjusted them on his hook-nose with deliberation and glanced carefully over his notes before speaking. Norman turned to Barbara with a sigh. She pressed his hand in silent sympathy. "Don't worry!" she whispered. Norman's breath quickened as he answered the pressure of the soft, warm fingers but he managed to move his chair and break the effects of her spell without revealing to her the effort it cost. Each hour of their association he felt the cords he dare not try to break tighten about his heart. He determined each day to put the thought from him. Over and over again with grim resolution he repeated his vow: "I'll keep a clear head. I've got to decide this issue on its merits. I owe it to my generous friends who made it possible." He had avoided her for the last few days. She guessed the cause intuitively and knew that he was fighting with desperation to escape the net she was slowly weaving about him. She began to watch the struggle now with a curious fascination in which cruelty and tenderness were equally mixed. The idea of surrendering her own heart had never once entered her pretty head. Her life had been lived in a strange war with human society. Man had always appeared to her imagination as an enemy. She had never trusted one--least of all Wolf, the big, impassive animal who had dominated the life of her foster-mother. With deliberate and cruel art she had set out to master the heart of the man who sat by her side. The task was accepted as part of her work. She had enlisted as a soldier in the Cause. She had received the orders from headquarters. When the deed was done she would turn to a greater task. She had expected to be bored by his idiotic love making. Now her curiosity was beginning to be piqued by his silence. She began vaguely to wonder each moment what kind of pictures she was making in his mind. Her brown eyes searched the depths of his soul in a dumb way that sent the blood rushing to Norman's heart, but each time he had eluded her. He sat in moody silence now, giving no response to her words of cheer. She roused him from his reverie with a plaintive protest. "What's the matter? Have I, too, offended?" He turned quickly and crushed her hand in his strong grasp: "For heaven's sake don't _you_ get into the habit of asking me questions! How could you offend? Your face is my lighthouse set on the cliffs, calm, serene, joyful. I couldn't get through a day without you." A smiling answer was just trembling on her lips when Diggs began to speak. "Now for the human interrogation point," Barbara laughed. "Comrade Judges," Diggs began, with guileless good humour, "while we are shaping the form of our ideal State for its permanent organization I wish to submit some questions which may help us in our search for truth." "Questions," Norman whispered, "which any fool can ask, but the angels of God can't answer." "But we will answer them!" she flashed, with defiant courage. "We agree," Diggs went on, "that society must be governed in some way. There must be rulers, but how shall we choose our rulers, and with what powers shall we clothe them? We can begin to see that the head of our social system must at times exercise the full powers of the State. Into whose hands can this enormous power be entrusted, and how shall he be called to account?" Diggs paused, and Norman flushed at this question, for he took it as a personal thrust. He had occasion to change his mind later. "How can we," the questioner went on, "retain our democratic liberties as law makers as we grow in numbers? Now we can all meet in general assembly. When the State numbers even five thousand this will not be possible. Will not our politics become even more corrupt than the old system, seeing how enormous the power over the smallest details of life which these legislators possess? "As our society grows--and thousands are now clamouring for admission--how is wealth to be distributed? Who shall determine, in this larger society, who shall be common labourers, who poets, artists, musicians, preachers, managers? Who shall appoint editors? And who shall call them to account if they publish treason against the State? What shall be done with the ever-increasing number of the lazy, dishonest, and criminal members of the community? "Who shall determine how much mental work is equivalent to so much manual labour, seeing how vast is the difference in the value of one man's brain product over another's? How can men who are not artists, poets, or musicians determine the value of such work? Or how can one poet be just to his rival if he be made the judge? When our theatre is opened, who shall select the actors? Who shall decide whether they are incompetent? Who shall decide on the selection of the star? What shall be done with an actor, for example, who should spit in the face of a judge deciding adversely? Suppose a man offends the judge? Shall he be punished? If so, who shall do it? "How can we prevent a man from losing his wages playing poker with his neighbour if he does so joyfully? "What shall be done with a man who works outside regular hours and accumulates a vast private fortune?" "Say, ain't you worked your jaw overtime now?" old Tom broke in rudely. "We'll take them things up when we come to 'em. We got somethin' else to do now--set down!" "These are only friendly suggestions for thought as we develop our ideal," Diggs answered, with smiling good nature, as he resumed his seat. "What makes me want to kill that man," Norman muttered to Barbara, "is the unfailing politeness and unction with which he asks those questions." "Patience! patience!" was the low, musical reply. "These little things will all adjust themselves." Methodist John pressed to the front and poured out to the judges a story of wrong and asked for justice. "Miss Barbara," he began, in plaintive tones, "you was always good to me in the other world, but since we've got here even you don't seem the same. Everybody's hard and cold. They hain't got no sympathy here for a poor man. In the other world I missed my callin'--I was born for the ministry. I come here to serve the Lord. And now they make me work so hard I ain't even got time to pray. I ask for a licence to preach the gospel. Just give me a chance. They've put me to feedin' hogs and tendin' ter calves. I ain't fit for such work. I want to call sinners to repentance, not swine to their swill. I tell ye I've been buncoed. It ain't a square deal. I left the poorhouse to come with you to heaven and, by gum, I've landed in the workhouse----" "And ef yer don't shet up and git back ter yer work," Tom thundered, "you'll land in the hospital--you hear me!" "I ain't er talkin' to you, you cussin, swearin', ungodly son of the devil," the old man answered. "Come, come, John," Norman interrupted, as he held Tom back. "We can't grant your request. We are not ready to undertake religious work yet." "Well, God knows ye need it!" John muttered, as the crowd pushed him away. At the door Catherine greeted him as he passed out, whispered encouraging words, and sent him back to his tasks more cheerful. She had taken her stand thus each day; and, while Wolf was busy quietly mingling with the men outside getting the facts as to the progress of each department, the tall graceful woman of soft voice and madonna face was fast becoming the friend and sympathizer of each discontented worker. She had now assumed the task of peacemaker after each harsh decision had been rendered, and did her work with rare skill--a skill which promised big results in the dawning State of Ventura. Uncle Bob Worth, an old Negro, bowed low before the judges. He had been a slave of Norman's grandfather in North Carolina and had joined the colony out of admiration for the young leader. "Marse Norman," he solemnly began. "Don't call me 'master,' Bob," Norman interrupted. "Remember that we are all comrades here." "Yassah! Yassah! Marse Norman, I try to 'member dat sah, but 'pears ter me dey's somefin' wrong bout dis whole 'comrade' business, sah! I'se er 'comrade' now but I'se wuss off dan I eber wuz. 'Fo' I come here I wuz er butler, and I wuz er gemmen--yas-sah, ef I do hat ter say it myself--and I allus live wid gemmens an' sociate wid gemmens. I come out here wid you ter be a white man an' er equal. Dat's what dey all say. I be er equal 'comrade.' I make up my mind dat I jine de minstrel band, pick de banjer, an' sing de balance er my life. Bress God, what happen. Dey make me a hod-carrier and make me 'sociate wid low-down po' white trash. I ain't come here ter be no 'comrade' wid dem kin' er folks. Dey ain't my equal, sah, an' I can't 'ford to 'sociate wid 'em. What's fuddermo, sah, carryin' a hod ain't my business--hit don't suit my health an' brick-dust ain't good fur my complexion, sah!" Tom grunted contemptuously. Norman smiled and shook his head. "Sorry, Comrade Bob," he replied. "We haven't men enough to organize the minstrels yet. We must rush the new building. We have thousands of new members clamouring to join. We have nowhere to house them." "Yassah, an' I 'spec' dey'll be clamourin' ter unjine fo' long," old Bob muttered, as he passed on to be comforted by Catherine's soothing words. Saka, the Indian, whom Colonel Worth had educated, had followed Norman. He demanded a return ticket to the Colonel's hunting lodge. It was promptly refused. Catherine attempted to soothe his ruffled feelings. He snapped his fingers in her face and grunted. The Brotherhood of Man saw Saka no more for many moons, but the crack of his rifle was heard on the mountain side and the smoke of his tepee curled defiantly from the neighbouring plains. The chef appeared before the court in answer to numerous complaints about the table. "I must have the law laid down for the tables, Comrade Judges," he demanded. "One man wants one thing and another refuses to eat at the table where such food is served. A dozen men and women ask only for bread, vegetables, and nuts. They refuse to eat meat. They refuse to allow me to cook it or any one else to eat it if they can help it. They make my life miserable. I want permission to kick them out of the kitchen. They demand the right to inspect my pots and pans to see if meat has touched them. They must go or I go. I will not be insulted by fools. If you do not give me permission to kick these people out of the kitchen I will do so without permission. You can take your choice." The cook mopped his brow and sat down with a defiant wave of his arm. A woman who had been a leader of the W.C.T.U. pressed forward before the cook's demand could be considered. "And I demand in the name of truth, purity, righteousness, justice, faith, and God, that no more wine be allowed on the table. I demand that we burn the wine house and issue an order to the cook never again, under penalty of imprisonment for life, to use a drop of alcohol in the food he serves to the Brotherhood----" "And I also demand, Comrade Judges," the cook interrupted, "the right to throw that woman out of the kitchen and have her fined and imprisoned the next time she dares to interfere with my business. She got into the pantry yesterday and destroyed five hundred mince pies because she smelled brandy in them." "Yes, and I'll do it again if you dare to poison the bodies and souls of my comrades with that hellish stuff!" she cried, triumphantly. "I'd like to know," the cook shouted, "how I'm to do my work if every fool in creation can butt into my business?" "Softly! Softly!" Norman warned. "I mean it!" thundered the chef. "This woman swears she will wreck the dining-room if I dare to place wine again on our bill of fare. I want to know if she's in command of this colony? If so, you can count me out!" "And while we are on this point, Comrade Judges," spoke up a mild-looking little man, "I have summoned a neighbour of mine to appear before you and show cause why he should _not_ cease to have sauerkraut served at breakfast. He sits at my table. I've begged him to stop it. I've begged the cook to stop cooking the stuff, but he bribes the cook----" "That's a lie," shouted the chef. "I saw him do it, your honours," the little man went on. "I'm a small-sized man or I'd lick him. I tried to move my seat but they wouldn't let me. I pledge you my word when he brings that big dish of steaming sauerkraut to our table it fogs the whole end of the dining-room. The odour is so strong it not only stops you from eating, you can't think. It knocks you out for the day." "Is it possible," Norman inquired, "that there is a human being among us who eats sauerkraut for breakfast?" "There's no doubt about it, comrade," promptly responded a tall, strapping-looking fellow, with a dark, scholarly face, as he stepped to the front. "That's him!" cried the little accuser. "I made him come. Told him I'd organize a party to lynch him if he didn't. He won't dare deny it. I can prove it." "I have no desire to deny that I eat sauerkraut, you little ape," he replied with scorn. "I come of German ancestry, comrades. My great-grandfather helped to create this nation. He was a pure-blooded German. I inherit from him my personal likes and dislikes. Sauerkraut is the best breakfast food ever served to man. It is a pure vegetable malt. It is wholesome, clean, healthful, and keeps the system of a brain worker in perfect order. I eat it with ham gravy and good hot wheat biscuits. It is some trouble for the cook to prepare this particular kind of soft tea-biscuit for me. I paid him a little extra for this bread--not the kraut. I suggest to your honours that you make sauerkraut a standard breakfast diet as a health measure. They may kick a little at first, but I assure you it will improve the health and character of the colony. If this little chap who accuses me were put on a diet of kraut for breakfast it might even now make a man of him. I not only have nothing to apologize for, I bring you good tidings. I proclaim sauerkraut the only perfect health food for breakfast, and I suggest its compulsory use. The man who sits next to me eats snails. I think the habit a filthy and dangerous one. If you are going into this question, do it thoroughly. Let us fix by law what is fit to eat, and stick to it. I'll back sauerkraut before any dietary commission ever organized on earth." The council appointed a commission to conduct hearings and make a rigid code of laws establishing the kind of foods for each meal. Again Roland Adair, the Bard of Ramcat, rose, shook his long hair and cleared his throat. Norman lifted his hand for silence. "I anticipate the poet's words. You solemnly protest against the further establishment of a tyranny which shall dare prescribe your food from day to day. I grieve over the necessity of these laws and mingle my tears with yours in advance. But, in the language of a distinguished citizen of the old republic, 'we are confronted by a condition, not a theory.' The council stands adjourned." The Bard poured his bitter protest into Catherine's patient ears and left with a growing conviction of her wisdom. The woman with the drooping eyelids stood watching his retreating figure while a quiet smile of contempt played about her full, sensuous lips. CHAPTER XX THE UNCONVENTIONAL Within a week it was necessary to appoint a commission to formulate an elaborate code of laws regulating various nuisances which had developed in the community. A kitchen-boy insisted on playing a cornet in his room. He didn't know a musical from a promissory note but he swore he'd become a musician before he died. His efforts came near proving fatal to his neighbours before he was suppressed. Several women had pet parrots. The people who lived near by strenuously objected. The parrots had to go. A sailor had brought a monkey whose manners were not appreciated by any one except his master. The monkey had to go. Cats were arraigned for trial and a fierce battle raged over the question of allowing them in the building. The question was finally put to the popular vote in the assembly and the cats won by a good majority. But strict laws regulating the kind of cats, their number, and their care, were put into force. Dogs won by a large majority when they were finally put on trial. The commission on nuisances had finally to make a code of laws regulating table manners and the conduct of all social gatherings. The one question which all but precipitated a civil war was the problem of dress. Inequality of wages meant, of necessity, inequality of dress. A desperate effort was made by a large number to force the community to adopt a uniform for both men and women. It was fiercely opposed. Every woman who believed herself good looking refused to listen to any argument on the subject. It was necessary at once, however, to formulate some sort of code. A number of men had been coming into the dining-room in their shirt sleeves. Some of them apparently never combed their hair or changed their linen. A number of women had gotten into the habit of coming into the dining-room in loose wrappers of variegated colors and without corsets. The Bard of Ramcat was particularly severe in his public criticism of these women in the general assembly of the Brotherhood. "In the name of beauty, I protest!" he cried. "Beauty is an attribute of God. It is woman's first duty to be beautiful, and if she isn't, at least to make man think she is. I insist that she shall have the widest liberty in the choice of dress. Only let her be careful that she is beautiful!" The poet was heartily applauded, and a resolution was passed which embodied his ideas, approving the widest freedom of choice in dress, approving especially unconventional forms of dress, provided always the ideal of beauty was held inviolate. In his speech advocating the immediate passage of the resolution the Bard urged every woman to outdo herself in the struggle for supreme beauty of appearance at the weekly ball on Friday evening. His resolutions and speech bore surprising fruit. When the festivities were at their height a crowd of fifteen pretty girls suddenly swept into the brilliantly lighted ball-room in tights! The sensation was so instantaneous and overwhelming the music stopped with a crash. The orchestra thought somebody had yelled fire. The girls in their beautiful but unconventional dress tried to appear unconcerned. But even the Bard was appalled at the results. The pretty young chorus-girls had taken him at his word. They had always cherished a secret desire to live in an unconventional real world, where they could have a chance to be themselves, without the hideous skirts of conventional society veiling their beauty. They had brought these costumes with them and joined the new moral world in the firm faith that their ideal would be realized. It had come very slowly, but it had come at last. They donned their beautiful costumes with hearts fluttering in triumphant pride. But they had huddled into a corner of the ball-room in a panic of fright at the insane commotion their honest efforts to promote beauty had caused. One by one every woman in skirts save Barbara and Catherine left the room. The married ones seized their husbands and pushed them out ahead. Norman, who was dancing with Barbara, broke down and burst into a paroxysm of laughter. Some of the girls began to cry, but others made a brave effort to face the crowd of eager, giggling boys who pressed nearer. The Bard approached with a serious look on his noble brow, deliberately put on his glasses and surveyed the crowd. "My dear girls," he began, "I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the sincerity and honesty of your efforts to express beauty in unconventional form, but really this is beyond my wildest expectation." Catherine drove the rude boys out of the room and closed the windows, while Barbara kissed the tears away from the hysterical innovators and led them back to their rooms. The next morning the general assembly held an unusually solemn meeting at which it was voted by a large majority to settle at once and forever the question of dress by adopting a Socialist uniform of scarlet and white for the women, and for the men a dull gray suit with scarlet bands on the sleeve, a scarlet stripe and belt for the trousers. The discussion was brief and Roland Adair, the Bard of Ramcat, protested in vain. CHAPTER XXI A PAIR OF COLD GRAY EYES From the night of the ball at which the group of chorus-girls made their sensational entrance in tights, Norman had his hands full. Disorder had rapidly grown in the Brotherhood. Two distinct parties began to line up for a desperate struggle for supremacy, the one standing for the widest liberty of the individual members of the community, the other demanding the stern enforcement of law and order and the formulation of a complete and strict code of rules for the government of daily conduct. Among the men assigned to various tasks there gradually appeared a number who slighted their work. From carelessness they drifted into utter incompetency and downright laziness. Groups of these loafers began to hang around the house daily. When they had spent the last penny of their credit at the general store of the community, they began to steal. Not a day or night passed but complaints of thefts were made from every department of the colony. One of the most serious of these burglaries was the robbery of the winery of an enormous quantity of the most valuable wines. Drunkenness had already become one of the serious problems of the Brotherhood, and the right to buy of the steward had been denied a large number of men and several women. These people began at once to show signs of intoxication. It was plain that the thieves had hidden this wine and that they were carrying on a secret traffic with those to whom it had been forbidden. With the increase of reckless drunkenness another evil grew with alarming rapidity, the carousing of boisterous men and women. One of them very quickly passed the limits of tolerance. She was in many respects the most beautiful girl in the colony, barely nineteen years old, with luxuriant blond hair, and big, wide, staring baby-blue eyes. She had with it all a smile so saucy, so winsome, so elfish, and yet so innocent, it was impossible for the average man or woman to think ill of her. To every appeal of Barbara she merely showed her pretty white teeth in a winsome smile, promised her anything she asked, and proceeded to do as she liked. At last her room was declared an intolerable nuisance by a committee appointed to enter the complaint on behalf of her neighbours on the floor on which she lived. The night before this committee appealed to Barbara two boys had fought a desperate fist duel in this room. The noise had roused the neighbours, and the case could no longer be ignored by the executive council. Barbara was sent to this room with full power to deal with the offender. "Good heavens," cried the girl, her big blue eyes opening wide with injured innocence, "how could I help it? They're both in love with me. I don't care a rap for either one of them, but they got to fighting, and I couldn't stop them. I threw a pitcher of water on them, but they kept right on. I'd have called the police, but there was none to call. It wasn't my fault." "But my dear Blanche," pleaded Barbara, "can't you see that you are bringing scandal and disgrace into the colony?" "It's not me!" the pretty lips pouted. "It's these old women who are talking. Let them shut their mouths and attend to their own business. I'm not bothering them." "You deny the accusations they bring against your good name?" Barbara said, with some surprise. "Of course I deny them," she snapped. "I've got to have some fun, haven't I? I can't help it that a dozen boys come to see me and nobody ever sees the old tabbies who lie about me, can I? I can't help it that they are old and ugly, can I?" Barbara had ceased to listen to the glib tongue, whose lying chatter tired her. She looked about the room with increasing amazement. It was stuffed with presents of every conceivable description. Costly rugs adorned the floor. Soft pillows filled the couch by the window. Dainty and expensive works of art adorned her mantel, and the richest and most beautiful underwear lay in a smoothly laundered pile on her luxuriant bed. "And how did you get all these costly and beautiful things, my dear?" Barbara asked, with a touch of sarcasm. The big blue eyes opened wide again with wonder. "Why, the boys who are in love with me gave them. Why shouldn't they? I can't help it that they are foolish, can I? God made them so." "And you accepted these rich and costly things in perfect innocence of the evil meaning others might put on them?" "Of course! How can I keep their tongues from wagging? Life's too short. I have but one life to live. I can't waste it worrying over nothing." For the first time in her career Barbara stood face to face with naked evil--with a liar to whom a lie was good--a radiantly beautiful girl to whom shame was sweet. For a moment the thought was suffocating. She looked out of the window at the infinite blue sea until the tears slowly blinded her. The first doubt of her theory of life crept into her heart and threw its shadow over the ideal of the new world she had built. She took the girl's hand, slipped her arm around her neck, kissed the soft, shining hair, and sobbed: "Poor little foolish sister! I'm afraid you've broken my heart to-day." "I haven't done a thing! Honestly, I haven't!" the lusty young liar rattled on and on, in a hundred silly, vain protests, which Barbara never heard. She left the room at length with a sickening sense of defeat, though the girl had promised her on the honour of her soul never again to give the slightest cause for complaint. Many a day she had trudged through the streets of the great city, after hours of nerve-racking struggles with sin and shame and despair in the old world, but she had always come home at night with a heart singing a battle-hymn of victory. She knew the cause of all the pain, and she had given her life to right the wrong. Nothing daunted her, nothing disconcerted her. In the end triumph was sure, and while she felt this there could be no such thing as failure. She stood before the full meeting of the executive council, honestly reported the case, and for the first time tasted the bitterness of defeat, helpless, complete, and overwhelming. While she was talking a peculiar expression in Wolf's cold gray eyes suddenly caught her attention and fixed her gaze on him with a curious fascination and horror. Wolf was quick to note her look, recovered himself and smiled in his old fatherly, friendly way. "Don't worry, comrade. We've got to meet and settle such questions. They are merely the inheritance of civilization. It will take a little time, that's all." But as Barbara's gaze lingered on the heavy brutal lines of Wolf's massive figure and she caught again the gleam of his gray eyes a sickening sense of foreboding gripped her heart. CHAPTER XXII THE FIGHTING INSTINCT As questions of discipline became more and more pressing old Tom refused to sit as an active judge in the executive council. Norman protested in vain against his decision to retire for a while. "I can't do no good settin' thar listenin' to them fools," the miner declared. "They make me sick. Besides, ye all vote me down when I tells ye what to do, and things keep on goin' from bad to worse. Jest let me git out and move around among the boys a little. I think I can do some good. You folks is all too chicken-hearted to run this Brotherhood. Love and fellowship is all right, but ye've got ter mix a little law and common sense before ye can straighten the kinks out of this here community." Norman gave his consent reluctantly, and was amazed at the end of a week to observe a remarkable improvement in the spirit of the colony. Loafers disappeared, stealing all but ceased, drinking and fighting were on the decrease. One by one old Tom had taken the loafers with him on a long walk up the beach. He was usually gone about an hour and always came back laughing and chatting with his friend in the best of humour. Invariably the loafer went to work. In the same way he took a walk with each one of a crowd of wild, unmannerly boys, whose rudeness at the table and whose horse-play about the building had become unendurable. The effects of these walks seemed magical. Always the pair returned in a fine humour and the most marked revolution was immediately noted in the conduct of the offender. Norman asked the old man again and again for the secret of his power. He replied in the most casual way: "Just had a plain heart-to-heart talk with 'em and told 'em what had to be--that's all." The good work had continued for a week with uninterrupted success, when a bomb was suddenly exploded in the executive council by the appearance of an irate mother leading an insolent fourteen-year-old cub, who walked rather stiffly. Amid a silence that was painful, the mother stripped the boy to the waist, thrust him before Norman and Barbara, and said: "Now, tell them what you've just told me." The boy glanced cautiously around to see if his enemy were near and poured forth a tale the like of which had never been heard before. "Old Tom asked me to take a walk with him. He got me away off in a lonely place behind the big rocks on that little island up the beach and pulled up a plank drawbridge so I couldn't get back till he wanted to let me. He stripped me like this, tied me to a whipping-post and nearly beat the life out of me. He said he'd been appointed by the council to settle with me in private so nobody would know anything about it." "Said that he had been appointed by the council to whip you?" Norman asked, in amazement. "That's what he said, sir," the boy went on. "He gave me forty-nine lashes with a cowhide and then set down and talked to me a half hour." "And what did he say?" Norman inquired, forcing back a smile by a desperate effort. "He told me that he tried to get out of the work, but the council had forced it on him. Said there oughtn't to be no hard feelings, that it was a dirty, tiresome job, and he didn't have no pleasure in it, but it had to be done for the salvation of the people. He said it wasn't wise to talk about such things among the Brotherhood. I told him I'd tell my ma the minute I got home. He said that would be foolish, that none of the others had said a word, that they had all taken their medicine like little men." "He told you he had whipped all the others who had taken that walk with him?" Norman gasped. "That's what he said, sir," the boy insisted, "and I guess he had, for they'd pawed a hole in the sand 'round that whipping-post big enough to bury a horse in." The boy paused and his mother shook him angrily. "Tell what else he said to you!" The cub glanced hastily toward the door and whispered: "Said if I opened my mouth about what had happened he'd skin me alive." The council sent the mother and son away with the assurance of immediate action. The court adjourned and Norman started with Barbara at once to find Tom. Faithful to his new calling he had strolled up the beach with a man who once had been his partner as a prospector and miner. Joe Weatherby had been drinking heavily the week before and Tom had keenly felt the disgrace his old partner had brought on the Brotherhood by his rudeness in the dining-room. Joe had thrown a plate of soup in the face of a boy who was making facetious remarks about his capacity for strong drink. When rebuked by his neighbours he had accentuated his displeasure by overturning the table and smashing every dish on it. He ended the affair by roundly cursing the Brotherhood for its rules and regulations interfering with his personal liberty, threw his pack on his back, and struck the trail for the mountains to prospect for gold. He had just returned, after a week's absence, and Tom seized the opportunity to invite Joe to take a walk with him. Knowing the character of the two men, Norman felt quite sure this walk could not possibly have the usual happy ending that attended so many of these performances. He quickened his pace. "Hurry, or we may have a funeral for our next function," he cried, with a laugh. A quarter of a mile up the beach the sound of loud angry words suddenly struck their ears from behind a pile of huge boulders. "Quick, we're just in time!" Barbara cried, "they've begun to quarrel." They cautiously approached the boulders and climbed to the top of the larger one overlooking the scene Tom had evidently chosen for his debate with Joe. "Hadn't you better part them now?" Barbara asked with some anxiety. "No, I'll stop them in time. I want to get acquainted with Tom's methods of persuasion first." Tom's voice was rising in accents of wrath. "Joe, I'm a man o' peace--I'm a member o' the Brotherhood and you're my brother, but I'll tell ye right now we've got to have law and order in this community----" "And I say, Tom Mooney, there hain't no law exceptin' what's inside a man." "Yes, but how kin ye git any law inside a man ef he's always chuck full er licker?" "I don't drink to 'mount to nothin'," Joe protested. "Just a drop now an' then ter keep me in good health." "Wall, ef you try any more capers in that dinin'-room, your health's goin' ter break clean down--yer hear me?" Joe eyed Tom a moment and said with sharp emphasis: "I reckon I can take care o' myself, partner, without you settin' up nights to worry about me." "That's just the trouble, Joe, ye can't. You jined the Brotherhood, but yer faith's gettin' weak. I'm afeard you're onregenerate, conceived in sin an' brought forth in iniquity, an' ye ain't had no change er heart nohow." "Look here, what are ye drivin' at?" Joe asked, beginning to back away cautiously. "I just want ter strengthen yer faith, partner," Tom protested kindly as he advanced good-naturedly and laid his hand on Joe's arm. Joe shook it off and turned to go. With a sudden spring Tom was on him. A brief, fierce struggle ensued marked by low, savage growls like two bull-dogs clinched and searching for each other's throats. "Stop them! Stop them! They'll kill one another," pleaded Barbara. "No. It'll do them good. Wait," he replied, watching them breathlessly. "Here! Here, you old fool," growled Joe. "Do you call this the Brotherhood of Man?" "Yes, my son, and specially the Fatherhood er God. The Lord chastens them he loveth!" With a sudden twist the writhing figures fell in the sand, Tom on top pinning Joe down. Joe fought with fierce strength to rise but it was no use. Tom clutched his throat and choked him steadily into submission. "I'm er man o' peace, Joe," he repeated. "Yes, you are!" the bottom one growled. "But when I mingles with the unregenerate, my son, I trusts in God an' keeps my powder dry!" "Let me up, you old fool!" Joe growled. "Not yet, my son!" was the firm answer. "You'll get my dander up in a minute and some body's goin' ter git hurt," warned the prostrate figure. "Please make them quit," Barbara whispered tremblingly. "Nonsense. They're enjoying themselves," Norman softly laughed. "What are you tryin' ter do anyhow?" whined Joe. "I'm callin' a lost sinner to repentance," was the prompt answer. "Lemme up, I tell ye," Joe yelled, struggling with desperation. Tom choked him again into silence and seated himself comfortably across Joe's stomach. "Now, Joseph, my boy. I want you ter say over the catechism of the Brotherhood of Man. Hit'll freshen yer mind an' be good fer yer soul----" Another grim struggle interrupted the teacher. "Say it after me: I believe in the fatherhood er God----" Joe squirmed. "Say it!" Still no sound. Tom firmly gripped his throat and Joe gurgled: "Fatherhood er God!" "And brotherhood o' man!" "Brotherhood er man!" "Yer believe it now?" Tom fiercely asked. Joe feebly assented. Tom gripped his throat. "Say it strong!" "Yes--I believe it!" Joe confessed. Again the under man struggled desperately and the man on top fiercely choked him into a quieter frame of mind. "Now again: No drunkard shall inherit the kingdom er God!" Joe repeated, "No drunkard--shall--what?" "Inherit--the--kingdom--er God--by golly you've forgot yer Bible too!" "Inherit--the--kingdom er--God!" "Who shall not inherit the kingdom of God?" "No drunkard!" Joe answered. "Let that soak into yer lost soul!" Tom growled, pausing a moment. "Now once more! Bear--ye--one--another's burdens!" Joe hesitated and the man on top bumped the words out of him one at a time: "Bear--ye--one--another's--burdens!" "An' ye're goin' ter help me bear mine?" the teacher asked. "Ain't I a-doin' it now?" grumbled the man below. "Well, once more then: Private property is theft!" "That's a lie an' you know it," Joe sneered. "The big chief says so and it goes--say it!" "Private property is theft," Joe repeated. "Well, then, once more: Love--one--another!" "Love one another," came the feeble echo. "Do ye love me?" Tom fiercely inquired. Joe struggled. "Say it!" commanded the teacher. "I love ye," he groaned. Norman suddenly appeared on the scene followed by Barbara and the two miners leaped to their feet. "Tom, old boy," the young leader cried, "you mean well, but we are told by the preacher that the kingdom of God cometh not of observation--it must be from within." "Just goin' over his Sunday-school lesson with him, Chief." Joe made a hostile movement, and Norman stepped between them. "Come! You two big kids--enough of this now, shake hands and make up!" The men both hung back stubbornly. Norman turned to Tom. "Were you not partners and friends before you joined the Brotherhood?" "Yes," the old miner replied grudgingly. "We bin tergether twelve years an' we worked an' played tergether, starved an' froze tergether, lived tergether, an' slept under the same blanket--he's the only partner I ever had--an' he's my best friend"--Tom paused and choked--"but I don't like 'im!" "Shake hands and make up!" Barbara laughed. They hung back a moment longer until Barbara's smile became resistless. Joe extended his hand, exclaiming: "Shake, you old coyote!" Norman gave Joe a serious talk--got a pledge from him to quit drink and stand by him in his efforts to bring order out of the confusion and chaos in which the colony was floundering. "You think I can do anything to help you?" Joe asked incredulously. "Of course you can. You and Tom are two men I've known all my life. I know where to find you if I get into trouble." "Is there goin' ter be any trouble?" Tom broke in, eagerly. "Not yet, but it's coming. When it does we'll fight it out and win. I've set my life on the issue of this experiment." Joe extended him his hand. "I'm sorry I got drunk. I won't do it again--we'll stand by ye!" "Through thick an' thin," Tom added. "And hereafter, Tom," Norman said with a smile, "I'd like to be consulted before you hold any more sessions of your court up the beach." Tom started. "You've heard about it?" "Yes." "By gum, I knowed I oughter licked that kid again!" the old miner observed, regretfully. Norman, said gravely: "Tom, we are getting into deep water. I've begun to have some doubts about our safety. A leader must lead. And I'm going to do it. Can I depend on you to execute my orders and mine alone?" "Every day in the year," was the firm reply. "The same here," Joe echoed. Barbara had drawn apart from the group of men and stood watching them with keen, suspicious interest as the two miners started homeward with restored good humour. "What did you mean by saying that you were afraid of coming trouble?" Barbara eagerly asked of Norman. "What have you heard? What do you suspect?" "Nothing," he answered, thoughtfully. "But I've had the blues for a week. It's been growing on me that we are not getting on except into situations more and more impossible. There's a screw loose somewhere in our system. There's going to be a wreck unless we find and repair it." "I have felt this, too, and I think I know the cause." "What?" "Liberty which has degenerated into licence. We lack authority and the power to enforce it." "And this is the one thing we cursed in the old system--the law, power, authority." "No," Barbara quickly objected. "We did not rebel against law or the exercise of authority. We rebelled against its unjust use." "And what depresses me is that I am convinced that we must use the power of law with more stern, direct, and personal pressure than ever known under the system of capitalism, or we must fail." "Is not such pressure desirable?" "It depends on who applies the pressure--but it seems inevitable--and it depresses me." Barbara broke into a joyous laugh. "Away with gloomy forebodings! It's only a day's fog. It will lift. The sun is shining behind it now." Her laughter was contagious. Norman smiled in quick sympathy, and a response of hope and courage was just forming itself on his lips when he looked toward the house and saw an excited crowd packed in the doorway. "What on earth is the matter?" Barbara gasped. "Some accident has happened," he replied, quickly. "Come, we must hurry!" Catherine's lithe figure darted down the steps and met them on the lawn. "What is it?" Norman cried. "A murder!" "A murder?" Barbara repeated, incredulously. "Yes--wilful, deliberate, cruel, horrible!" Catherine went on excitedly. "Not old Tom and Joe?" Norman broke in. "No--Blanche----" "Oh, God, I knew it," Barbara gasped. "Go on." "Blanche kept on playing fast and loose with the two boys who fought over her the other night. George Mann found his rival in her room just now, waylaid him in the hall, and when he came out sprang on him like a fiend, stabbed him through the heart and cut his throat. The brothers of the dead boy swear they will kill the murderer on sight, and they've locked him in your room, Norman, for safety. The men are excited to frenzy. Nobody likes the boy who did the crime. The rougher ones swear they are going to hang him. They tried to break in your door twice, but Herman knocked the ringleaders down and with Tom and Joe beat the crowd back. Something must be done at once to prevent another outbreak." Norman hurried to the scene and joined Wolf in his defence of the prisoner. Tom formed a guard of ten men heavily armed and marched the prisoner to the top of the house, placed him in the small room in one of the central towers, and stationed one man inside and five on the stairway leading into the tower. The executive council met immediately and voted unanimously to erect a prison, establish a penal colony on the small island at the north of Ventura, and restore the whipping-post for minor offenders. The announcement of this momentous act was made to the general assembly without request for debate or an expression of opinion. It was received in silence. The Bard could not protest. He was still confined to his room from the effects of a recent argument with his wife. CHAPTER XXIII THE CORDS TIGHTEN On Wolf's urgent advice Norman determined to use the autocratic power invested in him by the deed of gift to establish a complete code of law and enforce it without fear or favour. As the cords tightened, scores who became dissatisfied with their lot offered their resignations and asked to return to their old homes. In answer to their clamour Norman posted this notice on the bulletin board: "Every member of the army of the Brotherhood of Man enlisted for five years' service. Resignations will not be considered and deserters will be tried by court-martial. I am going to use my power for the best interests of the Brotherhood. I ask the coöperation of all the loyal members of the colony. Of traitors I ask no quarter, and I expect to give none. "NORMAN WORTH, "_Trustee and General Manager_." The effects of the proclamation were instantaneous. The helplessness of any attempt to resist authority firmly established under such daring leadership was at once apparent to the most stupid mind. Loafing, drinking, stealing, carousing, and disorder of all kind were reduced at once to a minimum. One act, however, of the executive council under Norman's direction precipitated a storm in an unexpected quarter. The council removed Blanche and a group of wayward girls with whom she associated to a cottage outside the lawn. The women of the Brotherhood were practically unanimous in their demands that the whole group be immediately expelled from the colony. A committee of three aggressive women presented their demand to Norman in no uncertain language. His reply was equally emphatic: "Comrades," he said, firmly, "I shall do nothing of the kind. We are going to work out this experiment in human society without compromise. We have successfully cut communication with the outside world. The crew of our ship are no longer allowed to land and only picked men unload her cargo. We are not going to play the baby act and dump these girls back on the old civilization which we have denounced. They may be wayward but they are our sisters." "They are not mine," shouted one of the committee. "The brazen creatures! And we do not propose to have our sons and daughters corrupted by association with them." "Then we must find some other solution than that of transportation," Norman insisted. "Send them to the penal colony, then," demanded the committee. "And back in a circle we immediately travel to the crimes of civilization from which we fled. I prefer to send the boys who associate with them. They are the real offenders." "I deny that assertion," firmly declared the leader of the committee. "My boy is one of the unfortunate victims of these brazen wretches. Before we came to this island he never gave me a word of impudence. From the night he met Blanche at our first ball he was beyond my advice or control. These girls are the enemies of society and this colony cannot exist if they remain within its life." "I refuse to believe it," Norman cried, with scorn. "It is your duty to reform these girls and restore them to mental and physical sanity, and as the leader of this colony I direct you to take up this divine work." "And I, for one," spoke, for the first time, the silent gray-haired member of the committee, "refuse to smirch my hands with the task." Norman, looked into the calm face of this white-haired, motherly looking woman with amazement. "I can't understand you, comrade mother!" he exclaimed, with bitterness. "That's because you're young, handsome, inexperienced, and, above all, because you are a man," was the quick reply. "I have spent a busy life since my own children grew out of the home nest in New York City in trying to help other people's children less fortunate than my own. I've helped scores of boys and never had one to disappoint me yet. I've tried to help scores of girls of the type we are discussing. I've always regretted it. I found them shallow, false, lazy, stupid, worthless. I have never looked at one of them except to blush that I am a woman. I speak from the saddest and most hopeless experiences of my life." Norman cut the argument short with a gesture of angry impatience. "This discussion is a waste of breath. As long as I am in command of this colony no such insane act of injustice shall be committed against these girls." "Then it's time you gave place to a man of greater wisdom and less sentimental mush in his brain," replied the calm, gray-haired woman. "Thank you," the young leader replied, with chilling politeness, "you may be right--but in the meantime I accept the responsibility. Good day." He had made three enemies whose power he was soon to feel. As they passed through the doorway Catherine greeted them politely and soothed their ruffled spirits with gentle words. CHAPTER XXIV SOME INTERROGATION POINTS The establishment of a police and detective service completed the efficient organization of the colony. Its life now began to move with clock-like regularity. But these changes were not made without provoking fierce debates and bitter prophecies in the general assembly over which Norman presided every Friday night. He began to listen to these endless wrangles, however, with a sense of growing anger. It became clearer each week that they were the source of cliques and factions, of plots and counter-plots, within the colony. His patience reached the limit on the night he announced the completion of the jail. "This is a sad present I am forced to make you to-night, comrades," he said, with a note of weariness in his voice. "But I have no choice in the matter. It was forced on the executive council. Crimes were committed which threatened the existence of our society. We had to meet the issue squarely. We could have begged the question by calling in the authorities of the State of California, acknowledged our defeat, and surrendered. We are not ready to surrender. We haven't begun to fight yet." He had scarcely taken his seat when Diggs, the human interrogation-point, slowly unwound his lank figure, adjusted his eye-glasses, and gazed smilingly at the chairman. Norman squirmed with rage as the glint of light from Diggs's big lenses began to irritate his spirit. Barbara slipped her little hand under the table and found his. He clasped it gratefully and refused to let go. She allowed him to hold it a minute and drew it away laughing. "Comrades," the man of questions slowly began, "we are making rapid progress. Our new building will soon be finished and another colony of two thousand enthusiastic souls will be added to our commonwealth. If we are going to successfully carry on this work we must begin to develop with infinite patience the details of this larger life. "I submit to you some questions that are profoundly interesting to me. "How are we to prevent speculation, wages being unequal? How is one community to exchange products with another? How determine which line of goods each community shall make? "What is to be done with a strong minority who are bitterly opposed to the action of the majority when we assume our permanent democratic form? "How are the thousand and one matters pertaining to private life and habits to be settled without continually augmenting the power of government? The authority of the most absolute despot who ever lived never dared to sit on questions we must decide. Can we do it? "If we are ever to attain a condition of equality must we not forbid gifts and exchanges? For, if men are not to be allowed to grow rich by trading, must not the State forbid private exchanges of every nature? "On the other hand, if the State alone can make exchanges, how can we prevent a shrewd man from getting rich by dealing with the State itself? "If the State will not make exchanges, what is one to do who has taken a piece of property and finds later he has no use for it? For example: if Miss Blanche grows tired of looking at her piano, which she cannot play, and desires to exchange it for a carriage and pair of horses, must she continue to walk because she cannot effect the exchange? [Illustration: BARBARA.] "If we solve these troubles by declaring all property in common, who shall decide the privilege of use which the various tastes of individuals may demand? "If each member be allowed a fixed number of units of value for each day of the year, must he spend them at once, or will the State keep an account for each individual? If he doesn't spend all his allowance by the end of the year can he save it and thus accumulate a private fortune? "Or will the State force him to spend all, thus encouraging reckless habits? "Suppose that a spendthrift squanders his allowance at once and later breaks his leg, has it amputated, and needs a hundred dollars to buy a wooden leg, how will he get it? Will the State make good his recklessness, force him to buy his own leg, or make him hop through the year on one leg?" "I move we adjourn!" Joe yelled, from the rear. "Second the motion!" Tom echoed, from the front. The Bard, who had recovered sufficiently to attend on crutches, rose painfully, adjusted the bandage on his eye, and once more raised his voice in protest. "I demand freedom of speech on behalf of my friend whom those rowdies are insulting!" he thundered. With reluctance the chairman rapped for order, and Diggs wiped his glasses and smilingly proceeded: "We have established a general nursery for the children. As they grow up, who shall decide at what age each child shall begin to work? Some children are slow, some quick in growth. Will the new State of Ventura take direct charge of all children? "Or, supposing that separate families are allowed to live apart and parents to govern their own children, how is each child to be protected so that it gets its exact due? How is it to be known whether the parents misappropriate the fund of a child, or favour one more than another? "As our numbers increase we cannot avoid the religious question." "Amen, O Lord!" shouted Methodist John. "A number of good people are clamouring for the use of this hall for religious services every night. We may deny their demands now. But we cannot as they increase. How are we to meet them? Shall we tax the unbeliever to support a church? Or shall we tax the believer to pay for lighting this hall for a weekly ball? "If religion is allowed, who shall determine how many preachers each denomination can have? How many sisters shall be allowed the Catholics and how many monks, and how shall they be distributed? To whom shall they answer, the State, or their superior church dignitary? "Shall Protestants be allowed a sum equal to the amount used in support of religious orders? If so, who shall determine how it shall be expended? "If churches are built, who shall determine their cost and their style of architecture if the State erects them? "When our theatre is opened, shall admission be free? If not, what shall be done when the receipts fall below expenses? "What compensation can we give to those who hate theatres? If a small majority want a dance-hall and musical extravaganza, and a minority want only the serious drama, which shall it be? Suppose a majority demand a race-course? Shall the resources of the colony be used thus against the bitter protest of those who do not believe in racing? Suppose, just before the race-course is finished, the majority become a minority and the work is stopped--has the new majority the right to destroy the property and accumulate a new fund for a different purpose? "Must a doctor always come when he's called--even for imaginary, hysterical, and foolish causes? Will the people vote for and elect their own doctor, or will he be assigned? If the doctor proves a failure, how will they get rid of him? If they get rid of him, how can he be saddled on another community? Shall one community suffer at the hands of an incompetent man, while a physician of genius ministers to the one next door? If a great surgeon is needed by ten persons at the same hour, who shall decide which operation he shall perform, and who shall live or die in consequence? "Who shall say when a doctor is not fit to practise? "We have just established a weekly paper. Within a year the population will need a daily. Who shall say when an editor is competent? "Some men fail in early life and make their great success later. At what period, or after how long a trial, shall it be decided that a man is a failure and must quit his chosen or assigned work? "Many young men promise well at first and make later miserable failures. Many are failures at first and make great successes. Who shall decide which to continue and which to stop? If a youth is forced to abandon a work on which he has set his heart, how can he be made of service to the community in a work he loathes? "We must continue to make inventions, or progress ceases. When the cost of experiments is greater than the total income of a citizen, how can the inventor bear the expense? Will any man sacrifice his own funds and his own time on an uncertain experiment when he can receive no benefit from the work? "Many men are working now over problems all other men believe cannot be solved. If the State must furnish the capital to make the experiments of inventors, who will be responsible for the enormous waste of treasure on senseless and useless and impossible inventions? "Who can decide whether ideas proposed are useless or impossible? All great inventions which have revolutionized the history of ages have been laughed at by the world. "How can we punish the jobbery and waste and corruption which may enter from experiments which are not made in good faith? Cannot any group of shrewd men pretend to have invented a machine which will save over half the labour of the colony, and spend millions on this imaginary invention which proves useless? If such an abuse of power should be made, would not the effect be to end forever all experiments and stop the progress of the world? "When many cities have been built and one is more healthful, beautiful, and cultured than the others, shall those who live in the poorer cities be allowed to move or be forced to remain where they are? How are sculptors, artists, musicians, or architects to be apportioned among different communities? Suppose they all demand the right to live in one place? "Will the State publish all books by all authors, or will selections be made? If all books are published will not vast sums be wasted in printing worthless trash? If selections are made, what unprejudiced, infallible board can be found competent to decide? "If a man chooses to be a writer, how many years shall he be allowed to work at his occupation if in the opinion of the judges he shows no talent? "Will the State permit freedom of opinion in the columns of its papers and the books printed? If so, what shall hinder a treasonable conspiracy from destroying respect for its authority? If opinions are to be edited by the State, how can the freedom of the press be maintained? "What shall be done with the Negro, the Chinaman, and the Indian when their numbers largely increase? Will these inferior races be placed on an absolute equality with the Aryan and will they be allowed to freely intermarry? If so, can the new mongrel race maintain itself against the progress and power of the great high-bred races of men? "Are women to receive the same allowance as men, and married women the same as spinsters? "Shall men and women be required to marry or be allowed to remain single? Shall all women be made to work? If it continues to cost more to support a single woman than a married one, how can equality of rights be maintained? "As food is the basis of all supply, many must be farmers. How shall this great industry be conducted ultimately? Can we allow individuals to work small farms? If so, who determines the kind of crop each farm shall raise? How much land will a man be required to work? "An Italian from the north of Italy can raise more on one acre than an Irishman can on ten--whose method shall be used, and whose capacity be taken for the standard? "How many hours shall constitute a day on the farm? Shall a farmhand get only a dollar a day and a bricklayer two? If so, where is the justice and equality of such an arrangement? "Can a farmer be allowed vacations? If so, must he ask permission where to go? If not, suppose he goes at seedtime or harvest, gets drunk, stays two weeks or two months, and destroys a year's crop? Who shall pay for this enormous damage, and how shall the penalty be enforced? "Suppose a poor manager spoils the crop on an immense tract of land, how can any adequate penalty be enforced? "Shall one general manager decide what kind of crops to raise on each piece of land or each manager decide for himself? Suppose they all raise hay----" "Then you'll have plenty to eat the balance of your life--you and all the other jackasses in the colony!" old Tom growled. A laugh rippled the crowd and the speaker paused in angry confusion. For the first time he lost his temper and stood glaring at his tormentors in silent rage. Norman whispered to Barbara: "Wolf has urged me for some time to suppress this meeting. Shall I do it?" "Yes. It's a nuisance. I agree with him. Do it." Norman rose just as Diggs sat down choking with anger. "Comrades," the young leader said, in commanding tones. "I think this assembly has completed its work of discussion. The questions propounded here to-night are important. We will meet and solve them in due time, as we come to them. What this community needs now is the spirit of coöperation, of loyalty, and industry. We have been assigned our tasks for the year. Now every man to his work! We have had enough of wrangling and questioning. Let's live and breathe awhile. The executive council has decided to close the weekly sessions of the assembly until the annual election of officers next spring. Hereafter a musicale and dance will be held both Monday and Friday evenings." The young folks broke into hearty applause led by old Tom and his partner Joe. The Bard sprang to his feet, his one good eye blazing with inspired wrath. "And I denounce this act of tyranny as the climax of a series of infamies! You have now forged the chains of slavery on every limb. Free speech has been suppressed--in God's name, what next?" But the crowd only laughed. The Bard had protested so often his words ceased to have weight. The halo of romance that once wreathed his classic brow had faded with the painful disillusioning which followed a thrashing his wife had given him. He was a prophet without honour and his warnings fell on deaf ears. Wolf and Catherine stood at the door with a word of cheer, a friendly nod, or a silent pressure of the hand for every one who emerged from the hall. These two alone at every turn grew in prestige among all jarring factions of the struggling colony. CHAPTER XXV THE MASTER HAND The whole machinery of the colony responded instantly to the grip of the master's hand. It was the one thing needed to insure successful progress. When the Brotherhood realized that the young poet-athlete was not merely a love-sick dreamer and theorist, but a man of quick decisions, of firm and inflexible will, and the power to execute his will, they fell in line, caught the step, and order emerged from chaos. When a crisis called for decision he made it with lightning rapidity and stuck to it. The situation demanded a dictatorship for the moment, and he did not hesitate to assume it. He saw before him sure success. If fools and cranks interfered with his plans he would crush and push them aside. The consciousness of power and its daily exercise developed his faculties to their highest tension. His mind began to arrange every detail of the vast and complicated system of the new social scheme. Men became the mere tools with which he would work out the revolution in human society. Every scrap of knowledge he had ever gained flashed through his excited imagination and fell into its place in the creation of the new order. He put the machine-shops to work constructing the big gold dredge on which he had experimented one summer. He had a pet scheme of farming which had come into his mind from watching his father's gardener the year before raise the most delicious cantaloups he had ever tasted. He discovered the secret of their marvellous sweetness and leaped to an instantaneous conclusion. He had the opportunity to test this inspiration now on a scale as vast as his dreams. He called the superintendents and overseers of the farm together, and asked their plans for the crop on the five hundred acres of fertile lands under cultivation. They gave him their schedule for a variety of crops. "Won't this soil grow cantaloups?" he asked. They all reported that it would. "Then I suggest that the entire acreage be planted in these vines." To a man they declared the plan absurd. "But suppose," he persisted, "that we raise and send to the East the most delicious melon they have ever tasted, and suppose we get three dollars a crate, we will make three hundred dollars an acre and our first crop will be worth one hundred and fifty thousand dollars." They laughed at him. "Do you know," smilingly inquired the superintendent, "how much it will cost to plant and harvest such a crop?" "I should say twenty-five dollars an acre," he replied. "Double it," he cried. "Very well, fifty dollars an acre," Norman agreed. "In round numbers it will cost us twenty-five thousand dollars. That leaves a profit of more than a hundred thousand, doesn't it?" Again the superintendent laughed. "And would you risk this enormous sum on one experiment? Suppose your melons would not be sweet?" "There is no such possibility," the young enthusiast declared. "Their sweetness depends solely on two things--the quality of the seed and the quantity of rain which falls on them while they are growing. We are wasting a supreme opportunity. No rain falls in Ventura during the summer. We get our water to the roots by irrigation, not by rainfall. Get the right seed and your melons must be perfect. This is a scientific fact I have seen demonstrated. Try it on a vast scale and success is sure." They voted unanimously against the proposition. Norman insisted. The superintendent resigned and appealed to the executive council. Wolf and Catherine, Tom and Barbara advised against placing so much capital in a single enterprise. "I've got to make you rich and successful in spite of yourselves," Norman finally declared. "For the present I control these funds and I'm going to plant this crop. So that settles it. I'm sorry we can't agree." His instantaneous decision fairly took Wolf's breath. Barbara laughed and congratulated him. "At least you have the courage of your convictions. I can't help admiring it." As further opposition was useless, the order was put into execution. The superintendent finally caught the young man's spirit, withdrew his resignation, and undertook the work with enthusiasm. At the end of the summer the success of the colony was astounding. The wildest prediction of the young leader fell below the facts. The crop of cantaloups averaged one hundred and five crates to the acre, and brought three dollars and a half a crate. The net profit on the melons reached the enormous total of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The men who raised the crop and added this wealth to the treasury of the colony were not slow in demanding an immediate readjustment of the scale of wages. Two hundred and fifty men had done all the work of planting, cultivating, harvesting this crop and added ten times as much to the year's income as the combined labour of all the other members of the colony. Brick-masons were receiving two dollars a day and farm-hands one dollar. The miners who were digging for gold in the mountain ranges and on the beaches were receiving five dollars a day and had added as yet not a single dollar to the wealth of the community. They had discovered gold in three new districts and thousands of dollars had been wasted in vain efforts to make it pay. The farmers protested bitterly against such waste, and demanded the equalization of wages. Their spokesman astonished Norman by the vehemence and audacity of their demands: "If Socialism means justice," he shouted, "now is the time to prove it! Labour creates all value. We have created one hundred and fifty thousand dollars' worth of wealth for the colony and we have received a mere pittance. If we created this wealth----" "Wait a minute, comrades," Norman interrupted, with irritation. "Why should you continue to repeat that foolish assertion? You didn't create this wealth." "Then I'd like to know who did?" shouted the orator. "We turned the soil, placed the fertilizers, planted every seed, cultivated every vine, pulled every melon, packed and placed them on the steamer. If we didn't make the wealth, who did?" "I did," the young leader declared. "I conceived the possibility of this crop. I tried to persuade your superintendent and overseers. They had no faith. I forced them to plant these particular seeds against their own wishes. Your labour is a fixed thing year in and year out. All men must work or die. All life is a struggle thus with tooth and nail for a living. The creator of wealth is the superior intelligence that conceives something better than this clodhopper's daily task. You did what you were told to do. Your hands would have worked just as many hours at labour just as tiresome over a crop of beans that wouldn't have paid a profit at all this year. Wealth belongs to its creator. I made the crop, your hands were the mere automata which my brain directed. Your demands are absurd. I refuse to consider them or to permit their discussion." The farmers refused point-blank to submit to this decision, and voted unanimously to quit work until they were given justice. Every plough stopped and the entire machinery of food production came to a dead standstill. Norman threatened to refuse them admission to the dining-hall unless they returned to work, and they boldly replied that they would smash the door down and take what was their own. Had the farmers been alone in their demands for an equalization of wages, the situation would have been easier to handle. But discontent over the question of wages had been growing steadily since the day of the decision that wages should be unequal. The distinctions of wealth and poverty were rapidly making their appearance as in the old world. The cook had married a scrubwoman and the scrubwoman's daughter had married the drainman who had charge of the sewers. The combine income of the two highest-salaried workers in the colony had at once formed the nucleus of a new aristocracy of wealth. The strike of the entire farming division of the colony was the match thrown in the powder magazine. Discontent flamed in every department of labour. The demand for absolute equality of wages became resistless. It was the only thing which could once more bring order out of chaos. Norman called a meeting of the general assembly and submitted the question for their discussion and decision. The debate was long, fierce, and bitter. In vain did the young leader plead with those who were receiving the highest rates that the profits of the colony would be greater and that each would share alike in the total wealth of the community. They denounced the proposed act as the climax of infamy. The chef was furious. "You give me the wages of a clodhopper and ask me to prepare a table fit for a king. Well, try it, and see what you get." He sat down repeating his threat in a series of endless announcements to the people around him. "I think he'll poison us all if you pass this law," Barbara whispered. "The farmers will run us through with their pitchforks if we don't," he laughed. "Poisoning is the easier way," she sighed. The leader of the brass band raised the biggest row of all. From the first these men had refused to lift their hand to do a thing except to play at stated hours each day and furnish the music for the three evenings of social amusement. "You place me on an equality with the lout who holds a calf or the clodhopper who holds a plough--I, who feed the soul with ravishing melody--I, who lift man from earth to heaven on the wings of angels!" The band leader swelled with righteous wrath and sat down beside the cook who was still muttering incoherently: "Let 'em try it--and see what they get!" Yet, in spite of the fierce threats of the cook, the scrubwoman, the drainman, the musician, and all the high-salaried favourites of labour, the inevitable occurred. When put to a vote equal wages were established by an overwhelming majority. Each member of the colony, man, woman, and child, was voted free food, clothes, and shelter, and a credit of five hundred dollars a year at the Brotherhood store. The executive council was abolished and in its place a board of governors established, composed of the heads of each department of labour and presided over by two regents, a man and a woman, elected by the general assembly. Norman and Barbara were elected regents without opposition, and the old heads of each department of labour placed on the board of governors to serve until the approaching annual election. The assembly proposed: "Article I. of the constitution of the new State of Ventura as follows: "Every citizen of the State must labour according to his ability. Those who can work and will not shall be made to work." No man who voted this simple and obviously just law could dream of the tremendous results. It was merely the enactment into statutory law of the first principle of an effective Socialism: "From every man according to his ability, unto every man according to his needs." The first obvious requirement of such a law was an immediate increase of the police and detective force at the command of the regents and the board of governors. Norman thanked the assembly for the promptness and thoroughness which had characterized their work, and closed his congratulations with a sentence of peculiarly sinister meaning to the man who had ears to hear. "Hereafter, comrades, we can move forward without another pause. There can never be another strike on the island of Ventura. The State is now supreme." The Wolfs, who had modestly declined all office, were omnipresent during the long sessions of the assembly, which had lasted two days. Everywhere they had counselled compromise, forbearance, good fellowship, moving quietly from group to group in the big hall, and always winning new friends. Wolf's gnarled hand gripped Norman's at the close of the meeting as he bent his massive head and whispered: "A great day's work, Comrade Chief--one that will make history." The young leader's face clouded as he slowly replied: "I wish I were sure that it will be history of the right kind." "You doubt it?" the old leader asked incredulously. "It all depends on our leadership." "With your hand on the helm"--Wolf paused and smiled curiously--"the ship of State is safe." CHAPTER XXVI AT THE PARTING OF THE WAYS Again the colony entered on a period of active and efficient industry. Every man was at his post and did the work assigned him. Eight hours was fixed as a working day in all departments. The first acts of insubordination were promptly suppressed. The discipline of an army was strictly enforced--the guard-house and whipping-post were found sufficient. No report except the most favourable had ever reached the outside world, and thousands of applicants in San Francisco were clamouring for admission. The new colony house with accommodation for two thousand had been completed, and another of like size was under way. Wolf had urged Norman to admit a new colony at once and prepare for the third. But the difficulties of government and the fights within the Brotherhood had alarmed the young leader. He hesitated, and the big new building as yet remained empty. As the day for the annual meeting of the assembly drew near, doubts of the future grew darker in the young regent's mind. He had the power, under the deed of gift, to prolong the experiment another year, holding the title to the property for further experiment, or divide the profits between the members and reconvey the gift back to its donors, or by deed convey at once the whole property to the Brotherhood and end his trusteeship. Which should it be? His faith in his fellow man had been shaken by the events of the past year, and yet the colony had succeeded. Its wealth was great and its prospects greater. With the perfect discipline recently inaugurated and wisely administered, no limit could be fixed to the productive power of such an organization. That he should hesitate a moment after the achievements of the year was a stunning shock to Wolf. The moment he realized the import of the crisis, he at once appealed to Barbara. "You alone can save us, child," he urged. "You must act at once. You promised to lead him captive in your train. You have failed for one reason only----" "Yes, I know," Barbara interrupted. "I haven't tried. I confess it." "There is not a moment to lose," Wolf urged. "We are entering on the most wonderful development in the history of the human race. The only thing lacking for its triumphant achievement is faith and leadership. Secure from our young dreamer the title to this island and you will achieve an immortal deed--you will not hesitate or fail?" "No," was the firm answer. "I will not fail. I'm going with him to-day on a mountain climb. Just for fun, if for nothing else, I'll test my power." "You'll report to me the moment you return?" Wolf urged. "Yes," she answered, dreamily. Norman found Barbara in a mood resistlessly charming. She seemed to have utterly forgotten that she was grown up or had ever been the herald of a revolutionary cause. She was a laughing girl of eighteen again, with the joy of youth sparkling in her eyes and laughter ringing in every accent of her voice. Instantly the mood of the man reflected hers. He threw to the winds the cares and worries of the great adventure that had brought them together, and the island of Ventura became the enchanted isle of song and story. "We shall be just two children to-day--shall we not?" she asked. "Yes," he responded gaily, "two children who have run away from school, tired of books, with hearts hungry for the breath of the fields." For half an hour hill and dale rang with laughter as they ascended the path of the brook. They came to a wide expanse of still water. And Norman said with a bantering laugh: "We leave the stream here and climb the hill to the left. I must wade and carry you across this place if you're not afraid?" "Who's afraid?" she asked with scorn. "All right." He removed his shoes, and rolled his trousers high. "Now your arm around my neck, and no jumping or screaming until we're safe on the other shore." She hesitated just an instant, blushed, and slipped her soft round arm about his neck as he lifted her slight figure and began to pick his way across the treacherous surface of the slippery bottom. His foot slipped on a muddy stone. She gave a scream, and both arms gripped his neck in sudden fear. Her burning cheek pressed his forehead. "I beg your pardon," she cried, blushing red. "I didn't mean to smother you." "And I distinctly said no jumping or screaming, didn't I?" "I won't do it again--oh, dear!" Again both arms clasped his neck in a strangling, smothering hug, which he purposely prolonged with an extra slip which might have been avoided. Her face was scarlet now and the blushes refused to go. They lingered in great red bunches after he had carefully placed her on the smooth grass on the opposite bank. "Honestly, I'm afraid I disgraced myself, didn't I?" she asked, timidly. "No. It was all my fault," he replied. "I did it on purpose." "Perhaps I choked you on purpose, too!" she answered, blushing again. Norman looked at her thoughtfully. "You know I never saw you blush before. I like it." "Is it becoming?" she asked, demurely. "Very." "You know I was never in a man's arms before." "And you didn't like it?" he asked, with a smile playing around his mouth. "To tell you the truth, I found it very awkward." "Awkward?" he laughed. "And exciting," she confessed. "Shall we repeat it until you are used to it?" "Thank you, I'm sufficiently amused for to-day," she answered, soberly. "And now we will put on our shoes and be good children." For the rest of the journey Norman found her strangely silent. Now and then he caught her looking at him furtively out of her big brown eyes, as if she had just met him and was half afraid to go further. He found himself particularly sensitive to her moods. The moment she became silent and thoughtful her impulses ruled his, and not a word was spoken for a mile. Scarcely two sentences passed between them until they reached the summit of the range and sat down on the cliff overhanging the sea. This cliff was one of the numerous headlands which thrust their peaks in almost perpendicular lines sheer into the ocean. They sat for an hour and drank in the peace and solemn grandeur of the infinite blue expanse. "What a little world, the one in which we live down there and fret and fume," he whispered. "The one we think so big when in the thick of the fight! We forget the dim expanse of ocean kissing ocean--encircling the earth--of the skies that kiss the sea and lead on and on into those great silent deeps where a universe of worlds roll in grandeur!" "Yet isn't man greater than all these worlds?" she asked, with sudden elation. "If he is a man, yes; a real man with the conscious divine power in his soul which says, I will! Isn't that the only power worth having? The herd of cattle we call men, whose souls have never spoken that divine word of character and of action--are they men? Have they souls at all? Is it worth the while of those who have to fret and fuss and fume trying to make something out of nothing?" Barbara turned suddenly, looked into Norman's eyes, and asked in anxious tones: "What do you mean?" "That I'm thinking of giving up this experiment." "Now that you are just making it a marvellous success?" "But is it a success? What is the good of achievement for any community if that achievement springs from the will of one man? If their souls are in subjection to his, has he not degraded them? Is life inside or outside? Are we Socialists not struggling merely with what is outside? Are we not in reality struggling back into the primitive savage herd out of which individual manhood has slowly emerged? I'm puzzled. I'm afraid to go on. I've asked you to come up here to-day to tell me what to do." Barbara's breath came quick. "You wish me to decide the momentous question of our colony? Perhaps the future of humanity?" "Yes, just that. You are a woman. Women know things by intuition rather than by reason. I'm growing more and more to believe that we only know what we feel. I trust you as I would not trust my own judgment just now. I'm going to ask you, in the purity and beauty of your woman's soul, to read the future for me. I'm going to allow you to decide this question. Feel with me its difficulties and its prospects, trust utterly to your own intuitions, and you will decide right." Barbara began to tremble and her voice was very low as she bent toward him. "Why do you trust me with the greatest question of your life with such perfect faith?" He took her hand, bowed, and kissed it. "Because, Barbara, I love you," he whispered with passionate tenderness. The girl looked away and smiled while her heart beat in an ecstasy of triumph. "And this is one of the things that has puzzled me most," he went on, rapidly. "Every hope and dream my soul has cherished of you has been at war with this scheme of herding men and women together. I want you all my very own. I want to seize you now in my arms and carry you a thousand miles away from every vulgar crowd on earth. A hundred times I've been on the point of telling you that I love you, but I drew back and sealed my lips. It was treason to the Cause. For how can this cause of the herd be one with the heart-cry of the man for the one woman on earth his mate? I've tried to reconcile them, but I can't. Come, dearest, you are my nobler, better self, the part of me I've been searching for and have found. You must answer this cry for light and guidance. Your voice shall be to me the voice of God. Shall I go back to the faith of my fathers in the old world, and will you come with me--my wife, my mate, my life? Or shall we remain here, and hand in hand fight this battle to a finish? The one thing that is unthinkable is that I shall lose you. I lay my life at your feet. Do with it as you will." Barbara tried to speak and a sob choked her into silence. She lifted her head at last and spoke timidly. "I thought it would be easy. But I find it very, very difficult--this settling the destiny of a man. Of one thing I'm sure. You must not give up this work." "I'll sign the deeds of transfer to-morrow," he interrupted. The girl's eyes opened in wonder and a feeling of awe stole into her heart. "You trust me so far?" she asked, brokenly. "Yes." "Then I must speak softly, must I not? I must weigh every word. You frighten me----" "I'm not afraid. You are the woman I love." "How long have you loved me?" she asked, studying him curiously. "Always, I think. Consciously since the day I tore that flag down on our lawn." "And yet you drew away from me at times." "Yes. I felt the irrepressible conflict between this ideal and my desires. Your voice called me to the work. I determined to put the work to the test first----" "And I was the inspiration behind your faith and daring leadership?" "Always." "You haven't asked me if I love you?" Barbara said, after a pause. "I've been afraid." "Why?" "Because I don't think you are yet conscious of the meaning of love." "And yet you place yourself absolutely in my power?" "Absolutely. I love you and I have not made a mistake." "Frankly, then, I don't know what love means. In my heart of hearts I've always been afraid of men----" "You're not afraid of me?" "After to-day--no, I don't think I will be." "You have made me very happy," he cried joyously. "Come, we must hurry back now. I'm going to make out the deeds to-night and place them in your hands to-morrow morning." Scarcely a word was spoken as they descended the mountain. She had gone up in the morning a laughing girl, conscious of her beauty and its cruel power, and determined to use it. She came down a sober little woman with a great, wondering question growing in her heart. When Wolf met her with eager questions she answered as in a dream. "He will deliver the deeds to-morrow?" he gasped in amazement. "Yes, to-morrow," she answered mechanically. CHAPTER XXVII THE FRUITS OF PATIENCE The next morning Norman asked Barbara to take breakfast alone with him in the little rose bower on the lawn where she had first announced her choice of work so oddly and charmingly. She entered with a timid hesitation and a half-frightened look he was quick to note. He was sure from the expression of her eyes that she had not slept. "You did not sleep well?" he asked. "I didn't sleep at all," she confessed. He attempted to take her hand and she drew back trembling. "Now, you _are_ afraid of me?" "Yes. I'm afraid I am," she stammered. "Why of me? The one man of all men on earth--the man who loves you?" "Perhaps that's just why I'm afraid of you," she said, with an effort to smile. "But, to tell you the truth, I think it's just because you are a man. Last night I lay awake thinking it all over. I'm quite sure that I shall always be afraid of men. I like you better than any man I've ever known, but now that you've told me you love me I'm uneasy when I'm near you. I think you'd better give me up at once. I'm sure I'm hopeless as a sweet-heart. I know I could never marry. The domestic instinct seems utterly missing in my nature. I love man in the abstract, but I can never surrender to any particular man. It seems like suicide. I want to be myself. I hate the idea of losing myself in another's being--I can't endure it, and if you make love to me any more I shall be very unhappy--and--I'll have to keep out of your way. You won't do this any more will you? Promise me, and we will be our old selves again--just comrades." Norman bowed with a smile. "I promise never to speak another word of love to you until you tell me that you love me!" "Honestly?" she laughed. "On my word of honour," he answered, gravely. "Then I shall be happy again," she cried. "You will not try to avoid me?" "No." "You will help and cheer me in the work I've planned?" "Every day," she promised. "Then I shall bide my time." He drew the deeds to the island from his pocket and handed them to her. "The title to a kingdom which I joyfully deliver by order of the queen-regent!" "You are sure you do this because I asked you?" "Do you really doubt it?" "No," was the candid reply. "And I'll be frank enough to confess that I feel very proud of my power. You flattered my vanity as never before. You have put me under a sense of gratitude for which I fear I can never reward you." "I have my reward in your approval." She smiled and lifted her finger in warning. "I'll not forget my promise," he said. "From to-day we understand each other perfectly. I am permitted to love you in silence. You graciously permit this as long as I am silent. In my wounded pride I have vowed that you yourself shall break this silence or it shall remain unbroken forever. This is our compact?" "Yes," she answered extending her hand. He felt it tremble at his first touch and then rest contentedly and confidently in his strong grasp for a moment before they parted. * * * * * When once his decision was made, Norman threw every doubt to the winds and devoted himself with tireless zeal to establishing the Brotherhood on the vast scale he had originally planned. In every step of the expanding life of the colony Barbara was his constant companion and silent inspiration. The transfer of the property was duly made under Wolf's keen gray eyes, with every detail of the law carefully guarded. A second colony of two thousand enthusiasts was landed and established in the new building. Under Norman's inspiring leadership their work was quickly organized. A new central administrative colony of five thousand was planned, and the foundation of its buildings laid with inspiring ceremonies. The huge structure was formed in the shape of a quadrangle covering ten acres of ground. In the centre of the court rose the house of the regents, in reality a palace of imposing splendour. The assembly hall was located in the regents' palace and formed the dining-room of their colony. At one end of the magnificent room was placed on an elevated platform the table at which the board of governors would sit, while at each end of the table stood the gilded chairs of state to be occupied by the regent and his consort. The scheme of imposing grandeur was suggested by Wolf. Norman objected at first, but yielded at last, convinced by his past experiences that a central authority of undisputed power was essential to the existence of any state founded on the socialistic ideal. At each corner of the quadrangle a public building was placed connected by the dormitories; on one corner was placed a theatre, on another a music hall, on another a school and nursery, on the other a lyceum to be used for public gatherings of all kinds, religious, social, or political. Each section of the outer buildings was connected with the regent's palace in the centre of the court by covered walk ways. The entire force of the four thousand members of the Brotherhood (except the farmers) were placed at work to complete this structure at the earliest possible moment. A day before the annual meeting of the Brotherhood at which the board of governors and the two regents were to be elected for the term of four years, Norman established a daily newspaper, _The New Era_, and the event was celebrated in the evening by a banquet and ball. As he walked among the joyous throngs of the Brotherhood as they moved through the brilliantly lighted ball-room he began to feel for the first time the conscious joy of a great achievement. Beyond a doubt the Brotherhood was an accomplished fact. Its fame was stirring the world beyond their little island. Pictures of the future flashed through his imagination, and always in greater and more alluring splendour. He saw himself becoming more and more the guiding spirit of the great enterprise. If men opposed his plans he would mould their wills in his. Gradually he meant to remove the hard and painful elements of force on which the efficiency of the colony now rested. The discipline of an army with its stern laws of physical violence back of its clock-like precision was not to his liking. He winced at the thought of that grim relic of barbarism, the whipping-post, which they had found necessary to temporarily revive. The jail, guard-house, and penal colony were thorns in his flesh which he would remove at the earliest possible moment. The one excuse for their existence was the inheritance of evil in man's nature due to his wrongs and suffering under the system of capitalism. They would outgrow them. Again and again he encountered Wolf and Catherine in the highest spirits, laughing, joking, chatting, shaking hands with each one they met. Suddenly it struck him for the first time that he had a poor memory for names and faces. He wondered how Wolf could remember the name of the most obscure member of the colony without an effort. He had been so absorbed in the big problems of the Brotherhood that he had given little or no time to cultivating the personal acquaintance of its individual members. The arts of the politician were foreign to his nature. He had never stooped in his thoughts even to consider them. He had always lived in a different world. Never for a moment had the idea occurred to him that he might have to fight for his position as leader of the colony which he had created, yet when he took his seat beside Barbara the following night to preside over the annual meeting, he was conscious instantly that through the crowd of eager faces before him there ran a strong current of personal hostility. It was a disagreeable surprise. But as he recalled the many unpopular decisions he had been called on to make during the past year it seemed but natural there should be a lingering soreness in some minds. It was not until he saw Wolf in deep consultation with Diggs's glasses, and Catherine whispering to the smooth, gray-haired woman who had demanded the expulsion of Blanche, that he knew an organized plot had been formed to depose him from power. His first impulse was one of blind rage. He recalled now with lightning flashes of memory the long hours Wolf and his wife had spent in soothing the anger of rebellious and troublesome members. At every public meeting he recalled their smiling faces at the door or moving through the hall. The whole scheme was plain, its low chicanery, its shallow hypocrisy, its fawning acceptance of his leadership! They had been patiently waiting for him to finish the work of strong, legal, invincible, powerful organization to step in and take the reins from his hands. And they had done it with such consummate skill, such infinite care and patience, that not one of his own personal followers had discovered the plot. When the smooth, gray-haired woman rose to nominate candidates for regent he knew, before she spoke, the names she would pronounce. He looked at her with a feeling of contempt and to save his life he couldn't recall her name. She repeated her address to the chair with angry emphasis: "Comrade Chairman!" "I beg your pardon," Norman answered, "but I could not for the moment recall your name. The comrade on my right (the woman without a soul, he added in low tones) has the floor." Barbara started at his tone of anger and whispered: "How could you be so rude--what is wrong?" "We are about to retire from office." "What!" Barbara gasped as the little woman began to speak. "Listen--you will understand," he said, with a sudden curve of his lip. "Comrades," the deep, calm voice began, "I place in nomination for the office of regents for the four ensuing years the names of a man and woman whom every member of the old colony entitled to vote to-night has learned to love and honour--a man and woman whose ripe experience, whose sound judgment, whose sense of right, whose powers of reasoning, whose executive genius will give to us all the guarantee of perfect justice and perfect order----" "You bet they will, old girl," Tom cried with enthusiasm, waving his hand admiringly toward Norman and Barbara. The speaker paused, regarded Tom a moment with quiet scorn, and continued: "I have the honour to name for the highest honour in the gift of the Brotherhood for the regency of the new State of Ventura Comrades Herman and Catherine Wolf." "What's that you say?" old Tom yelled with anger, leaping to his feet, and glaring around the room in a dazed surprise. The old miner was too shrewd a politician to doubt now for a moment the situation. He made the only possible attack on the programme that promised results. "In view of the fact, feller comrades," he shouted, "that half the present members er this here Brotherhood have not been here long enough to vote, I move that in justice to the new members we postpone this election for six months." Joe seconded the motion, and the chairman asked: "Are there any remarks on the motion?" The Bard moved as if to rise, when Diggs snatched him back into his seat. Amid a silence that was ominous the chairman put the question: "All in favour of postponing this election for six months that our new members may be able to vote will say 'Aye.'" The response was feeble. Tom and Joe yelled very loudly, but their effort was obvious. "All in favour say 'No.'" The whole audience seemed to shout in solid trained chorus "No!" Tom hastened to nominate Norman and Barbara. The old miner's speech was couched in plain, uncouth words, but they came from the heart and their rugged eloquence stirred the crowd with surprising power. Diggs glanced over the audience through his flashing glasses, and his perpetual smile faded into a look of uneasiness as a round of applause swept the house. He tiptoed to Wolf's side and whispered: "Any danger?" "Not the slightest. I want him to get some votes. It's better so." The programme went through without a hitch. Wolf and Catherine were elected regents by an overwhelming majority and a new board of governors chosen with not a single one whom Norman knew personally. The young leader sat in sullen silence, and watched the proceedings with contempt. Barbara looked on in increasing wonder and pain. When the result was announced and the cheering had died away she bent her beautiful head close to his and whispered: "This is a complete surprise. You believe me?" "Yes," he quickly answered, "and one touch of your hand will rob defeat of its sting." She pressed his hand with lingering tenderness and sought Catherine with a flash of anger in her brown eyes that boded trouble for the house of Wolf. CHAPTER XXVIII THE NEW MASTER Wolf lost no time in demonstrating that he was complete master of the situation. At nine o'clock next morning two armed guards, whom he had never seen in the house before, entered Norman's room and handed him the first official order of the new regents. The deposed young leader read it with amusement at first, but as his eyes rested on its brief words of command, something of their sinister meaning began to dawn in his mind. "All citizens of the State of Ventura are ordered to immediately surrender their arms. By order of "HERMAN WOLF, "_Regent_." Norman looked at the revolvers in the holsters of the guards and dryly remarked: "But the State will kindly continue their use, I see!" Norman surrendered his revolver, and his room was searched in every nook and corner for weapons he might have concealed. "Why this insult?" he demanded. The guardsman saluted. "Special orders of the regent, sir. We are to take no man's word for it." Norman sat in silence while the men opened his trunks, ransacked his drawers, and searched in every conceivable spot where a weapon of any kind might be hid. "I could have told you at first that I had no other guns. The entire colony is being disarmed this morning?" "Yes, sir, the work will be completed by two o'clock." "Indeed!" The man fumbled in his pocket and drew out another order. "And this one for you personally, sir." "Oh--after the disarming?" "Yes, sir!" Norman read the second order and the lines of his mouth tightened suddenly. The note was brief but to the point: "Comrade Norman Worth will report to the regent at ten o'clock for orders. "HERMAN WOLF, "_Regent_." For five minutes after the guards had gone Norman stood in silence staring at this order. It was the first he had ever received in his life except the one from his own father which he had disobeyed. To be driven into another man's presence to take orders as from a master to a servant was an idea that had never entered his imagination. He had seen such things. He had given orders, but he had never, somehow, counted himself in the class of men who took them. For the first time he began to realize the meaning of the work he had been doing, and began to see how deftly and unconsciously he had been forging the chains of a system of irresponsible slavery on his fellow men. While the motive which impelled him was one of unselfish love, and he had thought only of their best interest, he saw now in a flash with what crushing cruelty this power could be used. It all seemed simple enough when he regarded his own will as the centre and source of power. Now that another man had grasped the lever and applied this power, the whole scheme of artificial life which he had created took on a new and darker meaning. What should he do? His first impulse was to walk into Wolf's presence, denounce him as a scheming scoundrel, and defy his power. That Wolf would fight was not to be questioned for a minute. His first act of disarming the colony was a master-stroke, and the longer the young leader thought of it the more hopeless his present situation became. Beyond a doubt Wolf had been selecting the new regent's guard with the same patience and skill with which he had executed his political coup. This guard was composed now only of his tried and trusted henchmen. A single false step on Norman's part would simply play into the wily brute's hands, and he would destroy himself at a single stroke. He must use his brain. He must fight the devil with fire. He must submit for the moment, plan and work and wait with infinite patience, and when the work of patience was complete, then strike and strike to kill. And yet the blood rushed to his heart and strangled with the thought of submission to such a man. But there was no other way. He had himself set the trap of steel he now felt crash into his own flesh. To appeal to his father was unthinkable--his pride forbade it, even if it were possible. To escape was out of the question. Every way had been cut and that by his own order. The mail was inspected. The steamer held no communication with the people of the island. No boat was allowed to land, and no boat, even the smallest sail or row boat, was permitted to a member of the Brotherhood on any pretext. Besides, resignation or flight could not be thought of for another reason. To retreat now and leave thousands of people behind whom he had led into this enterprise would be the act of a coward. There was nothing left except to fight it out on the lines he had himself laid down. The one thing that hurt him most was the ugly suspicion that Barbara must have known something of this deeply laid scheme by which the Wolfs had gained control of the Brotherhood. And yet her surprise had been genuine, her anger real. He couldn't be mistaken about it. To believe her capable of such treachery and double-dealing was to doubt the very existence of truth and purity. And yet, when he recalled how little he really knew of her past life, what dark secrets might lurk in the story of the years she had spent under the same roof with these people, he grew sick at the thought. He knew now that the blond beast with the red scar on his neck and the slender, dark-eyed madonna-like mate who had always been his shadow were capable of anything. Two people who could smile in treacherous silence for a year and suddenly grip the throat of the man who had been their best friend, needed no written biography to tell their past. It was luminous. And in the glare in which he read it he shuddered at the sinister light it threw on the beautiful girl whom they had reared as their own. He took from his mantel a little picture made one day in San Francisco by a tintype man. It was a singularly beautiful likeness of Barbara, taken on a sudden impulse without a moment's thought or preparation. Her laughing face looked out at him, wreathed in a garland of wayward ringlets of dark brown hair. Truth, sincerity, beauty, intelligence, and a childlike innocence were stamped in every line. A thousand times since he had seen her just like that. And from the moment of their advent on the island this impression of girlish innocence and sincerity had grown rather than decreased. The more he saw of her in the simpler, quieter moments of their association, the stronger, deeper, and more tender his love became, and the deeper grew his utter faith in the purity of her soul and body. "I'll sooner doubt an angel of God!" he said at last, as he placed it back on the mantel. He would see Wolf at once, learn his plans, and then carefully make his own. He dressed with care and at the appointed hour rapped for admission at the executive office where the day before he sat as master. He was told the regent was busy with others and ordered to wait his turn. He flushed with anger, recovered himself, waited a half hour, and was ushered into the presence of the new ruler. Wolf sat in the big revolving chair at his desk with conscious dignity and power. Two of his guards stood outside the door, grim reminders of the substantial character of the new administration. Norman seated himself with careless ease without invitation and waited for the older man to speak. Wolf smiled grimly, stroked his thick, coarse reddish beard, and looked at Norman thoughtfully a moment. "Well, my boy," the regent began, with friendly patronage, "we'd as well come to the point without ceremony. You are down and out. The new board of governors will do what I wish. I am in supreme command of the ship of state. Do you want to fight or work?" "It's a poor doctor, Wolf," Norman said, coolly, "who can't take his own medicine. I came here to work." "Congratulations on your good sense!" the regent replied. "I've no desire to make trouble for you. I have nothing against you personally. I had to put you out and take command to save the colony from ruin. You meant well, but you were a bungling amateur, and you can be of greater service in the ranks than in command. I know you don't like me after what has happened, but you don't have to. I'll be generous. What sort of work would you like to have assigned you?" "Thanks, that's very kind of you, Wolf, I'm sure. I believe the warden of every penitentiary is equally generous to all convicts. However, that's a minor detail, seeing that I assisted in the creation of this ideal world." Wolf smashed the desk top with his big fist and suddenly glared at Norman, his cold eyes gleaming angrily. "Come to the point! I've no time to waste! Have you any choice as to the kind of work to which you wish to be assigned?" "I have a decided choice. Our mines have all failed. I'll redeem the failure by perfecting and completing the big dredge for mining gold from the low-grade sands on the beach." "A waste of time and money," Wolf snapped. "I can't afford to spare the men on any more fool inventions. Such things must stop." "You mean to stop all progress by stopping inventions?" Norman asked. "So far as the State is concerned, yes," said the regent, with emphasis. "Under your slipshod administration we spent nearly two hundred thousand dollars during the past year on so-called inventions. Every fool in the colony has invented something. Not one in a hundred has produced an idea that is practicable. We cannot afford to waste the capital of the State in such idiocy." "Give me twenty men and I'll complete the dredge." "Labour is capital in the Socialist State. I can't afford to waste it." "But you are not wasting it," Norman pleaded. "I've spent sixty thousand already on this invention. Unless the machine is completed the capital will be lost to the colony." "It will be lost anyhow," Wolf answered, impatiently. "Your whole conception is a piece of childish folly. You can't make a profit operating a dredge in sand containing only twenty cents' worth of gold to a ton of dirt." "I can do better," Norman urged with enthusiasm. "I can make a hundred per cent. on the investment if the dirt pans out ten cents to the ton. If it pans twenty cents a ton I can make millions." "So every crank has claimed for his particular piece of idiocy. I'll not permit another dollar or another day's labour to be thrown away on any such crazy experiment." Norman's face reddened with a rush of uncontrollable anger. "Look here, Wolf, you can't be serious in this." "I was never more serious in my life," the big jaws snapped. "I am going to issue an order to-day that hereafter any man or woman who conceives an invention can work it out himself without aid from the State. They must do this at odd hours after working the required time each day. They must put their own money into their machine." "As the State only has capital," Norman protested, "this means the practical prohibition of all invention. No man can with his own hands make the machinery needed in the progress of humanity. We have abolished private capital by abolishing rent, interest, and profit. Do you propose thus to stop the progress of the world?" "No," Wolf cried with a wave of his heavy hand. "Let the ambitious inventor work at night and build his own machine. I will grant, in my order on the subject, to each successful inventor the right to operate his own machine for ten years before it becomes the property of the State." "Suppose he succeeds," said Norman, "under such hard conditions with his own hands and without capital in perfecting an invention of enormous value, such as the dredge I have begun, of what use will the results be if he cannot invest them in rent or interest, and all gifts and exchanges are prohibited?" "He may build a home and lavish them on his wife and children, or he may become a great public benefactor and win the love and gratitude of the people by enriching the State and shortening the hours of labour. If your dredge can make a million, for example, as you claim--go ahead, work at night, perfect it, put it to work, build yourself a palace to live in, give millions to the Brotherhood. Shorten their hours from eight to four, and I'll guarantee you'll oust me from my position of power." Norman's eye suddenly flashed with resolution. "You will not grant me the labour to complete the dredge?" Norman asked. "Not one man for one minute," was the curt reply. "Then I'll finish it myself," Norman said, with determination. "After you've worked eight full hours a day, under my direction--you understand!" the regent responded sullenly. Norman sprang to his feet and the two men faced each other a moment, the big scar on Wolf's neck flashing red, his enormous fists instinctively closing. "Wolf, this is an infamous outrage!" "I'll teach you not to speak to me in that manner again, sir!" the regent slowly said, as he tapped his bell. The guards sprang to his side. "Show this gentleman to the barnyard--he is a good farmer. Put him at work with old Methodist John cleaning out the stables for the new cantaloup crop. He is very fond of cantaloups. If he makes any trouble tell the sergeant of your guard to give him thirty-nine lashes without consulting me." Norman stepped closer, and, trembling from head to foot, said to Wolf: "If ever one of your men lays the weight of his hand on me----" "And yet we both agreed that under our system discipline must be enforced--the discipline of an army?" the regent interrupted. Norman held his gaze fixed without moving a muscle, and slowly continued: "If you ever try it, you'd better finish your job." "I'll remember your advice," Wolf answered with a sneer. "Show him to his work." CHAPTER XXIX A TEST OF STRENGTH When Catherine saw the furious look on Barbara's face as she descended from the platform the night of the election, she avoided a meeting and went to bed pleading a headache. Early the next morning Barbara rapped for entrance, forced her way in, and stood, tense with anger, before the older woman, her eyes red from the long vigil of a sleepless night. "You avoided me last night----" Catherine laughed. "My dear, I never saw you in quite such a rage. It might be serious if it were not so silly." "You'll find it serious before you are through with this performance," Barbara retorted, angrily. "Remember, I am in supreme authority now. Don't you dare speak to me in that manner, you ungrateful little wretch!" "I'll dare to tell you the truth--even if you were the mother who bore me--even if I had not repaid you a hundredfold for every dollar you have spent on me." "Hush, hush, my dear, I do not wish to quarrel," Catherine said, recovering herself. "I know your pride is wounded over your defeat. I've watched your growing vanity in high office with much amusement for the past year." "I'm not thinking of myself," Barbara said with emphasis. "Of course not--what woman ever does?" Catherine sneered. "I am glad to be relieved of the annoyance of such a position. But your treatment of the brave and daring young spirit who conceived this colony and created its wealth and influence----" "Am I responsible?" "Yes. Herman is incapable of conceiving such a plot without your suggestion. It is your work. You have always loved luxury and power." "Perhaps I love a man also," Catherine interrupted, as her full sensuous lips curled in a curious smile. "Yes, I give you credit for that too," the girl admitted. "Though I confess the secret of your infatuation for that hulking brute has always been one of the black mysteries of life to me." "When you're older," again the round lips quivered with a smile, "perhaps you will understand. And now, my child, I've been patient with you. But don't you ever again call Herman a brute in my presence." "Take care he doesn't prove it to you!" the girl warned. Catherine suddenly paled. "What do you mean by that?" she whispered, glancing about the room. "Nothing! nothing! nothing! Only that in every deed of the devil there is the seed of death. You have planted the seed. The harvest is sure." "My dear----" "Don't call me that again! I hate you!" Barbara spoke with deliberate passion. "Have you gone mad?" Catherine cried, with impatience. "Yes, mad with hatred. From to-day we are enemies, and I'll hate you forever!" The older woman looked at her in astonishment and spoke with a deliberate sneer: "As you like. Remember, then, from this moment that you are a servant under my command. I am no longer your foster-mother. Leave this room instantly, take your things to the domestic servants' quarters, and report to the head-woman for duty in the corridors of this wing of the building." "And you think I'll submit to this?" Barbara gasped. Catherine rang the bell, and Barbara gazed at her with a look of mingled terror and rage. A sudden light flashed in her brown eyes. "You mean this?" "I'll show you in a moment," was the calm reply. "Then it's war between us," Barbara cried. She sprang to the door and Catherine caught her arm. "Where are you going?" "To Herman." "He cannot interfere with my decisions." Barbara threw her off and bounded through the door crying: "We shall see!" The girl rushed past the guard at the door of Wolf's office, trembling with rage, her eyes filled with blinding tears. Wolf sprang to his feet in astonishment and met her with outstretched hands. "What's the matter, child?" he asked as his big coarse fists closed over the hot little fingers and his gray eyes lighted at the sight of her dishevelled hair and bare throat. Barbara choked back the sobs, and looked appealingly into Wolf's face. "We have quarrelled about last night. You understand, Herman. Catherine has ordered me to leave my room and join the servants in the halls. You--you will not allow me to be degraded thus--will you?" Wolf drew the trembling girl into his arms, pressed her close a moment, stroked her curls with his gnarled hand, and his face flushed with a look of triumph. "Don't worry, dear, I'll protect you," he answered, bending and kissing her forehead. "Go back to your room, and if any one dares to disturb you, call for me." Barbara murmured through her tears: "Thank you, Herman." Wolf's eyes sparkled as he watched the graceful little figure proudly leave the room. CHAPTER XXX A VISION FROM THE HILLTOP Catherine's fight with Wolf was long and bitter. For hours she struggled to force him to leave in her hands the discipline of the women members of the colony. Her tears and threats fell on ears equally deaf to all pleading. At last the guards listening outside heard only the low sobbing of a woman's voice near the door for a half hour without a sound from the man. And then his short, sharp words came quick and curt and stinging: "Are you done now with this fool performance?" The answer was a sob. "Understand once for all," the cold, hard voice went on, "I am the master here. Your office as regent is one of courtesy only as my wife. My word alone is supreme. When you cease to be my wife another regent will be chosen and I do the choosing. I not only propose to do the work of disciplining the women, but it is the one kind of work to which I shall devote myself with pleasure." "Herman!" Catherine sobbed, as if she had sunk beneath a blow. The man laughed with brutal enjoyment. "You'd as well know this now as later. You can be getting used to it." Her eyes red with weeping, her proud shoulders drooped for the first time in her life, Catherine slowly walked from Wolf's office back to her room. Barbara passed her on the stairs without a word or a glance, and hurried again to see the regent, her whole being alert with quick intelligence. The guard had received instructions that she was the one privileged person in the colony who could enter his office at all hours, day or night, without ceremony or delay. They showed her in immediately. "I've just heard of your order sending Norman to the work of a common farm-hand, Herman," Barbara began. Wolf scowled. "You must not interfere in this little affair between my rival and myself, Barbara," he said, sternly. "I will interfere," she quickly replied, "both for your sake and his. You've made a serious mistake, Herman. Correct it at once." "I had to show him his place." "It isn't fair. The men will resent it. You will make enemies. Your power is complete. You can afford to be generous." Wolf looked at her with hungry, admiring gaze. "Perhaps you're right," he said slowly. "Of course I'm right!" she replied, "and you know it. You've made him a martyr and a hero on the first day of his fall from power. Your true policy is just the opposite. Let him do what he pleases for a time. Above all things don't put yourself in the position of his enemy. Your strength lies in standing as his patron and friend." "By Jove, Barbara," Wolf cried, "what a wise head on your little shoulders! Come, be honest with me now--you're not in love with this man?" The girl smiled demurely: "He is with me, I think," she admitted. "Yes, yes, of course--so we all are," he cried, with a smile. "But you have not accepted his love?" "No." "I thought you had better sense. I'll change my order at your suggestion." "I knew you would," she cried, joyfully. Wolf sat down at his desk and wrote: "Comrade Norman Worth is transferred from the field to the foundry, with permission, after his day's work, to employ his time in the shops perfecting any invention in which he may be interested. "WOLF--_Regent_." He handed the order to Barbara. "Take this to the youngster and tell him I did it at your suggestion, and hereafter give him a wide berth if you wish to be friendly with me." Barbara dropped her eyes and Wolf touched her chin with his coarse, short fingers. "A hint to the wise is sufficient, little girl. You understand?" Barbara took the order, turned toward the door, paused and smiled coquettishly: "I understand, Herman." She found Norman at work with Methodist John cleaning out a stable. To her amazement he was whistling and joking about something with the old man. She stopped and listened a moment. "But what on earth do you want a lightning-rod for, John?" Norman asked. "That's my secret, sir," the old man answered, "but I must have one--won't you get it for me?" "I'm sorry, John, but I have no more power now in the State of Ventura than you have." "But didn't you get the million dollars and didn't you make all the money for 'em--a hundred and fifty thousand dollars on the cantaloups the others didn't have sense enough to plant? Surely they'll give you enough to get me a thirty-foot lightning-rod?" "I'm afraid not, John, still I'll do my best. I don't like to press you for the secrets of your inner life, old man, but I've immense curiosity to know what you want with that lightning-rod? You say you're not afraid of lightning?" "No, sir, I'm not afraid of nothin'." "Then why----" "'Tain't no use in askin' sir, I can't tell ye. But I want it. I'm going to pray every night for it till I get it. Maybe the Lord will send me one by an angel----" Barbara suddenly appeared in the door of the stall. "Speaking of angels," Norman cried, laughing. "I have an order for you," Barbara said, quickly. Norman threw his pitchfork full of manure out of the window of the stall, stood the fork in the corner, brushed his hands, and bowed before Barbara. "What an exquisite picture you make standing in the doorway there with that ocean of blossoming peach trees stretching up the slope until it kisses the sky line. I wish I were an artist." She looked at him with amazement. "I expected to find you with murder in your heart. I can't understand." Norman took the note from her white fingers. "Because I'm laughing?" "Yes." "Well, isn't the joke on me? I've been preaching, preaching, preaching, about the dignity of all labour. I kicked the first few moments, I confess. The medicine was bitter, but I soon began to find that it was good for the soul. I'm getting acquainted with myself----" Norman paused, read Wolf's order, and looked tenderly into Barbara's eyes. "So you heard of my fall and came to my rescue. It's worth the jolt to be rescued by such a hand." He stooped and kissed the tips of her fingers. "Come with me up the hill yonder among those blossoming trees," he said, leading her toward the orchard. "I want to tell you about a vision I saw in that stable a while ago while I wielded the pitchfork and talked to my old pauper friend, both of us now comrade equals." They walked on in silence through the long, clean rows of fruit trees in full bloom, the air redolent with sweet perfume and quivering with the electric hum of growing life. On the top of the hill they paused and looked toward the sea that stretched away in solemn, infinite grandeur. Below, on the next plateau, rolled in apparently endless acres, the great white carpet of flowering plum trees and further on the tender budding grapes and beyond, lower still, the deep green valley with orange trees flashing their golden fruit. "What a glorious world!" Barbara cried. "Yes," he answered with a sigh, "a world of endless beauty in which after all there's nothing vile but man. And I once thought that in such a world angels only could live." "Must we despair because one man or woman proves false," she asked. "No," he answered cheerily, leading her to a boulder and taking his seat by her side. "I don't despair. I've been seeing visions to-day--visions as old as the beat of the human heart, perhaps, yet always new." He drew the order of Wolf from his pocket and looked at it. "From the moment of my awakening last night from the fool's paradise in which I've been living the past year my mind has been at work on solving the one unsolved problem in this dredge to which he refers. It came to me like a flash while at work this morning." "Your invention will succeed?" she interrupted. "Beyond the shadow of a doubt," he said, with enthusiasm. "I didn't solve it before because I lacked the incentive to apply my mind to it." "And you got the incentive in your defeat?" she asked, in surprise. "Yes. Deprived of my toys, I came back to myself, the source of power." "But your incentive--I don't understand--in such an hour?" "A very simple, very old, but very powerful one, I'm beginning to think, the source of all human progress--the determination to build a home here in one of these flower-robed hills overlooking the sea, and bring my bride to it some glorious day like this when every tree is festooned with joy! I don't want a modest cottage. My bride was born a queen. Every line of her delicate and sensitive face proclaims her royal ancestry. She shall have a palace. Love, Beauty, Music, Art, and Truth shall be her servants. I shall be the magician who will create all this out of the dirt men are now trampling under foot along the beach." Barbara drew a deep breath, trembled, and looked away. "I promised her never to speak of love again until her own dear lips called me, and I will not, though I fear sometimes the waiting seems long." "And if she never calls?" the girl asked, dreamily. "Then my palace shall remain silent and empty. Her hand alone can open its doors." "And if I do not see you often while your palace is building, you may know at least I have not forgotten--and you will understand?" "Yes, I will understand," he answered, with elation. CHAPTER XXXI IN LOVE AND WAR With untiring zeal Norman gave himself to work on the dredge. Wolf refused to modify his original order that a full day should first be given as a labourer in the foundry and machine shops before he could devote himself to his invention. This proved an advantage rather than a hindrance. By his unfailing courtesy, good fellowship, skill, and wit, Norman won his fellow workmen as warm personal friends. He was able thus to secure all the assistance he needed in his work. Within two months the big dredge was finished. From the first the regent had regarded Norman's fad with contempt. That he could succeed in making money out of dirt containing but twenty cents' worth of gold to a ton was an absurdity on its face. While the young inventor worked day and night with tireless energy the regent quietly perfected his grip on the life of the rapidly growing colony. To render escape from the island or communication with the coast more impossible than ever, he established the strict system of double patrol around each community. No member of the Brotherhood was allowed to leave his room at night without permission. Beyond the outer patrol a mounted guard was established and the entire line of beach was guarded by watchmen in relays who reported each hour, day and night, by telephone to the commandant. At the end of two months of Wolf's merciless rule the efficiency of labour had so decreased, it was necessary to lengthen the number of hours from eight to nine. As every inducement to efficiency of labour had been removed there was no incentive to any man to do more than he must without a fight with his guard or overseer. No vote was permitted on the question of increasing the hours of labour. The board of governors passed the order which Wolf wrote out for them without a dissenting voice. Norman had no trouble in getting a gang of willing hands to push the monster gold-digger into position on one of the sand-points inside the harbour. It was mounted on a float twenty-five feet wide and sixty-five feet long. For power it carried two fifty-horse-power distillate engines. Tom was in charge of one and Joe of the other. For raising the sand and gravel containing the gold two big Jackson gravel-pumps were located on opposite corners at the front end of the float. Old Tom blew the whistle, the engines started, and in an hour the pumps had raised a hundred tons of sand and gravel and deposited them in the concentrating flumes. Norman worked the dredge all night without a moment's pause and in twelve hours his pumps had lifted fifteen hundred tons of sand, showing a capacity of 3,000 tons per day. When the gold was extracted and weighed it was found that the dredge had averaged twenty cents from each ton of sand and that it would cost less than three cents a ton to operate the entire machinery of its production. The first experimental machine alone would net $500 dollars a day, or $150,000 a year. He could put five of these machines to work in three months and make $3,000 a day. * * * * * The invention stirred the colony to its depths. Norman's appearance was the signal for a burst of cheering wherever he went. Wolf was dumfounded. He called his board of governors together at once and ordered them to enact a new law to meet the situation. Norman announced in the _Era_ that he would give the Brotherhood from the beginning one half the net earnings of his machines, and asked the board of governors at once to grant him the men needed to build and operate enough dredges to reduce the hours of labour from nine to seven. Wolf met the emergency with prompt and vigorous action. He suspended the editor for printing the announcement and set him to work carrying a hod. He issued a proclamation as regent that the dredge in the hands of its inventor threatened the existence of the State, declared the law of inventions under which it was built suspended, and ordered Norman to at once operate the machine for the sole benefit of the State and begin the construction of twenty dredges of equal capacity. When Norman received this order he set to work without a moment's delay and made a half-dozen dynamite bombs, gave one each to Tom and Joe and their assistants, laid in a supply of provisions, erected a tent on the beach beside the dredge, and set the big machine to work for all it was worth. Wolf promptly ordered his arrest. The men who attempted to execute the order fled in terror at the sight of the bombs and reported for instructions. Wolf came in person at the head of a picked company of fifty guards. Norman had stretched a rope a hundred feet from the dredge and posted a notice that he would kill any man daring to cross it without his permission. Wolf paused at the rope. Norman stood alone on one of the big pumps with his arms folded watching his enemy in silence. The captain of the guard laid his hand on the regent's arm: "You'd better not try it." "He won't dare," Wolf growled. "Yes, he will," the captain insisted. "I'll risk it," the regent snapped. "Are you mad? What's the use? He'll blow it up. You can't rebuild the dredge--no one understands it. Use common sense. Send the girl with a flag of truce and ask for a conference." "A good idea--if it works," Wolf answered hesitating. "It's worth trying," the captain urged. Wolf returned to the house with his men, and in a few minutes Barbara came to Norman, her face white with terror, her voice quivering with pleading intensity. "Please," she gasped, "for my sake, I beg of you not to do this insane thing! The regent asks for a conference under a flag of truce. He recognizes that it is impossible that you should remain here after what has happened. He asks for a half-hour's talk with you to offer an adjustment under which you can resign and return to San Francisco." "It's a trick and a lie. He's deceiving you," Norman replied, sullenly. "No, I swear it's true. He is in earnest, Catherine is beside herself with fear lest he be killed. He swore to her as he swore to me to respect your wishes. I'll gladly give my life if he proves false." Norman turned his face away and looked over the still, blue waters, struggling with himself as he felt the tug of her soft hand on his heart. Suddenly a hundred men with Wolf at their head sprang over the steep embankment and rushed to the dredge. Tom leaped to his feet and lifted his bomb without a word. Norman covered Barbara and grasped his uplifted arm. "It's all over boys. I've surrendered!" he shouted. Barbara faced Wolf with blazing eyes: "You have betrayed my trust!" Wolf brushed her aside and confronted Norman, who had thrown the bomb he had taken from Tom's hand into the sea. Norman paid no attention to Wolf, and seemed to see only the girl's face convulsed with passion. His eyes never left her for a moment. Wolf turned and secured the other men who had defended the dredge, marching them with their hands tied behind their backs between two rows of guardsmen off to jail. Norman spoke at last to Barbara in low, cold tones: "I congratulate you." "What do you mean?" she gasped. "That you are a superb actress. You have played your part to perfection. Your rôle was very dramatic, too. A clumsy woman would have bungled it, and lost even at the last moment." "You cannot believe that I willingly betrayed you?" she cried, in anguish. "I wish I had died before I knew it," he answered, bitterly. Barbara pressed close to his side and seized his hand fiercely. He turned away with a shudder. "Look at me," she pleaded. He turned and faced her with a look of anger. "Words are idle. Deeds speak louder than words." "Norman, you are killing me with this cruel doubt!" she sobbed. "I give up! I love you! I love you!" She threw her arms around his neck and her head sank on his breast. He resisted for a moment, then clasped her to his heart, bent and kissed her with passionate tenderness. "You believe me now?" she cried, through her tears. "God forgive me for doubting you for a moment!" he answered, earnestly. The guard suddenly drew Norman from her arms, tied his hands, and led him away to prison while the little figure followed, sobbing in helpless anguish. Wolf walked behind, his big mouth twitching with smiles he could not suppress. CHAPTER XXXII A PRIMITIVE LOVER Wolf led Barbara into his office, lighted the lamp, and waited in patience for her first blinding surrender to grief to spend itself before speaking. He stood over her at last with a smile, bent and touched her brown curls. The girl sprang to her feet and faced him. "It's no use, my beauty, I'm on to your tricks now!" The little figure stiffened, and her gaze was steady, though her fingers trembled as she nervously twisted the tiny handkerchief she held. "You've been playing me for a fool for the past two months. Your eyes have been laughing into mine with all sorts of little daring suggestions when you had an axe to grind at my expense. And then you had a habit of disappearing until you needed something else. You were off billing and cooing with our hero and smiling at my stupidity behind my back." "I've spoken to him to-day," Barbara answered solemnly, "the first words of love that ever passed my lips." "You did pretty well for an amateur, if that was the first kiss you ever gave him." "It was the first!" she said, defiantly. "It will be the last for him." "Perhaps," she answered, with a curl to her lips. "You think I don't mean it?" Wolf demanded, stepping close and thrusting his massive head forward while his big fists closed. "I don't doubt it," she answered, firmly. "But I'm not afraid of you, Herman." "You doubt my power?" he asked. "Over others, no." "But over you?" Wolf suddenly grasped her. The girl shrank back in terror for an instant, and then, to his surprise, her hand was still and cold and steady. Not a tremor in the tense body. Her brown eyes, staring wide, held his gaze without a sign of weakness or of fear. Something in her attitude startled the beast within him. He suddenly dropped her hand and changed his tone. "Come, let's not quarrel! Don't be foolish. It is for you I've been scheming and planning the past year. For you the regent's palace was planned. Within five years a hundred thousand people will be here. The State will be rich beyond our wildest dreams, and I shall be the State. I want you to sit by my side." [Illustration: "WOLF GRASPED HER."] "You say this to me after all that Catherine has been to you and your life?" "And why not? If I no longer love, should I be chained?" "And this is the ideal you came here to build?" she asked, with scorn. "Certainly. It is the essence of Socialism. In my next proclamation I shall declare for the freedom of love. Every great Socialist has preached this. Marriage and the family form the tap-root out of which the whole system of capitalism grew. The system can never be destroyed until the family is annihilated. I had thought you a woman whose brilliant intellect had faced this issue and broken the chains of a degrading bourgeois morality." "The chains of love, I find, are very sweet," she interrupted, with dreamy tenderness. "You talk this twaddle about romantic love? You, the leader of a revolution! Come, you are no longer a child. We are living now in the world of freedom and reality where men and women say the unspoken things and live to the utmost reach of their being, body and soul." "Is it a world worth living in?" she asked. "Was the old world of family life, of starvation and misery, worth living in?" Wolf retorted. "Perhaps I might have said no an hour ago, but now that my lips have met my lover's the dream of the old family life, with its sanctity and purity, begins to call me. And something deep down within answers with a cry of joy. Why should you desire me, knowing that I thus love another?" "You can love where you like," he snapped, as his big jaws came together. "I can get along without your love. I just want you--and I'm going to have you!" "I'll die first!" "We shall see. Time works wonders." With a shudder Barbara turned and left him. CHAPTER XXXIII EQUALITY Barbara asked Wolf for permission to visit Norman in prison. The Regent shook his head. "No, my little beauty, it's not wise. I promise you that not a hair of his head shall be harmed. He is safe and well. If you wish to test my power, try to bribe my guards and see him." Day after day Barbara sought in vain to gain admittance to the jail, send or receive a message from within. Her lover had disappeared as completely as if the earth had opened and swallowed his body. The episode of the dredge was the last effort to question the power of the regent. The day after its capture Wolf put the men who had helped Norman build it to work operating the big machine, and its huge pumps began to throb in perfect time, piling ton on ton of gold-bearing sand and gravel into the flumes, as faithful to the touch of the thief who had stolen it as to the hand of the man of genius who invented it. The head machinist he ordered to build five duplicates, and placed the entire working force of the mechanical department at once on the job. The daily _New Era_ received a number of protests against the outrage of the inventor's arrest and imprisonment. Two protests were signed by the names of the writers, Diggs and the Bard. There appeared in the paper a warning editorial against sneaks who, under cover of the cause of justice, were seeking to aid treason and rebellion against the State. Diggs and the Bard were summoned before Wolf in person. The regent fixed his gray eyes on Diggs, and the man of questions forgot to smile. "You are not dealing with an amateur now, Diggs," Wolf said, with a sneer. "The insulting letter you wrote----" "I--I--beg your pardon, Mr. Regent," Diggs stammered, "my questions were asked in the spirit of honest inquiry." "I understand their spirit, sir," Wolf growled. "And don't you interrupt me again when I'm talking! Your article was seditious. I've a mind to imprison you a year, but as this is your first offence I'll simply transfer you from the department of accounts to that of garbage and sewerage. Report at once to the overseer." Diggs's lips quivered and he tried to speak, but Wolf froze him with a look and he dropped to a seat. "I said report at once, sir, to the overseer of the department of garbage and sewerage. Did you hear me?" Wolf thundered. Diggs leaped to his feet stammering and retreating. "Yes, sir! Yes, sir! Excuse me. I was only waiting for Comrade Adair, sir! Excuse me, sir, I'll go at once!" He stumbled through the door and disappeared. The Bard of Ramcat watched this scene with increasing terror. He had prepared an eloquent and daring appeal for freedom of speech. He tried to open his mouth, but Wolf's gaze froze the blood in his veins. His tongue refused to move. He sat huddled in a heap, trembling and shifting uneasily in his seat. At length the regent spoke with sneering patronage: "You wield a facile pen, Adair. I admire the glib ability with which you pour out gaseous matter from your overheated imagination." The Bard scrambled to his feet and bowed low in humble submission, fumbling his slouch hat tremblingly. "I meant no harm, sir, I assure you. A great leader of your power and genius can make allowances for poetic fervour. I'm sure you know that my whole soul is aflame with enthusiasm for our noble Cause!" "Well, upon my word," Wolf laughed, "you're developing into a nimble liar! You used to be quite brutal in the frankness of your criticisms." "But I see the error of my way, sir," the Bard humbly cried. "Then I'll remit your prison sentence also and merely transfer you to the stone-quarry. We need more common labourers on the rock-pile there preparing the macadam for the court of the regent's palace. Report at once to the foreman of that gang." "Thank you, sir," the Bard stammered, feebly, as he backed out of the room. The poet bent his proud back over the stone-pile for two weeks and suddenly disappeared. His hat was found on a rustic seat on a high cliff whose perpendicular wall was washed by the sea. Beneath this hat lay his last manuscript protest to the world. It was entitled: "The Journal of Roland Adair, Bard of Ramcat." It was written in blank verse and proved a most harrowing recital of the horrors he had suffered at the hands of the tyrant regent. With eloquence fierce and fiery he called on the slaves who were being ground beneath his heel to rise in their might and slay the oppressor. He had chosen to die that his death-song might stir their souls to heroic action. Search was made on the beaches for his body in vain. His wife's grief was genuine and a few of his friends gathered with her on the tenth day after his disappearance to express their sorrow and appreciation in a brief formal service. Diggs was delivering a funeral oration bombarding Death, Hell, and the Grave with endless questions, when suddenly the Bard appeared, pinched with hunger, his clothes covered with dirt, his long hair dishevelled and unkempt. He had evidently been sleeping in the open. His friends stood in wonder. His wife shrieked in terror. The Bard solemnly lifted his hand and cried: "I stood on the hills and waited for slaves to rise and fight their way to death or freedom. And no man stirred! Did they not find my death-song?" Diggs spoke in timid accents: "The regent destroyed it." "Yes, yes, but before my death I anticipated his treachery. I left ten mimeographed copies where they could be found by the people. If they have not been found my death would have been vain. I waited to be sure. I've come to ask." "They were found all right," his wife cried, angrily. "And if Wolf finds you now----" She had scarcely spoken when an officer of the secret service suddenly laid his hand on the Bard's shoulder and quietly said: "Come. We'll give you something to sing about now worth while!" His wife clung to the tottering, terror-stricken figure for a moment and burst in tears. His friends shrank back in silence. The regent had him flogged unmercifully; and Roland Adair, the Bard of Ramcat, ceased to sing. He became a mere cog in the wheel of things which moved on with swift certainty to its appointed end. The social system worked now with deadly precision and ceaseless regularity. No citizen dared to speak against the man in authority over him or complain to the regent, for they were his trusted henchmen. Men and women huddled in groups and asked in whispers the news. Disarmed and at the mercy of his brutal guard, cut off from the world as effectually as if they lived on another planet, despair began to sicken the strongest hearts, and suicide to be more common than in the darkest days of panic and hunger in the old world. A curious group of three huddled together in the shadows discussing their fate on the day the Bard was publicly flogged. Uncle Bob led the whispered conference of woe. "I tells ye, gemmens, dis beats de worl'! Befo' de war I wuz er slave. But I knowed my master. We wuz good friends. He say ter me, 'Bob you'se de blackest, laziest nigger dat ebber cumber de groun'! And I laf right in his face an' say, 'Come on, Marse Henry, an' le's go fishin'--dey'll bite ter-day'! An' he go wid me. He nebber lay de weight er his han' on me in his life. He come ter see me when I sick an' cheer me up. He gimme good clothes an' a good house an' plenty ter eat. He love me, an' I love him. I tells ye I'se er slave now an' I don't know who de debbil my master is. Dey change him every ten days. Dey cuss an' kick me--an' I work like a beast. Dis yer comrade business too much fer me." "To tell you the truth, boys," said a bowed figure by old Bob's side, "I lived in a model community once before." "Oh, go 'long dar, man, dey nebber wuz er nudder one!" Bob protested. "Yes. We all wore the same thickness of clothes, ate the same three meals regularly, never over-ate or suffered from dyspepsia; all of us worked the same number of hours a day, went to bed at the same time and got up at the same time. There was no drinking, cursing, carousing, gambling, stealing, or fighting. We were model people and every man's wants were met with absolute equality. The only trouble was we all lived in the penitentiary at San Quentin----" "Des listen at dat now!" Bob exclaimed. "Yes, and I found the world outside a pretty tough place to live in when I got out, too. I thought I'd find the real thing here and slipped in. What's the difference? In the pen we wore a gray suit. We've got it here with a red spangle on it. There they decided the kind of grub they'd give us. The same here. There we worked at jobs they give us. The same here. There we worked under overseers and guards. So we do here. I was sent up there for two years. It looks like we're in here for life." "How long, O Lord, how long, will Thy servant wait for deliverance?" cried Methodist John, in plaintive despair. "If I only could get back to the poorhouse! There I had food and shelter and clothes. It's all I've got here--but with it work, work, work! and a wicked, sinful, cussin' son of the devil always over me drivin' and watchin'!" John's jaw suddenly dropped as a black cloud swept in from the sea and obscured the sun. A squall of unusual violence burst over the island with wonderful swiftness. The darkness of twilight fell like a pall, and a sharp peal of thunder rang over the harbour. John watched the progress of the storm with strange elation, quietly walked through the blinding, drenching rain to the barn, and drew from the forks of two trees a lightning-rod about thirty feet long which Norman had finally made for him in answer to his constant pleading. The tip of the rod was pointed with a dozen shining spikes. John seized this rod, held it straight over his head, and began to march with firm step around the lawn. He walked with slow, measured tread past the two big colony houses to the amazement of the people who stood at the windows watching the storm. He held his lightning-rod as a soldier a musket on dress-parade, his eyes fixed straight in front. As he passed through the floral court between the two buildings he burst into an old Methodist song, his cracked voice ringing in weird and plaintive tones with the sigh and crash of the wind among the foliage of the trees and shrubbery: "I want to be an angel, And with the angels stand, A crown upon my forehead, A harp within my hand." Over and over he sang this stanza with increasing fervour as he marched steadily on through every path around the buildings, his rain-soaked clothes clinging to his flesh and flopping dismally about his thin legs. As the storm suddenly lifted he stopped in front of the kitchen, dropped his rod, and sank with a groan to his knees taking up again his old refrain: "How long, O Lord, how long?" Old Bob ran out and shook him. "Name er God, man, what de matter wid you? Is you gone clean crazy? What you doin' monkeyin' wid dat lightnin'-rod?" John lifted his drooping head and sighed: "You see, neighbour, I don't like to kill myself. It's against my religion. It seems like taking things out of the hands of God. But I thought the Lord, in His infinite wisdom and mercy, might be kind enough to spare me a bolt if I lifted my rod and put myself in the way. If he had only seen fit to do it, I'd be at rest now in the courts of glory!" "Dis here's a sad worl', brudder," Bob said comfortingly. "'Pears lak ter me de Lawd doan' lib here no mo'." Before John could reply, a guard arrested him for disorderly conduct. The regent kicked him from his office and ordered him to prison on a diet of bread and water for a week. The slightest criticism of his reign Wolf resented with instant and crushing cruelty. His system of spies was complete and his knowledge of every man's attitude accurate and full. Where-ever he appeared, he received the most cringing obeisance. Especially did women tremble at his approach and count themselves happy if he condescended to smile. CHAPTER XXXIV A BROTHER TO THE BEAST At the end of three months from the time he took possession of the dredge, Wolf's men had built five duplicates, and they were all at work. More than three thousand dollars' worth of gold he weighed daily and stored in secret vaults whose keys never left his grasp. The new colony he landed in groups of two hundred at intervals of sufficient time to assign each new member to work where the least trouble could be given. The strictest search for arms and weapons of every kind was made before each person was allowed to land. It took only about two weeks to bring the new group into perfect subjection. Spies reported every word of surprise and criticism that fell from the lips of a newcomer. The overseer of each gang of labourers was required to complete the task assigned to him by the standard of the very best records labour had ever made, and to secure these results it was necessary to constantly lengthen the hours of each day's service. As the efficiency of labour decreased the entire colony gradually gravitated to the basis of convict service. As no man received more than food, clothes, and shelter there could be no conceivable motive to induce any one to work harder than was necessary to escape the lash of the overseer. Consequently the hours of labour were increased from nine to ten. The one ambition now of every man was to win the favour of the authorities, and become one of the regent's guard, an overseer, or find relief from the hard, brutal tasks imposed on the great majority. The road to promotion could not be found in achievement. The power to assign and enforce work was the mightiest force ever developed in the hand of man. Under the system of capitalism wealth was desirable because it meant power over men. But this power was always limited. Under the free play of natural law no man, even the poorest, could be commanded to work by a superior power. He could always quit if he liked. He might choose to go hungry, or apply to the charity society for help in the last resort, but he was still master of his own person. His will was supreme. He, and he alone, could say, I will, or I will not. Here all was changed. A new force in human history had been created. Wealth beyond all the dreams of passion and avarice was in the grasp of the regent and his henchmen. He wielded the most autocratic and merciless power over men conceivable to the human imagination--a power final and resistless, from which there could be no appeal save in death itself. The results of this power quickly began to show in the development of life around the regent and each of his trusted minions. By the time the theatre and music hall were finished and opened, Wolf had selected more than a hundred of the prettiest girls in the colony for the two stages. His method of selection was always the same. The girl he desired he secretly ordered to be assigned to a dirty or disgusting form of labour. He allowed her to rave in hopeless anger at her tasks until she found that all appeal was in vain and her doom sealed. He then made it his business to call, express his surprise at the task to which she had been assigned, and smile vaguely at her eager appeal for a change. If she proved charming to the regent she was promptly assigned to the chorus of the State theatre and given luxurious quarters in the building adjoining. Their tasks were light and agreeable. They studied music and dancing and elocution. But, above all, they studied day and night the art of pleasing the regent, whose frown could send any of them instantly to the washtub or the scrubbing-brush. In like manner around the personality of each guard, overseer, secret-service man, superintendent, and governor of departments there grew a coterie of favoured ones whose position depended solely on the whim of the man in power. The State only could manufacture arms. The State only could bear arms. And the system of law which Socialism developed was so full, so minute in its touch on every detail of human life, and so merciless in its system of espionage, the very idea of revolution was slowly dying in the despairing hearts of the colonists. So sure was Wolf of his victim when once he had marked her, he was merely amused rather than displeased over Barbara's defiance of his wishes. A few days before the opening and dedication of the regent's palace, when all his preparations were complete, Wolf summoned Catherine. "I have here," he began, "my proclamation for the complete establishment of a perfect Social State. I publish it to-morrow morning. It goes into effect immediately: "'From to-day the State of Ventura enters upon the reign of pure Communism which is the only logical end of Socialism. All private property is hereby abolished. The claim of husband to the person of his wife as his own can no longer be tolerated. Love is free from all chains. Marriage will hereafter be celebrated by a simple declaration before a representative of the State, and it shall cease to bind at the will of either party. Complete freedom in the sex-relationship is left to the judgment and taste of a race of equally developed men and women. The State will interfere, when necessary, to regulate the birth-rate and maintain the limits of efficient population.'" "Which means for me?" Catherine inquired. "That you are divorced and free to marry whom you please." The woman uttered a cry of anguish, threw her arms around Wolf's big neck, and burst into sobs. "Oh, Herman, surely you have some pity left in your heart! For God's sake, don't cast me out of your life in this cruel, horrible way!" He turned his stolid face away with cold indifference. She lifted her tapering hand timidly and smoothed the coarse hair back from his forehead with a tender gesture. "Can you forget," she went on, in low, passionate tones, "all we have been to one another through the long, dark years of our fight with poverty and oppression? All I have done for your sake? That I broke my husband's heart--for he loved me even as I love you--I left my babies, and have never seen them since; broke with every friend and loved one on earth for you! Have you forgotten all I have done in this work? The tireless zeal with which I've fought your battles? Can you kick me from your presence now as though I were a dog?" Wolf pursed his thick lips and scowled. "No, I mean that you shall stay where you are and take charge of my new household. Barbara will need your assistance." "Barbara!" she gasped. "I have chosen her as the new regent," Wolf calmly answered. "I will announce our marriage at the dedication of the palace." "And you think that I will accept such shame?" "I'm sure you will!" he quickly answered with an ominous threat in his tone. The woman sprang to her feet and faced him, her tall, lithe figure tense with passion. "I dare you to try it!" "Dare?" Wolf repeated in a low growl. "I said it!" she cried, defiantly. "From the very housetop I'll shout the story of our life. I'll show you I'm a power you must reckon with----" "And I'll show you," Wolf answered "that there's but one power that counts now in the world of realities in which we live--the elemental force of tooth, and nail, and claw--do you understand?" He thrust his big, ugly face into hers and a look of terror flashed from her eyes as she saw his features convulsed with fury. "Please, Herman!" she pleaded at last in a feeble, childish voice. "You are still daring me?" "No, I give up--surely you will not strike me!" she gasped. "Not unless I have to," he answered, with cold menace. CHAPTER XXXV LOVE AND LOCKSMITHS Barbara sat in the little rose bower on the lawn puzzling her brain for the thousandth time over impossible schemes to communicate with Norman. From day to day she had watched with increasing fear the rapid growth of Wolf's cruel instincts under the conditions of tyranny he had established. She had appealed in vain to every man in authority. Everywhere the same answer. The regent's power inspired a terror which no appeal could penetrate. She started with a sudden thought. Among the guards who stood watch at Wolf's door was the nineteen-year-old boy who had acted as usher and shown Norman to a seat in the Socialist Hall the night they met. She had caught a peculiar look in his face the last time she entered Wolf's office. Could it be possible he was in love with her in the helpless, heroic, boy fashion of his age? She would put him to the test. It was worth trying. She found him on guard in the corridor outside Wolf's door, approached him cautiously, touched his hand timidly, and whispered: "Jimmy, I'm in great distress." "I wish I could help you, Miss Barbara," he answered in low, earnest tones, sweeping the corridor with a quick look. "Even at the risk of your life?" "I'd jump at the chance to die for you!" was the simple answer. Barbara's voice choked and her little hand caught the boy's gratefully. His conquest was too easy, his love too big and generous! "I wish I could do it, Jimmy, without letting you risk your life, but I must see Norman." "I'll help you if I can, Miss Barbara, but I don't know how. The jailer won't let me in without an order from the regent." "I'll go in now," she went on, "get a piece of paper from his desk, forge the order, and sign his name. I can imitate his handwriting. I'll give it to you immediately, and watch until you get back to your post." "I'll do it!" the boy answered, his eyes shining. "Tell Norman," Barbara whispered, "that I have found Saka in the hills. He has built a skiff and has it ready to sail with his message for relief." "I understand." She entered Wolf's office unannounced and surprised him with her girlish buoyancy of spirit. With a light laugh she sprang on his big desk, sat down among his papers, and deftly closed her hand over one of his small official order-pads. "I cannot see Norman, to-day?" she asked. "Not to-day, my dear. A little later, yes, but not to-day!" He laughed carelessly and turned in his armchair to a messenger: "Take that order to the captain of the guard and tell him to report to me at seven o'clock to-night." While he spoke, the girl slipped from her place on the desk and thrust the order pad in her pocket. "Then I'm wasting breath to plead with you?" "Decidedly. But I congratulate you on the rational way you are beginning to look at things." As she moved to the door she smiled over her shoulder: "Time will work wonders, perhaps!" "I told you so," he laughed. She hurried to her room and wrote the order signing Wolf's name without a moment's hesitation: "Admit the guard bearing this order for the delivery of a personal message to the prisoner, Norman Worth. "WOLF--_Regent_." She stood at the window and watched the boy enter the jail. He stayed an interminable time! Each tick of the tiny watch in her hand seemed an hour. One minute, two, three, four, five minutes slowly dragged. Merciful God, would he never return? A thousand questions began to strangle her. Had Wolf suspected and played with her? Had the jailer recognized the trick and arrested the boy? Had Wolf discovered the boy's absence from his post? She looked at her watch again. He had been gone seven minutes! The door of the jail suddenly opened and the boy appeared. Her hand was tingling with a curious pain. She looked, and the nails of her fingers had cut the flesh as she had stood in agony counting the seconds. The boy walked with leisurely precision as though on an ordinary errand for the regent. Barbara waited until he resumed his position on guard at the door and quickly reached his side. He pressed a note into her hand, whispering: "The jailer held me up at first--but I found him!" Barbara glanced down the corridor with a quick look threw her arms around the boy's neck and kissed him tenderly. He smiled, drew a deep breath, and said: "Now, I'm ready to die!" "No. To live and fight," she cried. "Fight our way back to freedom. You must help me!" She turned and flew to her room. The note in her hand was burning the soft flesh. She locked her door and read: "HEART OF MY HEART: "Iron bars have held my body but my soul has been with you! I've seen you walking among the flowers a hundred times and tried to force my message through the walls. I enclose a telegram to my father and one to the Governor of California. Send Saka to Santa Barbara with them. The troops should arrive in forty-eight hours. All I ask of God now is the chance to fight. I love you! "Always yours, NORMAN." She kissed the note, tore it into fragments, and burned the pieces. When night had fallen, Jimmy safely passed the patrol lines, delivered his message to Saka, helped him launch the skiff, watched the little sail spread before a fair wind, and returned to his post. CHAPTER XXXVI THE SHINING EMBLEM When Wolf's patrol telephoned two days later that a company of troops had suddenly landed on the other side of the island, he called the captain of the guard: "A detail of men to move the gold aboard the ship. Order the steam up. I'll divide with you. We must beat those soldiers back until we can sail. Fight them at every possible stand as they cross the hills. I'll join you if the guard is driven in." The captain hurried to execute Wolf's orders, while the regent began with feverish haste to transfer the treasures of the colony to the ship. * * * * * Norman sat on his cot in prison, awaiting anxiously the first sound of the troops. He suddenly leaped to his feet. "They are coming!" Listening a moment intently, he cried: "There it is again--the scream of fifes from the hills!--now, they are driving in the pickets--hear the crack of those rifles!--God in heaven, isn't it music!" He sank back on the cot with a sob of joy. In a rush the troops surrounded the jail. The sheriff lifted his hand and shouted: "In the name of the peace and dignity of the State of California----" Wolf answered with a defiant wave and charged at the head of his guard. The soldiers poured into their ranks a deadly fire. At the first volley the leader fell. The charging column hesitated, halted, threw down their arms, and surrendered. In five minutes Colonel Worth entered the jail and father and son silently embraced. Barbara followed and Norman clasped her in his arms. A shout rose from the troops and the group within moved to the prison window. The colour-sergeant had hauled down the red ensign of Socialism from the flag-staff on the lawn and lifted the Stars and Stripes in its place. Norman's hand sought his father's. They clasped a moment tremblingly, and, still looking through the barred window at the shining emblem in the sky, the young man slowly said: "It _is_ beautiful, isn't it Governor!" THE END BOOKS ON NATURE STUDY BY CHARLES G.D. ROBERTS Handsomely bound in cloth. Price, 75 cents per volume, postpaid. =THE KINDRED OF THE WILD. A Book of Animal Life. With illustrations by Charles Livingston Bull.= Appeals alike to the young and to the merely youthful-hearted. Close observation. Graphic description. We get a sense of the great wild and its denizens. Out of the common. Vigorous and full of character. The book is one to be enjoyed; all the more because it smacks of the forest instead of the museum. John Burroughs says "The volume is in many ways the most brilliant collection of Animal Stories that has appeared. It reaches a high order of literary merit." =THE HEART OF THE ANCIENT WOOD. Illustrated.= This book strikes a new note in literature. It is a realistic romance of the folk of the forest--a romance of the alliance of peace between a pioneer's daughter in the depths of the ancient wood and the wild beasts who felt her spell and became her friends. It is not fanciful, with talking beasts; nor is it merely an exquisite idyll of the beasts themselves. It is an actual romance, in which the animal characters play their parts as naturally as do the human. The atmosphere of the book is enchanting. The reader feels the undulating, whimpering music of the forest, the power of the shady silences, the dignity of the beasts who live closest to the heart of the wood. =THE WATCHERS OF THE TRAILS. A companion volume to the "Kindred of the Wild." With 48 full page plates and decorations from drawings by Charles Livingston Bull.= These stories are exquisite in their refinement, and yet robust in their appreciation of some of the rougher phases of woodcraft. "This is a book full of delight. An additional charm lies in Mr. Bull's faithful and graphic illustrations, which in fashion all their own tell the story of the wild life, illuminating and supplementing the pen pictures of the authors."--_Literary Digest._ =RED FOX. The Story of His Adventurous Career in the Ringwaak Wilds, and His Triumphs over the Enemies of His Kind. With 50 illustrations, including frontispiece in color and cover design by Charles Livingston Bull.= A brilliant chapter in natural history. Infinitely more wholesome reading than the average tale of sport, since it gives a glimpse of the hunt from the point of view of the hunted. "True in substance but fascinating as fiction. It will interest old and young, city-bound and free-footed, those who know animals and those who do not."--_Chicago Record-Herald._ GROSSET & DUNLAP, Publishers, New York FAMOUS COPYRIGHT BOOKS IN POPULAR PRICED EDITIONS Re-issues of the great literary successes of the time, library size, printed on excellent paper--most of them finely illustrated. Full and handsomely bound in cloth. Price, 75 cents a volume, postpaid. =NEDRA, by George Barr McCutcheon, with color frontispiece, and other illustrations by Harrison Fisher.= The story of an elopement of a young couple from Chicago, who decide to go to London, travelling as brother and sister. Their difficulties commence in New York and become greatly exaggerated when they are shipwrecked in mid-ocean. The hero finds himself stranded on the island of Nedra with another girl, whom he has rescued by mistake. The story gives an account of their finding some of the other passengers, and the circumstances which resulted from the strange mix-up. =POWER LOT, by Sarah P. McLean Greene. Illustrated.= The story of the reformation of a man and his restoration to self-respect through the power of honest labor, the exercise of honest independence, and the aid of clean, healthy, out-of-door life and surroundings. The characters take hold of the heart and win sympathy. The dear old story has never been more lovingly and artistically told. =MY MAMIE ROSE. The History of My Regeneration, by Owen Kildare. Illustrated.= This _autobiography_ is a powerful book of love and sociology. Reads like the strangest fiction. Is the strongest truth and deals with the story of a man's redemption through a woman's love and devotion. =JOHN BURT, by Frederick Upham Adams, with illustrations.= John Burt, a New England lad, goes West to seek his fortune and finds it in gold mining. He becomes one of the financial factors and pitilessly crushes his enemies. The story of the Stock Exchange manipulations was never more vividly and engrossingly told. A love story runs through the book, and is handled with infinite skill. =THE HEART LINE, by Gelett Burgess, with halftone illustrations by Lester Ralph, and inlay cover in colors.= A great dramatic story of the city that was. A story of Bohemian life in San Francisco, before the disaster, presented with mirror-like accuracy. Compressed into it are all the sparkle, all the gayety, all the wild, whirling life of the glad, mad, bad, and most delightful city of the Golden Gate. GROSSET & DUNLAP, Publishers, New York FAMOUS COPYRIGHT BOOKS IN POPULAR PRICED EDITIONS Re-issues of the great literary successes of the time, library size, printed on excellent paper--most of them finely illustrated. Full and handsomely bound in cloth. Price, 75 cents a volume, postpaid. =CAROLINA LEE. By Lillian Bell. With frontispiece by Dora Wheeler Keith.= Carolina Lee is the Uncle Tom's Cabin of Christian Science. Its keynote is "Divine Love" in the understanding of the knowledge of all good things which may be obtainable. When the tale is told, the sick healed, wrong changed to right, poverty of purse and spirit turned into riches, lovers made worthy of each other and happily united, including Carolina Lee and her affinity, it is borne upon the reader that he has been giving rapid attention to a free lecture on Christian Science; that the working out of each character is an argument for "Faith;" and that the theory is persuasively attractive. A Christian Science novel that will bring delight to the heart of every believer in that faith. It is a well told story, entertaining, and cleverly mingles art, humor and sentiment. =HILMA, by William Tillinghast Eldridge, with illustrations by Harrison Fisher and Martin Justice, and inlay cover.= It is a rattling good tale, written with charm, and full of remarkable happenings, dangerous doings, strange events, jealous intrigues and sweet love making. The reader's interest is not permitted to lag, but is taken up and carried on from incident to incident with ingenuity and contagious enthusiasm. The story gives us the _Graustark_ and _The Prisoner of Zenda_ thrill, but the tale is treated with freshness, ingenuity, and enthusiasm, and the climax is both unique and satisfying. It will hold the fiction lover close to every page. =THE MYSTERY OF THE FOUR FINGERS, by Fred M. White, with halftone illustrations by Will Grefe.= A fabulously rich gold mine in Mexico is known by the picturesque and mysterious name of _The Four Fingers_. It originally belonged to an Aztec tribe, and its location is known to one surviving descendant--a man possessing wonderful occult power. Should any person unlawfully discover its whereabouts, four of his fingers are mysteriously removed, and one by one returned to him. The appearance of the final fourth betokens his swift and violent death. Surprises, strange and startling, are concealed in every chapter of this completely engrossing detective story. The horrible fascination of the tragedy holds one in rapt attention to the end. And through it runs the thread of a curious love story. GROSSET & DUNLAP, Publishers, New York MEREDITH NICHOLSON'S FASCINATING ROMANCES Handsomely bound in cloth. Price, 75 cents per volume, postpaid. =THE HOUSE OF A THOUSAND CANDLES. With a frontispiece in colors by Howard Chandler Christy.= A novel of romance and adventure, of love and valor, of mystery and hidden treasure. The hero is required to spend a whole year in the isolated house, which according to his grandfather's will shall then become his. If the terms of the will be violated the house goes to a young woman whom the will, furthermore, forbids him to marry. Nobody can guess the secret, and the whole plot moves along with an exciting zip. =THE PORT OF MISSING MEN. With illustrations by Clarence F. Underwood.= There is romance of love, mystery, plot, and fighting, and a breathless dash and go about the telling which makes one quite forget about the improbabilities of the story; and it all ends in the old-fashioned healthy American way. Shirley is a sweet, courageous heroine whose shining eyes lure from page to page. =ROSALIND AT REDGATE. Illustrated by Arthur I. Keller.= The author of "The House of a Thousand Candles" has here given us a buoyant romance brimming with lively humor and optimism; with mystery that breeds adventure and ends in love and happiness. A most entertaining and delightful book. =THE MAIN CHANCE. With illustrations by Harrison Fisher.= A "traction deal" in a Western city is the pivot about which the action of this clever story revolves. But it is in the character-drawing of the principals that the author's strength lies. Exciting incidents develop their inherent strength and weaknesses, and if virtue wins in the end, it is quite in keeping with its carefully-planned antecedents. The N.Y. _Sun_ says: "We commend it for its workmanship--for its smoothness, its sensible fancies, and for its general charm." =ZELDA DAMERON. With portraits of the characters by John Cecil Clay.= "A picture of the new West, at once startlingly and attractively true. * * * The heroine is a strange, sweet mixture of pride, wilfulness and lovable courage. The characters are superbly drawn; the atmosphere is convincing. There is about it a sweetness, a wholesomeness and a sturdiness that commends it to earnest, kindly and wholesome people."--_Boston Transcript._ GROSSET & DUNLAP, Publishers, New York * * * * * +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Typographical errors corrected in text: | | | | Page 62: ecomonic replaced with economic | | Page 126: "could be plainly see" replaced with | | "could be plainly seen" | | Page 162: collasped replaced by collapsed | | Page 246: "he was was quick to note" replaced with | | "he was quick to note" | | Page 290: kissd replaced with kissed | | Page 297: "with which your pour out" replaced with | | "with which you pour out" | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------+ * * * * * 
35572	----	* * * * * +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Note: | | | | Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has | | been preserved. Bold text is represented =like so=. | | Superscripted text is represented like^{so}. | | | Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For | | a complete list, please see the end of this document. | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------+ * * * * * SOCIALISM AND DEMOCRACY IN EUROPE By SAMUEL P. ORTH, PH.D. _Author of "Five American Politicians" "Centralization of Administration in Ohio," etc._ [Illustration] NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1913 COPYRIGHT, 1913 BY HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY Published January, 1913 THE QUINN & BODEN CO. PRESS RAHWAY, N.J. PREFACE It is becoming more and more evident that democracy has served only the first years of its apprenticeship. Political problems have served only to introduce popular government. The economic problems now rushing upon us will bring the real test of democracy. The workingman has taken an advanced place in the struggle for the democratization of industry. He has done so, first, through the organization of labor unions; secondly, through the development of political parties--labor parties. The blend of politics and economics which he affects is loosely called Socialism. The term is as indefinite in meaning as it is potent in influence. It has spread its unctuous doctrines over every industrial land, and its representatives sit in every important parliament, including our Congress. Such a movement requires careful consideration from every point of view. It is the object of this volume to trace briefly the growth of the movement in four leading European countries, and to attempt to determine the relation of economic and political Socialism to democracy--a question of peculiar interest to the friends of the American Republic at this time. In preparing this volume, the author has made extended visits to the countries studied. He has tried to catch the spirit of the movement by personal contact with the Socialist leaders and their antagonists, and by many interviews with laboring men, the rank and file in every country visited. Everywhere he was received with the greatest cordiality, and he wishes here to express his appreciation of these many kindnesses. He wishes especially to acknowledge his obligations to the following gentlemen: Mr. Graham Wallas of the University of London; Mr. W.G. Towler of the London Municipal Society; Mr. John Hobson of London, and Mr. J.S. Middleton, assistant secretary of the Labor Party; to Dr. Robert Herz and Prof. Charles Gide of the University of Paris; Dr. Albert Thomas and M. Adolphe Landry of the Chamber of Deputies; M. Jean Longuet, editor of _L'Humanité_; to Dr. Franz Oppenheimer of the University of Berlin; Dr. Südekum of the Reichstag; Dr. Hilferding, editor of _Vorwärts_; Prof. T.H. Norton, American Consul at Chemnitz; M. Camille Huysmans, secretary of the "International," Brussels; as well as to many American friends for providing letters of introduction which opened many useful and congenial doorways. S.P.O. January, 1913. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. WHY DOES SOCIALISM EXIST? 1 II. THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIALISM 17 III. The Political Awakening of Socialism--The Period of Revolution 42 IV. THE POLITICAL AWAKENING OF SOCIALISM--THE INTERNATIONAL 56 V. THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF FRANCE 75 VI. THE BELGIAN LABOR PARTY 118 VII. THE GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY 146 VIII. GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY AND LABOR UNIONS 171 IX. THE ENGLISH LABOR PARTY 207 X. CONCLUSION 250 APPENDIX 273 INDEX 347 SOCIALISM AND DEMOCRACY IN EUROPE CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION--WHY DOES SOCIALISM EXIST? The answer to this question will bring us nearer to the core of the social movement than any attempted definition. The French Socialist program begins with the assertion, "Socialism is a question of class." Class distinction is the generator of Socialism. The ordinary social triptych--upper, middle, and lower classes--will not suffice us in our inquiry. We must distinguish between the functions of the classes. The upper class is a remnant of the feudal days, of the manorial times, when land-holding brought with it social distinction and political prerogative. In this sense we have no upper class in America. The middle class is composed of the business and professional element, and the lower class of the wage-earning element. There are two words, as yet quite unfamiliar to American readers, which are met with constantly in European works on Socialism and are heard on every hand in political discussions--_proletariat_ and _bourgeois_. The proletariat are the wage-earning class, the poor, the underlings. The bourgeois[1] are roughly the middle class. The French divide them into _petits_ bourgeois and _grands_ bourgeois. Werner Sombart divides them into lower middle class, the manual laborers who represent the guild system, and bourgeoisie, the representatives of the capitalistic system.[2] It will thus be seen that these divisions have a historical basis. The upper class reflect the days of feudalism, of governmental prerogative and aristocracy. The middle class are the representatives of the guild and mercantile systems, when hand labor and later business acumen brought power and wealth to the craftsman and adventurer. The lower class are the homologues of the slaves, the serfs, the toilers, whose reward has constantly been measured by the standard of bare existence. Socialism arises consciously out of the efforts of this class to win for itself a share of the powers of the other classes. It is necessary to understand that while this class distinction is historic in origin it is essentially economic in fact. It is not "social"; a middle-class millionaire may be congenial to the social circles of the high-born. It is not political; a workingman may vote with any party he chooses. He may ally himself with the conservative Center as he sometimes does in Germany, or with the Liberal Party as he sometimes does in England, or with either of the old parties as he does in the United States. On the other hand, a bourgeois may be a Socialist and vote with the proletarians. Indeed, many of the Socialist leaders belong to the well-to-do middle class. This class distinction, then, is economic. It is a distinction of function, the function of the capitalist and the function of the wage-earner. Let us go one step further; it is a distinction in property. The possessor of private wealth can become a capitalist by investing his money in productive enterprise. He then becomes the employer of labor. There are all grades of capitalists, from the master wagon-maker who works by the side of his one or two workmen, to the "captain" of a vast industry that gives employment to thousands of men and turns out a wagon a minute. The institution of private property is the basis of Socialism because it is the basis of capitalistic production. It places in one man's hands the power of owning raw material, machinery, land, factory, and finished product; and the power of hiring men to operate the machinery, and to convert the raw material into marketable wares. As long as this power was limited to hand industry the proletarian movement was abortive. When the industrial revolution linked the ingenuity of man to the power of nature it so multiplied the potency of the possessor that the proletarian movement by stress of circumstances became a great factor in industrial life. While the possession either of wealth or family tradition was always the basis of class distinction, the industrial revolution brought with it the enormously multiplied power of capital and the glorification of riches. The proletarians multiplied rapidly in number, and all the evils of sharp class distinction were heightened. In all lands where capitalistic production spread, the two classes grew farther apart, the distinction between possessor and wage-earner increased. It is not the mere possession of wealth, however, which forms the animus of the Socialist movement. It is probably not even the abuse of this wealth, although this is a large factor in the problem. It is the psychological effect of the capitalist system that is the real enginery of Socialism. It is the class feeling, the consciousness of the workingman that he is contributing muscle and blood and sweat to the perfection of an article whose possession he does not share. This feeling is aroused by the contrasts of life that the worker constantly sees around him. He feels that his own life energy has contributed to the magnificent equipages and the palatial luxuries of his employer. He compares his own lot and that of his family with the lot of the capitalist. This feeling of envy is not blunted by the kaleidoscopic suddenness with which changes of fortune can take place in America to-day. By some stroke of luck or piece of ingenious planning, a receiver of wages to-day may be the giver of wages to-morrow. Nor does the spread of education and intelligence dull the contrasts. It greatly heightens them. The workman can now begin to analyze the conditions under which he lives. He ponders over the distinctions that are actual and contrasts them with his imagined utopia. To him the differences between employer and employee are not natural. He does not attribute them to any fault or shortcoming or inferiority of his own, nor of his master, but to a flaw in the organization of society. The social order is wrong. The workingman has become the critic. Here you have the heart of Socialism. Whatever form its outward aspect may take, at heart it is a rebellion against things as they are. And whatever may be the syllogisms of its logic, or the formularies of its philosophy, they all begin with a grievance, that things as they are are wrong; and they all end in a hope for a better society of to-morrow where the inequalities shall somehow be made right. In his struggle toward a new economic ideal, the proletarian has achieved a class homogeneity and self-consciousness. The individuality that is denied him in industry he has sought and found among his own brethren. In the great factory he loses even his name and becomes number so-and-so. In his union and in his party he asserts his individuality with a grim and impressive stubbornness. The gravitation of common ideals and common protests draws these forgotten particles of industrialism into a massed consciousness that is to-day one of the world's great potencies. The very fact that we call this body of workers "the masses" is significant. We speak of them as a geologist speaks of his "basement complex." We recognize unconsciously that they form the foundation of our economic life. The class struggle, then, is between two clearly defined and self-conscious elements in modern industrial life that are the natural product of our machine industry. On the one hand is the business man pursuing with fevered energy the profits that are the goal of his activity; on the other hand are the workingmen who, more and more sullen in their discontent, are clamoring louder each year for a greater share of the wealth they believe their toil creates. There is some reason to believe that this class basis of Socialism is vanishing. In England J. Ramsay MacDonald denies its significance.[3] Revisionists and progressive Socialists, who are throwing aside the Marxian dogmas, are also preaching the universality of the Socialist conception. However, the economic factor based on class functions remains the essence of the social movement.[4] What are the ideals of Socialism? They are not merely economic or social, they embrace all life. After one has taken the pains to read the more important mass of Socialist literature, books, pamphlets, and some current newspapers and magazines, and has listened to their orators and talked with their leaders, confusion still remains in the mind. The movement is so all-embracing that it has no clearly defined limits. The Socialists are feeling their way from protest into practice. Their heads are in the clouds; of this you are certain as you proceed through their books and listen to their speeches. But are their feet upon the earth? For a literature of protest against "suffering, misery, and injustice," as Owen calls it, there is a wonderful buoyancy and hope in their words. It is one of the secrets of its power that Socialism is not the energy of despair. It is the demand for the right to live fully, joyfully, and in comfort. The Socialists demand ozone in their air, nutrition in their food, heartiness in their laughter, ease in their homes, and their days must have hours of relaxation. The awakening aspirations of the proletarian were expressed by one of their own number, William Weitling, a tailor of Magdeburg. He afterwards migrated to America and became one of our first Socialist agitators. His book is called _Garantieen der Harmonie und Freiheit_ (Guaranties of Harmony and Liberty). The book is illogical, full of contradictions, and all of the errors of a child's reasoning. But it remains the workingman's classic philippic, one of the most trenchant recitals of social wrongs, because it blends, with the illogical terminology of sentimentalism, the assurance of hope. "Property," he says, "is the root of all evil." Gold is the symbol of this world of wrongs. "We have become as accustomed to our coppers as the devil to his hell." When the rule of gold shall cease, then "the teardrops which are the tokens of true brotherliness will return to the dry eyes of the selfish, the soul of the evildoer will be filled with noble and virtuous sentiments such as he had never known before, and the impious ones who have hitherto denied God will sing His praise." The humble tailor is assured that the reign of property will be terminated and the age of humanity begin, and he calls to the workingman, "Forward, brethren; with the curse of Mammon on our lips, let us await the hour of our emancipation, when our tears will be transmuted into pearls of dew, our earth transformed into a paradise, and all of mankind united into one happy family."[5] Nor is the closing cry of his book without an element of prophecy. He addresses the "mighty ones of this earth," admonishing them that they may secure the fame of Alexander and Napoleon by the deeds of emancipation which lie in their power. "But if you compel us (the proletarians) to undertake the task alone with our raw material, then it will be accomplished only after weary toil and pain to us and to you." Let us turn to Robert Owen, who was at an early age the most successful cotton spinner in England. He adapted an old philosophy to a new humanitarianism. He saw that a "gradual increase in the number of our paupers has accompanied our increasing wealth."[6] He began the series of experiments which made his name familiar in England and America and made him known in history as the greatest experimental communist. His experiments have failed. But his hopefulness persists. In his address delivered at the dedication of New Lanark, 1816, he said that he had found plenty of unhappiness and plenty of misery. "But from this day a change must take place; a new era must commence; the human intellect, through the whole extent of the earth, hitherto enveloped by the grossest ignorance and superstition, must begin to be released from its state of darkness; nor shall nourishment henceforth be given to the seeds of disunion and division among men. For the time has come when the means may be prepared to train all the nations of the world in that knowledge which shall _impel them not only to love but to be actively kind to each other in the whole of their conduct, without a single exception_." Here is an all-inclusive hopefulness. Its significance is not diminished by the fact that it was spoken of his own peculiar remedy by education and environment. This faith and hope runs through all their books like a golden song. Excepting Marx, he was the great gloomy one. Even those who condemn modern society with the most scathing adjectives link with their denunciations the most sanguine sentences of hope. The Christian Socialism of Kingsley is filled with optimism. "Look up, my brother Christians, open your eyes, the hour of a new crusade has struck."[7] The song of the new crusade was sung by Robert Morris: "Come, shoulder to shoulder ere the world grows older! Help lies in naught but thee and me; Hope is before us, the long years that bore us, Bore leaders more than men may be. "Let dead hearts tarry and trade and marry, And trembling nurse their dreams of mirth, While we, the living, our lives are giving To bring the bright new world to birth." This song of hope is sung to-day by thousands of marching Socialists. Their bitter experiences in parliaments and in strikes, and all the warfare of politics and trade, have not blighted their rosy hope. They are still looking forward to "the bright new world," in which a new social order shall reign. Linked with this optimism is a certain prophetic tone, an elevation of spirit that lifts some of their books out of the commonplace. The sincerity of these prophets of Socialism contributes this quality more than does their originality of mind. In their search for happiness the Socialists see a great barrier in their way. The barrier is want, poverty. There are no greater contrasts, mental and temperamental, than between John Stuart Mill, the erudite economist and philosopher, and H.G. Wells, the romancer and sentimental critic of things as they are. Both begin their attacks upon the social order at the same point--the vulnerable spot, _poverty_. Mill places it first in his category of existing evils. He asks, "What proportion of the population in the most civilized countries of Europe enjoy, in their own person, anything worth naming of the benefits of property?" "Suffice it to say that the condition of numbers in civilized Europe, and even in England and France, is more wretched than that of most tribes of savages who are known to us."[8] Wells bases his racy criticism in his popular book, _New Worlds for Old_, on the facts revealed in the reports of various charity organizations in Edinburgh, York, and London. To both the exacting economist and the popular expositor of Socialism, poverty is the glaring fault of our social system. To Wells poverty is an "atrocious failure in statesmanship."[9] To Mill it is "_pro tanto_ a failure of the social arrangement."[10] These examples are typical. Every school of Socialism finds in poverty the curse, in private property the cause, of human misery, and in a readjusted machinery of social production the hope of human betterment. All Socialists, learned and unlearned, agree that poverty is the stumbling-block in the pathway to better social conditions. They all agree as to the causes of poverty: first, private capitalistic production; second, competition. It is private capitalistic production that enables the employer to pocket all the profits; it is competition that enables him to buy labor in an open market at the lowest possible price, a price regulated by the necessities of bare existence. To the Socialist, competition is anarchy, an anarchy that leaves "every man free to ruin himself so that he may ruin another."[11] To do away with private capital and to abolish competition means bringing about a tremendous change in society. All Socialists unhesitatingly and with boldness are ready, even eager, to make such a change. The problem is not insuperable to them. The three theories that underlie Socialism permit the hope of the possibility of a social regeneration. These theories are, first, that God made the world good, hence all you need to do is to revert to this pristine goodness and the world is reformed. Second, that society is what it is through evolution. If this is true then it is only necessary to control by environment the factors of evolution and the product will be preordained. Third, that even if man is bad and has permitted pernicious institutions like private property to exist, he can remake society by a bold effort, i.e., by revolution, because all social power is vested in man and he can do as he likes. The ruling class can impose its social order upon all. When the Socialist becomes the ruling class his social system will be adopted. This great change which the Socialist has in mind means the substitution of co-operation for competition and the placing of productive property in the care of the state or of society, instead of letting it remain under the domination of individuals. To abolish private productive capital by making it public, to establish a communistic instead of a competitive society, that is the object. In the Socialist's new order of society, where poverty will be unknown, there is to be a common bond. This bond is not possession, but work. With glowing exultation all the expositors and exhorters of the proletarian movement dwell upon the blessedness of toil. They glorify man, not through his inheritance of personality, certainly not through his possession of things, but through his achievements of toil. When all members of society work at useful occupations, then all the necessary things can be done in a few hours. Six or four, or some even say two, hours a day will be sufficient to do all the drudgery and the essential things in a well-organized human beehive. There is to be nothing morose or despondent in this toil. It is all to be done to the melody of good cheer and willingness. How is this great change to come about, and what is to be the exact organization of society under this regime of work and co-operation? Here unanimity ceases. As a criticism Socialism is unanimous, as a method it is divided, as a reconstructive process it is hopelessly at sea. At first Socialists were utopians, then they became revolutionists. This was natural. Socialism was born in an air of revolution--the political revolutions of the bourgeois, and the infinitely greater industrial revolution. The tides of change and passion were rocking the foundations of state and industry. The evils in early industrialism were abhorrent. Small children and their mothers were forced into factories, pauperism was thriving, the ugly machine-fed towns were replacing the quaint and cheerful villages, rulers were forgetting their duties in their greed for gain, and the state was persecuting men for their political and economic opinions. Every face was turned against the preachers of the new order, and they naturally thought that the change could be brought about only by violence and revolution. Louis Blanc said "a social revolution ought to be tried: "Firstly, because the present social system is too full of iniquity, misery, and turpitude to exist much longer. "Secondly, because there is no one who is not interested, whatever his position, rank, and fortune, in the inauguration of a new social system. "Thirdly, and lastly, because this revolution, so necessary, is possible, even easy to accomplish peacefully."[12] These are the naïve words of a young man of thirty-seven, the youngest member of the ill-fated revolutionary government of France in 1848. Not every one thought that the revolution could be peacefully accomplished, and, it must be admitted, few seemed to care. In their "Communist Manifesto," the most noted of all Socialist broadsides, Marx and Engels know of no peaceful revolution. They close with these virile words: "The communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have the world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!" These words are often quoted even in these placid days of evolution that have replaced the red days of violence. The workingmen of all countries are uniting, as we shall see, not for bloody revolution nor for the violence of passion, but for the promulgation of peace. To-day the silent coercion of multitudes is taking the place of the eruptive methods of the '40's and the '70's. As to the ultimate form of organized society, there is nothing but confusion to be found in the mass of literature that has grown up around the subject. The earliest writers were cocksure of themselves; the latest ones bridge over the question with wide-arching generalities. I have asked many of their leaders to give me some hint as to what form their Society of To-morrow will take. Every one dodged. "No one can tell. It will be humanitarian and co-operative." If one could be assured of this! Finally, all Socialists agree in the instrument of change. It lies at hand as the greatest co-operative achievement of our race, the state. It is the common possession of all, and it is the one power that can lay its hands upon property and compel its obedience. The power of the state is to be the dynamo of change. This state is naturally to be democratic. The people shall hold the reins of power in their own hands. It must be remembered that every year sees a shifting in the Socialist's attitude. As he has left the sphere of mere fault-finding and of dreaming, and has entered politics, entered the labor war through unions, and the business war through co-operative societies, he has been compelled to adapt himself to the necessities of things as they are. I have tried briefly to show that Socialism originated as a class movement, a proletarian movement; that the classes, wage-earner and capitalist, are the natural outcome of machine production; that Socialism is one of the natural products of the antagonistic relations that these two classes at present occupy; that Socialism intends to eliminate this antagonism by eliminating the private employer. I have tried to show also that Socialism is a criticism of the present social order placing the blame for the miseries of society upon the shoulders of private property and competition; that it is optimistic in spirit, buoyant in hope; and that its program of reconstruction is confused and immature. Stripped of its glamour, our society is in a neck-to-neck race for things, for property. Its hideousness has shocked the sensibilities of dreamers and humanitarians. Our machine industry has produced a civilization that is ugly. It is natural that the esthetic and philanthropic members of this society should raise their protest. Ruskin and Anatole France and Maeterlinck and Carlyle and Robert Morris and Emerson and Grierson are read with increasing satisfaction. It is natural that the participants in this death race should utter their cries of alternate despair and hope. Socialism is the cry of the toiler. It is not to be ignored. We in America have no conception of its potency. There are millions of hearts in Europe hanging upon its precepts for the hope that makes life worth the fight. Their Utopia may be only a rainbow, a mirage in the mists on the horizon. But the energy which it has inspired is a reality. It has organized the largest body of human beings that the world has known. Its international Socialist movement has but one rival for homogeneity and zeal, the Church, whose organization at one time embraced all kingdoms and enlisted the faithful service of princes and paupers. It is this reality in its political form which I hope to set forth in the following pages. We will try to discover what the Socialist movement is doing in politics, how much of theory has been merged in political practice, what its everyday parliamentary drudgery is, and, if possible, to tell in what direction the movement is tending. Before we do this it is necessary to state briefly the history of the underlying theories of the movement. FOOTNOTES: [1] "By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production, and employers of wage-labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage-laborers, who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live."--FREDERICK ENGELS, _Notes on the Communist Manifesto_, 1888. [2] See SOMBART, _Socialism and the Social Movement_, Introduction, for discussion of the class movement. [3] _The Socialist Movement_, p. 147. [4] The all-embracing character of Socialism was eloquently phrased by Millerand in 1896: "In its large synthesis Socialism embraces every manifestation of life, because nothing human is alien to it, because it alone offers to-day to our hunger for justice and happiness an ideal, purely human and apart from all dogma." See ENSOR, _Modern Socialism_, p. 53. [5] _Garantieen der Harmonie und Freiheit_, pp. 57-58, edition of 1845. [6] Letter I, addressed to David Ricardo. [7] Tract No. IV. [8] _Socialism_, pp. 71-72. [9] WELLS, _New Worlds for Old_, p. 36. [10] MILL, _Socialism_, p. 72. [11] LOUIS BLANC, _The Right to Labor_, p. 63. [12] _Organization of Labor_, p. 87, 1847. CHAPTER II THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIALISM I Socialism began in France, that yeast-pot of civilization. It began while the Revolution was still filling men's minds with a turbulent optimism that knew no limit to human "progress." Saint-Simon (Count Henri de) may be considered the founder of French Socialism. He was of noble lineage, born in 1760, and died in 1825. He took very little part in the French Revolution, but was a soldier in our Continental army, and always manifested a keen interest in American affairs. Possessed of an inquiring mind, an ambitious spirit, and a heart full of sympathy for the oppressed, he devoted himself to the study of society for the purpose of elaborating a scheme for universal human betterment. Before he began his special studies he amassed a modest fortune in land speculation. Not that he loved money, he assures us, but because he wished independence and leisure to do his chosen work. This money was soon lost, through unfortunate experiments and an unfortunate marriage, and the most of his days were spent in penury. He attracted to himself a number of the most brilliant young men in France, among them De Lesseps who subsequently carried out one of the plans of his master, the Suez Canal; and Auguste Comte, who embodied in his positivism the philosophical teachings of Saint-Simon. Saint-Simon believed that society needed to be entirely reorganized on a "scientific basis," and that "the whole of society ought to labor for the amelioration of the moral and physical condition of the poorest class. Society ought to organize itself in the manner the most suitable for the attainment of this great end."[1] The two counteracting motives or spirits in society are the spirit of antagonism and the spirit of association. Hitherto the spirit of antagonism has prevailed, and misery has resulted. Let the spirit of association rule, and the evils will vanish. Under the rule of antagonism, property has become the possession of the few, poverty and misery the lot of the many. Both property and poverty are inherited, therefore the state should abolish all laws of inheritance, take all property under its dominion, and let society be the sole proprietor of the instruments of labor and of the fund that labor creates. Through the teachings of Saint-Simon runs a constant stream of religious fervor. In Christianity he found the moral doctrine that gave sanction to his social views. He sought the primitive Christianity, stripped of the dogmas and opinions of the centuries. In his principal work, _Nouveau Christianisme_ (New Christianity), he subjects the teachings of Catholicism and Protestantism to ingenious criticism, and finds in the teachings of Christ the essential moral elements necessary for a society based on the spirit of association. Saint-Simon was a humanitarian rather than a systematic thinker. His analysis of society is ingenious rather than constructive. His teachings were elaborated by his followers, who organized themselves into a school called the "Sacred College of the Apostles," with Bazard and Enfantin as their leaders. They were accused, in the Chamber of Deputies, of promulgating communism of property and wives. Their defense, dated October, 1830, and issued as a booklet, is the best exposition of their views. They said that: "We demand that land, capital, and all the instruments of labor shall become common property, and be so managed that each one's portion shall correspond to his capacity, and his reward to his labors." "Like the early Christians, we demand that one man should be united to one woman, but we teach that the wife should be the equal of the husband." On the question of marriage, however, the sect split soon after this defense was written. Enfantin became a defender of free love, and inaugurated a fantastic sacerdotalism which drove Bazard from the "Sacred College."[2] The second French social philosopher of the Utopian school was François Marie Charles Fourier (1772-1837). He was a bourgeois, son of a draper, and brought as keen an intellect as did his noble fellow-countryman, Saint-Simon, to the analysis of society, and a much more practical experience. In his youth he had been employed in various business enterprises. He recalls, in his works, several experiences which he never forgot. As a lad, he was reproached for telling a prospective customer the truth about some goods in his father's shop. When a young man of twenty-seven he was sent to Marseilles to superintend the destruction of great cargoes of rice that had been held for higher prices, during a period of scarcity of food when thousands of people were suffering from hunger. The rice had spoiled in the waiting. The event made so profound an impression upon his mind that he resolved to devote his life to the betterment of an economic system that allowed such wanton waste. To his mind the problem of rebuilding society was practical, not metaphysical. But underlying his practical solution was a fantastic cosmogony and psychology. He reduced everything to a mathematical system, and even computed the number of years the world would spin on its axis. He believed that God created a good world, and that man has desecrated it; that the function of the social reformer is to understand the design of the Creator, and call mankind back to this original plan, back to the original impulses and passions, and primitive goodness. This could be done only under ideal environment. Such an environment he proposed to create in huge caravansaries, which he called phalansteries. Each group, or phalange, was composed of 400 families, or 1,800 persons, living on a large square of land, where they could be self-contained and self-sufficient, like the manors in the feudal days. The phalanstery was built in the middle of the tract, and was merely a glorified apartment house. Every one chose to do the work he liked best. Agriculture and manufacture were to be happily blended, and individual freedom given full sway. Each phalange was designed to be an ideal democracy, electing its officers and governing itself. The principle of freedom was to extend even to marriage and the relation of the sexes. It was Fourier's belief that one such phalange once established would so impress the world with its superiority that society would be glad to imitate it. Ere long there would be groups of phalanges co-operating with each other, and ultimately the whole world would be brought into one vast federation of phalanges, with their chief center at Constantinople. The general plan of this apartment-house utopia lent itself to all sorts of fantastic details. It gained adherents among the learned, the eager, and even the rich, and a number of experiments were tried. All of these have failed, I think, excepting only the community at Guise, founded by Jean Godin. Here, however, the fantasies have been eliminated, and the strong controlling force of the founder has made it prosperous. There is no agriculture connected with the Guise establishment. A number of Fourier colonies, most of them modifications of his phalanstery idea, were started in the United States. Of thirty-four such experiments tried in America all have failed. The most famous of these attempts was Brook Farm.[3] Robert Owen (1771-1858) was the great English utopian. He was the son of a small trader. Such was his business ability and tenacity of character that at nineteen years of age he was superintendent of a cotton mill that employed 500 hands. His business acumen soon made him rich, his philanthropic impulses led him to study the conditions of the people who worked for him. In 1800 he took charge of the mills at New Lanark. There he had under him as pitiful and miserable a group of workmen as can be imagined. The factory system made wretchedness the common lot of the English workingman of this period. The hours of labor were intolerably long, the homes of the working people unutterably squalid, women and tiny children worked all day under the most unwholesome conditions; vice, drunkenness, and ignorance were everywhere. Owen began as a practical philanthropist. He improved the sanitary conditions of his mills and town, was the first employer to reasonably shorten the hours of work, founded primary schools, proposed factory legislation, and founded the co-operative movement that has grown to great strength in England. He was one of the powerful men of the island at this period. He had the enthusiastic support of the queen, of many nobles, of clergy and scholars. But in a great public meeting in London he went out of his way to denounce the accepted forms of religion and declare his independence of all creeds, an offense that the English people never forgive. By this time he had perfected his scheme for social reform. He proposed to establish communities of 1,000 to 1,200 persons on about 1,500 acres of land. They were to live in an enormous building in the form of a square, each family to have its own apartments, but kitchen and dining-room to be in common. Every advantage of work, education, and leisure was planned for the inmates. A number of Owenite communities were founded in England and America. The one at New Harmony, Ind., was the most pretentious, and in it Owen sank a large portion of his fortune. None of the experiments survived their founder.[4] The Utopians were all optimists--the source of their optimism was the social philosophy that prevailed from the French Revolution to the middle of the last century. It was the philosophy of an unbounded faith in the goodness of human nature. A good God made a good world, and made man capable of attaining goodness and harmony in all his relations. The evil in the world was contrary to God's plan. It was introduced by the perversity of society. The source of misery is the lack of knowledge. If humankind knew the right way of living, knew the original plan of the Creator, then there would be no misery. You must find this knowledge, this science, and upon it build society. Hence they are all seeking a "scientific state of society," and call their system "scientific." From Rousseau to Hegel, the theory prevailed that evil is collective, good is individual; society is bad, man is pure. Cabet expresses it clearly. "God is perfection, infinite, all-powerful, is justice and goodness. God is our father, and it follows that all men are brethren and all are equal, as in one all-embracing family." "It is evident that, to the fathers of the Church, Christianity was communism. Communism is nothing other than true Christianity...." "The regnancy of God, through Jesus, is the regnancy of perfection, of omniscience, of justice, of goodness, of paternal love; and, it follows, of fraternity, equality, and liberty; of the unity of community interests, that is of communism (of the general common welfare), in place of the individual."[5] This edenesque logic was dear to Fourier, who left more profound traces on modern thought than the fantastic Saint-Simonians.[6] Fourier began with God. "On beholding this mechanism (the world and human society), or even in making an estimate of its properties, it will be comprehended that God has done well all that He has done."[7] Man has only to find "God's design" in order to find the true basis of society; and man's system of industrially parceling out the good things of life among a few favored ones, is the "antipodes of God's design." The finding of this design is the function of "exact science"; man, who has stifled the voice of nature, must now "vindicate the Creator."[8] Saint-Simon's whole system rests on this principle: "God has said that men ought to act toward each other as brethren." This principle will regulate society, for "in accordance with this principle, which God has given to men for the rule of their conduct, they ought to organize society in the manner the most advantageous to the greatest number."[9] The social philosophers at the end of the eighteenth century did not believe that this rightness should be brought about by violence. "What I should desire," says Godwin, "is not by violence to change its institutions, but by discussion to change its ideas. I have no concern, if I would study merely the public good, with factions or intrigue; but simply to promulgate the truth, and to wait the tranquil progress of conviction. Let us anxiously refrain from violence."[10] Owen, who lived a few decades later, came into contact with the theories of the succeeding school of thought. His utopianism remained, however, upon the older basis. He taught that the evils of society were not inherent in the nature of mankind. The natural state of the world and of man was good. But the evils "are all the necessary consequences of ignorance." Therefore, by education and environment he could "accomplish with ease and certainty the Herculean labor of forming a rational character in man, and that, too, chiefly before the child commences the ordinary course of education."[11] The Utopians are hopefully seeking the universal law which will re-form society. This was a natural view of things fundamental, to be taken by men who had witnessed the political emancipation of the Third Estate and had seen "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" carved over every public portal in France, and the abstract principles of justice debated in parliaments. A feeling of naïve simplicity runs through all their writings. Just as civil liberty, they believed, had come by the application of an abstract principle of natural law, so social and economic freedom would come by the application of one universal abstract principle of human conduct. From this simplicity came a violent reaction, which reached its climax in the anarchy of Proudhon. II The Utopian period of Socialism may be said to end, and the revolutionary era to begin, with the year 1830. The French Revolution was a bourgeois uprising. But behind it was the grim and resolute background of the proletarian mass. When the Third Estate achieved its victory, it proceeded to monopolize the governmental powers to the exclusion of its lowly allies. From 1830 to 1850 the ferment of democratic discontent spread over Europe and forced the demands of the workingman into the foreground. The first outbreak occurred in France, in 1831, when the workingmen of Lyons, during a period of distressing financial depression, marched under the banner, "Live working, or die fighting," demanding bread for their families and work for themselves. This second chapter of the development of Socialism begins with a red letter. Louis Blanc (1813-82), the first philosopher of the new movement, struck out boldly for a democratic organization of the government. This differentiates him from Fourier and Saint-Simon, and links him with the leading Socialist writers of our day. He published his _Organisation du Travail_ (Organization of Labor) in 1839. It immediately gave him an immense popularity with the working classes. It is a brilliant book, as fascinating in its phrases as it is forceful in its denunciation of existing society. He said that it is vain to talk of improving mankind morally without improving them materially. This improvement would not come from above, from the higher classes. It would come from below, from the working people themselves. Therefore, a prerequisite of social reform was democracy. The proletarian must possess the power of the state in order to emancipate himself from the economic bondage that holds him in its grasp. This democratic state should then establish national workshops, or associations, which he called "social workshops," the capital to be provided by the state and the state to supervise their operation. He believed that, once established, they would soon become self-supporting and self-governing. The men would choose their own managers, dispose of their own profits, and take care that this beneficent system would spread to all communities. He was careful to explain that "genius should assert its legitimate empire"--there must be a hierarchy of ability. Louis Blanc believed in revolution as the method of social advancement. He was himself a leader in the abortive revolution of 1848, the revolt of the people against a weak and careless monarch. As a member of the provisional government, he may be called the first Socialist to hold cabinet honors. And, like his successors in modern cabinets, he accomplished very little towards the bringing in of a new social order. It is true that national workshops were built by the French government at his suggestion; but not according to his plans. His enemies saw to it that they served to bring discredit rather than honor to the system which he had so carefully elaborated.[12] Louis Blanc did not entirely free himself of the earlier utopian conception that man was created good and innocent. He blames society for allowing the individual to do evil. But he does take a step toward the Marxian materialistic conception when he affirms that man was created with certain endowments of strength and intellect and that these endowments should be spent in the welfare of society. The empire of service, not the "empire of tribute," should be the measure of man's greatness. The doctrine of revolt was carried to its logical extreme by Proudhon (1809-65). He was the son of a cooper and a peasant maid, and he never forgot that he sprang from the proletariat. He was a precocious lad, was a theologian, philologist, and linguist before he undertook the study of political economy. In 1840 he brought out his notable work, _Qu'est-ce que la Propriété?_ (What Is Property?), a novel question for that day, to which he gave an amazing answer, "Property is theft," ergo "property holders are thieves." Proudhon was a man with the brain of a savant and the adjectives of a peasant. His startling phrases, however, are merely spotlights thrown on a theory of society which he permeated with a genuine good will. He was puritanic in moral principle, loyal to his friends, and a despiser of cant and formalism. But his love for paradoxes carried him beyond the confines of logic. Property is theft, he says, because it reaps without sowing and consumes without producing. What right has a capitalist to charge me eight per cent.? None. This eight per cent. does not represent anything of time or labor value put into the article I am buying. It is therefore robbery. Private property, the stronghold of the individualist, is then to be abolished and a universal communism established? By no means. Communism is as unnatural as property. Proudhon had only contempt for the phalanstery and national workshop of his predecessors. They were impossible, artificial, reduced life to a monotonous dead level, and encouraged immorality. Property is wrong because it is the exploitation of the weak by the strong; communism is equally wrong because it is the exploitation of the strong by the weak. To this ingenious juggler of paradoxes this was by no means a dilemma. He resorted to a formula that was later amplified into the most potent argument of Socialism by Marx. Service pays service, one day's work balances another day's work, time-labor is the just measure of value. Hour for hour, day for day, this should be the universal medium of exchange. Proudhon was really directing his attacks against rent and profit rather than against property. He proposed, as a measure of reform, a national bank where every one could bring the product of his toil and receive a paper in exchange denoting the time value of his article. These slips of paper were to be the medium of exchange capable of purchasing equal time values. This glorified savage barter he even proposed to the Constituent Assembly, of which he was a member, and when it was rejected--only two votes were recorded for it--he tried to establish it upon private foundations. He failed to raise the necessary capital and his plan failed. Proudhon is the father of modern Anarchy. His exaltation of individualism led him to the suppression of government. Government, he taught, is merely the dominance of one man over another, a form of intolerable oppression. "The highest perfection of society is found in the union of order and anarchy." For his bitter tirades against property he received the scorn of the bourgeois, for his attacks upon the government he served three years in prison, and some years later he escaped a second term for a similar cause by fleeing to Brussels. The ultimate outcome of his individualism was equality, which he achieved in economics by his theory of time-labor and in politics by his theory of anarchy. One cannot escape the conviction that the outcome of all his brilliant rhetorical legerdemain is man in a cage. Not man originally pure and good as the utopians would have him, but man wilful, egoistic, capable of enslaving his fellows, a very different being from the man of mercy and love crushed by the collective injustice of society. Proudhon frees this man from his oppressor and his oppressiveness by creating a condition of equality through the destruction of property and of government. But in destroying property he retains possessions, and in establishing anarchy he maintains order. "Free association, liberty--whose sole function is to maintain equality--in the means of production, and equivalence in exchanges, is the only possible, the only just, the only true form of society." "The government of man by man (under whatever name it be disguised) is oppression. Society finds its highest perfection in the union of order and anarchy."[13] Proudhon has had a large influence on modern Socialism. His trenchant invectives against property and society are widely copied. From his utterances on government the Syndicalists of France, Italy, and Spain have drawn their doctrine. The general strike is the child of his paradoxes. He wrote as the motto for his most influential book, _What Is Property?_, "Destruam et aedificabo" (I will destroy and I will build again). But, while he pointed the way to destruction, he failed to reveal a new and better order. The way to modern Socialism was paved in Germany. The teaching of Hegel cleared the way for the political unrest that spread over Europe in the '40's. Hegel was the proclaimer of the social revolution. He gave sanction to the tenets of destruction. Everything that exists is worth destroying, may be taken as the primary postulate at which the Young Hegelians arrived. Truth does not exist merely in a collection of institutions or dogmatic axioms that could be memorized like the alphabet; truth is in the process of being, of knowing, it has developed through the toilsome evolution of the race, it is found only in experience. Nothing is sacred merely because it exists. Existing institutions are only the prelude to other and better institutions that are to follow. This was roughly the formula that the radical Hegelians blocked out for themselves when they split from the orthodox conservatives in the '30's. In 1843 appeared Feuerbach's _Wesen des Christentums_ (Essence of Christianity), putting the seal of materialism upon the precepts of the Young Hegelians.[14] The God of the utopians was destroyed. Things were not created in harmony and beauty and disordered by man. Things as they are, are the result of evolution, of growth; nothing was created as it is, and even "Religion is the dream of the human mind."[15] Out of this atmosphere of philosophical, religious, and political rebellion sprang the prophet of modern Socialism, Karl Marx,[16] a man whose intellectual endowments place him in the first ranks among Socialists and link his name with other bold intellects of his age who have forced the current of human thought. There have been many books written on Marx, and every phase of his theories has been subjected to academic and popular scrutiny. His treatise, _Capital_, is the sacerdotal book of Socialists. It displays a mass of learning, a diligence of research, and acumen in the marshaling of ideas, and a completeness of literary expression that insures it a lasting place in the literature of social philosophy. Whatever may be said of the narrow dogmatism, of Marx, of his persistence in making the facts fit his preconceived notions, of his materialistic conception of history, or of the technical flaws in his political economy, he will always be quoted as the founder of modern scientific Socialism and the Socialist historian of the capitalistic régime. I must content myself with a bare statement of his theories. The economic basis of Marx is his well-known "Theory of Surplus Value." It was not his theory in the sense that he originated it. Economists like Adam Smith and especially Ricardo, Socialists like the Owenites and the Chartists in England, and Proudhon in France, had enunciated it; and in Germany Rodbertus, a lawyer and scholar of great learning, had elaborated it in his first book, published in 1842. Marx, with German thoroughness, developed this theory in all its ramifications. All economic goods, he said, have value. They have a physical value, and a value given them by the labor expended on them. Labor is the common factor of economic values. And the common denominator is the time that is consumed by the labor. Labor-time, therefore, is the universal measure of value, the common medium that determines values. But this labor is acquired in the open labor market by the capitalist at the lowest possible price, a price whose utmost limit is the bare cost of living. The reward for his labor is called a wage. This wage does not by any means measure the value of his services. What, then, becomes of the "surplus value," the value over and above wages? The capitalist appropriates it. Indeed, the great aim of the capitalist is to make this surplus value as big as possible. He measures his success by his profits. "Surplus value," or profit, is, then, a species of robbery; it is ill-gotten gain, withholding from the workman that which by right of toil is his. How did it come about that society was so organized as to permit this wholesale wrong upon the largest and most defenseless of its classes? It is in answer to this question that Marx makes his most notable contribution to Socialistic theory. With great skill, and displaying a comprehensive knowledge of economic history, especially of English industrial history, he traces the development of modern industrial society. He follows the evolution of capital from the days of medieval paternalism through the period of commercial expansion when the voyages of discovery opened virgin fields of wealth to the trader, into the period of inventions when the industrial revolution changed the conditions of all classes and gave a sudden and princely power to capital, establishing the reign of "capitalistic production." Always it was the man with capital who could take advantage of every new commercial and industrial opportunity, and the man without capital who was forced to succumb to the stress of new and cruel circumstances. In every stage of development it has been the constant aim of the capitalist to increase his profits and of the workingman to raise his standard of living. Marx then declares that, in order to have a capitalist society, two classes are necessary: a capitalist and a non-capitalist class; a class that dominates, and one that succumbs. There have always been these two classes. Originally labor was slave, then it was serf, and now it is free. But free labor to-day differs from serf-labor and slave-labor only in that it has a legal right to contract. The economic results are the same as they always have been: the capitalist still appropriates the surplus value. The method of production, however, is very different in our capitalistic era from the earlier eras. The industrial system herds the workmen into factories. Property and labor is no longer individualistic; it is social, it is corporate. Marx calls it "social production and capitalistic appropriation." Here is the eternal antagonism between the classes, the large class of laborers and the small class of the "appropriators" of their common toil. These factories, where labor is herded, spring up willy-nilly wherever there is a capitalist who desires to enter business. They flood the markets, not by mutual consent or regulation, but by individual ambitions. Each capitalist is ruled by self-interest; and self-interest impels him to make as many goods as he can and sell them at as big a profit as he can. Result, economic anarchy, called "over-production" or "under-consumption" by the economists. This leads to panics and all their attendant woes--woes that are further heaped upon the proletarian by the fact that he must compete with machinery, which, being more and more perfected, forces him out of the labor market into the street. These crises have the tendency to concentrate industry in fewer and fewer hands; the weaker capitalist must succumb to the inevitable laws of struggle and survival. The survivors fatten on the corpses of their fallen competitors. Thus the factories grow larger and larger, the number of capitalists fewer and fewer; the number of proletarian dependents multiplies; the middle class is crushed out of existence; the rich become richer and fewer, the poor more numerous and poorer. In this turmoil of social production, capitalistic appropriation, and anarchic distribution, there is discernible a reshaping of social potencies. The proletarian realizes the power of the state and sees how he may possess himself of that power and thereby gain control of the economic forces and reshape them to fit the needs of a better society. This will mean the appropriation of the means of production and distribution by society. Private capital will vanish; surplus values will belong to the people who created them; the people will be master and servant, capitalist and laborer. This is the Socialistic stage of society. It will be the result of the natural evolution of human industry. Its immediate coming will be the result of a social revolution. This revolution, this social cataclysm, is written in the nature of things. Man cannot prompt it, he cannot prevent it. He can only study the trend of things and "alleviate the birth-pangs" of the new time. Of this new time, this society of to-morrow, Marx gives us no glimpse. His function is not to prophesy, but to analyze. He is the natural historian of capital. He described the development of economic society and sought to ascertain its trend. In the first chapter of _Capital_ he says: "Let us imagine an association of free men, working with common means of production, and putting forth, consciously, their individual powers into one social labor power. The product of this association of laborers is a social product. A portion of this product serves in turn as a means of further production. It remains social property. The rest of this product is consumed by the members of the association as a means of living. It must consequently be distributed among them. The nature of this distribution will vary according to the particular nature of the organization of production and the corresponding grade of historical development of the producers." This is the only mention of the future made by Marx. It is a dim and uncertain ray of light cast upon a vast object. The formulæ of this epoch-making study may be summarized as follows: 1. Labor gives value to all economic goods. The laboring class is the producing class, but it is deprived of its just share of the products of its labor by the capitalistic class, which appropriates the "surplus value." 2. This is possible because of the capitalistic method of production, wherein private capital controls the processes of production and distribution. 3. This system of private capitalism is the result of a long and laborious process of evolution, hastened precipitately by the industrial revolution. 4. This industrial age is characterized (a) by anarchy in distribution, (b) private production, (c) the gradual disappearance of the middle class, (d) the development of a two-class system--capitalist and producer, (e) the rich growing richer and the poor growing poorer. 5. This will not always continue. The producers are becoming fewer each year. Presently they will become so powerful as to be unendurable. Then society--the people--will appropriate private capital and all production and distribution will be socialized. It is necessary to keep in mind the leading events in the life of this remarkable man in order to understand the genesis of his theories. Marx was born in Treves in 1818, of Jewish parentage. His mother was of Dutch descent, his father was German. When the lad was six years of age his parents embraced the Christian faith. His father was a lawyer, but his ancestors for over two hundred years had been rabbis. The home was one of culture, where English and French as well as German literature and art were discussed by a circle of learned and congenial friends. Marx studied at the universities of Bonn and Berlin. He took his doctorate in the law to please his father, but followed philosophy by natural bent, intending to become a university professor. The turmoil of revolution was in the air and in his blood. There was no curbing of his fiery temperament into the routine of scholastic life. In 1842 he joined the staff of the _Rhenish Gazette_ at Cologne, an organ of extreme radicalism. His drastic editorials prompted the police to ask him to leave the country, and he went to Paris, where he met Frederick Engels, who became his firm friend, partner of his views, and sharer of his labors. The Prussian government demanded his removal from Paris, and for a time he settled in Brussels. He returned to Germany to participate in the revolution of 1848, and in 1849 he was driven to London, where, immune from Prussian persecutions, he made his home until his death, in 1883. In 1842 he married Jennie von Westphalen, a lady of refinement, courage, and loyalty, whose family was prominent in Prussian politics. Her brother was at one time a minister in the Prussian cabinet. Marx was an exile practically all his life, though he never gave up his German citizenship. He never forgot this fact. He concluded his preface to the first volume of _Capital_, written in 1873, with a bitter allusion to the "mushroom upstarts of the new, holy Prussian German Empire." He lived a life of heroic fortitude and struggle against want and disease. From his infancy he had been taught to take a world view, an international view, of human affairs. This gave him an immediate advantage over all other Socialist writers of that day. At Bonn he was caught in the current of heterodoxy that was then sweeping through the universities. This carried him far into the fields of materialism, whose philosophy of history he adopted and applied to the economic development of the race. He received not alone his philosophy from the "Young Hegelians," but his dialectics as well. It gave him a philosophy of evil which, blending with his bitter personal experiences, gave a melancholy bent to his reasoning, and revealed to him the misericordia of class war, the struggle of abject poverty contending with callous capital in a bloody social revolution. There are four points which gave Marx an immense influence over the Socialistic movement. In the first place, he put the Socialistic movement on a historical basis; he made it inevitable. Think what this means, what hope and spirit it inspires in the bosom of the workingman. But he did more than this: he made the proletarian the instrument of destiny for the emancipation of the race from economic thraldom. This was to be accomplished by class war and social revolution. Marx imparts the zeal of fatalism to his Socialism when he links it to the necessities of nature. By natural law a bourgeoisie developed; by natural law it oppresses the proletarian; by natural law, by the compulsion of inexorable processes, the proletarians alone can attain their freedom. Capitalism becomes its own grave-digger. Liebknecht said in his Erfurt speech (1891): "The capitalistic state of the present begets against its will the state of the future." In the third place, Marx gave a formula to the Socialist movement. He defined Socialism in one sentence: "The social ownership of the means of production and distribution." This was necessary. From among the vague and incoherent mass of utopian and revolutionary literature he coined the sentence that could be repeated with gusto and the flavor of scientific terminology. And finally, he refrained from detailing the new society. He laid down no program except war, he pointed to no utopia except co-operation. This offended no one and left Socialists of all schools free to construct their own details. The Marxian system was no sooner enunciated than it was shown to be fallible as an economic generalization; and the passing of several decades has proved that the tendencies he deemed inevitable are not taking place. The refutation of his theory of value by the Austrian economist, Adolph Menger, is by economists considered complete and final. The materialistic conception of history, which is the soul of his work, lends itself more to the passion of a virile propaganda than to a sober interpretation of the facts. Further, the two practical results that flow from the use of his theory of surplus value and his materialism--namely, the ever-increasing volume of poverty and the ever-decreasing number of capitalists--are not borne out by the facts. The number of capitalists is constantly increasing, in spite of the development of enormous trusts; the middle class is constantly being recruited from the lower class; there is no apparent realization of the two-class system. And finally, the method by revolution is being more and more discarded by Socialists, as they see that intolerable conditions are being more and more alleviated, that "man's inhumanity to man" is a constantly diminishing factor in the bitter struggle for existence.[17] FOOTNOTES: [1] _New Christianity_, p. 38, English edition, 1834. [2] Saint-Simon's principal writings are: _Lettres d'un Habitant de Genève_, 1803; _L'Organisateur_, 1819; _Du Système Industriel_, 1821; _Catéchisme des Industriels_, 1823; _Nouveau Christianisme_, 1825. See A.J. BARTH, _Saint-Simon and Saint-Simonism_, London, 1871; REYBAUD, _Études sur les Réformateurs Modernes_, Paris, 1864; JANET, _Saint-Simon et le Saint-Simonisme_, Paris, 1878. _New Christianity_ was translated into English by Rev. J.E. Smith, London, 1834. [3] The best popular exposition of Fourierism is GATTI DE GAMMONT'S _Fourier et Son Système_. His most eminent commentator is Victor Considerant, whose _Destinée Sociale_ is the most complete analysis of Fourier's System. [4] It is interesting to note that the word "Socialism" first became current in the meetings of Owen's "Association of All Classes of All Nations," organized by him in 1835. [5] _Le Vrai Christianisme_, Chap. XVIII, edition of 1846. [6] An apt selection from the works of Fourier has been made by Prof. Charles Gide, prefaced by an illuminating Introduction on the life and work of Fourier. An English translation by Julia Franklin appeared in London, 1901. [7] _Le Nouveau Monde_, Vol. I, p. 26. [8] _Thème de l'Unité Universelle_, Vol. II, p. 128. [9] _New Christianity_, p. 2, English edition, 1834. [10] _Political Justice_, Vol. II, pp. 531, 537. [11] _Third Essay on a New View of Society_, pp. 65, 82. [12] See ÉMILE THOMAS, _History of the National Workshops_. [13] _What Is Property?_ Collected Works, Vol. I, p. 286. [14] In 1845 Marx made this note on the work of Feuerbach: "The point of view of the old materialism is bourgeois society; the point of view of the new materialism is human society or the unclassed humanity (vergesellschaftete Menschheit). "Philosophers have only differently _interpreted_ the world, but the point is to _alter_ the world." See FREDERICK ENGELS, _Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der Klassischen Deutschen Philosophie_, Stuttgart, 1903. [15] _Essence of Christianity_, Preface, p. xiii. [16] For a concise statement of the development of Marxian Socialism out of the German philosophy of that period, see FREDERICK ENGELS, _Die Entwickelung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft_, Berlin, 1891. It is the third chapter out of his _Dühring, Umwälzung_. [17] For a criticism of the teachings of Marx, see SOMBART, _Socialism and the Social Movement_, Chap. IV. CHAPTER III THE POLITICAL AWAKENING OF SOCIALISM--THE PERIOD OF REVOLUTION From the point of view of our inquiry the most significant event in the history of Socialism is its entrance into politics. This endows the workingman with a new power and a great power; a power that will bring him farther on his way toward the goal he seeks than any other he possesses. Because the modern state is democratic, and the democratic state bends in the direction of the mass. The revolutions attempted in the middle of the last century are child's play compared with the changes that can be wrought when constitutions and courts, parliaments and administrative systems, become the instruments of a determined, self-possessed, and united political consciousness. Scarcely half a century elapsed between the French utopians and the time when the proletarians organized actual political parties, and arrayed themselves against the older orders in the struggle for political privilege. In the interval, revolution had its brief hour, and reaction its days of waiting. The French Revolution was a necessary preliminary to the proletarian movement. It was the most powerful instrument for the propagation of those democratic ideas that were so attractively clothed by Rousseau and so terribly distorted by the revolutionists. While this revolution was a bourgeois movement, not a proletarian uprising, not a revolution in the sense that Marx, for instance, uses the word, it must not be forgotten that the proletarians were in the revolution. The dark and sullen background of that tragedy was the mass of unspeakably poor. They were not machine workers whose abjectness came from factory conditions, like the workmen of England a few decades later. They were proletarians without a class consciousness, but with a class grievance; proletarians in the literal sense of the word, poor, ragged, hungry, wretched. Such democracy as was achieved by the revolution was bourgeois. The powers of monarchy were transferred from the "privileged" classes to the middle class, who, in turn, became the privileged ones. The day of middle-class government had come. The class that had financed the fleets of adventurers to new and unexploited continents, and had backed the inventions of Arkwright and Hargreaves, were now in power in politics as well as in commerce and industry. A unity of purpose between industry and statecraft was thus achieved; new ideals became dominant. The patriarchal precepts of the feudal manors were forgotten. The people were no longer children of a great household with their king at the head. The king, when he was retained, was shorn of his universal fatherhood, and remained a mere remnant of ermine and velvet, a royal trader in social distinctions. While the old ideal, the feudal ideal, prevailed, governing was the _duty_ of a class. The newer ideal made governing an incident in the activities of a class whose dominating impulse was the making of profits. These ideals are at polar points; one deals with things, the other with men. The change in the form of government was wrought while the people were talking about the glittering abstractions of equality, liberty, justice, as if they were commodities to be exchanged in the political markets. The newer form of government marked an advance on the older. It represented a step forward in human political experience. A larger group of citizens was drawn into the widening circle of governmental activities. It was an inevitable step. The discovery of the New World and the invention of machinery were making a new earth--an unattractive earth, but nevertheless a new one. The balance of power was shifting from hereditary privilege to commercial privilege, and nations were fulfilling the law of human nature, that the power of the state reposes in the hands of the dominant class. The dominant class is actuated by its dominant idea. In the aristocratic class it is politics, in the middle class it is trade. All this inevitably accentuated the proletarian's position in the state. Under the older régime, as historians of our economic development have clearly shown, the antagonisms and grievances were fewer. The trader and the craftsman were overshadowed by the lord and the bishop. Social, political, and economical values were distributed by custom and imposed by heredity, rather than by individual effort or individual capacity. When, therefore, this great change came over society, a change that would have been unthinkable in the days of Charlemagne or of Elizabeth,--a change that virtually destroyed the most powerful of the classes and put human beings onto a basis of competition rather than of birth, and shifted power from tradition to effort, and transferred values from prerogatives to gold,--then the whole class problem changed, and entirely new antagonisms were created. The first movements of the new proletarians were mob movements. Actuated more by a desire to revenge themselves than to better themselves, they gather in the dark hours of the night and move sullenly upon the factories, to destroy their enemies, the machines. They pillage the buildings and threaten the house of their employer, whom they consider the agent of their undoing. In France and Germany, and especially in England, these infuriated workmen try to undo by violence what has been achieved by invention. When their first fury is abated and they see new machinery taking the place of that which they have destroyed, and new factories built on the foundations of those they have burned, they see the impotence of their actions. In England a new movement begins. They try to re-enact the Elizabethan statute of laborers, to bring back the days of handicrafts, of journeyman and apprentice. They soon learned that the old era had vanished, never to return. The workingman possessed neither the power nor the ingenuity to bring it back. He turned, next, to possess himself of the machinery of the state. Political conditions paved the way. France, after her orgy, had fallen back into absolutism. Germany and Austria had remained feudal in the most distasteful sense of the word; the nobility retained their ancient privileges and forsook their ancient duties. The landlord class even retained jurisdiction over their tenants. The old industry had been destroyed by Napoleon's campaigns; the new machine industry did not establish itself until after the enactment of protective tariffs and the creation "Zollverein," in 1818. This cemented the bourgeois interests. Manufacturers, traders, and bankers achieved a homogeneity of interest and ambition which was antagonistic to the spirit of the _junker_ and the feudalist. The new bourgeoisie wanted laws favorable to trade expansion. They needed the law-making machinery to achieve this. By 1840 the upper middle class had become feverish for political power. They imbibed the doctrines of the literature of that period which preached a constitutional republicanism. Hegel gave the weighty sanction of philosophy to the overthrow of absolute monarchy. The great mass of the people were, of course, workingmen, small traders, and shopkeepers, and the rural peasantry. The small trader was dependent upon the favors of the ruling class on the one hand, and of the banker and manufacturer on the other hand. When the interests of these two clashed he was alarmed, for he could neither remain neutral nor take sides. The peasants were abject subjects, little better than serfs. The laboring men, as we shall see presently, were achieving a mass consciousness. In Germany Frederick William, the Romantic, was face to face with revolution. This was not an economic revolution. It was a political revolution. It was joined by the communists and the Socialists. Marx himself, was a leader in the revolt, and one of its most faithful chroniclers. In 1844 the weavers of Silesia rose in revolt. There was rioting and bloodshed. This was followed by bread riots in various parts of Germany. In 1848 the whole country was in the turmoil of revolution, a revolution led by the upper middle class, but prompted and fired by the zeal of the proletarians, who, in some of the cities, notably Berlin, became the leading factor in the uprising. Marx says: "There was then no separate Republican party in Germany. People were either constitutional monarchists or more or less clearly defined Socialists or communists."[1] In Austria conditions were even more reactionary than in Germany. Metternich, the powerful representative of the ancient order of things, had a haughty contempt for the demands of the constitutional party. With the hauteur of absolutism he not only retained political power in the feudal class, but suppressed literature, censored learning, and rigorously superintended religion. A greater power than caste and tradition was slowly eating its way into this country, which had attempted to isolate itself from the rest of the world. This was the power of machine industry. It brought with it, as in every other country, a new class, the manufacturers, who, as soon as their business began to expand, sought favorable laws. This led them into political activity, which, in turn, brought friction with the feudalists. Both sides took to the field. The revolution broke in Vienna, March 13, 1848, seventeen days after the revolutionists had driven Louis Philippe out of Paris, and five days before the Prussian king delivered himself into the hands of a Berlin mob. It was in France that the revolution assumed its most virulent character. In Paris the revolution was "carried on between the mass of the working people on the one hand and all the other classes of the Parisian population, supported by the army, on the other."[2] This Parisian proletarian uprising was the red signal of warning to Germany and Austria. The bourgeois were now as anxious to rid themselves of the Socialist contingent as they had been eager for its support when they began their struggle for political power. Compromises between feudalists and commercialists were effected, and a sort of constitutionalism became the basis of the reconstructed governments. Of these revolutions Marx says: "In all cases the real fighting body of the insurgents, that body which first took up arms and gave battle to the troops, consisted of the working classes of the towns. A portion of the poorer country population, laborers and petty farmers, generally joined them after the outbreak of the conflict."[3] They were not merely bourgeois uprisings. The Parisian revolution was virtually a proletarian rebellion. Here "the proletariat, because it dictated the Republic to the provisional government, and through the provisional government to the whole of France, stepped at once forth as an independent, self-contained party; and it at once arrayed the entire bourgeoisie of France against itself.... Marche, a workingman, dictated a decree wherein the newly formed provincial government pledged itself to secure the position of the workingman through work, to do away with bourgeois labor, etc. And as they seemed to forget this promise, a few days later 200,000 workingmen marched upon the Hôtel de Ville with the battle-cry, 'Organization of labor! Create a ministry of labor!' and after a prolonged debate the provisional government named a permanent special commission for the purpose of finding the means for bettering the conditions of the working classes."[4] It is evident that Marx considered the revolutions of 1848-50 as a compound of proletarian and bourgeois uprisings against _feudal_ remnants in government. He is not always clear in his own mind as to the direction of these movements. But we now know that the direction was toward democracy. The French, or Parisian, uprising was more "advanced" than the other Continental attempts. The Parisians had piled barricades before; they were experienced in the bloody business. They tried again in 1871. This time the workingmen ruled Paris for two months. It was a bloody, turbulent period. Marx characterized it as "the glorious workingman's revolution of the 18th of March," and the Commune "as a lever for uprooting the economical foundations upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule." Its acts of violence he extolled, its burning of public buildings was a "self-holocaust." This "workingman's Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society."[5] So the attempt to possess the state by revolution has been tried by the proletarian. The revolutions were all abortive. The Socialists say they were ill-timed. Writing in 1895, Frederick Engels, the companion of Marx, could see these uprisings in a different perspective. He acknowledged the mistake made by the Socialists in believing that they could by violence somehow become the deciding factor in the government, and therefore in the economic arrangement of society. "History has shown us our error," he says. "Time has made it clear that the status of economic development on the Continent was far from ripe for the setting aside of the capitalistic régime."[6] These revolutions were not merely bourgeois, as is so often affirmed. There was everywhere a large element of Socialistic unrest. They were revolutions begun in the fever heat of youth--"Young Germany," "Young Austria," "Young Italy," were moved by "Young Hegelians" and "Young Communists." They embraced bourgeois tradesmen and proletarian workingmen, who, in their new-found delirium, thought that with "the overthrow of the reactionary governments, the kingdom of heaven would be realized on earth."[7] "They had no idea," continues Kautsky, who speaks on these questions with authority, "that the overthrow of these governments would not be the end, but the beginning of revolutions; that the newly won bourgeois freedom would be the battleground for the great class war between proletarian and bourgeois; that liberty did not bring social freedom, but social warfare." This is to-day the orthodox Socialist view. It believes that these revolutions taught the proletarians the folly of ill-timed violence; revealed to them their friends and their enemies; and, above all, gave them a class consciousness. Let us turn, for a moment, to a proletarian movement of a somewhat different type, the Chartist movement in England. The flame of revolution that enveloped Europe crossed the Channel to England and Ireland. But here revolution took a different course. In Ireland it was the brilliant O'Connell's agitation against the Act of Union; in England it was the workingman's protest against his exclusion from the Reform Act of 1832, an act that itself had been born amidst the throes of mob violence and incipient revolution. The Chartist movement was promulgated by the "Workingmen's Association." It was a workingman's protest. Its organizers were carpenters, its orators were tailors and blacksmiths and weavers, surprising themselves and their audiences with their new-found eloquence, and its writers were cotton spinners. The Reform Bill had been a bitter disappointment to them. It gave the right of suffrage to the middle class, but withheld it from the working class. A few radical members of Parliament met with representatives of the workingmen and drafted a bill. O'Connell, as he handed the measure to the secretary of the association, said: "There is your charter"--and the "People's Charter" it was called. Its "six points" were: Manhood suffrage, annual Parliaments, election by ballot, abolition of property qualifications for election of members to Parliament, payment of members of Parliament, and equitably devised electoral districts. These are all political demands, all democratic. But economic conditions pressed them to the foreground. The "Bread Tax" was as much an issue as the ballot. They demanded the ballot so that they might remove the tax. "Misery and discontent were its strongest inspirations," says McCarthy.[8] Carlyle saw the inwardness of the movement. "All along for the last five and twenty years it was curious to note how the internal discontent of England struggled to find vent for itself through any orifice; the poor patient, all sick from center to surface, complains now of this member, now of that: corn laws, currency laws, free trade, protection, want of free trade: the poor patient, tossing from side to side seeking a sound side to lie on, finds none." One of its own crude and forceful orators said on Kersall Moor to 200,000 turbulent workingmen of Manchester: "Chartism, my friends, is no mere political movement, where the main point is your getting the ballot. Chartism is a knife and fork question. The charter means a good house, good food and drink, prosperity, and short working hours."[9] The protest of this discontent became the nearest approach to a revolution England had encountered since Charles I. Monster meetings, for the first time called "mass meetings," were held in every county, and evenings, after working hours, enormous parades were organized, each participant carrying a torch, hence they were called "torchlight parades." These two spectacular features were soon adopted by American campaigners. A wild and desperate feeling seized the masses. "You see yonder factory with its towering chimney," cried one of its orators. "Every brick in that factory is cemented with the blood of women and children." And again: "If the rights of the poor are trampled under foot, then down with the throne, down with aristocracy, down with the bishops, down with the clergy, burn the churches, down with all rank, all title, and all dignity."[10] In their great petition to Parliament, signed by several million people, the agitators said: "The Reform Act has effected a transfer of power from one domineering faction to another and left the people as helpless as before." "We demand universal suffrage. The suffrage, to be exempt from the corruption of the wealthy and the violence of the powerful, must be secret." The whole movement had all the aspects of a modern, violent general strike. Its papers, _The Poor Man's Guardian_, _The Destructive_, and others, were full of tirades against wealth and privilege. When the agitation became an uprising in Wales, there was a conflict between the Chartists and the police in which a number were killed and wounded. In the industrial centers, soldiers were present at the meetings, and the outcry against the use of the military was the same that is heard to-day. A number of the leaders were tried for sedition, and the courts became the objects of abuse as they are to-day. It was a labor war for political privilege; a class war for economic advantages. SUMMARY OF THE PERIOD OF REVOLUTION These revolutions were political in that they were a protest against existing governmental forms. The revolutionary proletarian was found in all of them. He not only stood under the standard of Daniel Manin in Venice, when that patriot again proclaimed a republic in the ancient city, and shared with Mazzini his triumph in Rome, and fought with Kossuth for the liberty of Hungary; but he formed also the body of the revolutionary forces in Germany, Austria, and France. In all the Continental countries the uprisings were directed against the arrogance and oppression of monarchism, and against the recrudescence of feudalistic ideals. In France Louis Philippe had attempted the part of a petty despot. He restricted the ballot to the propertied class, balanced his power on too narrow a base, and it became top-heavy. While the workingmen of Germany and Austria were taking up arms under command of the middle class against the feudal remnants, the workingmen of France were sacking their capital because of an attempted revival of monarchic privilege, and the workmen of England were marching and counter-marching in monster torchlight parades in protest against middle-class domination. The panorama of Europe in these years of turmoil and blood thus exhibits every degree of revolt against governmental power, from the absolutism of Prussian Junkerdom and the oppression of the Hungarians by foreign tyranny, to the dominance of the aristocratic and middle-class alliance in Great Britain. The bread-and-butter question was not wanting in any of these political uprisings. The unity of life makes their separation a myth. One is interwoven with the other. The social struggle is political, the political struggle is social. Socialism is not merely an economic movement. It seeks to-day, and always has sought, the power of the state. The government is the only available instrument for effecting the change--the revolution--the Socialists preach, the transfer of productive enterprise from private to public ownership. "Political power our means, social happiness our end," was a Chartist motto. That is the duality of Socialism to-day. FOOTNOTES: [1] MARX, _Revolution and Counter-Revolution in 1848_. [2] MARX, _Revolution and Counter-Revolution_, p. 70. [3] _Op. cit._, pp. 123-124. [4] MARX, _Die Klassenkämpfe in Frankreich_, pp. 26-28. [5] See the third address issued by the International Workingmen's Association on the Franco-Prussian war, 1870-71. The Italian Socialists in Milan, June, 1871, closed a rhetorical address to the Parisian Communards as follows: "To despotism they responded, We are free. "To the cannon and chassepots of the leagued reactionists they offered their bared breasts. "They fell, but fell like heroes. "To-day the reaction calls them bandits, places them under the ban of the human race. "Shall we permit it? No! "Workingmen! At the time when our brothers in Paris are vanquished, hunted like fallow deer, are falling by hundreds under the blows of their murderers, let us say to them: Come to us, we are here; our houses are open to you. We will protect you, until the day of revenge, a day not far distant. "Workingmen! the principles of the Commune of Paris are ours: we accept the responsibility of its acts. Long live the Social Republic!" See ED. VILLETARD, _History of the International_, p. 342. This sentiment was also expressed in London and other centers. [6] Introduction to _Die Klassenkämpfe in Frankreich_, p. 8. [7] KAUTSKY, _Leben Friedrich Engels_, p. 14, Berlin, 1895. [8] _The Epoch of Reform_, p. 190. [9] ENGELS, _Condition of the Working Classes in 1844_, p. 230. Engels, who came to England at this time and was employed in Manchester in his father's business, and was therefore in the heart of the movement, says that Chartism was, after the Anti-Corn Law League had been formed, "purely a workingman's cause." It was "the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie." "The demands hitherto made by him (the laborer), the ten-hours' bill, protection of the worker against the capitalist, good wages, a guaranteed position, repeal of the new poor law--all of these things belong to Chartism quite as essentially as the 'Six Points.'"--_Supra cit._, pp. 229, 234, 235. [10] R.G. GRUMMAGE, _History of the Chartist Movement_, 1837-54, p. 59, Newcastle, 1894. CHAPTER IV THE POLITICAL AWAKENING OF SOCIALISM--THE INTERNATIONAL With 1848 vanished, more or less rapidly, the revolutions of the old school. "The street fight and barricade, which up to 1848 was decisive, now grew antiquated," says Engels.[1] A new species of plotting and propaganda began. The exiled agitators and revolutionists met, naturally, in their cities of refuge for the discussion of their common grievances. They complained that "the proletarian has no fatherland," and internationalism became their patriotism. In Paris a few of the ostracized Socialists, in 1836, founded "The League of the Just," a communistic secret society.[2] The group were compelled to leave Paris because they were implicated in a riot, and when some of them met in London they invited other refugees to join them. Among them was Marx, and his presence soon bore fruit. Their motto, "All men are brethren," was singularly paradoxical when contrasted with their methods of sinister conspiracy. Marx, with his superior intellect, at once began to reshape their ideas, a reorganization was effected called "The Communist League," and Marx and Engels were delegated to write a statement of principles for the League. That statement, written in 1847, they called "The Communist Manifesto." The "Manifesto" is the most influential of all Socialist documents. It is at once a firebrand and a formulary. Its formulæ are the well-known Marxian principles; its energy is the youthful vigor and zeal of ardent revolutionists. Nearly all the generalizations of _Capital_ are found in the "Manifesto." This is important, for it gave the sanction of a social theory to the Socialist movement. Hitherto there had been only utopian generalizations and keen denunciations of the existing order. It was of the greatest importance that early in the development of the movement it was given an economic theory expressed in such lucid terms, with the gusto of youth, and in the terminology of science, that it remains to-day the best synopsis of Marx's "Scientific Socialism." As a piece of campaign literature it is unexcelled. Combined with its clearness of statement, its economic reasoning, its terrific arraignment of modern industrial society, there is a lofty zeal and power that placed it in the front rank of propagandist literature. Engels, the surviving partner of the Marxian movement, wrote in the preface of the edition of 1888: "The 'Manifesto' being our joint production, I consider myself bound to say that the fundamental proposition which forms its nucleus belongs to Marx." That proposition embraced the materialistic theory of social evolution, that "the whole history of mankind has been a history of class struggles ... in which nowadays a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed classes--the proletariat--cannot attain their emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling classes--the bourgeoisie--without at the same time and once for all emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions, and class struggles." This liberation was, of course, to be accomplished by revolution. The "Manifesto" closes with these spirited and oft-quoted words: "The communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be obtained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling class tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains, they have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite." This was the language and the spirit of the times. The "Manifesto" was published only a few days before the February revolution of 1848. For a moment the ruling class did tremble; but the ill-timed uprisings were promptly suppressed and the days of reaction set in. Soon the workingmen of different countries were busy with the stupendous development of industry which followed in the wake of the wars and revolutions that had harassed the Continent for over fifty years. The revival of industry brought a renewal of international trade. This was followed by a wider exchange of views and greater international intimacy. In 1862 the first International Exposition was held. Before we proceed with the development of the "Old International," as it is now called, let us notice three points about the "Manifesto." First, it was not called the "Socialist Manifesto," although adopted by Socialists the world over. Engels, in his preface of 1888, tells us why. "When it was written we could not have called it a Socialist Manifesto. By Socialist, in 1847, were understood, on the one hand, the adherents of the various Utopian systems; Owenites in England, Fourierists in France, both of them already reduced to the position of mere sects, and gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks who, by all manner of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances; in both cases men outside the working-class movement, and looking rather to the 'educated' classes for support. Whatever portion of the working class had become convinced of the insufficiency of mere political revolutions, and had proclaimed the necessity of a total social change, that portion then called itself communist. It was a crude, rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of communism; still it touched the cardinal point and was powerful enough amongst the working class to produce the utopian communism in France of Cabet, and in Germany of Weitling. This Socialism was, in 1847, a middle-class movement; communism a working-class movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, 'respectable'; communism was the very opposite." It would be interesting to know how Engels would define Socialism to-day. Second, it is important for us to know that the "Manifesto" recognized the necessity of using the government as the instrument for achieving the new society. "The immediate aim of the communists," it recites, "is the conquest of political power by the proletariat"; to "labor everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries." The governmental organization of the communists' state was to be democratic. Thirdly, a provisional program of such a politico-socio-democratic party is suggested in the "Manifesto." Its principal points are: "1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. "2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. "3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance. "4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. "5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly. "6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state. "7. Extension of factories and the instruments of production owned by the state: the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally, in accordance with a common plan. "8. Equal liability of all labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. "9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition between town and country, by a more equable distribution of population over the country. "10. Free education for all children in public schools, combination of education with industrial production," _etc._ Though the "Manifesto" was written in 1848, neither Marx, who lived until 1882, nor Engels, who died in 1895, made any alteration in it, on the ground that it had become "a historical document which we have no longer any right to alter."[3] "However much the state of things may have altered during the last twenty-five years, the general principles laid down in this manifesto are, on the whole, as correct to-day as ever."[4] On one very important point, however, they could not refrain from further comment. The revolutionary language in the original draft would be radically mollified if written at the time of the joint preface in 1872. The example of the Paris Commune was disheartening. It demonstrated that "the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes."[5] These, then, were the principles of the international movement of which the "Manifesto" was the supreme expression. When labor had revived from its first stupor, after the hard blows it received in the years of revolution, the "Manifesto" was translated into several Continental languages. With the revival of internationalism, it has been translated into every language of the industrial world, and I am told a Japanese and a Turkish edition have been issued. This is a gauge of the spread of international Socialism. In 1862 a number of French workingmen, visiting the International Exhibition in London, were entertained by the Socialist exiles, and the question of reviving an international movement was discussed. Two years later, in St. Martin's Hall, London, workingmen from various countries organized a meeting and selected Mazzini, the Italian patriot, to draw up a constitution. But the South European view of class war was out of accord with the German and French views, and Mazzini's proposals were rejected. Marx then undertook the writing of the address. He succeeded remarkably well in avoiding the giving of offense to the four different elements present, namely, the trade unionists of England, who, being Englishmen, were averse to revolutions; the followers of Proudhon in France, who were then establishing free co-operative societies; the followers of Lassalle in Germany and Louis Blanc in France, who glorified state aid in co-operation; and the less easily satisfied contingent of Mazzini from Spain and Italy. Marx's diplomacy and his international vocabulary stood him in good stead. He began the "Address" by a clever rhetorical parallelism. Gladstone, whose splendor then filled the political heavens, had just delivered a great speech in which he had gloried in the wonderful increase in Britain's trade and wealth. Marx contrasted this growth in riches with the misery and poverty and wretchedness of the English working classes. Gladstone's small army of rich bourgeois were adroitly compared with Marx's large army of miserably poor. The growth of wealth, he said, brought no amelioration to the needy. But in this picture of gloom were two points of hope: first, the ten-hour working day had been achieved through great struggles, and it showed what the proletarian can do if he persists in fighting for his rights. Second, Marx alluded to the co-operative achievements of France and Germany as a proof that the laboring man could organize and carry on great industries without the intervention of capitalists. With these two elements of hope before them, the laborers should be of good cheer. Marx admonished them that they had _numbers_ on their side, and all that is necessary for complete victory is organization. In closing he repeats the battle-cry of '48: "Workingmen of all lands, unite!" The "statutes," or by-laws[6] were also drawn by Marx. The preamble is a second "Manifesto," in which he reiterates the necessity for international co-operation among workingmen, and concludes: "The First International Labor Congress declares that the International Workingmen's Association, and all societies and individuals belonging to it, recognize truth, right, and morality as the basis of their conduct towards one another and their fellowmen, without respect to color, creed, or nationality. This congress regards it as the duty of man to demand the rights of a man and citizen, not only for himself, but for every one who does his duty. No rights without duties, no duties without rights." The "Address" and the "Statutes" were adopted by the association at its first congress, held in Geneva in September, 1866, where sixty delegates represented the new movement. With the vicissitudes of Marx's International we are not especially concerned here. It met annually in various cities until 1873, when its last meeting was held at Geneva. Marx had successfully avoided offense to the various elements in his masterly address and preamble. But the organization contained irreconcilable elements more or less jealous of one another. The two extremes were the Anarchists, led by the Russian Bakunin, and the English labor unions. The Anarchists believed in overthrowing everything, the English laborists abhorred violence. Between these two extremes stood Marx's doctrine of evolutionary revolution, as distasteful to the English as it was despised by the Anarchists. When the congress met at The Hague, in September, 1872, Marx was one of the sixty-five delegates. He had hitherto held himself aloof from the meetings. But here even his magnetic presence could not prevent the breach with Bakunin.[7] There were stormy scenes. The Anarchists were expelled, and the seat of the general council was transferred to New York, where it could die an unobserved death. Before the final adjournment a meeting was held in Amsterdam. Here Marx delivered a powerful speech characterized by all the arts of expression of which he was master. He compared these humble "assizes of labor" with the royal conferences of "kings and potentates" who in centuries past had been wont to meet at The Hague "to discuss the interests of their dynasties." He admitted that in England, the United States, and maybe in Holland, "the workmen might attain their goal by peaceful means. But in most European countries force must be the lever of revolution, and to force they must appeal when the time comes." These were his last personal words to his International, the crystallization of his lifelong endeavor to lead the workingmen's cause. There was one more meeting at Geneva, in 1873; then it perished. Bakunin's following, renamed the International Alliance of Social Democracy, meanwhile went the way of all violent revolutionists. They took part in the uprisings in Spain in 1873; the rebellion was promptly suppressed, and the alliance came to an end. During its brief existence the International was the red bogey-man of European courts. The most violent and bloodthirsty ambitions were ascribed to it. Such conservative and careful newspapers as the London _Times_ indulged in the most extreme editorials and news items about the sinister organization that was soon to "bathe the thrones of Europe in blood" and "despoil property of its rights" and "human society of its blessings." In the light of history, these fears appear ridiculous. The poor, struggling organization that could summon scarcely one hundred members to an international convention was powerful only in the possession of an idea, the conviction of international solidarity. Its plotting handful of Anarchists were a great hindrance to it, and the events of the Commune put the stamp of veracity on the dire things the public press had foretold of its ambitions. The programs discussed at the various meetings are of more importance to us because they reveal whatever was practical in Marx's organization. For the second meeting, 1866, the following outline was sent out by the general council from London. It was unquestionably prepared by Marx himself. "1. Organization of the International Association; its ends; its means of action. "2. Workingmen's societies--their past, present, and future: stoppage, strikes--means of remedying them; primary and professional instruction. "3. Work of women and children in factories, from a moral and sanitary point of view. "4. Reduction of working hours--its end, bearing, and moral consequences; obligation of labor for all. "5. Association--its principle, its application; co-operation as distinguished from association proper. "6. Relation of capital and labor; foreign competition; commercial treaties. "7. Direct and indirect taxes. "8. International institutions--mutual credit, paper money, weights, measures, coins, and language. "9. Necessity of abolishing the Russian influence in Europe by the application of the principle of the right of the people to govern themselves; and the reconstitution of Poland upon a democratic and social basis. "10. Standing armies and their relation to production. "11. Religious ideas--their influence upon the social, political, and intellectual movements. "12. Establishment of a society for mutual help; aid, moral and material, given to the orphans of the association." This reads more like the agenda of a sophomore debating society than the outline of work for an international congress of workingmen. The discussions of the congress were desultory, quite impractical, and often tinged with the factional spirit that ultimately ruptured the association. At its first meeting the discussion of the eight-hour day, the limitation of work for women and children, and the establishing of better free schools took a modern turn. But the French delegates brought forward a proposal to confine the membership in the association to "hand workers." This was to get rid of Marx and Engels, who were "brain workers." Socialism was evidently no more clearly defined then than it is to-day. Occasionally practical subjects were debated, as the acquiring by the state of all the means of transportation, of mines, forests, and land. But their time was largely taken up in the discussion of general principles, such as "Labor must have its full rights and entire rewards." Or they resolved, as at Brussels in 1868, that producers could gain control of machines and factories only through an indefinite extension of co-operative societies and a system of mutual credit; or, as at Basle the following year, that society had a right to abolish private property in land. It is apparent to any one who reads the reports of their meetings that very little practical advance had been made since the "Manifesto." Socialism was still in the vapor of speculation. It had absorbed some practical aspects from the English unions. These were at first interested in the International, and at their national conference in Sheffield, 1868, they even urged the local unions to join it. This interest waned rapidly as they saw the Continental contingent veer towards the Commune. However, the beginnings of a new movement, a "new Socialism," were distinctly seen in the questions that the English element introduced: the length of the working day, factory legislation, work of women and children. These had been the subject of rigid governmental inquiry. Marx was thoroughly familiar with these parliamentary findings. They are no small part of the fortifications he built around his theory of social development. But his German training inclined him to the Continental, not the Anglo-Saxon, view of social progress and of politics. The "Old International," then, was an attempt to spread Marxian doctrines into all lands. As such an attempt it is noteworthy. The Marxian _modus_, however, did not fit the world. Some Socialist writers attribute its failure to the fact that the time was not ripe for Marx's methods. The time will never be ripe for the Marxian method. Marx tried to move everything from one center. He was a German dogmatist. His council was a centralized autocracy, issuing mandates like a general to an army. This is an impossible method of international organization. The center must be supported by the periphery, not the periphery by the center. There could be no proletarian internationalism until there was an organized proletarian nationalism. Its conceptions of its detailed duties were even cruder than its machinery. The discussions were a blending of pedantic declamation and phosphoric denunciation. Its programs were a mixture of English trade-union realities and Continental vagaries. Such a movement had neither wings nor legs. But it had an influence, nevertheless, and a very important one. It was the means of bringing the new generation of leaders together, the men who were to make Socialism a practical political force. Even the fact that an international laboring men's society could meet was important. It realized the central idea of Marx, that the labor problem is international. That is the important point. Human solidarity is not ethnic, but inter-ethnic. The "Old International" was a faltering step toward that solidarity of humanity that has been advanced so rapidly by inventions, by international arbitrations, by treaties of commerce, and every other movement that makes international hostilities every year more difficult. On Socialism the "International" had at least one beneficial effect. It cleared its atmosphere of the anarchistic thunder clouds and prepared the way for the present more practical movement. This was largely due to the influence of the English trade unions. They were not inclined toward philosophical dissertations like the Germans, nor brilliant speculative vagaries like the French. Their stolid forms were always on the earth. That Marx was anxious for their support is apparent, and he drove them out of the movement by his indiscreet utterances on the Parisian Commune of 1871. The "Old International" was a revival of the "Society of the Just," tempered with English trade-unionism and tinged with Anarchism; it was also a connecting link between the old and the new Socialism. The characteristics of the "New Socialism" cropped out at the first meeting of the "New International," as it is called. In the first place, the co-operative movement and the trade-union movement were both amply represented at the Paris meetings, where the "New International" was formed in 1889. This is indicative of the new direction that the economic phase of Socialism has since taken. In the second place, the Socialist congress split into two parties, ostensibly over the question of the credentials of certain delegates, but really over the question that divides Socialists in all countries to-day: Shall Socialists co-operate with other political parties or remain isolated? The Marxian dogmatists believed in isolation; the opportunists or Possibilists believed in co-operating with other parties. There were two congresses. The Marxian congress had 221 French delegates and about 175 from other countries. The Possibilist convention was composed of 91 foreign and 521 French delegates. It was virtually a labor union convention, for over 225 unions were represented. It is of great significance that these two meetings, which divided on a question of political policy, discussed virtually the same questions. They were against war, believed in collectivism, demanded international labor legislation, the eight-hour day, the "day of rest," etc.[8] Liebknecht, the distinguished German Socialist, who was one of the chairmen of the Marxian convention, wrote in his preface to the German edition of the _Proceedings_ that the Paris meeting began a new era, "and indicated a break with the past." He told the delegates at the convention, "the Old International lives in us to-day." There was a continuity of proletarian ambition. In this respect the old movement was resurrected in the new. But in every other respect the old movement was dead. The abstractions about property and the rights of individuals did not interest the new generation. They were more concerned with wages than wage theories, and in the purchasing power of their wages than in a theory of values. Even the spirit of the class consciousness had changed. Marx's organization was the source of the old; national consciousness was the source of the new. The present internationalism is the result of nationalism. The delegates at Paris were representatives; they represented nationalities. One of the rules of the Marxian congress was that votes should be counted "by the head," unless a delegation from any country should unanimously demand "voting by nationalities." In the twenty years that had elapsed since Bakunin and his conspiracy-loving following had disrupted the "Old International" by their preaching of violence against nationalism, labor had increased with the rapid strides of the increasing industry and commerce of the world. This labor had organized itself into unions and all manner of co-operative and protective associations. It had done this by natural compulsion from within, not by a superimposed force from without. They had thereby found their national homogeneity, and were ready to go forward into a great and universal international homogeneity. The International Workingmen's Association now embraces the labor movement of all the leading countries of the world. At the last congress, held in Copenhagen, 1910, reports were received from the following organizations: the British Labor Party, the Fabian Society, the Social Democratic Federation of England, the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the Social Democratic Labor Party of Austria, the Commission of Trade Unions of Austria, the Social Democratic Labor Party of Bohemia, the Social Democratic Party of Hungary, the Socialist Party of France, the Socialist Party of Italy, the Revolutionary Socialist Party of Russia, the Social Democratic Party of Lettland, the Social Democratic Party of Finland, the Socialist Party of Norway, the Social Democratic Labor Party of Sweden, the Danish Social Democracy, the Social Democratic Party of Holland, the Belgian Labor Party, the Socialist Labor Party of the United States, the Social Democratic Party of Servia, and the Bulgarian Laborers' Social Democratic Party.[9] These names indicate the threefold nature of the modern movement. It is a labor movement, it is democratic, and it is Socialistic. And the list of countries shows that it is international. At Brussels a permanent International Socialist Bureau is maintained, with a permanent secretary, who is in constant touch with the movement in all countries. There are two directions in which this remarkable co-operation of millions of workingmen of all lands may have a practical effect on international affairs. In the first place, there is an effort being made to internationalize labor unions. In Europe this has been done, to some extent, among the transportation workers. They have an international committee of their own, and keep each other informed of labor conditions and movements. The great railway strike in England, in the summer of 1911, was planned on the Continent, as well as in London and Liverpool, and there was a sympathetic restlessness with the strikers in various countries adjacent to the Channel that threatened to break out in violence. During the post-office strike in France the strikers attempted to persuade English and Belgian railway employees to refuse to handle French mail. The Syndicalists confidently look forward to the day when an international labor organization will be able to compel a universal general strike. In the second place, the new international organization will have a far-reaching influence on militarism. This is due to two causes: first, the recruit himself is filled with the discontent of the Socialist before he dons the uniform. In France, Germany, Belgium, Austria, and other countries the anti-military virus has been long at work. But more potent than this is the feeling of international solidarity that binds these recruits into a brotherhood of labor who are unwilling to fight each other for purposes that do not appeal to the Socialist heart. Warfare, to the laboring man, is merely one phase of the exploitation of the poor for the benefit of the capitalist, and patriotism an excuse to hide the real purposes of war. At St. Quentin, in 1911, the French Socialists denounced the war in Morocco as an exploitation of human lives for the purposes of capitalistic gain. The German Social Democracy has always opposed the colonial policy of the chancellors on the same ground, and the Belgian Labor Party has been the severest censor of the Belgian Congo campaigns. During the summer of 1911 the Morocco incident threatened a war between France and Germany, with England involved, and the other great powers more than interested. In August and September the situation became so acute that England and Germany were popularly said to have been "within two weeks of war." A profound sense of danger and an intense restlessness possessed the people. During this period of excitement the French Socialists held anti-war demonstrations. The German Social Democrats met in their annual convention at Jena and passed a resolution condemning the German Morocco policy, and Herr Bebel made a notable speech, detailing the horrors of war with grim exactness, and arraigning a civilization that would resort to the "monstrous miseries" of war for gaining a few acres of land. This speech was quoted at length by the great European dailies, and made a deep impression upon the people. In England the leaders of the Labor Party admonished the government that, while they were patriots and believed in national solidarity, the English workingman would never cease to consider the German and the French workingman as a fellow-laborer and brother. The International Socialist Bureau met in Zurich to discuss the situation and to consider how the organizations of labor might make their protests against war most effective. It is difficult to measure the influence of such an international protest against the powers of governments and of armies. That the protest was made, that it was sincere, rational and free from the hyperbola of passion, is the significant fact. Forty years ago such action on the part of labor would have been ridiculed. To-day it is respected. Disarmament, when it comes, will be due to the influences exerted by the recruit rather than to the benevolent impulses of governments and commanders. FOOTNOTES: [1] Introduction to _Klassenkämpfe_, p. 13. [2] See ENGELS, Introduction to MARX'S _Enthüllungen über den Kommunisten Process zu Köln_. [3] Joint-preface of edition of 1872. [4] _Ibid._ [5] See "Address of the General Council of the Workingmen's Association on the Civil War in France." [6] Many of the original documents, and extensive excerpts from others are given in DR. EUGEN JÄGER'S _Der Moderne Socialismus_, Berlin, 1873, and in DR. R. MEYER'S _Der Emancipations-Kampf des Vierten Standes_, 2nd edition, Vol. I, Berlin, 1882. Both of these works give a fairly detailed account of the development of the International and of its annual meetings. [7] See _Ein Complot gegen die International Arbeiter Association_, a compilation of documents and descriptions of Bakunin's organization. The work was first issued in French and translated into German by S. Koksky. [8] The Possibilists declared for an eight-hour day; a day of rest each week; abolition of night work; abolition of work for women and children; special protection for children 14-18 years of age; workshop inspectors elected by the workmen; equal wages for foreign and domestic labor; a fixed minimum wage; compulsory education; repeal of the laws against the International. The Marxian program included: an eight-hour day; children under 14 years forbidden to work, and work confined to six hours a day for youth 14-18 years of age, except in certain cases; prohibition of work for women dangerous to their health; 36 hours of continuous rest each week; abolition of "payment in kind"; abolition of employment bureaus; inspectors of workshops to be selected by workmen; equal pay for both sexes; absolute liberty of association. For the first meeting of the "New International," see WEIL, _Histoire Internationale de France_, pp. 262 et seq. [9] See Appendix, p. 340. for list of countries that maintain Socialist organizations and the political strength of same. CHAPTER V THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF FRANCE I The Commune abruptly put an end to Socialism in France. The caldron boiled over and put out the fire. Thiers, in his last official message as president, claimed that Socialism, living and thriving in Germany, was absolutely dead in France. It was, however, to be revived in a newer and more vital form. The exiled communards, in England and elsewhere, came in contact with Marxianism, and in 1880, when a general amnesty was declared, they brought to Paris a new and virile propaganda. The leader of the new Marxian movement was Jules Guesde, a tireless zealot, burning with the fire that kindles enthusiasm. The "affaire Boulanger" absorbed attention at this time, and Guesde, in his newspapers, _La Révolution Française_ and _Égalité_, supported the Republic. But he was also insisting upon "Le minimum d'état et la maximum de liberté" (a minimum of government and a maximum of liberty). This may be taken as the political maxim of the Socialists at that time, although it leads them into the embarrassing anomaly of using their own slave as their master. Meantime a political labor party had arisen. In Paris, in 1878, a workingman became a candidate for the municipal council, and he headed his program with the words "_Parti Ouvrier_"--Labor Party. This is the first time the words were used with a political significance.[1] It was a small beginning, his votes were few, and the newspaper that espoused the workingman's cause, _Le Prolétaire_, was constantly on the verge of bankruptcy for want of proletarian support. In other cities the political labor movement began, and in 1879 a labor conference was held in Marseilles. The two movements, labor and Socialist, drew together in 1880 at a general conference of workingmen at Havre. Here there were three groups which found it impossible to coalesce: the Anarchists, under Blanqui, formed the "Parti Socialiste Révolutionnaire"--the Revolutionary Socialist Party; the co-operativists, calling themselves the Republican Socialist Alliance, included the opportunist element of the Socialists; and the Guesdists, who were in the majority, organized the "Parti Ouvrier Français"--the French Labor Party--and adopted a Marxian program. The Guesdists entered the campaign with characteristic zeal. They polled only 15,000 votes in Paris and 25,000 in the Departments for their municipal tickets, and 50,000 in the entire country for their legislative ticket. From the first the Socialists in France have been rent by petty factions. We will hastily review these constantly shifting groups before proceeding to the larger inquiry. In 1882 the Guesdists split, and Brousse formed the "Fédération des Travailleurs Socialistes de France"--the Federation of Socialist Workingmen of France. In 1885 Malon formed a group for the study of the social problems, "Société d'Économie Sociale"--Society of Social Economics--which rapidly developed into the important group of Independent Socialists--"Parti Socialiste Indépendent." The labor movement was stimulated by the act of 1884, and in 1886 the "Fédération des Syndicats"--Federation of Labor Unions--was organized at Lyons, and in 1887 the Paris Labor Exchange--"Bourse du Travail"--was opened. In 1882 Allemane seceded from the Broussists to found a faction of his own, the Revolutionary Socialist Labor Party of France--"Parti Ouvrier Socialiste Révolutionnaire Français." In 1893 the first confederation of the labor exchanges (bourses) was held, and the first conspicuous victory at the polls achieved. In 1899 an effort was made to unify the warring factions, and a committee representing every shade of Socialistic faith was appointed. It was called the General Committee--"Comité Général Socialiste." Within the year the Guesdists withdrew on account of the rigorous quelling of the strike riots by the government at Châlons-sur-Saône. In 1901 the Blanquists withdrew and, coalescing with the Guesdists, formed the Socialist Party of France--"Parti Socialiste de France." This movement was soon followed by the uniting of the Jaurèsites and the Independents, who called themselves the French Socialist Party--"Parti Socialiste Français." After the expulsion of Millerand, the two parties united in 1905 at Rouen. This unity was achieved at the suggestion of the International Congress held at Amsterdam, 1904. The "United Party" is officially known as the French Section of the International Workingmen's Association--"Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière." The United Party, after its years of ridiculous factionalism, is the most compact and disciplined group in the Chamber of Deputies, and this in spite of the fact that the Guesdists and Jaurèsites have not forgotten their ancient differences. The French people are not amenable to discipline and party rigor as are the Germans and the Anglo-Saxons. At the last election (1910) the United Party elected 76 deputies in a chamber of 590 members. There are to-day two other groups that are more or less Socialistic but are not in "the Party." The Independent Socialists, numbering thirty-four members in the Chamber, are men who, either because of their intellectualism or because of their political ambitions, have a repugnance to hard and fast organization. This group includes a number of college professors and journalists; also Briand, Viviani, and Millerand, former ministers. They are not committed to any definite political program, take a leading part in all social reform measures, and are accused by the "united ones" of using the name Socialist merely as a bait for votes. The other group is the Socialist-Radical Party, numbering about 250 members in the Chamber. In most countries their radicalism would be called Socialism. But in France they are only the connecting link between Socialists and liberal Republicans.[2] II The "social questions" were slow in entering parliament. In 1876 a Bonapartist deputy, known for his charities, interpolated the government, asking what inquiries were being made toward securing the moral and material betterment of "the greatest number," and amidst the cheers of his followers the Prime Minister replied that the government's duty was comprehended in securing to the country "liberty, security, and education." This was the old idea of the functions of government. The new social movement had not yet gathered momentum. With the development of the workingman's political party, interest and sympathy for his problems suddenly increased. In 1880 the Republicans adopted a resolution in favor of freedom of association. At this time labor unions were illegal. In 1881 the government removed the restrictions that had been placed on the press. In the following year it extended the primary schools into every commune, and Gambetta did everything in his power to promulgate what he termed "an alliance of the proletariat and the bourgeois." Social science, he said, was the solvent of social ills. The Socialists, however, believed that politics, not "social science," was the solvent. It was not until 1884, while Waldeck-Rousseau was Minister of the Interior, that labor was given the legal right to organize. Immediately unions--called _syndicats_ by the French--sprang up everywhere. Article 3 of the act declared that these unions had for their exclusive object "the study and the promulgation of their interests, economic, industrial, commercial, and agricultural." They were not given the liberal legal powers that English and American unions have. The social movement now invaded French politics in full battle array. A government commission was intrusted with the study of the co-operative movement. In 1885 several deputies, calling themselves Socialists, began to interpellate the ministry on the labor questions. The government brought in two proposals, one pertaining to communal and industrial organizations, the other to the arbitration of industrial disputes. Both were tabled. In 1887 a man appeared in the Chamber ready to debate the social questions with the keenest and the ablest. This was Jean Jaurès, a professor of philosophy, whose profound knowledge and superb oratory immediately commanded attention. He was joined by another new deputy, M. Millerand, scarcely less proficient in debate, and even more extreme in his convictions. Both were considered members of the radical party. But they soon formed the nucleus of a new group, the Independent Socialists, that grew rapidly in influence and power. The social question was forced on the public from yet another direction. The Anarchists, who had been expelled from the Havre conference, remained passive until the organization of trade unions. They then began to promulgate the doctrine of the general strike. The unionists began not only to compel their employers to accede to their demands, but to coerce workingmen to join the unions. It was during this agitation that the government established an elaborate system of labor exchanges--"Bourse du Travail." From the labor unions the doctrine of the general strike was insinuated into Socialist circles. In 1890 it was proposed as a practical measure for enforcing the demand for an eight-hour day among the miners. In 1892 the Departmental Congress of Workingmen at Tours passed a resolution favoring the general strike, and it was discussed a few days later in a general convention of the unions, at the suggestion of Aristide Briand, a Socialist who was destined to play an important rôle in the development of the theory and practice of general strikes. The government could no longer dodge the social question. Millerand announced his conversion to Socialism and became the leader of a small parliamentary coterie who pressed the issue daily. In a signed statement to the unions they said: "The Republic has given the ballot into your hand, now give the Republic your instructions."[3] The parliamentary _entente_ of the liberal Socialists with the Radical Left dates from this time. The campaign spread with surprising fervor. Labor unions and parliamentary Socialists joined their forces. In 1893 they elected forty Socialists to the Chamber of Deputies. Among them were Jaurès, who now espoused the cause of the Socialist opportunists; Millerand, conspicuous as leader of the independent group; Guesde, the vehement Marxian; and Vaillant, a communard and Socialist of the older type. Now began the actual parliamentary Socialism in France. Jaurès, in introducing the group--they were scarcely a party--to the Chamber, affirmed their allegiance to the Republic and their devotion to the cause of humanity. The misery of the people had awakened, he said, after right of association had been granted. Labor had, through strikes, gained certain minor improvements. It was now prepared to conquer public authority. But so much of their time was spent in quarreling with each other, and debating whether they should vote with the Radicals, that very little substantial work was accomplished by the Socialists. Finally, encouraged by their unusual success in the municipal elections of 1896, the leaders of the various factions met at Saint-Mandé to celebrate their victory. They were tiring of their quarrels and were ready to unite. At least they agreed that each group could name its own candidate for the first ballot; on the second ballot they should all support the Socialist who polled the most votes on the first ballot.[4] But who is a Socialist? Here for the first time a political definition was attempted. Millerand, a Parisian lawyer who, we have seen, made his political début with Jaurès, as a member of the Radical Left, attempted the answer. It was made in the presence of Guesde, Vaillant, and Jaurès, and many local leaders from various parts of France. So, for the moment and for the occasion of rejoicing, there was a united Socialism. And it gave assent, with varying enthusiasm, to the general definition and program outlined by Millerand. He defined the ground to be covered as follows: "Is not the Socialistic idea completely summed up in the earnest desire to secure for every being in the bosom of society the unimpaired development of his personality? That implies two necessary conditions of which one is a factor of the other: first, individual appropriation of things necessary for the security and development of the individual, i.e., property; secondly, liberty, which is only a sounding and hollow word if it is not based on and safeguarded by property." He then accepted _in toto_ the Marxian theory that capitalistic society bears within itself the enginery of its own doom. "Men do not and will not set up collectivism; it is setting itself up daily; it is, if I may be allowed the phrase, being secreted by the capitalistic régime. Here I seem to have my finger on the characteristic feature of the Socialist program. In my view, whoever does not admit the necessary and progressive replacement of capitalistic property by social property is not a Socialist." Millerand was not satisfied with merely including banking, railroads, and mining in the list of "socialized" property. He believed that as industries become "ripe" they should be taken over by the state, and cites sugar refining as an example of a monopoly that is "incontestably ripe." Millerand also laid great stress on municipal activities, and hastened to guarantee to the small property owner his modest possessions. All this taking over by the state was to be done gradually. "No Socialist ever dreamed of transforming the capitalistic régime instantaneously by magic wand." The method of this gradual absorption by the state must be constitutional. "We appeal only to universal suffrage. To realize the immediate reforms capable of relieving the lot of the working class, and thus fitting it to win its own freedom, and to begin, as conditioned by the nature of things, the socialization of the means of production, it is necessary and sufficient for the Socialist party to endeavor to capture the government through universal suffrage."[5] This mild formulary, which places the "socialized society" far into the dim future, was accepted as long as it was rhetorical. But when Millerand himself became a member of the cabinet in the Waldeck-Rousseau coalition, and began to translate his words into deeds, a rupture followed. In the meantime occurred the Dreyfus affair, which shifted all the political forces of the Republic. At first the Guesdists remained indifferent, while Jaurès, with great energy, threw himself into the contest in behalf of Dreyfus. But when the affair took an anti-Republican turn and democracy was threatened, then all the Socialists united, with no lack of energy and zeal, in the defense of the Republic. On June 13, 1898, Millerand was spokesman in the Chamber of Deputies for the Socialist group, which now held the balance of power. With threats of violence against the Republic in the air, he assured the deputies that his comrades were united for "the honor, the splendor, and the safety of the Fatherland" (l'honneur, la grandeur, et la sécurité de la Patrie). And this was part of the price of their adhesion: old-age pensions, a fixed eight-hour day, factory legislation protecting the life and health of the workman, military service reduced to two years, and an income tax. The Radical Left adopted this "minimum program" of the Socialists, and the famous "Bloc" was formed. Jaurès was made vice-president of the Chamber and soon proved himself master of the coalition. Now for the first time in history the Socialists were in political power, and what occurred is of the greatest interest to us. III And now for the first time a Socialist becomes a cabinet member. In 1899 Waldeck-Rousseau appointed Millerand Minister of Commerce, to the consternation of the Conservatives and the division of the Socialists. Jaurès congratulated his colleague on his courage in assuming responsibility. But while the Independents were jubilant over the elevation of one of their number, the Guesdists and Blanquists withdrew from the "Bloc." They issued a manifesto setting forth their reasons. They did not wish further alliances with a "pretended Socialist." They were tired of "compromises and deviations," which for too long a time had been forced on them as "a substitute for the class war, for revolution, and the socialism of the militant proletariat."[6] To them the war of the classes forbade their entrance into a bourgeois ministry; and the conquest of political power did not imply collaboration with a government whose duty it was to defend property. Jaurès proposed to put the question up to the party congress, and in 1899 at Paris a bilateral compromise resolution was adopted. Guesde, however, restless and dissatisfied, compelled the congress to vote first upon the question, "Does the war of the classes permit the entrance of a Socialist into a bourgeois government?" The answer was 818 "no," 634 "yes." Jaurès' compromise was then adopted, 1,140 to 240.[7] The international congress held in Paris, September, 1900, adopted Kautsky's resolution declaring that the acceptance of office by a single Socialist in a bourgeois government "could not be deemed the normal commencement of the conquest for political power, but only an expedient called forth by transitory and exceptional conditions." At the Bordeaux congress, April, 1903, the whole time was given over to this perplexing question. The congress was composed largely of friends of Millerand and Jaurès. By this time the Socialist minister had had three years' experience in the cabinet. The Waldeck-Rousseau premiership had given way to Combes, who was also dependent upon the Socialists for his power. Millerand had especially offended the Socialists by voting against his party on three separate occasions: first, on a resolution abolishing state support for public worship; second, on a resolution to prosecute certain anti-militarists for publishing a book that tended to destroy military discipline; and, third, on a resolution asking the Minister of Foreign Affairs to invite proposals for international disarmament. He had further offended the Socialists by officially receiving the Czar on his visit to Paris. The debate, then, was disciplinary rather than doctrinal. But it was political discipline, evidence therefore that a party consciousness of some sort had been achieved. This meeting is significant because it tried to fix definite limits for Socialistic action and committed Jaurès to the narrowing, not to the expanding, policy of the party. M. Sarrante expressed the Millerand idea when he told the delegates that they were to judge "an entire policy," the policy of "democratic Socialism, which gains ground daily on the revolutionary Socialism, a policy which Citizen Millerand did not start, which he has merely developed and defined, and which forces itself upon us more and more in our republican country." The test of Socialism, he said, was just this "contact of theory with facts." Jaurès found himself in logical difficulty when he endeavored to reconcile both sides for the sake of party unity. He said that Sarrante was wrong "when he thinks it enough to lay down the principle of democracy in order to resolve, in a sort of automatic fashion, the antagonisms of society.... The enthronement of political democracy and universal suffrage by no means suppresses the profound antagonism of classes.... Sarrante errs in positing democracy without noting that it is modified, adulterated, thwarted by the antagonism of classes and the economic preponderance of one class. Just as Guesde errs in positing the class war apart from democracy." To Jaurès the problem was to "penetrate" this democracy with the ideas of Socialism until the "proletarian and Socialistic state has replaced the oligarchic and bourgeois state." This can be brought about, he said, by "a policy which consists in at once collaborating with all democrats, yet vigorously distinguishing one's self from them." Jaurès acknowledged the awkwardness of this policy, which required a superhuman legerdemain never yet accomplished by any party in the history of politics. Guesde's motion to oust Millerand from the party was lost. And a compromise offered by Jaurès censuring him for his votes, but permitting him to remain in the party fold, was adopted by 109 to 89 votes, fifteen delegates abstaining from voting. This was a very close margin, and in spite of Millerand's promise that he would in the future be more careful of his party allegiance he was expelled the following year from the Federation of the Seine. The stumbling-block was removed.[8] More important than the party discipline is the question of the economic measures attempted by Millerand. In general he followed the outlines laid down in his Saint-Mandé program.[9] His experience carried him farther away from the Guesdists every year until he repudiated the class war and adhered to social solidarity; substituted the method by evolution for the method by revolution, still espoused by Guesde; and placed the national interests upon as high a plane of duty as the international and the personal. His program of labor legislation was comprehensive, and he succeeded in getting some of it passed into law. These were his leading proposals: 1. Regulating the hours of labor and creating a normal working day of ten hours. He began the reduction at eleven hours, reducing it to ten and a half, and then to ten within three years. In the public works of his own department he reduced the working day at once to eight hours. 2. In public contracts he introduced clauses favorable to workingmen. These clauses embraced the number of hours in a normal work day, the minimum wage for every class of workmen, prohibition of piece-work, guarantee of no work on Sunday, and the per cent. of foreign workmen allowed on the job. He arranged that the workingmen should unite with the employer in fixing the wages and the hours of labor before the contract was signed. In these contracts, furthermore, the state reserved the right to indemnify the workmen out of the funds due to the contractor. 3. An accident insurance law. 4. The abolition of private employment agencies, with their many abuses, and replacing them with communal labor bureaus free to all. The voluntary federations of the trade unions were put on a similar footing with the communal labor exchanges, and were encouraged to co-operate with them. Millerand took great care to perfect the organization of trade unions. He introduced amendments to the old law of 1884, giving greater scope and elasticity to the unions, granting them greater corporate powers, and making the dismissal of a workman because he belonged to a union ground for a civil suit for damages. He began a movement to secure the co-operation between the unions and the state workshop inspectors. There had been a great deal of abuse in the operation of the inspection laws by the employers. An attempt was now made to define strictly the rights and duties of the inspectors. 5. His pet scheme was the establishing of labor councils (conseils du travail). On these councils labor and employer were to have equal representation. The duty of the councils embraced the adjudication of all disputes arising between employer and employee, suggesting improvements, and keeping vigilance over all local labor conditions. In 1891 a supreme labor council had been established. To this Millerand added lay and official members and greatly increased its efficiency. He tried to make it a central vigilance bureau, keeping in close touch with local conditions all over the land. 6. He elaborated a plan for regulating industrial disputes. This was to be effected by a permanent organization in each establishment employing more than fifty men, a sort of committee of grievance to which all matters of dispute might be referred. In case of failure to settle their difficulties an appeal to the local labor council was provided. By this democratic representative machinery Millerand hoped to solve the labor problem. It will be seen that Millerand's plan was an attempt, by law, to project the working class, not into politics but into the capitalist class. He would do this by compelling the employer to share the responsibility of ownership with his employees. This would mark the beginning of a revolution very different from the revolution ordinarily preached by propagandists, because this revolution would substitute class peace in place of our present incessant economic class war. The Socialists made it plain that Millerand's procedure was not Socialism. When Millerand was first asked to take a cabinet portfolio his friend Jaurès told him to accept. When he had perfected his practical procedure, and the bulk of the proletarians evinced their disappointment and chagrin that the elevation of a Socialist had not brought utopia, Jaurès gradually slipped away from his former alliance and finally left the reformist group. Jaurès also had his day of power. The Dreyfus affair presented the issue in tangible form--the old traditions, religious, political, social, against the new ideas of society, property, and government. It was the heroic period of modern French Socialism. Red and black flags were borne by enthusiastic multitudes through the streets of Paris. The "_Université Populaire_" was inaugurated by students for the purpose of instructing the common people in the issues that were at stake. The flame of eager anticipation spread over the Republic. As master of the "Bloc" in the Chamber, Jaurès became the first real head in the first French democracy. Two great reforms were undertaken: the disestablishment of the Church, carrying with it the secularization of education and the reorganization of the army. The old Royalist families had continued to send their sons into the army and navy. Many of the officers were suspected of royalist sympathies. An elaborate system of espionage was instituted, and the suspects weeded out. The last vestige of the old monarchy has now disappeared from French officialdom. France has a bourgeois army, a bourgeois school system, a bourgeois bureaucracy, thanks to the power of the proletarian Socialists led by Jaurès in the days of the Republic's danger. Jaurès remained orthodox; Millerand became heretic. The Millerand episode left a deep impression on the public mind. The first Socialist minister shaped not only a program but an entire policy. In 1906, when a new cabinet was formed, Millerand declined a portfolio, but two other Socialists accepted cabinet honors; Viviani, a well-known Parisian lawyer, held the newly created ministry of labor and social prevision (prévoyance sociale), and Aristide Briand became Minister of Public Instruction and Worship, and later Minister of Justice. The public regarded the elevation of two Socialists to the cabinet as a matter of course. Millerand's activity had taken the fear out of their hearts. Even the Marxian Socialists failed to notice the event. They had written into their party by-laws that no Socialist could accept office, so the new ministers, by their own acts, ceased to be "Socialists." Clémenceau, the new Premier, ushered in the next period of social adventure by a brilliant debate in the Chamber with Jaurès in which the philosophical basis of individualism was reviewed with great skill and some of the social questions discussed.[10] Jaurès claimed for the Socialists a dominant share in the great victory won by the friends of the Republic during the Dreyfus turmoil, and made much of the multitudes of workingmen to whom the Republic was now under great obligation. These workingmen, the proletariat, were the force now to be dealt with. "If you really wish society to evolve, if you wish it really to be transformed, there is the force you must deal with, and that you must neither repress nor rebuff." The parliamentary experience of Socialism Jaurès passed over lightly; it added nothing new, he thought, to the theory or the arguments of the Socialists. His opponent, however, in a single sentence laid bare the weakness of the Socialist's logic: "The truth is that it is necessary to distinguish between two different elements of the social organization, between the man and the system." Clémenceau read the Socialists' program upon which they had won their victory. It embraced: the eight-hour day, giving state employees the right to form unions, sickness and unemployment insurance; a progressive income tax; ballot reform (scrutin de liste) and proportional representation, and "restoration to the nation of the monopolies in which capital has its strongest fortress." "What a terribly bourgeois program!" exclaimed Clémenceau. "M. Jaurès, after expounding his program, challenged me to produce my own. I had very great difficulty in restraining the temptation to reply: 'You know my program very well. You have it in your pocket. You stole it from me.'" This debate was significant, not in what was said, but in the fact that it was possible to enlist the Prime Minister, the cleverest of French statesmen, and Jaurès, the greatest of French orators, in a discussion of Socialism from the tribune of the Chamber of Deputies. The whole country listened. During this brilliant tilt Clémenceau taunted Jaurès that his Socialism was impractical, a dream. "You are a visionary, I am a realist; you have dreams, I have facts." Jaurès replied with great fervor that he would prove to the people of France that Socialism is not impracticable and that within a year he would produce a plan for the new social order. The "Unified" Socialist Party, built up largely on Jaurès' abandonment of his former colleague and his earlier liberal convictions, may be considered a part of the fulfilment of this promise. The other part, the plans and specifications for the new society, is not yet before the world. Its introduction, properly its prelude, is the volume published by Jaurès in 1911, _L'Armée Nouvelle_, containing suggestions for reorganizing the state defense along lines of voluntary militia and cadets.[11] IV Clémenceau's régime was destined to test the Socialist policy in a new direction. The law of 1884 gave state employees the right to form associations, but not to federate or organize _syndicats_. A great many organizations were formed, especially among the postal employees and teachers. They were mutual benefit societies, "friendly" associations, and the government recognized them to the extent of discussing their grievances and questions of mutual interest with them. Among the workmen in the navy yards and the national match, tobacco, and porcelain works similar organizations existed. The Syndicalists would not let the matter rest there. They demanded that these organizations become members of the C.G.T. (General Confederation of Workingmen). The government objected because that would give the men the right to strike, a dangerous anomaly giving to the state's servants the right to make government nugatory. This extreme doctrine found ready advocates in the Chamber among the Socialists. In March, 1909, the post-office clerks and telegraph operators went out on strike. The government promptly discharged thirty-eight of the ringleaders and arrested eight of the strikers in Paris on the charge of resisting the police. In the course of a few days over 800 out of 15,000 employees were discharged. Soldiers were introduced into the service, and with the help of local chambers of commerce and other civic bodies the postal service was renewed. The strikers were then willing to make terms. They stipulated that the dismissed employees be reinstated and that M. Simyan, the Under-Secretary of Posts and Telegraphs, be dismissed. The first request was conceded, the second was denied. The ostensible cause of the strike had been the attitude of the under-secretary; the men asserted that he was arbitrary and had imposed petty political exactions upon them. The government refused to allow the men to dictate its affairs, the under-secretary remained, and the men went back to work. The Socialists censured the government for not being considerate with the men, and placed the entire blame upon the ministry for refusing the national employees a right to organize as other workmen. To this Simyan replied: "We are in the presence of an organized revolutionary agitation ... this is blackmail by strike." The Minister of Public Works said: "Over our heads these officials have revolted against you and against the entire nation. These are serious hours when the government needs perfect facilities of communication with its ambassadors and consuls [the Balkan question was in the pot], and in such hours a strike is an attack upon the national sovereignty. In these circumstances I cannot re-enter into negotiations with the general postal association. If I did so that would mean abdication."[12] The Socialist deputies voted against the government's resolution "not to tolerate strikes of functionaries." The general strike committee was not discharged when the men returned to work. When it became evident that the government did not intend to ask the under-secretary for his resignation the post-office employees organized a trade union, unauthorized by law. The government refused to meet representatives of this union, on the ground that state employees had organized for one purpose only, namely, to have the right to strike, and the government would not concede that right. On May 12 a second general post-office strike was called. The government immediately dismissed over two hundred of the strikers. The Socialists in the Chamber began a demonstration against the government. One of their number started the "Internationale," the Socialist war-song. After the first blush of indignation had passed, the whole Chamber sprang to its feet, there were shouts of protest, a Republican started the Marseillaise, and the two revolutionary hymns, bourgeois and proletarian, were blended for the first time in a parliamentary chamber. Now the general confederation of labor (C.G.T.) took charge of the strike, and soon plots began to be carried out in various parts of the country. There were indications of violence everywhere. The general committee of the C.G.T. declared a general strike. The situation threatened to become serious, but the soldiers distributed over the affected territory had a tranquilizing effect. Men in other trades were reluctant to follow the orders of the committee. A few electric workers succeeded in cutting some wires in Paris, leaving the city in darkness a few hours. There were desultory acts of _sabotage_, but there was more terror than enthusiasm, and in two days the general strike was over.[13] Here was an attempt to place the 800,000 French state employees into the revolutionary current of the C.G.T. The real question at issue was this: Is striking an act of mutiny? Barthou, a member of the ministry, said in the Chamber of Deputies that "the more solemnly you denounce the strike as a crime against the state, the greater the victory of the Syndicalists." The Syndicalist journal, _Le Voix du Peuple_, the day after the first strike was settled proclaimed "the victory which our comrades of the postal proletariat have won over their employer the state." This, they said, showed that the state conceded the main contention of Syndicalism--that it is not different from a private employer. And the Syndicalists gloried in the fact that the government, instead of treating the strikers as mutineers, parleyed with them and reinstated them. Clémenceau brought in a bill designed to relieve the situation by fixing the status of the state employees. The men were to be given the right of association for "professional" purposes only,--i.e., for improving their efficiency,--but were absolutely prohibited from striking and from joining other unions. A comprehensive civil-service reform was embodied in the bill, aimed to prevent the men from becoming victims of political abuse. Before the bill could be thoroughly considered the Clémenceau ministry fell and a new Prime Minister was called to the helm. This was none other than Aristide Briand, the first Socialist Prime Minister in European history. His former comrades had long before this disowned him, and he was soon to participate in events that would forever alienate them. He had been a furious Socialist, an anti-militarist, and defender of the general strike. In the Socialist congress at Paris, 1899, he said: "The general strike has the seductive advantage that it is nothing but the practice of an intangible right. It is a revolution which arises within the law. The workingman refuses to carry the yoke of misery any farther and begins the revolution in the field of his legal rights. The illegality must begin with the capitalist class, if it allows itself to be provoked into destroying a right which they themselves have professed to be holy." At the same meeting he expressed himself on the soldiery as follows: "If the command to fire is given, if the officers are stubborn enough to try to force the soldiers against their will, then the guns might be fired, but perhaps not in the direction the officers thought." Briand repeated these sentiments at the Amsterdam congress in 1903. This was the man whom destiny had chosen to lead the French government against the organized revolt of government employees. On assuming the premiership he announced his program: 1. Parliamentary and electoral reform, he said, were of the first necessity, but he deemed it best to experiment with the new methods of balloting locally before adopting a national system of reform. 2. A graduated income tax. 3. Fixing the legal status of state servants. 4. Old-age pension. October 10, 1910, the men employed on the Northern Railway went out on strike. Before they did so they had a conference with the Prime Minister and the Minister of Public Works, Millerand, requesting that they try to arrange a meeting between the men and the officials of the railway. The ministry offered its services to the railway directors, but they refused to meet the strikers, although Briand had volunteered to preside at such a meeting. The Prime Minister told the men firmly that the government could not tolerate a suspension of railway service, that it would exert its authority to prevent it, and that it relied on the common sense and patriotism of the men to prevent it. However, the strike spread to other lines, including the state railway. The men's demands were three: 1. A minimum wage of five francs a day. 2. A revision of the railway pension act making the pensions retroactive. 3. A weekly day of rest--the men had been excluded from the "rest day" act when it was passed. Briand at once characterized the strike as political in motive and revolutionary in character. In his mind the strike ceased to be merely a question of the right to strike, but was a criminal outbreak, an act of rebellion planned by a few revolutionary leaders and submitted to by the rank and file without their even voting on the question. He was greatly incensed at the sudden calling out of the men after the government had received their representatives, and especially since the railway companies had granted their request for a minimum wage and had taken under advisement the other demands of the men. Five of the ringleaders were promptly arrested under dramatic circumstances. They were attending a meeting in the office of _L'Humanité_,[14] attended by Jaurès and Vaillant and other leaders of the party. They were arrested under color of Sections 17 and 18 of the law of 1845 dealing with railway traffic.[15] This law proved a powerful factor in checking the strike. Arrests were made far and near. The energetic Prime Minister did not wait for acts of violence; he anticipated them. Briand called out the reserves (militia), and nearly all of the strikers were compelled to put on the uniform. If they refused they were guilty of a serious offense; if they obeyed they could no longer strike. The railways were run as in times of war, under military rigor. In spite of these precautions acts of violence occurred, and _sabotage_ was reported from various railway centers.[16] In one week the soldiery, under the determined minister, had done its work. The strike was over. The government refused to reinstate about 2,000 men employed on the state railway. The strike committee issued a manifesto excusing the failure of the strike, assuming the full responsibility for calling it, and affirming that the government had "lowered itself to the level of the most barbarous employer." The strike was hastily conceived, never had the sympathy of the public, and the destruction of property was deplored even by the labor unions, which, when it was all over, passed resolutions condemning _sabotage_. The leaders of the Syndicalists, the plotters of the strike, no doubt believed that the time was opportune. The Prime Minister and two of his cabinet, Viviani and Millerand, were Socialists, and a third member, Barthou, was a Radical who had as a private member of the Chamber, a short time before his appointment to the cabinet, vigorously defended the railway men's "right to strike." But official responsibility had its usual effect.[17] Now began a series of dramatic events in the Chamber. The united Socialists maintained that the men had a legal right to strike and that the government had denied to French citizens their legal privileges. Briand replied (October 25) that the strike had nothing to do with the labor problem. The government, had been confronted with "an enterprise designed to ruin the country, an anarchistic movement with civil war for its aim, and violence and organized destruction for its method"; and he had treated it as a rebellion, not as a strike. The government, he said, had evidence of a well-laid plot for _sabotage_; and the Syndicalist idea of liberty he characterized as a "hideous figure of license." Millerand (October 27) characterized the strike as a "criminal enterprise," and the _saboteurs_ as "criminals" guilty of "a revolutionary mobilization with a political object." For the Socialists Bouveri, a miner, replied. He defended bomb-throwing and _sabotage_; asked the Minister of War if, in case of invasion by a foreign foe, he would not blow up the bridges; and said the strikers were engaged in a social war and had the same excuse for destroying property. The climax of the debate came October 29, when Briand, turning to the Socialists, said: "I am going to tell you something that will make you jump (que vous faire bondir). If the government had not found in the law that which enabled it to remain master of the frontiers of France and master of its railways, which are the indispensable instruments of the national defense; if, in a word, the government had found it necessary to resort to illegality, it would have done so." No words can describe the disorder of the scene that followed this challenge. Cries of "Dictator!" "Resign!" were mingled with catcalls and hisses. Finally Jaurès was heard in bitter rebuke of his former comrade. Viviani answered Jaurès; they had fought together the battles of the workingman and would do so still "if Socialism had not adopted the methods of _sabotage_, of anti-patriotism, and of anarchy." A few weeks later Briand and his cabinet resigned, although sustained by a majority of the Chamber. But President Fallières immediately requested the dauntless Prime Minister to form a new cabinet. In his new program he included measures that would greatly strengthen the arms of the government in times of strikes, punishing _sabotage_ by heavy fines and penalties, penalizing the public railway servant for striking, and contemplating an elaborate system of conciliation boards patterned after Millerand's plan. These rigorous suggestions increased the flame of hatred against him, and his life was threatened. Nothing daunted, he proceeded in his warfare against the C.G.T., which he denounced as a handful of plotters exercising a wicked tyranny over Socialists and workingmen. Finally, February 27, 1911, he resigned, refusing to hold office by the sufferance of the reactionary Right. The Socialists voted with their enemies to dethrone their first Premier, whom they considered a traitor to the course.[18] So ended one of the most significant episodes of modern political history. Every government, especially every democratic government, will within the next few decades be compelled to meet the railway problem and the question of the relation of the government to its state servants. Two important details in the Briand affair are of especial interest. First, the Prime Minister's attempt to project the authority of the state into the contract relations of the railway employees and the companies. Instead of hostility, Briand's plan might well have deserved the support of the Socialists. For he was expanding the functions of the state, was enlisting the power of society in behalf of a contract that is of universal interest. Secondly, Briand's bill making it unlawful for a railway servant to strike was quite as revolutionary as the C.G.T.'s contention that the state had no right to interfere. Here, too, Briand was the Socialist and the Socialists were the individualists; the one recognized the paramount interests of society, the other saw only the interests of the individual worker. Put to this test, French Socialism failed as signally in theory as the violence, _sabotage_, and insubordination of the C.G.T. failed in practice.[19] V Who were these revolutionary labor leaders, this small handful of plotters to whom Briand constantly alluded?[20] In order to understand the Socialist movement in any country, both politically and industrially, it is necessary to understand the organization of labor. Socialism began as a class movement, and in every country it is endeavoring to capture the labor organizations.[21] In no two countries are the relations quite the same. In the United States the unions have traditionally kept out of politics altogether. In Great Britain they refused to be busied with politics until a few years ago, when the Labor Party was organized. Since then a number of union men have identified themselves rather loosely with Socialism. In Germany there is the closest co-operation between the party and the unions, but not any organic unity. In Belgium the political and economic organizations are virtually merged. In France the most interesting development has taken place. From the Revolution until 1864 no labor organizations were allowed. The National Assembly abolished all the trade guilds and corporations. The _Loi le Chappelier_ forbade unions of workers and of masters, and the _Code Napoléon_ imposed a penalty of imprisonment on those engaging in unlawful combinations. In 1864 the criminal laws were revised, and unions of twenty members were allowed. The law of 1884 left the way untrammeled for their development.[22] Within a few years unions were formed everywhere.[23] In 1886 the Guesdists organized the National Federation of Trade Unions, a Socialist body of workers subordinated to the Workingman's Party. Soon thereafter the Municipal Socialists, the Broussists, founded the Paris Labor Exchange, built a large clubhouse for if, and succeeded in getting an appropriation of 20,000 francs a year from the city for its maintenance. Within ten years about fifty of these exchanges were formed in as many cities, and about seventy per cent. of the union members belonged to them. The object of these exchanges was educational and benevolent. But they were soon made the hotbeds of Socialistic politics. In 1892 they were all federated in the Federation of Labor Exchanges (Fédération du Bourse du Travail). In 1895 Guesde's political adjunct, the National Federation of Trade Unions, became extinct. The Blanquists then organized a new federation, the notorious General Confederation of Labor (Confédération Générale du Travail), commonly called the C.G.T. These two bodies were bitter rivals, after the French fashion, until, in 1902, they amalgamated, retaining the name C.G.T.[24] The organization is dual, retaining the benevolent activities of the local exchanges and the trade activities of the local unions. These activities are federated into national councils. The union of these councils forms the central governing body of C.G.T. The organization allows a great deal of local autonomy, but the central control is none the less effective. In 1907 the C.G.T. claimed 350,000 members, in 1911 it reported 600,000. This body of workmen is known for its violence. Within its ranks has spread the doctrine known as revolutionary Syndicalism, a resurrection of the spirit of Proudhonism in the body of labor unionism. Briefly stated, it is class war in its most violent form without the aid of parliaments and politics; with the enginery of the general strike, and the spirit of universal upheaval and anarchy. It is the most effective outbreak of Anarchism since the days of Bakunin. The intellectual revival of the doctrine of violence may be dated from the appearance of Georges Sorel's book, _The Socialist Future of Trade Unions_, in 1897, and the culmination of the tide in his volume _Reflections upon Violence_, in 1908. For a movement so young Syndicalism has had a peculiarly expansive literature, written by professors and journalists of the bourgeois class, who live on respectable streets, receive you in comfortable drawing-rooms, and from their upholstered ease display a fine zeal for the oppressed proletariat.[25] It is not easy to classify Syndicalism, for it refuses to be called Anarchism, repudiates the leadership of Socialism, and scorns to be merely trade-unionism. The following are its principal characteristics: 1. It is disheartened with Socialism because, it says, Socialists have lost their ideals in the race for political power. Law-making is useless, because no laws can emancipate the workingmen. It therefore despises governments and abjures parliaments. But its ideals are Socialistic; it believes "in reorganizing society on a communistic basis, so that, with a minimum of productive effort, the maximum of well-being will be obtained."[26] 2. But repudiating governments and parliaments, they say, does not make them Anarchists. Syndicalists believe in local or communal government. Their state is a glorified trade union whose activities are confined to economic functions, their nation is a collection of federated communal trade societies. When I went among them they were especially solicitous that they should not be regarded as "mere Anarchists." 3. Syndicalism is not trade-unionism pure and simple, because its method is violence and its ideal the industrial unit, not the trade or craft unit. The weapon of Syndicalism is the general strike. A circular issued by the executive committee in 1898 defined the general strike as "the cessation of work, which would place the country in the rigor of death, whose terrible and incalculable consequences would force the government to capitulate at once. If it refused, the proletariat, in revolt from one end of France to the other, would be able to compel it." Sorel says that "revolutionary Syndicalism nourishes in the masses the desire to strike, and it can thrive only in places where great strikes, occupied with acts of violence, have taken place."[27] The strike committee of the C.G.T. in 1899 proclaimed the general strike as "the only practical method through which the working class can fully liberate itself from the capitalistic and governmental yoke." The general strike includes the boycott, _sabotage_, and all kindred forms of violence.[28] 4. Syndicalism revives the old revolutionary methods of conspiracy, of a dominant minority swinging the masses into line; "a conscious minority, which, through its example, sets the masses in motion and drives them on."[29] There are plots, underground manoeuvers, and sudden outbursts. An air of mystery pervades their spectacular uprisings. In order to accomplish their purpose there must be a solidarity of labor. But this unity is the result of the energy of the "conscious few," not of the assertive many. 5. Finally, Syndicalism proclaims that democracy is a "fraud" perpetrated upon the workingmen by the property-owning bourgeois; representative government and majority rule is to them merely a polite form of tyranny, and patriotism a farce. Potaud says: "Patriotism can only be explained by the fact that all patriots without distinction own a part of the social property, and nothing is more absurd than a patriot without a patrimony." "We workingmen will have none of these little fatherlands! Our country is the international world!" cried Yvetot to the post-office strikers in Paris. They regard the soldiers with enmity. At the national congress at Amiens, 1906, they resolved that the "anti-military and anti-patriotic propaganda should be promulgated with the greatest zeal and audacity."[30] Syndicalism is the extreme pessimism of the laboring class. It reached its height about 1907-1908. Portions of France were terrorized, more by its extravagant language than by its overt acts. There was no limit to their superlatives. "Rip up the bourgeois!" "Turn your rifles on your officers!" "Cut buttonholes in the skins of the bourgeois!" were familiar battle-cries. There was so much talk about putting vitriol into coffee, ground glass into bread, pulling the fire-plug out of engines, that finally language came to mean nothing. The "new commune" thought it was coming into reality with the post-office and railway strikes. We have seen how these outbreaks were met by a Radical government. Since then their ardor has cooled, and their adjectives grown flabby. They are now devoting themselves to organization. Anti-militarism does not mean merely opposition to standing armies. All Socialists are opposed to the maintenance of armaments. Anti-militarism is opposition to all force used by the state to assert its sovereignty. This includes the police and constabulary as well as the army, and courts and parliaments as well as the navy. Since soldiers and policemen are servants of the state, and since the state is the expression of nationalism, the anti-militarist concludes that his supreme enemy is the nation, the master of the soldier. Anti-militarism is the forerunner of anti-patriotism. In 1906 this doctrine was so rampant that, on May Day, an uprising was feared in Paris. A prophet had arisen, proclaiming the most extreme doctrines of anti-patriotism. This was Gustave Hervé, a teacher of history from Auxerre. He had spoken the suitable word, and became famous overnight: "The French flag arose from dirt!"; and to the peasantry he shouted, "Plant your country's flag in the barnyard dung-heaps!" He came to Paris and started a daily paper, _La Guerre Sociale_. Syndicalists and Socialists flocked to his standard, and even Jaurès was compelled to acknowledge his influence.[31] Hervé has a simple remedy for militarism: "The way to stop war is to refuse to fight." He exhorts his fellow-Socialists to join the army, but fire on their commanders, not on their comrades. He was arrested several times for these utterances and the overt acts that they aroused. Some years ago a Parisian workingman was arrested for an offense against public morals. He protested his innocence and, when released, in revenge killed a policeman. He was promptly executed. Hervé used the occasion for an onslaught upon the government in his paper. He said: "If the working class would display one-tenth of the energy that this workman displayed, the social revolution would not be long in coming." For his imprudence he was imprisoned for a term of four years.[32] His influence is waning, but the words he and his following have planted in the hearts of the conscripts may bear some strange fruit.[33] VI While the French Socialists have been prolific in the developing of factions and theories, they have been slow at achieving practical results. As early as 1887 they acquired considerable power in Paris. They contented themselves with establishing a labor exchange and extending a few municipal charities. The local program, as outlined at Lyons, included: the feeding of school children; an eight-hour day and a fixed minimum wage for municipal employees; the abolition of the "_octroi_"; sanitary regulations for workshops and factories; abolition of private employment bureaus; establishment of homes for the aged; maternity hospitals; free medical attendance for the poor; free public baths; sanitaria for children of workmen; free legal advice for workingmen; pensions for municipal employees; and the publication of a municipal bulletin giving record of all the votes cast by the councilors.[34] In 1892 a number of important cities were won by the Socialists, and in September of that year the first convention of Socialist municipal councilors was held at Saint-Ouen. The discussions were filled with revolutionary phraseology. In a few years the ideas of violence were discarded for more practical issues. In 1895, when the municipal convention met at Paris, the time was largely given over to the question of organizing the municipal public service, public hygiene, etc. In Lille the Socialists began their administration of local affairs by raising the budget from 740,000 francs in 1897 to 1,019,000 francs in 1899. Free industrial education was established for the working people; a municipal theater was opened; school children were fed and clothed; and an attempt was made to regulate the length of the working day and fix a minimum wage for municipal employees. At Dijon the feeding and clothing of school children was regulated by the amount of wages earned by the parents. Free medical aid was provided, and a drug-store was induced to sell medicines to the poor at reduced cost. The local labor exchange was voted an appropriation from public funds. These illustrations show the general trend of municipal Socialism in France. The results are not numerous. But the French Socialists justify their meager practical results by pointing to the centralized system of administration which enables the prefect and other administrative officers to veto many of the acts of the municipal councils. The first thing that the Socialists attempted to do in their towns was the readjustment of the finances for the benefit of the working classes. Their acts were vetoed on the ground that they were _ultra vires_. The attempt to fix a minimum wage for municipal employees met the same fate. Then the municipalities petitioned the central government for greater financial autonomy. This was denied. In Roubaix the opening of a municipal drug-store was disallowed by the prefect on the ground that the corporations act does not grant that power to municipalities. Municipal bakeries met the same fate. During the last few years, however, the rigor of the central administration has relaxed and the towns are allowed greater liberty in municipal affairs. Under the circumstances it is perhaps little wonder that French municipal Socialism is a poor housekeeper. You look in vain for the high ideals of the Socialist evangelist. If you visit the towns where Socialism abounds you will be told that the Socialists have spent more money on the poor than their predecessors. You will find better nurseries for the babies of the working mothers, meals and stockings doled out to school children of the poor, here and there a physician or a lawyer retained by the town to render free service to the working people. On inquiry you will find that the soldiers are drawing increased pensions, the widows and orphans of the workingmen are especially provided for, and that bread is delivered to the needy at the door so they need not go ask for it, need not be beggars. You are impressed that these proletarian town governments are trying to destroy poverty. Their ideal is noble, but some of their efforts are very crude. The French Socialists are not by any means a unit on the municipal question. In 1911 it was the principal question discussed at their national convention at Saint-Quentin. Professor Millhaud of the University of Geneva, in a very clear and able speech, pointed out the merits of municipalization, citing the ownership of street railways, gas, waterworks, garbage plants, and other public utilities of European and American cities. He included municipal drug-stores, the feeding and clothing of school children, the establishing of playgrounds, and many other municipal activities familiar to American practice, in his local Socialistic program. His exposition met with the approval of the Jaurès faction. But the Guesdists were not satisfied. "Who would benefit by cheap municipal gas?" cried a delegate from the rear of the hall. "The rich man, for he needs a great deal of gas to light up his big house. But what laboring man needs gas? When has he time to read? In the evening he is too tired, and he gives no receptions." Guesde maintained with great vehemence that municipal ownership and state ownership are not Socialism; they may be a step toward Socialism, but often result in substituting the tyranny of the state for the tyranny of the private employer. The convention adopted a municipal program after a prolonged discussion that brought out clearly the fact that the Guesdists are not devoted to state or municipal ownership as a principle, but only as a means to a greater end. During the last few years a very important movement has been taking place among the peasantry of southern France. Under the leadership of Compère-Morel, a gardener and member of the Chamber of Deputies, Socialism is spreading rapidly among these small and independent landowners. There are several million of these thrifty peasants in France, and their acquisition to Socialism will mean, not only a great increase in political power, but a modification of their theory of property. The Socialists are luring the small land-holder by telling him that they are with him in his fight against the large estates. They assure the peasant that they have no designs upon his small holdings. It is the _great_ property, not merely property, that is the object of their hostility.[35] There are other evidences that French Socialism is mellowing. Most of its leaders are bourgeois. Of the seventy-six united Socialists in the present Chamber, only thirty are workingmen, or trade-union officials; eight are professors in the University or secondary schools; seven are journalists; seven are barristers; seven are farmers; six are physicians; three are school teachers; and two are engineers. This does not suggest class war. Socialism is a power in French politics. An observer who moves among the middle class wonders how much of a power it is in French life. The Radical Party would be considered Socialistic in England or the United States; half of it calls itself Socialist-Radical. It rules the Republic from the Chamber of Deputies. Everywhere you hear the people talking about collectivism, the nationalization of railways, of mines, of vineyards, of docks, and ultimately of wheat-fields and market-gardens. But the French are a nation of small farmers and shopkeepers who cling to their property while they argue and vote for their radicalism and Socialism. This is the duality of their temperament; they love possessions and they love philosophical speculation. They keep their fields and their little shops, and speculate about the new to-morrow. They vote and debate with imaginative fervor; they pay taxes with stolid commonplace silence. In measuring the strength of French Socialism it is necessary to keep this in mind. Not that the Frenchman does not take Socialism seriously. He takes it as seriously as he takes monarchism or republicanism, and much more seriously than he takes religion. There is only one thing he takes more seriously--his property. That is why the Socialists number among their adherents all classes and all conditions of men, from Anatole France, most fastidious of literary aristocrats, to gaunt and hungry proletarians who infest the cellars and garrets of ancient Paris. The French are, after all, the greatest of realists. They speculate in dreams and delicate theories; but they never lose their grip on their little farms and their little shops and the gold bonds of Russia. FOOTNOTES: [1] GEORGES WEIL, _Histoire du Mouvement Socialiste en France_, Paris, 1904, p. 220. [2] Other groups--the word party is hardly applicable in the French Chamber of Deputies--are the reactionary Right; the republican Conservatives, or Center; the Radical Left, or Liberals. [3] WEIL, _supra cit._, p. 276. [4] In France, when any one candidate for the Chamber of Deputies fails to receive a majority of the votes cast, a second ballot is taken, for the two receiving the highest number of votes [5] Quoted by ENSOR, _Modern Socialism_, pp. 48-55. See also a collection of Millerand's speeches, _Le Socialisme Réformiste Français_, Paris, 1903. [6] See "Manifeste 14 Juillet," 1899. [7] See _V^{me} Congrès Général des Organisations Socialistes Français tenu à Paris du 3 au 8 Décembre. Compte-rendu sténographique officiel_, 1900, p. 154 ff. [8] A partial report of the debate of the Bordeaux congress is given in ENSOR'S _Modern Socialism_, pp. 163-184. [9] See A. LAVY, _L'Oeuvre de Millerand_, Paris, 1902, a sympathetic account of his work; contains also extracts from his speeches and state papers. [10] See the _Contemporary Review_, August, 1906, for a brief abstract of this debate. [11] One of the first laws passed with the aid of the Socialist vote was the "day of rest" law, commanding one day of the week as a day of rest. It met the obstinate opposition of the Conservatives. The operation of the law is of interest, and instructive. The workmen naturally rejoiced over this increased leisure. The employers, on the other hand, found themselves paying wages for hours in which no service was rendered. They lowered the wages; the workmen resisted. Finally the law was so amended as virtually to annul its effect, in certain trades. The Socialists became irritated to the verge of breaking their _entente_ with the Radicals. [12] Proceedings Chamber of Deputies, March 19, 1909. [13] During this agitation the teachers of the public schools, who had formed a great number of associations, joined in the demand of the Syndicalists. One of their number who had signed a vitriolic circular was dismissed by M. Briand, the Minister of Education, and for a time a strike of schoolmasters was threatened, but it did not materialize. [14] _L'Humanité_ is the leading Socialist daily of Paris. Briand had written editorials for it in his "red" days. [15] These sections declare that the employment, or abetting or instigating the employment, of any means of stopping or impeding railway traffic is a crime; and if it has been planned at a seditious meeting, the instigators are as liable to punishment as the authors of the crime, even if they did not intend to provoke the destruction of railway property. The penalties imposed are very severe. [16] Placards displayed the bitterness of the men. "For our vengeance Briand will suffice" was read on the walls under flaming posters that quoted fiery sentences from Briand's earlier speeches. [17] Viviani, Minister of Justice, resigned soon after the close of the strike. He did not agree with Briand in his efforts to pass a law making all railway strikes illegal. He said as long as railways were private property men had the right to strike, but not to destroy property. [18] Before his resignation, the old-age pension bill had passed the Senate and thus became a law. The Socialists supported the bill; but Guesde voted against it in spite of his party's instructions, because labor was charged with contributing to the fund. The syndicalists were also violently opposed to it because they believe the amount of the pension is too small. [19] When in January, 1912, M. Poincaré was appointed Prime Minister, he promptly invited Briand into his cabinet as vice-president and Millerand as Minister of War. [20] The co-operative movement is spreading gradually throughout France. There are two kinds of societies--the Socialist and the independent. In 1896 there were 202 co-operative productive societies. In 1907 there were 362. The following figures show the increase in the number of co-operative stores: 1902--1,641; 1903--1,683; 1906--1,994; 1907--2,166. [21] The following table, compiled from the reports of the Minister of Labor, shows the growth of the labor-union movement: Year Number of Number of Unions Members 1885 221 ... 1886 280 ... 1887 501 ... 1888 725 ... 1889 821 ... 1890 1,006 139,692 1891 1,250 205,152 1892 1,589 288,770 1893 1,926 402,125 1894 2,178 403,430 1895 2,163 419,781 1896 2,243 422,777 1898 2,324 437,739 1899 2,361 419,761 1900 2,685 491,647 1901 3,287 588,832 1902 3,679 614,173 1903 3,934 643,757 1904 4,227 715,576 1905 4,625 781,344 1906 4,857 836,134 1907 5,322 896,012 1908 5,524 957,102 [22] See _Journal of Political Economy_, March, 1909, for a comprehensive article on French labor unions by O.D. SKELTON. [23] From the beginning there were two kinds of unions, named after the color of their membership cards. The "yellows" are those pursuing a policy of peace, and the "reds" are the militants. [24] The following figures show the increase of strikes since the organization of the C.G.T.: Years Average Average Number Number Average Number of Strikes of Strikers of Days Idle 1890-1898 379 71,961 1,163,478 1899-1907 855 214,660 3,992,976 [25] The doctrines of Syndicalism may be found in the writings of Georges Sorel. Also in the following: POUGET, _Les Bases du Syndicalisme_; GRIFFUELHS, _L'Action Syndicaliste_, and _Syndicalisme et Socialisme_; POUGET, _La Parti du Travail_; POTAUD and POUGET, _Comment nous ferons la Révolution_; PAUL LOUIS, _Syndicalisme contre l'État_. [26] POUGET, _The Basis of Trade Unionism_, a pamphlet issued in 1908. [27] _Réflexions sur la Violence._ [28] See YVETOT, _A B C du Syndicalisme_, Chap. V. This pamphlet is issued by the C.G.T. [29] Statement of Strike Committee C.G.T., 1899. [30] "In every state, the army is for the property owner; in every European conflict, the working class is duped and sacrificed for the benefit of the governing class, the bourgeoisie, and the parasites. Therefore the XVth Congress approves and extols every action the anti-military and anti-patriotic propaganda, even though it only compromises the situation of all classes and all political parties." See YVETOT, _A B C du Syndicalisme_, p. 84. [31] Hervé has written a history of France that has had considerable vogue as a text-book in the public schools. He begins with the significant year 1789; glorifies the violence, and praises the Socialistic manifestations and the heroism of the revolutionists, that have made the past century one of turmoil and perpetual commotion. This book is a sample of the reading given into the hands of the children of the Republic. I was told, upon careful inquiry, that a large number of the primary and secondary school teachers are Socialists. Thiers, before he became President, while still a functionary of monarchy, objected to the establishment of government schools in every village, because, he said, he did not want "a red priest of Socialism in every town." To-day he would find these "red priests" everywhere. They have even organized _syndicats_ and joined the C.G.T. [32] When I called upon him in the Prison Santé he told me that he was as sincerely opposed to military measures as ever; but that it would be a long time before the people would regard all mankind, rather than a single ethnic group, as the object of their patriotism. Pointing to the grim walls of his prison, he said, "Vive la République! Vive la Liberté!" [33] Syndicalism and anti-militarism have spread to Spain and Italy. But they have not found favor among the phlegmatic North-European countries. [34] See STEHELIN, _Essais de Socialisme Municipal_, 1901. [35] See _Les Paysans et le Socialisme_, a speech delivered by Compère-Morel, in the Chamber of Deputies, December 6, 1909. Also published in pamphlet form by the Socialist Party. CHAPTER VI THE BELGIAN LABOR PARTY I In Belgium the physical, political, and economic environment is suited to a symmetrical development of Socialism. It is a small country, "at the meeting-point of the three great European civilizations," Vandervelde, the leader of the Belgian Socialists, has pointed out. And his boast is true that the Belgian Socialists have absorbed the leading characteristics of the social movement in each of these countries. "From England Belgian Socialists have learned self-help, and have copied their free and independent organizations, principally in the form of co-operative societies. From Germany they have adopted the political tactics and the fundamental doctrines which were expressed for the first time in the 'Communist Manifesto.' From France they have taken their idealistic tendencies, and the integral conception of Socialism, considered as an extension of the revolutionary philosophy and as a new religion, an extension and a realization of Christianity." This threefold growth would have been impossible if the environment had not been favorable. The Belgian population is congested into industrial towns that are thickly strewn over the country, like the suburbs of one vast manufacturing community. These working people have always been miserably housed and poorly fed. In 1903-05 a public inquiry into housing conditions was instituted in Brussels. In the most congested portions of the city, 564 households, comprising 2,224 persons, lived in one-room tenements. The houses were in miserable condition. The commission appointed after the riots of 1886 describes conditions that are little better than those that prevailed in England in 1830. Even as late as 1902, out of 750,000 working men and women one-tenth only worked less than ten hours a day; the rest worked from ten to twelve hours. One-fourth of these working people had a wage of 2 francs (40 cents) a day, another fourth had 2 to 3 francs (40 to 60 cents) a day, and the upper section only 3.50 to 4.50 francs (70 cents to 90 cents) a day. The government inquiry in 1896 disclosed the following rate of wages: 170,000 persons received less than 2 fr. (40c.) a day. 172,000 persons received less than 2-3 fr. (40-60c.) a day. 160,000 persons received less than 3-4 fr. (60-80c.) a day. 102,000 persons received more than 4 fr. (80c.) a day.[1] In the low countries where agriculture is the leading occupation, conditions are no better. The peasant is poor; the conditions of tenancy hard, though recent legislation has modified them somewhat in the tenant's favor; and the holdings small. Agricultural wages are very low. The men in the Flemish district receive an average of 1.63 francs (33 cents) a day, without board, or about .90 francs (18 cents) with board. The women receive 1.06 francs (21 cents) without board and .64 francs (12-1/2 cents) with board.[2] Here, then, is a population of industrial and peasant workers who are barely able to make a living, who have little time and less opportunity for education and general development. The percentage of illiteracy is very great; and is equaled only by the most backward countries of southern Europe. In 1902, out of every 1,000 militiamen, 101 were entirely illiterate; in France, 46; in England, 37; in Holland, 23; in Switzerland, 20; in Denmark, .08; in Germany, .07. In 1909 Rowntree estimated the illiteracy in the four largest Belgian cities to be 11.75 per cent.; in the Flemish communes, 34.69 per cent.; and in the Walloon communes (excepting Liège), 17.34 per cent. Outward circumstances have not been wanting to arouse this teeming population into violent discontent. The government for years paid no heed to their misery, and the Church, which is very powerful in Belgium, was content to distribute charity and consolation, and to admonish the employer to patriarchal care for his men. The national status of the country is guaranteed by the powers; there is no fear of invasion and no need for the intolerable military burdens that weigh down the great countries of Europe. There have been no international complications. This little country, with its clusters of thriving towns, its mines, farms, and seaports, could settle down contentedly to its daily tasks like a large family. The great manufacturers and industrial leaders took even less interest in the welfare of the working people than the state or the Church. No one seemed to care how the worker fared, and when he himself learned to care the first reactions were violent. We will limit ourselves, in this inquiry, to the political development of the labor movement. Belgium is a constitutional monarchy. The Constitution, provides for a parliament composed of the Senate and the Chamber of Representatives, both elected by the people, the Representatives by direct, the Senators by indirect, elections. The King has the veto power and the power to prorogue parliament. A general election follows prorogation, in which the whole membership of Senate and House are elected. The communes are governed by elective communal councils. From the establishment of the constitution, in 1831, there have been two leading political parties--the Clerical or Catholic, and the Liberal. The Clerical Party has been not merely conservative, it has been reactionary. It clings not only to monarchic prerogatives, but to ecclesiastical supremacy. This medieval policy it imposed upon school and government and Church. The party has until very recently been in the majority. It is strongest in the low counties, among the agricultural Flemings. When the activity of the Socialists and Radicals forced the question upon the country, a "left" wing of the party began to interest itself in the laboring man, through the traditional methods of the Church, rather than by means of state interference. The Liberal Party is a protest, not only against the predominant influence of the Church in political affairs, but also against the financial policies of the Conservatives. The Liberals early espoused the cause of free schools, modified tariffs, greater local autonomy, and liberal election laws. The election laws confined the electorate to the few property-holders and professional men of the country. In 1890, out of 1,800,000 male citizens, 133,000 were qualified electors. II These were the conditions that prevailed when the Socialists quite suddenly appeared on the scene. There had been a Socialist propaganda for years in Belgium. Brussels was a city of refuge to many fleeing revolutionists of 1848. In 1857 a labor union was organized among the spinners and weavers of Ghent. The same year Colin published his book, _What Is Social Science?_ This volume prepared the way for the remarkable collectivist movement, which was stimulated into modern activity by Anselee, a workingman of Ghent and organizer of the Vooruit Co-operative Society. Cæsar de Paepe, a disciple of Colin and a man of remarkable intellectual endowments, tried to bring unity to the Belgian movement. But the factionalism was not cast aside until 1885, when the Belgian Labor Party (Parti Ouvrier Belge) was organized. Now Socialists of all factions were drawn together. But, unlike Socialists in other countries, they did not expend their energies on political action. The Belgian labor movement had a threefold origin--the co-operative movement of Colin, the labor-union movement, and the Socialistic or political movement of de Paepe. These three activities, united in the Labor Party, have continued to develop, until they are a model for Socialists in all countries. The organization of the party is simple. The various organizations are federated into large groups, e.g., the co-operative group, each with a separate organization. The provinces and communes have their local committees for each separate activity. Over the entire party sits a general council (conseil général). An executive committee of nine is chosen from this council, and this committee has practical control of the party. The annual convention is the supreme authority. It elects the general council and decides, in democratic fashion, all important questions of policy and activity. Every constituent organization, such as the co-operative societies, etc., contributes from its funds to the support of the party. The party is therefore a federation of many societies with various activities, not a vast group of individual voters, as the German Social Democracy. Its solidarity is not individual, but federal. The organization of the Labor Party proved a stimulus to all the constituent societies. From 1885 to 1895 over 400 co-operative societies were formed, and within a few years 7,000 mutual aid societies were organized. The membership of the labor unions increased from less than 50,000 in 1880 to 62,350 in 1889, and nearly 150,000 in 1905. The Socialist movement had now achieved solidarity, and was prepared to enter into a conflict for power. Its issues were two: universal suffrage and free secular education. The second was necessarily included in the first; for without parliamentary power it would be impossible to secure liberal educational laws, and without a liberal franchise it would be impossible to get parliamentary power. All their political energies were therefore devoted to the reform of the election laws. It is in this activity that the Belgian movement forms for our purpose one of the most instructive chapters of European Socialism. Here is a proletarian horde deprived of participation in government in a constitutional monarchy, struggling toward political recognition. It is armed with all the weapons of militant Socialism: a revolutionary tradition; a national history rich in mob violence, street brawls, and conflicts with police and soldiers; possessed of a well-organized party, a class solidarity, and capable and courageous leaders who are willing to go, and do go, to the extreme of the general strike and violence in order to achieve their goal. In short, here we have the Socialist political ideal working itself from theory into reality through class struggle. But there is the usual important modification of the Marxian conditions; viz., the liberal bourgeois prove a potent ally to the Socialists in the press and on the floor of the Chamber of Representatives. While the Socialists were surging in vehement earnestness around the Parliament House, the Liberals were as earnestly pleading their cause within. The definite fight for universal suffrage began a few years before the organization of the Labor Party. In 1866 a group of workingmen issued an appeal to their fellows to begin the battle for the ballot. In 1879 the Socialists issued a manifesto which stated the case as follows: "'All powers are derived from the nation; all Belgians are equal before the law,' says the Constitution of 1831. "In reality all powers are derived from a small number of privileged ones, and all the Belgians are divided into two classes--those who are rich and have rights, and those who are poor and have burdens. "We wish to see this inequality vanish, at least before the ballot-box. For the most numerous class of society ought to be represented in the Chamber of Representatives, because the people whose daily bread depends upon the prosperity of the country should have the power to participate in public affairs. "Constitutions are not immutable, and what was solemnly promulgated on one occasion may, without revolution, be altered on another."[3] The proclamation then proceeded to call a meeting at Brussels for the following January (1880). At this meeting it was decided to circulate a monster petition asking Parliament to pass a liberal election law and to organize a demonstration to be held in Brussels the following summer. In this, the first of a long series of demonstrations, about 6,000 persons from various parts of the kingdom paraded the streets of the capital. There was a clash with the police, and a number of arrests were made. From 1881 to 1885 the Liberals tried to persuade the Clericals to agree upon a constitutional revision; and the Socialists brought to bear upon them all the pressure of the streets. But the Clericals were firm. Then the Socialists tried another manoeuver. They issued a manifesto "to the people of Belgium," complaining of the dominion of the Church over education, the dominion of a few families over the nation, and the failure of the government to grant liberty to the people. "The hour has come for all citizens to rally under the republican flag." Instead of a republican uprising, something more significant and potent occurred; the Labor Party was organized, welding together all the forces of discontent and unifying their demands into a protest so strong that the government was finally compelled to yield. Not, however, until it had exhausted almost every resource of resistance. The party was organized just in the crux of time. A financial crisis was beginning to increase the hardships of the industrial classes. The unrest was intensified by an ingenious piece of propagandist literature, a _Workingman's Catechism_ (_Catechism du Peuple_), written by a workingman. Two hundred thousand copies in French and 60,000 in Flemish were scattered among the discontented people. Its influence was wonderful. A few questions will indicate the power that lay behind its simple questions and answers. _Question._ "Who are you?" _Answer._ "I am a slave." _Q._ "Are you not a man?" _A._ "From the point of view of humanity I am a man, but in relation to society I am a slave." _Q._ "What is the 25th article of the Constitution?" _A._ "The 25th article of the Constitution says: 'All power is derived from the nation.'" _Q._ "Is this true?" _A._ "It is a falsehood." _Q._ "Why?" _A._ "Because the nation is composed of 5,720,807 inhabitants, about 6,000,000, and of this 6,000,000 only 117,000 are consulted in the making of laws." And so through every grievance, social, economic, and political. Every workman learned his catechism. Those who could not read gathered in groups around their more fortunate comrades and listened to the effective questions and answers. By the beginning of 1886 the little land was a seething caldron of political and economic unrest. The strike movement began at Liège and soon spread to Charleroi and other industrial centers. There was enough destruction of property and clashing with police and soldiery to create a panic in the country. In Brussels business was at a standstill for days. The Socialist Party, in a circular issued to the people, said: "The country is visited by a terrible crisis. The disinherited classes are suffering. Strikes are multiplying, riots are provoked by the misery. The constantly decreasing wages are spreading consternation everywhere." The disorder aroused a number of Anarchists in Brussels. They posted anonymous placards inciting the people to violence. The Socialists repudiated the Anarchists, and one of their orators said: "Do not let yourselves be carried away by violence; that will only benefit your adversaries." A mass demonstration was planned, but the mayor of Brussels prohibited it. The Labor Party, however, were allowed to hold their annual convention and to march under their red flag, the government merely requesting that the demonstrants refrain from shouting, "Vive la République!" Thirty thousand laboring men joined in the demonstration. The Liberals and Radicals refused to take part in it because they claimed it was only a workingman's movement, and the Anarchists refused because "elections lead to nothing." This demonstration was so serious and imposing that it made a deep impression upon the people, and was not without effect upon the government. The crisis finally passed over. A great many rioters were imprisoned in spite of the popular clamor for universal amnesty. The general strike brought no immediate advantage to the workmen. The next few years the Socialists devoted to organization. They were determined not to enter upon extended strikes again without thorough preparation. In the meantime the Liberal Party split. The Radicals, or Progressists, at their first congress in 1877 declared themselves in favor of the separation of Church and state, military reform, compulsory education, social and electoral reform. They were, however, not yet prepared to commit themselves to universal suffrage. They favored rather an educational test for voters. This, however, they abandoned in 1890, and virtually placed themselves upon the Socialist platform. On August 10, 1890, another great demonstration in favor of universal suffrage took place in Brussels. Over 40,000 men joined in the parade. The Progressists did not take part in the marching, but they were stationed along the route to cheer the men in line. Before they dispersed, all the participants united in taking a solemn oath that they would not give up the fight "until the Belgian people, through universal suffrage, should regain their fatherland." This is the famous "Oath of August 10." After this demonstration the Progressists joined with the Socialists in a conference for discussing ways and means for securing universal suffrage.[4] This conference is notable because it drew Radicals, Progressists, and Socialists into a united campaign for suffrage reform. The conference resolved to organize demonstrations in every corner of the kingdom and to memorialize Parliament. This was to be a final peaceful appeal. If it remained unheeded a general strike would follow. The bourgeois Progressists assented to this ultimatum. A few days before the Socialist-Progressist conference met, a clerical social congress had convened at Liège. The agitation of the Labor Party had at last aroused the Conservatives. The resolutions of this conference were pervaded by the traditional apostolic paternalistic spirit of the Church. It demanded social reform, amelioration of harsh conditions, state arbitration, industrial insurance; but it set its face against universal suffrage. On the wings of an awakened conservatism it tried to ride the whirlwind of Socialism. But no halfway measures would now placate the agitators. The great mass of Belgian workmen were aroused, and nothing but the ballot would satisfy them. A propaganda was begun in the army. The enlistment laws were favorable to the rich, who could purchase freedom from military service. The poor conscripts were especially susceptible to the Socialist propaganda. In the autumn of 1890 at the Labor Party's annual convention it was suggested that, inasmuch as the parliament of the Few had not heeded the wishes of the nation, a parliament of the People should be called, to be composed of as many members as the existing parliament, but chosen by universal suffrage. Even a program was proposed for this fancied parliament. By this time the petitions prepared by the suffrage congress were ready. In every arrondissement there were demonstrations. In Brussels 8,000 men marched to the city hall and handed the mayor their petition protesting against the privileged election laws and demanding universal suffrage. From every village in the kingdom protests were brought to the government demanding universal suffrage. Finally on November 27, 1890, a Liberal member in the Chamber of Representatives proposed a change in the Constitution enlarging the electoral franchise. He explained the injustice of the limited franchise, dwelt on the dangers of strikes and riots, and said that he believed the Belgian workmen as capable of exercising the rights of citizenship as those of neighboring countries. All parties agreed to discuss the amendment. The debate held popular excitement in abeyance. But as it became more and more evident that nothing would be done the workingman became restive. Early in 1892 riots broke out in various cities. The situation became acute. Socialists and Radicals organized a popular referendum on the question. It was not an official referendum, and its results were not binding. But it was an effective method of propaganda, and in many of the communes the councils gave it their sanction, thereby lending it the color of legality. Five propositions were submitted to the voters: (1) manhood suffrage at twenty-one years; (2) manhood suffrage at twenty-five years; (3) exclusion of illiterates and persons in receipt of public or private charity; (4) household suffrage and mental capacity defined by law; (5) the exclusion of all who have not passed an elementary educational standard. As a rule the Clericals refused to participate in the referendum. In Brussels, out of 72,465 entitled to vote only 38,217 voted, with the following results: manhood suffrage at twenty-one years, 29,949; manhood suffrage at twenty-five years, 5,253; all other propositions together, 3,015. In Huy, out of 3,513 voters only 1,800 voted, and 1,700 of these were in favor of universal suffrage. In Antwerp, where Liberals and Clericals are about evenly divided, only forty-three per cent. of the electors voted, and of 18,701 votes cast, 15,704 were for universal suffrage. This referendum, and all the demonstrations, had very little effect upon parliament. The deputies were in favor of revision, but could not agree upon a plan. The Radicals were in favor of universal suffrage, the Clericals unalterably opposed to it, and the Liberals only sympathetic towards it. Finally, in April, all the proposals were voted down by the Chamber of Representatives. The Socialists immediately ordered a general strike. It began in the coal mines of Hainault, spread to the weavers and spinners of Ghent, to the glass and iron works of the Walloon districts, to the printers and pressmen of Brussels, and to the docks at Antwerp. Two hundred thousand men stopped work in the course of a few days. While the mills and mines were idle the police and soldiers were busy. Six men were killed at Joliment, six killed and twelve wounded at Mons. In Brussels the mob pried up the paving-stones for weapons; the city guards patrolled the city, meetings were forbidden, the streets were cleared of people, and the mayor was wounded in a mêlée. A band of "communists" threw a barricade across Rue des Eperonniers, the last of the barricades. The troops made short work of it. Scores of arrests were made in the various cities and the offenders received sentences varying from six years' imprisonment to a fine of fifty francs. In the height of the excitement the Chamber of Representatives convened and agreed upon a franchise amendment. Immediately the general council of the Labor Party met and declared the strike off. It sent out this pronouncement: "The Labor Party through its general council records the insertion of manhood suffrage in the Constitution. It declares that this first victory of the party has been won under pressure of a general strike. It is resolved to persist in the work of propaganda until it has won universal political equality and has suppressed the plural voting privilege." The new electoral law (1893) was a compromise suggested by Professor Albert Nyssens of the University of Louvain. It recognized the three principal demands of the three parliamentary factions: universal suffrage of the Radicals, property qualifications of the Clericals, and educational qualifications of the Liberals. Universal suffrage was granted to all male citizens twenty-five years of age. But this was modified in favor of property and education by the granting of additional votes. One additional vote was give (1) to every voter thirty-five years of age who was the head of a family and paid a direct tax of 5 francs (one dollar); (2) to every owner of real property valued at 2,000 francs ($400.00), or who had an annual income of 200 francs ($40.00) derived from investments in the Belgian public funds. Two additional votes were given to the holders of diplomas from the higher schools, to those who were or had been in public office, and to those who practised a profession for which a higher education was necessary. No one was allowed more than three votes. Whatever may be said of this fancy franchise, it is at least ingenious. It satisfied the first popular hunger after the ballot. The workmen could vote. The conditions imposed for the casting of two votes seem very liberal and the majority of American voters could qualify under them. But in Belgium, the land of low wages and congested populations, they were real barricades. Nearly two-thirds of the voters failed to reach even this low standard. Voting made compulsory. Election was by _scrutin de liste_.[5] III Under these conditions the Socialists went into battle. There were 1,370,687 electors; 855,628 with one vote 293,678 with two votes, 223,380 with three votes. The Socialists polled 346,000 votes, the Clericals 927,000, the Liberals 530,000. The new parliament was composed as follows: Chamber of Representatives--Clericals, 104; Liberals, 19; Socialists, 29; Senate--Clericals 71; Liberals, 21; Socialists, 2.[6] From the first the Socialists in Belgium have not been reluctant in making election arrangements with other parties. In this their first election they united with the Progressists. In Brussels on the second ballot they proposed terms to the Liberals, which were refused. The Socialists, however, instructed their followers to vote against the Clericals in every instance. Wherever there were no Radical or Socialists lists they supported the Liberals.[7] The same widespread alarm that the first Socialist parliamentary accessions aroused everywhere, was caused by these twenty-nine Belgian Socialist representatives, especially as some of their number were promoted from prison to parliament, and one striker was given his liberty for the time being so that he could attend the session. Vandervelde allayed popular apprehension when he announced the program of his party, which combined with the usual labor legislation the demand for the state purchase of coal mines, state monopoly of the liquor business, and communal election reforms. The proposals of the Belgian Socialists in parliament have invariably been practical, not revolutionary or visionary. One of the first bills introduced by them provided for the reduction of the stamp tax and the tax on the transfer of property and leases. This tax was extremely high, nearly seven per cent., and worked a peculiar hardship on the small tenant. The bill failed of passage. But the government was so impressed by the facts presented in debate that it brought in a law reducing the tax on transfers for all small estates. It is by this indirect method, by their presence in the Chamber, and by their powers in debate that the Belgian Socialists have achieved many practical reforms. They have not the hauteur and aloofness of the German Social Democrat, nor the fiery passion for idealistic propaganda of the French; they are more sensible than either. Since their entrance into parliament a Secretary of Labor has been added to the cabinet, and every department of labor legislation has felt their influence. The delegation is in constant touch with the party in the various districts. An old-age pension act has been passed, great reductions have been made in military expenditure, the conscript laws have been modified, and the Socialists led in the opposition to the Belgian policy in the Congo. Their two main contentions have been over the educational laws and the electoral laws. A school law was passed by the Clericals in 1895. It was regarded as reactionary by the Socialists, and stormy scenes accompanied its enactment. Its provisions are still the source of constant agitation among Socialists and Liberals. They protest especially against the teaching of religion in the communal schools. It is true that any parent may have his child excused from attending such instruction for reasons of conscience on written application to the proper authorities. But they insist that this subjects the objecting parent to harsh treatment in Clerical communities.[8] The provincial and communal election laws were less favorable to the Socialists than the national law. In 1895 the government brought in a new local election bill which fixed the voting age at thirty, required three years' residence in a commune, and strengthened the plural voting system by giving a fourth vote to the large land-holders. The Socialists and Radicals united in contesting 507 of the communes (about one-fourth of the whole number). They won a majority in eighty and a considerable minority in 180 of these communal councils. Necessity had cemented the alliance of Radicals and Socialists. The Radicals were now called "_Chèvre-choutiers_" because they tried to carry the goat and the cabbage, Liberals and Socialists, across the stream in the same boat. In 1899 the government brought in its new election bill in which it proposed to concede to the demand for proportional representation. But only the large constituencies were to be included in the change, leaving the smaller districts, mostly in the Flemish section, to the Clerical majorities that prevailed there. The measure was unpopular. The people organized protests against it in every city in the land. In Brussels a mob gathered in front of the Chamber of Deputies. Paving-stones were ripped up and hurled through the windows, and there was charging and counter-charging between police and populace. Inside the Chamber the scene was not less tumultuous. The Socialists tried to prevent business by mob tactics. Desk-lids were banged, there was shouting and singing, one deputy had provided himself with a horn. The government was compelled to adjourn the session. All that night (June 28) there was rioting in Brussels. When the Chamber met the following day the wild scenes were re-enacted, when a Clerical deputy moved that any member causing a disturbance be expelled. In the debate that followed the government declared itself willing to adjourn and study the various proposals of the opposition. This cooled the crowd waiting outside the Chamber, and at Vandervelde's suggestion the mob quietly dispersed. In the meantime the mayors of Brussels, Ghent, Antwerp, and Liège waited on the King and told him they would no longer be responsible for the maintenance of order in their cities if the minister did not withdraw the obnoxious electoral bill. The Liberals now joined the Socialists and Radicals in their processions in every town, singing their war-songs and carrying placards and banners of protest. All this had its effect on the government. A committee representing all the groups in the Chamber was appointed to consider all the proposals that had been introduced. Vandervelde, in supporting the committee, said that he "spoke for the country that had so effectively demonstrated its power and achieved a victory." Soon after this the reactionary ministry fell, and the new government brought in a bill providing uniform proportional representation for all the districts. This bill was promptly enacted into law. The first general election under this law resulted as follows: Total vote cast 2,105,270 Socialists 467,326, electing 32 deputies. Clericals 995,056 " 85 " Liberals 449,521 " 31 " Radicals 47,783 " 3 " Christian Democrats 55,737 " 1 " The Clerical majority was cut from seventy to eighteen and at last the Liberal elements were hopeful of gaining the government and effecting universal suffrage "pure and simple." We have now seen how popular agitation wrested, first, a law permitting plural voting; second, a law permitting proportional representation, from an unwilling government. The contest for universal suffrage "pure and simple" has continued to the present day. In 1901 the Labor Party at its congress at Liège decided to renew the agitation in favor of universal suffrage, "even to the extent of the general strike, and agitation in the streets, and not to cease until after the conquest of political equality." Vandervelde introduced a bill into the Chamber providing for "one man, one vote," and it was defeated by a vote of 92 to 43. Immediately Vandervelde and the Radical leader proposed a revision of the Constitution. The debate on this motion continued until the spring of 1902. All the old spirit of unrest and violence broke out anew. To the violence of protesting mobs was added the coercive force of the general strike. Three hundred thousand men stopped work and began demonstrating. Troops were called out to guard the government buildings in Brussels and to hold the crowds at bay in the provinces. In Louvain eight strikers were killed by the soldiers, and in other localities there was bloodshed and destruction of property. Finally the Chamber of Representatives voted to close the debate and dismiss the question entirely for the session. The strike was declared off and quiet restored. In the elections the following May the Socialists lost three seats. This had its effect. A meeting of the party was called and it was decided not to resort to further violence. A delegate from Charleroi, the seat of the most tumultuous element in the party, expressed regret that the Labor Party had compromised with the bourgeois parties in calling off the strike. Vandervelde defended the action of the council on the ground that the continuance of the strike threatened internal dissensions because of the misery of the strikers and the violence of the government. The party organ, _Le Peuple_, said on June 5, 1902: "We are no longer in 1848. The days of barricades have gone by. The narrow little streets of former years have expanded into wide avenues. The soldiers are armed with Albinis and Mausers. Even if all the people were armed it would only be necessary to plant a few cannon at strategic places in the city to put down an insurrection in spite of the greatest heroism of the insurgents."[9] Van Overbergh, in his history of the strike, says: "The period of romantic Socialism in Belgium is past; the days of realism have commenced."[10] And Bertrand, the historian, adds the reason: "Its [the general strike's] effect was to keep down the vote. Even in the elections of 1904 and 1906 the vote has remained quite stationary."[11] Whether this means the apotheosis of the general strike in Belgium will depend no doubt upon circumstances, it is significant that the words were uttered, and still more significant that political coalition has taken the place of industrial warfare. The Liberals and Radicals now plan with the Socialists. They no longer stand aside and let the Socialists march, but they join step with them and carry banners. The greatest of all Belgian demonstrations for universal suffrage and free schools took place in August, 1911. In spite of the extreme heat, nearly 200,000 Radicals, Liberals, and Socialists gathered in the capital, "not so much to impress the government," a Socialist leader said to me, "but to impress the people that we are in earnest, and then to prepare for the coming elections." IV It must not be inferred from this rapid survey of its warfare for political privilege that Belgian Socialism has forgotten the co-operative movement and all the various activities that were blended in the making of the Labor Party. Belgian Socialism is primarily economic. This makes it unique. It has succeeded in becoming economic, in building dairies and bake-shops, in running dry-goods stores and grocery stores and butcher shops, in the present dispensation; and it has succeeded in doing so by accommodating itself to the present conditions. It adopts the eight-hour day when it can, but it is not averse to ten hours when necessary. It pays its employees the highest wage it can, but it recognizes talent and ability like the bourgeois shopkeeper across the street. It has insurance funds that draw interest at the same rate that is paid by bourgeois banks, and it has no scruples about putting the latest approved machinery into its workshops and bakeries. In all this, their activities have remained Socialistic. They compete with the bourgeois, but co-operate among themselves. The profits of their activities go to the members of their societies and to the party. Their competition has brought ruin to the door of many a shopkeeper who finds his customers flocking to their own shop. Government commissions have inquired into the movement at the nervous requests of merchants and tradesmen, but only to find every co-operative enterprise carefully conducted and thriving. The Belgian Socialist leaders all emphasize the importance of this unity of economic and political activity, and the priority of the economic over the political. It has been a splendid stimulant for the Belgian workman. It has aroused him out of the lethargy that has been his greatest enemy for years. It has taught him to work with others, the value of mass movement, the futility of separateness. It has schooled him, not only in reading and arithmetic, in the night classes established everywhere; but in business, in weights and measures; in percentage, in profit and loss; and most of all, in the real hardships that meet tradespeople and commercial men everywhere in their endeavor to get on. Workingmen often think that a business man is a necromancer juggling profits out of other people's necessities. The Belgian co-operativist has found out that trading is a commonplace and tedious task which requires constant alertness and is merely the drudgery of detail. This experience has taught him, moreover, the futility of laws and the utility of effort. In Belgium I was impressed most of all by the nonchalance, almost contempt, that the workman displays toward mere legislation. "Why should I toy with words when I have this?" And he points proudly to his co-operative store. The Belgian workman has been taught through his co-operative experience the value of patient toil and frugality. Slowly he has built up these institutions out of his own savings. When he thought his scant wages were barely enough for bread, he discovered means somehow to pay his dues in the "Mutualité." As an instance of his thrift, he saves every year a little fund which is used by the family for an annual holiday, usually a short excursion to a neighboring place of interest. Every member of the family contributes to this fund, and, no matter how poor, they look forward to their yearly holiday. The Belgian Socialist has also been successful in another field. While in other countries the Socialists have tried usually in vain to lure the peasant and small farmer, the Belgians have made constant progress in this direction. The agrarian movement began with the organizing of the Labor Party.[12] Vandervelde and Hector Dennis, a Professor of Economics in the University at Brussels, have been constant in their zeal for the agrarian interests. Again, the lure is not Socialism in the abstract, nor the gospel of discontent. It is practical, business co-operation. Dairies, stores, markets are proving powerful propagandists, even in the Catholic lowlands. Dr. Steffens-Frauenweiler quotes from a conservative newspaper: "From different sides we have heard the remark that Socialism would never penetrate into the country. In contradiction to this opinion we must observe that those who express this view, and presume to laugh away the Socialistic movement among the peasants and farmers, are either not well informed or are submitting themselves to illusions. Only a serious attempt to fight Socialism through positive reforms will prove a lasting check upon the ambitions of Socialists."[13] In Belgium the general strike has been used as an aid in the warfare for political power. We have seen how the first strike was premature, the second effective, and the third proved a boomerang in its reaction upon the Labor Party. Vandervelde distinguishes between the general strike as a means toward social revolution, and the general strike as a political weapon used for securing a _definite_ object.[14] He says: "The revolutionary general strike is itself the revolution. The reformist general strike, on the contrary, is the attempt of the proletariat to secure partial concessions from the government without questioning the existence of the government, and especially the administration that represents the government." To effect this, it is not essential that all the workmen go out, but only enough to interrupt "the normal course of business, even if the majority of the workers remain at work."[15] The political general strike has its example, then, in the Belgian movement for the electoral franchise. Whether it would succeed in wresting other political privileges from the state, is conjecture; that it would not succeed except under the most favorable conditions, is certain. The Belgian movement has displayed great absorptive powers and facility of adaptation. It has absorbed all the labor activities of the Radical and Socialist workmen. It has adapted itself to the necessities of the hour, giving up the daydreams of intangible things. In all this, it has displayed a saneness, in spite of its revolutionary traditions and anarchistic blood.[16] It has the most "modern" program of the European Socialist parties, and the most worldly efficiency. In visiting one of the large workingmen's clubhouses found in the cities, the visitor is impressed with the beehive qualities of the Belgian movement. At the "Maison du Peuple" in Brussels--that was built by these underpaid workmen at a cost of 1,000,000 francs--you find activity everywhere. The savings-bank department is swarming with women and children, come to conduct the business of the family. The café, the headquarters of the party, the offices of the co-operative societies, all are busy. In the evening there are debates, gymnasium contests, moving-picture shows, classes for instruction in the elementary branches, in art, and literature.[17] A temperance movement, started by the workmen some years ago, has attained a great deal of influence. Placards are on the walls of the clubhouses, setting forth the evils of the drink habit. Or you visit a co-operative bakery or butcher-shop or grocery store, and the same spirit of diligence, thrift, and reasonableness is there. And you are quite convinced that here is Socialism approximating somewhere near its ultimate form. If the Belgian Labor Party should secure control of the government to-morrow it would be more competent to assume the actual obligations of power than would the Socialists in any other European country. For they have not built a structure in mid-air, with merely an underpinning of more or less indifferent theories. FOOTNOTES: [1] _L'Enquête Gouvernementale_, Vol. XVIII. [2] _L'Annuaire Statistique._ [3] BERTRAND, _Histoire de la Démocratie et du Socialisme en Belgique depuis 1830_, Vol II, p. 331. [4] This conference sent the following telegram to the King: "You have asked what is the watchword of the country; the watchword is universal suffrage." [5] The candidates are arranged in groups or "lists," and the voter votes the list as well as for the individual names on the list. Any 100 electors may prepare such a list. The successful candidate must receive a majority. This often necessitates a second ballot between the two receiving the highest number of votes. [6] BERTRAND, _Histoire_, Vol. II, p. 552. [7] One of the significant incidents of this election was the contest against Frère Orban, for thirty years a parliamentary leader and one of the greatest politicians of his day. His seat was contested by an obscure workingman, and the distinguished parliamentarian was compelled to submit to the ordeal of a second ballot. [8] The Clerical forces are gradually retreating before the repeated onslaughts of Liberals and Socialists. But the loyalty to the Church remains undiminished. On May 17, 1901, a Clerical deputy remarked in the Chamber that he would like to see the temporal power of the pope restored. The Socialists immediately started an uproar which ended in their singing their "Marseillaise" and the adjournment of the sitting. [9] BERTRAND, _Histoire_, II, p. 590. [10] _La Grève Générale Belge d'Avril_, 1902, Brussels, 1902. [11] _Histoire_, II, p. 592. [12] See DR. STEFFENS-FRAUENWEILER, _Der Agrar-Sozialismus in Belge_. [13] _Op. cit._, p. 37. [14] See an article by E. VANDERVELDE, "_Der General Streik_," in _Archiv für Sozial-wissenschaft und Sozial-Politik_, Tübingen, May, 1908. The same article was published, same date, in _Revue du Mois_, Paris. [15] _Supra cit._, p. 541. [16] Bakunin had a large following in Belgium during the days of the "Old International," and Anarchists have never entirely ceased their activities in the large cities. [17] On the walls of the "Maison du Peuple" you will find noble paintings. Here labored Constantine Meunier, the sculptor, on his notable "Monument au Travail." Three remarkable sections of this monument, "La Mine," "L'Industrie," "La Glèbe," can be seen in the Gallery of Modern Art, in Brussels. There are evidences everywhere of the art interest of these alert working people. One of them, with sincere indignation, pointed out to me the large pile of stone that surmounts the heights of the city, the Palace of Justice, completed in 1883, and said its "bourgeois Babylonian hideousness is the high-water mark of bourgeois taste in art and bourgeois power in politics." CHAPTER VII THE GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY I It is the constant complaint of the German Democrats that there is no Liberal Party in Germany. The wars that repeatedly devastated the country during past centuries drove property owners to seek the protection of a strong, centralized government. This habit has survived the centuries. Whenever the middle classes show signs of breaking away from the conservatism of the "Regierung," the Prince always finds a way of bringing them back. The Period of Revolution--1850--ended in a compromise that ignored the workingmen and virtually left absolutism on the throne. When the new era dawned, and Bismarck, like a young giant, shaped the highways of empire, he used the Liberals so adroitly that, when his national legerdemain was accomplished, they were a broken and impotent faction, lost in the conservative reaction of the hour. Universal suffrage for the Reichstag elections was written into the Constitution of the new empire, not because the Chancellor and his Prince loved democracy, but because the smaller states insisted upon this safeguard against Prussian omnipotence. Democracy and Liberalism have never been strong enough to break the fetters of national habit; and nearly all the democracy, certainly all the workingman's democracy, in Germany to-day is found in the Social Democratic Party. In order to understand the development of Social Democracy in Germany, it is necessary to bear in mind the bureaucratic, autocratic, paternalistic character of the German government.[1] It is the German governmental policy to do everything for the welfare of its citizens that can be done; and, in return, it expects the people to let the government alone. The medieval conception of class responsibility survives. It is the attitude of a self-righteous parent toward ignorant and wilful children. The government assumes the right, and possesses the power, to regulate every phase of the citizen's life, in domestic, industrial, educational, moral, and political affairs. It is a regal survival of the theory that government is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. Germany is a made-to-order country that clings to medieval conservatism in government; a country that is thoroughly modern in industry and distinctly middle-age in caste; where the workingman has always been treated with patronizing condescension and his political acts watched with jealousy; and where he has, against great odds, determined to work out his own salvation. Surrounded by preordained and rigid conditions, he has perfected an organization that is the most remarkable example of proletarian achievement found anywhere in history. To the development and description of this organization we will now address ourselves. German Social Democracy, while Marxian in theory, owes its active existence to Ferdinand Lassalle, one of those brilliant and daring geniuses who flash, in an hour of adventure, across the prosaic days of history.[2] He was pronounced a _Wunderkind_ by William von Humboldt; dashed his way through university routine; attracted the friendship of poets, philosophers, and politicians; was lionized by society; became a revolutionist in 1848, and was, at the age of twenty-three, indicted for inciting a mob of Düsseldorf workingmen to acts of violence. He defended himself in a brilliant speech which launched him fully into the campaign of the workingman.[3] Early in his career he volunteered to defend the cause of the Countess Hatzfeldt, whose unfaithful husband was squandering his estates and suffering her to live in want. Lassalle fought the case through thirty-six courts for nine years, and won an ample fortune for the countess, who became the main financial support of Lassalle's campaigns. After his first arrest, Lassalle was kept under vigilance by the government. But finally, through the interposition of distinguished friends, he was allowed to return to Berlin. There, in 1862, he delivered a series of addresses that soon brought him into conflict with the police. His defense in the court was published later under the title, _Science and the Workingman_. This he followed with a letter, _Might and Right_,[4] sent broadcast over the land. In these two publications he succinctly enunciated his theory of democracy: "With Democracy alone dwells right, and in Democracy alone will might be found. No person in the Prussian state to-day has the right to speak of 'rights,' except the Democracy, the old and true Democracy. For Democracy alone has constantly clung to the right, and has never lowered herself by compromising with might."[5] In the political turmoil of that period, when new forces were awakening to their power and feudalism, conservatism, Cobdenism, and democracy were all contending for supremacy, there were three predominating currents of thought. The first was naturally the feudal, the absolutist that would put down by the police power, and failing in that by the soldiery, every attempt at changing the organization of the government. This was embodied in the reactionary, or Conservative Party, which held then, as it still does, the high places in army and government. Bismarck was its leader. It had ample nationalist aims, and was called the "Great German Party" ("Gross Deutschland"); Austria was included in its ambitions, and monarchic supremacy was the token of its power. It comprised the landowners, the nobles, and the agrarians. The second tendency was commercial, bourgeois. It found expression in the National Liberal Party, which was liberal in name only. It was the "Small German" ("Klein Deutschland") Party, preferring the ascendency of Prussia. It comprised the enterprising traders, manufacturers, and bankers, and was strongest in the cities. It was attached to monarchy, cared little for military or political glory, except as it affected trade and taxes. The third tendency had nothing in common with the other two. It was the revolt of the proletarians, led by men of great ability. It was the democratic movement. It abhorred both the idea of feudal prerogative in government, as expressed by king and noble, and the vulgar trade patriotism, as expressed by the National Liberals, the bourgeoisie. It took its inspiration from France and its example from England. From France came the political platitudes of equality and liberty with which we are familiar in America; from England, the example of strongly organized trade unions. In Germany these two movements, economic and political, were blended into one. Not that the workingman's movement was a unity. Schultze-Delitsch, the founder of the German co-operative movement, contended that labor should keep out of politics and devote itself to economic activities alone. Rodbertus, the distinguished economist, who was potent in shaping economic and political thought in Germany, wrote Lassalle, when he was entreated to join the brilliant agitator's propaganda, that he could "tolerate no political agitation which would excite the working classes against the existing executive power."[6] There was no unity in the theories of the workingman's movement. The first organizations, the "Workingmen's Associations," were founded soon after 1848, as soon as the laws gave a limited right of association to the working class. The government looked with suspicion on every political act of labor, and especially upon organizations for political purposes. The ban of the law was put upon those organizations in July, 1854, and the right of public meeting was greatly restricted; police autonomy increased, giving them arbitrary power to stop meetings; and the right of free press was virtually denied. Democracy became a movement of silent intrigue and occasional rough outbreak. At this juncture a new political party was organized, to absorb what was "legal" in the democratic workingman's movement and what was truly liberal in the National Liberal Party. The new party was called Progressist ("Fortschrittler"). It was a German party, devoted to the Manchester doctrine: Free commerce, free trade, free press, free speech; freedom of expression in every phase of human activity. It was _laissez-faire_ to the uttermost plunged into the reactionary mass of German politics. The economic issue became freedom of contract _versus_ feudal status; the political issue, freedom of ballot _versus_ hereditary prerogative. The new party began to appeal for the workingman's support. Their lure of free speech and freedom of organization was not without effect. The older workingmen, who were not familiar with the teachings of Marx and Engels, and who had not even read Weitling's communistic idealizations, were brought, in some numbers, into the new party. The younger and more radical element in the workingmen's clubs were restless. In 1862 some of them had visited the International Exposition in London and had talked with Marx. The fire of the "International" was kindled. A movement for calling a national workingman's convention was started among these radicals. The Progressists tried to check the agitation, saying that every effort should be directed toward establishing a new Constitution. But it was in vain. In Leipsic a group of radicals seceded from the Workingman's Union (Arbeiter Bildungs-Verein), and formed a new organization, which they called "Vorwärts" (Progress). These now invited Lassalle to address them on his views of the labor situation. The movement was opportune, and Lassalle's answer is the basic document of present-day Social Democracy.[7] There is no salvation for the workingman except through "political freedom," he says. This freedom demands laws, and to secure laws united action is essential. They must be powerful enough to get laws to their liking. This power they will not get by being an appendix to the Progressists, for they are dominated by a trade doctrine, not by altruistic ideals for the oppressed. With a clearness that has not been excelled, he showed the dependence of economic upon political power and influence. His economic program was none other than Louis Blanc's state-subsidized workshops. It made no great impression and soon faded away. But his bold plan of a workingman's party fighting fiercely for democracy, and for the betterment of the "normal conditions of the entire working classes," has been developed to surprising perfection. The state, he says, must be the instrument of their power, not the object of their striving. They are in politics, not as politicians, but as proletarians. "The state is nothing but the great organization, the all-embracing association of the working classes." No "sustaining and helping hand" will be their guide. Political supremacy is the "only way out of the desert." And how win the state? There is only one way: through universal suffrage, democracy. "Universal suffrage is not only your political but also your social foundation principle, the condition precedent of all social help. It is the only means for bettering the material conditions of the working classes." Cut loose from Rodbertus economically, and from the Progressists politically, Lassalle was invited to take the leadership of the new movement, which from the start was political rather than economic. He aimed to organize the German workingmen into a great national party, so powerful that it could control governments, make laws, and demand obedience. But it was slow work, and to the fiery spirit of Lassalle its snail's pace was exasperating. It provoked him into violence of speech which led him everywhere into the courts and into constant altercations with the Crown's solicitors. His powerful personality and unusually active mind made a profound impression everywhere. At the last conference of his association which he attended he claimed the Bishop of Mayence and the King of Prussia as converts. The Bishop, Baron von Ketteler, was indeed turning toward Socialism, but not Lassalle's political Socialism. He was the founder of that Christian Socialism which has made the Catholic Church in South Germany and the Rhineland a potent factor in the labor movement. The King, whose conversion Lassalle boldly announced, had only received a delegation of Silesian weavers who laid their grievances before him and were promised the royal sympathy. However, Lassalle and Bismarck had formed a general liking for each other, and the great minister received from the brilliant agitator many suggestions which he later embodied in his state insurance laws. Both Bismarck and Lassalle believed in the power of the state for the amelioration of social conditions. They met several times at the Chancellor's solicitation, and Bismarck disclosed their conversations to the Reichstag, on the insistence of Bebel, when the insurance bills were under discussion. The Chancellor expressed his admiration for the virility of the Socialist's mind and said he believed Lassalle perfectly sincere in his purpose.[8] Lassalle did not live to see his General Workingmen's Association ("Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeitsverein") attain political power. He was killed in a duel over a love affair August 31, 1864. His brilliant campaign for democracy had resulted in a petty organization of 4,610 members. Lassalle's influence is increasing every year. His death-day is celebrated by the German Socialists (Lassalle Feier). The present-day German movement is Lassallian rather than Marxian.[9] In a letter to Rodbertus, February, 1864, Lassalle says that he aimed to show the workingman "how identical the economic and the political forces are. Every separation of them is an abstraction, and I believe that uniting the two is the principal potency which I can give to the cause." II The little handful was soon rent by internal strife and threatened with utter extinction, both by police aggression and by Marxian competition. The year Lassalle died the International Workingman's Association was organized and agitation began in Germany under the leadership of William Liebknecht, a friend and disciple of Marx. Liebknecht was the scholar of the early Social Democratic group. He possessed a university education, was a revolutionist in 1848, a fugitive in Switzerland and England until 1862. His foreign sojourn did not mellow his natural dogmatism; on the contrary, his long intercourse with Marx in London hardened his orthodoxy. He was a powerful polemist. However, alone he could not have organized a national movement. He did not possess the personal traits that lure. He made a notable convert when he won August Bebel, a Saxon woodturner, to his cause. "I was Saul and became Paul," Bebel said to me. The words are not inapt: his power is Pauline. Lie has been persecuted and imprisoned, has written speeches and epistles, has made many missionary journeys, and kept constantly in intimate touch with every local phase of his propaganda. His imprisonments have undermined his health, but they have not diminished his mental vigor; and more than once the Iron Chancellor winced under his ferocious assaults. Liebknecht and Bebel were more advanced than the Workingmen's Association, which now had fallen under the leadership of Schweitzer, an able but dissolute disciple of Lassalle. The two organizations fought each other as rivals. The international wing, under Liebknecht and Bebel, in 1869, organized the Democratic Workingmen's Party at Eisenach, and were called "Eisenachers." Their program is of great importance. It stated that the first object of the new party was the attaining of the free state (Freier Volkstaat). This state Liebknecht explained at his trial in 1872: "The idea of a free state is interpreted by a majority of our party to mean a republic; but does this necessarily imply that it is to be forcibly introduced? No one has expressed an opinion as to how it is to be introduced. Let a majority of the people be won for our opinions, and the state is of our opinions, for the people are the state. A state without a king is conceivable, but not a state without a people. The government is the servant of the people." This free state, the program continues, can be won only by political freedom, and political freedom is the forerunner of economic freedom. Demand is therefore made for universal, equal, direct suffrage, with secret ballot, for all men twenty years of age, in both parliamentary and municipal elections. Other leading demands were: direct legislation; the abolition of all privileges, whether of birth, wealth, or religion; the establishment of militia in place of standing armies; the separation of Church and state; the secularizing of education; the extension of free schools and compulsory education; reform of the courts and extension of the jury system; abolition of all laws restricting freedom of speech, of press, and of association; the establishment of a normal workday; the restriction of female, and abolition of child, labor; the abolition of indirect taxes; the establishment of an income and inheritance tax; the extension of state credit for co-operative enterprises. This program sounds very modern and moderate. But its expositors were not restrained to moderation, and when the congress met at Dresden in 1871 it adopted a resolution extolling the French Commune. A great deal of popular sympathy was lost through this action. Meanwhile the Lassalle party was slowly gaining ground. In 1875 the two parties united at Gotha. There were 9,000 members in the Liebknecht party and 15,000 members in the Lassalle party. Here was adopted the first program of the united German Social Democracy. Its economics are thoroughly Marxian in theory and are only slightly tinged by the teachings of Lassalle and Schultze-Delitsch in practice. Labor, it affirmed, was the source of all wealth and was held under duress by the capitalistic class. Its only emancipation could come from the social ownership of the means of production. The way to this goal could be found through productive copartnership with state aid. The political part of the program embraced the demands made at Eisenach. With its unity, a new vigor took possession of the party. Its organization was perfected; 145 agitators were in the field; its twenty-three newspapers had over 100,000 subscribers. This meant increased police vigilance. All the leaders served terms in prison, newspapers were suppressed, organizations dissolved, houses searched, agitators ordered to leave the country. The government did everything in its power to suppress the movement. Every act of oppression popularized the Democracy among the proletarians. The blood of the martyrs bore the usual harvest. The new empire had been launched amidst the greatest enthusiasm, shared by every one except the discontented workingmen who had so stoutly fought for entire political freedom. The new imperial parliament was thrown open to them because Bismarck had found it necessary to include universal suffrage in the constitution of the Reichstag. In 1871 the Socialists elected two members, and the feudal lords beheld the novel sight of workingmen sitting with them in the imperial Diet. The voting strength of the party was 124,665. This was increased to 351,952 in 1874, when nine members were elected. In 1877 the party cast 493,288 votes, electing twelve members. This was cause for alarm. The party had now reached fifth place in point of votes among the fourteen parties or factions that contended for power in Germany, and eighth place in point of members elected. But in point of agitation, of perfervid speech and pointed interpellation, it ranked easily first. Its delegation in 1877 included Bebel and Liebknecht, now out of jail, and Most, afterwards the notorious Anarchist in America, and Hasselman and Bracke, who were not modest in the expression of their opinions. These representatives of democracy let no occasion pass to embarrass the government with peppery questions. Bismarck was slowly evolving a scheme for checking the Socialist growth and satisfying the demands of labor for better conditions. Both revolved around the pivot of patriarchal omnipotence. The suppression was to be accomplished by force; the gratification, by paternal rigor. III He addressed himself first to repression. He entreated the governments of Europe in 1871 to unite in stamping out Socialism, but he received no encouragement. In 1872 Spain, exasperated by the revolutionary outbreaks, addressed a circular to the Powers, asking their co-operation to check the growth of the revolutionary element. Bismarck was ready. But Lord Granville, for England, said the traditions of his country were favorable to an unrestricted right of residence for foreigners as long as they violated no law of their host. This ended the international attempt. Next (in 1874) Bismarck attempted to tighten the gag on the press, but the Reichstag refused to sanction his proposals. Then he fell back on existing legislation and with great vigor enforced the statutes against revolutionary activity. The police were given wide latitude in interpreting these laws. Several acts of wanton violence now occurred which brought about a sudden change of temper in the people. On May 11, 1878, while driving in Unter den Linden, Emperor William was shot at by a young man. The Emperor was not struck by the bullets, but the shots were none the less effective in rousing public indignation. Popular condemnation was turned against the Social Democrats because photographs of Liebknecht and Bebel were found on the person of the intended assassin. Two days later Bismarck introduced the anti-Socialist laws. They were debated in the Reichstag, while Most was being tried for libeling the clergy. But the Reichstag was not ready to go to the lengths of the Chancellor's desire, and by a vote of 251 to 57 rejected his bill. Here the matter would have rested had not a second attempt been made on the life of the aged Emperor. This occurred on June 2, and this time the Emperor was seriously wounded. Naturally the indignation of the nation was thoroughly aroused. In the midst of the excitement, a general election was held, and Bismarck won. His own peculiar Conservatives increased their delegation from 40 to 59, the Free Conservatives from 38 to 57; the National Liberals reduced their number from 128 to 99, the Liberals from 13 to 10, the Progressists from 35 to 26. The Socialists retained nine seats, losing three; their vote fell from 493,288 to 437,158. Immediately a repressive law was introduced. It was called "a law against the publicly dangerous activities of the Social Democracy" (Gesetz gegen die gemein-gefährlichen Bestrebungen der Sozial-Demokratie).[10] Bismarck prefaced his law with a very clever prologue (Begründung). In simple language he arraigned the Social Democracy as being, first, anti-social, because it aims at the modern system of production, and does so, not through "humanitarian motives," but through revolution; second, as anti-patriotic, because it makes "the most odious attacks" on the German Empire. "The law of preservation therefore compels the state and society to oppose the Social Democratic movement with decision.... True, thought cannot be repressed by external compulsion; the movements of minds can only be overcome in intellectual combat. But when movements take wrong pathways and threaten destruction, the means for their growth can and should be taken away by legal means. The Socialist agitation, as carried on for years, is a continual appeal to violence and to the passions of the multitudes, for the purpose of subverting the social order. The state _can_ check such a movement by depriving Social Democracy of its principal means of propaganda, and by destroying its organization; and it _must_ do so unless it is willing to surrender its existence, and unless the conviction is to spread amongst the people that either the state is impossible or the aims of Social Democracy are justifiable.[11] The law was passed against the vehement protest of the Socialists. They disclaimed any connection with the dastardly attempts on the life of the aged Emperor. Bebel, in an impressive speech, declared that while Socialists do "wish to abolish the present form of private property in the factors of production, labor, and land," they had never been guilty of destroying a penny's worth of property. Nor did they aim to do so. It was the system of private ownership of great properties, that enabled a few to oppress the many, that they were fighting. And here they were in good company: Rodbertus, Rosher, Wagner, Schaeffle, Brentano, Schmoller, and a host of other scholars and economists, Bebel affirmed, were Socialistic in their tendencies. Bismarck was unyielding. He said he would welcome any real effort to alleviate harsh conditions. But the Socialists were a party of destruction and were enemies to mankind. The leader of the Progressists said, "I fear Social Democracy more under this law than without it." The vote of 221 to 149 in favor of the law showed the grim Chancellor's sway over the assembly. The law made clean work of it. It forbade all organizations which promulgated views controvening the existing social and political order. It prohibited the collecting of money for campaign purposes; put the ban on meetings, processions, and demonstrations; on publications of all kinds, confiscating the existing stock of prohibited books; and created a status akin to martial law by endowing the police authorities with the power of declaring a locality in a "minor state of siege," and exercising arbitrary authority for one year. A commission was appointed by the Chancellor to carry out these inquisitions, and the war between Socialistic democracy and medieval autocracy was on. Its events are instructive to every government; its sequel a warning to all nations.[12] The government organized its commission; the Socialists met at Hamburg to consider the situation. They determined to perfect their organization, to promulgate a secret propaganda, and to use the tribune in the Reichstag as the one open pulpit whence they could proclaim their wrongs. The government promptly declared Berlin in a "minor state of siege." In the course of a few months about fifty agitators were expelled, bales of literature confiscated, organizations dissolved, meetings dismissed, gatherings prohibited, and the Socialist agitation pushed into cellars and back rooms. But there was one tribune which the Chancellor could not close--the Reichstag tribune. Here Bebel and Liebknecht talked to the nation, and their speeches were given circulation through the records of debate. Prince Bismarck, in his extremity, tried to muzzle the Socialist members and expunge their words from the records; but the members of the Reichstag refused this extreme measure. Then Bismarck asked permission to imprison Hasselman and expel Fritzche from Berlin. These two deputies had been especially vituperative in their attacks upon the law. The Chancellor claimed that the famous Section 28 of the anti-Socialist law authorizing the minor state of siege extended to members of the Reichstag. But the House, under the vehement leadership of Professor Gneist, the distinguished constitutional lawyer, refused to sanction this dangerous measure on the ground that the thirty-first article of the federal Constitution exempted members of the Reichstag from arrest. Bismarck soon had another plan for ridding himself of the Socialist nettles in the Reichstag. He introduced a bill creating a parliamentary court chosen by the House, who should have the power to punish any member guilty of parliamentary indiscretion. The bill also empowered the House to prevent the publication of any of its proceedings if it desired. The Reichstag also refused to sanction this measure. The assassination of Czar Alexander of Russia in March, 1881, gave Bismarck the opportunity to renew his efforts to quell Socialism and Anarchism by international concert. He asked Russia to take the initiative, and a conference was called at Brussels to which all the leading states were invited. Germany and Austria eagerly accepted, France made her participation dependent on England's action, and England refused to participate. Bismarck next tried to form an Eastern league, but Austria failed him and he had to content himself with an extradition treaty with Russia. Bismarck now fell back on his Socialist law. He enforced it with vigor, extending the minor state of siege to Altona, Leipsic, Hamburg, and Harburg. His commission reported yearly. Its words were not reassuring. In 1882 it said: "The situation of the Social Democratic movement in Germany and other civilized countries is unfortunately not such as to encourage the hope that it is being suppressed or weakened." The Minister of the Interior said to the Reichstag: "It is beyond doubt that it has not been possible by means of the law of October, 1878, to wipe Social Democracy from the face of the earth, or even to strike it to the center."[13] The duration of the law had been fixed at two years. At the end of each term it was renewed, each time with diminishing majorities. Meanwhile the rigor of the law was not diminished. The minor state of siege was extended to other centers, including Stettin and Offenbach. Meetings were suppressed everywhere, and dismissed often for the most trivial reasons. The police were given the widest powers and exercised them in the narrowest spirit.[14] "A hateful system of persecution, espionage, and aggravation was established, and its victims were the classes most susceptible to disaffection."[15] On the unique _index expurgatorius_ of the government were over a thousand titles, including the works of the high priests of the party, the poetry of Herwegh, the romances of Von Schweitzer, the photographs of the favorite Socialist saints, over eighty newspapers and sixty foreign journals. Bales of interdicted literature were smuggled in from Switzerland to feed the morose and disaffected mind of the German workingman. I can find no record of how many arrests were made. Bebel reported to the party convention in 1890 that 1,400 publications of all kinds had been interdicted and that 1,500 persons had been imprisoned, serving an aggregate of over one thousand years.[16] Every trial was a scattering of the seeds, and every imprisoned or exiled comrade became a hero. The awkwardness of the government was matched against the adroitness of the propagandists. A good deal of terror was spread among the people, stories of sudden uprisings and bloody revolutions were told. Even the National Liberals lost their heads at times. But Bebel was always superbly cool. This woodturner developed into one of the ablest political generals of his time. Persecuted and pressed into underground channels of activity the party persisted in growing. In 1880 it rid itself of the violent revolutionary faction led by Most and Hasselman. In the elections of 1881 the Socialists gained three deputies, but their popular vote was reduced over 125,000. In the next election, 1884, they won twenty-four seats and polled 549,990 votes; two out of six seats in Berlin were won, and one-tenth of the voters in the land were rallied under the red flag. The police were alarmed and the law was enforced with renewed energy. With this powerful backing Liebknecht asked the repeal of the "Explosives Act." A violent debate took place. Liebknecht said: "I will tell you this: we do not appeal to you for sympathy. The result is all the same to us, for we shall win one way or another. Do your worst, for it will be only to our advantage, and the more madly you carry on the sooner you will come to an end. The pitcher goes to the well until it breaks."[17] Bebel roused all the fury of Bismarck when he warned him that if Russian methods were imported there would be murder. In July of this year (1886) at Freiburg occurred the memorable trial of nine Socialist leaders, including Bebel, Dietz, Von Vollmar, Auer, Frohme, and Viereck, charged with participating in an illegal organization. All were sentenced to imprisonment for terms varying from six to nine months. Preceding the election of 1887 the Reichstag had been dissolved on the army bill. The patriotic issue, always effective, was made the universal appeal by the government. In spite of this the Social Democrats polled 763,128 votes, a gain of 213,128. Saxony had succeeded in holding down the vote to 150,000; but in Prussia the result was startling; in Berlin forty per cent. of the voters were Social Democrats. With all their voting strength the party elected only eleven members to the Reichstag. With proportional representation they would have elected forty. The Bismarck Conservatives returned forty-one members with fewer votes than the Socialists. Finally in 1890 came the end of this farce. It was also the end of the chancellorship of Bismarck. His old Emperor had died, and a young and daring hand was at the helm. Bismarck proposed to embody the anti-Socialist laws permanently in the penal code. This might have passed; but he also proposed to exile offenders, not merely from the territory under minor siege, but from the Fatherland. This expatriation the Assembly would not brook and the Reichstag was prorogued. The Socialists left parliament with eleven members, they returned with thirty-five; they left with 760,000 mandates, they returned with 1,500,000, more votes than any other party could claim, and on a proportional basis eighty-five seats would have been theirs. Bebel was justified in saying in the Reichstag, "The Chancellor thought he had us, but we have him." When midnight sounded on the last day of the existence of the oppressive law, great throngs of workingmen gathered in the streets of the larger cities, to sing their Marseillaise, cheer their victory, and wave their red flag. Now they could breathe again. For the first time in thirteen years they met in national convention on German soil. The veteran Liebknecht, recounting their hardships and sacrifices, raised his voice in jubilant phrase: "Our opponents did not spare us, and we, too proud and too strong to prove cowardly, struck blow for blow, and so we have conquered the odious law."[18] IV During the enforcement of the anti-Socialist law Bismarck began the second part of his policy. He would repress with one hand, with the other he would placate. In 1883 he introduced his sickness insurance bill, followed in 1884-85 by his accident insurance, and in 1889 by his old-age pension act.[19] It is not unnatural that these measures were opposed by the Social Democrats. They had no love for the Chancellor. The Dresden congress decided to "reject state Socialism unconditionally so long as it is inaugurated by Prince Bismarck and is designed to support the government system." Bismarck "had sown too much wind not to reap a whirlwind."[20] He had planted hatred in the hearts of the workingmen; he could not hope to reap respect and affection. Bismarck believed that Socialism existed because the laboring man was not sufficiently interested in the state. He had no property, and was not enlightened enough to appreciate the intangible benefits of sovereignty. In 1880 German trade had reached a low ebb. Agriculture had fallen into decay. German peasants and workingmen were emigrating to America by the tens of thousands. Bismarck promulgated his industrial insurance, first, to placate the workingman; second, to restore prosperity to German industry. As a result of his policy Germany is to-day the most "socialized" state in Europe. Here a workingman may begin life attended by a physician paid by the state; he is christened by a state clergyman; he is taught the rudiments of learning and his handicraft by the state. He begins work under the watchful eye of a state inspector, who sees that the safeguards to health and limb are strictly observed. He is drafted by the state into the army, and returns from the rigor of this discipline to his work. The state gives him license to marry, registers his place of residence, follows him from place to place, and registers the birth of his children. If he falls ill, his suffering is assuaged by the knowledge that his wife and children are cared for and that his expenses will be paid during illness; and he may spend his convalescent days in a luxurious state hospital. If he falls victim to an accident the dread of worklessness is removed by the ample insurance commanded by the state even if his injury permanently incapacitates him. If he should unfortunately become that most pitiful of all men, the man out of work, the state and the city will do all in their power to find employment for him. If he wanders from town to town in search of work the city has its shelter (Herberge) to welcome him; if he wishes to move to another part of his town the municipal bureau will be glad to help him find a suitable house, or may even loan him money for building a house of his own. If he is in difficulty the city places a lawyer at his disposal. If he is in a dispute with his employer the government provides a court of arbitration. If he is sued or wishes to sue his employer, he does so in the workingmen's court (Gewerbe Gericht). If he wishes recreation, there is the city garden; if he wishes entertainment let him go to the public concert; if he wishes to improve his mind there are libraries and free lectures. And if by rare chance, through the grace of the state's strict sanitary regulations and by thrift and care, he reaches the age of seventy, he will find the closing days of his long life eased by a pension, small, very small, to be sure, but yet enough to make him more welcome to the relatives or friends who are charged with administering to his wants.[21] FOOTNOTES: [1] For a comprehensive description of the German government, see DAWSON, _Germany and the Germans_, Vol. I. [2] Liebknecht said, in the Breslau congress of the Social-Democratic party: "Lassalle is the man in whom the modern organized German labor movement had its origin."--"Sozial-Demokratische Partei-Tag," _Protokoll_, 1895, p. 66. [3] For sketch of Lassalle and his work see KIRKUP, _History of Socialism_, pp. 72 et seq.; ELY, _French and German Socialism of Modern Times_, p. 189; RAE, _Contemporary Socialism_, pp. 93 ff. For an extended account, see DAWSON, _German Socialism and Ferdinand Lassalle_, London, 1888. GEORG BRANDES, _Ferdinand Lassalle_, originally in Danish, has been translated into German, 1877, and into English, 1911. Also see FRANZ MEHRING. _Die Deutsche Sozial-Demokratie: Ihre Geschichte und ihre Lehre_; BERNHARD BECKER, _Geschichte der Arbeiter Agitation Ferdinand Lassalles_, Brunswick, 1874: this volume contains a good detailed account of Lassalle's work. [4] Published in Zürich, 1863: _Macht und Recht_. [5] _Macht und Recht_, p. 13. [6] Letter dated April 22, 1863. [7] "Öffentliches Antwort-schreiben an das Zentral Committee zur Berufung eines Allgemeinen Deutschen Arbeiter Congress zu Leipzig," first published in Zurich, 1863. [8] In the Reichstag, September 16, 1878. [9] When Bernstein collected Lassalle's works he wrote a sketch of the agitator's life as a preface. A number of years later, 1904, he published his second sketch, _Ferdinand Lassalle and His Significance to the Working Classes_, in which he shifted his position and assumed a Lassallian tone. This change of mind is typical of the Social Democratic movement toward the Lassallian idea. [10] The law is reprinted in MEHRING, _Die Deutsche Sozial-Demokratie_. [11] See DAWSON, _German Socialism and Ferdinand Lassalle_, pp. 251 ff., for a discussion of this law. [12] A good description of the working of this law is found in DAWSON, _Germany and the Germans_, Vol. II, Chap. XXXVII. [13] December 14, 1882. [14] "At a large Berlin meeting a speaker innocently used the word commune (parish), whereupon the police officer in control, thinking only of the Paris Commune, at once dismissed the assembly, and a thousand persons had to disperse into the streets disappointed and embittered.... 'Militarism is a terrible mistake,' said a speaker at an election meeting, which legally should have been beyond police power, and at these words, further proceedings were forbidden and several persons were arrested. The Socialist deputy Bebel, in addressing some workingmen on economical questions, said that 'In the textile industry it happens that while the wife is working at the loom, the husband sits at home and cooks dinner,' and the meeting was dismissed immediately."--DAWSON, _Germany and the Germans_, Vol. II, pp. 190-1. [15] DAWSON, _supra cit._, p. 192. [16] _Protokoll des Partei-Tages_, 1890, p. 30. [17] Reichstag debates, April 2, 1886. [18] _Protokoll des Partei-Tages_, 1890, pp. 11-12. [19] For discussion of German industrial insurance, see W.H. DAWSON, _Bismarck and State Socialism_, also J. ELLIS BARKER, _Modern Germany_. [20] R. MEYER, _Der Emancipations-Kampf des Vierten Standes_, p. 475. [21] See Appendix for table showing cost of industrial insurance. In Germany the state owns railways, canals, river transportation, harbors, telephones, telegraph, and parcels post. Banks, insurance, savings banks, and pawnshops are conducted by the state. Municipalities are landlords of vast estates, they are capitalists owning street cars, gas plants, electric light plants, theaters, markets, warehouses. They have hospitals for the sick, shelters for the homeless, soup-houses for the hungry, asylums for the weak and unfortunate, nurseries for the babies, homes for the aged, and cemeteries for the dead. CHAPTER VIII GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY AND LABOR UNIONS I Before we proceed to describe the present organization of the Social Democratic Party it will be necessary to say a few words about the organization of labor in Germany.[1] There are four kinds of labor unions: the Social Democrat or free unions, the Hirsch-Duncker or radical unions, the Christian or Roman Catholic unions, and the Independent unions. All except the last group have special political significance; and only the Independents confine themselves purely to economic activity. The Socialist unions are called "Reds," the Independents "Yellow," the Christians "Black." The Hirsch-Duncker unions were the first in the field. They were organized in 1868 by Dr. Hirsch and Herr Franz Duncker, for the purpose of winning the labor vote for the Progressists. Dr. Hirsch went to England for his model, but the political bias he imparted to the unions was very un-English. They have grown less political and more neutral in every aspect, probably because political radicalism has dwindled, and because they contain a great many of the most skilled of German workmen, the machinists. They are a sort of aristocracy of labor, prefer peace to war, and hesitate long before striking. The Christian unions are strongest in the Rhine valley and the Westphalian mining districts. They are the offspring of Bishop Kettler's workingmen's associations, organized to keep the laborer in harmony with the Roman Catholic Church. They have undergone a great deal of change since the days of the distinguished bishop, and are now modeled after strict trade-union principles. They retain their connection with the Church and the Center Party (the Roman Catholic group in the Reichstag). For some years there has been a restlessness among these unions. The more militant members are protesting against the influence of the clergy in union affairs, and demand that laborers lead labor. The "Yellow" unions stand in bad repute among the others. They are for peace at any price. Their membership is largely composed of the engineering trades; and they are usually under contract not to strike, but settle their differences by arbitration. The employing firms contribute liberally to their union funds. By far the largest unions are the Social Democratic or "Free" unions. They embrace over eighty per cent. of all organized labor. Their growth has been very rapid during the last twenty years. In 1890, when the Socialist law was lifted, they numbered a little over 250,000; in 1910 they numbered nearly 2,000,000. As organizations, the Social Democratic unions possess all the perfection of detail and painstaking craftsmanship for which the Germans are justly celebrated.[2] Not the minutest detail is omitted; everything is done to contribute to the solidarity of the working classes. The theory of the German labor movement is, that physical environment is the first desideratum. A well-housed, well-groomed, well-fed workman is a better fighter than a hungry, ragged man; and it is for fighting that the unions exist. The bed-rock of the German workingman's theory is the maxim: "First, be a good craftsman, and all other things will be added unto you." These unions strive to do everything within their power to make, first, a good workman; second, a comfortable workman. This naturally, without artificial stimulants, brings the solidarity, the class patriotism, which is the source of the zeal and energy of these great fighting machines. In all of the larger towns they own clubhouses (Gewerkschaftshäuser), which are the centers of incessant activity. They contain assembly halls, restaurants, committee rooms, and lodgings for journeymen and apprentices (Wander-bursche) seeking work. There are night classes, public lectures, educational excursions, and circulating libraries. In Berlin the workingmen have organized a theater.[3] The workingman has a genuine sympathy for his union. It enlists his loyalty as much as his country enlists his patriotism. He finds social and intellectual intercourse, sympathy and responsiveness in his union. He saves from his frugal wages to support the union and to swell the funds in its war-chest. He is never allowed to forget that he is first a workingman, and owes his primary duties to his family and his union.[4] This vast and perfect organization of labor has a complete understanding with the Social Democratic party, but it is not an integral part of the party. When the unions began to revive, after the repeal of the anti-Socialist law, there was a short and severe struggle between the party and the unions for control. The victory of the unions for complete autonomy was decisive. Since then good feeling and harmony have prevailed. The governing committees of the two bodies meet for consultation, the powerful press of the party fights the union's battles, and often party headquarters are in the union's clubhouse. They are virtually two independent branches of the same movement. In the national triennial convention of the Social Democratic unions at Hamburg, 1908, a speaker said: "We can say with truth that to-day there are no differences of a fundamental nature between the two great branches [the Social Democratic unions and the Social Democratic Party] of the labor movement."[5] Bebel has said of the relation between the unions and the party: "Every workingman should belong to the union, and should be a party man; not merely as a laboring man, but as a class-conscious (Classenbewustsein) laboring man; as a member of a governmental and a social organization which treats and maltreats him as a laboring man."[6] This is the class spirit of Socialism, carried into practical effect. In Germany, then, the vast bulk of organized labor is co-operating voluntarily with the Social Democratic Party. II And what is the present organization of the Social Democratic Party? It is the most perfect party machine in the world. It is organized with the most scrupulous regard for details and oiled with the exuberance of a class spirit that is emerging from its narrowness and is finding room for its expanding powers in the practical affairs of national and municipal life. The only approach to it is the faultless, silently moving, highly polished mechanism devised by the English gentry to control the political destinies of the British Empire. Our American parties are crude compared with the noiseless efficacy of the English machine, or the remorseless yet enthusiastic and entirely effective operation of the German Social Democracy. Every detail of the workingman's life is embraced in this remarkable political organization. Every village and commune has its party vigilance committee. A juvenile department brings up the youth in the principles of the Social Democracy. The party press includes seventy-six daily papers, some of them brilliantly edited, a humorous weekly, and several monthly magazines. This press co-operates with the trade journals. Some of these--notably the masons' journal and the ironworkers' journal--have a vast circulation, numbering many hundred thousand subscribers. The party propaganda is stupendous. In 1910 over 14,000 meetings were held, and over 33,000,000 circulars and 2,800,000 brochures were distributed. Every workingman, every voter, was personally solicited during the campaign just closed (January, 1912). Committees and sub-committees were everywhere in this national beehive of workers. Women and children were enlisted in the work. The national party is controlled by an executive committee, elected by the national convention, who govern its many activities with the gravity of a college faculty, the astuteness of a lawyer, and the frugality of a tradesman. They issue annual reports, as full of statistics and involved analyses as a government report. And they have no patience for party stars who are ambitious to move in the orbit of their own individual greatness. Because the keynote of the party is solidarity, which is a synonym for discipline, "We have no factions, we are one. Personally any Social Democrat may believe as he pleases and do as he pleases. But when it comes to political activity, we insist that he act with the party." These are the words in which one of the younger leaders of the party explained their unity to me. In 1890, when the Bavarian rebels were under discussion in the national congress, Bebel told the delegates that "a fighting party such as our Social Democracy can only achieve its aims when every member observes the strictest discipline."[7] Evidences of party discipline are not lacking. The Prussian temperament is rough, dogmatic, implacable; the South German is mellow, yielding, kind. The two temperaments often clash. The one loves individual action; the other, military unity. The southern Socialist votes for his local budgets in town council and diet, and he receives the chastisement of the northern disciplinarian with mellow good-nature. But solidarity there is, whatever the price; and a class-consciousness, a brotherhood: they call each other "Comrades."[8] The membership of the party includes all those who pay party dues and will oblige themselves to party fealty, to do any drudgery demanded of them.[9] In six parliamentary districts the membership equals thirty per cent. of the Social Democratic vote cast; in twenty-four other districts there is a membership of over 10,000 per district.[10] It is difficult to say what proportion of the members of the union are members of the party. The vast bulk of the party members are laboring men, and no doubt the majority of them are members of the union. In the last imperial elections (January, 1912) this party cast 4,250,000 votes, almost one-fourth of the entire federal electorate, and elected 110 members to the Reichstag, over one-fourth of the entire membership.[11] In nineteen state legislatures the Social Democrats have 186 members, in 396 city councils 1,813 members, and in 2,009 communal councils 5,720 members.[12] The supreme authority of the party is the annual national convention, called "congress." Here detailed reports are made by the various committees; and the parliamentary delegation make an elaborate statement, detailing every official act of the group in the Reichstag. Everything is discussed by everybody; the speeches made by the members in the Reichstag, the opinions of the party editors in their daily editorials, the party finances, everything is freely criticised. The most insignificant member has the same privilege of criticism as the party czars; and the criticism often becomes naïvely personal. No doubt the party patriotism is largely fed by this frank, fearless, aboveboard airing of grievances, this freedom from "boss rule." Every one has his opportunity, and this robs the plotter and backbiter of his venom. Having listened to the faultfinder, they vote; and having voted, they rarely relent. When a decision is reached, the members are expected to abide by it faithfully and cheerfully. They make short work of traitors.[13] Every year a detailed report on the imperial budget is read, showing how the money is spent on armaments, on police, on courts, and every other department of the empire; and how the money is raised. The convention resolves itself into a school of public finance. This analysis is sent broadcast, as a campaign document. So yearly a report is read of the number of arrests made and the fines and penalties ensuing, on account of _lèse-majesté_ and other laws infringing upon the liberty of the press and of speech. Also, every year the central committee report, in great detail, every party activity in every corner of the empire. A well-knit hegemony of party interest is created. The mass is willing to listen to the individual, to bend to the needs of the smallest commune. Throughout their frank discussions and involved debates there runs a certain polysyllabic flavor that is characteristically German. They often choose, a year in advance, some important national question, such as the tariff, mining laws, the agrarian situation, and discuss it in great detail, more like an academy of universal knowledge than a political party. The learned blend their involved phraseology and store of facts with the refreshing frankness and ignorance of the unlearned. III We will now return to the present activities of this party that was born in revolution and nurtured by persecution. In order to understand this activity, it is necessary to review the present attitude of the government toward democracy and Socialism. The repeal of the anti-Socialist law could not suddenly alter the spirit of opposition. It merely changed the outward aspect of the opposition. The government indicates in many ways its distrust of Social Democrats. No member of the party has ever been invited by the government to a place of public honor and responsibility. Indeed, to be a Social Democrat effectively closes the door against promotion in civil life.[14] This silent hostility is not confined to political offices and the civil service; it extends into the professions. Judges and public physicians, pastors in the state church, teachers in the public schools, professors in the great universities are included in the ban. A pastor may be a "Christian Socialist," a professor may nourish his "Socialism of the chair," and a judge or a government engineer may be inclined toward far-reaching social experiment. But with Social Democracy they must have absolutely nothing to do.[15] The government's attitude is based on the theory that the Social Democrats are enemies of the monarchy, and are designing to overthrow it and declare a republic the moment they get into power. The Kaiser, on several public occasions, has expressed his distrust and disapproval for this vast multitude of his subjects. A number of years ago he is reported to have said that "the Social Democrats are a band of persons who are unworthy of their fatherland" ("Eine Bande von Menschen die ihres Vaterlands nicht würdig sind"). And more recently: "The Social Democrats are a crowd of upstarts without a fatherland" ("Vaterlandslose Gesellen"). The Kaiser joined in the public rejoicing over the check that had apparently been administered to the growth of the Social Democracy by the elections of 1907, and in a speech delivered to a throng of citizens gathered for jubilation in the palace yard in Berlin, he said that the "Socialists have been ridden down" ("niedergeritten"), a military figure of speech. Retaliation is not unnatural. The pictures of the Hohenzollerns and the high functionaries of state and army do not adorn the walls of the homes of the Social Democrats. There are seen the portraits of Marx and Lassalle, Liebknecht and Bebel. The members of the party never join in a public display of confidence in the government. They exercise a petty tyranny over their neighbors. Instances are told of shopkeepers who were compelled to yield to the boycott instituted against them because they voted against the Social Democrats, and of workmen coerced into joining the union. This feeling of bitterness is most clearly marked in Prussia. In southern Germany a feeling of good will and co-operation is becoming more marked every year. The King of Bavaria is not afraid to shake hands with Von Vollmar. Some years ago a Bavarian railway employee was elected to the Diet on the Social Democratic ticket, and his employer, the state, gave him leave of absence to attend to his legislative duties. In Baden the leader of the Social Democratic Party called at the palace to present the felicitations of his comrades to the royal family on the occasion of the birth of an heir. The principal immediate issue of the Social Democrats in Germany is electoral reform. None of the states or provinces are on a genuinely democratic electoral basis. In Saxony a new electoral law was passed in 1909 which typifies the spirit of the entire country.[16] The electorate is divided into four classes according to their income. The result of the first election under this law in the city of Leipsic was as follows: There were 172,800 votes cast by 79,928 voters. 32,576 voters in the one-vote class cast 32,576 votes 20,323 " " " two- " " " 40,646 " 8,538 " " " three- " " " 25,614 " 18,491 " " " four- " " " 73,964 " There are ninety-one members in the Saxon Diet. The law provided that only forty-three of these should be elected from the cities. The three leading cities of Saxony, Chemnitz, Dresden, Leipsic, are strongholds of Social Democracy, while the country districts are Conservative. The Social Democrats feel that the property qualifications and the distribution of the districts impose an unfair handicap against them. In spite of these obstacles they elected so many deputies that they were offered the vice-presidency of the Chamber of Deputies. The offer, however, was conditioned upon their attending the annual reception given by the King to the representatives. They had hitherto refused to attend these royal functions and were not willing to surrender for the sake of office.[17] The ancient free cities--Hamburg, Bremen, Lübeck--have election laws as ancient and antiquated as their charters. In Lübeck a large majority of the legislative body is elected by electors having an income of over 2,000 marks a year. In Hamburg the nobles, higher officials, etc., elect 40 representatives, the householders elect 40, the large landholders elect 8, those citizens having an income of over 2,500 marks a year elect 48, those who have an income from 1,200 to 2,500 marks a year elect 24, those who have an income of less than 1,200 marks have no vote. In Bremen the various groups or kinds of property are represented in the law-making body. Property, not the person, is represented. Prussia is the special grievance of the Social Democrats. Here the three-class system of voting prevails. The taxpayers are divided into three classes, according to the amount of taxes paid, each class paying one-third of the taxes. Each class chooses one-third of the electors who name the members of the Prussian Diet. By this arrangement the large property class virtually controls the elections.[18] By this system the Social Democratic representation is held down to 6 in a membership of 420. In 1909 the party polled 23-9/10 per cent. of the entire Prussian vote. Here again the districts are so arranged that the majority of the members are elected from the Conservative rural districts, while the cities, which are strongholds of Social Democracy, must content themselves with a minority, although nearly 60 per cent. of the population of Prussia is urban. These examples are sufficient to indicate the general nature of franchise legislation in Germany.[19] For the past several years universal suffrage demonstrations have been held throughout the empire. The general strike has not been used as a method of political coercion. It is doubtful whether the German temperament is adapted to that kind of warfare. Mass-meetings, however, and street demonstrations are the favorite means of the propaganda. Sometimes there are conflicts with the police, but these are diminishing in number every year. The government has not diminished its vigilance, and its jealous eyes are never averted from these demonstrations.[20] An incident occurred in March, 1910, which illustrates the temper of the people and the government. A gigantic demonstration was announced, to be held in Treptow Park, Berlin. The Police-president forbade the meeting and had every street leading to the park carefully guarded. One hundred and fifty thousand demonstrants met in the Thiergarten, in the very heart of the city, and so secretly had the word been given, so quietly was it executed, and so orderly was this vast throng of workingman, that the police knew nothing of it until the meeting was well under way. Permission for the Treptow meeting was not again refused. The immediate issue, then, of the German Social Democracy is universal suffrage. Lassalle's cry is more piercing to-day than when that brilliant and erratic agitator uttered it: "Democracy, the universal ballot, is the laboring man's hope." The name of the party is significant. The accent has shifted from the first to the second part of the compound--from the Marxian to the Lassallian word. The German Social Democrats have never had a Millerand or a Briand or a John Burns; their participation in imperial and provincial affairs has been strictly limited to parliamentary criticism. Even in local government, in the communes and cities, they have been allowed only a small share in actual constructive work. But in spite of these facts the party has undergone a most remarkable change of creed and tone. IV We will concern ourselves only with the most significant changes. These follow two general lines: (1) the attitude of the party towards legislation and practical parliamentary participation; (2) the internal changes in the party. We will follow these changes through the official reports of the annual party conventions. First we will briefly see what change has taken place in their attitude toward parliamentary activity. The Social Democrats began as revolutionists and violent anti-parliamentarians. They entered parliament, not to make laws, but to make trouble. In 1890 they changed their name from the Socialist Labor Party to the Social Democratic Party; and when some of the older members thought that this was a compromise with their enemies, one of the leaders replied that "a Socialist party must _eo ipse_ be a democratic party."[21] In 1890 Liebknecht said: "Formerly we had an entirely different tactic. Tactics and principles are two different things. In 1869 in a speech in Berlin I condemned parliamentary activity. That was then. Political conditions were entirely different."[22] Gradually tactics and principles have coalesced until their line of cleavage is obscured. The earlier reports of the parliamentary delegation are tinged with apology--they are in parliament as protestors, as propagandists, not as legislators. They seem to say: "Fellow-partisans, excuse us for being in the Reichstag. We don't believe in the bourgeois law-making devices. But since we are here, we purpose to do what we can for the cause. We will not betray you, nor the glorious Socialistic state of society that we are all working for." From the first, Social Democrats have voted against the imperial budget, have opposed all tariffs, indirect taxes, extension of the police power, increase in naval and military expenditure, and colonial exploitation. They took no part at first in law-making, held themselves disdainfully aloof from practical parliamentary efforts, and especially avoided every appearance of coalition with other parties. But gradually a change came over them. In 1895 they nominated one of their number for secretary of the Reichstag.[23] Gingerly they dipped their fingers into the pottage of reality. Soon they began to introduce bills. In 1901 they proposed a measure that increased the allowance of the private soldier. Their bill became a law. In the next national convention, when they were called to task for their worldliness, they excused themselves by saying that ninety per cent. of the private soldiers were proletarians and their parents were too poor to supply them with the money necessary for army sundries, and the allowance of the state had been inadequate. This was therefore a law that actually benefited the poor. In 1906 and 1908 they were compelled to face the practical question of an inheritance tax. The delegation supported the measure, after prolonged deliberation over what action to take. This action precipitated a heated discussion in the party congress; the veterans feared the party was surrendering its principles. They were assured by Bebel that the vote was orthodox.[24] In 1906 the party instructed its delegation to introduce bills for redistricting the empire for Reichstag elections; to reduce the legislative period from five to three years; to revise the laws relating to sailors and provide for better inspection of ships and shipping. These instructions mark a revolution in German Social Democracy, a change that can best be illustrated by the shift in its attitude on state insurance. In 1892 the party resolved: "So-called state Socialism, in so far as it concerns itself with bettering the conditions of the working people, is a system of half-reforms whose origin is in the fear of Social Democracy. It aims, through all kinds of palliatives and little concessions, to estrange the working people from Social Democracy and to cripple the party. "The Social Democracy have never disdained to ask for such governmental regulations, or, if proposed by the opposition, to approve of those measures which could better the conditions of labor under the present industrial system. But Social Democrats view such regulations as only little payments on account, which in nowise confuse the Social Democracy in its striving for a new organization of society."[25] They are now not above collecting even small sums on account. In 1910 their convention declares that state insurance is "the object of constant agitation. For what we have thus far secured by no means approaches what the laborer demands."[26] The committee on parliamentary action reported, a few years ago, that "no opportunity was lost for entering the lists in behalf of political and cultural progress. In the discussion of all bills and other business matters, the members of the delegation took an active part in committee as well as in _plenum_."[27] There is no longer half-abashed juvenile reluctance at legislative participation. The reports boast of the work done by the party in behalf of the workingman, the peasant, small tradesman, small farmer, and humbler government employees. Eleven bills were introduced by the delegation in 1909-10, relating to factory and mine inspection, amending the state insurance laws, the tariff laws, the redistricting of the empire for Reichstag elections--i.e., all pertaining to labor, politics, and finance. Twenty resolutions were moved by the delegation, and many interpellations called. Interpellation, however, is not very satisfactory in a government where the ministry is not responsible to parliament. In 1909 the Social Democrats introduced a bill to make the Chancellor and his cabinet responsible to the Reichstag. Ledebour, who made the leading speech for the Social Democrats, gave a clear exposition of his party's contention. He wanted a government "wherein the people, in the final analysis, decided the fate of the government. For, in such a government, only those men come into power who represent a program, represent conviction and character; not any one who has succeeded, for the moment, in pleasing the fancy and becoming the favorite of the determining kamarilla." If the election should turn on this issue, "whether there shall be a perpetuation of the sham-constitutional, junker bureaucracy, or the establishing of a democratic parliamentary authority," the parliamentary party would win. "The will of the people should be the highest law."[28] In January, 1912, this party of isolation entered the Reichstag as the strongest group: 110 members acknowledge the leadership of Bebel. By co-operating with the Radicals and National Liberals, the progressive elements had a majority over the Conservative and Clerical reactionaries for the first time in the history of the empire. Here Bebel consented to become a candidate for president of the Chamber. He received 175 votes; the candidate of the Conservatives, Dr. Spahn, leader of the Clerical Center, received 196. Enough National Liberals had wavered to throw the balance in favor of Conservatism. A Socialist was elected first vice-president, and a National Liberal second vice-president. The President-elect refused to act with a Socialist vice-president and resigned. The Radical member from Berlin, Herr Kaempf, was then elected President.[29] Thereupon the National Liberal second vice-president also resigned, and a Radical was chosen in his stead. The Social Democrats and the Radicals were made responsible for the leadership of the new Reichstag. It is customary for the President and the vice-president of the Chamber to announce to the Kaiser when the Reichstag is organized and ready for business. The Kaiser let it be known that he did not care to receive the Radical officers. The Socialist first vice-president refused to join in the proposed official visit. The Prussian temper is slow to change. These illustrations clearly indicate the trend of Social Democratic legislative and political policy. It is the universal story--ambition brings power, power brings responsibility, responsibility sobers the senses. V The second development that we are to trace relates to the program, or platform, of the party. The official program has not undergone any change, but the interpretation, the spirit, has mellowed. The Erfurter program of 1891 is still their party pledge. The program is in two parts; the first an elaborate exposition of Marxian economics, the second a series of practical demands differing only slightly from the Gotha program. Only one speech was made in the national convention on the adoption of this bifurcated platform, that attempted to link Marxian theory to Lassallian realism. This speech was made by Liebknecht, friend of Marx, who elaborately explained his friend's theory of value, doctrine of class war and social evolution. The program was adopted _en bloc_. The chairman ignored a few protesting "noes" when the vote was called, and declared it unanimously adopted. These few voices of protest soon swelled to considerable volume. Within one year after the repeal of the Socialist law the party had entered upon the difficult task of being both critic and parliamentarian, constructive and destructive, under rigid military discipline. To the few protesters at Erfurt, it seemed as though the party had entered the lifeboat, manned the oars, and neglected to untie the painter. When the elections of 1897 recorded a severe setback for the party the progressives were told to keep the eyes of faith on the "ultimate goal" of Socialism. One of the réformistes replied: "The whole idea of an ultimate goal is distasteful to me. There is no ultimate goal; for beyond your ultimate goal is another world of striving."[30] And another critic said: "Nothing wears threadbare so rapidly by constant use as words of faith. Constantly spoken or heard, they become stereotyped into phrases, and the inspired prophet creates the same offensive impression as a priest who has nothing else to offer but words." The interest of the workingman "finds its expression in the practicalness of the second part of the Erfurter program, and the wholly practical work of the party."[31] It was at this time that Edward Bernstein, friend and literary heir of Engel, published a series of critical papers in the party journal, _Die Neue Zeit_, attacking especially the catastrophic and revolutionary postulates and saying "the movement is everything, the goal is nothing." Kautsky, the dogmatist of the party, replied to these articles and a feverish discussion followed in all the party press.[32] In the party conventions of 1898 and 1899 this controversy was waged with considerable energy. Von Vollmar made merry over Kautsky's "inquisition" and called the debate "a noisy cackling over nothing." The mass of the party, he said, did not trouble their heads about theories, but plodded along unmindful of hairsplitting.[33] Bebel made a herculean effort to reconcile both elements. To the revisionists he said, "We are in a constant state of intellectual moulting,"[34] to the orthodox he said, "We remain what we have always been."[35] It was at Dresden, 1903, that the revisionist tempest reached its height in the party teapot. The Germans' love for polysyllabic phrase-making, for which Jaurès taunted them at the Amsterdam congress, was here given full play. Von Vollmar repeated that nobody except a few dull theorists read Kautsky's or Bernstein's views; the mass of voters cared for practical results, and "revisionists and anti-revisionists are nothing but a bugbear."[36] Here the matter rested until the elections of 1907 opened the eyes of the party high priests. They gained only 248,249 votes and lost one-half of their seats in the Reichstag. A number of the leading Socialists promptly began to attack the dogmas of the party program as illusions and pitfalls. The class war, the revolutionary method, the theory of an ever-increasing proletariat and decreasing bourgeoisie were attacked as unscientific, and illusory. "The Erfurt program recites a vagary, it repels the intellect, it must be changed;" that was the opinion of the advanced thinkers of the party. No party congresses, no priestly pronunciamentos have been able to check the spread of revolt. As long as Kautsky and Bebel live the program will probably not be re-phrased. But even Kautsky is mellowing under the ripeness of years and circumstances; and Bebel, shrewd politician, knows the campaigning value of appearing at the same time orthodox and progressive.[37] To-day one hears very little of Marx and a great deal of legislation. The last election, with its brilliant victory for Social Democracy, was not won on the general issues of the Erfurter program but on the particular issue of the arrogance of the bureaucracy, and ballot reform. A large mass of voters cast their ballots for Social Democratic candidates as a protest against existing governmental conditions, not as an affirmation of their assent to the Marxian dogmas. The truth is, Marx is a tradition, democracy is an issue.[38] Another indication of the notable changes that have come over Social Democracy is seen in the Socialists' relation to other parties. Here their dogmatic aloofness is the most tenacious. During the years of their bitter persecution by the government they found their excuse in an isolation that was forced upon them. Von Vollmar told his colleagues, immediately after the repeal of the anti-Socialist law, that the South Germans were ready to co-operate with every one who would be willing to give them an inch. In reply to this Bebel introduced a resolution affirming that "the primary necessity of attaining political power" could not be "the work of a moment," but was attained only by gradual growth. During the period of growth the Social Democrats should not work for mere "concessions from the ruling classes," but "have only the ultimate and complete aim of the party in mind." The Bebelian theory linked the ultimate goal with ultimate power, both to be attained by waiting until the flood tide. This question became practical when the Social Democratic members of the provincial legislatures voted with other parties for the state budget. The national party claimed authority over the local party, a claim which was resented by the Bavarians and other South German delegations.[39] In 1894 the South Germans were chastised by a vote of 164 to 64 for voting for their state budget. They were rebuked again in 1901 and in 1908. In the latter year Bebel told them "three times is enough," indicating that there would be a split in the party if they insisted on voting for their local budgets. The South Germans defended their action by saying that they had always agitated for more pay for state employees, and that they were willing to vote the funds that would make this possible. A new champion appeared for the réformistes--Dr. Frank of Mannheim, a brilliant speaker who is called by his following a "second Lassalle." He made a withering attack on the Marxian school, but Bebel's censure was carried by 256 to 119. Finally at Magdeburg, 1910, the budget question reached its climax. Bebel boasted that his policy of negation had wrought great changes in Germany. "I say it without boasting, in the whole world there is no Social Democracy that has accomplished as much positive good as the German Social Democracy."[40] He claimed the insurance laws, factory laws, and the repeal of special and oppressive legislation as the fruits of his policy. Bebel then warned the Badensians that this is the last time they will be forgiven; one other offense, and they will be put out of the party. Dr. Frank made an elaborate reply. He said that there was a working agreement between the Social Democrats and Liberals whereby they co-operated against the Conservatives. In the state legislature they had a "bloc" with the Liberals and had elected a vice-president and secretary and important chairmanships by means of this coalition. They had, moreover, reformed the public school system, secured factory legislation, and had secured direct elections in all towns of 4,000 or over. The réformistes' principles are so clearly stated in this speech that I quote several paragraphs: "I tell you, comrades, if you think that under all the circumstances you can win only small concessions; with such a message of hopelessness you will not conquer the world, not even the smallest election district. [_Great commotion and disturbance._] But what would be the meaning of this admission that small concessions can be secured? In tearing down a building dramatic effects are possible. But the erection of a building is accomplished only by an accumulation of small concessions. Behold the labor unions, that are so often spoken of, how they struggle for months, how they suffer hunger for months, in order to win a concession of a few pennies. Often one can see that a small concession contains enormous future possibilities, and in twenty or thirty years will become a vital force in the shaping of the society that is to come." "Nor will I examine the question whether in parliamentary activity only small concessions can be won. Is it not possible, through parliamentary action, to take high tariffs and business speculations from the necks of the workingmen? Is it not possible to modify police administration, and the legislative conditions that profane Prussia to-day? Are these conditions necessary concomitants of the modern class-state (Klassenstaat)? Is it not possible to create out of Prussia and Germany a modern state, where our workingmen, even as their brethren in Western Europe, can fight their great battles upon the field of democratic equality and citizenship? If you wish to view all that as 'small concessions' you are at liberty to do so. I view it as a tremendous revolution, if it succeeds, to secure, through such a struggle, liberty for the Prussian working class."[41] The censure was carried, the Baden delegation left the hall during the voting. On the following day it returned to declare its loyalty to the party, but with the proviso that they would by no means promise how they would vote on their state budget in the future. Events are shaping themselves rapidly in Germany. Ministerial responsibility cannot much longer be denied. The elections of 1912 should serve as a plain portent to the reactionaries. That Bebel is willing to be a candidate for President of the Reichstag is a significant concession; that the Radicals and many National Liberals are willing to vote for him, would have been deemed impossible ten years ago. Such conditions as prevail between the government and the Radicals and Social Democrats cannot long continue. The break with the past must come, sooner or later. The pressure of Radical and Democratic votes will become so powerful, that not even the strong traditions of the empire can wholly withstand it. In May, 1911, I visited the Reichstag on an eventful occasion. The Social Democrats had voted with the government for a new Constitution for Alsace-Lorraine containing universal manhood suffrage. Herr Bebel was jubilant. He said: "It marks a new epoch. We have voted with the government. Not that we have capitulated. But the government have come to our convictions, they have granted universal suffrage to Alsace, now they cannot long deny that right to Prussia and the other states."[42] We have now seen that politically a great change has come over the German Socialists; that they are participating in legislation, and are especially solicitous about all acts that pertain to labor and political liberty; that they are gradually moving toward co-operation with other parties; that they are gradually sloughing off the inflexible Marxian armor, and are assuming the pliable dress of modernism. All this is to be expected of a party that began as a vigorous, narrow, autocratic party of revolution and protest, and is emerging from its hard experiences, a self-styled "cultural party" ("Kultur Partei"). Dr. Südekum, editor of Communal Praxis, in his report of the parliamentary group, in 1907, wrote: "We have in the Reichstag two kinds of duties; first, the propaganda of our ideas and program; second, practical work, i.e., to enhance, not alone the interests of the working class, but the entire complex, so-called cultural interests. The problems that the Social Democratic party as a 'cultural party' has to solve, which are assigned to it as the representative of cultural progress in every realm of human activity, must increase in the same proportion that the bourgeois parties allow themselves to be captured by the government and neglect these problems."[43] It is a far cry from "class war" to "human cultural activities." Such an expansion of purpose requires a greatly enlarged electorate. The majority of the workingmen are already in the party, where will the increase come from? There are two directions in which the party can hope to gain new recruits--the small farmer and the small tradesman. The small farmer is peculiarly hard to reach. He is well guarded--the Church on the one side, the landlord and _junker_ on the other. To step in and steal his heart is a very difficult task. The work is pushed steadily, with tenacity, but results are slow in coming. Among the tradespeople and business men, there is more rapid progress, especially in southern Germany. In Munich a great many tradespeople vote for Von Vollmar.[44] Primarily it will always be a workingman's party. Its soul is the labor movement. Its political aim is democracy, and its hope is the power of sheer preponderance of numbers. What it will do when it has that power is a speculation that does not lure the prosaic Teutonic mind. "We will find plenty to do," one of them said, "when we have the government. We have plenty to do now, that we haven't the government." This is wisdom learned of France. This means that the party have given up their "splendid isolation"--what Von Vollmar called their "policy of sterility and despair"[45]--a policy which they acknowledged by words long after they had abandoned it in fact. They abandoned it the moment they championed labor legislation, and sought the sanitation of cities and the opening of parks, in their municipal councils. The pressure of things as they are has been too powerful for even the German Social Democracy, with its dogmatic temper and strength of millions. Revolution has, even here, been replaced by a slow and orderly development. The rapidity with which the medieval empire will be democratized will depend upon the formation of a genuine liberal party that will enlist those citizens who are inclined toward modernism but cannot be enticed into the Social Democratic or Radical parties. When such a party is formed, and an alliance made with the Social Democrats, then the transformations will be rapid.[46] Among the most significant accessions to the Social Democracy are many professional men: lawyers, physicians, engineers, etc. This augurs a change in party spirit and method. Dr. Frank of Mannheim told me that he considered the extent to which the party could lure the intellectual element the measure of the party greatness and power. VI A word should be added upon the attitude of the Social Democrats toward militarism. The standing army and the increasing navy of Germany are a heavy tax upon the people. The Germans for centuries have been military in ambition, soldiers by instinct. The Social Democrats, in common with all Socialists, are opposed to war. But the German is a patriot. In the International Congress at Stuttgart, the French and Russian delegations imposed an extreme anti-military resolution upon the Socialists, against the protest of the Germans. Bebel called their anti-patriotic utterances "silly word-juggling."[47] The Berlin congress, 1892, adopted the following resolution, in view of the added military burdens proposed by the Reichstag: "The prevailing military system, not being able to guarantee the country against foreign invasion, is a continual threat to international peace and serves the capitalistic class-government, whose aim is the industrial exploitation and suppression of the working classes, as an instrument of oppression against the masses. "The party convention therefore demands, in consonance with the program of the Social Democratic platform, the establishment of a system of defense based upon a general militia, trained and armed. The congress declares that the Social Democratic members of the Reichstag are in complete accord with the party and with the politically organized working classes of Germany, when they vote against every measure of the government aimed at perpetuating the present military system."[48] During a debate in the Reichstag in 1907, Bebel declared, in the defense of the Fatherland, _if it were invaded_, even he in his old age would "shoulder a musket." He demanded military drill for youths as a preliminary to the shortening of military service in the standing army; if this were not done the defense of the country would be weakened whenever the service shall be reduced to one year. The Chancellor had on this occasion introduced a bill making all military service uniformly two years, and abolishing the privileges that had been granted to a few favored classes. For this action they were severely criticised in the next party convention. Bebel replied: "I said, _if the Fatherland really must be defended_, then we will defend it. Because it is our Fatherland. It is the land in which we live, whose language we speak, whose culture we possess. Because we wish to make this, our Fatherland, more beautiful and more complete than any other land on earth. We defend it, therefore, not for you but against you."[49] This patriotic declamation was received with "tremendous applause." Von Vollmar, himself a soldier of distinction, said, in the Bavarian Diet, a few years ago: "If the necessity should arise for the protection of the realm against foreign invasion, then it will become evident that the Social Democrats love their Fatherland no less than do their neighbors; that they will as gladly and heroically offer themselves to its defense. On the other hand, if the foolish notion should ever arise to use the army for the support of a warring class prerogative, for the defense of indefeasible demands, and for the crushing of those just ambitions which are the product of our times, and a necessary concomitant of our economic and political development,--then we are of the firm conviction that the day will come when the army will remember that it sprang from the people, and that its own interests are those of the masses." This makes their position very clear. VII The party that for years held itself in disdainful aloofness, was so defiant of co-operation, in the national parliament, is ductile, neighborly, and eager to help in the municipal and communal councils. It has a communal program of practical details, and no small part of the splendid progress in municipal administration in Germany is due to the Social Democrats. Everywhere you hear praise from officials and from political rivals for the careful work of the Social Democratic members of municipal bodies. Owing to the unfavorable election laws, the Social Democrats do not elect a large number of members to local councils. In no important city do they preponderate. If universal manhood suffrage were enacted, they would control the majority of the local legislative bodies. As it is, they are an active minority, and guard jealously the interests of the working classes. Munich may be taken as the type of city in which the Social Democrats are active.[50] In 1907 there were 130,000 qualified electors for the Reichstag election in Munich, in 1905 there were only 31,252 qualified electors for the municipal elections. This shows the restrictive influence of property qualifications for local elections. In a city council of 60 members, the Social Democrats elected only 9. And of 20 elected members of the chamber of magistrates they elected only 3. This minority is an active committee of scrutiny. It carefully and minutely scrutinizes all the acts of the municipal authorities, especially pertaining to labor, to contracts for public work, and to the conditions of city employees. They vote consistently in favor of the enlargement of municipal powers; e.g., the extension of parks, of street-car lines, the building of larger markets. For a number of years the Social Democrats of Munich have urged the utilizing of the water power of the Isar, which rushes through the city. And the municipality is now utilizing some of this power. The Social Democrats also favor every facility for the extension of the art and culture for which Munich is justly celebrated. They take no narrow, provincial views of such questions, and set an example that might with profit be followed by parties who claim for themselves the prerogative of culture. They are constantly working for better public educational facilities, and are especially hostile to the encroachments of the Church upon the domain of public education. They are in favor of increased public expenditures; opposed to all indirect taxes, especially those that tend to raise the price of food. Their special grievance is the property qualification required for voting. They say that a law which allows only one-fifteenth of the citizens (30,000 out of over 500,000) a right to vote is "shameful," and they are bending every effort to change the law. What is true in Munich is true in other cities: democratic election laws are denied them. But they are active everywhere, and do not despise the doing of small details, doing them well and with zest. It is obvious that Socialism in Germany cannot be put to a constructive test until the election laws are democratized and the higher administrative offices are opened to them. That will bring the real test of this colossal movement. * * * * * We may sum it all up by saying that Social Democracy in Germany is first of all a struggle for democracy. The accent is on the second part of the compound. It is, secondly, a struggle for the self-betterment of the working classes; and it is, thirdly, a protest against certain conditions that the present organization of society imposes upon mankind. An American sojourning among the German people must be impressed with the painstaking organization of the empire. Every detail of life is carefully ordered to avoid waste and to secure efficiency, even at the cost of individual initiative. This military empire, of infinite discipline, is now undergoing a political metamorphosis. The force that is bringing about the change is being generated at the bottom of the social strata, not at the top. This signifies that a change is sure to come. FOOTNOTES: [1] See MEYER, _Emancipations-Kampf des Vierten Standes_, Chap. V; also J. SCHMOELE, _Die Sozial-Demokratische Gewerkschaften in Deutschland, seit dem Erlasse des Sozialistischen Gesetzes_, Jena, 1896, et seq. [2] The following table compiled from _Statistisches Jahrbuch_ shows their growth in recent years: Year Members 1902 733,206 1903 887,698 1904 1,052,108 1905 1,344,803 1906 1,689,709 1907 1,865,506 1908 1,831,731 1909 1,892,568 In 1909 their income was 50,529,114 marks, their expenditure 46,264,031 marks. See Appendix, p. 295, for membership of all the unions. [3] When I visited the Berlin _Gewerkschaftshaus_, a model three-room dwelling--living room, kitchen, and bedroom--had been furnished and decorated in simple, durable, and artistic fashion. This exhibit was thronged with workingmen, their wives and daughters. Some years ago it was discovered that the youth of the working people were reading cheap and unworthy literature. The Central Committee of the Unions now issues cheap editions of the choicest literature for children and young people. These two incidents show the vigilance of the unions, in looking after all the wants of their people. [4] The number of strikes in recent years are given as follows: 1902, 1,106; 1903, 1,444; 1904, 1,990; 1905, 2,657; 1906, 3,626; 1907, 2,512; 1908, 1,524.--From _Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich_. [5] _Protokoll: Sozial-Demokratische Partei-Tag_, 1908, p. 14. [6] See Bebel, _Gewerksbewegung und Politische Parteien_: Preface. [7] See _Protokoll des Partei-Tages_, 1890, pp. 156-7. [8] "_Genossen_": the word really means "brethren." [9] Party membership has grown as follows: 1906, 384,527; 1907, 530,466; 1908, 587,336; 1909, 633,309; 1910, 720,038; 1911, 836,562. [10] _Bericht des Partei-Vorstandes_, 1909-10. [11] See Appendix, p. 296, for complete election returns. [12] _Bericht des Partei-Vorstandes_, 1909-10. [13] In 1891-2 the "Berliner Opposition" threatened a revolt. They were given every opportunity of explaining their grievances, were told what to do, and, disobeying, were promptly shown the door. [14] "It has been truthfully said that in Germany a Social Democrat cannot even become a night-watchman."--PROF. BERNHARD HARMS (University of Kiel), _Ferdinand Lassalle und Seine Bedeutung für die Sozial-Demokratie_, 1909, p. 103. [15] "Do you enjoy freedom from political interference?" I asked a high official in the civil service. "Absolutely. We think as we please, talk as we please, and do as we please. But we must let the Social Democrats alone." [16] See Appendix, p. 293, for synopsis of this law. [17] The vote for the Saxon legislature at this time was as follows: Party Voters Votes Social Democrats 341,396 492,522 Conservatives 103,517 281,804 National Liberal 125,157 236,541 Independents (Freisinnige) 41,857 100,804 Anti-Semites 20,248 55,502 The Social Democrats included over one-half of the voters, cast about one-third of the votes, and elected only one-fourth of the members. [18] Some curious instances of inequality appear in the cities. In Berlin in one precinct one man paid one-third of the taxes and consequently possessed one-third of the legislative influence in that precinct. In another precinct the president of a large bank paid one-third of the taxes, and two of his associates paid another third. These three men named the member of the Diet from that precinct. [19] For the struggle for ballot reform in Bavaria, see _Der Kampf um die Wahlreform in Bayern_, issued in 1905 by the Bavarian Social Democratic Party Executive Committee. [20] February 13, 1910, was set aside as a day for suffrage demonstration throughout the empire. In Berlin alone forty-two meetings were announced. These provoked the following edict: "Notice! The 'right to the streets' is hereby proclaimed. The streets serve primarily for traffic. Resistance to state authority will be met by the force of arms. I warn the curious. Berlin, February 13, 1910. Police-president, VON IAGOW." The Social Democratic papers called attention to the fact that these notices were printed on the same forms that the Police-president often used to announce that the streets would be closed to all traffic on account of military parades. [21] _Protokoll_, 1890, pp. 119-120. [22] _Protokoll_, 1890, pp. 96-7. [23] There are eight secretaries elected. They are distributed, by custom, among the parties, according to their voting strength. The Social Democrats had always refrained from taking part in any of the elections; now they enter the lists, abstaining from voting for any candidate except their own--who, in turn, received no other votes. [24] Bebel was not present in the Reichstag at the time this vote was taken, but he told the convention that, had he been present, he should have supported the Tax Bill. _Protokoll_, 1908, p. 364. [25] _Protokoll_, 1892, p. 173. [26] _Protokoll_, 1910, p. 469. [27] _Protokoll_, 1910, p. 95. [28] Reichstag Debates, December 2, 1908. [29] In the election of January, 1912, the Social Democrats carried every district in Berlin excepting the one in which the Kaiser's palace is situated. Here a spirited contest took place. A second ballot was made necessary between the Radicals and Social Democrats, and the Conservatives, throwing all their forces on to the Radical side, succeeded in keeping this last stronghold from their enemies. But Herr Kaempf's majority was only 6 votes. [30] _Protokoll_, 1898, p. 89. [31] _Supra cit._, p. 90. [32] This controversy is known as the "revisionist movement." The revisionists' position is set forth in Bernstein's book, _Die Voraussetzung des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozial-Demokratie_. The Marxian position is set forth in Kautsky's reply, _Bernstein und die Sozial-Demokratie_. An English edition of Bernstein's book has been published in the Labor Party series in London. [33] _Protokoll_, 1899. [34] _Supra cit._, p. 94. [35] _Supra cit._, p. 127. [36] _Protokoll_, 1903, pp. 321-45. [37] In the congress of 1907 Bebel tried to dispel the gloom by a long and optimistic speech in which he declared that their success was not to be measured by the number of seats they won, but by the number of voters. He closed by saying, "We are the coming ones, ours is the future in spite of all things and everything."--_Protokoll_, 1907, p. 323. [38] One of the veteran party leaders answered my question as to the present-day influence of Marx as follows: "The bulk of our party have never read Marx. It takes a well-trained mind to understand him. Conditions have entirely changed since his day, and we are busy with questions of which Marx never dreamed and of which he could not foretell. He laid the philosophical basis for our party, but our party is practical, not philosophical." [39] In 1900 Bebel proposed the necessity of a working coalition with other parties in Prussia to gain electoral reform. He said: "We cannot stand alone. We must attempt to go hand in hand with certain elements in the bourgeois parties--without, however, endangering our identity." But the party was not willing to go as far as the veteran, and a resolution was adopted limiting such co-operation strictly to Prussia and giving the central committee full power to veto the acts any electoral district might take in this direction. [40] _Protokoll_, 1910, p. 249. [41] _Protokoll_, 1910, p. 272. [42] In November, 1911, Berlin's new city hall was dedicated. The members of the city council were invited to be present. The Social Democrats cast a large majority of all the votes in Berlin. But the Social Democrats refused to attend the ceremonies. The program, as published, called for a "Hoch!" to the Kaiser, and the Social Democrats never joined in public approval of the government. _Vorwärts_, the leading Social Democratic daily, said that Social Democrats have nothing to do with such a display of "Byzantinism." "If any one thought it necessary to shout 'Hoch!' he could shout 'Hoch!' to the working population of Berlin." [43] _Protokoll_, 1907, pp. 227-8. [44] Amongst the business people of Mannheim, Munich, and other cities in Baden, Bavaria, and Hesse, there are many who support the Social Democratic candidates, because, they say, there is no genuinely liberal party. It should, however, be borne in mind that the Social Democrats of these southern districts are liberal and progressive, not the unbending, orthodox variety of Prussia. [45] VON VOLLMAR, _Über die Aufgaben der Deutschen Social-Demokratie_. [46] The _Hansa Bund_ (Hanseatic League), organized a few years ago, may be the nucleus of such a party. It is composed of smaller manufacturers and business men opposed to tariffs and the trusts, and in favor of a more liberal government. [47] _Protokoll_, Social Democratic Party, 1907, p. 228. [48] _Protokoll_, 1892, p. 132. [49] _Protokoll_, 1907, p. 255. [50] See _Die Sozial-Demokratie im Münchener Rathaus_, issued by the Bavarian party executive committee, 1908. Also _Die Sozial-Demokratie im Bayerischen Landtag, 1888-1905_, 3 vols., issued by the Party Press in Munich; and E. AUER, _Arbeiterpolitik im Bayerischen Landtag_. CHAPTER IX THE ENGLISH LABOR PARTY I We come now to the land of the industrial revolution--that colossal upheaval which changed the face of society, as the vast continental uplifts of past geological epochs changed the face of the earth. And just as the continents were centuries in settling themselves to their new conditions, so human society is now slowly adjusting itself to the conditions wrought by this violent change. One of the evidences of this gradual readjustment is Socialism. For to Socialism machine industry is a condition precedent. In this sense England has produced modern Socialism. There is no blacker picture than the England of 1780 to 1840, and no drearier contrast than the quaint villages and their household industries of the earlier period and the "spreading of the hideous town," after Arkwright and Hargreaves and Watt. These inhuman conditions are faithfully and dispassionately revealed in the reports of the various Royal Commissions of Inquiry: statistical mines where Marx and Engels found abundant material for their philosophy of gloom. And from these dull and depressing government folios Charles Kingsley drew his indignant invectives, and Carlyle his trenchant indictments against a society that would imprison its eight-year-old children, its mothers, and its grandmothers in dingy factories fourteen hours a day for the sake of profits, and then release them at night only to find lodgings in the most miserable hovels and rickety tenements. It is almost surprising to one familiar with the details of this gruesome record that a social revolution did not follow immediately in the wake of the industrial revolution. There were riots at first, and machines were smashed. But the hand of the worker was impotent against the arm of steel. The workman soon resigned himself to his fate and his misery. The poor laws did not help, they only multiplied the burdens upon the state without taking the load from the poor. The laborer was too helpless to help himself, and the state and society were apathetic. The rapid expansion of industry found an ample outlet in the growing commerce to every corner of the world. England was making money. She was gradually shifting control from the traditional landowner to the new factory owner. The landed gentry had inherited a fine sense of patriarchal responsibility. The factory owner had no traditions. He was a parvenu. His interests were machinery and ships, not politics and humanity. He acquiesced in the poor laws as the easiest way out of a miserable mess; he let private charity take its feeble and intermittent course, paying his rates and giving his donations with self-satisfied sanctity. All this time labor was abundant. The markets of the world were hungry for the goods of English mills. Then came suddenly the Chartist Movement.[1] The flame of discontent spread and a revolution seemed impending. This first great outbreak of English labor was a political movement, fed by economic causes. The repeal of the corn laws and the passage of the factory acts modified economic conditions and mollified labor for the time. The repeal of the corn laws brought cheaper food; the factory acts brought better conditions of labor. Meanwhile individualism was evolving an economic creed. The Manchester doctrine was the logical outcome of England's insular position and her driving individualistic manufactures. But it was _laissez-faire_ in industrialism, not in unionism. The laboring men were now beginning to organize, and Cobden himself proposed the act that made unionism ineffective as a political force. However, indirectly, free trade stimulated labor, because it brought great prosperity, made work abundant, and employers sanguine. Unions now rapidly multiplied, but they were local, isolated. Their federation into a great national body came later. Socialism, or unionism, or any other general movement cannot develop in England with the rapidity and enthusiasm that is shown for "movements" on the Continent. The traditions of the English people are constitutional. Socialism can thrive among them only if it is "constitutional," and the Fabians are to-day talking about "constitutional Socialism" with judicial solemnity. All the training of the English people is contrary to the theory of progress through violence. They have had few revolutions accompanied by bloodshed, they have had a great many accompanied by prayers and Parliamentary oratory--"constitutional" methods. They have, moreover, a real reverence for property. The poor who have none are taught to respect the rich who have. The Church, the common law, the statute law, the customs, all the sources of tradition and habit, have emphasized the sanctity of property. Only within the last few decades, as will be seen presently, has a radical change, a veritable revolution, come over the people in this respect. The British temperament is not given to nerves. This stolid, phlegmatic, self-contained individualist has no inflammable material in his heart. Ruskin failed to arouse him, he wove too much artistry into his appeal; and Carlyle could not move him, his epigrams were too rhapsodical. Such temperaments are not given to rapid propagandism. And finally, the Englishman is too practical to be a utopist. He concerns himself with the duties of to-day rather than the vagaries of to-morrow. Utopianism made no impression on him. Owen, the great Utopian, was a Welshman. The Celt has imagination. Nor do intricate theories or involved philosophies touch the mind of the Briton. The splendor that enraptures the Frenchman, the abstruse reasoning that delights the German, are alike boredom to this practical inventor of machinery and builder of ships. In spite of these characteristics there is no country in Europe where there is more agitation about Socialism than there is in England to-day. It is discussed everywhere. Almost the entire time of Parliament during the past few years has been taken up with more or less "Socialistic" legislation. The public mind is steeped in it. There is more actually being done in England toward the "socialization" of property, and the state, than in any other European country. And less being said about the theory of value, the class war, capitalistic production, proletariat and bourgeois, and the other Continental pet phrases of Socialism. Marx, who lived among the English for many years, but whose heart was never with them, would not call this rapid social movement Socialistic, because it does not avowedly "aim" at "socializing capitalistic production." The doings of the English are certainly not accomplished in the spirit of his orthodoxy. But the current toward state control, toward pure democracy, land nationalization, nationalization of railways and mines, has set in with the swiftness of a mill-race and is grinding grist with an amazing rapidity. As I write these words, London and the whole country are wrought up over Lloyd George's Insurance Bill and the projected ballot reform bill. Meetings everywhere, fervid Parliamentary debate, the papers filled with letters from everybody; every organization, debating society, and board of directors of great industries passing resolutions. Even the Labor Party is divided over the paternalistic measure that aims to bring relief to the sick and disabled working man and woman. Amidst all this discussion, noise, and party zeal is discerned the drift of the nation toward a new and unexpected goal. Nowhere is it so difficult to define a Socialist, or to mark boundaries to the movement. But why mark shore-lines? The flood is on. I will here take the position that whatever extends the functions of the state (community) over property, or into activities formerly left to individuals or to the home, is an indication of the Socialistic trend. Old-fashioned Socialists like Keir Hardie are constantly warning the people that what is now going on in England is only social reform, not Socialism. The Fabians, on the other hand, are exerting every effort to add to the swiftness of the present movement. To a student of democracy things now passing into law, and events now shaping into history, in England, are of peculiar significance. Such events, transpiring in a country so long abandoned to a rampant individualism, are portents of a newer time. They are signals of approaching changes to America, to us who have inherited the common law, the governmental traditions, the democratic ideals of liberty, if not the substantial stolidity of temperament and self-complacent egoism of the Briton. All parties, Socialists and Conservatives, will admit this: that all this turmoil, these rapidly succeeding general elections, these public discussions, these new laws, indicate that a new social ideal is being formed. That in itself is worthy of consideration. For the ideal will shape the destiny. II Present-day Socialism in England seems to have risen to sudden magnitude from vacuity, to have permeated this cautious island over night. For over a generation all Socialism had disappeared from view. The elaborate schemes of Owen, the altruistic propaganda under the gentle Kingsley and his noble companion Maurice, the artistic revolt against the ugliness of commercialism led by Ruskin, who even shared the toil of the breakers of stones to prove his sincerity--all these movements seem suddenly to have disappeared from the face of the island, like a glacial current dropping suddenly, without warning, into the depths of the Moulin. England was given over to a highly prosperous industrialism. The Manchester doctrine was enthroned. Commercialism and a glittering pseudo-humanitarian internationalism found expression in the alternating victories of the astute Disraeli and the grandiloquent Gladstone. Meanwhile poverty and misery infested the underplaces of the land, a poverty and misery that was appalling. Every protester was proudly pointed to the repeal of the corn laws, the revision of the poor laws, the reform act of 1832, and the factory acts. When Sir Henry Vane had ascended the scaffold which his sacrifice made historic, he said: "The people of England have long been asleep; when they awake they will be hungry." When the England of to-day awoke it was to a greater hunger than the politically starved Roundhead or Cavalier ever endured. It is no figure of speech to speak of hungry England. Its brilliant industrialism has always had a drab background of want. Chiozza Money says of the present position of labor: "The aggregate income of the 44,500,000 people in the United Kingdom in 1908-9 was approximately £1,844,000,000; 1,400,000 persons took £634,000,000; 4,100,000 persons took £275,000,000; 39,000,000 persons took £935,000,000."[2] And he sums up the condition as follows: "The position of the manual workers in relation to the general wealth of the country has not improved. They formed, with those dependent upon them, the greater part of the nation in 1867, and they enjoyed but about forty per cent. of the national income, according to the careful estimate of Dudley Baxter. To-day, with their army of dependents, they still form the greater part of the nation, although not quite so great a part, and, according to the best information available, they take less than forty per cent. of the entire income of the nation." Although during this time the national income had increased much faster than the rate of population, "the Board of Trade, after a careful examination of the question of unemployment in 1904, arrived at the general conclusion that 'the average level of employment during the last 4 years has been almost exactly the same as the average of the preceding 40 years.'"[3] While the general level of wage-earners has been maintained, and while wealth has greatly increased, the poverty of the kingdom has shown little tendency to diminish. "As for pauperism, it is difficult to congratulate ourselves upon improvement since 1867, when we remember that in England and Wales alone 1,500,000 to 2,000,000 persons are in receipt of relief in the course of a single year. This means _one person in every 20_ has recourse to the poor-law guardians during a single year." "If our national income had but increased at the same rate as our population since 1867, it would in 1908 have amounted to but about £1,200,000,000. As we have seen, it is now about £1,840,000,000. Yet the Error in Distribution remains so great, that, while the total population in 1867 was 30,000,000, we have to-day a nation of 30,000,000 poor people in our rich country, and many millions of these are living under conditions of degrading poverty. Of those above the line of primary poverty, millions are tied down by the conditions of their labor to live in surroundings which preclude the proper enjoyment of life or the proper raising of children."[4] An event occurred in 1889 that aroused public opinion on the question of labor conditions. The dockers along the great wharves in London went out on strike, and forced public attention upon the misery of these most wretched of British workmen,[5] whose wages were so low that they could not buy bread for their families and their employment was so irregular that they were idle half of the time. John Burns came into prominence first during this strike. He raised over $200,000 by public appeals to support the strikers. General sympathy was with the men; and the arbitrators to whom their grievances were submitted awarded most of their demands. The effect of this strike was far-reaching. All over the kingdom unskilled labor was roused to its power, and a new era in labor organization began. III In no country has the labor-union movement achieved a greater degree of organization than in England.[6] The movement has been economic, turning to politics only in recent years; it concerned itself with wages and conditions of labor, not with party programs and Parliamentary candidates. The characteristic feature of English trade-unionism is collective bargaining, long since introduced into America, but unknown in most European countries. The English unions also organized insurance societies called "Friendly Societies."[7] For many years the laws regulating labor unions had been liberally construed by the courts, and the unions had done very much as they pleased. Two decisions have been rendered during the last decade that threatened the unions' existence both as a political and economic force. In 1900 the Taff Vale Railway Company brought suit against the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, charging the men with conspiring to induce the workmen to break their contracts with the company. The court enjoined the union from picketing and from interfering with the men in their contractual relations with the employing company, and assessed the damages at $100,000 against the offending union. The House of Lords, sitting in final appeal, affirmed the judgment of the trial court. This virtually meant the stopping of strikes, for strikes without pickets and vigilance would usually be unavailing. It also meant financial bankruptcy. A second far-reaching decision was made by the House of Lords in December, 1909, when the "Osborne Judgment" was affirmed, granting to one Osborne, a member of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, an injunction restraining the union from making a levy on its members, and from using any of its funds for the purpose of maintaining any of its members, or any other person, in Parliament. The unions had taken it for granted that they had the legal right to contribute out of their funds to political campaigns, and to pay the labor members of Parliament a salary out of the union treasury.[8] The court held such payments were illegal, on the ground that they were _ultra vires_. The charter of the unions did not sanction it.[9] The English workman has not only had the trade union for a training school in practical affairs, but the co-operative movement began here; and here it flourishes, not as widely spread among the poorer workmen as in Belgium, but among the better-paid workers it is very popular. It is singular that the only practical result left of Owen's stupendous plans was the little co-operative shop, opened in 1844 at Rochdale, with a capital of $140 and a gross weekly income of $10. Owen did not start this shop, but a handful of his followers were the promoters of the tiny enterprise. The co-operative union to-day embraces wholesale, retail, productive, and special societies, with nearly 3,000,000 members, increasing at the rate of 70,000 a year, and doing $550,000,000 worth of business annually. There is also a rapidly growing co-partnership movement, especially in the building of "garden suburbs" and tenements. In 1903 there were two such companies, with $200,000 worth of property. In 1909 they had increased to 15 associations, with over $3,085,000 worth of property. The membership is not confined to workingmen, but they form the bulk.[10] From the beginning of the modern labor movement we see that the British workmen have shown a strong tendency to organize. Their organizations included at first only the skilled workers. There was a gulf between the trained worker and the unskilled worker. The latter, forming the substratum of poverty, were too abject for organizing. These two great bodies of workers, skilled and unskilled, have been gradually brought together and their interests united. The Taff Vale and Osborne judgments have forced them into politics. The unskilled have been given the benefit of the experience of the skilled, and a fair degree of homogeneity and group ambition has been reached. To enter politics a new form of organization was necessary. We will see how one was prepared for them. IV We will now turn to the Socialist organizations. They are more numerous than in the other countries we have studied, and more varied in color. But not any of them are as strong as the French or German organizations. In 1880 William Morris and H.M. Hyndman, a personal friend of Marx, organized the "Democratic Federation." For a few years it was the only Socialist organization. It split on the question of revolution. Morris and his friends, many of them inclined toward Anarchy, founded the "Socialist League." This league has long since vanished. Hyndman and his followers renamed their society the "Social Democratic Federation." It still persists, under the name Social Democratic Party (popularly "S.D.P."), and remains the only organized trace of militant, reactionary Marxianism in England. For a long time it refrained from politics, advocated violence, and was the faithful imitator of the Guesdist party in France. These are doctrines and methods that repel the English mind, and the Federation never has been strong. It has a weekly paper, _Justice_, and a monthly paper, _The Social Democrat_; claims one member in Parliament, elected however by the Labor Party, and (in 1907) 124 members of various local governing bodies. Its aged leader, Hyndman, clings tenaciously to the dogmas of Marx, and all the changes that have come over the Socialist movement during the last decades have not altered his views or methods.[11] The Federation's affiliations and sympathy have been with the International rather than the British movement, and until a few years ago it monopolized British representation on the International Executive Committee. Soon after Morris left the Federation a new and novel Socialist society was formed in London. Two Americans gave the impulse that started the movement--Henry George, through his works on Single Tax, and Thomas Davidson of New York, a gentle dreamer of the New To-morrow. Henry George's books had been read by a group of young men in London, and when Dr. Davidson went there to lecture he found these young men ready to listen to his utopian generalizations. Soon these men organized the Fabian Society. They were not sure of their ground, and took for their motto: "For the right moment you must wait as Fabius did when warring against Hannibal, though many censured his delays; but when the time comes you must strike hard, as Fabius did, or your waiting will be in vain and fruitless." A number of brilliant young men soon joined the Fabians, and their "tracts" have become famous. Among their members they include Sidney Webb, the sociologist; George Bernard Shaw, the playwright and cynic; Chiozza Money, statistician and member of Parliament; Rev. R.J. Campbell of the City Temple; Rev. Stewart Headlam, leader in the Church Socialist Movement; and a horde of others, famous in letters, the professions, and the arts. It is difficult to estimate the influence of this unique group of personages, and it is very easy to underestimate it. From the first they committed themselves to the policy of "permeation," instead of aggressive propaganda. They would transform the world by intellectual osmosis. They have, thus, not only contributed by far the most brilliant literature to modern Socialism, but have touched some of the inner springs of political and social power. Prime ministers and borough councilmen, poor-law guardians and chancellors of the exchequer, have been influenced by the propulsion of their ideas. But it has all been done so noiselessly and so well disguised, that to the Social Democratic Federation the Fabians are "mere academicians," and to the Independent Labor Party they are forerunners of "tyrannical bureaucracy." Eleven Fabians are in Parliament, and they are not silent onlookers. For years the Fabians have dominated the London County Council. Its brilliant "missionaries" attract large audiences, and "Fabian Essays" have passed through many editions. Each member of this society is the creator of his own dogma. The Marxian formulas, especially the theory of surplus value, are not reverenced by them. England is the only country in Europe where there is a strong Church Socialist Movement. In 1889 the Christian Social Union was formed by members of the Church of England. It is not a Socialist organization, but it has enlisted a wide practical interest in the labor movement. It was the outgrowth of the Pan-Anglican Congress, which met at Lambeth in 1888. At this conference a committee on Socialism made a noteworthy report, recommending the bringing together of capital and labor through the agency of co-operation and association.[12] In 1906 "The Church Socialist League" was organized. "It seeks to convert the christened people of England to Socialism. Its members are committed to the definite economic Socialism of accredited Socialist bodies. The League is growing rapidly. Branches are springing up all over the country. Its members have addressed thousands of meetings on behalf of both Socialist and labor candidates at Parliamentary and principal elections.... The members of the League are Socialists. They seek to establish a commonwealth in which the people shall own the land and industrial capital collectively and administer the same collectively."[13] The influence of the Church Socialist League and the Fabians has spread to the universities, especially to Oxford and Cambridge. A number of distinguished professors are active Socialists. The movement thus gained ground more rapidly among the intellectuals than among the workingmen. It was not until 1893 that a Socialist Labor Party was organized. The Social Democratic Federation was too dogmatic, hard, and bitter to draw the English laboring man; the Fabians and the Church Socialists were avowedly not partisan. In 1893 a group of labor delegates met at Bradford and, under the leadership of Keir Hardie, organized the Independent Labor Party (I.L.P.). This definite step had been preceded by many local political organizations among labor unionists. The necessity for political activity had been felt in many places. The Bradford convention was merely the coalescing of many local movements. The I.L.P. is a Socialist body, but it is not dogmatically, not obnoxiously so. It forms, rather, a connecting link between Socialism and labor unions. It entered politics at once, but with discouraging results. Its 29 candidates polled only 63,000 votes; only 5 were elected. A closer alliance with the labor unions was necessary. This was accomplished when the unions, in 1899, appointed a Labor Representative Committee, whose duty it was, as the name implies, to increase labor's representation in Parliament.[14] This committee had first to determine its relation to the other political parties. The Liberals and Conservatives among the laborites were outvoted, and the committee determined upon a new course. Representatives from the Socialist bodies--the I.L.P., S.D.F., and Fabians--were asked to join the unions in an alliance that should use its united strength in electing members to Parliament. All agreed, but the S.D.F. soon withdrew. In 1906 the name of the committee was changed to the Labor Party. It is founded upon the broadest basis of co-operation, so that neither Socialist, no matter how radical, nor non-Socialist should find it impossible to work with the party. Its constitution defines this coalition: "The Labor Party is a federation consisting of Trade Unions, Trade Councils, Socialist Societies, and Local Labor Parties." "Co-operative Societies are also eligible," as are "national organizations of women accepting the basis of this constitution and the policy of the party." The object of the party is "to secure the election of candidates to Parliament and to organize and maintain a Labor Party with its own whips and policy." Party rigor is carefully prescribed: "Candidates and members must accept this constitution and agree to abide by the decisions of the Parliamentary party in carrying out the aims of this constitution; appear before their constituents under the title of labor candidates; abstain strictly from identifying themselves with or promoting the interests of any Parliamentary party not affiliated, or its candidates; and they must not oppose any candidate recognized by the national executive of the party." "Before a candidate can be regarded as adopted for a constituency, his candidature must be sanctioned by the national executive." The party, thus centrally controlled, is well organized in every part of the kingdom. It maintains a fund for paying the election expenses of its members.[15] The Osborne judgment has been a serious setback to the party, especially in local elections. The payment of members was voted in 1911 by Parliament as a partial remedy, and the government has promised a reform election bill that will impose the burden of all necessary election expenses upon the state. The party membership has grown from 375,000 in 1900 to nearly 1,500,000 in 1912. Such leading members of the party as J. Ramsay MacDonald, Keir Hardie, Philip Snowden, and over one-half of the Parliamentary group, are Socialists. The party refused to commit itself to Socialistic principles until 1907, when it declared itself in favor of the following resolution: "The socialization of the means of production, distribution, and exchange to be controlled in a democratic state in the interests of the entire community, and the complete emancipation of labor from the domination of capitalism and landlordism, with the establishment of social and economic equality between the sexes."[16] In 1908 the party had 26 members in county councils, 262 in town councils, 168 in urban district councils, 27 in rural district councils, 124 in parish councils, 145 on poor-law boards, 23 on school boards. There are (1910) about 1,500 labor men and Socialist members on the various local governing bodies in Great Britain.[17] V We see, then, that Socialism and trades-unionism in England coalesced. But a more important confluence of political ideals was soon to occur. The elections of 1906 indicated to the people of England that a new force had entered the domain of political power, which had so long been assigned to the gentry and men of wealth. A careful observer of political events, and a member of Parliament, described the results as follows: "When the present House of Commons (1907) was completed in January last, and it was discerned that 50 labor members had been elected, a cry of wonder went up from press and public. People wrote and spoke as if these 50 members were the forerunners of a political and social revolution; as if the old party divisions were completely worn out, and as if power were about to pass to a new political party that would represent the masses as opposed to the classes. These fears or hopes were reflected in the House of Commons itself. During the early months of the session the Labor Party received from all quarters of the House an amount of deference that would have been described as sycophantic if it had been directed towards an aristocratic instead of towards a democratic group."[18] The tidal wave of reaction following the Boer war had swept the Liberal Party into power, and had given fifty seats to the Labor Party. The effect was nothing short of revolutionary. Disraeli, in his _Sibyl_, spoke of "two nations," two Englands, the England of the gentry and the England of the working classes. The elections since the Boer war have given this "other England" its chance. The gentry, the Whigs and Tories, will never again fight their political jousts with the "other England" looking contentedly on. This "mass mind of organized labor" has become the "new controlling force in progressive politics."[19] The "transformed England" began to see evidences of the change. The first bill brought in by the Labor Party provided for the feeding of school children, from the homes of the poor, out of public funds. "The business in life of my colleagues and myself is to impress upon this House the importance of the poverty problem," said the spokesman of the Labor Party in an important debate.[20] England had awakened hungry. Now occurred the most significant political event in the history of modern England. The Liberal Party took over the immediate program of the Labor Party. This is significant because it swept England away from her industrial moorings of individualistic _laissez-faire_, and extended the functions of the state into activities that had hitherto been left to individual initiative. A complete revolution had taken place since Cobden's day. The state acknowledged new social and economic obligations. In the Parliamentary struggle that followed hereditary prerogative in property was undermined and hereditary prerogative in government virtually destroyed, and the principles of democracy enormously extended.[21] In England the question of co-operation between Socialists and other parties has been more important than in any other European country: because in a democratic parliament concessions are always made to large portions of the electorate by the parties in power, and because the practical temperamental qualities of the British discard the fine-drawn distinctions between groups and sub-groups that are so assiduously maintained in France and Germany. In the Amsterdam Congress of The International the question was discussed whether Socialists should act with other parties. Jaurès and his _bloc_ were the occasion of the debate. Kautsky said that in times of national crises like war it might be necessary for Socialists to co-operate with the government to insure national safety. No such extraordinary standard has ever existed among practical Englishmen, who usually know what they want, and are not particular about the means of getting it. William Morris, uncompromising dogmatist, inveighed against the Whigs in 1886 as "the Harlequins of Reaction." Democracy was his ideal of government, and he was not entirely averse to political action on the part of Socialists. "To capture Parliament, and turn it into a popular but constitutional assembly, is, I must conclude, the aspiration of the genuine democrats wherever they may be found." But he was wary of compromise. "Some democrats take up actual pieces of Socialism, the nationalization of land, or of railways, or cumulative taxation of incomes, or limiting the right of inheritance, or new patent laws, or the restriction by law of the day's labor.... All this I admit and say is a hopeful sign, and yet once again I say there is a snare in it.... A snake lies lurking in the grass." "Those who think they can deal with our present system in this piecemeal way very much underrate the strength of the tremendous organization under which we live, and which appoints to each of us his place, and, if we do not choose to fit it, grinds us down until we do."[22] Morris' advice, "Beware the Whigs," was uttered at a time when the leader of that party, Gladstone, was beginning to see that the chief event of the century would be the merging of the social question with politics. The "piecemeal" method that Morris decried became the actual method of Parliamentary activity as soon as a new party, a third party, arose and drew its inspiration from the working classes. Such a party was anticipated. Lord Rosebery said in 1894: "I am certain there is a party in this country, unnamed as yet, that is disconnected with any existing political organization--a party that is inclined to say, 'A plague on both your houses, a plague on all your politics, a plague on all your unending discussions that yield so little fruit.'"[23] And the same year John (now Lord) Morley prophesied: "Now I dare say the time may come, it may come sooner than some think, when the Liberal Party will be transformed or superseded by some new party."[24] And Professor Dicey, over a decade ago, spoke of the waning orthodoxy of Liberalism and its rapid merging into Socialism. The "piecemeal" party of Morris, the "transformed" party of Morley, the radicalized party of Dicey, is the Liberal Party of to-day. The "unnamed" party of Rosebery is the Labor Party, which not only says, "A plague upon all your discussions," but, "A plague upon all your fine-spun theories of class war--it's results we want." Before detailing some of the significant acts of this new democratic coalition, it should be added that the motive of the Liberal Party has not been unmixed with politics. The Labor Party possesses not only the 30 or 40 votes in the House of Commons; there are hundreds of thousands of labor votes outside. This background of silent, vigilant voters forms the greatest force of the Labor Party. Many Liberal members hold their seats by its favor. There are in both the great parties men with strong sympathies for the labor ideal. In fact, a number of Socialists are sitting with the Liberals. There is no clear demarcation. It is only a difference of the degree of infusion. The Labor Party has had a strong influence upon the House of Commons. For many years the "Government" has ruled quite arbitrarily. When there are only two parties this is possible. But when an influential third party appears on the scene, government by the "front benchers" must be moderated.[25] The "cross benchers" have wrested a good deal of power from the leaders. This is necessary in a democracy which is kept alive only by contact with the people. There is more government by the Commons, and less government by the ministry. This _entente_ can degenerate into Parliamentary tyranny if it wishes. It can demand the clôture, as well as open the valves of useless debate. But an arbitrary act unsanctioned by the cross benchers would be likely to bring destruction upon the government that perpetrated it. VI A review of the Acts of Parliament since the Liberal-Labor coalition and a perusal of the debates are convincing proof of the character of the new legislation and the opinions that prompt it. We must confine ourselves to a few types of this legislation, enough to show the actual changes now in process. The first bill introduced by the Labor Party, and enacted into law, authorized the providing of meals for poor children in the schools. It does not make this compulsory, but under its sanction in 1909 over $670,000 were spent in providing over 16,000,000 meals. Nearly half of these were in London.[26] This law is especially assailed by the anti-Socialists. They claim its administration has been too lenient, not discriminating between the needy and those capable of self-help. It is only the entering wedge of Socialism, they say; it is only a step from feeding the child to clothing him, and from feeding and clothing the child to caring for the parent. They recall that Sidney Webb has often said that if the city furnishes water free to its citizens it should be able to furnish milk as well. The second bill introduced by the Labor Party was the Trades Dispute Act. This was framed to annul the Taff Vale decision, making the unions immune from suits for tortious acts and providing an elaborate system of arbitrating labor disputes. The provisions of this act were tested by two railway crises. In 1907 the railway employees threatened to go out on strike. Lloyd George, then president of the Board of Trade, averted the strike by enlisting all the power of the government in persuading the companies and the men to agree to a scheme of arbitration. This was to last a stipulated term of years, but before the time had elapsed the men actually struck (1911), and for a week the country was in a panic. Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, again used all the power of the government to bring peace, and a commission was appointed to investigate the grievances of the men, who had agreed to abide by its decision. In this way the government has become the most active force in settling labor disputes--a subject that was formerly left to the two parties of the labor contract. A Workman's Compensation Act and an Old-Age Pension Act soon followed. The latter provides a pension for all workmen who are 70 years old. Unlike the German act, the government provides all the funds. In 1909 the Labor Exchange Act empowered the Board of Trade to establish labor exchanges. These have been established in every city. At first there was some friction with the unions because "blacklegs" were assigned to places. But since union men have been invited to sit on the local governing committees, things are running smoother. There are three laws which show the trend of the changing relation of the state to property. The Development Act of 1909 provides for the appointment of five commissioners, upon whose recommendation the Treasury advances money to any governmental department or public authority or university or association of persons for the purpose of aiding agriculture and rural industries of all sorts; the reclamation of drainage lands and of forests; the general improvement of rural transportation, including the building of "light railways"; the construction and improvement of harbors; the improvement of inland navigation, including the building of canals; and the development and improvement of fisheries. This law endows the government with the necessary authority for the absorption of virtually all the internal means of communication except the trunk railways, and extends the paternal arm of the government over agriculture and the fisheries and subsidiary industries.[27] The first report of the commission, 1910-11, indicates that work under this law has begun in earnest. A comprehensive plan of regeneration, embracing the entire kingdom and based on adequate surveys, is outlined. One of the interesting features of the plan is the proposal to do as much of the work as possible by direct labor rather than by competitive bidding. The commission wants to make sure "that the funds shall not go into the pockets of private individuals."[28] Under an enthusiastic commission there will be practically no limit to the influence of this law. Two other acts are closely allied with this scheme: the Small Holdings Act of 1908, and the Housing and Town Planning Act of 1909. The Small Holdings Act gives authority to county councils to "provide small holdings for persons who desire to buy or lease and will themselves cultivate the holdings." This provision is extended to borough, urban, district, and parish councils. These authorities may purchase such lands "whether situate within or without their county." The Town Planning Act gives cities and towns the power to purchase land and allot it, to tear down undesirable buildings, to co-operate with any workingman's association for improving and erecting dwellings, and to buy the necessary land for making improvements of all kinds. John Burns, who stood sponsor for this bill, explained that it gave complete authority to local governing bodies "to make a city healthful and a city beautiful." Following the British habit, work has very cautiously begun under these acts. Up to December, 1910, about 28,000 acres were purchased or leased under the allotment act, and sublet to 100,498 individual tenants. "Town planning" has progressed rapidly, and the regeneration of the British slums, the most dismal in the world, may be not far distant.[29] Under the Small Holdings Act there were, up to December, 1910, nearly 31,000 applicants, asking for over 500,000 acres. Only one-fifth of this amount was acquired, for 7,000 holders. Thirty per cent. of the applicants are agricultural laborers, and the majority of the others are drawn from the rural population who have some small business or trade in the villages and wish a plot of land for a garden. This "often makes the difference between a bare subsistence and comparative prosperity."[30] These laws show the drift of the current. The question of the nationalization of railways has been the subject of Parliamentary inquiry, and the great railway strike of 1911 emphasized the matter profoundly. The state in 1911 completed the taking over of all the telephone lines; it conducts an extensive postal savings bank and a parcels post. In local affairs some British cities are models of municipal enterprise. Even London, that amorphous mass of human misery and opulence, is changing its aspect. Since the granting of municipal home rule it has built a vast system of street railways, cleaned out acres of slums, opened breathing spaces, built tenements, and in many other ways displayed evidences of an awakening civic consciousness. Three other pieces of legislation must be described more in detail, because they are more revolutionary, far-reaching, and democratic than anything attempted by the British nation since the days of the Reform Bill. First is the famous "Budget" of Lloyd George. When this virile Welshman became Chancellor of the Exchequer he cast his budget in the mold of his social theories. He said: "Personally, I look on the Budget as a part only of a comprehensive scheme of fiscal and social reform: the setting up of a great insurance scheme for the unemployed and for the sick and infirm, and the creation, through the development bill, of the machinery for the regeneration of rural life."[31] The land system of England is feudal. Tenure still legally exists. There still clings the flavor of social and political distinction to fee simple. This the landowners have fortified against all the changes that industrialism has wrought. There has been no general land appraisement since the Pilgrims landed at the new Plymouth. The "land monopoly" successfully resisted every attack until the famous budget of 1908. Chiozza Money quotes John Bateman's analysis of the "New Domesday Book," fixing the ownership of land in England and Wales as follows:[32] In 1883, in the United Kingdom, there was a total area of 77,000,000 acres; of this 40,426,000 acres were owned by 2,500 persons. "While the total income of the nation is £1,840,000,000, the landowners take £106,000,000 as land rent."[33] England is a great industrial and commercial nation living on leased land. The development of the industrial towns has enormously multiplied the value of some of these vast estates.[34] The new budget proposed, first, to tax the land values; not a fictitious sum, or the value of the land with improvements, but the site value--the increment value with which the land is endowed because of its favorable location. Second, to this was added a 10 per cent. reversion duty. Third, a tax was levied on undeveloped land held for speculative purposes. And, fourth, a 5 per cent. tax on mineral rights was assessed on the owners of the land that contained the mines. These proposals raised a storm. They aimed at the traditional stronghold of English aristocracy. The budget passed the House of Commons by a large majority; the Lords rejected it. The government promptly prorogued Parliament and went before the people. And what was at first only an attack upon hereditary rights in land became an attack also upon hereditary rights in politics. The House of Lords became an issue as well as the budget. After a fiery and furious campaign, in which Socialists and Laborites joined Radicals and Liberals, the budget won by a safe majority.[35] The Lords passed the measure. But this resistance cost them dear. One of the first prerogatives established by the House of Commons was the right to control the purse-strings of the kingdom. Custom has given the sanction of constitutionality to this prerogative. And the Lords, in first denying and then delaying the budget, laid themselves open to the charge of "hereditary arrogance" and "unconstitutionalism." After the passage of the budget there followed six months of conference between the two front benches, to find a basis of reform for the House of Lords upon which all could unite. When it became evident that this was impossible, the government again prorogued Parliament and went to the people for a mandate on the question of "reforming the Lords." The Liberals and their allies were, for a third time, returned to power, and in February, 1911, the Prime Minister, Mr. Asquith, introduced his "Parliament Bill," taking from the House of Lords the power to amend a money bill so as to change its character. If any other bill passed by the Commons is rejected by the Lords, the Commons can pass it over their veto; and if this is done in three consecutive sessions of the same Parliament--provided two years elapse between the introduction of the bill and its third rejection by the Lords--it becomes a law. The law is intended as a preliminary measure. The preamble states that it is the intention of the government to provide for a second chamber "constituted on a popular instead of hereditary basis." The bill was so amended by the Lords as to change its character and returned to the Commons. The Prime Minister then informed the leaders of the opposition that the King, "upon the advice of his ministers," had consented to create enough peers to insure the passage of the bill in its original form. Rather than have their house encumbered by 400 new peers, the Lords gave a reluctant consent to the measure that virtually destroyed the bicameral system in England. This profound constitutional change, that practically makes England a representative democracy pure and simple, was unaccompanied by any of those popular and spectacular demonstrations one naturally expects to see on such occasions. The debate in both houses rarely touched the pinnacle of excitement, its fervor was partisan rather than patriotic.[36] In 1832, when the hereditary peers stood in the way of the Reform Bill, which had passed the Commons by only one majority, the populace rose _en masse_, surged through the streets of the capital, and threatened the King and his Iron Duke,--whose statue now adorns every available square in the city,--and made it known that their wishes must be respected. To-day the people, secure in the knowledge of their supremacy, scarcely notice the efforts of the opposition, in its attempts to bolster the falling walls of hereditary prerogative in representative government. So far has England assumed the air of democracy. The third piece of legislation, to which allusion has been made, indicates the direction that this democracy is taking. It is the Insurance Bill, also introduced by Lloyd George, and passed in December, 1911. It insures the working population against "sickness and breakdown." It is planned to follow up the law with insurance against non-employment. The law is of especial interest to Americans, because it adapts the principle of the German system to the Anglo-Saxon's traditional aversion to state bureaucracy. It commands a compulsory contribution from employer and employee, supplemented by state grants. These funds are not administered by the state, but by "Friendly Societies" (insurance orders organized by the unions) and other benevolent organizations of workingmen now in existence. These are democratic, voluntary organizations. Where no such organizations exist, the post-office administers the fund. The keynote of this law is the prevention of invalidity. Its details are largely based upon the reports of the Royal Poor Law Commissioners, 1905-9. The commission made two voluminous reports; Mrs. Sidney Webb, a member of the commission, prepared the minority report.[37] The Labor Party, in all of these measures, voted with the Liberals. The Insurance Bill was denounced by the most radical Laborites on the ground that labor was charged with contributing to the fund, and that the bill was inadequate. But the majority of the delegation voted for the measure. VII Enough has now been said to indicate the changes in economic and social legislation that are being brought about in England by the coalition of Socialists and Liberals.[38] The causes for this change cannot be laid to Socialism alone. Socialism is an effect quite as much as a cause; it is the result of industrial conditions, as well as the prompter of changes. The permeation of the working classes with the principles of state aid; the spread of discontent; the lure of better days; all deepened and emphasized by the poverty of the Island, are the sources of this Social Democratic current. This has led, first, to the unification of the several Socialist groups; secondly, to the coalescing of labor union and Socialist ambitions into the Labor Party; thirdly, to an effective co-operation between the Labor Party and the Liberal-Radicals. Sagacious Socialists saw this trend long ago. In 1888 Sidney Webb appealed to the Liberals to espouse the cause of labor. He pointed out the inevitable, and it has happened.[39] Two questions naturally arise: First, how far will this movement toward Social Democracy go? Second, how long will the Labor Party hold together and prompt the action of the Liberals and Radicals in social legislation? The first question is not merely conjectural. The Reform Bill now (1912) prepared by the government will destroy the last vestige of property qualifications for voting. It will destroy plural voting, which now allows a freeholder to vote in every district where he holds land. In some districts the absentee voters hold the balance of power.[40] Votes for women are also promised. This increased electorate will not be conservative in its convictions. Along with this will come the abolishing of the custom that compels candidates to bear the election expenses; the payment of members of Parliament has already begun; the lure of office is no longer a will-o'-the-wisp to the poor with ambition. The new Liberalism is, then, devoted first of all to real democracy, in which the King's prerogatives retain their sickly place. As to the functions of the state, it will "probably retain its distinction from Socialism in taking for its chief test of policy the freedom of the individual citizen rather than the strength of the state, though the antagonism of the two standpoints may tend to disappear in the light of progressive experience."[41] As to property, it will probably continue to make unearned increments and incomes bear the burden of social reform; create a business democracy for running the public utilities, leaving more or less unhampered the fields of legitimate industrial opportunity. "Property is not an absolute right of the individual owner which the state is bound to maintain at his behest. On the contrary, the state on its side is justified in examining the rights which he may claim, and criticising them; seeing it is by the force of the state and at its expense that all such rights are maintained."[42] This, the well-considered opinion of a well-known scholar, may be properly taken as the gauge of present-day English Radical sentiment on the inviolability of property rights. As to the second question: How long will the coalition hang together? the Socialists are now (1912) showing signs of restiveness. The old question, that has rent all Socialists in all countries, and always will, because Socialism is a wide-spreading and vague generalization, has arisen among these practical Englishmen. In the convention of the I.L.P., 1910, there was a prolonged discussion on the policy of the party in its relation to other parties. "The Labor Party should stand for labor, not for Liberalism," was the complaint. Keir Hardie suggested that they were not in Parliament to keep governments in office or to turn them out, but "to organize the working classes into a great independent political power, to fight for the coming of Socialism."[43] A resolution objecting to members of the party "appearing on platforms alongside Liberal and Tory capitalists and landlords," was defeated by a large majority.[44] In the House of Commons clashes are not infrequent between the Laborites and the Liberals. Annually the labor members move an amendment to the Address of the Crown, asking for a bill "to establish the right to work by placing upon the state the responsibility of directly providing employment or maintenance for the genuinely unemployed."[45] John Burns opposed their amendment in 1911, in a brilliant and vehement speech, not so much because the government was opposed to the principle, but for the political reason that the government was not ready to bring in a bill of its own, which should be a part of its comprehensive system of social reform.[46] The great strike of transportation workers, in the summer of 1911, widened the breach between Laborites and Liberals, and between the extreme and moderate Socialists. This strike spread from the dockers of Liverpool to London, from the dockers to the railway workers, and then to the teamsters and drivers of the larger cities, until a general tie-up of transportation was threatened. It came very near being a model general strike. Its violence was met with a call for the troops. The labor members in Parliament protested earnestly against the use of soldiers. But the government was prompt and firm in its suppression of disorder. A bitter debate took place between the government and the labor leaders.[47] How much of this give and take must be attributed to the play of politics, it is impossible to declare. But this great strike clearly revealed the difference between violent Socialism and moderate radicalism. The one is willing to effect revolutions through law and order, the other to effect them through violence and disruption. The moderate Socialists seem willing to take a middle course between these extremes. The following quotation from a speech delivered by Ramsay MacDonald, leader of the Labor Party, at a convention of the I.L.P., clearly illustrates the moderate view: "We can cut off kings' heads after a few battles, we can change a monarchy into a republic, we can deprive people of their titles, and we can make similar superficial alterations by force; but nobody who understands the power of habit and of custom in human conduct, who appreciates the fact that by far and away the greater amount of an action is begun, controlled, and specified by the system of social interrelationship in which we live, move, and have our being; and still more, nobody who understands the delicate and intricate complexity of production and exchange which keeps modern society going, will dream for a single moment of changing it by any act of violence. As soon as that act is committed, every vital force in society will tend to re-establish the relationship which we have been trying to end, and what is more, these vital forces will conquer us in the form of a violent reaction, a counter revolution. When we cut off a newt's tail, a newt's tail will grow on again. "I want the" I.L.P.'s action "to be determined by our numbers, our relative strength, the state of public opinion, the character of the question before the country. I appeal to it that it take into account all the facts and circumstances, and not, for the sake of satisfying its soul and sentiment, go gaily on, listening to the enunciation of policies and cheering phrases which obviously do not take into account some of the most important and at the same time most difficult problems which representation in Parliament presents to it."[48] In another place MacDonald has detailed the steps in the progress of Parliamentary Socialism. He begins with "palliatives," such as factory inspection, old-age pensions, feeding of school children; next, the state engages in constructive legislation, "municipalization and nationalization in every shape and form, from milk supplies to telephones," and finally insists on the taxing of unearned increment and a general redistribution of the burdens of the state.[49] Not all the members of the I.L.P. are agreed upon this moderate statement. Keir Hardie and his immediate followers still cling to the "larger hope" of a socialized society, to which commonplace legislation is only a crude preliminary. Bernard Shaw has confessed the orthodoxy of the new Social Democracy. "Nobody now considers Socialism as a destructive insurrection ending, if successful, in millennial absurdities," and of the budget he said: "If not a surrender of the capitalist citadel, it is at all events letting down the drawbridge."[50] The public utterances of the Radical leaders are often less restrained than those of the Socialists,[51] so that it becomes increasingly difficult to tell the difference. Professor Hobhouse, in his analysis of the difference between Liberal-Radicalism and Socialism, says: "I venture to conclude that the differences between a true and consistent public-spirited liberalism and a rational collectivism, ought, with a genuine effort at mutual understanding, to disappear. The two parties are called on to make common cause against the growing power of wealth, which, by its control of the press and of the means of political organization, is more and more a menace to the healthy working of popular government."[52] And Brougham Villiers stated, a year before the Liberals gained control of the government, that the hope of the country lay in an "alliance, won by persistent, intelligent helpfulness on the part of the Liberals, with the alienated artisans, for the betterment of the conditions of the poorest, so as to give at once hope and life and better leisure for thought."[53] So we see Socialism and Liberalism united in accomplishing changes in legislation and ancient institutions--changes that are revolutionary in character and will be far-reaching in results. It is not the red revolutionary Socialism of Marx; it is the practical British Socialism of amelioration. "This practical, constitutional, evolutionary Socialism," a chronicler of the Fabians calls it.[54] It would have to be practical to appeal to the British voter, constitutional to lure the British statesman, and evolutionary to satisfy the British philosopher. In the troublous days of 1888-90 there were a great many young Socialists who believed the social revolution was waiting around the next corner and would soon sweep over London in gory reality. Many of these young men are sober Fabians now, or staid Conservatives or Liberals. To-day they think they were mistaken. They were not. There was a revolution around the next corner. It has already captured the high places. Society, government, is rapidly encroaching upon private property through the powers of taxation, of police supervision, and all manner of constitutional instrumentalities. Ownership, even in land, is now only an incident, the rights of the community are in the ascendant. Democracy has conquered hereditary privilege. And the revolution is still advancing. England is showing the world that "The way to make Socialism safe is to make democracy real."[55] FOOTNOTES: [1] See _supra_, p. 51. [2] See CHIOZZA MONEY, _Riches and Poverty_, first page, edition 1911. [3] _Op. cit._, p. 337. [4] _Op. cit._, pp. 337-8. [5] See V. NASH and H.L. SMITH, _The Story of the Dockers' Strike_, London, 1890. [6] See SIDNEY and BEATRICE WEBB, _History of Trades Unionism_, London, 1911. [7] There are about 650,000 members in those unions that pay out-of-work benefits. The following table gives some conception of the magnitude of the out-of-work problem in England. It shows the sums expended by the unions for out-of-work relief: Year Amount 1898 £234,000 1899 185,000 1900 261,000 1901 325,000 1902 429,000 1903 516,000 1904 655,000 1905 523,000 1906 424,000 1907 466,000 Out of a body of 15,000,000 workmen, Chiozza Money estimates that 500,000 are always out of work. _Opus cit._, p. 122. [8] Members of Parliament received no pay until 1911, when the Radical-Liberal government passed a law giving each member a salary of $2,000 a year. [9] A discussion of this case from the Fabian point of view is found in the Preface to WEBB'S _History of Trades Unionism_, edition of 1911. The labor unions and the Labor Party have issued pamphlets on these two decisions. The legal points are fully discussed in the official reports of the cases. [10] There are 15,000,000 working men and women in Great Britain; 3,000,000 belong to co-operative enterprises, 2,500,000 to trade unions. [11] See H.M. HYNDMAN, _Autobiography_, London, 1911. [12] Dr. Wescott, Bishop of Durham, was the founder of the Christian Social Union. His pamphlet, _Socialism_, is a real contribution to the literature on the Church and its relation to labor. The present attitude of the Union may be gleaned from the following quotation taken from the letter written by Dr. Gore, Bishop of Birmingham, to his diocese, on the occasion of his transfer to the bishopric of Oxford. The letter was written during the railway and dockers' strike, in September, 1911: "There is a profound sense of unrest and dissatisfaction among workers recently. I cannot but believe that this profound discontent is justified, though some particular exhibitions of it are not. As Christians we are not justified in tolerating the conditions of life and labor under which the vast mass of our population is living. We have no right to say that these conditions are not remediable. Preventable lack of equipment for life among young, and later the insecurity of employment and inadequacy of remuneration, and consequent destitution and semi-destitution among so many people, ought to inspire in all Christians a determination to reform our industrial system." [13] From _Statement of Principles of the League_. [14] Even at this time the conservatism of the unions was hard to break. The vote to take this step was 546,000 to 434,000 in favor of appointing the committee. [15] Election expenses are borne by the candidates, not by the state. They frequently are over $3,000, and it obviously is impossible for a workingman to conduct such a campaign at his own expense. [16] Proceedings of Labor Party, Annual Congress, 1907. [17] See _Socialists in Great Britain_, a compilation published by the London _Times_, p. 24. The following table shows the membership of the Labor Party since its formation in 1900, from the annual report of the party executive, 1911: Trades Councils and Local Labor Trade Unions Parties Socialist Societies No. Membership No. No. Membership Total 1900-1 41 353,070 7 3 22,861 375,931 1901-2 65 455,450 21 2 13,861 469,311 1902-3 127 847,315 49 2 13,835 861,150 1903-4 165 956,025 76 2 13,775 969,800 1904-5 158 885,270 73 2 14,730 900,000 1905-6 158 904,496 73 2 16,784 921,280 1906-7 176 975,182 83 2 20,885 998,338{1} 1907 181 1,049,673 92 2 22,267 1,072,413{2} 1908 176 1,127,035 133 2 27,465 1,158,565{3} 1909 172 1,450,648 155 2 30,982 1,486,308{4} 1910 137 1,306,473 125 2 31,377 1,342,610{5} {1} This total includes 2,271 Co-operators. {2} Includes 472 Co-operators. {3} Includes 565 Co-operators, and 3,500 members of the Women's Labor League. {4} Includes 678 Co-operators, and 4,000 members of the Women's Labor League. {5} Includes 760 Co-operators, and 4,000 members of the Women's Labor League. The decrease in membership during the last year is ascribed to the Osborne judgment. [18] HAROLD COX, _Socialism in the House of Commons_, p. 1. [19] See J.A. HOBSON, _The Crisis of Liberalism_, for a discussion of the new party alignments. ÉMILE BOUTMY, philosophical critic of the English, says that England, "transformed in all outward seeming, ... has just begun a new history." See his _The English People: A Study in Their Political Psychology_, London, 1904, for a keen analysis of English political proclivities. [20] _Parliamentary Debates_, 5th series, vol. 21, p. 649. Speech by G. Lansbury. [21] The new Liberal government invited John Burns into the cabinet. He is the first workingman in English history to occupy a cabinet position. The more restless Socialists are inclined to call him a Liberal because responsibility has taught him caution. But he still persists that he is a Socialist. He is a Fabian, and boasts of the three times that he was imprisoned for participating in labor agitations. About twenty years before his elevation he said in the Old Bailey, where he had been arraigned for "sedition and conspiracy" in conducting a strike: "I may tell you, my lord, that I went to work in a factory at the early age of ten years and toiled there until five months ago, when I left my workshop to stand as Parliamentary candidate for the western division of Nottingham." It must be kept in mind that many of the Conservatives are committed to social legislation. They are not, however, in favor of the indefinite expansion of democracy, and are opposed to the adult suffrage bill as proposed by the Liberals. [22] WILLIAM MORRIS, _Signs of Change_, p. 4. [23] Speech delivered in St. James' Hall, March 21, 1894. [24] Speech delivered at Newcastle, May 21, 1894. [25] In the British House of Commons the ministry and the opposition leaders sit in the front benches on opposite sides of the House facing each other. A "front bencher" always commands a hearing, owing to his high position in the party. The members of the party sit behind their leaders and are called "back benchers." The minor groups, the Labor Party and the Irish Party, sit in the cross benches at the lower end of the chamber and are called "cross benchers." [26] See _Annual Report Board of Education_, 1909-1910. [27] Keir Hardie, the dean of the Socialist group in Parliament, fathered this law. Sidney Webb, the distinguished Fabian, was made a member of the commission. [28] See First Annual Report of the Commission. [29] See _Annual Report Home Office_, 1909-1910. [30] _Ibid._ [31] The money for these things he proposed to raise by taxes, and especially by a tax on land values. [32] CHIOZZA MONEY, _Riches and Poverty_, p. 82. No. of Owners Class of Owners Acres owned 400 Peers and peeresses 5,729,927 1,288 Great landowners 8,497,699 2,529 Squires{1} 4,319,271 9,589 Greater yeomen{1} 4,782,627 24,412 Lesser yeomen{1} 4,144,272 217,049 Small proprietors 3,931,806 703,289 Cottagers 151,148 14,459 Public bodies 1,443,548 Waste lands 1,524,624 ------- --------- 973,015 34,524,922 {1} This classification is purely arbitrary. [33] _Op. cit._, p. 91. [34] The leaseholder is burdened with "rack-rent" and "premiums"; when the lease expires the improvements revert to the landlord. There has been, for years, a well-organized Single-Tax movement in England that points to the evils of this land system as conclusive proof of the validity of Henry George's theory. [35] One of the choruses popular with the great throngs that paraded the streets in that eager campaign is full of significance. It was sung to the tune of "Marching through Georgia." "The land, the land, 'twas God who gave the land; The land, the land, the ground on which we stand; Why should we be beggars, with the ballot in our hand? God gave the land to the people." [36] During the debate on the second reading in the House of Commons, the writer one day counted twenty members on the benches, and a labor member called the attention of the Speaker to the fact that "in this hour of constitutional crisis only twenty brave men are found willing to defend the prerogatives of the realm!" [37] Some of the Fabians, nevertheless, fought the bill, and their champion, Bernard Shaw, called Lloyd George's effort "The premature attempt of a sentimental amateur." [38] In 1909 the Labor Party claimed credit for the following measures passed during the Parliamentary session of that year: "(1) The grant of an additional £200,000 ($1,000,000) for the unemployed, and the extraction of a promise that, if it was insufficient, 'more would be forthcoming.' "(2) The passing of the Trades Boards Bill--the first effective step against 'sweating.' "(3) The smashing of the bill authorizing the amalgamation of three great railways. "(4) A discussion, protest, and vote against the visit of Bloody Nicholas, the Tsar. The Labor Party's amendments secured 70 supporters, whilst only 187 members of the British Parliament were dirty enough to support the Tsar's visit. "(5) The introduction of the Shop Hours Bill and the extortion of a promise that it shall be adopted by the government and passed."--From a campaign pamphlet, _The Labor Party in Parliament_, p. 20. [39] See _Wanted--A Program: An Appeal to the Liberal Party_. S. WEBB, London, 1888. [40] See article by PROFESSOR HOBHOUSE, on "Democracy in England," _Atlantic Monthly_, February, 1912. [41] J.A. HOBSON, _The Crisis of Liberalism_, p. 93. [42] L.T. HOBHOUSE, _Democracy and Reaction_, p. 230. [43] See "Report Eighteenth Annual Conference, I.L.P.," 1910, p. 59. [44] _Supra cit._, p. 71. Some of the I.L.P. members are Continental in their views. The president of the party used these words in his address, 1910: "All this jiggery-pokery of party government played like a game for ascendency and power is no use to us" (_supra cit._, p. 35). The discipline of the Labor Party was unable to keep half a dozen of its ablest debaters from fighting the Insurance Bill. The reversion of the radical Socialist element to the I.L.P. is by some observers considered not unlikely. Then the liberal or _réformiste_ element will become either a faction of the Liberal-Radical party or melt entirely away as the Chartists did in 1844. [45] This was the language used in the amendment moved in January, 1911. [46] See _Parliamentary Debates_, 5th series, vol. 21, February 10, 1911. [47] The Socialist workmen always resent the activity of the police and soldiers during strikes. In 1888 F. Engels wrote to an American friend: "The police brutalities in Trafalgar Square have done wonders in helping to widen the gap between the workingmen Radicals and the middle-class Liberals and Radicals." (See _Briefe und Auszüge aus Briefen von Fr. Engels u. A._, Stuttgart, 1906.) One of the incidents of the debate over the railway strike in the House of Commons was a clash between Lloyd George, the Liberal leader, and Keir Hardie, the Socialist. Keir Hardie had made inflammatory speeches to striking workmen, and for this the Chancellor of the Exchequer gave him a terrific and unmerciful flaying. (See _Parliamentary Debates_, 5th series, vol. 29, Aug. 22, 1911.) [48] J. RAMSAY MACDONALD: speech delivered at Edinburgh, 1909. [49] See J. RAMSAY MACDONALD, _The Socialist Movement_, pp. 150-7. [50] G.B. SHAW, Preface to "Fabian Tracts." [51] See LLOYD GEORGE'S famous "Limehouse Speech." [52] L.T. HOBHOUSE, _Democracy and Reaction_, p. 237. [53] BROUGHAM VILLIERS, _The Opportunity of Liberalism_, Preface. [54] See article by Secretary PEASE, of the Fabians, on the Fabian Society, _T.P.'s Magazine_, February, 1911. [55] J.A. HOBSON, _The Crisis of Liberalism_, p. 156. CHAPTER X CONCLUSION We have now concluded our survey of the political activities of Socialism in the four countries that present the most characteristic features of this movement of the working classes. It is peculiarly difficult to draw general conclusions from the study of a movement so protean. Democracy is young; Socialism is in its early infancy. Is there a rational trend in Socialism? Or is it only a passing whim of the masses? Is it a crude theory, an earnest protest, a powerful propaganda? Or is it a current of human conviction so strong, so deep-flowing that it will be resistless? It is futile to deny the power of the Socialist movement. The greatest proof of its virility is its ability to break away from Marxian dogma and from the fantasies of the utopists, and acknowledge mundane ways and means. In spite of this earthiness, it still has its fanciful abstractions. Some of its prophets are still glibly proclaiming a new order,--as if society were artificial, like a house, and could be torn down piecemeal or by dynamite, and then rebuilt to suit the vagaries of a new owner. On the other hand, a portion of the Socialists are learning that society is a living thing that can be shaped only by training, like the mind of a child. Socialism, as a whole, is metamorphosing. Some of its vicious eccentricities, like the ravings against religion and the espousal of free love, have already vanished. It is learning that institutions are the product of ages, not of movements, and cannot be changed at the fancy of every new and disgruntled social prophet. The best school for Socialism has been the school of parliamentary activity. Here the hot-blooded protesters become sober artisans of statecraft. We have seen how the early utopian ideas, with their edenesque theory of the guilelessness of man, were abruptly exchanged for the theory of violence, based on the materialistic conception of the universe and of man. Neither the soft humanities of the utopists nor the blood and thunder of revolution overturned the existing state. But when the workingmen appeared in parliaments, then things began to change. In every country where the Socialists have entered parliament, they appeared suddenly, in considerable numbers. So in France, Germany, England, Belgium, Austria. And they always produced a flutter, often a scare, among the conservatives. They were an untried force. Their preachings of violence and their antagonism to property made them an unknown quantity, to be feared, and not to be lightly handled--a bomb of political dynamite that might explode any moment and scatter the product of ages into fragments! But no explosion came. And one more example of the persistence of human nature was added to the long annals of history. In every country the parliamentary experience has been the same: the liberal and radical element, attracted by the legislative demands of the labor party, coalesced, for specific issues, with the Socialists, and a new era of economic and social legislation was ushered in. Even in Germany, with its unmodern conditions in government, all the powers of feudal autocracy failed to crush the rising forces of the new political consciousness. In France and England we have seen Socialists take their places in the cabinet, to the chagrin of that portion of the Socialists who still regard social classes as natural enemies, and consider social co-operation among all the elements of society impossible. In brief, Socialism has entered politics and has become mundane. You need a microscope to tell a Socialist from a Socialist-Radical in France, and a Laborite from a Radical-Liberal in England. Briand and Millerand may be voted out of the Socialist Party, and John Burns may be spurned by the I.L.P. But these men are teaching a double lesson: first, that there are no new ways to human betterment; second, that the old way is worth traveling, because it does lead to happier and easier conditions of toil. Socialists the world over will soon be compelled to realize that the political force which shrinks from the responsibility of daily political drudgery will never be a permanent factor in life. A political party that is afraid to assume the obligations of government for fear that it will lose its ideal, is too fragile for this world. The Socialist Party wherever it exists is a labor party, with a labor program that is based on conditions which need to be remedied. Their practical demands as a rule are of such a nature that all of society would benefit by their enactment into law. The mystery has all gone out of the movement. It is not necromancy, it is plain parliamentary humdrum which you see. The threatened witchery is all words; the doing is intensely human, of the earth earthy. The Socialist movement tends toward the latest phase of democracy, which is social democracy; the democracy that has ceased to toy with Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, and the other tinsel abstractions of the bourgeois revolutions; the democracy that sees poverty and suffering increase as wealth and ease increase. It is the democracy of the human heart, that cares for the babe in the slums, the lad in the factory, the mother at the cradle, and the father in his old age. Against all these helpless ones society has sinned. And it is to a universal, sincere, social penance that the new democracy calls the rich, the powerful, and the comfortable. Socialism is merging rapidly into this new democracy. In doing so it is abandoning its two great illusions. The first illusion is that the interests of the worker are somehow different from the interests of the rest of the community. Class war has been a resonant battle-cry, and has served its purpose. It is folly for any class to magnify its needs above those of the rest of society. Civilization and culture embrace the artisan and the artist, the poor and the powerful. Any class interest that clashes with the welfare of society as a whole cannot survive. Socialism is abandoning the tyranny of class war, is being mellowed by class co-operation. Socialists are now claiming that their interests are the interests of society. The social complexion of the party in the countries of its greatest advancement is an indication of this. Many of the party leaders are of middle-class origin. Some of them are rich. You call at their homes and servants open the door and receive your card on a silver tray. Multitudes of lawyers, physicians, journalists, and professors are in the movement. Dr. Frank of Mannheim, the leader of the Badensian Socialists, said to me that the degree to which Socialism can gain the support of the intellectual element is the measure of success of the movement. All this indicates that Socialism is breaking the bonds of self-limited class egoism. The peasant landowner, the small shopkeeper, the intellectualist, and occasionally a man or two of wealth and high social position are being drawn into this new democracy. The question is now being seriously asked: Can there be a social co-operation? Must there always be industrial war? Von Vollmar, Millerand, Vandervelde, MacDonald proclaim the possibility of rational co-operation. MacDonald says: "The defense for democracy which is far and away the weightiest is that progress must spring, not from the generosity or enlightenment of a class, but from the common intelligence." "It must be pointed out that the labor legislation now being asked for is very much more than a sequel to that passed under the influence of Lord Shaftesbury. This differs from that as the working of the moral conscience differs from the motives of the first brute man who shaped his conduct under a contract of mutual defense with a friendly neighbor. To use the arm of the law to abolish crying evils, to put an end to an ever-present injustice, is one thing; to use that arm to promote justice and to keep open the road to moral advancement, to bring down from their throne in the ideal into a place in the world certain conceptions of distributive justice, is quite another thing. And yet this latter is now being attempted, and was certain to be attempted as soon as democracy came into power. When society is enfranchised, the social question becomes the political question."[1] "The state is not the interest of a class, but the organ of society."[2] There can be no broader foundation for political action than this. All progress springs from the "common intelligence" to which every one contributes his quota. The second great illusion of Socialism is the social revolution. No one except a few extremists any longer thinks of the revolution by blood. Engels, the friend of Marx, shows that everywhere violence is giving way to political methods. "Even in the Romance countries we see the old tactics revised. Everywhere the German example of using the ballots is being followed. Even in France the Socialists see more and more that no lasting victory is to be theirs unless they win beforehand the great masses of the people. The slow work of propaganda and parliamentary activity is here also recognized as the next step in party development."[3] Engels shows how Socialists have entered the parliaments of Belgium, Italy, Denmark, Bulgaria, Roumania, as well as the parliaments of the great powers. And he indicates that the revolution of the Socialist must come as a revolution by majorities--which is democracy. Engels still believed that violence would follow the accession of democratic power. If he had lived another decade he would have discarded this last remnant of the theory of violence. In Germany the bourgeois are more frightened over the legal than over the illegal acts of the Socialist. They fear the results of elections more than rebellion. Violence they can suppress with a bayonet, but laws--they must be obeyed. This is true in every country. The power of the ballot is infinitely greater than the power of the bullet, provided it is followed up with common sense and energy. The theory of violence, then, has almost disappeared. The Syndicalist, in his reversion to anarchy, attempts to revive the forsaken theory. He does this by a general strike. But the general strike is not to be confused with the social revolution. The general strike, wherever it has been tried as an economic forcing valve, has failed. But whenever it has been used as a political uprising, demanding political rights, it has been more or less successful. In Belgium we have seen how it brought results. In Sweden a few years ago there was a general strike that not only shut every factory, but stopped the street cars and all transportation lines, closed the gas-works, and even the newspapers were suspended. It was a powerful political protest, but the number of striking workmen did not equal the non-strikers. In Italy in 1904 a general strike was called to protest against the arbitrary attitude of the government toward the labor movement. In some of the cities all work ceased, even the gondoliers of Venice joined the strikers. In Russia in 1904-5 the transportation lines and post and telegraph lines were tied up while the workingmen demonstrated for their political liberty. The violence of Socialism to-day is political; the violence of trade unionism is economic. As the democratic consciousness spreads, there may be such a coalescing of interests that violence will cease. But a human society without warfare and contention is still a tax upon the imagination. Strikes are increasing in number and bitterness and all the arbitrations and devices of democracies seem helpless in the turmoil of economic strife. I am not unmindful that behind all this parliamentary activity there is the dim background of hope in the hearts of many Socialists that somehow the wage system will vanish, that competition will cease, that the primary activities of production and distribution will be assumed by society, and that economic extremes will become impossible. In a people of fitful temper and ebullient spirit the doctrine of overturning remains a constant menace. Socialism in Spain and Italy wears a scarlet coat, in Germany a drab, and in England a black. The danger to civilization lurks, not in the survival of the doctrines of the older Socialism, but in the temper of the people who espouse them. The Socialist movement has accomplished three notable things. First, it has spread democracy. The bourgeois revolutions established democracy; Socialism extends it. We have seen how in Belgium it compelled the governing powers to give labor the ballot; how in Germany, hard set and dogmatic, it is shaping events that will surely lead to ministerial responsibility and to universal suffrage; and how in England it is resulting in universal manhood suffrage and probably "votes for women." Socialism is spreading the obligations of government upon all shoulders. It is not, however, democratizing the machinery of administration. In France the centralized autocracy of Napoleon's empire remains almost untouched. In England the ancient traditions of administration are slow to change. In Germany the civil service will be the last barrier to give way. Secondly, Socialism has forced the labor question upon the lawmakers. This is a great achievement. The neglected and forgotten portions of the human family are now the objects of state solicitude. The record of this revolution is written in the statute books. Turn the leaves of the table of contents of a modern parliamentary journal, and compare it with the same work of thirty years ago. Almost the entire time is now taken up with questions that may be called humanitarian rather than financial or political. Grave ministers of state make long speeches on the death-rate of babies in the cities, on the cost of living in factory towns, on the causes of that most heartbreaking of modern woes, non-employment. Budgets are now concerned with the feeding of school children as well as the building of warships, and with the training of boys as well as the drilling of soldiers. Nowhere has this radical change taken place without a labor party. The laboring man forced the issue. He bent kings and cabinets and parliaments to his demands. The time was ripe, society had reached that stage of its development when it was ready to take up these questions. But it did not do so of its own free will. When labor parties sprang like magic into puissance, a decade ago, the social conscience was ready to hear their plea. Bismarck foresaw their demands. But he was too obsessed of feudalism to realize their motives. Therefore his state socialism failed to silence the Socialists. The workman had his heart in the cause, not merely his tongue. And the third great achievement is the natural result of the other two. When democracy is potent enough to force its demands on parliament, then the power of the state is ready to fulfil its demands. So we find in every country where Social Democracy has gained a foothold a constant increase of the functions of the state. What shall the state do? That is now the great question. One hundred years ago it was, What sort of a state shall we have? That is answered: a democratic state; at least, a state democratic in spirit. The state is no longer merely judge, soldier, lawmaker, and governor. It is physician, forester, bookkeeper, schoolmaster, undertaker, and a thousand other things. Society has grown complex, and the state, which is only another name for society, has developed a surprising precocity. We have seen that in England especially the trend of legislation is to deprive the individual, one by one, of those prerogatives which gave him dominion over property. A man owning land in the city of London, for instance, has not the liberty to build as he likes or what he likes. He must build as the state permits him, and the exactions are manifold. He can be compelled to build a certain distance from the street,--that is, the city demands a strip of his land for common use. He can build only a certain height,--the community wants the sunlight. If his older buildings are dilapidated, the city tears them down. If the streets through his allotment are too narrow, the city widens them. In short, he may have title in fee simple, but the community has a title superior. Even his income from this parcel of land is not all his own. The state now takes a goodly slice in taxes. If he is inclined to resent this, and does not improve his property, the state taxes him on the unearned increment, and if he refuses to submit to this "socialism," the constable seizes the whole parcel, and he can have what is left after the community has satisfied its demands. The taxes that he pays are distributed over a vast variety of activities. They go to feed school children, to pension aged workmen, to send inspectors into the factories, to keep up hospitals, as well as to light and pave the streets and pay policemen. Other taxes that he pays on other forms of property go to the improvement of agriculture, to the payment of boards of arbitration, and so on. In short, ownership is becoming more and more only an incident; it is not merely a badge of ease, but a symbol of social responsibility. The burden of the law is shifting from property to persons, from protecting things to protecting humanity. This change from the Roman law is almost revolutionary. Even Blackstone, our halfway-mark in the evolution of the common law, is busy with postulates protecting property. Where is this encroachment of the state on private "rights" going to end? There are some things which the state (society) can do better than the individual; like the marshaling of an army or conducting a post-office, and things that are done to counteract the selfishness of individuals, like factory inspection. But there are other things which society cannot do; things that depend on individual effort, like art, literature, and invention. The two fields of state and individual activity merge into each other. Each nation marks its own distinctions. But this is certain: _in a democracy the state will do the things which the people want it to do_. And in a Social Democracy these things are numerous. Social Democracy strikes a balance between individual duty and collective energy. It brings the power of government (collective power), not to the few who are rich, therefore ignoring oligarchy; nor to the few who are clever, thereby ignoring tyranny; nor to the few who are well-born, thus discarding aristocracy; but it brings all the power of the government to all the people. It attempts to coalesce the cleverness of the tyrant, the experience of the aristocrat, the wealth of the industrial nabob, and the aggregate momentum of the mass, into a humanitarian power. It attempts to use the gifts of all for the benefit of all. Social Democracy is the resultant of two forces meeting from opposite directions: the forces of industrialism, and Socialism, of collectivism and individualism. No one can draw the exact direction of this resultant. It attempts to avoid the tyranny and selfishness of the few, and the tyranny and greed of the many. Our study of the operation of governments under the sway of Social Democracy has shown the sort of legislation that is demanded. It is not necessary to repeat here the details of these laws. But it is necessary to bear in mind that there are two industrial questions which have absolutely refused to bend to the power of government: the question of the length of the workday and the question of wages. The vast majority of strikes are due to differences over these two questions. The eight-hour day and the minimum wage have been successful only in a limited government service.[4] Nor has any machinery set up by governments to avoid industrial collisions between workmen and employers been successful in avoiding differences over hours and wages. The elaborate system of Germany, for instance, is nothing more than the good will of the state offered to the warring industrial elements in the interests of peace. The questions of hours and wages are so fundamental that they embrace the right of private property. Any power that divests an individual of the right to dispose of his time or substance by contract virtually deprives him of the right of ownership. The limits to the possibilities of Social Democracy are the limits of private ownership. This brings us at once to the verge of the eternal question of government--the finding of a just ratio between individual and collective responsibility: a ratio that varies with varying nationalities, and that will vary with the passing years. Each generation in every land will have to fix the limitations for itself. The new Social Democracy has acquired certain characteristics which will help us in determining the trend of its movements. In the first place it is an educated Social Democracy. The taunt of ignorance applied to the old Socialism of passion cannot be applied to the new Socialism of practice. The nations of Europe no longer debate the suitability of universal education. That question happily was settled for the United States with the landing of the Pilgrims. It took one hundred years for Europe to understand the Ordinance of 1787, that "schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." Not all of the European nations have touched the heights of this ideal, but Social Democracy is struggling towards it, and schools, more or less efficient, are open to the workmen's children. This education is extended to adults by the press and by self-imposed studies. The eagerness with which men and women flock to lectures and night classes is a great omen. In Paris the _École Socialiste_ and _Université Populaire_, in Germany and Belgium the night classes in the labor union clubhouses, the debates and the lecture courses, are evidences of intellectual eagerness. In the second place it is a drilled democracy. It is organized into vast co-operative societies and trade unions. Here it learns the lesson of constant watchfulness over details. This training in the infinite little things of business is a good sedative. Socialists bargain and sell and learn the lessons of competition; do banking and learn discount; engage in manufacture and learn the problem of the employer. They are, moreover, drilled in parliaments, in city and county councils, in communal offices. They learn the advantages of give and take, are skilled in compromise, and feel the friction of opposition. All this has wrought a wonderful change in Socialism. To a Belgian co-operativist running a butcher-shop, the eight-hour day is a practical problem; and to a Bavarian member of a city council the question of opening communal dwellings ceases to be only a subject for debate. Nothing has brought these people to earth so suddenly as the infusion of earthly experience into their blood. And this transfusion has given them life. It has rid them of their many adjectives and given them a few verbs. It has robbed them in large measure of their mob spirit.[5] Every year the arbitrary governments of Europe are finding police coercion more and more unnecessary. The Socialist crowd is growing orderly, is achieving that self-control which alone entitles a people to self-government. It is not unnatural that this movement has made leaders. Of these, Herr August Bebel is the most remarkable example. This woodturner, turned party autocrat and statesman, is a never-ending wonder to the German aristocracy. His speeches are read as eagerly as those of the Chancellor, and his opinions are quoted as widely as the Kaiser's. When in 1911 he made his great speech on the Morocco Question in the Social Democratic Convention, it was reported by the column in all of the great Continental and English dailies. Bebel is an example of what the open door of opportunity will do, and he had to force the door himself. A few years ago, in a moment of reminiscent confidence, he confessed that he used to cherish as an ideal the time when he could, for once, have all the bread and butter he could eat. In America we are accustomed to this rising into power of obscure and untried men. But in Europe it is rare. European Social Democracy is an expression of the desire on the part of the people for the open highways of opportunity. In the third place, Social Democracy is self-conscious. I have not used the word class-conscious, because it is more than the consciousness of an economic group. History is replete with instances that reveal the irresistible power generated by mass consciousness. This is the psychology of nationalism. The dynamo that generates the mysterious voltage of patriotism, of tribal loyalty, is the heart. Socialism has replaced tribal and national ideals and welded its devotees into a self-conscious international unity. Whatever danger there may be in Socialism is the danger of the zealot. The ideal may be impracticable and discarded, but the devotion to it may be blind and destructive. As a rule, Socialist leaders and writers maintain that this drawing together of Socialism and democracy is only transitory, and that beyond this lies the promised land of social production. Jaurès has explained this clearly: "Democracy, under the impetus given it by organized labor, is evolving irresistibly toward Socialism, and Socialism toward a form of property which will deliver man from his exploitation by man, and bring to an end the régime of class government. The Radicals flatter themselves that they can put a stop to this movement by promising the working classes some reforms, and by proclaiming themselves the guardians of private property. They hope to hold a large part of the proletariat in check by a few reforming laws expressing a sentiment of social solidarity, and by their policy of defending private property to rouse the conservative forces, the petty bourgeoisie, the middle classes, and the small peasant proprietors to oppose Socialism."[6] So we see that in spite of their experiences Socialists still draw a clear distinction between their Socialism and democracy. The Socialist is willing to ignore the experiences of the past twenty years in his ecstasy of vision. He claims that whatever has been done is mere reform. He affects to belittle it, the Marxian scorns it. To the Socialist, democracy is only the halfway house on the road to the economic paradise. He has his gaze fixed on the New Jerusalem of "co-operative production" and "distributive justice." Whether this New City, with its streets paved with the gold of altruism and its gates garnished with the pearls of good will and benevolence, will be brought from the fleecy clouds of ecstatic imagination to our sordid earth remains a question of speculation to that vast body of sincere and practical citizens who have not scaled the heights of the Socialistic Patmos. European Socialism has been transplanted to America. But its growth until quite recently has been very slow, and confined largely to immigrants. There is no political spur to hasten the movement. Here democracy has been achieved. The universal ballot, free speech, free press, free association are accomplished. Many of the economic policies espoused by the Social Democratic parties of Europe are written into the platforms of our political parties. There will be no independent labor party of any strength until the old parties have aroused the distrust of the great body of laboring men, and until the labor unions cut loose from their traditional aloofness and enter politics. How socialistic such a party will be must depend upon the circumstances attending its organization. The two third-party movements which have flourished since the Civil War, the Greenback movement of the '70's and the Populist movement of the '90's, were virtually "class" parties, restricted to the agricultural population of the Middle and Far West; and both of them feared Socialism as much as they hated capitalism. Neither of these parties outlived a decade. Economic prosperity abruptly ended both.[7] The stress of political exclusiveness and the harsh hand of government will not produce a reactionary movement among the workingmen of America. But economic circumstances may do so. We are still a young country full of the hope of youth. The ranks of every walk of life are filled with those who have worked their way to success from humble origin. Most of our famous men struggled with poverty in their youth. Their lives are constantly held up to the children of the nation as examples of American pluck, enterprise, and opportunity. A nation that lures its clerks toward proprietorship and its artisans toward independence offers barren soil for the doctrines of discontent. We have no stereotyped poverty in the European sense. Our farmers own their acreage, and many of the urban poor are able to buy a cottage in the outskirts of the city. But there are signs that these conditions are undergoing profound changes. Unlimited competition has led to limitless consolidation of industries, and the financial destinies of the Republic repose in the hands of comparatively few men. So much of the Marxian proposition is fulfilled, at the moment, in America. This concentrated wealth has not been unmindful of politics. Governmental power and money power are closely identified in the public mind. Our cities are overflowing with a new population from the excitable portions of southern Europe, a population that is proletarian in every sense of the word. Panics follow one another in rapid succession. The uneasiness of business is fed by the turmoil of politics. Unrest is everywhere. Labor and business are engaged in constant struggles that affect all members of society. The cost of living has increased alarmingly in the last ten years. We are becoming rapidly a manufacturing nation; the balance of power is shifting from the farm to the city.[8] European Socialists are taking a keen interest in American affairs. Bebel said to me: "You are getting ready for the appropriation of the great productive enterprises and the railways. Your trusts make the problem easy." John Burns prophesied that violence and bloodshed alone would check us in our mad career for wealth. Jaurès asked how long it would take before our poverty would be worse than that of Europe. At a distance they see us plunging headlong into a Socialist régime. Professor Brentano of Munich knows us better. He said to me, "Conservation will be your Socialism."[9] If the fundamental principles of conservation can be embodied in constitutional laws, then there will be an almost indefinite extension of the power of the state over industry. It will embrace mines, forests, irrigated deserts; it will extend to the sources of all water supply and water power; the means of transportation may ultimately be included. So that without radical legal and institutional changes it will be possible for many of the sources of our raw materials to be placed under governmental surveillance, leaving the processes of manufacture and exchange in the hands of private individuals. There are at present many indications that this will be our general process of "socialization." The people appear to want it; and in a democracy the will of the people must prevail. Before we have advanced far along the new road of conservation we will find it necessary to reconstruct our whole system of administration. The haphazard of politics must be foreign to public business. Everywhere in Europe, especially in Germany and England, the people, including the Socialists, appear satisfied with the efficiency of their administrative machinery. Who would intrust the running of a railroad to our Federal or State governments? We have reached the extreme of rampant _laissez-faire_. Our youthful vigor and material wealth have kept us buoyant. Politically we will become more radical, economically less individualistic, in the next cycle of our development. There is no magic that saves a people except the magic of opportunity. In a democracy especially it is necessary to constantly purge society by free-moving currents of talent and virtue. This replenishing stream has its sources in the sturdy, healthy workers of the nation. The movement is from the depths upward. It is the supreme function of the state to keep these sources unclogged. FOOTNOTES: [1] J. RAMSAY MACDONALD, _Ethical Democracy_, pp. 61-71. [2] J. RAMSAY MACDONALD, _Socialism and Government_, Vol. II, p. 117. [3] FREDERICK ENGELS' Introduction to MARX' _Klassenkampf_, pp. 16-17, 1895. [4] The coal strike in England in March, 1912, brought the question of a legalized minimum wage before the people. [5] On November 28, 1905, a vast army of working men and women, estimated at 300,000 by the anti-Socialist papers, marched under the red flag through the streets of Vienna as a protest against the existing franchise laws. They were given the right of way and walked in silence through the streets of the capital. Their orderliness was more impressive than their vast numbers. It was an object-lesson that the government did not forget. [6] JEAN JAURÈS, _Studies in Socialism_, Eng. ed., p. 25. [7] What the so-called Progressive Party will accomplish, in this direction, remains to be seen. [8] The Socialist vote in the United States is as follows: 1892 21,164 1896 36,274 1900 87,814 1904 402,283 1908 402,464 1910 607,674 1911 1,500,000 (estimated) The vast increase shown in 1911 was made in municipal and other local elections. On January 1, 1912, 377 villages, towns, and cities in 36 States had some Socialist officers. Several important cities have been under Socialist rule, notably Milwaukee and Schenectady, where the Socialists captured the entire city machinery. In 1912 the Socialists lost control of Milwaukee, although their vote increased 3,000. Their overthrow was accomplished by the coalescing of the old parties into a Citizens' Party, a line-up between radicalism and conservatism that will probably become the rule in American local politics. The party is organized along the lines of the German Social Democracy. Its membership has grown as follows: 1903 15,975 1904 20,764 1905 23,327 1906 26,784 1907 29,270 1908 41,751 1909 41,479 1910 48,011 1911 84,716 1912 (May) 142,000 [9] In this statement, Professor Brentano re-enforces the opinions of the American economist to whose teachings and writings the "progressive" movement in American economics and politics, and especially the movement for conservation of natural resources, must be traced. For many years Professor Richard T. Ely has been pointing the way to this conservative "socialization" of our natural wealth. APPENDIX I. BIBLIOGRAPHY The following list of the principal works consulted in the preparation of this volume may serve also as a bibliography on the subject. There are very few American books in the list, because the object of this volume is to summarize the European situation. For the spirit of the movement the student must consult the contemporary literature of Socialism--the newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets, and the campaign documents that flow in a constant stream from the Socialist press. These are, of course, too numerous and too fluctuating in character to be catalogued. Lists of these publications can be secured at the following addresses: The Fabian Society, 3 Clements Inn, Strand, London, W.C. The Labor Party, 28 Victoria Street, Westminster, London, S.W. The Independent Labor Party, 23 Bride Lane, Fleet Street, London, E.C. German Social Democracy, Verlags-Buchhandlung _Vorwärts_, 68 Lindenstrasse, Berlin, S.W. Belgian Labor Party, _Le Peuple_, 33-35 rue de Sable, Brussels. French Socialist Party, _La Parti Socialiste_, 16 rue de la Corderie, Paris. GENERAL WORKS: THE FOUNDERS OF SOCIALISM BLANC, LOUIS: _Socialism._ An English edition was published in 1848. ---- _Organization of Labor._ English edition in 1848. BOOTH: _Saint-Simon and Saint-Simonism._ CABET, ÉTIENNE: _Le Vrai Christianisme_, 1846. FEUERBACH, FRIEDRICH: _Die Religion der Zukunft_, 1843-5. ---- _Essence of Christianity._ An English translation, 1881, in the "English and Foreign Philosophical Library." FOURIER, F.C.M.: _Oeuvres Complètes._ 6 vols. 1841-5. GAMMOND, GATTI DE: Fourier and His System, 1842. GIDE, CHARLES: _Selections from Fourier._ An English translation by Julien Franklin, 1901. GODWIN, WILLIAM: _An Inquiry Concerning Political Justice_, 1796. KINGSLEY: _Cheap Clothes and Nasty_, 1851. MORRELL, J.R.: _Life of Fourier_, 1849. MORRIS, WILLIAM: _Works of_; _Chants for Socialists_, 1885. OWEN, ROBERT: _An Address_, etc., 1813. ---- _Addresses_, etc., 1816. ---- _An Explanation of the Distress_, etc., 1823. ---- _Book of the New Moral World_, etc., 1836. PROUDHON, PIERRE JOSEPH: The Works of. English translation by Tucker, American edition, 1876. SAINT-SIMON: _New Christianity._ An English translation by Rev. J.E. Smith. 1834. WEIL, G.: _L'École Saint-Simonisme--son Histoire_, etc., 1896. WEITLING, WILLIAM: _Garantieen der Harmonie und Freiheit_, 1845. GENERAL WORKS: MODERN DISCUSSION BEBEL, A.: _Woman, in the Past, Present, and Future._ An English translation appeared in London in 1890. BERNSTEIN, EDWARD: _Responsibility and Solidarity in the Labor Struggle_, 1900. BROOKS, J.G.: _The Social Unrest_, 1903. ELY, R.T.: _French and German Socialism_, 1883. ENSOR, R.C.K.: _Modern Socialism._ A useful collection of Socialist documents, speeches, programs, etc. GRAHAM, W.: _Socialism New and Old_, 1890. GUTHRIE, W.B.: _Socialism Before the French Revolution_, 1907. GUYOT, Y.: _The Tyranny of Socialism_, 1894. JAURÈS, J.: _Studies in Socialism_, 1906. KAUTSKY, K.: _The Social Revolution._ An English translation by J.B. Askew. The best Continental view of modern Marxianism, and the most widely read. KELLY, EDMOND: _Twentieth Century Socialism_, 1910. The most noteworthy of recent American contributions to Socialist thought. KIRKUP: _A History of Socialism_, 1909. A concise and authoritative narrative. KOIGEN, D.: _Die Kultur-ausschauung des Sozialismus_, 1903. LEVY, J.H.: _The Outcome of Individualism_, 1890. MACDONALD, J.R.: _Socialism and Society_, 1905. MacDonald is not only the leader of the British Labor Party, but his writings comprise a comprehensive exposition of the views of labor democracy. ---- _Character and Democracy_, 1906. ---- _Socialism_, 1907. ---- _Socialism and Government_, 1909. MILL, J.S.: _Socialism_, 1891. A collection of essays, etc., from the writings of John Stuart Mill touching on Socialism. RAE, J.: _Contemporary Socialism_, 1908. A standard work. RICHTER: _Pictures of the Socialist Future_, 1893. SCHAEFFLE: _The Impossibility of Social-Democracy_, 1892. ---- _The Quintessence of Socialism_, 1898. Probably the most authoritative and concise refutation of the Socialist dogmas. SOMBART, WERNER: _Socialism and the Social Movement_, 1909. Widely read, both in the original and in the English translation. Contains an interesting critique of Marxianism. SPENCER, HERBERT: _The Coming Slavery_, 1884. A reprint from _The Contemporary Review_. STODDARD, JANE: _The New Socialism_, 1909. A convenient compilation. TUGAN-BARANOVSKY, M.I.: _Modern Socialism_, 1910. A systematic and scholarly résumé of the doctrines of Socialism. WARSCHAUER, O.: _Zur Entwickelungsgeschichte des Sozialismus_, 1909. WELLS, H.G.: _New Worlds for Old_, 1909. One of the most popular expositions of Socialism. MARX AND ENGELS AVELING, E.B.: _The Student's Marx._ A handy compilation. 1902. BOEHM-BAWERK: _Karl Marx and the Close of His System._ An English translation was made in 1898. ENGELS, FRIEDRICH: _Die Entwickelung des Socialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft_, 1891. ---- _Socialism--Utopian and Scientific_, 1892. ---- _L. Feuerbach und der Ausgang der Klassischen Deutschen Philosophie_, 1903. ---- _Briefe und Auszüge von Briefen_, 1906. ---- _Friedrich Engels, Sein Leben, Sein Wirken und Seine Schriften_, 1895. MARX and ENGELS: _The Communist Manifesto._ There have been many editions; that of 1888 is probably the widest known for its historical Introduction. MARX, KARL: _The Poverty of Philosophy._ An answer to Proudhon's _La Philosophie de la Misère_. An English translation was made by H. Quelch, 1900. ---- _Enthüllungen über den Kommunisten Process zu Köln_, 1875. Engels' Preface gives an account of the origin of the "Society of the Just." ---- _Die Klassenkämpfe in Frankreich, 1848-50._ ---- _Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany in 1848._ An English translation appeared in 1896. ---- _Capital_, 1896. ---- _The International Workingmen's Association._ Two addresses on the Franco-Prussian War, 1870. ---- _The international Workingmen's Association--The Civil War in France._ An address to the General Council of the International, 1871. THE INTERNATIONAL DAVE, V.: _Michel Bakunin et Karl Marx_, 1900. ENGELS, F.: _The International Workingmen's Association_, 1891. FROEBEL, J.: _Ein Lebenslauf_--for an account of Marx vs. Bakunin. GUILLAUME, J.: _L'Internationale: Documents et Souvenirs_, 1905. JAECKH, GUSTAV: _L'Internationale._ An English translation was published in 1904. JAEGER, E.: _Karl Marx und die Internationale Arbeiter Association_, 1873. MAURICE, C.E.: _Revolutionary Movements of 1848-9_, 1887. TESTUT, O.: _L'Internationale--son origine, son but, son principes, son organisation_, etc. Third edition, 1871. A German edition translated by Paul Frohberg, Leipsic, 1872. ---- _Le Livre Bleu de l'Internationale_, 1871. VILLETARD: _History of the International._ Translated by Susan M. Day, New Haven, 1874. _Ein Complot gegen die Internationale Arbeiter Association_, 1874, gives a careful version of the Marxian side of the Bakunin controversy. "International Workingmen's Association"--"_Procès-verbaux, Congrès à Lausanne_," 1867. _Troisième Congrès de l'Association Internationale des Travailleurs_, Brussels, 1868. _Manifeste aux Travailleurs des Campagnes._ Paris, 1870. _Manifeste addressé à toutes les associations ouvrières_, etc. Paris, 1874. _International Arbeiter Association Protokoll._ A German edition of the Proceedings of the Paris Congress, 1890, with a valuable Introduction by W. Liebknecht. FRANCE JAEGER, EUGEN: _Geschichte der Socialen Bewegung und des Socialismus in Frankreich_, 1890. JAURÈS, JEAN: _L'Armée Nouvelle--L'Organisation Socialiste de la France_, 1911. The initial installment of the long-promised account of the Socialist state. LAVY, A.: _L'Oeuvre de Millerand_, 1902. An appreciative history of Millerand's work. Contains many documents, speeches, etc. PEIXOTTO, J.: _The French Revolution and Modern Socialism_, 1901. VON STEIN, LORENZ: _Der Sozialismus und Communismus des Heutigen Frankreichs_, 1848. WEIL, GEORGES: _Histoire du Mouvement Socialiste en France_, 1904. BELGIUM BERTRAND, LOUIS: _Histoire de la Démocratie et Socialisme en Belgique depuis 1830_, 1906. Introduction by Vandervelde. ---- _Histoire de la Coopération en Belgique_, 1902. BERTRAND, LOUIS, et al.: _75 Années de Domination Bourgeois_, 1905. DESTRÉE et VANDERVELDE: _Le Socialisme en Belgique._ LANGEROCK, H.: _Le Socialisme Agraire_, 1895. STEFFENS-FRAUWEILER, H. VON: _Der Agrar Sozialismus in Belgien_, Munich, 1893. VANDERVELDE, ÉMILE: _Histoire de la Coopération en Belgique_, 1902. ---- _Essais sur la Question Agraire en Belgique_, 1902. ---- Article on the General Strike in _Archiv für Sozial Wissenschaft_, May, 1908. GERMANY BEBEL, AUGUST: _Die Social-Demokratie im Deutschen Reichstag._ A series of brochures detailing the activity of the Social Democrats--1871-1893. Of course from a partisan point of view. ---- _Aus Meinem Leben_, 1910. An intimate recital of the development of Social Democracy in Germany. BERNSTEIN, EDWARD: _Ferdinand Lassalle und Seine Bedeutung für die Arbeiter Klasse_, 1904. BRANDES, GEORG: _Ferdinand Lassalle: Ein Literarisches Charakter-Bild._ Berlin, 1877. An English translation was published in 1911. This is a brilliant biography. DAWSON, W.H.: _German Socialism and Ferdinand Lassalle_, 1888. ---- _Bismarck and State Socialism_, 1890. ---- _The German Workman_, 1906. ---- _The Evolution of Modern Germany_, 1908. EISNER, K.: _Liebknecht--Sein Leben und Wirken_, 1900. A brief sketch of the veteran Social Democrat. FRANK, DR. LUDWIG: _Die Bürgerlichen Parteien des Deutschen Reichstags_, 1911. A Socialist's account of the rise of German political parties. HARMS, B.: _Ferdinand Lassalle und Seine Bedeutung für die Deutsche Sozial-Demokratie_, 1909. ---- _Sozialismus und die Sozial-Demokratie in Deutschland._ HOOPER, E.G.: _The German State Insurance System_, 1908. KAMPFMEYER, P.: _Geschichte der Modernen Polizei im Zusammenhang mit der Allgemeinen Kulturbewegung_, 1897. A Socialist's recital of the use of police. ---- _Geschichte der Modernen Gesellschafts-klassen in Deutschland_, 1896. From a Socialist standpoint. KOHUT, A.: _Ferdinand Lassalle--Sein Leben und Wirken_, 1889. LASSALLE, FERDINAND: _Offenes Antwortschreiben an das Central-Comité zur Berufung eines Allgemeinen Deutschen Arbeiter Congress zu Leipzig_, 1863. ---- _Die Wissenschaft und die Arbeiter_, 1863. ---- _Macht und Recht_, 1863. A complete edition of Lassalle's works was published in 1899, under the title "Gesamte Werke Ferdinand Lassalles." LOWE, C.: _Prince Bismarck: An Historical Biography_, 1885. A sympathetic description of Bismarck's attempt to solve the social problem. MEHRING, F.: _Die Deutsche Sozial-Demokratie--Ihre Geschichte und Ihre Lehre_, 1879. Third edition. A compact narrative. MEYER, R.: _Emancipationskampf des Vierten Standes_, 1882. NAUMANN, FRIEDRICH: _Die Politischen Parteien_, 1911. History of German political parties. A Radical account. SCHMOELE, J.: _Die Sozial-Demokratische Gewerkschaften in Deutschland seit dem Erlasse des Sozialisten Gesetzes_, 1896, etc. _Sozial-Demokratische Partei-Tag-Protokoll._ Annual reports of the party conventions. _Documente des Sozialismus._ An annual publication edited by Bernstein. ENGLAND ARNOLD-FOSTER, H.: _English Socialism of To-day_, 1908. BARKER, J.E.: _British Socialism_, 1908. A collection of quotations. BIBBY, F.: _Trades Unionism and Socialism_, 1907. BLATCHFORD, R.: _Merrie England_, 1895. CHURCHILL, WINSTON: _Liberalism and the Social Problem_, 1909. ENGELS, F.: _The Condition of the Working Classes in England in 1844_, 1892. FAY, C.R.: _Co-operation at Home and Abroad_, 1908. GAMMAGE, R.G.: _History of the Chartist Movement_, 1894. HARDIE, KEIR: _From Serfdom, to Socialism_, 1907. HOBHOUSE, L.T.: _The Labor Movement_, 1898. ---- _Liberalism_, 1911. ---- _Democracy and Reaction_, 1904. HOBSON, J.A.: _The Crisis in Liberalism_, 1909. HOLYOAKE: _History of Cooperation_, 1906. KNOTT, Y.: _Conservative Socialism_, 1909. LECKY, W.E.H.: _Democracy and Liberty_, 1899. MACDONALD, J.R.: _The People in Power_, 1900. ---- _Socialism To-day_, 1909. MASTERMAN, C.F.G.: _The Condition of England_, 1909. MCCARTHY, J.: _The Epoch of Reform_, 1882. For Chartism and the reform movements of the nineteenth century democracy. MONEY, CHIOZZA: _Riches and Poverty_, 1911. NICHOLSON, J.S.: _History, Progress and Ideals of Socialism._ A criticism of the Socialist viewpoint. NOEL, CONRAD: _The Labor Party._ A criticism of the attitude of Liberals and Conservatives toward the social problems. From the Labor Party viewpoint. SNOWDEN, P.: _The Socialist Budget_, 1907. TOWLER, W.G.: _Municipal Socialism._ The anti-Socialist viewpoint. _The Times_: _The Socialist Movement in Great Britain_, 1909. A reprint of a series of carefully prepared articles in _The Times._ VILLIERS, B.: _The Opportunity of Liberalism_, 1904. ---- _The Socialist Movement in England_, 1908. WEBB, S.: _Wanted--A Program: An Appeal to the Liberal Party_, 1888. ---- _Socialism in England_, 1890. WEBB, B. and S.: _Industrial Democracy_, 1902. ---- _The History of Trade Unionism_, 1911. II. FRANCE 1. NOTE ON THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT Yves Guyot, the distinguished French publicist, told the writer that there was only one compact, disciplined political party in France, the United Socialists. Other than the Socialists, there is no well-organized group in the Chamber of Deputies. The Right, Center, and Left coalesce almost insensibly into each other. Party platforms and party loyalty are replaced by a political individualism that to an American politician would seem like political anarchy. The Chamber of Deputies is supreme--the ministry stands or falls upon its majority's behest. This gives to the deputy a peculiar personal power. He is only loosely affiliated with his group, is a powerful factor in the government of the Republic, and is directly dependent upon his constituents for his tenure in office. The result is a personal, rather then a party, system of politics. This remarkably decentralized system of representative governance is counterbalanced by a highly efficient and completely centralized system of administration, which is based on civil service, and outlives all the mutations of ministries and shifting of deputies. The ministry, naturally, has theoretical control over the administrative officials. During the campaign for reorganizing the army and navy, and the disestablishment of the Church, under the Radical-Socialist _bloc_, a few years ago, General André, acting for the ministry, resorted to a comprehensive system of espionage to ferret out the undesirable officers. Every commune has its official scrutinizer, who reports the doings of the employees to the government. This, in turn, has created a clientilism. The deputy is needed by the ministry, the deputy needs the votes of his constituency, the local officials need the good will of the deputy. The result is a fawning favoritism that has taken the place of party servitude as we know it in America. The Socialists have precipitated a serious problem in this relation of the government employee to the state: Can the state employees form a union? There are nearly 1,000,000 state employees. This includes not only all the functionaries, but all the workmen in the match factories, the mint, the national porcelain factory and tobacco plants, and the navy yards. In 1885 and again in 1902 the Court of Cassation decided that "the right of forming a union (_syndicat_) is confined to those who, whether as employers or as workmen or employed, are engaged in _industry, agriculture, or commerce_, to the exclusion of all other persons and all other occupations." The government has, however, countenanced some infringements. A few syndicates of municipal and departmental employees are allowed; but they are mostly workmen, not strictly functionaries. There are several syndicates of elementary school teachers. But they have not been allowed to federate their unions. At Lyons the teachers formed a union and, according to law, filed their rules and regulations with the proper official, who turned them over to the Minister of Justice, and after a cabinet consultation it was decided that the union was illegal, but would be ignored. They then joined the local _Bourse du Travail_ (federation of labor), and Briand, then Minister of Education, vetoed their action. Then a number of branches in the public service, including post-office and customs-house employees, teachers, etc., united in forming a committee "_pour la défense du droit syndical des salaries de l'état, des départements et du commerce_." This "Committee of Defense" petitioned Clémenceau on the right to organize, and intimated that the great and only difference between the state and the private employer is that the former adds political to economic oppression. This is pure Syndicalism. Under the individual political jugglery that takes the place of the party system in France, the problem is not made any the easier. 2. PROGRAM OF THE LIBERAL WING OF THE FRENCH SOCIALISTS, ADOPTED AT TOURS, 1902, UNDER THE LEADERSHIP OF JAURÈS _I.--Declaration of Principles_ Socialism proceeds simultaneously from the movement of democracy and from the new forms of production. In history, from the very morrow of the French Revolution, the proletarians perceived that the Declaration of the Rights of Man would remain an illusion unless society transformed ownership. How, indeed, could freedom, ownership, security, be guaranteed to all, in a society where millions of workers have no property but their muscles, and are obliged, in order to live, to sell their power of work to the propertied minority? To extend, therefore, to every citizen the guarantees inscribed in the Declaration of Rights, our great Babeuf demanded ownership in common, as a guarantee of welfare in common. Communism was for the boldest proletarians the supreme expression of the Revolution. Between the political régime, the outcome of the revolutionary movement, and the economic régime of society, there is an intolerable contradiction. In the political order democracy is realized: all citizens share equally, at least by right, in the sovereignty; universal suffrage is communism in political power. In the economic order, on the other hand, a minority is sovereign. It is the oligarchy of capital which possesses, directs, administers, and exploits. Proletarians are acknowledged fit as citizens to manage the milliards of the national and communal budgets; as laborers, in the workshop, they are only a passive multitude, which has no share in the direction of enterprises, and they endure the domination of a class which makes them pay dearly for a tutelage whose utility ceases and whose prolongation is arbitrary. The irresistible tendency of the proletarians, therefore, is to transfer into the economic order the democracy partially realized in the political order. Just as all the citizens have and handle in common, democratically, the political power, so they must have and handle in common the economic power, the means of production. They must themselves appoint the heads of work in the workshops, as they appoint the heads of government in the city, and reserve for those who work, for the community, the whole product of work. This tendency of political democracy to enlarge itself into social democracy has been strengthened and defined by the whole economic evolution. In proportion as the capitalistic régime developed its effects, the proletariat became conscious of the irreducible opposition between its essential interests and the interests of the class dominant in society, and to the bourgeois form of democracy it opposed more and more the complete and thorough communistic democracy. All hope of universalizing ownership and independence by multiplying small autonomous producers has disappeared. The great industry is more and more the rule in modern production. By the enlargement of the world's markets, by the growing facility of transport, by the division of labor, by the increasing application of machinery, by the concentration of capitals, immense concentrated production is gradually ruining or subordinating the small or middling producers. Even where the number of small craftsmen, small traders, small peasant proprietors, does not diminish, their relative importance in the totality of production grows less unceasingly. They fall under the sway of the great capitalists. Even the peasant proprietors, who seem to have retained a little independence, are more and more exposed to the crushing forces of the universal market, which capitalism directs without their concurrence and against their interests. For the sale of their wheat, wine, beetroot, and milk, they are more and more at the mercy of great middlemen or great industries of milling, distilling, and sugar-refining, which dominate and despoil peasant labor. The industrial proletarians, having lost nearly all chance of individually rising to be employers, and being thus doomed to eternal dependence, are further subject to incessant crises of unemployment and misery, let loose by the unregulated competition of the great capitalist forces. The immense progress of production and wealth, largely usurped by parasitic classes, has not led to an equivalent progress in well-being and security for the workers, the proletarians. Whole categories of wage-earners are abruptly thrown into extreme misery by the constant introduction of new mechanisms and by the abrupt movements and transformations of industry. Capitalism itself admits the disorder of the present régime of production, since it tries to regulate it for its gain by capitalistic syndicates, by trusts. Even if it succeeded in actually disciplining all the forces of production, it would only do so while consummating the domination and the monopoly of capital. There is only one way of assuring the continued order and progress of production, the freedom of every individual, and the growing well-being of the workers; it is to transfer to the collectivity, to the social community, the ownership of the capitalistic means of production. The proletariat, daily more numerous, ever better prepared for combined action by the great industry itself, understands that in collectiveness or communism lie the necessary means of salvation for it. As an oppressed and exploited class, it opposes all the forces of oppression and exploitation, the whole system of ownership, which debases it to be a mere instrument. It does not expect its emancipation from the good will of rulers or the spontaneous generosity of the propertied classes, but from the continual and methodical pressure which it exerts upon the privileged class and the government. It sets before itself as its final aim, not a partial amelioration, but the total transformation of society. And since it acknowledges no right as belonging to capitalistic ownership, it feels bound to it by no contract. It is determined to fight it, thoroughly, and to the end; and it is in this sense that the proletariat, even while using the legal means which democracy puts into its hands, is and must remain a revolutionary class. Already by winning universal suffrage, by winning and exercising the right of combining to strike and of forming trade-unions, by the first laws regulating labor and causing society to insure its members, the proletariat has begun to react against the fatal effects of capitalism; it will continue this great and unceasing effort, but it will only end the struggle when all capitalist property has been reabsorbed by the community, and when the antagonism of classes has been ended by the disappearance of the classes themselves, reconciled, or rather made one, in common production and common ownership. How will be accomplished the supreme transformation of the capitalist régime into the collectivist or communist? The human mind cannot determine beforehand the mode in which history will be accomplished. The democratic and bourgeois revolution, which originated in the great movement of France in 1789, has come about in different countries in the most different ways. The old feudal system has yielded in one case to force, in another to peaceful and slow evolution. The revolutionary bourgeoisie has at one place and time proceeded to brutal expropriation without compensation, at another to the buying out of feudal servitudes. No one can know in what way the capitalist servitude will be abolished. The essential thing is that the proletariat should be always ready for the most vigorous and effective action. It would be dangerous to dismiss the possibility of revolutionary events occasioned either by the resistance or by the criminal aggression of the privileged class. It would be fatal, trusting in the one word revolution, to neglect the great forces which the conscious, organized proletariat can employ within democracy. These legal means, often won by revolution, represent an accumulation of revolutionary force, a revolutionary capital, of which it would be madness not to take advantage. Too often the workers neglect to profit by the means of action which democracy and the Republic put into their hands. They do not demand from trade-unionist action, co-operative action, or universal suffrage, all that those forms of action can give. No formula, no machinery, can enable the working-class to dispense with the constant effort of organization and education. The idea of the general strike, of general strikes, is invincibly suggested to proletarians by the growing magnitude of working-class organization. They do not desire violence, which is very often the result of an insufficient organization and a rudimentary education of the proletariat; but they would make a great mistake if they did not employ the powerful means of action, which co-ordinates working-class forces to subserve the great interests of the workers or of society; they must group and organize themselves to be in a position to make the privileged class more and more emphatically aware of the gulf which may suddenly be cleft open in the economic life of societies by the abrupt stoppage of the worn-out and interminably exploited workers. They can thereby snatch from the selfishness of the privileged class great reforms interesting the working-class in general, and hasten the complete transformation of an unjust society. But the formula of the general strike, like the partial strike, like political action, is only valuable through the progress of the education, the thought, and the will of the working-class. The Socialist party defends the Republic as a necessary means of liberation and education. Socialism is essentially republican. It might be even said to be the Republic itself, since it is the extension of the Republic to the régime of property and labor. The Socialist party needs, to organize the new world, free minds, emancipated from superstitions and prejudices. It asks for and guarantees every human being, every individual, absolute freedom of thinking, and writing, and affirming their beliefs. Over against all religions, dogmas, and churches, as well as over against the class conception of the bourgeoisie, it sets the unlimited right of free thought, the scientific conception of the universe, and a system of public education based exclusively on science and reason. Thus accustomed to free thought and reflection, citizens will be protected against the sophistries of the capitalistic and clerical reaction. The small craftsmen, small traders, and small peasant proprietors will cease to think that it is Socialism which wishes to expropriate them. The Socialist party will hasten the hour when these small peasant proprietors, ruined by the underselling of their produce, riddled with mortgage debts, and always liable to judicial expropriation, will eventually understand the advantages of generalized and systematized association, and will claim themselves, as a benefit, the socialization of their plots of land. But it would be useless to prepare inside each nation an organization of justice and peace, if the relations of the nations to one another remained exposed to every enterprise of force, every suggestion of capitalist greed. The Socialist party desires peace among nations; it condemns every policy of aggression and war, whether continental or colonial. It constantly keeps on the order of the day for civilized countries simultaneous disarmament. While waiting for the day of definite peace among nations, it combats the militarist spirit by doing its utmost to approximate the system of permanent armies to that of national militias. It wishes to protect the territory and the independence of the nation against any surprise; but every offensive policy and offensive weapon is utterly condemned by it. The close understanding of the workers, of the proletarians of every country, is necessary as well to beat back the forces of aggression and war as to prepare by a concerted action the general triumph of Socialism. The international agreement of the militant proletarians of every country will prepare the triumph of a free humanity, where the differences of classes will have disappeared, and the difference of nations, instead of being a principle of strife and hatred, will be a principle of brotherly emulation in the universal progress of mankind. It is in this sense and for these reasons that the Socialist party has formulated in its congresses the rule and aim of its action--international understanding of the workers; political and economic organization of the proletariat as a class party for the conquest of government and the socialization of the means of production and exchange; that is to say, the transformation of capitalist society into a collectivist or communist society. _II.--Program of Reforms_ The Socialist party, rejecting the policy of all or nothing, has a program of reforms whose realization it pursues forthwith. (1) _Democratization of Public Authorities_ 1. Universal direct suffrage, without distinction of sex, in every election. 2. Reduction of time of residence. Votes to be cast for lists, with proportional representation, in every election. 3. Legislative measures to secure the freedom and secrecy of the vote. 4. Popular right of initiative and referendum. 5. Abolition of the Senate and Presidency of the Republic. The powers at present belonging to the President of the Republic and the Cabinet to devolve on an executive council appointed by the Parliament. 6. Legal regulation of the legislator's mandate, to be revocable by the vote of any absolute majority of his constituents on the register. 7. Admission of women to all public functions. 8. Absolute freedom of the press, and of assembly guaranteed only by the common law. Abrogation of all exceptional laws on the press. Freedom of civil associations. 9. Full administrative autonomy of the departments and communes, under no reservations but that of the laws guaranteeing the republican, democratic, and secular character of the State. (2) _Complete Secularization of the State_ 1. Separation of the Churches and the State; abolition of the Budget of Public Worship; freedom of public worship; prohibition of the political and collective action of the Churches against the civil laws and republican liberties. 2. Abolition of the congregations; nationalization of the property in mortmain, of every kind, belonging to them, and appropriation of it for works of social insurance and solidarity; in the interval, all industrial, agricultural, and commercial undertakings are to be forbidden to the congregations. (3) _Democratic and Humane Organization of Justice_ 1. Substitution for all the present courts, whether civil or criminal, of courts composed of a jury taken from the electoral register and judges elected under guarantees of competence; the jury to be formed by drawing lots from lists drawn up by universal suffrage. 2. Justice to be without fee. Transformation of ministerial offices into public functions. Abolition of the monopoly of the bar. 3. Examination from opposite sides at every stage and on every point. 4. Substitution for the vindictive character of the present punishments, of a system for the safe keeping and the amelioration of convicts. 5. Abolition of the death penalty. 6. Abolition of the military and naval courts. (4) _Constitution of the Family in conformity with Individual Rights_ 1. Abrogation of every law establishing the civil inferiority of women and natural or adulterine children. 2. Most liberal legislation on divorce. A law sanctioning inquiry into paternity. (5) _Civic and Technical Education_ 1. Education to be free of charge at every stage. 2. Maintenance of the children in elementary schools at the expense of the public bodies. 3. For secondary and higher education, the community to pay for those of the children who on examination are pronounced fit usefully to continue their studies. 4. Creation of a popular higher education. 5. State monopoly of education at the three stages; as a means towards this, all members of the regular and secular clergy to be forbidden to open and teach in a school. (6) _General recasting of the System of Taxation upon Principles of Social Solidarity_ 1. Abolition of every tax on articles of consumption which are primary necessaries, and of the four direct contributions;[1] accessorily, relief from taxation of all small plots of land and small professional businesses.[2] 2. Progressive income-tax, levied on each person's income as a whole, in all cases where it exceeds 3,000 francs (£120). 3. Progressive tax on inheritances, the scale of progression being calculated with reference both to the amount of the inheritance and the degree of remoteness of the relationship. 4. The State to be empowered to seek a part of the revenue which it requires from certain monopolies. (7) _Legal Protection and Regulation of Labor in Industry, Commerce, and Agriculture_ 1. One day's rest per week, or prohibition of employers to exact work more than six days in seven. 2. Limitation of the working-day to eight hours; as a means towards this, vote of every regulation diminishing the length of the working-day. 3. Prohibition of the employment of children under fourteen; half-time system for young persons, productive labor being combined with instruction and education. 4. Prohibition of night-work for women and young persons. Prohibition of night-work for adult workers of all categories and in all industries where night-work is not absolutely necessary. 5. Legislation to protect home-workers. 6. Prohibition of piece-work and of truck. Legal recognition of blacklisting. 7. Scales of rates forming a minimum wage to be fixed by agreement between municipalities and the working-class corporations of industry, commerce, and agriculture. 8. Employers to be forbidden to make deductions from wages, as fines or otherwise. Workers to assist in framing special rules for workshops. 9. Inspection of workshops, mills, factories, mines, yards, public services, shops, etc., shall be carried out with reference to the conditions of work, hygiene, and safety, by inspectors elected by the workmen's unions, in concurrence with the State inspectors. 10. Extension of the industrial arbitration courts to all wage-workers of industry, commerce, and agriculture. 11. Convict labor to be treated as a State monopoly; the charge for all work done shall be the wage normally paid to trade-unionist workers. 12. Women to be forbidden by law to work for six weeks before confinement and for six weeks after. (8) _Social Insurance against all Natural and Economic Risks_ 1. Organization by the nation of a system of social insurance, applying to the whole mass of industrial, commercial, and agricultural workers, against the risks of sickness, accident, disability, old age, and unemployment. 2. The insurance funds to be found without drawing on wages; as a means towards this, limitation of the contribution drawn from the wage-workers to a third of the total contribution, the two other thirds to be provided by the State and the employers. 3. The law on workmen's accidents to be improved and applied without distinction or nationality. 4. The workers to take part in the control and administration of the insurance system. (9) _Extension of the Domain and Public Services, Industrial and Agricultural, of State, Department, and Commune_ 1. Nationalization of railways, mines, the Bank of France, insurance, the sugar refineries and sugar factories, the distilleries, and the great milling establishments. 2. Organization of public employment registries for the workers, with the assistance of the Bourses du Travail and the workmen's organizations: and abolition of the private registries. 3. State organization of agricultural banks. 4. Grants to rural communes to assist them to purchase agricultural machinery collectively, to acquire communal domains, worked under the control of the communes by unions of rural laborers, and to establish depôts and entrepôts. 5. Organization of communal services for lighting, water, common transport, construction, and public management of cheap dwellings. 6. Democratic administration of the public services, national and communal; organizations of workers to take part in their administration and control; all wage-earners in all public services to have the right of forming trade-unions. 7. National and communal service of public health, and strengthening of the laws which protect it--those on unhealthy dwellings, etc. (10) _Policy of International Peace and Adaptation of the Military Organization to the Defense of the Country_ 1. Substitution of a militia for the standing Army, and adoption of every measure, such as reductions of military service, leading up to it. 2. Remodeling and mitigation of the military penal code; abolition of disciplinary corps, and prohibition of the prolongation of military service by way of penalty. 3. Renunciation of all offensive war, no matter what its pretext. 4. Renunciation of every alliance not aimed exclusively at the maintenance of peace. 5. Renunciation of Colonial military expeditions; and in the present Colonies or Protectorates, withdrawn from the influence of missionaries and the military régime, development of institutions to protect the natives. 3. BASIS OF THE UNITED SOCIALIST PARTY OF FRANCE _Adopted January 13, 1905_ The representatives of the various Socialistic organizations of France: the revolutionary Socialist Labor Party, the Socialist Party of France, the French Socialist Party, the independent federations of Bouches-du-Rhône, of Bretagne, of Hérault, of the Somme, and of l'Yonne, commanded by their respective parties and federations to form a union upon the basis indicated by the International Congress of Amsterdam, declare that the action of a unified party should be based upon the principles established by the International Congress, especially those held in France in 1900 and Amsterdam in 1904. The divergence of views and the various interpretations of the tactics of the Socialists which have prevailed up to the present moment have been due to circumstances peculiar to France and to the absence of a general party organization. The delegates declare their common desire to form a party based upon the class war which, at the same time, will utilize to its profit the struggles of the laboring classes and unite their action with that of a political party organized for the defense of the rights of the proletariat, whose interests will always rest in a party fundamentally and irreconcilably opposed to all the bourgeois classes and to the state which is their instrument. Therefore the delegates declare that their respective organizations are prepared to collaborate immediately in this work of the unification of all the Socialistic forces in France, upon the following basis, unanimously adopted: 1. The Socialist Party is a class party which has for its aim the socialization of the means of production and exchange, that is to say, to transform the present capitalistic society into a collective or communistic society by means of the political and economic organization of the proletariat. By its aims, by its ideals, by the power which it employs, the Socialist Party, always seeking to realize the immediate reforms demanded by the working class, is not a party of reforms, but a party of class war and revolution. 2. The members of Parliament elected by the party form a unique group opposed to all the factions of the bourgeois parties. The Socialist group in Parliament must refuse to sustain all of those means which assure the domination of the bourgeoisie in government and their maintenance in power: must therefore refuse to vote for military appropriations, appropriations for colonial conquest, secret funds, and the budget. Even in the most exceptional circumstances the Socialist members must not pledge the party without its consent. In Parliament the Socialist group must consecrate itself to defending and extending the political liberties and rights of the working classes and to the realization of those reforms which ameliorate the conditions of life in the struggle for existence of the working class. The deputies should always hold themselves at the disposition of the party, giving themselves to the general propaganda, the organization of the proletariat, and constantly working toward the ultimate goal of Socialism. 3. Every member of the legislature individually, as well as each militant Socialist, is subject to the control of his federation; all of the officials in all of the groups are subject to the central organization. In every case the national congress has the final jurisdiction over all party matters. 4. There shall be complete freedom of discussion in the press concerning questions of principle and policy, but the conduct of all the Socialist publications must be strictly in accord with the decisions of the national congress as interpreted by the executive committee of the party. Journals which are or may become the property of the party, either of the national party or of the federations, will naturally be placed under the management of authorities permanently established for that purpose by the party or the federations. Journals which are not the property of the party, but proclaim themselves as Socialistic, must conform strictly to the resolutions of the congress as interpreted by the proper party authorities, and they should insert all the official communications of the party and party notices, as they may be requested to do. The central committee of the party may remind such journals of the policies of the party, and if they are recalcitrant may propose to the congress that all intercourse between them and the party be broken. 5. Members of Parliament shall not be appointed members of the central committee, but they shall be represented on the central committee by a committee equal to one-tenth of the number of delegates, and in no case shall their representation be less than five. The Federation shall not appoint as delegates to the Central Committee "_militants_" who reside within the limits of the Federation. 6. The party will take measures for insuring, on the part of the officials, respect for the mandates of the party, and will fix the amount of their assessment. 7. A congress charged with the definite organization of the party will be convened as soon as possible upon the basis of proportional representation fixed, first upon the number of members paying dues, and second upon the number of votes cast in the general elections of 1902. III. GERMANY 1. POLITICAL PARTIES IN GERMANY There are a great many "fractions" in German politics. But, following the Continental custom, they are all grouped into three divisions, the Left or Radical, Right or Conservative, and the Center. In Germany the Center is the Catholic or Clerical Party. The leading groups are as follows: 1. _Conservative._--The "German Conservatives" are the old tories; the "Free Conservatives" profess, but rarely show, a tendency toward liberal ideas, although they have, at intervals, opposed ministerial measures. The Conservatives are for the Government (Regierung) first, last, and all the time. They were a powerful factor under Bismarck and docile in his hands. Since his day they have suffered many defeats because of their reactionary policy. But the group still is the Kaiser's party, the stronghold of modern medievalism, opposed to radical reforms, and adhering to "the grace of God" policy of monarchism. Economically they are _junker_ and "big business." The anti-Socialist laws were the expression of their ideas as to Socialism and the way to quench it. 2. _National Liberal._--This party is not liberal, in the sense that England or America knows liberalism. It is really only a less conservative party than the extreme Right, although it began as the brilliant Progressist Party of the early '60's. It was triumphant in the Prussian Diet until Bismarck shattered it on his war policy. In the first Reichstag it had 116 members, nearly one-third of the whole. But Bismarck needed it, got it, and left it quite as conservative as he wished. It voted for the anti-Socialist laws and for state insurance. 3. _Progressive_ (_Freisinnige_, literally, "free-minded").--This faction is a cession from the old Progressist Party of which Lassalle was a member for a few months. They are Radicals of a very moderate type, and are opposed to the junker bureaucracy. There are two wings--the People's Party (_Freisinnige Volkspartei_) and the Progressive Union (_Freisinnige Vereinigung_). It is a constitutional party, and has counted in its ranks such eminent scholars as Professor Virchow and Professor Theodor Mommsen. They are in favor of ministerial responsibility, are free traders of the Manchester type, opposed to state intervention and state insurance, but favor factory inspection, sanitation, and other social legislation. They are in favor of freedom in religion, trade, and education, and espouse ballot reform. They have a well-organized party, but do not seem effective in winning elections. They share, to some degree, with the Social Democrats the prejudice of the religious folk against free-thinking and religious latitudinarianism. It is the middle-class party of protest against bureaucracy. 4. The _Center_, or Catholic Party, is a homogeneous, isolated, well-disciplined, inflexible group, dominated by loyalty to their religion. Whenever they have co-operated with the government it has been in return for favors shown. The ranks of this party were closed by the _Culturkampf_, which resulted in the expulsion of the Jesuit orders and the separation of the elementary schools from the Church. The party is reactionary in politics and economics. 5. _Anti-Semitic._--The name discloses the ideals of a party inspired by dread and hatred of an element that comprises less than 1.5 per cent. of the population, and whose political disabilities were not all removed until 1850 in Prussia and 1869 in Mecklenburg. This party was formed in 1880, largely through the agitation of the Court Chaplain, Pastor Stöcker, whose diatribes were peculiarly effective in Berlin, where some very disgraceful scenes were enacted by members of this party. 6. _Independent groups_ are formed by the various nationalities that are under subjection to German dominance. These are the Danish, Hannoverian, Alsace-Lorraine, and Polish groups. They usually are grouped with the Center. 7. There are also a number of independent members in the Reichstag. They adhere loosely to the larger groups, but as a rule merit the name given them--_Wilden_, "wild ones." The accompanying table (p. 297) shows the distribution of seats in the Reichstag, for the past thirty years. 2. SOME MODERN GERMAN ELECTION LAWS _Analysis of the New Election Law of Saxony_ _A._ One vote--every male 25 years of age. _B._ Two votes, every male, as follows: 1. Those who have an annual income of over 1,600 marks ($400). 2. Those who hold public office or a permanent private position with an annual income of over 1,400 marks ($350). 3. Those who are eligible to vote for Landskulturrat (Agricultural Board) or Gewerbskammer (Chamber of Commerce) and from their business have an income of over 1,400 marks. (This includes merchants, landowners, and manufacturers.) 4. Those who are owners or beneficiaries of property in the kingdom from which they have an income of 1,250 marks ($312.50) a year, and upon which at least 100 tax units are assessed. 5. Those who own, or are beneficiaries of, land in the kingdom, to the extent of at least 2 hectares, devoted to agriculture, or forestry, or horticulture, or more than one-half hectare devoted to gardening or wine culture. 6. Those who have conducted such professional studies as entitle them to the one-year volunteer military service. _C._ The following have three votes: 1. Those who have an income of over 2,200 marks ($550). 2. Those in division B, 2 and 3, who have an income from office or position of over 1,900 marks ($475). 3. Those who are not in private or public service and have a professional income of over 1,900 marks. (This includes lawyers, physicians, artists, engineers, publicists, authors, professors.) 4. Those in B, 4, whose income is over 1,600 marks ($400). 5. Those in B, 5, with 4 hectares devoted to agriculture, etc., and 1 hectare to gardening or wine culture. _D._ The following have four votes: 1. Those who have an income of 2,800 marks ($700). 2. Those in B, 2 and 3, or in C, 3, with an income over 2,500 marks ($625). 3. Those in B, 4, with an annual income of over 2,200 marks ($550). 4. Those in B, 5, with 8 hectares devoted to agriculture or 2 hectares devoted to gardening or wine culture. _E._ Voters over 50 years old have an extra vote (Alters-stimme), but no voter is allowed over four votes. Sachsen-Altenburg, in 1908-9, modified its election laws as follows: The legislature is composed of 9 representatives elected by the cities; 12 by the rural districts; 7 by the highest taxpayers; one each by the Chamber of Commerce, the Board of Agriculture, the Craft guilds (Handwerks-kammer), and the Labor Council (Arbeiter-kammer). The vigorous protest of the Social Democrats did not avail against the passage of this law. Saxe-Weimar recently modified its election law as follows: All citizens of communes were given the right to vote. The great feudal estates (165 persons in 1909) elect 5 representatives to the Diet; the rest of the highest taxpayers, i.e., those who have a taxable income of over 3,000 marks, elect 5. The University of Jena elects 1 member, the Chamber of Commerce 1, the Handwerks-kammer (Craft Guilds) 1, Landwirthschaftkammer (Agricultural Board) 1, the Arbeitskammer (Labor Council) 1. There are 38 members in the Diet: the remaining 23 are elected at large. 3. STATISTICAL TABLES STATE INSURANCE IN GERMANY _Industrial Insurance in Germany, 1908._ Sick benefits: Number insured 13,189,599 Men 9,880,541 Women 3,309,058 Income 365,994,000 marks Outlay 331,049,900 " Accident Insurance: Number insured 23,674,000 Men 14,795,400 Women 8,878,600 Income 207,550,500 marks Outlay 157,884,700 " Old-Age Pensions: Number insured 15,226,000 Men 10,554,000 Women 4,672,000 Income 285,882,000 marks Outlay 181,476,800 " From 1885 to 1908 a total of 9,791,376,100 marks ($2,447,844,025) was paid out in industrial insurance. (Compiled from _Statistisches Jahrbuch des Deutschen Reiches_.) LABOR UNIONS IN GERMANY =================+===================+=============+====================== _Name of Union_ | _Membership_ | _No. of | _Amount in | | Unions_ | Treasury--Marks_ -----------------+---------+---------+------+------+----------+----------- | 1908 | 1909 | 1908 | 1909 | 1908 | 1909 +---------+---------+------+------+----------+----------- Social Democratic|1,831,731|1,892,568|11,024|11,725|40,839,791|43,743,793 Hirsh-Duncker | 105,633| 108,028| 2,095| 2,102| 4,210,413| 4,372,495 Christian | 264,519| 280,061| 3,212| 3,856| 4,513,409| 5,365,338 Patriotic | 16,507| 9,957| 69| 91| 57,786| 24,858 "Yellow" | 47,532| 53,849| 79| 85| 386,305| 437,602 Independent* | 615,873| 654,240| | | 1,357,802| 1,655,325 -----------------+---------+---------+------+------+----------+----------- * This is a nondescript group of local organizations, containing (1909) 56,183 Poles, as well as the organization of railwaymen, telegraph operators, postal employees, all in the government service, and organized as friendly societies rather than as fighting bodies. Government employees are not supposed to participate in "Unionism." Compiled from _Statistisches Jahrbuch des Deutschen Reiches_. TABLE SHOWING VOTE CAST IN REICHSTAG ELECTIONS SINCE THE FOUNDING OF THE EMPIRE* ==========================+==========+==========+==========+==========+ Election Year | 1871 | 1874 | 1877 | 1878 | Population of Empire |40,997,000|42,004,000|43,610,000|44,129,000| Number of voters | 7,656,000| 8,523,000| 8,943,000| 9,128,000| Number who voted | 3,885,000| 5,190,000| 5,401,000| 5,761,000| Per cent. of vote cast | 51.0 | 61.2 | 60.6 | 63.3 | ==========================+==========+==========+==========+==========+ Conservative | 549,000| 360,000| 526,000| 749,000| Imperial Conservative | 346,000| 376,000| 427,000| 786,000| Anti-Semites | ... | ... | ... | ... | Other Conservative Groups| ... | ... | ... | ... | Center | 724,000| 1,446,000| 1,341,000| 1,328,000| Guelphs | 73,000| 72,000| 86,000| 107,000| Danes | 21,000| 20,000| 17,000| 16,000| Poles | 176,000| 209,000| 216,000| 216,000| Alsatians | ... | 190,000| 149,000| 130,000| National Liberal | 1,171,000| 1,499,000| 1,470,000| 1,331,000| Other Liberal groups | 281,000| 98,000| 89,000| 69,000| Progressist or Radical | 361,000| 469,000| 403,000| 388,000| People's Party | 50,000| 39,000| 49,000| 69,000| Social Democrats | 124,000| 352,000| 493,000| 437,000| ==========================+==========+==========+==========+==========+ ==========================+==========+==========+==========+==========+ Election Year | 1881 | 1884 | 1887 | 1890 | Population of Empire |45,428,000|46,336,000|47,630,000|49,241,000| Number of voters | 9,090,000| 9,383,000| 9,770,000|10,146,000| Number who voted | 5,098,000| 5,663,000| 7,541,000| 7,229,000| Per cent. of vote cast | 56.3 | 60.6 | 77.5 | 71.6 | ==========================+==========+==========+==========+==========+ Conservative | 831,000| 861,000| 1,147,000| 895,000| Imperial Conservative | 379,000| 388,000| 736,000| 482,000| Anti-Semites | ... | ... | 12,000| 48,000| Other Conservative Groups| ... | ... | ... | 66,000| Center | 1,183,000| 1,282,000| 1,516,000| 1,342,000| Guelphs | 87,000| 96,000| 113,000| 113,000| Danes | 14,000| 14,000| 12,000| 14,000| Poles | 201,000| 203,000| 220,000| 247,000| Alsatians | 147,000| 166,000| 234,000| 101,000| National Liberal | 747,000| 997,000| 1,678,000| 1,179,000| Other Liberal groups | 429,000| ... | ... | ... | Progressist or Radical | 649,000| 997,000| 973,000| 1,160,000| People's Party | 108,000| 96,000| 89,000| 148,000| Social Democrats | 312,000| 550,000| 763,000| 1,427,000| ==========================+==========+==========+==========+==========+ ==========================+==========+==========+==========+ Election Year | 1893 | 1898 | 1903 | Population of Empire |50,757,000|54,406,000|58,629,000| Number of voters |10,628,000|11,441,000|12,531,000| Number who voted | 7,674,000| 7,753,000| 9,496,000| Per cent. of vote cast | 72.2 | 68.1 | 75.8 | ==========================+==========+==========+==========+ Conservative | 1,038,000| 859,000| 935,000| Imperial Conservative | 438,000| 344,000| 333,000| Anti-Semites | 264,000| 284,000| 249,000| Other Conservative Groups| 250,000| 250,000| 230,000| Center | 1,469,000| 1,455,000| 1,866,000| Guelphs | 106,000| 109,000| 101,000| Danes | 14,000| 15,000| 15,000| Poles | 230,000| 252,000| 354,000| Alsatians | 115,000| 107,000| 127,000| National Liberal | 997,000| 984,000| 1,338,000| Other Liberal groups | 258,000| 235,000| 285,000| Progressist or Radical | 666,000| 558,000| 538,000| People's Party | 167,000| 109,000| 92,000| Social Democrats | 1,787,000| 2,107,000| 3,011,000| ==========================+==========+==========+==========+ ==========================+==========+=========== Election Year | 1907 | 1912 Population of Empire |61,983,000|65,407,000 Number of voters |13,353,000|14,442,000 Number who voted |11,304,000|12,207,000 Per cent. of vote cast | 84.7 | 84.5 ==========================+==========+=========== Conservative | 1,099,000| 1,126,000 Imperial Conservative | 494,000| 383,000 Anti-Semites | 261,000| ... Other Conservative Groups| 272,000| 424,000 Center | 2,159,000| 1,991,000 Guelphs | 94,000| 91,000 Danes | 15,000| 17,000 Poles | 458,000| 448,000 Alsatians | 107,000| 157,000 National Liberal | 1,696,000| 1,723,000 Other Liberal groups | 435,000} Progressist or Radical | 744,000} 1,506,000 People's Party | 139,000} Social Democrats | 3,259,000| 4,250,000 ==========================+==========+=========== * In round numbers. From Kürschner's _Deutscher Reichstag_, p. 24. PARTY REPRESENTATION IN THE REICHSTAG THE YEARS ARE THOSE OF GENERAL ELECTIONS--EXCEPTING 1911 --------------------------+------+------+------+------+------+------+ _Party or Faction._ | 1881 | 1884 | 1887 | 1890 | 1893 | 1898 | --------------------------+------+------+------+------+------+------+ RIGHT Conservatives | 50 | 76 | 80 | 72 | 67 | 53 | German or Imperial | | | | | | | Conservatives | 27 | 28 | 41 | 20 | 28 | 22 | "Wild" Conservatives | 1 | 2 | -- | 1 | 5 | 4 | Anti-Semites | -- | -- | 1 | 5 | 16 | 14 | League of Landowners | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | 5 | Bavarian Land League | -- | -- | -- | -- | 4 | 5 | --------------------------+------+------+------+------+------+------+ CENTER Center | 98 | 99 | 98 | 106 | 96 | 102 | Poles | 18 | 16 | 13 | 16 | 19 | 15 | Guelphs | 10 | 11 | 4 | 11 | 7 | 9 | Alsatians | 15 | 15 | 15 | 10 | 8 | 10 | Danes | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | "Wild" Clericals | 2 | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | --------------------------+------+------+------+------+------+------+ LEFT National Liberals | 45 | 51 | 98 | 41 | 53 | 48 | RADICALS United Progressives | 47 } | | { 14 | 13 | (Radicals) | } 64 | 32 | 64 { | | Other Progressive | } | | { | | groups (Radicals) | 59 } | | { 23 | 29 | People's Party | 8 | 7 | -- | 10 | 11 | 8 | "Wild" Liberals | 3 | 3 | 3 | 5 | 1 | 3 | --------------------------+------+------+------+------+------+------+ Social Democrats* | 12 | 24 | 11 | 35 | 44 | 56 | --------------------------+------+------+------+------+------+------+ --------------------------+------+------+------+------+------+------+ _Party or Faction._ | 1900 | 1903 | 1906 | 1907 | 1911 | 1912 | --------------------------+------+------+------+------+------+------+ RIGHT | Conservatives | 51 | 52 | 52 | 58 | 59 | 43 | German or Imperial | | | | | | | Conservatives | 20 | 19 | 22 | 22 | 25 | 14 | "Wild" Conservatives | 7 | 6 | 1 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Anti-Semites | 13 | 11 | 14 | 20 } 29 | 13 | League of Landowners | 4 | 3 | 4 | 7 } | | Bavarian Land League | 3 | 3 | 3 | 1 | -- | 2 | --------------------------+------+------+------+------+------+------+ CENTER | Center | 102 | 100 | 100 | 104 | 103 | 90 | Poles | 14 | 16 | 16 | 20 | 20 | 18 | Guelphs | 7 | 7 | 7 | 2 | 3 | 5 | Alsatians | 10 | 10 | 10 | 8 | 7 | 9 | Danes | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | "Wild" Clericals | 1 | -- | 1 | -- | -- | 1 | --------------------------+------+------+------+------+------+------+ LEFT | National Liberals | 53 | 50 | 51 | 54 | 51 | 45 | RADICALS | United Progressives | 15 | 9 | 10 | 14 } | | (Radicals) | | | | } | | Other Progressive | | | | } 49 | 42 | groups (Radicals) | 28 | 21 | 20 | 28 } | | People's Party | 7 | 6 | 6 | 7 } | | "Wild" Liberals | 3 | 2 | -- | 4 | 4 | 2 | --------------------------+------+------+------+------+------+------+ Social Democrats* | 58 | 81 | 79 | 43 | 53 | 110 | --------------------------+------+------+------+------+------+------+ * They form the extreme Radical Left. (These groups are those given in Kürchner's _Deutscher Reichstag_, p. 398.) 4. PROGRAM OF THE GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY _Adopted at Erfurt, 1891_ The economic development of bourgeois society leads by natural necessity to the downfall of the small industry, whose foundation is formed by the worker's private ownership of his means of production. It separates the worker from his means of production, and converts him into a propertyless proletarian, while the means of production become the monopoly of a relatively small number of capitalists and large landowners. Hand-in-hand with this monopolization of the means of production goes the displacement of the dispersed small industries by colossal great industries, the development of the tool into the machine, and a gigantic growth in the productivity of human labor. But all the advantages of this transformation are monopolized by capitalists and large landowners. For the proletariat and the declining intermediate classes--petty bourgoisie and peasants--it means a growing augmentation of the insecurity of their existence, of misery, oppression, enslavement, debasement, and exploitation. Ever greater grows the number of proletarians, ever more enormous the army of surplus workers, ever sharper the opposition between exploiters and exploited, ever bitterer the class-war between bourgeoisie and proletariat, which divides modern society into two hostile camps, and is the common hall-mark of all industrial countries. The gulf between the propertied and the propertyless is further widened through the crises, founded in the essence of the capitalistic method of production, which constantly become more comprehensive and more devastating, which elevate general insecurity to the normal condition of society, and which prove that the powers of production of contemporary society have grown beyond measure, and that private ownership of the means of production has become incompatible with their application to their objects and their full development. Private ownership of the means of production, which was formerly the means of securing to the producer the ownership of his product, has to-day become the means of expropriating peasants, manual workers, and small traders, and enabling the non-workers--capitalists and large landowners--to own the product of the workers. Only the transformation of capitalistic private ownership of the means of production--the soil, mines, raw materials, tools, machines, and means of transport--into social ownership and the transformation of production of goods for sale into Socialistic production managed for and through society, can bring it about, that the great industry and the steadily growing productive capacity of social labor shall for the hitherto exploited classes be changed from a source of misery and oppression to a source of the highest welfare and of all-round harmonious perfection. This social transformation means the emancipation not only of the proletariat, but of the whole human race which suffers under the conditions of to-day. But it can only be the work of the working-class, because all the other classes, in spite of mutually conflicting interests, take their stand on the basis of private ownership of the means of production, and have as their common object the preservation of the principles of contemporary society. The battle of the working-class against capitalistic exploitation is necessarily a political battle. The working-class cannot carry on its economic battles or develop its economic organization without political rights. It cannot effect the passing of the means of production into the ownership of the community without acquiring political power. To shape this battle of the working-class into a conscious and united effort, and to show it its naturally necessary end, is the object of the Social Democratic Party. The interests of the working-class are the same in all lands with capitalistic methods of production. With the expansion of world-transport and production for the world-market the state of the workers in any one country becomes constantly more dependent on the state of the workers in other countries. The emancipation of the working-class is thus a task in which the workers of all civilized countries are concerned in a like degree. Conscious of this, the Social Democratic Party of Germany feels and declares itself _one_ with the class-conscious workers of all other lands. The Social Democratic Party of Germany fights thus not for new class-privileges and exceptional rights, but for the abolition of class-domination and of the classes themselves, and for the equal rights and equal obligations of all, without distinction of sex and parentage. Setting out from these views, it combats in contemporary society not merely the exploitation and oppression of the wage-workers, but every kind of exploitation and oppression, whether directed against a class, a party, a sex, or a race. Setting out from these principles the Social Democratic Party of Germany demands immediately-- 1. Universal equal direct suffrage and franchise, with direct ballot, for all members of the Empire over twenty years of age, without distinction of sex, for all elections and acts of voting. Proportional representation; and until this is introduced, re-division of the constituencies by law according to the numbers of population. A new Legislature every two years. Fixing of elections and acts of voting for a legal holiday. Indemnity for the elected representatives. Removal of every curtailment of political rights except in case of tutelage. 2. Direct legislation by the people by means of the initiative and referendum. Self-determination and self-government of the people in empire, state, province, and commune. Authorities to be elected by the people; to be responsible and bound. Taxes to be voted annually. 3. Education of all to be capable of bearing arms. Armed nation instead of standing army. Decision of war and peace by the representatives of the people. Settlement of all international disputes by the method of arbitration. 4. Abolition of all laws which curtail or suppress the free expression of opinion and the right of association and assembly. 5. Abolition of all laws which are prejudicial to women in their relations to men in public or private law. 6. Declaration that religion is a private matter. Abolition of all contributions from public funds to ecclesiastical and religious objects. Ecclesiastical and religious communities are to be treated as private associations, which manage their affairs quite independently. 7. Secularization of education. Compulsory attendance of public primary schools. No charges to be made for instruction, school requisites, and maintenance, in the public primary schools; nor in the higher educational institutions for those students, male and female, who in virtue of their capacities are considered fit for further training. 8. No charge to be made for the administration of the law, or for legal assistance. Judgment by popularly elected judges. Appeal in criminal cases. Indemnification of innocent persons prosecuted, arrested, or condemned. Abolition of the death-penalty. 9. No charges to be made for medical attendance, including midwifery and medicine. No charges to be made for death certificates. 10. Graduated taxes on income and property, to meet all public expenses as far as these are to be covered by taxation. Obligatory self-assessment. A tax on inheritance, graduated according to the size of the inheritance and the degree of kinship. Abolition of all indirect taxes, customs, and other politico-economic measures which sacrifice the interests of the whole community to the interests of a favored minority. For the protection of the working-class the Social Democratic Party of Germany demands immediately-- 1. An effective national and international legislation for the protection of workmen on the following basis: (_a_) Fixing of a normal working-day with a maximum of eight hours. (_b_) Prohibition of industrial work for children under fourteen years. (_c_) Prohibition of night-work, except for such branches of industry as, in accordance with their nature, require night-work, for technical reasons, or reasons of public welfare. (_d_) An uninterrupted rest of at least thirty-six hours in every week for every worker. (_e_) Prohibition of the truck system. 2. Inspection of all industrial businesses, investigation and regulation of labor relations in town and country by an Imperial Department of Labor, district labor departments, and chambers of labor. Thorough industrial hygiene. 3. Legal equalization of agricultural laborers and domestic servants with industrial workers; removal of the special regulations affecting servants. 4. Assurance of the right of combination. 5. Workmen's insurance to be taken over bodily by the Empire; and the workers to have an influential share in its administration. 6. Separation of the Churches and the State. (_a_) Suppression of the grant for public worship. (_b_) Philosophic or religious associations to be civil persons at law. 7. Revision of sections in the Civil Code concerning marriage and the paternal authority. (_a_) Civil equality of the sexes, and of children, whether natural or legitimate. (_b_) Revision of the divorce laws, maintaining the husband's liability to support the wife or the children. (_c_) Inquiry into paternity to be legalized. (_d_) Protective measures in favor of children materially or morally abandoned. 5. COMMUNAL PROGRAM OF THE BAVARIAN SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY Inasmuch as our communes are hindered in the fulfilment of their economic and political duties by reactionary laws, we demand: A.--OF THE STATE: 1. A change of the municipal code, granting genuine local autonomy. A single representative chamber, a four-year term of office, one-half retiring every two years. Universal adult suffrage, secret ballot, the franchise not to be denied to those receiving public aid. 2. Radical tax reform, through the establishing of a uniform, progressive income and property tax, collected by the communes; local taxes to be assessed upon increment value; and prohibition of all taxes upon the necessaries of life. 3. A common-school law providing universal public education free from all religious bias, compulsory up to fourteen years of age. Obligatory secondary schools, the inclusion of social and political economy in their curricula; the defraying of expenses of pupils by the state. Substitution of professional supervision of schools for clerical supervision. 4. Enactment of a domiciliary law, in place of the present inadequate laws, providing for all the necessary sanitary and socio-political demands. Extending the municipalities' right of condemnation to the extent that towns may erect houses and schools, open streets, and make all necessary public improvements demanded by the public welfare. 5. Passage of a sanitary code. Regulation of sanitation in the public interests. Free medical attendance at births. Public nurseries. 6. The administration of public charities by the local authorities. B.--OF THE COMMUNE WE DEMAND: 1. Abolishing all taxes upon the rights of citizenship and of residence. Granting of full franchise rights after one year's residence. 2. Elections to be held on a holiday or on Sunday. 3. Pensions for communal employees. 4. The cost of local administration to be borne by local property or from additions to the direct state taxes. Abolishing of all indirect taxes. Denial of all public aid to the Church. 5. All public services to be conducted by the commune; these to be considered as public conveniences and necessities, and not to serve a mere pecuniary interest, but to be run as the public welfare demands. Rational development of existing water-power, means of communication, etc. 6. Stipulating, in every contract for municipal work, the wages to be paid, and other conditions of labor, such arrangements to be made with the labor organizations; the right to organize into unions not to be denied to laborers and municipal employees and officers. Abolishing of strike clause in contracts for public works. Prohibition, of the sub-contractor system. Securing wages of workmen by bonds. Forbidding municipal officers participating in any business that will bring them into contract relations with the municipality. 7. Development of a public school system which shall be non-sectarian and free to all. Restricting the number of pupils in the classes as far as practical. Furnishing free meals and clothing to needy school children; such service not to be counted as public charity. Establishing continuation schools for both sexes, and schools for backward children. Establishing of public reading-rooms and free public libraries. 8. The advancement of public housing plans. The purchasing of large land areas by the municipality, to prevent speculation in building lots. Simplification of the procedure in examination of building plans, and the granting of building permits. Simplifying the regulations pertaining to the building of cottages and small residences. Municipal aid in the building of workingmen's homes. Providing cheaper homes in municipal houses and tenements. Providing loans of public moneys to building associations and agricultural associations. Leasing of land by the municipality. Municipal inspection of dwellings and of all buildings, the municipality to keep close scrutiny on all real estate developments. Establishment of a public bureau of homes, where information and aid can be secured, and where proper statistics can be gathered concerning building conditions. 9. Providing for cheap and wholesome food through the regulation and supervision of its importation and inspection. 10. Extension of sanitation. Conducting hospitals according to modern medical science. Establishing municipal lying-in hospitals. Free burials. 11. Public care for the poor and orphans. The bettering of the economic condition of women. The granting of aid out of public funds. Public inspection and control of all orphanages, hospitals for children, and nurseries. 12. The establishment of public labor bureaus, which are to act as employment agencies, information bureaus, gather labor statistics, and supervise the sociological activities of the municipality. Providing work for those in need of employment, on the public works of the commune. Provision for the support of those out of work in co-operation, with the labor unions' efforts in the same direction. The extension of municipal factory inspection and labor laws, as far as the general laws permit. Appointment of laborers as building inspectors. The development of the industrial and commercial courts. Sunday as a day of rest. 13. Liberal wages to be paid workmen employed on public works. Fixing a minimum wage in accordance with the rules of the labor unions; formation of public loan and credit system; eight-hour day. Insuring public employees against sickness, accident, and old age. Making provision for widows and orphans of public employees. Right to organize not to be denied all municipal employees and officials. Recognition of the unions. Annual vacation, on full pay, to every municipal employee and official. Municipal employees to be given their wages during their attendance on military manoeuvers, and the payment of the difference between their wages and their sick-benefits in case of illness. 14. Formation of a union of communes or towns, when isolated municipalities find themselves impotent in securing these demands. 6. ELECTION ADDRESS (WAHLRUF) OF THE GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRATS FOR THE REICHSTAG ELECTIONS OF 1912 On the 12th of January, 1912, the general election for the Reichstag takes place. Rarely have the voters been called upon to participate in a more consequential election. This election will determine whether, in the succeeding years, the policy of oppression and plundering shall be carried still farther, or whether the German people shall finally achieve their rights. In the Reichstag elections of 1907 the voters were deceived by the government and the so-called national parties: many millions of voters allowed themselves to be deluded. The Reichstag of the "National" _bloc_ from Heydebrand down to Weimar and Nauman has made nugatory the laws pertaining to the rights of coalition; has restricted the use of the non-Germanic languages in public meetings; has virtually robbed the youth of the right of coalition, and has favored every measure for the increase of the army, navy, and colonial exploitation. The result of their reactionaryism is an enormous increase of the burdens of taxation. In spite of the fact that in 1906 over 200,000,000 marks increase was voted, in stamp tax, tobacco tax, etc., in spite of the sacred promise of the government, through its official organ, that no new taxes were being contemplated, the government has, through its "financial reforms," increased our burden over five hundred millions. Liberals and Conservatives were unanimous in declaring that four-fifths of this enormous sum should be raised through an increase in indirect taxes, the greater part of which is collected from laborers, clerks, shopkeepers, artisans, and farmers. Inasmuch as the parties to the Bülow-_bloc_ could not agree upon the distribution of the property tax and the excise tax, the _bloc_ was dissolved and a new coalition appeared--an alliance between the holy ones and the knights (Block der Ritter und der Heiligen). This new _bloc_ rescued the distiller from the obligations of an excise tax, defeated the inheritance tax, which would have fallen upon the wealthy, and placed upon the shoulders of the working people a tax of hundreds of millions, which is paid through the consumption of beer, whiskey, tobacco, cigars, coffee, tea--yea, even of matches. This Conservative-Clerical _bloc_ further showed its contempt for the working people in the way it amended the state insurance laws. It robbed the workingman of his rights and denied to mothers and their babes necessary protection and adequate care. In this manner the gullibility of the voters who were responsible for the Hottentot elections of 1907 was revenged. Since that date every by-election for the Reichstag, as well as for the provincial legislatures and municipal councils, has shown remarkable gains in the Social Democratic vote. The reactionaries were consequently frightened, and now they resort to the usual election trick of diverting the attention of the voters from internal affairs to international conditions, and appeal to them under the guise of nationalism. The Morocco incident gave welcome opportunity for this ruse. At home and abroad the capitalistic war interests and the nationalistic jingoes stirred the animosities of the peoples. They drove their dangerous play so far that even the Chancellor found himself forced to reprimand his _junker_ colleagues for using their patriotism for partisan purposes. But the attempt to bolster up the interests of the reactionary parties with our international complications continues in spite of this. Voters, be on your guard! Remember that on election day you have in your hand the power to choose between peace or war. The outcome of this election is no less important in its bearing upon internal affairs. Count Bülow declared, before the election of 1907, "the fewer the Social Democrats, the greater the social reforms." The opposite is true. The last few years conclusively demonstrate this. The socio-political mills have rattled, but they have produced very little flour. In order to capture their votes for the "national" candidates, the state employees and officials were promised an increase in their pay. To the high-salaried officials the new Reichstag doled out the increase with spades, to the poorly paid humble employees with spoons. And this increase in pay was counterbalanced by an increase in taxes and the rising cost of living. To the people the government refused to give any aid, in spite of their repeated requests for some relief against the constantly increasing prices of the necessities of life. And, while the Chancellor profoundly maintained that the press exaggerated the actual conditions of the rise in prices, the so-called saviors of the middle class--the Center, the Conservatives, the anti-Semites and their following--rejected every proposal of the Social Democrats for relieving the situation, and actually laid the blame for the rise in prices upon their own middle-class tradesmen and manufacturers. _New taxes, high cost of living, denial of justice, increasing danger of war_--that is what the Reichstag of 1907, which was ushered in with such high-sounding "national" tom-toms, has brought you. And the day of reckoning is at hand. Voters of Germany, elect a different majority! The stronger you make the Social Democratic representation in the Reichstag, the firmer you anchor the world's peace and your country's welfare! The Social Democracy seeks the conquest of political power, which is now in the hands of the property classes, and is mis-used by them to the detriment of the masses. They denounce us as "revolutionists." Foolish phraseology! The bourgeois-capitalistic society is no more eternal than have been the earlier forms of the state and preceding social orders. The present order will be replaced by a higher order, the Socialistic order, for which the Social Democracy is constantly striving. Then the solidarity of all peoples will be accomplished and life will be made more humane for all. The pathway to this new social order is being paved by our capitalistic development, which contains all the germs of the New Order within itself. For us the duty is prescribed to use every means at hand for the amelioration of existing evils, and to create conditions that will raise the standard of living of the masses. Therefore we demand: 1. The democratizing of the state in all of its activities. An open pathway to opportunity. A chance for every one to develop his aptitudes. Special privileges to none. The right person in the right place. 2. Universal, direct, equal, secret ballot for all persons twenty years of age without distinction of sex, and for all representative legislative bodies. Referendum for setting aside the present unjust election district apportionment and its attendant electoral abuses. 3. A parliamentary government. Responsible ministry. Establishment of a department for the control of foreign affairs. Giving the people's representatives in the Reichstag the power to declare war or maintain peace. Consent of the Reichstag to all state appropriations. 4. Organization of the national defense along democratic lines. Militia service for all able-bodied men. Reducing service in the standing army to the lowest terms consistent with safety. Training youth in the use of arms. Abolition of the privilege of one-year volunteer service. Abolition of all unnecessary expense for uniforms in army and navy. 5. Abolition of "class-justice" and of administrative injustice. Reform of the penal code, along lines of modern culture and jurisprudence. Abolition of all privileges pertaining to the administration of justice. 6. Security to all workingmen, employees, and officials in their right to combine, to meet, and to organize. 7. Establishment of a national Department of Labor, officials of this Department to be elected by the interests represented upon the basis of universal and equal suffrage. Extension of factory inspection by the participation of workingmen and workingwomen in the same. Legalized universal eight-hour day, shortening the hours of labor in industries that are detrimental to health. 8. Reform of industrial insurance, exemption of farm laborers and domestic servants from contributing to insurance funds. Direct election of representatives in the administration of the insurance funds; enlarging the representation of labor on the board of directors; increasing the amounts paid workingmen; lowering age for old-age pensions from 70 to 65 years; aid to expectant mothers; and free medical attendance. 9. Complete religious freedom. Separation of Church and State, and of school and Church. No support of any kind, from public funds, for religious purposes. 10. Universal, free schools as the basis of all education. Free text-books. Freedom for art and science. 11. Diminution and ultimate abolition of all indirect taxes, and abolition of all taxes on the necessities of life. Abolition of duties on foodstuffs. Limiting the restrictions upon the importation of cattle, fowl, and meat to the necessary sanitary measures. Reduction in the tariff, especially in those schedules which encourage the development of syndicates and pools, thereby enabling products of German manufacture to be sold cheaper abroad than at home. 12. The support of all measures that tend to develop commerce and trade. Abolition of tax on railway tickets. A stamp tax on bills of lading. 13. A graduated income, property, and inheritance tax; inasmuch as this is the most effective way of dampening the ardor of the rich for a constantly increasing army and navy. 14. Internal improvements and colonization; the transformation of great estates into communal holdings, thereby making possible a greater food supply and a corresponding lowering of prices. The establishment of public farms and agricultural schools. The reclamation of swamp-lands, moors, and dunes. The cessation of foreign colonization now done for the purpose of exploiting foreign peoples for the sake of gain. Voters of Germany! New naval and military appropriations await you; these will increase the burdens of your taxes by hundreds of millions. As on former occasions, so now the ruling class will attempt to roll these heavy burdens upon the shoulders of the humble, and thereby increase the burden of existence of the family. Therefore, let the women, upon whom the burden of the household primarily rests, and who are to-day without political rights, take active part in this work of emancipation and join themselves with determination to our cause, which is also their cause. Voters of Germany! If you are in accord with these principles, then give your votes on the 12th of January to the Social Democratic Party. Help prepare the foundations for a new and better state whose motto shall be: Death to Want and Idleness! Work, Bread, and Justice for all! Let your battle-cry on election day resound: Long live the Social Democracy! EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE OF THE SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC REPRESENTATION IN THE REICHSTAG. BERLIN, December 5, 1911. FOOTNOTES: [1] Personal tax; tax on movables; tax on land; door and window tax. [2] A license to trade is required for many businesses in France. IV. BELGIUM POLITICAL UNIONISM IN BELGIUM The Catholic Church essayed to organize in Belgium a "Christian Socialist" movement, patterned after Bishop Kettler's movement in the Rhine provinces. The movement was called "Fédération des Sociétés Ouvriers Catholiques" and grew to considerable power. The federation soon, however, developed democratic tendencies that separated it from the Clerical Party, and the Abbé Daens, their first deputy in the Chamber of Representatives, provoked the hostility of the ecclesiastical authorities and was deprived of his clerical prerogatives. The Catholic labor unions, which did not join in this democratic movement, have in the last few years developed some strength, and have now about 20,000 members. The Progressists or Radicals have from the first been favorable to labor and have in their ranks many workmen from the industries "de luxe," such as bronze workers, jewelers, art craftsmen, etc. The Liberals have a trades-union organization which does not flourish. It has about 2,000 members. The Liberals have, however, together with the Progressists, some influence over the independent unions, with their 32,000 members. The Socialist labor unions are the largest and most powerful. Their average yearly membership in the years 1885-90 was 40,234; in 1899 it was 61,451; in 1909 it had increased to 103,451. STATISTICAL TABLES TABLE SHOWING THE DEVELOPMENT OF CO-OPERATIVE SOCIETIES IN BELGIUM =======+===========+============+===========+=========+ | | | | | | _No. of | _Sales-- | _Profits--| _No. of | _Year_ | Societies_| Francs_ | Francs_ | Members_| -------+-----------+------------+-----------+---------+ 1904 | 168 | 26,936,873 | 3,140,210 | 103,349 | 1905 | 161 | 28,174,563 | 3,035,941 | 119,581 | 1906 | 162 | 33,569,359 | 3,493,586 | 126,993 | 1907 | 166 | 39,103,673 | 3,843,568 | 134,694 | 1908 | 175 | 40,655,359 | 3,855,444 | 140,730 | 1909 | 199 | 43,288,867 | 4,678,559 | 148,042 | ---------+-----------+------------+-----------+---------+ =======+===========+============+============ | _No. | _Value of | _Paid-up | of | Realty | Capital _Year_ | Employees_| Francs_ | Francs_ -------+-----------+------------+------------ 1904 | 1785 | 10,302,059 | 1,146,651 1905 | 1752 | 12,091,300 | 1,655,061 1906 | 1809 | 12,844,976 | 1,694,878 1907 | 2093 | 14,280,955 | 1,940,175 1908 | 2128 | 14,837,114 | 1,942,266 1909 | 2223 | 15,850,158 | 1,893,616 ---------+-----------+------------+------------ TABLE SHOWING THE GROWTH OF THE WHOLESALE CO-OPERATIVE MOVEMENT IN BELGIUM FROM THE DATE OF ITS BEGINNING IN 1901 ========+===================== | _Amount of Business _Year_ | Done--Francs_ --------+--------------------- 1901 | 760,356 1902 | 1,211,439 1903 | 1,485,573 1904 | 1,608,475 1905 | 2,219,842 1906 | 2,416,372 1907 | 2,796,196 1908 | 2,995,615 1909 | 3,221,849 1910 | 4,489,996 --------+--------------------- PROGRAM OF THE BELGIAN LABOR PARTY _Adopted at Brussels in 1893_ DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES 1. The constituents of wealth in general, and in particular the means of production, are either natural agencies or the fruit of the labor--manual and mental--of previous generations besides the present; consequently they must be considered the common heritage of mankind. 2. The right of individuals or groups to enjoy this heritage can be based only on social utility, and aimed only at securing for every human being the greatest possible sum of freedom and well-being. 3. The realization of this ideal is incompatible with the maintenance of the capitalistic régime, which divides society into two necessarily antagonistic classes--the one able to enjoy property without working, the other obliged to relinquish a part of its product to the possessing class. 4. The workers can only expect their complete emancipation from the suppression of classes and a radical transformation of existing society. This transformation will be in favor, not only of the proletariat, but of mankind as a whole; nevertheless, as it is contrary to the immediate interests of the possessing class, the emancipation of the workers will be essentially the work of the workers themselves. 5. In economic matters their aim must be to secure the free use, without charge, of all the means of production. This result can only be attained, in a society where collective labor is more and more replacing individual labor, by the collective appropriation of natural agencies and the instruments of labor. 6. The transformation of the capitalistic régime into a collectivist régime must necessarily be accompanied by correlative transformations-- (_a_) In _morals_, by the development of altruistic feelings and the practice of solidarity. (_b_) In _politics_, by the transformation of the State into a business management (_administration des choses_). 7. Socialism must, therefore, pursue simultaneously the economic, moral, and political emancipation of the proletariat. Nevertheless, the economic point of view must be paramount, for the concentration of capital in the hands of a single class forms the basis of all the other forms of its domination. To realize its principles the Labor Party declares-- (1) That it considers itself as the representative, not only of the working-class, but of all the oppressed, without distinction of nationality, worship, race, or sex. (2) That the Socialists of all countries must make common cause (_être solidaires_), the emancipation of the workers being not a national, but an international work. (3) That in their struggle against the capitalist class the workers must fight by every means in their power, and particularly by political action, by the development of free associations, and by the ceaseless propagation of Socialistic principles. I.--POLITICAL PROGRAM 1. _Electoral reform._ (_a_) Universal suffrage without distinction of sex for all ranks (age-limit, twenty-one; residence, six months). (_b_) Proportional representation. (_c_) Election expenses to be charged on the public authorities. (_d_) Payment of elected persons. (_e_) Elected persons to be bound by pledges, according to law. (_f_) Electorates to have the right of unseating elected persons. 2. _Decentralization of political power._ (_a_) Suppression of the Senate. (_b_) Creation of Legislative Councils, representing the different functions of society (industry, commerce, agriculture, education, etc.); such Councils to be autonomous, within the limits of their competence and excepting the veto of Parliament; such Councils to be federated, for the study and defense of their common interests. 3. _Communal autonomy._ (_a_) Mayors to be appointed by the electorate. (_b_) Small communes to be fused or federated. (_c_) Creation of elected committees corresponding to the different branches of communal administration. 4. _Direct legislation._ Right of popular initiative and referendum in legislative, provincial, and communal matters. 5. _Reform of education._ (_a_) Primary, all-round, free, secular, compulsory instruction at the expense of the State. Maintenance of children attending the schools by the public authorities. Intermediate and higher instruction to be free, secular, and at the expense of the State. (_b_) Administration of the schools by the public authorities, under the control of School Committees elected by universal suffrage of both sexes, with representatives of the teaching staff and the State. (_c_) Assimilation of communal teachers to the State's educational officials. (_d_) Creation of a Superior Council of Education, elected by the School Committees, who are to organize the inspection and control of free schools and of official schools. (_e_) Organization of trade education, and obligation of all children to learn manual work. (_f_) Autonomy of the State Universities, and legal recognition of the Free Universities. University Extension to be organized at the expense of the public authorities. 6. _Separation of the Churches and the State._ (_a_) Suppression of the grant for public worship. (_b_) Philosophic or religious associations to be civil persons at law. 7. _Revision of Sections in the Civil Code concerning marriage and the paternal authority._ (_a_) Civil equality of the sexes, and of children, whether natural or legitimate. (_b_) Revision of the divorce laws, maintaining the husband's liability to support the wife or the children. (_c_) Inquiry into paternity to be legalized. (_d_) Protective measures in favor of children materially or morally abandoned. 8. _Extension of liberties._ Suppression of measures restricting any of the liberties. 9. _Judicial reform._ (_a_) Application of the elective principle to all jurisdictions. Reduction of the number of magistrates. (_b_) Justice without fees; State-payment of advocates and officials of the Courts. (_c_) Magisterial examination in penal cases to be public. Persons prosecuted to be medically examined. Victims of judicial errors to be indemnified. 10. _Suppression of armies._ Provisionally; organization of a national militia. 11. _Suppression of hereditary offices, and establishment of a Republic._ II.--ECONOMIC PROGRAM A.--_General Measures_ 1. _Organization of statistics._ (_a_) Creation of a Ministry of Labor. (_b_) Pecuniary aid from the public authorities for the organization of labor secretariates by workmen and employers. 2. _Legal recognition of associations, especially--_ (_a_) Legal recognition of trade-unions. (_b_) Reform of the law on friendly societies and co-operative societies and subsidy from the public authorities. (_c_) Repression of infringements of the right of combination. 3. _Legal regulation of the contract of employment._ Extension of laws protecting labor to all industries, and especially to agriculture, shipping, and fishing. Fixing of a minimum wage and maximum of hours of labor for workers, industrial or agricultural, employed by the State, the Communes, the Provinces, or the contractors for public works. Intervention of workers, and especially of workers' unions, in the framing of rules. Suppression of fines. Suppression of savings-banks and benefit clubs in workshops. Fixing of a maximum of 6,000 francs for public servants and managers. 4. _Transformation of public charity into a general insurance of all citizens--_ (_a_) against unemployment; (_b_) against disablement (sickness, accident, old age); (_c_) against death (widows and orphans). 5. _Reorganization of public finances._ (_a_) Abolition of indirect taxes, especially taxes on food and customs tariffs. (_b_) Monopoly of alcohol and tobacco. (_c_) Progressive income-tax. Taxes on legacies and gifts between the living (excepting gifts to works of public utility). (_d_) Suppression of intestate succession, except in the direct line and within limits to be determined by law. 6. _Progressive extension of public property._ The State to take over the National Bank. Social organization of loans, at interest to cover costs only, to individuals and to associations of workers. i. _Industrial property._ Abolition, on grounds of public utility, of private ownership in mines, quarries, the subsoil generally, and of the great means of production and transport. ii. _Agricultural property._ (_a_) Nationalization of forests. (_b_) Reconstruction or development of common lands. (_c_) Progressive taking over of the land by the State or the communes. 7. _Autonomy of public services._ (_a_) Administration of the public services by special autonomous commissions, under the control of the State. (_b_) Creation of committees elected by the workmen and employees of the public services to debate with the central administration the conditions of the remuneration and organization of labor. B.--_Particular Measures for Industrial Workers_ 1. _Abolition of all laws restricting the right of combination._ 2. _Regulation of industrial labor._ (_a_) Prohibition of employment of children under fourteen. (_b_) Half-time system between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. (_c_) Prohibition of employment of women in all industries where it is incompatible with morals or health. (_d_) Reduction of working-day to a maximum of eight hours for adults of both sexes, and minimum wage. (_e_) Prohibition of night-work for all categories of workers and in all industries, where this mode of working is not absolutely necessary. (_f_) One day's rest per week, so far as possible on Sunday. (_g_) Responsibility of employers in case of accidents, and appointment of doctors to attend persons wounded. (_h_) Workmen's memorandum-books and certificates to be abolished, and their use prohibited. 3. _Inspection of work._ (_a_) Employment of paid medical authorities, in the interests of labor hygiene. (_b_) Appointment of inspectors by the Councils of Industry and Labor. 4. _Reorganization of the Industrial Tribunals_ (Conseils de Prud'hommes) _and the Councils of Industry and Labor_. (_a_) Working women to have votes and be eligible. (_b_) Submission to the Courts to be compulsory. 5. _Regulation of work in prisons and convents._ C.--_Particular Measures for Agricultural Workers_ 1. _Reorganization of the Agricultural Courts._ (_a_) Nomination of delegates in equal numbers by the landowners, farmers, and laborers. (_b_) Intervention of the Chambers in individual or collective disputes between landowners, farmers, and agricultural workers. (_c_) Fixing of a minimum wage by the public authorities on the proposition of the Agricultural Courts. 2. _Regulation of contracts to pay farm-rents._ (_a_) Fixing of the rate of farm-rents by Committees of Arbitration or by the reformed Agricultural Courts. (_b_) Compensation to the outgoing farmer for enhanced value of property. (_c_) Participation of landowners, to a wider extent than that fixed by the Civil Code, in losses incurred by farmers. (_d_) Suppression of the landowner's privilege. 3. _Insurance by the provinces, and reinsurance by the State, against epizootic diseases, diseases of plants, hail, floods, and other agricultural risks._ 4. _Organization by the public authorities of a free agricultural education._ Creation or development of experimental fields, model farms, agricultural laboratories. 5. _Purchase by the communes of agricultural implements to be at the disposal of their inhabitants._ Assignment of common lands to groups of laborers engaging not to employ wage labor. 6. _Organization of a free medical service in the country._ 7. _Reform of the Game Laws._ (_a_) Suppression of gun licenses. (_b_) Suppression of game preserves. (_c_) Right of cultivators to destroy all the year round animals which injure crops. 8. _Intervention of public authorities in the creation of agricultural co-operative societies--_ (_a_) For buying seed and manure. (_b_) For making butter. (_c_) For the purchase and use in common of agricultural machines. (_d_) For the sale of produce. (_e_) For the working of land by groups. 9. _Organization of agricultural credit._ III.--COMMUNAL PROGRAM 1. _Educational reforms._ (_a_) Free scientific instruction for children up to fourteen. Special courses for older children and adults. (_b_) Organization of education in trades and industries, in co-operation with workmen's organizations. (_c_) Maintenance of children; except where the public authorities intervene to do so. (_d_) Institution of school refreshment-rooms. Periodical distribution of boots and clothing. (_e_) Orphanages. Establishments for children abandoned or cruelly ill-treated. 2. _Judicial reforms._ Office for consultations free of charge in cases coming before the law-courts, the industrial courts, etc. 3. _Regulation of work._ (_a_) Minimum wage and maximum working-day to be made a clause in contracts for communal works. (_b_) Intervention of trade associations in the fixing of rates of wages, and general regulation of industry. The Echevin of Public Works to supervise the execution of these clauses in contracts. (_c_) Appointment by the workmen's associations of inspectors to supervise the clauses in contracts. (_d_) Rigorous application of the principle of tenders open to all, for all services which, during a transition-period, are not managed directly. (_e_) Permission to trade-unions to tender, and abolition of security-deposit. (_f_) Creation of _Bourses du Travail_, or at least offices for the demand and supply of employment, whose administration shall be entrusted to trade-unions or labor associations. (_g_) Fixing of a minimum wage for the workmen and employees of a commune. 4. _Public charity._ (_a_) Admission of workmen to the administration of the councils of hospitals and of public charity. (_b_) Transformation of public charity and the hospitals into a system of insurance against old age. Organization of a medical service and drug supply. Establishment of public free baths and wash-houses. (_c_) Establishment of refuges for the aged and disabled. Night-shelter and food-distribution for workmen wandering in search of work. 5. _Complete neutrality of all communal services from the philosophical point of view._ 6. _Finance._ (_a_) Saving to be effected on present cost of administration. Maximum allowance of 6,000 francs for mayors and other officials. Costs of entertainment for mayors who must incur certain private expenses. (_b_) Income tax. (_c_) Special tax on sites not built over and houses not let. 7. _Public services._ (_a_) The commune, or a federation of communes composing one agglomeration, is to work the means of transport--tramways, omnibuses, cabs, district railways, etc. (_b_) The commune, or federation of communes, is to work directly the services of general interest at present conceded to companies--lighting, water-supply, markets, highways, heating, security, health. (_c_) Compulsory insurance of the inhabitants against fire; except where the State intervenes to do so. (_d_) Construction of cheap dwellings by the commune, the hospices, and the charity offices. V. ENGLAND GROWTH OF SOCIALISTIC SENTIMENT IN ENGLAND In 1885 the Earl of Wemyss made a speech in the House of Lords deploring the advancement of state interference in business and giving a résumé of the Acts of Parliament that showed how "Socialism" invaded St. Stephens from 1870 to 1885. His speech is interesting, not because it voices the ultra-Conservative's apprehensions but because the Earl had really discovered the legal basis of the new Social Democratic advance, which had come unheralded. The Earl reviewed the bills that Parliament had sanctioned, which dealt with state "interference." Twelve bills referred to lands and houses. "All of these measures assume the right of the state to regulate the management of, or to confiscate real property"--steps in the direction of substituting "land nationalization" for individual ownership. Five laws dealt with corporations, "confiscating property of water companies," etc.; nine dealt with ships: "all of them assertions by the Board of Trade of its right to regulate private enterprise and individual management in the mercantile marine;" six with mines, "prompting a fallacious confidence in government inspection;" six with railways, "all encroachments upon self-government of private enterprise in railways--successive steps in the direction of state railways." Nine had to do with manufactures and trades, "invasions by the state of the self-government of the various interests of the country, and curtailment of the freedom of contract between employers and employed." "The Pawnbrokers' Act of 1872 was the thin edge of the wedge for reducing the business of the 'poor man's banks' to a state monopoly." Twenty laws dealt with liquor, "all attempts on the part of the state to regulate the dealings and habits of buyers and sellers of alcoholic drinks." Sixteen dealt with dwellings of the working class, "all embodying the principle that it is the duty of the state to provide dwellings, private gardens, and other conveniences for the working classes, and assume its right to appropriate land for these purposes." There were nine education acts, "all based on the assumption that it is the duty of the state to act _in loco parentis_." Four laws dealt with recreation, "whereby the state, having educated the people in common school rooms, proceeds to provide them with common reading-rooms, and afterwards turns them out at stated times into the streets for common holidays." Of local government and improvement acts, there were passed "a vast mass of local legislation ... containing interferences in every conceivable particular with liberty and property." The Earl quotes Lord Palmerston as saying in 1865, "Tenant right is landlord wrong," and Lord Sherbrooke, in 1866, "Happily there is an oasis upon which all men, without distinction of party, can take common stand, and that is the good ground of political economy." And the noble lord concludes by predicting, "The general social results of such Socialistic legislation may be summed up in 'dynamite,' 'detectives,' and 'general demoralization.'"[1] In 1887 the Earl again turned his guns upon the radical advance, but only seven peers were on the benches to listen. In 1890 he made a third résumé under a more liberal patronage of listeners; this time the factory laws and inspection measures came in for his especial criticism. He said: "Now, my lords, what is the character of all this legislation? It is to substitute state help for self help, to regulate and control men in their dealings with one another with regard to land or anything else. The state now forbids contracts, breaks contracts, makes contracts. The whole tendency is to substitute the state or the municipality for the free action of the individual."[2] AN EARLY POLITICAL BROADSIDE BY THE MARXIANS. The earlier attitude of the Marxian Socialists of London toward participating in elections is shown in the following broadside, dated July, 1895: "We, revolutionary Social Democrats, disdain to conceal our principles. We proclaim the class war. We hold that the lot of the worker cannot to any appreciable extent be improved except by a complete overthrow of this present capitalist system of society. The time for social tinkering has gone past. Government statistics show that the number of unemployed is slowly but surely increasing, and that the decreases in wages greatly preponderate over the increases, and everything points to the fact that the condition of your class is getting worse and worse. "Refuse once for all to allow your backs to be made the stepping stones to obtain that power which they (the politicians) know only too well how to use against you. "Scoff at their patronizing airs and claim your rights like men. Refuse to give them that which they want, i.e., your vote. Give them no opportunity of saying that they are _your_ representatives. Refuse to be a party to the fraud of present-day politics, and "ABSTAIN FROM VOTING." THRIFT INSTITUTIONS IN ENGLAND FOR SAVINGS, INSURANCE, ETC., 1907 (FROM CHIOZZA MONEY--"RICHES AND POVERTY," p. 56) ----------------------------------------+--------------+-------------- _Name of Institution_ | _Number of | _Funds_--£ | Members_ | ----------------------------------------+--------------+-------------- Building Societies | 623,047 | 73,289,229 ========================================+==============+============== Ordinary Friendly Societies | 3,418,869 | 19,346,567 Friendly Societies having branches | 2,710,437 | 25,610,365 Collecting Friendly Societies | 9,010,574 | 9,946,447 Benevolent Societies | 29,716 | 337,393 Workingmen's Clubs | 272,847 | 381,463 Specially Authorized Societies | 70,980 | 532,717 Specially Authorized Loan Societies | 141,850 | 897,784 Medical Societies | 313,755 | 65,513 Cattle Insurance Settlers | 4,029 | 8,570 Shop Clubs | 12,207 | 1,349 ----------------------------------------+--------------+-------------- Total | 15,983,264 | 57,128,168 ========================================+==============+============== Co-operative Societies, industry and | | trade | 2,461,028 | 53,788,917 Business Co-operative Societies | 108,550 | 984,680 Land Co-operative Societies | 18,631 | 1,619,716 ----------------------------------------+--------------+-------------- Total | 2,588,209 | 56,393,313 ========================================+==============+============== Trade Unions | 1,973,560 | 6,424,176 Workmen's Compensation Schemes | 99,371 | 164,560 Friends of Labor Loan Societies | 33,576 | 260,905 ----------------------------------------+--------------+-------------- Grand Total of Registered Provident | | Societies | 21,301,027 | 193,660,351 ========================================+==============+============== Railway Savings Banks | 64,126* | 5,865,351@ Trustee Savings Banks | 1,780,214* | 61,729,588@ Post Office Savings Banks | 10,692,555* | 178,033,974@ ----------------------------------------+--------------+-------------- Bank Total | 12,536,895 | 245,628,634 ----------------------------------------+--------------+-------------- Grand Total | 33,837,922 | 439,388,985 ----------------------------------------+--------------+-------------- | * Depositions| @ Deposits ----------------------------------------+--------------+-------------- In this table allowance must be made for those belonging to more than one society, and, of course, not all the depositors or members are workingmen, especially in the savings banks and building-societies. CONSTITUTION AND STANDING ORDERS OF THE INDEPENDENT LABOR PARTY OF ENGLAND STANDING ORDERS (1911) _Contributions_ Affiliation Fees and Parliamentary Fund Contributions must be paid by December 31st each year. _Annual Conference_ 1. The Annual Conference shall meet during the month of January. 2. Affiliated Societies may send one delegate for every thousand or part of a thousand members paid for. 3. Affiliated Trades Councils and Local Labor Parties may send one delegate if their affiliation fee has been 15s., and two delegates if the fee has been 30s. 4. Persons eligible as delegates must be paying bona fide members or paid permanent officials of the organizations sending them. 5. A fee of 5s. per delegate will be charged. 6. The National Executive will ballot for the places to be allotted to the delegates. 7. Voting at the Conference shall be by show of hands, but on a division being challenged, delegates shall vote by cards, which shall be issued on the basis of one card for each thousand members, or fraction of a thousand, paid for by the Society represented. _Conference Agenda_ 1. Resolutions for the Agenda and Amendments to the Constitution must be sent in by November 1st each year. 2. Amendments to Resolutions must be sent in by December 15th each year. _Nominations for National Executive and Secretaryship_ 1. Nominations for the National Executive and the Secretaryship must be sent in by December 15th. 2. No member of the Parliamentary Committee of the Trade Union Congress or of the Management Committee of the General Federation of Trade Unions is eligible for nomination to the National Executive. CONSTITUTION (As revised under the authority of the Newport Conference, 1910) ORGANIZATION I. _Affiliation._ 1. The Labor Party is a Federation consisting of Trade Unions, Trades Councils, Socialist Societies, and Local Labor Parties. 2. A Local Labor Party in any constituency is eligible for affiliation, provided it accepts the Constitution and policy of the Party, and that there is no affiliated Trades Council covering the constituency, or that, if there be such Council, it has been consulted in the first instance. 3. Co-operative Societies are also eligible. 4. A National Organization of Women, accepting the basis of this Constitution, and the policy of the Party, and formed for the purpose of assisting the Party, shall be eligible for affiliation as though it were a Trades Council. II. _Object._ To secure the election of Candidates to Parliament and organize and maintain a Parliamentary Labor Party, with its own whips and policy. III. _Candidates and Members._ 1. Candidates and Members must accept this Constitution; agree to abide by the decisions of the Parliamentary Party in carrying out the aims of this Constitution; appear before their constituencies under the title of Labor Candidates only; abstain strictly from identifying themselves with or promoting the interests of any Parliamentary Party not affiliated, or its Candidates; and they must not oppose any Candidate recognized by the National Executive of the Party. 2. Candidates must undertake to join the Parliamentary Labor Party, if elected. IV. _Candidatures._ 1. A Candidate must be promoted by an affiliated Society which makes itself responsible for his election expenses. 2. A Candidate must be selected for a constituency by a regularly convened Labor Party Conference in the constituency. [The Hull Conference accepted the following as the interpretation of what a "Regularly Convened Labor Party Conference" is:--All branches of affiliated organizations within a constituency or divided borough covered by a proposal to run a Labor Candidate must be invited to send delegates to the Conference, and the local organization responsible for calling the Conference may, if it thinks fit, invite representatives from branches of organizations not affiliated but eligible for affiliation.] 3. Before a Candidate can be regarded as adopted for a constituency, his candidature must be sanctioned by the National Executive; and where at the time of a by-election no Candidate has been so sanctioned, the National Executive shall have power to withhold its sanction. V. _The National Executive._ The National Executive shall consist of fifteen members, eleven representing the Trade Unions, one the Trades Councils, Women's Organizations, and Local Labor Parties, and three the Socialist Societies, and shall be elected by ballot at the Annual Conference by their respective sections. VI. _Duties of the National Executive._ The National Executive Committee shall 1. Appoint a Chairman, Vice-Chairman, and Treasurer, and shall transact the general business of the Party; 2. Issue a list of its Candidates from time to time, and recommend them for the support of the electors; 3. Report to the affiliated organization concerned any Labor Member, Candidate, or Chief Official who opposes a Candidate of the Party, or who acts contrary to the spirit of the Constitution; 4. And its members shall strictly abstain from identifying themselves with or promoting the interests of any Parliamentary Party not affiliated, or its Candidates. VII. _The Secretary._ The Secretary shall be elected by the Annual Conference, and shall be under the direction of the National Executive. VIII. _Affiliation Fees and Delegates._ 1. Trade Unions and Socialist Societies shall pay 15s. per annum for every thousand members or fraction thereof, and may send to the Annual Conference one delegate for each thousand members. 2. Trades Councils and Local Labor Parties with 5,000 members or under shall be affiliated on an annual payment of 15s.; similar organizations with a membership of over 5,000 shall pay £1 10s., the former Councils to be entitled to send one delegate with one vote to the Annual Conference, the latter to be entitled to send two delegates and have two votes. 3. In addition to these payments a delegate's fee to the Annual Conference may be charged. IX. _Annual Conference._ The National Executive shall convene a Conference of its affiliated Societies in the month of January each year. Notice of resolutions for the Conference and all amendments to the Constitution shall be sent to the Secretary by November 1st, and shall be forthwith forwarded to all affiliated organizations. Notice of amendments and nominations for Secretary and National Executive shall be sent to the Secretary by December 15th, and shall be printed on the Agenda. X. _Voting at Annual Conference._ There shall be issued to affiliated Societies represented at the Annual Conference voting cards as follows: 1. Trade Unions and Socialist Societies shall receive one voting card for each thousand members, or fraction thereof paid for. 2. Trades Councils and Local Labor Parties shall receive one card for each delegate they are entitled to send. Any delegate may claim to have a vote taken by card. PARLIAMENTARY FUND I. _Object._ To assist in paying the election expenses of Candidates adopted in accordance with this Constitution, in maintaining them when elected; and to provide the salary and expenses of a National Party Agent. II. _Amount of Contribution._ 1. Affiliated Societies, except Trades Councils, and Local Labor Parties shall pay a contribution to this fund at the rate of 2d. per member per annum, not later than the last day of each financial year. 2. On all matters affecting the financial side of the Parliamentary Fund only contributing Societies shall be allowed to vote at the Annual Conference. III. _Trustees._ The National Executive of the Party shall, from its number, select three to act as Trustees, any two of whom, with the Secretary, shall sign checks. IV. _Expenditure._ 1. _Maintenance._--All Members elected under this Constitution shall be paid from the Fund equal sums not to exceed £200 per annum, provided that this payment shall only be made to Members whose Candidatures have been promoted by one or more Societies which have contributed to this Fund; provided further that no payment from this Fund shall be made to a Member or Candidate of any Society which has not contributed to this Fund for one year, and that any Society over three months in arrears shall forfeit all claim to the Fund on behalf of its Members or Candidates, for twelve months from the date of payment. 2. _Returning Officers' Expenses._--Twenty-five per cent. of the Returning Officers' net expenses shall be paid to the Candidates, subject to the provisions of the preceding clause, so long as the total sum so expended does not exceed twenty-five per cent. of the Fund. 3. _Administration._--Five per cent. of the Annual Income of the Fund shall be transferred to the General Funds of the Party, to pay for administrative expenses of the Fund. THE INDEPENDENT LABOR PARTY: CONSTITUTION AND RULES, 1910-1911 NAME _The Independent Labor Party._ MEMBERSHIP Open to all Socialists who indorse the principles and policy of the Party, are not members of either the Liberal or Conservative Party, and whose application for membership is accepted by a Branch. Any member expelled from membership of a Branch of the I.L.P. shall not be eligible for membership of any other branch without having first submitted his or her case for adjudication of the N.A.C. OBJECT The Object of the Party is to establish the Socialist State, when land and capital will be held by the community and used for the well-being of the community, and when the exchange of commodities will be organized also by the community, so as to secure the highest possible standard of life for the individual. In giving effect to this object it shall work as part of the International Socialist Movement. METHOD The Party, to secure its objects, adopts-- 1. _Educational Methods_, including the publication of Socialist literature, the holding of meetings, etc. 2. _Political Methods_, including the election of its members to local and national administrative and legislative bodies. PROGRAM The true object of industry being the production of the requirements of life, the responsibility should rest with the community collectively, therefore:-- The land being the storehouse of all the necessaries of life should be declared and treated as public property. The capital necessary for the industrial operations should be owned and used collectively. Work, and wealth resulting therefrom, should be equitably distributed over the population. As a means to this end, we demand the enactment of the following measures:-- 1. A maximum of 48 hours' working week, with the retention of all existing holidays, and Labor Day, May 1st, secured by law. 2. The provision of work to all capable adult applicants at recognized Trade Union rates, with a statutory minimum of 6d. per hour. In order to remuneratively employ the applicants, Parish, District, Borough, and County Councils to be invested with powers to:-- (_a_) Organize and undertake such industries as they may consider desirable. (_b_) Compulsorily acquire land; purchase, erect, or manufacture buildings, stock, or other articles for carrying on such industries. (_c_) Levy rates on the rental values of the district, and borrow money on the security of such rates for any of the above purposes. 3. State pension for every person over 50 years of age, and adequate provision for all widows, orphans, sick and disabled workers. 4. Free, secular, moral, primary, secondary, and university education, with free maintenance while at school or university. 5. The raising of the age of child labor, with a view to its ultimate extinction. 6. Municipalization and public control of the Drink Traffic. 7. Municipalization and public control of all hospitals and infirmaries. 8. Abolition of indirect taxation and the gradual transference of all public burdens on to unearned incomes with a view to their ultimate extinction. The Independent Labor Party is in favor of adult suffrage, with full political rights and privileges for women, and the immediate extension of the franchise to women on the same terms as granted to men; also triennial Parliaments and second ballot. ORGANIZATION I.--OFFICERS 1. Chairman and Treasurer. 2. A _National Administrative Council._--To be composed of fourteen representatives, in addition to the two officers. 3. No member shall occupy the office of Chairman of the Party for a longer consecutive period than three years, and he shall not be eligible for re-election for the same office for at least twelve months after he has vacated the chair. 4. _Election of N.A.C._--Four members of the N.A.C. shall be elected by ballot at the Annual Conference, and ten by the votes of members in ten divisional areas. 5. _Duties of N.A.C._-- (_a_) To meet at least three times a year to transact business relative to the Party. (_b_) To exercise a determining voice in the selection of Parliamentary candidates, and, where no branch exists, to choose such candidates when necessary. (_c_) To raise and disburse funds for General and By-Elections, and for other objects of the Party. (_d_) To deal with such matters of local dispute between branches and members which may be referred to its decision by the parties interested. (_e_) To appoint General Secretary and Officials, and exercise a supervising control over their work. (_f_) To engage organizers and lecturers when convenient, either permanently or for varying periods, at proper wages, and to direct and superintend their work. (_g_) To present to the Annual Conference a report on the previous year's work and progress of the Party. (_h_) To appoint when necessary sub-committees to deal with special branches of its work, and to appoint a committee to deal with each Conference Agenda. Such Committee to revise and classify the resolutions sent in by branches and to place resolutions dealing with important matters on the Agenda. (_i_) It shall not initiate any new departure or policy between Conferences without first obtaining the sanction of the majority of the branches. (_k_) Matters arising between Conferences not provided for by the Constitution, shall be dealt with by the N.A.C. (_l_) A full report of all the meetings of the N.A.C. as held shall be forwarded to each branch. 6. _Auditor._--A Chartered or Incorporated Accountant shall be employed to audit the accounts of the Party. II.--BRANCHES 1. _Branch._--An Association which indorses the objects and policy of the Party, and affiliates in the prescribed manner. 2. _Local Autonomy._--Subject to the general constitution of the Party, each Branch shall be perfectly autonomous. III.--FINANCES 1. Branches shall pay one penny per member per month to the N.A.C. 2. The N.A.C. may strike off the list of branches any branch which is more than 6 months in arrears with its payments. 3. The N.A.C. may receive donations or subscriptions to the funds of the Party. It shall not receive moneys which are contributed upon terms which interfere in any way with its freedom of action as to their disbursement. 4. The financial year of the Party shall begin on March 1st, and end on the last day of February next succeeding. IV.--ANNUAL CONFERENCE 1. The _Annual Conference_ is the ultimate authority of the Party, to which all final appeals shall be made. 2. _Date._--It shall be held at Easter. 3. _Special Conferences._--A Special Conference shall always be called prior to a General Election, for the purpose of determining the policy of the Party during the election. Other Special Conferences may be called by two-thirds of the whole of the members of the N.A.C, or by one-third of the branches of the Party. 4. _Conference Fee._--A Conference Fee per delegate (the amount to be fixed by the N.A.C.) shall be paid by all branches desiring representation, on or before the last day of February in each year. 5. No branch shall be represented which was not in existence on the December 31st immediately preceding the date of the Annual Conference. 6. Branches of the Party may send one delegate to Conference for each fifty members, or part thereof. Branches may appoint one delegate to represent their full voting strength. Should there be two or more branches which are unable separately to send delegates to Conference, they may jointly do so. 7. Delegates must have been members of the branch they represent from December 31st immediately preceding the date of the Conference. 8. Notices respecting resolutions shall be posted to branches not later than January 3d. Resolutions for the Agenda, and nominations for officers and N.A.C. shall be in the hands of the General Secretary eight weeks before the date of the Annual Conference, and issued to the branches a fortnight later. Amendments to resolutions on the Agenda and additional nominations may be sent to the Secretary four weeks before Conference, and they shall be arranged on the final Agenda, which shall be issued to branches two weeks before Conference. A balance sheet shall be issued to branches two weeks before the Conference, showing the receipts and expenditure of the Party for the year, also the number of branches affiliated and the amount each branch has paid in affiliation fees during the year. 9. The Chairman of the Party for the preceding year shall preside over the Conference. 10. _Conference Officials._--The first business of the Conference shall be the appointment of tellers. It shall next elect a Standing Orders Committee, with power to examine the credentials of delegates, and to deal with special business which may be delegated to it by the Conference. 11. In case any vacancy occurs on the N.A.C. between Conferences, the unsuccessful candidate receiving the largest number of votes at the preceding election shall fill the vacancy. Vacancies in the list of officers shall be filled up by the vote of the branches. 12. The principle of the second ballot shall be observed in all elections. 13. The Conference shall choose in which Divisional Area the next Conference shall be held. V.--PARLIAMENTARY CANDIDATES 1. The N.A.C. shall keep a list of members of the Party from which candidates may be selected by branches. 2. Any Branch at any time may nominate any eligible member of the Party to be placed upon that list. 3. The N.A.C. itself may place names on the list. 4. No person shall be placed upon this list unless he has been a member of the Party for at least twelve months. 5. Branches desiring to place a candidate in their constituencies must in the first instance communicate with the N.A.C., and have the candidate selected at a properly convened conference of representatives of the local branches of all societies affiliated with the Labor Party, so that the candidate may be chosen in accordance with the constitution of the Labor Party. The N.A.C. shall have power to suspend this clause where local or other circumstances appear to justify such a course. 6. Before the N.A.C. sanctions any candidature it shall be entitled to secure guarantees of adequate local financial support. 7. No Branch shall take any action which affects prejudicially the position or prospects of a Parliamentary candidate, who has received the credentials of the Labor Party, without first laying the case before the N.A.C. 8. Each candidate must undertake that he will run his election in accordance with the principles and policy of the Party, and that if elected he will support the Party on all questions coming within the scope of the principles of the I.L.P. * * * * * _The Constitution shall not be altered or amended except every third year, unless upon the requisition of two-thirds of the N.A.C. or one-third of the branches of the Party, when the proposed alterations or amendments shall be considered at the following Conference._--Resolution, Edinburgh, 1909. BASIS OF THE FABIAN SOCIETY The Fabian Society consists of Socialists. It therefore aims at the re-organization of society by the emancipation of land and industrial capital from individual and class ownership, and the vesting of them in the community for the general benefit. In this way only can the natural and acquired advantages of the country be equitably shared by the whole people. The Society accordingly works for the extinction of private property in land and of the consequent individual appropriation, in the form of rent, of the price paid for permission to use the earth, as well as for the advantages of superior soils and sites. The Society, further, works for the transfer to the community of the administration of such industrial capital as can conveniently be managed socially. For, owing to the monopoly of the means of production in the past, industrial inventions and the transformation of surplus income into capital have mainly enriched the proprietary class, the worker being now dependent on that class for leave to earn a living. If these measures be carried out, without compensation (though not without such relief to expropriated individuals as may seem fit to the community), rent and interest will be added to the reward of labor, the idle class now living on the labor of others will necessarily disappear, and practical equality of opportunity will be maintained by the spontaneous action of economic forces with much less interference with personal liberty than the present system entails. For the attainment of these ends the Fabian Society looks to the spread of Socialist opinions, and the social and political changes consequent thereon. It seeks to promote these by the general dissemination of knowledge as to the relation between the individual and society in its economic, ethical, and political aspects. The following questions are addressed to Parliamentary candidates by the Fabians: Will you press at the first opportunity for the following reforms:-- I.--_A Labor Program_ 1. The extension of the Workmen's Compensation Act to seamen, and to all other classes of wage earners? 2. Compulsory arbitration, as in New Zealand, to prevent strikes and lockouts? 3. A statutory minimum wage, as in Victoria, especially for sweated trades? 4. The fixing of "an eight-hours' day" as the maximum for all public servants; and the abolition, wherever possible, of overtime? 5. An Eight-Hours' Bill, without an option clause, for miners; and, for railway servants, a forty-eight-hours' week? 6. The drastic amendment of the Factory Acts, to secure (_a_) a safe and healthy work-place for every worker, (_b_) the prevention of overwork for all women and young persons, (_c_) the abolition of all wage-labor by children under 14, (_d_) compulsory technical instruction by extension of the half-time arrangements to all workers under 18? 7. The direct employment of labor by all public authorities whenever possible; and, whenever it is not possible, employment only of fair houses, prohibition of sub-contracting, and payment of trade-union rates of wages? 8. The amendment of the Merchant Shipping Acts so as (_a_) to secure healthy sleeping and living accommodation, (_b_) to protect the seaman against withholding of his wages or return passage, (_c_) to insure him against loss by shipwreck? II.--_A Democratic Budget_ 9. The further taxation of unearned incomes by means of a graduated and differentiated income-tax? 10. The abolition of all duties on tea, cocoa, coffee, currants, and other dried fruits? 11. An increase of the scale of graduation of the death duties, so as to fall more heavily on large inheritances? 12. The appropriation of the unearned increment by the taxation and rating of ground values? 13. The nationalization of mining rents and royalties? 14. Transfer of the railways to the State under the Act of 1844? III.--_Social Reform in Town and Country_ 15. The extension of full powers to parish, town, and county councils for the collective organization of the (_a_) water, (_b_) gas and (_c_) electric lighting supplies, (_d_) hydraulic power, (_e_) tramways and light railways, (_f_) public slaughter-houses, (_g_) pawnshops, (_h_) sale of milk, (_i_) bread, (_j_) coal, and such other public services as may be desired by the inhabitants? 16. Reform of the drink traffic by (_a_) reduction of the number of licenses to a proper ratio to the population of each locality, (_b_) transfer to public purposes of the special value of licenses, created by the existing monopoly, by means of high license or a license rate, (_c_) grant of power to local authorities to carry on municipal public houses, directly or on the Gothenburg system? 17. Amendment of the Housing of the Working Classes Act by (_a_) extension of period of loans to one hundred years, treatment of land as an asset, and removal of statutory limitation of borrowing powers for housing, (_b_) removal of restrictions on rural district councils in adopting Part III. of the Act, (_c_) grant of power to parish councils to adopt Part III. of the Act, (_d_) power to all local authorities to buy land compulsorily under the allotments clauses of the Local Government Act, 1894, or in any other effective manner? 18. The grant of power to all local bodies to retain the free-hold of any land that may come into their possession, without obligation to sell, or to use for particular purposes? 19. The relief of the existing taxpayer by (_a_) imposing, for local purposes, a municipal death duty on local real estate, collected in the same way as the existing death duties, (_b_) collecting rates from the owners of empty houses and vacant land, (_c_) power to assess land and houses at four per cent. on the capital value, (_d_) securing special contributions by way of "betterment" from the owners of property benefited by public improvements? 20. The further equalization of the rates in London? 21. The compulsory provision by every local authority of adequate hospital accommodation for all diseases and accidents? IV.--_The Children and the Poor_ 22. The prohibition of the industrial or wage-earning employment of children during school terms prior to the age of 14? 23. The provision of meals, out of public funds, for necessitous children in public elementary schools? 24. The training of teachers under public control and free from sectarian influences? 25. The creation of a complete system of public secondary education genuinely available to the children of the poor? 26. State pensions for the support of the aged or chronically infirm? V.--_Democratic Political Machinery_ 27. An amendment of the registration laws, with the aim of giving every adult man a vote, and no one more than one vote? 28. A redistribution of seats in accordance with population? 29. The grant of the franchise to women on the same terms as to men? 30. The admission of women to seats in the House of Commons and on borough and county councils? 31. The second ballot at Parliamentary and other elections? 32. The payment of all members of Parliament and of Parliamentary election expenses, out of public funds? 33. Triennial Parliaments? 34. All Parliamentary elections to be held on the same day? THE PROGRAM OF THE SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC FEDERATION, 1906 OBJECT The Socialization of the Means of Production, Distribution, and Exchange, to be controlled by a Democratic State in the interests of the entire community, and the complete Emancipation of Labor from the Domination of Capitalism and Landlordism, with the establishment of Social and Economic Equality between the Sexes. The economic development of modern society is characterized by the more or less complete domination of the capitalistic mode of production over all branches of human labor. The capitalistic mode of production, because it has the creation of profit for its sole object, therefore favors the larger capital, and is based upon the divorcement of the majority of the people from the instruments of production and the concentration of these instruments in the hands of a minority. Society is thus divided into two opposite classes: one, the capitalists and their sleeping partners, the landlords and loanmongers, holding in their hands the means of production, distribution, and exchange, and being, therefore, able to command the labor of others; the other, the working-class, the wage-earners, the proletariat, possessing nothing but their labor-power, and being consequently forced by necessity to work for the former. The social division thus produced becomes wider and deeper with every new advance in the application of labor-saving machinery. It is most clearly recognizable, however, in the times of industrial and commercial crises, when, in consequence of the present chaotic conditions of carrying on national and international industry, production periodically comes to a standstill, and a number of the few remaining independent producers are thrown into the ranks of the proletariat. Thus, while on one hand there is incessantly going on an accumulation of capital, wealth, and power into a steadily diminishing number of hands, there is, on the other hand, a constantly growing insecurity of livelihood for the mass of wage-earners, an increasing disparity between human wants and the opportunity of acquiring the means for their satisfaction, and a steady physical and mental deterioration among the more poverty-stricken of the population. But the more this social division widens, the stronger grows the revolt--more conscious abroad than here--of the proletariat against the capitalist system of society in which this division and all that accompanies it have originated, and find such fruitful soil. The capitalist mode of production, by massing the workers in large factories, and creating an interdependence, not only between various trades and branches of industries, but even national industries, prepares the ground and furnishes material for a universal class war. That class war may at first--as in this country--be directed against the abuses of the system, and not against the system itself; but sooner or later the workers must come to recognize that nothing short of the expropriation of the capitalist class, the ownership by the community of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, can put an end to their abject economic condition; and then the class war will become conscious instead of unconscious on the part of the working-classes, and they will have for their ultimate object the overthrow of the capitalist system. At the same time, since the capitalist class holds and uses the power of the State to safeguard its position and beat off any attack, the class war must assume a political character, and become a struggle on the part of the workers for the possession of the political machinery. It is this struggle for the conquest of the political power of the State, in order to effect a social transformation, which International Social Democracy carries on in the name and on behalf of the working-class. Social Democracy, therefore, is the only possible political party of the proletariat. The Social Democratic Federation is a part of this International Social Democracy. It, therefore, takes its stand on the above principles, and believes-- 1. That the emancipation of the working-class can only be achieved through the socialization of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, and their subsequent control by the organized community in the interests of the whole people. 2. That, as the proletariat is the last class to achieve freedom, its emancipation will mean the emancipation of the whole of mankind, without distinction of race, nationality, creed, or sex. 3. That this emancipation can only be the work of the working-class itself, organized nationally and internationally into a distinct political party, consciously striving after the realization of its ideals; and, finally, 4. That, in order to insure greater material and moral facilities for the working-class to organize itself and to carry on the class war, the following reforms must immediately be carried through:-- IMMEDIATE REFORMS _Political_ Abolition of the Monarchy. Democratization of the Governmental machinery, viz., abolition of the House of Lords, payment of members of legislative and administrative bodies, payment of official expenses of elections out of the public funds, adult suffrage, proportional representation, triennial parliaments, second ballot, initiative and referendum. Foreigners to be granted rights of citizenship after two years' residence in the country, without any fees. Canvassing to be made illegal. All elections to take place on one day, such day to be made a legal holiday, and all premises licensed for the sale of intoxicating liquors to be closed. Legislation by the people in such wise that no legislative proposal shall become law until ratified by the majority of the people. Legislative and administrative independence for all parts of the Empire. _Financial and Fiscal_ Repudiation of the National Debt. Abolition of all indirect taxation and the institution of a cumulative tax on all incomes and inheritance exceeding £300. _Administrative_ Extension of the principle of local self-government. Systematization and co-ordination of the local administrative bodies. Election of all administrators and administrative bodies by equal direct adult suffrage. _Educational_ Elementary education to be free, secular, industrial, and compulsory for all classes. The age of obligatory school attendance to be raised to 16. Unification and systematization of intermediate and higher education, both general and technical, and all such education to be free. State maintenance for all attending State schools. Abolition of school rates; the cost of education in all State schools to be borne by the National Exchequer. _Public Monopolies and Services_ Nationalization of the land and the organization of labor in agriculture and industry under public ownership and control on co-operative principles. Nationalization of the trusts. Nationalization of railways, docks, and canals, and all great means of transit. Public ownership and control of gas, electric light, and water supplies, as well as of tramway, omnibus, and other locomotive services. Public ownership and control of the food and coal supply. The establishment of State and municipal banks and pawnshops and public restaurants. Public ownership and control of the lifeboat service. Public ownership and control of hospitals, dispensaries, cemeteries, and crematoria. Public ownership and control of the drink traffic. _Labor_ A legislative eight-hour working-day, or 48 hours per week, to be the maximum for all trades and industries. Imprisonment to be indicted on employers for any infringement of the law. Absolute freedom of combination for all workers, with legal guarantee against any action, private or public, which tends to curtail or infringe it. No child to be employed in any trade or occupation until 16 years of age, and imprisonment to be inflicted on employers, parents, and guardians who infringe this law. Public provision of useful work at not less than trade-union rates of wages for the unemployed. Free State insurance against sickness and accident, and free and adequate State pensions or provision for aged and disabled workers. Public assistance not to entail any forfeiture of political rights. The legislative enactment of a minimum wage of 30s. for all workers. Equal pay for both sexes for the performance of equal work. _Social_ Abolition of the present workhouse system, and reformed administration of the Poor Law on a basis of national co-operation. Compulsory construction by public bodies of healthy dwellings for the people; such dwellings to be let at rents to cover the cost of construction and maintenance alone, and not to cover the cost of the land. The administration of justice and legal advice to be free to all; justice to be administered by judges chosen by the people; appeal in criminal cases; compensation for those innocently accused, condemned, and imprisoned; abolition of imprisonment for contempt of court in relation to non-payment of debt in the case of workers earning less than £2 per week; abolition of capital punishment. _Miscellaneous_ The disestablishment and disendowment of all State churches. The abolition of standing armies, and the establishment of national citizen forces. The people to decide on peace and war. The establishment of international courts of arbitration. The abolition of courts-martial; all offenses against discipline to be transferred to the jurisdiction of civil courts. THE LABOR PARTY: SESSION OF PARLIAMENT, 1911-1912 [At the beginning of every session of Parliament, the Labor Party members agree on a program of procedure to which they adhere for that session. They stick to the bills, in the order chosen, until they are either passed or defeated. The following is the list for 1911.] Bills to be balloted for in order named: 1. Trade Union Amendment Bill. 2. Unemployed Workmen Bill. 3. Education (Administrative Provisions) Bill. 4. Electoral Reform Bill. 5. Eight-Hour Day Bill. 6. Bill to Provide against Eviction of Workmen during Trade Disputes. 7. Railway Nationalization Bill. Motions to be balloted for in order named: 1. Militarism and Foreign Policy: (on lines of Resolution passed by the Special Conference at Leicester). 2. Defect in Sheriffs' Courts Bill (Scotland) relating to power of Eviction during Trade Disputes. 3. General 30s. Minimum Wage. Other Motions from which selection may be made after the three foregoing subjects have been dealt with: Saturday to Monday Stop. Eviction of Workmen during Trade Disputes. Extension of Particulars Clause to Docks, etc. Nationalization of Hospitals. Adult Suffrage. Commission of Inquiry into Older Universities. Workmen's Compensation Amendment. Atmosphere and Dust in Textile Factories. System of Fines in Textile and Other Trades. Inclusion of Clerks in Factory Acts. Eight-Hour Day. Electoral Reform. Inquiry into Industrial Assurance. Poor Law Reform. Truck. Railway and Mining Accidents. Labor Exchanges Administration. Labor Ministry. Veto Conference. Day Training Classes. School Clinics. Indian Factory Laws. Hours in Bakehouses. House-letting in Scotland. FABIAN ELECTION ADDRESS [The following is an election broadside issued for the municipal election of London, soon after the establishment of municipal home rule for the metropolis, by the organization of the London County Council. It discloses the practical nature of the earlier Fabian political activities.] COUNTY COUNCIL ELECTION: ADDRESS OF MR. SIDNEY WEBB, LL.B. (LONDON UNIVERSITY), (PROGRESSIVE AND LABOR CANDIDATE) Central Committee Rooms, 484, New Cross Road, S.E. ELECTORS OF DEPTFORD, On the nomination of a Joint Committee of Delegates of the Liberal and Radical Association, the Women's Liberal Association, the Working Men's Clubs, and leading Trade Unionists and Social Reformers in Deptford, I come forward as a Candidate for the County Council Election. I shall seek to lift the contest above any narrow partisan lines, and I ask for the support of all who are interested in the well-being of the people. _The Point at Issue_ For much is at stake for London at this Election. Notwithstanding the creation of the County Council, the ratepayers of the Metropolis are still deprived of the ordinary powers of municipal self-government. They have to bear needlessly heavy burdens for a very defective management of their public affairs. The result is seen in the poverty, the misery, and the intemperance that disgrace our city. A really Progressive County Council can do much (as the present Council has shown), both immediately to benefit the people of London, and also to win for them genuine self-government. Do you wish your County Council to attempt nothing more for London than the old Metropolitan Board of Works? This is, in effect, the Reactionary, or so-called "Moderate," program. Or shall we make our County Council a mighty instrument of the people's will for the social regeneration of this great city, and the "Government of London by London for London?" That is what I stand for. _Relief of the Taxpayer_ But the crushing burden of the occupier's rates must be reduced, not increased. Even with the strictest economy the administration of a growing city must be a heavy burden. The County Council should have power to tax the ground landlord, who now pays no rates at all directly. Moreover, the rates must be equalized throughout London. Why should the Deptford ratepayer have to pay nearly two shillings in the pound more than the inhabitant of St. George's, Hanover Square? And we must get at the unearned increment for the benefit of the people of London, who create it. _A Labor Program_ I am in favor of Trade Union wages and an eight-hours day for all persons employed by the Council. I am dead against sub-contracting, and would like to see the Council itself the direct employer of all labor. _Municipalization_ At present London pays an utterly unnecessary annual tribute, because, unlike other towns, it leaves its water supply, its gas-works, its tramways, its markets, and its docks in the hands of private speculators. I am in favor of replacing private by Democratic public ownership and management, as soon and as far as safely possible. It is especially urgent to secure public control of the water supply, the tramways, and the docks. Moreover, London ought to manage its own police, and all its open spaces. _The Condition of the Poor_ But the main object of all our endeavors must be to raise the standard of life of our poorer fellow-citizens, now crushed by the competitive struggle. As one of the most urgent social reforms, especially in the interests of Temperance, I urge the better housing of the people; the provision, by the Council itself, of improved dwellings and common lodging-houses of the best possible types, and a strict enforcement of the sanitary laws against the owners of slum property. _Local Questions_ I believe in local attention to local grievances, and I should deem it my duty, if elected, to look closely after Deptford interests, especially with regard to the need for more open spaces, and the early completion of the new Thames tunnel. A more detailed account of my views may be found in my book, "The London Programme," and other writings. I am a Londoner born and bred, and have made London questions the chief study of my life. I have had thirteen years' administrative experience in a Government office, a position which I have resigned in order to give my whole time to London's service. With regard to my general opinions, it will be enough to say that I have long been an active member of the Fabian Society, and of the Executive Committee of the London Liberal and Radical Union. SIDNEY WEBB. 4, Park Village East, Regent's Park, N.W. The following meetings have already been arranged. Others will be announced shortly. February 11.--Lecture Hall, High Street, at 8 P.M. February 25.--Lecture Hall High Street, at 8 P.M. March 3.--New Cross Hall, Lewisham High Road, at 8 P.M. FABIAN ELECTION DODGER [The Fabians and other Socialists broke into London municipal politics under the name "Progressives." The following is one of their earliest election dodgers.] COUNTY COUNCIL ELECTION _Saturday, March 5, 1892_ Part of the PROGRAM OF THE PROGRESSIVES _Rates._--Reduce the Occupiers' Rates one-half, by charging that portion upon the great Landlords, whose ground values are increased by every improvement, and are now untaxed; and by a Municipal Death Duty. _Gas and Water._--Reduce the cost and improve the quality and quantity by new sources of supply, if the present Companies will not come to terms favorable to the Taxpayer. _City Companies._--Apply their whole Income of, say £500,000 (on leave obtained from the new Parliament), for the benefit of London. The Royal Commission of 1884 stated that this income is virtually Public Property. About £300,000 is now squandered each year among the members and their friends. _Homes for the Poor._--The Poor can all be comfortably housed, as in the Municipal Dwellings of Glasgow and Liverpool, without extra cost to the Taxpayer, and the "Doss-houses" abolished. _Cheap Food._--By doing away with the Market Monopolies of the City Corporation and other private owners, Food can be lowered in price. Good food, especially fish, is now often destroyed or sold for manure to keep up the price. _Poor Man's Vote._--One-third of your Votes are lost. The Registration Laws must be thoroughly altered. FOOTNOTES: [1] Debates, House of Lords, July, 31, 1885. The speech was privately printed. [2] Debates, May 19, 1890. This speech was also given private circulation. VI. GENERAL 1. ORIGIN OF THE WORD "COLLECTIVISM" "This word, invented by Colins, came into common use toward the end of the Empire. Bakunin used it in the congress at Berne in 1868, to oppose it to the communistic régime of Cabet. An economist in 1869 designated, under this name, the system under which production will be confined to communes or parishes. The Socialists who opposed authority, disciples of Bakunin, used the word for a long time to designate their doctrine. The section of Locle was one of the first to employ it. But by and by, about 1878, the Marxists, partisans of the proletarian reign, used the word 'collectivism' to distinguish their 'scientific Socialism,' of which term they were fond, from the communistic utopias of the older school, which they discovered. And they gave to Bakunins the name Anarchists. These accepted the name, taking care to write it with a hyphen, _an-archie_, as their master Proudhon had done. They soon dropped the hyphen and accepted the word anarchy as a declaration of war against all things as they are."[1] 2. TABLE SHOWING RESULTS OF PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS (COMPILED FROM REPORT OF SECRETARY OF THE INTERNATIONAL, 1910) ====================+===========+===========+===========+============== | _No. | _Total No.|_No. Seats |_Per cent. of _Country_ | Socialist | Seats in |Held by |Socialists | Votes_ |Parliament_|Socialists_| Seats_ --------------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-------------- Great Britain (1910)| 505,690 | 670 | 40 | 5.97 Germany (1912) | 4,250,000 | 397 | 110 | 38.81 Luxemburg (1909) | | 48 | 10 | 20.8 Austria (1907) | 1,041,948 | 516 | 88 | 17.06 France (1910) | 1,106,047 | 584 | 76 | 13.01 Italy (1909) | 338,885 | 508 | 42 | 8.26 Spain (1910) | 40,000 | 404 | 1 | 0.25 Russia | | 442 | 17 | 3.82 Finland (1910) | 316,951 | 200 | 86 | 43.00 Norway (1907) | 90,000 | 123 | 11 | 8.94 Sweden (1909) | 75,000 | 165 | 36 | 21.81 Denmark (1910) | 98,721 | 114 | 24 | 21.06 Holland (1909) | 82,494 | 100 | 7 | 7.00 Belgium (1910) | 483,241 | 166 | 35 | 21.08 Switzerland (1908) | 100,000 | 170 | 7 | 4.11 Turkey (1908) | | 196 | 6 | 3.06 Servia (1908) | 3,056 | 160 | 1 | 0.62 U.S.A. (1910) | | | 1 | --------------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-------------- IN 1910 THE SOCIALISTS HELD THE FOLLOWING NUMBER OF LOCAL OFFICERS, ACCORDING TO THE REPORT OF THE INTERNATIONAL SECRETARY ============================+============================ Great Britain 1126 | Finland 351 Germany 7729 | Norway 873 Austria-Bohemia 2896 | Sweden 125 Hungary 96 | Denmark 1000 France 3800 | Belgium 850 Bulgaria 7 | Servia 22 ----------------------------+---------------------------- 3. TABLE SHOWING THE MEMBERSHIP OF THE SOCIALIST PARTY, IN VARIOUS COUNTRIES (COMPILED FROM REPORTS OF THE SECRETARY OF THE INTERNATIONAL, 1909-10) =========================+===================+=================== | 1907 | 1908 -------------------------+-------+-----------+-------+----------- |_Local | |_Local | _Country_ |Groups_| _Members_ |Groups_| _Members_ -------------------------+-------+-----------+-------+----------- Great Britain, L.P. | 275 | 1,072,412 | 307 | 1,152,786 | | | | Great Britain, J.L.P. | 600 | 35,000 | 765 | 50,000 Great Britain, S.D.F. | 202 | 14,500 | 250 | 16,000 Great Britain, Fabians | 10 | 1,207 | 27 | 2,015 Germany | 2704 | 530,466 | 3120 | 587,336 | | (10,943)| | (29,458) Austria | | | | Bohemia | | | | | | | | Hungary | | 130,000 | | 102,054 France | | 48,237 | | 49,328 Italy | | | | 43,000 Russia* | 8 | 16,000 | 8 | 5,000 Spain | | | | Poland-Prussian | | | 10 | 400 Poland-Russian | | 22,700 | | Finland | 1156 | 80,328 | 1127 | 71,266 | | (18,873)| | (16,826) Norway | 499 | 23,000 | 602 | 27,500 | | (1,800)| | (2,000) Sweden | | | 296 | 112,693 Denmark | | | | Holland | 167 | 7,471 | 176 | 8,411 Belgium | 803 | 161,239 | | 183,997 Switzerland | | | | Servia | | 615 | | Bulgaria | 71 | 2,658 | 80 | 2,886 U.S.A. | 1900 | 26,784 | | -------------------------+-------+-----------+-------+----------- =========================+==================== | 1909 -------------------------+-------+------------ |_Local | _Country_ |Groups_| _Members_ -------------------------+-------+------------ Great Britain, L.P. | 318 | 1,481,368 | | (4,000) Great Britain, J.L.P. | 900 | 60,000 Great Britain, S.D.F. | | 17,000 Great Britain, Fabians | 39 | 2,462 Germany | 3281 | 633,309 | | (62,259) Austria | | 126,000 Bohemia | 2462 | 156,000 | | (6,000) Hungary | 769 | 85,266 France | 2500 | 51,692 Italy | | 30,000 Russia* | 8 | 3,000 Spain | | Poland-Prussian | 40 | 1,500 Poland-Russian | | 3,500 Finland | | | | Norway | 637 | 26,500 | | (2,500) Sweden | 338 | 60,183 Denmark | 360 | 47,000 Holland | 211 | 9,289 Belgium | 906 | 185,318 Switzerland | 23 | 21,132 Servia | | 1,950 Bulgaria | 109 | 4,287 U.S.A. | 3200 | 53,375 -------------------------+-------+----------- * Province of Lettland. Figures in parenthesis indicate number of women members. 4. AMERICAN SOCIALIST PARTY PLATFORM [Adopted by National Convention May, 1908, and by Membership Referendum August 8th, 1908. Amended by Referendum September 7th, 1909.] PRINCIPLES Human life depends upon food, clothing, and shelter. Only with these assured are freedom, culture, and higher human development possible. To produce food, clothing, or shelter, land and machinery are needed. Land alone does not satisfy human needs. Human labor creates machinery and applies it to the land for the production of raw materials and food. Whoever has control of land and machinery controls human labor, and with it human life and liberty. To-day the machinery and the land used for industrial purposes are owned by a rapidly decreasing minority. So long as machinery is simple and easily handled by one man, its owner cannot dominate the sources of life of others. But when machinery becomes more complex and expensive, and requires for its effective operation the organized effort of many workers, its influence reaches over wide circles of life. The owners of such machinery become the dominant class. In proportion as the number of such machine owners compared to all other classes decreases, their power in the nation and in the world increases. They bring ever larger masses of working people under their control, reducing them to the point where muscle and brain are their only productive property. Millions of formerly self-employing workers thus become the helpless wage slaves of the industrial masters. As the economic power of the ruling class grows it becomes less useful in the life of the nation. All the useful work of the nation falls upon the shoulders of the class whose only property is its manual and mental labor power--the wage worker--or of the class who have but little land and little effective machinery outside of their labor power--the small traders and small farmers. The ruling minority is steadily becoming useless and parasitic. A bitter struggle over the division of the products of labor is waged between the exploiting propertied classes on the one hand and the exploited propertyless class on the other. In this struggle the wage-working class cannot expect adequate relief from any reform of the present order at the hands of the dominant class. The wage workers are therefore the most determined and irreconcilable antagonists of the ruling class. They suffer most from the curse of class rule. The fact that a few capitalists are permitted to control all the country's industrial resources and social tools for their individual profit, and to make the production of the necessaries of life the object of competitive private enterprise and speculation is at the bottom of all the social evils of our time. In spite of the organization of trusts, pools, and combinations, the capitalists are powerless to regulate production for social ends. Industries are largely conducted in a planless manner. Through periods of feverish activity the strength and health of the workers are mercilessly used up, and during periods of enforced idleness the workers are frequently reduced to starvation. The climaxes of this system of production are the regularly recurring industrial depressions and crises which paralyze the nation every fifteen or twenty years. The capitalist class, in its mad race for profits, is bound to exploit the workers to the very limit of their endurance and to sacrifice their physical, moral, and mental welfare to its own insatiable greed. Capitalism keeps the masses of workingmen in poverty, destitution, physical exhaustion, and ignorance. It drags their wives from their homes to the mill and factory. It snatches their children from the playgrounds and schools and grinds their slender bodies and unformed minds into cold dollars. It disfigures, maims, and kills hundreds of thousands of workingmen annually in mines, on railroads, and in factories. It drives millions of workers into the ranks of the unemployed and forces large numbers of them into beggary, vagrancy, and all forms of crime and vice. To maintain their rule over their fellow-men, the capitalists must keep in their pay all organs of the public powers, public mind, and public conscience. They control the dominant parties and, through them, the elected public officials. They select the executives, bribe the legislatures, and corrupt the courts of justice. They own and censor the press. They dominate the educational institutions. They own the nation politically and intellectually just as they own it industrially. The struggle between wage workers and capitalists grows ever fiercer, and has now become the only vital issue before the American people. The wage-working class, therefore, has the most direct interest in abolishing the capitalist system. But in abolishing the present system, the workingmen will free not only their own class, but also all other classes of modern society. The small farmer, who is to-day exploited by large capital more indirectly but not less effectively than is the wage laborer; the small manufacturer and trader, who is engaged in a desperate and losing struggle for economic independence in the face of the all-conquering power of concentrated capital; and even the capitalist himself, who is the slave of his wealth rather than its master. The struggle of the working class against the capitalist class, while it is a class struggle, is thus at the same time a struggle for the abolition of all classes and class privileges. The private ownership of the land and means of production used for exploitation, is the rock upon which class rule is built; political government is its indispensable instrument. The wage-workers cannot be freed from exploitation without conquering the political power and substituting collective for private ownership of the land and means of production used for exploitation. The basis for such transformation is rapidly developing within present capitalist society. The factory system, with its complex machinery and minute division of labor, is rapidly destroying all vestiges of individual production in manufacture. Modern production is already very largely a collective and social process. The great trusts and monopolies which have sprung up in recent years have organized the work and management of the principal industries on a national scale, and have fitted them for collective use and operation. There can be no absolute private title to land. All private titles, whether called fee simple or otherwise, are and must be subordinate to the public title. The Socialist Party strives to prevent land from being used for the purpose of exploitation and speculation. It demands the collective possession, control, or management of land to whatever extent may be necessary to attain that end. It is not opposed to the occupation and possession of land by those using it in a useful and bona fide manner without exploitation. The Socialist Party is primarily an economic and political movement. It is not concerned with matters of religious belief. In the struggle for freedom the interests of all modern workers are identical. The struggle is not only national but international. It embraces the world and will be carried to ultimate victory by the united workers of the world. To unite the workers of the nation and their allies and sympathizers of all other classes to this end, is the mission of the Socialist Party. In this battle for freedom the Socialist Party does not strive to substitute working class rule for capitalist class rule, but by working class victory, to free all humanity from class rule and to realize the international brotherhood of man. PROGRAM As measures calculated to strengthen the working class in its fight for the realization of this ultimate aim, and to increase its power of resistance against capitalist oppression, we advocate and pledge ourselves and our elected officers to the following program: _General Demands_ 1. The immediate government relief for the unemployed workers by building schools, by reforesting of cut-over and waste lands, by reclamation of arid tracts, and the building of canals, and by extending all other useful public works. All persons employed on such works shall be employed directly by the government under an eight-hour work-day and at the prevailing union wages. The government shall also loan money to states and municipalities without interest for the purpose of carrying on public works. It shall contribute to the funds of labor organizations for the purpose of assisting their unemployed members, and shall take such other measures within its power as will lessen the widespread misery of the workers caused by the misrule of the capitalist class. 2. The collective ownership of railroads, telegraphs, telephones, steamboat lines, and all other means of social transportation and communication. 3. The collective ownership of all industries which are organized on a national scale and in which competition has virtually ceased to exist. 4. The extension of the public domain to include mines, quarries, oil wells, forests, and water power. 5. The scientific reforestation of timber lands, and the reclamation of swamp lands. The land so reforested or reclaimed to be permanently retained as a part of the public domain. 6. The absolute freedom of press, speech, and assemblage. _Industrial Demands_ 7. The improvement of the industrial condition of the workers. (_a_) By shortening the workday in keeping with the increased productiveness of machinery. (_b_) By securing to every worker a rest period of not less than a day and a half in each week. (_c_) By securing a more effective inspection of workshops and factories. (_d_) By forbidding the employment of children under sixteen years of age. (_e_) By forbidding the interstate transportation of the products of child labor, of convict labor, and of all uninspected factories. (_f_) By abolishing official charity and substituting in its place compulsory insurance against unemployment, illness, accidents, invalidism, old age, and death. _Political Demands_ 8. The extension of inheritance taxes, graduated in proportion to the amount of the bequests and to the nearness of kin. 9. A graduated income tax. 10. Unrestricted and equal suffrage for men and women, and we pledge ourselves to engage in an active campaign in that direction. 11. The initiative and referendum, proportional representation, and the right of recall. 12. The abolition of the senate. 13. The abolition of the power usurped by the supreme court of the United States to pass upon the constitutionality of legislation enacted by Congress. National laws to be repealed or abrogated only by act of Congress or by a referendum of the whole people. 14. That the Constitution be made amendable by majority vote. 15. The enactment of further measures for general education and for the conservation of health. The bureau of education to be made a department. The creation of a department of public health. 16. The separation of the present bureau of labor from the department of commerce and labor, and the establishment of a department of labor. 17. That all judges be elected by the people for short terms, and that the power to issue injunctions shall be curbed by immediate legislation. 18. The free administration of justice. Such measures of relief as we may be able to force from capitalism are but a preparation of the workers to seize the whole power of government, in order that they may thereby lay hold of the whole system of industry and thus come to their rightful inheritance. FOOTNOTES: [1] GEORGES WEIL, _Histoire du Mouvement Social en France_, p. 208. INDEX Allemane, 77 American Socialist Party platform, 341 Amsterdam Congress, 228 Anarchy, 29, 65, 127 Anselee, 122 Anti-militarism, in France, 110-112; in Belgium, 129; in Germany, 201-202 Anti-Socialist Law (German), 160-167 Asquith, Premier, and the Parliament Bill, 238-240 Austria, revolution in, 47 Bakunin, 65, 71 Barthou, on French post-office strike, 97; on railway strike, 101 Bebel, August, 155, 158; on Anti-Socialist Law, 161, 162, 163, 165, 166; arrest of, 167; candidate for President of Reichstag, 190; on defeat of Socialism, 1907, 194; on inheritance tax, 188; as a party leader, 264; on new Alsatian Constitution, 198; on militarism, 202-203; on participation in legislation, 188, 189; on party discipline, 177, 193, 195, 196; on Socialism in United States, 268 Belgium, 118-145; government of, 121-122; co-operative movement in, 140-145; agrarian movement in, 142; nature of Belgian Socialism, 143-144; labor organizations in, 122-125; Labor Party in Parliament, 133-135; political parties in, 121; poverty and illiteracy in, 118-120, 125, 128 Bernstein, Ed., 192 Bibliography, 273-279 Bismarck and Lassalle, 154; and Reichstag suffrage, 158; and repression of Socialism, 159-161; Anti-Socialist Law, 160-168; and State Insurance, 168-169 Blanc, Louis, 13, 26-28, 62; Lassalle adopts plan of, 152 Bourgeoisie, defined, 2 Bourse du Travail, 77, 80; federation of, 77; organization of, 105-106 Brentano, Prof., on Socialism in U.S., 269 Briand, Aristide, 78, 81, 91, 97; became Prime Minister, 97; program of legislation, 98; and the railway strike, 99-104 Brousse, 76, 105 Brussels, city of refuge, 122; demonstrations in, 127, 128, 139-140; Maison du Peuple of, 144 Burns, John, 215; in cabinet, 228, 234; on right to work, 244; on Socialism in U.S., 268 Cabet, 23 Carlyle, on Chartist movement, 52 "C.G.T." _See_ Syndicalists and Syndicalism Chartist movement, 51-54, 208 Christian Socialism, 9, 221-222 Christian Social Union, 221 Church Socialist League, 222 Class basis of Socialism, 1-6, 15, 35. _See also_ Marx Class interests, illusion of, 253-254 Class War, Guesdists on the, 85 Class War and Syndicalists, 106-107 Clémenceau, debate with Jaurès, 92, 94; on post-office strike, 96-97 Clerical Party in Belgium, 129, 134, 135, 136, 308; in Germany, 200. _See also_ political parties Colin, co-operative movement started by, 122 "Collectivism," origin of word, 339 Communal Program of Bavarian Socialists, 301; of Belgian Socialists, 314 Communist League, the, 56 Communist Manifesto, 13, 56-61 Compère-Morel, 115-116 Competition and the Socialist theory, 11, 35 Co-operation, 11; in Belgium, _see_ Belgium; in England, 217-218; _see also_ England; statistics of, 308, 309 Davidson, Thomas, 220 Democracy and Socialism, 42, 43; spread of, by Socialists, 257 Democratic revolutions, 26-55; in Germany, 146-148 Dennis, Prof. Hector, 142 Development Act (Eng.), 233 Dicey, Prof., on the Liberal and Socialist parties, 230 Dockers' strike, 215 Dreyfus affair, 84-90 Eisenach Program, 157-158 Election laws, German, 293-294 Electoral reform. _See_ Saxony, Prussia, "Free Cities," Chartist Movement Ely, Prof. R.T., conservation in U.S., 269 Emperor William's life attempted, 159-160 Engels, Frederick, 50, 52, 56-61; on English police, 245; on changes in revolutionary ideals, 255 England, growth of Socialism in, 315; thrift institutions in, 318; Socialism in, 207-249; character of Socialism in, 211-212. _See also_ Chartist movement; Engels; Industrial Revolution; Insurance Bill; Labor Party; Labor Exchange Act; Land System; Liberal Party; Lords, House of English, characteristics of the, 209-211; income of the, 213-214 Erfurt Program, 191; dissatisfaction with, 192-194 Fabian Society, origin, 220-221; famous members, 220-221; attitude toward constitutionalism, 248; basis of, 327; an election address of, 335; an election dodger of, 337 Feudalism, class ideals of, 43, 44, 45; in Germany, 147 Feuerbach, 31-32 Fourier, 19-22, 24 France, Revolution of 1848, 47; commune of 1871, 49, 61; Socialist Party of, 75-117; factions in Socialist Party, 76-78; "United Socialists," 77, 78; Socialist Radicals, 78; the "Bloc," 84, 85; labor unions in, 77; post-office strike in, 94-97; railway strike in, 98-99; local Socialism in, 112-113; government of, 280-281 France, Anatole, 117 Frank, Dr., on the Baden budget, 196-198; on the intellectual classes and Socialism, 254 "Free Cities," election laws in, 183 French Revolution, 42 Gambetta, 79 General strike, 256; in Belgium, 126, 131, 138, 143 George, Henry, 220 George, Lloyd, 232; budget of, 236-238; Insurance Bill of, 240-241; flays Keir Hardie, 245 Germany, Social Democracy in, 146-170; revolution in, 46; character of government in, 147; the new Empire, 158; most "socialized" country, 169-190; labor unions in, 171-175; party representation in Reichstag, 297; vote of all parties in, 296; political parties in, 292-293. _See also_ "Free Cities;" Suffrage; Progressists; Labor Organizations; Liberal Party Gneist, Prof., and Anti-Socialist law, 162 Godin, J., 21 Godwin, 24 Guesde, Jules, 75, 76, 81, 85, 87, 105, 106 Guise, community at, 21 Hardie, Keir, 222, and Development Act, 234, 243; on using military during strike, 245; on goal of Socialism, 247 Hasselman, 158; expelled from Social Democratic Party, 166 Hegel, 23, 31 Hegelians, Young, 31, 50 Hervé, Gustave, 110, 112 Hobhouse, Prof., 247 Hyndman, H.M., 219 I.L.P., organization of, 222, 243; on Liberal coalition, 243-244; attitude on Insurance Bill, 244; constitution and by-laws, 322 Industrial revolution, 43; change in social ideals, 44, 45; violence of first days, 45; in England, 207-209 Insurance Bill (Eng.), 240-241 International, the, 56; "Old International," 56-69; "New International," 69-74; Amsterdam Congress of, 228 International Socialist Bureau, 72, 74 International Socialist Statistics, 339, 340 International Workingmen's Association, 71 Jaurès, Jean, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 87, 100; leader of "Bloc," 90-91; debate with Clémenceau, 92-93; in Amsterdam Congress, 228; on difference between Socialism and Democracy, 265; on Socialism in U.S., 268 Kaiser, the, and German Social Democrats, 180, 181 Kautsky, K., 50, 85; on Revisionism, 192-193; on Amsterdam Congress, 228 Kingsley, 212 Labor Exchange Act (England), 233 Labor Organization in France, 104; in Germany, 150-151, 171-175 Labor Party, English, 74, 274, 223-225, 226, 227-232, 228, 231, 241, 242; Program of, 318, 334 Labor Party, the first, 75; in Belgium, _see_ Belgium; Program of, 309 Labor Questions and Socialism, 258 Labor unions in Belgium, political activity of, 308. _See also_ Belgium Labor unions in England. _See_ Trades Unions Labor unions in France. _See_ Bourse du Travail, and Syndicats Labor unions in Germany, 295. _See also_ Germany Land system of England, 236-237 Lassalle, 147-155, 185; Leipzig address, 152; General Workingman's Association, 152-154; influence on German Social Democracy, 154 League of the Just, 56-57, 69 Ledebour, on ministerial responsibility, 189 Legislation, advocated by Socialists, in Germany, _see_ Social Democratic Party; in England, 231-241 Liberal Party, in Germany, 146-148, 150, 151; in England, 226, 227, 228, 230-231, 242-245 Liebknecht, 70, 155, 156, 157, 158, 163; in Reichstag, 166; arrested, 167; on party tactics, 186; on Erfurt Program, 191 London, progress in, 235 Lords, House of, an issue, 237-239, 240 MacDonald, J. Ramsay, on I.L.P., 245-247; on Democracy, 254-255 Mazzini, 54, 61, 62 McCarthy, Justin, on Chartism, 52 Marx, Karl, 9, 32, 38, 39; theories of 32-36; formulæ of, "capital," 37-38; influence on Socialist movement, 39-40; criticism of, 40, 41; theory of Revolution, 43; on German revolution, 47, 48, 49; on the Commune, 49, 69; the Communist Manifesto, 56-61; "address" and "statutes" of the "Old International," 62, 63, 67, 68; at The Hague, 64; present influence in Germany, 194 Marxian influence in the International, 69-71 Marxians and the Possibilists, 85, 91 Marxians in England, 219, 317 Maurice, 212 Menger, Adolph, critique of Marxianism, 40-41 Mill, John Stuart, 10 Millerand, 77, 78, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 91; at St. Mandé, 82; Program of, 88-90; expelled from Socialist Party, 87; on railway strike, 101, 102; on ideals of Socialism, 6. Militarism, and the International, 72-74; and the Syndicalists, 108-109 Money, Chiozza, 213, 214, 215, 236 Morley, Lord, on new Liberalism, 230 Morris, Wm., 9, 219; on Whigs, 229 Most, Herr, in Reichstag, 158; expelled from Socialist Party, 166 Munich, Socialist activity in, 204-206 Municipal Socialism in France, 112-115; in Germany, 204-206 Old Age Pensions, 101 Osborne Judgment, the, 217 Owen, Robert, 6, 8, 21-23, 25; Rochdale, 27 Paepe, Cæsar de, 122 Paris, Commune. _See_ Commune. First meeting of "New International," 69-71 Parliament Bill, 238-240 Peasantry, French, 115-116; Belgian, 142-143 Possibilists, 70 Poverty and Socialism, 10-11; in England, 213-215; in Belgium, _see_ Belgium Progressists, in Belgium, 128, 129; in Germany, 151, 162, 190 Proudhon, 28-31, 62 Proudhonism in England, 106 Prussia, election laws, 183 Réformistes, in France, _see_ Millerand, Briand; in Germany, 192-193 Revisionist controversy in Germany, 192-193 Revolution, social, 12, 13, 255, 256; modern idea, 53 Revolutionary era, 26-55 Rodbertus, 150, 153, 155 Rosebery, Lord, 229 Rousseau, 42 Ruskin, 212 Sabotage, 96, 100, 101, 102, 104, 108 Sachsen-Altenburg, election law, 294 Saint-Simon, 17-19, 23 Saxe-Weimar, election law, 294 Saxony, new election law, 182, 293 Schultze-Delitsch, 150 Shaw, G.B., 220, 240, 247 Simiyan, on French post-office strike, 95 Small Holdings Act, 234, 235 Social Democratic Federation, (English), 219, 220, 317, 330 Social Democratic Party (German), 175-190; discipline, 177-179; attitude of government towards, 179-181; change in temper, 186-204; attitude towards legislation, 186-191; first bill in Reichstag, 187; attitude on state insurance, 188; present temper, 191; program of, 191, 198, 199, 297; attitude towards other parties, 194, 199; election address of, 303 Socialism, ideals of, 6-10; theories, 11; development of, 17; political awakening of, 42; modern conception of revolution, 51; what is, 62, 63; changes in, 250; illusions of, 253; in different countries, 257; limits of, 262; characteristics of present, 262-266; in Parliaments, 251; what it has accomplished, 257-260; nature of its demands, 261-262; difference between Socialism and Democracy, 265-266; when the word was first used, 23 Socialist officers, list of, 340 Socialist Party, membership of, 340 Socialist vote in leading countries, 339 Sorel, Georges, 107 South Germany budget controversy, 159-199 State, increased functions of, 259-260 State Insurance, opposed by Socialists, 167; attitude of present-day Socialists, 188; in Germany, 169, 170; statistics, 295; _see also_ Bismarck Südekum, Dr., on nature of Social Democratic Party, 199 Suffrage, struggle for, in Belgium, 124-133; electoral laws of Belgium, 132-136; struggle for, in Germany, 146, 182-185 Syndicalism, 94, 107-110, 96-98, 99-102, 105-106, 256 Taff Vale decision, 216-217, 232 Thiers, President, 75 Town Planning Act, 234, 235 Trades Disputes Act, 232 Trades Unions, English, and the International, 62, 67, 69; characteristics, 215, 216, 217, 218; and Socialism, 69, 72; and Syndicalism, 108 Transportation strike, England, 244, 245 United Socialist Party of France, Basis of Union, 289; U.S., Socialism in, 266-270; Socialist vote in, 268; platform of Socialists in U.S., 341 Vaillant, 81, 82, 100 Vandervelde, 118, 134, 137, 138, 142, 143 Villiers, Brougham, 247-248 Viviani, 78, 91, 101 Von Kettler, Baron, Bishop of Mayence, 153, 172 Von Vollmar, 181, 193, 195, 200, 203, 204 Waldeck-Rousseau, 79, 84, 85 Webb, Sidney, 220, 221, 234, 242 Weitling, Wm., 7 Wells, H.C., 10 Wescott, Dr., Bishop of Durham, 221 Workingmen's Association of Lassalle, 154, 156, 157, 158 Workingmen's Compensation Act (England), 233 Yvetot on Syndicalism, 108, 109 MEN VS. 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35962	----	generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) * * * * * +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Note: | | | | Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has | | been preserved. | | | | Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For | | a complete list, please see the end of this document. | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------+ * * * * * PRICE 10 CENTS Socialism, Revolution and Internationalism By GABRIEL DEVILLE SOCIALISM, REVOLUTION AND INTERNATIONALISM A LECTURE DELIVERED IN PARIS, NOVEMBER 27, 1893, BY GABRIEL DEVILLE Translated by ROBERT RIVES LA MONTE CHICAGO CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY 1907 PRESS OF JOHN F. HIGGINS CHICAGO SOCIALISM, REVOLUTION AND INTERNATIONALISM. I Socialism, revolution, internationalism--these are the three subjects regarding which I beg your permission to say what--with no pretence of being infallible--I believe to be the truth. At the risk of telling you nothing new, I will simply try to speak truth. Those who reproach the socialists for constantly repeating the same thing, have, no doubt, the habit of accommodating the truth to suit their taste for variety. On the other hand, to talk of socialism is to do what everyone else is doing at this time, but I will speak to you of it from the standpoint of a socialist, and--unhappily--that is not as yet equally common. The signal and distinctive mark of modern socialism is that it springs directly from the facts. Far from resting on the imaginary conceptions of the intellect, from being a more or less utopian vision of an ideal society, socialism is to-day simply the theoretical expression of the contemporaneous phase of the economic evolution of humanity. At this point we are met with two objections. On the one hand, because we say that socialism springs from the facts, we are accused of denying the influence of the Idea and the liberal defenders of the Idea rise up in revolt; they can calm themselves again. How could we deny the influence of the Idea, when socialism itself is as yet, as I have just pointed out, only a theoretical expression, _i.e._, an idea, which we nevertheless believe has a certain influence? We merely assert that a truth, irrevocably established by science as a valid generalization, does not cease to be a truth when it is applied to human history and socialism. This truth is the action of the environment: all living beings are the product of the environment in which they live. To the environment, in the last analysis, to the relations necessarily created by the multiple contacts, actions and reactions of the environment and the environed are due all the transformations of all organisms and, in consequence, all the phenomena that emanate from them. Thought is one of these phenomena, and, just like all the others, it has its source in actual facts. To say that socialism springs from the facts, is then simply to place the socialist idea on the same plane with all other ideas. In socialism, as in all subjects, the idea is the reflex in the brain of the relations of man with his surroundings, and the greater or less aptitude of the brain for acquiring, retaining and combining ideas, constitutes intelligence. The latter, in making various combinations out of the elements provided by the environment, may obviously lose sight of the reality which serves as its foundation, but our socialism aims never to depart from the data drawn from unbiased observation of the facts. We are accused, on the other hand, because we believe that the economic question contains the whole of socialism, of denying the existence and influence of the intellectual factor, the sentimental factor, the psychological factor--in short, a whole collection of factors. Now, as I am going to try to show you, our only error, if it is an error, is that we wish to put the cart behind the horse, and to accuse us of wishing to suppress the cart because we refuse to put it in front or alongside of the horse, proves, at once, the incontestable desire to find us at fault, and the difficulty of gratifying that desire. Man, as I said just now, is the product of the environment. But, to the influence of the cosmic or natural environment, which affects all beings, there was soon joined in his case the influence of the special environment created by him, an environment resulting from the acquired means of action, from the material of the tools used, from the conditions of life added by him to those furnished him by nature, or else substituted for them, the influence, in a word, of the economic environment, an influence which has gradually become predominant because the conditions of life, determining in all orders of society man's mode of life, have finally become less and less dependent upon the purely physical capabilities of the cosmic environment, and more and more dependent upon the means of action acquired by human exertions, upon the artificial capabilities of the economic environment, upon human thought materialized in various innovations. We find at the foundation of everything affecting man the influence of the natural and economic environments, and, if it is quite true that we recognize the preponderant influence of the economic environment, it is passing strange to accuse us of not recognizing the action of human intelligence, which we assert is the creator of this environment. Only we do not forget that, at any stage of development whatever, intelligence does nothing by its creations except to elaborate the elements which it finds "ready made," as it were, in the environment. Therefore, intelligence can, by working with the elements furnished by the existing environment, produce a change in this environment. This new environment thus changed becomes the determining environment of future intelligence. You see that, far from degrading the role of intelligence, we attribute to it a considerable importance; we only refuse to see in it a spontaneous phenomenon. Having replied to the reproach of not taking into consideration what is called intelligence and is paraded as the intellectual factor, it is scarcely necessary for me to honor with special replies all the other factors mobilized against us, as they are all merely products of intelligence. I will remark, however, that if it is true that we do not deduce our theory from this association of factors, this does not authorize the conclusion that morality, right, justice, psychology, and sentiment are for us words devoid of meaning. To refuse to elevate them to the rank of scientific proofs, which is what we do, and all that we do, is not to deny them; it is simply to avoid employing them for a use for which they are not and could not be destined. Because, to uphold our theory, we prefer to have recourse to the observation of facts and their tendencies, we have never proscribed the conception or sentiment of justice as motives for adhesion to that very theory, and we do not hesitate to declare that that which is unfitted to serve as a scientific proof, may be utilized as a motive for action. Moreover, even those who attribute to the "syndicate" of factors a preponderating power over historical progress do not attribute to intelligence a greater influence than we recognize as belonging to it. In fact, the controversy here is not concerning the influence of ideas. The controversy arises when we attempt to determine which ideas are influential. On either side it is simply a matter of choosing from among the products of intelligence. Our opponents insist upon the claims of the factors in combination, instead of recognizing, as do we, the predominant influence of the ideas which clothe themselves in the phenomenal form of acts, such as inventions, etc., which lead to the modification of the economic environment and consequently, as we believe, to the modification of man himself, in his mode of life first, in his habits and methods of thought afterward. As soon as it is seen that the transformation of the economic conditions, of the conditions of life, is the fundamental transformation, that upon which all the others are more or less dependent, it will be recognized that to say that socialism is simply the expression of the contemporaneous phase of economic conditions is not to narrow, in the slightest degree, its field of action, but only to define more accurately its immediate goal. The affirmation that there is in progress an evolution of the economic environment implies necessarily a corresponding evolution of the various branches of human knowledge, which are all influenced by this environment, just as the apple-tree implies the apple without its being necessary to speak of the integral apple-tree.[1] If socialism is contained "in a purely economic formula," it is just as the apple-tree is contained in the seed. Let us be vigilant to see that this "economic formula" and this seed are not thwarted in their normal development, and we shall have all the fruits that may be desired, even if we refrain from heaping qualifying or complemental adjectives upon the apple-tree and socialism. Some have thought that they have discovered an argument against this predominance of the economic environment and of the economic question, in the fact that some events which are not economic in nature--and they cite, most frequently, the invention of gunpowder and the revocation of the edict of Nantes--have had a great influence on human history. They forget that, if such or such an important event was not directly in itself an economic phenomenon, it is chiefly by the consequences that it had from the economic point of view that it became important; like all human discoveries, all historic events, it reached a point where it became a modifying element of the economic environment. To recapitulate, if we insist upon the influence of the surroundings, and, particularly, upon the preponderant influence of the economic environment--the creation of man--this does not justify representing us as attributing an exclusive influence to the economic environment and as holding that this environment itself is created and influenced only by facts properly classed as economic. I return then to my first proposition: socialism must have and has for its foundation the economic environment, the economic facts. What are those facts? FOOTNOTES: [1] A word is needed to make the force of this sarcasm clear to American readers. There was formed around the late Benoît Malon, the founder of _La Revue Socialiste_, a small but very intelligent and influential school of socialists, who loved (and still love) to prate about the inadequacy of Marxism, its neglect of various "factors," etc., etc. They regard Marxian economics as being true so far as they go, but as constituting a very inadequate and incomplete socialism, which it was reserved for them, by a beneficent Providence, to complete. Their own socialism they call "integral socialism." We have their like in America--men who use Marxian ammunition and belittle Marx.--Tr. II. In order for man, who can live only on condition that he works, to be able to perform any sort of work, he must have at his disposition the instruments and the subject of labor. Now, these tools and this material, in one word, the means of labor, are, more and more, becoming the property of the capitalists. Those who are despoiled of the means of utilizing in work their own labor-power (or physical capacity for work) are, henceforth, compelled, being unable to live otherwise, to sell the use of that power to the capitalists who hold in their possession the things indispensable for labor. Through their possession of the things indispensable for the functioning of labor-power, the capitalists are, in fact, masters of all who cannot utilize their own power themselves, nor live without utilizing it. From this economic dependence flows the existence of distinct classes, distinct in spite of the civil and political equality of their members; and, as the capitalist regime expropriates the Middle Class more and more, it tends to accentuate the division of society into two principal classes: on the one hand, those who control the means of labor; on the other, those for whom the actual use of those means is the sole possibility of life. I will ask you to note that I speak of classes and not of orders or estates, because these last expressions imply a legal demarcation between the categories of persons which they indicate; while the word _class_ simply denotes, according to Littré,[2] the "grades established among men by the diversity and inequality of their circumstances." This is the reason that some among us refuse to make use of the expression "Fourth Estate." There are no longer any Estates, it is true, but it is not the less true that there still are classes. As no one among us any longer dares to approve of their existence, to deny it is the only way to avoid combatting it. And so it is this denial that is resorted to by those adversaries of socialism whose only weapons are falsehood and hypocrisy. Socialists are not the cause of the existence of classes because they recognize their existence. They limit themselves to establishing that which has been, that which is and that which is destined to be: the origin of classes, their present persistence and their approaching disappearance. * * * * * As soon as, thanks to the development of the faculties of man and to his industrial discoveries, the productivity of labor became great enough for an individual to be able to produce more than was indispensable for his maintenance, the division of society into two great classes, the exploiters and the exploited, was effected. And this division had its justification, so long as production was not sufficient to render comfort for all a possibility. But, thanks to machinery and to scientific appliances which facilitate labor, while vastly multiplying the supply of articles of consumption, the exhausting labor of the masses and the monopolization of comfort by a minority can henceforth give place, must henceforth give place, and will give place in a future which no longer seems distant, to the universalization of labor and its inevitable consequence, the universalization of comfort and of leisure, that is to say, to social conditions under which there will be no classes, because their existence will (as now) serve no useful end as it has done in the past. We will soon see that our present ruling class, far from being useful, is already becoming baneful. To-day, if the existence of distinct classes has, apparently, lost all legal sanction, it is just as real a fact as ever. To deny it, one must have--pardon me the expression, but I can find no other defining as accurately this state of mind--the desire to play the fool, or the interest to do so. It is impossible to deny seriously that a part of the population is, in fact, through the form of the economic relations, through their material self-interest, through their need of food, placed in a position of dependence upon another portion of the population, and that there is an antagonism between those who must struggle to exist by working and those who can bargain out to them the means of labor.[3] By proclaiming the existence of classes and their antagonism, by divulging that antagonism, which is not their work, on the political rostrum, socialists are not creating factitious distinctions, they are not resuscitating and do not dream of resuscitating any of the social forms so fortunately and so energetically annihilated by the French Revolution, they are only adapting themselves to the situation as it presents itself to them now. In fact, modern industry is forcing the workers more and more every day to comprehend the necessity of association or combination in their disputes with the possessors of the means of labor, and thus the interests to be defended have to the workers less and less the false aspect of individual interests; they appear to them in their naked reality as class interests. Born of strikes, of coalitions of every kind imposed upon them by the customs and conditions of life in a capitalist society, their class activity soon takes an a political character. To this then are due the working-class agitations resulting in the recognition of political equality and the establishment of universal suffrage. In possession of political rights, the workingmen are obviously led to make use of these rights in behalf of their own interests. Inevitably, therefore, the political struggle is becoming more and more a class struggle which cannot end until the political power, in the hands of the workingmen, shall at last place the State at the service of the interests of all the exploited, and thus enable the latter to proceed to the economic reforms which will lead to the disappearance of classes as a direct consequence. Therefore, the Class Struggle is not an invention of the socialists, but the very substance of the facts and acts of history in the making that are daily taking place under their eyes. FOOTNOTES: [2] The French Webster. [3] "In fact the different classes dove-tail into each other, and there are always between two classes a multitude of unclassifiable hybrids, belonging wholly to neither class, in part to both."--Karl Kautsky. III. We know that those whose activity is subordinate in its exercise to a capital which they have not--and these compose the working-class--are compelled to sell their labor-power to some of the possessors of this capital who form, on their side, the bourgeois[4] class. What is sold by him who has to labor in order to live, and who has not in his possession the means of labor, to the possessor of those means is simply labor in the potential state, that is the muscular or intellectual faculties that must be exerted in the production of useful things. In fact, on the one hand, before these faculties are brought into active exercise, labor does not exist and cannot be sold. Now, the contract is made between the buyer and the seller before any action takes place and has for its effective cause, so far as the seller is concerned, the fact that the seller is so situated that he can not by himself bring his capacity for labor into productive use. On the other hand, as soon as the action (labor) begins, as soon as labor manifests itself, it cannot be the property of the laborer, for it consists in nothing but the incorporation of a thing which the laborer has just alienated by sale--capacity to perform labor--with other things which are not his--the means of production. To sum up, when the labor does not exist, the laborer can not sell that which he does not possess and which he has not the means of realizing; when the labor does exist, it can not be sold by the laborer to whom it does not belong. The only thing which the laborer can sell is his labor-power, a power distinct from its function, labor, just as the power of marching is distinct from a parade, just as any machine is distinct from its operations. What is paid under the form of wages by the possessor of the means of labor, the purchaser of the labor-power to the possessor of that power, cannot, therefore, be, and is not, the price of the labor furnished, but is the price of the power made use of, a price that supply and demand cause to oscillate about and especially below its value determined, like the value of any other commodity, by the labor-time socially necessary for its production, or in other words, in this case by the sum which will normally enable the laborer to maintain and perpetuate his labor-power under the conditions necessary for the given kind and stage of production. But, even when the laborer gets a value equal to the value of his power, he furnishes a value greater than that which he receives. The duration of labor required for a given wage, regularly exceeds the time necessarily occupied by the laborer in adding to the value of the means of production consumed, a value equal to that wage; and the labor thus furnished over and above that which represents the equivalent of what the laborer gets, constitutes _surplus-labor_. SURPLUS-LABOR THEN IS UNPAID LABOR. And here let us be clearly understood. When we speak of unpaid labor, we are stating a simple fact, and do not at all intend to say that capitalists, in the existing state of things, are personally guilty of extracting from the laborers labor for which they do not pay them. We are not of the number of those who think that "the causes of the ills from which we suffer are to be found in men rather than institutions," as M. Glasson declared before the members of the Le Play School. We say exactly the contrary; for us the evil is due to institutions rather than to men and, in society as it is at present constituted, things cannot possibly take place in any other or different fashion. On the side of the laborer, the thing sold, as I have proved, cannot be his labor. It is his labor-power. The sum paid cannot be the price of his labor. It is the price of his labor-power, a price which, in view of the number of applicants for work, can only very rarely be equal to its value; but, even in this case, he furnishes a greater value than he receives. If he does not, his remuneration is not, strictly speaking, wages, for the furnishing of surplus-labor by the worker is a condition _sine qua non_ of wages. When his compensation is split up into wages and supplementary remuneration under the form of profit-sharing or under any other form, the workingman does not furnish less surplus-labor, less unpaid labor; quite the contrary, we may say, for it is clear that this supplementary remuneration, for the laborer, is a mere delusion, mere supplementary moon-shine. All that the workingman can hope to achieve, under, I repeat, the existing organization of society, is the curtailment of his surplus-labor, and that is the explanation and justification of the struggle for the reduction of the working-day, of the Eight Hours movement. On the side of the capitalist, on account of the fierce war of competition with low prices as weapons which rages throughout the field of production, it is financial suicide for the employer to extract from his work-people less unpaid labor than his competitors do; and that is why it is necessary to strive to obtain the reduction of the day by legal enactment. I add that so long as the employer, so long as the capitalist keeps within the bounds of what may be called the normal conditions of exploitation, he cannot reasonably be held responsible for the economic structure which is so advantageous to him, but which the best of intentions on the part of individuals would be powerless to modify. On the other hand, if capitalists are personally powerless to ameliorate the state of affairs, it would be rash to rush to the conclusion that they are capitalists in the interest of the workers. We must avoid exaggeration in either direction. Surplus-labor was not invented by the capitalists. Ever since human societies issued from the state of primitive communism, surplus-labor has always existed; and it is the method by which it is wrung from the immediate producers, which differentiates the different economic forms of society. Before man was able to produce in excess of his needs, one portion of society could not live upon the fruits of the toil of another portion. How could a man work gratuitously for others when his entire time was barely sufficient to procure him his own necessary means of existence? When, in consequence of human progress, labor had acquired such a degree of productiveness that an individual was enabled to produce more than what was strictly necessary for his needs, it became possible for some to subsist upon the toil of others and slavery could be established. That it was established by force is not doubtful; but it must be confessed that its establishment promoted human evolution. So long as the productiveness of labor, although sufficient to make surplus-labor possible, was not sufficient to render participation in directly useful labor compatible with other occupations or pursuits, the toilsome drudgery and exploitation of some was the necessary condition of the leisure of others, and, thereby, of the development of all. For, if none had had leisure, no progress could have been made in the sciences, the arts and all the branches of knowledge, the benefits of which we all enjoy in some degree. And the fact that the thinkers of antiquity and the greatest among them, Aristotle, excused slavery, is a proof that the mode of thought is determined by the exigencies of the economic organization of society. To reproach Aristotle, in particular, because he did not regard slavery and property as it is natural for us to regard them, is equivalent to reproaching him for not having applied the processes of our modern production to ancient industries. Slavery did not appear to lack a rational foundation, and did not begin to disappear until the external conditions were profoundly transformed and thus rendered another kind of labor and of surplus-labor more in harmony with the material requirements. Following upon the economic environment in which slavery was the rule there came then the economic environment in which serfdom predominated, and the latter, in its turn, has been superseded by the economic environment in which the wage-system has become the general rule. Each of these environments has had or has its own habits and modes of thought which may be in contradiction with ours, but which are the natural consequences of the modes of life in vogue in their respective eras. An examination of the aspect of surplus-labor in these three environments shows that it has the appearance of being all labor in the first, a larger or smaller fraction of the whole labor in the second, and apparently falls to zero in the third. In fact, in slavery, during a part of the day, the slave only replaces the value of what he consumes and so really works for himself; notwithstanding, even then his labor appears to be labor for his owner. All his labor has the appearance of surplus-labor, of labor for others. Under serfdom or the _corvée_ system, the labor of the serf for himself and his gratuitous labor for his feudal lord are perfectly distinct, the one from the other; by the very way in which the labor is performed, the serf distinguishes the time during which he works for his own benefit from the time which he is compelled to devote to the satisfaction of the wants of his lordly superiors. Under the wage-system, the wage-form, which appears in the guise of direct payment of labor, wipes out every visible line of demarcation between paid labor and unpaid labor; when he receives his wages, the laborer seems to get all the value due to his labor, so that all his labor takes on the form or appearance of paid labor. While, under slavery, the property-relation conceals the labor of the slave for himself, under the wage-system the money-relation conceals the gratuitous labor of the wage-worker for the capitalist. You will readily perceive the practical importance of this disguised appearance of the real relation between labor and capital. The latter is deemed to breed or expand by its own virtue, and the former to receive its full remuneration. FOOTNOTES: [4] In America where, since 1865, we have had no landed aristocracy, bourgeois and wealthy are well nigh synonymous.--Tr. IV. Wage-labor as an economic form existed before the actual appearance of industrial capital which in fact only dates from the day when production by the aid of wage-labor became general. Capital, in fact, is not a quality with which the means of production are naturally endowed, which they have always had and which they are destined always to have. It is a character which they possess only under definite social conditions. The means of production are no more naturally capital than a negro is naturally a slave. And when socialists talk of suppressing capital and capitalists, those who do not wish to make a ridiculous confusion, ought to remember that it is simply a question of taking away from the means of production and those who hold possession of them a character which they now have, and which can be taken from them without destroying an atom of their material substance, just as in suppressing slavery, it is not necessary, in order to take away the slave-character from the negro, to kill the negro. For a long time capital was known only under the form of merchants' capital and usurers' capital; for it was only, or almost only, under those two forms that money bred its like, and it is this possibility of money's breeding which constitutes capital. This possibility could not exist, except as an exceptional fact, for money invested in the means of production, so long as industry remained more or less domestic in character. In order for capital to spread beyond the domain of commerce in goods and money and appear in the domain of production, it was necessary for the wealth accumulated in commerce and usury to effect on a large scale the concentration of the scattered petty producers and their petty individual tools; the workshop had to be enlarged; it was necessary to bring together a large number of workers working at the same time, in the same place, under the orders of the same "captain of industry," in producing on a large scale the same kind of commodity, and to find for the disposal of the latter a sufficiently extended market. The money advanced in production can, in fact, realize an appreciable profit by the sale of the objects produced, only when its possessor is able to realize a certain quantity of surplus-labor; now, to accomplish this he must have a certain number of laborers. For it is the surplus-labor realized, we know, that forms the excess of the value produced over that of the money laid out in production, or, in other words, the surplus-value which incessantly swells the capital and continually increases its power to dominate labor. The capitalist mode of production, the mode of production in which the means of labor function as capital, owes to capital its specific character, which is its power of making money breed money, of giving birth to surplus-value. The capitalist purchaser of labor-power has only one object, viz., to enrich himself by making his money breed or expand, by the process of making commodities containing more labor than he pays for, and by selling which he therefore realizes a value greater than that of the sum of the advances or outlays made. If, since the productiveness of labor has made it possible, one part of society has, under various economic forms, been forced to add to the labor-time required for its own support, a certain amount of surplus-labor-time, for which it has received no equivalent and the benefit of which has been enjoyed by another part of society, it is likewise true that so long as the aim of production was to enable the privileged class to appropriate the means of consumption and enjoyment, the surplus-labor of the immediate producers reached its limit with the full satisfaction of those needs and desires, as extensive as they might be, to gratify which was the object of this appropriation. But as soon as it becomes a question of obtaining, instead of a certain mass of products, the production at any cost of surplus-value, the incessant multiplication of money, the possessor of the means of production strives relentlessly to make those means of production absorb the greatest possible quantity of surplus-labor. If this insatiable thirst for and headlong pursuit of surplus-value has been for the laborers and their families the cause of an exploitation of their labor-power, more burdensome than any form of exploitation previously known, it must be recognized that it has contributed to the development of the means of production. It is with capital as with slavery. Both, sources of sufferings for their victims, they have been, on the whole, sources of progress for humanity. The history of human progress is far from being an idyl. Our too forgetful and too proud civilization is the result of a long series of torments and miseries endured by the nameless and forgotten masses. Therefore capital has had its utility, and the era of capitalist production constitutes a great step forward in the evolution of the productive powers. Beginning with the enlargement of the small guild workshop, passing through action in common, the co-operation of a large number of laborers in the enlarged workshop through the manufacturing stage, by the division of labor within the workshop, by the introduction and general adoption of the machine-tool, by the employment of steam as a motive power, capitalist production has finally developed into modern mechanical industry which has revolutionized the mode of production more radically than had any previous change. It is its continuous and radical alteration of the technical processes which distinguishes the capitalist period from all the preceding periods, and prevents it from having the relatively permanent conservative character which they had. V. What are the results of these revolutions in industrial methods, and what are their tendencies? Machinery is more and more seizing upon all industries, and, instead of making use of his tool, the laborer is the servant of the machine. The relative ease of work of this kind makes it possible to substitute unskilled labor for skilled labor, women and children for men. By thus throwing men out of work, the instrument of labor lowers wages and expropriates the laborer from his means of existence. This machinery, thanks to which the genius of Aristotle foresaw the possibility of the emancipation of the slave, has as yet been merely a cause of enslavement, and just as man is moulded by the economic environment which is his own work, he is here enslaved by his own product. With the extension of the system of mechanical industry, the product ceases more and more to be the work of an individual. The individual by himself alone no longer makes a product, but a fraction of a product, and the owner no longer works with his instrument of labor, or, in other words, uses his property himself, but turns this task over to a certain number of laborers, to a group of wage-slaves. Thus, when the possessor of a hand-saw works with it, the owner uses his own property; with the machine-saw, it is used not by the owner, but by the laborers, whom he has to employ to operate it. While the operation of the means of production so largely augmented requires the common action of a host of workers, the undertakings and establishments grow to such dimensions that the vast sums of capital necessary for their conduct are not to be found in the hands of a single capitalist. Having become too gigantic for a single capitalist, the title or nominal ownership of these means of production, and along with it the profits, passes from the individual capitalist to an association of capitalists, to a company of stockholders. This company actually has, considered as a collective body, a particular tangible property; but what does this property represent for each individual shareholder? A fiction. The individual stockholder cannot lay his finger upon any particular material object and say: that is mine. While the means of production are thus ceasing to be in the strict sense private property, and require for their actual operation a collective body of laborers, while the product is becoming a social product, the owners of the means of production and the products, are becoming shareholders, and thus ceasing to perform any useful function, to have any real utility. The success of a business in former times depended upon the energy and skill of its proprietor, just as it sometimes does to-day in small manufacturing or mercantile establishments. Since the introduction of stock companies, the producing organism is no longer affected by the personal traits of those who own it; it does not know the shareholder, the present multiple proprietor, any more than the latter knows his property; it functions independently of him, and does not feel his influence, so that even a change of ownership has no effect upon it. The former functions of the proprietor are at the present time performed by wage-workers, trained engineers or managers, more or less well paid, but still wage-workers. In place of the managing proprietor, we have then a salaried manager, and he is a better manager because he is only a salaried employee, as M. de Molinari admits, when he writes: "All that is requisite is for him to possess the ability, knowledge and character demanded for his functions, and these are all qualities which are more easily and cheaply obtained on the market, divorced from capital than united to it."[5] Not only is the proprietary class, "the haves," losing all social utility, but, more than this, it is becoming baneful through its exclusive pre-occupation with personal profits. Baneful it is henceforth for all branches of social production which the mad and unorganized pursuit of profits subjects to disastrous perturbations, to periodical crises swamping the market and lasting amid failures and shut-downs until the outlets for goods once more open up; baneful for all the workers, worked to utter exhaustion in periods of business activity and reduced to wretched poverty in periods of industrial depression, during which they suffer from want of everything, because there is, relatively to the purchasing power of the people, too much of everything--(here we see once more the creator dominated by the creation, the producers by their products, just as in the cases formerly noticed of the human intelligence and the economic environment, of the machine and the workman); baneful for all consumers, who are victims of the adulteration of products begotten by the mad strife for gain; baneful for the petty capitalists, the small producers in constant danger of bankruptcy and ruin through the intensity of the war of competition which always results in the victory of the great capitalists or the great combinations of capital (trusts, etc.). To recapitulate, our economic movement tends toward labor in common, since the operation of the means of production is passing from the working-proprietor to a collective group of laborers, and toward the elimination of the mode or form of private or individual ownership of the means of production, since the nominal property in them is passing from the individual proprietor to a collective body of shareholders (stock-company or trust). It also tends to leave the proprietary class no useful role or function, thus making them for the future not only superfluous, but baneful. At the same time that the organization of labor adapted to the present form and state of the productive forces is escaping from the hands of the proprietary class and is thus the signal that the close of its historic career is at hand, it is concentrating and organizing men everywhere in the same way that it concentrates material wealth. It brings the laborers together and leads them, through their identity in position and interests, to combine in groups or unions, it constitutes them into a class more and more conscious of its situation, disciplines their masses systematically arranged and graded in each industrial establishment, and fashions out of their own ranks an intellectual aristocracy upon which devolves the function of super-intending and managing all industries. And while the individual form of their petty tools or instruments of labor, and their mode of production which keeps them in independent isolation, engender in the workers in petty industries ideas too individualistic and egoistic, wherever modern mechanical industry has already wrested from the laborer his tool and transformed it into a mechanical apparatus effacing individuality from the labor-process, wherever individual labor merges into and blends with collective labor, wherever the technical processes are such that the task of each is of service only through the participation (co-operation) of all, and is itself the condition of the performance of the collective task, the strictly individualistic tendencies of the producers in the petty industries are replaced by the spirit of solidarity, which, with the progress of industrial development, is leading--nay, forcing the working class every day more and more toward socialist ideas, ideas which spring from the material necessities which inexorably force their way into the minds of men. These are facts against which our personal preferences are of no avail. The material and intellectual elements of the collective (or co-operative) form of production, elaborated by the capitalist regime, are thus developing more and more every day, and socialism is, you see, the natural consequence of existent conditions. It is not something imported from abroad and added to our social movement, neither is it an article of export good for any sort of economic environment; it is the rigorous consequence of a certain orderly sequence of facts, the result of a definite evolution whose progress it has noted, but which has taken place independently of it; it has not created it because it has been conscious of its existence. And so, as M. Paul Leroy-Beaulieu recognizes: "the field of modern mechanical industry is extending its boundaries more and more, and it is difficult to see what limits can be set to its possible extension." Now it is modern industry which lays bare the antagonisms immanent in capitalist production, and at the same time renders their destruction possible. The historic role of capital has been the development of the productive powers, and, in the process of developing them, it has created the weapons which are destined to kill it. Necessary during a certain stage of economic development, it is not eternal, but inevitably comes to an end with a change in the relations of the means of production to the producers. FOOTNOTES: [5] L'Evolution économique, p. 38. VI. The preparation and training of the working-class (for their high functions) by the productive powers, the growing and inevitable development and crystallization of the collective tendencies of the latter, the increasing incompatibility between their essential character and their private ownership, all lead to a new economic regime in which they will be owned and controlled collectively just as they are operated collectively, in which they will be conducted by society and for society. And all the socialism of the socialists consists of wishing to perpetuate in a fully developed form the present social character of the material conditions of life. I say socialism of the socialists because we have seen flourish in our day a peculiar socialism, the socialism of those good people who earnestly wish to remove the inconveniences and injustices of our present social state, but who also wish a little more earnestly to preserve the cause of these inconveniences, who wish at once to suppress or abolish the proletariat and to preserve the capitalist form of society. It is quite possible for socialism also to have its converts and even its backsliders; it asks its adherents, not whence they come, but to go whither it is going, or, at least, to permit it to proceed upon its road without attempting to turn it aside from it. As one of our adversaries declares, we can say in our turn: 'On one side are the socialists, on the other those who are not socialists,' and among the latter may be counted those who accept the name while rejecting the thing. Apart from the socialization of the means of labor which have already taken on a collective form, there may be and there often is charlatanry, but there is no real possibility of emancipation, there is no socialism. So long as the means of labor and labor shall not be united in the same hands, the means of labor will retain the character of capital, and capital will inevitably exploit the workingman and wring from him labor for which it will not pay him. The source of the troubles of the working-class is to be found in their expropriation from the means of labor; now, the harder they work on the established basis of expropriation, the more power they give the capitalist class to enrich themselves and to expropriate those who have not yet entered the inner circle of capitalism. On the basis of the present gigantic forms of the instruments of labor, the collective means of labor and labor itself can be united in the same hands, only by the transformation of the capitalist ownership of these means of labor into social ownership, only by the transformation of capitalist production into social production. The logical consequence of the material facts of the existing environment, this transformation, the socialization of the means of production having collective tendencies, is possible, and it appears as the only practical method of emancipating the laborers, of emancipating society as a whole. Emancipated the laborers will be, since their lives will no longer be dependent upon the means of labor monopolized by others and they will be free to make their lives what they will. In fact, they will freely choose the kind of productive labor they prefer, and all kinds of work will, in accordance with the law of supply and demand, be reduced in varying proportions to definite quantities of ordinary labor. After once deducting from the product of the labor of each a portion which will take the place of the present taxes, the portion necessary to replace the means of labor consumed, to provide for the extension of the scale of production, for insurance against disastrous contingencies, such, for instance, as floods, lightning, tornadoes, etc., for the support of those incapable of labor, to meet generously the expenses of administration and of satisfying the common requirements of sanitation, education, etc., the producers of both sexes will distribute the balance among themselves, proportionally to the quantity of ordinary labor furnished by them severally. The right of each laborer will be equal, in the sense that for all, without distinction, the labor furnished will be the measure alike for all, and this equal right may possibly lead to an unequal distribution, according to the greater or smaller quantities of labor furnished. The standard of rights in force in an economic environment cannot be superior in quality to that environment, but it will go on increasing in perfection as the environment advances toward perfection, thus reducing, so far as material conditions shall permit, the inequalities of natural origin. The important point is that, from the dawn of social production, there will be no more surplus-labor, no more classes, and, therefore, no more exploitation, as there inevitably is under capitalist production. Every adult able to work will receive, under one form or another, partly in articles for personal consumption, partly in social guarantees, in public services of every kind, the same quantity of labor that he shall give to society. If goods are rationed out, this rationing will not be accompanied by exploitation; as rationing can then be due only to a deficiency in personal or social production, and not to the spoliation which the wage-system implies, a system under which overproduction, far from being favorable to the satisfaction of the demand of the working-class for articles of consumption, results for them in loss of employment and starvation diet. During the capitalist period, it suffices for socialism to establish the possibility of the emancipation of the working-class and to work for that emancipation. There is no occasion to waste time in working out and settling the details of the organization of the future society. Each epoch has its task. Let us not have the presumption to lay down rules for those who are to come after us, and let us be content with present duties. The point upon which socialism trains its guns at present, though recognizing the utility that it has had in the past, is the capital-form; but let us not forget that the substance beneath this form will be every whit preserved. When an office is taken away from an office-holder, the individual is left without a hair the less. In the same way, in taking from the means of production their function as capital, everything that functions to-day under that form will remain intact. Socialism then attacks the capital-form, the form only, and it attacks it only in so far as the economic phenomena authorize such an attack. Everything which constitutes the substance of capital will be preserved, the capital-form alone will disappear and along with it that power that it involves of exploiting the labor of others. What will be the fate of the capitalists? Capital appears to be a collective power or force, by its origin, since it springs from the accumulated surplus-labor of a collective body of laborers, by its functional activity since it also requires a collective body of laborers to enable it to enter upon its functions, and by its mode of ownership since, if it is private property, it tends more and more to be the private property, not of an individual, but of a collective body, a company or trust. To make public property of the means of production, which are capital when they are able to exploit the labor of others and which are capital only on that condition, is simply to generalize the collective or social character which they already have. Is the holder of a share in a mining or railway company or any sort of stock-company justified in speaking of "his" property? Where is his property? In what does it consist? What can he show if someone asks to see it? A machine? A piece of real estate? No, simply one or several bits of paper which represent only an infinitesimal fraction of an undivided whole. Would this shareholder be any the less a property-owner, if this undivided whole should become an integrant portion of the national property? Would there be such a great difference between "his" property, as it now is, and his quota or share in the national property? Just as the capitalists understand well enough to-day how to avail themselves of the national forests, for instance, for fresh air, pleasure excursions afoot and awheel, recreation, etc., so, after the socialization of the material objects that make up what is at present capital, they would use this newly nationalized property as means of labor or production. This, then, would be a true democratization[6] of property. The process, ordinarily called by this name, the dispersion of shares, stocks and bonds, is only the process--called legitimate--of extracting good hard cash from all pockets, even those most scantily supplied, centralizing it, monopolizing the real possession of it in exchange for a certificate of nominal ownership, making it breed or expand, and permitting to flow back in interest, dividends, etc., only tiny crumbs until the day comes when the poor investors cease to get even these microscopical returns. This pretended democratization of property results simply in the formation of a financial aristocracy creating scandalous fortunes out of the good dollars of the small investors, and if these dollars, when the paper accepted in their stead is no longer worth anything, are lost for their former possessors, they are not lost for everyone. (They have become the reward of "abstinence."--Translator.) Let the stocks representing part-ownership in a company lose all value--this is an occurrence that the shareholders and bondholders of the Panama canal, for example, can tell you is not unknown in our bourgeois society--and the shareholder finds himself, in this instance, permitted to enjoy all the blessings of expropriation without any indemnifying compensation; sometimes even he has the delicate attention of an invitation from the Receiver or the Courts to pour some more money into the hole where his former savings disappeared. Now even in this case the owners of this sort of personal property do not make too much ado about the matter. Why should they complain any more bitterly on the day when there will be, as it were, only a substitution of one kind of stocks or shares for another, when they will all become stockholders and bondholders of the great society (the Co-operative Commonwealth), instead of being shareholders and bondholders in one or several little societies or companies? By this transformation they will gain complete assurance against risk of loss--a real enough danger to-day when, after the actual control of property passes into the hands of financial magnates, the revenue of the nominal owners, the stockholders, etc., falls to zero or nearly zero, thus cutting off their means of existence or enjoyment. They will lose only one thing: the power of dominating the labor of others and of appropriating its fruits; while they will have the privilege of enjoying the common wealth and the advantages springing from its co-operative employment. Healthy adults will take for their own use, provided they work, their share of the social products. If they are already accustomed to any kind of work, they will find no hardship in this obligation to perform useful labor; if they are not accustomed to it, they will acquire the habit and will find their health greatly improved thereby in every respect. If they are old and infirm they will be liberally provided for by society. What they can reasonably expect and insist upon having is the sustenance of life (in a broad sense),[7] and this they will have, as you see, in any case. The socialization will not result in such a change in the distribution of wealth as is often caused by watering the stock of a company. It will simply extend to all, those who hold stocks at present included, those advantages which a minority alone enjoys to-day, and it will benefit all, but stockholders especially, by doing away with those risks which capitalist exploitation forces everyone to run. * * * * * Finally, socialism will rob no one. I would ask those who assert the contrary, what description then should be given to those transactions in the goods and property of the nobility, the clergy and above all of the communes, performed by our great radicals in the French Revolution, by those whose work has become a "compass" for our guidance. Just as soon as we cease simply substituting one privileged class for another, just as soon as we enable all without exception to enjoy the same advantages, no one will be robbed or deprived of anything. Simply, inequality in the enjoyment of privilege will have been abolished, another privileged class will have vanished from the stage. Yes, the capitalists will lose, along with their special privileges or rights over the means of production, that characteristic or quality that makes them capitalists; but, I repeat, they will have exactly the same rights as all others to the use and enjoyment of those means of production, from that time forth the inalienable property of society. With capital dethroned, the principles of the Republic will at last be applied with controlling power to the field of economics, just as they are to the field of politics, and political democracy will have ceased to be a farce, for it will have developed into its perfect flower, INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY. FOOTNOTES: [6] This is not an English word, but I will take the liberty of borrowing it from the French.--Tr. [7] "The world owes every man a living," is a common saying. VII. Far from being a material upheaval, the advent of socialism will be simply the culmination of the economic evolution now going on. Born, in its contemporaneous form, from the study of facts, socialism sees in the facts the controlling elements of the modifications to be effected. It makes no pretence of going in advance of the economic phenomena, it limits itself to following them, to adapting itself to conditions which it does not create and which it is not its part to create. Now, if, in all those cases where the means of production are already collectively owned by companies or trusts or are concentrated in the hands of single individuals, they can be placed at the disposition of ALL only by the substitution of society as a whole for their present capitalist possessors, in those cases in which the form of ownership of the means of labor is still truly individual, _i.e._, where they are still in the hands of those who themselves directly make use of them in actual work, it is not for society to force itself into the place of the present proprietors. The purpose of the interference of society, indeed, is to give, in the only form to-day possible, the means of production to the laborers who have them not, it is to restore the tools and materials of labor to those who have been robbed of them. It is not its business, then, to interfere in those cases where the laborers are still in possession of their tools and materials. And so the peasant will retain the patch of land he possesses and tills, the petty tools and implements will continue to belong to the artisan-manufacturer who himself works with them, until the facts shall lead them to renounce voluntarily this form of private ownership, no longer to their advantage, in order to enjoy the far more fruitful benefits of collective ownership and production. Moreover, just as, in the capitalist period, the changes brought about by the development of machinery re-acted upon even those branches of production in which machinery had not as yet been introduced, by developing, for example, in all branches the exploitation of women and children, in the same way, the advantages of the socialization of the means of production previously centralized by the capitalists, will re-act upon the petty proprietors of the means of production not yet socialized. The petty producer, who remains master of his own instrument of labor, will, through the simultaneity and propinquity of the embryonic co-operative commonwealth, get the help he needs. Notably, he will be freed from the clutches of the financial middlemen whose victim he is at present; his labor, freed from their exploitation, will be in its turn emancipated, just as truly, although in a different way, as will be the labor of those who, exploited to-day because they lack the means of labor, will have these means, socialized, placed at their free disposition. The result for all will thus be the emancipation of labor, in the one case, by placing the socialized means of labor at the free disposition of all laborers, in the other, by leaving to the individual laborer his individual tool. In both cases, the tools will be owned by those who use them. And, though it displeases our opponents, this way of proceeding is very logical, although it does not conform to their pretended conception of logic. The logic of the Socialists does not consist in forcing a solution demanded by a certain set of facts upon other facts which do not yet require that solution, it does not consist in making fish live out of the water because that mode of life agrees with men. It consists in adapting itself in all cases to the environment, to the facts, in always acting with reference to the facts, instead of requiring the same kind of action in the face of different combinations of facts. To those who assert that this position is in conflict with the "pure dogma of the socialist church," you have only to reply that there is neither a socialist church nor a socialist dogma, but that there are far too many bourgeois imbeciles who attempt to palm off ideas made by themselves out of the whole cloth as the dogmas of socialism. During the sixteen years that our socialist theory has been developing in France, it has never varied upon the subject of the petty producers. Those who assert the contrary follow their own imaginations and not the facts. I defy them to prove that we have not always spoken in the same way in regard, for example, to the small farms of the peasants. They now accuse our opinion on this subject of opportunism, using the word in its political meaning; they could, more correctly, accuse us of having always professed opportunism, but this time using the word in the sense implied by its derivation. You know how necessary it is to avoid the confusion--opportune for some, it is true--of the political meaning of a word with its true meaning. The political radicals are far from being radical in the ordinary sense, and their brothers (nominally opponents) the opportunists, instead of wishing that which is opportune, find nothing opportune except the satisfaction of their own appetites and the postponement of all else. In the true meaning--the time has come to say it--of the word, there cannot be a party more thoroughly opportunist than the socialist party which--I will not cease repeating--must simply adapt itself to the facts and which has no guide, save the facts, to point the way in the transformation of property. When we talk of the transformation of property which is nothing, as they are obliged to confess, but "a social institution,"[8] our opponents, with their strange fashion of doing us justice, change our words into "suppression of property." "Socialists of all schools have decreed the suppression of property"[9] is the notable affirmation of "a certain number of young men, strangers hitherto to politics"[10]--this part of the phrase is not mine, it is, possibly, the least open to criticism of any part of the work of the young men in question, who have felt impelled to speak on a question that they confess is foreign to them. Their confession is superfluous; we would have readily perceived, unaided, that they spoke of socialism after the fashion of those who know nothing of it. These young men, in founding the "_comité d'action de la gauche libérale_,"[11] wrote: "We are partisans of individual liberty and of individual property." I assume, until proof to the contrary is forthcoming, that they are not partisans of these things for themselves and their friends alone. If they advocate them for every one, I beg them to tell us what they think of the liberty of the man who has, as his source of livelihood, only his labor-power without the means of utilizing it. Either they recognize that every man ought to have the means of labor at his disposal, and, in that case, I will ask them how, with the system of mechanical industry, they hope to put at the disposal of all these means so necessary to the liberty of all. Or, they do not recognize that every man, to be free, must dispose of the tools and materials of labor, and then I will ask them what becomes of the liberty of the man to whom the employer can say: if you do such or such a thing, if you do not accept such or such a thing, you shall have no work, that is to say, it shall be impossible for you to eat. And that they may not accuse me of describing hypothetical cases blacker than nature, I will submit for their meditation the following fact related by the _Temps_ (Times)[12] at the time of the strike of Rive-de-Gier. "An engine-stoker fell ill. He was replaced, all the time of his illness, by a common laborer at 50 cents a day. The regular stoker having gotten well, resumed his duties. He was completely surprised, at the end of the fortnight, to receive only 50 cents a day, when he had been paid, before his illness, 80 cents. He protested. 'There it is. Take it or leave it,' he was told; 'we have found out that a common laborer at 50 cents does this work just as well as you; we cut you down to 50 cents. Get out or accept it.' The man had a family, and choice was forbidden him. He accepted it." In the face of such facts, M. Célestin Jonnart has the assurance--which I will describe, returning one of the epithets he applies to us, as "villainous"--to assert that the socialists "are working for conditions which will produce generations of men who will know nothing but abject submission and will be ready for every degradation." These generations, sir, are not to be made; they are to be raised from their degradation, and that is the task at which socialism is working. If I have cited only one fact, this is not because facts of this kind are rare, it is because the one I have cited has the advantage of coming from the _Temps_ which may be suspected of anything you like except socialism. Then, besides proving how free the laborer is in his choice, this fact shows how the free contract between capitalist and laborer is concluded. When the stoker resumes his place, he naturally imagines that he is resuming it upon the former conditions, and no one undeceives him. On pay-day, which does not come till a fortnight later, he perceives that he must conclude a new free contract different from the one he had a right to believe in force, and accept 50 cents instead of the 80 cents expected and agreed upon. Are these men free, the stoker and his like? I would gladly have on this point the opinion of M. Léon Say who not long since posed as the champion, against the socialists, of "human liberty and dignity." The truth is that the laborer is free, only when, to the right of being free, he joins the effective power of being free, only when he has at his disposition the things necessary to the realization of his labor, only, in other words, when he does not have to throw himself upon the mercy of the possessors of those things. Whatever the law may say, the man who depends upon another for his subsistence is not free. What is requisite is to furnish means of labor to the laborers who have them not; now, on the basis of the present form or character of these means, society can assure possession of them to all, only when these means shall have been socialized, shall have become social property. As regards the laborers who still possess their means of labor, they will retain them, as I explained just above. In fact, only through socialism can individual liberty be made a reality for all. It is the same with individual property as with individual liberty. From all that I have just stated it is clear that the only property that socialism wishes to transform, is the property no longer made use of by the individual owners thereof; it is the property which is formed by the agglomeration of petty scraps of property wrested from the immense majority, and which exists only to the detriment of that very majority.[13] And even in this case there will be no suppression, since the present holders will be granted the use of their transformed property on the same terms as others. What, then, is the property of "those silent multitudes who toil and struggle so hard for existence and who are in truth the artisans of our greatness?"[14] Is not your capitalist society stripping them more and more every day of the means of labor and of individually owned dwellings, and leaving to them in individual ownership only the things indispensable to the bare support of life? It is the capitalist regime which, by increasing immeasurably the property of the few, contracts the limits within which the personal acquirement of property by the many is possible. It is the socialist regime which will increase this possibility of the personal acquirement of property, by assuring to each the share earned by his labor. It is only under the regime of socialism that individual property will be a reality for all, as this regime alone will suppress--though suppressing nothing else--the possibility of using this property to exploit the labor of others. FOOTNOTES: [8] M. Célestin Jonnart. [9] Déclaration du "Comité d'action de la gauche libérale." [10] Idem. [11] Committee of action of the Liberal Left. [12] March 8, 1893, 2d page. [13] "Political economy confuses on principle two very different kinds of private property, of which one rests on the producers' own labor, the other on the employment of the labor of others. It forgets that the latter not only is the direct antithesis of the former, but absolutely grows on its tomb only."--Marx, 1st vol. of _Capital_, Humboldt Edition, page 488. [14] M. Célestin Jonnart. VIII. It appears that from the moment when it will no longer be possible to exploit the individual, there will no longer be any individuality. At least it so appears to the capitalists who deem that which does not yield them a profit to be non-existent. To the socialists, on the other hand, the existence of individuality appears dependent upon its freedom. Now, as it is, as we have just seen, only in the socialist period that all individuals will be able to have the means necessary to true freedom, it follows that the triumph of socialism will be the triumph of the individual, the blossoming of personality.[15] In the socialist period, indeed, all those who shall wish to work will be able to do so, by choosing freely their favorite kind of socially useful labor, and all will be able to consume the social products proportionally to the labor they have furnished. Will it not, therefore, be to the interest of all to work, and to try to make the work as little toilsome and as productive as possible? Is there not here, apart from the joy of serving one's fellows, the most powerful motive for emulation both as regards the quantity of labor individually performed and in the invention or discovery of improved processes tending to procure for each and all the maximum of benefits in return for the minimum of exertion? A certain degree of audacity is required to dare compare the producers of the future under socialism, with the office-holders of to-day under capitalism. What interest has the office-holder of to-day to reduce to the minimum the cost to the State of the services it is his function to perform? His salary, determined before any labor is performed, is independent of the quantity and quality of his labor; and so the office-holder, though full of righteous indignation against the workingmen who wish to work only eight hours a day, seeks, on his own part, to work just as little as possible, and he squanders and wastes as much as possible, because extravagance never costs him a penny and sometimes brings him in handsome rewards. While under the regime of socialism, the personal interest of the individual will be in harmony with the social interest of all, under the present system the personal interests of the office-holders are in direct conflict with the interest of the State. Under the regime of socialism, men, all men, will be producers and not office-holders; they will not be office-holders any more than are members of a family who, in order to provide for the satisfaction of the needs of the family, perform severally various functions. * * * * * In conclusion, the whole question may be summed up thus: Is the spirit of initiative and personal energy likely to be more broadly disseminated among the masses, when the latter know that they are compelled to make their own wretchedness the instrument of the prosperity of a minority, or when they shall know that their own prosperity will be whatever they, by their own labor, shall make it, under a system of absolute equality of privilege? There can be no doubt as to the answer in the minds of all those who are not too much wonted to the denial of truth. But, under the regime of socialism, initiative[16] and energy cannot promote personal interests alone; while being more favorable than ever to those interests, they will necessarily be advantageous to all. As soon as the material conditions necessary for the attainment of individual prosperity shall also be the conditions requisite for social prosperity, we shall see grow out of this harmony a system of ethics based on the newly acquired consciousness of social solidarity, and under this new morality the action of the individual will have not only as its necessary though indirect result, but also as its guiding principle, motive and goal, the social or common interest, the greatest good of all. It would seem that from this time forth all ought to unite their efforts in order to hasten the dawn of the realization of a social environment so advantageous to all. In fact, excepting a very small minority of great financiers and capitalists, all those who work or have worked with hand or brain, all have an interest in the triumph of socialism; unfortunately all are not conscious of the undeniable precariousness of the situation of all under the regime of capitalism, and so do not see the advantage for all in transforming this regime along the lines of its social tendencies, and many will stupidly strive to prolong the state of things which is the cause of their troubles. Socialism repels no one and is open to all those, without regard to their social position, who comprehend its necessity. But, if it is far from repelling them--striving indeed to attract them--it cannot count in advance, generally speaking, on those who too readily become the dupes of illusions begotten by a more or less privileged social situation and who are unable to rise above their class prejudices sufficiently to form a just conception of their own true interests. While preparing the ground for socialism which is developing wherever the capitalist mode of production has reached a certain stage, the economic phenomena at the same time necessitate the economic and political organization of the industrial[17] laborers, and they are the class immediately and directly interested in the triumph of socialism. Small industrial employers, artisans, retail merchants and working owners of small farms have two-fold class-ties. They belong to the possessing class, and yet they are exploited. When, under the empire of a naive pride and vain hopes, the man proud of his possessions, the would-be capitalist, dominates in them, they give heed to the dirty blackguards who are forever telling them that the common laborer and the socialist wish to take their little property away from them, and they show a hostility which, in spite of their conservative intentions, is aimed against those whom they ought to help if they wish to be sure of retaining the little property they have. When, under the lashes of the thong of stern reality they feel themselves exploited and menaced with expropriation, they applaud the demands of the socialists and help support--as has often been seen--the strikes of the laborers. According to circumstances the middle class declares itself in this way, now on one side, now on the other. The industrial workingmen who own nothing but their labor-power and to whom the possession, even in a dream, of the smallest estate is an impossibility, cannot possibly conceive the false idea that they have anything to lose by the victory of socialism. From that to thinking that they have everything to gain by that victory is not far; for this all that is needed is for them to be brought into contact with the socialist propaganda. Therefore the principal mission of socialism is to instruct and organize the multitudes of industrial laborers; they must be won over the first of all. This which is, in fact, for the middle class only a defensive war against the great capitalists becomes an offensive war for the great majority of the industrial laborers who have to conquer that which the middle class has only to preserve. Because we say that socialism makes its appeal more particularly to the industrial laborers, we beg our critics not to represent us as saying that socialism ought to neglect the members of all other classes. Socialism struggling for the emancipation--no longer impossible--of all, combats in every rank or stratum of society all exploitations and all oppressions, and it is the natural defender of all the exploited and all the oppressed. Just as, to regard the economic question as the sum and substance of militant socialism is not, in our opinion, to restrict its field of action, but is simply, on the contrary, to pursue directly the only line of conduct by which it is possible for its efforts to produce broad general effects, so to devote our attention first of all to the industrial laborers is not to make light of the wrongs of the other victims of exploitation, but it is to devote our first efforts to strengthening the active army of socialism, formed of those who have to blaze out a path for the movement, but whose success--which will be hastened by the support of members of other classes--will assure the emancipation of all. FOOTNOTES: [15] "In place of the old bourgeois society with its classes and class antagonisms we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."--Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, page 43, New York, 1898, published by Nat. Ex. Committee of the Socialist Labor Party. [16] This word is used so exclusively in a technical sense by the Direct Legislation faddists, it may be necessary to say it is here used to denote originality and independent strength of mind, etc.--Tr. [17] "Industrial," as used here, and, indeed, correctly, it should be noted, does not include agricultural.--Tr. IX. Socialism and the party which incarnates it are begotten by the economic transformations which are taking place under our eyes. If it is impossible to suppress (or eliminate) certain phases of social development, at a certain stage of development it is possible for men to facilitate or retard the success of socialism. This depends sometimes upon men who are not socialists, and nearly always upon socialist tactics. Is socialism inexorably destined to wait for "the natural play (working) of institutions and laws to bring to pass the triumph of its aspirations," as M. Charles Dupuy asked in one of his astonishing addresses? Socialism which is essentially an evolutionary theory expects its realization to result from the natural working out of the facts; but, under normal conditions, it can no more rely on the natural play or action of existing laws, than a republican, eager for the Republic, could with any show of reason, have relied, in the time of the Empire, on the natural working of the imperial laws to evolve the Republic. But in a republic, such as France or the United States, where universal suffrage makes the People the sole nominal sovereign, and where by strictly legal action the People may become the effective, actual sovereign, if socialism cannot rely for its triumph upon the free play and natural working of the laws of evolution, it can rely upon the ever-growing influence of socialist electors and officials on political action and legislation--a source of hope that was forbidden to the republicans under the empire. It may also happen that its triumph may be brought about by a rupture of _de facto_ legality, a rupture which under certain contingencies may become unavoidable, a rupture which may be forced upon them without any regard to the personal preferences of socialists, as, for example, in France, on the 4th of September, 1870, such a rupture was forced upon Jules Simon and other fanatical partisans of legality, and it is a rupture of this kind which constitutes a revolution. Evolution and Revolution are not contradictory terms. Quite the contrary. When they both take place, the one following and supplementing the other, the second is the conclusion of the first, the revolution is only the characteristic crisis which ends and gives real effect to a period of evolution. Notice what takes place in the case of the young chick. After having gone through the regular process of development inside of its shell, the little brute, who is as yet unable to read the _Temps_, does not know that it has been decreed that evolution must take place without any violence; instead of employing its leisure in gently and legally wearing a hole through its shell, it breaks its way out without warning or ceremony. Well, then, socialism which does read the _Temps_, will act just as though it had not read it, and, if the emergency arises, will imitate the little chick; if in the course of events it becomes necessary, it will burst asunder the mould of legality within which it is developing, and within which, at the present time, it has simply to continue its regular and peaceful development. The distinctive mark of a revolution, as I have said, is the rupture of _de facto_ legality--that is the only _sine qua non_, everything else is merely incidental. Unfortunately the strong general tendency is to think that the word, revolution, necessarily implies the execution of persons and the destruction of property. The latter are catastrophes that the socialists will make every possible effort to avoid; for they know that excesses in one direction inevitably provoke a re-actionary movement in the opposite direction, and they will do everything they possibly can to keep from thus unconsciously defeating their own ends. At some particular time in the future events may occur that, purely by the power of circumstances over men, will lead to a rupture of legality. When and how will this happen, if it does happen? We know nothing about it, and we are not and will not be the responsible cause of such an event, because we recognize and point out the possibility of its occurrence. The interested fears of some will not destroy this possibility, nor will the too pardonable impatience of others convert it into a probability. As the _Temps_ said one day, in speaking incidentally of revolutions: "One does not make them; they make themselves."[18] Although we can not indicate the character any more than the period of this possible rupture of legality, still we have a right to say that this rupture, or in other words, this revolution, may take place peacefully, like the one that occurred on the 4th of September, 1870. The difference in the consequences of the two revolutions makes no difference from our present point of view. It is true that the revolution of the 4th of September was purely a political revolution. But, while the revolution, whose possibility we are considering, is to usher in a social transformation, as a revolution it is simply a change of a political character. If the capitalists are as prudent as were the Bonapartists on the 4th of September, the future rupture of legality may be just as peaceful as was that in which Senator Jules Simon took part. It is seen, then, that socialism may burst the mould of legality while preserving the peace. On the other hand, it may make use of violence while remaining within the forms of strict legality. Whether or not a revolutionary situation is destined to arise, the duty, the whole duty of socialists consists in educating the masses, in rendering them conscious of their condition, their task and their responsibility, of organizing them in readiness for the day when the political power shall fall into their hands. To win for socialism the greatest possible number of partisans, that is the task to which socialist parties must consecrate their efforts, using, for this purpose, all pacific and legal means, but using such means only. In ordinary times, such as those in which we live, any sort of action, except peaceful and legal action with a view to the instruction and organization of the masses, is sure, whether so intended or not, to have a deterrent and reactionary influence, and to interfere with the spread of socialist ideas. What I am advocating is not the policy of keeping our colors hidden in our pockets, it is not the policy of mutilating, however slightly, the theory of socialism, it is the policy of sticking strictly to that theory without marring or disfiguring it by violences which form no part of it, by vain predictions which threaten with no certainty of fulfilment. The truth is that it is impossible to promise in advance to stick solely to either method--force or legality; and this is true for all parties. A Radical, M. Sigismund Lacroix, recognized this fact when he wrote some time ago: "Many people of whom I am one ... would hesitate to swear to stick, under all circumstances, to legal and peaceful means. This depends, not on opinions, but on situations. Revolutionary situations may arise, when to be a revolutionist will be a duty."[19] Even admitting that there must be a revolution--a question which the events and not the wills of men will decide--this revolution, no matter what its incidents, will be only one term in the series of phenomena which are leading us from one social form to another, only one link in a chain, and is it reasonable, therefore, to hypnotize the laborers by concentrating their attention on that single link? What is necessary is to make socialists, to make the masses conscious of the economic movement in progress, to bring their wills into harmony with that movement, and thus to lead to the election of more and more socialists to our various elective assemblies, where it will be their duty and privilege to maintain the forgotten and despised rights of the people, and to effect, so far as they can, under the circumstances, the various ameliorations of the conditions and status of the toiling masses for which socialism is striving. The socialist party is the only party which pursues these aims in a practical fashion, by basing its tactics on the economic conditions of the environment. What is the use, therefore, of talking of anything but socialism, of expatiating on the nature of the crisis which will terminate the present phase of evolution and will be the beginning of a new phase? Why waste time talking about a contingent event that circumstances may force upon us in the future, but the time or character of which no man can define or describe to-day? At all events, if we must talk of revolution, our aim should be to overthrow the false ideas on this subject industriously circulated by our opponents with a view to deterring recruits from enlisting in the socialist army. FOOTNOTES: [18] Issue of Nov. 14, 1891. [19] _Le Radical_, May 30, 1893. X.[20] Just as the idea of revolution is identified with the ideas of murder and destruction, in the same way the internationalism of the workers is identified with anti-patriotism. There is in the latter case as in the former a fundamental error, and it remains for me to show that, theoretically and practically, the identification of the internationalism of labor with anti-patriotism is unjustifiable. And, to begin with, he who says internationalism says internationalism, and does not say anti-nationalism; consequently, you see at once that no one ought--either to approve or condemn it--to use the word, internationalism, to express what it does not mean and what other words do mean. Instead of allowing ourselves to be led astray by our various fantastic notions, let us here as elsewhere examine the facts and see what conclusions they impose upon us. Socialism flows from the facts, it follows them and does not precede them. This is the truth to which we must constantly return, which we must never forget. Now, the facts show us, _bon gré mal gré_, two things: on the one hand, the existence of countries (fatherlands); on the other, the existence, in every social stratum, of an international solidarity. It is with countries as with classes; some deny the existence of the former, others of the latter. Now, in reason it is no more possible to deny the existence of the country (fatherland) than the existence of classes in that country. It is all right to look forward to the day when national patriotism shall be swallowed up in world-wide brotherhood, when classes shall vanish in human solidarity, but while waiting for the facts to turn this noble ideal into a reality, we must, in both cases, adapt ourselves to the facts as they actually are at present. To wish to suppress them (classes, etc.) does not suppress them, to protest against their existence does not at all prevent them from existing and, so long as countries and classes shall exist, it will be necessary for us, not to deny their existence in declamations in the Bryan-McKinley style, but to adapt our tactics to the facts which are the consequences of their existence. Just as the feeling of national solidarity is added to the feeling of family solidarity, without destroying the latter, in the same way the relatively new sentiment of international solidarity is added to the former which is still retained. A new sentiment springing from a new situation does not annihilate the older sentiments and emotions as long as the conditions that gave them birth continue to exist, and families and nations are still in existence. The tendency toward internationalism was inaugurated by capital. In obedience to its own law of continuous growth, it has, more and more, substituted international commerce for national trade. It has created industries whose raw materials come from abroad and whose products require, for an outlet, the universal or world market. It has thus developed the reciprocal interdependence of nations, no one of which to-day can live without the aid of the others. Capitalist internationalism, moreover, pursues its ends with stern remorselessness. In order to lower national wages and gain greater profits, the capitalist does not hesitate to deprive his fellow-countrymen of work, and to import, to compete with them on the labor market, foreigners wonted by greater poverty to a lower standard of living, and therefore able and willing to work for lower wages. To prohibit them, not from employing foreigners, but from paying them less than the national rate of wages is the only effective means of meeting this evil. On the other hand, provided he sees a goodly profit in the transaction, the capitalist never hesitates to loan money or sell military supplies to a foreign country, though he thus increases its power to wage war against his own. This international character, assumed by capital in all its forms, is, in its effects, co-extensive with the domain of human affairs. And so, as M. Aulard declared in a lecture about which there has been too much talk: "There are no national boundaries for reason and science * * * They are neither French, nor English, nor German, but international and human." How, therefore, can the workingmen be justly reproached for taking the road on which everything and everybody has started, and along which the capitalists have preceded them? Face to face with the international domination of capital, they have come to understand, in all civilized nations, the common character, the oneness, of their own interests. They are everywhere the victims of the same kind of exploitation, due everywhere to the same cause. The same facts have suggested to them the same demands, the same means and tactics to attain the same goal. International exploitation has thus given birth to an ever growing international solidarity among the workers who resist its encroachments. And the international concurrence of the workers is publicly declared by the world-wide celebration of the First day of May. Notwithstanding the most sincere sentiment of international solidarity on both sides, the workingmen of two countries may still have to fight against each other. This is one of the numerous contradictions--and one of the most horrible--inherent in the capitalist regime, which is condemned to aspire to peace and to unchain the horrid dogs of war. While, for example, commerce on the world market requires peace, the bitterness of competition on that market begets conflicts. * * * * * * * * * To safeguard the little independence left to them as laborers, the workers have been led by the state of affairs, by actual conditions, as were the business men before them, to be internationalists; but they are patriots, and must be patriots only whenever their country--be it France or America--is menaced by danger from abroad. I hope you now see that the internationalism of the workers and the socialists cannot, by any possibility lead to anti-patriotism. These are two distinct ideas which cannot be legitimately confounded, no matter what the object of this confusion. Our internationalism and our patriotism spring from two wholly distinct categories of facts, and different facts logically necessitate different solutions, logic consisting, here and everywhere, in adapting the solution to the facts and not in applying the same solution indiscriminately to all sorts of facts. To sum up, workingmen and socialists ought to be internationalists in their relations with their toiling comrades when the interests of labor are at stake in times of peace, patriots and Frenchmen before all when France, our country shall be, if it must be, in danger of war, conscious always of the duty to be performed, conscious, if need be, especially in victory, of the duty of respecting in the case of others, especially the conquered, the rights that they claim for themselves. * * * * * I have finished. That is all that socialism means. I have taken pains to set it forth in its entirety, free from both the attenuations and the exaggerations by which it is often mutilated or disfigured, but which seem to me to have no foundation in reality. Its goal is the socialization of the means of labor which have already manifested collective tendencies--either in their mode of ownership or in the mode of their employment as exploiting agencies--and the abolition of classes. Its means, the transference to the political battlefield of the Class Struggle, the existence of which it is compelled to acknowledge. It must, for the time being, be resolved to preserve legality at home and peace abroad, but equally energetically determined to tolerate no measure that will make the situation of the toilers more intolerable, to preserve republican institutions intact and to defend the national territory against all foreign foes. GABRIEL DEVILLE. FOOTNOTES: [20] In France, where pseudo-patriotism, or jingoism, runs riot, the argument that international socialism is unpatriotic is much in vogue with the hireling scribes of capitalism. Hence, this section. In this country, owing in part to its geographical isolation, but still more to the almost complete lack of a sense of international solidarity on the part of the American worker, we seldom have to meet this argument, and so I will condense and abridge this section.--Tr. 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36272	----	SOME OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM. From "The Atheistic Platform", Twelve Lectures By Charles Bradlaugh. London: Freethought Publishing Company 63, Fleet Street, E.C. 1884 SOME OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM The great evils connected with and resulting from poverty--evils which are so prominent and so terrible in old countries, and especially in populous cities--have, in our own land compelled the attention, and excited the sympathy, of persons in every rank of society. Many remedies have been suggested and attempted, and from time to time, during the present century, there have been men who, believing that the abolition of individual private property would cure the misery abounding, have advocated Socialism. Some pure-hearted and well-meaning men and women, as Robert Owen, Abram Combe, and Frances Wright, have spent large fortunes, and devoted much of their lives in the essay to test their theories by experiments. As communities, none of these attempts have been permanently successful, though they have doubtless, by encouraging and suggesting co-operative effort in England, done something to modify the fierceness of the life struggle, in which too often the strongest and most unscrupulous succeeded by destroying his weaker brother. Some Socialistic associations in the United States,* as the Shakers and the Oneida community, have been held together in limited numbers as religious societies, but only even apparently successful, while the numbers of each community remained comparatively few. Some communities have for many years bravely endured the burden of debt, penury, and discomfort, to be loyal to the memory of their founder, as in the case at Icaria of the followers of Cabet. But in none of these was the sense of private property entirely lost; the numbers were relatively so small that all increase of comfort was appreciable, and in nearly all the communities there was option of the withdrawal of the individual, and with him of a proportion of the property he had helped to create or increase. * Particulars of all existing Socialistic communities in the United States are given in the works of Mr. Hinds and Mr. Nordhoff. During the past generation, Socialistic theory has been specially urged in Germany, and the Socialist leaders there have acquired greater influence because of the poverty of the people, and because too of the cruel persecution to which Social Reformers, as well as Socialists, have been subjected by Prince Bismarck's despotic government. A difficulty arising from the repressive measures resorted to in Germany has been that German emigrants to the United States and to Great Britain, speak and write as if precisely the same wrongs had to be assailed in the lands of their adoption as in the land of their birth. Very recently in England--and largely at the instance of foreigners--there has been a revival of Socialist propaganda, though only on a small scale compared with fifty years ago, by persons claiming to be "Scientific Socialists," who declare that such Socialists as Robert Owen and his friends were Utopian in thinking that any communities could be successfully founded while ordinary society exists. These Scientific Socialists--mostly middle-class men--declare their intense hatred of the _bourgeoisie_, and affirm that the Social State they desire to create can only be established on the ruins of the present society, by a revolution which they say must come in any event, but which they strive to accelerate. These Scientific Socialists deny that they ought to be required to propound any social scheme, and they contemptuously refuse to discuss any of the details connected with the future of the new Social State, to make way for which the present is to be cleared away. Most of the points touched on in this lecture were raised in the discussion on Socialism between myself and Mr. Hyndman recently held in St. James's Hall. Others of the questions have been raised in my articles in _Our Corner_, and in the reply there by Mr. Joynes. The Socialists of the Democratic Federation say that "Socialism is an endeavor to substitute an organised co-operation for existence" for the present strife, but they refuse to be precise as to the method or character of the organisation, or the lines upon which it is to be carried out. Their reason is, probably, that they have not even made the slightest effort to frame any plan, but would be content to try first to destroy all existing government. I suggest that this want and avoidance of foresight is, in the honest, folly, and in the wise, criminality. They mix up some desirable objects which are not all Socialistic with others that are not necessarily Socialistic, and add to these declarations which are either so vague as to be meaningless, or else in the highest degree Socialistic and revolutionary. Whilst Mr. Hyndman, one of the prominent members of the Democratic Federation, thus speaks of Socialism as endeavoring "to substitute an organised co-operation," Mr. E. Belfort Bax, another prominent member and co-signatory of the manifesto, emphatically says, "no 'scientific' socialist pretends to have any 'scheme' or detailed plan of organisation." When organisation can be spoken of as possible without any scheme or detailed plan, it shows that words are used without regard to serious meaning. These Socialists declare that there must be "organisation of agricultural and industrial armies under State control," and that the exchange of all production must be controlled by the workers; but they decline to explain how this control is to be exercised, and on what principles. We agree that there are often too many concerned in the distribution of the necessaries of life, and that the cost to the consumer is often outrageously augmented; but we suggest that this may be reformed gradually and in detail by individual effort through local societies, and that it ought not to be any part of the work of the State. We point to the fact that there are now in Great Britain--all established during the present reign--nearly one thousand distributive co-operative societies, with more than half a million members, with over seventeen and three-quarter millions of pounds of yearly sales, with two and a half millions of stock-in-trade, with five and a quarter millions of working capital, and dividing one and a half millions of annual profit; and that these societies, each keeping its own property, still further co-operate with one another to reduce loss in exchange by havings a wholesale co-operative society in England, with sales in 1882 exceeding three and a half millions sterling, and another similar wholesale society in Scotland, with transactions in the same year to nearly one million sterling. We say the way to render the cost of exchange of products less onerous to the laborer is by the extension and perfection of this organisation of co-operative distribution, and that this may be and is being done successfully and usefully, ameliorating gradually the condition and developing the self-reliance of the individual workers who take part in such co-operative stores, and thus inciting and inducing other individuals to join the societies already founded, or to establish others, and so educating individual after individual to better habits of exchange. We say that this is more useful than to denounce as idlers and robbers "the shopkeepers and their hangers on," as is done by the present teachers of Socialism. We object that the organisation of all industry under State control must paralyse industrial energy and discourage and neutralise individual effort. The Socialists claim that there shall be "collective ownership of land, capital, machinery and credit by the complete ownership of the people," and yet they object that they are misrepresented when told that they want to take the private economies of millions of industrious wage-earners in this kingdom for the benefit of those who may have neither been thrifty nor industrious. The truth is that, if language is to have any meaning, the definitions must stand given by me and unchallenged by my opponent in the St. James's Hall debate, viz.: (1) "Socialism denies all individual private property, and affirms that society, organised as the state, should own all wealth, direct all labor, and compel the equal distribution of all produce." (2) "A Socialistic State would be a State in which everything would be held in common, in which the labor of each individual would be directed and controlled by the State, to which would belong all results of such labor." The realisation of a Socialistic State in this country would, as I then urged, require (1) a physical force revolution, in which all the present property owners unwilling to surrender their private properties to the common fund would be forcibly dispossessed. This revolution would be in the highest degree difficult, if not impossible, for property holders are the enormous majority. Mr. Joynes, in an article published in _Our Corner_, does challenge my definition, and says that the immediate aim of Socialism "is not the abolition of private property, but its establishment by means of the emancipation of labor on the only sound basis. It is private capital we attack, the power to hire laborers at starvation wages, and not the independent enjoyment of the fruits of labor by the individual who produces them." And he refers me to a paragraph previously dealt with by me as an illustration of contradictory statement, in which he and his cosignatories write: "Do any say we attack private property? We deny it. We only attack that private property for a few thousand loiterers and slave-drivers, which renders all property in the fruits of their own labor impossible for millions. We challenge that private property which renders poverty at once a necessity and a crime." But surely this flatly contradicts the declaration by Mr. Hyndman in the debate, of "the collective ownership of land, capital, machinery, and credit." I am afraid that Mr. Joynes has in his mind some other unexplained meaning for the words "capital" and "property." To me it seems impossible that if everything be owned collectively, anything can be owned individually, separately, and privately. Mr. Joynes, however, apparently concedes that it is true that the private property of "a few thousand loiterers and slave-drivers" is attacked. Though he does not in his reply explain who these "few thousand" are, I find in "The Summary of the Principles of Socialism," signed by Mr. Joynes, that they are "the capitalist class, the factory owners, the farmers, the bankers, the brokers, the shopkeepers, and their hangers-on, the landlords." But these make much more than a "few thousand." The census returns for England and Wales alone show under the headings professional classes, 647,075; commercial classes, 980,128 (and these do not include the ordinary shopkeepers); farmers and graziers, 249,907; and unoccupied males over twenty, 182,282. Add to these proportional figures for Scotland and Ireland, and it is at once seen how misleading it is to speak of these as a "few thousand." Mr. Joynes disapproves of my "small army of statistics." I object that he and his friends never examine or verify the figures on which they found their allegations. Mr. Joynes says that it is not private property, the fruits of labor, that is attacked by the Socialists, but "private capital, the power to hire laborers." Does that mean that £30 saved by an artisan would not be attacked so long as he kept it useless, but that if he deposited it with a banker who used it in industrial enterprise, or if he invested it in railway shares, it would be forfeited? If an artisan may, out of the fruits of his labor, buy for £3 and keep as his own a silver watch, why is the £3 to be confiscated when it gets into the hands of the Cheapside or Corn-hill watch dealer? A property owner is not only a Rothschild, a Baring, or an Overstone, he is that person who has anything whatever beyond that which is necessary for actual existence at the moment. Thus, all savings however moderate; all household furniture, books, indeed everything but the simplest clothing are property, and the property owners belong to all classes. The wage-earning classes, being largely property owners, viz., not only by their household goods, but by their investments, building societies, their small deposits in savings banks, their periodical payments to their trade societies and friendly societies, they would naturally and wisely defend these against confiscation. If the physical force revolution were possible, because of the desperate energy of those owning nothing, its success would be achieved with serious immediate crime, and would be attended with consequent social mischief and terrible demoralisation extending over a long period. Mr. Hyndman has written that "force, or fear of force, is, unfortunately, the only reasoning which can appeal to a dominant estate, or will ever induce them to surrender any portion of their property." I read these words to him in the debate, and he made no reply to them. I object that a Socialistic State to be realised by force can only be so realised after a period of civil war shocking to contemplate, and one in which the wisest would go near madness. But a Socialistic State, even if achieved, could not be maintained without a second (mental) revolution, in which the present ideas and forms of expression concerning property would have to be effaced, and the habit of life (resulting from long-continued teachings and long-enduring traditions) would have to be broken. The words "my house," "my coat," "my horse," "my watch," "my book," are all affirmations of private property which would have to be unlearned. The whole current of human thought would have to be changed. In a Socialistic State there would be no inducement to thrift, no encouragement to individual saving, no protection for individual accumulation, no check upon, no discouragement to waste. Nor, if such a Socialistic State be established, is it easy to conceive how free expression of individual opinion, either by press or platform, can be preserved and maintained. All means of publicity will belong to, and be controlled by, the State. But what will this mean? Will a Socialistic government furnish halls to its adversaries, print books for its opponents, organise costly journals for those who are hostile to it? If not, there must come utter stagnation of opinion. And what could the organisation and controlling of all labor by the State mean? In what could it end? By whom, and in what manner, would the selection of each individual for the pursuit, profession, or handicraft for which he was fittest be determined? I object that the Socialistic advocates exaggerate and distort real evils, and thus do mischief to those who are seeking to effect social reforms. For example, they declare that the whole of the land of the country is held by "a handful of marauders," who ought to be dispossessed, and when told that there are 852,438 persons owning on an average less than one fifth of an acre each, holding probably in the neighborhood of towns, and that more than half a million of these persons are members of building societies, paying for their small properties out of their wage-earnings, they only say: "Do you suppose those who hold building allotments will be dispossessed?" But if they are not dispossessed, if their private property is left to them, then "collective ownership" must have a new meaning. Pressed with the fact that there are 205,358 owning on an average fifteen acres each, they make no other answer. Yet this 1,037,896, representing with their families more than four millions of human beings, are clearly not a "handful," nor is there any evidence offered that they are "marauders." My complaint is that the possibility of early Land Law Reform is injured and retarded by such rashness. It is an undoubted evil that in this crowded kingdom so few as 2,238 persons should own 39,924,232 acres of land, and that the enormous holdings should be inadequately taxed, but we need the influence of the one million small landowners to enable us legally to reform and modify those obnoxious land laws which have facilitated the accumulation of such vast estates in so few hands. In the debate with myself, Mr. Hyndman spoke very contemptuously of the "small ownerships" and "paltry building allotments," yet he ought to know that the holders of these houses are law-abiding, peace-promoting citizens, who are encouraged by these slight possessions, which give promise of comfort in life, to strive so that the comfort shall be extended and secured. A sample of the wild and extraordinary exaggeration indulged in by the Democratic Federation may be found on p. 48 of the "Summary of the Principles of Socialism," where it is gravely declared that the "idlers who eat enormously and produce not at all form the majority of the population," and this may be fairly contrasted with another statement by the same persons that the present conditions of labor have "brought luxury for the few, misery and degradation for the many." If the latter be accurate, the former must be a perversion. The Socialists say that there are a few thousand persons who own the National Debt, and they recommend its extinction; usually leaving it in doubt as to whether this is to be by wholesale or by partial repudiation. When reminded that there are an enormous number of small depositors (at least 4,500,000 accounts in one year) owning through the ordinary savings banks £45,403,569, and through the Post Office Sayings Bank, £36,194,495, they neither explain the allegation as to the few thousands, nor do they condescend to offer the slightest explanation as to how any savings have been possible if all the wealth created by labor has been "devoured only by the rich and their hangers-on." Repudiation of the National Debt would ruin the whole of these. The Socialist leader says that the small ownership of land and these small savings do not really benefit the working classes, for that in times of depression the savings are soon used up. That may often be true, but if there were no savings then it must be starvation, pauperism, or crime; at least the saving mitigates the suffering. When told that there are 2,300,000 members of friendly societies, who must represent at least 9,000,000 of the inhabitants of this country, and that these, amongst other investments, have £1,397,730 in the National Debt, we are answered that these are mere details. On this point I think Mr. Joynes a little fails in candor. He takes one set of my figures, and says "the share of each individual is on the average a little more than £3 3s., and the dividend which annually accrues to each of these propertied persons is slightly over 2s. It does not require a very high standard of intelligence to enable a man to perceive that Socialists who intend to deprive him of these 2s., and at the same time to secure him the full value of his work, are proposing not to diminish his income, but to raise it in a very high degree." Let me first say that the friendly society represents to each artisan investor, not the 2s. per year, but his possible sick money, gratuity on disablement, allowance whilst unemployed, etc.; next, that here Mr. Joynes does in this actually admit an attack on the private property of the laborer, and does propose to take away the accumulated "fruits of labor" from the independent enjoyment of the individual who earned it. And the working-man's house? and his savings in the savings-bank, or in the co-operative store? Are these to be taken too? If not, why not? and if yes, of how much of the fruits of his labor is the laborer to be left by the Socialists in "independent enjoyment"? When pressed that the confiscation of the railways "without compensation," would bankrupt every life assurance company, and thus destroy the provision made for hundreds of thousands of families, because in addition to about' £5,262,000 in the Funds, and about £75,000,000 invested on mortgages of houses and land, the life insurance companies are extensive holders of railway securities--the advocates of Socialism only condescend to say: "Who are the shareholders in the railways? Do they ever do any good in the world? They are simply using the labor of the dead in order to get the labor of the living." But is this true? The shareholders originally found the means to plan, legalise, and construct the railway, to buy the land, to pay the laborer day by day his wage, whilst yet the railway could bring no profit, to buy the materials for the permanent way, to purchase and maintain the rolling stock. Many hundreds of shareholders in unsuccessful lines have never received back one farthing of what they paid to the laborer. No laborer worked on those unsuccessful lines without wage. Some railway shareholders have got too much, but there are thousands of comparatively poor shareholders who are to be ruined by the seizure of their shares without compensation. It is not at all true that railway shareholders use "the labor of the dead in order to get the labor of the living." On the contrary, during the last few years the tendency on lines like the Midland, has been to afford the widest facilities, and the greatest possible comfort consistent with cheapness, to working-folk travelling for need or pleasure. That all railway managers are not equally far-seeing is true, that much more might be done in this direction is certain, that some managing directors are over-greedy is clear, but that the change has been for the better during the past twenty years none would deny who had any regard for truth. That railway porters, pointsmen, guards, firemen, and drivers are, as Mr. Joynes well urges, often badly paid, and nearly always overworked, is true, but making the railways State property would not necessarily improve this. The Post Office is controlled by the State for the State, and the letter-carriers and sorters are as a body disgracefully remunerated. Mr. Joynes complains that I have not met the question of the "surplus value" of labor, which he says "is the keystone of the Socialistic argument." He does not explain upon what basis the alleged surplus value is calculated, but shelters himself behind a vague, and I submit incorrect, reference to a declaration by Mr. Hoyle, the well-known earnest temperance advocate. Mr. Joynes says that in one and a-half hours the laborer earns enough for subsistence. Mr. Hoyle's often-repeated declaration is in substance to the effect, that if the whole drink traffic of the country were abolished, and neither wines, beers, nor spirits drunk by any of the industrial classes, then that the working men could earn enough for comfort in very much less time than they now do. Mr. Joynes here entirely overlooks the substance of Mr. Hoyle's declaration, which is, in effect, that the working men do now receive, and then spend wastefully, what would keep them. I have always contended that in nearly every department of industry labor has been insufficiently paid, in some cases horribly paid, and I have claimed for the laborer higher wages, and tried to help to teach him, through trades' unions and otherwise, how to get these higher wages; but if Mr. Joynes and his friends mean anything, wages are to disappear altogether, and the State is to apportion to each a sort of equal subsistence, without regard to the skill or industry of the individual laborer, so that the skilled engineer, the unskilled hod-carrier, the street sweeper, the ploughman, and the physician, would each, in the Socialistic State, have neither less nor more than the other. The Socialists say "the laborers on the average replace the value of their wages for the capitalist class in the first few hours of their day's work; the exchange value of the goods produced in the remaining hours of the day's work constitutes so much embodied labor which is unpaid; and this unpaid labor so embodied in articles of utility, the capitalist class, the factory owners, the farmers, the bankers, the brokers, the shopkeepers, and their hangers-on, the landlords, divide amongst themselves in the shape of profits, interests, discounts, commissions, rent, etc." But without the capitalist where would be the workshop, the plant, or the raw material? It would be better if in co-operative production workmen would be their own capitalists, but surely the owner of capital is entitled to some reward? If not how is he to be persuaded to put it into fixed capital as factory and plant? Why should he beforehand purchase raw material on which labor may be employed, subsist labor while so employed, and take the risk of loss as well as profit in exchanging the article produced? And why is not the farmer to be sustained by the laborers if that farmer grows the food the laborer requires? Why should not the shopkeeper be rewarded for bringing ready to the laborer articles which would be otherwise in the highest degree difficult to procure? If the laborer procured his own raw material, fashioned it into an exchangeable commodity, and then went and exchanged it, there are many to whom the raw material would be inaccessible, and more who would lose much of the profits of their labor in fruitless efforts to exchange. The vague declarations by the Socialist that production and exchange are to be organised are delusive without clear statement of the methods and principles of the organisation. Robert Owen is called "Utopian" by these Democratic Federation Socialists, but at least he did try to reduce to practice his theories of production and exchange. The Democratic Federation say that "surplus value" is produced by "labor applied to natural objects under the control of the capitalist class." I object that but for capital, fixed and circulating, there are many natural objects which would be utterly inaccessible to labor; many more which could only be reached and dealt with on a very limited scale. That but for capital the laborer would often be unable to exist until the object had exchangeable value, or until some one was found with an equivalent article ready to exchange, and I submit that the banker, the shopkeeper, the broker may and do facilitate the progress of labor, and would and could not do so without the incentive of profit. We agree that "wage" is often much too low, and we urge the workers in each trade to join the unions already existing, and to form new unions, so that the combined knowledge and protection of the general body of workers as to the demand for, and value of, the labor, may be at the service of the weakest and most ignorant. We would advocate the establishment of labor bureaux, as in Massachusetts, so that careful and reliable statistics of the value of labor and cost of life may be easily accessible. We would urge the more thorough experiment on, and establishment of, cooperative productive societies in every branch of manufacture, so that the laborers furnishing their own capital and their own industry, may not only increase the profit result of labor to the laborer, but also afford at least a reasonable indication as to the possible profit realised by capitalists engaged in the same industries. We would increase wage (if not in amount, at any rate in its purchasing power), by diminishing the national and local expenditure, and thus also decreasing the cost of the necessaries of life. We would try to shift the pressing burden of taxation more on to land, and to the very large accumulation of wealth. We contend that he or she who lives by the sale of labor should, with the purchase money, be able to buy life, not only for the worker, but for those for whom that worker is fairly bread-winner. And life means not only healthy food, reasonable clothing, cleanly, healthy shelter, education for the children until they are so sufficiently grown that labor shall not mean the crippling of after life--but also leisure. Leisure for some enjoyment, leisure for some stroll in the green fields, leisure for some look into the galleries of paintings and sculpture, leisure for some listening to the singer, the actor, the teacher; leisure that the sunshine of beauty may now and then gild the dull round of work-a-day life; and we assert that in any country where the price of honest earnest industry will not buy this, then that if there are any in that country who are very wealthy, there is social wrong to be reformed. But this is the distinction between those with whom I stand and the Socialists. We want reform, gradual, sure, and helpful. They ask for revolution, and know not its morrow. Revolution may be the only remedy in a country where there is no free press, no free speech, no association of workers, no representative institutions, and where the limits of despotic outrage are only marked by the personal fear of the despot. But in a country like our own, where the political power is gradually passing into the hands of the whole people, where, if the press is not entirely free it is in advance of almost every European country, and every shade of opinion may find its exponent, here revolution which required physical force to effect it would be a blunder as well as a crime. Here, where our workmen can organise and meet, we can claim reforms and win them. The wage-winners of Durham and Northumberland, under the guidance of able and earnest leaders, have won many ameliorations during the past twenty years. Each year the workers' Parliament meets in Trades Union Congress, to discuss and plan more complete success, and to note the gains of the year. Every twelve months, in the Co-operative Congresses, working men and women delegates gather together to consult and advise. Each annual period shows some progress, some advantage secured, and though there is much sore evil yet, much misery yet, much crime yet, much--far too much--poverty yet, to-day's progress from yesterday shows day-gleam for the people's morrow. Printed by Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh, at 63, Fleet Street, London, E.O.--1884. 
37141	----	* * * * * +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Note: | | | | Bold text is represented =like so=. | | | | Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For | | a complete list, please see the end of this document. | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------+ * * * * * Why I Am In Favor of Socialism [Illustration] SYMPOSIUM [Illustration] Original Papers [Illustration] EDWARD SILVIN [Illustration] Sacramento, California U. S. A. Copyright, 1913 BY EDWARD SILVIN INDEX TO AUTHORS Allen, Fred Hovey 31 Andrews, Eliza Frances 10 Andrews, Martin Register 12 Axon, Stockton 23 Baldwin, E.F. 11 Baxter, James Phinney 11 Beard, Daniel Carter 11 Bigelow, Poultney 9 Broome, Isaac 15-16 Burgess, Gelett 8-9 Cazalet, Edward Alexander 31 Chancellor, William Estabrook 7-8 Clare, Israel Smith 24-25 Conger-Kaneko, Josephine 31 Cooke, George Willis 36 Cutler, James Elbert 5 Fisk, Everett Olin 9 Fleming, William Hansell 22 Gates, George Augustus 7 Helms, E.J. 31 Hitchcock, Charles C. 32-34 Hume, Gibson 17-21 James, George Wharton 35 James, W.E.S. 25-27 Kalley, Ella Hartwig 29 Kinney, Abbot 30 Koeb, Otto 36 Levermore, Charles Herbert 29-30 London, Jack 5 Loveman, Robert 5-6 Noll, Aaron 34 O'Neill, John M. 25 Parsons, Eugene 16-17 Peake, Elmore Elliott 27 Pease, Charles Giffin 13 Post, Louis Freeland 6 Russell, Charles Edward 34-35 Sawyer, Roland Douglas 14 Schindler, Solomon 23 Silvin, Edward 37 Sinclair, Upton 14 Smiley, James L. 6 Strobell, George H. 28-29 Towne, Elizabeth 12 Taylor, J.P. 15 Weber, Gustavus Adolphus 27-28 Whitaker, Robert 22 White, Hervey 9-10 Whitson, John Harvey 10-11 Williams, S.B. 15 Why I Am In Favor of Socialism =London, Jack.= (Author.) I am in favor of Socialism because I am an individualist, and because in Socialism I see the only possible social organization that will give equal opportunity and an even chance to every individual to develop and realize what is strongest and best in him--and in her, if you please. Because Socialism is in line with social evolution, is foreshadowed as inevitable by today's social tendencies, was foreshadowed as inevitable by the social tendencies of ten thousand years ago and ten thousand generations ago. Because I am convinced that it is the only form of social organization that will give a square deal to the little boys and girls that are coming into the world today, tomorrow, and in the days after tomorrow's morrow. * * * * * =Cutler, James Elbert.= (University Professor.) I am in favor of Socialism as regards its aims and purposes, because I believe it to be in this respect in harmony with the fundamental principles of social progress. * * * * * =Loveman, Robert.= (Poet.) I believe Plato favored an ideal commonwealth, and I favor Plato. Walt Whitman was inclined towards the Utopian theory--and Walt was a poet with a "yawp," that was perhaps barbarian--but it was emphatic. I am something of a Socialist--a little of a Communist--I hope not much of an Anarchist--and I believe with Lincoln that "God must love the common people--He made so many of them." Wm. Morris, the English poet, had Socialistic theories--and headed a movement in 1884, I believe--so we have plenty of example. I do not hate the rich--but I pity the poor--and I do not think a few men should own billions--and hoard the wealth--and that millions of human kind starving, barely exist. We are still savage. * * * * * =Post, Louis Freeland.= (Editor, The Public, Chicago, Ill.) I am in favor of Socialism because it aims at abolishing the exploitation of labor. * * * * * =Smiley, James L.= (Clergyman.) I am in favor of Socialism because--First: It stands for absolute justice. It guarantees to every one the full product of his labor. It provides that children and infirm and aged persons be cared for by the strong. It demands that all the natural resources of the earth be equitably administered for all the inhabitants. Second: Socialism will abolish capitalism, which is a grand system of gambling. Third: Socialism will abolish the evil fruits of capitalism, such as internecine commercial competition, the white slave traffic, preventable poverty and disease, and war itself. Fourth: Socialism means brotherhood, industrial and commercial. It, therefore, harmonizes with the teachings of the Bible, making the Ten Commandments and the "Sermon on the Mount" perfectly practicable. Fifth: As an excellent example of its practical value, Socialism will solve the intricate liquor problem. By public ownership this traffic will be purified from all adulterations and excessive abuse, allowing (in harmony with the Bible) the temperate use of pure beverages. Sixth: Socialism is the economic expression of Christianity. * * * * * =Gates, George Augustus.= (President, Fisk University.) I don't think I am wholly in favor of Socialism, though I believe it would, even if actually in power, be better than the present reign of stark capitalism. I am in favor of about nine-tenths of what Socialism advocates. Nearly all of the world's real troubles arise from selfishness. Some way must at last be found out of that regime. The world is keyed to mutual helpfulness; consequently there is and ought to be discord as long as we stupidly play the great game of life in the false key. There is, as a matter of fact, mutual helpfulness anyhow; we cannot live without each other, and more so as our civilization rises. The trouble is that in the present order this helpfulness is an incident, not the motive. All gospels must unite to make it the motive. * * * * * =Chancellor, William Estabrook.= (Lecturer and Author.) It all depends upon the definition and description of Socialism. I am heartily in favor of what I call Socialism. I was indeed mayoralty candidate in my city upon a Socialistic ticket. I do not see how any good or intelligent man can oppose my notions of Socialism. To illustrate: I believe that God made the earth for all of us and that it is a crime, vile and terrible, to allow any man or woman as landlord to collect rent from the father of a family or the mother of babies for a place upon which to rear their children--God's children, my brothers. Yet I, myself, am both a landlord and a rent tenant because of a pitiful legalistic and economic regime that does not allow me to solve my problem. I am a landlord of a trust estate and yet unable to buy a home where my business is because I cannot sell. It is a mere illustration. There are tens of thousands of others as pertinent. To illustrate again: I am sure that it is absurd and wicked that some should rot in luxury without working, while others die of the diseases of starvation though working diligently. I am in favor of changing the statute laws so that these kings shall no more be, than chattel slavery of blacks, or the punishment of religious heresy by death. I believe that the Father in Heaven does not intend the vicious inequitableness of this passing economic system and of this social regime upon which the habit-minded look with such apish pleasure. I refuse to eat the leavened bread of the Pharisees and to sit silent amid these wrongs; but at the same time I suspect that I am rather an opportunistic reformer, a Christian Socialist, perhaps a Social Democrat, than a revolutionary all-or-none, now-this-minute Socialist, for I can be charitable to most other men who still worship the idols of the market-place. Some, however, I cannot forgive; I cannot forgive the hypocrites or the malicious. * * * * * =Burgess, Gelett.= (Author.) I am in favor of Socialism because I believe that co-operation, rather than competition will the sooner bring about the brotherhood of man. Because the conditions that surround the majority of mankind are continually growing worse, and Socialism offers a radical solution for the problem of the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Because the rich are steadily growing richer, and the poor, poorer, under the present industrial system. Because the concentration of this wealth in the hands of a few has shown the possibility of a centralized control of the industries, and has taught methods of handling big business, so that these activities may and should be in the hands of the people. Because of the enormous saving through co-operation, both time and opportunity will be increased for the benefit of the people. Because the use of this time may be used by the people for education, for culture, for travel and for larger mental growth. Because this change in economic system will emancipate woman by making her man's equal and will thereby develop her mind, her self-respect, and her inventive capacity. Because with a rational industrial system and the opportunity for leisure natural and sexual selection will work more freely amongst men and women by giving both a wider choice, a better approximation of the ideal mate. Because this effect will result in a benefit and happiness not only to the present but to the future of the race. Because Socialism is the only project which contemplates these benefits. * * * * * =Bigelow, Poultney.= (Author and Barrister.) I am in favor of Socialism because it is the teachings of our Savior, Jesus Christ, and of his predecessors, the Buddhists, and before them the people who followed the example of Rama or Brahma. * * * * * =Fisk, Everett Olin.= (President of the Fisk Teachers' Agencies.) While I do not count myself a Socialist in the extreme sense and shall never vote a Socialist ticket, I lean very strongly toward public ownership of public utilities and find myself in cordial sympathy with the view of some of my intimate friends who will vote for Mr. Debbs. Just how fast the public should assume control of public utilities I am not clear, but I feel quite sure that we should move in that direction and keep public ownership in mind as an ideal. Whatever embarrassments may arise, and certainly embarrassments must arise in any change of program, I feel that the disadvantages would be more than offset by the education of the public and by the cultivation of public spirit which would naturally accompany the gradual introduction of public control. The fact that the post-office, the public schools and in many cities water supply, street lighting and transportation have been well managed by the public, promises well for extension of public control and I think we are moving along toward this perhaps as fast as can be expected, in view of our imperfect human nature. * * * * * =White, Hervey.= (Novelist and Poet.) Socialism seems to me the most practical plan for the individuals of a highly specialized and complicated society to share the duties, the responsibilities, and the rewards of their organization. It is the logical development of our system of combination or "trusts" that has already supplanted competition. It will do more to put the wealth produced by intellect and labor into the possession of the earners than any program I have met with. * * * * * =Andrews, Eliza Frances.= (Author and College Professor.) There are so many reasons why I am a Socialist and why everybody should be one, that it would require a book to give them all. A few of them are: First: Because I believe that those who do the work of the world should receive the full product of their labor, and not be forced, as under the capitalist system, to pay a tribute from their toil for the support of useless idlers. Second: I believe that "the earth and the fullness thereof" was provided by nature for the benefit of all her children, and not as the "vested interest" of a few greedy monopolists. Third: As history teaches us through the example of Jesus Christ and all who have rendered the greatest and noblest services to mankind, that, love of greed and personal gain is not an incentive, but a hindrance to noble deeds. I believe that Socialism, by removing this hindrance, will leave men free to follow the higher promptings of their nature, and through the noble incentives it offers, hasten the evolution of the race to a higher plane. * * * * * =Whitson, John Harvey.= (Novelist.) At present I am a Progressive. But I can see that our industrial system is breaking down. As men rise in the scale of humanity they reach a point, and it is now near, when the exploitation of the weaker by the stronger can no longer be tolerated. I think present conditions clearly show that the government (the people) should own all such natural monopolies as coal, oil, minerals and the like; and that the railways, express companies, and the big machinery of transportation should also be government conducted, like the post-office. When that has been accomplished, further steps in that line can be taken, if the people deem that best. In so far, I am in favor of Socialism, and stand ready to go farther when it seems desirable and the people are ready for it. That is, have risen to it. * * * * * =Beard, Daniel Carter.= (Author and Artist.) I am in favor of Socialism because I am not afraid of their ever introducing into this country the Socialism of Carl Marx, and I do believe that by their propaganda, their enthusiasm and insistency, they are forcing people to think who otherwise would drift along in the same old rut, and anything that makes the people think stands for progress, although it may not be progress along the lines advocated. * * * * * =Baldwin, E.F.= (Editor, Star, Peoria, Ill.) Socialism is a beautiful dream, but when we wake up, we still have to scratch for a living. Under Socialism, one man is as good as another, and generally a good deal better. Poverty is a crime. Therefore, every poor man ought to be in jail. Socialism is a panacea for all the present ills. The trouble is, nobody wants to apply it. Under the present system, it is every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost. Under Socialism every man is hindmost. Every honest man now is a Socialist. The trouble is, there are no honest men. I never knew but one honest Socialist editor, and he has just committed suicide. * * * * * =Baxter, James Phinney.= (Author and Ex-Mayor, Portland, Me.) Socialism is subject to several definitions. There is a Christian Socialism which embodies the spirit of the second precept: "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." It is patient and long-suffering; wise in its efforts of helping men to advance by righteous ways to the stature of true manhood. * * * * * =Towne, Elizabeth.= (Editor and Author.) I am in favor of the Socialist ideal, because it aims to take care of all the people, affording equal opportunity for everybody to develop, laying no extra burdens on any one person or class of persons. I believe the Socialist ideal to be the ripened fruit which the world is to bring forth. But I do not believe in the Socialist practice of forcing the ripening of that fruit. In other words, I do not believe the world is ready to do away with capitalism. And I do not believe in the inopportunism of Socialists. I do not believe in tearing off the husks of capitalism before human intelligence is ripe for expression on the higher plane. As long as Socialists hold aloof, and will not co-operate with capitalism they show themselves unfit to co-operate with all the people in the world in the making of an ideal government without capitalism. The Socialists missed the chance of a life-time, yes, of a hundred years, when they did not lead and nominate Theodore Roosevelt and Hiram Johnson on their own ticket, instead of putting up two men whom they know it is impossible to elect this year, thus weakening the strength of Roosevelt, who is trying to put into practice a whole lot of the Socialist program, which the Socialists accused him of stealing from them. As if the Socialists themselves did not steal every one of those ideas from somebody else! Why, Confucius ran a Socialist government five hundred years before Christ. I am opposed to the Socialist practice of hypnotising itself with the working class consciousness, in opposition to all other classes. Because of Socialist inopportunism others will have to do the practical work of putting into practice the Socialist ideal. Theodore Roosevelt has done and is doing more to bring Socialism into practice than any other one man in the world today. * * * * * =Andrews, Martin Register.= (College Professor and Editor.) I have listened attentively to the talks of Socialist orators, who seem to be honest, earnest men, who have a strong desire to do something for the betterment of "poor, sad humanity." With many of the reforms for which they plead I am heartily in sympathy. * * * * * =Pease, Charles Giffin, M.D.= (Reformer and Author.) I am in favor of Socialism, the fundamental basis of which, as I understand Socialism, is economic co-operation or the individual laboring for the good of the whole; for the reason that competition is based upon selfishness, and stimulates selfishness. Competition or doing business for individual gain is responsible for the placing of liquor saloons on almost every other block of some of our avenues; for the opening of a still larger number of tobacco stores for the sale of the most poisonous weed grown; for the opening of gambling halls, race tracks, questionable resorts and brothels of all kinds. Doing business for personal gain is an incentive to foister upon the people intoxicating liquors, tobacco and other harmful drinks and articles by means of alluring advertisements; the adulteration of foods; the maintaining of high prices, thus depriving the poor, who are victims of the competitive system, of the necessities of life. Under the present system, the anxiety of the employed upon the advent of "dull times," lest they may lose the needed employment; the unrest, the chicanery, the criminality and the perversion of normal appetites resulting therefrom, is opposed to the best interests of the race morally, mentally and physically. Competition or doing business for personal gain, develops the worst there is in man. Co-operation or the individual laboring for the whole, brings out or develops the best there is in man and establishes true brotherhood. The greatest benefactors the world has ever known have labored for the uplift of the race without personal material gain as an incentive, but with the full knowledge that their labors would mean for them persecution or perhaps the Cross. Under Socialism, the whole moral atmosphere would be changed and the individual, and consequently, the race would be enriched in the development of qualities that make for peace, joy, love and normality, as man would merge from the influence of the present conditions into the influence of the conditions under Socialism. * * * * * =Sawyer, Roland Douglas= (Clergyman and Author, Ware, Mass.) We of the present generation come into a world where the swamps are cleared, the forests felled, the soil ready for our seed, roads of gravel, steel, and across the trackless waters connect us; great machines of iron and steel are ready to take upon their tireless muscles the work of the world--and the human race today is rich--so rich that it can easily supply the material needs of every soul. But still over half the race are in want, just as though we were poor. The only thing needed is a scientific organization of industry, and Socialism is a scheme for such scientific organization. Therefore, I, as being intelligent to the present-day conditions, favor Socialism. Of course, those who are selfishly receiving personal gains out of the present system, and those who live in the ideas of the dead, will howl for "things as they are," but more and more we must firmly (though kindly) show them the door--they don't belong with us of this day. I might also add that it is necessary for me to advocate Socialism to square myself with my profession; I am a minister of the Gospel; as such I advocate before men that there is a loving Father in Heaven; that Jesus was the divine, ideal man; that human beings have souls that will not die with the body. I could not advocate these things without blushing if I did not at the same time condemn the existing social order--for the existing social order kills the souls in men, the ideals of Jesus cannot live in it, and should it continue we could not believe in a loving Father who rules things. For me to preach the gospel of Jesus without at the same time demanding social revolution, would be for me to confess that I was either a mental prostitute or a moral pervert, and I hope I am neither. * * * * * =Sinclair, Upton.= (Author.) I am in favor of Socialism because it is impossible for me to be happy while living under a system which deprives others of the fruits of their labor. * * * * * =Taylor, J.P.= (Manufacturer, Winston-Salem, N.C.) I am in favor of Socialism because I think that the time has about arrived for society to take into its own hands the operation of the means of producing and distributing the wealth by which it lives and progresses. I have become conscious that the present mode of production and distribution of wealth does not fill society's requirements; that private ownership is no longer necessary in the machinery of wealth production and distribution, either as owning or managing; that the whole machinery is operated by hired men; that these hired men can better be used to produce social wealth for use than private wealth for profit. * * * * * =Williams, S.B.= (Clergyman, Eureka Springs, Ark.) I am in favor of Socialism because it is more than a political party. It is a world movement having as its fundamental principles, the teachings of Jesus. It is an intensely practical interpretation of such teachings. Socialism stands for the brotherhood of the human race. It is a constructive program of economics that will result in the emancipation of the wage slave. Many good people misunderstand Socialism, because some of its most ardent advocates blunder in their teaching, and its growth is retarded by the fact that skeptics and infidels become prominent in leadership and try to foster their private religious beliefs on the movement, but in time all such will find their proper level, and all true, earnest Christians will be glad to embrace the propaganda, and Socialism in its truest aspects will help to usher in the kingdom promised by our Lord. * * * * * =Broome, Isaac.= (Sculptor, Lecturer, Inventor and Author, Trenton, N.J.) All good men--poets, artists, moralists, philosophers, scientists, economists, scholars--have in all ages proclaimed the ideal of a civilization, wherein all should help and protect each other, to develop intelligence and destroy ignorance, which is the root of all crime and misery. Socialism has for its proper idea the fulfillment of this universal hope--by uniting the world industrially, with the object of abolishing poverty as the base of ignorance, and ignorance as the base of crime, injustice and disorganized society. This is the ideal. An ideal impossible at present with society composed of a few ignorant, predatory rich and a mass of equally ignorant, predatory poor--both destroyers of society's substance, from the scientific, economic view. * * * * * =Parsons, Eugene.= (Editor.) I am not altogether opposed to Socialism. I am willing to see a move, yes, several moves, made in that direction. I am in favor of municipal ownership of public utilities, such as gas, water, electric light, street railways, etc. When franchises for these utilities are sold or given away to an individual or a company, they afford opportunities for private enrichment at the expense of the people at large. If such enterprises as water or lighting, or tramways, be in the hands of the city fathers, the profits, if there be any, go into the pockets of the common people, which is better than the piling up of fortunes by the favored few, known in common parlance as "big business." It has been proved time and again that men of business ability and initiative do have public spirit and are willing to serve the people well, to give the attention requisite for success in the management of public utilities. I have a case in mind. The light plant of Ellsworth, Iowa, is a paying proposition, although run by the town. Says the "Ellsworth News," December 5, 1912: "Not only is it a question of being on a paying proposition, but the comfort of having good lights is worth considerable. The city fathers are to be congratulated upon the management of the light plant. Many dollars of expense would have been added to the installation of the plant had they charged anything for their services, but they had gone to a great deal of trouble and a large amount of expense that they had paid out of their own pockets, just because they were enough interested in the welfare of the town to push things along and make it a success." There it is in a nutshell--unselfish service. So it is a matter that involves one of the fundamentals of human nature. However, the altruistic sentiment will develop more and more under a different system from the present, with all its inequalities in the distribution of wealth. The question is a large one, requiring full discussion. Let the trial of municipal ownership and management be made, I say. Time will tell how much of grafting will be done. Je ne sais quoi. I for one am willing to risk it. Furthermore, let us go one step toward Socialism in another direction. I refer to the nationalization of railways. I am in favor of it, and hold that all public-spirited citizens should advocate it, whether Socialists or not. It would simplify things, and put an end to the extortionate charges of the express companies, to say nothing of unfair freight rates. * * * * * =Hume, Gibson, A.M., Ph. D.= (Head of the Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto, Canada.) To endorse and accept all the various conflicting and even contradictory proposals loosely and popularly called Socialism would indeed be absurd and ridiculous. Nevertheless, on the whole the term Socialism has stood for constructive rather than destructive plans. What might be termed Christian Socialism, or perhaps still better constructive Christian Socialism, has ideals and aims that I unhesitatingly adopt as noble, just and right. When it comes to a program or plan to give practical application and realization to these ideals there is much room for debate and difference of opinion. Here, it seems to me, we face real problems. Christian theology dealing with the relations of God and man succeeded long ago in definitely rejecting the abstract atomism of atheism, and also, though perhaps not so clearly and definitely, the pantheism which over-zealous for God forgot to leave a place for human personality. In our time modern Christianity is concentrating its attention on the problems of the relation of man to man, of the individual to the community, and logically and consistently with its past speculations opposes the extreme individualism that issues in anarchism and atomism, and also opposes the other extreme of communism which overshadows the individual overmuch in its zeal for the collective standpoint, and the opposition in this instance is the more notable because the early Christian Church for a short time really tried the experiment of having "all things in common." While modern constructive Christian Socialism rejects the opposing panaceas of a simple character offered by the extreme individualist on the one hand and the extreme collectivist on the other, it nevertheless sees in each of these one-sided proposals and theories a certain measure of truth, and it therefore faces the much more difficult and complex problem of trying to combine and harmonize these partial truths in such a manner as to secure a proper self-respecting individualism or personal responsibility on the one hand, and an adequate collectivistic co-operation on the other. With this double aim and purpose in mind there has arisen a beginning at least of a positive and constructive program leading toward this goal. Emerging from the mediaeval twilight where the fallacy was widespread that made religion a thing apart, modern Christian thought is suspicious of any religious creed or profession which remains a merely intellectual assent or declaration of faith, and demands that a true religion should also permeate and transmute the life and issue in conduct touching and helping the lives and conduct of others. The key to the Christian social position is the "Golden Rule," not as a mere sentiment of kindliness, though that is good as far as it goes, but it must be made to go further and issue in a principle of action, a principle in action controlling the practice, guiding and inspiring the actual conduct of life, both in its individual and in its social or collective aspect. At the outset, then, it respects and preserves the individual, not by the negative and suicidal method of rejecting the claims of society, but, on the contrary, insisting that the individual can develop his moral personality only by accepting the duties of social service, which when properly understood becomes not a burden but a privilege, since in this way alone may real self-hood become realized. Zeal for the preservation of the other person inspired the earlier attack on slavery; it now reappears in a crusade against industrial bondage. Corporations now resist control on the plea that it is an interference with personal liberty. The Christian view-point never granted to the individual a selfish liberty of defying properly constituted authority, much less such right to a corporation. It now makes it perfectly plain that the individual has duties, and to this view of the individual it would be ludicrous for the corporation to appeal in its dislike to bow to social demands. In international relations the claim of Christianity to be under the Prince of Peace makes modern Christian Socialism demand that other nations should be treated not simply as good neighbors, but as actual brothers, since all are children of the same Father. Hence it follows that the brutality, waste and wickedness, the wholesale butchery and murder known as war, must be condemned and opposed. Furthermore, all militarism and jingoism, all journalistic or other stirring up of bad feeling, leading to strife between different races, the atavistic revival of ancient blood feuds or modern commercial intrigues to reap profit out of the piling up of armaments oppressing the common people, are all to be resisted. The specious claim that armies and navies are merely policy restraining criminals is easily seen to be erroneous, for if each army claims to be a policy restraining criminals, it must follow that each army is by the other army put among the class of criminals. And the fallacious claim that preparation for war is a guarantee of peace, an insurance policy against war, is met by the counterclaim that the best way in times of peace to insure the continuance of peace is to extend the principles and practices that teach the value of peace, that conduce to peace, that make people desirous that peace may continue. The bellicose claim that our neighbors cannot or will not attack us if we are powerful enough in armaments to intimidate them, simply teaches other nations to pursue the same policy of attempted intimidation, which can only breed ill will and ultimately tend to provoke actual hostilities. When disputes and misunderstandings arise, Christian Socialism favors arbitration as a peaceful way of settling differences, appealing to right and justice and intelligence, not to brute force and blind passion. Hence the development of the principles of international law and justice, the establishing of international courts of appeal and arbitration in matters of divided jurisdiction or conflict of interests is explicitly approved. Within the State, the principles of Christian Socialism demand that each person participate in governing, making government to become simply collective self-control through willing co-operation. In proper theories of government much progress has been made towards at least the partial adoption of "the rule of the people, by the people, for the people," though this maxim is disregarded for earlier tyrannical or paternal theories of government wherever women are debarred from taking their share in the duty of directing and controlling the laws governing all and affecting all, not only men but also women. The reason for still excluding children is simply due to the fact of their immaturity. It is in the field of industry and commerce that the greatest reconstruction will need to be made, for after having struggled so long to secure the freedom of the individual when it becomes clearly recognized that the only freedom that is even partially secured is the negative one of being left alone and that positive freedom of efficient action is lacking, there is bound to be a new direction to the constant efforts of civilization to secure the good of its component members. When aggregations, companies, corporations, trusts, etc., become an "imperium in imperio," turning the powerful engine of combination into the work of consolidating selfish aggrandizement and rendering impossible the development of a normal and healthy life among the great masses of the unorganized, the lesson taught by the power of organization is likely to be learned by the masses, and this will point to the attempt to secure the control for the co-operative community of all those great fundamental factors that are sometimes called natural monopolies, and the old regime that allowed these to be used as toll houses on the highway of progress to levy tribute to private monopoly and leading to the formation of a class of idle rich on the one hand and of idle poor on the other, will require most radical reconstruction in the interests of mankind. As Christian Socialism has no simple formula to solve all the manifold and complex economic difficulties, it must go slowly, cautiously and experimentally. As it sympathizes with both the individualist and the collectivist in certain respects in each case, it may seem to favor opposing policies, but perhaps it is a case of walking forward by first moving up the left foot, then the right foot. Where competition is found by experience to be both feasibly and advantageous, Christian Socialism will strive to secure real competition and so will assist in removing any device tariff or tax that favors one and penalizes the other. On the other hand, where monopolistic control is unavoidable or economically advantageous, it will strive to have such monopolistic enterprize strictly supervised and controlled by government or where it is practicable owned and operated by the community through its government, central or local. Christian Socialism stands unambiguously and clearly for the sanctity and preservation of the family as a fundamental social unit more significant than the disconnected individuals in whose interests much legislation has been made bearing heavily on the family and favoring unduly those who have selfishly preferred to stand alone. As the perpetuation of the race is one of the most obvious and outstanding of the purposes of the family, marriage will need to be safeguarded still more with this in view, that is to the securing of fit and proper persons as parents through the guardianship, complete supervision and restraint of the unquestionably unfit. Nevertheless, Christian Socialism could scarcely be expected to endorse some of the wild and even shockingly cruel and barbarous proposals of the eugenic group. The child is the special ward and care of Christian Socialism, and here all the earlier paternalism of primitive Christianity may still find beneficent scope. The child should be protected, nurtured and cared for, and trained in such a manner as to prepare for the most efficient and noble service at maturity. In the child we see embodied our hope for the future, hence as the most promising road to the fulfillment of the dreams of all social reformers and idealists we must eventually learn to concentrate our efforts on the child. How can the child be trained so as to develop most fully his latent aptitudes and abilities so as to be capable on the one hand of reaching his own greatest realization and on the other hand contributing most to the good of the race? Surely we should all aim to secure for each and every child the fullest development of all his powers, physical, mental, moral-religious, and the moral-religious most of all if we are to secure that altruistic character, that unselfish disposition without which all plans, schemes and programs must necessarily end in failure. * * * * * =Fleming, William Hansell.= (Lecturer, Author and Editor.) If by Socialism you mean that the individual in asserting and demanding his rights should consider and grant equal rights to all others in the community, then I am in favor of Socialism. * * * * * =Whitaker, Robert.= (Clergyman and Editor.) I am in favor of Socialism because I see no other way out of the world-wide social distress which afflicts all the industrial nations today. Capitalism has outlived its historic function, and is today a cause of intolerable oppression, immeasurable misery and irrepressible conflict. The whole order of things by which society exists for the exploitation of the many by the few, either through competition or private monopoly, is fundamentally awry, and must be superseded by an order which shall give us the largest measure of practicable co-operation for ends of common service. There can be no real or lasting peace between capital and labor until society recognizes the common rights of all in natural resources, until we meet the marvelous multiplication of human effort through mechanical invention with social ownership and democratic control of the machine, and until the whole industrial order is organized so as to eliminate the waste of competition not in the interest of a few great industrial barons, but in the interest of the whole body of laborers. This is the program of Socialism in a large way, a system of social service as against a system of private profit, of co-operation as against exploitation, whose threefold objective is to make every man a partner with every other man in the commonwealth of nature, in the common gain of the world's inventive genius which is fundamentally social and not individual in its origin, and in the organization of industrial life, which ought to be democratic and not autocratic or oligarchic in its end. I am for Socialism because Socialism is the economic expression of both democracy and religion, and because as such it is as inevitable as the movement of the suns. * * * * * =Schindler, Solomon.= (Author.) If Socialism means the adjustment of social conditions of the past to the industrial and commercial needs of the present or some future day; if its objects are the utilization of natural forces, inventions and discoveries, for the benefit, not of the few, but for the greatest number--I am thoroughly in favor of Socialism. Or, if Socialism stands for an endeavor to improve all things human, to attack all the hostile forces that threaten human well-being, such as hunger, sickness, ignorance, etc.--I, again, am in favor of Socialism or any "ism" that will try to make this world a happy abode of human beings. But, if Socialism should stand for upheaval by force instead of peaceable evolution; if it should appeal to class hatred nurtured by envy; if it should endeavor to realize dreams of an impossible economic equality by means of the ballot or nitro-glycerine--in that case I am not in favor of Socialism. Show me your Socialism, and I will tell you whether I am in favor of it or not. * * * * * =Axon, Stockton.= (University Professor and Writer.) I think that all people who hold progressive opinions are desirous of getting a more equitable distribution of the wealth which is produced by the many, of getting such governmental adjustments as will destroy favors and special privileges under the government, of getting a government sensitive to the interests of all instead of a few. I believe these things can be accomplished by the free processes of democracy in the hands of a thoroughly aroused and informed people, sufficiently informed to make their own choices, and sufficiently determined to hold their leaders responsible to themselves, the people. Every progressive platform has in it something that may be called Socialistic, and I am not sure just how much progressivism is necessary to make a Socialist. Politically, I am a Democrat, and I was never stronger than now in the faith that Democracy can be free and powerful to serve the best interests of the whole people. * * * * * =Clare, Israel Smith.= (Historian, Author of "Library of Universal History," 15 Vols. Address: Lancaster, Pa., R.F.D. 2.) I am a Socialist because Socialism is right; because it is industrial democracy and economic freedom; because it is in accordance with the principle of human brotherhood; because it is against dividing up, against breaking up the home, against free lust (wrongfully called "free love," as all love is free love, there being no forced love or compulsory love), against killing good incentive or good personal initiative; because it is against robbing the producer of four-fifths of his product; because it is against poverty, misery, prostitution, vice, crime, insanity, war, murder, suicide, pestilence, famine, ignorance and all that is bad; because its ethics are identical with the ethics of Jesus Christ; because it would make man's existence in this life a heaven upon earth; because the Socialism we already have works so well, as our post-office system, our public school system, our free textbook system, our public water and fire departments, our public roads, our public parks, our public playgrounds, our public libraries, etc.; because it is the next step in accord with economic revolution and is inevitable, is destined to come in spite of all opposition, in spite of all obstacles thrown in its way to obstruct or retard it, and in spite of all mistakes or shortcomings of Socialists themselves; in short, because Socialism is a rising sun. I am opposed to Capitalism, because it is social and economic slavery; because it is in accord with the doctrine of human greed and selfishness; because it robs the workers and the industrious and rewards the shirkers and the exploiters; because it is for dividing up with a vengeance; because it breaks up the home by low wages, unemployment and high cost of living, as shown by government statistics, which tell us that there are a million divorces every ten years in this country; because it promotes race suicide, as the marriage rate and the birth rate are decreasing, and the death rate increasing, in all so-called civilized countries; because it causes panics and business depressions and makes ninety-eight out of every hundred business men fail (according to Dunn's Agency figures); because it discourages all good incentive and encourages all bad incentive; because it promotes free lust, or so-called "free love;" because it causes poverty and then punishes its victims for being poor; because it breeds poverty, misery, crime, prostitution, drunkenness, insanity, political corruption, pestilence, famine, war, murder, suicide, ignorance and all that is bad; because it is in accordance with the ethics of His Satanic Majesty; because it is a setting sun, a dying system, as it is destroying itself, is impregnated with the seeds of its own dissolution, is slowly committing suicide and digging its own grave, giving up the ghost, unwept, unhonored and unsung. * * * * * =O'Neill, John M.= (Editor, The Miners' Magazine, Denver, Colo.) I am in favor of Socialism because I believe that Socialism in operation means the emancipation of the human race. It is idle to talk about political liberty while the vast majority of the people are without industrial liberty. The man who owns a thousand jobs, owns a thousand lives. Such a statement may sound harsh and brutal to the man whose cradle has been rocked beneath the starry banner of young Columbia, and he may say to me, "I am not a slave for I can quit the owner of the job," but if he quits the owner of the job and he belongs to the disinherited class, the wage earning class, then necessity demands that he shall seek another owner of jobs, and he has merely changed masters and he is still a slave. For men to be free, they must own their jobs, and to own the jobs the people must own collectively, the natural resources of the earth, and its machinery of production and distribution. I am in favor of Socialism because collective ownership of the earth and its machines of production and distribution will open wide the gates of equal opportunity to every man, woman and child who live upon the face of the earth. Socialism means that the profit system shall be destroyed and that upon its shattered ruins shall be built a real republic, beneath whose sheltering dome, there can live no master and no slave. * * * * * =James, W.E.S., M.A., B.D.= (Clergyman, Ayr, Ont., Canada.) Socialism is the scientific analysis of the present state of society and the theory of social development founded thereon. A Socialist is one whose study of this scientific analysis has convinced him that society is progressing towards a co-operative commonwealth. My study extends over fifteen years, and I clearly see the gradual concentration of capital--the gradual consolidation of labor interests and the life and death struggle between them. As no question is ever settled until it is settled right, this can have only one result--the capturing of the wealth of the nations by the producers of wealth and the utilizing of it, not for the few, but for the whole people. With the passing of the small privately owned shop through the coming of the large manufactury, socially operated but privately owned, way was prepared for the larger, nation-wide manufactury, socially operated and socially owned. It must come. As right has behind it all the power of omnipotence and so must prevail the present system, which makes the many toil in poverty while the few live on the earnings in idleness and luxury, must make way for a system which will provide a more equitable reward of labor. As competition is based on man's selfishness and so is un-Christian, co-operation, based on man's brotherhood, the essence of Christianity, must supersede it. The capitalistic system must consider profits first--business must pay--and men second. The last hundred years has traced the gradual rise of man and the next twenty-five will see him freeing himself from this system of wage slavery and evolving another which will dethrone the dollar and will enthrone the rights of man. When the ballot was given to the masses and free education to their children, the inevitable result was the rise of these masses to assert their freedom and their right to all the product of their labor--possible only in a co-operative commonwealth. Every great religious awakening of the past has resulted from the preaching of some great neglected truth especially needed in that age. The next great religious awakening will come from preaching the one sadly neglected truth of this age--economic justice and brotherhood. It will be greater, more fundamental, more stupendous in its effects than any reformation or revolution of the past. It is inevitable. This coming emancipation of man--dethronement of competition and dollar rule--the new moral, social and religious awakening--these give my life its greatest joy, its highest hope, and its greatest inspiration to service. I am in favor of Socialism. * * * * * =Peake, Elmore Elliott.= (Author.) The word "Socialism" (aside from its partisan use) has so many connotations that one can hardly say he is either for it or against it without being misconstrued. With Socialism's cardinal tenet, the better distribution and the better production of wealth, I am heartily in sympathy, as I suppose everybody is. People disagree as to the means by which this may be obtained. Public ownership of wealth-producing factors is evidently coming more and more into favor, as is evidenced by the municipal ownership of electric, gas and water plants. This principle is bound to be extended. But it seems to me that Socialism stands with Prohibition to this extent: Long before either of them has made sufficient converts to put their party in power, their principles will have been incorporated by other parties which do not confine themselves to these specific contentions. * * * * * =Weber, Gustavus Adolphus.= (Economist.) The ideal of Socialism, as I understand it, is a condition of society in which each individual will render his share of service in the production and distribution of wealth, and in which each will receive his proportionate share for consumption. I do not dispute the desirability of such a condition. I take issue with the Socialists in their contention that this condition can be brought about, or that a material advance toward such a condition can be accomplished, by legislation. Society must advance by gradual evolution, as it has done since its beginning, and I believe that this ideal condition is still many generations, perhaps centuries, distant. The only way to strive for its realization is for each generation to do its part in promoting a spirit of temperance, co-operation, fairness and intellectuality. Society will then gradually realize the waste, unfairness and barbarism of industrial competition, of inheritance and of unequal distribution and consumption. While man is thus slowly becoming civilized, he will naturally devise from time to time, such laws and such forms of government as will fit each stage of his development. * * * * * =Strobell, George H.= I work and vote for Socialism. Every age has its special problems, its special tyranny to combat, its own liberty and independence to preserve, to hand down to its descendants. The machine has destroyed hand labor and association in labor is inevitable. The machine, too large and complex to be owned by individuals, has made necessary combinations of owners. Combinations of owners destroyed competition, and, through resultant economy and increase of production and profit, became rich and powerful corporations. These corporations control the means of life of over nine-tenths of the people. The owners no longer are the administrators of their property. They hire the necessary business abilities to run the business machine, but they insistently demand higher dividends and profits. These demands cause the virtual slavery of the workers, and millions work today long hours at a speed and productive capacity never before known in the world, and get so little for it that they are hungry all the time, live in squalor and dress poorly. More and better machinery being constantly invented, turns loose on the labor market a host of unemployed to compete with their fellow workers for work. We are not the freeman our fathers were. Fortunes so vast as to stagger the imagination for a few; dire, ever-increasing poverty for the masses is now and will be increasingly the result of this development unless-- Unless we look at it in the sane way, as a development toward a new order, where the people will, in their collective capacity, own and operate and democratically manage all industry. That will be Socialism. There is no other way of escape in sight. Socialism is not, however, inevitably the outcome. There must be conscious action by the people to turn this evolution away from its present tendency. To continue as we are is to invite the destruction of our civilization. Therefore I work and vote for Socialism. It is a step forward in the progress of the race and a promise of the fulfillment of the prayer, "Thy Kingdom come, on earth as it is in Heaven." * * * * * =Kalley, Ella Hartwig.= (Lecturer.) I have long felt the need of a more humane form of government, a system of justice regulating international commercial relations, insuring peace and education for the older as well as the younger persons. Our country should be a republic, industrially as well as politically, and liberate the wage slave by the abolition of the capitalist. As a writer, I shall continue to defend the interests of the masses instead of the classes, and as a Temperance Suffragette Socialist lecturer, I shall endeavor to inspire my audiences above the misty horizon of all other political parties to the star line of true reform, which is "the hoe of promise" and basis of a nation's greatness. I am not alone in the thought that a temperance plank added to the Socialist Platform would cause the greatest majority to leave other parties, as Socialism would be more attractive than ever, to the very finest and best representatives of society everywhere, while justice would flower and bloom and the Dove of Peace perch upon our banners. It would be a lame platform for any political party to overlook the crying need of reform on all lines and to enforce the boasted pure food law, and at the same time to tolerate and uphold distilleries, saloons and breweries, is to herald the weakness and sandy foundation of the parties, old or new. As comrades and co-workers in behalf the downtrodden, let loyal men and women unite and lead in the vanguard of Christian political victory. * * * * * =Levermore, Charles Herbert.= (Educator and Author.) I am in favor of Socialism because I believe in the common ownership of land and water and of instruments of production and distribution, and because I believe that the highest ideals of social and moral perfection would lead us all to labor for the welfare of the community rather than of any individual. But I am not convinced that any party now called Socialist, or any group of avowedly Socialist leaders has as yet shown a safe and practicable plan for the realization of those ideals. * * * * * =Kinney, Abbot.= (Author, Venice, Cal.) We are all Socialists. Man is a social animal. It is consequently impossible that any government of man should be anything but a Socialism. The people have lost sight of the fact that all property in a State belongs to the State. The exercise by every State of the right of eminent domain is an illustration of this. Modern governments customarily pay the private user or holder of property, when the property is taken for public use. This is always the rule when property is taken by corporations, or persons under a delegation to them of the right of eminent domain. It is only properly so delegated for public utilities in private hands. Public payment for property so taken is a matter of convention and convenience. It is deemed fair that property taken from one member of the society for the benefit of all, should be paid for by all. Or, if such property is taken by a common carrier, for instance, that such common carrier should pay for it. In case of public stress, however, as in the blowing up of a row of houses to stop the course of a fire, or in the seizure of food or quarters for the use of military in national defense, or in the clearing away of houses or property for defensive purposes, payment may or may not be made as the conditions indicate. More than this, every human life in a society belongs to the State. Thus the State may draft its citizens to fight fire, suppress disorder, or take part in the military defense of the society or State. The State also imprisons and even executes its members who attack the general welfare. * * * * * =Cazalet, Edward Alexander.= (President of the Anglo-Russian Literary Society, Imperial Institute, London.) The ideals of Socialism might be realized by the precepts of Christianity, "love your neighbor as yourself." Difficult social questions which cannot be solved by the head are sometimes settled by the heart, for it appeals to the conscience, diminishing selfishness and making all classes friends. Christian Socialism, by encouraging mutual concessions, might perhaps attain better results than agitation and violence. * * * * * =Allen, Fred Hovey.= (Clergyman and Author.) I believe in a Socialism which levels upward, which makes a man what he was not, only a higher, nobler, richer being. I believe that next to being God, the greatest thing is to be a man. The more Godlike he becomes, the more man will reflect the true and only permanent Socialism. I am in favor of such Socialism as will attach the chain of brotherhood to the lowest, if that lowest is capable of rising into true manhood, because truth, honesty, love and kindness mean the Kingdom of Heaven begun on earth, and equal rights to all the children of God. * * * * * =Helms, E.J.= (Clergyman.) I am in favor of Socialism insofar as it is the practical application of Christianity to our economic and industrial life. * * * * * =Conger-Kaneko, Josephine.= (Editor, The Progressive Women.) I am in favor of Socialism because it seems to be the next step in social evolution, carrying the human race toward a more perfect civilization. * * * * * =Hitchcock, Charles C.= (Merchant and Author.) We are fast coming to realize that co-operation in the use of our economic resources is the only form of society worthy of civilized people. A co-operative commonwealth demands that the able-bodied individual shall not be allowed to consume more wealth as measured in labor power, than he creates. Is not this so evidently reasonable that the system should command the approval of every fair mind? It doubtless would do so were we not born into and environed by the capitalist order, thereby being naturally prejudiced against an innovation so radically different as is Socialism. Perhaps no more comprehensive definition of Socialism can be given than that by Walter Thomas Mills, which is: "First. The collective ownership of the means of producing the means of life." "Second. The democratic management by the workers of the collectively owned means of producing the means of life." "Third. Equal opportunities for all men and women to the use and benefits of these collectively owned and democratically managed means of producing the means of life." Under the present order of society the means of producing the means of life are privately owned and controlled; the owners thereby forming a privileged class and are enabled to dictate the terms on which the means of life--land and the machinery of production--can be used. As a result of this private ownership labor receives but a portion of the product, the larger part of wealth produced being either wasted in the strife of competition or retained by the capitalist in the form of interest, rent and profit. The wealth we command merely through the ownership of stocks and bonds--so-called income producing capital--is wealth received which we do nothing to produce; hence this wealth must, of necessity, be produced by others who are deprived of a portion of their product. This wealth thus appropriated is wealth derived from profit in the employment of labor (surplus value). A thorough study of economics shows clearly that interest, rent, and profit result in exploitation of labor--the robbery of labor. It is this profit system which is strangling our civilization. Poverty and the greater portion of crime can be traced directly to this exploitive system. The aim of the Socialist movement is the dethronement of capital and the capitalistic class by merging all humanity into one class, a producing class. The exploited majority, the poverty stricken, the submerged, as now under capitalism, will under a Socialistic Republic come into their inheritance--equality of opportunity to the resources of wealth and production--and be enabled to retain the wealth they produce. The capitalist class, in any fair view of the situation, while being obliged to surrender the privileges now retained through the private ownership of "the means of producing the means of life," will under a Social Republic receive indirect benefit which we claim will out-weigh any advantage they may now seem to possess. Human nature does not stand in the way of the realization of a co-operative commonwealth. It is natural that mankind not only seek but demand that to which they are in equity entitled. Under capitalism the majority are exploited out of a good share of their product. As the producer awakens to an understanding of the present situation, it is this normal and justifiable self-interest--selfishness--which will prove to be a strong, if not the leading, factor in bringing about Socialism. The unseemly antagonism and strifes so manifest today under capitalism are largely traceable directly to our conflicting economic interests occasioned by the private ownership of the means of life. A study of social evolution leads clearly in the direction of Socialism. But it is when we carefully consider the economic situation that we become aware of the fallacy of the capitalist system and realize that the wealth producing majority will in time inevitably demand, as a matter of justice, the co-operative commonwealth; that is, will insist that the wealth producer receive the wealth he produces--that the capitalist, who as capitalist receives usury thereby commanding, without labor, wealth produced by others, must cease to be a parasite on labor. This changed order, this revolution, can be brought about only through socialization of the means of production and of distribution. Not very long ago the advocate of Socialism was the voice "crying in the wilderness." Today he bears "good tidings of great joy" to a rapidly assembling multitude. * * * * * =Noll, Aaron.= (Clergyman.) I have been a member of the Socialist Party since the year 1900. I have, also, for twenty-five years, been a Christian minister, serving pastorates, in regular connection with an orthodox denomination--the Reformed Church in the United States. I am increasingly persuaded of the righteousness of the Socialist Movement. To me it seems that Socialism will make possible, in a practical way, the social ideals of the founder of the Christian Religion. The Church, at any period of its history, may, or it may not, truthfully, stand for the practical application of those ideals. But the Socialist Movement, at all times, the world over, stands for social and industrial justice. Jesus implanted in the consciousness of man the worth of the individual life. Socialism will make possible the true development of the individual unto a complete life. Socialism will throw around every individual a wall of protection against the rapacity of the strong, greedy, selfish individual, and it will put into the hands of every one the means of life whereby he may rise to the full stature of his being, there being none to hinder or oppress him. The concern of each will be the concern of all. But it will be a concern founded on justice, love and peace. Socialism, being scientifically correct, holds out to all men a vision of future good that inspires a hope that makes life seem worth while. * * * * * =Russell, Charles Edward.= (Journalist and Author.) I am in favor of Socialism because Socialism would put an end to the monstrous system of injustice by which men toil to create wealth and then are deprived of the wealth that they create. All wealth is created by labor and should belong to the men and women whose labor creates it. Socialism would abolish poverty, put an end to child labor, make education the universal possession, abolish prostitution and make the earth fit for the inhabitation of its children. It would obliterate the slum, the breeder of nine-tenths of the evils that now afflict society. It would mean industrial as well as political democracy. I believe in democracy. Therefore, I believe in Socialism, which is perfected and applied democracy. * * * * * =James, George Wharton.= (Explorer, Ethnologist and Author.) As I now stand I can scarcely be said either to favor or oppose Socialism. The term must first be clearly defined. I believe in fellowship, in municipal ownership of all public or semi-public utilities; the establishment of free municipal markets for vegetables, etc.; the purchase by the city authorities of fruit, vegetables, eggs, meat, coal, etc., when dealers seek to force up the prices, and their disposal at cost to users. I would take back from all corporations, or else compel them to pay to the people an annual rent for the same, all water rights, power rights, etc., that they have filed upon and held by the right of might; I would make all great coal mining, oil mining and other reapers of crops for which they did not sow, pay a certain percentage of their returns into the public treasury; I would compel the abolition of all slums, even to the extent of compelling the municipalities to provide decent shelter for the poor at reasonable rates; I would parole all well-behaved prisoners (as a rule) at the end of a year and give them a chance to make good; I in every way would seek to educate the people as a whole to the rights, responsibilities and privileges of government, and then give them, what is theirs inherently, a full power to determine how and by whom they shall be governed. These, hastily and crudely expressed, are some of my ideas on this important question. * * * * * =Koeb, Otto, B.S.= (Stanford University, Cal.) I believe in universal world-peace between all nations. Since the Socialists are the only political party honestly indorsing world-peace, I sympathize with them. I am in favor of an universal eight-hour working day, six days per week; abolition of child labor; creation of old age pensions for disabled working men. A certain minimum wage rate, which makes it possible for every normally developed laborer to support a family. Up to the above mentioned points I am in favor of Socialism. * * * * * =Cooke, George Willis.= (Author and Lecturer.) I am in favor of Socialism because I believe in equal opportunities for all children born into the world, and that each should be able to use all his natural gifts according to his ability. I believe in Socialism because I detest all forms of monopoly and exclusiveness, not being able to see why the minority should possess property and the majority should be deprived of its advantages. If it is good for any, it is good for all. I am a Socialist because it is quite apparent that the great fundamental sources of the necessities of life, on which all alike are dependent, are social and public in their nature, and should be open to all. They should belong to the nation, accessible on the same terms to all who need them, without giving monopolistic advantage to any. I am a Socialist because I cannot understand why one man should be subject to another as slave, serf or wage-earner. No man is good enough, said Lincoln, to have the control of another man's life. I am a Socialist because I believe in the equality of men and women, that the domination of women by men has been vastly injurious to the race, and that the ballot will give women a better opportunity to live a noble and healthy life as woman, wife and mother. I am a Socialist because I believe in freedom, individuality and initiative for every man and woman, and that these can be secured for all men and women, according to the measure of their individual capacity, only by that co-operative method offered by Socialism. HERE AND THERE. Here is a mother kneeling by a cradle, who vainly endeavors with smacks and kindly words to appease her hungry babies. There is a father, dusty and fatigued, vainly begging for work. Here is a magnificent edifice which is called a museum. It shelters dead mummies and statues of marble. There on a park bench sits a homeless living human being, who, shivering with cold, stares at the pale moon and wonders why his tears are subject to gravitation. EDWARD SILVIN. * * * * * =-----------------------------------------------------------= | Typographical errors corrected in text: | | | | Page 21: "more significant that" replaced with | | "more significant than" | | | =-----------------------------------------------------------= * * * * * 
37246	----	* * * * * +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Note: | | | | Bold text is represented =like so=. | | | | Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For | | a complete list, please see the end of this document. | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------+ * * * * * Why I Am Opposed to Socialism [Illustration] Original Papers by Leading Men and Women [Illustration] EDWARD SILVIN [Illustration] SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA U.S.A. Copyright, 1913 By EDWARD SILVIN INDEX TO AUTHORS Adams, Thomas Sewall 36-37 Allen, Alfred 27 Allen, John Robert 52 Anderson, Rasmus Bjorn 44-45 Andrews, Martin Register 26 Arford, Fremont 31 Barr, Granville Walter 32-33 Barstow, George Eames 41 Baxter, James Phinney 45-46 Beard, Daniel Carter 20-21 Bell, Mackenzie 22 Benington, Arthur 8 Bigelow, Edward Fuller 30 Binney, Charles Chauncey 23-24 Boyd-Carpenter, William B. 11-12 Brazier, Marion Howard 17 Brown, Mrs. M. McClellan 7 Brownscombe, Jennie 42 Burke, John Butler 19-20 Cavanaugh, John 32 Cazalet, Edward Alexander 17-18 Clark, John Bates 8-9 Crowell, John Franklin 34 Cutler, James Elbert 44 Eggert, Charles Augustus 5-6 Ellis, George Washington 46-52 Ellis, Horace 10 Emerson, Samuel Franklin 46 Esenwein, Joseph Berg 13 Ferguson, Charles 45 Field, Walter Taylor 40 Gaines, Clement Carrington 39 Garvin, Lucius Fayette Clark 12 Giering, Eugene T. 53 Hastings, William Granger 20 Heald, G.H. 35 Hovey, Lewis R. 14-16 Jefferys, Upton S. 20 Kelly, Robert Lincoln 35-36 Kizer, Edwin Dicken 17 Krout, Mary Hannah 14 Ladd, George Trumbull 36 Ladd, Horatio Oliver 21-22 Leckie, A.S. 40 Lee, Elmer 41-42 Levermore, Charles Herbert 22 Leveroni, Frank 44 Lightner, Ezra Wilberforce 43 Linn, Walter R. 37 Long, John Luther 12-13 McConnell, Francis J. 7-8 Mencken, Henry Louis 6-7 Nevin, Theodore Williamson 29-30 Owen, Douglas 27-28 Painter, Franklin Verzelius Newton 28-29 Penrose, Stephen Beasley Linnard 16 Post, Louis Freeland 30 Purrington, William Archer 18 Raymond, George Lansing 9-10 Russell, Isaac Franklin 25-26 Scheffauer, Herman 38 Screws, William Wallace 19 Super, Charles William 13-14 Terhune, William Lewis 37-38 Thayer, William Roscoe 29 Tutt, John Calhoun 31 Walker, Albert H. 30-31 White, William Allen 33-34 Wilcox, Lute 34 Wilson, Alonzo Edes 24-25 _The gentle reader, who is inclined to say why he is opposed to Socialism, is cordially invited to contribute his thoughts to the future editions of this little book._ Why I Am Opposed to Socialism =Eggert, Charles Augustus.= (Author and College Professor.) I am opposed to Socialism, first, because it is not an inductively obtained system, but an "ism" that postulates qualities in the individuality of a nation which no nation, or community even, has yet developed to a sufficiently high state to make this "ism" fit to be seriously tried. Second: Much of what Socialism teaches will be put to the test by society anyhow, for society is based on interest, on financial considerations, and it has been found very long ago, that co-operation cheapens products, while steadying employment. Third: As a working system Socialism is based on the limited intellectual powers of a large number of people who will not receive systematic instruction, or cannot. Any large school shows how large the proportion of children is who must eventually be, as adults, members of this number, and, by exercising their right to vote for their officers and leaders, will make a scientific and economical management exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. Tried on a limited scale it amounts only to co-operation--different from Socialism. Fourth: The existing system is based on the rewards held out to individual effort, thus furnishing leaders who, by accumulating capital through self-denial, great moderation in the pursuit of pleasure, and strenuous work, will be eventually enabled to establish large combinations, factories, corporations of all sorts, which, as history and daily experience prove, pay even the unintelligent laborers higher wages and furnish them more security than they could possibly have obtained if left to themselves as Socialistic organizations. In order to obtain the best results, however, a protective tariff must keep out undue foreign competition. Fifth: Differences of opinion on these points can be settled satisfactorily only by a close and careful study of the history of business, and the leading Socialists, Marx, etc., have been shown to be palpably and grievously incapable of such study. Sixth: Socialism would lead to governmental art, science and literature, that is to say to the counterfeit of real art, science, and literature. It would be the rule of the unintelligent and largely of the demagogues (for such would stand a better chance than the honest and thoughtful, for election to offices). Seventh: Socialism could not be established (as an "ism") except by robbery. Good men would not lend themselves to such business. * * * * * =Mencken, Henry Louis.= (Author of "The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche," editor of The Players' Ibsen, part-author with Robert Rives LaMonte of "Men vs. the Man." Member of the editorial staff of the Baltimore Evening Sun.) I am opposed to Socialism because, in general, it means a vain and costly attack upon the immutable natural law that the strong shall have advantage over the weak. I do not defend that law as perfect, nor do I even maintain that it is just. If I had the world to make over I should probably try to find something to take its place, something measurably less wasteful and cruel. But the world is as it is and the law is as it is. Say what you will against it, you must at least admit that it works, that it tends to destroy the botched and useless, that it places a premium upon enterprise and courage, that it makes for health and strength, that it is the most powerful of all agents of human progress. Would brotherhood, supposing it to be achieved, do as well? I doubt it. Brotherhood would help the soft man, the clinging man, the stupid man. But would it help the alert and resourceful man? Answer for yourself. Isn't it a fact that difficulties make daring, that effort makes efficiency? Do not functions develop by use? Does the cell act or react? Meanwhile, I grant all schemes of brotherhood one indubitable merit. Socialism shares it with Christianity. It is this: that they are eternally impossible of carrying out, that men cannot actually live them. The Beatitudes, after 2,000 years, are still mere poetry. No human fiat will ever repeal the law of natural selection. No rebellion of slaves will ever break down that great barrier which separates slaves from masters. * * * * * =Brown, Mrs. M. McClellan.= (Lecturer and Reformer.) I am opposed to Socialism-- First: Because it is unnatural. Men are born free, but far from being equal in competency mentally, morally, or spiritually to use with advantage to self or others, the proceeds of earth, or the elements, or labor; even under the same civil, social, and educational opportunities (often in the same family) some are incompetent to make ends meet. Second: Because it is impracticable, unjust, and detrimental to development and ennoblement of the human race, which is the manifest object of human creation. Third: Because it destroys the ultimate power of individuality, which is the unit of State organization and social protection. The individual is the axis of reality in all the objective changes for human uplift. Fourth: Because the Spirit of God is the humanizing power in the world, given to individual spirits as a complete fact, large or small, but personal in dynamic currents of bodily gifts as varied as the offices of the human organs. Fifth: Because civilization is the fruit of developed individual consciousness in a concrete, unsharable experience of free personality which makes the vital push for progress in the world; even a social consciousness so-called, must turn on the axis of the individual. Sixth: Because the only historic and scientific demonstration of Socialism is original barbarism. Set the pot in the midst of the group and let each use his paw. * * * * * =McConnell, Francis J.= (Bishop of Methodist Episcopal Church, Denver, Colorado.) I am opposed to Socialism because it goes farther than is necessary. The real reforms for which Socialism stands are very important, but I think these can be secured without accepting the extreme puttings of Socialistic doctrine. Within the past twenty-five years we have reached many of the results of the Socialistic programme and yet without adopting extreme Socialism. * * * * * =Benington, Arthur.= (Journalist.) I am opposed to Socialism because I believe that the State was made for man, not man for the State. Because every one of the infinite number of projects of Socialism tends to discourage individual effort; hence, in a really Socialistic State there would be no incentive to achievement in art, literature, science, discovery, etc. The dull level of mediocrity would prevail; stagnation would take the place of progress. Because the leading Socialists and all the Socialist newspapers I have ever seen attack religion. Because Socialism would abolish the home and make the State responsible for the bringing up of children. The result of this would be to substitute a breeding farm for matrimony. Love--which cannot be abolished--would have no place in the scheme of things; it would struggle against institutions, either secretly in spite of them and contrary to them, or openly in rebellion. This is true not only of sex love, but of parental and filial love. Because it is contrary to all the principles upon which the United States of America have won success in the world. It is an exotic importation from lands in which liberty is stifled, brought here by persons who do not understand American institutions, taken up as a fad by a few dreamers. Because men always cease to be Socialists as soon as they have won success in life; suggesting that Socialism is merely a vague expression of the discontent of some, the disappointment of others. * * * * * =Clark, John Bates.= (Professor of political economy and author.) I am opposed to Socialism because it would soon impoverish workers. The income to be divided would be smaller than is supposed by advocates of Socialism, and it would grow smaller per capita as the number of workers increased. * * * * * =Raymond, George Lansing.= (Author and University Professor.) I am opposed to Socialism because I think it founded on a misconception of the requirements of human nature; and this, mainly, for three reasons: First: A great many people will not practice diligence and thrift, unless stimulated to do so by a possibility of obtaining, possessing and using something that they can call their own. This is something that Socialism theoretically, and so far as it has been applied, practically, would deny them. Second: A great many will not work at all, when their only inducement is that others wish them to work, or need their help. Socialism, if established, would be obliged--merely to secure support for the community--to force such people to work against their own wills. This would inevitably involve the re-establishment of a system of human slavery. Third: All a man's mental and moral development in this world--to say nothing of what may come after death--needs training. According to a law apparently divine, but certainly human, this training, whether in home, school, business or society, is imparted by means of discipline. The discipline is mainly derived from the circumstances of life in which one finds himself placed, and, in such cases, is always accompanied by dissatisfaction with one's alloted place, and by actual suffering. The Socialist aims to escape from this dissatisfaction and suffering by making a change in his circumstances--such a change, for instance, as would make a king a servant, or make all men kings or servants. But history and experience show that kings, whose friends die, courtiers flatter, and enemies trick, are no more free from the sufferings attendant upon discipline than are servants. The truth seems to be that to occupy a different position in life means merely to be placed in a different part of the same apparently divine and certainly social machine which--as some have faith to believe--is at work grinding out of the coarse grain of humanity what shall, some day, prove to be its fine flour. One who has the wisdom to apply this theory to life, will, in no position that a man can fill, feel either too haughty or too humiliated to sympathize with everybody, and to do his best everywhere to alleviate suffering, lessen oppression, equalize opportunity, enthrone justice, and prove himself, in every sense of the term, a fellow-man. The result upon individual consciousness and conscience of this attitude of mind is the most important of any that can be exerted in order to secure human welfare. It differs from Socialism in being derived--as Socialism is not--from a recognition of the exact and entire truth--a truth that includes, both that which is material and spiritual, philosophical and religious. * * * * * =Ellis, Horace.= (President Vincennes University.) Socialism originally meant to become an effective protest against the tyrannies of all forms of monarchy. If it had succeeded in its ambition we all had been Socialists. But it failed utterly. Its failure may be traced to certain fundamental errors as to the means it should employ to realize its purpose. It presumed that most practices it found in the economic world were inherently bad because they had been employed by heartless men in furthering their individual interests. Socialism denies the accepted maxim relating to competition--in spite of the evidences of history which have fully established the fact that, in every realm of human activity, competition has been one of the mightiest factors for individual, community, national and racial prestige. Socialism would deny to virile, purposeful, masterful leaders of men the privilege of leadership because, forsooth, some such leaders have misused authority reposed in them. In lieu of this practice, it would constitute society at large the rightful leader in all economic matters--because some evidences appear which indicate that society possesses some attributes of stability. Fatal--both of these deductions. There are many thousands of good Socialists, but few substantial economic contentions behind them. * * * * * =Boyd-Carpenter, William B., B.A., F.R.G.S.= (Publicist, Address: Wynstones, Ascot, England.) The world has always sighed after novelty. Even St. Paul found that the Athenians of old longed to hear some new thing. The craze for novelty, or an increasing curiosity are the symptoms of the decline of a philosophic outlook on life. It is the idea that a change means reform. Now reform can never be a change in the substance, but rather an application, a direct and precise application of a thought-out remedy for a particular and authentic grievance. Nor is innovation a real reform--we have to change our clothes because they are wet, but this does not mean we reform ourselves or our clothes. Woman makes an innovation in the shape of her clothes or her hats--she does not reform her clothes or her hats. But Socialists and syndicalists demand the immediate alteration of the capitalists' system of production--by which they mean, if they mean anything, such a reform as will give to them, as a political party within any State, the power of using the forces, political and capitalistic within the State on behalf of their own section of the community, unless they mean this, they cannot hope to benefit wages and employment. If they do not mean this, they are hoodwinking workingmen and merely are seeking a change, not a reform. Change is impermanent--therefore transitory change is merely the expression of want of tone in the political health of a people. But Socialism and syndicalism by seeking the benefit of the many workers at the expense of the few capitalists, is creating a form of injustice, which in their main doctrines Socialists assert they are hoping to avoid. Injustice to any section of a community is the creation of inequality again in a community. If we cannot reform with equity, let us not reform at all. As we put back the hands of the clock's progress, so we recreate inequalities. Life at best is a matter of compensation; it is the disturbance of this balance which makes for injustice and inequality. Then again, Socialism has been tried and has always resulted in the re-erection of the capitalist system. The Revolutions of France--1789, 1832, 1848, 1871--all were to usher in the millennium. But France is capitalistic today and amongst the wealthiest nations on the earth. The German Revolution, 1848, or the Spanish Revolution--all began in high hopes of republics to be ruled by Democrats. All these countries have gone back to what the world has tried and found stands best the test of time. Nations, like individuals, are impatient and do damage in fits of temper for which many years of steady care are required to effect the repairs. The world wants more religion in active life and more ostracism of the irreligious. The fear of public disgust is the beginning of ordered honesty. The strength of a public opinion is the poor man's friend. "To complain of the age in which we live; to revile the possessors of power; to lament the past; to conceive wild hopes for the future, are the common dispositions of the vast majority of men." They are also the attributes of laziness and the form of a vulgar levity. A nation must have all classes--grumblers and saints, happy and querulous, in order to make strong men. * * * * * =Garvin, Lucius Fayette Clark.= (Ex-Governor of R.I.) I am opposed to Socialism because its theory is not proved to my satisfaction. The public ownership of all artificial instruments of production, means that no interest upon capital should go to individuals. This means that the person who builds a boat to let should not own it, and that the payment made by a borrower for its use should not go to the builder, but into the public treasury. Socialism asserts that if one person catches fifteen fish, another ten, and third but five, they are not each entitled to the proceeds of the sale of his fish. This is in violation of the natural law that the value produced is the just reward of labor. Land values, being earned by the community, belong to the community; and economic rent should be taken by the community (in lieu of taxation) for public purposes. The Socialist does not distinguish between the artificial and the natural instruments of production--two things wholly different in kind. He confuses the just return to capital with the unjust return to monopoly. * * * * * =Long, John Luther.= (Author and Playwright.) I don't know what you mean by mere "Socialism." I wish I did. I wish you did. But, the deuce of it is that no two persons seem to mean the same thing--or else no one knows what any one means. If it means an honest brotherhood, wherein it is recognized that all are not equal, to the end that those who are more or have more shall help those who are less and have less, I am for it with all my heart. If it means that the vicious shall profit from the just--no. If it means that the loafer shall live without work--no. For that means that some one else--many--must be working in his stead. If Socialism means that genius and idiocy must sleep in the same bed and be equals I am very much against it. We are not all equal. We are not even born equal. No pronunciamento can make us so. And if Socialism of the McNamara and Ettor and Giovannitti sort means to make us so, it might as well quit now as later. It is trying to amalgamate unamalgamables. * * * * * =Esenwein, Joseph Berg.= (Author and Editor Lippincott's Magazine.) I am opposed to Socialism because, with all its attendant weaknesses in its present unperfected state, competition is the best known stimulus to ambition. Human nature can never be essentially altered by either legislation or a new social system, therefore we shall always need competitive incentives to make us do what we can. Our present system needs decided modification, but it does not need the reversal that Socialism proposes. * * * * * =Super, Charles William.= (Retired College President.) Socialism is advocated in so many different forms that it is difficult to deal with the term intelligently without prefixing a somewhat lengthy definition. Every government is at present adopting some of the features of the Socialistic creed. I am opposed to Socialism in so far as it hinders individual initiative and enterprise. No community ever made a great invention, or an important discovery, or created a great work of art, or planned a great enterprise. The first step forward must always be taken, or at least proposed, by some one person. I believe the State should protect those who cannot take care of themselves, especially children, and those who have proved unable to stand the strain of modern economic conditions. Those who are weak should not be left to lie helpless along the path of progress. But I do not believe government has a right to dictate how many hours an adult shall labor, or what wages his employer shall pay him. The men who have done and are still doing great things in the world have not worked a certain number of hours in twenty-four, but all the time. Socialism, to a certain extent at least, puts a premium on inefficiency. It is a serious objection to Socialism that it has proved a failure wherever it has been tried. It is a return to primitive conditions. The prospect of getting something for nothing is a strong incentive to idleness. Most men are naturally lazy. The power of the State to create value is very limited. If it provides an army of officials whose constant and ubiquitous interference with production limits the collective output, they must be paid from the earnings of individuals. This must increase the cost of living. Laws should be passed and enforced to help the weak and restrain the wicked, but they should not put too heavy a clog on those who are by nature qualified to succeed. You cannot promote the prosperity of a community by taxing the strong for the benefit of the weak, either directly or indirectly. The State should be particularly vigilant against giving any encouragement to the lazy, the shiftless and the willfully inefficient. * * * * * =Krout, Mary Hannah.= (Author.) I am opposed to Socialism because it is impossible and un-philosophical. All the measures advocated by Socialists today--or most of them--were advocated by the French in the Revolution of 1785, with disastrous results. * * * * * =Hovey, Lewis R.= (Editor, The Record, Haverhill, Mass.) I am opposed to Socialism because it is unscientific, unwise, and would destroy liberty and progress for the human race. The bed-rock theory of Socialism is that under the present system, wealth and industry concentrates into fewer and fewer hands, that the big fish eat the little fish, and so on until society is confronted with a great proletarian class on the one hand, with nothing but their labor power, and on the other a few very rich plutocrats who own all the means of production and exchange. That this theory is unsound and unscientific is proved in a thousand ways by every blue book of every industrial nation on earth. The number of wealth-owners in Europe has increased twice as rapidly as population during the past twenty years. In the United States we find that ownership of land, railways, banks, bonds, industrial stocks, etc., have actually increased three or four times as rapidly as the population. For instance: In 1901, the year of the organization of the "Steel Trust," so-called, there were just about fifty-five thousand men and women who owned all the iron and steel plants in this country, and at this time the Steel Company did seventy per cent. of the iron and seventy-five per cent. of the steel production of the nation. Today the U.S. Steel Company produces only forty-five per cent. of the iron and steel, and in place of fifty-five thousand owners of the iron and steel business, there are now over three hundred and fifty thousand owners. Seventeen years ago the Great Northern Railway was owned by one hundred and twenty-two stockholders; today that same railroad has eighteen thousand owners. An investigation by the New York Journal of Commerce, a short while ago, proved that two hundred and thirty-one industrial and railway corporations had ten years ago less than two hundred and thirty thousand owners, but those same companies now have eight hundred and thirty-five thousand owners (round numbers). Like illustrations could be cited to fill pages of this book. This shows that the so-called scientific theory of Marx Socialism is a myth, a dream, an imagination from the brain of Karl Marx. Socialism would be unwise because it would be an attempt to change human nature by economic and political processes. This world has progressed in just that proportion as it has got away from things Socialistic. The imperialistic Socialism of ancient Rome destroyed that greatest of nations; the barbarian Socialism of Peru, with thirty million followers, was destroyed by a handful of Spanish adventurers. The Socialization of railways, the municipal ownership of a street railway, a gas plant or an electric lighting plant, has, as a rule, proved a failure when all the facts are taken into consideration. This wild yell of the Socialists, that labor receives but a small part of the wealth it produces, has no foundation in fact and is but the uncouth and unintelligent expression of minds who were never made for statistical insight or investigation. The promise of the "full value of your production" is a false promise and known to be such by every intelligent Socialist. The workers today do far less work, with less hours, and yet receive twice as high wages compared fifty years ago. This is due to organization and invention of the few. That is, a small minority of society have organized industry and made economic production possible; "they have made two blades of grass grow where one grew before." The Socialists would reverse this, for it is absolutely certain that under the blighting influence of economic Socialism, production would go down. Politically, Socialism would destroy liberty. A pure democracy leads straight to despotism. Nothing is more despotic than the bossism of the Socialist parties of the world today, and if ever the nations of the world go to Socialism, they will go to a regime of mob rule directed by a Socialist oligarchy, and then the liberty of man will be absolutely destroyed. * * * * * =Penrose, Stephen Beasley Linnard.= (President, Whitman College.) I am not in favor of that very attractive theory, Socialism, first, on psychological grounds. It rests upon an unscientific analysis of human interests and motives. It overlooks or undervalues strong tendencies of human nature. It may be called a theory for angels, not for men. Second, on practical grounds; it cannot work well because it can supply neither sufficient motive nor sufficient machinery to secure efficiency, either in production or distribution. I applaud the moral impulse which is found in many Socialists, but I do not approve their solution for great economic problems. * * * * * =Kizer, Edwin Dicken.= (College President.) I am in favor of that which means the correcting of the evils that allow one man to prey upon another when that preying is personal or enters into the effect of the preyer, in combination with conditions to be remedied by economic changes. But the very radical differences manifest among the Socialists themselves, i.e., those who accept Marx, and those who deny him in his main statements; the revolutionist, who insists upon a revolution, by blood, if necessary, and the evolutionist, who looks for a more gradual development, would make me hesitate to cast my lot with such a divided army. Again I am not quite certain that I am willing to give first place to the forces that the scientific Socialist places as fundamental in the affairs of men. I must also confess to a lingering of the older theory of individualism that constrains me to believe that at least a part (those for example who by brain or circumstance are leaders) of mankind, will be personally regenerated by a high spiritual motive before the Socialist ideal is possible to think of even. Also, radicalism never reaches in practice what it aims to perform. A little less of the ultimate, with destructive acts that undermine man's faith in his present creation, and a little more of the doing the task before us is what is needed. If Socialism is inevitable, as some think it is, we can neither help nor hinder: evolution of moral and spiritual forces entirely rule the average man out of the contest. * * * * * =Brazier, Marion Howard.= (Journalist and Lecturer.) I am opposed to Socialism because I do not favor anything likely to develop anarchy. Socialistic agitation tends to promote unrest and discord. If granted my divine right to vote, I might look into it more closely and get another point of view. * * * * * =Cazalet, Edward Alexander.= (President of the Anglo-Russian Literary Society, Imperial Institute, London.) Socialism has been defined as the name given to schemes for regenerating society by a more equal distribution of property and especially by substituting the principle of association for that of competition. A great statesman and author, M. de Tocqueville, branded Socialism as an energetic and pernicious appeal to the lower passions of mankind; as a system of which the basis was a thorough mistrust of liberty, a hearty contempt of man individually. The shrewd and experienced L.A. Thiers in his treatise "De la Propriete," also combats the maxim: "La propriete c'est le vol." He depicted the universal poverty and barbarism that would follow from such notions being adopted. Robert Owen, the enthusiastic and practical Socialist, was not successful in his colony of New Harmony in United States. The improvement of his workmen's material interests in the New Lanark Mill in Scotland, finally proved a disappointment. (See also "Why I am in Favor of Socialism.") * * * * * =Purrington, William Archer.= (Lawyer and Author.) I do not know of any practicable scheme of Socialism, or of any satisfactory definition of the term upon which Socialists agree; an accurate definition is the necessary basis of intelligent expression of opinion. Apparently, Socialists in general believe, or at least preach that the State should own the material and means of production, to the end that all should share what is now enjoyed by the few. I doubt if the proposed means would achieve the desired end. At present the United States Government supplies us with postage stamps. The stamps will not stick. Socialism will be practicable, if ever, only when "The roughs, as we call them, grown loving and dutiful, Worship the true and the good and the beautiful. And preying no longer, as tiger and vulture do, Read the Atlantic, as persons of culture do." That day is far distant, and even when it comes the man of brains will assert his individualism. * * * * * =Screws, William Wallace.= (Editor The Montgomery Advertiser.) I am opposed to Socialism because I believe in conservatism. We are drifting too far already away from precepts and principles which guided us safely as long as they were adhered to. I am opposed to Socialism because I believe in individualism. Each man in the community should do something for it instead of each man in the community expecting the community to do something for him. I could give many other reasons, but these are enough to convince me that Socialism engrafted in our laws would be dangerous to government and society. * * * * * =Burke, John Butler, M.A.= (Author and Scientist.) My sympathies are very much on the side of Socialism, but intense as those sympathies may be, they cannot counteract the convictions, still more strong, that the hope of its realization is futile. A lease for capital is all I can plead for equivalent to that for copyright. There cannot be any doubt, in my mind at least, that Socialism, that is, the distribution of wealth equally for the benefit of the individuals composing the community, desirable as this might be in accordance with the spirit of equality and fraternity, is yet at variance with the principles of freedom and of justice. And unjust as the existing system may be in giving an unequal start in life to individuals, to insist that those who work effectively and those who do not, should share equally the benefits of their combined labors is surely more iniquitous still. Nay, more, that the individual should not possess the power to accumulate and dispose of the fruits of his own work, is perhaps still more at variance with the true principles of liberty. A Socialistic state, however perfect ideally, to commence with, would be in an unsteady state of equilibrium, and the inequalities with which Nature, as distinct from man, has endowed us, would, I fear, sooner or later, disturb that unstable state and bring things back to the condition where only the struggle for power and its consequent supremacy would prevail, through the rule of the strong in character and intellect. Hence, heredity as a gift or privation of Nature, like wealth and penury in the existing state of things, prevents the ideal of equality otherwise desirable. Such being inevitable, the accumulated effects of industry and talent will ever seek and obtain protection from the hands of the fortunate and the strong. A lease of the rights of property and capital generally, equivalent to a copyright, for works of genius is all I ever hope for in the interests of humanity, so that with the lapse of time wealth might be redistributed broadcast for the benefit of the State and mankind. * * * * * =Hastings, William Granger.= (Lawyer.) I am opposed to Socialism because like Comte, I am unable to accept the teachings of "any of the senseless sects who attack those bases of the State, property and the family." If we are to have States, we must have families. At best, if we are to have anything like our present existing States. If we are to have families, we must have property, and private property if they are to be private families. It is as certain as that we must have public property if we are to have any State. * * * * * =Jefferys, Upton S.= (Editor, Post-Telegram, Camden, N.J.) I am opposed to Socialism because I think that in the final analysis it palsies individual initiative, attempting to set aside nature's law of competition and the survival of the fittest. I cannot agree with the proposition that Socialism is a practical panacea for industrial and economic conditions that have existed since man began to acquire property. While human nature remains as it is, I question whether it is possible to successfully apply Socialism to State and nation. * * * * * =Beard, Daniel Carter.= (Author and Artist.) I do not believe in Socialism because I am an individualist. I think that the old American idea is broad enough to admit of all the necessary reforms without reverting to the Socialism of Marx. Both Socialism and Anarchy are off-springs of monarchial forms of government evolved by people under the tyranny class and official oppression. As long as the opportunities in this country were free to all, neither the seed of Socialism nor of Anarchy could take root, but when the opportunities were absorbed by a few, it produced a condition similar to that of a monarchial form of government, and the seed of these exotic plants, Socialism and Anarchy, both found a soil suited to their growth. There is nothing the matter with our form of government. It has produced the greatest success the world has ever witnessed, has developed a manhood, a self-reliance and a self-respect to be found on no place else on the face of the earth, and I see no reason why we should change that form of government, because some people have monopolized the opportunity for labor and produced an unsatisfactory condition economically. There is but one opportunity to labor, and that is the land. We can free the land without changing our form of government, by simply taxing it to its full rental value, and doing away with all other forms of taxation. This will immediately take the burden off of labor, and while not reducing our present millionaires to the ranks of plain, honest men, it will effectually prevent the growth of any more millionaire monstrosities. (See also "Why I am in Favor of Socialism.") * * * * * =Ladd, Horatio Oliver.= (Clergyman. Author and Educator.) I do not favor Socialism because it is an effort to reform society against the nature of man. No man is created equal to another, or every other man. He is an individual who makes his place in the world by his special individual traits and powers. By these he uses the powers of others, and material and moral instruments and forces around him to accomplish his ends. He concedes to others what he cannot or does not wish to hold or acquire for himself in the influence and possessions of this life. The inequality of man in this world is everywhere manifest. The advantages won in this life are the result of effort and character, not of any distribution based upon the principle of equality of man. The differences in man's condition, make the interest and the incitements of life. Collectivism is an absurd theory of distribution of the good of life, because it cannot preserve equal conditions, even in one generation. The weak, the lame and the lazy must fall behind the strong, the able, the ambitious. The apples on a tree are of different sizes, and soundness, because of the vigor of the buds, leaves, branches and location which have contributed to their growth. So it is in all Nature, and in man. The prizes of life belong to those who win them by merit of their powers, their diligence and their effort. A common opportunity is the highest condition Nature and society can offer to the individual. Life is rich in and through its varieties. Religion and common sense stand for these principles of individualism in the development and conduct of human life and government. * * * * * =Levermore, Charles Herbert.= (Educator and Author.) I am opposed to Socialism because I believe that any plan thus far proposed for the reorganization of society upon a Socialist basis would result in a tyranny of a majority, or of a bureaucratic clique or "ring," representing that majority, which would be meaner and more unendurable than any corporation-ridden party-machine or any Tammany Hall that we have ever known. (See also "Why I Am in Favor of Socialism.") * * * * * =Bell, Mackenzie.= (Poet, Critic and Lecturer.) Though a collectivist I am not a Socialist in the Marxian sense, because I think the private ownership of capital has never until now, had a fair chance in the work of civilization. Throughout the world the people are dimly awaking to insist that property has its duties as well as its rights, and to insist likewise that property pays its due toll to the commonwealth. * * * * * =Binney, Charles Chauncey.= (Lawyer and Author.) I cannot pretend to much familiarity with Socialist writings, but I have read with some care the platform of the Socialist Party for the recent election. Some few of the planks have nothing to do with Socialism in itself, and some (that in regard to child labor, for instance) express the views of men of all parties; but the distinctively Socialist part of the platform impressed me as co-operation run mad. People seemed to be regarded as masses only, not as individuals, although the individualist feeling is one of the strongest in human nature, and is of the utmost importance in the progress of civilization. If a Socialist administration of government be possible as a permanent institution (which I doubt) it would be impossible under the conditions demanded by this platform, because no man's life or property (if any individual property be permitted) would be safe under it. For instance, the legislative power is to be vested in a Congress and legislatures composed of one chamber only, subject to no veto and controlled by no constitution, for the courts are to be forbidden to question the constitutionality of laws. This would make the legislature all-powerful, but the fact that no one branch of the government is all-powerful is an important guarantee of our present liberties. Worse than this, although the experience of ages has shown that the greatest safeguard of liberty is the administration of law by an independent and fearless judiciary--that is, by judges who cannot be dismissed except for official wrongdoing, and who therefore are not merely free to do right in every case, but have the strongest incentives to do so--yet the platform proposes to destroy judicial tenure during good behavior wherever it exists, and to cause all judges to be elected for short terms. If you ask any man of intelligence, who wants only justice, whether he would feel more sure of a just decision in a United States Court before a judge holding office during good behavior, or in a State Court, before a judge elected by the voters of a political party for a short term only, I am confident that he would express much greater confidence in the former. The Socialist platform asserts that the "capitalist class" controls the judiciary. This broad assertion is ridiculously false. What is true is that the judiciary is not composed of Socialists, that the judges are as yet unwilling to disregard the law, and to decide in accordance with the wishes of Socialists. If, however, the "capitalist class" sought to control the judiciary, it could do so much more easily in the case of judges elected for short terms than in that of judges holding office during good behavior. Evidently the Socialists want a chance to "control" the judiciary themselves, whereas what the country needs is a judiciary uncontrolled by any class, capitalist or Socialist. The platform declares for collective ownership of all railroads, telegraph and telephone lines, etc. The word "confiscation" is avoided, but confiscation must be intended, for surely the Socialists do not wish to enrich the "capitalist class" by buying out their interests in public service corporations at a fair valuation. I could criticise the Socialist platform in many other respects, especially the tone of violence and hatred that pervades it. There is not a suggestion of Christianity about it. I shall conclude, however, by stating my own experience of local government under the Socialist Party. Being in ill health last winter, I stayed at Bordighera in Italy. The Socialists controlled the town government, and were anxious to continue in office, and therefore not to offend the rank and file of their party. The drunkenness and noise at night were often intolerable, but all protests were useless, as the drinkers and shouters had votes, and the foreign visitors had none. Gambling was carried on as openly as at Monte Carlo, without any regard to the well-being of the community. After this slight experience, I was able to understand better what took place under the Socialist commune of Paris in 1871, which I am old enough to remember well. * * * * * =Wilson, Alonzo Edes.= (Editor and Lecturer.) There are many good things about the theory of Socialism, but I do not believe in the remedy as proposed through the Socialist Party. The battle can never be won that way. I also believe that our hardest fight and the first thing to be done is the killing of our greatest common enemy, the liquor traffic and the business of drunkard making, by the Government. The settlement of this problem will solve many of our ills and then we can take up some of these other questions. * * * * * =Russell, Isaac Franklin, LL., D.C.L.= (Chief Justice of the Court of Special Sessions of the City of New York.) I am opposed to Socialism because of its erroneous attitude to labor. Labor is not a thing to be avoided, but rather to be welcomed and encouraged. The only real happiness we ever experience in this world is the intelligent exercise of our faculties. A perpetual motion machine or some fanciful device for saving us from labor, so far from being a blessing, would paralyze our noblest powers. I charge Socialism with economic error and heresy for its attacks on capital and capitalists. Capital is indispensable to enterprise. It is the source and mainspring of wages. The laborer cannot pay himself his wages out of the finished product of his toil, else he would have no quarrel with his master. Even public credit, on which we are building the Panama Canal and our city schools, rests on visible resources in lands, franchises and personal property. I charge Socialism with economic error in advocating a rate of wages determined by arbitrary authority, irrespective of demand and supply. No producer of merchandise for any appreciable length of time can continue to pay more than the market rate of wages and keep out of bankruptcy. The manhood wage--a plan by which we accord to each laborer enough money to support himself, his wife and as many children as God sends to his home--is a delusion and a snare. It directly encourages improvidence and stimulates the growth of population by diverting nature's stern but benignant discipline from the unworthy to the worthy. It paralyzes thrift and temperance, and puts a premium on recklessness and vicious self-indulgence. I charge Socialism with fundamental error in preaching the doctrine of human equality. Nature abhors equality. Men vary infinitely, from the meanest degenerates to the tallest of the sons of God. They can be equal only before the law, or in the eye of the law, or as suppliants for justice. Intellectually we need patricians and noblemen to encourage us by precept and example and point out the path of progress to better things. A dollar a day, or one thousand dollars a day, never will remunerate men like Edison and Harriman for their services to a world of workers. Socialism trifles with the principles that underlie the institution of property. Even animal and sub-human ethics regard the right of the individual to his accumulated store and the home he has builded. The attitude of Socialists toward the courts of law is undemocratic. In America we must reverence the law. It is our only hope. To teach the multitude that justice is bought and sold in this country and that the judgments of our judicial tribunals are knocked down to the highest bidder is to accuse a whole nation of crime. Socialism represses individual development. It substitutes for self-direction the authority of the many. But it is in constructive Socialism that we find the greatest peril and the most monumental folly. Utopias innumerable have been conceived by the heated imagination of dreamers of all ages. The monotony of Utopia would be maddening. No moral crisis can arise in a perfect society. Charity and philanthropy, sympathy, courage and all the human virtues can have no play in such a spot. Competition is not to be decried as vicious. It is really a benignant principle. It is the supreme divine law. To competition among employers the workman looks for high wages; on competition among sellers he relies to buy what he needs at the lowest figure. * * * * * =Andrews, Martin Register.= (College Professor and Editor.) The machinery of government which the Socialists propose seems to me likely to aggravate the very evils of which they justly complain. The proposal to confiscate the homes of the farmers and work the former owners under some boss chosen by the State, as I heard advocated a few days ago, may be a blessing to the brewers, but not to the great body of workingmen. (See also "Why I Am in Favor of Socialism.") * * * * * =Allen, Alfred.= (Playwright and Author.) I am opposed to Socialism because of their inhumanity towards the poor millionaire. In spite of it all, they are our brothers. * * * * * =Owen, Douglas.= (Author, Barrister and Lecturer.) Until Socialists themselves shall have come to some sort of an agreement as to the aims and objects of the Socialism to be adopted as their creed, how can one formulate one's objections to Socialism? The more moderate and reasonable of its advocates profess, indeed, indignation and abhorrence at the views of the extremists, and to reply to the extremists is to call forth charges of gross misrepresentation on the part of the more moderate. But broadly stated, what Socialism even in its more moderate form appears to aim at, is the negation and suppression of the greatest and most beneficent law of nature--law of humanity--which we know as the law of the survival of the fittest. On this supreme law depends, and always has depended, and must depend, the uplifting, enlightenment and, in the end, the highest welfare of mankind. And just as that which is good for the hive cannot be bad for the bee, so must the welfare of the hive depend on the independent effort of each individual bee. The mainspring of the world's upward and forward progress is the ambition and emulation of the individual worker: the slothful, the ill-qualified and the weakling being left behind; one and the same law, beneficent if hard, for all life upon this world, whether animate or inanimate. The Socialists' aim is to deprive the individual of stimulus to put forth his best efforts for his own advancement and therefore for the benefit of the human hive. When I received your invitation to state my views on this subject, I chanced to be reading David Hannay's work. "The Sea Trader." At the conclusion he deals with the subject of convoy, under which all ships, fast and slow, good and bad, were compelled to voyage under armed escort. His remarks on the consequences of the system are so apposite that I quote them here: "The necessity for keeping together imposed a restriction often of a highly injurious kind, on the best appointed vessels. Since the whole must be kept together, it followed that the convoy was condemned to sail at the rate of speed of the slowest among them. A quick sailing ship lost the whole advantage of her superiority. She could neither obtain the advantage of being early in the market, nor make prompt arrangements to unload or reload. She was brought down to the level of the most lumbering tub. Of what use was it to build for speed, to be alert, to seek for better ways, when the law stood over you, fine and imprisonment in hand, to make you go slow, to force you to follow the known road!" Of course, it meant utter stagnation in shipbuilding; it was death to advance an improvement. The Socialist, in his shortsighted and narrow view, aims at the same thing over again, on a universal scale, with all its dire and retrograde results. He would reduce the well-found, well-equipped and speedy vessel to the level of the most lumbering tub in the human fleet. * * * * * =Painter, Franklin Verzelius Newton.= (Author and College Professor.) If Socialism is what its friends say it is, it should be commended; if it is what its enemies say it is, it should be condemned. In developing a sense of social obligation, Socialism accomplishes a fine work; but in expecting a thorough human reformation from altered social conditions, it betrays the weakness of illiterate credulity. In seeking greater justice and equality in economic conditions, Socialism rests on a strong moral basis; but in seeking no more than greater material ease and comfort, it betrays the presence of mortality. In demanding individual sacrifice for the common good, Socialism emphasizes an important duty; but in totally submerging the individual in society, it is guilty of an ancient wrong. The truths of Socialism are rapidly finding expression in life and government; its errors will prove its ultimate destruction. The fundamental defect of Socialism is its materialism; for there is that in man which transcends food and raiment. * * * * * =Thayer, William Roscoe.= (Historian.) I am opposed to Socialism because I have seen no explanation by any of its various, and mutually antagonistic advocates, of the way in which it can safeguard the individual. The purpose of life is to produce individuals, each of whom shall be trained to the highest efficiency--manual, intellectual and moral--of which he is capable. Socialism, having only the welfare of all (an abstraction) in view, must logically slight or suppress the individual. So, logically, it must destroy the family--the unit of civilization--and reduce mankind in their sexual relations below the level of the beasts. What I desire is not crazy Nietzsche's superman--individualism run mad--nor Socialism which denies the individual. * * * * * =Nevin, Theodore Williamson.= (Editor.) I am opposed to Socialism principally because of its impracticability. Theoretically it is beautiful, but until human nature changes radically from what it is at present, the plan will not work out in practice. Go into any of the small Socialistic societies, see the petty wrangling, the striving for domination--bossing by the stronger leaders, the self-seeking efforts of all, weak and strong; and it will at once be seen that the theory is not a success there. If not successful in these smaller experiments, how can it be expected to be in the larger field of a nation? My fear would be that if the system could ever be fastened on the national government (which I consider an impossibility) it would be disastrous--it would take away ambition, it would have a blighting effect on enterprise, and would result in the production of the most intolerant "bosses," great and small that the world has ever seen. The resultant slavery of the masses would be shocking, compared with which the most asserted, so-called slavery under our modern industrial system would be the perfection of freedom. After all, isn't Socialism, present day Socialism, simply an effort of those that have not, trying to get a share of the possessions of those that have? * * * * * =Bigelow, Edward Fuller.= (Lecturer and Writer.) I am in favor of Socialism in so far as it contains many good ideals, and am against it in so far as the methods of obtaining those ideals are non-existent, indefinite or impracticable. Many harangues by Socialist orators and many tracts, claiming to set forth Socialistic doctrines are mostly vague with omission of all practical methods. It may do for the poet to rave about sailing away to the moon, but if the poet becomes politician he must show the ship and explain how it will make the journey. * * * * * =Post, Louis Freeland.= (Editor, The Public, Chicago, Ill.) I am opposed to Socialism in its economic program because it proposes to suppress competition, and in its tactics because it stands for class warfare. As to competition, I do not believe that it can be suppressed without substituting an intolerable despotism, and I do believe it will operate fairly if divested of the law-created monopolies with which it is now bedeviled. As to class warfare, I regard the real contest as a contest over economic interests and moral ideals, which neither are nor can be differentiated by any lines of personal class. (See also "Why I Am in Favor of Socialism.") * * * * * =Walker, Albert H.= (Lawyer and Author.) I am opposed to Socialism because it is contrary to nature. In nature, progress results from evolution; and evolution results from fortuitous differentiation and survival of the fittest. Socialism proposes to try to make the unfittest survive, at the expense of the fittest. That also is the proposition of Christianity. But both those systems are contrary to nature in that respect. * * * * * =Tutt, John Calhoun.= (Writer.) Socialism is not feasible. It is a myth of dreamy minds. It has an idealistic atmosphere and is attractive to those who lag in the struggle of life. Its worst feature is that it deceives the people who conscientiously seek relief in it. Its leadership thrives because its impracticability prevents the experimental tests that would expose its sophistry. There is no way to prove by actual demonstration that the persuasive gospel or philosophy of the men who lead its movements is a mockery. You can't try out Socialism. It is evasive. No people ever did or ever will grasp it. There is no equality in either civilization or barbarism. The men most conspicuous in the Socialist movement do not exemplify equality. You find Socialists among the most destitute. If Socialism is a legitimate form of government, why have not the forces of government evolved it? The age of experiment has long since passed. We have had repetition over and over again, but no materialization of Socialism. Government is purely human, and until there is a new creation there will never be anything new in government. * * * * * =Arford, Fremont.= (Editor, Western Trade Journal, Chicago.) I am opposed to Socialism because it does not lead to anything practical or concrete. The theories and plans of the great body of Socialists are largely chimerical and do not appeal to my idea of bettering the conditions of which they, and myself as well, complain. To accomplish what Socialism is attempting to bring about, necessitates a revolution of all that now goes to make up human nature, and nothing short of omnipotence can do this. * * * * * =Cavanaugh, John, C.S.C.= (President University of Notre Dame.) As a philosophy Socialism is hostile to organized government because organized government stands for restraint. Restraint is necessary wherever people live together. Socialism wants a so-called liberty which, in my judgment, is license. Socialism is opposed to religion for the same reason. Religion teaches man to be patient and Socialism can thrive only where men are discontented. Socialism is opposed to the home because husband and father in the nature of things are economically dependent upon employers, and it is characteristic of Socialists that they wish to flaunt offence in the face of employers. Individual Socialists will deny that these charges against Socialism are true. Such individual Socialists are sometimes honest, a fact which only proves that they don't know the inner meaning of Socialism. Socialistic papers like the New York Call make no pretense of concealing the true meaning of the Socialist philosophy. As a matter of fact the vast majority of so-called Socialists think it is merely a political plan that concerns only the question of capital and labor and government ownership. Even as a matter of political policy Socialism is not convincing; it could not cure the ills of society which are due to inequalities of talent, strength, wisdom and industry rather than to political policies. I am not willing to close this brief statement without adding that capitalists should take care so to deal with labor as to deprive agitators of all excuse and valid argument for Socialism, while to the working man I say: "Be wise, thrifty, virtuous and industrious so that you may improve your condition." I say with equal earnestness to the capitalist: "Stop making Socialists. Treat your laboring people like equals rather than inferiors, and as brothers, not as aliens." * * * * * =Barr, Granville Walter.= (Writer.) The accomplishment of ethics by the enactment of laws always fails, and always will fail, except in those cases where there is a strong trend of public opinion to the same end. There are places where murder is not punished, and other places where only certain forms of murder are punished; as there are places where the sale of alcoholic liquors and gambling are utterly prevented by the punishment of all who commit these acts contrary to law. Socialism is a program of law far ahead of the public opinion of today in this country. Therefore it cannot effect itself here and now. There may be in the future a time and place where it will be effective, and then its laws will be beneficent. But only under the conditions stated, will it be harmless. The greatest evil in America today is the non-enforcement of laws. Any law not enforced, because contrary to public opinion in the governmental unit involved, becomes malevolent in its effects. In one city whose people believe liquors should be sold, saloons flourish in spite of a State statute prohibiting them, because conviction of saloon keepers is impossible in that bailiwick; thirty years of this state of affairs has produced a generation of young men who firmly believe that laws are made to be enforced or disregarded at will--who are germinating the seeds of anarchy. To enact a mass of law which cannot be enforced until the millennium is nearer its dawn, is to weaken all law. Hence, Socialism as a political factor is malevolent--as a propaganda, it is of course beneficent and to be encouraged academically, exactly as one should encourage the growth of Methodism or Presbyterianism while keeping them both out of political matters. Socialism seems determined to intrude into politics--is essentially political, indeed--and its most active writers sneer at the American constitution and institutions while they have nothing practicable to substitute except the Golden Rule--which excellent rule of action never has been enforced upon any nation, nor any large group of people, and which cannot be enforced soon. When it can be enforced, Socialism will have arrived. In the meantime, human nature must be made over--God speed the day! * * * * * =White, William Allen.= (Editor and Author.) I am opposed to Socialism because I believe that it attempts to do by legislative enactment, what must come through an evolutionary process. I believe that we are now ready for a long evolutionary jump, but not so far forward as some of our Socialist brethren would like to jump. I desire to go as far toward human justice and good will toward men, as anyone, but I do not feel that we should start and stop, because we are not ready to go the whole distance. I would start and go but one day's journey at a time. * * * * * =Crowell, John Franklin.= (Economist.) I am opposed to Socialism-- First: Because it fails to provide for the requisites of progress, and this threatens to cause a stationary civilization. Second: Because it seems to me to misplace the emphasis by putting the material before the spiritual in human happiness. Third: Because it is anti-national in its attitude toward liberty and self-government. By means of national citizenship modernity has gained most of its rights and privileges. To show utter contempt for the national flag, by referring to it as "an old rag," exhibits a personal quality wholly incompatible with true human brotherhood. * * * * * =Wilcox, Lute.= (Editor, Field and Farm, Denver, Colo.) I am opposed to Socialism upon the broad ground that we already have too many loafers in America for the future good of the nation. All mankind is Socialistic to a certain degree. The most of us are inclined to double shoot the turn and ride a free horse to death. We make Socialism a sort of excuse to shift responsibilities that certainly belong to each and every individual living under a democratic form of government. We are always dodging the little duties that go to make up the ground work of life. Socialism seems to inculcate that spirit of inactivity which might be more properly called loaferism and no country can become great with such a dominant spirit prevailing among its people. * * * * * =Heald, G.H.= (Editor, Life and Health) I am both in favor of, and opposed to Socialism, because Socialism means very many different things. As one man said: Christian Socialism means "all mine is yours," and the other kind means, "all yours is mine." Our present government is partially Socialistic; our public schools, our public roads, our postoffice department, and more and more of our public work is becoming socialized. Another form of Socialism, although not political, is the co-operative bodies seen in the garden suburbs of the cities of England, and the co-operative stores, etc. It seems to me that the cry against capital is not well taken. Turn ten thousand anti-capitalists into a new undeveloped country and let them develop it! The first thing they will require is capital. And after a while if a few of the more energetic ones begin to do things it will be because they have accumulated a little capital. However, I can understand that this capital might be held co-operatively by the laborers as it is in some institutions, rather than by a few. But the present conditions which get a monopoly of franchise on public utilities or a monopoly of natural wealth of the country, whether of mines or forests or water power, is all wrong. We need more of public ownership, less of larger corporations fattening their stockholders by squeezing the prices to the highest limit and wages to the lowest limit. * * * * * =Kelly, Robert Lincoln.= (President, Earlham College.) I feel that the tendency in our country is toward a more Socialistic form of government and with this movement I am in entire sympathy. This means, however, that these tendencies will be incorporated in our government by the process of evolution and not by that of revolution. In other words, that we will hammer these questions out one at a time and adopt them only as they are proven to be practicable in every-day experience. Since Socialism presumably stands for an extensive program which is to be adopted in toto and without due deliberation and tentative experience I cannot become a member of that party. Let those who wish to advocate the cause in this wholesale way, have every possible opportunity of doing so, but recognize that as a matter of fact, forms of government and even public opinion are changed very slowly with the process of the sun. * * * * * =Ladd, George Trumbull.= (University Professor.) I believe in the spiritual unity of the race, and in the duty of nations and individuals to treat each other like brothers, and sons of a common father. I detest all class hatred and all arrangements, political and social, for securing and promoting class interests at the expense of the public welfare. I am the enemy of all systems of "bossism," or monopoly, or control by other than natural laws and moral principles, of the opportunities of the individual to labor, to enjoy the fruits of labor, and to develop himself and help others. Thus far I am a Socialist. I do not believe, however, in any of the definite schemes for equalizing the rewards of labor, irrespective of the merits of the laborer and the excellence of his work. I do not believe in communism, either in the sharing by compulsion, of goods; and certainly not, in the sharing of the privileges of the family life. Nor do I think that the control of government, whether of city, State or Nation, by any Socialistic Party, would, in the large and the long run, improve matters. I fear it would make bad matters even worse. The only way to improve society is to make the men and women who compose society, intellectually, morally, and religiously, better men and better women. I want, first of all, to be improved in all these ways myself; and next, to help the next fellow to improve himself. * * * * * =Adams, Thomas Sewall.= (Professor Political Economy.) If Socialism means primarily the ownership and operation by the State of the principal industries, I am opposed to it because a long experience in State and public work convinces me that public work is, comparatively speaking, inefficient work. The cause of this inefficiency lies deep in the nature of democratic government and will never, I think, be removed. The individual public servant is neither lazy nor inferior, but the conditions of his work make it impossible to get the same results as he could in private employment. The spirit of public work is more equitable. Greater consideration is given to the humane factors. More of this spirit will have to be injected into private industry. The result will be not public industry, but private industry animated by a new ideal and conducted under the guardianship of the State rather than by the State. Industrial life is not simple; it is very complex, and no simple solution is to be looked for. The quasi-public industry managed by private individuals, deeply impressed with the feeling of their public trusteeship, is the ultimate ideal. With the deeper and better spirit of Socialism I am altogether in accord. Most Socialists think that the strength of the movement lies in their tactics; their specific provisions for government ownership; their philosophical doctrines; but the contrary is the truth and the one enduring thing in Socialism is the religious zeal and high ideals of its best exponents. * * * * * =Linn, Walter R.= (Editor Harrisburg Telegraph, Harrisburg, Pa.) I am opposed to Socialism because the progress of the world has been made under individualism. Any system which has a tendency to discourage or repress personal initiative is a system which can produce no good to the country. * * * * * =Terhune, William Lewis.= (Publisher.) Socialism, to my mind, means the overthrow of all the advancements of the past one hundred years or more. The man of brains and energy would stand but little show or encouragement under a government controlled by Socialism or Socialistic ideas. I believe that, the man who is capable of making his way in this world, is smart and energetic enough to build up a business and with it a fortune, is entitled to all he can possess through honest efforts. I do not believe in government ownership of public utilities, but I do believe in a controlling power of the government to in some way supervise these corporations so they will be obliged to keep in the path of honesty in all their transactions with the public. Individual freedom is the watchword of our great country. When we lose that, we lose ourselves. * * * * * =Scheffauer, Herman.= (Author.) I am opposed to theoretical Socialism wherever it threatens to interfere with the full and unhampered development of the individual or to lower his worth. Being a mass philosophy, Socialism must logically strive to sacrifice the individual to that mass. I hold that it is only through the channels of a free, noble, self-restrained individualism that man may naturally attain to his supreme development in happiness, culture and power. Theoretical Socialism is a splendid fallacy that shines like a truth when contemplated beneath the skies of the future already reddened by the sanguine color of the creed. But it is a fallacy based upon another fallacy, that of the virtue in the sovereign mass or democracy, which in turn is based upon certain fallacies of Christianity. These systems of the multitude amount to mob rule, and will never evolve the highest type of men--the intellectual and moral samurai of whom H.C. Wells has written, the rulers by nature, training and fitness, the men who, in Nietzsche's phrase, are to surpass men. In practical matters Socialism may be said to be already operative, and largely operative for good. It is correcting many ancient evils and bringing a certain degree of order and balance into the world. That is its chief value--an industrial and economic one. It is a means and not an end. For in the last analysis of human things it will be undone by that iron fiat which decrees that every man must be an end in himself and unto himself. * * * * * =Gaines, Clement Carrington.= (President Eastman College.) I am opposed to Socialism because I believe that Socialism is an impracticable form of governmental administration, and therefore must, if it should ever come to power, fail as a system of government. In support of this view I suggest the following considerations: First: A free democratic government, a government by the people in any form, must necessarily be controlled by parties. Second: Parties are held together by the interests of the organization. These interests in the end are opposed to the interests of the people in that any party must support itself by what its organizers and promoters can get out of the people, which is another way of saying that every party is held together by the cohesion of public plunder, the private interests of its organizers. That policy is always most popular with the party in power which promises most profit to its leaders. The leaders are controlled by the policy which seems to serve their interests best, and not by the principles of righteousness or altruism. Third: Hence in the administration of Government by a party the success and policy of the party must dominate its action rather than the interests of the people whom the party would govern, because this success is the thing most necessary to the continuance of the party in power. The effort to succeed leads to corruption notwithstanding the apparent purity of its principles or promises of its platform. Conclusion: Since the three principles enunciated seem to be the fundamental law of party government, and since the principles of Socialism are in contravention of this fundamental law, it is believed that Socialism cannot permanently succeed as a method of party government. It is further believed that the principles of Socialism are in contravention of the natural law that no creature may advance in any direction except by the law of competition of all its vital forces, principles, and powers. Mr. Darwin calls this "the law of natural selection and survival of the fittest," and says conclusively that this natural law governs and directs the development and progress of the material world, and that it applies with equal force to man's nature, and to his progress as a member of the moral, social, industrial, and political world. * * * * * =Leckie, A.S.= (Editor, The Joliet Herald, Joliet, Ill.) We may oppose or improve human legislative enactments, but not natural laws. Socialism, in its logical perfection, would attempt this. The species improves and advances only through the struggle for existence (or preferment). The law of the survival or supremacy of the fittest is immutable in natural conditions. Remove from the petted squirrels the necessity of providing their winter's food, and they become unable to do so when the necessity again arises. Ambition in competition, carried if you will, to the extreme of cupidity and greed, are instincts as natural as that of self-preservation. Without the incentive of reward in preferment, power or wealth, we should have no progress. Any enforced leveling of talent or ability would curb and eventually stop human advancement. Possibly we are advancing too fast; the advance of Socialism may be a working of the natural law of compensation, destined to put a brake upon the wheels of a too rapid progress. * * * * * =Field, Walter Taylor.= (Author.) I am opposed to such Socialism as emphasizes "class-consciousness" and the entire abolition of private property. True Socialism should make absolutely no distinction between classes, but should hold mankind as a common brotherhood. I am opposed to the entire abolition of private property as removing one of the strongest incentives to labor and progress. We need social reform badly enough, and a check upon inheritances and large accumulations of private property, but I believe the remedy for most of our social evils lies in encouraging the wage-earners to become small farmers and small artisans and in protecting them by stringent legislation against the encroachments of large business. I am heartily in sympathy with the spirit of Socialism, but not with its methods. * * * * * =Barstow, George Eames.= (Business man.) I am opposed to Socialism, first, because the All-Wise One in His inscrutable wisdom in arranging for His people for occupying the promised land, provided that every man should go and take up the land alloted to him. Second: The Creator knew what would best contribute to the social and economic order of humanity in all time to come. Third: Socialism means a community of property. I am opposed to such a social and economic order, believing same to be against the public welfare. Society has now too many drones, lazy and idle from choice. Such class would be largely increased under Socialism. The subject's agitation reveals such product. Fourth: What is needed in these days is an increase of social justice, not social injustice. Fifth: A man should enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and can only do this as he is at liberty, under wise laws, to exercise his full capacity for himself; leaving to himself the right to contribute to others as he may choose. Sixth: There are some vital questions to be solved for the betterment of the people at large, concerning social, economic and industrial order; but, their best solution will not be found in Socialism. Many noble and patriotic men and women are devoting money and life to these ends, and will in due time accomplish, through wise laws, the purposes for which they strive and which will be for the healing and uplifting of the peoples of the earth. * * * * * =Lee, Elmer.= (Physician, Author, Inventor, Lecturer and Editor.) Life is experimental and whatever man wishes to try in the hope of bettering his condition will neither hurt him in the long run, and probably not better him. Each new generation of men is largely unmindful of the experiments of men in the past, and feels that it has a solution for human trial, and disappointment, only to find when it is put to the test that, after all, it will not accomplish what was expected from it. Man banded together for a common interest, will not go far before he meets reverse and disappointment; he will fall out with his associate and quarrel with him; differences will arise which will lead to dissatisfaction and dissolution of the plan. Man is primarily selfish and imaginative, and seeks to operate independently and erect for himself, his family and his affairs. Man has so much power and invention that he will not long consent to remain within any set limitation; he will break out and will prefer to fight his own battle. Anything like common interest and division of labor, under Socialism or whatever name, will become unsatisfactory, if not to the generation which starts it, certainly to its children. Any system will suffice, were man always in health, intelligent in the selection of food and in the care of his body. Were man willing and able to practice self-control, to avoid self-debasing habits, to abstain from tobacco, liquor, drugs and venery, it would not much matter what form of government prevailed. Social form is less important than individual conduct. It will always be a struggle for man to survive the perils of life, such as temptation, indulgence, weakness, accident and disease. The test is personal and continuous, and cannot be shifted to the shoulder of society. * * * * * =Brownscombe, Jennie.= (Artist.) I believe in a more rigid enforcement of our existing laws. They are a precious heritage from our forefathers; a resumé of the wisdom of the ages. Where time and altered conditions have made it desirable to amend them, they should be amended by the wisest and purest statesmen of our land, guided by the trend of public thought. I believe that the great need of this time and of all times, is not Socialism, better laws or absence of law, but capable, industrious and honest men and women, who strive to abide by and enforce the Golden Rule in all matters of character and conduct. "Our duties are of more consequence to us than are our rights." * * * * * =Lightner, Ezra Wilberforce.= (Journalist) Some of the most profound of thinkers, some of the grandest of men and women, have written in regard to Socialism; some on the one side and some on the other. If in the mind of the majority of the most earnest and thoughtful and reasoning men and women the majority shall one day say that what is called Socialism is a stride in the process of slow evolution which has brought us to the measure of civilization now recognized, then whether or not we are yet living when that time comes, we must accept that condition as one of the processes of evolution and try the experiment. I don't believe that at this time anybody can say clearly whether he or she is a Socialist except in vague theory. There are too many bases for doubt, as there are in regard to the finality of the political systems in active operation today. One thing that can't be doubted is that from the date of the Republic of Plato, the Utopia of Moore, the writing of Jean Jacques Rousseau, the "Voyage of Icaria" of Etienne Capet, the essays of Proudhon, St. Simon, Fourier, "Das Kapital" of Karl Marx, the tremendous labor of Liebknecht, Bebel, Lassalle, Singer, William Morris, the English artist, poet and philosopher, John Ruskin, and a host of others, the increase in numbers of the supporters of the Socialist ideal has been one of the most remarkable of economical evangels. Yet with all this I think that a long process of educational work would be necessary to prepare mankind for the experiment, if it be possible to make it a success. William Morris, before he had declared outright for Socialism, wrote his "Earthly Paradise:" "Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time. Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?" Every thoughtful person recognizes the crooked, even though he may himself be a crook: and even many of the crooks, and certainly all the rest of us, desire with our might to make the crooked straight and to have an "Earthly Paradise," and to hope that "At last, far off, some good will come to all." We are groping, and to grope earnestly and vigorously is to find. We shall find; we must find; or chaos will come again. It must not be the invention of mere dreamers, however. In this age it is the practical business man who builds for permanency. * * * * * =Cutler, James Elbert.= (University Professor.) I am opposed to Socialism as a method or system because of the impracticability of any particular program thus far formulated by Socialists. In the formulation of a Socialist program of action some important principle of social progress is invariably either wholly disregarded or treated superficially by general statements which lack point and application. The inability of the Socialists to agree among themselves as regards a program or plan of action plainly indicates the limitations under which Socialism labors in this respect. (See also "Why I am in Favor of Socialism.") * * * * * =Leveroni, Frank.= (Counsellor at Law.) I am opposed to Socialism because-- First: It is pure theory. Second: It is impractical. Third: It leads to nowhere. Fourth: It tends to destroy and it does not supply anything in the place of that which it destroys. Fifth: It is opposed to Christianity and to Christian marriage and to settled economic theory. Sixth: Its theory of distribution of property is fallacious as it overlooks human nature, it takes away the initiative in man, it compels the community to provide for the laggard and drone. Seventh: It aims to destroy the family which is the center of civilization, it aims to place the education and training of children directly in the care of the State, which would be detrimental to the home life and love that ought to exist between parent and child. * * * * * =Anderson, Rasmus Bjorn.= (Editor, College Professor and Translator.) I am opposed to Socialism on account of its attitude to Christianity. Its attitude to Christianity manifests itself in the fact that it is not only a political party, but also a theory or philosophy of life. Its principles and aims are wholly materialistic. It makes earthly happiness the main purpose and highest ideal to be attained. I have in mind Socialism as taught by its great promotor, Karl Marx. Socialism refuses to consider anything beyond the grave It deals exclusively with things pertaining to this life. It refuses to answer, nay, it insists that it is not necessary to answer the great question to every soul: If a man dies, shall he still live? It says we do not know and it is not worth while investigating. Denying all connection between morals and religion, it builds its moral life on a weaker foundation than that built on Christianity. Socialism is selfish. * * * * * =Ferguson, Charles.= (Author, Editorial Staff, New York American.) I am not in favor of Socialism because Socialism is a state of mind in which men are absorbed in the problem of the division of goods. The true and wholesome preoccupation of mankind should be the creation of goods. It is of course important to divide right, but the right division cannot possibly be worked out until the problem is envisaged from the engineering point of view. The tools must belong to those who can use them. And the genius of our redemption requires that all wealth shall be made fecund or reproductive--that there shall no longer be any dead wealth--that there shall be nothing but capital and tools. * * * * * =Baxter, James Phinney.= (Author and Ex-Mayor of Portland, Me.) There is an unchristian Socialism which embodies the spirit of an utterance all too familiar: "Do to thy neighbor as he does unto you." It is impatient and intolerant of restraint, and, ignoring individual freedom, would resort to force to compel men to obey its arbitrary commands; indeed, it would destroy the fabric of society in the vain hope of rebuilding a perfect structure upon its ruins. What this spirit would do for the world may be read in the pages of history. To achieve its ends, it would employ cruel agencies, and the structure it would rear would partake of its own imperfections, for the unchangeable law is, men are known by their works. May God deliver us from this kind of Socialism, and, in His good time, establish that, the beauty of which He sent Christ to reveal to men. (See also "Why I am in Favor of Socialism.") * * * * * =Emerson, Samuel Franklin.= (College Professor.) I am opposed to Socialism because it is a mechanical reconstruction of society, instead of an organic development. Because it is an economic readjustment of society instead of morals. Because it is based upon the essential antagonism of social classes instead of essential co-operation. Because it is a passing reaction against the present transitional system of industry. Because it fails to recognize the importance of the individual in all social movements. Because it would result in a dead social uniformity, instead of a rich social variety. Because its ideal is in reality drawn from the mediaeval and superseded social past, instead of evaluating the forces of the present. Because it is saturated with a false and vicious economic philosophy. Because it misconceives the social function of war, national rivalry and industrial conflict in the social economy. Because it fails to evaluate the spiritual forces of society. * * * * * =Ellis, George Washington.= (Lawyer and Writer.) In so far as Socialistic theory is concerned, beginning in Plato's "Republic," reasserted in Sir Thomas Moore's "Utopia," embraced in the latter part of the eighteenth century in Europe by Fourier, Baboeuf, Saint Simon and Cabet, and later in the United States by Greeley, Dana and Hawthorne, I regard as important contributions to literature, whose chief value is inspirational rather than practical. These theories involve such complete reconstruction and reorganization of society that their attainment are placed far into the indefinite future, yet their value as social and intellectual ideals serve a very useful purpose in human progress. I accept in part what is called Christian Socialism in so far as it desires to bring more and more the Christ-spirit to bear in the commercial and business world, but I am opposed to the substitution of co-operation for competition in the present state of human development. Co-operation may be all right when society has slowly developed by evolution up to the point where competition is not needed to keep economic and social conditions on a natural and normal basis, but under present conditions it leads to economic monopoly and social poverty, as a few selfish and commanding industrial spirits get control of the whole plan of co-operation to the detriment of the great masses. To prevent this situation competition is the greatest natural check on monopoly and one of the best protections of the people. The advocates of this phase of Socialism I think are correct in their contention that Socialistic schemes will not solve the labor problems without that inner development through education and applied Christianity, yet I submit that they are in error when they insist that the powers of the government should not be invoked except to remove hostile legislation. I heartily concur in Professional Socialism, called by Professor Ely, Socialism of the Chair. It repudiates the doctrine of laisser-faire, and in the study of political economy adopts the historical method. It not only repudiates the laisser-faire principle, but it demands the aid of the State to bring about a better distribution of the products of labor and capital. It especially desires that the laborer should have a larger share in the products of his toil, and helps the solution of the labor problems through the assistance of the government in factory acts, sanitary measures, public parks, savings-banks, shortening of the hours of labor, and other similar measures designed to elevate the laboring people. Such a course I think is more than justified by the present economic and social conditions in the United States. The use of machinery has enormously increased the productive capacity of the laborer for his employer, but his wages have not increased in proportion as they should. Invention and machinery have multiplied many times the power of labor, but capital takes practically all of the product, while the lot of labor is little better than in the hand-made era. By this I do not mean to even imply that higher wages would solve the labor problem, and while it would help some, I wish here little more than to call attention to this abnormal phase of the economic situations in the more modern States. I am opposed to what is known as the Socialism of today which had its beginning in Frederick Engels and Karl Marx during the last century and which is now established in both Europe and America, and whose propaganda has tended to meet with favor and increasing acceptance during recent years. The central fact of this school is that the means of production and distribution should be owned by the community and administered by it. Speaking of Socialism, John Stuart Mill said: "What is characteristic of Socialism is the joint ownership by all the members of the community of the instruments and means of production; which carries with it the consequence that the division of the produce among the body of owners must be a public act performed according to rules laid down by the community." In an address by J.W. MacKail, Socialism is defined as having two principal divisions, economic and moral; and he sums them up thus: "On the economic side, its central idea is the communization, the placing in the hands of the community, under the common control and for the common good, of the wealth which the community has inherited or created, and of the machinery for preserving and increasing that wealth." "On its moral side, its central idea is the brotherhood of mankind, and the unimpeded exercise by all of the highest functions and faculties of which their nature is capable." The moral side of Socialism as expressed by MacKail is sound and should be more generally adopted by all enlightened peoples, for it is essentially Christian in its nature and influence. But, I cannot bring myself to accept, under my present information and experience, the economic side of Socialism as defined by either MacKail or Mill. My reasons for its rejection are many, but I will only give one or two of the most important. In the first place, I think that this school of social propagandists have located what they call the social disease in the wrong portion of the social body, and thus are offering the wrong remedy. The idea of the ownership of the means of production and distribution carries with it too largely the implication that poverty is the chief, if not the principal, cause of all our social and economic ills. I think this is a mistake, and too much emphasis is thus placed on this phase of our social troubles. As a matter of fact, society suffers quite as much, if not more, from ignorance, crime, intemperance, vice, immorality, etc. This is more than confirmed by the students of sociology. And inasmuch as this is the case, the crux of our social problems is much more than economic, and any social program which therefore, is purely economic will hardly meet our social requirements. No doubt poverty is a great source of social misery, but the greatest social wrongs are not confined to the very poor. More money per capita will doubtless register some beneficial effects in most of the other departments of society, and this is likewise true of more per capita intelligence, morality, practical Christianity, culture, etc. My opinion is that these social evils can only be removed finally by the development of the individual on the one hand and society at large on the other, through the intellectual, moral, religious and economic forces of society. All the social forces, in the largest sense, must change and develop human nature, in culture and civilization, and I cannot believe that the mechanical change of private ownership to community ownership of the means of production and distribution, would be sufficient to cure the ills of society or put them on the road to quicker cure, than they are at present. Moreover, there is danger in the adoption of Socialism in the present state of individual and societary development. In the United States the rise and development of American industry discloses the fact that in most all the lines of business, capital has been organized and so concentrated as not only to crush out competition, but to create such a monopoly as to enable the stockholders and directors to fix such prices to consumers as the big corporations and trusts deem advisable from time to time, not in accord with the laws of supply and demand or the cost of production, but in accord with their desire and ability to command the tribute of the consuming public. The representatives of these large interests, themselves, have combined and through liberal contributions and the influence of their industrial and economic importance have built up a system of political bosses, in complete control of the two dominant old parties, and both the bosses and the interests have united to pervert the local and national governments in the United States from their true functions in the interests of the people to advance and promote the welfare of special interests to the neglect and detriment of the great majority. And thus a few leaders in American industry have secured possession of the great natural resources of the country, have obtained a monopoly of the business opportunities of the great American market, and have utilized the power of the governments to protect their unfair and unjust advantages, in the freest and greatest democracy of the world. The contest to overthrow this sinister and selfish government of the few is exceedingly difficult, because of the minor and supposed divergent and individual interests, social and political divisions of class and party prejudice, and a general intellectual inability of the mass to fully grasp the importance of the problems involved, so essential to that united action on the part of the people, necessary to meet the situation. The people now have the means at their command to have the government administered in their interests and to control those industrial concerns which have proved a menace to the general welfare, but they must be educated as to how to use them. And to place the means of production and distribution into the hands of the community, in the present development of society, is simply to make it easier for the few to exploit the many, and it is especially dangerous because the leaders would have sufficient numbers in their employ and administration to make it next to impossible to dislodge one set when once in power, without a resort to arms and revolution. The example of the Federal office-holders in the great majority in voting and using their influence to protect their individual positions, without regard to the larger interest of the public, is such as to make all patriotic citizens acquainted with the facts wish and desire that their numbers be not increased to any such extent as would be the case in the community ownership of industry and business. The history of American large cities, shows for the most part, that these urban governments are controlled and administered by one set of selfish political leaders after another, whose power is predicated upon party machinery, held together mainly by party patronage, favoritism and public graft. And thus to put industry and business under the administration of the government is to more than multiply the dangers to the public of those industrial and political leaders, who have made representative government in the United States little more than a mere form. Economic Socialism would not only place too large a machine at the disposal of political leaders to be used against the people, but it would stifle initiation and tend too much to hold society in a static condition. Under individual ownership of industry and business, under the laws of legitimate competition, initiation is encouraged by offering increasing rewards to those who adopt new methods and invent new things to advance human welfare by lightening the burdens of life and labor. The spirit of rivalry and competition maintains a constant and steady demand for the best that can be produced for the people in all lines of industry and business, which is among the strongest incentives to new thought and invention. Man is naturally a conservative being and without some stimulant will be content with conditions as they came down to him from the past. It is true that in spite of economic incentives there will appear now and then an individual who is inspired by higher motives for the advancement of the race, but the great masses of the people still require the power and pleasure of possession, individual ownership, and the more material rewards of industry and business. And so it appears to me that Socialism would tend to bring society to a stagnant condition, arrest human progress most seriously, and discourage in the future those human benefactors, who, in the past have blazed the way for the marvelous development and advancement of modern society. Finally, after waiving many other objections to Socialism, it might be well to observe that in the present state of society, if we were to inaugurate the industrial Socialistic regime, we would have still with us all the great social problems to be solved, perhaps in different form, with some additional ones with entirely new features and surrounded with new conditions. To my mind the different social problems constitute the problem of civilization and through the coming ages must be worked out together. All devices and schemes which do not include the individual development and social progress at large are so much wasted efforts that might be better spent. The final and ultimate solution of all human problems is necessarily educational and will have the best results if society is permitted to evolve in its natural and normal way. All the uplifting forces of society must be utilized to develop the social wants and economic demands of the masses, through increased social and industrial opportunities. The people must be brought into contact with an increasing variety of economic and social phenomena, carrying with the process an ever growing demand for the consumption of the best there is in life and mind. And until the perfection of human nature, every age will have its problems and its vices, in spite of what we think and do. * * * * * =Allen, John Robert.= (University Professor, Minister and Author.) I am opposed to Socialism because I believe it will have an injurious effect upon the development of individual power and character; since it will withdraw the stimulus to achievement by destroying its rewards, and since it will weaken the attractiveness of virtue by trying to destroy the pains that follow vice. I do not believe that Socialism will develop great individuals like the present conditions even, unjust as many things now are. I am opposed to Socialism on the other hand because I believe it will be deleterious to society as a whole, because it will eliminate the entrepreneur at the top, and I can conceive of no way whereby at the bottom of the social ladder it can have the disgusting and unpleasant work done, which, however, must be done for the well-being of the race. I am for "applied Christianity," which in common with Socialism denies the right to use property merely for personal aggrandizement and pleasure. * * * * * =Giering, Eugene T.= (Editor, The Wilkesbarre, Pa., Record.) I am opposed to Socialism because I believe the discontent which it represents can be very appreciably lessened, if not altogether removed, by other means that have not yet been given sufficient trial. Socialism appears to be striving after something unattainable under such a form of government as we deem to be the safest and best. It cannot be made to work out satisfactorily until human nature has changed, and we are not yet near the millennium. Theoretically it is appealing. Practically it is hampered by limitations that suggest economic destruction, both of that which is good and of that which is bad. We are now in the midst of an evolution. The higher moral standards now in the process of establishment should suffice. * * * * * "_Why I Am in Favor of Socialism_" _is a publication similar to this, and the price is also the same: paper, fifty cents; cloth, seventy-five cents. It will be sent to any address on receipt of the above mentioned price. Address: Edward Silvin, Sacramento, California._ * * * * * +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Typographical errors corrected in text: | | | | Page 12: advoted replaced with advocated | | Page 21: monarchal replaced with monarchial | | Page 43: Jean Jacque Rousseau replaced with | | Jean Jacques Rousseau | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------+ * * * * * 
37290	----	* * * * * +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Note: | | | | Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has | | been preserved. | | | | Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For | | a complete list, please see the end of this document. | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------+ * * * * * _SOCIAL STUDIES SERIES_ (_VOLUME TWO_). THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1921 [_All rights reserved._] THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX BY M. BEER _Author of "A History of British Socialism"_ TRANSLATED BY T.C. PARTINGTON AND H.J. STENNING, AND REVISED BY THE AUTHOR NATIONAL LABOUR PRESS, LIMITED, LONDON: 8/9, JOHNSON'S COURT, E.C. 4 MANCHESTER: 30, BLACKFRIARS STREET CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAGE INTRODUCTION: I. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MARX ix. II. THE WORK OF HEGEL xiii. I. PARENTS AND FRIENDS: I. MARX'S APPRENTICESHIP 1 II. STUDENT 3 III. BEGINNINGS OF PUBLIC LIFE 11 II. THE FORMATIVE PERIOD OF MARXISM: I. THE FRANCO-GERMAN YEAR BOOKS 15 II. FRIENDSHIP WITH FRIEDRICH ENGELS 19 III. CONTROVERSY WITH BAUER AND RUGE 21 IV. CONTROVERSY WITH PROUDHON 26 III. YEARS OF AGITATION AND VARYING FORTUNES: I. THE REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT OF THE FORTIES 39 II. THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO 41 III. THE REVOLUTION OF 1848 48 IV. DAYS OF CLOUD AND SUNSHINE IN LONDON 51 V. THE INTERNATIONAL 54 VI. THE PARIS COMMUNE 59 VII. THE EVENING OF LIFE 60 IV. THE MARXIAN SYSTEM: I. THE MATERIALIST CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 65 II. CLASSES, CLASS STRUGGLES AND CLASS-CONSCIOUSNESS 78 III. THE ROLE OF THE LABOUR MOVEMENT AND THE PROLETARIAN DICTATORSHIP 84 IV. OUTLINES OF THE ECONOMIC DOCTRINES 93 V. CONCLUSION 125 INTRODUCTION. I. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MARX. Karl Marx belongs to the ranks of those philosophical and sociological thinkers who throw potent thought-ferment into the world, and set in motion the masses of mankind. They awaken slumbering doubts and contradictions. They proclaim new modes of thought, new social forms. Their systems may sooner or later become obsolete, and the ruthless march of time may finally overthrow their intellectual edifice; meanwhile, however, they stimulate into activity the minds of countless men, inflame countless human hearts, imprinting on them characteristics which are transmitted to coming generations. This is the grandest and finest work to which any human being can be called. Because these thinkers have lived and worked, their contemporaries and successors think more clearly, feel more intensely, and are richer in knowledge and self-consciousness. The history of philosophy and of social science is comprised in such systems and generalisations. They are the index to the annals of mankind. None of these systems is complete, none comprehends all human motives and capacities, none exhausts all the forces and currents of human society. They all express only fragmentary truths, which, however, become effective and achieve success because they are shining lights amidst the intellectual confusion of the generation which gives them birth, bringing it to a consciousness of the questions of the time, rendering its further development less difficult, and enabling its strongest spirits to stand erect, with fixity of purpose, in critical periods. Hegel expresses himself in a similar sense where he remarks: "When the refutation of a philosophy is spoken of, this is usually meant in an abstract negative (completely destructive) sense, so that the confuted philosophy has no longer any validity whatever, and is set aside and done with. If this be so, the study of the history of philosophy must be regarded as a thoroughly depressing business, seeing that this study teaches that every system of philosophy which has arisen in the course of time has found its refutation. But if it is as good as granted that every philosophy has been refuted, yet at the same time it must be also asserted that no philosophy has been refuted, nor ever can be refuted ... for every philosophical system is to be considered as the presentation of a particular moment or a particular stage in the evolutionary process of the idea. The history of philosophy ... is not, in its totality, a gallery of the aberrations of the human intellect, but is rather to be compared to a pantheon of deities." --("Hegel, Encyclopædia," vol. 1, section 86, note 2.) What Hegel says here about philosophy is true also of systems of social science, and styles and forms in art. The displacement of one system by another reflects the historical sequence of the various stages of social evolution. The characteristic which is common to all these systems is their vitality. In spite of their defects and difficulties there surges through them a living spirit from the influence of which contemporaries cannot escape. Opponents may put themselves to endless trouble to contradict such systems, and show up their shortcomings and inconsistencies, and yet, with all their pains, they do not succeed in attaining their object; their logical sapping and mining, their passionate attacks break against the vital spirit which the creative genius has breathed into his work. The deep impression made on us by this vitality is one of the main factors in the formation of our judgments upon scientific and artistic achievements. Mere formal perfection and beauty through which the life of the times does not throb can never create this impression. Walter Scott, who was often reproached with defects and inconsistencies in the construction of his novels, once made answer with the following anecdote: A French sculptor, who had taken up his abode in Rome, was fond of taking to the Capitol his artistically inclined countrymen who were travelling in Italy, to show them the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, on which occasions he was at pains to demonstrate that the horse was defectively modelled, and did not meet the requirements of anatomy. After one of these criticisms a visitor urged him to prove his case in a concrete form by constructing a horse on correct artistic principles. The critic set to work, and when, after the lapse of a year, his friends were again visiting Rome, exhibited to them his horse. It was anatomically perfect. Proudly he had it brought to the Capitol, in order to compare both productions and so celebrate his triumph. Quite absorbed in his critical comparison, the French sculptor after a while gave way to a burst of genuine artistic feeling, which caused him pathetically to exclaim, "_Et pourtant cette bête-là est vivante, et la mienne est morte!_" (And yet that animal is alive, while mine is dead.) Quite a number of Marxian critics find themselves in the same position as the hypercritical French sculptor. Their formal and logically complete economic doctrines and systems of historical philosophy, provided with pedantically correct details and definitions, remain dead and ineffective. They do not put us into contact with the relations of the time, whereas Marx has bequeathed both to the educated and the uneducated, to his readers and to non-readers, a multitude of ideas and expressions relating to social science, which have become current throughout the whole world. In Petrograd and in Tokio, in Berlin and in London, in Paris and in Pittsburg, people speak of capital and of the capitalist system, of means of production and of the class struggle; of Reform and Revolution; of the Proletariat and of Socialism. The extent of Marx's influence is shown by the economic explanation of the world-war, which is even accepted by the most decided opponents of the materialist conception of history. A generation after Marx's death, the sovereignty of Capital shrinks visibly, works' committees and shops' stewards interfere with the productive processes, Socialists and Labour men fill the Parliaments, working men and their representatives rise to or take by storm the highest position of political power in States and Empires. Many of their triumphs would scarcely have received Marx's approval. His theory, white-hot with indomitable passion, demanded that the new tables of the Law should be given to men amidst thunder and lightning. But still the essential thing is that the proletariat is loosening its bonds, even if it does not burst them noisily asunder. We find ourselves in the first stages of the evolution of Socialist society. Through whatever forms this evolutionary process may pass in its logical development, this much is certain, that only by active thought on the part of Socialists and by the loyal co-operation of the workers can it be brought to its perfection. We are already using Hegelian expressions, and must therefore pause here to note briefly Hegel's contribution to the subject. Without a knowledge of this, no one can be in a position to appreciate the important factors in the life and influence of Marx, or even to understand his first intellectual achievements during his student years. II. THE WORK OF HEGEL. Until towards the end of the eighteenth century, learned and unlearned, philosophers and philistines, had some such general notions as the following. The world has either been created, or it has existed from eternity. It is either governed by a personal, supernatural god or universal spirit, or it is kept going by nature, like some delicate machine. It exists in accordance with eternal laws, and is perfect, ordained to fulfil some design, and constant. The things and beings which are found in it are divided into kinds, species and classes. All is fixed, constant and eternal. Things and beings are contiguous in space, and succeed one another in time, as they have done ever since time was. It is the same with the incidents and events of the world and of mankind. Such common proverbs as "There is nothing new under the sun" and "History repeats itself" are but the popular expression of this view. Correlative to this philosophy was Logic, or the science of the laws of thinking (Greek logos--reason, word). It taught how men should use their reason, how they should express themselves reasonably, how concepts arise (in what manner, for example, the human understanding arrived at the concepts stone, tree, animal, man, virtue, vice, etc.); further, how such concepts are combined into judgments (propositions), and finally, how conclusions are drawn from these judgments. This logic exhibited the intellectual processes of the human mind. It was founded by the Greek philosopher, Aristotle (384 to 322 B.C.), and remained essentially unaltered until the beginning of the nineteenth century, in the same way as our whole conception of the universe remained unchanged. This science of human intellectual processes was based on three original laws of thought, which best characterise it. Just as an examining magistrate looks a prisoner in the face, and identifies him, so that uncertainty and contradiction may be avoided, so this logic began by establishing the identity of the conceptions with which it was to operate. Consequently, it established as the first law of thought the Principle of Identity, which runs as follows: A = A, i.e., each thing, each being, is like itself; it possesses an individuality of its own, peculiar to itself. To put it more clearly, this principle affirms that the earth is the earth, a state is a state, Capital is Capital, Socialism is Socialism. From this proceeds the second law of thought, the Principle of Contradiction. A cannot be A and not--A. Or following our example given above, the earth cannot be the earth and a ball of fire; a State cannot be a State and an Anarchy; Capital cannot be Capital and Poverty; Socialism cannot be Socialism and Individualism. Therefore there must be no contradictions, for a thing which contradicts itself is nonsense; where, however, this occurs either in actuality or in thought, it is only an accidental exception to the rule, as it were, or a passing and irregular phenomenon. From this law of thought follows directly the third, viz., the Principle of the Excluded Middle. A thing is either A or non-A; there is no middle term. Or, according to our example, the earth is either a solid body, or, if it is not solid, it is no earth; there is no middle term. The State is either monarchical, or, if it is not monarchical, it is no State. Capitalism is either oppressive, or altogether not Capitalism. Socialism is either revolutionary, or not Socialism at all; there is no middle term. (Socialism is either reformist, or not Socialism at all; there is no middle term.) With these three intellectual laws of identity, of contradiction, and of the excluded middle, formal logic begins. It is at once apparent that this logic operates with rigid, constant, unchanging, dogmatic conceptions, something like geometry, which deals with definitely bounded spatial forms. Such was the rationale of the old world-philosophy. By the beginning of the nineteenth century a new conception of the world had begun to make its way. The world, as we see it, or get to know it from books, was neither created, nor has it existed from time immemorial, but has developed in the course of uncounted thousands of years, and is still in process of development. It has traversed a whole series of changes, transformations, and catastrophes. The earth was a gaseous mass, then a ball of fire; the species and classes of things and beings which exist on the earth have partly arisen by gradual transition from one sort into another, and partly made their appearance as a result of sudden changes. And in human history it is the same as in nature; the form and significance of the family, of the State, of production, of religion, of law, etc., are subjected to a process of development. All things are in flux, in a state of becoming, of arising and disappearing. There is nothing rigid, constant, unchanging in the Cosmos. In view of the new conception, the old formal logic could no longer satisfy the intellect; it could not adequately deal with things in a state of evolution. In ever-increasing measure it became impossible for the thinker to work with hard and fast conceptions. From the beginning of the nineteenth century a new logic was sought, and it was G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) who made a comprehensive and thoroughly painstaking endeavour to formulate a new logic in accordance with the universal process of evolution. This task appeared to him to be the more urgent, as his whole philosophy aimed at bringing thought and being, reason and the universe, into the closest connection and agreement, dealing with them as inseparable from each other, regarding them as identical, and representing the universe as the gradual embodiment of Reason. "What is reasonable is real; what is real is reasonable." The task of philosophy is to comprehend what is. Every individual is the child of his time. Even philosophy is its time grasped in thought. No individual can overleap his time. (Pref. to Phil, of Law.) It is evident that, in his way, Hegel was no abstract thinker, divorced from actuality, and speculating at large. Rather he set himself to give material content to the abstract and purely ideal, to make it concrete, in fact. The idea without reality, or reality without the idea, seemed to him unthinkable. Accordingly his logic could not deal merely with the laws of thought, but must at the same time take account of the laws of cosmic evolution. Merely to play with the forms of thought, and to fence with ideas, as the old logicians, especially in the Middle Ages, were wont to do, seemed to him a useless, abstract, unreal operation. He, therefore, created a science of thinking, which formulated not only the laws of thought, but also the laws of evolution, albeit, unfortunately, in a language which offered immense difficulties to his readers. The essence of his logic is the dialectic. By dialectic the old Greeks understood the art of discourse and rejoinder, the refutation of an opponent by the destruction of his assertions and proofs, the bringing into relief of the contradictions and antitheses. When examined closely, this art of discussion, in spite of its contradictory and apparently negative (destructive) intellectual work, is seen to be very useful, because, out of the clash of opposing opinions, it brings forth the truth and stimulates to deeper thought. Hegel seized hold of this expression, and named his logical method after it. This is the dialectical method, or the manner of conceiving the things and beings of the universe as in the process of becoming, through the struggle of contradictory elements and their resolution. With its aid, he brings to judgment the three original laws of thought which have already been alluded to. The principle of identity is an abstract, incomplete truth, for it separates a thing from the variety of other things, and its relations to them. Everybody will see this to be true. Let us take the proposition: the earth is the earth. Whoever hears the first three words of this proposition naturally expects that what is predicated of the earth should tell him something which distinguishes the earth from other things. Instead of this, he is offered an empty, hard and fast identity, the dead husk of an idea. If the principle of identity is at best only an incomplete truth, the principles of contradiction and of the excluded middle are complete untruths. Far from making a thought nonsense, contradiction is the very thing which unfolds and develops the thought, and hence, too, the object which it expresses. It is precisely opposition, or antithesis, which sets things in motion, which is the mainspring of evolution, which calls forth and develops the latent forces and powers of being. Had the earth as a fiery, gaseous mass remained in that state, without the contradiction, that is, the cooling and condensation, taking place, then no life would have appeared on it. Had the State remained autocratic, and the contradictory principle, middle-class freedom, been absent, then the life of the State would have become rigid, and the bloom of culture rendered impossible. Had Capitalism remained without its proletarian contradiction, then it would have reverted to an industrial feudalism. It is the contradiction, or the antithesis, which brings into being the whole kingdom of the potentialities and gifts of nature and of humanity. Only when the contradictory begins to reveal itself does evolution to a higher plane of thought and existence begin. It is obvious that we are not concerned here with logical contradictions, which usually arise from unclear thinking or from confusion in the presentation of facts; Hegel, and after him Marx, dealt rather with real contradictions, with antitheses and conflicts, as they arise of themselves in the process of evolution of things and conditions. The thing or the being, against which the contradiction operates, was called by Hegel the Positive, and the contradiction, the antagonistic element, or the antithesis, he called the Negation. As may be seen from our example, this negation is not mere annihilation, not a resolution into nothing, but a clearing away and a building up at the same time; a disappearance and a coming into existence; a movement to a higher stage. Hegel says in this connection: "It has been hitherto one of the rooted prejudices of logic and a commonly accepted belief that the contradiction is not so essential or so inherent a characteristic (in thought and existence) as the identity. Yet in comparison with it the identity is, in truth, but the characteristic of what is simply and directly perceived, of lifeless existence. The contradiction, however, is the source of all movement and life; only in so far as it contains a contradiction can anything have movement, power, and effect." The part played by the contradiction, the antithesis, or the negation very easily escapes a superficial observer. He sees, indeed, that the world is filled with a variety of things, and that where anything is there is also its opposite; e.g., existence--non-existence, cold--heat, light--darkness, mildness--harshness, pleasure--pain, joy--sorrow, riches--poverty, Capital--Labour, life--death, virtue--vice, Idealism--Materialism, Romanticism--Classicism, etc., but superficial thought does not realise that it is faced with a world of contradictions and antitheses; it only knows that the world is full of varied and manifold things. "Only active reason," says Hegel, "reduced the mere multiplicity and diversity of phenomena to antithesis. And only when pushed to this point do the manifold phenomena become active and mutually stimulating, producing the state of negation, which is the very heart-beat of progress and life." Only through their differentiation and unfolding as opposing forces and factors is further progress beyond the antithesis to a higher positive stage made possible. "Where, however," continues Hegel, "the power to develop the contradiction and bring it to a head is lacking, the thing or the being is shattered on the contradiction."--(Hegel, "Science of Logic," Pt. 1, Sec. 2, pp. 66, 69, 70.) This thought of Hegel's is of extraordinary importance for the understanding of Marxism. It is the soul of the Marxian doctrine of the class-struggle, nay, of the whole Marxian system. One may say that Marx is always on the look-out for contradictions within the social development, for wherever the contradiction (antithesis--class struggle) shows itself, there begins, according to Marx-Hegel, the progress to a higher plane.[1] We have now become familiar with two expressions of the dialectical method, the positive and the negation. We have seen the first two stages of the process of growth in thought and in reality. The process is not yet complete. It still requires a third stage. This third step Hegel called the Negation of the Negation. With the continued operation of the negation, a new thing or being comes into existence. To revert to our examples: the complete cooling and condensation of the earth's crust: the rise of the middle-class State: the victory of the Proletariat: these things represent the suspension or the setting aside of the Negation; the contradiction is thus resolved, and a new stage in the process of evolution is reached. The expressions Positive (or affirmation), Negation, and Negation of the Negation, are also known as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. In order to understand this more distinctly, and to visualise it, let us consider an egg. It is something positive, but it contains a germ, which, awakening to life, gradually consumes (i.e., negatives) the contents of the egg. This negation is, however, no mere destruction and annihilation; on the contrary, it results in the germ developing into a living thing. The negation being complete, the chick breaks through the egg shell. This represents the negation of the negation, whereby there has arisen something organically higher than an egg. This mode of procedure in human thinking and in the operations of nature and history Hegel called the dialectical method, or the dialectical process. It is evident that the dialectic is at the same time a method of investigation and a philosophy. Hegel outlines his dialectic in the following words: "The only thing which is required for scientific progress, an elementary principle for the understanding of which one should really strive, is the recognition of the logical principle that the negative is just as much a positive, or that the contradictory does not resolve into nothing, into an abstract nothingness, but actually only into the negation of a special content.... In so far as the resultant, the negation, is a definite negation, it has a content. It is a new conception, but a higher and richer conception than the preceding one; for it has been enriched by the negation or antithesis of this; it therefore contains it and more than contains it, being indeed the synthetic unity of itself and its contrary. In this way the system of concepts has to be formed--and is to be perfected by a continual and purely intellectual process which is independent of outside influences."--(Hegel, "Science of Logic" (German), Bk. I., Introduction.) The dialectical process completes itself not only by gradual transitions, but also by leaps. Hegel remarks: "It has been said that there are no sudden leaps in nature, and it is a common notion that things have their origin through gradual increase or decrease. But there is also such a thing as sudden transformation from quantity into quality. For example, water does not become gradually hard on cooling, becoming first pulpy and ultimately attaining the rigidity of ice, but turns hard at once. If the temperature be lowered to a certain degree, the water is suddenly changed into ice, i.e., the quantity--the number of degrees of temperature--is transformed into quality--a change in the nature of the thing."--("Logic" (German), Pt. 1, Sec. 1, p. 464, Ed. 1841.) Marx handled this method with unsurpassed mastery; with its aid he formulated the laws of the evolution of Socialism. In his earliest works, "The Holy Family" (1844) and the "Poverty of Philosophy" (1847), written when he was formulating his materialist conception of history, as also in his "Capital," it is with the dialectic of Hegel that he investigates these laws. "Proletariat and Riches (later Marx would have said Capital) are antitheses. As such they constitute a whole; both are manifestations of the world of private property. The question to be considered is the specific position which both occupy in the antithesis. To describe them as two sides of a whole is not a sufficient explanation. Private property as private property, as riches, is compelled to preserve its own existence, and along with it that of its antithesis, the Proletariat. Private property satisfied in itself is the positive side of the antithesis. The Proletariat, on the other hand, is obliged, as Proletariat, to abolish itself, and along with it private property, its conditioned antithesis, which makes it the Proletariat. It is a negative side of the antithesis, the internal source of unrest, the disintegrated and disintegrating Proletariat.... Within the antithesis, therefore, the owner of private property is the conservative, and the proletarian is the destructive party. From the former proceeds the action of maintaining the antithesis, from the latter the action of destroying it. From the point of view of its national, economic movement, private property is, of course, continually being driven towards its own dissolution, but only by an unconscious development which is independent of it, and which exists against its will, and is limited by the nature of things; only, that is, by creating the Proletariat as proletariat, poverty conscious of its own physical and spiritual poverty, and demoralised humanity conscious of its own demoralisation and consequently striving against it. "The Proletariat fulfils the judgment which private property by the creation of the Proletariat suspends over itself, just as it fulfils the judgment which wage-labour suspends over itself in creating alien riches and its own condemnation. If the Proletariat triumphs, it does not thereby become the absolute side of society, for it triumphs only by abolishing itself and its opposite. In this way both the Proletariat and its conditioned opposite, private property, are done away with."[2] The dialectical method is again described in a few sentences on pages 420-421 of the third volume of "Capital" (German), where we read: "In so far as the labour process operates merely between man and nature, its simple elements are common to every form of its social development. But any given historical form of this process further develops its material foundations and its social forms. When it has attained a certain degree of maturity the given historical form is cast off and makes room for a higher one. That the moment of such a crisis has arrived is shown as soon as there is a deepening and widening of the contradiction and antithesis between the conditions of distribution, and consequently also the existing historical form of the conditions of production corresponding to them, on the one hand, and the forces of production, productive capacity, and the state of evolution of its agents, on the other. There then arises a conflict between the material development of production and its corresponding social form." But the Hegelian dialectic appears most strikingly in the famous twenty-fourth chapter (sec. 7) of the first volume of "Capital" (German), where the evolution of capitalism from small middle-class ownership through all phases up to the Socialist revolution is comprehensively outlined in bold strokes: "The capitalist method of appropriation, which springs from the capitalist method of production, and therefore capitalist private property, is the first negation of individual private property based on one's own labour. But capitalist production begets with the inevitableness of a natural process its own negation. It is the negation of the negation." Here we have the three stages: the thesis--private property; the antithesis--capitalism; the synthesis--common ownership. Of critical social writers outside Germany it was Proudhon, in particular, who, in his works "What is Property?" and "Economic Contradictions, or the Philosophy of Poverty" (1840, 1846), attempted to use the Hegelian dialectic. The fact that he gave his chief book the title "Economic Contradictions" shows that Proudhon was largely preoccupied with Hegel. Nevertheless, he did not get below the surface; he used the Hegelian formulæ quite mechanically, and lacked the conception of an immanent process of development (the forward-impelling force within the social organism). If we look at the dialectical method as here presented, Hegel might be taken for a materialist thinker. Such a notion would be erroneous. For Hegel is an idealist: the origin and essence of the process of growth is to be sought, according to him, not in material forces, but in the logical idea, reason, the universal spirit, the absolute, or--in its religious expression--God. Before He created the world He is to be regarded as an Idea, containing within itself all forms of being, which it develops dialectically. The idea creates for itself a material embodiment; it first expresses itself in the objects of inorganic nature; then in plants, organisms wherein life awakens; then in animals, in which the Idea attains to the twilight of reason; finally, in men, where reason rises into mind and achieves self-consciousness and freedom. As self-conscious mind it expresses itself in the history of peoples, in religion, art and philosophy, in human institutions, in the family and in law, until it realises itself in the State as its latest and highest object. According to Hegel, then, the universal Idea develops into Godhead in proportion as the material world rises from the inorganic to the organic, and, finally, to man. In the mental part of man, the Idea arrives at self-consciousness and freedom and becomes God. In his cosmology, Hegel is a direct descendant of the German mystics, Sebastion Franck and Jacob Boehme. He was in a much higher degree German than any of the German philosophers since Leibnitz. The strangest thing, however, is that Germanism, Protestantism, and the Prussian State appeared to Hegel as the highest expression of the universal mind. Particularly the Prussian State as it existed before March, 1848, with its repudiation of all middle-class reforms and liberalism (of any kind), and its basis of strong governmental force. There is little purpose in trying to acquire a logical conception of Hegelian cosmology. It is not only idealist, but, as we said, mystical; it is as inconceivable to human reason as the biblical; it is irrational, and lies beyond the sphere of reason. Making the universe arise out of pure reason, out of the logical idea, developing through the dialectical process with a consciousness of freedom, it yet concludes in unreason and an obstinate determinism. In Liberalism Hegel saw only a simple negation, a purely destructive factor, which disintegrates the State and resolves it into individuals, thus depriving it of all cohesion and organising strength. He blamed Parliamentarism for demanding "that everything should take place through their (the individuals) expressed power and consent. The will of the many overturns the Ministry, and what was the Opposition now takes control, but, so far as it is the Government, the latter finds the many against it. Thus agitation and unrest continue. This collision, this knot, this problem, is what confronts history, a problem which it must resolve at some future time." One would have thought that it was precisely Parliamentarism, with its unrest and agitation, its antitheses and antagonisms, which would have had a special attraction for Hegel, but nevertheless he turned aside from it. How is this to be explained? Hegel's relation to the Prussian State is to be accounted for by his strong patriotic sentiments. His disposition inclined him strongly to nationalism in politics. In his early manhood he witnessed the complete dissolution of the German Empire, and deeply bewailed the wretchedness of German conditions. He wrote: "Germany is no longer a State; even the wars which Germany waged have not ended in a particularly honourable manner for her. Burgundy, Alsace, Lorraine have been torn away. The Peace of Westphalia has often been alluded to as Germany's Palladium, although by it the complete dismemberment of Germany has only been established more thoroughly than before. The Germans have been grateful to Richelieu, who destroyed their power." On the other hand, the achievements of Prussia in the Seven Years' War, and in the War of Liberation against the French, awoke in him the hope that it was this State which could save Germany. To this thought he gave eloquent and enthusiastic expression in his address at the opening of his Berlin lectures in October, 1818, and also in his lecture on Frederick the Great. Hegel therefore rejected everything which seemed to him to spell a weakening of the Prussia State power. The dialectician was overcome by national feelings. However, Hegel's place in the history of thought rests, not on his explanations of the creation of the world, nor on his German nationalist politics, but upon the dialectical method. In exploring, by means of this method, the wide expanse of human knowledge, he scattered an astonishing abundance of materialistic and strictly scientific observations and suggestions, and inspired his pupils and readers with a living conception of history, of the development of mankind to self-consciousness and freedom, thus rendering them capable of pushing their studies further, and emancipating themselves from all mysticism. As an example of the materialist tendency of his philosophy, the following references will serve. His "Philosophy of History" contains a whole chapter upon the geographical foundations of universal history. In this chapter he expresses himself--quite contrary to his deification of the State--as follows: "A real State and a real central government only arise when the distinction of classes is already given, when Riches and Poverty have become very great, and such conditions have arisen that a great multitude can no longer satisfy their needs in the way to which they have been accustomed." Or take his explanation of the founding of colonies by the Greeks. "This projecting of colonies, particularly in the period after the Trojan War until Cyrus, is here a peculiar phenomenon, which may thus be explained: in the individual towns the people had the governing power in their hands, in that they decided the affairs of State in the last resort. In consequence of the long peace, population and development greatly increased, and quickly brought about the accumulation of great riches, which is always accompanied by the phenomenon of great distress and poverty. Industry, in our sense, did not exist at that time, and the land was speedily monopolised. Nevertheless, a section of the poorer classes would not allow themselves to be depressed to the poverty line, for each man felt himself to be a free citizen. The sole resource, therefore, was colonisation." Or even the following passage, which conceives the philosophical system merely as the result and reflection of the accomplished facts of existence, and therefore rejects all painting of Utopias: "Besides, philosophy comes always too late to say a word as to how the world ought to be. As an idea of the universe, it only arises in the period after reality has completed its formative process and attained its final shape. What this conception teaches is necessarily demonstrated by history, namely, that the ideal appears over against the real only after the consummation of reality, that the ideal reconstructs the same world, comprehended in the substance of reality, in the form of an intellectual realm. A form of life has become old when philosophy paints its grey on grey, and with grey on grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only recognised. The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the falling twilight."--Preface to the "Philosophy of Law." No materialist could have said this better: the owl--the symbol of wisdom--only begins her flight in the evening, after the busy activities of the world are over. Thus we have first the universe, and then thought; first existence, and then consciousness. Hegel himself was therefore an example of his own teaching that contradictory elements are to be found side by side. His mind contained both idealism and realism, but he did not bring them by a process of reasoning to the point of acute contradiction in order to reach a higher plane of thought. And as he regarded it as the task of philosophy to recognise the principle of things, and to follow it out systematically and logically throughout the whole vast domain of reality, and as further, owing to his mystical bent, he asserted the idea to be the ultimate reality, he remained a consistent Idealist. The Conservatism of Hegel, who was the philosophical representative of the Prussian State, was, however, sadly incompatible with the awakening consciousness of the German middle class, which, in spite of its economic weakness, aspired to a freer State constitution, and greater liberty of action. These aspirations were already somewhat more strongly developed in the larger towns and industrial centres of Prussia and the other German States. The Young Hegelians[3] championed this middle-class awakening in the philosophical sphere, just as "Young Germany" (Heine, Boerne, etc.) did in the province of literature. Just at the time when Marx was still at the university the Young Hegelians took up the fight against the conservative section of Hegel's disciples and the Christian Romanticism of Prussia. The antagonism between the old and the new school made itself felt both in religious philosophy and political literature, but both tendencies were seldom combined in the same persons. David Strauss subjected the Gospels to a candid criticism; Feuerbach investigated the nature of Christianity and of religion generally, and in this department inverted Hegel's Idealism to Materialism; Bruno Bauer trained his heavy historical and philosophical artillery on the traditional dogmas concerning the rise of Christianity. Politically, however, they remained at the stage of the freedom of the individual: that is, they were merely moderate Liberals. Nevertheless, there were also less prominent Young Hegelians who were at that time in the Liberal left wing as regards their political opinions, such as Arnold Ruge. None of the Young Hegelians had, however, used the dialectical method to develop still further the teaching of the Master. Karl Marx, the youngest of the Hegelians, first brought it to a higher stage in social science. He was no longer known to Hegel, who might otherwise have died with a more contented or perhaps even still more perturbed mind. Heinrich Heine, who belonged to the Hegelians in the thirties and forties, relates the following anecdote, which if not true yet excellently illustrates the extraordinary difficulties of the Master's doctrines:-- As Hegel lay dying, his disciples, who had gathered round him, seeing the furrows deepen on the Master's care-worn countenance, inquired the cause of his grief, and tried to comfort him by reminding him of the large number of admiring disciples and followers he would leave behind. Breathing with difficulty, he replied: "None of my disciples has understood me; only Michelet has understood me, and," he added with a sigh, "even he has misunderstood me." FOOTNOTES: [1] In one of the later chapters the reader will find the series of contradictions discovered by Marx in the evolution of capitalism. Sec. IV., "Outlines of the Economic Doctrine." Chapter 8, "Economic Contradictions." [2] Marx, in "The Holy Family" (1844), reprinted by Mehring in the "Collected Works or Literary Remains of Marx and Engels," vol. II., p. 132. [3] After the death of Hegel differences of opinion arose among his disciples, chiefly with respect to his doctrines of the Deity, immortality and the personality of Christ. One section, the so-called "Right Wing," inclined to orthodoxy on these questions. In opposition to them stood the "Young Hegelians," the progressive "Left Wing." To this section belonged Arnold Ruge, Bruno Bauer, Feuerbach, and Strauss, author of the "Life of Jesus." The Life and Teaching of Karl Marx I. PARENTS AND FRIENDS. I. MARX'S APPRENTICESHIP. Karl Heinrich Marx first saw the light of day in Treves on May 5, 1818. His father, an enlightened, fine feeling, and philanthropic Jew, was a Jurist who had slowly risen from the humble circumstances of a German Rabbi family and acquired a respectable practice, but who never learnt the art of making money. His mother was a Dutchwoman, and came of a Rabbi family called Pressburg, which, as the name indicates, had emigrated from Pressburg, in Hungary, to Holland, in the seventeenth century. She spoke German very imperfectly. Marx has handed on to us one of her sayings, "If Karl made a lot of Capital, instead of writing a lot about Capital, it would have been much better." The Marxes had several children, of whom Karl alone showed special mental gifts. In the year 1824 the family embraced Christianity. The baptism of Jews was at that time no longer a rarity. The enlightenment of the last half of the eighteenth century had undermined the dogmatic beliefs of many cultured Jews, and the succeeding period of German Christian Romanticism brought a strengthening and idealising of Christianity and of national feeling, from which, for practical just as much as for spiritual reasons, the Jews who had renounced their own religion could not escape. They were completely assimilated, felt and thought like the rest of their Christian and German fellow-citizens. Marx's father felt himself to be a good Prussian, and once recommended his son to compose an ode, in the grand style, on Napoleon's downfall and Prussia's victory. Karl did not, in truth, follow his father's advice, but from that time of Christian enthusiasm and German patriotic sentiment until his life's end, there remained with him an anti-Jewish prejudice; the Jew was generally to him either a usurer or a cadger. Karl was sent to the grammar school in his native town, leaving with a highly creditable record. The school was, however, not the only place where he developed his mind. During his school years he used to frequent the house of the Government Privy Councillor, L. von Westphalen, a highly cultured Prussian official, whose favourite poets were Homer and Shakespeare, and who followed attentively the intellectual tendencies of his time. Although he had already reached advanced age, he liked to converse with the precocious youth, and to influence his mental growth. Marx honoured him as a fatherly friend "who welcomes every progressive movement with the enthusiasm and sober judgment of a lover of truth, and who is a living proof that Idealism is no imagination, but the truth."--(Dedication of Marx's doctor thesis.) After quitting the public school, Marx went to the University of Bonn, in order to study jurisprudence, according to his father's wishes. After a year of the merry life of a student, he removed in the autumn of 1836 to Berlin University, the centre of culture and truth, as Hegel had called it in his Inaugural Lecture (1818). Before his departure for Berlin, he had become secretly engaged to Jenny Von Westphalen, the daughter of his fatherly friend, a woman distinguished alike for beauty, culture, and strength of character. II. STUDENT. In Berlin, Marx threw himself into the study of Philosophy, Jurisprudence, History, Geography, Literature, the History of Art, etc. He had a Faust-like thirst for truth, and his appetite for work was insatiable; in these matters only superlatives can be used to describe, Marx. In one of his poems dating, from this period, he says of himself: "Ne'er can I perform in calmness What has seized my soul with might, But must strive and struggle onward In a ceaseless, restless flight. All divine, enhancing graces Would I make of life a part; Penetrate the realms of science, Grasp the joys of Song and Art." Giving up all social intercourse, he worked night and day, making abstracts of what he read, translating from Greek and Latin, working at philosophical systems, setting down a considerable number of his own thoughts, and drafting outlines of philosophy or jurisprudence, as well as writing three volumes of poems. The year 1837 marks one of the critical periods of Marx's intellectual development; it was a time of vacillation and ferment and of internal struggle, at the end of which he found refuge in the Hegelian dialectics. In so doing he turned his back on the abstract idealism of Kant and Fichte, and made the first step towards reality; and indeed at that time Marx firmly believed that Hegel actually stood for reality. In a somewhat lengthy letter dated November 10, 1837, a truly human document, Marx gives his father an account of his intense activity during that remarkable period, comprising his first two terms at the University of Berlin, when he was still so very young: "DEAR FATHER, "There are times which are landmarks in our lives; and they not only mark off a phase that has passed, but, at the same time, point out clearly our new direction. At such turning points we feel impelled to make a critical survey of the past and the present, so as to attain to a clear knowledge of our actual position. Nay, mankind itself, as all history shows, loves to indulge in this retrospection and contemplation, and thereby often appears to be going backward or standing still, when after all it has only thrown itself back in its armchair, the better to apprehend itself, to grasp its own doings, and to penetrate into the workings of the spirit. "The individual, however, becomes lyrical at such times; for every metamorphosis is in part an elegy on the past and in part the prologue of a great new poem that is striving for permanent expression in a chaos of resplendent but fleeting colours. Be that as it may, we would fain set up a monument to our past experiences that they may regain in memory the significance which they have lost in the active affairs of life: and what more fitting way can we find of doing that than by bringing them and laying them before the hearts of our parents! "And so now, when I take stock of the year which I have just spent here, and in so doing answer your very welcome letter from Ems, let me consider my position, in the same way as I look on life altogether, as the embodiment of a spiritual force that seeks expression in every direction: in science, in art, and in one's own personality.... On my arrival in Berlin I broke off all my former connections, paid visits rarely and unwillingly, and sought to bury myself in science and art.... In accordance with my ideas at the time, poetry must of necessity be my first concern, or at least the most agreeable of my pursuits, and the one for which I most cared; but, as might be expected from my disposition and the whole trend of my development, it was purely idealistic. Next I had to study jurisprudence, and above all I felt a strong impulse to grapple with philosophy. Both studies, however, were so interwoven that on the one hand I worked through the Jurist's Heineccius and Thibaut and the Sources docilely and quite uncritically, translating, for instance, the first two books of the Pandects of Justinian, while on the other hand I attempted to evolve a philosophy of law in the sphere of jurisprudence. By way of introduction I laid down a few metaphysical principles, and carried this unfortunate work as far as Public Rights, in all about 300 sheets. "In this, however, more than in anything else, the conflict between what is and what ought to be, which is peculiar to Idealism, made itself disagreeably prominent. In the first place there was what I had so graciously christened the Metaphysics of Law, i.e., first principles, reflections, definitions, standing aloof from all established jurisprudence and from every actual form of legal practice. Then the unscientific form of mathematical dogmatism in which there is so much beating about the bush, so much diffuse argumentation without any fruitful development or vital creation, hindered me from the outset from arriving at the Truth. A triangle may be constructed and reasoned about by the mathematician; it is a mere spatial concept and does not of itself undergo any further evolution; it must be brought in conjunction with something else, when it requires other properties, and thus by placing the same thing in various relationships we are enabled to deduce new relationships and new truths. Whereas in the concrete expression of the mental life as we have it in Law, in the State, in Nature, and in the whole of philosophy, the object of our study must be considered in its development.... The individual's reason must proceed with its self-contradiction until it discovers its own unity." In this we perceive the first trace of the Hegelian dialectic in Marx. We see rigid geometrical forms contrasted with the continually evolving organism, with social forms and human institutions. Marx had put up a stout resistance against the influence of the Hegelian philosophy; nay, he had even hated it and had made mighty efforts to cling faithfully to his idealism, but in the end he, too, must fall under the spell of the idea of evolution, in the form which it then assumed in Hegelian speculation in Germany. Marx then goes on to speak of his legal studies as well as of his poems, and thus continues: "As a result of these various activities I passed many sleepless nights during my first term, engaged in many battles, and had to endure much mental and physical excitement; and at the end of it all I found myself not very much better off, having in the meanwhile neglected nature, art and society, and spurned pleasure: such, indeed, was the comment which my body seemed to make. My doctor advised me to try the country, and so, having for the first time passed through the whole length of the city, I found myself before the gate on the Stralau Road.... From the idealism which I had cherished so long I fell to seeking the ideal in reality itself. Whereas before the gods had dwelt above the earth, they had now become its very centre. "I had read fragments of Hegel's philosophy, the strange, rugged melody of which had not pleased me. Once again I wished to dive into the depths of the sea, this time with the resolute intention of finding a spiritual nature just as essential, concrete, and perfect as the physical, and instead of indulging in intellectual gymnastics, bringing up pure pearls into the sunlight. "I wrote about 24 sheets of a dialogue entitled 'Cleantes or on the Source and Inevitable Development of Philosophy.' In this, art and science, which had hitherto been kept asunder, were to some extent blended, and bold adventurer that I was, I even set about the task of evolving a philosophical, dialectical exposition of the nature of the Deity as it is manifested in a pure concept, in religion, in nature, and in history. My last thesis was the beginning of the Hegelian system; and this work, in course of which I had to make some acquaintance with science, Schelling and history, and which had occasioned me an infinite amount of hard thinking, delivers me like a faithless siren into the hands of the enemy.... "Upset by Jenny's illness and by the fruitlessness and utter failure of my intellectual labours, and torn with vexation at having to make into my idol a view which I had hated, I fell ill, as I have already told you in a previous letter. On my recovery I burnt all my poems and material for projected short stories in the vain belief that I could give all that up; and, to be sure, so far I have not given cause to gainsay it. "During my illness I had made acquaintance with Hegel from beginning to end, as also with most of his disciples. Through frequent meetings with friends in Stralau I got an introduction into a Graduates' Club, in which were a number of professors and Dr. Rutenberg, the closest of my Berlin friends. In the discussions that took place many conflicting views were put forward, and more and more securely did I get involved in the meshes of the new philosophy which I had sought to escape; but everything articulate in me was put to silence, a veritable ironical rage fell upon me, as well it might after so much negation."--("Neue Zeit," 16th year, Vol. I., No. 1.) His father was anything but pleased with this letter. He reproached Karl with the aimless and discursive way in which he worked. He had expected that these Berlin studies would lead to something more than breeding monstrosities and destroying them again. He believed that Karl would, before everything else, have considered his future career, that he would have devoted all his attention to the lectures in his course, that he would have cultivated the acquaintance of people in authority, that he would have been economical, and that he would have avoided all philosophical extravagances. He refers him to the example of his fellow students who attend their lectures regularly and have an eye to their future: "Indeed these young men sleep quite peacefully except when they now and then devote the whole or part of a night to pleasure, whereas my clever and gifted son Karl passes wretched sleepless nights, wearying body and mind with cheerless study, forbearing all pleasures with the sole object of applying himself to abstruse studies: but what he builds to-day he destroys again to-morrow, and in the end he finds that he has destroyed what he already had, without having gained anything from other people. At last the body begins to ail and the mind gets confused, whilst these ordinary folks steal along in easy marches, and attain their goal if not better at least more comfortably than those who contemn youthful pleasures and undermine their health in order to snatch at the ghost of erudition, which they could probably have exorcised more successfully in an hour spent in the society of competent men--with social enjoyment into the bargain!" In spite of his unbounded love for his father, Marx could not deviate from the path which he had chosen. Those deeper natures who, after having lost their religious beliefs, have the good fortune to attain to a philosophical or scientific conception of the universe, do not easily shrink from a conflict between filial affection and loyalty to new convictions. Nor was Marx allured by the prospects of a distinguished official career. Indeed his fighting temperament would never have admitted of that. He wrote the lines: Therefore let us, all things daring, Never from our task recede; Never sink in sullen silence, Paralysed in will and deed. Let us not in base subjection Brood away our fearful life, When with deed and aspiration We might enter in the strife. His stay in Stralau had the most beneficial effects on his health. He worked strenuously at his newly-acquired philosophical convictions, and for this his relations with the members of the Graduates' Club stood him in good stead, more especially his acquaintance with Bruno Bauer, a lecturer in theology, and Friedrich Köppen, a master in a grammar school, who in spite of difference of age and position treated him as an equal. Marx gave up all thought of an official career, and looked forward to obtaining a lectureship in some university or other. His father reconciled himself to the new studies and strivings of his son; he was, however, not destined to rejoice at Karl's subsequent achievements. After a short illness he died in May, 1838, at the age of fifty-six. Marx then gave up altogether the study of jurisprudence, and worked all the more assiduously at the perfecting of his philosophical knowledge, preparing himself for his degree examination in order--at the instigation of Bruno Bauer--to get himself admitted as quickly as possible as lecturer in philosophy at the University of Bonn. Bauer himself expected to be made Professor of Theology in Bonn after having served as lecturer in Berlin from 1834 to 1839 and in Bonn during the year 1840. Marx wrote a thesis on the Natural Philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus, and in 1841 the degree of Doctor of Philosophy was conferred on him at Jena. He then went over to his friend Bauer in Bonn, where he thought to begin his career as lecturer. Meanwhile his hopes had disappeared. Prussian universities were at that time no places for free inquirers. It was not even possible for Bauer to obtain a professorship; still less could Marx, who was much more violent in the expression of his opinions, reckon on an academic career. His only way out of this blind alley was free-lance journalism, and for this an opportunity soon presented itself. III. BEGINNINGS OF PUBLIC LIFE. Marx made his entry into public life with a thorough philosophical training and with an irrestrainable impulse to enter into the struggle for the spiritual freedom of Germany. By spiritual freedom he understood first and foremost freedom in religion and liberalism in politics. He was, too, perfectly clear as to the instrument to be used: it was criticism. The positive and rigid having become ineffectual and unreasonable, is to fall before the weapon of criticism and so make room for a living stream of thought and being, or as Marx himself expressed it in 1844, "to make the petrified conditions dance by singing to them their own tune." Their own tune is, of course, the dialectic. Criticism, generally speaking, was the weapon of the Young Hegelians. Criticism is negation, sweeping away existing conditions and prevailing dogmas to make a clear path for life. Not the setting up of new principles or new dogmas, but the clearing away of the old dogmas is the task of the Young Hegelians. For if dialectic be rightly understood, criticism or negation is the best positive work. Criticism finds expression, above all, in polemics, in the literal meaning of waging war--ruthless war--against the unreal for the purpose of shaking up one's contemporaries. After Marx had given up all hope of an academic career, the only field of labour that remained open to him was, as we have already said, that of journalism. His material circumstances compelled him, moreover, to consider the question of an independent livelihood. Just about this time the Liberals in the Rhine provinces took up a scheme for the foundation of a newspaper, the object of which was to prepare the way for conditions of greater freedom. The necessary money was soon procured. Significantly enough, Young Hegelians were kept in view for editors and contributors. On the first of January, 1842, the first number of the _Rheinische Zeitung_ was published at Cologne. The editor was Dr. Rutenberg, who had formed an intimate friendship with Marx at the time the latter was attending the University of Berlin; and so Marx, then in Bonn, was also invited to contribute. He accepted the invitation, and his essays brought him to the notice of Arnold Ruge, who likewise invited him to take part in his literary undertakings in conjunction with Feuerbach, Bauer, Moses Hess, and others. Marx's essays were greatly appreciated, too, by the readers of the _Rheinische Zeitung_, so that in October, 1842, on the retirement of Rutenberg, he was called to the editorial chair of that journal. In his new position he had to deal with a series of economic and political questions which, no doubt, with a less conscientious editor would have occasioned little hard thinking, but which for Marx showed the need of a thorough study of political economy and Socialism. In October, 1842, a congress of French and German intellectuals was held in Strasburg, and amongst other things French Socialist theories were discussed. Likewise in the Rhine provinces arose questions concerning landed property and taxes, which had to be dealt with from the editorial chair, questions which were not to be answered by a purely philosophical knowledge. Besides, the censorship made the way hard for a paper conducted with such critical acumen, and did not allow the editor to fulfil his real mission. In the preface to "The Critique of Political Economy" (1859) Marx gives a short sketch of his editorial life: "As editor of the _Rheinische Zeitung_, in 1842 and 1843 I came up, for the first time, against the difficulty of having to take part in the controversy over so-called material interests. The proceedings of the Diet of the Rhine provinces with regard to wood stealing and parcelling out of landed property, and their action towards the farmers of the Moselle districts, and lastly debates on Free Trade and Protection, gave the first stimulus to my investigation of economic questions. On the other hand, an echo of French Socialism and Communism, feebly philosophical in tone, had at that time made itself heard in the columns of the _Rheinische Zeitung_. I declared myself against superficiality, confessing, however, at the same time that the studies I had made so far did not allow me to venture any judgment of my own on the significance of the French tendencies. I readily took advantage of the illusion cherished by the directors of the _Rheinische Zeitung_, who believed they could reverse the death sentence passed on that journal as a result of weak management, in order to withdraw from the public platform into my study." And so the intellectual need which he felt of studying economics and Socialism, as well as his thirst for free, unfettered activity, resulted in Marx's retirement from his post as editor, although he was about to enter upon married life and had to make provision for his own household. But he was from the beginning determined to subordinate his material existence to his spiritual aspirations. II. THE FORMATIVE PERIOD OF MARXISM. I. THE FRANCO-GERMAN YEAR BOOKS. Between the years 1843 and 1844 we have the second and probably the most important critical period in the intellectual development of Marx. In 1837 he had become a disciple of Hegel, into whose philosophy he penetrated deeper and deeper during the two years which ensued. Between 1843 and 1844 he became a Socialist, and in the following two years he laid the foundations of those social and historical doctrines associated with his name. Of the way he came to be a Socialist and by what studies he was led to Socialism, we know nothing. All that can be said is that in the summer of 1848 he must have pursued the reading of French Socialist literature just as assiduously as he did the study of Hegel in 1837. In his letters to Arnold Ruge, written about 1843, and printed in the Franco-German Year Books, we find a few passages which bear witness to his sudden turnover. In a letter from Cologne (May, 1843) he remarks: "This system of acquisition and commercialism, of possession and of the exploitation of mankind, is leading even more swiftly than the increase of population to a breach within the present society, which the old system cannot heal, because indeed it has not the power either to heal or create, but only to exist and enjoy." That is still in the sentimental vein, and anything but dialectical criticism. In the following few months, however, he made surprisingly rapid progress towards the fundamental ideas of that conception of history and society, which later on came to be known as Marxism, and which he almost built up into a complete system during those restless years of exuberant creative activity, 1845-46. In a letter from Kreuznach, dated September, 1843, he shows already an acquaintance with Fourier, Proudhon, Cabet, Weitling, etc., and sees his task not in the setting up of Utopias but in the criticism of political and social conditions, "in interpreting the struggles and aspirations of the age." And by the winter of 1843 he has already advanced so much as to be able to write the introduction to the criticism of Hegel's "Philosophy of Law," which is one of the boldest and most brilliant of his essays. He deals with the question of a German revolution, and asks which is the class that could bring about the liberation of Germany. His answer is that the positive conditions for the German revolution and liberation are to be sought "in the formation of a class in chains, a class which finds itself in bourgeois society, but which is not of it, of an order which shall break up all orders. The product of this dissolution of society reduced to a special order is the proletariat. The proletariat arises in Germany only with the beginning of the industrial movement; for it is not poverty resulting from natural circumstances but poverty artificially created, not the masses who are held down by the weight of the social system but the multitude arising from the acute break-up of society--especially of the middle class--which gives rise to the proletariat. When the proletariat proclaims the dissolution of the existing order of things, it is merely announcing the secret of its own existence, for it is in itself the virtual dissolution of this order of things. When the proletariat desires the negation of private property, it is merely elevating to a general principle of society what it already involuntarily embodies in itself as the negative product of society." Marx wrote this in Paris, whither he had removed with his young wife in October, 1843, in order to take up the editorship of the Franco-German Year Books founded by Arnold Ruge. In a letter addressed to Ruge from Kreuznach in September, 1843, Marx summed up the program of this periodical as follows: "If the shaping of the future and its final reconstruction is not our business, yet it is all the more evident what we have to accomplish with our joint efforts, I mean the fearless criticism of all existing institutions--fearless in the sense that it does not flinch either from its logical consequences or from the conflict with the powers that be. I am therefore not with those who would have us set up the standard of dogmatism; far from it; we should rather try to give what help we can to those who are involved in dogma, so that they may realise the implications of their own principles. So, for example, Communism as taught by Cabet, Dezamy, Weitling, and others is a dogmatic abstraction.... Moreover, we want to work upon our contemporaries, and particularly on our German contemporaries. The question is: How is that to be done? Two factors cannot be ignored. In the first place religion, in the second place politics, are the two things which claim most attention in the Germany of to-day.... As far as everyday life is concerned, the political State, even where it has not been consciously perfected through Socialist demands, exactly fulfils, in all its modern forms, the demands of reason. Nor does it stop there. It presupposes reason everywhere as having been realised. But in so doing it lands itself everywhere in the contradiction between its ideal purpose and its real achievements. Out of this conflict, therefore, of the political State with itself social truth is evolved." Without a doubt, the Hegelian conception of the State as the embodiment of reason and morality did not accord well with the constitution and the working of the actual State. And Marx goes on to remark that in its history the political State is the expression of the struggles, the needs, and the realities of society. It is not true, then, as the French and English Utopians have thought, that the treatment of political questions is beneath the dignity of Socialists. Rather is it work of this kind which leads into party conflict and away from the abstract theory. "We do not then proclaim to the world in doctrinaire fashion any new principle: 'This is the truth, bow down before it!' We do not say: 'Refrain from strife, it is foolishness!' We only make clear to men for what they are really struggling, and to the consciousness of this they must come whether they will or not." That is conceived in a thoroughly dialectical vein. The thinker propounds no fresh problems, brings forward no abstract dogmas, but awakens an understanding for the growth of the future out of the past, inspiring the political and social warriors with the consciousness of their own action. II. FRIENDSHIP WITH FRIEDRICH ENGELS. Of the Franco-German Year Books only one number appeared (Spring, 1844). Alongside Marx's contributions (an Introduction to the criticism of Hegel's "Philosophy of Jurisprudence" and a review of Bauer's book on the Jewish Question) the volume contains a comprehensive treatise, "Outlines for a Criticism of Political Economy," from the pen of Friedrich Engels (born in Barmen, 1820; died in London, 1895), who was then living in Manchester. In September, 1844, Engels went to visit Marx in Paris. This visit was the beginning of the lifelong intimate friendship between the two men, who without a close collaboration would not have achieved what they did. Marx was a highly-gifted theorist, a master in the realm of thought, but he was quite unpractical in the affairs of everyday life. Had he enjoyed a regular income throughout life, he would probably have attained his end even without the help of Engels. On the other hand, Engels was an exceedingly able, energetic, and highly-cultured man, eminently practical and successful in everything he undertook, but not endowed with that speculative temperament which surmounts intellectual crises and opens out new horizons. But for his intellectual association with Marx he would, in all probability, have remained little more than a Moses Hess. Marx was never a Utopian; the complete saturation of his mind with Hegelian dialectics made him immune to all eternal truths and final social forms. On the contrary, up to 1844 Engels was a Utopian--until Marx explained to him the meaning of political and social conflicts, the basis and the motive force, the statics and dynamics of the history of civilised mankind. Engels' "Criticism of Political Economy" is a very noteworthy performance for a youth of twenty-three engaged in commerce, but it does not rise above the level of the writings of Owen, Fourier, and Proudhon. Engels' contributions to Owen's "New Moral World" (1843-44) are indeed more philosophical than the other articles by Owenites, but as far as matter goes, there is no perceptible difference between them. "The System of Economic Contradictions," on which Proudhon was working when Engels published his "Outlines," is couched, as far as the critical side is concerned, in the same strain of thought as we find in Engels. Both sought to expose the contradictions of the middle-class economic system, not in order to discover in them the source of the progress of society, but to condemn them in the name of justice. Whereas the Owenites considered their system as perfect, Proudhon and Engels had, independently of one another, striven to free themselves from the Socialist Utopias. Proudhon became a peaceful Anarchist and found salvation in the scheme of autonomous economic groups, which should carry on an exchange of labour equivalents with one another. Engels, on the other hand, found a solution of his difficulties in Marx, whom he rewarded with a lifelong friendship and devotion, which proved to be Marx's salvation. Without Engels' literary and financial help, Marx, with his unpractical, helpless, and, at the same time, proud and uncompromising disposition, would most probably have perished in exile. III. CONTROVERSIES WITH BAUER AND RUGE. After the Franco-German Year Books had been discontinued, Marx, recognising the importance of economics, studied English and French systems of political economy with still greater zeal than before, and continued his studies in Socialism and history with remarkable steadiness of purpose. No longer now did he show signs of hesitation or wavering; he knew exactly what he wanted. He had left behind him that period of ideological speculation when he was still a disciple of Hegel, and he was impelled, as in the autumn of 1837, to envisage, from his new standpoint, the past and the future. He takes such a survey in "The Holy Family," which had its genesis in the autumn of 1844, and to which Engels also furnished a slight contribution. It is a settling of accounts with his former friend and master, Bruno Bauer, and his brother Edgar, who had not been able to break away from Hegel. The aim of the book was to force the Young Hegelians into the path of social criticism, to urge them forward and prevent them from falling into stereotyped and abstract ways of thinking. It is not easy reading. In it Marx has compressed the knowledge he then had of philosophy, history, economics, and Socialism in concentrated and sharply-cut form. Besides the excellent sketch of English and French materialism, which among other things discloses in a few short but pregnant sentences the connection between this and English and French Socialism, "The Holy Family" contains the germs of the materialistic conception of history as well as the first attempt to give a social revolutionary interpretation to the class struggle between Capital and Labour. In the Introduction to the present book a quotation from "The Holy Family" has been given. Speaking against Bauer's conception of history, Marx says: "Or can he believe that he has arrived even at the beginning of a knowledge of historical reality so long as he excludes science and industry from the historical movements? Or does he really think that he can understand any period without having studied, for example, the industries of that period, the immediate means of production of life itself?... In the same way as he separated thought from the senses, the soul from the body, and himself from the world, so he separates history from science and industry, and he does not see the birthplace of history in coarse, material production upon earth but in the nebulous constructions in the heavens."--("Posthumous Works," Vol. II., pp. 259-60.) Bruno Bauer, who believed in the world-swaying might of the idea, but would not concede that the masses had any power whatever, wrote: "All the great movements of history up to this time were therefore doomed to failure and could not have lasting success, because the masses had taken an interest in them and inspired them--or they must come to a lamentable conclusion because the underlying idea was of such a nature that a superficial apprehension of it must suffice, that is to say, it must reckon on the approval of the masses." Marx's answer to this was that "the great historical movements had been always determined by mass interests, and only in so far as they represented these interests could the ideas prevail in these movements; otherwise the ideas might indeed stir up enthusiasm, but they could not achieve any results. The idea always fell into disrepute in so far as it differed from the interest. On the other hand, it is easy to understand that, when it makes its first appearance on the world-stage, every mass interest working itself out in history far exceeds, as an idea or in its presentation, its actual limits and identifies itself purely and simply with the interest of humanity. Thus the idea of the French Revolution not only took hold of the middle classes, in whose interest it manifested itself in great movements, but it also aroused enthusiasm in the labouring masses, for whose conditions of existence it could do nothing. As history has shown, then, ideas have only had effective results in so far as they corresponded to class interests. The enthusiasm, to which such ideas gave birth, arose from the illusion that these ideas signified the liberation of mankind in general."--("Posthumous Works," Vol. II., pp. 181-3.) In August, 1844, Marx published under the title "Marginal Notes" in the Paris _Vorwärts_ a lengthy polemic against Ruge, which is a defence of Socialism and revolution and takes the part of the German proletariat against Ruge. "As regards the stage of culture or the capacity for culture of the German workers, let me refer to Weitling's clever writings, which in their theoretical aspect often surpass those of Proudhon, however much they may fall behind them in execution. Where would the middle classes, their scholars and philosophers included, be able to show a work like Weitling's 'Guarantees of Peace and Concord' bearing on the question of emancipation? If one compares the insipid, spiritless mediocrity of German political literature with this unconstrained and brilliant literary début of the German workers, if one compares these gigantic baby shoes of the proletariat with the dwarfishness of the worn-out political shoes of the German middle classes, one can only prophesy an athletic stature for the German Cinderella. One must admit that the German proletariat is the philosopher of the European proletariat, just as the English proletariat is its political economist and the French proletariat its politician. One must admit that Germany is destined to play just as classic a rôle in the social revolution as it is incompetent to play one in the political. For, as the impotence of the German middle classes is the political impotence of Germany, so the capacity of the German proletariat--even leaving out of account German philosophy--is the social capacity of Germany." At that time (1844) Marx had already begun to mix among the German working classes resident in Paris, who clung to the various Socialist and Anarchist doctrines which then held sway, and he sought to influence them according to his own ideas. With Heine, too, who at that time was coquetting with Communism, he carried on a sprightly and not unfruitful intercourse. He likewise came into frequent contact with Proudhon, whom he endeavoured to make familiar with Hegelian philosophy. Already in his first work, "What is Property?" (1840) Proudhon had played with Hegelian formulæ, and Marx probably believed that he could win him over to Socialism. Proudhon, who, like the German Weitling, sprang from the proletariat, ushered in his activity as a social theorist with the above-mentioned work, which had a stimulating effect on Marx and on German Socialists in general, all the more so as Proudhon manifested some acquaintance with classical German philosophy. In this book ("What is Property?" German edition, 1844, p. 289) he sums up the whole matter as follows: "Expressing this according to the Hegelian formula, I should say that Communism, the first kind, the first determination of social life, is the first link in social evolution, the _thesis_; property is the antagonistic principle, the _antithesis_; if only we can get the third factor, the _synthesis_, the question is solved. This synthesis comes about only through the cancelling of the thesis by the antithesis; one must therefore in the last instance examine its characteristics, discard what is anti-social, and in the union of the remaining two is then seen the real kind of human social life." That was indeed a superficial conception of Hegelian dialectics, for what Proudhon wanted to find was not a synthesis but a combination; still for a French working man it was a smart performance to have manipulated German philosophical formulæ, and would justify the most sanguine hopes. Marx did not want to let this opportunity slip, and in "debates both late and long" he discussed Hegelian philosophy with Proudhon.--(Marx: "The Poverty of Philosophy," German edition, Stuttgart, 1885, p. 29.) In the midst of this activity, however, Marx and other German contributors to the Paris _Vorwärts_ were expelled from France in January, 1845, at the instigation of the Prussian Government. Marx packed up his traps and left for Brussels, where he lived, with short interruptions, until the outbreak of the European Revolution in February, 1848. During his sojourn in Brussels his time was occupied mainly with economic studies, for which Engels placed his library of works on political economy at his disposal. Marx embodied the result of these studies in the criticism directed against Proudhon in his "Misère de la Philosophie" (Poverty of Philosophy), published in 1847. IV. CONTROVERSY WITH PROUDHON. Marx's "Misère de la Philosophie" indicates the culmination of the fist phase of his creative work. In this critical review he makes his position clear with respect not only to Proudhon but to Utopian Socialism in general. It marks also the turning point in the studies of Marx: English political economy occupied henceforth the place which German philosophy had held. The anti-Proudhon controversy is therefore worthy of a fuller treatment. Pierre Joseph Proudhon (b. 1809 in Besançon, d. 1865 in Paris) was one of the most gifted and most distinguished of social philosophers which the modern proletariat has produced. He was originally a compositor, like his similarly minded English contemporary, John Francis Bray, the author of "Labour's Wrongs," published in 1839, but he had a much greater inclination for study and a more fruitful literary talent. He managed to acquire, self-taught, a knowledge of the classical languages, of mathematics and of science, read assiduously but indiscriminately works on economics, philosophy, and history, and applied himself to social criticism. It is rare for a working man in the West of Europe to feel impelled to make an acquaintance with Kant, Hegel, and Feuerbach as Proudhon did through French translations and through intercourse with German scholars in Paris. He possessed the noble ambition of blending French sprightliness with German thoroughness. But self-instruction failed to give him that intellectual training which is more valuable than knowledge, and which alone gives the power to order and to utilise the information acquired, as well as to submit one's own work to self-criticism. The value of a systematic education does not consist in the main in the acquisition of knowledge but in the training of our intellectual faculties as instruments of inquiry and apprehension, of methodical thinking and of sound judgment, to enable us to find our bearings more easily in the chaos of phenomena, experiences, and ideas. A self-taught man may no doubt attain to this degree of culture, but only if his first attempts at independent creative work are submitted to a strict but kindly criticism, which makes him discipline his thoughts. This was not the case with Proudhon; he lacked mental self-discipline. His first work, "What is Property?" (1840) brought him immediate recognition and strengthened him in his high opinion of his knowledge and his powers, even to the point of making him conceited. When, for example, the French historian, Michelet, disapproved of his dictum, "Property is robbery," Proudhon replied, "Not twice in a thousand years does one come across a pronouncement like that."--("Economic Contradictions," Leipzig, 1847. Vol. II., p. 301.) And yet the idea is as old as Communism itself. Besides all this, the vivacity and exuberance of language for which Proudhon was noted easily blinded him to the shortcomings of his intellectual culture. Thus it often happened that he rediscovered ideas of his predecessors and published them to the world with naïve pride. Through page after page of argument he holds the reader in expectation of the explanation, which he is about to give, of the nature of value, which he rightly characterises as the "corner-stone of political economy." At last he will disclose the secret: "It is time to make ourselves acquainted with this power. This power ... is _labour_." His main work, "The System of Economic Contradictions," swarms with philosophical formulæ and expressions like thesis, antithesis, antinomies, synthesis, dialectics, induction, syllogisms, etc., as also with Latin, Greek, and Hebrew etymologies; it often wanders into irrelevant theological and philosophical digressions and side issues, not so much with the intention of parading the author's knowledge as from his lack of intellectual discipline and insufficient command of his material. The work in question was to combine German philosophy with French and English political economy, and its author believed that it would secure for him before everything else the admiration of the German Socialists, especially of Marx. He drew the latter's attention to it by letter, and awaited his "rigorous criticism." The criticism came in "Misère de la Philosophie" (Brussels, 1847), but it could no longer fulfil its purpose, as the fundamental difference between the two men had already widened to a gulf that could not be bridged. Marx had almost completed his materialistic, logical, and revolutionary Socialism, Proudhon had laid the foundations of his peaceful Anarchism with its federative economic basis. With his searching analysis, his systematised knowledge, and his great indignation at the presumptuous attacks on every Socialist school and leader, Marx sat in judgment upon Proudhon, exposing him as a dilettante in philosophy and economics, and at the same time sketching in outline his own conception of history and economics. Marx's verdict is damning, yet one cannot but acknowledge that Proudhon, in spite of his obvious insufficiency, had endeavoured, honestly and zealously, to extricate himself from Capitalism as well as from Utopianism, and to outline a scheme for an economic order, in which men, such as he had found them, might lead a free, industrious, and righteous life. The task which Proudhon had set himself was the same as that which engaged the attention of Marx, the criticism of political economy and of the sentimental Utopian Socialism. That is the key-note of Proudhon's system, and it is sounded in almost every chapter. He lacked, however, the requisite knowledge and the historical sense which alone could have made him equal to his task. The whole of his criticism consists virtually in the complaint that riches and poverty accumulate side by side, and that the economic categories--use value, exchange value, division of labour, competition, monopoly, machinery, property, ground rent, credit, tax, etc.--manifest contradictions. Proudhon's special problem was the following: "The workers of any country produce yearly goods to the value, let us say, of 20 milliards. But if the workers, as consumers, wish to buy back these goods they have to pay 25 milliards. The workers are thus cheated out of a fifth. That is a terrible contradiction."--("What is Property?" Chap. IV.; "Economic Contradictions," Vol. I., pp. 292-93.) This statement of the problem shows that Proudhon had no inkling of the essential features of the question of value, in spite of the fact that he cites Adam Smith, David Ricardo, etc., whom he must therefore have read. Had he really understood these economists and taken up his critical attitude towards them from the standpoint of justice, he would have stated the problem somewhat as follows: "The workers of any country produce yearly goods to the value, say, of 20 milliards. For their work, however, they receive as wages a quantity of goods of the value of only 10 or 12 milliards. Is that just?" Only this way of stating the question could possibly have revealed to him the nature of wages, of value, of profit, of capital and its contradictions. Proudhon sees the perpetration of fraud or robbery in the sphere of exchange and not in that of production, and he does not ask himself how, if labour produces goods to the value of only 20 milliards, they can be exchanged at a value of 25 milliards, and what is responsible for the increase of five milliards. The other contradictions which he brings forward are not indeed new, but they are ingeniously treated. For example: the essence of exchange-value is labour, which creates wealth; but the more the wealth produced, the less becomes its exchange-value. Or this: the division of labour is, according to Smith, one of the most effective means of increasing wealth, but the further the division of labour proceeds the lower sinks the workman, being reduced to the level of an unintelligent automaton engaged in the performance of a fractional operation. The same thing holds good for machinery. So, too, competition stimulates effort, but brings much misery in its train by leading to adulteration, sharp practices, and strife between man and man. Further, taxation should be proportional to riches, in reality it is proportional to poverty. Or again, private ownership of land ought to increase productivity; in practice it deprives the farmer of the land. In this way he runs to earth the contradictions in political economy, and so we find everywhere the words thesis and anti-thesis or antinomies (contradictions between two well-established propositions). And out of this contradiction springs poverty. The solution or the synthesis is the creation of an economic order which shall preserve the good elements in this category and eliminate the bad ones, and so satisfy the demands of justice. And that is what Socialism cannot do. "For the economic order is based upon calculations of an inexorable justice and not upon those angelic sentiments of brotherhood, sacrifice, and love which so many well-meaning Socialists of the present time are endeavouring to awake in the people. It is useless for them to preach, after the example of Jesus Christ, the necessity for sacrifice, and to set an example of it in their own lives: selfishness is stronger than they and can only be restrained by rigid justice and immutable economic law. Humanitarian enthusiasm may cause upheavals which are conducive to the progress of civilisation, but such emotional crises, like the fluctuations in value, simply result in the establishing of law and order on a more rigid and more restricted basis. Nature or the Deity planted mistrust in our hearts, having no faith in the love of man for his fellow men; and though I say it to the shame of the human conscience (for our hypocrisy must be confronted with it sooner or later), every disclosure which science has made to us concerning the designs of providence with respect to the progress of society points to a deeply rooted hatred of mankind on God's part."--("System of Economic Contradictions or the Philosophy of Poverty," Vol. I., p. 107.) Just as severely does he denounce the institution of Trade Unionism and its methods of warfare, together with State politics, as indeed the working of class organisation and of the State generally. The only way to realise social justice is to create a society of producers who exchange their goods among one another according to their equivalents in labour and carry on work in adequate relationship to the production of wealth, or, to put it clearly, to establish an order where supply and demand balance one another. Marx's answer to the "Philosophy of Poverty" is indicated at once by the title "The Poverty of Philosophy." He deals first of all with the economic details of Proudhon's work, and proves with documentary evidence that the theses and antitheses it contains partly spring from a half-understood reading of English and French political economists, and in part have been taken direct from the English Communists. Marx already displays in this section an extensive knowledge of economic literature. Then he confronts Proudhon's philosophical and social theories with his own deductions and gives many positive results. Marx's main object was to induce the Socialists to give up their Utopianism and think in terms of realism, and to regard social and economic _categories_ in their historical setting: "Economic _categories_ are only the theoretical expressions, ideal conceptions of the conditions of production obtaining in society.... Proudhon has grasped well enough that men manufacture cloth, linen, etc., under certain conditions of production. But what he has not grasped is that these social conditions themselves are just as much human products as cloth, linen, etc. Social conditions are intimately bound up with productive power. With the acquisition of new productive power men change their methods of production, and with the change in the methods of production, in the manner of obtaining a livelihood, they change their social conditions. The hand-mill gives rise to a society with feudal lords, the steam-mill to a society with industrial capitalists. But the same men who shape the social conditions in conformity with the material means of production, shape also the principles, the ideas, the _categories_ in conformity with their social conditions. Consequently these ideas, these _categories_, are just as little eternal as are the conditions to which they give expression. They are the transitory and changing products of history. We are living in the midst of a continuous movement of growth in productive power, of destruction of existing social conditions, of formation of ideas."--("Poverty of Philosophy," Stuttgart, 1885, pp. 100-101.) Here it should, above all, be noticed that Marx ascribes to industrialism a powerful revolutionary effect, and that he characterises the different forms of society by their different methods of labour. Or, as he says later in "Capital," "not _what_ is produced, but _how_ it is produced distinguishes the various forms of society." What he means to say, then, is that ideas and systems are limited by their time, that they are conditioned by the prevailing means of production. To understand them one must study the times which have preceded them, as well as investigate the ideas and systems themselves, and find out whether new forms have not arisen which stand in contradiction or in contrast to the old one. Or, as Marx says: "Feudalism, too, had its proletariat--the villeinage--which contains all the germs of the middle class. Feudal production, too, had two contradictory elements which are likewise characterised as the 'good' and 'bad' sides of feudalism without regard to the fact that it is always the 'bad' side which triumphs ultimately over the 'good' side. It is the bad side which calls into being the movement which makes history, in that it brings the struggle to a head. If, at the time of the supremacy of feudalism, the economists, in their enthusiasm for knightly virtues, for the beautiful harmony between rights and duties, for the patriarchal life of the towns, for the flourishing home industries in the country, for the development of industry organised in corporations, companies and guilds, in a word, for everything which forms the finer side of feudalism, had set themselves the problem of eliminating everything which could throw a shadow on this picture--serfdom, privileges, anarchy--where would it all have ended? They would have destroyed every element which called forth strife, they would have nipped in the bud the development of the middle class. They would have set themselves the absurd problem of blotting out history. "When the middle class had come to the top, neither the good nor the bad side of feudalism come into question. The productive forces, which had been developed under feudalism through its agency, fell to its control. All old economic forms, the legal relations between private individuals, which corresponded to them, the political order, which was the official expression of the old society, were shattered." "Those Socialists and social revolutionaries who regard the hardships and struggles of society as an absolute evil and plan the construction of a society comprised solely of good elements, have not grasped the meaning of the history of mankind. They think abstractly. They misjudge both the past and the present. "Hence to form a correct judgment of production under feudalism one must consider it a method of production based upon contradiction. One must show how wealth was produced within this contradiction, how productive power developed contemporaneously with the antagonism of classes, how one of these classes, the bad side, the social evil, constantly increased until the material conditions for its liberation were fully ripe. "Does that not show clearly enough that the means of production, the conditions under which productive power is developed, are anything but eternal laws, that they rather correspond to a definite stage in the evolution of mankind and of its productive power, and that a variation in the productive power of mankind necessarily brings about a variation in its conditions of production? "The middle class begins with a proletariat, which in its turn is itself a remnant of the feudal proletariat. In the course of its historical development the middle class necessarily develops its contradictory character, which on its first appearance is more or less veiled, existing only in a latent form. In proportion as the middle class develops, there develops in its bosom a new proletariat, a modern proletariat; and a struggle arises between the proletarian class and the middle class, a struggle which, before being felt, observed, estimated, understood, acknowledged, and finally openly proclaimed on both sides, issues in the meanwhile only in partial and transitory conflicts and acts of destruction." In a special chapter Marx shows the necessity and the historical significance of the Trade Unions, which in spite of all the apprehensions and warnings of Utopians and Economists the workers have gone on establishing and perfecting, in order to be able to withstand the domination of capital. That means the gathering together of the divided interests and activities of the workers in a vast class movement, standing in opposition to the middle class; which, however, does not exclude the possibility of conflicting interests within the classes themselves, though these shall be put aside as soon as class is brought against class: "From day to day it becomes clearer then that the conditions of production, among which the middle class moves, have not a simple, uniform character but one which involves conflicting elements; that the same conditions which produce wealth produce also poverty; that the same conditions which tend to the development of productive power develop also the power of repression; that these conditions only create bourgeois wealth, i.e., the wealth of the middle class, at the cost of the continued destruction of the wealth of individual members of this class and the creation of an ever-increasing proletariat."--("Poverty of Philosophy," 1885, pp. 116-118, 177 sq.) This antithetical character of capitalist society has for its effect that the political economists, who are the philosophers of the existing order, lose their bearings, while the Socialists, who are the philosophers of the proletariat, look round for means to relieve the distress. They condemn class struggles,[4] build Utopias and plan schemes of salvation, whereas the only real solution, because it is the only one which arises from the actual conditions, must be to further the organisation of the oppressed class and make it conscious of the objects of its struggles. For out of these struggles the new society will arise, and that, of course, can only happen when productive power has reached a high stage of development. Or as Marx himself proceeds: "An oppressed class is a vital condition of any society founded upon class antagonism. The liberation of the oppressed class necessarily includes, therefore, the creation of a new society. In order that the oppressed class may be able to free itself, a stage must be reached in which the already acquired powers of production and the prevailing social institutions can no longer exist side by side. Of all the instruments of production, the greatest productive force is the revolutionary class itself. The organisation of the revolutionary elements as a class presupposes the existence in perfected form of all the productive forces that could in any way be developed in the bosom of the old society. Does this mean that after the collapse of the old order of society there will be a new class domination culminating in a new political power? The condition of the emancipation of the working class is the abolition of all classes, as the condition of the emancipation of the third estate, of the middle class, was the abolition of all the three estates. The working class will, in the course of its evolution, replace the old middle-class society by an association excluding classes and their antagonism, and there will no longer be any real political power,[5] because it is just this political power which is the official expression of class antagonism within the community. "Meanwhile the antagonism between proletariat and bourgeoisie is a struggle of class against class, a struggle which, when brought to its highest expression, means a complete revolution. And can one indeed be surprised that a society founded upon class antagonism should, at its final dissolution, issue in brutal conflict and collision of man against man? Let it not be said that the social movement excludes the political. There never was a political movement which was not at the same time a social movement. "Only in an order of things where there are no classes and no class antagonism will social evolution cease to be political revolution. Until then the last word of social science on the eve of every general reconstruction of society must ever be: 'Fight or die; bloody war or annihilation. Thus are we confronted with the inexorable question.'--(George Sand)." With this battle-cry "The Poverty of Philosophy" comes to a close. It is the prologue to the "Communist Manifesto," which in itself is but a popular version of the positive doctrines developed in the controversy against Proudhon. FOOTNOTES: [4] The Socialists of those times were the Owenites and the Fourierists, who condemned all class struggles, Trade Unionist strikes, and Labour politics. [5] Marx means the State. III. YEARS OF AGITATION AND VARYING FORTUNES. I. THE REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT OF THE FORTIES. Marx was a revolutionary not only in the sense that he was the representative of a new conception of society and the founder of a theory of a new economic order, but also in the popular sense of advocating the use of force, in which connection he looked to the first years of the French Revolution as a model. He had a keen ear for the revolutionary rumblings in the depths of the populace. The years during which the elements of his new conception of society were accumulating in his mind and shaping themselves into a system were involved in a revolutionary atmosphere. In 1842 England witnessed the first strike on a large scale, which threatened to extend into a general strike and bore a political revolutionary character. In 1843 and 1844 the idea of the impending revolution was widely spread in England. Insurrections broke out among the Silesian weavers in 1844. In 1845 and 1846 Socialism spread rapidly on all sides in Germany, and Socialist periodicals appeared in the industrial centres. France swarmed with Socialist systems, Socialist novels and newspaper articles. The spectre of Communism was abroad in Europe. The convention of the United Assembly by Frederick William IV. at the beginning of February, 1847, was looked upon as the harbinger of the German Revolution. The connection between these phenomena could not escape acute intellects. Hand in hand with the extension of industry and the rapid construction of railways and telegraphs came alternations of economic prosperity and crisis, poverty grew, and the workers fought with ever-increasing bitterness against the iron law of wages and against the scanty pay, which hardly allowed the proletariat to eke out a bare subsistence. The cry in England was: "More factories, more poverty," but at the same time: "The greater the political rights of the masses, the surer becomes emancipation." Whoever lived in England and France during these years and had dealings with Socialism could not help feeling that political and social revolutions were on the march. Already in his first letter to Ruge, written from Holland in March, 1843, Marx deals with the coming revolution, and foresees, to the astonishment of Ruge, who refused to believe it, that the Government of Frederick William IV. was drifting towards a revolution. At that time Marx had hardly begun his studies in Socialism; and the further he advanced in these studies, elaborating his social dialectics and evolving the ideas of the class struggle, the more inevitably was he driven to the conclusion that the proletarian revolution, the seizure of political power by the proletariat, was the indispensable preliminary to the triumph of Communism. Utopian Socialism stood outside the State and attempted to set up a Socialist Commonwealth apart from the State and behind the back of the State. Utopianism, with its moral and religious motives and mediæval Communist traditions, was pervaded with that spirit of contempt for the State which was characteristic of the Catholic Church during the period of its splendour. Moreover Marx, who recognised all practical forms of power, even if he did not always estimate them at their true value, saw in the State an executive power which it was a question of overturning and using as an extremely powerful instrument in the social revolution. As a result of his excursions into politics and French and English Socialism, Marx gave up Hegel's overstrained idea of the State and accepted the view current in Western European thought of the time; but he interpreted the State in the sense of the doctrine of the class struggle as the executive council of the ruling and possessing classes. The impressions, the ideas, the experiences and the modes of thinking which took root in the mind of Marx during the evolution of the fundamental principles of his sociological and historical system dominated the whole of his life's work. Marxism is quite a natural growth of the revolutionary soil of the first half of the nineteenth century. Marx completes the social revolutionary doctrines of that time, of which he is, as it were, the executor. All his thoughts and sentiments are deeply rooted in it; they have nothing specifically Jewish about them. I know of no Jewish philosopher, sociologist, or poet who had so little of the Jewish character as had Marx. II. THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO. As in Paris, so too in Brussels, Marx frequented the society of German working men in order to instruct them by lectures and by conversation. He was loyally seconded by Engels, who had more time and more money to devote to this task, and who worked for the new doctrine in Paris, Cologne, Elberfeld and other towns. Since 1836 the German working men living abroad had been organised in the League of the Just, which from 1840 had its head-quarters in London. The individual groups were kept in touch with one another by means of Communist correspondence committees. The Paris and Brussels groups drew the attention of the London Committee to Marx, and in January, 1847, Joseph Moll, one of its members, was commissioned to go to Brussels and obtain information about Marx.--("Mehring's Introduction to the Reprint of the Cologne Communist Proceedings," published by _Vorwärts_, Berlin, 1914, pp. 10-11.) The result was the transformation of the League of the Just into the League of Communists, which held its first Congress in London in the summer of 1847, Engels and Wilhelm Wolff (Lupus) being among those present as delegates. At the second Congress, held in London towards the end of November and beginning of December, 1847, Marx also appeared, and together with Engels was commissioned to prepare a new program. The new program is the Communist Manifesto. Engels had come from Paris, Marx from Brussels. Before leaving Paris, Engels wrote a letter to Marx, dated November 24, in which he speaks as follows on the subject of the Manifesto: "Just think over the confession of faith a little. I believe it will be best if we leave out the form of catechism and entitle the thing 'The Communist Manifesto.' And then, as more or less of it will consist in historical narrative, the present form is quite unsuitable. I am bringing along the manuscript which I have written; it is a plain narrative, but is badly put together, and has been done in a frightful hurry. I begin, 'What is Communism?' and then straight away with the proletariat--the history of its origin, difference from earlier workers, development of the antagonism of the proletariat and the middle class, crises, conclusions, with all kinds of secondary considerations thrown in, and lastly party politics of the Communists, as much as is good for the public to know."--("Correspondence of Marx and Engels," Vol. I., p. 84.) Engels' draft of the Communist Manifesto has been edited by Eduard Bernstein.--("Grundsätze des Kommunismus," published by _Vorwärts_, 1914.) A comparison of this draft with the actual "Communist Manifesto" makes evident the full extent of Marx's intellectual superiority to Engels. The Communist Manifesto contains four main groups of ideas: (1) The history of the evolution of the middle class, its character, its positive and negative achievement--modern capitalism and the rise of the proletariat. (2) Theoretical conceptions and conclusions--the doctrine of the class struggle and the rôle of the proletariat. (3) Practical application--revolutionary action by the Communists. (4) Criticism of other Socialist schools. The last section has long ago lost all practical interest, so that we need only deal with the first three sections. (1) The middle class developed in the bosom of feudal society, in the mediæval industrial towns. With the geographical discoveries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries its sphere of activity was extended; it revolutionised the methods of industry, agriculture and communication; it broke through the mediæval economic and political bonds; it overthrew feudalism, the guilds, the little self-governing regions, absolute monarchy, and established modern industry with its accelerated and concentrated production, middle-class franchise, the national State, and, at the same time, international trade. It was the middle class which first showed what human activity can accomplish. "It has achieved greater miracles than the construction of Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, or Gothic cathedrals, it has carried out greater movements than the migration of peoples or the crusades.... Although it is scarcely a century since it came to be the dominating class, the middle class has created more powerful and more gigantic forces of production than all past generations put together." The subjugation of natural forces, machinery, the application of chemistry to industry and to agriculture, steamships, railways, electric telegraphs, the clearing of whole continents, making the rivers navigable, the conjuring forth of whole peoples out of the ground: that is the positive achievement of the middle class. Now for the negative: it created the proletariat, immeasurable, uncontrollable, anarchical economic conditions, periodical crises--poverty and famine in consequence of over-production and a glut of wealth, over-driving and reckless exploitation of the workers, whose labour is bought in exchange for the minimum quantity of the necessaries of life. These facts show that the forces of production are more extensive and more powerful than is demanded by the conditions under which they are operative: the economic system can produce and deliver more goods than society can use under the existing laws concerning property, i.e., the distribution and the effective demand fall short of the manufacture and the supply. The material forces of production press upon the limits imposed upon them by the laws of private property. This happens, too, because the working class must reduce its consumption of goods to a minimum in consequence of the existing laws of property, which give to capital the right of distribution. All these conditions taken together, the positive as well as the negative ones, make possible and give rise to the struggles of the workers against the middle class--and so the productive agents rise in rebellion. These struggles lead to the organisation of the workers in trade unions, to the awakening of class consciousness, and, as a result, to the formation of the political labour party. (2) The movements within middle-class society, as well as in feudal and ancient society, where freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, baron and serf, guild-master and journeyman, capitalist and working man stood and stand in constant antagonism to one another, prove that the whole history of mankind since the rise of private ownership is the history of class struggles, and that in these class struggles, carried on now openly, now under the surface, either new forms of society and of ownership, new economic systems arise or else end with the common destruction of the two classes. The antagonistic classes are supporters of conflicting economic interests, systems of ownership and ideals of culture. The craftsman and tradesman of the towns, the burgher, fought against the feudal lord and knight for individual property, for freedom of industry and trade, for freedom to dispose of personal property and for the national State. With the triumphal progress of the middle class private property fell into fewer and fewer hands. The proletarians are without property, they have no share in the wealth of their country; on the other hand, the production of capital becomes more and more a matter of common co-operation, and capital becomes a joint product. The proletariat can, accordingly, no longer fight for individual ownership but for the socially conducted utilisation of the means of production belonging to the community and of the goods produced. The middle class has therefore created in the proletariat a social class which must have as its object to do away with the middle class system of ownership and to set up the proletarian system of common ownership. (3) In this struggle of the working classes the Communists are therefore the pioneers of the movement. They are at once the philosophers and the self-sacrificing champions of the proletariat awakened into class consciousness. "The Communists are not a special party in contradistinction to the other Labour parties. They have no interests apart from the interests of the whole proletariat. They set up no special principles according to which they wish to mould the proletarian movement." The Communists lay stress on the common interests of the whole proletariat and of the collective movement. Their aim is the organisation of the proletariat into a class, the overthrow of middle-class domination, and the conquest of political power by the proletariat. They support everywhere "any revolutionary movement against the existing social and political conditions. In all these movements they emphasise the question of property, in whatever state of evolution it may appear, as the foundation of the movement. And finally the Communists work everywhere for the union and agreement of democratic parties[6] of all nationalities. The Communists disdain to conceal their views and intentions. They declare openly that their ends can only be attained by the forcible overthrow of every obtaining order of society. Let the ruling classes tremble before a Communist revolution; the workers have nothing to lose by it but their chains. They have the world to win. Workers of every land, unite!" From the standpoint of social philosophy, the Manifesto, a document reflecting its time, is almost perfect. Strong emotion and extraordinary intellectual power are united in it. Years of study of one of the boldest and most fertile minds are here welded together in the glowing heat of one of the most active of intellectual workshops. But the work is not free from logical flaws. In the passages we have quoted the part played in history by the middle class is extolled by Marx; yet in the last few lines of the very same section he declares that "the middle class is the unwitting and inert instrument of industrial progress," and still more scathing is his criticism in the second section, where the middle class is accused of indolence. "It has been objected that, if private property were done away with, all activity would cease and a general laziness set in. According to that, middle-class society would have been ruined by idleness long ago; for those of its members who work gain nothing, and those who gain do not work." That is as much as to say that the middle class is lazy and does not work, and yet the Manifesto says that the middle class has achieved more marvellous works than Egypt, Rome, and the Middle Ages, and that, in its reign of power of scarcely a hundred years, it has created more powerful and more gigantic forces of production than all past generations put together. How can a class which does not work produce more marvellous works than the whole ancient and mediæval world? Marx frees himself later from this inconsistency by ascribing surplus value solely to the operation of the variable part of capital (wage-labour)--a doctrine which he develops with iron logic in his principal work, "Capital." III. THE REVOLUTION OF 1848. The ink had hardly dried on the Communist Manifesto when the February Revolution broke out. The crowing of the Gallic cock soon awoke an echo in the various German States, whilst in Brussels the democrats were attacked and ill-treated by the mob. One of the victims of this attack was Karl Marx, who was, moreover, banished shortly afterwards by the Belgian Government. This action, however, did not cause him any embarrassment, as he was ready in any case to proceed to Paris, whither the Provisional Government of the French Republic had already invited him in the following terms: "Paris, March 1, 1848. "BRAVE AND FAITHFUL MARX, "The soil of the French Republic is a place of refuge for all friends of freedom. Tyranny has banished you; France, the free, opens to you her gates--to you and to all who fight for the holy cause, the fraternal cause of every people. In this sense shall every officer of the French Government understand his duty. _Salut et Fraternité._ FERDINAND FLOCON, Member of the Provisional Government." The stay in Paris was, however, of short duration. Marx and Engels gathered together the members of the League of Communists and procured them the means for returning to Germany to take part in the German revolution. They themselves travelled to the Rhineland and succeeded in getting the establishment of the newspaper planned in Cologne into their hands. On the first of June, 1848, the _Neue Rheinische Zeitung_ appeared for the first time. It goes without saying that the editor was Karl Marx, and among his collaborators were Engels, Freiligrath, Wilhelm Wolff, and Georg Weerth. Occasionally, too, Lassalle sent contributions. It is but rarely given to a daily paper to have such an editorial staff. In the third volume of his "Collected Papers of Marx and Engels," Franz Mehring gives a selection of the articles which appeared in this journal. They are still worth reading. Here are a few examples. After the fall of Vienna he wrote an article concluding with the following words: "With the victory of the 'Red Republic' in Paris the armies from the inmost recesses of every land will be vomited forth upon the boundaries and over them, and the real strength of the combatants will clearly appear. Then we shall remember June and October, and we too shall cry, 'Woe to the vanquished!' The fruitless butcheries which have occurred since those June and October days ... will convince the peoples that there is only one means of shortening, simplifying, and concentrating the torturing death agonies of society--only one means--revolutionary terrorism."--(_Neue Rheinische Zeitung_, November 6, 1848.) Or take, for example, this passage from the last article of the paper, when on May 18, 1849, it succumbed to the "craft and cunning of the dirty West Kalmucks" (i.e., the Prussians). "In taking leave of our readers we remind them of the words in our first January number: 'Revolutionary upheaval of the French working class, general war--that is the index for the year 1849. And already in the east a revolutionary army comprised of warriors of all nationalities stands confronting the old Europe represented by and in league with the Russian army, already from Paris looms the Red Republic.'" In reading these extracts one has only to substitute Russia for France and Moscow for Paris and we get at one of the sources of Lenin's and Trotsky's revolutionary policy. The articles written by Marx in 1848 and 1849 have supplied the Bolsheviks their tactics. The censorship, Press lawsuits, and the decline of the revolution severed the life threads of the paper after scarcely a year of its existence. Marx sacrificed everything he had in money and valuables--in all, 7,000 thalers--in order to satisfy creditors and to pay the contributors and printers. Then he travelled to Paris, where he witnessed not the triumph of the Red Republic but that of the counter-revolution. In July, 1849, he was banished by the French Government to the boggy country of Morbihan, in Brittany; he preferred, however, to go over to London, where he remained to the end of his life. IV. DAYS OF CLOUD AND SUNSHINE IN LONDON. Marx lived for more than a generation in London. Half of this time was spent in a wearying struggle for existence, which, however, did not prevent him from collecting and systematising a vast amount of material for his life-work, "Capital," nor from taking a decisive part in the Labour movement as soon as the opportunity presented itself, as it did on the founding of the International. The first decade was particularly trying. A letter written on May 20, 1851, by Marx's wife to Weydemeyer, in America, gives an affecting picture of their poverty during these first years of exile.--("Neue Zeit," 25th year, Vol. II., pp. 18-21.) The attempt to continue the _Neue Rheinische Zeitung_ under the title _Neue Rheinische Revue_ had only the negative result of swallowing up Marx's last resources. How poor Marx then was can be judged from the fact that he had to send his last coat to the pawnshop in order that he might buy paper for his pamphlet on the Cologne Communist trial (towards the end of 1852). On top of all this, lamentable differences sprang up among the German exiles, who, deceived in their revolutionary illusions, overwhelmed one another with recriminations; an echo of these conflicts is heard in the pamphlet "Herr Vogt" (1860). Marx's only regular source of income in the years 1851-60 was his earnings as correspondent of the _New York Tribune_, which paid him at the rate of a sovereign per article, and this hardly covered his rent and the cost of newspapers and postage. Yet his articles were veritable essays, the fruit of researches which cost him a good deal of time. And in the midst of this penury the idea of writing a Socialistic criticism of political economy burnt within him. One might almost say that since 1845 this idea had allowed him no peace. Freiligrath's lines are, as it were, stamped upon him: In the clouds his goal he planted; In the dust had he to live, Bare existence daily granted. Cramped, hemmed in on every side, Pinched by poverty and urged By want, he, of all denied, By necessity was scourged. Only in the sixties did his fortunes improve. Small family inheritances, Wilhelm Wolff's legacy of over £800, and Engels' more plentiful and regular help, which from 1869 onward amounted to about £350 annually, enabled Marx to write his "Capital," the first volume of which, as is well known, is dedicated to Wilhelm Wolff. To these relatively happy times belong Paul Lafargue's reminiscences--("Neue Zeit," 9th year, Vol. I., pp. 10-17, 37-42)--of his intercourse with the Marx family. In particular he depicts the personality of the author of "Capital." In the bosom of his family and among the circle of his friends on Sunday evenings Marx was a genial companion, full of wit and humour. "His dark black eyes sparkled with mirth and with a playful irony whenever he heard a witty remark or a prompt repartee." He was a tender, indulgent father, who never asserted the parental authority. His wife was his helper and companion in the truest sense of the word. She was four years older than he, and notwithstanding her aristocratic connections and in spite of the great hardships and persecutions which for years she had to suffer by the side of her husband, she never regretted having taken the step which linked her destiny with that of Marx. She possessed a cheerful, bright disposition and an unfailing tact, easily winning the esteem of every one of her husband's acquaintances, friends, and followers. "Heinrich Heine, the relentless satirist, feared Marx's scorn; but he cherished the greatest admiration for the keen, sensitive mind of Marx's wife. Marx esteemed so highly the intelligence and the critical sense of his wife that he told me in 1866 he had submitted all his manuscripts to her and that he set a high value upon her judgment." Six children were born to the Marxes, four girls and two boys, of whom only three of the girls grew up--Jenny, who married Charles Longuet; Laura, who became the wife of Paul Lafargue; and the unhappy but highly-gifted Eleanor, who spent 14 sad years of her life by the side of Dr. Edward Aveling. The sixties were undoubtedly the happiest years of Marx's life, and seemed to promise an abundant harvest in his later life. But his health soon began to fail, and did not allow him to complete his work. The most productive years of Marx's life were between 1837 and 1847 and between 1857 and 1871. All his valuable work falls within these years: the "Poverty of Philosophy," the Communist Manifesto, his activity in the International, "Capital," the Civil War in France (the Commune). V. THE INTERNATIONAL. The economic studies necessitated by his book "Capital" led Marx into the study of the social history of England during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and gave him an insight into the working-class movements of those times such as but few scholars, English or foreign, have acquired. He became familiar with the modes of thought and expression of the working-class revolutionary movements, and especially of the Chartist movement, with the surviving leaders and adherents of which he was personally acquainted. Always eager to obtain knowledge of the actual working-class movement and to take part in it, he watched the activities of the English working class, which in the fifties was mainly occupied with purely trade unionist questions, being, politically, still in the Liberal camp. A change seemed imminent, however, about the beginning of the sixties. The London Labour leaders began to think about a Parliamentary reform movement, about starting a campaign for universal suffrage, which was an old Chartist demand. Likewise they manifested an interest in the fate of Poland and in other international questions concerning liberty. At the International Exhibition held in London in 1862, the Labour leaders made the acquaintance of a deputation of French working men, with whom they afterwards carried on a correspondence. In 1863 and 1864, in the course of this correspondence, the idea of founding an international union of workers was mooted; and in the fourth week of September, 1864, this idea was carried into effect. Labour delegates from Paris and London held a conference in London from the 25th to the 28th of September, and the event was celebrated by a public gathering in St. Martin's Hall on the evening of the 28th. Marx received an invitation to this meeting in order that the German workers might be represented there. This conference and meeting resulted in the formation of the International Working Men's Association. Committees and sub-committees were elected to draw up a declaration of principles and outline the constitution. One of Mazzini's followers and a Frenchman submitted schemes which were handed over to Marx to be elaborated by him. He consigned them to the waste-paper basket and wrote the "Inaugural Address," giving a history of the English workers since the year 1825, and deducing the necessary conclusions. The declaration of principles is entirely the work of Marx, and it is by no means a subtly and diplomatically conceived composition designed to please English and French working men; it consists essentially of Marxian ideas expressed in terms, however, which would appeal to English working men of that time. "It was difficult," writes Marx to Engels--("Correspondence," Vol. III., p. 191)--"so to arrange matters that our view should appear in a form which would prove acceptable to the working-class movement with its present outlook.... It needs time before the reanimated movement will allow of the old boldness of speech. One must go _fortiter in re, suaviter in modo_ (firmly maintaining essential principles with a pleasant manner)." The Inaugural Address sums up the history of the English working class from 1825 to 1864, and shows that from its struggles, as indeed from modern social history in general, the following lessons may be learnt by the proletariat: independent economic and political action by the working class; the turning to account of reforms forced out of the ruling classes by the proletariat; international co-operation of workers in the Socialist revolution and against secret, militarist diplomacy. Marx devoted a great deal of his time during the years 1865 to 1871 to the International. Its progress awoke in him the greatest hopes. In 1867 he writes to Engels: "Things are moving. And in the next revolution, which is perhaps nearer than it seems, we (i.e., you and I) have this powerful machinery _in our hands_."--("Correspondence of Marx and Engels," Vol. III., p. 406.) The International passed through three phases: from 1865 to 1867 the followers of Proudhon held sway; from 1868 to 1870 Marxism was in the ascendant; from 1871 to its collapse it was dominated and ultimately broken up by the Bakunists. The followers of Proudhon, like those of Bakunin, were against political action and in favour of the federative economic form of social organisation, only the Bakunists were also Communists, whereas the followers of Proudhon had an antipathy to Communism. Both groups were in agreement with Marx only on the one point--that he made economics the basis of the working-class movement. Both groups, however, accused him of being dictatorial, of attempting to concentrate the whole power of the International in his own hands. Besides insurmountable theoretical differences, racial and national prejudices crept into the International as disintegrating factors. The Romance and Russian Anarchists looked upon Marx as a pan-German, and conversely, some Marxians considered Bakunin a pan-Slav. Even as late as 1914, in the first months of the war, Professor James Guillaume, the last of the Bakunists, wrote a pamphlet entitled "Karl Marx, Pangermaniste" (Paris). Michael Bakunin (b. 1814, near Twer, in Russia; d. 1876, in Berne) lived and studied in Germany during the forties. In 1848 and 1849 he took part in the revolution, was arrested, then handed over to Russia and banished to Siberia, whence he escaped in 1856, afterwards living in various countries of Western Europe. He was an indifferent theorist, and contributed little to the enrichment of philosophical Anarchism, but he distinguished himself by his immense revolutionary activity and his capacity for sacrifice. The influence which he exercised sprang from his character. He had been acquainted with the Young Hegelians as well as with Marx, Engels, and Wilhelm Wolff since the beginning of the forties. Until the end of 1868 he acknowledged Marx as his intellectual leader, as is evident from the following letter which he addressed to Marx: "123, Montbrillant, Geneva, "December 22, 1868. "Serno has shown me the portion of your letter which concerns me. You ask him whether I am still your friend. Yes, more than ever, my dear Marx, for now I understand better than ever how truly right you are when you advance along the high road of economic revolution and invite us to follow, and when you set those below us who stray into the side-tracks either of national or exclusively political enterprises. I am now doing the same thing that you have been doing for more than twenty years. Since my solemn public leave-taking from the bourgeois of the Berne Congress, I no longer know any other society, any other milieu, than the world of the workers. Henceforth my country is the 'International,' of which you are one of the most illustrious founders. Yon see, my dear friend, that I am your disciple--and I am proud of it. That will be enough to make clear my attitude and my feelings toward you."--("Neue Zeit," 19th year, Vol. I., p. 6.) Nevertheless, this discipleship did not hinder Bakunin from secretly forming a separate organisation which contributed to the break-up of the International. Moreover, the International was only a kind of school for Socialist officers who had yet to create their armies, but it proved even more successful than Marx himself could have expected. The fundamental principles of Marxism ousted every other social revolutionary system which had made itself prominent within the working-class movement. VI. THE PARIS COMMUNE. On September 1, 1870, a part of the French Army was defeated near Sedan and compelled to capitulate on the following day. Among the prisoners was Louis Bonaparte, the French Emperor. The Empire fell on September 4, and France was proclaimed a Republic. On September 6 Marx wrote to Engels: "The French section of the International travelled from London to Paris in order to do foolish things in the name of the International. They want to overthrow the Provisional Government and set up a _Commune de Paris_."--("Correspondence," Vol. IV., p. 330). Although the Provisional Government of the newly-baked French Republic was in no wise made up of friends of the democracy, Marx and Engels expressed themselves _against_ any revolutionary action by the Paris working class. In the second Address (or declaration) of the General Council of the International, written on September 9, and composed by Marx, the question is discussed as follows: "Thus the French working class finds itself placed in extremely difficult circumstances. Any attempt to overthrow the new Government, when the enemy is already knocking at the gates of Paris, would be a hopeless piece of folly. The French workers must do their duty as citizens; but they must not let themselves be overcome by the national reminiscences of 1792.... They have not to repeat the past but to build the future. Let them quietly and with determination make the most of the republican freedom granted to them, in order to carry out thoroughly the organisation of their own class. That will give them new, Herculean strength for the rebirth of France and for our common task--the emancipation of the proletariat."--("Civil War in France," Second Address.) Marx then urged the French workers not to do anything foolish, not to set up a revolutionary Commune of Paris, but to make use of their republican liberties to create proletarian organisations and to save and discipline their forces for future tasks. Circumstances, however, proved much stronger than any words of wisdom. Goaded by the anti-democratic moves of the Government supporters, deeply humiliated by the defeats of the French army, burning with patriotism and whipped up into fury against the "capitulards," the Paris working men cast Marx's words to the winds and rose in revolution on March 18, 1871, proclaiming the Paris Commune. Paris was to be the capital of a Socialist Republic. In seven weeks the Paris Revolution was overthrown--and "Vae victis!" (Woe to the vanquished!) Marx afterwards wrote the pamphlet on "The Civil War in France, 1871," which is one of the most mature of his writings. He did not cut himself entirely adrift from the revolutionaries--the Bolsheviks of that time--but defended them with unsurpassable energy. It is the swan song of Marx and of the first International. VII. THE EVENING OF LIFE. During the last twelve years of his life Marx had to fight almost uninterruptedly against various bodily ailments, all of which had their origin in his chronic liver complaint and over-exertion. His work, for which he had sacrificed, as he wrote to an American friend, "health, happiness and family," remained unfinished. He devoted his enforced leisure to making a study of American agriculture and of rural conditions in Russia, for which purpose he learnt Russian; he likewise occupied himself with studies of the Stock Exchange, banking, geology, physiology, and higher mathematics. In 1875 he wrote his "Criticism of the Gotha Program"--("Neue Zeit," 9th year, Vol. I., No. 18)--which contains some very important data as to Marx's attitude to the State, to the revolutionary period of transition from Capitalism to Socialism, and lastly to Socialist society itself. He went to Karlsbad for the purpose of recovering his health. In 1877 and 1878 he was in some measure capable of carrying on his work, and set about arranging his manuscripts and getting the second volume of "Capital" ready for the press; it soon appeared, however, that his capacity for work had gone. The decline in body and mind could no longer be checked; even visits to French and Algerian watering-places proved ineffective. It was just at this time that Marx began to find recognition both in France and in England: Jules Guesde, Henry M. Hyndman, Belfort Bax set about spreading Marxian doctrines, and Marxian and anti-Marxian parties were formed. But the man to whom this recognition had come was already a ruin. Bronchial catarrh, inflammation of the lungs, spasmodic asthma, together with the loss of his wife on December 2, 1881, and of his eldest daughter (Mme. Longuet) in January, 1883, gave the finishing stroke to his enfeebled body. On March 14, 1883, Marx breathed his last. Engels gives an account of the last moments in a letter to his American friend Sorge, dated March 15, 1883: "Yesterday, at half-past two in the afternoon, the best time for visiting him, I went down to see him; everybody was in tears; it looked as if the end had come. I made inquiries, trying to get at the truth of the matter and to offer consolation. There had been a slight hæmorrhage, but a sudden collapse had supervened. Our good old Lena, who had tended him better than any mother does her child, went up, came down. He was half asleep, she said; I could go up. As we went in, he lay there, sleeping, never to wake again. Pulse and breathing had ceased. In those two minutes he had gone painlessly and peacefully to sleep.... Mankind is less by a head, and indeed by the most important head it had to-day. The working-class movement will pursue its course, but its central point, to which French, Russians, Americans, and Germans turned of their own accord in decisive moments, always to receive that clear, unambiguous counsel which genius and perfect mastery alone can give--is gone." On Saturday, March 17, he was buried in the Highgate Cemetery, London. Among those who spoke at the graveside were Friedrich Engels and Wilhelm Liebknecht. The former gave a brief account of his revolutionary struggles, in which he said: "Just as Darwin discovered the law of the evolution of organic nature, so Marx discovered the evolutionary law of human history--the simple fact, hitherto hidden under ideological overgrowths, that above all things men must eat, drink, dress, and find shelter before they can give themselves to politics, science, art, religion, or anything else, and that therefore the production of the material necessaries of life and the corresponding stage of economic evolution of a people or a period provides the foundation upon which the national institutions, legal systems, art, and even religious ideas of the people in question have been built, and upon which, therefore, their explanation must be based, a procedure the reverse of that which has hitherto been adopted. Marx discovered also the special law of motion for the modern capitalist mode of production and for the middle-class society which it begets. With the discovery of surplus value light was at once thrown upon a subject, all the earlier investigations of which, whether by middle-class economists or by Socialist critics, had been gropings in the dark...." After him spoke Liebknecht, who had hastened from Germany to pay a last tribute to his friend and master: "The dead one, whose loss we mourn, was great in his love and in his hate. His hate sprang from his love. He had a great heart, as he had a great intellect. He has raised social democracy from a sect, from a school, to a party, which now already fights unconquered, and in the end will win the victory." Engels, who outlived him by twelve years, edited the two last volumes of "Capital," while Karl Kautsky, the disciple and successor of Engels and the real disseminator of Marxian doctrines, edited the three volumes of Marx's historical studies on surplus value. The latter work is not far short of being a great history of political economy. FOOTNOTES: [6] By democratic parties were then understood working-class political movements, such as Chartism, etc. IV. THE MARXIAN SYSTEM. I. THE MATERIALIST CONCEPTION OF HISTORY. As a guide to his studies from 1843-4 onwards, Marx used the conception of history, or method of investigation, which--in contradistinction to the idealist conception of history of Hegel--was named materialistic. As its nature is dialectic--as it seeks to conceive in thought the evolving antagonisms of the social process--it is, like Hegel's dialectic, a conception of history and a method of investigation at the same time. Nowhere did Marx work out his method of investigation in a special and comprehensive form; the elements of it are scattered throughout his writings, particularly in the Communist Manifesto and in the "Poverty of Philosophy," and serve the purpose of polemics or demonstration. Only in the preface to his book, "On the Critique of Political Economy" (1859) did he devote two pages to a sketch of his conception of history, but in phraseology which is not always clear, sequential, or free from objection. It was the intention of Marx to write a work on Logic, where he would certainly have formulated clearly his materialistic dialectic. As, however, his fundamental ideas on this subject are available, we are able to extract the essentials of his position. A glance over human history suffices to teach us that from age to age man has held to be true or false various opinions on rights, customs, religion, the State, philosophy, land-holding, trade, industry, etc., that he has had various economic arrangements, and forms of the State and of society, and that he has gone through an endless series of struggles and wars and migrations. How has this complicated variety of human thought and action come about? Marx raises that question, which, so far as he is concerned, does not aim in the first place at the discovery of the origin of thought, of rights, of religion, of society, of trade, etc.; these he takes to be historically given. He is rather concerned to find out the causes, the impulses, or the springs which produce the changes and revolutions of the essentials and forms of the mental and social phenomena, or which create the tendencies thereto. In a sentence: What interested Marx here was not the _origin_, but the development and change of things--he is searching for the dynamic law of history. Marx answered: The prime motive power of human society, which is responsible for the changes of human consciousness and thought, or which causes the various social institutions and conflicts to arise, does not originate, in the first place, from thought, from the Idea, from the world-reason or the world-spirit, but from the material conditions of life. The basis of human history is therefore material. The material conditions of life--that is, the manner in which men as social beings, with the aid of environing nature, and of their own in-dwelling physical and intellectual qualities, shape their material life, provide for their sustenance, and produce, distribute and exchange the necessary goods for the satisfaction of their needs. Of all categories of material conditions of existence, the most important is production of the necessary means of life. And this is determined by the nature of the productive forces. These are of two kinds: inanimate and personal. The inanimate productive forces are: soil, water, climate, raw materials, tools and machines. The personal productive forces are: the labourers, the inventors, discoverers, engineers, and finally, the qualities of the race--the inherited capacities of specific groups of men, which facilitate work. The foremost place among the productive forces belongs to the manual and mental labourers; they are the real creators of exchange-value in capitalist society. The next place of importance is taken by modern technology, which is an eminently revolutionising force in society.--("Capital" (German), Vol. I., Chapters 1, 12, 13 and 14, "Poverty of Philosophy" (German edition, 1885, pp. 100-101.)) So much for the conception "Productive Forces," which plays an important part with Marx. We come now to the other equally important notion, "Conditions of production." By this phrase Marx understands the legal and State forms, ordinances and laws, as well as the grouping of social classes and sections: thus, the social conditions which regulate property and determine the reciprocal human relations in which production is carried on. The conditions of production are the work of men in society. Just as men produce various material goods out of the materials and forces made available to them by Nature, so they create out of the reactions of the productive forces upon the mind definite social, political, and legal institutions, as well as systems of religion, morals, and philosophy. "Men make their own history, but do not so spontaneously in conditions chosen by them, but on the contrary, in conditions which they have found ready to hand transmitted and given."--(Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire," I.) That is to say, under the influence of productive work and its needs, men build their form of society, their State, their religion, their philosophy and science. The material production is the substructure or the groundwork, while the corresponding political, religious, and philosophical systems are the superstructure. And in such a manner that the superstructure corresponds to the foundation, lends it strength, and promotes its development. The foundation is material, and the superstructure is the psychical reflex and effect. In broad outlines this conception may be illustrated somewhat as follows: Primitive human groups lived under Communism and were organised according to blood relationship. Their deities have the characteristics of their natural environment, and reflect the physical effects of this environment upon the primitive mental life of the "savage"; their religion, their morality, and their laws promote the communal life and the tribal discipline. Feudal society is based on the possession of land by the nobles and on the industrial labour of the corporations of the towns. The inherited religious ideas are soon transformed in accordance with the dominant interests of these historical periods (primitive Christianity became a State religion); all religious, ethical, and philosophical ideas antagonistic to these interests were fought and persecuted. The middle-class society, which is based on personal property, is endeavouring to sweep away all vestiges of communal and corporation rights, to set free the individual, to mobilise labour and property, to abolish Feudalism and the old Church and monasterial institutions, and to put in their place the individual relation between man and God, or the personal conscience (the Reformation), introducing individual rights as well; it struggles against the independent sovereignty of the feudal domains, and labours for a united national territory, which will afford greater scope to trade and commerce; it supports Absolutism, so long as the latter is in conflict with the feudal lords; and when, afterwards, Absolutism is a hindrance to the development of middle-class society, this also is fought and a constitutional monarchy or a republic demanded. And all this takes place not because certain human intelligences, by reason of more intense thought, or enlightenment, or the call of a supernatural power, are primarily at work, but as a consequence of the influence of the material basis, of the economic foundation of society, upon the mind, which translates and transforms these external realities into religious, juridical, and philosophic conceptions: "It is not the consciousness of men which determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness."--(Marx, Preface to "Critique of Political Economy.") Man, even the most heroic, is not the sovereign maker and law-giver of social life, but its executive; he only follows out the tendencies and currents set up by the material foundation of society. Nevertheless, a great deal depends upon the executive officials. If they possess comprehensive knowledge, energetic natures, and outstanding capacities, they are able, within the boundaries drawn for them, to accomplish great things, and to accelerate the development. "Up to the present the philosophers have but interpreted the world; it is, however, necessary to change it."--(Marx, "Theses to Feuerbach.") We have referred in various places to interests. We are not to understand by this personal, but general social or class interests. Marx is not of the opinion that everybody acts in accordance with his personal welfare. This is not Marxian doctrine, but that of the middle-class moral philosophers, like Helvetius (1715-1771) and Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), who regarded pleasure and pain of the individual as the measure and motive of his actions and conduct. Marx is rather of the opinion that men often, in the most important events of their lives, act contrary to their personal interests, as in their feelings and thoughts they identify themselves with that which they hold to be the interests of the community or of their class. According to Marx, individual interest generally plays a slight part in history. He is preoccupied with the collective interest of social production. Only the latter does he hold to be determining in the formation of the intellectual superstructure. Up till now we have only spoken of various forms of production and society, and their corresponding mental systems. But we do not yet know why and how one form of production and society becomes obsolete and gives place to another, that is, how and why revolutionary changes are brought about. Or in other words: we have hitherto considered the statics of society; we will now look at its dynamics. The revolutionary changes in society depend on two groups of phenomena, which, although casually connected with each other, yet work differently. One of these groups of phenomena is technical, and consists in changes in the productive forces. The other group, which is the effect of the first, is of a personal nature, and consists in struggles between the social classes. Let us consider the first group of causes. As the productive forces expand, through greater skill on the part of the worker, through discoveries of new raw material and markets, through the invention of new labour processes, tools and machines, and through the better organisation of trade and exchange, so that the material basis or the economic foundation of society is altered, then the old conditions of production cease to promote the interests of production. For the conditions of production: the former social classes, the former laws, State institutions, and intellectual systems were adapted to a state of the productive forces which is either in process of disappearing, or no longer exists. The social and intellectual superstructure no longer corresponds to the economic foundation. The productive forces and the conditions of production come into conflict with each other. This conflict between the new realty and the old form, this conflict between new causes and the obsolete effects of bygone causes, begins gradually to influence the thoughts of men. Men commence to feel that they are confronted with a new external world, and that a new era has been opened. Social divisions acquire a new significance: classes and sections which were formerly despised gain in social and economic power; classes which were formerly honoured decline. While this transformation of the social foundation is proceeding, the old religious, legal, philosophical, and political systems cling to their inherited positions, and insist on remaining, although they are obsolete and can no longer satisfy mental needs. For human thought is conservative: it follows external events slowly, just as our eye perceives the sun at a point which the sun has in reality already passed, as the rays require several minutes of time in order to strike our optic nerves. We may recall Hegel's fine metaphor: "The Owl of Minerva begins its flight only when twilight gathers." However late, it does begin. Great thinkers gradually arise, who explain the new situation, and create new ideas and trains of thought which correspond to the new situation. The human consciousness gives birth to anxious doubts and questionings, and then new truths; leading to differences of opinion, disputes, strifes, schisms, class struggles, and revolutions. In the next chapter we will consider more closely the class struggle between Labour and Capital. Meanwhile, we will look at the class struggle generally. In primitive societies, where private property is yet unknown, or still undeveloped, there are no class distinctions, no class domination, and no class antagonisms. The chief, the medicine man, and the judge regulate or supervise the observance of the customary usages, religious ceremonies, and social arrangements. But as soon as the old order is dissolved, and private property develops, in consequence of trade with other peoples or through wars, there arise classes of those who possess and those who do not. The possessing class carries on the Government, makes laws, and creates institutions, which chiefly serve the end of protecting the interests of the possessing and ruling classes. The intellectual structure of the class society likewise corresponds to the interests of those who possess and rule. So long as these interests promote the common good in some measure, so long as the old forms of production and the old conditions of production are largely in harmony with each other, a certain truce prevails between the classes. But should there set in the above-mentioned opposition between the productive forces and the conditions of production, the latter will cease to satisfy the oppressed classes, and class conflicts will arise, which will either result in legal compromises (reforms) or will end in the overthrow of the society concerned, or will lead to a new set of conditions. Ancient history (Hebrew, Greek, Roman) is full of these social struggles; all the great reform laws of these peoples were attempts to establish social peace, but the rich and the poor, the Patricians and the Plebeians, the Slaves and Freemen, continued their struggles until the downfall of the old world, which has bequeathed to us great intellectual treasures as the fruit of these struggles. In the Middle Ages social struggles between the feudal lords and the traders, between nobles and peasants, were kindled. In more recent times the middle classes fought Autocracy and Squirearchy, and at length the proletariat was pitted against the bourgeoisie--class struggles which led to rebellions and revolutions, and powerfully influenced the intellectual life. From these historical antagonisms and struggles arose the intellectual and political antagonisms, personified by the leaders of the social groups and classes, of which world-history relates: opposing religious and philosophical systems: Brahma and Buddha, Baal and Jahveh, National God and Universal God, Heathendom and Christendom, Catholicism and Protestantism, Materialism and Idealism, Realism and Nominalism. However abstract or metaphysical, however remote from actual life and material production they may appear to be, nevertheless, in the last resort they are to be traced back through many intermediate stages to changes in the economic foundation of the society in question, to the contradiction between this foundation and the conditions of production, as well as to the great struggles between conflicting interests which spring therefrom. The ethical, political, and politico-economic systems which strive with each other for mastery, as well as national and world wars, are separated from the real basis of society by a progressively smaller number of intermediate stages: the questions of idealist or utilitarian ethics, monarchy or republic, oligarchy or democracy, protection or free trade, State regulation or free scope for the economic forces, Socialism or private enterprise, etc., however lofty and humanitarian may be the arguments and ideal motives which their champions may adduce, are connected with the material foundation and the conditions of production which have come into conflict with it. Marx and Engels have set forth this conception in the Communist Manifesto, in popular form, as follows: "Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views, and conceptions, in one word, man's consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life? "What else does the history of ideas prove than that intellectual production changes in character in proportion as material production is changed. The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class. "When people speak of ideas that revolutionise society they do but express the fact that within the old society the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence. "When the ancient world was in its last throes the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the eighteenth century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death-battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competition within the domain of knowledge." Now one step farther. When the conditions of production, the social divisions into classes, and the laws of property become fetters to the productive forces, when the conflict of interests condense themselves into class struggles, then comes a period of social revolution. "With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations the distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, æsthetic, or philosophic--in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so we are not able to judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must rather be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social forces of production and the conditions of production."--(Preface to "Critique of Political Economy.") The revolutionary period only closes when the social order that had become full of contradictions liberates the productive forces and strikes off their fetters, and creates new conditions of production which correspond to them. The old society, which is doomed to disappear, evolves the new conditions of existence before it sinks into oblivion. The men who assist the progress of the new society accordingly occupy themselves with problems which they are able to solve, as the means thereto are given in the material development. Such problems are set before them because, regarded from the theoretical standpoint, they are the mental reflex of the contradictions and revolutionary tendencies within society. Accordingly, the essence of the historical development of human society has been so far the progressive dialectical unfolding and perfection of the productive forces. "In broad outlines," says Marx, "we can designate the Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal, and the modern bourgeois methods of production, as so many epochs in the progress of the economic formation of society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production--antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism, but of one arising from conditions surrounding the life of individuals in society; at the same time the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of that antagonism. This social formation constitutes, therefore, the closing chapter of the prehistoric stage of human society." Prehistoric stage of human society! What significant words! The capitalist economic order is the last phase of this stage, which is written in streams of blood and tears of the dispossessed and exploited, and to which is given the task of developing the productive forces and liberating men from the material fetters, so that they may enter into a life of mental culture. The materialist conception of history, unethical and unidealist like all natural science, opens up wide and elevating prospects. During thousands of years man struggled on the physical plane to obtain release from the animal kingdom, and was subjected to the discipline of unfeeling nature. After he had emerged from the animal kingdom, man laboured for thousands of years to lay the foundation of human society, a process which was performed under the hunger whip of stern taskmasters, and which powerfully stimulated the intellectual capacities of men, but only disclosed the ideal of justice and humanity as a remote and inaccessible star. The materialist conception of history has shown itself to be a fruitful method of historical investigation. Some aspects of this idea were uttered both before and during Marx's lifetime. The revolution in the positions of classes and the struggles which followed hard on the English industrial revolution (1760-1825), and everywhere attended the transition from an agrarian to an industrial State, were too palpable to be overlooked. It was Marx who fused these ideas, with the aid of the Hegelian dialectics made of them a method of investigation, and pressed them into the service of Socialism and historical research. II. CLASSES, CLASS STRUGGLES, AND CLASS-CONSCIOUSNESS. One of the most important contributions of Marx to the understanding of historical processes is his conception of social classes and of class struggles. Although, prior to Marx, there were historians and politicians who pointed out the part played by social classes in politics and in social convulsions, it was Marx who first grasped this conception in its entire scope and significance, giving it precise form, and making it an essential part of political and social thought. He refers to the subject in the Communist Manifesto in the following terms: "The Socialist and Communist systems properly so called, those of St. Simon, Fourier, Owen, and others, spring into existence in the early undeveloped period of the struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie. The founders of these systems see, indeed, the class antagonisms, as well as the action of the decomposing elements in the prevailing form of society. But the proletariat, as yet in its infancy, offers to them the spectacle of a class without any historical initiative or any independent political movement." The classification of the various groups of society, or the division of human society into classes, is as logical a process, that is, a result attained by the operations of reason, as the division of animals, plants, and minerals into various classes. A specific group of social beings, which bear the stamp of common characteristics, is put in a certain class by social science. This classification cannot be made by purely empirical methods of immediate sensuous perceptions. It cannot be determined from the appearance of modern men, whether they are capitalists or workers. We must look for certain scientifically established features which determine the social classification of men. As we have just seen, Marx held economic facts to be fundamental, and he contended that the economic characteristics were valid for purposes of classification. In his view, the manner in which a specific human group obtained its sustenance was the chief characteristic. Men whose chief means of life are wages form the working class. Men whose most important source of livelihood is the ownership of capital (land, buildings, workshops, and raw material) form the capitalist class. It is of little moment that a worker owns a savings-bankbook, and draws interest or dividends from a co-operative society, or that a capitalist personally supervises his undertaking, or organises his business, so that his profits partly consist in wages of superintendence or salary. The outstanding feature is that the chief interest of the worker is concentrated on wages, whilst that of the capitalist is directed on property. It goes without saying that the social classes are not completely homogeneous. Like botanical and zoological classes, they may be divided into kinds and species; the working classes include well-paid hand and brain workers, as well as sweated sections; but all the subdivisions of the social classes possess the common outstanding quality of the same source of livelihood, which is either personal labour or the possession of capital. One class disposes only of labour-power, while the other class owns the means of production. Between these two classes, says Marx, there are deep-seated, unbridgeable antagonisms, which lead to a class struggle. The antagonisms are primarily of an economic nature. The wage-earners, as the owners of labour power, are constrained to sell this as dear as possible, i.e., to obtain the highest possible wages, whereas the owners of capital endeavour to buy such labour-power as cheap as possible, i.e., to pay the least possible wages. This antagonism is indeed fundamental, but, at first sight, does not touch the intellectual sphere very deeply. On the surface, this antagonism is only one as between buyer and seller, but in reality the distinction is very great, as the seller of labour-power will quickly starve if he does not market his commodity. The owner of the means of production is therefore in a position to cause the seller of labour-power to starve, if the latter does not accept the conditions which the capitalist imposes. Ownership of capital reveals itself as a power that can oppress the owner of labour-power. This antagonism leads to the formation of Trade Unions. It is also the prime cause of the class struggle, but mere trade unionism is but its incipient stage. It develops into a class struggle when the workers recognise that their condition of subjection is not a temporary state, but the result of the economic system of private capitalism, that the subjection will last so long as this economic system exists, and that the latter could be replaced by an economic order in which the means of production belong to all the members of society. The wage-workers only participate in the class struggle when they learn to think in a Socialist sense, when hostility to the existing social order develops out of the sporadic and unrelated wage struggle and actions of Trade Unions, and when the proletariat, as an organised class, turns from the preoccupations of the present to the tasks of the future, and strives to change the basis of society from private property to common property. The workers then become aware that there can be neither freedom nor equality for them in the existing society, and that their emancipation can only be attained through Socialism. The class struggle may, however, stop short at the recognition of these facts. The dialectical movement will be incomplete if the working class does not take its fate into its own hands, and is not convinced that it has the power to achieve its own emancipation, and therefore contents itself with small social reforms, or relies on noble-minded and benevolent men and heroic redeemers. This was actually the case in the beginnings of the Socialist movement, when the workers saw in Socialism the only way out, but were still too weak to take their fate into their own hands. This was the period which Marx called Utopian, when outstanding personalities spread Socialist ideas, and made Socialist plans and experiments to free the labouring masses. As these personalities knew the impotence of the masses, they turned to philanthropists and humane rulers, and sought to convince them that reason, justice, and the general welfare demanded that Socialism should be introduced, and poverty, misery, and their consequences abolished. This period of Utopian Socialism gave way before the further development of industry, the progress of machine technique, the centralisation and concentration of the means of production and exchange, which brought with it an increase in the number, strength, organisation, and class-consciousness of the working classes. It is the centralisation of the means of production and exchange, in particular, which renders it possible for the working class, by paralysing industry and power stations, to cause the whole of society to feel that living labour-power forms the soul of the economic life. At the same time Socialist investigators appear, who not only show the reasonableness and justice of Socialism, but exhibit the proof that the new economic order of Socialism is being prepared in the womb of Capitalism, and that therefore the aspirations of the worker are in harmony with the course of social development. In this wise, a science and an aspiring Socialist movement founded upon reality develops from Utopian Socialism, and, conscious of class, of power, and of aim, enters upon the decisive struggle with the capitalist economic order. The class struggle acts as a lever of social revolution. The original antagonism of the worker and capitalist over wages and hours of labour becomes am impassionate struggle of two classes over the question of the maintenance or transformation of the social and economic system--one of which classes fights for the existing order of private property and the other for the coming Socialistic system. Great social class struggles inevitably become political struggles. The immediate object of the struggle is the possession of the power of the State, with the aid of which the capitalist class endeavours to maintain its position, whilst the working class aims at the conquest of the power of the State in order to accomplish its larger objects. The following chapter will show the direction taken by the Labour movement. Here we will but briefly refer to the profound influence of Marx's doctrine of the class struggle as exercised in political thought. Prior to Marx, political thought and the struggles of political parties seemed to revolve around ideas and great personalities. Idealogy and hero-worship were prevalent. Now, political thought, consciously or unconsciously, proceeds along class and economic lines. This is equally true of historical investigations. These new political and historical orientations are largely the result of Marx's life-work. Rigidly conceived and applied, the Marxian doctrine of the class-struggle may lead to ultra-revolutionary tactics of the Socialist and Labour movement, to the system of Workers' Councils, and Proletarian Dictatorship. If the emerging class and its struggle constitutes the lever of social revolution and the impulse of the dialectical social process, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is justified, and in any case, democracy, which includes both the capitalist and working class, cannot be the State form during the transition period from private property to Socialism. Considered from the economic standpoint, political democracy is generally impossible, or only sham democracy so long as economic inequality exists. The Communist Manifesto does not contain a single political democratic reform. The conclusion can be drawn from Marx's idea, as a whole, that in his estimation, the class stood higher than so-called democracy. This is one of the sources of Bolshevism. III. THE ROLE OF THE LABOUR MOVEMENT AND THE PROLETARIAN DICTATORSHIP. The Labour Party is the political expression of the whole Trade Union movement so far as the latter formulates national demands, directed towards the State and society generally. The Labour Party will function the more effectively, and be able to accomplish its allotted task, as its foundation--the Trade Union movement--becomes established and strengthened, and the more comprehensive will be its effects. The Trade Unions are not merely to be satisfied with the work of the present, but are to become the focus and centre of gravity of the proletarian aspirations which arise out of the social transformation process, and are to work for the abolition of Capitalism. The most effective lever for the achievement of this object is the conquest of political power. With its aid the proletariat can consciously carry out the transformation of a Capitalist into a Communist society. To this transformation, there also corresponds a political transition period, the state of which can be nothing else than a revolutionary Dictatorship of the Proletariat.--(Marx, Letter to the German Social Democracy, 1875, on their Gotha Programme.) Marx considered himself to be the real author of the idea of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. In a letter written by him, in 1852, to his American friend, Weydemeyer, he declares: "As far as I am concerned, I can't claim to have discovered the existence of classes in modern society or their strife against one another. Middle-class historians long ago described the evolution of the class struggles, and political economists showed the economic physiology of the classes. I have added as a new contribution the following propositions: (1) that the existence of classes is bound up with certain phases of material production; (2) that the class struggle leads necessarily to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat; (3) that this dictatorship is but the transition to the abolition of all classes and to the creation of a society of free and equal."--("Neue Zeit," Vol. XXV., second part, p. 164.) With the exception of the year 1870, Marx remained true to his doctrine of Proletarian Dictatorship: he thought in 1875 as he did in 1847, when he sketched the groundwork of the Proletarian Dictatorship in the Communist Manifesto: "The first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy. "The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible. "Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production." But suppose that it is not the revolutionary working class which first attains to power in the revolution, but the democracy of the lower middle class and the social reformists. In this case, Marx gives the following advice: "Separate from it, and fight it." In the address to the League of Communists in 1850 he said: "It may be taken for granted that in the bloody conflicts that are coming, as in the case of previous ones, the courage, resolution, and sacrifice of the workers will be the chief factor in the attainment of victory. As hitherto, so in this struggle, the mass of the lower middle class will maintain an attitude of delay, irresolution, and inactivity as long as possible, in order that, as soon as victory is assured, to arrogate it to themselves and call on the workers to remain quiet, return to work, avoid so-called excesses, and to exclude the proletariat from the fruits of victory. It is not in the power of the workers to hinder the lower middle classes from doing this, but it is within their power to render their success over the armed proletariat very difficult, to dictate to them such conditions that from the beginning the rule of the middle-class democrats is doomed to failure, and its later substitution by the rule of the proletariat is considerably facilitated. "The workers must, during the conflict and immediately afterwards, as much as ever possible, oppose the compromises of the middle class, and compel the democrats to execute their present terrorist threats. They must aim at preventing the subsiding of the revolutionary excitement immediately after the victory. On the contrary, they must endeavour to maintain it as long as possible. "Far from opposing so-called excesses, and making examples of hated individuals or public buildings to which hateful remembrances are attached, by sacrificing them to the popular rage, such examples must not only be tolerated, but their direction must even be taken in hand. During the struggle and after the struggle, the workers must seize every opportunity to present their own demands side by side with those of the middle-class democrats. The workers must demand guarantees as soon as the middle-class democrats propose to take the government in hand. If necessary, these guarantees must be exacted, and the new rulers must be compelled to make every possible promise and concession, which is the surest way to compromise them. The workers must size up the conditions in a cool and dispassionate fashion, and manifest open distrust of the new Government, in order to quench, as much as possible, the ardour for the new order of things and the elation which follows every successful street fight. Against the new official Government, they must set up a revolutionary workers' government, either in the form of local committees, communal councils, or workers' clubs or workers' committees, so that the democratic middle-class government not only immediately loses its support amongst the working classes, but from the commencement finds itself supervised and threatened by a jurisdiction, behind which stands the entire mass of the working class. In a word: from the first moment of victory the workers must no longer level their distrust against the defeated reactionary party, but direct it against their former allies, who would seek to exploit the common victory for their own ends. The workers must be armed and organised to enable them to threaten energetic opposition to this party, whose treason to the workers will commence in the first hour of victory. The arming of the whole proletariat with rifles and ammunition must be carried out at once, and steps taken to prevent the reviving of the old militia, which would be directed against the workers. But should this not be successful, the workers must endeavour to organise themselves as an independent guard, choosing their own chief and general staff, with orders to support not the State power, but the councils formed by the workers. Where workers are employed in State service, they must arm and organise in a special corps, with a chief chosen by themselves, or form a part of the Proletarian Guard. Under no pretext must they give up their arms and equipment, and any attempt at disarmament must be forcibly resisted. Destruction of the influence of the middle-class democrats over the workers, immediate independent and armed organisation of the workers, and the imposition of the most irksome and compromising conditions possible upon the rule of the bourgeois democracy, which is for the time unavoidable.... We have noted that the Democrats come to power in the next phase of the movement, and how they will be obliged to impose measures of a more or less Socialistic nature. It will be asked what contrary measures should be proposed by the workers. Naturally, in the beginning of the movement the workers cannot propose actual Communist measures, but they can (1) compel the Democrats to attack the old social order from as many sides as possible, disturb its regular course, and compromise themselves, and concentrate in the hands of the State as much as possible of the productive forces, means of transport, factories, railways, etc. (2) When the Democrats propose measures which are not revolutionary, but merely reformist, the workers must press them to the point of turning such measures into direct attacks on private property; thus, for example, if the small middle class propose to purchase the railways and factories the workers must demand that such railways and factories, being the property of the reactionaries, shall be simply confiscated by the State, without compensation. If the Democrats propose a proportional tax, the workers must demand a progressive tax; if the Democrats themselves declare for a moderate progressive tax, the workers must insist on a tax so steeply graduated as to cause the collapse of large fortunes; if the Democrats demand the regulation of the State debt, the workers must demand State bankruptcy. Thus the demands of the workers must everywhere be directed against the concessions and measures of the Democrats.... Further, the Democrats will either work directly for a Federal Republic, or, at least, if they cannot avoid the Republic one and indivisible, will seek to paralyse it by granting the greatest possible independence to the municipalities and provinces. The workers must set themselves against this plan, not only to secure the one and indivisible German Republic, but to concentrate as much power as possible in the hands of the State. They need not be misled by democratic platitudes about the freedom of the Communes, self-determination, etc. Their battle-cry must be 'the revolution in permanence.'" This Address of Marx, written in 1850, appears to be the guide of the Bolsheviks and Spartacists. The working classes may, however, not expect their immediate emancipation from their political victory. "In order to work out their own emancipation, and with it that higher form of life which present-day society inevitably opposes, the protracted struggle must pass through a whole series of historical processes, in the course of which men and circumstances alike will be changed. They have no ideal to realise; they have only to set free the elements of the new society, which have already developed in the womb of the collapsing bourgeois society."--(Marx, "Civil War in France.") The means of production will gradually be socialised, production will be placed on a co-operative basis, education will be combined with productive work, in order to transform the members of society into producers. So long as the transition period lasts the Communist maxim, "From each according to his capacity, to each according to his needs," cannot become operative. For this period is in every respect--economic, social, and intellectual--still tainted with the marks of the old society, and "rights cannot transcend the economic structure of society, and the cultural development which it determines."--(Criticism of Gotha Program.) To each will be given according to his deeds. "Accordingly the individual producer will receive back what he gives to society, after deductions for government, education, and other social charges. He will give society his individual quota of labour. For example: the social working day consists in the sum total of individual working days; the individual labour time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day which he contributes; his share thereof. He will receive from society a certificate that he has performed so much work (after deducting his work for social funds), and with this certificate he will draw from the social provision of articles of consumption as much as a similar quantity of labour costs. The same quantity of labour as he will give to society in one form he will receive back in another.... The right of producers will be proportionate to the work they will perform: the equality will consist in the application of the same measure: labour." Because performances will vary in accordance with unequal gifts and degrees of diligence, an unequal distribution will actually take place during the transition period. Only in a fully developed Communistic society, after the distinction between intellectual and physical labour has disappeared, when productive activity has become a first need of life, when the all-round development of the individual and the productive forces has been achieved, and all the springs of co-operative riches flow abundantly; only then can the narrow middle-class idea of rights be improved on, and the Communist principle of equality be put into operation. Marx, who reasoned on strictly economic lines, and placed the emancipation of the working class as the highest goal, to which all other political and economic movements are subordinated, did not mistake the economic, political, and historical rôle of the nation: this is shown by the Communist Manifesto, where the creation of the national State by the bourgeoisie is indicated. He mocked at the young enthusiasts who thought they could brush aside the nation as an obsolete prejudice, but, in spite of this, he considerably under-estimated the unifying force of national feeling, considered from a biological and cultural point of view. He divided civilised mankind into antagonistic classes, and assumed that the economic dividing lines would prove to be more effective than national and political boundary lines. He was, therefore, through and through international. Marx demanded that the national Labour Parties should act internationally as soon as there was a possibility of the collapse of the capitalist domination. He reproached the original Gotha program with the fact that "it borrowed from middle-class Leagues of Peace and Freedom the phrase of the international brotherhood of peoples, whereas it was necessary to promote the international combination of the working classes in a common struggle against the ruling classes and their Governments." Marx had no confidence in the pacifism of the bourgeoisie. IV. OUTLINES OF THE ECONOMIC DOCTRINES. 1. _Capital._ As we already know, Marx became a Socialist in the year 1843. As a believer in dialectics, he knew that Socialism can only be understood by a knowledge of the movement operating in middle-class society and its developing forces. His investigations in 1843-4 led to the result that political economy forms the basis of bourgeois society. Henceforth political economy became the chief department of his studies. His comprehensive studies of French and English economists, especially Sismondi and Ricardo, and the anti-capitalist literature of England of the years 1820-40, which were connected with the Ricardian theory of value, furnished him with a wealth of suggestions and materials for the criticism of political economy, for the source and origin and development and decline of capitalism, written from the standpoint of the working class and the coming Socialistic society. Such a work is "Capital." It consists of three volumes. Only the first volume (1867) was carried through the press by Marx himself. The other two volumes he only sketched, and they were completed and published by Engels after Marx's death. The first volume deals with the origin and tendencies of large industrial capital, with the immediate and simple process of commodity production, so far as it concerns the relations between employer and worker, the exploitation of the proletariat, wages and labour time, and the influence of modern technique on the condition of the worker. We see in the first volume the effect of the factory system in creating capital. Its chief figure is the producing, suffering, rebellious working class. In the second volume, the employer appears on the market, sells his commodities, and sets the wheels of production again in motion, so that commodities will continue to be produced. In the third volume, the realisation process of the undertakings of the capitalist class, or the movement of capital as a whole is exhibited: cost of production, cost price, total gains and their division into profit, interest and ground rent. The first volume presents the greatest difficulties. The tremendous efforts of the author to produce a masterpiece unnecessarily refined and sublimated and overloaded with learning the doctrines of value and surplus value until they attained the level of a philosophy, an example of Hegelian logic. He played with his subject like an intellectual athlete. That Marx could handle complicated economic questions in a clear, vigorous manner is shown by the third volume, which is written just as it came out of the author's head, and without the apparatus of learning subsequently erected, without the crutches of notes and polemico-philosophical excursions. To understand "Capital" it is necessary to bear in mind that (1) Marx regarded the scientifically discovered principles as the real inner being of things, practice he regarded as the superficial appearance of things, capable of being apprehended empirically; for example, Value is the theoretical expression, Price the empirical; Surplus Value is the theoretical, and Profit the empirical expression; the appearances apprehended by experience (Price and Profit) deviate indeed from theory, but without the theory they cannot be understood; (2) he looked at the capitalist economic system as being essentially free from external hindrances and disturbances, free from invasions both by the State and the proletariat: the Labour struggles of factory protection laws of which Marx speaks in "Capital" serve rather to perfect the productive forces than to restrict the exploiting proclivities of sovereign capital. 2. _Value._ The life and motion of capitalistic society appears as an infinite net of exchange operations, formed out of numerous entwined meshes. Through the medium of money, men continually exchange the most varied commodities and services. A ceaseless buying and selling, an uninterrupted series of exchanges of things, and labour power--this constitutes the essential part of human relations in capitalistic society. An economic map of these relations, graphically displayed, would not be less confusing than an astronomical map which exhibited the manifold and intersected orbits of the heavenly bodies. And yet there must be some rule or law which operates in this seeming medley of movements; for men do not work or exchange their goods by hazard, like savages who give their entire lumps of gold or rough diamonds for a necklace of glass pearls. The English and French economists in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, amongst whom Petty (1623-87), Quesnay (1694-1759), Adam Smith (1723-96), and Ricardo (1772-1823) were the most original, sought for the laws which regulated exchange operations, and their theories were designated by Marx as classical bourgeois economy. Following up their investigations, Marx declared: Every commodity, that is, every thing or good produced under Capitalism and brought to the market possesses a use value and an exchange value. The use value is the utility of the commodity to satisfy a physical or mental need of its user: a commodity without use value is not exchangeable or saleable. As use values, commodities are materially different from each other; nobody will exchange a ton of wheat for a ton of wheat of the same kind, but he will for clothes. In what measure will commodities exchange with one another? The measure is the exchange value, and this consists in the trouble and quantity of labour which the production of a commodity costs. Equal quantities of labour are exchanged with each other on the market. As exchange values, as the embodiment of human labour, commodities are essentially equal to each other, only quantitatively are they different, as different categories of commodities embody different quantities of labour. It is obvious that the quantities of labour will not be calculated according to the working methods of the individual producers, but according to the prevailing social working methods. If, for example, hand-weaver A requires twenty hours for the production of a piece of cloth, which in a modern factory will be produced in five hours, the cloth of the hand-weaver does not therefore possess four-fold exchange value. If hand-weaver A demands of consumer B an equivalent of twenty working hours, B answers that a similar piece of cloth can be produced in five hours, and therefore it only represents an exchange value of five working hours. Thus, according to Marx, the exchange value of a commodity consists in the quantity of socially necessary labour power which its reproduction would require. This quantity of labour is no constant factor. New inventions, improvements in labour processes, increase in the productivity of labour, etc., cause a diminution in the quantity of labour necessary for the reproduction of a commodity; its exchange value, or expressed in terms of money, its price, will therefore sink, provided that other things (demand, medium of exchange) remain equal. Consequently, labour is the source of exchange value, and the latter is the principle which regulates exchange operations. Exchange value even measures the extent of the commodity wealth of society. Wealth may increase in volume, but decrease in value, in so far as a less quantity of socially necessary labour becomes necessary for its reproduction. The more progressive a country is industrially and the higher the level of its civilisation, the greater is its wealth, and the smaller is the quantity of labour which must be expended on the creation of wealth. In the practical Labour politics of our times, this is expressed in higher wages and shorter working hours. It was said above that use value is a basic condition for the exchange of the individual commodity. This does not exhaust the rôle of use value. The quantity of use value of which society has need determines the quantity of the exchange values to be created. If more commodities are required than society requires, the superfluous commodities have no exchange value, in spite of the labour that is expended on them.--("Capital" (German), Vol. III., 1, pp. 175-176.) The complete realisation of exchange values or the social labour that is performed depends, as is seen, on the adaptation of supply to demand, and is a matter of organisation, of social direction. We have noticed that the Marxian theory of value is related to that of the classical economists, but they are by no means the same thing. Apart from some improvements and definitions which Marx made, they are distinguished by the following conceptions: In the classical theory of value, the capitalist who directs production and provides with his capital the tools and raw materials of labour, markets the finished commodity, and keeps going the processes of reproduction, appears as the only creator of value: the wage worker is only one of his means of production. In the Marxian theory of value, on the other hand, the wage worker who transforms the raw materials into commodities, or removes the raw materials to the place of production, appears as the sole creator of value. Value is only created by the worker in production, and in distribution connected therewith. 3. _Wages and Labour._ The worker appears to receive wages for his work. In reality he receives wages as the equivalent for the labour power expended by him, quite in accordance with the law of value, inasmuch as he receives by way of exchange as much means of sustenance as is usual and customary to replace the labour power he has expended, just as the working horse receives as much oats and hay as are necessary to maintain it capable of work. The capitalist and the worker exchange certain quantities of commodities in proportions determined by economic laws (means of subsistence against a quantity of the commodity, labour power, of equal value, commodity for commodity, exchange value for exchange value). As, therefore, the wages of labour signify a certain quantity of the means of subsistence, so they increase even if their money form remains unaltered with a fall in the price of the means of life, for the worker is then in the position, with his unaltered wage, to buy a greater quantity of the means of life. In the reverse case, if the prices of the means of life rise, the wages of labour fall, even if their money form remains the same as previously. This law of wages, formulated by Ricardo, was accepted by Marx, but he did not content himself with this acceptance. Ricardo regarded the capitalist world as the only possible and reasonable one, at least at the time when he wrote his "Principles," while Marx from the year 1843 adopted a critical attitude towards it, and sought to negate it. Consequently, he investigated further, and expressed himself somewhat as follows: The capitalist theoricians believed that the wages question was disposed of when it was settled by the law of value. We know, however, that every commodity possesses not only an exchange value, but also a use value, and is bought for the sake of the latter. The use value of the commodity labour power is distinguished in a very remarkable way from the use value of all other commodities. The use or the employment of labour power creates exchange value, and can create much more exchange value than itself possesses. The employer can make use of labour power so long that it not only creates its own exchange value (the value of the means of subsistence), but double this. To create the value of wages, the worker needs five or six hours daily, but he is obliged to produce for the capitalist during ten or twelve hours. If the worker were independent he would only produce during one half of the working day in order to receive his means of subsistence. This period of producing Marx called "necessary labour." As he is dependent on the capitalist, the worker must not only perform "necessary labour" but also surplus labour: the worker can generally only find employment under the conditions that, besides the time needed for himself, he also works a definite number of hours for the capitalist without payment. Or, as Marx says: "The fact that half a day's labour is necessary to keep the labourer alive during the 24 hours, does not in any way prevent him from working the whole day. Therefore, the value of labour power and the value which labour creates in the labour process are two entirely different magnitudes. And this difference in the two values was what the capitalist had in view when he was purchasing labour power. The circumstance that on the one hand the daily sustenance of labour power costs only half a day's labour, while on the other hand the very same labour power can work during a whole day; that consequently the value which its use during one day creates is double what he pays for that use, this circumstance is, without doubt, a piece of good luck for the buyer, but by no means an injury to the seller." "No injury to the seller," which is quite correct from the standpoint of Ricardo, but not from that of Marx. He often calls surplus value "unpaid labour," and says, for example, "the capitalist appropriates one half of every day's labour without payment." In other words, he takes away something without return. This is a very distinct ethical judgment. On the other hand, it is very important that in our consideration of the wages question we have come up against the Marxian doctrine of surplus value. For this doctrine is the cornerstone of the whole economic system of Marx. 4. _Surplus Value._ We have already noted that Marx followed the classical economics in his treatment of the theory of value, but improved the definition of it, and brought it to bear on wages. In doing this he laid stress on the conflict between Capital and Labour. The beginning of this dialectical process, so far as England was concerned, was the work of the anti-capitalistic critics, who uttered their protest about 1820, or three years after the appearance of Ricardo's work. They declared, according to Ricardo, labour is the source and the measure of value. And yet according to his opinion labour is nothing and capital everything. This should be reversed: labour must be all, and capital nothing. This literature was contemporaneous with the emergence of the English revolutionary Labour movement, from which Chartism arose at a later date. Piercy Ravenstone (1821) called capital a metaphysical (airy, impalpable) entity. Hodgskin (1827) called it a fetish, whereas they described labour as the economic reality. The expressions surplus-product and surplus-value were already known to this anti-capitalist school, with which Marx also connected himself when he set to work to elaborate his criticism of political economy.[7] But this literature supplied him with much less material for the construction of the theory of surplus value than the formulation of the theory of value of the classical economy. Besides, while the English anti-capitalist critics, like Ravenstone, Gray, Hodgskin, and J.F. Bray merely condemned surplus value as immoral and as the source of all social wrongs, Marx used the theory of surplus value as the key to unlock the mechanism of the capitalist system and to reveal its workings, its tendencies, and its final destiny. This appears to be the real difference between the English anti-capitalist critics and Marx. In this matter he was obliged to perform most of the work himself. The question he put was no longer "What is the substance of wealth and how is it measured?" but "How is its growth and continual accretions to be explained?" Capital is that portion of wealth which is employed for the purpose of gain, of increase. Whence comes this gain, this increase? The answer is as follows: All capital that is embarked on a productive undertaking consists of two parts: one part is expended on the technical means of production--on buildings, machines, tools, and raw materials, the other on wages. The first part Marx calls Constant Capital (c), the other part Variable Capital (v). The first is called constant, because it only adds to the commodities just as much value as it loses in the course of the productive process; it creates no fresh value: Marx also calls it the passive portion. The outlay on wages is called variable capital because it undergoes an alteration in the process of production: it creates new additional value: Marx also called variable capital the active portion, for it creates surplus value (s). This composition of capital of constant and variable parts Marx calls its organic composition. He calls it average or normal composition when the capital of a business is 80 per cent. constant and 20 per cent. variable. If the constant part is higher, and the variable part lower, he calls it capital of a high composition. Capital of under 80 per cent. constant portion and over 20 per cent. variable portion he calls capital of a lower composition. And rightly, because the higher the ladder of capitalist production is, the more costly and extensive are the machinery and factory buildings and the greater is the outlay on raw materials, whereas primitive businesses employ less machinery, cheaper workshops, but a relatively greater number of workers. The relation between (c) and (v) reveals at the same time the stage to which production has developed. Thus, according to Marx, it is solely the variable capital which creates surplus value, or, as it is commonly expressed, profit. We have seen above, in the explanation of the nature of wages, why variable capital creates more value than it is paid for by the capitalist; the worker does indeed receive the exchange value of his labour power, but the use value of the labour power functions, we have assumed, twice as many hours as are necessary for its reproduction. This surplus labour is embodied in surplus value. While the worker receives, let us say, a daily wage of three shillings, for the reproduction of which five hours of work suffice, his labour power will be used for ten hours. These five hours of surplus labour appear in the exchange value of the commodity, so that the value of the commodity is composed of the transferred portion of the constant capital, the outlay on wages, and the added surplus value. Immediately before the production process only constant and variable capital existed, or, in brief (c) and (v); after the completion of the production process, the commodity embodies constant and variable capital and also surplus value, or (c) and (v) and (s). This is the actual value of the commodity, (c) or, shortly expressed, c + v + s. The relation between wages and surplus value, or between paid and unpaid labour, or, shortly, s/v, Marx calls the rate of surplus value: it expresses the degree of the exploitation of labour. If wages amount to three shillings, which can be produced in five working hours, and if the worker works in the factory ten hours for these wages, so that he creates exchange value to the amount of six shillings, then the rate of surplus value is 100 per cent. The whole of the surplus value which arises in this manner in the process of production is called the mass of the surplus value, or shortly, m.s., that is to say, the individual rate of surplus value multiplied by the total number of workers engaged in an undertaking, or the total amount of wages. 5. _Profit._ The mass of surplus value appears to the capitalist in the shape of profit. Surplus value is a Marxian scientific term which exactly expresses the principle of profit. Profit is a commercial expression which describes surplus value as it appears in practical life as a subject of experience, i.e., empirically. The distinction between the Marxian theoretical and the commercial empirical conception is, however, not so simple: it arises from the different conceptions of the influence of capital and labour in the economic process. Let us explain it more distinctly. As is known, Marx divided the capital embarked in industrial enterprise into two parts: into constant (technical means of production) and variable (living labour power, wages). He assumed that only the living labour power (wage labour) creates surplus value, whilst the constant capital only adds its own value to the new products. The capitalist divides his capital outlay otherwise: into fixed (buildings and machines) and circulating (raw materials and wages) capital. The fixed capital is only used up slowly and only passes entirely into production during a series of years--let us say 15 years: thus of a fixed capital of £75,000, £5,000 would each year be consumed in the production of commodities, and written off in the balance sheet. On the other hand, the circulating capital (raw materials and wages) are wholly consumed in every period of production, and must be renewed at the beginning of a new period of production. Suppose an industrial undertaking about to be started requires a capital expenditure of £105,000: £75,000 fixed capital (for buildings and machinery), £20,000 for raw materials, £10,000 for wages. For convenience sake, we will suppose that the period of production lasts a year, and that the rate of surplus value amounts to 100 per cent., that is, the labour power receives a payment of £10,000, and produces a value of £20,000. At the end of the year, the capitalist reckons an expenditure of £5,000 on account of fixed capital, and £30,000 of circulating capital: the commodities produced cost, therefore, a net outlay of £35,000. This is the cost price, without adding profit. According to Marx, cost price signifies (c) and (v), therefore without (s), (surplus value). But the capitalist knows that the manufactured commodities represent a greater value than the cost price. According to Marx, the surplus value amounts to £10,000 (as the variable capital of £10,000 creates surplus value at the rate of 100 per cent.); but the capitalist adds to the cost price a profit which includes the gains of the enterprise and interest on the capital outlay. If the capitalist were alone in the market, his profit might suck up the whole of the surplus value of £10,000; but he has to reckon with competition and the state of the market. The cost price, plus profit, is the production price as established by the capitalist. But according to Marx, that is, in pure theory, the production price is equal to the cost price, plus surplus value. There is thus a quantitative distinction--a difference in the amount of money--between the theoretical and practical production price, as well as a qualitative distinction between the notions of the capitalist and Marx respecting the source of profit. The capitalist believes that profit is the result of the portion of capital which he has put into the process of production, combined with his own commercial ability. On the other hand, Marx asserts that the capitalist can only extract a profit because the wage workers (the living labour power) create a surplus value in the process of production for which they receive no payment. We assumed that the surplus value amounted to 100 per cent. measured with variable capital, and that £10,000 expended on wages produced £20,000. The annual balance sheet, however, would show the percentage of profit to the total outlay. Consequently, we must spread the £10,000 surplus value over the £35,000 which have been expended. The surplus value of an undertaking spread over the total capital (c) Marx calls the rate of profit, or shortly, s/c = 10000/35000 = 28.58 per cent. As a rule, the capitalist cannot sell under cost price without becoming bankrupt, but he can quite easily sell under the production price, and mostly does so. In the example already given, his rate of profit amounts to over 28 per cent. According to the degree of competition, or by reason of other circumstances which we will examine in the next chapter, he can content himself with a rate of profit of 10, 15, or 20 per cent., which will serve him partly as an income and partly be expended in the development of his enterprise. The 28 per cent. profit generally forms a circle within which he fixes his manufactured price. Under favourable circumstances he can add the whole 28 per cent, to the price; under less favourable, only 20, 15, or 10 per cent. Accordingly, several portions of surplus value remain in the commodities which are not yet realised. What happens to them? The remaining portions of profit or of surplus value fall to the large or small traders who are interposed between producer and consumer, or go in the form of interest to the banking institutions, in the event of the capitalist operating with borrowed money. As the profit is only realised in the process of circulation (in commerce and exchange) and there divided amongst the various economic classes and sections, most people believe that profit arises in commercial transactions. They do not know that the price of a commodity can only be increased in trade because its manufactured price was fixed below its price of production or its value, that is, because the commodities contain surplus value which is only gradually realised in the process of circulation. The social significance of this doctrine is far-reaching. If it is correct, then all the social sections which are not engaged as manual and brain workers in the process of production, or in the transport of raw material, lead a parasitical life and consume the surplus value which is squeezed by the capitalist class out of the proletariat and appropriated without payment. Quite otherwise are capitalist ideas. According to them, profit is the result both of the spirit of the enterprise and the ability of the capitalist, added to that portion of the capital which is put into the process of production: the machines and buildings and raw materials which are used up, and the labour power, all of which are bought at their proper exchange value. It is only fit and proper that the trader and moneylender should receive a portion of the profit so created, for they assist in realising the exchange value by bringing the commodities to the consumer, and thus rendering possible the process of production. Surplus value or profit? Labour or Capital? Behind this question lurks the great class struggle of the modern social order. No wonder the Marxian doctrine of value and surplus value was the occasion for an extensive controversy, in which the famous problem of the average rate of profit played a great part. 6. _The Average Rate of Profit._ According to Marx's doctrine of value and surplus value only variable capital creates fresh value and surplus value. An industrial undertaking of a lower organic composition, which thus employs much variable capital and little constant capital, must consequently create a greater surplus value or more profit than an industrial undertaking of higher composition which may employ the same total capital, but composed of greater constant and smaller variable portions than the former. Let us take two industrial capitals of £35,000 each. One expends £15,000 on the constant elements (machinery, raw materials) and £20,000 on the variable element (wages of labour). The other shows £20,000 constant part and £15,000 variable part. With an equal rate of surplus value--100 per cent.--the first capital would produce £20,000 surplus value (profit) and the other only £15,000 profit. Experience shows, however, that equal amounts of capital--in spite of temporary differences in profits--tend to produce equal profits. From this, it would appear that it is actually the capital expended and not the labour employed which determines the magnitude of the surplus value (profit), that the concrete results of the capitalist process of production do not confirm the Marxian theory of value, that the facts directly contradict the theory. It was Marx himself who drew attention to this problem. After he had constructed his theory of surplus value in the form of a scientific law, he continued: "This law clearly contradicts all experience based on appearance. Everyone knows that a cotton spinner, who, reckoning the percentage on the whole of his applied capital, employs much constant capital and little variable capital, does not, on account of this, pocket less profit or surplus value than a baker, who relatively sets in motion much variable and little constant capital." How, then, can the equal rate of profit in the case of capitals of different organic composition be harmonised with the theory of surplus value? Marx concedes that equal capital sums whose organic parts are unequally employed give an equal rate of profit, although the volumes of surplus value created are different. Two capital sums of £50,000 each, one of which, for example, represents £40,000 constant and £10,000 variable capital, and with a rate of surplus value of 100 per cent. gives £10,000 surplus value, while the other is composed of £10,000 constant and £40,000 variable capital, and with an equal rate of surplus value gives an amount of £40,000 surplus value, will nevertheless yield an equal rate of profit, although theoretically they would be unequal if the rate of surplus value directly determined the rate of profit. In the first case, the rate of profit would amount to 20 per cent. and in the second to 80 per cent. In reality both undertakings yield an equal rate of profit. How is this explained, according to Marx? By means of competition, the different rates of profit are levelled to a general rate of profit, which is the average of all the various rates of profit. Thus the capitalists do not realise the surplus value as it is created in any particular factory, but in the form of average rate of profit as it is produced by the operations of the total capital of society. The average rate of profit may be lower or higher than the individual rate of profit, for the "various capitalists," as Marx explains, "so far as profits are concerned, are so many stockholders in a stock company in which the shares of profits are uniformly divided for every 100 shares of capital, so that profits differ in the case of the individual capitalists only according to the amount of capital invested by each of them in the social enterprise, according to his investment in social production as a whole, according to his shares." While thus the individual rates of profit do not proportionately coincide with the rates of surplus value, i.e., while the degree of exploitation of the worker in the individual factory, and the volume of surplus value thus individually created, do not directly determine the individual rate of profit, it is the total mass of social surplus value which is the source of the average rate of profit. If the mass of the surplus value be large, the average rate of profit will also be great. Marx says: "It is here just the same as with average rate of interest which a usurer makes who lends out various portions of his capital at different rates of interest. The level of his average rate depends entirely on how much of his capital he has lent at each of the different rates of interest." The higher the various individual rates of interest, the higher will be the average rate of interest at which his capital has been put out. The individual price of production signifies, therefore, cost price plus the average rate of profit, and not plus surplus value: it does not necessarily correspond with the total amount of the constant and variable portions of capital employed in an individual enterprise, plus the mass of the surplus value: the prices and magnitudes of value of commodities are not manifestly equal, as Marx has often pointed out. Of course, the total profits of the capitalist class coincide with the total surplus value extracted from the working class, provided, of course, that the supply of commodities corresponds with the social needs. Thus the law of surplus value, in spite of all deviations and refractions, holds good in the last resort. "In theory," observes Marx, "it is assumed that the laws of the capitalist mode of production develop freely. In reality, there is always only an approximation." And the more capitalist production develops, the greater will be the degree of approximation in particular cases, for the progress of Capitalism signifies a continuous increase of constant capital, a more mechanical character being given to industrial processes, and a reduction of variable capital to the necessary minimum, so that the differences in the organic composition of capitalist undertakings become less, thus bringing the average rate of profit and the rate of surplus value nearer to each other. This indirect and difficult method of realising profits involves the fact that the capitalist does not distinctly observe the exploitation of wage labour practised by him, but he believes that the profit is owing to his own commercial ability. This difficult section of the outlines of the economic doctrines of Marx can be most fitly concluded by quoting the comprehensive observations of Marx himself upon this subject, which he gives at the end of his book.--("Capital" (German), Vol. III., 2, pp. 355-6.) "In a capitalist society, this surplus value or this surplus product (leaving aside accidental fluctuations in its distribution and considering only the regulating law of these fluctuations) is divided among the capitalists as a dividend in proportion to the percentage of the total social capital held by each. In this shape the surplus value appears as the average profit, which in its turn is separated into profits of enterprise and interest, and which in this way may fall into the hands of different kinds of capitalists. Just as the active capitalist squeezes surplus labour, and with it surplus value in the form of profit out of the worker, so the landlord in his turn squeezes a portion of this surplus value from the capitalist in the shape of rent. Hence when speaking of profit as that portion of surplus value which falls to the share of capital, we mean average profit.... Profits of capital (profits of enterprise plus interest) and ground rent are merely particular constituents of surplus value.... If added together, these parts form the sum of the social surplus value. A large part of profits is immediately transformed into capital." In this way, capital grows, or, as Marx says, accumulates. 7. _Surplus Value as Social Driving Force._ It has been said already that capital is that portion of wealth which is devoted to the object of increasing wealth, of gain, the extraction of profit or surplus value. This object dominates the capitalist class; the desire for surplus value is the leading impulse and principle motive of their activity. Goaded by this desire and exclusively occupied with their special interests, this class unconsciously and unintentionally develops the entire capitalist system and leads it to ever higher and more comprehensive stages. Surplus value is thus the driving force of the history of modern capitalist society. This principle is rigidly followed out by Marx in his theoretical system, which aims at showing the rise and growth of Capitalism. The capitalist is no scientific investigator: he is not clear himself whether profit is created by a portion of the capital, or is the result of personal productive forces, but he knows one thing--without living labour power, without the wage worker, his whole capital remains dead and does not increase; all the fixed capital and raw materials are of no use to him so long as they are not set in motion by living labour power and transformed into commodities. His efforts are, therefore, primarily directed to making proper use of the living labour power. Historically considered, little constant and relatively much variable capital was employed in the primitive stage of the large scale industry: there was as yet little machinery, and the chief thing was the living labour power. The workers were not yet factory proletarians in the modern sense, but artisans who had lost their independent existence. The capitalist harnessed them and utilised their labour power and special ability. Consequently, he strives to lengthen the working day, in order that as many commodities and as much profit as possible may be produced. If previously the wage worker had laboured ten hours, of which five were devoted to the production of the value of his wages and five to surplus value, he is now obliged to work for twelve hours, which increases the period for surplus labour to seven hours. The surplus value which is extracted through the lengthening of the working day is called by Marx "absolute surplus value." Meanwhile, the capitalist learns by experience that if the workers are so organised as to co-operate with one another, the productivity of labour increases. From this arises the mode of labour which Marx calls Co-operation, or a reorganisation of the workplace, which raises the entire production of commodities to a higher level. The co-operation of the workers in the process of production soon leads to the discovery that, if the worker does not himself create the whole product, but only a part thereof, he loses less time and becomes quicker and more skilful in his work and produces more than previously. This discovery leads to the "division of labour," which indeed reduces the worker to the position of an automaton, or a living machine, but considerably augments commodity wealth. Division of labour again demands finer tools; mechanical problems arise to be solved by mechanicians and engineers. This favours the progress of mechanics. The growing commodity wealth, and the pressure to realise it profitably, renders necessary more extensive markets; the need for extension comes up against transport difficulties; transport problems arise, to be solved by road and canal engineers. The increasing variety of the labour process and the categories of commodities which are produced results in new metallurgical, physical, and chemical problems. Natural science flourishes. Meanwhile, things are not so peaceful in the places of manufacture. The lengthening of labour the closer strain on their nerves and muscles, as well as the arrangement of the work, cause the workers to combine and struggle for improved conditions of labour. This struggle, together with the progress of natural science, of technology, and the expansion of markets, result in the discovery of machine technology, of steam and electricity, the foundation of large-scale industry. The capitalist is impelled, on the one hand, to make himself as independent as possible of living labour-power; on the other hand, to increase the volume of his profits. The means thereto are offered him by the new technical discoveries. Those workers who still possessed some pride in handicraft, or as expropriated small peasants were not able to submit to factory discipline, and showed themselves rebellious, were partly replaced by the labour of women and children, and partly curbed and made pliable. The labour time is repeatedly lengthened, and the exploitation of the labour of women and children assumes terrible proportions. The wage worker, who entered into the manufacturing premises of the employer full of the pride of his calling and often with his own tools, became then a small cog in a gigantic, relentless piece of working machinery. In this extensive and hitherto unprecedented social transformation the old forms of handicraft disappear: whole sections of society, which are the representatives of the disappearing forms of handicraft, sink into poverty, and augment the class of proletarians. The progress of the industrial revolution extends also to agriculture: the greed for surplus value (ground rent) leads to enclosure of common lands by the great landlords, the independent yeomanry is decimated, the small proprietor and small tenant are made proletarians. A transmutation of social classes takes place; the urban population grows rapidly, the country districts are depopulated: out of the revolutionary process the outlines of two classes become more and more distinct: Capitalist and Proletarian. Both the factory proletariat and the other social sections which adopt a hostile attitude towards Capitalism react against the health-destroying exploitation, and struggle for a normal working day. The working time is curtailed and bounds are set to the efforts of the capitalist to lengthen the working day and obtain surplus value, but soon the progress of machine technique compels the worker to labour more intensely in the shorter working time: the accelerated movement of the machine determines the pace and necessitates a sharper straining of the nerves. Henceforth, the worker must compress into a working hour as much effort as was previously expended in an hour and a half. The surplus value which is extracted in this way Marx calls "relative surplus value." The struggle of the workers to secure a shorter working day is a powerful incentive to the manufacturers to perfect their machinery, in order to increase the amount of relative surplus value. The intensification of work or the creation of relative surplus value is one of the most immediate effects and one of the most striking features of advanced Capitalism. The understanding of this new phase is a preliminary condition to the comprehension of the Marxian system. In this matter, Marx goes considerably beyond the anti-capitalist theoreticians who followed upon Ricardo. What happens when the capitalist observes that the extraction of absolute surplus value comes up against an insurmountable obstacle? He sets himself to fit up his enterprise with the newest and most costly machinery, in order to supplant living labour-power and to work more intensively the living labour-power which he employs. As, however, less living labour-power brings forth less exchange value and less surplus value, he is obliged to multiply production, in order to cover the fall in surplus value by a larger mass of commodities: if the single commodity brings him less profit, he produces it in such large quantities that the profit thereon is the same, or even greater, than formerly. The more complicated machinery, the greater quantities of raw materials consumed, and the relatively smaller amount of labour-power signify obviously an alteration in the organic composition of capital: the constant portion (machinery, raw materials) preponderates more and more over the variable portion. If, previously, the composition was 50 per cent. constant and 50 per cent. variable, it becomes now something like 80 per cent.: 20 per cent. At the same time, the initial capital is also increased greatly, as machines and large quantities of raw and auxiliary materials demand such increase of capital. If, for example, the initial capital previously amounted to £100,000, divided into £50,000 constant and £50,000 variable capital, it would now amount to £500,000, comprising £400,000 constant and £100,000 variable. This organic composition signifies: that relatively smaller masses of labour set in motion large masses of technical means of production; labour is more productive because more intense; the sum total of commodities is increased; the profit on single articles is smaller, but the total profit is greater; the reconversion of profits into capital proceeds rapidly. The scale of production is more and more extended, and the amount of initial outlay becomes ever greater, because only large capitals are capable of creating relative surplus value in sufficient sums to assure a profit on the enterprise and payment of interest, and thus assist the accumulation of capital. The more extended scale of production is not possible to the less powerful capitalist undertakings. They partly disappear and partly combine in joint stock companies. The first alternative gives rise to the concentration of the means of production in fewer hands, and the second to the centralisation of the means of production. This is the effect of the new organic composition of capital on the capitalist class. The effect on the working class is not less profound. As long as the hand-worker still played an important part in the works premises, as long as the variable part was superior or equal to the constant part in the organic composition of capital, as was the case prior to and at the beginning of large-scale industry, the accumulation of capital meant an increased demand for wage-labour. The position was changed as Capitalism developed, in the manner just described. Although the mass of capital grows, there is a relative decrease in the demand for workers. For this growth of capital refers chiefly to the constant part (machinery and raw materials), while there is a relative shrinkage in the variable part; that means the worker is obliged to consume a much greater quantity of raw material than formerly. And whereas the prices of commodities fall during the phase of the high organic composition of capital, the period of necessary labour (the hours needed for the reproduction of wages) becomes shorter, while the period of surplus labour becomes longer. The great industrial development therefore signifies for the worker: intensive exploitation and relative over-population, a reserve army of labour-power, which is absorbed by industry in times of prosperous trade, and is speedily demobilised when the slump comes. In times of good business the reserve army serves to check the wage demands of the workers regularly employed, and in times of bad trade it serves to depress wages. The outcome for the workers is as follows: "Within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage to a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work, and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour-process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour-process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of Capital. But all methods for the production of surplus value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows, therefore, that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital."--("Capital" (German), Vol. I., pp. 660-1.) The result of the capitalist social order is the unfolding of the productive forces, the efflorescence of science, the expansion of material civilisation, the dividing of society into antagonistic classes, the conferring of economic power on the few, and the enslavement and degradation of the many. 8. _Economic Contradictions. Decay of Society and its Reconstruction._ As the ripening of the capitalist social order to its highest point proceeds, its innate contradictions develop, and announce distinctly the fact that Capitalism has outlived its usefulness, while new life, a higher form of society, is emerging from its womb. The most important contradictions are: The driving force of the capitalist is to obtain the largest measure of surplus value or profit. The latest stage of Capitalism is, however, marked by the fact of the high organic composition of capital, which means that living labour-power, the source of surplus value, has relatively decreased. The decrease of variable capital signifies manifestly a lower rate of profit. Capitalism in normal times exhibits a tendency towards a lowering of the rate of profit. Therefore it gives rise to a phenomenon which contradicts the aim of the endeavours of the capitalists. The capitalist strives to accumulate capital, but as variable capital and the rate of profit relatively decrease, a tendency towards the depreciation of capital is revealed. The capitalist endeavours to counteract this tendency, and to achieve his object by extending the scale of production, so that the mass of commodities will compensate him for what he loses on them singly. But while he furthers this object by resorting to a higher organic composition of capital, he squeezes out the middleman, reduces the numbers of workers in employment, and creates a relative over-population, a reserve of those who are only employed intermittently; there is a substantial shrinkage in the demand for commodities, as the impoverished masses of the people have obviously less purchasing power. The capitalist extends production, and at the same time contracts the market. The upshot is over-production, under-consumption--crisis: wasting of capital, restriction of production, paralysis of the productive forces. And if Marx lived to-day he would add: the developed economy of large-scale capitalism, that is, the high organic composition of industrial capital, requires enormous quantities of raw materials, which, in part, are only to be had from tropical and sub-tropical countries, and also from eastern Asia; the struggle for these sources of raw materials, and for access to them, leads to wars in which capital sums of unprecedented amount are destroyed. Since 1894 these wars over raw materials and trade routes have broken out every few years. Economic crises and imperialist wars; immeasurable destruction of capital and productive forces. This is a consequence which stands in sharp contradiction to the historical task of the economic order of Capitalism, and to the immediate aims of the individual capitalists. Further, the capitalist tries from the beginning to create docile and unresisting masses of workers, and yet unites and combines them by the creation of large centres of production; the factories become centres for the organisation of the workers, and for the welding of the individual wills of the proletarians into a class will; they abolish the scattered and antagonistic interests of single sections of the workers, and consolidate them into a unified class interest. Finally, the whole economic process, which began by resting on individualist principles, has assumed a common character; thousands upon thousands of hand and brain workers engage in production in economic undertakings upon a single and uniform plan, with the aid of productive implements which can only be used in common. The significance and tendency of these contradictions are sketched by Marx in the great finale, which properly belongs to the concluding chapter of the third volume: "As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the labourers are turned into proletarians, their means of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist means of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialisation of labour and further transformation of the land and other means of production into socially exploited, and therefore common means of production, as well as the further expropriation of private proprietors, takes a new form. That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the labourer working for himself, but the capitalist employing many labourers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalist production itself, by the centralisation of capital. One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralisation, or this expropriation of many capitalists by a few, develop on an ever-extending scale the co-operative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economising of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialised labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalist regime. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this, too, grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter on the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with it, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated."--("Capital," Vol. I. English edition, chap. 84.) FOOTNOTES: [7] Compare M. Beer, "History of British Socialism," Vol, I., pp. 245-270. CONCLUSION. An appreciation of Marx can only be arrived at by adopting the Marxian method. We must judge him in the same way as any other towering figure in the realm of thought or of action. Marx was a child of his time, and his system is a logical conception of certain economic and social phenomena of his age, owing something to the pioneer work and thinking of some of his predecessors. Two important events dominated his thinking: the French Revolution and the English Industrial Revolution. Even apart from the statement of Arnold Ruge that in 1843-44 Marx had collected a vast amount of material for a history of the French National Convention, we know from the work he did between 1844 and 1852 how profound was the influence of the French Revolution on his intellectual life. Still deeper, however, were the traces left upon his mind by the studies he made on the economic transformation of England during the period 1700-1825. Both events are obvious, catastrophic expressions of class movements and class conflicts, in which the middle class, as the representative of a higher economic order, gains the victory over autocratic forms of feudal authority and oligarchic systems of organisation through State regulation, in which, however, at the same time, a new class--the working class--raises its head and begins to make a stand against the victor. Marx was led to interpret these events in this way and to make them the basis of his conception of history chiefly through the influence of Hegel, Ricardo, and the English anti-capitalist school following upon Ricardo. To the end of his life he clung to the opinion that dialectic, as Hegel had formulated it, was indeed mystical but, when materialistically conceived, contains the laws of the movement of society. "The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel's hands in no wise hinders him from presenting in a comprehensive and intelligible manner its general processes."--(Preface to second German edition of "Capital," 1873.) The splitting up of the concept into contradictories, and the attainment of a higher positive through the negation of these contradictories, that was what, to Marx's mind, constituted the essence and the deepest meaning of the French Revolution and of the English Industrial Revolution. Society, the positive, split up into feudal and bourgeois, into two sharply divided contradictories, the bourgeoisie appearing as the negation, to be supplanted by the proletariat and so to make room for a Communist society, the higher synthesis. What he got from Hegel in a mystical form found an economic expression in Ricardo and the anti-capitalist school. Ricardo's writings, which belong to the second decade of the nineteenth century and which formulate, in the guise of a system of economics, the antagonisms and the conflicts between industry and landed nobility, presented themselves as a practical demonstration of the validity of dialectic. The fundamental idea of Ricardo's system may be expressed as follows: Capital is the motive force of society and the creator of civilisation, but the fruits of its activity are enjoyed not by capital but by the landed nobility. That is the thesis; now for the proof. The value of all commodities which can be made in any quantity desired consists in the quantity of labour which is expended for the purpose of producing them. The value is expressed in the costs of production, the most important components of which are wages and profit. Wages and profit stand in opposition to one another: if wages rise, profit falls, and conversely. Wages consist in a definite quantity of the necessaries of life, sufficient to keep the worker effective. Wages must obviously rise whenever the cost of living rises. The facts show that this is actually the case. The following reasons make this clear. In consequence of the civilising effects of capital, there is an increase in the opportunities for work and in population, resulting in an increased demand for the necessaries of life. Agriculture must be extended, but agricultural land is limited and of varying quality. The extension of agriculture brings into use the inferior kinds of land, which demand a greater amount of labour for their cultivation. And as the amount of labour determines the value of the commodity, the cost of living increases, and there is a rapid rise in ground rents. The workers demand higher wages, whereby the profits of the employers are diminished. But there is still another circumstance to be taken into consideration. Whereas the prices of agricultural products rise, those of industrial products fall, since, in consequence of the invention of machinery and of the superior division of labour, smaller quantities of labour are required to produce manufactured goods. The result of the entire working of capital for the civilised community is accordingly the reduction of profits, the depreciation of capital, and the increase of wages. This latter, however, is of no advantage to the workers, for food prices rise higher and higher; on the contrary, the whole advantage falls to the landed nobility, who do nothing for the furtherance of civilisation, but who, through ground rents and protective tariffs, receive everything. We have, then, in Ricardo a system of economic contradictions between profit, wages, and rent, or between bourgeoisie, proletariat, and nobility, in which the antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat is still undeveloped. The year of the publication of Ricardo's "Principles" (1817) is the year which witnessed the rise of English Socialism. In that year, Robert Owen, in a public meeting in the City of London, declared himself a Socialist. Three years later appeared the first criticisms of Ricardo's political economy. In these it was argued that, according to Ricardo, labour is the source of value, yet he considers capital as the creative factor of society and the working class as a mere appendage of capital. It must be the reverse; for the workers create values together with the surplus products which are appropriated by capital. In 1817, Robert Owen openly declares himself a Socialist; four years later appears the anonymous letter to Lord John Russell; Percy Ravenstone publishes his "Criticism of Capitalism," John Gray his Lecture, and Hodgskin his pamphlet on the unproductive nature of capital, in which he establishes the existence of a raging class struggle. The deep impression which these writings made on Marx is clearly seen in the second and third volumes of his "Theories on Surplus Value." And he links on to them. He completed what Ricardo hinted at and what the anti-capitalist school deduced from Ricardo. How Marx continued and elaborated these deductions we haw already seen in Chapter 3, "Outlines of Marx's Economics," and Chapter 7, "Surplus Value as the Motive Force of Society," where capital is shown to be the mass of surplus value of which the workers have been deprived. The deductions made by the English anti-capitalist school from Ricardo signified, politically, the first awakenings of the English workers to class-consciousness, to the struggle against capital. Just as Ricardo's theory of value and rent was the battle-cry of capital against the aristocracy--a battle-cry which created the free trade movement and shattered the economic power of the landed nobility, so the theory of value and surplus value was to become the battle-cry of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, the declaration of independence, so to speak, of the working class. The English proletariat lacked a philosopher who could work out the idea to its logical conclusion, until Marx applied himself to the problem and solved it, so far indeed as philosophical problems can be solved, by a science which places itself at the disposal of a class movement. For it is impossible to set aside the view that Marx's theory of value and surplus value has rather the significance of a political and social slogan than of an economic truth. It is for Marx the basis of the class struggle of the workers against the middle class, just as Ricardo's theory of rent was the basis of the class struggle of the bourgeoisie against the aristocracy, or as the doctrines of the social contract and of the natural rights of man formed the basis of the struggle of the middle classes against autocracy and divine right. Such militant philosophies need not in themselves be true, only they must accord with the sentiments of the struggling mass. It is with such philosophical fictions that human history works. Marx's theory of value explains neither the vast and unparalleled accumulation of wealth nor the movement of prices during the last sixty years. Wealth, measured in values, has, in the last few decades, increased by many times the increase in living labour-power. In this connection the old formula can be reversed: wealth increases in geometrical, living labour-power in arithmetical progression. The greatest difficulty in Marx is that the inventors and discoverers, the chemists and physicists, the pioneers and organisers of industry and agriculture, are not regarded by him as creators of surplus values. Thinkers, who by chemical researches and discoveries double the productive capacity of the soil and conjure forth values in millions from the waste products of industry: physicists who place new sources of power and new means of production at the disposal of mankind and multiply the productivity of labour; organisers who co-ordinate the forces of production and introduce new methods of working--all this creative and directive work, demanding, as it often does, an infinite amount of intensive intellectual effort, is not considered to increase the total sum of exchange values of the nation. However, as far as the distribution of products is concerned, Marx's theory is, generally speaking, correct; distribution is carried out under the capitalist economic system not according to the amount of productive work done, but in proportion to the outlay of capital and the skill in commercial manoeuvring which obtains in the sphere of circulation. Unique as an investigator of the laws of the proletarian movement, eminent and even a great pioneer as a sociologist, Marx is, in respect of economic theory, predominantly an agitator. His system, more than any other system of Socialism or of political economy, is the revolutionary expression of proletarian thought and feeling. His doctrines of value, surplus value, the economic determination of history, the evolution from Capitalism to Socialism, the political and economic class struggle, will for long have the force of truth for the masses and will continue to move them. Marx's heart must have been filled with joy and gladness when, out of the elements of Hegel, Ricardo, and the English anti-capitalist school, out of his studies of the French Revolution, of the English Industrial Revolution, and of French and English Socialism there arose a unified system whose destiny it was to lead mankind out of the earth-bound history of the past into the new world wherein a spiritual civilisation should fully blossom forth. Man is to quit the realm of necessity and to enter into that of freedom, where he shall cease to be a tool for the profit of others and shall rise to have a purpose of his own, freely associating himself with his fellow men to work in the service of all. "The realm of freedom, indeed, only begins there where work conditioned by necessity and external utility ceases. According to the nature of the thing, therefore, it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must struggle with nature for the satisfaction of his needs, for self-preservation and self-reproduction, so too must the civilised man, whatever be the form of society or the methods of production obtaining. Side by side with his own evolution develops this constitutional necessity, because his needs increase; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these needs likewise increase. Freedom in this sphere can only consist in this--that men in their social relationship, the associated producers, should regulate this material exchange with Nature in a rational manner and bring it under their united control, instead of being governed by it as by some blind power; it should be carried on with the minimum expenditure of energy and under conditions most adapted to and most worthy of human nature. Yet it remains all the same a realm of necessity. It is beyond this where that development of human power, which may be called independent purpose, begins, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can only flourish upon the basis of that realm of necessity."--("Capital," Vol. III., 2, p. 355.) The National Labour Press, Ltd., Manchester and London. 31258 * * * * * +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Typographical errors corrected in text: | | | | Page 37: FN4: Fouvierists replaced with Fourierists | | Page 42: Wilhelm Wolf replaced with Wilhelm Wolff | | Page 60: "That will give give them new" replaced with | | "That will give them new" | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------+ * * * * * 
38138	----	* * * * * +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Note: | | | | Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has | | been preserved. | | | | Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For | | a complete list, please see the end of this document. | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------+ * * * * * SOCIALISM. BY JOHN STUART MILL. _Reprinted from the Fortnightly Review._ CHICAGO. BELFORDS, CLARKE & CO. MDCCCLXXIX. MANUFACTURED _BY_ DONOHUE HENNEBERRY. _CHICAGO, ILL._ PRELIMINARY NOTICE. It was in the year 1869 that, impressed with the degree in which, even during the last twenty years, when the world seemed so wholly occupied with other matters, the socialist ideas of speculative thinkers had spread among the workers in every civilized country, Mr. Mill formed the design of writing a book on Socialism. Convinced that the inevitable tendencies of modern society must be to bring the questions involved in it always more and more to the front, he thought it of great practical consequence that they should be thoroughly and impartially considered, and the lines pointed out by which the best speculatively-tested theories might, without prolongation of suffering on the one hand, or unnecessary disturbance on the other, be applied to the existing order of things. He therefore planned a work which should go exhaustively through the whole subject, point by point; and the chapters now printed are the first rough drafts thrown down towards the foundation of that work. These chapters might not, when the work came to be completely written out and then re-written, according to the author's habit, have appeared in the present order; they might have been incorporated into different parts of the work. It has not been without hesitation that I have yielded to the urgent wish of the editor of this Review to give these chapters to the world; but I have complied with his request because, while they appear to me to possess great intrinsic value as well as special application to the problems now forcing themselves on public attention, they will not, I believe, detract even from the mere literary reputation of their author, but will rather form an example of the patient labor with which good work is done. HELEN TAYLOR. _January, 1879._ SOCIALISM. INTRODUCTORY. In the great country beyond the Atlantic, which is now well-nigh the most powerful country in the world, and will soon be indisputably so, manhood suffrage prevails. Such is also the political qualification of France since 1848, and has become that of the German Confederation, though not of all the several states composing it. In Great Britain the suffrage is not yet so widely extended, but the last Reform Act admitted within what is called the pale of the Constitution so large a body of those who live on weekly wages, that as soon and as often as these shall choose to act together as a class, and exert for any common object the whole of the electoral power which our present institutions give them, they will exercise, though not a complete ascendency, a very great influence on legislation. Now these are the very class which, in the vocabulary of the higher ranks, are said to have no stake in the country. Of course they have in reality the greatest stake, since their daily bread depends on its prosperity. But they are not engaged (we may call it bribed) by any peculiar interest of their own, to the support of property as it is, least of all to the support of inequalities of property. So far as their power reaches, or may hereafter reach, the laws of property have to depend for support upon considerations of a public nature, upon the estimate made of their conduciveness to the general welfare, and not upon motives of a mere personal character operating on the minds of those who have control over the Government. It seems to me that the greatness of this change is as yet by no means completely realized, either by those who opposed, or by those who effected our last constitutional reform. To say the truth, the perceptions of Englishmen are of late somewhat blunted as to the tendencies of political changes. They have seen so many changes made, from which, while only in prospect, vast expectations were entertained, both of evil and of good, while the results of either kind that actually followed seemed far short of what had been predicted, that they have come to feel as if it were the nature of political changes not to fulfil expectation, and have fallen into a habit of half-unconscious belief that such changes, when they take place without a violent revolution, do not much or permanently disturb in practice the course of things habitual to the country. This, however, is but a superficial view either of the past or of the future. The various reforms of the last two generations have been at least as fruitful in important consequences as was foretold. The predictions were often erroneous as to the suddenness of the effects, and sometimes even as to the kind of effect. We laugh at the vain expectations of those who thought that Catholic emancipation would tranquilize Ireland, or reconcile it to British rule. At the end of the first ten years of the Reform Act of 1832, few continued to think either that it would remove every important practical grievance, or that it had opened the door to universal suffrage. But five-and-twenty years more of its operation had given scope for a large development of its indirect working, which is much more momentous than the direct. Sudden effects in history are generally superficial. Causes which go deep down into the roots of future events produce the most serious parts of their effect only slowly, and have, therefore, time to become a part of the familiar order of things before general attention is called to the changes they are producing; since, when the changes do become evident, they are often not seen, by cursory observers, to be in any peculiar manner connected with the cause. The remoter consequences of a new political fact are seldom understood when they occur, except when they have been appreciated beforehand. This timely appreciation is particularly easy in respect to tendencies of the change made in our institutions by the Reform Act of 1867. The great increase of electoral power which the Act places within the reach of the working classes is permanent. The circumstances which have caused them, thus far, to make a very limited use of that power, are essentially temporary. It is known even to the most inobservant, that the working classes have, and are likely to have, political objects which concern them as working classes, and on which they believe, rightly or wrongly, that the interests and opinions of the other powerful classes are opposed to theirs. However much their pursuit of these objects may be for the present retarded by want of electoral organization, by dissensions among themselves, or by their not having reduced as yet their wishes into a sufficiently definite practical shape, it is as certain as anything in politics can be, that they will before long find the means of making their collective electoral power effectively instrumental to the proportion of their collective objects. And when they do so, it will not be in the disorderly and ineffective way which belongs to a people not habituated to the use of legal and constitutional machinery, nor will it be by the impulse of a mere instinct of levelling. The instruments will be the press, public meetings and associations, and the return to Parliament of the greatest possible number of persons pledged to the political aims of the working classes. The political aims will themselves be determined by definite political doctrines; for politics are now scientifically studied from the point of view of the working classes, and opinions conceived in the special interest of those classes are organized into systems and creeds which lay claim to a place on the platform of political philosophy, by the same right as the systems elaborated by previous thinkers. It is of the utmost importance that all reflecting persons should take into early consideration what these popular political creeds are likely to be, and that every single article of them should be brought under the fullest light of investigation and discussion, so that, if possible, when the time shall be ripe, whatever is right in them may be adopted, and what is wrong rejected by general consent, and that instead of a hostile conflict, physical or only moral, between the old and the new, the best parts of both may be combined in a renovated social fabric. At the ordinary pace of those great social changes which are not effected by physical violence, we have before us an interval of about a generation, on the due employment of which it depends whether the accommodation of social institutions to the altered state of human society, shall be the work of wise foresight, or of a conflict of opposite prejudices. The future of mankind will be gravely imperilled, if great questions are left to be fought over between ignorant change and ignorant opposition to change. And the discussion that is now required is one that must go down to the very first principles of existing society. The fundamental doctrines which were assumed as incontestable by former generations, are now put again on their trial. Until the present age, the institution of property in the shape in which it has been handed down from the past, had not, except by a few speculative writers, been brought seriously into question, because the conflicts of the past have always been conflicts between classes, both of which had a stake in the existing constitution of property. It will not be possible to go on longer in this manner. When the discussion includes classes who have next to no property of their own, and are only interested in the institution so far as it is a public benefit, they will not allow anything to be taken for granted--certainly not the principle of private property, the legitimacy and utility of which are denied by many of the reasoners who look out from the stand-point of the working classes. Those classes will certainly demand that the subject, in all its parts, shall be reconsidered from the foundation; that all proposals for doing without the institution, and all modes of modifying it which have the appearance of being favorable to the interest of the working classes, shall receive the fullest consideration and discussion before it is decided that the subject must remain as it is. As far as this country is concerned, the dispositions of the working classes have as yet manifested themselves hostile only to certain outlying portions of the proprietary system. Many of them desire to withdraw questions of wages from the freedom of contract, which is one of the ordinary attributions of private property. The more aspiring of them deny that land is a proper subject for private appropriation, and have commenced an agitation for its resumption by the State. With this is combined, in the speeches of some of the agitators, a denunciation of what they term usury, but without any definition of what they mean by the name; and the cry does not seem to be of home origin, but to have been caught up from the intercourse which has recently commenced through the Labor Congresses and the International Society, with the continental Socialists who object to all interest on money, and deny the legitimacy of deriving an income in any form from property apart from labor. This doctrine does not as yet show signs of being widely prevalent in Great Britain, but the soil is well prepared to receive the seeds of this description which are widely scattered from those foreign countries where large, general theories, and schemes of vast promise, instead of inspiring distrust, are essential to the popularity of a cause. It is in France, Germany, and Switzerland that anti-property doctrines in the widest sense have drawn large bodies of working men to rally round them. In these countries nearly all those who aim at reforming society in the interest of the working classes profess themselves Socialists, a designation under which schemes of very diverse character are comprehended and confounded, but which implies at least a remodelling generally approaching to abolition of the institution of private property. And it would probably be found that even in England the more prominent and active leaders of the working classes are usually in their private creed Socialists of one order or another, though being, like most English politicians, better aware than their Continental brethren that great and permanent changes in the fundamental ideas of mankind are not to be accomplished by a _coup de main_, they direct their practical efforts towards ends which seem within easier reach, and are content to hold back all extreme theories until there has been experience of the operation of the same principles on a partial scale. While such continues to be the character of the English working classes, as it is of Englishmen in general, they are not likely to rush head-long into the reckless extremities of some of the foreign Socialists, who, even in sober Switzerland, proclaim themselves content to begin by simple subversion, leaving the subsequent reconstruction to take care of itself; and by subversion, they mean not only the annihilation of all government, but getting all property of all kinds out of the hands of the possessors to be used for the general benefit; but in what mode it will, they say, be time enough afterwards to decide. The avowal of this doctrine by a public newspaper, the organ of an association (_La Solidarite_ published at Neuchatel), is one of the most curious signs of the times. The leaders of the English working-men--whose delegates at the congresses of Geneva and Bale contributed much the greatest part of such practical common sense as was shown there--are not likely to begin deliberately by anarchy, without having formed any opinion as to what form of society should be established in the room of the old. But it is evident that whatever they do propose can only be properly judged, and the grounds of the judgment made convincing to the general mind, on the basis of a previous survey of the two rival theories, that of private property and that of Socialism, one or other of which must necessarily furnish most of the premises in the discussion. Before, therefore, we can usefully discuss this class of questions in detail, it will be advisable to examine from their foundations the general question raised by Socialism. And this examination should be made without any hostile prejudice. However irrefutable the arguments in favor of the laws of property may appear to those to whom they have the double prestige of immemorial custom and of personal interest, nothing is more natural than that a working man who has begun to speculate on politics, should regard them in a very different light. Having, after long struggles, attained in some countries, and nearly attained in others, the point at which for them, at least, there is no further progress to make in the department of purely political rights, is it possible that the less fortunate classes among the "adult males" should not ask themselves whether progress ought to stop there? Notwithstanding all that has been done, and all that seems likely to be done, in the extension of franchises, a few are born to great riches, and the many to a penury, made only more grating by contrast. No longer enslaved or made dependent by force of law, the great majority are so by force of poverty; they are still chained to a place, to an occupation, and to conformity with the will of an employer, and debarred by the accident of birth both from the enjoyments, and from the mental and moral advantages, which others inherit without exertion and independently of desert. That this is an evil equal to almost any of those against which mankind have hitherto struggled, the poor are not wrong in believing. Is it a necessary evil? They are told so by those who do not feel it--by those who have gained the prizes in the lottery of life. But it was also said that slavery, that despotism, that all the privileges of oligarchy were necessary. All the successive steps that have been made by the poorer classes, partly won from the better feelings of the powerful, partly extorted from their fears, and partly bought with money, or attained in exchange for support given to one section of the powerful in its quarrels with another, had the strongest prejudices opposed to them beforehand; but their acquisition was a sign of power gained by the subordinate classes, a means to those classes of acquiring more; it consequently drew to those classes a certain share of the respect accorded to power, and produced a corresponding modification in the creed of society respecting them; whatever advantages they succeeded in acquiring came to be considered their due, while, of those which they had not yet attained, they continued to be deemed unworthy. The classes, therefore, which the system of society makes subordinate, have little reason to put faith in any of the maxims which the same system of society may have established as principles. Considering that the opinions of mankind have been found so wonderfully flexible, have always tended to consecrate existing facts, and to declare what did not yet exist, either pernicious or impracticable, what assurance have those classes that the distinction of rich and poor is grounded on a more imperative necessity than those other ancient and long-established facts, which, having been abolished, are now condemned even by those who formerly profited by them? This cannot be taken on the word of an interested party. The working classes are entitled to claim that the whole field of social institutions should be re-examined, and every question considered as if it now arose for the first time; with the idea constantly in view that the persons who are to be convinced are not those who owe their ease and importance to the present system, but persons who have no other interest in the matter than abstract justice and the general good of the community. It should be the object to ascertain what institutions of property would be established by an unprejudiced legislator, absolutely impartial between the possessors of property and the non-possessors; and to defend and to justify them by the reasons which would really influence such a legislator, and not by such as have the appearance of being got up to make out a case for what already exists. Such rights or privileges of property as will not stand this test will, sooner or later, have to be given up. An impartial hearing ought, moreover, to be given to all objections against property itself. All evils and inconveniences attaching to the institution in its best form ought to be frankly admitted, and the best remedies or palliatives applied which human intelligence is able to devise. And all plans proposed by social reformers, under whatever name designated, for the purpose of attaining the benefits aimed at by the institution of property without its inconveniences, should be examined with the same candor, not prejudged as absurd or impracticable. SOCIALIST OBJECTIONS TO THE PRESENT ORDER OF SOCIETY. As in all proposals for change there are two elements to be considered--that which is to be changed, and that which it is to be changed to--so in Socialism considered generally, and in each of its varieties taken separately, there are two parts to be distinguished, the one negative and critical, the other constructive. There is, first, the judgment of Socialism on existing institutions and practices and on their results; and secondly, the various plans which it has propounded for doing better. In the former all the different schools of Socialism are at one. They agree almost to identity in the faults which they find with the economical order of existing society. Up to a certain point also they entertain the same general conception of the remedy to be provided for those faults; but in the details, notwithstanding this general agreement, there is a wide disparity. It will be both natural and convenient, in attempting an estimate of their doctrines, to begin with the negative portion which is common to them all, and to postpone all mention of their differences until we arrive at that second part of their undertaking, in which alone they seriously differ. This first part of our task is by no means difficult; since it consists only in an enumeration of existing evils. Of these there is no scarcity, and most of them are by no means obscure or mysterious. Many of them are the veriest commonplaces of moralists, though the roots even of these lie deeper than moralists usually attempt to penetrate. So various are they that the only difficulty is to make any approach to an exhaustive catalogue. We shall content ourselves for the present with mentioning a few of the principal. And let one thing be remembered by the reader. When item after item of the enumeration passes before him, and he finds one fact after another which he has been accustomed to include among the necessities of nature urged as an accusation against social institutions, he is not entitled to cry unfairness, and to protest that the evils complained of are inherent in Man and Society, and are such as no arrangements can remedy. To assert this would be to beg the very question at issue. No one is more ready than Socialists to admit--they affirm it indeed much more decidedly than truth warrants--that the evils they complain of are irremediable in the present constitution of society. They propose to consider whether some other form of society may be devised which would not be liable to those evils, or would be liable to them in a much less degree. Those who object to the present order of society, considered as a whole and who accept as an alternative the possibility of a total change, have a right to set down all the evils which at present exist in society as part of their case, whether these are apparently attributable to social arrangements or not, provided they do not flow from physical laws which human power is not adequate, or human knowledge has not yet learned, to counteract. Moral evils and such physical evils as would be remedied if all persons did as they ought, are fairly chargeable against the state of society which admits of them; and are valid as arguments until it is shown that any other state of society would involve an equal or greater amount of such evils. In the opinion of Socialists, the present arrangements of society in respect to Property and the Production and Distribution of Wealth, are as means to the general good, a total failure. They say that there is an enormous mass of evil which these arrangements do not succeed in preventing; that the good, either moral or physical, which they realize is wretchedly small compared with the amount of exertion employed, and that even this small amount of good is brought about by means which are full of pernicious consequences, moral and physical. First among existing social evils may be mentioned the evil of Poverty. The institution of Property is upheld and commended principally as being the means by which labor and frugality are insured their reward, and mankind enabled to emerge from indigence. It may be so; most Socialists allow that it has been so in earlier periods of history. But if the institution can do nothing more or better in this respect than it has hitherto done, its capabilities, they affirm, are very insignificant. What proportion of the population, in the most civilized countries of Europe, enjoy in their own persons anything worth naming of the benefits of property? It may be said, that but for property in the hands of their employers they would be without daily bread; but, though this be conceded, at least their daily bread is all that they have; and that often in insufficient quantity; almost always of inferior quality; and with no assurance of continuing to have it at all; an immense proportion of the industrious classes being at some period or other of their lives (and all being liable to become) dependent, at least temporarily, on legal or voluntary charity. Any attempt to depict the miseries of indigence, or to estimate the proportion of mankind who in the most advanced countries are habitually given up during their whole existence to its physical and moral sufferings, would be superfluous here. This may be left to philanthropists, who have painted these miseries in colors sufficiently strong. Suffice it to say that the condition of numbers in civilized Europe, and even in England and France, is more wretched than that of most tribes of savages who are known to us. It may be said that of this hard lot no one has any reason to complain, because it befalls those only who are outstripped by others, from inferiority of energy or of prudence. This, even were it true, would be a very small alleviation of the evil. If some Nero or Domitian was to require a hundred persons to run a race for their lives, on condition that the fifty or twenty who came in hindmost should be put to death, it would not be any diminution of the injustice that the strongest or nimblest would, except through some untoward accident, be certain to escape. The misery and the crime would be that they were put to death at all. So in the economy of society; if there be any who suffer physical privation or moral degradation, whose bodily necessities are either not satisfied or satisfied in a manner which only brutish creatures can be content with, this, though not necessarily the crime of society, is _pro tanto_ a failure of the social arrangements. And to assert as a mitigation of the evil that those who thus suffer are the weaker members of the community, morally or physically, is to add insult to misfortune. Is weakness a justification of suffering? Is it not, on the contrary, an irresistible claim upon every human being for protection against suffering? If the minds and feelings of the prosperous were in a right state, would they accept their prosperity if for the sake of it even one person near them was, for any other cause than voluntary fault, excluded from obtaining a desirable existence? One thing there is, which if it could be affirmed truly, would relieve social institutions from any share in the responsibility of these evils. Since the human race has no means of enjoyable existence, or of existence at all, but what it derives from its own labor and abstinence, there would be no ground for complaint against society if every one who was willing to undergo a fair share of this labor and abstinence could attain a fair share of the fruits. But is this the fact? Is it not the reverse of the fact? The reward, instead of being proportioned to the labor and abstinence of the individual, is almost in an inverse ratio to it: those who receive the least, labor and abstain the most. Even the idle, reckless, and ill-conducted poor, those who are said with most justice to have themselves to blame for their condition, often undergo much more and severer labor, not only than those who are born to pecuniary independence, but than almost any of the more highly remunerated of those who earn their subsistence; and even the inadequate self-control exercised by the industrious poor costs them more sacrifice and more effort than is almost ever required from the more favored members of society. The very idea of distributive justice, or of any proportionality between success and merit, or between success and exertion, is in the present state of society so manifestly chimerical as to be relegated to the regions of romance. It is true that the lot of individuals is not wholly independent of their virtue and intelligence; these do really tell in their favor, but far less than many other things in which there is no merit at all. The most powerful of all the determining circumstances is birth. The great majority are what they were born to be. Some are born rich without work, others are born to a position in which they can become rich _by_ work, the great majority are born to hard work and poverty throughout life, numbers to indigence. Next to birth the chief cause of success in life is accident and opportunity. When a person not born to riches succeeds in acquiring them, his own industry and dexterity have generally contributed to the result; but industry and dexterity would not have sufficed unless there had been also a concurrence of occasions and chances which falls to the lot of only a small number. If persons are helped in their worldly career by their virtues, so are they, and perhaps quite as often, by their vices: by servility and sycophancy, by hard-hearted and close-fisted selfishness, by the permitted lies and tricks of trade, by gambling speculations, not seldom by downright knavery. Energies and talents are of much more avail for success in life than virtues; but if one man succeeds by employing energy and talent in something generally useful, another thrives by exercising the same qualities in out-generalling and ruining a rival. It is as much as any moralist ventures to assert, that, other circumstances being given, honesty is the best policy, and that with parity of advantages an honest person has a better chance than a rogue. Even this in many stations and circumstances of life is questionable; anything more than this is out of the question. It cannot be pretended that honesty, as a means of success, tells for as much as a difference of one single step on the social ladder. The connection between fortune and conduct is mainly this, that there is a degree of bad conduct, or rather of some kinds of bad conduct, which suffices to ruin any amount of good fortune; but the converse is not true: in the situation of most people no degree whatever of good conduct can be counted upon for raising them in the world, without the aid of fortunate accidents. These evils, then--great poverty, and that poverty very little connected with desert--are the first grand failure of the existing arrangements of society. The second is human misconduct; crime, vice, and folly, with all the sufferings which follow in their train. For, nearly all the forms of misconduct, whether committed towards ourselves or towards others, may be traced to one of three causes: Poverty and its temptations in the many; Idleness and _desoeuvrement_ in the few whose circumstances do not compel them to work; bad education, or want of education, in both. The first two must be allowed to be at least failures in the social arrangements, the last is now almost universally admitted to be the fault of those arrangements--it may almost be said the crime. I am speaking loosely and in the rough, for a minuter analysis of the sources of faults of character and errors of conduct would establish far more conclusively the filiation which connects them with a defective organization of society, though it would also show the reciprocal dependence of that faulty state of society on a backward state of the human mind. At this point, in the enumeration of the evils of society, the mere levellers of former times usually stopped; but their more far-sighted successors, the present Socialists, go farther. In their eyes the very foundation of human life as at present constituted, the very principle on which the production and repartition of all material products is now carried on, is essentially vicious and anti-social. It is the principle of individualism, competition, each one for himself and against all the rest. It is grounded on opposition of interests, not harmony of interests, and under it every one is required to find his place by a struggle, by pushing others back or being pushed back by them. Socialists consider this system of private war (as it may be termed) between every one and every one, especially fatal in an economical point of view and in a moral. Morally considered, its evils are obvious. It is the parent of envy, hatred, and all uncharitableness; it makes every one the natural enemy of all others who cross his path, and every one's path is constantly liable to be crossed. Under the present system hardly any one can gain except by the loss or disappointment of one or of many others. In a well-constituted community every one would be a gainer by every other person's successful exertions; while now we gain by each other's loss and lose by each other's gain, and our greatest gains come from the worst source of all, from death, the death of those who are nearest and should be dearest to us. In its purely economical operation the principle of individual competition receives as unqualified condemnation from the social reformers as in its moral. In the competition of laborers they see the cause of low wages; in the competition of producers the cause of ruin and bankruptcy; and both evils, they affirm, tend constantly to increase as population and wealth make progress; no person (they conceive) being benefited except the great proprietors of land, the holders of fixed money incomes, and a few great capitalists, whose wealth is gradually enabling them to undersell all other producers, to absorb the whole of the operations of industry into their own sphere, to drive from the market all employers of labor except themselves, and to convert the laborers into a kind of slaves or serfs, dependent on them for the means of support, and compelled to accept these on such terms as they choose to offer. Society, in short, is travelling onward, according to these speculators, towards a new feudality, that of the great capitalists. As I shall have ample opportunity in future chapters to state my own opinion on these topics, and on many others connected with and subordinate to them, I shall now, without further preamble, exhibit the opinions of distinguished Socialists on the present arrangements of society, in a selection of passages from their published writings. For the present I desire to be considered as a mere reporter of the opinions of others. Hereafter it will appear how much of what I cite agrees or differs with my own sentiments. The clearest, the most compact, and the most precise and specific statement of the case of the Socialists generally against the existing order of society in the economical department of human affairs, is to be found in the little work of M. Louis Blanc, _Organisation du Travail_. My first extracts, therefore, on this part of the subject, shall be taken from that treatise. "Competition is for the people a system of extermination. Is the poor man a member of society, or an enemy to it? We ask for an answer. "All around him he finds the soil preoccupied. Can he cultivate the earth for himself? No; for the right of the first occupant has become a right of property. Can he gather the fruits which the hand of God ripens on the path of man? No; for, like the soil, the fruits have been _appropriated_. Can he hunt or fish? No; for that is a right which is dependent upon the government. Can he draw water from a spring enclosed in a field? No; for the proprietor of the field is, in virtue of his right to the field, proprietor of the fountain. Can he, dying of hunger and thirst, stretch out his hands for the charity of his fellow-creatures? No; for there are laws against begging. Can he, exhausted by fatigue and without a refuge, lie down to sleep upon the pavement of the streets? No; for there are laws against vagabondage. Can he, dying from the cruel native land where everything is denied him, seek the means of living far from the place where life was given him? No; for it is not permitted to change your country except on certain conditions which the poor man cannot fulfil. "What, then, can the unhappy man do? He will say, 'I have hands to work with, I have intelligence, I have youth, I have strength; take all this, and in return give me a morsel of bread.' This is what the working-men do say. But even here the poor man may be answered, 'I have no work to give you.' What is he to do then?" * * * * * "What is competition from the point of view of the workman? It is work put up to auction. A contractor wants a workman: three present themselves.--How much for your work?--Half-a-crown; I have a wife and children.--Well; and how much for yours?--Two shillings: I have no children, but I have a wife.--Very well; and now how much for you?--One and eightpence are enough for me; I am single. Then you shall have the work. It is done; the bargain is struck. And what are the other two workmen to do? It is to be hoped they will die quietly of hunger. But what if they take to thieving? Never fear; we have the police. To murder? We have got the hangman. As for the lucky one, his triumph is only temporary. Let a fourth workman make his appearance, strong enough to fast every other day, and his price will run down still lower; then there will be a new outcast, a new recruit for the prison perhaps! "Will it be said that these melancholy results are exaggerated; that at all events they are only possible when there is not work enough for the hands that seek employment? But I ask, in answer, Does the principle of competition contain, by chance, within itself any method by which this murderous disproportion is to be avoided? If one branch of industry is in want of hands, who can answer for it that, in the confusion created by universal competition, another is not overstocked? And if, out of thirty-four millions of men, twenty are really reduced to theft for a living, this would suffice to condemn the principle. "But who is so blind as not to see that under the system of unlimited competition, the continual fall of wages is no exceptional circumstance, but a necessary and general fact? Has the population a limit which it cannot exceed? Is it possible for us to say to industry--industry given up to the accidents of individual egotism and fertile in ruin--can we say, 'Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther?' The population increases constantly: tell the poor mother to become sterile, and blaspheme the God who made her fruitful, for if you do not, the lists will soon become too narrow for the combatants. A machine is invented: command it to be broken, and anathematize science, for if you do not, the thousand workmen whom the new machine deprives of work will knock at the door of the neighboring workshop, and lower the wages of their companions. Thus systematic lowering of wages, ending in the driving out of a certain number of workmen, is the inevitable effect of unlimited competition. It is an industrial system by means of which the working-classes are forced to exterminate one another." * * * * * "If there is an undoubted fact, it is that the increase of population is much more rapid among the poor than among the rich. According to the _Statistics of European Population_, the births at Paris are only one-thirty-second of the population in the rich quarters, while in the others they rise to one-twenty-sixth. This disproportion is a general fact, and M. de Sismondi, in his work on Political Economy, has explained it by the impossibility for the workmen of hopeful prudence. Those only who feel themselves assured of the morrow can regulate the number of their children according to their income; he who lives from day to day is under the yoke of a mysterious fatality, to which he sacrifices his children as he was sacrificed to it himself. It is true the workhouses exist, menacing society with an inundation of beggars--what way is there of escaping from the cause?... It is clear that any society where the means of subsistence increase less rapidly than the numbers of the population, is a society on the brink of an abyss.... Competition produces destitution; this is a fact shown by statistics. Destitution is fearfully prolific; this is shown by statistics. The fruitfulness of the poor throws upon society unhappy creatures who have need of work and cannot find it; this is shown by statistics. At this point society is reduced to a choice between killing the poor or maintaining them gratuitously--between atrocity or folly."[1] So much for the poor. We now pass to the middle classes. "According to the political economists of the school of Adam Smith and Leon Say, _cheapness_ is the word in which may be summed up the advantages of unlimited competition. But why persist in considering the effect of cheapness with a view only to the momentary advantage of the consumer? Cheapness is advantageous to the consumer at the cost of introducing the seeds of ruinous anarchy among the producers. Cheapness is, so to speak, the hammer with which the rich among the producers crush their poorer rivals. Cheapness is the trap into which the daring speculators entice the hard-workers. Cheapness is the sentence of death to the producer on a small scale who has no money to invest in the purchase of machinery that his rich rivals can easily procure. Cheapness is the great instrument in the hands of monopoly; it absorbs the small manufacturer, the small shopkeeper, the small proprietor; it is, in one word, the destruction of the middle classes for the advantage of a few industrial oligarchs. "Ought we, then, to consider cheapness as a curse? No one would attempt to maintain such an absurdity. But it is the specialty of wrong principles to turn good into evil and to corrupt all things. Under the system of competition cheapness is only a provisional and fallacious advantage. It is maintained only so long as there is a struggle; no sooner have the rich competitors driven out their poorer rivals than prices rise. Competition leads to monopoly, for the same reason cheapness leads to high prices. Thus, what has been made use of as a weapon in the contest between the producers, sooner or later becomes a cause of impoverishment among the consumers. And if to this cause we add the others we have already enumerated, first among which must be ranked the inordinate increase of the population, we shall be compelled to recognize the impoverishment of the mass of the consumers as a direct consequence of competition. "But, on the other hand, this very competition which tends to dry up the sources of demand, urges production to over-supply. The confusion produced by the universal struggle prevents each producer from knowing the state of the market. He must work in the dark, and trust to chance for a sale. Why should he check the supply, especially as he can throw any loss on the workman whose wages are so pre-eminently liable to rise and fall? Even when production is carried on at a loss the manufacturers still often carry it on, because they will not let their machinery, &c., stand idle, or risk the loss of raw material, or lose their customers; and because productive industry as carried on under the competitive system being nothing else than a game of chance, the gambler will not lose his chance of a lucky stroke. "Thus, and we cannot too often insist upon it, competition necessarily tends to increase supply and to diminish consumption; its tendency therefore is precisely the opposite of what is sought by economic science; hence it is not merely oppressive but foolish as well." * * * * * "And in all this, in order to avoid dwelling on truths which have become commonplaces, and sound declamatory from their very truth, we have said nothing of the frightful moral corruption which industry, organized, or more properly speaking, disorganized, as it is at the present day, has introduced among the middle classes. Everything has become venal, and competition invades even the domain of thought. "The factory crushing the workshop; the showy establishment absorbing the humble shop; the artisan who is his own master replaced by the day-laborer; cultivation by the plow superseding that by the spade, and bringing the poor man's field under disgraceful homage to the money-lender; bankruptcies multiplied; manufacturing industry transformed by the ill-regulated extension of credit into a system of gambling where no one, not even the rogue, can be sure of winning; in short a vast confusion calculated to arouse jealousy, mistrust, and hatred, and to stifle, little by little, all generous aspirations, all faith, self-sacrifice, and poetry--such is the hideous but only too faithful picture of the results obtained by the application of the principle of competition."[2] The Fourierists, through their principal organ, M. Considérant, enumerate the evils of the existing civilisation in the following order:-- 1. It employs an enormous quantity of labor and of human power unproductively, or in the work of destruction. "In the first place there is the army, which in France, as in all other countries, absorbs the healthiest and strongest men, a large number of the most talented and intelligent, and a considerable part of the public revenue.... The existing state of society develops in its impure atmosphere innumerable outcasts, whose labor is not merely unproductive, but actually destructive: adventurers, prostitutes, people with no acknowledged means of living, beggars, convicts, swindlers, thieves, and others whose numbers tend rather to increase than to diminish.... "To the list of unproductive labor fostered by our state of Society must be added that of the judicature and of the bar, of the courts of law and magistrates, the police, jailers, executioners, &c.,--functions indispensable to the state of society as it is. "Also people of what is called 'good society'; those who pass their lives in doing nothing; idlers of all ranks. "Also the numberless custom-house officials, tax-gatherers, bailiffs, excise-men; in short, all that army of men which overlooks, brings to account, takes, but produces nothing. "Also the labors of sophists, philosophers, metaphysicians, political men, working in mistaken directions, who do nothing to advance science, and produce nothing but disturbance and sterile discussions; the verbiage of advocates, pleaders, witnesses, &c. "And finally all the operations of commerce, from those of the bankers and brokers, down to those of the grocer behind his counter."[3] Secondly, they assert that even the industry and powers which in the present system are devoted to production, do not produce more than a small portion of what they might produce if better employed and directed:-- "Who with any good-will and reflection will not see how much the want of coherence--the disorder, the want of combination, the parcelling out of labor and leaving it wholly to individual action without any organization, without any large or general views--are causes which limit the possibilities of production, and destroy, or at least waste, our means of action? Does not disorder give birth to poverty, as order and good management give birth to riches? Is not want of combination a source of weakness, as combination is a source of strength? And who can say that industry, whether agricultural, domestic, manufacturing, scientific, artistic, or commercial, is organized at the present day either in the state or in municipalities? Who can say that all the work which is carried on in any of these departments is executed in subordination to any general views, or with foresight, economy, and order? Or, again, who can say that it is possible in our present state of society to develop, by a good education, all the faculties bestowed by nature on each of its members; to employ each one in functions which he would like, which he would be the most capable of, and which, therefore, he could carry on with the greatest advantage to himself and to others? Has it even been so much as attempted to solve the problems presented by varieties of character so as to regulate and harmonize the varieties of employments in accordance with natural aptitudes? Alas! The Utopia of the most ardent philanthropists is to teach reading and writing to twenty-five millions of the French people! And in the present state of things we may defy them to succeed even in that! "And is it not a strange spectacle, too, and one which cries out in condemnation of us, to see this state of society where the soil is badly cultivated, and sometimes not cultivated at all; where man is ill lodged, ill clothed, and yet where whole masses are continually in need of work and pining in misery because they cannot find it? Of a truth we are forced to acknowledge that if the nations are poor and starving it is not because nature has denied the means of producing wealth, but because of the anarchy and disorder in our employment of those means; in other words, it is because society is wretchedly constituted and labor unorganized. "But this is not all, and you will have but a faint conception of the evil if you do not consider that to all these vices of society, which dry up the sources of wealth and prosperity, must be added the struggle, the discord, the war, in short under many names and many forms which society cherishes and cultivates between the individuals that compose it. These struggles and discords correspond to radical oppositions--deep-seated antinomies between the various interests. Exactly in so far as you are able to establish classes and categories within the nation; in so far, also, you will have opposition of interests and internal warfare either avowed or secret, even if you take into consideration the industrial system only."[4] One of the leading ideas of this school is the wastefulness and at the same time the immorality of the existing arrangements for distributing the produce of the country among the various consumers, the enormous superfluity in point of number of the agents of distribution, the merchants, dealers, shopkeepers and their innumerable, employés, and the depraving character of such a distribution of occupations. "It is evident that the interest of the trader is opposed to that of the consumer and of the producer. Has he not bought cheap and under-valued as much as possible in all his dealings with the producer, the very same article which, vaunting its excellence, he sells to you as dear as he can? Thus the interest of the commercial body, collectively and individually, is contrary to that of the producer and of the consumer--that is to say, to the interest of the whole body of society. * * * * * "The trader is a go-between, who profits by the general anarchy and the non-organization of industry. The trader buys up products, he buys up everything; he owns and detains everything, in such sort that:-- "1stly. He holds both Production and Consumption _under his yoke_, because both must come to him either finally for the products to be consumed, or at first for the raw materials to be worked up. Commerce with all its methods of buying, and of raising and lowering prices, its innumerable devices, and its holding everything in the hands of _middle-men_, levies toll right and left; it despotically gives the law to Production and Consumption, of which it ought to be only the subordinate. "2ndly. It robs society by its _enormous profits_--profits levied upon the consumer and the producer, and altogether out of proportion to the services rendered, for which a twentieth of the persons actually employed would be sufficient. "3rdly. It robs society by the subtraction of its productive forces; taking off from productive labor nineteen-twentieths of the agents of trade who are mere parasites. Thus, not only does commerce rob society by appropriating an exorbitant share of the common wealth, but also by considerably diminishing the productive energy of the human beehive. The great majority of traders would return to productive work if a rational system of commercial organization were substituted for the inextricable chaos of the present state of things. "4thly. It robs society by the _adulteration_ of products, pushed at the present day beyond all bounds. And in fact, if a hundred grocers establish themselves in a town where before there were only twenty, it is plain that people will not begin to consume five times as many groceries. Hereupon the hundred virtuous grocers have to dispute between them the profits which before were honestly made by the twenty; competition obliges them to make it up at the expense of the consumer, either by raising the prices as sometimes happens, or by adulterating the goods as always happens. In such a state of things there is an end to good faith. Inferior or adulterated goods are sold for articles of good quality whenever the credulous customer is not too experienced to be deceived. And when the customer has been thoroughly imposed upon, the trading conscience consoles itself by saying, 'I state my price; people can take or leave; no one is obliged to buy.' The losses imposed on the consumers by the bad quality or the adulteration of goods are incalculable. "5thly. It robs society by _accumulations_, artificial or not, in consequence of which vast quantities of goods, collected in one place, are damaged and destroyed for want of a sale. Fourier (Th. des Quat. Mouv., p. 334, 1st ed.) says: 'The fundamental principle of the commercial systems, that of _leaving full liberty to the merchants_, gives them absolute right of property over the goods in which they deal: they have the right to withdraw them altogether, to withhold or even to burn them, as happened more than once with the Oriental Company of Amsterdam, which publicly burnt stores of cinnamon in order to raise the price. What it did with cinnamon it would have done with corn; but for the fear of being stoned by the populace, it would have burnt some corn in order to sell the rest at four times its value. Indeed, it actually is of daily occurrence in ports, for provisions of grains to be thrown into the sea because the merchants have allowed them to rot while waiting for a rise. I myself, when I was a clerk, have had to superintend these infamous proceedings, and in one day caused to be thrown into the sea some forty thousand bushels of rice, which might have been sold at a fair profit had the withholder been less greedy of gain. It is society that bears the cost of this waste, which takes place daily under shelter of the philosophical maxim of _full liberty for the merchants_.' "6thly. Commerce robs society, moreover, by all the loss, damage, and waste that follows from the extreme scattering of products in millions of shops, and by the multiplication and complication of carriage. "7thly. It robs society by shameless and unlimited _usury_--usury absolutely appalling. The trader carries on operations with fictitious capital, much higher in amount than his real capital. A trader with a capital of twelve hundred pounds will carry on operations, by means of bills and credit, on a scale of four, eight, or twelve thousand pounds. Thus he draws from capital _which he does not possess_, usurious interest, out of all proportion with the capital he actually owns. "8thly. It robs society by innumerable _bankruptcies_, for the daily accidents of our commercial system, political events, and any kind of disturbance, must usher in a day when the trader, having incurred obligations beyond his means, is no longer able to meet them; his failure, whether fraudulent or not, must be a severe blow to his creditors. The bankruptcy of some entails that of others, so that bankruptcies follow one upon another, causing widespread ruin. And it is always the producer and the consumer who suffer; for commerce, considered as a whole, does not produce wealth, and invests very little in proportion to the wealth which passes through its hands. How many are the manufactures crushed by these blows! how many fertile sources of wealth dried up by these devices, with all their disastrous consequences! "The producer furnishes the goods, the consumer the money. Trade furnishes credit, founded on little or no actual capital, and the different members of the commercial body are in no way responsible for one another. This, in a few words, is the whole theory of the thing. "9thly. Commerce robs society by the _independence_ and _irresponsibility_ which permits it to buy at the epochs when the producers are forced to sell and compete with one another, in order to procure money for their rent and necessary expenses of production. When the markets are overstocked and goods cheap, trade purchases. Then it creates a rise, and by this simple manoeuvre despoils both producer and consumer. "10thly. It robs society by a considerable _drawing off_ of _capital_, which will return to productive industry when commerce plays its proper subordinate part, and is only an agency carrying on transactions between the producers (more or less distant) and the great centres of consumption--the communistic societies. Thus the capital engaged in the speculations of commerce (which, small as it is, compared to the immense wealth which passes through its hands, consists nevertheless of sums enormous in themselves), would return to stimulate production if commerce was deprived of the intermediate property in goods, and their distribution became a matter of administrative organization. Stock-jobbing is the most odious form of this vice of commerce. "11thly. It robs society by the _monopolising_ or buying up of raw materials. 'For' (says Fourier, Th. des Quat. Mouv., p. 359, 1st ed.), 'the rise in price on articles that are bought up, is borne ultimately by the consumer, although in the first place by the manufacturers, who, being obliged to keep up their establishments, must make pecuniary sacrifices, and manufacture at small profits in the hope of better days; and it is often long before they can repay themselves the rise in prices which the monopoliser has compelled them to support in the first instance...." "In short, all these vices, besides many others which I omit, are multiplied by the extreme complication of mercantile affairs; for products do not pass once only through the greedy clutches of commerce; there are some which pass and repass twenty or thirty times before reaching the consumer. In the first place, the raw material passes through the grasp of commerce before reaching the manufacturer who first works it up; then it returns to commerce to be sent out again to be worked up in a second form; and so on until it receives its final shape. Then it passes into the hands of merchants, who sell to the wholesale dealers, and these to the great retail dealers of towns, and these again to the little dealers and to the country shops; and each time that it changes hands, it leaves something behind it. "... One of my friends who was lately exploring the Jura, where much working in metal is done, had occasion to enter the house of a peasant who was a manufacturer of shovels. He asked the price. 'Let us come to an understanding,' answered the poor laborer, not an economist at all, but a man of common sense; 'I sell them for 8_d._ to the trade, which retails them at 1_s._ 8_d._ in the towns. If you could find a means of opening a direct communication between the workman and the consumer, you might have them for 1_s._ 2_d._, and we should each gain 6_d._ by the transaction.'"[5] To a similar effect Owen, in the _Book of the New Moral World_, part 2, chap. iii. "The principle now in practice is to induce a large portion of society to devote their lives to distribute wealth upon a large, a medium, and a small scale, and to have it conveyed from place to place in larger or smaller quantities, to meet the means and wants of various divisions of society and individuals, as they are now situated in cities, towns, villages, and country places. This principle of distribution makes a class in society whose business is to _buy from_ some parties and to _sell to_ others. By this proceeding they are placed under circumstances which induce them to endeavor to buy at what appears at the time a low price in the market, and to sell again at the greatest permanent profit which they can obtain. Their real object being to get as much profit as gain between the seller to, and the buyer from them, as can be effected in their transactions. "There are innumerable errors in principle and evils in practice which necessarily proceed from this mode of distributing the wealth of society. "1st. A general class of distributers is formed, whose interest is separated from, and apparently opposed to, that of the individual from whom they buy and to whom they sell. "2nd. Three classes of distributers are made, the small, the medium, and the large buyers and sellers; or the retailers, the wholesale dealers, and the extensive merchants. "3rd. Three classes of buyers thus created constitute the small, the medium, and the large purchasers. "By this arrangement into various classes of buyers and sellers, the parties are easily trained to learn that they have separate and opposing interests, and different ranks and stations in society. An inequality of feeling and condition is thus created and maintained, with all the servility and pride which these unequal arrangements are sure to produce. The parties are regularly trained in a general system of deception, in order that they may be the more successful in buying cheap and selling dear. "The smaller sellers acquire habits of injurious idleness, waiting often for hours for customers. And this evil is experienced to a considerable extent even amongst the class of wholesale dealers. "There are, also, by this arrangement, many more establishments for selling than are necessary in the villages, towns, and cities; and a very large capital is thus wasted without benefit to society. And from their number opposed to each other all over the country to obtain customers, they endeavor to undersell each other, and are therefore continually endeavoring to injure the producer by the establishment of what are called cheap shops and warehouses; and to support their character the master or his servants must be continually on the watch to buy bargains, that is, to procure wealth for less than the cost of its production. "The distributers, small, medium, and large, have all to be supported by the producers, and the greater the number of the former compared with the latter, the greater will be the burden which the producer has to sustain; for as the number of distributers increases, the accumulation of wealth must decrease, and more must be required from the producer. "The distributers of wealth, under the present system, are a dead weight upon the producers, and are most active demoralisers of society. Their dependent condition, at the commencement of their task, teaches or induces them to be servile to their customers, and to continue to be so as long as they are accumulating wealth by their cheap buying and dear selling. But when they have secured sufficient to be what they imagine to be an independence--to live without business--they are too often filled with a most ignorant pride, and become insolent to their dependents. "The arrangement is altogether a most improvident one for society, whose interest it is to produce the greatest amount of wealth of the best qualities; while the existing system of distribution is not only to withdraw great numbers from producing to become distributers, but to add to the cost of the consumer all the expense of a most wasteful and extravagant distribution; the distribution costing to the consumer many times the price of the original cost of the wealth purchased. "Then, by the position in which the seller is placed by his created desire for gain on the one hand, and the competition he meets with from opponents selling similar productions on the other, he is strongly tempted to deteriorate the articles which he has for sale; and when these are provisions, either of home production or of foreign importation, the effects upon the health, and consequent comfort and happiness of the consumers, are often most injurious, and productive of much premature death, especially among the working classes, who, in this respect, are perhaps made to be the greatest sufferers, by purchasing the inferior or low-priced articles. * * * * * "The expense of thus distributing wealth in Great Britain and Ireland, including transit from place to place, and all the agents directly and indirectly engaged in this department, is, perhaps, little short of one hundred millions annually, without taking into consideration the deterioration of the quality of many of the articles constituting this wealth, by carriage, and by being divided into small quantities, and kept in improper stores and places, in which the atmosphere is unfavorable to the keeping of such articles in a tolerably good, and much less in the best, condition for use." In further illustration of the contrariety of interests between person and person, class and class, which pervades the present constitution of society, M. Considérant adds:-- "If the wine-growers wish for free trade, this freedom ruins the producer of corn, the manufacturers of iron, of cloth, of cotton, and--we are compelled to add--the smuggler and the customs' officer. If it is the interest of the consumer that machines should be invented which lower prices by rendering production less costly, these same machines throw out of work thousands of workmen who do not know how to, and cannot at once, find other work. Here, then, again is one of the innumerable _vicious circles_ of civilisation ... for there are a thousand facts which prove cumulatively that in our existing social system the introduction of any good brings always along with it some evil. "In short, if we go lower down and come to vulgar details, we find that it is the interest of the tailor, the shoemaker, and the hatter that coats, shoes, and hats should be soon worn out; that the glazier profits by the hail-storms which break windows; that the mason and the architect profit by fires; the lawyer is enriched by law-suits; the doctor by disease; the wine-seller by drunkenness; the prostitute by debauchery. And what a disaster it would be for the judges, the police, and the jailers, as well as for the barristers and the solicitors, and all the lawyers' clerks, if crimes, offences, and law-suits were all at once to come to an end!"[6] The following is one of the cardinal points of this school:-- "Add to all this, that civilisation, which sows dissension and war on every side; which employs a great part of its powers in unproductive labor or even in destruction; which furthermore diminishes the public wealth by the unnecessary friction and discord it introduces into industry; add to all this, I say, that this same social system has for its special characteristic to produce a repugnance for work--a disgust for labor. "Everywhere you hear the laborer, the artisan, the clerk complain of his position and his occupation, while they long for the time when they can retire from work imposed upon them by necessity. To be repugnant, to have for its motive and pivot nothing but the fear of starvation, is the great, the fatal, characteristic of civilised labor. The civilised workman is condemned to penal servitude. So long as productive labor is so organized that instead of being associated with pleasure it is associated with pain, weariness and dislike, it will always happen that all will avoid it who are able. With few exceptions, those only will consent to work who are compelled to it by want. Hence the most numerous classes, the artificers of social wealth, the active and direct creators of all comfort and luxury, will always be condemned to touch closely on poverty and hunger; they will always be the slaves to ignorance and degradation; they will continue to be always that huge herd of mere beasts of burden whom we see ill-grown, decimated by disease, bowed down in the great workshop of society over the plow or over the counter, that they may prepare the delicate food, and the sumptuous enjoyments of the upper and idle classes. "So long as no method of attractive labor has been devised, it will continue to be true that 'there must be many poor in order that there may be a few rich;' a mean and hateful saying, which we hear every day quoted as an eternal truth from the mouths of people who call themselves Christians or philosophers. It is very easy to understand that oppression, trickery, and especially poverty, are the permanent and fatal appanage of every state of society characterized by the dislike of work, for, in this case, there is nothing but poverty that will force men to labor. And the proof of this is, that if every one of all the workers were to become suddenly rich, nineteen-twentieths of all the work now done would be abandoned."[7] In the opinion of the Fourierists, the tendency of the present order of society is to a concentration of wealth in the hands of a comparatively few immensely rich individuals or companies, and the reduction of all the rest of the community into a complete dependence on them. This was termed by Fourier _la jeodalite industrielle_. "This feudalism," says M. Considérant, "would be constituted as soon as the largest part of the industrial and territorial property of the nation belongs to a minority which absorbs all its revenues, while the great majority, chained to the work-bench or laboring on the soil, must be content to gnaw the pittance which is cast to them."[8] This disastrous result is to be brought about partly by the mere progress of competition, as sketched in our previous extract by M. Louis Blanc; assisted by the progress of national debts, which M. Considérant regards as mortgages of the whole land and capital of the country, of which "les capitalistes prêteurs" become, in a greater and greater measure, co-proprietors, receiving without labor or risk an increasing portion of the revenues. THE SOCIALIST OBJECTIONS TO THE PRESENT ORDER OF SOCIETY EXAMINED. It is impossible to deny that the considerations brought to notice in the preceding chapter make out a frightful case either against the existing order of society, or against the position of man himself in this world. How much of the evils should be referred to the one, and how much to the other, is the principal theoretic question which has to be resolved. But the strongest case is susceptible of exaggeration; and it will have been evident to many readers, even from the passages I have quoted, that such exaggeration is not wanting in the representations of the ablest and most candid Socialists. Though much of their allegations is unanswerable, not a little is the result of errors in political economy; by which, let me say once for all, I do not mean the rejection of any practical rules of policy which have been laid down by political economists, I mean ignorance of economic facts, and of the causes by which the economic phenomena of society as it is, are actually determined. In the first place it is unhappily true that the wages of ordinary labor, in all the countries of Europe, are wretchedly insufficient to supply the physical and moral necessities of the population in any tolerable measure. But, when it is further alleged that even this insufficient remuneration has a tendency to diminish; that there is, in the words of M. Louis Blanc, _une baisse continue des salaires_; the assertion is in opposition to all accurate information, and to many notorious facts. It has yet to be proved that there is any country in the civilized world where the ordinary wages of labor, estimated either in money or in articles of consumption, are declining; while in many they are, on the whole, on the increase; and an increase which is becoming, not slower, but more rapid. There are, occasionally, branches of industry which are being gradually superseded by something else, and, in those, until production accommodates itself to demand, wages are depressed; which is an evil, but a temporary one, and would admit of great alleviation even in the present system of social economy. A diminution thus produced of the reward of labor in some particular employment is the effect and the evidence of increased remuneration, or of a new source of remuneration, in some other; the total and the average remuneration being undiminished, or even increased. To make out an appearance of diminution in the rate of wages in any leading branch of industry, it is always found necessary to compare some month or year of special and temporary depression at the present time, with the average rate, or even some exceptionally high rate, at an earlier time. The vicissitudes are no doubt a great evil, but they were as frequent and as severe in former periods of economical history as now. The greater scale of the transactions, and the greater number of persons involved in each fluctuation, may make the fluctuation appear greater, but though a larger population affords more sufferers, the evil does not weigh heavier on each of them individually. There is much evidence of improvement, and none, that is at all trustworthy, of deterioration, in the mode of living of the laboring population of the countries of Europe; when there is any appearance to the contrary it is local or partial, and can always be traced either to the pressure of some temporary calamity, or to some bad law or unwise act of government which admits of being corrected, while the permanent causes all operate in the direction of improvement. M. Louis Blanc, therefore, while showing himself much more enlightened than the older school of levellers and democrats, inasmuch as he recognizes the connection between low wages and the over-rapid increase of population, appears to have fallen into the same error which was at first committed by Malthus and his followers, that of supposing that because population has a greater power of increase than subsistence, its pressure upon subsistence must be always growing more severe. The difference is that the early Malthusians thought this an irrepressible tendency, while M. Louis Blanc thinks that it can be repressed, but only under a system of Communism. It is a great point gained for truth when it comes to be seen that the tendency to over-population is a fact which Communism, as well as the existing order of society, would have to deal with. And it is much to be rejoiced at that this necessity is admitted by the most considerable chiefs of all existing schools of Socialism. Owen and Fourier, no less than M. Louis Blanc, admitted it, and claimed for their respective systems a pre-eminent power of dealing with this difficulty. However this may be, experience shows that in the existing state of society the pressure of population on subsistence, which is the principal cause of low wages, though a great, is not an increasing evil; on the contrary, the progress of all that is called civilization has a tendency to diminish it, partly by the more rapid increase of the means of employing and maintaining labor, partly by the increased facilities opened to labor for transporting itself to new countries and unoccupied fields of employment, and partly by a general improvement in the intelligence and prudence of the population. This progress, no doubt, is slow; but it is much that such progress should take place at all, while we are still only in the first stage of that public movement for the education of the whole people, which when more advanced must add greatly to the force of all the two causes of improvement specified above. It is, of course, open to discussion what form of society has the greatest power of dealing successfully with the pressure of population on subsistence, and on this question there is much to be said for Socialism; what was long thought to be its weakest point will, perhaps, prove to be one of its strongest. But it has no just claim to be considered as the sole means of preventing the general and growing degradation of the mass of mankind through the peculiar tendency of poverty to produce over-population. Society as at present constituted is not descending into that abyss, but gradually, though slowly, rising out of it, and this improvement is likely to be progressive if bad laws do not interfere with it. Next, it must be observed that Socialists generally, and even the most enlightened of them, have a very imperfect and one-sided notion of the operation of competition. They see half its effects, and overlook the other half; they regard it as an agency for grinding down every one's remuneration--for obliging every one to accept less wages for his labor, or a less price for his commodities, which would be true only if every one had to dispose of his labor or his commodities to some great monopolist, and the competition were all on one side. They forget that competition is a cause of high prices and values as well as of low; that the buyers of labor and of commodities compete with one another as well as the sellers; and that if it is competition which keeps the prices of labor and commodities as low as they are, it is competition which prevents them from falling still lower. In truth, when competition is perfectly free on both sides, its tendency is not specially either to raise or to lower the price of articles, but to equalize it; to level inequalities of remuneration, and to reduce all to a general average, a result which, in so far as realized (no doubt very imperfectly), is, on Socialistic principles, desirable. But if, disregarding for the time that part of the effects of competition which consists in keeping up prices, we fix our attention on its effect in keeping them down, and contemplate this effect in reference solely to the interest of the laboring classes, it would seem that if competition keeps down wages, and so gives a motive to the laboring classes to withdraw the labor market from the full influence of competition, if they can, it must on the other hand have credit for keeping down the prices of the articles on which wages are expended, to the great advantage of those who depend on wages. To meet this consideration Socialists, as we said in our quotation from M. Louis Blanc, are reduced to affirm that the low prices of commodities produced by competition are delusive and lead in the end to higher prices than before, because when the richest competitor has got rid of all his rivals, he commands the market and can demand any price he pleases. Now, the commonest experience shows that this state of things, under really free competition, is wholly imaginary. The richest competitor neither does nor can get rid of all his rivals, and establish himself in exclusive possession of the market; and it is not the fact that any important branch of industry or commerce formerly divided among many has become, or shows any tendency to become, the monopoly of a few. The kind of policy described is sometimes possible where, as in the case of railways, the only competition possible is between two or three great companies, the operations being on too vast a scale to be within the reach of individual capitalists; and this is one of the reasons why businesses which require to be carried on by great joint-stock enterprises cannot be trusted to competition, but, when not reserved by the State to itself, ought to be carried on under conditions prescribed, and, from time to time, varied by the State, for the purpose of insuring to the public a cheaper supply of its wants than would be afforded by private interest in the absence of sufficient competition. But in the ordinary branches of industry no one rich competitor has it in his power to drive out all the smaller ones. Some businesses show a tendency to pass out of the hands of many small producers or dealers into a smaller number of larger ones; but the cases in which this happens are those in which the possession of a larger capital permits the adoption of more powerful machinery, more efficient by more expensive processes, or a better organized and more economical mode of carrying on business, and thus enables the large dealer legitimately and permanently to supply the commodity cheaper than can be done on the small scale; to the great advantage of the consumers, and therefore of the laboring classes, and diminishing, _pro tanto_, that waste of the resources of the community so much complained of by Socialists, the unnecessary multiplication of mere distributors, and of the various other classes whom Fourier calls the parasites of industry. When this change is effected, the larger capitalists, either individual or joint stock, among which the business is divided, are seldom, if ever, in any considerable branch of commerce, so few as that competition shall not continue to act between them; so that the saving in cost, which enabled them to undersell the small dealers, continues afterwards, as at first, to be passed on, in lower prices, to their customers. The operation, therefore, of competition in keeping down the prices of commodities, including those on which wages are expended, is not illusive but real, and, we may add, is a growing, not a declining, fact. But there are other respects, equally important, in which the charges brought by Socialists against competition do not admit of so complete an answer. Competition is the best security for cheapness, but by no means a security for quality. In former times, when producers and consumers were less numerous, it was a security for both. The market was not large enough nor the means of publicity sufficient to enable a dealer to make a fortune by continually attracting new customers: his success depended on his retaining those that he had; and when a dealer furnished good articles, or when he did not, the fact was soon known to those whom it concerned, and he acquired a character for honest or dishonest dealing of more importance to him than the gain that would be made by cheating casual purchasers. But on the great scale of modern transactions, with the great multiplication of competition and the immense increase in the quantity of business competed for, dealers are so little dependent on permanent customers that character is much less essential to them, while there is also far less certainty of their obtaining the character they deserve. The low prices which a tradesman advertises are known, to a thousand for one who has discovered for himself or learned from others, that the bad quality of the goods is more than an equivalent for their cheapness; while at the same time the much greater fortunes now made by some dealers excite the cupidity of all, and the greed of rapid gain substitutes itself for the modest desire to make a living by their business. In this manner, as wealth increases and greater prizes seem to be within reach, more and more of a gambling spirit is introduced into commerce; and where this prevails not only are the simplest maxims of prudence disregarded, but all, even the most perilous, forms of pecuniary improbity receive a terrible stimulus. This is the meaning of what is called the intensity of modern competition. It is further to be mentioned that when this intensity has reached a certain height, and when a portion of the producers of an article or the dealers in it have resorted to any of the modes of fraud, such as adulteration, giving short measure, &c., of the increase of which there is now so much complaint, the temptation is immense on these to adopt the fraudulent practises, who would not have originated them; for the public are aware of the low prices fallaciously produced by the frauds, but do not find out at first, if ever, that the article is not worth the lower price, and they will not go on paying a higher price for a better article, and the honest dealer is placed at a terrible disadvantage. Thus the frauds, begun by a few, become customs of the trade, and the morality of the trading classes is more and more deteriorated. On this point, therefore, Socialists have really made out the existence not only of a great evil, but of one which grows and tends to grow with the growth of population and wealth. It must be said, however, that society has never yet used the means which are already in its power of grappling with this evil. The laws against commercial frauds are very defective, and their execution still more so. Laws of this description have no chance of being really enforced unless it is the special duty of some one to enforce them. They are specially in need of a public prosecutor. It is still to be discovered how far it is possible to repress by means of the criminal law a class of misdeeds which are now seldom brought before the tribunals, and to which, when brought, the judicial administration of this country is most unduly lenient. The most important class, however, of these frauds, to the mass of the people, those which affect the price or quality of articles of daily consumption, can be in a great measure overcome by the institution of co-operative stores. By this plan any body of consumers who form themselves into an association for the purpose, are enabled to pass over the retail dealers and obtain their articles direct from the wholesale merchants, or, what is better (now that wholesale co-operative agencies have been established), from the producers, thus freeing themselves from the heavy tax now paid to the distributing classes and at the same time eliminate the usual perpetrators of adulterations and other frauds. Distribution thus becomes a work performed by agents selected and paid by those who have no interest in anything but the cheapness and goodness of the article; and the distributors are capable of being thus reduced to the numbers which the quantity of work to be done really requires. The difficulties of the plan consist in the skill and trustworthiness required in the managers, and the imperfect nature of the control which can be exercised over them by the body at large. The great success and rapid growth of the system prove, however, that these difficulties are, in some tolerable degree, overcome. At all events, if the beneficial tendency of the competition of retailers in promoting cheapness is fore-gone, and has to be replaced by other securities, the mischievous tendency of the same competition in deteriorating quality is at any rate got rid of; and the prosperity of the co-operative stores shows that this benefit is obtained not only without detriment to cheapness, but with great advantage to it, since the profits of the concerns enable them to return to the consumers a large percentage on the price of every article supplied to them. So far, therefore, as this class of evils is concerned, an effectual remedy is already in operation, which, though suggested by and partly grounded on socialistic principles, is consistent with the existing constitution of property. With regard to those greater and more conspicuous economical frauds, or malpractices equivalent to frauds, of which so many deplorable cases have become notorious--committed by merchants and bankers between themselves or between them and those who have trusted them with money, such a remedy as above described is not available, and the only resources which the present constitution of society affords against them are a sterner reprobation by opinion, and a more efficient repression by the law. Neither of these remedies has had any approach to an effectual trial. It is on the occurrence of insolvencies that these dishonest practices usually come to light; the perpetrators take their place, not in the class of malefactors, but in that of insolvent debtors; and the laws of this and other countries were formerly so savage against simple insolvency, that by one of those reactions to which the opinions of mankind are liable, insolvents came to be regarded mainly as objects of compassion, and it seemed to be thought that the hand both of law and of public opinion could hardly press too lightly upon them. By an error in a contrary direction to the ordinary one of our law, which in the punishment of offences in general wholly neglects the question of reparation to the sufferer, our bankruptcy laws have for some time treated the recovery for creditors of what is left of their property as almost the sole object, scarcely any importance being attached to the punishment of the bankrupt for any misconduct which does not directly interfere with that primary purpose. For three or four years past there has been a slight counter-reaction, and more than one bankruptcy act has been passed, somewhat less indulgent to the bankrupt; but the primary object regarded has still been the pecuniary interest of the creditors, and criminality in the bankrupt himself, with the exception of a small number of well-marked offences, gets off almost with impunity. It may be confidently affirmed, therefore, that, at least in this country, society has not exerted the power it possesses of making mercantile dishonesty dangerous to the perpetrator. On the contrary, it is a gambling trick in which all the advantage is on the side of the trickster: if the trick succeeds it makes his fortune, or preserves it; if it fails, he is at most reduced to poverty, which was perhaps already impending when he determined to run the chance, and he is classed by those who have not looked closely into the matter, and even by many who have, not among the infamous but among the unfortunate. Until a more moral and rational mode of dealing with culpable insolvency has been tried and failed, commercial dishonesty cannot be ranked among evils the prevalence of which is inseparable from commercial competition. Another point on which there is much misapprehension on the part of Socialists, as well as of Trades Unionists and other partisans of Labor against Capital, relates to the proportions in which the produce of the country is really shared and the amount of what is actually diverted from those who produce it, to enrich other persons. I forbear for the present to speak of the land, which is a subject apart. But with respect to capital employed in business, there is in the popular notions a great deal of illusion. When, for instance, a capitalist invests £20,000 in his business, and draws from it an income of (suppose) £2,000 a year, the common impression is as if he was the beneficial owner both of the £20,000 and of the £2,000, while the laborers own nothing but their wages. The truth, however, is, that he only obtains the £2,000 on condition of applying no part of the £20,000 to his own use. He has the legal control over it, and might squander it if he chose, but if he did he would not have the £2,000 a year also. As long as he derives an income from his capital he has not the option of withholding it from the use of others. As much of his invested capital as consists of buildings, machinery, and other instruments of production, are applied to production and are not applicable to the support or enjoyment of any one. What is so applicable (including what is laid out in keeping up or renewing the buildings and instruments) is paid away to laborers, forming their remuneration and their share in the division of the produce. For all personal purposes they have the capital and he has but the profits, which it only yields to him on condition that the capital itself is employed in satisfying not his own wants, but those of laborers. The proportion which the profits of capital usually bear to capital itself (or rather to the circulating portion of it) is the ratio which the capitalist's share of the produce bears to the aggregate share of the laborers. Even of his own share a small part only belongs to him as the owner of capital. The portion of the produce which falls to capital merely as capital is measured by the interest of money, since that is all that the owner of capital obtains when he contributes nothing to production except the capital itself. Now the interest of capital in the public funds, which are considered to be the best security, is at the present prices (which have not varied much for many years) about three and one-third per cent. Even in this investment there is some little risk--risk of repudiation, risk of being obliged to sell out at a low price in some commercial crisis. Estimating these risks at 1/3 per cent., the remaining 3 per cent. may be considered as the remuneration of capital, apart from insurance against loss. On the security of a mortgage 4 per cent. is generally obtained, but in this transaction there are considerably greater risks--the uncertainty of titles to land under our bad system of law; the chance of having to realize the security at a great cost in law charges; and liability to delay in the receipt of the interest even when the principal is safe. When mere money independently of exertion yields a larger income, as it sometimes does, for example, by shares in railway or other companies, the surplus is hardly ever an equivalent for the risk of losing the whole, or part, of the capital by mismanagement, as in the case of the Brighton Railway, the dividend of which, after having been 6 per cent. per annum, sunk to from nothing to 1-1/2 per cent., and shares which had been bought at 120 could not be sold for more than about 43. When money is lent at the high rates of interest one occasionally hears of, rates only given by spend-thrifts and needy persons, it is because the risk of loss is so great that few who possess money can be induced to lend to them at all. So little reason is there for the outcry against "usury" as one of the grievous burthens of the working-classes. Of the profits, therefore, which a manufacturer or other person in business obtains from his capital no more than about 3 per cent. can be set down to the capital itself. If he were able and willing to give up the whole of this to his laborers, who already share among them the whole of his capital as it is annually reproduced from year to year, the addition to their weekly wages would be inconsiderable. Of what he obtains beyond 3 per cent. a great part is insurance against the manifold losses he is exposed to, and cannot safely be applied to his own use, but requires to be kept in reserve to cover those losses when they occur. The remainder is properly the remuneration of his skill and industry--the wages of his labor of superintendence. No doubt if he is very successful in business these wages of his are extremely liberal, and quite out of proportion to what the same skill and industry would command if offered for hire. But, on the other hand, he runs a worse risk than that of being out of employment; that of doing the work without earning anything by it, of having the labor and anxiety without the wages. I do not say that the drawbacks balance the privileges, or that he derives no advantage from the position which makes him a capitalist and employer of labor, instead of a skilled superintendent letting out his services to others; but the amount of his advantage must not be estimated by the great prizes alone. If we subtract from the gains of some the losses of others, and deduct from the balance a fair compensation for the anxiety, skill, and labor of both, grounded on the market price of skilled superintendence, what remains will be, no doubt, considerable, but yet, when compared to the entire capital of the country, annually reproduced and dispensed in wages, it is very much smaller than it appears to the popular imagination; and were the whole of it added to the share of the laborers it would make a less addition to that share than would be made by any important invention in machinery, or by the suppression of unnecessary distributors and other "parasites of industry." To complete the estimate, however, of the portion of the produce of industry which goes to remunerate capital we must not stop at the interest earned out of the produce by the capital actually employed in producing it, but must include that which is paid to the former owners of capital which has been unproductively spent and no longer exists, and is paid, of course, out of the produce of other capital. Of this nature is the interest of national debts, which is the cost a nation is burthened with for past difficulties and dangers, or for past folly or profligacy of its rulers, more or less shared by the nation itself. To this must be added the interest on the debts of landowners and other unproductive consumers; except so far as the money borrowed may have been spent in remunerative improvement of the productive powers of the land. As for landed property itself--the appropriation of the rent of land by private individuals--I reserve, as I have said, this question for discussion hereafter; for the tenure of land might be varied in any manner considered desirable, all the land might be declared the property of the State, without interfering with the right of property in anything which is the product of human labor and abstinence. It seemed desirable to begin the discussion of the Socialist question by these remarks in abatement of Socialist exaggerations, in order that the true issues between Socialism and the existing state of society might be correctly conceived. The present system is not, as many Socialists believe, hurrying us into a state of general indigence and slavery from which only Socialism can save us. The evils and injustices suffered under the present system are great, but they are not increasing; on the contrary, the general tendency is towards their slow diminution. Moreover the inequalities in the distribution of the produce between capital and labor, however they may shock the feeling of natural justice, would not by their mere equalisation afford by any means so large a fund for raising the lower levels of remuneration as Socialists, and many besides Socialists, are apt to suppose. There is not any one abuse or injustice now prevailing in society by merely abolishing which the human race would pass out of suffering into happiness. What is incumbent on us is a calm comparison between two different systems of society, with a view of determining which of them affords the greatest resources for overcoming the inevitable difficulties of life. And if we find the answer to this question more difficult, and more dependent upon intellectual and moral conditions, than is usually thought, it is satisfactory to reflect that there is time before us for the question to work itself out on an experimental scale, by actual trial. I believe we shall find that no other test is possible of the practicability or beneficial operation of Socialist arrangements; but that the intellectual and moral grounds of Socialism deserve the most attentive study, as affording in many cases the guiding principles of the improvements necessary to give the present economic system of society its best chance. THE DIFFICULTIES OF SOCIALISM. Among those who call themselves Socialists, two kinds of persons may be distinguished. There are, in the first place, those whose plans for a new order of society, in which private property and individual competition are to be superseded and other motives to action substituted, are on the scale of a village community or township, and would be applied to an entire country by the multiplication of such self-acting units; of this character are the systems of Owen, of Fourier, and the more thoughtful and philosophic Socialists generally. The other class, who are more a product of the Continent than of Great Britain and may be called the revolutionary Socialists, propose to themselves a much bolder stroke. Their scheme is the management of the whole productive resources of the country by one central authority, the general government. And with this view some of them avow as their purpose that the working classes, or somebody in their behalf, should take possession of all the property of the country, and administer it for the general benefit. Whatever be the difficulties of the first of these two forms of Socialism, the second must evidently involve the same difficulties and many more. The former, too, has the great advantage that it can be brought into operation progressively, and can prove its capabilities by trial. It can be tried first on a select population and extended to others as their education and cultivation permit. It need not, and in the natural order of things would not, become an engine of subversion until it had shown itself capable of being also a means of reconstruction. It is not so with the other: the aim of that is to substitute the new rule for the old at a single stroke, and to exchange the amount of good realised under the present system, and its large possibilities of improvement, for a plunge without any preparation into the most extreme form of the problem of carrying on the whole round of the operations of social life without the motive power which has always hitherto worked the social machinery. It must be acknowledged that those who would play this game on the strength of their own private opinion, unconfirmed as yet by any experimental verification--who would forcibly deprive all who have now a comfortable physical existence of their only present means of preserving it, and would brave the frightful bloodshed and misery that would ensue if the attempt was resisted--must have a serene confidence in their own wisdom on the one hand and a recklessness of other people's sufferings on the other, which Robespierre and St. Just, hitherto the typical instances of those united attributes, scarcely came up to. Nevertheless this scheme has great elements of popularity which the more cautious and reasonable form of Socialism has not; because what it professes to do it promises to do quickly, and holds out hope to the enthusiastic of seeing the whole of their aspirations realised in their own time and at a blow. The peculiarities, however, of the revolutionary form of Socialism will be most conveniently examined after the considerations common to both the forms have been duly weighed. The produce of the world could not attain anything approaching to its present amount, nor support anything approaching to the present number of its inhabitants, except upon two conditions: abundant and costly machinery, buildings, and other instruments of production; and the power of undertaking long operations and waiting a considerable time for their fruits. In other words, there must be a large accumulation of capital, both fixed in the implements and buildings, and circulating, that is employed in maintaining the laborers and their families during the time which elapses before the productive operations are completed and the products come in. This necessity depends on physical laws, and is inherent in the condition of human life; but these requisites of production, the capital, fixed and circulating, of the country (to which has to be added the land, and all that is contained in it), may either be the collective property of those who use it, or may belong to individuals; and the question is, which of these arrangements is most conducive to human happiness. What is characteristic of Socialism is the joint ownership by all the members of the community of the instruments and means of production; which carries with it the consequence that the division of the produce among the body of owners must be a public act, performed according to rules laid down by the community. Socialism by no means excludes private ownership of articles of consumption; the exclusive right of each to his or her share of the produce when received, either to enjoy, to give, or to exchange it. The land, for example, might be wholly the property of the community for agricultural and other productive purposes, and might be cultivated on their joint account, and yet the dwelling assigned to each individual or family as part of their remuneration might be as exclusively theirs, while they continued to fulfil their share of the common labors, as any one's house now is; and not the dwelling only, but any ornamental ground which the circumstances of the association allowed to be attached to the house for purposes of enjoyment. The distinctive feature of Socialism is not that all things are in common, but that production is only carried on upon the common account, and that the instruments of production are held as common property. The _practicability_ then of Socialism, on the scale of Mr. Owen's or M. Fourier's villages, admits of no dispute. The attempt to manage the whole production of a nation by one central organization is a totally different matter; but a mixed agricultural and manufacturing association of from two thousand to four thousand inhabitants under any tolerable circumstances of soil and climate would be easier to manage than many a joint stock company. The question to be considered is, whether this joint management is likely to be as efficient and successful as the managements of private industry by private capital. And this question has to be considered in a double aspect; the efficiency of the directing mind, or minds, and that of the simple workpeople. And in order to state this question in its simplest form, we will suppose the form of Socialism to be simple Communism, _i.e._ equal division of the produce among all the sharers, or, according to M. Louis Blanc's still higher standard of justice, apportionment of it according to difference of need, but without making any difference of reward according to the nature of the duty nor according to the supposed merits or services of the individual. There are other forms of Socialism, particularly Fourierism, which do, on considerations of justice or expediency, allow differences of remuneration for different kinds or degrees of service to the community; but the consideration of these may be for the present postponed. The difference between the motive powers in the economy of society under private property and under Communism would be greatest in the case of the directing minds. Under the present system, the direction being entirely in the hands of the person or persons who own (or are personally responsible for) the capital, the whole benefit of the difference between the best administration and the worst under which the business can continue to be carried on accrues to the person or persons who control the administration: they reap the whole profit of good management except so far as their self-interest or liberality induce them to share it with their subordinates; and they suffer the whole detriment of mismanagement except so far as this may cripple their subsequent power of employing labor. This strong personal motive to do their very best and utmost for the efficiency and economy of the operations, would not exist under Communism; as the managers would only receive out of the produce the same equal dividend as the other members of the association. What would remain would be the interest common to all in so managing affairs as to make the dividend as large as possible; the incentives of public spirit, of conscience, and of the honor and credit of the managers. The force of these motives, especially when combined, is great. But it varies greatly in different persons, and is much greater for some purposes than for others. The verdict of experience, in the imperfect degree of moral cultivation which mankind have yet reached, is that the motive of conscience and that of credit and reputation, even when they are of some strength, are, in the majority of cases, much stronger as restraining than as impelling forces--are more to be depended on for preventing wrong, than for calling forth the fullest energies in the pursuit of ordinary occupations. In the case of most men the only inducement which has been found sufficiently constant and unflagging to overcome the ever-present influence of indolence and love of ease, and induce men to apply themselves unrelaxingly to work for the most part in itself dull and unexciting, is the prospect of bettering their own economic condition and that of their family; and the closer the connection of every increase of exertion with a corresponding increase of its fruits, the more powerful is this motive. To suppose the contrary would be to imply that with men as they now are, duty and honor are more powerful principles of action than personal interest, not solely as to special acts and forbearances respecting which those sentiments have been exceptionally cultivated, but in the regulation of their whole lives; which no one, I suppose, will affirm. It may be said that this inferior efficacy of public and social feelings is not inevitable--is the result of imperfect education. This I am quite ready to admit, and also that there are even now many individual exceptions to the general infirmity. But before these exceptions can grow into a majority, or even into a very large minority, much time will be required. The education of human beings is one of the most difficult of all arts, and this is one of the points in which it has hitherto been least successful; moreover improvements in general education are necessarily very gradual because the future generation is educated by the present, and the imperfections of the teachers set an invincible limit to the degree in which they can train their pupils to be better than themselves. We must therefore expect, unless we are operating upon a select portion of the population, that personal interest will for a long time be a more effective stimulus to the most vigorous and careful conduct of the industrial business of society than motives of a higher character. It will be said that at present the greed of personal gain by its very excess counteracts its own end by the stimulus it gives to reckless and often dishonest risks. This it does, and under Communism that source of evil would generally be absent. It is probable, indeed, that enterprise either of a bad or of a good kind would be a deficient element, and that business in general would fall very much under the dominion of routine; the rather, as the performance of duty in such communities has to be enforced by external sanctions, the more nearly each person's duty can be reduced to fixed rules, the easier it is to hold him to its performance. A circumstance which increases the probability of this result is the limited power which the managers would have of independent action. They would of course hold their authority from the choice of the community, by whom their function might at any time be withdrawn from them; and this would make it necessary for them, even if not so required by the constitution of the community, to obtain the general consent of the body before making any change in the established mode of carrying on the concern. The difficulty of persuading a numerous body to make a change in their accustomed mode of working, of which change the trouble is often great, and the risk more obvious to their minds than the advantage, would have a great tendency to keep things in their accustomed track. Against this it has to be set, that choice by the persons who are directly interested in the success of the work, and who have practical knowledge and opportunities of judgment, might be expected on the average to produce managers of greater skill than the chances of birth, which now so often determine who shall be the owner of the capital. This may be true; and though it may be replied that the capitalist by inheritance can also, like the community, appoint a manager more capable than himself, this would only place him on the same level of advantage as the community, not on a higher level. But it must be said on the other side that under the Communist system the persons most qualified for the management would be likely very often to hang back from undertaking it. At present the manager, even if he be a hired servant, has a very much larger remuneration than the other persons concerned in the business; and there are open to his ambition higher social positions to which his function of manager is a stepping-stone. On the Communist system none of these advantages would be possessed by him; he could obtain only the same dividend out of the produce of the community's labor as any other member of it; he would no longer have the chance of raising himself from a receiver of wages into the class of capitalists; and while he could be in no way better off than any other laborer, his responsibilities and anxieties would be so much greater that a large proportion of mankind would be likely to prefer the less onerous position. This difficulty was foreseen by Plato as an objection to the system proposed in his Republic of community of goods among a governing class; and the motive on which he relied for inducing the fit persons to take on themselves, in the absence of all the ordinary inducements, the cares and labors of government, was the fear of being governed by worse men. This, in truth, is the motive which would have to be in the main depended upon; the persons most competent to the management would be prompted to undertake the office to prevent it from falling into less competent hands. And the motive would probably be effectual at times when there was an impression that by incompetent management the affairs of the community were going to ruin, or even only decidedly deteriorating. But this motive could not, as a rule, expect to be called into action by the less stringent inducement of merely promoting improvement; unless in the case of inventors or schemers eager to try some device from which they hoped for great and immediate fruits; and persons of this kind are very often unfitted by over-sanguine temper and imperfect judgment for the general conduct of affairs, while even when fitted for it they are precisely the kind of persons against whom the average man is apt to entertain a prejudice, and they would often be unable to overcome the preliminary difficulty of persuading the community both to adopt their project and to accept them as managers. Communistic management would thus be, in all probability, less favorable than private management to that striking out of new paths and making immediate sacrifices for distant and uncertain advantages, which, though seldom unattended with risk, is generally indispensable to great improvements in the economic condition of mankind, and even to keeping up the existing state in the face of a continual increase of the number of mouths to be fed. We have thus far taken account only of the operation of motives upon the managing minds of the association. Let us now consider how the case stands in regard to the ordinary workers. These, under Communism, would have no interest, except their share of the general interest, in doing their work honestly and energetically. But in this respect matters would be no worse than they now are in regard to the great majority of the producing classes. These, being paid by fixed wages, are so far from having any direct interest of their own in the efficiency of their work, that they have not even that share in the general interest which every worker would have in the Communistic organization. Accordingly, the inefficiency of hired labor, the imperfect manner in which it calls forth the real capabilities of the laborers, is matter of common remark. It is true that a character for being a good workman is far from being without its value, as it tends to give him a preference in employment, and sometimes obtains for him higher wages. There are also possibilities of rising to the position of foreman, or other subordinate administrative posts, which are not only more highly paid than ordinary labor, but sometimes open the way to ulterior advantages. But on the other side is to be set that under Communism the general sentiment of the community, composed of the comrades under whose eyes each person works, would be sure to be in favor of good and hard working, and unfavorable to laziness, carelessness, and waste. In the present system not only is this not the case, but the public opinion of the workman class often acts in the very opposite direction: the rules of some trade societies actually forbid their members to exceed a certain standard of efficiency, lest they should diminish the number of laborers required for the work; and for the same reason they often violently resist contrivances for economising labor. The change from this to a state in which every person would have an interest in rendering every other person as industrious, skilful, and careful as possible (which would be the case under Communism), would be a change very much for the better. It is, however, to be considered that the principal defects of the present system in respect to the efficiency of labor may be corrected, and the chief advantages of Communism in that respect may be obtained, by arrangements compatible with private property and individual competition. Considerable improvement is already obtained by piece-work, in the kinds of labor which admit of it. By this the workman's personal interest is closely connected with the quantity of work he turns out--not so much with its quality, the security for which still has to depend on the employer's vigilance; neither does piece-work carry with it the public opinion of the workman class, which is often, on the contrary, strongly opposed to it, as a means of (as they think) diminishing the market for laborers. And there is really good ground for their dislike of piece-work, if, as is alleged, it is a frequent practice of employers, after using piece-work to ascertain the utmost which a good workman can do, to fix the price of piece-work so low that by doing that utmost he is not able to earn more than they would be obliged to give him as day wages for ordinary work. But there is a far more complete remedy than piece-work for the disadvantages of hired labor, viz., what is now called industrial partnership--the admission of the whole body of laborers to a participation in the profits, by distributing among all who share in the work, in the form of a percentage on their earnings, the whole or a fixed portion of the gains after a certain remuneration has been allowed to the capitalist. This plan has been found of admirable efficacy, both in this country and abroad. It has enlisted the sentiments of the workmen employed on the side of the most careful regard by all of them to the general interest of the concern; and by its joint effect in promoting zealous exertion and checking waste, it has very materially increased the remuneration of every description of labor in the concerns in which it has been adopted. It is evident that this system admits of indefinite extension and of an indefinite increase in the share of profits assigned to the laborers, short of that which would leave to the managers less than the needful degree of personal interest in the success of the concern. It is even likely that when such arrangements become common, many of these concerns would at some period or another, on the death or retirement of the chief's pass, by arrangement, into the state of purely co-operative associations. It thus appears that as far as concerns the motives to exertion in the general body, Communism has no advantage which may not be reached under private property, while as respects the managing heads it is at a considerable disadvantage. It has also some disadvantages which seem to be inherent in it, through the necessity under which it lies of deciding in a more or less arbitrary manner questions which, on the present system, decide themselves, often badly enough but spontaneously. It is a simple rule, and under certain aspects a just one, to give equal payment to all who share in the work. But this is a very imperfect justice unless the work also is apportioned equally. Now the many different kinds of work required in every society are very unequal in hardness and unpleasantness. To measure these against one another, so as to make quality equivalent to quantity, is so difficult that Communists generally propose that all should work by turns at every kind of labor. But this involves an almost complete sacrifice of the economic advantages of the division of employments, advantages which are indeed frequently over-estimated (or rather the counter considerations are under-estimated) by political economists, but which are nevertheless, in the point of view of the productiveness of labor, very considerable, for the double reason that the co-operation of employment enables the work to distribute itself with some regard to the special capacities and qualifications of the worker, and also that every worker acquires greater skill and rapidity in one kind of work by confining himself to it. The arrangement, therefore, which is deemed indispensable to a just distribution would probably be a very considerable disadvantage in respect of production. But further, it is still a very imperfect standard of justice to demand the same amount of work from every one. People have unequal capacities of work, both mental and bodily, and what is a light task for one is an insupportable burthen to another. It is necessary, therefore, that there should be a dispensing power, an authority competent to grant exemptions from the ordinary amount of work, and to proportion tasks in some measure to capabilities. As long as there are any lazy or selfish persons who like better to be worked for by others than to work, there will be frequent attempts to obtain exemptions by favor or fraud, and the frustration of these attempts will be an affair of considerable difficulty, and will by no means be always successful. These inconveniences would be little felt, for some time at least, in communities composed of select persons, earnestly desirous of the success of the experiment; but plans for the regeneration of society must consider average human beings, and not only them but the large residuum of persons greatly below the average in the personal and social virtues. The squabbles and ill-blood which could not fail to be engendered by the distribution of work whenever such persons have to be dealt with, would be a great abatement from the harmony and unanimity which Communists hope would be found among the members of their association. That concord would, even in the most fortunate circumstances, be much more liable to disturbance than Communists suppose. The institution provides that there shall be no quarrelling about material interests; individualism is excluded from that department of affairs. But there are other departments from which no institutions can exclude it: there will still be rivalry for reputation and for personal power. When selfish ambition is excluded from the field in which, with most men, it chiefly exercises itself, that of riches and pecuniary interest, it would betake itself with greater intensity to the domain still open to it, and we may expect that the struggles for pre-eminence and for influence in the management would be of great bitterness when the personal passions, diverted from their ordinary channel, are driven to seek their principal gratification in that other direction. For these various reasons it is probable that a Communist association would frequently fail to exhibit the attractive picture of mutual love and unity of will and feeling which we are often told by Communists to expect, but would often be torn by dissension and not unfrequently broken up by it. Other and numerous sources of discord are inherent in the necessity which the Communist principle involves, of deciding by the general voice questions of the utmost importance to every one, which on the present system can be and are left to individuals to decide, each for his own case. As an example, take the subject of education. All Socialists are strongly impressed with the all-importance of the training given to the young, not only for the reasons which apply universally, but because their demands being much greater than those of any other system upon the intelligence and morality of the individual citizen, they have even more at stake than any other societies on the excellence of their educational arrangements. Now under Communism these arrangements would have to be made for every citizen by the collective body, since individual parents, supposing them to prefer some other mode of educating their children, would have no private means of paying for it, and would be limited to what they could do by their own personal teaching and influence. But every adult member of the body would have an equal voice in determining the collective system designed for the benefit of all. Here, then, is a most fruitful source of discord in every association. All who had any opinion or preference as to the education they would desire for their own children, would have to rely for their chance of obtaining it upon the influence they could exercise in the joint decision of the community. It is needless to specify a number of other important questions affecting the mode of employing the productive resources of the association, the conditions of social life, the relations of the body with other associations, &c., on which difference of opinion, often irreconcilable, would be likely to arise. But even the dissensions which might be expected would be a far less evil to the prospects of humanity than a delusive unanimity produced by the prostration of all individual opinions and wishes before the decree of the majority. The obstacles to human progression are always great, and require a concurrence of favorable circumstances to overcome them; but an indispensable condition of their being overcome is, that human nature should have freedom to expand spontaneously in various directions, both in thought and practice; that people should both think for themselves and try experiments for themselves, and should not resign into the hands of rulers, whether acting in the name of a few or of the majority, the business of thinking for them, and of prescribing how they shall act. But in Communist associations private life would be brought in a most unexampled degree within the dominion of public authority, and there would be less scope for the development of individual character and individual preferences than has hitherto existed among the full citizens of any state belonging to the progressive branches of the human family. Already in all societies the compression of individuality by the majority is a great and growing evil; it would probably be much greater under Communism, except so far as it might be in the power of individuals to set bounds to it by selecting to belong to a community of persons like-minded with themselves. From these various considerations I do not seek to draw any inference against the possibility that Communistic production is capable of being at some future time the form of society best adapted to the wants and circumstances of mankind. I think that this is, and will long be an open question, upon which fresh light will continually be obtained, both by trial of the Communistic principle under favorable circumstances, and by the improvements which will be gradually effected in the working of the existing system, that of private ownership. The one certainty is, that Communism, to be successful, requires a high standard of both moral and intellectual education in all the members of the community--moral, to qualify them for doing their part honestly and energetically in the labor of life under no inducement but their share in the general interest of the association, and their feelings of duty and sympathy towards it; intellectual, to make them capable of estimating distant interests and entering into complex considerations, sufficiently at least to be able to discriminate, in these matters, good counsel from bad. Now I reject altogether the notion that it is impossible for education and cultivation such as is implied in these things to be made the inheritance of every person in the nation; but I am convinced that it is very difficult, and that the passage to it from our present condition can only be slow. I admit the plea that in the points of moral education on which the success of communism depends, the present state of society is demoralizing, and that only a Communistic association can effectually train mankind for Communism. It is for Communism, then, to prove, by practical experiment, its power of giving this training. Experiments alone can show whether there is as yet in any portion of the population a sufficiently high level of moral cultivation to make Communism succeed, and to give to the next generation among themselves the education necessary to keep that high level permanently If Communist associations show that they can be durable and prosperous, they will multiply, and will probably be adopted by successive portions of the population of the more advanced countries as they become morally fitted for that mode of life. But to force unprepared populations into Communist societies, even if a political revolution gave the power to make such an attempt, would end in disappointment. If practical trial is necessary to test the capabilities of Communism, it is no less required for those other forms of Socialism which recognize the difficulties of Communism and contrive means to surmount them. The principal of these is Fourierism, a system which, if only as a specimen of intellectual ingenuity, is highly worthy of the attention of any student, either of society or of the human mind. There is scarcely an objection or a difficulty which Fourier did not forsee, and against which he did not make provision beforehand by self-acting contrivances, grounded, however, upon a less high principle of distributive justice than that of Communism, since he admits inequalities of distribution and individual ownership of capital, but not the arbitrary disposal of it. The great problem which he grapples with is how to make labor attractive, since, if this could be done, the principal difficulty of Socialism would be overcome. He maintains that no kind of useful labor is necessarily or universally repugnant, unless either excessive in amount or devoid of the stimulus of companionship and emulation, or regarded by mankind with contempt. The workers in a Fourierist village are to class themselves spontaneously in groups, each group undertaking a different kind of work, and the same person may be a member not only of one group but of any number; a certain minimum having first been set apart for the subsistence of every member of the community, whether capable or not of labor, the society divides the remainder of the produce among the different groups, in such shares as it finds attract to each the amount of labor required, and no more; if there is too great a run upon particular groups it is a sign that those groups are over-remunerated relatively to others; if any are neglected their remuneration must be made higher. The share of produce assigned to each group is divided in fixed proportions among three elements--labor, capital, and talent; the part assigned to talent being awarded by the suffrages of the group itself, and it is hoped that among the variety of human capacities all, or nearly all, will be qualified to excel in some group or other. The remuneration for capital is to be such as is found sufficient to induce savings from individual consumption, in order to increase the common stock to such point as is desired. The number and ingenuity of the contrivances for meeting minor difficulties, and getting rid of minor inconveniencies, is very remarkable. By means of these various provisions it is the expectation of Fourierists that the personal inducements to exertion for the public interest, instead of being taken away, would be made much greater than at present, since every increase of the service rendered would be much more certain of leading to increase of reward than it is now, when accidents of position have so much influence. The efficiency of labor, they therefore expect, would be unexampled, while the saving of labor would be prodigious, by diverting to useful occupations that which is now wasted on things useless or hurtful, and by dispensing with the vast number of superfluous distributors, the buying and selling for the whole community being managed by a single agency. The free choice of individuals as to their manner of life would be no further interfered with than would be necessary for gaining the full advantages of co-operation in the industrial operations. Altogether, the picture of a Fourierist community is both attractive in itself and requires less from common humanity than any other known system of Socialism; and it is much to be desired that the scheme should have that fair trial which alone can test the workableness of any new scheme of social life.[9] The result of our review of the various difficulties of Socialism has led us to the conclusion that the various schemes for managing the productive resources of the country by public instead of private agency have a case for a trial, and some of them may eventually establish their claims to preference over the existing order of things, but that they are at present workable only by the _élite_ of mankind, and have yet to prove their power of training mankind at large to the state of improvement which they presuppose. Far more, of course, may this be said of the more ambitious plan which aims at taking possession of the whole land and capital of the country, and beginning at once to administer it on the public account. Apart from all consideration of injustice to the present possessors, the very idea of conducting the whole industry of a country by direction from a single centre is so obviously chimerical, that nobody ventures to propose any mode in which it should be done; and it can hardly be doubted that if the revolutionary Socialists attained their immediate object, and actually had the whole property of the country at their disposal, they would find no other practicable mode of exercising their power over it than that of dividing it into portions, each to be made over to the administration of a small Socialist community. The problem of management, which we have seen to be so difficult even to a select population well prepared beforehand, would be thrown down to be solved as best it could by aggregations united only by locality, or taken indiscriminately from the population, including all the malefactors, all the idlest and most vicious, the most incapable of steady industry, forethought, or self-control, and a majority who, though not equally degraded, are yet, in the opinion of Socialists themselves as far as regards the qualities essential for the success of Socialism, profoundly demoralised by the existing state of society. It is saying but little to say that the introduction of Socialism under such conditions could have no effect but disastrous failure, and its apostles could have only the consolation that the order of society as it now exists would have perished first, and all who benefit by it would be involved in the common ruin--a consolation which to some of them would probably be real, for if appearances can be trusted the animating principle of too many of the revolutionary Socialists is hate; a very excusable hatred of existing evils, which would vent itself by putting an end to the present system at all costs even to those who suffer by it, in the hope that out of chaos would arise a better Kosmos, and in the impatience of desperation respecting any more gradual improvement. They are unaware that chaos is the very most unfavorable position for setting out in the construction of a Kosmos, and that many ages of conflict, violence, and tyrannical oppression of the weak by the strong must intervene; they know not that they would plunge mankind into the state of nature so forcibly described by Hobbes (_Leviathan_, Part I. ch. xiii.), where every man is enemy to every man:-- "In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation, no use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society; and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." If the poorest and most wretched members of a so-called civilised society are in as bad a condition as every one would be in that worst form of barbarism produced by the dissolution of civilised life, it does not follow that the way to raise them would be to reduce all others to the same miserable state. On the contrary, it is by the aid of the first who have risen that so many others have escaped from the general lot, and it is only by better organization of the same process that it may be hoped in time to succeed in raising the remainder. THE IDEA OF PRIVATE PROPERTY NOT FIXED BUT VARIABLE. The preceding considerations appear sufficient to show that an entire renovation of the social fabric, such as is contemplated by Socialism, establishing the economic constitution of society upon an entirely new basis, other than that of private property and competition, however valuable as an ideal, and even as a prophecy of ultimate possibilities, is not available as a present resource, since it requires from those who are to carry on the new order of things qualities both moral and intellectual, which require to be tested in all, and to be created in most; and this cannot be done by an Act of Parliament, but must be, on the most favorable supposition, a work of considerable time. For a long period to come the principle of individual property will be in possession of the field; and even if in any country a popular movement were to place Socialists at the head of a revolutionary government, in however many ways they might violate private property, the institution itself would survive, and would either be accepted by them or brought back by their expulsion, for the plain reason that people will not lose their hold of what is at present their sole reliance for subsistence and security until a substitute for it has been got into working order. Even those, if any, who had shared among themselves what was the property of others would desire to keep what they had acquired, and to give back to property in the new hands the sacredness which they had not recognised in the old. But though, for these reasons, individual property has presumably a long term before it, if only of provisional existence, we are not, therefore, to conclude that it must exist during that whole term unmodified, or that all the rights now regarded as appertaining to property belong to it inherently, and must endure while it endures. On the contrary, it is both the duty and the interest of those who derive the most direct benefit from the laws of property to give impartial consideration to all proposals for rendering those laws in any way less onerous to the majority. This, which would in any case be an obligation of justice, is an injunction of prudence also, in order to place themselves in the right against the attempts which are sure to be frequent to bring the Socialist forms of society prematurely into operation. One of the mistakes oftenest committed, and which are the sources of the greatest practical errors in human affairs, is that of supposing that the same name always stands for the same aggregation of ideas. No word has been the subject of more of this kind of misunderstanding than the word property. It denotes in every state of society the largest powers of exclusive use or exclusive control over things (and sometimes, unfortunately, over persons) which the law accords, or which custom, in that state of society, recognizes; but these powers of exclusive use and control are very various, and differ greatly in different countries and in different states of society. For instance, in early states of society, the right of property did not include the right of bequest. The power of disposing of property by will was in most countries of Europe a rather late institution; and long after it was introduced it continued to be limited in favor of what were called natural heirs. Where bequest is not permitted, individual property is only a life interest. And in fact, as has been so well and fully set forth by Sir Henry Maine in his most instructive work on Ancient Law, the primitive idea of property was that it belonged to the family, not the individual. The head of the family had the management and was the person who really exercised the proprietary rights. As in other respects, so in this, he governed the family with nearly despotic power. But he was not free so to exercise his power as to defeat the co-proprietors of the other portions; he could not so dispose of the property as to deprive them of the joint enjoyment or of the succession. By the laws and customs of some nations the property could not be alienated without the consent of the male children; in other cases the child could by law demand a division of the property and the assignment to him of his share, as in the story of the Prodigal Son. If the association kept together after the death of the head, some other member of it, not always his son, but often the eldest of the family, the strongest, or the one selected by the rest, succeeded to the management and to the managing rights, all the others retaining theirs as before. If, on the other hand the body broke up into separate families, each of these took away with it a part of the property. I say the property, not the inheritance, because the process was a mere continuance of existing rights, not a creation of new; the manager's share alone lapsed to the association. Then, again, in regard to proprietary rights over immovables (the principal kind of property in a rude age) these rights were of very varying extent and duration. By the Jewish law property in immovables was only a temporary concession; on the Sabbatical year it returned to the common stock to be redistributed; though we may surmise that in the historical times of the Jewish state this rule may have been successfully evaded. In many countries of Asia, before European ideas intervened, nothing existed to which the expression property in land, as we understand the phrase, is strictly applicable. The ownership was broken up among several distinct parties, whose rights were determined rather by custom than by law. The government was part owner, having the right to a heavy rent. Ancient ideas and even ancient laws limited the government share to some particular fraction of the gross produce, but practically there was no fixed limit. The government might make over its share to an individual, who then became possessed of the right of collection and all the other rights of the state, but not those of any private person connected with the soil. These private rights were of various kinds. The actual cultivators or such of them as had been long settled on the land, had a right to retain possession; it was held unlawful to evict them while they paid the rent--a rent not in general fixed by agreement, but by the custom of the neighborhood. Between the actual cultivators and the state, or the substitute to whom the state had transferred its rights, there were intermediate persons with rights of various extent. There were officers of government who collected the state's share of the produce, sometimes for large districts, who, though bound to pay over to government all they collected, after deducting a percentage, were often hereditary officers. There were also, in many cases village communities, consisting of the reputed descendants of the first settlers of a village, who shared among themselves either the land or its produce according to rules established by custom, either cultivating it themselves or employing others to cultivate it for them, and whose rights in the land approached nearer to those of a landed proprietor, as understood in England, than those of any other party concerned. But the proprietary right of the village was not individual, but collective; inalienable (the rights of individual sharers could only be sold or mortgaged with the consent of the community) and governed by fixed rules. In mediæval Europe almost all land was held from the sovereign on tenure of service, either military or agricultural; and in Great Britain even now, when the services as well as all the reserved rights of the sovereign have long since fallen into disuse or been commuted for taxation, the theory of the law does not acknowledge an absolute right of property in land in any individual; the fullest landed proprietor known to the law, the freeholder, is but a "tenant" of the Crown. In Russia, even when the cultivators of the soil were serfs of the landed proprietor, his proprietary right in the land was limited by rights of theirs belonging to them as a collective body managing its own affairs, and with which he could not interfere. And in most of the countries of continental Europe when serfage was abolished or went out of use, those who had cultivated the land as serfs remained in possession of rights as well as subject to obligations. The great land reforms of Stein and his successors in Prussia consisted in abolishing both the rights and the obligations, and dividing the land bodily between the proprietor and the peasant, instead of leaving each of them with a limited right over the whole. In other cases, as in Tuscany, the _metayer_ farmer is virtually co-proprietor with the landlord, since custom, though not law, guarantees to him a permanent possession and half the gross produce, so long as he fulfils the customary conditions of his tenure. Again: if rights of property over the same things are of different extent in different countries, so also are they exercised over different things. In all countries at a former time, and in some countries still, the right of property extended and extends to the ownership of human beings. There has often been property in public trusts, as in judicial offices, and a vast multitude of others in France before the Revolution; there are still a few patent offices in Great Britain, though I believe they will cease by operation of law on the death of the present holders; and we are only now abolishing property in army rank. Public bodies, constituted and endowed for public purposes, still claim the same inviolable right of property in their estates which individuals have in theirs, and though a sound political morality does not acknowledge this claim, the law supports it. We thus see that the right of property is differently interpreted, and held to be of different extent, in different times and places; that the conception entertained of it is a varying conception, has been frequently revised, and may admit of still further revision. It is also to be noticed that the revisions which it has hitherto undergone in the progress of society have generally been improvements. When, therefore, it is maintained, rightly or wrongly, that some change or modification in the powers exercised over things by the persons legally recognised as their proprietors would be beneficial to the public and conducive to the general improvement, it is no good answer to this merely to say that the proposed change conflicts with the idea of property. The idea of property is not some one thing, identical throughout history and incapable of alteration, but is variable like all other creations of the human mind; at any given time it is a brief expression denoting the rights over things conferred by the law or custom of some given society at that time; but neither on this point nor on any other has the law and custom of a given time and place a claim to be stereotyped for ever. A proposed reform in laws or customs is not necessarily objectionable because its adoption would imply, not the adaptation of all human affairs to the existing idea of property, but the adaptation of existing ideas of property to the growth and improvement of human affairs. This is said without prejudice to the equitable claim of proprietors to be compensated by the state for such legal rights of a proprietary nature as they may be dispossessed of for the public advantage. That equitable claim, the grounds and the just limits of it, are a subject by itself, and as such will be discussed hereafter. Under this condition, however, society is fully entitled to abrogate or alter any particular right of property which on sufficient consideration it judges to stand in the way of the public good. And assuredly the terrible case which, as we saw in a former chapter, Socialists are able to make out against the present economic order of society, demands a full consideration of all means by which the institution may have a chance of being made to work in a manner more beneficial to that large portion of society which at present enjoys the least share of its direct benefits. THE END. FOOTNOTES: [1] See Louis Blanc, "Organisation du Travail," 4me edition, pp. 6, 11, 53, 57. [2] See Louis Blanc, "Organisation du Travail," pp. 58-61, 65-66, 4me edition. Paris, 1845. [3] See Considérant, "Destinée Sociale," tome i. pp. 35, 36, 37, 3me ed. Paris, 1848. [4] See "Destinée Sociale," par V. Considérant, tome i. pp. 38-40. [5] See Considérant, "Destinée Sociale," tome i. pp. 43-51, 3me. edition, Paris, 1848. [6] Considérant, "Destinée Sociale," tome i., pp. 59, 60. [7] Considérant, "Destinée Sociale," tome i., pp. 60, 61. [8] Considérant, "Destinée Sociale," tome i., p. 134. [9] The principles of Fourierism are clearly set forth and powerfully defended in the various writings of M. Victor Considérant, especially that entitled _La Destinée Sociale_; but the curious inquirer will do well to study them in the writings of Fourier himself; where he will find unmistakable proofs of genius, mixed, however with the wildest and most unscientific fancies respecting the physical world, and much interesting but rash speculation on the past and future history of humanity. It is proper to add that on some important social questions, for instance on marriage, Fourier had peculiar opinions, which, however, as he himself declares, are quite independent of, and separable from, the principles of his industrial system. * * * * * +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Typographical errors corrected in text: | | | | Page 14: founddation replaced with foundation | | Page 15: Congressses replaced with Congresses | | Page 22: moreever replaced with moreover | | Page 28: Dominitian replaced with Domitian | | Page 42: monoply replaced with monopoly | | Page 44: extention replaced with extension | | Page 84: conditon replaced with condition | | Page 86: occassionally replaced with occasionally | | Page 94: wisdon replaced with wisdom | | Page 96: recieved replaced with received | | Page 123: FN 9: Considerant replaced with Considérant | | Page 123: FN 9: Destinee replaced with Destinée | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------+ * * * * * 
39257	----	* * * * * +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Note: | | | | Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has | | been preserved. | | | | Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For | | a complete list, please see the end of this document. | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------+ * * * * * 25 CENTS SOCIALISM UTOPIAN AND SCIENTIFIC _By Frederick Engels_ [Illustration: _Labor_] CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY _Publishers CHICAGO_ PRINTED IN U.S.A. SOCIALISM UTOPIAN AND SCIENTIFIC BY FREDERICK ENGELS _TRANSLATED BY EDWARD AVELING_ _D.Sc., Fellow of University College, London_ WITH A SPECIAL INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR CHICAGO CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY PUBLISHER'S NOTE Socialism, Utopian and Scientific needs no preface. It ranks with the Communist Manifesto as one of the indispensable books for any one desiring to understand the modern socialist movement. It has been translated into every language where capitalism prevails, and its circulation is more rapid than ever before. In 1900, when our publishing house had just begun the circulation of socialist books, we brought out the first American reprint of the authorized translation of this work. The many editions required by the growing demand have worn out the plates, and we are now reprinting it in more attractive form. It will be observed that the author in his introduction says that from 1883 to 1892, 20,000 copies of the book were sold in Germany. Our own sales of the book in America from 1900 to 1908 were not less than 30,000. Last year we published the first English version of the larger work to which the author refers in the opening page of his introduction. The translation is by Austin Lewis, and bears the title "Landmarks of Scientific Socialism" (cloth, $1.00). It includes the greater portion of the original work, omitting what is presented here, and also some of the personalities due to the heat of controversy. Frederick Engels is second only to Karl Marx among socialist writers, and his influence in the United States is only beginning. C.H.K. June, 1908. INTRODUCTION The present little book is, originally, a part of a larger whole. About 1875, Dr. E. Dühring, _privatdocent_ at Berlin University, suddenly and rather clamorously announced his conversion to Socialism, and presented the German public not only with an elaborate Socialist theory, but also with a complete practical plan for the reorganization of society. As a matter of course, he fell foul of his predecessors; above all, he honored Marx by pouring out upon him the full vials of his wrath. This took place about the time when the two sections of the Socialist party in Germany--Eisenachers and Lassallians--had just effected their fusion, and thus obtained not only an immense increase of strength, but, what was more, the faculty of employing the whole of this strength against the common enemy. The Socialist party in Germany was fast becoming a power. But to make it a power, the first condition was that the newly-conquered unity should not be imperiled. And Dr. Dühring openly proceeded to form around himself a sect, the nucleus of a future separate party. It thus became necessary to take up the gauntlet thrown down to us, and to fight out the struggle whether we liked it or not. This, however, though it might not be an over difficult, was evidently a long-winded, business. As is well known, we Germans are of a terribly ponderous _Gründlichkeit_, radical profundity or profound radicality, whatever you may like to call it. Whenever anyone of us expounds what he considers a new doctrine, he has first to elaborate it into an all-comprising system. He has to prove that both the first principles of logic and the fundamental laws of the universe had existed from all eternity for no other purpose than to ultimately lead to this newly-discovered, crowning theory. And Dr. Dühring, in this respect, was quite up to the national mark. Nothing less than a complete "System of Philosophy," mental, moral, natural, and historical; a complete "System of Political Economy and Socialism"; and, finally, a "Critical History of Political Economy"--three big volumes in octavo, heavy extrinsically and intrinsically, three army-corps of arguments mobilized against all previous philosophers and economists in general, and against Marx in particular--in fact, an attempt at a complete "revolution in science"--these were what I should have to tackle. I had to treat of all and every possible subject, from the concepts of time and space to Bimetallism; from the eternity of matter and motion to the perishable nature of moral ideas; from Darwin's natural selection to the education of youth in a future society. Anyhow, the systematic comprehensiveness of my opponent gave me the opportunity of developing, in opposition to him, and in a more connected form than had previously been done, the views held by Marx and myself on this great variety of subjects. And that was the principal reason which made me undertake this otherwise ungrateful task. My reply was first published in a series of articles in the Leipzig "Vorwärts," the chief organ of the Socialist party, and later on as a book: "Herrn Eugen Dühring's Umwälzung der Wissenschaft" (Mr. E. Dühring's "Revolution in Science"), a second edition of which appeared in Zürich, 1886. At the request of my friend, Paul Lafargue, now representative of Lille in the French Chamber of Deputies, I arranged three chapters of this book as a pamphlet, which he translated and published in 1880, under the title: "_Socialisme utopique et Socialisme scientifique_." From this French text a Polish and a Spanish edition were prepared. In 1883, our German friends brought out the pamphlet in the original language. Italian, Russian, Danish, Dutch, and Roumanian translations, based upon the German text, have since been published. Thus, with the present English edition, this little book circulates in ten languages. I am not aware that any other Socialist work, not even our "Communist Manifesto" of 1848 or Marx's "Capital," has been so often translated. In Germany it has had four editions of about 20,000 copies in all. The economic terms used in this work, as far as they are new, agree with those used in the English edition of Marx's "Capital." We call "production of commodities" that economic phase where articles are produced not only for the use of the producers, but also for purposes of exchange; that is, as _commodities_, not as use-values. This phase extends from the first beginnings of production for exchange down to our present time; it attains its full development under capitalist production only, that is, under conditions where the capitalist, the owner of the means of production, employs, for wages, laborers, people deprived of all means of production except their own labor-power, and pockets the excess of the selling price of the products over his outlay. We divide the history of industrial production since the Middle Ages into three periods: (1) handicraft, small master craftsmen with a few journeymen and apprentices, where each laborer produces the complete article; (2) manufacture, where greater numbers of workmen, grouped in one large establishment, produce the complete article on the principle of division of labor, each workman performing only one partial operation, so that the product is complete only after having passed successively through the hands of all; (3) modern industry, where the product is produced by machinery driven by power, and where the work of the laborer is limited to superintending and correcting the performances of the mechanical agent. I am perfectly aware that the contents of this work will meet with objection from a considerable portion of the British public. But if we Continentals had taken the slightest notice of the prejudices of British "respectability," we should be even worse off than we are. This book defends what we call "historical materialism," and the word materialism grates upon the ears of the immense majority of British readers. "Agnosticism" might be tolerated, but materialism is utterly inadmissible. And yet the original home of all modern materialism, from the seventeenth century onwards, is England. "Materialism is the natural-born son of Great Britain. Already the British schoolman, Duns Scotus, asked, 'whether it was impossible for matter to think?' "In order to effect this miracle, he took refuge in God's omnipotence, _i.e._, he made theology preach materialism. Moreover, he was a nominalist. Nominalism, the first form of materialism, is chiefly found among the English schoolmen. "The real progenitor of English materialism is Bacon. To him natural philosophy is the only true philosophy, and physics based upon the experience of the senses is the chiefest part of natural philosophy. Anaxagoras and his homoiomeriæ, Democritus and his atoms, he often quotes as his authorities. According to him the senses are infallible and the source of all knowledge. All science is based on experience, and consists in subjecting the data furnished by the senses to a rational method of investigation. Induction, analysis, comparison, observation, experiment, are the principal forms of such a rational method. Among the qualities inherent in matter, motion is the first and foremost, not only in the form of mechanical and mathematical motion, but chiefly in the form of an impulse, a vital spirit, a tension--or a 'qual,' to use a term of Jacob Böhme's[A]--of matter. "In Bacon, its first creator, materialism still occludes within itself the germs of a many-sided development. On the one hand, matter, surrounded by a sensuous, poetic glamour, seems to attract man's whole entity by winning smiles. On the other, the aphoristically formulated doctrine pullulates with inconsistencies imported from theology. "In its further evolution, materialism becomes one-sided. Hobbes is the man who systematizes Baconian materialism. Knowledge based upon the senses loses its poetic blossom, it passes into the abstract experience of the mathematician; geometry is proclaimed as the queen of sciences. Materialism takes to misanthropy. If it is to overcome its opponent, misanthropic, fleshless spiritualism, and that on the latter's own ground, materialism has to chastise its own flesh and turn ascetic. Thus, from a sensual, it passes into an intellectual, entity; but thus, too, it evolves all the consistency, regardless of consequences, characteristic of the intellect. "Hobbes, as Bacon's continuator, argues thus: if all human knowledge is furnished by the senses, then our concepts and ideas are but the phantoms, divested of their sensual forms, of the real world. Philosophy can but give names to these phantoms. One name may be applied to more than one of them. There may even be names of names. It would imply a contradiction if, on the one hand, we maintained that all ideas had their origin in the world of sensation, and, on the other, that a word was more than a word; that besides the beings known to us by our senses, beings which are one and all individuals, there existed also beings of a general, not individual, nature. An unbodily substance is the same absurdity as an unbodily body. Body, being, substance, are but different terms for the same reality. _It is impossible to separate thought from matter that thinks._ This matter is the substratum of all changes going on in the world. The word infinite is meaningless, unless it states that our mind is capable of performing an endless process of addition. Only material things being perceptible to us, we cannot know anything about the existence of God. My own existence alone is certain. Every human passion is a mechanical movement which has a beginning and an end. The objects of impulse are what we call good. Man is subject to the same laws as nature. Power and freedom are identical. "Hobbes had systematized Bacon, without, however, furnishing a proof for Bacon's fundamental principle, the origin of all human knowledge from the world of sensation. It was Locke who, in his Essay on the Human Understanding, supplied this proof. "Hobbes had shattered the theistic prejudices of Baconian materialism; Collins, Dodwall, Coward, Hartley, Priestley similarly shattered the last theological bars that still hemmed-in Locke's sensationalism. At all events, for practical materialists, Theism is but an easy-going way of getting rid of religion."[B] Thus Karl Marx wrote about the British origin of modern materialism. If Englishmen nowadays do not exactly relish the compliment he paid their ancestors, more's the pity. It is none the less undeniable that Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke are the fathers of that brilliant school of French materialists which made the eighteenth century, in spite of all battles on land and sea won over Frenchmen by Germans and Englishmen, a pre-eminently French century, even before that crowning French Revolution, the results of which we outsiders, in England as well as in Germany, are still trying to acclimatize. There is no denying it. About the middle of this century, what struck every cultivated foreigner who set up his residence in England, was, what he was then bound to consider the religious bigotry and stupidity of the English respectable middle-class. We, at that time, were all materialists, or, at least, very advanced freethinkers, and to us it appeared inconceivable that almost all educated people in England should believe in all sorts of impossible miracles, and that even geologists like Buckland and Mantell should contort the facts of their science so as not to clash too much with the myths of the book of Genesis; while, in order to find people who dared to use their own intellectual faculties with regard to religious matters, you had to go amongst the uneducated, the "great unwashed," as they were then called, the working people, especially the Owenite Socialists. But England has been "civilized" since then. The exhibition of 1851 sounded the knell of English insular exclusiveness. England became gradually internationalized, in diet, in manners, in ideas; so much so that I begin to wish that some English manners and customs had made as much headway on the Continent as other continental habits have made here. Anyhow, the introduction and spread of salad-oil (before 1851 known only to the aristocracy) has been accompanied by a fatal spread of continental scepticism in matters religious, and it has come to this, that agnosticism, though not yet considered "the thing" quite as much as the Church of England, is yet very nearly on a par, as far as respectability goes, with Baptism, and decidedly ranks above the Salvation Army. And I cannot help believing that under these circumstances it will be consoling to many who sincerely regret and condemn this progress of infidelity, to learn that these "new-fangled notions" are not of foreign origin, are not "made in Germany," like so many other articles of daily use, but are undoubtedly Old English, and that their British originators two hundred years ago went a good deal further than their descendants now dare to venture. What, indeed, is agnosticism, but, to use an expressive Lancashire term, "shamefaced" materialism? The agnostic's conception of Nature is materialistic throughout. The entire natural world is governed by law, and absolutely excludes the intervention of action from without. But, he adds, we have no means either of ascertaining or of disproving the existence of some Supreme Being beyond the known universe. Now, this might hold good at the time when Laplace, to Napoleon's question, why in the great astronomer's _Mécanique céleste_ the Creator was not even mentioned, proudly replied: _Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse_. But nowadays, in our evolutionary conception of the universe, there is absolutely no room for either a Creator or a Ruler; and to talk of a Supreme Being shut out from the whole existing world, implies a contradiction in terms, and, as it seems to me, a gratuitous insult to the feelings of religious people. Again, our agnostic admits that all our knowledge is based upon the information imparted to us by our senses. But, he adds, how do we know that our senses give us correct representations of the objects we perceive through them? And he proceeds to inform us that, whenever he speaks of objects or their qualities, he does in reality not mean these objects and qualities, of which he cannot know anything for certain, but merely the impressions which they have produced on his senses. Now, this line of reasoning seems undoubtedly hard to beat by mere argumentation. But before there was argumentation, there was action. _Im Anfang war die That._ And human action had solved the difficulty long before human ingenuity invented it. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. From the moment we turn to our own use these objects, according to the qualities we perceive in them, we put to an infallible test the correctness or otherwise of our sense-perceptions. If these perceptions have been wrong, then our estimate of the use to which an object can be turned must also be wrong, and our attempt must fail. But if we succeed in accomplishing our aim, if we find that the object does agree with our idea of it, and does answer the purpose we intended it for, then that is positive proof that our perceptions of it and of its qualities, _so far_, agree with reality outside ourselves. And whenever we find ourselves face to face with a failure, then we generally are not long in making out the cause that made us fail; we find that the perception upon which we acted was either incomplete and superficial, or combined with the results of other perceptions in a way not warranted by them--what we call defective reasoning. So long as we take care to train and to use our senses properly, and to keep our action within the limits prescribed by perceptions properly made and properly used, so long we shall find that the result of our action proves the conformity of our perceptions with the objective nature of the things perceived. Not in one single instance, so far, have we been led to the conclusion that our sense-perceptions, scientifically controlled, induce in our minds ideas respecting the outer world that are, by their very nature, at variance with reality, or that there is an inherent incompatibility between the outer world and our sense-perceptions of it. But then come the Neo-Kantian agnostics and say: We may correctly perceive the qualities of a thing, but we cannot by any sensible or mental process grasp the thing in itself. This "thing in itself" is beyond our ken. To this Hegel, long since, has replied: If you know all the qualities of a thing, you know the thing itself; nothing remains but the fact that the said thing exists without us; and when your senses have taught you that fact, you have grasped the last remnant of the thing in itself, Kant's celebrated unknowable _Ding an sich_. To which it may be added, that in Kant's time our knowledge of natural objects was indeed so fragmentary that he might well suspect, behind the little we knew about each of them, a mysterious "thing in itself." But one after another these ungraspable things have been grasped, analyzed, and, what is more, _reproduced_ by the giant progress of science; and what we can produce, we certainly cannot consider as unknowable. To the chemistry of the first half of this century organic substances were such mysterious objects; now, we learn to build them up one after another from their chemical elements without the aid of organic processes. Modern chemists declare that as soon as the chemical constitution of no matter what body is known, it can be built up from its elements. We are still far from knowing the constitution of the highest organic substances, the albuminous bodies; but there is no reason why we should not, if only after centuries, arrive at that knowledge and, armed with it, produce artificial albumen. But if we arrive at that, we shall at the same time have produced organic life, for life, from its lowest to its highest forms, is but the normal mode of existence of albuminous bodies. As soon, however, as our agnostic has made these formal mental reservations, he talks and acts as the rank materialist he at bottom is. He may say that, as far as _we_ know, matter and motion, or as it is now called, energy, can neither be created nor destroyed, but that we have no proof of their not having been created at some time or other. But if you try to use this admission against him in any particular case, he will quickly put you out of court. If he admits the possibility of spiritualism _in abstracto_, he will have none of it _in concreto_. As far as we know and can know, he will tell you there is no Creator and no Ruler of the universe; as far as we are concerned, matter and energy can neither be created nor annihilated; for us, mind is a mode of energy, a function of the brain; all we know is that the material world is governed by immutable laws, and so forth. Thus, as far as he is a scientific man, as far as he _knows_ anything, he is a materialist; outside his science, in spheres about which he knows nothing, he translates his ignorance into Greek and calls it agnosticism. At all events, one thing seems clear: even if I was an agnostic, it is evident that I could not describe the conception of history sketched out in this little book, as "historical agnosticism." Religious people would laugh at me, agnostics would indignantly ask, was I going to make fun of them? And thus I hope even British respectability will not be overshocked if I use, in English as well as in so many other languages, the term, "historical materialism," to designate that view of the course of history, which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another. This indulgence will perhaps be accorded to me all the sooner if I show that historical materialism may be of advantage even to British respectability. I have mentioned the fact, that about forty or fifty years ago, any cultivated foreigner settling in England was struck by what he was then bound to consider the religious bigotry and stupidity of the English respectable middle-class. I am now going to prove that the respectable English middle-class of that time was not quite as stupid as it looked to the intelligent foreigner. Its religious leanings can be explained. When Europe emerged from the Middle Ages, the rising middle-class of the towns constituted its revolutionary element. It had conquered a recognized position within mediæval feudal organization, but this position, also, had become too narrow for its expansive power. The development of the middle-class, the _bourgeoisie_, became incompatible with the maintenance of the feudal system; the feudal system, therefore, had to fall. But the great international center of feudalism was the Roman Catholic Church. It united the whole of feudalized Western Europe, in spite of all internal wars, into one grand political system, opposed as much to the schismatic Greeks as to the Mohammedian countries. It surrounded feudal institutions with the halo of divine consecration. It had organized its own hierarchy on the feudal model, and, lastly, it was itself by far the most powerful feudal lord, holding, as it did, fully one-third of the soil of the Catholic world. Before profane feudalism could be successively attacked in each country and in detail, this, its sacred central organization, had to be destroyed. Moreover, parallel with the rise of the middle-class went on the great revival of science; astronomy, mechanics, physics, anatomy, physiology, were again cultivated. And the bourgeoisie, for the development of its industrial production, required a science which ascertained the physical properties of natural objects and the modes of action of the forces of Nature. Now up to then science had but been the humble handmaid of the Church, had not been allowed to overstep the limits set by faith, and for that reason had been no science at all. Science rebelled against the Church; the bourgeoisie could not do without science, and, therefore, had to join in the rebellion. The above, though touching but two of the points where the rising middle-class was bound to come into collision with the established religion, will be sufficient to show, first, that the class most directly interested in the struggle against the pretensions of the Roman Church was the bourgeoisie; and second, that every struggle against feudalism, at that time, had to take on a religious disguise, had to be directed against the Church in the first instance. But if the universities and the traders of the cities started the cry, it was sure to find, and did find, a strong echo in the masses of the country people, the peasants, who everywhere had to struggle for their very existence with their feudal lords, spiritual and temporal. The long fight of the bourgeoisie against feudalism culminated in three great, decisive battles. The first was what is called the Protestant Reformation in Germany. The war-cry raised against the Church by Luther was responded to by two insurrections of a political nature: first, that of the lower nobility under Franz von Sickingen (1523), then the great Peasants' War, 1525. Both were defeated, chiefly in consequence of the indecision of the parties most interested, the burghers of the towns--an indecision into the causes of which we cannot here enter. From that moment the struggle degenerated into a fight between the local princes and the central power, and ended by blotting out Germany, for two hundred years, from the politically active nations of Europe. The Lutheran reformation produced a new creed indeed, a religion adapted to absolute monarchy. No sooner were the peasants of North-east Germany converted to Lutheranism than they were from freemen reduced to serfs. But where Luther failed, Calvin won the day. Calvin's creed was one fit for the boldest of the bourgeoisie of his time. His predestination doctrine was the religious expression of the fact that in the commercial world of competition success or failure does not depend upon a man's activity or cleverness, but upon circumstances uncontrollable by him. It is not of him that willeth or of him that runneth, but of the mercy of unknown superior economic powers: and this was especially true at a period of economic revolution, when all old commercial routes and centers were replaced by new ones, when India and America were opened to the world, and when even the most sacred economic articles of faith--the value of gold and silver--began to totter and to break down. Calvin's church constitution was thoroughly democratic and republican; and where the kingdom of God was republicanized, could the kingdoms of this world remain subject to monarchs, bishops, and lords? While German Lutheranism became a willing tool in the hands of princes, Calvinism founded a republic in Holland, and active republican parties in England, and, above all, Scotland. In Calvinism, the second great bourgeois upheaval found its doctrine ready cut and dried. This upheaval took place in England. The middle-class of the towns brought it on, and the yeomanry of the country districts fought it out. Curiously enough, in all the three great bourgeois risings, the peasantry furnishes the army that has to do the fighting; and the peasantry is just the class that, the victory once gained, is most surely ruined by the economic consequences of that victory. A hundred years after Cromwell, the yeomanry of England had almost disappeared. Anyhow, had it not been for that yeomanry and for the _plebeian_ element in the towns, the bourgeoisie alone would never have fought the matter out to the bitter end, and would never have brought Charles I. to the scaffold. In order to secure even those conquests of the bourgeoisie that were ripe for gathering at the time, the revolution had to be carried considerably further--exactly as in 1793 in France and 1848 in Germany. This seems, in fact, to be one of the laws of evolution of bourgeois society. Well, upon this excess of revolutionary activity there necessarily followed the inevitable reaction which in its turn went beyond the point where it might have maintained itself. After a series of oscillations, the new center of gravity was at last attained and became a new starting-point. The grand period of English history, known to respectability under the name of "the Great Rebellion," and the struggles succeeding it, were brought to a close by the comparatively puny event entitled by Liberal historians, "the Glorious Revolution." The new starting-point was a compromise between the rising middle-class and the ex-feudal landowners. The latter, though called, as now, the aristocracy, had been long since on the way which led them to become what Louis Philippe in France became at a much later period, "the first bourgeois of the kingdom." Fortunately for England, the old feudal barons had killed one another during the Wars of the Roses. Their successors, though mostly scions of the old families, had been so much out of the direct line of descent that they constituted quite a new body, with habits and tendencies far more bourgeois than feudal. They fully understood the value of money, and at once began to increase their rents by turning hundreds of small farmers out and replacing them by sheep. Henry VIII., while squandering the Church lands, created fresh bourgeois landlords by wholesale; the innumerable confiscations of estates, regranted to absolute or relative upstarts, and continued during the whole of the seventeenth century, had the same result. Consequently, ever since Henry VII., the English "aristocracy," far from counteracting the development of industrial production, had, on the contrary, sought to indirectly profit thereby; and there had always been a section of the great landowners willing, from economical or political reasons, to co-operate with the leading men of the financial and industrial bourgeoisie. The compromise of 1689 was, therefore, easily accomplished. The political spoils of "pelf and place" were left to the great land-owning families, provided the economic interests of the financial, manufacturing, and commercial middle-class were sufficiently attended to. And these economic interests were at that time powerful enough to determine the general policy of the nation. There might be squabbles about matters of detail, but, on the whole, the aristocratic oligarchy knew too well that its own economic prosperity was irretrievably bound up with that of the industrial and commercial middle-class. From that time, the bourgeoisie was a humble, but still a recognized component of the ruling classes of England. With the rest of them, it had a common interest in keeping in subjection the great working mass of the nation. The merchant or manufacturer himself stood in the position of master, or, as it was until lately called, of "natural superior" to his clerks, his workpeople, his domestic servants. His interest was to get as much and as good work out of them as he could; for this end they had to be trained to proper submission. He was himself religious; his religion had supplied the standard under which he had fought the king and the lords; he was not long in discovering the opportunities this same religion offered him for working upon the minds of his natural inferiors, and making them submissive to the behests of the masters it had pleased God to place over them. In short, the English bourgeoisie now had to take a part in keeping down the "lower orders," the great producing mass of the nation, and one of the means employed for that purpose was the influence of religion. There was another fact that contributed to strengthen the religious leanings of the bourgeoisie. That was the rise of materialism in England. This new doctrine not only shocked the pious feelings of the middle-class; it announced itself as a philosophy only fit for scholars and cultivated men of the world, in contrast to religion which was good enough for the uneducated masses, including the bourgeoisie. With Hobbes it stepped on the stage as a defender of royal prerogative and omnipotence; it called upon absolute monarchy to keep down that _puer robustus sed malitiosus_, to wit, the people. Similarly, with the successors of Hobbes, with Bolingbroke, Shaftesbury, etc., the new deistic form of materialism remained an aristocratic, esoteric doctrine, and, therefore, hateful to the middle-class both for its religious heresy and for its anti-bourgeois political connections. Accordingly, in opposition to the materialism and deism of the aristocracy, those Protestant sects which had furnished the flag and the fighting contingent against the Stuarts, continued to furnish the main strength of the progressive middle-class, and form even to-day the backbone of "the Great Liberal Party." In the meantime materialism passed from England to France, where it met and coalesced with another materialistic school of philosophers, a branch of Cartesianism. In France, too, it remained at first an exclusively aristocratic doctrine. But soon its revolutionary character asserted itself. The French materialists did not limit their criticism to matters of religious belief; they extended it to whatever scientific tradition or political institution they met with; and to prove the claim of their doctrine to universal application, they took the shortest cut, and boldly applied it to all subjects of knowledge in the giant work after which they were named--the _Encyclopédie_. Thus, in one or the other of its two forms--avowed materialism or deism--it became the creed of the whole cultured youth of France; so much so that, when the great Revolution broke out, the doctrine hatched by English Royalists gave a theoretical flag to French Republicans and Terrorists, and furnished the text for the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The great French Revolution was the third uprising of the bourgeoisie, but the first that had entirely cast off the religious cloak, and was fought out on undisguised political lines; it was the first, too, that was really fought out to the destruction of one of the combatants, the aristocracy, and the complete triumph of the other, the bourgeoisie. In England the continuity of pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary institutions, and the compromise between landlords and capitalists, found its expression in the continuity of judicial precedents and in the religious preservation of the feudal forms of the law. In France the Revolution constituted a complete breach with the traditions of the past; it cleared out the very last vestiges of feudalism, and created in the _Code Civil_ a masterly adaptation of the old Roman law--that almost perfect expression of the juridical relations corresponding to the economic stage called by Marx the production of commodities--to modern capitalistic conditions; so masterly that this French revolutionary code still serves as a model for reforms of the law of property in all other countries, not excepting England. Let us, however, not forget that if English law continues to express the economic relations of capitalistic society in that barbarous feudal language which corresponds to the thing expressed, just as English spelling corresponds to English pronunciation--_vous écrivez Londres et vous prononcez Constantinople_, said a Frenchman--that same English law is the only one which has preserved through ages, and transmitted to America and the Colonies the best part of that old Germanic personal freedom, local self-government, and independence from all interference but that of the law courts, which on the Continent has been lost during the period of absolute monarchy, and has nowhere been as yet fully recovered. To return to our British bourgeois. The French Revolution gave him a splendid opportunity, with the help of the Continental monarchies, to destroy French maritime commerce, to annex French colonies, and to crush the last French pretensions to maritime rivalry. That was one reason why he fought it. Another was that the ways of this revolution went very much against his grain. Not only its "execrable" terrorism, but the very attempt to carry bourgeois rule to extremes. What should the British bourgeois do without his aristocracy, that taught him manners, such as they were, and invented fashions for him--that furnished officers for the army, which kept order at home, and the navy, which conquered colonial possessions and new markets abroad? There was indeed a progressive minority of the bourgeoisie, that minority whose interests were not so well attended to under the compromise; this section, composed chiefly of the less wealthy middle-class, did sympathize with the Revolution, but it was powerless in Parliament. Thus, if materialism became the creed of the French Revolution, the God-fearing English bourgeois held all the faster to his religion. Had not the reign of terror in Paris proved what was the upshot, if the religious instincts of the masses were lost? The more materialism spread from France to neighboring countries, and was reinforced by similar doctrinal currents, notably by German philosophy, the more, in fact, materialism and freethought generally became, on the Continent, the necessary qualifications of a cultivated man, the more stubbornly the English middle-class stuck to its manifold religious creeds. These creeds might differ from one another, but they were, all of them, distinctly religious, Christian creeds. While the Revolution ensured the political triumph of the bourgeoisie in France, in England Watt, Arkwright, Cartwright, and others, initiated an industrial revolution, which completely shifted the center of gravity of economic power. The wealth of the bourgeoisie increased considerably faster than that of the landed aristocracy. Within the bourgeoisie itself, the financial aristocracy, the bankers, etc., were more and more pushed into the background by the manufacturers. The compromise of 1689, even after the gradual changes it had undergone in favor of the bourgeoisie, no longer corresponded to the relative position of the parties to it. The character of these parties, too, had changed; the bourgeoisie of 1830 was very different from that of the preceding century. The political power still left to the aristocracy, and used by them to resist the pretensions of the new industrial bourgeoisie, became incompatible with the new economic interests. A fresh struggle with the aristocracy was necessary; it could end only in a victory of the new economic power. First, the Reform Act was pushed through, in spite of all resistance, under the impulse of the French Revolution of 1830. It gave to the bourgeoisie a recognized and powerful place in Parliament. Then the Repeal of the Corn Laws, which settled, once for all, the supremacy of the bourgeoisie, and especially of its most active portion, the manufacturers, over the landed aristocracy. This was the greatest victory of the bourgeoisie; it was, however, also the last it gained in its own, exclusive interest. Whatever triumphs it obtained later on, it had to share with a new social power, first its ally, but soon its rival. The industrial revolution had created a class of large manufacturing capitalists, but also a class--and a far more numerous one--of manufacturing work-people. This class gradually increased in numbers, in proportion as the industrial revolution seized upon one branch of manufacture after another, and in the same proportion it increased in power. This power it proved as early as 1824, by forcing a reluctant Parliament to repeal the acts forbidding combinations of workmen. During the Reform agitation, the working-men constituted the Radical wing of the Reform party; the Act of 1832 having excluded them from the suffrage, they formulated their demands in the People's Charter, and constituted themselves, in opposition to the great bourgeois Anti-Corn Law party, into an independent party, the Chartists, the first working-men's party of modern times. Then came the Continental revolutions of February and March, 1848, in which the working people played such a prominent part, and, at least in Paris, put forward demands which were certainly inadmissible from the point of view of capitalistic society. And then came the general reaction. First the defeat of the Chartists on the 10th April, 1848, then the crushing of the Paris working-men's insurrection in June of the same year, then the disasters of 1849 in Italy, Hungary, South Germany, and at last the victory of Louis Bonaparte over Paris, 2nd December, 1851. For a time, at least, the bugbear of working-class pretensions was put down, but at what cost! If the British bourgeois had been convinced before of the necessity of maintaining the common people in a religious mood, how much more must he feel that necessity after all these experiences? Regardless of the sneers of his Continental compeers, he continued to spend thousands and tens of thousands, year after year, upon the evangelization of the lower orders; not content with his own native religious machinery, he appealed to Brother Jonathan, the greatest organizer in existence of religion as a trade, and imported from America revivalism, Moody and Sankey, and the like; and, finally, he accepted the dangerous aid of the Salvation Army, which revives the propaganda of early Christianity, appeals to the poor as the elect, fights capitalism in a religious way, and thus fosters an element of early Christian class antagonism, which one day may become troublesome to the well-to-do people who now find the ready money for it. It seems a law of historical development that the bourgeoisie can in no European country get hold of political power--at least for any length of time--in the same exclusive way in which the feudal aristocracy kept hold of it during the Middle Ages. Even in France, where feudalism was completely extinguished, the bourgeoisie, as a whole, has held full possession of the Government for very short periods only. During Louis Philippe's reign, 1830-48, a very small portion of the bourgeoisie ruled the kingdom; by far the larger part were excluded from the suffrage by the high qualification. Under the second Republic, 1848-51, the whole bourgeoisie ruled, but for three years only; their incapacity brought on the second Empire. It is only now, in the third Republic, that the bourgeoisie as a whole have kept possession of the helm for more than twenty years; and they are already showing lively signs of decadence. A durable reign of the bourgeoisie has been possible only in countries like America, where feudalism was unknown, and society at the very beginning started from a bourgeois basis. And even in France and America, the successors of the bourgeoisie, the working people, are already knocking at the door. In England, the bourgeoisie never held undivided sway. Even the victory of 1832 left the landed aristocracy in almost exclusive possession of all the leading Government offices. The meekness with which the wealthy middle-class submitted to this, remained inconceivable to me until the great Liberal manufacturer, Mr. W.A. Forster, in a public speech implored the young men of Bradford to learn French, as a means to get on in the world, and quoted from his own experience how sheepish he looked when, as a Cabinet Minister, he had to move in society where French was, at least, as necessary as English! The fact was, the English middle-class of that time were, as a rule, quite uneducated upstarts, and could not help leaving to the aristocracy those superior Government places where other qualifications were required than mere insular narrowness and insular conceit, seasoned by business sharpness.[C] Even now the endless newspaper debates about middle-class education show that the English middle-class does not yet consider itself good enough for the best education, and looks to something more modest. Thus, even after the Repeal of the Corn Laws, it appeared a matter of course, that the men who had carried the day, the Cobdens, Brights, Forsters, etc., should remain excluded from a share in the official government of the country, until twenty years afterwards, a new Reform Act opened to them the door of the Cabinet. The English bourgeoisie are, up to the present day, so deeply penetrated by a sense of their social inferiority that they keep up, at their own expense and that of the nation, an ornamental caste of drones to represent the nation worthily at all State functions; and they consider themselves highly honored whenever one of themselves is found worthy of admission into this select and privileged body, manufactured, after all, by themselves. The industrial and commercial middle-class had, therefore, not yet succeeded in driving the landed aristocracy completely from political power when another competitor, the working-class, appeared on the stage. The reaction after the Chartist movement and the Continental revolutions, as well as the unparalleled extension of English trade from 1848-1866, (ascribed vulgarly to Free Trade alone, but due far more to the colossal development of railways, ocean steamers, and means of intercourse generally), had again driven the working-class into the dependency of the Liberal party, of which they formed, as in pre-Chartist times, the Radical wing. Their claims to the franchise, however, gradually became irresistible; while the Whig leaders of the Liberals "funked," Disraeli showed his superiority by making the Tories seize the favorable moment and introduce household suffrage in the boroughs, along with a redistribution of seats. Then followed the ballot; then in 1884 the extension of household suffrage to the counties and a fresh redistribution of seats, by which electoral districts were to some extent equalized. All these measures considerably increased the electoral power of the working-class, so much so that in at least 150 to 200 constituencies that class now furnishes the majority of voters. But parliamentary government is a capital school for teaching respect for tradition; if the middle-class look with awe and veneration upon what Lord John Manners playfully called "our old nobility," the mass of the working-people then looked up with respect and deference to what used to be designated as "their betters," the middle-class. Indeed, the British workman, some fifteen years ago, was the model workman, whose respectful regard for the position of his master, and whose self-restraining modesty in claiming rights for himself, consoled our German economists of the _Katheder-Socialist_ school for the incurable communistic and revolutionary tendencies of their own working-men at home. But the English middle-class--the good men of business as they are--saw farther than the German professors. They had shared their power but reluctantly with the working-class. They had learnt, during the Chartist years, what that _puer robustus sed malitiosus_, the people, is capable of. And since that time, they had been compelled to incorporate the better part of the People's Charter in the Statutes of the United Kingdom. Now, if ever, the people must be kept in order by moral means, and the first and foremost of all moral means of action upon the masses is and remains--religion. Hence the parsons' majorities on the School Boards, hence the increasing self-taxation of the bourgeoisie for the support of all sorts of revivalism, from ritualism to the Salvation Army. And now came the triumph of British respectability over the freethought and religious laxity of the Continental bourgeois. The workmen of France and Germany had become rebellious. They were thoroughly infected with socialism, and, for very good reasons, were not at all particular as to the legality of the means by which to secure their own ascendency. The _puer robustus_, here, turned from day to day more _malitiosus_. Nothing remained to the French and German bourgeoisie as a last resource but to silently drop their freethought, as a youngster, when sea-sickness creeps upon him, quietly drops the burning cigar he brought swaggeringly on board; one by one, the scoffers turned pious in outward behavior, spoke with respect of the Church, its dogmas and rites, and even conformed with the latter as far as could not be helped. French bourgeoisie dined _maigre_ on Fridays, and German ones sat out long Protestant sermons in their pews on Sundays. They had come to grief with materialism. "_Die Religion muss dem Volk erhalten werden_,"--religion must be kept alive for the people--that was the only and the last means to save society from utter ruin. Unfortunately for themselves, they did not find this out until they had done their level best to break up religion for ever. And now it was the turn of the British bourgeois to sneer and to say: "Why, you fools, I could have told you that two hundred years ago!" However, I am afraid neither the religious stolidity of the British, nor the _post festum_ conversion of the Continental bourgeois will stem the rising Proletarian tide. Tradition is a great retarding force, is the _vis inertiæ_ of history, but, being merely passive, is sure to be broken down; and thus religion will be no lasting safeguard to capitalist society. If our juridical, philosophical, and religious ideas are the more or less remote offshoots of the economical relations prevailing in a given society, such ideas cannot, in the long run, withstand the effects of a complete change in these relations. And, unless we believe in supernatural revelation, we must admit that no religious tenets will ever suffice to prop up a tottering society. In fact, in England, too, the working-people have begun to move again. They are, no doubt, shackled by traditions of various kinds. Bourgeois traditions, such as the widespread belief that there can be but two parties, Conservatives and Liberals, and that the working-class must work out its salvation by and through the great Liberal party. Working-men's traditions, inherited from their first tentative efforts at independent action, such as the exclusion, from ever so many old Trade Unions, of all applicants who have not gone through a regular apprenticeship; which means the breeding, by every such union, of its own blacklegs. But for all that the English working-class is moving, as even Professor Brentano has sorrowfully had to report to his brother Katheder-Socialists. It moves, like all things in England, with a slow and measured step, with hesitation here, with more or less unfruitful, tentative attempts there; it moves now and then with an over-cautious mistrust of the name of Socialism, while it gradually absorbs the substance; and the movement spreads and seizes one layer of the workers after another. It has now shaken out of their torpor the unskilled laborers of the East End of London, and we all know what a splendid impulse these fresh forces have given it in return. And if the pace of the movement is not up to the impatience of some people, let them not forget that it is the working-class which keeps alive the finest qualities of the English character, and that, if a step in advance is once gained in England, it is, as a rule, never lost afterwards. If the sons of the old Chartists, for reasons explained above, were not quite up to the mark, the grandsons bid fair to be worthy of their forefathers. But the triumph of the European working-class does not depend upon England alone. It can only be secured by the co-operation of, at least, England, France, and Germany. In both the latter countries the working-class movement is well ahead of England. In Germany it is even within measurable distance of success. The progress it has there made during the last twenty-five years is unparalleled. It advances with ever-increasing velocity. If the German middle-class have shown themselves lamentably deficient in political capacity, discipline, courage, energy, and perseverance, the German working-class have given ample proof of all these qualities. Four hundred years ago, Germany was the starting-point of the first upheaval of the European middle-class; as things are now, is it outside the limits of possibility that Germany will be the scene, too, of the first great victory of the European proletariat? F. ENGELS. _April 20th, 1892._ FOOTNOTES: [A] "Qual" is a philosophical play upon words. Qual literally means torture, a pain which drives to action of some kind; at the same time the mystic Böhme puts into the German word something of the meaning of the Latin _qualitas_; his "qual" was the activating principle arising from, and promoting in its turn, the spontaneous development of the thing, relation, or person subject to it, in contradistinction to a pain inflicted from without. [B] Marx and Engels, "Die Heilige Familie," Frankfurt a. M. 1845, pp. 201-204. [C] And even in business matters, the conceit of national Chauvinism is but a sorry adviser. Up to quite recently, the average English manufacturer considered it derogatory from an Englishman to speak any language but his own, and felt rather proud than otherwise of the fact that "poor devils" of foreigners settled in England and took off his hands the trouble of disposing of his products abroad. He never noticed that these foreigners, mostly Germans, thus got command of a very large part of British foreign trade, imports and exports, and that the direct foreign trade of Englishmen became limited, almost entirely, to the colonies, China, the United States, and South America. Nor did he notice that these Germans traded with other Germans abroad, who gradually organized a complete network of commercial colonies all over the world. But when Germany, about forty years ago, seriously began manufacturing for export, this network served her admirably in her transformation, in so short a time, from a corn-exporting into a first-rate manufacturing country. Then, about ten years ago, the British manufacturer got frightened, and asked his ambassadors and consuls how it was that he could no longer keep his customers together. The unanimous answer was: (1) You don't learn your customer's language but expect him to speak your own; (2) You don't even try to suit your customer's wants, habits, and tastes, but expect him to conform to your English ones. SOCIALISM UTOPIAN AND SCIENTIFIC I Modern Socialism is, in its essence, the direct product of the recognition, on the one hand, of the class antagonisms, existing in the society of to-day, between proprietors and non-proprietors, between capitalists and wage-workers; on the other hand, of the anarchy existing in production. But, in its theoretical form, modern Socialism originally appears ostensibly as a more logical extension of the principles laid down by the great French philosophers of the eighteenth century. Like every new theory, modern Socialism had, at first, to connect itself with the intellectual stock-in-trade ready to its hand, however deeply its roots lay in material economic facts. The great men, who in France prepared men's minds for the coming revolution, were themselves extreme revolutionists. They recognized no external authority of any kind whatever. Religion, natural science, society, political institutions, everything, was subjected to the most unsparing criticism; everything must justify its existence before the judgment-seat of reason, or give up existence. Reason became the sole measure of everything. It was the time when, as Hegel says, the world stood upon its head;[1] first, in the sense that the human head, and the principles arrived at by its thought, claimed to be the basis of all human action and association; but by and by, also, in the wider sense that the reality which was in contradiction to these principles had, in fact, to be turned upside down. Every form of society and government then existing, every old traditional notion was flung into the lumber-room as irrational: the world had hitherto allowed itself to be led solely by prejudices; everything in the past deserved only pity and contempt. Now, for the first time, appeared the light of day, the kingdom of reason; henceforth superstition, injustice, privilege, oppression, were to be superseded by eternal truth, eternal Right, equality based on Nature and the inalienable rights of man. We know to-day that this kingdom of reason was nothing more than the idealized kingdom of the bourgeoisie; that this eternal Right found its realization in bourgeois justice; that this equality reduced itself to bourgeois equality before the law; that bourgeois property was proclaimed as one of the essential rights of man; and that the government of reason, the Contrat Social of Rousseau, came into being, and only could come into being, as a democratic bourgeois republic. The great thinkers of the eighteenth century could, no more than their predecessors, go beyond the limits imposed upon them by their epoch. But, side by side with the antagonism of the feudal nobility and the burghers, who claimed to represent all the rest of society, was the general antagonism of exploiters and exploited, of rich idlers and poor workers. It was this very circumstance that made it possible for the representatives of the bourgeoisie to put themselves forward as representing, not one special class, but the whole of suffering humanity. Still further. From its origin, the bourgeoisie was saddled with its antithesis: capitalists cannot exist without wage-workers, and, in the same proportion as the mediæval burgher of the guild developed into the modern bourgeois, the guild journeyman and the day-laborer, outside the guilds, developed into the proletarian. And although, upon the whole, the bourgeoisie, in their struggle with the nobility, could claim to represent at the same time the interests of the different working-classes of that period, yet in every great bourgeois movement there were independent outbursts of that class which was the forerunner, more or less developed, of the modern proletariat. For example, at the time of the German reformation and the peasants' war, the Anabaptists and Thomas Münzer; in the great English revolution, the Levellers; in the great French revolution, Baboeuf. There were theoretical enunciations corresponding with these revolutionary uprisings of a class not yet developed; in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Utopian pictures of ideal social conditions; in the eighteenth, actual communistic theories (Morelly and Mably). The demand for equality was no longer limited to political rights; it was extended also to the social conditions of individuals. It was not simply class privileges that were to be abolished, but class distinctions themselves. A Communism, ascetic, denouncing all the pleasures of life, Spartan, was the first form of the new teaching. Then came the three great Utopians; Saint Simon, to whom the middle-class movement, side by side with the proletarian, still had a certain significance; Fourier; and Owen, who in the country where capitalist production was most developed, and under the influence of the antagonisms begotten of this, worked out his proposals for the removal of class distinction systematically and in direct relation to French materialism. One thing is common to all three. Not one of them appears as a representative of the interests of that proletariat, which historical development had, in the meantime, produced. Like the French philosophers, they do not claim to emancipate a particular class to begin with, but all humanity at once. Like them, they wish to bring in the kingdom of reason and eternal justice, but this kingdom, as they see it, is as far as heaven from earth, from that of the French philosophers. For, to our three social reformers, the bourgeois world, based upon the principles of these philosophers, is quite as irrational and unjust, and, therefore, finds its way in the dust-hole quite as readily as feudalism and all the earlier stages of society. If pure reason and justice have not, hitherto, ruled the world, this has been the case only because men have not rightly understood them. What was wanted was the individual man of genius, who has now arisen and who understands the truth. That he has now arisen, that the truth has now been clearly understood, is not an inevitable event, following of necessity in the chain of historical development, but a mere happy accident. He might just as well have been born 500 years earlier, and might then have spared humanity 500 years of error, strife, and suffering. We saw how the French philosophers of the eighteenth century, the forerunners of the Revolution, appealed to reason as the sole judge of all that is. A rational government, rational society, were to be founded; everything that ran counter to eternal reason was to be remorselessly done away with. We saw also that this eternal reason was in reality nothing but the idealized understanding of the eighteenth century citizen, just then evolving into the bourgeois. The French Revolution had realized this rational society and government. But the new order of things, rational enough as compared with earlier conditions, turned out to be by no means absolutely rational. The State based upon reason completely collapsed. Rousseau's Contrat Social had found its realization in the Reign of Terror, from which the bourgeoisie, who had lost confidence in their own political capacity, had taken refuge first in the corruption of the Directorate, and, finally, under the wing of the Napoleonic despotism. The promised eternal peace was turned into an endless war of conquest. The society based upon reason had fared no better. The antagonism between rich and poor, instead of dissolving into general prosperity, had become intensified by the removal of the guild and other privileges, which had to some extent bridged it over, and by the removal of the charitable institutions of the Church. The "freedom of property" from feudal fetters, now veritably accomplished, turned out to be, for the small capitalists and small proprietors, the freedom to sell their small property, crushed under the overmastering competition of the large capitalists and landlords, to these great lords, and thus, as far as the small capitalists and peasant proprietors were concerned, became "freedom _from_ property." The development of industry upon a capitalistic basis made poverty and misery of the working masses conditions of existence of society. Cash payment became more and more, in Carlyle's phrase, the sole nexus between man and man. The number of crimes increased from year to year. Formerly, the feudal vices had openly stalked about in broad daylight; though not eradicated, they were now at any rate thrust into the background. In their stead, the bourgeois vices, hitherto practiced in secret, began to blossom all the more luxuriantly. Trade became to a greater and greater extent cheating. The "fraternity" of the revolutionary motto was realized in the chicanery and rivalries of the battle of competition. Oppression by force was replaced by corruption; the sword, as the first social lever, by gold. The right of the first night was transferred from the feudal lords to the bourgeois manufacturers. Prostitution increased to an extent never heard of. Marriage itself remained, as before, the legally recognized form, the official cloak of prostitution, and, moreover, was supplemented by rich crops of adultery. In a word, compared with the splendid promises of the philosophers, the social and political institutions born of the "triumph of reason" were bitterly disappointing caricatures. All that was wanting was the men to formulate this disappointment, and they came with the turn of the century. In 1802 Saint Simon's Geneva letters appeared; in 1808 appeared Fourier's first work, although the groundwork of his theory dated from 1799; on January 1, 1800, Robert Owen undertook the direction of New Lanark. At this time, however, the capitalist mode of production, and with it the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, was still very incompletely developed. Modern Industry, which had just arisen in England, was still unknown in France. But Modern Industry develops, on the one hand, the conflicts which make absolutely necessary a revolution in the mode of production, and the doing away with its capitalistic character--conflicts not only between the classes begotten of it, but also between the very productive forces and the forms of exchange created by it. And, on the other hand, it develops, in these very gigantic productive forces, the means of ending these conflicts. If, therefore, about the year 1800, the conflicts arising from the new social order were only just beginning to take shape, this holds still more fully as to the means of ending them. The "have-nothing" masses of Paris, during the Reign of Terror, were able for a moment to gain the mastery, and thus to lead the bourgeois revolution to victory in spite of the bourgeoisie themselves. But, in doing so, they only proved how impossible it was for their domination to last under the conditions then obtaining. The proletariat, which then for the first time evolved itself from these "have-nothing" masses as the nucleus of a new class, as yet quite incapable of independent political action, appeared as an oppressed, suffering order, to whom, in its incapacity to help itself, help could, at best, be brought in from without, or down from above. This historical situation also dominated the founders of Socialism. To the crude conditions of capitalistic production and the crude class conditions corresponded crude theories. The solution of the social problems, which as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic conditions, the Utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain. Society presented nothing but wrongs; to remove these was the task of reason. It was necessary, then, to discover a new and more perfect system of social order and to impose this upon society from without by propaganda, and, wherever it was possible, by the example of model experiments. These new social systems were foredoomed as Utopian; the more completely they were worked out in detail, the more they could not avoid drifting off into pure phantasies. These facts once established, we need not dwell a moment longer upon this side of the question, now wholly belonging to the past. We can leave it to the literary small fry to solemnly quibble over these phantasies, which to-day only make us smile, and to crow over the superiority of their own bald reasoning, as compared with such "insanity." For ourselves, we delight in the stupendously grand thoughts and germs of thought that everywhere break out through their phantastic covering, and to which these Philistines are blind. Saint Simon was a son of the great French Revolution, at the outbreak of which he was not yet thirty. The Revolution was the victory of the third estate, _i.e._, of the great masses of the nation, _working_ in production and in trade, over the privileged _idle_ classes, the nobles and the priests. But the victory of the third estate soon revealed itself as exclusively the victory of a small part of this "estate," as the conquest of political power by the socially privileged section of it, _i.e._, the propertied bourgeoisie. And the bourgeoisie had certainly developed rapidly during the Revolution, partly by speculation in the lands of the nobility and of the Church, confiscated and afterwards put up for sale, and partly by frauds upon the nation by means of army contracts. It was the domination of these swindlers that, under the Directorate, brought France to the verge of ruin, and thus gave Napoleon the pretext for his _coup-d'état_. Hence, to Saint Simon the antagonism between the third estate and the privileged classes took the form of an antagonism between "workers" and "idlers." The idlers were not merely the old privileged classes, but also all who, without taking any part in production or distribution, lived on their incomes. And the workers were not only the wage-workers, but also the manufacturers, the merchants, the bankers. That the idlers had lost the capacity for intellectual leadership and political supremacy had been proved, and was by the Revolution finally settled. That the non-possessing classes had not this capacity seemed to Saint Simon proved by the experiences of the Reign of Terror. Then, who was to lead and command? According to Saint Simon, science and industry, both united by a new religious bond, destined to restore that unity of religious ideas which had been lost since the time of the Reformation--a necessarily mystic and rigidly hierarchic "new Christianity." But science, that was the scholars; and industry, that was in the first place, the working bourgeois, manufacturers, merchants, bankers. These bourgeoisie were certainly, intended by Saint Simon to transform themselves into a kind of public officials, of social trustees; but they were still to hold, _vis-à-vis_ of the workers, a commanding and economically privileged position. The bankers especially were to be called upon to direct the whole of social production by the regulation of credit. This conception was in exact keeping with a time in which Modern Industry in France and, with it, the chasm between bourgeoisie and proletariat was only just coming into existence. But what Saint Simon especially lays stress upon is this: what interests him first, and above all other things, is the lot of the class that is the most numerous and the most poor ("_la classe la plus nombreuse et la plus pauvre_"). Already, in his Geneva letters, Saint Simon lays down the proposition that "all men ought to work." In the same work he recognizes also that the Reign of Terror was the reign of the non-possessing masses. "See," says he to them, "what happened in France at the time when your comrades held sway there; they brought about a famine." But to recognize the French Revolution as a class war, and not simply one between nobility and bourgeoisie, but between nobility, bourgeoisie, and the non-possessers, was, in the year 1802, a most pregnant discovery. In 1816, he declares that politics is the science of production, and foretells the complete absorption of politics by economics. The knowledge that economic conditions are the basis of political institutions appears here only in embryo. Yet what is here already very plainly expressed is the idea of the future conversion of political rule over men into an administration of things and a direction of processes of production--that is to say, the "abolition of the State," about which recently there has been so much noise. Saint Simon shows the same superiority over his contemporaries, when in 1814, immediately after the entry of the allies into Paris, and again in 1815, during the Hundred Days' War, he proclaims the alliance of France with England, and then of both these countries with Germany, as the only guarantee for the prosperous development and peace of Europe. To preach to the French in 1815 an alliance with the victors of Waterloo required as much courage as historical foresight. If in Saint Simon we find a comprehensive breadth of view, by virtue of which almost all the ideas of later Socialists, that are not strictly economic, are found in him in embryo, we find in Fourier a criticism of the existing conditions of society genuinely French and witty, but not upon that account any the less thorough. Fourier takes the bourgeoisie, their inspired prophets before the Revolution, and their interested eulogists after it, at their own word. He lays bare remorsely the material and moral misery of the bourgeois world. He confronts it with the earlier philosophers' dazzling promises of a society in which reason alone should reign, of a civilization in which happiness should be universal, of an illimitable human perfectibility, and with the rose-colored phraseology of the bourgeois ideologists of his time. He points out how everywhere the most pitiful reality corresponds with the most high-sounding phrases, and he overwhelms this hopeless fiasco of phrases with his mordant sarcasm. Fourier is not only a critic; his imperturbably serene nature makes him a satirist, and assuredly one of the greatest satirists of all time. He depicts, with equal power and charm, the swindling speculations that blossomed out upon the downfall of the Revolution, and the shopkeeping spirit prevalent in, and characteristic of, French commerce at that time. Still more masterly is his criticism of the bourgeois form of the relations between the sexes, and the position of woman in bourgeois society. He was the first to declare that in any given society the degree of woman's emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation. But Fourier is at his greatest in his conception of the history of society. He divides its whole course, thus far, into four stages of evolution--savagery, barbarism, the patriarchate, civilization. This last is identical with the so-called civil, or bourgeois, society of to-day--_i.e._, with the social order that came in with the sixteenth century. He proves "that the civilized stage raises every vice practiced by barbarism in a simple fashion, into a form of existence, complex, ambiguous, equivocal, hypocritical"--that civilization moves in "a vicious circle," in contradictions which it constantly reproduces without being able to solve them; hence it constantly arrives at the very opposite to that which it wants to attain, or pretends to want to attain, so that, _e.g._, "under civilization poverty is born of superabundance itself." Fourier, as we see, uses the dialectic method in the same masterly way as his contemporary Hegel. Using these same dialectics, he argues, against the talk about illimitable human perfectibility that every historical phase has its period of ascent and also its period of descent, and he applies this observation to the future of the whole human race. As Kant introduced into natural science the idea of the ultimate destruction of the earth, Fourier introduced into historical science that of the ultimate destruction of the human race. Whilst in France the hurricane of the Revolution swept over the land, in England a quieter, but not on that account less tremendous, revolution was going on. Steam and the new tool-making machinery were transforming manufacture into modern industry, and thus revolutionizing the whole foundation of bourgeois society. The sluggish march of development of the manufacturing period changed into a veritable storm and stress period of production. With constantly increasing swiftness the splitting-up of society into large capitalists and non-possessing proletarians went on. Between these, instead of the former stable middle-class, an unstable mass of artisans and small shopkeepers, the most fluctuating portion of the population, now led a precarious existence. The new mode of production was, as yet, only at the beginning of its period of ascent; as yet it was the normal, regular method of production--the only one possible under existing conditions. Nevertheless, even then it was producing crying social abuses--the herding together of a homeless population in the worst quarters of the large towns; the loosening of all traditional moral bonds, of patriarchal subordination, of family relations; overwork, especially of women and children, to a frightful extent; complete demoralization of the working-class, suddenly flung into altogether new conditions, from the country into the town, from agriculture into modern industry, from stable conditions of existence into insecure ones that changed from day to day. At this juncture there came forward as a reformer a manufacturer 29 years old--a man of almost sublime, childlike simplicity of character, and at the same time one of the few born leaders of men. Robert Owen had adopted the teaching of the materialistic philosophers: that man's character is the product, on the one hand, of heredity, on the other, of the environment of the individual during his lifetime, and especially during his period of development. In the industrial revolution most of his class saw only chaos and confusion, and the opportunity of fishing in these troubled waters and making large fortunes quickly. He saw in it the opportunity of putting into practice his favorite theory, and so of bringing order out of chaos. He had already tried it with success, as superintendent of more than five hundred men in a Manchester factory. From 1800 to 1829, he directed the great cotton mill at New Lanark, in Scotland, as managing partner, along the same lines, but with greater freedom of action and with a success that made him a European reputation. A population, originally consisting of the most diverse and, for the most part, very demoralized elements, a population that gradually grew to 2,500, he turned into a model colony, in which drunkenness, police, magistrates, lawsuits, poor laws, charity, were unknown. And all this simply by placing the people in conditions worthy of human beings, and especially by carefully bringing up the rising generation. He was the founder of infant schools, and introduced them first at New Lanark. At the age of two the children came to school, where they enjoyed themselves so much that they could scarcely be got home again. Whilst his competitors worked their people thirteen or fourteen hours a day, in New Lanark the working-day was only ten and a half hours. When a crisis in cotton stopped work for four months, his workers received their full wages all the time. And with all this the business more than doubled in value, and to the last yielded large profits to its proprietors. In spite of all this, Owen was not content. The existence which he secured for his workers was, in his eyes, still far from being worthy of human beings. "The people were slaves at my mercy." The relatively favorable conditions in which he had placed them were still far from allowing a rational development of the character and of the intellect in all directions, much less of the free exercise of all their faculties. "And yet, the working part of this population of 2,500 persons was daily producing as much real wealth for society as, less than half a century before, it would have required the working part of a population of 600,000 to create. I asked myself, what became of the difference between the wealth consumed by 2,500 persons and that which would have been consumed by 600,000?"[2] The answer was clear. It had been used to pay the proprietors of the establishment 5 per cent. on the capital they had laid out, in addition to over £300,000 clear profit. And that which held for New Lanark held to a still greater extent for all the factories in England. "If this new wealth had not been created by machinery, imperfectly as it has been applied, the wars of Europe, in opposition to Napoleon, and to support the aristocratic principles of society, could not have been maintained. And yet this new power was the creation of the working-classes."[3] To them, therefore, the fruits of this new power belonged. The newly-created gigantic productive forces, hitherto used only to enrich individuals and to enslave the masses, offered to Owen the foundations for a reconstruction of society; they were destined, as the common property of all, to be worked for the common good of all. Owen's Communism was based upon this purely business foundation, the outcome, so to say, of commercial calculation. Throughout, it maintained this practical character. Thus, in 1823, Owen proposed the relief of the distress in Ireland by Communist colonies, and drew up complete estimates of costs of founding them, yearly expenditure, and probable revenue. And in his definite plan for the future, the technical working out of details is managed with such practical knowledge--ground plan, front and side and bird's-eye views all included--that the Owen method of social reform once accepted, there is from the practical point of view little to be said against the actual arrangement of details. His advance in the direction of Communism was the turning-point in Owen's life. As long as he was simply a philanthropist, he was rewarded with nothing but wealth, applause, honor, and glory. He was the most popular man in Europe. Not only men of his own class, but statesmen and princes listened to him approvingly. But when he came out with his Communist theories, that was quite another thing. Three great obstacles seemed to him especially to block the path to social reform: private property, religion, the present form of marriage. He knew what confronted him if he attacked these--outlawry, excommunication from official society, the loss of his whole social position. But nothing of this prevented him from attacking them without fear of consequences, and what he had foreseen happened. Banished from official society, with a conspiracy of silence against him in the press, ruined by his unsuccessful Communist experiments in America, in which he sacrificed all his fortune, he turned directly to the working-class and continued working in their midst for thirty years. Every social movement, every real advance in England on behalf of the workers links itself on to the name of Robert Owen. He forced through in 1819, after five years' fighting, the first law limiting the hours of labor of women and children in factories. He was president of the first Congress at which all the Trade Unions of England united in a single great trade association. He introduced as transition measures to the complete communistic organization of society, on the one hand, cooperative societies for retail trade and production. These have since that time, at least, given practical proof that the merchant and the manufacturer are socially quite unnecessary. On the other hand, he introduced labor bazaars for the exchange of the products of labor through the medium of labor-notes, whose unit was a single hour of work; institutions necessarily doomed to failure, but completely anticipating Proudhon's bank of exchange of a much later period, and differing entirely from this in that it did not claim to be the panacea for all social ills, but only a first step towards a much more radical revolution of society. The Utopians' mode of thought has for a long time governed the socialist ideas of the nineteenth century, and still governs some of them. Until very recently all French and English Socialists did homage to it. The earlier German Communism, including that of Weitling, was of the same school. To all these Socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason, and justice, and has only to be discovered to conquer all the world by virtue of its own power. And as absolute truth is independent of time, space, and of the historical development of man, it is a mere accident when and where it is discovered. With all this, absolute truth, reason, and justice are different with the founder of each different school. And as each one's special kind of absolute truth, reason, and justice is again conditioned by his subjective understanding, his conditions of existence, the measure of his knowledge and his intellectual training, there is no other ending possible in this conflict of absolute truths than that they shall be mutually exclusive one of the other. Hence, from this nothing could come but a kind of eclectic, average Socialism, which, as a matter of fact, has up to the present time dominated the minds of most of the socialist workers in France and England. Hence, a mish-mash allowing of the most manifold shades of opinion; a mish-mash of such critical statements, economic theories, pictures of future society by the founders of different sects, as excite a minimum of opposition; a mish-mash which is the more easily brewed the more the definite sharp edges of the individual constituents are rubbed down in the stream of debate, like rounded pebbles in a brook. To make a science of Socialism, it had first to be placed upon a real basis. FOOTNOTES: [1] This is the passage on the French Revolution: "Thought, the concept of law, all at once made itself felt, and against this the old scaffolding of wrong could make no stand. In this conception of law, therefore, a constitution has now been established, and henceforth everything must be based upon this. Since the sun had been in the firmament, and the planets circled round him, the sight had never been seen of man standing upon his head--_i.e._, on the Idea--and building reality after this image. Anaxagoras first said that the Nous, reason, rules the world; but now, for the first time, had man come to recognize that the Idea must rule the mental reality. And this was a magnificent sunrise. All thinking Beings have participated in celebrating this holy day. A sublime emotion swayed men at that time, an enthusiasm of reason pervaded the world, as if now had come the reconciliation of the Divine Principle with the world." [Hegel: "Philosophy of History," 1840, p. 535.] Is it not high time to set the anti-Socialist law in action against such teachings, subversive and to the common danger, by the late Professor Hegel? [2] From "The Revolution in Mind and Practice," p. 21, a memorial addressed to all the "red Republicans, Communists and Socialists of Europe," and sent to the provisional government of France, 1848, and also "to Queen Victoria and her responsible advisers." [3] Note, l. c., p. 70. II In the meantime, along with and after the French philosophy of the eighteenth century had arisen the new German philosophy, culminating in Hegel. Its greatest merit was the taking up again of dialectics as the highest form of reasoning. The old Greek philosophers were all born natural dialecticians, and Aristotle, the most encyclopædic intellect of them, had already analyzed the most essential forms of dialectic thought. The newer philosophy, on the other hand, although in it also dialectics had brilliant exponents (_e.g._ Descartes and Spinoza), had, especially through English influence, become more and more rigidly fixed in the so-called metaphysical mode of reasoning, by which also the French of the eighteenth century were almost wholly dominated, at all events in their special philosophical work. Outside philosophy in the restricted sense, the French nevertheless produced masterpieces of dialectic. We need only call to mind Diderot's "Le Neveu de Rameau," and Rousseau's "Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes." We give here, in brief, the essential character of these two modes of thought. When we consider and reflect upon nature at large, or the history of mankind, or our own intellectual activity, at first we see the picture of an endless entanglement of relations and reactions, permutations and combinations, in which nothing remains what, where, and as it was, but everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes away. We see, therefore, at first the picture as a whole, with its individual parts still more or less kept in the background; we observe the movements, transitions, connections, rather than the things that move, combine, and are connected. This primitive, naïve, but intrinsically correct conception of the world is that of ancient Greek philosophy, and was first clearly formulated by Heraclitus: everything is and is not, for everything is fluid, is constantly changing, constantly coming into being and passing away. But this conception, correctly as it expresses the general character of the picture of appearances as a whole, does not suffice to explain the details of which this picture is made up, and so long as we do not understand these, we have not a clear idea of the whole picture. In order to understand these details we must detach them from their natural or historical connection and examine each one separately, its nature, special causes, effects, etc. This is, primarily, the task of natural science and historical research; branches of science which the Greeks of classical times, on very good grounds, relegated to a subordinate position, because they had first of all to collect materials for these sciences to work upon. A certain amount of natural and historical material must be collected before there can be any critical analysis, comparison, and arrangement in classes, orders, and species. The foundations of the exact natural sciences were, therefore, first worked out by the Greeks of the Alexandrian period, and later on, in the Middle Ages, by the Arabs. Real natural science dates from the second half of the fifteenth century, and thence onward it has advanced with constantly increasing rapidity. The analysis of Nature into its individual parts, the grouping of the different natural processes and objects in definite classes, the study of the internal anatomy of organized bodies in their manifold forms--these were the fundamental conditions of the gigantic strides in our knowledge of Nature that have been made during the last four hundred years. But this method of work has also left us as legacy the habit of observing natural objects and processes in isolation, apart from their connection with the vast whole; of observing them in repose, not in motion; as constants, not as essentially variables; in their death, not in their life. And when this way of looking at things was transferred by Bacon and Locke from natural science to philosophy, it begot the narrow, metaphysical mode of thought peculiar to the last century. To the metaphysician, things and their mental reflexes, ideas, are isolated, are to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for all. He thinks in absolutely irreconcilable antitheses. "His communication is 'yea, yea; nay, nay;' for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil." For him a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude one another; cause and effect stand in a rigid antithesis one to the other. At first sight this mode of thinking seems to us very luminous, because it is that of so-called sound commonsense. Only sound commonsense, respectable fellow that he is, in the homely realm of his own four walls, has very wonderful adventures directly he ventures out into the wide world of research. And the metaphysical mode of thought, justifiable and necessary as it is in a number of domains whose extent varies according to the nature of the particular object of investigation, sooner or later reaches a limit, beyond which it becomes one-sided, restricted, abstract, lost in insoluble contradictions. In the contemplation of individual things, it forgets the connection between them; in the contemplation of their existence, it forgets the beginning and end of that existence; of their repose, it forgets their motion. It cannot see the wood for the trees. For everyday purposes we know and can say _e.g._, whether an animal is alive or not. But, upon closer inquiry, we find that this is, in many cases, a very complex question, as the jurists know very well. They have cudgelled their brains in vain to discover a rational limit beyond which the killing of the child in its mother's womb is murder. It is just as impossible to determine absolutely the moment of death, for physiology proves that death is not an instantaneous, momentary phenomenon, but a very protracted process. In like manner, every organized being is every moment the same and not the same; every moment it assimilates matter supplied from without, and gets rid of other matter; every moment some cells of its body die and others build themselves anew; in a longer or shorter time the matter of its body is completely renewed, and is replaced by other molecules of matter, so that every organized being is always itself, and yet something other than itself. Further, we find upon closer investigation that the two poles of an antithesis, positive and negative, _e.g._, are as inseparable as they are opposed, and that despite all their opposition, they mutually interpenetrate. And we find, in like manner, that cause and effect are conceptions which only hold good in their application to individual cases; but as soon as we consider the individual cases in their general connection with the universe as a whole, they run into each other, and they become confounded when we contemplate that universal action and reaction in which causes and effects are eternally changing places, so that what is effect here and now will be cause there and then, and _vice versâ_. None of these processes and modes of thought enters into the framework of metaphysical reasoning. Dialectics, on the other hand, comprehends things and their representations, ideas, in their essential connection, concatenation, motion, origin, and ending. Such processes as those mentioned above are, therefore, so many corroborations of its own method of procedure. Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern science that it has furnished this proof with very rich materials increasing daily, and thus has shown that, in the last resort, Nature works dialectically and not metaphysically; that she does not move in the eternal oneness of a perpetually recurring circle, but goes through a real historical evolution. In this connection Darwin must be named before all others. He dealt the metaphysical conception of Nature the heaviest blow by his proof that all organic beings, plants, animals, and man himself, are the products of a process of evolution going on through millions of years. But the naturalists who have learned to think dialectically are few and far between, and this conflict of the results of discovery with preconceived modes of thinking explains the endless confusion now reigning in theoretical natural science, the despair of teachers as well as learners, of authors and readers alike. An exact representation of the universe, of its evolution, of the development of mankind, and of the reflection of this evolution in the minds of men, can therefore only be obtained by the methods of dialectics with its constant regard to the innumerable actions and reactions of life and death, of progressive or retrogressive changes. And in this spirit the new German philosophy has worked. Kant began his career by resolving the stable solar system of Newton and its eternal duration, after the famous initial impulse had once been given, into the result of a historic process, the formation of the sun and all the planets out of a rotating nebulous mass. From this he at the same time drew the conclusion that, given this origin of the solar system, its future death followed of necessity. His theory half a century later was established mathematically by Laplace, and half a century after that the spectroscope proved the existence in space of such incandescent masses of gas in various stages of condensation. This new German philosophy culminated in the Hegelian system. In this system--and herein is its great merit--for the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process, _i.e._, as in constant motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development. From this point of view the history of mankind no longer appeared as a wild whirl of senseless deeds of violence, all equally condemnable at the judgment seat of mature philosophic reason, and which are best forgotten as quickly as possible; but as the process of evolution of man himself. It was now the task of the intellect to follow the gradual march of this process through all its devious ways, and to trace out the inner law running through all its apparently accidental phenomena. That the Hegelian system did not solve the problem it propounded is here immaterial. Its epoch-making merit was that it propounded the problem. This problem is one that no single individual will ever be able to solve. Although Hegel was--with Saint Simon--the most encyclopædic mind of his time, yet he was limited, first, by the necessarily limited extent of his own knowledge, and, second, by the limited extent and depth of the knowledge and conceptions of his age. To these limits a third must be added. Hegel was an idealist. To him the thoughts within his brain were not the more or less abstract pictures of actual things and processes, but, conversely, things and their evolution were only the realized pictures of the "Idea," existing somewhere from eternity before the world was. This way of thinking turned everything upside down, and completely reversed the actual connection of things in the world. Correctly and ingeniously as many individual groups of facts were grasped by Hegel, yet, for the reasons just given, there is much that is botched, artificial, labored, in a word, wrong in point of detail. The Hegelian system, in itself, was a colossal miscarriage--but it was also the last of its kind. It was suffering, in fact, from an internal and incurable contradiction. Upon the one hand, its essential proposition was the conception that human history is a process of evolution, which, by its very nature, cannot find its intellectual final term in the discovery of any so-called absolute truth. But, on the other hand, it laid claim to being the very essence of this absolute truth. A system of natural and historical knowledge, embracing everything, and final for all time, is a contradiction to the fundamental law of dialectic reasoning. This law, indeed, by no means excludes, but, on the contrary, includes the idea that the systematic knowledge of the external universe can make giant strides from age to age. The perception of the fundamental contradiction in German idealism led necessarily back to materialism, but _nota bene_, not to the simply metaphysical, exclusively mechanical materialism of the eighteenth century. Old materialism looked upon all previous history as a crude heap of irrationality and violence; modern materialism sees in it the process of evolution of humanity, and aims at discovering the laws thereof. With the French of the eighteenth century, and even with Hegel, the conception obtained of Nature as a whole, moving in narrow circles, and forever immutable, with its eternal celestial bodies, as Newton, and unalterable organic species, as Linnæus, taught. Modern materialism embraces the more recent discoveries of natural science, according to which Nature also has its history in time, the celestial bodies, like the organic species that, under favorable conditions, people them, being born and perishing. And even if Nature, as a whole, must still be said to move in recurrent cycles, these cycles assume infinitely larger dimensions. In both aspects, modern materialism is essentially dialectic, and no longer requires the assistance of that sort of philosophy which, queen-like, pretended to rule the remaining mob of sciences. As soon as each special science is bound to make clear its position in the great totality of things and of our knowledge of things, a special science dealing with this totality is superfluous or unnecessary. That which still survives of all earlier philosophy is the science of thought and its laws--formal logic and dialectics. Everything else is subsumed in the positive science of Nature and history. Whilst, however, the revolution in the conception of Nature could only be made in proportion to the corresponding positive materials furnished by research, already much earlier certain historical facts had occurred which led to a decisive change in the conception of history. In 1831, the first working-class rising took place in Lyons; between 1838 and 1842, the first national working-class movement, that of the English Chartists, reached its height. The class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie came to the front in the history of the most advanced countries in Europe, in proportion to the development, upon the one hand, of modern industry, upon the other, of the newly-acquired political supremacy of the bourgeoisie. Facts more and more strenuously gave the lie to the teachings of bourgeois economy as to the identity of the interests of capital and labor, as to the universal harmony and universal prosperity that would be the consequence of unbridled competition. All these things could no longer be ignored, any more than the French and English Socialism, which was their theoretical, though very imperfect, expression. But the old idealist conception of history, which was not yet dislodged, knew nothing of class struggles based upon economic interests, knew nothing of economic interests; production and all economic relations appeared in it only as incidental, subordinate elements in the "history of civilization." The new facts made imperative a new examination of all past history. Then it was seen that _all_ past history, with the exception of its primitive stages, was the history of class struggles; that these warring classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and of exchange--in a word, of the _economic_ conditions of their time; that the economic structure of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of juridical and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period. Hegel had freed history from metaphysics--he had made it dialectic; but his conception of history was essentially idealistic. But now idealism was driven from its last refuge, the philosophy of history; now a materialistic treatment of history was propounded, and a method found of explaining man's "knowing" by his "being," instead of, as heretofore, his "being" by his "knowing." From that time forward Socialism was no longer an accidental discovery of this or that ingenious brain, but the necessary outcome of the struggle between two historically developed classes--the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Its task was no longer to manufacture a system of society as perfect as possible, but to examine the historico-economic succession of events from which these classes and their antagonism had of necessity sprung, and to discover in the economic conditions thus created the means of ending the conflict. But the Socialism of earlier days was as incompatible with this materialistic conception as the conception of Nature of the French materialists was with dialectics and modern natural science. The Socialism of earlier days certainly criticised the existing capitalistic mode of production and its consequences. But it could not explain them, and, therefore, could not get the mastery of them. It could only simply reject them as bad. The more strongly this earlier Socialism denounced the exploitation of the working-class, inevitable under Capitalism, the less able was it clearly to show in what this exploitation consisted and how it arose. But for this it was necessary--(1) to present the capitalistic method of production in its historical connection and its inevitableness during a particular historical period, and therefore, also, to present its inevitable downfall; and (2) to lay bare its essential character, which was still a secret. This was done by the discovery of _surplus-value_. It was shown that the appropriation of unpaid labor is the basis of the capitalist mode of production and of the exploitation of the worker that occurs under it; that even if the capitalist buys the labor-power of his laborer at its full value as a commodity on the market, he yet extracts more value from it than he paid for; and that in the ultimate analysis this surplus-value forms those sums of value from which are heaped up the constantly increasing masses of capital in the hands of the possessing classes. The genesis of capitalist production and the production of capital were both explained. These two great discoveries, the materialistic conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalistic production through surplus-value, we owe to Marx. With these discoveries Socialism became a science. The next thing was to work out all its details and relations. III The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders, is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in man's better insight into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the _philosophy_, but in the _economics_ of each particular epoch. The growing perception that existing social institutions are unreasonable and unjust, that reason has become unreason, and right wrong, is only proof that in the modes of production and exchange changes have silently taken place, with which the social order, adapted to earlier economic conditions, is no longer in keeping. From this it also follows that the means of getting rid of the incongruities that have been brought to light, must also be present, in a more or less developed condition, within the changed modes of production themselves. These means are not to be invented by deduction from fundamental principles, but are to be discovered in the stubborn facts of the existing system of production. What is, then, the position of modern Socialism in this connection? The present structure of society--this is now pretty generally conceded--is the creation of the ruling class of to-day, of the bourgeoisie. The mode of production peculiar to the bourgeoisie, known, since Marx, as the capitalist mode of production, was incompatible with the feudal system, with the privileges it conferred upon individuals, entire social ranks and local corporations, as well as with the hereditary ties of subordination which constituted the framework of its social organization. The bourgeoisie broke up the feudal system and built upon its ruins the capitalist order of society, the kingdom of free competition, of personal liberty, of the equality, before the law, of all commodity owners, of all the rest of the capitalist blessings. Thenceforward the capitalist mode of production could develop in freedom. Since steam, machinery, and the making of machines by machinery transformed the older manufacture into modern industry, the productive forces evolved under the guidance of the bourgeoisie developed with a rapidity and in a degree unheard of before. But just as the older manufacture, in its time, and handicraft, becoming more developed under its influence, had come into collision with the feudal trammels of the guilds, so now modern industry, in its more complete development, comes into collision with the bounds within which the capitalistic mode of production holds it confined. The new productive forces have already outgrown the capitalistic mode of using them. And this conflict between productive forces and modes of production is not a conflict engendered in the mind of man, like that between original sin and divine justice. It exists, in fact, objectively, outside us, independently of the will and actions even of the men that have brought it on. Modern Socialism is nothing but the reflex, in thought, of this conflict in fact; its ideal reflection in the minds, first, of the class directly suffering under it, the working-class. Now, in what does this conflict consist? Before capitalistic production, _i.e._, in the Middle Ages, the system of petty industry obtained generally, based upon the private property of the laborers in their means of production; in the country, the agriculture of the small peasant, freeman or serf; in the towns, the handicrafts organized in guilds. The instruments of labor--land, agricultural implements, the workshop, the tool--were the instruments of labor of single individuals, adapted for the use of one worker, and, therefore, of necessity, small, dwarfish, circumscribed. But, for this very reason they belonged, as a rule, to the producer himself. To concentrate these scattered, limited means of production, to enlarge them, to turn them into the powerful levers of production of the present day--this was precisely the historic rôle of capitalist production and of its upholder, the bourgeoisie. In the fourth section of "Capital" Marx has explained in detail, how since the fifteenth century this has been historically worked out through the three phases of simple co-operation, manufacture, and modern industry. But the bourgeoisie, as is also shown there, could not transform these puny means of production into mighty productive forces, without transforming them, at the same time, from means of production of the individual into _social_ means of production only workable by a collectivity of men. The spinning-wheel, the handloom, the blacksmith's hammer, were replaced by the spinning-machine, the power-loom, the steam-hammer; the individual workshop, by the factory implying the co-operation of hundreds and thousands of workmen. In like manner, production itself changed from a series of individual into a series of social acts, and the products from individual to social products. The yarn, the cloth, the metal articles that now came out of the factory were the joint product of many workers through whose hands they had successively to pass before they were ready. No one person could say of them: "I made that; this is _my_ product." But where, in a given society, the fundamental form of production is that spontaneous division of labor which creeps in gradually and not upon any preconceived plan, there the products take on the form of _commodities_, whose mutual exchange, buying and selling, enable the individual producers to satisfy their manifold wants. And this was the case in the Middle Ages. The peasant, _e.g._, sold to the artisan agricultural products and bought from him the products of handicraft. Into this society of individual producers, of commodity-producers, the new mode of production thrust itself. In the midst of the old division of labor, grown up spontaneously and upon _no definite plan_, which had governed the whole of society, now arose division of labor upon _a definite plan_, as organized in the factory; side by side with _individual_ production appeared _social_ production. The products of both were sold in the same market, and, therefore, at prices at least approximately equal. But organization upon a definite plan was stronger than spontaneous division of labor. The factories working with the combined social forces of a collectivity of individuals produced their commodities far more cheaply than the individual small producers. Individual production succumbed in one department after another. Socialized production revolutionized all the old methods of production. But its revolutionary character was, at the same time, so little recognized, that it was, on the contrary, introduced as a means of increasing and developing the production of commodities. When it arose, it found ready-made, and made liberal use of, certain machinery for the production and exchange of commodities; merchants' capital, handicraft, wage-labor. Socialized production thus introducing itself as a new form of the production of commodities, it was a matter of course that under it the old forms of appropriation remained in full swing, and were applied to its products as well. In the mediæval stage of evolution of the production of commodities, the question as to the owner of the product of labor could not arise. The individual producer, as a rule, had, from raw material belonging to himself, and generally his own handiwork, produced it with his own tools, by the labor of his own hands or of his family. There was no need for him to appropriate the new product. It belonged wholly to him, as a matter of course. His property in the product was, therefore, based _upon his own labor_. Even where external help was used, this was, as a rule, of little importance, and very generally was compensated by something other than wages. The apprentices and journeymen of the guilds worked less for board and wages than for education, in order that they might become master craftsmen themselves. Then came the concentration of the means of production and of the producers in large workshops and manufactories, their transformation into actual socialized means of production and socialized producers. But the socialized producers and means of production and their products were still treated, after this change, just as they had been before, _i.e._, as the means of production and the products of individuals. Hitherto, the owner of the instruments of labor had himself appropriated the product, because, as a rule, it was his own product and the assistance of others was the exception. Now the owner of the instruments of labor always appropriated to himself the product, although it was no longer _his_ product but exclusively the product of the _labor of others_. Thus, the products now produced socially were not appropriated by those who had actually set in motion the means of production and actually produced the commodities, but by the _capitalists_. The means of production, and production itself, had become in essence socialized. But they were subjected to a form of appropriation which presupposes the private production of individuals, under which, therefore, every one owns his own product and brings it to market. The mode of production is subjected to this form of appropriation, although it abolishes the conditions upon which the latter rests.[4] This contradiction, which gives to the new mode of production its capitalistic character, _contains the germ of the whole of the social antagonisms of to-day_. The greater the mastery obtained by the new mode of production over all important fields of production and in all manufacturing countries, the more it reduced individual production to an insignificant residuum, _the more clearly was brought out the incompatibility of socialized production with capitalistic appropriation_. The first capitalists found, as we have said, alongside of other forms of labor, wage-labor ready-made for them on the market. But it was exceptional, complementary, accessory, transitory wage-labor. The agricultural laborer, though, upon occasion, he hired himself out by the day, had a few acres of his own land on which he could at all events live at a pinch. The guilds were so organized that the journeyman of to-day became the master of to-morrow. But all this changed, as soon as the means of production became socialized and concentrated in the hands of capitalists. The means of production, as well as the product of the individual producer became more and more worthless; there was nothing left for him but to turn wage-worker under the capitalist. Wage-labor, aforetime the exception and accessory, now became the rule and basis of all production; aforetime complementary, it now became the sole remaining function of the worker. The wage-worker for a time became a wage-worker for life. The number of these permanent wage-workers was further enormously increased by the breaking-up of the feudal system that occurred at the same time, by the disbanding of the retainers of the feudal lords, the eviction of the peasants from their homesteads, etc. The separation was made complete between the means of production concentrated in the hands of the capitalists on the one side, and the producers, possessing nothing but their labor-power, on the other. _The contradiction between socialized production and capitalistic appropriation manifested itself as the antagonism of proletariat and bourgeoisie._ We have seen that the capitalistic mode of production thrust its way into a society of commodity-producers, of individual producers, whose social bond was the exchange of their products. But every society, based upon the production of commodities, has this peculiarity: that the producers have lost control over their own social inter-relations. Each man produces for himself with such means of production as he may happen to have, and for such exchange as he may require to satisfy his remaining wants. No one knows how much of his particular article is coming on the market, nor how much of it will be wanted. No one knows whether his individual product will meet an actual demand, whether he will be able to make good his cost of production or even to sell his commodity at all. Anarchy reigns in socialized production. But the production of commodities, like every other form of production, has its peculiar inherent laws inseparable from it; and these laws work, despite anarchy, in and through anarchy. They reveal themselves in the only persistent form of social inter-relations, _i.e._, in exchange, and here they affect the individual producers as compulsory laws of competition. They are, at first, unknown to these producers themselves, and have to be discovered by them gradually and as the result of experience. They work themselves out, therefore, independently of the producers, and in antagonism to them, as inexorable natural laws of their particular form of production. The product governs the producers. In mediæval society especially in the earlier centuries, production was essentially directed towards satisfying the wants of the individual. It satisfied, in the main, only the wants of the producer and his family. Where relations of personal dependence existed, as in the country, it also helped to satisfy the wants of the feudal lord. In all this there was, therefore, no exchange; the products, consequently, did not assume the character of commodities. The family of the peasant produced almost everything they wanted: clothes and furniture, as well as means of subsistence. Only when it began to produce more than was sufficient to supply its own wants and the payments in kind to the feudal lord, only then did it also produce commodities. This surplus, thrown into socialized exchange and offered for sale, became commodities. The artisans of the towns, it is true, had from the first to produce for exchange. But they, also, themselves supplied the greatest part of their own individual wants. They had gardens and plots of land. They turned their cattle out into the communal forest, which, also, yielded them timber and firing. The women spun flax, wool, and so forth. Production for the purpose of exchange, production of commodities, was only in its infancy. Hence, exchange was restricted, the market narrow, the methods of production stable; there was local exclusiveness without, local unity within; the mark[5] in the country, in the town, the guild. But with the extension of the production of commodities, and especially with the introduction of the capitalist mode of production, the laws of commodity-production, hitherto latent, came into action more openly and with greater force. The old bonds were loosened, the old exclusive limits broken through, the producers were more and more turned into independent, isolated producers of commodities. It became apparent that the production of society at large was ruled by absence of plan, by accident, by anarchy; and this anarchy grew to greater and greater height. But the chief means by aid of which the capitalist mode of production intensified this anarchy of socialized production, was the exact opposite of anarchy. It was the increasing organization of production, upon a social basis, in every individual productive establishment. By this, the old, peaceful, stable condition of things was ended. Wherever this organization of production was introduced into a branch of industry, it brooked no other method of production by its side. The field of labor became a battle-ground. The great geographical discoveries, and the colonization following upon them, multiplied markets and quickened the transformation of handicraft into manufacture. The war did not simply break out between the individual producers of particular localities. The local struggles begat in their turn national conflicts, the commercial wars of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. Finally, modern industry and the opening of the world-market made the struggle universal, and at the same time gave it an unheard-of virulence. Advantages in natural or artificial conditions of production now decide the existence or non-existence of individual capitalists, as well as of whole industries and countries. He that falls is remorselessly cast aside. It is the Darwinian struggle of the individual for existence transferred from Nature to society with intensified violence. The conditions of existence natural to the animal appear as the final term of human development. The contradiction between socialized production and capitalistic appropriation now presents itself as _an antagonism between the organization of production in the individual workshop and the anarchy of production in society generally_. The capitalistic mode of production moves in these two forms of the antagonism immanent to it from its very origin. It is never able to get out of that "vicious circle," which Fourier had already discovered. What Fourier could not, indeed, see in his time is, that this circle is gradually narrowing; that the movement becomes more and more a spiral, and must come to an end, like the movement of the planets, by collision with the center. It is the compelling force of anarchy in the production of society at large that more and more completely turns the great majority of men into proletarians; and it is the masses of the proletariat again who will finally put an end to anarchy in production. It is the compelling force of anarchy in social production that turns the limitless perfectibility of machinery under modern industry into a compulsory law by which every individual industrial capitalist must perfect his machinery more and more, under penalty of ruin. But the perfecting of machinery is making human labor superfluous. If the introduction and increase of machinery means the displacement of millions of manual, by a few machine-workers, improvement in machinery means the displacement of more and more of the machine-workers themselves. It means, in the last instance, the production of a number of available wage-workers in excess of the average needs of capital, the formation of a complete industrial reserve army, as I called it in 1845,[6] available at the times when industry is working at high pressure, to be cast out upon the street when the inevitable crash comes, a constant dead weight upon the limbs of the working-class in its struggle for existence with capital, a regulator for the keeping of wages down to the low level that suits the interests of capital. Thus it comes about, to quote Marx, that machinery becomes the most powerful weapon in the war of capital against the working-class; that the instruments of labor constantly tear the means of subsistence out of the hands of the laborer; that the very product of the worker is turned into an instrument for his subjugation. Thus it comes about that the economizing of the instruments of labor becomes at the same time, from the outset, the most reckless waste of labor-power, and robbery based upon the normal conditions under which labor functions; that machinery, "the most powerful instrument for shortening labor-time, becomes the most unfailing means for placing every moment of the laborer's time and that of his family at the disposal of the capitalist for the purpose of expanding the value of his capital" ("Capital," American edition, p. 445). Thus it comes about that over-work of some becomes the preliminary condition for the idleness of others, and that modern industry, which hunts after new consumers over the whole world, forces the consumption of the masses at home down to a starvation minimum, and in doing thus destroys its own home market. "The law that always equilibrates the relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the laborer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time, accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, _i.e._, on the side of the class that produces _its own product in the form of capital_." (Marx' "Capital" Vol. I [Kerr & Co.]. p. 709.) And to expect any other division of the products from the capitalistic mode of production is the same as expecting the electrodes of a battery not to decompose acidulated water, not to liberate oxygen at the positive, hydrogen at the negative pole, so long as they are connected with the battery. We have seen that the ever-increasing perfectibility of modern machinery is, by the anarchy of social production, turned into a compulsory law that forces the individual industrial capitalist always to improve his machinery always to increase its productive force. The bare possibility of extending the field of production is transformed for him into a similar compulsory law. The enormous expansive force of modern industry, compared with which that of gases is mere child's play, appears to us now as a _necessity_ for expansion, both qualitative and quantitative, that laughs at all resistance. Such resistance is offered by consumption, by sales, by the markets for the products of modern industry. But the capacity for extension, extensive and intensive, of the markets is primarily governed by quite different laws, that work much less energetically. The extension of the markets can not keep pace with the extension of production. The collision becomes inevitable, and as this cannot produce any real solution so long as it does not break in pieces the capitalist mode of production, the collisions become periodic. Capitalist production has begotten another "vicious circle." As a matter of fact, since 1825, when the first general crisis broke out, the whole industrial and commercial world, production and exchange among all civilized peoples and their more or less barbaric hangers-on, are thrown out of joint about once every ten years. Commerce is at a stand-still, the markets are glutted, products accumulate, as multitudinous as they are unsaleable, hard cash disappears, credit vanishes, factories are closed, the mass of the workers are in want of the means of subsistence, because they have produced too much of the means of subsistence; bankruptcy follows upon bankruptcy, execution upon execution. The stagnation lasts for years; productive forces and products are wasted and destroyed wholesale, until the accumulated mass of commodities finally filter off, more or less depreciated in value, until production and exchange gradually begin to move again. Little by little the pace quickens. It becomes a trot. The industrial trot breaks into a canter, the canter in turn grows into the headlong gallop of a perfect steeplechase of industry, commercial credit, and speculation, which finally, after breakneck leaps, ends where it began--in the ditch of a crisis. And so over and over again. We have now, since the year 1825, gone through this five times, and at the present moment (1877) we are going through it for the sixth time. And the character of these crises is so clearly defined that Fourier hit all of them off, when he described the first as "_crise pléthorique_," a crisis from plethora. In these crises, the contradiction between socialized production and capitalist appropriation ends in a violent explosion. The circulation of commodities is, for the time being, stopped. Money, the means of circulation, becomes a hindrance to circulation. All the laws of production and circulation of commodities are turned upside down. The economic collision has reached its apogee. _The mode of production is in rebellion against the mode of exchange._ The fact that the socialized organization of production within the factory has developed so far that it has become incompatible with the anarchy of production in society, which exists side by side with and dominates it, is brought home to the capitalists themselves by the violent concentration of capital that occurs during crises, through the ruin of many large, and a still greater number of small, capitalists. The whole mechanism of the capitalist mode of production breaks down under the pressure of the productive forces, its own creations. It is no longer able to turn all this mass of means of production into capital. They lie fallow, and for that very reason the industrial reserve army must also lie fallow. Means of production, means of subsistence, available laborers, all the elements of production and of general wealth, are present in abundance. But "abundance becomes the source of distress and want" (Fourier), because it is the very thing that prevents the transformation of the means of production and subsistence into capital. For in capitalistic society the means of production can only function when they have undergone a preliminary transformation into capital, into the means of exploiting human labor-power. The necessity of this transformation into capital of the means of production and subsistence stands like a ghost between these and the workers. It alone prevents the coming together of the material and personal levers of production; it alone forbids the means of production to function, the workers to work and live. On the one hand, therefore, the capitalistic mode of production stands convicted of its own incapacity to further direct these productive forces. On the other, these productive forces themselves, with increasing energy, press forward to the removal of the existing contradiction, to the abolition of their quality as capital, to the _practical recognition of their character as social productive forces_. This rebellion of the productive forces, as they grow more and more powerful, against their quality as capital, this stronger and stronger command that their social character shall be recognized, forces the capitalist class itself to treat them more and more as social productive forces, so far as this is possible under capitalist conditions. The period of industrial high pressure, with its unbounded inflation of credit, not less than the crash itself, by the collapse of great capitalist establishments, tends to bring about that form of the socialization of great masses of means of production, which we meet with in the different kinds of joint-stock companies. Many of these means of production and of distribution are, from the outset, so colossal, that, like the railroads, they exclude all other forms of capitalistic exploitation. At a further stage of evolution this form also becomes insufficient. The producers on a large scale in a particular branch of industry in a particular country unite in a "Trust," a union for the purpose of regulating production. They determine the total amount to be produced, parcel it out among themselves, and thus enforce the selling price fixed beforehand. But trusts of this kind, as soon as business becomes bad, are generally liable to break up, and, on this very account, compel a yet greater concentration of association. The whole of the particular industry is turned into one gigantic joint-stock company; internal competition gives place to the internal monopoly of this one company. This has happened in 1890 with the English _alkali_ production, which is now, after the fusion of 48 large works, in the hands of one company, conducted upon a single plan, and with a capital of £6,000,000. In the trusts, freedom of competition changes into its very opposite--into monopoly; and the production without any definite plan of capitalistic society capitulates to the production upon a definite plan of the invading socialistic society. Certainly this is so far still to the benefit and advantage of the capitalists. But in this case the exploitation is so palpable that it must break down. No nation will put up with production conducted by trusts, with so barefaced an exploitation of the community by a small band of dividend-mongers. In any case, with trusts or without, the official representative of capitalist society--the State--will ultimately have to undertake the direction of production.[7] This necessity for conversion into State-property is felt first in the great institutions for intercourse and communication--the postoffice, the telegraphs, the railways. If the crisis demonstrate the incapacity of the bourgeoisie for managing any longer modern productive forces, the transformation of the great establishments for production and distribution into joint-stock companies, trusts, and State property, show how unnecessary the bourgeoisie are for that purpose. All the social functions of the capitalist are now performed by salaried employees. The capitalist has no further social function than that of pocketing dividends, tearing off coupons, and gambling on the Stock Exchange, where the different capitalists despoil one another of their capital. At first the capitalistic mode of production forces out the workers. Now it forces out the capitalists, and reduces them, just as it reduced the workers, to the ranks of the surplus population, although not immediately into those of the industrial reserve army. But the transformation, either into joint-stock companies and trusts, or into State-ownership does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies and trusts this is obvious. And the modern State, again, is only the organization that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments, as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern State, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers--proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State-ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution. This solution can only consist in the practical recognition of the social nature of the modern forces of production, and therefore in the harmonizing the modes of production, appropriation, and exchange with the socialized character of the means of production. And this can only come about by society openly and directly taking possession of the productive forces which have outgrown all control except that of society as a whole. The social character of the means of production and of the products to-day reacts against the producers, periodically disrupts all production and exchange, acts only like a law of Nature working blindly, forcibly, destructively. But with the taking over by society of the productive forces, the social character of the means of production and of the products will be utilized by the producers with a perfect understanding of its nature, and instead of being a source of disturbance and periodical collapse, will become the most powerful lever of production itself. Active social forces work exactly like natural forces: blindly, forcibly, destructively, so long as we do not understand, and reckon with, them. But when once we understand them, when once we grasp their action, their direction, their effects, it depends only upon ourselves to subject them more and more to our own will, and by means of them to reach our own ends. And this holds quite especially of the mighty productive forces of to-day. As long as we obstinately refuse to understand the nature and the character of these social means of action--and this understanding goes against the grain of the capitalist mode of production and its defenders--so long these forces are at work in spite of us, in opposition to us, so long they master us, as we have shown above in detail. But when once their nature is understood, they can, in the hands of the producers working together, be transformed from master demons into willing servants. The difference is as that between the destructive force of electricity in the lightning of the storm, and electricity under command in the telegraph and the voltaic arc; the difference between a conflagration, and fire working in the service of man. With this recognition at last of the real nature of the productive forces of to-day, the social anarchy of production gives place to a social regulation of production upon a definite plan, according to the needs of the community and of each individual. Then the capitalist mode of appropriation, in which the product enslaves first the producer and then the appropriator, is replaced by the mode of appropriation of the products that is based upon the nature of the modern means of production; upon the one hand, direct social appropriation, as means to the maintenance and extension of production--on the other, direct individual appropriation, as means of subsistence and of enjoyment. Whilst the capitalist mode of production more and more completely transforms the great majority of the population into proletarians, it creates the power which, under penalty of its own destruction, is forced to accomplish this revolution. Whilst it forces on more and more the transformation of the vast means of production, already socialized, into State property, it shows itself the way to accomplishing this revolution. _The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production into State property._ But in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and class antagonisms, abolishes also the State as State. Society thus far, based upon class antagonisms, had need of the State. That is, of an organization of the particular class which was _pro tempore_ the exploiting class, an organization for the purpose of preventing any interference from without with the existing conditions of production, and therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited classes in the condition of oppression corresponding with the given mode of production (slavery, serfdom, wage-labor). The State was the official representative of society as a whole; the gathering of it together into a visible embodiment. But it was this only in so far as it was the State of that class which itself represented, for the time being, society as a whole; in ancient times, the State of slave-owning citizens; in the middle ages, the feudal lords; in our own time, the bourgeoisie. When at last it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a State, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society--the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society--this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not "abolished." _It dies out._ This gives the measure of the value of the phrase "a free State," both as to its justifiable use at times by agitators, and as to its ultimate scientific insufficiency; and also of the demands of the so-called anarchists for the abolition of the State out of hand. Since the historical appearance of the capitalist mode of production, the appropriation by society of all the means of production has often been dreamed of, more or less vaguely, by individuals, as well as by sects, as the ideal of the future. But it could become possible, could become a historical necessity, only when the actual conditions for its realization were there. Like every other social advance, it becomes practicable, not by men understanding that the existence of classes is in contradiction to justice, equality, etc., not by the mere willingness to abolish these classes, but by virtue of certain new economic conditions. The separation of society into an exploiting and an exploited class, a ruling and an oppressed class, was the necessary consequence of the deficient and restricted development of production in former times. So long as the total social labor only yields a produce which but slightly exceeds that barely necessary for the existence of all; so long, therefore, as labor engages all or almost all the time of the great majority of the members of society--so long, of necessity, this society is divided into classes. Side by side with the great majority, exclusively bond slaves to labor, arises a class freed from directly productive labor, which looks after the general affairs of society; the direction of labor, State business, law, science, art, etc. It is, therefore, the law of division of labor that lies at the basis of the division into classes. But this does not prevent this division into classes from being carried out by means of violence and robbery, trickery and fraud. It does not prevent the ruling class, once having the upper hand, from consolidating its power at the expense of the working-class, from turning their social leadership into an intensified exploitation of the masses. But if, upon this showing, division into classes has a certain historical justification, it has this only for a given period, only under given social conditions. It was based upon the insufficiency of production. It will be swept away by the complete development of modern productive forces. And, in fact, the abolition of classes in society presupposes a degree of historical evolution, at which the existence, not simply of this or that particular ruling class, but of any ruling class at all, and, therefore, the existence of class distinction itself has become an obsolete anachronism. It presupposes, therefore, the development of production carried out to a degree at which appropriation of the means of production and of the products, and, with this, of political domination, of the monopoly of culture, and of intellectual leadership by a particular class of society, has become not only superfluous, but economically, politically, intellectually a hindrance to development. This point is now reached. Their political and intellectual bankruptcy is scarcely any longer a secret to the bourgeoisie themselves. Their economic bankruptcy recurs regularly every ten years. In every crisis, society is suffocated beneath the weight of its own productive forces and products, which it cannot use, and stands helpless, face to face with the absurd contradiction that the producers have nothing to consume, because consumers are wanting. The expansive force of the means of production bursts the bonds that the capitalist mode of production had imposed upon them. Their deliverance from these bonds is the one precondition for an unbroken, constantly-accelerated development of the productive forces, and therewith for a practically unlimited increase of production itself. Nor is this all. The socialized appropriation of the means of production does away, not only with the present artificial restrictions upon production, but also with the positive waste and devastation of productive forces and products that are at the present time the inevitable concomitants of production, and that reach their height in the crises. Further, it sets free for the community at large a mass of means of production and of products, by doing away with the senseless extravagance of the ruling classes of to-day, and their political representatives. The possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialized production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day by day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties--this possibility is now for the first time here, but _it is here_.[8] With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organization. The struggle for individual existence disappears. Then for the first time, man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of Nature, because he has now become master of his own social organization. The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face to face with man as laws of Nature foreign to, and dominating, him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him. Man's own social organization, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by Nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history, pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, more and more consciously, make his own history--only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom. Let us briefly sum up our sketch of historical evolution. I. _Mediæval Society._--Individual production on a small scale. Means of production adapted for individual use; hence primitive, ungainly, petty, dwarfed in action. Production for immediate consumption, either of the producer himself or of his feudal lord. Only where an excess of production over this consumption occurs is such excess offered for sale, enters into exchange. Production of commodities, therefore, only in its infancy. But already it contains within itself, in embryo, _anarchy in the production of society at large_. II. _Capitalist Revolution._--Transformation of industry, at first by means of simple co-operation and manufacture. Concentration of the means of production, hitherto scattered, into great workshops. As a consequence, their transformation from individual to social means of production--a transformation which does not, on the whole, affect the form of exchange. The old forms of appropriation remain in force. The capitalist appears. In his capacity as owner of the means of production, he also appropriates the products and turns them into commodities. Production has become a _social_ act. Exchange and appropriation continue to be _individual_ acts, the acts of individuals. _The social product is appropriated by the individual capitalist._ Fundamental contradiction, whence arise all the contradictions in which our present day society moves, and which modern industry brings to light. A. Severance of the producer from the means of production. Condemnation of the worker to wage-labor for life. _Antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie._ B. Growing predominance and increasing effectiveness of the laws governing the production of commodities. Unbridled competition. _Contradiction between socialized organization in the individual factory and social anarchy in production as a whole._ C. On the one hand, perfecting of machinery, made by competition compulsory for each individual manufacturer, and complemented by a constantly growing displacement of laborers. _Industrial reserve-army._ On the other hand, unlimited extension of production, also compulsory under competition, for every manufacturer. On both sides, unheard of development of productive forces, excess of supply over demand, over-production, glutting of the markets, crises every ten years, the vicious circle: excess here, of means of production and products--excess there, of laborers, without employment and without means of existence. But these two levers of production and of social well-being are unable to work together, because the capitalist form of production prevents the productive forces from working and the products from circulating, unless they are first turned into capital--which their very superabundance prevents. The contradiction has grown into an absurdity. _The mode of production rises in rebellion against the form of exchange._ The bourgeoisie are convicted of incapacity further to manage their own social productive forces. D. Partial recognition of the social character of the productive forces forced upon the capitalists themselves. Taking over of the great institutions for production and communication, first by joint-stock companies, later on by trusts, then by the State. The bourgeoisie demonstrated to be a superfluous class. All its social functions are now performed by salaried employees. III. _Proletarian Revolution._--Solution of the contradictions. The proletariat seizes the public power, and by means of this transforms the socialized means of production, slipping from the hands of the bourgeoisie, into public property. By this act the proletariat frees the means of production from the character of capital they have thus far borne, and gives their socialized character complete freedom to work itself out. Socialized production upon a predetermined plan becomes henceforth possible. The development of production makes the existence of different classes of society thenceforth an anachronism. In proportion as anarchy in social production vanishes, the political authority of the State dies out. Man, at last the master of his own form of social organization, becomes at the same time the lord over Nature, his own master--free. To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed proletarian class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific Socialism. FOOTNOTES: [4] It is hardly necessary in this connection to point out, that, even if the form of appropriation remains the same, the _character_ of the appropriation is just as much revolutionized as production is by the changes described above. It is, of course, a very different matter whether I appropriate to myself my own product or that of another. Note in passing that wage-labor, which contains the whole capitalistic mode of production in embryo, is very ancient; in a sporadic, scattered form it existed for centuries alongside of slave-labor. But the embryo could duly develop into the capitalistic mode of production only when the necessary historical preconditions had been furnished. [5] _See Appendix._ [6] "The Condition of the Working-Class in England" (Sonnenschein & Co.), p. 84. [7] I say "have to." For only when the means of production and distribution have _actually_ outgrown the form of management by joint-stock companies, and when, therefore, the taking them over by the State has become _economically_ inevitable, only then--even if it is the State of to-day that effects this--is there an economic advance, the attainment of another step preliminary to the taking over of all productive forces by society itself. But of late, since Bismarck went in for State-ownership of industrial establishments, a kind of spurious Socialism has arisen, degenerating, now and again, into something of flunkeyism, that without more ado declares _all_ State-ownership, even of the Bismarckian sort, to be socialistic. Certainly, if the taking over by the State of the tobacco industry is socialistic, then Napoleon and Metternich must be numbered among the founders of Socialism. If the Belgian State, for quite ordinary political and financial reasons, itself constructed its chief railway lines; if Bismarck, not under any economic compulsion, took over for the State the chief Prussian lines, simply to be the better able to have them in hand in case of war, to bring up the railway employees as voting cattle for the Government, and especially to create for himself a new source of income independent of parliamentary votes--this was, in no sense, a socialistic measure, directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously. Otherwise, the Royal Maritime Company, the Royal porcelain manufacture, and even the regimental tailor of the army would also be socialistic institutions, or even, as was seriously proposed by a sly dog in Frederick William III.'s reign, the taking over by the State of the brothels. [8] A few figures may serve to give an approximate idea of the enormous expansive force of the modern means of production, even under capitalist pressure. According to Mr. Giffen, the total wealth of Great Britain and Ireland amounted, in round numbers, in 1814 to £2,200,000,000. 1865 to £6,100,000,000. 1875 to £8,500,000,000. As an instance of the squandering of means of production and of products during a crisis, the total loss in the German iron industry alone, in the crisis of 1873-78, was given at the second German Industrial Congress (Berlin, February 21, 1878) as £22,750,000. * * * * * +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Typographical errors corrected in text: | | | | Page 29: conteracting replaced with counteracting | | Page 60: non-possesing replaced with non-possessing | | Page 111: "But the perfecting of machinery is the making | | human labor superfluous." replaced with | | "But the perfecting of machinery is making | | human labor superfluous." | | Page 130: preletariat replaced with proletariat | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------+ * * * * * 
44800	----	by the Google Books Project, with a Creative Commons license granted by the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama THE LAW By Frédéric Bastiat Ludwig von Mises Institute Auburn, Alabama Cover: Prise de la Bastille ("The Storming of the Bastille"); 1789. Painting by Jean-Pierre Hoiiel (1735-1813). Permission was obtained from the Bibliothèque nationale de France for its use. Copyright © 2007 by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Printed in China. Published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute 518 West Magnolia Avenue, Auburn, Alabama 36832 ISBN: 978-1-933550-14-5 This book is licensed under a Creative Commons license. FOREWORD {v} Anyone building a personal library of liberty must include in it a copy of Frédéric Bastiat's classic essay, "The Law." First published in 1850 by the great French economist and journalist, it is as clear a statement as has ever been made of the original American ideal of government, as proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, that the main purpose of any government is the protection of the lives, liberties, and property of its citizens. Bastiat believed that all human beings possessed the God-given, natural rights of "individuality, liberty, property." "This is man," he wrote. These "three gifts from God precede all human legislation." But even in his time--writing in the late 1840s--Bastiat was alarmed over how the law had been "perverted" into an instrument of what he called legal plunder. Far from protecting individual rights, the law was increasingly used to deprive one group of citizens of those rights for the benefit of another group, and especially for the benefit of the state itself. He condemned the legal plunder of protectionist {vi} tariffs, government subsidies of all kinds, progressive taxation, public schools, government "jobs" programs, minimum wage laws, welfare, usury laws, and more. Bastiat's warnings of the dire effects of legal plunder are as relevant today as they were the day he first issued them. The system of legal plunder (which many now celebrate as "democracy") will erase from everyone's conscience, he wrote, the distinction between justice and injustice. The plundered classes will eventually figure out how to enter the political game and plunder their fellow man. Legislation will never be guided by any principles of justice, but only by brute political force. The great French champion of liberty also forecast the corruption of education by the state. Those who held "government-endowed teaching positions," he wrote, would rarely criticize legal plunder lest their government endowments be ended. The system of legal plunder would also greatly exaggerate the importance of politics in society. That would be a most unhealthy development as it would encourage even more citizens to seek to improve their own well-being not by producing goods and services for the marketplace but by plundering their fellow citizens through politics. Bastiat was also wise enough to anticipate what modern economists call "rent seeking" and "rent avoidance" behavior. These two clumsy phrases refer, respectively, to the phenomena of lobbying for political favors (legal plunder), and of engaging in political activity directed at protecting oneself from being the victim of plunder seekers. (For example, the steel manufacturing industry lobbies for high tariffs on steel, whereas steel-using industries, like the automobile industry, can be expected to lobby against high tariffs on steel). {vii} The reason why modem economists are concerned about "rent seeking" is the opportunity cost involved: the more time, effort and money that is spent by businesses on conniving to manipulate politics--merely transferring wealth--the less time is spent on producing goods and services, which increases wealth. Thus, legal plunder impoverishes the entire society despite the fact that a small (but politically influential) part of the society benefits from it. It is remarkable, in reading "The Law," how perfectly accurate Bastiat was in describing the statists of his day which, it turns out, were not much different from the statists of today or any other day. The French "socialists" of Bastiat's day espoused doctrines that perverted charity, education, and morals, for one thing. True charity does not begin with the robbery of taxation, he pointed out. Government schooling is inevitably an exercise in statist brainwashing, not genuine education; and it is hardly "moral" for a large gang (government) to (legally) rob one segment of the population, keep most of the loot, and share a little of it with various "needy" individuals. Socialists want "to play God," Bastiat observed, anticipating all the future tyrants and despots of the world who would try to remake the world in their image, whether that image would be communism, fascism, the "glorious union," or "global democracy." Bastiat also observed that socialists wanted forced conformity; rigid regimentation of the population through pervasive regulation; forced equality of wealth; and dictatorship. As such, they were the mortal enemies of liberty. "Dictatorship" need not involve an actual dictator. All that was needed, said Bastiat, was "the laws," enacted {viii} by a Congress or a Parliament, that would achieve the same effect: forced conformity. Bastiat was also wise to point out that the world has far too many "great men," "fathers of their countries," etc., who in reality are usually nothing but petty tyrants with a sick and compulsive desire to rule over others. The defenders of the free society should have a healthy disrespect for all such men. Bastiat admired America and pointed to the America of 1850 as being as close as any society in the world to his ideal of a government that protected individual rights to life, liberty, and property. There were two major exeptions, however: the twin evils of slavery and protectionist tariffs. Frédéric Bastiat died on Christmas Eve, 1850, and did not live to observe the convulsions that the America he admired so much would go through in the next fifteen years (and longer). It is unlikely that he would have considered the U.S. government's military invasion of the Southern states in 1861, the killing of some 300,000 citizens, and the bombing, burning, and plundering of the region's cities, towns, farms, and businesses as being consistent in any way with the protection of the lives, liberties and properties of those citizens as promised by the Declaration of Independence. Had he lived to see all of this, he most likely would have added "legal murder" to "legal plunder" as one of the two great sins of government. He would likely have viewed the post-war Republican Party, with its 50 percent average tariff rates, its massive corporate welfare schemes, and its 25-year campaign of genocide against the Plains Indians as first-rate plunderers and traitors to the American ideal. In the latter pages of "The Law" Bastiat offers the sage advice that what was really needed was "a science of {ix} economics" that would explain the harmony (or lack thereof) of a free society (as opposed to socialism). He made a major contribution to this end himself with the publication of his book, _Economic Harmonies_, which can be construed as a precursor to the modern literature of the Austrian School of economics. There is no substitute for a solid understanding of the market order (and of the realities of politics) when it comes to combating the kinds of destructive socialistic schemes that plagued Bastiat's day as well as ours. Anyone who reads this great essay along with other free-market classics, such as Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson and Murray Roth-bard's Power and Market, will possess enough intellectual ammunition to debunk the socialist fantasies of this or any other day. Thomas J. DiLorenzo May 2007 Thomas DiLorenzo is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and a member of the senior faculty of the Mises Institute. THE LAW [1] {1} The law perverted! The law--and, in its wake, all the collective forces of the nation--the law, I say, not only diverted from its proper direction, but made to pursue one entirely contrary! The law become the tool of every kind of avarice, instead of being its check! The law guilty of that very iniquity which it was its mission to punish! Truly, this is a serious fact, if it exists, and one to which I feel bound to call the attention of my fellow citizens. We hold from God the gift that, as far as we are concerned, contains all others, Life--physical, intellectual, and moral life. But life cannot support itself. He who has bestowed it, has entrusted us with the care of supporting it, of developing it, and of perfecting it. To that end, He has provided us with a collection of wonderful faculties; He has plunged us into the midst of a variety of elements. It is by {2} the application of our faculties to these elements that the phenomena of assimilation and of appropriation, by which life pursues the circle that has been assigned to it are realized. Existence, faculties, assimilation--in other words, personality, liberty, property--this is man. It is of these three things that it may be said, apart from all demagogic subtlety, that they are anterior and superior to all human legislation. It is not because men have made laws, that personality, liberty, and property exist. On the contrary, it is because personality, liberty, and property exist beforehand, that men make laws. What, then, is law? As I have said elsewhere, it is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense. Nature, or rather God, has bestowed upon every one of us the right to defend his person, his liberty, and his property, since these are the three constituent or preserving elements of life; elements, each of which is rendered complete by the others, and that cannot be understood without them. For what are our faculties, but the extension of our personality? and what is property, but an extension of our faculties? If every man has the right of defending, even by force, his person, his liberty, and his property, a number of men have the right to combine together to extend, to organize a common force to provide regularly for this defense. Collective right, then, has its principle, its reason for existing, its lawfulness, in individual right; and the common force cannot rationally have any other end, or any other mission, than that of the isolated forces for which it is substituted. Thus, as the force of an individual cannot lawfully touch the person, the liberty, or the property of {3} another individual--for the same reason, the common force cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, the liberty, or the property of individuals or of classes. For this perversion of force would be, in one case as in the other, in contradiction to our premises. For who will dare to say that force has been given to us, not to defend our rights, but to annihilate the equal rights of our brethren? And if this be not true of every individual force, acting independently, how can it be true of the collective force, which is only the organized union of isolated forces? Nothing, therefore, can be more evident than this: The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense; it is the substitution of collective for individual forces, for the purpose of acting in the sphere in which they have a right to act, of doing what they have a right to do, to secure persons, liberties, and properties, and to maintain each in its right, so as to cause justice to reign over all. And if a people established upon this basis were to exist, it seems to me that order would prevail among them in their acts as well as in their ideas. It seems to me that such a people would have the most simple, the most economical, the least oppressive, the least to be felt, the most restrained, the most just, and, consequently, the most stable Government that could be imagined, whatever its political form might be. For under such an administration, everyone would feel that he possessed all the fullness, as well as all the responsibility of his existence. So long as personal safety was ensured, so long as labor was free, and the fruits of labor secured against all unjust attacks, no one would have any difficulties to contend with in the State. When {4} prosperous, we should not, it is true, have to thank the State for our success; but when unfortunate, we should no more think of taxing it with our disasters than our peasants think of attributing to it the arrival of hail or of frost. We should know it only by the inestimable blessing of Safety. It may further be affirmed, that, thanks to the nonintervention of the State in private affairs, our wants and their satisfactions would develop themselves in their natural order. We should not see poor families seeking for literary instruction before they were supplied with bread. We should not see towns peopled at the expense of rural districts, nor rural districts at the expense of towns. We should not see those great displacements of capital, of labor, and of population, that legislative measures occasion; displacements that render so uncertain and precarious the very sources of existence, and thus enlarge to such an extent the responsibility of Governments. Unhappily, law is by no means confined to its own sphere. Nor is it merely in some ambiguous and debatable views that it has left its proper sphere. It has done more than this. It has acted in direct opposition to its proper end; it has destroyed its own object; it has been employed in annihilating that justice which it ought to have established, in effacing amongst Rights, that limit which it was its true mission to respect; it has placed the collective force in the service of those who wish to traffic, without risk and without scruple, in the persons, the liberty, and the property of others; it has converted plunder into a right, that it may protect it, and lawful defense into a crime, that it may punish it. How has this perversion of law been accomplished? And what has resulted from it? {5} The law has been perverted through the influence of two very different causes--naked greed and misconceived philanthropy. Let us speak of the former. Self-preservation and development is the common aspiration of all men, in such a way that if every one enjoyed the free exercise of his faculties and the free disposition of their fruits, social progress would be incessant, uninterrupted, inevitable. But there is also another disposition which is common to them. This is to live and to develop, when they can, at the expense of one another. This is no rash imputation, emanating from a gloomy, uncharitable spirit. History bears witness to the truth of it, by the incessant wars, the migrations of races, sectarian oppressions, the universality of slavery, the frauds in trade, and the monopolies with which its annals abound. This fatal disposition has its origin in the very constitution of man--in that primitive, and universal, and invincible sentiment that urges it towards its well-being, and makes it seek to escape pain. Man can only derive life and enjoyment from a perpetual search and appropriation; that is, from a perpetual application of his faculties to objects, or from labor. This is the origin of property. But also he may live and enjoy, by seizing and appropriating the productions of the faculties of his fellow men. This is the origin of plunder. Now, labor being in itself a pain, and man being naturally inclined to avoid pain, it follows, and history proves it, that wherever plunder is less burdensome than labor, it prevails; and neither religion nor morality can, in this case, prevent it from prevailing. When does plunder cease, then? When it becomes more burdensome and more dangerous than labor. It is {6} very evident that the proper aim of law is to oppose the fatal tendency to plunder with the powerful obstacle of collective force; that all its measures should be in favor of property, and against plunder. But the law is made, generally, by one man, or by one class of men. And as law cannot exist without the sanction and the support of a preponderant force, it must finally place this force in the hands of those who legislate. This inevitable phenomenon, combined with the fatal tendency that, we have said, exists in the heart of man, explains the almost universal perversion of law. It is easy to conceive that, instead of being a check upon injustice, it becomes its most invincible instrument. It is easy to conceive that, according to the power of the legislator, it destroys for its own profit, and in different degrees amongst the rest of the community, personal independence by slavery, liberty by oppression, and property by plunder. It is in the nature of men to rise against the injustice of which they are the victims. When, therefore, plunder is organized by law, for the profit of those who perpetrate it, all the plundered classes tend, either by peaceful or revolutionary means, to enter in some way into the manufacturing of laws. These classes, according to the degree of enlightenment at which they have arrived, may propose to themselves two very different ends, when they thus attempt the attainment of their political rights; either they may wish to put an end to lawful plunder, or they may desire to take part in it. Woe to the nation where this latter thought prevails amongst the masses, at the moment when they, in their turn, seize upon the legislative power! {7} Up to that time, lawful plunder has been exercised by the few upon the many, as is the case in countries where the right of legislating is confined to a few hands. But now it has become universal, and the equilibrium is sought in universal plunder. The injustice that society contains, instead of being rooted out of it, is generalized. As soon as the injured classes have recovered their political rights, their first thought is not to abolish plunder (this would suppose them to possess enlightenment, which they cannot have), but to organize against the other classes, and to their own detriment, a system of reprisals--as if it was necessary, before the reign of justice arrives, that all should undergo a cruel retribution--some for their iniquity and some for their ignorance. It would be impossible, therefore, to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this--the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder. What would be the consequences of such a perversion? It would require volumes to describe them all. We must content ourselves with pointing out the most striking. In the first place, it would efface from everybody's conscience the distinction between justice and injustice. No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree, but the safest way to make them respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality are in contradiction to each other, the citizen finds himself in the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense, or of losing his respect for the law--two evils of equal magnitude, between which it would be difficult to choose. It is so much in the nature of law to support justice that in the minds of the masses they are one and the same. There is in all of us a strong disposition to regard what is lawful as legitimate, so much so that many falsely derive {8} all justice from law. It is sufficient, then, for the law to order and sanction plunder, that it may appear to many consciences just and sacred. Slavery, protection, and monopoly find defenders, not only in those who profit by them, but in those who suffer by them. If you suggest a doubt as to the morality of these institutions, it is said directly--"You are a dangerous experimenter, a utopian, a theorist, a despiser of the laws; you would shake the basis upon which society rests." If you lecture upon morality, or political economy, official bodies will be found to make this request to the Government: That henceforth science be taught not only with sole reference to free exchange (to liberty, property, and justice), as has been the case up to the present time, but also, and especially, with reference to the facts and legislation (contrary to liberty, property, and justice) that regulate French industry. That, in public lecterns salaried by the treasury, the professor abstain rigorously from endangering in the slightest degree the respect due to the laws now in force.[2] So that if a law exists that sanctions slavery or monopoly, oppression or plunder, in any form whatever, it must not even be mentioned--for how can it be mentioned without damaging the respect that it inspires? Still further, morality and political economy must be taught in connection with this law--that is, under the supposition that it must be just, only because it is law. {9} Another effect of this deplorable perversion of the law is that it gives to human passions and to political struggles, and, in general, to politics, properly so called, an exaggerated importance. I could prove this assertion in a thousand ways. But I shall confine myself, by way of an illustration, to bringing it to bear upon a subject which has of late occupied everybody's mind: universal suffrage. Whatever may be thought of it by the adepts of the school of Rousseau, which professes to be very far advanced, but which I consider 20 centuries behind, universal suffrage (taking the word in its strictest sense) is not one of those sacred dogmas with respect to which examination and doubt are crimes. Serious objections may be made to it. In the first place, the word universal conceals a gross sophism. There are, in France, 36,000,000 inhabitants. To make the right of suffrage universal, 36,000,000 electors should be reckoned. The most extended system reckons only 9,000,000. Three persons out of four, then, are excluded; and more than this, they are excluded by the fourth. Upon what principle is this exclusion founded? Upon the principle of incapacity. Universal suffrage, then, means: universal suffrage of those who are capable. In point of fact, who are the capable? Are age, sex, and judicial condemnations the only conditions to which incapacity is to be attached? On taking a nearer view of the subject, we may soon perceive the reason why the right of suffrage depends upon the presumption of incapacity; the most extended system differing from the most restricted in the conditions on which this incapacity depends, and which constitutes not a difference in principle, but in degree. {10} This motive is, that the elector does not stipulate for himself, but for everybody. If, as the republicans of the Greek and Roman tone pretend, the right of suffrage had fallen to the lot of every one at his birth, it would be an injustice to adults to prevent women and children from voting. Why are they prevented? Because they are presumed to be incapable. And why is incapacity a reason for exclusion? Because the elector does not reap alone the responsibility of his vote; because every vote engages and affects the community at large; because the community has a right to demand some assurances, as regards the acts upon which its well-being and its existence depend. I know what might be said in answer to this. I know what might be objected. But this is not the place to settle a controversy of this kind. What I wish to observe is this, that this same controversy (in common with the greater part of political questions) that agitates, excites, and unsettles the nations, would lose almost all its importance if the law had always been what it ought to be. In fact, if law were confined to causing all persons, all liberties, and all properties to be respected--if it were merely the organization of individual right and individual defense--if it were the obstacle, the check, the chastisement opposed to all oppression, to all plunder--is it likely that we should dispute much, as citizens, on the subject of the greater or lesser universality of suffrage? Is it likely that it would compromise that greatest of advantages, the public peace? Is it likely that the excluded classes would not quietly wait for their turn? Is it likely that the enfranchised classes would be very jealous of their privilege? And is it not clear, that the interest of all being one and the same, some would act without much inconvenience to the others? {11} But if the fatal principle should come to be introduced, that, under pretense of organization, regulation, protection, or encouragement, the law may take from one party in order to give to another, help itself to the wealth acquired by all the classes that it may increase that of one class, whether that of the agriculturists, the manufacturers, the ship owners, or artists and comedians; then certainly, in this case, there is no class which may not try, and with reason, to place its hand upon the law, that would not demand with fury its right of election and eligibility, and that would overturn society rather than not obtain it. Even beggars and vagabonds will prove to you that they have an incontestable title to it. They will say: We never buy wine, tobacco, or salt, without paying the tax, and a part of this tax is given by law in perquisites and gratuities to men who are richer than we are. Others make use of the law to create an artificial rise in the price of bread, meat, iron, or cloth. Since everybody traffics in law for his own profit, we should like to do the same. We should like to make it produce the right to assistance, which is the poor man's plunder. To effect this, we ought to be electors and legislators, that we may organize, on a large scale, alms for our own class, as you have organized, on a large scale, protection for yours. Don't tell us that you will take our cause upon yourselves, and throw to us 600,000 francs to keep us quiet, like giving us a bone to pick. We have other claims, and, at any rate, we wish to stipulate for ourselves, as other classes have stipulated for themselves! How is this argument to be answered? Yes, as long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true mission, that it may violate property instead of securing it, {12} everybody will be wanting to manufacture law, either to defend himself against plunder, or to organize it for his own profit. The political question will always be prejudicial, predominant, and absorbing; in a word, there will be fighting around the door of the Legislative Palace. The struggle will be no less furious within it. To be convinced of this, it is hardly necessary to look at what passes in the Chambers in France and in England; it is enough to know how the question stands. Is there any need to prove that this odious perversion of law is a perpetual source of hatred and discord, that it even tends to social disorganization? Look at the United States. There is no country in the world where the law is kept more within its proper domain--which is, to secure to everyone his liberty and his property. Therefore, there is no country in the world where social order appears to rest upon a more solid basis. Nevertheless, even in the United States, there are two questions, and only two, that from the beginning have endangered political order. And what are these two questions? That of slavery and that of tariffs; that is, precisely the only two questions in which, contrary to the general spirit of this republic, law has taken the character of a plunderer. Slavery is a violation, sanctioned by law, of the rights of the person. Protection is a violation perpetrated by the law upon the rights of property; and certainly it is very remarkable that, in the midst of so many other debates, this double legal scourge, the sorrowful inheritance of the Old World, should be the only one which can, and perhaps will, cause the rupture of the Union. Indeed, a more astounding fact, in the heart of society, cannot be conceived than this: That law should have become an instrument of injustice. And if this fact occasions consequences so formidable to the United {13} States, where there is but one exception, what must it be with us in Europe, where it is a principle--a system? Mr. Montalembert, adopting the thought of a famous proclamation of Mr. Carlier, said, "We must make war against socialism." And by socialism, according to the definition of Mr. Charles Dupin, he meant plunder. But what plunder did he mean? For there are two sorts: extralegal and legal plunder. As to extralegal plunder, such as theft, or swindling, which is defined, foreseen, and punished by the penal code, I do not think it can be adorned by the name of socialism. It is not this that systematically threatens the foundations of society. Besides, the war against this kind of plunder has not waited for the signal of Mr. Montalembert or Mr. Carlier. It has gone on since the beginning of the world; France was carrying it on long before the revolution of February--long before the appearance of socialism--with all the ceremonies of magistracy, police, gendarmerie, prisons, dungeons, and scaffolds. It is the law itself that is conducting this war, and it is to be wished, in my opinion, that the law should always maintain this attitude with respect to plunder. But this is not the case. The law sometimes takes its own part. Sometimes it accomplishes it with its own hands, in order to save the parties benefited the shame, the danger, and the scruple. Sometimes it places all this ceremony of magistracy, police, gendarmerie, and prisons, at the service of the plunderer, and treats the plundered party, when he defends himself, as the criminal. In a word, there is a legal plunder, and it is, no doubt, this that is meant by Mr. Montalembert. This plunder may be only an exceptional blemish in the legislation of a people, and in this case, the best thing {14} that can be done is, without so many speeches and lamentations, to do away with it as soon as possible, notwithstanding the clamors of interested parties. But how is it to be distinguished? Very easily. See whether the law takes from some persons that which belongs to them, to give to others what does not belong to them. See whether the law performs, for the profit of one citizen, and, to the injury of others, an act that this citizen cannot perform without committing a crime. Abolish this law without delay; it is not merely an iniquity--it is a fertile source of iniquities, for it invites reprisals; and if you do not take care, the exceptional case will extend, multiply, and become systematic. No doubt the party benefited will exclaim loudly; he will assert his acquired rights. He will say that the State is bound to protect and encourage his industry; he will plead that it is a good thing for the State to be enriched, that it may spend the more, and thus shower down salaries upon the poor workmen. Take care not to listen to this sophistry, for it is just by the systematizing of these arguments that legal plunder becomes systematized. And this is what has taken place. The delusion of the day is to enrich all classes at the expense of each other; it is to generalize plunder under pretense of organizing it. Now, legal plunder may be exercised in an infinite multitude of ways. Hence come an infinite multitude of plans for organization; tariffs, protection, perquisites, gratuities, encouragements, progressive taxation, free public education, right to work, right to profit, right to wages, right to assistance, right to instruments of labor, gratuity of credit, etc., etc. And it is all these plans, taken as a whole, with what they have in common, legal plunder, that takes the name of socialism. Now socialism, thus defined, and forming a doctrinal body, what other war would you make against it than a {15} war of doctrine? You find this doctrine false, absurd, abominable. Refute it. This will be all the easier, the more false, absurd, and abominable it is. Above all, if you wish to be strong, begin by rooting out of your legislation every particle of socialism which may have crept into it--and this will be no light work. Mr. Montalembert has been reproached with wishing to turn brute force against socialism. He ought to be exonerated from this reproach, for he has plainly said: "The war that we must make against socialism must be one that is compatible with the law, honor, and justice." But how is it that Mr. Montalembert does not see that he is placing himself in a vicious circle? You would oppose law to socialism. But it is the law that socialism invokes. It aspires to legal, not extralegal plunder. It is of the law itself, like monopolists of all kinds, that it wants to make an instrument; and when once it has the law on its side, how will you be able to turn the law against it? How will you place it under the power of your tribunals, your gendarmes, and of your prisons? What will you do then? You wish to prevent it from taking any part in the making of laws. You would keep it outside the Legislative Palace. In this you will not succeed, I venture to prophesy, so long as legal plunder is the basis of the legislation within. It is absolutely necessary that this question of legal plunder should be determined, and there are only three solutions of it: 1. When the few plunder the many. 2. When everybody plunders everybody else. 3. When nobody plunders anybody. Partial plunder, universal plunder, absence of plunder, amongst these we have to make our choice. The law can only produce one of these results. {16} Partial plunder. This is the system that prevailed so long as the elective privilege was partial; a system that is resorted to, to avoid the invasion of socialism. Universal plunder. We have been threatened by this system when the elective privilege has become universal; the masses having conceived the idea of making law, on the principle of legislators who had preceded them. Absence of plunder. This is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, conciliation, and of good sense, which I shall proclaim with all the force of my lungs (which is very inadequate, alas!) till the day of my death. And, in all sincerity, can anything more be required at the hands of the law? Can the law, whose necessary sanction is force, be reasonably employed upon anything beyond securing to every one his right? I defy anyone to remove it from this circle without perverting it, and consequently turning force against right. And as this is the most fatal, the most illogical social perversion that can possibly be imagined, it must be admitted that the true solution, so much sought after, of the social problem, is contained in these simple words--LAW IS ORGANIZED JUSTICE. Now it is important to remark, that to organize justice by law, that is to say by force, excludes the idea of organizing by law, or by force any manifestation whatever of human activity--labor, charity, agriculture, commerce, industry, instruction, the fine arts, or religion; for any one of these organizings would inevitably destroy the essential organization. How, in fact, can we imagine force encroaching upon the liberty of citizens without infringing upon justice, and so acting against its proper aim? Here I am taking on the most popular prejudice of our time. It is not considered enough that law should be just, {17} it must be philanthropic. It is not sufficient that it should guarantee to every citizen the free and inoffensive exercise of his faculties, applied to his physical, intellectual, and moral development; it is required to extend well-being, instruction, and morality, directly over the nation. This is the fascinating side of socialism. But, I repeat it, these two missions of the law contradict each other. We have to choose between them. A citizen cannot at the same time be free and not free. Mr. de Lamartine wrote to me one day thus: "Your doctrine is only the half of my program; you have stopped at liberty, I go on to fraternity." I answered him: "The second part of your program will destroy the first." And in fact it is impossible for me to separate the word fraternity from the word voluntary. I cannot possibly conceive fraternity legally enforced, without liberty being legally destroyed, and justice legally trampled under foot. Legal plunder has two roots: one of them, as we have already seen, is in human greed; the other is in misconceived philanthropy. Before I proceed, I think I ought to explain myself upon the word plunder. I do not take it, as it often is taken, in a vague, undefined, relative, or metaphorical sense. I use it in its scientific acceptation, and as expressing the opposite idea to property. When a portion of wealth passes out of the hands of him who has acquired it, without his consent, and without compensation, to him who has not created it, whether by force or by artifice, I say that property is violated, that plunder is perpetrated. I say that this is exactly what the law ought to repress always and everywhere. If the law itself performs the action it ought to repress, I say that plunder is still perpetrated, and even, in a social point of view, under aggravated circumstances. In this case, {18} however, he who profits from the plunder is not responsible for it; it is the law, the lawgiver, society itself, and this is where the political danger lies. It is to be regretted that there is something offensive in the word. I have sought in vain for another, for I would not wish at any time, and especially just now, to add an irritating word to our disagreements; therefore, whether I am believed or not, I declare that I do not mean to impugn the intentions nor the morality of anybody. I am attacking an idea that I believe to be false--a system that appears to me to be unjust; and this is so independent of intentions, that each of us profits by it without wishing it, and suffers from it without being aware of the cause. Any person must write under the influence of party spirit or of fear, who would call into question the sincerity of protectionism, of socialism, and even of communism, which are one and the same plant, in three different periods of its growth. All that can be said is, that plunder is more visible by its partiality in protectionism, [3] and by its universality in communism; whence it follows that, of the three systems, socialism is still the most vague, the most undefined, and consequently the most sincere. Be that as it may, to conclude that legal plunder has one of its roots in misconceived philanthropy, is evidently to put intentions out of the question. {19} With this understanding, let us examine the value, the origin, and the tendency of this popular aspiration, which pretends to realize the general good by general plunder. The Socialists say, since the law organizes justice, why should it not organize labor, instruction, and religion? Why? Because it could not organize labor, instruction, and religion, without disorganizing justice. For remember, that law is force, and that consequently the domain of the law cannot properly extend beyond the domain of force. When law and force keep a man within the bounds of justice, they impose nothing upon him but a mere negation. They only oblige him to abstain from doing harm. They violate neither his personality, his liberty, nor his property. They only guard the personality, the liberty, the property of others. They hold themselves on the defensive; they defend the equal right of all. They fulfill a mission whose harmlessness is evident, whose utility is palpable, and whose legitimacy is not to be disputed. This is so true that, as a friend of mine once remarked to me, to say that the aim of the law is to cause justice to reign, is to use an expression that is not rigorously exact. It ought to be said, the aim of the law is to prevent injustice from reigning. In fact, it is not justice that has an existence of its own, it is injustice. The one results from the absence of the other. But when the law, through the medium of its necessary agent--force--imposes a form of labor, a method or a subject of instruction, a creed, or a worship, it is no longer negative; it acts positively upon men. It substitutes the will of the legislator for their own will, the initiative of the legislator for their own initiative. They have no need to consult, to compare, or to foresee; the law does all that for them. The intellect is for them a useless {20} encumbrance; they cease to be men; they lose their personality, their liberty, their property. Try to imagine a form of labor imposed by force, that is not a violation of liberty; a transmission of wealth imposed by force, that is not a violation of property. If you cannot succeed in reconciling this, you are bound to conclude that the law cannot organize labor and industry without organizing injustice. When, from the seclusion of his office, a politician takes a view of society, he is struck with the spectacle of inequality that presents itself. He mourns over the sufferings that are the lot of so many of our brethren, sufferings whose aspect is rendered yet more sorrowful by the contrast of luxury and wealth. He ought, perhaps, to ask himself whether such a social state has not been caused by the plunder of ancient times, exercised in the way of conquests; and by plunder of more recent times, effected through the medium of the laws? He ought to ask himself whether, granting the aspiration of all men to well-being and improvement, the reign of justice would not suffice to realize the greatest activity of progress, and the greatest amount of equality compatible with that individual responsibility that God has awarded as a just retribution of virtue and vice? He never gives this a thought. His mind turns towards combinations, arrangements, legal or factitious organizations. He seeks the remedy in perpetuating and exaggerating what has produced the evil. For, justice apart, which we have seen is only a negation, is there any one of these legal arrangements that does not contain the principle of plunder? You say, "There are men who have no money," and you apply to the law. But the law is not a self-supplied {21} fountain, whence every stream may obtain supplies independently of society. Nothing can enter the public treasury, in favor of one citizen or one class, but what other citizens and other classes have been forced to send to it. If everyone draws from it only the equivalent of what he has contributed to it, your law, it is true, is no plunderer, but it does nothing for men who want money--it does not promote equality. It can only be an instrument of equalization as far as it takes from one party to give to another, and then it is an instrument of plunder. Examine, in this light, the protection of tariffs, subsidies, right to profit, right to labor, right to assistance, free public education, progressive taxation, gratuitousness of credit, social workshops, and you will always find at the bottom legal plunder, organized injustice. You say, "There are men who want knowledge," and you apply to the law. But the law is not a torch that sheds light that originates within itself. It extends over a society where there are men who have knowledge, and others who have not; citizens who want to learn, and others who are disposed to teach. It can only do one of two things: either allow a free operation to this kind of transaction, i.e., let this kind of want satisfy itself freely; or else preempt the will of the people in the matter, and take from some of them sufficient to pay professors commissioned to instruct others for free. But, in this second case there cannot fail to be a violation of liberty and property--legal plunder. You say, "Here are men who are wanting in morality or religion," and you apply to the law; but law is force, and need I say how far it is a violent and absurd enterprise to introduce force in these matters? {22} As the result of its systems and of its efforts, it would seem that socialism, notwithstanding all its self-complacency, can scarcely help perceiving the monster of legal plunder. But what does it do? It disguises it cleverly from others, and even from itself, under the seductive names of fraternity, solidarity, organization, association. And because we do not ask so much at the hands of the law, because we only ask it for justice, it alleges that we reject fraternity, solidarity, organization, and association; and they brand us with the name of individualists. We can assure them that what we repudiate is not natural organization, but forced organization. It is not free association, but the forms of association that they would impose upon us. It is not spontaneous fraternity, but legal fraternity. It is not providential solidarity, but artificial solidarity, which is only an unjust displacement of responsibility. Socialism, like the old policy from which it emanates, confounds Government and society. And so, every time we object to a thing being done by Government, it concludes that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of education by the State--then we are against education altogether. We object to a State religion--then we would have no religion at all. We object to an equality which is brought about by the State then we are against equality, etc., etc. They might as well accuse us of wishing men not to eat, because we object to the cultivation of corn by the State. How is it that the strange idea of making the law produce what it does not contain--prosperity, in a positive sense, wealth, science, religion--should ever have gained ground in the political world? The modern politicians, particularly those of the Socialist school, found their different {23} theories upon one common hypothesis; and surely a more strange, a more presumptuous notion, could never have entered a human brain. They divide mankind into two parts. Men in general, except one, form the first; the politician himself forms the second, which is by far the most important. In fact, they begin by supposing that men are devoid of any principle of action, and of any means of discernment in themselves; that they have no initiative; that they are inert matter, passive particles, atoms without impulse; at best a vegetation indifferent to its own mode of existence, susceptible of assuming, from an exterior will and hand an infinite number of forms, more or less symmetrical, artistic, and perfected. Moreover, every one of these politicians does not hesitate to assume that he himself is, under the names of organizer, discoverer, legislator, institutor or founder, this will and hand, this universal initiative, this creative power, whose sublime mission it is to gather together these scattered materials, that is, men, into society. Starting from these data, as a gardener according to his caprice shapes his trees into pyramids, parasols, cubes, cones, vases, espaliers, distaffs, or fans; so the Socialist, following his chimera, shapes poor humanity into groups, series, circles, subcircles, honeycombs, or social workshops, with all kinds of variations. And as the gardener, to bring his trees into shape, needs hatchets, pruning hooks, saws, and shears, so the politician, to bring society into shape, needs the forces which he can only find in the laws; the law of tariffs, the law of taxation, the law of assistance, and the law of education. It is so true, that the Socialists look upon mankind as a subject for social experiments, that if, by chance, they {24} are not quite certain of the success of these experiments, they will request a portion of mankind, as a subject to experiment upon. It is well known how popular the idea of trying all systems is, and one of their chiefs has been known seriously to demand of the Constituent Assembly a parish, with all its inhabitants, upon which to make his experiments. It is thus that an inventor will make a small machine before he makes one of the regular size. Thus the chemist sacrifices some substances, the agriculturist some seed and a corner of his field, to make trial of an idea. But think of the difference between the gardener and his trees, between the inventor and his machine, between the chemist and his substances, between the agriculturist and his seed! The Socialist thinks, in all sincerity, that there is the same difference between himself and mankind. No wonder the politicians of the nineteenth century look upon society as an artificial production of the legislator's genius. This idea, the result of a classical education, has taken possession of all the thinkers and great writers of our country. To all these persons, the relations between mankind and the legislator appear to be the same as those that exist between the clay and the potter. Moreover, if they have consented to recognize in the heart of man a capability of action, and in his intellect a faculty of discernment, they have looked upon this gift of God as a fatal one, and thought that mankind, under these two impulses, tended fatally towards ruin. They have taken it for granted that if abandoned to their own inclinations, men would only occupy themselves with religion to arrive at atheism, with instruction to come to ignorance, and with labor and exchange to be extinguished in misery. {25} Happily, according to these writers, there are some men, termed governors and legislators, upon whom Heaven has bestowed opposite tendencies, not for their own sake only, but for the sake of the rest of the world. Whilst mankind tends to evil, they incline to good; whilst mankind is advancing towards darkness, they are aspiring to enlightenment; whilst mankind is drawn towards vice, they are attracted by virtue. And, this granted, they demand the assistance of force, by means of which they are to substitute their own tendencies for those of the human race. It is only needful to open, almost at random, a book on philosophy, politics, or history, to see how strongly this idea--the child of classical studies and the mother of socialism--is rooted in our country; that mankind is merely inert matter, receiving life, organization, morality, and wealth from power; or, rather, and still worse--that mankind itself tends towards degradation, and is only arrested in its tendency by the mysterious hand of the legislator. Classical conventionalism shows us everywhere, behind passive society, a hidden power, under the names of Law, or Legislator (or, by a mode of expression which refers to some person or persons of undisputed weight and authority, but not named), which moves, animates, enriches, and regenerates mankind. We will give a quotation from Bossuet: One of the things which was the most strongly impressed (by whom?) upon the mind of the Egyptians, was the love of their country.... Nobody was allowed to be useless to the State; the law assigned to every one his employment, which descended from father to son. No one was permitted to have two professions, nor to adopt another. ... But there was one occupation which was {26} obliged to be common to all, this was the study of the laws and of wisdom; ignorance of religion and the political regulations of the country was excused in no condition of life. Moreover, every profession had a district assigned to it (by whom?).... Amongst good laws, one of the best things was, that everybody was taught to observe them (by whom?). Egypt abounded with wonderful inventions, and nothing was neglected which could render life comfortable and tranquil. Thus men, according to Bossuet, derive nothing from themselves; patriotism, wealth, inventions, husbandry, science--all come to them by the operation of the laws, or by kings. All they have to do is to be passive. It is on this ground that Bossuet takes exception when Diodorus accuses the Egyptians of rejecting wrestling and music. "How is that possible," says he, "since these arts were invented by Trismegistus?" It is the same with the Persians: One of the first cares of the prince was to encourage agriculture.... As there were posts established for the regulation of the armies, so there were offices for the superintending of rural works.... The respect with which the Persians were inspired for royal authority was excessive. The Greeks, although full of mind, were no less strangers to their own responsibilities; so much so, that of themselves, like dogs and horses, they would not have ventured upon the most simple games. In a classical sense, it is an undisputed thing that everything comes to the people from without. The Greeks, naturally full of spirit and courage, had been early cultivated by kings and colonies who had come from Egypt. From them they had {27} learned the exercises of the body, foot races, and horse and chariot races.... The best thing that the Egyptians had taught them was to become docile, and to allow themselves to be formed by the laws for the public good. FENELON--Reared in the study and admiration of antiquity and a witness of the power of Louis XIV, Fenelon naturally adopted the idea that mankind should be passive, and that its misfortunes and its prosperities, its virtues and its vices, are caused by the external influence that is exercised upon it by the law, or by the makers of the law. Thus, in his Utopia of Salentum, he brings the men, with their interests, their faculties, their desires, and their possessions, under the absolute direction of the legislator. Whatever the subject may be, they themselves have no voice in it--the prince judges for them. The nation is just a shapeless mass, of which the prince is the soul. In him resides the thought, the foresight, the principle of all organization, of all progress; on him, therefore, rests all the responsibility. In proof of this assertion, I might transcribe the whole of the tenth book of _Telemachus_. I refer the reader to it, and shall content myself with quoting some passages taken at random from this celebrated work, to which, in every other respect, I am the first to render justice. With the astonishing credulity that characterizes the classics, Fénelon, against the authority of reason and of facts, admits the general felicity of the Egyptians, and attributes it, not to their own wisdom, but to that of their kings: We could not turn our eyes to the two shores, without perceiving rich towns and country seats, agreeably situated; fields that were covered every year, {28} without intermission, with golden crops; meadows full of flocks; laborers bending under the weight of fruits that the earth lavished on its cultivators; and shepherds who made the echoes around repeat the soft sounds of their pipes and flutes. "Happy," said Mentor, "is that people who is governed by a wise king."... Mentor afterwards desired me to remark the happiness and abundance that was spread over all the country of Egypt, where twenty-two thousand cities might be counted. He admired the excellent police regulations of the cities; the justice administered in favor of the poor against the rich; the good education of the children, who were accustomed to obedience, labor, and the love of arts and letters; the exactness with which all the ceremonies of religion were performed; the disinterestedness, the desire of honor, the fidelity to men, and the fear of the gods, with which every father inspired his children. He could not sufficiently admire the prosperous state of the country. "Happy" said he, "is the people whom a wise king rules in such a manner." Fénelon's idyll on Crete is still more fascinating. Mentor is made to say: All that you will see in this wonderful island is the result of the laws of Minos. The education that the children receive renders the body healthy and robust. They are accustomed, from the first, to a frugal and laborious life; it is supposed that all the pleasures of sense enervate the body and the mind; no other pleasure is presented to them but that of being invincible by virtue, that of acquiring much glory... there they punish three vices that go unpunished amongst other people--ingratitude, dissimulation, and avarice. As to pomp and dissipation, there is no need to punish these, for they are unknown in Crete.... No costly furniture, no magnificent clothing, no delicious feasts, no gilded palaces are allowed. {29} It is thus that Mentor prepares his scholar to mould and manipulate, doubtless with the most philanthropic intentions, the people of Ithaca, and, to confirm him in these ideas, he gives him the example of Salentum. So we receive our first political notions. We are taught to treat men very much as Oliver de Serres teaches farmers to manage and to mix the soil. MONTESQUIEU-- To sustain the spirit of commerce, it is necessary that all the laws should favor it; that these same laws, by their regulations in dividing the fortunes in proportion as commerce enlarges them, should place every poor citizen in sufficiently easy circumstances to enable him to work like the others, and every rich citizen in such mediocrity that he must work, in order to retain or to acquire. Thus the laws are to dispose of all fortunes. Although in a democracy, real equality be the soul of the State, yet it is so difficult to establish that an extreme exactness in this matter would not always be desirable. It is sufficient that a census be established to reduce or fix the differences to a certain point, after which, it is for particular laws to equalize, as it were, the inequality by burdens imposed upon the rich and reliefs granted to the poor. Here, again, we see the equalization of fortunes by law, that is, by force. There were, in Greece, two kinds of republics. One was military, as Sparta; the other commercial, as Athens. In the one it was wished (by whom?) that the citizens should be idle: in the other, the love of labor was encouraged. It is worth our while to pay a little attention to the extent of genius required by these legislators, that {30} we may see how, by confounding all the virtues, they showed their wisdom to the world. Lycurgus, blending theft with the spirit of justice, the hardest slavery with extreme liberty, the most atrocious sentiments with the greatest moderation, gave stability to his city. He seemed to deprive it of all its resources, arts, commerce, money, and walls; there was ambition without the hope of rising; there were natural sentiments where the individual was neither child, nor husband, nor father. Chastity even was deprived of modesty. By this road Sparta was led on to grandeur and to glory. The phenomenon that we observe in the institutions of Greece has been seen in the midst of the degeneracy and corruption of our modern times. An honest legislator has formed a people where probity has appeared as natural as bravery among the Spartans. Mr. Penn is a true Lycurgus, and although the former had peace for his object, and the latter war, they resemble each other in the singular path along which they have led their people, in their influence over free men, in the prejudices which they have overcome, the passions they have subdued. Paraguay furnishes us with another example. Society has been accused of the crime of regarding the pleasure of commanding as the only good of life; but it will always be a noble thing to govern men by making them happy. Those who desire to form similar institutions will establish community of property, as in the republic of Plato, the same reverence as he enjoined for the gods, separation from strangers for the preservation of morality, and make the city and not the citizens create commerce: they should give our arts without our luxury, our wants without our desires. {31} Vulgar infatuation may exclaim, if it likes, "It is Montesquieu! magnificent! sublime!" I am not afraid to express my opinion, and to say: What! You have the gall to call that fine? It is frightful! It is abominable! And these extracts, which I might multiply, show that according to Montesquieu, the persons, the liberties, the property, mankind itself, are nothing but grist for the mill of the sagacity of lawgivers. ROUSSEAU--Although this politician, the paramount authority of the Democrats, makes the social edifice rest upon the general will, no one has so completely admitted the hypothesis of the entire passiveness of human nature in the presence of the lawgiver: If it is true that a great prince is a rare thing, how much more so must a great lawgiver be? The former has only to follow the pattern proposed to him by the latter. This latter is the engineer who invents the machine; the former is merely the workman who sets it in motion. And what part have men to act in all this? That of the machine, which is set in motion; or rather, are they not the brute matter of which the machine is made? Thus, between the legislator and the prince, between the prince and his subjects, there are the same relations as those that exist between the agricultural writer and the agriculturist, the agriculturist and the clod. At what a vast height, then, is the politician placed, who rules over legislators themselves and teaches them their trade in such imperative terms as the following: Would you give consistency to the State? Bring the extremes together as much as possible. Suffer neither wealthy persons nor beggars. {32} If the soil is poor and barren, or the country too much confined for the inhabitants, turn to industry and the arts, whose productions you will exchange for the provisions which you require.... On a good soil, if you are short of inhabitants, give all your attention to agriculture, which multiplies men, and banish the arts, which only serve to depopulate the country.... Pay attention to extensive and convenient coasts. Cover the sea with vessels, and you will have a brilliant and short existence. If your seas wash only inaccessible rocks, let the people be barbarous, and eat fish; they will live more quietly, perhaps better, and most certainly more happily. In short, besides those maxims which are common to all, every people has its own particular circumstances, which demand a legislation peculiar to itself. It was thus that the Hebrews formerly, and the Arabs more recently, had religion for their principal object; that of the Athenians was literature; that of Carthage and Tyre, commerce; of Rhodes, naval affairs; of Sparta, war; and of Rome, virtue. The author of the "Spirit of Laws" has shown the art by which the legislator should frame his institutions towards each of these objects.... But if the legislator, mistaking his object, should take up a principle different from that which arises from the nature of things; if one should tend to slavery, and the other to liberty; if one to wealth, and the other to population; one to peace, and the other to conquests; the laws will insensibly become enfeebled, the Constitution will be impaired, and the State will be subject to incessant agitations until it is destroyed, or becomes changed, and invincible Nature regains her empire. But if Nature is sufficiently invincible to regain its empire, why does not Rousseau admit that it had no need of the legislator to gain its empire from the beginning? {33} Why does he not allow that by obeying their own impulse, men would of themselves apply agriculture to a fertile district, and commerce to extensive and commodious coasts without the interference of a Lycurgus, a Solon, or a Rousseau, who would undertake it at the risk of deceiving themselves? Be that as it may, we see with what a terrible responsibility Rousseau invests inventors, institutors, conductors, and manipulators of societies. He is, therefore, very exacting with regard to them. He who dares to undertake the institutions of a people, ought to feel that he can, as it were, transform every individual, who is by himself a perfect and solitary whole, receiving his life and being from a larger whole of which he forms a part; he must feel that he can change the constitution of man, to fortify it, and substitute a social and moral existence for the physical and independent one that we have all received from nature. In a word, he must deprive man of his own powers, to give him others that are foreign to him. Poor human nature! What would become of its dignity if it were entrusted to the disciples of Rousseau? RAYNAL-- The climate, that is, the air and the soil, is the first element for the legislator. His resources prescribe to him his duties. First, he must consult his local position. A population dwelling upon maritime shores must have laws fitted for navigation.... If the colony is located in an inland region, a legislator must provide for the nature of the soil, and for its degree of fertility.... It is more especially in the distribution of property that the wisdom of legislation will appear. As a {34} general rule, and in every country, when a new colony is founded, land should be given to each man, sufficient for the support of his family.... In an uncultivated island, which you are colonizing with children, it will only be needful to let the germs of truth expand in the developments of reason!... But when you establish old people in a new country, the skill consists in only allowing it those injurious opinions and customs which it is impossible to cure and correct. If you wish to prevent them from being perpetuated, you will act upon the rising generation by a general and public education of the children. A prince or legislator ought never to found a colony without previously sending wise men there to instruct the youth.... In a new colony, every facility is open to the precautions of the legislator who desires to purify the tone and the manners of the people. If he has genius and virtue, the lands and the men that are at his disposal will inspire his soul with a plan of society that a writer can only vaguely trace, and in a way that would be subject to the instability of all hypotheses, which are varied and complicated by an infinity of circumstances too difficult to foresee and to combine. One would think it was a professor of agriculture who was saying to his pupils The climate is the only rule for the agriculturist. His resources dictate to him his duties. The first thing he has to consider is his local position. If he is on a clayey soil, he must do so and so. If he has to contend with sand, this is the way in which he must set about it. Every facility is open to the agriculturist who wishes to clear and improve his soil. If he only has the skill, the manure which he has at his disposal will suggest to him a plan of operation, which a professor can only vaguely trace, and in a way that would be subject to the uncertainty of all hypotheses, which vary and are complicated by an {35} infinity of circumstances too difficult to foresee and to combine. But, oh! sublime writers, deign to remember sometimes that this clay, this sand, this manure, of which you are disposing in so arbitrary a manner, are men, your equals, intelligent and free beings like yourselves, who have received from God, as you have, the faculty of seeing, of foreseeing, of thinking, and of judging for themselves! MABLY--(He is supposing the laws to be worn out by time and by the neglect of security, and continues thus): Under these circumstances, we must be convinced that the bonds of Government are slack. Give them a new tension (it is the reader who is addressed), and the evil will be remedied.... Think less of punishing the faults than of encouraging the virtues that you want. By this method you will bestow upon your republic the vigor of youth. Through ignorance of this, a free people has lost its liberty! But if the evil has made so much way that the ordinary magistrates are unable to remedy it effectually, have recourse to an extraordinary magistracy, whose time should be short, and its power considerable. The imagination of the citizens requires to be impressed. In this style he goes on through twenty volumes. There was a time when, under the influence of teaching like this, which is the foundation of classical education, everyone was for placing himself beyond and above mankind, for the sake of arranging, organizing, and instituting it in his own way. CONDILLAC-- Take upon yourself, my lord, the character of Lycurgus or of Solon. Before you finish reading {36} this essay, amuse yourself with giving laws to some wild people in America or in Africa. Establish these roving men in fixed dwellings; teach them to keep flocks.... Endeavor to develop the social qualities that nature has implanted in them.... Make them begin to practice the duties of humanity.... Cause the pleasures of the passions to become distasteful to them by punishments, and you will see these barbarians, with every plan of your legislation, lose a vice and gain a virtue. All these people have had laws. But few among them have been happy. Why is this? Because legislators have almost always been ignorant of the object of society, which is to unite families by a common interest. Impartiality in law consists in two things, in establishing equality in the fortunes and in the dignity of the citizens.... In proportion to the degree of equality established by the laws, the dearer will they become to every citizen. How can avarice, ambition, dissipation, idleness, sloth, envy, hatred, or jealousy agitate men who are equal in fortune and dignity, and to whom the laws leave no hope of disturbing their equality? What has been told you of the republic of Sparta ought to enlighten you on this question. No other State has had laws more in accordance with the order of nature or of equality. It is not to be wondered at that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries should have looked upon the human race as inert matter, ready to receive everything--form, figure, impulse, movement, and life, from a great prince, or a great legislator, or a great genius. These ages were reared in the study of antiquity; and antiquity presents everywhere--in Egypt, Persia, Greece, and Rome, the {37} spectacle of a few men molding mankind according to their fancy, and mankind to this end enslaved by force or by imposture. And what does this prove? That because men and society are improvable, error, ignorance, despotism, slavery, and superstition must be more prevalent in early times. The mistake of the writers quoted above is not that they have asserted this fact, but that they have proposed it as a rule for the admiration and imitation of future generations. Their mistake has been, with an inconceivable absence of discernment, and upon the faith of a puerile conventionalism, that they have admitted what is inadmissible, viz., the grandeur, dignity, morality, and well-being of the artificial societies of the ancient world; they have not understood that time produces and spreads enlightenment; and that in proportion to the increase of enlightenment, right ceases to be upheld by force, and society regains possession of herself. And, in fact, what is the political work that we are endeavoring to promote? It is no other than the instinctive effort of every people towards liberty. And what is liberty, whose name can make every heart beat, and which can agitate the world, but the union of all liberties, the liberty of conscience, of education, of association, of the press, of movement, of labor, and of exchange; in other words, the free exercise, for all, of all the inoffensive faculties; and again, in other words, the destruction of all despotisms, even of legal despotism, and the reduction of law to its only rational sphere, which is to regulate the individual right of legitimate defense, or to repress injustice? This tendency of the human race, it must be admitted, is greatly thwarted, particularly in our country, by the fatal disposition, resulting from classical teaching and common to all politicians, of placing themselves beyond {38} mankind, to arrange, organize, and regulate it, according to their fancy. For whilst society is struggling to realize liberty, the great men who place themselves at its head, imbued with the principles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, think only of subjecting it to the philanthropic despotism of their social inventions, and making it bear with docility, according to the expression of Rousseau, the yoke of public felicity as pictured in their own imaginations. This was particularly the case in 1789. No sooner was the old system destroyed than society was to be submitted to other artificial arrangements, always with the same starting point--the omnipotence of the law. SAINT-JUST-- The legislator commands the future. It is for him to will for the good of mankind. It is for him to make men what he wishes them to be. ROBESPIERRE-- The function of Government is to direct the physical and moral powers of the nation towards the object of its institution. BILLAUD VARENNES-- A people who are to be restored to liberty must be formed anew. Ancient prejudices must be destroyed, antiquated customs changed, depraved affections corrected, inveterate vices eradicated. For this, a strong force and a vehement impulse will be necessary.... Citizens, the inflexible austerity of Lycurgus created the firm basis of the Spartan republic. The feeble and trusting disposition of Solon plunged Athens into slavery. This parallel contains the whole science of Government. {39} LEPELLETIER-- Considering the extent of human degradation, I am convinced--of the necessity of effecting an entire regeneration of the race, and, if I may so express myself, of creating a new people. Men, therefore, are nothing but raw material. It is not for them to will their own improvement. They are not capable of it; according to Saint-Just, it is only the legislator who is. Men are merely to be what he wills that they should be. According to Robespierre, who copies Rousseau literally, the legislator is to begin by assigning the aim of the institutions of the nation. After this, the Government has only to direct all its physical and moral forces towards this end. All this time the nation itself is to remain perfectly passive; and Billaud Varennes would teach us that it ought to have no prejudices, affections, nor wants, but such as are authorized by the legislator. He even goes so far as to say that the inflexible austerity of a man is the basis of a republic. We have seen that, in cases where the evil is so great that the ordinary magistrates are unable to remedy it, Mably recommends a dictatorship, to promote virtue. "Have recourse," says he, "to an extraordinary magistracy, whose time shall be short, and his power considerable. The imagination of the people requires to be impressed." This doctrine has not been neglected. Listen to Robespierre: The principle of the Republican Government is virtue, and the means to be adopted, during its establishment, is terror. We want to substitute, in our country, morality for self-indulgence, probity for honor, principles for customs, duties for decorum, the empire of reason for the tyranny of {40} fashion, contempt of vice for contempt of misfortune, pride for insolence, greatness of soul for vanity, love of glory for love of money, good people for good company, merit for intrigue, genius for wit, truth for glitter, the charm of happiness for the weariness of pleasure, the greatness of man for the littleness of the great, a magnanimous, powerful, happy people, for one that is easy, frivolous, degraded; that is to say, we would substitute all the virtues and miracles of a republic for all the vices and absurdities of monarchy. At what a vast height above the rest of mankind does Robespierre place himself here! And observe the arrogance with which he speaks. He is not content with expressing a desire for a great renovation of the human heart, he does not even expect such a result from a regular Government. No; he intends to effect it himself, and by means of terror. The object of the discourse from which this puerile and laborious mass of antithesis is extracted, was to exhibit the principles of morality that ought to direct a revolutionary Government. Moreover, when Robespierre asks for a dictatorship, it is not merely for the purpose of repelling a foreign enemy, or of putting down factions; it is that he may establish, by means of terror and as a preliminary to the operation of the Constitution, his own principles of morality. He pretends to nothing short of extirpating from the country by means of terror, self-interest, honor, customs, decorum, fashion, vanity, the love of money, good company, intrigue, wit, luxury, and misery. It is not until after he, Robespierre, shall have accomplished these miracles, as he rightly calls them, that he will allow the law to regain her empire. Truly it would be well if these visionaries, who think so much of themselves and so little of mankind, who want to {41} renew everything, would only be content with trying to reform themselves, the task would be arduous enough for them. In general, however, these gentlemen, the reformers, legislators, and politicians, do not desire to exercise an immediate despotism over mankind. No, they are too moderate and too philanthropic for that. They only contend for the despotism, the absolutism, the omnipotence of the law. They aspire only to make the law. To show how universal this strange disposition has been in France, I had need not only to have copied the whole of the works of Mably, Raynal, Rousseau, Fenelon, and to have made long extracts from Bossuet and Montesquieu, but to have given the entire transactions of the sittings of the Convention. I shall do no such thing, however, but merely refer the reader to them. No wonder this idea suited Bonaparte so well. He embraced it with ardor, and put it in practice with energy. Playing the part of a chemist, Europe was to him the material for his experiments. But this material reacted against him. More than half undeceived, Bonaparte, at St. Helena, seemed to admit that there is an initiative in every people, and he became less hostile to liberty. Yet this did not prevent him from giving this lesson to his son in his will--"To govern is to diffuse morality, education, and well-being." After all this, I hardly need show, by fastidious quotations, the opinions of Morelly, Babeuf, Owen, Saint Simon, and Fourier. I shall confine myself to a few extracts from Louis Blanc's book on the organization of labor. "In our project, society receives the impulse of power." In what does the impulse that power gives to society consist? In imposing upon it the project of Mr. Louis Blanc. {42} On the other hand, society is the human race. The human race, then, is to receive its impulse from Mr. Louis Blanc. It is at liberty to do so or not, it will be said. Of course the human race is at liberty to take advice from anybody, whoever it may be. But this is not the way in which Mr. Louis Blanc understands the thing. He means that his project should be converted into law, and consequently forcibly imposed by power. In our project, the State has only to give a legislation to labor, by means of which the industrial movement may and ought to be accomplished in all liberty. It (the State) merely places society on an incline (that is all) that it may descend, when once it is placed there, by the mere force of things, and by the natural course of the established mechanism. But what is this incline? One indicated by Mr. Louis Blanc. Does it not lead to an abyss? No, it leads to happiness. Why, then, does not society go there of itself? Because it does not know what it wants, and it requires an impulse. What is to give it this impulse? Power. And who is to give the impulse to power? The inventor of the machine, Mr. Louis Blanc. We shall never get out of this circle--mankind passive, and a great man moving it by the intervention of the law. Once on this incline, will society enjoy something like liberty? Without a doubt. And what is liberty? Once for all: liberty consists not only in the right granted, but in the power given to man to exercise, to develop his faculties under the empire of justice, and under the protection of the law. And this is no vain distinction; there is a deep meaning in it, and its consequences are imponderable. For {43} when once it is admitted that man, to be truly free, must have the power to exercise and develop his faculties, it follows that every member of society has a claim upon it for such education as shall enable his faculties to display themselves, and for the tools of labor, without which human activity can find no scope. Now, by whose intervention is society to give to each of its members the requisite education and the necessary tools of labor, unless by that of the State? Thus, liberty is power. In what does this power consist? In possessing education and tools of labor. Who is to give education and tools of labor? Society, who owes them. By whose intervention is society to give tools of labor to those who do not possess them? By the intervention of the State. From whom is the State to obtain them? It is for the reader to answer this question, and to notice whither all this tends. One of the strangest phenomena of our time, and one that will probably be a matter of astonishment to our descendants, is the doctrine which is founded upon this triple hypothesis: the radical passiveness of mankind,--the omnipotence of the law,--the infallibility of the legislator: this is the sacred symbol of the party that proclaims itself exclusively democratic. It is true that it professes also to be social. So far as it is democratic, it has an unlimited faith in mankind. So far as it is social, it places mankind beneath the mud. Are political rights under discussion? Is a legislator to be chosen? Oh, then the people possess science by instinct: they are gifted with an admirable discernment; their will is always right; the general will cannot err. Suffrage cannot {44} be too universal. Nobody is under any responsibility to society. The will and the capacity to choose well are taken for granted. Can the people be mistaken? Are we not living in an age of enlightenment? What! Are the people to be forever led about by the nose? Have they not acquired their rights at the cost of effort and sacrifice? Have they not given sufficient proof of intelligence and wisdom? Are they not arrived at maturity? Are they not in a state to judge for themselves? Do they not know their own interest? Is there a man or a class who would dare to claim the right of putting himself in the place of the people, of deciding and of acting for them? No, no; the people would be free, and they shall be so. They wish to conduct their own affairs, and they shall do so. But when once the legislator is duly elected, then indeed the style of his speech alters. The nation is sent back into passiveness, inertness, nothingness, and the legislator takes possession of omnipotence. It is for him to invent, for him to direct, for him to impel, for him to organize. Mankind has nothing to do but to submit; the hour of despotism has struck. And we must observe that this is decisive; for the people, just before so enlightened, so moral, so perfect, have no inclinations at all, or, if they have any, these all lead them downwards towards degradation. And yet they ought to have a little liberty! But are we not assured by Mr. Considerant that liberty leads fatally to monopoly? Are we not told that liberty is competition? and that competition, according to Mr. Louis Blanc, is a system of extermination for the people, and of ruination for trade? For that reason people are exterminated and ruined in proportion as they are free--take, for example, Switzerland, Holland, England, and the United States? Does not Mr. Louis Blanc tell us again that competition {45} leads to monopoly, and that, for the same reason, cheapness leads to exorbitant prices? That competition tends to drain the sources of consumption, and diverts production to a destructive activity? That competition forces production to increase, and consumption to decrease--whence it follows that free people produce for the sake of not consuming; that there is nothing but oppression and madness among them; and that it is absolutely necessary for Mr. Louis Blanc to see to it? What sort of liberty should be allowed to men? Liberty of conscience?--But we should see them all profiting by the permission to become atheists. Liberty of education?--But parents would be paying professors to teach their sons immorality and error; besides, if we are to believe Mr. Thiers, education, if left to the national liberty, would cease to be national, and we should be educating our children in the ideas of the Turks or Hindus, instead of which, thanks to the legal despotism of the universities, they have the good fortune to be educated in the noble ideas of the Romans. Liberty of labor? But this is only competition, whose effect is to leave all products unconsumed, to exterminate the people, and to ruin the tradesmen. The liberty of exchange? But it is well known that the protectionists have shown, over and over again, that a man will inevitably be ruined when he exchanges freely, and that to become rich it is necessary to exchange without liberty. Liberty of association? But according to the socialist doctrine, liberty and association exclude each other, for the liberty of men is attacked just to force them to associate. You must see, then, that the socialist democrats cannot in conscience allow men any liberty, because, by their own {46} nature, they tend in every instance to all kinds of degradation and demoralization. We are therefore left to conjecture, in this case, upon what foundation universal suffrage is claimed for them with so much importunity. The pretensions of organizers suggest another question, which I have often asked them, and to which I am not aware that I ever received an answer: Since the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to allow them liberty, how comes it to pass that the tendencies of organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their agents form a part of the human race? Do they consider that they are composed of different materials from the rest of mankind? They say that society, when left to itself, rushes to inevitable destruction, because its instincts are perverse. They presume to stop it in its downward course, and to give it a better direction. They have, therefore, received from heaven, intelligence and virtues that place them beyond and above mankind: let them show their title to this superiority. They would be our shepherds, and we are to be their flock. This arrangement presupposes in them a natural superiority, the right to which we are fully justified in calling upon them to prove. You must observe that I am not contending against their right to invent social combinations, to propagate them, to recommend them, and to try them upon themselves, at their own expense and risk; but I do dispute their right to impose them upon us through the medium of the law, that is, by force and by public taxes. I would not insist upon the Cabetists, the Fourierists, the Proudhonians, the Academics, and the Protectionists renouncing their own particular ideas; I would only have them renounce the idea that is common to them all--viz., {47} that of subjecting us by force to their own categories and rankings to their social laboratories, to their ever-inflating bank, to their Greco-Roman morality, and to their commercial restrictions. I would ask them to allow us the faculty of judging of their plans, and not to oblige us to adopt them if we find that they hurt our interests or are repugnant to our consciences. To presume to have recourse to power and taxation, besides being oppressive and unjust, implies further, the pernicious assumption that the organized is infallible, and mankind incompetent. And if mankind is not competent to judge for itself, why do they talk so much about universal suffrage? This contradiction in ideas is unhappily to be found also in facts; and whilst the French nation has preceded all others in obtaining its rights, or rather its political claims, this has by no means prevented it from being more governed, and directed, and imposed upon, and fettered, and cheated, than any other nation. It is also the one, of all others, where revolutions are constantly to be dreaded, and it is perfectly natural that it should be so. So long as this idea is retained, which is admitted by all our politicians, and so energetically expressed by Mr. Louis Blanc in these words--"Society receives its impulse from power," so long as men consider themselves as capable of feeling, yet passive--incapable of raising themselves by their own discernment and by their own energy to any morality, or well-being, and while they expect everything from the law; in a word, while they admit that their relations with the State are the same as those of the flock with the shepherd, it is clear that the responsibility of power is immense. Fortune and misfortune, wealth and destitution, equality and inequality all proceed from it. It is charged {48} with everything, it undertakes everything, it does everything; therefore it has to answer for everything. If we are happy, it has a right to claim our gratitude; but if we are miserable, it alone must bear the blame. Are not our persons and property in fact, at its disposal? Is not the law omnipotent? In creating the educational monopoly, it has undertaken to answer the expectations of fathers of families who have been deprived of liberty; and if these expectations are disappointed, whose fault is it? In regulating industry, it has undertaken to make it prosper, otherwise it would have been absurd to deprive it of its liberty; and if it suffers, whose fault is it? In pretending to adjust the balance of commerce by the game of tariffs, it undertakes to make commerce prosper; and if, so far from prospering, it is destroyed, whose fault is it? In granting its protection to maritime armaments in exchange for their liberty, it has undertaken to render them self-sufficient; if they become burdensome, whose fault is it? Thus, there is not a grievance in the nation for which the Government does not voluntarily make itself responsible. Is it any wonder that every failure threatens to cause a revolution? And what is the remedy proposed? To extend indefinitely the dominion of the law, i.e., the responsibility of Government. But if the Government undertakes to raise and to regulate wages, and is not able to do it; if it undertakes to assist all those who are in want, and is not able to do it; if it undertakes to provide work for every laborer, and is not able to do it; if it undertakes to offer to all who wish to borrow, easy credit, and is not able to do it; if, in words that we regret should have escaped the pen of Mr. de Lamartine, "the State considers that its mission is to enlighten, to {49} develop, to enlarge, to strengthen, to spiritualize, and to sanctify the soul of the people"--if it fails in this, is it not obvious that after every disappointment, which, alas! is more than probable, there will be a no less inevitable revolution? I shall now resume the subject by remarking, that immediately after the economical part [4] of the question, and before the political part, a leading question presents itself. It is the following: What is law? What ought it to be? What is its domain? What are its limits? Where, in fact, does the prerogative of the legislator stop? I have no hesitation in answering, Law is common force organized to prevent injustice;--in short, Law is Justice. It is not true that the legislator has absolute power over our persons and property, since they pre-exist, and his work is only to secure them from injury. It is not true that the mission of the law is to regulate our consciences, our ideas, our will, our education, our sentiments, our works, our exchanges, our gifts, our enjoyments. Its mission is to prevent the rights of one from interfering with those of another, in any one of these things. Law, because it has force for its necessary sanction, can only have the domain of force, which is justice. And as every individual has a right to have recourse to force only in cases of lawful defense, so collective force, so which is only the union {50} of individual forces, cannot be rationally used for any other end. The law, then, is solely the organization of individual rights that existed before law. Law is justice. So far from being able to oppress the people, or to plunder their property, even for a philanthropic end, its mission is to protect the people, and to secure to them the possession of their property. It must not be said, either, that it may be philanthropic, so long as it abstains from all oppression; for this is a contradiction. The law cannot avoid acting upon our persons and property; if it does not secure them, then it violates them if it touches them. The law is justice. Nothing can be more clear and simple, more perfectly defined and bounded, or more visible to every eye; for justice is a given quantity, immutable and unchangeable, and which admits of neither increase or diminution. Depart from this point, make the law religious, fraternal, equalizing, industrial, literary, or artistic, and you will be lost in vagueness and uncertainty; you will be upon unknown ground, in a forced Utopia, or, what is worse, in the midst of a multitude of contending Utopias, each striving to gain possession of the law, and to impose it upon you; for fraternity and philanthropy have no fixed limits, as justice has. Where will you stop? Where is the law to stop? One person, Mr. de Saint Cricq, will only extend his philanthropy to some of the industrial classes, and will require the law to slight the consumers in favor of the producers. Another, like Mr. Considérant, will take up the cause of the working classes, and claim for them by means of the law, at a fixed rate, clothing, lodging, food, and {51} everything necessary for the support of life. A third, Mr. Louis Blanc, will say, and with reason, that this would be an incomplete fraternity, and that the law ought to provide them with tools of labor and education. A fourth will observe that such an arrangement still leaves room for inequality, and that the law ought to introduce into the most remote hamlets luxury, literature, and the arts. This is the high road to communism; in other words, legislation will be--as it now is--the battlefield for everybody's dreams and everybody's covetousness. Law is justice. In this proposition we represent to ourselves a simple, immovable Government. And I defy anyone to tell me whence the thought of a revolution, an insurrection, or a simple disturbance could arise against a public force confined to the repression of injustice. Under such a system, there would be more well-being, and this well-being would be more equally distributed; and as to the sufferings inseparable from humanity, no one would think of accusing the Government of them, for it would be as innocent of them as it is of the variations of the temperature. Have the people ever been known to rise against the court of appeals, or assail the justices of the peace, for the sake of claiming the rate of wages, free credit, tools of labor, the advantages of the tariff, or the social workshop? They know perfectly well that these matters are beyond the jurisdiction of the justices of the peace, and they would soon learn that they are not within the jurisdiction of the law quite as much. But if the law were to be made upon the principle of fraternity, if it were to be proclaimed that from it proceed all benefits and all evils--that it is responsible for every individual grievance and for every social inequality--then {52} you open the door to an endless succession of complaints, irritations, troubles, and revolutions. _Law is justice_. And it would be very strange if it could properly be anything else! Is not justice right? Are not rights equal? With what show of right can the law interfere to subject me to the social plans of Messrs. Mimerel, de Melun, Thiers, or Louis Blanc, rather than to subject these gentlemen to my plans? Is it to be supposed that Nature has not bestowed upon me sufficient imagination to invent a Utopia too? Is it for the law to make choice of one amongst so many fancies, and to make use of the public force in its service? _Law is justice_. And let it not be said, as it continually is, that the law, in this sense, would be atheistic, individual, and heartless, and that it would mold mankind in its own image. This is an absurd conclusion, quite worthy of the governmental infatuation which sees mankind in the law. What then? Does it follow that if we are free, we shall cease to act? Does it follow that if we do not receive an impulse from the law, we shall receive no impulse at all? Does it follow that if the law confines itself to securing to us the free exercise of our faculties, our faculties will be paralyzed? Does it follow, that if the law does not impose upon us forms of religion, modes of association, methods of education, rules for labor, directions for exchange, and plans for charity, we shall plunge headlong into atheism, isolation, ignorance, misery, and greed? Does it follow, that we shall no longer recognize the power and goodness of God; that we shall cease to associate together, to help each other, to love and assist our unfortunate brethren, to {53} study the secrets of nature, and to aspire after perfection in our existence? _Law is justice_. And it is under the law of justice, under the reign of right, under the influence of liberty, security, stability, and responsibility, that every man will attain to the fullness of his worth, to all the dignity of his being, and that mankind will accomplish with order and with calmness--slowly, it is true, but with certainty--the progress ordained for it. I believe that my theory is correct; for whatever be the question upon which I am arguing, whether it be religious, philosophical, political, or economical; whether it affects well-being, morality, equality, right, justice, progress, responsibility, property, labor, exchange, capital, wages, taxes, population, credit, or Government; at whatever point of the scientific horizon I start from, I invariably come to the same thing--the solution of the social problem is in liberty. And have I not experience on my side? Cast your eye over the globe. Which are the happiest, the most moral, and the most peaceable nations? Those where the law interferes the least with private activity; where the Government is the least felt; where individuality has the most scope, and public opinion the most influence; where the machinery of the administration is the least important and the least complicated; where taxation is lightest and least unequal, popular discontent the least excited and the least justifiable; where the responsibility of individuals and classes is the most active, and where, consequently, if morals are not in a perfect state, at any rate they tend incessantly to correct themselves; where transactions, meetings, and associations are the least fettered; where labor, capital, and production suffer the least from artificial {54} displacements; where mankind follows most completely its own natural course; where the thought of God prevails the most over the inventions of men; those, in short, who realize the most nearly this idea that within the limits of right, all should flow from the free, perfectible, and voluntary action of man; nothing be attempted by the law or by force, except the administration of universal justice. I cannot avoid coming to this conclusion--that there are too many great men in the world; there are too many legislators, organizers, institutors of society, conductors of the people, fathers of nations, etc., etc. Too many persons place themselves above mankind, to rule and patronize it; too many persons make a trade of looking after it. It will be answered--"You yourself are occupied upon it all this time." Very true. But it must be admitted that it is in another sense entirely that I am speaking; and if I join the reformers it is solely for the purpose of inducing them to relax their hold. I am not doing as Vaucauson did with his automaton, but as a physiologist does with the human frame; I would study and admire it. I am acting with regard to it in the spirit that animated a celebrated traveler. He found himself in the midst of a savage tribe. A child had just been born, and a crowd of soothsayers, magicians, and quacks were around it, armed with rings, hooks, and bandages. One said--"This child will never smell the perfume of a calumet, unless I stretch his nostrils." Another said--"He will be without the sense of hearing, unless I draw his ears down to his shoulders." A third said--"He will never see the light of the sun, unless I give his eyes an oblique direction." A fourth said--"He will never be upright, unless I bend his legs." A fifth said--"He will not be able to think, unless I press his {55} brain." "Stop!" said the traveler. "Whatever God does, is well done; do not pretend to know more than He; and as He has given organs to this frail creature, allow those organs to develop themselves, to strengthen themselves by exercise, use, experience, and liberty." God has implanted in mankind also all that is necessary to enable it to accomplish its destinies. There is a providential social physiology, as well as a providential human physiology. The social organs are constituted so as to enable them to develop harmoniously in the grand air of liberty. Away, then, with quacks and organizers! Away with their rings, and their chains, and their hooks, and their pincers! Away with their artificial methods! Away with their social laboratories, their governmental whims, their centralization, their tariffs, their universities, their State religions, their inflationary or monopolizing banks, their limitations, their restrictions, their moralizations, and their equalization by taxation! And now, after having vainly inflicted upon the social body so many systems, let them end where they ought to have begun--reject all systems, and try liberty--liberty, which is an act of faith in God and in His work. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: First published in 1850.] [Footnote 2: General Council of Manufactures, Agriculture, and Commerce, 6th of May, 1850.] [Footnote 3: If protection were only granted in France to a single class, to the engineers, for instance, it would be so absurdly plundering, as to be unable to maintain itself. Thus we see all the protected trades combine, make common cause, and even recruit themselves in such a way as to appear to embrace the mass of the national labor. They feel instinctively that plunder is slurred over by being generalized.] [Footnote 4: Political economy precedes politics: the former has to discover whether human interests are harmonious or antagonistic, a fact which must be settled before the latter can determine the prerogatives of Government.] INDEX Action, human. See Individualism; Mankind Agriculture analogy to society, 35 Persian, 26 Antiquity. See Greece; Rome Authority. See Government Beggars, 11 Billaud-Varennes, Jean Nicolas, 38 Blanc, Louis competition, 45 doctrine, 42, 43 force of society, 47, 48 labor, 42 law, 50, 52 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 41 Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne, 25, 26 Cabetists, 46, 47 Capital displacement, 2 Carlier, Pierre, 13 Carthage, 32 Charity, vii, 5, 17 See also Wealth, equality of; Welfare Classical studies, 25, 26, 36, 37, 38 Collectivism, 2, 3 See also Government Communism, 18 Competition meaning, 45 results, 45 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 35, 38 Constituent Assembly, 24 Conventionality, 37 Crete, 28 Defense right of, 2, 3, 37, 49, 50 Democracy, vi, 43, 44 Democrats, 43 Dictatorship, vii, 39, 40 Disposition, fatal, 5, 37, 38 Distribution, 33, 34 Dole, 10, 11 See also Welfare Dupin, Charles, 13 Education classical, 26, 38 controlled, 33 Greek, 26 {57} {58} liberty in, 44 free, 21, 22 government provided, 22, 48 Egypt, 25, 26, 27 Elections, 43, 44 See also Voting Employment assigned, 26 See also Labor Equality of wealth, 11, 20, 29, 36 Fénelon, François de Salignac de La Mothe antiquity, 27, 29 Telemachus, 27 Force common or collective, 2, 3 individual, 2, 3 motive, of society, 40, 43 See also Government; Law Forced conformity, viii Fourier, François Marie Charles, 41 Fourierists, 46 France revolutions, 47 Fraternity legally enforced, 16, 17, 21, 22 Fraud, 13, 14 Freedom. See Liberty French Revolution, 38 public services, 10, 11 purpose of, v relaxed, 35 republican, 30, 39 responsibility and, 3, 47, 48, 51 results, 28 stability, 31 virtue, 39 See also Communism, Socialism Greece education, 26 law, 26, 27 republic, 29, 30 Sparta, 32, 36, 38 Greed, 5 Happiness of the governed, 28 History, 5 Humanity lost, 19, 20 Imports. See Trade Individualism, 3 Industry, protected. See Protectionism Jobs. See Employment Justice and injustice, distinction between, 7 generalized, 7 immutable, 49, 50 intentions and, 17, 18 law and, 3, 6, 49 reigning, 19 General welfare, 19 Government American ideal of, v corrupting education by, vi democratic, 29, 43, 44 education, 23, 48 force, 2, 3 function, 38 monopoly, 45 morality, 39 motive force, 40, 43 power, v, 47 Labor displaced, 4 Land. See Property Law Cretan, 28 defined, 2, 16 {59} Egyptian, 25, 26, 27, 28 fraternity and, 17 functions, 16, 31, 33, 49, 50 Greek, 26, 28, 29 justice and, 3, 4, 16, 51 morality and, 7, 21 motive force, 25 object of, 19 omnipotence, 44, 49 Persian, 26 perverted, v, 1, 5 philanthropic, 17 plunder and, 5, 13 posterior and inferior, 2, 3 respect for, 7, 9 Rousseau's views, 31, 33, 38 spirit of, 32 study of, 25 United States, 12 See also Legislation Lamartine, Alphonse Marie Louis de, fraternity, 17 government power, 48, 49 Lawgiver, 38, 43 Legislation conflict in, 32 monopoly on, 5 struggle for control of, 11, 12 universal right of, 7 See also Law Legislator. See Lawgiver; Politicians Lepéletier, Louis Michel de Saint Fargeau, 39 Liberty competition and, 44, 45 defined, 42 denied, 44, 45 described, 53 education and, 44, 45 individual, 3 as power, 43 returned to, 55 seeking, 38 Life, faculties of, 1 Louis XIV 27 Lycurgus government, 30, 35, 36 influence, 33, 40 Mably, Abbé Gabriel Bonnot de, 35, 39 Mankind assimilation, 2 concern for, 54 degraded, 25 divided, 23 inert, 23, 25, 26, 28, 31, 35, 36, 38, 39, 42, 43, 44, 47 inertia, 44 as machine, 31 nature of, 33 violation of, 52 Melun, Armand de, 52 Mentor, 28, 29 Mimerel de Roubaix, Pierre Auguste Remi, 52 Monopoly, 5, 45 Montalembert, Charles, Comte de, 13, 15 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondât, Baron de, 29, 31 Morality law and, 21, 22 Morelly, 41 Napoleon, 41 Natural rights, v Nature, gifts of, 1 Oliver de Serres, Guillaume Antoine, 29 Order, 3 Owen, Robert, 41 Ownership. See Property Paraguay, 30 Persia, 26 {60} Personality, 2 Phalansteries, 55 Philanthropy. See Charity Plato republic, 30 Plunder absence of, 16 burdens of, 5, 6 defined, 17 general welfare and, 19 extralegal, 13 kinds, 13 legal, v, ix, 6, 13, 22 organized, 14 origin of, 6 partial, 15, 16 socialistic, 13 universal, 15, 16 Politicians dreams of, 36 genius of, 30 goodness of, 25 importance of, 22, 23 responsibility of, 27 social engineers, 22, 24, 32, 34, 37, 38, 40, 42, 44, 45 superior, 46, 54 Politics exaggerated importance of, 8 and favors, vi plunder through, vi Poor relief. See Charity; Welfare Power. See Government Property man and, 2 origin of, 5 Protectionism, 18 United States, 12 Proudhonians, 46 Providence, 55 Public relief, 10, 20, 29 Raynal, Abbé Guillaume, 33, 35 Religion, State, 22 Rent seeking, vi, vii Republic kinds of, 29 virtues of, 39 Revolt, 6 Revolution, 47 French, 38 Rhodes, 32 Rights individual, v, 2, 3 Roberspierre, Jean Jacques government, 38 lawgiver, 40 Rome virtue, 32 Rousseau, Jean Jacques disciples, 8, 9 on the lawgiver, 31, 33 Saint-Cricq, Barthélémy, Pierre Laurent, Comte de, 50 Saint-Just, Louis Antoine Léon de, 38 Saint-Simon, Claude Henri, Comte de doctrine, 41 Salentum, 27, 29 Security consequences, 3 Self-defense, 2, 37, 49, 50 Selfishness, 5 Serres, Oliver de, 29 Slavery, United States, viii, 12 universality, 5 Socialism confused, ix, 22 defined, 14, 15 disguised, 22 experiments, 23, 24 legal plunder, 13 sincerely believed, 18 social engineers, 22, 24 refutation of, 15 Socialists, vii Society enlightened, 37 {61} experiments, 23 motive force, 40, 43 object of, 36, 37 parable of the traveler, 54, 55 Solon, 33, 35 Sparta, 32, 36 Spoliation. See Plunder State. See Government Suffrage. See Universal suffrage Tariffs, vi, viii Telemachus, 27 Terror as means of republican government, 39, 40 Theirs, Louis Adolphe doctrine, 52 education, 45 Tyre, 32 United States, viii, 12 Declaration of Independence, v Universal suffrage demand for, 9, 43, 44, 46, 47 importance of, 10 incapacity and, 9 objections, 9 Vaucanson, Jacques de, 54 Vested interests, 13, 14 Virtue and vice, 28, 30, 35, 36, 40 Voting responsibility and, 9, 10 right of, 10 See also Universal suffrage Want satisfaction, 4 Wealth equality of, 11, 21, 29, 36 transfer of, vii Welfare, 10, 20, 28 The law perverted! The law--and, in its wake, all the collective forces of the nation. The law, I say, not only diverted from its proper direction, but made to pursue one entirely contrary! The law becomes the tool of every kind of avarice, instead of being its check! The law guilty of that very inequity which it was its mission to punish! Truly, this is a serious fact, if it exists, and one to which I feel bound to call the attention of my fellow-citizens. --Frédéric Bastiat 
45827	----	+-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | | | Note: | | | | Equals signs are used to surround =bold text=; | | underscores to surround _italic text_. | | | | Transcriber notes can be found at the end of the file | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ Fabian Tract No. 45. THE IMPOSSIBILITIES OF ANARCHISM. BY BERNARD SHAW PUBLISHED BY THE FABIAN SOCIETY PRICE TWOPENCE LONDON TO BE OBTAINED OF THE FABIAN SOCIETY, 276 STRAND, W.C. REPRINTED NOVEMBER 1895 THE IMPOSSIBILITIES OF ANARCHISM.[1] Anarchists and Socialists. Some years ago, as the practical policy of the Socialist party in England began to shape itself more and more definitely into the program of Social-Democracy, it became apparent that we could not progress without the gravest violations of principles of all sorts. In particular, the democratic side of the program was found to be incompatible with the sacred principle of the Autonomy of the Individual. It also involved a recognition of the State, an institution altogether repugnant to the principle of Freedom. Worse than that, it involved compromise at every step; and principles, as Mr. John Morley once eloquently showed, must not be compromised. The result was that many of us fell to quarrelling; refused to associate with one another; denounced each other as trimmers or Impossibilists, according to our side in the controversy; and finally succeeded in creating a considerable stock of ill-feeling. My own side in the controversy was the unprincipled one, as Socialism to me has always meant, not a principle, but certain definite economic measures which I wish to see taken. Indeed, I have often been reproached for limiting the term Socialism too much to the economic side of the great movement towards equality. That movement, however, appears to me to be as much an Individualist as a Socialist one; and though there are Socialists, like Sir William Harcourt, to whom Socialism means the sum total of humanitarian aspiration, in which the transfer of some millions of acres of property from private to public ownership must seem but an inessential and even undesirable detail, this sublimer shade of Socialism suffers from such a lack of concentration upon definite measures, that, but for the honor and glory of the thing, its professors might as well call themselves Conservatives. Now what with Socialists of this sort, and persons who found that the practical remedy for white slavery was incompatible with the principle of Liberty, and the practical remedy for despotism incompatible with the principle of Democracy, and the practical conduct of politics incompatible with the principle of Personal Integrity (in the sense of having your own way in everything), the practical men were at last driven into frank Opportunism. When, for instance, they found national and local organization of the working classes opposed by Socialists on the ground that Socialism is universal and international in principle; when they found their Radical and Trade Unionist allies ostracized by Socialists for being outside the pale of the Socialist faith one and indivisible; when they saw agricultural laborers alienated by undiscriminating denunciations of allotments as "individualistic"; then they felt the full force of the saying that Socialism would spread fast enough if it were not for the Socialists. It was bad enough to have to contend with the conservative forces of the modern unsocialist State without also having to fight the seven deadly virtues in possession of the Socialists themselves. The conflict between ideal Socialism and practical Social-Democracy destroyed the Chartist organization half a century ago, as it destroyed the Socialist League only the other day. But it has never gone so far as the conflict between Social-Democracy and Anarchism. For the Anarchists will recommend abstention from voting and refusal to pay taxes in cases where the Social-Democrats are strenuously urging the workers to organize their votes so as to return candidates pledged to contend for extensions of the franchise and for taxation of unearned incomes, the object of such taxation being the raising of State capital for all sorts of collective purposes, from the opening of public libraries to the municipalization and nationalization of our industries. In fact, the denunciation of Social-Democratic methods by Anarchists is just as much a matter of course as the denunciation of Social-Democratic aims by Conservatives. It is possible that some of the strangers present may be surprised to hear this, since no distinction is made in the newspapers which support the existing social order between Social-Democrats and Anarchists, both being alike hostile to that order. In the columns of such papers all revolutionists are Socialists; all Socialists are Anarchists; and all Anarchists are incendiaries, assassins and thieves. One result of this is that the imaginative French or Italian criminal who reads the papers, sometimes declares, when taken red-handed in the commission of murder or burglary, that he is an Anarchist acting on principle. And in all countries the more violent and reckless temperaments among the discontented are attracted by the name Anarchist merely because it suggests desperate, thorough, uncompromising, implacable war on existing injustices. It is therefore necessary to warn you that there are some persons abusively called Anarchists by their political opponents, and others ignorantly so described by themselves, who are nevertheless not Anarchists at all within the meaning of this paper. On the other hand, many persons who are never called Anarchists either by themselves or others, take Anarchist ground in their opposition to Social-Democracy just as clearly as the writers with whom I shall more particularly deal. The old Whigs and new Tories of the school of Cobden and Bright, the "Philosophic Radicals," the economists of whom Bastiat is the type, Lord Wemyss and Lord Bramwell, Mr. Herbert Spencer and Mr. Auberon Herbert, Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Arthur Balfour, Mr. John Morley, Mr. Leonard Courtney: any of these is, in England, a more typical Anarchist than Bakounin. They distrust State action, and are jealous advocates of the prerogative of the individual, proposing to restrict the one and to extend the other as far as is humanly possible, in opposition to the Social-Democrat, who proposes to democratize the State and throw upon it the whole work of organizing the national industry, thereby making it the most vital organ in the social body. Obviously there are natural limits to the application of both views; and Anarchists and Social-Democrats are alike subject to the fool's argument that since neither collective provision for the individual nor individual freedom from collective control can be made complete, neither party is thoroughly consistent. No dialectic of that kind will, I hope, be found in the following criticism of Anarchism. It is confined to the practical measures proposed by Anarchists, and raises no discussion as to aims or principles. As to these we are all agreed. Justice, Virtue, Truth, Brotherhood, the highest interests of the people, moral as well as physical: these are dear not only to Social-Democrats and Anarchists, but also to Tories, Whigs, Radicals, and probably also to Moonlighters and Dynamitards. It is with the methods by which it is proposed to give active effect to them that I am concerned here; and to that point I shall now address myself by reading you a paper which I wrote more than four years ago on the subject chosen for to-night. I may add that it has not been revived from a wanton desire to renew an old dispute, but in response to a demand from the provincial Fabian Societies, bewildered as they are by the unexpected opposition of the Anarchists, from whom they had rather expected some sympathy. This old paper of mine being the only document of the kind available, my colleagues have requested me to expunge such errors and follies as I have grown out of since 1888, and to take this opportunity of submitting it to the judgment of the Society. Which I shall now do without further preamble. Individualist Anarchism. The full economic detail of Individualist Anarchism may be inferred with sufficient completeness from an article entitled "State Socialism and Anarchism: how far they agree, and wherein they differ," which appeared in March, 1888, in _Liberty_, an Anarchist journal published in Boston, Mass., and edited by the author of the article, Mr. Benjamin R. Tucker. An examination of any number of this journal will shew that as a candid, clear-headed, and courageous demonstrator of Individualist Anarchism by purely intellectual methods, Mr. Tucker may safely be accepted as one of the most capable spokesmen of his party. "The economic principles of Modern Socialism," says Mr. Tucker, "are a logical deduction from the principle laid down by Adam Smith in the early chapters of his _Wealth of Nations_--namely, that labor is the true measure of price. From this principle, these three men [Josiah Warren, Proudhon and Marx] deduced 'that the natural wage of labor is its product.'" Now the Socialist who is unwary enough to accept this economic position will presently find himself logically committed to the Whig doctrine of _laissez-faire_. And here Mr. Tucker will cry, "Why not? _Laissez-faire_ is exactly what we want. Destroy the money monopoly, the tariff monopoly, and the patent monopoly. Enforce then only those land titles which rest on personal occupancy or cultivation;[2] and the social problem of how to secure to each worker the product of his own labor will be solved simply by everyone minding his own business."[3] Let us see whether it will or not. Suppose we decree that henceforth no more rent shall be paid in England, and that each man shall privately own his house, and hold his shop, factory, or place of business jointly with those who work with him in it. Let everyone be free to issue money from his own mint without tax or stamp. Let all taxes on commodities be abolished, and patents and copyrights be things of the past. Try to imagine yourself under these promising conditions with life before you. You may start in business as a crossing sweeper, shopkeeper, collier, farmer, miller, banker, or what not. Whatever your choice may be, the first thing you find is that the reward of your labor depends far more on the situation in which you exercise it than on yourself. If you sweep the crossing between St. James's and Albemarle Streets you prosper greatly. But if you are forestalled not only there, but at every point more central than, say, the corner of Holford Square, Islington, you may sweep twice as hard as your rival in Piccadilly, and not take a fifth of his toll. At such a pass you may well curse Adam Smith and his principle that labor is the measure of price, and either advocate a democratically constituted State Socialist municipality, paying all its crossing sweepers equally, or else cast your broom upon the Thames and turn shopkeeper. Yet here again the same difficulty crops up. Your takings depend, not on yourself, but on the number of people who pass your window per hour. At Charing Cross or Cheapside fortunes are to be made: in the main street at Putney one can do enough to hold up one's head: further out, a thousand yards right or left of the Portsmouth Road, the most industrious man in the world may go whistle for a customer. Evidently retail shopkeeping is not the thing for a man of spirit after Charing Cross and Cheapside have been appropriated by occupying owners on the principle of first come first served. You must aspire then to wholesale dealing--nay, to banking. Alas! the difficulty is intensified beyond calculation. Take that financial trinity, Glyn, Mills and Currie; transplant them only a few miles from Lombard Street; and they will soon be objects of pity to the traditional sailor who once presented at their counter a cheque for £25 and generously offered to take it in instalments, as he did not wish to be too hard on them all at once. Turning your back on banking, you meddle in the wheat trade, and end by offering to exchange an occupying ownership of all Salisbury Plain for permission to pay a rack rent for premises within hail of "The Baltic" and its barometer. Probably there are some people who have a blind belief that crossing sweepers, "The Baltic," Lombard Street, and the like, are too utterly of the essence of the present system to survive the introduction of Anarchism. They will tell me that I am reading the conditions of the present into the future. Against such instinctive convictions it is vain to protest that I am reading only Mr. Tucker's conditions. But at least there will be farming, milling, and mining, conducted by human agents, under Anarchism. Now the farmer will not find in his perfect Anarchist market two prices at one time for two bushels of wheat of the same quality; yet the labor cost of each bushel will vary considerably according to the fertility of the farm on which it was raised, and the proximity of that farm to the market. A good soil will often yield the strongest and richest grain to less labor per acre or per bushel than must be spent on land that returns a crop less valuable by five shillings a quarter. When all the best land is held by occupying owners, those who have to content themselves with poorer soils will hail the principle that labor is the measure of price with the thumb to the nose. Among the millers, too, there must needs be grievous mistrust of Proudhon and Josiah Warren. For of two men with equally good heart to work and machinery to work with, one may be on a stream that will easily turn six millstones; whilst the other, by natural default of water, or being cut off by his fellow higher up stream, may barely be able to keep two pairs of stones in gear, and may in a dry season be ready to tie these two about his neck and lie down under the scum of his pond. Certainly, he can defy drought by setting to work with a steam engine, steel rollers, and all the latest contrivances for squashing wheat into dust instead of grinding it into flour; yet, after all his outlay, he will not be able to get a penny a sack more for his stuff than his competitor, to whose water-wheel Nature is gratuitously putting her shoulder. "Competition everywhere and always" of his unaided strength against that of his rival he might endure; but to fight naked against one armed with the winds and waves (for there are windmills as well as watermills) is no sound justice, though it be sound Anarchism. And how would occupying ownership of mines work, when it is an easier matter to get prime Wallsend and Silkstone out of one mine than to get slates and steam fuel out of another, even after twenty years' preliminary shaft-sinking? Would Mr. Tucker, if he had on sale from a rich mine some Silkstone that had only cost half as much labor as steam coal from a relatively poor one, boldly announce:--"Prices this day: Prime Silkstone, per ton, 25s.; best steam ditto, 50s. Terms, cash. Principles, those of Adam Smith--see 'Wealth of Nations' _passim_"? Certainly not with "competition everywhere and always," unless custom was no object to him in comparison with principle. It is useless to multiply instances. There is only one country in which any square foot of land is as favorably situated for conducting exchanges, or as richly endowed by nature for production, as any other square foot; and the name of that country is Utopia. In Utopia alone, therefore, would occupying ownership be just. In England, America and other places, rashly created without consulting the Anarchists, Nature is all caprice and injustice in dealing with Labor. Here you scratch her with a spade; and earth's increase and foison plenty are added to you. On the other side of the hedge twenty steam-diggers will not extort a turnip from her. Still less adapted to Anarchism than the fields and mines is the crowded city. The distributor flourishes where men love to congregate: his work is to bring commodities to men; but here the men bring themselves to the commodities. Remove your distributor a mile, and his carts and travellers must scour the country for customers. None know this better than the landlords. Up High Street, down Low Street, over the bridge and into Crow Street, the toilers may sweat equally for equal wages; but their product varies; and the ground rents vary with the product. Competition levels down the share kept by the worker as it levels up the hours of his labor; and the surplus, high or low according to the fertility of the soil or convenience of the site, goes as high rent or low rent, but always in the long run rack rent, to the owner of the land. Now Mr. Tucker's remedy for this is to make the occupier--the actual worker--the owner. Obviously the effect would be, not to abolish his advantage over his less favorably circumstanced competitors, but simply to authorize him to put it into his own pocket instead of handing it over to a landlord. He would then, it is true, be (as far as his place of business was concerned) a worker instead of an idler; but he would get more product as a manufacturer and more custom as a distributor than other equally industrious workers in worse situations. He could thus save faster than they, and retire from active service at an age when they would still have many years more work before them. His ownership of his place of business would of course lapse in favor of his successor the instant he retired. How would the rest of the community decide who was to be the successor--would they toss up for it, or fight for it, or would he be allowed to nominate his heir, in which case he would either nominate his son or sell his nomination for a large fine? Again, his retirement from his place of business would leave him still in possession, as occupying owner, of his private residence; and this might be of exceptional or even unique desirability in point of situation. It might, for instance, be built on Richmond Hill, and command from its windows the beautiful view of the Thames valley to be obtained from that spot. Now it is clear that Richmond Hill will not accommodate all the people who would rather live there than in the Essex marshes. It is easy to say, Let the occupier be the owner; but the question is, Who is to be the occupier? Suppose it were settled by drawing lots, what would prevent the winner from selling his privilege for its full (unearned) value under free exchange and omnipresent competition? To such problems as these, Individualist Anarchism offers no solution. It theorizes throughout on the assumption that one place in a country is as good as another. Under a system of occupying ownership, rent would appear only in its primary form of an excess of the prices of articles over the expenses of producing them, thus enabling owners of superior land to get more for their products than cost price. If, for example, the worst land worth using were only one-third as productive as the best land, then the owner-occupiers of that best land would get in the market the labor cost of their wares three times over. This 200 per cent premium would be just as truly ground rent as if it were paid openly as such to the Duke of Bedford or the Astors. It may be asked why prices must go up to the expenses of production on the very worst land. Why not ascertain and charge the average cost of production taking good and bad land together?[4] Simply because nothing short of the maximum labor cost would repay the owners of the worst land. In fact, the worst land would not be cultivated until the price had risen. The process would be as follows. Suppose the need of the population for wheat were satisfied by crops raised from the best available land only. Free competition in wheat-producing would then bring the price down to the labor cost or expenses of production. Now suppose an increase of population sufficient to overtax the wheat-supplying capacity of the best land. The supply falling short of the demand, the price of wheat would rise. When it had risen to the labor cost of production from land one degree inferior to the best, it would be worth while to cultivate that inferior land. When that new source came to be overtaxed by the still growing population, the price would rise again until it would repay the cost of raising wheat from land yet lower in fertility than the second grade. But these descents would in nowise diminish the fertility of the best land, from which wheat could be raised as cheaply as before, in spite of the rise in the price, which would apply to all the wheat in the market, no matter where raised. That is, the holders of the best land would gain a premium, rising steadily with the increase of population, exactly as the landlord now enjoys a steadily rising rent.[5] As the agricultural industry is in this respect typical of all industries, it will be seen now that the price does not rise because worse land is brought into cultivation, but that worse land is brought into cultivation by the rise of price. Or, to put it in another way, the price of the commodity does not rise because more labor has been devoted to its production, but more labor is devoted to its production because the price has risen. Commodities, in fact, have a price before they are produced; we produce them expressly to obtain that price; and we cannot alter it by merely spending more or less labor on them. It is natural for the laborer to insist that labor _ought to be_ the measure of price, and that the _just_ wage of labor is its average product; but the first lesson he has to learn in economics is that labor is not and never can be the measure of price under a competitive system. Not until the progress of Socialism replaces competitive production and distribution, with individual greed for its incentive, by Collectivist production and distribution, with fair play all round for its incentive, will the prices either of labor or commodities represent their just value. Thus we see that "competition everywhere and always" fails to circumvent rent whilst the land is held by competing occupiers who are protected in the individual ownership of what they can raise from their several holdings. And "the great principle laid down by Adam Smith," formulated by Josiah Warren as "Cost is the proper limit of price," turns out--since in fact price is the limit of cost--to be merely a preposterous way of expressing the fact that under Anarchism that small fraction of the general wealth which was produced under the least favorable circumstances would at least fetch its cost, whilst all the rest would fetch a premium which would be nothing but privately appropriated rent with an Anarchist mask on. We see also that such a phrase as "the natural wage of labor is its product" is a misleading one, since labor cannot produce subsistence except when exercised upon natural materials and aided by natural forces external to man. And when it is so produced, its value in exchange depends in nowise on the share taken by labor in its production, but solely to the demand for it in society. The economic problem of Socialism is the just distribution of the premium given to certain portions of the general product by the action of demand. As Individualist Anarchism not only fails to distribute these, but deliberately permits their private appropriation, Individualist Anarchism is the negation of Socialism, and is, in fact, Unsocialism carried as near to its logical completeness as any sane man dare carry it. Communist Anarchism. State Socialism and Anarchism, says Mr. Tucker, "are based on two principles, the history of whose conflict is almost equivalent to the history of the world since man came into it; and all intermediate parties, including that of the upholders of the existing society, are based upon a compromise between them." These principles are Authority--the State Socialist principle, and Liberty--the Anarchist principle. State Socialism is then defined as "the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by the government, regardless of individual choice," whereas Anarchism is "the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by individuals or voluntary associations, and that the State should be abolished." Now most revolutionists will admit that there was a stage in the growth of their opinions when the above seemed an adequate statement of the alternatives before them. But, as we have seen, when the Individualist Anarchist proceeds to reduce his principle to practice, he is inevitably led to Mr. Tucker's program of "competition everywhere and always" among occupying owners, subject only to the moral law of minding their own business. No sooner is this formulated than its effect on the distribution of wealth is examined by the economist, who finds no trouble in convicting it, under the economic law of rent, of privilege, monopoly, inequality, unjust indirect taxation, and everything that is most repugnant to Anarchism. But this startling reverse, however it may put the Anarchist out of conceit with his program, does not in the least reconcile him to State Socialism. It only changes his mind on one point. Whilst his program satisfied him, he was content to admit that State Socialism was the only possible alternative to Individualist Anarchism--nay, he rather insisted on it, because the evils of the State Socialist alternative were strong incentives to the acceptance of the other. But the moment it becomes apparent that the one is economically as bad as the other, the disillusioned Individualist Anarchist becomes convinced of the insufficiency of his analysis of the social problem, and follows it up in order to find out a _tertium quid_, or third system which shall collect and justly distribute the rent of the country, and yet prevent the collecting and distributing organ from acquiring the tyrannous powers of governments as we know them. There are two such systems at present before the world: Communism and Social-Democracy. Now there is no such thing as Anarchist Social-Democracy; but there is such a thing as Anarchist Communism or Communist Anarchism. It is true that Mr. Tucker does not recognize the Communist Anarchist as an Anarchist at all: he energetically repudiates Communism as the uttermost negation of true Anarchism, and will not admit any logical halting place between thoroughgoing State Socialism and thoroughgoing Individualist Anarchism. But why insist on anybody occupying a logical halting place? We are all fond of shewing that on any given subject there are only two of these safe spots, one being the point of agreement with us, and the other some inconceivable extremity of idiocy. But for the purposes of the present criticism it will be more practical to waive such crude rationalizing, and concede that to deal with Mr. Tucker without also dealing with Peter Kropotkine is not to give Anarchism fair play. The main difficulty in criticising Kropotkine lies in the fact that, in the distribution of generally needed labor products, his Communism is finally cheap and expedient, whereas Mr. Tucker's Individualism, in the same department, is finally extravagant and impossible. Even under the most perfect Social-Democracy we should, without Communism, still be living like hogs, except that each hog would get his fair share of grub. High as that ideal must seem to anyone who complacently accepts the present social order, it is hardly high enough to satisfy a man in whom the social instinct is well developed. So long as vast quantities of labor have to be expended in weighing and measuring each man's earned share of this and that commodity--in watching, spying, policing, and punishing in order to prevent Tom getting a crumb of bread more or Dick a spoonful of milk less than he has a voucher for, so long will the difference between Unsocialism and Socialism be only the difference between unscientific and scientific hoggishness. I do not desire to underrate the vastness of that difference. Whilst we are hogs, let us at least be well-fed, healthy, reciprocally useful hogs, instead of--well, instead of the sort we are at present. But we shall not have any great reason to stand on the dignity of our humanity until a just distribution of the loaves and fishes becomes perfectly spontaneous, and the great effort and expense of a legal distribution, however just, is saved. For my own part, I seek the establishment of a state of society in which I shall not be bothered with a ridiculous pocketful of coppers, nor have to waste my time in perplexing arithmetical exchanges of them with booking clerks, bus conductors, shopmen, and other superfluous persons before I can get what I need. I aspire to live in a community which shall be at least capable of averaging the transactions between us well enough to ascertain how much work I am to do for it in return for the right to take what I want of the commoner necessaries and conveniences of life. The saving of friction by such an arrangement may be guessed from the curious fact that only specialists in sociology are conscious of the numerous instances in which we are to-day forced to adopt it by the very absurdity of the alternative. Most people will tell you that Communism is known only in this country as a visionary project advocated by a handful of amiable cranks. Then they will stroll off across the common bridge, along the common embankment, by the light of the common gas lamp shining alike on the just and the unjust, up the common street, and into the common Trafalgar Square, where, on the smallest hint on their part that Communism is to be tolerated for an instant in a civilized country, they will be handily bludgeoned by the common policeman, and haled off to the common gaol.[6] When you suggest to these people that the application of Communism to the bread supply is only an extension, involving no new principle, of its application to street lighting, they are bewildered. Instead of picturing the Communist man going to the common store, and thence taking his bread home with him, they instinctively imagine him bursting obstreperously into his neighbor's house and snatching the bread off his table on the "as much mine as yours" principle--which, however, has an equally sharp edge for the thief's throat in the form "as much yours as mine." In fact, the average Englishman is only capable of understanding Communism when it is explained as a state of things under which everything is paid for out of the taxes, and taxes are paid in labor. And even then he will sometimes say, "How about the brainwork?" and begin the usual novice's criticism of Socialism in general. Now a Communist Anarchist may demur to such a definition of Communism as I have just given; for it is evident that if there are to be taxes, there must be some authority to collect those taxes. I will not insist on the odious word taxes; but I submit that if any article--bread, for instance--be communized, by which I mean that there shall be public stores of bread, sufficient to satisfy everybody, to which all may come and take what they need without question or payment, wheat must be grown, mills must grind, and bakers must sweat daily in order to keep up the supply. Obviously, therefore, the common bread store will become bankrupt unless every consumer of the bread contributes to its support as much labor as the bread he consumes costs to produce. Communism or no Communism, he must pay or else leave somebody else to pay for him. Communism will cheapen bread for him--will save him the cost of scales and weights, coin, book-keepers, counter-hands, policemen, and other expenses of private property; but it will not do away with the cost of the bread and the store. Now supposing that voluntary co-operation and public spirit prove equal to the task of elaborately organizing the farming, milling and baking industries for the production of bread, how will these voluntary co-operators recover the cost of their operations from the public who are to consume their bread? If they are given powers to collect the cost from the public, and to enforce their demands by punishing non-payers for their dishonesty, then they at once become a State department levying a tax for public purposes; and the Communism of the bread supply becomes no more Anarchistic than our present Communistic supply of street lighting is Anarchistic. Unless the taxation is voluntary--unless the bread consumer is free to refuse payment without incurring any penalty save the reproaches of his conscience and his neighbors, the Anarchist ideal will remain unattained. Now the pressure of conscience and public opinion is by no means to be slighted. Millions of men and women, without any legal compulsion whatever, pay for the support of institutions of all sorts, from churches to tall hats, simply out of their need for standing well with their neighbors. But observe, this compulsion of public opinion derives most of its force from the difficulty of getting the wherewithal to buy bread without a reputation for respectability. Under Communism a man could snap his fingers at public opinion without starving for it. Besides, public opinion cannot for a moment be relied upon as a force which operates uniformly as a compulsion upon men to act morally. Its operation is for all practical purposes quite arbitrary, and is as often immoral as moral. It is just as hostile to the reformer as to the criminal. It hangs Anarchists and worships Nitrate Kings. It insists on a man wearing a tall hat and going to church, on his marrying the woman he lives with, and on his pretending to believe whatever the rest pretend to believe; and it enforces these ordinances in a sufficient majority of cases without help from the law: its tyranny, in fact, being so crushing that its little finger is often found to be thicker than the law's loins. But there is no sincere public opinion that a man should work for his daily bread if he can get it for nothing. Indeed it is just the other way: public opinion has been educated to regard the performance of daily manual labor as the lot of the despised classes. The common aspiration is to acquire property and leave off working. Even members of the professions rank below the independent gentry, so called because they are independent of their own labor. These prejudices are not confined to the middle and upper classes: they are rampant also among the workers. The man who works nine hours a day despises the man who works sixteen. A country gentleman may consider himself socially superior to his solicitor or his doctor; but they associate on much more cordial terms than shopmen and car-men, engine drivers and railway porters, bricklayers and hodmen, barmaids and general servants. One is almost tempted in this country to declare that the poorer the man the greater the snob, until you get down to those who are so oppressed that they have not enough self-respect even for snobbery, and thus are able to pluck out of the heart of their misery a certain irresponsibility which it would be a mockery to describe as genuine frankness and freedom. The moment you rise into the higher atmosphere of a pound a week, you find that envy, ostentation, tedious and insincere ceremony, love of petty titles, precedences and dignities, and all the detestable fruits of inequality of condition, flourish as rankly among those who lose as among those who gain by it. In fact, the notion that poverty favors virtue was clearly invented to persuade the poor that what they lost in this world they would gain in the next. Kropotkine, too optimistically, as I think, disposes of the average man by attributing his unsocialism to the pressure of the corrupt system under which he groans. Remove that pressure, and he will think rightly, says Kropotkine. But if the natural man be indeed social as well as gregarious, how did the corruption and oppression under which he groans ever arise? Could the institution of property as we know it ever have come into existence unless nearly every man had been, not merely willing, but openly and shamelessly eager to quarter himself idly on the labor of his fellows, and to domineer over them whenever the mysterious workings of economic law enabled him to do so? It is useless to think of man as a fallen angel. If the fallacies of absolute morality are to be admitted in the discussion at all, he must be considered rather as an obstinate and selfish devil, who is being slowly forced by the iron tyranny of Nature to recognize that in disregarding his neighbor's happiness he is taking the surest way to sacrifice his own. And under the present system he never can learn that lesson thoroughly, because he is an inveterate gambler, and knows that the present system gives him a chance, at odds of a hundred thousand to one or so against him, of becoming a millionaire, a condition which is to him the summit of earthly bliss, as from it he will be able to look down upon those who formerly bullied and patronized him. All this may sound harsh, especially to those who know how wholesomely real is the workman's knowledge of life compared to that of the gentleman, and how much more genuinely sympathetic he is in consequence. Indeed, it is obvious that if four-fifths of the population were habitually to do the utter worst in the way of selfishness that the present system invites them to do, society would not stand the strain for six weeks. So far, we can claim to be better than our institutions. But the fact that we are too good for complete Unsocialism by no means proves that we are good enough for Communism. The practical question remains, Could men trained under our present system be trusted to pay for their food scrupulously if they could take it for nothing with impunity? Clearly, if they did not so pay, Anarchist Communism would be bankrupt in two days. The answer is that all the evils against which Anarchism is directed are caused by men taking advantage of the institution of property to do this very thing--seize their subsistence without working for it. What reason is there for doubting that they would attempt to take exactly the same advantage of Anarchist Communism? And what reason is there to doubt that the community, finding its bread store bankrupt, would instantly pitch its Anarchism to the four winds, and come down on the defaulters with the strong hand of a law to make them pay, just as they are now compelled to pay their Income Tax? I submit, then, to our Communist Anarchist friends that Communism requires either external compulsion to labor, or else a social morality which the evils of existing society shew that we have failed as yet to attain. I do not deny the possibility of the final attainment of that degree of moralization; but I contend that the path to it lies through a transition system which, instead of offering fresh opportunities to men of getting their living idly, will destroy those opportunities altogether, and wean us from the habit of regarding such an anomaly as possible, much less honorable. It must not be supposed that the economic difficulties which I pointed out as fatal to Individualist Anarchism are entirely removed by Communism. It is true that if all the bread and coal in the country were thrown into a common store from which each man could take as much as he wanted whenever he pleased without direct payment, then no man could gain any advantage over his fellows from the fact that some farms and some coal-mines are better than others. And if every man could step into a train and travel whither he would without a ticket, no individual could speculate in the difference between the traffic from Charing Cross to the Mansion House and that from Ryde to Ventnor. One of the great advantages of Communism will undoubtedly be that huge masses of economic rent will be socialized by it automatically. All rent arising from the value of commodities in general use which can be produced, consumed, and replaced at the will of man to the full extent to which they are wanted, can be made rent free by communizing them. But there must remain outside this solution, first, the things which are not in sufficiently general use to be communized at all; second, things of which an unlimited free supply might prove a nuisance, such as gin or printing; and thirdly, things for which the demand exceeds the supply. The last is the instance in which the rent difficulty recurs. It would take an extraordinary course of demolition, reconstruction, and landscape gardening to make every dwelling house in London as desirable as a house in Park Lane, or facing Regent's Park, or overlooking the Embankment Gardens. And since everybody cannot be accommodated there, the exceptionally favored persons who occupy those sites will certainly be expected to render an equivalent for their privilege to those whom they exclude. Without this there would evidently be no true socialization of the habitation of London. This means, in practice, that a public department must let the houses out to the highest bidders, and collect the rents for public purposes. Such a department can hardly be called Anarchistic, however democratic it may be. I might go on to enlarge considerably on the limits to the practicability of direct Communism, which varies from commodity to commodity; but one difficulty, if insurmountable, is as conclusive as twenty. It is sufficient for our present purpose to have shewn that Communism cannot be ideally Anarchistic, because it does not in the least do away with the necessity for _compelling_ people to pay for what they consume; and even when the growth of human character removes that difficulty there will still remain the question of those commodities to which the simple Communist method of so-called "free distribution" is inapplicable. One practical point more requires a word; and that is the difficulty of communizing any branch of distribution without first collectivizing it. For instance, we might easily communize the postal service by simply announcing that in future letters would be carried without stamps just as they now are with them, the cost being thrown entirely upon imperial taxation. But if the postal service were, like most of our distributive business, in the hands of thousands of competing private traders, no such change would be directly possible. Communism must grow out of Collectivism, not out of anarchic private enterprise. That is to say, it cannot grow directly out of the present system. But must the transition system therefore be a system of despotic coercion? If so, it will be wrecked by the intense impulse of men to escape from the domination of their own kind. In 1888 a Russian subject, giving evidence before the Sweating Inquiry in the House of Lords, declared that he left the Russian dominion, where he worked thirteen hours a day, to work eighteen hours in England, _because he is freer here_. Reason is dumb when confronted with a man who, exhausted with thirteen hours' toil, will turn to for another five hours for the sake of being free to say that Mr. Gladstone is a better man than Lord Salisbury, and to read Mill, Spencer, and _Reynold's Newspaper_ in the six hours left to him for sleep. It brings to mind the story of the American judge who tried to induce a runaway slave to return to the plantation by pointing out how much better he was treated there than the free wage-nigger of the Abolitionist states. "Yes," said the runaway; "but would you go back if you were in my place?" The judge turned Abolitionist at once. These things are not to be reasoned away. Man will submit to fate, circumstance, society, anything that comes impersonally over him; but against the personal oppressor, whether parent, schoolmaster, overseer, official chief, or king, he eternally rebels. Like the Russian, he will rather be compelled by "necessity" to _agree_ to work eighteen hours, than ordered by a master to work thirteen. No modern nation, if deprived of personal liberty or national autonomy, would stop to think of its economic position. Establish a form of Socialism which shall deprive the people of their sense of personal liberty; and, though it double their rations and halve their working hours, they will begin to conspire against it before it is a year old. We only disapprove of monopolists: we _hate_ masters. Then, since we are too dishonest for Communism without taxation or compulsory labor, and too insubordinate to tolerate task work under personal compulsion, how can we order the transition so as to introduce just distribution without Communism, and maintain the incentive to labor without mastership? The answer is, by Democracy. And now, having taken a positive attitude at last, I must give up criticizing the Anarchists, and defend Democracy against _their_ criticisms. Democracy. I now, accordingly, return to Mr. Tucker's criticism of State Socialism, which, for the sake of precision, had better be called Social-Democracy. There is a Socialism--that of Bismarck; of the extinct young England party; of the advocates of moralized feudalism; and of mob contemners generally--which is not Social-Democracy, but Social-Despotism, and may be dismissed as essentially no more hopeful than a system of Moralized Criminality, Abstemious Gluttony, or Straightforward Mendacity would be. Mr. Tucker, as an American, passes it over as not worth powder and shot: he clearly indicates a democratic State by his repeated references to the majority principle, and in particular by his assertion that "there would be but one article in the constitution of a State Socialistic country: 'The right of the majority is absolute.'" Having thus driven Democracy back on its citadel, he proceeds to cannonade it as follows: "Under the system of State Socialism, which holds the community responsible for the health, wealth and wisdom of the individual, the community, through its majority expression, will insist more and more on prescribing the conditions of health, wealth, and wisdom, thus impairing and finally destroying individual independence and with it all sense of individual responsibility. "Whatever, then, the State Socialists may claim or disclaim, their system, if adopted, is doomed to end in a State religion, to the expense of which all must contribute and at the altar of which all must kneel; a State school of medicine, by whose practitioners the sick must invariably be treated; a State system of hygiene, proscribing what all must and must not eat, drink, wear and do; a State code of morals, which will not content itself with punishing crime, but will prohibit what the majority decide to be vice; a State system of instruction, which shall do away with all private schools, academies and colleges; a State nursery, in which all children must be brought up in common at the public expense; and, finally, a State family, with an attempt at stirpiculture, or scientific breeding, in which no man or woman will be allowed to have children if the State prohibits them, and no man or woman can refuse to have children if the State orders them. Thus will Authority achieve its acme and Monopoly be carried to its highest power." In reading this one is reminded of Mr. Herbert Spencer's habit of assuming that whatever is not white must be black. Mr. Tucker, on the ground that "it has ever been the tendency of power to add to itself, to enlarge its sphere, to encroach beyond the limits set for it," admits no alternative to the total subjection of the individual, except the total abolition of the State. If matters really could and did come to that I am afraid the individual would have to go under in any case; for the total abolition of the State in this sense means the total abolition of the collective force of Society, to abolish which it would be necessary to abolish Society itself. There are two ways of doing this. One, the abolition of the individuals composing society, could not be carried out without an interference with their personal claims much more serious than that required, even on Mr. Tucker's shewing, by Social-Democracy. The other, the dispersion of the human race into independent hermitages over the globe at the rate of twenty-five to the square mile, would give rise to considerable inequality of condition and opportunity as between the hermits of Terra del Fuego or the Arctic regions and those of Florida or the Riviera, and would suit only a few temperaments. The dispersed units would soon re-associate; and the moment they did so, goodbye to the sovereignty of the individual. If the majority believed in an angry and jealous God, then, State or no State, they would not permit an individual to offend that God and bring down his wrath upon them: they would rather stone and burn the individual in propitiation. They would not suffer the individual to go naked among them; and if he clothed himself in an unusual way which struck them as being ridiculous or scandalous, they would laugh at, him; refuse him admission to their feasts; object to be seen talking with him in the streets; and perhaps lock him up as a lunatic. They would not allow him to neglect sanitary precautions which they believed essential to their own immunity from zymotic disease. If the family were established among them as it is established among us, they would not suffer him to intermarry within certain degrees of kinship. Their demand would so rule the market that in most places he would find no commodities in the shops except those preferred by a majority of the customers; no schools except those conducted in accordance with the ideas of the majority of parents; no experienced doctors except those whose qualifications inspired confidence in a whole circle of patients. This is not "the coming slavery" of Social-Democracy: it is the slavery already come. What is more, there is nothing in the most elaborately negative practical program yet put forward by Anarchism that offers the slightest mitigation of it. That in comparison with ideal irresponsible absolute liberty it is slavery, cannot be denied. But in comparison with the slavery of Robinson Crusoe, which is the most Anarchistic alternative Nature, our taskmistress, allows us, it is pardonably described as "freedom." Robinson Crusoe, in fact, is always willing to exchange his unlimited rights and puny powers for the curtailed rights and relatively immense powers of the "slave" of majorities. For if the individual chooses, as in most cases he will, to believe and worship as his fellows do, he finds temples built and services organized at a cost to himself which he hardly feels. The clothes, the food, the furniture which he is most likely to prefer are ready for him in the shops; the schools in which his children can be taught what their fellow citizens expect them to know are within fifteen minutes' walk of his door; and the red lamp of the most approved pattern of doctor shines reassuringly at the corner of the street. He is free to live with the women of his family without suspicion or scandal; and if he is not free to marry them, what does that matter to him, since he does not wish to marry them? And so happy man be his dole, in spite of his slavery. "Yes," cries some eccentric individual; "but all this is untrue of me. I want to marry my deceased wife's sister. I am prepared to prove that your authorized system of medicine is nothing but a debased survival of witchcraft. Your schools are machines for forcing spurious learning on children in order that your universities may stamp them as educated men when they have finally lost all power to think for themselves. The tall silk hats and starched linen shirts which you force me to wear, and without which I cannot successfully practice as a physician, clergyman, schoolmaster, lawyer, or merchant, are inconvenient, unsanitary, ugly, pompous, and offensive. Your temples are devoted to a God in whom I do not believe; and even if I did believe in him I should still regard your popular forms of worship as only redeemed from gross superstition by their obvious insincerity. Science teaches me that my proper food is good bread and good fruit: your boasted food supply offers me cows and pigs instead. Your care for my health consists in tapping the common sewer, with its deadly typhoid gases, into my house, besides discharging its contents into the river, which is my natural bath and fountain. Under color of protecting my person and property you forcibly take my money to support an army of soldiers and policemen for the execution of barbarous and detestable laws; for the waging of wars which I abhor; and for the subjection of my person to those legal rights of property which compel me to sell myself for a wage to a class the maintenance of which I hold to be the greatest evil of our time. Your tyranny makes my very individuality a hindrance to me: I am outdone and outbred by the mediocre, the docile, the time-serving. Evolution under such conditions means degeneracy: therefore I demand the abolition of all these officious compulsions, and proclaim myself an Anarchist." The proclamation is not surprising under the circumstances; but it does not mend the matter in the least, nor would it if every person were to repeat it with enthusiasm, and the whole people to fly to arms for Anarchism. The majority cannot help its tyranny even if it would. The giant Winkelmeier must have found our doorways inconvenient, just as men of five feet or less find the slope of the floor in a theatre not sufficiently steep to enable them to see over the heads of those in front. But whilst the average height of a man is 5ft. 8in. there is no redress for such grievances. Builders will accommodate doors and floors to the majority, and not to the minority. For since either the majority or the minority must be incommoded, evidently the more powerful must have its way. There may be no indisputable reason why it ought not; and any clever Tory can give excellent reasons why it ought not; but the fact remains that it will, whether it ought or not. And this is what really settles the question as between democratic majorities and minorities. Where their interests conflict, the weaker side must go to the wall, because, as the evil involved is no greater than that of the stronger going to the wall,[7] the majority is not restrained by any scruple from compelling the weaker to give way. In practice, this does not involve either the absolute power of majorities, or "the infallibility of the odd man." There are some matters in which the course preferred by the minority in no way obstructs that preferred by the majority. There are many more in which the obstruction is easier to bear than the cost of suppressing it. For it costs something to suppress even a minority of one. The commonest example of that minority is the lunatic with a delusion; yet it is found quite safe to entertain dozens of delusions, and be generally an extremely selfish and troublesome idiot, in spite of the power of majorities; for until you go so far that it clearly costs less to lock you up than to leave you at large, the majority will not take the trouble to set itself in action against you. Thus a minimum of individual liberty is secured, under any system, to the smallest minority. It is true that as minorities grow, they sometimes, in forfeiting the protection of insignificance, lose more in immunity than they gain in numbers; so that probably the weakest minority is not the smallest, but rather that which is too large to be disregarded and too weak to be feared; but before and after that dangerous point is weathered, minorities wield considerable power. The notion that they are ciphers because the majority could vanquish them in a trial of strength leaves out of account the damage they could inflict on the victors during the struggle. Ordinarily an unarmed man weighing thirteen stone can beat one weighing only eleven; but there are very few emergencies in which it is worth his while to do it, because if the weaker man resists to the best of his ability (which is always possible) the victor will be considerably worse off after the fight than before it. In 1861 the Northern and Southern States of America fought, as prize-fighters say, "to a finish"; and the North carried its point, yet at such a heavy cost to itself that the Southern States have by no means been reduced to ciphers; for the victorious majority have ever since felt that it would be better to give way on any but the most vital issues than to provoke such another struggle. But it is not often that a peremptory question arises between a majority and minority of a whole nation. In most matters only a fragment of the nation has any interest one way or the other; and the same man who is in a majority on one question is in a minority on another, and so learns by experience that minorities have "rights" which must be attended to. Minorities, too, as in the case of the Irish Party in the English Parliament, occasionally hold the balance of power between majorities which recognize their rights and majorities which deny them. Further, it is possible by decentralization to limit the power of the majority of the whole nation to questions upon which a divided policy is impracticable. For example, it is not only possible, but democratically expedient, to federate the municipalities of England in such a manner that Leicester might make vaccination penal whilst every other town in the island made it compulsory. Even at present, vaccination is not in fact compulsory in Leicester, though it is so in law. Theoretically, Leicester has been reduced to a cipher by the rest of England. Practically, Leicester counts twelve to the dozen as much as ever in purely local affairs. In short, then, Democracy does not give majorities absolute power, nor does it enable them to reduce minorities to ciphers. Such limited power of coercing minorities as majorities must possess, is not given to them by Democracy any more than it can be taken away from them by Anarchism. A couple of men are stronger than one: that is all. There are only two ways of neutralizing this natural fact. One is to convince men of the immorality of abusing the majority power, and then to make them moral enough to refrain from doing it on that account. The other is to realize Lytton's fancy of _vril_ by inventing a means by which each individual will be able to destroy all his fellows with a flash of thought, so that the majority may have as much reason to fear the individual as he to fear the majority. No method of doing either is to be found in Individualist or Communist Anarchism: consequently these systems, as far as the evils of majority tyranny are concerned, are no better than the Social-Democratic program of adult suffrage with maintenance of representatives and payment of polling expenses from public funds--faulty devices enough, no doubt, but capable of accomplishing all that is humanly possible at present to make the State representative of the nation; to make the administration trustworthy; and to secure the utmost power to each individual and consequently to minorities. What better can we have whilst collective action is inevitable? Indeed, in the mouths of the really able Anarchists, Anarchism means simply the utmost attainable thoroughness of Democracy. Kropotkine, for example, speaks of free development from the simple to the composite by "the free union of free groups"; and his illustrations are "the societies for study, for commerce, for pleasure and recreation" which have sprung up to meet the varied requirements of the individual of our age. But in every one of these societies there is government by a council elected annually by a majority of voters; so that Kropotkine is not at all afraid of the democratic machinery and the majority power. Mr. Tucker speaks of "voluntary association," but gives no illustrations, and indeed avows that "Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats." He says, indeed, that "if the individual has a right to govern himself, all external government is tyranny"; but if governing oneself means doing what one pleases without regard to the interests of neighbors, then the individual has flatly no such right. If he has no such right, the interference of his neighbors to make him behave socially, though it is "external government," is not tyranny; and even if it were they would not refrain from it on that account. On the other hand, if governing oneself means compelling oneself to act with a due regard to the interests of the neighbors, then it is a right which men are proved incapable of exercising without external government. Either way, the phrase comes to nothing; for it would be easy to show by a little play upon it, either that altruism is really external government or that democratic State authority is really self-government. Mr. Tucker's adjective, "voluntary," as applied to associations for defence or the management of affairs, must not be taken as implying that there is any very wide choice open in these matters. Such association is really compulsory, since if it be foregone affairs will remain unmanaged and communities defenceless. Nature makes short work of our aspirations towards utter impunity. She leaves communities in no wise "free" to choose whether they will labor and govern themselves. It is either that or starvation and chaos. Her tasks are inexorably set: her penalties are inevitable: her payment is strictly "payment by results." All the individual can do is to shift and dodge his share of the task on to the shoulders of others, or filch some of their "natural wage" to add to his own. If they are fools enough to suffer it, that is their own affair as far as Nature is concerned. But it is the aim of Social-Democracy to relieve these fools by throwing on all an equal share in the inevitable labor imposed by the eternal tyranny of Nature, and so secure to every individual no less than his equal quota of the nation's product in return for no more than his equal quota of the nation's labor. These are the best terms humanity can make with its tyrant. In the eighteenth century it was easy for the philosophers and for Adam Smith to think of this rule of Nature as being "natural liberty" in contrast to the odious and stupid oppression of castes, priests, and kings--the detested "dominion of man over man." But we, in detecting the unsoundness of Adam Smith's private property and _laisser-faire_ recipe for natural liberty, begin to see that though there is political liberty, there is no natural liberty, but only natural law remorselessly enforced. And so we shake our heads when we see LIBERTY on the title-page of Mr. Tucker's paper, just as we laugh when we see THE COMING SLAVERY on Mr. Herbert Spencer's "Man and the State." We can now begin to join the threads of our discussion. We have seen that private appropriation of land in any form, whether limited by Individualist Anarchism to occupying owners or not, means the unjust distribution of a vast fund of social wealth called rent, which can by no means be claimed as due to the labor of any particular individual or class of individuals. We have seen that Communist Anarchism, though it partly--and only partly--avoids the rent difficulty, is, in the condition of morals developed under existing Unsocialism, impracticable. We have seen that the delegation of individual powers by voting; the creation of authoritative public bodies; the supremacy of the majority in the last resort; and the establishment and even endowment, either directly and officially or indirectly and unconsciously, of conventional forms of practice in religion, medicine, education, food, clothing, and criminal law, are, whether they be evils or not, inherent in society itself, and must be submitted to with the help of such protection against their abuse as democratic institutions more than any others afford. When Democracy fails, there is no antidote for intolerance save the spread of better sense. No form of Anarchism yet suggested provides any escape. Like bad weather in winter, intolerance does much mischief; but as, when we have done our best in the way of overcoats, umbrellas, and good fires, we have to put up with the winter; so, when we have done our best in the way of Democracy, decentralization, and the like, we must put up with the State. The Anarchist Spirit. I suppose I must not leave the subject without a word as to the value of what I will call the Anarchist spirit as an element in progress. But before I do so, let me disclaim all intention of embarrassing our Anarchist friends who are present by any sympathy which I may express with that spirit. On the Continent the discussion between Anarchism and Social-Democracy is frequently threshed out with the help of walking-sticks, chair-legs, and even revolvers. In England this does not happen, because the majority of an English audience always declines to take an extreme position, and, out of an idle curiosity to hear both sides, will, on sufficient provocation, precipitately eject theorists who make a disturbance, without troubling itself to discriminate as to the justice of their views. When I had the privilege some time ago of debating publicly with Mr. G. W. Foote on the Eight Hours question, a French newspaper which dealt with the occasion at great length devoted a whole article to an expression of envious astonishment at the fact that Mr. Foote and I abstained from vilifying and finally assaulting one another, and that our partisans followed our shining example and did not even attempt to prevent each other's champions from being heard. Still, if we do not permit ourselves to merge Socialism, Anarchism, and all the other isms into rowdyism, we sometimes debate our differences, even in this eminently respectable Fabian Society, with considerable spirit. Now far be it from me to disarm the Anarchist debater by paying him compliments. On the contrary, if we have here any of those gentlemen who make it their business to denounce Social-Democrats as misleaders of the people and trimmers; who declaim against all national and municipal projects, and clamor for the abolition of Parliaments and County Councils; who call for a desperate resistance to rent, taxes, representative government and organised collective action of every sort: then I invite them to regard me as their inveterate opponent--as one who regards such doctrine, however sincerely it may be put forward, as at best an encouragement to the workers to neglect doing what is possible under pretext of waiting for the impossible, and at worst as furnishing the reactionary newspapers in England, and the police agents on the Continent, with evidence as to the alleged follies and perils of Socialism. But at the same time, it must be understood that I do not stand here to defend the State as we know it. Bakounine's comprehensive aspiration to destroy all States and Established Churches, with their religious, political, judicial, financial, criminal, academic, economic and social laws and institutions, seems to me perfectly justifiable and intelligible from the point of view of the ordinary "educated man," who believes that institutions make men instead of men making institutions. I fully admit and vehemently urge that the State at present is simply a huge machine for robbing and slave-driving the poor by brute force. You may, if you are a stupid or comfortably-off person, think that the policeman at the corner is the guardian of law and order--that the gaol, with those instruments of torture, the treadmill, plank bed, solitary cell, cat o' nine tails, and gallows, is a place to make people cease to do evil and learn to do well. But the primary function of the policeman, and that for which his other functions are only blinds, is to see that you do not lie down to sleep in this country without paying an idler for the privilege; that you do not taste bread until you have paid the idler's toll in the price of it; that you do not resist the starving blackleg who is dragging you down to his level for the idler's profit by offering to do your work for a starvation wage. Attempt any of these things, and you will be haled off and tortured in the name of law and order, honesty, social equilibrium, safety of property and person, public duty, Christianity, morality, and what not, as a vagrant, a thief, and a rioter. Your soldier, ostensibly a heroic and patriotic defender of his country, is really an unfortunate man driven by destitution to offer himself as food for powder for the sake of regular rations, shelter and clothing; and he must, on pain of being arbitrarily imprisoned, punished with petty penances like a naughty child, pack-drilled, flogged or shot, all in the blessed name of "discipline," do anything he is ordered to, from standing in his red coat in the hall of an opera house as a mere ornament, to flogging his comrade or committing murder. And _his_ primary function is to come to the rescue of the policeman when the latter is overpowered. Members of Parliament whose sole qualifications for election were £1000 loose cash, an "independent" income, and a vulgar strain of ambition; parsons quoting scripture for the purposes of the squire; lawyers selling their services to the highest bidder at the bar, and maintaining the supremacy of the moneyed class on the bench; juries of employers masquerading as the peers of proletarians in the dock; University professors elaborating the process known as the education of a gentleman; artists striving to tickle the fancy or flatter the vanity of the aristocrat or plutocrat; workmen doing their work as badly and slowly as they dare so as to make the most of their job; employers starving and overworking their hands and adulterating their goods as much as _they_ dare: these are the actual living material of those imposing abstractions known as the State, the Church, the Law, the Constitution, Education, the Fine Arts, and Industry. Every institution, as Bakounine saw, religious, political, financial, judicial, and so on, is corrupted by the fact that the men in it either belong to the propertied class themselves or must sell themselves to it in order to live. All the purchasing power that is left to buy men's souls with after their bodies are fed is in the hands of the rich; and everywhere, from the Parliament which wields the irresistible coercive forces of the bludgeon, bayonet, machine gun, dynamite shell, prison and scaffold, down to the pettiest centre of shabby-genteel social pretension, the rich pay the piper and call the tune. Naturally, they use their power to steal more money to continue paying the piper; and thus all society becomes a huge conspiracy and hypocrisy. The ordinary man is insensible to the fraud just as he is insensible to the taste of water, which, being constantly in contact with his mucous membrane, seems to have no taste at all. The villainous moral conditions on which our social system is based are necessarily in constant contact with our moral mucous membrane, and so we lose our sense of their omnipresent meanness and dishonor. The insensibility, however, is not quite complete; for there is a period in life which is called the age of disillusion, which means the age at which a man discovers that his generous and honest impulses are incompatible with success in business; that the institutions he has reverenced are shams; and that he must join the conspiracy or go to the wall, even though he feels that the conspiracy is fundamentally ruinous to himself and his fellow-conspirators. The secret of writers like Ruskin, Morris and Kropotkine is that they see the whole imposture through and through, in spite of its familiarity, and of the illusions created by its temporal power, its riches, its splendor, its prestige, its intense respectability, its unremitting piety, and its high moral pretension. But Kropotkine, as I have shewn, is really an advocate of free Democracy; and I venture to suggest that he describes himself as an Anarchist rather from the point of view of the Russian recoiling from a despotism compared to which Democracy seems to be no government at all, than from the point of view of the American or Englishman who is free enough already to begin grumbling over Democracy as "the tyranny of the majority" and "the coming slavery." I suggest this with the more confidence because William Morris's views are largely identical with those of Kropotkine: yet Morris, after patient and intimate observation of Anarchism as a working propaganda in England, has definitely dissociated himself from it, and has shewn, by his sketch of the communist folk-mote in his _News from Nowhere_, how sanely alive he is to the impossibility of any development of the voluntary element in social action sufficient to enable individuals or minorities to take public action without first obtaining the consent of the majority. On the whole, then, I do not regard the extreme hostility to existing institutions which inspires Communist Anarchism as being a whit more dangerous to Social-Democracy than the same spirit as it inspires the peculiar Toryism of Ruskin. Much more definitely opposed to us is the survival of that intense jealousy of the authority of the government over the individual which was the mainspring of the progress of the eighteenth century. Only those who forget the lessons of history the moment they have served their immediate turn will feel otherwise than reassured by the continued vitality of that jealousy among us. But this consideration does not remove the economic objections which I have advanced as to the practical program of Individualist Anarchism. And even apart from these objections, the Social-Democrat is compelled, by contact with hard facts, to turn his back decisively on useless denunciation of the State. It is easy to say, Abolish the State; but the State will sell you up, lock you up, blow you up, knock you down, bludgeon, shoot, stab, hang--in short, abolish you, if you lift a hand against it. Fortunately, there is, as we have seen, a fine impartiality about the policeman and the soldier, who are the cutting edge of the State power. They take their wages and obey their orders without asking questions. If those orders are to demolish the homestead of every peasant who refuses to take the bread out of his children's mouths in order that his landlord may have money to spend as an idle gentleman in London, the soldier obeys. But if his orders were to help the police to pitch his lordship into Holloway Gaol until he had paid an Income Tax of twenty shillings on every pound of his unearned income, the soldier would do that with equal devotion to duty, and perhaps with a certain private zest that might be lacking in the other case. Now these orders come ultimately from the State--meaning, in this country, the House of Commons. A House of Commons consisting of 660 gentlemen and 10 workmen will order the soldier to take money from the people for the landlords. A House of Commons consisting of 660 workmen and 10 gentlemen will probably, unless the 660 are fools, order the soldier to take money from the landlords for the people. With that hint I leave the matter, in the full conviction that the State, in spite of the Anarchists, will continue to be used against the people by the classes until it is used by the people against the classes with equal ability and equal resolution. Printed by G. STANDRING, 7 and 9 Finsbury Street, London, E.C. FABIAN SOCIETY.--The Fabian Society consists of Socialists. A statement of its Rules, etc., and the following publications can be obtained from the Secretary, at the Fabian Office, 276 Strand, London, W.C. FABIAN ESSAYS IN SOCIALISM. (35th Thousand.) Library Edition, 6/-; _or, direct from the Secretary for Cash_, 4/6 (_postage_, 4 1/2_d._). Cheap Edition, Paper cover, 1/-; plain cloth, 2/-. At all booksellers, or post free from the Secretary for 1/- and 2/- respectively. 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No. 57, Rural District Councils. No. 59, Urban District Councils. FABIAN MUNICIPAL PROGRAM (Tracts Nos. 30 to 37). =1. The Unearned Increment. 2. London's Heritage in the City Guilds. 3. Municipalization of the Gas Supply. 4. Municipal Tramways. 5. London's Water Tribute. 6. Municipalization of the London Docks. 7. The Scandal of London's Markets. 8. A Labor Policy for Public Authorities. Each 4 pp.= The eight in a red cover for 1d. (9d. per doz.); or separately 1/- per 100. =FABIAN ELECTION LEAFLETS.=--No. 64, How to Lose and How to Win; No. 65, Trade Unionists and Politics; No. 66, A Program for Workers. Each 2 pp., 6d. per 100, or 5s. per 1000. [Illustration: (pointing finger)] =The Set post free 2/3. Bound in Buckram post free for 3/9.= Boxes for set of Tracts 1s., post free 1s. 3d. =Manifesto of English Socialists.= In red cover. 8 pp., 1d. each; or 9d. per doz. Parcels to the value of 10/- and upwards, post free. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: A paper read to the Fabian Society by G. Bernard Shaw, on 16th October, 1891.] [Footnote 2: This is an inference from the following paragraph in Mr. Tucker's article: "Second in importance comes the land monopoly, the evil effects of which are seen principally in exclusively agricultural countries, like Ireland. This monopoly consists in the enforcement by government of land titles which do not rest on personal occupancy and cultivation. It was obvious to Warren and Proudhon that as soon as individuals should no longer be protected by their fellows in anything but personal occupation and cultivation of land, ground rent would disappear, and so usury have one less leg to stand on." See also Mr. Tucker's article entitled "A Singular Misunderstanding," in _Liberty_ of the 10th September, 1892. "Regarding land," writes Mr. Tucker, "it has been steadily maintained in these columns that protection should be withdrawn from all land titles except those based on personal occupancy and use."] [Footnote 3: "Nor does the Anarchistic scheme furnish any code of morals to be imposed on the individual. 'Mind your own business,' is its only moral law."] [Footnote 4: This would of course be largely practicable under a Collectivist system.] [Footnote 5: English readers need not baulk themselves here because of the late fall of agricultural rents in this country. Rent, in the economic sense, covers payment for the use of land for any purpose, agricultural or otherwise; and town rents have risen oppressively. A much more puzzling discrepancy between the facts and the theory is presented by the apparent absence of any upward tendency in the prices of general commodities. However, an article may be apparently no less cheap or even much cheaper than it was twenty years ago; and yet its price may have risen enormously relatively to its average cost of production, owing to the average cost of production having been reduced by machinery, higher organization of the labor of producing it, cheapened traffic with other countries, etc. Thus, in the cotton industry, machinery has multiplied each man's power of production eleven hundred times; and Sir Joseph Whitworth was quoted by the President of the Iron and Steel Institute some years ago as having declared that a Nottingham lace machine can do the work formerly done by 8,000 lacemakers. The articles entitled "Great Manufacture of Little Things," in Cassell's _Technical Educator_, may be consulted for examples of this sort in the production of pins, pens, etc. Suppose, then, that an article which cost, on the average, fivepence to make in 1850, was then sold for sixpence. If it be now selling for threepence, it is apparently twice as cheap as it was. But if the cost of production has also fallen to three-halfpence, which is by no means an extravagant supposition, then the price, considered relatively to the cost of production, has evidently risen prodigiously, since it is now twice the cost, whereas the cost was formerly five-sixths of the price. In other words, the surplus, or rent, per article, has risen from 16 2/3 per cent. to 100 per cent., in spite of the apparent cheapening. This is the explanation of the fact that though the workers were probably never before so monstrously robbed as they are at present, it is quite possible for statisticians to prove that on the whole wages have risen and prices fallen. The worker, pleased at having only to pay threepence where he formerly paid sixpence, forgets that the share of his threepence that goes to an idler may be much larger than that which went out of each of the two threepences he paid formerly.] [Footnote 6: Written in the 1887-92 period, during which Trafalgar Square was forcibly closed against public meetings by the Salisbury administration.] [Footnote 7: The evil is decidedly _less_ if the calculation proceeds by the popular method of always estimating an evil suffered by a hundred persons as a hundred times as great as the same evil suffered by only one. This, however, is absurd. A hundred starving men are not a hundred times as hungry as one starving man, any more than a hundred five-foot-eight men are each five hundred and sixty-six feet eight inches high. But they are a hundred times as strong a political force. Though the evil may not be cumulative, the power to resist it is.] * * * * * +--------------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber Notes: | | | | P.17. 'antonomy' changed to 'autonomy' | | P.22. 'Tuc er's' changed to 'Tucker's' | +--------------------------------------------------------------+ 
4776	----	POLITICAL IDEALS by Bertrand Russell CONTENTS I: Political Ideals II: Capitalism and the Wage System III: Pitfalls in Socialism IV: Individual Liberty and Public Control V: National Independence and Internationalism Chapter I: Political Ideals In dark days, men need a clear faith and a well-grounded hope; and as the outcome of these, the calm courage which takes no account of hardships by the way. The times through which we are passing have afforded to many of us a confirmation of our faith. We see that the things we had thought evil are really evil, and we know more definitely than we ever did before the directions in which men must move if a better world is to arise on the ruins of the one which is now hurling itself into destruction. We see that men's political dealings with one another are based on wholly wrong ideals, and can only be saved by quite different ideals from continuing to be a source of suffering, devastation, and sin. Political ideals must be based upon ideals for the individual life. The aim of politics should be to make the lives of individuals as good as possible. There is nothing for the politician to consider outside or above the various men, women, and children who compose the world. The problem of politics is to adjust the relations of human beings in such a way that each severally may have as much of good in his existence as possible. And this problem requires that we should first consider what it is that we think good in the individual life. To begin with, we do not want all men to be alike. We do not want to lay down a pattern or type to which men of all sorts are to be made by some means or another to approximate. This is the ideal of the impatient administrator. A bad teacher will aim at imposing his opinion, and turning out a set of pupils all of whom will give the same definite answer on a doubtful point. Mr. Bernard Shaw is said to hold that _Troilus and Cressida_ is the best of Shakespeare's plays. Although I disagree with this opinion, I should welcome it in a pupil as a sign of individuality; but most teachers would not tolerate such a heterodox view. Not only teachers, but all commonplace persons in authority, desire in their subordinates that kind of uniformity which makes their actions easily predictable and never inconvenient. The result is that they crush initiative and individuality when they can, and when they cannot, they quarrel with it. It is not one ideal for all men, but a separate ideal for each separate man, that has to be realized if possible. Every man has it in his being to develop into something good or bad: there is a best possible for him, and a worst possible. His circumstances will determine whether his capacities for good are developed or crushed, and whether his bad impulses are strengthened or gradually diverted into better channels. But although we cannot set up in any detail an ideal of character which is to be universally applicable--although we cannot say, for instance, that all men ought to be industrious, or self-sacrificing, or fond of music--there are some broad principles which can be used to guide our estimates as to what is possible or desirable. We may distinguish two sorts of goods, and two corresponding sorts of impulses. There are goods in regard to which individual possession is possible, and there are goods in which all can share alike. The food and clothing of one man is not the food and clothing of another; if the supply is insufficient, what one man has is obtained at the expense of some other man. This applies to material goods generally, and therefore to the greater part of the present economic life of the world. On the other hand, mental and spiritual goods do not belong to one man to the exclusion of another. If one man knows a science, that does not prevent others from knowing it; on the contrary, it helps them to acquire the knowledge. If one man is a great artist or poet, that does not prevent others from painting pictures or writing poems, but helps to create the atmosphere in which such things are possible. If one man is full of good-will toward others, that does not mean that there is less good-will to be shared among the rest; the more good-will one man has, the more he is likely to create among others. In such matters there is no _possession_, because there is not a definite amount to be shared; any increase anywhere tends to produce an increase everywhere. There are two kinds of impulses, corresponding to the two kinds of goods. There are _possessive_ impulses, which aim at acquiring or retaining private goods that cannot be shared; these center in the impulse of property. And there are _creative_ or constructive impulses, which aim at bringing into the world or making available for use the kind of goods in which there is no privacy and no possession. The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest. This is no new discovery. The Gospel says: "Take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?" The thought we give to these things is taken away from matters of more importance. And what is worse, the habit of mind engendered by thinking of these things is a bad one; it leads to competition, envy, domination, cruelty, and almost all the moral evils that infest the world. In particular, it leads to the predatory use of force. Material possessions can be taken by force and enjoyed by the robber. Spiritual possessions cannot be taken in this way. You may kill an artist or a thinker, but you cannot acquire his art or his thought. You may put a man to death because he loves his fellow-men, but you will not by so doing acquire the love which made his happiness. Force is impotent in such matters; it is only as regards material goods that it is effective. For this reason the men who believe in force are the men whose thoughts and desires are preoccupied with material goods. The possessive impulses, when they are strong, infect activities which ought to be purely creative. A man who has made some valuable discovery may be filled with jealousy of a rival discoverer. If one man has found a cure for cancer and another has found a cure for consumption, one of them may be delighted if the other man's discovery turns out a mistake, instead of regretting the suffering of patients which would otherwise have been avoided. In such cases, instead of desiring knowledge for its own sake, or for the sake of its usefulness, a man is desiring it as a means to reputation. Every creative impulse is shadowed by a possessive impulse; even the aspirant to saintliness may be jealous of the more successful saint. Most affection is accompanied by some tinge of jealousy, which is a possessive impulse intruding into the creative region. Worst of all, in this direction, is the sheer envy of those who have missed everything worth having in life, and who are instinctively bent on preventing others from enjoying what they have not had. There is often much of this in the attitude of the old toward the young. There is in human beings, as in plants and animals, a certain natural impulse of growth, and this is just as true of mental as of physical development. Physical development is helped by air and nourishment and exercise, and may be hindered by the sort of treatment which made Chinese women's feet small. In just the same way mental development may be helped or hindered by outside influences. The outside influences that help are those that merely provide encouragement or mental food or opportunities for exercising mental faculties. The influences that hinder are those that interfere with growth by applying any kind of force, whether discipline or authority or fear or the tyranny of public opinion or the necessity of engaging in some totally incongenial occupation. Worst of all influences are those that thwart or twist a man's fundamental impulse, which is what shows itself as conscience in the moral sphere; such influences are likely to do a man an inward danger from which he will never recover. Those who realize the harm that can be done to others by any use of force against them, and the worthlessness of the goods that can be acquired by force, will be very full of respect for the liberty of others; they will not try to bind them or fetter them; they will be slow to judge and swift to sympathize; they will treat every human being with a kind of tenderness, because the principle of good in him is at once fragile and infinitely precious. They will not condemn those who are unlike themselves; they will know and feel that individuality brings differences and uniformity means death. They will wish each human being to be as much a living thing and as little a mechanical product as it is possible to be; they will cherish in each one just those things which the harsh usage of a ruthless world would destroy. In one word, all their dealings with others will be inspired by a deep impulse of _reverence_. What we shall desire for individuals is now clear: strong creative impulses, overpowering and absorbing the instinct of possession; reverence for others; respect for the fundamental creative impulse in ourselves. A certain kind of self-respect or native pride is necessary to a good life; a man must not have a sense of utter inward defeat if he is to remain whole, but must feel the courage and the hope and the will to live by the best that is in him, whatever outward or inward obstacles it may encounter. So far as it lies in a man's own power, his life will realize its best possibilities if it has three things: creative rather than possessive impulses, reverence for others, and respect for the fundamental impulse in himself. Political and social institutions are to be judged by the good or harm that they do to individuals. Do they encourage creativeness rather than possessiveness? Do they embody or promote a spirit of reverence between human beings? Do they preserve self-respect? In all these ways the institutions under which we live are very far indeed from what they ought to be. Institutions, and especially economic systems, have a profound influence in molding the characters of men and women. They may encourage adventure and hope, or timidity and the pursuit of safety. They may open men's minds to great possibilities, or close them against everything but the risk of obscure misfortune. They may make a man's happiness depend upon what he adds to the general possessions of the world, or upon what he can secure for himself of the private goods in which others cannot share. Modern capitalism forces the wrong decision of these alternatives upon all who are not heroic or exceptionally fortunate. Men's impulses are molded, partly by their native disposition, partly by opportunity and environment, especially early environment. Direct preaching can do very little to change impulses, though it can lead people to restrain the direct expression of them, often with the result that the impulses go underground and come to the surface again in some contorted form. When we have discovered what kinds of impulse we desire, we must not rest content with preaching, or with trying to produce the outward manifestation without the inner spring; we must try rather to alter institutions in the way that will, of itself, modify the life of impulse in the desired direction. At present our institutions rest upon two things: property and power. Both of these are very unjustly distributed; both, in the actual world, are of great importance to the happiness of the individual. Both are possessive goods; yet without them many of the goods in which all might share are hard to acquire as things are now. Without property, as things are, a man has no freedom, and no security for the necessities of a tolerable life; without power, he has no opportunity for initiative. If men are to have free play for their creative impulses, they must be liberated from sordid cares by a certain measure of security, and they must have a sufficient share of power to be able to exercise initiative as regards the course and conditions of their lives. Few men can succeed in being creative rather than possessive in a world which is wholly built on competition, where the great majority would fall into utter destitution if they became careless as to the acquisition of material goods, where honor and power and respect are given to wealth rather than to wisdom, where the law embodies and consecrates the injustice of those who have toward those who have not. In such an environment even those whom nature has endowed with great creative gifts become infected with the poison of competition. Men combine in groups to attain more strength in the scramble for material goods, and loyalty to the group spreads a halo of quasi-idealism round the central impulse of greed. Trade-unions and the Labor party are no more exempt from this vice than other parties and other sections of society; though they are largely inspired by the hope of a radically better world. They are too often led astray by the immediate object of securing for themselves a large share of material goods. That this desire is in accordance with justice, it is impossible to deny; but something larger and more constructive is needed as a political ideal, if the victors of to-morrow are not to become the oppressors of the day after. The inspiration and outcome of a reforming movement ought to be freedom and a generous spirit, not niggling restrictions and regulations. The present economic system concentrates initiative in the hands of a small number of very rich men. Those who are not capitalists have, almost always, very little choice as to their activities when once they have selected a trade or profession; they are not part of the power that moves the mechanism, but only a passive portion of the machinery. Despite political democracy, there is still an extraordinary degree of difference in the power of self-direction belonging to a capitalist and to a man who has to earn his living. Economic affairs touch men's lives, at most times, much more intimately than political questions. At present the man who has no capital usually has to sell himself to some large organization, such as a railway company, for example. He has no voice in its management, and no liberty in politics except what his trade-union can secure for him. If he happens to desire a form of liberty which is not thought important by his trade-union, he is powerless; he must submit or starve. Exactly the same thing happens to professional men. Probably a majority of journalists are engaged in writing for newspapers whose politics they disagree with; only a man of wealth can own a large newspaper, and only an accident can enable the point of view or the interests of those who are not wealthy to find expression in a newspaper. A large part of the best brains of the country are in the civil service, where the condition of their employment is silence about the evils which cannot be concealed from them. A Nonconformist minister loses his livelihood if his views displease his congregation; a member of Parliament loses his seat if he is not sufficiently supple or sufficiently stupid to follow or share all the turns and twists of public opinion. In every walk of life, independence of mind is punished by failure, more and more as economic organizations grow larger and more rigid. Is it surprising that men become increasingly docile, increasingly ready to submit to dictation and to forego the right of thinking for themselves? Yet along such lines civilization can only sink into a Byzantine immobility. Fear of destitution is not a motive out of which a free creative life can grow, yet it is the chief motive which inspires the daily work of most wage-earners. The hope of possessing more wealth and power than any man ought to have, which is the corresponding motive of the rich, is quite as bad in its effects; it compels men to close their minds against justice, and to prevent themselves from thinking honestly on social questions while in the depths of their hearts they uneasily feel that their pleasures are bought by the miseries of others. The injustices of destitution and wealth alike ought to be rendered impossible. Then a great fear would be removed from the lives of the many, and hope would have to take on a better form in the lives of the few. But security and liberty are only the negative conditions for good political institutions. When they have been won, we need also the positive condition: encouragement of creative energy. Security alone might produce a smug and stationary society; it demands creativeness as its counterpart, in order to keep alive the adventure and interest of life, and the movement toward perpetually new and better things. There can be no final goal for human institutions; the best are those that most encourage progress toward others still better. Without effort and change, human life cannot remain good. It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active. It is a sad evidence of the weariness mankind has suffered from excessive toil that his heavens have usually been places where nothing ever happened or changed. Fatigue produces the illusion that only rest is needed for happiness; but when men have rested for a time, boredom drives them to renewed activity. For this reason, a happy life must be one in which there is activity. If it is also to be a useful life, the activity ought to be as far as possible creative, not merely predatory or defensive. But creative activity requires imagination and originality, which are apt to be subversive of the _status quo_. At present, those who have power dread a disturbance of the _status quo_, lest their unjust privileges should be taken away. In combination with the instinct for conventionality,[1] which man shares with the other gregarious animals, those who profit by the existing order have established a system which punishes originality and starves imagination from the moment of first going to school down to the time of death and burial. The whole spirit in which education is conducted needs to be changed, in order that children may be encouraged to think and feel for themselves, not to acquiesce passively in the thoughts and feelings of others. It is not rewards after the event that will produce initiative, but a certain mental atmosphere. There have been times when such an atmosphere existed: the great days of Greece, and Elizabethan England, may serve as examples. But in our own day the tyranny of vast machine-like organizations, governed from above by men who know and care little for the lives of those whom they control, is killing individuality and freedom of mind, and forcing men more and more to conform to a uniform pattern. [1] In England this is called "a sense of humor." Vast organizations are an inevitable element in modern life, and it is useless to aim at their abolition, as has been done by some reformers, for instance, William Morris. It is true that they make the preservation of individuality more difficult, but what is needed is a way of combining them with the greatest possible scope for individual initiative. One very important step toward this end would be to render democratic the government of every organization. At present, our legislative institutions are more or less democratic, except for the important fact that women are excluded. But our administration is still purely bureaucratic, and our economic organizations are monarchical or oligarchic. Every limited liability company is run by a small number of self-appointed or coöpted directors. There can be no real freedom or democracy until the men who do the work in a business also control its management. Another measure which would do much to increase liberty would be an increase of self-government for subordinate groups, whether geographical or economic or defined by some common belief, like religious sects. A modern state is so vast and its machinery is so little understood that even when a man has a vote he does not feel himself any effective part of the force which determines its policy. Except in matters where he can act in conjunction with an exceptionally powerful group, he feels himself almost impotent, and the government remains a remote impersonal circumstance, which must be simply endured, like the weather. By a share in the control of smaller bodies, a man might regain some of that sense of personal opportunity and responsibility which belonged to the citizen of a city-state in ancient Greece or medieval Italy. When any group of men has a strong corporate consciousness--such as belongs, for example, to a nation or a trade or a religious body--liberty demands that it should be free to decide for itself all matters which are of great importance to the outside world. This is the basis of the universal claim for national independence. But nations are by no means the only groups which ought to have self-government for their internal concerns. And nations, like other groups, ought not to have complete liberty of action in matters which are of equal concern to foreign nations. Liberty demands self-government, but not the right to interfere with others. The greatest degree of liberty is not secured by anarchy. The reconciliation of liberty with government is a difficult problem, but it is one which any political theory must face. The essence of government is the use of force in accordance with law to secure certain ends which the holders of power consider desirable. The coercion of an individual or a group by force is always in itself more or less harmful. But if there were no government, the result would not be an absence of force in men's relations to each other; it would merely be the exercise of force by those who had strong predatory instincts, necessitating either slavery or a perpetual readiness to repel force with force on the part of those whose instincts were less violent. This is the state of affairs at present in international relations, owing to the fact that no international government exists. The results of anarchy between states should suffice to persuade us that anarchism has no solution to offer for the evils of the world. There is probably one purpose, and only one, for which the use of force by a government is beneficent, and that is to diminish the total amount of force used m the world. It is clear, for example, that the legal prohibition of murder diminishes the total amount of violence in the world. And no one would maintain that parents should have unlimited freedom to ill-treat their children. So long as some men wish to do violence to others, there cannot be complete liberty, for either the wish to do violence must be restrained, or the victims must be left to suffer. For this reason, although individuals and societies should have the utmost freedom as regards their own affairs, they ought not to have complete freedom as regards their dealings with others. To give freedom to the strong to oppress the weak is not the way to secure the greatest possible amount of freedom in the world. This is the basis of the socialist revolt against the kind of freedom which used to be advocated by _laissez-faire_ economists. Democracy is a device--the best so far invented--for diminishing as much as possible the interference of governments with liberty. If a nation is divided into two sections which cannot both have their way, democracy theoretically insures that the majority shall have their way. But democracy is not at all an adequate device unless it is accompanied by a very great amount of devolution. Love of uniformity, or the mere pleasure of interfering, or dislike of differing tastes and temperaments, may often lead a majority to control a minority in matters which do not really concern the majority. We should none of us like to have the internal affairs of Great Britain settled by a parliament of the world, if ever such a body came into existence. Nevertheless, there are matters which such a body could settle much better than any existing instrument of government. The theory of the legitimate use of force in human affairs, where a government exists, seems clear. Force should only be used against those who attempt to use force against others, or against those who will not respect the law in cases where a common decision is necessary and a minority are opposed to the action of the majority. These seem legitimate occasions for the use of force; and they should be legitimate occasions in international affairs, if an international government existed. The problem of the legitimate occasions for the use of force in the absence of a government is a different one, with which we are not at present concerned. Although a government must have the power to use force, and may on occasion use it legitimately, the aim of the reformers to have such institutions as will diminish the need for actual coercion will be found to have this effect. Most of us abstain, for instance, from theft, not because it is illegal, but because we feel no desire to steal. The more men learn to live creatively rather than possessively, the less their wishes will lead them to thwart others or to attempt violent interference with their liberty. Most of the conflicts of interests, which lead individuals or organizations into disputes, are purely imaginary, and would be seen to be so if men aimed more at the goods in which all can share, and less at those private possessions that are the source of strife. In proportion as men live creatively, they cease to wish to interfere with others by force. Very many matters in which, at present, common action is thought indispensable, might well be left to individual decision. It used to be thought absolutely necessary that all the inhabitants of a country should have the same religion, but we now know that there is no such necessity. In like manner it will be found, as men grow more tolerant in their instincts, that many uniformities now insisted upon are useless and even harmful. Good political institutions would weaken the impulse toward force and domination in two ways: first, by increasing the opportunities for the creative impulses, and by shaping education so as to strengthen these impulses; secondly, by diminishing the outlets for the possessive instincts. The diffusion of power, both in the political and the economic sphere, instead of its concentration in the hands of officials and captains of industry, would greatly diminish the opportunities for acquiring the habit of command, out of which the desire for exercising tyranny is apt to spring. Autonomy, both for districts and for organizations, would leave fewer occasions when governments were called upon to make decisions as to other people's concerns. And the abolition of capitalism and the wage system would remove the chief incentive to fear and greed, those correlative passions by which all free life is choked and gagged. Few men seem to realize how many of the evils from which we suffer are wholly unnecessary, and that they could be abolished by a united effort within a few years. If a majority in every civilized country so desired, we could, within twenty years, abolish all abject poverty, quite half the illness in the world, the whole economic slavery which binds down nine tenths of our population; we could fill the world with beauty and joy, and secure the reign of universal peace. It is only because men are apathetic that this is not achieved, only because imagination is sluggish, and what always has been is regarded as what always must be. With good-will, generosity, intelligence, these things could be brought about. Chapter II: Capitalism and the Wage System I The world is full of preventible evils which most men would be glad to see prevented. Nevertheless, these evils persist, and nothing effective is done toward abolishing them. This paradox produces astonishment in inexperienced reformers, and too often produces disillusionment in those who have come to know the difficulty of changing human institutions. War is recognized as an evil by an immense majority in every civilized country; but this recognition does not prevent war. The unjust distribution of wealth must be obviously an evil to those who are not prosperous, and they are nine tenths of the population. Nevertheless it continues unabated. The tyranny of the holders of power is a source of needless suffering and misfortune to very large sections of mankind; but power remains in few hands, and tends, if anything, to grow more concentrated. I wish first to study the evils of our present institutions, and the causes of the very limited success of reformers in the past, and then to suggest reasons for the hope of a more lasting and permanent success in the near future. The war has come as a challenge to all who desire a better world. The system which cannot save mankind from such an appalling disaster is at fault somewhere, and cannot be amended in any lasting way unless the danger of great wars in the future can be made very small. But war is only the final flower of an evil tree. Even in times of peace, most men live lives of monotonous labor, most women are condemned to a drudgery which almost kills the possibility of happiness before youth is past, most children are allowed to grow up in ignorance of all that would enlarge their thoughts or stimulate their imagination. The few who are more fortunate are rendered illiberal by their unjust privileges, and oppressive through fear of the awakening indignation of the masses. From the highest to the lowest, almost all men are absorbed in the economic struggle: the struggle to acquire what is their due or to retain what is not their due. Material possessions, in fact or in desire, dominate our outlook, usually to the exclusion of all generous and creative impulses. Possessiveness--the passion to have and to hold--is the ultimate source of war, and the foundation of all the ills from which the political world is suffering. Only by diminishing the strength of this passion and its hold upon our daily lives can new institutions bring permanent benefit to mankind. Institutions which will diminish the sway of greed are possible, but only through a complete reconstruction of our whole economic system. Capitalism and the wage system must be abolished; they are twin monsters which are eating up the life of the world. In place of them we need a system which will hold in cheek men's predatory impulses, and will diminish the economic injustice that allows some to be rich in idleness while others are poor in spite of unremitting labor; but above all we need a system which will destroy the tyranny of the employer, by making men at the same time secure against destitution and able to find scope for individual initiative in the control of the industry by which they live. A better system can do all these things, and can be established by the democracy whenever it grows weary of enduring evils which there is no reason to endure. We may distinguish four purposes at which an economic system may aim: first, it may aim at the greatest possible production of goods and at facilitating technical progress; second, it may aim at securing distributive justice; third, it may aim at giving security against destitution; and, fourth, it may aim at liberating creative impulses and diminishing possessive impulses. Of these four purposes the last is the most important. Security is chiefly important as a means to it. State socialism, though it might give material security and more justice than we have at present, would probably fail to liberate creative impulses or produce a progressive society. Our present system fails in all four purposes. It is chiefly defended on the ground that it achieves the first of the four purposes, namely, the greatest possible production of material goods, but it only does this in a very short-sighted way, by methods which are wasteful in the long run both of human material and of natural resources. Capitalistic enterprise involves a ruthless belief in the importance of increasing material production to the utmost possible extent now and in the immediate future. In obedience to this belief, new portions of the earth's surface are continually brought under the sway of industrialism. Vast tracts of Africa become recruiting grounds for the labor required in the gold and diamond mines of the Rand, Rhodesia, and Kimberley; for this purpose, the population is demoralized, taxed, driven into revolt, and exposed to the contamination of European vice and disease. Healthy and vigorous races from Southern Europe are tempted to America, where sweating and slum life reduce their vitality if they do not actually cause their death. What damage is done to our own urban populations by the conditions under which they live, we all know. And what is true of the human riches of the world is no less true of the physical resources. The mines, forests, and wheat-fields of the world are all being exploited at a rate which must practically exhaust them at no distant date. On the side of material production, the world is living too fast; in a kind of delirium, almost all the energy of the world has rushed into the immediate production of something, no matter what, and no matter at what cost. And yet our present system is defended on the ground that it safeguards progress! It cannot be said that our present economic system is any more successful in regard to the other three objects which ought to be aimed at. Among the many obvious evils of capitalism and the wage system, none are more glaring than that they encourage predatory instincts, that they allow economic injustice, and that they give great scope to the tyranny of the employer. As to predatory instincts, we may say, broadly speaking, that in a state of nature there would be two ways of acquiring riches--one by production, the other by robbery. Under our existing system, although what is recognized as robbery is forbidden, there are nevertheless many ways of becoming rich without contributing anything to the wealth of the community. Ownership of land or capital, whether acquired or inherited, gives a legal right to a permanent income. Although most people have to produce in order to live, a privileged minority are able to live in luxury without producing anything at all. As these are the men who are not only the most fortunate but also the most respected, there is a general desire to enter their ranks, and a widespread unwillingness to face the fact that there is no justification whatever for incomes derived in this way. And apart from the passive enjoyment of rent or interest, the methods of acquiring wealth are very largely predatory. It is not, as a rule, by means of useful inventions, or of any other action which increases the general wealth of the community, that men amass fortunes; it is much more often by skill in exploiting or circumventing others. Nor is it only among the rich that our present régime promotes a narrowly acquisitive spirit. The constant risk of destitution compels most men to fill a great part of their time and thought with the economic struggle. There is a theory that this increases the total output of wealth by the community. But for reasons to which I shall return later, I believe this theory to be wholly mistaken. Economic injustice is perhaps the most obvious evil of our present system. It would be utterly absurd to maintain that the men who inherit great wealth deserve better of the community than those who have to work for their living. I am not prepared to maintain that economic justice requires an exactly equal income for everybody. Some kinds of work require a larger income for efficiency than others do; but there is economic injustice as soon as a man has more than his share, unless it is because his efficiency in his work requires it, or as a reward for some definite service. But this point is so obvious that it needs no elaboration. The modern growth of monopolies in the shape of trusts, cartels, federations of employers and so on has greatly increased the power of the capitalist to levy toll on the community. This tendency will not cease of itself, but only through definite action on the part of those who do not profit by the capitalist régime. Unfortunately the distinction between the proletariat and the capitalist is not so sharp as it was in the minds of socialist theorizers. Trade-unions have funds in various securities; friendly societies are large capitalists; and many individuals eke out their wages by invested savings. All this increases the difficulty of any clear-cut radical change in our economic system. But it does not diminish the desirability of such a change. Such a system as that suggested by the French syndicalists, in which each trade would be self-governing and completely independent, without the control of any central authority, would not secure economic justice. Some trades are in a much stronger bargaining position than others. Coal and transport, for example, could paralyze the national life, and could levy blackmail by threatening to do so. On the other hand, such people as school teachers, for example, could rouse very little terror by the threat of a strike and would be in a very weak bargaining position. Justice can never be secured by any system of unrestrained force exercised by interested parties in their own interests. For this reason the abolition of the state, which the syndicalists seem to desire, would be a measure not compatible with economic justice. The tyranny of the employer, which at present robs the greater part of most men's lives of all liberty and all initiative, is unavoidable so long as the employer retains the right of dismissal with consequent loss of pay. This right is supposed to be essential in order that men may have an incentive to work thoroughly. But as men grow more civilized, incentives based on hope become increasingly preferable to those that are based on fear. It would be far better that men should be rewarded for working well than that they should be punished for working badly. This system is already in operation in the civil service, where a man is only dismissed for some exceptional degree of vice or virtue, such as murder or illegal abstention from it. Sufficient pay to ensure a livelihood ought to be given to every person who is willing to work, independently of the question whether the particular work at which he is skilled is wanted at the moment or not. If it is not wanted, some new trade which is wanted ought to be taught at the public expense. Why, for example, should a hansom-cab driver be allowed to suffer on account of the introduction of taxies? He has not committed any crime, and the fact that his work is no longer wanted is due to causes entirely outside his control. Instead of being allowed to starve, he ought to be given instruction in motor driving or in whatever other trade may seem most suitable. At present, owing to the fact that all industrial changes tend to cause hardships to some section of wage-earners, there is a tendency to technical conservatism on the part of labor, a dislike of innovations, new processes, and new methods. But such changes, if they are in the permanent interest of the community, ought to be carried out without allowing them to bring unmerited loss to those sections of the community whose labor is no longer wanted in the old form. The instinctive conservatism of mankind is sure to make all processes of production change more slowly than they should. It is a pity to add to this by the avoidable conservatism which is forced upon organized labor at present through the unjust workings of a change. It will be said that men will not work well if the fear of dismissal does not spur them on. I think it is only a small percentage of whom this would be true at present. And those of whom it would be true might easily become industrious if they were given more congenial work or a wiser training. The residue who cannot be coaxed into industry by any such methods are probably to be regarded as pathological cases, requiring medical rather than penal treatment. And against this residue must be set the very much larger number who are now ruined in health or in morale by the terrible uncertainty of their livelihood and the great irregularity of their employment. To very many, security would bring a quite new possibility of physical and moral health. The most dangerous aspect of the tyranny of the employer is the power which it gives him of interfering with men's activities outside their working hours. A man may be dismissed because the employer dislikes his religion or his politics, or chooses to think his private life immoral. He may be dismissed because he tries to produce a spirit of independence among his fellow employees. He may fail completely to find employment merely on the ground that he is better educated than most and therefore more dangerous. Such cases actually occur at present. This evil would not be remedied, but rather intensified, under state socialism, because, where the State is the only employer, there is no refuge from its prejudices such as may now accidentally arise through the differing opinions of different men. The State would be able to enforce any system of beliefs it happened to like, and it is almost certain that it would do so. Freedom of thought would be penalized, and all independence of spirit would die out. Any rigid system would involve this evil. It is very necessary that there should be diversity and lack of complete systematization. Minorities must be able to live and develop their opinions freely. If this is not secured, the instinct of persecution and conformity will force all men into one mold and make all vital progress impossible. For these reasons, no one ought to be allowed to suffer destitution so long as he or she is _willing_ to work. And no kind of inquiry ought to be made into opinion or private life. It is only on this basis that it is possible to build up an economic system not founded upon tyranny and terror. II The power of the economic reformer is limited by the technical productivity of labor. So long as it was necessary to the bare subsistence of the human race that most men should work very long hours for a pittance, so long no civilization was possible except an aristocratic one; if there were to be men with sufficient leisure for any mental life, there had to be others who were sacrificed for the good of the few. But the time when such a system was necessary has passed away with the progress of machinery. It would be possible now, if we had a wise economic system, for all who have mental needs to find satisfaction for them. By a few hours a day of manual work, a man can produce as much as is necessary for his own subsistence; and if he is willing to forgo luxuries, that is all that the community has a right to demand of him. It ought to be open to all who so desire to do short hours of work for little pay, and devote their leisure to whatever pursuit happens to attract them. No doubt the great majority of those who chose this course would spend their time in mere amusement, as most of the rich do at present. But it could not be said, in such a society, that they were parasites upon the labor of others. And there would be a minority who would give their hours of nominal idleness to science or art or literature, or some other pursuit out of which fundamental progress may come. In all such matters, organization and system can only do harm. The one thing that can be done is to provide opportunity, without repining at the waste that results from most men failing to make good use of the opportunity. But except in cases of unusual laziness or eccentric ambition, most men would elect to do a full day's work for a full day's pay. For these, who would form the immense majority, the important thing is that ordinary work should, as far as possible, afford interest and independence and scope for initiative. These things are more important than income, as soon as a certain minimum has been reached. They can be secured by gild socialism, by industrial self-government subject to state control as regards the relations of a trade to the rest of the community. So far as I know, they cannot be secured in any other way. Guild socialism, as advocated by Mr. Orage and the "New Age," is associated with a polemic against "political" action, and in favor of direct economic action by trade-unions. It shares this with syndicalism, from which most of what is new in it is derived. But I see no reason for this attitude; political and economic action seem to me equally necessary, each in its own time and place. I think there is danger in the attempt to use the machinery of the present capitalist state for socialistic purposes. But there is need of political action to transform the machinery of the state, side by side with the transformation which we hope to see in economic institutions. In this country, neither transformation is likely to be brought about by a sudden revolution; we must expect each to come step by step, if at all, and I doubt if either could or should advance very far without the other. The economic system we should ultimately wish to see would be one in which the state would be the sole recipient of economic rent, while private capitalistic enterprises should be replaced by self-governing combinations of those who actually do the work. It ought to be optional whether a man does a whole day's work for a whole day's pay, or half a day's work for half a day's pay, except in cases where such an arrangement would cause practical inconvenience. A man's pay should not cease through the accident of his work being no longer needed, but should continue so long as he is willing to work, a new trade being taught him at the public expense, if necessary. Unwillingness to work should be treated medically or educationally, when it could not be overcome by a change to some more congenial occupation. The workers in a given industry should all be combined in one autonomous unit, and their work should not be subject to any outside control. The state should fix the price at which they produce, but should leave the industry self-governing in all other respects. In fixing prices, the state should, as far as possible, allow each industry to profit by any improvements which it might introduce into its own processes, but should endeavor to prevent undeserved loss or gain through changes in external economic conditions. In this way there would be every incentive to progress, with the least possible danger of unmerited destitution. And although large economic organizations will continue, as they are bound to do, there will be a diffusion of power which will take away the sense of individual impotence from which men and women suffer at present. III Some men, though they may admit that such a system would be desirable, will argue that it is impossible to bring it about, and that therefore we must concentrate on more immediate objects. I think it must be conceded that a political party ought to have proximate aims, measures which it hopes to carry in the next session or the next parliament, as well as a more distant goal. Marxian socialism, as it existed in Germany, seemed to me to suffer in this way: although the party was numerically powerful, it was politically weak, because it had no minor measures to demand while waiting for the revolution. And when, at last, German socialism was captured by those who desired a less impracticable policy, the modification which occurred was of exactly the wrong kind: acquiescence in bad policies, such as militarism and imperialism, rather than advocacy of partial reforms which, however inadequate, would still have been steps in the right direction. A similar defect was inherent in the policy of French syndicalism as it existed before the war. Everything was to wait for the general strike; after adequate preparation, one day the whole proletariat would unanimously refuse to work, the property owners would acknowledge their defeat, and agree to abandon all their privileges rather than starve. This is a dramatic conception; but love of drama is a great enemy of true vision. Men cannot be trained, except under very rare circumstances, to do something suddenly which is very different from what they have been doing before. If the general strike were to succeed, the victors, despite their anarchism, would be compelled at once to form an administration, to create a new police force to prevent looting and wanton destruction, to establish a provisional government issuing dictatorial orders to the various sections of revolutionaries. Now the syndicalists are opposed in principle to all political action; they would feel that they were departing from their theory in taking the necessary practical steps, and they would be without the required training because of their previous abstention from politics. For these reasons it is likely that, even after a syndicalist revolution, actual power would fall into the hands of men who were not really syndicalists. Another objection to a program which is to be realized suddenly at some remote date by a revolution or a general strike is that enthusiasm flags when there is nothing to do meanwhile, and no partial success to lessen the weariness of waiting. The only sort of movement which can succeed by such methods is one where the sentiment and the program are both very simple, as is the case in rebellions of oppressed nations. But the line of demarcation between capitalist and wage-earner is not sharp, like the line between Turk and Armenian, or between an Englishman and a native of India. Those who have advocated the social revolution have been mistaken in their political methods, chiefly because they have not realized how many people there are in the community whose sympathies and interests lie half on the side of capital, half on the side of labor. These people make a clear-cut revolutionary policy very difficult. For these reasons, those who aim at an economic reconstruction which is not likely to be completed to-morrow must, if they are to have any hope of success, be able to approach their goal by degrees, through measures which are of some use in themselves, even if they should not ultimately lead to the desired end. There must be activities which train men for those that they are ultimately to carry out, and there must be possible achievements in the near future, not only a vague hope of a distant paradise. But although I believe that all this is true, I believe no less firmly that really vital and radical reform requires some vision beyond the immediate future, some realization of what human beings might make of human life if they chose. Without some such hope, men will not have the energy and enthusiasm necessary to overcome opposition, or the steadfastness to persist when their aims are for the moment unpopular. Every man who has really sincere desire for any great amelioration in the conditions of life has first to face ridicule, then persecution, then cajolery and attempts at subtle corruption. We know from painful experience how few pass unscathed through these three ordeals. The last especially, when the reformer is shown all the kingdoms of the earth, is difficult, indeed almost impossible, except for those who have made their ultimate goal vivid to themselves by clear and definite thought. Economic systems are concerned essentially with the production and distribution of material goods. Our present system is wasteful on the production side, and unjust on the side of distribution. It involves a life of slavery to economic forces for the great majority of the community, and for the minority a degree of power over the lives of others which no man ought to have. In a good community the production of the necessaries of existence would be a mere preliminary to the important and interesting part of life, except for those who find a pleasure in some part of the work of producing necessaries. It is not in the least necessary that economic needs should dominate man as they do at present. This is rendered necessary at present, partly by the inequalities of wealth, partly by the fact that things of real value, such as a good education, are difficult to acquire, except for the well-to-do. Private ownership of land and capital is not defensible on grounds of justice, or on the ground that it is an economical way of producing what the community needs. But the chief objections to it are that it stunts the lives of men and women, that it enshrines a ruthless possessiveness in all the respect which is given to success, that it leads men to fill the greater part of their time and thought with the acquisition of purely material goods, and that it affords a terrible obstacle to the advancement of civilization and creative energy. The approach to a system free from these evils need not be sudden; it is perfectly possible to proceed step by step towards economic freedom and industrial self-government. It is not true that there is any outward difficulty in creating the kind of institutions that we have been considering. If organized labor wishes to create them, nothing could stand in its way. The difficulty involved is merely the difficulty of inspiring men with hope, of giving them enough imagination to see that the evils from which they suffer are unnecessary, and enough thought to understand how the evils are to be cured. This is a difficulty which can be overcome by time and energy. But it will not be overcome if the leaders of organized labor have no breadth of outlook, no vision, no hopes beyond some slight superficial improvement within the framework of the existing system. Revolutionary action may be unnecessary, but revolutionary thought is indispensable, and, as the outcome of thought, a rational and constructive hope. Chapter III: Pitfalls in Socialism I In its early days, socialism was a revolutionary movement of which the object was the liberation of the wage-earning classes and the establishment of freedom and justice. The passage from capitalism to the new régime was to be sudden and violent: capitalists were to be expropriated without compensation, and their power was not to be replaced by any new authority. Gradually a change came over the spirit of socialism. In France, socialists became members of the government, and made and unmade parliamentary majorities. In Germany, social democracy grew so strong that it became impossible for it to resist the temptation to barter away some of its intransigeance in return for government recognition of its claims. In England, the Fabians taught the advantage of reform as against revolution, and of conciliatory bargaining as against irreconcilable antagonism. The method of gradual reform has many merits as compared to the method of revolution, and I have no wish to preach revolution. But gradual reform has certain dangers, to wit, the ownership or control of businesses hitherto in private hands, and by encouraging legislative interference for the benefit of various sections of the wage-earning classes. I think it is at least doubtful whether such measures do anything at all to contribute toward the ideals which inspired the early socialists and still inspire the great majority of those who advocate some form of socialism. Let us take as an illustration such a measure as state purchase of railways. This is a typical object of state socialism, thoroughly practicable, already achieved in many countries, and clearly the sort of step that must be taken in any piecemeal approach to complete collectivism. Yet I see no reason to believe that any real advance toward democracy, freedom, or economic justice is achieved when a state takes over the railways after full compensation to the shareholders. Economic justice demands a diminution, if not a total abolition, of the proportion of the national income which goes to the recipients of rent and interest. But when the holders of railway shares are given government stock to replace their shares, they are given the prospect of an income in perpetuity equal to what they might reasonably expect to have derived from their shares. Unless there is reason to expect a great increase in the earnings of railways, the whole operation does nothing to alter the distribution of wealth. This could only be effected if the present owners were expropriated, or paid less than the market value, or given a mere life-interest as compensation. When full value is given, economic justice is not advanced in any degree. There is equally little advance toward freedom. The men employed on the railway have no more voice than they had before in the management of the railway, or in the wages and conditions of work. Instead of having to fight the directors, with the possibility of an appeal to the government, they now have to fight the government directly; and experience does not lead to the view that a government department has any special tenderness toward the claims of labor. If they strike, they have to contend against the whole organized power of the state, which they can only do successfully if they happen to have a strong public opinion on their side. In view of the influence which the state can always exercise on the press, public opinion is likely to be biased against them, particularly when a nominally progressive government is in power. There will no longer be the possibility of divergences between the policies of different railways. Railway men in England derived advantages for many years from the comparatively liberal policy of the North Eastern Railway, which they were able to use as an argument for a similar policy elsewhere. Such possibilities are excluded by the dead uniformity of state administration. And there is no real advance toward democracy. The administration of the railways will be in the hands of officials whose bias and associations separate them from labor, and who will develop an autocratic temper through the habit of power. The democratic machinery by which these officials are nominally controlled is cumbrous and remote, and can only be brought into operation on first-class issues which rouse the interest of the whole nation. Even then it is very likely that the superior education of the officials and the government, combined with the advantages of their position, will enable them to mislead the public as to the issues, and alienate the general sympathy even from the most excellent cause. I do not deny that these evils exist at present; I say only that they will not be remedied by such measures as the nationalization of railways in the present economic and political environment. A greater upheaval, and a greater change in men's habits of mind, is necessary for any really vital progress. II State socialism, even in a nation which possesses the form of political democracy, is not a truly democratic system. The way in which it fails to be democratic may be made plain by an analogy from the political sphere. Every democrat recognizes that the Irish ought to have self-government for Irish affairs, and ought not to be told that they have no grievance because they share in the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It is essential to democracy that any group of citizens whose interests or desires separate them at all widely from the rest of the community should be free to decide their internal affairs for themselves. And what is true of national or local groups is equally true of economic groups, such as miners or railway men. The national machinery of general elections is by no means sufficient to secure for groups of this kind the freedom which they ought to have. The power of officials, which is a great and growing danger in the modern state, arises from the fact that the majority of the voters, who constitute the only ultimate popular control over officials, are as a rule not interested in any one particular question, and are therefore not likely to interfere effectively against an official who is thwarting the wishes of the minority who are interested. The official is nominally subject to indirect popular control, but not to the control of those who are directly affected by his action. The bulk of the public will either never hear about the matter in dispute, or, if they do hear, will form a hasty opinion based upon inadequate information, which is far more likely to come from the side of the officials than from the section of the community which is affected by the question at issue. In an important political issue, some degree of knowledge is likely to be diffused in time; but in other matters there is little hope that this will happen. It may be said that the power of officials is much less dangerous than the power of capitalists, because officials have no economic interests that are opposed to those of wage-earners. But this argument involves far too simple a theory of political human nature--a theory which orthodox socialism adopted from the classical political economy, and has tended to retain in spite of growing evidence of its falsity. Economic self-interest, and even economic class-interest, is by no means the only important political motive. Officials, whose salary is generally quite unaffected by their decisions on particular questions, are likely, if they are of average honesty, to decide according to their view of the public interest; but their view will none the less have a bias which will often lead them wrong. It is important to understand this bias before entrusting our destinies too unreservedly to government departments. The first thing to observe is that, in any very large organization, and above all in a great state, officials and legislators are usually very remote from those whom they govern, and not imaginatively acquainted with the conditions of life to which their decisions will be applied. This makes them ignorant of much that they ought to know, even when they are industrious and willing to learn whatever can be taught by statistics and blue-books. The one thing they understand intimately is the office routine and the administrative rules. The result is an undue anxiety to secure a uniform system. I have heard of a French minister of education taking out his watch, and remarking, "At this moment all the children of such and such an age in France are learning so and so." This is the ideal of the administrator, an ideal utterly fatal to free growth, initiative, experiment, or any far reaching innovation. Laziness is not one of the motives recognized in textbooks on political theory, because all ordinary knowledge of human nature is considered unworthy of the dignity of these works; yet we all know that laziness is an immensely powerful motive with all but a small minority of mankind. Unfortunately, in this case laziness is reinforced by love of power, which leads energetic officials to create the systems which lazy officials like to administer. The energetic official inevitably dislikes anything that he does not control. His official sanction must be obtained before anything can be done. Whatever he finds in existence he wishes to alter in some way, so as to have the satisfaction of feeling his power and making it felt. If he is conscientious, he will think out some perfectly uniform and rigid scheme which he believes to be the best possible, and he will then impose this scheme ruthlessly, whatever promising growths he may have to lop down for the sake of symmetry. The result inevitably has something of the deadly dullness of a new rectangular town, as compared with the beauty and richness of an ancient city which has lived and grown with the separate lives and individualities of many generations. What has grown is always more living than what has been decreed; but the energetic official will always prefer the tidiness of what he has decreed to the apparent disorder of spontaneous growth. The mere possession of power tends to produce a love of power, which is a very dangerous motive, because the only sure proof of power consists in preventing others from doing what they wish to do. The essential theory of democracy is the diffusion of power among the whole people, so that the evils produced by one man's possession of great power shall be obviated. But the diffusion of power through democracy is only effective when the voters take an interest in the question involved. When the question does not interest them, they do not attempt to control the administration, and all actual power passes into the hands of officials. For this reason, the true ends of democracy are not achieved by state socialism or by any system which places great power in the hands of men subject to no popular control except that which is more or less indirectly exercised through parliament. Any fresh survey of men's political actions shows that, in those who have enough energy to be politically effective, love of power is a stronger motive than economic self-interest. Love of power actuates the great millionaires, who have far more money than they can spend, but continue to amass wealth merely in order to control more and more of the world's finance.[2] Love of power is obviously the ruling motive of many politicians. It is also the chief cause of wars, which are admittedly almost always a bad speculation from the mere point of view of wealth. For this reason, a new economic system which merely attacks economic motives and does not interfere with the concentration of power is not likely to effect any very great improvement in the world. This is one of the chief reasons for regarding state socialism with suspicion. [2] Cf. J. A. Hobson, "The Evolution of Modern Capitalism." III The problem of the distribution of power is a more difficult one than the problem of the distribution of wealth. The machinery of representative government has concentrated on _ultimate_ power as the only important matter, and has ignored immediate executive power. Almost nothing has been done to democratize administration. Government officials, in virtue of their income, security, and social position, are likely to be on the side of the rich, who have been their daily associates ever since the time of school and college. And whether or not they are on the side of the rich, they are not likely, for the reasons we have been considering, to be genuinely in favor of progress. What applies to government officials applies also to members of Parliament, with the sole difference that they have had to recommend themselves to a constituency. This, however, only adds hypocrisy to the other qualities of a ruling caste. Whoever has stood in the lobby of the House of Commons watching members emerge with wandering eye and hypothetical smile, until the constituent is espied, his arm taken, "my dear fellow" whispered in his ear, and his steps guided toward the inner precincts--whoever, observing this, has realized that these are the arts by which men become and remain legislators, can hardly fail to feel that democracy as it exists is not an absolutely perfect instrument of government. It is a painful fact that the ordinary voter, at any rate in England, is quite blind to insincerity. The man who does not care about any definite political measures can generally be won by corruption or flattery, open or concealed; the man who is set on securing reforms will generally prefer an ambitious windbag to a man who desires the public good without possessing a ready tongue. And the ambitious windbag, as soon as he has become a power by the enthusiasm he has aroused, will sell his influence to the governing clique, sometimes openly, sometimes by the more subtle method of intentionally failing at a crisis. This is part of the normal working of democracy as embodied in representative institutions. Yet a cure must be found if democracy is not to remain a farce. One of the sources of evil in modern large democracies is the fact that most of the electorate have no direct or vital interest in most of the questions that arise. Should Welsh children be allowed the use of the Welsh language in schools? Should gipsies be compelled to abandon their nomadic life at the bidding of the education authorities? Should miners have an eight-hour day? Should Christian Scientists be compelled to call in doctors in case of serious illness? These are matters of passionate interest to certain sections of the community, but of very little interest to the great majority. If they are decided according to the wishes of the numerical majority, the intense desires of a minority will be overborne by the very slight and uninformed whims of the indifferent remainder. If the minority are geographically concentrated, so that they can decide elections in a certain number of constituencies, like the Welsh and the miners, they have a good chance of getting their way, by the wholly beneficent process which its enemies describe as log-rolling. But if they are scattered and politically feeble, like the gipsies and the Christian Scientists, they stand a very poor chance against the prejudices of the majority. Even when they are geographically concentrated, like the Irish, they may fail to obtain their wishes, because they arouse some hostility or some instinct of domination in the majority. Such a state of affairs is the negation of all democratic principles. The tyranny of the majority is a very real danger. It is a mistake to suppose that the majority is necessarily right. On every new question the majority is always wrong at first. In matters where the state must act as a whole, such as tariffs, for example, decision by majorities is probably the best method that can be devised. But there are a great many questions in which there is no need of a uniform decision. Religion is recognized as one of these. Education ought to be one, provided a certain minimum standard is attained. Military service clearly ought to be one. Wherever divergent action by different groups is possible without anarchy, it ought to be permitted. In such cases it will be found by those who consider past history that, whenever any new fundamental issue arises, the majority are in the wrong, because they are guided by prejudice and habit. Progress comes through the gradual effect of a minority in converting opinion and altering custom. At one time--not so very long ago--it was considered monstrous wickedness to maintain that old women ought not to be burnt as witches. If those who held this opinion had been forcibly suppressed, we should still be steeped in medieval superstition. For such reasons, it is of the utmost importance that the majority should refrain from imposing its will as regards matters in which uniformity is not absolutely necessary. IV The cure for the evils and dangers which we have been considering is a very great extension of devolution and federal government. Wherever there is a national consciousness, as in Wales and Ireland, the area in which it exists ought to be allowed to decide all purely local affairs without external interference. But there are many matters which ought to be left to the management, not of local groups, but of trade groups, or of organizations embodying some set of opinions. In the East, men are subject to different laws according to the religion they profess. Something of this kind is necessary if any semblance of liberty is to exist where there is great divergence in beliefs. Some matters are essentially geographical; for instance, gas and water, roads, tariffs, armies and navies. These must be decided by an authority representing an area. How large the area ought to be, depends upon accidents of topography and sentiment, and also upon the nature of the matter involved. Gas and water require a small area, roads a somewhat larger one, while the only satisfactory area for an army or a navy is the whole planet, since no smaller area will prevent war. But the proper unit in most economic questions, and also in most questions that are intimately concerned with personal opinions, is not geographical at all. The internal management of railways ought not to be in the hands of the geographical state, for reasons which we have already considered. Still less ought it to be in the hands of a set of irresponsible capitalists. The only truly democratic system would be one which left the internal management of railways in the hands of the men who work on them. These men should elect the general manager, and a parliament of directors if necessary. All questions of wages, conditions of labor, running of trains, and acquisition of material, should be in the hands of a body responsible only to those actually engaged in the work of the railway. The same arguments apply to other large trades: mining, iron and steel, cotton, and so on. British trade-unionism, it seems to me, has erred in conceiving labor and capital as both permanent forces, which were to be brought to some equality of strength by the organization of labor. This seems to me too modest an ideal. The ideal which I should wish to substitute involves the conquest of democracy and self-government in the economic sphere as in the political sphere, and the total abolition of the power now wielded by the capitalist. The man who works on a railway ought to have a voice in the government of the railway, just as much as the man who works in a state has a right to a voice in the management of his state. The concentration of business initiative in the hands of the employers is a great evil, and robs the employees of their legitimate share of interest in the larger problems of their trade. French syndicalists were the first to advocate the system of trade autonomy as a better solution than state socialism. But in their view the trades were to be independent, almost like sovereign states at present. Such a system would not promote peace, any more than it does at present in international relations. In the affairs of any body of men, we may broadly distinguish what may be called questions of home politics from questions of foreign politics. Every group sufficiently well-marked to constitute a political entity ought to be autonomous in regard to internal matters, but not in regard to those that directly affect the outside world. If two groups are both entirely free as regards their relations to each other, there is no way of averting the danger of an open or covert appeal to force. The relations of a group of men to the outside world ought, whenever possible, to be controlled by a neutral authority. It is here that the state is necessary for adjusting the relations between different trades. The men who make some commodity should be entirely free as regards hours of labor, distribution of the total earnings of the trade, and all questions of business management. But they should not be free as regards the price of what they produce, since price is a matter concerning their relations to the rest of the community. If there were nominal freedom in regard to price, there would be a danger of a constant tug-of-war, in which those trades which were most immediately necessary to the existence of the community could always obtain an unfair advantage. Force is no more admirable in the economic sphere than in dealings between states. In order to secure the maximum of freedom with the minimum of force, the universal principle is: _Autonomy within each politically important group, and a neutral authority for deciding questions involving relations between groups_. The neutral authority should, of course, rest on a democratic basis, but should, if possible, represent a constituency wider than that of the groups concerned. In international affairs the only adequate authority would be one representing all civilized nations. In order to prevent undue extension of the power of such authorities, it is desirable and necessary that the various autonomous groups should be very jealous of their liberties, and very ready to resist by political means any encroachments upon their independence. State socialism does not tolerate such groups, each with their own officials responsible to the group. Consequently it abandons the internal affairs of a group to the control of men not responsible to that group or specially aware of its needs. This opens the door to tyranny and to the destruction of initiative. These dangers are avoided by a system which allows any group of men to combine for any given purpose, provided it is not predatory, and to claim from the central authority such self-government as is necessary to the carrying out of the purpose. Churches of various denominations afford an instance. Their autonomy was won by centuries of warfare and persecution. It is to be hoped that a less terrible struggle will be required to achieve the same result in the economic sphere. But whatever the obstacles, I believe the importance of liberty is as great in the one case as it has been admitted to be in the other. Chapter IV: Individual Liberty and Public Control I Society cannot exist without law and order, and cannot advance except through the initiative of vigorous innovators. Yet law and order are always hostile to innovations, and innovators are almost always, to some extent, anarchists. Those whose minds are dominated by fear of a relapse towards barbarism will emphasize the importance of law and order, while those who are inspired by the hope of an advance towards civilization will usually be more conscious of the need of individual initiative. Both temperaments are necessary, and wisdom lies in allowing each to operate freely where it is beneficent. But those who are on the side of law and order, since they are reinforced by custom and the instinct for upholding the _status quo_, have no need of a reasoned defense. It is the innovators who have difficulty in being allowed to exist and work. Each generation believes that this difficulty is a thing of the past, but each generation is only tolerant of _past_ innovations. Those of its own day are met with the same persecution as though the principle of toleration had never been heard of. "In early society," says Westermarck, "customs are not only moral rules, but the only moral rules ever thought of. The savage strictly complies with the Hegelian command that no man must have a private conscience. The following statement, which refers to the Tinnevelly Shanars, may be quoted as a typical example: 'Solitary individuals amongst them rarely adopt any new opinions, or any new course of procedure. They follow the multitude to do evil, and they follow the multitude to do good. They think in herds.'"[3] [3] "The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas," 2d edition, Vol. I, p. 119. Those among ourselves who have never thought a thought or done a deed in the slightest degree different from the thoughts and deeds of our neighbors will congratulate themselves on the difference between us and the savage. But those who have ever attempted any real innovation cannot help feeling that the people they know are not so very unlike the Tinnevelly Shanars. Under the influence of socialism, even progressive opinion, in recent years, has been hostile to individual liberty. Liberty is associated, in the minds of reformers, with _laissez-faire_, the Manchester School, and the exploitation of women and children which resulted from what was euphemistically called "free competition." All these things were evil, and required state interference; in fact, there is need of an immense increase of state action in regard to cognate evils which still exist. In everything that concerns the economic life of the community, as regards both distribution and conditions of production, what is required is more public control, not less--how much more, I do not profess to know. Another direction in which there is urgent need of the substitution of law and order for anarchy is international relations. At present, each sovereign state has complete individual freedom, subject only to the sanction of war. This individual freedom will have to be curtailed in regard to external relations if wars are ever to cease. But when we pass outside the sphere of material possessions, we find that the arguments in favor of public control almost entirely disappear. Religion, to begin with, is recognized as a matter in which the state ought not to interfere. Whether a man is Christian, Mahometan, or Jew is a question of no public concern, so long as he obeys the laws; and the laws ought to be such as men of all religions can obey. Yet even here there are limits. No civilized state would tolerate a religion demanding human sacrifice. The English in India put an end to suttee, in spite of a fixed principle of non-interference with native religious customs. Perhaps they were wrong to prevent suttee, yet almost every European would have done the same. We cannot _effectively_ doubt that such practices ought to be stopped, however we may theorize in favor of religious liberty. In such cases, the interference with liberty is imposed from without by a higher civilization. But the more common case, and the more interesting, is when an independent state interferes on behalf of custom against individuals who are feeling their way toward more civilized beliefs and institutions. "In New South Wales," says Westermarck, "the first-born of every lubra used to be eaten by the tribe 'as part of a religious ceremony.' In the realm of Khai-muh, in China, according to a native account, it was customary to kill and devour the eldest son alive. Among certain tribes in British Columbia the first child is often sacrificed to the sun. The Indians of Florida, according to Le Moyne de Morgues, sacrificed the first-born son to the chief....'"[4] [4] _Op cit._, p. 459. There are pages and pages of such instances. There is nothing analogous to these practices among ourselves. When the first-born in Florida was told that his king and country needed him, this was a mere mistake, and with us mistakes of this kind do not occur. But it is interesting to inquire how these superstitions died out, in such cases, for example, as that of Khai-muh, where foreign compulsion is improbable. We may surmise that some parents, under the selfish influence of parental affection, were led to doubt whether the sun would really be angry if the eldest child were allowed to live. Such rationalism would be regarded as very dangerous, since it was calculated to damage the harvest. For generations the opinion would be cherished in secret by a handful of cranks, who would not be able to act upon it. At last, by concealment or flight, a few parents would save their children from the sacrifice. Such parents would be regarded as lacking all public spirit, and as willing to endanger the community for their private pleasure. But gradually it would appear that the state remained intact, and the crops were no worse than in former years. Then, by a fiction, a child would be deemed to have been sacrificed if it was solemnly dedicated to agriculture or some other work of national importance chosen by the chief. It would be many generations before the child would be allowed to choose its own occupation after it had grown old enough to know its own tastes and capacities. And during all those generations, children would be reminded that only an act of grace had allowed them to live at all, and would exist under the shadow of a purely imaginary duty to the state. The position of those parents who first disbelieved in the utility of infant sacrifice illustrates all the difficulties which arise in connection with the adjustment of individual freedom to public control. The authorities, believing the sacrifice necessary for the good of the community, were bound to insist upon it; the parents, believing it useless, were equally bound to do everything in their power toward saving the child. How ought both parties to act in such a case? The duty of the skeptical parent is plain: to save the child by any possible means, to preach the uselessness of the sacrifice in season and out of season, and to endure patiently whatever penalty the law may indict for evasion. But the duty of the authorities is far less clear. So long as they remain firmly persuaded that the universal sacrifice of the first-born is indispensable, they are bound to persecute those who seek to undermine this belief. But they will, if they are conscientious, very carefully examine the arguments of opponents, and be willing in advance to admit that these arguments _may_ be sound. They will carefully search their own hearts to see whether hatred of children or pleasure in cruelty has anything to do with their belief. They will remember that in the past history of Khai-muh there are innumerable instances of beliefs, now known to be false, on account of which those who disagreed with the prevalent view were put to death. Finally they will reflect that, though errors which are traditional are often wide-spread, new beliefs seldom win acceptance unless they are nearer to the truth than what they replace; and they will conclude that a new belief is probably either an advance, or so unlikely to become common as to be innocuous. All these considerations will make them hesitate before they resort to punishment. II The study of past times and uncivilized races makes it clear beyond question that the customary beliefs of tribes or nations are almost invariably false. It is difficult to divest ourselves completely of the customary beliefs of our own age and nation, but it is not very difficult to achieve a certain degree of doubt in regard to them. The Inquisitor who burnt men at the stake was acting with true humanity if all his beliefs were correct; but if they were in error at any point, he was inflicting a wholly unnecessary cruelty. A good working maxim in such matters is this: Do not trust customary beliefs so far as to perform actions which must be disastrous unless the beliefs in question are wholly true. The world would be utterly bad, in the opinion of the average Englishman, unless he could say "Britannia rules the waves"; in the opinion of the average German, unless he could say "Deutschland über alles." For the sake of these beliefs, they are willing to destroy European civilization. If the beliefs should happen to be false, their action is regrettable. One fact which emerges from these considerations is that no obstacle should be placed in the way of thought and its expression, nor yet in the way of statements of fact. This was formerly common ground among liberal thinkers, though it was never quite realized in the practice of civilized countries. But it has recently become, throughout Europe, a dangerous paradox, on account of which men suffer imprisonment or starvation. For this reason it has again become worth stating. The grounds for it are so evident that I should be ashamed to repeat them if they were not universally ignored. But in the actual world it is very necessary to repeat them. To attain complete truth is not given to mortals, but to advance toward it by successive steps is not impossible. On any matter of general interest, there is usually, in any given community at any given time, a received opinion, which is accepted as a matter of course by all who give no special thought to the matter. Any questioning of the received opinion rouses hostility, for a number of reasons. The most important of these is the instinct of conventionality, which exists in all gregarious animals and often leads them to put to death any markedly peculiar member of the herd. The next most important is the feeling of insecurity aroused by doubt as to the beliefs by which we are in the habit of regulating our lives. Whoever has tried to explain the philosophy of Berkeley to a plain man will have seen in its unadulterated form the anger aroused by this feeling. What the plain man derives from Berkeley's philosophy at a first hearing is an uncomfortable suspicion that nothing is solid, so that it is rash to sit on a chair or to expect the floor to sustain us. Because this suspicion is uncomfortable, it is irritating, except to those who regard the whole argument as merely nonsense. And in a more or less analogous way any questioning of what has been taken for granted destroys the feeling of standing on solid ground, and produces a condition of bewildered fear. A third reason which makes men dislike novel opinions is that vested interests are bound up with old beliefs. The long fight of the church against science, from Giordano Bruno to Darwin, is attributable to this motive among others. The horror of socialism which existed in the remote past was entirely attributable to this cause. But it would be a mistake to assume, as is done by those who seek economic motives everywhere, that vested interests are the principal source of anger against novelties in thought. If this were the case, intellectual progress would be much more rapid than it is. The instinct of conventionality, horror of uncertainty, and vested interests, all militate against the acceptance of a new idea. And it is even harder to think of a new idea than to get it accepted; most people might spend a lifetime in reflection without ever making a genuinely original discovery. In view of all these obstacles, it is not likely that any society at any time will suffer from a plethora of heretical opinions. Least of all is this likely in a modern civilized society, where the conditions of life are in constant rapid change, and demand, for successful adaptation, an equally rapid change in intellectual outlook. There should be an attempt, therefore, to encourage, rather than discourage, the expression of new beliefs and the dissemination of knowledge tending to support them. But the very opposite is, in fact, the case. From childhood upward, everything is done to make the minds of men and women conventional and sterile. And if, by misadventure, some spark of imagination remains, its unfortunate possessor is considered unsound and dangerous, worthy only of contempt in time of peace and of prison or a traitor's death in time of war. Yet such men are known to have been in the past the chief benefactors of mankind, and are the very men who receive most honor as soon as they are safely dead. The whole realm of thought and opinion is utterly unsuited to public control; it ought to be as free, and as spontaneous as is possible to those who know what others have believed. The state is justified in insisting that children shall be educated, but it is not justified in forcing their education to proceed on a uniform plan and to be directed to the production of a dead level of glib uniformity. Education, and the life of the mind generally, is a matter in which individual initiative is the chief thing needed; the function of the state should begin and end with insistence on some kind of education, and, if possible, a kind which promotes mental individualism, not a kind which happens to conform to the prejudices of government officials. III Questions of practical morals raise more difficult problems than questions of mere opinion. The thugs honestly believe it their duty to commit murders, but the government does not acquiesce. The conscientious objectors honestly hold the opposite opinion, and again the government does not acquiesce. Killing is a state prerogative; it is equally criminal to do it unbidden and not to do it when bidden. The same applies to theft, unless it is on a large scale or by one who is already rich. Thugs and thieves are men who use force in their dealings with their neighbors, and we may lay it down broadly that the private use of force should be prohibited except in rare cases, however conscientious may be its motive. But this principle will not justify compelling men to use force at the bidding of the state, when they do not believe it justified by the occasion. The punishment of conscientious objectors seems clearly a violation of individual liberty within its legitimate sphere. It is generally assumed without question that the state has a right to punish certain kinds of sexual irregularity. No one doubts that the Mormons sincerely believed polygamy to be a desirable practice, yet the United States required them to abandon its legal recognition, and probably any other Christian country would have done likewise. Nevertheless, I do not think this prohibition was wise. Polygamy is legally permitted in many parts of the world, but is not much practised except by chiefs and potentates. If, as Europeans generally believe, it is an undesirable custom, it is probable that the Mormons would have soon abandoned it, except perhaps for a few men of exceptional position. If, on the other hand, it had proved a successful experiment, the world would have acquired a piece of knowledge which it is now unable to possess. I think in all such cases the law should only intervene when there is some injury inflicted without the consent of the injured person. It is obvious that men and women would not tolerate having their wives or husbands selected by the state, whatever eugenists might have to say in favor of such a plan. In this it seems clear that ordinary public opinion is in the right, not because people choose wisely, but because any choice of their own is better than a forced marriage. What applies to marriage ought also to apply to the choice of a trade or profession; although some men have no marked preferences, most men greatly prefer some occupations to others, and are far more likely to be useful citizens if they follow their preferences than if they are thwarted by a public authority. The case of the man who has an intense conviction that he ought to do a certain kind of work is peculiar, and perhaps not very common; but it is important because it includes some very important individuals. Joan of Arc and Florence Nightingale defied convention in obedience to a feeling of this sort; reformers and agitators in unpopular causes, such as Mazzini, have belonged to this class; so have many men of science. In cases of this kind the individual conviction deserves the greatest respect, even if there seems no obvious justification for it. Obedience to the impulse is very unlikely to do much harm, and may well do great good. The practical difficulty is to distinguish such impulses from desires which produce similar manifestations. Many young people wish to be authors without having an impulse to write any particular book, or wish to be painters without having an impulse to create any particular picture. But a little experience will usually show the difference between a genuine and a spurious impulse; and there is less harm in indulging the spurious impulse for a time than in thwarting the impulse which is genuine. Nevertheless, the plain man almost always has a tendency to thwart the genuine impulse, because it seems anarchic and unreasonable, and is seldom able to give a good account of itself in advance. What is markedly true of some notable personalities is true, in a lesser degree, of almost every individual who has much vigor or force of life; there is an impulse towards activity of some kind, as a rule not very definite in youth, but growing gradually more sharply outlined under the influence of education and opportunity. The direct impulse toward a kind of activity for its own sake must be distinguished from the desire for the expected effects of the activity. A young man may desire the rewards of great achievement without having any spontaneous impulse toward the activities which lead to achievement. But those who actually achieve much, although they may desire the rewards, have also something in their nature which inclines them to choose a certain kind of work as the road which they must travel if their ambition is to be satisfied. This artist's impulse, as it may be called, is a thing of infinite value to the individual, and often to the world; to respect it in oneself and in others makes up nine tenths of the good life. In most human beings it is rather frail, rather easily destroyed or disturbed; parents and teachers are too often hostile to it, and our economic system crushes out its last remnants in young men and young women. The result is that human beings cease to be individual, or to retain the native pride that is their birthright; they become machine-made, tame, convenient for the bureaucrat and the drill-sergeant, capable of being tabulated in statistics without anything being omitted. This is the fundamental evil resulting from lack of liberty; and it is an evil which is being continually intensified as population grows more dense and the machinery of organization grows more efficient. The things that men desire are many and various: admiration, affection, power, security, ease, outlets for energy, are among the commonest of motives. But such abstractions do not touch what makes the difference between one man and another. Whenever I go to the zoölogical gardens, I am struck by the fact that all the movements of a stork have some common quality, differing from the movements of a parrot or an ostrich. It is impossible to put in words what the common quality is, and yet we feel that each thing an animal does is the sort of thing we might expect that animal to do. This indefinable quality constitutes the individuality of the animal, and gives rise to the pleasure we feel in watching the animal's actions. In a human being, provided he has not been crushed by an economic or governmental machine, there is the same kind of individuality, a something distinctive without which no man or woman can achieve much of importance, or retain the full dignity which is native to human beings. It is this distinctive individuality that is loved by the artist, whether painter or writer. The artist himself, and the man who is creative in no matter what direction, has more of it than the average man. Any society which crushes this quality, whether intentionally or by accident, must soon become utterly lifeless and traditional, without hope of progress and without any purpose in its being. To preserve and strengthen the impulse that makes individuality should be the foremost object of all political institutions. IV We now arrive at certain general principles in regard to individual liberty and public control. The greater part of human impulses may be divided into two classes, those which are possessive and those which are constructive or creative. Social institutions are the garments or embodiments of impulses, and may be classified roughly according to the impulses which they embody. Property is the direct expression of possessiveness; science and art are among the most direct expressions of creativeness. Possessiveness is either defensive or aggressive; it seeks either to retain against a robber, or to acquire from a present holder. In either case an attitude of hostility toward others is of its essence. It would be a mistake to suppose that defensive possessiveness is always justifiable, while the aggressive kind is always blameworthy; where there is great injustice in the _status quo_, the exact opposite may be the case, and ordinarily neither is justifiable. State interference with the actions of individuals is necessitated by possessiveness. Some goods can be acquired or retained by force, while others cannot. A wife can be acquired by force, as the Romans acquired the Sabine women; but a wife's affection cannot be acquired in this way. There is no record that the Romans desired the affection of the Sabine women; and those in whom possessive impulses are strong tend to care chiefly for the goods that force can secure. All material goods belong to this class. Liberty in regard to such goods, if it were unrestricted, would make the strong rich and the weak poor. In a capitalistic society, owing to the partial restraints imposed by law, it makes cunning men rich and honest men poor, because the force of the state is put at men's disposal, not according to any just or rational principle, but according to a set of traditional maxims of which the explanation is purely historical. In all that concerns possession and the use of force, unrestrained liberty involves anarchy and injustice. Freedom to kill, freedom to rob, freedom to defraud, no longer belong to individuals, though they still belong to great states, and are exercised by them in the name of patriotism. Neither individuals nor states ought to be free to exert force on their own initiative, except in such sudden emergencies as will subsequently be admitted in justification by a court of law. The reason for this is that the exertion of force by one individual against another is always an evil on both sides, and can only be tolerated when it is compensated by some overwhelming resultant good. In order to minimize the amount of force actually exerted in the world, it is necessary that there should be a public authority, a repository of practically irresistible force, whose function should be primarily to repress the private use of force. A use of force is _private_ when it is exerted by one of the interested parties, or by his friends or accomplices, not by a public neutral authority according to some rule which is intended to be in the public interest. The régime of private property under which we live does much too little to restrain the private use of force. When a man owns a piece of land, for example, he may use force against trespassers, though they must not use force against him. It is clear that some restriction of the liberty of trespass is necessary for the cultivation of the land. But if such powers are to be given to an individual, the state ought to satisfy itself that he occupies no more land than he is warranted in occupying in the public interest, and that the share of the produce of the land that comes to him is no more than a just reward for his labors. Probably the only way in which such ends can be achieved is by state ownership of land. The possessors of land and capital are able at present, by economic pressure, to use force against those who have no possessions. This force is sanctioned by law, while force exercised by the poor against the rich is illegal. Such a state of things is unjust, and does not diminish the use of private force as much as it might be diminished. The whole realm of the possessive impulses, and of the use of force to which they give rise, stands in need of control by a public neutral authority, in the interests of liberty no less than of justice. Within a nation, this public authority will naturally be the state; in relations between nations, if the present anarchy is to cease, it will have to be some international parliament. But the motive underlying the public control of men's possessive impulses should always be the increase of liberty, both by the prevention of private tyranny and by the liberation of creative impulses. If public control is not to do more harm than good, it must be so exercised as to leave the utmost freedom of private initiative in all those ways that do not involve the private use of force. In this respect all governments have always failed egregiously, and there is no evidence that they are improving. The creative impulses, unlike those that are possessive, are directed to ends in which one man's gain is not another man's loss. The man who makes a scientific discovery or writes a poem is enriching others at the same time as himself. Any increase in knowledge or good-will is a gain to all who are affected by it, not only to the actual possessor. Those who feel the joy of life are a happiness to others as well as to themselves. Force cannot create such things, though it can destroy them; no principle of distributive justice applies to them, since the gain of each is the gain of all. For these reasons, the creative part of a man's activity ought to be as free as possible from all public control, in order that it may remain spontaneous and full of vigor. The only function of the state in regard to this part of the individual life should be to do everything possible toward providing outlets and opportunities. In every life a part is governed by the community, and a part by private initiative. The part governed by private initiative is greatest in the most important individuals, such as men of genius and creative thinkers. This part ought only to be restricted when it is predatory; otherwise, everything ought to be done to make it as great and as vigorous as possible. The object of education ought not to be to make all men think alike, but to make each think in the way which is the fullest expression of his own personality. In the choice of a means of livelihood all young men and young women ought, as far as possible, to be able to choose what is attractive to them; if no money-making occupation is attractive, they ought to be free to do little work for little pay, and spend their leisure as they choose. Any kind of censure on freedom of thought or on the dissemination of knowledge is, of course, to be condemned utterly. Huge organizations, both political and economic, are one of the distinguishing characteristics of the modern world. These organizations have immense power, and often use their power to discourage originality in thought and action. They ought, on the contrary, to give the freest scope that is possible without producing anarchy or violent conflict. They ought not to take cognizance of any part of a man's life except what is concerned with the legitimate objects of public control, namely, possessions and the use of force. And they ought, by devolution, to leave as large a share of control as possible in the hands of individuals and small groups. If this is not done, the men at the head of these vast organizations will infallibly become tyrannous through the habit of excessive power, and will in time interfere in ways that crush out individual initiative. The problem which faces the modern world is the combination of individual initiative with the increase in the scope and size of organizations. Unless it is solved, individuals will grow less and less full of life and vigor, and more and more passively submissive to conditions imposed upon them. A society composed of such individuals cannot be progressive or add much to the world's stock of mental and spiritual possessions. Only personal liberty and the encouragement of initiative can secure these things. Those who resist authority when it encroaches upon the legitimate sphere of the individual are performing a service to society, however little society may value it. In regard to the past, this is universally acknowledged; but it is no less true in regard to the present and the future. Chapter V: National Independence and Internationalism In the relations between states, as in the relations of groups within a single state, what is to be desired is independence for each as regards internal affairs, and law rather than private force as regards external affairs. But as regards groups within a state, it is internal independence that must be emphasized, since that is what is lacking; subjection to law has been secured, on the whole, since the end of the Middle Ages. In the relations between states, on the contrary, it is law and a central government that are lacking, since independence exists for external as for internal affairs. The stage we have reached in the affairs of Europe corresponds to the stage reached in our internal affairs during the Wars of the Roses, when turbulent barons frustrated the attempt to make them keep the king's peace. Thus, although the goal is the same in the two cases, the steps to be taken in order to achieve it are quite different. There can be no good international system until the boundaries of states coincide as nearly as possible with the boundaries of nations. But it is not easy to say what we mean by a nation. Are the Irish a nation? Home Rulers say yes, Unionists say no. Are the Ulstermen a nation? Unionists say yes, Home Rulers say no. In all such cases it is a party question whether we are to call a group a nation or not. A German will tell you that the Russian Poles are a nation, but as for the Prussian Poles, they, of course, are part of Prussia. Professors can always be hired to prove, by arguments of race or language or history, that a group about which there is a dispute is, or is not, a nation, as may be desired by those whom the professors serve. If we are to avoid all these controversies, we must first of all endeavor to find some definition of a nation. A nation is not to be defined by affinities of language or a common historical origin, though these things often help to produce a nation. Switzerland is a nation, despite diversities of race, religion, and language. England and Scotland now form one nation, though they did not do so at the time of the Civil War. This is shown by Cromwell's saying, in the height of the conflict, that he would rather be subject to the domain of the royalists than to that of the Scotch. Great Britain was one state before it was one nation; on the other hand, Germany was one nation before it was one state. What constitutes a nation is a sentiment and an instinct, a sentiment of similarity and an instinct of belonging to the same group or herd. The instinct is an extension of the instinct which constitutes a flock of sheep, or any other group of gregarious animals. The sentiment which goes with this is like a milder and more extended form of family feeling. When we return to England after being on the Continent, we feel something friendly in the familiar ways, and it is easy to believe that Englishmen on the whole are virtuous, while many foreigners are full of designing wickedness. Such feelings make it easy to organize a nation into a state. It is not difficult, as a rule, to acquiesce in the orders of a national government. We feel that it is our government, and that its decrees are more or less the same as those which we should have given if we ourselves had been the governors. There is an instinctive and usually unconscious sense of a common purpose animating the members of a nation. This becomes especially vivid when there is war or a danger of war. Any one who, at such a time, stands out against the orders of his government feels an inner conflict quite different from any that he would feel in standing out against the orders of a foreign government in whose power he might happen to find himself. If he stands out, he does so with some more or less conscious hope that his government may in time come to think as he does; whereas, in standing out against a foreign government, no such hope is necessary. This group instinct, however it may have arisen, is what constitutes a nation, and what makes it important that the boundaries of nations should also be the boundaries of states. National sentiment is a fact, and should be taken account of by institutions. When it is ignored, it is intensified and becomes a source of strife. It can only be rendered harmless by being given free play, so long as it is not predatory. But it is not, in itself, a good or admirable feeling. There is nothing rational and nothing desirable in a limitation of sympathy which confines it to a fragment of the human race. Diversities of manners and customs and traditions are, on the whole, a good thing, since they enable different nations to produce different types of excellence. But in national feeling there is always latent or explicit an element of hostility to foreigners. National feeling, as we know it, could not exist in a nation which was wholly free from external pressure of a hostile kind. And group feeling produces a limited and often harmful kind of morality. Men come to identify the good with what serves the interests of their own group, and the bad with what works against those interests, even if it should happen to be in the interests of mankind as a whole. This group morality is very much in evidence during war, and is taken for granted in men's ordinary thought. Although almost all Englishmen consider the defeat of Germany desirable for the good of the world, yet nevertheless most of them honor a German for fighting for his country, because it has not occurred to them that his actions ought to be guided by a morality higher than that of the group. A man does right, as a rule, to have his thoughts more occupied with the interests of his own nation than with those of others, because his actions are more likely to affect his own nation. But in time of war, and in all matters which are of equal concern to other nations and to his own, a man ought to take account of the universal welfare, and not allow his survey to be limited by the interest, or supposed interest, of his own group or nation. So long as national feeling exists, it is very important that each nation should be self-governing as regards its internal affairs. Government can only be carried on by force and tyranny if its subjects view it with hostile eyes, and they will so view it if they feel that it belongs to an alien nation. This principle meets with difficulties in cases where men of different nations live side by side in the same area, as happens in some parts of the Balkans. There are also difficulties in regard to places which, for some geographical reason, are of great international importance, such as the Suez Canal and the Panama Canal. In such cases the purely local desires of the inhabitants may have to give way before larger interests. But in general, at any rate as applied to civilized communities, the principle that the boundaries of nations ought to coincide with the boundaries of states has very few exceptions. This principle, however, does not decide how the relations between states are to be regulated, or how a conflict of interests between rival states is to be decided. At present, every great state claims absolute sovereignty, not only in regard to its internal affairs but also in regard to its external actions. This claim to absolute sovereignty leads it into conflict with similar claims on the part of other great states. Such conflicts at present can only be decided by war or diplomacy, and diplomacy is in essence nothing but the threat of war. There is no more justification for the claim to absolute sovereignty on the part of a state than there would be for a similar claim on the part of an individual. The claim to absolute sovereignty is, in effect, a claim that all external affairs are to be regulated purely by force, and that when two nations or groups of nations are interested in a question, the decision shall depend solely upon which of them is, or is believed to be, the stronger. This is nothing but primitive anarchy, "the war of all against all," which Hobbes asserted to be the original state of mankind. There cannot be secure peace in the world, or any decision of international questions according to international law, until states are willing to part with their absolute sovereignty as regards their external relations, and to leave the decision in such matters to some international instrument of government.[5] An international government will have to be legislative as well as judicial. It is not enough that there should be a Hague tribunal, deciding matters according to some already existing system of international law; it is necessary also that there should be a body capable of enacting international law, and this body will have to have the power of transferring territory from one state to another, when it is persuaded that adequate grounds exist for such a transference. Friends of peace will make a mistake if they unduly glorify the _status quo_. Some nations grow, while others dwindle; the population of an area may change its character by emigration and immigration. There is no good reason why states should resent changes in their boundaries under such conditions, and if no international authority has power to make changes of this kind, the temptations to war will sometimes become irresistible. [5] For detailed scheme of international government see "International Government," by L. Woolf. Allen & Unwin. The international authority ought to possess an army and navy, and these ought to be the only army and navy in existence. The only legitimate use of force is to diminish the total amount of force exercised in the world. So long as men are free to indulge their predatory instincts, some men or groups of men will take advantage of this freedom for oppression and robbery. Just as the police are necessary to prevent the use of force by private citizens, so an international police will be necessary to prevent the lawless use of force by separate states. But I think it is reasonable to hope that if ever an international government, possessed of the only army and navy in the world, came into existence, the need of force to enact obedience to its decisions would be very temporary. In a short time the benefits resulting from the substitution of law for anarchy would become so obvious that the international government would acquire an unquestioned authority, and no state would dream of rebelling against its decisions. As soon as this stage had been reached, the international army and navy would become unnecessary. We have still a very long road to travel before we arrive at the establishment of an international authority, but it is not very difficult to foresee the steps by which this result will be gradually reached. There is likely to be a continual increase in the practice of submitting disputes to arbitration, and in the realization that the supposed conflicts of interest between different states are mainly illusory. Even where there is a real conflict of interest, it must in time become obvious that neither of the states concerned would suffer as much by giving way as by fighting. With the progress of inventions, war, when it does occur, is bound to become increasingly destructive. The civilized races of the world are faced with the alternative of coöperation or mutual destruction. The present war is making this alternative daily more evident. And it is difficult to believe that, when the enmities which it has generated have had time to cool, civilized men will deliberately choose to destroy civilization, rather than acquiesce in the abolition of war. The matters in which the interests of nations are supposed to clash are mainly three: tariffs, which are a delusion; the exploitation of inferior races, which is a crime; pride of power and dominion, which is a schoolboy folly. The economic argument against tariffs is familiar, and I shall not repeat it. The only reason why it fails to carry conviction is the enmity between nations. Nobody proposes to set up a tariff between England and Scotland, or between Lancashire and Yorkshire. Yet the arguments by which tariffs between nations are supported might be used just as well to defend tariffs between counties. Universal free trade would indubitably be of economic benefit to mankind, and would be adopted to-morrow if it were not for the hatred and suspicion which nations feel one toward another. From the point of view of preserving the peace of the world, free trade between the different civilized states is not so important as the open door in their dependencies. The desire for exclusive markets is one of the most potent causes of war. Exploiting what are called "inferior races" has become one of the main objects of European statecraft. It is not only, or primarily, trade that is desired, but opportunities for investment; finance is more concerned in the matter than industry. Rival diplomatists are very often the servants, conscious or unconscious, of rival groups of financiers. The financiers, though themselves of no particular nation, understand the art of appealing to national prejudice, and of inducing the taxpayer to incur expenditure of which they reap the benefit. The evils which they produce at home, and the devastation that they spread among the races whom they exploit, are part of the price which the world has to pay for its acquiescence in the capitalist régime. But neither tariffs nor financiers would be able to cause serious trouble, if it were not for the sentiment of national pride. National pride might be on the whole beneficent, if it took the direction of emulation in the things that are important to civilization. If we prided ourselves upon our poets, our men of science, or the justice and humanity of our social system, we might find in national pride a stimulus to useful endeavors. But such matters play a very small part. National pride, as it exists now, is almost exclusively concerned with power and dominion, with the extent of territory that a nation owns, and with its capacity for enforcing its will against the opposition of other nations. In this it is reinforced by group morality. To nine citizens out of ten it seems self-evident, whenever the will of their own nation clashes with that of another, that their own nation must be in the right. Even if it were not in the right on the particular issue, yet it stands in general for so much nobler ideals than those represented by the other nation to the dispute, that any increase in its power is bound to be for the good of mankind. Since all nations equally believe this of themselves, all are equally ready to insist upon the victory of their own side in any dispute in which they believe that they have a good hope of victory. While this temper persists, the hope of international coöperation must remain dim. If men could divest themselves of the sentiment of rivalry and hostility between different nations, they would perceive that the matters in which the interests of different nations coincide immeasurably outweigh those in which they clash; they would perceive, to begin with, that trade is not to be compared to warfare; that the man who sells you goods is not doing you an injury. No one considers that the butcher and the baker are his enemies because they drain him of money. Yet as soon as goods come from a foreign country, we are asked to believe that we suffer a terrible injury in purchasing them. No one remembers that it is by means of goods exported that we purchase them. But in the country to which we export, it is the goods we send which are thought dangerous, and the goods we buy are forgotten. The whole conception of trade, which has been forced upon us by manufacturers who dreaded foreign competition, by trusts which desired to secure monopolies, and by economists poisoned by the virus of nationalism, is totally and absolutely false. Trade results simply from division of labor. A man cannot himself make all the goods of which he has need, and therefore he must exchange his produce with that of other people. What applies to the individual, applies in exactly the same way to the nation. There is no reason to desire that a nation should itself produce all the goods of which it has need; it is better that it should specialize upon those goods which it can produce to most advantage, and should exchange its surplus with the surplus of other goods produced by other countries. There is no use in sending goods out of the country except in order to get other goods in return. A butcher who is always willing to part with his meat but not willing to take bread from the baker, or boots from the bootmaker, or clothes from the tailor, would soon find himself in a sorry plight. Yet he would be no more foolish than the protectionist who desires that we should send goods abroad without receiving payment in the shape of goods imported from abroad. The wage system has made people believe that what a man needs is work. This, of course, is absurd. What he needs is the goods produced by work, and the less work involved in making a given amount of goods, the better. But owing to our economic system, every economy in methods of production enables employers to dismiss some of their employees, and to cause destitution, where a better system would produce only an increase of wages or a diminution in the hours of work without any corresponding diminution of wages. Our economic system is topsyturvy. It makes the interest of the individual conflict with the interest of the community in a thousand ways in which no such conflict ought to exist. Under a better system the benefits of free trade and the evils of tariffs would be obvious to all. Apart from trade, the interests of nations coincide in all that makes what we call civilization. Inventions and discoveries bring benefit to all. The progress of science is a matter of equal concern to the whole civilized world. Whether a man of science is an Englishman, a Frenchman, or a German is a matter of no real importance. His discoveries are open to all, and nothing but intelligence is required in order to profit by them. The whole world of art and literature and learning is international; what is done in one country is not done for that country, but for mankind. If we ask ourselves what are the things that raise mankind above the brutes, what are the things that make us think the human race more valuable than any species of animals, we shall find that none of them are things in which any one nation can have exclusive property, but all are things in which the whole world can share. Those who have any care for these things, those who wish to see mankind fruitful in the work which men alone can do, will take little account of national boundaries, and have little care to what state a man happens to owe allegiance. The importance of international coöperation outside the sphere of politics has been brought home to me by my own experience. Until lately I was engaged in teaching a new science which few men in the world were able to teach. My own work in this science was based chiefly upon the work of a German and an Italian. My pupils came from all over the civilized world: France, Germany, Austria, Russia, Greece, Japan, China, India, and America. None of us was conscious of any sense of national divisions. We felt ourselves an outpost of civilization, building a new road into the virgin forest of the unknown. All coöperated in the common task, and in the interest of such a work the political enmities of nations seemed trivial, temporary, and futile. But it is not only in the somewhat rarefied atmosphere of abstruse science that international coöperation is vital to the progress of civilization. All our economic problems, all the questions of securing the rights of labor, all the hopes of freedom at home and humanity abroad, rest upon the creation of international good-will. So long as hatred, suspicion, and fear dominate the feelings of men toward each other, so long we cannot hope to escape from the tyranny of violence and brute force. Men must learn to be conscious of the common interests of mankind in which all are at one, rather than of those supposed interests in which the nations are divided. It is not necessary, or even desirable, to obliterate the differences of manners and custom and tradition between different nations. These differences enable each nation to make its own distinctive contribution to the sum total of the world's civilization. What is to be desired is not cosmopolitanism, not the absence of all national characteristics that one associates with couriers, _wagon-lit_ attendants, and others, who have had everything distinctive obliterated by multiple and trivial contacts with men of every civilized country. Such cosmopolitanism is the result of loss, not gain. The international spirit which we should wish to see produced will be something added to love of country, not something taken away. Just as patriotism does not prevent a man from feeling family affection, so the international spirit ought not to prevent a man from feeling affection for his own country. But it will somewhat alter the character of that affection. The things which he will desire for his own country will no longer be things which can only be acquired at the expense of others, but rather those things in which the excellence of any one country is to the advantage of all the world. He will wish his own country to be great in the arts of peace, to be eminent in thought and science, to be magnanimous and just and generous. He will wish it to help mankind on the way toward that better world of liberty and international concord which must be realized if any happiness is to be left to man. He will not desire for his country the passing triumphs of a narrow possessiveness, but rather the enduring triumph of having helped to embody in human affairs something of that spirit of brotherhood which Christ taught and which the Christian churches have forgotten. He will see that this spirit embodies not only the highest morality, but also the truest wisdom, and the only road by which the nations, torn and bleeding with the wounds which scientific madness has inflicted, can emerge into a life where growth is possible and joy is not banished at the frenzied call of unreal and fictitious duties. Deeds inspired by hate are not duties, whatever pain and self-sacrifice they may involve. Life and hope for the world are to be found only in the deeds of love. 
34979	----	* * * * * +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Note: | | | | Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has | | been preserved. | | | | Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For | | a complete list, please see the end of this document. | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------+ * * * * * TWENTIETH CENTURY SOCIALISM TWENTIETH CENTURY SOCIALISM _WHAT IT IS NOT; WHAT IT IS: HOW IT MAY COME_ BY EDMOND KELLY, M.A., F.G.S. Late Lecturer on Municipal Government at Columbia University, in the City of New York Author of "Government or Human Evolution," "Evolution and Effort," etc., etc. LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK LONDON, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA 1911 Copyright, 1910 BY LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. First Edition, May, 1910 Reprinted, November, 1910 May, 1911 THE SCIENTIFIC PRESS ROBERT DRUMMOND AND COMPANY BROOKLYN, N.Y. INTRODUCTION I No one whose intellectual parts are in working order believes that the industrial world will go back to an unorganized individualistic production and distribution of wealth. No one whose moral sense is awake desires to see the chief means of production owned and controlled by a small number of monstrously wealthy men, however great their ability or good their intentions. Nevertheless, most persons of moral sense and normal mentality are disturbed when one suggests in so many words that if industry cannot henceforth be individualistic and should not be owned and controlled by the Big Few, it will, apparently, have to be owned and controlled by the Many. This paradoxical psychology possibly indicates that we queer human beings do our real thinking and perform our occasional feats of moral self-examination in lucid intervals, alternating with states of mind--and conscience--which were better not described in non-technical language. Edmond Kelly was a man whose lucidity was not interrupted. It was a necessity of his nature to think clearly and coherently. Not less necessary was it for him to think comprehensively, for his sympathy was boundless. Every phase of life interested him. He found nothing but meanness contemptible; and nothing but injustice moved him to hate. To such a mind the partial view is intolerable. A fact must be seen from every side and its relations to other facts must be traced out. From his earliest manhood Mr. Kelly looked upon the struggle for existence as both evolution and effort. Accepting the Darwinian explanation of life, he yet could not admit that man is powerless to control his fate. Physical evolution shades into physiological, and physiological evolution into psychological. Effort, foresight, and directed effort are products of evolution, but having been produced, they become forces in further evolution. In the higher evolution of man, they have become principal forces. From the moment that Mr. Kelly grasped this thought his mind was busy with it through all the years of his exceedingly active life, mastering its implications, examining it in its social or collective, no less than in its individual aspect, and forecasting the chief lines of constructive effort by an enlightened mankind industrially and politically organized for the most effective coöperation. Yet it was not until a few years before his death that Mr. Kelly became a declared Socialist. The slow advance to his ultimate conclusions was characteristic. Though his mind moved swiftly, his intellectual integrity compelled him to examine every position as he went on. Because of these qualities his books form a series, consecutive in premisses and argument; a logical sequence corresponding to their chronological order. Thus, in his early work, "Evolution and Effort," Mr. Kelly was content to do thoroughly one particular thing, namely, to demonstrate that the Spencerian philosophy of evolution could be accepted without committing mankind to the practical programme of _laissez faire_, upon which Mr. Spencer himself so strongly insisted. This work Mr. Kelly did so well that there is no need for anyone to do it over, and it provided a firm foundation for his further constructive efforts. _The Popular Science Monthly_, which was then, under the editorship of Professor Edward L. Youmans, unreservedly committed to Spencerian views, acknowledged that it was the most telling attack upon what Professor Huxley had called "administrative nihilism" that had been made in any quarter. The main ideas of "Evolution and Effort" were elaborated and clinched in the two large volumes on "Government or Human Evolution," and were concretely applied to pressing practical questions in the unsigned book, "A Programme for Workingmen." Each of the two volumes on "Government" was devoted, as "Evolution and Effort" had been, to establishing firmly a specific proposition. When Mr. Kelly began writing the first volume, which bore the sub-title "Justice," he was a lecturer in the Faculty of Political Science at Columbia University and was intensely interested in the movement for the reform of municipal politics in New York city. Believing that adequate organization was the chief need, he had founded the City Club and the subsidiary Good Government Clubs. In the discussions which this movement called forth, he says: "One fact stood out with startling conspicuousness. Not one out of a thousand was able to formulate a clear idea as to the principles upon which he stood; upon one measure he was an Individualist; upon another, a Collectivist; one day he was for strong governmental action; the next for liberty of contract; and of those who presented the claims of expediency and justice respectively, no one was able to say what justice was." It seemed, therefore, to Mr. Kelly that on the theoretical side we needed first, and above all else, a clear conception of justice as an end to be attained. For conclusions already arrived at in "Evolution and Effort" made it impossible for him to believe that justice is satisfied by merely "rewarding every man according to his performance." Seeing in evolution possibilities beyond present attainment, he believed that a way should be found to enable every man to achieve his potential performance. Thus his notion of justice, derived from the principle of evolution, became substantially identical with that which had been set forth two thousand years ago by Plato in _The Republic_. To quote Mr. Kelly's own words: "Justice may, then, be described as the effort to eliminate from our social conditions the effects of the inequalities of Nature upon the happiness and advancement of man, and particularly to create an artificial environment which shall serve the individual as well as the race, and tend to perpetuate noble types rather than those which are base." It was inevitable that with such a conception of justice in mind, a thinker scientifically so remorseless as Mr. Kelly was, should find individualistic prejudices shaken before he completed his task. "Beginning with a strong bias against Socialism of every kind," he was forced before he reached the end of his first volume to "a reluctant recognition that by collective action only could the uncorrupted many be rescued from the corrupt few, and could successful effort be made to diminish the misery of poverty and crime." Having arrived at this conclusion, Mr. Kelly was able to make his second volume on the respective claims of Individualism and Collectivism an exposition which, for clearness of insight, acuteness of philosophical observation, wealth of historical knowledge, and sanity of judgment, has few equals in the modern literature of social problems. He demonstrated the inevitable failure of individualism as an adequate working programme for a complex civilization. He showed that collectivism must be accepted, whether we like it or not, if we desire justice; and, more than this, he showed, not speculatively, but from concrete and experimental data, that a civilized mankind may be expected to like a reasonable collectivism when it begins to understand and to adopt it, far better than it has liked individualism, and for the adequate reason that collectivism will diminish misery and increase happiness. Not even upon the completion of this remarkable volume, however, was Mr. Kelly quite ready to take the final step of identifying himself with the Socialist party. So strong was that nature within him which, without theological implications, we may call the spiritual or religious, that he would have been glad if he could have seen the possibility of attaining the ends which Socialism contemplates through a movement essentially subjective, that is to say, through developments of the intellectual and moral nature of man which would impel all human beings, irrespective of class distinctions, to work together spontaneously and unselfishly, for the creation of a wholesome environment and essential justice in social relations. It was this feeling that led him to write the anonymously published, "Practical Programme for Workingmen," in which essentially socialistic measures are advocated, but with strong emphasis upon the vital importance of character and sympathy. When a strong-minded man of strict intellectual honesty has thus advanced, step by step, from one position to another, at every stage of his progress surveying the whole field of human struggle; observing it dispassionately, as a scientific evolutionist; observing it sympathetically, "as one who loves his fellowmen," comes at last to the socialistic conclusion, and devotes the last weeks of his life to the preparation of a new statement of socialistic doctrine, the fact is more significant, as an indication of the way mankind is going, than are all the cries of "lo here, lo there" that arise from the din of party discussion. In Mr. Kelly's case the significance was deepened by all the circumstances of taste and association. Intensely democratic in his relations to men, Mr. Kelly was in breeding, in culture, in delicacy of feeling an aristocrat of the purest type. Educated at Columbia and at Cambridge, his university acquaintance and his political and professional activities in New York and in Paris had kept him continually in touch with what the socialist calls "the capitalist class." In joining the Socialist party he jeopardized friendships and associations that meant more to him than anything else save the approval of his own conscience. The book now given to the public, written when he knew that his days were numbered, is, all in all, the most remarkable of his works. All writers of experience know that it is far easier to write a first statement of a newly discovered truth, than to restate the chief principles of a system already partly formulated; a system more or less vague where it is most vital, more or less unscientific and impossible where it is most specific. No one knew better than Mr. Kelly did that while the larger-minded leaders of the Socialist movement would generously welcome any thought which he had to give, there would be some of the rank and file who would feel that, in differing from the accredited writers, he was revealing himself as a convert not yet quite informed on all tenets of the creed--perhaps not even quite sound in the faith. A less enthusiastic nature, or one less resolutely determined to complete his life work as best he could, would have shrunk from such an undertaking as this book was. That under the circumstances he could put into it the vigor of thought and of style, the incisive criticism, the wealth of fact and illustration; above all, the freshness of view, the practical good sense and the strong constructive treatment which we find in these pages, is indeed remarkable. How clearly he saw what sort of a book was needed, is best indicated in his own account of what he desired to do. It should be first of all, he thought, comprehensive. Socialism has been presented from the economic standpoint, from the scientific, from the ethical and from the idealistic. As Mr. Kelly saw it, Socialism is not merely an economic system, nor merely an idealistic vision. It is a consequence and product of evolution. "Science has made it constructive," he says, "and the trusts have made it practical." It is ethical because "the competitive system must ultimately break upon the solidarity of mankind," because the survival of the fit is not the whole result of evolution. The result still to be attained is "the improvement of all." And Socialism is idealistic because it not only contemplates, but gives reasonable promise of "a community from which exploitation, unemployment, poverty and prostitution shall be eliminated." But besides making an exposition of Socialism as a whole and in all its parts, Mr. Kelly aimed to make a book "for non-socialists." With this purpose in view he has kept closely to concrete statement and above all has tried to avoid vagueness and loose generalization. He has described possibilities in terms that all know and understand. With the precision of the trained legal mind, he seizes the essential point when he says: "It is not enough to be told that there are a thousand ways through which Socialism can be attained. We want to see clearly one way." With the last strength that he had to spend Mr. Kelly showed one way; and no bewildered wayfarer through our baffling civilization, however he may hesitate to set his feet upon it, will venture to say that it is not clear. FRANKLIN H. GIDDINGS. NEW YORK, April 19, 1910. II An immense revolution, a wonderful revolution, is opening in the mind of the human race; a new driving force is taking hold of the souls of men--the devotion to the welfare of the whole; a new sense, with all the intensity of a new-born feeling, is emerging in the consciousness of men--the sense that one cannot himself be healthy or happy unless the race is happy and healthy. A hundred theories appearing here and there, a thousand organizations springing up, a million acts of individuals everywhere, attest each day the presence and the growing power of this vast solidarizing movement. Among these manifestations throughout the world, the most pronounced and the most clearly defined is that compact, fiercely vital organization known as the international Socialist party. Yet the Socialist party is not the movement, any more than the cresting billow is the torrent. It is an imperatively necessary element; but the movement itself is vastly broader and deeper than any manifestation of it. An uncounted multitude in all lands are gradually becoming conscious of this sweeping tendency and of their own part in it--a multitude as yet not bearing any specific title. Out of these a considerable number are fully conscious of the movement, and are willing partakers. These we might call solidarists, in token of their conviction that the goal ought to be and will be an economic solidarity. But of even these it is only a part who are distinctively to be called Socialists, only those who have perceived two certain mighty facts: first, that men's mass-relations in the process of making a living are fundamental to their other relations, to their opinions and motives, and to all revolutions; and, second, that the chief agency in bringing about changes in the great affairs of the human race has always been and continues to be the pressure and clash between enduring masses of men animated by opposite economic interests. The Socialist is one who sees these social and historic facts and whose action is guided by such sight; the non-Socialist solidarist is one who, though animated by the socializing impulses, has not yet perceived these two most weighty facts. Now Edmond Kelly, as was natural from his antecedents, was for nearly the whole of his life a non-Socialist solidarist. But, about two years before his death, being at the height of his powers of insight and intellect, he attained the clear vision of the "class-struggle," and no longer had any doubts where he himself belonged in the army of humanity--he became and remained a comrade--a loyal comrade. There is a certain bit of doggerel, said to derive from Oxford, which tells us that: "Every little boy or gal, Who comes into this world alive, Is born a little Radical, Or else a small Conservative." And this all-pervading division penetrates even that most radical of bodies, the Socialist party. That party has its own conservative and radical wings--its right and its left--and Edmond Kelly is distinctly of the right. One who is inclined by instinct to the one wing, and by logic to the other, can realize the indispensableness of both--the special contribution which each makes, and which the other cannot make, to the common cause. The motive of this note is to appeal to the comrades of the left not to shut their eyes to the value of this book, not to forego its special usefulness. For the very attitude of its author, which may be distasteful to them--his making appeals which they no longer make, his using forms of speech which they reject, his making so little use of that which is their main appeal, fit him especially to influence the minds of that numerous fringe of educated persons who must evidently be first made "rightists" before they can become "centrists" or "leftists." It may even be imagined that the difficult type of working man, he who thinks himself too noble-minded to respond to class appeal, might begin to rouse himself if he could once be brought under the charm of this book. Aware that he had not long to live, Mr. Kelly hastened to finish the first draft of the book, and indeed he survived that completion only two weeks. He knew that considerable editorial work was needed, and this he entrusted to Mrs. Florence Kelley, author of "Some Ethical Gains through Legislation" and translator of Marx' "Discourse on Free Trade," and of Friedrich Engels' work on the "Condition of the Working Class in England." She undertook and has fulfilled this trust, and has been aided throughout by the untiring labors of Shaun Kelly, the author's son. Thus this book of Mr. Kelly's is doubly a memorial of love--of his for man, and of ours for him. RUFUS W. WEEKS. CONTENTS INTRODUCTORY NOTES: PAGE By Professor Franklin H. Giddings v By Rufus W. Weeks xii INTRODUCTORY 1 BOOK I _WHAT SOCIALISM IS NOT_ CHAPTER I. SUBJECTIVE OBSTACLES TO THE UNDERSTANDING OF SOCIALISM 18 Vested Interests 18 II. ECONOMIC CONDITIONS 23 1. Bourgeois, Revolutionist, and Evolutionist 23 (_a_) The Bourgeois Point of View 23 (_b_) The Revolutionist Point of View 24 (_c_) The Evolutionist Point of View 27 III. MISREPRESENTATION AND IGNORANCE 31 1. Socialism is not Anarchism 31 2. Socialism is not Communism 33 3. Socialism will not Suppress Competition 36 4. Socialism will not Destroy the Home 40 5. Socialism will not Abolish Property 42 6. Socialism will not Impair Liberty 46 7. Conclusion 51 BOOK II _WHAT CAPITALISM IS_ EVILS OF CAPITALISM 53 I. CAPITALISM IS STUPID 57 1. Overproduction 57 2. Unemployment 66 3. Prostitution 79 4. Strikes and Lockouts 86 5. Adulteration 88 II. CAPITALISM IS WASTEFUL 94 1. Getting the Market 95 2. Cross Freights 96 III. CAPITALISM IS DISORDERLY 101 1. Anarchy of Production and Distribution 102 (_a_) Tyranny of the Market 102 (_b_) Tyranny of the Trust 104 (_c_) Tyranny of the Trade Union 106 IV. PROPERTY AND LIBERTY 112 1. Origin of Property 113 V. RESULTS OF PROPERTY 131 1. The Guilds 135 2. Trade Unions 140 3. The Unsolved and Insoluble Problems of Trade Unionism 159 (_a_) The Conflict between the Trust and the Trade Union 167 (_b_) Advantage of Trusts over Unions 169 (_c_) Advantage of Unions over Trusts 171 VI. MONEY 176 VII. CAN THE EVILS OF CAPITALISM BE ELIMINATED BY COÖPERATION 199 BOOK III _WHAT SOCIALISM IS_ I. ECONOMIC ASPECT OF SOCIALISM 204 II. ECONOMIC CONSTRUCTION OF THE COÖPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH 235 1. How Socialism May Come 239 2. Reform and Revolution 243 3. Possible Transitional Measures 248 4. Farm Colonies 263 5. Land 278 6. Summary of the Productive Side of Economic Construction 286 7. Distribution 288 8. Remuneration 303 9. Circulating Medium under Socialism 307 10. Summary 313 III. POLITICAL ASPECT 317 1. Education 325 2. Churches 328 3. Political Construction 329 IV. SCIENTIFIC ASPECT 335 1. Natural Environment 337 (_a_) Struggle for Life or Competitive System 337 (_b_) Coöperative System 342 2. Human Environment 349 3. Effect of Competitive System on Type 357 4. Brief Restatement 360 5. Can Human Nature be Changed by Law 364 6. Summary 374 V. ETHICAL ASPECT 378 1. Conflict between Science and Religion 378 2. Conflict between Economics and Religion 389 3. Socialism Reconciles Religion, Economics, and Science 395 VI. SOLIDARITY 402 APPENDIX 413 INDEX 433 TWENTIETH CENTURY SOCIALISM INTRODUCTORY My reason for writing this book is that I do not know of any one book that gives in small compass to the uninformed a comprehensive view of Socialism. It would be fatal to suggest to one not quite certain whether he wants to know about Socialism or not, that he should read the great economic foundation work of Karl Marx.[1] The excellent book of Emil Vandervelde,[2] which seems to me to contain one of the most compendious accounts of economic Socialism, is written from the Belgian and European point of view rather than from the American; it does not attempt to give either the scientific[3] or the ethical argument for Socialism, nor does it contain specific answers to the objections which are most imminent in American minds to-day. The recent book by Morris Hillquit,[4] deservedly recognized as one of the leaders of the party in America, an authoritative, clear and admirable statement of what the Socialist party stands for, seems to be addressed to the Socialist rather than to the non-Socialist. Innumerable books and pamphlets by Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, John Spargo, William Morris and others throw light on this enormous subject. But for years past when asked by the average American what one book would give him a complete account of Socialism, I have been at a loss what to recommend. The book that first opened my eyes to the possibilities of Socialism was "Fabian Tracts"; but I doubt whether this would appeal to many American readers. An economic mind must be given the economic argument; a scientific mind the scientific argument; an idealistic mind, the ideal; an ethical mind, the ethical; but the average mind must be given all four; for it is in the convincing concurrence of all four that the argument for Socialism is unanswerable. Another reason for writing this book is the desire to put Socialism firmly on the solid foundation of fact. It is the progress of science and the economic development of the last few years that have made Socialism constructive and practical. Science has made it constructive and the trusts have made it practical. It no longer rests on the imagination of poets nor on the discontent of the unemployed. On the contrary, Science with its demonstration that man is no longer the mere result of his environment, but can become its master, teaches us that by constructing our environment with intelligence we can determine the direction of our own development. The trusts, with their demonstration of the waste and folly of competition, teach us that what a few promoters have done for their own benefit the whole community can do for the benefit of all. Again, history has revealed a fact upon which the competitive system must ultimately break; it may break under the hammer of the new builder or through the upheaval of a mob; but that it must eventually break is as certain as that day follows night. This fact is the solidarity of mankind. Whether it was wise of the Few to share the government with the Many it is too late now to inquire. The thing has been done--_alea jacta_. And that the Few should imagine that, after having put a club in the hands of the Many with which they can, when they choose, at any election smash to pieces the machinery--political and industrial--that oppresses them; and having established a system of education--nay, of compulsory education--through which the Many _must_ learn during their childhood, how upon attaining majority, they can use this club most effectually, the Many will refrain from using it--is one of those delicious inconsequences of the governing class which throws a ray of humor over an otherwise tragic scene. I do not believe it was in the power of the Few to perpetuate their reign; I think there are evidences of a Power working through Evolution to which even Herbert Spencer has paid the tribute of a capital P, which ordained from the beginning that Man should progress not as his forbears did, through the survival only of the fit, but as Man has unconsciously for centuries been doing, through the improvement of all. I think this is the Power that some worship under the name of Jah and others under the name of God. But this view will not be insisted upon, for it is not necessary to insist upon it. The fact of human solidarity will, I think, be demonstrated,[5] and it will, I hope, at the same time be shown that Socialism is no longer a theory born of discontent, but a system developed by fact, and as inevitably so developed as the tiger from the jungle of India, or cattle from the civilization of man. Again, I do not think it is sufficient to demonstrate that Socialism is sound in theory. We have also to show that it is attainable in fact. The practical American will not be satisfied with being told that there are a thousand different ways through which Socialism can be attained. He does not want to be told how many ways there are to Socialism, but wants to be shown one way along which his imagination can safely travel. What the "bourgeois" wants to know is just how Socialism is going to work. He cannot conceive of industry without capitalism, any more than he can conceive of the world without the sun. Some concrete picture must be presented to his mind that will enable him to understand that while capital is not only good, but essential, the capitalist is not only bad, but superfluous. Nothing less than a picture of industry actually in operation without capitalism will suffice; and this, therefore, I have attempted to draw. No pretence is made that the picture is the only possible Socialist state, or that it will ever be realized in the exact shape in which it is drawn. The only claim to be made for it is that it furnishes a fair account of an industrial community from which exploitation, unemployment, poverty and prostitution are eliminated; that such an industrial community is more practical because far more economical than our own; and that it is the goal towards which, if we survive the dangers attending the present conflict between capital and labor, industrial and ethical evolution are inevitably driving us. Again, there is probably no feature connected with Socialism that it is more important to demonstrate and define than its economy. It occurred to me that we possessed in our official reports, and particularly in the 13th Annual Report of the Bureau of Labor, figures which would enable us to arrive at a considerable part of this economy with some mathematical certainty. I pointed out my plan to Mr. J. Lebovitz, of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., who has a better talent for statistics than myself, and I cannot but congratulate myself and my readers upon the results to which, thanks to his help, we have jointly come. It must be admitted that the figures in our possession do not enable us to estimate the whole economy of Socialism; but they do enable us to give a tentative estimate of how many hours a workingman would have to work to produce the things which the average workingman consumes if no account be taken of profit, rent, interest, and the cost of distribution. Of course, though profit, interest and rent would be eliminated in a coöperative commonwealth, we should still be subject to the cost of distribution and, therefore, the figures we arrive at are incomplete in the sense that we have to take into account the fact that they do not include this cost. But there would be economies exercised in a coöperative commonwealth, such as the economy of insurance, of advertising, of unnecessary sickness, of strikes and lockouts, of the cost of pauperism, crime and in some measure that of dependents, defectives and delinquents, etc., which would probably pay the cost of distribution. I feel, therefore, that although our figures are not absolute, they do furnish a starting-point more satisfactory than has heretofore been obtained. The most impelling reason for writing this book is the persistently false and misleading statements made regarding Socialism by the very persons whose business it is to be informed on the subject. For years now the men we elect to office as best fitted to govern us--Presidents and Presidential candidates, Roosevelt, Taft and Bryan, have in spite of repeated protests and explanations been guilty of this offence. Mr. Roosevelt stands too high in the esteem of a large part of our voting public, and I myself entertain too high an opinion of his ability, for such charges as those he has made against Socialism to go unanswered. And in answering them I shall take as my justification the platform of the Socialist party,[6] which must be carefully read by all who want to understand what Socialism really is in the United States of America. It is of course impossible in a platform to give the whole philosophy of Socialism, but the platform does state with sufficient precision what Socialists stand for to make it impossible for anyone who has read it to remain any longer under the false impression created by ignorance or deliberate misrepresentation. I take Mr. Roosevelt's articles in the _Outlook_ as the special object of my explanations, not only because they express very widespread fallacies regarding Socialism, but because they emanate from one who for popularity and reputation casts every other American in the shade; and also because, for this reason, his utterances not only command the attention of the foolish--this he easily gets--but should also, in view of his position, arrest that of those who tend by his exaggerations to be estranged from him. So I have felt it an urgent duty to explain not only what Socialism is, as Hillquit, Vandervelde, Thompson,[7] and many others have so ably done, but specifically to point out what it is not: That it is not Anarchism, but order; not Communism, but justice; that it does not propose to abolish competition, but to regulate it; nor to abolish property, but to consecrate it; nor to abolish the home, but to make the home possible; nor to curtail liberty, but to enlarge it. Now if this last is to be done, it is indispensable to have clear notions as to what liberty is; no intelligent understanding of liberty is possible unless there is an equally intelligent understanding of property, which is more closely connected with liberty than is generally recognized. The necessary relation between property and liberty has escaped some of our ablest lawyers. Just after James C. Carter had finished his argument in Paris on the Seal Fishery case and was preparing a supplementary brief that he had been given permission to file, he told me that he felt it necessary to study up the fundamental question of what property was and had been advised to read Proudhon! I did not know much about Socialism at that time, but did know enough to explain to him that Proudhon was an anarchistic communist; and asked him if he thought the court was disposed to listen to this kind of argument. Mr. Carter was shocked in the extreme, and lowering his voice, asked, a little shamefacedly, what Anarchism and Communism were, and were they the same as Socialism. This led to a discussion of property, of the views held regarding it by Socialists, Communists and Anarchists respectively; and to the strange conclusion that the brief which Mr. Carter was preparing in order to maintain the liberty of the United States to protect seals as the property of humanity at large was Socialism Simon pure! To his dismay he found himself on the verge of preaching the very doctrine which of all doctrines he most abhorred! I do not know any standard work on Socialism that enters carefully into the nature of these things. I attempted it in "Government or Human Evolution," to which I shall have occasion sometimes to refer. But this book was addressed to students of Political Science and is not short or compendious enough for the general public. In a word, I have written this book to supply what I believe to be a crying need--for a compact, simple statement of what Socialism is not, of what Socialism is, how Socialism may come about, and particularly distinguishing modern Socialism from the crude ideas that prevailed before Marx, Darwin and the development of trusts. The public imagines to-day that Socialism is Utopian. This is singularly erroneous. Socialism is the only intelligent, practical system for providing humanity with the necessaries and comforts of life with the least waste, the least effort and the least injustice. The competitive system under which these things are now produced and distributed has been condemned by the business men whose opinions the business world most respects, because it involves infinite labor to a vast majority of the race and useless cost to all, without, I venture to add, assuring happiness to any. Socialism, on the other hand, presents a simple, obvious and unanswerable solution of the manifold problems presented by the competitive system. This solution ought to appeal to business men because it undertakes to do for the benefit of the nation what our greatest business men have been engaged for some years in doing for the benefit of themselves. It is not likely that the American public, once it understands the situation, will refuse to adopt the only practical method of ridding itself of a wasteful system and a corrupt government just because the few who profit by it for very obvious reasons do not want them to. All the public needs is a clear understanding of what Socialism really is; how it is certain to come eventually; and how it is best that it should come. Many Socialists make the mistake of asking us to look too far ahead. We are not all equally far-sighted. Some are very near-sighted. In fact the habit of looking closely at our ledgers and at our looms tends to make us near-sighted. Socialists too may be wrong in their forecast centuries ahead. This book therefore makes a distinction between those things that can be demonstrated and those which, on the contrary, are still matter for mere speculation. It can be demonstrated that a _partial_ substitution of coöperation for competition in definite doses will put an end to pauperism, prostitution and in great part to crime. Whether a _wholesale_ substitution of coöperation for competition will still further promote human development and happiness is a matter of speculation--as to which men can legitimately differ. The contention made in this book is that a substitution of coöperation for competition in the dose herein prescribed _must_ put an end to the three gigantic evils above mentioned, and incidentally confer upon us a larger and truer measure of liberty and happiness than the world has ever yet known. One word about the language of this book. As it is addressed to persons not familiar with the Socialist vocabulary, I am going to abstain to the utmost possible from using this vocabulary. I am not going to use the words "surplus value" when the more familiar word "profit" can be used with practically the same advantage. I am going to avoid the expression "materialist interpretation of history" when the words "economic interpretation of history" are equally correct and less likely to mislead. And I am above all going to avoid, wherever I can, the use of the words "individualism" and "individualists," because these words have been already used by capitalists to beg the whole question. Capitalists have quietly appropriated this word to themselves and Socialists have been foolish enough to permit them to do it. Capitalism does indeed promote a certain kind of individualism; but we shall have to discuss later just what is the nature of the individualism promoted by existing conditions and compare it with the individualism that will be promoted by Socialism. I think it will become clear that it is the peculiar province of Socialism to rescue the vast majority of men from conditions which make the development of the individual impossible, and to put opportunities of individual development at the disposal of all; that, indeed, the highest type of individualism can be realized only in a coöperative commonwealth that will give to every man not only opportunity for developing his individual talents, but leisure for doing so--the very leisure of which the vast majority are deprived under the present system and of which the few who have it profit little. It is not easy to find words to substitute for individualist and individualism. The word that best describes the individualist is "egotist." But the use of the word "egotist," for the very reason that it is the truest word for describing the individualist, would arouse such protest in the minds of those so designated as perhaps to prevent this book from being read by the very persons to whom it is chiefly addressed. The word "capitalist" cannot be used for this purpose either, because by no means all who have capitalistic ideas are capitalists, and some capitalists are free from capitalistic ideas. So instead of the words "individualist," "egotist" and "capitalist," I am going to use the French word "bourgeois." It seems to convey what it is intended to convey with least error and most consideration for capitalistic susceptibilities. It is true that "bourgeois" is a French word and should be avoided in consequence, but it has been now so acclimated to our language that many editors print it without quotation marks. The word "bourgeois" roughly includes all those who have property or employ labor, or who can be psychologically classed with these. It includes the small shop-keeper who keeps a clerk, or perhaps only a servant, and the millionaire who keeps thousands of men at work in his factories, mines, railroads or other industries. It includes the large farmer who employs help, but not the small farmer who employs no help; it includes the lawyer, the broker and the agent who depend upon the capitalist but are lifted above the hunger line. Instead of the word "individualism," I shall use another French expression which has also become acclimated--that is to say, _laissez faire_; for _laissez faire_ are words adopted by the bourgeois to describe the system for which he generally stands. This expression is peculiarly appropriate to-day, when we hear our business men clamoring to be "let alone." Indeed were it not for the awkwardness of the expression "let-alone-ism," this literal translation of _laissez faire_ would just suit my purpose. It is true that the _laissez faire_ of to-day differs from that of the last century. For there is at present a very wide belief in the possibility of controlling corporations, and whereas the _laissez faire_ of the last century went so far as to deny the necessity of government control, that of to-day very largely admits it. By laissez faire, therefore, I mean the controlled _laissez faire_ that now prevails as well as the uncontrolled _laissez faire_ of a century ago, the essential difference between _laissez faire_ and Socialism being that the former implies leaving the production and distribution of everything to private capital whether controlled or uncontrolled by government; whereas Socialism implies putting production and distribution of at least the necessaries of life into the hands of those who actually produce and distribute them without any intervention or control of private capital whatever. I have been careful to take my facts and figures not from Socialist publications, but from government publications or economists of admitted authority. I have, too, in every case where it seems necessary quoted my authority so that there may be no doubt as to the source from which my facts are drawn. In conclusion it must be stated that there are four very different standpoints from which Socialists start--the economic, the political, the scientific and the ethical. Ethical writers began by disregarding the economic side of Socialism altogether, and some economic Socialists are therefore disposed to despise ethical and so-called Christian Socialism; whereas the ethical view is not only useful, but essential to a complete understanding of the subject. The scientific view of Socialism has been comparatively little treated, but it is not for that reason the least important. On the contrary, Herbert Spencer and his school have built a formidable opposition to Socialism based upon pseudo-scientific grounds. It becomes, therefore, important to point out the extent to which Herbert Spencer was wrong and Huxley right in the application of science to this question. My own conviction is that the highest Socialism is that which reconciles all four views--the economic, the political, the scientific and the ethical. But as this is a work of exposition rather than of controversy, I have abstained from insisting upon this view and have, on the contrary, endeavored to give a fair account of all four arguments, in the hope that those who are inclined to the economic view may adopt it for economic reasons; those inclined to the political view may adopt it for political reasons; those who are attracted by the scientific view may adopt it for scientific reasons; and those who are attracted by the ethical view may adopt it for ethical reasons, leaving it to time to determine whether the strongest argument for Socialism is not to be found in the fact that it is recommended by all four. FOOTNOTES: [1] "Capital," by Karl Marx. [2] "Collectivism and Industrial Revolution," Emil Vandervelde. [3] Engels and others have described Marxian or Economic Socialism as scientific, on the ground that Marx was the first to reduce Socialism to a science. But the word science has become so inseparably connected in our minds with chemistry, physics, biology, zoology, and geology, etc., that it seems wiser to define Marxian Socialism as economic and to keep the word scientific for that view of Socialism which is built on the sciences proper and principally on biology. [4] "Socialism in Theory and Practice." Macmillan, 1909. [5] Book III, Chapter VI. [6] See Appendix. [7] "The Constructive Program of Socialism," Carl D. Thompson. BOOK I _WHAT SOCIALISM IS NOT_ Socialism is not a subject which can be put into a nutshell. On the contrary it resembles rather a lofty mountain which has to be viewed from every point of the compass in order to be understood. Mont Blanc, approached from the North or Swiss side, presents the aspect of a round white dome of snow; approached from the South or Italian side it presents that of a sharp black peak of rock. Yet these totally different aspects belong to the same mountain. It takes a mountaineer about three days to go round Mont Blanc on foot; it takes an ordinary pedestrian who has to stick to roads about a week. It is probable, therefore, that the reader new to the subject will take at least a week to understand Socialism, which is quite as big a subject as Mont Blanc and considerably more important. He is likely, however, to take much more than a week if, as happens in most cases, he starts in a forest of prejudices any one of which is sufficient to obstruct his view. In the confusion in which the ordinary citizen finds himself, owing to this forest of prejudices which constitutes the greatest obstacle to the understanding of Socialism, he may very possibly wander all his life, and the first duty, therefore, of a book on Socialism is to take him out of the forest which he cannot himself see "because of the trees." The great enemy to a sound understanding of Socialism used to be ignorance; to-day, however, there is less ignorance, but a great deal more confusion; and the confusion arises from two sources: confusion deliberately created by false denunciations of Socialism, and confusion unconsciously created by personal interests and prejudice. The confusion arising from these two sources may be described as subjective obstacles to Socialism because they exist within ourselves. They are to be distinguished from objective obstacles to Socialism which exist outside of ourselves. For example, if a majority of us were in favor of adopting Socialism, we should still find many objective obstacles to it; for example, if we proposed to expropriate the trusts, we should undoubtedly be enjoined by the courts; we should find ourselves confronted with federal and State constitutions; we perhaps would have to amend these constitutions. These difficulties are outside of us. But before we reach these obstacles, we have to overcome others that exist within us and are to-day by far the most formidable. These subjective obstacles reside in our minds and are created there by vested interests, property, ignorance and misrepresentation. We are all of us under a spell woven about us by the economic conditions under which we live. For example, the workingman who has saved a few hundred dollars and goes out West to take up land, thinks that by so doing he will escape from wage slavery. He does not know that he is not escaping slavery at all, but only changing masters. Instead of being the slave of an employer, he becomes the slave of his own farm. And the farm will prove an even harder taskmaster than a Pittsburg steel mill, for it will exact of him longer hours during more days of the year and seldom give him as high a wage. Nevertheless, the fact that he owns the farm--that the farm is his property--awakens in him the property instinct that tends to rank him on election day by the side of the bourgeois. So also the store-keeper who, because he owns his stock, buys goods at a low price and sells them at a high, and makes profit, considers himself superior to the wage-earner, unmindful of the fact that his store adds to long hours and low wage the anxieties of the market and that, thanks to trusts and department stores, he is kept perpetually on the ragged edge of ruin. The clerk, too, whose only ambition is to rise one grade higher than the one which he occupies, is prevented by the narrowness of his economic field from appreciating the extent to which he is exploited. Instead of being bound by class consciousness with his fellow clerks, he is, on the contrary, in perpetual rivalry with them, and is likely to be found on election day voting with the owner who exploits them all. And even the wage-earner, the factory hand, who is the most obviously exploited of all, is in America still so absorbed by his trade union, by his fight with his employer, that he has not yet learned to recognize how much stronger he is in this fight on the political than on the economic field. So he too, instead of recognizing the salvation offered to him by Socialism as his fellow workingmen in Germany do, allows himself regularly to be betrayed into voting for one of the capitalist parties which his employer alternately controls. And the darkness in which these men are regarding matters of vital interest to them is still further darkened by their own ignorance, by the ignorance of those around them and, I am afraid I must add, by deliberate misrepresentation. Let us begin by extricating ourselves from the forest of prejudice that makes all clearness of vision impossible and, when we can see with our eyes, we shall take a rapid walk around this mountain of Socialism, as all climbers do, if only to choose the best points from which to climb it. CHAPTER I SUBJECTIVE OBSTACLES TO THE UNDERSTANDING OF SOCIALISM VESTED INTERESTS There is in the archives of the House of Commons a petition filed by the gardeners of Hammersmith in opposition to a proposed improvement of the country roads, which would enable gardeners further removed from London to compete with Hammersmith gardeners on the London market. They regarded themselves as having a vested right in bad roads and actually took these so-called rights sufficiently seriously to petition Parliament not to improve roads which were going to bring them into competition with gardeners already at a disadvantage by being further removed from the market than themselves. This is an illustration of the extent to which the human mind can be perverted by personal interest. But there is another illustration of so-called vested interests much more revolting in its nature and yet perhaps more justified in fact. When the cholera broke out in Paris, in 1830, and it was believed to have been brought into the country through rags, a bill was presented before the French Parliament for the destruction of all deposits of rags in the city. This was violently opposed by the rag pickers, who pointed out that these rags constituted their only source of existence, and they found many members of the French Parliament to support their view. We, who can dispassionately consider the situation of these rag pickers, have to admit that, if they could earn their living in no other way than rag picking, it would be a mistake for Parliament to deprive them of their source of living without giving them some other employment. But it would be worse still were Parliament to allow Paris to be decimated by cholera because the rag pickers claimed a vested right in pestiferous rags. A similar situation presents itself in the city of New York to-day. The tenement-house commission has imposed upon tenement-house owners certain obligations which involve an expenditure of considerable sums of money, and many of our best citizens are indignant because the tenement-house law is not always rigidly enforced. Yet all who have followed the recent rent strike on the East Side, know that the tenement houses there are in large part owned by men as poor as those who live in them. The immense congestion in this district brought about such competition for lodgings that speculators were enabled to buy tenement houses at their utmost value and to sell them at a still higher price by persuading the thriftiest of the inhabitants of the district that, if they purchased these tenement houses and acted as their own janitors and agents, they could earn more money than was then being earned. Victims were found who have put all their savings into these tenement houses, leaving the larger part of the purchase on mortgage. These new landlords raise the rent in order to make the houses pay for themselves. These pauper tenement-house owners are in the same position to-day as the Paris rag pickers of 1830. The question of what, if any, compensation should be paid when the state interferes with vested rights cannot be decided by any general rule. The demand for compensation by the Hammersmith gardeners was absurd; but that of the rag pickers was justified; that of poor tenement-house owners on the East Side seems also to be justified; but if the state in taking over these unwholesome tenements were to find one in the hands of a speculator, would compensation be to the same degree justified? So these questions seem to become questions of detail; they cannot be disposed of by a general rule: "there shall be compensation" or "there shall not be compensation." Above all things, these so-called general rules must not be erected into dogmas or "principles" under the standard of which Socialists are to group themselves and fight one another. It is interesting to consider in connection with this subject the geographical character of the objections to Socialism as illustrated by the attitude taken by England and America respectively on the subject of municipal ownership. In England, municipal ownership of gas is the rule rather than the exception. Indeed Manchester has owned its own gas plant from 1843, and has furnished the public with gas at 60 cents per thousand cubic feet, and even at that price[8] made a net profit in 1907-8 of £57,609, which has been applied to the diminution of rates and extension of the service. Birmingham, which had to pay an extravagant price for its gas plant, nevertheless immediately reduced the price of gas and brought it down from $1.10 under private ownership to 50 cents to-day. In England, therefore, it is perfectly respectable to approve of municipal ownership of gas. But inasmuch as water has been until very lately furnished to London in great part by a private company chartered by James I. the stock of which has increased in value a thousand per cent and which counts among its stockholders royalty itself, anybody until very lately who proposed municipal ownership of water in London, was regarded as a dangerous anarchist. The New York situation is just the reverse. For New York, after having tried private ownership of water and abandoned it as early as 1850 on account of the corruption that resulted therefrom, undertook public ownership of water with such success that no disinterested citizen to-day wants to go back to the old plan. So a New Yorker can advocate municipal ownership of water and still be regarded as a perfectly respectable citizen; but should he venture to favor municipal ownership of gas he is at once classed with those whose heads are only fit to be beaten with a club. How long are we going to allow our opinions to be manufactured for us by water companies in London and gas companies in New York? Obviously we cannot take an impartial and intelligent view of this great question until we have divested ourselves of the prejudices created by vested interests. If the propertied class, which is committed to existing conditions by the fact that it profits by them, is willing to yield no inch to the rising tide of popular dissatisfaction and the awakening of popular conscience, it is probable that the revolutionary wing of the Socialist party will prevail, if only because under these circumstances the evolutionary wing will not be allowed to prevail. If, on the other hand, the propertied class become alive not only to the danger of undue resistance, but also to the reasonableness and justice of the Socialist ideal, there is no reason why vested interests, save such as owe their existence to downright robbery and crime, should materially suffer in the process of Socialist evolution. If this be true the words "menace of Socialism" will turn out to be inappropriate and unfounded. Sound Socialism has no menace for any but evil-doers. Having now climbed out of the forest of prejudices created by private or so-called vested interests, let us next consider the different points of view created by temperament and economic conditions, from which the subject of Socialism tends to be regarded. FOOTNOTES: [8] "Municipal Year Book," 1909, p. 482. CHAPTER II ECONOMIC CONDITIONS BOURGEOIS, REVOLUTIONIST, AND EVOLUTIONIST Every man who is earning a living is profoundly affected by all that affects his living. If Socialism seems to threaten this living, he instinctively and often unconsciously repudiates it. From one point of view, Socialism presents a more formidable aspect than from another. It takes a very skilled climber to scale Mont Blanc from the Italian side, whereas from the Swiss side it is simply a matter of endurance. The same thing is true of Socialism. Now there are three distinct and opposing points of view: The bourgeois point of view, the revolutionist point of view, and the evolutionist point of view. (_a_) _The Bourgeois Point of View_ The bourgeois point of view is that which students of political science have been in the habit of describing as individualism. But there are objections to this use of the word individualism, as will appear later on. The bourgeois view is that the production and distribution of the things we need can best be conducted by allowing every man to choose and do his own work under the stimulus of need when poor and of acquisitiveness when rich. This system is well described in the maxim: "Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost." The first part of this maxim has in it considerable merit, for it encourages the self-reliance that has made the prosperity of America. But the latter part merely expresses a pious wish that is seldom gratified. The devil does not take the hindmost. The devil leaves them here to stalk through our highways and streets, a permanent army of about 500,000 tramps, swelled at all times by thousands and in such times as these by millions of unemployed.[9] The bourgeois view is that of the man who owns or expects to own property; the bourgeois class represents a small proportion of the whole population, and is sometimes described as the propertied class. But as the propertied class is in control of our schools, colleges and press, it has hitherto made the opinions of the vast majority. Thus the bourgeois view is not only that of the propertied class, but also that of most of those who have no property. It is the view of the man in the street. Lately, however, Socialism has been making inroads into the opinions of both classes, and this has divided Socialists into two groups which, though generally found fighting under the same banner, nevertheless take different views of the subject, which tends to confuse the uninitiated. These two views are conveniently described as revolutionist and evolutionist. Let us study the revolutionist point of view first: (_b_) _The Revolutionist Point of View_ Marx rendered a great service by pointing out the extent to which the non-propertied class is exploited by the propertied class--the proletariat by the bourgeois--the factory hand by the factory owner. Marx, however, did not himself confine Socialism to the struggle between the factory hand and the factory owner. But there has arisen out of the Marxian philosophy a school which has emphasized the observation of Marx that the factory hands increased in number while the factory owners decreased in number, and that this tends to produce a conflict between the two--a revolution from which the factory hand must emerge released from the incubus of the factory owner. Two ideas dominate this school: the class struggle--a struggle practically confined to the factory worker on the one hand and the factory owner on the other; and the revolution--the eventual clash between the two. The triumph of the factory hand is, according to this school, to result in the complete overturn of the whole social, industrial and economic fabric of society, the community[10] succeeding to the individual in the ownership of all land and all sources of production--all profit now appropriated by the factory owner accruing to the community and inuring to all the citizens of the state. This revolutionist school regards Socialism from the point of view of a class that has no property--the proletariat--just as the bourgeois looks at Socialism from the point of view of those who have property. Both points of view tend to be partial; the bourgeois tends to see only what is good for himself in existing conditions and all that is bad for him in Socialism; the revolutionist tends to see all that is bad for him in existing conditions and only what is good for him in the proposed new Socialism. This fact tends to make revolutionists dominate the Socialist party (which is mainly recruited from the proletariat) and is, therefore, entitled to the most serious consideration. Private interest is the dominating motive of political action to-day. It is the avowed motive of the bourgeois. He has, therefore, no excuse for denouncing this same motive in the proletariat, all the less as the bourgeois has to admit that his industrial system produces pauperism, prostitution, and crime; whereas the proletariat points out that Socialism will put an end to pauperism and prostitution and in great part also to crime. Because revolutionists believe that this change cannot be effected without a revolution--without a transfer of political power from the bourgeois to the proletariat--they speak of their movement as revolutionary, and often say that Socialism must come by revolution and not by reform. But these words must not be allowed to mislead. Although the Socialist platform says that "adequate relief" cannot be expected from "any reform of the present order," it nevertheless embraces a series of reforms entitled "Immediate Demands." This is proof positive that the Socialist party is not opposed to legislative measures that in the bourgeois vocabulary are known as reforms, since it advocates them. Socialists make a distinction between legislation that tends to transfer political power from the exploiters to the exploited and those that do not; the former are termed revolutionary and the latter are termed mere reforms. The former are what they stand for. But they do not for that reason remain indifferent to legislation that improves human conditions. On the contrary, the immediate demands of the Socialist platform include: The scientific reforestation of timber lands and the reclamation of swamp lands; the land so reclaimed to be permanently retained as a part of the public domain: The enactment of further measures for general education and for the conservation of health. The Bureau of Education to be made a department. The creation of a department of public health. The free administration of justice. Obviously, therefore, even revolutionary Socialists advocate certain reforms; but they will be content with nothing less than the transfer of political power from those who now use it ill to those who will use it better. Last, but not least, revolution does not in the Socialist vocabulary involve the idea of violence. It is used in the same sense as we use the expression "revolution of the planets," "revolution of the seasons," "revolution of the sun." Undoubtedly there are Socialists willing to use violence in order to attain their ends just as there are Fricks willing to use Pinkerton men, and mine owners willing to use the militia to attain theirs. But the idea of violence has been expressly repudiated by the leaders of the Socialist party. And the word "revolution" must not be understood to include it. This question is studied in fuller detail in Book III, Chapter II. (_c_) _The Evolutionist Point of View_ The evolutionist point of view claims to be wider than either of the foregoing. The evolutionist is not content to study Socialism from the point of view of any one class. He undertakes to climb out of the forest of prejudices created by class to a point where he can study Socialism free from every obstruction. He studies Socialism from the point of view of the whole Democracy, including the employer, the employee, and those who neither employ nor are employed; as, for example, the farmer who farms his own land without the assistance of any farm hands outside of his own family. From this point of view, he can denounce the evils of the existing system of production and distribution--if system it can be called[11]--without the bitterness that distorts the view of the victims of this system, and can therefore see perhaps more clearly the methods by which the evils of the existing system can be eliminated. The evolutionist points to history to prove that forcible revolution is generally attended by great waste of property and life, and is followed by a reaction that injuriously retards progress. He therefore seeks to change existing conditions without revolution, by successive reforms. This class of Socialist is denounced by revolutionists under a variety of names. He is called a parlor Socialist, an intellectual Socialist, but perhaps the name that carries with it the most contempt is that of step-by-step Socialist. He answers, however, that when he finds his progress arrested by a perpendicular precipice such as we are familiar with at the top of the Palisades, he refrains from throwing himself--or advising his neighbors to throw themselves--headlong into the abyss, but takes the trouble to find a possibly circuitous way round. He will not consent to sit at the top of the precipice until he grows wings, as the Roman peasant sat by the Tiber "until it ran dry." The step-by-step Socialist is content to adopt a winding path which sometimes turns his back to the place which he wishes to reach, because he holds in his hand a compass whose unerring needle will bring him eventually to the desired goal. Again, the evolutionist claims to be supported by ethical and scientific considerations which the revolutionary Socialist regards as of secondary importance. But for the present it is convenient to postpone the study of the ethical and the scientific aspects of Socialism and to content ourselves with stating two principal claims made by the evolutionist, viz.: First: that his view is likely to be clearer than that of either the bourgeois or the revolutionist, because it is not obstructed by class interest; Second: that his policy is likely to be wise, because it is neither stationary as that of the bourgeois nor headlong as that of the revolutionist. In conclusion, the revolutionist keeps his eye fixed on the horizon--perhaps it may even be said that he fixes his eye beyond the horizon, if that be possible; he looks forward to a state of society which, because it seems unrealizable to-day most of us are inclined to regard as visionary; and in presenting to us a commonwealth in which every personal interest will be vested in the community, he attacks at once the personal interests of every man who owns property in the country. Obviously, if all agriculture is to be owned by the community, every farmer will lose his farm. If all the factories are to be owned by the community, every factory owner will lose his factory. If all distribution is to be managed by the community, every storekeeper will lose his store. The revolutionary Socialist therefore raises against himself every property owner in the land; and all the more because there is division in the ranks of revolutionists as regards compensation, to which I have already referred. (See Vested Interests, p. 18.) The evolutionist on the contrary confines his attention for the present to existing conditions. He adopts, it is true, as an ultimate goal the coöperative commonwealth advocated by the revolutionists. It is indeed the point to which his compass is always directing him. It constitutes the ideal to which he believes the race will eventually adapt itself. But in addition to historical fact regarding the cost of revolution in the past, and in view of certain other scientific facts which will be dwelt upon later, he recognizes that personal or vested interests are likely to interfere more than anything else with the adoption of Socialism as an ultimate goal, and that these interests therefore no statesman can afford to disregard. FOOTNOTES: [9] December, 1908. [10] I am careful to use the word "community" and not the word "state," for state ownership is not Socialism. The Prussian State stands for state ownership, and even Mr. Roosevelt would not characterize the Prussian Government as Socialistic. [11] Book II, Chapter III. CHAPTER III MISREPRESENTATION AND IGNORANCE Michaelangelo has said that sculpture is the art of chipping off superfluous stone. The sculptor sees a statue in every block. This is what Whistler used to call the "divine art of seeing." The sculptor's task is to remove those parts of the block that hide the statue from the layman's eye. So the Socialist sees the coöperative commonwealth imprisoned within the huge, rough, cruel mass that we call modern civilization, and his task is to remove from the beautiful form he sees the errors which mask it from the view of the unenlightened. If we can but remove these errors our task is in great part accomplished; and the first of these errors is that which confounds Socialism with Anarchism. § 1. SOCIALISM IS NOT ANARCHISM Nothing is more unjustified than the confusion which exists in people's minds between Anarchism and Socialism. This confusion is not altogether unnatural, for Socialism and Anarchism have one great feature in common--both express discontent with existing conditions. The remedies, however, propounded by the Anarchists for evil conditions and those propounded by Socialists are contradictorily opposite. They are so opposite that the bourgeois turns out to be more nearly associated with the Anarchist than the Socialist is. The theory upon which our present economic and political conditions are founded is that the less government interferes with the individual's action, the better. This theory may be said to have taken its start at the period of the French Revolution, and is generally connected in the minds of English-speaking people with Adam Smith, the Manchester School of _laissez faire_, the earlier works of John Stuart Mill, and all the works of Herbert Spencer. When, however, the pernicious consequences of allowing every individual to do as he chose with his own became felt, as for example in the poisoning of rivers by allowing every factory to pour its waste into them; and in degeneration of the race through unlimited exploitation of women and children in factories and mines, governments all over the world have been obliged as measures of self-defence to enact laws limiting individual action. The individualism of the beginning of last century has been gradually leading to the Socialism of to-day, Socialism being, among other things, an intelligent limitation of the abuse of property in accordance with a preconceived plan, instead of spasmodic limitation of the abuse of property forced upon us by the pernicious consequences thereof, often creating new abuses as bad as those suppressed.[12] While therefore the Socialist asks that the functions of government be extended sufficiently to secure to every man the greatest amount of liberty, and the bourgeois on the contrary demands that there shall be the least amount of government consistent with the protection of property and life, the Anarchist asks that there shall be no government at all. The bourgeois, therefore, is closer to the Anarchist than the Socialist is--in fact he stands between the two. Socialists and Anarchists then are polar opposites. There is a whole world between them. Indeed it is impossible to conceive two theories of government more opposite one to another than that of Socialism, which demands more government, and that of Anarchism, which demands the destruction of government altogether. § 2. SOCIALISM IS NOT COMMUNISM Those who derive their information regarding Socialism solely from books are apt to be puzzled by the word "Communism," because it has at different times stood for different things. The early Christians were Communists; so were Plato and Sir Thomas More; so also was Proudhon, whom Mr. Roosevelt places in the same category with Karl Marx. He does not seem to be aware that Proudhon and Marx were the protagonists of conflicting schools and that Marx drove Proudhon--who was a communistic Anarchist--and his followers out of the Socialist party of that day. For from Marx' economic doctrine of value was derived a totally new idea in the movement; this idea is couched in a formula which has become so familiar to Socialists that it seems incredible that anyone undertaking to write about Socialism should ignore it; namely, that the _laboring class is entitled to the full product of its labor_; that is to say, that it shall securely have exactly what it earns; no more, no less; that it shall be deprived of it neither by the capitalist as to-day nor by the thriftless or vicious as under the Communism of Apostolic times. Mr. Roosevelt accuses Socialists of "loose thinking." Is there not a little loose thinking about this confusion of Socialism and Communism? Or is it that Mr. Roosevelt is just a century behindhand? Or is it that he has never read the works of Proudhon and Karl Marx, whom he groups together as propounding the same kind of Socialism? As a matter of fact, Proudhon has been so discredited by Marx that few Socialists think it worth while to read his works; whereas "Capital" is to-day the Bible of the Socialist movement. One word, however, must be added about Communism before dismissing the subject: There are two kinds of Communists, just as there are two kinds of Anarchists; those who adopt Communism and Anarchism out of discontent with the present system; and those who adopt them because they stand for perfection. With the first category we need not concern ourselves. Their day is over. With the second there is an important point to be noted: Such writers as Kropotkin see further than the average citizen. They look forward to a day when the spirit of mutual helpfulness which ought to attend the substitution of coöperation for competition will have entirely changed human nature; when men will have acquired _habits_ of industry, of justice, and of self-restraint that seem now incredible to us; they will then as naturally work as they now naturally shirk; they will as naturally help one another as they now naturally fight; they will as naturally share with one another as they now despoil one another. This may seem wildly impossible to us now; but if we look back to the day when our forbears lived in hordes, when children bore their mother's name because they did not know their father's, when no woman could move from her hut alone without being subject to assault, when self-indulgence prevailed except in so far as it was checked by fear, we can appreciate the scorn with which one of them would have listened to a prophet who should announce that men and women would ultimately mate once for all and be faithful to one another; children know their fathers and bear their father's name; women travel from one end of the country to another with perfect security, and self-restraint cease to be an imposition and become a habit. If then man has become so profoundly modified by the progress from the promiscuousness of the horde to the self-restraint of the family, why should he not be capable of one step further--from the habits that result from competition to the habits that would result from coöperation--from mutual hatred to mutual helpfulness? This is the hope and faith of such writers as Kropotkin. But it is not yet within the range of practical politics. So the Socialist party rightly confines its program within practical limits. There are too many idle and vicious among us to-day; too many products of human exploitation; too many worn-out men, women, and children; too much degeneration; too much hypocrisy; too much "looseness of thought." We must cut our garment to our customer. All that the Socialist asks to-day is to have what he earns. Morally he is entitled to it. Can our system of production be so modified as to assure this to him? This is the problem we have to solve. Socialists say that it can be so modified, or that it can, at least, be so modified as to put an end to pauperism, prostitution, and in great part to crime. This is the practical Socialism of to-day as distinguished from the Communism of centuries ago or that of centuries ahead. This is what the Socialist party stands for, and it is by this standard and no other that the Socialist party must be judged. Socialism then does not stand to-day for Communism. On the contrary, it demands that the workers be assured, as exactly as is humanly possible, the product of their labor, and not share it with the idle and vicious on the one hand or be deprived of it by the capitalist on the other. One reason why Communism has been discarded by the Socialist party is that generations of competition have so molded human nature that it is extremely probable that production would suffer were it suddenly eliminated. A man who has accustomed himself to the stimulus of arsenic cannot be suddenly deprived of arsenic without developing the symptoms of arsenical poisoning. It will doubtless be indispensable to maintain competition in the coöperative commonwealth. There is no longer question then of discarding competition; the question is in what doses shall it be administered; in doses that produce the pauperism and prostitution of to-day, or in doses that will furnish the necessary stimulus for human exertion without pushing that stimulus to exhaustion and degeneracy? This question brings us to our next subject: § 3. SOCIALISM WILL NOT SUPPRESS COMPETITION No modern Socialist maintains that all competition is bad, or that it would be advisable to eliminate competition altogether from production and distribution. But it has become the duty of every sane man to consider whether it may not be possible to eliminate the excessive competition that gives rise to pauperism, prostitution, and crime. To answer this question, we must begin by determining what competition is good and what bad; and if the bad can be eliminated and the good maintained. Competition is a part of the joy of life; healthy children race one another as they are let out from school; they challenge one another to wrestle and leap; and when they are tired of emulation, they join hands and dance. Competition and coöperation are the salt and the sweet of life; we want the one with our meat and the other with our pudding; we do not want all salt or all sweet; for too much sweet cloys the mouth while too much salt embitters it. We all unconsciously recognize this by encouraging games and discouraging gambling. Now what is the difference between games and gambling? One is a wholesome use of time for the purpose of wholesome amusement; the other is an unwholesome abuse of time for the purpose of making money. The one incidentally encourages a beneficial action of muscle and brain; the other, on the contrary, promotes a detrimental appetite for unlawful profit. We are all perfectly agreed about this so long as we confine ourselves to games and gambling; but as soon as we extend our argument to production and distribution we shall at once come into collision with the bourgeois. Let us therefore be very sure that our premises are sound and our deduction sure before we confront him. Even as regards gambling there are degrees of vice; some would justify old people who bet only just enough on the issue of a game of piquet to make it worth while to count the points; whereas all would condemn a bet that involved the entire fortune, much more the life or death of a human being. Now it may seem extravagant to assert that the competitive system of production imposes upon the majority a bet involving life or death, yet statistics demonstrate that mortality is from 35 to 50 per cent higher with those who lose than with those who win in the game of life.[13] But it is not extravagant to assert that it imposes upon the majority a bet involving a thing quite as precious as life--I mean health. A man who bets his life and loses is free from pain on this earth at any rate; but the man who bets his health and loses is committed to a period of misery not only for himself, but for all those around him so long as breath is in his body. The greatest evil that attends the competitive system of production is that it commits all engaged in it to a game the stake of which is the life happiness not only of himself, but of all dependent on him. If this were a matter of mere sport there is not a man with a spark of moral sense in him who would not condemn it. He would denounce it as a gladiatorial show; as belonging to the worst period of the worst empire known to history. But because it is a matter of production the bourgeois has for it no word save of justification and praise. He justifies it by the argument of necessity: "the poor you have with you always." He praises it because it "makes character." If there were indeed no other system of production possible but the competitive system, the plea of necessity would be justified. But when we are dealing with a question involving the happiness of the majority of our fellow creatures, we must be very sure that there is no better system before the plea can be admitted. And as to those often misquoted words of Christ, there will undoubtedly under the coöperative as well as the competitive system always be some shiftless, some poor. But everything depends on what is meant by the word "poor." To-day the poor are on the verge of starvation; poverty means not only misery, but disease and crime. Under a coöperative system there need be no starvation; no fear of starvation; less disease; and infinitely less crime! The vast majority of men do not need the lash to drive them to their work; it is no longer necessary to keep before us the fear of want, of misery, of starvation; we have passed that stage; and just as the lash is used by trainers only for wild beasts, and gentler animals are better trained by the hope of reward than by the fear of punishment, so humanity has reached a point of moral development which makes it no longer inferior to the lower animals--the bourgeois notwithstanding. Better work can be got from a man by the prospect of increased comfort than by the fear of misery and unemployment. As to the second justification, that the competitive system makes character; look for a moment at the character of the men who have succeeded in the competitive mill. Are these the saints of the latter day? Or are our saints not to be found amongst those who have never been in the competitive mill--who have resolutely kept out of it--Florence Nightingale, Father Damien, Rose Hawthorne, the Little Sisters of the Poor? The real problem is not whether we should or can eliminate competition altogether from the field of production, but whether we should or can eliminate it to the extent necessary to put an end to the three great curses of humanity to-day. § 4. SOCIALISM WILL NOT DESTROY THE HOME Mr. Roosevelt in his _Outlook_ editorial[14] said of the "Socialists who teach their faith as both a creed and a party platform" that "they are and necessarily must be bitterly hostile to religion and morality," that they "occupy in relation to morality and especially domestic morality a position so revolting--and I choose my words carefully--that it is difficult even to discuss it in a reputable paper." When, however, he undertakes to substantiate this, he is obliged to admit that he cannot find any traces of it in American writers, and has to go to France and England for his examples. Had he been better informed, he would have known that not only is there no trace of immorality in our American Socialist press, but that there is one Socialist organ--the Christian Socialist--which has in the most vigorous terms denounced all those whose writings tend in any way to attack the fundamental principles of marriage. It is true that Christian Socialists in Mr. Roosevelt's opinion "deserve scant consideration at the hands of honest and clean-living men and women"; but he has not explained why. Nor has he ventured any explanation why Christian Socialists or any other Socialists should be "necessarily--bitterly hostile to religion and morality." I must postpone to the chapter on the Ethical Aspect of Socialism[15] the explanation why Socialism, far from being "necessarily bitterly hostile to religion and morality," as Mr. Roosevelt maintains, is--on the contrary--the only form of society ever proposed which could make religion and morality possible. At the present time, it seems sufficient to point out the obvious fallacy of Mr. Roosevelt's syllogism. Here it is: Gabriel Deville wants to destroy the home. Gabriel Deville is a Socialist; Therefore: All Socialists want to destroy the home. The logic of this is bad enough, but even the premiss is false. Deville is no longer a Socialist; and if he does want to destroy the home, no one that I know of in America wants him back in the fold. In exactly the same manner our ex-Presidential logician argues regarding divorce: Herron divorced; Herron is a Socialist; Therefore: All Socialists divorce. Herron was divorced in 1901. He is the only leading Socialist who has divorced during twenty years to Mr. Roosevelt's knowledge or to mine. Whereas, during that time here are the statistics of divorces for the United States: Total number of marriages 1887-1906, 12,832,044 Total number of divorces 1887-1906, 945,625 or about one in 12,[16] in all of which the majority of the men presumably voted for Mr. Roosevelt. Can anyone who knows the family life of Socialists assert that the divorce rate among them is greater than that of the community in which they live? Again, the pretence that the American home to-day is one which a capitalist like Mr. Roosevelt can hold up to the admiration of the world will not stand scrutiny. Where there is wealth for leisure, there we find immorality enthroned as a vice; and where there is no leisure, there we find immorality imposed as a necessity. Are the filthy tenements and promiscuous lodgings of the congested districts in our large cities the homes to which Mr. Roosevelt is fearful that Socialism will put an end?[17] Or is it the so-called She-towns in New England from which men are driven because there is no employment in them for any save women and children?[18] Or the lumber camps to which these men are driven where there is no employment for women?[19] Or the home of the unemployed to which the bread-winner has returned day after day for two years now, seeking employment and finding none--guilty of no crime save that no man has hired him? Thousands--nay, hundreds of thousands of such so-called homes are scattered over the face of this land which Mr. Roosevelt has during seven years administered. As a matter of fact, no decent home is possible for the majority of our fellow citizens so long as they are called upon to support it at present prices on present wages. All this will, I think, be made clear in the description of industrial conditions. Suffice it to say here that these conditions furnish a few luxurious and often licentious homes for the propertied class and a few comfortable and moral homes for the aristocracy of the working class, but leave a vast number of our families so nearly upon the edge of poverty as to drive their daughters to prostitution and their sons to crime. § 5. SOCIALISM WILL NOT ABOLISH PROPERTY Another charge made by Mr. Roosevelt is that Socialists propose to abolish property and distribute wealth. It has been repeated by both Mr. Taft and Mr. Bryan and is still being repeated _ad nauseam_ by the press. Workingmen so absorbed by the making of bread that they have no time to discuss questions of government may be excused for being ignorant on such a point as this; to them ignorance cannot be imputed as a fault. But that those who set themselves up as the persons best fitted to govern and educate our country--as indeed the only persons in the country possessing the knowledge of statesmanship necessary to handle our governmental affairs and publish our daily press--should either never have taken the trouble to find out what Socialism is, or, having taken the trouble, should so traduce it, is a sad commentary upon our editors and statesmen. Just as it has been demonstrated that Socialism is opposed to Anarchism, so can it be demonstrated that Socialism is opposed to the distribution of wealth or the abolition of property. Far from distributing wealth, the essence of Socialism is that it seeks to concentrate it. Far from wanting to abolish property Socialism seeks to put it on a throne. The question of property is so important that a special chapter has been devoted to it. I shall therefore only say here just enough to remove the error created by the misstatements current on the subject. Property is not only the basis of our present civilization, but must be the basis of all conceivable civilizations. It may be said that not only all law, but all government, is founded upon it. Property was instituted to furnish to every industrious man security as regards himself, his family, and the means of their support; to protect him and them from theft, from fraud and evil doing. Unfortunately property, like every human institution--even the best of them[20]--has been abused to serve the selfishness of the crafty; and there have arisen, therefore, notions and laws regarding property which have reversed the results which property was instituted to secure. Instead of making every industrious man secure as regards himself, his family, and the means of their support, it has actually deprived the majority of all security regarding these things and, indeed, put the majority as regards these things at the mercy of a very few. Not only this, it has created conditions which to-day are depriving several millions of us not only of all means of support, but of all opportunity of earning them. The bourgeois' excuse for such conditions is that no better can be devised. Here is the whole issue of Socialism raised; for Socialism contends that these conditions are totally unnecessary; that it does not need any imagination or invention to substitute for them a system that will put an end to such evils as pauperism, prostitution, and, in great part, crime; that we have but to adopt as a community the principles already adopted by the men--the makers of the trusts--to whom the whole business world looks up as infallible on these subjects; and that this can be accomplished by ridding the institution of property of the fallacies with which it has been industriously defaced. Just indeed as the truly religious have during all ages sought to rescue religion from the crafty who tend to use it for their own ends--Christ from the Pharisee, Plato from the Sophist, Luther from the Borgias, so Socialists are now seeking to rescue property from the few who, under a mistaken theory of happiness, use property to injure their fellow creatures when these very few can attain happiness only by so using property as to benefit those they now injure. It must, however, be specifically stated that Socialism does not involve the concentration of all wealth in the state. No sane Socialist proposes to vest in the state the things which a man uses, his personal apparel, his personal furniture, his objects of art, his musical instruments, his automobile, or even his private yacht. There is no intention to suppress private property except so far as it is used for exploitation. Light is thrown upon this subject in another paragraph, which indicts the capitalist system for making the production of the necessaries of our lives the object of their competitive enterprises and speculations. What the Socialist party proposes to do is not to abolish property, but to abolish the capitalist system, as it expressly states; and it proposes to do this not only in the interest of the proletariat, but also in the interest of the capitalist himself, who, to quote the words of the platform, is "the slave of his wealth rather than its master." The extent to which this last is true will be discussed in a subsequent chapter and ought to constitute an impressive argument for all--even millionaires--who have become the slaves of the very fortunes they have made. And the moral tendency to restore property to its original intention by abolishing the capitalist system is expressly stated in the platform as not an attempt "to substitute working-class rule for capitalist-class rule, but to free all humanity from class rule and to realize the international brotherhood of man." If this be immoral, then a great many of us do not know what morality is. Nor does it propose to vest in the state anything but what it is indispensable for a state to own in order to rescue the unwealthy majority from the exploitation of the wealthy few. Nothing is more false or libelous than the allegation that Socialism proposes to destroy property, or to deprive a man of the benefit of his talents, or of the enjoyment of the products of his work. It is the present industrial system that deprives the majority of the product of their work. Socialism aims at the opposite of these things. What Socialism does propose is to preserve wealth by eliminating waste and to ensure to all men the fullest benefit of their talents and the enjoyment of the whole product of their work. It does not propose to level down, as is so often claimed; the necessary effect of Socialism is to level up, if indeed it levels at all. The extent to which it may be wise to concentrate wealth in the state, or whether it is necessary to concentrate it in the state at all, is a question which must be postponed until we have a clear idea of what Socialism is. Meanwhile I venture to suggest one view of Socialism which, although it does not attempt to define it, may help us as a first effort to get a correct apprehension of it. Socialism is the concentration of just so much wealth in the community--please note that I do not say "state"--as may be necessary to secure the liberty and the happiness of every man, woman, and child consistent with the liberty and the happiness of every other man, woman, and child. We are obviously here brought to the question of what is liberty, and to the discussion of another error regarding Socialism upon which the bourgeois is disposed to insist, viz.: Socialism will impair liberty. § 6. SOCIALISM WILL NOT IMPAIR LIBERTY The same thing must be said of liberty as of property: both are such important subjects that they demand a chapter to themselves. But there are current errors about liberty which, when removed, will prepare the mind for the undoubted fact that Socialism, far from impairing liberty, will greatly enlarge it. When negro slavery existed people thought that if slavery were only abolished, liberty would be secured. It was found, however, that when negro slavery was abolished there was still another liberty to be secured--political liberty. Now that we have secured the constitutional right and the constitutional weapon by which political liberty ought to be attained, we discover that these rights and weapons are useless to us so long as the immense majority of us are still economic slaves. Let us consider for a moment just what is meant by an economic slave. An economic slave is a man who is dependent for his living on another man or class of men and who, because all his waking hours and all his vitality must be devoted to making a living, has no leisure either to exercise his political rights or to enjoy himself. It may seem exorbitant to say that the "immense majority" of us are economic slaves, yet a very little consideration will, I think, convince that we are. Workingmen are dependent on their employers under conditions worse than negro slavery. For a slave owner had an interest in the life of his slave just as a farmer has an interest in the life of his stock. He therefore fed his slaves and did not overwork them. Nor was a slave subject to losing his job. The factory owner, on the contrary, not being the owner of his factory hands, is free to dismiss them as soon as they are worn out, and it is to his interest, by speeding up his machinery, to get the most work out of his hands possible, regardless whether he is overworking them; for as soon as they show signs of overwork he has but to dismiss them and employ a younger generation. Nor can it be said of workingmen that they have leisure for education, politics, or enjoyment. Now the last census shows that our industrial population numbers 21,000,000. In the second place, the farmer works himself as hard--if not harder--than the factory owner works his factory hand. He is driven by the same necessity as the factory owner--the necessity of making money.[21] There are of course a few large farmers who own enough land to work it as the factory owner works his factory--by the use of machinery and men. But these are few, and it is the extraordinary economy that these men make in working their farms that obliges the small farmer to work night as well as day to make a bare living out of his land. Now by the last census the farming population in the United States numbers 30,000,000. And what has been said of the workingman is true of the clerk and domestic; and what has been said of the small farmer is true of the small tradesman. Now clerks, domestics, and tradesmen number 30,000,000. Summing up we have: Industrial population 21,000,000 Farmers 30,000,000 Clerks, domestics and tradesmen 30,000,000 ---------- 81,000,000 out of a total population of 90,000,000 are economic slaves. And of the 9,000,000 that remain, how many are economically free? These are in part teachers, physicians, and lawyers. I leave it to teachers to tell us how much time they can call their own. As to the rest, it is the dream of a young doctor to get a large practice; and when his dream is realized, how much leisure does he enjoy? He is at the mercy of his practice, not only weekdays, but Sundays--days and nights. He is the slave of his own practice. It is the dream of the young lawyer to get rich clients and handle big cases. When he gets them, he discovers that he must have an office that costs between $30,000 and $50,000 a year to take care of them, and that he must earn these large sums before there is a penny left for himself. So he too is the slave of his own office. But further than this: Our great business men--amongst them the very greatest--I have seen with my own eyes slowly sink under the burden of the very institutions their own genius had created. They too have become the slaves of their own creations. So we are all slaves, the greatest and the least of us, with exceptions so few that they are hardly worth mentioning. And how do these exceptions use their leisure? It were better not too closely to inquire. Too much leisure is as detrimental to happiness and progress as too much work. The enormous increase of lunacy in late years is a straw that shows how the stream runs. Because of too much work or too much leisure the race is marching with fatal speed toward general prostration of nerve, of body, and of mind. Whether then we look at this question from the point of view of human progress or of human happiness, it seems indispensable that the whole machinery of production be speeded down a little instead of continuously up. Now this is what Socialism proposes to do: It proposes by the substitution of coöperation for competition to make the same economy for all humanity as trust promoters have made for themselves. And the economy will be an economy of time. We shall work as hard while we are working, but we shall work four hours instead of eight and twelve. And the rest of the time we shall have to ourselves; we shall be economically free. Yet if the reader has in his mind any such idea of Socialism as Mr. Roosevelt's "state free lunch counter," resulting in an "iron despotism over all workers compared to which any slave system of the past would seem beneficent because less utterly hopeless"--he will be disposed to condemn in advance any economic freedom purchased at such a price. I beg the reader, therefore, to try to rid his mind of the prejudice created by such views as Mr. Roosevelt's until he has read the chapters on the Economy of Socialism and How Socialism May Come. If in these chapters the errors of Mr. Roosevelt's notions are not dissipated, then this book will have been written in vain. One thing more, however, must be said on this subject. Inexcusable though Mr. Roosevelt may be in most of his attacks on Socialism, it must be admitted that the "iron despotism" to which he thinks Socialism will lead is justified by many Socialist authors, and it is only very lately that a way has been found for introducing coöperation without compulsion. Again, Mr. Roosevelt is in good company in making this charge. It is the great _cheval de bataille_ of every anti-Socialist. In "A Plea for Liberty," edited by Herbert Spencer, the idea of concentrating wealth in the community is denounced as a "conception of life or conduct" which would compel men "to rise at morn to the sound of a state gong, breakfast off state viands, labor by time according to a state clock, dine at a state table supplied at the state's expense, and to be regulated as to rest and recreation." In fact, Socialism proposes none of these things. But if it did, a factory hand might very well ask whether such a conception of life or conduct would be worse than to rise at morn by the sound of a factory bell, labor by time according to a factory clock, neither breakfast nor dine at a factory table supplied at the factory's expense, but be regulated as to rest and recreation by factory rules. When we come to discuss liberty, we shall be in a position to compare the liberty enjoyed under Socialism with the liberty enjoyed to-day. In the chapter on Property and Liberty, the subject of liberty is carefully analyzed; no more, therefore, need be said on this subject except in conclusion to insist that it is the competitive system of to-day that makes slaves of practically all of us, and that it is the coöperative system alone that will secure for us the last and greatest of all the liberties--economic liberty--because it is economic liberty alone that will enable us to enjoy the other two. § 7. CONCLUSION Having now chipped off some but not all of the errors that prevail, regarding Socialism, let us sum up what Socialism is not; it will help us to a study of what Socialism is. Socialism is not Anarchism. It is the contradictory opposite of Anarchism. It believes in regulation, but demands that the regulation be wise and just. Socialism is not Communism. On the contrary it demands that workingmen be assured as nearly as possible the product of their labor. Socialism does not propose to eliminate competition, but only to abolish excessive competition that gives rise to pauperism, prostitution and crime. Socialism is not hostile to the home. On the contrary, it seeks to remove the evils that make the homes of our millions insupportable. Socialism is not immoral. On the contrary, it seeks to make the Golden Rule practical. Socialism does not propose to abolish property or distribute wealth. It proposes, on the contrary, to consecrate property and concentrate wealth so that all shall enjoy according to their deserts the benefits of both. Socialism will not impair liberty. On the contrary, it will for the first time give to humanity economic liberty without which so-called individual and political liberty are fruitless. It proposes to regulate production, consecrate property, and concentrate wealth only to the extent necessary to assure to every man the maximum of security and the maximum of leisure; thereby putting an end to pauperism, prostitution, and in great part, to crime, and furnishing to man environment most conducive to his advancement and happiness. Whether it will accomplish these things can only be determined by approaching it from the positive side. We shall proceed next then to answer the question what Capitalism is. FOOTNOTES: [12] The principal evil attending such laws is that they give rise to graft. In other words, our political machine actually favors such laws, because they put a club in the hands of the machine through which it can not only levy political contributions, but coerce their victims into support of the machine. [13] The death rate in 1900 among occupied males in the professions was 15.3 per 1000; in clerical and official classes 13.5; mercantile, 12.1; laboring and servant classes 20.2 per 1000 (12th Census U.S.) Dr. Emmett Holt, writing in the _Journal of the American Medical Association_, points out the marked contrast between the death rate of the children of the poor and the children of the rich. See Appendix, p. 421. [14] _Outlook_, March 20, 1909. [15] Book III, Chapter V. [16] U.S. Census Bulletin 96, p. 7, 12. [17] "Poverty," by Robert Hunter. (Macmillan.) [18] "Socialism and Social Reform," by R.T. Ely, p. 43. (Crowell.) [19] Ibid. [20] "Government or Human Evolution," Vol. II, p. 88 _et seq._, by the author. [21] "The American Farmer," A.M. Simons. BOOK II _WHAT CAPITALISM IS_ Socialism is necessarily twofold: destructive and constructive; critical and remedial. We shall take the critical or destructive rôle of Socialism first; setting down the evils in our existing industrial system which Socialism criticizes and seeks to destroy, and leaving the remedial or constructive rôle of Socialism where it properly belongs--to the end. For this reason the present book, which treats of the evils of the existing industrial system, is entitled "What Capitalism is." EVILS OF CAPITALISM For nearly two centuries men have produced and distributed the things they needed, upon what is called "the competitive system." That is to say, every individual is free to choose his particular share in this work and to make out of his work all that he can, in order with the money so made to purchase for himself the things that he individually needs. The farmer undertakes to furnish us with food, the forester with lumber, the miner with iron. Another set of men run railroads, steamboats, wagons, etc., to distribute the things produced to those who are engaged in selling them--by wholesale to the trade, or by retail to the consumer. Every man engaged in production and distribution is in a measure competing with every other man engaged in it, each trying to make out of his particular calling the largest amount of money possible with the view of being able with the money so earned to purchase for himself the largest amount of necessaries, comforts, and luxuries. This so-called competitive system has been elaborately described by all writers of political economy from de Quesnay and Adam Smith, the fathers of our present system of political economy, to the present day; and because it follows the predatory plan of nature (by which one set of animals lives by devouring another set), it is claimed by some so-called philosophers to be "natural" and therefore wise. The most notorious author of this so-called scientific justification of the competitive system is Herbert Spencer. The competitive system, however, has been found to result in great waste, misery, and disease; and it is to these evil consequences that the Socialist desires to put an end. He claims that the competitive system is not wise, not scientific, and above all, not economical, but is the most wasteful system conceivable. He alleges that the only intelligent, economic way of producing and distributing the things we need is by coöperation; and the whole economic issue between Socialism and our present industrial system is that Socialism stands for coöperation, and our present system for competition. It is by no means a necessary part of Socialist philosophy that competition be entirely eliminated. On the contrary, it has been pointed out and will later be further seen that competition has many useful qualities.[22] Socialism, however, points out that competition, when allowed full sway in producing and distributing the necessaries of life, is the direct occasion of the larger part of the misery in the world, and insists, therefore, that as _regards production and distribution of the necessaries of life_, competition be sufficiently eliminated to assure to all men the opportunity to work, and as nearly as possible the full product of their work. The limitation in italics is the definite dose to which reference has already been made.[23] One prominent feature of the competitive system is that men do not work for the purpose of supplying the needs of their fellow creatures. The Steel Trust does not manufacture steel to satisfy our need for steel; the farmer does not raise wheat to satisfy our need for bread; they produce these things simply for the purpose of making money for themselves in order that with this money they can procure for themselves the things they need. Socialism claims that the rôle played by money in the competitive system is unfortunate, because the amount of money available at any given time is not always properly adjusted. Sometimes it is so badly adjusted that there is more cotton in one place than the people in that place can use, and in another more people who need cotton than there is cotton to give them; so that it is deliberately proposed to burn cotton for lack of consumers in one place, while consumers are allowed to suffer for lack of cotton in the other. So a short time ago thousands were dying of starvation for lack of wheat in India, while we had such a superabundance of it in America that we were exporting it every day. But that wheat was not available for India because it had to be converted into money. Socialists allege that this bad situation would never arise if things were produced for the purpose of satisfying human needs instead of for making money. Let us enumerate some of the most important evils of the competitive system, which Socialism seeks to correct. These evils briefly are: The competitive system is stupid because wasteful and disorderly; it is unnecessarily immoral, unjust and cruel. FOOTNOTES: [22] See Book I, Chapter III. [23] See Book I, Chapter III. CHAPTER I CAPITALISM IS STUPID § 1. OVERPRODUCTION The first and most glaring evil of the competitive system is that it is stupid. In support of this I shall call as witnesses captains of industry whom the business men regard as the greatest authorities in the world: John D. Rockefeller[24], Henry O. Havemeyer[25], Elbert H. Gary[26] and others. Socialists are accused of being impractical. I shall have failed in properly presenting the Socialist case if I do not succeed in demonstrating that the impractical people are the bourgeois, the Roosevelts, Tafts and Bryans who, though aware of the waste of the competitive system, insist upon maintaining it; and that the only practical people are those who, like the Socialists, having perceived the waste that attends the competitive system, seek to replace it by a more economic plan. No one will, I think, deny that the most practical business men to-day in America are Rockefeller, Pierpont Morgan, Havemeyer, and the others who have been engaged in organizing our great trusts. Now the only object of a trust is to eliminate the unnecessary waste of competition; and the only difference between the Socialist and the trust magnate is that the Socialist wants the benefit derived from reducing competition to be shared by all; whereas Rockefeller, Pierpont Morgan and the other trust magnates want the profit secured by the elimination of waste all to themselves. I do not suppose there is any man living so prejudiced or so dull as to deny that, if Socialism could present a system by which all could be made to profit from the elimination of the waste of the competitive system in such a manner that the profit of each shall be proportional to the amount which each contributes, Socialism would be justified. The only point upon which there can be discussion is whether it is possible to suggest a workable plan under which the evils of competition can be eliminated, and the blessings of coöperation take their place. In other words, is coöperation a practical cure for competition? It is obviously impossible to decide whether a given treatment would constitute a cure for a given disease, without a thorough knowledge of the disease. It is therefore essential that we should be clear as regards the defects of the competitive system, and how far these defects are curable and how far incurable. The beauty of the competitive system upon which the bourgeois loves to dwell is that it is automatic; whenever there is overproduction in an industry prices fall, profits disappear and therefore capital flows away from it; as soon as overproduction comes to an end prices rise, profits reappear and capital flows back to it. And the beauty of this automatic system is the more commended because it closely follows Nature; and indeed, the system of Nature is beautiful in the extreme. The sun draws the vapor of pure water from the salt ocean; lifts it high into the air, wafts it by propitious breezes to the continent; sheds it in beneficent rain upon the thirsty land, and deposits it in gigantic reservoirs of ice and snow upon our mountain heights; there is the supply upon which during hot summers we depend; and the hotter the summer, and the more therefore we need moisture, the more the snow and glaciers melt and furnish us with torrents of refreshing streams; so that at last the vapor that has been drawn by the sun from the ocean, in obedience to the inevitable law of gravitation, returns to it in a thousand rivers, after having performed its function of nutrition and refreshment on the way. In the same fashion demand is ever beckoning labor and capital to seek new fields, tempting them from the low levels of low interest to high levels of high profit; and supply, increasing through their efforts, is forever bringing them back, like the force of gravitation, to the point whence they started; and the cycle is repeated over and over again, performing its mission of production and distribution on the way. Unfortunately, Nature, though beneficial in the main, does not accomplish its work without distressing incidents. Breezes are not always propitious; they sometimes create disastrous havoc; torrents are sometimes more than refreshing, and summers unduly hot. For example, the more abundant a crop is, the more prosperous the country which grows the crop ought to that extent to be; but it sometimes happens that, in such case, prices fall so low as to bring disaster to those who have grown it.[27] Nature is not always to be depended on. Occasionally a crop entirely fails, and when this happens, as lately in India, millions are exposed to starvation and thousands actually starve. Even when Nature is most bountiful the competitive system results in misfortune. For example, the President of the Boston Chamber of Commerce in a speech to the Chamber said in 1891: "In 1890 we harvested a cotton crop of over eight million bales--several hundred thousand bales more than the world could consume. Had the crop of the present year been equally large, it would have been an _appalling calamity_ to the section of our country that devotes so large a portion of its labor and capital to the raising of cotton."[28] In 1905 the newspapers announced "the South is proposing to burn cotton so as to keep up its price."[29] And still more recently the same suggestion has been made regarding the tobacco crop in Kentucky. Again, the competitive system under which every man goes into the business where he sees most profit, inevitably leads to periods of overproduction, and overproduction leads to unemployment and misery. No political economist denies the obvious fact that whenever an industry is known to be profitable, capitalists are likely to engage in this industry--indeed, this is one of the automatic processes which the Manchester school has put forward as constituting the chief merit of the system. It is, of course, important for the community at large that prices should in no one industry become excessive; and obviously the disposition of capital to rush into industries where profits are high, does by competition tend to reduce prices, and thus prevent them from becoming excessive. But economists, especially those of the Manchester school, have not been willing to recognize that this disposition of capital to flow into productive enterprises may, though sometimes beneficial, be also sometimes ruinous; may, indeed, often result in a devastating deluge. These economists, therefore, it may be well to confront with a brief history of one or two of our largest combinations. Let us take as a first example the sugar trust. Just before the organization of this trust, overproduction had become so excessive that of forty refiners in the United States eighteen became bankrupt. Of the twenty-two that remained, eighteen combined. Of the refineries belonging to these eighteen, eleven were closed, leaving seven to do profitably the work which had previously been done unprofitably by forty. The history of the whisky trust shows overproduction to a still more aggravated degree. Before the organization of the Distilling and Cattle-Feeding Company, agreements were entered into by the majority of the distillers; under one of them they agreed to reduce production to forty per cent of what it at that time was; subsequently they agreed to reduce still further to twenty-eight per cent; and of eighty of the principal distillers who organized the Distilling and Cattle-Feeding Company, the establishments of sixty-eight were closed, leaving only twelve distilleries operating. The same succession of events is found in the history of the American Steel and Wire Company, and indeed of practically all American trusts. This inevitable tendency towards overproduction vitally concerns workingmen, for it is upon them that the evil consequences of this process first and most fatally fall. As soon as the process results in the inevitable reduction of prices to near cost, the manufacturer must either throw workmen out of employment or reduce wages. Wages constitute the only elastic element in cost, and it is therefore the workingman who first pays for the evil working of this system. And not only does the workingman pay for it, but the employer pays for it also; for workingmen, to protect their interests, strike, and only the wealthiest employers can stand the strain of a strike; the rest are ruined by it. Even a reduction of the hours of work or the days of employment in the week will, if it lasts long enough, ruin the employer, for he has still to pay the fixed charges of the factory, and if prices get low enough, and he cannot sell his goods except at a ruinous loss, he ends by not having means to pay these charges; and this process is illustrated in the cases just mentioned; for example, eighteen out of forty sugar refiners became bankrupt; and it was not till the eighteen were ruined that a combination was possible amongst the rest. One method employed by trusts to keep up prices at home is to sell their excess of goods in foreign markets at prices below cost. Mr. Gary, President of the Federal Steel Company, testified before the Industrial Committee that steel had been recently shipped to Japan at a price below the domestic price.[30] Mr. J.W. Lee, President of the three independent pipe-line organizations, testified that prior to 1895 "oil for export was sold below the cost of crude at the refinery."[31] Again, at a time when the American trade was paying $28 for steel rails, the same steel rails were sold in Japan at $20.[32] Obviously, the nations who are the victims of this process are not long going to tolerate it; but this is a relatively small part of the international complications produced by overproduction. The most serious consequence of overproduction is that manufacturers, when they can no longer get a remunerative price for their goods in the home markets, are inevitably driven to seek it elsewhere. They seek foreign markets, and failing foreign markets, they seek new markets by colonization or conquest. It is impossible to read the history of the British Empire during the last 150 years without becoming persuaded that its so-called greed for conquest inevitably results from the necessity under which English manufacturers have been to secure markets for their increasing goods. Either British factories had to close, and British workmen to be thrown out of employment, or England must, by colonization or conquest, secure a price outside her own borders for the goods which competition perpetually tended to make her factories overproduce. Indeed, the war through which England compelled China to purchase Indian opium looks like the greatest of international crimes; yet, when we understand this so-called crime of England, it turns out to have been a commercial necessity; for the remunerative prices obtained by the production of opium in India had so developed this branch of business that millions of Indians depended for their lives upon it, and either Chinese must poison themselves with opium, or Indians must die of hunger. The responsibilities of England were to her subjects first. The Chinese had to pay the price of this responsibility. No better illustration of the wicked despotism that results from existing industrial conditions could be given than this; it brought about a condition of things under which England must commit a crime against China, or millions of her subjects must perish in Hindustan. The millions that would starve in India if the opium market were suddenly closed remind us of the millions who are on the verge of starvation here in the United States,[33] and have been for two years past because of inherent and incurable defects in our industrial system. It is no answer to say that the evil results of overproduction are promptly remedied by the fluidity of capital to flow towards profitable and to withdraw from unprofitable manufactures. Every time such withdrawal takes place a corresponding number of workmen are thrown out of employment, are subjected to want and anguish of anxiety. The evil of this system cannot be explained away by pointing out that the capital withdrawn from one manufacture will soon be reinvested in another. A cotton-spinner cannot in a week or a month become a boilermaker. The commercial system which makes it easy for a capitalist to maintain income at cost of agony to the workingman does not recommend itself to the political student seeking the establishment of Justice in economic conditions. For, unfortunately, labor is not as "fluid" or insensible as capital. The workingman is a human being with the capacity for pain and anxiety that characterizes our race; and every time that capital profits by its fluidity to flow from one industry to another, the lives of men, women, and children are threatened by want. Even in prosperous times memories of the last panic and the certainty of a recurring panic keep their hearts haunted by fear. Overproduction is by no means the only cause for these periods of unemployment. Indeed, the panic of 1907 was not the result of overproduction, but of overinvestment, or what the French call the "immobilization of capital." Every nation has two very different uses for wealth: one for keeping its population alive and comfortable, the other for developing the resources of the country, e.g., building roads and railroads, exploiting mines and quarries, etc. If too much wealth is immobilized in the latter, there is not enough for the former. The important function of regulating this matter is in the hands of bankers who make money not only out of the prosperity of prosperous times, but out of the panic of panic periods. Thus in May, 1907, the bankers, knowing that there had been overinvestment, took care of themselves by selling securities at top-notch prices, occasioning what was called the "rich man's panic," because the rich men of leisure were its victims; so that when the poor man's panic came in October and stocks tumbled to one-half of May prices, the bankers were able to reinvest the proceeds of May sales at fifty per cent profit. One of the consequences of this operation was that in October, 1907, neither manufacturers nor railroad men could get money to keep their work going; gangs of five thousand men at a time were summarily dismissed by railroads, and manufactures shut down. Of course, the bankers did not "make the panic," as has been sometimes ignorantly asserted; they only made money out of it both ways--out of high prices in May and out of low prices in November. And this illustrates one of the great defects of the competitive system--that it puts different sets of men in a position where they can make individual profit out of the misfortunes of their neighbors; bankers out of panics; distillers and liquor dealers out of drunkenness; manufacturers and retailers out of adulteration, and so down the whole gamut of production and distribution; and this is the process which the bourgeois approves because it "makes character." But the unemployment that is the necessary result of all periods of depression, whether produced by overproduction or overinvestment, deserves more than passing mention for its fruits in the shape of misery, pauperism, prostitution and crime, are menacing and prejudicial to the race. § 2. UNEMPLOYMENT The subject of Unemployment has just been treated by an expert in a book[34] hailed by the press as the final word on the subject. All the theories ever propounded as to the cause of unemployment have been reviewed in this book, from overproduction, underconsumption, competition, to "spots on the sun." And the author concludes in favor of competition.[35] As regards the facts and the explanation of these facts, there seems to be no essential disagreement between orthodox economists and Socialists. Both trace unemployment back to competition. And in addition to the arguments given by Mr. Beveridge for tracing unemployment to competition, I venture to add that competition must be decided to be the primary cause, because it is itself the cause of the other so-called causes occasionally proposed--overproduction, underconsumption, underemployment, underpayment--in fact, all except "spots on the sun," which can, I think, except for purposes of hilarity be definitely abandoned. But although we are agreed as to facts, we very much differ as to emphasis. Mr. Beveridge, and indeed all orthodox economists, pass lightly over the injustice, the immorality and the agony of unemployment. He refers to the "cyclical fluctuation" which gives rise to unemployment as a mere failure of adjustment between demand and supply. "No doubt," he says, "the adjustment takes time and may only[36] be accomplished with a certain amount of friction and loss." Now this "friction and loss," when expressed in money and wealth, seem to us socialists stupid because avoidable; but when expressed in human life and misery, they seem so intolerable that we are prepared if necessary to shatter to bits the whole system that underlies them, in order to "remould it nearer to the heart's desire." We are relieved then when we discover that by applying wisdom instead of temper to the solution of the problem, it is unnecessary to do any shattering, that we can remould it without violence, and that this is what Socialism proposes to do. Mr. Beveridge disposes of the Socialist solution in a sentence: "To abolish the competitive stimulus," he says, "is to abolish 'either the possibility of, or the principal factor in material progress.'"[37] But these few words beg the whole question: Need we abolish the competitive stimulus in the adoption of the Socialist cure? Can we not confine ourselves to eliminating the gambling element in it? Can we not diminish the stakes without abandoning them altogether? Can we not take our arsenic in tonic instead of in fatal doses? These questions belong to our constructive chapters at the end of the book. I shall take up here only a few other points about unemployment which orthodox economists do not sufficiently emphasize, in order that there may be no doubt as to the magnitude of this evil and as to the duty upon us to eliminate it if we can. Few things irritate the bourgeois more than to speak of workingmen as "wage slaves." I have seen college professors lose their temper over this word so often that they have served to suggest that in using it we are, as children say, getting "warm." We are very near the Negro we are looking for in the woodpile. Unemployment will help us in our search. Not only the slave, but the savage, has a great advantage over the workingman, in that the former is never unemployed and the latter need never be so unless he chooses. Unemployment then is the peculiar product of our civilization. It is only under this competitive system of ours that a strong, hearty, able-bodied man, not only willing, but burning to work, with plenty of work to be done and with plenty of food to be eaten, is refused both. Although there are vacant lots in the heart of our cities and deserted farms within a few miles of them, the unemployed and the women and children dependent on them are to starve because owing to the "failure of adjustment between supply and demand," no one for two years past has been able to make money by employing them. Why this is so will more fully appear in Book II, Chapter III. It is only necessary here to point out the forces that tend to make the wage slave not only more unfortunate, but more dangerous to the community than the African slave. The slave owner has the same interest in the welfare of his slaves as the cowboy in his cattle. God knows this is not much, but it is sufficient to keep slaves and cattle in good condition if only for the purpose of getting work out of the one and high prices out of the other. The interest that a slave owner has in the health of his slaves is a continuing one; it lasts during the working years of his slave. The owner has paid a price or his slave has cost him a certain amount to raise. The interest of the owner, therefore, is to get the most work out of the slave during his working years. For this purpose he lengthens these working years to the utmost possible; and accordingly feeds and clothes his slave sufficiently and does not overwork him. The interest of the factory owner is just the opposite. He has paid nothing out of his capital for what is called the "free labor" he employs; and because free labor exacts a high wage and short hours, it is to the interest of the factory owner to get the greatest work possible out of his employee, regardless whether his employee is overworked. It is to his interest, not only to use his employee, but to use him up; and to this end he speeds up his machinery to the utmost point in order to force his employees to do the greatest work possible during the hours of employment, and has recourse to pacemakers. He does this with perfect security, because he has an unlimited amount of young labor always at his disposal to replace employees prematurely worn out from overwork and the diseases that come from overwork. The factory owner does not adopt these methods out of hardness of heart, but out of the necessity of the market. If he pays a workingman high wages for short hours, he must get the greatest work out of him if he is to compete successfully with other factory owners in the same line of business. Even the most merciful factory owners have to overwork their employees in order to sell goods at prices fixed by the merciless market. This system results in manifold evils. It creates a class not only of unemployed, but of unemployables; men who cannot render efficient service because of disease and of the drunkenness to which overwork tends; for when a workingman feels his strength begin to wane he has recourse to stimulants to last his day out, and once the habit of stimulants is contracted, he loses his appetite for nourishing food and becomes thereby more and more confirmed in the use of intoxicants. We have here, therefore, a perpetual and necessary production of unemployed and unemployable; the industrial town resembles a gigantic threshing machine which produces its regular quota of unemployed and unemployables as certainly as a threshing machine produces chaff. This leads to another point to which I wish to attract special attention. Unemployment is generally regarded as a purely temporary evil. Indeed, the New York _Times_ took me to task for speaking of it as a permanent evil.[38] The reason for this widespread error is that permanent unemployment is a thing to which we have grown accustomed. Charitable societies are familiar with it and know that it exists all the time; but it is only when unemployment adopts gigantic proportions so that the unemployed crowd our parks and streets and even indulge in public demonstrations, that the public becomes aware of it. And it is not only the regular operation of the industrial threshing machine that produces the unemployed and unemployables; it is the character of certain industries and occupations such as seasonal industries--for example, carpentering and casual occupations, such as stevedores and longshoremen. Mr. Beveridge gives a very graphic picture of the unemployment on the London docks:[39] Most of us have heard of the great Dock Strike of 1889, and of the distinguished men who undertook to settle it. Efforts were made then to regulate work on the wharves, and while these efforts did improve the condition of the best of the men, as Mr. Beveridge says, "it is seldom realized how small a proportion of the total field of dock and wharf labor is really covered by the reform."[40] He attributes the maintenance of evil conditions still prevailing on the docks to the "separation of the interests of wharfingers, shipowners, and contractors," to our old enemy--competition. To appreciate the evil effects of casual or irregular employment, we have again but to quote Mr. Beveridge: "The knowledge that any man, whatever his experience, however bad his antecedents, might get a job at the docks, attracted to their neighborhood a perpetual stream of blackguards, weaklings and failures from other every occupation. The experience, soon made, that regular attendance was not necessary to secure selection on days when work happened to be plentiful, and the daily alternations of hard exercise and idleness rapidly developed in those who came, if they had it not before, the greatest irregularity of habits, and physical or moral incapacity for continuous exertion. The low physique and half-starved condition of many of the laborers made their work dear at 4d. an hour."[41] Here he falls in with the evil feature of the competitive system which has been described as gambling with nothing less for stakes than life, health and happiness: "Finally," concludes Mr. Beveridge, "the door is opened to abuse of patronage; convivial drinking and even direct bribery are not unknown as a means of securing employment."[42] The form of bribery paid by employees when of the female sex is a still darker side of this dark subject.[43] Another permanent cause of unemployment is underemployment and underpayment. In many occupations, such as coal mining, underemployment is averaged over a year so as to cause little unemployment but much distress; the high wages which the miners are able to stipulate for through their trade unions are reduced by diminishing the days of work in the year. In other occupations underemployment and underpayment reduce employees to a state of starvation, which of course swells the rank of the unemployables. Having seen how the pressure of the market forces factory owners to overwork their employees and to dismiss all who are not able to earn the wages they receive; how casual employment creates and keeps alive a class of labor such as is described by Mr. Beveridge, and as must perpetually throw employees either upon charity or into the street; and having seen that this is a result of inherent and constant conditions of our industrial system, we are not surprised to find that statistics of unemployment indicate that it exists not only in periods of industrial depression, as is imagined by the New York _Times_ and others, but is, on the contrary, a permanent feature. For example, the September Report of the New York Commissioner of Labor shows that the average percentage of unemployment during the prosperous period between 1902 and 1907, was 16.1 per cent. We shall see later when we endeavor to calculate the amount of our population affected by unemployment, that 16.1 per cent, being derived entirely from trade union reports, does not fully represent the whole, because it is generally admitted that unemployment prevails in much larger proportion in unorganized labor than in organized.[44] The last United States Census sets down the number of factory hands at over 7,000,000. Taking therefore the official figures as representing the minimum of constant unemployment, 16 per cent of 7,000,000 is 1,120,000, and as every factory hand has on an average four persons dependent upon him, this means a total population of 4,480,000, or roughly, four millions and a half permanently in want in the United States owing to this unemployment which orthodox economists recognize as a necessary result of the competitive system. But the public takes no account of the fact that our industrial system regularly reduces a population of 4,500,000 to want. The public only takes account of the extraordinary unemployment which occasions disorder and riot in times of panic and industrial depression. Panics and industrial depressions must not be confounded. We have seen that industrial depressions are the inevitable result of what Mr. Beveridge calls "cyclical fluctuations" and recur with abominable regularity. Quite independent, however, of these regularly recurring industrial depressions due to the working of the competitive system, there are financial crises or panics due to similar perturbations in our money market. Although they differ in many respects from industrial depressions, nevertheless they have in common with them the inevitable result of producing unemployment on a large scale. The panic of 1907 began as a purely financial crisis, but promptly became a lengthy period of industrial depression. It is not necessary at this point to discuss the relation between these two. But it is important that mere scarcity of money in the panic of 1907 produced unemployment more suddenly and in larger proportions than any other panics that have preceded it. Not only private enterprises such as railroads, but public bodies such as municipalities, being no longer able to borrow money, had not only to abandon work already voted, but to put a sudden stop to work already undertaken. Laborers were dismissed in batches of five thousand at a time, and every manufacturing and railroad plant was driven by the impossibility of borrowing money to cutting down expenses with a view to increasing the efficiency of the plant. Thus the Pennsylvania Railroad announced that it had so increased the efficiency of its plant that it was able to dismiss 30,000 men during the year; the New York Central during 1907 dismissed ten per cent of the staff upon its main line alone; seventy-six railroads, operating over 172,000 miles of railroad, report an economy of nearly $100,000,000, most of which constituted an economy in wages,[45] and Senator Guggenheim, in an interview published in the _Wall Street Journal_,[46] said: "For the first time in many years the employer is getting from his men the 100 per cent in efficiency for which he pays. It is a safe assertion that prior to the panic the efficiency of labor was no higher than 75 per cent, perhaps not even that." Special attention is directed to the foregoing because unemployment is ceasing to be a merely accidental and periodic phenomenon and is assuming not only larger, but more permanent proportions. In other words, the 30,000 men dismissed by the Pennsylvania Railroad were not dismissed because of a temporary cessation of traffic. They were dismissed because the Pennsylvania Railroad has succeeded in so raising the efficiency of their system that they can permanently run their lines with 30,000 less employees than they could before. Let us endeavor to form some idea of the unemployment during the last two years. The only State that regularly publishes official reports on this subject is New York. The State of New York derives its information from such trade unions as report to it; and from these reports it seems that during 1908, the average unemployment has been about one-third. As has been intimated, an average of one-third of organized labor reported by trade unions, means a very much larger proportion of unorganized labor. It is true that Mr. Beveridge disputes this in one passage,[47] but he himself furnishes the evidence of its truth in several others; as for example, where he says that "in practice, therefore, it is found that acute recurrent distress at times of seasonal depression is confined to the unskilled occupations";[48] and again, he points out how the lack of intelligence of unorganized and semi-skilled and unskilled workmen makes it impossible for them to take account of the fluctuations that produce unemployment. "The measure of their failure," he says, "is to be found in those periods of clamant distress which evoke Mansion House Relief Funds."[49] In Chapter V, again, he points out the chronic distress of unskilled men and that unemployment is largely due to lack of organization. It stands to reason that whereas a factory owner thinks twice before dismissing a skilled workman he will not hesitate to dismiss an unskilled workman whom he can replace at any time.[50] However much authorities may differ on this in Europe, there can be no question about it in America. It was impossible to read the daily papers in October, 1907, without being satisfied that the first men to suffer were the unorganized and unskilled. Hardly a day passed for weeks without papers announcing the discharge of workingmen in batches of thousands at a time. It was only later that factories shut down, and then for the most part, a day or so in the week. Unfortunately, because the unskilled workingman is unorganized, it is impossible to get any information regarding the extent of unemployment in their ranks; but it can be stated without fear of contradiction, that the percentage of unemployment is much larger in the ranks of the unorganized than in those of trade unions. The one-third, therefore, as shown by the New York Labor reports, is below the mark, I will not undertake to say how much. In endeavoring to make an estimate as to the extent of unemployment throughout the entire Union, we must remember that the percentage of employment in New York is likely to be larger than in purely agricultural States. On the other hand, nowhere is the percentage of unemployment greater than in the States devoted to mining. The difficulty under which we find ourselves, therefore, in giving the exact figure of the extent of unemployment, makes it wise not to increase the one-third reported by trade unions in New York in consequence of the certainty that this proportion was far larger in unorganized labor; and on the other hand, not to decrease it out of the consideration that there were some States in which the percentage would not be as much as in the State of New York. Under these circumstances it may be assumed that the percentage reported by the trade unions to the Labor Department fairly represents the average unemployment throughout the whole United States of America. Taking the census figures of over 7,000,000 as that of the workingmen in the country, one-third of 7,000,000 is 2,333,333; add to this the number of persons dependent on these workingmen; four to each, 9,333,333; add this to the first figure and we get a population of 11,666,666 which for two years has been on the edge of starvation, and saved from it only through accumulated earnings, help from trade unions and charity. As the unskilled workingman can hardly ever save money owing to the low rate of his wages, and as he is not organized and never receives benefits from a union, it may be said that the large majority of these have been living for two years on the charity of their neighbors. It is probable, too, that the trade union member has been reduced to depending upon charity; for the last report on savings banks shows that $25,000,000 have been withdrawn during the last year, and their presidents, when interviewed, recognized that this diminution was caused by the withdrawal of funds by the unemployed. It was also due to the withdrawal of funds by the trade unions. In October, 1907, many trade unions had large sums accumulated which have been applied during the year to the support of the unemployed. The Union of Pressmen had $30,000 last October, all of which has gone to support the unemployed during the year, and this union has suffered comparatively little, only 20 per cent being now idle. This 20 per cent is supported by assessments on those who are at work. As regards remedies for unemployment, Mr. Beveridge says that "no cure for industrial fluctuation can be hoped for; the aim must be palliation." And he dwells at great length upon the palliative measures to which Switzerland, Germany, Belgium and to a less extent, France, have recourse; employment bureaus, insurance against unemployment, and farm colonies, to which last he refers only incidentally, pointing out that Hollesley Bay had proved for the most part ineffectual.[51] These palliatives have, however, rendered comparatively small service. In Germany, where they have all been applied, unemployment during 1908 reached the rioting stage, at which it becomes dangerous and commands the attention of our economists, as in England. The palliative, to which Mr. Beveridge only incidentally refers, is, to my mind, calculated not only to diminish the evil immediately, but to serve as an important bridge over which the unemployed and unemployables may pass into the Promised Land. The farm colony, however, belongs to the constructive chapter at the end of the book. Another necessary consequence of the competitive system is a form of unemployment which, because of its importance, deserves consideration by itself--Prostitution. § 3. PROSTITUTION Prostitution is not an easy or agreeable subject to treat; it will be disposed of, therefore, in the fewest words possible. The treatment of it will be summary, not because the subject is unimportant, but because it is abominable. And if it is true that Socialism would put an end to it, this alone, for those who can comprehend the horrors thereof, ought to justify Socialism whatever be the sacrifice necessary to the realization of it. If our present competitive system is responsible for the evil to both sexes that results from prostitution, then the maintenance of this system is, so far as every one of us by indifference tolerates it, nothing less than crime. We must begin by making ourselves clear as to what prostitution is. Mere promiscuity of sexual relation does not constitute prostitution, for many a woman is unfaithful to her husband many times without losing social consideration, provided only she conduct herself with sufficient discretion to avoid scandal. Nor does intercourse for money constitute prostitution; for then prostitution would include all those who marry for money. The real definition of a prostitute is a woman who has intercourse both promiscuously and for a money reward, promiscuity and gain must be united. Now it will later be made clear that in a Socialist state because every woman would be furnished an opportunity to work, none would be driven to prostitution. Prostitution is generally the direct result of the disgrace put upon a woman by loss of virtue. She is turned out of her home and her legitimate employment. She has then but one recourse. It is sometimes due to lack of employment; sometimes to the greater facility prostitution affords for making a livelihood with the least labor. In all these cases the _primum mobile_ is the making of a livelihood. As Socialism would remove this _primum mobile_, would assure a livelihood to every woman upon the single condition of her performing her allotted work--there would be no motive for prostitution. If she refused to perform her allotted task she would become a pauper--but a prostitute never; for a Socialist state, as will be later explained, would segregate paupers in farm colonies, where they would be compelled to support themselves, and would not leave them to demoralize their neighbors by profligacy and prostitution. It may be objected that society keeps itself pure by casting out women of loose character, and that an innocent girl should not be called upon to work in a factory side by side with one who will deprave her if she can. An exhaustive answer to this would involve a study of the special conditions of each State, the laws of each State, the mental attitude of the people, their tolerance of immorality or their intolerance of it. It is a problem common to every society. This exhaustive study it is not the province of this book to undertake; the subject must be disposed of, therefore, by the following general considerations: In the society of the wealthy to-day we are confronted by the same problem as would be presented in a coöperative commonwealth in which prostitution would be rendered impossible by state employment regardless of morality. In other words, wealth does for the wealthy class what Socialism would do for the unwealthy; it makes prostitution improbable if not impossible. And the wealthy manage to solve the problem of promiscuity--every wealthy society for itself in its own way. In one country the woman who outrages morality is socially ostracized; in another she is tolerated; in one country divorces are not only lawful, but fashionable; in others the church forbids divorce but tolerates the complaisant husband. _All these are problems of sex which Socialism does not undertake to solve._ Later on the scientific and ethical aspects of Socialism will, I hope, lead to the conclusion that Socialism will so raise our ethical standards and habits of mind that sexual irregularities will tend to diminish. Prostitution, however, is not a sex, but an economic problem. A woman does not receive money payment except for economic reasons. If the economic pressure is removed she may be licentious, but she will not be a prostitute. Chastity ought to be a purely moral or social question, not an economic one. The competitive system makes it economic, and of all the crimes imputable to the competitive system, this is the greatest, for it directly perverts not only the human body, but the human soul. Of course, unemployment, in degenerating the body, ultimately degenerates the soul also, but the latter generation is more or less remote; the public conscience may be forgiven for not having discovered or taken account of it. But that we should see women daily compelled by hunger to sell soul as well as body and should then shut against them the door of our homes and our hearts, is a crime not only against them, but against ourselves. We are hardening our hearts as well as theirs. We are forcing our minds to that obliquity which sees in Socialism only "pornographic literature" and "pornographic propaganda" and charges the men who sacrifice their lives to the putting an end to the conditions that produce prostitution with "criminal nonsense" and "grave mental or moral shortcoming."[52] This evil, like all evils that arise from the competitive system, is not incidental or occasional, but inherent and necessary. It cannot be better stated than by Miss Woodbridge, the secretary of the Working Women's Society, in a report made to the Society on May 6, 1890: "It is a known fact that men's wages cannot fall below a limit upon which they can exist, but woman's wages have no limit, since the paths of shame are always open to her. The very fact that some of these women receive partial support from brothers or fathers and are thus enabled to live upon less than they earn, forces other women who have no such support either to suffer for necessities or seek other means of support." The extent to which wages are reduced below starvation rates is also stated as follows: "The wages, which are low, we find are often reduced by excessive fines, the employers placing a value upon time lost that is not given to service rendered. The salaries of saleswomen range from $2.00 to $18.00, but the latter sum is only paid in rare instances in cloak and suit departments. The average salary in the best houses does not exceed $7.00, and averages $4.00 or $4.50 per week. Cashiers receive from $6.00 to $15.00, averaging about $9.00. Cash girls receive from $1.50 to $2.50 per week, though we know of but one store where $2.50 is paid. In the Broadway stores boys are employed, usually on commission. The average salary of one large shop for saleswomen and cash girls is $2.40; another $2.90; another $3.10; but in the latter, the employees are nearly all men and boys. We find in many stores the rule to fine from five to thirty cents for a few minutes' tardiness. In one store all women who earn over $7.00 are fined thirty cents for ten minutes' tardiness. Cash girls who earn $1.75 per week are fined ten cents for ten minutes' tardiness." It is hardly necessary to comment on a wage to saleswomen varying from $2.40 to $3.10 a week, and this liable to reduction by fines. It will be observed too that owners of department stores are compelled by the pressure of the market to seek this half-supported help. Miss Woodbridge says: "In all the stores the tendency is to secure cheap help. You often see the advertisement reading thus: 'Young misses, just graduated, wanted for positions as saleswomen;' which means that being girls with homes they can afford to work cheaper than those who are self-supporting." The words "just graduated" constitute a direct appeal to the educated--that is to say, partially supported--women. So a self-respecting young girl who desires to contribute to the expenses of the home, sets the rate of wages which drives her less fortunate sister to misery and crime, and thus becomes the unconscious instrument of her shame. If anyone is not satisfied that the conditions above described must result, unsavory details of a kind to persuade him will be found in the report of Miss Maud E. Miner, probation officer of city magistrates' courts, published in the Survey. Lastly, temptation would be indirectly as well as directly diminished by the absence of prostitutes as a class. It has been already intimated that prostitution committed injustice to _both_ sexes. By this it was intended to refer to the injustice of exposing our young men to perpetual temptation furnished by the facilities for prostitution. The whole question of sexual morality is mainly one of suggestion. Take eight men accustomed to believe that they cannot dispense with sexual connection; put them in a crew and remove the suggestion that they can obtain relief at any time by substituting therefor the notion of loyalty to the crew or a desire to win a race, and the desire which before seemed uncontrollable practically disappears. The moment the race is over, the old suggestion returns, and the night of a boat race has become proverbial in consequence. The same is true of men who go on hunting expeditions, yachting cruises, into lumber camps, etc. Desire becomes dormant or controllable as soon as facilities for gratifying it disappear; the moment the facility returns, the suggestion is revived, and desire becomes uncontrollable. What, then, would be the consequence if the suggestion were minimized by the absence of prostitution altogether? But this is not all: Men who seduce young girls and married women have learned to gratify their passions through the facility afforded by prostitution. If our youths were never afforded the chance of taking that first step which leads to the _facilis descensus_, they would, from the fact of never having gratified their passions, be less likely to undertake to gratify them at the cost of seduction. The suggestion would be absent; all women would tend to be as sacred to a man as his sister. The relation of brother and sister is due entirely to the absence of suggestion; he has learned to regard her with an unconscious respect which removes the possibility of erotic suggestion. What actually happens in the small family of to-day could also happen in the larger family of to-morrow. This must not be understood as a contention that Socialism would destroy immorality. Far from it. All that is claimed is that it might diminish immorality and that it would put an end to prostitution. This last is reason enough for it. It is impossible to treat of the economic cause of prostitution without discussing its ethical consequences, because the consequences react upon the cause. But we are here chiefly concerned with its economic features; and it is impossible to put too much emphasis upon the fact that the greatest permanent blot upon our civilization is the necessary result of a competitive system that leaves a large part of our women no other means of livelihood. Although we have carefully distinguished between the woman who sells herself to one man for a fortune and the common prostitute who sells herself to many men for a pittance, the first is often more to blame than the latter, because the latter is compelled by hunger while the former often barters her chastity out of sheer love of luxury. The whole heredity of man may be altered by the elimination through Socialism of the sordid motive for marriage. Avarice may become diminished by sexual selection. For although sexual selection is not to-day found to have the force in animal heredity that Darwin thought, it is an important factor in human heredity, thanks to the opportunity for deliberate selection furnished by our institution of marriage. But this belongs to another chapter. From a purely economic point of view, prostitution is to be classed with unemployment, which burdens the community with the support of a class that in a coöperative commonwealth would be self-supporting. It seems hardly necessary to state that the dissipation that attends the life of a prostitute unfits her for work. And not content with being idle herself, she causes others to be idle and constitutes a permanent source of contagion, moral and physical, in our midst. This is a necessary consequence of the competitive system. § 4. STRIKES AND LOCKOUTS Another necessary result of a system of production that sets the man who works with his hands against the man who works with his head, is the conflict between capital and labor, that expresses itself in strikes and lockouts. The conflict itself is treated in detail in the chapter entitled Trusts and Trade Unions. Here we shall confine ourselves to its wastefulness in time and money. The sixteenth Annual Report of the United States Commissioner of Labor,[53] for 1901, estimates the loss to employees resulting from strikes and lockouts from January 1, 1881, to December 1, 1900--a period of twenty years--at $306,683,223, and the loss to employers during the same time at $142,659,104--together $449,342,327; or roughly--$450,000,000. It is interesting to note how much less is the loss to employers who are relatively able to bear it than to employees who are relatively unable to bear it. But without regard to the injustice of a system that bears so hardly upon the workingman, no practical American who desires to see production attended with the least waste and friction, can look upon such a loss as this without impatience and humiliation. Quite irrespective of the misery that results from unemployment and the evils that attend it for the whole community--employed as well as unemployed--too much emphasis cannot be put upon the foolish waste of human energy that unemployment occasions. There have been for two years in this country over a million (and probably much more than a million) able-bodied men willing and anxious to assist in the production and distribution of the things we need, and who have not been permitted to do so--the energy of over a million, and probably a great many more, absolutely wasted. I have been amazed at the indifference of our wealthy class, and even of the philanthropists amongst our wealthy class, at this condition of the unemployed until a clue to this indifference was furnished by the naïveté of a few of our captains of industry. Here is what one of them, Daniel Guggenheim, president of the American Smelting and Refining Company, says to the _Wall Street Journal_, August 10: "Every manufacturer in the country has lowered his costs of production, partly through cheaper prices for raw materials, but principally on account of the increased efficiency of labor. The latter is one of the redeeming features of the current depression. "For the first time in many years the employer is getting from his men the 100 per cent in efficiency for which he pays. It is a safe assertion that prior to the panic the efficiency of labor was no higher than 75 per cent, perhaps not even that. "Another thing--wherever a thousand men are needed, twelve hundred apply. The result is that the thousand best men are picked; the others, of necessity, must be turned away. But the thousand work more conscientiously, knowing that two hundred are waiting to take the places of the incompetents." Here again we have one small class benefited by the misery of millions of unemployed, and willing to perpetuate this condition of unemployment in order to profit by it. Of all the waste that attends the competitive system this waste of human energy is the most unjust, and the most unjustifiable, unless it can be found that the pauperism it imposes on the millions and the heartlessness it promotes in the few, contribute, as the bourgeois tells us, "to make character!" But if the waste of human energy at the cost of human agony is a matter of indifference to business men, there is another form of waste which is likely to appeal to them. We Americans pride ourselves upon our business efficiency. In the next chapter we will consider the waste of money that attends the competitive system and how the ablest business men have set about eliminating it. § 5. ADULTERATION It would seem as though the indifference of the public at large to such wicked and wasteful things as unemployment, strikes, lockouts and prostitution, were due to hardness of heart; but if we observe a similar indifference to adulteration which concerns every individual to the utmost, we have to recognize that tolerance of the evils of the competitive system is due not so much to hardness of heart as to stupidity. For since the dawn of our present civilization, adulteration has been a constant and abominable evil. As the Encyclopedia Americana puts it: "Adulteration is coexistent with trade;"[54] and as the Britannica puts it: "The practice of adulteration has become an art in which the knowledge of science and the ingenuity of trade are freely exercised." Before industrialism had reached its present development the statutes enacted against adulteration were severe. They punished it with the pillory and tumbrel. The following are the words of the statute: "If any default shall be found in the bread of a baker in the city, the first time, let him be drawn upon a hurdle from the Guildhall to his own house through the great street where there be most people assembled, and through the great streets which are most dirty, with the faulty loaf hanging from his neck; if a second time he shall be found committing the same offence, let him be drawn from the Guildhall through the great street of Cheepe, in the manner aforesaid, to the pillory, and let him be put upon the pillory, and remain there at least one hour in the day; and the third time that such default shall be found, he shall be drawn, and the oven shall be pulled down, and the baker made to forswear the trade in the city forever."[55] As the Encyclopædia puts it: "All this has given way to the force of free trade." In other words, freedom of industry has been interpreted to mean freedom of adulteration, and the Act of 1872 accordingly punishes adulteration with "a sum not to exceed fifty pounds," and only provides imprisonment in case of a second offence.[56] It is interesting to take up any standard encyclopædia and read the cold-blooded accounts of the various poisons introduced into our food and other commodities for the purpose of adulteration. The matter has been well treated by Mr. W.J. Ghent;[57] and in spite of the fact that he is a prominent Socialist his book may be read, because in every case he cites an authority, and his authorities are, for the most part, reports of State Commissions and Health Departments. It is probable that no article enters more universally into consumption than milk, and of all the articles that we consume, it is most important that milk should be pure, because it is the food of infants and children. Yet in spite of all the laws passed for the prevention of adulteration of milk, "in New York city, during 1902, of 3970 samples of milk taken from dealers for analysis, 2095, or 52.77 per cent, were found to be adulterated. The arrests in the city under the inspection acts were 193 in 1899, 460 in 1900, 464 in 1901, and 722 in 1902."[58] The experience in Ohio has been just the same as that of New York: "The Dairy and Food Department of that State was created in 1886. After seventeen years of inspections, arrests and prosecutions, adulterations of milk still continue. 'Out of 1199 samples tested by the chemists,' says the report for the year ending November 15, 1903, 'about one-fourth were found to be either below the required standard in solids and butter fats, or adulterated with that base adulterant known as "formalin" or "formaldehyde."'"[59] Mr. A.J. Wedderburn calculates that 15 per cent of all our products are adulterated; that is to say, $1,125,000,000 per annum.[60] And this figure does not include adulterations of wine, whisky, beer, tobacco, drugs or patent medicines. Of eleven samples of coffee compounds analyzed by the Pennsylvania Department in 1897-1898, "six contained no coffee whatever, and none contained more than 25 per cent. The contents ranged from pea hulls (65 per cent in one instance) to bran and the husks of cocoa beans."[61] The Ohio Report of 1898, in describing what is called "renovated butter," says as follows: "These factories have agents in all the large markets who buy up the refuse from the commission men and retailers, taking stale, rancid, dirty and unsalable butter in various degrees of putrefaction; this refuse is put through a process of boiling, straining, filtering, and renovating, and is finally churned with fresh milk, giving it a more salable appearance. The effect is only temporary, however, as in a few days the stuff becomes rancid and the odor it gives off is something frightful. It is usually sold to people having a large trade who will dispose of it quickly, for if it is not consumed at once it cannot be used at all without being further renovated."[62] After immense agitation we have had recent legislation of a character to render adulteration difficult; the Federal Food and Drug Act which went into effect January 1, 1907, since reënacted in thirty of our States, and I suppose that many of our fellow-citizens think that this Food and Drug Act is going to some extent to put an end to adulteration. But is the experience of the entire race during its entire history to be treated as of no importance in this connection? Have we not had laws of this kind before, punishing adulteration in every way--by the pillory and tumbrel as well as by fines and imprisonment--and has any of them had any permanent effect in putting an end to adulteration? How many more centuries are to elapse before we learn the lesson that, so long as you give to one set of men an irresistible motive for adulteration, no laws--no penalties, light or severe, will materially check that impulse. If they are severe the courts will not enforce them; if they are light the trade will disregard them. It is true that the adulteration of the things we eat and drink is more important than the adulteration of things we wear. Nevertheless it is a matter of no small importance that there is hardly a thing that we do wear that is not adulterated in an astonishing degree. An interesting paper on this subject was read before the Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics, 1908.[63] The art of adulterating textiles seems to be taught in our textile schools: "As a student in a textile school said to a visitor: 'Our teacher is so clever, he can spin wool and cotton together so they can never be detected;'" and adulteration appears to be practically authorized under our New York State law of 1900, which provides that "collars marked 'linen,' 'all linen,' and 'pure linen,' must contain at least one thickness or ply of pure linen." It is a common saying that, although the total supply of wool in the world is only sufficient to meet one-third of the demand, there is always wool to be had. Of course, one principal reason why adulteration prevails is that it is impossible for the ordinary consumer to detect it. For example, in order to analyze stockings they must be destroyed. No consumer is possessed of the technical schooling necessary to distinguish all-wool or all-silk goods. Indeed it is stated by high authority that such a thing as all-silk and all-wool is not to be purchased in the market, though we continually buy articles declared to be all-wool or all-silk. I do not know whether the advocates of the present industrial condition, on the ground that it "makes character," would go so far as to approve of adulteration for this reason. It must be admitted, however, that virtually everybody engaged in manufacture, production, and distribution is a partner in the deliberate adulteration of things for the purpose of cheating the public. This has been coexistent with trade and has become recognized as one of our modern arts. The extent to which adulteration is organized can be judged by the fact that "no less than 40,000,000 pounds of fiber made from old rags, called 'shoddy,' are annually made in Yorkshire, at an estimated value of £8,000,000 sterling, and that all is used for adulterating woolen cloth."[64] FOOTNOTES: [24] Industrial Commission Report, Vol. I, p. 794. [25] Ibid., p. 101. [26] Ibid., p. 982. The results of the work of this Commission are well summed up in Ind. Com. Rep., Vol. I, Pt. I, p. 39, by Professor Jenks; and the waste eliminated by trusts still more compendiously treated in "Government," Vol. II, p. 543, by the author. [27] See N.Y. _Tribune_, Jan. 1, 1905, p. 2, column 2. Ibid., Jan. 2, 1905, p. 11, column 1. [28] "Socialism and Social Reform," by R.T. Ely, p. 134. [29] See N.Y. _Tribune_, Jan. 1, 1905, p. 2, column 2. Ibid., Jan. 2, 1905, p. 11, column 1. [30] Report of the Industrial Commission, 1900. Vol. I, p. 199. [31] Report of the Industrial Commission, Vol. I, 1900, p. 121. [32] _Monde Economique_, Feb. 20, 1897. [33] July 19, 1909. [34] "Unemployment: A Problem of Industry," by W.H. Beveridge and others. (Longmans.) [35] Ibid., p. 61. [36] "Unemployment: A Problem of Industry," by W.H. Beveridge and others. [37] Ibid., p. 63. [38] N.Y. _Times_, Oct. 2, 1908. [39] "Unemployment." W.H. Beveridge, p. 87. [40] Ibid., p. 91. [41] "Unemployment." W.H. Beveridge, p. 87. [42] Ibid., p. 98. See also "Problems of Unemployment in the London Building Trades." N.B. Dearles (1908, J.M. Dent). Cf. pp. 87-8. [43] Book II, Chapter I. [44] Mr. Beveridge denies this in one place, p. 21; but himself produces proof of it later, p. 35. [45] _Financial Chronicle_, Sept. 26, 1908. [46] August, 1908. [47] Beveridge, "Unemployment," p. 21. [48] Ibid., p. 35. [49] Beveridge, "Unemployment," p. 65. [50] The managers of Trusts have pointed out that in order to keep their highly skilled men, they have to sell often at a loss; and they give this as the reason for what is called "dumping" their goods into foreign markets. In other words, in order not to lower prices in America during periods of depression due to overproduction, they sell their goods at a loss abroad.--Industrial Commission, Vol. I, p. 282, [51] Beveridge, "Unemployment," p. 182. [52] Mr. Roosevelt in the _Outlook_, 1909, p. 622. [53] P. 24. [54] Americana, Vol. I, Subj. Adulteration. [55] Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. I, p. 51. [56] An act to amend the laws of adulteration of food, drinks, and drugs, 1872. [57] "Mass and Class," by W.J. Ghent, p. 180-200. [58] "The Health Department." A pamphlet published by the City Club (1903), p. 23. [59] Eighteenth Annual Report of the Ohio Dairy and Food Commission (1903), p. 8. [60] Address of Dr. W.C. Mitchell of the Colorado State Board of Health, before the Portland Pure Food Convention (1902). Journal of Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Convention of the National Association of State Dairy and Food Departments, held at Portland, Ore., pp. 378-383. [61] "Portland Proceedings," p. 469. [62] Ohio Report (1898), p. 10. [63] "The Study of Textiles," by Miss Nellie Crooks, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1908. [64] Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. I, Subj. Adulteration. CHAPTER II CAPITALISM IS WASTEFUL Under the system of free competition in the beginning and middle of the last century, every investor who saw a profit in refining oil or sugar, or making steel, put up a refinery or factory. The aim of every factory was to manufacture the largest amount possible and sell it at the highest price possible; and this is what Herbert Spencer[65] and the Manchester School regard as the ideal system of production. Now let us see just what happens as a result of this system of unlimited competition. § 1. GETTING THE MARKET Every manufacturer and refiner has to find purchasers for his product. This effort to find purchasers is called in the trade, "getting the market." The expression "getting the market" covers all the expenses attending the bringing of goods to the attention of the public, and they may be roughly divided into two principal categories--advertising and commercial travellers. The public little appreciates the enormous cost which attends the work of finding a purchaser. Mr. Bradley, after a careful calculation, estimates that "somewhere between the distiller and the consumer in this country forty millions of dollars are lost; this goes primarily to the attempt to secure trade."[66] Mr. Dowe[67] the President of the Commercial Travellers' National League, testifies that 35,000 salesmen have been thrown out of employment by the organization of trusts, and 25,000 reduced to two-thirds of their previous salaries. This would represent a loss of $60,000,000 in salaries on a basis of $1200 each. He cites, as instances of trusts that have dismissed salesmen, the baking powder, bicycle, chair, paper-bag, rubber, tin-plate, steel and rod, sugar, coffee, thread and type-founders' combinations. Not only do trusts dismiss salesmen, they substitute for salesmen who, prior to the organization of the trust had been earning $4000 to $5000 a year, cheaper salesmen who receive $18 a week. He also estimates that the dismissal of commercial travellers means a loss to railways of about $250 per day, 240 days in the year; in all, $25,000,000. The loss to hotels is about as much, and "many hotels are likely to become bankrupt if any more travellers are taken off." § 2. CROSS FREIGHTS Another waste attending the competitive system results from "cross freights," the double freight a refiner sometimes pays for hauling oil from the well, or sugar from the nearest seaboard and back over exactly the same ground, when refined, to the customer. So also the steel manufacturer sometimes pays freight for hauling ore to the coal mine or coal to the ore, and back, after smelting, to the customer. This waste resulting from cross freights is only a small part of a similar waste that results from competition in the task of distribution--or retail trade. We are all familiar with the amazing results obtained by the national enterprise known as the Post Office, and how, for the insignificant sum of two cents, a letter written in New York can be delivered in an incredibly short space of time in San Francisco, and even perhaps more incredibly in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. Let us consider for a moment the cost of doing this were letters distributed throughout the country in the same way as our other commodities, as for example, milk, coal, or bread. It would be interesting to calculate how many hundred dealers in milk there are in New York[68] or London, equipped with their own horses, wagons, and men, each engaged in delivering milk all over the city; add to these the thousands distributing in like manner bread, and the thousands distributing coal, and so on with butter, eggs, meat, fish, vegetables, and all other things that enter into our daily consumption. Every block of houses is served with milk by this large number of milk dealers instead of by one, as would be the case if the distribution of milk were in the hands of one agency; so every block is furnished with butter, eggs, meat, fish, and vegetables by this large number of dealers in butter, eggs, meat, fish, and vegetables, instead of by one, and so on, through every article that enters into our daily use. Compare with this the economy of time, labor, and expense effected by the Government Post Office through sorting letters beforehand according to streets, and confining the distribution in any one street to a single carrier who distributes the letters with the greatest economy of time and labor, from door to door. No practical business man would be guilty of the stupidity of putting a hundred men to do the work that could be done just as well by a single man; and yet, this is exactly the stupidity of which the competitive system is guilty. Let us consider the unnecessary number of butcher shops in the city of New York.[69] Before methods of communication had attained their present development, it was necessary that there should be butcher shops in every block to satisfy the needs of the people in the block. But to-day, the telephone service permits of ordering meat at a great distance, and the automobile permits of this meat being rapidly delivered to the consumer. The best housekeepers residing downtown to-day go for their meat to a butcher who lives in Harlem. Now there is no reason why this Harlem butcher should not furnish all the meat to the island of Manhattan, or indeed to all in Greater New York. But there is a reason why under our competitive system this should not take place, and this is the stupidity of butchers in particular and the stupidity of the community at large. Most butchers believe that they can make most money by cheating their customers; and the public at large believe all butchers equally dishonest and therefore deal with the butcher nearest them. This stupidity is to a great extent justified. The art of the butcher consists in finding out to which customers he can sell third-class meat at first-class prices;[70] and as a rule, he is so successful in doing this that no butcher is ever known to fail. On the contrary, they all grow rich. This being the rule, the public is justified in giving up the expectation of being honestly served, so that it is only the most intelligent housewives who discover that there are butchers who do not have dishonest methods. Thus the stupidity of butchers and public tends to encourage the multiplicity of shops and keeps in the butcher business an enormously larger number than is necessary. If now we take into consideration that what is true of butchers is true of almost every dealer in the articles of food we consume, we shall appreciate how much waste of human effort there is in this business of distribution. But all this waste, encouraging stupidity in the customer and dishonesty in the retailer, is endorsed because it "makes character!" Last but not least is the loss of by-products that inevitably results from manufacturing upon anything less than a gigantic scale. The managers of the Standard Oil Trust testify that among the waste products capable of being utilized in sufficiently large refineries are gasoline, paraffine, lubricating oil, vaseline, naphtha, aniline dyes, and no less than two hundred drugs; and that the total value of these waste products is actually as great as that of the oil itself.[71] Is or is not the contention with which this chapter started, justified? It was charged that the competitive system is stupid because wasteful and disorderly, and that it was unnecessarily immoral, unjust, and cruel. The testimony of men recognized as the highest authorities has been produced to demonstrate its wastefulness: Waste of capital owing to bankruptcy, to working at irregular efficiency, to frequent change of dimension, to cost of "getting the market," to cross freights, to anarchy of distribution, to loss of by-products; Waste of human energy in the work of competition; and above all in unemployment leading to vagrancy and pauperism. And we need produce no testimony to prove things so obvious as the immorality, injustice, and cruelty of overemployment and unemployment and the necessary results thereof: drunkenness, disease, pauperism, prostitution, insanity, and crime. One word only still needs explanation: It has been stated that this immorality, injustice, and cruelty are "unnecessary." It is useless to rail at these things if they are necessary. Nature is often immoral, unjust and cruel. The survival of the few fit and the corresponding sacrifice of the many unfit has no justification in morality. Death, deformity, and disease are often both unjust and cruel. Yet against these last we are in great part helpless. It is not enough to show that the competitive system results in evil; we have to demonstrate that these evils are avoidable; and that our remedy for them will not involve still greater evils. This belongs to the final chapters on Socialism; and is referred to here only to assure the reader that it has not been overlooked. Sufficient emphasis, however, has not yet been put upon the lack of order that characterizes the competitive system. FOOTNOTES: [65] "A Plea for Liberty," p. 17: "Under our existing voluntary coöperation with its free contracts and its competition, production and distribution need no official oversight. Demand and supply, and the desire of each man to gain a living by supplying the needs of his fellows, spontaneously evolve that wonderful system whereby a great city has its food daily brought round to all doors or stored at adjacent shops; has clothing for its citizens everywhere at hand in multitudinous varieties; has its houses and furniture and fuel ready made or stocked in each locality; and has mental pabulum from halfpenny papers, hourly hawked round, to weekly shoals of novels, and less abundant books of instruction, furnished without stint for small payments. And throughout the kingdom, production as well as distribution is similarly carried on with the smallest amount of superintendence which proves efficient; while the quantities of the numerous commodities required daily in each locality are adjusted without any other agency than the pursuit of profit." [66] Report of the Industrial Commission, pp. 829-831, Vol. I, 1900. [67] Ibid., pp. 27-36. [68] This work has been in part eliminated by combination. But the economies resulting therefrom have all gone to the combinations. The consumer pays just as much as he did before. [69] Trow's Business Directory of New York city, 1909, lists about 4000 retail butcher shops in Manhattan and The Bronx. There are about 275 postal stations in the same territory. [70] All good housekeepers know this by experience. I know it from the butchers themselves, who explained it in the course of an effort to arrange a combination of butchers in Paris. [71] Testimony of Mr. Archbold (pp. 570-571) in the Report of the Industrial Commission, Vol. I, 1900. CHAPTER III CAPITALISM IS DISORDERLY Nature is both orderly and disorderly. She is orderly, for example, in the general succession of her seasons, in the average rainfall, the average sunshine. She is orderly in the regular drawing of water from the ocean to the hills and the return of water from the hills to the ocean. But Nature is extremely disorderly in her detail. Some years rainfall is deficient and men starve because of drouth. Other years the sunshine is insufficient and men starve because of rain. The beneficent flow of water from the hills to the ocean is attended by disorder which is often calamitous; the river swells to a torrent in one place and spreads out to unwholesome marshes in another. The power of man to profit by the order of Nature and to adjust its disorder is an attribute that makes man almost divine; for this power exerts as great influence over the soul of man as over the matter of Nature. Man has demonstrated his control over Nature by protecting himself against deficiency of water through reservoirs, and against excess of rain through drainage; he has robbed torrents of their terrors by dykes, and made them his servants by irrigation; he drains the swamp and waters the desert. In one respect only has he failed to exercise as yet sufficient control; namely, the competitive system. The competitive system is applauded by Herbert Spencer because he finds it in Nature. But Nature does not proceed only upon the competitive plan. She furnishes us with the beehive and anthill as types of coöperation, from which man can not only learn a lesson, but receive a warning; for the evils that attend the coöperative plan of the beehive are almost as great as those that attend the competitive or predatory system.[72] What man then has to do is not blindly to follow Nature either as respects her competitive system or her coöperative system; but to do in this direction what he has done in others--profit by what is good and orderly in Nature and suppress what is evil and disorderly in it. § 1. ANARCHY OF PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION The intelligent business man has been at work in suppressing the evils of the competitive system. He has found the waste and disorder attending unlimited competition so abominable that he has suppressed competition to the utmost possible by the organization of trusts. It has been pointed out that the disorder attending our production and distribution gives rise to anarchy in both these departments of industry. As long as every man is free to produce exactly what he chooses--what he thinks will benefit him, there is no rational relation between supply and demand. (_a_) _Tyranny of the Market_ This process is going on in every industry. Capital rushes away from business where there is no profit to business where there is profit. The result is that the capitalist generally discovers a demand for an article too late to profit by it, and does not discover that there is no demand for an article until he is ruined by the discovery. The boasted "fluidity of capital" causes it to pour from one industry to another in obedience to what is called "the market"; and of all the despotisms that the folly of man has subjected him to, none for stupidity and pitilessness approaches the market. So long as there was no large-enough combination of capital to acquire knowledge of the supply and demand that determines market price or to any extent control it, no man, however intelligent, could tell when prices were going to rise and when to fall. And although the older economists loved to dwell upon the fluidity of labor as well as upon the fluidity of capital, they failed to take account of the bankruptcy that attends the one or the appalling conditions that attend the other. For when the supply of labor is large and factories are running at low capacity; when men and women are seeking employment, and the demand for labor is small, the effect of this law is to reduce wages below the rate necessary to support life; the unemployed are then reduced to a choice between the almshouse and starvation. This evil consequence is a matter over which isolated employers have little or no control; for the very same cause that reduces wages reduces also the price of goods. It is because the demand for goods is small that the manufacturer has to run his factory at a reduced capacity; and the demand being small, the manufacturer cannot get a remunerative price for his goods. Now the thing that reduces prices is competition, and the thing that reduces wages is competition, and the main source of every financial, commercial, and industrial disaster is competition. Employer and employee are alike subjected to the levelling principle. The moment a particular manufacture is found to be profitable, and therefore able to pay a high rate of wages, new factories are started and wages reduced by the competition of workingmen. The flow to this industry, therefore, of both capital and labor, inevitably reduces not only wages by the direct competition between workingmen, but also the profit out of which high wages were originally paid. Employer, therefore, and employee are both slaves of the market; the employer cannot get more than the market price for his goods, and out of this he has to pay for his raw material, the cost of running the factory, and the wages of his men. He cannot reduce the price of raw material nor the cost of running the factory--rent, fuel, etc.; these too are determined by the market. The only thing he can reduce is wages: so he is driven to reduce wages or close his factory, for he cannot long run his factory at a loss. And so anarchy of production and anarchy of distribution lead inevitably, as all anarchy does, to despotism--the despotism of the market. (_b_) _Tyranny of the Trust_ Now trusts are an attempt of capital to escape from the tyranny of the market, to eliminate the waste of competition and bring order in the place of disorder by making supply proportionate to demand. The testimony of John D. Rockefeller before the Industrial Commission is illuminating on this subject. In answer to Question 9, he says that he "ascribes the success of the Standard Oil to its consistent policy to make the _volume of its business large_." To Question 10, he says he did this "by coöperation, or what is the same thing, combination." But the necessity of keeping the volume of the business large made it indispensable to extend the market. He says "Dependent solely upon local business, we should have failed years ago. We were forced to extend our market and to seek for export trade." "And so," he says, "the Standard Oil spared no expense in _forcing_ its products into the markets of the world." The despotism of the market extends over the whole world. It is impossible for any one nation to organize its industry, or for the industry of any one nation to organize itself, under a world-wide competitive system, without taking into consideration the conditions of the world market. The Standard Oil could not maintain prices in competition with foreign oil. It had to carry the industrial war into Europe and Asia, and did this by eliminating competition at home; putting an end to anarchy of distribution as well as to anarchy of production; by transforming the whole system through the building of pipe lines, the use of tank cars and tank steamers, through an enormous aggregation of capital, and the use of every ingenious improvement. The Standard Oil succeeded in doing this and "receiving in return from foreign lands nearly $50,000,000 per year." Mr. Rockefeller is an adroit witness, and carefully refrained from reference to the methods by which competition was crushed as an indispensable preliminary to what he calls the "enlargement of the business." Mr. H.O. Havemeyer, President of the Sugar Trust, was more frank. Here is his testimony on this subject in full: _Q._ (By Senator Mallory) "Did I understand you to say--perhaps I may have misunderstood you a while ago--that it was your policy to make as much profit out of the consumer as you possibly could?"--_A._ "Consistent with business methods." _Q._ "Consistent with business principles. In other words, your idea is that your organization, the American Sugar Refining Company, will, if it can, get the maximum profit out of its business from the consumer. Now, I also understood you to imply at least that it is the policy of the American Sugar Refining Company to crush out all competition if possible."--_A._ "But that is not so; there is no such testimony. I understand it has been put in that form by one of the gentlemen here, but it is not the fact. What I said was that it was the policy of the American Sugar Refining Company to maintain and protect its trade, _and if it resulted in crushing a competitor it is no concern of the American Company; if he gets in the press, that is his affair, not ours_." _Q._ "And if anyone interferes with the business, profits, or competition of the American Sugar Refining Company, it is its policy to prevent it if possible?"--_A._ "By lowering profits to defy it." _Q._ "And if it results in crushing him out?"--_A._ (Interrupting) "That is his affair." _Q._ "Not the affair of the American Sugar Refining Company?"--_A._ "No." _Q._ "Now, suppose in the natural course of events the American Sugar Refining Company should suppress--we will not use the words 'crush out'--all competition, all opposition. I understand from your theory--business principles--that you would then seek to get out of the public and consumer the largest amount of profit consistent with your idea of business principles?"--_A._ "Precisely." _Q._ "Then, if you had the power to charge or impose prices on the public, what would be your idea of the limit that the public could possibly stand?"--_A._ "I think it would stand a quarter of a cent to-day. I think we could do it for twenty cents a hundred. I think the country is really damaged by having a number of people in the business." _Q._ "That is not an answer to my question. My question is the limit. What restraint would you put upon yourselves? What would be your restraint?"--_A._ "I call that restraint business consideration." _Q._ "Would it not be the utmost limit that the consumer would bear?"--_A._ "Until we had competition we should be in that position, but whether or not we would exercise it, is quite another matter." The very effort of Mr. Havemeyer to disown the "policy of crushing out competition" followed immediately by his admission that a trust is a "press" built for that purpose, is indicative of the capitalist's mind on the subject: At one moment he naïvely admits what a moment before he emphatically denied. The trust, then, is the organization of an industry by one or a few men strong enough to suppress competition and bleed the consumer. The tyranny of the market has been suppressed only to substitute therefor the tyranny of the trust. And this new tyranny has for effect to enrich the trust magnate at the expense of the whole nation. The course of industrial events beginning with the creation of guilds to suppress the anarchy of the Middle Ages; the tyranny of the guilds; the revolt against the guild; its suppression; the substitution therefor of so-called freedom of industry, of contract, of trade; the disorder or anarchy that ensued; the despotism of the market; the gradual suppression of all three freedoms in order to escape from the despotism of the market; and this suppression only preparing the way for the tyranny of the trust, is not accidental. It is a cycle through which industry had to pass till mankind found its way of escaping from the whirlpool. We find the same cycle in the political world. The anarchy of the horde paving the way to the despotism of the tyrant; the despotism of the tyrant creating a revolt resulting in a new anarchy leading to another despotism as bad as the last, until staggering between anarchy and despotism, men slowly evolved a system of popular government. We shall see later that popular government can never remain popular under a system of industrial anarchy or industrial despotism, and that our industrial organization must adopt a system of popular control, if popular government is ever to become in fact as well as in name, popular. Suffice it to point out that our industrial development following a law of necessity has so far staggered like a drunken man from anarchy to despotism and from despotism to anarchy--and that we are not likely to attain order from despotism until we recognize that the competitive system, such as we now have, can never attain it; and that it can be attained only by a deliberate substitution of coöperation for competition _to the extent necessary_. (_c_) _Tyranny of the Union_ Let us now consider another part of the industrial field which seems destined to be the arena of the next great development--the field of labor. The consumer is not organized as yet; he has not waked up to the extent to which he is fleeced by the trust. But labor is organized, driven to organization by the terrible consequences of the freedom of contract[73] for which he clamored so loud in the Revolutionary period. A workingman alone, ignorant of the profits earned by the manufacturer, ignorant of the number of workingmen applying for work, himself hungry, and with a hungry family to support, is no match for an employer with sufficient capital at his disposal, a considerable knowledge of the labor market where he can find men to replace such as ask for a higher wage than he is willing to pay, and with practically no reason to fear hunger or even discomfort for himself or for those who are dear to him. Freedom of contract, therefore, meant for the unorganized workingman at the beginning of the nineteenth century, not freedom, but slavery. It will be later recorded how inevitably the tyranny of the market and the greed of capital combined to reduce workingmen to starvation wages and condemn women and children to degrading labor. One of two things had to happen: The whole laboring class had to be reduced to a condition of permanent slavery, or the laboring class had to combine to put an end to competition between worker and worker that left them at the mercy of the market. That men reduced to the physical condition created by the industrialism of a century ago should have had the intelligence, courage, and self-restraint to combine and act in concert until they were able to some extent to impose rates of wages upon the employers, seems to-day hardly less than miraculous, and ought to serve as a warning to capitalists that they can no longer dispute the coming political power of such workingmen, or remain indifferent to it, or even denounce it with _Outlook_ intemperateness. Mr. Eliot, President Emeritus of Harvard University, is outraged by what he regards as the tyranny of the trade union. Has he ever thought of the tyranny of the trust, or the tyranny of the market from which both inevitably spring? Has he ever understood that such a competitive system as ours can only put an end to anarchy by despotism; and can only shake off despotism at the risk of anarchy? But the subject of trusts and trade unions is too large to be treated as an incident in the discussion of the evils of the competitive system. I shall content myself, therefore, with summing up briefly the course of events through which industrial development has passed, for the light it throws upon the course through which it has still to pass: Anarchy of industrial conditions during the Middle Ages gave rise to the guild, which for a season substituted order for disorder. The order introduced by the guild involved regulation; regulation involves power; and wherever power is exercised free from efficient popular control, it must end in tyranny. The tyranny of the guild aroused a revolt and the cry of freedom of trade, freedom of industry, freedom of contract; these three freedoms under the competitive system reintroduced an era of anarchy--both in production and distribution--both for the employer and the employee, subject only to the despotism of the market. The employees undertook to put an end to competition between employees by organizing trade unions. The employers undertook to put an end to competition between employers by organizing trusts. So the anarchy which, under the competitive system, must result from freedom, has given rise to the tyranny of the market, and the effort to escape the tyranny of the market to two other tyrannies--of the trust and of the trade union. These two tyrannies stand to-day not only arrayed against one another, but in the bitterest conflict--in the courts, in strikes, lockouts, and ultimately on the field of politics. One thing stands out in singular relief from the foregoing sketch, viz., that it is freedom--of industry, of contract, and of trade--the battle cry both of the bourgeois employer and the proletarian employee--that has led to these two tyrannies. At the present time I believe that the confusion in the ranks not only of the employer, but of the employee, as regards this so-called freedom--a freedom that both are clamoring for but neither have ever attained--is responsible for the failure of both to understand one another. And the subject of freedom or liberty will therefore be discussed in a chapter to itself. FOOTNOTES: [72] "Government," Vol. I, p. 276. [73] Book II, Chapter IV. CHAPTER IV PROPERTY AND LIBERTY The savage in a savage country, free from all constraint of law, custom, or government, must, I suppose, be admitted to enjoy the greatest freedom conceivable. He is free to hunt what animals he chooses; to pick the fruits of the earth; to gather the shells by the seashore. He is free also to till any part of the land if he knows how to do it; to sow and harvest it. He is also free to rob his fellow men; to enslave them; to kill them and, if his tastes so incline, to eat them. But such a savage, while enjoying the greatest freedom conceivable, is also exposed to the greatest risk conceivable; for example, he is exposed to the risk of having the animals he hunts taken from him by one stronger than he; if he tills the ground and reaps the harvest, he is liable to have that harvest taken from him; and though he is free to rob, enslave, kill, and eat his fellow men, his fellow men are equally free to rob, enslave, kill, and eat him. The same thing, of course, is true of his domestic relations. He may capture any female he likes and compel her to serve as his wife; but he is liable at any time to have his wife taken from him. As regards his physical and domestic needs, therefore, while he enjoys the greatest freedom possible, he is exposed to the greatest risk also. § 1. ORIGIN OF PROPERTY It may be said for this order of things, if things can be said to have order where there is no order, that the strong men would prefer this system to one under which they would be limited as to the satisfaction of appetite, passion, and caprice. But the strongest men are liable to be subdued by a sufficient number of weaker men, as Polyphemus was subdued by Ulysses and his crew. So the strong men in the community as well as the weak, early discovered the importance of agreeing to respect each one the rights of the other in the things which through their labor they had acquired. Long, then, before there was any system of written law, our savage ancestors recognized the right of men in the product of their toil; and this recognition, whether we find it in the Ten Commandments of the Jews, or the Twelve Tables of the Romans, or in the customs of more savage races, is nothing more nor less than the institution of property. Although this institution of property involves an abridgment of freedom--for under the property system nobody is free to rob another--nevertheless it is an abridgment of freedom by which everyone except the lazy profits; and it tends to put an end to laziness, because, under this institution of property, only those who work can eat. It is because the institution of property is an abridgment of freedom that property and liberty are treated together in this chapter. It is impossible correctly to understand the one without the other. It will be seen later that as civilization develops and men are crowded together in a small space, it becomes indispensable to the convenience of all that freedom should be further abridged; and that so long as the freedom of the individual is abridged, not only for the benefit of his neighbors, but of himself, the abridgment is a good thing and not a bad. Whereas, when we find freedom being abridged to the disadvantage of the many and the advantage of a few, then it will turn out that this abridgment is a bad thing and not a good. One feature about the abridgment of freedom it is impossible to emphasize too much: In nations in which liberty is supposed most to prevail, the abridgment of freedom is for the most part confined to matters which involve little or no sacrifice. For example, the average citizen does not find himself in the slightest degree hampered by the criminal code; he does not want to kill or rob; it is perfectly clear to him that the sacrifice he makes of his freedom to kill or rob is of no importance by the side of the enormous security he receives as regards those people who might want to kill or rob him. Socialism has been much injured by certain fanciful writers who have suggested various abridgments of human freedom that would be altogether abominable; as for example, the undue limitation of a man's liberty to choose his wife, and to choose his occupation. And opponents of Socialism use these totally discredited suggestions as weapons with which to fight Socialism; though in fact, modern Socialism repudiates them altogether. The institution of property, in abridging freedom, creates duties; and in furnishing security, establishes rights. Thus we say that men have a right of property in the product of their toil; a right to enjoy the cabins they have built; a right to harvest the grain they have sown. And the same thing can be said of rights and duties as has been said about the abridgment of freedom. So long as no man exacts rights of property in anything more than the result of his labor, so long is he only asking what is due to him. And the institution of property in the product of men's toil is not only justified by convenience, but is also ordered by religion. It is only economic expression of the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you;" or "I shall respect your right to the cabin you have built, as I expect you to respect my right to the cabin I have built." Moreover, even though this were not the rule imposed by religion, it is a rule imposed by the principle of the survival of the fit. In the conflict between races, those races in which rights of property were respected were bound to prevail over those in which these rights were not respected, because respect for rights of property such as these is the only condition upon which a race can become prosperous, accumulate wealth, strength, and all the resources that enable one race successfully to fight with another. And here we see the first reconciliation between religion and science. Both teach exactly the same thing; that is to say, the Golden Rule. In one sense the institution of property abridges freedom. In another sense it enlarges it. For if a man has not only to kill his game, but to protect it from others, he is a slave to the game he has killed until he has eaten it. Whereas if the community in which he lives has adopted the institution of property and respects it, he can leave his game unprotected, and has leisure therefore for other occupation. It will be seen ultimately that if the institution of property were confined to the product of men's toil, the increase of knowledge of the last few centuries would permit of another enormous enlargement of freedom, for it would permit of the organization of labor in such a manner that the work of securing the necessaries of life that now costs the savage all his time, and the workingman of to-day between eight and twelve hours of his day, need really only cost him a comparatively insignificant fraction of it. But the demonstration of this must be left until later.[74] We have seen, therefore, that so long as property is confined to the product of men's toil, all is well. The freedom of a savage life which exposed every man to being robbed by every other man is what we call license. The freedom, on the contrary, under the institution of property which secures to men the product of their toil, we may call liberty--liberty being freedom secured by law. "Legum omnes servi sumus, ut liberi esse possumus."[75] However simple the idea of property of men in the product of their toil may seem to be, it has in practical life never yet been realized. There are many reasons for this. If a community were to attempt to-day to divide its available land into tracts of just the size each one could himself cultivate, results would very soon demonstrate that such a division is a physical impossibility. Land varies much in fertility, and the amount of labor necessary to cultivate one acre of land is very different from that necessary to cultivate another acre of land. Men differ in their ability to cultivate. One lacks strength; another intelligence--indeed, some lack intelligence so much that they can never successfully cultivate their own land, and these naturally become the employees of those who can. Again, cultivation, of land leaves nothing for a man to do for a part of the year, and gives him a great deal more than one man can do during the rest of the year. It is impossible, therefore, to divide up the available land of any community into parts which will mathematically or even approximately correspond with the amount of work that each man can do during the year. Then, too, the men who render great services to the community seem entitled to larger buildings, better accommodations, more ease and comfort, more personal service than those who render no service beyond simply the day's work upon land. We find ourselves confronted immediately by the enormous difficulty that results from the inequality of land and the inequality of men, in any attempt to frame a society which will even approximately assure to every man the product of his own labor. These are inherent difficulties which no statesman can disregard. These difficulties have been enormously increased by the selfishness, the intelligence, the violence, and the craft of men, which have been used to secure to some such large tracts of land that the majority were left without land altogether. And this system tends to be perpetuated by the natural and laudable desire of every man to leave his children after his death as well off as himself, thus creating laws regarding testacy and intestacy of a character to secure this. But the satisfaction of this laudable paternal instinct has had a bad effect upon the community; for, whereas we are all disposed to allow to every man the property which he has accumulated himself, even though this accumulation confers upon him larger wealth than his services warrant, we cannot but feel it improper that his issue, who may be altogether worthless persons, should be enabled through the success of their skilful ancestor to lead lives of idleness and even profligacy from generation to generation. We are all, for example, outraged to think that because John Jacob Astor over a century ago had the forethought to invest his earnings in New York real estate, his descendant, William Waldorf Astor, should to-day, though he has abjured his American nationality and thereby escapes the payment of personal taxes, nevertheless receive millions annually arising from property which has increased in value through the labor of Americans and not through any labor of his own. Thus we find that owing to inherent physical difficulties such as the inequality of land and the inequality of men, and owing to moral difficulties some of which are reprehensible, as for example, avarice and violence; and others commendable, such as intelligence and love of offspring, notions of property have become altogether different in fact from what they are in theory. Rights of property are not confined to the product of men's toil, but cover all those things which a family has been enabled under the law to accumulate whether by good deeds or by bad. This has given rise to two well-defined classes--one very small which owns land, and the other very large which owns no land. And the fact that the small class owns land and the large one does not own it, makes the latter dependent upon the former. Much the same thing has taken place as regards personal property. Relatively few men have secured control of the great industries of the country, and are thereby in a position to dictate who shall work at these industries, and as to the wages and conditions under which the work shall be done. Economically, therefore, the world can be divided into two sets of people--a small set that owns the land and controls our industries; and an enormous number of people dependent upon these; that is to say, the vast majority can only work at these industries upon the conditions imposed by a relatively insignificant minority. The institution of property, therefore, originally destined to assure to men the product of their toil, has altogether changed in character, so that it--on the contrary--puts a very few men in a position where they can exploit the labor of the rest. A study of property and liberty cannot be separated from a study of government, because the institution of property involves the idea of law, and of a government to enforce the law. So long as no man seeks to secure more property than the product of his labor, the amount of government necessary to enforce the law need be but small--only just enough to compel the lazy to work and to prevent them from stealing. But the moment the institution of property is extended to cover more than the product of labor, government has to be harsh; for as this perverted notion of property creates a small propertied class and a large proletariat, it is obvious that the government has to be bolstered by a powerful organization of law courts, prisons, army, and police in order to enable a very small minority to coerce a very large majority. In fact, in our ancient civilizations the propertied class consisted of either priests, soldiers, or both. In the case of the priests, it was the domination of superior intelligence over unintelligent superstition; and in the case of the soldiers, it was the domination of organized force. Now, if the small propertied class which controlled the government had governed well, or indeed had governed without grossly outraging the governed, the whole development of man might have been different. But it is not in human nature for a few men possessed of autocratic power to use that power wisely. There are exceptional periods in the history of the world when autocratic power has been used wisely; but in the long run the opportunities furnished by unlimited power to the evil propensities in men are certain to result in gross injustice. Such is the testimony of history. Now if the few in the exploitation of the many had shown as much temperance and wisdom as our ranch-men show to their cattle--and this God knows is not much--the few might have enjoyed their liberty at the expense of the many for an indefinite period. But they have shown so little of either that in the State of New York our official Labor Bulletin publishes that there have been for two years past about 200,000 breadwinners unable to earn the means of subsistence, and this means--on the generally admitted average of four dependents (aged, infirm, women, and children) to every breadwinner--a million human beings on the verge of starvation for no fault of their own. And as the population of New York is about one-tenth that of the whole country, it would seem as though in this great, wealthy, prosperous nation of ours freedom spells for some ten millions of people freedom only to starve. And as these ten millions are not cattle, but men and women with hearts and brains, armed with a vote and carefully--nay, compulsorily--educated to use this vote effectually, it does seem a little foolish to imagine that they will continue indefinitely to tolerate these conditions, if they can be changed. So not only by the unfortunate majority, but also by some of the fortunate minority who have bowels of compassion, the question is being asked with insistence whether these conditions may not be changed and if so how. Conspicuous among the evils that have resulted from misgovernment by the propertied class, are personal slavery and political despotism. And the history of the world may be summed up as the effort of the majority to escape from these two evils. One reason why men have confused ideas about liberty is that they have not carefully distinguished the various phases through which this conflict has passed; for there are three kinds of liberty, all of which are singularly interwoven one with the other and yet each of which is distinctly different from the other. There is personal liberty; that is, freedom from physical restraint. In all civilized countries, personal liberty has been, to a large measure, secured. Slavery, except in some parts of Africa, is practically unknown, and every individual is protected from arbitrary arrest west of Russia. Next comes political liberty, which in so-called popular governments we are supposed to enjoy; that is, we are supposed to be no longer subject to autocratic government; we are supposed each to have a voice in determining who are to govern us and what are to be the laws under which we are to be governed. It will be seen later on that this so-called political liberty is, in fact, enjoyed only by a very few people in any country of the world, though universal franchise seems to assure it to all. Third and last, there is economic liberty; that is, freedom to earn one's living. We have seen that the lawless savage enjoys economic freedom. There is no restraint whatever upon him in procuring those things which he needs--whether food, clothing, or shelter. We have also seen that his position was immensely improved by the institution of property in the product of toil, for under this definition of property he practically enjoyed security and retained all the freedom previously enjoyed except the freedom to rob; and he enjoyed thereby a larger freedom because he did not have to keep perpetual watch over the things he had hunted or produced. But the moment the land was appropriated by a few men so that the majority could not work on the land except as the wage servants of the propertied class, then economic liberty came to an end; for no man can be considered economically free if he depends upon some other man not only for the means of subsistence, but for opportunity to work in order to earn the means of subsistence. This economic dependence, due to the appropriation of land by a class, results in a loss of all the other liberties; for the franchise is of no value to a man every waking hour of whose day has to be spent in earning a wage just sufficient to support himself and his family. A vote can only be effectually exercised if directed by a political education sufficient to understand the political problems of the day, and if combined with other votes in a political organization sufficient to carry out the collective will of the people. The facility with which the Republican and Democratic parties have divided the vote of the proletariat is mainly due, I think, to the fact that the proletariat is too exhausted by overwork to undertake political organization, though it is beginning now to understand the necessity for doing so. Last, but not least, a man cannot be regarded as enjoying liberty to any appreciable extent if his actions during all the waking hours of the day are determined, not by his own free will, but by the factory bell. And although it may be necessary to secure personal and political liberty before economic liberty can be attained, it is certain that until economic liberty be attained, neither political nor personal liberty is effectually enjoyed. This subject will be treated at greater length when we study the Political Aspect of Socialism.[76] The point which it is essential to keep clearly in mind now is that there are two notions of property, one of which is beneficent, and furnishes a maximum of security and a maximum of liberty; the other of which is unjust, and furnishes neither security nor liberty except to the privileged few. The first is the theory that men are entitled to property in the product of their labor; the second is that men are entitled to property in things which are not the product of their labor. The most conspicuous of these things is land, which of course is not the product of any man's labor, but the gift of Nature or God to the whole race, or in America to Americans--certainly not to the Englishman, W.W. Astor, for instance. And the appropriation by a few men of all the tools of production--the factories, water power, steam power, electric power, and of the great natural monopolies such as railroads, telegraphs, telephones, tramways, gas, etc., has had just as bad a result as the appropriation of land, for it has brought about exactly the same condition--the exploitation of the many by the few. This is the point which Henry George has overlooked, and it is a failure to appreciate this fact that principally occasions the differences between Single Taxers and Socialists. Private ownership of land by a few was doubtless in its origin an act of spoliation; whereas private ownership of factories and natural monopolies was the result of the application of intelligence and labor to the organization of industry. The latter, therefore, seems relatively justifiable, whereas the first is not justifiable. But if the effect of the latter is as bad for the community as that of the former, and if there can be no escape from this system of exploitation except by readjusting property in factories as well as property in land, does it not seem evident that both must equally be faced? At this point it may be well to point out that sound Socialism does not endorse such exaggeration as Proudhon's "La propriété est le vol"--"Property is theft," though there may be Socialists who do. On the contrary, the fundamental basis of sound Socialism is the distinction between property in the product of men's own toil and property in the product of other men's toil. The one is altogether just and beneficial; the other is unjust and detrimental. Nor does Socialism fail to take into account the undoubted fact that much land and many factories represent to-day an investment of accumulated wages; and that to expropriate such land without compensation would be as unjust an act of spoliation as the seizure of land by violence or the enclosing of commons by craft. On the contrary, Socialism recognizes that the problem of how to readjust property so as to secure to men the full product of their toil is of great difficulty and can only be solved by the application thereto of the highest deliberation and wisdom. It appeals, therefore, to those who have knowledge and those who have experience, those who have studied and those who have suffered, convinced that it is by uniting knowledge and experience and not by disuniting them that the solution can best be attained. We are now in a position to complete what has been said on the subject of liberty. Liberty is defined in all our dictionaries as "freedom from restraint." But it may be truly said that there is no such thing as universal freedom from restraint. There may be indeed freedom from restraint of man by man. But we remain under restraint to Nature owing to our natural needs. That is to say, we are not free to spend our time as we wish, for our natural needs compel us to devote our time to securing shelter, clothing, and food. So also there may be partial freedom from the restraint of Nature; but only upon the condition of restraint of man by man, a restraint which under existing conditions bestows in ordinate and generally unhappy leisure upon a few at the expense of all the rest. We have therefore to recognize two kinds of restraint: Natural restraint due to our needs, which makes us slaves to things--shelter, clothing, and food; Human restraint, exercised by one man over another, that puts some men under restraint to others. Again, the kind of freedom from restraint that exists in the savage state is incompatible with two very precious things--security and leisure; and there are two kinds of insecurity, corresponding to the two kinds of restraint just mentioned: I. Insecurity that arises from our own needs--food, shelter, clothing, etc. II. Insecurity that arises from the needs of others--theft, slavery, despotism, etc. The first--insecurity arising from our own needs--tends to make us slaves to things. The second--insecurity arising from the needs of others--tends to make us slaves to people. In the savage state or state of Nature, this insecurity is at a maximum. A savage is a slave to his needs to such an extent that in any climate save the tropics, he has to devote all his time to satisfying them. And he is liable to be robbed or reduced to slavery by men stronger than he. It was to rescue himself from this insecurity that man created the institution of property--of priceless value, it assured to men the product of their labor and did not encourage one man to exploit the labor of another. And for the same purpose man instituted law; that is, the power for enforcing these rules--both also of priceless value so long as they furnished security and the leisure that results therefrom. It was inevitable, however, that, owing to inequalities of men and of things, the very system instituted to give security, liberty, and leisure to all, should end by giving security, liberty, and leisure to a few at the expense of the many. Property, therefore, came to include two very different principles: I. That men should securely enjoy the product of their toil. This is believed by Socialists to be the desirable principle of property. II. That a few should without any toil enjoy the products of the toil of the majority. This is the principle of property that actually prevails to-day. Now the bourgeois claims that the first or desirable principle of property is unattainable and that the second is the only practical system. This is the whole question we have to discuss. I think that if we carefully reduce to its simplest terms the effort of civilization to make men happy it will be found to be this: It seeks to rescue men from the two restraints under which they labor in a savage state: Natural restraint due to our needs, i.e., shelter, clothing, food, etc. Human restraint due to the needs of others, i.e., theft, violence, slavery, despotism, etc. In other words, it seeks to secure for men _Liberty_, which, properly understood, is emancipation from these two restraints. And the blessings that ought to follow such liberty as this are two-fold: Security and leisure. So that liberty, security, and leisure may be described as the Trinity of human happiness; and all the more justly because just as it is from the First Person of the Holy Trinity that the other Two emerge, so it is from liberty that we get security and leisure. The real issue between the bourgeois and the Socialist is then reduced to the following: Can security, liberty, and leisure be enjoyed only by a few at the expense of the many? Or can they be enjoyed equally by all? I am glad in this connection to use the word "enjoyed," because this word assumes--as indeed the whole bourgeois philosophy assumes--that the few not only have security, liberty, and leisure, but that they "enjoy" them; whereas I think it can be demonstrated that only the worthless few have leisure and that they do not enjoy it, and that neither the industrious nor the worthless have liberty or security at all. In other words, the few in grasping at these things at the expense of the many _enjoy_ none of them because of the hard fact of human solidarity, which will drive them at last to reconsider all these things. But this belongs to the subject of Solidarity and cannot therefore be elaborated in this chapter. The essential thing to be kept in mind is that the only liberty worth having is one that will rescue us from _both_ kinds of restraints--natural and human; that it is quite useless to throw off human restraint and fall back into the condition of natural slavery which seems to be the policy of the anarchist; nor is it of any advantage to escape from natural slavery only to become a prey to human despotism or exploitation, according to the creed of the bourgeois. Socialism is the _juste milieu_ between Let-alone-ism on the one hand and Anarchism on the other. Liberty, to be worth having, must secure the greatest emancipation from _both_ restraints possible. If we apply this notion of liberty to existing conditions, I think we shall come to the following conclusion: From natural slavery created by men's needs it was impossible for the race to escape, except by the system which actually prevails--of making the unwealthy majority work for the wealthy few. This results in pauperism, prostitution, and crime. Slavery to Nature in a natural or savage state practically condemns savages to devote their whole time to procuring the necessaries of life, and to protecting these things, once procured, from the spoliation of their neighbors. A great stride in the progress of humanity was made when savages began each to respect the product, of the other's toil. And if this system could have prevailed, our late advance in science and our consequent, control of Nature would secure us two priceless advantages: one, security from spoilation; the other, an organization of labor that would reduce the hours every man would have to spend in procuring the necessaries and comforts of life to a very small fraction of the working day. The results in leisure that would accrue under a coöperative system will be explained later;[77] but at this point it seems only necessary to indicate that if a man need devote only three or four hours during the working days of his life to satisfying his needs, he would have most of his waking hours to devote to social service, literature, art, music, or amusement, to an understanding of his political and economic problems, and to the political organization necessary to secure popular control over government for the first time in the history of the world. Every reform movement in New York has failed because men who wanted reform did not have the leisure to give to it; and the reform movement was therefore left to those who devoted their whole time to it in order to share the plunder on the day of victory. In other words, every reform movement if successful resulted in a political machine animated by selfish motives and therefore as bad as other political machines similarly animated. When every man has time to protect his business interests in the government; when these business interests are not hostile to the general welfare, but coincide with it; and when politics is the business of every man instead of being as now the business of a few professional politicians, then for the first time this world will see a veritable democracy. Liberty, security, and leisure seem to me altogether the most important things that we can attain through a correct understanding of property. But owing to false notions of property created by the few who have acquired all the property at the expense of their fellow-citizens, there have arisen artificial conditions which have created what may be called artificial slavery; that is to say, personal dependence, political dependence, and economic dependence. Of these three the last is the most important because, in consequence of it, neither personal nor political independence is effectually enjoyed. That these three forms of dependence are unnecessary and are due to false notions of property which can be slowly eradicated, is the belief of the Socialist. It is also his belief that the very changes that will put an end to these three forms of dependence will also set up true notions of property instead of false, and thereby secure the priceless benefits of liberty and security on the one hand and of leisure on the other. In other words, Socialism proposes not to abolish property, but to reinstate it; to relieve the rich from the insecurity and hatred to which they are now exposed; to rescue them from slavery to wealth and _ennui_; to confer upon them the immense consolation of knowing that what they enjoy is at the expense of no one; that it commits none to pauperism, prostitution, or crime; that it is earned by social service, the only service worth doing; that the consideration they enjoy is due to their own merits and not to inherited or ill-gotten wealth; and to accomplish this by securing to all men the product of their toil; by restoring property to the consideration to which it is entitled; by furnishing to every man the maximum of liberty, security, and leisure. FOOTNOTES: [74] Book III, Chapter II. [75] Cicero, "Pro Cluentio," sec. 53. [76] Book III, Chapter III. [77] Book III, Chapter V. Economic Aspect. CHAPTER V THE RESULTS OF PROPERTY Not only did Proudhon make a great mistake in condemning all property, but some Socialists still make the same mistake; for property even in its worst form has rendered humanity an indispensable service. It is the cocoon which the human chrysalis has instinctively wound around itself for protection while it is changing from a lower to a higher stage of development. For example, property even in its worst form--that is, property that puts one man in a position to exploit the labor of another man--has encouraged the intelligent and industrious to accumulate wealth; and the accumulation of wealth makes economic development possible; for if a man produced no more than was necessary for the support of himself and his family, there would be no surplus out of which to support those engaged in the development of national resources--for example, the building of roads, the building of railroads, the building of factories, the exploitation of mines. Every progressing nation has got to have two totally different resources--the resources necessary to support that part of the population which is engaged in production and distribution--that is, in keeping the community alive; and the resources accumulated for supporting those who are developing the country; for example, the building of roads, etc. Obviously, therefore, it is indispensable that more be produced every year than is necessary for the support of those engaged in production and distribution; enough must be produced to support also those engaged in building roads, factories, etc. Indeed little can be done in developing a country until a certain amount of commodities has been accumulated for this purpose. Now the accumulated resources applicable to development form what is called capital--which, in the hands of a few persons, permits of those few exploiting the rest; but in the hands of the producers themselves, will permit of a better development without the evil results of exploitation. It is alleged by opponents of Socialists that Socialism proposes to abolish wealth or capital. It is inconceivable that men supposed to be educated--such as Roosevelt, Taft, Bryan--should be so ignorant in a matter concerning which it is their peculiar duty to be informed. No cabinet minister in England, Germany, or France would be capable of such a mistake.[78] In Europe statesmen take the trouble to study Socialism and thus avoid making themselves ridiculous by such a blunder as believing that Socialism proposes to destroy or abolish wealth. Far from wishing to abolish wealth, Socialism seeks to enhance it--to consecrate it--to put it beyond the reach of private avarice or public discontent. How they expect to do this will be explained later. Meanwhile, it is important to keep clearly in mind the fact that it is not wealth that Socialists denounce, but the present distribution of wealth. This explains why well-informed Socialists are the first to recognize the beneficent rôle which the institution of private property even in its worst form has played in stimulating accumulation. Here again, whether property was instituted for the deliberate purpose of stimulating accumulation or not, we see once more evolution favoring the survival of those nations who did accumulate at the expense of those who did not. In a conflict between two tribes, it was the tribe provided with the larger store of good weapons and food that must eventually prevail over the tribe less well provided with these. And so evolution has pushed men in the direction of accumulating wealth because it destroyed those tribes which did not accumulate it and allowed the survival only of those who did. This accumulation of wealth involved two qualities of predominating importance in human development, the exercise of forethought and self-restraint. If we compare man with the lower animals we find that there are no qualities in which he differs more from them than in these two. Man is capable of deliberate self-restraint. And the nations most capable of forethought and self-restraint have prevailed over nations which have been less capable of these. Here again, it may be incidentally pointed out that in no respect was the institution of property more important to human development than in the recognition of the kind of property which a man originally had in his wife and children; and the more the domestic relations created by this property required exercise of self-restraint, the more the nations having these institutions prevailed over those which did not have them. The systematic survival first of patriarchal tribes over metronymic tribes,[79] and secondly, of monogamous tribes over polygamous tribes, is an unanswerable argument in favor of marriage, of which no well-informed Socialist fails to take account--Mr. Roosevelt to the contrary notwithstanding. The Socialist party is to be judged by its platform and not by extracts of isolated writers who have no more right to bind the whole Socialist party on the subject of marriage, than an isolated Republican or Democrat would have to bind the Republican or Democratic parties respectively. Of course, property of a man in his wife long ago ceased to exist in civilized countries; it has played its part in its time, but disappeared before a more humane, intelligent, and just understanding of the relations of man to his wife. In the same way, the right of property of one man in the labor of another will also yield to a more intelligent and wise understanding of the right of property. The institution of property performs one other function in society of inestimable importance. Early civilizations such as those of Greece and Rome, dominated by families who claimed descent from the gods, created an aristocracy of birth which, because it was exclusive, tended inevitably to become tyrannical. As, however, rights of property became more and more recognized, the aristocracy found itself confronted by a population that had accumulated wealth indispensable to the maintenance of the state. Men too who had accumulated this wealth had done so by the use of their brains, industry, forethought, and self-restraint. They constituted a group with which the aristocracy of birth had first to parley and to which it had eventually to succumb. It is true that this group of the aristocracy of wealth, which succeeded the aristocracy of birth, in one sense only replaced one set of rulers by another. But the transfer of power to the aristocracy of wealth was almost always effected through the support of the people, and was almost always attended by some concession of political control to the people. So that on the whole, the tendency has been for every transfer of political power from the aristocracy of birth to the aristocracy of wealth to include some element of popular representation until slowly through the gradual substitution of the bourgeoisie for the king, noble, and priest, the people has secured the priceless boon of the franchise which it has not yet learned to use.[80] § 1. THE GUILD Now that we have given full credit to the rôle which property has played in the world, let us consider some of its results. In the first place, let us eliminate a prevailing error. We frequently read in Socialist books that the competitive system is the necessary result of the institution of private property. This is not altogether true: Obviously, the institution of property has connected with it the notion that as long as men are protected in the product of their labor, every man is bound to labor enough to support himself; and if he does not so labor, he must suffer the natural consequences. Under this system, every man is at liberty to labor in whatever occupation he chooses, to produce as much as he can, and to get the best price he can for what he produces. No attempt will be made here to describe the abominable consequences of this system prior to the Middle Ages. The history of the industrial struggle prior to the Middle Ages is still obscure and complicated. But the Crusades in the eleventh century withdrew from Europe the most turbulent of its oppressing nobility and the most servile of its religious subjects. The result was to give to the less servile craftsmen an opportunity to organize themselves against the noble and the priest in defence of their common craft. So we find all over Europe an immense development of guilds or corporations organized by the respective crafts or industries, primarily for self-defence, and secondarily, for the organization and regulation of labor therein. The story of these guilds has been too often written to make it necessary to repeat it here.[81] I shall content myself therefore with pointing out that these guilds did for a season exercise an extraordinarily beneficial effect, not only on industry, but on government. The guilds were composed not only of employers, but also employees, and thus stand out in marked contrast to trade unions. In many respects, however, they were similar to trade unions. Thus they had benefit funds in case of sickness and death; and they were animated by a sense of solidarity similar to that which animates the trade unions. But the fact that the guild included employer as well as employee gave it also different and important functions. Every guild at the outset was inspired by a sense of self-respect as well as of solidarity. It was a matter of pride with them that the guild should furnish no goods not up to standard. The guild therefore early established elaborate rules fixing standards and prices so that no man could charge a high price for a low standard of goods, nor could he compete with others in the same guild by offering a high standard of goods for a lower price than that determined by the guild. The guild protected the public from poor workmanship and the worker from competition. Moreover, competition was still further eliminated by the fact that no man could engage in any craft or trade unless he belonged to the guild organized to defend and protect the trade; and as the guild became a part of the municipal government and indeed at certain periods controlled the municipal government altogether, the guild was in a position to enforce this rule. There are many features in the guild system which would be usefully borrowed in a coöperative commonwealth. But the guild system broke down because every guild was concerned with its own interests irrespective of the interests of the whole community. Every guild therefore became a class corporation which sought to use the guild for purely selfish purposes. Entrance to the guild was confined to members of the families of those controlling the guild; and no provision was made for the thousands and hundreds of thousands who, because they could not get admission to a guild and could find no work to do upon the land, were left to wander as vagrants through the streets and highways with no alternative save to steal or starve. In other words, the vagrant of the Middle Ages included the unemployed of to-day. Again, those who controlled the guild sought by limiting the number of its members to create a privileged society from which they could derive wealth without labor. Thus the whole business of killing and selling meat was at one time in Paris confined to twenty persons. These persons did not themselves engage in the business, but they sublet their respective monopolies to others, and thus constituted an idle aristocracy. The abuses which attended the guild system became so intolerable that in 1776, the very year when we in America were setting forth our political rights in the Declaration of Independence, King Louis XVI proclaimed the economic rights of the workingmen in France in one of the most extraordinary documents to be found in history.[82] If we could get this Republic of America to promulgate and to put into operation the principles set forth in this decree of an absolute king in 1776, we should secure all that the Socialist party of to-day demands; that is to say, the right secured by law to men, not only to work, but to enjoy the full product of their work. But civilization had not yet advanced far enough to understand the full import of this decree, and the guilds were too powerful at that time to permit of its execution. The Parlement de Paris flatly refused to register the edict. The king tried to execute the edict notwithstanding the refusal by the Paris Parlement; but the attempt created such disorder that in the same year the edict was abrogated. No attempt was made to execute this decree in the provinces whatever. Meanwhile, however, two forces were at work that were destined to break up the tyranny of the guilds. One was the discovery of steam, which put an end to home industry and subjected workmen to the conditions imposed by the owner of the factory. The other was the growing upheaval of the Tiers Etat, or popular branch of the government, which resulted in the French Revolution. The French Revolution has been a good deal too much confined by historians to the political upheaval of the people against the noble, the priest, and the king. Attention has not been sufficiently attracted to the fact that it was at the same time a revolt against the economic tyranny of the corporation or the guild. The cry of liberty which ushered in the French Revolution was not confined to political liberty. It was extended to liberty of industry--liberty of trade--liberty of contract. In other words, what Rousseau did for political emancipation with his theory of social contract, de Quesnay did for economic emancipation with his doctrine of _laissez faire_, a doctrine which prepared the way for the political economy of Adam Smith and that of the Manchester School. The essential principle preached by de Quesnay and later by Adam Smith and Herbert Spencer, is that every man must in his efforts to support himself and accumulate wealth be "let alone!" It is of the utmost interest that this policy of _laissez faire_ was inaugurated under the cry of liberty and is still supported on the ground of liberty. When we see the evil consequences of this kind of liberty we shall feel like crying with Madame Roland when she saw the guillotine doing its grim work on the Place de la Grêve: "O liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!" And here we shall appreciate the importance of having clear ideas as to what liberty is and of therefore being able to distinguish false notions of liberty from true. If leaving to every man absolute liberty as to what he is to produce, how he is to produce, and what he shall charge for it, would result in the most orderly and therefore economical system of production and distribution; if it were to secure to every man work in the first place, and the product of his work in the second place, then it would be justified. But if it produces none of these things, but on the contrary, produces the greatest conceivable disorder and therefore greatest possible waste; if it not only fails to assure to men the product of their work, but even fails to give as many as one-third of those engaged in industry any chance of working at all, as at present, so that hundreds of thousands and even millions are at this time of writing not only without work, but actually on the verge of starvation--and if this system not only causes injustice and misery to all these millions, but does not even make the few who profit by it happy--if the tendency is also to make them immoral--if instead of promoting liberty, it--on the contrary--makes slaves of all, not only of employees but also of employers, so that neither is free to be generous or just to the other and both are skirting ruin--the employer in the shape of bankruptcy, and the employee in the shape of unemployment; and last but not least, if this system is stupid--of all the stupid systems conceivable the most stupid--and I have been able to call as witnesses to this assertion the admittedly ablest business men now living in America, what shall we shrewd, practical Americans have to say in defence of it? But we have still two important results of the competitive system to consider--the trade union and the trust; not only for the evils that attend them, but for the inevitable conflict to which they give rise. The issue of this conflict is the real political issue of the day. All the political parties save only one are seeking to ignore it; but they cannot. It will end by either reforming or destroying them. To this question too much attention cannot be given, for upon it depends the survival of civilization itself. § 2. TRADE UNIONS The attempt has already been made to show that the organization of trade unions and trusts was not due to accident, but was the necessary and inevitable consequence of the freedom of contract, freedom of industry, and freedom of trade inaugurated by the French Revolution. These three so-called freedoms are a sentimental way of describing the competitive system, and as a matter of fact, not only make real freedom impossible, but pave the way for despotism--the despotism of the market in the first place and the despotism of the trade union and trust, to which the despotism of the market inevitably leads. The illusion contained in the words "freedom of contract" is well demonstrated in the history of the trade union, for if the employee is to be free to make such contracts as he chooses, he is not only free as regards the contracts he chooses to make with his employer, but also as regards the contracts he chooses to make with his fellow employee. And amongst the contracts that he is free to make with his fellow employee is the contract not to work for his employer except under certain agreed conditions. In other words, the trade union is simply an expression of freedom of contract between employee and employee. But to what does this freedom of contract between employee and employee lead? It leads to a suppression of the freedom of contract, for it is an agreement not to work with the employee except under conditions imposed by the trade union. Freedom of contract, therefore, so far as the employee is concerned, under the competitive system compels employees to abandon freedom of contract. This may seem paradoxical until we understand the real significance of it. Man stands between two alternatives--the unlimited freedom and insecurity of savagery and the limited freedom and security of civilization. This has been developed in the chapter on Property and Liberty and receives interesting confirmation in the history of trade unions, which has been too often and too well told to make it necessary to repeat it here. Suffice it to point out that all historians of the trade union movement record the fact that at the very time when employers were shouting for freedom of contract they passed laws denying freedom of contract to workingmen.[83] But the very effort of the employers to prevent employees from combining with one another reduced wages to so low a level and brought about so wicked an exploitation of women and children and such unsanitary conditions of the whole working population, that a parliament of employers was as a matter of national defence compelled to restore to workingmen the right to agree to abandon freedom of contract. It may appear to the unsophisticated that for a workingman to endeavor to escape from the tyranny of the employer by subjecting himself to the tyranny of the trade union is but a jump from the frying-pan into the fire. But such a conclusion would display woeful ignorance as to the whole trend of human development; that is to say, from involuntary subjection to a power over which we have no control, to voluntary subjection to a power over which we have control. This is the history of the development of all popular government. Reactionaries are disposed to dwell on what they call the tyranny of the majority and compare it unfavorably with the beneficent despotism of a Henri IV. They, however, ignore the very material fact that an absolute monarchy represents an involuntary servitude over which the subject has no control; whereas the tyranny of a majority represents a voluntary subjection to authority over which we have control. It may be and undoubtedly is true that control over government even under popular forms of government is small and ineffectual; but I hope to make it clear in the chapter on the Political Aspect of Socialism[84] that the ineffectualness of our control over government is due to the competitive system and that under a coöperative system our control over government would be effectual; and that it is only under a coöperative commonwealth that the ideal democracy can be realized. The development of trade unionism throws also a great light on the fact of human solidarity. Socialists are often accused of being theoretical and the bourgeois is disposed to regard human solidarity as a theory. But in the growth of trade unionism it will be observed that solidarity presents itself as a rock upon which the competitive system must ultimately be wrecked. The capitalist class expressed its wish in the law of 1799, which was a law of oppression; but the inconvenient fact that women cannot be worked like beasts of burden under ground without arousing the sympathies even of the capitalist class; that little children cannot be made to suffer and to starve without reaching the hearts of the whole nation, and that cholera bred in unsanitary dwellings will find its way to the doors of the rich, forced this same capitalist class to abrogate the law of 1799; to abandon the policy of oppression in consideration of its own best interests. So combinations amongst employees have grown in strength in spite of all the power of capital--political and industrial. This progress was inevitable. Given freedom of contract, or in other words, the competitive system; given some intelligence on the part of some of the proletariat; and some compassion in the hearts of some employers, and trade unions had to develop and grow in strength. But now that they have developed and grown in strength--now that they can be said to have reached what seems to be maturity, let us consider how much good they have done. Let us discuss the unsolved and what I believe to be the insoluble problems that result from trade unionism. Before entering into this subject, let me say that if I do not discuss here the merits of trade unionism it is not because I am not aware of them; but rather because in this work on Socialism, which I desire to make as concise as possible, it is not the merits of trade unionism which it is important to emphasize, but their demerits. Although the intelligence, order, and self-restraint displayed in the trade union movement must be to the eternal credit of the workingman, nevertheless all his efforts, however intelligent, however orderly, however sacrificing, have failed to solve the problem of the conflict between labor and capital. It is obviously wiser for the workingman to seek salvation where it is to be found than by clinging exclusively to trade unionism to abandon salvation altogether. Trade unionism, I cannot emphasize it too much--was and is still a necessary step in the development and education of the workingman; but it is only a step, and nothing demonstrates the inadequacy of trade unionism better than the conditions of unemployment that have existed during the last two years not only in the United States of America, but almost throughout the entire civilized world. It must not be supposed, however, that because trade unions are believed to have created new evils almost as intolerable as those they were organized to suppress, that trade unions are to be looked upon with disfavor. On the contrary, the whole argument of this book proceeds upon the self-evident fact that trade unions have performed a necessary function and are bound to perform a necessary function in the community until the trade union realizes its ideal, but that a realization of this ideal is impossible under the competitive system. In other words, the attempt will be made not only to demonstrate that trade unions have, under the competitive system, failed and must continue to fail to accomplish the work they set out to do, but that under the coöperative system they can and will attain their ideal--they can and will perform exactly what they started out to do. However much, therefore, our argument may demonstrate the failure of trade unions under existing conditions, it only leads to the triumph of trade unions under coöperative conditions. What the trade union has failed to do under competition, it can and will accomplish under a coöperative commonwealth. The argument of this book, therefore, is not to abandon trade unions, but, on the contrary, to appeal to the unorganized employee to join the trade union in order to strengthen it industrially; and on the other hand to appeal to all employees, organized or unorganized, to combine politically for the purpose of securing by franchise what they never can accomplish by the strike. The moral then to be drawn from the following pages is not that trade unions have come to an end of their usefulness, but that whereas their task in the past has been to check exploitation, their rôle in the future will be to put an end to it altogether. § 3. THE UNSOLVED AND INSOLUBLE PROBLEMS OF TRADE UNIONISM John Mitchell in his book "Organized Labor" has very properly stated that "the ideal of Trade Unionism is to combine in one organization _all_ the men employed, or capable of being employed, at a given trade, and to demand and secure for each and _all_ of them a definite minimum standard of wages, hours and conditions of work;"[85] and the principle of Trade Unionism is also well described as "the _absolute and complete prohibition_ of contracts between employers and individual men."[86] In other words, the object of the Trade Union is to put an end to competition between employees in order to substitute what is called "collective bargaining," which, if complete, would put the employer at the mercy of the employee, for individual bargaining, which on the contrary puts the employee at the mercy of the employer. The above is stated in other words in the Report of the Industrial Commission:[87] "The union is conceived as a means of bettering the condition of its members by united action. If this action is to be thoroughly effective, it must be taken by or on behalf of _all the members of the craft_. It is by the establishment of an _absolute monopoly of labor power_ and to ameliorate the conditions under which it is sold and used." Now the inherent and necessary defect of trade unionism under the competitive system is to be found in the words I have italicized in the above extract. If the trade union could be a "real monopoly of labor," it could dictate terms to the employer; but it must not be forgotten that, with the employer, it would remain subject to the conditions created by the market. The very fact, however, that all relations between labor and capital are determined by the conditions of the market makes it impossible and will always make it impossible for the trade union to attain its ideal; that is to say, to constitute an absolute monopoly of labor power, to bind in one organization _all_ the men employed, to secure the absolute and complete prohibition of contracts between employers and individual men, to demand and secure for each and _all_ of them a definite minimum standard of labor, wages, and conditions of work. This is the crux of the whole question. It has taken over a century of organization on the part of the employer and employee, of conflict between the two, of bankruptcy for the employer and of misery for the employee, to demonstrate that the ideal of trade unionism has not been and can never, so long as the competitive system persists, be attained. The trade unionist will answer that even though it be impossible to attain the ideal, trade unions have accomplished much and can accomplish more for the wage-earning class. To this it may be fairly answered that whatever trade unions have in fact accomplished has been accomplished only at a ruinous price--that the price they must continue to pay for this accomplishment will continue to be ruinous and insufferable until either by the revolt of the discontented as predicted by Karl Marx, or by the awakening conscience of the whole community, as has already to a limited degree taken place, the betterment aimed at by the trade unionist will be attained and maintained without the payment of the awful toll now exacted by the competitive system. It is probable that both employers and employees, during a century's struggle, have failed to take proper account of the extent to which both were hampered by the exigencies of the market. The blindness of both to this fact was perhaps due to the expansion of trade both in England and America during most of the century; this expansion being due to the development of the country in the United States and, in England, to the conquests of new markets and colonies. So long as expansion continued, trade unionists could insist upon increasing wages out of increasing prices, and the success which attended trade unions in raising wages during a large part of the century, brought about a false idea that there was no limit to the extent to which trade unions could by organization increase their share in the profits of industry. Unfortunately, the era of expansion could not last forever, and it was not until the lockout of the engineers in 1898-1899 that the British trade unionists began to discover how narrow were the limits within which they could improve conditions. Until 1897 the employees had on an average the best of it. In 1893 no less than 63 per cent of strikes were decided in favor of the employees. In 1896 again the proportion of working people involved in disputes settled in their favor was greater than in any of the previous years since 1892 with the exception of 1893; and it may be interesting to note that during this year there was a lower percentage of unemployed than during any year since 1890.[88] It is not surprising, therefore, that trade unionists were convinced that there was no limit to the extent to which they might increase their share in the profits of industry. In 1897, however, the condition of the steel industry in England became such that the employers could no longer comply with the exactions of the trade unionists. In 1895 American manufacturers for the first time attempted to export their steel to other lands,[89] and their exports grew to $121,913,548 in 1900 and to $183,982,182 in 1908.[90] In the presence of American as well as German competition, the pressure of the market was such that the employers felt they must either break the power of the union or go out of business. They therefore locked out the engineers in July, 1897, and the lockout lasted until January, 1898, when the union was obliged to abandon all its contentions. This lockout is the turning point in the history of trade unionism in England. Up to that time, the idea that workingmen could be induced to abandon the parties to which they belong in order to organize a party of their own was never seriously taken into consideration at their conventions, and resolutions in favor of Socialism were overwhelmingly voted down. But as soon as the power of the engineers--the strongest union in England--was broken in 1897 we find trade union conventions entertaining the idea of political organization and resolutions in favor of Socialism receiving careful consideration. The history of trade unionism in America has not as yet resulted in any such definite climax as this; but what foreign competition has compelled English employers to do a combination of employers in the Steel Trust has done for the steel workers in America. In other words, the trade union has to face one of two alternatives: either foreign competition is bound ultimately to compel the employer to destroy the union; or in the absence of foreign competition owing to a high protective tariff, a combination of employers will do for their own benefit what competition compelled British employers to do as a condition of survival. If we turn from the history to the nature of trade unions it will be seen that what has happened must have happened. As has been stated, all agree that the ideal of trade unionism is to unite all the workers in one trade so as to substitute collective bargaining for individual bargaining. Unfortunately by the very nature of things such a combination is impossible. It is impossible to read any work on trade unions, whether it emanates from the government, or from employers, or from employees, without being struck by the fact that trade unions seek to be comprehensive, to include all the members in the trade on the one hand, while on the other hand there is a perpetual pressure upon them to be exclusive. For example, we find locals charging heavy initiation fees of a character to keep out members, for instance the longshoremen, the garment workers, glass workers; and it may be "stated as a general rule that when a union does succeed in establishing a monopoly against employers it is exceedingly likely to go on, if it feels strong enough, to establish a monopoly against the employees."[91] It is perfectly true that this tendency is frowned upon by the trade unionists at large; but the reason for this is that every union which tries to be exclusive cultivates a crop of non-unionists who constitute a menace to the union. A better illustration of the quandary in which unionists find themselves between the importance of being comprehensive in the one hand and the importance of being exclusive on the other, is found in their attitude towards boy labor. Modern conditions have made apprenticeship practically obsolete, and yet many national organizations endeavor to maintain the practice with a view to preventing too great a supply of skilled workers in the trade. The limit generally fixed by national organizations is 1 to 10, though some, such as pressmen, trunk and bag workers, flint glass workers, allow 1 to 4. Lithographers allow 1 to 5.[92] "It is obvious," says the Report of the Industrial Commission, "that the chief motive which influences the unions in the shaping of their apprenticeship rules is the desire to maintain their wages, by diminishing competition within the trades."[93] It is true that many unions in controlling apprenticeship are animated by a much higher purpose; that is to say, to provide that when a boy undertakes to learn a trade he shall have a chance to learn it. John Mitchell in his book[94] claims that the restriction of admission of apprentices in the United States is negligibly small, and yet deplores the fact that "the great mass of youths to-day receive little or no training in their particular trade as a result of the breakdown of the apprenticeship system." In his opinion the solution to the problem is not to be found in apprenticeship, but in industrial schools; yet he deplores the hostility of graduates of trade schools to trade unions, without apparently recognizing that this hostility is due to the hostility first evinced by unions to trade schools. But let us turn from conflicting opinions and look the facts in the face. When a unionist approaches the age of forty years, he is confronted by the fact that he cannot rival in speed and efficiency the work of a young graduate of an industrial school. He looks forward to the time when his place will be taken by the graduate of the industrial school. He is very naturally therefore hostile to the industrial school and the graduate of the industrial school is for the same reason hostile to him. And here we come to the real difficulty: When a trade union fails to include _all_ the members in the trade, it does _not_ succeed in eliminating competition between workingmen. On the contrary, it begins by creating two hostile classes of workingmen: Those within the union and those without--classes which bitterly hate one another because they are both fighting for the same job. But they do more than this: They create competition within the trade union because by insisting upon high wages and short hours they are making it impossible for the employer to utilize the service of any but the most efficient. John Mitchell himself points this out. In resisting the charge that trade unions tend to level down, he says: "If there is a levelling at all in the trade union world, it is a levelling up and not a levelling down. The only levelling which the trade union does is _the elimination of men who are below a certain fixed standard of efficiency_."[95] He further expresses it in another passage:[96] "Trade unionism tends to improve workmen not only directly, through an increase in wages and a reduction in hours, but it attains the same end in an indirect manner. The general policy of trade unionism, as has been explained before, is the establishment of a minimum wage, safeguarding, as a rule, the right of the employer to discharge for proved inefficiency. The result of this is the gradual creation of a dead line of a standard of efficiency, to which all who work must attain. Where there is a minimum wage of four dollars a day, the workman can no longer choose to do only three dollars' worth of work and be paid accordingly, but he must earn four dollars, _or else cease from work_, at least in that particular trade, locality, or establishment. The consciousness that he may be employed for a varying wage permits many a man to give way to his natural idleness and carelessness, whereas the maintenance of a rigid standard causes a rapid and steady improvement. The minimum wage acts upon the workman, as the school examination upon the child. If a child falls, by however small a margin, below the standard set by the school, he fails of promotion, and the stimulus which is strong in the case of a school child is infinitely more intense in that of a worker with a family dependent upon him. The principle of the survival of the fittest through union regulations works out slowly and unevenly; nevertheless its general effect is towards a steady and continuous progress of workingmen to a permanently higher standard of efficiency."[97] There is one point upon which the author is silent--yet it is the point which enormously interests the workingman at large: this is that while trade unionism guarantees high wages and short hours to the efficient, it throws out of the trade altogether those workingman who do not attain a high standard of efficiency or who, having attained it, fall back from it owing to overwork, sickness, or old age. There is, therefore, a perpetual struggle going on in the trade unions, not only between members and non-members, but even amongst the members of the union itself, in view of the fact that diminished efficiency must eventually lead to the weeding out of the inefficient. In periods of industrial depression such as we have just passed through it is obvious that the most inefficient are the first to be dismissed, and being the most inefficient, they are the ones least able to find employment in other industries. Under the title of Unemployment, the extent of this evil has been pointed out; it must not be lost sight of; it reaches a population of a million at the best of times and of five millions at such times as these. But the problem raised by the importance of comprehensiveness to prevent "scabbing" on the one hand and of exclusiveness to maintain wages on the other, is not confined to such details as initiation fees and apprenticeship. It covers the whole question of the employment of boys, women, old men, and half-supported persons, and includes the "sweating" system. The higher the wages exacted by trade unions the more employers are compelled to have recourse to cheap labor of women and children, and this labor is all the cheaper because the unionist himself contributes to the supply; for the unionist supports his wife and children, and the very fact of the support he gives them permits them to accept a lower rate of wages than if they were not supported. To understand the operation of this principle it must be borne in mind that rates of wages are determined, not by the wishes of the employee or even by the greed of the employer; they are determined by the market price. Unionists are not the only persons who object to the labor of women and boys. There is indeed no divergency of opinion as to the unwisdom of working boys before their education is complete or their bodies matured; or the unwisdom of employing women, destined by Nature to perform other more important functions. No better witness to the control exercised by the market on this important subject can be found than a member of the English Ministry, the Right Honorable H.O. Arnold-Forster, who says: "The great cotton industry of Lancashire, the wool and worsted industry of Yorkshire, and many other industries in a less degree are at the present time dependent upon child labor. It is interesting to observe that as lately as the autumn of 1907 a deputation waited upon the responsible minister to urge upon him the desirability of raising the age of half-timers from twelve to thirteen. The desirability of the change was not denied, _but it was not considered possible to give effect to it_. "Those who have any acquaintance with the cotton trade are well aware that that great industry, employing as it does no less than half a million persons, is conducted upon the _most minute margins of profit and loss_. The rate book of the cotton trade, in which wages of every kind of work are calculated out to the tenth of a penny, is a miracle of painstaking and intelligent computation. These fine calculations are absolutely necessary. Both employers and employed know perfectly well that the trade is, so to speak, _balanced on a knife edge_, and that any sudden increase of cost, whatever may be its cause, is likely to upset the balance, and turn the hardly won profit out of which operators as well as employers obtain their living, into a loss. The _fierce competition of the world_, especially of those countries in which child labor and long hours are prevalent, has to be met, and the persons principally concerned are only too well aware of the fact."[98] Nothing then is better established than that every employer is forced by the pressure of competition to keep wages down, and that any employer who either under the compulsion of a trade union or out of generosity of heart attempts to raise wages one cent above the price permitted by the market, must expiate his mistake in the bankruptcy court. There is only one way in which this competition can be met--the way imagined by Karl Marx: a comprehensive organization of trade unions, not only within one nation, but amongst all nations; in other words, the famous--and at one time loudly proclaimed as the infamous--International. The fact that the international plan of organization imagined by Karl Marx failed, is little argument against it. But the fact that trade unions do not succeed in securing all the members of a trade in any nation--that indeed in the United States organized labor includes at most 2,000,000 members, whereas the working population is over 20,000,000, ought to be a convincing argument that a comprehensive organization of workers all over the world is still less possible. One word must be said in this connection about the sweating system and its relation to trade unions. It is a current statement that sweating is confined in America to a few industries, such as tobacco and garment making. This, however, is a great mistake. Sweating may be defined as the reduction of wages to starvation or even below starvation level. It is true that sweating in this country is in large part due to an ignorant, unorganized, and poverty-stricken class of immigrants. But sweating is also to be found in a much higher order of employees. I refer to the sweating of certain factories and department stores where the rate of wages is determined, not by the cost of living, but by the price which half-supported women are willing to take for their week's work. In many factories and in practically all the department stores the wages are below the sum necessary for a working woman to live; and they are made so at least in part by the fact that the daughters of well-to-do workingmen, being supported at home, are able and willing to give their time for a sum less than sufficient to support life. In some cases this work is rendered in a laudable desire to contribute to the common expense of the home. In many cases it must be attributed to vanity and the attractiveness of this kind of work. We find, therefore, the workingman put in this singular position: Through his trade union he secures a high rate of wages; with this high rate of wages he seeks to establish a decent home; the desire of a decent home permeates the entire family; the daughters want to contribute thereto and, because they are partially supported themselves by the high wages received by the father, they accept a rate of wages so low that their less fortunate sisters are doomed to starve. So on every side the trade unionist is hoist by his own petard. The high wage he is in a position to exact is perpetually menaced by the competition of the women and children of his own family whom his own high wages put in a position to compete with him. These high wages throw out of employment all save those of the highest efficiency, and by permitting the half-supported members of his family to work for low wages, reduce others who are not half supported below the level of starvation. I shall not insist on other problems which still divide the members of trade unions, such as what is called "right of trade," or "the conflict between industrial and craft organization," both of which occasion loss of employment and division in the ranks of labor, because these are not insoluble. It is true that they have not yet been solved, but there is nothing in their very nature that makes a solution impossible. I do, however, insist upon the problems above referred to, because they are not only unsolved, but by their very nature can never be solved. No trade union can ever include _all_ the men of the trade, because _all_ cannot earn the high standard of wages set by the union; because the trade never can give employment to all the men in the trade--at the best of times there are over 3 per cent unemployed; because by insisting on a high rate for unionists, they compel the employer to have recourse to the cheaper labor of women and boys; because the very sense of family responsibility which makes a unionist support his wife and children is exploited by the employer to secure the services of these last at half wages; because the existence of a half-supported population creates and maintains sweated trades; because the employers, were they Angels of Mercy, cannot, thanks to the pressure of the market, raise wages or dispense with the cheap labor of women and boys without either incurring bankruptcy or shutting down; because either contingency would deprive the unionist of work and therefore of wages; because both employer and employee are perpetually being chased round a vicious circle by the devil of competition which, by keeping down prices and wages, keeps both in danger of ruin and unemployment. The conclusion to which we are driven seems to be that the competitive system has the same effect upon trade unions as upon the rest of the industrial field--it sacrifices the many to the few. During these last two years wages have not been appreciably reduced. The most efficient have continued to receive the same wages as before. But the price paid for this advantage has been the reduction of between five and twenty millions of people to the verge of starvation, a large part of whom must by the very necessity of things be driven to vagrancy and through vagrancy to crime.[99] What Socialism proposes is to maintain the principle of competition to the extent necessary to assure most comfort to the most efficient without exposing the rest to so awful an alternative as unemployment. And I think it will be seen that the education of the workingman through the organization, the order, the democracy of trade unions will play no small part in making Socialism possible, and that it is probably through the organization of trade unions that a true democracy will eventually be attained. § 4. TRUSTS Two pictures of trusts have already been borrowed in this book,[100] one by Mr. Rockefeller, showing the economies they make, and the other by Mr. Havemeyer, showing the dangers that attend them. Trade unions start out to include all the men in the industry; this is their ideal; and it has been shown how far short of it they fall. It is generally supposed that trusts likewise seek to include all employers in the industry, but this is a great mistake. Not only does the law forbid this, but it would be a mistaken policy. A trust that included all the industry would invite newcomers for blackmailing purposes if for no other. The last and best policy of the promoter is to include only the most prosperous and to leave around the trust a fringe of independents too weak to affect prices but just strong enough to live as a warning to others. A good collection of independent factories on the verge of bankruptcy is the finest bulwark a trust can have, for they discourage the starting of any more. How the trusts make prices and keep independents in their wake is well illustrated by the following extract:[101] "The custom has regularly been for some years for the Standard Oil Company to announce from day to day the price which it would pay for crude petroleum and the price at which it would sell refined petroleum. This price is generally accepted as the market price, and competitors follow." "Likewise, the American Sugar Refining Company first posts the prices for the day, and is then followed by its competitors, who post theirs. Generally they take the prices fixed by the American Sugar Refining Company; but at times, if they have a little surplus stock on hand, or if it is difficult for them to secure a customer, they will cut the price perhaps one-sixteenth of a cent per pound. One or two of the chief competitors seem to be forced to put their prices quite frequently at one-sixteenth of a cent below that of the American Sugar Refining Company. In spite of its control over the output it is said by Mr. Post that the American Sugar Refining Company has not, in his judgment, unduly restricted the output. It is probable, he thinks, that had that company not been formed the competitive system would have ruined many established refineries, so that as many would have been closed as is now the case, and the output would have been fully as small, probably even less. Practically all of the witnesses, both members of the combination and their opponents, concede that while there is a certain arbitrariness in fixing the prices it has been exercised in most cases only within comparatively narrow limits, and then, mainly to meet competition or stifle it." Trusts, therefore, do in one sense succeed where trade unions fail; that is to say, they do succeed in getting all to join them that they want; whereas the trade unions do not, the essential difference between the two being that the trust is essentially monopolistic whereas the trade union is essentially democratic. The one wants to benefit a few at the expense of the many; the other wants to benefit all at the expense of none. As the competitive system favors the policy of the trust and disfavors that of the union, the trust succeeds where the union fails. No one would accuse the organizers of a union of seeking to benefit a few at the expense of the many, and yet this under the competitive system is not only what happens but what must happen. On the other hand, no one imagines that the organizers of a trust have any other intention: they deliberately set out to eliminate competitors for their own benefit and they have succeeded in their task to an altogether unexpected degree. It has been claimed, however, for the trusts that whatever may be the private benefit of their stockholders, they do perform a great public service. Among the public services they were supposed to render it was claimed that they would pay good wages and furnish steady employment.[102] Even the labor unions themselves were of this opinion. Their leaders testified that they did not fear industrial combination and that if combinations were able by virtue of their savings to increase the profits of industry, workingmen would be able by pressure to "maintain or increase their wages quite as readily as before the combinations were made."[103] Another contention made for trusts was that they would lower prices. With the view of maintaining this contention, the trust magnates themselves testified to the enormous economies effected by combination, for the purpose of persuading us that the consumers would profit by these economies. Mr. Havemeyer was honest enough, however, to admit that he would be guided in fixing the price only by business considerations. But it was believed at that time that business considerations would be sufficient to keep prices down and the experience of the Whisky Trust was cited to prove that it was impossible to maintain prices above a reasonable margin of profit. The Whisky Trust was organized in 1887 and after having lowered prices for the purpose of eliminating competitors, it brought the prices up to as high a level as had ever been reached before. The result of this was that at the end of 1888 prices fell, owing to a reorganization of the trust and to a subsequent raising of prices by the trust in 1891, only to be followed by a corresponding fall in 1892. And so prices went on reaching a very high level at the close of 1892, only to fall back to a low level in 1893; and again to a high level in 1894, only to go down so low in 1895 as to put the trust into the hands of a receiver. By this time the Whisky Trust had learned its lesson; it learned that if it endeavored to put the price of whisky up to an undue height, new distilleries were started to profit by these high prices, and the only way of avoiding bankruptcy was to maintain the price just high enough to return profits to the trust, but not high enough to encourage outside competition. Undoubtedly the opinion generally prevailed at the end of the last century that increase in price by the trust was not to be feared. But at that time trusts had not yet acquired the art of handling independent competitors. To-day the art has been acquired. Owing to the enormous capital they control and the enormous extent of territory they cover, they are in a position so to reduce prices in any one spot where competition becomes dangerous as to crush out the competitor in that place. They adopted this method recklessly at first, crushing out all competitors and then raising the price unduly. Now they have learned to maintain a group of competitors about them and to keep these competitors alive, keeping prices high so long as competition is not dangerous and depressing them just enough to crush out competition when it becomes dangerous. The movement of prices since the end of last century is sufficient to demonstrate that trusts, far from reducing prices, are advancing them. It must in all fairness to trusts be admitted that the enormous increase in the annual output of gold tends to increase prices, and it is extremely difficult to state just how much of the advance in price since the end of last century is due to the increased output of gold, and how much is due to deliberate advance on the part of the trusts. We have, however, a guide in the relation between increase of wages and increase of prices. If the advance in prices were due entirely to increased output of gold, wages ought to increase in the same proportion. But they do not. Of the opinion expressed at the end of the last century that trusts would improve the condition of workingmen, there is very little left to-day. From almost every point of view, trusts have since 1900 disappointed expectations. It was claimed and with every show of reason that trusts would, by their control of the market, be able to adjust supply to demand and thus avoid the gluts that produce unemployment,[104] and that although the economies they practised might result in the shutting down of some factories and the discharge of employees, in the end the workingmen would gain because their employment would be steady and because trade unions would have only one employer to bargain with instead of many.[105] How far has experience justified these anticipations? Far from diminishing unemployment, the reign of the trusts has resulted in the most intense and widespread depression that we have any record of.[106] Far from benefiting the unions, trusts have crushed unions out of existence. Far from raising wages and shortening hours, the employees of the Steel Trust in Pittsburg are to-day working twelve hours at $1.80 a day, and once a fortnight twenty-four hours in a single shift; whereas miners in the same district because their union has not yet been crushed by the Coal Trust, are working only eight hours at $2.36 a day.[107] And the Miners' Union has been saved from the trust only by what is still regarded by many as the improper personal intervention of President Roosevelt Oct. 31, 1902. The conditions of labor under trust rule cannot be better described than in the Survey, an investigation published not by Socialists, nor even by persons inclined towards Socialism, but by believers in and upholders of the competitive system:[108] "With this number, Charities and The Commons completes its presentation of the findings of the Pittsburg Survey, as to conditions of life and labor of the wage-earners of the American Steel district. The gist of the situation, as we find it, is as follows: "I. An altogether incredible amount of overwork by everybody, reaching its extreme in the twelve-hour shift for seven days in the week in the steel mills and the railway switchyards. "II. Low wages for the great majority of the laborers employed by the mills, not lower than other large cities, but low compared with the prices--so low as to be inadequate to the maintenance of a normal American standard of living; wages adjusted to the single man in the lodging-house, not to the responsible head of a family. "III. Still lower wages for women, who receive for example in one of the metal trades in which the proportion of women is great enough to be menacing, one-half as much as unorganized men in the same shops and one-third as much as the men in the union. "IV. An absentee capitalism, with bad effects strikingly analogous to those of absentee landlordism, of which Pittsburg furnishes noteworthy examples. "V. A continuous inflow of immigrants with low standards, attracted by a wage which is high by the standards of Southeastern Europe, and which yields a net pecuniary advantage because of abnormally low expenditures for food and shelter; and inadequate provision for the contingencies of sickness, accident, and death. "VI. The destruction of family life, not in any imaginary or mystical sense, but by the demands of the day's work and by the very demonstrable and material method of typhoid fever and industrial accidents; both preventable, but costing in single years in Pittsburg considerably more than a thousand lives, and irretrievably shattering nearly as many homes. "VII. Archaic social institutions such as the aldermanic court, the ward school district, the family garbage disposal, and the unregenerate charitable institution, still surviving after the conditions to which they were adapted have disappeared. "VIII. The contrast--which does not become blurred by familiarity with detail, but on the contrary becomes more vivid as the outlines are filled in--the contrast between the prosperity on the one hand of the most prosperous of all the communities of our western civilization, with its vast natural resources, the generous fostering of government, the human energy, the technical development, the gigantic tonnage of the mines and mills, the enormous capital of which the bank balances afford an indication; and, on the other hand, the neglect of life, of health, of physical vigor, even of the industrial efficiency of the individual. Certainly no community before in America or Europe has ever had such a surplus, and never before has a great community applied what it had so meagerly to the rational purposes of human life. Not by gifts of libraries, galleries, technical schools, and parks, but by the cessation of toil one day in seven, and sixteen hours in the twenty-four, by the increase of wages, by the sparing of lives, by the prevention of accidents, and by raising the standards of domestic life, should the surplus come back to the people of the community in which it is created." It would be unfair, however, to the trusts not to recognize that in spite of the shameful conditions they create for the majority they do benefit a minority to no small degree. The highly skilled are highly paid; they are fairly safe from unemployment; they are also furnished an opportunity of purchasing stock, of which this minority avails itself. The effect of the trust system on the workingman is very much like that of the trade union; both benefit the highly skilled and highly efficient, but at the expense of all the rest. Now those who believe in the competitive system regard this as proper; and that the highly skilled and highly efficient should fare better than the lazy and vicious is equally a part of the Socialist creed. All that the Socialist asks is that the punishment for falling short of the highest skill and the highest efficiency be _not so severe_ as that described by the Pittsburg Survey; and this not only in the interest of the victim, but in that of the community of which he forms an essential part. It is because Socialism proposes a plan for giving to the efficient what their efficiency earns without committing the inefficient to a life of degradation, that it is entitled to the consideration of practical business men. The degradation of the majority is not the only evil that results from the trusts. The rich are accustomed to look upon this evil as necessary and, therefore, one that they cannot hope to do more than mitigate by philanthropy. They seem unconscious of the goal to which this evil is inevitably driving them; and it is to this goal that I want above all to direct their attention. (_a_) _The Conflict Between the Trust and the Trade Union_ It might seem as though the title for this section ought to be the conflict between capital and labor rather than the conflict between trusts and trade unions. This, however, is a mistake. So long as labor and capital were disorganized, there was not much danger in the conflict between the two. The employer was too strong and he had on his side in case of disturbance, the police, the militia, and the law. The moment, however, that labor became organized, it became too powerful for the police; it became dangerous even to the militia; and it has in England been strong enough to change the law; and this in spite of the fact that the organization of the workingman in unions has compelled the employers to combine in associations and trusts. Again, although all violence is injurious to individuals, the violence to which unorganized workingmen resort in local disputes with their employers, however injurious to local interests, tends to be essentially temporary and does not tend to overthrow economic or social institutions. The effect of organization, however, expresses itself in the magnitude of the conflicts to which it gives rise; as for example, the Homestead strike in 1892, the Pullman strike in 1894, and what was practically equivalent to a civil war in Colorado during 1903. It is generally believed that violence is the peculiar weapon of the workingman. This again is a mistake. Employers have often been the first to have recourse to violence and under conditions which hardly seem pardonable. That a striking employee should be enraged at seeing his place taken by strikebreakers and should be driven by his rage to violence, is easily understood; but that employers, merely for the sake of keeping down wages and making more profit, should have recourse to it seems altogether unjustifiable. It is a matter of official record that the Carnegie Steel Company opened negotiations with Robert A. Pinkerton for armed men nineteen days before any strike occurred.[109] The report also says that there was "no evidence to show that the slightest damage was done or was attempted to be done to property on the part of the strikers,"[110] and so far as acts of violence are concerned, a personal investigation of the Colorado strike satisfied me that the Employers' Association was just as guilty as the miners. An impartial account of this struggle is to be found in the _Political Science Quarterly_[111] published by a board of which J. Pierpont Morgan is a member, and which cannot be accused therefore of tenderness to miners or leanings towards Socialism. It is difficult to justify the action of the mine owners in removing Moyer, Haywood, and Pettibone under the circumstances described by Judge McKenna in his dissenting opinion.[112] If the trust managers have deliberate recourse to violence and questionable methods in their conflict with labor which involve merely a question of more or less profit, is there not excuse for the workingman who has at stake his very livelihood and that of his wife and children? There are elements, however, in the coming conflict which to my mind make it clear that notwithstanding the enormous advantages which capital has over labor, it is labor and not capital that in the end will triumph. To understand these elements it is indispensable to consider the character of the advantages which the trusts have over the trade unions, and the character of the advantages which the unions have over the trusts. (_b_) _Advantages of Trusts over Unions_ So far in America the conflict between trusts and unions has been confined to the economic field, and in the economic field it must be admitted that trusts have the advantage. In the first place, as has already been intimated, the trusts have at stake merely a matter of more or less profit. The trust can for the purpose of crushing the union, sacrifice part of its profit without material damage. The trust in this respect is in an infinitely better condition than the isolated employer, for whom a strike very often means bankruptcy. This is not the case with the trust. Its capital is too large and its operations are conducted over too great an area for any strike to threaten insolvency.[113] Moreover, an isolated employer is far more at the mercy of the employees than a trust, because a strike very often deprives him of custom. The orders he cannot fill are filled elsewhere and he may never recover the custom he has in this manner lost. The trust, however, can allow a strike to take place in one factory without for that reason failing to fill all its orders; for it can transfer them to another of its numerous factories in another place. That this is regularly done by the trust is a matter of common knowledge. The case cited by the Industrial Commission[114] is that of the American Smelting and Refining Company which "continued its business in the districts where there was no strike, transferring the work as far as possible." In America, at any rate, the trusts have also on their side not only the police and the militia, but the law. The courts have decided that in the case of strikes and boycotts the courts can by injunction commit for contempt and punish by imprisonment those who violate their orders. These questions have been carried to the highest court and all further attempts on the part of labor to fight these questions in the courts are practically certain to be unavailing. The remedy of the Federation of Labor is not to dispute these decisions in the courts, but to secure new legislation reversing existing decisions on this subject. The English unions have discovered this and, by the organization of their Labor party, have wrested from the British Government the trades dispute law which has settled these questions in their favor. So long as unions persist in fighting trusts exclusively on the economic field and in the law courts, the unions seem bound to suffer defeat. There is one weakness in the armor of the trusts to which attention has not yet been sufficiently directed. Trusts suffer more from their victories than from their defeats; for a defeat as to the length of hours or rate of wages, while it strengthens labor a little, does not weaken the trust much. But every victory of the trust is the greatest calamity to which it seems at present exposed; for every victory tends to shift the arena from the economic field, where the trust is invincible, to the political field, where labor has every advantage. This will become clear when we examine the advantages of unions over trusts. (_c_) _Advantages of Unions over Trusts_ The larger the number of workers in every industry, the weaker are they on the economic field. It has been pointed out that unions tend to divide labor. They not only separate the labor world into two bitterly hostile classes--organized and unorganized--but by the high rate of wages that they demand they tend also to create jealousy within the trade union between the efficient who can earn these high wages and the less efficient who cannot. If the working population were so small that the demand for labor was greater than the supply, then indeed the unions might control the situation. But experience has shown that, without accepting the exaggerations of Malthus, there is always a greater supply of labor than demand. Even in the most prosperous times between 3 and 4 per cent of the trade unions are unemployed and, outside the unions, there is a mass of unorganized labor, a great part of which is either working for wages insufficient to support life or is not working at all. These things inevitably produce hostility between the prosperous and highly paid members of the union and all the rest; and this hostility is a source of weakness in the economic struggle of capital against labor. The unions, too, instead of being able to apply their funds to maintain strikes, have to apply a large part of these funds to the support of unemployed, whether through sickness or through industrial depression. Upon the economic field, therefore, numbers tend to cripple the worker in his fight against capital. On the political field, on the contrary, the larger the number of workers, the stronger they are; for every wage-earning man has his vote, and the vote of every wage-earner counts as much as that of every capitalist. On the political field there need be no division in the ranks of labor--organized and unorganized labor can unite on a platform looking to the political subjection of their common master. Indeed, if the trusts and employers were to succeed in the task which they seem to have set themselves--the destruction of every trade union--they would by so doing put an end to the principal obstacle which now prevents workingmen from uniting upon a common platform, for the suppression of unions would mean two things: it would persuade the defeated unionists that their only chance of successfully fighting capital was on the political field; and it would put an end to the hostility between organized and unorganized labor that is the principal obstacle at this moment to united action of any kind. Moreover, the workingman could so frame his political program as to secure the alliance of the whole exploited class; the small farmer, the domestic, the clerk, and all those who, out of interest or sympathy, find themselves arrayed against the exploiting class. The discovery that the workingman is no match for his employer on the economic field having already been made in England, the Labor party there has no less than 40 members in Parliament, and this small contingent has been strong enough to obtain the legislation above referred to. It is the sense of inferiority on the economic field that has organized the millions who are every year swelling the ranks of the Socialist party in Europe. The shortsightedness of employers in failing to take account of this fact has its humorous side. The employee was not very long ago ignorant and incapable of organization--economic or political--and without any vote on public affairs. It was only upon condition that he should remain ignorant and incapable of political organization and without any voice in public affairs that he could continue to suffer the domination of his employer--such as is described in the Pittsburg Survey. Yet the employer has given to every employee an equal vote with himself in public affairs, so that to-day the employees outvote the employers. Not content with this, and fearful lest the employee should not be able adequately to use his vote, the employer has covered the country with school-houses for the purpose of teaching the employee how to use it. Yet employers proceed upon the assumption that the intelligent, educated workingman of to-day, armed with a vote and capable of the organization displayed in his unions, will continue to endure such conditions as are described in the Pittsburg Survey as patiently in the future as he has done in the past! So trusts continue complacently to crush out unions, oblivious of the fact that every union crushed drives its members to Populism, Socialism, Anarchism, pauperism, and crime. Of all the folds ready to receive the unfortunates driven out of their unions by the trusts, which is the one least likely to prove dangerous to the state? This question does not seem to concern the trusts at all. They consider all these "isms" as equally vile, impractical, and obnoxious. Yet, if they would only give to this matter one-half the attention that they give to their business affairs, they could not fail to see that every union they crush raises for them a crop of political enemies who, if they show as much ability in political organization as they have shown in economic organization--and there is no reason why they should not--cannot but eventually secure a large majority in our legislatures. When they have done this; when they have the writing of a new constitution; when the police, the militia, the army, and the law courts are on their side, is it not better that this majority be intelligent and educated, as it might if Socialism were rightly understood, and not uneducated and violent, as it will certainly be if Socialism is not rightly understood? The conclusion to which we seem to be driven is that, so long as labor struggles with capital on the economic field through strikes, boycotts, and litigation, it is bound to be beaten; but that every victory of capital on the economic field shortens its reign; for it drives labor to abandon the economic field, where it is weak, for the political field, where it is strong; and that the evidence of constructive ability and self-restraint exhibited by labor in the organization and administration of the unions, indicates that that same ability exercised in the political field will make it invincible there: "We are many; they are few." If this be so, then capital can no longer afford to disregard or misrepresent the political aspirations of the army of labor. It may indeed turn out in the words of the Cumæan Sybil: "Via prima salutis Quâ minime reris Graia pandetur ab urbe." Our way of safety may be--not in the defeat of labor--but in its enlightenment. We have before us two alternatives: We can continue to fight labor; to crush it; to create unemployment one day and wring our hands over it the next; to arm labor, educate it, and force it to organize an army of discontent that will eventually outvote capital and, with little or no preparation for its task, seize the reins of government. Or we can leave the fighting of labor to the trusts from which the whole public suffers as well as the workingman, and ourselves join in a reorganization of political forces that will make the legitimate demands of the disinherited our own, and at last lay the foundations of the Democracy that Lincoln through the smoke of the Civil War dimly foresaw. FOOTNOTES: [78] Since writing this I see that Jaurès makes exactly the same observation in _Van Norden's Magazine_, August, 1909. [79] The metronymic tribes were tribes in which there was practically no paternal relation. The mother was the head of the family and the offspring took her name. This condition of things prevailed for some time in ancient Egypt. [80] This is elaborated in "Government or Human Evolution," Vol. II, p. 96. [81] "Government or Human Evolution," Vol. II, p. 102. [82] Translation, see Appendix p. 422. [83] Article 414 of the French Penal Code and Law of 1799 of the British Parliament. [84] Book III, Chapter III. [85] "Organized Labor." By John Mitchell, p. 4. [86] Ibid., p. 3. [87] Report of the Industrial Commission, 1901, Vol. XVII, page 1. [88] Bulletin of the Dept. of Labor, 1898, pp. 714-717. [89] Andrew Carnegie's article on the Steel Industry in the Encyclopedia Americana, Vol. XIV. [90] Statistical Abstract, 1908, p. 445. [91] Report of the Industrial Commission, 1901, Vol. XVII, p. 1. [92] Report of the Industrial Commission, 1901, Vol. XVII, p. lii. [93] Ibid., p. liii, 1901. [94] "Organized Labor," Chapter XXX. [95] "Organized Labor," p. 240. [96] Ibid., p. 163. [97] "Organized Labor," p. 163. [98] "English Socialism of To-day," pp. 99-100. [99] Letter of Police Commissioner Bingham, New York city, N.Y. _Times_, Jan. 5, 1908. See Appendix, p. 423. [100] Book II, Chapter III. [101] Report of the Industrial Commission, 1901, Vol. I, p. 18. [102] Report of the Industrial Commission, 1901, Vol. I, p. 29. [103] Ibid., p. 31. [104] "Most members of combinations feel that the tendency is to make work more permanent under the combination form of doing business, inasmuch as the combination is better able to adjust the supply of goods to the demand, and thus to secure regularity in their productive conditions." Report of the Industrial Commission, Vol. XIII, p. xxxi. [105] "Some of the witnesses are of the opinion that the industrial combinations give to the labor unions a decided advantage, inasmuch as it enable them to deal with the trade as a whole instead of with separate manufacturers." Report of the Industrial Commission, Vol. XIII, p. xxxii. [106] Book II, Chapter I, Unemployment. [107] Pittsburg Survey, Charities, XXI, p. 1063. [108] Charities, XXI, p. 1035. [109] Senate Reports, 52d Congress, 2d session, Vol. I, Rept. No. 1280, p. xiv. [110] Ibid., p. xiii. [111] _Political Science Quarterly_, March, 1908. [112] See Appendix, p. 424. [113] Many workingmen still believe in the possibility of strikes and even of a general strike. I do not take account of such strikes, because they have not yet occurred and labor does not seem organized upon a sufficiently comprehensive scale to make such strikes possible. [114] Report of the Industrial Commission, Vol. XIII, p. xxxi. CHAPTER VI MONEY No attempt will be made in this chapter to enter upon the disputed questions regarding money, but only to point out undenied and undeniable facts in connection with its use and abuse. Coin, whether gold or silver, is used all over the world as the medium of exchange. But gold and silver available for the purpose of coin are limited in amount and totally inadequate to serve as mediums of exchange without the assistance of other devices. Thus banks of issue are organized for the purpose of issuing paper money. This money is upon its face redeemable in coin, but banks of issue, relying upon the probability that all paper issued will not be redeemed on the same day, issue far more paper money than they have reserve in coin. In England, this reserve is notably small. Business, too, is conducted largely on credit; that is to say, the trader buys goods not with coin, but with notes or promises to pay gold, relying upon the probability that he will sell the goods before his notes come due and thus be able to meet his notes with the proceeds derived from the sale of the goods purchased with these notes. Industries, railroad companies, and transportation companies also use credit for the purpose of building and running their roads and factories. This credit takes the shape of permanent bonds and temporary accommodations of the same character as the notes used by private traders. The total number of bonds outstanding at par amount to-day in the United States alone to $13,500,000,000.[115] It is through the ability of railroad companies to issue bonds and credit notes that they are enabled in prosperous periods to extend their roads and factories. Farmers also borrow largely upon their farms for the purchase of implements, live stock, improvements, etc. Recent figures of bonded indebtedness are not to be obtained; but they figure in the billions. Again, cash payments are no longer made in coin; they are for the most part made by check. Checks are not paid in coin; they are cleared through clearing houses; the banks in every financial center belong to a clearing house through which they daily settle with one another, paying only differences of accounts in cash. Thus, in 1906, the total transactions of fifty-five banks in New York city amounted to over $103,000,000,000; yet the balances paid in money during the year only amounted to about $3,000,000,000--a proportion of 3.69. So that through the clearing-house system instead of exchanging gold to an amount of $103,000,000,000 the whole business was transacted with only 3.69 per cent thereof in coin. The above figures tend to show how small a relation is borne by coin to the total exchanges of the world. Indeed, although coin is still the ultimate medium of exchange, commercial and industrial transactions are conducted for the most part through an enormous system of credit built upon a comparatively small amount of coin. The importance of this is considerable, for it puts those who have coin and those who handle coin in a position which enables them to control the industrial and commercial activities of the Nation. This feature of our money system occasions what are called "financial crises" as distinguished from commercial crises. Commercial crises and industrial crises are due to overproduction. Financial crises are produced for the most part by a breaking down of credit. Credit may be broken down in many ways. A breakdown may be due to inability on the part of those who handle coin to meet their obligations in coin. It may, however, be due to the unwillingness of those who have and handle money to put this money at the disposal of the industrial public. It is sometimes occasioned by both. Money is indispensable to the working of the industrial system. It may be regarded as the blood of the industrial system because no farmer can operate his farm, no factory owner his factory, no railroad company its road without money or the equivalent of money--credit. And if money can be compared with the blood in the human body, the banking system must be regarded as its heart; the organ that keeps money in circulation, accommodates circulation to the needs of the body, furnishes the economic body with as much as at periods of exercise it needs; and moderates its circulation when at periods of repose the economic body is less in need of it. It is hardly necessary to point out the extreme importance under these conditions that the heart of this system act for the benefit of the system, and have at no time an interest of its own to act independently of the system or in a manner hostile to it. Now this is exactly the evil of existing monetary conditions. Those who have and handle money have an interest of their own to serve. While it is generally to their interest to use money in making the community prosperous, it is at certain critical periods to their interest on the contrary to withhold money. This is the point upon which emphasis must be put. Let us, with a view to understanding this, consider into how few hands the control of coin tends to be concentrated; and how easy it is for these few to serve their own interests at the expense of the public by withholding coin at moments of utmost need. A very brief study of the movements of coin in the United States will demonstrate the very few hands in which the control of coin in the country is vested: Every trust, every corporation, every railroad company makes payments to its stockholders at stated intervals consisting of dividends on stock and interest on bonds. These amounts are large. In 1905 dividends amounted to $840,018,022, and interest to $636,287,621--together a billion and a half.[116] Most of this is paid in New York and produces a regular flow of money from the great corporations to the New York banks. The great life insurance companies have their principal offices in New York and there flow daily into the coffers of these companies millions of dollars of premiums, amounting in the year to nearly half a billion ($492,676,987 in 1908). During the last half century, 1859-1908, the income from premiums reached the enormous total of $7,870,892,759.[117] All these go into the hands of New York banks and trust companies. These moneys are, in the ordinary course of business, returned to the industrial public in the shape of accommodations to banks, loans to farmers, factories, railroad companies, etc.; and if these enormous sums that go into the hands of the Wall Street Group are not returned to the industrial system, the industrial system must perish just as the body must perish if its vital functions are not furnished with blood. But as has been stated, it is to the interest of the Group to keep the industrial system prosperous and, therefore, in prosperous times this amount gets back to the country again, the Group receiving a profit on taking in these moneys and on the paying out of them. One thing, however, is certain--that the Group can by withholding money make money scarce. It can by releasing money make it plentiful. The power given to the Group by this order of things is incalculable. If the Group desires to issue securities, it has an interest in making money plentiful. If the Group desires to purchase securities cheaply, it has an interest in making money scarce. The Group is therefore in a position where it can serve its own interests whatever be the direction these interests take. A banker once described to me the situation as follows: "The bulk of business is conducted with credit. An enormous credit system is built upon a relatively small amount of gold. The bankers control the gold; by controlling the gold they control credit; by controlling credit they control business. "This credit and gold system can be compared to an enormous system of reservoirs and irrigation works, the sluices of which are all opened and closed by electricity. It takes a very minute amount of electricity to open and close the sluices; but the man who has control of that small amount of electricity has the whole irrigation system at his mercy. By pressing a button he can furnish water to one region and take it away from another; and if water has been largely used--as in the case of overinvestment--he can, by withholding water altogether, put the whole population of the land irrigated by the system on its knees." Let us select as a concrete illustration of the workings of this system the events of 1907: The year prior to the October panic of 1907 was the most prosperous year the country had ever seen. The balance of trade in our favor was $446,000,000[118]; that is to say, Europe owed us $446,000,000 on the year's transactions; the value of our crop exceeded that of the previous year by over $480,000,000; the net earnings of our railroads exceeded those of the previous year by over $260,000,000; the deposits in our banks exceeded those of the previous year by over $880,000,000; the cash held by our banks exceeded that held in the previous year by over $100,000,000; and the Treasury of the United States was bulging with ingots of gold. Nevertheless, the bankers knew that there had been overinvestment. In fifteen years the banks had invested in stocks and bonds no less than $437,000,000. In three years the trust companies had invested no less than $643,000,000 in these securities.[119] Moreover, immense sums had been loaned by trust companies and cash reserves had fallen from nearly 18 per cent in 1897 to a little over 11 per cent in 1907.[120] The Wall Street Group knew that there had been overinvestment. As one of them said, "We are being overwhelmed by our own prosperity." The breeze was blowing too strong and we were carrying too much sail. The Wall Street Group, however, knowing that a crisis was at hand and determined to realize the fullest possible price for stocks, began selling securities in January, 1907, giving rise to what has been termed "the rich man's panic," which climaxed in March.[121] Securities fell in consequence of this selling on an average of about 40 points. This tended to cripple all weak financial institutions which were no longer able to sell securities with a view to meeting obligations except at a loss. But this weakness did not express itself until October. The first to suffer was the brokerage firm of Otto Heinze & Company, well-known speculators, particularly in copper stocks. The next to fall were Charles W. Morse and E.R. Thomas, also speculators and directors of the Mercantile National Bank, and others. All banks controlled by these men at once showed weakness. But the panic did not reach its climax until the Knickerbocker Trust Company became involved. To understand the situation of the Knickerbocker Trust Company, a word must be said regarding trust companies and their relations to banks. Banks in the city of New York are required by law to keep a reserve of 15 per cent of their deposits in coin. Trust companies, not being subject to the banking law in this respect, are not called upon to maintain this reserve. They have, therefore, an advantage over banks because they can invest the whole of their deposits instead of keeping a part of them uninvested in coin. The natural hostility that would arise between trust companies and banks owing to this difference was eliminated in almost every case because trust companies were controlled by the banks. The Knickerbocker Trust Company, however, formed a notable exception to this rule. Owing to the genius of its President, Charles T. Barney, the Knickerbocker Trust Company had increased its deposits to over eighty millions in 1907. Mr. Barney did not belong to the Wall Street Group in the sense of the word that he acted independently of it, and his extraordinary enterprise and ability aroused the jealousy of the Group. In 1907, the institution having 8,000 depositors with total deposits of $80,000,000, became an independent power which was not to be tolerated by the Group. Under these conditions, it could not be expected that the Group would make any extraordinary effort to save the Knickerbocker Trust Company. It was to the interest of the Group that the Knickerbocker Trust Company should cease to remain an independent financial power. Everybody knew that the Knickerbocker Trust Company, though temporarily embarrassed, was perfectly sound. The receivers, appointed when its doors closed, so stated and subsequent events have proved that the receivers were right. No one doubts the ability of the Group to save the Knickerbocker Trust Company if it had chosen to do so. But the Group had in its hands an instrument by means of which the ruin of Mr. Barney could be effected: The clearing house has never admitted trust companies to membership, because trust companies were not under the obligation to maintain the 15 per cent reserve above referred to. This matter had come up frequently for discussion and the clearing house had insisted that all trust companies applying for membership to the clearing house should keep a reserve at of least 10 per cent. This the trust companies declined to do; but they nevertheless profited by the clearing-house system by employing banks that were members of the Clearing House Association to do their clearing for them--a dangerous situation that proved the ruin of Mr. Barney. The Bank of Commerce was the clearing-house agent of the Knickerbocker Trust Company; and the Bank of Commerce was controlled by the Wall Street Group. Under these conditions, the Knickerbocker Trust Company was at the mercy of the Wall Street Group. The Bank of Commerce publicly announced its refusal to clear any longer for the Knickerbocker Trust Company on the 21st of October.[122] Mr. Charles T. Barney was told that no help would be given to the Knickerbocker Trust Company unless he resigned. Understanding this to mean that help would be given if he did resign, he resigned; but help was withheld; the Knickerbocker Trust Company was allowed to go into the hands of receivers, and Mr. Barney committed suicide. Mr. Barney's corporation was not the only one upon which the Group had its eye. The Group is interested in the General Electric Company, the largest electrical company in America. The only serious rival of the General Electric Company in the country is the Westinghouse Company. Westinghouse was doing a larger business than he had capital for. "He was overwhelmed by his own prosperity." All Westinghouse needed at that time was money in order to protect his business. This money was refused to him. The Group is also interested in the railroads of the country and indeed controls them. It is one of the bad features of our railroad system that it almost everywhere controls steamship lines and thus prevents the public from having the benefit of cheaper water rates by exacting the same rates on steamboats as upon land. Morse with the supposed backing of the Knickerbocker Trust had organized a system of steamship companies which were running independently of the railroads and threatening their monopoly of freight rates. It was necessary that these steamship lines should be controlled by the various railroad systems with which these lines competed, and Morse's steamship company was forced into the hands of a receiver. But there was another corporation of still more importance to the Group--the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company. The Steel Trust had never been able to purchase this company, and this company was in a measure indispensable to them. The Tennessee Coal and Iron Company had the extraordinary advantage of owning inter-bedded coal and iron; that is to say, coal and iron in the same spot. It was thus relieved of the necessity of transporting coal several hundred miles to iron ore or iron ore several hundred miles to coal. This enabled the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company to fix a price for steel independently of the Steel Trust. As has been explained, although trusts seek to have weak independent concerns in existence if only to prevent strong independent concerns from being organized, they cannot afford to have an independent concern competing with them which is able to fix prices lower than their own. For this reason, the Wall Street Group availed itself of the panic to get control of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company. Upon the testimony of Oakleigh Thorne, President of the Trust Company of America, and George W. Perkins of the firm of J.P. Morgan & Company, who is a member of the Finance Board of the United States Steel Corporation, before the Senate Committee on January 19, 1909,[123] it appears that a syndicate had been organized for the purpose of acquiring the stock of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company. Mr. Oakleigh Thorne was a member of this syndicate, and the Trust Company of America, of which he was president, had loaned on November 1, 1907, $482,700 to this syndicate against the stock of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company as collateral. It seems that the Trust Company called this loan and that although the stock of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company was a dividend-paying stock and quoted at 119, the syndicate found it impossible to borrow money upon it. The only condition upon which they could borrow money was selling out to the Steel Trust. The Steel Trust gave in exchange for the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company stock at 119 its own second mortgage bonds, quoted on the market at that time at 82, and as soon as this exchange was effected the syndicate was furnished with all the money it needed. Wall Street loaned to the syndicate against steel second mortgage bonds the amounts which had previously been refused upon the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company stock. In other words, the Wall Street Group by refusing to loan money to the syndicate against the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company stock, compelled the syndicate to sell this stock to the Steel Trust by agreeing to loan to the syndicate against Steel Trust second mortgage bonds at 82 what they refused to loan to the same syndicate on Tennessee Coal and Iron Company stock at 119. The New York _Times_ says on this subject:[124] "What inquiring Senators want to know is, How was it possible for a small group of bankers to get together and, merely by agreement, force out one security by giving preference to another less valuable? This power is regarded as highly dangerous to all classes of securities, placing them entirely at the mercy of the Wall Street Group." The power of the Wall Street Group to which the _Times_ objects is in times of panic reinforced by no less a power than the United States Government. The United States differs from other countries in not having a government bank for receiving government deposits and distributing them in the ordinary course of banking business. The result is that the receipts of the government accumulate in the United States Treasury, and this tends to increase stringency in periods of panic. It has become, therefore, a rule of the government to step in on such occasions and deposit with its national banks a sufficient amount to relieve stringency. It will be readily seen that this intervention of the Secretary of the Treasury, while indispensable to the public welfare, constitutes a great resource to the Wall Street Group. For the Group can, by withholding cash at periods of stringency, practically compel the government to come to the relief of the market when, for purposes of its own the Group decides to withhold funds. And as the Group includes the best-informed persons regarding the finances of the country, it is to the Group that the Secretary of the Treasury naturally goes for advice on these occasions. The Wall Street Group therefore occupies a position which permits it to call upon the government for funds when it desires to hoard its own funds for its own purposes. Thus we find Secretary Cortelyou in daily conference with the Wall Street Group at this period; and after the Knickerbocker Trust Company closed its doors on the 22d of October and receivers had been appointed for the three Westinghouse firms on the 23d, Secretary Cortelyou deposited $25,000,000 in the New York banks indicated by the Group. This was just sufficient to prevent ruin but not sufficient to relieve stringency. On November 4th, Judge Gary and Mr. Frick went to see the President and explained to him that the purchase of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company stock by the Steel Trust was necessary "in order to stop the panic."[125] The President on the same day wrote a letter to the Attorney-General, subsequently communicated to the Senate, in which he explained that in view of the fact that such a purchase would tend "to stop the panic" and that it would not give the Steel Trust more than 60 per cent. of the Steel industry, he did "not feel it a public duty to interpose any objection." The purchase of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company having been effected, the United States Government was once more called upon by the Group and on November 17, the President and Secretary Cortelyou announced the issue of 2 per cent Panama bonds for an amount of $50,000,000, and 3 per cent on certificate indebtedness to an amount of $100,000,000. By this time, however, the Group had decided that there was no necessity to maintain panic conditions, and the issue of these bonds was arrested, so that only one-half of the Panama bonds and only $15,000,000 of the Treasury certificates were allotted. It has been intimated that the Wall Street Group during the whole of this panic was in possession of funds which it purposely withheld. This intimation seems justified by the events which immediately followed the purchase of the Tennessee Coal and Iron stock by the Steel Trust. In November newspapers informed us that our bankers were engaged in "buying gold" in Europe, and during November no less than $63,000,000 were imported and in December a further $44,000,000 were imported; together--over $100,000,000. It is a somewhat singular thing that the public does not seem to have asked for information as to what was meant by this singular expression "buying gold." The machinery through which gold was brought over to America in November and December was the following: Our farmers had already produced crops and sold them to Europe; the 1907 cotton crop began to move in August--a large part of it was in Europe before the panic. Our wheat crop, though late, was already partly in Europe and on its way there. Those who had produced and sold these crops had drawn against their shipments. These drafts are called "cotton bills"--"wheat bills." Certain bankers with connections abroad make it their special business to buy these bills and present them for payment in Europe at a minute profit called "exchange." But these bankers could not, during the panic, borrow money as usual to buy these bills; and they did not dare to use the money of their depositors for this purpose when they were under imminent danger of a run. So these bills became a drug on the market; they could be got for four cents in the pound cheaper than in average years; and at this price, and at an exceptional profit, the Wall Street Group went into the market and bought them up, presented them for payment and got all the money from Europe that was wanted. This is the process that was called "buying gold." But _who had gold with which to buy these bills? Who had been hoarding gold?_ What do these facts disclose? They disclose that at the time when the Wall Street Group refused help to the Knickerbocker Trust it had at its disposal the gold in the United States Treasury--did not Cortelyou actually put this gold at its disposal?--the credit of the United States Government--did not Cortelyou at its bidding issue all the bonds he was told to issue?--and enough money of its own at the proper moment to purchase cotton and wheat bills at panic prices, so that every ship that in November and December sailed from Europe to New York came laden with gold? No one can, I think, deny the power of the Group after a fair consideration of these incidents. Let us see how this power was exercised as regards the city of New York. The Comptroller in a report published in November, 1907 (pages 5 and 6) showed that the city had not only voted, but appropriated over $195,000,000 for, public works, much of which was urgently needed by the city and some of which ought to have been completed four years before. Yet this city of four million inhabitants, whose property is underassessed at $7,000,000,000, was not able to employ its thousands of unemployed at this urgently needed public work because, as Comptroller Metz stated at a crowded meeting, Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan would not give the money to do it with, _and the city could get it from no one else_.[126] Morgan allowed the city in October to issue $30,000,000 of its bonds at 6 per cent, but refused to permit any further issue until the last day of January. On January 29th, according to the New York _Sun_,[127] Mr. Morgan relented, and the Mayor of the city, the Comptroller, the Deputy Comptroller, the Corporation Counsel, and the City Chamberlain were summoned to Mr. Morgan's library. There at last the imperial consent was given; the richest city in America was allowed by Mr. Morgan to issue its own bonds, but not in an amount large enough to permit of any public works. So the unemployed were left to tramp sleeplessly through our streets. The Wall Street Group found another important element of profit in the fall of securities during the panic. It has been said that securities fell on an average 40 points when the Group sold securities between January and March, 1907. Mr. James H. Brookmire estimates that they fell another 16 points during the panic. The Group seemed informed as to the exact moment at which securities had reached the bottom price; that is, they knew the moment when the panic was intended to come to an end. I was fortunate enough to be informed by a member of the Group at the right moment. I purchased Northern Pacific stock upon the advice given and, in the course of the year, made 50 per cent profit thereupon. The Group that sold between January and March, 1907, was in a position to buy back stock at less than one-half what they sold it for and, if they chose to realize at the present time, it would make an additional 50 per cent. In other words, it was in a position to make over 100 per cent upon the whole transaction. When we keep in mind the enormous figures which the operations of the Group attain, the amount of profit realized upon this amount alone can be imagined. I do not wish to be understood as pretending that the facts marshalled in the foregoing pages constitute conclusive proofs that the Group either made money by the panic, or withheld cash and credit for the purpose of making money. It is possible that the sales of stock between January and March and the repurchase of stock in November were effected solely with a view to the public welfare; it is possible that the Knickerbocker Trust Company was allowed to go to the wall solely through error in judgment; it is possible that the Steel Trust reluctantly purchased the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company as Messrs. Gary and Frick explained to the President--solely for the purpose of "stopping the panic." But practical business men are not accustomed to concluding in this fashion. When the keenest appetites of humanity are whetted to the utmost and opportunities are extended for the satisfaction of these appetites, we generally conclude that these opportunities are not refused through pure asceticism; at least not by the Wall Street Group. When Mrs. Forrest brought action against her husband, Edwin Forrest, the actor, it was proved that the defendant had been seen visiting a house of ill fame; after he entered, a third story front room was lit; the room remained lit for about an hour; the light was extinguished at the end of this period, and a few moments thereafter Mr. Forrest was seen leaving the house. His counsel maintained that this was not conclusive evidence against him; that his profession obliged him to study human nature in every rank of life at close quarters, and that it had not been proved that he visited this house for any other purpose. Charles O'Conor in responding to this part of the defendant's argument, said: "I can see the defendant walking up the steps of this house of ill fame; I can see him enter and ushered into a room full of human nature exclusively of the female sex ready and willing to be studied at close quarters; I can see him select the one which he believed to be able to furnish the best opportunities for this purpose; I can see the two mount the stairs to the third story front and light the gas; and I can see them together there devote an hour to meditation and prayer." The jury was satisfied with the evidence and rendered a verdict for divorce in favor of Mrs. Forrest. Whatever be the opinion, however, as to whether or not the Wall Street Group withheld funds to effect its purpose during the panic; or whether it made money out of the panic, one thing is perfectly certain--it was in a position where it could have withheld money; it was in a position where it could have made money out of the panic. The question the community has to decide is whether it is willing to leave this power and this temptation to any group of bankers--either to the saints now in control of Wall Street, or possibly to their less worthy successors. In one of the standard English works on Money,[128] George Clare points out the exorbitant power of the Secretary of our Treasury: "The New York Market is in fact at the mercy of an autocrat who, having full power to loose or bind large masses of currency at his absolute discretion, decides for himself whether and when money shall be cheap, and whether and when it shall be dear." This autocratic power is to-day at the disposal of the Wall Street Group--not owing to any improper influence of the Group; not through any improper conduct of the Treasury; but as a necessary result of existing conditions. And if Mr. Clare is right in criticising the wisdom of granting to the Treasury the autocratic power it now enjoys, how much more dangerous is it to grant this autocratic power not to an official who can be removed, but to a group of financiers who cannot be removed? For the power exerted by the Wall Street Group includes not only all the resources of the Treasury, but all the resources of the entire country. It holds the life blood of our economic system in its hands and, because it controls this life blood, it controls politics, education, morals, and religion. And this group of men was not elected to the position it now enjoys by the majority of our citizens; it has usurped the position by virtue of its control over silver and gold. The fact, however, that the use of silver and gold as our sole medium of exchange gives men control of the most essential things in our life, whom we never elected to that office and who at critical times have a personal interest to serve in opposition to that of the public welfare, is not the only evil connected with their use: Silver and gold do not furnish us with constant standards of values. At various periods in the history of our civilization, gold and silver have been discovered in enormous quantities, and the effect of the discoveries and the putting of the gold and silver on the market has been and must be of a character to seriously affect the interests of all. When the amount of gold and silver in circulation is increased, prices go up, but wages do not correspondingly rise; and the wage-earner is unconsciously robbed. He goes on receiving the same amount in gold or silver for his work, but the purchasing power of the wage he receives diminishes. Again, when contraction takes place, as for example when silver was demonetized in 1893, a great wrong was done to the farmers who had borrowed money upon their farms; for by demonetizing silver, gold increased correspondingly in value and the farmer was called upon to pay his mortgages with money worth far more than it was prior to the demonetization of silver. One thing, however, we want to bear in mind, that although farmers suffer by the demonetization of silver and wage-earners suffer by the demonetization of silver, and no change in the amount of silver and gold used as currency takes place without somebody suffering, the financiers and all those who handle money are in a position so to conduct their affairs as to profit by these changes. Meanwhile the rest of the community are in such a position that they have not the knowledge and even if they had the knowledge, would probably not have the ability, to do anything but lose by them. The average citizen has no knowledge on these subjects whatever, and is therefore at the mercy of financial heretics. He was misled by the greenback craze in the 80's, by the silver craze in the 90's, and is subject to further delusions so long as coin remains the medium of exchange and coin is controlled by a few individuals whose only interest in it is to make out of it the largest fortune possible. It must not be imagined that an attempt has been made to furnish anything like an exhaustive account of the opportunities which financiers have for profiting at the expense of the public. To do so would require a volume as large as this one devoted entirely to this subject. For example, at this very time of writing,[129] the papers inform us that Mr. Morgan is hurrying back from Europe to settle the question whether a dividend is to be paid on the common stock of the United States Steel Company. It is known that Mr. Morgan received a very large block of this stock as his compensation for promoting the trust. If he still has enough of this stock to make the payment of a dividend of importance to him, or if he wants to sell at a high price, he will be naturally influenced by this motive to declare a dividend. If, on the other hand, he who best of all knows how prosperous the Company is, desires to purchase more of this stock at a low price, he will be tempted not to declare a dividend. The stock will fall and he will be able to make a large profit by purchasing. In this manner directors are always able, if they choose, to make money on the declaration of doubtful dividends; and this can be done without its being possible to impute any blame to them, for a declaration of a dividend is always a matter of judgment. It is wise to put aside a certain part of the profits as a reserve to meet hard times, and just how much shall be put aside as a reserve and how much shall be paid out for dividends are matters on which it is very difficult for the best-intentioned men to agree. The directors, however, who control the company can make up their minds beforehand whether they will declare a dividend or not. If they propose to pass a dividend, they can sell as much as the market permits and buy back later at reduced prices. If they decide to declare a dividend, they can buy as much as the market permits and sell later at advanced prices. Again, there seems to be no standard of morality amongst bankers as regards the profits they make. In the ordinary walks of life, a man is expected to be able to explain what the services are for which he receives any considerable sum of money. This, however, does not seem to be the case with bankers. In 1893, the United States Congress appointed a committee to investigate the rumor that over a million dollars had been remitted to J.P. Morgan & Company, Winslow Lanier & Company and J. & W. Seligman for the purpose of corrupting Congress. Messrs. Morgan, Lanier and Seligman were obliged to admit that a sum of $1,200,000 had been divided among them, "apparently for the use of their names and for nothing else." When asked if it had been remitted for the purpose of corrupting Congress, they denied it; when asked if they were still in possession of this sum, they admitted they were; when asked what the services were for which they had received this sum, they naïvely stated that they did not know.[130] Such an admission made by a lawyer would be ground for having him disbarred. The very moral or immoral attitude that permits of bankers receiving enormous sums of money without being able to explain why these moneys were paid to them, pervades the whole financial atmosphere. The directors of our large corporations corrupt our legislatures; they endow universities and pervert our education; they support the churches and prevent them from preaching the doctrines of Christ; they determine elections so as to secure legislators whom they can control. They are masters, not only of our whole system of production and distribution, but of our government and our laws. And this democracy which in theory is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, turns out to be a government of the people, by financiers, for financiers. Nor does it seem possible to put an end to this condition of things so long as our system of production and distribution is competitive; for gold and silver have proved to be altogether the best mediums of exchange, and some medium of exchange we must have in order to carry on trade so long as that trade is left to individual initiative as at present. The whole community pays tribute to those who have gold and silver and those who handle it, and these last have a personal interest contrary to the interest of the public at moments of the greatest emergency. Competitive conditions have subjected the whole currency of the country to the control of a few men who thereby are masters of our commerce, our manufactures, our exports, our politics, our religion. In view of the fact that this small group practically governs the country in matters of legislation, and by virtue of a sort of class solidarity between the judges and the possessing class, governs the courts also, the men who determine the making and executing of our laws should, in a democracy such as ours, be elected by the people. But they are not elected by the people and they are not removable by the people. They are irremovable usurpers; they are created by economic conditions and, as long as these economic conditions last, they will continue to enjoy the power they now exercise. FOOTNOTES: [115] An article by Charles A. Conant in the _Atlantic Monthly_, Jan., 1908. [116] _Atlantic Monthly_, Charles A. Conant, Jan., 1908, p. 101. [117] Insurance Year Book: Life and Casualty sections, 1909, p. 236-7. [118] Statistical abstract of the U.S., 1908. [119] "Monetary and Banking Systems." By Maurice L. Muhleman, formerly U.S. Deputy Assistant Treasurer at New York. [120] Ibid. [121] According to computations made by Mr. James H. Brookmire on quotations of twenty representative railroad stocks, these reached at the highest point in 1906, 138. In March, these securities had gone down to 98. [122] N.Y. _Press_, Oct. 22, 1907. [123] See N.Y. _Times_, Jan. 30, 1909. [124] N.Y. _Times_, February 1, 1909. [125] The N.Y. _Times_, Jan. 7, 1909. [126] N.Y. _Sun_, Jan. 17, 1908. [127] Ibid., Jan. 30, 1908. [128] "A Money Market Primer," by George Clare. Recommended by the Council of the Institute of Bankers. Revised edition, London, 1896, p. 123. [129] July 16, 1909. [130] House Reports, 52d Congress, 2d Session, v. 3, No. 2615, p. 5. CHAPTER VII CAN THE EVILS OF CAPITALISM BE ELIMINATED BY COÖPERATION? One of our ablest captains of industry has lately collected articles and addresses on this subject in a book entitled, "Problems of the Day." If we were to eliminate from this book the errors under which Mr. Carnegie labors as to what Socialism is, we could make of it an admirable piece of Socialist propaganda. For Mr. Carnegie, although denouncing Socialism in every page, believes in giving the workingman an interest in the factory, and carries his belief in this system so far that he actually looks forward to the day when labor will reach "an equality with the millionaire as his partner in business."[131] He cites as an example of what could be done in this direction the Filene stores of Boston, the capital stock of which he says is held "exclusively by employees." Now this is exactly the system which modern Socialism wants to bring into existence. Because, therefore, Mr. Carnegie does not belong to the Platonic School of Socialism which suggests the breaking-up of the home and is denounced by all practical Socialists of to-day; and because he disapproves of the abolition of wealth, as do all practical Socialists of to-day, he deserves to occupy a front rank in our Socialist army for having put his finger upon the real evil--competition; and for having pointed the way to the real solution--the substitution, of coöperation for competition all through our industrial system. One thing, however, Mr. Carnegie has failed to appreciate: namely, that when all our industries are organized on the principle of the Filene stores--when, as Mr. Carnegie explains, the capital stock of every industry and department store is held exclusively by employees, the worker will not be the partner of the millionaire--he will have superseded him. I am afraid this is not what Mr. Carnegie wants, at least not in his day. But when he really wants this as much as in his book he seems to want it, Mr. Carnegie will be qualified to be a member of the Socialist party. There is an important distinction to be made between coöperation and coöperatives, because coöperatives may be divided into two very different classes: capitalistic coöperatives and socialistic coöperatives. The capitalistic coöperatives are either the efforts of capitalists to secure the fidelity of employees by giving them a minute share in the profits of the business, or the efforts of employees to benefit themselves by eliminating capitalists without eliminating capitalism; in other words, the fact that such coöperatives undertake to produce or distribute commodities under the competitive _régime_, converts them into capitalists. In marked contrast to these are the coöperative stores of Belgium, organized in part to improve the condition of those engaged in them, but also with the view of putting an end to capitalism altogether. These are performing a work of inestimable value to Socialism and the Socialist party in Belgium, while materially helping those who belong to them, they at the same time hold up as the standard aimed at, not the mere material improvement of themselves, but the ultimate triumph of an ideal. The field for coöperation is so vast that it cannot be traversed in the scope of this work. I shall close this subject therefore with the suggestion that all coöperatives--even the capitalistic--are good and useful, for they tend to educate. It is true that they may also occasion evil; as for example, the Steel Trust when it encourages employees to purchase stock, while it discourages and destroys trade-union organization, and thereby creates an aristocracy of labor which tends to prevent the sense of solidarity in labor ranks that Marxians regard as essential to the triumph of the Socialist cause. But the evil it does is probably compensated by the good. Incidentally it furnishes us Socialists with a triumphant answer to Mr. Carnegie: Here in his city of Pittsburg which he built up with his genius, is the principle of coöperation adopted which he regards as the solution of all our ills; yet it is this very Pittsburg that to-day furnishes to the whole world the most abominable picture of exploitation ever presented.[132] We Socialists are indeed fortunate that this picture has been drawn not by ourselves, but by those who are to-day the most intelligently opposing us. FOOTNOTES: [131] "Problems of the Day," by Andrew Carnegie, p. 76. [132] The Pittsburg Survey, published by the Russell Sage Foundation. BOOK III _WHAT SOCIALISM IS_ Socialism is too vast a subject to be brought within the four corners of any one definition. It is as impossible for a definition to convey an idea of Socialism as for an empty theater to convey the comedies, the idylls, and the tragedies nightly enacted on its boards. A definition can at best barely give the mechanism of Socialism; it cannot furnish a picture of the effect of that mechanism in eliminating misery, in promoting progress, in making character. This must be painted on a canvas--and on a large canvas--and on many canvases--for, as has been already urged, Socialism is not a simple thing; it is a highly complex thing; and it is only when we have grasped _all_ that Socialism will effect--when we have studied its economic results, its political results, its scientific results, and its ethical results--that we can appreciate this new Gospel of the Poor. Socialism not only derives strength from each of these results, it unites the divergencies between economics and politics, and solves the conflict between science and religion. So that these four great departments of human thought, instead of being independent or actually in conflict with one another, find themselves in Socialism united in one great harmonious whole. Just as Christianity derived its strength from the discontent of the oppressed, so Socialism has pushed its first roots in the misery of the proletariat. But we do not judge of a flower exclusively from its roots. So must we not judge Socialism exclusively from that part of it which at present flourishes in dark tenements and in the misery of the unemployed. It is our fault that the tenements are dark, that the unemployed suffer. It will be our fault if Socialism remains the Gospel of the Poor when we can make of it the final Gospel of the whole human race. For humanity has nearly finished the first great phase of its existence; it has played the rôle of the worm long enough; already is it cribbed, cabined, and confined by silk threads of its own weaving that for a hundred years the cocoon has been accumulating about it, repressing here, regulating there, till it is stifling under limitations created by itself. But the very pressure of these limitations has been developing new functions in us--a conscience restive under false standards, a capacity for wider sympathies--the wings of the grub, destined to burst the chrysalis of worn-out prejudices, regulations, legislations, and despotisms; to spread out into new spaces where there shall be development and happiness. Whether these hopes are well founded or not is the subject of our inquiry, beginning first with Economics--the roots of our flower; proceeding then to Politics--its stem; next to Science--its structure, and lastly to Morality and Religion--its blossom and its fruit. And if I group Morality and Religion, it is because these have both from the beginning of years and not always hand in hand, been groping after the same thing--Happiness. CHAPTER I THE ECONOMIC ASPECT OF SOCIALISM Let us begin by considering how large a part of our population is now devoting its entire time to the work of competition, as distinguished from that which is devoting its time to the task of production. It is obvious that all who are devoting their time to the work of competition would, in a coöperative commonwealth, be free to give their entire time to production; and the time they gave to production would be so much taken away from the time which those now engaged in production have to give to it. For example, the United States to-day keeps alive, according to the census of 1900, over 76,000,000 men, women, and children; of these the working population is estimated at a little over 29,000,000, of which, however, many are not engaged in production or distribution; as for example, actors, clergymen, lawyers, soldiers; and although some others, such as journalists, physicians, and surgeons, are not occupied in production and distribution, they nevertheless are so necessary to every community that they may be regarded as a part of the working population. The percentage excluded, however, by excluding those not engaged in production and distribution, is so small that it is not worth while taking them into account; and for purposes of easy calculation we should, therefore, consider the whole population in round figures--75,000,000, of which 30,000,000 are engaged in production and distribution, the remaining 45,000,000 consisting of the aged, sick, women, and children who cannot work and in fact, all who by wealth or disability are deprived of the necessity of working. Now if, of the 30,000,000 who do the work of production, it is found that 15,000,000, or one-half, are engaged in work that results from the competitive character of our industrial system, it is clear that in a Socialist community in which there is no competition, these 15,000,000 would be applied to the work of production; and therefore every man would have to work only one-half the number of hours he now works in order to keep the community alive. Let us see if we can form any idea how many are engaged in the wasteful work of competition, and how many, therefore, would in a Socialist society be set free to relieve the labor of those engaged in production. It is conceded that of every one hundred men who start a new business ninety become insolvent. This means that for every ten fit and able to conduct a new business ninety engage in new business who are unable to earn their bread at it. In a coöperative commonwealth the exact number of men necessary to conduct business in any given place could be mathematically determined; and the ninety unsuccessful men who are now engaged in futile efforts to destroy the business of the ten successful men would be employed in production to their own advantage and to the relief of those already engaged therein. The wastefulness, however, of the present plan is not confined to the circumstance that many are engaged in attempting to do what can better be done by a few, but is increased by the fact that in the conflict between the successful and the unsuccessful a vast horde of men are employed by competition, who would be thrown out of employment and therefore be serviceable for production in case competition were avoided. Amongst the men so employed are commercial travellers; these men occasion waste to the community, not only because instead of themselves producing they are living on the production of others, but because they constitute a large part of the passenger traffic of the country. The railroads are put to the expense of carrying these travellers all over the United States that they may each have an opportunity in every corner of the United States of decrying the goods of one another. And this throws a side light on the evils of our present plan, for the railroads have an interest in encouraging this work. If they did not have this horde of commercial travellers to carry about the country, many of them might not be able to pay interest on their bonds. The testimony taken by the Industrial Commission furnishes admirable instances of the waste attending competitive production and the corresponding economy that would attend a Socialist system. Mr. Edson Bradley, President of the American Spirits Manufacturing Company, testifies that in the whisky business "somewhere between the distiller and the consumer in this country, $40,000,000 is lost. This goes primarily to the attempt to secure trade."[133] Now the whole capital invested in liquors and beverages is, according to the last census, $660,000,000, whereas the total manufactures amount to about $12,686,000,000. It will be seen, therefore, that the capital invested in liquors and beverages is about one-twentieth of that invested in other manufactures. If, therefore, $40,000,000 are lost in getting the trade in the liquor business, it may be inferred that twenty times this amount--that is to say, $800,000,000--are lost in getting the trade by all the manufactures in the country. This represents only the expense of advertising in manufactures; it does not cover the advertising done by the whole retail trade, the department stores, insurance companies--life insurance, fire insurance, title insurance--real estate agents, quack medicines, and that vast body of population known as middlemen, who raise the price of commodities to the consumer and whose services would be eliminated in a coöperative commonwealth. This latter class of advertising is very much larger than that of the manufacturer, because it is the peculiar function of the retailer to sell--to get the market--and the burden of advertising falls heavier upon him. If $800,000,000 therefore represents the cost to the manufacturer of getting the market, it is probable that the total cost of getting the market by the whole community does not fall short of twice this sum. The advertiser practically pays the whole cost of printing and publishing the innumerable newspapers and magazines of this country. The one cent paid for such a paper as the _American_ does not cover the cost of the paper alone; it is the advertisements that pay handsomely for all the rest. Advertising would be unnecessary in a coöperative system, where practically everything would be furnished by a single industry. As the Reverend E. Ellis Carr says,[134] the United States Government does not find it necessary to advertise postage stamps. The Standard Oil no longer advertises oil. Those of us who are old enough remember how, prior to the organization of the oil trust, our fences were placarded by the rival claims of a dozen different oils: Pratt's Astral oil, etc., in letters of huge and ungainly size. The only advertising necessary would be that of private enterprises started in such industries as did not give satisfaction to the public, and these, it is to be hoped, would be relatively small. Mr. Dowe, President of the Commercial Travellers' National League, testified[135] that "35,000 salesmen had been thrown out of employment by the organization of trusts and 25,000 reduced to two-thirds of their previous salaries.... The Baking Powder Trust has replaced men at $4000 to $5000 a year by others at $18 a week.... The displacement of travelling men represents also large loss to railways, amounting, on the estimate that each traveller spends $2.50 a day for 240 days, to $27,000,000, while the loss to hotels would be at least as much as to railways." Adding up these losses, we reach the following result: 35,000 salesmen at an average compensation (including commissions) of $3000 each a year $105,000,000 Loss in railroad travelling 27,000,000 Loss in hotel expenses 27,000,000 ------------ Together $159,000,000 In the few industries, therefore, in which competition has been diminished by the trust system, an economy of $159,000,000 was estimated to have been already effected in the employment of salesmen alone. And this was ten years ago. These figures enable us to appreciate the enormous economy that would result from an elimination of competition from our industries. An economy that constitutes a loss to commercial travellers, railroads, and hotels under the competitive system would constitute a pure gain to a Socialist community; for it would mean so much more labor for production. Our present system then encourages useless expenditure, whereas Socialism would eliminate it. Another important economy would be made in the running of public enterprises, through the absence of the necessity of collecting revenue therefrom. In municipal tramways, for example, one-half the force could be dispensed with, for the functions of the conductor are practically confined to collecting fares. A similar economy would be practised on railroads; in telegrams; no stamps would be required for postage; no costly corps of clerks for bookkeeping. Under our system gas is furnished to our cities by gas companies, each one of which tears up the streets at great detriment to public convenience and health, to lay its mains for the mere purpose of competing with existing companies, with the result of forcing a consolidation which tends to make gas dearer instead of cheaper to the consumer. Professor Ely estimates[136] that the consolidation of gas companies in Baltimore has cost eighteen millions, of which ten millions represent pure loss. Much the same thing is true of railroads. Professor Ely quotes a railroad manager who states that if the railways of the United States were managed as a unit instead of by competing companies, such management would effect an economy of two hundred million dollars a year; he cites, as an instance of useless paralleling of roads, the numerous railroads which connect New York with Chicago. He estimates that these lines cost two hundred million dollars, and that the maintenance of the useless lines involves perpetual loss. To-day, when railroads have doubled in length and traffic, the possible economy may well be estimated at twice this amount. He is obliged, however, to admit that the paralleling of railroads results in considerable accommodation, when parallel lines pass through different places and occasion some advantage in the time-table. With many lines in the United States this, however, is not the case. The Colorado Midland parallels the Denver and Rio Grande, passing through virtually the same places, and as both are subjected to the necessity of connecting and forwarding passengers to lines at their extremities, both are obliged to run trains at the same hours. There is in this case no advantage either to the time-table or to new places. Nor does the competition of parallel roads always furnish better accommodation to the public. Between Chicago and Denver one line is able easily to run trains from place to place in twenty-four hours; but for the purpose of avoiding a freight war with competing lines, it has entered into an arrangement with them under which it agrees not to run passenger trains in less than thirty-six hours. The public, therefore, instead of gaining, loses an advantage of twelve hours, thereby learning at no small inconvenience that competition does not always compete. What is true of the railroads and gas companies is also true of telegraph business. The Western Union was capitalized at one hundred million dollars. It is estimated that the cost of laying the lines actually used by the Western Union was not more than twenty millions; eighty million dollars, therefore, have been wasted by the existing system, which encourages private companies to construct lines with the result of compelling other companies to buy them up. Professor Ely adds that "it cost England nearly as much to make the telegraph a part of the postoffice as it did all the other countries of Europe put together, because in these the telegraph has been from the beginning a part of the postoffice, and the wastes of competition had been avoided."[137] Another most wasteful feature attending our present system is the expense of distributing goods; for example, the articles which enter most into our daily life, milk, bread, butter, eggs, meat, fish, and vegetables. Compare the method of distributing these things with that for distributing letters adopted by the postoffice. The fact that the government is the only instrumentality through which letters are distributed permits it to effect economy in time, labor, and expense by sorting the letters beforehand according to streets and confining the distribution in any one street to a single carrier, who distributes the letters door by door. This is the economical system for distributing all things in regular use that would be adopted by the Socialist plan. Compare this now with the plan necessitated by the competitive system. Every block is served with milk by a number of milk dealers instead of by one;[138] every block is furnished with bread by a very large number of dealers instead of by one; every block is furnished with meat by a very large number of dealers instead of by one; and so on through every article which enters into our daily use. Not only is there great waste of labor in the business of producing and distributing the necessaries of life under the competitive system, but the system itself creates a large class of business that absorbs much of the wealth of the community and employs a very large number of its members. For example, under a socialist system there would no longer be any necessity or advantage in insurance, whether against death or fire, or accident, or hail, or defective title, or any other danger. The reason of this is obvious: we insure against pecuniary loss arising out of these accidents because otherwise the whole loss will fall upon ourselves. In a Socialist society some of occasions for loss would not exist at all, and those that did exist would fall upon the entire people and would consequently be inappreciable by any one member of it. For example, a man insures his life so that his children will not be reduced to poverty by his death; but in the Socialist society the widow and the child are provided for, being all of them members and all sharers in its income. Death in such a case would practically not constitute a loss to the state financially, because the number of deaths of the very old and the very young--the unproductive members of the community--is far greater than that of its productive members. Insurance companies are beginning to understand the importance of keeping their policy holders in good health. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company is to-day maintaining nurses for this purpose. Another business that would be eliminated in a Socialist state is the entire business done by brokers; not only Wall Street brokers, but real estate brokers, mining brokers, and brokers of every description, in so far as they are engaged in competition. The abolition of Wall Street would carry with it the abolition of gambling in stocks which is a necessary feature thereof. No law has yet been devised, though the attempt has often been made, that would, so long as the competitive system endures, put a stop to gambling in stocks. A law which would successfully stop gambling in stocks would stop legitimate dealing in stocks also. But the immoral element involved in "puts" and "calls" is only an exaggeration of the immoral element involved in all industrial transactions built upon the principle of private profit. For although business can be conducted in such a way as only to furnish to those engaged in it a fair remuneration, it perpetually furnishes a temptation to contrive so that it shall furnish a large rather than a fair return. In fact, the whole struggle of business consists in endeavoring to secure the largest return of profit for the least expenditure of labor. The man who succeeds in getting the largest return for the least expenditure is the successful business man; and no man does this with more security than the next class to which attention may be called, whose occupation would come to an end in the Socialist state; namely, the bankers. It would take too long to enter here into an accurate and fair estimate of the service rendered by the banker and the reward he obtains for it. Most writers who favor Socialism undervalue the functions of the banker. They are so impressed by the enormous incomes which bankers make that they do not appreciate the great services they render; and although, in a Socialist state, the banker _qua_ banker would tend to disappear, the man who to-day does the work of a banker would, it is hoped, do the same work for the state. So that although the business of banking would disappear, the best form of government would be that in which individuals who have been discovered to be best fitted for the onerous and difficult duties of finance would be those to whom these duties would be intrusted. Whether the man best fitted to do this difficult work would be intrusted with it under the Socialist plan is a doubt raised as an objection to Socialism which will be considered later.[139] Another large class of intelligent men, now engaged in carrying on the quarrels which result from the competitive system, would be left without an occupation under the Socialist plan; namely, the lawyers. With them, the hatred and vindictiveness which arise from litigation would in a Socialist society, in great part, disappear also. For lawyers constitute the class whose business it is to conduct these quarrels, and, alas! also to inflame them. When we consider that in New York city alone there are nearly ten thousand practising lawyers, and add to these the clerks, stenographers, bookkeepers, and office-boys employed by each of them, those employed in the courts, the sheriff's office, the county clerk's office, marshals, deputy sheriffs, and others; and take into account that most of these men are engaged in fighting, we cannot but be struck by the enormous advantage to the community of a system which would practically eliminate this class altogether. I must not be understood to mean, however, that there would be no necessity for courts under the Socialist plan. Even though crimes against property were eliminated by Socialism, there would still be a temptation to commit crime, owing to sexual jealousy and in a certain degree to intemperance and idleness. It cannot be doubted that intemperance and idleness would tend to diminish with the disappearance of the misery that reduces men to the physical condition that engenders these vices, but there would still, doubtless, be some intemperance and some idleness; there would certainly remain unhappy marriages; and as every man is to remain possessed of a small amount of property there would be minute questions of property sometimes involved. But it is hardly conceivable that such questions could involve any system of justice more elaborate than that of the justice of the peace, and possibly a single court of appeal. The diminution of competition would so simplify the law that no question would be likely to arise that the parties to the litigation could not themselves explain. How little litigation would be likely under a Socialist _régime_ may be judged by comparing the litigation to which the administration of the postoffice gives rise with the interminable lawsuits which result from the administration of railroads.[140] Moreover, it is to be hoped that a Socialist community would at last have leisure to study criminology and to understand that the criminal has to be treated as a sick man rather than a wicked one. The whole system of criminal procedure would be changed, and the type now known as the criminal lawyer would disappear. The existing system, under which every prosecuting officer considers his reputation involved in securing the punishment of every accused person brought before the court,[141] necessarily gives rise to a corresponding class of lawyer who regards his reputation as well as his fee involved in opposing the efforts of the prosecuting officer by any means, however unjustifiable. Of course, to the extent to which the competitive system was left standing, there would have to be lawyers to protect competitive interests. But these lawyers would be supported by the competitive system. If, now, we consider that the large number of men liberated by the substitution of Socialism for our present form of government would not only diminish the labor of those now engaged in production, but that it constitutes the part of our population engaged in fanning the flame of hatred in the minds of men, the advantage to a community of having this perpetual source of trouble removed will be obvious. But we are not concerned so much now with the reduction of hatred under the Socialist plan as with its economy. Let us next pass to the consideration of the wastefulness involved in the field of production itself: In 1894 horses in the West became so valueless that they were left unbranded by their owners, lest the branding of them involve the payment of taxes thereupon. Cattle, on the other hand, have of late risen in value; the price of them fell so low some time ago as to involve the ruin of all those largely engaged in raising them; but to-day everyone is rushing back into this business. This state of things furnishes a fair opportunity of judging how imperfectly informed the producer is as to the needs of the community. _He is only informed that the community is overstocked with an article by being ruined in the course of producing it._ This plan is not only productive of misery to a large number of individuals in every community, but is necessarily an extremely wasteful one. The object of every community ought to be to produce the things it needs, not the things it does not need. The present system, on the contrary, obliges the community to be continually producing the things it does not need as the only means by which it can arrive at a knowledge of what it does need. For under the existing system, overproduction occasions a surplusage of things in themselves valuable, but the exchange value of which has been diminished by their abundance. And the producer cannot afford to keep this surplusage, because he has fixed charges to pay. He has to sell his crop at a loss because he must have money to pay rent, or interest on mortgage, or salaries, or for his own support during the year. It is this pressure he is under to sell which impoverishes him. And its consequences are far-reaching; for as the price of raw cotton goes down, cotton manufacturers are encouraged to buy, and to increase the output of their factories; and so overproduction of raw material tends to result in overproduction of manufactured goods. In a Socialist society the industry or good harvest of one year would have for effect a diminution of labor the next; or greater comfort or luxury next year for the same labor; no man's labor would be lost, and the bountifulness of Nature would be a blessing and not, as now, a misfortune. The efforts to prevent the overproduction of cotton in the South gave rise to a convention in 1892, regarding which Professor Ely quotes a telegram from Memphis, January 8, as follows: "That the farmers of the South are in earnest in their endeavors to solve the serious problems of overproduction of cotton is evinced by the enthusiastic meeting of delegates to the convention of the Mississippi Valley Cotton Growers' Association, which was called to order in this city this morning."[142] And again the speech of the President of the Boston Chamber of Commerce: "In 1890 we harvested a cotton crop of over eight million bales--several hundred thousand bales more than the world could consume. Had the crops of the present year been equally large, it would have been an appalling calamity to the section of our country that devotes so large a portion of its labor and capital to the raising of cotton."[143] Nothing could better illustrate the evil of our present system and the benefits of Socialism than such a state of things as is described in the speech already quoted from the President of the Boston Chamber of Commerce.[144] If in a Socialist Society more bales of cotton were produced in any given year than the community or the world could consume, the community would store away the unused cotton and modify its agriculture in a manner to bring the cotton crop into proper relation to existing needs. But such an event could not be an "appalling calamity"; it could not be anything but a benefit; so much more wealth for the community; so much less labor for its citizens. And what is true of the cotton crop is equally true of all other crops. Overproduction is impossible in a coöperative community, for all the overproduction of one year would mean less work in that particular kind of production the next. Every citizen in the community would profit by so-called overproduction instead of, as now, suffering from it. Overproduction is closely allied to invention, which, as is well known, has been a source of despair to workingmen; for improvements in machinery almost always throw large numbers of them out of employment. In India, as has been described, the destruction of hand-loom weavers by machinery brought about a misery hardly paralleled in the history of war; "the bones of the cotton-weavers are bleaching on the plains of India." Yet invention, far from bringing distress to the workingmen, as under our system it must, would in a coöperative commonwealth prove an unqualified advantage. For every invention that increases the efficiency of human labor diminishes the amount of time that must be spent in labor to obtain the same result. In a coöperative state the saving of labor is a benefit to every individual in the community, whereas under the competitive system the saving of labor is of immediate benefit to the owner of the patent alone, and means immediate distress to the laborers it particularly affects. A standard objection to Socialism is that it would remove all stimulus to invention. This I believe to be a profound mistake. In the first place, inventors are not always urged to invention by the prospect of financial reward. The great discoveries of humanity, at the basis of all our practical advances, were made by men who neither sought nor obtained a reward therefor. It was not with the view of making money that Newton discovered and propounded the laws of gravity, or Ohm the laws of electrical resistance. Nor do inventors to-day reap the reward of their inventions. Capitalists often have an interest in suppressing inventions; for inventions generally involve the expensive transformation of existing plants. For example, Mr. Babbage[145] describes how a patent for welding gun-barrels by machinery had long been unused because of the cheapness of hand labor; but as soon as a strike forced up wages recourse was had to the patent, which until then had been neglected. Capitalists often prefer to dispense with an improvement rather than go to the expense which improvements generally occasion. This was the unwritten motive for the opposition of England to the construction of the Suez Canal, and was believed by M. DeLesseps to be the motive of their opposition to the Panama Canal.[146] Again, no one who has had personal acquaintance with inventors can believe that their discoveries are to any material extent the result of financial motive. It would be difficult to imagine the conditions under which Edison and Maxim would not invent. They cannot help inventing; they are as much under a necessity to invent as a hen to lay eggs. Undoubtedly there are certain environments which favor the production and utilization of inventing types, and others that disfavor the production and utilization of such types. And undoubtedly a motive for invention is a part of the environment which does contribute to invention; but would such a motive be wanting in a Socialist society? I think it can be shown that it would not only be present, but would be a stronger motive in the Socialist society than in our own; for under our own the reward which an inventor receives for an invention is a patent, and a patent is, as all lawyers will testify, merely a subject for litigation. In other words, every man who invents a useful thing has to overcome the objections of the patent office; the objections of infringers; the objections of owners of machines which would be superseded, all three obstacles of no small order. And not until they are all overcome, if indeed, they are, is the patent likely to be a source of income to the inventor. Under the Socialist order, however, every man is interested in increasing the productiveness of society to diminish the hours of labor; and nothing, moreover, would be easier than for a Socialist Society exceptionally to reward invention by diminishing the hours of labor due to it by the inventor. If an inventor by any one invention shortened the hours of labor in an aggregate amount equivalent to a lifetime of his own work for the community, he ought to be relieved of the necessity of himself doing further work. If the invention were clearly due to inventive skill and not to accident, it would be to the interest of the industry in which he was engaged to furnish him with a laboratory where he could experiment with a view to further invention, as the General Electric Company does for its inventors and Mr. Westinghouse for his. There is not one inventor in a hundred but would laboriously avail of such an opportunity; for the delight of an inventor is to invent. So inventors would constitute one of the Honor group of the community. They would receive during their lives the consideration due to their inventiveness and industry. At present the enormous majority of inventors die poor and unknown. Of all the inventors in America only three that I know of are rich, Westinghouse, Bell, and Edison. Practically all the rest have been victims of their own inventive faculty. Who knows the name of the inventor of the slot machine so much in vogue to-day? His name was Percival Everitt, and he died a pauper in the street. But we need not have recourse to argument to demonstrate that pecuniary reward is not necessary to stimulate invention. There is one profession in which a germ of self-respect has established the rule that no discovery or invention shall receive pecuniary reward--the medical profession. No doctor who wants to keep or earn a standing patents a medicine or surgical instrument. Those who do so are at once ostracized. Medicine or surgical inventions are deemed by self-respecting doctors too important to the community for the inventor to limit their use by patent. If this idea of social service to-day animates the medical profession, why should it not ultimately animate other professions, other industries, other occupations? Why should it not animate them all? Another profession has furnished the elements for all invention and has never asked a pecuniary reward--I mean the teachers. If, for example, we take such a subject as electricity, it will be found that all the fundamental discoveries that enable the modern use of electricity are due entirely to the researches of men who, out of sheer love of the work, added research to the occupations for which they were paid. Sir Isaac Newton was the first to discover the use of glass as a non-conductor of electricity. Galvani and Volta, who gave their names--one to Galvanic, and the other to Voltaic electricity--were professors in Italy. The action of the electric current on a compass needle was discovered by Professor H.O. Oersted in Copenhagen; and the nature of electro-motive force, current strength and resistance, were determined by Professor G.S. Ohm in Holland. But the greatest discoveries of all were made by Faraday, who refused a title in order to remain a professor all the days of his life. Is it possible that with the record of these men before us, we can maintain the theory that gain is the only stimulus to invention? If we think a little, we shall see how essentially childish this notion is. There are three principal motives for invention: The desire to make money is one, but my experience of inventors has persuaded me that it is the least, and is only perceptible in inventors of the smallest caliber. The faculty of invention is itself the determining motive. A man who has a faculty _must_ exercise that faculty or suffer. The artist _must_ paint; the sculptor _must_ sculpt; the musician _must_ make music; the poet _must_ make rhymes. Lowell said that when he had no time to state a proposition carefully in prose, he stated it in rhyme. No one who has worked with inventors would be guilty of the error that inventors need the stimulus of money reward. The mind of the inventor teems with inventions as a herring at spawning season teems with spawn. And as the herring must relieve herself of her spawn so must the inventor relieve himself of his inventions. One great inventor of the present day was in 1883 so fertile that the company who had secured his exclusive services paid him to go to Europe and stop inventing in order to avoid the ruinous expense of taking out his patents. The inventor is driven by two forces: a function that insists upon being exercised, and the pleasure which this exercise occasions. Every man who can do a thing well loves doing that thing. To-day when athletics bring notoriety it is very natural to conclude that men row to get this notoriety. But in the old days when there was little or no notoriety, men who could row, rowed for the pleasure of it; men who could box, boxed for the pleasure of it. So to-day because a few inventors--a very few--have become wealthy, the conclusion is drawn that inventors invent only to make money. It is a pardonable fallacy, but one that it takes very little intellectual effort to explode. A man gifted with curiosity and imagination will forget altogether the needs of the body in his effort to attain his end. Inventors are notoriously improvident. Bernard Palissy not only forgot to eat, but to furnish food to his wife and children. Nay, he not only starved himself and them, but burned his furniture to the last chair in his desperate efforts to get the glaze he was in search of. A chemist will forget mealtime and bedtime in his laboratory. There is no force in the world more compelling than the force of an idea; none to which the body is under a more complete subjection. An inventor in pursuit of a solution needs no more stimulus than a stag in the rutting season in pursuit of his doe. The theory that he does, and that it is the stimulus of money that he needs, is that of the amateur who has never seen an inventor at work, or of the bookkeeper who reduces everything--body, mind, soul, and heart--to dollars and cents. An inventor may have been compelled to abandon research by the necessity of making money or by the difficulty of finding it. Many an one has been crushed by just such difficulties as these; and indeed it may justly be said that more inventions are lost to us by the money difficulty than are secured to us by the stimulus of a money reward. A third motive is the desire for consideration which is at the bottom of many other desires--at the bottom even of the desire for money itself. For if we analyze the desire for money we shall perceive that it includes two very different motives: the motive of prudence--the desire to secure the comforts and luxuries of life; and the motive of ambition, or the desire for the consideration of others. Now the former is the first in time, for a man must begin by securing the material things of life. But once these are secured the motive that keeps men making money is desire for consideration. And this desire, though evil when excessive, is in moderation one of the greatest of human virtues; for it sets men upon deserving the affection of their neighbors and promotes unselfishness and self-sacrifice. One of the curses of the competitive system is that the desire for consideration, which in its essence is a virtue, is converted by our money system into a vice, because money is the chief instrument in securing consideration.[147] More will have to be said on this subject later. Here we may content ourselves with noting that in a Socialist society consideration will be secured not meretriciously through money, but deservedly through service. The inventor who shortens hours of labor for the community will belong to the Honor Roll. He will secure this recognition not after having forced his invention on the capitalist and fought its merits through the courts, created unemployment for his fellows, and crushed competition out of the field his patent covers--but directly from the industry he has benefited, without the waste that attends the establishing of patent rights to-day. The inventor under Socialism will have a stronger stimulus than he has to-day; for the chances of securing livelihood and consideration are certainly not more than one in a hundred, whereas under Socialism they will be a hundred to one. There will not be the opposition of invested capital to overcome; nor the hostility of his fellow-workman; nor the villainy of the infringer. If his invention can reduce the hours of labor or otherwise benefit the community, it will be hailed with delight and honor. And so even though he need no stimulus he will under Socialism have it; for his reward will be prompt and secure. Moreover, as Professor Ely has pointed out, the tendency of invention in a Socialist state would be to replace work which now involves drudgery by machinery that would tend to lessen or eliminate it. If it were conceivable that a law could be made or enforced requiring that millionaires, and none but millionaires, were to serve as stokers, there is no doubt that all the ingenuity in the land would at once be put to making the work of stoking less detestable than it now is; if necessary, naval architecture would be so reformed from top to bottom, as to reduce the work of stoking to that pressure of a finger upon a button which is the only physical work imposed by modern conditions upon the millionaire to-day. The improvements due to invention would in a Socialist society differ, perhaps, in character but not in quantity, for invention obeys the particular stimulus which gives rise to it. Thus Karl Marx points out[148] that mechanical traction was not introduced into mines until a law forbade the use of women and children there, and the "half-time system stimulated the invention of the piecing-machine," thereby replacing child labor in woolen-yarn manufacture. Again, immense improvements have been made in charging and drawing gas retorts, owing to labor troubles, and there is no doubt that all arduous work would soon be made less arduous if we all had to take a turn at it. The objection that Socialism, would destroy the stimulus to invention has been treated at what may seem disproportionate length on account of its extreme importance. For it is owing to human inventiveness that production to-day tends to outstrip consumption. Of all the speculations upon the possible advantages of a new social order those which concern themselves with the shortening of the average working day are the most fascinating, yet the most dangerous. They are fascinating because, of the many afflictions of the present order it is the excessive workday that we feel most, for it is that which robs so many of us or our need of personal life; and we know that any reduction of the hours of labor would mean an immediate increase in the quantity, and an ultimate increase in the quality, of our life. But they are dangerous speculations because they probe to the very heart of that wonderfully complicated economic process which we call Capitalism. To make any scientific estimate of the social labor time required to produce the commodities socially necessary for our health and happiness would require an elaborate and intimate investigation of the most secret details of industry, trade, and transportation, such as there is little likelihood of ever being made. Nevertheless, it is possible, in the light of some data already at our command, to get a suggestive glimpse into the probabilities of the situation. The 13th Annual Report of the Bureau of Labor is an exhaustive study of the actual time required to produce some 600 different commodities, ranging all the way from apple trees to loaves of bread and shingles. The principal object of this Report was to compare the cost of production by hand with the cost of production by machine; and it has demonstrated the enormous progress that has been made in the art of production by the substitution of machine for hand labor. For example, before the introduction of machine labor it took about sixty-three hours and a half to produce thirty bushels of barley; whereas to-day, with the use of machinery, the same amount can be produced in two hours and forty-two minutes (p. 24-5). The Report, in estimating the cost of producing, includes breaking the ground, sowing and covering seed and pulverizing topsoil, hauling water and fuel for engine, reaping, threshing, measuring, sacking and hauling to the granary (p. 432-3). Having these figures it would seem to be a very simple matter to ascertain the total time required to produce the various commodities consumed by the average workingman's family. It would seem as though all we had to do was to make out a list of these commodities, get the time cost of each from the Report and add these together to get the total. Unfortunately, however, the Report does not cover all the items which would have to be included in this list of necessaries; and to make an estimate from a single commodity or from two or three commodities would be a little dangerous, because some of the commodities have much higher time values than others and would therefore introduce many elements of uncertainty. But we may approach the question from another standpoint. The Report does furnish the time value of ten of the principal crops and of bituminous coal. Let us, then, restate the problem in the following form: _Assuming social ownership of land (including bituminous coal lands) and modern machinery, how many hours' labor per day would be required to produce enough of the principal crops to sell at farm or mine for a sum sufficient to buy the necessaries of existence for the average family?_ The first step, obviously, is to determine what constitutes the necessaries of existence for the average American family. Here again we may resort to official statistics. In the year 1900-01 the U.S. Bureau of Labor entered upon an investigation of the income and expenditure of the average American family. Agents were sent out all over the country to collect data at first hand. These agents got reports from some 25,440 families, and the figures are tabulated and summarized in the 18th Annual Report of this Bureau.[149] These 25,000 families had the necessaries of existence, we know, simply because they managed to live, survive, and reproduce. Their average income was $749.50; their average expenditure, $699.24, thus representing a saving of $50 a year. But many of these families had boarders, many had grown-up children or wife at work, many had lodgers, so that the income was artificially increased or diminished by these factors. There were, however, 11,156 families among these which the report designates as "normal"; these were distinguished by the following characteristics: a husband at work; a wife at home; not more than five children--none over 14 years of age; no dependents, boarders, lodgers, or servants (p. 18). Good units, you see, from a statistical standpoint. Now, the average income of these normal families was $650.98; the average expenditure $617.80.[150] Here, then, we have over 10,000 families, of five persons each, who manage to live on $617.80 a year, without resorting to crime or charity. That they live in straitened conditions is undoubtedly true, but they are by no means submerged, for in their coöperation with the agents of the Bureau of Labor they all displayed qualities of intelligence which are not to be found among the submerged. In short, they were average self-respecting American workingmen's families. But let us assume that $617.80 is inadequate; let us provide a margin of safety by allowing $800 as the minimum for procuring the necessaries of existence.[151] Below is a table showing time cost per unit (bushels or pounds) of ten principal crops and of bituminous coal. This is derived from the tables on pages 24-25 of the 13th Annual Report of the Bureau of Labor, which are assumed to be accurate. ------------+-------------+--------------+---------+----------- | | Time Cost. | | Time Cost Commodity. | Quantity. +--------------+ Unit. | in | | Hrs. | Min. | | Minutes. ------------+-------------+------+-------+---------+----------- Barley | 30 bush. | 2 | 42.8 | 1 bush. | 5.427 Wheat | 40 " | 6 | 17.4 | 1 " | 9.435 Hay | 2 tons | 15 | 30.5 | 1 ton | 465.25 Oats | 40 bush. | 7 | 5.8 | 1 bush. | 10.645 Rice | 60 " | 17 | 2.5 | 1 " | 17.042 Rye | 25 " | 25 | 10 | 1 " | 60.40 Corn | 80 " | 42 | 38.1 | 1 " | 31.97 Potatoes | 220 " | 38 | ... | 1 " | 10.364 Tobacco | 2,750 lbs. | 606 | 5.1 | 1 lb. | 13.22 Cotton | 1,000 " | 78 | 42 | 1 " | 4.72 Bit. Coal | 200 tons | 379 | 36 | 1 ton | 113.88 ------------+-------------+------+-------+---------+----------- Having the time cost per unit of each of these commodities, let us now ascertain the time cost of the total crops of these produced in the United States. This is exhibited in the table on the next page, which is derived from the figures given in the Year Book of the Department of Agriculture, 1907, p. 668. These, too, are assumed to be accurate. We see from this table that the total time cost of these principal crops, if produced with modern machinery on a large scale, would be 185,759,513,000 minutes, and that the money value of these commodities, sold at farm or mine, is $3,214,510,707. If, then, it would require 185,759,513,000 minutes' labor to produce $3,214,510,707 worth of commodities, how much labor would be required to produce $800 worth of these commodities? This is a problem in simple proportion: $800: $3,214,510,707:: _x_ minutes: 185,759,513,000 minutes. Working this out we find that _x_ equals 46,230 minutes or 770 hours and 30 minutes. Estimating 300 working days to the year, this would seem to indicate that a social work-day of 2-½ hours should be sufficient to procure the necessaries of existence, valuing these at $800. ----------+-----------+--------------+---------+--------+----------- | Average |Average Total |Time | |Total Time | Annual |Value on Farm |Cost in | | Cost in Commodity.| Production| Dec. 1, |Minutes. | Unit. |Thousand | 1898-1907.| 1898-1907. | | |Minutes. ----------+-----------+--------------+---------+--------+----------- | Millions | | | | Barley | 117 bush.| $53,872,896| 5.427 | 1 bush.| 633,959 Wheat | 642 " | 444,206,221| 9.435 | 1 " | 6,057,270 Hay | 59 tons | 524,124,456| 465.25 | 1 ton | 27,449,750 Oats | 841 bush.| 265,595,639| 10.645 | 1 bush.| 8,952,445 Rice | 18 " | 14,594,913| 17.042 | 1 " | 305,756 Rye | 29 " | 16,527,099| 60.40 | 1 " | 1,751,600 Corn |2,309 " | 953,158,114| 31.977 | 1 " | 73,834,893 Potatoes | 255 " | 134,236,563| 10.364 | 1 " | 2,642,820 Tobacco | 743 lbs. | 59,548,881| 13.22 | 1 lb. | 9,822,460 Cotton |5,233 " | 457,787,442| 4.72 | 1 " | 24,699,760 Bit. Coal | 260 tons | 290,858,483| 113.88 | 1 ton | 29,608,800 | +--------------| | +----------- | |$3,214,510,707| | |185,759,513 ----------+-----------+--------------+---------+--------+----------- Before accepting the above conclusion, however, it will be necessary to make proper allowances for some important factors. First, the figures quoted from the Report do not include time spent on bookkeeping, upkeep, and repair of machinery, the time cost of the raw material, of the machinery, etc. All these items are certainly important, but we may safely assume that, taken together, they would probably not increase the total by fifty per cent. If, then, we allow an additional 1-¼ hours for these items, thus making the work-day 3-¾ hours, we shall be well within reason. Second, it is to be inferred that the ten crops for which the 13th Annual Report furnishes the time value were produced under unusually favorable conditions, if not actually on "bonanza" farms. It is true that the introduction (p. 12) affirms, in a blanket clause, "that the effort was made to ascertain, not the quantity of work that could be done under the most favorable conditions, but what was being accomplished steadily in everyday work"; nevertheless, in the absence of more specific information as to the actual conditions under which the units under discussion were farmed, we cannot ignore the doubt that arises in our minds. We may, however, offset this by two other factors which were quite conservative in our estimate: (1) In adopting the sum of $800 as a measure of the necessaries of existence, we have, as already shown, allowed nearly a third over and above the sum ($617.80) actually ascertained to be requisite in the years 1900-1901. (2) The figures in the 13th Annual Report are based upon investigations made from fifteen to twenty years ago, between 1890-95. The steady improvement in agricultural machinery which has been made since then would undoubtedly reduce the present time cost of these commodities very materially. It is not unreasonable, then, to urge that these factors counterbalance each other; but in order to be on the safe side let us add another quarter of an hour, thus making the probable work-day consist of a round four hours. We seem, then, to have warrant for believing that if agricultural production were socialized to-day a 1200-hour work-year would suffice to produce the necessaries, and an 1800-hour year, many of the luxuries, of existence for the community. This, arranged to suit the exigencies of agricultural production, might mean a twelve-hour workday for four or six summer months, as the case may be. Does this seem Utopian? Granted: all speculations of this sort must seem Utopian. And yet, if we look back a few centuries, we shall find, according to no less an authority than Thorold Rogers ("Six Centuries of Work and Wages"), that the English workman, during the fifteenth century and the first part of the sixteenth, lived, and lived well, on the product of an eight-hour-day. Is it, then, so fantastic to suppose that modern machinery, under a socialized system of production, could cut this day in two? The objection may be raised that this estimate is one-sided because it is based on figures for agricultural production only, whereas industrial production is really the more important half of the modern economic process; and that therefore the generalization could not apply to the whole economic process in a coöperative commonwealth. It is true, as already pointed out, that we do not have comprehensive data for all, or nearly all, the industrial products in actual use in the average household. But we have posited, hypothetically, a socialized agricultural community producing a quantity of goods which it can sell at the farm for an average $800 per family; this $800 sufficing, when brought to the village store or forwarded to the city, to buy the necessaries of existence for the family _at retail_. Now it is well known that under present conditions the retail price of any manufactured article comprises about one-third for actual cost of production, one-third for manufacturer's profits and accounting costs, and one-third for selling costs. In other words, every such article, when it reaches the ultimate consumer, is weighted down with a load of barnacles of trade-profits of innumerable middlemen, rents, dividends, cost of advertising, and other trade-getting devices, etc., etc. Part of this cost of distribution is undoubtedly legitimate and could not be dispensed with under any organization of society, no matter how scientific. The man engaged in producing the necessaries of life will always have to support the man engaged in transporting and distributing them, and the man engaged in manufacturing and repairing the machinery and other instruments of production necessary thereto. But it is impossible to believe that this auxiliary corps will ever, in a rational system of production, consume two-thirds of the ultimate retail value of most goods, as it does to-day. It would seem, therefore, that if the industrial community organized itself in the same fashion as our hypothetical agricultural community, the exchange value of its products, whether stated in terms of social labor, time, or money, or any other standard of value, would actually be lower than our estimate assumes. By how much our four-hour work-day would be reduced we have no means of determining, but it could hardly be increased. Probably, therefore, four hours will constitute the average daily labor in a coöperative commonwealth, and these ought to be sufficient to give to every citizen not only the necessaries and comforts now enjoyed by the middle class, but some of the luxuries enjoyed only by the millionaire. FOOTNOTES: [133] Report of the Industrial Commission, Vol. I, p. 829. [134] _Christian Socialist._ [135] Report of the Industrial Commission, Vol. I, Part I, p. 222. [136] "Socialism and Social Reform," p. 121. [137] "Socialism and Social Reform," p. 120. [138] It is stated that the retailing of milk in New York is practically confined to six companies. But the price of milk has not been reduced accordingly. The economies resulting from this combination have swelled the profits of these companies. The consumers gain nothing from it. And this is what is taking place with all trust articles. [139] Book III, Chapter III. [140] This is more true of railroads in the United States than in England, probably because competing roads have not been tolerated in England to the same extent as in our country. [141] The Thaw case furnishes an unfortunate illustration of this tendency. [142] Ely, "Socialism and Social Reform," p. 134. [143] Ely, "Socialism and Social Reform," p. 134. [144] Book II, Chapter I. This subject has been discussed in detail in "Government or Human Evolution," Book II, Chapter II, p. 273, _et seq._, by the author. [145] "Economy of Manufacture." Babbage (London, 1832), p. 246. [146] M. DeLesseps has stated that it cost England £100,000,000 to change its shipping so as to fit it for passage through the Suez Canal, and this expense applies more or less to change of machinery due to invention in every factory. [147] Book III, Chapter II. [148] "Capital," Part IV, Chapter XV. [149] Issued by the Government Printing Office in 1904, entitled, "Cost of Living and Retail Prices of Food." [150] "Cost of Living and Retail Prices of Food," pp. 18, 90-102, 516-93. [151] "The Standard of Living Among Workingmen's Families in New York City," by Robert Coit Chapin, Ph.B., Charities Publication Committee, 1909, p. 178, _et seq._ CHAPTER II ECONOMIC CONSTRUCTION OF THE COÖPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH Few things deterred me from a study of Socialism more than the prevailing error that it necessarily would subject us all to the tyranny of a state which would, because it owned all the sources of production, be able to dictate to every one of us the kind of work we should do and the hours during which we should do it. It must be admitted that this is the Socialism described by many authorities, amongst them Schäffle, in a book still widely read, entitled the "Quintessence of Socialism." But this book loses some of its authority when we remember that Schäffle followed it with another, entitled "Why Socialism is Impossible"; and assuredly the state Socialism described by Schäffle is extremely unattractive to the bourgeois mind. It is not so unattractive to the workingman, because he now has these things determined for him by his employer without having any security of employment. State Socialism, therefore, has no terrors for him. On the contrary, as the workingman expects that the Socialist society will be controlled by workingmen, he expects to that extent to be his own master; that is, he will control the society that controls him. State Socialism, therefore, is the form probably most in vogue amongst workingmen. They have not before their minds the history of previous revolutions which have for the most part only substituted one set of masters for another. They cannot be expected, therefore, to appreciate the profound change that comes over men when put into positions of power, the temptations to which they are exposed, and the errors which even the best intentioned are likely to commit. I do not mean to condemn state Socialism; for state Socialism veritably controlled by the people would probably furnish better government than that which we are now given at the hands of capitalists. But I shall not attempt to describe the economic structure that would prevail under state Socialism, because it has been already described; whereas I do not think that there has been any effort made to describe a coöperative commonwealth in which the state would have very little more power than that enjoyed by the government in England or Germany to-day. The difficulty of assigning tasks and of determining wages which makes Socialism impracticable to the bourgeois mind is a pure fiction, encouraged, I admit, by many Socialist writers who imagine that Socialism can only come by a sudden and violent transfer of political power from the capitalist to the proletariat, called revolution. As will more fully appear in the next chapter, the Political Aspect of Socialism, such a revolution is by no means necessary; for the coöperative commonwealth, as I understand it, need not be introduced by any sudden transfer of political power whatever. In one sense, indeed, Socialism has in part come. The _laissez faire_ school had barely announced their doctrine and proceeded to legislate in accordance therewith, before the abominable consequences of the _laissez faire_ doctrine became so obvious that steps had at once to be taken to put an end to it. So the idea that a man could do what he liked with his own, which resulted in working women in mines to an extent which reduced them to the condition of the lower animals, the use of children in factories to a degree imperilling the future of the race, the reduction of men to starvation wages, the pollution of rivers by factory products, the spread of cholera by unwholesome dwellings--all gave rise to a series of legislative acts which limited the right of a man to exploit women and children, compelled landlords to maintain sanitary dwellings, and prevented the pollution of waters by factory products altogether. All this legislation was an unconscious tribute to that solidarity of the human race which is at the root of Socialism. Nor was this all. The state and city could so obviously perform certain functions better and cheaper than private corporations that enterprise after enterprise was slowly taken from individuals and assumed by the state. The postoffice was the foremost of these. The municipalization of gas, water, and trams, the nationalization of railroads, telegraphs, and telephones, have been pursued as purely economic measures rendered necessary by considerations of social welfare. Indeed, England has been rushing towards Socialism with such rapidity that increasing rates gave the capitalists an excuse for frightening the public with threats of bankruptcy, and occasioned the reaction in municipal progress through which the country is now passing. But the forces behind Socialism are so overwhelming that they convert its very enemies into its unconscious prophets, priests, and promoters. Mr. Roosevelt, who has so lately entered the lists against Socialism, is with the exception perhaps of Pierpont Morgan and Rockefeller, the greatest practical Socialist in America. When Mr. Roosevelt called together the Governors of the States to consider what steps, if any, could be taken to prevent the shameful waste of our national resources by capitalistic enterprise, and when Mr. J.J. Hill in a remarkable summary counted up the awful loss to humanity involved in this waste, neither appears to have been aware that they were demonstrating to the world not only that Socialism was good, but that it was indispensable. When Rockefeller brought together the distillers of oil into a single deliberately planned body, eliminating the waste of individual competition, he does not seem to have been aware that he was demonstrating the amazing advantage of eliminating competition and slowly preparing an industry for nationalization. When Mr. Morgan did the same thing for the Steel Trust, and the Coal Trust, and when he tried to do the same thing for the railroads until checked by a blundering government,[152] he, too, was unaware that he was demonstrating the failure of the very capitalistic system for which he stands. So the idol they themselves set up for worship they are engaged in smashing all to pieces; and they none of them see the humor of it. When a horse refuses to return to his stable and balks when brought to its door, a simple device overcomes his resistance: His head is turned away from the door and he allows himself to be shoved without opposition hind end foremost into the stable which he declines to enter in the more usual way. Roosevelt, Rockefeller, and Pierpont Morgan are just like this balky horse. They loudly proclaim that under no consideration whatever will they proceed front side forward, and yet in the middle of these protestations they are going hind side forward faster than perhaps is prudent. The difference between Socialists and Messrs. Roosevelt, Rockefeller, and Pierpont Morgan is that Socialists consider it more dignified to move front side forward; more intelligent to see plainly where they are going, and proceed deliberately of their own motion instead of being pushed there backward by forces they pretend to ignore. § 1. HOW SOCIALISM MAY COME The many theories proposed as to how Socialism may come, can be generally classified into two: that it will come by revolution and that it will come by successive reforms. The so-called Marxian school calls itself revolutionary, and undoubtedly many members of this school are revolutionary, and have the idea that Socialism will come by revolution--by violence--while among the more thoughtful, this word is used to mean that Socialism will constitute revolution because it will transfer power from the exploiting class to the exploited class.[153] Others have confused ideas of the meaning of the word revolution in which the element of violence and that of the transfer of political power are more or less mixed. Socialism, of course, involves a transfer of political power, and since such a transfer is revolutionary, Socialism may be properly called revolutionary, though its coming may not be attended by violence. Many authors believe that Socialism will come by the use of extra political methods--not by successive reforms introduced by parliamentary methods, but by a general strike, or the conversion of the army, or adroit use of the conditions produced by war (as in Russia after the Japanese War). Some, again, believe that Socialism may come by the development of a secret society which will secure the support of a sufficient number of those in the possession of our military stores and military places to permit of a conquest of political power by force. To those it may be suggested that the days for the success of secret societies are over. Capitalistic society possesses machinery in the shape of the press and the secret service which would make the success of a secret society impossible. The slightest indiscretion of one of its members under feminine influence or that of drink would be sufficient to break up the entire plan. The capitalists are in possession of the army, the navy, the police, the militia, and above all, the weapons with which to arm all these. Recourse to bullets seems unnecessary and dangerous when our enemy has the bullets and we have not, all the more when the work can be equally well done with infinitely less disorder and agony if we only have recourse to the ballots which we have and they have not. When a sufficient number of men are persuaded that Socialism is the best solution of our present economic evils, they can get what they want the day they choose to use the ballot for that purpose; whereas recourse to violence would lead not only to immediate disaster, but to an indefinite postponing of the desired result. For a very large part of our population which would, then, as now, be in doubt as to the wisdom of adopting Socialism, would certainly be driven by violence into the capitalistic fold and a period of capitalistic reaction would result. This has been observed in so many revolutions in the past that it is unnecessary to insist upon it here. This must not be interpreted, however, as intending to eliminate violence as a possible factor in the coming of Socialism. Had Haywood been convicted it would have created an indignation so profound that a very widespread and dangerous uprising might have taken place, and although it would have been quelled, still, it is probable that such an uprising might have led to Socialistic legislation. It is as impossible to state beforehand how large a part violence will play in the coming of Socialism as to state how much contributed to remedial legislation in Ireland--the violence of 1798 and the 60's, or how much the parliamentary tactics of Parnell. Socialistic legislation is of two very different kinds, and these must be carefully distinguished. Bismarck inaugurated Socialistic legislation such as national insurance, intended, by taking away part of the grievance of the workingmen, to diminish their discontent and their reason for espousing Socialism. Indeed, since the beginning of the nineteenth century legislation more or less Socialistic has been enacted in every civilized country in the world, partly owing to the _bona fide_ desire on the part of legislators to put an end to evils that shocked their moral sense, but perhaps far more by legislators who thought to satisfy Cerberus with a sop. Socialistic legislation, therefore, enacted by capitalistic legislators for the purpose of appeasing popular discontent, does little towards promoting Socialism. Some Socialist writers claim that it does nothing to this end, but this view is extreme and I think incorrect. For example, it would be impossible for Socialism to come without violence had not the nations of the world been slowly conferring the franchise upon the class in whose interests and through whom Socialism will come. Socialistic legislation of a character to put the political weapon in the hands of the people, through which they can secure the transfer of political power from those who now enjoy it to themselves, is of the utmost value. Indeed, it is of so much value that those Marxian Socialists who protest against all compromise with capitalistic parties must have forgotten that it is through the capitalistic parties, and through compromises of Socialists with capitalistic parties, that these measures of political reform have been enacted. In Belgium to-day the Socialists are combining with the Radicals to wrest universal franchise from the Catholics. Again, Socialistic legislation which improves the condition of the working class, though it takes away a part of their grievance and does, to that extent, diminish the incentive to Socialism, nevertheless strengthens the workingmen, raises their standard of living and of thought, and gives them the very education and equipment they need in order to become Socialists. Nevertheless Socialistic legislation obtained from capitalistic legislators can never effect the final transfer of political power from the exploiting to the exploited class without which no Socialist commonwealth can be secured. Here, therefore, we see the elements which confuse this question of revolution and reform. The Marxian Socialists in Germany have seen Socialistic legislation enacted year after year and have seen it, by diminishing evils, tend to diminish enthusiasm for revolution. Moreover, revolutionary German Socialists, conscious that they have to destroy the existing political machinery represented by the Emperor, the nobles and the church; conscious too, that the farmer class is essentially capitalistic in its temper and thought, and despairing therefore of getting a parliamentary majority, naturally look to extra political methods as the only ones at their disposal. § 2. REFORM AND REVOLUTION There is great and regrettable confusion as regards the words reform and revolution. The Socialist party calls itself revolutionary, and as revolution is connected in the minds of most people with violence, the popular impression is that the Socialist party stands for violence. This is a profound mistake. The whole subject has been well treated by Kautsky, an authoritative leader of the Socialist party; and he distinctly disavows violence. Revolution to him is a "transfer of political power from one class to another." The French Revolution transferred political power from the king, the noble, and the church to the bourgeois. The Socialist revolution is to transfer political power from the bourgeois to the proletariat. Here a word of caution must be said: Socialist literature is written for the most part by the proletariat for the proletariat; and it is natural that it should abound in just such phrases as these. Not that the phrase is wrong or incorrect; rather is it incomplete. To-day, in France the Republic is largely supported by the nobles of yesterday; so also will the proletarian government of the Socialist revolution be largely supported by the bourgeois of to-day. The word revolution, therefore, is used here not to convey the idea of violence, but rather in the sense of the revolution of the planets, or of the seasons. It is as it were the closing of one cycle and the beginning of another. There is, of course, a great difference of opinion as to how this revolution is to be effected--whether by parliamentary methods or extra-parliamentary methods such as strikes. Into this subject, however, this book, being addressed to non-Socialists rather than to Socialists, will not enter. It is purely a question of tactics and may be said to have been solved in America for the present by the very existence of a Socialist party which puts up candidates at every election wherever feasible in order to do what can be done in the direction of Socialism by constitutional methods. There is, however, another use of the word revolution concerning which it is of the utmost importance to be clear. Socialists often say that "Socialism must come by revolution and not by reform." What is exactly the meaning of this sentence? What is the difference between reform and revolution? Reformers proceed upon the assumption that the competitive system is good and that capitalists can be entrusted with the task of reforming it so to eliminate its admitted evils. The revolutionary Socialist on the contrary says that the competitive system is bad and that the capitalist cannot be entrusted with the task of putting an end to it. So he decries mere reform and insists upon nothing less than revolution, the transfer of political power from the capitalist to the people at large. There is thus between the reformer and the revolutionary Socialist a difference of principle; the one upholding the competitive system and the other denouncing it. But there is also another difference of hardly less importance between the reformer and the revolutionary Socialist--a difference of method. A bourgeois reformer has no preconceived plan of reform. He hits at every evil like an Irishman at a fair--as he sees it. Governor Hughes, who belongs to this class, thought in 1908 that race track gambling was the greatest evil of existing conditions and devoted the entire session of the legislature to an anti-race track gambling bill which he triumphantly passed, only to see it nullified at the first opportunity by the courts. In 1909 he thought that a primary election bill was the most important reform; but this primary election bill failed to pass. The legislature, very much under his guidance, spent two years in passing a useless anti-race track gambling bill and refusing to pass a primary bill, although during these two years at least 200,000 men have been seeking employment and not finding it, and a population therefore of about a million[154] in New York State alone has been on the verge of starvation in consequence. The most striking feature of the bourgeois reformer is his lack of sense of proportion; but there is a reason for it. Unemployment is not a popular subject with the class to which Governor Hughes belongs. As an evil it is too merciless; as a resource it is too unavowable.[155] So it is impossible to get any legislature in any State in this Union effectively to consider the subject of unemployment. The Socialist, on the contrary, has a definite preconceived plan of legislative enactment. While the reformer, however well-intentioned and intelligent, is hacking away at random at the jungle of evils in which the competitive system encompasses him, and hardly ever attaining any substantial progress, the Socialist has his course directed for him by the polar star. He regards such bills as anti-race track gambling as a waste of time. Race-track gambling is a necessary and poisonous fruit of the competitive system. It is useless to attack the fruit and leave the tree standing. The only legislation, therefore, that interests the Socialist looks towards putting an end or a check to the competitive system that results in the exploitation of the Many by the Few. And of all the evils the one that has stood out most startling and appalling during the last two years is the evil of unemployment. The immediate demands of the Socialist party published at the end of the Socialist platform,[156] indicate the character of measures which the Socialists urge. In one sense these are reforms, many of which Governor Hughes favors, but they all tend towards one definite end--the limitation and ultimate suppression of the competitive system with the exploitation of the Many by the Few. In one sense, therefore, Socialists are reformers, but revolutionary reformers; all their reforms look towards the transfer of political power from the Few who exploit political power for their individual benefit, to the Many who will utilize political power for the benefit of all. Having indicated the difference between reform and revolution, let us consider how far the Socialist is justified in saying that the competitive system is so bad that it cannot be improved--that it must be replaced altogether. When a wagon is thoroughly worn out, it is useless to repair it; for if one part is strengthened it throws the strain upon a neighboring part which breaks down; and if that part is strengthened it throws the strain upon another which again breaks down. It is possible by intelligently renewing various parts of the wagon upon a preconceived plan, eventually to replace the broken-down wagon by an entirely new one; but the difficulty of doing this is extreme, and the wagon when so reconstructed, being composed of parts of different ages, must again give way at its most worn part. So experience indicates that it is better to throw a fairly used-up wagon on the junk heap and build a new one in its place. Reform measures such as we have had under former administrations resemble an effort to patch up a worn-out wagon; for a reform measure directed at one evil is found to produce other evils very apt to be as great, if not greater than those that the measure is trying to suppress. Not many years ago a society for the suppression of vice made a crusade in New York upon vicious resorts. Such resorts are abominable; they should not exist in an orderly community. But attacking these resorts, without attacking the conditions that created them, only distributed the evil all over the city, involving a pernicious contact with unperverted youth. Again, the difficulty of reconciling Sunday closing of barrooms with furnishing _bona fide_ travellers at hotels with refreshments was solved in New York by the Raines law, which defined a hotel by establishing a minimum of bedrooms. The result was that to almost every barroom there is attached this minimum of bedrooms to permit of the sale of liquor on Sunday; and this effort to secure Sunday closing has resulted in converting the barroom into a house of prostitution. Again, legislation for putting an end to the awful congestion and filth of the New York city tenements has by imposing upon the landlord expensive repairs, raised rents, so that, although the tenement dweller is little benefited because of evasion of the law, his rent has been uniformly raised. In the chapters on the Scientific and Ethical Aspects of Socialism, an effort will be made to show why the competitive system is essentially bad and must remain bad so long as acquisitiveness is deliberately made the dominating motive of human activity; and how by modifying economic conditions we can secure all the benefits of a tempered acquisitiveness without the appalling results of an acquisitiveness that knows no bounds. This argument belongs, however, to the constructive argument for Socialism, and we have not yet completed the destructive argument against existing conditions. For there are two further illustrations furnished by recent efforts to curb competition which not only tend to demonstrate the hopelessness of the task, but throw light upon existing conditions and impending dangers. I refer to the rate law and legislation tending to control monopolies--to the inevitable tyrannies of the trust and the trade unions and the irreconcilable conflict between the two. § 3. POSSIBLE TRANSITIONAL MEASURES I shall describe the coöperative commonwealth on the theory that it is to come gradually, not because I consider this the only way for Socialism to come, but one of the possible ways and the one most intelligible to the bourgeois mind. Morris Hillquit and John Spargo have given good sketches of the Socialist state.[157] I shall adhere closely to their views, emphasizing and detailing them; and I am the more glad to adopt this plan because both are members of the National Executive Committee of the Socialist party and will not be accused of taking the bourgeois view of Socialism; whereas because I have been a bourgeois, I am likely to be accused of this. Mr. Spargo begins by repudiating the idea of the Socialist state as a "great bureaucracy" and declares the Socialist ideal to be a "form of social organization in which every individual will enjoy the greatest possible amount of freedom for self-development and expression; and in which social authority will be reduced to the minimum necessary for the preservation and insurance of that right to all individuals." The rights of the individual Mr. Spargo summarizes as follows: "There must be perfect freedom of movement, including the right to withdraw from the domain of the government, to migrate at will to other territories; immunity from arrest, except for infringing others' rights, with compensation for improper arrest; respect of the privacy of domicile and correspondence; full liberty of dress, subject to decency; freedom of utterance, whether by speech or publication, subject only to the protection of others from insult, injury, or interference with their equal liberties. Absolute freedom of the individual in all that pertains to art, science, philosophy, and religion, and their teaching, or propaganda, is essential. The state can rightly have nothing to do with these matters; they belong to the personal life alone. Art, science, philosophy, and religion cannot be protected by any authority, nor is such protection needed." On the other hand, he summarizes the functions of the state as follows: "The state has the right and the power to _organize_ and _control_ the economic system, comprehending in that term the production and distribution of all social wealth wherever private enterprise is dangerous to the social well-being, or is inefficient; the defence of the community from invasion, from fire, flood, famine, or disease; the relations with other states, such as trade agreements, boundary treaties, and the like; the maintenance of order, including the judicial and police systems in all their branches; and public education in all its departments." The state, according to Mr. Spargo, is not to _own_ all sources of production (this is state Socialism); but is to have the right and power to _organize_ and _control_ the economic system. There is between these two statements all that distinguishes the crude Socialism of the nineteenth century from the practical Socialism of to-day. This is emphasized by Mr. Spargo when he states that "Socialism by no means involves the suppression of all private property and industry"; and the further recognition that the "Socialist state will not be static"; that is to say, it will not once for all decide that certain industries must be socialized and certain other industries be left to individual initiative. The dominant factor that will determine these things is the public welfare. When private property in a particular thing is found injurious to public welfare, it will be taken over by the state for the purpose of being socialized, as will hereafter be explained. When it is deemed that private property in a public industry is injurious to public welfare, this industry will be socialized. When, on the contrary, it is found that by socializing an industry the advance of that industry tends to be paralyzed, private initiative will be encouraged to enter into that industry. Indeed, the economic structure of the commonwealth will be such that inefficiency in a socialized industry will automatically give rise to the competition of private initiative therein. I have used the expression "socialized industry." It is above all things important that we should be clear as to what these words mean; for it is the socialization of industry which is the modern substitute for the Socialist state. We cannot understand this better than by taking a concrete example. Let us assume that the public has become convinced that a few individuals have already too long grown inordinately rich out of the refining and distribution of oil, and that the time has come for this industry to be socialized. The old theory was that the state would expropriate this industry and become the employer of all engaged in it. It is argued in favor of such a system that if the state can be entrusted with the distribution of letters, it can also be entrusted with the distribution of oil; and this is undoubtedly true. But if this same argument is applied to all industries it will expose the state to two great dangers: the state will be overburdened by the multiplicity and vastness of these tasks; and the state will become despotic. And because this task is greater than any one set of men can properly perform; even though the intentions of the members of the government be the best possible, errors of judgment and errors of detail will involve the state in injustice and discontent. This difficulty can be met by not putting all these functions upon the state, but by so providing that the men shown in the past best able to handle a particular industry should continue to handle it. The socialization of the Standard Oil industry would simply mean the elimination of capitalistic control and exploitation. In taking over the oil industry, the state would doubtless adopt the method already adopted in taking over railroads, etc. A board would be appointed to take expert testimony as to the valuation of the industry, to determine the real value of every share. It would be called upon to value every stockholding with a view to determining to what compensation each stockholder was entitled; because a distinction will have to be made between various classes of stockholders. Some stockholders have purchased their stock out of the economies of an industrious lifetime. They depend upon the dividends from such stock to support their old age. To cut down the income they derive from this stock might not only work an injustice, but work an injury to the commonwealth; for if these stockholders had not sufficient income to support themselves, they would become a burden on the state. Other stockholders would be found to have sufficient wealth to support a considerable reduction in the valuation of their stock without hardship. Others again would have such enormous wealth, that, having much more income than they can possibly spend, the reduction of their income would mean no hardship save that of depriving them of _power_ for the most part exerted at the present time injuriously to the commonwealth. Experts, therefore, appointed by the state to make estimates with a view to the transfer of an industry from private to social ownership will have two distinct functions to perform: the function that boards of experts in similar cases perform to-day, to estimate the actual value of the property; and to estimate the wealth of the respective stockholders and classify stockholders according to wealth with the view of effecting the transfer from private to social ownership without injustice to the individual or injury to the commonwealth. It is probable that compensation to stockholders will consist of annuities rather than lump sums. The advantage of compensation by annuity rather than by cash payment is considerable. As the state is taking over industries it will be more difficult for individuals to find investment for lump sums than to-day. As the state is looking forward to taking over industries to a sufficient extent to eliminate pure capitalism[158] altogether, it is to be hoped that future generations will not feel the need of capital of their own and will be all the more ready to enter into the coöperative scheme of industry if, having no capital, they have to work each in his own industry under the new and prosperous conditions which coöperative production ought by that time to have brought about. Cases will undoubtedly be found where wealthy parents have worthless or defective children and grandchildren. Again, some parents have so contributed to the development of industry of the nation, as in the case of Mr. John D. Rockefeller and Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, that it may seem proper that the compensation given in the shape of an annuity to them should not end abruptly at their death; but that a part of it should be continued to their offspring. This question is one of conscience as well as of social welfare; and in view of the enormous importance of it to the wealthy of to-day, it is a pity that they confine themselves to denouncing Socialism, and by so doing, leave the elaboration of the Socialist program to a party of discontented which is likely to deal with them when the day of expropriation arrives, not only without mercy, but without justice. To judge of the difficulty of determining the questions likely to arise, let us consider for a moment the case of Mr. Rockefeller. Mr. John D. Rockefeller has testified over and over again that for many years he has had nothing to do with the management of the Standard Oil, and yet he draws from the Standard Oil an income so enormous that, not being able to spend more than a fraction of it, he has invested the balance in railroad shares and thus become master of a large part of our railroad system. I myself believe after a careful study of the organization and development of the Standard Oil that Mr. Rockefeller has amassed his fortune strictly in conformity with law. He has, it is true, deliberately lied at certain critical periods. But lying is not a crime, and is not actionable except under specified conditions. Mr. Rockefeller then is not a criminal. He simply presents a case where, having rendered an immense service to the community, he has received as a remuneration for that service wealth that surpasses the dreams of avarice. If Mr. Rockefeller's holdings in the Standard Oil were expropriated by the state without one dollar of remuneration, Mr. Rockefeller would still be in possession of a far larger income derived from his railroad holdings than he and all his family could possibly spend. It is probable, therefore, that in such cases as those of Mr. Rockefeller, J. Pierpont Morgan, and others of their class, the state would make a valuation of all their wealth, leave them what it is proper they should have, and expropriate the rest. Even though there were left to multi-millionaires more income than they could possibly spend, the surplus expropriated by the state out of each of their swollen fortunes would leave to every industry a large fund which could be applied to increasing wages, improving conditions, and reducing prices. If, for example, it turned out that the income Mr. Rockefeller derives from his railroad shares is more than he can spend and that, therefore, there were no reason why he should continue to own any shares in the Standard Oil whatever, the dividends accruing from the shares now held by Mr. Rockefeller in the Standard Oil would be applicable to improving the conditions of those who work for the Standard Oil. It is probable that Mr. Rockefeller owns about one-half of the shares in the Standard Oil. All the dividends now paid to Mr. Rockefeller would in such case be applicable to these things. Such a solution would permit of the division of the enormous dividends which are being paid to-day to Mr. Rockefeller amongst the working body of the Standard Oil. As to compensation, there is considerable disagreement in the Socialist party, and many Socialists would not admit the principle of compensation at all. In France, it is probable that these last constitute, if not a majority, at any rate a very large minority of the party; but in America I think it can be said that the Socialist party stands for compensation. In support of this contention I cannot do better than quote a passage from the article of Mr. Steffens in _Everybody's Magazine_, Oct., 1908.[159] This passage is extremely illuminating because we find in it the opinions of two men thoroughly representative of the two wings of the Socialist party: Eugene Debs, who is what Mr. Roosevelt would call "an extreme Socialist"; that is to say, he looks at Socialism from the revolutionary point of view; he regards the issue as between the capitalist on the one side and the proletariat on the other; he is an ardent exponent of the class struggle theory; his sympathies are exclusively marshalled on the side of the poor, and his first impulse, therefore, on being questioned on this subject, is to express an opinion contrary to compensation. And yet his ideas on this subject are not so rooted but that they can at once be corrected when he is reminded by Victor Berger of the evils likely to result from expropriation without compensation. To those unfamiliar with the personnel of the Socialist party, it is important to say a word regarding Victor Berger. He is the editor of the _Social Democratic Herald_, published in Milwaukee; but he is far more than this. He is the recognized leader of the Socialist party in Wisconsin, the only State in which Socialism has succeeded in electing members to the municipal council and to the State legislature. No one who reads his editorials can fail to recognize that he is not only an economist, but a scholar. He is regularly elected to the National Executive Committee of the Socialist party at the head of the poll; and although I must not be understood to imply that there are no other men in the party of as great weight as Mr. Victor Berger, I think it may be stated without fear of contradiction that he to-day has more personal influence in the party than any other one man. The ease with which he brought the Presidential nominee around to his view on the subject of compensation is a measure of his influence. I think that upon the subject of compensation the opinion of Victor Berger is likely to prevail.[160] The socialization of industry does not mean any change in the personnel of the industry whatever. Every man drawing salary or wages from the Standard Oil will go on drawing salary or wages as before. The industry will be handed over to those who actually maintain and work at it. These men will run the industry in very much the same way as did the guilds in the Middle Ages, subject to the payment of annuities to old stockholders determined by the court. There would, however, be some notable distinctions, between the medieval guild and the guild under a coöperative commonwealth. The latter would not constitute a complete monopoly; on the contrary, independent refiners would continue to refine and distribute oil, maintaining a wholesome competition of a character to prevent the oil guild from becoming perfunctory and inefficient. This competition would tend to avert the evils that attended the close monopoly of the medieval guild, practically all of which can be traced to the completeness of their monopoly. Again the state would not _own_ the oil industry; it would reserve the right to _control_ it. No direct control need be exercised providing the industry were wisely administered; but if the industry had recourse to devices for crushing out competition to which the trusts to-day habitually resort, the state would exercise this direct control by appointing one or more members to the governing board of the industry. The oil guild would, therefore, be kept upon its good behavior, both by the competition of the independent refineries and by the danger of state intervention. When the public became convinced that the time had come for the socialization of the steel industry, exactly the same process would be adopted. In this case, the function of those who had to value stockholdings would be facilitated. It has never been revealed how much J. Pierpont Morgan got in common stock for his rôle in the organization of the Steel Trust; but it is known that the amount of stock taken by him on that occasion was enormous. It would be interesting to calculate the number of hours of work he personally spent in promoting this trust and to compare these hours with the amount of stock which he received as a price of this service. Such a method might facilitate the work of those who had to value the stock and determine the amount to which he was entitled for the service he rendered. The socialization of industry, therefore, will be seen to be a process in which, once started, the state need have little further to do. It will practically consist of a transfer of the industry from the hands of the capitalist to the hands of those actually engaged therein. It will involve the valuation of every stockholding in such a fashion that the capitalist will during his life receive in some cases all, though in other cases less than he has heretofore received; so that the excessive income now enjoyed by the capitalist will be applicable to improving the conditions of those engaged in the industry; it will also be applicable to the reduction of cost to the consumer. And this process applied to every trusted industry will have for immediate effect gradually to improve the condition of the workingmen. When applied to them all, not only will the workers receive an increased wage, but the wage they receive will have its purchasing power increased by the lowering of prices in all industries. Obviously this system is not going immediately to put the luxuries now enjoyed by the multi-millionaire at the disposal of every workingman; but it will increase them as the annuitants die, so that with the disappearance of the first generation of multi-millionaires, the conditions of labor will be still further improved; and with the disappearance of the second generation, to whom doubtless some annuities will also be given, the workingman will receive all the benefits now given to the capitalist. Inasmuch as the wage-earners now receive on an average a little less than one-half of the whole profits of the industry, from this socialization of industry alone the laborer's will ultimately have their compensation doubled by increase of wage and decrease of prices. By "worker" is not meant what we now call workingmen alone. It includes all engaged in industry through the work of their hands or their heads. It is a common error into which Mr. Roosevelt has fallen that Socialism proposes to improve the condition of the one at the expense of the other; that it is a doctrine of Socialists that "all wealth is produced by _manual_ workers."[161] No such foolish proposition has ever been propounded by any Socialist however "extreme."[162] Socialists recognize the enormous rôle played by brain in the organization and administration of industry. What Socialism seeks to do is to eliminate the idle stockholder--not the industrious manager. If Mr. Roosevelt would cast his comprehensive eye around the class to which he belongs, he will observe that it is composed in great part of idle stockholders who contribute nothing whatever to the work of the industries which furnish their dividends. And because these stockholders are idle, he will find that they tend also to be "thriftless and vicious," and that he is denouncing his own class when he characterizes as "morally base" the proposition that "the thriftless and the vicious, who could or would put in but little, should be entitled to take out the earnings of the intelligent, the foresighted, and the industrious." He is very hard on them; he says this is living by "theft or by charity" and that this means "in each case degradation, a rapid lowering of self-respect and self-reliance."[163] If a Socialist were to use this language of the idle stockholders, he would be characterized as intemperate. I would not myself go so far as Mr. Roosevelt. There are many idle stockholders who, _because they are unconscious of living "by theft or by charity,"_ have preserved a social conscience that sets them to righting the wrongs of the many. Mr. Roosevelt himself, indeed, belongs to this very class. If he ever takes the trouble to understand Socialism, he will see that it proposes to put an end to the class that is idle and tends to be "thriftless and vicious"; that in other words, in this as in every other point on which Mr. Roosevelt attacks us, Socialism stands for the very opposite of what Mr. Roosevelt thinks. It proposes to take our industries out of the control of the idle and hand them over to the industrious, whether their industry be of the hand or of the head. The result of such transfer will be to leave every man doing the work which he is already doing; to improve his condition; to keep alive the competition necessary to prevent inefficiency or perfunctoriness and make character; to diminish the stakes of the game, so that the worker shall not lose health and happiness as now, but shall secure more or less of the luxuries of life. And industry will be so organized that no man who wants to work shall be without work; and no one who does not want to work shall be allowed to be idle. Having explained what is meant by the socialization of industry, and pointed out how small the rôle of the state need be in the socialization of industry at large, we may next proceed to consider certain industries in which the state does, to-day, in other countries and would in a coöperative commonwealth certainly play the dominant rôle. In the first place, the state would own all natural monopolies. By the word "state" must not be understood the Government at Washington alone. Certain monopolies are national monopolies and would therefore be owned by the national Government at Washington; for example, railroads, telegraphs, national forests, national waterways, etc. But it is the local authorities that would take over such local monopolies as tramways, electric works, gas works, and all those things that are essentially municipal in their nature. The wisdom of this transfer of natural monopolies from private to public ownership it is not necessary to discuss. The enormous advantages that have attended this transfer in countries where it has been conscientiously tried leave no room for discussion except by those who have a personal interest in it, and to those this book is not addressed. Moreover, this subject will be treated in the next chapter. There are, however, certain industries which, because they are intimately connected with public hygiene, it seems indispensable that the municipality should take over. I refer to such industries as packing houses, butcher shops, pharmacies, and the production and distribution of milk, ice, and bread. The recklessness with which we allow ice companies to distribute ice collected from ponds into which the drainage of a large population filters and from the head waters of such rivers as the Hudson, which receives all the sewage of Albany, Schenectady, and Troy, seems incredible, were we not already familiar with the recklessness which hands over all our industries to a competitive system so fierce in its operation that adulteration is its necessary consequence. Many of the bakeshops which furnish us with our bread baffle description, and on the poisons which are introduced into our milk I have already dilated. Wherever the temptation to adulterate is considerable and the consequence of adulteration to public health great, the community should not accept the risk that arises from competition except within the narrowest possible limits. For this reason, it will doubtless be wise for a coöperative commonwealth to own and run packing houses, butcher shops, pharmacies, bakeries, and to produce and distribute milk and ice. As regards ice, it is amazing that the municipal authorities should not have undertaken this task before--especially in view of the raising of the price of ice for the poor by the Ice Trust. Every city has to supply its citizens with water, and as they are in control of pure water, it should be as much the function of the city to furnish pure ice as pure water. They have reservoirs free from pollution from which ice could be cut; and nothing but the political influence of the Ice Trust on the one hand, and the stupid indifference of the consumer on the other, has permitted this business to remain in private hands.[164] The enormous profits made by the Meat Trust would permit not only of sanitary handling of this industry, but proper compensation to all engaged therein, and a notable reduction in the price of meat. The fact that the baking industry is not trusted will make the taking over of this industry by the state a more difficult undertaking, but not for that reason an impossible one. Competition is not necessarily to be eliminated in the taking over of these industries. It is quite possible that the state might not furnish good bread, and it ought, therefore, to be permissible for any individual to enter into this business. The competition will be limited because, inasmuch as the state will charge for its bread very little above cost price, few will be induced to enter into this business out of the desire for making money. The only motive that will induce citizens to enter into the business will be that of furnishing bread to their taste. Moreover, such industries would have to comply strictly with hygienic conditions, and they would be not so numerous as to make inspection as difficult, ineffectual, or expensive as to-day. The production and distribution of milk suggests a function of the state to which sufficient importance cannot be attached. I mean the creation of farm colonies. On this single point I am not supported by the authority of the Socialist party. In other words, farm colonies have never been suggested as a part of the Socialist program; but this seems to be due to an oversight, for there does not seem to be in the Socialist party, as far as I can judge of it, any opposition to the idea. And the rôle of the farm colony seems to me of such importance that it is hardly possible to give too much attention to it. § 4. FARM COLONIES The first farm colony was established in Holland. The system has since taken root all through Europe, but has reached its finest development in the Canton of Berne, in Switzerland. It proceeds upon the principle that while it is difficult to make money out of farm land, it is easy to get nourishment from it, and that the most obvious remedy for idle labor is to apply it to idle land. In Switzerland it is also recognized that idle labor is divided into two distinct classes--the unemployed and the unemployable--and the unemployable must be again classified into those unable to work through physical defect and those unable to work through moral defect; that is to say, those who are morally willing and physically unable and those physically able and morally unwilling. There are therefore in Switzerland two different kinds of farm colonies: forced colonies which deal with the tramp, the drunkard, and the misdemeanant--all those persons upon whom discipline has to be exercised; and free colonies for those physically disabled or who are out of employment through causes over which they have no control. It is in the poorest countries in Europe that farm colonies have reached their highest development. Switzerland has been driven to organize farm colonies by the fact that she is too poor to disregard the burden of the unemployed and unemployables. It is in the richest countries, England, France, and America, that the farm colony system has been most neglected. The farm colony plan is the cheapest as well as the best way of solving the problem of pauperism, deserving or undeserving. This question has been fully treated elsewhere[165] and it is only referred to here in sufficient detail to explain why it is believed that the farm colony system will form an essential feature of every Socialistic community. For although there will be an enormous diminution in the number of those unwilling or unable to work (for the reason that under a coöperative commonwealth no one need be overworked and, therefore, no one need be reduced to the physical exhaustion which is the prime cause of pauperism), and although there will be fewer drunkards because drunkenness, also, is largely due to overwork, nevertheless, until the coöperative commonwealth has been in operation several generations, that part of the population that is unwilling or unable to work will have to be provided for. And even later there will certainly be some part of the population that will require discipline as regards work. The farm colony system, more and more indispensable in our existing civilization, will perform an important rôle in the gradual transformation of society from the competitive to the coöperative form. It probably presents to-day one of the most perfect pieces of constructive Socialistic work in which legislators can engage. For it has the extraordinary advantage of satisfying an immediate necessity of the competitive system and at the same time realizing some fundamental principles of Socialism; for example, that every man and woman is entitled to work; that the aged are entitled to support; and that the state should own enough land to assure both these things. The fact that our railroads are now awakening to the necessity of handling the tramp proves the necessity of the system, and the fact that in Switzerland the forced colonies have been made to pay their own expenses indicates its economy. Indeed, no proposed legislation illustrates so well the power driving us towards Socialism as the history of attempts at legislation in this direction in New York State. Twelve years ago a farm colony bill was drawn by a committee appointed by the charitable societies in New York; but it did not secure at Albany a moment's serious attention. We were told by our legislators that poverty is not a crime. When we answered that our bill did not make it a crime more than the penal code, but only purposed to substitute for the expensive and degenerating system of the misnamed workhouse, inexpensive and regenerating work on a state farm, and that the plan had operated effectually in Holland and Belgium for over a hundred years, we were told that the plan might do in Holland, but would not do here. So in the archives of the French senate may still be read the report made by Thiers, when appointed by Louis Philippe on a committee to investigate the first railroad ever built, which concludes as follows: "Railroads may serve a purpose in England, but they are not suited to France." A similar bill, improved by borrowing from late experience in Switzerland, drawn by a similar committee (to which was added the Commissioner of Charities, Mr. Hebberd) was presented at Albany at the session of 1909, and although not passed, was sufficiently well received to encourage the hope that it will pass at the session of 1910. It had the support of the great railroads in New York state; for the railroads have discovered that the tramp is an intolerable nuisance.[166] Colonel Pangborn of the Baltimore & Ohio has lately estimated that the damage occasioned by tramps to railroads in the United States amounts in a single year to twenty-five million dollars.[167] For the tramp in America does not tramp; he rides on railroads; he sets fire to freight cars and freight stations; he obstructs the lines, wrecks trains, and is a fruitful cause of action for damages. The measure, therefore, which was thrown out by the Assembly when proposed from motives of humanity, may be passed as a measure of self-defence, and self-defence thus constitutes an element of the power always at work on the side of progress that neither ignorance nor interest will be able to resist. The reason for believing that the farm colony will perform an important function not only during the period which must elapse before the coöperative commonwealth, but also after the coöperative commonwealth has been attained, is that work on land seems to be the only work to which the unemployed and unemployables can be suitably put. Every day we seem to be increasing our capacity to make land productive. We not only make new discoveries, but profit by those of more ancient civilizations than our own. It has long been known that in the East they subject grain to the same system of replanting that truck gardeners do early vegetables.[168] Dr. Fesca informs us that in Japan rice is treated in the same way: "It is allowed first to germinate; then it is sown in special warm corners, well inundated with water and protected from the birds by strings drawn over the ground. Thirty-five to fifty-five days later, the young plants, now fully developed and possessed of a thick network of rootlets, are replanted in the open ground. In this way the Japanese obtain from twenty to thirty-two bushels of dressed rice to the acre in the poor provinces, forty bushels in the better ones, and from sixty to sixty-seven bushels in the best lands. The average, in six rice-growing States of North America, is at the same time only nine and a half bushels."[169] Agriculturists are familiar with the results obtained by Major Hallett's growing what he called "pedigree cereals"; that is to say, by using as seed only the best ears in his crop; and by giving to each grain sufficient space he obtained sometimes as much as 2500 grains for one grain planted. Even better results were obtained by Grandeau.[170] We are only beginning to know how much can be produced out of an acre of ground. One thing, however, is certain: where labor is cheap and land limited as in the case of our unemployed, there is no method known by which labor can produce better results than by putting it to what is called "intensive culture"; and as the secrets of intensive culture become more known, it becomes clear that if the state would only take the trouble to set aside a certain amount of land for the purpose, it could without further expense than that of the first installation make able-bodied unemployed and unemployables self-supporting. This is not a question of fertility; it is simply a question of space. Unfertile land is made fertile by intensive culture. It has been said that the Paris gardener defies the soil and the climate. Every truck gardener there stipulates in renting land that he "may carry away his soil down to a certain depth, when he quits his tenancy."[171] In other words, soil is now a manufacture; we are no longer confined to fertile areas; we can make any area fertile by the application to it of industry and intelligence. Municipalities can contribute enormously to the fertility of the land around them. A district near Paris, called Genevilliers, was a few years ago a desert tract of sand. The city poured over this tract the sewage of the city after a filtration that deprived it of its offensive features. This tract has become of fabulous fertility; but the municipality having failed to buy this land before this operation, the increased value of the land has accrued to the persons who happened to be the owners of it; whereas if the city had begun by purchasing the land at the price at which it could have been purchased before this operation, it would have had here a tract of enormous value that, by the farm colony system, would have greatly contributed to relieve the city of the burden of pauperism. It would seem as though the art of using manure were practically unknown in this country by the farmers. The results that can be obtained in this way are given in the Farmer's Bulletin, No. 242, where an intelligent use of manure resulted in crops of 6.7 tons of hay for every acre of cultivation;[172] and this not by the application of any extraordinary science, but simply by recognizing the obvious fact that manure must be spread daily and not allowed to lose most of its value from being piled into heaps, where it burns and degenerates.[173] The farm colony must be so organized that it furnishes work summer and winter. As its name implies, the colony is not confined to work on land. Many skilled workmen would lose their skill if they were put to farm work. Swiss colonies, therefore, have a few industries established in each colony to which skilled workmen are put. This occupies unskilled inmates during the winter months when the weather is too inclement for out of door work, and also teaches them. Moreover, in a self-supporting farm colony there is work which can be done by the aged and the infirm, teaming, taking care of animals, plucking fruits and vegetables, preparing them for preserving, and all the small jobs that attend large housekeeping. The farm colony plan will in part relieve the state of the expense of old-age pensions. Every industry will provide pensions for its own workers and thus the state will be relieved by the guilds; but there will always be some aged left unsupported by such private industries as will continue to exist by the side of the guilds. Of these it may be expedient to relieve some in their own homes; but many will find in the free farm colony an abiding place more congenial to themselves than the almshouse, and far less expensive to the state. It will be more congenial because there will be no more disgrace attending a free farm colony than any other state employment, and because it will be organized so as to render its work as agreeable as possible. It will never be so attractive as work outside the colony because it will be subject to the kind of regulations that attend all big institutions, so there is little fear of these colonies becoming larger than is good for the community. But it will be a home rather than an almshouse, and it will be less expensive to the state because of the work which even the aged can do. The farm colony furnishes a system by means of which the state can compel the unwilling, able-bodied tramp and pauper to earn his own livelihood; where it can afford work to the unemployed without cost to the state; and can utilize to the utmost possible the services of those who are not able-bodied. It must not be imagined that discipline of a harsh character is necessary. There are in every one of these colonies in Europe dark cells, where a man who will not work, or will not obey rules, is confined and kept on bread and water until he consents to work and to obey rules; and the very fact of the existence of these cells, and of this system, has been found sufficient to secure good work and obedience to rules without using the dark cells except under exceptional circumstances. The director of one of the Dutch colonies told me that he did not use the dark cell once a year. There is no reason why the farm colony system should not be extended to the treatment of all crime except that we have prisons, prison managers, and a prison administration which stand in the way of radical prison reform; and the general stupidity which prefers the ills we have to the blessings which, obvious as they are, we have not imagination enough to comprehend. The folly of keeping an enormous population of criminals idle, within four walls, at an enormous expense to the community, when we could keep them busy to their great advantage, physical, intellectual, and moral, without a penny of cost to the community, is one of those things which future generations will find it difficult to believe.[174] In the coöperative commonwealth there will be no prisons, no penitentiaries, no almshouses, no tramps, no unemployed. There will be farm colonies of various grades, from those that have no discipline beyond that necessary to secure the observance of rules necessary to all institutional life, through those that have just enough discipline to keep lazy men at work, to those that have sufficient discipline to keep even criminals at work. For although it is obvious that under a coöperative commonwealth in which there is no necessity for exhausting any individual, no necessity for alcoholism or stimulation, no anxiety regarding the means of existence; where there is throughout a high standard of living, ease for the mind and abundance for the body, the production of the natural criminal ought to be immensely diminished, yet the occasional criminal will have to be provided for. For further study of the farm colony system as it has been developed in Switzerland, and as it might be applied in the United States under existing conditions, the reader is referred to "The Elimination of the Tramp."[175] It is hoped, however, that enough has been said regarding these colonies to enable us to consider the immense rôle which an intelligent classification of farm colonies would play, not only under existing conditions, but in the future coöperative commonwealth. A single farm colony for dealing with tramps as proposed in the bill now before the Assembly of New York State would render an indispensable service by taking off the streets and highways the vagrants who, because they are now confounded with the unemployed, tend to confuse the mind of the public on this all-important subject. But although such a colony, organized under the same conditions as the forced labor colony in Switzerland, would render this service without cost to the state beyond that of first installation, its usefulness in the problem of production at large would be extremely small. It would attain its purpose if it were self-supporting. But if this tramp colony proves a success, the same system could be applied not only to take care of all our dependent and criminal classes, but to play an important rôle in the production of the necessaries of life. There ought to be three distinct classes of colonies: The criminal farm colony surrounded by walls where the strictest discipline would be enforced, and within which the inmates would be confined to intensive cultivation, handicrafts, and some form of machine industry. The forced labor colony for misdemeanants and able-bodied vagrants and paupers where larger liberty would be enjoyed; and The free labor colony where there would be no regulation except that indispensable in all institutions. Perhaps to these should be added probationary colonies as described in the "Elimination of the Tramp," p. 59, for those as to whose willingness to work there is doubt. These would furnish the "test" so much sought by English Poor Law Guardians. From these probationary colonies the inmates would be graduated down to the forced labor colony, or up to the free. So also criminals would be prepared for social life by passing through the forced labor colony, and inmates of the forced labor colony prepared for social life by passing through the free labor colony. In a coöperative commonwealth free labor would have no objection to industrial work conducted within these colonies, because the less work there is to be done in any given industry, the less hours would the workers in that industry have to give to it. So that every industry carried on in the colony would by so much diminish the amount of goods produced outside by that industry, and to that extent relieve the free labor engaged therein. This great objection to penal labor being removed, the state will have an advantage in distributing the industries throughout its colonies according to geographical conditions. The criminal colonies will naturally be more industrial in their character than the agricultural, because they will have to be operated within prison walls. They will nevertheless include truck gardening and horticulture.[176] Penal colonies, therefore, will group themselves around great water power, which will be retained by the state and not dissipated by the gift of franchises to private corporations.[177] Misdemeanants and tramps will preferably be set to work on large farms which, because of their size and remoteness from towns, will render escape difficult. The methods adopted in Switzerland for making escape difficult if not impossible, are fully described in the "Elimination of the Tramp."[178] As in these colonies there is more or less work to be done all the year round, it would be indispensable to build in connection with them factories which could be operated during the winter months, the state being careful to limit the factories to the production of things already socialized, so as not to compete injuriously with private industry. Free labor colonies ought to be located near large centers of population, not only because of the character of the things they will produce, for example, milk, vegetables, and fruits, which need a market at the door, but also because it is in these great centers that pauperism and unemployment express themselves in largest figures and in greatest variation. In these colonies inmates will remain the shortest terms, and it is important, therefore, to have them in proximity to places where the inmates are likely to live in order to avoid the heavy expense of transportation. Free labor colonies will be engaged in the production of milk for two reasons: The hygienic importance of milk is so great that it should as much as possible be removed from the competitive field. It is important that milk should be produced as near as possible to the town where it is to be consumed. It is wiser, therefore, to assign the production of milk to the free labor colony, near the city, than to the penal or forced labor colony that would be comparatively remote. But it must not be imagined that the production of milk can be confided exclusively to such inexpert labor as that of the inmates of free labor colonies. The production of milk can only be entrusted to careful experts receiving a relatively high rate of wages. Free labor colonies, therefore, will have to be provided with a corps of men and women trained in the production of milk and dairy products. It may be suggested that the fact that dairy products must be entrusted to trained experts is a reason for not associating the production of milk with free labor colonies. This objection disappears when account is taken of the fact that dairy farms should have connected with them such subsidiary products as chickens and pigs. Skimmed milk is of the greatest value in these subsidiary productions; so also is the garbage that would accumulate in such an institution as a farm colony. The care of pigs and poultry can be confided to defectives such as we are likely to find in a free labor colony. It furnishes work all the year round; it enriches the soil rather than impoverishes it. Free labor colonies, therefore, will be engaged in the production of milk, pigs, poultry, vegetables, fruits, and flowers. They will be furnished with grain by the forced labor colonies in the States where grain can be cultivated on a large scale; and by distributing industries among the three classes of colonies and arranging for exchange of products, the whole colony system ought not only to be self-supporting, but to produce more than the colonies can themselves consume. The disposition made of these products will be studied in connection with the problem of distribution. Under such a plan, no pauperism or even poverty will be tolerated in the towns. As soon as a man, woman, or family is incapable of self-support in the competitive field, or because of sickness or accident in the coöperative field, they will be taken out of the town where their presence is an expense and a nuisance not only to themselves, but to the community, to a free farm colony where health can be restored and defectives put to the best use possible. Farm colonies in the Rocky Mountain region where sheep and cattle can be fed on public land for nine or ten months in the year, and fed by hand during the remaining two or three months, will furnish cattle and sheep to municipal packing-houses that will distribute meat with the economy of the postoffice system from door to door. State farm colonies in the grain-growing districts will furnish grain to all the other colonies and wheat to municipal bakeries that will distribute bread with the economy of the postoffice system from door to door. Free labor colonies adjoining cities will produce milk, butter, and dairy products, pork and pork products, chickens, eggs, vegetables, fruits, and flowers and distribute them with the economy of the postoffice system from door to door. State factories distributed amongst penal colonies in accordance with the geographical conditions that will make them most efficient, will furnish garments, shoes, hats, etc., to the other colonies at the cheapest possible price. By the side of these productions, there will be maintained exactly the same system of private ownership that exists to-day with all the virtues that emulation produces free from the fatal consequences that make failure result in misery, pauperism, prostitution, vagrancy, and crime. For so long as the individual prospers in his private enterprise, he will be encouraged to maintain it; whereas the moment he fails, he will come within the state system under which the private individual having proved his inability to support himself and his family under the competitive plan, will be shown how to support himself and his family by state institutions that will have reduced this task to a science. That the state will occasionally fail in this task is to be expected. But what is the worst consequence that can result from failure? Nothing more than the maintenance of the competitive system in every field of industry where the state fails. If the state fails to furnish good bread, private initiative will take the baking of bread from the state and will keep it until the state succeeds in furnishing bread to the taste of the public. If the state fails in furnishing garments, private initiative will keep garment making in its hands except in so far as the state makes garments for the inmates of its own institutions. Many problems connected with this system of production will occur to the mind of the intelligent reader. These problems, however, will be found to belong more strictly to the question of distribution and government control--two subjects that cannot be intelligently discussed until the question of private property in land has been answered. § 5. LAND Socialism was formerly defined as including state ownership of land. This idea is to-day, however, abandoned in favor of a much more intelligent system: One principal difference between the Socialist and the Single Taxer is that the Single Taxer is opposed to state ownership of all land; and it is probable that the Single Taxer is more wise in this respect than the state Socialist. In the first place, the state Socialist who wants all land to be owned by the state ignores some very fundamental facts in human nature: He ignores the fact that humanity has for generations cultivated the instinct of ownership in land. There is nothing dearer in life to the French peasant than the strip of land barely sufficient to support life, and he will cling to that strip of land until some accident has torn it from him and reduced him to the condition of a pauper. Out of this instinct of ownership springs the extraordinary industry of the farmer--an industry which is not excelled or equalled in any but sweated trades. The life of the peasant or small farmer is one of hardship that leaves no moment for leisure, and of monotony that populates our lunatic asylums.[179] Not only is the life of the farmer one of the hardest, but it is also one of the least secure. The failure of a single crop, the loss of a single horse, disease in a chicken yard, a violent hail-storm--any of these may oblige a farmer to put that first small mortgage on his farm which is the beginning of his ruin. Nevertheless, the farmer sticks to his farm and labors on it from the rising of the sun, through the glare of noon and up to the last ray in the west, because the land is his own and he has for it the kind of affection that a mother has for her child--an affection that makes no sacrifice too great. It would seem unwise to deprive the farmer of the satisfaction of ownership and the community of the industry and productivity which this sense of ownership results in. There is no conceivable advantage in depriving the farmer of the ownership of his farm. The farmer now pays taxes on his land. The right of the state to exact a tax puts the state in the position of a landlord except that the state calls the tribute it levies on the farm a "tax," whereas the owner calls this tribute "rent." Of course there is a great difference between the tax levied by the state and the rent paid by the farmer to the private owner, because the one is light and the other heavy. This is the material difference which must not be lost sight of in the discussion of the subject. Every farmer expects to pay taxes to the state and all he asks is that the tax be not an onerous one. It can be rendered less onerous in the coöperative commonwealth than to-day because a coöperative commonwealth will not exact payment of taxes in money, but will content itself with payment in produce. Instead of the state taking over the land and depriving the farmer of ownership, and exacting rent, the coöperative commonwealth will leave the ownership in the farmer and exact a tax in produce; and so long as this tax is paid, the farmer will remain the undisputed owner of his land, and will continue to give it that hourly care without which the best results can hardly be obtained. There is nothing in modern Socialism, therefore, to frighten the farmer. He cannot but benefit by it, for his taxes will be levied in produce instead of in cash; and it is the conversion of farm produce into cash which is the farmer's main difficulty to-day, as was seen when money was discussed. The title of a farmer under a coöperative commonwealth will be much like that of the peasant in the Island of Jersey, who generally purchases his land on condition of paying a certain amount to the owner per annum. These Jersey titles are just as secure as freeholds in England or in this country, subject of course to the payment of the rent charged. The tax in produce, however, which the farmer is to pay the state will be far more just and fair. Land will be classified according to productivity, and the farmer will never be called upon to furnish the state with a larger proportion of his crop than he can afford. On the other hand, farmers will not be allowed to keep the ownership of land which they do not use. If it is to the benefit of the community that land be drained, the owner will be called upon to drain it within a definite period. If he does not drain it within that period, the state will take his undrained land from him. Nor will the farmer be allowed to cut down timber where the maintenance of the timber is deemed important to the commonwealth.[180] He will be taught forestry and the propagation of deer, and shown how to produce as much income out of his timber as he would out of the land when cleared. Above all, he will be relieved from the exorbitant prices which he now pays the trust for every article which he does not himself produce. The state will undertake the task of distribution, so that he can receive as the farmer in South Australia does to-day--a part payment in cash for all produce he delivers at the nearest railroad, and a subsequent payment when his goods have been sold through the instrumentality of the state. But this last belongs to Distribution. Prices will not be lowered by the competition of farm colonies. On the contrary, they will be maintained by the prices asked by farm colonies. Farm-colony prices will allow every efficient farmer a substantial living, and the farmer will have the benefit of the example and advice furnished him by the nearest farm colony, which will be a model farm. It may be objected that under this system the farmer will not have sufficient motive for adopting modern methods. There are undoubtedly farmers who are averse to the adoption of modern methods; but there are also thousands of farmers eager to know modern methods. Rev. J.D. Detrich, who produced 6.7 tons of hay for every acre in cultivation on his farm[181] was so pestered by neighbors who called to study his methods that he was obliged to remove to an adjoining State. Recalcitrant farmers will slowly be compelled to adopt modern methods by the fixing of prices that will make modern methods indispensable to prosperity. In every way, therefore, the farmer will be benefited by the introduction of Socialism. He will keep the title of ownership in his farm that is dear to him; he will pay his taxes in produce instead of in cash; he will have the benefit of education and advice at his door; and he will be relieved of the exorbitant prices now demanded by the trusts, and of that greatest of all his anxieties, the conversion of his produce into cash. As regards city land, the problem is a very different one, because the treatment of city land is an essential part of the whole municipal problem. Practically all municipal problems may be reduced to one--namely, crowding. As long as farmers live half a mile apart as they do on a standard 160-acre farm in the West, sewage and garbage are matters of individual rather than social interest. Provided the farmer does not pollute springs and water courses, he may dispose of his sewage and garbage as he chooses; but the moment men and women are crowded into cities on the vertical as well as on the horizontal plane, the disposal of sewage and garbage becomes of vital importance to the whole community. So also the maintenance of roads is a comparatively simple problem in the country, where traffic is light; whereas in the city, where traffic is great, the pavement of the streets presents problems not only of resistance, but of noise. The droppings of horses on the country road can be neglected; whereas those of horses passing a thousand per hour in a crowded city street create a dust injurious to health, and give rise to the problem of street cleaning. Again, where land is plentiful compared with population, the rent charged for land is small and often negligible; whereas where land is scarce compared with the population, as in the island of Manhattan, the rent becomes prohibitive for all except the wealthy, and workingmen are reduced to the alternative between living near their work in unwholesome tenements and living far from their work in less unwholesome conditions. And this scarcity of land gives rise to many problems of congested districts, of tuberculosis, sanitation, transportation, and of rent. If we look back on the whole history of our civilization, we shall see an unconscious struggle always going on between private interest and public spirit. The one tends to divide cities into two districts, one composed of the palaces of the rich, the other of the slums of the poor, and seeks to convert every problem of municipal government into means of increasing private wealth. The other, on the contrary, we find manifested in the "Age of Faith" building cathedrals; in the Age of Beauty or Renaissance, building public squares and gardens; and in recent years taking such services as transportation out of the hands of private individuals and vesting them in the city. This struggle between public and private interest has been, up to the present time, unconscious or fitful. The Socialist asks that it should become conscious and progressive; that is all. Let us take a few concrete instances: It was not until dark alleys were found to facilitate the work of criminals that municipalities were driven to light the streets; it was not until a district of Birmingham had become a menace to public welfare because its filth engendered both disease and crime that the municipality was driven to put an end to it; it was not until cholera began its ravages that municipalities were driven to provide clean dwellings; it was not until the evils attending imperfect transportation became intolerable that New York was driven to build subways; it was not until fires devastated the city that New York organized its fire department; it was not until the filth of the streets was intolerable that the city took the cleaning of streets out of the hands of private contractors. Up to the present time municipal activities have been forced into existence by the growth of the evils to a point where they could no longer be endured. Over a century ago it was said that municipalities were "sores upon the body politic," and this phrase has been solemnly quoted ever since as a sort of slogan of despair; whereas the municipality might be and ought to be, if intelligently administered, the mainspring of all our great national activities. The Socialist asks that, instead of waiting for evils to become intolerable before we attempt to cope with them and then adopting measures which, because they come late, are inadequate, we should take up municipal administration as a housekeeper takes hold of the administration of her house, adopting measures which we must inevitably in the end adopt before the evils become intolerable, and before the city becomes so over-built as to make the difficulty of coping with these evils insurmountable. This is the spirit in which a citizen should approach the question of city land; and if we do approach it in this spirit, the problem of how to put an end to the evils arising from private ownership of land is in many respects similar to those which present themselves in our effort to put an end to the evils of private ownership of stock. For example, some land will be in the hands of men who have contributed absolutely nothing to its value. They have inherited it, and upon the rent which conditions have enabled them to exact they have lived lives of uselessness if not of profligacy. One has abjured his American nationality to avoid the payment of the personal tax, and applies the sums which he receives, thanks to the industry of the community in New York, to the publishing of a conservative newspaper in London opposed to every effort permanently to improve the conditions of humanity there. Some land will be in the hands of men and women who have invested it in the economies of a laborious life and for whom it represents an old-age pension. Between these two, there is every degree of merit. The problem of compensation in taking over of city land will prove as complicated as in the socialization of industries, and very much the same principles will apply. Every city presents problems of its own, and it is difficult, therefore, to lay down general principles applicable to all cities. But one point seems clear: We shall have to live in our cities while we are transforming them, and this means that the transformation will have to be slow. If the state undertakes to transform the slums into habitable tenements, the present families of the slums must be accommodated somewhere while the transformation takes place. Rebuilding our cities to accommodate them to the changed conditions of a coöperative commonwealth, will be little more than doing on a large scale what Birmingham did on a small scale when it converted its slums into Corporation Street. If it is to be done well, it must be preceded with the deliberate preparation indispensable to the success of every large undertaking. The Single Taxers are right when they claim that the enhancement of the value of land due to the industry of the many ought not to be appropriated by the idle few. The "unearned increment" should accrue to the whole community and not to a few landowners. As, therefore, the enhancement of the value of land due to crowding is a peculiar feature of the city, and distinguishes it from the country, it seems indispensable that city land should eventually be owned by the city; by the mass of citizens who labor and dwell therein. Another thing seems clear, namely, that a city cannot be transformed to suit the needs of a coöperative commonwealth so long as the city is owned by a few individuals who, by virtue of their ownership, have a right to resist the transformation. The ownership in city land is, therefore, totally different from ownership in farmland. In the latter case, there is no necessity for suppressing private ownership; whereas in the city, such suppression seems indispensable. It may be added that the beautiful parts of every city are due to state ownership. The Place des Vosges was built by Henry IV; the Place Vendôme was built by Louis XIV; the Place de la Concorde was built by Louis XV; the Champs Elysées and the Arc de l'Etoile were built by the two Napoleons. Practically all the great monuments of Paris were built by the state. Her streets were planned by the state, and the height of her private buildings regulated by the state. The same thing is true of London and Vienna. It is in our American cities alone that private initiative being allowed full sway, our buildings look like ill-assorted books in a neglected library; that we are committed to interminable streets and avenues which pass what monuments we have but lead up to none. In a word, our cities are committed to conditions so inartistic that the task of making them beautiful seems impossible short of destroying and rebuilding them altogether. § 6. SUMMARY OF PRODUCTIVE SIDE OF ECONOMIC CONSTRUCTION It will be seen that modern Socialism does not propose to interfere with the private ownership of the farmer in his farm, and that the production of agricultural and dairy products will remain much in the same hands as at present, except that the state will have farm colonies to standardize production; to weed out those farmers who, because of their incapacity, are unable to produce what the land is capable of producing; and to furnish work not only for unsuccessful farmers, but for all who cannot earn a living in socialized industries or under competitive conditions. Such a condition of things will involve no redistribution of tasks. It will leave every man working in the industry in which he is; it will leave those who are engaged in competition still engaged in competition where it is not productive of injurious result. It will raise wages in all socialized industries, and raise the purchasing power of these industries by reducing prices; it will, therefore, raise the standard of life for the workingman, secure for him clean and wholesome habitations, and a possibility of maintaining a home in the best sense of the word, where our present civilization makes such a home impossible. By farm colonies it will make the exploitation of men, women, and children impossible. Children will not work at all until they have reached the fullest education of which they are capable; women will not be allowed in industrial work as long as they are bearing and rearing children; and men need never receive a sweated wage when they have state institutions where they can in exchange for their work, have board, lodging, and as much wage as they can in addition earn. There will be no criminal class, for no man need be driven to crime by want; and by the abolition of the criminal class and the criminal environment, it is probable that crime resulting from economic causes will tend to disappear. Nor will a woman be driven by need to prostitution. Every industry will provide compensation for its own superannuated and defectives, and the state will have but few for whom to furnish old-age pensions. The community will be relieved, therefore, of the enormous burden of vagrancy, pauperism, prostitution, and crime; and all this without interfering with any competitive industry capable of supporting its workers up to the standard of life created by socialized industry, and without any such convulsion as will throw upon the state the dangerous problem of assigning tasks. We have heretofore considered only the problem of production; we have still to consider that of distribution. § 7. DISTRIBUTION. At the present time anarchy reigns over production and distribution. This anarchy has been in great part already replaced in the field of manufacture by the trust. By combination, or as Mr. Rockefeller says, "by coöperation" (Book II, Chapter III), all those engaged in the manufacture of the same thing have eliminated competition so as to obtain the advantages of production on a large scale. The coöperative commonwealth will avail itself of the work already done by the trust, and as has been already shown, will leave all these trusted industries in the hands of those actually engaged in the work thereof. In the field of agricultural production, however, little has been done to diminish the anarchy of distribution.[182] The anarchy which now characterizes distribution must be considered under two heads: competition in the field of transportation, and competition in the field of retail trade. America is unique among the nations of the world for insisting upon railroads being run on the competitive system. In Europe franchises are given to railroads with a view to public welfare and the distinct policy of avoiding competition. Capitals are adopted as railroad centers and franchises so granted as to furnish a system of main lines radiating from these centers in such a manner as to compete with one another the least possible. In America we have proceeded upon the plan that railroads are to compete just as traders do, and that it is by competition that rates are to be kept down. Railroads competing with one another between the same places are run at a social loss, the community is better served by one railroad run in the interests of the country than by two between the same points run in the interests of private individuals. As regards transportation then there seems to be no room for competition whatever. The state should own all systems of transportation with a view to bringing the produce of the country and of the factory to the consumer at the lowest possible cost to the community. Let us consider how a coöperative community will deal with competition in the retail trade. There is no reason why the private retailer conducting a business for his own account should not continue to exist side by side with a system of state distribution. There are reasons of propinquity and convenience that enable the small retailer to live to-day next door to the big department store. In the same way, the private retailer can perfectly well continue to live by the side of the state distributing system. Nevertheless, some parts of retail trade will be taken over absolutely, for example, milk, for hygienic reasons. And other departments will be so completely in the hands of the state that so long as the state furnishes a good quality it will be improbable that private enterprise will find it useful to interfere; as for example, the baking of bread. As regards all those things which are likely to remain in the hands of individual enterprise, as, for example, things in which taste plays an important rôle--garments, hats, wallpaper, furniture, musical instruments, other instruments of pleasure such as athletic goods, bicycles, automobiles, steam launches, photographic apparatus--the retailing of these is likely to remain as much a matter of private enterprise as the production of them. As regards the necessaries of life the consumer should be able to get them at the lowest possible price. All things of a hygienic character, which it is of the utmost importance that the consumer should have of the purest quality, the state will undertake not only to transport, but to distribute in state stores. It is of course conceivable that in some towns the state store will not be conducted to the satisfaction of its citizens, and private enterprise will therefore run a store in that place better than the state. In such case, private enterprise ought to be encouraged in its competition. But inasmuch as good state management will be in a coöperative commonwealth a matter of the greatest importance, it is not likely that the citizen will long endure bad administration. This belongs more to the political aspect of Socialism than to the economic, and will be studied there. We shall therefore now pass to a brief consideration of just how this system of distribution will work. The state, having control of transportation, will adopt the method now prevailing in South Australia, and will pay the manufacturer and the farmer in cash at least 50 per cent--if not more--of the value of his goods at the railroad station. These will then be transported by the state in conformity with the needs of the various villages, towns and cities to stores of its own. These will be run upon the coöperative plan; the goods sold at only a small margin above cost, this margin being kept to meet the expense of distribution; and the profits--if any--will be distributed at the end of the year amongst customers on the coöperative plan. It is obvious, however, that if the state is to distribute in the most economical manner, it must have some control over production. It must not be called upon to transport and distribute more of any one thing than the public wants; nor must it be caught without enough to satisfy the needs of the consumer. This makes it indispensable to study the problem of control at the same time with the problem of distribution. No function of the state will probably be more important in a coöperative commonwealth than that of controlling the production of those things which, because they are necessaries or have hygienic importance, a coöperative commonwealth should itself control, transport, and distribute. The problem of control is not as difficult as it might at first seem. We know perfectly well to-day how much wheat, corn, beef, mutton, etc., are actually consumed by our population. All we have to do to determine this amount for ourselves is to take, for example, the amount of wheat produced in the country, and the amount exported, subtract the exports from the product and determine the amount consumed in this country. The same thing can be done practically with every staple product. The state, therefore, can determine every year in advance how much of every staple product _must_ be produced for the needs of the country. It will, of course, add to the amount actually needed a margin to provide for poor crops and other accidents. Let us consider how this control will be exercised as regards farm and dairy products. It has been already suggested that land should be classified according to geographical conditions, exposure, and soil. The productivity of the farm colonies will of course be known by the state. Every private farm will have its productivity roughly determined and every farmer will be expected to produce a minimum amount. Of the amount he produces, a part will be taken as taxes to furnish the government with the means to pay for administration. The rest will be paid for partly in gold and partly in orders on the state stores. The object of this system of payment is the following: It has been explained that taxes will be paid in produce. This payment therefore needs no further comment. A minimum product ascribed to every farm will be paid for with orders on the state store. This represents the amount which the farmer _must_ produce to keep his farm. It also represents the amount which the state _must_ have to supply its citizens with food. All over and above this amount will be paid for in orders on the public store, or in cash, as the farmer shall elect; or, if the farmer chooses to dispose of this part to private traders he will be at liberty to do so. By this method the community will be furnished with produce belonging to three different categories: produce in the shape of a tax for which the farmer receives no compensation, this being practically the rent he pays the state for his land; second, the minimum produce for which the farmer receives equivalent orders on the public store, this category being the produce upon which the community depends for its sustenance. The order upon the public store need differ in no way from the greenback of to-day except that, instead of entitling the holder to a dollar's worth of gold, it will entitle him to a dollar's worth of goods in the public store. Thus if wheat can be produced in a coöperative commonwealth at 50 cents per bushel, as seems likely,[183] the farmer will receive for every two bushels an order for one dollar on the public store. The third category which represents the surplus above what the farmer is required to produce in order to keep his farm, will constitute a surplus of production applicable to exchange for luxuries and foreign goods. This exchange can be made directly by the farmer or by private banks and private merchants, or by the state. Let us consider the control the state must exercise over, and the rôle it must play in, the distribution of products of socialized industries such as oil, sugar, steel, iron, leather, etc. The amount of iron and steel required by the nation in the course of a year is not as constant a quantity as the amount of wheat. It is, however, sufficiently constant to make it possible to establish a minimum. The state will begin by requiring socialized industries to furnish this minimum and determine the price to be paid for it, thus creating a stock on hand which can be accumulated so as to diminish the amount needed in subsequent years and furnish a reserve which can be called upon in case of extraordinary need. The state, having established the minimum of steel, sugar, oil, etc., which it needs, will require of the socialized industries to produce this minimum. It will also require them to produce, in addition, an amount necessary to contribute their share to the maintenance of the government. Every associated industry, therefore, will furnish at regular intervals the result of its manufacture in three categories similar to those already explained--a part for taxes; a minimum already referred to that will be paid for in orders on the public stores, and a surplus of which it can dispose either to the state or directly to foreign bankers and merchants. In this way, every associated industry will so adjust its manufacture as to produce these three categories; the proceeds of the surplus will be applicable in the first place to the support of workers through accidents, illness, and during old age; and the rest will be divided as profits amongst those engaged for example in the steel industry. These profits will be applicable to the purchase of luxuries either produced at home or produced abroad. Under this system the coöperative commonwealth will have goods to exchange with foreign countries and will to this extent be a merchant as regards all those things which it holds in excess of the needs of the community, and as regards that surplus which it may purchase from the farmer and the socialized industries. This leaves room for a system of private banks and private enterprises in international trade; for the farmer and the socialized industries will be free to trade their surplus through the government or through private individuals as they may consider most to their profit. The distributive stores will present very much the same aspect as our department stores of to-day except that, though they may be even more gigantic in size, they are not likely to be as diverse; for a large proportion of the things now dealt in by department stores will doubtless remain in the hands of private industry. The essential duty of the state will be to provide its citizens with necessaries, not luxuries pertaining to taste and pleasure. The state store will be divided into two departments, retail and wholesale; not that a different price need necessarily be charged in the retail than in the wholesale department, but because the machinery for furnishing builders with bricks is different from that for furnishing housewives with groceries. The state stores will also have a system for the regular delivery from door to door of such necessaries of life as are daily or at stated intervals consumed, e.g., milk, bread, coal, ice, meat, vegetables, and fruit, thereby applying postoffice economies to the distribution of these things. The labor of distribution will be diminished by the slow transformation of city dwellings into gigantic apartment houses so constructed as to give the fullest supply of light and air to every room; and these apartment houses will have a distributing system of their own to the relief of the state. As regards alcoholic drinks, the state will undoubtedly undertake the production of these with a view to taking this industry as far as possible out of private hands. It will not be necessary, however, to take it entirely out of private hands provided all private production is subjected to vigorous control. But the distribution of alcoholic liquors will probably be monopolized by the state on the Gothenburg plan with, perhaps, the important feature which characterizes the Public House Trust in England; that is, the persons in charge will receive a salary and an additional commission upon the sale of non-alcoholic drinks, but no commission on the sale of alcoholic drinks; and this with a view to giving the persons in charge an interest in selling non-alcoholic drinks. Under these circumstances, there will be no temptation to encourage drunkenness and the rule of not giving alcoholic drinks to persons already under the influence of liquor will be complied with. It will be possible under such a general system for the state to serve as a medium for an exchange of labor that will greatly enhance the pleasure of life. Under existing conditions, the factory works summer as well as winter despite the fact that temperature makes work during the summer irksome and dangerous to health and life; and at the very time that the population is debilitated by being called upon to work in factories during the heat of June, July, and August, the farmer is in despair because he cannot find help to take in his harvest. Once industries are associated so that they have a definite knowledge of how much they have to produce, there is no reason why they should not so adjust the work of the factory as to keep it open during the eight cool months of the year, leaving the factory hands free to help the farmer in the country during the four hot months. The same thing holds good with the farmer who, during the short cold days of winter, has little to do on the farm and can, therefore, to his advantage as well as to the advantage of the community, devote those months to factory work. There need be nothing compulsory about this exchange, for socialized industry is master of its own time and can distribute its work throughout the year as it chooses. But the fact that the state is possessed of the knowledge how much is to be produced by every factory and how much by every farmer--how many men are needed in the winter in every factory and how many men in the summer on every farm, will enable the state to serve as a medium through which the factory hand can arrange to work on the farm during the summer and the farmer can arrange to work in the factory in the winter, if they respectively desire to do so. It does not follow that the farmer is to be compelled to work long hours in the summer in the field and also in the factory during the winter; or the factory hand to give up his holiday in order to work on the farm during the summer. It has been shown that all the necessaries of life can probably be produced, even at the present time, by the adults in the community though they work no more than two hours and a half a day. If this be so, it would be easy so to adjust the work as to enable those who desire it to work more hours in the day and become entitled to so much longer vacation. The foregoing is only intended to show that in addition to the vacation which can be thus enjoyed, the farmer can relieve the monotonous existence of the farm during the winter months by work in the factory, and the factory hand can escape from factory conditions during the summer to his own advantage and to the advantage of the community at large. Another object we have in view is to put an end to the anarchy which exists in all that part of our industry which has not been concentrated into trusts--the anarchy under which some things are produced in greater quantities than are needed, and some things needed are not produced in sufficient quantities--under which no producer can tell whether he is producing enough of a thing until the time for profiting by the knowledge has passed; no producer can tell whether he is producing too much of a thing until he is injured and even ruined by the discovery. It is, I think, obvious that all these objects are obtained by concentrating industry after the fashion of trusts in the hands of the men actually engaged in the process of production; by producing things not to make profit but to satisfy needs; and in the quantities which we know to be needed and not in quantities determined by the desire of the producer to make large profits cheeked only by the bankruptcy that attends production in larger quantities than the market will take. Thus, the state orders thirty million tons of iron ore because we know that this amount of iron ore has served the needs of the country during a period of great activity, and will furnish not only all we can use ourselves in that year, but all that we can dispose of abroad. These thirty million tons represent then the maximum that we can usefully manufacture; and we can safely order thirty million tons because the state is not under the necessity to sell this iron to get gold with which to pay wages, rent, coal, and the running expenses of the factory. In a coöperative commonwealth there will be no rent to pay. The coal will be paid for in exactly the same way as the iron, by the issue of store orders. The workers will get as nearly as possible the exact product of their work. There will be no capitalist who will take from them what the capitalist now takes, that is, about one-half of their earnings. Nor will those doing a low order of work receive as much as those doing a high order of work; every man will be paid according to his capacity; for we begin by assuming that the distribution of work according to capacity to-day is not far wrong, and so every man engaged in the steel industry will continue to receive the same wages as he received before with a certain prospect of an additional wage in the shape of profit, representing the difference in wage between the new conditions and the old. Overwork will be impossible in the iron trade, because a sufficient number will be employed to prevent overwork. And unemployment will be impossible because if, at any period, it turns out that more iron is being produced than the community can use, the excess men employed in the previous year will be set to work by the state in some other industry. The effect of such a discovery will be to diminish the number of hours required all round. It must not be forgotten how little work need actually be done to produce the things we need. Under these circumstances, we need hardly consider the question of overwork, for all will enjoy ample leisure. The hours of labor will not diminish in a great degree in the first year that an industry is taken over, for during the transition period, experience must be given time to demonstrate the extent to which hours of labor can be reduced. And as regards unemployment, even though there be no industry in which, for instance, the surplus workers of the iron trade can be usefully employed, there will always be farm colonies where their labor can be self-supporting. Another beneficial consequence of this system is that if, as is likely, it turns out that thirty million tons of iron are more than we can use, the state will not be obliged to dump the excess upon European markets as do now the trusts,[184] thereby incurring a heavy loss to the home industry and arousing the animosity of the European industry affected thereby. Again, no financial panic can hurt the iron industry. The bankers may gamble to their heart's desire. If they withhold gold the worst they can do is to injure those engaged in competitive industry. No withholding of gold can affect an industry which produces for use and not for profit and receives weekly the wages of its employees in a currency which, because it is not gold or based upon gold and not, therefore, within the control of the banker or the financier, escapes entirely the evil effects of financial operations. Nor can such an industry be affected by what are called "industrial panics"; for industrial panics are the result of overproduction--of the anarchy that exists under the competitive system. These panics may affect competitive industries, but cannot affect guild industries built on yearly state orders for definite amounts calculated beforehand from the known needs of the community, and not left as now to the anarchy and accidents of the market. Neither financial nor industrial panics can ever have the terrible consequences in a coöperative commonwealth that they have under existing conditions, because in a coöperative commonwealth all the necessaries and most of the comforts of life will be produced upon the coöperative plan, and therefore, a financial or industrial panic can only affect that part of industry which proceeds under the competitive system and as regards, for the most part, luxuries and not necessaries of life. Obviously, the system of store orders cannot be applied upon the first transfer of an industry from the hands of the capitalist to those of the guild. For a time gold will have to be used until the transformation from capitalism to coöperation has been sufficiently extended to put the state in a position to open public stores. There need, however, be no anxiety as to the state not being in possession of enough gold to handle this part of the business, because it will obviously be the first duty of the coöperative commonwealth to expropriate the mines and put itself in possession of the gold necessary to carry on financial operations with the guilds until such time as the public stores can be usefully opened. Moreover, in taking over the gold mines, the state will also take over the iron mines; and iron ore will be furnished to the iron guild under conditions that will make the necessity of the use of gold far smaller than it would be if the iron ore remained in private hands and had to be paid for in gold. The state will only have to pay gold representing the labor cost of extracting the ore, and will not have to pay miners' profits. Under this system, there is no temptation to mine more ore or to cut down more forests than is absolutely necessary for the needs of the community. When every member in the community is educated to understand that waste means more work for himself and that the saving of waste means less work for himself, every man in the community will have a direct personal interest in discouraging waste and promoting economy. Obviously, too, industry will be conducted at its maximum efficiency. Instead of being slaves of the market, we shall become its master. We shall have only so many factories running as are necessary to produce the things we need. Every factory will be running at maximum capacity, at maximum efficiency. It will be observed that it is proposed to pay the same price for pig iron after taking over the industry as was paid under competitive conditions at the time of the transfer. The objection may be made that this is obviously improper; that it is not fair to the workers in other industries to pay what is known to be an excessive price to the workers in pig iron. To this it may be answered that it will always be better to apply a regular rule than to leave questions of this kind to arbitrary administrative action. Besides, the rule that on taking over a new industry the price paid for the production of the first year shall be the price ruling at that time, will eventually put all industries upon the same footing. At the excessive prices now ruling, the workers will during the first year get a larger proportion than they will ultimately be entitled to; but the larger proportion they will get this year will be needed to face the initial expenses of a higher standard of life. But here comes the most serious objection that can be made to this plan. It has been said that these prices will have to be revised; that if those manufacturing cotton thread believe themselves to be receiving less for the work they accomplish in their industry than those engaged in making pig iron, they will insist on revision; if so, there will be continual altercations between industries as to the price to be paid for their goods and as to the share in this price that each is to receive; and the problem arises, who is to settle these innumerable questions? This difficulty is the one that tends to make communists of us. It would be easy to wave away this difficulty by providing that the total profits be divided equally amongst all the members of the community. Humanity, however, is not prepared for such a system. Generations of selfishness have so determined the minds of those who are likely to have to decide these questions in a coöperative commonwealth, that the idea of paying the man at the head of the iron guild the same wages as the man who puddles, will seem too preposterous to be entertained. Whether man will ever develop to a point of unselfishness that will enable him to entertain this idea is a matter of speculation. Suffice it to recognize that if Socialism is to come within one hundred years, and if we take into account the attitude of the public mind as it is to-day, and the slowness with which the public mind changes in matters so radical as these, we shall have to recognize that Communism is still beyond the range of practical politics; and we shall have to face the problem how the questions of the price of goods and the remuneration of the individual are to be solved. § 8. REMUNERATION It has been pointed out that the proportion at present received by the various grades of workers in an industry, from the man who manages the whole industry to those who do the least skilled work, will at first be maintained. It may be that the salaries paid to managers at present rates may seem so exorbitant[185]--so out of all proportion to those paid to others--that there will be an outcry against it, leading to a diminution of these salaries. For present high salaries to managers are due to the extraordinary difficulty of handling industry under competitive conditions--difficulties that will in great part disappear when coöperative conditions are substituted for competitive conditions. With the exception of these highest salaries, probably the wisest rule will be to maintain at first the proportion that exists at the time when the industry is taken over. Taking over these industries will at once raise the salaries of all because they will receive the share of the profits which now comes to the capitalist, after the deduction of sums paid to annuitants. Nevertheless, it cannot be expected that the proportion now existing will be indefinitely maintained. The cost of management under competitive conditions is far higher than it would be under coöperative. A railroad man once pointed out to me that the coöperative system is impossible because it would be impossible for the government to find men capable of handling railroads at the price habitually paid by the government for such services. He pointed out that genius is necessary to handle railroads,--the genius of such men as J.J. Hill and the late E.H. Harriman. When, however, it was explained to him that the reason why it was necessary to have such men as Harriman and Hill run our railroads was the competition between them, and when he was asked whether it would be necessary to have such men if our railroads were run as our postoffice is run, he admitted that under such conditions nine-tenths of the difficulty of management would be eliminated. Obviously, therefore, the enormous salaries paid to men at the head of trusts, life insurance companies, and railroad systems, would no longer be earned, and of course they would no longer be paid. What is true regarding the heads of these industries is true throughout a large part of the administration. It would need less of the faculty which characterizes the larger carnivora and more of the faculties which characterize the beaver and the ant. For these humbler services lower wages would be paid. This does not mean, however, that there will not be in the state room for men of the constructive ability of Harriman and Hill; but these men will not be the servants of our industries, they will be the servants of our state; and the genius that is now absorbed by business, will, in a coöperative commonwealth, be more usefully employed in the larger fields of politics. After this slight digression, let us return to the question how far the remuneration will be subject to revision. It may be that the lower grades will not be subject to revision at all; that all the iron ore we need can be produced by working four hours a day during eight months of the year, and that the rate of wages earned upon the old scale increased by the profits to which workers will be entitled will, without changing the proportion, furnish a standard of comfort such as to-day it is difficult to foresee. It is probable, however, that workingmen who are to-day members of the Socialist party will not agree with this prognosis, but will insist that in a coöperative commonwealth the whole scheme of remuneration will have to be revised. If this be so, it is useless to deny that the revision of this rate of wages will be a matter of difficulty and that the difficulties arising will tend to be perpetual. Obviously, there must be some plan devised under which these matters will be better adjusted than by a government board, as has been suggested by certain Socialists. Mr. Hillquit[186] quotes with approval the words of Kautsky that government in a coöperative commonwealth will change in character, and that the state will no longer govern, but administer, and this is to a large degree true. But if the administration is to determine what every man is to receive as compensation for the work he does, it is clear that matters of such vital importance cannot be referred to the arbitrary action of a board of administrators. It seems to me that it will be indispensable to submit these matters to an industrial parliament in which every industry will be represented. And as the determination of these questions will be a matter of the greatest importance to every individual, it is probable that these parliaments will have to be bicameral for the same reason that our government is bicameral; for the same difficulty will present itself. New York insists upon having its large population represented in Congress. Rhode Island, on the other hand, in spite of its small size, insists upon having its state sovereignty represented; so New York is given a representation in proportion to its population in the Lower House and Rhode Island is given equal representation in the Upper House. Exactly the same situation will present itself it regard to industries: Certain industries will be enormous and will want to be represented in proportion to their size; for example, the steel industry. Others will be much smaller but perhaps of much greater importance; for example, the engineers. They will want to be fairly represented in spite of their small size and I see no way of adjusting this other than by adopting an industrial parliament of two chambers, in one of which representation will be according to numbers, while in the other every industry will be equally represented irrespective of size. This may seem a cumbersome system, but it will take no more time than the administration of the trade union takes to-day, and will not be half as costly; for the trade union of to-day has to accumulate funds to provide for unemployment, old age, sickness, and strikes. Strikes and unemployment it will not be necessary to provide against and the others will be provided for by every guild for their own members. The question, therefore, of the adjustment of price and wages will occupy far less time than is now occupied by federations of trade unions. It is probable that the conclusions to which the industrial parliament will come will not be final. It will be deemed wise to refer them for execution to the general government. This matter, however, belongs to the chapter on the political aspect of Socialism. § 9. CIRCULATING MEDIUM UNDER SOCIALISM It may not be clear at first sight why it is proposed to substitute store checks for greenbacks or gold. Early Socialist writers--particularly Rodbertus--attached much importance to the elimination of gold and the substitution therefor of what they called "labor checks"; a currency representing time spent in labor. Modern Socialist writers have been disposed to cast aside all efforts to substitute this kind of currency for gold. Mr. Hillquit quotes Kautsky[187] with approval on this subject: "'Money,' says Kautsky, 'is the simplest means known up to the present time which makes it possible in as complicated a mechanism as that of the modern productive process, with its tremendous far-reaching division of labor, to secure the circulation of products and their distribution to the individual members of society. It is the means which makes it possible for each one to satisfy his necessities according to his individual inclination (to be sure within the bounds of his economic power). As a means to such circulation, money will be found indispensable until something better is discovered.'"[188] Upon this point I find myself at variance with modern Socialists. In Book II, Chapter VI, on Money, I have endeavored to show how the use of gold for currency puts those who own and handle gold in a position practically to control the entire country. If I have failed in proving this, there will be no occasion for substituting anything for gold. But if I have failed, it is, I think, my fault; or perhaps Socialist writers on this subject have not had, and do not possess, the intimate knowledge of financial affairs indispensable to an understanding of this subject. If Mr. Kautsky had practiced law in America, and had had American financiers for his clients, he would not, I think, have failed to understand that money is still more to-day what it always has been since the beginning of the civilized world--the "root of all evil." By money, I mean not currency, which is indispensable, but the use of precious metals as the sole fundamental medium of exchange; because the amount of such precious metals being limited, the few, who under competitive conditions contrive to get control of these metals, become by virtue of this control masters not only of our economic, but of our political conditions. Mr. Hillquit says[189] that the principal economic classes and interest groups are represented by separate and well-defined political parties; and that the "only exception seems to be presented by the money-lending group of capitalists, who, as a rule, do not form parties of their own. This, however, may perhaps be accounted for by the function of money capital, which can become operative only in connection with the other forms of capitalistic ownership, but has no independent productive existence." It is misleading to endeavor to draw conclusions from political groups which characterize politics in Germany and France, and there is, I think, a better reason why the great "money-lending group of capitalists" or financiers do not form parties of their own. Mr. Hillquit is doubtless right in saying that the "Republican party is substantially the party of the modern capitalists," "while the Democratic party is largely the party of the middle class"; nevertheless, in America, as in Europe, the so-called interests and capitalists belong to no one party, because they must and do control both. And it is because Socialist writers do not seem to be aware of the extent to which they do control politics, that comparatively little interest is taken by these writers in questions of currency. No one who lived in Europe during the Boer war is ignorant of the immense desire of both France and Germany to intervene on behalf of the Boers, and they certainly would have intervened not only because it afforded them a good opportunity to crush England, which one of them openly and the other less openly desired to do, but because such a war would have been popular with the masses in both countries. One thing alone prevented this: Financiers in France and Germany were heavily interested in African gold mines and it was their influence that turned the scale against the crushing of England at that time. In America, the revelations of the life insurance investigation told all the world what Wall Street previously knew: that big corporations contribute to both Republican and Democratic parties and practically control the action of the Democratic side of our legislatures as well as the Republican. Nothing could have been more transparent than the influence of financiers in the decision whether Cannon and the rules that make Cannon supreme in Congress were to be maintained. The Wall Street Group, which had a lobby in Washington, appealed to the Republican majority not to disorganize their party by fighting against Cannon personally, promising that the Republican party would alter the rules that gave him his present autocratic power; and when in compliance with this promise, Cannon was reëlected and the rules came up, the same lobby secured enough Democratic votes to maintain the rules in spite of the adverse votes of the insurgent Republicans, the argument then used being that the tariff bill could not be passed unless the rules were maintained. Again, after Taft had, on three separate occasions, solemnly promised the people, if he were elected, a revision downward of the tariff, the same lobby secured a revision of the tariff upwards. We are assured by Messrs. Aldrich and Payne that the revision is a revision downward. How, then, will they explain the extraordinary haste with which ships sought to reach this port before the new tariff came into effect?[190] Were these ships hurrying to port in order to escape the payment of a low tariff? It may be answered that although the tariff was raised as regards certain articles, it was lowered as regards others. To this I have but to quote the _Reviews of Reviews_ for September, 1909, and the articles entitled, "The Payne-Aldrich Tariff," which follow in subsequent numbers. The _Review of Reviews_ is quoted rather than other periodicals because it is recognized as a supporter of the so-called Roosevelt policies and, therefore, cannot be accused of Socialistic tendencies. It is seldom that the Interests have gone so far as to elect a presidential candidate on a definite promise and deliberately, as soon as the candidate was elected, to violate their promise. But the Interests have at this moment such control over our politics that they can even do this; and it seems very doubtful whether this treachery will ever be materially punished. If, as I believe, it is important that the competitive system be allowed to survive in the coöperative commonwealth, it is obvious that it can only be tolerated on the condition that the community be safe from such political control as this. And for this reason it seems to me essential that the use of gold as currency be limited; and that as regards the exchange of all the necessaries of our existence, we should have a currency that entirely escapes the control of the financier. This is the reason why I have insisted on the use of store checks which are just as convenient and secure as our present greenbacks. There seems to be no other way of eliminating the undemocratic autocracy of the financier than by some such system as the one above described; that is to say, the issue by the state of orders on the public stores to the extent of the goods in the public stores, which may in their general appearance differ but little from the greenback of to-day: Instead of reading "Good for $1.00 gold currency," they will read "Good for $1.00 at the public stores." This public store currency will eliminate the use of gold and silver throughout the socialized industries and as regards all agricultural products except a very small portion. Every socialized industry and every farmer will furnish to the state the bulk of his produce--that is, the minimum exacted by the state--in exchange for this kind of currency.[191] It is only the surplus--the amount produced by the farmer and factory above the minimum established by the state--that the farmer and the factory will be at liberty to sell for gold instead of exchanging for public store notes; and of this surplus the farmer and factory will be free to sell as much as they choose for public store notes, so that gold and silver will constitute a small part of the medium of exchange. This system will have the following advantages: It will practically eliminate the present control of political and economic conditions by financiers. So long as the currency used in exchanging necessaries and comforts is rescued from the control of financiers, it is a matter of comparative indifference whether the financiers control the currency used in the manufacture and distribution of luxuries, for such control will have practically no effect upon the things necessary to human existence. It will give to the state the use of the gold coin which is now accumulated in its treasury for the redemption of its notes; and the state will use this large gold fund for the purchase of the products of other nations.[192] Let us see how this proposed system of store notes will work in a given manufacture: The state will order the steel guild to manufacture thirty million tons of pig iron (the amount produced in 1907 was a little over twenty-six millions); and will allot to the steel guild for the supply of steel six hundred and sixty million dollars in store notes, this being calculated at the rate of $20 a ton. (The price in 1907 was a little over $22.) These $660,000,000 will be paid to the steel guild in the following manner: Every week a number of store orders will be issued to the amount of the wages of the week and of the fixed charges. At stipulated periods the steel guild will furnish the state pig iron so that the state will never have advanced to the guild store orders amounting to more than the value of the pig iron in the store, an exception of course being made for the first few weeks that the industry proceeds upon this basis. Upon the delivery of pig iron at these stated periods, the state will deliver the difference between the weekly amounts already paid and the price of the pig iron delivered. If deliveries of pig iron can be made once a month, this will enable a repartition of a part of the profits so that the workers will not have to wait until the end of the year before they receive their profits, the final dividend being paid at the expiration of each year. Such an order as the above will serve the following purposes and have the following consequences: the steel guild will have a definite order for a definite amount of pig iron to manufacture. It will know exactly how many men it will need to manufacture this pig iron. It will employ a few more men than those employed in 1910. The state will issue to the steel guild weekly the amount of store notes necessary to pay the wages upon the same scale as in 1910. Men engaged in the Steel Trust at the moment of transference will continue to work and receive the same rate of wages; but they will be entitled to their share of the profits after the amounts due annuitants and the amounts necessary to create a fund for old age and sickness have been deducted. Obviously, this first order of thirty million tons is far larger than the country uses, because a large part of the product of 1907 was exported. The amount thus exported will be at the disposal of the state either to export, or exchange for foreign products, or to set aside as a reserve upon which the state can draw in case of deficit. § 10. SUMMARY Let us now consider the purposes we have in view in this proposed economic organization of the coöperative commonwealth and how far we attain these purposes: The main object of a coöperative commonwealth is to give to all workers as nearly as possible the exact product of their work. It may be interesting to note that this is the ideal that Mr. Roosevelt himself proposes, and he objects to Socialism because he thinks Socialism will on the contrary allow the "thriftless and the vicious" to profit. These words describe not a coöperative commonwealth, but existing conditions. For example, such a degenerate as Harry Thaw, who would, I suppose, according to Mr. Roosevelt be classified as one of the "thriftless and vicious," obtains his income from the profit created by others who work for it; whereas those who work, instead of getting the full product of their work, are obliged to see that nearly if not altogether one-half of it goes to the support of the idle, among them this young man. These are the exact conditions to which Socialism proposes to put an end, and, therefore, I point out that the principal object that Socialism has in view is to do exactly the thing that Mr. Roosevelt wants to see done--to undo the very things to which Mr. Roosevelt objects. Another principal object of this proposed organization is to prevent overwork and unemployment, that necessarily lead to drunkenness, pauperism, prostitution, and crime. A third thing which this system of organization proposes to do is to preserve the resources of the country; and here again we find ourselves realizing the ideal of Mr. Roosevelt. The single idea of a lumberman is to sell lumber--not to preserve it; the idea of a coal miner is to sell coal--not to preserve it; the idea of an iron miner is to sell ore--not to preserve it. In a coöperative commonwealth there is no desire to make profit out of these things. The one object in view is to use our lumber, coal, and ore to the best advantage and with the least waste. Another object we have in view is to produce with the greatest economy, with the greatest efficiency. We do not want forty refiners engaged in refining sugar where seven will suffice.[193] We want all our factories while they are working, to be working at their best efficiency, not on half time or with only one-half the engines going. We also want the things we need to be produced in such a way as to take advantage of every waste product--a thing that can only be done when industry is concentrated in the hands of a single guild instead of being distributed as it tended to be (before the organization of trusts) in the hands of many competing manufacturers. This system of production and distribution would maintain the present check upon overpopulation which Mr. Huxley regarded as the principal objection to Socialism;[194] for under this plan, although every member of the community would be assured a comfortable income, his comforts would be limited by the number of children he brought into the world. Experience shows that the prudence of the middle class to-day constitutes a check upon overpopulation; that, in other words, overpopulation is to be feared, not in the middle class, but in those, such as the extremely poor, who are under no prudential check.[195] The imprudent in such a coöperative commonwealth as is above described, have always before them the prospect of the state farm with its different degrees of unattractiveness. If, therefore, to-day workingmen look upon the almshouse with abhorrence, it does not seem unreasonable to suppose that the workers in a coöperative commonwealth, accustomed to a far higher standard of living than the workingman of to-day, would be deterred as much by the prospect of committal to a farm colony as a self-respecting worker to-day is deterred by the prospect of the almshouse. But there is another point of view from which the question of overpopulation must be considered: The increasing independence of women in America has already served to diminish the increase of population to the extent which our sociologists regard as alarming. The population of the United States is increasing chiefly through immigration and the increase of immigrants. Here, as elsewhere, it is the extremely poor that propagate. Indeed, as women become more and more independent economically, as they certainly would in a coöperative commonwealth, there seems to be more danger of underpopulation than overpopulation. But here the state can no doubt exert a very important influence; for if there seems danger of underpopulation it might increase its tax upon the industries of the state and apply the tax to the support of children so as to relieve parents at the expense of the entire state, of the cost of educating children, thereby removing all economic motive for underpopulation. I think, moreover, that since Mr. Huxley's day the whole opinion as to overpopulation has changed. There is not a shadow left of the fears of Malthus; for the extraordinary results published in the 13th Annual Report of the Bureau of Labor show that productivity is likely to increase rather than diminish in a coöperative commonwealth, in view of the fact that all those now engaged in pure competition and therefore a burden on the community, will be put to the work of production, thereby increasing the productivity of the nation relatively to its numbers. FOOTNOTES: [152] See Northern Securities Case, 193 U.S. [153] Kautsky, "The Social Revolution." [154] Upon every breadwinner there are on an average four persons dependent--the aged, women, and children; 200,000 unemployed is therefore equivalent to 1,000,000 in want. [155] See Book II, Chapter I, Unemployment. [156] See Appendix, p. 412. [157] "Socialism." By John Spargo, p. 217. "Socialism in Theory and Practice." By Morris Hillquit, Chapters V and VI. [158] By "pure capitalism" is meant the ownership of industry entitling the owner to dividends although the owner contributes nothing to the industry in the way of personal service. [159] See Appendix, p. 428. [160] _Saturday Evening Post_, May 8, 1909. [161] _Outlook_, March 20, 1909, p. 622. [162] Ibid., p. 619. [163] Ibid., p. 623. [164] On the very day of writing of the above, the N.Y. _Times_ of June 25, 1909, states that the United States Postoffice Department has installed a complete ice-making plant which has made such economy that the Government is considering the building of an ice-plant for all its departments. Private dealers charge at the rate of $7.65 a ton for ice, whereas the Postoffice Department now furnishes ice at a cost of 65 cents a ton. [165] "The Elimination of the Tramp," by Edmond Kelly. (G.P. Putnam's Sons.) [166] See Appendix, p. 429. [167] _Charities and the Commons_, p. 342, June, 1907. [168] Eugène Simon, "La cité chinoise" (translated into English); Toubeau, "La répartition métrique des impôts," 2 vols., Paris (Guillaumin), 1880, quoted by Kropotkin in "Fields, Factories and Workshops," p. 239. See Evolution and Effort, p. 168. [169] Dr. M. Fesca, "Beiträge zur Kenntniss der japanesischen Landwirthschaft," Part II, p. 33 (Berlin, 1893). The economy in seeds is also considerable. While in Italy 250 kilogrammes to the hectare are sown, and 160 kilogrammes in South Carolina the Japanese use only sixty kilogrammes for the same area. Semler, "Tropische Agrikultur," Bd. III, pp. 20-28. Quoted by Prince Kropotkin in "Fields, Factories and Workshops," p. 239. [170] L. Grandeau, "Etudes Agronomiques," 3d series, 1887-8, p. 43. Quoted by Kropotkin, Ibid., 101. [171] See Ponce, "La Culture maraiche," 1869. Barrel's "Dictionnaire d'Agriculture." Quoted by Kropotkin, Ibid., p. 64. [172] Very little land in New York State produces more than from two to three tons an acre, and most of it does not produce so much. [173] It is impossible in this book to give to the question of soil fertility the scope which it needs in order to convince a layman of the almost unlimited extent to which good soil can be manufactured and made fertile. Those who are anxious to satisfy themselves on this subject are urged to read the books above quoted. [174] "The Elimination of the Tramp," p. 51. [175] Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons. [176] See "Elimination of the Tramp," p. 45. [177] See _Hampton's Magazine_ for May and June, 1909. [178] See p. 58. [179] The occupation that furnishes most inmates to our asylums is farming. [180] This limitation on property has already been enacted in the State of New York (Chap. 463, Laws of 1909), and bills of similar import have been introduced into the legislatures of California, Maine, and Pennsylvania. In Maine a hypothetical question as to the constitutionality of such legislation was submitted to the supreme court, which reported favorably (19 Lawyers' Reports annotated [U.S.] 422). [181] Farmers' Bulletin, No. 242. [182] Something has been done in connection with the milk supply. Thus the milk producers of Boston have organized a union and have agreed to a price with the Milk Contractors' Association. But although this effort at combination has cheapened milk for large consumers such as hotels, large restaurants, and even small stores, pint customers pay just as much in Boston as elsewhere; that is, 8 cents a quart. (Industrial Commission Report, Vol. VI, p. 409.) [183] See 13th Annual Report of the Bureau of Labor of U.S., p. 25, where the cost of producing wheat under the best conditions is approximately 30 cents per bushel. [184] Book II, Chapter II. [185] For example, it is generally believed that the President of the Steel Trust gets over $100,000 a year. Before the insurance investigation presidents of life insurance companies got similar salaries. Railroad presidents are also paid at similar rates. [186] "Socialism in Theory and Practice," p. 133. [187] "Socialism in Theory and Practice," p. 119. [188] Karl Kautsky, "The Social Revolution," p. 129. [189] "Socialism in Theory and Practice," p. 164. [190] See any daily newspaper between March 16, 1909, when the bill was introduced in the House, and Aug. 6, 1909, when the law went into effect. [191] Obviously, until all the industries are socialized, a part of this minimum will have to be paid in gold. When, however, all the industries are socialized, the whole of the minimum will be paid in store checks. [192] See Appendix, p. 431. [193] Book II, Chapter I. [194] I am not aware that Mr. Huxley has ever suggested any other objection to Socialism than this; but I may be mistaken. [195] "Government," Vol. I, p. 339. CHAPTER III POLITICAL ASPECT OF SOCIALISM The importance of the political aspect of Socialism depends upon the kind of Socialism selected for study. In Fourier's system, the social side altogether predominates--the political side is relatively unimportant. In state Socialism, on the other hand, the political side is the most important and the social side is subsidiary. In modern Socialism, the government takes an intermediary position; the functions of the state under modern Socialism would be in some respects less extended than in such a government as that of Prussia; while in other respects it would be more extended; but in no department would it assume the excessive power and interference generally associated with Socialism in the public mind. It cannot be too emphatically repeated that modern Socialism discards the idea of a common home or even of a common table except to the extent that a common table is sometimes found convenient in our own day. To just the same extent the coöperative commonwealth discards the idea of state ownership of industry and state ownership of land except within the limits set forth in the previous chapter. The two great political objections to Socialism are: that it would give to the government a power destructive of individual liberty; and that the corruption in our existing government demonstrates the unwisdom of increasing the scope of its operations. On the first of these objections it is not necessary to dwell; for it is obvious that the moment state Socialism is abandoned, this objection falls to the ground. The state no longer has the onerous and probably impossible function of assigning tasks; the state no longer controls the hours of labor; the state no longer interferes in the private life of the individual any more than to-day. The relations of the government are not so much with the individual as with conglomerations of individuals in the respective industries; and even here, the government does no more than indicate the amount of a given thing that must be produced and the rate at which the thing so produced is to exchange with the other necessaries of life. It has been suggested that just as in France where commercial cases are brought before purely commercial courts and thus separated from civil and criminal cases, so all things pertaining to production and distribution might be determined by an industrial parliament that would determine such matters as the amount of a given thing to be produced and the rate at which this thing is to exchange with other necessaries, subject to the approval of Congress. Such a system would have the great advantage of referring business matters to business men who would bring no other than business considerations to the solution of them. It would relieve Congress of the necessity of discussing commercial details with which its members are generally unfamiliar, and it would above all prevent that sacrifice of business interests to purely political considerations which often occurs to-day. There will be an important rôle to be played in determining the amount of the various necessaries of life which the socialized industries will be called upon to produce, in distributing these products, exchanging surplus products with foreign markets, and distributing the proceeds of these exchanges. All this work is of a purely business character and should be confided to business men, who have shown themselves by their practical success in business fields most fitted therefor. It would seem wiser to refer these matters to a parliament composed of the representatives of associated industries, of agricultural producers, and of distributing bodies. It would be the duty of such a parliament to appoint its own executive and cabinet, and it may be advisable to associate with the representatives of agriculture and industry in such a parliament, representatives selected by the citizens at large, so as to minimize the possibility of combinations between powerful groups of industries for the purpose of determining questions of public interest to their particular advantage. No attempt will be made here to work out the details of such a system, the object of this book being rather to indicate the possibility of doing these things than to point out the particular method by which they should be done. The objection that the corruption in our existing government demonstrates the unwisdom of increasing the scope of its operations seems at first sight a formidable one. If our government is as corrupt as our "yellow journals" make it out to be, it seems folly to extend its functions and give it larger opportunities for the exercise of this corruption and for the demoralization of the community which this corruption tends to produce. There are, however, many reasons for believing that the less government has to do, the more corrupt it is; and the more it has to do, the less corrupt it is. For example, the Board of Aldermen in the city of New York was once the governing body of the city. It was a body to which men of importance belonged because its functions were important. When corruption crept into the Board of Aldermen the legislature was persuaded more and more to abridge its powers, and Tweed availed himself of this disposition to take practically all the powers of government out of the hands of the board and concentrate it in a small body of men called "supervisors," to which he took care that he and the members of his ring should belong. Some time after the Tweed ring was broken up the Board of Aldermen retained the right of confirming the appointments of the mayor; but this power too was taken from it by ex-President--then Assemblyman--Roosevelt in 1884, and from that year the Board of Aldermen became little more than a franchise-bestowing corporation. The board has consequently become so corrupt that the title of Alderman, which used to be a title of honor, is in New York a title of disgrace. If we compare the Board of Aldermen to the board which corresponds to it in London, we shall find a totally different state of things. In London it is the County Council that governs the municipality, and accordingly we find on it men who stand first in the ranks of the business world. But there is another consideration of vastly more importance than this. New York citizens continue to complain year after year of the low order of men selected by its citizens, not only to the Board of Aldermen, but to all elective offices, including the State Assembly and the Senate. Yet they do not stop to inquire the reason for this, though it is obvious. What stake have the majority of New York citizens in the government of the city? The vast majority are not interested in the tax rates, for they do not pay taxes, or do not think they do. The majority are not interested in an efficient fire department, because they do not own property likely to be destroyed by fire and, indeed, it is said that it is members of this very majority that start most of the fires in New York. They are not interested in clean streets, for foul though our streets be, they are not as foul as the unwholesome tenements. They are not interested in an efficient police. They are not interested in a board of education, because all they want to get out of school for their children is reading, writing, and arithmetic--enough to get a job. It is difficult to see in what respect the large majority of our citizens are interested in good government at all. What then are they interested in? They are interested in bad government. They want to get a brother or a cousin on the police force; and they want the police to be complaisant to a brother or a cousin in a liquor saloon. The retailer does not want to be disturbed in his encroachments on the sidewalk. The building trade does not want to be annoyed by a too conscientious building department. The German wants his beer on Sunday and barrooms want to do business on Sunday. The peddler wants to violate street ordinances and stand his cart in the already too crowded streets. Churches want to receive per capita contributions to their asylums and have long made efforts to secure per capita contributions to their schools. The gambler wants to keep open his gambling den; and the people want the gambler to be undisturbed. The business man, the corporation, and the criminal want to be "let alone"; and those dregs of the population too low to be able to use the vote, want to sell it for a pittance on election day. These are the conditions under which distinguished citizens and committees of one hundred expect to secure good government! And we go on ineffectually organizing municipal leagues, good government clubs, and citizens' unions to this hopeless end. It is not reasonable to suppose that in a government determined by the majority we can expect the government to be good when the majority does not want the government good, but wants it bad. Occasionally the government in New York gets so bad that it outrages even our outrageous majority, and the overthrow of bad government is regarded as a triumph for reform. But no reform movement has ever lasted more than one administration. The public has emphatically assured us, over and over again, that it does not want reform administration, and indeed it may be said that some of these reform administrations have been just as bad as those they were intended to reform. Municipal politicians want good laws, if at all, in order to use them for the purpose of levying blackmail, and the community is willing to pay the blackmail so long as it is not too extortionate. Business men find it cheaper to pay blackmail and be allowed to do what they want. And the same is true all the way down the line until we get to the criminal class, which has the biggest stake in bad government of all. Yet the strange anomaly of existing conditions is that while the majority of the citizens of New York have shown year after year for a century that they want bad government and mean to have it, these citizens are not bad men, but want to be good. It is the folly of our economic conditions that makes them want bad government, and no more pitiable sight was ever presented to gods and men than this city of New York, or indeed any other of our great cities, full of citizens animated with the best intentions, forced by economic conditions to be bad. It has not yet seemed to dawn upon the reformers of the present day that, if they want to have good government, the majority of the citizens must be interested in the government being good; and not, on the contrary, interested in its being bad as at this present time. There are two ways of accomplishing this. One way has been pointed out; to put an end to the competitive system that sets every man at the throat or pocket of his neighbor. The other is to enlarge the functions of the government sufficiently to make it important to every citizen that the government be good; then only will public spirit become stronger than private interest. This conflict between public spirit and private interest is not a matter about which there can be any longer any doubt. When a group was engaged in organizing the City Club, we were told not once but a dozen times by a dozen different men of high standing in the community, that the whole question of good government to them resolved itself into this: "Can I by contributing money or time to reform sufficiently reduce taxes to make it worth my while to give my time and my money to this thing; or is it not better for me to use my money in purchasing protection from the organization that now controls the city and devote my time to my own private affairs?" To these men the question of good government was simply a question of tax rate, and these citizens are the ones least touched by political conditions. When we come to citizens whose business puts them continually in contact with political conditions, we find the contrast between public spirit and private interest still more marked; in the corporations that want franchises, in the builders who want their plans approved, and in the citizens already described who have an interest in keeping on good terms with the powers that be. If now we remove the temptation on the one hand and give a motive for good government on the other, is it not reasonable to suppose that we are more likely to obtain good government than now? Temptation can be removed in many ways. Altogether the greatest motive for corruption is that furnished by the eagerness of corporations to secure franchises. Indeed the city was at one time governed by the owners of our city transportation system. The temptation to violate building laws would be removed if it were the city who built and not the private individual. The temptation to vote for a corrupt police force would be removed if the city instead of private barrooms sold alcoholic drinks. The temptation to vote for corruptible milk inspectors would be removed if the city instead of private dealers supplied milk. In a word, if the city were to undertake the tasks heretofore suggested, practically all temptation for graft would be eliminated. The same process would not only eliminate temptation for graft, but would give the citizens a stake in good government. If the city distributed milk the citizen would be interested in having pure milk at a low price; if the city owned tramways, the citizen would be interested in having transportation effective and cheap; if the city manufactured gas and electric light, the citizen would be interested in having good heat and light at proper prices; and so at last the dream of the reformer that all citizens of the same city regard themselves as stockholders in the same corporation, would cease to be a dream and would be realized. They would have the same interest in the gas plant, electric plant, ice plant, milk plant, transportation plant of their city as a stockholder to-day has in the dividends which these respective industries accord him, though the dividends would not be paid in gold, but in wholesome service at cheap prices. Then only would the conflict between public spirit and private interest come to an end, for a man would find it more to his interest that the government be carried on honestly and efficiently than he does now to secure a government that is dishonest and inefficient. In a word, as Mr. Mill said that the cure for the abuse of liberty is more liberty, so the cure for the abuse of government is more government. This must not be understood as a relapse in favor of state Socialism. It cannot be too often repeated that it would be as great an error to confide too much to the state as, at present, it is an error to confide too little to it. The solution is to be found in taking the middle course: _medio tutissimus ibis_. Give to the government the work it is fitted to do and no more. What work it is fitted to do and what work it is not fitted to do has already been explained.[196] Amongst the tasks for which it is fitted is the work of Education: § 1. EDUCATION There is no reason why the present system of education should be much changed in a coöperative commonwealth. In its nature it would remain very much the same and would only be extended in time; that is, all children who show themselves capable of profiting by education will have the opportunity of extending their education as far as their abilities justify. Education need by no means be confined to the state. There is no reason why the existing universities should not continue their work of education even though they be maintained by Rockefellers and Carnegies, and throw all their weight in support of the competitive system against the coöperative. Socialism stands for light, and if at any period in its development it turns out that the community is not fitted for the phase of Socialism which it has attempted, it may be important to correct the perfunctoriness of official administration by a larger dose of private initiative; and in such case let privately endowed schools and universities be there to preach this doctrine. Nor need there be any objection to sectarian schools. Once the human mind is freed from the shackles of economic servitude, it can be trusted to choose its religion, whether educated by sectarian schools or not. The essential difference between the educational system in a coöperative commonwealth and under existing conditions will be that, inasmuch as child labor in competitive industries will be absolutely forbidden, no child will be deprived of education by economic conditions. Every child, therefore, will have an equal opportunity for mental development. And the fact that the hours of work will be shorter will give to every human being leisure throughout his his entire life in which to develop talents of which no trace may be observable during attendance at school or university. The coöperative commonwealth, therefore, without changing the existing forms of education, will furnish to every man, woman, and child an opportunity for educational development during the whole of life instead of confining it as now to the very first few years of it. It is important to note that, under this system, every industry will be free to work as few hours as it chooses, subject only to the condition of working long enough to pay taxes, to furnish the minimum required by the state, and to create a fund to provide for sickness, accident, and old age. Citizens in this respect will divide themselves into different categories: Some will want to work the least possible and devote the rest of their time to idleness or pleasure. Others will want to work at the particular industries in which they are engaged the least possible and devote the rest of their time to such things as will more interest them--to literature, art, music, or even to some other industry--even to industries competing with the state. Others, instead of working the short hours required in a coöperative commonwealth, will prefer to work long hours so as to have a longer vacation than that enjoyed by the majority; others, on the contrary, will prefer to work long hours at the industry to which they belong, not with a view to earning a longer vacation, but for the purpose of earning more wages applicable to the increase of their comforts, luxuries, and amusements. It would not be difficult for every industry to take account of these various contingencies: A certain number of hours those engaged in a particular industry will have to work, but they will be far shorter than the hours of to-day. Those who volunteer to work longer hours will be allowed to work longer hours. The work of the factory will naturally be divided into two shifts: the one, a morning shift; and the other, an afternoon shift, so that one shift can put in all their work in the morning and the other in the afternoon. Who shall work in each shift will be determined primarily by choice and, wherever choice cannot be resorted to, by lot. Such a condition of things as the foregoing would give to every industry the greatest opportunity for transfer from one industry to another. One who desired to exchange steel working for garment making, could work during the morning shift at the steel trade and during the afternoon shift at the garment trade; and when he had become proficient in the garment trade, he would be able to abandon the steel trade altogether and devote all his working hours to garment making. Still more important, the system would give an opportunity to every man to develop his peculiar talents, however late in life. It is well known that men of genius often show no trace of their genius at school. It is impossible to calculate how much human ability is lost to the race by the fact that, not being observable in the few school years during which children are subject to observation, it is crushed out altogether in the competitive mill. The fact that the number of hours we have to work in a coöperative commonwealth would be small, would give to every man the rest of the day in which to develop his undeveloped talents. § 2. CHURCHES There is no reason why churches should not be supported in a coöperative commonwealth under exactly the same conditions as to-day. It is probable, however, that there will be a tendency to modify public worship so as to render it less subject to obvious objections than to-day. At the present time, children animated with a desire to preach are encouraged to join the ministry; and it sometimes happens that men of vast business and political experience are made by the convention of respectability to sit every Sabbath Day under a boy in the pulpit reading crude theological essays. Few men are equipped in a manner usefully to instruct or advise their fellow creatures in matters so intimate as those of religion until they have attained years which, while they unfit them for the hard work of industrial life, do by accumulated experience peculiarly fit them for the work of the pulpit. The divinity school and the divinity student will tend to diminish and our pulpits will be filled by men who have shown themselves during fifty or sixty years of active work in the community to be best fitted to fill them. And these men, having at that age earned a retiring pension, will not be at the expense of the community nor will they be required by economic conditions as at present, to preach doctrines as to the truth of which some are in doubt and others absolutely disbelieve. § 3. POLITICAL CONSTRUCTION Let us see now whether we can come to some conclusion regarding the political construction of government under a coöperative commonwealth. The idea prevails that Socialism involves an extreme centralization of government. This, however, is quite contrary to modern notions of Socialism. Indeed, in one sense of the word, Socialism upon the plan already proposed would deprive the federal government of much of its power. Nor do I see any reason why our present federal form of government should be materially changed. For example, the present state governments would be maintained with practically all the rights they now enjoy, and the federal government would continue to operate with less than the enumerated powers given it by our present constitution. For example, instead of having as at present the right to regulate commerce, to coin money, and to make patent laws, these powers would be delegated to the industrial parliament subject only to the approval of Congress. And although the title of all such properties as railroads, mines, etc., would be vested in the United States, the effectual control and administration of these properties would be left to the industrial parliament, so that real power as regards these matters would be exercised not by the federal government, but by the industrial parliament, elected not upon the geographical basis of Congress, but by the industries respectively wheresoever situated, as explained in the previous chapter.[197] It would be well to give the right of appeal to Congress because the industrial parliament would consist of producers and each would have an interest in securing for his industry the largest price possible. It may be feared that a few powerful industries might, by the number of votes they control in the chamber elected proportionately to numbers, secure for itself privileges not fair to other industries. This power would be restrained by the fact that the other chamber, elected according to industries, not numbers, would exercise a wholesome check upon any such attempt, and an appeal to Congress may therefore not be necessary. Nevertheless, Congress would represent the whole mass of the nation and would be, as it were, the consumers' parliament in its relation to the industrial parliament. And it would seem proper to give to Congress the right to reconsider and discuss all new departures in connection with the business of the country, not only out of consideration of the rights of consumers, but also for the dignity of Congress. What under these circumstances would be the special functions of Congress? Congress would continue to exercise the powers it now exercises as regards collecting taxes, establishing rules of naturalization, providing for the punishment of counterfeiting, establishing postoffices and postroads, organizing federal courts, punishing piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offences against the law of nations, declaring war, and providing for and maintaining the army, navy, and militia. The States would enjoy all the rights they now enjoy as regards the federal government; but the cities would enjoy much larger powers of government than they now do. There seems to be no reason why the question whether the city of New York should own its own subway should be referred to farmers sitting in Albany, who have no interest and little, if any, knowledge of the needs and resources of the city of New York. It is probable, therefore, that on the whole the effect of Socialism would be to decentralize rather than to centralize. The parties in a coöperative commonwealth would probably be determined by the main issue between coöperation and competition, and we find here a reason for leaving to Congress the last word as regards the decisions of the industrial parliament. For the latter would be a parliament of coöperative industries and disposed, in protecting these industries, to perpetually invade the territory of competition. So long as humanity needs the stimulus of competition, it is essential that this element be fairly represented in the political organization of the state. All measures tending to restrain competition ought therefore to be subject to the approval of the whole nation represented in Congress. One principal bourgeois objection to Socialism is that, under competitive conditions the men best fitted to run an enterprise are those to whom business enterprises are to-day confided upon the principle of the survival of the fittest; whereas under a coöperative commonwealth, the selection of those who are to manage industries must be left to the doubtful intrigues of politics. This objection cannot be seriously taken into consideration. There is probably nothing more difficult for the bourgeois to understand than the difference that would exist between the politics of a coöperative and those of a competitive commonwealth. In the latter, the field of politics is inevitably a cesspool of corruption, because every business man has something to lose or gain through politics. The tariff law just enacted presents one of the most recent illustrations of this. Not only so, but the men appointed to office and elected to Congress in our competitive commonwealth are selected by business interests, and not appointed because of special fitness for the task. In a coöperative commonwealth this situation would be reversed. When all our comforts in life and the necessaries of existence are furnished by our municipalities and our guilds, the management of these municipalities and guilds will be of the utmost importance to every one of us. Our citizens, instead of being interested in bad government, will become interested in good government, in good management and in good administration. Here the public will benefit by the power of recall which, though it may work very imperfectly under competitive, ought to work well under coöperative conditions. For every man is interested in his municipal bakery furnishing good bread, his municipal gas plant furnishing good gas; and citizens will be so deeply interested in matters that touch them as nearly as this that they will not be influenced by political cabals to put in a bad man as superintendent of the municipal bakery, or to replace a good one by a bad one for purely political reasons. One reason why our politics are bad to-day is that hardly any of us have time to give to making them good even if we wanted them good. The workingman who works ten or more hours in the factory and travels two or more hours to reach his work in the morning and return home when his work is done, can hardly have much vitality left to attend to politics. Indeed, the complaint of the trade unions is that he has not vitality enough left to attend to matters so important to him as those of his own trade union. But when the workingman in the first place is thoroughly trained by an education that will last not less than eighteen years--when he is not called upon to work more than four or five hours a day, he will have the knowledge necessary to understand his political needs, and the leisure to organize political movements when necessary to remove a bad administrator and put a good administrator in his place. Indeed, popular government is impossible under capitalism for the reasons just stated; those of us who want good government have not the time to secure it. Popular government is only possible when the people are sufficiently educated to understand their rights and have leisure enough to organize with a view to enforcing them. In the foregoing two chapters entitled, respectively, The Economic Construction of the Coöperative Commonwealth, and The Political Aspect of Socialism, I have endeavored to draw a picture of a coöperative commonwealth in which capitalism is eliminated from the production and distribution of all the necessaries and many of the comforts of life; leaving, however, full play to the existing competitive system as regards the luxuries, some of its comforts, and even as regards necessaries wherever the coöperative commonwealth fails to do its work up to the standard of taste of the community. This picture has been drawn not because it is possible at this time to forecast exactly what this economic and political construction will be, but because many persons find it impossible to form to themselves any idea how things can be produced and distributed without the help of capitalism. No more is claimed for these chapters than that they do present a scheme by means of which necessaries and many comforts can be produced and distributed without the evils of capitalism, of unemployment, of pauperism, of prostitution, and of economic crime. Obviously, the two foregoing chapters suggest a thousand questions to an inquiring mind, but I hope that the missing details cannot be classed amongst those details which Gladstone characterized as organic. In other words, I hope that they present a picture giving sufficient details to make it clear that Socialism, as regards the production and distribution of the necessaries and most of the comforts of life, is not only beneficial, but practical and economical; that, in a word, it puts an end to the waste and the anarchy which jointly characterize the capitalistic system of to-day. FOOTNOTES: [196] Book III, Chapter II. [197] Book III, Chapter II. CHAPTER IV SCIENTIFIC ASPECT OF SOCIALISM Herbert Spencer has contributed more than any other modern writer to emphasize the effect of environment upon life, whether vegetable, animal, or human; yet, singularly enough, in applying his scientific conclusions to sociology, he entirely failed to take account of the essential difference which exists between natural environment and human environment; between the effect of evolution upon life prior to the advent of man, and its effect upon life subsequent to the advent of man. He applied to human development the laws of evolution which he found working prior to man, though man has reversed the natural process of development so that evolution, under the environment created by man, is taking and must continue to take a direction entirely opposite to that which it took under the dominion of Nature alone. Into what errors Mr. Spencer was led by his failure to recognize the difference between human and animal evolution may be gathered from the fact that he denounced governmental effort to prevent disease as "sanitary dictation";[198] he denounced also municipal ownership of gas and water, the building by the state of houses for the poor, free libraries, free local museums, free education, and generally all that he includes in the expression "coercive philanthropy."[199] He assumed that the predatory system which he saw prevailing in the domain of Nature must prevail also in the domain of Man; and thus became an apostle of _laissez faire_ and of the competitive system. As such he advocated the utmost limitation of state interference and opposed the Socialistic trend of modern legislation on the ground that man is, as it were, doomed to perfection by the principles of evolution, and that any effort of his to modify evolution can only result in retarding it. He was led by the analogy between society and organism into the theory that human institutions must be allowed to grow as organisms _grow_, and that efforts on the part of man to construct his own institutions produce more evil than good. Mr. Huxley demolished the whole sociological structure which Herbert Spencer built up on these errors in three essays, to which the reader is referred.[200] The subject is also fully treated in the first volume of "Government or Human Evolution."[201] The effort will be made here to condense the argument and conclusions therein drawn by a short study of environment--natural and human--with a view to demonstrating the control which man has acquired over his environment and thereby over his ultimate destiny. This leads to a study of the effect of the competitive and coöperative systems on type respectively, how far society is a growth and how far a construction, and how far human nature can be modified by the conscious, deliberate purpose of Man; all this to demonstrate that human happiness can be best attained by substituting coöperation for competition to the extent necessary to put an end to the evils resulting from the competition of to-day, without for that reason eliminating wholesome competition altogether. There are two kinds of environment: the environment we find in Nature, and the environment made by Man. We shall study first the environment of Nature, and begin by distinguishing therein two systems: the competitive, or so-called struggle for life; and the coöperative or community system; confining ourselves to facts observed in Nature prior to or outside of the intervention of Man. § 1. THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT (_a_) _The Struggle for Life, or the Competitive System_ Beasts of the field are necessary products of their environment. The study of the crust of the earth reveals that upon the central mass there have been laid layer upon layer of sand, clay, and limestone by successive seas, which have successively rested on now buried continents. Nearly every layer contains fragments of shell, scale, or bone belonging to the beasts that have succeeded to one another upon the earth during millions of years. These layers of sand, clay, and limestone are the leaves of a gigantic book, the earliest of which are burned by fire, the next scarred by it, and the most recent illustrated by pictures so vivid that we can read the story there of the development of Man from the lowest of all forms of life. The rocks are charts painted by the hand of Nature herself. In these charts we read the story of Evolution. We learn the geography of the world millions of years before the age of history; we know that this land upon which we live has not only once, but often been sunk beneath a deep sea; that during the earliest period of which there is any record unburned, there was no living thing more highly organized than a crab; not a fish nor any animal possessing the backbone that distinguishes the vertebrates to which Man belongs from the invertebrates to which belong the lowest kinds of living thing. We know that later the whole face of the world was changed, and then followed a warm period called Carboniferous, and that just before and during this Carboniferous period there slowly developed fish possessing the backbone that marks one of the great strides in animal development. But at this time we see no trace of the four-footed mammalia which immediately preceded Man. In the marshes in which forests grew and died during the Carboniferous period, there were piled, one upon another, layers of vegetation that hardened into coal; this coal sank slowly beneath a deepening sea. In this so-called cretaceous sea were deposited, in its deepest parts, huge masses of chalk accumulated from countless shells; and upon its shores crept four-footed things resembling fish, as the seal and the sea-lion resemble them to-day, closely allied to them and clearly developed from them, as if fish stranded upon the shallows had used their fins for motion upon the banks, and out of fins made legs. And from the gigantic lizards of the cretaceous period we find in the overlying tertiary beds the infinite variety of four-legged animals which people our continents to-day. All this knowledge, full of profound interest to the student of Man, comes from a study of the earth--Geology. And next comes Zoölogy, telling how this amazing development of life from lower to higher forms proceeded. For centuries Man studied the living things on the earth, and added fact to fact till at last, a few years ago, Darwin, Wallace, and others demonstrated the law according to which this development takes place, the law of Evolution. Briefly it is this: All living things prior to the advent of Man tended to adapt themselves to their environment by the process known as the survival of the fit. Only those animals fit to survive, survived; all the rest perished. When there was a change of environment, as, for example, of climate, only those individuals survived that were capable of adapting themselves to this change. The process by which animals adapt themselves to changes of environment is as follows: There is in every new generation of animals an infinite variety; some differ enough from the rest to be called "sports." These differences are transmitted to future generations by heredity. Men have used these differences to create types of animals suited to their purpose. Thus by putting stallions built for speed to mares similarly built, Man has produced the race-horse. On the contrary, by putting stallions built for drawing loads to mares similarly built, Man has produced the cart-horse. Before the advent of man this selection of types was made by the environment or by Nature, as the environment used to be called. Hence the expression, natural selection, is used to describe the process by which Nature or environment selects certain types for survival at the expense of the rest; the process by which animals that live in the desert gradually adapt themselves to endure great heat; and those that live near the Poles gradually adapt themselves to endure great cold. The environment or Nature uses in this process of selection a very cruel but effectual device: A great many more living things are born into the world than the world can support. In the lower forms of life Nature is wastefully fertile; thousands of herrings' eggs are laid for one herring that grows to maturity. This amazing fertility of Nature results in a struggle for life which condemns the enormous majority of living things born into the world to an early death, but has the singular advantage of allowing only the types most fitted to the environment to survive. And this process of natural selection acting in an environment favorable to development from a lower to a higher type has gradually caused the lowest forms of life, which consist of a mere sac of so-called protoplasm, to develop organs especially adapted to accomplish specific things: a mouth to take in food; a stomach to digest it; bowels to assimilate it; a system of circulation--arms and legs; a nervous system; a brain; ears; a nose; eyes; until at last, in the order of creation as demonstrated in the great Book of the Rocks, and as confirmed by zoölogy and other sciences, Man has evolved out of the original protoplasmic sac. Who created the first protoplasmic sac; why this cruel system was invented by which life was ordered to pass through millions of sacrificed and suffering bodies before it could emerge into the least imperfect form; why Man to-day must suffer still in the progress which he is destined to make from his present to a still higher form--these are queries which it is not given us yet to answer. But that this process has taken place at the cost of great agony and during millions of years, is a fact which no man who has studied the face of Nature can deny. If we want to learn the art of happiness--for in spite of the process just described there is nevertheless an art of happiness--we must understand the processes of Nature. It is only by understanding the processes of Nature that we can ever hope to modify them. And it is here that we come to the first great lesson we have to learn from a study of Evolution: Man has already modified the processes of Nature in the past, and he can doubtless still further modify them in the time to come. But before we undertake to study how far Man has modified, and may still modify, the cruel process of natural selection, there is another process observable in Nature to which we must direct our most earnest attention. It is a common error to suppose that because Man has developed from a lower form of life through a process of struggle for survival that favors a few types at the expense of millions of other forms condemned by this struggle to suffering and death, therefore it is only by this same struggle that Man can hope to attain a higher form of development. This is the error that approves the competitive system and the resulting classification of men into a few rich and many poor. It is because the question as to the merits and demerits of the competitive system rests upon the principles of evolution, that it is indispensable for all who want to understand the competitive system also to understand the principles of evolution. For those who deny the force of competition altogether are as wrong as the millionaires who base their argument in favor of the competitive system upon the law of evolution. We cannot neglect the argument drawn from the struggle for life involved in natural selection. Until we have shown that there is something better than this struggle that can be put in its place, we have left to the millionaires the vantage-ground, from which they can quiet the conscience of the world. Thousands of our fellow-creatures who are separated from us by the accident of wealth would come to our side were they not sincerely convinced that poverty, pauperism, and crime are necessary evils, belonging to the cosmic principles of evolution through which Man has attained his existing dominion, and through which he may hope, though not without infinite patience and agony, ultimately to reach a still higher station. This error must be removed, and it can only be removed by sober argument. Temper will not do it; nor indignation; nor vituperation; nor hate. The plain facts, if properly marshalled, are sufficient to prove the error of the notion that competition is a necessary evil, and that society cannot exist without unlimited competition, and the poverty, pauperism, and crime that result therefrom. The first of these facts is that by the side of the competitive system just described, there is in Nature also a coöperative system almost as highly developed as the competitive system and destined eventually almost to take its place. (_b_) _The Coöperative System_ We have seen that the struggle for life has had for effect to permit only those forms of life to survive that adapted themselves to the environment, and that when the environment was favorable to development, this tendency of the fit to survive at the expense of the less fit caused an evolution from lower to higher forms of life. The effect of this tendency in the higher forms of life has been to create two opposite types--the carnivores, who became more skilful in tracking game, and more powerful in destroying it; and the herbivores, the natural prey of the carnivores, who became more swift in escaping their pursuers. Now the herbivores, conscious of their weakness, early developed the instinct to herd for the purpose of common defence. The fierce carnivore, on the contrary, is prevented by his natural ferocity from herding. He tends to become solitary. Lions and tigers are solitary animals; whereas sheep, goats, horses, and cattle herd. This tendency to herd tends to develop in proportion as an animal is weak; so that it is in insects that we find the herding instinct most perfectly developed, and certain colonies of ants and bees present a picture of coöperation to which the attention of millionaires cannot be too strenuously directed. Let it be said at the outset that these colonies are not offered as models for us to imitate. On the contrary there are many features in these colonies which we ought diligently to avoid. But just as there are features in the competitive system that are good and some that are atrociously bad, so there are features in the colony system that are bad and some that are altogether good. It will later on appear that _the essential privilege of Man is to be able to choose the good of both and eschew the bad_. A beehive is a city of bees built by the entire community for its common use. This community consists for the most part of barren females who do all the hard work, and are therefore commonly called the workers; they build the comb, and add to it as the community enlarges; they attend on the queen bee--the only fertile female allowed to survive; they feed her, and act the part of midwife to her when she lays her eggs; they see to the hatching of the eggs, and by crowding about them provide them with the necessary temperature; when the eggs are hatched, the workers feed the young ones differently so as to produce a few fertile females to play the rôle of queen should the throne become vacant, a large number of males to be utilized when the nuptial hour arrives, and a larger number still of barren females to continue the work of the community; the workers collect honey from the flowers in the summer and store it away for common use during the cold season; they determine which of the fertile females is to be impregnated and become their queen; she is liberated on her wedding-day, and in a summer flight, pursued by the males, conceives. Then she returns to the comb, and is let loose upon the other fertile females in the comb, and watched as she stings her possible rivals to death one by one. Few males return from the nuptial flight; one only of them weds, and he perishes in the act; the others perish without wedding, or if they have strength to return to the comb, are despatched by the workers watching at the entrance to perform the execution. It is impossible to conceive a more complete system of coöperation or communism than this, or one which so little conforms to our notions of justice or welfare. Indeed, it is probable that from a human point of view the tiger in the jungle attains a greater measure of happiness than any member of a bee community; for the workers seem to labor without reward; of the males only one weds, and he perishes in the act; and the queen herself is kept a close prisoner during her entire existence, save only during the brief ecstasy of the nuptial flight. The lesson to be learned from insect communities seems then to be, not that coöperation in a natural environment results in the maximum of happiness, but merely that coöperation is as much a part of Nature's plan as competition, and that therefore the coöperative system is as available to man as the competitive. The problem before man is how to take the best of both systems, and eliminate the bad. But there is a further lesson to be drawn from the singular customs that prevail in the hive and in the ants' nest: In both, the entire energies of all seem concentrated upon two problems--the support of the community, and its perpetuation; and as these two problems are identically the same as those by which men are confronted, the systems adopted to solve them cannot but be of absorbing interest to Man. Nature or environment follows two diverging lines in animal development. Along one line she seeks the perfection of the individual; along the other the perfection of the community. But the ideal of perfection presented by Nature is not Justice or Morality; it is _perpetuation_, for perpetuation is the prize offered to the most fit types in the struggle for survival. And there are obviously two ways in which types can succeed in this struggle--one by individual excellence, and another by sexual jealousy. And this sexual jealousy must be eliminated from a community if its members are to live in permanent harmony together. The scheme adopted by Nature in the beehive to eliminate sexual jealousy is radical and cruel, but effectual. Obviously, the community system proceeds with reckless disregard of the individual; the destruction of all the fertile females save the single queen and of all the male sex; the singular fact that the sting cannot be used save at the cost of the life of the individual using it; the enforced chastity of the workers--all prove that Nature's plan for securing the welfare of the community is to sacrifice thereto the happiness and the lives of the individuals that constitute it. Obviously, Man must find some better solution of this problem than ants and bees. How Man has at various periods attempted to solve it we shall study later. But before leaving natural environment, we have a lesson to learn from the moral qualities which the two lines of divergence have respectively developed--the qualities of the solitary carnivore and those of the communistic bee. We may be helped by observing the habits of herding animals that are neither so fierce as the lion nor so servile as the ant. For although it has of late been the fashion to justify our existing capitalistic system by exaggerating the extent to which competition exists in Nature, careful study reveals that though competition does prevail between different species, it is the exception rather than the rule between individuals of the same species. Nature has proceeded along two lines of development: one of mutual struggle, and another of mutual aid. Thus we find even carnivora, such as the hyena and the wolf, herding for the purpose of the chase; even foxes and bears have been seen to herd; eagles, kites, and pelicans notoriously associate to this end. Practically all herbivora herd more or less permanently, the permanence of the herd depending apparently upon the mildness or the ferocity of the sexual instinct. In the case of the elk, the stag, the bull, and the horse, that fight for the female, and prevent the weak from perpetuating the race, the herd breaks up into groups during the rutting season; whereas, in the case of apes and monkeys that herd, the herd remains permanent. Too little is known about the sexual relations of such animals as herd permanently for any certain conclusions to be drawn from them, but it can be said without fear of contradiction that Nature has succeeded best through the combination of strength, selfishness, and ferocity on the one hand, and that of intelligence, altruism,[202] and servility on the other; for it is the lion and the tiger that dominate the jungles of Asia; in Africa and South America it is the white ant. These considerations lead us to conclusions of great importance, for they enable us to trace the development of certain habits or instincts, which, when we find them developed in Man, become lifted into virtues or vices according to their nature and intensity. Thus solitude imposes upon solitary animals habits of selfishness and self-reliance; the tiger has no one to look to but himself for the satisfaction of the two great animal needs--food and self-perpetuation; he is the Ishmaelite of the animal kingdom; his hand is against everyone and everyone's hand is against him. Whereas, community life imposes upon the ant habits of docility and altruism; she works not for herself, but for her neighbors; she is a natural slave, but a slave to a useful end--the common weal of all. To sum up: Natural environment has operated on animal life through the principle of evolution or survival of the fittest in such a manner as to develop physical organs and instinctive habits, both of which seem to be necessary results. These physical organs and instinctive habits depend for their nature and excellence upon two parallel systems: According to one, the struggle for life has taken place not only between one species and another, but also between individuals of the same species; this has resulted in individual excellence, as in the case of the lion and the tiger; and has developed habits of selfishness, self-reliance and ferocity. According to the other, the struggle for life has taken place mainly between one group and another, and hardly at all between individuals of the same group, but both the lives and the happiness of the individual are recklessly sacrificed to it; this has resulted in collective excellence at the expense of the individual; and has developed habits of docility and altruism. In the former, or competitive system, there is the greatest individual freedom of action and the greatest individual satisfaction of animal propensities, but there is the greatest individual risk, the few survive at the expense of the many, and there is little or no social satisfaction. In the latter, or coöperative system, there is less individual freedom, less satisfaction of animal propensities (indeed, sexual appetite is left unsatisfied for all except one individual of each sex, and at the expense of personal liberty for the female and for the male of life itself), but there is least individual risk for the workers, and most social satisfaction. Intermediate systems partake of both the competitive and coöperative plan, none of the intermediate systems, however, leading to supremacy, and some of them resulting in degeneracy. Such are the results of the unconscious action of natural environment on living things. We are now in a position to study the actual and possible results of the conscious action of an artificial environment on Man. § 2. HUMAN ENVIRONMENT Before studying the possible effects upon Man of an artificial environment, consciously and deliberately created by him with the definite purpose of attaining the maximum of human perfection and happiness, we must be clear as to the actual effects upon man of the artificial environment in which he finds himself. And first we must give its full value to the fact that the environment in which we live is in great part artificial, that it is the product not of Nature only, but also of Art. We have seen that the lower animals, prior to the advent of Man, were the necessary product of the natural environment. We have now to study how Man has modified the face of the world, as regards them and himself, by the application thereto of Art. The most obvious and striking change effected by Art on human life is in relation to climate. There is geologic evidence that the forefathers of Man in what is called the Miocene Period, while not so intellectual as Man, were of a far higher type than any living ape; the head, for example, indicates a superior structure.[203] Now, the Miocene Period was exceptionally warm. The bones of the so-called troglodytes are found in the caves of the Dordogne with other vegetable and animal remains that indicate a tropical temperature. This was followed by the glacial epoch, which substituted for tropical conditions those now existing in the Arctic zone. The troglodyte had to choose between the alternatives; he had to flee to the tropics before the cold wave from the North, or to resist the cold by recourse to Art. It is probable that he did both; some did the one, and the rest the other; some fled to the tropics and degenerated there into the existing anthropoid apes; the rest invented weapons with which to slay fur-bearing animals, to strip them of their skins, and convert the skins into clothing; used the shelter furnished by natural caves, and eventually discovered the way to produce a flame. This last Promethean gift was probably the first of the great human inventions. When Man discovered how to produce and utilize fire he became superior to climate. This discovery produced an amazing consequence; for it seems certain that our race made its first strides towards civilization in tropical countries; but that progress in the Arts, by enabling Man to inhabit colder and more bracing climates, permitted an increase in his power to resist not only climate, but all the other natural conditions hostile to his improvement; and so we find the Northern races gradually subduing those of the South, and demonstrating the great rule _that man's progress is secured, not by yielding to natural environment, but by resisting it_. The key to human progress in the past, and the probable key to human progress in the future, is the faculty of Man to resist Nature; and this faculty is twofold. Intelligence is the more obvious of the two elements. But intelligence is not sufficient of itself. Intelligence must be coupled with the power of self-restraint. For although intelligence is the light which can guide men toward perfection, it is useless unless accompanied by the willingness and power to follow the light. What avails it to the millionaire to know that he can by the intelligent use of his millions alleviate the misery of the poor, if he lacks the willingness and power to apply this knowledge? What avails it to us to know that by substituting coöperation for competition in the production of the necessaries of life, poverty can be annihilated, if we have not the willingness and the power to effect the substitution? What avails it to a drunkard to know that drink is the cause of his misery, if he has not the power to refuse it? In man's struggle with climate, intelligence seems to play the principal rôle, but there is also a spirit of resistance, in strong contrast with submission that characterizes the lower animals. In other arenas the power of self-control plays a still more conspicuous part. There is probably no institution in which man differs more from the lower animals than in that of marriage; and none more characterized by self-control. If we compare the promiscuous intercourse that prevails between the sexes in troops of apes, with the fidelity that characterizes the highest types of marriage in our most highly civilized communities, we cannot but be struck, not only with the enormous gap between the two, but with the dominant rôle played in development from the lower to the higher type by the power of self-control. The passionate propensity that condemns the fiercer carnivora to solitude, and reduces even the docile bee to a wholesale massacre of one of the two sexes, has been so controlled in our civilization that we find men and women not only living in the closest proximity without violating the marriage vow, but even consecrating themselves to life-long chastity out of respect for a religious scruple. Man has attained this result through the training of children by parents in the family, of youth by masters in schools, and of adults each by himself in the world at large. Perhaps the most precious result of the institution of marriage is the education furnished by the family which results from marriage. In Greek life this education was the kernel of Greek religion. Every family worshipped its own gods, and these gods were the shades of its ancestors. Almost every duty in life resolved itself into a duty to these shades; the duty to marry was but to ensure offspring who would continue to minister to the deceased; the duty of chastity, and indeed of morality in general, resolved itself into a duty to keep inviolable the sacred flame upon the hearth. The two virtues peculiarly stimulated by Greek religion were courage in man and chastity in woman; these singularly correspond to the qualities that characterize solitary carnivora--ferocity in the male and compulsory fidelity in the female. They are the virtues that attend individualism, and individualism so impregnated Greek civilization that it prevented the Greek cities from ever combining into a Greek nation, and ultimately left them a prey to the invader. And those two individualistic virtues--courage and chastity--became still more emphasized under the Roman rule in the soldier and the vestal. Christianity introduced a new element into civilized life; Christ deprecated exhibitions of courage by inculcating humility; He tempered the fierce demand for fidelity by bidding "him who was without sin cast the first stone at her." The virtue He taught above all was the virtue of Love; not love in the sense of natural affection, but love in the sense of sacrifice; not love confined to the family, but love extended from the family to the neighbor: "Love your neighbor as yourself." And so under the dispensation of Christ all men, being the children of a common Father, became as brothers one to another; the early Christians carrying out this theory into practical life, abandoned the acquisition of private wealth and brought all their earnings into a common stock, giving to everyone according to his need. Unfortunately, the prosperity of the Church under Constantine converted it into a political machine as unconscionable in its methods, and as effectual in results, as the so-called rings which govern many cities to-day. The Church forgot the virtues which it was instituted to teach; and our Western civilization has ever since been distracting us by encouraging the fighting virtues of the Roman soldier on the one hand, and the altogether inconsistent humility of the Christian saint on the other. But men and women cannot live close to one another for centuries, without having social virtues forced upon them; and while the competitive system which prevails in our industrial and international relations has stimulated the fighting qualities in us, the teaching of Christ has preserved in our hearts ideas of happiness which have more or less unconsciously created a tendency to replace competition by coöperation wherever possible. The joint effect of Roman and Christian rules of conduct has been to substitute for the qualities that we observe in Nature--the lust and ferocity of the carnivore and the servility of the ant--new qualities altogether different, and in some respects almost opposite. For lust has been replaced by a conception of the conjugal relation which converts marriage into a sacrament; ferocity has yielded to the courage of the medieval knight and the modern gentleman; servility tends to disappear and be replaced by respect for laws; and fear has been lifted by religion into reverence--"The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom." The fact that these virtues are held up to us as desirable and that we are trained to conform thereto, is of dominating importance in considering the character of human environment; and were there nothing in human institutions to render the universal practice of these virtues impossible, we should assuredly enjoy the happiness that must result therefrom. Unfortunately there are two reasons why we cannot practice these virtues though we would: We are divided into nations, each striving against all the rest to secure for its citizens the largest possible share of the good things of this world. Every nation is composed of individuals or families, each engaged in a similar strife. The first, the international conflict, gives rise to a peculiar virtue called patriotism, which, in so far as it teaches a man to love the country to which he belongs, and the people amongst whom he lives, is altogether good, but in so far as it teaches him to hate and occasionally slay those of other nations is altogether bad. The second, the intranational conflict, gives rise to a quality which, though not recognized as a virtue, should, if measured by the rewards it receives, be assuredly regarded as the greatest of all--acquisitiveness; for the fortunate few who possess this quality gather unto themselves all the good things in the world at the expense of all the rest. Let us briefly study each of these formidable obstacles to virtue and happiness: As regards the international conflict, the world is so large, and is peopled by races of men so different, that it would be quite impossible to include them all under the same government. The Red Indian is incapable of adopting our civilization; he would rather die. The Chinese has a conception of government so different from ours that he has no word in his language for patriotism. The Oriental, who has occupied the Danubian provinces for five centuries, is still so foreign to us that he cannot live amongst Christians except either as a conqueror in Turkey or a subject in Hindoostan. So long as these differences exist, there must be separate nations; and the smoke of international conflict must occasionally burst into a flame. Nevertheless, even to-day human effort can do much to diminish occasions for war; witness the Tribunal of The Hague and the daily multiplying treaties of arbitration; witness, too, the gradual extension of solidarity between workingmen beyond national frontiers and the growing disposition to organize regardless of them. As regards the intranational conflict--between individuals belonging to the same country--there is much more to be said, for although the total elimination of occasions of conflict between citizens of the same nation may still be far off, there is serious reason to believe that a partial elimination of them is immediately possible, and may constitute the most practical of all political programs, and the most vital of all religious faiths. Indeed, a thorough understanding of the problem presented by this intranational conflict is so indispensable to its prosperous solution, that upon this understanding may be said to depend the question whether our civilization is to degenerate. The intranational conflict is mainly concerned with the acquisition of wealth; and because this conflict has so far inordinately enriched a few and impoverished the mass, it is the fashion for us to rail against wealth. But wealth is the necessary product of civilization, and like manure, it is a benefaction when lightly distributed over the right place, though a pest when heavily concentrated in the wrong. The wealthier a community is the happier it ought to be. It is not wealth itself which constitutes our grievance, but the method of its distribution. Now the unequal distribution of wealth is mainly due to the system of private property under which the few who have the gift of money-making acquire large fortunes, while the many are left in comparative poverty and even want. Under this system, every man, instead of working for all, is working only for himself, and he who has most acquisitiveness becomes master of those who have less, society being by this single quality divided into a series of classes or castes, at the top of which are a few millionaires, and at the bottom the large contingent that after a life of misery end their lives in the almshouse, the prison, or the lunatic asylum--a contingent that has been determined by carefully prepared statistics to constitute one-fifth of the entire population in the richest country in the world.[204] Private property has played an essential rôle in the slow enfranchisement of the people. But just as the cocoon serves an essential purpose in protecting the worm during its slow development, but becomes a prison which the butterfly discards when it attains its final freedom, so private property may turn out to have already served its purpose if we can demonstrate ourselves so far developed as to be fit to cast it aside. Let us recall what rôle private property plays in our human environment to-day: It is the great stimulus which sets each one of us to work for himself, and by working for himself to accumulate wealth that contributes to the maintenance of all the rest. It furnishes (in theory) a method under which the man who works most effectually gets the highest reward. Now, as it is essential in every community that every man should contribute to the maintenance of all, and as justice seems to demand that the workers should be rewarded according to results, it is claimed that private property solves the problem of production in a manner both effectual and just. The competitive system, however, and the false notion of property to which the competitive system gives rise by setting every man to work for himself regardless of all the rest, prevents men from proceeding upon the far more economical plan of coöperation. § 3. THE EFFECT OF THE COMPETITIVE SYSTEM ON TYPE We have seen that under the law of evolution type tends to adapt itself to environment. It must so adapt itself or perish. There is no escape from this iron law. If the climate change from warm to cold, animals must put on blubber or fur; if the climate change from cold to hot, they must throw off blubber or fur. Those who adapt themselves to the change survive; those who do not adapt themselves die. So also, if in a given community the individual can secure the necessaries of life only on the condition of outdoing his neighbor, it is those who most successfully outdo their neighbors who prevail; those who are outdone sink deeper and deeper into poverty and ultimately join the irreclaimable fifth. The effect, then, of the competitive system on type is to stimulate the qualities that go to make up acquisitiveness; selfishness and all the necessary results of selfishness--avarice, greed, envy, injustice, hardness of heart. It would be by no means fair to maintain that no man can be successful in business who is not cursed with all these vices. On the contrary, some of our greatest philanthropists have been successful business men. But philanthropy sometimes results from the blessed principle of reaction, under which vice, when it gets bad enough, creates a revulsion against evil. Reaction, however, is the eddy in the stream; and it is the stream and not the eddy that in the end counts. The main, the essential, the inevitable result of private property is to promote selfishness, for the competitive system creates an artificial environment to which the human type must tend to conform. This artificial environment not only promotes selfishness at large, but tends to degrade every institution which man has invented in his effort to advance. Among these institutions, the two which have sprung from the noblest instincts in man, and ought most to tend to his improvement, are Marriage and the Church. Yet both are demoralized by the competitive system. In the state of nature, animals tend to improve through sexual selection. By sexual selection is meant the fight between males for the female, the result of which is that the strongest males are the ones that perpetuate the type. In the artificial environment produced by private property, a very different process is at work. Marriage tends to be determined by wealth rather than fitness; and the wealthy tend to have few children or none; whereas it is found that in the unwealthy classes, the poorest have the most children. Well-to-do people protect themselves and their families from poverty by prudence, whereas, those who despair of escaping from poverty have no reason for refusing themselves what is often almost their only satisfaction; and the result is that while the houses of the rich tend to be desolate through childlessness, those of the poor are crowded with the offspring of despair. The religious conception of Marriage that it is a sacrament has become practically obsolete; particularly in this so among the rich, whose daughters are annually offered for sale in the market of Mayfair as shamelessly as not long ago were Circassian girls in that of Istamboul. The effect of private property on the Church is no less deplorable. It costs money to maintain a church; and the more splendidly a church is maintained the more money it costs. The priest has to live; bishops indeed have to live in a certain state. The Church, then, must have money. In some countries the Church secures money from the government, and is driven thereby into the questionable field of politics; in others, every individual church is thrown upon its own resources, and has either to make its services attractive by ritual, or to depend for its supplies upon one or two of the wealthy members of its congregation. It is not surprising, then, that under this subjection to wealth, Christians have abandoned the teaching of Christ, and forgotten that in early days they sold all and gave to the poor, contributed their earnings to a common stock, and resisted not evil but overcame evil with good. Yet the Church has rendered, and is still rendering, a priceless service to man. Falter though she may, she has preserved for us the Gospel of Christ. The blame rests not with the Church, but with the artificial environment which man has himself created, and to which he alone can put an end--the environment that appeals to the selfishness of man, and having made man selfish, insolently asserts that in no other environment can he be otherwise. Man will be what his environment makes him. If the environment stimulates selfishness, man will be selfish. If it stimulates unselfishness, he will be unselfish. But man can by art so alter his environment that it will elicit the noble in man, instead of the base. Let us now sum up the difference between human and natural evolution, and arrive at some conclusion regarding the part man has played, and may still play, in his own advancement. § 4. BRIEF RESTATEMENT Before the advent of man animal life prospered or degenerated according as the natural environment was favorable to progress or degeneration. The process of evolution was necessarily unconscious and undeliberate. With the advent of man a new force appeared upon the face of the world, the power to modify the environment so as to make it serve human needs, and accord with human intention. Before the advent of man, selection was exercised by Nature or the natural environment; since the advent of man it is man who has selected and not Nature; animals dangerous and useless to man have almost disappeared except in museums; and only those that are useful to him are allowed to survive. Climate is no longer paramount; man by the use of tools, clothing, architecture, and other arts, contrives to-day to live in climates which were once fatal to him. By increase of knowledge man has acquired a control of the forces of Nature, which makes him now a master where he was once a slave. By increase of self-restraint--and self-restraint involves the subjection of natural instincts--man has developed qualities which permit of social existence unknown in any other race. Without having lost the self-reliance that characterizes the solitary carnivora, he has, by resisting Nature--by such artificial institutions as that of marriage, and the education which results from family relations--developed all the social virtues. Ferocity has been tempered; lust has been reduced to subjection; in the place of the one we now see courage; in the place of the other chastity; craft is growing into wisdom; fear into reverence. He has substituted for the standard of Nature the standard of Morality, and the substitution of the standard of Morality for the standard of Nature has permitted men and women to live in the same community safe from the ferocity that drives the larger carnivora to solitude, and from the massacre and mutilation which characterize such natural communities as those of bees. When from this point of view we compare man with the lower animals, so immense is his progress that we are tempted to believe perfection within the reach of his attainment. Two things, however, suffice to keep alive evil in man: While at almost every point he has so moulded his own environment as to eliminate the vices that characterize the rest of the animal kingdom, in two respects the predatory system still prevails: The international conflict keeps nations in perpetual competition with one another, and this periodically forces them to war; and the intranational conflict keeps individuals in perpetual conflict with one another, and stimulates all the vices which most interfere with human happiness. The international conflict seems doomed to continue so long as man remains separated by racial antipathies and commercial interests. Efforts are being made to diminish occasions for war to the utmost possible, by bringing all races to recognize and aim at the same social ideal. But there would still remain ample occasion for war so long as men are kept in competition by conflicting commercial interests. The task first in importance and time, therefore, seems to be to eliminate as much as is advisable the commercial and industrial conflict, which has been already pointed out to be the great intranational obstacle to human perfection and happiness. Now the intranational conflict has been seen to result from our industrial system. This, as at present organized, is an artificial creation of man; indispensable though it may have been to the gradual evolution of the race, it has always acted, and must always act to keep alive in man the very quality--selfishness--the elimination of which is most essential to the happiness of a community, and the absence of which particularly characterizes natural communities such as those ants and bees. While, then, man has resisted and in great part subdued Nature in the physical world by science, and in a world which he has himself created--the moral world--by self-restraint, he has added to this artificial environment two institutions which tend to counterbalance the advantages already secured. These are national governments that create international conflict, and an industrial system that creates intranational conflict; and we are confronted with the problem whether these two hothouses of crime, hatred, selfishness and vice, can be dispensed with. Science affords us the encouraging hope that they can. It points out that man has already suppressed many of the most merciless effects of the natural environment; that by virtue of the power through which he can in great part create and certainly modify his own environment, he may still further push on the work of civilization if he will but recognize that the real enemy to human happiness is hatred and the real friend to it solidarity; and if he will return to the Gospel of Christ, which economic conditions have so far compelled him to disregard. Before closing the study of evolution it is proper to point out that we are now in a position to dispose of the contention that, because natural evolution proceeds upon the principle of the survival of the fittest, therefore human evolution must proceed upon the same lines. This is the argument that millionaires and individualists set up against those who believe in the possibility of diminishing human misery by reducing the occasions for human conflict. It is totally false. Man has demonstrated his ability to resist Nature and to progress along lines that are diametrically opposed to those of natural evolution. The whole fabric of human civilization is an answer to the millionaire's argument. The natural principle of the survival of the fittest is no longer at work. Man has put an end to it. The lion and the tiger no longer reign in the jungle nor the white ant in the Pampas. Man, alone, determines which animals shall live and which shall disappear. The weak in our own race no longer perish; mercy comes to their rescue. The strong are no longer the only ones to perpetuate the type; marriage protects the weak husband in his marital rights as well as the strong. Climate no longer determines survival; man has made himself master of climate, and indeed works most effectually to-day in latitudes which at an earlier stage were peopled only by savages. At every point where man touches Nature he has reversed the natural process. The unfit no longer perish, the fit no longer alone survive. Man is no longer the necessary result of the natural environment: _he makes his own environment_; and if he be wise enough he can so modify it as to modify himself with it. When, if ever, he so modifies it as to eliminate those elements in it which stimulate vice, then he will have realized the word of the Gospel, "Ye are Gods." § 5. CAN HUMAN NATURE BE CHANGED BY LAW? It is currently urged and has become a sort of maxim that human nature cannot be changed by law. Not only is this quoted by the bourgeois in his argument against the Socialist, but even Henry George has fallen into this error. Indeed, it is this error that prevented Henry George from adopting Socialism and left him the distinguished founder of an inadequate philosophy. For the most superficial knowledge of history will suffice to demonstrate its untruth. Human nature has already been profoundly changed by law; by the institution of marriage, by education, by property. This has already been sufficiently discussed to make it unnecessary further to comment on it.[205] It does not, however, seem sufficient to point out the profound modification of human nature by law in the past in order to persuade the bourgeois that humanity can still further be modified by law in the future; for a thousand instances can be quoted of efforts to change human nature by law that have failed, and it is argued very illogically that because in many instances they have failed, they must always fail. Then, too, there remains in the minds of all influenced by Herbert Spencer, the profound error that society is an organism and must be allowed to grow; whereas on the contrary, a very little study demonstrates that society differs from an organism in essential points.[206] No society can exist without some law of association. The law may be a natural one, as in the case of myxomycetes; or it may be an artificial one, as in the case of the United States constitution; or it may be both, as indeed is the case in every human society. This law of association is called "government." Strictly speaking, in a political sense government means only that law of association which is promulgated and enforced by the supreme power of the state; but human society is controlled by a double system of laws--one written, whether in judicial decisions or in express statute, and the other not written, because it resides in the mass of the citizens under conditions which baffle description. This last is imperfectly rendered in the English word "custom," is more definitely expressed in the French word _moeurs_, and is admirably conveyed by Horace in the words Quid leges sine moribus Vanae proficiunt? The essential characteristic of custom is that, however controlling it may be in fact, it does not enjoy the sanction of legislative enactment or executive decree; indeed, it often arises out of opposition to law; as where in the Western states game laws remain unenforced, because public opinion supports the ranchman's defence of necessity; and sometimes again where, though a law be in itself proper, a community declines to avail itself of the law, as in the custom that discredited divorce in the early Roman Republic. Now, the importance of this moral or sometimes immoral sense that makes custom independently of law, must not be underestimated--for it is in many respects superior to law for evil or for good; and it differs from law in the essential fact that it grows almost imperceptibly, whereas law, in the strict sense of the word, is the result of judicial decision or legislative enactment--both acts of deliberation--or so purporting to be. The question naturally arises then whether, in so far as society develops along the line of custom, it does not follow the process of growth rather than that of construction. It is impossible to deny that custom and public opinion are in a continual state of change; the varying fortunes of political parties sufficiently testify to this; but how far these variations are in civilized communities due to unconscious growth and how far to conscious effort it is not easy to determine. Suffice it to point out that, while opposing forces such as egotism and philanthropy, do continually tend to mould opinion under conditions that baffle inquiry, there are conscious forces at work which are quite as powerful and could be made more so. Chief amongst these is education; and in the word "education" are included not our schools and universities alone, but all the educating influences of the day--the press, the stage, music, literature, and art. That all these are engaged in moulding public opinion--some in bringing popular government into contempt, some in relaxing public morals, some in holding up low ideals, some in indulging luxurious tastes, while they could be doing just the opposite of all these things--there is no doubt. The existence of these things is mentioned here because failure to mention them would have left the discussion incomplete. Enough has been said to indicate that there are great forces at work in society which to-day escape the control of government, and that it is not easy to say how far they operate after the haphazard fashion of Nature and how far subject to the deliberate purpose of man. Whatever be the conclusion, it is certain that so far as they are left to Nature's guidance they will result in Nature's handiwork; whereas so far as they are controlled by human wisdom they will bear the fruits of that wisdom. In conclusion, therefore, associations of individuals are characterized in primitive forms of life by unconsciousness; but as the individuals develop, these associations seem to become deliberate rather than unconscious, until in man they not only seem deliberate but are so. The history of human society shows that when it has been allowed to grow unconsciously the development has been in the same direction as under the predatory system of Nature; that is to say, institutions have been moulded to benefit individuals presenting the combination of strength and craft best fitted to survive in the artificial environment which the strong and crafty created to that end. When conditions produced by this system of growth under the spur of egotism were replaced by one of construction under the guidance of wisdom, there was progress. Society is controlled by two forces: one which it consciously set up for itself, called "government"; one which is unconsciously operating through the silent struggle of natural and non-natural motives in the individual lives of every one of us. The latter to a great extent escapes the control of government; but in so far as society does consciously create its own institutions, it ought to be engaged in the process of construction and in the conscious effort towards self-improvement. To this extent society is not an organism, and _à fortiori_ government is not an organism either. Society, then, is not an organism. It differs from an organism in the following essential particulars: The units of an organism have no individual existence; they are parts essential to the whole and exist for the sake of the whole. The units of a society have an individual existence; and, in the case of human society, do not exist for the sake of the society, but society for the sake of the individual. Not only have the units of a society each an individual existence, but they have each an individual will, an independent consciousness, and, all except Materialists will add, an individual soul. The units of an organism are conspicuously without any of these essential attributes. But society, though not itself an organism, is an association of organisms. And although human society seems to resemble a machine more than an organism, the legislator cannot for a moment afford to forget that the parts of his machine are not inanimate inorganic matter, but organic living beings, endowed with the faculties of consciousness and will--and above all alive to pleasure and sensitive to pain. Nor can he afford to forget that the efficacy of all laws depends ultimately upon the consent of those upon whom they are to operate; and that therefore no law can be effectual that is not supported by public opinion. Now, public opinion is the result of all the forces acting in the social field, unconscious as well as conscious; so that while the aim of the legislator should be to replace unconscious growth so far as is possible by conscious construction, he commits a fatal error if he fails to recognize that men and women are to-day actuated as to nine-tenths of their thoughts and deeds by habit, and many--perhaps the majority of them--incapable of conscious deliberate self-restraint at all. Legislation therefore that seeks suddenly to exact of the public a greater capacity for self-restraint than it is capable of, cannot but prove ineffectual; and ineffectual legislation is bad, because it tends to bring legislation into contempt. Prohibition furnishes a good illustration of this principle: in those States in which Prohibition is supported by public opinion it operates advantageously; where it is not so supported it operates only as an instrument of blackmail. Obviously Prohibition has diminished crime and improved social conditions in some States, whereas every attempt to force it or anything approaching to it upon the city of New York has resulted in the corruption of the police engaged in enforcing it, or in prompt punishment for the political party responsible for its enactment. The helplessness of mere laws to eradicate defects of temperament is one of the facts which tend to support the theory of _laissez faire_; but the argument that because under certain conditions legislation is inadequate, therefore legislation is always inadequate, is too obviously illogical to need refutation. It could hardly have received a moment's consideration had it not been bolstered by pseudo-scientific conclusions drawn from an alleged identity between society and organisms. But even if society were an organism, this argument would still be incorrect; just as incorrect as though it were contended that because under certain conditions medicine is inadequate, medicines must always be avoided. Were society as subtle and difficult to treat as the human bodies of which it is composed, it would still be the duty of the legislator to study the one, just as the physician studies the other, with a view to determining the limits as well as the extent of his resources. But society is not an organism; on the contrary, the more human and civilized it is, the less it conforms to unconscious growth and the more it yields to intelligent purpose. That it is composed of organisms, however, sets a limit to the wisdom of interference which it is of paramount importance that we should carefully define. These limits seem roughly to be marked out by two essential factors: one is the purpose of legislation--or justice, the other is the obstacles to legislation--or national character. Government in aiming at justice has to recognize defects of character. The justice which can be attained in one community could not be attempted in another; that which could be attained in one community in one stage of its development, it would have been folly to attempt at an earlier one. The approach to perfection in social conditions depends essentially upon the approach to perfection attained by the individuals of which the society is composed. How nearly a government can attain perfection depends, then, upon the individual character of those subject to it; and how nearly the individual character can attain perfection depends to a great extent upon the government to which it is subjected. These two factors cannot be treated apart; one is a function of the other. Just as a physician has in treating a patient to consider the hygienic conditions which surround him, and the peculiarities of constitution which may make a sudden change of these conditions injurious, so a legislator in framing laws for a community and thus changing the conditions of its environment, has to consider the temperament of the community and its fitness to undergo the proposed change. This is one of the limits that Nature puts to legislation, and it is upon a just apprehension of it that the wisdom of legislation depends. Although the extent to which legislation can modify nature depends largely upon the individuals who compose the community, there are, nevertheless, certain rules that can be laid down applicable by and large, to the whole community. When a trainer desires to subdue a wild beast, the first thing he does is to diminish his rations. So long as the carnivorous passions of the lion are kept whetted all attempt to control him fails. Or to use a more homely illustration, when we want to break a high-spirited colt, his supply of oats is lowered. To give such an animal an unlimited amount of oats and then to seek to control him with a powerful harness would be a mistake. If the harness left him free to move at all, he would kick the harness to pieces. Every trainer knows that if a horse is refractory, the first thing to be done to give him habits of docility is to reduce his rations of grain and to feed him on a less stimulating diet. This simple and universally admitted principle is, however, singularly neglected in our social and political institutions. These proceed upon the opposite plan; that is to say, they whet the appetite of man to the utmost by offering the largest rewards to the most crafty, the most greedy, the most dishonest, and the most merciless of men, and then legislatures, for the most part elected by these very men, are expected to control their craft, greed, dishonesty, and mercilessness. Thus while the competitive system, by making money the main object of human existence, drives men to gambling and crime, we maintain an elaborate system of police courts, penitentiaries, and prisons for suppressing these things, although the experience of all recorded history demonstrates that these methods are totally ineffectual. By overworking our wage-earners, we give them an insatiable thirst for drink; we entrust the sale of liquor to private individuals; we give these last the keenest motive for forcing the sale of liquor on a community alas, too eager to buy it, and then we attempt by the license system to control drunkenness. We leave our currency, which is the lifeblood of our industrial system, in the hands of men entitled under our law to consider this currency a mere method of increasing their private wealth; we offer to these men monopolies of transportation, of water, of gas, from which they can make gigantic fortunes and through which they can control our politics, and then we expect the very legislatures they control, the very legislators they elect, and the very officers they appoint, to control them. Obviously, if we begin by putting our legislature into the hands of the men whose interest it is to use that legislature to exploit us, we ought not to be surprised if the laws enacted by these legislatures fail to "change human nature." If, however, these appetites were never awakened, or if they were only sufficiently tolerated to produce healthy activity; if the "brotherhood of man" ceased to be a formula and became a fact; if men were educated from the cradle to believe that coöperation resulted in more economy, liberty, and happiness than competition; if coöperative habits were created so that men instinctively coöperated with one another instead of fighting with one another, can it be doubted that the laws enacted to produce this change in our human conditions would have a profound effect upon human nature? The natural environment has produced the lion, the tiger, and the ape. The artificial or human environment has produced man. But man is still a competitive animal. The next step that we have to take is still further so to modify our artificial environment as to make him a coöperative animal; to suppress the excessive competition that to-day promotes hatred, leaving enough to spur activity; to introduce enough coöperation to create habits of mutual helpfulness, yet not so much as to suppress individual initiative. This effort does not involve any sudden revolution in our development; it is only an intelligent continuation of the process already begun. We have diminished the ferocity of the carnivora in men; we have still further to diminish it without impairing courage. If we keep in mind that the object of political effort should be to diminish unhappiness and increase happiness, we shall conclude that this can best be done by continuing to develop along this line; by eliminating the eagerness created by the competitive system that makes success indispensable, not only to luxury and comfort, but to health and life; and that by modifying our institutions in the direction indicated in the foregoing pages, we shall not only secure a larger measure of happiness, but we shall so modify type as to change habits and change ideals. In a word, Science teaches us that we are and must be creatures of our own environment. History teaches us that we have moulded and can mould our own environment. By this inestimable power, man can determine the development of the human type. By maintaining existing conditions, we shall continue to produce the type of grasping millionaires that the community at large in its heart abhors. Whereas, by modifying the environment by the substitution of coöperation for competition in the measure above described, we shall create a type that humanity has set up in all its poetry, music, and art, as the type to be desired, respected, and loved. § 6. SUMMARY In conclusion let us briefly summarize the scientific argument for Socialism free from the explanations with which in a first presentation of this subject it was necessary to encumber the text. Evolution prior to the advent of man was an unconscious and therefore indeliberate adaptation of function to environment through the survival of the fittest and the corresponding destruction of the less fit. Herbert Spencer and his school have been misled by this fact into a glorification of the competitive system which seemed to them the most conspicuous factor in the improvement of type. This school altogether fails to take account of two facts of the utmost importance: Development under purely natural conditions--prior to the advent of man--by no means proceeded alone along competitive lines. It also proceeded along coöperative lines, so that while the lion, the tiger, and the ape are the prevailing types in certain regions, in others the prevailing type is the white ant. The other equally important fact is that whereas evolution under purely natural conditions--before the advent of man--was unconscious, indeliberate, and merciless, since the advent of man it has become conscious, deliberate, and merciful, to such an extent that in almost every essential particular, development has reversed the process that preceded the advent of man. Before the advent of man, animals were not only the victims of the forces of nature, but also their necessary result. Only those animals survived that were able to adapt themselves to changes of environment. The rest perished. And they adapted themselves to changes of environment mainly by developing new organs to that end. For example, the camel develops pads under its feet to protect them from the burning sands, and a reservoir in its alimentary canal to furnish water during its wanderings in the desert; the hairless hide of the tropical elephant becomes covered with thick curly wool when found in the Arctic zone. When, however, man appears upon the face of the earth, all this order changes. The survival of animals in the world is no longer determined by changes of climate or changes of environment; the survival of the fittest is no longer determined by Nature. It is determined by Art--by Man. The animals beneficial to man survive; the animals detrimental to man perish. Again, man is no longer the victim of the forces of Nature; he has become in great part master of them. The flame that raged uncontrollably over the forest and plain, man now puts under his kettle to make his tea; the torrent that devastated the valleys, man now dikes and distributes in irrigating ditches, transforming deserts into green fields. The fitful flash of the lightning in the heavens man conducts along a little wire and converts into the steady glow of the incandescent lamp. Nor does man any longer adapt function to environment. The Esquimau of the Arctic regions has not developed a thick curly fur; he has clothed himself in the furs of other animals; the Arab of the desert has not developed pads under his feet or a reservoir in his alimentary canal; he rides and loads water on the back of the camel already so provided. Man is no longer the necessary result of natural environment; he makes his own environment. Wherever he goes, he makes a climate of his own. In the tropics, he builds houses to protect himself from the heat, and creates an artificial cold by punkahs, electric fans, and the manufacture of ice. In winter, he creates another climate by building houses to protect himself from the cold, heating them with a furnace and lighting them with gas and electricity. Most important of all, by the control of man over environment, he can determine not only his own destiny, but also the destiny of generations to come. He can by preserving the competitive conditions that exist, go on developing the base type that is now the necessary result of these conditions--the type that seeks happiness regardless of the happiness of others, such as our oil kings and railroad kings, steel kings and other so-called captains of industry. By substituting coöperation for competition, he can, on the contrary, develop a noble type that seeks happiness through the happiness of others, such as the settlement worker and the Little Sister of the Poor, with, however, this amazing difference: that whereas to-day those who rejoice in social service for its own sake are for the most part humble and obscure, and those who use social service for their own advancement are wealthy and illustrious, in a coöperative commonwealth the genius that now goes into competitive business will be drawn into the service of the coöperative commonwealth. The present alliance between ability and craft will be broken up and a new partnership encouraged between ability, wisdom, and unselfishness. The fact that all life must adapt itself to environment has been felt from the earliest dawn of civilization. Plato stated it in the Republic. If justice is to be attained, according to Plato it can only be attained under a just form of government. The whole history of man since the days of Plato has demonstrated that every change in the condition of man can be traced as the direct result of change of environment--economic, political, ethical, and religious. The demonstration that this not only is so but must be so was left to science. And the contribution of science to Socialism is the demonstration of the fact that man can create his own environment--can take those elements in competition which are good and eliminate those which are bad--can take those elements in coöperation which are good and eliminate those which are bad; and by thus constructing his environment through wisdom and art, determine whether the type perpetuated by this environment is to be noble or base. FOOTNOTES: [198] "Principles of Sociology," p. 414. [199] "Government or Human Evolution," Vol. II, p. 181. [200] "Essays on Evolution and Ethics," "Essays on Science and Morals," and "Struggle for Existence in Human Society." [201] "Government or Human Evolution," Vol. I, p. 239. [202] The word "altruism" is used instead of the more familiar word "unselfishness" to avoid the criticism of those who contend that there is no such thing as unselfishness. It is true that we are all selfish in the sense that we are all seeking happiness for ourselves; but selfishness can be defined as the search for happiness regardless of the happiness of others, and altruism as the search for happiness through the happiness of others. [203] Lyell, Sir Charles, "Principles of Geology," 1872, Vol. I, Chapter X, p. 201. [204] This conclusion is arrived at by Charles Booth in a statistical work which commands the approval of all authorities of whatever shade of political opinion. [205] Book III, Chapter V. [206] "Introduction to the Study of Sociology." Herbert Spencer, Chapter III. CHAPTER V ETHICAL ASPECT OF SOCIALISM The ethical aspect of Socialism is a practical continuation of the argument of the last chapter, and brings us to the crowning glory of Socialism: that it alone can and does reconcile the conflict between science, economics, and religion. § 1. THE CONFLICT BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION Science produces convictions founded on fact. Religion imposes convictions founded on faith. If Religion confines itself to matters of faith--to the supernatural--it need not come into conflict with Science. But when it trespasses on the realms of Science--when it begins to deal with matters of fact--it creates a conflict with Science in which Science must in the end be victorious. Thus when the Church ventured to make it a matter of faith that the sun revolves around the earth, it might secure the recantation of Galileo, but it had in the end to yield before the demonstrations of astronomy. This element of conflict between the church and the state is disappearing and is bound entirely to disappear. The church is more and more confining itself to supernatural matters which are properly within the domain of faith. So long as it does this, it need not clash with Science. There is, however, another occasion of conflict between Science and Religion more modern than the former and more real: The doctrine of evolution in attacking the theory of special creation needed at one time to attack the existence of God; and as interpreted by Herbert Spencer and his school, gave rise to the doctrine that "because, on the whole, animals and plants have advanced in perfection of organization by means of the struggle for existence and the consequent 'survival of the fittest,' therefore men in society, men as ethical beings, must look to the same process to help them towards perfection."[207] This notion, which Huxley describes as the fallacy that at that time pervaded the so-called "ethics of evolution," raised an issue not only with the church, but with the fundamental principles of religion. For if, in fact, the blind process of evolution proceeding through the survival of the fittest and the destruction of the unfit, was the only process to which man could look for his development, then there is no need of a God, and what is far more important, there is no need for either human responsibility or human effort. Now the church, however much its sects may differ in other matters, has always been united in teaching not only the existence of a God, but the responsibility of man to God, and a duty of man to make the effort necessary to comply with his commandments. It is to the pages of Huxley that we must turn to see this Spencerian fallacy refuted. Huxley pointed out that a gardener in growing things beautiful and useful to man proceeded in violation of the principles of evolution. The characteristic feature of what he calls the "cosmic process," that is to say, evolution _prior_ to the advent of man, "is the intense and unceasing competition of the struggle for existence." The characteristic of evolution since the advent of man is "_the elimination of that struggle_ by the removal of the conditions which give rise to it."[208] The immense importance of these considerations is that they demonstrate no less important a fact than that Man is to-day the selecting agent and not Nature; and Man, by replacing evolution by Art converts things which in the domain of Nature are not edible, such as kale, into things which under Art become edible, such as cabbage. But let us now take up the story as told by Huxley: "Let us now imagine that some _administrative authority, as far superior in power and intelligence to men, as men are to their cattle, is set over the colony, charged to deal with its human elements_ in such a manner as to assure the victory of the settlement over the antagonistic influences of the state of nature in which it is set down. He would proceed in the same fashion as that in which the gardener dealt with his garden. In the first place, he would, as far as possible, put a _stop to the influence of external competition_ by thoroughly extirpating and excluding the native rivals, whether men, beasts, or plants. And our administrator would select his human agents, with a view to his ideal of a successful colony, just as the gardener selects his plants with a view to his ideal of useful or beautiful products. "In the second place, in order that no struggle for the means of existence between these human agents should weaken the efficiency of the corporate whole in the battle with the state of nature, he would make arrangements by which each would be provided with those means; and would be relieved from the fear of being deprived of them by his stronger or more cunning fellows. Laws, sanctioned by the combined force of the colony, would restrain the self-assertion of each man within the limits required for the maintenance of peace. In other words, the cosmic struggle for existence, as between man and man, would be rigorously suppressed; and _selection, by its means, would be as completely excluded as it is from the garden_. "At the same time, the obstacles to the full development of the capacities of the colonists by other conditions of the state of nature than those already mentioned, would be removed by the creation of artificial conditions of existence of a more favorable character. Protection against extremes of heat and cold would be afforded by houses and clothing; drainage and irrigation works would antagonize the effects of excessive rain and excessive drought; roads, bridges, canals, carriages, and ships would overcome the natural obstacles to locomotion and transport; mechanical engines would supplement the natural strength of men and of their draught animals; hygienic precautions would check, or remove the natural causes of disease. With every step of this progress in civilization, the colonists would become more and more independent of the state of nature; more and more, their lives would be conditioned by a state of art. In order to attain his ends, the administrator would have to avail himself of the courage, industry, and coöperative intelligence of the settlers; and it is plain that the interest of the community would be best served by increasing the proportion of persons who possess such qualities, and diminishing that of persons devoid of them. In other words, by _selection directed towards an ideal_. "Thus the administrator might look to the establishment of an earthly paradise, a true garden of Eden, in which all things should work together towards the well-being of the gardeners; within which the cosmic process, the coarse struggle for existence of the state of nature, should he abolished; in which that state should be replaced by a state of art; where every plant and every lower animal should be adapted to human wants, and would perish if human supervision and protection were withdrawn; where men themselves should have been selected with a view to their efficiency as organs for the performance of the functions of a perfected society. And this ideal polity would have been brought about, not by gradually adjusting the men to the conditions around them, but by creating artificial conditions for them; not by allowing the free play of the struggle for existence, but by excluding that struggle; and by substituting selection directed towards the administrator's ideal for the selection it exercises."[209] And this is not confined to physical things, but is extended to moral. "_Social progress_," he says, "_means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process_; the end of which is not the survival of those who may happen to be the fittest, in respect of the whole of the conditions which obtain, but of those who are ethically the best."[210] And this leads to the final conclusion: "As I have already urged, the practice of that which is ethically best--what we call goodness or virtue--involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence. In place of ruthless self-assertion it demands self-restraint; in place of thrusting aside, or treading down all competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely respect, but shall help his fellows; its influence is directed, _not so much to the survival of the fittest, as to the fitting of as many as possible to survive_. It repudiates the gladiatorial theory of existence. It demands that each man who enters into the enjoyment of the advantages of a polity shall be mindful of his debt to those who have laboriously constructed it; and shall take heed that no act of his weakens the fabric in which he has been permitted to live."[211] Further on, he repeats: "Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it."[212] And later on: "I see no limit to the extent to which intelligence and will, guided by sound principles of investigation, and organized in a common effort, may modify the conditions of existence, for a period longer than that now covered by history. _And much may be done to change the nature of man himself._ The intelligence which has converted the brother of the wolf into the faithful guardian of the flock ought to be able to do something towards curbing the instincts of savagery in civilized men."[213] And in a note Huxley emphasizes the extent to which human nature has been already modified by pointing to the fact that sexual instinct has been suppressed between near relations.[214] Huxley's demonstrations that the happiness of man can only be attained by the limitation of competition, by deliberate institutions to that effect, and by conscious efforts to create an environment that will tend to develop the ethical qualities of men, put an end to the last serious occasion for conflict between Science and Religion; for it results in the same theories of human responsibility, and the same appeals to human effort, that it has been the rôle of the church to preach from the beginning. I have quoted from "Evolution and Ethics" because to my mind this essay and its prolegomena make Huxley the founder of Scientific and Ethical Socialism. It is true that he himself repudiates this. To him Socialism is impossible because of what he describes as "the mighty instinct of reproduction."[215] He points out that we cannot apply to superfluous or defective human beings the system of extirpation which gardeners apply to superfluous and defective vegetables and weeds. I have already answered the objection to Socialism on the ground of overproduction.[216] But Huxley never had presented to him the modern idea of Socialism herein described. He speaks of the "elimination of competition." It never occurred to him that the evils of competition could be eliminated without eliminating competition. Candor, however, compels me to admit that I do not think any presentation of the most modern form of Socialism would at all have converted Professor Huxley. There were two subjects upon which he could not speak without getting into a temper: Gladstone and Socialism. When I met him, I was not myself a Socialist. Indeed, I did not become a Socialist until after Huxley died. My impressions, therefore, of him were not affected by a prejudice in favor of Socialism. On the contrary, I still regarded Socialism as impractical; I still believed it to be absurd. It was only after months of labor in attempting to utilize the "considerable fragments of a constructive creed"[217] which Professor Ritchie found in Professor Huxley's pages, that I was driven to a study of the Socialism to which I was utterly opposed, and found in it the only solution to the contradictions which blurred even the lucid pages of Huxley's works. And the contradictions in Huxley are not difficult to find. Nothing could be more pessimistic than what seems to be the climax of his argument in "Evolution and Ethics": "The theory of evolution encourages no millennial anticipations. If, for millions of years, our globe has taken the upward road, yet, some time, the summit will be reached and the downward route will be commenced. The most daring imagination will hardly venture upon the suggestion that the power and the intelligence of man can ever arrest the procession of the great year."[218] And yet, on the very next page, he closes this essay with a note of the serenest optimism: "So far, we all may strive in one faith towards one hope."[219] And the keynote of his attitude towards this subject is to be found in a passage in which he "thinks it unjust to require a crossing-sweeper in Piccadilly to tell you the road to Highgate; he has earned his copper if he had done all he professes to do and cleaned up your immediate path"; and a little later where he "shudderingly objects to the responsibility of attempting to set right a world out of joint." Now Socialists have the audacity to maintain that it is not beyond the intelligence of the crossing-sweeper of Piccadilly to know and tell the road to Highgate, and that the time has come when no one has a right to "shudderingly object to the responsibility of attempting to set right a world out of joint." Huxley builded better than he knew; and in spite of his detestation of Socialism it was he who built its strongest and most enduring foundation; for unanswerable as may be the economic argument in favor of Socialism, it might take centuries to prevail if there were not an equally strong scientific and ethical argument for it. The moment that Huxley recognizes that it is by the "elimination of competition," or shall we say the "limitation of competition," by substituting human selection for natural selection, and directing selection towards an ideal that man is to progress and develop, he has recognized the scientific basis of Socialism; and when he points out that Science teaches self-restraint, human responsibility, human effort, not so much the "survival of the fittest" as fitting as many as possible to survive, he has reconciled Science and Religion. It is probable that one of the reasons why Huxley took a pessimistic view of the future was that he despaired of finding a solution to the economic struggle. I cannot forget the melancholy with which he said one day: "I am informed that England keeps its control of the market of cotton goods by a difference in cost of production of a farthing per yard. How long can this last?" But Huxley only gave a part of the scientific argument for Socialism. For the other part we have to turn from the pages of Huxley to those of Karl Marx. One of the most important services Karl Marx rendered humanity was the demonstration of the predominating influence of economics in the development of man, in the determining of our custom, character, and conduct. The economic conception of history is described by F. Engels as follows: "The materialist conception of history starts from the principle that production, and next to production the exchange of its products, is the basis of every social system; that in every society arising in history the allotment of products, and with it the division of society into classes or ranks, depends upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how when produced it is exchanged. Accordingly the ultimate causes of all social changes and political revolutions are not to be looked for in the heads of men, in their growing insight into eternal truth and justice, but in changes of the methods of production and exchange; they are to be looked for not in the philosophy, but in the economy of the epoch in question."[220] Before elaborating this conception of history, it may be well to point out one or two elements of confusion in the terms in which it is stated. It is described as the "materialist conception of history," and for this reason many people imagine that the admission of this theory means the exclusion of the ideal. This is a profound error due to a misunderstanding of the use of the word "materialist." This word does not necessarily imply that the only proper conception of history is a materialistic one in the sense that it excludes the operation of ideals; but only that material conditions have played a predominating rôle in determining ideas. The admission, however, must be made that this explanation is by no means admitted by all Socialist writers. Indeed the very language used by Engels is inconsistent with it. He says "they are not to be looked for in the philosophy, but in the economy of the epoch in question." If, however, Mr. Engels were alive to-day and were challenged as to whether in fact he meant by this phrase to exclude philosophy altogether, I think he would answer in the negative. What he meant to say, I think, was that the ultimate causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be looked for in the economy of the epoch rather than in its philosophy. And this, I think, with some limitation is true, for the philosophy of every period is to a large extent determined by its economic conditions. To this general statement there are, however, notable exceptions. Some men either by the adequacy of their means or the smallness of their needs, are lifted entirely above economic conditions, so that they can reason abstractly without regard to economic conditions. This probably is true of almost every philosopher that has made his mark. It is impossible to read the words of Christ, of Plato, Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, Carlyle, Emerson, and Tolstoi without being impressed by the fact that they soared far above all economic considerations. On the other hand, economic conditions had a controlling influence on the whole philosophy of Ruskin. His first contact with life was while travelling with his father, who sold sherry to wealthy county families, and approached their mansions by way of the butler's pantry. This impregnated Ruskin with a cult for aristocracy. It made it impossible for him to consider popular government without impatience. Economic conditions too had put their mark so ineffaceably on the mind of Huxley that although in his criticism of Herbert Spencer he destroyed the principal philosophic bulwark of capitalism, he could not talk on Socialism without irritation. Thus although men as great as Ruskin and Huxley were unable to rise above the slavery of the economic conditions in which their minds had been formed, others are so constituted as to be able to discuss ethics without any regard to economic conditions whatever. There is, however, no doubt as to the dominating influence of economic conditions in determining the average mental attitude. Man had two dominating appetites--for food and for perpetuation; and of these, because that for perpetuation is fitful whereas that for food is continuous, the latter is the more determining of the two. There is hardly an act in a man's life which is not determined by the needs of food in the first place and the search for food in the second. This is admitted by all sociologists. A right understanding of economics is therefore of the utmost importance to the conscious development of man. Unfortunately economists themselves have been until very lately just as narrow in their disregard of science and religion as science and religion have been narrow in their disregard of economics. Let us consider as briefly as the subject permits the inconsistencies which result from this narrowness in regard to religion and economics. § 2. CONFLICT BETWEEN ECONOMICS AND RELIGION It is said that by the side of every poison in Nature there grows its antidote; that for every bean of St. Ignatius there is a bean of Calabar; and that a man poisoned by the one has only to stretch his hand out to the other. So also in our social system may the two influences be at work, at odds with each other; whereas, did we but know enough, they might not only serve to counteract one another, but even become a priceless boon to humanity, as indeed the beans of St. Ignatius and Calabar have been made to yield up drugs as useful as nux vomica and eserine. Religion and economics start by assumptions that are glaringly inconsistent. Religion proceeds upon the assumption that man has morality in him and will, sometimes, act morally even contrary to his material interests. Economics proceed upon the assumption that man has no morality in him and will never act morally if morality be contrary to his material interests. Modern economists have somewhat modified this last view, but I am not criticising modern Political Economy, which is already lowering its flag to new doctrine; I am criticising the doctrine of _laissez faire_, which still constitutes the backbone of our existing economics and will continue to deform our economic ideas until that backbone is relegated to museums by the side of the Ichthyosaurus and the Iguanodon. Is the assumption that economic science is uninfluenced by morality true or false? Undoubtedly an economic science can be and has been constructed which does ignore morality and, dealing with man not as he really is but stripped of his morality, or as he is termed by some economic writers, "economic man," and still more naïvely by others the "average sensual man," has laid down the laws which _for such a man_ govern the production, distribution, and accumulation of wealth. In the development of this science it has been found necessary to define wealth, and here we come upon the first hard substance against which economists have broken their heads. For obviously wealth is to the "economic" or "average sensual" man a totally different thing to what it is to a Diogenes, a Cato, or to a Sister of Charity. To the latter wealth or well-being as opposed to illth or ill-being, consists mainly in the opportunity to be helpful to our fellow-creatures, whereas to the average sensual man wealth means money or the things that represent money, produce, bonds, and shares of stock. Now all economists are not "average sensual" men; it is doubtful whether to those who know the Dean of Modern Economists, Mr. Alfred Marshall, he can be described as a sensual man at all; and so there are few subjects upon which economists have differed so much as upon the definition of wealth. The extremists confine wealth to material things that have an exchange value; but the absurdity of such a definition is slowly making itself recognized; thus it has been forced upon some that skill is wealth; and upon others that honesty too is wealth; for the money value of honesty is now put into dollars and cents by surety companies. And so very slowly but surely economists are beginning to recognize that man is a moral as well as a sensual animal, and that his morality cannot be disregarded even by economics. Then, too, what is wealth in one country is not wealth in another; thus we are told that the food of John the Baptist was "locusts and wild honey," and in certain parts of Africa locusts are still a marketable article of food; so snails are wealth in France though not in England; and human flesh which is not wealth in Europe is still wealth in some parts of Africa. Wealth then depends upon two factors: intrinsic and extrinsic; the first including qualities of the thing itself, the second depending upon human demand; so that a painting by Tintoretto is wealth to a community that loves art, but an encumbrance to one that does not love it; and absinthe, that is regarded as a valuable asset in France, is excluded by Belgium as poison. Here again we come up against the morality of man; will he continue to poison himself with absinthe or will he abstain? Upon this ethical decision will depend the question whether the immense stock of absinthe now on the French market is wealth or not. And so we are led insensibly to a question of still wider importance: Is wealth money or is it happiness? If it is money then economists are right; if it is happiness then they are wrong. And yet it is as clear as the sun on a cloudless day that what man wants is happiness, and that if he has been set all these centuries on seeking money it is because money is believed by him to be practically the only medium through which he can attain happiness. Here is repeated the old story of the captive beaver in the attic gathering sticks to make a dam when the water pitcher was upset. The object for making dams had disappeared, but the dam-building instinct survived. We have grown so accustomed to labor for money that we have lost sight of the real object of our efforts; and we have to think a long time before we recognize that money in itself is of no importance to us whatever; and that the only thing of real importance is that for which money is sought--happiness. Now what happiness consists of depends upon the mentality of any given community. The tree-dwelling savage's idea of happiness is plenty of nuts and fine weather; the Englishman's idea is plenty of land and a seat in Parliament; the American's idea is millions of money; and the tree-dwelling savage is probably as near the truth as either of the other two. Obviously there is an ideal of happiness quite different from this; an ideal that recognizes the solidarity of the race and recognizes that no one man can be securely happy unless his neighbors are happy also; an ideal built on the plan of mutual helpfulness--of coöperation instead of competition. But here the lip of the economist will curl and he will, if he deigns to express himself at all, denounce such a proposition as "impractical." But why does he do this? Because he has been educated to believe that economics deal only with the "average sensual man," and that wealth consists exclusively of "material things that have an exchange value." If, then, it turns out that both these assumptions are false, is it not time for him to revise his philosophy? It is not unnatural that starting with false definitions of man and of wealth, economists should arrive at a false conclusion regarding the so-called beauties of our industrial system, and of such time-honored though immoral maxims as "competition is the soul of trade" and "_caveat emptor_." And now after this rapid glance at economic philosophy and the "average sensual man," let us turn to Religion and see how Religion regards man. It seems inconceivable that the same civilization should include two bodies of men living in apparent harmony and yet holding such opposite and inconsistent views on man as economists on the one hand and theologians on the other. To these last, man has no economic needs; this world does not count; it is merely a place of probation, mitigated sometimes, it is true, by ecclesiastical pomp and episcopal palaces; but serving for the most part as a mere preparation for a future existence which will satisfy the aspirations of the human soul--the only thing that does count, in this world or the next. So while to the economist man is all hog, to the theologian he is all soul; and between the two the Devil secures the vast majority. One-fifth of the population in London is admittedly foredoomed to die in a penitentiary, an almshouse, or a lunatic asylum; and the vast multitude of wage earners are kept out on the ragged edge of the strike on one hand and unemployment on the other, with no better prospect before them than a destitute old age. Were there no churches in the land, were there no charity in man, no pity, the economists would be comprehensible; but with our churches still crowded; with charitable societies as thick as universities; with pity in their own hearts giving every day the lie to the economic enormities they profess and teach, what are we going to say of these men? And were there no economists in the chair, no stock exchange, no factory, no strikes, no unemployed; did our theologians' stomachs never themselves clamor for food, or their bodies cry out for shelter and heat, they too would be excusable. But with our tenements steeped in misery; with misery pitilessly leading to crime, vice, disease; with the demands of the body brought home to every one of them a thousand times a day, is it not time for theologians at last to remember that men have bodies as well as souls? Consider then these two sets of teachers, one professing a philosophy built on the assumption that man is all body and no soul, the other built on the contrary assumption that man is all soul, meeting daily at dinner parties and discussing the agony of the workingman with complacency and "philosophic calm"! Yet if we look at the world as it is, so full of evil and yet so easily set right, we will not delve at the roots of plants and say: "Life is all mud;" nor point to their leaves and say: "Life is all flower and fruit." Life is made up of root and flower; man is made up of body and soul. The economy and the religion that heed this will alone be true. Let economics be enlightened by religion and let religion be enlightened by economics; let the economist learn that the soul of man is more than raiment and the priest that the needs of the body come in order of time before the needs of the soul; let the economist learn the laws of mutual helpfulness and the priest the laws of the production and the distribution of well-being; and there will spring into existence a new religion and a new political economy that will preach the same thing--the solidarity of man--that what man wants in this world is not money, but happiness--and that he can prepare himself best for the next world of which he knows nothing by making his neighbor as well as himself wholesome as well as happy, in this world of which he to-day alas, knows too much of its misery and too little of its play. § 3. SOCIALISM RECONCILES RELIGION, ECONOMICS, AND SCIENCE Let us now consider the Scientific and Ethical aspects of Socialism from a slightly different angle than that which closed the preceding chapter. In what Huxley calls the "cosmic process"--the process of evolution prior to the advent of Man--the development or degeneration of animal or vegetable life is determined by the environment. If the environment is favorable to development, there is development; if it is unfavorable, there is degeneration. The question, therefore, whether animal or vegetable life is to develop or degenerate is left to the caprice of environment. The process through which this caprice is exercised is the survival of the fittest, and this includes two processes: the utmost propagation on the one hand, and the utmost competition on the other. With all the cruelty that this system involves, it would be idle to call such a process moral; nor would it be reasonable to call it immoral. The cosmic process is non-moral. It ignores justice because justice is a conception of either God or Man, and is not found in Nature outside of God or Man at all. If now we turn from the cosmic process to that employed by the gardener in converting wild land into a garden for the purpose of producing things beautiful or useful to man, we find that the gardener reverses the cosmic process. He does not tolerate utmost propagation or even propagation at all except to the extent necessary to furnish him beautiful or useful things. He limits propagation; and as to utmost competition, he eliminates competition altogether. And it is only by limiting propagation and eliminating competition that the gardener keeps his garden beautiful and useful. The moment he stops applying to his garden patch the art which limits propagation and eliminates competition, that moment the garden tends to return to a state of Nature; to "an unweeded garden, That grows to seed; things rank, and gross in nature, Possess in merely."[221] It must also be observed that in the garden patch selection is not exercised by the environment, though it is limited by the environment; selection is exercised by the gardener who, within the limits permitted by the environment, replaces Nature. It is no longer Nature that selects, but Man. Let us now turn from the civilized garden to the civilized community. Here, too, we find the cosmic process in some respects reversed; in other respects, allowed to run riot. It is reversed in the sense of the word that prudence created by the ownership of property limits the propagation of the educated; but it remains unreversed by the fact that despair created by absence of property leaves propagation unchecked in the uneducated. So that if it be admitted that it would be better for type that the educated should propagate than the uneducated, the human type is tending to degenerate owing to the fact that there is unlimited propagation of the least desirable types; whereas there is limited propagation of the more desirable. When we turn to competition, we find it almost unrestrained. Indeed, it was the deliberate policy of the government and of political economists a century ago to let it proceed absolutely without restraint. Such was the doctrine of _laissez faire_ and such is the doctrine which to-day is expressed by business men in the request to be "let alone." But the experience of the past one hundred years has demonstrated that humanity cannot afford to let competition go unrestrained; that it leads to such fatal consequences that all--even the most educated and carefully nurtured--are exposed to the contagion of disease engendered by unrestrained competition; witness the cholera scare and the hygienic laws to which this cholera scare gave rise.[222] Competition has been controlled in various manners: by laws such as factory acts, child labor acts, women labor acts; second, by trade unions which the community and the law have had to protect in order to keep workingmen from the danger of having to work for less than starvation wages; and last of all, by trusts, which discovered that competition involves a waste which, could it be saved, would roll up enormous dividends to stockholders. But trusts have occasioned evils against which to-day the whole nation is crying out. So that the cry now abroad is to control monopolies, trusts, and corporations; and if the efforts to control corporations have not already sufficiently demonstrated that such laws are bound to result in more blackmail than control, no reasonable man can doubt that they must in the end so result in view of the fact that the prizes offered by business attract first-class talent to business whereas the smaller prizes offered by politics or the government can only draw to it second-or third-rate ability. I trust it has been shown that the confusion that results from the competitive system is due to false notions of property; that property as an institution is, and must always be, essential to the economic structure of the state in the sense that the original and beneficial purpose of property is to secure to men as nearly as possible the full product of their toil. This is the ideal distinctly expressed by Mr. Roosevelt, and is the ideal of every mind that has distinct notions about property at all. Our social structure, therefore, should be so organized as to assure to men the full product of their toil by the adoption of some such system as has been described in the chapter on the Economic Construction of the Coöperative Commonwealth. In such a social structure, competition would be limited so that we should reserve its stimulus and eliminate its sting, and propagation would be limited not only by prudence, but by the economic independence of women, who ought to have most to say on the subject. In such a social structure, we should for the first time have an environment that would discourage vice and encourage virtue. And here comes, as I have already said, the crowning glory of Socialism that reconciles religion, economics, and science. For the Church teaches: "Man is born in sin; his passions are sinful; unaided by God he is their slave. If, however, he chooses to make the effort necessary to secure the aid of God, he can master his passions and earn salvation. But although the Grace of God will secure to him some happiness in this world, this world is a place of unhappiness and purgation; the reward of the faithful is not in this world, but in the world to come." The Economist teaches: "Man is born in sin; his passions are sinful; in matters so practical as bread and butter we must not allow ourselves to be deluded by the promises of the Church, as to the fulfilment of which no evidence has ever been furnished. A practical system of economics then must be built on the undoubted fact that the 'average man' is 'sensual' and will always act in accordance with what he believes to be his material interest. It must be founded on human selfishness; let every man be driven by selfishness to make wealth primarily for himself and incidentally for the community at large. This is the only practical system for the accumulation of wealth." Science says: "Man is born with passions, but are these passions sinful? They are sinful when uncontrolled, because they may then act injuriously to the neighbor. When controlled they act beneficially to the neighbor. The problem is not how to suppress passion, but how to control it. Man must indeed obey his greater inclination; but Man has the power to mould his own environment; to make his own habits; to make his own inclination; Man therefore is master--not slave. There is too in evolution a power which from the creation to this day has persistently worked toward progress, justice, and happiness; but we are still ignorant as to what this power is except in so far as we see it working in Man. In Man we can see and study the working of this power. And we find it in Man's capacity to mould his own environment by resisting Nature instead of yielding to it. And so science teaches to-day--not the gospel of evolution alone--but also the gospel of effort and Art." In Nature we observe two systems of social existence: one competitive, one coöperative. Both are attended by evils; both by advantages. Man can frame his social and economic conditions so as to eliminate the evils and secure the advantages of both. This is Socialism. Socialism leaves the church free to proceed along the lines of its faith; but it furnishes the church with the inestimable advantage of creating economic conditions that make the practice of religion for the first time possible. To-day economic conditions by ignoring the soul of Man and appealing only to his appetites make the practice of the Golden Rule impossible. Economic conditions can be so changed that they appeal to the soul of man without ignoring his appetites. It may be that the earth is a place of preparation for another life. But it is not for that reason necessarily a place of misery and injustice. Socialism by eliminating misery and injustice will make this preparation easier. The environment of Socialism will tend to improve not only the individual, but also the type. It may be that the grace of God will help man to be noble and just. Let the church continue to teach this. But let science be heard also in the positive proof it furnishes that man will and must be what the environment makes him; that if we continue to tolerate economic conditions that appeal to his selfishness, he will and must remain selfish; whereas if wiser economic conditions appeal to his unselfishness he will and must tend to be unselfish. And so in Socialism and in Socialism alone, do we find reconciled the ethics of the church, the needs of economics, and the demands of science. The new church will continue to teach social service; the new economics will permit of social service; and the new science will make of social service an environment out of which the new type of man will be evolved that will justify the words of Christ: "Hath it not been said in your law 'Ye are Gods'?" FOOTNOTES: [207] "Evolution and Ethics," by T.H. Huxley, p. 80. [208] "Evolution and Ethics," p. 13. [209] "Evolution and Ethics," p. 20. [210] Ibid., p. 81. [211] "Evolution and Ethics," p. 81. [212] Ibid., p. 83. [213] Ibid., p. 85. [214] Ibid., p. 116. [215] "Evolution and Ethics," p. 20. [216] Book II, Chapter I. [217] "Government or Human Evolution," Vol. I, p. 16. [218] "Evolution and Ethics," p. 85. [219] Ibid., p. 86. [220] "Modern Socialism," by R.C.K. Ensor. [221] Of course, I must not be understood to mean that nothing beautiful or useful grows in Nature outside of the art of the gardener. On the contrary, we know that in the Tropics Nature furnishes not only beautiful things, but enough of useful things to make the art of the gardener unnecessary. The lesson to be drawn from the garden patch is that, if the best result in the shape of beautiful and useful things is to be obtained from a limited surface, Art must be applied to that surface; Nature cannot be depended upon. [222] Book III, Chapter II. CHAPTER VI SOLIDARITY I think it was Miss Martineau who said that if her generation was better than that which preceded her, the betterment was due to the teachings of Carlyle; and much though we may differ with John Ruskin in matters of detail, no one will dispute the apostolic fervor with which he endeavored to push on the work of Thomas Carlyle. It is a significant fact, therefore, that both Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin had nothing but abuse to give to political economy. Nevertheless, I think we all must agree that this hostile attitude was due to a misconception of the scope of political economy, a misconception due in great part to its name; for the words "political economy" seem to indicate that it deals with the economy of the state, and that it becomes the duty of its teachers to show us not only what the rules regarding the production and distribution of goods are, but what they ought to be. In fact, however, although economists do discuss how--if at all--the system of production and distribution of goods can be improved, they have always regarded it as their principal function to describe accurately what the rules that govern production and distribution really are, rather than what they ought to be. And as existing industrial conditions are extremely complicated, those who have thrown light upon them are highly to be honored. And although they have contributed nothing to the solution of such problems as unemployment, pauperism, and the conflict of labor and capital, it may be as unreasonable to complain of this as to quarrel with the "crossing-sweeper of Piccadilly" because he is unable "to tell you the road to Highgate." Again, political economy has encountered a great deal of unmerited abuse because critics have confounded authors with their subject, and have held economists responsible for the industrial conditions they describe; whereas, these economists have earned our sincerest thanks for demonstrating that the competitive system offers no solution for the conflict between capital and labor, or the problem of unemployment and all the other problems as those of pauperism, prostitution, and economic crime which result therefrom. Mr. Ruskin is certainly wrong when he denounces political economy as the "science of getting rich," and when he adds that "persons who follow its precepts" do actually become rich; "all persons who disobey them become poor"; for our ablest political economists have always been and still are relatively poor men, and our richest millionaire is a past master of the rules in the game which it is his particular business to play; but he is not concerned with a science which does no more than study wealth under the competitive system and demonstrate how inevitably a few grow rich and the rest grow poor under it. Let us then abandon hostility to a science without which to-day we could not see clearly the workings of the existing system, and on the contrary, avail ourselves of all its teachings, recognizing that a study of what industrial conditions to-day are must precede the study of what they could and should be. The study of political economy is necessary to a study of "social economy." Political economy admittedly deals with the average sensual man, and having determined the rules that determine the actions of the average sensual man, it becomes now the problem of social economy to deal with the average moral man. And the moral man must not be regarded as opposed to the sensual. The moral man includes the sensual, but adds affection, sympathy, and all that makes happiness to the sensual man who may, through absence of affection and sympathy, fail to attain the happiness of which he is in search. Under this definition, while political economy deals with the attainment of wealth, social economy deals with the attainment of happiness; and as man must eat before he can pursue happiness, social economy must concern itself with the acquisition of wealth to satisfy physical needs before it concerns itself with the attainment of justice to satisfy moral needs. An attempt has been made in this book to present the social and economic structure which would best attain happiness. Would such a system at the same time attain justice?[223] To arrive at a correct notion of justice, we have to refer once more to the difference between what Huxley calls the "cosmic process"--that is to say, the process of the environment of Nature before the advent of Man--and the ethical process, or the process of the artificial environment created by Man. For there is one difference, and a most essential difference, between them to which attention has not yet been directed: namely, that in communities such as those of the bee and ant, the individual is sacrificed to the community; whereas the effort of Man is or should be to so organize his community that it will serve the happiness of the individual. For example, we would not tolerate a community upon the plan we see practised by the bees, under which only one male out of a whole hive is permitted to propagate and all the rest of the males on attaining maturity are caused to die; only one female of the whole hive is allowed to be fertile and to propagate, all the rest being subject to the dreary round of keeping the fertile bee a prisoner, of feeding her, of rearing, feeding and caring for the young in the hive, and incidentally destroying any males who may return to the hive from the nuptial flight. We have to recognize that the great obstacle to happiness in community life is sexual instinct, of which Socialists of the type of Edward Bellamy have for the most part failed to take account. Reference has been made to the various devices adopted by different races of animals and by Man at different periods and at different places to solve the problem of sexual instinct,[224] and it has been, I think, demonstrated by Professor Giddings, that of all the systems proposed none can compare with our present institution of marriage.[225] The mere fact that the marriage system has survived in the conflict with races that have adopted other systems ought to furnish an argument in favor of its superiority. In the struggle between races of Man, those races the institutions of which require most self-restraint have invariably overwhelmed those races whose institutions require less self-restraint. For example, the tribes that lived without any regulation of sexual instinct and in which children took the name of their mother because the name of their father was not and could not be known, disappeared in the conflict with tribes which insisted upon some restraint to sexual appetite, such as the patriarchal system. Again, the patriarchal system which tolerated polygamy has everywhere been destroyed when it came into conflict with monogamous races, such as our own, which involve still further restraint in the sexual relation. It would seem, therefore, as though the monogamous marriage were the keystone of our present civilization, for upon it has been built the family, and the education and self-restraint which family life involves.[226] There is too no function of the family more important than that it serves as a model of what the state ought to be as distinguished from what the state actually is; that is to say, a government which should have equal concern for every member of the community, and not one which as at present surfeits some and starves others. It is the growing idea that a properly constituted state must do this for the protection not only of the many, but of the few that probably give the most continuous aid to Socialism. As Mr. Edwin Björkman expressed it: "We are beginning to grasp the futility of planning the welfare of any one human being apart from the rest of his kind. We are coming to think of ourselves, at last, as links in a chain so firmly bound together that when the devil grabs the hindmost the wrench is felt by the top-most--felt in the very marrow of his bones."[227] And so while the institution of marriage has removed an obstacle to solidarity in community life, public health has proved its ally. Mr. Björkman has made an estimate of the enormous cost of unnecessary sickness. But the protection of public health is furnishing us a far better argument in favor of solidarity and Socialism than the mere cost of neglecting it. In Cuba our sanitary engineers have practically got rid of yellow fever, not only for that community, but for our own. Recent discoveries tracing malaria to the mosquito are leading to the destruction of this insect. Smallpox and cholera have practically been stamped out, and efforts are now being made to do the same with typhoid and tuberculosis. Now one feature characterizes all these efforts. They cannot be made by one man for himself; they have to be made by whole communities for whole communities and they will eventually have to be made by the whole world for the whole world. The same thing is true of vagrancy, pauperism, and crime. No individual or group of individuals can handle this problem; it must be handled by every community, and through the further extension of extradition treaties by all countries for the whole world. Again, reference has been often made in this book to the necessity under which governments, openly professing the policy of _laissez faire_, have found themselves to enact laws totally inconsistent with this doctrine. Such, laws ought to be sufficient evidence that the days of _laissez faire_ are gone forever; and that this theory, universally proclaimed a century ago as the only sound theory of government, has to-day given way before the recognition that no wealth can compensate a man for the misery of his neighbors; and that even if, abandoning all ideals and all ethics, we confine ourselves to the problem how to make men materially happy, we can only do so by adjusting our institutions so that no man will be allowed to become or to remain a pauper or criminal. I am not discussing here matters of theory, but matters of fact. Theoretically, the development of man might have taken a totally different direction. The master minds of the period (such as that, for example, of Mr. W.H. Mallock) might have so organized the able as to constitute an aristocracy strong enough to keep the rest of the community in a state of ignorant servitude, so that while Mr. Mallock was enjoying the necessary leisure to discuss the "New Republic" amid the luxury of his English country home, all the work of the world would be accomplished by human automata with no desires beyond that of the immediate gratification of their appetites. Unfortunately, however, Mr. Mallock has come too late upon the scene. Some years before he was born, the die was cast. Workingmen were given a voice in public affairs and have been educated, so that they constitute a power with which government has to reckon. Here is a fact against which it is useless for millionaires to break their heads. No one can ignore the power exercised by such men as Bebel in Germany, Jaurès and Guesde in France, Vandervelde in Belgium, Keir Hardie and MacDonald in England, Gompers and John Mitchell in America. These men are all engaged in organizing the workingmen's vote with extraordinary efficacy in Europe, and with extraordinary inefficacy in the United States. But the days of Gompers and Mitchell are drawing to a close, and in this country as well as in Europe, Organized Labor will grow to understand the inevitable truth that it is only by political action and with the Socialist program that it can defeat the power of capital. So that whether Mr. Mallock be right or not, the day of aristocracy is over and the day of solidarity has dawned. The question for us to decide is whether we should recognize this fact and modify our institutions to conform to the new era, or whether we should continue to ignore the fact until we break our heads against it. The point which Mr. Mallock and his school have failed to understand is that the very greed which creates aristocracy unfits the aristocrat for the coöperation indispensable to its survival. This condemns him, as it does all the highest types of carnivora, created by the competitive system to isolation. For it is out of the jealousy and struggles of the aristocrats with one another that the people are at last getting to their own. It was because the king, the noble, and the church could not agree in the division of spoils that their perpetual altercations left room for the organization of the Communes in France at the end of the eleventh century. It was because the church, the noble and the king would not give a fair share of the honors and spoils of the state to the wealthy bourgeoisie, that the bourgeois was obliged to associate himself with the people in 1789; it was because of the conflict between the Whigs and the Tories that the franchise was gradually extended to the workingmen in England; and it is because the Republicans can put no limit to their greed that workingmen in America will find themselves eventually compelled to organize politically their at present disunited multitudes. It is, therefore, extremely improbable that, even if Mr. Mallock had lived in an earlier age, he could have prevented the inevitable progress of the great principle of solidarity which has determined the direction of human development ever since it began to differ from that of other animals. If now we run through all the differences between the natural environment and the environment created by Man, we shall see that they practically all proceed upon the theory that men must develop no longer as individuals but as a unit. All our customs and laws proceed upon the theory of liberty and justice; and upon that theory is based the original principle of property that assures to all men the product of their toil. Now if all men are to be assured the product of their toil, there must be an end to the system which puts a few millionaires at one end of the social scale and millions of paupers at the other. Again, for centuries the so-called struggle for life has ceased to be a struggle for life, but has become a struggle for wealth, power, and consideration. It is no longer only the fit that survive; the unfit also survive; and if the unfit are to survive, we all have a common interest in taking the necessary steps to prevent the unfit from proving too heavy a burden upon the community. Again, all isolating vices such as lust, ferocity, craft, fear, and selfishness--vices which characterize the carnivora and condemn them to lives of isolation--are being tempered by the necessities of common life--by the fundamental fact of the solidarity of Man. Thus, lust is tempered and in part replaced by love and mercy; ferocity is tempered and in part replaced by courage and patience; fear is tempered and in part replaced by respect and reverence; selfishness is tempered and in part replaced by unselfishness. And all this advantage which humanity has attained over the lower animals is due to its ability to mould its own environment, and deliberately undertake the task of justice; namely, to "eliminate from our social conditions the effects of the inequalities of Nature upon the happiness and advancement of Man, and particularly to create an artificial environment which shall serve the individual as well as the race, and tend to perpetuate noble types rather than those which are base." It is true that so far our efforts to attain justice have lamentably failed; but they have failed mainly because we have not yet sufficiently limited the scope of competition. The day we limit competition as suggested in the chapter on the Economic Structure of Socialism,[228] that day we shall have removed the lion from our path. And as stated in the Preface, the development of Man will then proceed upon the theory that all are perfectible and that it is through the improvement of all that every individual will attain his best freedom, his best happiness, and the fullest opportunities for promoting the happiness of all around him. This is the ideal to attain which the environment described in the Chapter on the Economic Construction of the Coöperative Commonwealth has been conceived. It is the ideal which furnishes the most economical method of production and distribution and, therefore, the most leisure and liberty; that creates the environment fitted to perpetuate the noble rather than the base type; to promote virtue and discourage vice and, in a word, creates conditions under which we can practise the morality preached by every religion, whether it be that of Moses, of Mohammed, or of Christ. FOOTNOTES: [223] In a previous attempt to define justice, I have found it necessary to devote to this subject an entire volume, and I do not believe that the subject can be sufficiently discussed in less than such a volume. The definition with which I concluded that book has been adopted by Mr. Lester F. Ward in his book on Applied Sociology. I believe that all other definitions of justice are defective mainly because other definitions such as those of Herbert Spencer in his book entitled "Justice" confound justice with liberty. In other words, his definition of justice is a definition of liberty, whereas justice is more than liberty. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say that liberty is one of the elements of justice. [224] See "Government or Human Evolution," Vol. II, p. 181. [225] See "Principles of Sociology," pp. 414-415. [226] See "Justice," p. 127, by the author. [227] The Unnecessary Curse of Sickness, _World's Work_, July, 1909. [228] See Book III, Chapter II. APPENDIX I SOCIALIST PARTY NATIONAL PLATFORM ADOPTED AT THE NATIONAL CONVENTION ASSEMBLED AT CHICAGO, MAY, 1908 Human life depends upon food, clothing, and shelter. Only with these assured are freedom, culture and higher human development possible. To produce food, clothing and shelter, land and machinery are needed. Land alone does not satisfy human needs. Human labor creates machinery and applies it to the land for the production of raw materials and food. Whoever has the control of land and machinery controls human labor, and with it human life and liberty. To-day the machinery and land used for industrial purposes are owned by a rapidly decreasing minority. So long as machinery is simple and easily handled by one man, its owner cannot dominate the sources of life of others. But when machinery becomes more complex and expensive, and requires for its effective operation the organized effort of many workers, its influence reaches over wide circles of life. The owners of such machinery become the dominant class. POWER GOES WITH CONCENTRATION In proportion as the number of such machine owners, compared to all other classes, decreases, their power in the nation and in the world increases. They bring ever larger masses of working people under their control, reducing them to the point where muscle and brain are their only productive property. Millions of formerly self-employing workers thus become the helpless wage slaves of the industrial masters. As the economic power of the ruling class grows, it becomes less useful in the life of the nation. All the useful work of the nation falls upon the shoulders of the class whose only property is its manual and mental labor power--the wage workers--or of the class who have but little land and little effective machinery outside of their labor power--the small traders and small farmers. The ruling minority is steadily becoming useless and parasitic. STRUGGLE BETWEEN CLASSES A bitter struggle over the division of the products of labor is waged between the exploiting propertied classes on the one hand, and the exploited propertyless class on the other. In this struggle the wage-working class cannot expect adequate relief from any reform of the present order at the hands of the dominant class. The wage workers are, therefore, the most determined and irreconcilable antagonists of the ruling class. They suffer most from the curse of class rule. The fact that a few capitalists are permitted to control all the country's industrial resources and social tools for their individual profit, and to make the production of the necessaries of life the object of competitive private enterprise and speculation, is at the bottom of all the social evils of our time. ANARCHY OF CAPITALIST PRODUCTION In spite of the organization of trusts, pools and combinations, the capitalists are powerless to regulate production for social ends. Industries are largely conducted in a planless manner. Through periods of feverish activity the strength and health of the workers are mercilessly used up, and during periods of enforced idleness the workers are frequently reduced to starvation. The climaxes of this system of production are the regularly recurring industrial depressions and crises which paralyze the nation every fifteen or twenty years. The capitalist class, in its mad race for profits, is bound to exploit the workers to the very limit of their endurance and to sacrifice their physical, moral and mental welfare to its own insatiable greed. Capitalism keeps the masses of workingmen in poverty, destitution, physical exhaustion and ignorance. It drags their wives from their homes to the mill and factory. It snatches their children from the playgrounds and schools and grinds their slender bodies and unformed minds into cold dollars. It disfigures, maims, and kills hundreds of thousands of workingmen annually in mines, on railroads and in factories. It drives millions of workers into the ranks of the unemployed and forces large numbers of them into beggary, vagrancy and all forms of crime and vice. HOW THE RULING CLASS CONTROLS To maintain their rule over their fellow men, the capitalists must keep in their pay all organs of the public powers, public mind and public conscience. They control the dominant parties and, through them, the elected public officials. They select the executives, bribe the legislatures, and corrupt the courts of justice. They own and censor the press. They dominate the educational institutions. They own the nation politically and intellectually just as they own it industrially. SOCIALISM WILL FREE ALL CLASSES The struggle between wage workers and capitalists grows ever fiercer, and has now become the only vital issue before the American people. The wage-working class, therefore, has the most direct interest in abolishing the capitalist system. But in abolishing the present system the workingmen will free not only their own class, but also all other classes of modern society: the small farmer who is to-day exploited by large capital more indirectly but not less effectively than is the wage laborer; the small manufacturer and trader, who is engaged in a desperate and losing struggle for economic independence in the face of the all-conquering power of concentrated capital; and even the capitalist himself, who is the slave of his wealth rather than its master. The struggle of the working class against the capitalist class, while it is a class struggle, is thus at the same time a struggle for the abolition of all classes and class privileges. PRIVATE OWNERSHIP THE BASIS OF CLASS RULE The private ownership of the land and means of production used for exploitation is the rock upon which class rule is built; political government is its indispensable instrument. The wage workers cannot be freed from exploitation without conquering the political power and substituting collective for private ownership of the land and means of production used for exploitation. The basis for such transformation is rapidly developing within present capitalist society. The factory system, with its complex machinery and minute division of labor, is rapidly destroying all vestiges of individual production in manufacture. Modern production is already very largely a collective and social process. The great trusts and monopolies which have sprung up in recent years have organized the work and management of the principal industries on a national scale, and have fitted them for collective use and operation. The Socialist Party is primarily an economic and political movement. It is not concerned with matters of religious belief. FREEDOM THROUGH SOLIDARITY In the struggle for freedom the interests of all modern workers are identical. The struggle is not only national, but international. It embraces the world and will be carried to ultimate victory by the united workers of the world. To unite the workers of the nation and their allies and sympathizers of all other classes to this end, is the mission of the Socialist Party. In this battle for freedom the Socialist Party does not strive to substitute working-class rule for capitalist-class rule, but by working-class victory to free all humanity from class rule and to realize the international brotherhood of man. THE SOCIALIST PLATFORM The Socialist Party, in national convention assembled, again declares itself as the party of the working class, and appeals for the support of all workers of the United States and of all citizens who sympathize with the great and just cause of labor. We are at this moment in the midst of one of those industrial breakdowns that periodically paralyze the life of the nation. The much-boasted era of our national prosperity has been followed by one of general misery. Factories, mills and mines are closed. Millions of men, ready, willing and able to provide the nation with all the necessaries and comforts of life are forced into idleness and starvation. Within recent times the trusts and monopolies have attained an enormous and menacing development. They have acquired the power to dictate the terms upon which we shall be allowed to live. The trusts fix the prices of our bread, meat and sugar, of our coal, oil and clothing, of our raw material and machinery, of all the necessities of life. CAPITALISM TAKES THE OFFENSIVE The present desperate condition of the workers has been made the opportunity for a renewed onslaught on organized labor. The highest courts of the country have within the last year rendered decision after decision depriving the workers of rights which they had won by generations of struggle. The attempt to destroy the Western Federation of Miners, although defeated by the solidarity of organized labor and the Socialist movement, revealed the existence of a far-reaching and unscrupulous conspiracy by the ruling class against the organizations of labor. In their efforts to take the lives of the leaders of the miners the conspirators violated State laws and the federal constitution in a manner seldom equalled even in a country so completely dominated by the profit-seeking class as is the United States. CAPITALIST REFORM FUTILE The Congress of the United States has shown its contempt for the interests of labor as plainly and unmistakably as have the other branches of government. The laws for which the labor organizations have continually petitioned have failed to pass. Laws ostensibly enacted for the benefit of labor have been distorted against labor. The working class of the United States cannot expect any remedy for its wrongs from the present ruling class or from the dominant parties. So long as a small number of individuals are permitted to control the sources of the nation's wealth for their private profit in competition with each other and for the exploitation of their fellow men, industrial depressions are bound to occur at certain intervals. No currency reforms or other legislative measures proposed by capitalist reformers can avail against these fatal results of utter anarchy in production. Individual competition leads inevitably to combinations and trusts. No amount of government regulation, or of publicity, or of restrictive legislation will arrest the natural course of modern industrial development. While our courts, legislatures and executive offices remain in the hands of the ruling classes and their agents, the government will be used in the interest of these classes as against the toilers. OLD PARTIES REPRESENT CLASS RULE Political parties are but the expression of economic class interests. The Republican, the Democratic, and the so-called 'Independence' parties and all parties other than the Socialist Party, are financed, directed and controlled by the representatives of different groups of the ruling class. In the maintenance of class government both the Democratic and Republican parties have been equally guilty. The Republican party has had control of the national government and has been directly and actively responsible for these wrongs. The Democratic party, while saved from direct responsibility by its political impotence, has shown itself equally subservient to the aims of the capitalist class whenever and wherever it has been in power. The old chattel-slave-owning aristocracy of the South, which was the backbone of the Democratic party, has been supplanted by a child-slave plutocracy. In the great cities of our country the Democratic party is allied with the criminal element of the slums as the Republican party is allied with the predatory criminals of the palace in maintaining the interests of the possessing class. TEMPORARY MEASURES DEMANDED The various "reform" movements and parties which have sprung up within recent years are but the clumsy expression of widespread popular discontent. They are not based on an intelligent understanding of the historical development of civilization and of the economic and political needs of our time. They are bound to perish, as the numerous middle-class reform movements of the past have perished. As measures calculated to strengthen the working class in its fight for the realization of this ultimate aim, and to increase its power of resistance against capitalist oppression, we advocate and pledge ourselves and our elected officers to the following program: GENERAL DEMANDS 1. The immediate government relief for the unemployed workers, by building schools, by reforesting of cut-over and waste lands, by reclamation of arid tracts, and the building of canals, and by extending all other useful public works. All persons employed on such works shall be employed directly by the government under an eight-hour workday and at the prevailing union wages. The government shall also loan money to States and municipalities without interest for the purpose of carrying on public works. It shall contribute to the funds of labor organizations for the purpose of assisting their unemployed members, and shall take such other measures within its power as will lessen the widespread misery of the workers caused by the misrule of the capitalist class. 2. The collective ownership of railroads, telegraphs, telephones, steamship lines and all other means of social transportation and communication and all land.[229] 3. The collective ownership of all industries which are organized on a national scale and in which competition has virtually ceased to exist. 4. The extension of the public domain to include mines, quarries, oil wells, forests and water power. 5. That occupancy and use of land be the sole title to possession. The scientific reforestation of timber lands and the reclamation of swamp lands. The land so reforested or reclaimed to be permanently retained as a part of the public domain. 6. The absolute freedom of press, speech and assemblage. INDUSTRIAL DEMANDS 7. The improvement of the industrial conditions of the workers: (_a_) By shortening the workday in keeping with the increased productiveness of machinery. (_b_) By securing to every worker a rest period of not less than a day and a half in each week. (_c_) By securing a more effective inspection of workshops and factories. (_d_) By forbidding the employment of children under sixteen years of age. (_e_) By forbidding the interstate transportation of the products of child labor, of convict labor and of all uninspected factories. (_f_) By abolishing official charity and substituting in its place compulsory insurance against unemployment, illness, accidents, invalidism, old age, and death. POLITICAL DEMANDS 8. The extension of inheritance taxes, graduated in proportion to the amount of the bequests and to nearness of kin. 9. A graduated income tax. 10. Unrestricted and equal suffrage for men and women, and we pledge ourselves to engage in an active campaign in that direction. 11. The initiative and referendum, proportional representation and the right of recall. 12. The abolition of the Senate. 13. The abolition of the power usurped by the Supreme Court of the United States to pass upon the constitutionality of legislation enacted by Congress. National laws to be repealed or abrogated only by act of Congress or by a referendum of the whole people. 14. That the constitution be made amendable by majority vote. 15. The enactment of further measures for general education and for the conservation of health. The Bureau of Education to be made a department. The creation of a Department of Public Health. 16. The separation of the present Bureau of Labor from the Department of Commerce and Labor, and the establishment of a Department of Labor. 17. That all judges be elected by the people for short terms, and that the power to issue injunctions shall be curbed by immediate legislation. 18. The free administration of justice. Such measures of relief as we may be able to force from capitalism are but a preparation of the workers to seize the whole powers of government, in order that they may thereby lay hold of the whole system of industry, and thus come to their rightful inheritance. FOOTNOTES: [229] By a referendum vote of the entire membership of the Socialist party in 1909 these three words, "and all land," were stricken out of the Socialist platform. II DR. L. EMMETT HOLT All who practice medicine among children and who study the question of infant mortality statistically are struck with the marked contrast between the death rate of the children of the poor and those of the rich. Clay estimates that in England in the aristocratic families the mortality of the first year is 10 per cent; in the middle class, 21 per cent; in the laboring classes, 32 per cent. This difference in the infant mortality of the various classes is most striking in the case of acute intestinal disease. Halle states that of 170 deaths from this cause investigated in Graz in 1903 and 1904 there were 161 among the poor, 9 among the well-to-do, and none among the rich. It may not be true in adult life, but _in infancy money may purchase not only health, it may purchase life_, since it puts at the disposal of the infant the utmost resources of science, the best advice, the best food and the best surroundings for the individual child. To relieve, or even greatly to diminish, infant mortality these basal conditions of modern city life--poverty and ignorance--must be attacked. _Journal American Medical Association_, Feb. 26, 1910. III EXTRACTS FROM EDICT OF LOUIS XVI, 1776, ABOLISHING THE GUILDS[230] Louis, etc. We owe it to our subjects to assure them the full and complete enjoyment of their rights; we owe that protection especially to that class of men who, possessing nothing but their labor and industry, above all others have the need and right of employing to the limit of their capacity their sole resources for subsistence. We have viewed with pain the multiplied blows which have been struck at this natural and common right of ancient institutions, blows which neither time, nor opinion, nor even the acts emanating from the authority, which seems to have sanctioned them, have been able to make legitimate. [After describing the vicious effects of the guild monopoly, it continues:] ... Some persons ... contend that the right of labor is a royal right, one that the Prince could sell and that the subjects ought to purchase. We hasten to place beside this another maxim: God, by giving to men needs and making them dependent upon the resources of labor, has made the right of labor the property of all men, and that property is primary, the most sacred and most imprescriptable of all. We regard it as one of the first obligations of our justice, and as an act in every way worthy of our beneficence, to emancipate our subjects from all their restraints which have been laid upon that inalienable right of humanity. Wherefore, we will to abolish the arbitrary institutions which do not permit the indigent to live by their labor; which exclude the sex whose weakness implies greatest needs and fewest resources ... which stifle emulation and industry and make useless the talents of those whom circumstances exclude from admission into the guild; which deprive the state and art of all the advantages which foreigners might furnish.... FOOTNOTES: [230] Translation taken from "Turgot and the Six Edicts," by R.P. Shepherd, 1903, pp. 182, 186-7. IV POLICE COMMISSIONER BINGHAM Declaring that "law-breaking is the easiest and the most lucrative business in New York for the work involved," Police Commissioner Bingham yesterday forwarded his annual report to Mayor McClellan. After stating that law-breaking in the city is an easy and lucrative business, the Commissioner continued: "Its profits for slight effort are enormous and law-breaking has been able to intrench itself behind such a rampart of legislation and highly paid lawyers that the forces of law and order are placed in the astonishing position of being actually on the defensive against the law-breakers. Law-breakers and their highly paid lawyers frequently fool even the courts into giving them protection against the police on the grounds of illegal interference, or oppression. "The howl of innocence is never so loud as when raised by crooks, and this includes not only the actual criminals, but their friends and protectors, crooked politicians. How otherwise is it possible for prizefights to be held in New York city, in spite of the earnest efforts of the police to prevent them? How otherwise is it possible for places positively known by the police to be gambling resorts to be conducted, and to obtain injunctions restraining the police from interfering with them? "The foregoing is far from saying that the police force of New York is incompetent, or not able to cope with the situation. The police force is competent, short-handed though it is. Its activity and efficiency are proved by the very resistance given it by law-breakers, for the better the work done by the police, the more stubborn is the resistance they meet with from law-breakers." As an example of what the police have to cope with the Commissioner mentions the recent Sunday-closing incident, where a court decision was handed down, and enforced, and the Aldermen straightway amended the law. He then asks: "How then can the police execute the law, when there seems to be so much doubt as to what the law really is?" Gen. Bingham continues: "These points are necessary in order that scheming politicians may be deprived of any possibility of summarily getting rid of an honest commissioner and in order that the honest men of the police force may be encouraged. The men of the force to-day are not quite sure who is their real boss--the 'machine' or the police commissioner. If once satisfied that it is the commissioner, with a long term and only removable on publication of charges, they will obey him." Legislation requiring persons who sell any sort of dangerous weapons to record the date and hour of the sale, and report it, with the name and address of the buyer, to the police, is suggested, as well as a daily report from pawnbrokers, giving the date, hour, and other particulars of their transactions. This, the Commissioner says, is the custom in other large cities. The following figures of arrests, etc., in the last year are given in the report: ARRESTS MADE By uniformed force 192,680 Detective Bureau 11,416 ------- Total 204,096 These figures refer to the Boroughs of Manhattan, The Bronx, and Richmond. N.Y. _Times_, Jan. 5, 1908. V PETTIBONE v. NICHOLS _Dissenting opinion_ of Mr. Justice MCKENNA: I am constrained to dissent from the opinion and judgment of the court. The principle announced, as I understand it, is that "a Circuit Court of the United States, when asked upon _habeas corpus_ to discharge a person held in actual custody by a State for trial in one of its courts under an indictment charging a crime against its laws, cannot properly take into account the methods whereby the State obtained such custody." In other words, and to illuminate the principle by the light of the facts in this case (facts, I mean, as alleged, and which we must assume to be true for the purpose of our discussion), that the officers of one State may falsely represent that a person was personally present in the State and committed a crime there, and had fled from its justice, may arrest such person and take him from another State, the officers of the latter knowing of false accusation and conniving in and aiding its purpose, thereby depriving him of an opportunity to appeal to the courts, and that such person cannot invoke the rights guaranteed to him by the Constitution and statutes of the United States in the State to which he is taken. And this, it is said, is supported by the cases of _Ker_ v. _Illinois_, 119 U.S. 436, and _Mahon_ v. _Justice_, 127 U.S. 700. These cases, extreme as they are, do not justify, in my judgment, the conclusion deduced from them. In neither case was the State the actor in the wrongs that brought within its confines the accused person. In the case at bar, the States, through their officers, are the offenders. They, by an illegal exertion of power, deprived the accused of a constitutional right. The distinction is important to be observed. It finds expression in _Mahon_ v. _Justice_. But it does not need emphasizing. Kidnapping is a crime, pure and simple. It is difficult to accomplish; hazardous at every step. All of the officers of the law are supposed to be on guard against it. All of the officers of the law may be invoked against it. But how is it when the law becomes the kidnapper, when the officers of the law, using its forms and exerting its power, become abductors? This is not a distinction without a difference--another form of the crime of kidnapping, distinguished only from that committed by an individual by circumstances. If a State may say to one within her borders and upon whom her process is served, I will not inquire how you came here; I must execute my laws and remit you to proceedings against those who have wronged you, may she so plead against her own offences? May she claim that by mere physical presence within her borders, an accused person is within her jurisdiction denuded of his constitutional rights, though he has been brought there by her violence? And constitutional rights the accused in this case certainly did have, and valuable ones. The foundation of extradition between the States is that the accused should be a fugitive from justice from the demanding State, and he may challenge the fact by _habeas corpus_ immediately upon his arrest. If he refute the fact he cannot be removed. _Hyatt_ v. _Corkran_, 188 U.S. 691. And the right to resist removal is not a right of asylum. To call it so in the State where the accused is is misleading. It is the right to be free from molestation. It is the right of personal liberty in its most complete sense. And this right was vindicated in _Hyatt_ v. _Corkran_, and the fiction of a constructive presence in a State and a constructive flight from a constructive presence rejected. This decision illustrates at once the value of the right and the value of the means to enforce the right. It is to be hoped that our criminal jurisprudence will not need for its efficient administration the destruction of either the right or the means to enforce it. The decision in the case at bar, as I view it, brings us perilously near both results. Is this exaggeration? What are the facts in the case at bar as alleged in the petition, and which it is conceded must be assumed to be true? The complaint, which was the foundation of the extradition proceedings, charged against the accused the crime of murder on the thirtieth of December, 1905, at Caldwell, in the county of Canyon, State of Idaho, by killing one Frank Steunenberg, by throwing an explosive bomb at and against his person. The accused avers in his petition that he had not been "in the State of Idaho, in any way, shape or form, for a period of more than ten years" prior to the acts of which he complained, and that the Governor of Idaho knew accused had not been in the State the day the murder was committed, "nor at any time near that day." A conspiracy is alleged between the Governor of the State of Idaho and his advisers, and that the Governor of the State of Colorado took part in the conspiracy, the purpose of which was "to avoid the Constitution of the United States and the act of Congress made in pursuance thereof, and to prevent the accused from asserting his constitutional right under cl. 2, sec. 2, of art. IV, of the Constitution of the United States and the act made pursuant thereof." The manner in which the alleged conspiracy had been executed was set out in detail. It was in effect that the agent of the State of Idaho arrived in Denver, Thursday, February 15, 1906, but it was agreed between him and the officers of Colorado that the arrest of the accused should not be made until some time in the night of Saturday, after business hours--after the courts had closed and judges and lawyers had departed to their homes; that the arrest should be kept a secret and the body of the accused should be clandestinely hurried out of the State of Colorado with all possible speed, without the knowledge of his friends or his counsel; that he was at the usual place of business during Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, but no attempt was made to arrest him until 11.30 o'clock P.M. Saturday, when his house was surrounded and he was arrested. Moyer was arrested under the same circumstances at 8.45, and he and accused "thrown into the county jail of the city and county of Denver." It is further alleged that, in pursuance of the conspiracy, between the hours of five and six o'clock on Sunday morning, February 18, the officers of the State and "certain armed guards, being a part of the forces of the militia of the State of Colorado," provided a special train for the purpose of forcibly removing him from the State of Colorado, and between said hours he was forcibly placed on said train and removed with all possible speed to the State of Idaho; that prior to his removal and at all times after his incarceration in the jail at Denver he requested to be allowed to communicate with his friends and his counsel and his family, and the privilege was absolutely denied him. The train, it is alleged, made no stop at any considerable station, but proceeded at great and unusual speed; and that he was accompanied by and surrounded with armed guards, members of the State militia of Colorado, under the orders and directions of the adjutant general of the State. I submit that the facts in this case are different in kind and transcend in consequences those in the cases of _Ker_ v. _Illinois_ and _Mahon_ v. _Justice_, and differ from and transcend them as the power of a State transcends the power of an individual. No individual or individuals could have accomplished what the the power of the two States accomplished; no individual or individuals could have commanded the means and success; could have made two arrests of prominent citizens by invading their homes; could have commanded the resources of jails, armed guards and special trains; could have successfully timed all acts to prevent inquiry and judicial interference. The accused, as soon as he could have done so, submitted his rights to the consideration of the courts. He could not have done so in Colorado, he could not have done so on the way from Colorado. At the first instant that the State of Idaho relaxed its restraining power he invoked the aid of _habeas corpus_ successively of the Supreme Court of the State and of the Circuit Court of the United States. He should not have been dismissed from the court, and the action of the Circuit Court in so doing should be reversed. VI EUGENE v. DEBS "Yes," said Debs. "The trusts are wiping out the competitive system. They are a stage in the process of evolution: the individual; the firm; the corporation; the trust; and so, finally, the commonwealth. By killing competition and training men to work together, trusts are preparing for the coöperative stage of industry: Socialism." "Then you would keep the trusts we have and welcome others?" I asked. "Of course," he answered, and Berger nodded approval. "They do harm now," I suggested. "Yes," said Debs, but Berger boomed: "No; not the trusts. Private owners of the trusts do harm, yes; but not the trusts." "Well, but how would you deal with the harm?" "Remove 'em," snapped Berger, and Debs explained: "We would have the government take the trusts and remove the men who own or control them: the Morgans and Rockefellers, who exploit; and the stockholders who draw unearned dividends from them." "Would you pay for or just take them?" Berger seemed to have anticipated this question. He was on his feet, and he uttered a warning for Debs--in vain. "Take them," Debs answered. "No," cried Berger, and, running around to Debs, he stood menacingly over him. "No, you wouldn't," he declared. "Not if I was there. And you shall not say it for the party. It is my party as much as it is your party, and I answer that we would offer to pay." It was a tense but an illuminating moment. The difference is typical and temperamental; and not only as between these two opposite individualities, but among Socialists generally. Debs, the revolutionist, argued gently that, since the system under which private monopolies had grown up was unjust, there should be no compromise with it. Berger, the evolutionist, replied angrily that it was not alone a matter of justice, but of "tactic"; and that tactics were settled by authority of the party. "We (Socialists) are the inheritors of a civilization," he proclaimed, "and all that is good in it--art, music, institutions, buildings, public works, character, the sense of right and wrong--not one of these shall be lost. And violence, like that, would lose us much." Berger cited the Civil War: "All men can see now that it was coming years before 1861. Some tried to avert it then by proposing to pay for the slaves. The fanatics on both sides refused. We all know the result: slavery was abolished. But how? Instead of a peaceful evolution and an outlay of, say, a billion, it was abolished by a war which cost us nearly ten billion dollars and a million lives. We ought to learn from history, so I say we will offer compensation; because it seems just to present-day thought and will prove the easiest, cheapest way in the end. And anyhow," he concluded, "and besites, the party, it has decited that we shall offer to pay." From the article by Mr. Steffens, _Eugene V. Debs_, in _Everybody's Magazine_, Oct., 1908. VII TRAMPS AND VAGRANTS Tramps, professional and amateur, and trespassers of both sexes and all ages, are simply swarming over the railroads east of the Mississippi River, forming a very serious problem for both railroads and State Governments, according to reports which O.F. Lewis has received from most of the great roads of the East, and recently published in _Charities_ and _The Commons_. Mr. Lewis finds from these reports that the railroad tramp and trespasser evil is on the increase, with roads and States through which they pass unable to check it, and one road, the New York Central, declares that half of the loss and damage claims currently paid by railroads may be ascribed to robberies committed by tramps and trespassers. Much of this increase in trampdom is ascribed to the effects of the panic and the hard times, which threw thousands of men out of employment. "Most of the railroads," says Mr. Lewis, in summing up the replies received to the questions he sent out, "report a very noticeable increase in vagrancy on their lines. The Central Vermont says 75 per cent, the Chicago & Eastern Illinois 50 per cent, the Great Northern 200 per cent. Great increases are reported by the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western, the New York Central, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia & Reading, and many others. The Northern Pacific reports more vagrants travelling than ever before. "A decrease is reported on the Central of New Jersey, the Cumberland Valley, Chicago, Indiana & Southern, and on the Missouri Pacific. Emphasizing the increase on the Pennsylvania, President McCrea states that four times as many arrests were made for illegal train riding in June, 1908, as in June, 1907. "Stealing foodstuffs, stealing rides, stealing handcars, threatening and injuring trainmen, placing obstructions on tracks, stoning freight crews, setting air brakes, and robbing ticket offices, are typical offences." As bearing on the question of, literally, "Who pays the freight?" the following is from the New York Central's report: "We are required by law to charge all of the costs arising out of the operation of the railroad to operating expenses, which constitute the loss of the services rendered. Among these expenses are loss and damage due to the effects of trespassing and the acts of trespassers. Inasmuch as the definition of a reasonable rate has been stated to include the cost of the service and a reasonable return upon the value of the property employed, it inevitably follows that our charge to the public includes these elements of cost. It may, therefore, be said that in the end the public pays, but we would prefer to eliminate this source of cost as far as practicable." Many railroads ascribe the increased number of vagrants to "hard times," resulting in the reduction in the number of men employed throughout the country. The report is frequent that more "honest out-of-works" are stealing rides and trespassing. President McCrea reports that "not many of the illegal train riders are vagrants, but men out of employment." The Southern Pacific reports that "the type of trespasser is as a whole better." With striking frequency the railroads report the majority of illegal train riders to be young men and boys. The ages "18 to 25" are often mentioned. The Central Railroad of New Jersey says they can be considered as the coming generation of tramps. Answering the question, "Do you believe in a State constabulary to coöperate with the railway police in prosecuting vagrants?" twenty-three railroads replied "yes," five replied "no," and sixteen either had not considered the matter thoroughly or made no reply. The State constabulary is favored mainly by trunk lines that are troubled by vagrants. N.Y. _Times_, Feb. 14, 1909. VIII PUBLIC STORE NOTES The last report of the Director of the Mint (as quoted in _Statistical Abstract of the United States_, 1908, p. 714) gives the stock of gold in the United States as nearly $1,600,000,000 and amount of silver as almost $700,000,000--in all, $2,300,000,000. Of course, all this coin will never be at the disposal of the State; some of it will remain as now in private hands. But all the coin now held by the Government as reserves to secure greenbacks issued will be gradually released by the substitution of store notes for greenbacks. This substitution cannot be honestly effected except in proportion to the amount of produce which goes into the public stores. There are at the present moment a little over $1,000,000,000 of greenbacks issued by the United States Government redeemable in coin. If in any given year the produce acquired by the state amounts to--say, $100,000,000, the state can withdraw greenbacks to the amount of $100,000,000 and substitute therefor public store notes for $100,000,000, and so on, until there have been substituted public store notes for all the greenbacks in circulation. As regards the remaining $1,300,000,000, some of this, of course, will remain in private hands; and if it were the policy of the government to increase its supply of gold for the purchase of foreign goods, it could levy taxes paid by those engaged in private industry in gold instead of in produce. If, on the other hand, the private banking system operated satisfactorily, the state could leave the whole of $1,300,000,000 in the hands of private bankers and through its ownership of mines, would still have the whole gold and silver production in the United States for the purchase of foreign goods. As the amount of gold and silver produced in the United States amounted in 1907 to over $90,000,000 of gold and over $37,000,000 of silver, it will be seen that the state would have at its disposal some $127,000,000 in gold and silver which it could use in the purchase of foreign goods against which it could issue public store notes. In other words, gold and silver will be confined to the amount used in the competitive system and that required for the settlement of foreign exchanges. INDEX A Accidents, 165, 166, 326, 420 adulteration, 66, 88-93 advertising, cost of, 5, 95, 207-208, 233 Africa, 121, 309, 391 Agriculture, 29, 218 Year Book of the Department of, 230 Albany, 261, 265 alcoholism, 272 America, 16, 137, 140 business men in, 58 land in, 123 municipal ownership in, 20 prosperity of, 24 Republic of, 138 Socialism in, 149 sweating in, 156 trade unionism in, 149 workingman in, 409 American-- ---- cities, 286 ---- export of wheat, 55 ---- Farmer, 48 ---- Federation of Labor, 171 ---- Medical Association, 421 ---- nationality, 118, 284 ---- Smelting and Refining Company, 87, 170 ---- Socialist press, 40 ---- Steel District, 164 ---- Steel and Wire Company, 62 ---- Sugar Refining Company, 106 ---- view of Socialism, 1 ---- workingmen's families, 229 Anarchism, 7, 31, 33-34, 43, 51, 127, 174 anarchists, 21, 31-34 Communistic, 33 anarchy, 108, 110, 300 ---- of distribution, 99, 102-110 ---- of production, 102-110, 414-415 ---- of the Middle Ages, 107 apprenticeship, 150 ---- rules, 151 Archbold, 99 art, 31, 45, 128, 328, 429 adulteration an, 88, 93 Asia, 105 Astor, John Jacob, 117 William Waldorf, 118, 123 B Babbage, Economy of Manufacture, 219 Bankers, Institute of, 193 Barrel, Dictionnaire d'Agriculture, 268 Bebel, August, 408 Belgian view of Socialism, 1 Belgium, 392 coöperative stores in, 200 farm colonies in, 78 universal franchise in, 242 Bell, Alexander Graham, 221 Bellamy, Edward, 405 Berger, Victor, 255-256 Berger, Victor, views on compensation, 428-429 Berne, Canton of, 263 Beveridge, W.H., 66, 71-73, 75-76, 78 Bingham, Theodore, Police Commissioner of New York city, 158, 423, 424 Birmingham, 285 ---- converted its slum into Corporation Street, 283 municipal ownership of gas in, 20 Bismarck, 241 Björkman, Edwin, 406-407 Boer War, 309 Booth, Charles, 356 Boston, Chamber of Commerce of, 60, 218 ---- Milk Contractors' Association, 288 bourgeois, 4, 11, 23, 25-26, 29, 32, 37, 39, 44, 46, 58, 66, 111 ---- needs concrete statement, 4 characterization of, 11 ---- controls schools, colleges, and press, 24, 42-43, 68 Bradley, Edson, 206 British-- ---- Empire, 63 ---- employers, 148 ---- government, 171 ---- opium war in China, 63 ---- Parliament, 142 ---- trade unionists, 148 Brookmire, James H., 182, 191 Bryan, Wm. J., 6, 42, 57, 132 Bureau of Labor, 5, 227-228, 230, 293, 421 business men slaves of their own creations, 49 C California, 280 Canal, 419 Canal, Panama, 220 Suez, 220 Cannon, Joseph, 309 capital, 58-61, 102-105, 109, 132, 144, 165, 167, 172, 226, 409 ---- by Karl Marx, 1, 34 fluidity of, 64-65, 103 waste of, 99 capitalist, 4, 10-11, 33, 36, 60, 102, 107, 109, 200, 219, 308, 414-415 ---- class, 418 ---- society, 414 Carlyle, Thomas, 388, 402 Carnegie, Andrew, 148, 199, 201, 325 Problems of the Day, by, 199 Carnegie Steel Company, 168 Carter, James C., 7 Census (U.S.), 41, 48, 73, 77, 204 Central Railroad of Vermont, 430 ---- of New Jersey, 430 Chamber of Commerce (Boston), 60, 218 Chapin, Robert Coit, 229 Charities, 164, 229 ---- and the Commons, 266, 429 Commissioner of, 266 charity, 72, 77, 78, 420 Chicago, 209-210, 413, 430 children, 34-35, 65, 68 109, 117, 120, 143, 154, 321, 325, 328, 415, 421 death rate of, 38 exploitation of, 42 employment of, 42, 154, 157-158, 420 property in, 133 China, 63 Chinese, 64, 354 cholera, 18, 19, 143 Christian Socialism, 12 Christian Socialist, 40, 207 churches, 328-330 circulating medium, 307-313 citizens, 25, 42, 218, 320, 327 citizens' union, 322-324 City Club, 90, 323 civil war, 168, 175, 429 civilization, 31, 85, 88, 113, 119, 126, 134, 138, 140-141 property the basis of every conceivable, 43 unemployment a peculiar product of our, 68 Clare, George, 193 class, 118, 144, 152, 416, 422 bourgeois, 24, 26, 137 capitalist, 143 criminal, 322 ---- consciousness, 16 dominant, 412 exploited, 26 ---- interest, 29, 418 laboring, 33, 109 propertied, 24, 68, 120, 122, 414 ---- rule, 45, 416 ruling, 414-418 ---- struggle, 25, 414 wage-earning, 147, 415 Clearing House, 177 ---- Association, 183 coal, 417 ---- trust, 164, 238 Collectivism and Revolution, 1 colleges, controlled by propertied class, 68 colony, farm, 263-277, 380 agricultural, 273 penal, 274, 276 Colorado, 426-427 ---- Midland railroad, 210 ---- miners' strike, 168 ---- State Board of Health, 90 Columbia University, 92 combination, 96, 99, 104, 143, 149-150, 160, 163-164, 319, 414, 419 commerce, 329 ---- chamber of, 60, 218 Commerce and Labor, U.S. Department of, 421 Commercial Travelers' National League, 208 ---- crises, 178, 414 Commonwealth, 5, 10, 30-31, 36, 80, 137, 143, 145, 252, 256, 300, 305, 317, 325-329, 426 Communism, 33, 36, 51, 302 ---- of Apostolic times, 34 Socialism is not, 7 Communist, 7, 302 Sir Thomas More a, 33 community, 25, 29, 116, 123, 131, 144, 147, 218, 319, 323, 326, 329, 410 compensation, 19-20, 29, 123, 251-253, 255-256, 285, 429 competition, 7, 9, 18-19, 34-38, 51, 58, 61, 63, 71, 94, 99-103, 106-107, 151-152, 155, 157, 158, 262, 409, 419 foreign, 149 ---- primary cause of unemployment, 66-67 competitive system, 8, 37-39, 51, 53, 56-57, 60-66, 72-74, 79, 82, 86, 88, 99, 101-102, 105, 110, 134, 140-142, 144-147, 153, 160, 323, 426, 432 Comptroller of the City of New York, 190 compulsory education, 3, 120 Conant, Charles A., 177, 179 conflict, 115, 121, 140, 144 ---- between capital and labor, 5, 86 ---- between economics and religion, 389 ---- between races, 115 ---- between science and religion, 378-395 ---- between tribes, 133 conflict between trusts and trade unions, 176 international, 354 congested districts, 19, 42, 283 Congress (U.S.) 168, 197, 308-309, 318, 329-332, 417, 420, 426 Constitution, 329, 365, 417, 421 federal, 15 ---- of the United States, 365, 425-426 State, 15 Constructive Program of Socialism, 7 consumer, 92-93, 96-97, 105-107 Consumers' parliament, 330 contract, freedom of, 94, 107, 109-110, 144 coöperation, 9, 34-35, 50-51, 54, 58, 94, 102, 104, 108, 199-201, 409 coöperative system, 39, 51, 128, 342-347 ---- stores in Belgium, 200 corporations, 72, 320-321, 323-324, 426 Cortelyou, George, 187-189 cost, 62, 87, 155 ---- of advertising, 5, 95 ---- of crime, 5 ---- of crude oil, 63 ---- of distribution, 5 ---- of getting the market, 99 ---- of letter distribution, 96 ---- of living, 156, 228-229 ---- of revolutions, 30 cotton, 55, 92, 155 ---- industries of Lancashire, 153 proposal to burn, 60 ---- weavers of India, 218 country, 29, 35, 43, 65, 77, 112, 118, 120, 121, 131-132, 156, 330, 417 County Council (London), 320 courts, 15, 92, 110, 119, 155, 415-428 credit, 178 crime, 9, 22, 26, 35, 39, 42, 44, 52, 63, 66, 83, 99, 128, 130, 158, 415, 424-426 crises, 178, 414 cross freights, 96, 99-100 Cuba, 407 Cumberland, 430 custom, 13, 112, 113, 366 cyclical fluctuations, 67, 73 D Dairy and Food Commission of Ohio, 90 ---- products, 275 Damien, Father, 39 Darwin, Charles, 8, 85 Dearles, N.B., 72 death, 37-38, 99, 136, 212, 421 Debs, Eugene V., 255, 428-429 Declaration of Independence, 137 defectives and delinquents, 5 degeneracy, 36 Delaware, 430 democracy, 28, 129, 143, 158, 175 Denver, 210, 426-427 depression, 66, 76, 87, 414 industrial, 73, 153, 418 Detrich, J., 281 disease, 39, 54, 58, 69-70, 99 distribution, 23, 28-29, 36-37, 54-55, 59, 66, 87, 93-94, 97 anarchy of, 99, 102 cost of, 5, 10, 288, 318, 411 divorce, 40, 81 Dowe, President Commercial Travelers' League, 95 drunkenness, 70, 79, 99 Dutch farm colonies, 271 E economic conditions, 23-30, 64, 322, 329 points of view created by, 22 economic interpretation of history, 10 ---- liberty, 51-52 ---- socialism, 1, 13, 14 ---- tyranny, 138 Economists, 61, 66, 73, 103, 403 orthodox, 68 economy, 48, 50 ---- of Manufacture, 219 ---- of Socialism, 5 education, 144, 154, 158, 325-328 Board of, 321 ---- of workingmen, 48, 144 U.S. Department of, 27, 421 Elimination of the Tramp, 264, 271-272 Eliot, Charles W., 109 Ely, Richard T., 42, 60, 209, 210, 217, 225 employers-- loss to, from strikes, 86 Employers' Association in Colorado, 168 Encyclopedia Americana, 88, 148 ---- Britannica, 93 Engels, Friedrich, 1, 387 engineer's lockout, 148-149 England, 40, 63, 78, 132, 147-148, 176, 193, 210, 220, 236-237, 264, 309, 409, 421 Labor party in, 171 municipal ownership in, 20 Public House Trust in, 295 English-- manufacturers, 63 ministry, 154 ---- Poor Law Guardians, 273 ---- Socialism of To-day, 155 ---- unions, 171 Ensor, R.C.K., Modern Socialism, 387 Ethical argument for Socialism, 12, 13, 29 ---- Aspect of Socialism, 378-410 Ethical standards, 81 Europe, 76, 105, 132, 135-136, 166, 173, 181, 188, 196, 210, 223, 263, 289, 309, 408-409 Evolution, 3, 5 ---- and Effort, 267 ---- and Ethics, 336, 379-385 Socialist, 22 evolutionist, 23-24, 27-30, 429 exploitation, 4, 35, 45, 416 ---- of women and children, 32 export of wheat, 55 ---- of oil, 63, 104 F Fabian Tracts, 2 factory, 29, 32, 48, 80, 103-104, 123-124, 132, 138, 156, 220, 327, 415-417 ---- hand 16, 25, 47, 50, 73 independent, 159 ---- inspection, 420 ---- owners, 25, 29, 47-48, 69-70 fallacies regarding Socialism, 6 family, 28, 35, 42, 44, 109, 118, 122, 131, 134, 137, 153, 157, 421, 427 Faraday, 222 farm, 29 colony, 78-80, 263-277 deserted, 68 ---- hands, 28 ownership of, 16 farmer, 15, 28-29, 48, 55, 177-178, 415 Farmers' Bulletin, 269, 281 farming population, 48 Federal Steel Company, 62 Federation of Labor, 171 Fesca, Dr. M., Beiträge zur Kenntniss der japanesischen Landwirthschaft, 267 Fields, Factories and Workshops (Kropotkin), 267 Filene Store, 199-200 financial crises, 178, 299 fines (for adulteration), 88-93 food, 98 ---- adulteration, 89-93 Food and Drugs Act, 91 forests, 27 Forster, Rt. Hon. H.O. Arnold, 154 Fourier, 317 France, 40, 78, 132, 137, 243, 264, 266, 308-309, 318, 392, 409 franchise, 135, 145 free trade, 69 freedom, 109, 116, 121, 124 law an abridgment of, 113-114 ---- of contract, 11, 140-141 ---- of industry, 111 economic, 50, 125 French Parliament, 18-19 ---- peasant, 278 ---- penal code, 142 ---- Revolution, 32, 138, 140, 243 Frick, Henry, 27, 188, 191 funds, 172, benefit, 136 Mansion House Relief, 76 savings bank, 78 trade union, 78 G Galvani, 222 gambling, 38, 68, 72, 423 gardeners (Paris), 268 ---- Hammersmith, 18-20 Gary, Elbert H., 57-62, 188, 191 gas, 123, 324 ---- in Birmingham, 20 ---- in Manchester, 20 ---- in New York, 21 General Electric Company, 184, 221 Genevilliers, 268 George, Henry, 123, 364 German (the), 321 ---- competition, 148 Germany, 236, 242, 308-309, 408 cabinet minister in, 132 palliative measures in, 78 workingmen in, 16 Ghent, W.J., 89 Giddings, Professor Franklin H., 405 Gladstone, 334, 384 Gompers, Samuel, 408 Gothenburg system, 295 government, 32-33, 43, 102, 121, 128-129, 135-136, 150, 218, 315, 317-320, 336, 416-418, 431 ---- control, 12, 72 good, 321-324 ---- postoffice, 97 ---- printing office, 228 publications of U.S., 12, 228 the Prussian, 25 Grandeau, L., Etudes agronomiques, 268 Guesde, Jules, 408 Guggenheim, Senator, 74 Daniel, 87 guilds, 135, 140 tyranny of, 135-140 H Hague Tribunal, 355 Hallet, Major, 267 Hammersmith, 18-20 Hardie, Keir, 408 Harriman, 304 Havemeyer, H.O., 57, 105, 107, 159, 161 Haywood, 169, 240 health, 414, 421 Colorado State Board of, 90 conservation of, 27, 38, 72 Department of, 27 Hebberd, Mr., Commissioner of Charities of New York city, 266 Henri IV, 142 Hill, James J., 238, 304 Hillquit, Morris, 2, 7, 248, 305, 307 Hindustan, 64, 355 history, 28, 387 Holland, 222 farm colonies in, 262, 265 Hollesley Bay, 78 Holt, Dr. L. Emmett, 38, 421 home, 7, 40-42, 51, 83, 105, 156, 157, 415 common, 317 ---- Economics, Conference on, 92 ---- industry, 138 horde, 34, 35, 107 hours of labor, 62, 69, 128, 145, 152, 153, 220, 318, 326, 328, 419 excessive, 70 four hours' workday, 50 ---- of farmer, 15 House of Commons, 18 House report, 52d Congress, 2d session, 197 Hudson river, 261 Hughes, Charles F., 244-245 Hunter, Robert, 42 Huxley, Thomas, 13, 315-316, 379-380, 382-386, 388, 395, 404 I Ice Trust, 262 Idaho, 426-427 Illinois, 425, 427, 430 immediate demands, 26, 27, 246 immobilization of capital, 65 imprisonment for adulteration, 89-93 India, 218 starvation in, 55, 60 tiger developed in, 4 Indian opium forced upon China, 63 Indiana, 430 individualism, 10, 23, 32 Industrial Commission, 57, 62-63, 76, 95, 99, 104-107, 146, 150-151, 159, 161-164, 170, 206-208, 288 industrial conditions, 42, 64, 76, 93 ---- depression, 153, 414 ---- Parliament, 318 ---- population, 48 ---- schools, 151 ---- system, 26, 46, 52, 73 industrialism, 88 industries, 118, 318, 326-327, 414, 416 captain of, 87 collective ownership of, 419 seasonal, 71 socialized, 319 industry, 65, 102-105, 107, 123, 134, 138-140, 148, 155, 159, 317, 421-422 insurance, 5, 78, 179, 303, 420 German national, 241 ---- Year Book, 179 International, the, 155 ---- complications, 63 ---- conflict, 354 ---- crime, 63 interest, 59, 69 personal, 29-30 private, 26 vested, 15, 17, 19, 20, 22-30 intranational conflict, 354 invention, 44, 219, 222-224 inventor, 219, 220-224 investor, 94 Ireland, 241 Italy, 22, 267 J James I of England, 21 Japan, 62-63, 239, 267 Jaurès, 132, 408 Jersey, Island of, 280 justice, 27, 34, 64, 411-429 K Kautsky, Karl, 239, 243, 307-308 Kentucky, 60 Knickerbocker Trust Company, 182-184, 189, 191 Kropotkin, 34, 135, 267-268 L labor, 36, 50-51, 75, 80, 86, 104, 113-114, 116-117, 119, 123, 131, 135, 144, 147, 154, 157, 414-422 ---- Bulletin, 120 Bureau of, 421 child, 109 Commerce and, 421 Department of, 421 fluidity of, 103 ---- market, 109 ---- members of Parliament, 173 ---- not so fluid as capital, 64 ---- of women, 109 young, 69 laborers, 72, 74 _Laissez-faire_, 11, 32, 139, 407 Lancashire, 154 land, 15, 24, 27, 29, 42, 48, 59, 112, 116, 118, 122-124, 148, 269, 278, 317, 412-414, 416, 420 law, 43, 91-92, 108, 112-113, 119, 121, 126, 137, 159, 322, 324, 410, 417, 420, 423, 425, 430 ---- of 1799 of British Parliament, 142 relation of custom to, 13 Lebovitz, J., 5 legislation, 26, 424 leisure, 48-49, 52, 65, 125-130, 325, 411 Lesseps de, 220 Lewis, Orlando F., 429-430 liberty, 7, 32, 46-47, 50, 52, 110, 130, 139, 317, 325, 409, 412, 426 A Plea for, 50, 94 life, 28, 33, 37-38, 50, 67-72 Lincoln, 175 lockout, 5, 86-88, 110, 148 London, 18, 21, 71, 219, 284, 286, 320, 394 Louis XIV, 137, 422 Lowell, James Russell, 223 lumber, 53 camps, 42 lunacy, 49, 278 Lyell, Sir Charles, 349 M McCrea, President, 430 MacDonald, J. Ramsay, 408 McKenna, Judge, 169, 424 machine, political, 129 machinery, 69, 218, 414-420 Maine, 280 Mallock, 408-409 Malthus, 172, 316 Manchester, 20 ---- school, 32, 60, 139 Manhattan, 97-98, 282, 424 Mansion House Relief Fund, 76 Manufacture, Economy of, 219 market, 16, 18, 64, 93, 103-105, 109-110, 141, 146, 148, 158 foreign, 62, 63, 76, 319 getting the, 95-96 ---- price, 154, 159 the London, 18 tyranny of the, 102-103 marriage, 40, 85, 134, 351-353, 358-359 Marshall, Alfred, 391 Martineau, Harriet, 402 Marx, Karl, 1, 8, 25, 33-34, 147, 155-156, 226, 386 Marxian school, 25, 201, 239 ---- doctrine of value, 33 ---- socialism, 1 ---- socialist, 242 Mass and Class, 89 Maxim, 220 meat, 137, 417 ---- distribution, 97 ---- Trust, 262 Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, 212 Metz, Hermann, Comptroller of New York city, 190 Middle Ages, 107, 110, 135, 138 militia, 27, 427 milk, 96-97, 324 ---- adulteration, 90 ---- Contractors' Association, 288 trust, 211 Mill, John Stuart, 32, 325 Miner, Maud E., probation officer, 83 mineowners, 27 miners, 65 131, 415, 417 ---- union, 164 Western Federation of, 417 misrepresentation, 6, 15-16 Mississippi, 429 Mitchell, Dr. W.C., 90-91 Mitchell, John, 146, 151-152, 408 Modern Socialism, R.C.K. Ensor, 387 Monde Economique, 63 Monetary and Banking system, by Maurice L. Muhleman, 181 money, 37, 53-55, 66-68, 77-79, 81, 86, 176-198, 323, 419 ---- market, 74 ---- Market Primer, by George Clare, 193 monopoly, 260, 416, 422, 428 ---- of guilds, 256 monopolies, 123, 137, 146, 150 morality, 40, 45, 81-84 More, Sir Thomas, 33 Morgan, J. Pierpont, 169, 185, 195-196, 237-239, 254, 257, 428 elimination of waste by, 58 organization of steel and coal trusts by, 238 share of, in New York city finances, Oct., 1908, 190 Morris, William, 2 mortality, 38 infant, 419 Moyer, 169 Muhleman, Maurice L., 181 municipalities, 74 municipal ownership, 20-21 Municipal Year Book, 20 N nation, 63, 65, 105, 107, 114, 131, 133, 412-418 National Association of State Food and Dairy Departments, 91 National Executive Committee, 248, 256 necessaries of life, 128, 417 Negro slavery, 46 New England, 42 New York Central railroad, 74, 429-430 New York city, 19-22, 177, 179, 190, 209, 214, 283-284, 320-322 Aldermen in, 247 butcher shops in, 97 reform in, 128 Trow's directory of, 97 New York State, 245, 265, 269, 272 ---- Department of Labor, 73,74 Newton, Isaac, 219, 222 Nightingale, Florence, 39 Northern Pacific, 191, 430 Northern Securities Case, 238 O occupations, 71-72, 75, 114-115, 278 Oersted, 222 Ohio Dairy and Food Department, 90 Ohm, 219, 222 oil, 63, 94, 96, 105, 417 Pratts' Astral, 207 Standard, 99, 104, 207 opium, 63-64 ---- war in China, 63 organization, 115, 147-148, 157 industrial, 107 international, 156 ---- of labor, 127, 145 ---- of trade unions, 159 political, 122, 128 Organized Labor, by John Mitchell, 73-75, 115, 145-146, 151-153, 409, 417 Outlook the, 6, 40, 82, 109, 259 overinvestment, 65-66 overproduction, 57-66, 218 overwork, 48, 69-70, 72, 122, 164 ownership, 20-21, 416 collective, 419 ---- of land, 24, 121, 280 State, 317 State, not Socialism, 25 P pacemakers, 69 Palissy, Bernard, 223 palliative measures, 78 Panama bonds, 188 ---- canal, 220 Pangborn, Col., 266 panic, 63, 65, 73-75, 87, 181-194, 299 Paris, 7, 18, 98, 137, 138, 286 Parliament, 173 Industrial, 319 parlor Socialists, 28 Parnell, 241 party, 416-419 capitalistic, 16 Democratic, 122, 134, 308 dominant, 415 Labor, in England, 171 Republican, 122, 134, 309, 418 Socialist, 2, 21, 26-27, 34-36, 45, 134, 200, 248, 414, 418, 428-429 pauper, 80 pauperism, 9, 22, 26, 35-36, 44, 52, 66, 99, 128, 130 penal colonies, 274 Pennsylvania, 74-75, 91, 280, 430 Pettibone vs. Collins, 424 Philadelphia, 430 philanthropists, 87 philosophy of Socialism, 6, 54 Pinkerton, Robert A., 168 pipe-line, 63, 105 Pittsburg, 15, 164-165, 167, 173, 201 Survey, 164, 167, 173-174, 201 platform, Socialist, 6, 26-27, 45, 134, 413, 421 Plato, 33, 44, 388 Platonic school of Socialism, 199 Plea for Liberty, 50, 94 political-- ---- action, 26, 110, 409 ---- contributions, 32 ---- control, 135 ---- issue, 140 ---- liberty, 47, 52, 121 ---- parties, 140 ---- power, 26-27 ---- Science Quarterly, 169 ---- students, 23 politics, 48, 110, 129 Ponce, La Culture Maraiche, 268 Poor Law guardians, 273 popular government, 107, 142 population, 65, 131, 134, 142, 153, 156-158, 323 Populism, 174 Portland Proceedings, 90-91 postoffice, 262 ---- economies, 96-97 Poverty, by Robert Hunter, 42 press, 66, 415, 420 propertied class in control of, 42-43 price, 42, 50, 58-63, 65-66, 69, 76, 87, 94, 98, 103-104, 106, 134-135, 147-148, 158-160, 228, 324, 417 Principles of Sociology, 335-405 Problems of the Day, by Andrew Carnegie, 199 problems, solution of, 151 economic, 128 Problems of Unemployment, 72 production, 12, 23, 25, 28, 33, 35-38, 45, 49, 52-54, 59, 66, 86, 93-94, 104, 110, 123, 131-132, 139 anarchy of, 318, 413, 414, 416, 418 products, 33, 36, 46, 51, 55, 99, 105, 113, 116-117, 119, 121, 123-124, 126, 128, 135, 137, 139, 314-319 profit, 5, 10, 16, 25, 37, 58-60, 65, 94, 102, 104-106, 108, 148, 155, 414, 423 proletariat, 25-26, 45, 119, 122 property, 7, 15-16, 24-25, 28-29, 32-33, 42-46, 112, 131-175, 414, 422 ---- and Liberty, 54, 112-130 prostitution, 4, 9, 26, 35-36, 44, 66, 79, 86, 88, 99, 128, 130 Proudhon, 7, 33-34, 124, 131 Prussia, 317 Prussian Government, 25 public domain, 27 Public House Trust, 295 public ownership, 20-21, 27, 106 Pullman, 168 Q de Quesnay, 54 Quintessence of Socialism, 235 R race, 32, 65-66, 91, 115, 128, 327, 411 for profits, 415 rags sold as woollen cloth, 93 ---- pickers of Paris, 18-20 railroads, 53, 65, 73-95, 123, 131, 215, 303, 329, 415, 419, 429-431 reclamation, 27, 101 reforestation, 27 reform, 26-28, 71, 127, 129, 243, 414, 418-419 relief, 26, 76 remedies, 31, 78 remuneration, 303-306 republic, 243 revolution, 25-28, 243 revolutionary period, 108 ---- Socialists, 27, 29 revolutionist, 23-26, 30, 228 Rhode Island, 306 Ritchie, Professor, 385 Rockefeller, 57-58, 104, 159, 237-239, 253-255, 288, 325 Rocky mountains, 96, 276 Rodbertus, 307 Rogers, Thorold, 233 Roosevelt, Theodore, 6, 25, 33-34, 40-42, 50, 82, 132, 134, 237-239, 255, 259-260, 320, 398 Rousseau, 138 royalty, 21 Ruskin, John, 402-403 Russia, 121, 239 S salaries, 82, 303-306 San Francisco, 96 savings Banks, 42, 65, 78 Schäffle, 235 Schenectady, 261 school, 153, 165, 321, 326, 328, 409, 415, 419 divinity, 329 industrial, 151 Manchester, 20, 32, 60, 139 Marxian, 25 trade, 151 Science, 1, 88, 115, 128, 421 ---- and Morals, 336 Scientific aspect of Socialism, 335-377 Seligman, J. & W., 196 semi-skilled workers, 75 Semler, Tropische Agrikultur, 267 Shaw, Bernard, 2 sickness, 5, 136, 153, 172, 326, 406-407 Simon, A.M., The American Farmer, 48 Simon Eugène, La Cité Chinoise, 267 single tax, 123, 278, 285 slave, 15, 45, 47, 49, 51, 104, 115, 125, 140, 415, 429 slaveowner, 69 slavery, 15, 109, 120, 125, 127, 128-130 Smith, Adam, 32, 54, 139 Social Revolution (Kautsky), 239 Socialism and Social Reform, 42, 60, 209, 211, 217-218 Socialism in Theory and Practice, 248, 305, 307-308 socialization of industries, 34 South, farmers of the, 217 South Australia, 290 South Carolina, 267 Southern Pacific, 430 Spargo, John, 2, 248-250 Spencer, Herbert, 3, 13, 32, 54, 94, 101, 137, 336, 365, 388, 404 standard of living, 165, 229 standard of wages, 157 Standard Oil, 99, 104-105, 152, 159, 207, 251, 253-256 starvation, 103, 120, 139, 156, 158, 414, 417 State, 45-46, 80, 91, 134, 325, 409, 424-431 agricultural, 77 ---- commissions, 89 ---- constabulary, 431 ---- Government, 329 ---- laws, 417 mining, 77 New York, 75, 280 ---- ownership not Socialism, 25 Prussian, 25 ---- Socialism, 235, 317-318 ---- Socialist, 27 ---- viands, 50 Statistical Abstract of the United States, 148, 181, 431 statistics, 5, 38, 73 steel, 94, 327-328 ---- industry, 148 ---- rails, 63 ---- trust, 55, 149, 164, 185-186, 201, 238, 257, 303 U.S.,--Corporation, 185 Steffens, Lincoln, 255, 429 step by step socialist, 28 stockholders, 21, 252, 324 stocks, 85, 160 store, 11, 29, 82, 156, 431 strike, 62, 71, 86-88, 145, 148, 168 struggle, 147, 153, 415 class, 25 ---- for Existence in Human Society, 336 ---- for life, 337, 410 study of Sociology, 365 Suez canal, 220 sugar trust, 61, 95 Survey, 164, 167, 173-174, 201 swamplands, 27, 101, 180, 420 sweated trades, 158 sweating system, 154, 156 Switzerland, 263, 266, 272 farm colonies in, 78, 269 system, 28, 34, 44, 409, 421 apprenticeship, 151 ---- of production, 35, 414 capitalist, 45 competitive, 37, 39, 54, 66, 86, 98, 99, 145, 323, 325 coöperative, 128 factory, 416 Fourier's, 317 T Taft, President, 1, 6, 42, 132 taxes, 323, 326, 420 personal, 118 single, 123 ---- rate, 320 teachers, 49 ---- college, 92 tenements, 19, 41, 247, 321 Tennessee Coal and Iron Company, 185-186, 188, 191 textiles, 92 ---- schools, 92 Thompson, Carl D., 7 tobacco, 156 adulteration of, 91 ---- crop in Kentucky, 60 Tolstoi, 388 Toubeau, La répartition métrique des impôts, 267 trade, 63, 88, 92, 93, 95 export, 105-106, 111, 137, 145, 149, 151-155, 321, 328 trade unions, 16, 72-77, 86, 110, 136, 140-159, 167-174 organization of, 159-160 tramps, 24, 264, 271-272, 273-274, 430 Troy, 261 trust companies, 182 Trust Company of America, 185 trusts, 15, 16, 76, 86, 104, 107, 110, 140, 142, 159, 175, 418 expropriation of, 15 development of, 58 Standard Oil, 99 steel, 149, 303 Turgot, 422 Tweed, 320 Tyranny, 142 economic, 138 ---- of the guilds, 138 ---- of the market, 102-104, 107, 109 ---- of the trade union, 108-110 ---- of the trusts, 104, 109 U underconsumption, 66, 67 underemployment, 66, 67, 72 underpayment, 67, 72 unemployable, 70-72, 78, 87 unemployed, 24, 42, 66-79, 103, 107, 148, 157, 245, 415 unemployment, 4, 39, 60, 65, 79, 81, 86, 88-89, 140, 144, 153, 164, 245 unions, 108, 159-160, 169-175 United States, 7, 61, 64, 144, 147, 151, 177, 179, 187-188, 193, 204, 206, 209, 215, 266, 272, 416-417 ---- Bureau of Labor, 228, 293 ---- Census, 41, 48, 73, 77, 204 ---- Congress, 168, 197, 308-309, 318, 329-330, 417, 420, 426 ---- Constitution, 15, 365, 417, 426 ---- Department of Agriculture, 230 ---- Department, of Labor, 148, 230 divorce in, 40-41 ---- postoffice, 96-97, 262 United States, Secretary of the Treasury of, 187, 189 statistical abstract of, 148, 181, 431 statutes of, 424-425 ---- Treasury, 181, 187-188 unorganized labor, 73, 75, 77, 109, 145 unskilled labor, 75-77 V value, 125-126 Marx' theory of, 33 surplus, 10 Vandervelde, Emil, 1, 7, 408 Vermont, 430 vested interests, 15, 18-22, 30 vice, 40, 362, 410-411, 415 Vienna, 286 violence, 27, 67, 117-118, 124, 168-169, 425, 429 Volta, 222 W wages, 69-70, 103-104, 109, 118, 124, 142, 145,147,151-158, 165 miners', 82-83 ---- earners', 16 ---- servants', 122 ---- slave, 68 ---- slavery, 68-69 union, 419 Wall Street, 179-192, 212 war, 168, 175, 429 Ward, Lester F., 404 Washington, 5, 260, 309 waste, 96, 102, 139, 301 ---- lands, 419 ---- of capital, 99 waste of life and property in revolution, 28 water, 20, 21, 101, 123, 419 wealth, 42-43, 45-46, 50, 52, 65, 67, 115, 117, 130-131, 134-135, 137, 410, 415, 418 Webb, Sidney, 2 Western Federation of Miners, 417 Western Union, 210 Westinghouse Company, 184, 187, 221 wheat, 55, 293 whiskey, adulteration of, 91 Trust, 61, 161-162 Why Socialism is Impossible, 235 Winslow, Lanier & Company, 196 Wisconsin, 256 women, 35, 46, 65, 68, 80-86, 120, 142-143, 154, 157-158, 165, 245, 265, 275 exploitation of, 32 suffrage for, 420 Woodbridge, Alice, 82 working class, 42-45, 414-416, 419 workingmen, 15, 47-48, 51, 62, 64, 68, 70, 75, 77, 86, 103, 108, 109, 116, 137-138, 142, 144, 149, 151-154 standard of living of, 229 Y Year Book of the Department of Agriculture, 230 Insurance, 179 Municipal, 20 Yorkshire, 154 * * * * * +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Typographical errors corrected in text: | | | | Page xiv: distaseful replaced with distasteful | | Page 14: Socalism replaced with Socialism | | Page 19: landords replaced with landlords | | Page 88: similiar replaced with similar | | Page 163: advancng replaced with advancing | | Page 164: presention replaced with presentation | | Page 180: noney replaced with money | | Page 205: conoeded replaced with conceded | | Page 226: pulverzing replaced with pulverizing | | Page 229: expediture replaced with expenditure | | Page 285: cooperative replaced with coöperative | | Page 290: cooperative replaced with coöperative | | Page 292: catagories replaced with categories | | Page 295: Gothenberg replaced with Gothenburg | | Page 312: "six hundred and and sixty million dollars" | | replaced with | | "six hundred and sixty million dollars" | | Page 312: "will be paid to be steel guild" replaced with | | "will be paid to the steel guild" | | Page 327: primarly replaced with primarily | | Page 336: subsituting replaced with substituting | | Page 351: cooperative replaced with coöperative | | Page 362: self-straint replaced with self-restraint | | Page 371: "If the the harness left" replaced with | | "If the harness left" | | Page 407: communites replaced with communities | | Page 409: canivora replaced with carnivora | | Page 433: Barral replaced with Barrel | | Page 435: captial replaced with capital | | Page 437: Beitrage replaced with Beiträge | | Page 438: ecomonic replaced with economic | | Page 440: Kautzky replaced with Kautsky | | Page 443: Unemplovment replaced with Unemployment | | Page 443: Tharold replaced with Thorold | | Page 444: Kautzky 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49854	----	provided by the Internet Archive A CRITIQUE OF SOCIALISM By George R. Sims Read Before The Ruskin Club Of Oakland California, Edward F. Adams, Paul Elder and Company Publishers, San Francisco 1905 WITH THE COMPLIMENTS OF THE AUTHOR TO THE RUSKIN CLUB OF OAKLAND WHOSE MEMBERS LISTENED SO PATIENTLY TO THE READING OF THIS PAPER AND DANCED ON IT SO BLITHELY THEREAFTER, AS AN INTIMATION OF HIS FERVENT BELIEF THAT NO MORE CHARMING CONVOCATION OF SOCIALISTS, OR ONE MORE HOPELESSLY ENTHRALLED BY THEIR DELUSIONS, EXISTS ON EARTH. TO THE RUSKIN CLUB:-- When your Mr. Bamford wrote me that the Ruskin Club was out hunting trouble, and that if I would come over here the bad men of the club would "do me up," I confess my first impulse was to excuse myself from the proffered hospitality. In the first place, as I have never posed as a social champion I had no reputation at stake and I was horribly afraid. Secondly, while my reading of Socialist and Anti-Socialist literature is the reverse of extensive, I am very sure that nothing can be said for or against Socialism which has not already been said many times, and so well said that a fair collection of Anti-Socialist literature would make a punching-bag solid enough to absorb the force of the most energetic of pugilists. Finally, the inutility of such a sally presented itself forcibly, since there is, so far as I know, no record of the reformation of a Socialist after the habit is once firmly established. But while at first these considerations were all against my putting on my armor, in the end the instinct of eating and fighting, which is as forceful in the modern savage, under the veneer of civilization, as in our unpolished progenitors, overcame all considerations of prudence, and here I am to do battle according to my ability. I promise to strike no foul blows and not to dodge the most portentous of whacks, but to ride straight at you and hit as hard as I can. CRITIQUE OF SOCIALISM |WHILE it is doubtless true that no one can live in the world without in some degree modifying his environment, it is also true that the influence of a single person is seldom appreciable or his opinion upon social questions of sufficient importance to excite curiosity, but I confess that when I listen to an address intended to be thoughtful, I enjoy it more or at any rate endure it better, if I have some knowledge of the mental attitude of the speaker toward his general subject. Thinking that possibly those who hear me this evening may have the same feeling, I begin by saying that I earnestly favor a just distribution of comfort. I suppose that if I should analyze the mental processes leading to that wish, I should find toward the bottom a conviction that if each had his due I should be better off. The objection to the Socialistic program is that it would prevent a just distribution of comfort. Some years ago in a book of which I was guilty, I wrote the following: "There is implied in all Socialistic writing the doctrine that organized man can override, and as applied to himself, repeal the fundamental law of Nature, that no species can endure except by the production of more individuals than can be supported, of whom the weakest must die, with the corollary of misery before death. Competitive Society tends to the death of the weakest, Socialistic Society would tend to the preservation of the weak. There can be no question of the grandeur of this conception. To no man is given nobler aspirations than to him who conceives of a just distribution of comfort in an existence not idle, but without struggle. It would be a Nirvana glorious only in the absence of sorrow, but still perhaps a happy ending for our race. It may, after all, be our destiny. Nor can any right-minded man forbear his tribute to the good which Socialistic agitation has done. No man can tell how much misery it has prevented, or how much it will prevent. So, also, while we may regret the emotionalism which renders even so keen an intellect as that of Karl Marx an unsafe guide, we must, when we read his description of conditions for which he sought remedy, confess that he had been less a man had he been less emotional. The man whom daily contact with remediable misery will not render incompetent to always write logically, I would not wish to know. But it is the mission of such men to arouse action and not to finally determine its scope. The advocate may not be the judge. My animus is that I heartily desire most if not all the ends proposed by abstract Socialism, which I understand to be a perfectly just distribution of comfort. If, therefore, I am a critic of Socialism, I am a friendly critic, my objections to its program resting mainly on a conviction that it would not remove, but would intensify, the evils which it is intended to mitigate." That is quite sufficient in regard to the personal equation. There appear to be, unfortunately, as many sects of Socialists as of Christians, and if "Capital" were a more clearly written book I should be of the opinion that it would be as much better for Socialists if all other books on Socialism were destroyed as it would be for Christians and Jews if all books on Theology were destroyed, except the Bible. By Socialism I mean what some Socialist writers call "Scientific Socialism." "Marxism," it might be called. "Humanism," I think Marx would have preferred to call it, and I believe did call it, for he dealt with abstract doctrine applicable to men and not to nations, and his propaganda was the "International." Incidentally, as we pass on, we may notice in this connection the dilemma of American Socialists which they do not seem to realize. State Socialism has no logical place in a Socialistic program, for it merely substitutes the more deadly competition of nations for that of the individual, or even "trust" competition now existing, while Humanism, or Marxism, tends to a uniform condition of humanity which the American proletariat would fight tooth and nail because they would rightly believe that for them it would at present be a leveling down instead of leveling up. Karl Marx was, of course, not the inventor of Socialism, nor was he, so far as I know, the originator of any of its fundamental doctrines,--the doctrine, for example, that all value is derived from labor was part of mediaeval clericism,--but he first reduced it to coherent form and published it as a complete and definite system, and upon the issues, substantially as he formulated and left them, must Socialism stand or fall. I must assume the members of the Ruskin Club to be familiar with the Marxian fundamental propositions, which I do not state because I shall confine my attack to the three derived propositions about which discussion mainly centers. We certainly do not want an exercise in serious dialectics after dinner, but I will say in passing that I do not think that any of his fundamental propositions are true, or that his theory of value has a single sound leg to stand on, and as for what he calls "surplus value," I doubt whether there be such a thing. At any rate he has not proved it, nor can it be proved, without taking into consideration the enormous number of industrial failures, as well as the more limited number of industrial successes--and there are no data for that purpose. I may also mention as what seems to me a fatal flaw in Socialistic philosophy, its concentration upon the conditions of industrial society, without adequate conception of a provision for the requirements of agriculture. Industrialism and commercialism are doubtless conveniences essential to our present civilization; but if every factory and all commerce were blotted from the earth the world would go right along, and when the necessary millions had perished in the adjustment, those remaining would be as happy as ever. Mankind adjusts itself to new environments very readily. We here in cities talking wisely on these things are wholly unnecessary. The farmer is essential, because without him we should starve. Nobody else is essential. We must not get the big-head. Economical farming on Socialistic methods is impossible, and any successful system of Social betterment must be based on the requirements of economical farming. Finally, to conclude this preliminary reconnaissance, the attitude of Socialism to religion is wholly unjustifiable. I am profoundly convinced that the groveling heathen, who in sincerity bows down to a "bloomin' idol made of mud," as Kipling puts it, has in him the propagation of a nobler and happier posterity than the most cultured cosmopolitan who is destitute of reverence. The church and the synagogue are the only existing institutions of modern society which are engaged in the work of upbuilding and strengthening that rugged personal character which is the only sure foundation of any worthy civilization. I do not discuss the fundamental Marxian propositions for two reasons. In the first place, it would be laborious beyond measure for me, and dreary beyond measure for you. For example, the bottom stone in the foundation of the sub-basement of the Marxian edifice is the proposition that the equation= ```X commodity A=y commodity B ````essentially differs from the equation ```y Commodity B = X Commodity A.= Now, a discussion whether there is between these two equations a difference which it is socially necessary to take account of, is a thing to be put into books where it can be skipped, and not imposed in cold blood even on intellectual enemies. Personally I do not believe there is, for I do not think that social phenomena can be dealt with by the rigorous methods of mathematics. One can never be sure that the unknown quantities are all accounted for. But whether this or similar propositions are essential to the discussion of the theory of surplus value or not, I do not describe them because they are of no particular importance. Socialism is not based upon the Marxian theory of value, but the Marxian theory of value was evolved in an endeavor to fix a scientific basis for a popular movement already fully under way. Socialism is not based on reason, but emotion; not on reflection, but desire; it is not scientific, but popular. If every Socialist on earth should concede that the Marxian theory of surplus value had been knocked into smithereens, it would have no more effect on the progress of Socialism than the gentle zephyr of a June day on the hide of a rhinoceros. Socialism must be attacked in the derived propositions about which popular discussion centers, and the assault must be, not to prove that the doctrines are scientifically unsound, but that they tend to the impoverishment and debasement of the masses. These propositions are three, and I lay down as my thesis--for I abhor defensive warfare--that= `````Rent is rights `````Interest is rights `````Profits are right,= and that they are all three ethically and economically justified, and are in fact essential to the happiness and progress of the race, and more especially to those who labor with their hands. Now, first, _rent_: I confess that I have no patience with any one who claims, as an inherent right, the exclusive ownership of any part of the earth. He might as well claim ownership in a section of air. In this I am very certain that I have the hearty concurrence of every member of this Club. I am so sure of this, in fact, that I am going to make that assumption, in which we all agree, the starting point of a little dialogue, in which, after the manner of Plato, I will put Socrates at one end of the discussion, and some of his friends, whom we will suppose to be Phædo, and Crito, and Simmias, and the rest at the other, and we will let Socrates and Phædo carry on the conversation, which might run as follows: _Socrates_--We are agreed, then, that no man has any right inherent in himself to the ownership of land. _Phædo_--Certainly, we agree to that. Such a thing is absurd, for the earth is a gift to the human race, and not to particular men. _Socrates_--I am glad that you think so, and am sure we shall continue to agree. And if no one man has any right to exclusive ownership of land, neither have any two men, since it is plain that neither could convey to himself and another any right which he did not possess, nor could two men together by any means get lawful title to what neither was entitled to hold. _Phædo_--You are doubtless right, Socrates. I do not think any man could dispute that. _Socrates_--And if neither one man nor two men can acquire lawful title to land, neither for the same reason could any number, no matter how great, acquire lawful title. _Phædo_--That certainly follows from what we have already agreed to. _Socrates_--And it makes no difference how small or how great a portion of land may be. No man and no number of men can acquire lawful ownership of it. _Phædo_--That is also so plainly true that it seems hardly worth while to say it. It certainly makes no difference whether the land be a square furlong or a continent. _Socrates_--As you say, Phædo, that is very evident. The earth belongs to mankind, and all men are by nature sharers in its benefits. _Phædo_--I trust that you will understand that I agree with you in that, and so make an end of it. _Socrates_--It is perhaps best that we be very sure that we agree as we go on, so that if we should at any time disagree, we do not need to go far back to find where our difference began. The earth is the property of men in common, and each has an undivided share in its possession. _Phædo_--That is another thing too plain to be disputed. _Socrates_--And when men hold property in common, each has as much right to all parts of it as another. _Phædo_--To be sure. I do not see why we need waste time in mentioning things so plain and so trivial. _Socrates_--And when men own property they may do with it as they please, and property which men own jointly they may visit and remain upon, the one as much as the other. _Phædo_--Unquestionably that is so, and we should do better to go to sleep in the shade, somewhere, than to spend time in repeating things so simple. _Socrates_--Be patient, Phædo, and in time we may find somewhat wherein we do not so perfectly agree. But whatever property men have the right to visit and remain upon they are always free to use in common with their fellow owners. _Phædo_--Certainly. Will you never, O Socrates, have done with this? _Socrates_--And Chinamen, therefore, have full right to come and live in California. _Phædo (and the rest)_--We will all see them in hell first. And I am very certain that every Socialist in California will agree both with the premises and the conclusion. But we might try another course of reasoning by which we may perhaps more easily reach the predetermined conclusion, and we will let the same parties carry on the dialogue, which is a most delightful way of reasoning when, as in the case of Plato and myself, the same person conducts both sides of the discussion. It might run in this way: _Phædo_--We have come, Socrates, to discuss with you, if you will permit us, the question of the ownership of land. Crito and Hippias and myself and others were considering that subject the other day, and we were not able to agree. Hippocrates, whom you know, has lately returned from the region of Mount Olympus, and as he was hunting one day on the lower slopes of the mountain, he came, haply, upon a beautiful vale, fertile and well watered, wherein was no habitation or sign of man. The soft breezes blew gently over the rich green plain whereon the red deer grazed peacefully and turned not at his approach. And when Hippocrates returned from his hunt he found upon inquiry that no man of the region knew of that vale or had ever heard thereof. So, as he had marked the entrance thereto, he returned thither with the intent to remain there for a space. And remaining there through the warm summer he fenced in the vale and the deer in it, and built him an house, and remained there a full year. But certain concerns of his family at that time constrained Hippocrates to return to Athens, and since he can no more live in his vale he offered to sell it to Hipparchus for a talent of silver for a place to keep summer boarders. And Hipparchus was content; but when they repaired to the Demosion to exchange the price for the deed, Hippocrates was unable to produce any parchment showing his title to the vale. And when he was unable to do that, Hipparchus would not pay down his silver, until he could make further inquiry. The next day, we all, meeting at the house of Phidias, fell to debating whether Hippocrates owned the land and could sell it to Hipparchus. And some said one thing and some another, and in the end we agreed that when some of us were next together, we would go to the house of Socrates, and if he were content, we would discuss the matter with him. And today happening to so meet we have come to you, Socrates, and would be glad to hear whether you think Hippocrates owns that vale, and may sell it or no. _Socrates_--You are very welcome, Phædo, and your friends, and as for the matter you name, I shall be glad to talk of it with you and see if we can come to some understanding of it. But before we can proceed in the discussion, it will be necessary to find some starting point upon which we can all agree, because until we agree, at the beginning, upon some one thing pertaining to the matter, as certain and not to be doubted, discussion is useless, but if we can find such a thing, which none of us doubt, we may be able to make something of the matter. I propose, therefore, O Phædo, that you propound some one statement which all you who have been discussing the matter believe. _Phædo_--Of a truth, Socrates, we discussed the matter till the sun went down, but I do not remember any one thing to which we all agreed except that there is such a vale at the foot of Mount Olympus, as Hippocrates describes, and that he lived therein for a year. That we believe because Hippocrates so told us, and all Athens knows Hippocrates for a truthful man. _Socrates_--That is something, for all truth is useful; but it does not seem to me to be such a truth as will well serve for a foundation from which we may penetrate, as one might say, the very bowels of the subject. I pray you to propound some other. _Phædo_--Truly, Socrates, I cannot, nor can we any of us, for upon nothing else pertaining to the matter are we able to agree. _Socrates_--If it please you, then, I will propound a saying and see if you agree with me. _Phædo_--We shall be very glad if you will. _Socrates_--I suggest, then, that we begin by agreeing, if we are able to do so, that the gods have given the earth to man for his use. _Phædo_--Surely that seems to be true. _Socrates_--I am glad that you think favorably of it, but that is not sufficient if we are to reason upon it, because that upon which we found our argument must be what we accept as absolute truth. _Phædo_--I think the earth was made for mankind, but if in our conversation something should also seem true, and yet contradictory to that, I know not what I should think. _Socrates_--Let us, then, think of something else: The earth is at any rate surely for the use of some beings. The mighty Atlas would never sustain it upon his broad shoulders if it did nobody good. _Phædo_--That, at least, is certain, Socrates. _Socrates_--And it must be for beings who can make use of it and enjoy it. _Phædo_--That also is true. _Socrates_--And beings which can use and enjoy the earth must be living beings. _Phædo_--Nobody will deny that. _Socrates_--And there are no living things except the gods, mankind, the lower animals, and plants. _Phædo_--I agree to that. _Socrates_--And it is plain that the gods did not build the earth for themselves, for they do not live upon it, except on Olympus, and nowhere does the earth produce ambrosia and nectar, which are the food of the gods. _Phædo_--That is true, for the gods live in the heavens and in the nether world, and not upon the earth. _Socrates_--And the plants do not use the earth, or enjoy it, although they live upon it, but they are themselves used and enjoyed by man and beasts. _Phædo_--Certainly the earth was not made for the plants. _Socrates_--And surely as between man and the lower animals, the earth was intended for man. _Phædo_--Certainly, that is what we think, but I do not know what the lion and the horse and the ox might say, for they certainly use the earth and enjoy it. _Socrates_--But man is superior to the lower animals, and the superior cannot be subordinate to the inferior. _Phædo_--I do not know how we can tell which is superior. The primordial cell in differentiating out of homogeneity into heterogeneity developed different qualities in different beings, and of the organs integrated from the heterogeneous elements each has its use and many are essential to life. In man the brain is more powerful than in the ox, but in the ox the stomach is more powerful than in man, and while both stomach and brain are necessary, yet is one with a weak brain and strong stomach doubtless happier than one with a weak stomach and strong brain. Is it not, then, true that the stomach is nobler than the brain, and if so, then the pig and the lion and the goat, which have strong stomachs, nobler than man, whose stomach could in nowise digest carrion, or alfalfa, or tin cans, and therefore may it not be that the earth was made for the lower animals, who can use more of its products than man? _Socrates_--That is a deep thought, O Phædo, which shows that you are well up in your Spencer, although shy in your surgery, for it is true that the stomach has been removed from a man who lived happy ever after, while neither man nor beast ever lived a minute after his brains were knocked out; but is it not true that it is by the function of the brain that man makes his powers more effective than those of animals stronger than he, so that he is able to bear rule over all the lower animals and either exterminate them from the earth or make them to serve him? _Phædo_--Yes, that is true. _Socrates_--And we cannot say that the earth was made for beasts which themselves are made to serve the purpose of man, for as plants are consumed by beasts, so beasts are consumed by man who acquires for his own use and enjoyment whatever power is generated by the organs of all other living things. _Phædo_--That is true, and I can now see that the earth was not made by the gods for themselves, or for plants or beasts. _Socrates_--Therefore it appears to me that it must have been made for man. _Phædo_--That is true, and I now agree that the earth was made for man. _Socrates_--Then, since we have found a common starting point, we may go on with our conversation. We have proved that the earth was made for man, because man, by powers inherent in himself, can overcome all other living things on the earth and subject them to his uses. _Phædo_--Yes, we have proved that. _Socrates_--And the real source of his kingship is power. _Phædo_--That must be true. _Socrates_--And force is power applied to some object, so that power and force may be spoken of as the same thing. _Phædo_--Certainly. _Socrates_--And where power lies, there and there only is sovereignty, and where power ends sovereignty finds its limit. So that, for example, if the lion could subdue man and the other animals, the earth would be for the use of the lion. _Phædo_--That is plain. _Socrates_--And if a company of men should find an island and go and live upon it and be strong enough to subdue the wild animals and keep out other men, that island would be for their use. _Phædo_--That follows, because sovereignty goes with power exercised in force. _Socrates_--And so if one man should find a vacant space and take possession, it would be his. _Phædo_--That is true. _Socrates_--And what belongs to man, man may dispose of as he will. _Phædo_--All men agree to that. _Socrates_--And, therefore, since Hippocrates has found a vacant space on the earth and taken possession thereof, and no man disputes his possession, it is his and he may sell it. _Phædo_--That is certainly true, and I do not doubt that Hipparchus will now pay down his talent of silver and take over the vale in the Olympian forest. _Socrates_--And if instead of finding an island the company of men had found an entire continent it would be theirs if they were strong enough to keep it. _Phædo_--Surely that is so, for power is but concentrated ability to enjoy, and where most power lies, there lies most ability to enjoy, and therefore the highest possible aggregate of human happiness, in the attainment of which the will of the gods shall be done. _Socrates_--And if a company can take part of a continent, but not the whole, whatever they are able to take is theirs. _Phædo_--Undoubtedly. _Socrates_--And what is theirs is not the property of others. _Phædo_--By no means. _Socrates_--And if it does not belong to others, others may not lawfully use it. _Phædo_--Surely not. _Socrates_--And they who do own it may prevent others from entering it. _Phædo_--Surely, for hath not the poet said:= ```"That they shall take who have the power, ```And they may keep who can."= _Socrates_--Therefore it is plain that the United States may keep Chinamen out of America. _Phædo_--There can be no doubt of it whatever. _Socrates_--And Chinese may keep Americans out of China. _Phædo_--That is another story. One must never let his logic get the better of him. And so we might play with these great subjects forever, with reasoning as leaky as a sieve, but good enough to catch the careless or the untrained. One of the most interesting lectures which I ever listened to was one before the Economic League of San Francisco on the "Dialectics of Socialism." The lecturer was a very acute man, who would not for one moment be deceived by the sophistry of my Socrates and Phædo, but who, himself, made willing captives of his hearers by similar methods. I was unable to hear all his address, but when I reluctantly left, it appeared to me that he was expecting to prove that Socialism must be sound philosophy because it was contradictory to all human observation, experience, judgment and the dictates of sound common sense--and his large audience was plainly enough with him. The dialectics of the schoolmen or their equivalent are useless in Social discussion. Social phenomena do not lend themselves to the rigorous formulas of mathematics and logic, for the human intellect is unable to discern and grasp all the factors of these problems. My travesty of Plato was intended to illustrate the difficulty of close reasoning on such topics. Neither, on the other hand, are we to blindly follow the impulses of emotion which lead us to jump at a conclusion, support it with what reason we can, but reach it in any event. Emotion is the source of social power, but power unrestrained and undirected is dangerous. Energy created by the sight of distress must be controlled by reason or it will not relieve distress. And by reason I do not mean social syllogisms, of whose premises we are always uncertain, but conclusions half unconsciously formed in the mind as the result of human experience operating on human feeling--the practical wisdom which we call common sense. Human conduct, individual and aggregate, must be regulated and determined by the consensus of the judgment of the wisest made effective through its gradual acceptance as the judgment of the majority. Private ownership of land, with its accompanying rent, is justified, not by an imaginary inherent right in the individual, which has no real existence and so cannot be conveyed, but because _the interests of society require the stimulus to effort which private ownership and private ownership only can give_. And here I shall leave this point without the further illustration and elaboration with which I could torment you longer than you could keep awake. And with the other two points I will confine myself to the most condensed forms of statement. _INTEREST_--Socialists and Non-Socialists agree that what a man makes is his. Socialists and I agree that every man is entitled to his just share of the Social dividend. I believe, and in this I suppose that Socialists would agree with me, that when a man gets his annual dividend he may use it, or keep it for future use. If, while he does not use his dividend, or the product of his labor, he permits others to use it to their profit, it seems to me that he is entitled to some satisfaction in compensation for his sacrifice. I believe it to the interest of society that he have it. It is by individual thrift that society accumulates, and it is wise to encourage thrift. If I build a mill and, falling sick, cannot use it, it is fair that he who does use it shall pay me for my sacrifice in building it. If I forego possible satisfactions of any kind, those whom I permit to enjoy them should recompense me. And that is interest. Its foundation as a right rests not only on those natural sentiments of justice with which the normal man everywhere is endowed and behind which we cannot go, but on the interest of society to encourage the creation of savings funds to be employed for the benefit of society. _PROFITS_--Private profit is far less a private right than a public necessity. Its absence would involve a waste which society could not endure. With individual operations controlled by fallible men enormous waste is inevitable. It is essential to society that this waste be minimized. No industrial or commercial enterprise can go on without risk. _Profit is the compensation for risk_. One of the things which I believe, but which cannot be proved, is that from the dawn of history losses to individuals by which society gained have exceeded profits to individuals, and the excess of these losses is the social accumulation, increased, of course, by residues left after individuals have got what they could. Whitney died poor, but mankind has the cotton-gin. Bell died rich, but there is a profit to mankind in the telephone. Socialists propose to assume risks and absorb profits. I do not believe society could afford this. I am profoundly convinced that under the Socialist program the inevitable waste would be so enormously increased as to result in disaster approaching a social cataclysm. This is an old argument whose validity Socialists scout. Nevertheless I believe it sound. The number of these whose intellectual and physical strength is sufficient for the wisest direction of great enterprises is very small. Some who are interested in our great industrial trusts carry heavy insurance on the life of Mr. Morgan, lest he die and leave no successor. If the natural ability is found its possessor will necessarily lack the knowledge which Mr. Morgan has accumulated, and in the light of which he directs his operations. It is essential that great operations--and the business of the future will be conducted on a great scale--be directed by great wisdom and power. The possessors of high qualities we now discover by the trying-out process. They can be discovered in no other way, and great effort can be secured only by the hope of great reward. Until human nature changes we can expect nothing different. Socialism implies popular selection of industrial leadership. Wherever tried thus far in the world's history there has usually been abject failure. The mass can choose leaders in emotion but not directors of industry. The selection of experts by the non-expert can be wise only by accident. If the selection is not popular, then Socialism is tyranny, as its enemies charge. If it be popular, or in so far as it is popular, direction is likely to fall to the great persuaders and not to the great directors. Never did a "people's party" yet escape the control of the unscrupulous. _No political movements result in so much political and social rascality as so-called popular movements originated by earnest and honest men_. I see no reason to suppose that the Socialistic direction of industrial affairs in any city would be directed from any other source than the back rooms of the saloons where political movements are now shaped. If the Socialistic program were to go into effect tomorrow morning there would be here tonight neither lecturer nor audience. The good dinner would remain untasted in the ovens. Every mortal soul of us would be scooting from one social magnate to another to assure that we were on the slate for the soft jobs and that nobody was crowding us off. I have no faith in human nature except as it is constantly strengthened and purified by struggle. That struggle is an irrepressible conflict existing in all nature, and from which man cannot escape. It is better for mankind that it go on openly and in more or less accord with known rules of warfare than in the secret conspiring chambers of the class which in the end controls popular movement. All serious conflict involves evil, but it is also strengthening to the race. I wish misery could be banished from the world, but I fear that it cannot be so banished. I have little confidence in human ability to so thoroughly comprehend the structure and functions of the social body as to correctly foretell the steps in its evolution, or prescribe constitutional remedies which will banish social disease. If I were a social reformer--and were I with my present knowledge still an ingenuous youth in the fulness of strength with my life before me I do not know that I would not be a social reformer--I would profess myself a social agnostic, and prosecute my mission by the methods of the opportunist. I would endeavor to direct the social ax to the most obvious and obtrusive roots of the social evil, and having removed them and watched the result, would then determine what to do next. Possibly I would endeavor to begin with the abolition of wills and collateral inheritance, and so limiting direct inheritance that no man able to work should escape its necessity by reason of the labor of his forefathers. I might say that I recognized the vested rights of the Astors to the soil on Manhattan Island, but that I recognized no right as vested in beings yet unborn. I might say that it was sufficient stimulation and reward for the most eminent social endeavor to select, within reason, the objects of public utility to which resulting accumulations should be applied and to superintend during one's lifetime their application to those purposes. I might think in this way, and might not, were I an enthusiastic social reformer in the heyday of youth, but it appears to me now that at any rate we shall make most progress toward ultimate universal happiness if we recognize that out of the increasing strenuousness of our conflict there is coming constantly increasing comfort and better division thereof, and if we direct that portion of our energies which we devote to the service of mankind toward such changes in the direction of the social impulse as can be made without impairing the force of the evolutionary movement, rather than to those which involve the reversal of the direction of the force with the resulting danger of explosion and collapse. 
48446	----	generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) KARL MARX A SKETCH BY ACHILLE LORIA KARL MARX BY ACHILLE LORIA AUTHORISED TRANSLATION FROM THE ITALIAN WITH A FOREWORD BY EDEN & CEDAR PAUL [Illustration: Logo] NEW YORK THOMAS SELTZER 1920 COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY THOMAS SELTZER, INC. All Rights Reserved Printed in the United States of America _The socialism that inspires hopes and fears to-day is of the school of Marx. No one is seriously apprehensive of any other so-called socialistic movement, and no one is seriously concerned to criticise or refute the doctrines set forth by any other school of "socialists."_ FOREWORD BY EDEN AND CEDAR PAUL FOREWORD It has been said that the professional and professorial exponents of economic science confine themselves to variants of a single theme. Usually belonging to the master class by birth and education, and at any rate attached to that class by the ties of economic interest, they are ever guided by the conscious or subconscious aim of providing a theoretical justification for the capitalist system, and their lives are devoted to inculcating the art of extracting honey from the hive without alarming the bees. Achille Loria is an exception to this generalisation. Professor of political economy at Turin, and one of the most learned economists of the day, he is anything but an apologist for the bourgeois economy. With the exception of the first volume of Marx's _Capital_, no more telling indictment of capitalism has ever been penned than Loria's _Analysis of Capitalist Property_ (1889). This gigantic work has not been translated, but a number of Loria's books are available to English readers: _The Economic Foundations of Society_, 1902; _Contemporary Social Problems_, 1911; _The Economic Synthesis_, 1914. A biographical and critical study of Malthus, in the Italian, was rendered into English in 1917 and published in the United States as the opening chapter of a symposium on _Population and Birth Control_ edited by the writers of this foreword. _The Economic Foundations of Society_ has run through five editions in Swan Sonnenschein's (now Allen & Unwin's) "Social Science Series." But on the whole Loria's works are less widely known in England and America than on the continent, far less widely known than they deserve to be. An exposition of his outlook and a study of his relationship to Marx will not only be of interest in themselves, but will help readers to surmount certain terminological difficulties in the _Karl Marx_. All original thinkers write perforce in a language of their own minting. Those of us to whom "surplus value," the "class struggle," the "materialist conception," "economic determinism," have been familiar concepts from childhood upwards, are apt to forget that Marx's contemporaries were repelled by what they regarded as superfluous jargon. The first students of Kant, the first students of Darwin, the first students of all great innovators in philosophy, science, and the arts, have had to master a new vocabulary before they could understand what these writers were driving at; for new ideas must be conveyed in a new speech or by the use of old words refashioned. We cannot understand Loria, we cannot appreciate Loria's criticism of Marx, we cannot grasp the nature of Loria's own affiliation to Marx, unless we realise precisely what the Italian economist means by the speciously familiar terms "income," "subsistence," "unproductive labourers," "recipients of income," and the like. The familiarity of the words makes them all the more misleading to those who do not hold the Lorian clue to guide them through the economic labyrinth. Does this sound alarming? Yet Loria's doctrines, like those of Marx, like those of Darwin, like those of--but we must not say "like those of Kant"--are simplicity itself to anyone who is able to survive the first shock of the encounter, to surmount the first agony of a new idea. In our own view the difficulty of economics in large part depends upon the fact that it is either a system of apologetics or else a system of attack. There are, in fact, two conflicting sciences: the economic science of the master class, and the economic science of the proletariat. Both are necessarily tendentious, and the conflicting tendencies will remain irreconcilable as long as the class struggle continues. Not until that struggle has been fought to a successful issue, not until the co-operative commonwealth has come into existence, can there be a comparatively dispassionate political economy. As dispassionate as conic sections it can never be, for it is biological, sociological, is by its very nature tinged with human interest, and can therefore never be wholly impartial. But many of the contradictions and perplexities of economics are by no means inherent; they are, we contend, no more than confusing reflexes of the class struggle. Loria seems to hold a somewhat similar opinion. In _Contemporary Social Problems_ (pp. 99, 100) he writes: "I am inclined to consider political economy and socialism as two intellectual weapons which, for a long time separate and mutually antagonistic owing to the apologetic theories of the one and the subversive utopianism of the other, are drawing closer and closer together as they become more human and the old animosities disappear. Perhaps the day is not far distant when the two forces will unite under one standard." To a casual reader this might suggest that Loria thinks that the class struggle, that the conflict between orthodox economics and socialism, can be overcome within the framework of the bourgeois economy--that the capitalist Old-Man-of-the-Sea can at one and the same time remain seated upon the back of the proletarian Sindbad the Sailor, and walk beside him amicably arm in arm as the two climb the mount of human endeavour. But an attentive student of Loria's _Karl Marx_ will realise that when the Italian speaks of "a day not far distant," he means the morrow of the social revolution, when Marx's promethean work shall have been completed, and when, led by Marx "the emperor in the realm of mind," the human race shall have reached "the brilliant goal which awaits it in a future not perhaps immeasurably remote" (infra p. 162). For Loria, one of the greatest living champions of the doctrine of economic determinism, sees no difficulty in reconciling that doctrine with a firm belief in the magistral efficacy, at the stage which evolution has now reached, of the deliberate human will. "The economic natural force," writes Eduard Bernstein (_Evolutionary Socialism_, p. 14), "like the physical, changes from the ruler of mankind to its servant, according as its nature is recognised." Herein is embodied the application in the special economic field of the profound general truth that by scientific study man, the child of nature, learns to control nature, and thereby to mould his own being and social environment in accordance with the dictates of his own enlightened will. Similarly Loria is far from the rigid economic determinism which would refuse to admit the existence of "ideal" causation, or the possibility in the sphere of sociology of intelligently adapting means to ends. "Idealism" is a word which has been soiled by such ignoble use that one really hesitates to employ it; but we must distinguish between idealism and sentimentalism, and between idealism and window dressing. The right sort of idealism is realist idealism, and Loria is a realist idealist. He distinguishes clearly between fatalism and quietism, on the one hand, and economic determinism tempered by rationalist guidance, on the other. In _The Economic Foundations of Society_ (pp. 376 et seq.) he writes: "Can we say that a doctrine leads to fatalism which concedes a fertile field to human activity, and which only seeks to mark out the limits within which such efforts may be applied? Can we give the name of quietism to a theory whose aims lie in the direction of substituting enlightened action, aware of its ends, for blind and ignorant innovation which is powerless to realise its purposes?... Turning to consider the great social transformations which alter the structure of property, our theory does, it is true, deny that such movements can be effected before the necessary change in economic conditions has rendered them inevitable; but far from this conclusion leading to the degradation of human nature, it seems to us to inspire the highest sentiments. If we examine the great spontaneous movements that have sought to modify economic conditions before their time, we shall find that they all lacked definite purpose. There was no clear idea of the new order of things to be substituted for the old; on this account these movements were wanting in discipline; they were anarchic, and hence their lack of effect. Our theory, on the contrary, declares that it is first of all necessary to learn the nature of the future social system, and, after this knowledge has been acquired, to substitute a co-ordination of effort towards this rigorously determined end for the blind and disorganised attempts that have thus far been made in this direction.... Far from leading towards fatalism our theory tends to encourage rational human activity, which alone can prevent, or at least mitigate, the confusion otherwise attendant upon the social metamorphosis.... A wide field is thus opened to human activity, and it is certainly a noble mission for mankind to withdraw social development from the operation of the blind and brutal forces of physical evolution and to submit the process to the kindlier and more civilised action of human reason." The definitive exposition of Loria's views is to be found in _The Economic Synthesis_; but since in his theory of social evolution the effects of increasing population play so notable a part, reference must first be made to his examination of Malthus' theory of population. At the outset, however, let us recall Marx's attitude to the Malthusian doctrine. Marx rejected the idea that, for human beings, population tends to grow in such a manner as necessarily to press on the means of subsistence. Though he accepted Darwinism and had a profound admiration for Darwin, as far as the human species is concerned he rejected Malthusianism (on which Darwinism is based), and wrote of Malthus in terms of bitter personal hostility. The animus we may ignore, but the arguments are worth recapitulating. Pressure of population, he says, is the outcome of capitalism. On p. 645 of _Capital_ Marx writes: "The labouring population ... produces, along with the accumulation of capital produced by it, the means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous, is turned into a relatively surplus population, and it does this always to an increasing extent. This is a law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode of production, and in fact every special historic mode of production has its own special laws of population, historically valid within its limits alone. An abstract law of population exists for plants and animals only, and only in so far as man has not interfered with them." Later in the same chapter he says (in effect) that undue fertility is characteristic of poverty-stricken circumstances, and that with improved conditions the population difficulty tends to settle itself. We shall see that Loria says much the same thing, and shall consider the assertion presently. At a later date (1875) Marx writes somewhat more guardedly. In his _Criticism of the Gotha Programme_ the reference to the Malthusian doctrine of population runs as follows: "But if I accept this law [the iron law of wages] as formulated by Lassalle, I must likewise accept its foundation. What is this foundation? As F. A. Lange showed shortly after Lassalle's death, the iron law of wages is founded upon Malthus' theory of population, a theory which Lange himself espoused. Now if the iron law of wages be correct, it is impossible to abrogate it, even if we should do away with wage labour a hundred times over, for not the wage system alone, but every social system, must be governed by the law. Upon this foundation, for fifty years and more, economists have continued to demonstrate that socialism could never suppress poverty, which they regard as resulting from the nature of things. Socialism, they declare, can only generalise poverty, can only diffuse it simultaneously over the whole surface of society!" Does it not almost seem as if Marx, by 1875, had, for a moment at least, glimpsed the real difficulty? For if we grant for the sake of argument that the excess of population under capitalism be only a relative excess, if we grant that each historic mode of production has its own special law of population, the question we have to ask ourselves as socialists is, "What will be the law of population under socialism?" May not socialism tend to promote an _absolute_ excess of population? Will not natural increase, stimulated by easy circumstances, threaten the stability of the system unless the growth of population be deliberately checked? Will not the inhabitants of each area have to specify some limit beyond which it is undesirable that the population of that area should increase? Ways and means, social and individual, lie beyond our present scope. But in our opinion Paul Lafargue, Henry George, and many others who have written on this question, and who have endeavoured to meet the Malthusian difficulty by a simple denial of the facts upon which "Parson Malthus" grounded his theory, have displayed more zeal than knowledge. As Karl Pearson wrote thirty years ago: "Marx by abusing Malthus has not solved the population difficulty"; and we agree with the same writer that "the acceptance of the law discovered by Malthus is an essential of any socialistic theory which pretends to be scientific"; but happily it is no longer true that "Kautsky seems to stand alone among socialists in accepting the Malthusian law and its consequences" (_The Ethic of Free-thought_, 1888, pp. 438-9). Loria's treatment of the subject is closely akin to that of Marx, though Loria differs from Marx in that he speaks with admiration, nay almost with veneration, of the author of _The Principles of Population_. As regards the main issue, Loria contends that while Malthus elucidated a profoundly important truth, he erred in respect of many of its applications. In present conditions, i.e., under capitalism, says Loria, there is no excess of population over food supply, but merely (in certain countries) an excess of people in relation to the privately owned capital which is able to secure profitable investment. Hence, as a result not of over-population but simply of capitalist conditions, we have in addition to the mass of the workers who obtain subsistence, on the one hand an owning class with a superfluity, and on the other a parasitic class of dependents, paupers, semi-criminals, and criminals. He contends, further, that Malthus' theory is invalidated by the ascertained fact that, as far as human beings are concerned, an excess of food over population does not necessarily lead to an increase in the birth rate--that a rising standard of life is nowadays apt to be characterised by diminished procreation. Speaking of certain postmalthusian applications of Malthus' theory, he writes (_Contemporary Social Problems_, p. 79): "Some also suggest various physiological expedients--the obscene abominations of the so-called neomalthusians--to limit population. Do they not see that there is no excess of mouths to be fed, and that procreation will of itself diminish with the amelioration of the condition of the working classes, without recourse to loathsome and unnatural practices?" In this passage, as repeatedly in his _Malthus_, Loria fails oddly (for so acute a mind) in his analysis of operating causes. As the result of a rising standard of life--consequent upon improved economic conditions among the proletariat--the workers, we are told (_Malthus_, p. 80), "become less prolific." Thus the growth of population is "automatically" regulated by economic means, and there is no need to have recourse to "physiological expedients" to limit population. Yet he nowhere endeavours to elucidate the working of this economic factor in the biologic field, or to show how it can possibly operate unless precisely in virtue of what he is so strangely and so inconsistently moved to condemn, viz., the deliberate application of increasing physiological knowledge by individual couples in order to regulate the number of their offspring. In a word, by birth control. As far as past stages of economic evolution are concerned, the transition from primitive tribal communism to slavery, from slavery to serfdom and the guild system, and from these to capitalism, Loria himself insists that the prime motive force has been the pressure of increasing population on the means of subsistence. Thus in _Contemporary Social Problems_ (pp. 128 et seq.) he writes: "We easily understand how evolution takes place in the sphere of economic phenomena provided we steadfastly hold in mind the simple premise that ceaseless increase in population makes necessary the occupation and cultivation of lands ever less fertile, hence requiring more efficacious means of production to combat the increasing resistance of matter. Given, therefore, a certain density of population and a certain degree of fertility of cultivated land, there is rendered not only possible, but also necessary, a determinate economic system permitting human labour to attain a commensurate productivity; but population increasing, and the necessity of cultivating less fertile lands becoming urgent, the economic system hitherto existing proves inadequate, since the degree of productivity which it permits to labour is insufficient to combat matter now become more rebellious. As the economic and productive system which corresponded with the preceding degree of the productivity of the soil has grown incompatible with the new and more exacting conditions, it must be supplanted by a better system. Then follows an epoch of social disintegration which destroys the superannuated form, from whose ashes a new structure arises; on the ruins of the shattered economic system is erected a new one which allows human nature to become more productive, and is therefore adapted, for a time, to combat the increasing resistance of matter. However, with each additional increment to population, a moment comes when it is necessary to bring under cultivation lands which are still more resistant, and for the development of which the prevailing economic system is found to be inadequate; consequently this system suffers the fate of those which have preceded it, and it is in turn destroyed to give place to a new and superior form." The detailed application of these ideas is one of the main themes of Loria's _Analysis of Capitalist Property_. We learn, he says, from history and statistics that capitalistic property (the term is here used by Loria in the widest sense to include all the forms of property which render possible the exploitation of one human being by another) is everywhere and at all times due to one and the same cause, the suppression of free land. As long as there is any free land, as long as any man who so desires can take possession of a piece of land and develop it by his labour, capitalistic property is impossible, because no man will willingly work for another when he can establish himself for his own account on a piece of land without paying for it. Where there is free land, labour owns the means of production, so that agriculture is carried on by free peasants on small holdings, whilst manufacturing industry (in so far as this exists at such a stage) is in the hands of independent artisans. In these conditions labour is isolated, and isolated labour rarely produces anything more than the labourer's subsistence. The regular supplementary production of "income" is the characteristic feature of associated labour. This brings us to _The Economic Synthesis_, a work which bears as sub-title "A Study of the Laws of Income." It is, Loria tells us, "the complement and the theoretic crown" of all his earlier writings. The meaning he attaches to the word income is, in truth, simple enough; but that meaning is the very core of Lorianism, just as surplus value is (for many) the very core of Marxism. Isolated labour, labour of the kind described in the last paragraph, produces, says Loria, first of all subsistence--the bare necessities of life. In exceptionally favourable conditions even isolated labour may produce something more than this, and that something more is income. But as a rule, and more and more as population increases and land of diminishing fertility has to be brought under cultivation, _isolated_ labour fails to produce anything beyond subsistence, fails to produce even that, so that it becomes necessary to have recourse to the superior productivity of _associated_ labour. Now for this, since the natural man is averse from associated labour, some form of _coercion_, direct or indirect, is essential; and the history of all the developed economic systems that have hitherto prevailed is the history, in one form or another, of the _coercion to associated labour_. Income, in the Lorian sense of the term, is "the specific product of associated labour"; i.e., it is the surplus produced by labour because it is associated, over and above what the labourers could have produced in isolation. Working in isolation they produce, or theoretically might have produced, subsistence for themselves; associated they produce something more, which is income, and this accrues to those who control and direct the associating force. In primitive tribal communism that force emanates from the collectivity of economic equals, and the "undifferentiated income" is communally owned and consumed. But subsequently "differentiated income," received by non-labourers, makes its appearance. In slave-owning communities, differentiated income goes to the slave owners; in feudal serfdom, it accrues to the baronage; under modern capitalist conditions the dispossessed proletarian masses produce of course their own subsistence, and produce in addition income for the legal owners of land and capital. Slave owners, barons, capitalists, are in successive stages the "recipients of [differentiated] income." Throughout the history of these economic phases there has been a conflict between the interests of the labourers and those of the recipients of income, taking the form, in times of exceptional stress, of slave insurrections and slave wars, of jacqueries and ruthless reprisals by the baronage, of strikes and lock-outs. Here we have one aspect of what Loria terms "the struggle between subsistence and income," and this aspect coincides obviously enough with one aspect of the Marxist class struggle. The association of labour is the prime cause of labour's enhanced productivity. But while the association increases productivity, the coercion that is requisite to secure association exercises a restrictive influence upon productivity, the restriction being more marked in proportion to the severity of the coercion. Thus the crude and harsh coercion of the slave-owning system makes slave labour (in part for psychological reasons dependent upon the mentality of the labourer) less productive than serf labour under the feudal system, wherein coercion was somewhat milder. In modern capitalism coercion, though still very real, is veiled, and for this reason (quite apart from the peculiar advantages of machinofacture) associated labour is more productive under capitalism. It is the superior productivity of each successive system which has rendered it victorious over its predecessor. With the dry light of economic science Loria displays for us the working of the type of production dominant to-day, the most effective system of production the world has yet known. Such is Loria's outline picture of the succession of economic phases. It is impossible here to trace the Italian economist's detailed analysis of the causes which lead to the break up of one economic system and its replacement by another. Suffice it to say that in his view an important part is played by the action of those whom he calls "unproductive labourers," members of the educated caste living also on differentiated income, on portions of income reallotted by the primary recipients of income, whose interests, in the prosperous phase of any system of income, the educated caste is thus paid to serve. A typical service is that of the priestly order, which is maintained "to pervert the egoism" of the labourers, to delude them into the belief that they are pursuing their own better interests by peacefully and diligently producing income for the master class. But in the declining phase of any economic system (and Loria considers that the wage system of capitalism has now, despite its imposing appearance, actually entered its declining phase), the diminution of income curtails the amount available for reallotment to the unproductive labourers. Hence from supporters of the existing system they are speedily transformed into its active opponents. These "intellectuals" now make common cause with the labourers, the disinherited of the earth; and the old property system totters to its fall. He writes (_The Economic Foundations of Society_, p. 347): "All revolutions undertaken by the non-proprietary classes alone, without the support of the unproductive labourers, are ... foredoomed to failure. The rebels, divided and disorganised, not at all sure of themselves and uncertain of the ends they would attain, soon fall back under the dominion of the proprietary class.... The ancient economy was not destroyed by the revolt of the slaves, nor was the ruin of the medieval economy effected by the armed uprising of the serfs. These two economic systems did not succumb until the clients of the Roman economy and the ecclesiastics of the medieval economy were induced by a falling-off of their share in the constantly decreasing revenues [income] to break their long-standing alliance with the revenue holders [recipients of income] and to lend their support to the final revolt of the labouring classes." To the Lorian theory of revolution we shall return in conclusion, after we have discussed the relationships of Loria to Marx. The theory involves tactical questions of the utmost interest and importance. Apart from these, the crux of the problem of transition to the co-operative commonwealth centres, as most thoughtful socialists are coming to see, around the question of the coercion to associated labour. A fundamental part of the socialist outlook is the belief that the existence of a special class of recipients of income, whether these be slave owners, feudal barons, or legal monopolists of land and capital, is not needful to modern civilisation. We affirm that the disappearance of such a class (though that class may have played a necessary part in social evolution) can now be witnessed by the enlightened without a single regret. But what is to ensure the continuance of that high social productivity which will be necessary to the maintenance of general wellbeing? Now that our race is at length becoming truly self-conscious, will it be possible "to transform the economic natural force from the ruler of mankind to its servant?" The closing sentences of The _Economic Synthesis_ show in outline how Loria envisages that possibility: "The essential social contradiction can be eliminated, economic equilibrium can be established, only by means of a profound transformation, affecting not merely the process of distribution but also the process of production, relieving this latter process from the coercion which has hitherto environed it and restricted its efficiency; in other words by the destruction of the coercive association of labour and its replacement by the free association of labour. Herein is to be found the supreme objective towards which must converge all the forces of social renovation." And in a terminal footnote he adds: "This is now understood by all the most enlightened economists, not excepting the socialists, who point out that a reform which effects no more than the distribution of income among the proletarians, while leaving unaffected the method by which that income is actually produced, would have no more than an extremely restricted and fugitive effect; and that a decisive and durable social renovation must be initiated by a radical metamorphosis in the process of production." We have now to ask, what does Loria consider the most important elements of Marxist teaching? In his account of the _Communist Manifesto_ (infra p. 68) he tells us that "this writing contains the whole Marxist system in miniature, and ... supplies a critique of all doctrinaire, idealist, and utopian forms of socialism. Thus the _Manifesto_ voices the two fundamentals of Marxism: the dependence of economic evolution upon the evolution of the instrument of production, in other words the _technicist determination of economics_; and the derivation of the political, moral, and ideal order from the economic order, in other words the _economic determination of sociology_--or, as we should express it to-day, historical materialism." On pp. 145 and 146 he tells us that we must "recognise in Marx the supreme merit of having been the first to introduce the evolutionary concept into the domain of sociology, the first to introduce it in the only form appropriate to social phenomena and social institutions; not as" an "unceasing and gradual upward movement," but as a "succession of age-long cycles rhythmically interrupted by revolutionary explosions." Speaking of Marx's "masterly investigation into the successive forms of the technical instrument, of productive machinery," he says that Marx may be termed "the Darwin of technology.... This physiology of industry, which is now the least studied and least appreciated of Marx's scientific labours, nevertheless constitutes his most considerable and most enduring contribution to science." Loria wrote his _Karl Marx_ nearly two years before the publication of William Paul's _The State_, of which pp. 2 to 7, the section on "Man and Tools" is devoted to a restatement of this aspect of Marxism; and the Italian economist is not acquainted with the thought-trend of Walton Newbold. As far as the young but rapidly growing and vigorous school of British Marxists is concerned, it is certainly no longer true that Marx's work as "the Darwin of technology" is the least studied and least appreciated of Marx's scientific labours. To the class struggle Loria does not refer at any length in this essay on Karl Marx. We have already seen that he recognises the enormous part the class struggle has played in history; but he has throughout life remained the man of science, the man of the study; he has never entered the arena as what the French term a "militant." In 1904, when the Italian Socialist Party wished him to be socialist parliamentary candidate for Turin, Loria refused on the ground that parliamentary life would interfere with his theoretical studies; and it may be that for these and other reasons he is less keenly impressed than are most left-wing socialists of the profound importance of diffusing among the workers awareness of the class struggle. Economic determinism has been sufficiently considered in what has gone before. If in the present study Loria says less about it than about some of the other elements of Marxism, this is not because he considers it of minor importance, nor because he accepts it uncritically, but because he has devoted an entire volume to the exposition of this aspect of reality. It remains, then, to discuss Loria's outlook on the Marxist theory of value. It is here that Lorianism will be most strenuously challenged by those more enthusiastic disciples of Marx who, even if they do not accept the dogma of Marx's infallibility, none the less regard the doctrine of value, based on the labour theory of value, as the very heart of Marxist socialism. We must remember that it is natural for persons who do not gain their subsistence by applying their labour power to the production of commodities, and whose claim to the title of "workers" will nevertheless hardly be disputed, to question the labour theory of value. Bernard Shaw, for example, in his pamphlet _The Impossibilities of Anarchism_, protests that it is "natural for the [manual] labourer to insist that labour _ought to be_ the measure of price, and that the just wage of labour is its average product; but the first lesson he has to learn in economics is that labour is not and never can be the measure of price under a competitive system. Not until the progress of socialism replaces competitive production and distribution with individual greed for its incentive, by collectivist production and distribution with fair play all round for its incentive, will the prices either of labour or of commodities represent their just value." Leaving Shaw to the tender mercies of the orthodox Marxists who will not be slow to declare that if he means "value" he should not say "price," and that if he thinks that "price" and "value" are interchangeable terms he is not worth powder and shot, and without ourselves venturing to rush into the fray, we may suggest that our propagandists would be less inclined to make the Marxist theory of value an article of faith, "which faith except everyone do keep whole and undefiled without doubt he shall perish everlastingly"--if they could realise that the theory is perhaps no more than a difficult point of abstract economic doctrine which is not essential to the use of the conception of surplus value as a means of making the worker aware of the basic character of capitalist exploitation. Bernstein explains the matter very well in the book previously quoted (p. 35): "Practical experience shows that in the production and distribution of commodities a part only of the community takes an active share, whilst another part consists of persons who either enjoy an income for services which have no direct relation to the process of production, or have an income without working at all. An essentially greater number of men thus live on the labour of all those engaged in production than are actively engaged in it, and income statistics show that the classes not actively engaged in production appropriate, moreover, a much greater share of the total produced than the ratio of their number to that of the actively producing class. The surplus labour of the latter is an empiric fact, demonstrable by experience, which needs no deductive proof. Whether the Marxist theory of value be correct or not, is quite immaterial to the proof of surplus labour. It is in this respect no demonstration, but only a means of analysis and illustration." The professional economist, however, cannot rest content with these loose formulations. Loria feels that there is a void in the Marxist system, and it seems to us (though Loria nowhere tells us so in set terms) that the Lorian doctrine of differentiated income, the most essential part of the Italian economist's teaching, is really an attempt to restate the theory of surplus value in a form absolutely proof against enemy attack. Be this as it may, the conception, however interesting, is far less easy to convey to the uninstructed mind, and it is unlikely, for propaganda purposes, to replace the simple formula of surplus value. But is it not essential that those who undertake to teach socialist economics should themselves fully understand the objections to the Marxist theory of value, and that they should have a clear grasp of Loria's alternative doctrine of the nature of capitalist exploitation? Let us return, in conclusion, to the Lorian theory of revolution. If we may summarise that theory in colloquial phraseology, it is that, while economic evolution must pave the way for revolution, the final stages of revolution have been effected in the past, and can only be effected in the future, through the co-operation of "disgruntled intellectuals." These are the "unproductive labourers" of Loria's scheme, who have served as hirelings of the master class during the prosperous phase of an economic system: but in the declining phase of that system, when the diminution of income curtails the amount available for these secondary recipients of income, they turn against the primary recipients, their employers, make common cause with the subject class, and give the death-blow to the old order. This may possibly have been true of the fall of the slave economy, and it may possibly have been true of the fall of the medieval economy; but we do not think it is true that a revolution of the non-proprietary classes under capitalism is "foredoomed to failure" unless these classes secure the support of the unproductive labourers. Their support for a genuinely _proletarian_ revolution can hardly be expected, on Loria's own theory. The intellectuals who aided in the overthrow of the slave economy, and the intellectuals who helped to subvert the feudal order and to promote the bourgeois and industrial revolution, did so, says Loria, in order to maintain their position as "recipients of income," to maintain their position as members of a privileged class. What have such as they to gain from a proletarian revolution, which will abolish class, will put an end to exploitation, will do away for ever with the private appropriation of income and surplus value? We need only turn our eyes eastward to see how such "intellectuals" will hail the revolution of the propertiless. Despite the onslaughts of the capitalist powers, the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic has lived long enough to show the sort of help socialists may expect from the Kerenskys. Men of this calibre, "people whose interests lie in the opposite direction," even if they "are carried away by the new ideas and enter the lists for the new order of things" (Boudin, _The Theoretical System of Karl Marx_, 1918), are aghast when the real revolution comes, and endeavour to lay the red spectre they have helped to conjure up. In truth, a revolution foredoomed to failure would be that of proletarians who should depend in large measure upon the support of disgruntled intellectuals. A serf's life was on the average better than that of a chattel slave; a wage labourer's life is on the average better than was that of slave or serf. But neither the replacement of slavery by feudalism, nor the replacement of feudalism by capitalism, secured the emancipation of labour in any adequate sense of that term. All that a proletarian revolution carried through with the help of middle-class intellectuals is likely to bring about is some form of Fabian collectivism or state capitalism--in a word, the servile state. As far as the _productive_ labourers are concerned the revolution would be a sham. The form of the state might be revolutionised, but the authoritative state would endure, and production would be effected, not by the free, but by the coercive association of labour. What Loria has failed to recognise is that the conditions of the problem are now radically changed. As he says, in the old revolutions the rebels were divided and disorganised, were not sure of themselves, and were uncertain of the ends they would attain. As far as the workers were concerned, revolt only was possible, not revolution. It is otherwise to-day; and still more will it be otherwise the day after to-morrow. Thanks to the new forms of organisation now being worked out: thanks to industrial unionism and the growth of the workers committees and shop stewards movements; and thanks above all to independent working class education, which is forging the new weapons and simultaneously teaching the workers how to use them, which is fashioning the limbs of the co-operative commonwealth within the womb of the capitalist order--thanks to all these things, the workers of the day after to-morrow need not put their trust in the frail reed of the support of intellectuals. Once more we raise the Marxist slogan and cry: "The emancipation of the workers must be the work of the workers themselves." And if we modify another Marxist watchword, quoted on p. 154 below, that force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one, it is only to say that, while we do not repudiate force (which the skilled accoucheur ever has in reserve), new times bring new methods. The self-educated workers of the future may have no occasion to use force, and certainly need not await the aid of Loria's unproductive labourers. For the day draws nigh, and on that day the workers will achieve their own salvation. They will achieve the salvation of all the workers, and indeed of all the world of man; but it will not be all the workers that will actively participate. No more will be possible than that there should be a considerable minority of educated workers. A minority they must inevitably remain until after the social revolution; but a little leaven can leaven a large lump. The midwife of revolution is not force but--independent working class education. In a word, the "dynamogenic function" of which Loria speaks (infra pp. 159 and 160), attaches not to poverty but to slavery. The poor have seldom failed to realise their poverty, and poverty when extreme has at times led to revolt; but it is the new realisation of the _slavery_ of wagedom that is organising the workers for the social revolution. By means of Marxist education "the proletarian is breaking his chains and entering upon an era of conscious and glorious freedom." Do we seem to imply that there is no place in our movement for middle-class intellectuals? Such is not our meaning. They have played in the past a rôle of supreme importance, and may still have a notable part to play in the future. But the intellectuals for whom there is a place are not the kind of intellectuals described in Loria's theory of revolution, and the rôle of the intellectual is no longer the one which he assigns. It is not those intellectuals who are dissatisfied with their reallotment of income, not those who are discontented with their ration of loaves and fishes, not those who sigh for the vanishing cakes and ale, who will help the coming of the definitive social revolution. Rarely indeed, too, is the function of the socialist intellectual the function of leadership. To an increasing extent, under the new conditions, he tends to be no more than the fifth wheel of the revolutionary coach. The right sort of intellectual had a function in the past; it was to help the workers to overcome their division and disorganisation, to help them to be sure of themselves, to help them to clear views of the ends they must attain. That work is afoot. The ferment has been created: created by such men as Marx, whose abilities would have secured him ease, comfort, wealth, had he made his peace with bourgeoisdom, but who was a revolutionist by deliberate choice; by such men as Engels, a well-to-do manufacturer; by such men as Loria himself, a university professor; by such men as the American, Scott Nearing, who recently forfeited his academic position because he would not keep the class struggle out of his lectures on economics. Can it be said that men like Herzen, Bakunin, and Kropotkin, have been, or that men like Trotzky and Lenin are, the disgruntled intellectuals of Loria's theory of revolution? Quite apart from leadership under such peculiar conditions as obtain in Russia, there is work for socialist intellectuals, the work of promoting independent working-class education, the work of assisting in the spread of the ferment generated by the writings of earlier revolutionary thinkers. Our conviction that we ourselves, declassed bourgeois, have a modest function, that though not part of the team, not even spokes of a fifth wheel, we may at least help to complete the outfit as little dogs under the waggon, is witnessed by our translation of Achille Loria's monograph on Karl Marx. EDEN AND CEDAR PAUL. LONDON, _The Centenary of Karl Marx_. KARL MARX CHAPTER I It is unquestionably one of the strangest of anomalies exhibited by the polychrome flora of human thought that revolutionary blossoms should so frequently spring from aristocratic seeds, and that the most incendiary and rebellious spirits should emerge from a domestic and social environment compounded of conservatism and reaction. Yet when we look closely into the matter, we find it less strange than it may have appeared at first sight. It is, in fact, not difficult to understand that those only who live in a certain milieu can fully apprehend its vices and its constitutional defects, which are hidden as by a cloud from those who live elsewhere. It is true enough that many dwellers in the perverted environment lack the intelligence which would enable them to understand its defects. Others, again, are induced by considerations of personal advantage to close their eyes to the evils they discern, or cynically to ignore them. But if a man who grows to maturity in such an environment be at once intelligent and free from base elements, the sight of the evil medium from which he himself has sprung will arouse in his mind a righteous wrath and a spirit of indomitable rebellion, will transform the easy-going and cheerful patrician into the prophet and the revolutionary. Such has been the lot of the great rebels of the world, of men like Dante, Voltaire, Byron, Kropotkin, and Tolstoi, who all sprang from the gentle class, and whose birthright placed them among the owners of property. Similar was the lot of Karl Marx. It would, indeed, be difficult to imagine a more typically refined and aristocratic entourage than the one wherein the future high priest of the revolution was born and passed his early years. He was born at Treves on May 5, 1818. His ancestors on both sides had been distinguished rabbis, famed for their commentaries on the scriptures. The father's family was originally known as Mordechai, whilst the mother's family, Pressburg by name, had come from Hungary to settle in Holland. His father, an employee in the state service, became a Christian, and the whole family was baptised when Karl was five years of age. As he grew up, the young man was an intimate in the best houses of the district, and one of his closest friends was Edgar von Westphalen, who subsequently became a member of the reactionary Manteuffel ministry. In 1843 Marx married Westphalen's sister, the beautiful and brilliant Jenny. The match proved well assorted, and was blessed by a love so intense and so unfailing as to lead a certain German pastor to say that it had been ratified in heaven. Thus by origin Marx belonged to an extremely ancient stock devoted to the accumulation of wealth, whilst his marriage united him to the race of German feudatories, fierce paladins of the throne and of the altar. Is it not then truly remarkable that from such an environment, eminently calculated to foster ideas of obscurantism and reaction, there should emerge the most brilliant, most consistent, and most invincible example of a thinker and revolutionary agitator? Unquestionably, Marx's thought, essentially slow-moving, laborious, and ever subjected to a rigorous process of self-criticism, does not seem at first sight characteristically negational and rebellious. In youth, indeed, he was still no more than the earnest student. Engels tells us that he closed his university career at Bonn in 1841 by writing a brilliant thesis upon the philosophy of Epicurus, while in leisure moments Marx penned verses of no mean order. These latter compositions display numerous defects of style; they are heavy and turgid; the movement is sluggish; their sonorous gravity reminds the reader of a company of medieval warriors in heavy armour mounting the grand staircase: but they are none the less distinguished by remarkable profundity of thought, and they may be looked upon as versified philosophy rather than as poetry in the proper sense of the term. In the following year we find Marx at Cologne as editor of the "Rhenish Gazette." His editorials, it is true, were at first devoted to harmless topics of general interest; but he soon began to turn his attention to social questions, such as forest thefts, the subdivision of landed property, the condition of the peasantry in the Moselle district, and French socialism. To this last doctrine, the editor declared himself adverse, while professing a great personal admiration for Proudhon. But the discussion upon socialism revealed to him his own ignorance and incompetence, and induced him to withdraw from the journalistic arena that he might devote himself to study. An excuse for resigning his editorship was furnished in 1843, when the "Rhenish Gazette" found it necessary to assume an extremely cautious tone in order to avoid the attentions of the police. But, like all the more brilliant and free-spirited among his contemporaries, he soon found himself incommoded by the obscurantism of Prussia, and, accompanied by his young wife, he hastened to Paris, the city of light, where there shortly assembled a circle of intellectual rebels from all lands--France, Germany, England, Italy, and Russia. The Russians predominated, and indeed we learn from Marx himself that the most fervent of his disciples at this date were drawn from among the scions of the Russian nobility and upper bourgeoisie, who, when they returned to their country, were unhesitatingly to become the sycophants of authority. In this cohort of spiritual rebels he assumed from the first the position of dictator, and none competed for the crown with the revolutionary Cæsar. People were already beginning to talk of the Marxists, and the police made a black cross against the name of a Parisian café where the associates of Marx were wont to assemble. He struck up a friendship with Heinrich Heine, and one day, accompanied by his staff, he paid a formal visit to the poet and declared that the latter ought to divide among the exiles the pension granted him by Guizot, to which suggestion Heine cynically replied that he could spend the pension more profitably upon himself. Marx had a yet closer intimacy with Proudhon, with whom he passed long evenings talking about Hegel and discussing the problems of socialism; but this friendship was destined ere long to be replaced by fierce hostility, aroused by fundamental differences of opinion. In 1844, in conjunction with Arnold Ruge, Marx founded the "Franco-German Year Book," of which, however, there appeared but one volume, containing writings by Marx himself on the philosophy of law and upon the Jews, in addition to letters from Holland, and articles by Engels, Heine, Freiligrath, and other more or less rebellious spirits. These outward activities represent nothing more than an interlude or partial episode in the series of his essential occupations, science and philosophy. Engels' contribution to the "Year Book," a criticism of political economy, initiated between the two thinkers a friendship which time was to strengthen and to render indissoluble. The first fruit of this friendship was a joint work entitled _The Holy Family_, a criticism of the philosophy of Bruno Bauer and his followers (1845), stuffed with sallies and orphic sayings of doubtful taste and still more doubtful value. The young men next turned to a weightier task, a criticism of posthegelian philosophy, which filled two huge octavo manuscript volumes, but has never found a publisher. Nevertheless, Marx tells us, this enormous labour cannot be regarded as utterly wasted, for it enabled the writers to gain an understanding of themselves, and traced the lines by which henceforward they were to be safely guided through the labyrinth of social investigation. But revolutionary agitation (which Marx continued even amid his philosophical meditations), and the editorship of the definitely antiprussian journal "Forward," now attracted the hostile attention of the Prussian government, upon whose demand, in January, 1845, Guizot suppressed the periodical and expelled Marx from France. Marx removed to Brussels, where Engels was living, and for the first time devoted himself to prolonged and profound labours. In the year 1847, he published in the Belgian capital his book _The Poverty of Philosophy, a Reply to Proudhon's Philosophy of Poverty_, a harsh criticism of the "economic contradictions" of his rival. Marx reproached Proudhon for complete ignorance of that Hegelian philosophy which Proudhon tried to apply to economics, and reproached the French socialist yet more for arbitrary and fallacious expositions, for the idealisation of a tortuous series of fantastic categories (division of labour, machines, competition, rent, etc.), declaring that Proudhon confined himself in each case to an examination of the good and the bad effects without ever troubling to throw light upon the nature of the phenomena under consideration or upon the course of their formation and development. The criticism is apt, but might well rebound upon Marx himself, enmeshed at this epoch in a series of categories whose progressive evolution he arbitrarily asserted. Further, Marx fiercely criticised Proudhon's theory of "constituted value," according to which the reduction of value to labour cannot be effected in extant society, and must be deferred to the future society, fashioned in the brain of the thinker. It is well to point out that Marx, though in the first volume of _Capital_ he conceives the reduction of value to the quantity of effective labour to be one of the immanent laws of capitalist economy, nevertheless admits in the third volume that in the capitalist economic phase value neither is nor can be reduced to the quantity of labour, and that value as measured by labour is merely an archetype or suprasensible entity, but not a concrete reality. Substantially this means that Marx's labour measure of value is, after all, not essentially different from the constituted value of Proudhon. But amid these unjust or excessive criticisms, Marx's book gives utterance to the idea, profoundly true, and at that time practically original, that economic relationships are no mere arbitrary products or derivatives of human will, but are the inevitable issue of the existing condition of the forces of production. The deduction drawn from this is that utopian socialism, which exhausts itself in futile declamations or in yet more futile imaginary reconstructions of the social order, must yield place to scientific socialism, wholly devoted to the analysis of the necessary process of economic evolution and to the possibility of accelerating that evolution. The same idea can be read between the lines of the _Lecture on Free Exchange_ delivered by Marx at Brussels on January 9, 1849. Herein he asserted that socialism ought to declare in favour of freedom of trade, for this, hastening the dissolution of the old nationalities and accentuating the contrast between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, would precipitate the dissolution of the capitalist economy. But the idea is affirmed far more categorically in the _Manifesto of the Communist Party_, the joint composition of Engels and Marx, published in the year 1848, embodying the first and most decisive formulation of the latter's teaching. Even though some of his special theories, subsequently to secure fuller development in _Capital_, are but cursorily sketched in the _Manifesto_, even though some of these theories (for example, the theory of wages, stated to be the price of "wage labour" instead of being the price of "labour power") are still in an undeveloped and imperfect state, it is nevertheless true that this writing contains the whole Marxist system in miniature, and that it supplies a critique of all doctrinaire, idealist, and utopian forms of socialism. Thus the _Manifesto_ voices the two fundamentals of Marxism: the dependence of economic evolution upon the evolution of the instrument of production, in other words the _technicist determination of economics_; and the derivation of the political, moral and ideal order from the economic order, in other words the _economic determination of sociology_--or, as we should express it to-day, historical materialism. This dependence of the political order upon the economic order, leading as it does to the concentration of political power in the hands of those who hold economic power, or in the hands of their representatives and agents, renders absurd the idea of effecting by peaceful political means any amelioration in the condition of the proletarian classes, and indicates to the dispossessed that revolution is their only hope of salvation. To revolution, then, or to the compact federation which can alone pave the way for revolution, the _Manifesto_ incites the sufferers of the world with the historic phrase: "Workers of the world, unite." The epoch-making significance of the _Manifesto_ is not to-day disputed by the most resolute adversaries of that document. It is, in fact, the Declaration of Rights of the Fourth Estate, the Magna Charta of the revolutionary proletariat, the oriflamme of fire and blood, the standard round which the insurrectionary phalanxes have ever since mustered. Hardly had the message been launched upon the world when the young leader hoped to translate it into action, for the movements of 1848 and 1849 led the rebel masses to entertain new and bolder aspirations. Expelled from Belgium, Marx first went to Paris, and hastened thence to his German homeland, now in a ferment, assuming there editorial charge of the "New Rhenish Gazette." But although the skill of the able editor was for a brief period successful in saving the barque of the imperilled gazette from the waves of police persecution, a day soon arrived when the situation became untenable. An appeal to the German people published in the columns of the journal advocating a refusal to pay taxes led to its suppression and to two criminal charges against the editor. Triumphantly acquitted by the Cologne jury, but none the less exiled by the Prussian government, he immediately returned to Paris, where it seemed to his restless imagination that events were taking a more favourable turn. But France proved a no securer refuge than Germany, and the Parisian government propounded to our agitator a peremptory dilemma, interment in the remote department of Morbihan or exile from France. He was not likely to hesitate in his choice, and indeed at this juncture was glad to accept an invitation from the executive committee of the Communist Party, then centred in London, to remove with his devoted wife to that great metropolis (1849). CHAPTER II In London the saddest trials awaited him, for poverty, gloomy companion, sat ever at his board from the day of his entry into the British capital down to the hour of his last breath. One after another of his children died in the unwholesome dwellings of his exile, and he was forced to beg from friends and comrades the scanty coins needed to pay for their burial; he and his family had to make the best of a diet of bread and potatoes; he was forced to pawn his watch and his clothing, to sell his books, to tramp the streets in search of any help that might offer; the day came when, under the lash of hunger, he was compelled to contemplate seeking work as railway clerk, of placing his daughters out to service, of making them governesses or actresses, whilst himself retiring with his unhappy wife to dwell in the proletarian quarter of Whitechapel. The severity of these sufferings did much to add a tinge of gall to a character naturally acerb, a character which amid the upheavals and horrors of exile frequently showed itself far from amiable. Mingled sentiments of grief and anger fill our minds when, in Marx's private letters to Engels, we trace the manifestations of this harshness, which left him unmoved by the misfortunes of his dearest friends, which led him to make any use he could of these friends and then to overwhelm them with reproaches and accusations, which showed itself (and this is the worst of all) in a jealous hatred of comrades less unfortunate than himself. Deplorable from every point of view was his conduct towards Freiligrath and Lassalle, in especial towards Lassalle, who had shown him the utmost friendliness, had given him ample financial assistance, had entertained him in Berlin, had helped him to find a publisher; for Marx subsequently censured Lassalle's works with much acrimony, beheld his triumphs askance, and commented upon the incidents of Lassalle's death in a tone of tepid apology. But you well-fed folk who amid easy circumstances are studying the life of our agitator, be not too ready to blame him, and before stoning him bethink yourselves of all the miseries the exile must suffer, of all the tortures amid which he must bear his cross. Vainly did he endeavour by hard work to free himself from the sad restraints of poverty. It is true he was able to place articles with the "New York Tribune," writing for this paper essays on political, economic, and financial questions, which secured much appreciation. But the pay was only one pound per article, and he could write but one article a week. Collaboration in the production of an American encyclopædia, to be paid at the rate of two dollars a page, seemed to promise more ample funds, and with feverish anxiety he devoted himself to the production of articles on the most varied topics, well stored with facts. But this source of income, limited at best, was suddenly interrupted by the outbreak of the American civil war. The loss was not adequately compensated by the possibility of occasionally inserting some poorly paid contribution in a German newspaper like the "New Oder Gazette" or in one of the Viennese periodicals. He was lucky in that certain turns of fortune favoured him from those sources of property and inheritance which he condemned and attacked with such persistence and vehemence. He had a legacy from his mother-in-law; a legacy from his mother; a trifling legacy from an aunt; and Wilhelm Wolff, a companion in exile, bequeathed him £800. An uncle in Holland, whom he had begged for some trifling help, gave him £160; from Lassalle and Freiligrath came generous gifts; and Droncke, another companion in exile, gave £250 to enable him to complete the scientific work on which he was engaged. But none of these casual resources, however extensive, would have saved him from ruin had it not been for the providential assistance of his friend Friedrich Engels, who applied himself to the care of Marx with inexhaustible generosity, and with the tenderness of a woman. Engels, indeed, will secure a splendid place in the history of socialist thought, were it only because of the way in which he devoted himself to Marx. It was through Engels that Marx was enabled to continue his studies and to complete the work which is his title to eternal fame. Engels, a well-to-do cotton spinner at Manchester, gladly responded to his friend's unremitting requests for aid, succouring him in every emergency. Engels was an expert upon military topics, and penned articles which Marx passed on to the "Tribune" and to the encyclopædia, articles for which Marx was paid; Engels sent Marx weekly subsidies, and frequently despatched gifts of port wine; he made presents of £100 or £150 at a time; and at length, when his business prospered, he gave his friend a regular allowance of £350 a year. Not even these strokes of good luck sufficed, it is true, to restore a satisfactory balance to Marx's finances, for he was a bad manager, and the disorder was probably incurable. However, they enabled our thinker to furnish aid to companions yet more unfortunate, to Pieper, Eccarius, and Dupont; they enabled him to escape from the worst extremities of poverty and to establish himself in life under conditions more worthy of an honest and respectable bourgeois. He was able to move from the decayed neighbourhood of Soho Square and to settle in Maitland Park Road on Haverstock Hill; it became possible for him to secure a good education for his daughters, to have them taught French and Italian, drawing and music; he could weigh the financial status of aspirants to their hands, and could choose Lafargue and Longuet, who were comparatively well off. He often went to the theatre, and with one of his daughters he attended at the Society of Arts a soirée graced by the presence of royalty; from time to time he took his family to the seaside; he liked his wife to sign herself "Jenny, née Baronne de Westphalen"; he was well received in affluent circles, and was frequently consulted by the "Times" upon financial affairs; finally he accepted the office of constable of the vestry of St. Pancras, taking the customary oath, and donning the regulation uniform on gala occasions. Nevertheless, neither this final settlement in a foreign land nor the persecution he suffered from the government of his own country could destroy or even lessen his devotion to Germany. To the day of his death he remained a faithful child of the fatherland, for which he hoped the greatest of futures. He sang the praises of German music and literature; he delighted in German victories and German expansion; he dreaded a weakening of German protectionism which might strengthen the commercial hegemony of Britain; and in 1870 he refused to sign an appeal in favour of peace unless it were definitely stated that Germany was waging a purely defensive war. The French and Russian exiles in London were indignant, and circulated whispers that Marx was a Prussian emissary, and had received a bribe of £10,000. An idle tale! It is true that among German conservatives and among the beneficiaries of Germany there could not be found a supporter more sincere and more fervent than was this proscribed rebel. But he was no paladin on behalf of Prussian imperialism, as we can learn beyond dispute from a letter he sent to the "Daily News" in 1878 denouncing Bismarckian ambitions and the Bismarckian expansionist policy as a growing peril. Yet the supreme aim of his activity and his life enormously transcended the circumscribed range of country and of nation, for he aspired to a loftier goal, to the organisation of the mental and manual workers of all countries so that they might constitute a united revolutionary force. Within a brief time of his arrival in the British metropolis he again became the chief, nay the dictator, of a circle to which none could be admitted without passing a severe examination as to knowledge of science in general and of political economy in particular, an examination so rigorous that even Wilhelm Liebknecht was unable at first to satisfy its requirements, an examination that was physical as well as mental, for the aspirants were subjected (rejoice, shade of Lombroso!) to precise craniometrical tests. Thus our thinker, crowned as if by divine right with a kind of imperial halo, exercised undisputed sway over the troop of exiles, Pieper, Bauer, Blind, Biskamp, Eccarius, Liebknecht, Freiligrath, Cesare Orsini (brother of the regicide), and even over the revolutionary agitators in Germany. Soon, however, his mind was invaded and dominated by a yet more ambitious design, for he planned the formation of a society which should unite the proletarians of all the world into one formidable International, to resist the aggressions of capital and to work for the destruction of the capitalist system. It was at first an association of modest proportions, consisting merely of a few revolutionaries assembled in London. Marx absolutely refused the chairmanship, contenting himself with the post, ostensibly less important, of delegate for the German section. From the first formation of the new federation Marx did his utmost to counteract the influence of Mazzini, for Mazzini, through the instrumentality of two of his followers, Fontana and the elder Wolff, wished to inspire the International with his idealist conceptions and to initiate it into the secrets of conspiracy. Marx, on the other hand, was unwearying in his efforts to advocate his own view that material interests preponderate, and that these interests must be publicly asserted and defended in the arena of history. Soon the federation established branches in France, Germany, the United States, and even the Latin countries; and this involved for Marx, who was really the chief, a mass of work in the way of organisation, and of struggle against those who held conflicting views. Everywhere, in fact, he had to encounter trends differing from his own, and differing no less extensively one from another owing to the varying characters of the countries concerned. In Germany he had to fight the opportunism of Lassalle, a man inclined to compromises and to elastic unions with constituted authority. In France anti-intellectual tendencies were already manifest, so that there was an inclination to restrict the socialist outlook to an aspiration for immediately practical labour legislation of minor importance. In Italy and in Spain, Marx's troubles arose from the anarchist tendencies characteristic of those countries, tendencies fostered by the propaganda of Bakunin. As against these divergent aims, Marx, with inflexible tenacity, maintained his own programme with the utmost rigour, insisting that it was essential to federate the proletarian forces of the world into an invincible organisation which in all possible ways, by strikes, by parliamentary and legal methods, but also by force should need arise, should deliver onslaughts upon the bourgeoisie and upon constituted authority, should exact concessions of increasing importance, and should ultimately secure a complete triumph. The proletarians of the two hemispheres were not slow to accept the programme; and this man who was himself suffering from actual hunger, now secured a great position as a thinker, so that the operatives of Paris, New York, and Düsseldorf did honour to his name. These activities, however, did not completely interrupt his intellectual labours, for during the period at which we have now arrived he published in the "New York Tribune" a series of articles upon _Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany_ and upon _Political Struggles in France_. In 1852, in "The Revolution," published in the German tongue in New York, there had appeared the article _The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte_. Substantially these writings are an application of the materialist conception of history to the more conspicuous events of the recent political history of Germany and of France. In addition, Marx published in the "Tribune" a series of articles of a more distinctively political character, dealing with _The Eastern Question_, displaying marvellous erudition and a wonderful power of forecasting events. CHAPTER III Nevertheless, the organisation of the proletariat, and his journalistic labours, however intense and however weighty, did not represent in the life of Marx anything more than a vexatious parenthesis or a regrettable delay in the fulfilment of the supreme task he had set before himself from the very outset of his life in Britain. Hardly, in fact, had Marx settled down in the wonderful town of London, to the economist so inexhaustible a field for study and experience, than he proposed to rebuild from the foundations the entire edifice of his economic and statistical knowledge, which was at that time comparatively small when contrasted with the vast extent of his preliminary readings in philosophy. In the British Museum library, therefore, he plunged into the study of the classical economists of the island realm, showing inexhaustible patience in tracing the earliest and most trifling ramifications of economic science. Beginning with the study of the theory of rent, he went on to the study of money, of the relationship between the quantity of metal in circulation and the rate of exchange, of the influence of bank reserves upon prices, and so forth. He then devoted himself to the theories of value, profit, interest, and population. Simultaneously he studied without remission statistics, blue books, ministerial and parliamentary concerns. From all this gigantic toil he derived the materials for the writing of the work which was henceforward to be at once the sorrow and the joy of his life. His first intention was to limit himself to a critical history of political economy, or a detailed analysis of the theories which he had so often enunciated, as well as of the lacunae which had become apparent in them. But an unexpected result issued from the mental contact with this huge mass of science and analysis, for he believed that he had made a splendid and startling discovery whereby the sacred theory of profit could be utterly exploded. Now, therefore, he outlined the design of his great work, which was to consist of two parts; a first, historico-critical, intended to elucidate the different forms of the theory of profit as expounded by the various British economists; and a second, theoretical and constructive, which was to announce to the world the author's own doctrine. This method of exposition is substantially identical with that followed by Böhm-Bawerk in his _Capital and Interest_, and it corresponds moreover to the immediate requirements of the investigation, which ought to begin with the study of prevailing opinions and doctrines, and then only proceed to innovation. But a more attentive examination of the question soon convinced Marx that this would not be the most efficacious method of furnishing a theoretical reproduction of actualities, since, to this end, we must let the phenomena tell their own tale before we proceed to call to account those who have already analysed them, and before we draw attention to the ways in which their conception of the facts diverges from that which reality, when directly questioned, reveals. The method has ever been preferred by the most gifted theorists, and has been applied by Bergson with admirable dexterity in his _Creative Evolution_. Marx, therefore, never weary of destroying and refashioning, inverted his original design, and promptly began the study and analysis of concrete phenomena, to proceed then only to a criticism of the theories of his precursors. It was in accordance with such criteria that he wrote his _Criticism of Political Economy_, of which the first instalment was published at Berlin in 1859. The most notable portion of this work is the preface, which contains the first statement of the theory of historical materialism. The relationships of men in social life, says Marx, are determined by the conditions of production, are necessary relationships independent of the individual will; these determined relationships constitute the real foundation upon which is erected the legislative, political, moral, and religious superstructure of every age. The relationships of production, or the economic relationships prevailing at a given period, are a natural and necessary outcome of the method of production, or rather of the historic phase of the instrument of production. But sooner or later the further development of the productive forces generates a new configuration in technical method, a configuration incompatible with the prevailing relationships of production, those correlative to the productive order hitherto dominant. There then occurs an explosion, a social revolution, which disintegrates economic relationships, and, by ricochet, disintegrates existing social relationships, replacing them by better economic relationships, adequate to the new and more highly evolved phase of the productive instrument. In broad outline it may be said that economic evolution has exhibited four progressive phases; the Asiatic economy, the classical economy, the feudalist economy, and the modern bourgeois or capitalist economy. The evolution of the productive instrument, never arrested in its secular march, will in due course renew the eternally recurrent opposition between the method of production and the relationships of production, rendering these incompatible. Once more will come an explosion, the last of the great social convulsions, whereby the bourgeois economic order will be overthrown and will be replaced by the co-operative commonwealth. This new development will close the primary epoch of the history of human society. But the work we are discussing is further noteworthy inasmuch as it reflects a special phase of our author's thought, a thought which never ceased to exhibit a struggle between opposing trends and was ever oppressed by their contrast. The book, in fact, shows Marx continually involved in antiquated Hegelian machinery, or proceeding through a chain of categories evolving one from another--capital, landed property, the wage system, the state, foreign commerce, the world market. From each of these categories we may infer how the process of their successive development is accomplished. We are led to infer that the wage system is the outcome of landed proprietorship, for the expropriation of the peasant proprietors produces the proletarianised masses offering labour power for sale; and we are led to infer that the constitution of the world market is the crown and the epilogue of modern capitalist economy. In fact, according to Marx, the historic mission of capitalism based upon wage labour, whose origins go back to the sixteenth century, is the creation of the world market. The world market is now devoted to the colonisation of California and Australia and to the opening of trading ports in China and Japan; its creation marks the climax of capitalism's historic mission, and indicates the approaching end of the economic form which was destined to fulfill it. Now these ideas, in themselves arbitrary and fantastic, show how Marx's thought at that epoch was still in an undecided or amphibious phase, in which the torrid sun of British economic science had not as yet succeeded in totally dispelling the fogs of German philosophy. But another incompatibility lessens the value of the book or diminishes its doctrinal efficacy; for Marx, at this stage of his studies, invariably gave to the history of doctrine too preponderant a place, introducing it insistently into the course of his own exposition, which was thus deprived of continuity and weakened in force. Further, the book we are considering did not directly bear upon any of the social questions which strongly arouse public interest, but was restricted to the study of two theories whose importance at first sight seems purely academic, the theory of value and the theory of money. Marx contended that the value of commodities is exclusively determined by the quantity of labour incorporated into them; he traced the affiliations of this thesis with the work of its first enunciators in Italy and in England; but he did not offer any reasoned demonstration of its truth. On the contrary, he frankly recognised that this contention is full of contradictions alike theoretical and practical, contradictions that appear insoluble; but he promised to vanquish them in the subsequent course of his exposition. Far more noteworthy is the chapter on money, for it contains a masterly criticism of the quantitative theory of Ricardo, and an effective refutation of the "labour notes" idea of Bray, Gray, Proudhon, and others. According to this plan, every producer performing a certain quantum of labour would receive from the state a voucher entitling him to obtain from other producers the result of an equal quantum of labour; but the suggestion implies complete ignorance of the intrinsic conditions of the individualistic economy, wherein each producer creates an object without any certainty that there will be a market for it, or that it represents a real utility and will fetch a definite price. It obviously follows that the producer cannot be sure that he will be able to sell the article which he has produced, or that he will be able to transform it into anything with universal purchasing power; the product has to be baptised or sanctioned by the market, which alone has power to stamp it as useful by purchasing it. Now the "labour note" system claims that it can forcibly dispense with the market by supplying to the producer of an article whose utility and saleable value has not been recognised by the market, a universally available purchasing power. The practical outcome of this forcible method is that the producer of a useless article can by means of his "labour note" secure for himself a useful article, whereas the producer of this latter will not in turn be able to exchange his own "labour note" for any object possessing utility; that is to say, the article made by the first producer will find no purchaser, and the "labour note" of the second producer will effect no purchase. This is inevitable, for the proposed reform is inconsistent, eclectic, and incomplete, since it pretends to socialise exchange while maintaining production and distribution upon their old individualistic basis, and overlooks the incongruity of any such supposition. The "labour note" system cannot rationally be instituted until production has been socialised, or until the state shall impose upon each individual the production of a specified quantity and quality of commodities, correlatively imposing upon the consumer the obligation to acquire these. In such conditions, however, we could no longer speak of commodities or of exchange, for these phenomena belong exclusively to an individualistic economy and would have no place in a socialised economy. This means that the reform of exchange by the suppression of profit can only be effected by the suppression of exchange itself, by the institution of the co-operative commonwealth. Indeed, Robert Owen, who proposed the "labour note" system in 1832, and was the most brilliant of its advocates, clearly recognised this difficulty, and understood that the socialisation of production would be an indispensable preliminary to the adoption of the plan. It was the impatience of his disciples which forced him to inaugurate the system within the framework of the capitalist economy by founding the National Equitable Labour Exchange. The logic of facts gave a patent demonstration of the irrationality of the attempt; and Owen, saddened and humiliated, was compelled to witness the failure of the new institution. It will readily be understood that these abstruse and abstract investigations, devoid as they are of any tangible connection with the burning problems of property, were not likely to arouse interest among the members of the party. Nothing could be more natural than the tone of hopeless discouragement with which the volume was greeted even by the author's most devoted friends. Liebknecht, for example, declared that he had never before experienced so great a disappointment. Biskamp enquired what on earth it was all about; Burgers deplored that Marx should have published a work so dull and fragmentary. It is true that the book had a moderate sale; Rau quoted it in his treatise; certain Russian and American economists made it the subject of profound studies. Nevertheless, the publisher refused to proceed with the issue. Hardly had this literary bickering come to an end when Marx became involved in a violent quarrel with the distinguished naturalist Karl Vogt, who publicly charged him with setting snares for the German exiles and with having sordid relationships with the police. Marx replied with a savage booklet entitled _Herr Vogt_ (London, 1860). The style of this polemic writing is intolerably vulgar; but in other respects the book is noteworthy, for it contains interesting revelations anent the Italian campaign and the relationships between Turin and the Tuileries. We must remember, moreover, that the accusation here launched against Vogt, that he was in the pay of the Second Empire, was subsequently confirmed beyond dispute, for in 1871 among the ruins of the Tuileries there was found a receipt for frs. 40,000 which had been paid over to Vogt. But scientific failures, personal contests, persistent and distressing domestic discomforts, seemed to inspire our athlete with renewed strength for the continuance of the work he had begun. Nevertheless, profiting by experience, he decided upon a yet further modification in the plan of his book, resolving to defer to its final section all historico-critical disquisitions, and to concentrate his energies upon the positive analysis of concrete reality. Further, being prevented by frequent illness from tackling the more difficult themes of pure economics, he devoted these long intervals of comparative leisure to statistical investigations and to the perusal of factory inspectors' reports, of white books and of blue books, and he plunged into the study of the economic history of Great Britain, so that it became possible for him to interleave the pages of abstract theory, necessarily difficult to understand, with pages that are really living, pages that vibrate with the reflex of reality. At length, abandoning the method he had previously followed of publishing fragmentary essays, he decided to rewrite the work throughout before sending it to press. After several years of incredible labour, the days being devoted to reading in the British Museum library, and the nights (for he often went on writing until four in the morning) to literary composition; falling again and again beneath the burden of his cross, but ever rising to his feet once more, thanks to the demon within urging him on and thanks also to the sustaining hand of his incomparable friend; he at length completed his task, and in the spring of 1867 sailed for Hamburg with the manuscript of the first volume of _Capital_, which he entrusted to Meissner for publication. In Hamburg he passed pleasant days with Dr. Kugelmann, a friend and fervent admirer, and with various officials, generals, and bankers; he was visited by a lawyer named Warnebold, an emissary from Bismarck, who, acting on the minister's instructions, exhorted him "to employ his brilliant talents for the advantage of the German people." Before long, however, he returned to London, where he earnestly devoted himself to giving the last touches to his book, which was finally issued from the press in the autumn of the same year. Thus was at length given to the world the monumental work destined to revolutionise sociological thought, and to give a new and higher trend, not to socialism alone, but to political economy itself. To sum up its drift very briefly, we may say that the argument follows three chief lines, value, machinery, and primitive accumulation. He set out from the fundamental principle (a principle which the philosopher Krause had declared to be as important to political economy as the fall of heavy bodies is important to physics) that the value of products is measured by the mass of labour incorporated into them, and drew the conclusion that the profit of capital is nothing other than the materialisation of a quantity of labour expended by the worker, and is in other words unpaid labour, stolen and usurped income. The worker, that is to say, transmits into the product a value equal to the quantity of labour incorporated therein, but receives from the capitalist a value less than this, a value equal to the quantity of labour embodied in the commodities necessary to reproduce the energy expended by the worker. Now the difference between the value of the product (that is to say the quantity of labour transmitted by the worker into the product) and the value of the labour power (that is to say the quantity of labour employed in producing the commodities consumed by the worker) constitute the surplus value which is gratuitously pocketed by the owner of the means of production in virtue of the fact that he is owner. In this way Marx attains to the qualitative notion of the income of capital, or explains whereof that income effectively consists. It remains to determine the quantity of income, which cannot be specified unless there have previously been precisely determined the measure and the figure of wages. Now though it be true that the growth of accumulation virtually tends to bring about an increase in the amount paid in wages, it is nevertheless within the power of the capitalist to obviate this undesirable event by investing the growing accumulation in the form of technical capital, which by its very nature is without influence upon wages. But the capitalist can do more than this. He can transform into technical capital a part of the capital which has hitherto been utilised in paying wages, thus throwing some of the workers out of employment, or creating an industrial reserve army. This reserve army, on the one hand stifles all resistance on the part of the workers in active employment, keeping their wages at a level which will purchase the barest necessaries, and on the other hand permits to capitalist industry the sudden expansions in times of prosperity which to the capitalist are so desirable and so profitable. Thus Marx's qualitative investigation is succeeded by a quantitative investigation, so that we learn, not only what surplus value is, but that it is equal to all the excess over and above the more or less limited subsistence of the worker, and that the worker is not merely defrauded of part of the value resulting from his labour, but is reduced to a wretched pittance, happy if he can secure this, and if he be not condemned by the hopeless entanglements of capitalist relationships to submergence in the backwater of the most terrible poverty. The result is that to the favoured recipients of surplus value there is subject a brutalised crowd reduced to a narrow wage, while at a yet lower level there struggles in the morass the amorphous mass of those who are condemned to labour without end. We thus realise, adds Marx, how profit is born of capital and is in its turn transformed into capital. But none of the considerations hitherto adduced suffice to make it clear what was the origin of primitive capital, that which first of all gave birth to profit, and consequently cannot be the product of profit. The celebrated section on the secret of primitive accumulation was intended to solve this problem. Classical political economy, said Marx, regarded the formation of primitive capital as an episode which occurred during the first days of creation. In times long gone by, there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and above all frugal élite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. Thus it came to pass before long that the former became impoverished whilst the latter grew wealthy, and the wealthy earned the gratitude of the poor by hiring these to work for them in return for a paltry wage. The theological legend of original sin tells us how man came to be condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; but the economic history of original sin reveals to us that there are people to whom this is by no means essential. We learn that one section of humanity has succeeded in eluding the divine judgment and in procuring for itself bread and cakes by the sweat of others. Unfortunately, continues Marx, a conscientious questioning of history discloses that primitive capital originated in very various ways, of a character anything but idyllic. Until the close of the fifteenth century there existed in England a race of peasant proprietors, nominally subject to the jurisdiction of the great lords of the soil. But the increasing demand for wool which resulted from the expansion of the Flemish wool industry, and the increasing demand for flesh meat consequent upon the growth of population, induced the great landowners to destroy an agrarian system by which their returns from rent were rendered practically nil. The free cultivators were brutally evicted from the fields which their ancestors had arduously tilled for centuries past, to be replaced by shepherds and flocks, the crowds of the expropriated hastening to the towns to offer the strength of their arms for hire. Here they happened upon a rout of usurers, traders, house-owners, enriched craftsmen, and lucky speculators; and here too were those who had expropriated them, the landowners who had heaped up savings by fair means or foul, but had hitherto been unable to turn their savings to account owing to the restrictions imposed by the corporative economy (guild system). These accepted as a gift from heaven the influx of the proletarian multitude, and were not slow in setting the newcomers to work on behalf of the growing manufactures. Modern capitalist industry thus originated in a terrible expropriation of the working population which transformed the independent peasants into an impoverished and hunger-stricken mob. But historic nemesis awaits this society conceived in theft, and Marx predicts its disastrous end in the ominous words: "The knell of capitalist property will sound; the expropriators will be expropriated." The fulfilment of the process will be effected by the forces inherent in the mechanism of the capitalist economy. The more extensive the development of that economy, the fiercer becomes the internecine struggle between the individual aggregations of capital, the more extensive become the accumulations of wealth in the hands of capitalists of the upper stratum, and the smaller becomes the number of these; correlatively there takes place an increase in the size of the working and poverty-stricken crowd, the more hopeless and more pitiful becomes its degradation, whilst simultaneously its cohesion grows more compact, for the workers are disciplined and organised by the very process which associates labour in the factory and upon the land. At a given moment, when the number of mammoth capitalists has conspicuously diminished, and when the pullulating mass of proletarians has increased to an immeasurable degree and has been forced down into the most abject poverty, it will at length be easy to the dispossessed to expropriate the small group of usurpers. Thus the expropriation of the masses by the few, which greeted the dawn of the contemporary economic order, will be counterposed by the expropriation of the restricted number of masters at the hands of the proletarian masses, and this will triumphantly herald a calmer and more resplendent sunrise. CHAPTER IV A broad outline has now been given of the marvellous work which, whatever judgment we may feel it necessary to pass upon the value of the doctrines it enunciates, will remain for all time one of the loftiest summits ever climbed by human thought, one of the imperishable monuments of the creative powers of the human mind. Above all we are impressed and charmed by the magnificent quality of the exposition, in which but one defect can be pointed out, and this was probably imposed by the abnormal conditions under which the author wrote. We allude to the last chapter, the one that crowns the story of the historic expropriation of the workers with the eloquent example of the colonies. Logically this chapter should precede the penultimate chapter, wherein Marx, from his account of these terrible happenings, casts the horoscope of revolution. It is probable that the inversion was deliberate, for the prophetic call to the proletarian revolution would have been more likely to attract the attention of the censorship had it been placed at the end of the volume. Apart from this trifling matter, we cannot but admire the shapely pyramidal construction, the harmonious and flowing movement of the book, which, passing from the most subtle disquisitions upon the algebra of value, deals with the complexities of factory life and machine production, plunges into the inferno of workshops and mines and into the infamous stews of unspeakable poverty, to conclude with a description of the tragic expropriation of a suffering population. The work is a masterpiece wherein all is great, all alike incomparable and wonderful--the acuteness of the analysis, the statuesque majesty of the whole, the style vibrant with sorrow or with indignation according as the author is sympathising with the woes of the poor or scourging the villainies of the mighty, the vast learning, and the torrential impetus of passion. There is a stupendous harmony of irreconcilables, so that, as in the mysterious creations of nature, we find an almost inconceivable association of real symmetry with apparent disorder; an association of minute attention to detail with monumental synthesis, an association of mathematics with history, an association of repose with movement; so that in all its fibres the book seems to be the offspring of an unfathomable and transcendental union between superhuman labour and superhuman pain. Nothing, therefore, is more natural or more readily explicable than the phenomenal success of _Capital_, a success which has rarely been paralleled in the history of intellectual productions. Translated into almost every language (recently even into Chinese); eagerly read by men of learning no less than by statesmen, by reactionaries as well as by rebels; quoted in parliaments and in meetings of the plebs, from the pulpit and from the platform, in huts and in palaces--it speedily secured a world-wide reputation for its author, making him the idol of the most irreconcilable classes and of the most contrasted stocks. Whereas, in fact, the prophetic announcement of the glorious advent of collective property led to the assembling round Marx of all the common people of the west, who hailed him as avenger, as leader, and as seer of the onward march of the proletariat; in such countries as Russia, where capitalist development was as yet in its infancy, the bourgeois classes sang the praises of the book which announced the historic mission of capitalism, and thus it was that the idol of the western pétroleurs became in the far east of Europe the fetich of bankers and manufacturers. After the first shock of surprise, however, readers turned to the dispassionate analysis of the individual doctrines advocated in the work, and were not slow to bring to light certain gaps and sophisms. To say truth, no sovereign importance can be attributed to any of these criticisms, nor is it necessary to make much of the numerous attacks upon the statistical demonstrations of _Capital_. It is undeniable that Marx's thesis of the progressive concentration of wealth into the hands of an ever-diminishing number of owners, and of the correlatively progressive impoverishment of the common people, has not been confirmed. It has indeed been confuted by the most authoritative statistics collected since the publication of the book, for these show that the greater recipients of income increase more than proportionally to the medium and lesser recipients, whereas the number of taxpayers in the lowest grades diminishes, with a proportionate increase in the number of those at a slightly higher level. Further, as far as this last fact is concerned, there can be no doubt that wages have increased of late, so that they not merely rise above the miserable level of bare subsistence specified by Lassalle, but also rise above the level (which is still miserable, though a trifle higher) expressed in the calculations of Marx. It is, however, needful to add that the Marxist thesis merely points to a general tendency, and does not imply a denial that more or less considerable fluctuations may occur at particular periods. Moreover, the concentration of wealth does not find expression solely in the diminution of the numerical proportion between the greater and the lesser recipients of income, but in addition in a diminution of the ratio between the taxpayers and the population and in an increase in the contrast between the wealth of the recipients of income in various grades. Further, the most authoritative statistics demonstrate a growing diminution in the ratio between the owners and the general population. Again, no one can deny that the contrast between high grade and low grade incomes has of late exhibited an enormous increase; that banking concentration and the sway of the banks over industry (a source of increasing disparity in fortunes) has attained in recent years an intensity which even Marx could not have foreseen; and that, subsequently to the publication of _Capital_ and to the death of its author, the social fauna has been enriched by an economic animal of a species previously unknown, the multimillionaire, whose existence undeniably reveals an unprecedented advance in capitalist concentration. Nay more, after Marx's death, agrarian and industrial concentration attained preposterous proportions, such as he had never ventured to predict. In the American Union, a single landed estate will embrace territories equal to entire provinces, while industrial capital becomes amassed by milliards in the hands of a few despotic trusts, so that two-thirds of the entire working population are employed by one-twentieth of all the separate enterprises in the country. These statements concern the apex of the social pyramid; but even at the base of that structure the phenomena are far from invalidating the Marxist conception to the extent which many contend. Correlatively with the undeniable rise in wages (which, moreover, has been arrested of late, and has been replaced by a definite movement of retrogression), there has occurred an enormously greater increase in income, and therefore a deterioration in the relative condition of the workers. There has further been manifest an increasing instability of employment, so that unemployment has become more widespread and more frequent, exposing the working classes to impoverishment and incurable degradation. Marx's other theses, however, are open to more serious objection. Retracing the thread of his demonstrations with special attention to his study of primitive accumulation, no one can deny the absolute authenticity of the facts he narrated. Nor can Marx be blamed for having restricted his historic demonstration to England; though in actual fact the expropriation of the cultivators has been carried out everywhere, openly or tacitly, and everywhere this expropriation has been an initial stage in the foundation of capitalist property. Even Russia, who flattered herself upon her independence of the universal law and upon escaping the fated expropriation of her peasants, Russia, whom Marx himself, as if in a sudden fit of mental aberration, was on the point of excluding from the sphere of his generalisations, has to submit to the invariable rule, and to witness the transformation of her independent peasant proprietors into proletarians. The constitutional defect of this portion of Marx's book is of a very different character. Although he tells the story of the expropriation of the cultivators, he fails to explain why such expropriation must always take place, he fails to bring this great historical event beneath the sway of a universal economic theory. Now, putting aside the incongruity that a book essentially founded upon logical demonstration should all at once break off that demonstration to turn to a historical disquisition and a simple record of facts, no one has any right to construct a theoretical generalisation upon the bare narration of hard facts without referring these to the general psychological and logical causes which have produced them. It cannot be denied that in this respect Marx's demonstration presents a defect which it is impossible to make good. Yet more serious criticism may be directed against the theory of the industrial reserve army, the theory wherein Marx attempts to sum up the law of population of the capitalist era. For the theory is wholly based upon the premise that the conversion of wage capital into technical capital is competent to bring about the permanent unemployment of labour, or definitively to reduce the demand for labour. Now this premise will not hold, for technical capital, by promptly increasing the profit of capital, and by lowering the price of the product in the long run, provides for the capitalist, first of all, and subsequently for the consumer, the possibility of fresh savings, and these in the end create a further demand for labour, so that sooner or later there will be a call upon the active services of the workers who are temporarily unemployed. Vain, therefore, is any attempt to make technical capital responsible for the relative excess of population, which technical capital cannot possibly produce, for this phenomenon must be referred to the presence and to the activity of a very different variety of capital, and one not considered by Marx, namely unproductive capital. But these criticisms, which after all touch no more than points of detail, are mere trifles in comparison with the incurable contradictions in which the author's fundamental theory is involved. In fact, by a vigorous deduction from his premise that the value of commodities is measured by the mass of labour incorporated in them, Marx arrives at the fundamental and logical distinction between constant capital and variable capital. If, however, the value of products be exclusively determined by the mass of labour incorporated in them, it is evident that the capital invested in machinery or in raw material can only transmit to the product a value exactly equal to the quantity of labour contained therein, without adding any surplus, and that it is therefore constant capital; whereas wage capital transmits to the product value equal to all the quantity of labour which it maintains and sets in motion, a quantity which, as we know, exceeds the quantity of labour contained in the capital itself. In other words, wage capital, besides reproducing its own value, furnishes a supplement or a surplus value, and is therefore variable capital. Consequently surplus value arises exclusively from variable capital, and is therefore precisely proportional to the quantity of this capital. It further ensues that of two undertakings employing equal amounts of aggregate capital, the one which employs a larger proportion of constant capital ought to furnish a profit and a rate of profit lower than that furnished by the other. But free competition among the capitalists enforces an equal rate of profit upon the capitals invested in the various undertakings, and leads to the immediate abandonment of undertakings requiring a greater proportion of constant capital, and to the correlative expansion of the others. There consequently results an increase in the value of the products of the former undertakings, and a diminution in the value of the products of the latter. This process continues until the value of the respective products furnishes an equal rate of profit to the capitals respectively employed in producing them. Value, therefore, though in the first instance it is equivalent to the labour employed in producing the products, necessarily diverges from that standard in the end, and has then an utterly different measure. Thus the theory we are discussing is peremptorily refuted, or is reduced to absurdity. From the outset Marx is distinctly aware of the existence of this striking contradiction, which emerges in so formidable a manner in the first stage of his investigation; he frankly recognises it, but postpones its solution to the later volumes of his treatise. On the very morrow, indeed, of the publication of the first volume, he ardently set to work once more, and sketched to his friend, in monumental pages, the design of the complete book. Just as St. Augustine was grieved that the duties of his episcopate deprived him of the hours which he would have preferred to devote to the writing of a volume to be the crown of his _City of God_, so Marx was harassed by the thought of the time which the work of party organisation filched from his scientific labours, and it was solely that he might escape from the absorbing engagements involved in the former task that in the Hague congress of 1872 he proposed the transfer of the International to New York. But now we unexpectedly reach a "dead point" in the biography of our thinker, for his mental life, otherwise so normal and so brilliant, here suddenly becomes obscured, and is tinged with mystery and enigma. For, on the one hand, Marx clearly affirmed, and showed by his actions, that he definitely wished to devote himself to the completion of his treatise, whereas, on the other hand, it is undeniable that after the publication of the first volume of _Capital_, he never wrote another line of the book, and that all the posthumous additions to this volume were composed prior to 1867. I do not mean to imply that during subsequent years he gave himself up to inertia or repose, for it was during this period that he wrote all the economic section in Engels' booklet against Dühring; he learned Russian; he read the agricultural statistics of numerous countries and the reports on poverty in Ireland; he studied the matriarchal system; carried on ingenious discussions with Engels concerning Carey's theory of rent and Bastiat's theory of the cost of reproduction; threw light on the influence of fluctuations in the value of money upon the rate of profit; sketched a mathematical theory of commercial cycles--in a word, his thought-process remained so active that when a certain publisher asked for the right to issue his complete works, he replied, "My works, those which represent my present thought, are not yet written." But the essential work of his life, the work which had been so much cherished and which he again and again turned over in his thoughts, seems, as far as palpable traces are concerned, to have been entirely dismissed from his mind. We thus look on, marvelling and grieved, at the sight of the enfeebled hero withdrawing from the field, what time his banner, whose staff is not yet firmly implanted in the ground, is left as a target for the easy assaults of his emboldened adversaries. There certainly contributed to this intellectual shipwreck the illnesses and the misfortunes from which Marx suffered during the later years of his life. His health had been gravely undermined by overwork during the composition of the first volume of _Capital_ and during the task of proletarian organisation; trouble from boils alternated with bronchitis, liver disorder, headache, and lumbago. In vain did he seek health in gentler climes, at Ramsgate, Ventnor, Neuenahr, Carlsbad, Algiers, Monte Carlo, Vevey, and other fashionable health resorts. All attempts at cure proving inefficacious, he had at length to settle down once more in London. In 1881 occurred the death of his wife; while the death of his beautiful daughter Jenny, Longuet's wife, in January, 1883, was, if possible, a yet more cruel blow. Marx never recovered from this last shock; henceforward he was a broken man, the mere shadow of his former self; he passed his time contemplating the portraits of his two dear ones which Engels was to bury with him, and he no longer took any interest in the world around him or in the social tumult of which he was the inspirer and the originator. He died suddenly at two in the afternoon of March 14, 1883, while seated in his study chair. The titanic brain, which had given a new world to humanity, which had broken once for all the spiritual and material bondage of mankind, had ceased to live and to vibrate. Most distressing of all, he had taken with him to the grave the solution of the formidable enigma which everyone, the vulgar and the thinkers alike, had expected his genius to solve, and which no one else could unravel. It is true that shortly before his death he showed his friend the bulky manuscripts dictated in earlier days relating to the _Criticism of Political Economy_, suggesting that something might be made of this collection. It is also true that Engels, faithful executor of his divinity's wishes, devoted himself with splendid zeal to the publication of the manuscripts. But alas what delusion was in store for the admirers of the master! What a Russian campaign of disaster organised by enthusiastic lieutenants to the hurt of this Napoleon of thought! In 1885, two years after the death of Marx, there was published under Engels' supervision a so-called second volume of _Capital_. But the careless and pedestrian editorship, the long theoretical disquisitions making no appeal to facts for their justification, disquisitions in which the argumentative thread is continually broken, suffice to show that what we have before us is not a book, hardly even a sketch for a book, but a series of casual writings composed for the purposes of study and for personal illumination. Moreover, the work is wholly devoted to uninspiring monetary discussions upon the circulation of capital, to dissertations concerning fixed and circulating capital, the formation of metallic reserves, the circulation of commodity-capital, etc. Noteworthy, in any case, are the investigations which aim at throwing light on the process in virtue of which there is effected the formation of metallic reserves which remain out of circulation for a longer or shorter period. If, says Marx, a certain commodity requires for its production six months of labour, and cannot be sold until two months after its production has been completed, the capitalist, if he is to continue the work of production during the period in which the commodity remains unsold, has need of additional capital which he could dispense with if the sale could be effected immediately after production. But when, at the close of the circulation period, the capitalist resumes possession of the capital first utilised and realises it in money, he has no immediate need of all this capital, but only of the quantity necessary to make good the additional capital which he has invested, that is to say, a quantity of capital equal to the difference between the primary capital and the supplementary capital; consequently the excess remains at liberty, and goes to constitute and to increase monetary reserves. These reserves are formed in addition, and by an analogous process, on account of the wear of machinery; for the portions of value transmitted by the machines to the product and correlative to the wear of these machines are pent up until the day of the complete destruction of the machines or of their necessary replacement. Thus the difference between the period of production and the period of exchange of the commodities, and the difference between the period of economic redintegration and the period of technical redintegration of the productive machinery, give rise to the formation of monetary or capitalistic reserves, which become in their turn the source of intricate developments and interesting complications. The book likewise contains a masterly, though wordy and disconnected, account of the circulation of capital. But absolutely nowhere does it touch on or even hint at the theoretical enigma left unsolved in the first volume. Solely in Engels' preface do we find an announcement that the definitive solution will be furnished in a subsequent volume, and a suggestion that in the interim economists engage in a sort of academic debate, and bring forward their respective solutions. There actually took part in this strange competition, with varying success, Conrad Schmidt, Landé, Lexis, Skworzoff, Stiebeling, Julius Wolf, Fireman, Lafargue, Soldi, Coletti, Graziadei, and myself. At length, however, in 1894, appeared the third volume, which was to reveal to an impatient world the desired solution. The solution reduces itself to this. It is true, says Marx, that the value commensurate to labour ends by assigning to the capitals respectively employed as constant and as variable, different rates of profit, and that this is radically incompatible with competition. But it is likewise true that products are not actually sold for their value, but for their price of production, which is equal to the capital consumed plus profit at the ordinary rate on the total capital employed. Certainly if we consider the mass of products sold, we find that their total price is precisely equal to their total value. But this integral value is not distributed among the various products in proportion to the quantity of labour incorporated in them, but in a lesser or greater proportion, according as the products themselves contain a greater or less proportion of the mean between the constant capital and the total capital; that is to say, the products containing a proportion of constant capital superior to the mean are sold at a price above their value in order to eliminate the deficiency of profit due to the preponderance of the capital which does not produce surplus value; whereas the products containing a proportion of constant capital inferior to the mean are sold at a price less than their value so as to eliminate the excess of profit due to the preponderance of the capital that produces surplus value; whilst only the products containing the mean proportion of constant capital and total capital are sold at a price precisely identical with their value. But it soon becomes apparent that this so-called solution is little more than a play upon words, or, better expressed, little more than a solemn mystification. For when economists endeavour to throw light upon the laws of value, they naturally consider the value at which the commodities are actually sold, and not a fantastical or transcendental value, not a value which neither possesses nor can possess any concrete relationship to facts. It may well be that value as determined by abstract economic theory will not always correspond precisely with value as a concrete fact, for the complexities and the manifold vicissitudes of real life impose obstacles; it may well be, indeed, that to the rigidity of normal value, constituting the type of the relationship of exchange, we ought to counterpose the comparatively transient fluctuations of current value. But it must be understood that no logical fact should stand in the way of the realisation of normal value, for this, conversely, ought to be derived by logical necessity from fundamental economic premises. Of a value, indeed, which not only is not realised, but is not logically capable of realisation, the economist neither can nor ought to take any account; he should show in what respect, instead of being the expression of what value is, it is the expression of what value is not and cannot be; he should point out the negation of every correct and positive theory of value. Now this value commensurate to labour, value as defined by Marx's theory, not merely has its realisation restricted or modified by the vicissitudes of reality, but further, as Marx himself is constrained to recognise, is not logically capable of realisation, seeing that it would give rise to results incompatible with the most elementary advantage of those who effect the exchange of commodities; consequently, it is not merely an abstraction remote from reality, but is incompatible with reality; not only is it an impossibility in the realm of fact, but further and above all it is a logical impossibility. Thus, far from effecting the salvation of the threatened doctrine, this alleged solution administers a death-blow, and implies the categorical negation of what it professes to support. For what meaning can there possibly be in this reduction of value to labour, the doctrine dogmatically affirmed in the first volume, to one who already knows that the author is himself calmly prepared to jettison it? Is there any reason for surprise at Marx's hesitation to publish this so-called defence; need we wonder that his hand trembled, that his spirit quailed, before the inexorable act of destruction? Despite all, however, genius will not be denied, and even this volume contains here and there masterly disquisitions, enriching the science of economics with new and fertile truths. It will be enough, in this connection, to refer to two theories. The first of these, the theory of the decline in the rate of profit, though not free from objection, is none the less inspired and profound. The second is the theory of absolute rent, a brilliant and acute deduction from the Marxist theory of value. This theory, indeed, as we saw just now, leads to the conclusion that value commensurate to labour furnishes an extra profit to the capital which produces commodities requiring for their production an above-average proportion of variable capital. Now, where free competition exists, such extra profit cannot continue, and must necessarily be eliminated by a reduction in the price of the product to a point below its value. But when competition is not fully free, there is no reason why such extra profit should not be permanent. Now agrarian production requires an abnormally high proportion of variable capital, and consequently agricultural produce, when sold for its value, furnishes an extra profit. But since land is a monopolised element, this extra profit can be permanently assigned to the owners of the soil, because there is no effective competition to prevent their continuing to draw it. There thus comes into existence an absolute land rent, in opposition to or in addition to the differential rent of Ricardo's theory. This absolute rent is not due to the varying cost of production in different areas; it is not the exclusive appanage of lands more favourably situated or of lands of better quality; it arises solely from the excess in the value of agrarian produce over its cost of production, and is a general attribute of land per se, in virtue of its quality as a monopolised element. Marx acutely studies the manifold varieties of this rent according as it is rendered in work, in produce, or in money; and with sound and far-reaching intuition he deduces from his theory explanations of the intricate agrarian relationships among the various peoples of the globe. Nor is this the only gem with which the work is adorned. Very remarkable are the pages upon merchants' capital and moneylenders' capital, on their despotic predominance prior to the inauguration of the capitalist régime, and upon their inevitable dissolution after the advent of that régime. The closing pages, however, seem to breathe a vague weariness, and we find hardly any trace of masterly theoretical discussion of the class struggle, of its origin, of the instruments through which it operates, although this discussion, according to the author's original plan, was to be the monumental crown of the titanic work. Thus, however fragmentarily, and thanks to the help of lieutenants and of disciples who were not always adequately instructed, the theoretical treatise, at once the pride and the torment of our prophet, at length arrived at completion. But the reader will not forget that to the positive treatment of his subject, Marx always counterposed a historico-critical investigation of the theories of his precursors, and in the more mature design of his work such an exposition was to follow upon the exposition of his own doctrines and to form their apt complement. It remained, therefore, to bring to light this last part of his researches, a duty which was faithfully discharged (after the death of Engels) by Karl Kautsky, with the publication of the _History of the Theory of Surplus Value_, which appeared in four volumes during the years 1905 to 1910. Substantially, though publishers have preferred to treat it as a work apart, this book is nothing other than the concluding section of _Capital_, announced in the preface to the first volume, where the author tells of a sequel to be devoted to the history of this theory. In the posthumous work Marx traces the development of the theory of surplus value through its three essential stages, the prericardian, the Ricardian, and the postricardian. To the first of these phases belong the theories of the physiocratic school, whose essence Marx grasps with marvellous acuteness, maintaining that the theories in question were the doctrinal reflection of the interests of the rising capitalist class, constrained to pretend that its own economic claims were the logical expression of the advantage of the landed and feudalist classes then politically dominant. Particularly noteworthy are the comments on the teaching of Adam Smith. The second volume contains a searching criticism of the Ricardian system, and above all of Ricardo's theories of value and of profit. In the third section Marx passes judgment on the theories of Ricardo's successors, Malthus, Senior, and John Stuart Mill, for these writers, says Marx, follow the setting sun of bourgeois economic science, follow that science to its now inevitable doom. It was a fixed idea with Marx that the theoretical analysis of capitalist relationships had secured its fullest and most adequate expression in the pages of Ricardo; he believed that Ricardo had supplied the ultimate synthesis possible on these lines; that any further progress of economic science in its bourgeois trappings had become impossible; that its decline amid contradictions and perversions was inevitable; and that economics could only be renewed and reborn when the disintegrated vesture of bourgeois economic relationships had been completely thrown aside to give place to a definitive and superior social form. It is scarcely necessary to point to the sophisms and the arbitrary assumptions upon which this concept is based; but it must be admitted that the poverty, deficiency, and incurable vanity of current economic science increasingly tend to give the theory an awkward semblance of truth. CHAPTER V To-day, now that the fruits of Marx's meditations, be it only as the result of the work of collaborators, be it only with many gaps and imperfections, have all been given forth to the reading world, it is at length possible to take a general view, and to pass a dispassionate judgment upon the pre-eminent worth of his writings. The most austere criticism must bow reverently before such gigantic mental attainments as have few counterparts in the history of scientific thought, garnering from all branches of knowledge on behalf of the undying cause of mankind. The most inexorable criticism should recognise in Marx the supreme merit of having been the first to introduce the evolutionary concept into the domain of sociology, the first to introduce it in the only form appropriate to social phenomena and social institutions; not as the unceasing and gradual upward-movement outlined by Spencer, but as the succession of agelong cycles rhythmically interrupted by revolutionary explosions, proceeding in accordance with the manner sketched by Lyell for geological evolution, and in our own time by de Vries for biological evolution. With the aid of this concept, strictly positive and scientific, Marx triumphantly overthrew, on the one hand classical economic science, taken prisoner by its own notion of a petrified society, and on the other the philosophy of law and idealist socialism which were convinced that it was possible to mould the world in accordance with the arbitrary conceptions of the thinker. Looked at in this light, the work of Marx presents a new instrument for the use of the philosophy of history and for the use of sociology; and it has contributed no less powerfully to the advance of technological science, thanks to the writer's masterly investigation into the successive forms of the technical instrument of productive machinery. In this respect more than in any others Marx may be compared with Darwin, and may indeed be spoken of as the Darwin of technology: for no one has ever had a profounder knowledge than Marx of the structural development of the industrial mechanism, no one else has followed step by step the formation and upward elaboration of productive technique; just as Darwin, with invincible mental energy, traced the evolution of animal technique, the development of the functional apparatus of organised beings. This physiology of industry, which is now the least studied and least appreciated of Marx's scientific labours, nevertheless constitutes his most considerable and most enduring contribution to science. Noteworthy, in especial, and destined to form a permanent and integral part of the economic science of the world, are Marx's analyses of money, credit, the circulation of capital, poverty, primitive accumulation, not to speak of the historico-critical investigations into the work of the British classical economists--for here Marx, without prejudice to the merits of those who have fought honourably in this difficult arena, will ever remain the most brilliant and most profound commentator. For these mighty and noble contributions, his name will be inscribed in imperishable letters in the history of creative thought. But if his sociological, historical, and technological investigations, if his studies of money, the banking system, and industrial statistics, be so many intellectual jewels of which no praise can be excessive, it is none the less true that his fundamental economic theory is essentially vitiated and sophistical, and that he is himself responsible for reducing it to hopeless absurdity. We arrive, therefore, at this remarkable result: that Marx, whose primary aim it was to be a theorist of political economy, and to deal only in subsidiary fashion with the philosophy of history and technology, secured a triumphant success in these subordinate fields; whereas in respect of the fundamental object of his thought, his work was a complete failure. Nor can we deny that the very design of Marx's work, however marvellous in the Michelangelesque grandeur of its ensemble, does not satisfy those who insist upon strictly scientific method, and that in this respect Marx stands far below the great masters of positive science. For, however admirable and however great this man who succeeded in subsuming an entire world within the limits of an extremely simple initial principle, and whose life was but the development of an equation which he had formulated at its outset, how far more straightforward and trustworthy, how far more scientific, was the method of Darwin, who never formulated any apriorist principles, but, quite free from preconceptions, accepted phenomena in the order of progressive complexity in which life itself presented them. Darwin first studied the natural formation of organised beings, then devoted himself to an examination of the larger types, and was finally led to infer their development by evolutionary growth. This method, which follows nature and reflects it, seems far more worthy of respect, far more honest, far more strictly scientific, than the other method, which manipulates the truth, does violence to the truth, in order to accommodate it to hidden ends. There is no reason, therefore, to be surprised that such a flood of criticism should have been directed against this colossus, or that on the morrow of the completion of Marx's work the skies of the two hemispheres should have rung with disorderly clamour proclaiming the crisis, nay the failure, of Marxism. But that which is less easy to understand, that which discloses the utter immaturity of economic science as well as of contemporary socialism, is that criticism has not been directed against the truly vulnerable point of the system, but has been solely concerned in attacking its better defended and less fragile parts. In fact the scientific and socialist currents partially or wholly opposed to Marxism display a strange reverence for his theory of value, or do not venture to attack it, but concentrate their forces against the statistical and historical theories which are the deductions and complements of the Marxist theory of value. In this respect the critics of Marxism form two very distinct groups. The first of these, the reformist or revisionist school, has a high respect for the master's theory of value, and reiterates it as an indisputable truth; whereas reformists criticise the theory of increasing misery, the theory of the concentration of capital, and above all the catastrophic vision of the proletarian revolution. The writers of this school affirm, and think that in so doing they are setting up an antithesis to Marxism, that to await the millennium of the social revolution is futile utopianism; they contend, that the progressive reduction in the number of the wealthy, paralleled by the ceaseless increase in the number of more and more impoverished proletarians, a development which according to Marx's vision was to provide the apparatus destined to destroy the contemporary economy, is negatived by an actual tendency towards a more democratic distribution of commodities; and they insist, therefore, that socialism should aim at securing the triumph of its cause by means that are less violent but far more efficacious, namely by social legislation or by reforms tending to reduce inequality. Now, without troubling to repeat what I have already said, that the Marxist dynamic of the distribution of wealth is far from being as completely negatived by contemporary facts as these critics are pleased to insist, I merely propose to point out that this paying of high honour to reform and social legislation nowise conflicts with the doctrine or with the work of Marx, who, on the contrary, was the first to throw into high relief the pre-eminent value of social legislation, devoting classical chapters to the elucidation of its most memorable manifestations. In this light, therefore, revisionism or reformism, far from being a negation or correction of Marxism, is a specific application or partial realisation of the doctrine, for it brings into the lime-light one of the numerous sides of that marvellous polyhedron, and deserves credit for having explained and developed this particular aspect of Marxism. But revisionism errs gravely in that it wishes to replace the beautiful and complex multiplicity of the Marxist system by forcing us to contemplate this unilateral aspect alone. The reformists err in that they fail to see that legislative reforms, though desirable and extremely opportune, are invariably circumscribed by the prepotent opposition of the privileged classes, and can never do anything more than mitigate a few of the grosser harshnesses of the present system--whilst, precisely because they effect this mitigation, reforms tend to preserve an increasingly unstable economic order from the imminent disaster of a destructive cataclysm. If the reformist school mutilates Marxism thus violently, by reducing the whole of _Capital_ to the paragraphs extolling social legislation, the syndicalists inflict a yet cruder mutilation on the Marxist system by tearing a single page out of _Capital_, to make of this page the alpha and the omega of their revolutionary creed. It is true that Marx, in the thirty-first chapter of _Capital_, makes an explicit appeal to force, the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one; but this appeal is not made until it has been fully demonstrated that the social revolution can only be effected at the close of a slow and lengthy evolutionary process which shall have caused complete disintegration of the existing economic order and shall have paved the way for its inevitable transformation into a superior order. Now the syndicalists unhesitatingly sponge all this demonstration from the slate, and affirm that the proletarian masses can undertake action at any moment, can violently overthrow the prevailing economic order whenever it shall please them to do so; and they declare that it is needless for revolutionists to keep their eyes fixed upon the clock of history, in order to see if this is about to sound the knell of the present social order. It would be superfluous to demonstrate the absurdity of such a thesis, for the very school which proclaims it has assumed the task of giving it the lie in clamorous accents. For if, as the new apostles of force contend, the proletarian masses can at any moment annihilate the prevailing economic order, why do they not rise against the capitalism they detest, and replace it with the co-operative commonwealth for which they long? Why is it that after so much noisy organisation, after so much declamation and delirious excitement, the utmost they are able to do is to tear up a few yards of railway track or to smash a street lamp? Do we not find here an irrefragable demonstration that force is not realisable at any given moment but only in the historic hour when evolution shall have prepared the inevitable fall of the dominant economic system? Thus whatever they can do, it always seems that the infirm will of the disciples who demand an arbitrary renovation of the social system (whether by legal measures or by force) breaks vainly against the fatality of evolution, and that reformism and syndicalism are merely caricatures, counterfeits, or exaggerations of the many-sided and well-balanced theory of the master, who proposed a threefold line of advance: by social legislation; by the activity of the organised workers; and by revolution. In face of these various forms of neo-marxism, the outcome of mutilations and of one-sided exclusivism, Marx redivivus would have excellent reason for repeating his own adage, so thoughtful and so true, "I am not a Marxist." However striking the temporary success of these new forms among the crowd or among the learned, we may confidently predict that neither reformism nor syndicalism will definitively supplant the Marxist system, which despite all and against all remains and will remain a supreme and invincible force at once of theory and of organisation for the proletarian assault upon the long-enduring fortress of property. The value of Marx's work is, in fact, displayed in the most brilliant light by the detailed criticism of the theorists and by the contrast with opposing trends; all the more when we compare the aspect of economic thought and of proletarian organisation before and after the publication of _Capital_. For if we study the utterances of thinkers upon these matters during the middle of the nineteenth century, we find that nearly all are dominated by the categorical idea that the social order is of an absolutely immobile character, and that none but a few utopians entertain the thought of changing that order by means of precipitate legislation inspired by their individual preconceptions. In any case, it was an idea common to all, to revolutionists as well as to conservatives, that the poverty of the masses was a negative and distressing residue from the economic system, that it was a purely passive feature of that system which must be accepted with resignation, for it could not exercise any propulsive influence in the general social movement. This is substantially the notion which emerges from Victor Hugo's _Les Misérables_, for poverty is here regarded as an overwhelming mass of suffering for which it is impossible to assign the responsibility; it is looked upon as a load pressing with inexorable cruelty upon suffering humanity, which is unable to respond by anything more effective than complaints and tears. But how utterly different is the notion prevailing in our own days upon this matter. Not only is the conviction now rooted in the mind of every thinker that the economic order is subject to unceasing change, is advancing towards predestined destruction; but it is considered certain that the artificer, the demiurge, the most potent factor of this destruction, will be the active resistance, the unrest, the rebellion, of the proletarians in the grasp of the capitalist machine and eager to destroy it. This conception of the dynamogenic function of poverty is the most characteristic feature of the social thought of our day, the feature wherein that thought contrasts most categorically with the ideas of an earlier age. Just as the Christian sect, represented by Gibbon as a mere pathological efflorescence growing on the margin of Roman society, is by the better equipped science of our own time looked upon as having been the most potent solvent of the imperial complex and as the ferment generating a new and better life, so the proletarian masses, regarded by the science and the art of the past as a crushed and pitiful appendage of the bourgeois economy, now appear to contemporary science as the most vigorous among the forces tending to disintegrate that economy, as tending irresistibly to create a higher and better balanced form of association. Correlatively with this development, whereas the proletarians of other days were content to sulk in their hovels as they contemplated the brilliant gyrations of the capitalist constellation, merely cursing in secret the sorrows of their lot, to-day the workers of the two worlds are advancing in serried ranks to the conquest of a new humanity and a new life. Thus the immobility of our fathers has given place to rapid movement; their discouragement and resignation, to rebellious demands; and whereas of old a chasm yawned between the scattered visionaries who entertained dreams of social rebirth and the inert mass of the poverty-stricken, we find to-day that the impoverished are themselves becoming the artificers, the heralds, the pioneers, of the irresistible ascent of humanity towards a juster and better social order. Now all this new moral and social world, unknown to our grandparents, the glory and the plague of science, of society, of contemporary life; all this gigantic tumult of ideas, facts, claims, of assaults, wounds, innovating reconstructions; all this marvellous necromancy is the work of one man, a sage and a martyr. All this we owe to Karl Marx. It measures, concretes, and materialises for us his colossal worth and the omnipotent vastness of his achievement. Though science may well and with full right complain of the gaps in his doctrinal system, though life may furnish the most definite refutations of his theoretical visions, and though future history may display forms of which he never dreamed, nevertheless, no one will ever be able to unseat him from his throne, or to dispute the sovereignty which accrues to him on account of his splendid contributions to civil progress. Whether praised and accepted, or despised and rejected, by practice or by theory, by history or by reason, he will always remain the emperor in the realm of mind, the Prometheus foredestined to lead the human race towards the brilliant goal which awaits it in a future not perhaps immeasurably remote. For the day is coming. And in that day, when remorseless time shall have destroyed the statues of the saints and of the warriors, renascent humanity will raise in honour of the author of this work of destruction, upon the shores of his native stream, a huge mausoleum representing the proletarian breaking his chains and entering upon an era of conscious and glorious freedom. Thither will come the regenerated peoples bearing garlands of remembrance and of gratitude to lay upon the shrine of the great thinker, who, amid sufferings, humiliations, and numberless privations, fought unceasingly for the ransom of mankind. And the mothers, as they show to their children the suffering and suggestive figure, will say, their voices trembling with emotion and joy: See from what darkness our light has come forth; see how many tears have watered the seeds of our joy; look, and pay reverence to him who struggled, who suffered, who died for the Supreme Redemption. 
5624	----	THE INHUMANITY OF SOCIALISM The Case Against Socialism & A Critique of Socialism Two papers, the First Read Before the League of the Republic at the University of California, December the Fifth, Nineteen Hundred and Thirteen, and the Second Read Before the Ruskin Club of Oakland, California, Some Years Earlier By Edward F. Adams "And finally, let each of us according to his ability and opportunity practice and inculcate respect for the law, the maintenance of order, regard for the rights of others, admiration for the successful, sympathy with the unfortunate, charity for all, hope for humanity, joy in the simple life and contentment therewith." Foreword One might write continuously while he lived for or against Socialism and yet at the end of a long and misspent life have said nothing that others had not said before him. Nevertheless, new generations come on and have to learn about Socialism as they learn about other things, for there always have been and always will be Socialists. It is a habit of mind which becomes fixed in a certain number of each generation; and succeeding generations seem to prefer fresh statements of the theory to the study of the ancient texts. Besides, Socialistic endeavor, while its ultimate object in all ages is the same, assumes different forms at different periods and is best dealt with in terms of the day. I am opposed to Socialism because of its inhumanity; because it saps the vitality of the human race which has no vitality to spare; because it lulls to indolence those who must struggle to survive; because the theories of good men who are enthralled by its delusions are made the excuse of the wicked who would rather plunder than work; because it stops enterprise, promotes laziness, exalts inefficiency, inspires hatred, checks production, assures waste and instills into the souls of the unfortunate and the weak hopes impossible of fruition whose inevitable blasting will add to the bitterness of their lot. Some years ago I was invited to dine with and address a charming group of Socialists comprising the Ruskin Club of Oakland. We had a joyful evening and I read to them "A Critique of Socialism" which forms the second part of this volume. It was published in 1905 by Paul Elder and Company, but almost the entire edition was burned in our great fire of 1906. As there are still inquiries for it, it is thought best to republish it. Obviously it was primarily intended to amuse my hosts, but there is some sense in it. A few months ago I was asked to present "The Case Against Socialism" to the League of the Republic, an organization within the student body of the University of California, it being the last of a series in which a member of the Faculty of Stanford University and a much respected Socialist of the State took part, neither of whom, much to my regret, was I able to hear. What I said seemed to please some of the more vigorous non-Socialists present who thought it should be printed. Those who prefer pleasant reading should skip the "Case" and read the "Critique." Edward F. Adams San Francisco, June Nineteen hundred and thirteen THE CASE AGAINST SOCIALISM The postponement of this address, which was to have been delivered two weeks ago, was a real disappointment to me for I did not then know that another opportunity would be arranged. As one approaches maturity, it becomes a joy to talk to a group of young people in the light of whose pleasant faces one seems to renew his own youth. Youth is the most precious thing there is--it knows so little it never worries. It is difficult for me to be here at this hour of the day and it has been impossible for me to hear those who have preceded me in this course. What I have to say may therefore have too little relation to what has been presented from other points of view to be satisfactory in what seems to have been designed as a debate. Nor have I, in recent years, read much Socialistic or anti-Socialistic literature of which the world is full. From my point of view, as will presently be seen, perusal of this literature would be a waste of time for none of it that I have seen or heard of discusses what seems to me essential, but in saying this I must not be understood as disparaging either the sincerity or the ability of writers on this subject. When I was more or less familiar with Socialistic controversy the Socialistic propaganda was devoted in different countries to the accomplishment of the immediate program which in the respective countries was considered the essential thing to be done next, very little being said about the ultimate end which it was hoped to reach in due time. Thus it happened that in some countries what was called the Socialistic agitation was directed to the accomplishment of what was already established by non-Socialists in other countries. That is doubtless so still. Those discussions do not interest me and I have not followed them and shall not discuss any of them here. I shall consider only the ultimate aims of theoretical Socialism and whether if accomplished they probably would or would not make for the general welfare and especially for the welfare of the least efficient. The ultimate aim of Socialism is the nationalization of all land, industry, transportation, distribution and finance and their collective administration for the common good as a governmental function and under a popular government. It involves the abolition of private profit, rent and interest and especially excludes the possibility of private profit by increase of values resulting from increase or concentration of population. The majority of Socialists would reach this end gradually, by successive steps, and with compensation to existing owners. A violent minority would reach it per saltum, by bloodshed if necessary, and by confiscation--"expropriation" they call it. All alike conduct their propaganda by endeavoring to create or accentuate the class consciousness of manual workers who constitute the majority of human beings and whose condition, it is insisted, would be improved under a Socialistic regime. The violent wing promotes not merely class consciousness but class hatred. I have no time to split hairs in this discussion and it may be assumed that I understand that Socialists do not expect to absolutely control all personal activity but would leave all persons free to pursue any vocation which they might desire and to have and hold whatever they may acquire by personal activity and enterprise so only that they make no profit on the work of another or absorb for their own use any gift of Nature. No Socialist that I know of has attempted to draw the exact line between activities to be wholly absorbed by the State and those which would be left to private enterprise. No wise Socialist I think--if there are wise Socialists--would attempt to draw such a line at present. There is a certain vagueness in the Socialists' presentation of their case. And before we proceed further let us get rid of the intellectual fog which envelops and shelters the advocates of Socialism. It is the fog of humanitarianism. I see and hear no advocacy of Socialism whose burden is not the uplift of humanity. Now, humanitarianism is perhaps the most beautiful thing there is. There is no more ennobling and inspiring sentiment than desire for the uplift of our fellowmen; but it has no legitimate place in the discussion of Socialism. For an advocate of Socialism to even refer, in presenting his case, to humanitarian sentiment is to that extent to beg the question. For if Socialism would improve the lot of mankind, or of the major portion of it, that settles the whole matter. The quicker we get to it the better. Opponents of Socialism insist that it would benefit nobody, and that as to the least efficient in whose behalf Socialistic doctrines are especially urged, it would be deadly. As to the strong or the fairly efficient we need not concern ourselves. They will get on anyhow. What it is important to consider is the probable condition of the less efficient, and especially the submerged class, under a Socialist regime. And consideration will be useful only if it is in cold blood, absolutely without sentiment, and especially without even sub-conscious assumption or imagination that the condition of the unfortunate, or less fortunate, would or would not be improved by Socialism, or whether mankind can or cannot be made happier by attempts to control economic conditions by interference with the natural working out of economic results as the resultant of opposing pressure of individual interests. And do not call me a brute if I reach the conclusion that human selfishness is the hope of the race. Because selfishness inspires to energetic action which means the largest possible aggregate production which is the first essential prerequisite to abundance for all. It is useless to talk about better distribution until the commodities exist to be distributed. And there is no other such spur to production as the expectation of personal profit. The pieceworker with more satisfaction to himself and profit to the world will produce far more than he would turn out under a daily wage if his earnings are thereby increased. And there are no others who give so little for what they receive as those who work for the public. The first count in the case against Socialism is that by making the majority of workers public servants without the stimulus of selfishness it would increase human misery by reducing the aggregate of production and therefore the possible per capita consumption. That, however, is on the surface. Let us bore a little deeper toward the core of the subject. It is a fundamental fallacy of Socialism that all gain is the result of Labor and that therefore all gain belongs to Labor--the term "Labor" in practice meaning the great majority of laborers who are manual workers[1]. Of course Labor is essential to production--so is Capital, which we shall come to later--and as between two things, both essential, it is perhaps impossible to conceive of one or the other as superior. But there is another element, also essential, but in a class so much above the other two essential elements, that it is not too much to say that without it there could be no production adequate to sustain for more than a brief time any great population. And that element is Brains. It is not to Labor but to the human intellect as developed in the exceptional man that we owe all that exists, outside of Nature, which we count valuable, and the ability to so use the resources of Nature as to enable mankind to live. If products were to be divided among mankind so that each should receive according to his contribution to the possibilities of production, after the exceptional men had received their just dues, there would be very little left for the rest of us. When European races first discovered this continent it probably supported less than one million souls, and the number was not increasing. That it will ultimately support some hundreds of millions is due to the dealings of the human intellect with Nature. Brains do not get, do not ask, do not expect and could not use what would rightfully come to them. But intellects vary in character and usefulness, and let us try by differentiation and elimination to isolate and consider those particular classes of intellect whose activities bear most directly on the questions raised by Socialistic theory. The chiefs are the devotees of pure science--the Galileos, the Newtons, the Pasteurs, the Faradays, the Kelvins, and the innumerable company of those like them, many known but most unknown, who spend their days and nights in the search for truth. They deserve and get the greatest of rewards which is the respect and admiration of their fellowman. As for material things, they desire and get very little. Following them are the magnates of applied science, the Watts, the Stephensons, the Bells, the Edisons, and their like, who apply to beneficial use the discoveries of the great lights of pure science often with prodigious material profit to themselves. The patent offices know them all, big and little. They perform a magnificent service, are highly esteemed in their day and generation and their material rewards are great. And upon the whole the world does not grudge them what they get. But there are others. Next after the magnates of applied science in public estimation, but of equal economic importance, I would place the Captains of Industry. Without their grasp of human necessity and desire and their organizing and directing ability, Labor would grope blindly in the dark by wasteful methods to the production of insufficient quantities of undesirable products. The Marxian[2] conception of an economic surplus wrongfully withheld from Labor which produces it is the disordered fancy of a fine intellect hopelessly warped by the contemplation of human misery and humanitarian sympathy with human distress. All economic discussion is worthless if tainted by human sympathy. The surplus value in production is trifling and seems large only because concentrated in comparatively few hands. The surplus of ages is concentrated in the structures which we see all about us, and in the commodities ready or partly ready for consumption and which will disappear in a short time. The annual accretions are small for an enormous amount of human effort is wastefully directed. That more effort is not wasted is due to the increasing necessities of an increasing population stimulating the most competent by the hope of personal gain to provide new means and new methods whereby those necessities may be served. No stimulus other than the hope of personal gain has ever been found effective to inspire this effort, or make it successful. Government administration invents nothing. It copies tardily and administers wastefully. Direction falls to those who compete successfully in talk not to those who demonstrate resourcefulness and masterfulness in forseeing human requirements, utilizing available means for supplying them, and effectiveness in least wastefully directing labor in the use of these means. Our Captains of Industry are those who for the most part starting life with nothing but a sound mind in a strong body have risen to the direction of great affairs through unrestricted opportunity to strenuously compete through long hours of hard labor and the mental and bodily strength to endure it. There is no reason to suppose that any other method than the same strenuous and unrestricted competition would produce men equal to such responsibilities, or that any inspiration but the hope of personal gain would induce such effort. The contention that the honor of direction and the applause of the multitude would incite to the necessary competition is not sound. In the first place long years of inconspicuous service but with the same eager effort are essential preliminaries to the great places which but few can reach, and secondly the honor would go as it does now in public affairs, not to the man efficient in industry, but to the man efficient in talk. The one stimulus to personal exertion which Nature supplies, and the only stimulus which operates powerfully, and universally and continuously is the desire of personal gain coupled with the instinct for construction and accomplishment. Since the desire is for the largest possible production it is folly to try to withdraw that stimulus and substitute an emotion which, however powerful in a few persons and for uncertain periods, operates most strongly on those industrially least capable. For I venture the assertion that there is not now and never has been among Socialists a single person who has demonstrated the ability to so direct the Labor of any considerable number of men either in production or distribution that the aggregate of yearly accomplishment at market value is as great as the aggregate cost at current wages. The second count in the indictment of Socialism, therefore, is that for lack of the sole stimulus which Nature supplies, and the lack of opportunity under a system of equal tasks, with ideals of leisure, direction of production and exchange under a Socialistic regime would be so much less efficient than now that the aggregate waste would be far greater than that of the parasitism which has always existed in competitive Society. A social parasite is a person whose contribution to the social product is less than the cost of his or her keep. If obviously defective we shall, at least for the present, let humanity override the economic instinct which suggests their removal--an instinct which has effectively operated in some overcrowded communities and take care of them. But the world has no use for the able-bodied parasite who during his or her working period of life does not contribute to the social dividend by personal exertion sufficient to pay for the kind of life which has been led. In opposing Socialism I am not defending parasitism. That can be got rid of when it becomes worth while and will be. But to jump out of parasitism into Socialism would be jumping out of the frying-pan into the fire. And we should have parasites still. So much for the Captains of Industry whom we need. But there is still another class which could not exist in the Socialistic state, and which a great part of mankind holds in profound disesteem, but which is essential nevertheless. This is the man with the instinct of accumulation and whom we stigmatize as the "Capitalist"--the man who grasps what is within reach and holds it; who often gets the main profits of the inventions of the inventor; who forsees the future value of unused gifts of Nature and acquires them while they can be got cheap; who combines with others like him to control everything controllable and makes mankind pay roundly when it wants it. He is really the man to whom mankind is most indebted of all for without his beneficent if execrated service, in vain would the scientist toil in his laboratory, the inventor struggle through poverty to perfect his machine, the Captain of Industry conceive great accomplishment, and the laborer delve and grind at his daily task. The one supremely useful man is he who accumulates and holds. If you say that this is an unlovely person the answer is that sometimes he is and sometimes he is not. If you say he is selfish the reply is that we are all selfish--he merely being able to make his selfishness effective. If you say he accumulates by devious ways and by grinding the face of the poor the reply is that sometimes he does and sometimes he does not. In these human aspects he is about like the rest of us. He it is who makes happiness and helpfulness possible. But to these and all other assaults upon the character and methods of the accumulating man there is one general reply and that is that from the economic standpoint they are of no consequence whatever. It makes no economic difference what he is or what he does so only that he performs his accumulating office. The one essential fact is that he assembles within his grasp the savings of Society, prevents their dissipation in personal indulgence, applies them to beneficial use, and enables the laborer to produce under the direction of the Captain of Industry by means of the devices of the inventor applied to the formulas of the scientist what is needful for the welfare of mankind--and to live while he is doing it. It is the accumulating man impelled by his instinct, or if you please his lust, for wealth and power who makes it possible for poor men to live in any great number. If he happens also to be a Captain of Industry, which usually he is not, it is merely one middleman cut out. His essential function is that of the money-grabber. It is by his exercise of that function that most of us exist. The third count in the indictment of Socialism is that by obliterating the Capitalist, accumulating by interest, profit, rent, and the exploitation of Nature for private gain, it would make life impossible to half the population of the world and not worth living to the fittest who should manage to survive. I trust I make myself understood for there is more and worse to come. This discussion is necessarily didactic and assertive for it is impossible to prove or disprove any of these postulates. It is for that reason, and the lack of time that I cite no instances. They would be merely illustrative and not probative, for the human intellect is unequal to any adequate inductive study of the subject, and human life is too short to classify, master and digest the data even if they could be assembled. All that can be done is to state conclusions reached upon such observation and experience as is to each of us available and commend them to the judgment of others upon their observation and experience. Whatever can be proved at all can be reduced to a syllogism but agreement upon premises is in this case impossible. But some things we do know and among them is the awful fact that man is powerless before Nature which deals with man precisely as it deals with other forms of life. Man can dodge Nature as the scale insect cannot, but higher forms of life can, and man the most effectively of all. But in the end she will get every one of us. Those will live happiest and longest who best know how to work with Nature and not against her. And individualism and not collectivism, is Nature's way. If our own object is the greatest aggregate of human comfort, we should realize that the greatest possible aggregate can only be attained when each individual under the stimulus of self-interest gets the largest measure of comfort for himself. In the dim future which we shall not see, this may lead to conclusions which one shudders to think of. It may be that the time will come on this planet when in a decreasing population struggling for existence from the remains of an exhausted Nature, the greatest good of the greatest number will be found by the deliberate extinction of those least fit, that what is available may be reserved to those who can make best use of it. Astronomers tell us there are probably dead worlds whose spectrums tell us that they are of the same material as our own planet and presumably once the abode of sentient beings, for it is unthinkable that of all the worlds which occupy space which has no confines, the small planet which we inhabit alone supports sentient life. What tragedies darkened the last centuries of life in those dying worlds or what may happen to our own remote descendants happily we cannot know, but human experience does not enable us to conceive of any physical structure which does not ultimately resolve itself into its primal elements. On our own planet we know of forms of once vigorous life which utterly perished by reason of physical changes which we cannot comprehend, and that high civilizations one after another have risen, flourished, faded and become extinct while yet our own world was young, and who shall say what is in store for our own civilization? If this is gruesome why should one be asked to present a subject which cannot be adequately presented without showing what pygmies we are and how helpless in the grasp of an all-powerful Nature. And the application of it all is that when Nature's sole and universal stimulus to progress is the love of self which she has implanted in every soul, it is folly to assume that we can better Nature's work by substituting for the universal stimulus to effort a more or less fleeting emotion which takes hold of but a very few and persists with but a still smaller number. Whatever scheme of collectivism we may establish, we know in advance that every member of the collective group will continuously strive to get for himself to the utmost limit regardless, if it could be discovered, of what is rightfully due. And a plan of Society which each member of Society is striving to subvert is doomed from its birth. And the fourth count in the indictment of Socialism is that it is contradictory to Nature to such a degree as to make its permanence unthinkable because destructive not only of human comfort and happiness but of human life. Expressed in briefest form the four counts are as follows[3]: I. Public servants produce less for consumption than private workers. Decrease of consumption means increase of human misery. Therefore, Socialism, making all of us public servants would increase human misery. II. Brains, not Labor, creates the social dividend. Ability is demonstrated only under strenuous competition inspired by self-interest. Therefore, Socialism, excluding competition inspired by self-interest would obliterate the social dividend. III. The accumulating man inspired by selfishness is essential to any social saving. Social saving is essential to the support of an increasing population. Therefore, Socialism by eliminating the Capitalist would make life impossible to many who now live. IV. To fight Nature is to die. Socialism fights Nature. Therefore, Socialism would destroy the race. It is a matter of premises, and I have already said that the premises in these syllogisms can neither be proved or disproved. People, I suppose, will continue to fight over them but I shall not. No human life is long enough and no human intellect strong enough to demonstrate or disprove any one of them. Experimentally mankind is always somewhere trying out one or the other of these postulates but success or failure only proves that they did or did not prove true in that particular case. An underlying fallacy of Socialism is the concept that poverty or at least extreme poverty, can be banished from the world. It cannot. It is impossible for the effective to produce and save as fast as the ineffective will waste and destroy if they can get at it. No truth in the Bible is more profound than the saying: "The poor ye have always with you." The concept is based upon an unfounded belief in the competence of the average man. He is not nearly so competent an animal as he has taught himself to believe. We read our Nordau and with but the very slightest ability to judge what he says we declare him a libeler. We read our Le Bon and declare off-hand that it is absurd and wicked to say that the crowd has no more sense than a flock of sheep. When we hear of an alienist who cites the increase of murder, suicide and insanity as evidence that mankind is losing its mental balance, we declare that the man is crazy himself. I do not say that such men are or are not right or anywhere near right in the views they express, but I do say that they are writing in cold blood in the light of a great deal of exact knowledge and certainly are much better judges of the truth in those matters than most of us who dispose of them so brusquely. The fact is that man, like other animals, differs greatly in individual ability but he differs from other animals in that the difference between the most competent and the least competent is enormously greater than such difference in any other species. The highest type of man is almost Godlike in the scope and keenness of his intellect. The lowest type reaches depths of degradation not touched by any other animal. There is no degradation so utterly degraded as a degraded mind. If you ask what all this has to do with Socialism, the reply is that it has everything to do with it. The sole object which I have in this address is to impress upon you the concept of man as an animal in the grip of an all-powerful Nature, and differing from other animals solely in his greater ability to dodge and evade, and so prolong the processes through which Nature will surely get him in the end; to conceive of him also as subject to the same law which enthralls other animals, whereby the fittest who demonstrate their fitness in the economic struggle shall survive while the least fit shall perish; to conceive of him as prepared and inspired for the struggle by the love of self which Nature has implanted in his soul in order that the race may endure to the utmost limit possible for it, by the survival of those having the greatest capacity for happiness. And, having fixed this conception in your minds, form your own judgment of the probable outcome of a contest which would begin by eliminating from man the one principle--selfishness--through which he must survive if he survives at all. Thus far, I have dealt with the subject in icy cold blood as a purely economic problem wholly excluding all considerations of humanity. It must be dealt with in that way if we are to deal with it intelligently. What must be will be, however dearly we may wish it otherwise. But we do not wish to go home with ice in our souls, and let us see if we cannot find some reflections more comforting. I am sure that we can. I have said that humanitarianism has no legitimate place in economic discussion and it has not. But it has a very large place outside economic theory and often in contact with economic results. There may be economic gains which ought to be and will be surrendered for social gains, as long as we can do it and live. A very reliable test of the prosperity of a Society is the extent to which it can without distress, surrender economic goods in exchange for social goods. I have attacked Socialism, not Socialists. Multitudes of Socialists are most charming men and women, and the aspirations of pure Socialism are the noblest of which the human mind can conceive. How impossible they are of realization I think they are, I have endeavored to show. But there are individualists whose ideals are equally noble. Any conception that Socialists as a class are upon a higher ethical plane than individualists may be dismissed. Personally, I fear that at present the average ethical plane of Socialists is below that of opponents for the allurements of Socialistic theory have attracted to that cult a great number of the economically impotent, but nevertheless greedy, who know nothing and care less about Socialistic theory but lust for that which they have never earned. It is they who promote class hatred as well as class consciousness. They are an effective offset, morally, to the greedy and consciousless employers who nevertheless perform a useful economic function which the greedy among the Socialists do not. But, my controversy at this time is not with them, but with the Socialistic idealists moved by the loftiest conception of the welfare of mankind and the most earnest desire to promote it. And now let us introduce somewhat of humanitarianism, which, while it has no place in economic theory, is that which most ennobles and beautifies human character. And here let me register my last attack upon Socialistic controversy, which is, that fundamentally it tends to degrade human character by adopting for, and applying to the manual workers of the world a contemptuous epithet. When Marx, if it was he, I am not sure, shouted: "Proletariat of all nations, unite" he said a very wicked thing. It is not my conception of the manual worker that he is a mere "child getter," but rather that he is as such, morally and socially the equal of any of us, from whose ranks there are continually emerging the leaders of thought, of discovery, of direction and of accumulation to whose abilities and activities all human progress is due, and I cannot hear without indignation suggestions from his own would-be leaders which impair his self-respect. I wish, for a concrete example, that the workingman should pay his poll tax and contribute to his occupational insurance with the rest of us, not to relieve Capital of a burden, but that the character of the working man himself may be strengthened by a conscious contribution to the upkeep of Society. Our emotions are stronger than our reasoning powers, and as a matter of fact, collective human action is and during any period which we need consider will be controlled by humanitarian instincts and not by the rigidity of economic theory. Individually, we do and always shall, seek each his own particular interest. Collectively, we invariably consider the welfare of all. This has been particularly impressed on me during the last few years, during which I have presided over the deliberations of a large body of good citizens, probably about equally divided between the accumulating and non-accumulating classes. Whatever the individual practices and tendencies of the respective members, whenever after discussion the collective opinion is expressed on any social topic the vote is invariably substantially unanimous for that policy which those present believe will make for the general good. It is not true that the rich desire to oppress the poor. It is not true that there is any real conflict of interest between classes. It is true that there is a general desire for the general welfare. And it is also true that the general welfare will be surest and soonest attained by cooperation, and not conflict between classes, under the direction of those proved to be strongest and wisest. I have said, and I am sure you must agree, that man economically differs from other animals mainly in his greater ability to evade the operation of Nature's own laws and to make use of the material resources and forces of Nature to assist him in so doing. And he does it mainly by collective action which is displayed most effectively and beneficently in those great economic organizations which we hate and stigmatize as "trusts" and which every one of us longs to get into as our best assurance of economic stability. The problem is how to so regulate these economic regulators of Nature, that each shall get from their beneficent operation, not that which is his ethical due, for that we can never determine, nor would it be for the general welfare that each should receive his due, but that which each can receive without injury to Society. It is certain that each will get less as the ages go by unless by our human ingenuity we can make production keep pace with population. At present, production greatly varies in different parts of the world, and the condition in each country is indicated by the amount of leisure possible to the average man. As population increases, leisure must decrease. If we work in a crowded community but eight hours per day, some will die among the weaker who would have lived if all had worked nine hours. The best index of the economic condition of any country is the amount of leisure which can be enjoyed by the average man without noticeable increase of mortality among the least efficient. The mortality tables have not yet been studied in their relations to this subject, but in time they will be. In Australia, mostly unsettled, the eight hour day is easy. If enforced in China the mortality would be awful. But then China has great but untouched natural resources to be developed by machinery devised elsewhere, and whose development will decrease mortality, while at the same time, at least for a long period, permitting more leisure. These conditions tend to equalize themselves throughout the world and in time the contest between humanitarian instincts and economic pressure will reach a world-wide equilibrium through the operation of natural law. What will happen then I do not know. Neither can any of us know. What we do know is that in each generation the aggregate of human happiness will be in a direct ratio with production per capita, up to the limit of the ability of the earth to produce food. We also know that the rate of production per capita will increase or decrease in a direct ratio with the amount of human energy devoted to production and not wasted in conflict, whether individual, class or international. Each generation must work out its own problems in its own way. As population grows denser, individual freedom must more and more give way to collective restraint and direction. We in the cities have less freedom than those of the country, and the greater the city the more the individual impulse must be subordinated to collective control. But we must never attempt to supplant individual selfishness, inspiring individual initiative and energy by any form of community ownership or direction which destroys or lessens opportunity for the more competent and especially the economically exceptional man. You would create thereby a machine operated by machinists for the accomplishment of machine purposes which are the purposes, good or bad as the case may be, of the individual operators who have never been and are not likely to be the economically competent. For our generation the problem is, while not restricting either the opportunity or the reward of the economically competent, to compel the predatory and extortionate among them to behave decently, so that others of their class may do so without ruin--to which end, in my judgment, jail sentences and not fines will be most effective. And likewise, to compel the ill-disposed and violent among the economically ineffective, to obey the laws or suffer the consequences. To bother our heads much less about Social theories, whose premises it is impossible to establish, and much more about the practical relief of the unfortunate by both individual and collective action and suppression of parasitism among both rich and poor. To encourage and promote the organization of interests, not for contention, but for cooperation. To fully recognize, that only by personal exertion according to his ability does any one earn the right to live, but that the reward of exertion will be and should be apportioned, not in the ratio of energy displayed, but in that of its effectiveness and usefulness to Society. To learn to differentiate between that reasonable discontent which is the mainspring of human progress, and that unreasonable discontent which is the destruction of Society. And finally, each of us according to his ability and opportunity, to practice and inculcate respect for the law, the maintenance of order, regard for the rights of others, admiration for the successful, sympathy with the unfortunate, charity for all, hope for humanity, joy in the simple life and contentment therewith. [Footnote 1: See Note 2.] [Footnote 2: The accuracy of this reference was challenged by a young Socialist, after the address. I have not read Capital for many years but think I cannot be far wrong in my statement and, in any case, the conception as stated, whether accurately Marxian or not, is the conception of all who give vitality to Socialism in this country. Hence, I do not take the time to verify my recollection. I am a busy man and it is no light thing to tackle Capital with intent to extract its precise meaning. Multitudes who have tried it have failed. Perhaps I was one of them. Of course Marx recognized the value of Labor other than manual, but his appeal was to manual workers and it is mainly they who have responded.] [Footnote 3: Some of these counts would bear subdividing but they would come out all right. Any syllogism will come out all right when you assume the premises.] ***** A CRITIQUE OF SOCIALISM To the Ruskin Club When your Mr. Bamford wrote me that the Ruskin Club was out hunting trouble, and that if I would come over here the bad men of the club would "do me up," I confess my first impulse was to excuse myself from the proffered hospitality. In the first place, as I have never posed as a social champion I had no reputation at stake and I was horribly afraid. Secondly, while my reading of Socialist and Anti-Socialist literature is the reverse of extensive, I am very sure that nothing can be said for or against Socialism which has not already been said many times, and so well said that a fair collection of Anti-Socialist literature would make a punching-bag solid enough to absorb the force of the most energetic of pugilists. Finally, the inutility of such a sally presented itself forcibly, since there is, so far as I know, no record of the reformation of a Socialist after the habit is once firmly established. But while at first these considerations were all against my putting on my armor, in the end the instinct of eating and fighting, which is as forceful in the modern savage, under the veneer of civilization, as in our unpolished progenitors, overcame all considerations of prudence, and here I am to do battle according to my ability. I promise to strike no foul blows and not to dodge the most portentous of whacks, but to ride straight at you and hit as hard as I can. A Critique of Socialism While it is doubtless true that no one can live in the world without in some degree modifying his environment, it is also true that the influence of a single person is seldom appreciable or his opinion upon Social questions of sufficient importance to excite curiosity, but I confess that when I listen to an address intended to be thoughtful, I enjoy it more or at any rate endure it better, if I have some knowledge of the mental attitude of the speaker toward his general subject. Thinking that possibly those who hear me this evening may have the same feeling, I begin by saying that I earnestly favor a just distribution of comfort. I suppose that if I should analyze the mental processes leading to that wish, I should find toward the bottom a conviction that if each had his due I should be better off. The objection to the Socialistic program is that it would prevent a just distribution of comfort. Some years ago in a book of which I was guilty, I wrote the following: "There is implied in all Socialistic writing the doctrine that organized man can override, and as applied to himself, repeal the fundamental law of Nature, that no species can endure except by the production of more individuals than can be supported, of whom the weakest must die, with the corollary of misery before death. Competitive Society tends to the death of the weakest, Socialistic Society would tend to the preservation of the weak. There can be no question of the grandeur of this conception. To no man is given nobler aspirations than to him who conceives of a just distribution of comfort in an existence not idle, but without struggle. It would be a Nirvana glorious only in the absence of sorrow, but still perhaps a happy ending for our race. It may, after all, be our destiny. Nor can any right-minded man forbear his tribute to the good which Socialistic agitation has done. No man can tell how much misery it has prevented, or how much it will prevent. So, also, while we may regret the emotionalism which renders even so keen an intellect as that of Karl Marx an unsafe guide, we must, when we read his description of conditions for which he sought remedy, confess that he had been less a man had he been less emotional. The man whom daily contact with remediable misery will not render incompetent to always write logically, I would not wish to know. But it is the mission of such men to arouse action and not to finally determine its scope. The advocate may not be the judge. My animus is that I heartily desire most if not all the ends proposed by abstract Socialism, which I understand to be a perfectly just distribution of comfort. If, therefore, I am a critic of Socialism, I am a friendly critic, my objections to its progress resting mainly on a conviction that it would not remove, but would intensify, the evils which it is intended to mitigate." That is quite sufficient in regard to the personal equation. There appear to be, unfortunately, as many sects of Socialists as of Christians, and if "Capital" were a more clearly written book I should be of the opinion that it would be as much better for Socialists if all other books on Socialism were destroyed as it would be for Christians and Jews if all books on Theology were destroyed, except the Bible. By Socialism I mean what some Socialist writers call "Scientific Socialism." "Marxism," it might be called. "Humanism," I think Marx would have preferred to call it, and I believe did call it, for he dealt with abstract doctrine applicable to men and not to nations, and his propaganda was the "International." Incidentally, as we pass on, we may notice in this connection the dilemma of American Socialists which they do not seem to realize. State Socialism has no logical place in a Socialistic program, for it merely substitutes the more deadly competition of nations for that of the individual, or even "trust" competition now existing, while Humanism, or Marxism, tends to a uniform condition of humanity which the American proletariat would fight tooth and nail because they would rightly believe that for them it would at present be a leveling down instead of leveling up. Karl Marx was, of course, not the inventor of Socialism, nor was he, so far as I know, the originator of any of its fundamental doctrines,--the doctrine, for example, that all value is derived from Labor was part of mediaeval clericism,--but be first reduced it to coherent form and published it as a complete and definite system, and upon the issues, substantially as he formulated and left them, must Socialism stand or fall. I must assume the members of the Ruskin Club to be familiar with the Marxian fundamental propositions, which I do not state because I shall confine my attack to the three derived propositions about which discussion mainly centers. We certainly do not want an exercise in serious dialectics after dinner, but I will say in passing that I do not think that any of his fundamental propositions are true, or that his theory of value has a single sound leg to stand on, and as for what he calls "surplus value," I doubt whether there be such a thing. At any rate he has not proved it, nor can it be proved, without taking into consideration the enormous number of industrial failures, as well as the more limited number of industrial successes--and there are no data for that purpose. I may also mention as what seems to me a fatal flaw in Socialistic philosophy, its concentration upon the conditions of Industrial Society, without adequate conception of a provision for the requirements of agriculture. Industrialism and commercialism are doubtless conveniences essential to our present civilization; but if every factory and all commerce were blotted from the earth the world would go right along, and when the necessary millions had perished in the adjustment, those remaining would be as happy as ever. Mankind adjusts itself to new environments very readily. We here in cities talking wisely on these things are wholly unnecessary. The farmer is essential, because without him we should starve. Nobody else is essential. We must not get the big-head. Economical farming on Socialistic methods is impossible, and any successful system of Social betterment must be based on the requirements of economical farming. Finally, to conclude this preliminary reconnaissance, the attitude of Socialism to religion is wholly unjustifiable. I am profoundly convinced that the groveling heathen, who in sincerity bows down to a "bloomin' idol made of mud," as Kipling puts it, has in him the propagation of a nobler and happier posterity than the most cultured cosmopolitan who is destitute of reverence. The Church and the Synagogue are the only existing institutions of modern Society which are engaged in the work of upbuilding and strengthening that rugged personal character which is the only sure foundation of any worthy civilization. I do not discuss the fundamental Marxian propositions for two reasons. In the first place, it would be laborious beyond measure for me, and dreary beyond measure for you. For example, the bottom stone in the foundation of the sub-basement of the Marxian edifice is the proposition that the equation X commodity A=y commodity B essentially differs from the equation y Commodity B=X Commodity A. Now, a discussion whether there is between these two equations a difference which it is Socially necessary to take account of, is a thing to be put into books where it can be skipped, and not imposed in cold blood even on intellectual enemies. Personally I do not believe there is, for I do not think that Social phenomena can be dealt with by the rigorous methods of mathematics. One can never be sure that the unknown quantities are all accounted for. But whether this or similar propositions are essential to the discussion of the theory of surplus value or not, I do not describe them because they are of no particular importance. Socialism is not based upon the Marxian theory of value, but the Marxian theory of value was evolved in an endeavor to fix a scientific basis for a popular movement already fully under way. Socialism is not based on reason, but emotion; not on reflection, but desire; it is not scientific, but popular. If every Socialist on earth should concede that the Marxian theory of surplus value had been knocked into smithereens, it would have no more effect on the progress of Socialism than the gentle zephyr of a June day on the hide of a rhinoceros. Socialism must be attacked in the derived propositions about which popular discussion centers, and the assault must be, not to prove that the doctrines are scientifically unsound, but that they tend to the impoverishment and debasement of the masses. These propositions are three, and I lay down as my thesis--for I abhor defensive warfare--that Rent is right, Interest is right, Profits are right, and that they are all three ethically and economically justified, and are in fact essential to the happiness and progress of the race, and more especially to those who labor with their hands. Now, first, rent: I confess that I have no patience with any one who claims, as an inherent right, the exclusive ownership of any part of the earth. He might as well claim ownership in a section of air. In this I am very certain that I have the hearty concurrence of every member of this Club. I am so sure of this, in fact, that I am going to make that assumption, in which we all agree, the starting point of a little dialogue, in which, after the manner of Plato, I will put Socrates at one end of the discussion, and some of his friends, whom we will suppose to be Phaedo, and Crito, and Simmias, and the rest at the other, and we will let Socrates and Phaedo carry on the conversation, which might run as follows: SOCRATES--We are agreed, then, that no man has any right inherent in himself to the ownership of land. PHAEDO--Certainly, we agree to that. Such a thing is absurd, for the earth is a gift to the human race, and not to particular men. SOCRATES--I am glad that you think so, and am sure we shall continue to agree. And if no one man has any right to exclusive ownership of land, neither have any two men, since it is plain that neither could convey to himself and another any right which he did not possess, nor could two men together by any means get lawful title to what neither was entitled to hold. PHAEDO--You are doubtless right, Socrates. I do not think any man could dispute that. SOCRATES--And if neither one man nor two men can acquire lawful title to land, neither for the same reason could any number, no matter how great, acquire lawful title. PHAEDO--That certainly follows from what we have already agreed to. SOCRATES--And it makes no difference how small or how great a portion of land may be. No man and no number of men can acquire lawful ownership of it. PHAEDO--That is also so plainly true that it seems hardly worth while to say it. It certainly makes no difference whether the land be a square furlong or a continent. SOCRATES--As you say, Phaedo, that is very evident. The earth belongs to mankind, and all men are by nature sharers in its benefits. PHAEDO--I trust that you will understand that I agree with you in that, and so make an end of it. SOCRATES--It is perhaps best that we be very sure that we agree as we go on, so that if we should at any time disagree, we do not need to go far back to find where our difference began. The earth is the property of men in common, and each has an undivided share in its possession. PHAEDO--That is another thing too plain to be disputed. SOCRATES--And when men hold property in common, each has as much right to all parts of it as another. PHAEDO--To be sure. I do not see why we need waste time in mentioning things so plain and so trivial. SOCRATES--And when men own property they may do with it as they please, and property which men own jointly they may visit and remain upon, the one as much as the other. PHAEDO--Unquestionably that is so, and we should do better to go to sleep in the shade somewhere, than to spend time in repeating things so simple. SOCRATES--Be patient, Phaedo, and in time we may find somewhat wherein we do not so perfectly agree. But, whatever property men have the right to visit and remain upon, they are always free to use in common with their fellow owners. PHAEDO--Certainly. Will you never, O Socrates, have done with this? SOCRATES--And Chinamen, therefore, have full right to come and live in California. PHAEDO (and the rest)--We will all see them in hell first. And I am very certain that every Socialist in California will agree both with the premises and the conclusion. But we might try another course of reasoning by which we may perhaps more easily reach the predetermined conclusion, and we will let the same parties carry on the dialogue, which is a most delightful way of reasoning when, as in the case of Plato and myself, the same person conducts both sides of the discussion. It might run in this way: PHAEDO--We have come, Socrates, to discuss with you, if you will permit us, the question of the ownership of land. Crito and Hippias and myself and others were considering that subject the other day, and we were not able to agree. Hippocrates, whom you know, has lately returned from the region of Mount Olympus, and as he was hunting one day on the lower slopes of the mountain, he came, haply, upon a beautiful vale, fertile and well watered, wherein was no habitation or sign of man. The soft breezes blew gently over the rich green plain whereon the red deer grazed peacefully and turned not at his approach. And when Hippocrates returned from his hunt he found upon inquiry that no man of the region knew of that vale or had ever heard thereof. So, as he had marked the entrance thereto, he returned thither with the intent to remain there for a space. And remaining there through the warm summer he fenced in the vale and the deer in it, and built him a house, and remained there a full year. But certain concerns of his family at that time constrained Hippocrates to return to Athens, and since he can no more live in his vale he offered to sell it to Hipparchus for a talent of silver for a place to keep summer boarders. And Hipparchus was content; but when they repaired to the Demosion to exchange the price for the deed, Hippocrates was unable to produce any parchment showing his title to the vale. And when he was unable to do that, Hipparchus would not pay down his silver, until he could make further inquiry. The next day, we all, meeting at the house of Phidias, fell to debating whether Hippocrates owned the land and could sell it to Hipparchus. And some said one thing and some another, and in the end we agreed that when some of us were next together, we would go to the house of Socrates, and if he were content, we would discuss the matter with him. And today happening to so meet we have come to you, Socrates, and would be glad to hear whether you think Hippocrates owns that vale, and may sell it or no. SOCRATES--You are very welcome, Phaedo, and your friends, and as for the matter you name, I shall be glad to talk of it with you and see if we can come to some understanding of it. But before we can proceed in the discussion, it will be necessary to find some starting point upon which we can all agree, because until we agree, at the beginning, upon some one thing pertaining to the matter, as certain and not to be doubted, discussion is useless, but if we can find such a thing, which none of us doubt, we may be able to make something of the matter. I propose, therefore, O Phaedo, that you propound someone statement which all you who have been discussing the matter believe. PHAEDO--Of a truth, Socrates, we discussed the matter till the sun went down, but I do not remember any one thing to which we all agreed except that there is such a vale at the foot of Mount Olympus, as Hippocrates describes, and that he lived therein for a year. That we believe because Hippocrates so told us, and all Athens knows Hippocrates for a truthful man. SOCRATES--That is something, for all truth is useful; but it does not seem to me to be such a truth as will well serve for a foundation from which we may penetrate, as one might say, the very bowels of the subject. I pray you to propound some other. PHAEDO--Truly, Socrates, I cannot, nor can we any of us, for upon nothing else pertaining to the matter are we able to agree. SOCRATES--If it please you, then, I will propound a saying and see if you agree with me. PHAEDO--We shall be very glad if you will. SOCRATES--I suggest, then, that we begin by agreeing, if we are able to do so, that the gods have given the earth to man for his use. PHAEDO--Surely that seems to be true. SOCRATES--I am glad that you think favorably of it, but that is not sufficient if we are to reason upon it, because that upon which we found our argument must be what we accept as absolute truth. PHAEDO--I think the earth was made for mankind, but if in our conversation something should also seem true, and yet contradictory to that, I know not what I should think. SOCRATES--Let us, then, think of something else: The earth is at any rate surely for the use of some beings. The mighty Atlas would never sustain it upon his broad shoulders if it did nobody good. PHAEDO--That, at least, is certain, Socrates. SOCRATES--And it must be for beings who can make use of it and enjoy it. PHAEDO--That also is true. SOCRATES--And beings which can use and enjoy the earth must be living beings. PHAEDO--Nobody will deny that. SOCRATES--And there are no living things except the gods, mankind, the lower animals, and plants. PHAEDO--I agree to that. SOCRATES--And it is plain that the gods did not build the earth for themselves, for they do not live upon it, except on Olympus, and nowhere does the earth produce ambrosia and nectar, which are the food of the gods. PHAEDO--That is true, for the gods live in the heavens and in the nether world, and not upon the earth. SOCRATES--And the plants do not use the earth, or enjoy it, although they live upon it, but they are themselves used and enjoyed by man and beasts. PHAEDO--Certainly the earth was not made for the plants. SOCRATES--And surely as between man and the lower animals, the earth was intended for man. PHAEDO--Certainly, that is what we think, but I do not know what the lion and the horse and the ox might say, for they certainly use the earth and enjoy it. SOCRATES--But man is superior to the lower animals, and the superior cannot be subordinate to the inferior. PHAEDO--I do not know how we can tell which is superior. The primordial cell in differentiating out of homogeneity into heterogeneity developed different qualities in different beings, and of the organs integrated from the heterogeneous elements each has its use and many are essential to life. In man the brain is more powerful than in the ox, but in the ox the stomach is more powerful than the brain, and while both stomach and brain are necessary, yet is one with a weak brain and strong stomach doubtless happier than one with a weak stomach and strong brain. Is it not, then, true that the stomach is nobler than the brain, and if so, then the pig and the lion and the goat, which have strong stomachs, nobler than man, whose stomach could in nowise digest carrion, or alfalfa, or tin cans, and therefore may it not be that the earth was made for the lower animals, who can use more of its products than man? SOCRATES--That is a deep thought, O Phaedo, which shows that you are well up in your Spencer, although shy in your surgery, for it is true that the stomach has been removed from a man who lived happy ever after, while neither man nor beast ever lived a minute after his brains were knocked out; but, is it not true that it is by the function of the brain that man makes his powers more effective than those of animals stronger than he, so that he is able to bear rule over all the lower animals and either exterminate them from the earth or make them to serve him? PHAEDO--Yes, that is true. SOCRATES--And we cannot say that the earth was made for beasts which themselves are made to serve the purpose of man, for as plants are consumed by beasts, so beasts are consumed by man who acquires for his own use and enjoyment whatever power is generated by the organs of all other living things. PHAEDO--That is true, and I can now see that the earth was not made by the gods for themselves, or for plants or beasts. SOCRATES--Therefore, it appears to me that it must have been made for man. PHAEDO--That is true, and I now agree that the earth was made for man. SOCRATES--Then, since we have found a common starting point, we may go on with our conversation. We have proved that the earth was made for man, because man, by powers inherent in himself, can overcome all other living things on the earth and subject them to his uses. PHAEDO--Yes, we have proved that. SOCRATES--And the real source of his kingship is power. PHAEDO--That must be true. SOCRATES--And force is power applied to some object, so that power and force may be spoken of as the same thing. PHAEDO--Certainly. SOCRATES--And where power lies, there and there only is sovereignty, and where power ends sovereignty finds its limit. So that, for example, if the lion could subdue man and the other animals, the earth would be for the use of the lion. PHAEDO--That is plain. SOCRATES--And if a company of men should find an island and go and live upon it and be strong enough to subdue the wild animals and keep out other men, that island would be for their use. PHAEDO--That follows, because sovereignty goes with power exercised in force. SOCRATES--And so if one man should find a vacant space and take possession, it would be his. PHAEDO--That is true. SOCRATES--And what belongs to man, man may dispose of as he will. PHAEDO--All men agree to that. SOCRATES--And, therefore, since Hippocrates has found a vacant space on the earth and taken possession thereof, and no man disputes his possession, it is his and he may sell it. PHAEDO--That is certainly true, and I do not doubt that Hipparchus will now pay down his talent of silver and take over the vale in the Olympian forest. SOCRATES--And if instead of finding an island the company of men had found an entire continent it would be theirs if they were strong enough to keep it. PHAEDO--Surely that is so, for power is but concentrated ability to enjoy, and where most power lies, there lies most ability to enjoy, and therefore the highest possible aggregate of human happiness, in the attainment of which the will of the gods shall be done. SOCRATES--And if a company can take part of a continent, but not the whole, whatever they are able to take is theirs. PHAEDO--Undoubtedly. SOCRATES--And what is theirs is not the property of others. PHAEDO--By no means. SOCRATES--And if it does not belong to others, others may not lawfully use it. PHAEDO--Surely not. SOCRATES--And they who do own it may prevent others from entering it. PHAEDO--Surely, for hath not the poet said: "That they shall take who have the power, And they may keep who can." SOCRATES--Therefore it is plain that the United States may keep Chinamen out of America. PHAEDO--There can be no doubt of it whatever. SOCRATES--And Chinese may keep Americans out of China. PHAEDO--That is another story. One must never let his logic get the better of him. And so we might play with these great subjects forever, with reasoning as leaky as a sieve, but good enough to catch the careless or the untrained. One of the most interesting lectures which I ever listened to was one before the Economic League of San Francisco on the "Dialectics of Socialism." The lecturer was a very acute man, who would not for one moment be deceived by the sophistry of my Socrates and Phaedo, but, who, himself, made willing captives of his hearers by similar methods. I was unable to hear all his address, but when I reluctantly left, it appeared to me that he was expecting to prove that Socialism must be sound philosophy because it was contradictory to all human observation, experience, judgment and the dictates of sound common sense--and his large audience was plainly enough with him. The dialectics of the schoolmen or their equivalent are useless in Social discussion. Social phenomena do not lend themselves to the rigorous formulas of mathematics and logic, for the human intellect is unable to discern and grasp all the factors of these problems. My travesty of Plato was intended to illustrate the difficulty of close reasoning on such topics. Neither, on the other hand, are we to blindly follow the impulses of emotion which lead us to jump at a conclusion, support it with what reason we can, but reach it in any event. Emotion is the source of Social power, but power unrestrained and undirected is dangerous. Energy created by the sight of distress must be controlled by reason or it will not relieve distress. And by reason I do not mean Social syllogisms, of whose premises we are always uncertain, but conclusions half unconsciously formed in the mind as the result of human experience operating on human feeling--the practical wisdom which we call common sense. Human conduct, individual and aggregate, must be regulated and determined by the consensus of the judgment of the wisest made effective through its gradual acceptance as the judgment of the majority. Private ownership of land, with its accompanying rent, is justified, not by an imaginary inherent right in the individual, which has no real existence and so cannot be conveyed, but because the interests of Society require the stimulus to effort which private ownership and private ownership only can give. And here I shall leave this point without the further illustration and elaboration with which I could torment you longer than you could keep awake. And with the other two points I will confine myself to the most condensed forms of statement. Interest--Socialists and non-Socialists agree that what a man makes is his. Socialists and I agree that every man is entitled to his just share of the Social dividend. I believe, and in this I suppose the Socialists would agree with me, that when a man gets his annual dividend he may use it, or keep it for future use. If, while he does not use his dividend, or the product of his labor, he permits others to use it to their profit, it seems to me that he is entitled to some satisfaction in compensation for his sacrifice. I believe it to the interest of Society that he have it. By individual thrift Society accumulates, and it is wise to encourage thrift. If I build a mill and, falling sick, cannot use it, it is fair that he who does use it shall pay me for my sacrifice in building it. If I forego possible satisfactions of any kind, those whom I permit to enjoy them should recompense me. And that is interest. Its foundation as a right rests not only on those natural sentiments of justice with which the normal man everywhere is endowed and behind which we cannot go, but on the interest of Society to encourage the creation of savings funds to be employed for the benefit of Society. Profits--Private profit is far less a private right than a public necessity. Its absence would involve a waste which Society could not endure. With individual operations controlled by fallible men enormous waste is inevitable. It is essential to Society that this waste be minimized. No industrial or commercial enterprise can go on without risk. Profit is the compensation for risk. One of the things which I believe, but which cannot be proved, is that from the dawn of history losses to individuals by which Society gained have exceeded profits to individuals, and the excess of these losses is the Social accumulation, increased, of course, by residues left after individuals have got what they could. Whitney died poor, but mankind has the cotton-gin. Bell died rich, but there is a profit to mankind in the telephone. Socialists propose to assume risks and absorb profits. I do not believe Society could afford this. I am profoundly convinced that under the Socialist program the inevitable waste would be so enormously increased as to result in disaster approaching a Social cataclysm. This is an old argument whose validity Socialists scout. Nevertheless I believe it sound. The number of these whose intellectual and physical strength is sufficient for the wisest direction of great enterprises is very small. Some who are interested in our great industrial trusts are said to carry heavy insurance on the life of Mr. Morgan, lest he die and leave no successor. If the natural ability is found its possessor will probably lack the knowledge which Mr. Morgan[4] has accumulated, and in the light of which he directs his operations. It is essential that great operations--and the business of the future will be conducted on a great scale--be directed by great wisdom and power. The possessors of high qualities we now discover by the trying-out process. They can be discovered in no other way, and great effort can be secured only by the hope of great reward. Until human nature changes we can expect nothing different. Socialism implies popular selection of industrial leadership. Wherever tried thus far in the world's history there has usually been abject failure. The mass can choose leaders in emotion but not directors of industry. The selection of experts by the non-expert can be wise only by accident. If the selection is not popular, then Socialism is tyranny, as its enemies charge. If it be popular, or in so far as it is popular, direction is likely to fall to the great persuaders and not to the great directors. Never did a "peoples party" yet escape the control of the unscrupulous. No political movements result in so much political and Social rascality as so-called popular movements originated by earnest and honest men. I see no reason to suppose that the Socialistic direction of industrial affairs in any city would be directed from any other source than the back rooms of the saloons where political movements are now shaped. If the Socialistic program were to go into effect tomorrow morning there would be here tonight neither lecturer nor audience. The good dinner would remain untasted in the ovens. Every mortal soul of us would be scooting from one Social magnate to another to assure that we were on the slate for the soft jobs and that nobody was crowding us off. I have no faith in human nature except as it is constantly strengthened and purified by struggle. That struggle is an irrepressible conflict existing in all nature, and from which man cannot escape. It is better for mankind that it go on openly and in more or less accord with known rules of warfare than in the secret conspiring chambers of the class which in the end controls popular movement. All serious conflict involves evil, but it is also strengthening to the race. I wish misery could be banished from the world, but I fear that it cannot be so banished. I have little confidence in human ability to so thoroughly comprehend the structure and functions of the Social body as to correctly foretell the steps in its evolution, or prescribe constitutional remedies which will banish Social disease. If I were a Social reformer--and were I with my present knowledge still an ingenuous youth in the fulness of strength with my life before me I do not know that I would not be a Social reformer--I would profess myself a Social agnostic, and prosecute my mission by the methods of the opportunist. I would endeavor to direct the Social ax to the most obvious and obtrusive roots of the Social evil, and having removed them and watched the result, would then determine what to do next. Possibly I would endeavor to begin with the abolition of wills and collateral inheritance, and so limiting direct inheritance that no man able to work should escape its necessity by reason of the labor of his forefathers. I might say that I recognized the vested rights of the Astors to the soil on Manhattan Island, but that I recognized no right as vested in beings yet unborn. I might say that it was sufficient stimulation and reward for the most eminent Social endeavor to select, within reason, the objects of public utility to which resulting accumulations should be applied and to superintend during one's lifetime their application to those purposes. I might think in this way, and might not, were I an enthusiastic Social reformer in the heyday of youth, but it appears to me now that at any rate we shall make most progress toward ultimate universal happiness if we recognize that out of the increasing strenuousness of our conflict there is coming constantly increasing comfort and better division thereof, and if we direct that portion of our energies which we devote to the service of mankind toward such changes in the direction of the Social impulse as can be made without impairing the force of the evolutionary movement, rather than to those which involve the reversal of the direction of the force with the resulting danger of explosion and collapse. [Footnote 4: This was written and originally printed long before the death of Mr. Morgan, but there is a general feeling that he has left no successor of his caliber.] ***** Here ends The Inhumanity of Socialism, being two papers--The Case Against Socialism and A Critique of Socialism--By Edward F. Adams. Published by Paul Elder and Company at their Tomoye Press, in the city of San Francisco, and seen through the press by John Swart, in the month of June, Nineteen Hundred & Thirteen 
61	----	Transcribed by Allen Lutins with assistance from Jim Tarzia. MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY [From the English edition of 1888, edited by Friedrich Engels] A spectre is haunting Europe--the spectre of Communism. All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies. Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as Communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the Opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries? Two things result from this fact. I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European Powers to be itself a Power. II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself. To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London, and sketched the following Manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages. I. BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations. The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes, directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed. The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development. The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop. Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of the industrial middle class, by industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois. Modern industry has established the world-market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its time, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages. We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange. Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the mediaeval commune; here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany), there taxable "third estate" of the monarchy (as in France), afterwards, in the period of manufacture proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, corner-stone of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world-market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part. The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment." It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless and indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom--Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation. The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which Reactionists so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature. The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image. The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West. The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier and one customs-tariff. The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground--what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour? We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder. Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted to it, and by the economical and political sway of the bourgeois class. A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society. In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity--the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand inforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented. The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself. But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons--the modern working class--the proletarians. In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed--a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piece-meal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market. Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. Nay more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labour increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by increase of the work exacted in a given time or by increased speed of the machinery, etc. Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is. The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex. No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc. The lower strata of the middle class--the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants--all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by the new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population. The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by individual labourers, then by the workpeople of a factory, then by the operatives of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labour, they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages. At this stage the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeoisie. Thus the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie. But with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The unceasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon the workers begin to form combinations (Trades Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there the contest breaks out into riots. Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern proletarians, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years. This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus the ten-hours' bill in England was carried. Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further, in many ways, the course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all times, with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for its help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own instruments of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie. Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling classes are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress. Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the process of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole. Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product. The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat, they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat. The "dangerous class," the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue. In the conditions of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family-relations; modern industrial labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests. All the preceding classes that got the upper hand, sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property. All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air. Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie. In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat. Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society. The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. II. PROLETARIANS AND COMMUNISTS In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole? The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties. They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement. The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: (1) In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. (2) In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole. The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement. The immediate aim of the Communist is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat. The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of Communism. All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions. The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favour of bourgeois property. The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few. In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property. We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man's own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence. Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of the petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily. Or do you mean modern bourgeois private property? But does wage-labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labour, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage-labour. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism. To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion. Capital is, therefore, not a personal, it is a social power. When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class-character. Let us now take wage-labour. The average price of wage-labour is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence, which is absolutely requisite in bare existence as a labourer. What, therefore, the wage-labourer appropriates by means of his labour, merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labour of others. All that we want to do away with, is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it. In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated labour. In Communist society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer. In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality. And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at. By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying. But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other "brave words" of our bourgeoisie about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the Communistic abolition of buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production, and of the bourgeoisie itself. You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society. In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend. From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolised, i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say individuality vanishes. You must, therefore, confess that by "individual" you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible. Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriation. It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us. According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of the tautology: that there can no longer be any wage-labour when there is no longer any capital. All objections urged against the Communistic mode of producing and appropriating material products, have, in the same way, been urged against the Communistic modes of producing and appropriating intellectual products. Just as, to the bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture. That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine. But don't wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will, whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class. The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property--historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production--this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property. Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists. On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution. The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital. Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty. But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social. And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention, direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class. The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour. But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the whole bourgeoisie in chorus. The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women. He has not even a suspicion that the real point is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production. For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial. Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's wives. Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with, is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private. The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality. The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word. National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world-market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto. The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat. In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end. The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical, and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination. Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views and conceptions, in one word, man's consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life? What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class. When people speak of ideas that revolutionise society, they do but express the fact, that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence. When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the 18th century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competition within the domain of knowledge. "Undoubtedly," it will be said, "religious, moral, philosophical and juridical ideas have been modified in the course of historical development. But religion, morality philosophy, political science, and law, constantly survived this change." "There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc. that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience." What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs. But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms. The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas. But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to Communism. We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling as to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible. Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production. These measures will of course be different in different countries. Nevertheless in the most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable. 1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. 2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 3. Abolition of all right of inheritance. 4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. 5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly. 6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State. 7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. 8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. 9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country. 10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c., &c. When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class. In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. III. SOCIALIST AND COMMUNIST LITERATURE 1. REACTIONARY SOCIALISM A. Feudal Socialism Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the aristocracies of France and England to write pamphlets against modern bourgeois society. In the French revolution of July 1830, and in the English reform agitation, these aristocracies again succumbed to the hateful upstart. Thenceforth, a serious political contest was altogether out of the question. A literary battle alone remained possible. But even in the domain of literature the old cries of the restoration period had become impossible. In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy were obliged to lose sight, apparently, of their own interests, and to formulate their indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new master, and whispering in his ears sinister prophecies of coming catastrophe. In this way arose Feudal Socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart's core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history. The aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the proletarian alms-bag in front for a banner. But the people, so often as it joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats of arms, and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter. One section of the French Legitimists and "Young England" exhibited this spectacle. In pointing out that their mode of exploitation was different to that of the bourgeoisie, the feudalists forget that they exploited under circumstances and conditions that were quite different, and that are now antiquated. In showing that, under their rule, the modern proletariat never existed, they forget that the modern bourgeoisie is the necessary offspring of their own form of society. For the rest, so little do they conceal the reactionary character of their criticism that their chief accusation against the bourgeoisie amounts to this, that under the bourgeois regime a class is being developed, which is destined to cut up root and branch the old order of society. What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it creates a proletariat, as that it creates a revolutionary proletariat. In political practice, therefore, they join in all coercive measures against the working class; and in ordinary life, despite their high falutin phrases, they stoop to pick up the golden apples dropped from the tree of industry, and to barter truth, love, and honour for traffic in wool, beetroot-sugar, and potato spirits. As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord, so has Clerical Socialism with Feudal Socialism. Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage, against the State? Has it not preached in the place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat. B. Petty-Bourgeois Socialism The feudal aristocracy was not the only class that was ruined by the bourgeoisie, not the only class whose conditions of existence pined and perished in the atmosphere of modern bourgeois society. The mediaeval burgesses and the small peasant proprietors were the precursors of the modern bourgeoisie. In those countries which are but little developed, industrially and commercially, these two classes still vegetate side by side with the rising bourgeoisie. In countries where modern civilisation has become fully developed, a new class of petty bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie and ever renewing itself as a supplementary part of bourgeois society. The individual members of this class, however, are being constantly hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition, and, as modern industry develops, they even see the moment approaching when they will completely disappear as an independent section of modern society, to be replaced, in manufactures, agriculture and commerce, by overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen. In countries like France, where the peasants constitute far more than half of the population, it was natural that writers who sided with the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, should use, in their criticism of the bourgeois regime, the standard of the peasant and petty bourgeois, and from the standpoint of these intermediate classes should take up the cudgels for the working class. Thus arose petty-bourgeois Socialism. Sismondi was the head of this school, not only in France but also in England. This school of Socialism dissected with great acuteness the contradictions in the conditions of modern production. It laid bare the hypocritical apologies of economists. It proved, incontrovertibly, the disastrous effects of machinery and division of labour; the concentration of capital and land in a few hands; overproduction and crises; it pointed out the inevitable ruin of the petty bourgeois and peasant, the misery of the proletariat, the anarchy in production, the crying inequalities in the distribution of wealth, the industrial war of extermination between nations, the dissolution of old moral bonds, of the old family relations, of the old nationalities. In its positive aims, however, this form of Socialism aspires either to restoring the old means of production and of exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the old society, or to cramping the modern means of production and of exchange, within the framework of the old property relations that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means. In either case, it is both reactionary and Utopian. Its last words are: corporate guilds for manufacture, patriarchal relations in agriculture. Ultimately, when stubborn historical facts had dispersed all intoxicating effects of self-deception, this form of Socialism ended in a miserable fit of the blues. C. German, or "True," Socialism The Socialist and Communist literature of France, a literature that originated under the pressure of a bourgeoisie in power, and that was the expression of the struggle against this power, was introduced into Germany at a time when the bourgeoisie, in that country, had just begun its contest with feudal absolutism. German philosophers, would-be philosophers, and beaux esprits, eagerly seized on this literature, only forgetting, that when these writings immigrated from France into Germany, French social conditions had not immigrated along with them. In contact with German social conditions, this French literature lost all its immediate practical significance, and assumed a purely literary aspect. Thus, to the German philosophers of the eighteenth century, the demands of the first French Revolution were nothing more than the demands of "Practical Reason" in general, and the utterance of the will of the revolutionary French bourgeoisie signified in their eyes the law of pure Will, of Will as it was bound to be, of true human Will generally. The world of the German literate consisted solely in bringing the new French ideas into harmony with their ancient philosophical conscience, or rather, in annexing the French ideas without deserting their own philosophic point of view. This annexation took place in the same way in which a foreign language is appropriated, namely, by translation. It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written. The German literate reversed this process with the profane French literature. They wrote their philosophical nonsense beneath the French original. For instance, beneath the French criticism of the economic functions of money, they wrote "Alienation of Humanity," and beneath the French criticism of the bourgeois State they wrote "dethronement of the Category of the General," and so forth. The introduction of these philosophical phrases at the back of the French historical criticisms they dubbed "Philosophy of Action," "True Socialism," "German Science of Socialism," "Philosophical Foundation of Socialism," and so on. The French Socialist and Communist literature was thus completely emasculated. And, since it ceased in the hands of the German to express the struggle of one class with the other, he felt conscious of having overcome "French one-sidedness" and of representing, not true requirements, but the requirements of truth; not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests of Human Nature, of Man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy. This German Socialism, which took its schoolboy task so seriously and solemnly, and extolled its poor stock-in-trade in such mountebank fashion, meanwhile gradually lost its pedantic innocence. The fight of the German, and especially, of the Prussian bourgeoisie, against feudal aristocracy and absolute monarchy, in other words, the liberal movement, became more earnest. By this, the long wished-for opportunity was offered to "True" Socialism of confronting the political movement with the Socialist demands, of hurling the traditional anathemas against liberalism, against representative government, against bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom of the press, bourgeois legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality, and of preaching to the masses that they had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by this bourgeois movement. German Socialism forgot, in the nick of time, that the French criticism, whose silly echo it was, presupposed the existence of modern bourgeois society, with its corresponding economic conditions of existence, and the political constitution adapted thereto, the very things whose attainment was the object of the pending struggle in Germany. To the absolute governments, with their following of parsons, professors, country squires and officials, it served as a welcome scarecrow against the threatening bourgeoisie. It was a sweet finish after the bitter pills of floggings and bullets with which these same governments, just at that time, dosed the German working-class risings. While this "True" Socialism thus served the governments as a weapon for fighting the German bourgeoisie, it, at the same time, directly represented a reactionary interest, the interest of the German Philistines. In Germany the petty-bourgeois class, a relic of the sixteenth century, and since then constantly cropping up again under various forms, is the real social basis of the existing state of things. To preserve this class is to preserve the existing state of things in Germany. The industrial and political supremacy of the bourgeoisie threatens it with certain destruction; on the one hand, from the concentration of capital; on the other, from the rise of a revolutionary proletariat. "True" Socialism appeared to kill these two birds with one stone. It spread like an epidemic. The robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of rhetoric, steeped in the dew of sickly sentiment, this transcendental robe in which the German Socialists wrapped their sorry "eternal truths," all skin and bone, served to wonderfully increase the sale of their goods amongst such a public. And on its part, German Socialism recognised, more and more, its own calling as the bombastic representative of the petty-bourgeois Philistine. It proclaimed the German nation to be the model nation, and the German petty Philistine to be the typical man. To every villainous meanness of this model man it gave a hidden, higher, Socialistic interpretation, the exact contrary of its real character. It went to the extreme length of directly opposing the "brutally destructive" tendency of Communism, and of proclaiming its supreme and impartial contempt of all class struggles. With very few exceptions, all the so-called Socialist and Communist publications that now (1847) circulate in Germany belong to the domain of this foul and enervating literature. 2. CONSERVATIVE, OR BOURGEOIS, SOCIALISM A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances, in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society. To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of Socialism has, moreover, been worked out into complete systems. We may cite Proudhon's Philosophie de la Misere as an example of this form. The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie. A second and more practical, but less systematic, form of this Socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class, by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economic relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of Socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be effected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work, of bourgeois government. Bourgeois Socialism attains adequate expression, when, and only when, it becomes a mere figure of speech. Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working class. This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of bourgeois Socialism. It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois--for the benefit of the working class. 3. CRITICAL-UTOPIAN SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM We do not here refer to that literature which, in every great modern revolution, has always given voice to the demands of the proletariat, such as the writings of Babeuf and others. The first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own ends, made in times of universal excitement, when feudal society was being overthrown, these attempts necessarily failed, owing to the then undeveloped state of the proletariat, as well as to the absence of the economic conditions for its emancipation, conditions that had yet to be produced, and could be produced by the impending bourgeois epoch alone. The revolutionary literature that accompanied these first movements of the proletariat had necessarily a reactionary character. It inculcated universal asceticism and social levelling in its crudest form. The Socialist and Communist systems properly so called, those of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen and others, spring into existence in the early undeveloped period, described above, of the struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie (see Section 1. Bourgeois and Proletarians). The founders of these systems see, indeed, the class antagonisms, as well as the action of the decomposing elements, in the prevailing form of society. But the proletariat, as yet in its infancy, offers to them the spectacle of a class without any historical initiative or any independent political movement. Since the development of class antagonism keeps even pace with the development of industry, the economic situation, as they find it, does not as yet offer to them the material conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat. They therefore search after a new social science, after new social laws, that are to create these conditions. Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive action, historically created conditions of emancipation to fantastic ones, and the gradual, spontaneous class-organisation of the proletariat to the organisation of society specially contrived by these inventors. Future history resolves itself, in their eyes, into the propaganda and the practical carrying out of their social plans. In the formation of their plans they are conscious of caring chiefly for the interests of the working class, as being the most suffering class. Only from the point of view of being the most suffering class does the proletariat exist for them. The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own surroundings, causes Socialists of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favoured. Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the ruling class. For how can people, when once they understand their system, fail to see in it the best possible plan of the best possible state of society? Hence, they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary, action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, and endeavour, by small experiments, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social Gospel. Such fantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time when the proletariat is still in a very undeveloped state and has but a fantastic conception of its own position correspond with the first instinctive yearnings of that class for a general reconstruction of society. But these Socialist and Communist publications contain also a critical element. They attack every principle of existing society. Hence they are full of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class. The practical measures proposed in them--such as the abolition of the distinction between town and country, of the family, of the carrying on of industries for the account of private individuals, and of the wage system, the proclamation of social harmony, the conversion of the functions of the State into a mere superintendence of production, all these proposals, point solely to the disappearance of class antagonisms which were, at that time, only just cropping up, and which, in these publications, are recognised in their earliest, indistinct and undefined forms only. These proposals, therefore, are of a purely Utopian character. The significance of Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism bears an inverse relation to historical development. In proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value and all theoretical justification. Therefore, although the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects. They hold fast by the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development of the proletariat. They, therefore, endeavour, and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realisation of their social Utopias, of founding isolated "phalansteres," of establishing "Home Colonies," of setting up a "Little Icaria"--duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem--and to realise all these castles in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois. By degrees they sink into the category of the reactionary conservative Socialists depicted above, differing from these only by more systematic pedantry, and by their fanatical and superstitious belief in the miraculous effects of their social science. They, therefore, violently oppose all political action on the part of the working class; such action, according to them, can only result from blind unbelief in the new Gospel. The Owenites in England, and the Fourierists in France, respectively, oppose the Chartists and the Reformistes. IV. POSITION OF THE COMMUNISTS IN RELATION TO THE VARIOUS EXISTING OPPOSITION PARTIES Section II has made clear the relations of the Communists to the existing working-class parties, such as the Chartists in England and the Agrarian Reformers in America. The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement. In France the Communists ally themselves with the Social-Democrats, against the conservative and radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right to take up a critical position in regard to phrases and illusions traditionally handed down from the great Revolution. In Switzerland they support the Radicals, without losing sight of the fact that this party consists of antagonistic elements, partly of Democratic Socialists, in the French sense, partly of radical bourgeois. In Poland they support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution as the prime condition for national emancipation, that party which fomented the insurrection of Cracow in 1846. In Germany they fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a revolutionary way, against the absolute monarchy, the feudal squirearchy, and the petty bourgeoisie. But they never cease, for a single instant, to instil into the working class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat, in order that the German workers may straightaway use, as so many weapons against the bourgeoisie, the social and political conditions that the bourgeoisie must necessarily introduce along with its supremacy, and in order that, after the fall of the reactionary classes in Germany, the fight against the bourgeoisie itself may immediately begin. The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilisation, and with a much more developed proletariat, than that of England was in the seventeenth, and of France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution. In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. In all these movements they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time. Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries. The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE! 
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60222	----	generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org) Note: Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/raidofdoverroman00ford THE RAID OF DOVER: A Romance Of The Reign Of Woman: A.D. 1940. by The Author of "A Time of Terror," "The Devil's Peepshow," &c. "If that Old England fall Which Nelson left so great----" LORD TENNYSON. London: King, Sell, & Olding, Limited, 27, Chancery Lane, W.C. Portsmouth: Holbrook & Son, Limited. 1910. AUTHOR'S NOTE. _While this Forecast in Fiction has been running as a Serial, the writer has realised that in some respects it may be open to misconstruction. Patriotism, not pessimism, is its real keynote._ "This England never did, nor never shall, Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror, But when it first did help to wound itself." _That is the crux. England is being wounded by Englishmen; and the events imagined in this story are only a concrete example of the possibilities foreshadowed by Mr. Balfour (Jan. 24th, 1910) in the following words:--_ "If the pressure of public opinion is not effected, then I tell you with all solemnity that there are difficulties and perils before this country which neither we nor our fathers nor our grand-fathers nor our great-grand-fathers have ever yet had to face, and that before many years are out there will be a Nemesis for this manifest and scandalous folly in saving money just at the wrong time, in refusing to carry out a plain duty." _The history of the rise and fall of nations is only the story of Cause and Effect. Given concomitant causes (1)--the unchecked blight of Socialism, (2) the Revolt of Woman on "democratic lines," (3) weakened Maritime Power--and the Effect is only too likely to be that England will "lie at the proud foot of a conqueror." Let it be hoped that the British people will remove the causes and prevent the otherwise probable result._ _It must not be supposed that the writer identifies himself with the views expressed by any of his characters on the subject of Woman or Votes for Women. On the contrary, he thinks that women have been treated with small tact and much harshness. But we already have abundant evidence of the dangerous result of giving the franchise to hundreds of thousands of uneducated men; and if, even short of universal suffrage, the vote should be granted to the other sex on what Mr. Asquith calls "democratic lines," it would mean that hundreds of thousands of uneducated women might join hands with the existing forces of enfranchised Socialism. That way madness lies, and the end of the British Empire, "which peril Heaven forfend!"_ _The story is, in some sort, a sequel to "A Time of Terror," in which the sign of the Spider may be taken as a reminder of the fabled Kraken. The Kraken, in turn, may be taken to symbolise the German Fleet, "a sea monster of vast size said to have been seen off the Coast of Norway." Oddly enough, Pliny speaks of such a monster in the Straits of Gibraltar,--which blocked the entrance of ships._ CONTENTS. PROLOGUE. CHAP. PAGE I. THE LOST LEADER i. II. A PRISONER OF THE MAHDI v. THE RAID OF DOVER. I. HOW NICHOLAS JARDINE ROSE 1 II. HOW ENGLAND FELL 6 III. ABOARD THE AIRSHIP 13 IV. THE STAR OF LIFE 21 V. A THREEFOLD PLEDGE 25 VI. THE REVOLT OF WOMAN 33 VII. THE PRICE OF POWER 44 VIII. WARDLAW'S WORKS 51 IX. THE LOOSENED GRIP 59 X. ZENOBIA'S DREAM 66 XI. THE NEW AMAZONS 82 XII. A SECRET AND A THUNDERBOLT 94 XIII. THE RAID OF THE EAGLES 104 XIV. THE FIGHT FOR THE FORT 114 XV. IN THE HEART OF THE HILL 122 XVI. SIGNS AND WONDERS 134 XVII. HOW THE RAID FAILED 142 XVIII. THE WRECK OF THE AIRSHIP 152 XIX. THE COUP D'ÉTAT? 164 XX. LINKED LIVES 172 XXI. THE WRATH OF SUL 179 PROLOGUE. CHAPTER I. THE LOST LEADER. Wilson Renshaw, the most brilliant member of the House of Commons, was on the verge of a complete breakdown at the end of the memorable Session of 1930, a session in which the marshalled forces of Socialism, allied with the insurgent women of England, had almost, but not quite, swept the board. The Vacation of that year had brought a truce in the fiercest Parliamentary campaign known to modern times, and Renshaw, under the peremptory advice of medical specialists, left England for a prolonged holiday. He went to Egypt, recruited his health at Cairo, and then, in pursuance of a long-cherished wish, set out by a circuitous route for Khartum. With the exception of Jerusalem, the Nubian capital was regarded by the young English statesman as the most sacred spot on earth, sanctified, as it was, by the blood of General Gordon, a Christian soldier, who, to the indelible disgrace of the political clique then in power, had been left unsupported in the midst of his blood-thirsty enemies, until it was too late to rescue him. That for which Gordon had paved the way; that which Kitchener and Macdonald had gallantly achieved, in these latter days political sentimentalists, Englishmen of parochial mind, had gradually undone. Egypt, brought to a pitch of high prosperity under the civil administration of Lord Cromer, had been gradually allowed to lapse back into native hands. There had been no absolute evacuation at the date of Renshaw's arrival in the country, but the British garrison had been reduced to insignificant proportions. But Renshaw did not come back! He had vanished from the ken of civilization--swallowed up as effectually in the Nubian desert as when the earth had opened and swallowed up Dathan and covered the congregation of Abiram. The history of Egypt and the Soudan, written in blood at the period in question, only accorded with that written in ink, in advance of the event, by those who in the first decade of the twentieth century foresaw the outcome of Little Englandism all the world over. The native movement--the strength of which the dominant party in Parliament had chosen to ignore--manifested itself in scenes of sudden and overwhelming violence, while at the same time the Holy War, preached by a Mahdi in whose existence great numbers of people had refused to believe, claimed as sacrificial victims nearly every white-skinned man throughout the length and breadth of the Soudan. The caravan with which Renshaw was travelling fell into the hands of the Mahdi's adherents, betrayed by a treacherous guide, who then spread the news--anticipating what he had every reason to believe would really happen--of the death of The White Kaffir, as a consequence of the resistance he had offered to a band of "True Believers." The news was received in England with grief and lamentation by those who esteemed Renshaw, appreciated his talents, and knew how essential were his services if the aims of the Socialist-Labour Leader, Nicholas Jardine, and his party were to be defeated. But the public in general saw in the disappearance of the rising statesman the almost inevitable result of a rash enterprise. It came to be regarded only as an incidental episode in the wholesale upheaval of which India, Egypt, and other lands once dominated by the British sceptre soon became the scene. All this had happened ten years and more before the critical events of 1940. From time to time during that period little-credited reports reached England concerning a certain white prisoner in the hands of the Mahdi, who was believed by some to be none other than Renshaw, the missing man. But, except with a few, these rumours carried little weight. It was not the first time that tales of that sort had reached home after the disappearance of well-known men in remote regions of the Dark Continent. Many, recalling the explorations of Dr. Livingstone, and Stanley's expedition for the rescue of Emin Pasha, said that when Renshaw was found and brought home they would believe that he was alive--and not before. Meanwhile, in England, Nicholas Jardine carried everything before him. The Constitutional Party, leaderless and disorganized, seemed to sink into helpless apathy, and right and left the rapid shrinkage of the British Empire bore witness to the ruinous success of new and revolutionary parties in the State. Sometimes, in the House of Commons, old followers of the Labour Leader's missing rival asked questions, which, for the moment, attracted marked attention and, in some minds, roused most sinister suspicions. Had the President received any information that tended to confirm the rumour that Mr. Renshaw was still living and undergoing the tortures of a barbarous imprisonment? Was it a fact that, after a specified date, the Government, or any members of it, had been notified, not only that Mr. Renshaw was alive, but that on payment of a ransom he might be restored to his country? Had any confidential information been received from certain oriental visitors who, from time to time, had come to this country? Was it, or was it not, a fact that certain periodical payments of large amount had been made out of secret service funds in relation to Mr. Renshaw and his alleged imprisonment? These searching questions were evaded in the usual Parliamentary manner, and it was observed that never was President Jardine--such was his official title as chief of the new Council of State--so black and taciturn as when this suggestive topic was from time to time revived in Parliament. CHAPTER II. A PRISONER OF THE MAHDI. Through all those dreadful years Wilson Renshaw lived--lived day and night the tortured life of a white man at the mercy of the black. Year after year the iron entered his soul, even as the Mahdi's fetters ate into his swollen and bleeding limbs. There were others who suffered with him in the barbaric prison-house. What he endured was no less, no more, than they were made to bear. Happy indeed were those whom death released from misery and anguish that tongue could never tell, nor pen describe. Hell itself, as pictured by maddest brain of the most fiendish fanatic, could not have shown greater resources in the way of physical and mental torture. The Black Hole of Calcutta lacked many of the special horrors of the inner den in which the prophet's prisoners were herded during all the awful hours of night. The bloodstained walls of the Tower of London, if walls could speak, whispering of the rack, the thumbscrew, and the boot, might tell indeed of sharper anguish, sooner over. The secret history of the Spanish Inquisition, if published, would reveal not less ingenuity--perhaps greater, in the refined subtleties of cruelty. But the prison at Khartum excelled them all at least in one respect--the prolongation of the agony inflicted. Not for weeks or months, but for years, if life endured, the prisoner had to suffer. Wearing three sets of shackles, with an iron ring round his neck, to which was attached a heavy chain, Renshaw--the White Kaffir--the man of culture and social ease in London, but here the reviled unbeliever, when night came was thrust into a stone-walled room measuring some thirty feet each way. A large pillar, supporting the roof, reduced the space available. Two prisoners, in chains, were dying of smallpox in a corner; some thirty others, suffering from various diseases, lay about the floor, which reeked with filth and swarmed with vermin. A compound stench, sickening and over-powering, assailed the nostrils, and every moment this increased as more prisoners, and yet more, were driven in for the night. The groans of the sick, the screams of the mad, the curses of others as they fought fiercely for places against one or another of the walls, blended in awful tumult as the door was closed upon the darkness within. Yet again and again that door was opened, and more prisoners were crowded in; until, at last, they fought and bit and raved even for standing room. Night after night, for nearly four years, Renshaw, the man of delicate fibre and refined training, the son of Western civilization, lived through such scenes as these, amid incidental horrors of bestiality that cannot be set down. When the uproar in the prison attained exceptional violence, the guards threw back the doors, and lashed with their hide-whips at the heads and faces of the nearest prisoners, and every time that this occurred some of them, struggling to move back, fell to the ground, and were trampled under foot. Renshaw was the only white prisoner among the Soudanese and Egyptians who thus endured the tender mercies of the Prophet--the Prophet for whom, it was said, the Angels had fought and would fight again, until every follower of the Cross accepted the Koran of Mahommed. For, like many of the greatest crimes that stain the annals of mankind, this prison discipline, in theory, was designed to benefit the souls of the captives. The White Kaffir, as an unbeliever, a dog and an outcast, was a special object of the Mahdi's solicitation. Only let him believe and his fetters should be struck off, or, at least, some of them. He had but to cry aloud in fervent faith, "There is but one God, and Mahommed is his Prophet!" But it was a cry that never passed the lips of Wilson Renshaw. The lash was tried again and again. Fifteen to twenty lashes at first; then a hundred; then a hundred and fifty. But still the bleeding lips in which the white man's teeth were biting in his anguish would not blaspheme. "Will you not cry out?" the gaoler asked. "Dog of a Christian, are thy head and heart of stone?" No answer; and again and yet again the lash descended. If only death would come, kind death to end this pain of mutilated flesh; this still sharper pain of degradation and humiliation! But death came not. Courage, indomitable pride of race, a godlike quality of patience, armed the White Kaffir to endure the slings and arrows of his dreadful fate. Death he would welcome with a sigh of gladness, but these barbarians should never, never break his spirit. At last the rigour of his sufferings was abated. Out of the mists of what seemed an interminable period of delirium, he awoke to a change of his treatment that caused him much surprise. No longer was he to be half starved. At night he was allowed to sleep alone in a rough, dark hut in a corner of the prison compound. Each day he was permitted, though still fettered, to go down to the river, on the banks of which the prison was placed, and wash in the waters of the Nile. From all of these changes it became apparent that his life, and not his death, was now desired. The motive for the change he had yet to realize. A whisper here and there, a chance word from his gaolers, with sundry indications, fugitive and various, at length convinced him that this amelioration of his fate could have but one sinister explanation, and one inspiring motive. If not the Mahdi himself, then some of the more covetous of his leading followers must be drawing payment from some mysterious source, a subsidy for holding him secure, here under the burning African sun, remote and cut off from all chance of rescue or escape. Yet escapes were planned, for even among these barbarous people there were a few who felt compassion for the hapless condition of the White Kaffir; and when it began to be rumoured that he was a man of high consideration in his native country, others, moved by cupidity and the prospect of a great reward, found means of letting Renshaw know that, _on conditions_, they were willing to secure him at least a chance of freedom. But every plan fell through. The Mahdi's spies were everywhere, and those who fell under suspicion of seeking to aid Renshaw to break free from his captivity received a punishment so terrible that he shrank from listening to any further offer of assistance. Presently his condition underwent yet further betterment. He became a prisoner at large--though still fettered and still closely watched. Employment he had none, save the performance of a few menial offices. Books he had none, save Al-Koran, the volume containing the religious, social, commercial, military, and legal code of Islam. But here, in the heart of this dreadful land, among the dark people of the Dark Continent, he now learned to look upon the book of life itself from a new and startling standpoint. Before him was unfolded a new and terrible chapter of history in the making, a chapter which revealed the slow marshalling of millions of the dark-skinned races, eager to wrest dominion and supremacy from the white-skinned masters of the world. THE RAID OF DOVER. CHAPTER I. HOW NICHOLAS JARDINE ROSE. The fall of England synchronised with the rise of Nicholas Jardine--first Labour Prime Minister of this ancient realm. When he married it was considered by his wife's relations that she had married beneath her! It fell out thus. In the neighbourhood of Walsall an accomplished young governess had found employment in the family of a wealthy solicitor, who was largely interested in the ironworks of the district. Her employer was conservative in his profession and radical in his politics. He took the chair from time to time at public meetings, and liked his family to be present on those occasions as a sort of domestic entourage, to bear witness to the eloquence of his orations. On one of these occasions a swarthy young engineer made a speech which quite eclipsed that of the chairman. He carried the meeting with him, raising enthusiasm and admiration to a remarkable height, and storming, among other things, the heart of the clever young governess. The young orator was not unconscious of the interest he excited. Bright eyes told their tale, and the whole-hearted applause that greeted his rhetorical flourishes could not escape attention at close quarters. Fair and refined in face, with fine, wavy light hair, the girl afforded a striking contrast to this forceful, dark-skinned man of the people; but they were drawn to each other by those magnetic sympathies which carry wireless messages from heart to heart. It would be too much to say that he fell in love with her at first sight. Had they never met again, mutual first impressions might have worn off; but they did meet again, and yet again. Coming to her employer's house on some political business, young Jardine encountered the girl in the hall, and she frankly gave him her hand--blushingly and with a word or two of thanks for the speech which had seemed to her so eloquent. After that, in the grimy streets of Walsall and in various public places, the acquaintance ripened, until one winter day, outside the town, she startled him with an unusually earnest "good-bye." The children she had taught were going away to school; she, too, was going away--whither she knew not. "Don't go," he said, slowly; "don't go. Stay and marry me." She was almost alone in the world, and shuddering at the grey prospect of her life. Besides, she loved him, or at least believed she did. Within a month they were married at the registrar's office. Nicholas Jardine did not hold with any church or chapel observances. After the banal ceremony of the civil law, he took his bride to London for a week. Then they returned to Walsall. His means were of the scantiest; they lived in a little five-roomed house, with endless tenements of the same mean type and miserable material stretching right and left. The conditions of life, after the first glamour faded, were dreary and soul-subduing. All the women in Warwick Road knew or wanted to know their neighbour's business; all resented 'uppish' airs on the part of any particular resident. They were of the ordinary type, those neighbours, kindly, slatternly, given to gossip. Mrs. Jardine was not, and did not look like, one of them. She was sincerely desirous of doing her duty in that drab state of life in which she found herself, but she wholly failed to please her neighbours, whose quarrels she heard through the miserable plaster walls, or witnessed from over the road. Worse than that, she found with dismay, as time went on, that she did not wholly please her husband. She was conscious of a gloomy sense of disappointment on his part; and she, though bravely resisting the growing feeling, knew in her heart that disillusionment had fallen upon herself. The recurrent coarseness of the man's ideas and expressions jarred upon her nerves. His way of eating, sleeping, and carrying himself, in their cramped domestic circle, constantly offended her fastidious tastes. When their child was born life went better; and all the time Jardine himself, though rather grudgingly, had been improving under the refining but unobstrusive influence of his cultured wife. One thing, at least, they had in common: a love of reading. Most of the money that could be spared in those days went in book buying. It was a time of education for the husband, and a time of disenchantment for the wife. She drooped amid their grey surroundings. The summers were sad, for the Black Country is no paradise even in the time of flowers. Everywhere the sombre industries of the place asserted themselves, and in the gloomy winters short dark days seemed to be always giving place to long dreary nights, hideously illumined by the lurid furnaces that glowed on every side. Jardine himself was as strong as the steel with which he had so much to do in the local works in which he found employment. But his wife found herself less and less able to stand up against the adverse influences of their environment. It came upon him with a shock that she had grown strangely fragile. Great God in heaven!--men call upon the name of God even when they profess to be agnostics--could she be going to die? Her great fear was for the future of the child; and her chief hope that the passionate devotion of Jardine to the little girl would be a redeeming influence in his own life and character. Both of them, from the first, took what care they could that their daughter should not grow up quite like the other children of the Walsall back streets. Their precautions helped to make them unpopular, and "that little Obie Jardine," as the Warwick Road ladies called Zenobia, was consequently compelled to hear many caustic remarks concerning the airs and graces that "some people" were supposed to give themselves. Good fortune and advancement came to Nicholas Jardine too late for his wife to share in them. The once bright eyes were closed for ever before the Trade Union of which he was secretary put him forward as a Parliamentary candidate. The swing of the Labour pendulum carried him in, and Jardine, M.P., and his little daughter moved to London. They found lodgings in Guildford Place, opposite the Foundling Hospital. The child was happier now, and the memory of the mother faded year by year. Life grew more cheerful and interesting for both of them as time went on. Members of Parliament and wire-pullers of the Labour party came to the lodgings and filled the sitting-room with smoke and noisy conversation. Zenobia listened and inwardly digested what she heard. Sundays were the dullest days. She often felt that she would like to go to service in the Foundling Chapel, but that was tacitly forbidden. Religion was ignored by Mr. Jardine, and among the books he had brought up from Walsall, and those he had since bought, neither Bible nor Prayer Book found a place. Jardine had other things to think of. He was going forward rapidly, and busy--in the world of politics--fighting Mr. Renshaw in the House of Commons. When the old Labour leader in the House of Commons had a paralytic seizure, the member for Walsall was chosen, though not without opposition, to fill the vacant place. There were millions of voters behind him now; Nicholas Jardine had become a power. At last the popular wave carried him into the foremost position in the State. The resolute Republican mechanic of miry Walsall actually became the foremost man in what for centuries had been the greatest Empire in the world. Before that great step in promotion was obtained, Jardine had removed from London to the riverside house, in which he still resided, when a certain young Linton Herrick came from Canada and stayed with his uncle--Jardine's next door neighbour. According to the new Constitution, the Government held office for five years. The end of that term was now approaching, and every adult man and woman in the land would shortly have the opportunity of voting for his retention in office or for replacing him with a successor, man or woman. He talked much with his daughter of the struggle that was coming, as it had been his custom to do for years. She was his only companion, the only object of his affections, the one domestic interest in his life. CHAPTER II. HOW ENGLAND FELL. So much for the man. What of the Empire? Nicholas Jardine had witnessed, and assisted in, its collapse. He had witnessed the result of a "corner" in food stuffs, and discovered that Uncle Sam was not the man to miss his chance of making millions merely because in theory blood is thicker than water. He had witnessed, also, some of the effects of the great international confidence trick. The feature of the common swindle so described is that the trickster makes ingenuous professions. The dupe, not to be outdone in generous sentiments, places his watch or his bank-notes in the trickster's hands--just to show confidence. The trickster goes outside and does not come back again. So, in the matter of national armaments, Germany had avowed the friendliest disposition towards Great Britain. England, fatuously eager to believe in another _entente cordiale_, obligingly sapped her own resources. Germany, with her tongue in her cheek, went ahead, determined that England should not catch up to her. Thus had the way been paved for certain disastrous events: the cutting of the lion's claws, the clipping of his venerable tail, and the annexation of vast outlying domains in which the once unchallenged beast aforetime had held his own, monarch of all he surveyed. When Germany conceived that the fateful moment had arrived, Germany pounced. France was friendly, but not active, Russia active and not friendly, Italy was busily occupied in Abyssinia, and nominally allied with Germany. Austria had her hands full in Macedonia, and was actually allied with Germany. Spain and Portugal did not count. Holland disappeared from the map, following the example of Denmark. The German cormorant swallowed them up, and German squadrons appropriated the harbours on the North Sea, as previously those on the Baltic. While these European changes were being effected with bewildering rapidity, our former allies, the Japanese, who had learnt naval warfare in the English school, played their own hand with notable promptitude and success. Japan had long had her eye on Australia. She wanted elbow room. She wanted to develop Asiatic power. Now was the time, when British warships were engaged in a stupendous struggle thousands of miles away. The little navy that the Australians had got together for purposes of self-defence crumpled up like paper boats under the big guns of the Yellow Fleet. Australia was lost. It made the heart ache to think of the changes wrought by the cruel hand of time--wrought in only a quarter of a century--in the pride of Britannia, in her power and her possessions. India, that once bright and splendid jewel in the British Crown, the great possession that gave the title of Empress to Queen Victoria of illustrious memory--India, as a British possession, had been sliced to less than half its size by those same Japanese, allied with pampered Hindu millions; and it was problematical whether what was left could be held much longer. The memorable alliance with Japan, running its course for several years, had worn sharp and thin towards the end. It had not been renewed. Japan never had really contemplated pulling chestnuts out of the fire for the sole benefit of Great Britain. They saved us from Russia only to help themselves; and now that Great Britain was derisively spoken of as Beggared Britain, the astute Jap, self-seeking, with limited ideas of gratitude, was England's enemy. In South Africa, alas! England had lost not only a slice, but all. The men of words had overruled the men of deeds. What had been won in many a hard-fought battle, was surrendered in the House of Commons. Patriotism had been superseded by a policy of expediency. The great Boer War had furnished a hecatomb of twenty thousand British lives. A hundred thousand mourners bowed their heads in resignation for those who died or fought and bled for England. Millions had groaned under the burden of the war tax, and then, after years, we had enabled Brother Boer to secure, by means of a ballot box, what he had lost for the world's good in the stricken field. They had talked of a union of races--a fond thing vainly invented. Oil and water never mix. Socialists, in alliance with sentimentalists in the swarming ranks of enfranchised women, had reduced the British Lion to the condition of a zoological specimen--a tame and clawless creature. The millennium was to be expedited so that the poor old Lion might learn to eat straw like the ox. If he could not get straw, let him eat dirt--dirt, in any form of humble pie, that other nations thought fit to set before the one-time King of Beasts. In another part of the world, the link between England and Canada, another great dominion, as Linton Herrick well knew, had worn to the tenuity of thinnest thread. Canada, as yet, had not formally thrown off allegiance to the old country, but the thread might be snapped at any moment. Linton, who had lived all his life in the Dominion, knew very well how things were tending. The English were no longer the dominant race in those vast tracts. They might have been, if a wise system of colonisation had been organised by British Governments. But the rough material of the race had been allowed to stagnate and rot here in the crowded cities of England. Loafers, hooligans, and alien riff-raff had reached incredible numbers in the course of the last five-and-twenty years. Workhouses, hospitals, lunatic asylums, and prisons could not be built fast enough to accommodate the unfit and the criminal. Meanwhile, the vast tracts of grain-growing Canada, where a reinvigorated race of Englishmen might have found unlimited elbow-room, had been largely annexed by astute speculators from the United States. The Canadians, unsupported, had found it impossible to hold their own. The State was too big for them. As far back as 1906, the remnant of the British Government garrison had said good-bye to Halifax; and the power and the glory had gone, too, with the once familiar uniform of Tommy Atkins. At Quebec and Montreal, all the talk was of deals and dollars. The whole country had been steadily Americanised, and Sir Wilfred Laurier, when he went the ultimate way of all Premiers, was succeeded by office-holders who cared nothing for Imperial ties. For a time they were not keen about being absorbed by the United States, for that would mean loss of highly paid posts and political prestige. The march of events was too strong for them, and between the American and the British stools they were falling to the ground. It was bound to come, that final tumble. The force of things and the whirligig of time would bring in the assured revenges. The big fish swallows the little fish all the world over. It was the programme of Socialism that had weakened the foundations of the British Empire and paved the way for the troublous times that followed. Cajoled by noisy agitators and the shallow arguments of Labour leaders and Socialists, the working man lost sight of the fact that his living depended on working up raw material into manufactured goods, and thus earning a wage that enabled him to pay for food and shelter. The middle-class had proved not less supine. So long as Britannia ruled the waves, and the butcher and baker were in a position to supply the Briton's daily needs, all went well. But when a family could get only one loaf, instead of four; and two pounds of meat when it wanted five, it necessarily followed that a good many people grew hungry. Hungry people are apt to lose their tempers, their moral sense of right and wrong, and all those nice distinctions between _meum et tuum_ on which the foundations of society so largely depend. Moral chaos becomes painfully accentuated when, as the result of a naval defeat and an incipient panic, the price of bread bounds up to eighteenpence per quartern loaf, with a near prospect of being unprocurable even for its weight in gold. All this had happened in these once favoured isles, because the masses, encouraged by self-seeking and parochially-minded leaders, had been more intent on making war upon the classes than on securing their subsistence through the agency of British shipping, protected by the British Navy at a height of power that could keep all other navies at a distance. In olden time, when the earth was corrupt and filled with violence, the word came from on high: "Make thee an ark of gopher wood." And Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark, to the saving of his house. But while the ark was a-preparing, the people went about their business, marrying and giving in marriage, making small account of the shipbuilder and his craze. It had been pretty much the same in the twentieth century, when the British people were warned that another sort of flood was coming, and that they, too, would need an ark, of material considerably stronger than gopher wood. They refused to believe in the flood. But it came. It was bound to come. We fought, yes; when it came to the critical hour, we fought for dear life and liberty--fought hard, fought desperately, but under conditions that made comparative defeat inevitable. And the fight was for unequal stakes. To us it was an issue of life or death. To our foes it was an affair of wounds that would heal. The law of nations, the law of humanity, itself counted for nothing in that deadly and colossal struggle. Our merchant ships were sent to the bottom, crews and all. No advantage of strength or numbers served to inspire magnanimity. It was a fight, bloody, desperate, and remorseless for the sovereignty of the seas, a fight to the bitter end. And it was over, for all practical purposes, in a week. The British Government did not dare to maintain the struggle any longer. The Navy would have fought on till victory had been attained or every British warship had been sunk or disabled. The spirit of the service did credit to both officers and men, for much had been feared from disaffection. Socialism had crept into the fleet. Political cheapjacks with their leaflets and promises had sown discord between officers and men, and here and there had been clear indications of a mutinous spirit. But when it came to the pinch, one and all--officers, seamen, and stokers--had manfully done their duty. Where they were victorious, they were humane. When they were beaten, they faced the fortune of war, and death itself, with firmness and discipline. But all in vain as regards the general result. England's rulers for the time being, alarmed at the accumulating signs of a crumbling empire, daunted by the popular disturbances that broke out in London and the provinces, made all haste to negotiate such terms of peace, and agreed to such an indemnity that the dust of Nelson, and of Pitt, may well have shivered in their graves. Peace, peace at any price! was the cry. Peace now, lest a worse thing happen through a continuance of the struggle. Germany, however, would not have stayed her hand, and England would have become a conscript province, but for the daring feat of a little band of Englishmen. Six of them, in the best equipped air-ship that money could buy, by means of bombs almost entirely destroyed the enormous works of Messrs. Krupp at Essen. By this means Germany's resources were so gravely prejudiced that it suited her to stay her hand for the time being. Out of this act of retaliation sprang the famous Air-Ship Convention, of which the outcome will appear presently. During these dire events the women had votes, and many of them had seats in Parliament. Their sex was dominant. They heard the cry of the children. The men heard the lamentations of the women, and were unmanned. Thus was Great Britain reduced to the level of a third-rate Power--a downfall not without precedent in the history of the world's great empires. But sadder even than the accomplished downfall was the fact that vast numbers of Britons had grown used to the situation, had so lost the patriotic spirit and fibre of their forefathers that the loss of race-dominance and of the mighty influence of good which Empire had sustained, seemed to them of little moment compared with their immediate individual advantage and petty personal interests. CHAPTER III. ABOARD THE AIR-SHIP. "So you've made the young lady's acquaintance on the river?" remarked the Judge, looking amusedly at his nephew. "Yes," said Linton, "and the President's, ... in the garden." "'Youth, youth, how buoyant are thy hopes,'" quoted Sir Robert, chuckling. "And," added the young man, with a slightly heightened colour, which the gathering dusk failed to conceal, "they've promised me a trip in their air-boat!" Sir Robert groaned. "Air-boats! Wish they'd never been invented." He flicked away the ash of his cigar and gazed at the first stars faintly twinkling in the evening sky. They were sitting on the terrace, and the September air was as balmy as the breath of June. "Look!" exclaimed Herrick, springing to his feet, "don't you see one over yonder?" His uncle gazed and nodded. "And just imagine," he said, "what it will mean when the present law expires and all restrictions are removed. Everyone will want to be at liberty to 'aviate'; and as a consequence, we shall want an enormous staff of air-police to control the upper traffic and check outrage and robbery. I tell you, sir, the world's going too fast. The thing won't work!" "Everything will settle into shape in time," argued Linton, soothingly, his eyes still following the evolutions of the air-boat with its twinkling lights. "Well, you're young, and may live to see it, but it won't be in my day," sighed Sir Robert, "and I don't want it to be. Who wants an air-ship calling for his parlour-maid at the attic window? Who wants thieves sailing up to his balcony? And as to collapses and collisions overhead--we've had some of 'em already--and it don't add to the gaiety of nations or the comfort and security of the peaceful citizen down below." "It'll all come right, sir," said Herrick cheerfully. "Perhaps it will and perhaps it won't," was his uncle's comment. "It's not so much a question of individuals as of nations. How are we going to regulate international commerce? The fiscal question, like the Eastern question, will assume a wholly different character. You may sail a ship, but you can't build custom houses in the air. What about imports and exports? What about a hundred things that have been governed hitherto by the broad fact that man and merchandise have only been able to move about either on sea or land?" "She's coming this way," exclaimed the inattentive Herrick. The little ship, wonderfully swift and graceful in her motions, was crossing high above the river, then circled gradually lower and lower, nearing them, like a bat, at every sweep. "There's a lady in her," said the Judge, "perhaps it's Miss Jardine." The two men, with the electric lights from the dining-room throwing their figures into relief, must have been clearly outlined to the people in the boat. "Yes," declared Linton. "I'll hail her. Boat ahoy! is that the _Bladud_?" "Aye, aye," answered a man's voice, and then they thought they heard a low laugh from the lady in the stern. The boat circled lower and lower. "Gently," said the Judge under his breath, "it's the President, it's Jardine himself, with his daughter." "Would anyone like a sail?" came the question from above. "Yes, of all things," was Linton's eager reply. "She's not built for more than three, or we would offer to take you too, Sir Robert." The Judge had risen to his feet. "Heaven forbid! Much obliged to you all the same, Mr. President." The fans were at work now, assisting in the delicate process of letting down the boat by slow degrees in the centre of the lawn. She reached the ground gently and lightly, and Linton and the Judge went forward and greeted her occupants. Then Linton Herrick stepped aboard, and his uncle moved clear of the wings. The _Bladud_ rose to a height of about 200 feet. Then the elevating apparatus was switched off, and the boat having circled in a few ever-widening sweeps, sped away in the direction of London. Until now the President, who was in charge of the machinery in the fore part of the boat, had scarcely spoken. Linton sat in the stern beside Zenobia Jardine, who, so far, also was silent, her attention being required for the steering gear, with which, however, she seemed perfectly familiar. Jardine now explained that the _Bladud_ needed only one-third of her power for keeping afloat, and two-thirds for propelling her. After that he became unreservedly communicative. Whether it was due to the fact of being in the air, instead of upon earth, or to a ready fancy for the young Canadian, the President showed himself in a character which seemed to cause his daughter pleased surprise. There was nothing pompous or self-important in his manner. He talked like a man who is delighted to get upon his favourite hobby in company with a sympathetic listener. "It's the birds we had to study, the birds in the air," he said. "When I was about your age I was an engineer, and I used to study birds, because they gave us the best pattern for an air-ship; it's nature's own pattern, and you can't beat nature. There's the breast bone, for instance, provided with a sort of keel to serve as a point of attachment for the muscles that set the wings in motion. There's the small head, with a pointed beak, like a ship's bow. Then you've got the light expanding wings that press like a fan on the elastic air waves. Those are nature's aeroplanes, Mr. Herrick, and that's the model we've had to follow. Then there's the tail, tapering off--that's nature's rudder." "We get everything except the feathers," ventured Linton. "Feathers are not essential," was the answer. "There are wings of other sorts. The bat has no feathers. It is fitted with a sort of umbrella frame from top to toe, so to say, that can be expended when required for flying. But for an air-ship we get the best model in the frigate-bird or the albatross--that's what we've aimed at in our newest aeroplanes." "And the best motive power?" queried Linton. "The air itself, compressed as we've got it here," said Mr. Jardine, with decision. "Air can do everything. Nearly a century ago, 'Puffing Billy,' the primitive locomotive, proved that the adhesion of the wheels to the rails was sufficient to give drawing power. Everybody had doubted it. Then everybody doubted whether anything heavier than air could be sustained and move in air. That's why they wasted money and lives in ballooning. The fallacy was disproved. We are disproving it at this very moment. Then came another problem--what was the right sort of motor? They tried everything. There were endless difficulties as regards the steam engine. The internal combustion motor was a remarkable source of power. They used it largely in submarines. It gave the necessary electrical energy when the vessel was propelled under the sea. But petrol was not the last word in locomotion. The first and last power, when you know how to harness it, is the air itself. That's what we've come to after many false starts and failures. You see, you get extreme lightness combined with great power. The bursting pressure and the reduced pressure are all calculated to a nicety per lb. to the square inch. You can have power that will serve for a toy-ship--say three-quarters of a minute, for a flight of 200 yards; or you can build upon the same basis for any size, weight, or distance that can be required." "Isn't it wonderful!" exclaimed his daughter with enthusiasm; and Linton nodded. "Wonderful, indeed, yet here it is!" Her father went on stolidly: "It was proved many years ago that a flying machine weighing nearly 8,000 lbs., carrying its own engine, fuel, and passengers, can lift itself into the air. An aeroplane will always lift a great deal more than a balloon of the same weight." "I know," agreed Linton, "and it can travel at a high rate of velocity with less expenditure of power." "Exactly; a well-made screw propeller obtains sufficient grip on the air to propel an air-boat at almost any speed; the greater the speed the greater the efficiency of the screw. We are going slowly at this moment, but I could put her along at 70 miles an hour, if one wanted to." Suiting the action to the word, he did increase the speed very considerably for a short distance, and conversation had to be suspended. It was the quickest travelling Linton had yet experienced in the upper air, and he turned with some anxiety to Zenobia Jardine, thinking the pace might tax her nerves. She was perfectly calm, however, and her father set all fears at rest by saying, as he slackened pace again: "The steering with the new gyroscope is almost automatic, just as if she were a torpedo. Even in a stiff wind she reverts to a horizontal keel. It is simply like the balancing of a bird." "The _Bladud_ is splendid!" cried Linton with conviction. "She's hard to beat," was the President's comment. "But, after all, she's only the natural outcome of the air-gun, which has been known for generations. An air-gun is shaped like a rifle, with a hollow boiler or reservoir of power. You force into the reservoir by means of a condensing syringe as much air-power as it will hold. By opening a valve a portion of the air escapes into the barrel of the gun. That's what takes place when you pull the trigger. The released air presses against the ball just as gunpowder would. Off goes your bullet without a sound or sign to show that it has been discharged. Air condensed to 1-46th of its bulk gives about half the velocity of gunpowder. It's precisely the same principle that's firing us through the air at the present moment." "It's a wonderful discovery!" was Linton's comment. "Yes," mused Mr. Jardine, "and yet the thing was always there to be discovered." "Just as the air waves were always ready for wireless telegraphy, but unused till Marconi came along at the beginning of the present century." The President looked around him at the star-spangled heavens and drew in a deep breath: "Yes," he said, slowly, "and there are more secrets waiting to be revealed." "There's a professor of chemistry in one of the American universities who thinks we shall be able to live on air some day," laughed the young man. The President did not laugh. "Why not?" he asked. "We know well enough we can't live without it. It's quite conceivable that the atmosphere contains undetected sources of nourishment. They may be generated by vaporisation or by electricity and chemical action within the air itself. No one knew anything about ozone a hundred and fifty years ago, and he would be a rash man who said that ozone is the last word in atmospheric discovery." "It may end in air cakes," suggested Linton, rather flippantly. "Or begin with air-cakes and end in air-tabloids," said Zenobia. "What a glorious idea! Only think how it would simplify housekeeping. Meat, vegetables, fish, and all the rest, might be superseded, and the butcher's bill would cease to be a terror." "And dyspepsia would be abolished with the weekly bills." "Nature, the only universal provider; complete independence of foreign imports. No starvation and no over-feeding. We should no longer go in for a big square meal, but for a small round tabloid." "Cooks, with all their greasy pots and pans, would not be wanted. You could carry your meals in your waistcoat pocket and eat them when you pleased." "Yes," agreed Miss Jardine with mock seriousness, "instead of sitting down to a food function--soup, fish, joint, entrée, pastry and dessert, as if it were a sort of religious ceremony! The possibilities are endless." "And the prospect glorious!" chimed in the Canadian--then the two young people, having kept the ball of frivolity rolling to their own satisfaction, laughed merrily, and even the grim, dark face of the President relaxed into something like a smile. "But there would be rather a sameness in the diet," added Zenobia, thoughtfully. "We could vary it occasionally by harking back to the old fleshpots. Besides, discovery would lead to discovery. The constituents of the atmosphere defy the microscope at present, but by and by they may be seized upon and served up in different forms and combinations for the nourishment of man." "And woman." "The greater includes the less. They--oh! I beg your pardon! I was forgetting. The old order is changed. We live in the Reign of Woman." Rather to Linton's surprise, instead of hearing a quick retort, he thought he heard a low and rather plaintive sigh. "Ozone, at any rate, has a special flavour," remarked Mr. Jardine. "It resembles lobster, and, like lobster, you can have too much of it. But the plants have always lived on air. Man consumes the flesh of beasts, but the beasts have built up their flesh by eating grass or plants. Thus, indirectly, we ourselves live on air already, and draw our vitality from the atmosphere. Presently we may get it by a shorter cut, that's all. So your air-cakes and tabloids may really come to pass," and Mr. Jardine nodded. This time there was no laughter, partly because the idea did not seem so wild, and partly because they were now close to London, and the wonder of the lighted capital spreading down below was a strange and solemn thing to look upon. CHAPTER IV. THE STAR OF LIFE. The _Bladud_ passed swiftly over Paddington Station, and followed the line of the Edgware Road to the Marble Arch. The incessant roar of the traffic below reached their ears, and it was a relief to get over the great, far-spreading Park--silent and only faintly lighted by the scattered lamps. To the left, Park Lane had a gloomy look. The famous residences of the wealthy, like hundreds of great London mansions in the neighbouring squares, were untenanted. People could not afford to live in such palaces nowadays; the governing bodies of the capital had done their best to ruin it by Socialistic experiments and over-rating. At Hyde Park Corner, which was soon reached, once more the tumult of the traffic rose into the air, and the long lines of electric lamps stretching eastward along Piccadilly, gave the impression of an enormous glittering serpent down below. They followed the route to Piccadilly Circus, where the blaze of lights and the swiftly changing units in the thoroughfares produced an effect that, seen for the first time by Linton Herrick, held him in a sort of fascination. Trafalgar Square and the Strand produced the same bewildering characteristics, and to the right the effect conveyed by the illuminated bridges was marvellously beautiful. The _Bladud_ circled widely so that Linton might take his fill of the spectacle. Then Mr. Jardine headed her eastward again, and for awhile the streets below lay gloomy and silent until they had crossed the City. Soon the lights of the Commercial Road and Whitechapel outlined the great thoroughfares of the East End, while in every direction branch streams of flaring, smoky light showed where the hawkers and hucksters plied their evening trade. They had sailed over the Isle of Dogs and Greenwich Reach before the President put the boat about; then in the distance, like a lighthouse, the great clock towering over the Houses of Parliament came into view, the dial shining like a huge, dull moon. In these days it was always illuminated, whether the House were sitting or in recess. "Look!" exclaimed Zenobia, suddenly. Away in the heart of Southwark huge flames were shooting into the air, and monstrous clouds of woolly looking smoke rolled slowly from above a conflagration. "A fire," said Mr. Jardine, "and a big one, too. We'll have a look at it." "Not too close, father," said his daughter, for the first time showing nervousness. "Keep her to windward," said Mr. Jardine, slowing down a little, and the girl obeyed. Vast showers of sparks rose into the air; they heard the hiss and splash of water, and the pant-pant of half a dozen fire engines as they played upon the burning buildings. The lights shone on the helmets of the firemen--clambering here and there on the roofs of towering warehouses, and dense masses of people seemed to be packed into the streets, on whose pallid, upturned faces the lights produced a strangely weird effect. The sight below seemed full of awe and terror. Presently, a sudden gust of wind changed the direction of the smoke column and brought a volley of sparks over the _Bladud_. "Hard a-port!" cried Mr. Jardine, "we'll get out of this." In a moment they had veered away from the scene of the conflagration, and were crossing first the river, then Cannon Street, almost at full speed. The fans were set to work, and they rose to a greater altitude to avoid all risk of colliding with church towers and steeples. A dark, domed mass took shape a hundred feet away, and over it the great cross of St. Paul's loomed for an instant into view; a train with faces showing against the lighted windows, crawled across the railway bridge at the foot of Ludgate Hill; and far away in the West the gleam of another fire lighted up the sky with a sudden threatening glare. From below there now arose the piteous bellowing of cattle. They were passing over the huge markets in Smithfield, and the shouts of the drovers blended with the noise made by the doomed and harried beasts, whose flesh was to feed London on the morrow. Soon another long row of lights revealed Southampton Row, running straight, as it seemed, from Kingsway to Euston. The station clock showed that it was nearly ten. They swept over the quiet West Central squares, over the Euston Road and Regent's Park, and so onward and away, until the huddled dwellings of the capital gave place to suburbs, dark roads, and silent fields. Linton, through the later sights and sounds of the night, was conscious of being in a sort of dream; and in the dream the girl by his side was the principal, nay, the only figure save his own. The end of a light scarf that was round her neck blew across his face; the sway of the _Bladud_ brought her arm against his own, and each slight contact seemed to thrill him. Once or twice he glanced at her face, almost inquiringly; for now he had the oddest feeling that she was no stranger; that in reality they knew each other and had only met again; that in the past, somehow, somewhere he knew not when, there had been a kinship or a tie between them. From the first moment of their meeting she had interested and attracted him. Of that he was well aware. But not until they sat side by side in this aerial journey had the impression of which he was now conscious crept into his mind or memory. What could it mean? That strange exhilaration of the upper air, the quickening of imagination, wrought by their rapid travelling high above the solid earth and all its limitations, perhaps might account in some degree for the puzzling feeling that possessed him. He glanced at her again; their eyes met, and in hers he read, or fancied that he read, a telepathic answer to his thoughts. Suddenly he found himself repeating, as if with better understanding, lines that always lingered in his memory: "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar." "How odd," murmured the girl in a wondering voice, "the very lines that I was thinking of," and in low tones she finished the quotation: "O joy, that in our embers Is something that doth live; That nature yet remembers, What was so fugitive!" CHAPTER V. A THREE-FOLD PLEDGE. All through the following day the deep impressions of the previous evening held Linton as one is held by the memory of some haunting and impressive dream. Everything down below seemed insignificant and irrelevant. They were dining out that evening, and he could not shake off the feeling that in everything connected with that ordinary function he was playing the part of a small automaton on a puppet stage. He and his fellow-puppet, Sir Robert, got into a little motor-car and rushed over five miles of little roads, between two little hedges, to General Hartwell's little bungalow. Presently, they were sitting round a little white-covered table, cutting up food with little implements, and taking little sips out of little glasses. How wise and important they thought themselves in the midst of all these little things; how self-satisfied everyone appeared! There were four of them at the dinner-table, the third guest being Major Edgar Wardlaw, of the Sappers, a man to whom their host showed great deference and affection. Wardlaw talked but little; the look in his eyes and the lines on his broad, fair forehead suggested concentration of thought on some problem remote from those which the others were discussing. The General himself did most of the talking. He was a woman-hater, that is to say, a hater of woman in the abstract. To the individual woman he was gentleness and kindness itself. But rumours of a new and daring forward movement by the Vice-President of the Council and her party had roused the veteran to a pitch of extraordinary resentment. It was said that Lady Catherine contemplated forming a regiment of Amazons in the Twentieth Century! It was monstrous. The General boiled over with disgust and indignation. His language at times became absolutely lurid. "A devilish nice pass we've come to at last," he growled. Then he seemed to be vainly ransacking his vocabulary for strong language, and gulped down his wine in default of finding an adequate objurgation. The judge laughed with gentle amusement at his fiery old friend. "It's all very well to laugh, Herrick, but, damme, sir, it's the last straw, it's the last straw!" roared the General. "Just what we've been wanting," said Sir Robert, calmly. "Eh, what d'ye mean?" General Hartwell stared. "When people get the last straw laid on, they can't stand any more. So now's the time for the worm to turn." "You're right! By gad, you're right! But how's the worm going to manage it?" cried the old officer, leaning back. The judge fingered the stem of his wine glass and gazed thoughtfully at the table-cloth. Major Wardlaw turned his gaze on him as if suddenly recalled from the regions of mental speculation. Linton, also self-absorbed as yet, began to listen and to wonder. "You have strong views about women. You don't exactly love the sex," said the Judge. "How can a man love 'em when he sees the mischief they've done by their ambitions and pertinacity?" demanded the General. "My dear fellow, you are too sweeping. They're not all alike. There are plenty of good women left in the world." "Show me where they are, then! I don't say they all set out to break the Ten Commandments. But it's their love of power, their restless ambitions, their confounded unreasonableness, that have played the deuce with us. They want to rule the world, sir, and they weren't meant for it, and it's not good for them, and they know it!" They all laughed at the General's vehemence, and extending a wrinkled forefinger, he went on, with unabated powers of declamation: "Men ought to have nipped it in the bud, that's what they ought to have done. Instead of which we gave place to their insidious aggressions. We gave 'em an inch and they took an ell. We gave 'em the whip hand, and they weren't content with it in little things. By heaven, they're chastising us with scorpions. And there'll be the devil to pay before we can put 'em back in their proper place. But, mark you, it'll have to be done, if we want to call our souls our own, it'll have to be done. Why! my blood boils when I think of the misery shrewish, self-willed women have inflicted on some of the best fellows in the world. I know cases. I've seen it done among my old friends. I knew a man, he was a retired Colonel with a splendid record. What do you think? His scold of a wife used to send him out to buy cream for the apple-tart. It's not always the wife. Sometimes it's the mother-in-law. Sometimes it's a sister. Now and then it's a daughter. I know an old school-fellow, a parson; the poor beggar has three plain sisters quartered on him; great, gaunt women who talk about 'dear Robert,' and badger dear Robert out of his life. His only happy moment is when they're all gone to bed. He'd like to marry; but he's too soft-hearted to send 'em about their business. I tell you the man's afraid. I know another fellow, too ... but there--what's the good of talking!" Major Wardlaw was raising from his seat. "Excuse me for two minutes, General!" "Yes, yes, to be sure," assented his host, and when the Major had closed the door behind him, he dropped his voice and leaned across the table. "Now there's a man! The best engineer the British army has produced for thirty years. That man, sir, designed the great fort they built at Dover to guard the Channel Tunnel. He's got a big brain and a great heart, but in one way he's shown himself a fool. What does he do but go and marry a garrison flirt, sir, a little thing with a pretty face and fluffy hair, and the tongue of a viper. The poison of asps was under her lips. I can tell you she led Wardlaw a life. Now she's dead and gone, and I do believe he's sorry! He worships the child she left him,--little Miss Flossie. She's upstairs at the present moment. Wardlaw's gone to say good-night to her. He worships the ground she walks on, and that child takes it all for granted. By heaven! she orders him about. She's got her mother's blue eyes and fluffy hair, and I'd wager she's got her temper too. By-and-by she'll lead her father a pretty dance. He wouldn't come here to stay with me--and, mind you, I'm his oldest friend,--no, he wouldn't come without Miss Flossie. Oh these women! By heaven, they raise my gorge." "My dear Hartwell," said the Judge, calmly, "You go too far. You're prejudiced...." "Prejudiced!" exclaimed the General, "were Thackeray and Dickens prejudiced? Look at Becky Sharpe and the way she treated that big affectionate booby, Rawdon Crawley. Look at that girl Blanche Amory, the little plotter who ran after Pendennis. And if you come to Dickens, what about Rosa Dartle,--a woman as venomous as a serpent!" "Types, my dear fellow, types; but not a universal type." "There's lots more like 'em," nodded the General. "And many more unlike them. You see, we old fogeys...." "Fogeys, by gad! Speak for yourself, Herrick." "I do," said the Judge, "it isn't that I feel like a fogey any more than you do. It's the label that the world insists on fastening on men of our age, and it is apt to make us feel bitter. We're supposed to have had our time and finished it. It's not what we feel, Hartwell, it's what we look that settles it, and I'm afraid, my dear fellow, sometimes when our hair turns grey our tempers turn bitter. It's the way of the world...." "It's the way of the women, I grant you." "Come, come, let us leave the women alone for a bit. They've brought things to a crisis. It's the last straw. Well and good. Doesn't that suggest an opportunity?" "Now, you know, you've got something in your lawyer's head. Come, man, what the deuce are you driving at?" "We haven't drunk Renshaw's health yet," said the Judge with apparent irrelevance. They rose and raised their glasses. Linton--who had taken no part in the recent discussion--now watched his uncle expectantly. "Renshaw, God bless him! and bring him back to England!" "By the way," said Sir Robert, casually, as they resumed their seats, "is Wardlaw with us?" The General, who had taken his old friend's lecture in good part, nodded: "Of course he is. Isn't nearly every man, in both services? Do you suppose we want an army of Amazons armed with lethal weapons to keep in order?" "What about the Corps of Commissionaires?" "Being their Commander, I ought to know. Seventy per cent. of 'em, at least, are dead against petticoat government. They're good chaps, and they've seen good service. They don't like the way the country is being run any more than you or I do. You take my word for that." The Judge mused for a moment, tipping the ash from his cigar. "What about the old Household troops?" he asked. "Same story. But what can we do without a leader in Parliament? and suppose, after all, poor Renshaw is dead?" Sir Robert Herrick suddenly abandoned his careless bearing, threw away his cigar, and took from his pocket a letter written on foreign notepaper. "Listen," he said, "both of you," and lowering his voice, he read the letter, slowly and distinctly so that every word was understood. Then he twisted it into a spill and burnt it bit by bit. They sat for a few moments in silence. Then from the General, whose fierce little eyes seemed starting from his head under the bristling white eyebrows, there came a sort of gasping exclamation: "God bless my soul! Why not?" Then, after a pause, dropping into the familiar style of their early days: "You know, Bob, there's risk in it. I'm with you to the last. I'm with you; but there's risk in it, we must remember that." "Yes, there's risk in it," answered Sir Robert, gravely. "We must count the cost. But the risk and the cost are not half what they were in other days, when men were ready to die for their country and their cause. If Tower Hill could talk it could tell many a tale of men who were faithful unto death. If the block could unfold its secrets; if the red axe could speak, there'd be some stern lessons for modern men to ponder on. Did you ever read how Balmerino faced the headsman after Culloden? Come what may, we shouldn't have to face the axe, Hartwell." "Hanging would be no improvement," growled the General. "Still, mind this, I'm with you heart and soul, if we can work it out." "I don't think we should have to face the hangman either," said the Judge quietly. "We might, perhaps, have to spend the evening of our days behind prison bars. Even that is doubtful. Nothing succeeds like success. What's treason under one rule becomes loyalty under another. History has illustrated that over and over again?" "What age would Renshaw be by this time?" "Why, not forty, even after ten years' captivity. He is the only man who can bring back the ancient glory and prestige of the Kingdom. Once in our midst, the people will rally round him with enthusiastic loyalty. If well organised, it will be a bloodless revolution, Hartwell, a glorious and thankful reversion to the old system of man's government for man and woman. It is best suited to the British nation. We've tried something else and it's proved a failure." "A d----d failure," agreed the General, heartily. "We've given way to cranks and noisy, shrill-voiced women; to vapouring politicians; to socialism and all the other isms. We had a notion that we could ante-date the millennium and work the scheme of national life according to ideas of equality and uniformity. It can't be done. Experience proves that anomalies work well when logical systems fail. It's a conceited age, a puffed up generation. We are not really wiser than our fathers, though we think we are. Let us try to revert to first principles." "I'm your man, heart and soul," said General Hartwell, and the two old friends grasped hands across the table. "I knew you would be!" There was a shine as of tears in the Judge's eyes. "But you and I can't work this thing alone. We must have colleagues; not many, but some, or at least one," and he looked at Linton Herrick. "I'm with you too, sir," said the young man simply, "show me the way, that's all." "We three alone at present, with loyal hearts and silent tongues," said Sir Robert, gravely. "The Three Musketeers!" ventured Linton. "By Jove, yes," agreed the old officer. "And we undertake everything that serves the State," added Sir Robert, solemnly. They rose by mutual understanding and clinked their glasses. "All for one! and one for all!" they cried with one accord. And Major Wardlaw, opening the door at that moment, stared amazed. CHAPTER VI. THE REVOLT OF WOMAN. England was agitated by two items of the latest intelligence. The same journal which announced the sudden and serious illness of President Jardine also recorded a bold move in the campaign of the Lady Catherine Kellick, Vice-President of the Council of State. Enormous interest was roused, not so much by the advertised notice of a public meeting on affairs of State, as by the rumours of its real object. Ostensibly, the people of London were invited, so far as the accommodation of the Queen's Hall would permit, to hear a statement as to the position of public affairs and to consider questions of national importance. But it was well understood that the real aim of the convener of the meeting was to strengthen her grip on the helm of State by means of her rumoured forward policy, in the interests of the sex which she claimed to represent. Long before the hour fixed for the meeting, multitudes of people of both sexes approached Langham Place by every converging avenue. The doors of the Hall were besieged by an enormous concourse, and the police on duty soon found themselves entirely powerless to preserve order. As evening approached, the crowd became more and more dense, extending southward far into Regent Street, and northward into Portland Place. Every window in the Langham Hotel was crowded with wondering visitors, looking down upon the immense assembly, from which rose angry shouts as mounted constables forced their horses through the outskirts of the crowd in the vain effort to keep the people on the move. When darkness rendered the situation still more dangerous, urgent representations were made to the managers of the Hall, and the doors were suddenly thrown open. A wild yell of relief or eagerness rose from thousands of throats, and a scene of indescribable violence and confusion followed, as men and woman pushed, struggled, and fought their way towards the entrances. In a few moments every seat had been seized, every inch of standing room occupied. The attempts of the attendants to attend to the angry demands of those who held tickets for reserved seats were absolutely futile. Every gangway was blocked by pushing and struggling humanity, and those who, alarmed by such a condition of things, sought to force their way out were prevented from doing so by the swarms of people who were already wedged in the corridors. A babel of voices arose on every side, but at length the audience was weeded out to some extent, and the great numbers that remained settled down in patient expectation, solaced, after a time, by the music of the grand organ and the singing of the songs and choruses. Tier after tier at the back of the platform, usually occupied by musicians, had been reserved for Members of Parliament and officials of State. Not one seat was vacant save the chair of the Vice-President. When the hour appointed for the meeting struck on the clocks of the neighbouring churches, there was a great clapping of hands, and an excited waving of hats and handkerchiefs. A tall thin figure, wearing a flowing robe of scarlet, now advanced from the right-hand side of the platform, and, on emerging from behind the rows of palms and ferns, came into full view of the audience. Although she had become so great a power in England, the Vice-President was only known by means of pictures and photographs to a great number of those who were present. They gazed at her with wonder and interest. There was character in every line of her face. Her grey hair, swept back from the broad low brow, made her look older than her actual years. Her eyes were rather prominent and staring. The upper lip was so long as to betoken a marked degree of obstinacy, and her chin, square and firm, with the flesh bagging a little on either side, accentuated the general indications of hardness. When she spoke, her greatest charm was made known. Her voice was excellent, it had that kind of purring intonation which reminded some of the older people of the celebrated actress Sarah Bernhardt; her friends said that it was partly because of the "purr" that she had acquired the popular nickname of "Lady Cat." There were no formal preliminaries. Raising her hand for silence, she began to speak, and her first sentence was well chosen and arresting: "The Amazon is the greatest river in the world!" Puzzled glances were exchanged, and here and there was heard a wondering titter. Were they in for a lecture on geography? The speaker went on without a pause, and swiftly undeceived them: "The Amazon flows from the Andes with such stupendous force, in such enormous volume, that its waters are carried unmixed into the Atlantic Ocean." They now had a dim idea of what was coming, and the impression was speedily confirmed: "There are other mighty forces in the world besides that river, and I for one, speaking for the sex to which I belong, would glory in the name of Amazon. Call us Amazons, if you will. Let those laugh who win; women are winning all along the line!" Shrill applause went up from hundreds of women in the audience. The men, in a minority, were silent and uneasy. "The time has come for facing facts, for examining claims and titles. Man's title to be Lord of Creation is full of flaws, and we dispute it." Frantic cheers and handkerchief-waving came from the women; a few deep groans from the men. "It is no use trusting to recent history. The men by force and fraud got into possession of all the good things, all the power that life has to offer, and thousands of us have meekly acquiesced. If you are content to be regarded as the weaker vessel, if it satisfies you to be compared with men as water is compared with wine, or moonlight unto sunlight, be it so; we who are wiser must leave you to your fate. But some of us have already advanced a stage or two towards the position we claim rightfully as our own. Yet, you women of England, mark this, the stages already covered are nothing to what we can and will achieve." Excited applause for a few minutes prevented the speaker from proceeding. A fierce disturbance broke out at the back of the Hall, but was promptly quelled. "One thing all men and women here to-night must realise. There cannot be two Kings in Brentford, no, nor a King and Queen. Of the two sexes, one alone can reign. Which shall it be?" Shrill cries of "ours, ours!" broke from the speaker's supporters. "Yes," she cried triumphantly, "our turn has come at last; it _shall_ be ours, if women only stand to their guns. But there can be no halting half way. Forward or Retreat!" "Forward, Forward!" came from the now enthusiastic audience, with eager cheers and shouts, and again the cry went up: "Forward, one and all." "Forward let it be. But, remember, the race will be to the swift and the battle to the strong. To-night I call you to arms. To-night I remind you that among the ancient races of the world there were women who set us the example that we need. The story of the Amazons of old is no fable. They lived--they fought for supremacy. They won it and they held it. So can we!" Tumultuous cries, blended now with angry hisses from the men, disturbed the meeting. But so great was the ascendency which the Vice-President already had acquired over most of her hearers, that a wave of her hand stilled the uproar, and she was enabled to proceed. At the same moment, on a screen at the back of the platform, was thrown a startling life-sized picture of an Amazonian warrior: "Behold!" cried the orator, grasping the dramatic moment and extending her arm, "Behold Thalestris--Queen of the Amazons!" For an instant the vast audience paused--surprised, staring, almost bewildered. "You are asking yourselves who was Thalestris," the speaker continued. "The Amazons founded a state in Asia Minor on the coast of the Black Sea. Herodotus will tell you how they fought with the Greeks; how they hunted in the field and marched with the Scythians to battle. Well, Thalestris became their Queen. They styled her the daughter of Mars. She set the men to spin wool and do the work of the house. The women went to the wars, and the men stayed at home and employed themselves in those mean offices which in this country have been forced upon our sex. The Amazons went from strength to strength; they built cities, erected palaces, and created an empire. And there were other Amazonian nations. All of them acted on the same principle. The women kept the public offices and the magistracy in their own hands. Husbands submitted to the authority of their wives. They were not encouraged, or allowed, to throw off the yoke. The women, in order to maintain their authority, cultivated every art of war. For this is certain--all history proves it: force is the ultimate remedy in all things. That was why the Amazons of old learnt how to draw the bow and throw the javelin." "For shame! for shame!" roared a man's voice from the balcony. "There is plenty of cause for shame," was the speaker's swift retort, "but the shame is on the men, the swaggering, bullying, self-sufficient men who in times past held women in subjection. Why, there were men in England not so very long ago who would put a halter round a wife's neck and bring her into open market, for sale to the highest bidder. It used to be the law of England that men might chastise their wives with a rod of specified dimensions...." "We don't do it now," shouted the same voice. "No! because you cannot and you dare not. It used to be said that there was one law for the rich and another law for the poor. But it was always a much more glaring truth that there was one law for men and another law for women. It was so in the Divorce Court until we women altered it. It was so in respect of the results of what was called a lapse from virtue, and we are going to alter that. It was so in regard to votes and representation, and you know we have changed all that!" Loud and vehement applause from the majority of the audience greeted this allusion to the suffrage. "More than half the nation is no longer disenfranchised. But we must not rest content. Like Alexander, we seek more worlds to conquer, and conquest will be ours. While women have grown, men have shrivelled. Athletic exercise and a freer and more varied life have given our women thews and sinews. But the men are decadent, degenerates who have led indolent, self-indulgent lives. They have given up the Battle of Life. Thousands of them are as enfeebled in body as in intellect. We see around us an undeveloped, puny, stunted race. What? Call these creatures men? I tell you they are not men, they are only mannikins!" Immense uproar broke out again in every part of the heated, crowded building. When it was subdued, the speaker resumed in scornful tones: "Better masculine women than effeminate men! Better the Amazon than the mannikin! Read the story of Boadicea, of Joan of Arc, and of Joan of Montfort! Read what history will tell you about Margaret of Anjou! Worthy successors were they of the Amazons of the Caucasus and the Amazons of America, the noble women who gave their name to the greatest river in the world. Like the women of old, let the Amazons of the present century--the Amazons of England--learn to arm, and learn to fight." There was a moment's pause. Then the Vice-President, in tones now piercing and tremulous, cried out: "Who will join the First Regiment of the Amazons of England?" The electrified audience saw the speaker raise her hand, and at the signal twenty girls in smart military uniform marched on to the platform, saluted, and stood at attention. Each Amazon's hair was cut short, but not too short to be frizzed. On each small head was worn a helmet like that of Thalestris. The braided tunic was buttoned from shoulder to shoulder in the Napoleonic style, and the two rows of gilt buttons narrowed down to the bright leather belt that encircled the waist. "Bloomers" completed the costume, and a light cutlass and a revolver furnished each Amazon's warlike equipment. Laughter, applause, and shouted comments greeted the entrance of the girl-soldiers. It became a scene of indescribable confusion. Then once more the Vice-President vehemently appealed to the audience: "Who will join the Amazons of England?" Shouts of "I will, I will!" came, first, from the body of the hall; then from every part of the building, until, at last, the women seemed to answer in a perfect scream of eagerness. Many minutes passed before silence was restored. Then it was announced that all recruits could give in their names as they left the hall, and the Vice-President went on to move in formal terms a resolution declaring that this meeting was firmly persuaded that the cause of the nation and of woman required that the women of England should take up arms, and pledged itself, first, to support the establishment of a new body of militia to be recruited from the ranks of the young women of England; and, secondly, to claim from the State the same rate of pay that hitherto had been paid to men alone. A thin young woman with hectic cheeks and excited manner sprang to her feet on the right of the platform and seconded the motion. She only made one point, but it went home. "I'll ask you one question," she exclaimed, in tones so shrill that here and there a laugh broke out: "Are we inferior to poor Tommy Atkins?" The aggregate answer was so ready and so violent a negative that the opposing element was momentarily subdued. Storms of applause broke out as she resumed her seat. But with equal readiness another speaker was on her feet on the other side of the platform. In clear high tones her voice rang out over the noisy assembly: "I oppose it!" Another storm--a storm of remonstrance now arose. Cries of "Shame, shame," were hurled towards the platform. Then, as some of the audience recognized the new speaker, they exclaimed to the people near them: "It's the President's daughter! It's Zenobia Jardine!" "Order, order!" roared a minority of the audience, now somewhat encouraged, and in a few minutes, while Zenobia waited--her eyes bright, her lips firmly set--order was secured. The Vice-President had sat down. She looked at her young opponent with no friendly eye, taking no trouble to secure her a quiet hearing. But there was a section of the audience that had only waited for a champion, and meant to see fair play. "I oppose it," repeated Zenobia, "because I believe that to arm women and train them to fight will be a mad and wicked act. It would mean a return to barbarism. It would be adding a monstrous climax to the progress of a great cause. Instead of being the final exaltation of our sex, it would lead to our political extinction and our ruin. Let us have none of it." The Vice-President's face wore a wicked look, and her thin lips tightened as this appeal drew a loud cheer from the men and from a certain number of the women in the excited audience. "It has been said that the empire of women is an empire of softness, of address. Her commands are caresses, her menaces are tears!" "No! No!" came from the throats of the Vice-President's supporters. The Vice-President herself arose. "Will the speaker favour us with the authority for her quotations?" she asked in loud and cutting tones. "Rousseau...." began Zenobia nervously. "An effeminate authority indeed!" exclaimed the Vice-President. "We are not all in love" she added sneeringly. She seemed for the moment to have won the audience back to her cause. But Zenobia was not beaten. "Very well!" she cried, "I will give you an English author. Doctor Johnson, at least, was not effeminate. What did he say? 'The character of the ancient Amazons was terrible, rather than lovely. The hand could not be very delicate that was only employed in directing the bow and brandishing the battle-axe. Their power was maintained by cruelty; their courage was deformed by ferocity'.... Besides, the whole thing's impossible." Conflicting cries broke out in every quarter, and the rest of the sentence became wholly inaudible. There was a slight lull when the Vice-President rose and raised her hand. "Is it your pleasure that this lady be heard further?" she demanded. The hint received a ready response, and shrieks of "No, no!" drowned the protests of the minority. In a moment, the Vice-President put her resolution and called for a show of hands. In another moment, she had declared the motion carried by an overwhelming majority. At a sign, the organ gave forth a trumpet note, and then burst into a rushing volume of sound, which drowned all cries and counter-cries, and ended the meeting in a scene of unexampled tumult and excitement. CHAPTER VII. THE PRICE OF POWER. After the great and epoch-making meeting in Queen's Hall, the disturbed state of public feeling was accentuated. It was generally felt that the sex-conflict which the revolt of woman had brought about now was shaping towards some new and startling climax. A crisis was at hand. Moreover, at the same time, the appearance and rapid development of a serious and unfamiliar epidemic created widespread alarm. At first people had laughed at the "new disease," but the laughter was shortlived--like great numbers of those whom the epidemic attacked. Harley Street described it professionally as a recrudescence of _plica polonica_; and just as at an earlier period people had contracted influenza into "the flue," they now went about asking each other how about the "plic." It was a malady which at one time had prevailed extensively in Poland, and but little doubt could be felt that it had now been introduced into England by the Polish Jews, whose alien colony in Whitechapel and other parts of the East End had attained enormous proportions. The peculiar feature of the plic. was that it attacked the hair of the head, matting it together and twisting it in hard knots, to touch which caused the most exquisite pain; this symptom was often accompanied with manifestations of acute nervous disorder. The patient speedily became feverish, and in most instances showed signs of derangement in the functions of the brain. As the malady developed sleep was banished, or, when obtained, would be disturbed by dreadful dreams. Profound depression weighed upon the spirits, and the bare sight of food and drink excited strong repulsion. Gouty pains in arms and legs caused acute agony to some of the sufferers, and in many cases there were fits of giddiness and an affection of the optic nerve that produced temporary blindness. The disease more often than not proved fatal. Physicians were at a loss for radical cures, and a course of thermal baths was found to be the most efficacious palliative that the faculty could recommend. Under the advice of Harley Street, great numbers of patients, in the early stages of the disease, flocked to Bath for the water-cure. Not since the days of the Georges had the famous city of the west harboured so many afflicted visitors. Every hotel was crowded from basement to attic. The lodging-house keepers exacted monstrous prices for the most indifferent accommodation. Local doctors drove a roaring trade, and every other woman in the street seemed to wear the familiar garb of the hospital nurse. Among the distinguished persons who had been advised to have recourse to the healing properties of the famous baths was the foremost man, officially speaking, in the country. Nicholas Jardine was declared to be suffering from a severe attack of the prevailing epidemic, and the papers announced that the President would at the earliest possible moment leave London for Bath. This intelligence caused far more anxiety throughout the country than might have been anticipated. It was not that the President was particularly beloved, but that among a large section of the community the Vice-President was distinctly unpopular. Her ambitions and the determination of her character were well known. Hence the prevailing apprehensions. What might not Lady Cat accomplish in the temporary absence of the President? And, worse still, what might not she dare and do, as the champion and inciter of woman, if the head of the Government should die? The instrument of Government provided that supreme executive authority should be vested in one person--the President, or his deputy for the time being, in conjunction with the Commons in Parliament assembled. The functions of the Lords had long since been abrogated. The President, or his deputy, in the circumstances stated, with the assistance of the members of the Committee or Council of State, had the fullest powers as the executive, and, in effect, presided over the destinies of the nation. From the President the judiciaries and magistrates derived their honours and emoluments. In him was vested civil command of the national forces both by sea and land. With the sanction of the Council, he could maintain peace or declare war. These powers were to some extent checked by the enactment that no law of the realm could be repealed, suspended, or amended without the consent of Parliament; but in Parliament the Vice-President had powerful support. In the event of the death of the President, the other members of the Council could immediately nominate his successor. It was well known that the "Cat" had striven to ally herself in marriage with Nicholas Jardine, with the object, as most people believed, of indirectly grasping the reins of Government. It was known also that, foiled in that design, she treasured feelings of animosity against the President and his daughter. What, then, would be likely to limit her revenge or curb her ambition if an opportunity like the present could be made to serve her purpose? It was widely felt that a crisis impended; that events of dark and threatening character were shaping for some great struggle or convulsion, the issue of which no one could foresee. The men of England, though in the course of years they had yielded inch by inch before the persistent aggression of the other sex, were not wholly forgetful of their past, nor blind to the possibilities of the future. The more virile among them remained rebels against woman's dominion, struggling, like strong but despairing swimmers, against the rushing tide that was sweeping them away. But such men were in a notable minority. Vast numbers seemed to have lapsed without resistance, if not without reluctance, into the position of underlings. Relieved of various responsibilities, they acquiesced in the position which the other sex had gradually assumed. They had grown lazy and half-hearted. With a shrug of the shoulders they accepted the widely-held dictum that their own sex was decadent. In point of numbers that was beyond denial. The entire birth rate of the country had fallen, year after year, but more notable than that was the emphasis given to the dominant note of the age by a steady diminution in the percentage of new-born males. The more vital question arose, what view would the women themselves take of any new departure on the part of their leading representative in the Councils of the State? But such a question could not readily be answered. It might be hazarded that most of those who had displaced the male competitor or who were already in the way of promotion, would be for holding the ground and making any further bid for supremacy that occasion should suggest. But still there were known to be great numbers, patient and, so far, inarticulate women, who viewed the existing state of things with deep regret, and anticipated the future with positive alarm. If the men and the women were in opposite camps, "the sex" undoubtedly was divided in sentiment; for the change of the old order of things had brought many developments that told against the grace and charm of woman's life. She had gained something; but she had lost more. The protective character which in former times man had felt bound in honour to assume for the benefit of the weaker vessel had been largely discarded. Chivalrous feelings were blunted by the competition in which woman had engaged with man. If the grey mare was bent on being the better horse, she must accept the conditions of the competition. However reasonable and welcome this might seem to the mature or hardened woman, it was far from agreeable to the young and charming girl. For still there were charming girls in England, girls who wanted to be wooed and won; girls whose hearts fluttered at the sound of a certain footstep; girls who did not want to rule their lovers, but to lean on them; girls to whom romance was the spice of life. Such girls as these, and it was whispered that they grew in numbers, shrank from the harsh conflict of the battle of life, in which it seemed to be expected that each and all would readily engage. They found in the open doors of professional business or political life inadequate compensation for the deference, tenderness, and delicate consideration which had been accorded by men to earlier generations of women. The Forward faction with their facts and figures, could count on great numbers of adherents. But certainly there were others, and perhaps the best and sweetest in the world of women, who looked with growing distaste and resentment upon the leaders who had brought the business and the pleasures of life to such a pass. There was one English girl who, in the trouble that had come upon her by reason of her father's illness, discovered and pondered on these momentous questions. What would it profit a woman to force herself out of her ordained place in the plan of creation? And what should she give in exchange for that submissive tender love of wife for husband which the Sacred Book declared to be the law of God? Zenobia Jardine, turning for the first time to the Bible, pondered over mysterious passages of the early Scriptures, which came to her with all the greater force because they had not been weakened by parrot-like familiarity. It was a revelation. Historical or allegorical--regarded either way--the story of the Garden of Eden and the first parents of the human race was imperishable in its power and significance. Therein lay the true lesson of life. The waves of the centuries had vainly surged around it. Like pygmies biting on the rock, the newest of new theologists, and the latest of scientific discoverers, had left the rock still standing, impregnable in its eternal strength. The voice that spake to the woman in the garden seemed to be speaking still: "What is this that thou hast done?" And the woman's answer was: "The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat." The enmity that had sprung from that far-off and typical wrong-doing was bearing bitter fruit. The bruising of the heel had been renewed through all the history of man and woman. The woman now was bruised in her affections. In the Homeric story, Thetis took her son Achilles by the heel and dipped him in the river Styx to make the boy invulnerable. The water covered him save where the heel was covered by his mother's hand. And it was through the heel, that one vulnerable spot, that ultimately death assailed the hero. So, also, it seemed to the reflective girl, the heel typified her heart. All the armour of life that she had taken to herself under the auspices of her father would not avail against the enemy who assailed her in that one weak spot. There were times when she felt that she had discredited her training and fallen below her appointed level. There were other times when she felt instinctively convinced that in woman's weakness lay her truest strength--her greatest victory in her ordained defeat. CHAPTER VIII. WARDLAW'S WORKS. To counteract the dangers arising from the Channel Tunnel, long since an accomplished fact, and to soothe the apprehensions of a large section of the public, new defence works of enormous strength and intricacy had been constructed on the heights of Dover. Always a place of vast importance by reason of its position, the ancient stronghold now had become more notably than ever the key to England. As a watering place it had steadily dwindled in importance. Its neighbour, Folkestone, easily held the palm for all pleasure-seekers; but the commercial development of Dover as a port of call for the great liners had been remarkable, just as its strength for naval purposes had been vastly augmented. The completion of the Admiralty Harbour by the construction of the East Arm and the South Breakwater now afforded a safe haven for the largest warships in the British Navy. Here they might ride at anchor, or safely come and go, always protected by the monster guns which had been mounted in the various forts. The commercial harbour had been provided with a huge marine station, where transatlantic passengers in ever-increasing numbers were enabled to land or embark under shelter, continuing their journey either on land or sea with a modicum of inconvenience. It was the great aim of competing steam and railway companies to simplify the methods of travel and enable everybody to go everywhere and do everything with the greatest possible amount of comfort. Those who could not trust themselves, invaluable as they were to themselves, amid the chops of the Channel, now might travel by tunnel to and from the Continent, and thus avoid the risks of nausea or the inconsiderate assaults of wind or wave. By one means or another thousands upon thousands of passengers of all nations and tongues streamed through Dover year after year. It was before all things a place of passage--in so far as it was not a place of arms. If one had repeated to most of these globe-trotters Gloster's question in King Lear: "Dost thou know Dover?" the answer would probably have been: "Well, I just caught a glimpse of it." From the Channel, Shakespeare's Cliff, to the westward of the Admiralty pier, certainly was found less impressive than most people had expected. Like English life, as a whole, it seemed less spacious than it was considered to be in the days of good Queen Bess. But then, of course, Shakespeare, with his cloud-capp'd towers and gorgeous palaces, was always such a very imaginative dramatist. Still, there was the ancient, though slowly-crumbling, cliff remaining in evidence to remind English folk and foreigners of the splendid story of England's past. There, too, on Castle Hill, the ancient Roman Pharos--adjoining St. Mary's-in-Castro--reared its roofless walls towards the clouds. The mariners of England and of Gaul no longer needed the lights of the Pharos to guide them in the Channel, and, of course, the venerable bells that used to ring for matins and evensong were silent many a year before Admiral Rooke removed them to Portsmouth parish church. The great Castle, close at hand, was visited by very few excursionists. The climb between Castle Hill and the Western heights was found fatiguing. More Americans than Englishmen appeared to interest themselves in the story of the Castle; its occupation by William of Normandy after the Battle of Hastings, its associations with King John's craven submission to the Papal Legate, its victorious defence by Hubert de Burgh, the French attack--fruitless again--of 1278, and other incidents of historic interest. The Long Gun, known as Queen Elizabeth's pocket-pistol, still pointed its muzzle sea-ward, and the inscription in low Dutch, very freely translated, rashly adjured the current generation to-- "Load me well and keep me clean, I'll carry my ball to Calais Green." But inspection of the Castle was not encouraged, and tourists of foreign appearance who showed a disposition to take snapshots in the vicinity were promptly checked in their pursuit of the pleasing but too common art of photography. Yet it was certain that, pigeon-holed in every war department, of continental and, perhaps, of certain Eastern powers, there were full details, or nearly full, of the elaborate defence works with which Dover was provided. It was known that Castle Hill was honeycombed with subterranean passages and galleries, and that the Castle (nowadays a barrack rather than a fortress) was thus connected with the modern forts in its immediate vicinity. Fort Burgoyne, to the north of the castle itself, was, until recent times, the strongest link in the chain of defence, its guns being of great calibre, and commanding a vast range over land and sea. But far more powerful, and better equipped with modern armament and military resources, was Fort Warden; such being the name given to the works which had been specially constructed as a safeguard against possible attack by means of the Channel Tunnel. The very hill had been hewn and carved and moulded to meet the needs of such a danger. Commanding the gradual sweep by which the railway descended towards the Tunnel, the great guns of Fort Warden were always trained upon the gaping archway from which the incoming trains were constantly emerging. The highest battery of the Fort occupied a dominating position overlooking all the _enceinte_ fortifications, which were armed with machine guns and small cannon. There was a subterranean passage connecting the fort with the waterworks of a large service reservoir in a hollow of the hill, which had been constructed in modern times to ensure an adequate supply of water for the troops and the Duke of York's School. Fort Warden was complete in itself; but, linked up with the other fortifications, it formed, as it were, the citadel of a composite fortress where, in the event of attack, the last stand would be made by England's defenders. Round the fort extended a double row of trenches, and within these was a moat. Strong wire entanglements defended the trenches, and the loopholes in the breastworks were protected by 3/4-inch steel plates with a cross-shaped opening for the rifles. In addition, strong bomb-proofs were provided for the reserves, with wide bomb-proof passages leading to certain of the other forts. In all directions on the hill were placed howitzers and mortars, most of the battery positions and gun epaulements being ingeniously masked and difficult for an advancing enemy to locate. The military scientist who had designed most of the elaborate defences and put finishing touches to those of earlier construction was Major Edgar Wardlaw of the Royal Engineers. His old friend General Hartwell held that from the point of view of an invading enemy, this quiet, unassuming officer was the most dangerous man in all the British army. Major Wardlaw certainly knew better than anyone else of what Dover Castle Hill was capable. The military authorities were very chary of rehearsing its possible performances, because, in the vulgar parlance of an earlier period, it would give the show away. It was a "show" that must be closely reserved and kept dark in times of international peace and quietness. Meanwhile, the hillside showed but few signs of life; the winds of heaven blew over it, the rains descended, or the sun shone. Birds hopped about, and people came and went. Often there was hardly a sound to break the silence of the hill. A visitor who had climbed the heights could gaze over the town of Dover and the hills and valleys behind it, or look right across the Channel to the coast of France, quite undisturbed by human voice or sound of busy life. But Major Wardlaw could have told that visitor that on the instant, at a signal, this placid scene could be converted into one of awful violence and furious sound; that in a flash the hill would vomit forth, as if from many avenues of hell, wholesale, fiery death and indiscriminate destruction. On every side would rise the roar of monster ordnance, the ceaseless rattle of machine guns, the deafening crack of musketry. Woe betide the foe that dared to rouse the sleeping monster of the hill! Such were Wardlaw's Works, as they were called throughout the British army. When the Major retired from active service, he still lingered in the neighbourhood of his _magnum opus_. In a charming bungalow, perched on the hillside of Folkestone Warren, he and Miss Flossie spent unruffled days amid eminently healthy surroundings. The Warren, a bay of much natural beauty, had been rescued from neglect. A station on the line from Folkestone proper to Dover afforded easy access to the Bay; trees had been planted and roads cut in the hillside. Everywhere on summer nights the lights gleamed from villas and bungalows, and down below on the new jetty, and at the mastheads of scores of pleasure craft. The place suited Major Wardlaw admirably, and even little Miss Wardlaw, who was by way of being exacting, seemed quite satisfied with her surroundings. Her father kept a small cutter in the bay, and frequently took the young lady for health-giving sails upon the dancing sea. Usually their port of call was Dover. The Major was always going to Dover. He couldn't keep away from it. When the cutter was laid up for the winter, he went by train, or sometimes walked across the wind-swept downs. Dover town itself had no particular attractions for him. The magnet lay on Castle Hill. In short, Wardlaw could not keep away from Wardlaw's Works. Even when he was not visiting the Works, he was always thinking about them. When military friends of his came over from the Castle or from Shorncliffe, they seemed to talk of nothing else but Fort Warden--all that it was, and all that it would be if the critical hour of conflict or invasion ever came. Flossie Wardlaw disapproved of the whole thing. It annoyed her--this constant absorption, this ever recurring topic of conversation. Personally, she refused to discuss the Works, and had it been possible would have forbidden all allusion to the Fort when those tiresome friends dropped in and talked "shop" with her father. Poor Wardlaw, torn with conflicting emotions, knowing that the child was jealous of the Works, used to look at her apologetically when one of his cronies started the everlasting topic. But Flossie was not easily to be mollified. With her little nose in the air, she would glance severely, disdainfully, at the author of her being, tossing back that mass of silky, sunny hair from which her pet name was derived. And now the hated subject of the "Works" was more to the fore than ever, for the military movement among the women of England had brought Fort Warden into prominence in the newspapers. The Vice-President of the Council, in pursuance of her policy, was turning the Fort to unforeseen account. The First Amazons, as they were popularly called, had been "enrolled and uniformed," and now the Fighting Girls (as some people styled them) were to have this wonderful fort placed at their disposal for the purpose of training and instruction in the art of war. The idea was very popular among the Amazons. Some two hundred of them were to spend a fortnight in the Fort, and then give place to another batch, the Fort meanwhile being vacated by the artillerymen, save only a handful of gunnery instructors and lecturers. So the men marched out of the tortoise-backed "Works," and the Amazons, very smart in their new uniforms, and full of gleeful excitement, briskly and triumphantly marched in. It was a picturesque episode in martial history which afforded excellent scope for lively descriptive reporting. Great numbers of people seemed to be pleasurably interested in the event, just as they used to be in the volunteer military picnics on Easter Monday. There were others, however, who, like General Hartwell noisily, and Edgar Wardlaw quietly, condemned the whole thing as monstrous, unseemly, and fraught with danger to the nation. The majority, however, laughed at the minority. What was there to be afraid of? There was not a cloud in the international sky. England's difficulties, they said, now were purely domestic. Greater Britain had been so cut up and divided that we had nothing further to fear. Surely no greedy Jezebel would dream of stirring up a Continental Ahab to covet and lay violent hands on the remnant of Naboth's Vineyard. CHAPTER IX. THE LOOSENED GRIP. "Bladud, the son of Lud, founded this Bath three hundred years before Christ." It was a far cry from Bladud to Nicholas Jardine! A goodly span, too, from the time when a great statesman was carried through the streets of Bath, swathed in flannels; his livid face, peering through the windows of the sedan chair, the fierce eyes staring from beneath his powdered wig. One can almost see his ghost in Milsom Street, and hear the whisper spread from group to group: "There he goes! the great Commoner, Mr. Pitt!" And now through the streets of the same town they wheeled a very different sort of statesman; and yet, perhaps, the product, by slow processes of inevitable evolution, of that very time "when America thrust aside the British sceptre, when the ingenious machine of Dr. Guillotine removed the heads of King and Queen in France, when Ireland rose in rebellion, when Napoleon grasped at the dominion of the Western World, when Wellington fought the French Marshals in Spain," and when, God be thanked! Nelson triumphed in Trafalgar Bay. Just as the inhabitants and visitors of Bath used to take off their hats to William Pitt in his sedan chair, so now the new generation saluted Nicholas Jardine, when, seated in his bath-chair, he was drawn through the streets to the baths. For though times were changed, the President in his way was a great personage--such a remarkably successful man; and in all times it has been proved true that nothing succeeds like success. Jardine, when he acknowledged these salutations, showed an awkwardness unknown to those to the Manor born. It disconcerted him to be stared at, especially now that he was ill. He hated traversing the public streets, and often sat with closed eyes until his chair entered the bathing establishment. Once there he became alert and interested--but not in the reminiscences of Georgian functions and the manners and customs of the fops and flirts of that vanished period. What appealed to him, as a trained mechanic, was the heritage of far remoter days. The brain of the Roman Engineer and the skilled hand of the Roman Architect and Mason had left these signs and wonders for future generations to look upon. The great rectangular bath had only been uncovered about sixty years earlier. The Goths and Vandals of an earlier period had built over it their trumpery shops and dwelling-houses. But the present bath, with its modern additions, actually was built upon the ancient piers. The very pavements, or scholæ, that bordered it were those which the Roman bathers had trod. The recesses or exedræ corresponded with those at Pompeii, and had been used for hanging the clothes of the Roman bathers or for resting places. The floor of the bath was coated with lead, and in all probability that lead was brought from the Roman mines in the Mendip Hills, where had been discovered the imperial emblems of Claudius and Vespasian. The President was not without a sense of the beautiful. The scene around him awakened his imagination. He knew that the wooded slopes of the stately hills, the stone hewn from the inexhaustible quarries, and the broad river--formerly spanned by bridges and aqueducts graceful in outline and noble in proportions--each and all had furnished the means which skilful hands had put to glorious uses. Yet all these ingredients of beauty might have remained unused but for the wonderful thermal waters which here, for untold centuries, had risen ceaselessly from fathomless depths, streaming ever from rocky fissures, filling the pools and natural basins, and still overflowing into the rushing river. But this beneficent spring and these now verdant hills must have had their remote origin in some terrible concussion of natural forces. Mother Earth had laboured and brought them forth, far back in her pre-historic ages. Subterranean fires, begotten by the portentous union of iron and sulphur, had waited their appointed time. Drop after drop, the hidden waters had filtered on inflammable ingredients, until the imprisoned air at last exploded, and the earth, rending and rocking in appalling convulsions, opened enormous chasms and brought forth, amid fire and smoke and vapour, the embryo of all this lovely scene. The City was the offspring of seismic action; the earth had travailed and brought forth these wooded hills. The smiling valley, where now stood the City, was but the crater of an extinct volcano, perpetuated in memory by the steaming waters that still gushed upward from the mystic depths. Below the streets and houses of the modern town were the original baths of the City of Sulcastra, of many acres in extent. Here, indeed, in this most wonderful of Spas, history unfolded itself page by page--the City of Sul in the grip, successively, of Roman, Saxon, Dane; dynasty succeeding dynasty, sovereign coming after sovereign, statesman after statesman, until now, when a Walsall mechanic in a bath-chair was all that England had to show by way of substitute for absolute sovereignty and sceptred sway. And with Nicholas Jardine, too, the relentless law of time was at work. The sceptre was falling from his grasp. The grass withereth; the flower fadeth. Man passes to his long home, and the mourners go about the street. Would it be his turn next? Every day Zenobia seemed to see in her father's face signs of a slowly working change. She witnessed the melancholy spectacle of waning strength, of failing interest in those things that once had absorbed his thoughts and energies. It wrought in her a corresponding change, a protective tenderness which she had never felt before, a deepening sense of the transience and sadness of human pomp and circumstance, a broadened sympathy with all the sons of men. A great silence seemed to have fallen upon the man who in the past had made so many speeches. A brooding wistfulness revealed itself in his expression. There was a haunting look of doubt or question in his eyes, a look as of one who, without compass and without rudder, finds himself drifting on an unknown sea. The land was fading from his sight. The solid earth on which he had walked, self-confident, self-sufficient, no longer gave him foothold. His nerveless hands were losing grip on the only life of which he knew anything, the only life in which he had been able to believe. And day by day, and night by night, there came to his mind the memory of his earlier life, of the faith that he had seen shining in the dying eyes of the woman who had believed while he had disbelieved. Vividly he recalled to mind--albeit with a sense of wonder and irritation--an occasion when he had sat beside her in the old Cathedral at Lichfield. The sun was setting, and its glory illumined the huge western window; the words of the great man of action, who was also the man of great faith, were being read from the lectern, and at a certain passage his wife had turned and looked at him with sad and supplicating eyes: "If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable." If in this life only ...! All other hope he had scorned and rejected. No other hope had seemed needful to his happiness and success. But now? Already _this_ life was dwindling and departing. He felt it; he knew it in his inmost being, as his steps faltered, his hands grew thin and pallid, and his brain, once so busy with a hundred projects and ambitions, now refused to work, or brought to him only recurrent recollections of things which in the prime and strength of his manhood he had scouted and despised. If in this life only ...! Sometimes a great restlessness possessed him, and Zenobia, in the silent watches of the night, heard him moving heavily and slowly about his room. On one of these nights, anxious and alarmed, she hurried in and found him standing at the window in the darkness. The furnished house they occupied was on Bathwick Hill, and the night scene from the windows was one of striking mystery and beauty. The blackness of the valley in which lay the ancient city, and of the towering hills on every side, was studded with myriads of lights--shining like stars in an inverted firmament. "Father!" She crossed the room and laid her hand upon his arm; but, scarcely heeding her, the sick man still stood by the window, looking as if fascinated on the magical scene of the night. Zenobia also gazed, and gazed steadfastly; but the impression made upon herself was wholly different. With him it was a sad impression of farewell. But in Zenobia's brain there suddenly sprang up an extraordinary sense of recognition. There was a subtle, haunting familiarity in the scene she looked upon--this valley and these hills, in and about which all that was modern, save the lights, was quite invisible. Thus might the valley of Sulcastra have looked under the darkened sky two thousand years ago. Thus might the lamps of Roman villas, temples, baths, and public buildings have twinkled when a vestal virgin, maintaining Sul's undying fires upon the altar, looked down upon the silent city. The puzzled girl caught her breath, half sighing, unable to shake off the belief that at some remote period she had gone through precisely the same experience that was now presented to her. And, doubly strange, in connection with the scene, though she could see no reason for it, her thoughts flew instantly to Linton Herrick. She became oppressed, almost suffocated, with a sense as of pre-existence--a bewildering sensation, almost a revelation--that seemed to tell of the mystery of the ego, of the indestructibility of human life. * * * * * It was the last time that Nicholas Jardine looked down upon the old city, by night or by day. The next day he remained in bed, and the day after, and all the days that were left to him. The afternoon sunshine came upon the walls, the shadows followed, night succeeded day. The demarcations of time became blurred. His calendar was growing shorter and shorter. The world mattered less and less to him, who had played a leading part in it; and already he mattered nothing to the world. Death was not close at hand. Nevertheless he was dying. "For this losing is true dying: This is lordly man's down-lying: This his slow but sure reclining, Star by star his world resigning." CHAPTER X. ZENOBIA'S DREAM. The night which followed her heartsearching experience of feeling on looking down upon the sleeping city of Bath, Zenobia had a dream. It was a vision of extraordinary vividness, and strangely circumstantial. Beneath her eyes the golden light of a summer sunset was flooding the temples, the baths, the stately villas of ancient "Rome in England"--the city of Sulcastra. Garbed as a Priestess of the Temple, she stood upon a plateau, high on the Hill of Sul on the east side of the valley. Behind her rose the Temple of the Goddess, and by her side stood one whom she knew to be the sculptor Lucius Flaccus, son of that centurion who was charged to carry Paul from Adramythium to Rome. He had been telling her in graphic phrases of his association with the great Apostle; how for the first time he had heard him on Mars' Hill at Athens boldly rebuking the listening and resentful throng who had erected there an altar _to the unknown God_. Then with a gesture of repugnance which horrified the priestess, the narrator, quoting the Christian preacher's words, had turned and pointed towards the Temple in which she with other vestals kept ever burning the sacred fire of Sul. "Forasmuch, then, as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like silver or gold, graven by art or man's device...." Thus far he had spoken when her own voice interrupted passionately: "Do not blaspheme the gods!" "The gods are dead," he answered sternly, "nay, rather, they have never lived. Our Roman gods have eyes that see not, ears that hear not, they are but silver, gold, or stone--the work of hands like these." Thus speaking, he held forth his hands, delicate and mobile, in one of which was grasped the chisel of his ancient art. The priestess stood for a moment looking in his eyes, silent, terror-stricken. "Yet," he went on, bending his gaze upon the city with a sigh, "Sulcastra is beautiful." He knew and loved each particular feature of artistic beauty in the city. Its architecture afforded him a delight that never failed. The symbolic work of the chisel was evidenced on every side. The noble columns that supported the terraces; the pavements resembling those of Pompeii; the graceful friezes and delicate cornices appealed irresistibly to every votary of art. Indeed, the Thermæ of Sulcastra were held by many of the cultured Romans to be not less splendid than the baths at Scipio Africanus, or even those built at Rome by Caracalla and Diocletian. For here, too, the lofty chambers were ornamented with curious mosaics, varied in rich colours and infinitely delicate in design. And here, also, the medicinal waters were poured into vast reservoirs through wide mouths of precious metal and Egyptian granite, while the green marble of Numidia had been brought from afar to give variety to the native stone from the adjacent quarries. The fame of the wonderful waters went back for eight centuries before the birth of Christ. Here, according to tradition, Bladud, son of Lud the British King, father of King Lear, had found a cure for his foul leprosy. Yonder had stood the first Temple of Minerva, dedicated by that same Bladud to the goddess. Had he not sought by magical aid to soar aloft like the eagle, only to fall and be dashed to pieces on Minerva's altar? The sculptor shaded his eyes against the slanting rays of sunlight, and turned his gaze upon the vast stadium in which at stated intervals the people of Sulcastra witnessed the elaborated games of mighty Rome. Such an occasion recently had occurred, a scene of splendid pageantry and power which invariably moved the spectators to superstitious awe, and often to wild excesses of fanaticism. Young and old had implored the favour of the gods, and pledged themselves to maintain unbroken the religious observances of the Rome people. In the darkness of night, mystic sacrifices had been offered on the banks of the river; and the whole city, as the sculptor and the priestess now looked down upon it, still seemed to be fermenting with the excitement which the great celebration had occasioned. At that very moment an imposing procession was seen to be advancing towards the Temple of Minerva. Trumpet note after trumpet note echoed round the hills. Chariots full of garlands and branches of myrtle approached the shrine. A large black bull was being led to the sacrificial altar, and youths and maidens, chanting a hymn to Minerva, carried in procession costly vases full of wine and milk to be poured as libations to the goddess, while others bore cruets of wine, oil, and perfumed essences to anoint the pillars of the sacred monuments within the temple. Lucius Flaccus looked down upon the procession with sad and moody eyes. The Vestal's eyes were bent no less sadly on the sculptor, as if divining all his thoughts. They sprang, she doubted not, out of the subject of their conversation, and she turned uneasily towards the pillar-altar on which the sculptor's skilful hands had been at work. It stood upon the turf at the entrance to a little grove which gave access to the gates of the Temple of Sul, the temple in which she herself ministered as priestess. A cloth lay over the graceful monument, to the inscription upon which the young Roman had but just now put the final touch. His work upon the monument, screened from view, had long excited the interest and curiosity of the Romans and the slaves who passed that way, but reverence for the goddess and respect for the sculptor himself had served to arrest all questions. The work of art, it was thought, would be unveiled in time; and doubtless it would prove to be another and a worthy tribute to the goddess who presided in a special manner over the fortunes of the city. Lucius Flaccus had studied in a great and noble school. He had gazed long and often on the famous statue of the Olympian Jove modelled in ivory by the master hand of Phidias. He had marked every curve and feature of the Minerva--standing sixty cubits high--on whose shield the great Athenian sculptor had so marvellously represented the wars of the Amazons. There were those, indeed, familiar with the work of the young Roman who foretold for him an imperishable reputation as an exponent of the noble art to which he was devoted. Lucius Flaccus had been welcomed in Sulcastra as one who was likely to add to the beauty of the city, and the honour of the special goddess of the citizens. The sculptor's art, like the Ten Commandments, was written on tables of stone. It was for all time; nearly five hundred years had passed since the chisel dropped from the hand of Phidias, but the glory of his work remained. It was indestructible. So also, thought some, might the handiwork of Lucius Flaccus be handed down from century to century. The cult of Sul was scarcely distinguishable from that of Vesta. Like Vesta, she was a home-goddess, a national deity, whose vestals were solemnly pledged ever to maintain her altar-fire, lest its extinction should bring disaster on the people. Sul, also, was a fire deity. According to the kindred mythology of Scandinavia, the goddess was so beautiful a being that she had been placed in heaven to drive the chariot of the Sun from which she took her name--that glorious sun, the rays of which were now illuminating the city of Sulcastra. Sul, in the eyes of the Romans, was more exalted than Soma, daughter of the Moon, though in the East Soma was held in the highest reverence as the mother of Buddha. Soma was the sovereign goddess of plants and planets. In the Vedic hymns she was identified with the moon-plant which a falcon had brought down from heaven. Its juice was an elixir of life. To drink it conferred immortality on mortals, and even exhilarated the gods themselves. But even greater virtue and miraculous power did the Romans attribute to the waters of Sul, and with better evidence of their potency. For here, in Sulcastra, century after century, and ever at the same temperature, the magical, unfathomable well had poured forth its mystic waters for the healing of the people. The Temple of Sul, like that of Vesta, was circular, to represent the world; and in the centre of the temple stood the altar of the sacred flame, ever burning to symbolise the central fires of Mother Earth, just as the sun was deemed to be the centre of the universe. There were nothing strange or unusual in freedom of conversation between the Priestess and the Sculptor--who, in former years, had added many decorations to the Temple. The virgin priestesses were permitted to receive the visits of men by day; by night none but women were suffered to enter their apartments, which adjoined the sacred building in which they ministered. Each priestess was pledged to continence for thirty years. During the first ten they were employed in learning the tenets and rites of their religion. During the next ten they engaged in actual ministrations. In the final ten years they were employed in training the younger vestals, and after the age of thirty they might abandon the functions of the temple and marry. Few exercised that option. Custom, when such an age was reached, had become ingrained, the impulses of youth frozen, and the honour paid to their office became more valued than the prospects of marriage. The reverence shown to them was very great, but so also was the punishment that followed a lapse from the letter or the spirit of their duties. The least levity in conduct, the smallest neglect of ministerial duty, was dealt with by the Pontifex or the Flamens, and visited with great severity. The loss of virginal honour, or the failure to maintain the sacred fire, involved a penalty of inexpressible terror. The condemned priestess, placed in a litter, shut up so closely that her loudest cries were scarcely audible, was carried through the city in the order, and with the adjuncts, of a funeral procession, a journey of death in life--its goal the niche or narrow vault in which the living vestal was to be immured. THE SCULPTOR'S STORY. The dreamer knew these things, and still dreamed on. It seemed as if her own voice broke the silence: "Fain would I know more of this same Paul of whom you speak." Then she paused, but looks still questioned him. Presently the young Roman spoke again-- "My father, the centurion Julius, was charged to carry him to Rome, and I had planned to bear him company. We took ship to sail along the coasts of Asia; touched at Sidon and afterwards at Cyprus, the winds being contrary. Later we transhipped at Alexandria, and thus reached Crete. The seas grew dangerous, and the sailors feared. Scarcely had we sailed when there arose that strong, tempestuous wind they call Euroclydon. The ship, being caught, could not bear against the wind, and we let her drive. Then, near the island of Clauda, we were like to be driven on the shore; and fearing quicksands, we struck sail, and so were driven again. The tempest tossed us, and the ship was lightened. We cast adrift the tackling; but still the tempest held us; neither sun nor star appeared for many days, and all that time the ship was driven before the storm, until at length the shipmen deemed that we drew near to land. They sounded and found twenty fathoms. Again they sounded and found five fathoms less. Then, fearing we should be upon the rocks, they made all haste to cast four anchors from the stern, and waited for the day." "The storm had lasted long?" "For fourteen days and nights." "And there were many in the ship?" "Two hundred, three-score and sixteen souls; and everyone was saved. Land lay before us, though we knew it not. But we discovered close at hand a creek. So they took up the anchors, loosed the rudder-bands, hoisted the mainsail to the wind, and made for shore. She ran into a place where two seas met, and went aground. The forepart held and seemed immovable, but soon the hinder part was broken by the violence of the waves. The soldiers then would have killed all the prisoners, lest they should escape, but my father stayed their hands. Those who could swim sprang first into the sea. Others on boards, and some on broken pieces of the ship, made for the land, and I, with all the rest, came safe ashore." "The gods be thanked; the gods be thanked for that." The words came fervently from the Vestal's lips. He turned on her and sighed. "What! still the gods?" She pressed her hands upon her brow. "Is there no more to tell?" He paused a moment. "Already I have told too much if told in vain. The island we had reached was Melita, and Publius, the chief man of the place, received us courteously. Paul healed his father of a grievous sickness, and many others also, ere we departed in a ship of Alexandria. We touched at Syracuse, and then at Rhegium, whence we went towards Rome. There many brethren greeted Paul with joy, and there in reverence and sorrow did I part from him." "And he--this Paul himself?" "Remains at Rome, having his own hired house, receiving all who come to him, preaching of the Heavenly kingdom, teaching with all confidence, of the coming of the Christ--no man yet forbidding him." Deep silence fell between them, and the only sound came from a droning that in Sulcastra never ceased by night or day--the voice of the rushing river as it poured across the weir. Now they stood erect; each was tall and nobly framed; each face had beauty intellectual and physical. Yet in the sculptor's features and his deep-set eyes there was the look that visionaries wear, the stamp of those who nourish great ideals. The gaze the priestess bent upon him told a different tale. The dreamer knew this woman loved this man, while he, as yet, had found no passion in his soul for her. She raised her hand in gesture of adieu, and moved with slow steps towards the temple. Then, as if stirred by sudden impulse, she turned to him again. "And this Paul--tell me--what teacheth he concerning women?" "He teacheth that man is the image and the glory of God, and woman the glory of the man. That man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man: neither was man created for the woman, but the woman for the man. He commandeth that women keep silence in the Christian churches, and in all things be subject to their husbands, for the husband is the head of the wife." "Then he forbiddeth not to marry?" "Is not Paul the Apostle of Him who blessed the marriage feast of Cana?" "In whom thou dost believe?" "In whom I do believe," he answered steadfastly. "I tell thee that the banner of the Cross shall one day float above the capitol of Rome itself." The priestess took two swifter steps towards him. "Then why, O Lucius Flaccus, hast thou built here an altar to our Goddess Sul?" She pointed to the pedestal beside them; and he, answering not a word, stretched forth his hand and drew away the covering that concealed the apex. There, in the fading light, there stood revealed the hated emblem of the Christian Faith. "A cross!" she cried, "a cross!" The sculptor raised his eyes and clasped his hands: "The Cross of Him who died for all the world!" THE VESTAL'S FATE. The spirit of the dream had changed. A sense of horrible foreboding agonized the dreamer. No longer did the sculptor and the priestess look down upon Sulcastra. Yet the dreamer knew all that had happened and was happening still. The city was in tumult. The baths, the public schools, the temples were deserted. People thronged the streets. There was but one thing spoken of--an outrage on the goddess whom they all revered. Lucius Flaccus, the favoured sculptor of Sulcastra, son of Julius the centurion, had erected on the threshold of her temple an altar to the God-Man of the Nazarenes. Nor was that all. The sacred fire that should have been kept burning in Sul's temple had been suffered to die out, if indeed it had not been deliberately extinguished; climax of all--Verenia, priestess of Sul, had been found in the broad light of day kneeling with bowed head before the hated emblem that profaned the grove. Amazement had given place to fury. The cry went up for punishment--a cry redoubled when it became known that the augurs foretold dire calamity for Sulcastra and the citizens, as the inevitable consequence of an outrage so profane. The people feared the vengeance of the gods! Yet there were some who kept a grief-stricken silence in the midst of all the raging of the citizens, for each of the offenders was well esteemed, and both belonged to honoured Roman families. The dreadful fate that lay in store alike for the sculptor and the priestess moved many hearts to awe and anguished apprehension. In each case the appalling penalty was as certain as the dawn of day. Lucius Flaccus would be carried to the rock of Sul, high on the steepest hill that overlooked the valley, and thence cast headlong on the rocks below. For Verenia, the priestess, a yet more awful punishment was prepared--the slow starvation of a living tomb. The dreadful preparations were complete. The Vestal's grave was ready--a narrow niche in the massive stone foundations of the Temple--the temple of that goddess whose worship she had mocked. In this tiny cell was placed a pallet, a lamp that when lighted would burn for forty hours, and a small quantity of food. All knew what course the funeral ceremonies would follow. The Pontifex would read some prayers over the doomed priestess, but without the lustrations and other expiatory ceremonies that were used at the burial of the dead. When the last prayer had been uttered, the lictors would let her down into the vault, the entrance would be filled with slabs of stone, then covered up with earth. The awful hours, the agonizing days, would slowly pass. The lamp would flicker and the light expire. Deep silence that no shriek could pierce would shut the buried vestal from the ken of all who loved her. The food would fail; then, slowly, hour by hour, and day by day, the dreadful sentence of the law would be fulfilled. No father, mother, lover, friend, could save the victim, or by one iota lessen the torture of starvation, or that still greater torture of the brain to which her judges had condemned her. Did not the crime of which she was convicted strike at the root of the religion of the people? The maintenance of the sacred fire as a pious and propitiatory observance was not peculiar to the Romans. The Hebrews held it a divine commandment: "The fire shall ever be burning upon the altar, saith the Lord; it shall never go out." Undying fires were maintained in the temples of Ceres at Mantinea; of Apollo at Delphos and at Athens; and in that of Diana at Echatan. A lamp was always burning in the temple of Jupiter Ammon. The ancient custom came from the Egyptians to the Greeks, and from the Greeks to the Romans, who had made it a vital, essential feature of their faith. Like the veil of Astoreth in the temple of the moon-goddess at Carthage; like the sacred shield which, as Numa Pompilius avowed, had fallen from heaven, the altar-fire of Sul safeguarded the domestic prosperity, the political wisdom, the military supremacy of Rome in Britain. And this gross insult to the mighty goddess had been perpetrated in the midst of the festival; on the very eve of the ceremony of the blessed waters used specially on that occasion for purifying the temple of Sul. It was a local event of paramount importance, for then the statue of Sul was covered with flowers and anointed with perfumed oil. The Salii marched through the city carrying vessels, richly decorated and of beautiful design, containing water from the sacred spring. The feast lasted for three days, and during that time the Romans undertook no serious or important business. The banquets with which the festival was concluded were magnificent and costly. The edict of Numa Pompilius enjoining reverence to the gods remain unrepealed. It was obeyed in Sulcastra as in Rome itself. Inscribed on tables of stone, it could be read in all the schools and temples: "Let none appear in the presence of the gods but with a pure heart and sincere piety. Let none there make a vain show and ostentation of their riches but fear lest they should thereby bring on themselves the vengeance of heaven. "Let no one have particular gods of his own, or bring new ones into his house, or receive strange ones unless allowed by edict. Let everyone preserve in his house the oratories established by his fathers, and pay his domestic gods the worship that has always been paid to them. "Let all honour the ancient gods of heaven, and the heroes whose exploits have carried them thither, such as Bacchus, Hercules, Castor and Pollux. Let altars be erected to the virtues which carry us up to heaven; but never to vices." These dread laws the sculptor and the priestess had impiously broken and defied. The climax was at hand. A strange, loud clangour beat upon the ear, pierced by the wailing cry of weeping women. The dreamer heard the tramp of many feet; then saw a long and closely packed procession emerging from the centre of the city. Slowly and solemnly the multitude advanced. The first section of the great procession reached the narrower road which wound amid the trees that beautified the Hill of Sul. High up on the barer slopes of the great hill stood out the jutting rock from which the sculptor was to take his last long gaze upon the sunlit world. A band of lictors headed the procession. Behind them, with head erect, walked Lucius Flaccus on the road to death. The trees swayed gently in the morning breeze, the birds were singing in the groves; the glory of the summer decked the land. Yet the tenderness of nature and all the splendour of the world seemed but to mock the tragedy of that slow procession. On every side was life, life, strong, abundant, free; but this one lonely man, bare-headed and white-faced, who climbed the hill, had done with life. With each step of the slow advance he drew nearer and nearer to the gate of death. The second part of the procession was lead by twelve Salii, each of whom carried a shield on his left arm and a javelin in his right hand. They were dressed in habits striped with purple, girded with broad belts, and clasped with buckles of brass. On their heads they wore helmets which terminated in a point. From these men the clangour came. Sometimes they sang in concert a hymn to Sul; sometimes they advanced with dancing step, beating time with their javelins on their shields. Next came many mourners, women and children, weeping and wringing their hands as in a funeral procession; and then a closely-curtained litter, with priests on either hand followed by the Pontifex, magnificently habited and carrying a staff or sceptre in his hand. Priestesses, with bowed heads and clasped hands, followed the Pontifex. Then came another body of lictors, followed by a miscellaneous multitude of citizens and their families; and, finally, a tall centurion leading a company of soldiers. The road grew steeper, narrower, winding round the hill; and the first body of lictors, with their prisoner, had passed out of view of the company that followed, when suddenly arose a violent outcry and the clash of arms. The sculptor had turned upon his guard, seized a javelin from one of them, and mounted the steep bank beside the road. The whole procession halted in confusion. Disconcerted priests whispered and gesticulated; the crowd closed up and filled the narrow way from side to side. "Romans! hear me!" The appeal, in high-pitched, fervent tones, came from Lucius Flaccus, and was not unanswered by the people: "Hear him! let him speak!" The lictors at the bidding of the Pontifex half turned, but being few in number were daunted by the strenuous cries of the excited crowd. The sculptor seized the moment of their irresolution and raised his voice again: "Romans! spare her." He pointed to the litter. "You who have sisters, daughters, restrain your rulers from an act that would disgrace a barbarous nation." Murmurs and conflicting cries were raised. The priests sent messengers to the soldiers at the rear of the procession. But the crowd, closer and closer packed, rendered it difficult for the messengers to pass. Above the tumult, the Pontifex cried in shrill excited tones: "The gods demand her death!" Thus incited, many in the crowd shouted in assent, while others cried again: "Hear Lucius Flaccus, hear him!" Once more the sculptor raised his voice: "The gods are names for priests to conjure with...." For a moment indescribable tumult prevailed. The centurion sought in vain to force a way through the dense, now struggling, mass of people. Again the sculptor made a passionate appeal: "I implore the aid of the Roman people. I call upon my fellow citizens to save a woman. To what purpose do we expose our lives in war? Why do we defend our wives and sisters from a foreign enemy if Rome has tyrants who incite the people to violent and vindictive acts? Soldiers in arms, do not endure these things! Free citizens, exalt yourselves by being merciful." The frantic appeal now met with no response. Lucius Flaccus looked wildly round, despair and desperation in his face. He raised the javelin, and for the last time his voice was heard: "Then thus, and thus only, can I save her from a crueller fate!" In an instant he sprang upon the lictors who confronted him, and, striking left and right, actually reached the curtains of the litter. A shudder of horror ran through all the crowd. The women shrieked. The people swayed and struggled, and the next moment it was seen that the sculptor had been beaten back, though not yet secured. He sprang upon a rock beside the road and raised the javelin high in air. "Then, Romans, if infernal gods there be, let them accept another sacrifice!" Down flashed the steel, the sharp point plunged into his heart; and, throwing out his hands, he swayed into the lictors' arms. A dreadful silence fell upon the people. Then from within the thickly-curtained litter came a despairing and half-stifled shriek. * * * * * With that wild, agonizing cry Zenobia awoke. The cry from the litter was her cry. It was her own voice that died away, and what was this mysterious sound--rising from the valley with the mists that melted at the break of day? The sound was the same that the sculptor and the priestess had heard nearly two thousand years ago; the voice of many waters as they swept across the weir, insistent, unceasing--the monotone of doom. CHAPTER XI. THE NEW AMAZONS. On every side the continued rivalry between the sexes in their struggle for supremacy in national life was producing lamentable results. To this general evil now was added the new move inaugurated by the Vice-President of the Council in the matter of military training. The unfortunate illness of President Jardine had facilitated the schemes of that daring leader of the women, and it soon became apparent that preparations for enrolling large bodies of Amazons, though hitherto kept secret, in fact had been very far advanced before the memorable meeting at Queen's Hall. Recruits flocked in from every quarter. The idea of military service or a military picnic for a few months in the Amazonian militia appealed to all sorts and conditions of girls and young women. Those who had reached the age when the resources or pleasures of home life had begun to pall, those who saw no chance of getting married, those who had met with disappointments in love and were stirred with the restless spirit of the times, those who rebelled against parental rule, domestic employments, or the monotony of days spent in warehouse or office, one and all caught eagerly at the idea of a course of military training in smart uniforms, with the possibility of encountering experiences and adventures from which parents and guardians had sought to withhold them. Ready pens were at the service of the New Amazons. History and tradition were ransacked by industrious scribes in search of precedents and raw material for "copy." The _Epoch_, (the unofficial press organ of the Vice-President) boldly vaunted the capacity of women to bear arms. Who would dare to deny that women were as brave as men? In modern times the Dahomey Amazons had been a force in being. An eminent professor had made researches which went to show that the Amazons of old were real warriors. Humboldt refused to regard American Amazons as mythical, and other trustworthy authorities had confirmed his view. Then there were the Shield Maidens of the Vikings, to whose existence witness was borne by historical sagas. The ancient literature of Ireland set forth as a fact that "men and women went alike to battle in those days." Did not a certain abbot of Iona go to Ireland to organise a movement against the custom of summoning women to join the standard and fight the enemy? In Europe, not so very long ago, the Montenegrins and Albanians called their women to arms in the hour of national extremity. The _Epoch_ presented the 1st Amazons of England with a silken banner, embroidered with a representation of Thalestris the Amazonian queen, and pointed out that, however fabulous might be the achievements of the women warriors of ancient times, modern warfare need make no similar demands on the physical strength of woman. War had become a feat of science, rather than of endurance. It was no longer necessary for contending champions to engage in a trial of muscular strength. Macbeth and Macduff were not called upon to "lay on" until one of them cried: "Hold! enough." Battles were fought and victories won at long range. Thin red lines and Balaclava charges belonged to ancient history. And if by any chance it should come to fighting at close quarters, had woman shown herself lacking in courage, or even in ferocity in such encounters? Why, in every memorable riot in which the civil population had been in conflict with the soldiery, the women, again and again, had proved themselves to be the foremost in attack and the most fertile of hostile resource. Thus argued the _Epoch_ and other press advocates of the New Amazons, at the same time citing many instances of the prowess exhibited by individual women on fields of battle. Vast numbers of young persons, supremely ignorant of life in its uglier and more dangerous aspects, thus encited, discovered that they were not, and could not be, happy at home all the year round. They wanted variety; they pined for change and excitement; and all of them were firmly pursuaded that they knew much better than their elders what was good for them. In their eyes all things were not only lawful, but all things were expedient. They stood up with stolid looks, deaf to remonstrances and appeals, and expressed an obstinate wish to join the Amazons. Numbers of them, being more self-willed than their parents, got their own way, and were enrolled; while still larger numbers were put back as physically ineligible, but with liberty, in some cases, to renew their application at a future time. That the movement had "caught on" nobody could deny. That it was full of dangerous possibilities became more and more apparent every day. Zenobia, who came to London to attend the Queen's Hall meeting, had returned to Bath to nurse her father, whose illness showed increasingly alarming symptoms. Linton Herrick, meanwhile, was not wholly without occupation, for there were sundry private conferences between his uncle and General Hartwell at which his presence was required. These discussions and reports became of the more importance in view of certain news from the East and of the complications likely to arise at home in the event of the illness of the President proving fatal. Nevertheless, there were times when Linton found himself mooning about his uncle's house and garden in a state both of mental and physical restlessness. He missed Zenobia, missed a glimpse of her on the river, or a flash of her as she sped away in the _Bladud_ to London. They had met often, and it seemed to him as if they had known each other all their lives. He would have given anything to hear the yelping of her dog Peter next door, because it would have betokened the presence of Peter's mistress. Before Mr. Jardine's departure for Bath, the young Canadian had sat with him and talked on many topics and on several occasions. The enormous strides which Canada had made, and was making, in the way of prosperity greatly interested the President. Linton, however, was astonished to find how little the man whom fortune had pitch-forked into a foremost position in England really knew about Colonial affairs. He frequently fell into amazing geographical errors, mistakes quite comparable with that of a certain Duke of Newcastle who announced with surprise to George II. his discovery that Cape Breton was an island. Linton liked the President, not wholly for the President's sake, but partly for the same reason that he had developed a friendly feeling towards Peter the dog. The President, on his part, certainly had taken a fancy to him, and in those bedside conversations talked with far less reserve than he was in the habit of employing in conversations with Englishmen, particularly young Englishmen. These conversations gradually impressed Linton with the belief that this hardheaded and successful mechanic, who found himself, thanks to the strength of a numerous and well-drilled party, at the head of the State, actually was discovering his own deficiencies--the educational deficiencies, the intellectual deficiencies for which doggedness and powers of oratory were no true substitute. In a word, it seemed as if, in that time of inactivity and reflection which a bed of sickness enforces, Nicholas Jardine had begun to realise his own shortcomings as a ruler of men--his unfitness to direct the destinies of a nation great in history, and still great in possibilities of recuperation if only well and wisely led. "If you should be down West, come and see me at Bath," were the President's parting words. "Indeed I will," said the young man heartily, and there was something in his eyes as he turned to say good-bye to Zenobia that made her colour. Nothing seemed more probable to both of them at that moment than that Linton would find himself down West, and nothing more certain than that there would be only one reason for his going there. The young man had fought his way into Queen's Hall on the night of the great meeting, solely and wholly because he had heard that Miss Jardine was likely to be present. But he had no idea what line she was likely to adopt in reference to the momentous question under discussion. Yet the one drawback that hitherto he had found in her was her attitude, or what he feared was her attitude, towards the question of woman's ascendency. In the crush of the hot and noisy meeting, he had failed to see Zenobia on the platform, and when she rose to speak his feelings were strangely blended--of admiration at her bearing, and of dread less she might say something than ran counter to his own convictions. But her actual utterance astonished and delighted him; and the hostile method of the "Cat" provoked in him such feelings of fierce resentment as he had never felt towards womanhood before. Yet there was one sentence that fell from the Vice-President which caused him to be sensible of emotion of another sort. That sneering suggestion that the younger speaker must be in love excited him strangely. He felt an intimate personal concern in that scornful imputation. In love with whom? And now he had ample time in his uncle's riverside house, with the empty dwelling and silent garden on the other side of the hedge, to ponder the same question. The _Bladud_, however, proved a great boon. It had been left at his disposal, and Wilton, the Jardine's engineer and skipper, was always ready to accompany him in an air trip. Wilton was a hard-featured little man with a soft heart and a shrewish wife, who kept the domestic nest in so spick and span a condition that poor Wilton could never take his ease at home, and therefore appreciated any good and sufficient reason for getting out of it. Wilton confessed to Linton Herrick a treacherous thought. It concerned the wife of his bosom and the new Amazons. "Seems to me," said the little man, "as this here scheme may be a good thing in a manner of speaking. There's girls, and, maybe, there's wives too, that wants a bit of a change. Well, that's right enough. Why not?" "What do you mean?" asked Linton, wondering and amused. "Wot I mean, under pervisions, mind, under pervisions...." Linton laughed, but Wilton was quite serious, his thoughts engaged in a great domestic problem, his hands busy with the machinery of the _Bladud_, in which they were just about to go aloft. "Well, it's like this, I wouldn't be for letting women jine a reg'lar army, but militia's different. They'd get a 'oliday at Government expense. When they come back they'd be more contented-like with their 'omes; and while they was away, well, there...." rubbing his head with a pair of pincers. "And while they were away the men would have a quiet time, eh?" laughed Linton, who had heard of Wilton's family history. "You've 'it it, sir, you've 'it it," said Wilton, without the vestige of a smile. "Not but what women has a lot to put up with, mind you; and there's times when they're as kind as kind. Still, wot I say is, a lot of 'em's never content unless they can have the upper 'and, and that's what's wrong with England." * * * * * Meanwhile, at Bath, the condition of Nicholas Jardine had given Zenobia cause for increasing anxiety. In the hushed and tranquil days that sometimes come with October, the leaves fall of their own volition, and with scarcely perceptible sound. Their hour has come, and, with a faint whisper or rustle of farewell, one by one they flutter down to mother earth. Thus also, the leaves of human life are ever falling--the sighing souls of men, obedient to the immutable design, passing from out the bourn of time and space. In those last days, when the certainty of the end came home to him, Jardine, for the first time, began to ponder on problems to which he had scarcely given a thought in the active years of his remarkable career. Perhaps in the silence of the days, and in the deeper silence of the nights, he asked himself unconsciously those same questions which, thousands of years ago, the Son of Sirach had framed for all time in language so expressive: "What is man, and whereto serveth he? What is his good, and what is his evil? As a drop of water unto the sea, and a gravel-stone in comparison of the sand, so are a thousand years to the days of eternity!" "All flesh waxeth old as a garment; for the covenant from the beginning is: Thou shalt die the death. As the green leaves on a thick tree, some fall and some grow: so is the generation of flesh and blood, one cometh to an end, and another is born." "Every work rotteth and consumeth away, and the worker thereof shall go withal!" One day the President startled Zenobia by asking for a Bible. She brought it wonderingly. He signed to her to read. And as she read to him, the sick man and his daughter looked up into each other's eyes with something like bewilderment. "Father," cried the girl passionately, as she closed the Book, "Why did you keep it from me? Why did you do it?" The dying man looked into her face with troubled gaze, and whispered something very faintly. Was it the word "Forgive?" A yet stranger and more terrible ordeal was in store for Zenobia. To her lot it fell to hear from her father's lips a confession that seared her to the very soul. This confession presently was embodied in his will, which two days later he dictated to his daughter. His mind was perfectly clear, though his hand could scarcely hold the pen. As a matter of precaution, he insisted that the doctor and the nurse should be the attesting witnesses. The will was sealed in an envelope, and placed under lock and key. When that was done, Zenobia, with set face, hurried to the nearest telegraph office and sent the following message to Linton Herrick: "I implore you to come immediately. A matter of life and death." Meanwhile, Jardine had settled his affairs, and finished with the business of life. Like the King of old, he turned his face to the wall. Yet startling things were occurring close at hand--strange occurrences within this very city of Bath. To others they were sufficiently alarming. Indeed, there had been something in the nature of a panic. The first manifestation had taken place at the Grand Pump Room Hotel. The King of Bath, if he could have come to his realm again, would have encountered not a few surprises, and would have found the famous Hotel transformed beyond all recognition. The examples of London, Paris, and New York had been diligently followed. There was a stately Palm Court, with marble columns and gilded cornices. Oriental rugs and luxurious fauteuils had been lavishly provided. On a raised marble terrace, during the dinner hour, a stringed band furnished an undercurrent for the banal remarks of the diners. There were rooms in the Adams style, rooms in the Louis the Sixteenth style, a Charles II. Smaller dining Room, and a Smoking Room in the Elizabethan style--with ingle-nook and heavy ceiling beams in oak. But the people who dined and chattered and smoked amid these surroundings were not Elizabethan, Stuart, or Georgian in style. They were the product of the twentieth century, and were of no style at all; they lacked repose and dignity; they were self-conscious, self-assertive; believers, and encouraged to believe, in the powers of the almighty dollar, hustlers and bustlers, who rushed hither and thither, and did this or that without knowledge and without appreciation, and solely for the purpose of being able to say that they had done it. Everything inanimate in this twentieth-century Bath Hotel was very beautiful. There were skilful imitations of Adams, Sheraton, and Chippendale; there were coloured marbles, trophies, garlands, ornamentation of all sorts in gilt and bronze; decorative panels, with consoles and mirrors everywhere,--everything being in elaborate imitation of something else and something older. But in one corner of the Grand Dining Hall was one thing real and old--a fountain of Sulis water, which had been brought into a decorative niche and enshrined amid elaborate allegorical figures which nobody understood. It was typical of England. She had gained in some ways, she had lost in many more. She had acquired electric appliances, telephones, and air-ships, but lost in grace and picturesqueness. Frequenters of Bath no longer wore wigs, laced coats, and buckled shoes. They no longer settled their little difficulties with the rapier. The ladies had discarded powder in any appreciable quantities, and patches altogether; but people of quality had vanished from the once familiar scene. Quantity had taken the place of quality everywhere. Money had proved the great key and the great leveller. There was a dead level in style and tone and appearance. Society had to be taken in the mass, instead of in the class, and notabilities were far to seek. Such were the people upon whom the panic seized, amid the clatter of knives and forks, the rattle of plates, and the popping of corks--inseparable accompaniments of the _table d'hôte_ dinner hour. The visitors started to their feet with cries of dismay. An astonishing thing had occurred. The fountain of Sulis water in the grotto at the end of the great dining hall had suddenly burst its bounds! The pipes were forced from their position. Great volumes of orange-tinted, steaming water began to flood the room. The members of the string band, whose seats and music stands were placed among the ferns and palms, in immediate proximity to the fountain, grasped their instruments, and beat a precipitate retreat. Ladies, uttering shrill cries, jumped upon chairs. There was a scene of uncontrolled confusion. In a few moments, water, almost boiling, covered the floor to the depth of several inches, and male guests and waiters, carrying the ladies on chairs or in their arms, made all haste to escape into the vestibule. At the same time the springs in the Roman baths displayed extraordinary activity. Everywhere the water rose in enormous and unprecedented volume. All the baths were hastily cleared of occupants and closed to the public, and the most astounding reports spread like wildfire through the city. The corporation officials speedily came upon the scene, and trenches were hastily cut for the purpose of carrying the overflow of water direct into the river. To the intense relief of everybody, in the course of a few hours the flood slackened. Two days later, when people had begun to think there had been no sufficient reason for their fears, came other sounds and signs of abnormal activity in the earth itself. Faint tremors shook the surrounding hills, more especially Lansdown, and these signs were succeeded by sundry landslips, which sent many of the hillside residents flying in terror from their houses. A huge crack presently opened in the high plateau of the hill, and from this fissure arose at intervals strong puffs of curious, reddish-tinted vapour. CHAPTER XII. A SECRET AND A THUNDERBOLT. President Jardine was dead. Low lay the head, and still the form of the man of whom flatterers had often spoken as the uncrowned King--an Oliver the Second, the Cromwell of the Twentieth Century. His, indeed, had been the power symbolised by the ancient Crown, the Sceptre, and the Orb. The vanished majesty of great dynasties--the Normans, the Plantaganets, the Tudors, the Stuarts, and the House of Hanover--had but paved the way for the practical rule of this man of the people. Even yet, it is true, the jealousy of political parties had preserved--none knew for how long--the title of King for a descendant of Queen Victoria. But a grudging socialistic democracy had left the legitimate monarch little more than the dignity of an august pensioner. The King was shorn of regal authority, deprived of all real prerogative of royalty, and neither expected nor allowed to take any real part in the government of his shrunken empire. And now that the lifeless hand of the President had dropped the real sceptre, whose hand was to take it up? Was the reign of woman to be inaugurated on new and bolder lines; or would man, in the nick of time, re-assert himself? The women had their leader in Catherine Kellick, a daring, unscrupulous and energetic champion. But where was the leader of men? Everywhere the lament was uttered: "If only Renshaw were back at Westminster!" And everywhere the question was asked: "Where is he? Is it true he is still alive?" Zenobia's telegram was delivered late at night, and in the absence of Wilton it was impossible to start immediately. Before daybreak on the following morning Linton was knocking at the door of his cottage, and in half-an-hour the little engineer had got the _Bladud_ into working order. It was very early, on a calm autumn morning, when Linton, at a sign from Wilton, stepped on board. The _Bladud_, rose rapidly into the air, but at first there was nothing to be seen. The atmosphere being charged with the vapour of the night, the air was warm, and the sky veiled with a misty curtain of cloud. In eight minutes they had risen a thousand feet, and the earth below was hidden from them by a woolly carpet of mist. Rising and rising still, at a height of 5,000 feet, the _Bladud_ emerged from the clouds, and away in the east was seen a long, long line, bright as silver. The day was breaking, and the shadows fled away. Every moment the great silver bar lengthened and broadened, a moving miracle of the empyrean, at which the young Canadian gazed in fascination and in awe. But the marvel of marvels was to come; and it came swiftly, in that deep silence of the spheres, which is as the silence of Him by whom all things were made. Yes, all created things, thought Linton, filled with wonder--the earth beneath them, still partly hidden from sight, the limitless realms of the air through which they moved, and this great orb of day that was rising as if from the depths of some immeasurable crater. Presently the sun, as it climbed above the cloud rim, began to flood with pure and glorious light the rolling tracts of vapour that surrounded them, like an illimitable molten sea, whose billows glowed and gleamed beneath the darting beams. Higher and higher rose the _Bladud_, a tiny speck in the midst of the immeasurable clouds, which ever broke and crumbled into new shapes and shreds in full light of the broadening sunshine. Already the morning mists below were in some measure dispelled, and through the breaking vapour glimpses of the earth became more plainly visible. At a height of 9,000 feet, the surrounding oceans and mountains of vapour assumed a hue of roseate violet that far transcended the beauty of anything upon which Linton's eyes had ever looked before; while from the east a thousand golden rays--pathways of light and glory--were darted forth above the sleeping world. When they had reached a height of 13,000 feet, the air was almost clear, and far down below London became visible--London so mighty, yet now so insignificant! Linton could see a railway train creeping out of Paddington like some little caterpillar on a garden path. The steam from the engine was but a thin serpentine mist, like smoke from a man's pipe. Everything below was flat and dwarfed to one mean artificial-looking plane. Away East, the dome of St. Paul's seemed scarcely more important than a thimble. The Docks were merely an elaborate toy in sections; the rolling Thames a winding ditch; the ships like little playthings for young children. Yet the range of view had become enormous, and as the morning cleared Wilton pointed out hills and church steeples that were a hundred miles away. In that solemn and wonderful hour Linton Herrick felt within himself, as Goethe did, the germs of undeveloped faculties--faculties that men must not expect to see developed in life as it is, so far, known to us. Yet there was the aspiration in his heart and soul. How glorious for the astral body to plunge into the aerial space; to look unmoved on some unfathomable abyss; to glide above the roaring seas; to mount with eagle's strength to heights unthinkable! Looking upon the supernal grandeur of the sunrise, he realised that he was in the presence of God's daily miracle. It steeped his soul in faith and thankfulness. * * * * * Linton, guessing that the President was _in extremis_, nevertheless had hoped to be in time to bid a last farewell to the taciturn man who had shown him much friendly feeling, and of whom, as Zenobia's father, he was anxious to think the best. But when the _Bladud_ descended on the spacious lawn of the house on Bathwick Hill, the blinds were down. The whole place wore that sad and subtle air which impresses itself upon a scene of death. There was no need to ask questions. Linton understood. A faint, half-hearted yelp from Peter was the first sound that greeted him. Presently, inside the darkened house, he awaited the coming of Peter's mistress. The door opened very quietly, and Zenobia entered; a slim, sad figure, the blackness of whose dress in that dim light heightened the pallor of her face. Her hand was in his own. He looked into her eyes; the gaze of the lover softened and chastened to that of the tender and compassionate friend. "You understand how much I feel for you," he said. "Yes," she answered gratefully, "It was good of you to come. But, in a sense, it is too late." He waited quietly for what she chose to say. "I mean," she added "that I hoped you could come before ... before the end. But at the last it was sudden, so sudden." "You have something to tell me. There is something I can do for you in your trouble?" Zenobia paused for a moment. Then, with some effort and a faint tinge of colour coming to her cheeks, continued: "If you had come while my father lived, I could have told him...." She looked down, and drew a long deep sigh of distress. "I could have told him," she then went on with greater firmness, "that you, if you were willing, could help us, though so late, to do an act of justice to another. Mr. Herrick, it grieves me to tell you...." She turned away and rested her elbows on the marble mantelpiece, unable for the moment to proceed. "Perhaps I know more than you suppose," he said very gently, "and, perhaps, I can guess the rest." "No," turning towards him, "I won't ask you to guess. Why should you help me, unless I tell you all, everything--everything, fully and frankly? Will you read this?" He look the paper the girl placed in his hands, but did not immediately unfold it. "I am willing to do anything you can wish, asking no questions," he said. She looked at him with eyes that seemed to shine with grateful tears. "You are good to me. I have no other friends." "I am your friend," said Herrick, not without a tremor in his voice, "yours to command, always and in everything." For the moment she could not speak, but held out her hand to him impulsively. Holding the slim fingers tenderly, he bent and kissed them. "That paper," she said, "is my father's will. Will you read it, please!" Then she sat down and turned away her face. Linton read the will. The sheets rustled as he turned them over. He folded and returned them. "I knew something of this," he said quietly. "Now I understand all. You need tell me no more." "Is Mr. Renshaw still living--is it _really_ true that he is still alive?" she said looking up anxiously. "Quite true." "Thank God. Oh! God be thanked for that!" "It is not too late." "Only too late for him to know and seek forgiveness." "You mean your father?" The girl bowed her head. Then she burst out vehemently: "It must not be softened down. I know, I feel, the horror, the wickedness of what was done. I must accept the shame, the punishment. The sins of the fathers must be visited on the children. It is the law of nature and the law of God! I want to make atonement; yet nothing can undo the past, the cruelty and wickedness of all those years of suffering and imprisonment." "Renshaw will not harbour revengeful or vindictive feelings, I am sure of that," Linton answered soothingly. "He is a man of noble character, and a Christian gentleman." "And it was he, a man like that, whom my father...." she paused, biting her trembling lips. "Oh it is horrible, horrible!" "But he repented, he was sorry--the will proves it," said Linton. "Yes, it is written there, a public confession, the dying declaration of his sorrow and his shame. There shall be no concealment. He did not wish it at the last. The truth must be made known to all the world." "If Renshaw wishes it. But I do not think he will." "Where is he now--is he ill, is he safe?" "He is recovering, getting back his strength, in a monastery in Herm, one of the smaller Channel Islands. Arrangements are being made for his return to England at the right moment." She stood up, interested and excited. "Yes, yes?" "A society has been formed--the members call themselves the Friends of the Phoenix. My uncle and General Hartwell are at the head of it. The aim is to restore Renshaw to power. He is the only man who can save the country in the present crisis." "And you are helping--you are one of them?" He nodded. "I am to bring him back to England in the _Bladud_ if I have your permission." "Don't lose an hour," she cried, "don't lose an hour!" "Not a moment, when the time is ripe. I am waiting orders. They will reach me here." "If only my father could have known of this before he died." She sighed and looked at him wistfully, then said appealingly: "You will come upstairs?" Linton bowed his head and followed her. Upstairs in the room from which the President had looked out on the lights of Bath for the last time the sheeted figure lay upon the bed. They paused for a moment side by side. Then Linton gazed for the last time on the cold and rigid face of Nicholas Jardine. Three days later, the sun, shining through the windows of the ancient Abbey church, fell upon sculptured saint and heavenward-pointing angel, revealed the lettering on many a mural tablet dedicated to long-departed men and women, illumined the sombre crowd of black-clothed worshippers, and gleamed on the silver coffin plate of the dead President. Deep organ notes rolled beneath the fretted arches as choir and congregation, with heads bowed low, raised in mournful cadence the wail of the _Dies iræ_. Apart from the girl, by whose side Linton Herrick knelt, perhaps there were few present who really mourned for Nicholas Jardine. But, as people do at such a time, they mourned for themselves, they mourned for humanity; and recent local events--the strange convulsions of nature, with the apprehension of more terrible possibilities to come, served to accentuate the feelings of the worshippers. For the moment, at any rate, they believed in the life of the world to come. They recognised in the burial of the dead that dread passing through the gate of judgment to which man, frail man, has ever been predestined. The air was full of lamentations: "Day of wrath! O day of mourning! See fulfill'd the prophets' warning! Heav'n and earth in ashes burning! Oh, what fears, man's bosom rendeth, When from heav'n the Judge descendeth, On Whose sentence all dependeth! Wondrous sound the trumpet flingeth, Through earth's sepulchres it ringeth, All before the Throne it bringeth!" Verse after verse the solemn litany continued: "Ah! that day of tears and mourning, From the dust of earth returning, Man for judgment must prepare him; Spare, O God, in mercy spare him." The funeral march pealed forth as the body was borne from the Church. Slowly the congregation dispersed, until at last only one figure remained, the solitary kneeling form of Zenobia. * * * * * Within an hour after Linton had left the cemetery, he received a telegram in cipher from Sir Robert Herrick. He gave immediate instructions to Wilton, and sent a message to Zenobia. She came to him at once. Linton looked at her with troubled eyes. There was something infinitely pathetic in the aspect of this slim, fair girl with the sunny hair, on whose face suffering and distress of spirit suddenly had set so sad a stamp. "Good-bye," she answered, "God grant that you may both come safely back. When Mr. Renshaw is in England, I must see him, I must tell him all." With a final pressure of her hand, he turned away. However much his heart might be wrung at leaving her, however hard to keep back the words of love and tenderness that rose to his lips, he must be silent for the moment. There was a task to be performed. It was the hour for action. Great issues were involved. A national crisis was at hand. That much Linton knew. But as yet he did not know that the crisis was to assume a double and appalling complexity. A thunderbolt had been hurled against England from an unexpected quarter. A swift and staggering blow, well timed in the hour of Jardine's death, had been levelled against the remaining pillars of her once proud Empire. CHAPTER XIII. THE RAID OF THE EAGLES. It was the suddenness of the calamity that staggered humanity. One day not a cloud in the over-seas sky, and the next a catastrophe that petrified the nation. In London the hoarse croaking notes of the news-vendors--the ravens of the press--filled the streets and squares, and flaring placards, displayed in every quarter, attracted the notice of ever-increasing crowds. Men wrangled, and even fought, over copies of the papers, and edition after edition was reeled off to meet the enormous public demand. It was the news from Dover that created this unparalleled excitement. An inconceivable thing had happened. By means of crafty strategy, a mixed body of American and German troops had seized and were in possession of Fort Warden! Immediately the wildest and most conflicting accounts were in circulation. But, separating the chaff from the wheat, the more responsible of the London journals presently set forth a bald statement of the facts--facts that were alleged to be beyond dispute. The statements published by these papers, indeed, were said to be authorised by the Chiefs of the Intelligence Department at the War Office. Further details, however, constantly were coming over the wires, and it was known that large bodies of regular and territorial troops were being hurried to the aid of the garrison at Dover. The first report, viz., that foreigners had obtained a foothold by means of the Channel Tunnel was officially contradicted. The simple truth was as follow: On the previous evening a Hamburg liner had entered the commercial harbour, and some hundreds of her passengers at once had landed on the jetty. There was nothing remarkable or suspicious in such an occurrence. The great German liner was a familiar and frequent visitor to the port. Though it was noticed that a large number of passengers came ashore, that circumstance was plausibly explained by the statement of the ship's officers, who said that something had gone wrong with her machinery. It would take the engineers two hours or more to put right the defect. What more natural than that most of the passengers should land and fill up the time by the inspection of the points of interest in the town? The harbour officials estimated that altogether some three hundred men had come ashore. They had the appearance of tourists. The evening was cold, and, wearing travelling caps and capes or ulsters, the visitors passed briskly across the jetty and disappeared, in little parties of eight or nine, into the town. The townspeople, as they were putting up their shutters, noticed the strangers as they passed through the streets. It was remarked that they spoke to each other in low tones or not at all, also that they did not loiter or stare about them like ordinary sightseers. The general impression was that they had only landed to stretch their legs, and meant to climb the hill and then come back again. They certainly did climb the hill, but none of them returned. It was not until an hour later that an amazing rumour spread throughout the town. The story was brought by bands of excited Amazons belonging to those to whom Fort Warden had temporarily been given up for gunnery practice. Their pale faces and distraught appearance at once made it clear that something very serious had happened. Yet the townsfolk were incredulous. The thing seemed so absurd, so impossible! These girl-soldiers, they thought, were the victims of some monstrous practical joke or of hysterical hallucination. Who could possibly credit such a tale? But the Amazons, in trembling tones and with nervous gestures, declared that it was true. Their numbers rapidly increased; some of them came tearing down the Castle Hill in uncontrollable alarm. All of them, in one way or another, verified the amazing story. It was this: A band of foreigners, comprising 150 Americans and 150 soldierly Germans, armed with revolvers, had "rushed" Fort Warden. The approaches were open at the time, and guarded by only a few artillerymen. It was visitors' day, and the visitors were departing as the foreigners arrived. The struggle was of the briefest. Those of the artillerymen who showed fight had been instantly shot down. The others had been secured, together with the chief gunnery instructor and the head of the chemical department--a non-combatant from whom the foreigners had violently forced such information as they needed. As for the Amazons themselves, they had not been maltreated--but, what was worse, many had been insultingly kissed or roughly caressed by the invaders. With all speed and no ceremony, they had been contemptuously bundled out of the fort--and here they were to tell the tale! A staff-officer at the local head-quarters, to whom the report was carried by a breathless tradesman, lost no time in ringing up Fort Warden. For some time there was no reply. He rang angrily again and yet again; at last came some unintelligible response. He swore irritably, and then roared an inquiry: "Are you there? Who is it?" Still no reply. "Why don't you answer? What's this I hear about the Fort?" The only answer was an inarticulate growl. "Why the devil don't you speak? Who are you?" Then, at last, came an intelligible response--in English with a strong American intonation: "Guess you'd better come and see!" * * * * * How and why had this dastardly combined attack on England come to pass? The story can be briefly told. Great Britain had long been regarded by America as old and stricken in years--not merely as the old country, but as a country that was in its dotage--old and played out. America was young and lusty, and quite persuaded that the old folk at home were too feeble to retain the management of the old Estate. Already the United States, in the scramble for British possessions, had pocketed some nice little pickings. The West Indian Islands, the Bermudas and British Guiana, had been virtually surrendered to Washington. England for years, but in vain, had sought to placate this big and blustering branch of the ancient race whenever family friction had arisen. Again and again weaker members of the clan, poor relations, like Newfoundland, had been sacrificed to the demands of the United States. But some appetites are insatiable, some ambitions unbounded. A new order of American politicians had arisen, men who aimed at a great federation of the Anglo-Saxon race, with America not as the junior partner, but as the head and ruling spirit of that federation. When the possessor of a great estate becomes imbecile or lapses into second childhood his affairs are taken out of his hands--for his own good and for the due protection of his solicitous relations. That, argued the plotters, was just what was needed in the case of Great Britain. The indications of decrepitude had been slowly but, to keen observers, convincingly manifested during a period of more than thirty years. Thirty years ago Englishmen would have scouted the idea of an American invasion, or the idea of America in alliance with Germany against Great Britain. Monstrous! Was not blood thicker than water? Were not the American people our own kith and kin? Yes, but times had changed, while human nature had remained the same. America had become a cosmopolitan country. From all parts of Europe--and especially from Germany--men had emigrated to the United States. Thither, too, swarms of the yellow from China and Japan, had insidiously made their way in spite of opposition; and year after year the black population of the great continent had enormously increased, while the Anglo-Saxon birth-rate had rapidly declined. The British element in America thus had been absorbed, submerged. The old and consolatory theory of family ties, like other popular fallacies fondly cherished in spite of the march of events, at last had been convincingly exploded by the raid on Dover. Signs of the coming times had not been wanting. England, fearing a German invasion, had kept her fleets in home waters. The great scheme of Imperial Defence, much discussed in 1909, had not been perfected. As far back as the earthquake of 1906 in Jamaica, the growing inability of England to look after her outlying possessions had been strikingly instanced. No British Squadron was near at hand in that hour of trial to succour the afflicted islanders. Was it not an American, not an English, Admiral who had come to the rescue of the British colony? Had not the English Governor been summarily suppressed by the Home Government because he had ventured sarcastically to point out that American assistance, however kindly meant, was not required, and had not been regulated by the accepted law of nations? From that day forth--and there had been other similar examples--the more enterprising politicians of Washington took an increasing interest in British affairs, and dreamed dreams in which the old familiar colours on the map of the world--where once upon a time red was so predominant--underwent some radical and striking alterations. Of course, there was one part of the British dominions, and that very near to the centre of British Government, in which America had taken the closest interest for more than a century. There was Ireland, the emigrated population of which had become part of the mixed population of the United States. The Irish vote, moreover, had become of increasing importance to those who wished to hold the helm at Washington; and, in truth, it was the old and long cherished idea of planting the American standard on Irish soil that gradually had led up to this daring exploit, the news of which the great guns of Fort Warden were booming out to all the world. It was not really surprising that men with so marked an aptitude for commercial enterprise as the American wire-pullers should have turned covetous eyes towards the Isle of Erin. Ireland was the great junction for the ship-line between the Old Country and the New, an unexploited island of noble harbours, rich in mountain, lake, and river. A certain Senator Hiram P. Dexter, a Prince of Tammany, who had become President of the United States, crystallised the idea thus: "England had colonised America. Why should not America re-colonise depopulated Ireland. She could then dominate her former senior partner in the ancient British firm and make things hum!" The idea was "cute," inspiring. Nevertheless, it was certain that, however anxious she might be for peace and quietness, Britannia could never tolerate another flag so near to her own centre of government. The line must be drawn somewhere. Hiram P. Dexter and his friends realised that for dominion in Ireland, even under the Jardine dispensation and in the reign of woman, England must needs fight, fight to the bitter end; unless, indeed, by some master-stroke of policy and daring she could first be disabled by the strong man armed. Hence the plan of campaign--by unscrupulous strategy to seize the key of the castle, the stronghold of Dover; while, at the same time, the squadrons of the two Eagles menaced the coast of Ireland itself and landed troops at various points. It was an infamy; it was a dastardly and fratricidal act; it was a combination worthy of Herod and Pilate! All these things were said. But history is not made or unmade by the aid of epithets. History reckons with great national forces, race problems, and the bed-rock of accomplished facts. Abundant precedents could have been cited, and nothing succeeds likes success. In this case, if the attempt should fail, it might be explained away as the mad raid of a band of freebooters. Those who survived might be nominally called to account, just as had happened fifty years earlier after the futile raid of a certain Dr. Jameson, and others, when one Kruger was "King" of the Transvaal. In either event, whatever England might think and say of this stab in the back, there were millions in the States who would applaud the blow as smart beyond anything that had ever been attempted by American Presidents, and Hiram P. Dexter would go down to posterity as a Napoleon of enterprise--the man who realised that even America was not big enough in these mid-century days for the mixed peoples of the States; that the dominant race in that massed population needed more room to turn round in; more scope for hustling; fresh fields and pastures new for the feverish multiplication of the almighty dollar. But there was another nation to be reckoned with. The two greatest competitors for world-power and commerce were Germany and America. And Germany and America did not want to fight--at present. A system of mutual concessions--with mental reservations--better suited the provisional purposes of Berlin and Washington, at any rate for the time being. Clearly, nothing could be done by way of aggression in Europe without taking Germany into account. So the business-like President of the States had engineered with the Germans what brokers and auctioneers describe as a big "knock-out." They had come to an understanding--about England--an understanding provisional and tentative. Again, thirty years ago Englishmen would have scouted such an idea. But nothing stands still. We ripe and ripe, and then from hour to hour we rot and rot. So also with the Empires of the world. The law of the survival of the fittest operates in all created things. Britain herself had been one of the chief exponents of this immutable law. Not by means of Peace Conferences and a tentative reduction of armaments, coupled with pious platitudes concerning methods of barbarism--otherwise War--had her great Empire been built up. With the strong hand, in past times, we had belaboured effete and wealthy Spain. With force of arms we had driven from the seas Holland--once our great and powerful rival for the trade of the world. We had humbled Napoleon and the pride of France on the field of Waterloo. India had been taken with the sword. With shot and shell and reeking bayonet these and other things were done. And as we had done unto others, by reason of the necessities of national existence, so might we rationally have expected that others in their turn would do unto us. History, though in our self-absorption we forget it, is full of dramatic surprises, and suddenly develops startling situations. The rise of Japan had been a staggering surprise--both for Europe and America, and, indeed, had become a great factor in the latest departure of American policy. There had been other shocks, and there were more to follow. Over all the white nations there hung a dark and ominous shadow, ever increasing, caused by the rise and rapid expansion of the yellow and black. The East was filling up, and inasmuch as Great Britain still held much coveted territory in the West, and had money in her banks, it was around and against the British Isles that the Spirit of Annexation still watchfully hovered--ready to pounce. The raid at Dover--whether failing or succeeding--therefore must be viewed as a sign, a lurid, awful sign, of altered times. The hour was well chosen. Nicholas Jardine, the Man of the People, lay dead. The nation was in the throes of a domestic crisis, the Champion of the Women straining every nerve to take the dead President's place, and pursue a programme which would satisfy the special aspirations of her sex. Yet it could not be believed that such a nation, a race originally so splendid in fibre, so dogged in courage, would take the onslaught of her rivals lying down. England, surely, now at the eleventh hour, would be roused to action. England would fight, and even dying breathe defiance to her foes. But, alas! England sorely needed leadership--the potent magic of some great personality to inspire her people with courage and enthusiasm. And in this hour of dire distress, Renshaw, the only leader who could have commanded a widespread patriotic following, was lost to England--lying scarred and beaten, it was said, chained like a dog in the prison of the Mahdi. So thought most of those who thought of him at all. Yet, even while his name was on their lips, the Phoenix was reviving. Sir Robert Herrick knew it. General Hartwell and Linton knew it; and there were others, quick of hearing, keen of sight, who already heard the flapping of the wings; saw the Phoenix rising from the ashes of the past and speeding from afar towards our violated shores. CHAPTER XIV. THE FIGHT FOR THE FORT. The enemy still held the fort. All through the night a terrific bombardment had been maintained, and even when the first grey line of dawn began to creep across the downs the insistent fury of the guns increased rather than diminished. Major Wardlaw estimated that during the last twelve hours over eleven thousand shots had been fired from the big guns of Fort Warden, while thousands of shrapnel hurled against its fortifications from the various encircling field batteries manned by British gunners were beyond all definite calculation. At the height of the bombardment not less than 80 per minute must have been directed by way of return against the British batteries, and in this onslaught the great guns (of which there were seven at work in Fort Warden) contributed the most overwhelming and terrible results. This deafening and incessant rain of fire was directed mainly against the Castle and Fort Burgoyne, but, incidentally, it had wrought ruin and convulsion on every side. Shells falling into the town of Dover had already reduced it to heaps of tumbled masonry. Here and there great volumes of smoke rose from the wreckage of shops and houses. The Town Hall--the ancient _Maison Dieu_, founded by Hugh de Burgh, Constable of Dover, in the reign of John--having escaped destruction during the night, caught fire about daybreak, the flames, rushing upward in the morning air, watched by thousands from the western heights, to which the terrified inhabitants had fled for safety. On the Castle Hill the bluish haze caused by the ceaseless bursting of shells and shrapnel in some measure veiled the central scene of conflict; and this haze, spreading far and wide over the landscape, presently assumed the most delicate and beautiful colours as the sun rose up and threw its shafts of light on hill and dale. When the light grew stronger, cloud after cloud of smoke was seen to rush aloft from the contending forts, and every moment the sun, with growing glory, painted these rolling billows with glorious hues of burnished gold or bronze. Here and there, while the people watched, columns of earth and chalk rose high into the air, as shot and shell ploughed deep into the soil, while flashes of fire from the bursting shells, the pale smoke rushing like steam from the shrapnels, and the leaping fountains of soil, all combined to give the beholder the impression of some terrific convulsion of nature. So extraordinary and ghastly was the general effect produced that many of the spectators believed they were witnessing a volcanic eruption allied in some way with the seismic disturbances reported to have occurred at Bath and other inland watering-places. Yet towards the awful crater of this man-made volcano, British troops were now advancing. It had been fondly hoped by the British staff that the tremendous bombardment from the big howitzers, maintained ceaselessly during the night, would have disabled Fort Warden to such an extent that an infantry attack in the morning would meet with but feeble resistance. Very few of the officers, however, had any true conception of the enormous strength and staying power with which Wardlaw had endowed his military master-piece. Yet the onslaught had to be made. To the Highlanders--brought over from Shorncliffe--was entrusted the honour of leading the attack on one side, while the Royal Marines, from Chatham; were simultaneously to advance on the other. The hour of trial came. Firing not a shot, but with heads bent low, creeping forward, and taking advantage of every inequality in the ground for cover, the attacking force approached the flaming portals that confronted them. It was but a short distance, for during the night the saps had been carried close to the first circle of wire entanglements. Some of the wires, moreover, had been destroyed, leaving gaps through which the Highlanders were ordered to drag light scaling ladders and approach the moat, while others pushed sandbags before them to take the invaders' fire. Suddenly the word of command broke hoarsely on their ears. As it came from the Commanding Officer, a bullet struck him in the heart. He fell with a groan that was hardly audible. At the last word of their beloved Commander the Highlanders sprang up, and with an angry yell rushed headlong towards the moat. But narrow though the space they had to cross, the withering fire from the machine guns made it impossible to traverse it. The leading ranks, officers and men alike, were beaten down by lead as hail beats down a field of waving corn. The rest wavered, turned, and in a moment the ill-starred regiment, all that was left of it, rushed down the hill in desperate flight. Attempts to rally them were futile. Neither man nor devil could, or would, stand against that awful overwhelming hail of shot and shell. On the other side of the fort, the Marines had approached somewhat nearer to success. Here the gaps in the wire entanglements seen at close quarters afforded some encouragement. With an inspiring cheer, the men dashed forward, their bayonets fixed; but suddenly, as if from the earth itself, sprang up an opposing line of bayonets. The gaps in the entanglement were filled with German soldiers, and in an instant the combatants were engaged, man to man, in a furious hand-to-hand encounter. Deep groans and screaming blasphemies blended with the tumult of the guns. Here and there in the mêlée, men whose bayonets were broken off clubbed their rifles and savagely battered at each other's faces; but still more ghastly than the injuries thus exchanged was the hellish work effected by the hand grenades, of which the Fort contained large quantities. These explosives, now used for the first time on English soil, blew men literally to pieces. Neither skill nor courage could avert these horrible results. The methods of the anarchist had been allowed to find scope in the warfare of civilized peoples. The bombs, wherever they struck, made mincemeat of humanity. The Marines, like the Highlanders, had been driven back, and there came a ghastly interlude when the Germans sought to rescue their wounded and distinguish and carry in the dead. Those who had been butchered by the hand grenades had to be hastily shovelled into sacks and baskets before their remains could be removed. No pen could dare describe in detail all the revolting sights which this small battle-field in a few brief moments had revealed. Severed heads rolled down the hill, the eyes wide open, the features fixed in horror. In one spot from ten to fifteen corpses, friends and foes together, involved and twisted in a shapeless mass, were suddenly discovered in a hollow. In many instances the force of the explosions had torn the clothing from the bodies of the soldiers. Arms and legs had been wrenched from their trunks and blown away. From pyramidal heaps of mutilated English corpses stiffened fingers pointed towards the sky. Many of the Marines who had escaped the hand grenades had had limbs clean amputated by the knife-like fragments of the high explosives ere the rush was made. In some instances the upper halves of bodies lay on the hill without marks of injury, the lower limbs having wholly disappeared. Yet terribly and suddenly as death had come to these devoted men, far more awful was the fate of those whom shell and bomb had shattered without absolutely killing. These slowly dying fragments of humanity lay moaning in their tortured state, praying as they had never prayed before for that last agony which should release them from sufferings that no tongue could utter and no imagination even picture. Already the havoc wrought in human flesh had been accompanied with inconceivable disaster in all directions. Fort Burgoyne, its guns silenced by the more modern ordnance, was little better than a heap of ruins--ruins piled high above the dead and dying gunners. The more exposed batteries on the Western Heights had been dismantled long before the inhabitants of Dover climbed the hill and gazed across the valley. When, after the repulse of the British attack, the fury of fight was abated for a brief period, and the smoke of battle temporarily rolled away, the appearance of Dover Castle itself filled the spectators with amazement and dismay. So great was the destruction and the transformation that it was difficult to believe that what they now looked upon had any association with the great towers and massive walls which had been familiar objects to them all their lives. The Norman keep, with walls more than 20 feet thick, had been so battered as to present the appearance of a jagged range of rock. Peveril's Tower had disappeared. The Cotton Gate, rising as it did to a height of 90 feet and 460 feet above sea-level, by some miracle had escaped all damage; but the Constable's Tower was reduced to half its former height. The upper half, it was conjectured, lay crumbling in the moat below. What had happened to the Duke of York's School, which the boys had evacuated overnight, or to the batteries that had been placed in Northfall Meadows and on the Golf Links, could only be a matter of surmise. The Pharos and St. Mary's Church so far seemed to be untouched, possibly because the gunners in Fort Warden had not deemed it worth while to waste their fire on either. In all the awestricken throng that stood upon the Western Heights and gazed across the ruined town towards Castle Hill, none had feelings that corresponded wholly with those of Major Wardlaw. Scanning the field of operations through his glasses, his face twitched as if in actual pain. The attention of the uninformed lookers-on was constantly diverted from one thing to another, the wreck of the Castle, the crash of a roof as it collapsed in the town below, or the woolly clouds caused by bursting shrapnel, which still was being fired at intervals. But Wardlaw heeded none of the more picturesque effects. His mind, his powers of observation, his poignant feelings, were intent on causes, not effects. Every inch of the scene of operations was known to him. He knew the position and capacity of each fort and field battery. He could distinguish, where others knew no distinction, between the work of the big guns, the siege guns, howitzers, mortars, and field artillery. A sudden and terrific detonation told him that a huge naval gun had been landed from one of the great ships in the Admiralty Harbour. It must have been a work of enormous difficulty to get that gun ashore, during the night, and a still more terrific task to drag it into position to play with full effect upon Fort Warden. It was the work, as he knew, of British seamen--British seamen at their best, which happily still meant that there were none better in the world. But, more than all, his thoughts ran on Fort Warden--the Fort itself. Nearly all his life the study of fortification had obsessed him. While he looked at people, or even talked to them, his mind had been at work on parapets, banquettes, palisades, scarp and counter-scarp. All the technicology of the art of war and of the scientific defence of permanent positions was as familiar to this Engineer Officer as are household words to household people. Fort Warden, as already indicated, was the outcome of his concentrated mental labours and his soldier's instinct. In his younger days superior officers had looked rather coldly on his zeal. He had shown that he was a young man with ideas, and ideas are unwelcome to officials who love red tape and well-established grooves. But as years went on and slow promotion at last came to him, he had gained the ear of men in military power. Thus advanced in confidence and authority, he had been allowed almost a free hand in designing the modernized defences of Castle Hill. It was so desirable to sooth the public mind that public money had been spent upon the works without any sort of stint. Everything that the Major thought Fort Warden ought to have was there. In construction his plans had been faithfully observed. He had been allowed to make experiments of every kind. Not satisfied with earthworks, moats, wire entanglements, and bomb-proof shelters for the trenches, Wardlaw had adopted a novel system of armour plates for the protection of the Fort--plates that were produced by the use of tantalum ore alloyed with steel. This hardy metal, imported from Australia, had been proved to possess the most remarkable qualities. In itself it was heavier than iron, and could be so treated as to increase by 30 per cent. the resisting power of any armour plates previously in use for naval or military purposes. The success of Wardlaw's designs, the wisdom of his carefully-considered plans, the selection and apportionment of warlike material (in the preparation of which the chemist played a more important part than the armourer), had been only too amply justified. Results affirmed the first principle of fortification and of the art of gunnery, which principle lay in creating and arming a position of such strength and such resources that it could be held by a body of men greatly inferior in numbers to those by whom they were attacked. Fort Warden, the great outcome of the Major's career, the splendid achievement on the strength of which he had retired from active service, thus stood justified beyond all cavil or dispute. Yet, as he gazed towards the work of his hands, Wardlaw's heart was full of grief and bitterness. There stood the Fort in all its pride and strength; around it lay the victims of its fury; within it less than three hundred foreigners still defied thousands of British troops on British soil. Above it floated, so far, in victory, two foreign Eagles--the flags of Germany and the United States. CHAPTER XV. IN THE HEART OF THE HILL. While the dead were being buried and the wounded removed, there was a long cessation of the savage struggle. Indeed, the long lull in the firing almost led some people to believe that it would be heard no more. Crowds on the Western heights glanced curiously, anxiously, towards Fort Warden, with some idea that its picked garrison would now abandon their desperate and daring attempt to hold the position. It became known that the enemy's plans had been in part defeated--either by reason of some official blunder or through the watchfulness of the French at the other extremity of the Channel Tunnel. The German troops that were to have raided the French terminus, and then poured into England, under the protection of the guns of Fort Warden, already seized by their advance guard, had not arrived, and could not now approach to aid their countrymen. Movements of foreign warships and transports were hourly reported by telegraph and wireless messages, but the British Fleet had by this time formed a deadly barrier of iron and steel around the coast line of Kent and Sussex. There must be a great battle and a great defeat of our squadrons before another foreigner could set his foot on Kentish shore. The brooding day wore on, tense with suspense and fear. In the stillness that accompanied the deepening of twilight, hundreds of field-glasses were finally directed towards the silent fort to discover whether the American and German flags had yet given place to the white flag of submission. Any such anticipation, however, proved unfounded. For suddenly, as the dusk increased, the roar of artillery was heard; the masked batteries of the British once more had opened simultaneous fire upon the Fort. Instantly the challenge was accepted. Fort Warden roared its defiance. The big naval gun thundered its repeated demand for surrender; the siege guns crashed in unison; the howitzers savagely chimed in, barking as in sudden fury, like monster dogs of war; and fifty field guns combined to swell the dreadful, deafening chorus. Presently the fire from the Fort slackened. It seemed clear they were husbanding their strength for work more crucial. Or could it be that they were running short of ammunition? Perhaps, it was conjectured, more damage had been done to Wardlaw's Works than the British had supposed. Such speculations cheered the spirits of officers and men. But the wiser among them only shook their heads. They appreciated the mettle of the men who held the fort, realised that they had counted the cost, expected no quarter, and meant to win or die. The British staff knew that it would be folly to cry until they were out of the wood. They realised that many a man must bite the dust in agony before the British Standard floated over Wardlaw's Works again, if, indeed, it ever fluttered there at all! The invaders would, and must, hold the Fort till their last gasp--not because they in themselves could hope for ultimate triumph over the increasing forces that now surrounded them, but because to them time was everything--time for their countrymen to develop elsewhere the work of conquest; time for the American and German combined squadrons to land troops at unprotected spots of Great Britain and Ireland, while they, the daring three hundred, monopolised the attention of the flower of England's troops. The plans of the Allies were elaborate. This was but their first great move. Meanwhile, imperative orders had been given for the British to attack the Fort again. The attempt was to be made directly darkness had set in, and it was only to pave the way for a new and even more determined onslaught that the guns had broken forth in the renewed bombardment already chronicled. Troops, Regular and Territorial, still were pouring into Kent. No drum or bugle note disturbed the evening air; an interval of ominous silence, pregnant with dreadful threats and dire potentialities, preceded the renewed attack. When the hour had come, the word of command, uttered in a whisper, was whispered on from rank to rank. In open order, the swarming infantry battalions crept swiftly up the hill, simultaneously making for the Fort on every side. They reached a certain point, then paused under the last scrap of cover that remained available, while the field telephones sent swift messages to certain batteries. The signals served their purposes, and as the guns burst out again, the men sprang to their feet and doubled forward. Those who were advancing from the South stopped almost instantly, dazzled and confused. The powerful searchlight of the Fort glared into their faces with bewildering suddenness, and the insistent racket of rifles and machine guns told them that their advance had been discovered. The doomed and blinded soldiers fell in scores, in hundreds, before a withering storm of bullets. Then, just as suddenly as it had been revealed, the flashlight was concealed; but only to glare forth again on the British supports that were hurried to the front. Thus, brilliant light and deepest darkness alternated in swift and bewildering succession, and through both alike the leaden messengers of death mowed down the advancing troops. Rank after rank reeled back upon their climbing comrades. On the South side, once more, the attack had failed, and failed at heavy cost. North, West, and East, the result had been the same--repulse, defeat. The night was now illumined with extraordinary brilliance. Star-shells, rising high into the air above the Fort, burst in quick and dazzling succession. The blinding glare lighted up the hill, the sea, and every field and building, revealing, too, the fleeing figures of the retreating force and the prostrate forms of hosts of dead and wounded. A hail of bullets from the Maxims persistently pursued the remnant of the fleeing soldiers, and swept the plateau and the hillside clear of living things. Pom, pom, pom! the murderous machines of wholesale destruction continued their deadly work until the men who worked them could find no living thing to put to death. Broken and beaten--many of them desperately and horribly wounded--the panting remnant of the attacking force heard, as, at last, they halted, a shrill shout of triumph from the jubilant defenders of the Fort. But the night's work was far from finished. The Fort must fall--cost what it might, the Fort must fall. If it could not be captured above ground in the staring light of star-shells, the attack must be made by burrowing in darkness through the hill itself. Preparations for this desperate and dangerous work had been already started, and much progress made. For twelve hours or more, during what appeared to be a suspension of hostilities, the sappers had worked in relays with furious and unremitting energy. While their comrades above ground were being repulsed, while the star-shells went up in a rapid succession, and the implacable searchlight swept the hill in all directions, the picks of the Engineers, yard by yard, were steadily hacking a way towards the very foundations of the Fort. These tunnelling operations would have been infinitely more tedious and more arduous had not an elaborate system of subterranean passages already been provided by Major Wardlaw. Various cunningly devised galleries bad been secretly cut in the hill in order to furnish the garrison of the Fort (on the assumption that the garrison would be English and acting on the defensive), with the means of taking an attacking force in the rear, and of laying mines for the destruction of any besiegers. But the tables had been turned, though how far, if at all, the invaders were aware of these hidden avenues and the method by which they could be made available, remained a matter of doubt and anxious speculation to the British Staff. Meanwhile, hour after hour, deep in the heart of the hill, the sappers sweated at their work. Nearer and nearer they approached to the spot at which a mine, if exploded, might be expected to shatter at least a section of the Fort, and open a way for British bayonets to enter. A few more yards and the vital point would be reached. Then, suddenly, the sapper who was wielding a pickaxe in advance of all the rest paused in his work, listening intently. He raised his hand excitedly, and the officer in command of the party instantly crept forward, and with an imperious gesture stopped the work. The sappers, their faces shining in the lantern light, at first wondered what it meant. But soon enough they heard and understood. Faintly, as through a massive wall, there came to their ears the fateful sound of tapping--the click, click, click of other pickaxes. It came from below the tunnel they themselves were cutting. One thing, and only one, could explain the sound. The invaders had found out, or someone had betrayed to them, one of the secret tunnels of the hill. The sappers, pale as death, gazed in each other's faces. In a flash they realised the awful jeopardy in which they stood. The invaders were counter-mining at a lower stratum! beneath their very feet. At any moment--while a breath was drawn or glances were exchanged--they might explode their mine! There was an awesome pause, then the officer gave a sharp, half-whispered order. Instantly, boldly, the picks were at their work again. It was a desperate race for time--here in this cramped tunnel--in the smothering depths of mother earth; and no man's life was worth a moment's purchase. Yet iron self-discipline prevailed. The sappers worked with almost frenzied haste and vigour. After ten minutes of furious, exhausting labour, they were allowed to pause. The chests of the toilers heaved painfully; some of them tried to hold their breath; others shook their heads impatiently, as if to stop the singing in their ears. They wanted to listen, to hear, and know their fate. No sound reached them. It was a moment of agonizing tension. Then, nearer than before, they heard the picks again. Suddenly the sound ceased. The invaders had completed their work. There was no time to lose. At a sign from the officer, who brushed a handkerchief across his face and drew a laboured breadth, a grim-faced sergeant began to crawl back swiftly to the distant opening of the tunnel for the dynamite. Another and more torturing pause ensued. Which mine would be exploded first? It was an affair of minutes, then of seconds. Their mine was not yet ready. But duty held them to their ground. Though hell should burst upon them on the instant, the flaming portals must be faced. Out in the open, those who watched and waited suddenly heard a thunderous detonation. A huge mass of earth and chalk rose high in the air, and clouds of whitish smoke spread skyward in the full glare of the searchlights. Three engineers, half doubled up, now came rushing from the tunnel to the outlet, bursting among a little group of officers, who staggered back with horror in their faces. "Done for ... countermined!" One of the sappers gasped out the fateful words, then sank exhausted on the ground. "My God!" exclaimed Helmore, the officer in charge of the relief party, falling back a pace. Then, promptly recovering his self-control, he cried: "Forward to the rescue. Some of our men may be alive!" He himself dashed into the tunnel, followed by half a dozen men. At a little distance, the narrow avenue was blocked. The miners were entombed! but an indirect opening had been made by the concussion, which gave the rescuing party access to another tunnel. Following this, and finding it intact, Helmore, in advance of the party, raised his lanthorn and saw in the distance an exposed angle of a massive concrete wall. He understood at once that the exploded mine, working in a lateral direction as well as upward, had exposed the caponiere, or covered lodgment under the counter-scarp, which Wardlaw had sunk in that position designedly for the protection of the Fort. Therefore, the holders of the Fort, in a measure, were hoist with their own petard. Their mine had exploded first, but at the same time it had exposed a point against which a subterranean attack now might be directed. The moat encircling the Fort was twenty-eight feet wide and eighteen deep. Strongly fortified everywhere, a special feature of its strength lay in the caponiere gallery. The walls of this gallery, constructed beneath the entire counter-scarp, were some seven feet thick. On this, the South side, as also on the East, the gallery was divided by concrete partitions into five communicating cells or chambers. These chambers, as Lieutenant Helmore knew from the confidential plans of the defence works, communicated, cell with cell, by low and narrow doorways. From the last of the five cells, by a narrow flight of steps, could be reached a door of massive steel, and on the other side of that door a passage five feet wide passed beneath the rampart and the moat into the interior of the Fort itself. This communication, of course, was intended to enable defenders of the Fort to reach the caponieres which jutted into the moat at intervals, and thence fire upon any troops that sought to bridge it. The enormous importance of his discovery made Helmore forget for a moment the fate or peril of his ill-starred comrades--buried as they were in the adjacent débris. Indeed, it was apparent that nothing could be done for them. Their dreadful fate was sealed, and the faint groans that at first reached the ears of the would-be rescuers soon entirely ceased to be heard. Helmore, after a moment's pause, sent a man back with news of the discovery to his commanding officer, who instantly grasped the requirements of the situation. He issued certain rapid orders, and a hundred men darted down the hill in prompt obedience. Meanwhile, the relief sappers, guided by Helmore, crept through the narrow tunnel into which an opening had been forced by the explosion. Without losing an instant, the Engineers began to chisel several holes in the exposed section of the concrete wall. A charge of dynamite was passed along, and all made ready. The men rushed back and waited. The crack and crash of a violent explosion followed, and the sappers, hurrying forward, followed by other troops, found that a broad gap had been made in the gallery of the caponiere. Through this breach they crept and crawled, to find themselves in the first of the five cells, or gallery-sections, that have been described. Opposite to them was the arched doorway leading into the next chamber. But already the defending force had occupied it. Foreseeing that the entire gallery might be rushed chamber by chamber, they had brought heavy sandbags and piled them high, close to the first doorway. Against these obstacles the attacking party hurled themselves, furiously but in vain. Half a dozen engineers immediately commenced to break through the wall itself, in the hope of thus reaching the adjoining chamber. Only a few men could work in so confined a space, and while they hacked against the solid wall, the German defenders now thrust their rifles between the gaps of the sandbags and fired at random. Four Englishmen fell dead, or desperately wounded. Their comrades dragged them back, making room for others. The Colonel's orders had now been carried out, and hand grenades were passed along from man to man. These fearful engines of destruction were only to be used in case of dire extremity; because, closed within these walls, beneath the hill, the explosives might well prove as fatal to the men who used them as to the enemy. For the same reasons, doubtless, the German soldiers engaged in this subterranean struggle, so far, had made no use of bombs. The sappers having found it hopeless to cut a wider entrance through the wall into the adjoining chamber, another plan was quickly thought of and attempted. A can of kerosene was passed along and poured upon the sandbags; then another and another. The moment a light was applied, the soaked sandbags began to burn with so fierce a flame that the soldiers on each side were driven back, and for a brief space the chambers on both sides of the archway were left quite tenantless. Then, with a half stifled cheer, a dozen British soldiers, their rifles clubbed, dashed across the chamber and thrust the burning mass into the inner cell. The Germans in the opposite entry already were hastily piling more sandbags in position, but the gap was not wholly filled when the attacking party rushed upon them impetuously and with an excited shout. Bayonets crossed bayonets now, but neither side could get free play either for attack or for defence. Over the waist-high sandbags in this second archway, the combatants with desperate fury thrust and stabbed. Groans and savage oaths blended with the flash of steel. The place grew slippery with blood. Men fell and could not rise again. Comrade trod comrade under foot and heeded not. Only one lanthorn now remained alight, half revealing the intent and savage faces of the combatants. The Germans seemed to have no light at all. And poor Helmore, who held the solitary lanthorn aloft to guide his men, thus helped to direct the fatal thrust that laid him low. With a hoarse cry, one of the Germans had hurled a bayonet through the doorway. It pierced deep into the lieutenant's throat. The lanthorn dropped from his upraised hand, and he fell against the wall. Blood gushed in a torrent from his mouth, even while he bravely strove to utter the last word of command: "Forward, men, forward!" he gasped, then spoke no more. A young soldier who heard him had marked well the position of the archway, ere darkness hid it, and, maddened at the fall of his officer, he hurled a hand grenade towards the opening. The effect was instantaneous and terrific. The dreadful shock was succeeded by a still more dreadful silence. When a light was struck it was seen that every German in the inner chamber had been blown to pieces. A moment's hesitation in face of the ghastly sight, then, as the light went out again, the British sprang into the inner cell to find, or rather feel, that it was splashed and smeared with blood and clogged with spongy fragments of the mutilated dead. Cell number two, by some freak of the explosive, had not been affected, and as the third chamber thus was gained, a sergeant, shouting in the darkness, gave the eager word: "Forward again! we'll have the Fort! By God, we'll have the Fort!" Again the men pressed forward, but this time no defenders barred the way. In the distance there was a sound of hurrying footsteps. The Germans had retreated down the stone stair which led to the steel door of communication. Reinforcements had now reached the gallery, and fresh lights were brought. Well might the newcomers shudder and turn sick at what those lights revealed in chamber number three. At the moment it was quite impossible to carry the dead and wounded to the rear. Officers and men were swarming in, and none could leave the gallery. But word was passed along for surgeons to be sent, and the wounded were laid against the walls, leaving a clear gangway. Then the advance was cautiously continued. Another officer--Carlow, who had just obtained his company--now took command. Promptly but slowly, he headed the advance, for this silence, this sudden cessation of resistance, might betoken some deadly ambuscade. The men went forward, two and two. Chambers four and five proved to be quite deserted. They reached the farther archway of cell number five, and there Carlow, halting, peered down into the darkness of the narrow stair. As he stood, gazing, listening, strange and pungent fumes crept up between the walls. He gasped for breath and staggered back. The men behind him did the same. The fumes were rising, spreading--permeating the low gallery with extraordinary rapidity, travelling swiftly into every chamber. Only a few understood how this awful sense of suffocation was occasioned; and some who guessed that from an air-pump down below the Germans were pumping asphyxiating gas into the gallery guessed it too late. A few, before the gas had wholly overpowered them, fought their way back to the open, but more than a hundred men dropped where they stood in the close chambers--dropped and died. CHAPTER XVI. SIGNS AND WONDERS. That important person, Miss Flossie Wardlaw, was extremely angry! Events were interfering with her plan of life, and upsetting all her theories of fitness. The preoccupation, the infatuation, shown by the only other member of her family for something outside domestic life was too exasperating. That tiresome fort at Dover was absorbing all her father's thoughts. He grew paler and more haggard day by day, bestowing less and less attention on the far more important interests that concerned his little daughter and the familiar programme of her daily life. Flossie told herself that she was not unreasonable. She had been quite ready to make allowances. Alarming things, she knew, had happened close at hand. Impudent foreigners had seized Fort Warden by stealth. The ceaseless boom of the big guns disturbed the current of existence in the bungalow. Things were tiresome; indeed, quite worrying when they kept on like that! It was dreadful, that Englishmen, her father's soldier-friends, should be killed by foreigners--killed in England too, only ten miles away; usually they were only killed a long way off, and that seemed different. But, of course, it could only end in one way; the offenders would be turned out and most severely punished. Meanwhile, the repeated and prolonged absence of her father at Dover, and his preoccupied behaviour when he was at home, filled Flossie with mixed feelings of annoyance and sympathy, in which the former ingredient became more and more predominant. Her queenly power seemed to be undermined. Her faithful subject had deserted her. Oh! that horrid Fort! Miss Flossie nursed the personal sense of injury, and husbanded her growing grievance, to the exclusion of thoughts concerning the national questions that arose. So much depends upon the point of view; and that, in turn, so much depends upon one's age. Nevertheless, the issues of the struggle at Fort Warden were vitally important. They riveted the attention of many millions of the population of the world. Here in England itself the seizure of the fort had assumed a colossal significance, shaking the nation out of the ever-narrowing grooves of Parliamentary and municipal party conflict, compelling men to look back to a great history and forward to an era of littleness that gave pause even to the most selfish and complacent. Cost what it might, the enemy must be driven out. Our Flag must wave above that fort again. A spreading feeling of fury and resentment arose against the Government. To this complexion had we come! Pushing politicians, self-seeking wire-pullers of both sexes, had dragged England in the dust. So much for Petticoat Government! So much for the Amazonian craze, this make-believe of women-soldiers and girl-gunners. Woman had largely ousted man from place and power, and this was the result! A handful of foreigners had been emboldened to assail us on our own sacred soil. Popular anger expressed itself afresh by breaking out viciously into the old doggerel:-- "Old Nick and the Cat, With Johnnie and Jan, Have brought poor England Under a ban!" Truly, Man was needed at the helm to which at this crisis woman clung so obstinately. Man was wanted in his old authority, and, behold! in every department of control woman was clinging to his coat-tails, hindering his action, dividing his counsels, prating of peace when there could be no peace, and exhibiting a rudimentary unfitness to grapple with an unprecedented and desperate situation. The outcry came not from the men alone, but with increasing vehemence from the very sex that had struggled for supremacy. Women out of office--necessarily the vast majority--now began to discover that those aggressive or more fortunate representatives of their sex who had obtained salaried posts or prominence of some sort in public life, were in many cases frauds and failures. This rule of woman that had come to pass was not what the great mass of her sex had contemplated or intended. They confessed it to husbands and brothers; and husbands and brothers nodded in wise and ready acquiescence. Their faces plainly said: "I told you so." Thousands of women ruefully admitted the impeachment. Successful rivalry--mostly vicarious--had brought them no real joy. They had gained power and lost love; and in their inmost hearts they knew that love was worth the world. Always it had been part of woman's character to strive for her own way, and always she had ended by despising the man who permitted her to gain it. Yes! woman's collective triumph in this new age, as she now sadly realised, had cost her dear. With the gradual abandonment of man's protective affection had gone the true ingredients of her happiness; much that made up the grace and joy of life, tenderness and chivalry, caressing mastery, the rightful dominance of the stronger sex. Yes! love was worth the world. The heel of woman disclosed her weakness--and revealed her strength. Fool and blind! grasping at the sceptre she had lost the kingdom; the kingdom of the heart, encircled and protected by the strong arms of a lover as the guardian-sea encircles England's shores. Like an electric spark this spirit of regret and discontent flew through the land. A little more, and it would mean a revolution. Away with the unnatural dominion of Woman! Back to the reign of Man! It would have been idle to expect unanimity where pride and personal interest were so closely involved. The pushing leaders of social democracy and the Vice-President and her following were not likely to submit without a struggle to the restoration of hereditary authority. Woman in office and power throughout the State would be sure to cling desperately to her foothold, and no one could yet foresee the outcome of the swiftly dawning struggle. The hands of a little band of energetic men, however, were busy throwing wide the floodgates, and no two men were more active than those veterans, one of the army, and the other of the law--General Hartwell and Sir Robert Herrick. To them it seemed that the signs of the times were full of deep significance, and pregnant with the highest hopes. They knew that there were still some men with grit in England, men who saw with bitter wrath the pass to which the nation had been brought. In their eyes the governance of this once glorious land had become a byword and a mockery. And it was because of this that the present humiliating spectacle was to be seen at Dover. Nor was that all. In the midst of these alarms, there was something else that shook and terrified the people, filling the minds of thousands with forebodings and distress. Strange symptoms of seismic disturbance had been reported not only from Bath, but also from other parts of England. Such awe-inspiring tremblings of the solid earth must ever produce a sense of apprehension which at any moment may grow into a universal panic. It was noticed that, so far, these disquieting indications were confined to the neighbourhood of thermal waters. At Matlock, Harrogate, Leamington, and Woodhall Spa, there had been a marked increase in the volume of the rising waters, with other signs of an abnormal earth activity. What did these things betoken? Signs of the times, they were variously interpreted. As in the days of Noah! The great multitude of men and women laughed at the shipbuilder and went about the business of their daily lives, so now hosts of dull and unimaginative persons remained unmoved in their obtuse philosophy. Others there were who believed a providential influence was at work--conveying an admonition and a warning by some such solemn signs as those predicted to occur before the last great change of all. Were there not to be signs in the heavens, and signs in the quaking earth, the sea and the waves roaring, nation rising against nation, creation, animate and inanimate, preparing for the awful Armageddon foreshadowed in the page of Holy Writ? Events were moving fast. A fanatic named Richards, stalking wild-eyed through the land, broke out into fierce prophetic utterance, mocked and jeered at by many, but followed by rapidly increasing numbers. This strange man entered on a pilgrimage from one to the other of the inland watering places, where symptoms of earthquake had been felt, everywhere inspiring awe and wonder in breasts of thousands. In South London, which he first visited, he was followed by enormous crowds, consisting to a great extent of women. Here, on the Surrey side, there had been a corresponding departure from the normal, for the old forgotten Spa of Bermondsey had developed a new and disturbing energy. While this ancient spring rose in unexampled quantities, and at high temperature, the once famous Spa at Epsom, only some twenty miles away, exhibited a like activity. The argument was irresistible that such far-spread manifestations of the same character must necessarily spring from a common cause. If so, then these mysterious subterranean workings also pointed to the pending evolution of some common result; it might take the shape of some terrific upheaval and convulsion that would reduce the British Isles to their primeval form, submerge them in the sea, or even change the face of Western Europe. Still these were but dark shadows and dread potentialities. Time alone could show whether events would verify such grim forebodings. But, meanwhile, there was one concrete and absorbing fact--the presence in England of the invading foreigner. This, at least, was a stern reality, pressing and predominant. The terrible Three Hundred still held the Fort; the great guns still roared and boomed, the pom-poms worked incessantly. Stiffened forms in increasing numbers strewed Castle Hill; the numbers of the dead and dying mounted daily. The highest military authorities now were constantly engaged in vehement and anxious conference with Major Wardlaw. The discussions, renewed again and again, early and late, had dealt with all aspects of the existing problem, had touched on and passed by many suggested expedients. One project, in particular, had excited much difference of opinion. Urgent advice had been given officially and through the newspapers to call the air-ships into play. Fort Warden, turtle-roofed, was supposed to be entirely bomb-proof, but it was argued that if all the air-ships in England--some 200--were to concentrate above the Fort and pour down bombs and explosives in great quantities, the result could hardly fail to terrify, if not to annihilate, the obstinate defenders. But Edgar Wardlaw shook his head. He alone knew the enormous resisting power that he had built up against this very contingency of warfare. Moreover, there were the obligations of treaties to be remembered. Air-ships were not to be used in warfare. International compacts on the subject of aerial navigation must be respected. To set a dishonourable example by disregarding them for our own immediate purpose might lead to disastrous international results. Two, and more than two, could play at such a game as that! And even, while the idea was being mooted, its immediate adoption became impossible. In a single night every English air-ship, the whereabouts of which was known, sustained mysterious, and, in most cases, irreparable damage. Such a discovery could not be concealed from the public. It was clear that some great and elaborate conspiracy was afoot, that the agents of the enemy were numerous, active, and daring, here in the very heart of England. It was clear, too, that the Government had been caught napping, and only too probable that worse surprises might yet befall the country. The police, it is true, made several arrests of suspected persons, but prevention, not cure, was the national desideratum. While the grass grew the steed might starve. Of what avail the slow formalities of legal, investigation, the jog-trot of red-tape routine, when the enemy was already at the gate, aye, in the heart of the citadel? In this crisis it transpired that the _Bladud_ was the only air-ship unaccounted for. There were conflicting statements about her recent movements; but presently it became known that she had been lent by the late President to a young Canadian friend named Linton Herrick. Mr. Herrick had been seen to go up with Wilton, the Engineer, and it was believed that subsequently the _Bladud_ had been identified with an air-ship that had been seen travelling rapidly, and at a considerable altitude, over the English Channel. CHAPTER XVII. HOW THE RAID FAILED. Flossie had spoken. Silent resentment, obdurately nursed for quite two days, had given place to voluble reproaches. He was naughty, she told her father; never before had she known him quite so naughty. Why! he had hardly opened his lips for days and days; he had not taken her out, nor brought things home, or done anything. Waking that morning very early and very hungry, she had found nothing--not a thing--under her pillow--no, not even a lump of sugar; and he knew perfectly well that there were always lumps of sugar in the sideboard. No! he had forgotten. He did not love her, that was quite clear. His head was fuller than ever of that horrid Fort. If he did not look out he would go there and get killed himself presently, and that would be a nice thing to happen, wouldn't it? Under the shower of these reproaches, Major Wardlaw hung his head. His silence and submissiveness slightly mollified the stern young lady. Like many others of her sex, Flossie must needs scold and then be sorry for the object of her reproaches. To-night there was something in her father's looks and bearing that arrested her vehemence. Why! goodness gracious! what was the matter? "You know," she said shrewdly, looking at him as she stood between his knees with that steady gaze of youthful eyes that is often so disconcerting, "You know, if you weren't a great big man, I should say you were going to cry." "Nonsense, nonsense," her father answered, and hugged her closely in his arms. "Mind my hair," said Flossie sharply, "I'm very tired and I'm going to bed. I hope you won't be naughty any more. Promise!" He nodded with a queer look in his eyes. "_You_ look tired, too! come up early. To-morrow we'll be just the same as ever, won't we? You shall be very nice, and I shall forgive you, because, after all, I do love you, don't I?" "That's right," he said gravely. "Yes, but you're not right. I've never seen you quite like this. I'm sure there's something. Where's my book?" He picked up the story-book and she tucked it under her arm, smothering a yawn that suffused her blue eyes and showed all her pretty teeth. "Good-night; be good," she said, and kissed him. "Yes! But you've forgotten your hymn." The child looked at him searchingly. His manner puzzled her more and more. His voice seemed hardly natural; he was grave, intensely grave, yet trying to cloak his seriousness by speaking in ordinary tones. "Must I, to-night?" she asked, half closing her sleepy eyes. "Yes, dearest, please, to-night." She glanced down at the story-book under her arm, and her father understood the look. Flossie wanted to reserve her few mental energies to finish a chapter in bed. But with a little sigh of resignation, she began in drowsy tones the recitation of the hymn. The theme was resignation. Wardlaw seemed to hang upon the well-known words: "If Thou shouldst call me to resign What most I prize, it ne'er was mine; I only yield Thee what is Thine; Thy Will be done." He bowed his head. Flossie, too heavy-eyed to notice, turned away. Her father looked up quickly. "Kiss me again, darling." He held her by the arms in front of him, firmly but lightly. The child roused herself to sudden alertness. "One for you, and one for me, and one for both together. That's three!" she observed after the third kiss--"Just for a treat." His eyes followed her as she crossed the room. At the door, she turned and nodded warningly. "Something nice to-night, mind, and don't stay up too late." Wardlaw held his breath and kept his seat while Flossie went slowly, languidly, up the stairs. Then, with clenched hands and tortured eyes, he started to his feet. The last time! God in heaven, could it be truly that? Never to know the kiss of her childish lips again, never to feel her warm, clinging little arms around his neck! With bloodshot eyes and still clenched hands he paced the room. Away in the distance the booming guns broke out again with their dreadful monotone, recalled inexorably the work he had to do. He had weighed it well, pondered it, as he told himself, too long already. The Fort must fall! All other means had failed. Blood had been poured out like water, and to no purpose. Yonder on the hill, thousands of men, obedient unto death, his brothers in arms, had braved the weapons which he, Wardlaw, had stored within those impregnable defences, weapons which had been turned against his own country and his own people with such terrible results. England could not wait while the foreigners were starved into surrender. The Fort must fall without delay. He, Wardlaw, knew the master-key of the position, and also knew that he who used it must be prepared to lose his life. Why had he not used it before? There were reasons which would satisfy reasonable people: the surprise of the situation, the slowness of the military authorities in inviting his assistance, the probability that, finding themselves without support in a hostile country, the invaders would throw up the sponge. But none of these probabilities had been verified. The Fort was still held by the foreigner; and the Fort must fall! Edgar Wardlaw was a scientific soldier--not one of those men of bull-dog courage who, obedient to orders, would hurl themselves without thought into a bloody struggle. The mind that can devise and perfect death-dealing armaments is not necessarily, or even probably, a mind that inspires and braces the fighting quality of the every-day soldier. The red badge of courage can indeed be won by men of high-strung nerves and delicate organisation, but it is won at most tremendous cost. Wardlaw had been slow in coming to his resolution, but he would never recede from it. They were arms of love that had enchained him, at the last--the arms of a little child. But now he was breaking even those fond links asunder. He was ready--almost ready. Pacing the room, he glanced at his watch. It was nearly ten o'clock. Soon she would be asleep. He went over to the sideboard and made a quick yet careful search, finding a small fancy cake, some fruit, and sugar; as Flossie had said, there was always sugar, though other things might fail. He must delay no longer. Carefully and on tiptoe he went up the creaking stairs. The servants were chattering and laughing in the kitchen, but in the child's bedroom there was not a sound. He entered cautiously. Yes, she was asleep, long lashes resting on the delicately flushed skin, lips slightly parted, one arm thrown out upon her open book. Wardlaw moved cautiously across the room and stood looking down upon the sleeping child. He looked long, and who shall say with what poignant and unutterable agony of spirit. Then he slipped the paper bag containing what he had brought with him under the pillow, and gently moved the book, lest it should fall upon the floor and wake her. The volume contained two stories, bound up together--"Sintram and his Companions," and "Aslauga's Knight," stories whose leaves come out of the old Saga-land, bringing with them the romance and adventure that charm the children, while also they reveal to older folk the mystic conflict of the human soul. Sintram's Companions, as Wardlaw knew, were Sin and Death, Companions of us all. With Death by his side, Sintram had to ride amid the terrors of the narrow mountain gorge--just as the Pilgrim of the immortal Progress had journeyed through the Valley of the Shadow. His eyes rested on the open page of the story-book:-- "When Death is coming near, When thy heart shrinks in fear And thy limbs fail, Then raise thy hands and pray To Him who smoothes the way Through the dark vale." He bowed his head and closed the book quietly, placing it near the child's pillow. Downstairs the clock chimed a quarter after ten--cheery little chimes, ticking off the flight of time as if endless days and years still remained for all who heard them. And yet for him who listened only a few hours of life remained. Death called him--not in the heat and excitement of battle, but in this still hour of cool blood and calm reflection. It made it vastly harder to obey. Never again would he hear those familiar tinkling chimes. This was his last farewell to all that he held dear. Death coldly beckoned him, as Sintram was beckoned at the entrance of the gorge. His hour had come to pass into the Shadow. The stern implacable demand of duty was ringing in his soul, and he dared gaze no longer on his sleeping child. If she should wake and look into his eyes, courage, honour, duty, all that makes man obedient unto death, might fail him even now. He dared not press his lips upon her cheek; he dared not even touch her hand. She stirred and muttered something in her sleep. He quickly raised and kissed a few strands of her lovely hair; it was the last touch, the final leave-taking! The father turned away. The child slept on. * * * * * A hundred yards from the bungalow--appointed to stay there, so that Flossie should not hear and wonder--a motor-car awaited him. The chauffeur belonged to his own corps--the Engineers. The man saluted him and looked anxiously at the drawn--white face, on which the lamp-light fell. Not a word was spoken. Wardlaw took his seat, and immediately the car, like a sentient thing let loose, sped swiftly on the road to Dover. It was a night of starshine and soft breezes. As they climbed the rising ground, the pure air from the sea grew stronger. Bracing, health-giving, breathing life, it fanned the face of the silent man who was rushing towards his self-appointed doom. Stiff and rigid, he sat, staring into the night, but conscious of nothing around him or before him. All his thoughts were of what was left behind--the dainty bedroom with the shaded light, the rosy sleeping child, the delicate dimpled face that he should see no more, his one ewe lamb of all the world. "If Thou shouldst call me to resign...." The burden of the hymn was ringing in his brain, insistent, agonizing. On and on sped the car. Away to the South the flashlights were sweeping the Channel, and, ahead, the first outlying lights of Dover soon came into view. Every moment the dull, dogged voices of the guns grew louder. Still Wardlaw remained rigid and voiceless, as one who is paralyzed by some dreadful nightmare, while ding-dong in his mind the words of the hymn persisted and repeated: "If Thou shouldst call me to resign.... If Thou shouldst call me to resign." ... They were close to Dover now. The car sped down from the heights. Ahead of them on the hard white road a lanthorn was swinging to and fro, and the chauffeur slackened speed to answer the challenge of the guard. He gave the password, and again the car tore forward. Houses on either side now were numerous. Presently the car wound down into the town. Silent, half-ruined, the unlighted streets gave an inexpressible impression of melancholy and disaster. Here and there the vibration caused by the passing car brought down loosened stone and brickwork with a sudden clatter. At one spot some fragments of mortar flew out and struck Wardlaw in the face. They pricked him into consciousness. He shook himself and gave a brief order to the chauffeur. The car turned down a side street, and presently drew up before a large house standing in the shelter of the Castle Hill. There were lights in all the windows; shadows passed and repassed across the drawn blinds. A strained air of animation and activity pervaded the place. A group of orderlies stood about the entrance, and through the open doorway there were glimpses of officers hurrying from room to room with clank of spur and rattle of accoutrement. This house, the head-quarters of the military staff, contained for the time being the brain of the British Army--foiled, so far, but still feverishly bent on devising means for the expulsion of the obstinate invader. As the car stopped, a tall officer hurried out and grasped Wardlaw by the hand. It was a grasp that told more than words could utter--a grasp that recognized the arrival of a supreme moment, at once the grip of friendship and the clasp of greeting and farewell. "The General's expecting you. I'll take you to him at once!" Wardlaw nodded, and, still as one that dreamed, followed the aide-de-camp into the house. * * * * * On the following day great news was wired throughout the length and breadth of England, and cabled far and wide throughout the civilised world. The newspapers of London and the provinces, in eager competition, issued special editions in quick succession. Everywhere great placards announced in heavy type and infinite variety of colours, a gladdening fact: the Fort had fallen! The hero of the hour was Major Wardlaw, but no sound of joy or triumph could ever reach his ears--Wardlaw was dead. The published particulars, though brief, were all-sufficient and convincing. The Major had calmly and deliberately laid down his life for his country and his comrades. What shot and shell and bayonet had failed to do, he, single-handed, had achieved. The episode was all the more tragic and impressive by reason of its great simplicity. A method was known to Major Wardlaw, as the designer, by which he could flood the Fort. The enemy would be drowned like so many rats in a gigantic trap. The master-key was in his hands, and though--high honour be to them--there were other volunteers for the fatal work, he had steadfastly refused to let another British soldier lose his life in that prolonged and dreadful struggle. He was prepared, resolved, to die--and death had come to him. Single-handed he had gone into the heart of the hill. The furious inrush of the water stored in the reservoir, which his own hand had deliberately let loose, claimed him, as he knew it must, first victim of the overwhelming flood. But the Fort was ours again! It was a counter-stroke with which the enemy had not reckoned; a danger which the invader was wholly unable to avert. As the waters of the Red Sea overwhelmed the Egyptian Warriors; as that ancient river, the river Kishon swept away the foes of the armies of Israel, so, in a new and terrible way, the water floods had destroyed the invaders of England. With a dull, elemental roar, with a suddenness that allowed of no flight, and a force that admitted of no resistance, ton after ton of water poured into the interior of the Fort. The sealed fate of its occupants was almost instantaneous. Of the survivors barely twenty men escaped with their lives, and these immediately fell into the hands of the encircling troops, and became prisoners of war. CHAPTER XVIII. THE WRECK OF THE AIR-SHIP. The little island of Herm possessed only one building of importance, a monastery of French refugees. In the great walled-in courtyard, there was present an object of special and curious interest to the monks. The arrival of the _Bladud_ had been observed with astonishment by all the inmates of the monastery, who naturally associated its coming with that of a certain mysterious visitor--a sun-scorched, iron-grey emaciated man--who had recently landed on the island, coming, it was said, from the coast of France. The visitor, who remained in complete seclusion in the building, sedulously nursed back to health and strength, was treated with extraordinary deference and respect by the Superior. That much the monks could not fail to know; but any sly inquiries and surmises on their part were met with the sternest and most peremptory discouragement. Excitement was quickened, therefore, when, only a few hours after the arrival of the air-ship, preparations were made for the distinguished visitor's departure. Linton stood in the courtyard, glancing anxiously at his watch, while Wilton, the engineer, put some finishing touches to the gear. The little man had proved himself a model of discretion. He asked no questions, but now and then threw quick glances towards the tall, thin stranger, who, at a respectful sign from Linton, had taken his seat in the stern of the boat. Whether Wilton knew or suspected the identity of Wilson Renshaw, who now calmly waited for the voyage to commence, Linton could not tell. He suspected that he did, and, little guessing what a few hours would bring forth, he registered a mental promise that the silent, faithful little engineer should not go unrewarded. It struck him that there was a good deal of nervousness in Wilton's manner, as he threw upward glances at the sky. While the preparations were being completed, the Superior of the Order stood close at hand, addressing in subdued tones his deferential and earnest farewells to Mr. Renshaw, and Herrick, raising his eyes, saw the peering faces of at least a score of monks at the upper windows of the monastery. Glancing higher still, he noted with some uneasiness that the scurrying clouds, copper-tinged from the setting sun, betokened the coming of a wild and stormy night. Fervently he breathed a prayer that the aerial voyage might have a happy issue. But by this time he knew enough of air-ships to be aware that there were perils which no scientific inventions, and no precautions, can wholly nullify: risks from defects and mishaps with machinery, dangers from both combined, that at any moment might bring about some irreparable catastrophe. Yet, to-night, everything must be hazarded. Not an hour, not a moment must be lost. The time had come. To let it pass unseized would be to miss the tide at the flood, to sacrifice the touchstone of fortune. He glanced at Wilton: "Ready?" The engineer gave a quick nod and lifted a grimy finger towards his cap. Linton, raising his own cap, turned towards the illustrious passenger: "Shall we start, sir?" "At once, please," was the answer. Linton stepped aboard and grasped the helm. Wilton took his place forward, and the Superior, bowing obsequiously, moved to a safe distance from the aeroplane. The faint preliminary throbbing of the engine instantly commenced. The boat began to rise, slowly at first, then more rapidly, as the elevating power obtained freer play. Every window of the monastery now was plastered with wondering, eager faces, intent on the _Bladud_ as she soared aloft. The Superior made angry and imperious gestures, but the monks did not, or pretended not to, see. This mounting of the aeroplane with such a passenger must not be missed. It was a spectacle the like of which they would not see again. Higher and higher climbed the _Bladud_, beating the air with her flapping wings. The cold breeze rushed through the wind-harp on the mast with a sighing, mournful sound as the boat swept in swiftly widening circles through the air. The passenger, impressed but not perturbed, glanced sharply round him; then, feeling the growing keenness of the wind, he drew his fur coat across his chest. When they were high enough, Herrick, with one eye on the compass, put the tiller over and gave an order. Wilton lightly moved a switch, and immediately the _Bladud_ headed at high speed for the open sea. * * * * * As the hours passed, night fell dark and thick about them; the wind became more violent, and ever and again chilly, sleety squalls affected to some extent the equilibrium of the boat. No one spoke, except for an occasional query from Herrick, to which Wilton responded by act or gesture only. Not one of the three men on board knew of any definite cause for anxiety, yet in the minds of at least two of them there was a growing sense of tension and disquietude. The muscles of Wilton's face twitched as he sat in silence, his eye watchful and his hand ready. Yet, so far, all went well. To avoid prolonged dangers of the open channel, they tacked northwards towards the coast of France, intending to resume the sea course as nearly as possible above the Straits of Dover. Nearer land the air grew less cloudy. The twinkling lights of habitations far below became visible like distant glow-worms. From the numbers of these lights they could form an idea of the size of the towns and villages over which they passed. Some thirty-five were counted. Presently the silent passenger himself identified the locality and said that they were passing over the highlands between Cape Blanc and Calais. It was time to give the ship a different course; and once again below them lay the wide expanse of sombre, tossing sea. But the _Bladud_ now encountered the strength of a growing gale from the North-East, and soon it became apparent that she was being dangerously deflected from her proper course. It was a discovery silently made, but fraught with the fears of potential disaster. If they should be blown out to sea, there was but one ultimate certainty--death for all on board. The store of motive power could only last for a given number of hours, and already much of the power had been expended. Their hope must lie in reaching dry ground within a period that grew perilously shorter and shorter even while they thought of it. Entrusting the helm for a moment to the passenger, Herrick crawled forward, and while the rising gale shrieked above them and around them, held a hasty, whispered conversation with the now excited engineer. "We'll never do it, sir, we'll never do it," Wilton said, hoarsely. "St. Margaret's Bay; Why, see! we've left it far behind already. No landing there to-night. What's the best air-ship that ever was built against a wind like this?" "Land us anywhere, anywhere," was Herrick's vehement answer. "Yes, if we can," muttered Wilton, gloomily. "I'm afeard there's something wrong with her, and that's the truth, Mr. Herrick." "Good God!" exclaimed Herrick, with an anxious glance towards the figure in the stern. "See that?" gasped the engineer, as a strong gust from the north drove the bow of the boat farther sea-ward. "See that, sir? I tell you, she can't stand it." Again and again the same thing happened. The gale, so far as it was easterly, drove them westward along the coastline, and ever and again the fierce gusts from the north forced them away from it. Linton crept back to the stern. Thirty minutes passed--minutes of increasing suspense. At the end of that time they had lost their bearings. The _Bladud_ became more and more beyond control. "Is there danger?" Renshaw asked the question very softly. "I am afraid there is, sir," said Linton. The other nodded: "I thought so. What part of the coast is that down there?" he asked after an interval. Linton peering over, pondered a minute before he answered: "Dover's left far behind by this time. We've passed Hastings. Those must be the lights of Brighton." "We can't get down?" "Impossible at present. We must drive straight ahead. Inside the Isle of Wight there'll be a chance for us--more shelter and more ships. Wilton knows that part." "Can we last as long?" "I think so--I hope so." A long silence fell as the _Bladud_ battled with the wind. Then there came a startling, rending sound that indicated some defect in the machinery. The boat began to veer erratically. "Steady, sir, steady," roared Wilton, making a trumpet of his hands. "For God's sake head her north!" From below there rose a sullen, surging sound, the threatening monotone of angry waves breaking upon a rocky shore. The sound grew fainter. They must be travelling inland--across the Isle of Wight. Now, then, was the time for a descent. Dimly in the forepart of the boat, Wilton's bent form could be discerned, his face peering, his hands at work in the complex box of the _Bladud's_ machinery. Suddenly he threw himself back, sitting on his heels, and Herrick thought he saw his hands raised with a gesture of despair. The _Bladud_ lurched and swayed violently, and for a moment it seemed as if the gyroscope had wholly failed to act. If that were so, in a moment the boat might lose her equilibrium, and all would end. But that was not the trouble. Linton now realised that it was the lowering apparatus that would not work. The _Bladud_ still rushed madly forward. With unchecked speed, they flew across the island. Another coast line then came into view--the long low line of lights stretching from Portsmouth, across Southsea to Eastney and Fort Cumberland. There was hope, then, or if not ground for hope, at least a fighting chance! But the _Bladud_ now by some inexplicable perversity of the machinery made obstinately for the eastern extremity of the line of lights. That, again, might serve if only they could descend on the wide common of Hayling Island. They were nearing it every moment. Presently from below there rose a new menace, an angry sound--grating and monotonous, that Linton could not understand. "What's that?" he shouted. "The Woolseners," bellowed Wilton, in reply, and made a wild gesture with his disengaged hand. He knew the deadly peril--those shifting banks of shingle churned in the shallows by the ceaseless action of the tides and waves. The Woolseners were as fatal as the Goodwin Sands to every ship or boat that found herself among them. With a desperate effort, aided by Renshaw and directed by Wilton, Herrick forced over the helm. Another ominous crack reached their ears, but for the moment they were successful, and a sudden squall from the east aided their combined efforts. They now were heading straight for Portsmouth Harbour. All might yet be well! Still travelling at great speed, they traversed nearly half the distance, it now being Wilton's design to bring the _Bladud_ down on Southsea Common. Then, suddenly, the horizontal movement of the boat absolutely ceased. All the motive power that was left in her began through some terrible mishap to be expended in the development of rapid elevation. The frantic efforts of Wilton to check the upward rush were unavailing, the boat went up and up with terrible velocity. This last catastrophe was paralyzing, overwhelming. Climbing higher and higher, the boat would rapidly exhaust her small remaining store of compressed air. Then, in an instant, would commence a reversal, and the _Bladud_ would rush down through space--the end for all on board, inevitable death. Linton again left the helm in Renshaw's hands. It was useless to retain it. He scrambled forward to assist Wilton in his desperate efforts to right the machinery. A dreadful feeling of sickness began to overpower him as the air-ship swayed and waltzed in the upper air-currents, lurching and righting as if struck by successive waves, but ever mounting higher and yet higher. It grew intensely cold. Feathery flakes of snow began to envelop them. Their lungs laboured. It became more and more difficult to breathe. Linton gasped enquiries which either Wilton did not hear or could not answer. He glanced back at their ill-starred passenger, who had set out to recover power and a great position and now was rushing to an awful death. He saw that Renshaw's head rolled limply on his shoulders. Already he seemed to be insensible. Filled with terror and alarm, he shouted to Wilton though the man was close to hand, but his voice, though the effort of utterance was so great, sounded even to himself quite faint and far away. By the light of the protected spirit lamp fixed to the tiny engine house, Linton saw that the recording instrument already registered an altitude of 20,000 feet. A dull indifference began to take possession of his mind. His faculties were slowly freezing. Even his eyesight now began to fail. He could scarcely see the column of mercury in the glass, or the minute hand of his watch. He felt that consciousness would soon completely desert him. His right hand was resting on the gunwale of the boat; he found he could not raise it. He could scarcely move his lower limbs, and, turning once more to glance at the barometer, his head fell forward helplessly. By a violent exercise of his muscles and his will, he raised his face a little, but for an instant only. It drooped again. He slid down into the bottom of the boat. His fading gaze sought that of Wilton. They looked into each other's eyes, like dying men bidding one another silent, sad farewells. The mists of death already seemed to be closing on them, when a sudden variation of the temperature, or, it may be, some magnetic current partially revived them. But the _Bladud_ still rushed upward, ever upward. They had reached a height of four miles above the earth, and the temperature had fallen to 24° below freezing point of water. To this appalling altitude the _Bladud_ had ascended with almost incredible rapidity. Upward, and upward still, they went, until five miles, then six, was reached above the surface of the vanished earth. Out of the void a muffled voice reached Linton's ears, the welcome voice of a living fellow-creature. It was Wilton trying to rouse him, Wilton speaking with urgency and vehemence. Gradually he came out of his swoon; familiar objects close to him revealed themselves again. Wilton was lying in the bottom of the boat. He was striving in vain to reach Linton. The piercing cold had almost paralyzed him. His hands were freezing. What did Wilton want? What was he trying to do? As far as could be judged, they had now reached an altitude of 37,000 feet--nearly seven miles. The mists closed in again. The thread of life was on the point of breaking. Linton became half conscious that a thick crust of ice had formed upon his clothes, his breath was freezing on his lips and in his nostrils. He glanced again with an agonizing effort at the moving record of their elevation. Another 1,000 feet, and then 2,000 feet. Needles of ice were pricking at his eyes. Close to him the prone form of Wilton seemed to be covered with minute crystals from head to foot. Linton tried to stretch out his hands to touch him, but found that they were helpless, numbed. What, he vaguely wondered, was Wilton doing now? What mad idea was this? With an exhausting effort the engineer had just smashed the lens of his telescope. Then his hands seemed again to fail him. Watching him helplessly, Linton felt that everything was useless, hopeless, lost. It would soon be over. But Wilton had gripped the broken glass of the telescope between his teeth. What was he doing now? Why was he sawing frantically, convulsively, at that tightened cord? Ah! that was it! Well done, Wilton. But it was hopeless, quite hopeless, after all. Linton rolled his head feebly. They had climbed another 1,000 feet, and they were mounting still. No! What was this? There was a change. Something had happened. Linton was sensible of a strange eddying, a pause, a feebler flapping of the aeroplanes. Merciful God! The boat had ceased to rise. Now she was sinking, sinking, with appalling speed, yet checked to some extent by the broad aeroplanes, just as a bird would be when, with extended wings, it floated down to earth. He tried to frame some words; tried to touch Wilton with his hand; failed to do either. Wilton lay motionless, with bleeding lips. * * * * * Out of the blur of mental chaos, Linton Herrick found himself roughly dragged back to consciousness. Kneeling in the boat, he discovered that he was submerged in water to the waist; flecks of salt water smote him in the face; all around there was a welter of wild, tossing waves. In his ears, to add to his distraction, there sounded a harsh and melancholy bell. It was tolling, tolling, close at hand. The _Bladud_, water-logged, tossed feebly in the trough of the angry sea. Built on a theory that she could float for a considerable period, it nevertheless rushed in upon Linton's mind that in a few minutes she would sink. He struggled to his feet, grasping the rigging as he did so. Something arrested his attention. What was that silent log-like thing the waves were rolling yonder in the semi-darkness? It must be Wilton, poor Wilton, who had saved their lives--or tried to save them, only to lose his own. Wilton! Dead! A voice hailed him. It came from Renshaw, his companion. He also was on his feet, swaying from side to side as the boat, settling deeper and deeper in the water, plunged and lurched beneath them. "Look!" cried Renshaw, "the buoy! We must swim for it!" As he spoke he plunged over the side and struck out for a towering object that rose and fell in the waves only a few yards away. Linton realised that that was where the clangour of the bell was coming from--the refuge of the shipwrecked--the bell-buoy close at hand! Before he fully knew what he was about, he, too, was struggling in the waves. He was a strong swimmer, but, clogged with his wet clothing, another yard or two would have been too much for him. He shouted some incoherent words of encouragement to Renshaw, and struck out with all his small remaining strength. The tall frame-work of the Spit-buoy rose out of the sea just in front of him. From its apex came louder than ever the noise of the iron clapper beating on the metal, as the tossing sea roiled the huge buoy this way and that. His hand touched something hard. He grasped an iron rail. Slowly and laboriously he drew his dripping form out of the sea. Then, panting heavily, he threw himself down face downward, full length, on the deck of the buoy, and stretched out both hands to the other swimmer. Renshaw's strength seemed well nigh spent. He was making futile struggles to rid himself of his heavy coat. As he rolled over helplessly, almost swept beneath the buoy, Linton grasped his collar. The next moment he had drawn him to the rail. A breathing space, and then another effort, exhausting and prolonged. Two panting men, half drowned but saved, lay side by side upon the buoy, fenced from the greedy sea by rusty, dripping iron bars. Above them, in the stormy mournful night, ding dong! the bell kept clanging to and fro--this way and that, with every wave and motion of the singing sea. CHAPTER XIX. THE COUP D'ÉTAT. While the fierce struggle for Fort Warden was proceeding, and while Nicholas Jardine lay dying, the Vice-President of the Council and her adherents were engaged in desperate efforts to strengthen the grip of Woman on the governance of England. To wrest to their own advantage the crisis that would arise on the expected death of the President was of paramount importance to the Kellick party. To turn it to their destruction was the anxious object of their political opponents. Thus was foreshadowed--for the critical hour--a fierce and crucial struggle for supremacy. The chief directors of the counteracting movement, General Hartwell, the woman-hater, and Sir Robert Herrick, wise in counsel and learned in law, were in constant conference. They met daily, and their conferences and study of reports often lasted far into the night. The outcome of their labours was to be seen in the creation of an association, which Linton had mentioned to Zenobia. It embodied both men and women, who styled themselves, as a bond of union, the Friends of the Phoenix. The general aim of this association was to re-establish man in his proper position in the State, and the particular aim to bring about the restoration of the long-lost leader, Wilson Renshaw. The last mentioned feature of the programme, though at first received with natural incredulity, presently acted with magical effect in quickening public interest; and when secret, but authoritative, assurances were forthcoming that Renshaw still lived, had been released by the Mahdi, and was about to return to England, vast numbers speedily enrolled themselves as Friends of the Phoenix. The great strength of the movement lay in the voluntary enlistment of hosts of disciplined men. The Police, the regular Army, and the Territorials, furnished many thousands of recruits. The old Household troops followed General Hartwell almost to a man; the Corps of Commissionaires followed suit. These men, in turn, rendered excellent, because unsuspected, service as propagandists among the humbler classes of the civil population. Evidences of disgust and discontent with the aggressive dominion of Woman were found on every side. The time was almost ripe. It looked as if but a match were needed to produce a vast and far-reaching conflagration; and the main problem that exercised the minds of General Hartwell and Sir Robert was how, when the moment came, to use the ready instruments of revolt without incurring the risk of bloodshed and the development of civil war. Every possible precaution was taken. The Friends of the Phoenix pursued their plans with the utmost secrecy, it being realised that, in order that the projected _coup d'état_ might succeed, it was essential that it should take the Kellick faction completely by surprise. Finally, it was decided to seize the occasion of a banquet in the City, at which it was known that the Vice-President would make an oratorical bid for a new mandate from the nation. This banquet, postponed from time to time in consequence of events at Dover and the President's illness, was to take place shortly after Mr. Jardine's funeral. It was announced that reasons of State and public convenience rendered further delay impossible; "Reasons of State" meant the interests of the Kellick faction; "Public convenience" had reference to the opening of a new London railway tube. An extension of the old Tube from the Post Office, via Gresham Street, to the Guildhall, had long been a cherished scheme of the City Fathers. The old approach through King Street and Cheapside to the head-quarters of the Corporation was only suitable for use in fine weather. But whatever changes and chances had befallen London during the first forty years of the twentieth century, British weather had developed but little alteration, and certainly no improvement. That State processions and civic functions should be spoilt by drizzle, rain, or fog, as so frequently had happened to pageants of the past, was felt to be not merely inconvenient, but quite uncalled for. The new alternative route presented many advantages. Celebrities and non-celebrities bound for the City on great occasions would be enabled to enter a special train at the West End, and could come to the surface in Guildhall Yard. The feast of oratory and the flow of champagne might thus be attained without the disadvantage of a preliminary journey through the rain-swept streets of the murky city. In like manner the members and officers of the corporation would enjoy similar immunity whenever official occasion required them to go westward. The feminine note in politics had something to do with the project; for woman, advanced woman, in her hours of ease and finery did not like to have her feathers and laces spoilt by London smuts and drizzle; and woman, of course, had become very much in evidence in the City of London. Facetious persons went so far as to say that the City Fathers had been superseded by the City Mothers, and further justified their views by treating the male minority as indistinguishable from a set of old women. The arrival of Woman as a member of County Councils and other public bodies, not to say in Parliament itself, long ago had rendered it practically certain that the conservatism of the City must ultimately yield to the onslaughts of the sex. In the fulness of time a woman took her place on the Bench as Chief Magistrate of the City of London. A wondering world was called upon, for the first time, to do honour to a Lady Mayoress, who shone with no reflected light. She herself was the Sun of the City firmament. Lord Mayor for some years there was none. The Lady Mayoress who held office at the critical period that had now arrived was a devoted ally of the Vice-President, and bent on advancing in every possible way the authority and interests of her sex. To this end the Corporation, which had largely subsidised the new branch tube, had solicitously waited the opportunity to entertain the acting representative of government in honour of the occasion. On the day of the banquet, the principal City streets presented their normal appearance to the eyes of all ordinary observers. The Vice-President and her supporters were to travel to the Guildhall by the new route. There was no occasion, therefore, for decoration, or for the special services of the military, or even of the police. Nevertheless, large numbers of uniformed men might have been observed moving through the side streets in small parties. In the neighbourhood of the General Post Office and of the Guildhall these numbers rapidly increased as the hour appointed for the function drew near. At the same time there were similar musters in the immediate vicinity of the Houses of Parliament, the War Office, the Admiralty, and other public offices. There was no apparent connection between these various groups, but in reality they were acting in complete unison. They had the same password--"the Phoenix"--and were directed from one and the same centre. In a word, one and all, these men were Friends of the Phoenix. Towards afternoon, when Londoners began to look for the early editions of the evening papers, which were expected to contain a summarised report of the Vice-President's speech in the City, extraordinary rumours began to spread throughout the Capital; and in the Clubs, the restaurants, the railway stations, and in the streets groups of men and women engaged in eager and excited discussion. The impatience of the public became uncontrollable. Crowds besieged the news-vendors' shops, and clamoured at the railway bookstalls. Even the newspaper offices were invaded, and when, at length, copies of the evening journals were available, hosts of people struggled fiercely to secure them. Scenes of extraordinary tumult were witnessed. The newsboys, tearing through the streets on their bicycles, were waylaid. Men fought and scrambled for copies of the papers, and as placard after placard appeared, public excitement was augmented until it reached the verge of frenzy. A COUP D'ÉTAT. REIGN OF WOMAN ENDS. RENSHAW RETURNS. Wild cheers and shouts broke out when lines like these were read by gaping multitudes. People came hurrying to their doors and windows; drivers of cabs and omnibuses stopped their vehicles, staring, laughing, shouting, questioning, and adding to the general babel and bewilderment. The streets were blocked. The news ran through the town like flame, evoking everywhere unbounded enthusiasm and the wildest joy. The climax was reached when overhead were heard the wind-harps of a fleet of air-ships. Fifty or sixty of the official craft had been repaired and brought into the service of the Phoenix. Sweeping over every district of London, they scattered tens of thousands of cards bearing Renshaw's portrait, and containing the same three-lined announcement that figured on the placards of the leading newspapers. At the same time, throughout the populous provincial centres, as well as in the Capital, similar cards in enormous numbers passed from hand to hand, and were scattered lavishly in every public place. But it was at Whitehall that the interest and excitement culminated. For there, riding through the streets, bare-headed and gravely acknowledging the plaudits of an enormous concourse, Renshaw himself was seen, passing on his way to the House of Commons, supported by General Hartwell and Sir Robert Herrick, and escorted by a jubilant army of the Friends of the Phoenix. The Friends already were in possession of all the Public Departments. Officials who withstood them or protested were quietly but summarily displaced. Everywhere the plan of campaign had worked like clockwork and without a hitch; and nowhere was the bloodless revolution more complete than in the City itself. The Vice-President's expected speech had not been reported because it was never uttered. The Friends of the Phoenix, in strong force, had taken possession of the Post Office Station of the new Tube directly the train carrying the City's distinguished guests had passed into the tunnel. At the same moment, another body of the Friends had seized the Guildhall terminus. Only those in the secret knew of what was happening in the depths of the earth. The City went about its business, the banquet waited, but no guests arrived. At both ends of the avenue the approaches to the Tube were completely blocked. The force available to maintain the blockade was more than sufficient. A handful of resolute men could easily have prevented access to or from the level of the streets. The lifts, by preconcerted signal, had been disconnected; the narrow winding staircases from the subterranean stations were effectually blocked. No violence was used; none was necessary. Behind the barriers at the top and at the bottom of the staircases stood resolute men, determined and trustworthy Friends of the Phoenix, who turned a deaf ear to all appeals and protests. No one was allowed to go down; no one was permitted to come up. Questions, clamour, threats from the imprisoned Vice-President and her party availed nothing. It was necessary to isolate certain people for a certain time, and isolated they were. Meanwhile, London learnt about the great and new situation. The Friends of the Phoenix carried out welcome change, and the nation got a firm grip on the to the letter the plans of their leaders, and Wilson Renshaw, saved from all perils, acclaimed throughout the Capital, was triumphantly restored to a position of power from which no enemy or rival could displace him. But he had a message for the nation, and for all nations, and the speech in which he delivered it thrilled the white man's world. He warned the peoples of Europe and America of a coming conflict, which would dwarf to insignificance all the international struggles, however stupendous, hitherto known to history. The white peoples, he declared, must abandon their mutual rivalries and ambitions. The sexes in civilised countries must check their suicidal competition for supremacy. Each and all must prepare, with united and unbroken front, to face the common foe. They were threatened with annihilation. Not so long ago the British nation alone had embraced 360 millions of the coloured races of the globe. Vast numbers of these had passed under other sceptres; but the change had only served to accelerate the rising of the dominated natives, who, far and wide, had learned to realise the overwhelming strength with which the weight of numbers had endowed them. No longer would the Black Man submit to their absolute dominion. No longer would the Yellow and the Tawny accept as their predestined masters the little band of pale-faced rulers by whom they had so long been held in subjection. The revolt was imminent. The Mahdi had proclaimed a holy war. The Crescent would be in the van, and North and South, and East and West, the coloured races would rise against, and seek to overwhelm, the recreant children of the Cross. CHAPTER XX. LINKED LIVES. Linton Herrick, losing not a day nor an hour in London, had carried the great news to Zenobia. Much that wired and wireless messages could not convey, he, as one of the inner circle, was in a position to explain. But the triumph of the Friends of the Phoenix and the restoration of Wilson Renshaw did not exhaust the subject of their conversation. Linton was charged with an impressive and confidential message from Renshaw himself. The restored Minister entreated the daughter of the dead President to resort to no act of public reparation; he besought her to let the dead past hold its dead. The story of her father's crime need never be given in its fulness to a censorious world. Against his enemy the rescued rival nourished no resentful bitterness. His feeling, rather, was one of sorrow that the temptations of power and ambition and the weakness of human nature had wrought the moral ruin of a man in whom he had discerned many admirable and striking qualities. Zenobia Jardine was greatly moved. She recognised the nobility of Renshaw's attitude, but she still had misgivings as to her own path of duty. The messages reached her at a time when she was torn with conflicting feelings, bewildered by new sensations, impressed with new aspects of human life, agitated by complex thoughts and emotions to which hitherto she had been a stranger. It was a crisis in her life. Subtle but masterful influences were at work upon her inmost being. Scales had failed, as it were, from her eyes, and her soul looked out upon possibilities of which in her unenlightened days she had never even dreamed. Love, duty, religion--each and all had acquired for her a deep and wonderful significance, and in her heart she feared to be presented with the problem of choice. Could these things be reconciled in the light of the revelation that had come to her? Would they be her armour and her strength wherewith she could go forward to some great predestined goal; or, if she chose the one, must she of necessity eschew the rest? One thing she knew for certain when she again held Linton's hand and looked into his face. This was the man she loved and always would love--stranger still, it seemed as if he were a man she always _had_ loved. But she knew now of his daring, his fidelity, his narrow escape from death, and realised his clear, though unspoken devotion to herself. And he, for his part, had known no peace until he found himself at her side again. Renshaw had placed at his disposal the _Albatross_, one of the swiftest of the Government air-ships, and another engineer had succeeded to the place of poor Wilton. Westwards he had rushed on the wings of the _Albatross_, leaving the lights of London, its crowded streets, its shouting and excited multitudes, far behind. And now, side by side, he and Zenobia and Peter, her dog, engaged in dog-like explorations on the route, went slowly across the quaint bridge with its low-roofed shops that spans the Avon, and passed through the streets of ancient Bath. "What would you do? What is your advice?" the girl asked, turning to him suddenly. They had been silent for some time, but each knew well what occupied the other's thoughts. "Respect Renshaw's wishes," was Linton's firm reply. "But the will--the confession is in the will," said Zenobia. "The will need not be proved. With or without it, what your father left belongs to you, his sole next of kin." She looked down thoughtfully. "It is your advice?" she asked, quietly. "Yes, mine as well as his." "Then I shall follow it." When next they spoke it was upon another subject. "This place strikes me oddly," said Linton, looking round as they went up the slopes of Victoria Park. "I have never been here before, and yet I have a curious feeling...." She turned quickly. "How strange! I know what you are going to say." "I believe you have the same feeling--as if we had been here before, you and I together, as if all that surrounds us were familiar." "Is this the first time you have felt like this?" she asked eagerly. "No, but I have never felt quite what I am feeling now." Again, with puzzled brow, he glanced round. "Once," she went on, hesitatingly, "the first time we went up in the _Bladud_, you remember that night ...?" "Yes, yes, I felt it then," cried Linton, pausing. "And the other night," Zenobia continued, seriously, "when I looked from a window down on the lights of Bath I had a strange sensation as if it were a scene which I had always known, and after that I had a dream in which that feeling was confirmed." "Curious," said Linton. "Do you believe in the theory of pre-existence?" she asked, abruptly, "do you think it possible that in some former state of being you and I or others can have met before?" "It may be so," he answered gravely. "Wise men have held the theory. Who can limit the life of the ego--fix its beginning, or appoint its end?" "If the breath of God is in us," said Zenobia solemnly, "all things must be possible. We, too, must be eternal. We may sleep and we may wake, but all the time we live. The soul does not belong to time, but to Eternity, and Eternity is an everlasting Now." "Yes," said Linton, "why should not the spirit have an all-pervading presence:-- "Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man!" While they were speaking thus gravely, they entered the Botanical Garden on the slope of the hill. Opposite the bench on which they sat down they noticed a sundial of curious construction. On the face of the dial, fixed at an angle, was an iron cross. They looked at the sacred emblem, at first vaguely, and then with growing attention. Below it was an inscription. "What mysteries, what mysteries enfold us," murmured Zenobia. She turned to him with a smile and a sigh that were pathetic. "What, I wonder, is the true philosophy of life?" she whispered. Linton sat silent for a moment. Then he leaned forward, and as he did so one hand closed upon and held her own. "I think we have it here in this inscription:-- "The hours are found around the Cross, and while 'tis fine, The time is measured by a moving line, But if the sky be clouded, mark the loss Of hours not ruled by shadows from the Cross." "Ah! The Cross! The Cross!" sighed Zenobia. Linton repeated the word in a pondering and half-puzzled tone, raising his hat with instinctive reverence. "I feel more than ever that this place is not new to me," he added, rising and looking round with wondering eyes. "And I, too, have the same persistent sense of memory," half whispered Zenobia. "There is a tradition that perhaps explains my dream--do you know it?--that in the days of the Romans there was a heathen temple here, where we are sitting, and that an early convert to Christianity, a sculptor of great skill, erected a cross upon its threshold." "And the sculptor was put to death! I have read it, or did I dream it?" He turned and looked down upon the city, as if seeking some clue or inspiration. "There was a priestess," he said slowly, "a priestess...." Zenobia had risen to her feet. "A priestess of the Temple of Sul. Yes! she, too, was put to death. They buried her alive." She pressed the backs of her hands to her brow; her gaze assumed an almost tragic intensity. "She had listened to the sculptor. They found her kneeling by the Cross, and in the Temple of Sul the sacred fire had gone out...." She paused. Each looked into the other's eyes. A flash of inspiration came to both of them. "Your face," she said, "is the face of the sculptor in my dream." * * * * * Heavy clouds had been rapidly gathering overhead; the atmosphere had grown strangely oppressive. So full had they been of other thoughts that no reference had been made to the developments of natural phenomena which had lately caused so much dismay in the locality, and, indeed, throughout the country. It was known that the signs of disturbance already chronicled had gradually diminished, and for some days the volume of water rising from the thermal spring had been little more than normal. The emission of smoke or vapour arising from the fissure on Lansdown had entirely ceased. But at this moment the sombre clouds that had gathered over the city seemed to be heavily charged with electricity, and there was a peculiarity in the sultry atmosphere which suggested some threatening association with the abnormal signs that lately had caused so much alarm. The day, throughout, had been exceptionally hot for the time of year, but it seemed to Linton as if the mercury must now be mounting up by leaps and bounds. An unnatural, brooding stillness had spread over the whole town. The few people who were walking in the Park did so languidly and in silence; a heavy weight pressed irresistibly upon the spirit. All things, animate and inanimate, seemed to be subsiding, drooping, under the pressure of some gloomy and mysterious influence. Peter, returning from sniffing explorations in the undergrowth of the gardens, came whining to his mistress's feet, as if seeking for the consolation of close companionship. Zenobia sat down and patted the dog affectionately. "Peter is frightened," she said, "there must be a storm coming." Linton looked around, but answered nothing. But he realised that the signs within and without were such as people who lived in tropical countries had more than once described to him. Peter sniffed the air, and then gave voice to a long and piteous howl. "We had better be going," said Linton, while Zenobia, still stooping, tried to soothe the dog. When she looked up there was an expression on Linton's face that puzzled her. She rose quickly and laid her hand upon his arm, following his gaze upward and around. "What does it mean?" she asked, breathlessly. "If this were not England," he replied, with hesitation, "I should think it meant...." As he spoke a low but formidable rumble became suddenly audible, coming not from above, but from below. Fraught with indescribable awe and menace, it produced an instantaneously petrifying effect. They stood rigid, holding to each other, waiting, listening for the coming climax. It came as in a flash. The rumble grew into a thunderous roar. A blue flame suddenly shot into the heavy clouds above them, and beneath their feet the solid earth rocked and swayed, again and yet again, as if with the rolling motion of a mighty wave. CHAPTER XXI. THE WRATH OF SUL. The earthquake, in the twinkling of an eye, had changed the face of all nature around them, and while it did so it annihilated stereotyped manners and conventional restraints. To Zenobia it did not seem strange that Linton's arms should be folded protectingly about her, or that she should cling to him, face to face and heart to heart. The moment of the earth's convulsion had bridged a gulf and wrought a revelation. They knew themselves, beyond all doubt, for what they were, lovers and twin souls, pledged to each other by unspoken vows. The dreadful shock had come and gone, but the external changes and terrors which the catastrophe had brought about could not be immediately realised. Presently they discovered that the ground had moved with them, and that they had been swept to a considerable distance from the plateau on which they had been standing. A great gap yawned where the sundial had stood. Peter had disappeared. They themselves had been saved from falling by the trunk of a giant tree--one of the few which had not been up-rooted--while below them, on the slope of the hill, new spaces were revealed where other trees had crashed down to the ground. The air was full of a strange echoing din, caused by the collapse of buildings outside the limits of the park and in the town below. In the midst of these reverberating sounds, and in strange contrast, was heard the prolonged wail of terrified women and the shrill cry of a frightened child. Gasping, and looking up the hill, they could see, rising from Lansdown, dense volumes of sulphurous smoke, through which shot vivid gleams of forking flame. Elsewhere a greyish veil began to spread across the land. A steaming, suffocating atmosphere choked their lungs. "There may be another shock! We must escape for our very lives," Linton whispered hoarsely. Zenobia, white to the lips, made a faint gesture of assent. "Hold my hand! We must find a way across the river," he said quickly. Again she made an obedient sign; and Linton, guiding her, they moved cautiously forward in the strange grey twilight which began to enfold them. Awe-inspiring sounds had been succeeded by a silence which was scarcely less terrible. A sense of horror half paralysed their faculties as they cautiously moved forward down the slope. Almost at their feet had opened a chasm which revealed many solid blocks of masonry, such as had been used of old in the construction of the Roman Baths. The rending of the earth had exposed to view a section of what looked like the foundations of an ancient and imposing temple. Between the massive walls, at the bottom of some steps, they observed a narrow cell or chamber, and as they stepped past the shadowy opening, Zenobia's foot came into contact with an ancient Roman lamp. Of these things neither of them was fully conscious at the moment. They were mental photographs, vivid experiences unconsciously stored in memory and fraught with a strange confirmatory significance not yet to be appreciated. Hand in hand, picking their steps apprehensively, they made their way between the fallen trees down to the broad avenue leading to the lower gate of the Park. Here, at the gate, for the first time they encountered evidence of death and disaster in the town itself. Houses had collapsed on every side; distracting moans and piteous cries from unseen sufferers assailed their ears. For a moment they paused before a monumental heap of stone and timber, impelled to render help in answer to these vague but terrible appeals. "We can do nothing," groaned Linton, in answer to Zenobia's questioning pause. "Come," and he led her quickly round the wreckage of the houses. Stumbling, half running, they made their way by a devious route down towards the heart of the town. In Queen Square there was a frightened crowd. Women and children, weeping and sobbing, were kneeling on the roadway with hands upraised in prayer. Men came running towards them shouting unintelligible warnings ... questions. Terrified faces appeared at many upper windows. They saw a frenzied girl leap from the parapet of a tottering house and disappear behind a heap of ruins. In the lower streets the destruction wrought was less noticeable, but a new terror was revealed. The sound of rushing waters reached their ears, and every moment white-faced men and women tore past them, crying in shrill tones: "The Spring! the Spring!" Then they saw eddying streams of steaming, orange-tinted water creep round street corners, overflow the gutters, and spread into the road. The water rose so rapidly that they had to turn aside and once more take to higher ground. They found themselves crossing Milsom Street, and as they did so a loud explosion sounded at the upper end, accompanied with an over-powering smell of gas. Screams rent the air, and another crowd of men and women, some of them carrying children in their arms, came rushing helter-skelter down the street. None of the houses at the lower end had fallen, but several were bulging forward and appeared to be deserted. And here already the predatory instinct was at work. Linton caught the arm of a filthy-looking tramp just as he raised an iron bar to smash the plate glass window of a jeweller's shop. He hurled the thief aside, then grasping Zenobia's hand again he dragged her forward, making for the nearest bridge. But once again their way was barred. From a great crack in the roadway a fountain--a geyser--of the yellow, steaming water suddenly leaped into the air. To avoid it they were compelled to make another circuit. They hurried down some narrow streets and reached the open space in front of the theatre. Fighting their way through excited and gesticulating groups of people, they passed the hospital, and, turning to the right, reached the front of the Grand Pump Room Hotel. Limping and enfeebled invalids, who could scarcely move unaided, were streaming from the the building, appealing eagerly for guidance to a way of escape from the perils that surrounded them. Tremulous but unheeded questions were heard on every side as Linton and Zenobia crossed the road and reached the Colonnade. To their right, from the doorways of the Grand Pump Room itself, another flood of tinted steaming water was pouring rapidly over the broad pavement and stealing into the Abbey Church. By keeping close to the opposite wall they escaped the stream, and leaving the great Church, which so far seemed intact, upon their right, they soon reached the space in front of the Guildhall. Only a little distance and they would gain the bridge! "This way!" cried Zenobia, as Linton, who knew nothing of the town, stopped in hesitation. But as she spoke, the pavement, barely ten yards away, bulged suddenly, then split apart, and with a violent rush another geyser burst into the street. They drew back just in time, and hurried breathlessly towards the Station Road. On their left rose the tall building of the Empire Hotel; behind them was the Abbey. A sudden shout impelled them to look back. A third geyser had opened in the middle of the roadway, and in an instant columns of steaming water were spouting high into the air. "Quick! Quick!" urged Linton. His voice was scarcely audible, for as they approached the river a mighty roar was coming from the weir, dominating the multitudinous sounds of terror which filled the air on every side. In this appalling crisis earth and air and water seemed united as in a ruthless conspiracy for the destruction of humanity. In the presence of these vast, mysterious, and irresistible forces, man, the boasted master, lord of creation, was subdued and helpless. The effect produced on the inhabitants of the city was that with which the struggling atoms of the race, accustomed only to a calm and ordered system, ever encounter nature in her moods of unfamiliar violence. In tempests of the deep, in the awful hurricane, when winds and seas mix and contend in a Titanic conflict, nature ignores the puppets tossing on the helpless ship, or half drowned on the surging raft. What is man in presence of the waterspout that towers from the ocean to the clouds? How shall he face the unfathomable whirlpool that yawns for the frail boat in which he is compelled to trust? Whither shall we fly, when, as now, the earth vomits forth from unimaginable caverns the scalding water floods that she has stored within her depths throughout uncounted centuries? None can stand unmoved when the hills smoke and the earth trembles; when darkness, a darkness that may be felt, spreads in a sinister and all-pervading veil over a world that seems abandoned to the powers of evil? Powdery ashes were falling everywhere upon the doomed city. From Lansdown a vast vaporous column, a dreadful blend of water, bitumen, and sulphur, rose high into the clouds. As the great column branched and spread, assuming the form of an enormous pine-tree, the darkness deepened, save where, above the hill itself, red-coloured flames slashed hither and thither through the cloud at frequent intervals. Terrific explosions accompanied these manifestations; and Linton, as he half carried Zenobia towards the river, was possessed with the fear that the great hill might be completely riven and pour forth streams of boiling water or of lava, that would not only submerge the town itself but destroy all life within a radius of many miles. Conceivably, indeed, it might be the beginning of the end--the end, at least, of England; for what were the British Isles but the summit of some vast mountain whose foundations were buried deep in the unfathomed sea? It had been forgotten that Great Britain with Ireland and its Giant's Causeway, afforded incontrovertible evidence of volcanic origin. These islands, with the Hebrides, the Faroe Islets, and, finally, Iceland, in fact constituted a vast volcanic chain, with Mount Hecla as its seismic terminus--a focus more active than Vesuvius itself. And here, at the other end of the chain, was Bath, where for thousands of years the waters of Sul had maintained a disregarded warning of that inevitable convulsion which, at last and in the fulness of time, had come to pass. In the midst of these flashing thoughts and fears that darted through his brain, Linton was possessed with the conviction that their only possible hope of safety lay in crossing the river, the surging roar of which each moment became more audible and threatening. Others in great numbers were animated with the same belief. Linton and Zenobia, indeed, found themselves involved in a madly-rushing crowd of panic-stricken men and women. Swept this way and that, they were in danger of being hurled to the ground and trodden underfoot by thousands of hurrying fellow creatures bent on self-preservation and on nothing else. Still supporting Zenobia with one arm and fighting his way forward step by step, Linton presently managed to turn the angle of the tall hotel. On their right the river, swollen enormously by the inrush from the hidden springs, had almost reached the level of the parapet. Boiling floods had poured, and still poured, into the Avon, blending with the normal stream; and the soul-subduing terror of the scene was augmented by the great clouds of steam that rose from the surface of the hurtling river. With desperate exertions, still supporting his half-fainting companion, Linton reached the turning towards the bridge. The narrow entrance was choked with a dense and struggling crowd, through which half a dozen men, lashing frantically at rearing horses, strove recklessly to force a passage. Screams and oaths blended with the angry roaring of the weir. The struggling people swayed hither and thither in dense compact masses, while a body of firemen from the station close at hand, seized the heads of several horses and forced them back to give the foot passengers some slight chance of escape. Individual efforts were futile in the midst of this confused and fighting crowd. By the impetus and weight of numbers, however, Linton and Zenobia, holding closely to each other, were swept as in a human eddy on to the bridge itself. The same contributory force of numbers, close packed between the windows of the shops, carried them rapidly towards the other side. Again and again there was a crash of glass as the terrific pressure forced in one or other of the windows; but far more ominous was the angry, roaring voice of the invisible river beneath them. Rising higher and yet higher every moment, it buffeted the bridge with unceasing and increasing violence, the torrent whirling round the piers and buttresses, fiercely impatient for greater destruction, as it tore upon its way towards the thundering weir. It was a question of time, and the time must needs be brief. The bridge must go. Half way across, beneath the feet of the scrambling, sobbing crowd, the roadway split and cracked. There was a sudden lurch that sent Linton and Zenobia, with a dozen others, into the open doorway of a right-hand shop. Like all the rest of the bridge buildings, it was but one storey high, and at the end of the short passage a narrow stairway gave access through a trapdoor to the leads. Linton, breathing heavily from his exertions, gasping a few words of encouragement to Zenobia, pondered in a flash the possibilities of the position. Those who had been swept into the deserted shop with them were making frantic and futile efforts to force their way back into the endless crowd that still streamed across the bridge in such maddened haste. But a place once lost in that dense multitude never could be recovered. In truth, there was no choice, and in a moment his resolve was taken. "The roof," he whispered, half to himself, "the roof!" Mounting the steps, he swept back the trapdoor, and, reaching down his hand, drew Zenobia after him. They emerged upon the flat roof of the shop. Only a dwarf party wall divided it from the rest. Below, on their left, the rushing and tumbling tide of humanity pressed forward to the Bathwick side. Below, on their right, they beheld the terrifying river, curdled in foam and throwing off increasing clouds of heavy steam. They scrambled forward quickly, passing on from roof to roof. Behind them came the sudden sound of rending masonry. A dreadful scream, a wild cry of despair from the multitude, pierced the powdery air. The bridge was slowly yielding to the enormous pressure of the swollen river; but Linton and Zenobia had safely reached the other side. Raising the trap door of the last shop in the row they descended rapidly and gained the road. Here the congested throng spread out across the wider space, and hurried onward to Great Pulteney Street. As they paused there came a sound--terrible, arresting, never-to-be-forgotten--the united wail of despairing voices, rising above the crash of the collapsing bridge as it carried with it, down into the boiling flood, hundreds of helpless and entangled fugitives. Zenobia, clinging convulsively to her protector, drew sobbing breaths at those appalling sounds. But for his supporting arms she would have sunk fainting to the ground. "Courage," he whispered. "Courage still." For the moment he himself believed that on this side of the river they were safe. But at that instant they felt again beneath their feet the quaking of the ground--a long and undulating throb. They reeled against a wall and stood there panting, until a quickened sense of peril impelled them once again to hasten forward. Turning up Edward Street, and leaving the church upon their left, they climbed the hill, until exhaustion compelled them to sink down upon a roadside bench and ease their labouring lungs. Thick grey smoke, heavy with choking particles and powdery ashes, was spreading everywhere; and from this higher ground, looking back towards the fiery summit of the volcanic hill, they could see cloud after cloud of fire-torn vapour mounting with spiral motion towards the darkened heavens. Wearied though they were, they struggled to their feet, and once more set their faces towards the hill. Linton fully realised that the area of disturbance was far wider than he had at first supposed. Safety, if attainable at all, could only be secured by placing many miles between themselves and the volcanic district. It was no time for weighing small considerations. Silently he decided what to do. They reached the house in which the President had spent and ended the last days of his life. The hall door was wide open; darkness and silence reigned in the interior. The servants, obviously, had fled. Linton shouted, but no answer came. It was clear to him that the engineer of the _Albatross_ was in full flight with the rest. Bidding Zenobia rest a minute in the hall, he opened the glass doors on the inner side and ran down the steps into the garden. There lay the _Albatross_, ready, as he knew, for an immediate aerial journey. His own knowledge of the mechanism of an air-ship, though not complete, was now sufficient, or, at any rate, it must be trusted. The boat was rather smaller than the _Bladud_, and in some respects contained improvements. A swift examination of the machinery satisfied him that the _Albatross_ was fit for flight. Hurrying up the steps he called Zenobia. She came to him obediently and instantly, calmness restored to her, and in her look a ready submission to all that he thought best. "Will you trust yourself to me?" he asked very tenderly, taking her hand. "The boat is ready. I think you will be safe." "I trust you in all things," she answered. "I am ready." He led her down the steps into the garden and helped her to her seat on the stern-bench of the _Albatross_. "You can steer?" he asked. "Yes, if you direct me." "All's ready, then. Keep her before the wind. Now, up and away!" He himself stepped into the boat and immediately switched on the motive power, adjusting the gear to suit the plans he had already formed. The _Albatross_ rose steadily into the air, then, gathering speed in a few rapid circles, began like some huge bird to wing her flight from the dread scene of the catastrophe. Behind them as they sped upon their way arose another violent detonation. Suddenly the clouded air was rent with vivid lightning, and this revealed the falling pinnacles of the Abbey Church. Then, as the thunder crashed above their heads, Linton beheld a vast and fiery chasm open in the labouring hill. Out of its lurid depths the waters of Sul leaped upwards in a mighty column, a fountain, as it were, of liquid fire. Then darkness settled on the scene, and all was still. The End. _BY THE SAME AUTHOR._ The Devil's Peepshow. _By the Author of "A Time of Terror."_ Morning Post.--"_The Devil's Peepshow_ is a remarkable book.... Its interest is never in doubt.... The causeries of this little company afford just those opportunities for political criticisms and shrewd moralising in which the author is singularly felicitous.... But the political lessons are not framed in epigram alone.... The delightful and erudite essay on the 'Weird of the Wanderer' is, perhaps, the best thing in the book, and strikes the undercurrent of mysticism with fine suggestiveness.... Whoever the author is, he is a man of nice penetration, and a philosopher worth listening to." Westminster Review. "Love and politics in equal proportions form the main ingredients of _The Devil's Peepshow_, ... and the lurid title ... serves as a fitting preliminary to the series of sensational episodes that make up this story with an unmistakable purpose." Liverpool Daily Post. "The volume is as thrilling as its predecessor.... The central theme of the story, that of a strong man of high qualities and noble ambitions, who falls a victim to the lures of an enchantress, is well developed. The author has force of style." Irish Times.--"The most impressive passages are those regarding the unfortunate position of some of the middle classes." Yorkshire Dally Post.--" ... it is a very up-to-date story of London Society during the season 1906, in which all the prominent politicians and personages of the day take part.... The novel is, however, no mere sensational melodrama, for the author makes it the medium for expressing very freely his ideas on politics and religion, which are by no means complimentary to the present Government, whose individual members he ridicules unsparingly and not without power ... the very strength of the contrast gives it relish." A TIME OF TERROR (Second Edition). Evening Standard.--"A politico-social romance of London and England--prophetic, of course, sensational and thrilling." Scotchman.--"Truly a time of terror, and the anonymous author has a clever enough pen with which to expose the vices--some of them real enough--of the opening years of the twentieth century." Outlook.--"The story of a man's revenge against a nation, our own. After war and internal anarchy, the capture of the Kaiser and the death of the avenger ends with a national thanksgiving. Very eventful." The Tribune.--"Whatever the cause, the occurrences are certainly terrible; ... beside the lurid vision, enormous in range and horrifying in nature, the accumulated sensations of a score of 'shilling shockers' pale into insignificance.... The book is written with much spirit." Yorkshire Post.--"The details are worked out so cleverly that there is a thrill on nearly every page. This is the work, one would say, of a practised writer, and the lover of sensational literature should not omit to read it." Literary World.--"This is a well-written, and in many respects a powerful story.... There are many sensational scenes, and plentiful satire of the social and political world of to-day." Aberdeen Free Press.--"The unaffectedly hair-raising title is indeed a fitting preliminary to a series of as startling episodes as have stirred the body corporate of English fiction for many a day.... The whole book is, it is true, sensationalism, but it is sensationalism with a purpose.... Some passages contain a fine plea for the Christian faith. It is a most original book, and at its lowest value an excellent entertainment." Newcastle Daily Journal.--"_A Time of Terror_ is original in conception and vividly effective in development. Its author is sure to be heard of again, and a later work from his pen will be eagerly awaited." Third (Sixpenny) Edition now on Sale. HURST & BLACKETT, Ltd. 
35687	----	+-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Note: | | | | Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original | | document have been preserved. | | | | Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For | | a complete list, please see the end of this document. | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------+ HISTORY OF AMERICAN SOCIALISMS. by JOHN HUMPHREY NOYES. * * * * * This is an exact reprint of the scarce 1870 edition This edition Limited to 500 Copies * * * * * PREFACE. The object of this book is to help the study of Socialism by the inductive method. It is, first and chiefly, a collection of facts; and the attempts at interpretation and generalization which are interspersed, are secondary and not intentionally dogmatic. It is certainly high time that Socialists should begin to take lessons from experience; and for this purpose, that they should chasten their confidence in flattering theories, and turn their attention to actual events. This country has been from the beginning, and especially for the last forty years, a laboratory in which Socialisms of all kinds have been experimenting. It may safely be assumed that Providence has presided over the operations, and has taken care to make them instructive. The disasters of Owenism and Fourierism have not been in vain; the successes of the Shakers and Rappites have not been set before us for nothing. We may hope to learn something from every experiment. The author, having had unusual advantages for observing the Socialistic movements, and especial good fortune in obtaining collections of observations made by others, has deemed it his duty to devote a year to the preparation of this history. As no other systematic account of American Socialisms exists, the facts here collected, aside from any interpretation of them, may be valuable to the student of history, and entertaining to the general reader. The present issue may be considered a proof-sheet, as carefully corrected as it can be by individual, vigilance. It is hoped that it will call out from experts in Socialism and others, corrections and additions that will improve it for future editions. _Wallingford, Conn., December, 1869._ CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAGE I. INTRODUCTION 1 II. BIRDS-EYE VIEW 10 III. THEORY OF NATIONAL EXPERIENCE 21 IV. NEW HARMONY 30 V. INQUEST ON NEW HARMONY 44 VI. YELLOW SPRINGS COMMUNITY 59 VII. NASHOBA 66 VIII. SEVEN EPITAPHS 73 IX. OWEN'S GENERAL CAREER 81 X. CONNECTING LINKS 93 XI. CHANNING'S BROOK FARM 102 XII. HOPEDALE 119 XIII. THE RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES 133 XIV. THE NORTHAMPTON ASSOCIATION 154 XV. THE SKANEATELES COMMUNITY 161 XVI. SOCIAL ARCHITECTS 181 XVII. FUNDAMENTALS OF SOCIALISM 193 XVIII. LITERATURE OF FOURIERISM 200 XIX. THE PERSONNEL OF FOURIERISM 211 XX. THE SYLVANIA ASSOCIATION 233 XXI. OTHER PENNSYLVANIA EXPERIMENTS 251 XXII. THE VOLCANIC DISTRICT 267 XXIII. THE CLARKSON PHALANX 278 XXIV. THE SODUS BAY PHALANX 286 XXV. OTHER NEW YORK EXPERIMENTS 296 XXVI. THE MARLBORO ASSOCIATION 309 XXVII. PRAIRIE HOME COMMUNITY 316 XXVIII. THE TRUMBULL PHALANX 328 XXIX. THE OHIO PHALANX 354 XXX. THE CLERMONT PHALANX 366 XXXI. THE INTEGRAL PHALANX 377 XXXII. THE ALPHADELPHIA PHALANX 388 XXXIII. LA GRANGE PHALANX 397 XXXIV. OTHER WESTERN EXPERIMENTS 404 XXXV. THE WISCONSIN PHALANX 411 XXXVI. THE NORTH AMERICAN PHALANX 449 XXXVII. LIFE AT THE NORTH AMERICAN 468 XXXVIII. END OF THE NORTH AMERICAN 487 XXXIX. CONVERSION OF BROOK FARM 512 XL. BROOK FARM AND FOURIERISM 529 XLI. BROOK FARM AND SWEDENBORGIANISM 537 XLII. THE END OF BROOK FARM 551 XLIII. THE SPIRITUALIST COMMUNITIES 564 XLIV. THE BROCTON COMMUNITY 577 XLV. THE SHAKERS 595 XLVI. THE ONEIDA COMMUNITY 614 XLVII. REVIEW AND RESULTS 646 XLVIII. TWO SCHOOLS OF SOCIALISM 658 AMERICAN SOCIALISMS. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. Many years ago, when a branch of the Oneida Community lived at Willow Place in Brooklyn, near New York, a sombre pilgrim called there one day, asking for rest and conversation. His business proved to be the collecting of memoirs of socialistic experiments. We treated him hospitably, and gave him the information he sought about our Community. He repeated his visit several times in the course of some following years, and finally seemed to take a very friendly interest in our experiment. Thus we became acquainted with him, and also in a measure with the work he had undertaken, which was nothing less than a history of all the Associations and Communities that have lived and died in this country, within the last thirty or forty years. This man's name was A.J. Macdonald. We remember that he was a person of small stature, with black hair and sharp eyes. He had a benevolent air, but seemed a little sad. We imagined that the sad scenes he had encountered while looking after the stories of so many short-lived Communities, had given him a tinge of melancholy. He was indeed the "Old Mortality" of Socialism, wandering from grave to grave, patiently deciphering the epitaphs of defunct "Phalanxes." We learned from him that he was a Scotchman by birth, and a printer by trade; that he was an admirer and disciple of Owen, and came from the "old country" some ten years before, partly to see and follow the fortunes of his master's experiments in Socialism: but finding Owenism in ruins and Fourierism going to ruin, he took upon himself the task of making a book, that should give future generations the benefit of the lessons taught by these attempts and failures. His own attempt was a failure. He gathered a huge mass of materials, wrote his preface, and then died in New York of the cholera. Our record of his last visit is dated February, 1854. Ten years later our attention was turned to the project of writing a history of American Socialisms. Such a book seemed to be a want of the times. We remembered Macdonald, and wished that by some chance we could obtain his collections. But we had lost all traces of them, and the hope of recovering them from the chaos of the great city where he died, seemed chimerical. Nevertheless some of our associates, then in business on Broadway, commenced inquiring at the printing offices, and soon found acquaintances of Macdonald, who directed them to the residence of his brother-in-law in the city. There, to our joyful surprise, we found the collections we were in search of, lying useless except as mementos, and a gentleman in charge of them who was willing we should take them and use them as we pleased. On examining our treasure, we found it to be a pile of manuscripts, of letter-paper size and three inches thick, with printed scraps from newspapers and pamphlets interspersed. All was in the loosest state of disorder; but we strung the leaves together, paged them, and made an index of their contents. The book thus extemporized has been our companion, as the reader will see, in the ensuing history. The number of its pages is seven hundred and forty-seven. The index has the names of sixty-nine Associative experiments, beginning with Brook Farm and ending with the Shakers. The memoirs are of various lengths, from a mere mention to a narrative of nearly a hundred pages. Among them are notices of leading Socialists, such as Owen, Fourier, Frances Wright, &c. The collection was in no fit condition for publication; but it marked out a path for us, and gave us a mass of material that has been very serviceable, and probably could not elsewhere be found. The breadth and thoroughness of Macdonald's intention will be seen in the following circular which, in the prosecution of his enterprise, he sent to many leading Socialists. PRINTED LETTER OF INQUIRY. "_New York, March, 1851._ "I have been for some time engaged in collecting the necessary materials for a book, to be entitled '_The Communities of the United States_,' in which I propose giving a brief account of all the social and co-operative experiments that have been made in this country--their origin, principles, and progress; and, particularly, the causes of their success or failure. "I have reason to believe, from long experience among social reformers, that such a work is needed, and will be both useful and interesting. It will serve as a guide to all future experiments, showing what has already been done; like a light-house, pointing to the rocks on which so many have been wrecked, or to the haven in which the few have found rest. It will give facts and statistics to be depended upon, gathered from the most authentic sources, and forming a collection of interesting narratives. It will show the errors of enthusiasts, and the triumphs of the cool-thinking; the disappointments of the sanguine, and the dear-bought experience of many social adventurers. It will give mankind an idea of the labor of body and mind that has been expended to realize a better state of society; to substitute a social and co-operative state for a competitive one; a system of harmony, for one of discord. "To insure the truthfulness of the work, I propose to gather most of my information from individuals who have actually been engaged in the experiments of which I treat. With this object in view, I take the liberty to address you, asking your aid in carrying out my plan. I request you to give me an account of the experiment in which you were engaged at ----. For instance, I require such information as the following questions would call forth, viz: "1. Who originated it, or how was it originated? "2. What were its principles and objects? "3. What were its means in land and money? "4. Was all the property put into common stock? "5. What was the number of persons in the Association? "6. What were their trades, occupations and amount of skill? "7. Their education, natural intelligence and morality? "8. What religious belief, and if any, how preached and practised? "9. How were members admitted? was there any standard by which to judge them, or any property qualification necessary? "10. Was there a written or printed constitution or laws? if so can you send me a copy? "11. Were pledges, fines, oaths, or any coercive means used? "12. When and where did the Association commence its experiment? Please describe the locality; what dwellings and other conveniences were upon it; how many persons it could accommodate; how many persons lived on the spot; how much land was cultivated; whether there were plenty of provisions; &c., &c. "13. How was the land obtained? Was it free or mortgaged? Who owned it? "14. Were the new circumstances of the associates superior or inferior to the circumstances they enjoyed previous to their associating? "15. Did they obtain aid from without? "16. What particular person or persons took the lead? "17. Who managed the receipts and expenditures, and were they honestly managed? "18. Did the associates agree or disagree, and in what? "19. How long did they keep together? "20. When and why did they break up? State the causes, direct and indirect. "21. If successful, what were the causes of success? "Any other information relating to the experiment, that you may consider useful and interesting, will be acceptable. By such information you will confer a great favor, and materially assist me in what I consider a good undertaking. "The work I contemplate will form a neat 12mo. volume, of from 200 to 280 pages, such as Lyell's 'Tour in the United States,' or Gorrie's 'Churches and Sects of the United States.' It will be published in New York and London at the lowest possible price, say, within one dollar; and it is my intention, if possible, to illustrate the work with views of Communities now in progress, or of localities rendered interesting by having once been the battle grounds of the new system against the old. "Please make known the above, and favor me with the names and addresses of persons who would be willing to assist me with such information as I require. "Trusting that I shall receive the same kind aid from you that I have already received from so many of my friends, "I remain, very respectfully, yours, "A.J. MACDONALD." Among the manuscripts in Macdonald's collection are many that were evidently written in response to this circular. Many others were written by himself as journals or reports of his own visits to various Associations. We have reason to believe that he spent most of his time from his arrival in this country in 1842 till his death in 1854, in pilgrimages to every Community, and even to every grave of a Community, that he could hear of, far and near. He had done his work when he died. His collection is nearly exhaustive in the extent of its survey. Very few Associations of any note are overlooked. And he evidently considered it ready for the press; for most of his memoirs are endorsed with the word "_Complete_," and with some methodical directions to the printer. He had even provided the illustrations promised in his circular. Among his manuscripts are the following pictures: A pencil sketch and also a small wood engraving of the buildings of the North American Phalanx; A wood engraving of the first mansion house of the Oneida Community; A pencil sketch of the village of Modern Times; A view in water-colors of the domain and cabin of the Clermont Phalanx; A pencil sketch of the Zoar settlement; Four wood engravings of Shaker scenes; two of them representing dances; one, a kneeling scene; and one, a "Mountain meeting;" also a pencil sketch of Shaker dwellings at Watervliet; A portrait of Robert Owen in wood; A very pretty view of New Harmony in India ink; A wood-cut of one of Owen's imaginary palaces; Two portraits of Frances Wright in wood; one representing her as she was in her prime of beauty, and the other, as she was in old age; A fine steel engraving of Fourier. In the following preface, which was found among Macdonald's manuscripts, and which is dated a few months before his death, we have a last and sure signal that he considered his collection finished: PREFACE TO THE BOOK THAT WAS NEVER PUBLISHED. "I performed the task of collecting the materials which form this volume, because I thought I was doing good. At one time, sanguine in anticipating brilliant results from Communism, I imagined mankind better than they are, and that they would speedily practise those principles which I considered so true. But the experience of years is now upon me; I have mingled with 'the world,' seen _stern reality_, and now am anxious to do as much as in me lies, to make known to the many thousands who look for a 'better state' than this on earth as well as in heaven, the amount (as it were at a glance) of the labors which have been and are now being performed in this country to realize that 'better state'. It may help to waken dreamers, to guide lost wanderers, to convince skeptics, to re-assure the hopeful; it may serve the uses of Statesmen and Philosophers, and interest the general reader; but it is most desirable that it should increase the charity of all those who may please to examine it, when they see that it was for Humanity, in nearly all instances, that these things were done. "Of necessity the work is imperfect, because of the difficulty in obtaining information on such subjects; but the attempt, whatever may be its result, should not be put off, since there is reason to believe that if not now collected, many particulars of the various movements would be forever lost. "It remains for a future historian to continue the labor which I have thus superficially commenced; for the day has not yet arrived when it can be said that Communism or Association has ceased to exist; and it is possible yet, in the progress of things, that man will endeavor to cure his social diseases by some such means; and a future history may contain the results of more important experiments than have ever yet been attempted. "I here return my thanks to the fearless, confiding, and disinterested friends, who so freely shared with me what little they possessed, to assist in the completion of this work. I name them not, but rejoice in their assistance. A.J. MACDONALD. "_New York City, 1854._" The tone of this preface indicates that Macdonald was discouraged. The effect of his book, if he had lived to publish it, would have been to aggravate the re-action against Socialism which followed the collapse of Fourierism. We hope to make a better use of his materials. It should not be imagined that we are about to edit his work. A large part of his collections we shall omit, as irrelevant to our purpose. That part which we use will often be reconstructed and generally condensed. Much of our material will be obtained from other sources. The plan and theory of this history are our own, and widely different from any that Macdonald would have been willing to indorse. With these qualifications, we still acknowledge a large debt of gratitude to him and to the Providence that gave us his collections. CHAPTER II. BIRDS-EYE VIEW OF THE EXPERIMENTS. A general survey of the Socialistic field will be useful, before entering on the memoirs of particular Associations; and for this purpose we will now spread before us the entire Index of Macdonald's collections, adding to it a schedule of the number of pages which he gave to the several Associations, and the dates of their beginning and ending, so far as we have been able to find them. Many of the transitory Associations, it will be seen, "made no sign" when they died. The continuous Communities, such as the Shakers, of course have no terminal date. INDEX OF MACDONALD'S COLLECTION. Associations, &c. No. of Pages. Dates. Alphadelphia Phalanx 7 1843-6. Auxiliary Branch of the Association of All Classes of All Nations 3 1836. Blue Spring Community 1 1826-7. Brazilian Experiment 1 1841. Brook Farm 20 1842-7. Brooke's Experiment 5 1844. Brotherhood of the Union 1 1850-1. Bureau Co. Phalanx 1 1843. Cincinnati Brotherhood 5 1845-8. Clarkson Industrial Association 11 1844. Clermont Phalanx 13 1844-7. Colony of Bethel 11 1852. Columbian Phalanx 1 1845. Commonwealth Society 1 1819. Communia Working Men's League 1 1850. Convention at Boston of the Friends of Association 2 1843. Convention in New York for organizing an Industrial Congress 1 1845. Co-operating Society of Alleghany Co. 1 1825. Coxsackie Community 2 1826-7. Davis' Harmonial Brotherhood 2 1851. Dunkers 4 1724. Ebenezer Community 5 1843. Emigration Society, 2d Section 4 1843. Forrestville Community 1 1825. Fourier, Life of 3 Franklin Community 1 1826. Garden Grove 1 1848. Goose Pond Community 1 1843. Grand Prairie Community 2 1847. Grand Prairie Harmonial Institute 8 1853. Guatemala Experiment 1 1843. Haverstraw Community 3 1826. Hopedale Community 13 1842. Hunt's Experiment of Equality 12 1843-7. Icaria 82 1849 Integral Phalanx 5 1845. Jefferson County Industrial Association 3 1843. Kendal Community 4 1826. Lagrange Phalanx 2 1843. Leraysville Phalanx 5 1844. Macluria 7 1826. Marlboro Association 10 1841. McKean County Association 1 1843. Modern Times 3 1851. Moorhouse Union 6 1843. Moravians, or United Brethren 9 1745. Murray, Orson S. 3 Nashoba 14 1825-8. New Lanark 10 1799. New Harmony 60 1825-7. North American Phalanx 38 1843-55. Northampton Association 7 1842. Ohio Phalanx 11 1844-5. Oneida Community 27 1847. One-mentian Community 6 1843. Ontario Phalanx 1 1844. Owen, Robert 25 Prairie Home Community 23 1844. Raritan Bay Union 5 1853. Sangamon Phalanx 1 1845. Shakers 93 1776. Skaneateles Community 18 1843-6. Social Reform Unity 23 1842. Sodus Bay Phalanx 3 1844. Spiritual Community at Mountain Cove 3 1853. Spring Farm Association 3 1846-9. St. Louis Reform Association 1 1851. Sylvania Association 25 1843-5. Trumbull Phalanx 13 1844-7. United Germans 2 1827. Venezuelan Experiment 25 1844-6. Warren, Josiah, Time Store &c. 11 1842. Washtenaw Phalanx 1 1843. Wisconsin Phalanx 21 1844-50. Wright, Frances 9 Wilkinson, Jemima, and her Community 5 1780. Yellow Springs Community 1 1825. Zoar 8 1819. On general survey of the matter contained in this index, we may begin to sort it in the following manner: First we will lay aside the antique _religious_ Associations, such as the Dunkers, Moravians, Zoarites, &c. We count at least seven of these, which do not properly belong to the modern socialistic movement, or even to American life. Having their origin in the old world, and most of them in the last century, and remaining without change, they exist only on the outskirts of general society. Next we put out of account the _foreign_ Associations, such as the Brazilian and Venezuelan experiments. With these may be classed those of the Icarians and some others, which, though within the United States, are, or were, really colonies of foreigners. We see six of this sort in the index. Thirdly, we dismiss two or three Spiritualistic attempts that are named in the list; first, because they never attained to the dignity of Associations; and secondly, because they belonged to a later movement than that which Macdonald undertook to record. The social experiments of the Spiritualists should be treated by themselves, as the _sequelæ_ of the Fourier excitement of Macdonald's time. The Associations that are left after these exclusions, naturally fall into two groups, viz.; those of the OWEN MOVEMENT, and those of the FOURIER MOVEMENT. Robert Owen came to this country and commenced his experiments in Communism in 1824. This was the beginning of a national excitement, which had a course somewhat like that of a religious revival or a political campaign. This movement seems to have culminated in 1826; and, grouped around or near that year, we find in Macdonald's list, the names of eleven Communities. These were not all strictly Owenite Communities, but probably all owed their birth to the general excitement that followed Owen's labors, and may therefore, properly be classified as belonging to the Owen movement. Fourierism was introduced into this country by Albert Brisbane and Horace Greeley in 1842, and then commenced another great national movement similar to that of Owenism, but far more universal and enthusiastic. We consider the year 1843 the focal period of this social revival; and around that year or following it within the forties, we find the main group of Macdonald's Associations. Thirty-four of the list may clearly be referred to this epoch. Many, and perhaps most of them, never undertook to carry into practice Fourier's theories in full; and some of them would disclaim all affiliation with Fourierism; but they all originated in a common excitement, and that excitement took its rise from the publications of Brisbane and Greeley. Confining ourselves, for the present, to these two groups of Associations, belonging respectively to the Owen movement of 1826 and the Fourier movement of 1843, we will now give a brief statistical account of each Association; i.e., all we can find in Macdonald's collection, on the following points: 1, Locality; 2, Number of members; 3, Amount of land; 4, Amount of debt; 5, Duration. We give the amount of land instead of any other measurement of capital, because all and more than all the capital of the Associations was generally invested in land, and because it is difficult to distinguish, in most cases, between the cash capital that was actually paid in, and that which was only subscribed or talked about. As to the reliability of these statistics, we can only say that we have patiently picked them out, one by one, like scattered bones, from Macdonald's heap. Though they may be faulty in some details, we are confident that the general idea they give of the attempts and experiences of American Socialists, will not be far from the truth. _Experiments of the Owen Epoch._ Blue Spring Community; Indiana; no particulars, except that it lasted "but a short time." Co-operative Society; Pennsylvania; no particulars. Coxsackie Community; New York; capital "small;" "very much in debt;" duration between 1 and 2 years. Forrestville Community; Indiana; "over 60 members;" 325 acres of land; duration more than a year. Franklin Community; New York; no particulars. Haverstraw Community; New York; about 80 members; 120 acres; debt $12,000; duration 5 months. Kendal Community; Ohio; 200 members; 200 acres; duration about 2 years. Macluria; Indiana; 1200 acres; duration about 2 years. New Harmony; Indiana; 900 members; 30,000 acres, worth $150,000; duration nearly 3 years. Nashoba; Tennessee; 15 members; 2,000 acres; duration about 3 years. Yellow Spring Community; Ohio; 75 to 100 families; duration 3 months. _Experiments of the Fourier Epoch._ Alphadelphia Phalanx; Michigan; 400 or 500 members; 2814 acres; duration 2 years and 9 months. Brook Farm; Massachusetts; 115 members; 200 acres; duration 5 years. Brooke's experiment; Ohio; few members; no further particulars. Bureau Co. Phalanx; Illinois; small; no particulars. Clarkson Industrial Association; New York; 420 members; 2000 acres; duration from 6 to 9 months. Clermont Phalanx; Ohio; 120 members; 900 acres; debt $19,000; duration 2 years or more. Columbian Phalanx; Ohio; no particulars. Garden Grove; Iowa; no particulars. Goose Pond Community; Pennsylvania; 60 members; duration a few months. Grand Prairie Community; Ohio; no particulars. Hopedale; Massachusetts; 200 members; 500 acres; duration not stated, but commonly reported to be 17 or 18 years. Integral Phalanx; Illinois; 30 families; 508 acres; duration 17 months. Jefferson Co. Industrial Association; New York; 400 members; 1200 acres of land; duration a few months. Lagrange Phalanx; Indiana; 1000 acres; no further particulars. Leraysville Phalanx; Pennsylvania; 40 members; 300 acres; duration 8 months. Marlboro Association; Ohio; 24 members; had "a load of debt;" duration nearly 4 years. McKean Co. Association; Pennsylvania; 30,000 acres; no further particulars. Moorhouse Union; New York; 120 acres; duration "a few months." North American Phalanx; New Jersey; 112 members; 673 acres; debt $17,000; duration 12 years. Northampton Association; Massachusetts; 130 members; 500 acres of land; debt $40,000; duration 4 years. Ohio Phalanx; 100 members; 2,200 acres; deeply in debt; duration 10 months. One-mentian (meaning probably one-mind) Community; Pennsylvania; 800 acres; duration one year. Ontario Phalanx; New York; brief duration. Prairie Home Community; Ohio; 500 acres; debt broke it up; duration one year. Raritan Bay Union; New Jersey; few members; 268 acres. Sangamon Phalanx; Illinois; no particulars. Skaneateles Community; New York; 150 members; 354 acres; debt $10,000; duration 2-1/2 years. Social Reform Unity; Pennsylvania; 20 members; 2,000 acres; debt $2,400; duration about 10 months. Sodus Bay Phalanx; New York; 300 members; 1,400 acres; duration a "short time." Spring Farm Association; Wisconsin; 10 families; duration 3 years. Sylvania Association; Pennsylvania; 145 members; 2394 acres; debt $7,900; duration nearly 2 years. Trumbull Phalanx; Ohio; 1500 acres; duration 2-1/2 years. Washtenaw Phalanx; Michigan; no particulars. Wisconsin Phalanx; 32 families; 1,800 acres; duration 6 years. _Recapitulation and Comments._ 1. _Localities._ The Owen group were distributed among the States as follows: in Indiana, 4; in New York, 3; in Ohio, 2; in Pennsylvania, 1; in Tennessee, 1. The Fourier group were located as follows: in Ohio, 8; in New York, 6; in Pennsylvania, 6; in Massachusetts, 3; in Illinois, 3; in New Jersey, 2; in Michigan, 2; in Wisconsin, 2; in Indiana, 1; in Iowa, 1. Indiana had the greatest number in the first group, and the least in the second. New England was not represented in the Owen group; and only by three Associations in the Fourier group; and those three were all in Massachusetts. The southern states were represented by only one Association--that of Nashoba, in the Owen group--and that was little more than an eleemosynary attempt of Frances Wright to civilize the negroes. The two groups combined were distributed as follows: in Ohio, 10; in New York, 9; in Pennsylvania, 7; in Indiana, 5; in Massachusetts, 3; in Illinois, 3; in New Jersey, 2; in Michigan, 2; in Wisconsin, 2; in Tennessee, 1; in Iowa, 1. 2. _Number of members._ The figures in our epitome (reckoning five persons to a family when families are mentioned), give an aggregate of 4,801 members: but these belong to only twenty-five Associations. The numbers of the remaining twenty are not definitely reported. The average of those reported is about 192 to an Association. Extending this average to the rest, we have a total of 8,641. The numbers belonging to single Associations vary from 15 to 900; but in a majority of cases they were between 100 and 200. 3. _The amount of land_ reported is enormous. Averaging it as we did in the case of the number of members, we make a grand total of 136,586 acres, or about 3,000 acres to each Association! This is too much for any probable average. We will leave out as exceptional, the 60,000 acres reported as belonging to New Harmony and the McKean Co. Association. Then averaging as before, we have a grand total of 44,624 acres, or about 1,000 acres to each Association. Judging by our own experience we incline to think that this fondness for land, which has been the habit of Socialists, had much to do with their failures. Farming is about the hardest and longest of all roads to fortune: and it is the kind of labor in which there is the most uncertainty as to modes and theories, and of course the largest chance for disputes and discords in such complex bodies as Associations. Moreover the lust for land leads off into the wilderness, "out west," or into by-places, far away from railroads and markets; whereas Socialism, if it is really ahead of civilization, ought to keep near the centers of business, and at the front of the general march of improvement. We should have advised the Phalanxes to limit their land-investments to a minimum, and put their strength as soon as possible into some form of manufacture. Almost any kind of a factory would be better than a farm for a Community nursery. We find hardly a vestige of this policy in Macdonald's collections. The saw-mill is the only form of mechanism that figures much in his reports. It is really ludicrous to see how uniformly an old saw-mill turns up in connection with each Association, and how zealously the brethren made much of it; but that is about all they attempted in the line of manufacturing. Land, land, land, was evidently regarded by them as the mother of all gain and comfort. Considering how much they must have run in debt for land, and how little profit they got from it, we may say of them almost literally, that they were "wrecked by running aground." 4. _Amount of debt._ Macdonald's reports on this point are few and indefinite. The sums owed are stated for only seven of the Associations. They vary from $1,000 to $40,000. Five other Associations are reported as "very much in debt," "deeply in debt," &c. The exact indebtedness of these and of the remaining thirty-three, is probably beyond the reach of history. But we have reason to think that nearly all of them bought, to begin with, a great deal more land than they paid for. This was the fashion of the socialistic schools and of the times. 5. _The duration_ of fourteen Associations is not reported; twelve lasted less than 1 year; two 1 year; four between 1 and 2 years; three 2 years; four between 2 and 3 years; one between 3 and 4 years; one 4 years; one 5 years; one 6 years; one 12 years, and one (it is said) 17 years. All died young, and most of them before they were two years old. CHAPTER III. THEORY OF NATIONAL EXPERIENCE. Now that our phenomena are fairly before us, a little speculation may be appropriate. One wants to know what position these experiments, which started so gaily and failed so soon, occupy in the history of this country and of the world; what relation they have to Christianity; what their meaning is in the great scheme of Providence. Students of Socialism and history must have some theory about their place and significance in the great whole of things. We have studied them somewhat in the circumspective way, and will devote a few pages to our theory about them. It will at least correct any impression that we intend to treat them disrespectfully. And first we keep in mind a clear and wide distinction between the Associations and the movements from which they sprung. The word _movement_ is very convenient, though very indefinite. We use it to designate the wide-spread excitements and discussions about Socialism which led to the experiments we have epitomized. In our last chapter we incidentally compared the socialistic movements of the Owen and Fourier epochs to religious revivals. We might now complete the idea, by comparing the Associations that issued from those movements, to churches that were organized in consequence of the revivals. A vast spiritual and intellectual excitement is one thing; and the _institutions_ that rise out of it are another. We must not judge the excitement by the institutions. We get but a very imperfect idea of the Owen and Fourier movements from the short-lived experiments whose remains are before us in Macdonald's collections. In the first place Macdonald, faithful as he was, did not discover all the experiments that were made during those movements. We remember some that are not named in his manuscripts. And in the next place the numbers engaged in the practical attempts were very small, in comparison with the masses that entered into the enthusiasm of the general movements and abandoned themselves to the idea of an impending social revolution. The eight thousand and six hundred that we found by averaging Macdonald's list, might probably be doubled to represent the census of the obscure unknown attempts, and then multiplied by ten to cover the outside multitudes that were converted to Socialism in the course of the Owen and Fourier revivals. Owen in 1824 stirred the very life of the nation with his appeals to Kings and Congresses, and his vast experiments at New Harmony. Think of his family of nine hundred members on a farm of thirty thousand acres! A magnificent beginning, that thrilled the world! The general movement was proportionate to this beginning; and though this great Community and all the little ones that followed it failed and disappeared in a few years, the movement did not cease. Owen and his followers--especially his son Robert Dale Owen and Frances Wright--continued to agitate the country with newspapers, public lectures, and "Fanny Wright societies," till their ideas actually got foot-hold and influence in the great Democratic party. The special enthusiasm for practical attempts at Association culminated in 1826, and afterwards subsided; but the excitement about Owen's ideas, which was really the Owen movement, reached its height after 1830; and the embers of it are in the heart of the nation to this day. On the other hand, Fourier (by proxy) started another national excitement in 1842. With young Brisbane for its cosmopolitan apostle, and a national newspaper, such as the _New York Tribune_ was, for its organ, this movement, like Owen's, could not be otherwise than national in its dimensions. We shall have occasion hereafter to show how vast and deep it was, and how poorly it is represented by the Phalanxes that figure in Macdonald's memoirs. Meanwhile let the reader consider that several of the men who were leaders in this excitement, were also leaders then and afterwards in the old Whig party; and he will have reason to conclude that Socialism, in its duplex form of Owenism and Fourierism, has touched and modified both of the party-sections and all departments of the national life. We must not think of the two great socialistic revivals as altogether heterogeneous and separate. Their partizans maintained theoretical opposition to each other; but after all the main idea of both was _the enlargement of home--the extension of family union beyond the little man-and-wife circle to large corporations_. In this idea the two movements were one; and this was the charming idea that caught the attention and stirred the enthusiasm of the American people. Owenism prepared the way for Fourierism. The same men, or at least the same sort of men that took part in the Owen movement, were afterward carried away by the Fourier enthusiasm. The two movements may, therefore, be regarded as one; and in that view, the period of the great American socialistic revival extends from 1824, through the final and overwhelming excitement of 1843, to the collapse of Fourierism after 1846. As a man who has passed through a series of passional excitements, is never the same being afterward, so we insist that these socialistic paroxysms have changed the heart of the nation; and that a yearning toward social reconstruction has become a part of the continuous, permanent, inner experience of the American people. The Communities and Phalanxes died almost as soon as they were born, and are now almost forgotten. But the spirit of Socialism remains in the life of the nation. It was discouraged and cast down by the failures of 1828 and 1846, and thus it learned salutary caution and self-control. But it lives still, as a hope watching for the morning, in thousands and perhaps millions who never took part in any of the experiments, and who are neither Owenites nor Fourierites, but simply Socialists without theory--believers in the possibility of a scientific and heavenly reconstruction of society. Thus our theory harmonizes Owenism with Fourierism, and regards them both as working toward the same end in American history. Now we will go a step further and attempt the reconciling of still greater repugnances. Since the war of 1812-15, the line of socialistic excitements lies parallel with the line of religious Revivals. Each had its two great leaders, and its two epochs of enthusiasm. Nettleton and Finney were to Revivals, what Owen and Fourier were to Socialism. Nettleton prepared the way for Finney, though he was opposed to him, as Owen prepared the way for Fourier. The enthusiasm in both movements had the same progression. Nettleton's agitation, like Owen's, was moderate and somewhat local. Finney, like Fourier, swept the nation as with a tempest. The Revival periods were a little in advance of those of Socialism. Nettleton commenced his labors in 1817, while Owen entered the field in 1824. Finney was at the height of his power in 1831-3, while Fourier was carrying all before him in 1842-3. Thus the movements were to a certain extent alternate. Opposed as they were to each other theologically--one being a movement of Bible men, and the other of infidels and liberals--they could not be expected to hold public attention simultaneously. But looking at the whole period from the end of the war in 1815 to the end of Fourierism after 1846, and allowing Revivals a little precedence over Socialism, we find the two lines of excitement parallel, and their phenomena wonderfully similar. As we have shown that the socialistic movement was national, so, if it were necessary, we might here show that the Revival movement was national. There was a time between 1831 and 1834 when the American people came as near to a surrender of all to the Kingdom of Heaven, as they came in 1843 to a socialistic revolution. The Millennium seemed as near in 1831, as Fourier's Age of Harmony seemed in 1843. And the final effect of Revivals was a hope watching for the morning, which remains in the life of the nation, side by side, nay identical with, the great hope of Socialism. And these movements--Revivalism and Socialism--opposed to each other as they may seem, and as they have been in the creeds of their partizans, are closely related in their essential nature and objects, and manifestly belong together in the scheme of Providence, as they do in the history of this nation. They are to each other as inner to outer--as soul to body--as life to its surroundings. The Revivalists had for their great idea the regeneration of the soul. The great idea of the Socialists was the regeneration of society, which is the soul's environment. These ideas belong together, and are the complements of each other. Neither can be successfully embodied by men whose minds are not wide enough to accept them both. In fact these two ideas, which in modern times are so wide apart, were present together in original Christianity. When the Spirit of truth pricked three thousand men to the heart and converted them on the day of Pentecost, its next effect was to resolve them into one family and introduce Communism of property. Thus the greatest of all Revivals was also the great inauguration of Socialism. Undoubtedly the Socialists will think we make too much of the Revival movement; and the Revivalists will think we make too much of the Socialistic movement; and the politicians will think we make too much of both, in assigning them important places in American history. But we hold that a man's deepest experiences are those of religion and love; and these are just the experiences in respect to which he is most apt to be ashamed, and most inclined to be silent. So the nation says but little, and tries to think that it thinks but little, about its Revivals and its Socialisms; but they are nevertheless the deepest and most interesting passages of its history, and worth more study as determinatives of character and destiny, than all its politics and diplomacies, its money matters and its wars. Doubtless the Revivalists and Socialists despise each other, and perhaps both will despise us for imagining that they can be reconciled. But we will say what we believe; and that is, that they have both failed in their attempts to bring heaven on earth, _because_ they despised each other, and would not put their two great ideas together. The Revivalists failed for want of regeneration of society, and the Socialists failed for want of regeneration of the heart. On the one hand the Revivalists needed daily meetings and continuous criticism to save and perfect their converts; and these things they could not have without a thorough reconstruction of domestic life. They tried the expedient of "protracted meetings," which was really a half-way attack on the fashion of the world; but society was too strong for them, and their half-measures broke down, as all half-measures must. What they needed was to convert their churches into unitary families, and put them into unitary homes, where daily meetings and continuous criticism are possible;--and behold, this is Socialism! On the other hand the Socialists, as often as they came together in actual attempts to realize their ideals, found that they were too selfish for close organization. The moan of Macdonald was, that after seeing the stern reality of the experiments, he lost hope, and was obliged to confess that he had "imagined mankind better than they are." This was the final confession of the leaders in the Associative experiments generally, from Owen to the last of the Fourierites; and this confession means, that Socialism needed for its complement, regeneration of the heart;--and behold, this is Revivalism! These discords and failures of the past surely have not been in vain. Perhaps Providence has carried forward its regenerative designs in two lines thus far, for the sake of the advantage of a "division of labor." While the Bible men have worked for the regeneration of the soul, the infidels and liberals have been busy on the problem of the reconstruction of society. Working apart and in enmity, perhaps they have accomplished more for final harmony than they could have done together. Even their failures when rightly interpreted, may turn to good account. They have both helped to plant in the heart of the nation an unfailing hope of the "good time coming." Their lines of labor, though we have called them parallel, must really be convergent; and we may hope that the next phase of national history will be that of Revivalism and Socialism harmonized, and working together for the Kingdom of Heaven. To complete our historical theory, we must mention in conclusion, one point of contrast between the Socialisms and the Revivals. _The Socialisms were imported from Europe; while the Revivals were American productions._ Owen was an Englishman, and Fourier was a Frenchman; but Nettleton and Finney were both Americans--both natives of Connecticut. In the comparison we confine ourselves to the period since the war of 1812, because the history of the general socialistic excitements in this country is limited to that period. But the Revivals have an anterior history, extending back into the earliest times of New England. The great American _system_ of Revivals, of which the Nettleton and Finney excitements were the continuation, was born in the first half of the last century, in central Massachusetts. Jonathan Edwards, whose life extended from 1703 to 1758, was the father of it. So that not only since the war of 1812, but before the Revolution of 1776, we find Revivalism, _as a system_, strictly an American production. We call the Owen and Fourier movements, _American_ Socialisms, because they were national in their dimensions, and American life chiefly was the subject of them. But looking at what may be called the _male_ element in the production of them, they were really European movements, propagated in this country. Nevertheless, if we take the view that Socialism and Revivalism are a unit in the design of Providence, one looking to the regeneration of externals and the other to the regeneration of internals, we may still call the entire movement American, as having Revivalism, which is American, for its inner life, though Socialism, the outer element, was imported from England and France. CHAPTER IV. NEW HARMONY. American Socialisms, as we have defined them and grouped their experiments, may be called _non-religious_ Socialisms. Several religious Communities flourished in this country before Owen's attempts, and have continued to flourish here since the collapse of Fourierism. But they were originally colonies of foreigners, and never were directly connected with movements that could be called national. Owen was the first Socialist that stirred the enthusiasm of the whole American people; and he was the first, so far as we know, who tried the experiment of a non-religious Community. And the whole series of experiments belonging to the two great groups of the Owen and Fourier epochs, followed in his footsteps. The exclusion of theology was their distinction and their boast. Our programme, limited as it is by its title to these national Socialisms, does not strictly include the religious Communities. Yet those Communities have played indirectly a very important part in the drama of American Socialisms, and will require considerable incidental attention as we proceed. In attempting to make out from Macdonald's collection an outline of Owen's great experiment at New Harmony (which was the prototype of all the Owen and Fourier experiments), we find ourselves at the outset quite unexpectedly dealing with a striking example of the relation between the religious and non-religious Communities. Owen did not build the village of New Harmony, nor create the improvements which prepared his 30,000 acres for his family of nine hundred. He bought them outright from a previous religious Community; and it is doubtful whether he would have ever gathered his nine hundred and made his experiment, if he had not found a place prepared for him by a sect of Christian Communists. Macdonald was an admirer, we might almost say a worshiper, of Owen. He gloats over New Harmony as the very Mecca of his devotion. There he spent his first eighteen months in this country. The finest picture in his collection is an elaborate India-ink drawing of the village. But he scarcely mentions the Rappites who built it. No separate account of them, such as he gives of the Shakers and Moravians, can be found in his manuscripts. This is an unaccountable neglect; for their pre-occupation of New Harmony and their transactions with Owen, must have thrust them upon his notice; and their history is intrinsically as interesting, to say the least, as that of any of the religious Communities. A glance at the history of the Rappites is in many ways indispensable, as an introduction to an account of Owen's New Harmony. We must therefore address ourselves to the task which Macdonald neglected. THE HARMONISTS. In the first years of the present century, old Würtemburg, a province always famous for its religious enthusiasms, was fermenting with excitement about the Millennium; and many of its enthusiasts were expecting the speedy personal advent of Christ. Among these George Rapp became a prominent preacher, and led forth a considerable sect into doctrines and ways that brought upon him and them severe persecutions. In 1803 he came to America to find a refuge for his flock. After due exploration he purchased 5000 acres of land in Butler Co., Pennsylvania, and commenced a settlement which he called Harmony. In the summer of 1804 two ship-loads of his disciples with their families--six hundred in all--came over the ocean and joined him. In 1805 the Society was formally organized as a Christian Community, on the model of the Pentecostal church. For a time their fare was poor and their work was hard. An evil eye from their neighbors was upon them. But they lived down calumny and suspicion by well-doing, and soon made the wilderness blossom around them like the rose. In 1807 they adopted the principle of celibacy; but in other respects they were far from being ascetics. Music, painting, sculpture, and other liberal arts flourished among them. Their museums and gardens were the wonder and delight of the region around them. In 1814, desiring warmer land and a better location for business, they sold all in Pennsylvania and removed to Indiana. On the banks of the Wabash they built a new village and again called it Harmony. Here they prospered more than ever, and their number increased to nearly a thousand. In 1824 they again became discontented with their location, on account of bad neighbors and malaria. Again they sold all, and returned to Pennsylvania; but not to their old home. They built their third and final village in Beaver Co, near Pittsburgh, and called it Economy. There they are to this day. They own railroads and oil wells and are reported to be millionaires of the unknown grade. In all their migrations from the old world to the new, from Pennsylvania to Indiana, and from Indiana back to Pennsylvania; in all their perils by persecutions, by false brethren, by pestilence, by poverty and wealth, their religion held them together, and their union gave them the strength that conquers prosperity. A notable example of what a hundred families can do when they have the wisdom of harmony, and fight the battle of life in a solid phalanx! A nobler "six hundred" than the famous dragoons of Balaklava! Such were the people who gave Robert Owen his first lessons in Communism, and sold him their home in Indiana. Ten of their best years they spent in building a village on the Wabash, not for themselves (as it turned out), but for a theater of the great infidel experiment. Rev. Aaron Williams, D.D., the historian to whom we are indebted for the facts of the above sketch, thus describes the negotiations and the transfer: "The Harmonists, when they began to think of returning to Pennsylvania, employed a certain Richard Flower, an Englishman, and a prominent member of an English settlement in their vicinity, to negotiate for a sale of their real estate, offering him five thousand dollars to find a purchaser. Flower went to England for this purpose, and hearing of Robert Owen's Community at New Lanark, he sought him out and succeeded in selling to him the town of Harmony, with all its houses, mills, factories and thirty thousand acres of land, for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. This was an immense sacrifice; but they were determined to leave the country, and they submitted to the loss. Having in the meantime made a purchase of their present lands in Pennsylvania, on the Ohio river, they built a steamboat and removed in detachments to their new and final place of settlement." Thus Owen, the first experimenter in non-religious Association, had substantially the ready-made material conditions which Fourier and his followers considered indispensable to success. We proceed now to give a sketch of the Owen experiment chiefly in Macdonald's words. When our own language occurs it is generally a condensation of his. OWEN'S NEW HARMONY. "Robert Owen came to the United States in December 1824, to complete the purchase of the settlement at Harmony. Mr. Rapp had sent an agent to England to dispose of the property, and Mr. Owen fell in with him there. In the spring of 1825 Mr. Owen closed the bargain. The property consisted of about 30,000 acres of land; nearly 3,000 acres under cultivation by the society; 19 detached farms; 600 acres of improved land occupied by tenants; some fine orchards; eighteen acres of full-bearing vines; and the village, which was a regularly laid out town, with streets running at right angles to each other, and a public square, around which were large brick edifices, built by the Rappites for churches, schools, and other public purposes." We can form some idea of the size of the village from the fact which we learn from Mr. Williams, that the Rappites, while at Harmony, numbered one thousand souls. It does not appear from Macdonald's account that Owen and his Community made any important additions to the village. "On the departure of the Rappites, persons favorable to Mr. Owen's views came flocking to New Harmony (as it was thenceforth called) from all parts of the country. Tidings of the new social experiment spread far and wide; and, although it has been denied, yet it is undoubtedly true, that Mr. Owen in his public lectures invited the 'industrious and well disposed of all nations' to emigrate to New Harmony. The consequence was, that in the short space of six weeks from the commencement of the experiment, a population of eight hundred persons was drawn together, and in October 1825, the number had increased to nine hundred." As to the character of this population, Macdonald insists that it was "as good as it could be under the circumstances," and he gives the names of "many intelligent and benevolent individuals who were at various times residents at New Harmony." But he admits that there were some "black sheep" in the flock. "It is certain," he says, "that there was a proportion of needy and idle persons, who crowded in to avail themselves of Mr. Owen's liberal offer; and that they did their share of work more in the line of _destruction_ than _construction_." _Constitution No. 1._ On the 27th of April 1825, Mr. Owen instituted a sort of provisional government. In an address to the people in New Harmony Hall, he informed them, "that he had bought that property, and had come there to introduce the practice of the new views; but he showed them the impossibility that persons educated as they were, should change at once from an irrational to a rational system of society, and the necessity for a 'half-way house,' in which to be prepared for the new system." Whereupon he tendered them a _Constitution_, of which we find no definite account, except that it was not fully Communistic, and was to hold the people in probationary training three years, under the title of the _Preliminary Society of New Harmony_. "After these proceedings Mr. Owen left New Harmony for Europe, and the Society was managed by the _Preliminary Committee_.(!)" We may imagine, each one for himself, what the nine hundred did while Mr. Owen was away. Macdonald compiled from the _New Harmony Gazette_ a very rapid but evidently defective account of the state of things in this important interval. He says nothing about the work on the 30,000 acres, but speaks of various minor businesses as "doing well." The only manufactures that appear to have "exceeded consumption" were those of soap and glue. A respectable apothecary "dispensed medicines without charge," and "the store supplied the inhabitants with all necessaries"--probably at Mr. Owen's expense. Education was considered "public property," and one hundred and thirty children were schooled, boarded and clothed from the public funds--probably at Mr. Owen's expense. Amusements flourished. The Society had a band of music; Tuesday evenings were appropriated to balls; Friday evenings to concerts--both in the old Rappite church. There was no provision for religious worship. Five military companies, "consisting of infantry, artillery, riflemen, veterans and fusileers," did duty from time to time on the public square. _Constitution No. 2._ "Mr. Owen returned to New Harmony on the 12th of January, 1826, and soon after the members of the Preliminary Society held a convention, and adopted a constitution of a Community, entitled _The New Harmony Community of Equality_. Thus in less than a year, instead of three years as Mr. Owen had proposed, the 'half-way house' came to an end, and actual Communism commenced. A few of the members, who, on account of a difference of opinions, did not sign the new constitution, formed a second Community on the New Harmony estate about two miles from the town, in friendly connection with the first." The new government instituted by Mr. Owen, was to be in the hands of an _Executive Council_, subject at all times to the direction of the Community; and six gentlemen were appointed to this function. But Macdonald says: "Difficulties ensued in organizing the new Community. It appears that the plan of government by executive council would not work, and that the members were unanimous in calling upon Mr. Owen to take the sole management, judging from his experience that he was the only man who could do so. This call Mr. Owen accepted, and we learn that soon after general satisfaction and individual contentment took the place of suspense and uncertainty." This was in fact the inauguration of _Constitution No. 3._ "In March the _Gazette_ says that under the indefatigable attention of Mr. Owen, order had been introduced into every department of business, and the farm presented a scene of active and steady industry. The Society was rapidly becoming a Community of Equality. The streets no longer exhibited groups of idle talkers, but each one was busily engaged in the occupation he had chosen. The public meetings, instead of being the arenas for contending orators, were changed into meetings of business, where consultations were held and measures adopted for the comfort of all the members of the Community. "In April there was a disturbance in the village on account of negotiations that were going on for securing the estate as private property. Some persons attempted to divide the town into several societies. Mr. Owen would not agree to this, and as he had the power, he made a selection, and by solemn examination constituted a _nucleus_ of twenty-five men, which _nucleus_ was to admit members, Mr. Owen reserving the power to _veto_ every one admitted. There were to be three grades of members, viz., conditional members, probationary members, and persons on trial. (?) The Community was to be under the direction of Mr. Owen, until two-thirds of the members should think fit to govern themselves, provided the time was not less than twelve months." This may be called, _Constitution No. 4._ In May a third Community had been formed; and the population was divided between No. 1, which was Mr. Owen's Community, No. 2, which was called Macluria, and No. 3, which was called _Feiba Peven_--a name designating in some mysterious way the latitude and longitude of New Harmony. "May 27. The immigration continued so steadily, that it became necessary for the Community to inform the friends of the new views that the accommodations were inadequate, and call upon them by advertisement not to come until further notice." _Constitution No. 5._ "May 30. In consequence of a variety of troubles and disagreements, chiefly relating to the disposal of the property, a great meeting of the whole population was held, and it was decided to form four separate societies, each signing its own contract for such part of the property as it should purchase, and each managing its own affairs; but to trade with each other by paper money." Mr. Owen was now beginning to make sharp bargains with the independent Communities. Macdonald says, "He had lost money, and no doubt he tried to regain some of it, and used such means as he thought would prevent further loss." On the 4th of July Mr. Owen delivered his celebrated _Declaration of Mental Independence_, from which we give the following specimen: "I now declare to you and to the world, that Man, up to this hour, has been in all parts of the earth a slave to a Trinity of the most monstrous evils that could be combined to inflict mental and physical evil upon his whole race. I refer to Private or Individual Property, Absurd and Irrational systems of Religion, and Marriage founded on Individual Property, combined with some of these Irrational systems of Religion." "August 20. After Mr. Owen had given his usual address, it was unanimously agreed by the meeting that the entire population of New Harmony should meet three times a week in the Hall, for the purpose of being educated together. This practice was continued about six weeks, when Mr. Owen became sick and it was discontinued." _Constitution No. 6._ "August 25. The people held a meeting at which they _abolished all officers_ then existing, and appointed three men as _dictators_." _Constitution No. 7._ "Sept. 17. A large meeting of all the Societies and the whole population of the town took place at the Hall, for the purpose of considering a plan for the '_amelioration of the Society_, to improve the condition of the people, and make them more contented.' A message was received from Mr. Owen proposing to form a Community with as many as would join him, and put in all their property, save what might be thought necessary to reserve to help their friends; the government to consist of Robert Owen and four others of his choice, to be appointed by him every year; and not to be altered for five years. This movement of course nullified all previous organizations. Disagreements and jealousies ensued, and, as was the case on a former change being made, many persons left New Harmony. "Nov. 1. The _Gazette_ says: 'Eighteen months experience has proved to us, that the requisite qualifications for a permanent member of the Community of Common Property are, 1, Honesty of purpose; 2, Temperance; 3, Industry; 4, Carefulness; 5, Cleanliness; 6, Desire for knowledge; 7, A conviction of the fact that the character of man is formed for, and not by, himself.' "Nov. 8. Many persons leaving. The _Gazette_ shows how impossible it is for a Community of common property to exist, unless the members comprising it have acquired the genuine Community character. "Nov. 11. Mr. Owen reviewed the last six months' progress of the Community in a favorable light. "In December the use of ardent spirits was abolished. "Jan. 1827. Although there was an appearance of increased order and happiness, yet matters were drawing to a close. Owen was selling property to individuals; the greater part of the town was now resolved into individual lots; a grocery was established opposite the tavern; painted sign-boards began to be stuck up on the buildings, pointing out places of manufacture and trade; a sort of wax-figure-and-puppet-show was opened at one end of the boarding-house; and every thing was getting into the old style." It is useless to follow this wreck further. Everybody sees it must go down, and _why_ it must go down. It is like a great ship, wallowing helpless in the trough of a tempestuous sea, with nine hundred _passengers_, and no captain or organized crew! We skip to Macdonald's picture of the end. "June 18, 1827. The _Gazette_ advertised that Mr. Owen would meet the inhabitants of New Harmony and the neighborhood on the following Sunday, to bid them farewell. I find no account of this meeting, nor indeed of any further movements of Mr. Owen in the _Gazette_. After his departure the majority of the population also removed and scattered about the country. Those who remained returned to individualism, and settled as farmers and mechanics in the ordinary way. One portion of the estate was owned by Mr. Owen, and the other by Mr. Maclure. They sold, rented, or gave away the houses and lands, and their heirs and assigns have continued to do so to the present day." Fifteen years after the catastrophe Macdonald was at New Harmony, among the remains of the old Community population, and he says: "I was cautioned not to speak of Socialism, as the subject was unpopular. The advice was good; Socialism was unpopular, and with good reason. The people had been wearied and disappointed by it; had been filled full with theories, until they were nauseated, and had made such miserable attempts at practice, that they seemed ashamed of what they had been doing. An enthusiastic socialist would soon be cooled down at New Harmony." The strength of the reaction against Communism caused by Owen's failure, may be seen to this day in the sect devoted to "Individual Sovereignty." Josiah Warren, the leader of that sect, was a member of Owen's Community, and a witness of its confusions and downfall; from which he swung off into the extreme of anti-Communism. The village of "Modern Times," where all forms of social organization were scouted as unscientific, was the electric negative of New Harmony. Macdonald thus moralizes over his master's failure: "Mr. Owen said he wanted honesty of purpose, and he got dishonesty. He wanted temperance, and instead, he was continually troubled with the intemperate. He wanted industry, and he found idleness. He wanted cleanliness, and found dirt. He wanted carefulness, and found waste. He wanted to find desire for knowledge, but he found apathy. He wanted the principles of the formation of character understood, and he found them misunderstood. He wanted these good qualities combined in one and all the individuals of the Community, but he could not find them; neither could he find those who were self-sacrificing and enduring enough, to prepare and educate their children to possess these qualities. Thus it was proved that his principles were either entirely erroneous, or much in advance of the age in which he promulgated them. He seems to have forgotten, that if one and all the thousand persons assembled there, had possessed the qualities which he wished them to possess, there would have been no necessity for his vain exertions to form a Community; because there would of necessity be brotherly love, charity, industry and plenty. We want no more than these; and if this is the material to form Communities of, and we can not find it, we can not form Communities; and if we can not find parents who are ready and willing to educate their children, to give them these qualities for a Community life, then what hope is there of Communism in the future?" Almost the only redeeming feature in or near this whole scene of confusion--which might well be called New Discord instead of New Harmony--was the silent retreat of the Rappite thousand, which was so orderly that it almost escaped mention. Remembering their obscure achievements and their persistent success, we can still be sure that the _idea_ of Owen and his thousand was not a delusion, but an inspiration, that only needed wiser hearts, to become a happy reality. CHAPTER V. INQUEST ON NEW HARMONY. The only laudable object any one can have in rehearsing and studying the histories of the socialistic failures, is that of learning from them practical lessons for guidance in present and future experiments. With this in view, the great experiment at New Harmony is well worth faithful consideration. It was, as we have said, the first and most notable of the entire series of non-religious Communities. It had for its antecedent the vast reputation that Owen had gained by his success at New Lanark. He came to this country with the prestige of a reformer who had the confidence and patronage of Lords, Dukes and Sovereigns in the old world. His lectures were received with attention by large assemblies in our principal cities. At Washington he was accommodated by the Speaker and President with the Hall of Representatives, in which he delivered several lectures before the President, the President elect, all the judges of the Supreme Court, and a great number of members of Congress. He afterwards presented to the Government an expensive and elaborate model, with interior and working drawings, elevations, &c., of one of the magnificent communal edifices which he had projected. He had a large private fortune, and drew into his schemes other capitalists, so that his experiment had the advantage of unlimited wealth. That wealth, as we have seen, placed at his command unlimited land and a ready-made village. These attractions brought him men in unlimited numbers. How stupendous the revolution was that he contemplated as the result of his great gathering, is best seen in the famous words which he uttered in the public hall at New Harmony on the 4th of July, 1826. We have already quoted from this speech a paragraph (underscored and double-scored by Macdonald) about the awful Trinity of man's oppressors--"Private property, Irrational Religion, and Marriage." In the same vein he went on to say: "For nearly forty years have I been employed, heart and soul, day by day, almost without ceasing, in preparing the means and arranging the circumstances, to enable me to give the death-blow to the tyranny which, for unnumbered ages, has held the human mind spellbound in chains of such mysterious forms that no mortal has dared approach to set the suffering prisoner free! Nor has the fullness of time for the accomplishment of this great event, been completed until within this hour! Such has been the extraordinary course of events, that the Declaration of Political Independence in 1776, has produced its counterpart, the _Declaration of Mental Independence_ in 1826; the latter just half a century from the former.*** "In furtherance of our great object we are preparing the means to bring up our children with industrious and useful habits, with national and of course rational ideas and views, with sincerity in all their proceedings; and to give them kind and affectionate feelings for each other, and charity, in the most extensive sense of the term, for all their fellow creatures. "By doing this, uniting our separate interests into one, by doing away with divided money transactions, by exchanging with each other our articles of produce on the basis of labor for equal labor, by looking forward to apply our surplus wealth to assist others to attain similar advantages, and by the abandonment of the use of spiritous liquors, we shall in a peculiar manner promote the object of every wise government and all really enlightened men. "And here we now are, as near perhaps as we can be in the center of the United States, even, as it were, like the little grain of mustard seed! But with these _Great Truths_ before us, with the practice of the social system, as soon as it shall be well understood among us, our principles will, I trust, spread from Community to Community, from State to State, from Continent to Continent, until this system and these _truths_ shall overshadow the whole earth, shedding fragrance and abundance, intelligence and happiness, upon all the sons of men!" Such were the antecedents and promises of the New Harmony experiment. The Professor appeared on the stage with a splendid reputation for previous thaumaturgy, with all the crucibles and chemicals around him that money could buy, with an audience before him that was gaping to see the last wonder of science: but on applying the flame that was to set all ablaze with happiness and glory, behold! the material prepared would not burn, but only sputtered and smoked; and the curtain had to come down upon a scene of confusion and disappointment! What was the difficulty? Where was the mistake? These are the questions that ought to be studied till they are fully answered; for scores and hundreds of just such experiments have been tried since, with the same disastrous results; and scores and hundreds will be tried hereafter, till we go back and hold a faithful inquest, and find a sure verdict, on this original failure. Let us hear, then, what has been, or can be said, by all sorts of judges, on the causes of Owen's failure, and learn what we can. Macdonald has an important chapter on this subject, from which we extract the following: "There is no doubt in my mind, that the absence of Robert Owen in the first year of the Community was one of the great causes of its failure; for he was naturally looked up to as the head, and his influence might have kept people together, at least so as to effect something similar to what had been effected at New Lanark. But with a people free as these were from a set religious creed, and consisting, as they did, of all nations and opinions, it is doubtful if even Mr. Owen, had he continued there all the time, could have kept them permanently together. No comparison can be made between that population and the Shakers, Rappites, or Zoarites, who are each of one religious faith, and, save the Shakers, of one nation. "Mr. Samson, of Cincinnati, was at New Harmony from the beginning to the end of the Community; he went there on the boat that took the last of the Rappites away. He says the cause of failure was a rogue, named Taylor, who insinuated himself into Mr. Owen's favor, and afterward swindled and deceived him in a variety of ways, among other things establishing a distillery, contrary to Mr. Owen's wishes and principles, and injurious to the Community. "Owen always held the property. He thought it would be ten or twelve years before the Community would fill up; but no sooner had the Rappites left, than the place was taken possession of by strangers from all parts, while Owen was absent in England and the place under the management of a committee. When Owen returned and found how things were going, he deemed it necessary to mike a change, and notices were published in all parts, telling people not to come there, as there were no accommodations for them; yet still they came, till at last Owen was compelled to have all the log-cabins that harbored them pulled down. "Taylor and Fauntleroy were Owen's associates. When Owen found out Taylor's rascality he resolved to abandon the partnership with him, which Taylor would only agree to upon Owen's giving him a large tract of land, upon which he proposed to form a Community of his own. The agreement was that he should have the land and _all upon it_. So on the night previous to the execution of the bargain, he had a large quantity of cattle and farm implements put upon the land, and he thereby came into possession of them! Instead of forming a Community, he built a distillery, and also set up a tan-yard in opposition to Mr. Owen!" In the _Free Enquirer_ of June 10th, 1829, there is an article by Robert Dale Owen on New Lanark and New Harmony, in which, after comparing the two places and showing the difference between them, he makes the following remark relative to the experiment at New Harmony: "There was not disinterested industry, there was not mutual confidence, there was not practical experience, there was not unison of action, because there was not unanimity of counsel: and these were the points of difference and dissension--the rocks on which the social bark struck and was wrecked." A letter in the _New Harmony Gazette_, of January 31, 1827, complains of the "slow progress of education in the Community--the heavy labor, and no recompense but _cold water_ and _inferior provisions_." Paul Brown, who wrote a book entitled "Twelve months at New Harmony," among his many complaints says, "There was no such thing as real general _common stock_ brought into being in this place." He attributes all the troubles, to the anxiety about "_exclusive property_," principally on the part of Owen and his associates. Speaking of one of the secondary Societies, he says there were "class distinctions" in it; and Macluria or the School Society he condemns as being most aristocratical, "its few projectors being extremely wealthy." In the _New Moral World_ of October 12, 1839, there is an article on New Harmony, in which it is asserted that Mr. Owen was induced to purchase that place on the understanding that the Rappite population then residing there would remain, until he had gradually introduced other persons to acquire from them the systematic and orderly habits, as well as practical knowledge, which they had gained by many years of practice. But by the removal of Rapp and his followers, Mr. Owen was left with all the property on his hands, and he was thus compelled to get persons to come there to prevent things from going to ruin. Mr. Josiah Warren, in his "Practical Details of Equitable Commerce," says: "Let us bear in mind that during the great experiments in New Harmony in 1825 and 1826, every thing went delightfully on, except pecuniary affairs! We should, no doubt, have succeeded but for property considerations. But then the experiments never would have been commenced but for property considerations. It was to annihilate social antagonism by a system of _common property_, that we undertook the experiments at all." Mr. Sargant, the English biographer of Owen, intimates several times that _religion_ was the first subject of discord at New Harmony. His own opinion of the cause of the catastrophe, he gives in the following words: "What were the causes of these failures? People will give different answers, according to the general sentiments they entertain. For myself I should say, that such experiments must fail, because it is impossible to mould to Communism the characters of men and women, formed by the present doctrines and practices of the world to intense individualism. I should indeed go further by stating my convictions, that even with persons brought up from childhood to act in common and live in common, it would be impossible to carry out a Communistic system, unless in a place utterly removed from contact with the world, or with the help of some powerful religious conviction. Mere benevolence, mere sentiments of universal philanthropy, are far too weak to bind the self-seeking affections of men." John Pratt, a Positivist, in a communication to _The Oneida Circular_, contributes the following philosophical observations: "Owen was a Scotch metaphysician of the old school. As such, he was a most excellent fault-finder and _disorganizer_. He could perceive and depict the existing discord, but knew not better than his contemporaries Shelley and Godwin, where to find the New Harmony. Like most men of the last generation he looked upon society as a manufactured product, and not as an organism endued with imperishable vitality and growth. Like them he attributed all the evils it endured to priests and politicians, whose immediate annihilation would be followed by immediate, everlasting and universal happiness. It would be astonishing if an experiment initiated by such a class of thinkers should succeed under the most favorable auspices. One word as to mere externals. Owen was a skeptic by training, and a cautious man of business by nature and nationality. He was professedly an entire convert to his own principles; yet set an example of distrust by holding on to his thirty thousand acres himself. This would do when dealing with starving Scotch peasantry, glad of the privilege of moderately remunerated labor, good food and clothing. Had he been a benevolent Southern planter he would have succeeded admirably with negro slaves, who would have been only too happy to accept any 'Principles.' He had to do with people who had individual hopes and aspirations. The internal affinities of Owen's Commune were too weak to resist the attractions of the outer world. Had he brought his New Lanark disciples to New Harmony, the result would not have been different. Removed from the mechanical pressure of despair and want, his weakly cohered elements would quickly have crumbled away." Our chapter on New Harmony was submitted, soon after it was written, to an evening gathering of the Oneida Community, for the purpose of eliciting discussions that might throw light on the failure; and we take the liberty here to report some of the observations made on that occasion. They have the advantage of coming from persons who have had long experience in Community life. _E.H. Hamilton_ said--"My admiration is excited, to see a man who was prospering in business as Mr. Owen was, turn aside from the general drift of the world, toward social improvement. I have the impression that he was sincere. He risked his money on his theories to a certain extent. His attempt was a noble manifestation of humanity, so far as it goes. But he required other people to be what he was not himself. He complains of his followers, that they were not teachable. I do not think he was a teachable man. He got a glimpse of the truth, and of the possibilities of Communism; but he adopted certain ideas as to the way in which these results are to be obtained, and it seems to me, in regard to those ideas, he was not docile. It must be manifest to all candid minds, that all the improvement and civilization of the present time, go along with the development of Christianity; and I am led to wonder why a man with the discernment and honesty of Mr. Owen, was not more impressible to the truth in this direction. It seems to me he was as unreceptive to the truths of Christianity, as the people he got together at New Harmony were to his principles. His favorite dogma was that a man's character is formed for him, and not by himself. I suppose we might admit, in a certain sense, that a man's character is formed for him by the grace of God, or by evil spirits. But the notion that man is wholly the creature of external circumstances, irrespective of these influences, seems foolish and pig-headed." _H.J. Seymour._--"I should not object to Owen's doctrine of circumstances, if he would admit that the one great circumstance of a man's life is the possibility of finding out and doing the will of God, and getting into vital connection with him." _S.R. Leonard._--"The people Mr. Owen had to deal with in Scotland were of the servile class, employees in his cotton-factories, and were easily managed, compared with those he collected here in the United States. When he went to Indiana, and undertook to manage a family of a thousand democrats, he began to realize that he did not understand human nature, or the principles of Association." _T.R. Noyes._--"The novelty of Owen's ideas and his rejection of all religion, prevented him from drawing into his scheme the best class in this country. Probably for every honest man who went to New Harmony, there were several parasites ready to prey on him and his enterprise, because he offered them an easy life without religion. Even if he might have got on with simple-minded men and women like his Lanark operatives, it was out of the question with these greedy adventurers." _G.W. Hamilton._--"At the west I met some persons who claimed to be disciples of Owen. From what I saw of them, I should judge it would be very difficult to form a Community of such material. They were very strong in the doctrine that every man has a right to his own opinion; and declaimed loudly against the effect of religion upon people. They said the common ideas of God and duty operated a great deal worse upon the characters of men, than southern slavery. There is enough in such notions of independence, to break up any attempt at Communism." _F.W. Smith._--"I understand that Owen did not educate and appoint men as leaders and fathers, to take care of the society while he was crossing the ocean back and forth. He undertook to manage his own affairs, and at the same time to run this Community. Our experience has shown that it is necessary to have a father in a great family for daily and almost hourly advice. I should think it would be doubly necessary in such a Community as Owen collected, to have the wisest man always at his post." _C.A. Burt._--"There are only two ways of governing such an institution as a Community; it must be done either by law or by grace. Owen got a company together and abolished law, but did not establish grace; and so, necessarily failed." _L. Bolles._--"The popular idea is that Owen and his class of reformers had an ideal that was very beautiful and very perfect; that they had too much faith for their time--too much faith in humanity; that they were several hundred years in advance of their age; and that the world was not good enough to understand them and their beautiful ideas. That is the superficial view of these men. I think the truth is, they were not up to the times; that mankind, in point of real faith, were ahead of them. Their view that the evil in human nature is owing to outward surroundings, is an impeachment of the providence of God. It is the worst kind of unbelief. But they have taught us one great lesson; and that is, that good circumstances do _not_ make good men. I believe the circumstances of mankind are as good as Providence can make them, consistently with their own state of development and the well-being of their souls. Instead of seeking to sweep away existing governments and forms of outward things, we should thank God that he has given men institutions as good as they can bear. We know that he will give them better, as fast as they improve beyond those they have." _J.B. Herrick._--"Although the apparent effect of the failure of Owen's movement was to produce discouragement, still below all that discouragement there is, in the whole nation, generated in part by that movement, a hope watching for the morning. We have to thank Owen for so much, or rather to thank God, for using Owen to stimulate the public mind and bring it to that state in which it is able to receive and keep this hope for the future." _C.W. Underwood._--"Owen's experiment helped to demonstrate that there is no such thing as organization or unity without Christ and religion. But on the other hand we can see that Owen did much good. The churches were compelled to adopt many of his ideas. He certainly was the father of the infant-school system; and it is my impression that he started the reform-schools, houses of refuge, etc. He gave impulse, at any rate, to the present reformatory movements." * * * * * It is noticeable, as a coïncidence with our observations on the lust for land in a preceding chapter, that Owen succeeded admirably in a factory, and failed miserably on a farm. Whether his 30,000 acres had anything to do with his actual failure or not, they would probably have been the ruin of his Community, if it had not failed from other causes. We have reason to believe from many hints, that _whisky_ had considerable agency in the demoralization and destruction of New Harmony. The affair of Taylor's distillery is one significant fact. Here is another from Macdonald: "I was one day at the tan-yard, where Squire B. and some others were standing, talking around the stove. During the conversation Squire B. asked us if he had ever told us how he had served 'old Owen' in Community times. He then informed us that he came from Illinois to New Harmony, and that a man in Illinois was owing him, and asked him to take a barrel of whisky for the debt. He could not well get the money; so took the whisky. When it came to New Harmony he did not know where to put it, but finally hid it in his cellar. Not long after Mr. Owen found that the people still got whisky from some quarter, he could not tell where, though he did his best to find out. At last he suspected Squire B., and came right into his shop and accused him of it; on which Squire B. had to own that it was he who retailed the whisky. 'It was taken for a debt,' said he, 'and what else was I to do to get rid of it?' Mr. Owen turned round, and in his simple manner said, 'Ah, I see you do not understand the principles.' This story was finished with a hearty laugh at 'old Owen.' I could not laugh, but felt that such men as Squire B. really did not understand the principles; and no wonder there are failures, when such men as he thrust themselves in, and frustrate benevolent designs." It was too early for a Community, when this country was a "nation of drunkards," as it was in 1825. Owen's method of getting together the material of his Community, seems to us the most obvious _external_ cause of his failure. It was like advertising for a wife; and we never heard of any body's getting a good wife by advertising. A public invitation to "the industrious and well-disposed of all nations," to come on and take possession of 30,000 acres of land and a ready-made village, leaving each one to judge as to his own industry and disposition, would insure a prompt gathering--and also a speedy scattering. This method, or something like it, has been tried in most of the non-religious experiments. The joint-stock principle, which many of them adopted, necessarily invites all who choose to buy stock. That principle may form organizations that are able to carry on the businesses of banks and railroads after a fashion; because such businesses require but little character, except zeal and ability for money-making. But a true Community, or even a semi-Community, like the Fourier Phalanxes, requires far higher qualifications in its members and managers. The socialistic theorizers all assume that Association is a step in advance of civilization. If that is true, we must assume also that the most advanced class of civilization is that which must take the step; and a discrimination of some sort will be required, to get that class into the work, and shut off the barbarians who would hinder it. Judging from all our experience and observation, we should say that the two most essential requisites for the formation of successful Communities, are _religious principle_ and _previous acquaintance_ of the members. Both of these were lacking in Owen's experiment. The advertising method of gathering necessarily ignores both. Owen, in his old age, became a Spiritualist, and in the light of his new experience confessed what seems to us the principal cause of his failure. Sargant, his biographer, referring to chapter and verse in his writings says: "He confessed that until he received the revelations of Spiritualism, he had been quite unaware of the necessity of good _spiritual conditions_ for forming the character of men. The physical, the intellectual, the moral, and the practical conditions, he had understood, and had known how to provide for; but the spiritual he had overlooked. _Yet this, as he now saw, was the most important of all in the future development of mankind._" In the same new light, Owen recognized the principal cause of all real success. Sargant continues: "Owen says, that in looking back on his past life, he can trace the finger of God directing his steps, preserving his life under imminent dangers, and impelling him onward on many occasions. It was under the immediate guidance of the Spirit of God, that during the inexperience of his youth, he accomplished much good for the world. The preservation of his life from the peculiar dangers of childhood, was owing to the monitions of this good Spirit. To this superior invisible aid he owed his appointment, at the age of seven years, to be usher in a school, before the monitorial system of teaching was thought of. To this he must ascribe his migration from an inaccessible Welsh county to London, and then to Stamford, and his ability to maintain himself without assistance from his friends. So he goes on recounting all the events of his life, great and small, and attributing them to the SPECIAL PROVIDENCE OF GOD." CHAPTER VI. YELLOW SPRINGS COMMUNITY. The fame of New Harmony has of course overshadowed and obscured all other experiments that resulted from Owen's labors in this country. It is perhaps scarcely known at this day that a Community almost as brilliant as Brook Farm, was started by his personal efforts at Cincinnati, even before he commenced operations at New Harmony. The following sketch, clipped by Macdonald from some old newspaper (the name and date of which are missing), is not only pleasant reading, but bears internal marks of painstaking and truthfulness. It is a model memoir of the life and death of a non-religious Community; and would serve for many others, by changing a few names, as ministers do when they re-preach old funeral sermons. The moral at the close, inferring the impracticability of Communism, may probably be accepted as sound, if restricted to non-religious experiments. The general career of Owen is sketched correctly and in rather a masterly manner: and the interesting fact is brought to light, that the beginning of the Owen movement in this country was signalized by a conjunction with Swedenborgianism. The significance of this fact will appear more fully, when we come to the history of the marriage between Fourierism and Swedenborgianism, which afterwards took place at Brook Farm. MEMOIR. "The narrative here presented," says the unknown writer, "was prepared at the request of a minister who had looked in vain for any account of the Communities established by Robert Owen in this country. It is simply what it pretends to be, reminiscences by one who, while a youth, resided with his parents as a member of the Community at Yellow Springs. For some years together since his manhood, he has been associated with several of the leading men of that experiment, and has through them been informed in relation to both its outer and _inner_ history. The article may contain some errors, as of dates and other matters unimportant to a just view of the Community; but the social picture will be correct. With the hope that it may convey a useful lesson, it is submitted to the reader. "Robert Owen, the projector of the Communities at Yellow Springs, Ohio, and New Harmony, Indiana, was the owner of extensive manufactories at New Lanark, Scotland. He was a man of considerable learning, much observation, and full of the love of his fellow men; though a disbeliever in Christianity. His skeptical views concerning the Bible were fully announced in the celebrated debate at Cincinnati between himself and Dr. Alexander Campbell. But whatever may have been his faith, he proved his philanthropy by a long life of beneficent works. At his manufactories in Scotland he established a system based on community of labor, which was crowned with the happiest effects. But it should be remembered that Owen himself was the owner of the works and controlled all things by a single mind. The system, therefore, was only a beneficent scheme of government by a manufacturer, for the good of himself and his operatives. "Full of zeal for the improvement of society, Owen conceived that he had discovered the cause of most of its evils in the laws of _meum et tuum_; and that a state of society where there is nothing _mine_ or _thine_, would be a paradise begun. He brooded upon the idea of a Community of property, and connected it with schemes for the improvement of society, until he was ready to sacrifice his own property and devote his heart and his life to his fellow men upon this basis. Too discreet to inaugurate the new system among the poorer classes of his own country, whom he found perverted by prejudice and warped by the artificial forms of society there, he resolved to proceed to the United States, and among the comparatively unperverted people, liberal institutions and cheap lands of the West, to establish Communities, founded upon common property, social equality, and the equal value of every man's labor. "About the year 1824 Owen arrived in Cincinnati. He brought with him a history of his labors at New Lanark; with glowing and not unjust accounts of the beneficent effects of his efforts there. He exhibited plans for his proposed Communities here; with model farms, gardens, vineyards, play-grounds, orchards, and all the internal and external appliances of the social paradise. At Cincinnati he soon found many congenial spirits, among the first of whom was Daniel Roe, minister of the "New Jerusalem Church," a society of the followers of Swedenborg. This society was composed of a very superior class of people. They were intelligent, liberal, generous, cultivated men and women--many of them wealthy and highly educated. They were apparently the best possible material to organize and sustain a Community, such as Owen proposed. Mr. Roe and many of his congregation became fascinated with Owen and his Communism; and together with others in the city and elsewhere, soon organized a Community and furnished the means for purchasing an appropriate site for its location. In the meantime Owen proceeded to Harmony, and, with others, purchased that place, with all its buildings, vineyards, and lands, from Rapp, who emigrated to Pennsylvania and established his people at Economy. It will only be added of Owen, that after having seen the New Harmonians fairly established, he returned to Scotland. "After careful consultation and selection, it was decided by the Cincinnati Community to purchase a domain at Yellow Springs, about seventy-five miles north of the city, [now the site of Antioch College] as the most eligible place for their purpose. It was really one of the most delightful regions in the whole West, and well worthy the residence of a people who had resolved to make many sacrifices for what they honestly believed to be a great social and moral reformation. "The Community, as finally organized consisted of seventy-five or one hundred families; and included professional men, teachers, merchants, mechanics, farmers, and a few common laborers. Its economy was nearly as follows: "The property was held in trust forever, in behalf of the members of the Community, by the original purchasers, and their chosen successors, to be designated from time to time by the voice of the Community. All additional property thereafter to be acquired, by labor, purchase, or otherwise, was to be added to the common stock, for the benefit of each and all. Schools were to be established, to teach all things useful (except religion). Opinion upon all subjects was free; and the present good of the whole Community was the standard of morals. The Sabbath was a day of rest and recreation, to be improved by walks, rides, plays, and pleasing exercises; and by public lectures. Dancing was instituted as a most valuable means of physical and social culture; and the ten-pin alley and other sources of amusement were open to all. "But although Christianity was wholly ignored in the system, there was no free-loveism or other looseness of morals allowed. In short, this Community began its career under the most favorable auspices; and if any men and women in the world could have succeeded, these should have done so. How they _did_ succeed, and how they did not, will now be shown. "For the first few weeks, all entered into the new system with a will. Service was the order of the day. Men who seldom or never before labored with their hands, devoted themselves to agriculture and the mechanic arts, with a zeal which was at least commendable, though not always according to knowledge. Ministers of the gospel guided the plough; called the swine to their corn, instead of sinners to repentance; and let patience have her perfect work over an unruly yoke of oxen. Merchants exchanged the yard-stick for the rake or pitch-fork. All appeared to labor cheerfully for the common weal. Among the women there was even more apparent self-sacrifice. Ladies who had seldom seen the inside of their own kitchens, went into that of the common eating-house (formerly a hotel), and made themselves useful among pots and kettles: and refined young ladies, who had all their lives been waited upon, took their turns in waiting upon others at the table. And several times a week all parties who chose mingled in the social dance, in the great dining-hall." But notwithstanding the apparent heartiness and cordiality of this auspicious opening, it was in the social atmosphere of the Community that the first cloud arose. Self-love was a spirit which would not be exorcised. It whispered to the lowly maidens, whose former position in society had cultivated the spirit of meekness--"You are as good as the formerly rich and fortunate; insist upon your equality." It reminded the favorites of former society of their lost superiority; and in spite of all rules, tinctured their words and actions with the love of self. Similar thoughts and feelings soon arose among the men; and though not so soon exhibited, they were none the less deep and strong. It is unnecessary to descend to details: suffice it to say, that at the end of three months--_three months!_--the leading minds in the Community were compelled to acknowledge to each other that the social life of the Community could not be bounded by a single circle. They therefore acquiesced, but reluctantly, in its division into many little circles. Still they hoped and many of them no doubt believed, that though social equality was a failure, community of property was not. But whether the law of _mine and thine_ is natural or incidental in human character, it soon began to develop its sway. The industrious, the skillful and the strong, saw the products of their labor enjoyed by the indolent, the unskilled, and the improvident; and self-love rose against benevolence. A band of musicians insisted that their brassy harmony was as necessary to the common happiness as bread and meat; and declined to enter the harvest field or the work-shop. A lecturer upon natural science insisted upon talking only, while others worked. Mechanics, whose day's labor brought two dollars into the common stock, insisted that they should, in justice, work only half as long as the agriculturist, whose day's work brought but one. "For a while, of course, these jealousies were only felt; but they soon began to be spoken also. It was useless to remind all parties that the common labor of all ministered to the prosperity of the Community. _Individual_ happiness was the law of nature, and it could not be obliterated; and before a single year had passed, this law had scattered the members of that society, which had come together so earnestly and under such favorable circumstances, back into the selfish world from which they came. "The writer of this sketch has since heard the history of that eventful year reviewed with honesty and earnestness by the best men and most intelligent parties of that unfortunate social experiment. They admitted the favorable circumstances which surrounded its commencement; the intelligence, devotion, and earnestness which were brought to the cause by its projectors; and its final, total failure. And they rested ever after in the belief that man, though disposed to philanthropy, is essentially selfish; and that a community of social equality and common property is impossible." CHAPTER VII. NASHOBA. Macdonald erects a magniloquent monument over the remains of Nashoba, the experiment of Frances Wright. This woman, little known to the present generation, was really the spiritual helpmate and better-half of the Owens, in the socialistic revival of 1826. Our impression is, not only that she was the leading woman in the communistic movement of that period, but that she had a very important agency in starting two other movements, that have had far greater success, and are at this moment strong in public favor: viz., Anti-Slavery and Woman's Rights. If justice were done, we are confident her name would figure high with those of Lundy, Garrison, and John Brown on the one hand, and with those of Abby Kelly, Lucy Stone and Anna Dickinson on the other. She was indeed the pioneer of the "strong-minded women." We copy the most important parts of Macdonald's memoir of Nashoba: "This experiment was made in Shelby Co., Tennessee, by the celebrated Frances Wright. The objects were, to form a Community in which the negro slave should be educated and upraised to a level with the whites, and thus prepared for freedom; and to set an example, which, if carried out, would eventually abolish slavery in the Southern States; also to make a home for good and great men and women of all countries, who might there sympathize with each other in their love and labor for humanity. She invited congenial minds from every quarter of the globe to unite with her in the search for truth and the pursuit of rational happiness. Herself a native of Scotland, she became imbued with these philanthropic views through a knowledge of the sufferings of a great portion of mankind in many countries, and of the condition of the negro in the United States in particular. "She traveled extensively in the Southern States, and explained her views to many of the planters. It was during these travels that she visited the German settlement of Rappites at Harmony, on the Wabash river, and after examining the wonderful industry of that Community, she was struck with the appropriateness of their system of coöperation to the carrying out of her aspirations. She also visited some of the Shaker establishments then existing in the United States, but she thought unfavorably of them. She renewed her visits of the Rappites, and was present on the occasion of their removal from Harmony to Economy on the Ohio, where she continued her acquaintance with them, receiving valuable knowledge from their experience, and, as it were, witnessing a new village, with its fields, orchards, gardens, vineyards, flouring-mills and manufactories, rise out of the earth, beneath the hands of some eight hundred trained laborers." Here is another indication of the important part the Rappites played in the early history of Owenism. As they cleared the 30,000 acres and built the village which was the theatre of Owen's great experiment, so it is evident from the above account and from other hints, that their Communistic ideas and manner of living were systematically studied by the Owen school, before and after the purchase of New Harmony. Indeed it is more than intimated in a passage from the _New Moral World_ quoted in our 5th chapter, that Owen depended on their assistance in commencing his Community, and attributed his failure to their premature removal. On the whole we may conclude that Owen learned all he really knew about practical Communism, and more than he was able to imitate, from the Rappites. They learned Communism from the New Testament and the day of Pentecost. "In the autumn of 1825 [when New Harmony was under full sail in the absence of Mr. Owen], Frances Wright purchased 2,000 acres of good and pleasant woodland, lying on both sides of the Wolf river in west Tennessee, about thirteen miles above Memphis. She then purchased several negro families, comprising fifteen able hands, and commenced her practical experiment." Her plan in brief was, to take slaves in large numbers from time to time (either by purchase, or by inducing benevolent planters to donate their negroes to the institution), and to prepare them for liberty by education, giving them half of what they produced, and making them pay their way and purchase their emancipation, if necessary, by their labor. The working of the negroes and the general management of the Community was to be in the hands of the philanthropic and wealthy whites associated with the lady-founder. The theory was benevolent; but practically the institution must have been a two-story commonwealth, somewhat like the old Grecian States which founded liberty on Helotism. Or we might define it as a Brook Farm _plus_ a negro basis. The trouble at Brook Farm, according to Hawthorne, was, that the amateurs who took part in that 'pic-nic,' did not like to serve as 'chambermaids to the cows.' This difficulty was provided against at Nashoba. "We are informed that Frances Wright found in her new occupation intense and ever-increasing interest. But ere long she was seized by severe and reïterated sickness, which compelled her to make a voyage to Europe for the recovery of her health. 'During her absence,' says her biographer, 'an intriguing individual had disorganized every thing on the estate, and effected the removal of persons of confidence. All her serious difficulties proceeded from her white assistants, and not from the blacks.'" In December of the following year, she made over the Nashoba estate to a board of trustees, by a deed commencing thus: "I, Frances Wright, do give the lands after specified, to General Lafayette, William Maclure, Robert Owen, Cadwallader Colden, Richardson Whitby, Robert Jennings, Robert Dale Owen, George Flower, Camilla Wright, and James Richardson, to be held by them and their associates and their successors in perpetual trust for the benefit of the negro race." By another deed she gave the slaves of Nashoba to the before-mentioned trustees: and by still another she gave them all her personal property. In her appeal to the public in connection with this transfer, she explains at length her views of reform, and her reasons for choosing the above-named trustees instead of the Emancipation or Colonization Societies; and in respect to education says: 'No difference will be made in the schools between the white children and the children of color, whether in education or any other advantage.' After further explanation of her plans she goes on to say: "'It will be seen that this establishment is founded on the principle of community property and labor: preserving every advantage to those desirous, not of accumulating money but of enjoying life and rendering services to their fellow-creatures; these fellow-creatures, that is, the blacks here admitted, requiting these services by services equal or greater, by filling occupations which their habits render easy, and which, to their guides and assistants, might be difficult or unpleasing.' [Here is the 'negro basis.'] "'No life of idleness, however, is proposed to the whites. Those who cannot work must give an equivalent in property. Gardening or other cultivation of the soil, useful trades practiced in the society or taught in the school, the teaching of every branch of knowledge, tending the children, and nursing the sick, will present a choice of employment sufficiently extensive.'" In the course of another year trouble had come and Disorganization had begun. "In March, 1828, the trustees published a communication in the _Nashoba Gazette_, explaining the difficulties they had to contend with, and the causes why the experience of two years had modified the original plan of Frances Wright. They show the impossibility of a co-operative Community succeeding without the members composing it are superior beings; 'for,' say they, 'if there be introduced into such a society thoughts of evil and unkindness, feelings of intolerance and words of dissension, it can not prosper. That which produces in the world only common-place jealousies and every-day squabbles, is sufficient to destroy a Community.' "The society has admitted some members to labor, and others as boarders from whom no labor was required; and in this they confess their error, and now propose to admit those only who possess the funds for their support. "The trustees go on to say that 'they desire to express distinctly that they have deferred, for the present, the attempt to have a society of co-operative labor; and they claim for the association only the title of a Preliminary Social Community.' "After describing the moral qualifications of members, who may be admitted without regard to color, they propose that each one shall yearly throw $100 into the common fund for board alone, to be paid quarterly in advance. Each one was also to build for himself or herself a small brick house, with piazza, according to a regular plan, and upon a spot of ground selected for the purpose, near the center or the lands of Nashoba." This communication is signed by Frances Wright, Richardson Whitby, Camilla Wright Whitby, and Robert Dale Owen, as resident trustee, and is dated Feb. 1, 1828. "It is probable that success did not further attend the experiment, for Francis Wright abandoned it soon after, and in June following removed to New Harmony, where, in conjunction with William Owen, she assumed for a short time the management of the _New Harmony Gazette_, which then had its name altered to the _New Harmony and Nashoba Gazette or Free Enquirer_. "Her biographer says that she abandoned, though not without a struggle, the peaceful shades of Nashoba, leaving the property in the charge of an individual, who was to hold the negroes ready for removal to Hayti the year following. In relinquishing her experiment in favor of the race, she held herself equally pledged to the colored families under her charge, to the southern state in which she had been a resident citizen, and to the American community at large, to remove her dependents to a country free to their color. This she executed a year after." This Communistic experiment and failure was nearly simultaneous with that of New Harmony, and was the immediate antecedent of Frances Wright's famous lecturing-tour. In December 1828 she was raising whirlwinds of excitement by her eloquence in Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York; and soon after the _New Harmony Gazette_, under the title of _The Free Enquirer_, was removed to the latter city, where it was ably edited several years by Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen. CHAPTER VIII. SEVEN EPITAPHS. We have passed the most notable monuments of the Owen epoch, and come now to obscurer graves. Doubtless many of the little Communities that followed New Harmony, and in a small way repeated its fortunes, were buried without memorial. We have on Macdonald's list the names of only seven more, and their epitaphs are for the most part very brief. We may as well group them all in one chapter, and copy what Macdonald says about them, without comment. EPITAPH NO. I. CO-OPERATIVE SOCIETY, 1825. "Located at Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. Founded on the principles of Robert Owen. Benjamin Bakewell, President; John Snyder, Treasurer; Magnus M. Murray, Secretary." EPITAPH NO. II. FRANKLIN COMMUNITY, 1826. "Located somewhere in New York. Had a printed Constitution; also a 'preparatory school.' No further particulars." EPITAPH NO. III. BLUE SPRINGS COMMUNITY. 1826-7. "A gathering under the above title, existed for a short time near Bloomington, Ind. It was said [by somebody] to be 'harmonious and prosperous' as late as Jan. 1, 1827; but as I find no trace of it in my researches, it is fair to conclude that it is numbered with the dead, like others of its day." EPITAPH NO. IV. FORRESTVILLE COMMUNITY. (INDIANA.) "This Society was formed on the 16th day of December, 1825, of four families consisting of thirty-one persons. March 26, 1826, the constitution was printed. During the year their number increased to over sixty. The business was transacted by three trustees, to be elected annually, together with a secretary and treasurer. The principles were purely republican. They had no established religion, the constitution only requiring that all candidates should be of good moral character, sober and industrious. They declared that 'a baptist, a methodist, a universalist, a quaker, a calvinist, a deist, or any other _ist_, provided he or she is a genuine good moralist, are equally privileged and equally esteemed.' They occupied 325 acres of land, two saw-mills, one grist-mill, a carding machine, and a tannery, and carried on wagon-making, shoe-making, blacksmithing, coopering, agriculture, &c." EPITAPH NO. V. HAVERSTRAW COMMUNITY. "This Society was formed in the year 1826 by a Mr. Fay (an attorney), Jacob Peterson and George Houston of New York, and Robert L. Ginengs of Philadelphia. It is probable that it originated in consequence of the lectures which were at that time delivered by Robert Owen in this country. "The principles and objects of the Society, as far as I can learn, were to better the condition of themselves and their fellowmen, which they conceived could be done by living in Community, having all things in common, giving equal rights to each, and abolishing the terms 'mine and thine.' "They increased their numbers to eighty persons, including women and children, and purchased an estate at Haverstraw, two miles back from the Hudson river, on the west side, about thirty miles above Mew York. There were 120 acres of wood land, two mansion houses, twelve or fourteen out-buildings, one saw-mill, and a rolling and splitting-mill: and the estate had a noble stream of water running through it. The property was owned by a Major Suffrens of Haverstraw, who demanded $18,000 for it. On this sum $6,000 were paid, and bond and mortgage were given for the remainder. To raise the $6,000 and to defray other expenses, Jacob Peterson advanced $7,000; another individual $300; and others subscribed sums as low as $10. Money, land, and every thing else were held as common stock for the equal benefit of all the members. "Among the members, were persons of various trades and occupations, such as carpenters, cabinet-makers, tailors, shoe-makers and farmers. It was the general opinion that the society, as a whole, possessed a large amount of intelligence; and both men and women were of good moral character. I was acquainted with two or three persons who were engaged in this enterprise, and must say I never saw more just and honorable old men than they were when I knew them. "It appears that they formed a church among themselves, which they denominated the _Church of Reason_; and on Sundays they attended meetings, where lectures were delivered to them on Morals, Philosophy, Agriculture and various scientific subjects. They had no religious ceremonies or articles of faith. "They admitted members by ballot. The details of their rules and regulations were never printed. I have reason to believe that they had an abundance of laws and by-laws; and that they disagreed upon these, as well as upon other matters. "While the Community lasted, they were well supplied with the necessaries of life, and generally speaking their circumstances were by no means inferior to those they had left. "The splitting and rolling mill was not used, but farming and mechanical operations were carried on; and it is supposed (as in many other instances) that if the officers of the society had acted right, the experiment would have succeeded; but by some means the affairs soon became disorderly, and though so much money had originally been raised, and assistance was received from without, yet the experiment came to an end after a struggle of only five months. "An informant asserts that dishonesty of the managers and want of good measures were the causes of failure, and expresses himself thus: 'We wanted men and women of skillful industry, sober and honest, with a knowledge of themselves, and a disposition to command and be commanded, and not men and women whose sole occupation is parade and talk.' "In this experiment, like many others, several individuals suffered pecuniary loss. Those who had but a home, left it for Community, and of course were thrown back in their progress. Those who had money and invested there, lost it. Jacob Peterson, of New York, who advanced $7,000, never got more than $300 of it back, and even that was lost to him through the dishonesty of those with whom he did business." EPITAPH NO. VI. COXSACKIE COMMUNITY. "This experiment also was commenced in 1826, and members from the Haverstraw experiment joined it on the breaking up of their Society. "The principal actors in this attempt, were Samuel Underhill, John Norberry, Nathaniel Underhill, Wm. G. Macy, Jethro Macy and Jacob Peterson. The objects were the same as at Haverstraw, but in trying to carry them out they met with no better success. It appears that the capital was small, and the estate, which was located seven miles back from Coxsackie on the Hudson river, was very much in debt. From the little information I am enabled to gather concerning this attempt, I judge that they made many laws, that their laws were bad, and that they had many persons engaged in talking and law-making, who did not work at any useful employment. The consequences were, that after struggling on for a little more than a year, this experiment came to an end. One of my informants thus expresses himself about this failure: 'There were few good men to steer things right. We wanted men and women who would be willing to live in simple habitations, and on plain and simple diet; who would be contented with plain and simple clothing, and who would band together for each others' good. With such we might have succeeded; but such attempts can not succeed without such people.' "In this little conflict there were many sacrifices; but those who survived and were still imbued with the principles, emigrated to Ohio, to fight again with the old system of things." EPITAPH NO. VII. KENDAL COMMUNITY. "This was an attempt to carry out the views of Mr. Owen. It was located near Canton, Stark County, Ohio. The purchase of the property was made in June 1826, by a body of freeholders, whose farms were mortgaged for the first payment, and who, on account of the difficulty of realizing cash for their estates, were under some embarrassment in their operations, though the property was a great bargain." Of this enterprise in its early stage the _Western Courier_ (Dec., 1826,) thus speaks: "The Kendal Community is rapidly on the increase; a number of dwellings have been erected in addition to those previously built; yet the increase of families has been such that there is much inconvenience experienced for want of house-room. The members are now employed in erecting a building 170 by 33 feet, which is intended to be temporarily occupied as private dwellings, but ultimately as work-shops. This and other improvements for the convenience of the place, will soon be completed. "Kendal is pleasantly and advantageously situated for health. We are informed that there is not a sick person on the premises. Mechanics of various professions have joined the Community, and are now occupied in prosecuting the various branches of industry. They have a woolen factory in which many hands are employed. Everything appears to be going on prosperously and harmoniously. There is observed a bustling emulation among the members. They labor hard, and are probably not exempt from the cares and perplexities incident to all worldly undertakings; and what society or system can claim immunity from them? The question is, whether they may not be mitigated. Trouble we believe to be a divisible quantity; it may be softened by sympathy and intercourse, as pleasure may be increased by union and companionship. These advantages have already been experienced at the Kendal Community, and its members are even now in possession of that which the poet hath declared to be the sum total of human happiness, viz., Health, Peace and Competence." "Several families from the Coxsackie Community," says Macdonald, "had joined Kendal when the above was written, and the remainder were to follow as soon as they were prepared. The Kendal Community then numbered about one bundled and fifty members including children. They were engaged in manufacturing woolen goods on a small scale, had a few hops, and did considerable business on the farm. They speak of their '_choice spirits_;' and anticipate assistance to carry out their plans, and prove the success of the social system beyond all contradiction, by the disposal of property and settlement of affairs at Coxsackie. In their enthusiasm they assert, 'that unaided, and with only their own resources and experience, and above all, with their little band of _invincible spirits_, who are tired of the old system and are determined to conquer or die, they _must_ succeed.' I conclude they did not conquer but died, for I can learn nothing further concerning them." A recent letter from Mr. John Harmon, of Ravenna, Ohio, who was a member of the Kendal Community, gives a more definite account of its failure, as follows: "Our Community progressed harmoniously and prosperously, so long as the members had their health and a hope of paying for their domain. But a summer-fever attacked us, and seven heads of families died, among whom were several of our most valued and useful members. At the same time the rich proprietors of whom we purchased our land urged us to pay; and we could not sell a part of it and give a good title, because we were not incorporated. So we were compelled to give up and disperse, losing what we had paid, which was about $7,000. But we formed friendships that were enduring, and the failure never for a moment weakened my faith in the value of Communism." * * * * * We group the three last Communities together, because they were evidently closely related by members passing from one to another, as the earlier ones successively failed. This habit of migrating from one Community to another is an interesting characteristic of the veterans of Socialism, which we shall meet with frequently hereafter. CHAPTER IX. OWEN'S GENERAL CAREER. Confining ourselves strictly to memoirs of Associations, we might leave Owen now and go on to the experiments of the Fourier school. But this would hardly be doing justice to the father of American Socialisms. We have exhibited his great failure; and we must stop long enough to acknowledge his great success, and say briefly what we think of his whole life and influence. Indeed such a review is necessary to a just estimate of the Owen movement in this country. We accept what he himself said about his early achievements, that he was under the guidance of the Spirit of God, and was carried along by a wonderful series of special providences in his first labors for the good of the working classes. The originality, wisdom and success of his doings at New Lanark were manifestly supernatural. His factory village was indeed a light to the world, that gave the nations a great lesson in practical beneficence; and shines still amid the darkness of money-making selfishness and industrial misery. The single fact that he continued the wages of his operatives when the embargo stopped his business, actually paying out $35,000 in four months, to men who had nothing to do but to oil his machinery and keep it clean, stamps him as a genius of an order higher than Napoleon. By this bold maneuver of benevolence he won the confidence of his men, so that he could manage them afterwards as he pleased; and then he went on to reform and educate them, till they became a wonder to the world and a crown of glory to himself. So far we have no doubt that he walked with inspiration and special providence. On the other hand, it is also manifest, that his inspiration and success, so far at least as practical attempts were concerned, deserted him afterwards, and that much of the latter part of his life was spent in disastrous attempts to establish Communism, without the necessary spiritual conditions. His whole career may be likened to that of the first Napoleon, whose "star" insured victory till he reached a certain crisis; after which he lost every battle, and sunk into final and overwhelming defeat. In both cases there was a turning-point which can be marked. Napoleon's star deserted him when he put away Josephine. Owen evidently lost his hold on practical success when he declared war against religion. In his labors at New Lanark he was not an active infidel. The Bible was in his schools. Religion was at least tolerated and respected. He there married the daughter of Mr. Dale, a preacher of the Independents, who was his best friend and counsellor through the early years of his success. But when his work at New Lanark became famous, and he rose to companionship with dukes and kings, he outgrew the modesty and practical wisdom of his early life, and undertook the task of Universal Reform. Then it was that he fell into the mistake of confounding the principles of the Bible with the character and pretensions of his ecclesiastical opposers, and so came into the false position of open hostility to religion. Christ was in a similar temptation when he found the Scribes and Pharisees arrayed against him, with the Old Testament for their vantage ground; but he had wisdom enough to keep his foothold on that vantage ground, and drive them off. His programme was, "Think not that I am come to destroy the law and the prophets. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill." Whereas Owen, at the turning-point of his career, abandoned the Bible with all its magazines of power to his enemies, and went off into a hopeless warfare with Christianity and with all God's past administrations. From that time fortune deserted him. The splendid success of New Lanark was followed by the terrible defeat at New Harmony. The declaration of war against all religion was between them. Such is our interpretation of his life; and something like this must have been his own interpretation, when he confessed in the light of his later experience, that by overlooking spiritual conditions, he had missed the most important of all the elements of human improvement. And yet we must not push our parallel too far. Owen, unlike Napoleon, never knew when he was beaten, and fought on thirty years after his Waterloo. It would be a great mistake to imagine that the failure of New Harmony and of the attempts that followed it, was the end of Owen's achievements and influence, even in this country. Providence does not so waste its preparations and inspirations. Let us see what was left, and what Owen did, after the disasters of 1826-7. In the first place the failure of his Community at New Harmony was not the failure of the _village_ which he bought of the Rappites. That was built of substantial brick and stone. The houses and a portion of the population which he gathered there, remained and have continued to be a flourishing and rather peculiar village till the present time. Several Communities that came over from England in after-years made New Harmony their rendezvous, either on their arrival or when they broke up. So Macdonald, with the enthusiasm of a true Socialist, on landing in this country in 1842 first sought out New Harmony. There he found Josiah Warren, the apostle of Individualism, returned from his wanderings and failures, to set up a "Time Store" in the old seat of Socialism. We remember also, that Dr. J.R. Buchanan, the anthropologist, was at New Harmony in 1842, when he astonished the world with his novel experiments in Mesmerism, which Robert Dale Owen reported in a famous letter to the _Evening Post_, and which gave impetus and respectability to the beginnings of modern Spiritualism. These facts and many others indicate that New Harmony continued to be a center and refuge of Socialists and innovators long after the failure of the Community. Notwithstanding the unpopularity of Communism which Macdonald says he found there, it is probably a semi-socialist village to this day, representing more or less the spirit of Robert Owen. In the next place, with all his failures, Owen was successful in producing a fine family; and though he himself returned to England after the disaster at New Harmony, he bequeathed all his children to this country. Macdonald, writing in 1842, says: "Mr. Owen's family all reside in New Harmony. There are four sons and one daughter; viz., William Owen, who is a merchant and bank director; Robert Dale Owen, a lawyer and politician, who attends to the affairs of the Owen Estate; David Dale Owen, a practical geologist; Richard Owen, a practical farmer; and Mrs. Fauntleroy. The four brothers, with the wives and families of three of them, live together in one large mansion." Mr. Owen in his published journal says that "his eldest son Robert Dale Owen, after writing much that was excellent, was twice elected member of Congress, and carried the bill for establishing the Smithsonian Institute in Washington; that his second son, David Dale Owen, was professor of chemistry, mineralogy and geology, and had been employed by successive American governments as their accredited geologist; that his third son, Major Richard Owen, was a professor in a Kentucky Military College; and that his only daughter living in 1851, was the widow of a distinguished American officer." Robert Dale Owen undoubtedly has been and is, the spiritual as well as natural successor of Robert Owen. Wiser and more moderate than his father, he has risen out of the wreck of New Harmony to high stations and great influence in this country. He was originally associated with Frances Wright in her experiment at Nashoba, her lecturing career, and her editorial labors in New York. At that time he partook of the anti-religious zeal of his father. Opposition to revivals was the specialty of his paper, the _Free Enquirer_. In those days, also, he published his "Moral Physiology," a little book teaching in plain terms a method of controlling propagation--_not_ "Male Continence." This bold issue, attributed by his enemies to licentious proclivities, was really part of the socialistic movement of the time; and indicated the drift of Owenism toward sexual freedom and the abolition of marriage. Robert Dale Owen originated and carried the law in Indiana giving to married women a right to property separate from their husbands; and the famous facilities of divorce in that State are attributed to his influence. He, like his father, turned toward Spiritualism, notwithstanding his non-religious antecedents. His report of Dr. Buchanan's experiments, and his books and magazine-articles demonstrating the reality of a world of spirits, have been the most respectable and influential auxiliaries to the modern system of necromancy. There is an air of respect for religion in many of his publications, and even a happy freedom of Bible quotation, which is not found in his father's writings. Perhaps the variation is due to the blood of his mother, who was the daughter of a Bible man and a preacher. So much Mr. Owen left behind. Let us now follow him in his after career. He bade farewell to New Harmony and returned to England in June 1828. Acknowledging no real defeat or loss of confidence in his principles, he went right on in the labors of his mission, as Apostle of Communism for the world, holding himself ready for the most distant service at a moment's warning. His policy was slightly changed, looking more toward moving the nations, and less toward local experiments. In April 1828, he was again in this country, settling his affairs at New Harmony, and preaching his gospel among the people. During this visit the challenge to debate passed between him and Rev. Alexander Campbell, and an arrangement was made for a theological duel. He returned to England in the summer, and in November of the same year (1828) sailed again for America on a scheme of obtaining from the Mexican government a vast territory in Texas on which to develop Communism. After finishing the negotiations in Mexico (which negotiations were never executed), he came to the United States, and in April 1829 met Alexander Campbell at Cincinnati in a debate which was then famous, though now forgotten. From Cincinnati he proceeded to Washington, where he established intimate relations with Martin Van Buren, then Secretary of State, and had an important interview with Andrew Jackson, the President, laboring with these dignitaries on behalf of national friendship and his new social system. In the summer of 1829 he returned to England, and for some years after was engaged in labors for the conversion of the English government, and in some local attempts to establish "Equitable Commerce," "Labor Exchange" and partial Communism, all of which failed. Here Mr. Sargant, his English biographer, gives up the pursuit of him, and slurs over the rest of his life as though it were passed in obscurity and dotage. Not so Macdonald. We learn from him that after Mr. Owen had exceeded the allotment of three-score years and ten, he twice crossed the ocean to this country. Let us follow the faithful record of the disciple. We condense from Macdonald: In September 1844, Mr. Owen arrived in New York and immediately published in the _Herald_ (Sept. 21) an address to the people of the United States proclaiming his mission "to effect in peace the greatest revolution ever yet made in human society." Fourierism was at that time in the ascendant. Mr. Owen called at the office of the _Phalanx_, the organ of Brisbane, and was received with distinction. In October he visited his family at New Harmony. On his way he stopped at the Ohio Phalanx. In December he went to Washington with Robert Dale Owen, who was then member of Congress. The party in power was less friendly than that of 1829, and refused him the use of the National Halls. He lectured, or advertised to lecture, in Concert Hall, Pennsylvania Avenue. "In March 1845," says Macdonald, "I had the pleasure of hearing him lecture at the Minerva rooms in New York, after which he lectured in Lowell and other places." In May he visited Brook Farm. In June he published a manifesto, appointing a World's Convention, to be held in New York in October; and soon after sailed for England. Stopping there scarcely long enough to turn round, he was in this country again in season to give a course of lectures preparatory to the October Convention. After that Convention (which Macdonald confesses was a trifling affair) he continued his labors in various places. On the 26th of October Macdonald met him on the street in Albany, and spent some time with him at his lodgings in much pleasant gossip about New Lanark. In November he called at Hopedale. Adin Ballou, in a published report of the visit, dashed off a sketch of him and his projects, which is so good a likeness that we copy it here: "Robert Owen is a remarkable character, in years nearly seventy-five: in knowledge and experience super-abundant; in benevolence of heart transcendental; in honesty without disguise; in philanthropy unlimited; in religion a skeptic; in theology a Pantheist: in metaphysics a necessarian circumstantialist; in morals a universal exclusionist; in general conduct a philosophic non-resistant; in socialism a Communist; in hope a terrestrial elysianist; in practical business a methodist; in deportment an unequivocal gentleman.** "Mr. Owen has vast schemes to develop, and vast hopes of speedy success in establishing a great model of the new social state; which will quite instantaneously, as he thinks, bring the human race into a terrestrial Paradise. He insists on obtaining a million of dollars to be expended in lands, buildings, machinery, conveniences and beautifications, for his model Community; all to be finished and in perfect order, before he introduces to their new home the well-selected population who are to inhabit it. He flatters himself he shall be able, by some means, to induce capitalists, or perhaps Congress, to furnish the capital for this object. We were obliged to shake an incredulous head and tell him frankly how groundless, in our judgment, all such splendid anticipations must prove. He took it in good part, and declared his confidence unshaken, and his hopes undiscourageable by any man's unbelief." The winter of 1845--6 Mr. Owen appears to have spent in the west, probably at New Harmony. In June 1846, he was again in Albany, and this time for an important purpose. The Convention appointed to frame a new Constitution for the State of New York was then in session. He obtained the use of the Assembly Chamber and an audience of the delegates; and gave them two lectures on "Human Rights and Progress," and withal on their own duties. Macdonald was present, and speaks enthusiastically of his energy and dignity. After reminding the Convention of the importance of the work they were about, he went on to say that "all religious systems, Constitutions, Governments and Laws are and have been founded in _error_, and that error is the false supposition that _man forms his own character_. They were about to form another Constitution based upon that error, and ere long more Constitutions would have to be made and altered, and so on, until the truth that the _character of man is formed for him_ shall be recognized, and the system of society based upon that principle become national and universal." "After the lecture," says Macdonald, "I lunched with Mr. Owen at the house of Mr. Ames. We had conversation on New Harmony, London, &c. Mr. Ames having expressed a desire for a photograph of Mr. Owen, I accompanied them to a gallery at the Exchange where I parted with him--perhaps forever! He returned soon after to England where he remains till the present time." [1854.] Six times after he was fifty years old, and twice after he was seventy, he crossed the Atlantic and back in the service of Communism! Let us not say that all this wonderful activity was useless. Let us not call this man a driveller and a monomaniac. Let us rather acknowledge that he was receiving and distributing an inspiration unknown even to himself, that had a sure aim, and that is at this moment conquering the world. His hallucination was not in his expectations, but in his ideas of methods and times. Owen had not much theory. His main idea was Communism, and that he got from the Rappites. His persistent assertion that man's character is formed for him by his circumstances, was his nearest approach to original doctrine; and this he virtually abandoned when he came to appreciate spiritual conditions. The rest of his teaching is summed up in the old injunction, "Be good," which is the burden of all preaching. But theory was not his function. Nor yet even practice. His business was to seed the world, and especially this country, with an unquenchable desire and hope for Communism; and this he did effectually. We call him the Father of American Socialisms, because he took possession of this country first. Fourierism was a secondary infusion. His English practicality was more in unison with the Yankee spirit, than the theorizing of the French school. He himself claimed the Fourierites as working on his job, grading the track by their half-way schemes of joint-stock and guaranteeism for his Rational Communism. And in this he was not far wrong. Communism or nothing, is likely to be the final demand of the American people. The most conspicuous trait in all Owen's labors and journeyings is his indomitable perseverance. And this trait he transmitted to a large breed of American Socialists. Read again the letter of John Harmon at the close of our last chapter. He is now an old man, but his faith in Communism remains unshaken; it is failure-proof. See how the veterans of Haverstraw, when their Community fell in pieces, moved to Coxsackie, and when the Coxsackie Community broke up, migrated to Ohio and joined the Kendal Community; and perhaps when the Kendal Community failed, they joined another, and another; and probably never gave up the hope of a Community-home. We have met with many such wanderers--men and women who were spoiled for the world by once tasting or at least imagining the sweets of Communism, and would not be turned back by any number of failures. Alcander Longley is a fine specimen of this class. He has tried every kind of Association, from Co-operation to Communism, including Fourierism and the nameless combinations of Spiritualism; and is now hard at work in the farthest corner of Missouri on his sixth experiment, as enthusiastic as ever! J.J. Franks is a still finer specimen. He began with Owenism. When that failed he enlisted with the Fourierites. During their campaign he bought five-thousand acres of land in the mountains of Virginia for a prospective Association, the Constitution of which he prepared and printed, though the Association itself never came into being. When Fourierism failed he devoted himself to Protective Unions. For twenty years past he has been a faithful disciple and patron of the Oneida Community. In such examples we trace the image and spirit of Robert Owen. CHAPTER X. CONNECTING LINKS. In the transition from Owenism to Fourierism and later socialist movements, we find that Josiah Warren fulfills the function of a modulating chord. As we have already said, after seeing the wreck of Communism at New Harmony, he went clear over to the extreme doctrine of "Individual Sovereignty," and continued working on that theme through the period of Fourierism, till he founded the famous village of Modern Times on Long Island, and there became the master-spirit of a school, which has developed at least three famous movements, that are in some sense alive yet, long after the Communities and Phalanxes have gone to their graves. Imprimis, Dr. Thomas L. Nichols was a fellow of the royal society of Individual Sovereigns, and an _habitue_ of Modern Times, when he published his "Esoteric Anthropology" in 1853, and issued his printed catalogue of names for the reciprocal use of affinity-hunters all over the country; whereby he inaugurated the system of "Free Love" or Individual Sovereignty in sexual intercourse, that prevailed among the Spiritualists. He afterwards fell into a reaction opposite to Warren's, and swung clear back into Roman Catholicism. But "though dead, he yet speaketh." Secondly, Stephen Pearl Andrews was publishing-partner of Josiah Warren in the propagandism of Individual Sovereignty; and built or undertook to build a notable edifice at Modern Times, when that village was in its glory. He subsequently distinguished himself by instituting, in connection with Nichols and others, a series of "Sociables" for the Individual Sovereigns in New York city, which were broken up by the conservatives. He is also understood to have originated a great spiritual or intellectual hierarchy, called the "Pantarchy," and a system of Universology, which is not yet published, but has long been on the eve of organizing science and revolutionizing the world. On the whole he may be regarded as the American rival of Comte, as A.J. Davis is of Swedenborg. Lastly, Henry Edger, the actual hierarch of Positivism, one of the ten apostles _de propaganda fide_ appointed by Comte, was called to his great work from Warren's school at Modern Times. He is still a resident of that village, and has attempted within a year or two to form a Positivist Community there, but without success. The genealogy from Owen to these modern movements may be traced thus: Owen begat New Harmony; New Harmony (by reaction) begat Individual Sovereignty; Individual Sovereignty begat Modern Times; Modern Times was the mother of Free Love, the Grand Pantarchy, and the American branch of French Positivism. Josiah Warren was the personal link next to Owen, and deserves special notice. Macdonald gives the following account of him: JOSIAH WARREN. "This gentleman was one of the members of Mr. Owen's Community at New Harmony in 1826, and from the experience gained there, he became convinced that there was an important error in Mr. Owen's principles, and that error was _combination_. It was then that he developed the doctrine of Individual Sovereignty, and devised the plan of Equitable Commerce, which he labored on incessantly for many years. He communicated his views on Labor Exchange to Mr. Owen, who endeavored to practice them in London upon a large scale, but failed, as Mr. Warren asserts, through not carrying out the principle of _Individuality_. A similar attempt was made in Philadelphia, but also failed for the same cause. "After the failure of the New Harmony Community, Mr. Warren went to Cincinnati, and there opened a Time Store, which continued in operation long enough, as he says, to demonstrate the truth of his principles. After this, in association with others, he commenced an experiment in Tuscarawas Co., Ohio; but in consequence of sickness it was abandoned. His next experiment was at Mount Vernon, Indiana, which was unsuccessful. After that he opened a Time Store in New Harmony, which he was carrying on when I became acquainted with him in 1842. "The following must suffice as a description of THE NEW HARMONY TIME STORE. "A portion of a room was divided off by a lattice-work, in which were many racks and shelves containing a variety of small articles. In the center of this lattice an opening was left, through which the store-keeper could hand goods and take pay. On the wall at the back of the store-keeper and facing the customer, hung a clock, and underneath it a dial. In other parts of the room were various articles, such as molasses, corn, buckets, dry-goods, etc. There was a board hanging on the wall conspicuous enough for all persons to see, on which were placed the bills that had been paid to wholesale merchants for all the articles in the store; also the orders of individuals for various things. "I entered the store one day, and walking up to the wicket, requested the store-keeper to serve me with some glue. I was immediately asked if I had a '_Labor note_,' and on my saying no, I was told that I must get some one's note. My object in going there was to inquire if Mr. Warren would exchange labor with me; but this abrupt reception scared me, and I hastily departed. However, upon my becoming further acquainted with Mr. Warren, we exchanged labor notes, and I traded a little at the Time Store in the following manner: "I made or procured a written labor note, promising so many hours labor at so much per hour. Mr. Warren had similar labor notes. I went to the Time Store with my note and my cash, and informed the keeper that I wanted, for instance, a few yards of Kentucky jean. As soon as he commenced conversation or business with me, he set the dial which was under the clock, and marked the _time_. He then attended to me, giving me what I wanted, and in return taking from me as much cash as he paid for the article to the wholesale merchant; and as much time out of my labor note as he spent for me, according to the dial, in the sale of the article. I believe five per cent. was added to the cash cost, to pay rent and cover incidental expenses. The change for the labor notes was in small tickets representing time by the five, ten, or fifteen minutes; so that if I presented a note representing an hour's labor, and he had been occupied only ten minutes in serving me, he would have to give me forty minutes in change. I have seen Mr. Warren with a large bundle of these notes, representing various kinds and quantities of labor, from mechanics and others in New Harmony and its vicinity. Each individual who gave a note, affixed his or her own price per hour for labor. Women charged as high, or nearly as high, as men; and sometimes unskillful hands overrated their services. I knew an instance where an individual issued too many of his notes, and they became depreciated in value. I was informed that these notes were refused at the Time Store. It was supposed that public opinion would regulate these things, and I have no doubt that in time it would. In this experiment Mr. Warren said he had demonstrated as much as he intended. But I heard him complain of the difficulties he had to contend with, and especially of the want of common honesty. "The Time Store existed about two years and a half, and was then discontinued. In 1844 Mr. Warren went to Cincinnati and lectured upon his principles. On the breaking up of the Clermont Phalanx and the Cincinnati Brotherhood, Mr. Warren went to the spot where both failures had taken place, and there found four families who were disposed to try 'Equitable Commerce.' With these and a few other friends he started a village which he called Utopia, where he published the _Peaceful Revolutionist_ for a time. "His next and last movement was at Modern Times, on Long Island, a few miles from New York, whither he came in 1851." From a copy of the _Peaceful Revolutionist_, published by Warren at Utopia in 1845, we take the first of the two following extracts. The second, relating to Modern Times, is from a newspaper article pasted into Macdonald's collection, without date, but probably printed in 1853. These will give a sufficient idea of the reaction from New Harmony, which, on several important lines of influence, connects Owen with the present time. A PEEP INTO UTOPIA. From an editorial by J. Warren. "Throughout the whole of our operations at this village, everything has been conducted so nearly on the _Individual_ basis, that not one meeting for legislation has taken place. No organization, no delegated power, no constitutions, no laws or bye-laws, rules or regulations, but such as each individual makes for himself and his own business; no officers, no priests nor prophets have been resorted to; nothing of this kind has been in demand. We have had a few meetings, but they were for friendly conversation, for music, dancing or some other social and pleasant pastime. Not even a single lecture upon the principles upon which we were acting, has been given on the premises! It was not necessary; for, as a lady remarked, 'the subject once stated and understood, there is nothing left to talk about; all is action after that.' "I do not mean to be understood that all are of one mind. On the contrary, in a progressive state there is no demand for conformity. We build on _Individuality_; any difference between us confirms our position. Differences, therefore, like the admissible discords in music, are a valuable part of our harmony! It is only when the rights of persons or property are actually invaded that collisions arise. These rights being clearly defined and sanctioned by public opinion, and temptations to encroachments being withdrawn, we may then consider our great problem practically solved. With regard to mere difference of opinion in taste, convenience, economy, equality, or even right and wrong, good and bad, sanity and insanity--all must be left to the supreme decision of each _Individual_, whenever he can take on himself the _cost_ of his decisions; which he cannot do while his interests or movements are united or combined with others. It is in combination or close connection only, that compromise and conformity are required. Peace, harmony, ease, security, happiness, will be found only in _Individuality_." A PEEP INTO MODERN TIMES. Conversation between a Resident and a Reporter. "We are not Fourierites. We do not believe in Association. Association will have to answer for very many of the evils with which mankind are now afflicted. We are not Communists; we are not Mormons; we are not Non-Resistants. If a man steals my property or injures me, I will take good care to make myself square with him. We are Protestants, we are Liberals. We believe in the SOVEREIGNTY OF THE INDIVIDUAL. We protest against all laws which interfere with INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS--hence we are Protestants. We believe in perfect liberty of will and action--hence we are Liberals. We have no compacts with each other, save the compact of individual happiness; and we hold that every man and every woman has a perfect and inalienable right to do and perform, all and singular, just exactly as he or she may choose, now and hereafter. But, gentlemen, this liberty to act must only be exercised at the _entire cost_ of the individuals so acting. They have no right to tax the community for the consequences of their deeds." "Then you go back to nearly the first principles of government, and acknowledge the necessity of some controlling power other than individual will?" "Not much--not much. In the present depraved state of society generally, we--few in numbers--are forced by circumstances into courses of action not precisely compatible with our principles or with the intent of our organization, thus: we are a new colony; we can not produce all which we consume, and many of our members are forced to go out into the world to earn what people call money, so that we may purchase our groceries, &c. We are mostly mechanics--eastern men. There is not yet a sufficient home demand for our labor to give constant employment to all. When we increase in numerical strength, our tinsmiths and shoemakers and hatters and artisans of that grade will not only find work at home, but will manufacture goods for sale. That will bring us money. We shall establish a Labor Exchange, so that if my neighbor, the blacksmith, wants my assistance, and I in turn desire his services, there will be a scale to fix the terms of the exchange." "But this would disturb Individual Sovereignty." "I don't see it. No one will be _forced_ to barter his labor for another's. If parties don't like the terms, they can make their own. There are three acres of corn across the way--it is good corn--a good crop--it is mine. You see that man now at work in the field cutting and stacking it. His work as a farmer is not so valuable as mine as a mason. We exchange, and it is a mutual benefit. Corn is just as good a measure of value as coin. You should read the pamphlet we are getting out. It will come cheap. Andrews has published an excellent work on this subject of Individual Sovereignty." "Have you any schools?" "Schools? Ah! we only have a sort of primary affair for small children. It is supported by individual subscription. Each parent pays his proportion." "How about women?" "Well, in regard to the ladies, we let them do about as they please, and they generally please to do about right. Yes, _they_ like the idea of Individual Sovereignty. We give them plenty of amusement; we have social parties, music, dancing, and other sports. They are not all Bloomers: they wear such dresses as suit the individual taste, _provided they can get them_!" "And the _breeches_ sometimes, I suppose?" "Certainly they can _wear the breeches_ if they choose." "Do you hold to marriage?" "Oh, marriage! Well, folks ask no questions in regard to _that_ among us. We, or at least some of us, do not believe in life-partnerships, when the parties can not live happily. Every person here is supposed to know his or her own interests best. We don't interfere; there is no eaves-dropping, or prying behind the curtain. Those are good members of society, who are industrious and mind their own business. The individual is sovereign and independent, and all laws tending to restrict the liberty he or she should enjoy, are founded in error, and should not be regarded." CHAPTER XI. CHANNING'S BROOK FARM. We are now on the confines of the Fourier movement. The time-focus changes from 1826 to 1843. As the period of our history thus approaches the present time, our resources become more ample and authentic. Henceforward we shall not confine ourselves so closely to Macdonald's materials as we have done. The printed literature of Fourierism is more abundant than that of Owenism; and while we shall still follow the catalogue of Associations which we gave from Macdonald in our third chapter, and shall appropriate all that is interesting in his memoirs, we shall also avail ourselves freely of various publications of the Fourierists themselves. A full set of their leading periodicals, (probably the only one in existence) was thrust upon us by the freak of a half-crazed literary gentleman, nearly at the very time when we had the good fortune to find Macdonald's collections. We shall hereafter refer most frequently to the files of _The Dial_, _The Present_, _The Phalanx_, _The Harbinger_, and _The Tribune_. In order to understand the Fourier movement, we must look at the preparations for it. This we have already been doing, in studying Owenism. But there were other preparations. Owenism was the socialistic prelude. We must now attend to what may be called the religious preparations. Owenism was limited and local, chiefly because it was thoroughly non-religious and even anti-religious. In order that Fourierism might sweep the nation, it was necessary that it should ally itself to some form of popular religion, and especially that it should penetrate the strongholds of religious New England. To prepare for this combination, a differentiation in the New England church was going on simultaneously with the career of Owenism. After the war of 1815, the division of Congregationalism into Orthodoxy and Unitarianism, commenced. Excluding from our minds the doctrinal and ecclesiastical quarrels that attended this division, it is easy to see that Providence, which is always on both sides of every fight, aimed at division of labor in this movement. One party was set to defend religion; the other liberty. One stood by the old faith, like the Jew; the other went off into free-thinking and the fine arts, like the Greek. One worked on regeneration of the heart; the other on culture of the external life. In short, one had for its function the carrying through of the Revival system; the other the development of Socialism. The royal men of these two "houses of Israel" were Dr. Beecher and Dr. Channing; and both left royal families, direct or collateral. The Beechers are leading the Orthodox to this day; and the Channings, the Unitarians. We all know what Dr. Beecher and his children have done for revivals. He was the pivotal man between Nettleton and Finney in the last generation, and his children are the standard-bearers of revival religion in the present. What the Channings have done for Socialism is not so well known, and this is what we must now bring to view. First and chief of all the experiments of the Fourier epoch was BROOK FARM. And yet Brook Farm in its original conception, was not a Fourier formation at all, but an American seedling. It was the child of New England Unitarianism. Dr. Channing himself was the suggester of it. So says Ralph Waldo Emerson. As this is an interesting point of history, we have culled from a newspaper report of Mr. Emerson's lecture on Brook Farm, the following summary, from which it appears that Dr. Channing was the pivotal man between old-fashioned Unitarianism and Transcendentalism, and the father of _The Dial_ and of Brook Farm: EMERSON'S REMINISCENCES OF BROOK FARM. "In the year 1840 Dr. Channing took counsel with Mr. George Ripley on the point if it were possible to bring cultivated, thoughtful people together, and make a society that deserved the name. He early talked with Dr. John Collins Warren on the same thing, who admitted the wisdom of the purpose, and undertook to make the experiment. Dr. Channing repaired to his house with these thoughts; he found a well chosen assembly of gentlemen; mutual greetings and introductions and chattings all around, and he was in the way of introducing the general purpose of the conversation, when a side-door opened, the whole company streamed in to an oyster supper with good wines, and so ended that attempt in Boston. Channing opened his mind then to Ripley, and invited a large party of ladies and gentlemen. I had the honor to be present. No important consequences of the attempt followed. Margaret Fuller, Ripley, Bronson and Hedge, and many others, gradually came together, but only in the way of students. But I think there prevailed at that time a general belief in the city that this was some concert of doctrinaires to establish certain opinions, or to inaugurate some movement in literature, philosophy, or religion, but of which these conspirators were quite innocent. It was no concert, but only two or three men and women, who read alone with some vivacity. Perhaps all of them were surprised at the rumor that they were a school or sect, but more especially at the name of 'Transcendentalism.' Nobody knows who first applied the name. These persons became in the common chance of society acquainted with each other, and the result was a strong friendship, exclusive in proportion to its heat.*** "From that time, meetings were held with conversation--with very little form--from house to house. Yet the intelligent character and varied ability of the company gave it some notoriety, and perhaps awakened some curiosity as to its aims and results. But nothing more serious came of it for a long time. A modest quarterly journal called _The Dial_, under the editorship of Margaret Fuller, enjoyed its obscurity for four years, when it ended. Its papers were the contributions and work of friendship among a narrow circle of writers. Perhaps its writers were also its chief readers. But it had some noble papers; perhaps the best of Margaret Fuller's. It had some numbers highly important, because they contained papers by Theodore Parker.** "I said the only result of the conversations which Dr. Channing had was to initiate the little quarterly called _The Dial_; but they had a further consequence in the creation of the society called the "Brook Farm" in 1841. Many of these persons who had compared their notes around in the libraries of each other upon speculative matters, became impatient of speculation, and wished to put it into practice. Mr. George Ripley, with some of his associates, established a society, of which the principle was, that the members should be stockholders, and that while some deposited money others should be allowed to give their labor in different kinds as an equivalent for money. It contained very many interesting and agreeable persons. Mr. Curtis of New York, and his brother of English Oxford, were members of the family; from the first also was Theodore Parker; Mr. Morton of Plymouth--engaged in the fisheries--eccentric; he built a house upon the farm, and he and his family continued in it till the end; Margaret Fuller, with her joyous conversations and sympathies. Many persons gave character and attractiveness to the place. The farm consisted of 200 acres, and occupied some spot near Reedville camp of later years. In and around it, whether as members, boarders, or visitors, were remarkable persons for character, intellect and accomplishments. *** The Rev. Wm. H. Channing, now of London, student of Socialism in France and England, was a frequent sojourner here, and in perfect sympathy with the experiment.*** "Brook Farm existed six or seven years, when the society broke up and the farm was sold, and all parties came out with a loss; some had spent on it the accumulations of years. At the moment all regarded it as a failure; but I do not think that all so regard it now, but probably as an important chapter in their experience, which has been of life-long value. What knowledge has it not afforded them! What personal power which the studies of character have given: what accumulated culture many members owe to it; what mutual pleasure they took of each other! A close union like that in a ship's cabin, of persons in various conditions; clergymen, young collegians, merchants, mechanics, farmers' sons and daughters, with men of rare opportunities and culture." Mr. Emerson's lecture is doubtless reliable on the main point for which we quote from it--the Unitarian and Channing-arian origin of Brook Farm--but certainly superficial in its view of the substantial character and final purpose of that Community. Brook Farm, though American and Unitarian in its origin, became afterward the chief representative and propagative organ of Fourierism, as we shall ultimately show. The very blossom of the experiment, by which it seeded the nation and perpetuated its species, was its periodical, _The Harbinger_, and this belonged entirely to the Fourieristic period of its career. Emerson dilates on _The Dial_, but does not allude to _The Harbinger_. In thus ignoring the public function by which Brook Farm was signally related to the great socialistic revival of 1843, and to the whole of American Socialism, Emerson misses what we conceive to be the main significance of the experiment, and indeed of Unitarianism itself. And here we may say, in passing, that this brilliant Community has a right to complain that its story should have to be told by aliens. Emerson, who was not a member of it, nor in sympathy with the socialistic movement to which it abandoned itself, has volunteered a lecture of reminiscences; and Hawthorne, who joined it only to jilt it, has given the world a poetico-sneering romance about it; and that is all the first-hand information we have, except what can be gleaned from obsolete periodicals. George William Curtis, though he was a member, coolly exclaims in _Harper's Magazine:_ "Strangely enough, Hawthorne is likely to be the chief future authority upon 'the romantic episode' of Brook Farm. Those who had it at heart more than he, whose faith and energy were all devoted to its development, and many of whom have every ability to make a permanent record, have never done so, and it is already so much a thing of the past, that it will probably never be done." In the name of history we ask, Why has not George William Curtis himself made the permanent record? Why has not George Ripley taken the story out of the mouths of the sneerers? Brook Farm might tell its own story through him, for he _was_ Brook Farm. It was George Ripley who took into his heart the inspiration of Dr. Channing, and went to work like a hero to make a fact of it; while Emerson stood by smiling incredulity. It was Ripley who put on his frock and carted manure, and set Hawthorne shoveling, and did his best for years to keep work going, that the Community might pay as well as play. It was no "picnic" or "romantic episode" or chance meeting "in a ship's cabin" to him. His whole soul was bent on making a _home_ of it. If a man's first-born, in whom his heart is bound up, dies at six years old, that does not turn the whole affair into a joke. There were others of the same spirit, but Ripley was the center of them. Brook Farm came very near being a _religious_ Community. It inherited the spirit of Dr. Channing and of Transcendentalism. The inspiration in the midst of which it was born, was intensely literary, but also religious. The Brook Farmers refer to it as the "revival," the "_newness_," the "_renaissance_." There was evidently an afflatus on the men, and they wrote and acted as they were moved. _The Dial_ was the original organ of this afflatus, and contains many articles that are edifying to Christians of good digestion. It was published quarterly, and the four volumes of it (sixteen numbers) extended from July 1840 to April 1844. The first notice we find of Brook Farm is in connection with an article in the second volume of _The Dial_ (Oct. 1841), entitled, "_A Glimpse of Christ's Idea of Society_." The writer of this most devout essay was Miss Elizabeth P. Peabody, then and since a distinguished literary lady. She was evidently in full sympathy with the "newness" out of which Brook Farm issued. Margaret Fuller, one of the constituents of Brook Farm, was editress of _The Dial_, and thus sanctioned the essay. Its reference to Brook Farm is avowed in a note at the end, and in a subsequent article. The following extracts give us THE ORIGINAL IDEAL OF BROOK FARM. [From _The Dial_, Oct. 1841.] "While we acknowledge the natural growth, the good design, and the noble effects of the apostolic church, and wish we had it, in place of our own more formal ones, we should not do so small justice to the divine soul of Jesus of Nazareth, as to admit that it was a main purpose of his to found it, or that when it was founded it realized his idea of human society. Indeed we probably do injustice to the apostles themselves, in supposing that they considered their churches anything more than initiatory. Their language implies that they looked forward to a time when the uttermost parts of the earth should be inherited by their beloved master; and beyond this, when even the name, which is still above every name, should be lost in the glory of the Father, who is to be all in all. "Some persons, indeed, refer all this sort of language to another world; but this is gratuitously done. Both Jesus and the apostles speak of life as the same in both worlds. For themselves individually they could not but speak principally of another world; but they imply no more than that death is an accident, which would not prevent, but hasten the enjoyment of that divine life, which they were laboring to make possible to all men, in time as well as in eternity.*** "The Kingdom of Heaven, as it lay in the clear spirit of Jesus of Nazareth, is rising again upon vision. Nay, this Kingdom begins to be seen not only in religious ecstasy, in moral vision, but in the light of common sense, and the human understanding. Social science begins to verify the prophecy of poetry. The time has come when men ask themselves what Jesus meant when he said, 'Inasmuch as ye have not done it unto the least of these little ones, ye have not done it unto me.' "No sooner is it surmised that the Kingdom of Heaven and the Christian Church are the same thing, and that this thing is not an association outside of society, but a reörganization of society itself, on those very principles of love to God and love to man, which Jesus Christ realized in his own daily life, than we perceive the day of judgment for society is come, and all the words of Christ are so many trumpets of doom. For before the judgment-seat of his sayings, how do our governments, our trades, our etiquettes, even our benevolent institutions and churches look? What church in Christendom, that numbers among its members a pauper or a negro, may stand the thunder of that one word, 'Inasmuch as ye have not done it to the least of these little ones, ye have not done it unto me?' And yet the church of Christ, the Kingdom of Heaven, has not come upon earth, according to our daily prayer, unless not only every church, but every trade, every form of social intercourse, every institution political or other, can abide this test.*** "One would think from the tone of conservatives, that Jesus accepted the society around him, as an adequate framework for individual development into beauty and life, instead of calling his disciples 'out of the world.' We maintain, on the other hand, that Christ desired to reörganize society, and went to a depth of principle and a magnificence of plan for this end, which has never been appreciated, except here and there, by an individual, still less been carried out.*** "There _are_ men and women, who have dared to say to one another, Why not have our daily life organized on Christ's own idea? Why not begin to move the mountain of custom and convention? Perhaps Jesus's method of thought and life is the Savior--is Christianity! For each man to think and live on this method is perhaps the Second Coming of Christ. To do unto the little ones as we would do unto _him_, would be perhaps the reign of the Saints--the Kingdom of Heaven. We have hitherto heard of Christ by the hearing of the ear; now let us see him, let us be him, and see what will come of that. Let us communicate with each other and live.*** "There have been some plans and experiments of Community attempted in this country, which, like those elsewhere, are interesting chiefly as indicating paths in which we should _not_ go. Some have failed because their philosophy of human nature was inadequate, and their establishments did not regard man as he is, with all the elements of devil and angel within his actual constitution. Brisbane has made a plan worthy of study in some of its features, but erring in the same manner. He does not go down into a sufficient spiritual depth, to lay foundations which may support his superstructure. Our imagination before we reflect, no less than our reason after reflection, rebels against this attempt to circumvent moral freedom, and imprison it in his Phalanx.** "_The_ church of Christ's Idea, world-embracing, can be founded on nothing short of faith in the universal man, as he comes out of the hands of the Creator, with no law over his liberty, but the Eternal Ideas that lie at the foundation of his Being. Are you a man? This is the only question that is to be asked of a member of human society. And the enounced laws of that society should be an elastic medium of these Ideas; providing for their everlasting unfolding into new forms of influence, so that the man of time should be the growth of eternity, consciously and manifestly. "To form such a society as this is a great problem, whose perfect solution will take all the ages of time; but let the Spirit of God move freely over the great deep of social existence, and a creative light will come at his word; and after that long evening in which we are living, the morning of the first day shall dawn on a Christian society.*** "N.B. A Postscript to this Essay, giving an account of a specific attempt to realize its principles, will appear in the next number." Thus, according to this writer, Brook Farm, in its inception, was an effort to establish the kingdom of God on earth; that kingdom in which "the will of God shall be done as it is done in heaven;" a higher state than that of the apostolic church; worthy even to be called the Second Coming of Christ, and the beginning of the day of judgment! A high religious aim, surely! and much like that proposed by the Shakers and other successful Communities, that have the reputation of being fanatical. The reader will notice that Miss Peabody, on behalf of Brook Farm, disclaims Fourierism, which was then just beginning to be heard of through Brisbane's _Social Destiny of Man_, first published in 1840. In the next number of _The Dial_ Miss Peabody fulfills her promise of information about Brook Farm, in an article entitled, "_Plan of the West Roxbury Community_." Some extracts will give an idea of the first tottering steps of the infant enterprise: THE ORIGINAL CONSTITUTION OF BROOK FARM. [From _The Dial_, Jan. 1842.] "In the last number of _The Dial_, were some remarks, under the perhaps ambitious title of, 'A Glimpse of Christ's Idea of Society;' in a note to which it was intimated, that in this number would be given an account of an attempt to realize in some degree this great Ideal, by a little company in the midst of us, as yet without name or visible existence. The attempt is made on a very small scale. A few individuals, who, unknown to each other, under different disciplines of life, reacting from different social evils, but aiming at the same object,--of being wholly true to their natures as men and women--have been made acquainted with one another, and have determined to become the Faculty of the Embryo University. "In order to live a religious and moral life worthy the name, they feel it is necessary to come out in some degree from the world, and to form themselves into a community of property, so far as to exclude competition and the ordinary rules of trade; while they reserve sufficient private property, or the means of obtaining it, for all purposes of independence, and isolation at will. They have bought a farm, in order to make agriculture the basis of their life, it being the most direct and simple in relation to nature. A true life, although it aims beyond the highest star, is redolent of the healthy earth. The perfume of clover lingers about it. The lowing of cattle is the natural bass to the melody of human voices. [Here we have the old farming hobby of the socialists.]*** "The plan of the Community, as an economy, is in brief this: for all who have property to take stock, and receive a fixed interest thereon: then to keep house or board in commons, as they shall severally desire, at the cost of provisions purchased at wholesale, or raised on the farm; and for all to labor in community, and be paid at a certain rate an hour, choosing their own number of hours, and their own kind of work. With the results of this labor and their interest, they are to pay their board, and also purchase whatever else they require at cost, at the warehouses of the Community, which are to be filled by the Community as such. To perfect this economy, in the course of time they must have all trades and all modes of business carried on among themselves, from the lowest mechanical trade, which contributes to the health and comfort of life, to the finest art, which adorns it with food or drapery for the mind. "All labor, whether bodily or intellectual, is to be paid at the same rate of wages; on the principle that as the labor becomes merely bodily, it is a greater sacrifice to the individual laborer to give his time to it; because time is desirable for the cultivation of the intellectual, in exact proportion to ignorance. Besides, intellectual labor involves in itself higher pleasures, and is more its own reward, than bodily labor.*** "After becoming members of this Community, none will be engaged merely in bodily labor. The hours of labor for the Association will be limited by a general law, and can be curtailed at the will of the individual still more; and means will be given to all for intellectual improvement and for social intercourse, calculated to refine and expand. The hours redeemed from labor by community, will not be re-applied to the acquisition of wealth, but to the production of intellectual goods. This Community aims to be rich, not in the metallic representative of wealth, but in the wealth itself, which money should represent; namely, LEISURE TO LIVE IN ALL THE FACULTIES OF THE SOUL. As a Community, it will traffic with the world at large, in the products of agricultural labor; and it will sell education to as many young persons as can be domesticated in the families, and enter into the common life with their own children. In the end it hopes to be enabled to provide, not only all the necessaries, but all the elegances desirable for bodily and for spiritual health: books, apparatus, collections for science, works of art, means of beautiful amusement. These things are to be common to all; and thus that object, which alone gilds and refines the passion for individual accumulation, will no longer exist for desire, and whenever the sordid passion appears, it will be seen in its naked selfishness. In its ultimate success, the Community will realize all the ends which selfishness seeks, but involved in spiritual blessings, which only greatness of soul can aspire after. "And the requisitions on the individuals, it is believed, will make this the order forever. The spiritual good will always be the condition of the temporal. Every one must labor for the Community in a reasonable degree, or not taste its benefits.*** Whoever is willing to receive from his fellow men that for which he gives no equivalent, will stay away from its precincts forever. But whoever shall surrender himself to its principles, shall find that its yoke is easy and its burden light. Everything can be said of it, in a degree, which Christ said of his kingdom, and therefore it is believed that in some measure it does embody his idea. For its gate of entrance is strait and narrow. It is literally a pearl hidden in a field. Those only who are willing to lose their life for its sake shall find it. Its voice is that which sent the young man sorrowing away: 'Go sell all thy goods and give to the poor, and then come and follow me.' 'Seek first the kingdom of Heaven and its righteousness, and all other things shall be added to you.'*** "There may be some persons at a distance, who will ask, To what degree has this Community gone into operation? We can not answer this with precision, but we have a right to say that it has purchased the farm which some of its members cultivated for a year with success, by way of trying their love and skill for agricultural labor; that in the only house they are as yet rich enough to own, is collected a large family, including several boarding scholars, and that all work and study together. They seem to be glad to know of all who desire to join them in the spirit, that at any moment, when they are able to enlarge their habitations, they may call together those that belong to them." Thus far it is evident that Brook Farm was not a Fourier formation. Whether the beginnings of the excitement about Fourierism may not have secretly affected Dr. Channing and the Transcendentalists, we can not say. Brisbane's first publication and Dr. Channing's first suggestion of a Community (according to Emerson) took place in the same year--1840. But Brook Farm, as reported by Miss Peabody, up to January 1842 had nothing to do with Fourierism, but was an original Yankee attempt to embody Christianity as understood by Unitarians and Transcendentalists; having a constitution (written or unwritten) invented perhaps by Ripley, or suggested by the collective wisdom of the associates. Without any great scientific theory, it started as other Yankee experiments have done, with the purpose of feeling its way toward co-operation, by the light of experience and common sense; beginning cautiously, as was proper, with the general plan of joint-stock; but calling itself a Community, and evidently bewitched with the idea which is the essential charm of all Socialisms, that it is possible to combine many families into one great home. Moreover thus far there was no "advertising for a wife," no gathering by public proclamation. The two conditions of success which we named as primary in a previous chapter, viz., _religious principle_ and _previous acquaintance_, were apparently secured. The nucleus was small in number, and well knit together by mutual acquaintance and spiritual sympathy. In all this, Brook Farm was the opposite of New Harmony. If we take Rev. William H. Channing, nephew and successor of Dr. Channing, as the exponent of Brook Farm--which we may safely do, since Emerson says he was "a frequent sojourner there, and in perfect sympathy with the experiment"--we have evidence that the Community had not fallen into the ranks of Fourierism at a considerably later period. On the 15th of September 1843, Mr. Channing commenced publishing in New York a monthly Magazine called _The Present_, the main object of which was nearly the same as that of _The Dial_, viz., the discussion of religious Socialism, as understood at Brook Farm and among the Transcendentalists; and in his third number (Nov. 15) he used language concerning Fourier, which _The Phalanx_, Brisbane's organ (then also just commencing), criticised as disrespectful and painfully offensive. From this indication, slight as it is, we may safely conclude that the amalgamation of Brook Farm and Fourierism had not taken place up to November 1843, which was more than two years after Miss Peabody's announcement of the birth of the Community. So far Brook Farm was American and religious, and stood related to the Fourier revival only as a preparation. So far it was _Channing's_ Brook Farm. Its story after it became _Fourier's_ Brook Farm will be reserved for the end of our history of Fourierism. CHAPTER XII. HOPEDALE. This Community was another anticipation of Fourierism, put forth by Massachusetts. It was similar in many respects to Brook Farm, and in its origin nearly contemporaneous. It was intensely religious in its ideal. As Brook Farm was the blossom of Unitarianism, so Hopedale was the blossom of Universalism. Rev. Adin Ballou, the founder, was a relative of the Rev. Hosea Ballou, and thus a scion of the royal family of the Universalists. Milford, the site of the Community, was the scene of Dr. Whittemore's first ministerial labors. Hopedale held on its way through the Fourier revival, solitary and independent, and consequently never attained so much public distinction as Brook Farm and other Associations that affiliated themselves to Fourierism; but considered by itself as a Yankee attempt to solve the socialistic problem, it deserves more attention than any of them. Our judgment of it, after some study, may be summed up thus: As it came nearest to being a religious community, so it commenced earlier, lasted longer, and was really more scientific and sensible than any of the other experiments of the Fourier epoch. Brook Farm was talked about in 1840, but we find no evidence of its organization till the fall of 1841. Whereas Mr. Ballou's Community dates its first compact from January 1841; though it did not commence operations at Hopedale till April 1842. The North American Phalanx is reputed to have outlived all the other Associations of the Fourier epoch; but we find, on close examination of dates, that Hopedale not only was born before it, but lived after it. The North American commenced in 1843, and dissolved in 1855. Hopedale commenced in 1841, and lasted certainly till 1856 or 1857. Ballou published an elaborate exposition of it in the winter of 1854-5, and at that time Hopedale was at its highest point of success and promise. We can not find the exact date of its dissolution, but it is reported to have attained its seventeenth year, which would carry it to 1858. Indeed it is said there is a shell of an organization there now, which has continued from the Community, having a President, Secretary, &c., and holding occasional meetings; but its principal function at present is the care of the village cemetery. As to the theory and constitutional merits of the Hopedale Community, the reader shall judge for himself. Here is an exposition published in tract form by Mr. Ballou in 1851, outlining the scheme which was fully elaborated in his subsequent book: "The Hopedale Community, originally called Fraternal Community, No. 1, was formed at Mendon, Massachusetts, January 28, 1841, by about thirty individuals from different parts of the State. In the course of that year they purchased what was called the 'Jones Farm,' _alias_ 'The Dale,' in Milford. This estate they named HOPEDALE--joining the word 'Hope' to its ancient designation, as significant of the great things they hoped for from a very humble and unpropitious beginning. About the first of April 1842, a part of the members took possession of their farm and commenced operations under as many disadvantages as can well be imagined. Their present domain (December 1, 1851), including all the lands purchased at different times, contains about 500 acres. Their village consists of about thirty new dwelling-houses, three mechanic shops, with water-power, carpentering and other machinery, a small chapel, used also for the purposes of education, and the old domicile, with the barns and out-buildings much improved. There are now at Hopedale some thirty-six families, besides single persons, youth and children, making in all a population of about 175 souls. "It is often asked, What are the peculiarities, and what the advantages of the Hopedale Community? Its leading peculiarities are the following: "1. It is a church of Christ (so far as any human organization of professed Christians, within a particular locality, have the right to claim that title), based on a simple declaration of faith in the religion of Jesus Christ, as he taught and exemplified it, according to the scriptures of the New Testament, and of acknowledged subjection to all the moral obligations of that religion. No person can be a member, who does not cordially assent to this comprehensive declaration. Having given sufficient evidence of truthfulness in making such a profession, each individual is left to judge for him or herself, with entire freedom, what abstract doctrines are taught, and also what external religious rites are enjoined in the religion of Christ. No precise theological dogmas, ordinances or ceremonies are prescribed or prohibited. In such matters all the members are free, with mutual love and toleration, to follow their own highest convictions of truth and religious duty, answerable only to the great Head of the true Church Universal. But in practical Christianity this church is precise and strict. There its essentials are specific. It insists on supreme love to God and man--that love which 'worketh no ill' to friend or foe. It enjoins total abstinence from all God-contemning words and deeds; all unchastity; all intoxicating beverages; all oath-taking; all slave-holding and pro-slavery compromises; all war and preparations for war; all capital and other vindictive punishments; all insurrectionary, seditious, mobocratic and personal violence against any government, society, family or individual; all voluntary participation in any anti-Christian government, under promise of unqualified support--whether by doing military service, commencing actions at law, holding office, voting, petitioning for penal laws, aiding a legal posse by injurious force, or asking public interference for protection which can be given only by such force; all resistance of evil with evil; in fine, from all things known to be sinful against God or human nature. This is its acknowledged obligatory righteousness. It does not expect immediate and exact perfection of its members, but holds up this practical Christian standard, that all may do their utmost to reach it, and at least be made sensible of their shortcomings. Such are the peculiarities of the Hopedale Community as a church. "2. It is a Civil State, a miniature Christian Republic, existing within, peaceably subject to, and tolerated by the governments of Massachusetts and the United States, but otherwise a commonwealth complete within itself. Those governments tax and control its property, according to their own laws, returning less to it than they exact from it. It makes them no criminals to punish, no disorders to repress, no paupers to support, no burdens to bear. It asks of them no corporate powers, no military or penal protection. It has its own Constitution, laws, regulations and municipal police; its own Legislative, Judiciary and Executive authorities; its own educational system of operations; its own methods of aid and relief; its own moral and religious safeguards; its own fire insurance and savings institutions; its own internal arrangements for the holding of property, the management of industry, and the raising of revenue; in fact, all the elements and organic constituents of a Christian Republic, on a miniature scale. There is no Red Republicanism in it, because it eschews blood; yet it is the seedling of the true Democratic and Social Republic, wherein neither caste, color, sex nor age stands proscribed, but every human being shares justly in 'Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.' Such is The Hopedale Community as a Civil State. "3. It is a universal religious, moral, philanthropic, and social reform Association. It is a Missionary Society, for the promulgation of New Testament Christianity, the reformation of the nominal church, and the conversion of the world. It is a moral suasion Temperance Society on the teetotal basis. It is a moral power Anti-Slavery Society, radical and without compromise. It is a Peace Society on the only impregnable foundation of Christian non-resistance. It is a sound theoretical and practical Woman's Rights Association. It is a Charitable Society for the relief of suffering humanity, to the extent of its humble ability. It is an Educational Society, preparing to act an important part in the training of the young. It is a socialistic Community, successfully actualizing, as well as promulgating, practical Christian Socialism--the only kind of Socialism likely to establish a true social state on earth. The members of this Community are not under the necessity of importing from abroad any of these valuable reforms, or of keeping up a distinct organization for each of them, or of transporting themselves to other places in search of sympathizers. Their own Newcastle can furnish coal for home-consumption, and some to supply the wants of its neighbors. Such is the Hopedale Community as a Universal Reform Association on Christian principles. "_What are its Advantages?_ "1. It affords a theoretical and practical illustration of the way whereby all human beings, willing to adopt it, may become individually and socially happy. It clearly sets forth the principles to be received, the righteousness to be exemplified, and the social arrangements to be entered into, in order to this happiness. It is in itself a capital school for self-correction and improvement. No where else on earth is there a more explicit, understandable, practicable system of ways and means for those who really desire to enter into usefulness, peace and rational enjoyment. This will one day be seen and acknowledged by multitudes who now know nothing of it, or knowing, despise it, or conceding its excellence, are unwilling to bow to its wholesome requisitions. 'Yet the willing and the obedient shall eat the good of the land.' "2. It guarantees to all its members and dependents employment, at least adequate to a comfortable subsistence; relief in want, sickness or distress; decent opportunities for religious, moral and intellectual culture; an orderly, well regulated neighborhood; fraternal counsel, fellowship and protection under all circumstances; and a suitable sphere of individual enterprise and responsibility, in which each one may, by due self-exertion, elevate himself to the highest point of his capabilities. "3. It solves the problem which has so long puzzled Socialists, the harmonization of just individual freedom with social co-operation. Here exists a system of arrangements, simple and effective, under which all capital, industry, trade, talent, skill and peculiar gifts may freely operate and co-operate, with no restrictions other than those which Christian morality every where rightfully imposes, constantly to the advantage of each and all. All may thrive together as individuals and as a Community, without degrading or impoverishing any. This excellent system of arrangements in its present completeness is the result of various and wisely improved experiences. "4. It affords a peaceful and congenial home for all conscientious persons, of whatsoever religious sect, class or description heretofore, who now embrace practical Christianity, substantially as this Community holds it, and can no longer fellowship the popular religionists and politicians. Such need sympathy, co-operation and fraternal association, without undue interference in relation to non-essential peculiarities. Here they may find what they need. Here they may give and receive strength by rational, liberal Christian union. "5. It affords a most desirable opportunity for those who mean to be practical Christians in the use of property, talent, skill or productive industry, to invest them. Here those goods and gifts may all be so employed as to benefit their possessors to the full extent of justice, while at the same time they afford aid to the less favored, help build up a social state free from the evils of irreligion, ignorance, poverty and vice, promote the regeneration of the race, and thus resolve themselves into treasure laid up where neither moth, nor rust, nor thieves can reach them. Here property is preëminently safe, useful and beneficent. It is Christianized. So, in a good degree, are talent, skill, and productive industry. "6. It affords small scope, place or encouragement for the unprincipled, corrupt, supremely selfish, proud, ambitious, miserly, sordid, quarrelsome, brutal, violent, lawless, fickle, high-flying, loaferish, idle, vicious, envious and mischief-making. It is no paradise for such; unless they voluntarily make it first a moral penitentiary. Such will hasten to more congenial localities; thus making room for the upright, useful and peaceable. "7. It affords a beginning, a specimen and a presage of a new and glorious social Christendom--a grand confederation of similar Communities--a world ultimately regenerated and Edenized. All this shall be in the forthcoming future. "The Hopedale Community was born in obscurity, cradled in poverty, trained in adversity, and has grown to a promising childhood, under the Divine guardianship, in spite of numberless detriments. The bold predictions of many who despised its puny infancy have proved false. The fears of timid and compassionate friends that it would certainly fail have been put to rest. Even the repeated desertion of professed friends, disheartened by its imperfections, or alienated by too heavy trials of their patience, has scarcely retarded its progress. God willed otherwise. It has still many defects to outgrow, much impurity to put away, and a great deal of improvement to make--moral, intellectual and physical. But it will prevail and triumph. The Most High will be glorified in making it the parent of a numerous progeny of practical Christian Communities. Write, saith the Spirit, and let this prediction be registered against the time to come, for it shall be fulfilled." In the large work subsequently published, Mr. Ballou goes over the whole ground of Socialism in a systematic and masterly manner. If the people of this country were not so bewitched with importations from England and France, that they can not look at home productions in this line, his scheme would command as much attention as Fourier's, and a great deal more than Owen's. The fact of practical failure is nothing against him in the comparison, as it is common to all of them. For a specimen, take the following: Mr. Ballou finds all man's wants, rights and duties in seven spheres, viz.: 1, Individuality; 2, Connubiality; 3, Consanguinity; 4, Congeniality; 5, Federality; 6, Humanity; 7, Universality. These correspond very nearly to the series of spheres tabulated by Comtists. On the basis of this philosophy of human nature, Mr. Ballou proposes, not a mere monotony of Phalanxes or Communities, all alike, but an ascending series of four distinct kinds of Communities, viz.: 1, The Parochial Community, which is nearly the same as a common parish church; 2, The Rural Community, which is a social body occupying a distinct territorial domain, but not otherwise consolidated; 3, The Joint-stock Community, consolidating capital and labor, and paying dividends and wages; of which Hopedale itself was a specimen; and 4, The Common-stock Community, holding property in common and paying no dividends or wages; which is Communism proper. Mr. Ballou provides elaborate Constitutional forms for all of these social states, and shows their harmonious relation to each other. Then he builds them up into larger combinations, viz.: 1, Communal Municipalities, consisting of two or more Communities, making a town or city; 2, Communal States; 3, Communal Nations; and lastly, "the grand Fraternity of Nations, represented by Senators in the Supreme Unitary Council." Moreover he embroiders on all this an ascending series of categories for individual character. Citizens of the great Republic are expected to arrange themselves in seven Circles, viz.: 1, The Adoptive Circle, consisting of members whose connections with the world preclude their joining any integral Community; 2, The Unitive Circle, consisting of those who join in building up Rural and Joint-stock Communities; 3, The Preceptive Circle, consisting of persons devoted to teaching in any of its branches; 4, The Communistic Circle, consisting of members of common stock Communities; 5, The Expansive Circle, consisting of persons devoted to extending the Republic, by founding new Communities; 6, The Charitive Circle, consisting of working philanthropists; and 7, The Parentive Circle, consisting of the most worthy and reliable counselors--the fathers and mothers in Israel. This is only a skeleton. In the book all is worked into harmonious beauty. All is founded on religion; all is deduced from the Bible. We confess that if it were our doom to attempt Community-building by paper programme, we should choose Adin Ballou's scheme in preference to any thing we have ever been able to find in the lucubrations of Fourier or Owen. To give an idea of the high religious tone of Mr. Ballou and his Community, we quote the following passage from his preface: "Let each class of dissenting socialists stand aloof from our Republic and experiment to their heart's content on their own wiser systems. It is their right to do so uninjured, at their own cost. It is desirable that they should do so, in order that it may be demonstrated as soon as possible which the true social system is. When the radically defective have failed, there will be a harmonious concentration of all the true and good around the Practical Christian Standard. Meantime the author confides this Cause calmly to the guidance, guardianship and benediction of God, even that Heavenly Father who once manifested his divine excellency in Jesus Christ, and who ever manifests himself through the Christ-Spirit to all upright souls. He sincerely believes the movement to have been originated and thus far supervised by that Holy Spirit. He is confident that well-appointed ministering angels have watched over it, and will never cease to do so. This strong confidence has sustained him from the beginning, under all temporary discouragements, and now animates him with unwavering hopes for the future. The Hopedale Community, the first constituent body of the new social order, commenced the settlement of its Domain in the spring of 1842, very small in numbers and pecuniary resources. Its disadvantages were so multiform and obvious, that most Associationists of that period regarded it as little better than a desperate undertaking, alike contracted in its social platform, its funds, and other fundamental requisites of success. Yet it has lived and flourished, while its supposed superiors have nearly all perished. Such was the will of God; such his promise to its founders; such their trust in him; such the realization of their hopes; and such the recompense of their persevering toils. And such is the benignant Providence which will bear the Practical Christian Republic onward through all its struggles to the actualization of its sublime destiny. Its citizens 'seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.' Therefore will all things needful be added unto them. Let the future demonstrate whether such a faith and such expectations are the dreams of a shallow visionary, or the divinely inspired, well-grounded assurances of a rightly balanced religious mind." Let it not be thought that Ballou was a mere theorizer. Unlike Owen and Fourier, he worked as well as wrote. Originally a clergyman and a gentleman, he gave up his salary, and served in the ranks as a common laborer for his cause. In conversation with one who reported to us, he said, that often-times in the early days of Hopedale he would be so tired at his work in the ditch or on the mill-dam, that he would go to a neighboring haystack, and lie down on the sunny side of it, wishing that he might go to sleep and never wake again! Then he would recuperate and go back to his work. Nearly all the recreation he had in those days, was to go out occasionally into the neighborhood and preach a funeral sermon! And this, by the way, is a fit occasion to say that in our opinion there ought to be a prohibitory duty on the importation of socialistic theories, that have not been worked out, as well as written out, by the inventors themselves. It is certainly cruel to set vast numbers of simple people agog with Utopian projects that will cost them their all, while the inventors and promulgators do nothing but write and talk. What kind of a theory of chemistry can a man write without a laboratory? What if Napoleon had written out a programme for the battle of Austerlitz, and then left one of his aids-de-camp to superintend the actual fighting? It will be noticed that Mr. Ballou, in his expositions, carries his assurance that his system is all right, and his confidence of success, to the verge of presumption. In this he appears to have partaken of a spirit that is common to all the socialist inventors. Fourier, without a laboratory or an experiment, was as dogmatic and infallible as though he were an oracle of God; and Owen, after a hundred defeats, never doubted the perfection of his scheme, and never fairly confessed a failure. But in the end Ballou rises above these theorizers, even in this matter. Our informant says he manfully owns that Hopedale was a _total_ failure. As to the causes of the catastrophe, his account is the old story of general depravity. The timber he got together was not suitable for building a Community. The men and women that joined him were very enthusiastic, and commenced with great zeal; their devotion to the cause seemed to be sincere; but they did not know themselves. The following details, given by Mr. Ballou, of the actual proceedings which brought Hopedale to its end, are very instructive in regard to the operation of the joint-stock principle. Mr. Ballou was the first President of the Community; but was ultimately superseded by E.D. Draper. This gentleman came to Hopedale with great enthusiasm for the cause. He was not wealthy, but was a sharp, enterprising business man; and very soon became the managing spirit of the whole concern. He had a brother associated with him in business, who had no sympathy with the Community enterprise. With this brother Mr. Draper became deeply engaged in outside operations, which were very lucrative. They gained in wealth by these operations, while the inside interests were gradually falling into neglect and bad management. The result was that the Community sunk capital from year to year. Meanwhile Draper bought up three-fourths of the joint-stock, and so had the legal control in his own hands. At length he became dissatisfied with the way matters were tending, and went to Mr. Ballou and told him that "this thing must not go any further." Mr. Ballou asked him if that meant that the Community must come to an end. He replied, "Yes." "There was no other way," said Mr. Ballou, "but to submit to it." He then said to Mr. Draper that he had one condition to put to him; that was, that he should assume the responsibility of paying the debts. Mr. Draper consented; the debts were paid; and thus terminated the Hopedale experiment. CHAPTER XIII. THE RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES. We have said that Brook Farm came very near being a religious Community; and that Hopedale came still nearer. In this respect these two stand alone among the experiments of the Fourier epoch. Here therefore is the place to bring to view in some brief way for purposes of comparison, the series of strictly religious Communities that we have referred to heretofore as colonies of foreigners. The following account of them first published in the _Social Record_, has the authority and freshness of testimony by an eye-witness. Of course it must not be taken as a view of the exotic Communities at the present time, but only at its date. JACOBI'S SYNOPSIS. "During the last eight years I have visited all the Communities in this country, except the Icarian and Oneida societies, staying at each from six months to two years, to get thoroughly acquainted with their practical workings. I will mention each society according to its age: "1. Conrad Beizel, a German, founded the colony of Ephrata, eight miles from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1713. There were at times some thousands of members. The Bible was their guide; they had all things in common; lived strictly a life of celibacy; increased in numbers, and became very rich. Conrad was at the head of the whole; he was the sun from which all others received the rays of life and animation. He lived to a very old age, but it was with him as with all other men; his sun was not standing in the zenith all the time, but went down in the afternoon. His rays had not power enough to warm up thousands of members, as in younger days: he as the head became old and lifeless, and the members began to leave. He appointed a very amiable man as his successor, but he could not stop the emigration. The property is now in the hands of trustees who belong to the world, and gives an income of about $1200 a year. Perhaps there are now twelve or fifteen members. Some of the grand old buildings are yet standing. This was the first Community in America. "2. Ann Lee, an English woman, came to this country in 1774, and founded the Shaker societies. I have visited four, and lived in two. In point of order, neatness, regularity and economy, they are far in advance of all the other societies. They are from nearly all the civilized nations of the globe, and this is one reason for their great temporal success. Other Communities do not prosper as well, because they are composed too much of one nation. In Ann Lee's time, and even some time after her departure, they had many spiritual gifts, as never a body of people after Christ's time has had; and they were of such a nature as Christ said should be among his true followers; but they have now lost them, so far as they are essential and beneficial. The ministry is the head. Too much attention is given to outward rules, that set up the ministers and elders as patterns, and keep all minds on the same plane. While limited by these rules there will be no progress, and their noble institutions will become dead letters. "3. George Rapp, a German, founded a society in the first quarter of this century. After several removals they settled at Economy, in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, eighteen miles from Pittsburg. They are all Germans; live strictly a life of celibacy; take the Bible as their guide, as Rapp understood it. They numbered about eighteen hundred in their best times, but are now reduced to about three hundred, and most of them are far advanced in years. They are very rich and industrious. Rapp was their leader and head, and kept the society in prosperous motion so long as he was able to exercise his influence; but as he advanced in years and his mental strength and activity diminished, the members fell off. He is dead; and his successor, Mr. Baker, is advanced in years. They are next to the Shakers in point of neatness and temporal prosperity; but unlike them in being strict Bible-believers, and otherwise differing in their religious views. "4. Joseph Bimeler, a German, in 1816 founded the colony of Zoar, in Tuscorora County, Ohio, twelve miles from New Philadelphia, with about eight hundred of his German friends. They are Bible believers in somewhat liberal style. Bimeler was the main engine; he had to do all the thinking, preaching and pulling the rest along. While he had strength all went on seemingly very well; but as his strength began to fail the whole concern went on slowly. I arrived the week after his death. The members looked like a flock of sheep who had lost their shepherd. Bimeler appointed a well-meaning man for his successor, but as he was not Bimeler, he could not put his engine before the train. Every member pushed forward or pulled back just as he thought proper; and their thinking was a poor affair, as they were not used to it. They live married or not, just as they choose; are well off, a good moral people, and number about five hundred. "5. Samuel Snowberger, an American, founded a society in 1820 at Snowhill, Pennsylvania, twenty miles from Harrisburg. He took Ephrata as his pattern in every respect. The Snowbergers believe in the Bible as explained in Beizel's writings. They are well off, and number about thirty. [This society should be considered an offshoot of No. 1.] "6. Christian Metz, a German, with his followers, founded a society eight miles from Buffalo, New York, in 1846. They called themselves the inspired people, and their colony Ebenezer. They believe in the Bible, as it is explained through their mediums. Metz and one of the sisters have been mediums more than thirty years, through whom one spirit speaks and writes. This spirit guides the society in spiritual and temporal matters, and they have never been disappointed in his counsels for their welfare. They have been led by this spirit for more than a century in Germany. They permit marriage, when, after application has been made, the spirit consents to it; but the parties have to go through some public mortification. In 1851 they had some thousands of members. They have now removed to Iowa, where they have 30,000 acres of land. This is the largest and richest Community in the United States. One member brought in $100,000, others $60,000, $40,000, $20,000, etc. They are an intelligent and very kind people, and live in little comfortable cottages, not having unitary houses as the other societies. They are not anxious to get members, and none are received except by the consent of the controlling spirit. They have a printing-press for their own use, but do not publish any books. "7. Erick Janson, a Swede, and his friends started a colony at Bishop Hill, Illinois, in 1846, and now number about eight hundred. They are Bible-believers according to their explanations. They believe that a life of celibacy is more adapted to develop the inner man, but marriage is not forbidden. Their minds are not closed against liberal progress, when they are convinced of the truth and usefulness of it. They began in very poor circumstances, but are now well off, and not anxious to get members; do not publish any books about their colony. Janson died eight years ago. They have no head; but the people select their preachers and trustees, who superintend the different branches of business. They are kept in office as long as the majority think proper. I am living there now. "_August 26 1858._ A. JACOBI." The connection between religion of some kind and success in these Communities, has come to be generally recognized, even among the old friends of non-religious Association. Thus Horace Greeley, in his "Recollections of a Busy Life," says: "That there have been--nay, are--decided successes in practical Socialism, is undeniable; but they all have that Communistic basis which seems to me irrational and calculated to prove fatal.*** "I can easily account for the failure of Communism at New Harmony, and in several other experiments; I can not so easily account for its successes. Yet the fact stares us in the face that, while hundreds of banks and factories, and thousands of mercantile concerns, managed by shrewd, strong men, have gone into bankruptcy and perished, Shaker Communities, established more than sixty years ago, upon a basis of little property and less worldly wisdom, are living and prosperous to-day. And their experience has been imitated by the German Communities at Economy, Zoar, the Society of Ebenezer, &c., &c. Theory, however plausible, must respect the facts.*** "Religion often makes practicable that which were else impossible, and divine love triumphs where human science is baffled. Thus I interpret the past successes and failures of Socialism. "With a firm and deep religious basis, any Socialistic scheme may succeed, though vicious in organization and at war with human nature, as I deem Shaker Communism and the antagonist or 'Free Love' Community of Perfectionists at Oneida. Without a basis of religious sympathy and religious aspiration, it will always be difficult, though I judge not impossible." Also Charles A. Dana, in old times a Fourierist and withal a Brook Farmer, now chief of _The New York Sun_, says in an editorial on the Brocton Association (May 1 1869): "Communities based upon peculiar religious views, have generally succeeded. The Shakers and the Oneida Community are conspicuous illustrations of this fact; while the failure of the various attempts made by the disciples of Fourier, Owen, and others, who have not had the support of religious fanaticism, proves that without this great force the most brilliant social theories are of little avail." It used to be said in the days of Slavery, that religious negroes were worth more in the market than the non-religious. Thus religion, considered as a working force in human nature, has long had a recognized commercial value. The logic of events seems now to be giving it a definite socialistic value. American experience certainly tends to the conclusion that religious men can hold together longer and accomplish more in close Association, than men without religion. But with this theory how shall we account for the failure of Brook Farm and Hopedale? They certainly had, as we have seen, much of the "fanaticism" of the Shakers and other successful Communities--at least in their expressed ideals. Evidently some peculiar species of religion, or some other condition than religion, is necessary to insure success. To discover the truth in this matter, let us take the best example of success we can find, and see what other principle besides religion is most prominent in it. The Shakers evidently stand highest on the list of successful Communities. Religion is their first principle; what is their second? Clearly the exclusion of marriage, or in other words, the subjection of the sexual relation to the Communistic principle. Here we have our clue; let us follow it. Can any example of success be found where this second condition is not present? We need not look for precisely the Shaker treatment of the sexual relation in other examples. Our question is simply this: Has any attempt at close Association ever succeeded, which took marriage into it substantially as it exists in ordinary society? Reviewing Jacobi's list, which includes all the Communities commonly reported to be successful, we find the following facts: 1. The Communists of Ephrata live strictly a life of celibacy. 2. The Rappites live strictly a life of celibacy; though Williams says they did not adopt this principle till 1807, which was four years after their settlement in Pennsylvania. 3. The Zoarites marry or not as they choose, according to Jacobi; but Macdonald, who also visited them, says: "At their first organization marriage was strictly forbidden, not from any religious scruples as to its propriety, but as an indispensable matter of economy. They were too poor to rear children, and for years their little town presented the anomaly of a village without a single child to be seen or heard within its limits. Though this regulation has been for years removed, as no longer necessary, their settlement still retains much of its old character in this respect." 4. The Snowbergers, taking Ephrata as their pattern, adhere strictly to celibacy. 5. The Ebenezers, according to Jacobi, permit marriage, when their guiding spirit consents to it; but the parties have to go through some public mortification. Another account of the Ebenezers says: "They marry and are given in marriage; but what will be regarded as most extraordinary, they are practically Malthusians when the economy of their organization demands it. We have been told that when they contemplated emigration to this country, in view of their then condition and what they must encounter in fixing a new home, they concluded there should be no increase of their population by births for a given number of years; and the regulation was strictly adhered to." 6. The Jansonists believe that a life of celibacy is more adapted to develop the life of the inner man; but marriage is not forbidden. Thus in all these Societies Communism evidently is stronger than marriage familism. The control over the sexual relation varies in stringency. The Shakers and perhaps the Ephratists exclude familism with religious horror; the Rappites give it no place, but their repugnance is less conspicuous; the Zoarites have no conscience against it, but exclude it from motives of economy; the Ebenezers excluded it only in the early stages of their growth, but long enough to show that they held it in subjection to Communism. The Jansonists favor celibacy; but do not prohibit marriage. The decreasing ratio of control corresponds very nearly to the series of dates at which these Communities commenced. The Ephratists settled in this country in 1713; the Shakers in 1774; the Rappites in 1804; the Zoarites in 1816; the Ebenezers in 1846; and the Jansonists in 1846. Thus there seems to be a tendency to departure from the stringent anti-familism of the Shakers, as one type of Communism after another is sent here from the Old World. Whether there is a complete correspondence of the fortunes of these several Communities to the strength of their anti-familism, is an interesting question which we are not prepared to answer. Only it is manifest that the Shakers, who discard the radix of old society with the greatest vehemence, and are most jealous for Communism as the prime unit of organization, have prospered most, and are making the longest and strongest mark on the history of Socialism. And in general it seems probable from the fact of success attending these forms of Communism to the exclusion of all others, that there is some rational connection between their control of the sexual relation and their prosperity. The only case that we have heard of as bearing against the hypothesis of such a connection, is that of the French colony of Icarians. We have seen their example appealed to as proof that Communism may exist without religion, and _with_ marriage. Our accounts, however, of this Society in its present state are very meager. The original Icarian Community, founded by Cabet at Nauvoo, not only tolerated but required marriage; and as it soon came to an end, its fate helps the anti-marriage theory. The present Society of Icarians is only a fragment of that Community--about sixty persons out of three hundred and sixty-five. Whether it retained its original constitution after separating from its founder, and how far it can fairly claim to be a success, we know not. All our other facts would lead us to expect that it will either subordinate the sexual relation to the Communistic, or that it will not long keep its Communism. Of course we shall not be understood as propounding the theory that the negative or Shaker method of disposing of marriage and the sexual relation, is the only one that can subordinate familism to Communism. The Oneida Communists claim that their control over amativeness and philoprogenitiveness, the two elements of familism, is carried much farther than that of the Shakers; inasmuch as they make those passions serve Communism, instead of opposing it, as they do under suppression. They dissolve the old dual unit of society, but take the constituent elements of it all back into Communism. The only reason why we do not name the Oneida Community among the examples of the connection between anti-marriage and success, is that we do not consider it old enough to be pronounced successful. Let us now go back to Brook Farm and Hopedale, and see how they stood in relation to marriage. We find nothing that indicates any attempt on the part of Brook Farm to meddle with the marriage relation. In the days of its original simplicity, it seems not to have thought of such a thing. It finally became a Fourier Phalanx, and of course came into more or less sympathy with the _expectations_ of radical social changes which Fourier encouraged. But it was always the policy of the _Harbinger_, the _Tribune_, and all the organs of Fourierism, to indignantly protest their innocence of any _present_ disloyalty to marriage. And yet we find in the _Dial_ (January 1844), an article about Brook Farm by Charles Lane, which shows in the following significant passage, that there was serious thinking among the Transcendentalists, as to the possibility of a clash between old familism and the larger style of life in the Phalanx: "The great problem of socialism now is, whether the existence of the marital family is compatible with that of the universal family, which the term 'Community' signifies. The maternal instinct, as hitherto educated, has declared itself so strongly in favor of the separate fireside, that Association, which appears so beautiful to the young and unattached soul, has yet accomplished little progress in the affections of that important section of the human race--the mothers. With fathers, the feeling in favor of the separate family is certainly less strong; but there is an undefinable tie, a sort of magnetic rapport, an invisible, inseverable, umbilical cord between the mother and child, which in most cases circumscribes her desires and ambition to her own immediate family. All the accepted adages and wise saws of society, all the precepts of morality, all the sanctions of theology, have for ages been employed to confirm this feeling. This is the chief corner-stone of present society; and to this maternal instinct have, till very lately, our most heartfelt appeals been made for the progress of the human race, by means of a deeper and more vital education. Pestalozzi and his most enlightened disciples are distinguished by this sentiment. And are we all at once to abandon, to deny, to destroy this supposed stronghold of virtue? Is it questioned whether the family arrangement of mankind is to be preserved? Is it discovered that the sanctuary, till now deemed the holiest on earth, is to be invaded by intermeddling skepticism, and its altars sacrilegiously destroyed by the rude hand of innovating progress? Here 'social science' must be brought to issue. The question of Association and of marriage are one. If, as we have been popularly led to believe, the individual or separate family is in the true order of Providence, then the associative life is a false effort. If the associative life is true, then is the separate family a false arrangement. By the maternal feeling it appears to be decided, that the co-existence of both is incompatible, is impossible. So also say some religious sects. Social science ventures to assert their harmony. This is the grand problem now remaining to be solved, for at least the enlightening, if not for the vital elevation of humanity. That the affections can be divided, or bent with equal ardor on two objects, so opposed as universal and individual love, may at least be rationally doubted. History has not yet exhibited such phenomena in an associate body, and scarcely perhaps in any individual. The monasteries and convents, which have existed in all ages, have been maintained solely by the annihilation of that peculiar affection on which the separate family is based. The Shaker families, in which the two sexes are not entirely dissociated, can yet only maintain their union by forbidding and preventing the growth of personal affection other than that of a spiritual character. And this in fact is not personal in the sense of individual, but ever a manifestation of universal affection. Spite of the speculations of hopeful bachelors and æsthetic spinsters, there is somewhat in the marriage bond which is found to counteract the universal nature of the affections, to a degree tending at least to make the considerate pause, before they assert that, by any social arrangements whatever, the two can be blended into one harmony. The general condition of married persons at this time is some evidence of the existence of such a doubt in their minds. Were they as convinced as the unmarried of the beauty and truth of associate life, the demonstration would be now presented. But might it not be enforced that the two family ideas really neutralize each other? Is it not quite certain that the human heart can not be set in two places? that man can not worship at two altars? It is only the determination to do what parents consider the best for themselves and their families, which renders the o'er populous world such a wilderness of self-hood as it is. Destroy this feeling, they say, and you prohibit every motive to exertion. Much truth is there in this affirmation. For to them, no other motive remains, nor indeed to any one else, save that of the universal good, which does not permit the building up of supposed self-good, and therefore forecloses all possibility of an individual family. "These observations, of course, equally apply to all the associative attempts, now attracting so much public attention; and perhaps most especially to such as have more of Fourier's designs than are observable at Brook Farm. The slight allusion in all the writers of the 'Phalansterian' class, to the subject of marriage, is rather remarkable. They are acute and eloquent in deploring Woman's oppressed and degraded position in past and present times, but are almost silent as to the future." So much for Brook Farm. Hopedale was thoroughly conservative in relation to marriage. The following is an extract from its Constitution: "ARTICLE VIII. Sec. 1. Marriage, being one of the most important and sacred of human relationships, ought to be guarded against caprice and abuse by the highest wisdom which is available. Therefore within the membership of this republic and the dependencies thereof, marriage is specially commended to the care of the Preceptive and Parentive circles. They are hereby designated as the confidential counselors of all members and dependents who may desire their mediation in cases of matrimonial negotiation, contract or controversy; and shall be held preëminently responsible for the prudent and faithful discharge of their duties. But no person decidedly averse to their interposition shall be considered under imperative obligation to solicit or accept it. And it shall be considered the perpetual duty of the Preceptive and Parentive Circles to enlighten the public mind relative to the requisites of true matrimony, and to elevate the marriage institution within this Republic to the highest possible plane of purity and happiness. "Sec. 2. Marriage shall always be solemnized in the presence of two or more witnesses, by the distinct acknowledgment of the parties before some member of the Preceptive, or of the Parentive Circle, selected to preside on the occasion. And it shall be the imperative duty of the member so presiding, to see that every such marriage be recorded within ten days thereafter, in the Registry of the Community to which one or both of them shall at the time belong. "Sec. 3. Divorce from the bonds of matrimony shall never be allowable within the membership of this Republic, except for adultery conclusively proved against the accused party. But separations for other sufficient reasons may be sanctioned, with the distinct understanding that neither party shall be at liberty to marry again during the natural lifetime of the other." On this text Mr. Ballou comments in his book to the extent of thirty pages, and occupies as many more with the severest criticisms of "Noyesism" and other forms of sexual innovation. The facts we have found stand thus: All the successful Communities, besides being religious, exercise control, more or less stringent, over the sexual relation; and this principle is most prominent in those that are most successful. But Brook Farm and Hopedale did not attempt any such control. We incline therefore to the conclusion that the Massachusetts Socialisms were weak, not altogether for want of religion, but because they were too conservative in regard to marriage, and thus could not digest and assimilate their material. Or in more general terms, the conclusion toward which our facts and reflections point is, first, that religion, not as a mere doctrine, but as an _afflatus_ having in itself a tendency to make many into one, is the first essential of successful Communism; and, secondly, that the _afflatus_ must be strong enough to decompose the old family unit and make Communism the home-center. We will conclude with some observations that seem necessary to complete our view of the religious Communities. When we speak of these societies as successful, this must not be understood in any absolute sense. Their success is evidently a thing of _degrees_. All of them appear to have been very successful at some period of their career in _making money_; which fact indicates plainly enough, that the theories of Owen and Fourier about "compound economies" and "combined industry," are not moonshine, but practical verities. We may consider it proved by abundant experiment, that it is easy for harmonious Associations to get a living, and to grow rich. But in other respects these religious Communities have had various fortunes. The oldest of them, Beizel's Colony of Ephrata, in its early days numbered its thousands; but in 1858 it had dwindled down to twelve or fifteen members. So the Rappites in their best time numbered from eight hundred to a thousand; but are now reduced to two or three hundred old people. This can hardly be called success, even if the money holds out. On the other hand, the Shakers appear to have kept their numbers good, as well as increased in wealth, for nearly a century; though Jacobi represents them as now at a stand-still. The rest of the Communities in his list, dating from 1816 to 1846, are perhaps not old enough to be pronounced permanently successful. Whether they are dwindling, like the Beizelites and Rappites, or at a stand-still, like the Shakers, or in a period of vigor and growth, Jacobi does not say; and we have no means of ascertaining. It is proper, however, to call them all successful in a relative sense; that is, as compared with the non-religious experiments. They have held together and made money for long periods; which is a success that the Owen and Fourier Communities have not attained. If required here to define absolute success, we should say that at the lowest it includes not merely self-support, but also self-perpetuation. And this attainment is nearly precluded by the ascetic method of treating the sexual relation. The adoption of foreign children can not be a reliable substitute for home-propagation. The highest ideal of a successful Community requires that it should be a complete nursery of human beings, doing for them all that the old family home has done, and a great deal more. Scientific propagation and universal culture should be its ends, and money-making only its means. The causes of the comparative success which the ascetic Communities have attained, we have found in their religious principles and their freedom from marriage. Jacobi seems disposed to give special prominence to _leadership_, as a cause of success. He evidently attributes the decline of the Beizelites, the Rappites and the Zoarites, to the old age and death of their founders. But something more than skillful leadership is necessary to account for the success of the Shakers. They had their greatest expansion after the death of Ann Lee. Jacobi recognizes, in his account of the Ebenezers, another centralizing and controlling influence, coöperating with leadership, which has probably had more to do with the success of all the religious Communities than leadership or anything else; viz., _inspiration_. He says of the Ebenezers: "They call themselves the inspired people. They believe in the Bible, as it is explained through their mediums. Metz, the founder, and one of the sisters, have been mediums more than thirty years, through whom _one_ spirit speaks and writes. This spirit guides the society in spiritual and temporal matters, and they have never been disappointed in his counsels for their welfare. They have been led by this spirit for more than a century in Germany. No members are received except by the consent of this controlling spirit." Something like this must be true of all the Communities in Jacobi's list. This is what we mean by _afflatus_. Indeed, this is what we mean by _religion_, when we connect the success of Communities with their religion. Mere doctrines and forms without afflatus are not religion, and have no more power to organize successful Communities, than the theories of Owen and Fourier. Personal leadership has undoubtedly played a great part in connection with afflatus, in gathering and guiding the religious Communities. Afflatus requires personal mediums; and probably success depends on the due adjustment of the proportion between afflatus and medium. As afflatus is the permanent element, and personal leadership the transitory, it is likely that in the cases of the dwindling Communities, leadership has been too strong and afflatus too weak. A very great man, as medium of a feeble afflatus, may belittle a Community while he holds it together, and insure its dwindling away after his death. On the other hand, we see in the case of the Shakers, a strong afflatus, with an ordinary illiterate woman for its first medium; and the result is success continuing and increasing after her death. It is probably true, nevertheless, that an afflatus which is strong enough to make a strong man its medium _and keep him under_, will attain the greatest success; or in other words, that the greater the medium the better, other things being equal. In all cases of afflatus continuing after the death of the first medium, there seems to be an alternation of experience between afflatus and personal leadership, somewhat like that of the Primitive Christian Church. In that case, there was first an afflatus concentrated on a strong leader; then after the death of the leader, a distributed afflatus for a considerable period following the day of Pentecost; and finally another concentration of the afflatus on a strong leader in the person of Paul, who was the final organizer. Compare with this the experience of the Shakers. The afflatus (issuing from a combination of the Quaker principality with the "French Prophets") had Ann Lee for its first medium, and worked in the concentrated form during her life. After her death, there was a short interregnum of distributed inspiration. Finally the afflatus concentrated on another leader; and this time it was a man, Elder Meacham, who proved to be the final organizer. Each step of this progress is seen in the following brief history of Shakerism, from the American Cyclopædia: "The idea of a community of property, and of Shaker families or unitary households, was first broached by Mother Ann, who formed her little family into a model after which the general organizations of the Shaker order, as they now exist, have been arranged. She died in 1784. In 1787 Joseph Meacham, formerly a Baptist preacher, but who had been one of Mother Ann's first converts at Watervliet, collected her adherents in a settlement at New Lebanon, and introduced both principles, together probably with some others not to be found in the revelations of their foundress. Within five years, under the efficient administration of Meacham, eleven Shaker settlements were founded, viz.: at New Lebanon, New York, which has always been regarded as the parent Society; at Watervliet, New York; at Hancock, Tyringham, Harvard, and Shirley, Massachusetts; at Enfield, Connecticut (Meacham's native town); at Canterbury and Enfield, New Hampshire; and at Alfred and New Gloucester, Maine." Going beyond the Communities for examples (as the principles of growth are the same in all spiritual organizations), we may in like manner compare the development of Mormonism with that of Christianity. Joseph Smith was the first medium. After his death came a period of distributed inspiration. Finally the afflatus concentrated on Brigham Young as its second medium, and he has organized Mormonism. For a still greater example, look at the Bonaparte dynasty. It can not be doubted that there is a persistent afflatus connected with that power. It was concentrated on the first Napoleon. After his deposal and death there was a long interregnum; but the afflatus was only distributed, not extinguished. At length it concentrated again on the present Napoleon; and he proves to be great in diplomacy and organization, as the first Napoleon was in war. We have said that the general conclusion toward which our facts and reflections point, is, first, that religion, not as a mere doctrine, but as an afflatus, is the first essential to successful Communism; and secondly, that the afflatus must be strong enough to make Communism the home-center. We may now add (if the law we have just enunciated is reliable), that the afflatus must also be strong enough to prevail over personal leadership in its mediums, and be able, when one leader dies, to find and use another. We must note however that this law of apparent transfer does not necessarily imply real change of leadership. In the case of Christianity, its adherents assume that the first leader was not displaced, but only transferred from the visible to the invisible sphere, and thus continued to be the administrative medium of the original afflatus. And something like this, we understand, is claimed by the Shakers in regard to Ann Lee. CHAPTER XIV. THE NORTHAMPTON ASSOCIATION. This Community, though its site was in a region where Jonathan Edwards and Revivalism reigned a hundred years before, could hardly be called religious. It seems to have represented a class sometimes called "Nothingarians." But like Brook Farm and Hopedale, it was an independent Yankee attempt to regenerate society, and a forerunner of Fourierism. Massachusetts, the center of New England, the mother of school systems and factory systems, of Faneuil Hall revolutions and Anti-Slavery revolutions, of Liberalism, Literature, and Social Science, appears to have anticipated the advent of Fourierism, and to have prepared herself for or against the rush of French ideas, by throwing out three experiments of her own on her three avenues of approach:--Unitarianism, Universalism, and Nothingarianism. The following neat account of the Northampton Community, is copied from a feminine manuscript in Macdonald's collection, on which he wrote in pencil: "_By Mrs. Judson, for me, through G.W. Benson, Williamsburg, February 14 1853._" MEMOIR. "The Northampton Association of Education and Industry had its origin in the aspiration of a few individuals for a better and purer state of society--for freedom from the trammels of sect and bigotry, and an opportunity of carrying out their principles, socially, religiously, and otherwise, without restraint from the prevailing practices of the world around. "The projectors of this enterprise were Messrs. David Mack, Samuel L. Hill, George W. Benson and William Adam. These, with several others who were induced to unite with them, in all ten persons, held their first meeting April 8 1842, organized the Association, and adopted a preamble, constitution and by-laws. "This little band formed the nucleus, around which a large number soon clustered, all thinking, intelligent persons; all, or nearly all, seeing and feeling the imperfections of existing society, and seeking a purer, more free and elevated position as regards religion, politics, business, &c. It would not be true to say that _all_ the members of the Community were imbued with the true spirit of reform; but the leading minds were sincere reformers, earnest, truthful souls, sincerely desiring to advance the cause of truth and liberty. Some were young persons, attracted thither by friends, or coming there to seek employment on the same terms as members, and afterwards applying for full membership. "The Association was located about two and a half miles from the village and center of business of Northampton. The estate consisted of five hundred acres of land, a good water-privilege, a silk factory four stories in height, six dwelling-houses, a saw-mill and other property, all valued at about $31,000. This estate was formerly owned by the Northampton Silk Company; afterwards by J. Conant & Co., who sold it to the persons who originated the Association. The amount of stock paid in was $20,000. This left a debt of $11,000 upon the Community, which, in the enthusiasm of the new enterprise, they expected soon to pay by additions to their capital stock, and by the profits of labor. But by the withdrawal of members holding stock, and also by some further purchases of property, this debt was afterwards increased to nearly four times its original amount, and no progress was made toward its liquidation during the continuance of the Association. "Labor was remunerated equally; both sexes and all occupations receiving the same compensation. "It could not be expected that so many persons, bound by no pledges or 'Articles of Faith,' should agree in all things. They were never asked when applying for membership, 'Do you believe so and so?' On the contrary, a good life and worthy motives were the only tests by which they were judged. Of course it was necessary, before they could be admitted, to decide the question, 'Can they be useful to the Association?' "The accommodations for families were extremely limited, and many times serious inconvenience was experienced, in consequence of small and few apartments. For the most part it was cheerfully sustained; at least, so long as there was any hope of success--that is, of paying the debts, and obtaining a livelihood. Most of the members had been accustomed to good, spacious houses, and every facility for comfortable living. "To obviate the difficulty of procuring suitable tenements for separate families, a community family was instituted, occupying a part of the silk-factory. Two stories of this building were appropriated to the use of such as chose to live at a common table and participate in the labor of the family. This also formed the home of young persons who were unconnected with families. "There was always plenty of food, and no one suffered for the necessaries or comforts of life. All were satisfied with simplicity, both in diet and dress. "At the first annual meeting, held January 18 1843, some important changes were made in the management of the affairs of the Association, and a new 'Preamble and Articles of Association,' tending toward consolidation and communism, were adopted for the year. This step was the occasion of dissatisfaction to some of the stockholders--to one in particular, and probably led to his withdrawal, before the expiration of the year. "Previous to this time some of the early members had become dissatisfied with life in a Community, and had withdrawn from all connection with it. They were persons who had been pleased with the avowed objects and principles of the Association, and with the persons composing it, and also looked upon it as a profitable investment of money. Of course in this they were disappointed, and they had no principles which would induce them to make sacrifices for the cause. "A department of education was organized, in which it was designed to unite study with labor, on the ground that no education is complete which does not combine physical with mental development. Mr. Adam was the first director of that department, and was an able and efficient teacher. He was succeeded by Mr. Mack and his wife, who were persons of much experience in teaching, and of superior attainments. A boarding-school was opened under their auspices, and several pupils were received from abroad, who pursued the same course as those belonging to the Association. "In the course of the third year a subscription was opened, for the purpose of relieving the necessities of the Association; and people interested in the object of Social Reform were solicited to invest money in this enterprise, no subscription to be binding unless the sum of $25,000 was raised. This sum never was subscribed, and of course no assistance was obtained in that way. "Many troubles were constantly growing out of the pecuniary difficulties in which the Community was involved. Many sacrifices were demanded, and much hard labor was required, and those whose hearts were not in the work withdrew. "As might be inferred from what has been said, there was no religious creed, and no particular form of religious worship enjoined. A meeting was sustained on the first day of the week most of the time while the Association existed, in which various subjects were discussed, and all had the right and an opportunity of expressing their opinions or personal feelings. Of course a great variety of views and sentiments were introduced. As the religious sentiment is strong in most minds, this introduction of every phase of religious belief was very exciting, producing in some dissatisfaction; in others, the shaking of all their preconceived views; and probably resulting in greater liberality and more charitable feelings in all. "The carrying out of different religious views was, perhaps, the occasion of more disagreement than any other subject: the more liberal party advocating the propriety and utility of amusements, such as card-playing, dancing, and the like; while others, owing perhaps to early education, which had taught them to look upon such things as sinful, now thought them detrimental and wholly improper, especially in the impoverished state of the Community. This disagreement operated to general disadvantage; as in consequence of it several worthy people and valuable members withdrew. "There was also a difference of opinion many times with regard to the management of business, which was principally in the hands of the trustees, viz., the President, Secretary, and Treasurer, and it is believed was honestly conducted. "The whole number of persons ever resident there, as nearly as can be ascertained, was two hundred and twenty; while probably the number of actual members at any one time did not exceed one hundred and thirty. "With regard to the dissolution of this organization, which took place November 1 1846, I can only quote from the official records. 'There being no business before the meeting, there was a general conversation among the members about the business prospects of the Association, and many were of the opinion that it was best to dissolve; as we were deeply in debt, and there was no prospect of any more stock being taken up, which was the only thing that could relieve us, as our earnings were not large, and those members who had left us, whose stock was due, were calling for it. Some spoke of the want of that harmony and brotherly feeling which were indispensable to the success of such an enterprise. Others spoke of the unwillingness to make sacrifices on the part of some of the members; also, of the lack of industry and the right appropriation of time.' At a subsequent meeting the Executive Council stated that 'in view of all the circumstances of the Association, they had decided upon a dissolution of the several departments as at present organized, and should proceed to close the affairs of the Association as soon as practicable.' So the Association ceased to exist. "The spirit which prompted it can never die; and though, in the carrying out of the principles which led to its organization, a failure has been experienced, yet the spirit of good-will and benevolence, that all-embracing charity, which led them to receive among them some unworthy and unprofitable members, still lives and is developing itself in other situations and by other means. "It is impossible to give a complete history of this Community--its changes--its trials--its failure, and in some respects, perhaps, its success. Much happiness was experienced there--much of trial and discipline. No doubt it had its influence on the surrounding world, leading them to greater liberality and Christian forbearance. It was a great innovation on the established order of things in the whole region, and was at first looked upon with horror and distrust. These prejudices in a great measure subsided, and gave way to a feeling of comparative respect. With other similar undertakings that have been abandoned, it has done its work; and may it be found that its influence has been for good and not for evil." CHAPTER XV. THE SKANEATELES COMMUNITY. A wonderful year was 1843. Father Miller's prophetic calculations had created a vast expectation that it would be the year of the final conflagration. His confident followers had their ascension-robes ready; and outside multitudes saw the approach of that year with an uneasy impression that the advent of Christ, or something equally awful, was about to make an end of the world. And indeed tremendous events did come in 1843. If Father Miller and his followers had been discerning and humble enough to have accepted a spiritual fulfillment of their prophecies, they might have escaped the mortification of a total mistake as to the time. The events that came were these: The Anti-slavery movement, which for twelve years had been gathering into itself all minor reforms and firing the northern heart for revolution, came to its climax in the summer of 1843, in a rush of one hundred National Conventions! At the same time Brisbane had every thing ready for his great socialistic movement, and in the autumn of 1843 the flood of Fourierism broke upon the country. Anti-slavery was destructive; Fourierism professed to be constructive. Both were rampant against existing civilization. Perhaps it will be found that in the junction and triumphant sweep of these forces, the old world, in an important sense, did come to an end. In 1843 Massachusetts, the great mother of notions, threw out in the face of impending Fourierism her fourth and last socialistic experiment. There was a mania abroad, that made common Yankees as confident of their ability to achieve new social machinery and save the world, as though they were Owens or Fouriers. The Unitarians at Brook Farm, the Universalists at Hopedale, and the Nothingarians at Northampton, had tried their hands at Community-building in 1841--2, and were in the full glory of success. It was time for Anti-slavery, the last and most vigorous of Massachusetts nurslings, to enter the socialistic field. This time, as if to make sure of out-flanking the French invasion, the post for the experiment was taken at Skaneateles (a town forty miles west of the present site of the Oneida Community), thus extending the Massachusetts line from Boston to Central New York. John A. Collins, the founder of the Skaneateles Community, was a Boston man, and had been a working Abolitionist up to the summer of 1843. He was in fact the General Agent of the Massachusetts Anti-slavery Society, and in that capacity had superintended the one hundred National Conventions ordered by the Society for that year. During the latter part of this service he had turned his own attention and that of the Conventions he managed, so much toward his private schemes of Association, that he had not the face to claim his salary as Anti-slavery agent. His way was to get up a rousing Anti-slavery Convention, and conclude it by calling a socialistic Convention, to be held on the spot immediately after it. At the close of the campaign he resigned, and the Anti-slavery Board gave him the following certificate of character: "Voted, That the Board, in accepting the resignation of John A. Collins, tender him their sincerest thanks, and take this occasion to bear the most cordial testimony to the zeal and disinterestedness with which, at a great crisis, he threw himself a willing offering on the altar of the Anti-slavery cause, as well as to the energy and rare ability with which for four years he has discharged the duties of their General Agent; and in parting, offer him their best wishes for his future happiness and success." In October Mr. Collins bought at Skaneateles a farm of three hundred and fifty acres for $15,000, paying $5,000 down, and giving back a mortgage for the remainder. There was a good stone farm-house with barns and other buildings on the place. Mr. Collins gave a general invitation to join. One hundred and fifty responded to the call, and on the first of January 1844 the Community was under way, and the first number of its organ, _The Communitist_, was given to the world. The only document we find disclosing the fundamental principles of this Community is the following--which however was not ventilated in the _Communitist_, but found its way to the public through the _Skaneateles Columbian_, a neighboring paper. We copy _verbatim_: _Articles of Belief and Disbelief, and Creed prepared and read by John A. Collins, November 19, 1843._ "BELOVED FRIENDS: By your consent and advice, I am called upon to make choice of those among you to aid me in establishing in this place, a Community of property and interest, by which we may be brought into love relations, through which, plenty and intelligence may be ultimately secured to all the inhabitants of this globe. To accomplish this great work there are but very few, in consequence of their original organization, structure of mind, education, habits and preconceived opinions, who are at the present time adapted to work out this great problem of human redemption. All who come together for this purpose, should be united in thought and feeling on certain fundamental principles; for without this, a Community of property would be but a farce. Therefore it may be said with great propriety that the success of the experiment will depend upon the wisdom exhibited in the choice of the materials as agents for its accomplishment. "Without going into the detail of the principles upon which this Community is to be established, I will state briefly a few of the fundamental principles which I regard as essential to be assented to by every applicant for admission: "1. RELIGION.--A disbelief in any special revelation of God to man, touching his will, and thereby binding upon man as authority in any arbitrary sense; that all forms of worship should cease; that all religions of every age and nation, have their origin in the same great falsehood, viz., God's special Providences; that while we admire the precepts attributed to Jesus of Nazareth, we do not regard them as binding because uttered by him, but because they are true in themselves, and best adapted to promote the happiness of the race: therefore we regard the Sabbath as other days; the organized church as adapted to produce strife and contention rather than love and peace; the clergy as an imposition; the bible as no authority; miracles as unphilosphical; and salvation from sin, or from punishment in a future world, through a crucified God, as a remnant of heathenism. "2. GOVERNMENTS.--A disbelief in the rightful existence of all governments based upon physical force; that they are organized bands of bandits, whose authority is to be disregarded: therefore we will not vote under such governments, or petition to them, but demand them to disband; do no military duty; pay no personal or property taxes; sit upon no juries; and never appeal to the law for a redress of grievances, but use all peaceful and moral means to secure their complete destruction. "3. That there is to be no individual property, but all goods shall be held in common; that the idea of mine and thine, as regards the earth and its products, as now understood in the exclusive sense, is to be disregarded and set aside; therefore, when we unite, we will throw into the common treasury all the property which is regarded as belonging to us, and forever after yield up our individual claim and ownership in it; that no compensation shall be demanded for our labor, if we should ever leave. "4. MARRIAGE.--[Orthodox as usual on this head.] That we regard marriage as a true relation, growing out of the nature of things--repudiating licentiousness, concubinage, adultery, bigamy and polygamy; that marriage is designed for the happiness of the parties and to promote love and virtue; that when such parties have outlived their affections and can not longer contribute to each other's happiness, the sooner the separation takes place the better; and such separation shall not be a barrier to the parties in again uniting with any one, when they shall consider their happiness can be promoted thereby; that parents are in duty bound to educate their children in habits of virtue and love and industry; and that they are bound to unite with the Community. "5. EDUCATION OF CHILDREN.--That the Community owes to the children a duty to secure them a virtuous education, and watch over them with parental care. "6. DIETETICS.--That a vegetable and fruit diet is essential to the health of the body, and purity of the mind, and the happiness of society; therefore, the killing and eating of animals is essentially wrong, and should be renounced as soon as possible, together with the use of all narcotics and stimulants. "7. That all applicants shall, at the discretion of the Community, be put upon probation of three or six months. "8. Any person who shall force himself or herself upon the Community, who has received no invitation from the Community, or who does not assent to the views above enumerated, shall not be treated or considered as a member of the Community; no work shall be assigned to him or her if solicited, while at the same time, he or she shall be regarded with the same kindness as all or any other strangers--shall be furnished with food and clothing; that if at any time any one shall dissent from any or all of the principles above, he ought at once, in justice to himself, to the Community, and to the world, to leave the Association. To these views we hereby affix our respective signatures. "Assented to by all, except Q.A. Johnson, of Syracuse; J. Josephine Johnson, do.; William Kennedy, do.; Solomon Johnson, of Martinsburgh; and William C. Besson, of Lynn, Massachusetts." This was too strong, and had to be repudiated the next spring by the following editorial in the _Communitist_: "CREEDS.--Our friends abroad require us to say a few words under this head. "We repudiate all creeds, sects, and parties, in whatever shape or form they may present themselves. Our principles are as broad as the universe, and as liberal as the elements that surround us. They forbid the adoption and maintenance of any creed, constitution, rules of faith, declarations of belief and disbelief, touching any or all subjects; leaving each individual free to think, believe and disbelieve, as he or she may be moved by knowledge, habit, or spontaneous impulses. Belief and disbelief are founded upon some kind of evidence, which may be satisfactory to the individual to-day, but which other or better evidence may change to-morrow. We estimate the man by his acts rather than by his peculiar belief. We say to all, Believe what you may, but act as well as you can. "These principles do not deny to any one the right to draw out his peculiar views--his belief and disbelief--on paper, and present them for the consideration and adoption of others. Nor do we deny the fact that such a thing has been done even with us. But we are happy to inform all our friends and the world at large, that such a document was not fully assented to and was never adopted by the Community; and that the authors were among the first to discover the error and retrace the step. The document, with all proceedings under it, or relating thereto, has long since been abolished and repudiated by unanimous consent; and we now feel ourselves to be much wiser and better than when we commenced." It will be noticed that there was a party in the Community, headed by Q.A. Johnson, who saw the error of the creed before Collins did, and refused to sign it. This Johnson and his party made much trouble for Collins; and the whole plot of the Community-drama turns on the struggle between these two men, as the reader will see in the sequel. Macdonald says, "A calamitous error was made in the deeding of the property. It appears that Mr. Collins, who purchased the property, and whose experiment it really was, permitted the name of another man [Q.A.J.] to be inserted in the deed, as a trustee, in connection with his own. He did this to avoid even the suspicion of selfishness. But his confidence was misplaced; as the individual alluded to subsequently acted both selfishly and dishonestly. Mr. Collins and his friends had to contend with the opposition of this person and one or two others during a great portion of the time." Mr. Finch, an Owenite, writing to the _New Moral World_, August 16, 1845, says: Mr. Collins held to no-government or non-resistance principles: and while he claimed for the Community the right to receive and reject members, he refused to appeal to the government to aid him in expelling imposters, intruders and unruly members; which virtually amounted to throwing the doors wide open for the reception of all kinds of worthless characters. In consequence of his efforts to reduce that principle to practice, the Community soon swarmed with an indolent, unprincipled and selfish class of 'reformers,' as they termed themselves; one of whom, a lawyer [Q.A.J.], got half the estate into his own hands, and well-nigh ruined the concern. Mr. Collins, from his experience, at length became convinced of his errors as to these new-fangled Yankee notions, and has now abandoned them, recovered the property, got rid of the worthless and dissatisfied members, restored the society to peace and harmony, and they are now employed in forming a new Constitution for the society, in agreement with the knowledge they have all gained by the last two years' experience. "Owing to the dissensions that arose from their defective organization at the first, a considerable number of the residents have either been dismissed, or have withdrawn from the place. The population, therefore, at present numbers only eleven adult male members, eight female, and seven children. The whole number of members, male and female, labor most industriously from six till six; and having large orders for their saw-mill and turning shop, they work them night and day, with two sets of men, working each twelve hours--the saw-mill and turning shop being their principal sources of revenue." _The Communitist_, September 18, 1845, about two years after the commencement of the Community, and eight months before its end, gives the following picture of its experiences and prospects, from the lively pen of Mr. Collins: "Most happy are we to inform our readers and the friends of Community in general, that our prospects of success are now cheering. The dark clouds which so long hung over our movement, and at times threatened not only to destroy its peace, but its existence, have at last disappeared. We now have a clear sky, and the genial rays of a brilliant sun once more are radiating upon us. Our past experience, though grievous, will be of great service to us in our future progress, and will no doubt ultimately work out the fruits of unity, industry, abundance, intelligence and progress. It has taught us how far we may, in safety to our enterprise, advance; that some important steps may be taken, of the practicability of which we had doubts; and others, in the success of which we had but little faith, have proved both safe and expedient. Our previous convictions have been confirmed, that all is not gold that glitters; that not all who are most clamorous for reform are competent to become successful agents for its accomplishment; that there is floating upon the surface of society, a body of restless, disappointed, jealous, indolent spirits, disgusted with our present social system, not because it enchains the masses to poverty, ignorance, vice and endless servitude; but because they could not render it subservient to their private ends. Experience has convinced us that this class stands ready to mount every new movement that promises ease, abundance, and individual freedom; and that when such an enterprise refuses to interpret license for freedom, and insists that members shall make their strength, skill and talent subservient to the movement, then the cry of tyranny and oppression is raised against those who advocate such industry and self-denial; then the enterprise must become a scape-goat, to bear the fickleness, indolence, selfishness and envy of this class. But the above is not the only class of minds that our cause convened. From the great, noble, and disinterested principles which it embraces, from the high hopes which it inspires for progress, reform and, in a word, for human redemption, it has called many true reformers, genuine philanthropists, men and women of strong hands, brave hearts and vigorous minds. "Our enterprise, the most radical and reformatory in its profession, gathers these two extremes of character, from motives diametrically opposite. When these are brought together, it is reasonable to expect that, like an acid and alkali, they will effervesce, or, like the two opposite poles of a battery, will repel each other. For the last year it has been the principal object of the Community to rid itself of its cumbersome material, knowing that its very existence hinged upon this point. In this it has been successful. Much of this material was hired to go at an expense little if any short of three thousand dollars. People will marvel at this. But the Community, in its world-wide philanthropy, cast to the winds its power to expel unruly and turbulent members, which gave our quondam would-be-called 'Reformers,' an opportunity to reduce to practice, their real principles. In this winnowing process it would be somewhat remarkable if much good wheat had not been carried off with the chaff. "Communities and Associations, in their commencement too heavily charged with an impracticable, inexperienced, self-sufficient, gaseous class of mind, have generally exploded before they were conscious of the combustible material they embraced, or had acquired strength or experience sufficient to guard themselves against those elements which threaten their destruction. With a small crew well acclimated, we have doubled the cape, and are now upon a smooth sea, heading for the port of Communism. "The problem of social reform must be solved by its own members; by those possessed of living faith, indomitable perseverance, unflinching devotion and undying energy. The vicious, the sick, the infirm, the indolent, can not at present be serviceable to our cause. Community should neither be regarded in the light of a poor-house nor hospital. Our object is not so much to give a home to the poor, as to demonstrate to them their own power and resources, and thereby ultimately to destroy poverty. We make money no condition of membership; but poverty alone is not a sufficient qualification to secure admission. Stability of character, industrious habits, physical energy, moral strength, mental force, and benevolent feelings, are characteristics indispensable to a valuable Communist. A Community of such members has an inexhaustible mine of wealth, though not in possession of one dollar. Do not understand by this that we reject either men or money, simply because they happen to be united. The more wealth a good member brings, the better. It is, however, the smallest of all qualifications, in and of itself. There should be at first as few non-producers as possible. Single men and women and small families are best adapted to our condition and circumstances. In the commencement, the less children the better. It would be desirable to have none but the children born on the domain. Then they would grow up with an undivided Community feeling. Through the agency of such is our cause to be successfully carried forward. A man with a large family of non-producing children, must possess extraordinary powers, to justify his admission." Macdonald thus concludes the tale: "After the experiment had progressed between two and three years, Mr. Collins became convinced that he and his fellow members could not carry out in practice the Community idea. He resolved to abandon the attempt; and calling the members together, explained to them his feelings on the subject. He resigned the deed of the property into their hands, and soon after departed from Skaneateles, like one who had lost his nearest and dearest friend. Most of the members left soon after, and the Community quietly dissolved. "This experiment did not fail through pecuniary embarrassment. The property was worth twice as much when the Community dissolved, as it was at first; and was much more than sufficient to pay all debts. So it may be truly said, that this experiment was given up through a conviction in the mind of the originator, that the theory of the Community could not be carried out in practice--that the attempt was premature, and the necessary conditions did not yet exist. The Community ended in May 1846." Mr. Collins subsequently acknowledged in the public prints his abandonment of the schemes of philanthropy and social improvement in which he had been conspicuous; and returned, as a socialistic paper expressed it, "to the decencies and respectabilities of orthodox Whiggery." For side-lights to this general sketch which we have collected from Macdonald, Finch and Collins, we have consulted the files of the _Phalanx_ and the _Harbinger_. The following is all we find: _The Phalanx_, September 7, 1844, mentions that the _Communitist_ has reached its seventh number--has been enlarged and improved--has changed its terms from _gratis_ to $1.00 per year in advance--congratulates the Community on this improvement, but criticises its fundamental principle of Communism. _The Harbinger_, September 14, 1845, quotes a Rochester paper as saying that "the Skaneateles concern has been sifted again and again of its chaff or wheat, we hardly know which, until, from a very wild republic, it appears verging toward a sober monarchy; i.e., toward the unresisted sway of a single mind." On this the _Harbinger_ remarks: "The Skaneateles Community, so far from being a Fourier institution, has been in open and bitter hostility with that system; no man has taken stronger ground against the Fourier movement than its founder, Mr. John Collins; and although of late it has somewhat softened in its opposition to the views of Fourier, it is no more in unison with them than it is with the doctrines of the Presbyterian Church, or the 'domestic arrangements' of South Carolina. We understand that Mr. Collins has essentially modified his ideas in regard to a true social order, since he commenced at Skaneateles; that he finds many principles to which he was attached in theory, untenable in practice; and that learning wisdom by experience, he is now aiming at results which are more practicable in their nature, than those which he had deeply at heart in the commencement. But with the most friendly feelings toward Mr. Collins and the Skaneateles Community, we declare that it has no connection with Association on the plan of Fourier; it is strictly speaking a Community of property--a system which we reject as the grave of liberty; though incomparably superior to the system of violence and fraud which is upheld in the existing order of society." In the _Harbinger_ of September 27, 1845, Mr. Ripley writes in friendly terms of the brightening prospects of the Skaneateles Community; objects to its Communistic principles and its hostility to religion; with these exceptions thinks well of it and wishes it success. In the _Harbinger_ of November 20, 1847, a year and more after the decease of the Community, an enthusiastic Associationist says that several defunct Phalanxes--the Skaneateles among the rest--"are not dead, but only asleep; and will wake up by and by to new and superior life!" Several members of the Oneida Community had more or less personal knowledge of the Skaneateles experiment. At our request they have written what they remember; which we present in conclusion, as the nearest we can get to an "inside view." RECOLLECTIONS OF H.J. SEYMOUR. "My acquaintance with the Skaneateles Community was limited to what I gathered under the following circumstances: John A. Collins lectured on Association in Westmoreland, near where I lived, in 1843. His eloquence had some effect on my father and his family, and on me among the rest. In the fall, when the Community started, my father sent my brother, then eighteen years old, with a wagon and yoke of oxen, to the Community. He remained there till nearly the middle of winter, when he returned home, ostensibly by invitation of my mother, who had become alarmed by the reports and evidences of the infidelity of Collins and his associates; but I am inclined to think my brother was ready to leave, having satisfied his aspirations for that kind of Communism. The next summer I made a call of a few hours at the Community in company with my mother; but most of my information about it is derived from my brother. "He spoke of Collins as full of fiery zeal, and a kind of fussy officiousness in business, but lacking in good judgment. To figure abroad as a lecturer was thought to be his appropriate sphere. The other most prominent leader was Q.A. Johnson of Syracuse. I have heard him represented as a long-headed, tonguey lawyer. The question to be settled soon after my brother's arrival, was, on which of the falls the saw-mill and machine-shop should be built. Collins said it should be on one; Johnson said it should be on the other; and the dispute waxed warm between them. I judge, from what my brother told me, that the conflict between these two men and their partisans raged through nearly the whole life of the Community, and was finally ended only by the withdrawal of Johnson, in consideration of a pretty round sum of money. "My brother did not make a practice of attending their evening meetings, for the reason that he was one of the hard workers and could not afford it; as there was an amount of disputing going on that was very wearisome to the flesh. "The question of diet was one about which the Community was greatly exercised. And there seems to have been an inner circle, among whom the dietetic furor worked with special violence. For the purpose of living what they considered a strictly natural life, they betook themselves to an exclusive diet of boiled wheat, and built themselves a shanty in the woods; hoping to secure long life and happiness by thus getting nearer to nature." RECOLLECTIONS OF E.L. HATCH. "I visited the Skaneateles Community twice, partly on business, and partly by request of a neighbor who was about to join, and wished me to join with him. I was received pleasantly and treated well. The first time, they gave me a cup of tea and bread and butter for supper. I told them I wished to fare as the rest did. They said it was usual for them to give visitors what they were accustomed to; but they were looking forward to some reform in this respect. In the morning I noticed that some poured milk on their plates, laid a slice of bread in it, and cut it into mouthfuls before eating. Some used molasses instead of milk. There was not much of the home-feeling there. Every one seemed to be setting an example, and trying to bring all the others to it. The second time I was there I discovered there were two parties. One man remarked to another on seeing meat on the table, that he 'guessed they had been to some grave-yard.' The other said he 'did not eat dead creatures.' After supper I was standing near some men in the sitting-room, when one said to another, 'How high is your God?' The answer was, 'About as high as my head.' The first, putting his hand up to his breast, said, 'Mine is so high.' I concluded they were infidels." RECOLLECTIONS OF L. VANVELZER. "I attended a Convention of Associationists held near the Skaneateles Community in 1845, and became very much interested in the principles set forth by John A. Collins and his friends. There was much excitement at that time all through the country in regard to Association. Quite a number came from Boston and joined the Skaneateles Community. Johnson and Collins seemed to be the two leading spirits, Collins was a strong advocate of infidel principles, and was very intolerant to all religious sects; while Johnson advocated religious principles and general toleration. In becoming acquainted with these two men, I was naturally drawn toward Johnson; this created jealousy between them. Mrs. Vanvelzer and myself talked a great deal about selling out and going there; but before we had made any practical move, I began to see that there was not any unity among them, but on the contrary a great deal of bickering and back-biting. I became disgusted with the whole affair. But my wife did not see things as I did at that time. She was determined to go, and did go. At the expiration of three or four weeks I went to see her, and found she was becoming dissatisfied. In consequence of her joining them, there had been a regular quarrel between the two parties, and it resulted in a rupture. They had a meeting that lasted nearly all night; Johnson and his party standing up for Mrs. Vanvelzer, and Collins and his party against her. Some went so far as to threaten Johnson's life. This state of things went on until they broke up, which was only a short time after Mrs. Vanvelzer left." RECOLLECTIONS OF MRS. S. VANVELZER. "In the winter of 1845 Mr. Collins and others associated with him lectured in Baldwinsville, where I then resided. My husband was interested in their teachings, and invited them to our house, where I had more or less conversation with them. They set forth their scheme in glowing colors, and professed that the doings of the day of Pentecost were their foundation; and withal they flattered me considerably, telling me I was just the woman to go to the Community and help carry out their principles and build up a home for humanity. "Well, I went; but I was disappointed. Nothing was as represented; but back-biting, evil-thinking, and quarreling were the order of the day. They set two tables in the same dining-room; one provided with ordinary food, though rather sparingly; the other with boiled wheat, rice and Graham mush, without salt or seasoning of any kind. They kept butter, sugar and milk under lock and key, and in fact almost every thing else. They had amusements, such as dancing, card-playing, checkers, etc. There were some 'affinity' affairs among them, which caused considerable gossiping. I remained there three weeks, and came away disgusted; but firm in the belief that Christian Communism would be carried out sometime." * * * * * Allen and Orvis, the lecturing missionaries of Fourierism sent out by Brook Farm in 1847, passed through Central New York in the course of their tour, and in their reports of their experiences to the _Harbinger_, thus bewailed the disastrous effects of Collins's experiment: "In Syracuse our meetings were almost a failure. Collins's Skaneateles 'Hunt of Harmony,' or fight to conquer a peace, his infidelity, his disastrous failure after making such an outcry in behalf of a better order of society, and the ignorance of the people, who have not intelligence enough to discriminate between a true Constructive Reform, and the No-God, No-Government, No-Marriage, No-Money, No-Meat, No-Salt, No-Pepper system of Community, but think that Collins was a 'Furyite' just like ourselves, has closed the ears of the people in this neighborhood against our words." CHAPTER XVI. SOCIAL ARCHITECTS. Thus far we have been disposing of the preludes of Fourierism. Before commencing the memoirs of the regular PHALANXES (which is the proper name of the Fourier Associations), we will devote a chapter or two to general views of Fourierism, as compared with other forms of Socialism, and as it was practically developed in this country. Parke Godwin was one of the earliest and ablest of the American expositors of Fourierism; second only, perhaps, to Albert Brisbane. In his "_Popular View of the Doctrines of Charles Fourier_" (an octavo pamphlet of 120 pages published in 1844), he has a chapter on "Social Architects," in which he proposes the following classification: "These daring and original spirits arrange themselves in three classes; the merely Theoretical; the simply Practical; and the Theoretico-Practical combined. In other words, the Social Architects whom we propose to consider, may be described as those who ideally plan the new structure of society; those who set immediately to work to make a new structure, without any very large and comprehensive plan; and those who have both devised a plan and attempted its actual execution. "I. The Theoretical class is one which is most numerous, but whose claims are the least worthy of attention. [Under this head, Mr. Godwin mentions Plato, Sir Thomas More and Harrington, and discusses their imaginative projects--the Republic, Utopia and Oceana.] "II. The Practical Architects of Society, or the Communities instituted to exemplify a more perfect state of social life. [The Essenes, Moravians, Shakers and Rappites are mentioned under this head.] "III. The Theoretico-Practical Architects of Society, or those who have combined the enunciation of general principles of social organization with actual experiments, of whom the best representatives are St. Simon, Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. This class will extend the basis of our inquiries, and demand a more elaborate consideration." This classification, if it had not gone beyond the popular pamphlet in which it was started, might have been left without criticism. But it is substantially reproduced in the New American Cyclopædia under the head of "Socialism," and thus has become a standard doctrine. We will therefore point out what we conceive to be its errors, and indicate a truer classification. In the first place, from the account of St. Simon and Fourier which Mr. Godwin himself gives immediately after the last of his three headings, it is clear that they did _not_ belong to the theoretico-practical class. St. Simon undertook to perfect himself in all knowledge, and for this purpose experimented in many things, good and bad; but it does not appear that he ever tried his hand at Communism or Association of any kind. He published a book called "New Christianity," of which Godwin says: "It was an attempt to show, what had been often before attempted, that the spirit and practice of religion were not at one; that there was a wide chasm separating the revelation from the commentary, the text from the gloss, the Master from the Disciples. Nothing could have been more forcible than its attacks on the existing church, in which the Pope and Luther received an equal share of the blows. He convicted both parties of errors without number, and heresies the most monstrous. But he did not carry the same vigor into the development of the positive portions of his thought. He ceased to be logical, that he might be sentimental. Yet the truth which he insisted on was a great one--perhaps the greatest, _viz._, that the fundamental principle in the constitution of society, should be Love. Christ teaches all men, he says, that they are brothers; that humanity is one; that the true life of the individual is in the bosom of his race; and that the highest law of his being is the law of progress." On the basis of this sentimentalism, St. Simon appealed most eloquently to all classes to unite--to march as one man--to inscribe on their banners, "Paradise on earth is before us!" but Godwin says: "Alas! the magnanimous spirit which could utter these thrilling words was not destined to see their realization. The long process of starvation finally brought St. Simon to his end; but in the sufferings of death, as in the agony of life, his mind retained its calmness and sympathy, and he perished with these words of sublime confidence and hope on his lips: 'The future is ours!' "The few devoted friends who stood round that deathbed, took up the words, and began the work of propagation. The doctrine rapidly spread; it received a more precise and comprehensive development under the expositions of Bazard and Enfantan; and a few years saw a new family, which was also a new church, gathered at Menilmontant. On its banner was inscribed, 'To each, according to his capacity, and to each capacity according to its work.' Its government took the form of a religious hierarchy, and its main political principle was the abolition of inheritance. "It was evident that a society so constituted could not long be held together. Made up of enthusiasts, without definite principles of organization, trusting to feeling and not to science, its members soon began to quarrel, and the latter days of its existence were stained by disgusting license. St. Simon was one of the noblest spirits, but an unfit leader of any enterprise. He saw all things, says a friendly critic, through his heart. In this was his weakness; he wanted head; he wanted precise notions; he vainly hoped to reconstruct society by a sentiment; he laid the foundations of his house on sand." What is there in all this that entitles St. Simon to a place among the theoretico-practicals? How does it appear that he "combined the enunciation of general principles of social organization with actual experiments?" His followers tried to do something; but St. Simon himself, according to this account, did absolutely nothing but write and talk; and far from being a theoretico-practical, was not even theoretical, but only sentimental! Fourier was theoretical enough. But we look in vain through Mr. Godwin's account of him for any signs of the practical. He meditated much and wrote many books, and that is all. He was a student and a recluse to the end of his career. Instead of engaging in any practical attempt to realize his social theories, he quarreled with the only experiment that was made by his disciples during his life. Godwin says: "A joint-stock company was formed in 1832, to realize the new theory of Association; and one gentleman, M. Baudet Dulary, member of parliament for the county of Seine and Oise, bought an estate, which cost him five hundred thousand francs (one hundred thousand dollars), for the express purpose of putting the theory into practice. Operations were actually commenced; but for want of sufficient capital to erect buildings and stock the farm, the whole operation was paralyzed; and notwithstanding the natural cause of cessation, the simple fact of stopping short after having commenced operations, made a very unfavorable impression upon the public mind. Success is the only criterion with the indolent and indifferent, who do not take the trouble to reason on circumstances and accidental difficulties. "Fourier was very much vexed at the precipitation of his partisans, who were too impatient to wait until sufficient means had been obtained. They argued that the fact of having commenced operations would attract the attention of capitalists, and insure the necessary funds. He begged them to beware of precipitation; told them how he had been deceived himself in having to wait more than twenty years for a simple hearing, which, from the importance of his discovery, he had fully expected to obtain immediately. All his entreaties were in vain. They told him he had not obtained a hearing sooner because he was not accustomed to the duplicity of the world; and confident in their own judgment, commenced without hesitation, and were taught, at the expense of their own imprudence, to appreciate more correctly the sluggish indifference of an ignorant public." Not only did Fourier thus wholly abstain from practical experiments himself and discourage those of others during his lifetime, but he condemned in advance all the experiments that have since been made in his name. He set the conditions of a legitimate experiment so high, that it has been thus far impossible to make a fair trial of Fourierism, and probably always will be. How Mr. Godwin could imagine him to be one of the theoretico-practicals, we do not understand. His system seems to us to have been as thoroughly separate from experiment, as it was possible for him to make it; and in that sense, as far removed from the modern standards of science, as the east is from the west. It can be defended only as a theory that came by inspiration or intuition, and therefore needs no experiment. Considered simply as the result of human lucubrations, it belongs with the _a priori_ theories of the ancient world, of which Youmans says: "The old philosophers, disdaining nature, retired into the ideal world of pure meditation, and holding that the mind is the measure of the universe, they believed they could reason out all truths from the depths of the soul." Owen, Mr. Godwin's third example, was really a theoretico-practical man; i.e. he attempted to carry his theories into practice--with what success we have seen. Instead of classing St. Simon and Fourier with him, we should name Ballou and Cabet as his proper compeers. Another error of Mr. Godwin is, in representing Plato as merely theoretical; meaning that the Republic, like the Utopia and Oceana, was "sketched as an exercise of the imagination or reason, rather than as a plan for actual experiment." It is recorded of Plato in the American Cyclopædia, that "he made a journey to Syracuse in the vain hope of realizing, through the new-crowned younger Dionysius, his ideal Republic." Thus, though he never made an actual experiment, he wished and intended to do so; which is quite as much as St. Simon and Fourier ever did. Mr. Godwin seems also to underrate the Practical Architects: i.e. those that we have called the successful Communities. It is hardly fair to represent them as merely practical. The Shakers certainly have a theory which is printed in a book; and there is no reason to doubt that such thinkers as Rapp, and Bimeler of the Zoarites, and the German nobleman that led the Ebenezers, had socialistic ideas which they either worked by or worked out in their practical operations, and which would compare favorably at least with the sentimentalisms of the first French school. If St. Simon and Owen and Fourier are to be called the theoretico-practicals, such workers as Ann Lee, Elder Meacham, Rapp, and Bimeler ought at least to be called the practico-theoreticals. Indeed these Practical Architects, who have actually given the world examples of successful Communism, have certainly contributed more to the great socialistic movement of modern times, than they have credit for in Godwin's classification, or in public opinion. We called attention, in the course of our sketch of the Owen movement, to the fact that Owen and his disciples studied the social economy of the Rappites, and were not only indebted to them for the village in which they made their great experiment, but leaned on them for practical ideas and hopes of success. These facts came to us at the first without our seeking them. But since then we have watched occasionally, in our readings of the socialistic journals and books, for indications that the Fourierist movement was affected in the same way by the silent successful examples; and we have been surprised to see how constantly the Shakers, Ebenezers &c., are referred to as illustrations of the possibilities and benefits of close Association. We will give a few examples of what we have found. _The Dial_, which was the nurse of Brook Farm and of the beginnings of Fourierism in this country, has two articles devoted to the Shakers. One of them entitled "A Day with the Shakers," is an elaborate and very favorable exhibition of their doctrines and manner of life. It concludes with the following observation: "The world as yet but slightingly appreciates the domestic and humane virtues of this recluse people; and we feel that in a record of attempts for the actualization of a better life, their designs and economies should not be omitted, especially as, during their first half century, they have had remarkable success." The other article, entitled the "Millennial Church," is a flattering review of a Shaker book. In it occurs the following paragraph: "It is interesting to observe, that while Fourier in France was speculating on the attainment of many advantages by union, these people have, at home, actually attained them. Fourier has the merit of beautiful words and theories; and their importation from a foreign land is made a subject for exultation by a large and excellent portion of our public; but the Shakers have the superior merit of excellent actions and practices; unappreciated, perhaps, because they are not exotic. 'Attractive Industry and Moral Harmony,' on which Fourier dwells so promisingly, have long characterized the Shakers, whose plans have always in view the passing of each individual into his or her right position, and of providing suitable, pleasant, and profitable employment for every one." Miss Peabody, in the article entitled "Christ's Idea of Society," from which we quoted in a former chapter, thus refers to the practical Communities: "The temporary success of the Hernhutters, the Moravians, the Shakers, and even the Rappites, has cleared away difficulties and solved problems of social science. It has been made plain that the material goods of life, 'the life that now is,' are not to be sacrificed (as by the anchorite) in doing fuller justice to the social principle. It has been proved, that with the same degree of labor, there is no way to compare with that of working in a Community, banded by some sufficient Idea to animate the will of the laborers. A greater quantity of wealth is procured with fewer hours of toil, and without any degradation of the laborer. All these Communities have demonstrated what the practical Dr. Franklin said, that if every one worked bodily three hours daily, there would be no necessity of any one's working more than three hours." A writer in _The Tribune_ (1845) at the end of a glowing account of the Ebenezers, says: "The labor they have accomplished and the improvements they have made are surprising; it speaks well for the superior efficiency of combined effort over isolated and individual effort. A gentleman who accompanied me, and who has seen the whole western part of this State settled, observed that they had made more improvements in two years, than were made in our most flourishing villages when first settled, in five or six." In _The Harbinger_ (1845) Mr. Brisbane gives an account of his visit to the same settlement, and concludes as follows: "It is amazing to see the work which these people have accomplished in two years; they have cleared large fields, and brought them under cultivation; they have built, I should judge, forty comfortable houses, handsomely finished and painted white; many are quite large. They have the frame-work for quite an additional number prepared; they are putting up a large woolen manufactory, which is partly finished; they have six or eight large barns filled with their crops, and others erecting, and some minor branches of manufactures. I was amazed at the work accomplished in less than two years. It testifies powerfully in favor of combined effort." But enough for specimens. Such references to the works of the Practical Architects are scattered everywhere in socialistic literature. The conclusion toward which they lead is, that the successful religious Communities, silent and unconspicuous as they are, have been, after all, the specie-basis of the entire socialistic movement of modern times. A glimmering of this idea seems to have been in Mr. Godwin's mind, when he wrote the following: "If, in spite of their ignorance, their mistakes, their imperfections, and their despotisms, the worst of these societies, which have adopted, with more or less favor, unitary principles, have succeeded in accumulating immeasurable wealth, what might have been done by a Community having a right principle of organization and composed of intellectual and upright men? Accordingly the discovery of such a principle has become an object of earnest investigation on the part of some of the most acute and disinterested men the world ever saw. This inquiry has given rise to our third division, called theoretico-practical architects of society." The great facts of modern Socialism are these: From 1776--the era of our national Revolution--the Shakers have been established in this country; first at two places in New York; then at four places in Massachusetts; at two in New Hampshire; two in Maine; one in Connecticut; and finally at two in Kentucky, and two in Ohio. In all these places prosperous religious Communism has been modestly and yet loudly preaching to the nation and the world. New England and New York and the great West have had actual Phalanxes before their eyes for nearly a century. And in all this time what has been acted on our American stage, has had England, France and Germany for its audience. The example of the Shakers has demonstrated, not merely that successful Communism is subjectively possible, but that this nation is free enough to let it grow. Who can doubt that this demonstration was known and watched in Germany from the beginning; and that it helped the successive experiments and emigrations of the Rappites, the Zoarites and the Ebenezers? These experiments, we have seen, were echoes of Shakerism, growing fainter and fainter, as the time-distance increased. Then the Shaker movement with its echoes was sounding also in England, when Robert Owen undertook to convert the world to Communism; and it is evident enough that he was really a far-off follower of the Rappites. France also had heard of Shakerism, before St. Simon or Fourier began to meditate and write Socialism. These men were nearly contemporaneous with Owen, and all three evidently obeyed a common impulse. That impulse was the sequel and certainly in part the effect of Shakerism. Thus it is no more than bare justice to say, that we are indebted to the Shakers more than to any or all other Social Architects of modern times. Their success has been the solid capital that has upheld all the paper theories, and counteracted the failures, of the French and English schools. It is very doubtful whether Owenism or Fourierism would have ever existed, or if they had, whether they would have ever moved the practical American nation, if the facts of Shakerism had not existed before them, and gone along with them. But to do complete justice we must go a step further. While we say that the Rappites, the Zoarites, the Ebenezers, the Owenites, and even the Fourierites are all echoes of the Shakers, we must also acknowledge that the Shakers are the far-off echoes of the PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. CHAPTER XVII. FUNDAMENTALS OF SOCIALISM. The main idea on which Owen and Fourier worked was the same. Both proposed to reconstruct society by gathering large numbers into unitary dwellings. Owen had as clear sense of the compound economies of Association as Fourier had, and discoursed as eloquently, if not as scientifically, on the beauties and blessings of combined industry. Both elaborated plans for vast buildings, which they proposed to substitute for ordinary family dwellings. Owen's communal edifice was to be a great hollow square, somewhat like a city block. Fourier's phalanstery, on the other hand, was to be a central palace with two wings. In like manner their plans of reconstructing society differed in details, but the main idea of combination in large households was the same. What they undertook to do may be illustrated by the history of bee-keeping. The usual way in this business is to provide hives that will hold only a few quarts of bees each, and so compel new generations to swarm and find new homes. But it has always been a problem among ingenious apiarians, how to construct compound hives, that will prevent the necessity of swarming, and either allow a single swarm to increase indefinitely, or induce many swarms to live together in contiguous apartments. We remember there was an invention of this kind that had quite a run about the time of the Fourier excitement. It was not very successful; and yet the idea seems not altogether chimerical; for it is known that wild bees, in certain situations, as in large hollow trees and in cavities among rocks, do actually accumulate their numbers and honey from generation to generation. Owen and Fourier, like the apiarian inventors (who are proverbially unpractical), undertook to construct, each in his own way, great compound hives for human beings; and they had the example of the Shakers (who may be considered the wild bees in the illustration) to countenance their schemes. The difference of their methods was this: Owen's plan was based on _Communism_; Fourier's plan was based on the _Joint-stock_ principle. Both of these modes of combination exist abundantly in common society. Every family is a little example of Communism; and every working partnership is an example of Joint-stockism. Communism creates homes; Joint-stockism manages business. Perhaps national idiosyncracies had something to do with the choice of principles in these two cases. _Home_ is an English word for an English idea. It is said there is no equivalent word in the French language. Owen, the Englishman, chose the home principle. Fourier, the Frenchman, chose the business principle. These two principles, as they exist in the world, are not antagonistic, but reciprocal. Home is the center from which men go forth to business; and business is the field from which they go home with the spoil. Home is the charm and stimulus of business; and business provides material for the comfort and beauty of home. This is the present practical relation between Communism and Joint-stockism every-where. And these two principles, thus working together, have had a wonderful expansion in modern times. Every body knows what progress has been made in Joint-stockism, from the old-fashioned simple partnership, to the thousands of corporations, small and great, that now do the work of the world. But Communism has had similar progress, from the little family circle, to the thousands of benevolent institutions that are now striving to make a home of the world. Every hospital and free school and public library that is comforting and civilizing mankind, is an extension of the free, loving element, that is the charm of home. And it is becoming more and more the fashion for men to spend the best part of their lives in accumulating millions by Joint-stockism, and at last lay their treasures at the feet of Communism, by endowing great public institutions of mercy or education. As these two principles are thus expanding side by side, the question arises, Which on the whole is prevailing and destined to prevail? and that means, which is primary in the order of truth, and which is secondary? The two great socialistic inventors seem to have taken opposite sides on this question. Owen believed that the grand advance which the world is about to make, will be into Communism. Fourier as confidently believed that civilization will ripen into universal Joint-stockism. In all cases of reciprocal dualism, there is manifestly a tendency to mutual absorption, coalescence and unity. Where shall we end? in Owenism or Fourierism? Or will a combination of both keep its place in the world hereafter, as it has done hitherto? and if so which will be primary and which secondary, and how will they be harmonized? We do not propose to answer these questions, but only to help the study of them, as we proceed with our history. A few facts, however, may be mentioned in passing, which lead toward some solution of them. One is, that the changes which are going on in the laws of marriage, are in the direction of Joint-stockism. The increase of woman's independence and separate property, is manifestly introducing Fourierism into the family circle, which is the oldest sanctuary of Communism. But over against this is the fact, that all the successful attempts at Socialism go in the other direction, toward Communism. Providence has presented Shakerism, which is Communism in the concrete, and Owenism, which is Communism in theory, to the attention of this country at advance of Fourierism; and there are many signs that the third great socialistic movement, which many believe to be impending, will be a returning wave of Communism. All these facts together might be interpreted as indicating that Joint-Stockism is devouring the institutions of the past, while Communism is seizing the institutions of the future. It must not be forgotten that, in representing Owen as the exponent of Communism, and Fourier as the exponent of Joint-stockism, we refer to their theoretical principles, and not at all to the experiments that have been made in their name. Those experiments were invariably compromises, and nearly all alike. We doubt whether there was ever an Owen Community that attempted unconditional Communism, even of worldly goods. Certainly Owen himself never got beyond provisional experiments, in which he held on to his land. And on the other hand, we doubt whether there was ever a Fourier Association that came any where near carrying out Joint-stockism, into all the minutiæ of account-keeping which pure Fourierism requires. When we leave theories and attempt actual combinations, it is a matter of course that we should communize as far as we dare; that is, as far as we can trust each other; and beyond that manage things as well as we can by some kind of Joint-stockism. Experiments therefore always fall into a combination of Owenism and Fourierism. If we could find out the metaphysical bases of the two principles represented respectively by Owen and Fourier, perhaps we should see that these practical combinations of them are, after all, scientifically legitimate. Let us search a little in this direction. Our view is, that unity of _life_ is the basis of Communism; and distinction of _persons_ is the basis of Joint-stockism. Property belongs to life, and so far as you and I have consciously one life, we must hold our goods in common; but so far as distinct personalities prevail, we must have separate properties. This statement of course raises the old question of the Trinitarian controversy, viz., whether two or more persons can have absolutely the same life--which we will not now stop to discuss. All we need to say is that, according to our theory, if there is no such thing as unity of life between a plurality of persons, then there is no basis for Communism. But the Communism which we find in families is certainly based on the assumption, right or wrong, that there is actual unity of life between husband and wife, and between parents and children. The common law of England and of most other countries recognizes only a unit in the male and female head of every family. The Bible declares man and wife to be "one flesh." Sexual intercourse is generally supposed to be a symbol of more complete unity in the interior life; and children are supposed to be branches of the one life of their parents. This theory is evidently the basis of family Communism. So also the basis of Bible Communism is the theory that in Christ, believers become spiritually one; and the law, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," is founded on the assumption that "thy neighbor" is, or should be, a part of "thyself." In this view we can reduce Communism and Joint-stockism to one principle. The object of both is to secure property to life. Communism looks after the rights of the unitary life--call it _afflatus_ if you please--which organizes families and spiritual corporations. Joint-stockism attends to the rights of individuals. Both these forms of life have rights; and as all true rights can certainly be harmonized, Communism and Joint-stockism should find a way to work together. But the question returns after all, Which is primary and which is secondary? and so we are in the old quarrel again. Our opinion, however, is, that the long quarrel between afflatus and personality will be decided in favor of afflatus, and that personality will pass into the secondary position in the ages to come. Practically, Communism is a thing of degrees. With a small amount of vital unity, Communism is possible only in the limited sphere of familism. With more unity, public institutions of harmony and benevolence make their appearance. With another degree of unity, Communism of external property becomes possible, as among the Shakers. With still higher degrees, Communism may be introduced into the sexual and propagative relations. And in all these cases the correlative principle of Joint-stockism necessarily takes charge of all property that Communism leaves outside. Other differences of theory, besides this fundamental contrast of Communism and Joint-stockism, have been insisted upon by the respective partizans of Owen and Fourier; but they are less important, and we shall leave them to be exhibited incidentally in our memoirs of the Phalanxes. CHAPTER XVIII. LITERATURE OF FOURIERISM. The exposition of Fourierism in this country commenced with the publication of the "_Social Destiny of Man_," by Albert Brisbane, in 1840. It is very probable that the excitement propagated by this book, turned the thoughts of Dr. Channing and the Transcendentalists toward Association, and led to the Massachusetts experiments which we have reported. Other influences prepared the way. Religious Liberalism and Anti-slavery were revolutionizing the world of thought, and predisposing all lively minds to the boldest innovations. But it is evident that the positive scheme of reconstructing society came from France through Brisbane. Brook Farm, Hopedale, the Northampton Community and the Skaneateles Community struck out, each on an independent theory of social architecture; but they all obeyed a common impulse; and that impulse, so far as it came by literature, is traceable to Brisbane's importation and translation of the writings of Charles Fourier. The second notable movement, preparatory to the great Fourier revival of 1843, was the opening of the _New York Tribune_ to the teachings of Brisbane and the Socialists. That paper was in its first volume, but already popular and ascending towards its zenith of rivalry with the _Herald_, when one morning in the spring of 1842, it appeared with the following caption at the top of one of its columns: "ASSOCIATION; OR, PRINCIPLES OF A TRUE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY. "This column has been purchased by the Advocates of Association, in order to lay their principles before the public. Its editorship is entirely distinct from that of the _Tribune_." By this contrivance, which might be called a paper within a paper, Brisbane became the independent editor of a small daily, with all the _Tribune's_ subscribers for his readers; and yet that journal could not be held responsible for his inculcations. It was known, however, that Horace Greeley, the editor-in-chief, was much in sympathy with Fourierism; so that Brisbane had the help of his popularity; though the stock-company of the _Tribune_ was not implicated. Whether the _Tribune_ lifted Fourierism or Fourierism lifted the _Tribune_, may be a matter of doubt; but we are inclined to think the paper had the best of the bargain; as it grew steadily afterward to its present dimensions, and all the more merrily for the _Herald's_ long persistence in calling it "our Fourierite cotemporary;" while Fourierism, after a year or two of glory, waned and disappeared. Brisbane edited his column with ability for more than a year. Our file (which is defective), extends from March 28, 1842, to May 28, 1843. At first the socialistic articles appeared twice a week; after August 1842, three times a week; and during the latter part of the series, every day. This was Brisbane's great opportunity, and he improved it. All the popularities of Fourierism--"Attractive Industry," "Compound Economies," "Democracy of Association," "Equilibrium of the Passions"--were set before the _Tribune's_ vast public from day to day, with the art and zest of a young lawyer pleading before a court already in his favor. Interspersed with these topics were notices of socialistic meetings, reports of Fourier festivals, toasts and speeches at celebrations of Fourier's birthday, and all the usual stimulants of a growing popular cause. The rich were enticed; the poor were encouraged; the laboring classes were aroused; objections were answered; prejudices were annihilated; scoffing papers were silenced; the religious foundations of Fourierism were triumphantly exhibited. To show how gloriously things were going, it would be announced on one day that "Mr. Bennett has promised us the insertion of an article in this day's _Herald_, in vindication of our doctrines;" on the next, that "_The Democratic_ and _Boston Quarterly Reviews_, are publishing a series of articles on the system from the pen of A. Brisbane;" on the next, that "we have obtained a large Hall, seventy-seven feet deep by twenty-five feet wide, in Broadway, for the purpose of holding meetings and delivering lectures." Perhaps the reader would like to see a specimen of Brisbane's expositions. The following is the substance of one of his articles in the _Tribune_, dated March, 1842; subject--"Means of making a Practical Trial:" "Before answering the question, How can Association be realized? we will remark that we do not propose any sudden transformation of the present system of society, but only a regular and gradual substitution of a new order by local changes or replacement. One Association must be started, and others will follow, without overthrowing any true institutions in state or church, such as universal suffrage or religious worship. "If a few rich could be interested in the subject, a stock company could be formed among them with a capital of four or five hundred thousand dollars, which would be sufficient. Their money would be safe: for the lands, edifices, flocks, &c., of the Association, would be mortgaged to secure it. The sum which is required to build a small railroad, a steamship, to start an insurance company or a bank, would establish an Association. Could not such a sum be raised? "A practical trial of Association might be made by appropriation from a State Legislature. Millions are now spent in constructing canals and railroads that scarcely pay for repairs. Would it endanger the constitution, injure the cause of democracy, or shock the consciences of politicians, if a Legislature were to advance for an Association, half a million of dollars secured by mortgage on its lands and personal estate? We fear very much that it might, and therefore not much is to be hoped from that source. "The truth of Association and attractive industry could also be proved by children. A little Association or an industrial or agricultural institution might be established with four hundred children from the ages of five to fifteen. Various lighter branches of agriculture and the mechanical arts, with little tools and implements adapted to different ages, which are the delight of children, could be prosecuted. These useful occupations could, if organized according to a system which we shall later explain, be rendered more pleasing and attractive than are their plays at present. Such an Association would prove the possibility of attractive industry, and that children could support themselves by their own labor, and obtain at the same time a superior industrial and scientific education. The Smithsonian bequest might be applied to such a purpose, as could have been Girard's noble donation, which has been so shamefully mismanaged. "The most easy plan, perhaps, for starting an Association would be to induce four hundred persons to unite, and take each $1,000 worth of stock, which would form a capital of $400,000. With this sum, an Association could be established, which could be made to guarantee to every person a comfortable room in it and board for life, as interest upon the investment of $1,000; so that whatever reverses might happen to those forming the Association, they would always be certain of having two great essentials of existence--a dwelling to cover them, and a table at which to sit. Let us explain how this could be effected. "The stockholders would receive one-quarter of the total product or profits of the Association; or if they preferred, they would receive a fixed interest of eight per cent. At the time of a general division of profits at the end of the year, the stockholders would first receive their interest, and the balance would be paid over to those who performed the labor. A slight deviation would in this respect take place from the general law of Association, which is to give one-quarter of the profits to capital, whatever they may be; but additional inducements of security should be held out to those who organize the first Association. "The investment of $1,000 would yield $80 annual interest. With this sum the Association must guarantee a person a dwelling and living; and this could be done. The edifice could be built for $150,000, the interest upon which, at 10 per cent., would be $15,000. Divide this sum by 400, which is the number of persons, and we have $37.50 per annum, for each person as rent. Some of the apartments would consist of several rooms, and rent for $100, others for $90, others for $80, and so on in a descending ratio, so that about one-half of the rooms could be rented at $20 per annum. A person wishing to live at the cheapest rates would have, after paying his rent, $60 left. As the Association would raise all its fruit, grain, vegetables, cattle, &c., and as it would economize immensely in fuel, number of cooks, and every thing else, it could furnish the cheapest priced board at $60 per annum, the second at $100, and the third at $150. Thus a person who invested $1,000 would be certain of a comfortable room and board for his interest, if he lived economically, and would have whatever he might produce by his labor in addition. He would live, besides, in an elegant edifice surrounded by beautiful fields and gardens. "If one-half of the persons taking stock did not wish to enter the Association at first, but to continue their business in the world, reserving the chance of so doing later, they could do so. Experienced and intelligent agriculturists and mechanics would be found to take their places; the buildings would be gradually enlarged, and those who remained out could enter later as they wished. They would receive, however, in the mean time their interest in cash upon their capital. A family with two or three children could enter upon taking from $2,000 to $2,500 worth of stock. "We have not space to enter into full details, but we can say that the advantages and economies of combination and Association are so immense, that if four hundred persons would unite, with a capital of $1,000 each, they could establish an Association in which they could produce, by means of economical machinery and other facilities, four times as much by their labor as people do at present, and live far cheaper and better than they now can; or which, in age or in case of misfortune, would always secure them a comfortable home. "There are multitudes of persons who could easily withdraw $1,000 from their business and invest it in an establishment of this kind, and secure themselves against any reverses which may later overtake them. In our societies, with their constantly recurring revulsions and ruin, would they not be wise in so doing?" With this specimen, we trust the imagination of the reader will be able to make out an adequate picture of Brisbane's long work in the _Tribune_. That work immediately preceded the rush of Young America into the Fourier experiments. He was beating the drum from March 1842 till May 1843; and in the summer of '43, Phalanxes by the dozen were on the march for the new world of wealth and harmony. On the fifth of October 1843, Brisbane entered upon his third advance-movement by establishing in New York City, an independent paper called THE PHALANX, devoted to the doctrines of Fourier, and edited by himself and Osborne Macdaniel. It professed to be a monthly, but was published irregularly the latter part of its time. The volume we have consists of twenty-three numbers, the first of which is dated October 5, 1843, and the last May 28, 1845. In the first number Brisbane gives the following condensed statement of practical experiments then existing or contemplated, which may be considered the results of his previous labors, and especially of his fourteen months _reveille_ in the _Tribune_: "In Massachusetts, already there are three small Associations, viz., the Roxbury Community near Boston, founded by the Rev. George Ripley; the Hopedale Community, founded by the Rev. Adin Ballou; and the Northampton Community, founded by Prof. Adam and others. These Associations, or Communities, as they are called, differ in many respects from the system of Fourier, but they accept some of his fundamental practical principles, such as joint-stock property in real and movable estate, unity of interests, and united domestic arrangements, instead of living in separate houses with separate interests. None of them have community of property. They have been founded within the last three years, and two of them at least, under the inspiration of Fourier's doctrine. "In the state of New York, there are two established on a larger scale than those in Massachusetts: the Jefferson County Industrial Association, at Watertown, founded by A.M. Watson, Esq.; and another in Herkimer and Hamilton Counties (on the line), called the Moorhouse Union, and founded by Mr. Moorhouse. A larger Association, to be called the Ontario Phalanx, is now organizing at Rochester, Monroe County. "In Pennsylvania there are several: the principal one is the Sylvan in Pike County, which has been formed by warm friends of the cause from the cities of New York and Albany; Thomas W. Whitley, President, and Horace Greeley, Treasurer. In the same county there is another small Association, called the Social Unity, formed principally of mechanics from New York and Brooklyn. There is a large Association of Germans in McKean County, Pennsylvania, commenced by the Rev. George Ginal of Philadelphia. They own a very extensive tract of land, over 30,000 acres we are informed, and are progressing prosperously: the shares, which were originally $100, have been sold and are now held at $200 or more. At Pittsburg steps are taking to establish another. "A small Association has been commenced in Bureau County, Illinois, and preparations are making to establish another in Lagrange County, Indiana, which will probably be done this fall, upon quite an extensive scale, as many of the most influential and worthy inhabitants of that section are deeply interested in the cause. "In Michigan the doctrine has spread quite widely. An excellent little, paper called _The Future_, devoted exclusively to the cause, published monthly, has been established at Ann Arbor, where an Association is projected to be called the Washtenaw Phalanx. "In New Jersey an Association, projected upon a larger scale than any yet started, has just been commenced in Monmouth County: it is to be called the North American Phalanx, and has been undertaken by a company of enterprising gentlemen of the city of Albany. "Quite a large number of practical trials are talked of in various sections of the United States, and it is probable that in the course of the next year, numbers will spring into existence. These trials are upon so small a scale, and are commenced with such limited means, that they exhibit but a few of the features of the system. They are, however, very important commencements, and are small beginnings of a reform in some of the most important arrangements of the present social order; particularly its system of isolated households or separate families, its conflicts of interest, and its uncombined and incoherent system of labor." The most important result of Brisbane's eighteen month's labor in the _Phalanx_ was the conversion of Brook Farm to Fourierism. William H. Channing's magazine, the _Present_, which commenced nearly at the same time with the _Phalanx_, closed its career at the end of seven months, and its subscription list was transferred to Brisbane. In the course of a year after this, Brook Farm confessed Fourierism, changed its constitution, assumed the title of the _Brook Farm Phalanx_, and on the 14th of June 1845 commenced publishing the _Harbinger_, as the successor of the _Phalanx_ and the heir of its subscription list. So that Brisbane's fourth advance was the transfer of the literary responsibilities of his cause to Brook Farm. This was a great move. A more brilliant attorney could not have been found. The concentrated genius of Unitarianism and Transcendentalism was at Brook Farm. It was the school that trained most of the writers who have created the newspaper and magazine literature of the present time. Their work on the _Harbinger_ was their first drill. Fourierism was their first case in court. The _Harbinger_ was published weekly, and extended to seven and a half semi-annual volumes, five of which were edited and printed at Brook Farm, and the last two and a half at New York, but by Brook Farm men. Its issues at Brook Farm extend from June 14, 1845 to October 30, 1847; and at New York from November 6, 1847 to February 10, 1849. The _Phalanx_ and _Harbinger_ together cover a period of more than five years. Other periodicals of a more provincial character, and of course a great variety of books and pamphlets, were among the issues of the Fourier movement; but the main vertebræ of its literature were the publications of which we have given account--Brisbane's _Social Destiny of Man_, his daily column in the _Tribune_, the monthly _Phalanx_, and the weekly _Harbinger_. CHAPTER XIX. THE PERSONNEL OF FOURIERISM. Albert Brisbane of course was the central man of the brilliant group that imported and popularized Fourierism. But the reader will be interested to see a full tableau of the persons who were prominent in this movement. We will bring them to view by presenting, first, a list of the contributors to the _Phalanx_ and _Harbinger_, and secondly, a condensed report of one of the National Conventions of the Fourierists. The indexes of the _Phalanx_ and _Harbinger_ (eight volumes in all), have at their heads the names of the principal contributors; and their initials, in connection with the articles in the indexes, enable us to give the number of articles written by each contributor. Thus the reader will see at a glance, not only the leading men of the movement, but proximately the proportion of influence, or at least of literature, that each contributed. Several of the names on this list are now of world-wide fame, and many of them have attained eminence as historians, essayists, poets, journalists or artists. A few of them have reached the van in politics, and gained public station. WRITERS FOR THE PHALANX AND HARBINGER. Names. No. of articles. John Allen, 2 Stephen Pearl Andrews, 1 Albert Brisbane, 56 Geo. H. Calvert, 1 Wm. E. Channing, 1 Wm. F. Channing, 1 Wm. H. Channing, 39 Otis Clapp, 1 J. Freeman Clarke, 1 Joseph J. Cooke, 10 Christopher P. Cranch, 9 George W. Curtis, 10 Charles A. Dana, 248 Hugh Doherty, 11 A.J.H. Duganne, 3 John S. Dwight, 324 George G. Foster, 7 Edward Giles, 3 Parke Godwin, 152 E.P. Grant, 4 Horace Greeley, 2 Frederic H. Hedge, 1 T.W. Higginson, 10 E. Ives, Jr., 3 Henry James, 32 Wm. H. Kimball, 1 Marx E. Lazarus, 52 James Russell Lowell, 2 Osborne Macdaniel, 47 Wm. H. Müller, 2 C. Neidhardt, 1 D.S. Oliphant, 1 John Orvis, 23 Jean M. Palisse, 16 E.W. Parkman, 1 Mary Spencer Pease, 1 J.H. Pulte, 1 George Ripley, 315 Samuel D. Robbins, 1 Lewis W. Ryckman, 5 J.A. Saxton, 1 James Sellers, 3 Francis G. Shaw, 131 Miss E.A. Starr, 5 W.W. Story, 14 Edmund Tweedy, 7 John G. Whittier, 1 J.J. Garth Wilkinson, 12 Most of these writers were in the prime of youth, and Socialism was their first love. It would be interesting to trace their several careers in after time, when acquaintance with "stern reality" put another face on their early dream, and turned them aside to other pursuits. Certain it is, that the socialistic revival, barren as it was in direct fruit, fertilized in many ways the genius of these men, and through them the intellect of the nation. NATIONAL CONVENTION. Report from _The Phalanx_ condensed. Pursuant to a call published in the _Phalanx_ and other papers, a Convention of Associationists assembled on Thursday morning, the 4th of April, 1844, at Clinton Hall, in the city of New York. The following gentlemen were appointed officers of the Convention: _President_, George Ripley. _Vice Presidents_, A.B. Smolnikar, Parke Godwin, Horace Greeley, Charles A. Dana, A. Brisbane, Alonzo M. Watson. _Secretaries_, Osborne Macdaniel, D.S. Oliphant. _Committee on the Roll and Finance._ John Allen, James P. Decker, Nathan Comstock, Jr. _Business Committee._ L.W. Ryckman, John Allen, Osborne Macdaniel, George Ripley, Horace Greeley, Albert Brisbane, Parke Godwin, James Kay, Charles A. Dana, W.H. Channing, A.M. Watson, Solyman Brown. Before proceeding to business, the secretary read letters addressed to the Convention by a number of societies and individuals in different parts of the United States. The style of these letters may be seen in a few brief extracts. E.P. Grant wrote: "The day is speedily coming when justice will be done to Fourier and his doctrines; when monuments will rise from ten thousand hills, surmounted by his statue in colossal proportions, gazing upon a happy people, whose God will be truly the Lord, because they will live in spontaneous obedience to his eternal laws." John White and others wrote: "We behold in the science of associated industry, a new social edifice, of matchless and indescribable beauty, and true architectural symmetry! Surely, it must be no other than that 'house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens;' for its foundation is justice, and the superstructure, praise; in every department of which dwell peace and smiling plenty, and whose walls are every where inscribed with manifold representations of that highest Divine attribute--love." H.H. Van Amringe wrote: "Certainly all creation is a reflex of the mind of the Deity, and we cannot hesitate to believe that all the works of Divine wisdom are connected, as Fourier teaches, by laws of groups and series of groups. To discover these, as observers of nature discover and combine the harmonies of astronomy, geology, botany and chemistry, should be our aim; and this noble and heavenly employment, while it banishes want and misery from our present life--destroying the spiritual death and hell which now reign--will, under the Providence of the most High, open to us admission into the Kingdom of the Messiah, that the will of our Father may be done on earth as it is done in heaven." And so on. After the reading of the letters, Wm. H. Channing, on behalf of the business committee, introduced a series of resolutions, prefacing them with a speech in the following vein: "It is but giving voice to what is working in the hearts of those now present, and of thousands whose sympathies are at this moment with us over our whole land, to say this is a religious meeting. Our end is to do God's will, not our own; to obey the command of Providence, not to follow the leadings of human fancies. We stand to-day, as we believe, amid the dawn of a new era of humanity; and as from a Pisgah look down upon a promised land." The resolutions (occupying nearly two pages of the _Phalanx_) commence with a long preamble of four _Whereases_ about the designs of God in regard to universal unity, the call of Christendom and especially of the United States to forward these designs, the dreadful state of the world, &c., &c. The third resolution proposes Association on Fourier's principles of Joint-stockism, Guaranteeism, Combined Industry, Series and Groups, &c., as the panacea of human woes. The fourth resolution protests against "rash and fragmentary attempts," and advises Associationists not to undertake practical operations till they have secured the right sort of men and women and plenty of capital. The fifth resolution recommends that Associationists concentrate their efforts on experiments already commenced, in preference to undertaking new enterprises. The sixth resolution betrays a little distrust of Fourier, and an inclination to keep a certain independence of him--a symptom that the Brook Farm and Unitarian element prevailed in the business committee. They say: "We do not receive all the parts of his theories which in the publications of the Fourier school are denominated 'conjectural,' because Fourier gives them as speculations, because we do not in all respects understand his meaning, and because there are parts which individually we reject; and we hold ourselves not only free, but in duty bound, to seek and obey truth wherever revealed, in the word of God, the reason of humanity, and the order of nature. For these reasons we do not call ourselves Fourierists; but desire to be always publicly designated as the Associationists of the United States of America." It must be borne in mind, in order to understand this _caveat_, that the courtship between the Massachusetts Socialists and the Brisbane propagandists, though very warm, had not yet proceeded to coalescence. Brook Farm was not yet a "Phalanx," The _Harbinger_ was yet _in futuro_. And Fourier's latitudinarian speculations about marriage and sexual matters, made a difficulty for men of Puritan blood, that was not yet disposed of. In fact this difficulty always made a jar in the family of American Fourierists, and probably helped on their disasters and hastened their dissolution. The seventh resolution proposes that measures be taken for forming a National Confederation of Associations. The eighth resolution expresses a wish for concert of action with the Associationists of Europe, and says: "For this end we hereby appoint Albert Brisbane, representative from this body, to confer with them as to the best modes of mutual coöperation. And we assure our brethren in Europe that the disinterestedness, ability and perseverance with which our representative has devoted himself to the promulgation of the doctrine of Association in the United States, entitle him to their most cordial confidence. Through him we extend to them, with joy and trust, the right hand of fellowship; and may heaven soon bless all nations with a compact of perpetual peace." The ninth and last resolution appoints the following gentlemen as an executive committee to edit the _Phalanx_, and to do many other things for carrying into effect the objects of the Convention: Horace Greeley, Parke Godwin, James P. Decker, Frederick Grain, Albert Brisbane, Wm. H Channing, Edward Giles, Chas. J. Hempel, Osborne Macdaniel, Rufus Dawes, D.S. Oliphant, Pierre Maroncelli, of the City of New York. Solyman Brown, Leraysville Phalanx, Bradford County, Pennsylvania. George Ripley, Brook Farm Association, West Roxbury, Massachusetts. Alonzo M. Watson, Jefferson County Industrial Association, New York. E.P. Grant, Ohio Phalanx, Belmont County, Ohio. John White, Cincinnati Phalanx, Cincinnati, Ohio. Nathan Starks, North American Phalanx, Monmouth County, New Jersey. On the second evening of the Convention, Parke Godwin, on behalf of the business committee, reported a long address to the people of the United States. It is a powerful presentation of all the common-places of Fourierism: the defects of present society; organization of the townships into joint-stock companies; central unitary mansions and workshops; division of labor according to the law of groups and series; distribution of profit in the proportion of five-twelfths to labor, four-twelfths to capital, and three-twelfths to talent, &c. We quote the eloquent and pious conclusion, as a specimen of the whole: "An important branch of the divine mission of our Savior Jesus Christ, was to establish the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth. He announced incessantly the practical reign of Divine wisdom and love among all men: and it was a chief aim of all his struggles and teachings to prepare the minds of men for this glorious consummation. He proclaimed the universal brotherhood of mankind; he insisted upon universal justice, and he predicted the triumphs of universal unity. 'Thou shall love,' he said,'the Lord thy God with all thy mind and all thy heart, and all thy soul, and thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.' Again: 'If ye love not one another, how can ye be my disciples?' 'I have loved you, that you also may love one another.' 'Ye are all one, as I and my father are one.' Again: he taught us to ask in daily prayer of our Heavenly Father, 'Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.' Aye, it must be done, actually executed in all the details of life! And again, in the same spirit his disciple said, 'Little children, love one another.' 'If you love not man, whom you have seen, how can you love God whom you have not seen?' And in regard to the form which this love should take, the apostle Paul says, 'As the body is one, so also is Christ. For by one spirit we are all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles,' &c. 'That there should be no schism (disunity) in the body, but that the members should have the same care one for another; and if one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honored, all the members rejoice with it.' 'Ye are members one of another.' "These Divine truths must be translated into actual life. Our relations to each other as men, our business relations among others, must all be instituted according to this law of highest wisdom and love. In Association alone can we find the fulfillment of this duty; and therefore we again insist that Association is the duty of every branch of the universal church. Let its views of points of doctrines be what they may; let it hold to any creed as to the nature of man, or the attributes of God, or the offices of Christ; we say that it can not fully and practically embody the spirit of Christianity out of an organization like that which we have described. It may exhibit, with more or less fidelity, some tenet of a creed, or even some phase of virtue; but it can possess only a type and shadow of that universal unity which is the destiny of the church. But let the church adopt true associative organization, and the blessings so long promised it will be fulfilled. Fourier, among the last words that he wrote, describing the triumph of universal Association, exclaims, 'These are the days of mercy promised in the words of the Redeemer, Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.' It is verily in harmony, in Associative unity, that God will manifest to us the immensity of his providence, and that the Savior will come according to his word, in 'all the glory of his Father:' it is the Kingdom of Heaven that comes to us in this terrestrial world; it is the reign of Christ; he has conquered evil. _Christus regnat, vincit, imperat._ Then will the Cross have accomplished its two-fold destiny, that of consolation during the reign of sin, and that of universal banner, when human reason shall have accomplished the task imposed upon it by the Creator. 'Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness'--the harmony of the passions in associative unity. Then will the banner of the Cross display with glory its device, the augury of victory, _In Hoc Signo Vinces_; for then it will have conquered evil, conquered the gates of hell, conquered false philosophy and national indigence and spurious civilization; _et portæ inferi non prevalebunt_. "To the free and Christian people of the United States, then, we commend the principle of Association; we ask that it be fairly sifted; we do not shrink from the most thorough investigation. The peculiar history of this nation convinces us that it has been prepared by Providence for the working out of glorious issues. Its position, its people, its free institutions, all prepare it for the manifestation of a true social order. Its wealth of territory, its distance from the political influences of older and corrupter nations, and above all the general intelligence of its people, alike contribute to fit it for that noble union of freemen which we call Association. That peculiar constitution of government, which, for the first time in the world's career, was established by our Fathers; that signal fact of our national motto, _E Pluribus Unum_, many individuals united in one whole; that beautiful arrangement for combining the most perfect independence of the separate members with complete harmony and strength in the federal heart--is a rude outline and type of the more scientific and more beautiful arrangement which we would introduce into all the relations of man to man. We would give our theory of state rights an application to individual rights. We would bind trade to trade, neighborhood to neighborhood, man to man, by the ties of interest and affection which bind our larger aggregations called States; only we would make the ties holier and more indissoluble. There is nothing impossible in this; there is nothing unpractical! We, who are represented in this Convention have pledged our sleepless energies to its accomplishment. It may cost time, it may cost trouble, it may expose us to misconception and even to abuse; but it must be done. We know that we stand on sure and positive grounds; we know that a better time must come; we know that the hope and heart of humanity is with us--that justice, truth and goodness are with us; we feel that God is with us, and we do not fear the anger of man. _The future is ours--the future is ours._ Our practical plans may seem insignificant, but our moral aim is the grandest that ever elevated human thought. We want the love and wisdom of the Highest to make their daily abode with us; we wish to see all mankind happy and good; we desire to emancipate the human body and the human soul; we long for unity between man and man in true society, between man and nature by the cultivation of the earth, and between man and God, in universal joy and religion." After this address, Mr. Ripley of Brook Farm made a speech, and Mr. Solyman Brown of the Leraysville Phalanx recited "a very beautiful pastoral, entitled, A Vision of the Future." Here occurred a little episode that brought our old friends of the Owenite wing of Socialism on the scene; not, however, altogether harmonically. The report says: "A delegation of English Socialists, from a society in this city, presented itself. The gentlemen composing the delegation, demanded seats as members of the Convention. The call of the Convention was read, and they were asked if they could unite with the Convention according to the terms of the call, as 'friends of Association based on the principles of Charles Fourier.' This they said they could not do, as they differed with the partisans of Fourier in fundamental principles, and particularly in regard to religion and property. They held to community of property, and did not accept our views of a Providential and Divine social order. They were informed that the objects of the Convention were of a special and business character, and that a controversy and discussion of principles could not be entered into. Their claim to sit as members of the Convention was therefore denied: but they were allowed freely to express their opinions, and treated with the utmost courtesy, without reply." Many "admirable addresses" continued to be delivered; among which one of Mr. Channing's is mentioned, and one of Charles A. Dana's is reported in full. He spoke as the representative of Brook Farm. We cull a few broken paragraphs: "As a member of the oldest Association in the United States, I deem it my duty to make some remarks on the practical results of the system. We have an Association at Brook Farm, of which I now speak from my own experience. We have there abolished domestic servitude. This institution of domestic servitude was one of the first considerations; it gave one of the first impulses to the movement at Brook Farm. It seemed that a continuance in the relations which it established, could not possibly be submitted to. It was a deadly sin--a thing to be escaped from. Accordingly it was escaped from, and we have now for three years lived at Brook Farm and have carried on all the business of life without it. At Brook Farm they are all servants of each other; no man is master. We do freely, from the love of it, with joy and thankfulness, those duties which are usually discharged by domestics. The man who performs one of these duties--he who digs a ditch or executes any other repulsive work, is not at the foot of the social scale; he is at the head of it. Again we have in Association established a natural system of education; a system of education which does justice to every one; where the children of the poor receive the integral development of all their faculties, as far as the means of Association in its present condition will permit. Here we claim to have made an advance upon civilized society. "Again, we are able already, not only to assign to manual labor its just rank and dignity in the scale of human occupations, but to insure to it its just reward. And here also, I think, we may humbly claim that we have made some advance upon civilized society. In the best society that has ever been in this world, with very small exceptions, labor has never had its just reward. Every where the gain is to the pocket of the employer. He makes the money. The laborer toils for him and is his servant. The interest of the laborer is not consulted in the arrangements of industry; but the whole tendency of industry is perpetually to disgrace the laborer, to grind him down and reduce his wages, and to render deceit and fraud almost necessary for him. And all for the benefit of whom? For the benefit of our excellent monopolists, our excellent companies, our excellent employers. The stream all runs into their pockets, and not one little rill is suffered to run into the pockets of those who do the work. Now in Association already we have changed all this; we have established a true relation between labor and the people, whereby the labor is done, not entirely for the benefit of the capitalist, as it is in civilized society, but for the mutual benefit of the laborer and the capitalist. We are able to distribute the results and advantages which accrue from labor in a joint ratio. "These, then, very briefly and imperfectly stated, are the practical, actual results already attained. In the first place we have abolished domestic servitude; in the second place, we have secured thorough education for all; and in the third place, we have established justice to the laborer, and ennobled industry.*** Two or three years ago we began our movement at Brook Farm, and propounded these few simple propositions, which I say are here proven. All declared it to be a scheme of fanaticism. There was universal skepticism. No one believed it possible that men could live together in such relations. Society, it was said, had always lived in a state of competition and strife between man and man; and when told that it was possible to live otherwise, no one received the proposition except with scorn and ridicule. But in the experience of two or three years, we maintain that we have by actual facts, by practical demonstration, proven this, viz.: that harmonious relations, relations of love and not of selfishness and mutual conflict, relations of truth and not of falsehood, relations of justice and not of injustice, are possible between man and man." At noon on Saturday the last resolution was adopted, and the Convention was about to adjourn, when Mr. Channing rose and addressed the assembly, as follows: "Mr. President and brother Associationists: We began our meeting with calling to mind, as in the presence of God, our solemn privileges and responsibilities. We can not part without invoking for ourselves, each other, our friends everywhere, and our race, a blessing. It this cause in which we are engaged, is one of mere human device, the emanation of folly and self, may it utterly fail; it will then utterly fail. But if, as we believe, it is of God, and, making allowance for human limitations, is in harmony with the Divine will, may it go on, as thus it must, conquering and to conquer. Those of us who are active in this movement have met, and will meet with suspicion and abuse. It is well! well that critical eyes should probe the schemes of Association to the core, and if they are evil, lay bare their hidden poison; well that in this fiery ordeal the sap of our personal vanities and weaknesses should be consumed. We need be anxious but on one account; and that is lest we be unworthy of this sublime reform. Who are we, that we should have the honor of giving our lives to this grandest of all possible human endeavors, the establishment of universal unity, of the reign of heaven on earth? Truly 'out of the mouths of babes and sucklings has the Lord ordained strength.' Kings and holy men have desired to see the things we see, and have not been able. Let our desire be, that our imperfections, our unfaithfulness, do not hinder the progress of love and truth and joy." The Convention then united in prayer, and parted with the benediction, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace, good will toward men." But this was not the end. That last day of the Convention was also the anniversary of Fourier's birthday, and in the evening the members held a festival at the Apollo Saloon. "The repast was plain and simple, but the intellectual feast and the social communion were delightful." The regular toasts, announced and probably prepared by Mr. Channing, were to the memory of Fourier, and to each of the twelve passions which, according to Fourier, constitute the active forces of human nature. "Soul-stirring speeches" followed each toast. Mr. Dana responded to the toast for friendship, and at the close of his speech Mr. Macdaniel proposed that the toast be repeated with clasped hands. "This proposition was instantly accepted, and with a burst of enthusiasm every man rose, and locking hands all round the table, the toast was repeated by the whole company, producing an electric thrill of emotion through every nerve." Mr. Godwin compared the present prospects of Association to the tokens of approaching land which cheered the drooping spirits of the crew of Columbus. The friends from Brook Farm were the birds, and those from other places the flowers that floated on the waves. Mr. Ripley said, "Our friend has compared us to birds. Well, it is true we have a good deal of singing, though not a great deal to eat; and we have very small nests. (Laughter.) Our most appropriate emblem is the not very beautiful or magnificent, but the very useful and respectable barn-yard fowl! for we all have to scratch for a living! "Mr. Brisbane pronounced an enthusiastic and hearty tribute of his gratitude, esteem and respect for Horace Greeley, for the manly, independent, and generous support he had given to the cause from its infancy to the present day; and closed by saying-- "He (Mr. Greeley), has done for us what we never could have done. He has created the cause on this continent. He has done the work of a century. Well then, I will give [as a toast], 'One Continent and One Man!'" Mr. Greeley returned his grateful thanks for what he said was the extravagant eulogium of his partial friend, and continued: "When I took up this cause, I knew that I went in the teeth of many of my patrons, in the teeth of prejudices of the great mass, in the teeth of religious prejudices; for I confess I had a great many more clergymen on my list before, than I have now, as I am sorry to say, for had they kept on, I think I could have done them a little good. (Laughter.) But in the face of all this, in the face of constant advices, 'Don't have any thing to do with that Mr. Brisbane,' I went on. 'Oh!' said many of my friends, 'consider your position--consider your influence.' 'Well,' said I, 'I shall endeavor to do so, but I must try to do some good in the meantime, or else what is the use of the influence.' (Cheers.) And thus I have gone on, pursuing a manly and at the same time a circumspect course, treading wantonly on no man's prejudice, telling on the contrary, universal man, I will defer to your prejudices, as far as I can consistently with duty; but when duty leads me, you must excuse my stepping on your corn, if it be in the way." (Cheers.) And so they went on with toasts and speeches and letters from distinguished outsiders--one, by the way, from Archbishop Hughes, courteously declining an invitation to attend--till the twelve o'clock bell warned them of the advent of holy time, and so they separated. A notable thing in this great demonstration was the intense _religious_ element that pervaded it. The Convention was opened and closed with prayers and Christian doxologies. The letters and addresses abounded in quotations from scripture, always laboring to identify Fourierism with Christianity. Even the jollities of the festival at the Apollo Saloon could not commence till a blessing had been asked. These manifestations of religious feeling were mainly due to the presence of the Massachusetts men, and especially to the zeal of William H. Channing. He never forgot his religion in his enthusiasm for Socialism. It would be easy to ridicule the fervor and assurance of the actors in this enthusiastic drama, by comparing their hopes and predictions with the results. But for our part we hold that the hopes and predictions were true, and the results were liars. Mistakes were made as to the time and manner of the blessings foreseen, as they have been made many times before and since: but the inspiration did not lie. We have had a long succession of such enthusiasms in this country. First of all and mother of all, was the series of Revivals under Edwards, Nettleton and Finney, in every paroxysm of which the Millennium seemed to be at the door. Then came Perfectionism, rapturously affirming that the Millennium had already begun. Then came Millerism, reproducing all the excitements and hopes that agitated the Primitive Church just before the Second Advent. Very nearly coincident with the crisis of this last enthusiasm in 1843, came this Fourier revival, with the same confident predictions of the coming of Christ's kingdom, and the same mistakes as to time and manner. Since then Spiritualism has gone through the same experience of brilliant prophecies and practical failures. We hold that all these enthusiasms are manifestations, in varied phase, of one great afflatus, that takes its time for fulfillment more leisurely than suits the ardor of its mediums, but inspires them with heart-prophecies of the good time coming, that are true and sure. HORACE GREELEY'S POSITION. The reader will observe that in the final passage of compliments between Messrs. Brisbane and Greeley at the Apollo festival, there is a clear answer to the question, Who was next in rank after Brisbane in the propagation of Fourierism in this country? As there is much confusion in the public memory on this important point in the _personnel_ of Fourierism, we will here make a note of the principal facts in the Fourieristic history of the _Tribune_: A prominent New England journal in an elaborate obituary on the late Henry J. Raymond, after mentioning that he was an efficient assistant of Mr. Greeley on the _Tribune_, from the commencement of that paper in 1841 till he withdrew and took service on the _Courier and Enquirer_, went on to say: "It was at the time of Mr. Raymond's withdrawal from it, that the _Tribune_, which was speedily joined by George Ripley and Charles A. Dana, fresh from Brook Farm, had its Fourieristic phase." The mistakes in this paragraph are remarkable, and ought not to be allowed any chance of getting into history. In the first place Ripley and Dana did not thus immediately succeed Raymond on the _Tribune_. The American Cyclopædia says that Raymond left the _Tribune_ and joined Webb on the _Courier and Enquirer_ in 1843. But Ripley and Dana retained their connection with Brook Farm till October 30, 1847, and continued to edit the _Harbinger_ in New York till February 10, 1849, as we know by the files of that paper in our possession. They could not have joined the _Tribune_ before the first of these dates, and probably did not till after the last; so that there was an interval of from three to six years between Raymond's leaving and their joining the _Tribune_. But the most important error of the above quoted paragraph is its implication that the "Fourieristic phase" of the _Tribune_ was after Raymond left it, and was owing to the advent of Ripley and Dana "fresh from Brook Farm." The truth is, that the _Tribune_ had become the organ of Mr. Brisbane, the importer of Fourierism, in March 1842, less than a year from its commencement (which was on April 10, 1841); and of course had its "Fourieristic phase" while Raymond was employed on it, and in fact before Ripley and Dana had been converted to Fourierism. Brook Farm, be it ever remembered, was originally an independent Yankee experiment, started in 1841 by the suggestion of Dr. Channing, and did not accept Fourierism till the winter of 1843-4. During the entire period of Brisbane's promulgations in the _Tribune_, which lasted more than a year, and which manifestly caused the great Fourier excitement of 1843, Brook Farm had nothing to do with Fourierism, except as it was being carried away with the rest of the world, by Brisbane and the _Tribune_. Thus it is certain that Ripley and Dana did not bring Fourierism into the _Tribune_, but on the contrary received Fourierism from the _Tribune_, during the very period when Raymond was assisting Greeley. When they joined the _Tribune_ in 1847-9, Fourierism was in the last stages of defeat, and the most that they or Greeley or any body else did for it after that, was to help its retreat into decent oblivion. The obituary writer probably fell into these mistakes by imagining that the controversy between Greeley and Raymond, which occurred in 1846, while Raymond was employed on the _Courier and Enquirer_, was the principal "Fourieristic phase" of the _Tribune_. But this was really an after-affair, in which Greeley fought on the defensive as the rear-guard of Fourierism in its failing fortunes; and even this controversy took place before Brook Farm broke up; so that Ripley and Dana had nothing to do with it. The credit or responsibility for the original promulgation of Fourierism through the _Tribune_, of course does not belong to Mr. Raymond; though he was at the time (1842) Mr. Greeley's assistant. But neither must it be put upon Messrs. Ripley and Dana. It belongs exclusively to Horace Greeley. He clearly was Brisbane's other and better half in the propagation of Fourierism. For practical devotion, we judge that he deserves even the _first_ place on the roll of honor. We doubt whether Brisbane himself ever pledged his property to Association, as Greeley did in the following address, published in the _Harbinger_, October 25, 1845: "As one Associationist who has given his efforts and means freely to the cause, I feel that I have a right to speak frankly. I know that the great number of our believers are far from wealthy; yet I know that there is wealth enough in our ranks, if it were but devoted to it, to give an instant and resistless influence to the cause. A few thousand dollars subscribed to the stock of each existing Association would in most cases extinguish the mortgages on its property, provide it with machinery and materials, and render its industry immediately productive and profitable. Then manufacturing invention and skill would fearlessly take up their abode with our infant colonies; labor and thrift would flow thither, and a new and brighter era would dawn upon them. Fellow Associationists! _I_ shall do whatever I can for the promotion of our common cause; to it whatever I have or may hereafter acquire of pecuniary ability is devoted: may I not hope for a like devotion from you? "H.G." CHAPTER XX. THE SYLVANIA ASSOCIATION. This was the first of the PHALANXES. The North American was the last. These two had the distinction of metropolitan origin; both being colonies sent forth by the socialistic schools of New York and Albany. The North American appears to have been Mr. Brisbane's _protege_, if he had any. Mr. Greeley seems to have attached himself to the Sylvania. His name is on its list of officers, and he gives an account of it in his "Recollections," as one of the two Phalanxes that issued from New York City. In the following sketch we give the rose-color first, and the shady side afterward. Indeed this will be our general method of making up the memoirs of the Phalanxes. The first number of Brisbane's paper, the _Phalanx_, (October 5, 1843) gives the following account of the Sylvania: "This Association has been formed by warm friends of the cause from the cities of New York and Albany. Thomas W. Whitley is President, and Horace Greeley, Treasurer. Operations were commenced in May last, and have already proved incontestably the great advantages of Association; having thus far more than fulfilled the most sanguine hopes of success of those engaged in the enterprise. Temporary buildings have been erected, and the foundation laid of a large edifice; a great deal of land has been cleared, and a saw- and grist-mill on the premises when purchased, have been put in excellent repair; several branches of industry, shoe-making particularly, have been established, and the whole concern is now in full operation. Upwards of one hundred and fifty persons, men, women and children, are on the domain, all contented and happy, and much gratified with their new mode of life, which is new to most of the members as a country residence, as well as an associated household; for nearly all the mechanics formerly resided in cities, New York and Albany principally. In future numbers we will give more detailed accounts of this enterprising little Association. The following is a description of its location and soil: "The Sylvania domain consists of 2,300 acres of arable land, situated in the township of Lackawaxen, County of Pike, State of Pennsylvania. It lies on the Delaware river, at the mouth of the Lackawaxen creek, fourteen miles from Milford, about eighty-five miles in a straight line west by north of New York City (by stage route ninety-four, and by New York and Erie Railroad to Middletown, one hundred and ten miles; seventy-four of which are now traversed by railroad). The railroad will certainly be carried to Port Jervis, on the Delaware, only fifteen miles below the domain; certainly if the Legislature of the State will permit. The Delaware and Hudson Canal now passes up the Delaware directly across from the domain, affording an unbroken water communication with New York City; and the turnpike from Milford, Pennsylvania, to Owego, New York, bounds on the south the lands of the Association, and crosses the Delaware by a bridge about one mile from the dwellings. The domain may be said, not very precisely, to be bounded by the Delaware on the north, the Lackawaxen on the west, the Shoholy on the east, and the turnpike on the south. "The soil of the domain is a deep loam, well calculated for tillage and grazing. About one hundred acres had been cleared before the Association took possession of it; the remainder is thinly covered with the primitive forest; the larger trees having been cut off of a good part of it for timber. Much of it can be cleared at a cost of six dollars per acre. Abundance of timber remains on it for all purposes of the Association. The land lies in gentle sloping ridges, with valleys between, and wide, level tables at the top. The general inclination is to the east and south. There are very few acres which can not be plowed after clearing. "Application for membership, to be made (by letter, post paid), to Thomas W. Whitley, Esq., President, or to Horace Greeley, Esq., New York." The Executive officers issued a pamphlet soon after the commencement of operations, from which we extract the following: "This Association was formed early in 1843, by a few citizens of New York, mainly mechanics, who, deeply impressed with the present defective, vice-engendering and ruinous system of society, with the wasteful complication of its isolated households, its destructive competition and anarchy in industry, its constraint of millions to idleness and consequent dependence or famine for want of employment, and its failure to secure education and development to the children growing up all around and among us in ignorance and vice, were impelled to immediate and energetic action in resistance to these manifold and mighty evils. Having earnestly studied the system of industrial organization and social reform propounded by Charles Fourier, and been led to recognize in it a beneficent, expensive and practical plan for the melioration of the condition of man and his moral and intellectual elevation, they most heartily adopted that system as the basis and guide of their operations. Holding meetings from time to time, and through the press informing the public of their enterprise and its objects, their numbers steadily increased; their organization was perfected; explorations with a view to the selection of a domain were directed and made; and in the last week of April a location was finally determined on and its purchase effected. During the first week in May, a pioneer division of some forty persons entered upon the possession and improvement of the land. Their number has since been increased to nearly sixty, of whom over forty are men, generally young or in the prime of life, and all recognizing labor as the true and noble destiny on earth. The Sylvania Association is the first attempt in North America to realize in practice the vast economies, intellectual advantages and such enjoyments resulting from Fourier's system. "Any person may become a stockholder by subscribing for not less than one share ($25); but the council, having as yet its head-quarters in New York, is necessarily entrusted with power to determine at what time and in what order subscribers and their families can be admitted to resident membership on the domain. Those who are judged best calculated to facilitate the progress of the enterprise must be preferred; those with large families unable to labor must await the construction of buildings for their proper accommodation; while such as shall, on critical inquiry, be found of unfit moral character or debasing habits, can not be admitted at all. This, however, will nowise interfere with their ownership in the domain; they will be promptly paid the dividends on their stock, whenever declared, the same as resident members. "The enterprise here undertaken, however humble in its origin, commends itself to the respect of the skeptical and the generous coöperation of the philanthropic. Its consequences, should success (as we can not doubt it will) crown our exertions, must be far-reaching, beneficent, unbounded. It aims at no aggrandizement of individuals, no upbuilding or overthrow of sect or party, but at the founding of a new, more trustful, more benignant relationship between capital and labor, removing discord, jealousy and hatred, and replacing them by concord, confidence and mutual advantage. The end aimed at is the emancipation of the mass; of the depressed toiling millions, the slaves of necessity and wretchedness, of hunger and constrained idleness, of ignorance, drunkenness and vice; and their elevation to independence, moral and intellectual development; in short, to a true and hopeful manhood. This enterprise now appeals to the lovers of the human race for aid; not for praises, votes or alms, but for coöperation in rendering its triumph signal and speedy. It asks of the opulent and the generous, subscriptions to its stock, in order that its lands may be promptly cleared and improved, its buildings erected, &c.; as they must be far more slowly, if the resident members must devote their energies at once and henceforth to the providing, under the most unfavorable circumstances, of the entire means of their own subsistence. Subscriptions are solicited, at the office of the Association, 25 Pine street, third story. "THOS. W. WHITLEY, President; J.D. PIERSON, Vice President; HORACE GREELEY, Treasurer; J.T.S. SMITH, Secretary." After this discourse, the pamphlet presents a constitution, by-laws, bill of rights, &c., which are not essentially different from scores of joint-stock documents which we find, not only in the records of the Fourier epoch, but scattered all along back through the times of Owenism. The truth is, the paper constitutions of nearly all the American experiments, show that the experimenters fell to work, only under the _impulse_, not under the _instructions_, of the European masters. Yankee tinkering is visible in all of them. They all are shy, on the one hand, of Owen's flat Communism (as indeed Owen himself was,) and on the other, of Fourier's impracticable account-keeping and venturesome theories of "passional equilibrium." The result is, that they are all very much alike, and may all be classed together as attempts to solve the problem, How to construct a _home_ on the joint-stock principle; which is much like the problem, How to eat your cake and keep it too. For the shady side, Macdonald gives us a Dialogue which, he says, was written by a gentleman who was a member of the Sylvania Association from beginning to end. It is not very artistic, but shrewd and interesting. We print it without important alteration. The curious reader will find entertainment in comparing its descriptions of the Sylvania domain with those given in the official documents above. In this case as in many others, views taken before and after trial, are as different as summer and winter landscapes. TALK ABOUT THE SYLVANIA ASSOCIATION. _B._--Good morning, Mr. A. I perceive you are busy among your papers. I hope we do not disturb you? _A._--Not in the least, sir. I am much pleased to meet you. _B._--I wish to introduce to you my friend Mr. C. He is anxious to learn something concerning the experiment in which you were engaged in Pike County, Pennsylvania, and I presumed that you would be willing to furnish him with the desired information. _A._--I suppose, Mr. C., like many others, you are doubtful about the correctness of the reports you have heard concerning these Associations. _C._--Yes, sir: but I am endeavoring to discover the truth, and particularly in relation to the causes which produce so many failures. I find thus far in my investigations, that the difficulties which all Associations have to contend with, are very similar in their character. Pray, sir, how and where did the Sylvania Association originate? _A._--It originated partly in New York City and partly in Albany, in the winter of 1842-3. We first held meetings in Albany, and agitated the subject of Socialism till we formed an Association. Our original object was to read and explain the doctrines of Charles Fourier, the French Socialist; to have lectures delivered, and arouse public attention to the consideration of those social questions which appeared to us, in our new-born zeal, to have an important bearing upon the present, and more especially upon the future welfare of the human family. In this we partly succeeded, and had arrived at the point where it appeared necessary for us to think of practically carrying out those splendid views which we had hitherto been dreaming and talking about. Hearing of a similar movement going on in New York City, we communicated with them and ascertained that they thought precisely as we did concerning immediate and practical operations. After several communications the two bodies united, with a determination to vent their enthusiasm upon the land. Our New York friends appointed a committee of three persons to select a desirable location, and report at the next meeting of the Society. _C._--What were the qualifications of the men who were appointed to select the location? I think this very important. _A._--One was a landscape painter, another an industrious cooper, and the third was a homoeopathic doctor! _C._--And not a farmer among them! Well, this must have been a great mistake. At what season did they go to examine the country? _A._--I think it was in March; I am sure it was before the snow was off the ground. _C._--How unhappy are the working classes in having so little patience. Every thing they attempt seems to fail because they will not wait the right time. Had you any capitalists among you? _A._--No; they were principally working people, brought up to a city life. _C._--But you encouraged capitalists to join your society? _A._--Our constitution provided for them as well as laborers. We wished to combine capital and labor, according to the theory laid down by Charles Fourier. _C._--Was his theory the society's practice? _A._--No; there was infinite difference between his theory and our practice. This is generally the case in such movements, and invariably produces disappointment and unhappiness. _C._--Does this not result from ignorance of the principles, or a want of faith in them? _A._--To some extent it does. If human beings were passive bodies, and we could place them just where we pleased, we might so arrange them that their actions would be harmonious. But they are not so. We are active beings; and the Sylvanians were not only very active, but were collected from a variety of situations least likely to produce harmonious beings. If we knew mathematically the laws which regulate the actions of human beings, it is possible we might place all men in true relation to each other. _C._--Working people seem to know no patience other than that of enduring the everlasting toil to which they are brought up. But about the committee which you say consisted of an artist, mechanic and a doctor; what report did they make concerning the land? _A._--They reported favorably of a section of land in Pike County, Pennsylvania, consisting of about 2,394 acres, partly wooded with yellow pine and small oak trees, with a soil of yellow loam without lime. It was well watered, had an undulating surface, and was said to be elevated fifteen hundred feet above the Hudson river. To reach it from New York and Albany, we had to take our things first to Rondout on the Hudson, and thence by canal to Lackawanna; then five miles up hill on a bad stony road. [In the description on p. 234 the canal is said to be "_directly across from the domain_."] There was plenty of stone for building purposes lying all over the land. The soil being covered with snow, the committee did not see it, but from the small size of the trees, they probably judged it would be easily cleared, which would be a great advantage to city-choppers. Nine thousand dollars was the price demanded for this place, and the society concluded to take it. _C._--What improvements were upon it, and what were the conditions of sale? _A._--There were about thirty acres planted with rye, which grain, I understood, had been successively planted upon it for six years without any manure. This was taken as a proof of the strength of the soil; but when we reaped, we were compelled to rake for ten yards on each side of the spot where we intended to make the bundle, before we had sufficient to tie together. There were three old houses on the place; a good barn and cow-shed; a grist-mill without machinery, with a good stream for water-power; an old saw-mill, with a very indifferent water-wheel. These, together with several skeletons of what had once been horses, constituted the stock and improvements. We were to pay $1,000 down in cash; the owner was to put in $1,000 as stock, and the balance was to be paid by annual instalments. _C._--How much stock did the members take? _A._--To state the exact amount would be somewhat difficult; for some who subscribed liberally at first, withdrew their subscriptions, while others increased them. On examining my papers, I reckon that in Albany there were about $4,500 subscribed in money and useful articles for mechanical and other purposes. In New York I should estimate that about $6,000 were subscribed in like proportions. _C._--When did the members proceed to the domain, and how did they progress there? _A._--They left New York and Albany for the domain about the beginning of May; and I find from a table I kept of the number of persons, with their ages, sex and occupations, that in the following August there were on the place twenty-eight married men, twenty-seven married women, twenty-four single young men, six single young women, and fifty-one children; making a total of one hundred and thirty-six individuals. These had to be closely packed in three very indifferent two-story frame houses. The upper story of the grist-mill was devoted to as many as could sleep there. These arrangements very soon brought trouble. Children with every variety of temper and habits, were brought in close contact, without any previous training to prepare them for it. Parents, each with his or her peculiar character and mode of educating children, long used to very different accommodations, were brought here and literally compelled to live like a herd of animals. Some thought their children would be taken and cared for by the society, as its own family; while others claimed and practiced the right to procure for their children all the little indulgences they had been used to. Thus jealousies and ill-feelings were created, and in place of that self-sacrifice and zealous support of the constitution and officers, to which they were all pledged (I have no doubt by some in ignorance), there was a total disregard of all discipline, and a determination in each to have the biggest share of all things going, except hard labor, which was very unpopular with a certain class. Aside from the above, had we been carefully selected from families in each city, and had we been found capable of giving up our individual preferences to accomplish the glorious object we had in view, what had we to experiment upon? In my opinion, a barren wilderness; not giving the slightest prospect that it would ever generously yield a return for the great sacrifices we were making upon it. The land was cold and sterile, apparently incapable of supporting the stunted pines which looked like a vast collection of barbers' poles upon its surface. I will give you one or two illustrations of the quality of the soil: We cut and cleared four and a half acres of what we thought might be productive soil; and after having plowed and cross-plowed it, we sowed it with buckwheat. When the crop was drawn into the barn and threshed, it yielded eleven and a-half bushels. Again, we toiled hard, clearing the brush and picking up the stones from seventeen acres of new land: we plowed it three different ways, and then sowed and harrowed it with great care. When the product was reaped and threshed, it did not yield more than the quantity of seed planted. Such experiences as these made me look upon the whole operation as a suicidal affair, blasting forever the hopes and aspirations of the few noble spirits who tried so hard to establish in practice, the vision they had seen for years. _C._--How long did the Association remain on the place? _A._--About a year and a half, and then it was abandoned as rapidly as it was settled. _C._--They made improvements while there. What were they, and who got them when the society left? _A._--We cleared over one hundred acres and fenced it in; built a large frame-house forty feet by forty, three stories high; also a two-story carpenter's-shop, and a new wagon-house. We repaired the dam and saw-mill, and made other improvements which I can not now particularize. These improvements went to the original owner, who had already received two thousand dollars on the purchase; and (as he expressed it) he generously agreed to take the land back, with the improvements, and release the trustees from all further obligations! _C._--It appears to me that your society, like many others, lacked a sufficient amount of intelligence, or they never would have sent such a committee to select a domain; and after the domain was selected, sent so many persons to live upon it so soon. Your means were totally inadequate to carry out the undertaking, and you had by far too many children upon the domain. There should have been no children sent there, until ample means had been secured for their care and education under the superintendence of competent persons. _A._--It is difficult to get any but married men and women to endure the hardships consequent on such an experiment. Single young men, unless under some military control, have not the perseverance of married men. _C._--But the children! What have you to say of them? _A._--I am not capable of debating that question just now; but I am satisfied that a very different course from the one we tried must be pursued. Better land and more capital must be obtained, and a greater degree of intelligence and subordination must pervade the people, before a Community can be successful. Macdonald moralizes as usual on the failure. The following is the substance of his funeral sermon: "There were too many children on the place, their number being fifty-one to eighty-five adults. Some persons went there very poor, in fact without anything, and came away in a better condition; while others took all they could with them, and came back poor. Young men, it is stated, wasted the good things at the commencement of the experiment; and besides victuals, dry-goods supplied by the Association were unequally obtained. Idle and greedy people find their way into such attempts, and soon show forth their character by burdening others with too much labor, and, in times of scarcity, supplying themselves with more than their allowance of various articles, instead of taking less. "Where such a failure as this occurs, many persons are apt to throw the blame upon particular individuals as well as on the principles; but in this case, I believe, nearly all connected with it agree that the inferior land and location was the fundamental cause of ill success. "It was a loss to nearly all engaged in it. Those who subscribed and did not go, lost their shares; and those who subscribed and did go, lost their valuable time as well as their shares. The sufferers were in error, and were led into the experiment by others, who were likewise in error. Working men left their situations, some good and some bad, and, in their enthusiasm, expected, not only to improve their own condition, but the condition of mankind. They fought the fight and were defeated. Some were so badly wounded that it took them many years to recover; while others, more fortunate, speedily regained their former positions, and now thrive well in the world again. The capital expended on this experiment was estimated at $14,000." The exact date at which the Sylvania dissolved is not given in Macdonald's papers, but the _Phalanx_ of August 10, 1844, indicates in the following paragraph, that it was dying at that time: "We are requested to state that the Sylvania Association, having become satisfied of its inability to contend successfully against an ungrateful soil and ungenial climate, which unfortunately characterize the domain on which it settled, has determined on a dissolution. Other reasons also influence this step, but these, and the fact that the domain is located in a thinly inhabited region, cut off almost entirely from a market for its surplus productions, are the prominent reasons. A grievous mistake was made by those engaged in this enterprise, in the selection of a domain; but as a report on the matter is forthcoming, we shall say no more at present." It is evident enough that this was not Fourierism. Indeed, Mr. A., the respondent in the Dialogue, frankly admits, for himself and doubtless for his associates, that their doings had in them no semblance of Fourierism. But then the same may be said, without much modification, of all the experiments of the Fourier epoch. Fourier himself would have utterly disowned every one of them. We have seen that he vehemently protested against an experiment in France, which had a cash basis of one hundred thousand dollars, and the advantage of his own possible presence and administration. Much more would he have refused responsibility for the whole brood of unscientific and starveling "picnics," that followed Brisbane's excitations. Here then arises a distinction between Fourierism as a theory propounded by Fourier, and Fourierism as a practical movement administered in this country by Brisbane and Greeley. The constitution of a country is one thing; the government is another. Fourier furnished constitutional principles; Brisbane was the working President of the administration. We must not judge Fourier's theory by Brisbane's execution. We can not conclude or safely imagine, from the actual events under Brisbane's administration, what would have been the course of things, if Fourier himself had been President of the American movement. It might have been worse; or it might have been better. It certainly would not have been the same; for Brisbane was a very different man from Fourier. For one thing, Fourier was practically a cautious man; while Brisbane was a young enthusiast. Again, Fourier was a poor man and a worker; while Brisbane was a capitalist. Our impression also is, that Fourier was more religious than Brisbane. From these differences we might conjecture, that Fourier would not have succeeded so well as Brisbane did, in getting up a vast and swift excitement; but would have conducted his operations to a safer end. At all events, it is unfair to judge the French theory by the American movement under Brisbane. The value of Fourier's ideas is not determined, nor the hope of good from them foreclosed, merely by the disasters of these local experiments. And, to deal fairly all round, it must further be said, that it is not right to judge Brisbane by such experiments as that of the Sylvania Association. Let it be remembered that, with all his enthusiasm, he gave warning from time to time in his publications of the deficiencies and possible failures of these hybrid ventures; and was cautious enough to keep himself and his money out of them. We have not found his name in connection with any of the experiments, except the North American Phalanx; and he appears never to have been a member even of that; but only was recommended for its presidency by the Fourier Association of New York, which was a sort of mother to it. What then shall we say of the rank-and-file that formed themselves into Phalanxes and marched into the wilderness to the music of Fourierism? Multitudes of them, like the poor Sylvanians, lost their all in the battle. To them it was no mere matter of theory or pleasant propagandism, but a miserable "Bull Run." And surely there was a great mistake somewhere. Who was responsible for the enormous miscalculation of times, and forces, and capabilities of human nature, that is manifest in the universal disaster of the experiments? Shall we clear the generals, and leave the poor soldiers to be called volunteer fools, without the comfort even of being in good company? After looking the whole case over again, we propose the following distribution of criticism: 1. Fourier, though not responsible for Brisbane's administration, was responsible for tantalizing the world with a magnificent theory, without providing the means of translating it into practice. Christ and Paul did no such thing. They kept their theory in the back-ground, and laid out their strength mainly on execution. The mistake of all "our incomparable masters" of the French school, seems to have been in imagining that a supreme genius is required for developing a theory, but the experimenting and execution may be left to second-rate men. One would think that the example of their first Napoleon might have taught them, that the place of the supreme genius is at the head of the army of execution and in the front of the battle with facts. 2. Brisbane, though not altogether responsible for the inadequate attempts of the poor Sylvanians and the rest of the rabble volunteers, must be blamed for spending all his energy in drumming and recruiting; while, to insure success, he should have given at least half his time to drilling the soldiers and leading them in actual battle. One example of Fourierism, carried through to splendid realization, would have done infinitely more for the cause in the long run, than all his translations and publications. As Fourier's fault was devotion to theory, Brisbane's fault was devotion to propagandism. 3. The rank-and-file, as they were strictly volunteers, should have taken better care of themselves, and not been so ready to follow and even rush ahead of leaders, who were thus manifestly devoting themselves to theorizing and propagandism without experience. It may be a consolation to all concerned--officers, privates, and far-off spectators of the great "Bull Run" of Fourierism--that the cause of Socialism has outlived that battle, and has learned from it, not despair, but wisdom. We have found by it at least _what can not be done_. As Owenism, with all its disasters, prepared the way for Fourierism, so we may hope that Fourierism, with all its disasters, has prepared the way for a third and perhaps final socialistic movement. Every lesson of the past will enter into the triumph of the future. CHAPTER XXI. OTHER PENNSYLVANIA EXPERIMENTS. Our memoirs of the Phalanxes and other contemporary Associations, may as well be arranged according to the States in which they were located. We have already disposed of the Sylvania, which was the most interesting of the experiments in Pennsylvania during the Fourier epoch. Our accounts of the remaining half-dozen are not long. The whole of them may be dispatched at a sitting. THE PEACE UNION SETTLEMENT. This was a Community founded by Andreas Bernardus Smolnikar, whose name we saw among the Vice Presidents of the National Convention. Macdonald says nothing of it; but the _Phalanx_ of April 1844, has the following paragraph: "This colony of Germans is situated in Limestown township, Warren County, Pennsylvania; it is founded upon somewhat peculiar views and associative principles, by Andreas Bernardus Smolnikar, who was Professor of Biblical Study and Criticism in Austria, and perceiving by the signs of the times compared with prophecies of the Bible, that the time was at hand for the foundation of the universal peace which was promised to all nations, and feeling called to undertake a mission to aid in carrying out the great work thus disclosed to him, he came to America. In the years 1838 and 1842, he published at Philadelphia five volumes in explanation of his views; and gathering around him a body of his countrymen, during the last summer he commenced with them the Peace Union Settlement, on a tract of fertile wild land of 10,000 acres, which had been purchased." That is all we find. Smolnikar begun, but, we suppose, was not able to finish. In 1845 he was wandering about the country, professing to be the "Ambassador extraordinary of Christ, and Apostle of his peace." He called on us at Putney; but we heard nothing of his Community. THE MCKEAN COUNTY ASSOCIATION. The _Phalanx_, in its first number (October 1843), announced this experiment among many others, in the following terms: "There is a large Association of Germans in McKean County, Pennsylvania, commenced by the Rev. George Ginal of Philadelphia. They own a very extensive tract of land, over thirty thousand acres we are informed, and are progressing prosperously. The shares, which were originally $100, have been sold and are now held at $200 or more." This is the first and the last we hear of the Rev. George Ginal and his thirty thousand acres. THE ONE-MENTIAN COMMUNITY. The name of this Community, Macdonald says, was derived from Scripture; probably from the expression of Paul, "Be of one mind." _The New Moral World_ claimed it as an Owenite Association, "with a constitution slightly altered from Owen's outline of rational society, i.e., made a little more theological." It originated at Paterson, New Jersey, but the sect of One-Mentianists appears to have had branches in Newark, New York, Brooklyn, Philadelphia and other cities. The prominent men were Dr. Humbert and Messrs. Horner, Scott, and Hudson. The _Regenerator_ of February 12, 1844, published a long epistle from John Hooper, a member of the One-Mentian Community, giving an account in rather stilted style, of its origin, state and prospects. We quote the most important paragraphs: "In the beginning of last year a few humble but sincere persons resolved to raise the standard of human liberty, and though limited indeed in their means, yet such as they could sacrifice they contributed for that purpose; believing that the tree being once planted, other generous spirits, filled with the same sympathy, enlightened by the same knowledge, and kindled by the same resolve, would, from time to time step forward, unite in the same holy cause, and nurture this tree, until its redeeming unction shall shed a kindred halo through the length and breadth of the land. Having made this resolve, they looked not behind them, but freely contributed of their hard-earned means, and purchased eight hundred acres of fertile wood-land, in Monroe County, Pennsylvania. Their zeal perhaps overpacing their judgment, they located upon their domain several families before organizing sufficient means for their support, which necessarily produced much privation and disappointment, and which placed men and women, good and true, in a position to which human nature never ought to be exposed. But their undying faith in the truth and grandeur of social Community, strengthened them in their endeavor to overcome their disasters, and they have passed the fiery ordeal chastened and purified. Do I censure their want of foresight? Do I regret this trial? Oh, no! It but the more forcibly confirms me in my persuasion of the practicability of our system. It but the more clearly shows how persons united in a good and just cause, can and will surmount unequaled privations, withering disappointments, and unimagined difficulties, if their impulse be as pure as their object is sacred and magnificent. It shows, too, most clearly, how the humblest in society can work out their redemption, when true to one another. And moreover, it is a security that blessings so dearly purchased, will be guarded by as judicious watchfulness and jealous care, as the labor was severe and trying in producing them. "But the land has been bought, and better still, it is paid for; and the Society stands at this moment free from debt. We have no interest nor rent to pay, no mortgage to dread; but we are free and unincumbered. The land is good, as can be testified by several persons in the city of New York, who well know it, and who are willing to bear witness of this fact to any who may or have questioned it. About sixteen acres of this land are cleared and cultivated. We have implements, some stock, and some machinery. But what is better than all, we have honest hearts, clear heads, and hardy limbs, which have passed the severest tests, battling with the huge forest, struggling with the hitherto sterile glebe, fostering the generous seed, that they may build suffering humanity a home. Who after this can be so cold as not to bid them good speed? Who so ungenerous as to speak to their disparagement? Who so niggardly as to withhold from them their mite? Having a fine water-power on their domain, they are yearning for the creation of a mill, which, at a small cost, can and will be soon accomplished," etc. Macdonald reports the progress and _finale_ of this experiment, with some wholesome criticisms, as follows: "The committee appointed to select a domain, chose the location when the ground was covered with snow. The land was wild and well timbered, but the region is said to be cold. Some of the soil is good, but generally it is very rocky and barren. The society paid five hundred dollars for some six or seven hundred acres, Cheap enough, one would say; but it turned out to be dear enough. "Enthusiasm drove between thirty and forty persons out to the spot, and they commenced work under very unfavorable circumstances. The accommodations were very inferior, there being at first only one log cabin on the place; and what was worse, there was an insufficiency of food, both for men and animals. The members cleared forty acres of land and made other improvements; and for the number of persons collected, and the length of time spent on the place, the work performed is said to have been immense. "As the land was paid for and assistance was being rendered by the various branches of the society, there were great anticipations of success. But it appears that an individual from Philadelphia visited the place, constituted himself a committee of inspection, and reported unfavorably to the Philadelphia branch; which quenched the Philadelphia ardor in the cause. A committee was sent on from the New York branch, and they likewise reported unfavorably of the domain. This speedily caused the dissolution of the Community. "The parties located on the domain reluctantly abandoned it, and returned again to the cities. I am informed that one of the members still lives on the place, and probably holds it as his own. Who has got the deeds, it seems difficult to determine. "This failure, like many others, is ascribed to ignorance. Disagreements of course took place; and one between Mr. Hudson and the New York branch, caused that gentleman to leave the One-Mentian, and start another Community a few miles distant. This probably broke up the One-Mentian. It lasted scarcely a year." THE SOCIAL REFORM UNITY. "This Association," says Macdonald, "originated in Brooklyn, Long Island, among some mechanics and others, who were stimulated to make a practical attempt at social reform, through the labors of Albert Brisbane and Horace Greeley. Business was dull and the times were hard; so that working-men were mostly unemployed, and many of them were glad to try any apparently reasonable plan for bettering their condition." Mr. C.H. Little and Mr. Mackenzie were the leading men in this experiment. They framed and printed a very elaborate constitution; but as Macdonald says they never made any use of it, we omit it. One or two curiosities in it, however, deserve to be rescued from oblivion. The 14th article provides that "The treasury of the Unity shall consist of a suitable metallic safe, secured by seven different locks, the keys of which shall be deposited in the keeping and care of the following officers, to wit: one with the president of the Unity, one with the president of the Advisory Council, one with the secretary general, one with the accountant general, one with the agent general, one with the arbiter general, and one with the reporter general. The monies in said treasury to be drawn out only by authority of an order from the Executive Council, signed by all the members of the same in session at the time of the drawing of such order, and counter-signed by the president of the Unity. All such monies thus drawn shall be committed to the care and disposal of the Executive Council." The 62d Article says, "The question or subject of the dissolution of this Unity shall never be entertained, admitted or discussed in any of the meetings of the same." "Land was offered to the society by a Mr. Wood, in Pike County, Pennsylvania, at $1.25 per acre, and the cheapness of it appears to have been the chief inducement to accepting it. They agreed to take two thousand acres at the above rate, but only paid down $100. The remainder was to be paid in installments within a certain period. "A pioneer band was formed of about twenty persons, who went on to the property: their only capital being their subscriptions of $50 each. The journey thither was difficult, owing to the bad roads and the ruggedness of the country. "The domain was well-timbered land near the foot of a mountain range, and was thickly covered with stones and boulders. A half acre had been cleared for a garden by a previous settler. A small house with about four rooms, a saw-mill, a yoke of oxen, some pigs, poultry, etc., were on the place; but the accommodations and provisions were altogether insufficient, and the circumstances very unpleasant for so many persons, and especially at such a season of the year; for it was about the middle of November when they went on the ground. "At the commencement of their labors they made no use of their constitution and laws to regulate their conduct, intending to use them when they had made some progress on their domain, and had prepared it for a greater number of persons. All worked as they could, and with an enthusiasm worthy of a great cause, and all shared in common whatever there was to share. They commenced clearing land, building bridges over the 'runs,' gathering up the boulders, and improving the habitation. But going on to an uncultivated place like that, without ample means to obtain the provisions they required, and at such a season, seems to me to have been a very imprudent step; and so the sequel proved. "None of the leading men were agriculturists; and although it may be quite true that the soil under the boulders was excellent, yet a band of poor mechanics, without capital, must have been sadly deluded, if they supposed that they could support themselves and prepare a home for others on such a spot as that; unless, indeed, mankind can live on wood and stone. "They depended upon external support from the Brooklyn Society, and expected it to continue until they were firmly established on the domain. In this they were totally disappointed; the promised aid never came; and indeed the subscriptions ceased entirely on the departure of the pioneers to the place of experiment. "They continued struggling manfully with the rocks, wood, climate and other opposing circumstances, for about ten months; and agreed pretty well till near the close, when the legislating and chafing increased, as the means decreased. "Occasionally a new member would arrive, and a little foreign assistance would be obtained. But this did not amount to much; and finally it was thought best to abandon the enterprise. Want of capital was the only cause assigned by the Community for its failure; but there was evidently also want of wisdom and general preparation." GOOSE-POND COMMUNITY. It was mentioned at the close of the account of the One-Mentian Community, that a Mr. Hudson seceded and started another Association. That Association took the domain left by the Social Reform Unity. The locality was called "Goose Pond," and hence the name of this Community. About sixty persons were engaged in it. After an existence of a few months it failed. THE LERAYSVILLE PHALANX. Several notices of this Association occur in The _Phalanx_, from which we quote as follows: [From the _Phalanx_, February 5, 1844.] "An Industrial Association, which promises to realize immediately the advantages of united interests, and ultimately all the immense economies and blessings of a true, brotherly social order, is now in progress of organization near the village of Leraysville, town of Pike, county of Bradford, in the State of Pennsylvania. "Nearly fifty thousand dollars have been subscribed to its stock, and a constitution nearly identical with that of the North American Phalanx, has received the signatures of a number of heads of families and others, who are preparing to commence operations early in the spring. Thus the books are fairly open for subscription to the capital stock, only a few thousand dollars more of cash capital being needed for the first year's expenditures. "About fifteen hundred acres of land have already been secured for the domain, consisting of adjacent farms in a good state of cultivation, well fenced and watered, and as productive as any tract of equal dimensions in its vicinity. "As Dr. Lemuel C. Belding, the active projector of this enterprise, and several other gentlemen who have united their farms to form the domain, are members of the New Jerusalem church, it may be fairly presumed that the Leraysville Phalanx will be owned mostly by members of that religious connection; although other persons desirous of living in charity with their neighbors, will by no means be excluded, but on the contrary be freely admitted to the common privileges of membership. "We are very much pleased with this little Phalanx, which is just starting into existence. Rev. Dr. Belding, the clergyman at the head of it, is a man of sound judgment, great practical energy, and clear views--not merely a theologian, talking only of abstract faith and future salvation. He knows that 'work is worship;' that order, economy and justice must exist on earth in the practical affairs of men, as they do wherever God's laws are carried out; and that if men would pray in _deed_, as they do in _word_, those principles would soon be realized in this world. "He enjoys the confidence of the people around him, and unites with them practically in the enterprise, setting an example by putting in his own land and other property, and doing his share of the LABOR." [From the _Phalanx_ March 1, 1844.] "We learn that this Association is proceeding with its organization under favorable auspices. The most interesting practical step that has been taken is, throwing down the division fences of the farms which have been united to form the domain. How significant a fact is this! The barricades of selfishness and isolation are overthrown! "Buried deep in the mountains of Pennsylvania, in a secluded, and as is said, beautiful valley, some honest farmers are living on their separate farms. In general they are thrifty; but they feel sensibly many evils and disadvantages to which they are subjected. The doctrines of Association reach them, and as intelligent, sincere minded men, they come together and discuss their merits. They are satisfied of their truth, and that they can live together as brethren with united interests, far better than they can separated, under the old system of divided and conflicting interests. They resolve to carry out their convictions, and to form an Association. Now how is this to be done? Simply by uniting their farms, and forming of them one domain. They do not sacrifice any interest in their property; the tenure of it only is changed. Instead of owning the acres themselves, they own the shares of stock which represent the acres, and the individual and collective interests are at once united. They are now joint-partners in a noble domain, and the interest of each is the interest of all, and the interest of all the interest of each. From unity of interests at once springs unity of feeling and unity of design; and the first sign is a destructive one; they throw down the old land-marks of division. The next will be constructive; they will build them a large and comfortable edifice in which they can reside in true social relations. "Now what do we gather from this? Plainly that the social transformation from isolation to Association, is a simple and easy thing, a peaceful and a practical thing, which neither violates any right nor disturbs any order. "We understand that as soon as the spring opens, the Leraysville Phalanx is to be joined by a number of enterprising men and skillful mechanics from this city and other places." [From the _Phalanx_, April 1, 1844.] "The cash resources of the Phalanx, in addition to its local trade, will consist of sales of cattle, horses, boots, shoes, saddles and harness, woolen goods, hats, books of its own manufacture, paper, umbrellas, stockings, gloves, clothing, cabinet-wares, piano fortes, tin-ware, nursery-trees, carriages, bedsteads, chairs, oil-paintings and other productions of skill and art, together with the receipts from pupils in the schools and boarders from abroad, residing on the domain. "It need not be concealed that the intention of the founders of the Leraysville Association, is to keep up, if possible, a prevailing New Church influence in the Phalanx, in order that its schools may be conducted consistently with the views of that religious connection." SOLYMAN BROWN, General Agent. 13 Park Place, New York. [From the _Phalanx_, September 7, 1844.] "We have received a paper containing an oration delivered on the Fourth of July, by Dr. Solyman Brown, late of this city, at the Leraysville Phalanx, which institution he has joined." So far the _Phalanx_ carries us pleasantly; but here it leaves us. Macdonald tells the unpleasant part of the story thus: "There were about forty men, women and children in the Association. Among them were seven farmers, two or three carpenters, one cabinet maker, two or three shoemakers, one cooper, one lawyer, and several doctors of physic and divinity, together with some young men who made themselves generally useful. The majority of the members were Swedenborgians, and Dr. Belding was their preacher. "The land (about three hundred acres) and other property belonged to Dr. Belding, his sons, his brother, and other relatives. It was held as stock, at a valuation made by the owners. "In addition to the families who were thus related, and who owned the property, individuals from distant places were induced to go there; but for these outsiders the accommodations were not very good. Each of the seven persons owning the land had comfortable homesteads on which they lived, the estimated value of which gave them controlling power and influence. But the associates from a distance (some even from the State of Maine) were compelled to board with Dr. Belding and others, until the associative buildings could be constructed--which in fact was never done. No doubt these invidious arrangements produced disagreements, which led to a speedy dissolution. The outsiders very soon became discontented with the management, conceiving that those who held the most stock, i.e., the original owners of the soil, after receiving aid from without, endeavored so to rule as to turn all to their own advantage. "The circumstances of the property owners were improved by what was done on the place; but the associates from a distance, whose money and labor were expended in cultivating the land and in rearing new buildings, were not so fortunate. Their money speedily vanished, and their labor was not remunerated. The land and the buildings remained, and the owners enjoyed the improvements. The whole affair came to an end in about eight months." We hope the reader will not fail to notice how powerfully the land-mania raged among these Associations. Let us recapitulate. The Pennsylvania Associations, including the Sylvania, are credited with real estate as follows: Acres. The Sylvania Association had 2,394 The Peace Union Settlement " 10,000 The McKean Co. Association " 30,000 The Social Reform Unity " 2,000 The Goose-Pond Community " 2,000 The Leraysville Phalanx " 1,500 The One-Mentian Community " 800 ------ Total for the seven Associations 48,694 It is to be observed that Northern Pennsylvania, where all these Associations were located, is a paradise of cheap lands. Three great chains of mountains and not less than eight high ridges run through the State, and spread themselves abroad in this wild region. Any one who has passed over the Erie railroad can judge of the situation. It is evident from the description of the soil of the above domains, as well as from the prices paid for them, that they were, almost without exception, mountain deserts, cold, rocky and remote from the world of business. The Sylvania domain in Pike County, was elevated 1,500 feet above the Hudson river. Its soil was "yellow loam," that would barely support stunted pines and scrub-oaks; price, four dollars per acre. Smolnikar's Peace Union Settlement was on the ridges of Warren County, a very wild region. The Rev. George Ginal's 30,000 acres were among the mountains of McKean County, which adjoins Warren, and is still wilder. The Social Reform Unity was located in Pike County, near the site of the Sylvania. Its domain was thickly covered with stones and boulders; price, one dollar and a quarter per acre. The Goose Pond Community succeeded to this domain of the Social Reform Unity, with its stones and boulders. The Leraysville Association appears to have occupied some respectable land; but the _Phalanx_ speaks of it as "deep buried in the mountains of Pennsylvania." The One-Mentian Community, like the Sylvania, selected its domain while covered with snow; the soil is described as wild, cold, rocky and barren; price, five hundred dollars for seven or eight hundred acres, or about sixty-five cents per acre. Such were the domains on which the Fourier enthusiasm vented itself. An illusion, like the _mirages_ of the desert, seems to have prevailed among the Socialists, cheating the hungry mechanics of the cities with the fancy, that, if they could combine and obtain vast tracts of land, no matter where or how poor, their fortunes were made. Whereas it is well known to the wise that the more of worthless land a man has the poorer he is, if he pays taxes on it, or pays any attention to it; and that agriculture anyhow is a long and very uncertain road to wealth. We can not but think that Fourier is mainly responsible for this _mirage_. He is always talking in grand style about vast domains--three miles square, we believe, was his standard--and his illustrations of attractive industry are generally delicious pictures of fruit-raising and romantic agriculture. He had no scruple in assigning a series of twelve groups of amateur laborers to raising twelve varieties of the Bergamot pear! And his staunch disciples are always full of these charming impracticable ruralities. CHAPTER XXII. THE VOLCANIC DISTRICT. Western New York was the region that responded most vigorously to the gospel of Fourierism, proclaimed by Brisbane, Greeley, Godwin and the Brook Farmers. Taking Rochester for a center, and a line of fifty miles for radius, we strike a circle that includes the birth-places of nearly all the wonderful excitements of the last forty years. At Palmyra, in Wayne County, twenty-five miles east of Rochester, Joseph Smith in 1823 was visited by the Angel Moroni, and instructed about the golden plates from which the book of Mormon was copied; and there he began the gathering which grew to be a nation and settled Utah. Batavia, about thirty miles west of Rochester, was the scene of Morgan's abduction in 1820; which event started the great Anti-Masonic excitement, that spread through the country and changed the politics of the nation. At Acadia, in Wayne County, adjoining Palmyra, the Fox family first heard the mysterious noises which were afterward known as the "Rochester rappings," and were the beginning of the miracles of modern Spiritualism. The Rochester region has also been famous for its Revivals, and borders on what Hepworth Dixon has celebrated as the "Burnt District." In this same remarkable region around Rochester, occurred the greatest Fourier excitement in America. T.C. Leland, writing from that city in April 1844, thus described the enthusiasm: "I attended the socialistic Convention at Batavia. The turn-out was astonishing. Nearly every town in Genesee County was well represented. Many came from five to twelve miles on foot. Indeed all western New York is in a deep, a shaking agitation on this subject. Nine Associations are now contemplated within fifty miles of this city. From the astonishing rush of applications for membership in these Associations, I have no hesitation in saying that twenty thousand persons, west of the longitude of Rochester in this State, is a low estimate of those who are now ready and willing, nay anxious, to take their place in associative unity." Mr. Brisbane traveled and lectured in this excited region a few months before Mr. Leland wrote the above. The following is his report to the _Phalanx_: "It will no doubt be gratifying to those who take an interest in the great idea of a Social Reform, to learn that it is spreading very generally through the State of New York. I have visited lately the central and western parts of the State, and have been surprised to see that the principles of a reform, based upon Association and unity of interests, have found their way into almost every part of the country, and the farmers are beginning to see the truth and greatness of a system of dignified and attractive industry, and the advantages of Association, such as its economy, its superior means of education, and the guaranty it offers against the indirect and legalized spoliation by those intermediate classes who now live upon their labor. "The conviction that Association will realize Christianity practically upon earth, which never can be done in the present system of society, with its injustice, frauds, distrust, and the conflict and opposition of all interests, is taking hold of many minds and attracting them strongly to it. There is a very earnest desire on the part of a great number of sincere minds to see that duplicity which now exists between theory and practice in the religious world, done away with; and where this desire is accompanied with intelligence, Association is plainly seen to be the means. It is beginning to be perceived that a great social reformation must take place, and a new social order be established, before Christianity can descend upon earth with its love, its peace, its brotherhood and charity. The noble doctrine propounded by Fourier, is gaining valuable disciples among this class of persons. "I lectured at Utica, Syracuse, Seneca Falls, and Rochester, and although the weather was very unfavorable, the audiences were large. At Rochester I attended a convention of the friends of Association, interested in the establishment of the Ontario Phalanx. Men of intelligence, energy and strong convictions, are at the head of this enterprise, and it will probably soon be carried into operation. A very heavy subscription to the stock can be obtained in Rochester and the vicinity, in productive farms and city real estate, for the purpose of organizing this Association; but, owing to the scarcity of money, it is difficult to obtain the cash capital requisite to commence operations. From the perseverance and determination of the men at the head of the undertaking, it is presumed, however, that this difficulty will be overcome. Those persons in the western part of the State of New York, who wish to enter an Association, can not be too strongly recommended to unite with the Ontario Phalanx. "It is very advisable that the friends of the cause should not start small Associations. If they are commenced with inadequate means, and without men who know how to organize them, they may result in failures, which will cast reproach upon the principles. The American people are so impelled to realize in practice any idea which strikes them as true and advantageous, that it will of course be useless to preach moderation in organizing Associations; still I would urgently recommend to individuals, for their own interest, to avoid small and fragmental undertakings, and unite with the largest one in their section of the country. "Four gentlemen from Rochester and its vicinity will be engaged this winter in propagating the principles of Association by lectures etc., in western New York. At Rochester they have commenced the publication of tracts upon Association, which we trust will be extensively circulated. That city is becoming an important center of propagation, and will, we believe, exercise a very great influence, as it is situated in a flourishing region of country, inhabited by a very intelligent population. "It must be deeply gratifying to the friends of Association to see the unexampled rapidity with which our principles are spreading throughout this vast country. Would it not seem that this very general response to, and acceptance of, an entirely new and radically reforming doctrine by intelligent and practical men, prove that there is something in it harmonizing perfectly with the ideas of truth, justice, economy and order, and those higher sentiments implanted in the soul of man, which, although so smothered at present, are awakened when the correspondences in doctrine or practice are presented to them clearly and understandingly? "The name of Fourier is now heard from the Atlantic to the Mississippi; from the remotest parts of Wisconsin and Louisiana responsive echoes reach us, heralding the spread of the great principles of universal Association; and this important work has been accomplished in a few years, and mainly within two years, since Horace Greeley, Esq., the editor of the _Tribune_, with unprecedented courage and liberality, opened the columns of his widely-circulated journal to a fair exposition of this subject. What will the next ten years bring forth?" Mr. John Greig of Rochester, a participator in this socialistic excitement and in the experiments that went with it, contributed the following sketch of its beginnings to Macdonald's collection of manuscripts: "We in western New York received an account of the views and discoveries of (the to-be-illustrious) Fourier, through the writings of Brisbane, Greeley, Godwin and the earnest lectures of T.C. Leland. Those ideas fell upon willing ears and hearts then (1843), and thousands flocked from all quarters to hear, believe, and participate in the first movement. "This excitement gathered itself into a settled purpose at a convention held in Rochester in August 1843, which was attended by several hundred delegates from the city and neighboring towns and villages. A great deal of discussion ensued as a matter of course, and some little amount of business was done. The nucleus of a society was formed, and committees for several purposes were appointed to sit in permanence, and call together future conventions for further discussions. "I was one of the Vice Presidents of that convention, and took a decided interest in the whole movement. As there existed from the very beginning of the discussions some diversity of opinion on several points of doctrine and expediency, there arose at least four different Associations out of the constituents of said convention. Those who were most determined to follow as near the letter of Fourier as possible, were led off chiefly by Dr. Theller (of 'Canadian Patriot' notoriety), Thomas Pond (a Quaker), Samuel Porter of Holly, and several others of less note, including the writer hereof. They located at Clarkson, in Monroe County. The other branches established themselves at Sodus Bay in Wayne County, at Hopewell near Canandaigua in Ontario County, at North Bloomfield in Ontario County, and at Mixville in Alleghany County." The Associations that thus radiated from Rochester, hold a place of peculiar interest in the history of the Fourier movement, from the fact that they made the first, and, we believe, the only practical attempt, to organize a _Confederation_ of Associations. The National Convention, as we have seen, recommended general Confederation; and its executive committee afterward, through Parke Godwin, made suggestions in the _Phalanx_ tending in the same direction. The movement, however, came to nothing, and at the subsequent National Convention in October, was formally abandoned. But the Rochester group of Associations, attracted together by their common origin, actually formed a league, called the "American Industrial Union," and a Council of their delegates held a session of two days at the domain of the North Bloomfield Association, commencing on the 15th of May, 1844. The _Phalanx_ has an interesting report of the doings of this Confederate Council, from which we give below a liberal extract, showing how heartily these western New Yorkers abandoned themselves to the spirit of genuine Fourierism: FROM THE REPORT OF THE SESSION OF THE INDUSTRIAL UNION. "_Resolved_, That it be recommended to the several institutions composing this Confederacy to adopt, as far as possible, the practice of mutual exchanges between each other; and that they should immediately take such measures as will enable them to become the commercial agents of the producing classes in the sections of the country where the Associations are respectively located. _Classification of Industry._ "_Resolved_, That in the opinion of the council, the first step towards organization should be an arrangement of the different branches of agricultural, mechanical and domestic work, in the classes of necessity, usefulness and attractiveness. The exact category in which an occupation shall be placed, will be influenced more or less by local circumstances, and is, at best, somewhat conjectural. It will be indicated, however, with certainty, by observation and experience. In the meantime, the council take the liberty to express an opinion, that to the _Class of Necessity._ belong, among others, the following, viz.: ditching, masonry, work in woolen and cotton factories, quarrying stone, brickmaking, burning lime and coal, getting out manure, baking, washing, ironing, cooking, tanning and currier business, night-sawing and other night work, blacksmithing, care of children and the sick, care of dairy, flouring, hauling seine, casting, chopping wood, and cutting timber. _Class of Usefulness._ "All mechanical trades not mentioned in the class of necessity; agriculture, school-teaching, book-keeping, time of directors while in session, other officers acting in an official capacity, engineering, surveying and mapping, store-keeping, gardening, rearing silk-worms, care of stock, horticulture, teaching music, housekeepers (not cooks), teaming. _Class of Attractiveness._ "Cultivation of flowers, cultivation of fruit, portrait-and landscape-painting, vine-dressing, poultry-keeping, care of bees, embellishing public grounds. _Groups and Series._ "The Council recommend to the different Associations the following plan for the organization of groups and series, viz.: "1. Ascertain, for example, the whole number of members who will attach themselves to, or at any time take part in, the agricultural line. From this number, organize as many groups as the business of the line will admit. "2. We recommend the numbers 30, 24, 18, as the maximum rank of the classes of necessity, usefulness and attractiveness. "The series should then be numbered in the order in which they are formed, and the groups in the same manner, beginning 1, 2, 3, &c., for each series. "Mechanical series can be organized, embracing all the different trades employed by the Association, in the same manner; and if the groups can not be filled up at once with adults, we would recommend to the institutions to fill them sufficiently for the purpose of organization, with apprentices. "Each group should have a foreman, whose business it should be to keep correct accounts of time, superintend and direct the performance of work, and maintain an oversight of working-dresses, etc. "There should be one individual elected as superintendent of the series, whose business it should be to confer with the farming committee of the board, and inform the different foremen of groups, of the work to be done, and inspect the same afterwards. "The council is thoroughly satisfied that all the labor of an Association should be performed by groups and series, and although the combined order can not be fully established at once, the adoption of this arrangement will avoid incoherence, and be calculated to impress on each member a sense of his personal responsibility. _Time and Rank._ "The time, rank and occupation should be noted daily, and oftener, if a change of employment is made. The sum of the products of the daily time of each individual, as multiplied by his daily rank, should be carried to the time-ledger, weekly or monthly, to his or her credit. Each of the several amounts, whether performed in the classes of necessity, usefulness, or attractiveness, will thus be made to bear an equal proportion to the value of the services rendered. A.M. WATSON, President. E.A. STILLMAN, Secretary." The reader may be curious to see how these instructions were carried out in actual account-keeping. Fortunately the _Phalanx_ furnishes a specimen of what, we suppose, may be called, unmitigated Fourierism. "The following tables," says a subsequent report, "exhibit the mode of keeping the account of a group at the Clarkson domain. The total number of hours that each individual has been employed during the week, is multiplied by the degree in the scale of rank, which gives an equation of rank and time of the whole group. At Clarkson, for every thousand of the quotient, each member is allowed to draw on his account for necessaries, to the value of seventy-five cents: SERIES OF TAILORESSES--GROUP NO. I. _Maximum Rank 25._ -----+-------------+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+-------- 1844| | | | | | | |Total|Hours Rank| | Mo.|Tue.| We.|Thu.|Fri.|Sat.|hours|& rank. -----+-------------+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+-------- 20 | M. Weed, | 6 | 10 | 3 | -- | -- | 5 | 24 | 480 25 | J. Peabody, | 10 | 10 | 10 | 12 | 10 | 10 | 62 | 1550 20 | S. Clark, | 10 | 10 | 10 | 10 | 8 | -- | 48 | 960 25 | E. Clark, | 2 | 10 | 10 |Sick| -- | -- | 22 | 550 18 | H. Lee, | 6 | 4 | 10 | 6 | 4 | 4 | 34 | 612 15 | J. Folsom, | 3 | 3 | 2 | 6 | 5 | 3 | 22 | 330 12 | Eliza Mann, | 4 | 4 | 2 | 2 | 6 | 4 | 22 | 264 -----+-------------+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+-------- The above is a true account of the time and rank of the whole group, working under my direction for the past week. JULIA PEABODY. Foreman. Entered on the books of the Association, by WM. SEAVER, Clerk. _Clarkson Domain, July 6, 1844._ SERIES OF WORKERS IN WOOD--GROUP NO II. _Maximum Rank 30._ -----+----------------+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+-------- 1844| | | | | | | |Total|Hours Rank| | Mo.|Tue.| We.|Thu.|Fri.|Sat.|hours|& rank. -----+----------------+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+-------- 24 | Chas. Odell, | 10 | 9 | 10 | 10 | 8 | 9 | 56 | 1344 30 | John Allen, | 10 | 10 | 2 | 6 | 10 | 8 | 46 | 1380 20 | Jas. Smith, |Sick| -- | -- | -- | -- | 3 | 3 | 120 30 | Wm. Allen, | 10 | 12 | 10 | 10 | 10 | 10 | 62 | 1860 30 | Jas. Griffith, | 10 | 10 | 10 | 10 | 10 | 10 | 60 | 1800 -----+----------------+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+-------- The above is a true account of the time and rank of the whole group, working under my direction for the past week. JAMES GRIFFITH, Foreman. Entered on the books of the Association, by WM. SEAVER, Clerk. _Clarkson Domain, July 6, 1844._" For the sake of keeping in view the various religious influences that entered into the Fourier movement, it is worth noting here that Edwin A. Stillman, the Secretary of the Union, was one of the early Perfectionists; intimately associated with the writer of this history at New Haven in 1835. We judge from the frequent occurrence of his official reports in the _Phalanx_ and _Harbinger_, that he was the working center of the socialist revival at Rochester, and of the incipient confederacy of Associations that issued therefrom. In like manner James Boyle, another New Haven Perfectionist, was a very busy writer and lecturer among the Socialists of New England in the excitements 1842-3, and was a member of the Northampton Community. CHAPTER XXIII. THE CLARKSON PHALANX. This Association appears to have been the first and most important of the Confederated Phalanxes. Mr. John Greig (before referred to) is its historian, whose account we here present with few alterations: "Our Association commenced at Clarkson on the shore of Lake Ontario, in the county of Monroe, about thirty miles from Rochester, in February 1844. We adopted a constitution and bye-laws, but I am sorry to say that I have not a copy of them. The reason why no copies have been preserved is, that after a year's experience in the associative life, we all became so wise (or smart, as the phrase is), that we thought we could make much better constitutions, and ceased to value the old ones. "We had no property qualifications. All male and female members over eighteen years of age were voters upon all important matters, excepting the investment and outlay of capital. No religious or political tests were required. The chief principle upon which we endeavored to found our Association, was to establish justice and judgment in our little earth at Clarkson domain, and as much further as possible. "Our means were ample; but, as it proved, unavailable. The beginning and ending of our troubles was this--and let all readers consider it--we were without the pale and protection of law, for want of incorporation. Consequently we could do no business, could not buy or sell land or other property, could not sue or be sued, could neither make ourselves responsible, nor compel others to become so; and as a majority of us were never able to adopt the dreamy abstractions of non-resistance and no-law, we were unable to live and prosper in that kingdom of smoke 'above the world.' "The members, in different proportions, had placed in the hands of trustees, after the manner of religious societies in this State, ninety-five thousand dollars worth of choice landed property, to be sold, turned into cash, and invested in Clarkson domain. We purchased of a Mr. Richmond Church and others, over two thousand acres of first-rate land, all on trust, excepting twenty acres bought for cash. The rise in value of our large purchase since our dispersion, has exceeded fifty thousand dollars. We probably took on to the domain some ten thousand dollars worth of goods and chattels. "Our property was not considered common stock; we only recognized a common cause. Our agreement gave capital to labor for less than half of the world's present interest, and gave to labor its full reward, according to merit, that is, skill, strength, and time; establishing 'Do as you would be done by' first; and attending to the questions of brotherhood afterward, such as home for life, respect, comfort, and all needful or desirable things to the old, the infant, the disabled, etc. This was the extent of our Communism. Our company stock was divided into twenty-five dollar shares. About one-third of the members owned none at all at first, although their rights were considered equal; and that point, be it said to the glory of the domain, was never mooted and scarcely mentioned. "We commenced our new life at Clarkson in March, April and May, 1844; building our temporary, and enlarging our established, houses, and beginning to marshal our forces of toil. In April we 'numbered Israel,' and found we were four hundred and twenty souls, as happy and joyous a family as ever thronged to an Independence dinner. If, in our fiscal affairs we were not Communists, in our moral and social feelings we were a house not divided against itself. "In relation to education, natural intelligence, and morality, I candidly think we were a little above the average of common citizens at large in the State, and no more. Trades and occupations were multiform. Our doctor and minister were academical scholars merely. We had one ripe merchant (a great rogue, too), some first-rate mechanics of all the substantial trades, and a noble lot of common farmers. "As for religion, we had seventy-four praying Christians, including all the sects in America, excepting Millerites and Mormons. We had one Catholic family (Dr. Theller's), one Presbyterian clergyman, and one Universalist. One of our first trustees was a Quaker. We had one Atheist, several Deists, and in short a general assortment; but of Nothingarians, none; for being free for the first time in our lives, we spoke out, one and all, and found that every body did believe something. All the gospels were preached in harmony and good fellowship. We early got up a committee on preaching the gospel, placing one of each known denomination upon said committee, including a Deist, who being a liberal soul, and no bigot in his infidelity, was chosen chairman on the gospel; and allow him modestly to say, he did acquit himself to the entire satisfaction of his more fortunate brethren in the faith. One word about our Atheist--our poor unfortunate Atheist; he was beloved by every soul on the domain, and was an intimate friend of our orthodox minister. We had no difficulties on the score of religion, and had we remained, we should have been nearer to love to God and love to man, than we are now, scattered as we are, broadcast over the continent. For membership, we required a decent character--no more. No oaths nor fines were required. Honorable pledges were given and generally kept. "Our domain was located at the mouth of Sandy Creek, on Lake Ontario. It was a slightly rolling plain, and the best soil in the world. On account of so much water (Lake, Bay and Creek), it was rather unhealthy, but would improve in time by cultivation. We had one good flour-mill, two saw-mills, one machine-shop, some good farm buildings and barns, and about half a mile in length of temporary rows of board buildings; a dry goods store for a portion of the time, and over 400 acres of land, under fair cultivation. At one period of our career, we had about four hundred sheep, forty cows, twenty-five span of horses, twelve yoke of oxen, swine, guinea fowls, barn fowls, geese, ducks, bees, etc., etc., in great abundance. We cultivated several acres of vegetable garden, reaped one hundred acres of wheat, and had corn, potatoes, peas, etc., to a large amount--I should think seventy-five acres. We had abundance of pasture, and must have cut two hundred tons of hay. Of wild berries there must have been gathered hundreds of bushels. "Our regularly elected officers managed the receipts and expenditures; and they were, I believe, honestly managed up to a certain time. "The four hundred and twenty members kept together until the autumn of the first year, and then were forced to break up and divide property, having but little to sustain themselves, because our capital was wrongfully tied up, in the hands of trustees: this course having been pursued by advice of certain great lawyers, who, when our legal troubles commenced, appeared in the courts against us. No purchasers could be found to buy the lands in the hands of the trustees; so we had come to a dead lock, and were obliged to break up or down, as the fact may be estimated. The associates did not disagree at all save in one thing, and that was, as to these bad property arrangements, which compelled them to break up. They staid or went by lots cast. Two hundred persons staid on the domain some four months longer, and then, the hope of a legal foundation having entirely died out, the whole matter was necessarily thrown into the court of Chancery, and the lawyers, as usual, took the avails of the hard earnings of the disappointed members. "The regularly organized Association kept together nearly one year. A remnant of the band remained after the court of chancery had adjudged a transfer of the estate back into the hands of the original owners. That remnant tried every little scheme and new contrivance that imagination could devise (except Fourierism), to stick together in a joint-stock capacity for a year longer or so, and then broke and ran all over the world, proclaiming Fourierism a failure. The Heavens may fall, and Fourier's industrial science may fail; but it must be tried first; till then it can not fail. "In short the reason why the attempt at Clarkson failed, and the only reason, was, that the founders missed the entrance door, viz., a legal foundation; by which they would have made friends with the old world, and begun the new in a constructive way, obtaining the right men and plenty of the 'mammon of unrighteousness.' They should have got incorporated under a general law like our manufacturing law, and obtained a suitable domain of at least 5760 acres of land or three miles square, and should have built and furnished a sufficient portion of a phalanstery to accommodate at least 400 persons, at the outset of organization. I boldly pronounce all partial attempts, short of such a beginning, a waste, and worse than a waste, of time and brain, blood and muscle, soul and body. JOHN GREIG." A writer in the _Phalanx_ (July 1844), viewing things from a standpoint a little further off than Mr. Greig's, gave the following more probable account of the Clarkson failure: "The original founders of this Association, no doubt actuated by good motives, but lacking discretion, held out such a brilliant prospect of comfort and pleasure in the very infancy of the movement, that hundreds, without any correct appreciation of the difficulties to be undergone by a pioneer band, rushed upon the ground, expecting at once to realize the heaven they so ardently desired, and which the eloquent words of the lecturers had warranted them to hope for. Thus, ignorant of Association, possessed, for the most part, of little capital, without adequate shelter from the inclemency of the weather, or even a sufficient store of the most common articles of food, without plan, and I had almost said, without purpose, save to fly from the ills they had already experienced in civilization, they assembled together such elements of discord as naturally in a short time led to their dissolution." One feature of Mr. Greig's entertaining sketch deserves notice in passing, viz., his cheerful boast of the multiplicity of religions in the Clarkson Association, and the wonderful harmony that prevailed among them. The meaning of the boast undoubtedly is, that religious belief was so completely a secondary and insignificant matter, that it did not prevent peaceful family relations, even between the atheists and the orthodox. This kind of harmony is often spoken of in the accounts of other Associations, and seems to have been a general characteristic, or at least a _desideratum_, of the Owen and Fourier schools. It is this harmonious indifference, which we refer to when we speak of the Associations of those schools as _non-religious_. The primary Massachusetts Communities, however, were hardly so free from religious limitations, though they issued from the sects commonly called liberal. The Brook Farmers, we have seen, covered the National Convention all over with the mantle of piety, insisting that they were at work as devout Christians, and that Fourierism, as they held it, was Christianity. And Hopedale was even more zealous for Christianity than Brook Farm. Collins's Community at Skaneateles, on the other hand, went clear over to exclusive anti-religion; and actually barred out by its original creed, all kinds of Christians, tolerating nobody but sound Atheists and Deists. The Northampton Association, which we have termed Nothingarian, seems to have invented the happy medium of the Clarkson platform, and in that respect may be regarded as the prototype of the whole class of Fourier Associations. The mixture of religions, however, at Northampton, was not so harmonious as at Clarkson. The historian of the Northampton Community says: "The carrying out of different religious views was perhaps the occasion of more disagreement than any other subject; and this disagreement, operated to general disadvantage, as in consequence of it several valuable members withdrew." We shall meet with similar disagreements and disasters in the Sodus Bay Phalanx and other Associations, to be reported hereafter. So that it does not seem altogether safe to huddle a great variety of contradictory religions together in close Association, notwithstanding the apparent results in the Clarkson case. And it occurs, as a natural suggestion, that possibly the Clarkson Association did not last long enough to fairly test the results of a general mixture of religions. CHAPTER XXIV. THE SODUS BAY PHALANX. This Association originated about the same time as the Clarkson Association (February 1844), and in the same place (Rochester). The following description of its domain is from the _Herald of Freedom_: "We have at this place about 1,400 acres of choice land, three hundred of which are under improvement. It borders on Sodus Bay, the best harbor on Lake Ontario, and for beauty of scenery, is not surpassed by any tract in the State. We have on the domain two streams of water, which can both be used for propelling machinery. We number at present about three hundred men, women and children. The buildings on the place were nearly enough to accommodate the whole, the place having formerly been occupied by the Shakers, who had erected good buildings for their own accommodation." The editor of the _Phalanx_ visited this Association in the autumn of 1844, and wrote of it as follows: "The advantages of the location seemed to us very rare, and it was with great pain that we discovered that the internal condition, of the Phalanx was not encouraging. We did not find that unity of purpose, without which a small and imperfectly provided Association can not be held together until it has attained the necessary perfection in its mechanism. At the commencement, as it appeared to us, there was not sufficient caution in the admission of members. A large number of persons were received without proper qualification, either in character or industrial abilities. Sickness unfortunately soon arose in the new Phalanx, and increased the confusion which resulted from a want of unity of feeling and systematic organization. Religious differences, pressed in an intolerant manner on both sides, had at the time of our visit produced entire uncertainty as to future operations, and carried disorder to its height. We left the domain with the conviction, which reflection has strengthened, that without an entire reörganization under more efficient leaders, the Association must fall entirely to pieces; a fact which is greatly to be deplored on account of the cause in general, as well as on account of the excellence of the location, and the real worth of several individuals who have passed unshaken through such trying circumstances. We have, however, in the case of this Phalanx, a striking example of the folly of undertaking practical Association without sufficient means, and without men of proper character. No other advantages can compensate for the want of these." Nearly a year later (September 1845), a member of the Sodus Bay Phalanx wrote to the _Harbinger_ in the following dubious vein: "We have only about twelve or fifteen adult males, and we believe we may safely say (from the amount of labor performed the present season), not many unprofitable ones. We have learned wisdom from the many difficulties and privations of last year, and there is now evidently a settled and determined will to succeed in our enterprise. There is, however, a debt which is very discouraging; $7,000 principal (besides $2,450 interest), which will come due next spring, and an ability on our part of paying no more than the interest." About the beginning of 1846 John A. Collins of the Skaneateles Community, visited Sodus Bay, and sent to his paper, the _Communitist_, the following mournful report: "Experience has taught them that but little confidence can be placed on calculations which are predicated upon a newly-organized, or more properly disorganized, body of heterogeneous materials, during the first and second years of its existence. There is not the least doubt, but that an energetic and efficient individual, with sufficient capital to erect with the least possible delay the saw-mill, lath, shingle, broom-handle, tub and pail, fork and hoe-handle, last, and general turning machinery, and employ as many first-class workmen as the business would require, could in three years, pay both principal and interest, and have the entire farm and several thousand dollars besides. But an Association composed of inexperienced, restless, indolent, feeble and selfish individuals, would perish beneath the pressure of interest, ere they could construct their mills, get their machinery in operation, and become organized and systematized, so that all things could be carried forward with that system and perfection which characterize isolation and the older established Communities. "But had not capital stepped forth to crush this movement, other elements equally poisonous and deadly were introduced, which would have sealed its ruin. A great portion of its members were brought together, not by a strong feeling or sympathy for the poor, noble philanthropy, or self-denying enthusiasm, but by the most narrow selfishness. Add to this, that bane of all that is meek, pure, noble and peaceful, religious bigotry was carried in and incorporated into the constitution of the Phalanx. Soon the body was divided into the religious and liberal portions, both of which carried their views, we think, to extremes. "We were present at a business meeting, in the early part of the fall of 1844. Each party, it seemed, felt bound to oppose the wishes, plans and movements of the other. We advised the more liberal portion of the society quietly to withdraw, and allow the other party to succeed if it possibly could. But they did not feel at liberty to do so; and soon after the religious body left, taking with them what of their property they could find, leaving those who remained (the liberal portion of the society), comparatively destitute. They felt determined to succeed, and nobly have they combated, to the present time, the hostile elements which have warred against them with terrible force. United in sympathy and feeling, they re-organized last spring; but the interest was too much for them to meet, and now there is no prospect of their remaining as an Association longer than the approaching April. Could those now upon the domain purchase three or four hundred acres of the land, we have not the least doubt but that they would succeed, and ultimately come into possession of the valuable wood-land adjoining. But this is impossible. In the evening all the adults convened together, and at their earnest request, we spoke for the space of an hour or more upon the signs of the times, the evidences of social progress, and the various minor difficulties that the pioneers in this movement must necessarily have to experience; proving to the satisfaction of most of them, we think, that Fourier's plan of distributing wealth, was both arbitrary and superficial; that it was a useless effort to unite two opposite and hostile elements, which have no more affinity for each other than water and oil, or fire and gunpowder; that inasmuch as individual and separate interests are the cause or occasion of nearly all the crime, poverty, and suffering in civilized society, it follows that the cause and occasion must be removed, ere the effects will disappear. Still the difference between Communists and Associationists is not so great, that they should be opposed and alienated. It should be our object to see the points of agreement, rather than seek for points of disagreement. In the former we have been too active and earnest. Association is a great school for Communism. It will develop the false, and point out the good. "As we left this interesting spot the following morning, it was painful to think that those men and women, who for nearly two years had struggled against great odds, with their philanthropic, manly and heroic spirit, with all their enthusiasm, zeal and confidence in the beauty and practicability of the principles of social co-operation, must soon be dispersed and thrown back again, to act upon the selfish and beggarly principles of strife and competition." Macdonald ends the story in his usual sombre style as follows: "This experiment was a total failure. I have been unable to gather many particulars concerning its last days, and those I have obtained are of a very unfavorable character. "The chief cause of failure was religious difference. Persons of various religious creeds could not agree. There were some among them who thought it no sin to labor on the Sabbath, and others who looked upon it as an outrage, which the Phalanx should take action to prevent. A committee was appointed to settle such differences, but in this they failed. Sickness was another of their troubles. They were severely afflicted with typhoid erysipelas, and at one time forty-nine of their members were upon the sick list. "After laboring a year or two under these difficulties, there was a hasty and disorderly retreat. It is said that each individual helped himself to the movable property, and that some decamped in the night, leaving the remains of the Phalanx to be disposed of in any way which the last men might choose. The fact that mankind do not like to have their faults and failings made public, will probably account for the difficulty in obtaining particulars of such experiments as the Sodus Bay Phalanx." Allen and Orvis, the lecturing missionaries of Brook Farm, in that same letter from which we quoted some time since a maledictory paragraph on the memory of the Skaneateles Community, mention also the bad odor of the defunct confederated Phalanxes of Western New York, in the following disrespectful terms. Their letter is dated at Rochester, September 1847: "The prospect for meetings in this city is less favorable than that of any place where we have previously visited. It is the nest wherein was hatched that anomalous brood of birds, called the 'Sodus Bay Phalanx,' 'The Clarkson Phalanx,' the 'Bloomfield Phalanx,' and the 'Ontario Union.' The very name of Association is odious with the public, and the unfortunate people who went into these movements in such mad haste, have been ridiculed till endurance is no longer possible, and they have slunk away from the sight and knowledge of their neighbors." The experience of the Sodus Bay Phalanx in regard to religion, suggests reflections. Let us improve the opportunity to study some of the practical relations of religion to Association. The object and end of Association in all its forms, as we have frequently said, is to gather men, women and children into larger and more permanent HOMES than those established by marriage. The advantages of partnership, incorporation and coöperation have become so manifest in modern affairs, that an unspeakable longing has arisen in the very heart of civilization for the extension of those advantages to the dearest of all human interests--family affairs--the business of home. The charm that drew the western New Yorkers together in such rushing multitudes, was simply the prospect of home on the large scale, which indeed is heaven. Now if we consider the laws which govern the formation of homes on the small scale, we shall be likely to get some wisdom in regard to their formation on the large scale. And in the first place, it is evident that homes formed by the conjunction of pairs in the usual way, are not all harmonious--perhaps we might say, are not generally harmonious. Families quarrel and break up, as well as Associations; and if husbands and wives were as free to separate as the members of Association are, possibly marriage would not make much better show than Socialism has made. Human nature, as we have seen it in the Communities and Phalanxes--discordant, centrifugal--is the same in marriage. Now, as experience has developed something like a code of rules that govern prudent people in venturing on marriage, our true way is to study that code, and apply it as far as possible to the vastly greater venture of Association. Fourier's dream that two or three thousand discordant centrifugal individuals in one great home, would fall, by natural gravitation, into a balance of passions, and realize a harmony unattainable on the small scale of familism, has not been confirmed by experience, and seems to us the wildest opposite of truth. We should expect, _a priori_, that with discordant materials, the greater the formation, the worse would be the hell: and this is just what has been proved by all the experiments. Let us go back, then, and study the rules of harmony in the formation of common families. Probably there is not one among those rules so familiar and so universally approved by the prudent, as that which advises men and women not to marry without agreement in religion This rule has nothing to do with bigotry. It does not look at the supposed truth or falsehood of different religious creeds. It simply says: Let the Catholic marry the Catholic; the Orthodox, the Orthodox; the Deist, the Deist; the Nothingarian, the Nothingarian; but don't match these discords together, if you wish for family peace. Now this is the precept which the Fourier Associations, as we see, deliberately violated; and yet they expected peace, and complained dreadfully because they did not get it! There is latent quarrel enough in the religious opposition of a single pair, to spoil a family; and yet these Socialists ventured on hundred-fold complications of such oppositions, with a heroism that would be sublime, if it were not desperately unwise. It is useless to say that religion is an affair of the inner man and need not disturb external relations. It did disturb the external relations of the Socialists at Sodus Bay, and could not do otherwise. They quarreled about the Sabbath. It did disturb the external relations of the Northampton Socialists. They quarreled about amusements. Religion always extends from the inner man to such external things. It is useless to say, as Collins evidently wished to insinuate, that the bigoted sort of religionists, those of the orthodox order, were alone to blame. In the first place this is not true. All the witnesses say, Collins among the rest, that both parties pushed and hooked. And in the next place, if it were true, it would only show the importance of excluding the orthodox from Associations, and the value of the rule that forbids marrying religious discords. Even Collins, with all his liberality, had originally too much good sense to attempt Association in the promiscuous way of the Fourierists. His first idea was to make his Community a sort of close-communion church of infidelity; and, as it turned out, this was his brightest idea; for in abandoning it he succumbed to his more religious rival, Johnson, and admitted quarreling and weakness that ruined the enterprise. His advice also to the liberal party at Sodus Bay to withdraw, shows that his judgment was opposed to the heterogeneous mixtures that were popular among the Fourierists. On the whole it seems to us that it should be considered settled by reason and experience, that the rule we have found governing the prudential theory of marriage on the small scale, should be transferred to the theory of Association, which is really marriage on the large scale. Better not marry at all, than marry a religious quarrel. Better have no religion, than have a dozen different religions, as they had at Clarkson. If you mean to found a Community for peace and permanence, first of all find associates that agree with you in religion, or at least in no-religion, and if possible bar out all others. Remember that all the successful Communities are harmonious, and the basis of their harmony is unity in religion. If you think you can find a way to secure harmony in no-religion, try it. But don't be so foolish as to enter on the tremendous responsibilities of Community-building, with a complication of religious quarrels lurking in your material. CHAPTER XXV. OTHER NEW YORK EXPERIMENTS. The next on the list of the Confederated Associations of western New York, was THE BLOOMFIELD ASSOCIATION. We have but meager accounts of this experiment. Macdonald does not mention it. The _Phalanx_ of June 15, 1844, says that it commenced operations on the 15th of March in that year, on a domain of about five hundred acres, mostly improved land, situated one mile east of Honeoye Falls, in the Counties of Monroe, Livingston and Ontario; that it was in debt for its land about $11,000, and had $35,000 of its subscriptions actually paid in; that it had one hundred and forty-eight resident members, and a large number more expecting to join, as soon as employment could be found for them. Two or three allusions to this Association occur afterward in the _Phalanx_, congratulating it on its prospects, and mentioning good reports of its progress. Finally in the _Harbinger_, volume 1, page 247, we find a letter from E.D. Wight and E.A. Stillman, dated August 20, 1845, defending the Association against newspaper charges, and asserting its continued prosperity; but giving us the following peep into a complication of troubles, that probably brought it to its end shortly afterwards: "We are not fully satisfied with the tenor by which our real estate, under the existing laws, is obliged to be held. Conveyances, pursuant to legal advice, were made originally by the owners of each particular parcel, to the committee of finance, in trust for the stockholders and members; and a power was executed by the stockholders to the committee, by which, under certain regulations, they were to have authority to sell and convey the same. The absurdity of the Statute of Trusts never having been licked into shape by judicial decisions, a close and unavailing search has since been instituted for the fugitive legal title. "Some counselors, learned in the law, find it in the committee of finance, as representatives of the Association; others have discovered that it is vested in them as individuals; others still, of equal eminence, and equally intent on arriving at a true solution, find perhaps that it is in the committee and stockholders jointly; while there are those who profess to find it in neither of these parties, but in the persons of whom the property was purchased, and to whom has been paid its full valuation! "In order to educe order out of this confusion of opinions, and to enable us to acquire, if possible, a less objectionable title, it has been proposed to petition the Chancellor for a sale, as a title from the court would be free from doubt." If this may be considered the end (as it probably was), it shows that the Bloomfield Association died, as the Clarkson did, in a quarrel about its titles, and in the hands of the lawyers. THE ONTARIO UNION. "This Association" says the _Phalanx_ of June 1844, "commenced operations about two weeks since, in Hopewell, Ontario County, five miles from Canandaigua. They have purchased the mills and farm formerly owned by Judge Bates, consisting of one hundred and fifty acres of land, a flouring mill with five run of burr stones, and saw-mill, at $16,000. They have secured by subscription, about one hundred and thirty acres of land in the immediate vicinity, which they are now working. To meet their liabilities for the original purchase, I am informed they have already a subscription which they believe can be relied on, amounting to over $40,000. They have now upon the domain about seventy-five members. This institution has been able already to commence such branches of industry as will produce an immediate return, and as a consequence, will avoid the necessity of living upon their capital. There is danger that their enthusiasm will get the better of their judgment in admitting members too fast." The editor of the _Phalanx_ visited this Association among others, in the fall of 1844, and gave the following cheerful account of it: "The whole number of resident members is one hundred and fifty; fifty of whom are men, and upward of sixty children. We were greatly pleased with the earnest spirit which seemed to pervade this little Community. We thought we perceived among them a really religious devotion to the great cause in which they have embarked. This gave an unspeakable charm to their rude, temporary dwellings, and lent a grace to their plain manners, far above any superficial elegance. We have no doubt that they will succeed in establishing a state of society higher even than they themselves anticipate. Of their pecuniary success their present condition gives good assurance. We should think that, with ordinary prudence, it was entirely certain." We find nothing after this in the _Phalanx_ about this Association. Macdonald merely mentions a few such items as the date, place, etc., and concludes with the following terse epitaph: "It effected but little, and was of brief duration. No further particulars." THE MIXVILLE ASSOCIATION was one of the group that radiated from Rochester, according to Mr. Greig; but we can find no account of it anywhere, except that it had not commenced operations at the time of the session of the Confederated Council; though a delegate from it was a member of that Council. How long it lived, or whether it lived at all, does not appear. THE JEFFERSON COUNTY PHALANX. This Association, though not properly a member of the group that radiated from Rochester, and somewhat remote from western New York, was named among the confederated Associations, and sent a delegate to the Bloomfield Council. Three notices of it occur in the _Phalanx_, which we here present. [From the _Phalanx_ October 5, 1843.] "This Association has been commenced through the efforts, principally, of A.M. Watson, Esq., the President, who for some years past has been engaged in advocating and disseminating the principles of Association in Watertown and that section of the State. There are over three hundred persons now on the domain, which consists of twelve or fifteen hundred acres of superior land, finely watered, and situated within two or three miles of Watertown. It is composed of several farms, put in by farmers, who have taken stock for their lands, and joined the Association. Very little cash capital has been paid in; the enterprise was undertaken with the subscription of property, real estate, provisions, tools, implements, &c., brought in by the members, who were principally farmers and mechanics in the neighborhood; and the result is an interesting proof of what can be done by union and combined effort among the producing classes. Different branches of manufactures have been established, contracts for building in Watertown have been taken, and an organization of labor into groups or squads, with their foremen or leaders, has been made to some extent. The agricultural department is prosecuted with vigor, and when last heard from, the Association was flourishing. We hope from this Association that perseverance and constancy--for it of course has many difficulties to contend with--which will insure success, and give another proof of the truth of the great principles of combined effort and united interests." [From the _Phalanx_, November 4, 1843.] "The following statement from the _Black River Journal_ of October 6th, exhibits the affairs of the Jefferson County Association in a gratifying light, and shows that so far it has been extremely prosperous and successful. The fact alone of a profit having been made, whether much or little, affords a strong proof of the advantages of associated effort, for we apprehend that either farmers or mechanics working separately, would generally find it difficult to show a balance in their favor upon the settlement of their accounts. But a net profit of nearly thirteen thousand dollars, or twenty-five per cent. upon the capital invested, for the first six months that a small Association has been in operation, under circumstances by no means the most favorable, is striking and incontestable evidence of real prosperity. Before a great while we shall have many such cases to record." ABSTRACT OF SEMI-ANNUAL REPORT. The first Semi-Annual Report of the property, expenditures and proceeds of labor of the Jefferson County Industrial Association, was submitted to a meeting of the stockholders on Monday the 2d inst. Since the organization of the Association in April last, the real and personal property acquired by purchase and subscription, has reached the amount of $54,832.10 This is subject to reduction by the amount of subscribed property applied to the purchase of real estate 5,458.28 -------- Total property on hand $49,373.82 The aggregate product of the several departments of business, to Sept. 23d $20,301.67 Expense of same, including all purchases of goods and supplies 7,331.95 -------- Net proceeds $12,969.72 Of this has been expended in improvement of buildings, making a brick-yard, and preparing summer fallows 1,365.00 ---------- Balance on hand $11,604.72 This balance consists of agricultural products in store, brick manufactured and now on hand, proceeds of jobbing contracts, earnings of mechanics' shops, etc. Published by order of the President and Board of Directors. _Report of A.M. Watson to the Confederate Council, May 15, 1844._ "The Jefferson County Association has made its first annual statement, by which it appears that capital in that institution will receive a fraction over six per cent. interest. Owing to inattention to the principles of Association, and a defective and incomplete organization of industry into groups and series, as well as to the fact that in the commencement much time is lost, labor in this institution fails to obtain its fair remuneration. Another circumstance which has operated to the disadvantage of labor, is, that no allowance has been made in its favor, in the annual settlement, for working dresses. These facts are conclusive, to my mind, that the disadvantages of improper or inadequate organization in all institutions, will be even more injurious to labor than to capital. "This institution commenced operations without the investment of much, if any, cash capital, and they now are somewhat embarrassed for want of such means. A subscription to their stock of two thousand dollars in cash, or a loan of that amount for a reasonable time, for which good security could be given, would, in my opinion, place them in a situation to carry on a very profitable business the ensuing year. If this obstacle can be surmounted, I know of no institution of better promise than this. This would seem to be but a small matter; but when the fact is considered that they are located in the midst of a community which sympathizes but little in the movement, while many exert themselves to increase the embarrassment by decrying their responsibility, it will readily be seen that their situation is unenviable. Their responsibility, when compared with that of most business concerns in the country, is more real than that of a majority of business men who are considered perfectly solvent. Considering the difficulties and embarrassments through which they have already struggled, I have strong confidence in their ultimate success. The whole number of members will not vary much at this time, from one hundred and fifty. They have reduced, by sale, their lands to about eight hundred acres, and I refer you to the annual report for further information as to their liabilities." We perceive in the depressed tone of this report, as well as in the reduction of numbers and land which it exhibits, that decline had begun and failure was impending. Nothing more is said in the _Phalanx_ about this Association, except that it sent a delegate to a socialistic convention that met in New York City on the 7th of October, 1844. We have to fall back, as usual, on Macdonald, for the summing-up and final moral. He says: "After a few months, disagreements among the members became general. Their means were totally inadequate; they were too ignorant of the principles of Association; were too much crowded together, and had too many idlers among them. There was bad management on the part of the officers, and some were suspected of dishonesty. As times grew better, many of those who joined on account of hard times, got employment and left; and many more thought they could do better in the world again, and did the same thing. The only aid they could get in their difficulties, was from stock subscriptions, and that was not much. Men who invested actual property sustained heavy losses. One farmer who involved his farm, lost nearly all he possessed. After existing about twelve months the land was sold to pay the debts, and the Association disbanded." THE MOORHOUSE UNION is mentioned in the first number of the _Phalanx_, October 1843, as one among the many Associations just starting at that time. Macdonald gives the following account of it: "This experiment originated in the offer of a grant of land by A.K. Moorhouse, of Moorhouseville, Hamilton County, New York, who owned 60,000 acres of land in the counties of Hamilton, Herkimer and Saratoga. As most of this land was situated in what is called the 'wilderness of New York,' he could find few persons who were willing to purchase and settle the inhospitable wild. Under these circumstances he offered to the Socialists as much of 10,000 acres as they might clear in three years, hoping that an Association would build up a village and form a nucleus around which individuals and Associations might settle and purchase his lands. "The offer was accepted by an Association formed in New York City, and several capitalists promised to take stock in the enterprise; but none was ever paid for. In May 1843, Mr. Moorhouse arrived at Piseco from New York, with a company of pioneers, who were soon followed by others, and the work commenced. The locality chosen at Lake Piseco was situated about five miles from Lake Pleasant, the county seat, a village of eight or nine houses and a court-house. On the arrival of the party it was found that Mr. Moorhouse had made some improvements, which he was willing to exchange for $2,000 of stock in the Association. This was agreed to. He also engaged to furnish provisions, tools etc., and take his pay in stock. The land on which the Association commenced its labors was a gift from Mr. Moorhouse; but the improvements which consisted of 120 acres of cleared land with a few buildings, was accepted as stock at the above valuation. "The money, property and labor were put into common stock. Labor was rated at fifty cents per day, no matter of what kind. A store was kept on the premises, in which articles were sold at prime cost, with an allowance for transportation, &c. By the constitution the members were entitled to scrip representing the excess of wages over the amount of goods received from the store; or, in other words, laborers became stockholders in proportion to that excess. No dividends were to be declared for the first five years. "The persons thus congregated to carry out the principles of Association [number not stated], belonged to a variety of occupations; but it appears that but few of them were adapted to the wants of the Community. Some of the members were intelligent and moral people; but the majority were very inferior. No property qualifications were necessary to admission. It appears that members were obtained by an agent, who took indiscriminately all he could get. The most common religious belief among them was Methodist; but a large proportion of them did not profess any religion, and some were what is commonly called infidels. "Though the persons congregated here had left but humble homes and poor circumstances generally, yet the circumstances now surrounding them were worse than those they had left, and as a natural consequence there was a deterioration of character. Not having formed any organization in the city, as is customary in such experiments, they received no aid from without; and the want of this aid does not appear to have insured success, as some enthusiastic Socialists have imagined that it would; but on the contrary a most signal failure ensued. "The leading persons were Mr. Moorhouse and a relative of his named Brown. The former furnished every thing and turned it in as stock. The latter kept the store and the accounts. The members do not appear to have been acquainted with the mode in which either the store or books were kept. "At the commencement, when they were sufficiently supplied from the store, they agreed tolerably well; but during the latter period of the experiment, when Mr. Moorhouse began to be slack in buying things for the members, there was a good deal of disagreement. The store was nearly always empty, and when anything was brought into it, there was a general scramble to see who should get the most. This, as a matter of course, produced much jealousy and quarreling. All kinds of suspicions were afloat, and it was generally reported that the executive, including the store-keeper, fared better than the rest. "Some work was done, and some improvements were made upon the land. Rye and potatoes were planted, and probably consumed. The experiment existed a few months, and then by degrees died away." The following from a person who took part in the experiment, will give the reader a nearer view of the causes of the failure: "The population congregated at Piseco was composed of all nations, characters and conditions; a motley group of ill-assorted materials, as inexperienced as it was heterogeneous. We had some specimens of the raw material of human nature, and some of New York manufacture spoiled in the making. There were philosophers and philanthropists, bankrupt merchants and broken-down grocery-keepers; officers who had retired from the Texan army on half-pay; and some who had retired from situations in the New York ten-pin alleys. There were all kinds of ideas, notions, theories, and whims; all kinds of religions; and some persons without any. There was no unanimity of purpose, or congeniality of disposition; but there was plenty of discussion, and an abundance of variety, which is called the spice of life. This spice however constituted the greater part of the fare, as we sometimes had scarcely anything else to eat. "At first we were pretty well off for provisions; but soon the supplies began to be reduced; and in November the list of luxuries and necessaries commenced with rye and ended with potatoes, with nothing between! As the supplies were cut off, the number of members decreased. They were starved out. But of course the starving process was slower in those cases where the individuals had not the means of transportation back to the white settlements. When I left the 'promised land' in March 1844, there were only six families remaining. I had determined to see it out; but the state of things was so bad, and the prospects ditto, that I could stand it no longer. I thought the whole would soon fall into the hands of Mr. Moorhouse, and I could not afford to spend any more time in a cause so hopeless. I had given nine months' time, was half starved, got no pay, had worn out my clothes, and had my best coat borrowed without leave, by a man who went to New York some time before. This I thought might suffice for one experiment. I left the place less sanguine than when I went there that Associations could succeed without capital and without a good selection of members. Yet my belief was as firm as ever in the coming abolition of conflicting interests, and the final harmonious reconstruction of society." Here ends the history of the Fourier Associations in the State of New York. The Ohio experiments come next. CHAPTER XXVI. THE MARLBORO ASSOCIATION. As in New England, so in Ohio, the general socialistic excitement of 1841 and afterwards, gave rise to several experiments that had nothing to do with Fourier's peculiar philosophy. We begin with one of these indigenous productions. Mrs. Esther Ann Lukens, a member of the Marlboro Community, answered Macdonald's inquiries about its history. We copy the greater part of her story: _Mrs. Lukens's Narrative._ "The Marlboro Community seems, as I think of it, to have had its existence so entirely in dreams of human advancement and the generous wish to promote it, and also in ignorance of all but the better part of human nature, that it is hard to speak of it as a _bona fide_ portion of our plodding work-a-day world. "It was originated by a few generous and ardent spirits, who were disgusted with the oppressive and antagonistic conditions of ordinary labor and commerce. The only remedy they saw, was a return to the apostolic manner of living--that of 'having all things common.' "The Association was first talked of and its principles generally discussed in Clinton County, some years before anything was done. Many in all parts of Ohio participated in this discussion, and warmly urged the scheme; but only a few were found who were hopeful and courageous enough to dare the final experiment. "The gathering commenced in 1841 on the farm of Mr. E. Brooke, and consisted at first of his family and a few other persons. Gradually the number increased, and another farm was added by the free gift of Dr. A. Brooke, or rather by his resigning all right and title to it as an individual, and delivering it over to the joint ownership of the great family. "As may be supposed, the majority of those who gathered around this nucleus, were without property, and very slenderly gifted with the talent of acquiring it, but thoroughly honest, philanthropic, warmly social, and willing to perform what appeared to them the right amount of labor belonging to freemen in a right state of society. They forgot in a few instances, that this right state did not exist, but was only dreamed about, and had yet to be realized by more than common labor with the hands. "The Community had but little property of any value but land, and that was in an uncultivated, half-wild state. There were a few hundred dollars in hand; I can not say how many; but certainly not half the amount required for purchases that seemed immediately necessary. There was a good house and barn on each farm, each house capable of accommodating comfortably three families, besides three small tenant houses of logs, capable of accommodating one family each. There were also on the premises four or five horses and a few cattle and sheep. "It became necessary, as the numbers increased, to purchase the farm intervening between the one first owned by E. Brooke, and the one given by Dr. A. Brooke, both for convenience in passing and repassing, and for the reason that more land was needed to give employment to all. The owner asked an exorbitant price, knowing our necessities; but it was paid, or rather promised, and so a load of debt was contracted. "The members generally were eminently moral and intellectual. As to religious belief, they were what people called, and perhaps justly, Free-thinkers. In our conferences for purposes of improvement and domestic counsel, which were held on Sundays, religion, as a distinct obligation, was never mentioned. "Provisions were easily procured. One of the farms had a large orchard, and our living was confined to the plainest vegetable diet; so that much time was left for social and mental improvement. All will join with me in saying that love and good fellowship reigned paramount; so that all enjoyed good care during sickness, and kindly sympathy at all times. "About a year and a-half after its foundation, the Community sustained a great loss by the death of one of its most efficient and ardent supporters, Joseph Lukens. It was after this period that a constitution or form of Association was framed, and many persons were admitted who had different views of property and the basis of rights, from what were generally held at the beginning. "The existence of the Community, from first to last, was nearly four years. If I should say there was perfect unanimity of feeling to the last, it would not be true. Yet there were no quarrels, and all discussions among us were temperate and kind. As to our breaking up, there was no cause for it clear to my mind, except the complicated state of the business concerns, the amount of debt contracted, and the feeling that each one would work with more energy, for a time at least, if thrown upon his own resources, with plenty of elbow-room and nothing to distract his attention." Mr. Thomas Moore, also a member of this Community, gave his opinion of the cause of its decease in a separate paper, as follows: _Mr. Moore's Post Mortem._ "The failure of this experiment may be traced to the fact that the minds of its originators were not homogeneous. They all agreed that in a properly organized Community, there should be no buying and selling between the members, but that each should share the common products according to his necessity. But while Dr. A. Brooke held that this principle should govern our conduct in our interchange with the whole world, the others believed it right for any number of individuals to separate themselves from the surrounding world, and from themselves into a distinct Community; and while they had every thing free among themselves, continue to traffic in the common way with those outside. And again, while many believed they were prepared to enter into a Community of this kind, Mr. Edward Brooke had his doubts, fearing that the time had not yet arrived when any considerable number of individuals could live together on these principles; that though some might be prompted to enter into such relations through principles of humanity and pure benevolence, others would come in from motives altogether selfish; and that discord would be the result. Dr. A. Brooke, not being willing to be confined in any Community that did not embrace the whole world, stepped out at the start, but left the Community in possession of his property during his life; believing that to be as long as he had any right to dispose of it. But Edward Brooke yielded to the views of others, and went on with the Community. "For some time the members who came in from abroad added nothing of consequence to the common stock. Some manifested by their conduct that their objects were selfish, and being disappointed, left again. Others, who perhaps entered from purer motives, also became dissatisfied for various reasons and left; and so the Community fluctuated for some time. At length three families were admitted as members, who had property invested in farms, and who were to sell the farms and devote the proceeds to the common stock. Two of these, after having tried community life a year, concluded to leave before they had sold their farms; and the third, not being able to sell, there was a lack of capital to profitably employ the members; and the consequence was, there was not quite enough produced to support the Community. Discovering this to be the case, several of the persons who originally owned the property became dissatisfied; and although according to the principles of the Community they had no greater interest in that property than any other members, yet it was no less a fact that they had donated it nearly all (excepting Dr. A. Brooke's lease), and that now they would like to have it back. This placed the true Socialists in delicate circumstances. Being without pecuniary means of their own, they could not exercise the power that had voluntarily been placed in their hands, to control these dissatisfied ones, so as to cause them, against their will, to leave their property in the hands of the Community. The property was freely yielded up, though with the utmost regret. My opinion therefore is that the experiment failed at the time it did, through lack of faith in those who had the funds, and lack of funds in those who had the faith." Dr. A. Brooke, who devoted his land to the Marlboro Community, but stepped out himself, because he would not be confined to anything less than Communism with the world, afterwards tried a little experiment of his own, which failed and left no history. Macdonald visited him in 1844, and reports some curious things about him, which may give the reader an idea of what was probably the most radical type of Communism that was developed in the Socialistic revival of 1841-3. "Dr. Brooke" says Macdonald, "was a tall, thin man, with gray hair, and beard quite unshaven. His face reminded me of the ancient Philosophers. His only clothing was a shirt and pantaloons; nothing else on either body, head, or feet. He invited us into his comfortable parlor, which was neatly furnished and had a good supply of books and papers. Our breakfast consisted of cold baked apples, cold corn bread, and I think potatoes. "We questioned him much concerning his strange notions, and in the course of conversation I remarked, that such men as Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, Josiah Warren and others, had each a certain number of fundamental principles, upon which to base their theories, and I wished to understand definitely what fundamental principles he had, and how many of them. He replied that he had only one principle, and that was to do what he considered right. He said he attended the sick whenever he was called upon, for which he made no charge. When he wanted anything which he knew one of his neighbors could supply, he sent to that neighbor for it. He shewed me a brick out-building at the back of his cottage, which he said had been put up for him by masons in the vicinity. He made it known that he wanted such work done, and no less than five men came to do it for him." Macdonald adds the following story: "I remember when in Cincinnati, one Sunday afternoon at a Fourier meeting I heard Mr. Benjamin Urner read a letter from Dr. A. Brooke to some hardware merchants in Cincinnati (the Brothers Donaldson in Main street, I believe), telling them that his necessities required a variety of agricultural tools, such as a plow, harrow, axes, etc., and requesting that they might be sent on to him. He stated that he had given up the use of money, that he gave his professional services free of cost to those whose necessities demanded them, and for any thing his necessities required he applied to those whom he thought able to give. Mr. Urner stated that this strange individual had been the post-master of the place where he now lived, but that he had given up the office so that he might not have to use money. He also informed us that the hardware merchants very kindly sent on the articles to Dr. Brooke free of cost; which announcement gave great satisfaction to the meeting." CHAPTER XXVII. PRAIRIE HOME COMMUNITY. This Association (another indigenous production) with several like attempts, originated with Mr. John O. Wattles, Valentine Nicholson and others, who, after attending a socialistic convention in New York in 1843, lectured on Association at various places on their way back to the West. Orson S. Murray, the editor of the _Regenerator_, was also interested in this Community, and was on his way with his printing establishment to join it and publish his paper under its auspices, when he was wrecked on Lake Erie, and lost nearly every thing but his life. Prairie Home is a beautiful location near West Liberty in Logan County, Ohio. The domain consisted of over five hundred acres; half of which on the hills was well-timbered, and the remainder was in fine rich fields stretching across the prairie. The members numbered about one hundred and thirty, nearly all of whom were born and bred in the West. Of foreigners there were only two Englishmen and one German. Most of the members were agriculturists. Many of them had been Hicksite Quakers. A few were from other sects, and some from no sect at all. There were but few children. A few months before the dissolution of this Community Macdonald visited it, and staid several days. His gossiping report of what he saw and heard gives as good an inside view of the transitory species of Associations as any we find in his collections. We quote the most of it: _Macdonald's visit at Prairie Home._ "On arriving at West Liberty I inquired eagerly for the Community; but when very coldly and doubtfully told that it was somewhere down the Urbana road, and seeing that folks in the town did not seem to know or care much where it was, my ardor sensibly abated, and I began to doubt whether it was much of an affair after all; but I pushed on, anxious at once to see the place. "On reaching the spot where I was told I should find the Community, I turned off from the main road up a lane, and soon met a gaunt-looking individual, rough but very polite, having the look of a Quaker, which I afterwards found he was. He spoke kindly to me, and directed me where to go. There was a two-story frame house at the entrance of the lane, which belonged to the Community; also a log cabin at the other corner of the lane. After walking a short distance I arrived at another two-story frame house, opposite to which was a large flour-mill on a little stream, and an old saw-mill, looking very rough. At the door of the dwelling-house there was a group of women and girls, picking wool; and as it was just noon, many men came in from various parts of the farm to take their dinner. At the back of the house there was a long shed, with a rough table down the center, and planks for seats on each side, on which thirty or forty people sat. I was kindly received by them, and invited to dinner; and a good dinner it was, consisting of coarse brown bread piled up in broken lumps, dishes of large potatoes unpeeled, some potato-soup, and a supply of melons for a second course. "I sat beside a Dr. Hard, who noticed that I took a little salt with my potatoes, and remarked to me that if I abstained from it, I would have my taste much more perfect. There was but little salt on the table, and I saw no person touch it. There was no animal food of any kind except milk, which one or two of them used. They all appeared to eat heartily. The women waited upon the table, but the variety of dishes being small, each person so attended to himself that waiting was rendered almost unnecessary. All displayed a rude politeness. "After dinner I fell in with a cabinet-maker, a young man from Bond street, London, and had quite a chat with him; also an elderly man from England, John Wood by name, who was acquainted with the socialistic movement in that country. I then went to see the man work the saw-mill, and was much pleased with his apparent interest and industry. "Not finding the acquaintance I was in search of at this place, and hearing that he was at another Community or branch of Prairie Home, about nine miles distant in a northerly direction (which they called the Upper Domain or Highland Home or Zanesfield), I determined to see him that night, and after obtaining necessary information I started on my journey. "The walk was long, and it was dark before I reached the Community farm. At length the friendly bow-wow of a dog told of the habitable dwelling, and soon I was in the comfortable and pretty looking farm house at Highland Home. This Community consisted of only ten or twelve persons. Here I found my friend, and after a wholesome Grahamite supper of corn-bread, apple-pie and milk, I had a long conversation with him and others on Community matters. I put many questions to them, all of which were answered satisfactorily. Here is a specimen of our dialogue: "Do you make laws? No. Does the majority govern the minority? No. Have you any delegated power? No. Any kind of government? No. Do you express opinions and principles as a body? No. Have you any form of society or test for admission of members? No. Do you assist runaway slaves? Yes. Must you be Grahamites? No. Do you object to religionists? No. What are the terms of admission? The land is free to all; let those who want, come and use it. Any particular trades? No. Can persons take their earnings away with them when they leave? Yes. "Their leading principle, they repeatedly told me, was to endeavor to practice the golden rule, 'Do as you would be done by.' "The next morning I took a walk round the farm. It was a nice place, and appeared to have been well kept formerly, but now there was some disorder. The workmen appeared to be without clear ideas of the duties they were to perform. It seemed as if they had not made up their minds what they could do, or what they intended to do. Some of them were feeble-looking men, and in conversation with them I ascertained that several, both here and at Prairie Home, had adopted the present mode of Grahamite living to improve their health. "Phrenology seemed to be pretty generally understood, and I was surprised to hear rude-looking men, almost ragged, ploughing, fence-making, and in like employments, converse so freely upon Phrenology, Physiology, Magnetism, Hydropathy, &c. The _Phrenological Journal_ was taken by several of them. "I visited a neighboring farm, said to belong to the Community, the residence, I believe, of Horton Brown, with whom I had an interesting conversation on religion and Community matters. He said they took the golden rule as their guide, 'Do unto others as ye would have others do unto you.' I reminded him that even the golden rule was subject to individual interpretation, and might be misinterpreted. "_Saturday, August 25, 1844._--I noticed several persons here were sick with various complaints, and those who were not sick labored very leisurely. During the day four men arrived from Indiana to see the place and 'join the Community;' but there were no accommodations for them. They reported quite a stir in Indiana in regard to the Community. "In the afternoon my friend was ready to return to Cincinnati, whither he was going to try and induce his family to come to Zanesfield. We walked to Prairie Home that evening. At night we were directed to sleep at the two-story frame house at the entrance of the lane. At that place there seemed to be much confusion; too many people and too many idlers among them. The young women were most industrious, attending to the supper table and the provisions in a very steady, business-like manner; but the young men were mostly lounging about doing nothing. At bed-time there were too many persons for each to be accommodated with a bed; so the females all went up stairs and slept as they could; and the males slept below, all spread out in rows upon the floor. This was unpleasant, and as the sequel proved, could not long be endured. "_Prairie Home, Sunday, August 26._--In the morning, there was a social meeting of all the members. The weather was too wet and cold for them to meet on the hills, as was intended; so they adjourned to the flour-mill, and seated themselves as best they could, on chairs and planks, men and women all together. Such a meeting as this was quite a novel sight for me. There was no chairman, no secretary and no constitution or by-laws to preserve order. Yet I never saw a more orderly meeting. The discussions seemed chiefly relating to agricultural matters. One man rose and stated that there was certain plowing to be done on the following day, and if it was thought best by the brothers and sisters, he would do it. Another rose and said he would volunteer to do the plowing if the first one pleased, and he might do something else. There appeared to be some competition in respect to what each should do, and yet a strong non-resistant principle was manifest, which seemed to smooth over any difficulty. There was some talk about money and the lease of the property, and several persons spoke, both male and female, apparently just as the spirit moved them. At the close of the meeting some singing was attempted, but it was very poor indeed. The folks scattered to the houses for dinner, and as usual took a pretty good supply of the potatoes, potato-soup, brown bread, apples and apple butter, together with large quantities of melons of various kinds. "Owing to the cold weather the people were all huddled together inside the houses. The rooms were too small, and many of the young men were compelled to sleep in the mill. Altogether there were too many persons brought together for the scanty accommodations of the place. "_Monday, August 27._--The wind blew hard, and threw down a large stack of hay. It was interesting to see the rapidity with which a group of volunteers put it in order again. The party seemed to act with perfect union. "Several persons arrived to join the Community; among the rest a farmer and his family in a large wagon, with a lot of household stuff. "I watched several men at work in different places, and to one party I could not help expressing myself thus: 'If you fail, I will give it up; for never did I see men work so well or so brotherly with each other.' But all were not thus industrious; for I saw some who merely crawled about (probably sick), just looking on like myself, at any thing which fell in their way. There was evident disorder, showing a transition state toward either harmony or anarchy. I am sorry to say, it too soon proved to be the latter. "After dinner some one suggested having a meeting to talk about a plow. With some little exertion they managed to get ten or twelve men together. Then they sat down and reasoned with each other at great length. But it was very uneconomical, I thought, to bring so many persons together from their work, to talk so much about so small a matter. A plow had to be repaired; some one must and did volunteer to go to the town with it; he wanted money to pay for it; there was no money; he must take a bag of corn or wheat, and trade that off to pay for the repairs; a wagon had to be got out; two horses put to it, and a journey of some miles made, and nearly a day of time expended about such a trifling job. "I went to see the saw-mill at work; found one or two men engaged at it. They were working for customers, and got a certain portion of the lumber for what they sawed. I then went into an old log cabin and found my acquaintance, the cabinet-maker. On my inquiring how he liked Community, he told me the following story: He came from London to find friends in Indiana, and brought with him a fine chest of tools. On his arrival, he found his friends about to start for Community; so he came with them. He brought his tools with him, but left them at Zanesfield, and came down here. The folks at Zanesfield, wanting a plane, a saw and chisels, and knowing that his box was there, having no key, actually broke open the box, and under the influence of the common-property idea, helped themselves to the tools, and spoiled them by using them on rough work. He had got his chest away from there. He said he had no objection to their using the tools, if they knew how and did not spoil them. I saw one or two large chisels with pieces chipped out of them and planes nicked by nails, all innocently and ignorantly done by the brothers, who scarcely saw any wrong in it. "It was interesting to see the groups of unshaven men. There were men between forty and fifty years of age, who had shaved all their lives before, but now they let their beards grow, and looked ferocious. The young men looked well, and some of them rather handsome, with their soft beards and hair uncut; but the elderly ones did certainly look ugly. There was a German of a thin, gaunt figure, about fifty years of age, with a large, stubby, gray beard, and an ill-tempered countenance. "John Wood, the Englishman, a pretty good specimen, blunt, open-hearted and independent, had got three pigs in a pen, which he fed and took care of. They were the only animals on the place, except the horses. But exercising his rights, he said, 'If the rest of them did not want meat, he _did_--for he liked a bit o'meat.' "I was informed that all the animals on the place, when the Community took possession of the domain, were allowed to go where they pleased; or those who wanted them were free to take them. "Before the meeting on Sunday, groups of men stood round the house talking; some two or three of them, including John Wood and the Dutchman (as he was called) were cleaning themselves up a bit; and John had blackened and polished his boots; after which he carefully put the blacking and brushes away. Out came the Dutchman and looked round for the same utensils. Not seeing them, he asked the Englishman for the 'prushes.' So John brings them out and hands them to him. Whereupon the Dutchman marches to the front of the porch, and in wrathful style, with the brushes uplifted in his hand, he addresses the assembled crowd: 'He-ar! lookee he-ar! Do you call dis Community? Is dis common property? See he-ar! I ask him for de prushes to placken mine poots, and he give me de prushes, and _not give me de placking_!' This was said with great excitement. 'He never saw such community as dat; he could not understand; he tought every ting was to be common to all!' But John Wood good-humoredly explained that he had bought a box of blacking for himself, and if he gave it to every one who wanted to black boots, he would very soon be without any; so he shut it up for his own use, and those who wanted blacking must buy it for themselves. "I noticed there was some carelessness with the farm tools. There was a small shed in which all the scythes, hoes, axes, &c., were supposed to be deposited when not in use. But they were not always returned there. It appeared that these tools were used indiscriminately by any one and every one, so that one day a man would have one ax or scythe, and the next day another. This was evidently not agreeable in practice; for every working-man well knows that he forms attachments for certain tools, as much as he does for friends, and his hand and heart get used to them, as it were, so that he can use them better than he can strange ones. "With these few notices of failings, I must say I never saw a better-hearted or more industrious set of fellows. They appeared to struggle hard to effect something, yet it seemed evident that something was lacking among them to make things work well. It might have been organized laws, or government of some kind; it might have been a definite bond of union, or a prominent leader. It is certain there was some power or influence needed, to direct the force mustered there, and make it work economically and harmoniously. "People kept coming and going, and were ready to do something; but there was nobody to tell them what to do, and they did not know what to do themselves. They had to eat, drink and sleep; and they expected to obtain the means of doing so; but they seemed not to reflect who was going to supply these means, or where they were to come from. Some seemed greedy and reckless, eating all the time, cutting melons out of the garden and from among the corn, eating them and throwing the peels and seeds about the foot-paths and door-ways. "There was an abundance of fine corn on the domain, abundance of melons of all kinds, and, I believe, plenty of apples at the upper Community. Much provision had been brought and sent there by farmers who had entered into the spirit of the cause. For instance there were some wagon-loads of potatoes and apples sent, as well as quantities of unbolted wheat meal, of which the bread was made. "On my asking about the idlers, the reply was, 'Oh! they will not stop here long; it is uncongenial to lazy people to be among industrious ones; and for their living, it don't cost much more than fifty cents per week, and they can surely earn that.' "At the Sunday meeting before mentioned, the enthusiasm of some was great. One man said he left his home in Indiana; he had a house there, which he thought at first to reserve in case of accident; but he finally concluded that if he had any thing to fall back upon, he could not give his heart and soul to the cause as he wanted to; so he gave up every thing he possessed, and put it into Community. Others did the same, while some had reserved property to fall back upon. Some said they had lands which they would put into the Community, if they could get rid of them; but the times were so hard that there was much scarcity of money, and the lands would not sell. "From all I saw I judged that the Community was too loosely put together, and that they had not entire confidence in each other; and I left them with forebodings. "The experiment lasted scarcely a year. On the 25th of October, about two months after my visit, they had a meeting to talk over their affairs. More than three thousand dollars had been paid on the property; but the land owner was pressed with a mortgage, and so pressed them. One man sold his farm and got part of the required sum ready to pay. Others who owned farms could not sell them; and the consequence was, that according to agreement they were obliged to give up the papers; so they surrendered the domain and all upon it, into the hands of the original proprietor. "The members then scattered in various directions. Several were considerable losers by the attempt, while many had nothing to lose. At the present time I learn that there are men and women of that Community who are still ready with hands and means to try the good work again. The cause of failure assigned by the Communists was their not owning the land they settled upon; but I think it very doubtful whether they could have kept together if the land had been free; for as I have before said, there was something else wanted to make harmony in labor." CHAPTER XXVIII. THE TRUMBULL PHALANX. This experiment originated among the Socialist enthusiasts of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. Its domain at Braceville, Trumbull County, Ohio, was selected and a commencement was made in the spring of 1844. From this date till its failure in the latter part of 1847, we find in the _Phalanx_ and _Harbinger_ some sixteen notices of it, long and short, from which we are to gather its history. We will quote the salient parts of these notices; and so let the friends of the experiment speak for themselves. The rose-color of their representations will be corrected by the ultimate facts. This was one of the three most notable experiments in the Fourier epoch--the North American and the Wisconsin Phalanxes being the other two. [From a letter of Mr. Jehu Brainerd, June 29, 1844.] "The location which this society has chosen, is a very beautiful one and is situated in the north-west quarter of Braceville township, eight miles west of Warren, and five miles north of Newton Falls. "The domain was purchased of Mr. Eli Barnum, at twelve dollars per acre, and consists of two hundred and eighty acres of the choicest land, about half of which is under good cultivation. There is a valuable and durable mill privilege on the domain, valued at three thousand six hundred dollars; and at the time the purchase was made, there were in successful operation, a grist-mill with two run of stones, an oil-mill, saw-mill, double carding-machine, and cloth-dressing works. "The principal buildings on the domain are a large two story brick house, grist-mill and oil-mill, very large, substantial, and entirely new, framed and well painted, and a large barn; the other buildings, though sufficient for present accommodation, are old and somewhat decayed. "There has been already subscribed in real estate stock, most of which is within two miles and less of the domain, nine hundred and fifty-seven acres of land, mostly improved farms, which were valued (including neat stock, grain, &c.) at sixteen thousand one hundred and fifty dollars. Five hundred dollars cash capital has also been subscribed and paid in; and about six hundred dollars in lathes, tools, machinery, &c., including one hundred thousand feet of lumber, have been received. "There are thirty-five families now belonging to the Association, in all one hundred and forty persons; of this number forty-three are males over twenty-one years of age. Until accommodations can be prepared on the domain, some of the families will reside on the farms subscribed as stock. It is the intention to commence an edifice of brick this present summer, and extend it from time to time, as the increase of members may require, or the funds of the society admit. For present necessity, temporary buildings are erected." [From a letter of N.C. Meeker, August 10, 1844.] "The number of persons belonging to the Phalanx is about two hundred; some reside on the domain proper; others on more distant farms belonging to the Phalanx. Indeed as regards room, they are much crowded, residing in loose sheds. Nevertheless, on no consideration would they exchange present conditions for former ones. More convenient residences are to be erected forthwith, but it is not contemplated to erect the Phalanstery or final edifice for a year or so, or until they are possessed of sufficient means. Then the magnificent palace of the Combined Order will equally shame the temples of antiquity and the card-houses of modern days. "For the present year hard work and few of the attractions of Association are expected. Almost everything is unfitted for the use of Associations, being too insignificant, or characteristic of present society; made to sell rather than to use. The members of the Trumbull Phalanx, knowing how to work truly, and fully understanding that it is a gigantic labor to overturn the despair which has been accumulating so long in men's bosoms, have nerved themselves manfully, showing the true dignity of human nature. "Labor is partially organized by the instituting of groups, and to much advantage. Boys who were idle and unproductive, have become producers, and a very fine garden is the work of their hands. They are under the charge of a proper person, who permits them to choose their foreman from among themselves, and at certain hours, in grounds laid out for the purpose, to engage in sports. Even the men themselves, at the close of the work, find agreeable and salutary exercise in a game of ball. Some going to school, earn six or seven shillings a week, and where they work in the brick-yard, from three to four shillings a day. These sums are not final wages, but _permits_; for when a dividend is declared there will be an additional remuneration. "On the Sabbath I attended their social meeting, in which those of all persuasions participated. The liberal views and kindly feelings manifested by the various speakers were such as I had never heard before. They spoke of the near relations they sustained to each other, and of the many blessings they look to receive in the future; meanwhile the present unity gave them an idea of heaven. One spirit of joy and gladness seemed to animate them, viz; that they had escaped from the wants, cares, and temptations of civilization, and instead were placed where public good is the same as individual good; hence nothing save pre-conceived prejudices, fast giving away, prevent their loving their neighbors as themselves. This is the spirit of Christianity. Their position calls for union. No good can arise from divers sects; no good ever did arise. They will all unite, Presbyterians, Disciples, Baptists, Methodists, and all; and if any name be needed, under that of Unionism. After meeting the sacrament was administered; then followed a Bible-class, and singing exercises closed the day. [It would seem from this description, that the religion of the Trumbull was more orthodox than any we have found in other Phalanxes.] "Those not accustomed to view the progress of combined labor will be astonished to see aggregates. A vast brick-kiln is raised in a short time; a touch plants a field of corn, and a few weeks turns a forest into a farm. Only a few of such results can be seen now; but enough has been done at this Phalanx since last spring, to give one an idea of the vast results which will arise in the days of the new industrial world. Seating myself in the venerable orchard, with the temporary dwellings on the opposite side, the joiners at their benches in their open shops under the green boughs, and hearing on every side the sound of industry, the roll of wheels in the mills, and merry voices, I could not help exclaiming mentally: Indeed my eyes see men making haste to free the slave of all names, nations and tongues, and my ears hear them driving, thick and fast, nails into the coffin of despotism. I can but look on the establishment of this Phalanx as a step of as much importance as any which secured our political independence; and much greater than that which gained the Magna Charta, the foundation of English liberty. "But as yet there is nothing clearly demonstrated save by faith. That which remains to be seen is, whether families can be made to associate in peace, enjoying the profits as well as pleasures arising from public tables, granaries, store-houses, libraries, schools, gardens, walks and fountains; or, briefer, whether a man will be willing that he and his neighbor should be happy together. Are men forever to be such consummate fools as to neglect even the colossal profits of Association? Am I to be astonished by hearing sensible men declare, because mankind have been the victims of false relations, that these things are impracticable? No, no! We have been shown by the Columbus of the new industrial world how to solve the problem of the egg, and a few caravels have adventured across the unknown ocean, and are now, at the dawn of a new day, drawing nigh unto strange shores, covered with green, and loading the breeze with the fragrance of unseen flowers. "NATHAN C. MEEKER." [From an official letter to a Convention of Associations in New York, signed by B. Robins and H.N. Jones, President and Secretary of the Trumbull Phalanx, dated October 1, 1844.] "We should have sent a delegate to your Convention or written sooner, were not the assistance of all of our members daily demanded, as also all our time, in the building up of Humanity's Home. In common with the inhabitants of the region round about (it is supposed on account of the dry season), we have had many cases of fever and ague, a disease which has not been known here for many years. This has prevented our executing various plans for organization, etc., which we are now entering upon. And now, with each day, we have abundant cause to hope for a joyous future. We have harmony within and sympathy without; and being persuaded that these are sure indications of success, we toil on, 'heart within and God o'erhead.' "Further, our pecuniary prospects brighten. Late arrangements add to our means of paying our debt, which is light; and accumulations of landed estate make us quite secure. Nevertheless we feel that we are in the transition period, using varied and noble elements not the most skillfully, and that we need more than man's wisdom to guide us. "The union of the Associations we look upon as a great and noble idea, without which the chain of universal unity were incomplete. When we shall have emerged from the sea of civilization, so that we can do our own breathing, we shall be able to coöperate with our friends throughout the world, as members of the grand Phalanx. Meanwhile our hearts will be with you, urging you not to falter in the work in which all the noble and healthy spirit of the age is engaged. "Accompanying is a copy of our constitution. Our number is over two hundred. We have 1,500 acres of land, half under cultivation, and a capital stock of $100,000. The branches of industry are sufficiently varied, but mostly agricultural." [Letter to the Pittsburg _Spirit of the Age_, July 1845.] "I have just returned from a visit to the Trumbull Phalanx, and I can but express my astonishment at the condition in which I found the Association. I had never heard much of this Phalanx, and what little had been said, gave me no very favorable opinion of either location or people, and in consequence I went there somewhat prejudiced against them. I was pleased, however, to find that they have a beautiful and romantic domain, a rich soil, with all the natural and artificial advantages they can desire. The domain consists of eleven hundred acres in all. The total cost of the real estate of the Phalanx is $18,428; on which they have paid $8,239, leaving a debt of $10,189. The payments are remarkably easy; on the principal, $1,000 are to be paid in September next, and the same sum in April 1846, and $1,133 in April 1847, and the same sum annually thereafter. They apprehend no difficulty in meeting their engagements. Should they even fail in making the first payments, they will be indulged by their creditor. From this it will be seen that the pecuniary condition of the Trumbull Phalanx is encouraging. "The Phalanx has fee simple titles to many tracts of land, and a house in Warren, with which they will secure capitalists who choose to invest money, for the purpose of establishing some branches of manufacturing. "There are about two hundred and fifty people on the domain at present, and weekly arrivals of new members. The greater portion of them are able-bodied men, who are industrious and devoted to the cause in which they are engaged. The ladies perform their duties in this pioneer movement in a manner deserving great praise. The educational department of the Phalanx is well organized. The children from eight to fourteen attend a manual-labor school, which is now in successful operation. The advantages of Association are realized in the boarding department. The cost per week for men, women and children, is not more than forty cents. "They soon expect to manufacture their own clothing. Carders, cloth-dressers, weavers etc., are now at work. These branches will be a source of profit to the Association. A good flouring-mill with two run of stone is now in operation, which more than supplies the bread-stuffs. They expect shortly to have four run of stone, when this branch will be of immense profit to the Association. The mill draws the custom of the neighborhood for a number of miles around. Two saw-mills are now in operation, which cut six hundred thousand feet per year, worth at least $3,000. The lumber is principally sent to Akron. A shingle-machine now in operation, will yield a revenue of $3,000 or $4,000 per annum. Machinery for making wooden bowls has been erected, which will also yield a revenue of about $3,000. An ashery will yield the present season about $500. The blacksmiths, shoemakers, and other branches are doing well. A wagon-shop is in progress of erection, and a tan-yard will be sunk and a house built, the second story of which is intended for a shoe-shop. "_Crops_: thirty acres of wheat, fifty acres of oats, seventy acres of corn, twelve acres of potatoes, five acres of English turnips, ten acres of buckwheat, five acres of garden truck, one and a half acres of broom corn. There are five hundred young peach trees in the nursery; two hundred apple trees in the old orchard; (fruit killed this year). _Live Stock_: forty-five cows, twelve horses, five yoke of oxen, twenty-five head of cattle. "From the above hasty sketch (for I can not find time to speak of this flourishing Association as I should), it will be seen that it stands firm. Under all the disadvantages of a new movement, the members live together, in perfect harmony; and what is gratifying, Mr. Van Amringe is there, cheering them on in the great cause by his eloquence, and setting them an example of devotion to the good of humanity. J.D.T." [Editorial in the _Harbinger_ August 23 1845.] "TRUMBULL PHALANX.--We rejoice to learn by a letter just received from a member of this promising Association, that they are going forward with strength and hope, determined to make a full experiment of the great principles which they have espoused. Have patience, brothers, for a short season; shrink not under the toils of the pioneer; let nothing daunt your courage, nor cloud your cheerfulness; and soon you will joy with the 'joy of harvest.' A few years will present the beautiful spectacle of prosperous, harmonic, happy Phalanxes, dotting the broad prairies of the West, spreading over its luxuriant valleys, and radiating light to the whole land that is now in 'darkness and the shadow of death.' The whole American people will yet see that the organization of industry is the great problem of the age; that the spirit of democracy must expand in universal unity; that coöperation in labor and union of interest alone can realize the freedom and equality which have been made the basis of our national institutions. "We trust that our friends at the Trumbull Phalanx will let us hear from them again at an early date. We shall always be glad to circulate any intelligence with which they may favor us. Here is what they say of their present condition: 'Our crops are now coming in; oats are excellent, wheat and rye are about average, while our corn will be superior. We are thankful that we shall raise enough to carry us through the year; for we know what it is to buy every thing. We are certain of success, certain that the great principles of Association are to be carried out by us; if not on one piece of ground, then on another. Literally we constitute a Phalanx, a Phalanx which can not be broken, let what will oppose. And this you are authorized to say in any place or manner.'" [Letter of N.C. Meeker to the _Pittsburg Journal_.] "_Trumbull Phalanx, September 13, 1845._ "R.M. RIDDLE--Sir: I have the pleasure of informing the public, through the columns of the _Commercial Journal_, that we consider the success of our Association as entirely certain. We have made our fall payment of five hundred dollars, and, what is perhaps more encouraging, we are at this moment engaged in industrial operations which yield us thirty dollars cash, each week. The waters are now rising, and in a few days, in addition to these works which are now in operation, we shall add as much more to the above revenue. The Trumbull Phalanx may now be considered as an entirely successful enterprise. "Our crops will be enough to carry us through. Last year we paid over a thousand dollars for provisions. We have sixty-five acres of corn, fifty-five of oats, twenty-four of buckwheat, thirty of wheat, twenty of rye, twelve of potatoes, and two of broom-corn. Our corn, owing to the excellent soil and superior skill of the foreman of the farming department, is the best in all this region of country. Thus we have already one of the great advantages of Association, in securing the services of the most able and scientific, not for individual, selfish good, but for public good. We are fortunate, also, that we shall be able to keep all our stock of fifty cows, etc., and not be obliged to drive them off or kill them, as the farmers do around us, for we have nearly fodder enough from our grains alone. Thus we are placed in a situation for building up an Association, for establishing a perfect organization of industry by means of the groups and series, and in education by the monitorial manual-labor system, and shall demonstrate that order, and not civilization, is heaven's first law. "Some eight or ten families have lately left us, one-fourth because they had been in the habit of living on better food (so they said), but the remainder because they were averse to our carrying out the principles of Association as far as we thought they ought to be carried. On leaving, they received in return whatever they asked of us. They who enter Association ought first to study themselves, and learn which stage of Association they are fitted for, the transitional or the perfect. If they are willing to endure privations, to eat coarse food, sometimes with no meat, but with milk for a substitute (this is a glorious resort for the Grahamites), to live on friendly terms with an old hat or coat, rather than have the society run in debt, and to have patience when many things go wrong, and are willing to work long and late to make them go right, they may consider themselves fitted for the transition-period. But if they sigh for the flesh-pots and leeks and onions of civilization, feel melancholy with a patch on their back, and growl because they can not have eggs and honey and warm biscuit and butter for breakfast, they had better stay where they are, and wait for the advent of perfect industrial Association. I am thus trifling in contrast; for there is nothing so serious, hearty, and I might add, sublime, as the building up of a Phalanx, making and seeing it grow day by day, and anticipating what fruits we shall enjoy when a few years are past. Why, the heart of man has never yet conceived what are the to-be results of the equilibrial development of all the powers and faculties of man. It is like endeavoring to comprehend the nature and pursuits of a spiritual and superior race of beings. "We are prepared to receive members who are desirous of uniting their interests with us, and of becoming truly devoted to the cause of industrial Association. "Yours truly, N.C. MEEKER." [From a letter to the _Tribune_, September 29, 1846.] "The progress made by the Trumbull Phalanx is doing great good. People begin to say, 'If they could hang together under such bad circumstances for so long a time, and no difficulties occur, what must we hope for, now that they are pecuniarily independent?' You have heard, I presume, that the Pittsburghers have furnished money enough to place that Association out of debt. I may be over-sanguine, but I feel confident of their complete success. I fear our Eastern friends have not sufficient faith in our efforts. Well, I trust we may disappoint them. The Trumbull, so far as means amount to any thing, stands first of any Phalanx in the United States; and as to harmony among the members, I can only say that there has been no difficulty yet. "Yours truly, J.D.S." [From the _Harbinger_, January 2, 1847.] "We have received the following gratifying account of the Trumbull Phalanx. Every attempt of the kind here described, though not to be regarded as an experiment of a model Phalanx, is in the highest degree interesting, as showing the advantages of combined industry and social union. Go forward, strong-hearted brothers, assured that every step you take is bringing us nearer the wished-for goal, when the redemption of humanity shall be fully realized. This is what they say: "'We are getting along well. Our Pittsburg friends have lately sent us two thousand dollars, and are to send more during the winter. We are also adding to our numbers. We have an abundance to eat of our own raising; but aside from this, our mill brings sufficient for our support. We have put up a power-loom at our upper works, and are about prepared to produce thereby sufficient to clothe us. Hence, by uniting capital, labor and skill in two mechanical branches, we secure, with ordinary industry, what no equal number of families in civilization can be said to possess entirely, a sufficient amount of food and clothing. And these are items which practical men know how to value; and we know how to value them too, because they are the results of our own efforts. "'We have two schools, one belonging to the district, that is, a State or public school, and the other to the Phalanx, both taught by persons who are members. In the latter school, among other improvements, there are classes in Phonography and Phonotopy, learning the new systems embraced by the writing and printing reformation, the progress of which is highly satisfactory. "'On the whole, we feel that our success is ensured beyond an earthly doubt. Not but that we have yet to pass through trying scenes. But we have encountered so many difficulties that we are not apprehensive but that we are prepared to meet others equally as great. Indeed we feel that if we had known at the commencement what fiery trials were to surround us, we should have hesitated to enter upon the enterprise. Now, being fairly in, we will brave it through, and we think you may look to see us grow with each year, adding knowledge to wealth, and industrious habits to religious precepts and elevated sentiments, till we shall be prepared to enter upon the combined order, and, with our co-partners, who are now breast and heart with us, lead the kingdoms of the earth into the regions of light, liberty and love.'" [From the _Pittsburg Post_, January 1847.] "TRUMBULL PHALANX.--Several Pittsburgers have joined the above-named Association: and a sufficient amount of money has been contributed to place it upon a solid foundation. It is pecuniarily independent, as we are informed; and the members are full of faith in complete success. Several letters have been received by persons in this city from resident members of the Phalanx. We should like to have one of them for publication, to show the feelings which pervade those who are working out the problem of social unity. They write in substance, 'The Association is prosperous, and we are all happy.' "The Trumbull Phalanx is now in its third or fourth year, and so far has met with but few of the difficulties anticipated by the friends or enemies of the cause. The progress has been slow, it is true, owing to a variety of causes, the principal one of which has been removed, viz.: debt. Much sickness existed on the domain during the last season, but no fears are felt for the future, as to the general health of the neighborhood." [From a letter of C. Woodhouse, July 3, 1847.] "This Phalanx has been in existence nearly four years, and has encountered many difficulties and submitted to many privations. Difficulties still exist and privations are not now few or small; but so great is the change for the better in less than four years, that they are fully impressed with the promise of success. At no time, indeed, have they met with as many difficulties as the lonely settler in a new country meets with; for in all their poverty they have been in pleasant company and have aided one another. They are now surrounded by all the necessaries and some of the comforts of life. Each family has a convenient dwelling, and so far as I can judge from a short visit, they enjoy the good of their labor, with no one to molest or make them afraid. Several branches of mechanical industry are carried on there, but agriculture is the staff on which they principally lean. Their land is very good, and of their thousand acres, over three hundred are improved. Their stock--horses, cattle and cows--look very well, as the farmers say. The improvements and condition of the domain bespeak thrift, industry and practical skill. The Trumbullites are workers. I saw no dainty-fingered theorists there. When such do come, I am informed, they do not stay long. Work is the order of the day. They would be glad of more leisure; but at this stage of the enterprise they put forth all their powers to redeem themselves from debt, and make such improvements as will conduce to this end and at the same time add to their comforts. Not a cent is expended in display or for knicknacks. The President lives in a log house and drives team on the business of the Association. Whatever politicians may say to the contrary, I think he is the only veritable 'log-cabin President' the whole land can show." [From a letter of the Women of the Trumbull Phalanx to the Women of the Boston Union of Associationists, July 15, 1847.] "It is plain that our efforts must be different from yours. Yours is the part to arouse the idle and indifferent by your conversation, and by contributing funds to sustain and aid publications. Ours is the part to organize ourselves in all the affairs of life, in the best manner that our imperfect institution will permit; and, not least, to have faith in our own efforts. In this last particular we are sometimes deficient, for it is impossible for us with our imperfect and limited capacities, clearly and fully to foresee what faith and confidence in God's providence can accomplish. We have been brought hither through doubts and dangers, and through the shadows of the future we have no guide save where duty points the way. "Our trials lie in the commonest walks. To forego conveniences, to live poorly, dress homely, to listen calmly, reply mildly, and wait patiently, are what we must become familiar with. True, these are requirements by no means uncommon; but imperfect beings like ourselves are apt to imagine that they alone are called upon to endure. Yet, perhaps, we enjoy no less than the most of our sex; nay, we are in truth, sisters the world round; if one suffers, all suffer, no matter whether she tends her husband's dogs amidst the Polar snows, or mounts her consort's funeral pile upon the banks of the Ganges. Together we weep, together we rejoice. We rise, we fall together. "It would afford us much pleasure could we be associated together. Could all the women fitted to engage in Social Reform be located on one domain, one can not imagine the immense changes that would ensue. We pray that we, or at least our children, may live to see the day when kindred souls shall be permitted to coöperate in a sphere sufficiently extensive to call forth all our powers." (From a letter of N.C. Meeker, August 11, 1847.) "Our progress and prosperity are still continued. By this we only mean that whatever we secure is by overcoming many difficulties. Our triumphs, humble though they be, are achieved in the same manner that the poet or the sculptor or the chemist achieves his, by labor, by application; and we believe that to produce the most useful and beautiful things, the most labor and pains are necessary. "Our present difficulties are, first, want of a sufficient number to enable us to establish independent groups, as Fourier has laid down. The present arrangement is as though we were all in one group; what is earned by the body is divided among individuals according to the amount of labor expended by each. Were our branches of business fewer (for we carry on almost every branch of industry necessary to support us) we could organize with less danger of interruption, which at present must be incessant; yet, at the same time there would be less choice of employment. Our number is about two hundred and fifty, and that of laboring men not far from fifty. This want of a greater number is by no means a serious difficulty; still, one we wish were corrected by an addition of scientific and industrious men, with some capital. "Again, when the season is wet, we have the fever and ague among us to some extent, though previous to our locating here the place was healthy. Whether it will be healthy in future we of course can not determine, but see no reason why it may not. The ague is by no means dangerous, but it is quite disagreeable, and during its continuance, is quite discouraging. Upon the approach of cold weather it disappears, and we recover, feeling as strong and hopeful as ever. Other diseases do not visit us, and the mortality of the place is low, averaging thus far, almost four years, less than two annually, and these were children. We are convinced, however, that all cause of the ague may be removed by a little outlay, which of course we shall make. "These are our chief incumbrances at present; others have existed equally discouraging, and have been surmounted. The time was when our very existence for a period longer than a few months, was exceedingly doubtful. Two or three heavy payments remained due, and our creditor was pressing. Now we shall not owe him a cent till next April. By the assistance of our Pittsburg friends and Mr. Van Amringe, we have been put in this situation. About half of our debt of about $7,000 is paid. All honor to Englishmen (William Bayle in particular), who have thus set an example to the 'sons of '76.'" [From a report of a Socialist Convention at Boston, October 1847.] "The condition and prospects of the experiments now in progress in this country, especially the North American, Trumbull and Wisconsin Phalanxes, were discussed. Mr. Cooke has lately visited all these Associations, and brings back a large amount of interesting information. The situation of the North American is decidedly hopeful; as to the other two, his impressions were of a less sanguine tone than letters which have been recently published in the _Harbinger_ and _Tribune_. Yet it is not time to despair." The reader will hardly be prepared for the next news we have about the Trumbull; but we have seen before that Associations are apt to take sudden turns. [Letter to the _Harbinger_ announcing failure.] "_Braceville, Ohio, December 3, 1847._ _To the Editors of the Harbinger_, "GENTLEMEN: You and your readers have no doubt heard before this of the dissolution of this Association, and the report is but too true; we have fallen. But we wish civilization to know that in our fall we have not broken our necks. We have indeed caught a few pretty bad scratches; but all our limbs are yet sound, and we mean to pick ourselves up again. We will try and try again. The infant has to fall several times before he can walk; but that does not discourage him, and he succeeds; nor shall we be so easily discouraged. "Some errors, not intentional though fatal, have been committed here; we see them now, and will endeavor to avoid them. I believe that it may be said of us with truth, that our failure is a triumph. Our fervent love for Association is not quenched; we are not dispersed; we are not discouraged; we are not even scared. We know our own position. What we have done we have done deliberately and intentionally, and we think we know also what we have to do. There are, however, difficulties in our way: we are aware of them. We may not succeed in reörganizing here as we wish to do; but if we fail, we will try elsewhere. There is yet room in this western world. We will first offer ourselves, our experience, our energies, and whatever means are left us, to our sister Associations. We think we are worth accepting; but if they have the inhumanity to refuse, we will try to build a new hive somewhere else, in the woods or on the prairies. God will not drive us from his own earth. He has lent it to all men; and we are men, and men of good intentions, of no sinister motives. Our rights are as good in his eyes as those of our brothers. "We do not deem it necessary here to give a detailed account of our affairs and circumstances. It will be sufficient to say that, however unfavorable they may be at present, we do not consider our position as desperate. We think we know the remedy; and we intend to use our best exertions to effect a cure. It may be proper also to state that we have not in any manner infringed our charter. "I do not write in an official capacity, but I am authorized to say, gentlemen, that if you can conveniently, and will, as soon as practicable, give this communication an insertion in the _Harbinger_, you will serve the cause, and oblige your brothers of the late Trumbull Phalanx. G.M.M." After this decease, an attempt was made to resuscitate the Association; as will be seen in the following paragraphs: [From a letter in the _Harbinger_, May 27, 1848.] "With improvident philanthropy, the Phalanx had admitted too indiscriminately; so that the society was rather an asylum for the needy, sick and disabled, than a nucleus of efficient members, carrying out with all their powers and energies, a system on which they honestly rely for restoring their race to elevation and happiness. They also had accepted unprofitable capital, producing absolutely nothing, upon which they were paying interest upon interest. All this weighed most heavily on the efficient members. They made up their minds to break up altogether. "A new society has been organized, which has bought at auction, and very low, the domain with all its improvements. We, the new society, purpose to work on the following foundation: Our object is to try the system of Fourier, so far as it is in our power, with our limited means, etc." [From a letter in the _Harbinger_, July 15, 1848.] "With respect to our little society here, we wish at present to say only that it is going on with alacrity and great hopes of success. We are prepared for a few additional members with the requisite qualifications; but we do not think it expedient to do or say much to induce any body to come on until we see how we shall fare through what is called the sickly season. To the present date, however, we may sum up our condition in these three words: We are healthy, busy and happy." This is the last we find about the new organization. So we conclude it soon passed away. As it is best to hear all sides, we will conclude this account with some extracts from a grumbling letter, which we find among Macdonald's manuscripts. [Account by a Malcontent.] "A great portion of the land was swampy, so much so that it could not be cultivated. It laid low, and had a creek running through it, which at times overflowed, and caused a great deal of sickness to the inhabitants of the place. The disease was mostly fever and ague; and this was so bad, that three-fourths of the people, both old and young, were shaking with it for months together. Through the public prints, persons favorable to the Association were invited to join, which had the effect of drawing many of the usual mixed characters from various parts of the country. Some came with the idea that they could live in idleness at the expense of the purchasers of the estate, and these ideas they practically carried out; whilst others came with good hearts for the cause. There were one or two designing persons, who came with no other intent than to push themselves into situations in which they could impose upon their fellow members; and this, to a certain extent, they succeeded in doing. "When the people first assembled, there was not sufficient house room to accommodate them, and they were huddled together like brutes; but they built some log cabins, and then tried to establish some kind of order, by rules and regulations. One of their laws was, that all persons before becoming members must pay twenty-five dollars each. Some did pay this, but the majority had not the money to pay. I think most persons came there for a mere shift. Their poverty and their quarrelling about what they called religion (for there were many notions about which was the right way to heaven), were great drawbacks to success. Nearly all the business was carried on by barter, there was so little money. Labor was counted by the hour, and was booked to each individual. Booking was about all the pay they ever got. At the breaking up, some of the members had due to them for labor and stock, five or six hundred dollars; and some of them did not receive as many cents. "To give an idea of the state of things, I may mention that there was a shrewd Yankee there, who established a boarding-house and pretended to accommodate boarders at very reasonable charges. He was poor, but he made many shifts to get something for his boarders to eat, though it was but very little. There was seldom any butter, cheese, or animal food upon the table, and what he called coffee was made of burnt bread. He had no bedding for the boarders; they had to provide it for themselves if they could; if not, they had to sleep on the floor. For this board he charged $1.62 per week, while it was proved that the cost per week for each individual was not more than twenty cents. This man professed to be a doctor, (though I believe he really knew no more of medicine than any other person there); and as there were so many persons sick with the ague, he got plenty of work. Previous to the breaking up, he brought in his bills to the patients (whom he had never benefited), charging them from ten to thirty dollars each, and some even higher. But the people being very poor, he did not succeed in recovering much of what he called his 'just dues;' though by threats of the law he scared some of them out of a trifle. There was another keen fellow, a preacher and lawyer, who got into office as secretary and treasurer, and kept the accounts. When there was any money he had the management of it; and I believe he knew perfectly well how to use it for his own advantage, which many of the members felt to their sorrow. The property was supposed to have been held by stockholders. Those who had the management of things know best how it was finally disposed of. For my part I think this was the most unsatisfactory experiment attempted in the West. "J.M., member of the Trumbull Phalanx." What a story of passion and suffering can be traced in this broken material! Study it. Think of the great hope at the beginning; the heroism of the long struggle; the bitterness of the end. This human group was made up of husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters, friends and lovers, and had two hundred hearts, longing for blessedness. Plodding on their weary march of life, Association rises before them like the _mirage_ of the desert. They see in the vague distance, magnificent palaces, green fields, golden harvests, sparkling fountains, abundance of rest and romance; in one word, HOME--which also is HEAVEN. They rush like the thirsty caravan to realize their vision. And now the scene changes. Instead of reaching palaces, they find themselves huddled together in loose sheds--thirty-five families trying to live in dwellings built for one. They left the world to escape from want and care and temptation; and behold, these hungry wolves follow them in fiercer packs than ever. The gloom of debt is over them from the beginning. Again and again they are on the brink of bankruptcy. It is a constant question and doubt whether they will "SUCCEED," which means, whether they will barely keep soul and body together, and pacify their creditors. But they cheer one another on. "They _must_ succeed; they _will_ succeed; they _are_ already succeeding!" These words they say over and over to themselves, and shout them to the public. Still debt hangs over them. They get a subsidy from outside friends. But the deficit increases. Meanwhile disease persecutes them. All through the sultry months which should have been their working time, they lie idle in their loose sheds, or where they can find a place, sweating and shivering in misery and despair. Human parasites gather about them, like vultures scenting prey from afar. Their own passions torment them. They are cursed with suspicion and the evil eye. They quarrel about religion. They quarrel about their food. They dispute about carrying out their principles. Eight or ten families desert. The rest worry on through the long years. Foes watch them with cruel exultation. Friends shout to them, "Hold on a little longer!" They hold on just as long as they can, insisting that they are successful, or are just going to be, till the last. Then comes the "break up;" and who can tell the agonies of that great corporate death! If the reader is willing to peer into the darkest depths of this suffering, let him read again and consider well that suppressed wail of the women where they speak of the "polar snows" and the "funeral pile;" and let him think of all that is meant when the men say, "If we had known at the commencement what fiery trials were to surround us, we should have hesitated to enter on the enterprise. _But now being fairly in, we will brave it_ _through!_" See how pathetically these soldiers of despair, with defeat in full view, offer themselves to other Associations, and take comfort in the assurance that God will not drive them from the earth! See how the heroes of the "forlorn hope," after defeat has come, turn again and reörganize, refusing to surrender! The end came at last, but left no record. This is not comedy, but direst tragedy. God forbid that we should ridicule it, or think of it with any feeling but saddest sympathy. We ourselves are thoroughly acquainted with these heights and depths. These men and women seem to us like brothers and sisters. We could easily weep with them and for them, if it would do any good. But the better way is to learn what such sufferings teach, and hasten to find and show the true path, which these pilgrims missed; that so their illusions may not be repeated forever. CHAPTER XXIX. THE OHIO PHALANX. This Association, originally called the American Phalanx, commenced with a very ambitious programme and flattering prospects; but it did not last so long as many of its contemporaries. It belonged to the Pittsburg group of experiments. The founder of it was E.P. Grant. Mr. Van Amringe was one of its leaders, whom we saw busy at the Trumbull. The first announcement of it we find in the third number of the _Phalanx_, as follows: [From the _Phalanx_, December 5, 1843.] "GRAND MOVEMENT IN THE WEST.--The friends of Association in Ohio and other portions of the West, have undertaken the organization of a Phalanx upon quite an extended scale. They have secured a magnificent tract of land on the Ohio, have framed a constitution, and taken preliminary steps to make an early commencement. The projectors say: "We feel pleasure in announcing that the American Phalanx has contracted for about two thousand acres of land in Belmont County, Ohio, known as the Pultney farm, lying along the Ohio river, seven or eight miles below Wheeling; and that sufficient means are already pledged to remove all doubts as to the formation of an Association, as soon as the domain can be prepared for the reception of the members. The land has been purchased of Col. J.S. Shriver, of Wheeling, Virginia, at thirty dollars per acre, payable at the pleasure of the Association, in sums not less than $5,000. The payment of six per cent. interest semi-annually, is secured by a lien on the land. "The tract selected is two and a-half miles in length from north to south, and of somewhat irregular breadth, by reason of the curvatures of the Ohio river, which forms its eastern boundary. It contains six hundred acres of bottom land, all cleared and under cultivation; the residue is hill land of a fertility truly surprising and indeed incredible to persons unacquainted with the hills of that particular neighborhood. Of the hill lands, about two hundred and fifty acres are cleared, and about three hundred acres more have been partially cleared, so as to answer imperfectly for sheep pasture. The residue is for the most part well-timbered. "There are upon the premises two frame dwelling-houses, and ten log houses, mostly with shingle roofs; none of them, however, are of much value, except for temporary purposes. "The domain is singularly beautiful, as well as fertile; and when it is considered, in connection with the advantages already enumerated, that it is situated on one of the greatest thoroughfares in the world, the charming Ohio, along which from six to ten steamboats pass every day for eight or nine months in the year; that it is immediately accessible to several large markets, and a multitude of small ones; and that it is within seven miles of that great public improvement, the National Road, leading through the heart of the Western States, we think we are authorized to affirm that the broad territory of our country furnishes but few localities more favorable for an experiment in Association, than that which has been secured by the American Phalanx. "From eighty to one hundred laborers are expected to be upon the ground early in the spring, and it is hoped that in the fall a magnificent edifice or Phalanstery, on Fourier's plan, will be commenced, and will progress rapidly, until it shall be of sufficient extent to accommodate one hundred families. "Our object can not be more intelligibly explained than by stating that it is proposed to organize an industrial army, which, instead of ravaging and desolating the earth, like the armies of civilization, shall clothe it luxuriantly and beautifully with supplies for human wants; to distribute this army into platoons, companies, battalions, regiments, in which promotion and rewards shall depend, not upon success in spreading ruin and woe, but upon energy and efficiency in diffusing comfort and happiness; in short, to invest labor the creator, with the dignity which has so long impiously crowned labor the destroyer and the murderer, so that men shall vie with each other, not in devastation and carnage, but in usefulness to the race." Applicants for admission or stock were referred to E.P. Grant, A. Brisbane, H. Greeley and others. [From the _Phalanx_, February 5, 1844.] "E.P. Grant, Esq., of Canton, Ohio, a gentleman of high standing, superior talents, and indefatigable energy, who is at the head of the movement to establish the American Phalanx, which is to be located on the banks of the beautiful Ohio, informs us by letter, that 'the prospect is truly cheering; even that greatest of wants, capital, is likely to be abundantly supplied. There will indeed be some deficiency during the ensuing spring and summer; but the amount already pledged to be paid by the end of the first year, is not, I think, less than $40,000, and by the end of the second year, probably not less than $100,000; and these amounts, from present appearances, can be almost indefinitely increased. Besides, the proposed associates are devoted and determined, resenting the intimation of possible failure, as a reflection unworthy of their zeal.'" [From the _Phalanx_, March 1, 1844.] "The Ohio Phalanx (heretofore called the American), is now definitely constituted, and the first pioneers are already upon the domain. More will follow in a few days to assist in making preliminary preparations. A larger company will be added in March, and by the end of May the Phalanx is expected to consist of 120 resident members, of whom the greater part will be adult males. They will be received from time to time as rapidly as temporary accommodations can be provided. The prospects of the Phalanx are cheering beyond the most sanguine anticipations of its friends. E.P. GRANT." [From the _Phalanx_, July 13, 1844.] "Our friends of the Ohio Phalanx appear to have celebrated the Fourth of July with much hilarity and enthusiasm. About ten o'clock the members of the Association with their guests, were seated beneath the shade of spreading trees, near the dwelling; when Mr. Grant, the President, announced briefly the object of the assemblage and the order to be observed, which was, first, prayer by Dr. Rawson, then an address by Mr. Van Amringe, in which the present condition of society, its inevitable tendencies and results, were contrasted with the social system as delineated by Fourier. It is not doing full justice to the orator to say merely that his address was interesting and able. It was lucid, cogent, religious and highly impressive. This portion of the festival was closed by prayer and benediction by Rev. J.P. Stewart, and adjournment for dinner. After a good and plentiful repast, the social party resumed their seats for the purpose of hearing (rather than drinking) toasts and whatsoever might be said thereupon." The topics of the regular toasts were, _The day we celebrate_; _The memory of Fourier_; _The Associationists of Pittsburg_; and so on through a long string. The volunteer toasters liberally complimented each other and the socialistic leaders generally, not forgetting Horace Greeley. Somebody in the name of the Phalanx gave the following: "_The Bible_, the book of languages, the book of ideas, the book of life. May its pages be the delight of Associationists, and its precepts practiced by the whole world." Our next quotation hints that something like a dissolution and reörganization had taken place. [From the _Phalanx_, May 3, 1845.] "We notice in a recent number of the _Pittsburg Chronicle_, an article from the pen of James D. Thornburg, on the present condition of the Ohio Phalanx, from which it appears that the report of its failure which has gone the rounds of the papers, is premature; and that although it has suffered embarrassment and difficulties from various causes, it is still in operation under new arrangements that authorize the hope of its ultimate success. We know nothing of the internal obstacles of which Mr. Thornburg speaks, and have no means of forming an opinion on the merits of the questions which, it would seem, have given rise to divided counsels and inefficient action. For the founder of the Ohio Phalanx, E.P. Grant, we cherish the most unqualified respect, believing him to be fitted as few men are, by his talents, energy and scientific knowledge, for the station of leader of the great enterprise, which demands no less courage and practical vigor, than wisdom and magnanimity. "We learn from Mr. Thornburg's statement that to those who chose to leave the Phalanx, it was proposed to give thirty-three per cent. on their investments, which is all they could be entitled to, in case of a forfeiture of the title to the domain, in which case all the improvements, buildings, crops in ground, etc., would be a total loss to the members. But there is no depreciation in the stock, when these improvements are estimated. The rent has been reduced to one-half the former amount. The proprietor is expected to furnish a large number of sheep, the profits of which, it is believed, will be nearly or quite sufficient to pay the rent. At the end of two years, $30,000 in bonds, mortgages, etc., is to be raised, for which the Phalanx will receive a fee-simple title to the domain. A large share of the balance will be invested in stock, and whatever may remain will be apportioned in payments at two and a-half per cent. interest, and fixed at a date so remote that no difficulty will result. There are buildings on the domain sufficient for the accommodation of forty families, in addition to a number of rooms suitable for single persons. The movable property on the domain is at present worth three thousand dollars. "In view of all the facts in the case, as set forth by Mr. Thornburg, we see no reason to dissent from the conclusion which he unhesitatingly expresses, that the future success of the Phalanx is certain. We trust that we have not been inspired with too flattering hopes by the earnestness of our wishes. For we acknowledge that we have always regarded the magnificent material resources of this Phalanx with the brightest anticipations; we have looked to it with confiding trust, for the commencement of a model Association; and we can not now permit ourselves to believe that any disastrous circumstance will prevent the realization of the high hopes which prompted its founders to engage in their glorious enterprise. "The causes of difficulty in the Ohio Phalanx, as stated in the article before us, are as follows: Want of experience; too much enthusiasm; unproductive members; want of means. These causes must always produce difficulty and discouragement; and at the same time, can scarcely be avoided in the commencement of every attempt at Association. "The harmonies of the combined order are not to be arrived at in a day or a year. Even with the noblest intentions, great mistakes in the beginning are inevitable, and many obstacles of a formidable character are incident to the very nature of the undertaking. A want of sufficient means must cripple the most strenuous industry. Ample capital is essential for a complete organization, for the necessary machinery and fixtures, for the ordinary conveniences, to say nothing of the elegancies of the household order; and this in the commencement can scarcely ever be obtained. Restriction, retrenchment, more or less confusion, are the necessary consequences; and these in their turn beget a spirit of impatience and discontent in all but the heroic; and few men are heroes. The transition from the compulsory industry of civilization to the voluntary, but not yet attractive, industry of Association, is not favorable to the highest industrial effects. Men who have been accustomed to shirk labor under the feeling that they had poor pay for hard work, will not be transformed suddenly into kings of industry by the atmosphere of a Phalanx. There will be more or less loafing, a good deal of exertion unwisely applied, a certain waste of strength in random and unsystematic efforts, and a want of the business-like precision and force which makes every blow tell, and tell in the right place. Under these circumstances many will grow uneasy, at length become discouraged, and perhaps prove false to their early love. But all these, we are fully persuaded, are merely temporary evils. They will soon pass away. They are like the thin mists of the valley, which precede, but do not prevent, the rising of the sun. The principles of Association are founded on the eternal laws of justice and truth; they present the only remedy for the appalling confusion and discord of the present social state; they are capable of being carried into practice by just such men and women as we daily meet in the usual walks of life; and as firmly as we believe in a Universal Providence, so sure we are that their practical accomplishment is destined to bless humanity with ages of abundance, harmony, and joy, surpassing the most enthusiastic dream." [Editorial in the _Harbinger_, June, 14, 1845.] "We learn from a personal interview with Mr. Thornburg, whose letter on the Ohio Phalanx was alluded to in a recent number of the _Phalanx_, that the affairs of that Association wear a very promising aspect, and that there can be no reasonable doubt of its success. He gives a very favorable description of the soil and general resources of the domain, and from all that we have learned of its character, we believe there are few localities at the West better adapted for the purposes of an experimental Association on a large scale. We sincerely hope that our friends in that vicinity will concentrate their efforts on the Ohio Phalanx, and not attempt to multiply Associations, which, without abundant capital and devoted and experienced men, will, almost to a certainty, prove unsuccessful. The true policy for all friends of Associative movements, is to combine their resources, and give an example of a well-organized Phalanx, in complete and harmonic operation. This will do more for the cause than any announcement of theories, however sound and eloquent, or ten thousand abortive attempts begun in enthusiasm and forsaken in despair." [From the correspondence of the _Harbinger_, July 19, 1845, announcing the final dissolution.] "On the 24th of June last, the Ohio Phalanx again dissolved. The reason is the want of funds. Since the former dissolution they have obtained no accession of numbers or capital worth considering. The members, I presume, will now disperse. They all retain, I believe, their sentiments in favor of Association; but they have not the means to go on." Macdonald contributes the following summary, to close the account: [From the Journal of a Resident Member of the Ohio Phalanx.] "At the commencement of the experiment there was general good-humor among the members. There seemed to be plenty of means, and there was much profusion and waste. There was no visible organization according to Fourier, most of the members being inexperienced in Association. They were too much crowded together, had no school nor reading-room, and the younger members, as might be expected, were at first somewhat unruly. The character of the Association had more of a sedate and religious tone, than a lively or social one. There was too much discussion about Christian union, etc., and too little practical industry and business talent. No weekly or monthly accounts were rendered. "About ten months after the commencement of the Association, a partial scarcity of provisions took place, and other difficulties occurred, which may in part be attributed to neglect in keeping the accounts. At this juncture Mr. Van Amringe started on a lecturing tour in aid of the Association; and the Phalanx had a meeting at which Mr. Grant, who was then regent, stated that between $7,000 and $8,000 had been expended since they came together; but no accounts were shown giving the particulars of this expenditure. From the difficult position in which the Phalanx was placed, Mr. Grant advised the breaking-up of the concern, which was agreed to, with two or three dissentients. [This was probably the first dissolution, referred to in a previous extract from the _Harbinger_.] "On December 26 a new constitution was proposed which caused much discontent and confusion; and with the commencement of 1845 more disagreements took place, some in relation to the social amusements of the people, and some regarding the debts of the Phalanx, the empty treasury, the depreciation of stock, Mr. Van Amringe's possession of the lease of the property, and the bad prospect there was for raising the interest upon the cost of the domain, which was about $4,140, or six per cent. on $69,000, the price of twenty-two hundred acres. "On January 20th, 1845, another attempt at re-organization was made by persons who had full confidence in the management of Mr. Grant, and on February 28th still another re-organization was considered. On March 10th a general meeting of the Phalanx took place. Three constitutions were read, and the third (attributed, I believe, to Mr. Van Amringe), was adopted by a majority of one. After this there was a meeting of the minority, and the constitution of Mr. Grant was adopted with some slight alterations. Difficulties now took place between the two parties, which led to a suit at law by one of the members against the Ohio Phalanx. [These fluctuations remind us of the experience of New Harmony in its last days.] "In such manner did the Association progress until August 27, 1845, when it was whispered about, that the Phalanx was defunct, although no notification to that effect was given to the members. Colonel Shriver, who held the mortgage on the property, took alarm at the state of affairs, and placed an agent on the premises to look after his interests. This agent employed persons to work the farm, and the members had to shift for themselves as best they could. Col. S. proposed an assignment of the whole property over to him, requiring entire possession by the 1st of October. This was assented to, though the value of the property was more than enough to cover every claim. "On September 9th advertisements were issued for the public sale of the whole property, and on the 17th of that month the sale took place before two or three hundred persons. After this the members dispersed, and the Ohio Phalanx was at an end. The lease of the property had been made out in the name of Mr. Grant for the Phalanx. It was afterward given up to him by Mr. Van Amringe, who had possession of it, and by Mr. Grant was returned to Colonel Shriver. "Much space might be occupied in endeavoring to show the right and the wrong of these parties and proceedings, which to the reader would be quite unprofitable. The broad results we have before us, viz., that certain supposed-to-be great and important principles were tried in practice, and through a variety of causes failed. The most important causes of failure were said to be the deficiency of wealth, wisdom, and goodness; or if not these, the fallacy of the principles." CHAPTER XXX. THE CLERMONT PHALANX. This Association originated in Cincinnati. An enthusiastic convention of Socialists was held in that city on the 22d of February, 1844, at which interesting letters were read from Horace Greeley, Albert Brisbane, and Wm. H. Channing, and much discussion of various practical projects ensued. A committee was appointed to find a suitable domain; and at a second meeting on the 14th of March, the society adopted a constitution, elected officers, and opened books for subscription of stock. Mr. Wade Loofbourrow, a gentleman of capital and enterprise, took the lead in these proceedings, and was chosen president of the future Phalanx. A domain of nine hundred acres was soon selected and purchased on the banks of the Ohio, in Clermont County, about thirty miles above Cincinnati. On the 9th of May a large party of the members proceeded from Cincinnati on a steamer chartered for the occasion, to take possession of the domain with appropriate ceremonies, and leave a pioneer band to commence operations. Macdonald accompanied this party, and gives the following account of the excursion: "There were about one hundred and thirty of us. The weather was beautiful, but cool, and the scenery on the river was splendid in its spring dress. The various parties brought their provisions with them, and toward noon the whole of it was collected and spread upon the table by the waiters, for all to have an equal chance. But alas for equality! On the meal being ready, a rush was made into the cabin, and in a few minutes all the seats were filled. In a few minutes more the provisions had all disappeared, and many persons who were not in the first rush, had to go hungry. I lost my dinner that day; but improved the opportunity to observe and criticise the ferocity of the Fourieristic appetite. We reached the domain about two o'clock P.M., and marched on shore in procession, with a band of music in front, leading the way up a road cut in the high clay bank; and then formed a mass meeting, at which we had praying, music and speech-making. I strolled out with a friend and examined the purchase, and we came to the conclusion that it was a splendid domain. A strip of rich bottom-land, about a quarter of a mile wide, was backed by gently rolling hills, well timbered all over. Nine or ten acres were cleared, sufficient for present use. Here then was all that could be desired, hill and plain, rich soil, fine scenery, plenty of first-rate timber, a maple-sugar camp, a good commercial situation, convenient to the best market in the West, with a river running past that would float any kind of boat or raft; and with steamboats passing and repassing at all hours of the day and night, to convey passengers or goods to any point between New Orleans and Pittsburg. Here was wood for fuel, clay and stone to make habitations, and a rich soil to grow food. What more could be asked from nature? Yet, how soon all this was found insufficient! "The land was obtained on credit; the price was $20,000. One thousand was to be paid down, and the rest in installments at stated periods. The first installment was paid; enthusiasm triumphed; and now for the beginning! On my return to the landing, I found a band of sturdy men commencing operations as pioneers. They were clearing a portion of the wood away with their axes, and preparing for building temporary houses, the materials for which they brought with them. A temporary tent was put up, and it would surprise any one to hear how many things were going to be done. "We left the domain on our return at about five P.M., and I noticed that the president, Mr. Loofbourrow, and the secretary, Mr. Green, remained with the workmen. There were about a dozen persons left, consisting, I believe, of carpenters, choppers and shoemakers. They all seemed in good spirits, and cheered merrily on our departure." A second similar excursion of Socialists from Cincinnati came off on the 4th of July following, which also Macdonald attended, and reports as follows: "We left Cincinnati triumphantly to the sound of martial music, and took our journey up the river in fine spirits, the young people dancing in the cabin as we proceeded. We arrived at the Clermont Phalanx about one o'clock. On landing, we formed a procession and marched to a new frame building, which was being erected for a mill. Here an oration was delivered by a Mr. Whitly, who, I noticed, had the Bible open before him. After this we formed a procession again and marched to a lot of rough tables enclosed within a line of ropes, where we stood and took a cold collation. After this the folks enjoyed themselves with music and dancing, and I took a walk about the place to see what progress had been made since my last visit. The frame building before mentioned was the only one in actual progress. A steam-boiler had been obtained, and preparations had been made to build other houses. A temporary house had been erected to accommodate the families then on the domain, amounting as I was informed, to about one hundred and twenty persons. This building was made exactly in the manner of the cabin of a Western steamboat; i.e., there was one long narrow room the length of the house, and little rooms like state-rooms arranged on either side. Each little room had one little window, like a port-hole; and was intended to accommodate a man and his wife, or two single men temporarily. It was at once apparent that the persons living there were in circumstances inferior to what they had been used to; and were enduring it well, while the enthusiastic spirit held out. But it seldom lasts long. It is said that people will endure these deprivations for the sake of what is soon to come. But experience shows that the endurance is generally brief, and that if they are able, they soon return to the circumstances to which they have been accustomed. They either find that their patience is insufficient for the task, or that being in inferior circumstances, _they_ are becoming inferior. Be the cause what it may, the result is nearly always the same. This Association had been on the ground only a few months; but I was told that disagreements had already commenced. The persons brought together were strangers to each other, of many different trades and habits, and discord was the result, as might have been anticipated. From one of the shoemakers I gained considerable information as to their state and prospects. In the afternoon we returned to the city." [From the _Phalanx_, May 3, 1845.] "We are glad to learn by the following notice, taken from a Cincinnati paper, that the _Clermont Phalanx_ still lives, and is in a fair way of going on successfully. We have received no account of it lately, and as the last that we had was not very flattering in respect to its pecuniary condition, we should not have been surprised to hear of its dissolution. The indiscretion of starting Associations without sufficient means and a proper selection of persons, has been shown to be disastrous in some other cases, and that we should fear for the fate of this one was quite natural. But if our Clermont friends can, by their devotion, energy and self-sacrificing spirit, overcome the trying difficulties of a pioneer state, rude and imperfect as it must be, they will deserve and will receive an abundant reward. We bid them God speed! They say: "'The pioneer band, with their friends, took possession of the domain on the 9th day of May last year, since which time we have been engaged in cultivating our land, clearing away the forest, and erecting buildings of various kinds for the use of the Phalanx. "'The amount of capital stock paid in is about $10,000; $3,000 of which has been paid for the domain. We have a stock of cattle, hogs and sheep, and sufficient teams and agricultural utensils of various kinds; also a steam saw- and grist-mill. Shoe, brush, tin and tailor's shops are in active operation. There are on the ground thirty-five able-bodied men, with a sufficient number of women and children. "'When we first entered on our domain, there were no buildings of any description, except three log-cabins, which were occupied by tenants. We have since erected a building for a saw- and grist-mill, a frame building forty by thirty feet, two stories high, and another, one story high, eighty by thirty-six feet, and one thirty-six by thirty feet, together with a kitchen, wash-house, etc. These buildings are of course slightly built, being temporary. We have also commenced a brick building eighty by thirty feet, three stories high, which is ready for the roof; all the timbers are sawed for that purpose; and we expect soon to put them on. "'There are about two thousand cords of wood chopped, part of which is on the bank of the river. There are thirty acres of wheat in the ground, in excellent condition, and it is intended to put in good spring crops. We are also preparing to plant large orchards this spring, Mr. A.H. Ernst having made us the noble donation of one thousand selected fruit-trees.'" [From the _Harbinger_, June 14, 1845.] "George Sampson, Secretary of the Phalanx, says, in an address soliciting funds: 'The members of the Association have the satisfaction of announcing that they have just paid off this year's installment due for their domain, amounting to $4,505, and have also advanced nearly $1,000 on their next year's payment. With increased zeal and confidence we now look forward to certain success.'" [Letter from a member, in the _Harbinger_, October 4, 1845.] "_Clermont Phalanx, September 13, 1845._" "I am pleased to have to inform you, that we are improving since you were among us. We have had an accession of members, three single men, and two with families. One of them attends the saw-mill, which he understands, and the others are carpenters and joiners, whom we much needed. "We are now hard at work on our large brick edifice. We are fitting up a large dining-hall in the rear of it, with kitchen, wash-house, bakery, etc. We think we shall get into it in about five weeks from this time. We now all sit down to the Phalanx table, and have done so for about six weeks, and all goes on harmoniously. How much better is this system than for each family to have their own table, their own dining-room, kitchen, etc. We have admitted several other members, who have not yet arrived. We have applications before us from several members of the Ohio Phalanx. How much I regret that these people were compelled to abandon so beautiful a location as Pultney Bottom, merely for want of money to carry on their operations. Their experience is the same as ours. Though their movement failed, they have become confirmed Associationists; they know that living together is practicable; that the Phalanstery is man's true home; and the only one in which he can enjoy all the blessings of earthly existence, without those evils which flesh is heir to in false civilization." Macdonald concludes his account with the following observations: "The Phalanx continued to progress, or to exist, till the fall of 1846, when it was finally abandoned. During its existence various circumstances concurred to hasten its termination; among them the following: Stock to the amount of $17,000 was subscribed, but scarcely $6,000 of it was ever paid; consequently the Association could not meet its liabilities. An installment of $3,000 had been paid at the purchase of the property, but as the after installments could not be met, a portion of the land had to be sold to pay for the rest. A little jealousy, originating among the female portion of the Community, eventually led to a law-suit on the part of one of the male members against the Association, and caused them some trouble. I have it also on good authority, that an important difficulty took place between Mr. Loofbourrow and the Phalanx, relative to the deed of the property which he held for the Phalanx. "At one time there were about eighty persons on the domain, exclusive of children. They were of various trades and professions, and of various religious beliefs. There was no common religious standard among them. "Some of the friends of this experiment say it failed from two causes, viz., the want of means and the want of men; while others attribute the failure to jealousy and the law-suit, and also to losses they sustained by flood." The fifth volume of the _Harbinger_ has a letter from one who had been a member of the Clermont Phalanx, giving a curious account of certain ghosts of Associations that flitted about the Clermont domain, after the decease of the original Phalanx. Here is what it says: [Letter in the _Harbinger_, October 2, 1847.] "It was well known that our frail bark would strand about a year ago. I need not say from what cause, as the history of one such institution is the history of all; but it is commonly said and believed that it was owing to our large indebtedness on our landed property. Persons of large discriminating powers need not inquire how and why such debt was contracted; suffice it to say, it was done, and under such burden the Clermont Phalanx went down about the first of November, 1856. The property of the concern was delivered up to our esteemed friends, B. Urner and C. Donaldson of Cincinnati, who disposed of the land in such a way as to let it fall into the hands of our friends of the Community school, of which John O. Wattles, John P. Cornell and Hiram S. Gilmore are conspicuous members, and who seem to have all the pecuniary means and talents for carrying on a grand and notable plan of reform. They are now putting up a small Community building, spaciously suited for six families, which for beauty, convenience and durability, probably is not surpassed in the western country. "Of the old members of the Clermont, many returned again to the city where the institution was first started, but a goodly number still remain about the old domain, making various movements for a re-organization. After the break-up, a deep impression seemed to pervade the whole of us that something had been wrong at the outset, in not securing individually a permanent place _to be_, and then procuring the things _to be with_. Had that been the case, a permanent and happy home would have been here for us ere this time. But I will add with gratitude that such is the case now. We have a home! We have a place to be! After various plans for uniting our energies in the purchase of a small tract of land, we were visited during the past summer by Mr. Josiah Warren of New Harmony, Indiana, who laid before us his plan for the use of property, in the rudimental re-organization of society. Mr. Warren is a man of no ordinary talents. In his investigations of human character his experience has been of the most rigorous kind, having begun with Mr. Owen in 1825, and been actively engaged ever since; and being an ingenious mechanic and artist, an inventor of several kinds of printing-presses and a new method of stereotyping and engraving, and an excellent musician, and combining withal a character to do instead of say, gives us confidence in him as a man. His plan was taken up by one of our former members, who has an excellent tract of land lying on the bank of the Ohio river, within less than a mile of the old domain. He has had it surveyed into lots, and sells to such of us as wish to join in the cause. An extensive brick-yard is in operation, stone is being quarried and lumber hauled on the ground, and buildings are about to go up 'with a perfect rush.' Mr. Warren will have a press upon the ground in a few weeks that will tell something. So you see we have a home, we have a place. But by no means is the cause at rest. We call upon philanthropists and all men who have means to invest for the cause of Association, to come and see us, and understand our situation, our means and our intentions. We are ready to receive capital in many forms, but not to hold it as our own. The donor only becomes the lender, and must maintain a strict control over every thing he possesses. [Here Warren's Individual Sovereignty protrudes.] Farms and farming utensils, mechanical tools, etc., can be received only to be used and not abused; and in the language of the 'Poughkeepsie seer,' of whose work we have lately received a number of copies, this all may be done without seriously depreciating the capital or riches of one person in society. On the contrary, it will enrich and advance all to honor and happiness." Here we come upon the trail of two old acquaintances. John O. Wattles was one of the founders of the Prairie Home Community. It seems from the above, that after the failure of that experiment, he set up his tent among the _debris_ of the Clermont Phalanx. And Josiah Warren came from the failure of his New Harmony Time-store to the same favored or haunted spot, and there started his Utopia. These intersections of the wandering Socialists are intricate and interesting. Note also that the ideas of the "Poughkeepsie seer," A.J. Davis, whose star was then only just above the horizon, had found their way to this queer mixture of all sorts of Socialists. CHAPTER XXXI. THE INTEGRAL PHALANX. This Association was founded in the early part of 1845 by John S. Williams of Cincinnati, who is spoken of by the _Phalanx_, as one of the most active adherents of Fourierism in the West. It settled first in Ohio, and afterwards in Illinois. [From the _Ohio State Journal_, June 14, 1845.] "An Association of citizens of Ohio, calling themselves the 'Integral Phalanx,' have recently purchased the valuable property of Mr. Abner Enoch, near Middletown, Butler County, in this State, known by the name of Manchester Mills, twenty-three miles north of Cincinnati, on the Miami Canal. This property embraces about nine hundred acres of the most fertile land in Ohio, or perhaps in the world; six hundred acres of which lie in one body, and are now in the highest state of cultivation, according to the usual mode of farming; three hundred acres in wood and timber land. There are now in operation on the place a large flouring-mill, saw-mill, lath-factory and shingle-cutter, with water-power which is abundantly sufficient to propel all necessary machinery that the company may choose to put in operation. The property is estimated to be worth $75,000, but was sold to the Phalanx for $45,000. As Mr. Enoch is himself an Associationist and a devoted friend of the cause, the terms of sale were made still more favorable, by the subscription, on the part of Mr. Enoch, of $25,000 of purchase money, as capital stock of the Phalanx. Entire possession of the domain is to be given as soon as existing contracts of the proprietor are completed. "Arrangements are already made for the vigorous prosecution of the plans of the Phalanx. A press is to be established on the domain, devoted to the science of industrial Association generally, and the interests of the Integral Phalanx particularly. Competent agents are appointed to lecture on the science, and receive subscriptions of stock and membership; and it is contemplated to erect, as soon as possible, one wing of a unitary edifice, large enough to accommodate sixty-four families, more than one-half of which number are already in the Association." [From the _Harbinger_, July 19, 1845.] "We have received the first number of a new paper, entitled, the '_Plowshare and Pruning-Hook_,' which the Integral Phalanx proposes to publish semi-monthly at the rate of one dollar per year. "The reasons presented for the establishment of the Integral Phalanx are to our minds quite conclusive, and we feel great confidence that its affairs will be managed with the wisdom and fidelity which will insure success. We earnestly desire to witness a fair and full experiment of Association in the West. The physical advantages which are there enjoyed, are far too great to be lost. With the fertility of the soil, the ease with which it is cultivated, the abundance of water-power, and the comparative mildness of the climate, a very few years of judicious and energetic industry would place an Association in the West in possession of immense material resources. They could not fail to accumulate wealth rapidly. They could live in great measure within themselves, without being compelled to sustain embarrassing relations with civilization; and with the requisite moral qualities and scientific knowledge, the great problem of social harmony would approximate, at least, toward a solution. We trust this will be done by the Integral Phalanx. And to insure this, our friends in Ohio should not be eager to encourage new experiments, but to concentrate their capital and talent, as far as possible, on that Association which bids fair to accomplish the work proposed. The advantages possessed by the Integral Phalanx will be seen from the following statement in their paper: "'To say that our prospects are not good, would be to say what we do not believe; or to say that the Phalanx, so far, is not composed of the right kind of materials, would be to affect a false modesty we desire not to possess. One reason why our materials are superior is, that young Phalanxes generally are known to be in doubtful, difficult circumstances, and therefore the inducement to rush into such movements merely from the pressure of the evils of civilization, without a full convincement of the good of Association, is not so great as it was. We are composed of men whose reflective organs, particularly that of caution, seem to be largely developed. We believe in moving slowly, cautiously, safely; giving our Phalanx time to grow well, that permanence may be the result. The members already enrolled on the books of the _Phalanx_, are, in their individual capacities, the owners of property to an amount exceeding one hundred thousand dollars, clear of all incumbrances; and they are all persons of industrial energy and skill, fully capable of compelling the elements of earth, air and water, to yield them abundant contributions for that harmonic unity with which their souls are deeply inspired. In view of all these advantages we can, with full confidence, invite the accession of numbers and capital, and assure them of a safe investment in the Integral Phalanx.'" [From the _Harbinger_, August 16, 1845.] "We have received the second number of the _Plowshare and Pruning-Hook_. Besides a variety of interesting articles on the subject of Association, this number contains the pledges and rules of the Integral Phalanx, together with an explanation of some parts of the instrument, which have been supposed to be rather obscure. It is an elaborate document, exhibiting the fruits of deep reflection, and aiming at the application of scientific principles to the present condition of Association. We do not feel ourselves called on to criticise it; as every written code for the government of a Phalanx must necessarily be imperfect, of the nature of a compromise, adapted to special exigences, and taking its character, in a great measure, from the local or personal circumstances of the Association for which it is intended. In a complete and orderly arrangement of groups and series, with attractive industry fully organized, with a sufficient variety of character for the harmonious development of the primary inherent passions of our nature, and a corresponding abundance of material resources, we conceive that few written laws would be necessary; everything would be regulated with spontaneous precision by the pervading common sense of the Phalanx; and the law written on the heart, the great and holy law of attraction, would supersede all others. But for this blessed condition the time is not yet. Years may be required, before we shall see the first red streaks of its dawning. Meanwhile, we must make the wisest provisional arrangements in our power. And no constitution recognizing the principles of distributive justice and the laws of universal unity, will be altogether defective; while time and experience will suggest the necessary improvements. "Three attorneys-at-law have left that profession and joined the Integral Phalanx, not, as they say, that they could not make a living, if they would stick to it and do their share of the dirty work, but because by doing so they must sacrifice their consciences, as the practice of the law, in many instances, is but stealing under another name. They are elevating themselves by learning honest and useful trades, so as to become producers in Association. A wise resolution." Here comes a sudden turn in the story of this Phalanx, for which the previous assurances of caution and prosperity had not prepared us, and of which we can find no detailed account. We skip from Ohio to Illinois, with no explanation except the dark hints of trouble, defeat, and partial dissolution, contained in the following document. The Sangamon Phalanx, which seems to have taken in the Integral (or was taken in by it), is one of the Associations of which we have no account either from Macdonald or the Fourier Journals. [From the New York _Tribune_.] "_Home of the Integral Phalanx, } Sangamon Co., Illinois, Oct. 20, 1845._" } "_To the Editor of the New York Tribune_: "We wish to apprise the friends of Association that the Integral Phalanx, having for the space of one year wandered like Noah's dove, finding no resting place for the sole of its foot, has at length found a habitation. A union was formed on the 16th of October inst., between it and the Sangamon Association; or rather the Sangamon Association was merged in the Integral Phalanx; its members having abandoned its name and constitution, and become members of the Integral Phalanx, by placing their signatures to its pledges and rules: the Phalanx adopting their domain as its home. We were defeated, and we now believe, very fortunately for us, in securing a location in Ohio. We have, during the time of our wanderings, gained some experience which we could not otherwise have gained, and without which we were not prepared to settle down upon a location. Our members have been tried. We now know what kind of stuff they are made of. Those who have abandoned us in consequence of our difficulties, were 'with us, but not of us,' and would have been a hindrance to our efforts. They who are continually hankering after the 'flesh-pots of Egypt,' and are ready to abandon the cause upon the first appearance of difficulties, had better stay out of Association. If they will embark in the cause, every Association should pray for difficulties sufficient to drive them out. We need not only clear heads, but also true hearts. We are by no means sorry for the difficulties which we have encountered, and all we fear is that we have not yet had sufficient difficulties to try our souls, and show the principles by which we are actuated. "We have now a domain embracing five hundred and eight acres of as good land as can be found within the limits of Uncle Sam's dominions, fourteen miles southwest from Springfield, the capital of the State, and in what is considered the best county and wealthiest portion of the State. This domain can be extended to any desired limit by purchase of adjoining lands at cheap rates. We have, however, at present, sufficient land for our purposes. It consists of high rolling prairie and woodlands adjoining, which can not be excelled in the State, for beauty of scenery and richness of soil, covered with a luxuriant growth of timber, of almost every description, oak, hickory, sugar-maple, walnut, etc. The land is well watered, lying upon Lick Creek, with springs in abundance, and excellent well-water at the depth of twenty feet. The land, under proper cultivation, will produce one hundred bushels of corn to the acre, and every thing else in proportion. There are five or six comfortable buildings upon the property; and a temporary frame-building, commenced by the Sangamon Association (intended, when finished, to be three hundred and sixty feet by twenty-four), is now being erected for the accommodation of families. "The whole domain is in every particular admirably adapted to the industrial development of the Phalanx. The railroad connecting Springfield with the Illinois river, runs within two miles of the domain. There is a steam saw- and flouring-mill within a few yards of our present eastern boundary, which we can secure on fair terms, and shall purchase, as we shall need it immediately. "But we will not occupy more time with description, as those who feel sufficiently interested, will visit us and examine for themselves. We 'owe no man,' and although we are called infidels by those who know not what constitutes either infidelity or religion, we intend to obey at least this injunction of Holy Writ. The Sangamon Association had been progressing slowly, prudently and cautiously, determined not to involve themselves in pecuniary difficulties; and this was one great inducement to our union with them. We want those whose 'bump of caution' is fully developed. Our knowledge of the progressive movement of other Associations has taught us a lesson which we will try not to forget. We are convinced that we can never succeed with an onerous debt upon us. We trust those who attempt it may be more successful than we could hope to be. "We are also convinced that we can not advance one step toward associative unity, while in a state of anarchy and confusion, and that such a state of things must be avoided. We will therefore not attempt even a unitary subsistence, until we have the number necessary to enable us to organize upon scientific principles, and in accordance with Fourier's admirable plan of industrial organization. The Phalanx will have a store-house, from which all the families can be supplied at wholesale prices, and have it charged to their account. It is better that the different families should remain separate for five years, than to bring them together under circumstances worse than civilization. Such a course will unavoidably create confusion and dissatisfaction, and we venture the assertion that it has done so in every instance where it has been attempted. Under our rules of progress, it will be seen that until we are prepared to organize, we shall go upon the system of hired labor. We pay to each individual a full compensation for all assistance rendered in labor or other services, and charge him a fair price for what he receives from the Phalanx; the balance of earnings, after deducting the amount of what he receives, to be credited to him as stock, to draw interest as capital. To capital, whether it be money or property put in at a fair price, we allow ten per cent. compound interest. This plan will be pursued until our edifice is finished and we have about four hundred persons, ready to form a temporary organization. Fourier teaches us that this number is necessary, and if he has taught the truth of the science, it is worse than folly to pursue a course contrary to his instructions. If there is any one who understands the science better than Fourier did himself, we hope he will make the necessary corrections and send us word. We intend to follow Fourier's instructions until we find they are wrong; then we will abandon them. "As to an attempt to organize groups and series until we have the requisite number, have gone through a proper system of training, and erected an edifice sufficient for the accommodation of about four hundred persons, every feature of our Rules of Progress forbids it. We believe that the effort will place every Phalanx that attempts it, in a situation worse than civilization itself. The distance between civilization and Association can not be passed at one leap. There must necessarily be a transition period; and any set of rules or constitution (hampered and destroyed by a set of by-laws), intended for the government of a Phalanx, during the transition period, and which have no analogical reference to the human form, will be worse than useless. They will be an impediment instead of an assistance to the progressive movement of a Phalanx. The child can not leap to manhood in a day nor a month, and unless there is a system of training suited to the different states through which he must pass in his progress to manhood, his energies can never be developed. If Associations will violate every scientific principle taught by Fourier, pay no regard to analogy, and attempt organisms of groups and series before any preparation is made for it, and then run into anarchy and confusion, and become disgusted with their efforts, we hope they will have the honesty to take the blame upon themselves, and not charge it to the science of Association. "We are ready at all times to give information of our situation and progress, and we pledge ourselves to give a true and correct statement of the actual situation of the Phalanx. We pledge ourselves that there shall not be found a variance between our written or published statements, and the statements appearing upon our records. Those of our members now upon the ground are composed principally of the former members of the Sangamon Association. We expect a number of our members from Ohio this fall, and many more of them in the spring. We have applications for information and membership from different directions, and expect large accession in numbers and capital during the coming year. We can extend our domain to suit our own convenience, as, in this land of prairies and pure atmosphere, we are not hemmed in by civilization to the same extent as Socialists in other States. We have elbow-room, and there is no danger of treading on each other's toes and then fighting about it. "The _Plowshare and Pruning-Hook_ will be continued from its second number, and published from the home of the Integral Phalanx in a few weeks, as soon as a press can be procured. "SECRETARY OF INTEGRAL PHALANX." Here all information in the _Harbinger_ about the Integral comes to an end, and Macdonald breaks off short with, "No further particulars." CHAPTER XXXII. THE ALPHADELPHIA PHALANX. This Association was commenced in the winter of 1843-4, principally by the exertions of Dr. H.R. Schetterly of Ann Arbor, Michigan, a disciple of Brisbane and the _Tribune_. The _Phalanx_ of February 5, 1844, publishes its prospectus, from which we take the following paragraph: "Notice is hereby given, that a Fourier industrial Association, called the Alphadelphia Phalanx, has been formed in this State, under the most flattering prospects. A constitution has been adopted and signed, and a domain selected on the Kalamazoo river, which seems to possess all the advantages that could be desired. It is extremely probable (judging from the information possessed), that only half the applicants can be received into one Association, because the number will be too great: and if such should be the case, two Associations will doubtless be formed; for such is the enthusiasm in the West that people will not suffer themselves to be disappointed." [From the _Phalanx_, March 1, 1844.] "THE ALPHADELPHIA ASSOCIATION.--We have received the constitution of this Association, a notice of the formation of which was contained in our last. In most respects the constitution is similar to that of the North American Phalanx. It will be seen by the description of the domain selected, which we publish below, that the location is extremely favorable. The establishment of this Association in Michigan is but a pioneer movement, which we have no doubt will soon be followed by the formation of many others. Our friends are already numerous in that State, and the interest in Association is rapidly growing there, as it is throughout the West generally. The West, we think, will soon become the grand theater of action, and ere long Associations will spring up so rapidly that we shall scarcely be able to chronicle them. The people, the farmers and mechanics particularly, have only to understand the leading principles of our doctrines, to admire and approve of them; and it would therefore be no matter of surprise to see in a short time their general and simultaneous adoption. Indeed, the social transformation from a state of isolation with all its poverty and miseries, to a state of Association with its immense advantages and prosperity, may be much nearer and proceed more rapidly than we now imagine. The signs are many and cheering." _History and Description of the Alphadelphia Association._ "In consequence of a call of a convention published in the _Primitive Expounder_, fifty-six persons assembled in the school-house at the head of Clark's lake, on the fourteenth day of December last, from the Counties of Oakland, Wayne, Washtenaw, Genesee, Jackson, Eaton, Calhoun and Kalamazoo, in the State of Michigan; and after a laborious session of three days, from morning to midnight, adopted the skeleton of a constitution, which was referred to a committee of three, composed of Dr. H.R. Schetterly, Rev. James Billings and Franklin Pierce, Esq., for revision and amendment. A committee consisting of Dr. Schetterly, John Curtis and William Grant, was also elected to view three places, designated by the convention as possessing the requisite qualifications for a domain. The convention then adjourned to meet again at Bellevue, Eaton County, on the third day of January, to receive the reports of said committees, to choose a domain from those reported on by the committee on location, and to revise, perfect and adopt said constitution. This adjourned convention met on the day appointed, and selected a location in the town of Comstock, Kalamazoo County, whose advantages are described by the committee on location, in the following terms: "The Kalamazoo river, a large and beautiful stream, nine rods wide, and five feet deep in the middle, flows through the domain. The mansion and manufactories will stand on a beautiful plain, descending gradually toward the bank of the river, which is about twelve feet high. There is a spring, pouring out about a barrel of pure water per minute, half a mile from the place where the mansion and manufactories will stand. Cobble-stone more than sufficient for foundations and building a dam, and easily accessible, are found on the domain; and sand and clay, of which excellent brick have been made, are also abundant. The soil of the domain is exceedingly fertile, and of great variety, consisting of prairie, oak openings, and timbered and bottom-land along the river. About three thousand acres of it have been tendered to our Association, as stock to be appraised at the cash value, nine hundred of which are under cultivation, fit for the plow; and nearly all the remainder has been offered in exchange for other improved lands belonging to members at a distance, who wish to invest their property in our Association." [Letter from H.R. Schetterly.] "_Ann Arbor, May 20, 1844._" "GENTLEMEN:--Your readers will no doubt be pleased to learn every important movement in industrial Association; and therefore I send you an account of the present condition of the Alphadelphia Association, to the organization of which all my time has been devoted since the beginning of last December. "The Association held its first annual meeting on the second Wednesday in March, and at the close of a session of four days, during which its constitution and by-laws were perfected, and about eleven hundred persons, including children and adults, admitted to membership, adjourned to meet on the domain on the first of May. Its officers repaired immediately to the place selected last winter for the domain, and after overcoming great difficulties, secured the deeds of 2,814 acres of land, (927 of which is under cultivation), at a cost of $32,000. This gives us perfect control over an immense water-power; and our land-debt is only $5,776 (the greater portion of the land having been invested as stock), to be paid out of a proposed capital of $240,000, $14,000 of which is to be paid in cash during the summer and autumn. More land adjoining the domain has since been tendered as stock; but we have as much as we can use at present, and do not wish to increase our taxes and diminish our first annual dividend too much. It will all come in as soon as wanted. At our last meeting the number of members was increased to upwards of 1,300, and more than one hundred applicants were rejected, because there seemed to be no end, and we became almost frightened at the number. Among our members are five mill-wrights, six machinists, furnacemen, printers, manufacturers of cloth, paper, etc., and almost every other kind of mechanics you can mention, besides farmers in abundance. "Farming and gardening were commenced on the domain about the middle of April, and two weeks since, when I came away, there were seventy-one adult male and more than half that number of adult female laborers on the ground, and more constantly arriving. We shall not however be able to accommodate more than about 200 resident members this season. "There is much talk about the formation of other Associations in this State (Michigan), and I am well convinced that others will be formed next winter. The fact is, men have lost all confidence in each other, and those who have studied the theory of Association, are desirous of escaping from the present hollow-hearted state of civilized society, in which fraud and heartless competition grind the more noble-minded of our citizens to the dust. "The Alphadelphia Association will not commence building its mansion this season; but several groups have been organized to erect a two-story wooden building, five hundred and twenty-three feet long, including the wings, which will be finished the coming Fall, so as to answer for dwellings till we can build a mansion, and afterwards may be converted into a silk establishment or shops. The principal pursuit this year, besides putting up this building, will be farming and preparing for erecting a furnace, saw-mill, machine-shop, etc. We have more than one hundred thousand feet of lumber on hand; and a saw-mill, which we took as stock, is running day and night. "I do not see any obstacle to our future prosperity. Our farmers have plenty of wheat on the ground. We have teams, provisions, all we ought to desire on the domain; and best of all, since the location of the buildings has been decided, we are perfectly united, and have never yet had an angry discussion on any subject. We have religious meetings twice a week, and preaching at least once, and shall have schools very soon. If God be for us, of which we have sufficient evidence, who can prevail against us? "Our domain is certainly unrivaled in its advantages in Michigan, possessing every kind of soil that can be found in the State. Our people are moral, religious, and industrious, having been actually engaged in manual labor, with few exceptions, all their days. The place where the mansion and out-houses will stand, is a most beautiful level plain, of nearly two miles in extent, that wants no grading, and can be irrigated by a constant stream of water flowing from a lake. Between it and the river is another plain, twelve feet lower, on which our manufactories may be set in any desirable position. Our mill-race is half dug by nature, and can be finished, according to the estimate of the State engineer, for eighteen hundred dollars, giving five and a-half feet fall without a dam, which may be raised by a grant from the Legislature, adding three feet more, and affording water-power sufficient to drive fifty pair of mill-stones. A very large spring, brought nearly a mile in pipes, will rise nearly fifty feet at our mansion. The Central railroad runs across our domain. We have a great abundance of first-rate timber, and land as rich as any in the State. "Our constitution is liberal, and secures the fullest individual freedom and independence. While capital is fully protected in its rights and guaranteed in its interests, it is not allowed to exercise an undue control, or in the least degree encroach on personal liberty, even if this too common tendency could possibly manifest itself in Association. As we proceed I will inform you of our progress. H.R. SCHETTERLY." The _Harbinger_ of January 17, 1846, mentions the Alphadelphia as still existing and in hopeful condition; but we find no further notice of it in that quarter. Macdonald tells the following story of its fortunes and failure, the substance of which he obtained from Dr. Schetterly: "At the commencement a disagreement took place between a Mr. Tubbs and the rest of the members. Mr. Tubbs wanted to have the buildings located on the land he had owned; but the Association would not agree to that, because the digging of a mill-race on the side of the river proposed by Mr. Tubbs would have cost nearly $18,000; whereas on the railroad side of the river, which was supposed to be a much better building-place, the race would have cost only $1,800. The consequence was that all but Mr. Tubbs voted for the railroad side, and Mr. Tubbs left, no doubt in disgust, at the same time cautioning every person against investing property in the Phalanx. This disagreement at the commencement of the experiment threw a damper on it, from which it never entirely recovered. "There were a number of ordinary farm-houses on the domain, and a beginning of a Phalanstery seventy feet long was erected to accommodate those who resided there the first winter. The rooms were comfortable but small. A large frame-house was also begun. During the warm weather a number of persons lived in a large board shanty. "The members of the Association were mostly farmers, though there were builders, shoemakers, tailors, blacksmiths and printers, and one editor; all tolerably skillful and generally well informed; though but few could write for the paper called the _Tocsin_, which was published there. The morality of the members is said to have been good, with one exception. A school was carried on part of the time, and they had an exchange of some seventy periodicals and newspapers. No religious tests were required in the admission of members. They had preaching by one of the printers, or by any person who came along, without asking about his creed. "All lived in clover so long as a ton of sugar or any other such luxury lasted; but before provisions could be raised, these luxuries were all consumed, and most of the members had to subsist afterward on coarser fare than they were accustomed to. No money was paid in, and the members who owned property abroad could not sell it. The officers made bad bargains in selling some farms that lay outside the domain. Laborers became discouraged and some left; but many held on longer than they otherwise would have done, because a hundred acres of beautiful wheat greeted them in the fields. In the winter some of the influential members went away temporarily, and thus left the real friends of the Association in the minority; and when they returned after two or three months absence, every thing was turned up-side-down. There was a manifest lack of good management and foresight. The old settlers accused the majority of this, and were themselves elected officers; but it appears that they managed no better, and finally broke up the concern." CHAPTER XXXIII. LA GRANGE PHALANX. The first notice of this Association is the following announcement in the _Phalanx_, October 5, 1843: "Preparations are making to establish an Association in La Grange County, Indiana, which will probably be done this fall, upon quite an extensive scale, as many of the most influential and worthy inhabitants of that section are deeply interested in the cause." [From a letter of W.S. Prentise, Secretary of the La Grange Phalanx, published in the Phalanx, February 5, 1844.] "We have now about thirty families, and I believe might have fifty, if we had room for them. We have in preparation and nearly completed, a building large enough to accommodate our present members. They will all be settled and ready to commence business in the spring. They leave their former homes and take possession of their rooms as fast as they are completed. The building, including a house erected before we began by the owner of a part of our estate, is one hundred and ninety-two feet long, two stories high, divided so as to give each family from twelve to sixteen feet front and twenty-six feet depth, making a front room and one or two bed-rooms. One hundred and twenty feet of this building is entirely new. We commenced it in September, and have had lumber, brick and lime to haul from five to twelve miles. All these materials can be hereafter furnished on our domain. Notwithstanding the disadvantages and waste attendant on hasty action without previous plan, we shall have our tenements at least as cheap again as they would cost separately. Our farm consists of about fifteen hundred acres of excellent land, four hundred of which is improved, about three hundred of rich meadow, with a stream running through it, falling twelve feet, and making a good water-power. We are about forty miles from Fort Wayne, on the Wabash and Erie canal. Our land, including one large new house and three large new barns, and a saw-mill in operation, cost us about $8.00 per acre. It was put in as stock, at $10.31 for improved, and $2.68 for unimproved. We have about one hundred head of cattle, two hundred sheep, and horse and ox teams enough for all purposes: also farming tools in abundance; and in fact every thing necessary to carry on such branches of business as we intend to undertake at present, except money. This property was put in as stock, at its cash value; cows at $10.00, sheep $1.50, horses $50.00, wheat fifty cents, corn twenty-five cents. "We shall have about one hundred and fifty persons when all are assembled; probably about half of this number will be children. Our school will commence in a few days. We have a charter from the Legislature, one provision of which, inserted by ourselves, is, that we shall never, as a society, contract a debt. We are located in Springfield, La Grange County, Indiana. The nearest post-office is Mongoquinong. We think our location a good one. Our members are seventy-three of them practical farmers, and the rest mechanics, teachers, etc. We shall not commence building our main edifice at present. When our dwelling rooms, now in progress, are completed, and such work-shops as are necessary to accommodate our mechanics, we shall stop building until more capital flows in, either from abroad or from our own labors. It is a pity that the mechanics of the city and farmers of the country could not be united. They would do far better together than separate. We have two of the best physicians in the country in our number." [From the _Harbinger_, July 4, 1846.] "LA GRANGE PHALANX.--This Association has been in operation some two years, and has been incorporated since the first of June, 1845. It commenced on the sure principle of incurring no debts, which it has adhered to, with the exception of some fifteen hundred dollars yet due on its domain. We find in the _True Tocsin_ a statement of the operations of this Association for the last fifteen months, and of its present condition, by Mr. Anderson, its Secretary, from which we make the following extracts: "_Annual Statement of the condition of La Grange Phalanx, on the 1st day of April, 1846._ "Total valuation of the real and personal estate of the Phalanx, including book accounts, due from members and others $19,861.61 Deduct capital stock. $14,668.39 " debts 1,128.82 15,797.21 ---------- Total product for fifteen months previous to the above date $4,064.40 Being a net increase of property on hand (since our settlement on the 1st of January, 1845), of $1,535.63, the balance of the total product above having been consumed (namely, $2,531.72) in the shape of rent, tuition, fuel, food and clothing. The above product forms a dividend to labor of sixty-one cents eight mills per day of ten hours, and to the capital stock four and eleven-twelfths per cent. per annum. "Our domain at present consists of ten hundred and forty-five acres of good land, watered by living springs. The land is about one-half prairie, the balance openings, well timbered. We have four hundred and ninety-two acres improved, and two hundred and fifty acres of meadow. The improvements in buildings are three barns, some out-houses, blacksmith's-shop, and a dwelling house large enough to accommodate sixteen families; besides a school-room twenty-six by thirty-six feet, and a dining-room of the same size. All our land is within fences. We consider our condition bids fair for the realization of at least a share of happiness, even upon the earth. "The rule by which this Association makes dividends to capital is as follows: When labor shall receive seventy-five cents per day of ten hours at average or common farming labor, then capital shall receive six per cent. per annum, and in that ratio, be the dividend what it may; in other words, an investment of one hundred dollars for one year will receive the same amount which might be paid to eight days average labor. "There are now ten families of us at this place, busily engaged in agriculture. We are rather destitute of mechanics, and would be very much pleased to have a good blacksmith and shoemaker, of good moral character and steady habits, and withal Associationists, join our number. "Since our commencement in the fall of 1843, our school has been in active operation up to the present time, with the exception of some few vacations. It is our most sincere desire to have the very best instruction in school, which our means will enable us to procure." The _Harbinger_ adds: "The preamble to the constitution of this little band of pioneers in the cause of human elevation, shows that their enterprise is animated by the highest purposes. We trust that they will not be disheartened by any discouragements or obstacles. These must of necessity be many; but it should be borne in mind that they can not be equal to the burdens which the selfishness and antagonism of the existing order of things lay upon every one who toils through its routine. The poorest Association affords a sphere of purer, more honest, and heartier life than the best society that we know of in the civilized world. Let our friends persevere; they are on the right track, and whatever mistakes they may make, we do not doubt that they will succeed in establishing for themselves and their children a society of united interests." [Communication in the _Harbinger_.] _Springfield, June, 14, 1846._ "We hope our humble effort here to establish a Phalanx, will in due time be crowned with success. Our prospects since we got our charter have been very cheering, notwithstanding the difficulties attendant upon so weak an attempt to form a nucleus, around which we expect to see truth and happiness assembled in perpetual union, and that too at no very distant period. Our numbers have lately been increased by some members from the Alphadelphia Association, whose faith has outlived that of others in the attempt to establish an Association at that place. "Agriculture has been our main and almost only employment since we came together. We have ten hundred and forty-five acres of excellent land, four hundred and ninety-two acres of which are improved, and two hundred and fifty acres of it are natural meadow. We are preparing this fall to sow three hundred acres of wheat. Our domain is as yet destitute of water-power except on a very limited scale. Our location in other respects is all that could be wished. We have a very fine orchard of peach-and apple-trees, set out mostly a year ago last spring, and many of the trees will soon bear, they having been moved from orchards which were set out for the use of families on different points of what we now call our domain. We shall have this season a considerable quantity of apples and peaches from old trees which have not been moved. The wheat crop promises to be very abundant in this part of the country. Oats and corn are rather backward on account of the late dry weather. We have at present on the ground one hundred and forty acres of wheat, fifty-two acres of oats, thirty-eight acres of corn, besides buckwheat, potatoes, beans, squashes, pumpkins, melons and what not. "WILLIAM ANDERSON, Secretary." Macdonald gives the following meager account of the decease of this Phalanx: "A person named Jones owned nearly one-half of the stock, and it appears that his influence was such that he managed trading and money matters all in his own way, whether he was an officer or not. This gave great dissatisfaction to the members, and has been assigned as the chief cause of their failure. They possessed about one thousand acres of land, with plenty of buildings of all kinds. The members were mostly farmers, tolerably moral, but lacking in enterprise and science. They maintained schools and preaching in abundance, and lived as well as western farmers commonly do. But they fully proved that, though hard labor is important in such experiments, yet without the right kind of genius to guide, mere labor is vain." CHAPTER XXXIV. OTHER WESTERN EXPERIMENTS. A half dozen obscure Associations, begun or contemplated in the Western States, will be disposed of together in this chapter; and then all that will remain of the experiments on our list, will be the famous trio with which we propose to conclude our history of American Fourierism--the Wisconsin, the North American and the Brook Farm Phalanxes. One of the experiments mentioned by Macdonald, but about which he gives very little information, was THE COLUMBIAN PHALANX. This Association turns up twice in the pages of the _Harbinger_; but we can not ascertain when it started, how long it lasted, nor even where it was located, except that it was in Franklin County, Ohio. Nevertheless it crowed cheerily in its time, as the following paragraphs testify: [Letter to the _Harbinger_, August 15, 1845.] "It is reported all through the country, and currently within thirty miles of the location, that the Columbian Phalanx have disbanded and broken up; and that those who remain are in a constant state of discontent and bickering, owing to want of food and comforts of life. Now, sir, having visited this spot, and viewed for myself, I can safely say, that in no one thing is this true. In fact only one family has left, and it is supposed that they can't stay away; while five families are now entering or about to enter, from Beverly, Morgan County, all of good, substantial character. As good a state of harmony exists in the Phalanx as could possibly be expected in so incipient a state. On Saturday last, having the required number of families (thirty-two), they went into an inceptive organization; and all feel that at no time have the prospects been as fair as at this moment. In proof of this, it need only be stated, that they are about four thousand dollars ahead of their payments, and no interest due till spring, with no other debts that they are not able to meet. They have one hundred and thirty-seven acres of wheat, and thirteen of rye, all of a most excellent quality, decidedly the best that I have seen this year; not more than ten or fifteen acres at all injured. On a part of it they calculate to get twenty-five bushels to the acre. They have one hundred and fifty acres of corn, much better than the corn generally in Franklin County; one hundred acres of oats, all of the largest kind; fifteen acres of potatoes, in the most flourishing condition; four acres of beans; five acres of vines; besides forty acres of pumpkins! (won't they have pies!) one acre of sweet potatoes; ten thousand cabbage plants; and are preparing ground for five acres of turnips; six acres of buckwheat; five acres of flax, and ten acres of garden. I had the pleasure of taking dinner with them to-day at the public table, furnished as comfortably as we generally find. They have provisions enough growing to supply three times their number, and they are calculating on a large increase this season. They are fully satisfied of the validity of their deed, which they are soon to secure." [A letter from a Member, in the _Harbinger_.] "_Columbian Phalanx, October 4, 1845._ "If I have said aught in high-toned language of our future prospects, preserve it as truth, sacred as Holy Writ. We are in a prosperous condition. The little difficulties which beset us for a time, arising from lack of means, and which the world magnified into destruction and death, have been dissipated. "Our crops of grain are the very best in the State of Ohio, a very severe drought having prevailed in the north of the State. We could, if we wished, sell all our corn on the ground. We have one hundred and fifty acres, every acre of which will yield one hundred bushels. We have cut one hundred acres of good oats. Potatoes, pumpkins, melons, etc., are also good. We are now getting out stuff to build a flouring-mill in Zanesville, for a Mr. Beaumont; two small groups of seven persons each, make twenty-five dollars per day at the job. We have the best hewed timber that ever came to Zanesville; and it is used in all the mills and bridges in this region. We have purchased fixtures for a new steam saw-mill, with two saws and a circulator, and various other small machinery, all entirely new, which we shall get into operation soon. Plenty to eat, drink, and wear, with three hundred dollars per week coming in, all from our own industry, imparts to us a tone of feeling of a quite different zest, to an abundance obtained in any other way. The world has watched with anxious solicitude our capacity to survive alone. Now that we have gained shore, we find extended to us the right hand of the capitalist and the laboring man; they beg permission to join our band. "You are already aware, no doubt, that the Beverly Association has joined us. The Integral having failed to obtain the location they had selected, some of the members have united their efforts with us. Tell Mr. W., of Alleghany, to come here; tell him for me that all danger is out of the question. Please by all means tell Mr. M. to come here; tell him what I have written. Tell H., of Beaver, to come and see us, and say to him that you have always failed in depicting the comforts and pleasures of Association. And in fine, say to all the Associationists in Pittsburg, that we are doing well, even better than we ourselves ever expected; and if they wish to know more and judge for themselves, let them come and see us. Yours, J.R.W." These are all the memorials that remain of the Columbian Phalanx. Another experiment of some note and enterprise, but with scanty history, was THE SPRING FARM ASSOCIATION, WISCONSIN. "In the year 1845," says Macdonald, "there was quite an excitement in the quiet little village of Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin, on the subject of Fourier Association, stimulated by the energetic mind of Dr. P. Cady of Ohio. Meetings were held and Socialism was discussed, until ten families agreed to attempt an Association somewhere in the wilds of Sheboygan County. In making a selection of a suitable place, they divided into two parties, the one wishing to settle on the shore of Lake Michigan, and the other about twenty miles from the lake and six miles from any habitation. So strong were the opinions and prejudices of each, that the tents were pitched in both places. The following brief account relates to the one which was commenced in February, 1846, on Government land about twenty miles from the lake shore, and was named 'Spring Farm' from the lovely springs of water which were found there. (The other company was less successful.) The objects proposed to be carried out by this little band, were 'Union, Equal Rights, and Social Guaranties.' "The pecuniary means, to begin with, amounted to only $1,000, put in as joint stock. The members consisted of six families, including ten children. Among them were farmers, blacksmiths, carpenters and joiners. They were tolerably intelligent, and with religious opinions various and free. They possessed an unfinished two-story frame building, twenty feet by thirty. They cultivated thirty acres of the prairie, and a small opening in the timber; but they appear to have made very little progress; though they worked in company for three years." One of the members thus answered Macdonald's questions concerning the general course and results of the experiment: "Mr. B.C. Trowbridge was generally looked up to as leader of the society. The land was bought of Government by individual resident members. We had nothing to boast of in improvements; they were only anticipated. We obtained no aid from without; what we did not provide for ourselves, we went without. The frost cut off our crops the second year, and left us short of provisions. We were not troubled with dishonest management, and generally agreed in all our affairs. We dissolved by mutual agreement. The reasons of failure were poverty, diversity of habits and dispositions, and disappointments through failure of harvest. Though we failed in this attempt, yet it has left an indelible impression on the minds of one-half the members at least, that a harmonious Association in some form is the way, and the only way, that the human mind can be fully and properly developed; and the general belief is, that community of property is the most practicable form." THE BUREAU COUNTY PHALANX. In the first number of the _Phalanx_, October 5, 1843, it is mentioned that a small Association had been commenced in Bureau County, Illinois. Macdonald repeats the mention, and adds, "No further particulars." THE WASHTENAW PHALANX was projected at Ann Arbor, Michigan, and a monthly paper called the _Future_, was started in connection with it; but it appears to have failed before it got fairly into operation; as the _Phalanx_ barely refers to it once, and Macdonald dismisses it as a mere abortive excitement. GARDEN GROVE COMMUNITY, IOWA, was projected by D. Roberts, W. Davis, and others. The plan was to settle a colony of the "right sort" on contiguous lots, each family with its separate farm and dwelling, but all having a common pleasure-ground, dancing-hall, lecture-room and seminary. What came of it is not known. THE IOWA PIONEER PHALANX is mentioned twice in the _Phalanx_, as a Fourierist colony about to emigrate from Jefferson County, New York, to Iowa. It issued a paper; but whether it ever emigrated or what became of it, does not appear. If there were any more of these feeble experiments--as there may have been many--they escaped the sharp eyes of Macdonald and the _Harbinger_, and left no memorials. CHAPTER XXXV. THE WISCONSIN PHALANX. This was one of the most conspicuous experiments of the Fourier epoch. The notices of it in the _Phalanx_ and _Harbinger_ are quite voluminous. We shall have to curtail them as much as possible, and still our patchwork will be a long one. The Wisconsin had the advantage of most other Phalanxes in the skill of its spokesman. Mr. Warren Chase, a gentleman at present well known among Spiritualists, was its founder and principal manager. Most of the important communications relating to it in the socialistic Journals and other papers, were from his ready pen. We will do our best to save all that is most valuable in them, while we omit what seems to be irrelevant or repetitious. It may be understood that we are indebted to the _Phalanx_ and _Harbinger_ for nearly all our quotations from other papers. [From the _Green Bay Republican_, April 30, 1844.] "WISCONSIN PHALANX.--We have just been informed by the agent of the above Association, that the _locale_ has been chosen, and ten sections of the finest land in the Territory entered at the Green Bay Land Office. The location is on a small stream near Green Lake, Marquette county. The teams conveying the requisite implements, will start in a week, and the improvements will be commenced immediately. We are in favor of Fourier's plan of Association, although we very much fear that it will be unsuccessful on account of the selfishness of mankind, this being the principal obstacle to be overcome: yet we are pleased to see the commendable zeal manifested by the members of the Wisconsin Phalanx, who are mostly leading and influential citizens of Racine County. The feasibility of Association will now be tested in such a manner that the question will be decided, at least so far as Wisconsin is concerned." [From a letter in the _Southport Telegraph_,] _Wisconsin Phalanx, May 27, 1844._ "We left Southport on Monday, the 20th inst., and arrived on the proposed domain, without accident, on Saturday last at five o'clock P.M. This morning (Monday) the first business was to divide into two companies, one for finding the survey stakes, and the other for setting up the tent on the ground designed for building and gardening purposes. Eight men, with ox-teams and cattle, arrived between nine and ten A.M. After dinner the members all met in the tent and proceeded to a regular organization, Mr. Chase being in the chair and Mr. Rounds Secretary. "A prayer was offered, expressing thanks for our safe protection and arrival, and invoking the Divine blessing for our future peace and prosperity. The list of resident members was called (nineteen in number), and they divided themselves into two series, viz., agricultural and mechanical (each appointing a foreman), with a miscellaneous group of laborers, under the supervision of the resident directors. "A letter was read by request of the members, from Peter Johnson, a member of the board of directors, relating to the proper conduct of the members in their general deportment, and reminding them of their obligations to their Creator. "The agricultural series are to commence plowing and planting to-morrow, and the mechanical to excavate a cellar and prepare for the erection of a frame building, twenty-two feet by twenty, which is designed as a central wing for a building twenty-two feet by one hundred and twenty. There are nineteen men and one boy now on the domain. The stock consists of fifty-four head of cattle, large and small, including eight yoke of oxen and three span of horses. More men are expected during the week, and others are preparing to come this summer. Families will be here as the building can be sufficiently advanced to accommodate them. "A few words in regard to the domain: There is a stream which, from its clearness, we have denominated Crystal Creek; it has sufficient fall and water supplied by springs, for one or two mill-seats. It runs over a bed of lime-stone, which abounds here, and can be had convenient for fences and building. There is a good supply of prairie and timber. Every member is well pleased with the location, and also the arrangements for business. Up to this time no discordant note has sounded in our company. "We have begun without a debt, which is a source of great satisfaction to each member; and we are certain of success, provided that the same union prevails which has hitherto, and the company incur no debt by loan or otherwise, in the transaction of business. We expect to be prepared this summer or fall to issue the prospectus of a paper to be published on the ground. "GEO. H. STEBBINS." [From a letter of Warren Chase.] "_Wisconsin Phalanx, September, 12, 1844._ "Our first company, consisting of about twenty men, arrived here and commenced improvements on the 27th of May last. We put in about twenty acres of spring crops, mostly potatoes, buckwheat, turnips, etc., and have now one hundred acres of winter wheat in the ground. We have erected three buildings (designed for wings to a large one to be erected this fall), in which there are about twenty families snugly stored, yet comfortable and happy and busy, comprising in all about eighty persons, men, women, and children. We have also erected a saw-mill, which will be ready to run in a few days, after which we shall proceed to erect better dwellings. We do all our cooking in one kitchen, and all eat at one table. All our labor (excepting a part of female labor, on which there is a reduction), is for the present deemed in the class of usefulness, and every member works as well as possible where he or she is most needed, under the general superintendence of the directors. We adhere strictly to our constitution and by-laws, and adopt as fast as possible the system of Fourier. We have organized our groups and series in a simple manner, and thus far every thing goes admirably, and much better than we could have expected in our embryo state. We have regular meetings for business and social purposes, by which means we keep a harmony of feeling and concert of action. We have a Sunday-school, Bible-class, and Divine service every Sabbath by different denominations, who occupy the Hall (as we have but one) alternately; and all is harmony in that department, although we have many members of different religious societies. They all seem determined to lay aside metaphysical differences, and make a united social effort, founded on the fundamental principles of religion. "WARREN CHASE." [From a letter in the _Ohio American_, August, 1845.] "I wish, through the medium of your columns, to correct a statement which has been going the rounds of the newspapers in this vicinity and in other parts, that the Wisconsin Phalanx has failed and dispersed. I am prepared to state, upon the authority of a letter from their Secretary, dated July 31, 1845, that the report is entirely without foundation. They have never been in a more prosperous condition, and the utmost harmony prevails. They are moving forward under a charter; own two thousand acres of fine land, with water-power; twenty-nine yoke of oxen, thirty-seven cows, and a corresponding amount of other stock, such as horses, hogs, sheep, etc.; are putting in four hundred acres of wheat this fall; have just harvested one hundred acres of the best of wheat, fifty-seven acres of oats, and other grains in proportion. They have been organized a little more than a year, and embrace in their number about thirty families. "One very favorable feature in this institution is, that they are entirely out of debt, and intend to remain so; they do not owe, and are determined never to owe, a single dollar. An excellent free school is provided for all the members; and as they have no idle gentlemen or ladies to support, all have time to receive a good education." [From a letter of Warren Chase.] "_Wisconsin Phalanx, August, 13, 1845._ "We are Associationists of the Fourier school, and intend to reduce his system to practice as fast as possible, consistently with our situation. We number at this time about one hundred and eighty souls, being the entire population of the congressional township. We are under the township government, organized similar to the system in New York. Our town was set off and organized last winter by the Legislature, at which time the Association was also incorporated as a joint-stock company by a charter, which is our constitution. We had a post-office and weekly mail within forty days after our commencement. Thus far we have obtained all we have asked for. "We have religious meetings and Sabbath-schools, conducted by members of some half-a-dozen different denominations of Christians, with whom creeds and modes of faith are of minor importance compared with religion. All are protected, and all is harmony in that department. We have had no deaths and very little sickness. No physician, no lawyer or preacher, yet resides among us; but we expect a physician soon, whose interest will not conflict with ours, and whose presence will consequently not increase disease. In politics we are about equally divided, and vote accordingly; but generally believe both parties culpable for many of the political evils of the day. "The Phalanx has a title from Government to fourteen hundred and forty acres of land, on which there is one of the best of water-powers, a saw-mill in operation and a grist-mill building; six hundred and forty acres under improvement, four hundred of which is now seeding to winter wheat. We raised about fifteen hundred bushels the past season, which is sufficient for our next year's bread; have about seventy acres of corn on the ground, which looks well, and other crops in proportion. We have an abundance of cattle, horses, crops and provisions for the wants of our present numbers, and physical energy enough to obtain more. Thus, you see, we are tolerably independent; and we intend to remain so, as we admit none as members who have not sufficient funds to invest in stock, or sufficient physical strength, to warrant their not being a burden to the society. We have one dwelling-house nearly finished, in which reside twenty families, with a long hall conducting to the dining-room, where all who are able, dine together. We intend next summer to erect another for twenty families more, with a hall conducting to another dining-room, supplied from the same cook-room. We have one school constantly, but have as yet been unable to do much toward improving that department, and had hoped to see something in the _Harbinger_ which would be a guide in this branch of our organization. We look to the Brook Farm Phalanx for instruction in this branch, and hope to see it in the _Harbinger_ for the benefit of ourselves and other Associations. "We have a well-regulated system of grouping our laborers, but have not yet organized the series. We have no difficulty in any department of our business, and thus far more than our most sanguine expectations have been realized. We commenced with a determination to avoid all debts, and have thus far adhered to our resolution; for we believed debts would disband more Associations than any other one cause; and thus far, I believe it has, more than all other causes put together. "WARREN CHASE." From the Annual Statement of the Condition and Progress of the Wisconsin Phalanx, for the fiscal year ending December 1, 1845. "The four great evils with which the world is afflicted, intoxication, lawsuits, quarreling, and profane swearing, never have, and with the present character and prevailing habits of our members, never can, find admittance into our society. There is but a very small proportion of the tattling, backbiting and criticisms on character, usually found in neighborhoods of as many families. Perfect harmony and concert of action prevail among the members of the various churches, and each individual seems to lay aside creeds, and strive for the fundamental principles of religion. Many have cultivated the social feeling by the study and practice of vocal and instrumental music. In this there is a constant progress visible. Our young gentlemen and ladies have occasionally engaged in cotillions, especially on wedding occasions, of which we have had three the past summer. "Our convenience for schools, their diminished expense, &c., is known only to those acquainted with Association. We have done but little in perfecting this branch of our new organization; but having erected a school-house, we are prepared to commence our course of moral, physical and intellectual education. For want of a convenient place, we have not yet opened our reading-room or library, but intend to do so during the present month. "The family circle and secret domestic relations are not intruded on by Association; each family may gather around its family altar, secluded and alone, or mingle with neighbors without exposure to wet or cold. In our social and domestic arrangements we have approximated as far toward the plan of Fourier, as the difficulties incident to a new organization in an uncultivated country would permit. Owing to our infant condition and wish to live within our means, our public table has not been furnished as elegantly as might be desirable to an epicurean taste. From the somewhat detached nature of our dwellings, and the consequent inconveniencies attendant on all dining at one table, permission was given to such families as chose, to be furnished with provisions and cook their own board. But one family has availed itself of this privilege. "In the various departments of physical labor, we have accomplished much more than could have been done by the same persons in the isolated condition. We have broken and brought under cultivation, three hundred and twenty-five acres of land; have sown four hundred acres to winter wheat; harvested the hundred acres which we had on the ground last fall; plowed one hundred and seventy acres for crops the ensuing spring; raised sixty acres of corn, twenty of potatoes, twenty of buckwheat, and thirty of peas, beans, roots, etc.; built five miles of fence; cut four hundred tons of hay; and expended a large amount of labor in teaming, building sheds, taking care of stock, etc. "We have nearly finished the long building commenced last year (two hundred and eight feet by thirty-two), making comfortable residences for twenty families; built a stone school-house, twenty by thirty; a dining-room eighteen by thirty; finished one of the twenty-by-thirty dwellings built last year; expended about two hundred days' labor digging a race and foundation for a grist-mill thirty by forty, three stories high, and for a shop twenty by twenty-five, one story, with stone basements to both, and erected frames for the same; built a wash-house sixty by twenty-two; a hen house eleven by thirty, of sun-dried brick; an ash-house ten by twenty, of the same material; kept one man employed in the saw-mill, one drawing logs, one in the blacksmith shop, one shoe-making, and most of the time two about the kitchen. "The estimated value of our property on hand is $27,725.22, wholly unincumbered; and we are free from debt, except about $600 due to members, who have advanced cash for the purchase of provisions and land. But to balance this, we have over $1,000 coming from members, on stock subscriptions not yet due. "The whole number of hours' labor performed by the members during the past year, reduced to the class of usefulness, is 102,760; number expended in cooking, etc., and deducted for the board of members, 21,170; number remaining after deducting for board, 81,590, to which the amount due to labor is divided. In this statement the washing is not taken into account, families having done their own. "Whole number of weeks board charged members (including children graduated to adults) forty-two hundred and thirty-four. Cost of board per week for each person, forty-four cents for provisions, and five hours labor. "Whole amount of property on hand, as per invoice, $27,725.22. Cost of property and stock issued up to December 1, $19,589.18. Increase the past year, being the product of labor, etc., $8,136.04; one-fourth of which, or $2,034.01, is credited to capital, being twelve per cent. per annum on stock, for the average time invested; and three-fourths, or $6,102.03 to labor, being seven and one-half cents per hour. "The property on hand consists of the following items: 1,553 acres of land, at $3.00 $4,659.00 Agricultural improvements 1,522.47 Mechanical improvements 8,405.00 Personal property 10,314.01 Advanced members in board, etc. 2,824.74 --------- Amount $27,725.22 "W. CHASE, _President_." [From a letter of Warren Chase,] _Wisconsin Phalanx, March 3, 1846._ "Since our December statement, our course and progress has been undeviatingly onward toward the goal. We have added eighty acres to our land, making one thousand six hundred and thirty-three acres free of incumbrance. We are preparing to raise eight hundred acres of crops the coming season, finish our grist-mill, and build some temporary residences, etc. We have admitted but one family since the 1st of December, although we have had many applications. In this department of our organization, as well as in that of contracting debts, we are profiting by the experience of many Associations who preceded or started with us. "We pretend to have considerable knowledge of the serial law, but we are not yet prepared, mentally or physically, to adopt it in our industrial operations. We have something in operation which approaches about as near to it as the rude hut does to the palace. Even this is better than none, and saves us from the merciless peltings of the storm. "Success with us is no longer a matter of doubt. Our questions to be settled are, How far and how fast can we adopt and put in practice the system and principle which we believe to be true, without endangering or retarding our ultimate object. We feel and know that our condition and prospects are truly cheering, and to the friends of the cause we can say, Come on, not to join us, but to form other Associations; for we can not receive one-tenth of those who apply for admission. Nothing but the general principles of Association are lawful tender with us. Money will not buy admission for those who have no faith in the principles, but who merely believe, as most of our neighbors do, that we shall get rich; this is not a ruling principle here. With our material, our means, and the principles of eternal truth on our side, success is neither doubtful nor surprising. "We expect at our next annual statement, to be able to represent ourselves as a minimum Association of forty families, not fully organized on Fourier's plan, but approaching to, and preparing for it. W. CHASE." From the Annual Statement of the Condition and Progress of the Wisconsin Phalanx, for the fiscal year ending December 7, 1846. "The study and adoption of the principles of industrial Association, have here, as elsewhere, led all reflecting minds to acknowledge the principles of Christianity, and to seek through those principles the elevation of man to his true condition, a state of harmony with himself, with nature and with God. The Society have religious preaching of some kind almost every Sabbath, but not uniformly of that high order of talent which they are prepared to appreciate. "The educational department is not yet regulated as it is designed to be; the Society have been too busily engaged in making such improvements as were required to supply the necessaries of life, to devote the means and labor necessary to prepare such buildings as are required. We have not yet established our reading-room and library, more for the want of room, than for a lack of materials. "The social intercourse between the members has ever been conducted with a high-toned moral feeling, which repudiates the slanderous suspicions of those enemies of the system, who pretend that the constant social intercourse will corrupt the morals of the members; the tendency is directly the reverse. "We have now one hundred and eighty resident members; one hundred and one males, seventy-nine females; fifty-six males and thirty-seven females over the age of twenty-one years. About eighty have boarded at a public table during the past year, at a cost of fifty cents per week and two and a half hours' labor; whole cost sixty-three cents. The others, most of the time, have had their provisions charged to them, and done their own cooking in their respective families, although their apartments are very inconvenient for that purpose. Most of the families choose this mode of living, more from previous habits of domestic arrangement and convenience, than from economy. We have resident on the domain, thirty-six families and thirty single persons; fifteen families and thirty single persons board at the public table: twenty-one families board by themselves, and the remaining five single persons board with them. "Four families have left during the past year, and one returned that had previously left. One left to commence a new Association: one, after a few weeks' residence, because the children did not like; and two to seek other business more congenial with their feelings than hard work. The Society has increased its numbers the past year about twenty, which is not one-fourth of the applicants. The want of room has prevented us from admitting more. "There has been 96,297 hours' medium class labor performed during the past year (mostly by males), which, owing to the extremely low appraisal of property, and the disadvantage of having a new farm to work on, has paid but five cents per hour, and six per cent. per annum on capital. "The amount of property in joint-stock, as per valuation, is $30,609.04; whole amount of liabilities, $1,095.33. The net product or income for the past year is $6,341.84, one-fourth of which being credited to capital, makes the six per cent.; and three-fourths to labor, makes the five cents per hour. We have, as yet, no machinery in operation except a saw-mill, but have a grist-mill nearly ready to commence grinding. Our wheat crop came in very light, which, together with the large amount of labor necessarily expended in temporary sheds and fences, which are not estimated of any value, makes our dividend much less than it will be when we can construct more permanent works. We have also many unfinished works, which do not yet afford us either income or convenience, but which will tell favorably on our future balance-sheets. "The Society has advanced to the members during the past year $3,293, mostly in provisions and such necessary clothing as could be procured. "The following schedule shows in what the property of the Society consists, and its valuation: 1,713 acres of land, at $3.00 $5,139.00 Agricultural improvements 3,206.00 Agricultural products 4,806.76 Shops, dwellings, and out-houses 6,963.61 Mills, mill-race and dam 5,112.90 Cattle, horses, sheep, hogs, &c. 3,098.45 Farming tools, &c. 1,199.36 Mechanical tools, &c. 367.26 Other personal property 715.70 ---------- Amount $30,609.04 "W. CHASE, President." In the _Harbinger_ of March 27, 1847, there is a letter from Warren Chase giving eighteen elaborate reasons why the Fourierists throughout the country should concentrate on the Wisconsin, and make it a great model Phalanx; which we omit. [From a letter of Warren Chase.] "_Wisconsin Phalanx, June 28, 1847._ "We have now been a little more than three years in operation, and my most sanguine expectations have been more than realized. We have about one hundred and seventy persons, who, with the exception of three or four families, are contented and happy, and more attached to this home than to any they ever had before. Those three or four belong to the restless, discontented spirits, who are not satisfied with any condition of life, but are always seeking something new. The Phalanx will soon be in a condition to adopt the policy of purchasing the amount of stock which any member may have invested, whenever he shall wish to leave. As soon as this can be done without embarrassing our business, we shall have surmounted the last obstacle to our onward progress. We have applications for admission constantly before us, but seldom admit one. We require larger amounts to be invested now when there is no risk, than we did at first when the risk was great. We have borne the heat and burden of the day, and now begin to reap the fruits of our labor. We also must know that an applicant is devoted to the cause, ready to endure for it hardships, privations and persecution, if necessary, and that he is not induced to apply because he sees our physical or pecuniary prosperity. We shall admit such as, in our view, are in all respects prepared for Association and can be useful to themselves and us; but none but practical workingmen need apply, for idlers can not live here. They seem to be out of their element, and look sick and lean. If no accident befalls us, we shall declare a cash dividend at our next annual settlement. "W. CHASE." [From a letter in the New York _Tribune_.] "_Wisconsin Phalanx, July 20, 1847._ "I have been visiting this Association several days, looking into its resources, both physical and moral. Its physical resources are abundant. In a moral aspect there is much here to encourage. The people, ninety of whom are adults, are generally quite intelligent, and possess a good development of the moral and social faculties. They are earnest inquirers after truth, and seem aware of the harmony of thought and feeling that must prevail to insure prosperity. They receive thirty or forty different publications, which are thoroughly perused. The females are excellent women, and the children, about eighty, are most promising in every respect. They are not yet well situated for carrying into effect all the indispensable agencies of true mental development, but they are not idle on this momentous subject. They have an excellent school for the children, and the young men and women are cultivating music. Two or three among them are adepts in this beautiful art. While writing, I hear good music by well-trained voices, with the Harmonist accompaniment. "I do believe something in human improvement and enjoyment will soon be presented at Ceresco, that will charm all visitors, and prove a conclusive argument against the skepticism of the world as to the capability of the race to rise above the social evils that afflict mankind, and to attain a mental elevation which few have yet hoped for. I expect to see here a garden in which shall be represented all that is most beautiful in the vegetable kingdom. I expect to see here a library and reading-room, neatly and plentifully furnished, to which rejoicing hundreds will resort for instruction and amusement. I expect to see here a laboratory, where the chemist will unfold the operations of nature, and teach the most profitable mode of applying agricultural labor. I expect to see here interesting cabinets, where the mineral and animal kingdoms will be presented in miniature. And I expect to see all the arts cultivated, and every thing beautiful and grand generally appreciated. HINE." On which the editor of the _Tribune_ observes: "We trust the remark will be taken in good part, that the writers of letters from these Associative experiments are too apt to blend what they desire or hope to see, with what they actually do see." [From a letter of J.J. Cooke in the _Tribune_.] "_Wisconsin Phalanx, August 28, 1847._ "_Editor of the New York Tribune_: "DEAR SIR: I have just perused in your paper, a letter from Mr. Hine, dated at this place. Believing that the letter is calculated to leave an erroneous impression on the mind of the reader, as to the true condition of this Association, I deem it to be my duty to notice it, for the reason of the importance of the subject, and the necessity of true knowledge in reference to correct action. "It is now twelve days since I arrived here, with the intention of making a visit sufficiently long to arrive at something like a critical knowledge of the experiment now in progress in this place. As you justly remark in your comments on Mr. Hine's letter, 'the writers of letters from these associative experiments are too apt to blend what they desire or hope to see, with what they actually do see.' So far as such a course might tend to induce premature and ill-advised attempts at practical Association, it should be regarded as a serious evil, and as such, should, if possible, be remedied. I presume no one here would advise the commencement of any Association, to pass through the same trials which they themselves have experienced. I have asked many of the members this question, 'Do you think that the reports and letters which have been published respecting your Association, have been so written as to leave a correct impression of your real existing condition on the mind of the reader?' The answer has invariably been, 'No.'" The writer then criticises the water-power, climate, etc., and proceeds to say: "The probability now is, that corn will be almost a total failure. 'Their present tenements,' says Mr. Hine, 'are such as haste and limited means forced them to erect.' This is undoubtedly true, and I will also add, that they are such as few at the East would be contented to live in. With the exception of the flouring-mill, blacksmith's-shop and carpenter's-shop, there are no arrangements for mechanical industry. This is not surprising, in view of the small means in their possession. 'In a moral aspect,' Mr. Hine says, 'there is much to encourage.' It would not be incorrect to say, that there is also something to fear. The most unpleasant feelings which I have experienced since I have been here, have been caused by the want of neatness around the dwellings, which seems to be inconsistent with the individual character of the members with whom I have become acquainted. This they state to be owing to their struggles for the necessaries of life; but I have freely told them that I considered it inexcusable, and calculated to have an injurious influence upon themselves and upon their children. 'They are earnest inquirers after truth,' says Mr. Hine, 'and seem aware of the harmony of thought and feeling that must prevail, in order to insure prosperity.' This I only object to so far as it is calculated to produce the impression that such harmony really exists. That there is a difference of feeling upon, at least, one important point, I know. This is in reference to the course to be pursued in relation to the erection of dwellings. I believe that a large majority are in favor of building only in reference to a combined dwelling; but there are some who think that this generation are not prepared for it, and who wish to erect comfortable dwellings for isolated households. A portion of the members go out to labor for hire; some, in order to procure those necessaries which the means of the Association have been inadequate to provide; and others, for want of occupation in their peculiar branches of industry. Mr. Hine says, 'They have an excellent school for the children.' I had thought that the proper education of the children was a want here, and members have spoken of it as such. They have no public library or reading-room for social re-union, excepting the school-room; and no room which is convenient for such purposes. There are no Associational guarantees in reference to sickness or disability in the charter (which is the constitution) of this Phalanx. "From the above statement, you can judge somewhat of the present foundation of Mr. Hine's hopes of 'soon' seeing the realization of the beautiful picture which he has drawn. JOSEPH J. COOKE." In the _Harbinger_ of January 8, 1848, Warren Chase replied to Mr. Cooke's criticisms, admitting the general truth of them, but insisting that it is unfair to judge the Association by eastern standards. In conclusion he says: "There is a difference of opinion in regard to board, which, under the law of freedom and attraction, works no harm. Most of our families cook their board in their rooms from choice under present circumstances; some because they use no meat and do not choose to sit at a table plentifully supplied with beef, pork and mutton: others because they choose to have their children sit at the table with them, to regulate their diet, etc., which our circumstances will not yet permit at our public table; others because they want to ask a blessing, etc.; and others because their manner of cooking and habits of living have become so fixed as to have sufficient influence to require their continuance. Some of our members think all these difficulties can not be speedily removed, and that cheap and comfortable dwellings, should be built, adapted to our circumstances, with a unitary work-house, bakery and dairy, by which the burdens should be removed as fast as possible, and the minds prepared by combined effort, co-operative labor, and equitable distribution, for the combined dwelling and unitary living, with its variety of tables to satisfy all tastes. Others think our devotion to the cause ought to induce us to forego all these attachments and prejudices, and board at one table and improve it, building none but unitary dwellings adapted to a unitary table. We pursue both ways in our living with perfect freedom, and probably shall in our building; for attraction is the only law whose force we acknowledge in these matters. We have passed one more important point in our progress since I last wrote you. We have adopted the policy to refund all investments to any member when he chooses to leave. W. CHASE." [From a letter of Warren Chase.] "_Wisconsin Phalanx, August 21, 1847._ "We are in the enjoyment of an excellent state of health, owing in part to our healthy location, and in part to the diet and regimen of our members. There is a prevailing tendency here to abandon the use of animal food; it has been slowly, but steadily increasing for some time, and has been aided some by those excellent and interesting articles from the pen of Dr. Lazarus on 'Cannibalism.' When we have to resort to any medical treatment, hydropathy is the system, and the _Water-cure Journal_ very good authority. Our society will soon evince symptoms of two conditions of Associative life, viz.: physical health and material wealth. By wealth I do not mean burdensome property, but an ample supply of the necessaries of life, which is real wealth. "I fully believe that nine out of ten organizations and attempts at Association would finally succeed, even with small means and few members, if they would adhere strictly to the following conditions: "First, keep free from debt, and live within their means; Second, not attempt too much in the commencement. "Great changes require a slow movement. All pioneers should remember to be constructive, and not merely destructive; not to tear down faster than they can substitute something better. Every failure of Association which has come to my knowledge, has been in consequence of disregarding these conditions; they have all been in debt, and depended on stock subscriptions to relieve them; and they have attempted too much. Having, in most cases, torn down the isolated household and family altar (or table), before they had even science enough to draft a plan of a Phalanstery or describe a unitary household, they seemed in some cases to imagine that the true social science, when once discovered, would furnish them, like the lamp of Aladdin, with all things wished for. They have awakened from their dreams; and now is the time for practical attempts, to start with, first, the joint-stock property, the large farm or township, the common home and joint property of all the members; second, coöperative labor and the equitable distribution of products, the large fields, large pastures, large gardens, large dairies, large fruit orchards, etc., with their mills, mechanic shops, stores, common wash-houses, bake-houses, baths, libraries, lectures, cabinets, etc.; third, educational organization, including all, both children and adults, and through that the adoption of the serial law, organization of groups and series; (at this point labor, without reference to the pay, will begin to be attractive;) fourth, the Phalansterian order, unitary living. As this is the greatest step, it requires the most time, most capital, and most mental preparation, especially for persons accustomed to country life. In most cases many years will be required for the adoption of the second of these conditions, and more for the third, and still more for the fourth. Hence the necessity of commencing, if the present generation is to realize much from the discovery of the science. "Let no person construe these remarks to indicate an advanced state of Association for the Wisconsin Phalanx. We have taken the first step, which required but little time, and are now barely commencing the second. We have spent three years, and judging from our progress thus far, it will doubtless take us from five to ten more to get far enough in the second to commence the third. We have made many blunders for the want of precedents, and in consequence of having more zeal than knowledge. Among the most serious blunders was an attempt at unitary living, without any of the surrounding circumstances being adapted to it. With this view we built, at a cost of more than $3,000, a long double front building, which can not be ventilated, and is very uncomfortable and extremely inconvenient for families to live in and do their cooking. But in this, bad as it is, some twenty of our families are still compelled to live, and will be for some time to come. This, with some other mistakes, will be to us a total loss, for the want of more knowledge to commence with. But these are trifling in comparison with the importance of our object and the result for a series of years. No true Associationist has been discouraged by these trials and losses; but we have a few among us who never were Associationists, and who are waiting a favorable opportunity to return to civilization; and we are waiting a favorable opportunity to admit such as we want to fill their places. W. CHASE." From the Annual Statement of the Condition and Progress of the Wisconsin Phalanx, for the fiscal year ending December 6, 1847. "The number of resident members is one hundred and fifty-seven; eighty-four males and seventy-three females. Thirty-two males and thirty-nine females are under twenty-one years, fifty-two males and thirty-four females over twenty-one years, and eighteen persons above the age of twenty-one unmarried. The whole number of resident families is thirty-two. We have resident with us who are not members, one family and four single persons. Four families and two single persons have left during the year, the stock of all of whom has been purchased, except of one family, and a single person; the former intends returning, and the latter owns but $25.00. "The number of hours' labor performed during the year, reduced to the medium class, is 93,446. The whole amount of property at the appraisal is $32,564.18. The net profits of the year are $9,029.73; which gives a dividend to stock of nearly 7-3/4 per cent., and 7-3/10 cents per hour to labor. "The Phalanx has purchased and cancelled during the year $2,000 of stock; we have also, by the assistance of our mill (which has been in operation since June), and from our available products, paid off the incumbrance of $1,095.33 with which we commenced the year; made our mechanical and agricultural improvements, and advanced to members, in rent, provisions, clothing, cash, etc., $5,237.07. The annexed schedule specifies the kinds and valuation of the property on hand: 1,713 acres of land at $3.00 $5,139.00 Agricultural improvements 3,509.77 Agricultural products 5,244.16 Mechanical improvements 12,520.00 Live stock 2,983.50 Farm and garden tools 1,219.77 Mechanical tools 380.56 Personal property, miscellaneous 1,567.42 ---------- Amount $32,564.18 "BENJ. WRIGHT, President." In June, 1848, Warren Chase sent a letter to the _Boston Investigator_, complaining of the _Harbinger's_ indifference to the interests of the Wisconsin Phalanx; and another writer in the _Investigator_ suggested that this indifference was on account of the irreligious character of the Phalanx; all of which the _Harbinger_ denied. To the charge of irreligion, a member of the Phalanx indignantly replied in the _Harbinger_, as follows: "Some of us are and have been Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, etc. Others have never been members of any church, but (with a very few exceptions) very readily admit the authenticity and moral value of the Scriptures. The ten commandments are the sum, substance and foundation of all true law. Add to this the gospel law of love, and you have a code of laws worthy of the adoption and practice of any man or set of men, and upon which Associationists must base themselves, or they can never succeed. There are many rules, doctrines and interpretations of Scripture among the (so denominated) Orthodox churches, that any man of common sense can not assent to. Even they can not agree among themselves; for instance the Old and New School Presbyterians, the Baptists, Methodists, etc. If this difference of faith and opinion is infidelity or irreligion, we to a man are infidels and irreligious; but if faith in the principles and morality of the Bible is the test, I deny the charge. I can scarcely name an individual here that dissents from them. "I have been a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church for about twenty years, and a Methodist local preacher for over three years, and am now Secretary of the Association. I therefore should know somewhat about this matter." [From the New York _Tribune_, July, 1848.] "WISCONSIN PHALANX.--Having lately seen running around the papers a statement that the last remaining 'Fourier Association,' somewhere in Illinois, had just given up the ghost, we gladly give place to the following extracts from a private letter we have just received from a former fellow citizen, who participated in two of the earlier attempts (Sylvania and Leraysville) to establish something that ultimately would or might become an Association after the idea of Fourier. After the second failure he attached himself to the communistic undertaking near Skaneateles, New York, and when this too ran aground, he went back perforce to the cut-throat system of civilized competition. But this had become unendurably hateful to him, and he soon struck off for Ceresco, and became a member of the Wisconsin Phalanx at that place, whereof he has now for some months been a resident. Of this Association he writes: "I have worked in the various groups side by side with the members, and I have never seen a more persevering, practical, matter-of-fact body of people in any such movement. Since I came here last fall, I see a great improvement, both externally and internally. Mr. Van Amringe, the energetic herald of national and social reform, did a good work by his lectures here last winter; and the meetings statedly held for intellectual and social improvement, have an excellent effect. All now indicates unity and fraternity. The Phalanx has erected and enclosed a new unitary dwelling, one hundred feet long, two stories high, with a spacious kitchen, belfry, etc. They have burnt a lime-kiln, and are burning a brick-kiln of one hundred thousand bricks as an experiment, and they bid fair to be first-rate. All this has been accomplished this spring in addition to their agricultural and horticultural operations. Their water-power is small, being supplied from springs, which the drought of the last three seasons has sensibly affected. In adding to their machinery, they will have to resort to steam. "The location is healthy and pleasant. The atmosphere is uniformly pure, and a good breeze is generally blowing. I doubt whether another site could be found combining so many natural advantages. I have visited nearly all the associative experiments in the country, and I like this the best. I think it already beyond the possibility of failure. D.S." Mr. Van Amringe spent considerable time at Ceresco, and sent several elaborate articles in favor of the Phalanx to the _Harbinger_. One of the members wrote to him as follows: "Since you left here a great change has taken place in the feelings and tastes of the members, and that too for the better. You will recollect the black and dirty appearance of the buildings, and the wood-work inside scrubbed until it had the appearance of a dirty white. About the first of May they made a grand rally to alter the appearance of things. The long building was white-washed inside and out, and the wood-work of nearly all the houses has been painted. The school-house has been white-washed and painted, the windows white, the panels of the wood-work a light yellow, carvings around a light blue, the seats and desks a light blue; this has made a great change in its appearance. You will recollect the frame of a new building that stood looking so distressed; about as much more was added to it, and all covered and neatly painted. The corridor is now finished; a handsome good kitchen has been put up in the rear of the old one, with a bakery underneath; a beautiful cupola is on the top, in which is placed a small bell, weighing one hundred and two pounds, about the size of a steamboat bell; it can be heard on the prairie. The blinds in the cupola windows are painted green. Were you to see the place now you would be surprised, and agreeably so, too. Some four or five have left since spring; new members have been taken in their stead, and a good exchange, I think, has been made. Two or three tailors, and the same number of shoemakers, are expected shortly." From the Annual Statement of the Condition and progress of the Wisconsin Phalanx, for the fiscal year ending December 4, 1848. "Religious meetings are sustained by us every Sabbath, in which the largest liberty is extended to all in the search for truth. In the educational department we do no more than sustain a common school; but are waiting, anxiously waiting, for the time when our condition will justify a more extended operation. In the absence of a reading-room and library, one of our greatest facilities for knowledge and general information is afforded by a great number and variety of newspapers and periodical publications, an interchange of which gives advantages in advance of the isolated family. The number of resident members is one hundred and twenty, viz.: sixty-three males and fifty-seven females. The number of resident families is twenty-nine. We have resident with us, who are not members, one family and twelve single persons. Six families and three single persons have left during the year, a part of whose stock we have purchased. We have lost by death the past year seven persons, viz.: one married lady (by consumption), one child two years of age, and five infants. The health of the members has been good, with the exception of a few cases of remittent and billious fevers. The Phalanx has sustained a public boarding-house the past year, at which the majority of the members have boarded at a cost not exceeding seventy-five cents per week. The remaining families board at their own apartments. "The number of hours' labor performed during the year, reduced to the medium class, is 97,036. The whole amount of property at the appraisal, is $33,527.77. The net profits of the year are, $8,077.02; which gives a dividend to stock of 6-1/4 per cent., and 6-1/4 cents per hour to labor. The annexed schedule specifies the kinds and valuation of property on hand: Real estate 1,793 acres at $3.00 $5,379.00 Live Stock 3,117.00 Mechanical tools 1,866.34 Farming tools 1,250.75 Mechanical improvements 14,655.00 Agricultural improvements 2,298.90 " products 3,161.56 Garden products 1,006.13 Miscellaneous property 793.09 ----------- Total amount $33,527.77 "S. BATES, President." The following anonymous summary, well written and evidently authentic, is taken from Macdonald's collection: [History of the Wisconsin Phalanx, by a member.] "In the winter of 1843-4 there was considerable excitement in the village of Southport, Wisconsin (now Kenosha City), on the subject of Association. The subject was taken up with much feeling and interest at the village lyceum and in various public meetings. Among the advocates of Association were a few persons who determined in the spring of 1844 to make a practical experiment. For that purpose a constitution was drawn up, and a voluntary Association formed, which styled itself 'The Wisconsin Phalanx.' As the movement began to ripen into action, the friends fell off, and the circle narrowed down from about seventy to twenty persons. This little band was composed mostly of men with small means, sturdy constitutions, below the middle age, and full of energy; men who had been poor, and had learned early to buffet with the antagonisms of civilization; not highly cultivated in the social and intellectual faculties, but more so in the moral and industrial. "They raised about $1,000 in money, which they sent to the land-office at Green Bay, and entered a tract of land selected by their committee, in a congressional township in the north-west corner of Fond du Lac County, a township six miles square, without a single inhabitant, and with no settlement within twenty miles, except a few scattered families about Green Lake. "With teams, stock, tents, and implements of husbandry and mechanism, they repaired to this spot in the latter part of May 1844, a distance of about one hundred and twenty-five miles from their homes, and commenced building and breaking up land, etc. They did not erect a log house, but split out of the tough burr and white oak of the 'openings,' shingles, clapboards, floors, frames and all the materials of a house, and soon prepared a shelter. Their families were then moved on. Late in the fall a saw-mill was built, and every thing prepared as well as could be for the winter. Their dwellings would have been unendurable at other times and under other circumstances; but at this time zeal, energy, excitement and hope kept them from complaining. Their land, which was subsequently increased to 1,800 acres, mostly at $1.25 per acre, consisted of 'openings,' prairie and timber, well watered, and with several small water-powers on the tract; a fertile soil, with as healthy a climate as could be found in the Western States. "It was agreed to name the new town Ceresco, and a post-office was applied for under that name, and obtained. One of the members always held the office of post-master, until the administration of General Taylor, when the office was removed about three-quarters of a mile to a rival village. In the winter of 1844-5, the Association asked the Legislature to organize their town, which was readily done under the adopted name. A few settlers had by this time moved into the town (which, owing to the large proportion of prairie, was not rapidly settled), and in the spring they held their election. Every officer chosen was a member of the society, and as they were required to elect Justices and had no need of any, they chose the three oldest men. From that time until the dissolution of the society nearly every town-office of importance was filled by its members. They had also one of their members in both Constitutional Conventions of the State, and three in the State Senate for one term of two sessions. Subsequently one of their members was a candidate for Governor, receiving more votes in his town than both of the other candidates together; but only a small vote in the State, as he was the free-soil candidate. "The Association drew up and prepared a charter or act of incorporation upon which they agreed, and applied to the Legislature for its passage; which was granted; and thus they became a body corporate and politic, known in the land as the 'Wisconsin Phalanx.' All the business was done in accordance with and under this charter, until the property was divided and the whole affair closed up. One clause in the charter prohibited the sale of the land. This was subsequently altered at the society's request, in an amendatory act in the session of 1849-50, for the purpose of allowing them to divide their property. "In the spring of 1845, after their organization under the charter, they had considerable accession to their numbers, and might have had greater; but were very careful about admitting new members, and erred very much in making a property qualification. About this time (1845) a question of policy arose among the members, the decision of which is supposed by many good judges to have been the principal cause of the ultimate division and dissolution; it was, whether the dwellings should be built in unitary blocks adapted to a common boarding-house, or in isolated style, adapted to the separate family and single living. It was decided by a small majority to pursue the unitary plan, and this policy was persisted in until there was a division of property. Whether this was the cause of failure or not, it induced many of the best members to leave; and although it might have been the true policy under other circumstances and for other persons, in this case it was evidently wrong, for the members were not socially developed sufficiently to maintain such close relations. Notwithstanding this, they continued to increase slowly, rejecting many more applicants than they admitted; and often rejecting the better and admitting the worse, because the worse had the property qualifications. In this way they increased to the maximum of thirty-three families. They had no pecuniary difficulties, for they kept mostly out of debt. "It was a great reading Community; often averaging as many as five or six regular newspapers to a family, and these constantly exchanging with each other. They were not religious, but mostly rather skeptical, except a few elderly orthodox persons. [This hardly agrees with the statement and protest on the 436th page.] "They were very industrious, and had many discussions and warm arguments about work, manners, progress, etc.; but still they continued to work and scold, and scold and work, with much energy, and to much effect. They raised one season ten thousand bushels of wheat, and much other grain; had about seven hundred acres under cultivation; but committed a great error in cultivating four hundred acres on the school lands adjoining their own, because it lay a little better for a large field. They had subsequently to remove their fences and leave that land, for they did not wish to buy it. "Their charter elections were annual, and were often warmly contested, and turned mainly on the question of unitary or isolated households; but they never went beyond words in their contentions. "They were all temperance men and women: no ardent spirits were kept or sold for the first four years in the township, and never on the domain, while it was held as joint-stock. "Their system of labor and pay was somewhat complicated, and never could be satisfactorily arranged. The farmers and mechanics were always jealous of each other, and could not be brought to feel near enough to work on and divide the profits at the end of the year; but as they ever hoped to get over this difficulty, they said but very little about it. In their system of labor they formed groups for each kind of work; each group, when consisting of three or more, choosing its own foreman, who kept the account of the time worked by each member, and reported weekly to a meeting of all the members, which regulated the average; and then the Secretary copied it; and at the end of the fiscal year each person drew, on his labor account, his proportion of the three-fourths of the increase and products which was allotted to labor, and on his stock shares, his proportion of the one-fourth that was divided to stock. The amount so divided was ascertained by an annual appraisal of all the property, thus ascertaining the rise or increase in value, as well as the product of labor. The dividend to capital was, however, usually considered too large and disproportionate. "The books and accounts were accurately kept by the Secretary, and most of the individual transactions passed through this form, thus leaving all accounts in the hands of a disinterested person, open to inspection at all times, and bringing about an annual settlement which avoided many difficulties incident to civilization. "The table of the Community, when kept as a public boarding-house, where the families and visitors or travelers were mostly seated, was set with plain but substantial food, much like the tables of farmers in newly settled agricultural States; but it often incurred the ridicule of loafers and epicures, who travel much and fare better with strangers than at home. "They had among their number a few men of leading intellect who always doubted the success of the experiment, and hence determined to accumulate property individually by any and every means called fair in competitive society. These would occasionally gain some important positions in the society, and representing it in part at home and abroad, caused much trouble. By some they were accounted the principal cause of the final failure. "In the summer and fall of 1849 it became evident that a dissolution and division was inevitable, and plans for doing it within themselves, without recourse to courts of law, were finally got up, and they determined to have it done by their legal advisers as other business was done. At the annual election in December 1849, the officers were elected with a view to that particular business. They had already sold much of the personal property and cancelled much of the stock. The highest amount of stock ever issued was about $33,000, and this was reduced by the sale of personal property up to January 1850, to about $23,000; soon after which the charter was amended, allowing the sale of real estate and the discontinuance of annual settlement, schools, etc. "In April 1850 they fixed on an appraisal of their lands in small lots (having some of them cut into village and farm lots), and commenced selling at public sale for stock, making the appraisal the minimum, and leaving any lands open to entry, after they had been offered publicly. During the summer of 1850 most of the lands were sold and most of the stock cancelled in this way, under an arrangement by which each stockholder should receive his proportional share of any surplus, or make up any deficiency. Most of the members bought either farming lands or village lots and became permanent inhabitants, thus continuing the society and its influences to a considerable extent. They divided about eight per cent. above par on the stock. "Thus commenced, flourished and decayed this attempt at industrial Association. It never attempted to follow Fourier or any other teacher, but rather to strike out a path for itself. It failed because its leading minds became satisfied that under existing circumstances no important progress could be made, rather than from a want of faith in the ultimate practicability of Association. "Many of the members regretted the dissolution, while others who had gained property and become established in business through the reputation of the Phalanx for credit and punctuality, seemed to care very little about it. Being absorbed in the world-wide spirit of speculation, and having their minds thus occupied, they forgot the necessity for a social change, which once appeared to them so important." The writer of the foregoing was probably one of the leading members. In a paragraph preceding the account he says that the Wisconsin Phalanx had these three peculiarities, viz: "1. The same individual who was the principal originator and organizer of it, was also the one, who, throughout the experiment, had the entire confidence of the members and stockholders; and finally did nearly all the business in the closing up of its affairs. "2. At the division of its property, it paid a premium on its stock, instead of sustaining a loss. "3. Neither the Association nor any of its members ever had a lawsuit of any kind during its existence, or at its close. "The truth is," he adds, "this attempt was pecuniarily successful; but socially, a failure." Macdonald concludes with the following note: "Mr. Daniels, a gentleman who saw the whole progress of the Wisconsin Phalanx, says that the cause of its breaking up was speculation; the love of money and the want of love for Association. Their property becoming valuable, they sold it for the purpose of making money out of it." This explanation of the mystery of the failure agrees with the hints at the conclusion of the previous account. On the whole, the coroner's verdict in this case must be--'DIED, not by any of the common diseases of Associations, such as poverty, dissension, lack of wisdom, morality or religion, but by deliberate suicide, for reasons not fully disclosed.' CHAPTER XXXVI. THE NORTH AMERICAN PHALANX. This was the test-experiment on which Fourierism practically staked its all in this country. Brisbane was busy in its beginnings; Greeley was Vice-President and stockholder. Its ambitious name and its location near New York City helped to set it apart as the model Phalanx. It was managed with great ability, and on the whole was more successful both in business and duration, than any other Fourier Association. It not only saw all the Phalanxes die around it, but it outlasted the _Harbinger_ that blew the trumpet for them; and fought on, after the battle was given up. Indeed it outlived our friend Macdonald, the 'Old Mortality' of Socialism. Three times he visited it; and the record of his last visit, which was written in the year of his death, 1854, and was probably the last of his literary labors, closes with an acknowledgement of the continuance and prosperity of the North American. We shall have to give several chapters to this important experiment. We will begin with a semi-official expose of its foundations. A History of the first nine years of the North American Phalanx, written by its practical chief, Mr. Charles Sears, at the request of Macdonald; dated December, 1852. "Prior to the spring of 1843, Mr. Albert Brisbane had been publishing, principally in the New York _Tribune_, a series of articles on the subject of social science. He had also published his larger work on Association, which was followed by his pamphlet containing a summary of the doctrines of a new form of society, and the outline of a project to found a practical Association, to be called the North American Phalanx. "There was nominally a central organization in the city of New York, and affiliated societies were invited to co-operate by subscribing the means of endowing the proposed Phalanx, and furnishing the persons to engage personally in the enterprise. It was proposed to raise about four hundred thousand dollars, thus making the attempt with adequate means to establish the conditions of attractive industry. "The essays and books above mentioned had a wide circulation, and many were captivated with the glowing pictures of a new life thus presented; others were attracted by the economies of the combined order which were demonstrated; still others were inspired by the hopes of personal distinction in the brilliant career thus opened to their ambition; others again, were profoundly impressed by Fourier's sublime annunciation of the general destinies of globes and humanities; that progressive development through careers, characterized all movement and all forms; that in all departments of creation, the law of the series was the method observed in distributing harmonies; consequently, that human society and human activity, to be in harmony with the universe of relations, can not be an exception to the great law of the series; consequently, that the existing order of civilization and the societies that preceded it are but phases in the growth of the race, and having subserved their more active uses, become bases of further development. "Among those who became interested in the idea of social progress, were a few persons in Albany, New York, who from reading and interchange of views, were induced to unite in an organization for the purpose of deliberately and methodically investigating the doctrines of a new social order as announced by Fourier, deeming these doctrines worthy of the most profound and serious consideration. "This body, after several preliminary meetings, formally adopted rules of organization on the 6th of April, 1843, and the declaration of their objects is in the following words: 'We, the undersigned, for the purpose of investigating Fourier's theory of social reform as expounded by Albert Brisbane, and if deemed expedient, of co-operating with like organizations elsewhere, do associate, with the ulterior view of organizing and founding an industrial and commercial Phalanx.' "Proceeding in this direction, the body assumed the name of 'The Albany Branch of the North American Phalanx;' opened a correspondence with Messrs. Brisbane, Greeley, Godwin, Channing, Ripley and others; had lectures of criticism on existing institutions and in exposition of the doctrines of the proposed new order. "During the summer practical measures were so matured, that a commission was appointed to explore the country, more particularly in the vicinity of New York and of Philadelphia, for a suitable domain upon which to commence the foundation of new social institutions. Mr. Brisbane was the delegate on the part of the New York friends, and Mr. Allen Worden on the part of the Albany Branch. A site was selected in Monmouth County, New Jersey, about forty miles south of New York; and on the 12th day of August, 1843, pursuant to public notice, a convention was held in the Albany Exchange, at which the North American Phalanx was organized by adopting a constitution, and subscribing to a covenant to invest in the capital stock. "At this convention were delegates from New York, Catskill, Troy, Brook Farm Association, and the Albany Branch; and when the real work of paying money and elevating life to the effort of social organization was to be done, about a dozen subscribers were found equal to the work, ten of whom finally co-operated personally in the new life, with an aggregate subscription of eight thousand dollars. This by common consent was the absolute minimum of men and means; and, contrasted with the large expectations and claims originally stated, was indeed a great falling-off; but the few who had committed themselves with entire faith to the movement, went forward, determined to do what they could to make a worthy commencement, hoping that with their own families and such others as would from time to time be induced to co-operate, the germs of new institutions might fairly be planted. "Accordingly in the month of September, 1843, a few families took possession of the domain, occupying to over-fullness the two farm-houses on the place, and commenced building a temporary house, forty feet by eighty, of two stories, for the accommodation of those who were to come the following spring. "During the year 1844 the population numbered about ninety persons, including at one period nearly forty children under the age of sixteen years. Crops were planted, teams and implements purchased, the building of shops and mills was commenced, measures of business and organization were discussed, the construction of social doctrines debated, personal claims canvassed, and thus the business of life was going on at full tide; and now also commenced the real development of character. "Hitherto there had been no settled science of society. Fourier, the man of profound insight, announced the law of progress and indicated the new forms that society would take. People accepted the new ideas gladly, and would as gladly institute new forms; but there was a lack of well-defined views on the precise work to be done. Besides, education tended strongly to confirm in most minds the force of existing institutions, and after attaining to middle age, and even before this period, the character usually becomes quite fixed; so that to break up habitudes, relinquish prejudices, sunder ties, and to adopt new modes of action, accept of modified results, and re-adjust themselves to new relations, was a difficult, and to the many, almost impossible work, as is proved by the fact that, of the thirty or forty similar attempts at associated life within the past ten years in this country, only the North American Phalanx now [1852] remains. Nor did this Association escape the inevitable consequences of bringing together a body of grown-up people with their families, many of whom came reluctantly, and whose characters were formed under other influences. "Personal difficulties occurred as a matter of course, but these were commonly overruled by a healthy sentiment of self-respect. Parties also began to form, but they were not fully developed until the first annual settlement and distribution of profits was attempted. Then, however, they took a variety of forms according to the interest or ambition of the partisans; though two principal views characterized the more permanent and clearly defined party divisions; one party contending for authority, enforced with stringent rules and final appeal to the dictation of the chief officer; the other party standing out for organization and distribution of authority. The former would centralize power and make administration despotic, claiming that thus only could order be maintained; the latter claimed that to do this, would be merely to repeat the institutions of civilization; that Association thus controlled would be devoid of corporate life, would be dependent upon individuals, and quite artificial; whereas what we wanted was a wholly different order, viz., the enfranchisement of the individual; order through the natural method of the series; institutions that would be instinct with the life that is organic, from the sum of the series, down to the last subdivision of the group. The strife to maintain these several views was long and vigorous; and it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that our days were spent in labor and our nights in legislation, for the first five years of our associative life. The question at issue was vital. It was whether the infant Association should or should not have new institutions; whether it should be Civilizee or Phalansterian; whether it should be a mere joint-stock corporation such as had been before, or whether the new form of industrial organization indicated by Fourier should be initiated. In the contest between the two principles of civilized joint-stock Association, and of the Phalansterian or Serial organization, the latter ultimately prevailed; and in this triumph of the idea of the natural organic forms of society through the method of the series, we see distinctly the development of the germ of the Phalanx. For when we have a true principle evolved, however insignificant the development may be, the results, although limited by the smallness of the development, will nevertheless be right in kind. It is perhaps important, to the end that the results of our experience be rightly comprehended, to indicate the essential features of the order of society that is to succeed present disorder, and wherein it differs from other social forms. "A fundamental feature is, that we deny the bald atheism that asserts human nature to be a melancholy failure and unworthy of respect or trust, and therefore to be treated as an alien and convict. On the contrary, we hold that, instead of chains, man requires freedom; instead of checks, he requires development; instead of artificial order through coercion, he requires the Divine harmony that comes through counterpoise. Hence society is bound by its own highest interests, by the obligation it owes to its every member, to make organic provision for the entire circle of human wants, for the entire range of human activity; so that the individual shall be emancipated from the servitude of nature, from personal domination, from social tyrannies; and that thus fully enfranchised and guaranteed by the whole force of society, into all freedoms and the endowment of all rights pertaining to manhood, he may fulfill his own destiny, in accordance with the laws written in his own organization. "In the Phalanx, then, we have, in the sphere of production, the relation of employer and employed stricken out of the category of relations, not merely as in the simple joint-stock corporations, by substituting for the individual employer the still more despotic and irresistible corporate employer; but by every one becoming his own employer, doing that which he is best qualified by endowment to do, receiving for his labor precisely his share of the product, as nearly as it can be determined while there is no scientific unit of value. "In the sphere of circulation or currency, we have a representative of all the wealth produced, so that every one shall have issued to him for all his production, the abstract or protean form of value, which is convertible into every other form of value; in commerce or exchanges, reducing this from a speculation as now, to a function; employing only the necessary force to make distributions; and exchanging products or values on the basis of cost. "In the sphere of social relations, we have freedom to form ties according to affinities of character. "In the sphere of education, we establish the natural method, not through the exaltation into professorships of this, that or other notable persons, but through a body of institutions reposing upon industry, and having organic vitality. Commencing with the nursery, we make, through the living corporation, through adequately endowed institutions that fail not, provision for the entire life of the child, from the cradle upward; initiating him step by step, not into nominal, ostensible education apart from his life, but into the real business of life, the actual production and distribution of wealth, the science of accounts and the administration of affairs; and providing that, through uses, the science that lies back of uses shall be acquired; so theory and practice, the application of science to the pursuits of life shall, through daily use, become as familiar as the mother tongue; and thus place our children at maturity in the ranks of manhood and womanhood, competent to all the duties and activities of life, that they may be qualified by endowment to perform. "In the sphere of administration, we have a graduated hierarchy of orders, from the simple chief of a group, or supervisor of a single function, up to the unitary administration of the globe. "In the sphere of religion, we have religious life as contrasted with the profession of a religious faith. The intellect requires to be satisfied as well as the affections, and is so with the scientific and therefore universal formula, that the religious element in man is the passion of unity; that is, that all the powers of the soul shall attain to true equilibrium, and act normally in accordance with Divine law, so that human life in all its powers and activities shall be in harmonious relations with nature, with itself, and with the supreme center of life. "Of course we speak of the success of an idea, and only expect realization through gradual development. It is obvious also that such realization can be attained only through organization; because, unaided, the individual makes but scanty conquests over nature, and but feeble opposition to social usurpations. "The principle, then, of the Serial Organization being established, the whole future course of the Association, in respect to its merely industrial institutions, was plain, viz.: to develop and mature the serial form. "Not that the old questions did not arise subsequently; on the contrary on the admission of new members from time to time, they did arise and have discussion anew; but the contest had been virtually decided. The Association had pronounced with such emphasis in favor of the organization of labor upon the basis of co-operative efforts, joint-stock property, and unity of interests, that those holding adverse views gradually withdrew; and the harmony of the Association was never afterward in serious jeopardy. "During the later as well as earlier years of our associated life, the question of preference of modes of realization came under discussion in the Phalansterian school, one party advocating the measure of obtaining large means, and so fully endowing the Phalanx with all the external conditions of attractive industry, and then introducing gradually a body of select associates. The North American Phalanx, as represented in the conventions of the school, held to the view that new social institutions, new forms into which the life of a people shall flow, can not be determined by merely external conditions and the elaboration of a theory of life and organization, but are matters of growth. "Our view is that the true Divine growth of the social, as of the individual man, is the progressive development of a germ; and while we would not in the slightest degree oppose a scientific organization upon a large scale, it is our preference to pursue a more progressive mode, to make a more immediately practical and controllable attempt. "The call of to-day we understand to be for evidence, First: Of the possibility of harmony in Association; Second: That by associated effort, and the control of machinery, the laborer may command the means, not only of comfort and the necessaries of life, but also of education and refinement; Third: that the nature of the relations we would establish are essentially those of religious justice. "The possibility of establishing true social relations, increased production, and the embodiment of the religious sentiment, are, if we read the signs aright, the points upon which the question of Association now hinges in the public mind. "Because, First: Man's capacity for these relations is doubted; Because, Second: Production is an essential and permanent condition of life, and means of progress; Because, Third: It is apprehended that the religious element is not sufficiently regarded and provided for in Association. "Demonstrate that capacity, prove that men by their own efforts may command all the means of life, show in institutions the truly religious nature of the movement and the relations that are to obtain, and the public will be gained to the idea of Association. "Another question still has been pressed upon us offensively by the advocates of existing institutions, as though their life were pure and their institutions perfect, while no terms of opprobrium could sufficiently characterize the depravity of the Socialists; and this question is that of the marriage relation. Upon this question a form of society that is so notoriously rotten as existing civilization is, a society that has marriage and prostitution as complementary facts of its relations of the sexes, a society which establishes professorships of abortion, which methodizes infanticide, which outlaws woman, might at least assume the show of modesty, might treat with common candor any and all who are seeking the Divine law of marriage. Instead, therefore, of recognizing its right to defame us, we put that society upon its defense, and say to it, Come out of your infidelities, and your crimes, and your pretenses; seek out the law of righteousness, and deal justly with woman. Nevertheless this is a question in which we, in common with others, have a profound interest; it is a question which has by no means escaped consideration among us, and we perhaps owe it to ourselves to state our position. "What the true law of relationship of the sexes is, we as a body do not pretend to determine. Here, as elsewhere, individual opinion is free; but there are certain conditions, as we think, clearly indicated, which are necessary to the proper consideration of the question; and our view is that it is one that must be determined mainly by woman herself. When she shall be fully enfranchised, fully endowed with her rights, so that she shall no longer be dependent on marriage for position, no longer be regarded as a pensioner, but as a constituent of the State; in a single phrase, when society shall, independently of other considerations than that of inherent right, assure to woman social position and pecuniary independence, so that she can legislate on a footing of equality, then she may announce the law of the sexual relations. But this can only occur in organized society; society in which there is a complete circle of fraternal institutions that have public acceptance; can only occur when science enters the domain of human society, and determines relations, as it now does in astronomy or physic. "We therefore say to civilization, You have no adequate solution of this problem that is convulsing you, and in which every form of private and public protest against the actual condition is expressing itself. Besides this we claim what can not be claimed for any similar number of people in civilization, viz., that we have been here over nine years, with an average population of nearly one hundred persons of both sexes and all ages, and, judged by the existing standard of morals, we are above reproach on this question. "Thus we have proceeded, disposing of our primary legislation, demonstrating to general acceptance the rectitude of our awards and distributions of profit, determining questions of social doctrine, perfecting methods of order, and developing our industry, with a fair measure of success. In this latter respect the following statistics will indicate partially the progress we have made. "We commenced in 1843, as before mentioned, with a dozen subscribers, and an aggregate subscription of $8,000. On the 30th of November, 1844, upon our first settlement, our property amounted in round numbers to $28,000; of which we owed in capital stock and balances due members, say, $18,000. The remainder was debt incurred in purchasing the land, $9,000; implements, etc., $1,000; total, $10,000. "Our population at this period, including members and applicants, was nearly as follows: Men, thirty-two; women, nineteen; children of both sexes under sixteen years, twenty-six; making an aggregate of seventy-seven. At one period thereafter our numbers were reduced to about sixty-five persons. "On the 30th of November, 1852, our property was estimated at $80,000, held as follows: capital stock and balances of account due members, say, $62,800; permanent debt, $12,103; floating debt, $5,097; total, $80,000. Dividing this sum by 673, the number of acres, the entire cost of our property is $119 per acre. "At this period our population of members and applicants is as follows: men, forty-eight; women, thirty-seven; adults, eighty-five; children under sixteen years, twenty-seven; making an aggregate of one hundred and twelve. "Dividing the sum of property by this number, we have an average investment for each man, woman and child, of over $700, or for each family of five persons, say, $3,600. Dividing the sum of our permanent debt by the number of our population, the average to each person is, say, $107. "For the purpose of comparing the pecuniary results of our industry to the individual, with like pursuits elsewhere, we make the following exhibition: In the year 1844 the average earnings of adults, besides their board, was three dollars and eighty cents a month, and the dividend for the use of capital was 4.7 per cent. 1845. Earnings of labor was $8.21 per month. of capital 05.1 per cent. 1846. Earnings of labor 2.73 per month. of capital 04.4 per cent. 1847. Earnings of labor 12.02 per month. of capital 05.6 per cent. 1848. Earnings of labor 14.10 per month. of capital 05.7 per cent. 1849. Earnings of labor 13.58 per month. of capital 05.6 per cent. 1850. Earnings of labor 13.58 per month. of capital 05.52 per cent. 1851. Earnings of labor 14.59 per month. of capital 04.84 per cent. "It is to be noted that when we took possession of our domain, the land was in a reduced condition; and upon our improvements we have made no profit excepting subsequent increased revenue, they having been valued at cost. Also that our labors were mainly agricultural until within the last three years, when milling was successfully introduced. We have, it is true, carried on various mechanical branches for our own purposes, such as building, smith-work, tin-work, shoe-making, etc.; but for purposes of revenue, we have not to much extent succeeded in introducing mechanical branches of industry. "Furthermore, we divide our profits upon the following general principles: For labors that are necessary, but repulsive or exhausting, we award the highest rates; for such as are useful, but less repugnant or taxing, a relatively smaller award is made; and for the more agreeable pursuits, a still smaller rate is allowed. "Thus observing this general formula in our classification of labor, viz.: the necessary, the useful, and the agreeable; and also awarding to the individual, first, for his labor, secondly, for the talent displayed in the use of means, or in adaptation of means to ends, wise administration, etc., and thirdly, for the use of his capital; it will be perceived that we make our award upon a widely different basis from the current method. We have a theory of awards, a scientific reason for our classification of labor and our awards to individuals; and one of the consequences is that women earn more, relatively, among us than in existing society. "In matters of education we have hitherto done little else than keep, as we might, the common district school, introducing, however, improved methods of instruction. Other interests have pressed upon us; other questions clamored for solution. We were to determine whether or not we could associate in all the labors of life; and if yea, then whether we could sufficiently command the material means of life, until we should have established institutions that would supersede the necessity of strenuous personal effort. It will be understood that this work has been sufficiently arduous, and consequently that our children, being too feeble in point of numbers to assert their rights, have been pushed aside." Here follows a labored disquisition on the possibilities of serial education, which we omit, as the substance of it can be found in the standard expositions of Fourierism. "If now we are asked, what questions we have determined, what results we may fairly claim to have accomplished through our nine years of associated life and efforts at organization, we may answer in brief, that so far as the members of this body are concerned, we meet the universal demand of this day with institutions which guarantee the rights of labor and the products thereof, of education, and a home, and social culture. This is not a mere declaration of abstract rights that we claim to make, but we establish our members in the possession and enjoyment of these rights; and we venture to claim that, so far as the comforts of home, private rights and social privileges are concerned, our actual life is greatly in advance of that of any mixed population under the institutions of existing civilization, either in town or country. We claim, so far as with our small number we could do, to have organized labor through voluntary Association, upon the principle of unity of interests; so reconciling the hitherto hostile parties of laborer and capitalist; so settling the world-old, world-wide quarrel, growing out of antagonistic interests among men; that is, we have organized the production and distribution of wealth in agricultural and domestic labor, and in some branches of mechanics and manufactures, and thus have abolished the servile character of labor, and the servile relation of employer and employed. And it is precisely in the point where failure was most confidently predicted, viz., in domestic labor, that we have most fully succeeded, because mainly, as we suppose, in the larger numbers attached to this industry we had the conditions of carrying out more fully the serial method of organization. "In distributing the profits of industry we have adopted a law of equitable proportion, so that when the facts are presented, we have initiated the measure of attaining to practical justice, or in the formula of Fourier, 'equitable distribution of profits.' We claim also that we guarantee the sale of the products of industry; that is, we secure the means of converting any and every form of product or fruit of labor at the cost thereof, into any other form also at cost. For all our labor is paid for in a domestic currency. In other words, when value is produced, a representative of that value is issued to the producer; and only so far as there is the production of value, is there any issue of the representative of value; so that property and currency are always equal, and thus we solve the problem of banking and currency; thus we have in practical operation, what Proudhon vainly attempted to introduce into France; what Kellogg proposed to introduce under governmental sanction in this country; what Warren proposes to accomplish by his labor notes and exchanges at cost. "We might state other facts, but let this suffice for the present; and we will only say in conclusion, that when the organization of our educational series shall be completed, as we hope to see it, we shall thus have established as a body a measurably complete circle of fraternal institutions, in which social and private rights are guaranteed; we shall then fairly have closed the first cycle of our societary life and efforts, fairly have laid the germs of living institutions, of the corporations which have perpetual life, which gather all knowledges, which husband all experiences, and into the keeping of which we commit all material interests, and which only need a healthy development to change without injustice, to absorb without violence, the discords of existing society, and to unfold, as naturally as the chrysalis unfolds into a form of beauty, a new and higher order of human society. "To carry on this work we need additional means to endow our agricultural, our educational, our milling and other interests, and to build additional tenements; and above all we need additional numbers of people who are willing to work for an idea; men and women who are competent to establish or conduct successfully some branch of profitable industry; who understand the social movement; who will come among us with worthy motives, and with settled purpose of fraternal co-operation; who can appreciate the labor, the conditions of life, the worth of the institutions we have and propose to have, in contrast with the chances of private gain accompanied by the prevailing disorder, the denial of right, and the ever-increasing oppressions of existing civilization. "The views of members and applicants upon the foregoing statement are expressed by the position of their signatures affixed below: _Aye._ H.T. Stone, Eugenia Thomson, E.L. Holmes, Lucius Eaton, Leemon Stockwell, Gertrude Sears, Alcander Longley, R.N. Stockwell, E.A. Angell, Herman Schetter, A.P. French, J. Bucklin, W.A. French, Nathaniel H. Colson, L.E. Bucklin, John Ash, Jr., John French, Edwin D. Sayre, John H. Steel, Mary E.F. Grey, O.S. Holmes, Phebe T. Drew, Althea Sears, John V. Sears, John Gray, H. Bell Munday, P. French, Robert J. Smith, Caroline M. Hathaway, M.A. Martin, J.R. Vanderburgh, Anna E. Hathaway, L. French, James Renshaw, Anne Guillauden, Z. King, Jr., J.G. Drew, L. Munday, D.H. King, S. Martin, Chloe Sears, A.J. Lanotte, Joseph T. French, James Renshaw, Jr., W.K. Prentice, N.H. Stockwell, Emile Guillauden, Jr., Julia Bucklin, Chas. G. French, Ellen M. Stockwell, ---- Maynet. _Nay._ "Geo. Perry believes that difficulty arises from the selfishness, class-interest and personal ambition, of Class No. 1 and 2; also, last and not least, absence of uniformity of attractions. "J.R. Coleman endorses the above sentiments. James Warren, do. H.N. Coleman, do. "M. Hammond has very reluctantly concluded that the difficulty is in the Institution and not in the members." CHAPTER XXXVII. LIFE AT THE NORTH AMERICAN PHALANX. The following pictures from the files of the _Harbinger_, with the subsequent reports of Macdonald's three visits, give a tolerable view of life at the North American in its early and its latter days. [Fourth of July (1845) at the Phalanx.] "As soon as the moisture was off the grass, a group went down to the beautiful meadows to spread the hay; and the right good will, quickness, and thoroughness with which they completed their task, certainly illustrated the attractiveness of combined industry. Others meanwhile were gathering for dinner the vegetables, of which, by the consent of the whole neighborhood, they have a supply unsurpassed in early maturity and excellence; and still others were busy in the various branches of domestic labor. "And now, the guests from New York and the country around having come in, and the hour for the meeting being at hand, the bell sounded, and men, women and children assembled in a walnut grove near the house, where a semicircle of seats had been arranged in the cool shade. Here addresses were given by William H. Channing and Horace Greeley, illustrating the position that Association is the truly consistent embodiment in practice of the professed principles of our nation. "After some hour and a half thus spent, the company adjourned to the house, where a table had been spread the whole length of the hall, and partook of a most abundant and excellent dinner, in which the hospitable sisters of the Phalanx had most satisfactorily proved their faith by their works. Good cold water was the only beverage, thanks to the temperance of the members. A few toasts and short speeches seasoned the feast. "And now once again, the afternoon being somewhat advanced, the demand for variety was gratified by a summons to the hay-field. Every rake and fork were in requisition; a merrier group never raked and pitched; never was a meadow more dexterously cleared; and it was not long before there was a demand that the right to labor should be honored by fresh work, which the chief of the group lamented he could not at the moment gratify. To close the festivities the young people formed in a dance, which was prolonged till midnight. And so ended this truly cheerful and friendly holiday." [George Ripley's visit to the Phalanx.] _May, 14, 1846._ "Arriving about dinner time at the Mansion, we received a cordial welcome from our friends, and were soon seated at their hospitable table, and were made to feel at once that we were at home, and in the midst of those to whom we were bound by strong ties. How could it be otherwise? It was a meeting of those whose lives were devoted to one interest, who had chosen the lot of pioneers in a great social reform, and who had been content to endure sacrifices for the realization of ideas that were more sacred than life itself. Then, too, the similarity of pursuits, of the whole mode of life in our infant Associations, produces a similarity of feeling, of manners, and I could almost fancy, even of expression of countenance. I have often heard strangers remark upon the cheerfulness and elasticity of spirit which struck them on visiting our little Association at Brook Farm; and here I found the same thing so strongly displayed, that in conversing with our new friends, it seemed as if they were the same that I had left at home, or rather that I had been side by side with them for months or years, instead of meeting them to-day for the first time. I did not need any formal introduction to make me feel acquainted, and I flatter myself that there was as little reserve cherished on their part. "After dinner we were kindly attended by our friend Mr. Sears over this beautiful, I may truly say, enchanting domain. I had often heard it spoken of in terms of high commendation; but I must confess, I was not prepared to find an estate combining so many picturesque attractions with such rare agricultural capabilities. "Our friends here have no doubt been singularly fortunate in procuring so valuable a domain as the scene of their experiment, and I see nothing which, with industry and perseverance, can create a doubt of their triumphant success, and that at no very distant day. "I was highly gratified with the appearance of the children, and the provision that is made for their education, physical as well as intellectual. I found them in a very neat school-room, under the intelligent care of Mrs. B., who is devoting herself to this department with a noble zeal and the most pleasing results. It is seldom that young people in common society have such ample arrangements for their culture, or give evidence of such a healthy desire for improvement. "This Association has not been free from difficulties. It has had to contend with the want of sufficient capital, and has experienced some embarrassment on that account. It has also suffered from the discouragement of some of its members--a result always to be expected in every new enterprise, and by no means formidable in the long run--and discontent has produced depression. Happily, the disaffected have retired from the premises, and with few, if any, exceptions, the present members are heartily devoted to the movement, with strong faith in the cause and in each other, and determined to deserve success, even if they do not gain it. Their prospects, however, are now bright, and with patient industry and internal harmony they must soon transform their magnificent domain into a most attractive home for the associative household. May God prosper them!" [N.C. Neidhart's visit to the Phalanx.] _July 4, 1847._ "It is impossible for me to describe the deep impression which the life and genial countenances of our brethren have made upon us. Although not belonging to what are very unjustly called the higher classes, I discovered more true refinement, that which is based upon humanitary feeling, than is generally found among those of greater pretensions. There is a serene, earnest love about them all, indicating a determination on their part to abide the issue of the great experiment in which they are engaged. "After a fatiguing walk over the domain, I found their simple but refreshing supper very inviting. Here we saw for the first time the women assembled, of whom we had only caught occasional glimpses before. They appeared to be a genial band, with happy, smiling countenances, full of health and spirits. Such deep and earnest eyes, it seemed to me, I had never seen before. Most of the younger girls had wreaths of evergreen and flowers wound around their hair, and some also around their persons in the form of scarfs, which became them admirably. "After tea we resorted to the reading-room, where are to be found on files all the progressive and reformatory, as well as the best agricultural, papers of the Union, such as the _New York Tribune_, _Practical Christian_, _Young America_, _Harbinger_, etc. There is also the commencement of a small library. "Only one thing was wanting to enliven the evening, and that was music. They possess, I believe, a guitar, flutes, and other instruments, but the time necessary for their cultivation seems to be wanting. The want of this so necessary accompaniment of universal harmony, was made up to us by some delightful hours which we spent in the parlor of Mrs. B., who showed us some of her beautiful drawings, and in whose intelligent society we spent the evening. This lady was formerly a member of the Clermont Phalanx, Ohio. I was sorry there was not time enough to receive from her an account of the causes of the disbandment of this society. She must certainly have been satisfied of the superiority of associated life, to encourage her to join immediately another. "It was my good fortune (notwithstanding the large number of visitors), to obtain a nice sleeping-room, from which I was sorry to see I had driven some obliging member of the Phalanx. The orderly simplicity of this room was quite pleasing. It enabled us to form some judgment of the order which pervaded the Community. "Next morning we took an early breakfast, and accompanied by Mr. Wheeler, a member of the society, we wandered over the whole domain. On our way home we struck across Brisbane Hill, where they intend to erect the future Phalansterian house on a more improved and extensive plan. "There is religious worship here every Sunday, in which all those who feel disposed may join. The members of the society adhere to different religious persuasions, but do not seem to care much for the outward forms of religion. "As far as I could learn, the health of the Phalanx has been generally very good. They have lost, however, several children by different diseases. During the prevalence of the small-pox in the Community, the superiority of the combined order over the isolated household was most clearly manifested. Quite lately they have constructed a bathing-house. The water is good, but must contain more or less iron, as the whole country is full of it." _Macdonald's first visit to the Phalanx._ _October, 1851._ "It was dark when I arrived at the Phalanstery. Lights shone through the trees from the windows of several large buildings, the sight of which sent a cheering glow through me, and as I approached, I inwardly fancied that what I saw was part of an early dream. The glancing lights, the sounds of voices, and the notes of music, while all nature around was dark and still, had a strange effect, and I almost believed that this was a Community where people were really happy. "I entered and inquired for Mr. Bucklin, whose name had been given me. At the end of a long hall I found a small reading-room, with four or five strange-looking beings sitting around a table reading newspapers. They all appeared eccentric, not alone because they were unshaven and unshorn, but from the peculiar look of their eyes and form of their faces. Mr. Bucklin, a kind man, came to me, glancing as if he anticipated something important. I explained my business, and he sat down beside me; but though I attempted conversation, he had very little to say. He inquired if I wished for supper, and on my assenting, he left me for a few minutes and then returned, and very soon after he led me out to another building. We passed through a passage and up a short flight of steps into a very handsome room, capable, I understood, of accommodating two hundred persons at dinner. It had a small gallery or balcony at one end of it, and six windows on either side. It was furnished with two rows of tables and chairs, each table large enough for ten or twelve persons to dine at. There were three bright lamps suspended from the ceiling. At one end of the room the chairs and tables had been removed, and several ladies and gentlemen were dancing cotillions to the music of a violin, played by an amateur in the gallery. At the other end of the room there was a doorway leading to the kitchen, and near this my supper was laid, very nice and tidy. Mr. Bucklin introduced me to Mr. Holmes, a gentleman who had lived in the Skaneateles and Trumbull experiments; and Mr. Holmes introduced me to Mr. Williston, who gave me some of the details of the early days of the North American Phalanx, during which he sometimes lived in high style, and sometimes was almost starved. He told of the tricks which the young members played upon the old members, many of whom had left. "On looking at the dancers I perceived that several of the females were dressed in the new costume, which is no more than shortening the frock and wearing trowsers the same as men. There were three or four young women, and three or four children so dressed. I had not thought much of this dress before, but was now favorably impressed by it, when I contrasted it with the long dresses of some of the dancers. This style is decidedly superior, I think, for any kind of active employment. The dress seems exceedingly simple. The frocks were worn about the same length as the Highland _kilt_, ending a little above the knee; the trowsers were straight, and both were made of plain material. Afterward I saw some of the ladies in superior suits of this fashion, looking very elegant. "Mr. Holmes shewed me to my bed, which was in the top of another building. It was a spacious garret with four cots in it, one in each corner. There were two windows, one of which appeared to be always open, and at that window a young man was sleeping, although the weather was very wet. The mattress I had was excellent, and I slept well; but the accommodations were rather rude, there being no chairs or pegs to hang the clothes upon. The young men threw their clothes upon the floor. There was no carpet, but the floor seemed very clean. "It rained hard all night, and the morning continued wet and unpleasant. I rose about seven, and washed in a passage-way leading from the sleeping-rooms, where I found water well supplied; passed rows of small sleeping-rooms, and went out for a stroll. The morning was too unpleasant for walking much, but I examined the houses, and found them to be large framed buildings, the largest of the two having been but recently built. It formed two sides of a square, and had a porch in front and on part of the back. It appeared as if the portion of it which was complete was but a wing of a more extensive design, intended to be carried out at some future time. The oldest building reminded me of one of the Rappite buildings in New Harmony, excepting that it was built of wood and theirs of brick. It formed a parallelogram, two stories high, with large garrets at the top. A hall ran nearly the whole length of the building, and terminated in a small room which is used as a library, and to which is joined the office. Apartments were ranged on either side of the hall up stairs. All the rooms appeared to be bed-rooms, and were in use. The new building was more commodious. There were well furnished sitting-rooms on either side of the principal entrance. The dining-hall, which I have before mentioned, was in the rear of this. Up stairs the rooms were ranged in a similar manner to the old building, and appeared to be very comfortable. I was informed that they were soon to be heated by steam. All these apartments were rented to the members at various prices, according to the relative superiority of each room. "As the bell at the end of the building rang a second time for breakfast, I followed some of the members into the room, and on entering took my seat at the table nearest the door. I afterward learned that this was the vegetarian table, and also that it was customary for each person always to occupy the same seat at his meals. The tables were well supplied with excellent, wholesome food, and I think the majority of the members took tea and coffee and ate meat. Young men and women waited upon the tables, and seemed active and agreeable. An easy freedom and a harmonious feeling seemed to prevail. "On leaving the room I was introduced to Mr. Sears, who, I ascertained, was what they called the 'leading mind.' He was rather tall, of a nervous temperament, the sensitive predominating, and was easy and affable. On my informing him of the object of my visit, he very kindly led me to his office and showed me several papers, which gave me every information I required. He introduced me to Mr. Renshaw, a gentleman who had been in the Ohio Phalanx. Mr. Renshaw was engaged in the blacksmith-shop; looked quite a philosopher, so far as form of head and length of beard and hair was concerned; but he had a little too much of the sanguine in his temperament to be cool at all times. He very rapidly asked me the object of my book: what good would it do? what was it for? and seemed disposed to knock down some imaginary wrong, before he had any clear idea of what it was. I explained, and together with Mr. Sears, had a short controversy with him, which had a softening tendency, though it did not lead to perfect agreement. Mr. Sears contended that Community experiments failed because the accounts were not clearly and faithfully kept; but Mr. Renshaw maintained that they all failed for want of means, and that the public impression that the members always disagreed was quite erroneous. At dinner I found a much larger crowd of persons in the room than at breakfast. I was introduced to several members, and among them to Mr. French, a gentleman who had once been a Universalist preacher. He was very kind, and gave me some information relative to the Jefferson County Industrial Association. "I also made the acquaintance of Mr. John Gray, a gentleman who had lived five years among the Shakers, and who was still a Shaker in appearance. Mr. Gray is an Englishman, as would readily be perceived by his peculiar speech; but with his English he had gotten a little mixture of the 'down east,' where he had lately been living. Mr. Gray was very fluent of speech, and what he said to me would almost fill a volume. He spoke chiefly of his Shaker experience, and of the time he had spent among the Socialists of England. He said it was his intention to visit other Communities in the United States, and gain all the experience he could among them, and then return to England and make it known. He was a dyer by trade (on which account he was much valued by the Shakers), and was very useful in taking care of swine. He spoke forcibly of the evils of celibacy among the Shakers, and of their strict regulations. He preferred living in the North American Phalanx, feeling more freedom, and knowing that he could go away when he pleased without difficulty. He thought the wages too low. Reckoning, for instance, that he earned about 90 cts. per day for ten hours labor, he got in cash every two weeks three-fourths of it, the remaining fourth going to the Phalanx as capital. Out of these wages he had to pay $1.50 per week for board, and $12 a year rent, besides extras; but he had a very snug little room, and lived well. He thought single men and women could do better there than married ones; but either could do better, so far as making money was the object, in the outer world. He decidedly preferred the single family and isolated cottage arrangement. I made allowances for Mr. Gray's opinions, when I remembered that he had been living five years among the Shakers, and but four months at the North American, whose regulations about capital and interest he was not very clear upon. "I had a conversation with a lady who had lived two years at Hopedale. She was intelligent, but very sanguine; well-spoken and agreeable, but had too much enthusiasm. She described to me the early days of Hopedale and its present condition. She did not like it, but preferred the North American and its more unitary arrangements. She thought that the single-cottage system was wrong, and that woman would never attain her true position in such circumstances. She had a great opinion of woman's abilities and capacities for improvement; was sorry that the Phalanx had such a bombastic name; had once been very sanguine, but was now chastened down; believed that the North American could not be called an experiment on Fourier's plan; the necessary elements were not there, and never had been, and no experiment had ever been attempted with such material as Fourier proposed; until that is done, we can not say the system is false, etc. "After supper I had conversation with several persons on Mr. Warren's plan of 'Equitable Commerce.' Most of them were well disposed toward his views of 'individuality,' but not toward his 'cost principle,' many believing the difficulties of estimating the cost of many things not to be overcome; the details in carrying out the system would be too trifling and fine-drawn. Conversation turned upon the Sabbath. Some thought it would be good to have periodical meetings for reading or lecturing, and others thought it best to have nothing periodical, but leave every thing and every body to act in a natural manner, such as eating when you are hungry, drinking when you are thirsty, and resting when you are tired; let the child play when it is so inclined, and teach it when it demands to be taught. There were all kinds of opinions among them regarding society and its progress. My Shaker friend thought that society was progressing 'first-rate' by means of Odd-Fellowship, Freemasonry, benevolent associations, railroads, steamboats, and especially all kinds of large manufactories, without such little attempts as these of the North American to regenerate mankind. "I might speculate on this strange mixture of minds, but prefer that the reader should take the facts and philosophize for himself. Here were persons who, for many years, had tried many schemes of social re-organization in various parts of the country, brought together not from a personal knowledge and attraction for each other, but through a common love of the social principles, which like a pleasant dream attracted them to this, the last surviving of that extensive series of experiments which commenced in this country about the year 1843. "I retired to my cot about ten o'clock, and passed a restless night. The weather was warm and wet, and continued so in the morning. Rose at five o'clock and took breakfast with Dr. Lazarus and the stage-driver, and at a quarter to six we left the Phalanx in their neat little stage. "During the journey to Keyport the Doctor seemed to be full of Association, and made frequent allusions to that state in which all things would be right, and man would hold his true position; thought it wrong to cut down trees, to clear land, to raise corn, to fatten pigs to eat, when, if the forest was left alone, we could live on the native deer, which would be much better food for man; he would have fruit-trees remain where they are found naturally; and he would have many other things done which the world would deem crazy nonsense." _Macdonald's second visit to the Phalanx._ "I visited the North American Phalanx again in July, 1852. The visit was an interesting one to me; but I will only refer to the changes which have taken place since my last visit. "They have altered their eating and drinking arrangements, and adopted the eating-house system. At the table there is a bill of fare, and each individual calls for what he wants; on obtaining it the waiter gives him a check, with the price of the article marked thereon. After the meal is over, the waiters go round and enter the sum marked upon the check which each person has received, in a book belonging to that person; the total is added up at the end of each month and the payments are made. Each person finds his own sugar, which is kept upon the table. Coffee is half-a-cent per cup, including milk; bread one cent per plate; butter, I think, half-a-cent; meat two cents; pie two cents; and other things in like proportion. On Mr. Holmes's book, the cost of living ran thus: breakfast from one and a-half cents to three and a-half cents; dinner four and a-half cents to nine cents; supper four and a-half cents to eight cents. In addition to this, as all persons use the room alike, each pays the same rent, which is thirty-six and a-half cents per week; each person also pays a certain portion for the waiting labor, and for lighting the room. The young ladies and gentlemen who waited on table, as well as the Phalanx Doctor (a gentleman of talent and politeness), who from attraction performed the same duty, got six and a-quarter cents per hour for their labor. "The wages of various occupations, agricultural, mechanical and professional, vary from six cents to ten cents per hour; the latter sum is the maximum. The wages are paid to each individual in full every month, and the profits are divided at the end of the year. Persons wishing to become members are invited to become visitors for thirty days. At the end of that time it is sometimes necessary for them to continue another thirty days; then they may be admitted as probationers for one year, and if they are liked by the members at the end of that time, it is decided whether they shall become full members or not. "They had commenced brick-making, intending to build a mill; thought of building at Keyport or Red Bank. Some anticipated a loan from Horace Greeley. Their stock was good; some said it was at par; one said, at seventy-five per cent. premium. (?) The profits were invested in things which they thought would bring them the largest interest; they had shares in two steamboats running to New York from Keyport and Red Bank. "Their crops looked well, superior to any in the vicinity. There were large fields of corn and potatoes and a fine one of tomatoes. The first bushel of the latter article had just been sent to the New York market, and was worth eight dollars. There was a field of good melons, quite a picture to look upon. Since my last visit, there had been an addition made to the large building. A man had built the addition at a cost of $800, and had put $200 into the Phalanx, making $1,000 worth of stock. He lived in the house as his own. There is a neat cottage near the large building, which I suppose is also Association property, put in by the gentleman who built it and uses it--a Mr. Manning, I believe. "The wages were all increased a little since my last visit, and there seemed to be more satisfaction prevailing, especially with the eating-house plan, which I understood had effected a saving of about two-thirds in the expenditure; this was especially the case in the article of sugar. "The stage group was abolished; and the stage sold. It called there, however, regularly with the mails and passengers as before. "I gleaned the following: The Phalanx property could support one thousand people, yet they can not get them, and they have not accommodations for such a number. Some doubt the advantage of taking more members until they are richer. All say they are doing well; yet some admit that individually they could do better, or that an individual with that property could have done better than they have done. They hire about sixteen Dutch laborers, and say they are better treated than they would be elsewhere. These board in a room beneath the Phalanx dining-room, and lodge in various out-places around. They had an addition of six Frenchmen to their numbers, said to be exiles; these persons were industrious and well liked. "In a conversation with one of the discontented members, who had been there five years, he said that after an existence of nine years, there were fewer members than at the commencement; there was something wrong in the system they were practicing; and if that was Association, then Association was wrong; thinks there are some persons who try to crush and oust those who differ from them in opinion, or who wish to change the system so as to increase their number. "There was more than enough work for all to do, mechanics especially. Carpenters were in demand. They had to hire the latter at $1.50 per day. They don't get any to join them. Some thought the wages too low; yet the cost of living was not much over $2. per week, including washing and all else but clothing and luxuries. "My acquaintance, John Gray, had been away from the Phalanx for some months, but had returned, having found that he could not live in 'old society' again; sooner than that, he would return to the Shakers. He spoke much more favorably of the North American than before, and was particularly pleased with the eating arrangement; he wanted to see the individual system carried out still further among them; for in proportion as they adopted that, they were made free and happy; but in proportion as they progressed toward Communism, the result was the reverse. After alluding to their many little difficulties, he pointed out so many advantages, that they seemed to counter-balance all the evils spoken of by himself and others. Criticism, he said, was the most potent regulator and governor. "The charges were increased at the Phalanx. For five meals and very inferior sleeping accommodations twice, I paid $1.75. The Phalanx had paid five per cent. dividend on stock, for the past year." _Macdonald's third visit to the Phalanx._ "In the fall of 1853 I made another pilgrimage to the North American. On my journey from Red Bank I had for my fellow-passengers, the well-known Albert Brisbane and a young man named Davidson. The ride was diversified by interesting debates upon Spiritualism and Association. "At the Phalanx I was pleased with the appearance of things during this visit. I saw the same faces, and felt assured they were 'sticking to it.' I also fell in with some strangers who had lately been attracted there. I was informed by one or two of the members that the articles which had been published about the Phalanx in the New York _Herald_, had done them good. It made the place known, and caused many strangers to visit them; among whom were some capitalists who offered to lend their aid; a Dr. Parmelee was named as one of these. The articles also did good in criticising their peculiarities, letting them know what the 'world' thought of them, and shaking them up, like wind upon a stagnant pond. "Mr. Sears informed me that they had had a freshet in August, which destroyed a large quantity of their forage; and the dams were broken down, causing a loss of two or three hundred dollars. Their peach-orchard had failed, causing a deficiency of nearly two-thirds the usual amount of peaches. He was of the opinion that in five years they would be able to show something more tangible to the world. He thought that in about that time the experiment would have completed a marked phase in its history, and become more worthy of notice. "In a conversation with Mr. French I learned that he had been away from the Phalanx for three weeks, seeing his friends in the country; but it made him happy to return; he felt he could not live elsewhere. He said their grand object was to provide a fitting education for their children. They had been neglected, though often thought of; and ere long something important would be done for them, if things turned out as he hoped. Last year, for the first time since their commencement, they declared a dividend to labor; this year they anticipated more, but the accidents would probably reduce it. Their total debts were $18,000, but the value of the place was $55,000. They bought the land at $20 per acre, and it had increased in value, not so much by their improvements as by the rise of land all through that country. They were not troubled about their debts; it was an advantage to them to let them remain; they could pay them at any time if necessary." CHAPTER XXXVIII. END OF THE NORTH AMERICAN PHALANX. The _Harbinger_ and Macdonald both fail us in our search for the history of the last days of the North American; and having asked in vain for an authentic account of its failure from one at least of its leaders, we must content ourselves with such scraps of information on this interesting catastrophe, as we have picked up here and there in various publications. And first we will bring to view one or two facts which preceded the failure, and apparently led to it. In the spring of 1853--the tenth year of the Phalanx--there was a split and secession, resulting in the formation of another Association, called the Raritan Bay Union, at Perth Amboy, New Jersey. A correspondent of the New York _Herald_, who visited this new Union in June, 1853, speaks of its founders and foundations as follows: "The subscriptions already amount to over forty thousand dollars. Among the names of the stockholders I notice that of Mrs. Tyndale, formerly an extensive crockery dealer in Chestnut street, Philadelphia, who carried on the business in her own name until she accumulated a handsome fortune, and then relinquished it to her son and son-in-law; also Marcus Spring, commission merchant of New York; Rev. William Henry Channing of Rochester, and Clement O. Read, late superintendent of the large wash-house in Mott street, New York. "The President of the corporation, George B. Arnold Esq., was last year President of the North American Phalanx. Many years ago he was a minister at large in the city of New York. He afterward removed to Illinois, where he established an extensive nursery, working with his own hands at the business, which he carried on successfully. He is an original thinker, a practical man, of clear, strong common sense. "The founders of the Union believe that many branches of business may be carried on most advantageously here, and that the best class of mechanics will soon find their interest and happiness promoted by joining them. Extensive shops will be erected, and either carried on directly by the corporation, or leased, with sufficient steam-power, to companies of its own members. The different kinds of business will be kept separate, and every tub left to stand upon its own bottom. They aim at combination, not confusion. Every man will have pay for what he does, and no man is to be paid for doing nothing. Whether they will drag the drones out, if they find any, and kill them as the bees do in autumn, or whether their ferryman will be directed to take them out in his boat and tip them into the bay, or what will be done with them, I can not say. But the creed of this new Community seems to be, that 'Labor is praise.' In religious matters the utmost freedom exists, and every man is left to follow the dictates of his own conscience." Macdonald briefly mentions this Raritan Bay Association, and characterizes it as "a joint-stock concern, that undertook to hold an intermediate position between the North American and ordinary society;" meaning, we suppose, that it was less communistic than the Phalanx. He furnishes also a copy of its constitution, the preamble of which declares that its object is to establish "various branches of agriculture and mechanics, whereby industry, education and social life may, in principle and practice, be arranged in conformity to the Christian religion, and where all ties, conjugal, parental, filial, fraternal and communal, which are sanctioned by the will of God, the laws of nature, and the highest experience of mankind, may be purified and perfected; and where the advantages of co-operation may be secured, and the evils of competition avoided, by such methods of joint-stock Association as shall commend themselves to enlightened conscience and common sense." The board of officers whose names are attached to this constitution were, _President_, George B. Arnold; _Directors_, Clement O. Read, Marcus Spring, George B. Arnold, Joseph L. Pennock, Sarah Tyndale; _Treasurer_, Clement O. Read; _Secretary_, Angelina G. Weld. It is evident that this offshoot drew away a portion of the members and stockholders of the North American. It amounted to little as an Association, and disappeared with the rest of its kindred; but its secession certainly weakened the parent Phalanx. During the summer after this secession, the North American appears to have had an acrimonious controversy about religion with somebody, inside or outside, the nature of which we can only guess from the following mysterious hints in a long article written by Mr. Sears in the fall of 1853, on behalf of the Association, and published in the New York _Tribune_ under the caption, "_Religion in the North American Phalanx_." Mr. Sears said: "I am incited to these remarks by the recent imposition of a missionary effort among us, and by a letter respecting it, indicating the failure of a cherished scheme, in a spirit which shows that the old sanctions only are wanting, to kindle the old fires. And, lest our silence be further misconstrued, and we subjected to further discourtesy, I am induced to say a few words in defense. "Neither our quiet nor our good character have quite sufficed to protect us from the customary officiousness of busy sectaries, who professed not to understand how a people could associate, how a commonwealth could exist, without adopting some sectarian profession of religious faith, some partisan form of religious observance. "In vain we urged that our institutions were religious; that here, before their eyes, was made real and practical in daily life and established as a real societary feature, that fraternity which the church in every form has held as its ideal; that here the Christian rule of life is made possible in the only way that it can be made possible, viz., through social guarantees which confirm the just claims of every member. In vain we showed that in the matter of private faith we did not propose to interfere, but in this respect held the same relation of a body to its constituent members, that the State of New Jersey or any other commonwealth does to its citizens; that tolerance was our only proper course, and must continue to be; that the professors of any name could organize a society and have a fellowship of the same religious communion, if they chose; but that our effort was to seek out the divine mathematics of societary relations, and to determine a formula that would be of universal application; and that to allow our organization to be taken possession of as an agency for pushing private constructions of doctrine, would be an impossible descent for us; that any who choose could make such profession and have such observances as they liked, and by arrangement have equal use of our public rooms. Still from time to time various parties have urged their private views upon us, and whenever they wished, have had, by arrangement, the use of room and such audience as they could attract. But never until the past summer has there been such a persistent effort to press upon us private observance as to excite much attention; and for the first time in our history there arose, through a reprehensible effort, a public discussion of religious dogmas; and, to our regret and annoyance, the usual sectarian uncharitableness was exhibited and has since been expressed to us." A further glimpse at the difficulty alluded to, is afforded by the following paragraph, which appeared in print about the same time, written by Eleazer Parmlee, a partizan of the other side: "I received the inclosed letter from Marcus Spring, who requested me to co-operate with himself and others (at the two Phalanxes) in sustaining a preacher; as he insists 'that the religious and moral elements in man should be cultivated for the true success of Association.' I shall write to Mr. Spring that it is not my opinion that religious cultivation or teaching will be allowed, certainly at one of the Associations; and I would advise all persons who have any respect or regard for the religion of the Bible, and who do not wish to have their feelings outraged by a total want of common courtesy, to keep entirely away, at least from the North American." It seems probable that this controversy, whatever it may have been, was complicated with the secession movement in the spring before. We notice that Marcus Spring, who was originally a prominent stockholder in the North American, and who went over, as we have seen, to the rival Phalanx at Perth Amboy, was mixed up with this controversy, and apparently instigated the "missionary imposition" of which Mr. Sears complains. It may be reasonably conjectured that this theological quarrel led to the ultimate withdrawal of stock which brought the Association to its end. In September 1853, after the secession and after the quarrel about religion, the following gloomy picture of the Phalanx was sent abroad in the columns of the New York _Tribune_, the old champion of Socialism in general and of the North American in particular. Whether its representations were true or not, it must have had a very depressing effect on the Association, and doubtless helped to realize its own forebodings: [Correspondence of the New York _Tribune_.] "I remained nine days at the North American Phalanx. They appear to be on a safe material basis. Good wages are paid the laborers, and both sexes are on an equality in every respect; the younger females wear bloomers; are beautiful and apparently refined; but both sexes grow up in ignorance, and seem to have but little desire for mental progression. Their mode of life, however, is a decided improvement on the old one: the land appears to be well cultivated and very productive; the majority of the men, and some of the women, are hard workers; the wages of labor and profits on capital are constantly increasing and likely to increase; probably in a few years more the stock will be as good an investment as any other stock, and the wages of labor much better than elsewhere. The standard of agricultural and mechanical labor is now nine cents per hour; kitchen-work, waiting, etc., about the same. Their arrangements for economizing domestic labor seem very efficient; but they have no sewing-machine and no store that amounts to any thing. If a hat of any kind is wanted, they have to go to Red Bank for it. They appear to make no effort to redeem their stock, which is now mostly in the hands of non-residents. The few who do save any thing, I understand, usually prefer something that 'pays' better. Most of them are decent sort of people, have few bad qualities and not many good ones, but they are evidently not working for an idea. They make no effort to extend their principles, and do not build, as a general thing, unless a person wanting to join builds for himself. Under such circumstances the progress of the movement must be necessarily slow, if even it progress at all. Latterly the number of members and probationers has decreased. They find it necessary to employ hired laborers to develop the resources of the land. "So far as regards the material aspect, however, they get along tolerably well. But I regard the mechanism merely as a means for general progress--a basis for a superstructure of unlimited mental and spiritual development. They seem to regard it as the end. This absence of facilities for education and mental improvement is astonishing, in a Community enjoying so many of the advantages of co-operation. Those engaged in nurseries should have some acquaintance with physiology and hygiene; but such things are scarcely dreamed of as yet among any of the members, except two or three; or if so, they keep very quiet about it. A considerable portion of their hard earnings ends in smoke and spittoons, or some other form of mere animal gratification, to which they are in a measure compelled to resort, in the absence of any rational mode of applying their small amount of leisure. Their reading-room is supplied by two _New York Tribunes_, a _Nauvoo Tribune_, and two or three worthless local papers. The library consists of between three and four hundred volumes, not many of them progressive or the reverse. I believe there is a sort of a school, but should think they don't teach much there worth knowing, if results are to be the criterion. Cigar smoking is bad enough in men, but particularly objectionable in twelve-year olds. A number of papers are taken by individuals, but those that most need them don't have much chance at them; besides, it is the end of associate life to economise by co-operation in this as in other matters. Some of them make miserable apologies for neglect of these matters, on the score of want of leisure, means, etc., but all amounts to nothing. "The Phalanx people, having deferred improving the higher faculties of themselves and children until their lower wants are supplied, which can never be, are heavily in debt; and so far as any effect on the outer world is concerned, the North American Phalanx is a total failure. No movement based on a mere gratification of the animal appetites can succeed in extending itself. There must be intellectual and spiritual life and progress; matter can not move itself." A year later the Phalanx suffered a heavy loss by fire, which was reported in the _Tribune_, September 13, 1854, as follows: Destruction of the Mills of the North American Phalanx. "About six and a-half o'clock Sunday morning, a fire broke out in the extensive mills of the North American Phalanx, located in Monmouth County, New Jersey. The fire was first discovered near the center of the main edifice, and had at that time gained great headway. It is supposed to have originated in the eastern portion of the building, and a strong easterly wind prevailing at the time, the flames were carried toward the center and western part of the edifice. This was a wooden building about one hundred feet square, three stories high, with a thirty horse-power steam-engine in the basement, and two run of burr-stones and superior machinery for the manufacture of flour, meal, hominy and samp, on the floors above. Adjoining the mill on the north was the general business office, containing the account books of the Association, the most valuable of which were saved by Mr. Sears at the risk of his life. Adjoining the office was the saw-mill, blacksmith-shop, tin-shop, etc., with valuable machinery, driven by the engine, all of which was destroyed. About two thousand bushels of wheat and corn were stored in the mill directly over the engine, which, in falling, covered it so as to preserve the machinery from the fire. There was a large quantity of hominy and flour and feed destroyed with the mill. The carpenters' shop, a little south of the grain mill, was saved by great exertion of all the members, men and women. All else in that vicinity is a smouldering mass. Nothing was insured but the stock, valued at $3,000, for two-thirds that amount. The loss is from $7,000 to $10,000." Alcander Longley, at present the editor of a Communist paper, was a member of the North American, and should be good authority on its history. He connects this fire very closely with the breaking-up of the Phalanx. In a criticism of one of Brisbane's late socialistic schemes, he says: "A little reminiscence just here. We were a member of the North American Phalanx. A fire burned our mills and shops one unlucky night. We had plenty of land left and plenty else to do. But we called the 'money bags' [stockholders] together for more stock to rebuild with. Instead of subscribing more, they dissolved the concern, because it didn't pay enough dividend! And the honest resident working members were scattered and driven from the home they had labored so hard and long for years to make. Would Mr. Brisbane repeat such a farce?" Yet it appears that the crippled Phalanx lingered another year; for we find the following in the editorial correspondence of _Life Illustrated_ for August 1855: Last Picture of the North American. "After supper (the hour set apart for which is from five to six o'clock) the lawn, gravel walks and little lake in front of the Phalanstery, present an animated and charming scene. We look out upon it from our window. Nearly the whole population of the place is out of doors. Happy papas and mammas draw their baby wagons, with their precious freight of smiling innocence, along the wide walks; groups of little girls and boys frolic in the clover under the big walnut-trees by the side of the pond; some older children and young ladies are out on the water in their light canoes, which they row with the dexterity of sailors; men and women are standing here and there in groups engaged in conversation, while others are reclining on the soft grass; and several young ladies in their picturesque working and walking costume--a short dress or tunic coming to the knees, and loose pantaloons--are strolling down the road toward the shaded avenue which leads to the highway. "There seems to be a large measure of quiet happiness here; but the place is now by no means a gay one. If we observe closely we see a shadow of anxiety on most countenances. The future is no longer assured. Henceforth it must be 'each for himself,' in isolation and antagonism. Some of these people have been clamorous for a dissolution of the Association, which they assert has, so far as they are concerned at least, proved a failure; but some of them, we have fancied, now look forward with more fear than hope to the day which shall sunder the last material ties which bind them to their associates in this movement." The following from the _Social Revolutionist_, January, 1856, was written apparently in the last moments of the Phalanx. [Alfred Cridge's Diagnosis in Articulo Mortis.] "The North American Phalanx has decided to dissolve. When I visited it two years since it seemed to be managed by practical men, and was in many respects thriving. The domain was well cultivated, labor well paid, and the domestic department well organized. With the exception of the single men's apartments being overcrowded, comfort reigned supreme. The following were some of the defects: "1. The capital was nearly all owned by non-residents, who invested it, however, without expectation of profit, as the stock was always below par, yielding at that time but 4-1/2 per cent. of interest, which was a higher rate than that formerly allowed. Probably the majority of the Community were hard workers, many of them to the extent of neglecting mental culture. I was informed that they generally lived from hand to mouth, saving nothing, though living was cheap, rent not high, and the par rate of wages ninety cents for ten hours, but varying from sixty cents to $1.20, according to skill, efficiency, unpleasantness, etc. Nearly all those who did save, invested in more profitable stock, leaving absentees to keep up an Association in which they had no particular interest. As the generality of those on the ground gave no tangible indications of any particular interest in the movement, it is no matter of surprise that, notwithstanding the zeal of a few disinterested philanthropists engaged in it, the institution failed to meet the sanguine expectations of its projectors. "2. They neglected the intellectual and æsthetic element. Some residents there attributed the failure of the Brook Farm Association to an undue predominance of these, and so ran into the opposite error. A well-known engraver in Philadelphia wished to reside at the Phalanx and practice his profession; but no; he must work on the farm; if allowed to join, he would not be permitted to follow his attractions. So he did not come. "3. The immediate causes of the dissolution of both Associations were disastrous fires, and no way attributable to the principles on which they were based. "4. The formation of Victor Considerant's colony in Texas probably hastened the dissolution of the Phalanx, as many of the members preferred establishing themselves in a more genial latitude, to working hard one year or two for nothing, which they must have done, to regain the loss of $20,000 by fire, to say nothing of the indirect loss occasioned by the want of the buildings. "Thus endeth the North American Phalanx! _Requiescat in pace!_ Where is the Phoenix Association that is to arise from its ashes? "P.S. Since the above was written, the domain of the North American Phalanx has been sold." N.C. Meeker, who wrote those enthusiastic letters from the Trumbull Phalanx (now one of the editors of the _Tribune_), is the author of the following picturesque account of the North American, which we will call its _Post Mortem and Requiem, by an old Fourierist._ [From the New York _Tribune_ of November 3, 1866.] "Once in about every generation, attention is called to our social system. Many evils seem to grow from it. A class of men peculiarly organized, unite to condemn the whole structure. If public affairs are tranquil, they attempt to found a new system. So repeatedly and for so many ages has this been done, that it must be said that the effort arises from an aspiration. The object is not destructive, but beneficent. Twenty-five years ago an attempt was made in most of the Northern States. There are signs that another is about to be made. To those who are interested, a history of life in a Phalanx will be instructive. It is singular that none of the many thousand Fourierists have related their experience. (!) Recently I visited the old grounds of the North American Phalanx. Additional information is brought from a similar institution [the Trumbull] in a Western State. Light will be thrown on the problem; it will not solve it. "Four miles from Red Bank, Monmouth County, New Jersey, six hundred acres of land were selected about twenty years ago, for a Phalanx on the plan of Fourier. The founders lived in New York, Albany and other places. The location was fortunate, the soil naturally good, the scenery pleasing and the air healthful. It would have been better to have been near a shipping-port. The road from Red Bank was heavy sand. "First, a large building was erected for families; afterward, at a short distance, a spacious mansion was built, three stories high, with a front of one hundred and fifty feet, and a wing of one hundred and fifty feet. It is still standing in good repair, and is about to be used for a school. The rooms are of large size and well finished, the main hall spacious, airy, light and elegant. Grape-vines were trained by the side of the building, flowers were cultivated, and the adjoining ground was planted with shade-trees. Two orchards of every variety of choice fruit (one of forty acres) were planted, and small fruits and all kinds of vegetables were raised on a large scale. The Society were the first to grow okra or gumbo for the New York market, and those still living there continue its cultivation and control supplies. A durable stream ran near by; on its banks were pleasant walks, which are unchanged, shaded by chestnut and walnut trees. On this stream they built a first-class grist-mill. Not only did it do good work, but they established the manufacture of hominy and other products which gave them a valued reputation, and the profits of this mill nearly earned their bread. "It was necessary to make the soil highly productive, and many German and other laborers were employed. The number of members was about one hundred, and visitors were constant. Of all the Associations, this was the best, and on it were fixed the hopes of the reformers. The chief pursuit was agriculture. Education was considered important, and they had good teachers and schools. Many young persons owed to the Phalanx an education which secured them honorable and profitable situations. "The society was select, and it was highly enjoyed. To this day do members, and particularly women, look back to that period as the happiest in their lives. Young people have few proper wishes which were not gratified. They seemed enclosed within walls which beat back the storms of life. They were surrounded by whatever was useful, innocent and beautiful. Neighborhood quarrels were unknown, nor was there trouble among children. There were a few white-eyed women who liked to repeat stories, but they soon sunk to their true value. "After they had lived this life fourteen years,[A] their mill burned down. Mr. Greeley offered to lend them $12,000 to rebuild it. They were divided on the subject of location. Some wanted to build at Red Bank, to save hauling. They could not agree. But there was another subject on which they did agree. Some suggested that they had better not build at all! that they had better dissolve! The question was put, and to every one's surprise, decided that they would dissolve. Accordingly the property was sold, and it brought sixty-six cents on a dollar. In a manner the sale was forced. Previously the stockholders had been receiving yearly dividends, and they lost little. "While the young had been so happy, and while the women, with some exceptions, enjoyed society, with scarcely a cause for disquiet, fathers had been considering the future prospects of those they loved. The pay for their work was out of the profits, and on a joint-stock principle. Work was credited in hours, and on striking a dividend, one hour had produced a certain sum. A foreman, a skillful man, had an additional reward. It was five cents a day. One of the chief foremen told me that after working all day with the Germans, and working hard, so that there would be no delay he had to arrange what each was to do in the morning. Often he would be awakened by falling rain. He would long be sleepless in re-arranging his plans. A skillful teacher got an additional five cents. All this was in accordance with democratic principles. I was told that the average wages did not exceed twenty cents a day. You see capital drew a certain share which labor had to pay. But this was of no consequence, providing the institution was perpetual. There they could live and die. Some, however, ran in debt each year. With large families and small wages, they could not hold their own. These men had long been uneasy. "There was a public table where all meals were eaten. At first there was a lack of conveniences, and there was much hard work. Mothers sent their children to school, and became cooks and chamber-maids. The most energetic lady took charge of the washing group. This meant she had to work hardest. Some of the best women, though filled with enthusiasm for the cause, broke down with hard work. Afterward there were proper conveniences; but they did not prevent the purchase of hair-dye. The idea that woman in Association was to be relieved of many cares, was not realized. "On some occasions, perhaps for reasons known at the time, there was a scarcity of victuals. One morning all they had to eat was buckwheat cakes and water. I think they must have had salt. In another Phalanx, one breakfast was mush. Every member felt ashamed. "The combined order had been strongly recommended for its economies. All articles were to be purchased at wholesale; food would be cheaper; and cooking when done for many by a few, would cost little. In practice there were developments not looked for. The men were not at all alike. Some so contrived their work as not to be distant at meal-time. They always heard the first ringing of the bell. In the preparation of food, naturally, there will be small quantities which are choice. In families these are thought much of, and are dealt out by a mother's good hands. They come last. But here, in the New Jerusalem, those who were ready to eat, seized upon such the first thing. If they could get enough of it, they would eat nothing else. "You know that in all kinds of business there must be men to see that nothing is neglected. On a farm teams must be fed and watered, cattle driven up or out, and bars or gates closed. They who did these things were likely to come to their meals late. They were sweaty and dirty, their feet dragged heavy. First they must wash. On sitting down they had to rest a little. Naturally they would look around. At such times one's wife watches him. At a glance she can see a cloud pass across his face. He need not speak to tell her his thoughts. She can read him better than a Bible in large type. In one Phalanx where I was acquainted, the public table was thrown up in disgust, like a pack of unlucky cards. "But our North Americans were determined. To give to all as good food as the early birds were getting, it was necessary to provide large quantities. When this was done, living became very expensive and the economies of Association disappeared. "They had to take another step. They established an eating-house on what is called the European plan. The plainest and the choicest food was provided. Whatever one might desire he could have. His meal might cost him ten cents or five dollars. When he finished eating he received a counter or ticket, and went to the office and settled. He handed over his ticket, and the amount printed on it was charged to him. For instance, a man has the following family: first, wifey, and then, George, Emily, Mary, Ralph and Rosa. They sit at a table by themselves, unless wifey is in the kitchen, with a red face, baking buckwheat cakes with all her might. They select their breakfast--a bill of fare is printed every day--and they have ham and eggs, fifteen cents; sausage, ten cents; cakes, fifteen cents; fish, ten cents; and a cup of coffee and six glasses of water, five cents; total, fifty-five cents, which is charged, and they go about their business. If wifey had been to work, she would eat afterward, and though she too would have to pay, she was credited with cake-baking. One should be so charitable as to suppose that she earned enough to pay for the meal that she ate sitting sideways. To keep these accounts, a book-keeper was required all day. One would think this a curious way; but it was the only one by which they could choke off the birds of prey. One would think, too, that Rosa, Mary and Co., might have helped get breakfast; but the plan was to get rid of drudgery. "Again, there was another class. They were sociable and amiable men. Everybody liked to hear them talk, and chiefly they secured admission for these qualities. Unfortunately they did not bring much with them. All through life they had been unlucky. There was what was called the Council of Industry, which discussed and decided all plans and varieties of work. With them originated every new enterprise. If a man wanted an order for goods at a store, they granted or refused it. Some of these amiable men would be elected members; it was easy for them to get office, and they greatly directed in all industrial operations. At the same time those really practical would attempt to counteract these men; but they could not talk well, though they tried hard. I have never seen men desire more to be eloquent than they; their most powerful appeals were when they blushed with silent indignation. But there was one thing they could do well, and that was to grumble while at work. They could make an impression then. Fancy the result. "Lastly: the rooms where families lived adjoined each other, or were divided by long halls. Young men do not always go to bed early. Perhaps they would be out late sparking, and they returned to their rooms before morning. A man was apt to call to mind the words of the country mouse lamenting that he had left his hollow tree. Sometimes one had a few words to say to his wife when he was not in good humor on account of bad digestion. When some one overheard him, they would think of her delicate blooming face, and her ear-rings and finger-rings, and wonder, but keep silent; while others thought that they had a good thing to tell of. But let no one be troubled. These two will cling to each other, and nothing but death can separate them. He will bear these things a long time, winking with both eyes; but at last he thinks that they should have a little more room, and she heartily agrees. "Fourteen years make a long period. At last they learned that it was easy enough to get lazy men, but practical and thorough business men were scarce. Five cents a day extra was not sufficient to secure them. A promising, ambitious young man growing up among them, did not see great inducements. He heard of the world; men made money there. His curiosity was great. One can see that the Association was likely to be childless. "Learning these things which Fourier had not set down, their mill took fire. Still they were out of debt. They were doing well. The soil had been brought to a high state of cultivation. Of the fifteen or twenty Associations through the country, their situation and advantages were decidedly superior. I inquired of the old members remaining on the ground, and who bought the property and are doing well, the reason for their failure. They admit there was no good reason to prevent their going on, except the disposition. But Fourier did not recommend starting with less than eighteen hundred. When I asked them what would have been the result if they had had this number, they said they would have broken up in less than two years. Generally men are not prepared. Association is for the future. "I found one still sanguine. He believes there are now men enough afloat, successfully to establish an Association. They should quietly commence in a town. There should be means for doing work cheaply by machinery. A few hands can wash and iron for several hundred in the same manner as it is done in our public institutions. Baking, cooking and sewing can be done in the same way. There is no disputing the fact that these means did not exist twenty years ago. Gradually family after family could be brought together. In time a whole town would be captured. "The plausible and the easy again arise in this age. Let no one mistake a mirage for a real image. Disaster will attend any attempt at social reform, if the marriage relation is even suspected to be rendered less happy. The family is a rock against which all objects not only will dash in vain, but they will fall shivered at its base. "N.C.M." But even marriage and family, rocks though they are, have to yield to earthquakes: and Fourierism, in which Meeker delighted, was one of the upheavals that have unsettled them. They will have to be reconstructed. The latest visitor to the remains of the North American whose observations have fallen under our notice, is Mr. E.H. Hamilton, a leading member of the Oneida Community. His letter in the _Circular_ of April 13, 1868, will be a fitting conclusion to this account; as well for the new peep it gives us into the causes of failure, as for its appropriate reflections. Why the North American Phalanx failed. "_New York, March 31, 1868._ "Business called me a short time ago to visit the domain once occupied by the North American Phalanx. The gentleman whom I wished to see, resided in a part of the old mansion, once warm and lively with the daily activities and bright anticipations of enthusiastic Associationists. The closed windows and silent halls told of failure and disappointment. When individuals or a Community push out of the common channel, and with great self-sacrifice seek after a better life, their failure is as disheartening as their success would have been cheering. Why did they fail? "The following story from an old member and eye-witness whom I chanced to meet in the neighboring village, impressed me, and was so suggestive that I entered it in my note-book. After inquiring about the Oneida Community, he told his tale almost word for word, as follows: _C._--My interest in Association turns entirely on its relations to industry. In our attempt, a number of persons came together possessed of small means and limited ideas. After such a company has struggled on a few years as we did, resolutely contending with difficulties, a vista will open, light will break in upon them, and they will see a pathway opening. So it was with us. We prospered in finances. Our main business grew better; but the mill with which it was connected grew poorer, till the need of a new building was fairly before us. One of our members offered to advance the money to erect a new mill. A stream was surveyed, a site selected. One of our neighbors whose land we wanted to flow, held off for a bonus. This provoked us and we dropped the project for the time. At this juncture it occurred to some of us to put up a steam-mill at Red Bank. This was the vista that opened to us. Here we would be in water-communication with New York city. Some $2,000 a year would be saved in teaming. This steam-mill would furnish power for other industries. Our mechanics would follow, and the mansion at Red Bank become the center of the Association, and finally the center of the town. Our secretary was absent during this discussion. I was fearful he would not approve of the project, and told some of our members so. On his return we laid the plan before him, and he said no. This killed the Phalanx. A number of us were dissatisfied with this decision, and thirty left in a body to start another movement, which broke the back of the Association. The secretary was one of our most enthusiastic members and a man of good judgment; but he let his fears govern him in this matter. I believe he sees his mistake now. The organization lingered along two years, when the old mill took fire and burned down; and it became necessary to close up affairs. _E.H.H._--Would it not have been better if your company of thirty had been patient, and gone on quietly till the others were converted to your views? If truth were on your side, it would in time have prevailed over their objections. _C._--I would not give a cent for a person's conversion. When a truth is submitted to a body of persons, a few only will accept it. The great body can not, because their minds are unprepared. _E.H.H._--How did your company succeed in their new movement? _C._--We failed because we made a mistake. The great mistake Associationists every where made, all through these movements, was to locate in obscure places which were unsuitable for becoming business centers. Fourier's system is based on a township. An Association to be successful must embrace a township. _E.H.H._--Well, suppose you get together a number sufficient to form a township, and become satisfactorily organized, will there not still remain this liability to be broken up by diversity of judgments arising, as in the instance you have just related to me? _C._--No; let the movement be organized aright and it might break up every day and not fail. "Here ended the conversation. The story interested me especially, because it taught so clearly that the success of Communism depends upon something else besides money-making. When Hepworth Dixon visited this country and inquired about the Oneida Community, Horace Greeley told him he would 'find the O.C. a trade success.' Now according to C.'s story the North American Phalanx entered the stage of 'trade success,' and then failed because it lacked the _faculty of agreement_. It is patent to every person of good sense, that 'a house divided against itself can not stand.' Divisions in a household, in an army, in a nation, are disastrous, and unless healed, are finally fatal. The great lesson that the Oneida Community has been learning, is, that agreement is possible. In cases where diversity of judgment has arisen, we have always secured unanimity by being patient with each other, waiting, and submitting all minds to the Spirit of Truth. We have experienced this result over and over again, until it has become a settled conviction through the Community, that when a project is brought forward for discussion, the best thing will be done, and we shall all be of one mind about it. How many times questions have arisen that would have destroyed us like the North American Phalanx, were it not for this ability to come to an agreement! Prosperity puts this power of harmony to a greater test than adversity. When we built our new house, how many were the different minds about material, location, plan! How were our feelings wrought up! Party-spirit ran high. There was the stone party, the brick party, and the concrete-wall party. Yet by patience, forbearing one with another and submitting one to another, the final result satisfied every one. Unity is the essential thing. Secure that, and financial success and all other good things will follow." FOOTNOTES: [A] To be exact, this should be eleven years instead of fourteen. The Phalanx commenced operations in September, 1843, and the fire occurred in September, 1854. The whole duration of the experiment was only a little over twelve years, as the domain was sold, according to Alfred Cridge, in the winter of 1855-6. CHAPTER XXXIX. CONVERSION OF BROOK FARM TO FOURIERISM. At the beginning of our history of the Fourier epoch, we gave an account of the origin of the Brook Farm Association in 1841, and traced its career till the latter part of 1843. So far we found it to be an original American experiment, not affiliated to Fourier, but to Dr. Channing; and we classed it with the Hopedale, Northampton and Skaneateles Communities, as one of the preparations for Fourierism. Now, at the close of our history, we must return to Brook Farm and follow it through its transformation into a Fourierist Phalanx, and its career as a public teacher and propagandist. In the final number of the _Dial_, dated April 1844, Miss E.P. Peabody published an article on Fourierism, which commences as follows: "In the last week of December, 1843, and first week of January, 1844, a convention was held in Boston, which may be considered as the first publication of Fourierism in this region. "The works of Fourier do not seem to have reached us, and this want of text has been ill supplied by various conjectures respecting them; some of which are more remarkable for the morbid imagination they display than for their sagacity. For ourselves we confess to some remembrances of vague horror connected with this name, as if it were some enormous parasitic plant, sucking the life principles of society, while it spread apparently an equal shade, inviting man to repose under its beautiful but poison-dropping branches. We still have a certain question about Fourierism, considered as a catholicon for evil; but our absurd horrors were dissipated, and a feeling of genuine respect for the friends of the movement ensured, as we heard the exposition of the doctrine of Association, by Mr. Channing and others. That name [Channing] already consecrated to humanity, seemed to us to have worthily fallen, with the mantle of the philanthropic spirit, upon this eloquent expounder of Socialism; in whose voice and countenance, as well as in his pleadings for humanity, the spirit of his great kinsman still seemed to speak. We can not sufficiently lament that there was no reporter of the speech of Mr. Channing." At the close of this article Miss Peabody says: "We understand that Brook Farm has become a Fourierist establishment. We rejoice in this, because such persons as form that Association, will give it a fair experiment. We wish it Godspeed. May it become a University, where the young American shall learn his duties, and become worthy of this broad land of his inheritance." William H. Channing, in the _Present_, January 15, 1844, gives an account of this same Boston convention, from which we extract as follows: "This convention marked an era in the history of New England. It was the commencement of a public movement upon the subject of social reform, which will flow on, wider, deeper, stronger, until it has proved in deeds the practicability of societies organized, from their central principle of faith to the minutest detail of industry and pleasure, according to the order of love. This movement has been long gathering. A hundred rills and rivers of humanity have fed it. "The number of attendants and their interest increased to the end, as was manifested by the continuance of the meetings from Wednesday, December 27th, when the convention had expected to adjourn, through Thursday and Friday. The convention was organized by the choice of William Bassett, of Lynn, as President; of Adin Ballou, of Hopedale, G.W. Benson, of Northampton, George Ripley, of Brook Farm, and James N. Buffum, of Lynn, as Vice-Presidents; and of Eliza J. Kenney, of Salem, and Charles A. Dana, of Brook Farm, as Secretaries. The Associations of Northampton, Hopedale and Brook Farm, were each well represented. "It was instructive to observe that practical and scientific men constantly confirmed, and often apparently without being aware of it, the doctrines of social science as announced by Fourier. Indeed, in proportion to the degree of one's intimacy with this profound student of harmony, does respect increase for his admirable intellectual power, his foresight, sagacity, completeness. And for one, I am desirous to state, that the chief reason which prevents my most public confession of confidence in him as the one teacher now most needed, is, that honor for such a patient and conscientious investigator demands, of all who would justify his views, a simplicity of affection, an extent and accuracy of knowledge, an intensity of thought, to which very few can now lay claim. Quite far am I from saying, that as now enlightened, I adopt all his opinions; on the contrary, there are some I reject; but it is a pleasure to express gratitude to Charles Fourier, for having opened a whole new world of study, hope and action. It does seem to me, that he has given us the clue out of our scientific labyrinth, and revealed the means of living the law of love." The _Phalanx_ of February 5, 1844, refers to the revolution going on at Brook Farm, as follows: "The Brook Farm Association, near Boston, is now in process of transformation and extension from its former condition of an educational establishment mainly, to a regularly organized Association, embracing the various departments of industry, art and science. At the head of this movement, are George Ripley, Minot Pratt and Charles A. Dana. We can not speak in too high terms of these men and their enterprise. They are gentlemen of high standing in the community, and unite in an eminent degree, talent, scientific attainments and refinement, with great practical energy and experience. This Association has a fine spiritual basis in those already connected with it, and we hope that it will be able to rally to its aid the industrial skill and capital necessary to organize an Association, in which productive labor, art, science, and the social and the religious affections, will be so wisely and beautifully blended and combined, that they will lend reciprocal strength, support, elevation and refinement to each other, and secure abundance, give health to the body, development and expansion to the mind, and exaltation to the soul. We are convinced that there are abundant means and material in New England now ready to form a fine Association; they have only to be sought out and brought together." From these hints it is evident that the Brook Farmers were fully converted to Fourierism in the winter of 1843-4, and that William H. Channing led the way in this conversion. He had been publishing the _Present_ since September 1843, side by side with the _Phalanx_ (which commenced in October of that year); and though he, like the rest of the Massachusetts Socialists, began with some shyness of Fourierism, he had gradually fallen into the Brisbane and Greeley movement, till at last the _Present_ was hardly distinguishable in its general drift from the _Phalanx_. Accordingly in April, 1844, just at the time when the _Dial_ ended its career, as we have seen, with a confession of quasi-conversion to Fourierism, the _Present_ also concluded its labors with a twenty-five-page exposition of Fourier's system, and the _Phalanx_ assumed its subscription list. The connection of the Channings with Fourierism, then, stands thus: Dr. Channing, the first medium of the Unitarian afflatus, was the father (by suggestion) of the Brook Farm Association, which was originally called the West Roxbury Community. William H. Channing, the second medium according to Miss Peabody, converted this Community to Fourierism and changed it into a Phalanx. The _Dial_, which Emerson says was also a suggestion of Dr. Channing, and the _Present_, which was edited by William H. Channing, ended their careers in the same month, both hailing the advent of Fourierism, and the _Phalanx_ and _Harbinger_ became their successors. The _Dial_ and _Present_, in thus surrendering their Roxbury daughter as a bride to Fourierism, did not neglect to give her with their dying breath some good counsel and warning. We will grace our pages with a specimen from each. Miss Peabody in the _Dial_ moralizes thus: "The social passions, set free to act, do not carry within them their own rule, nor the pledge of conferring happiness. They can only get this from the free action upon them of the intellectual passions which constitute human reason. "But these functions of reason, do they carry within themselves the pledge of their own continued health and harmonious action? "Here Fourierism stops short, and, in so doing, proves itself to be, not a life, a soul, but only a body. It may be a magnificent body for humanity to dwell in for a season; and one for which it may be wise to quit old diseased carcases, which now go by the proud name of civilization. But if its friends pretend for it any higher character than that of a body, thus turning men from seeking for principles of life essentially above organization, it will prove but another, perhaps a greater curse. "The question is, whether the Phalanx acknowledges its own limitations of nature, in being an organization, or opens up any avenue into the source of life that shall keep it sweet, enabling it to assimilate to itself contrary elements, and consume its own waste; so that, phoenix-like, it may renew itself forever in greater and finer forms. "This question, the Fourierists in the convention, from whom alone we have learned any thing of Fourierism, did not seem to have considered. But this is a vital point. "The life of the world is now the Christian life. For eighteen centuries, art, literature, philosophy, poetry, have followed the fortunes of the Christian idea. Ancient history is the history of the apotheosis of nature, or natural religion; modern history is the history of an idea, or revealed religion. In vain will any thing try to be, which is not supported thereby. Fourier does homage to Christianity with many words. But this may be cant, though it thinks itself sincere. Besides, there are many things which go by the name of Christianity, that are not it. "Let the Fourierists see to it, that there be freedom in their Phalanxes for churches, unsupported by their material organization, and lending them no support on their material side. Independently existing, within them but not of them, feeding on ideas, forgetting that which is behind petrified into performance, and pressing on to the stature of the perfect man, they will finally spread themselves in spirit over the whole body. "In fine, it is our belief, that unless the Fourierist bodies are made alive by Christ, 'their constitution will not march;' and the galvanic force of reäction, by which they move for a season, will not preserve them from corruption. As the corruption of the best is the worst, the warmer the friends of Fourierism are, the more awake should they be to this danger, and the more energetic to avert it." Charles Lane in the _Present_ discoursed still more profoundly, as follows: "Some questions, of a nice importance, may be considered by the Phalanx before they set out, or at least on the journey, for they will have weighty, nay, decisive influences on the final result. One of these, perhaps the one most deserving attention, nay, perhaps that upon which all others hinge, is the adjustment of those human affections, out of which the present family arrangements spring. In a country like the United States of North America, where food is very cheap, and all the needs of life lie close to the industrious hand, it is very rare to find a family of old parents with their sons and daughters married and residing under the same roof. The universal bond is so weak, or the individual bond is so strong, that one married pair is deemed a sufficient swarm of human bees to hive off and form a new colony. How, then, can it be hoped that there is universal affection sufficient to unite many such families in one body for the common good? If, with the natural affections to aid the attempt to meliorate the hardships and difficulties in natural life, it is rare, nay, almost impossible, to unite three families in one bond of fellowship, how shall a greater number be brought together? If, in cases where the individual characters are known, can be relied on, are trusted with each other's affections, property and person, such union can not be formed, how shall it be constructed among strangers, or doubtful, or untried characters? The pressing necessities in isolated families, the great advantages in even the smallest union, are obvious to all, not least to the country families in this land; yet they unite not, but out of every pair of affectionate hearts they construct a new roof-tree, a new hearth-stone, at which they worship as at their exclusive altar. "Is there some secret leaven in this conjugal mixture, which declares all other union to be out of the possible affinities? Is this mixture of male and female so very potent, as to hinder universal or even general union? Surely it can not happen, in all those numerous instances wherein re-unions of families would obviously work so advantageously for all parties, that there are qualities of mind so foreign and opposed, that no one could beneficially be consummated. Or is it certain, that in these natural affections and their consequences in living offspring, there is an element so subversive of general Association that the two can not co-exist? The facts seem to maintain such a hypothesis. History has not yet furnished one instance of combined individual and universal life. Prophecy holds not very strong or clear language on the point. Plato scarcely fancied the possible union of the two affections; the religious Associations of past or present times have not attempted it; and Fourier, the most sanguine of all futurists, does not deliver very succinct or decisive oracles on the subject. "Can we make any approximation to axiomatical truth for ourselves? May we not say that it is no more possible for the human affections to flow at once in two opposite directions, than it is for a stream of water to do so? A divided heart is an impossibility. We must either serve the universal (God), or the individual (Mammon). Both we can not serve. Now, marriage, as at present constituted, is most decidedly an individual, and not a universal act. It is an individual act, too, of a depreciated and selfish kind. The spouse is an expansion and enlargement of one's self, and the children participate of the same nature. The all-absorbent influence of this union is too obvious to be dwelt upon. It is used to justify every glaring and cruel act of selfish acquisition. It is made the ground-work of the institution of property, which is itself the foundation of so many evils. This institution of property and its numerous auxiliaries must be abrogated in associative life, or it will be little better than isolated life. But it can not, it will not be repealed, so long as marital unions are indulged in; for, up to this very hour, we are celebrating the act as the most sacred on earth, and what is called providing for the family, as the most onerous and holy duty. "The lips of the purest living advocates of human improvement, Pestalozzi, J.P. Greaves and others, are scarcely silent from the most strenuous appeals to mothers, to develop in their offspring the germs of all truth, as the highest resource for the regeneration of our race; and we are now turning round upon them and declaring, that naught but a deeper development of mortal selfishness can result from such a course. At least such seems to be a consequence of the present argument. Yet, if it be true, we must face it. This is at least an inquiry which must be answered. It is certain, indeed, that if there be a source of truth in the human soul, deeper than all selfishness, it may be consciously opened by appeals which shall enforce their way beneath the human selfishness which is superincumbent on the divine origin. Then we may possibly be at work on that ground whereon universal Association can be based. But must not, therefore, individual (or dual) union cease? Here is our predicament. It haunts us at every turn; as the poets represent the disturbed wanderings of a departed spirit. And reconciliation of the two is not yet so clearly revealed to the faithful soul, as the headlong indulgence is practiced by the selfish. It is an axiom that new results can only be arrived at by action on new principles, or in new modes. The old principle and mode of isolated families has not led to happy results. This is a fact admitted on all hands. Let us then try what the consociate, or universal family will produce. But, then, let us not seduce ourselves by vain hopes. Let us not fail to see, that to this end the individual selfishness, or, if so they must be called, the holy gratifications of human nature, must be sacrificed and subdued. As has been affirmed above, the two can not be maintained together. We must either cling to heaven, or abide on earth; we must adhere to the divine, or indulge in the human attractions. We must either be wedded to God or to our fellow humanity. To speak in academical language, the conjunction in this case is the disjunctive 'or,' not the copulative 'and.' Both these marriages, that is, of the soul with God, and of soul with soul, can not exist together. It remains, therefore, for us, for the youthful spirit of the present, for the faithfully intelligent and determinedly true, to say which of the two marriages they will entertain." In consummation of their union with Fourierism, the Brook Farmers formed and published a new constitution, confessing in its preamble their conversion, and offering themselves to Socialists at large as a nucleus for a model Phalanx. They say: "The Association at Brook Farm has now been in existence upwards of two years. Originating in the thought and experience of a few individuals, it has hitherto worn, for the most part, the character of a private experiment, and has avoided rather than sought the notice of the public. It has, until the present time, seemed fittest to those engaged in this enterprise to publish no statements of their purposes or methods, to make no promises or declarations, but quietly and sincerely to realize as far as might be possible, the great ideas which gave the central impulse to their movement. It has been thought that a steady endeavor to embody these ideas more and more perfectly in life, would give the best answer, both to the hopes of the friendly and the cavils of the skeptical, and furnish in its results the surest grounds for any larger efforts. "Meanwhile every step has strengthened the faith with which we set out; our belief in a divine order of human society, has in our own minds become an absolute certainty; and considering the present state of humanity and of social science, we do not hesitate to affirm that the world is much nearer the attainment of such a condition than is generally supposed. The deep interest in the doctrine of Association which now fills the minds of intelligent persons every where, indicates plainly that the time has passed when even initiative movements ought to be prosecuted in silence, and makes it imperative on all who have either a theoretical or practical knowledge of the subject, to give their share to the stock of public information. "Accordingly we have taken occasion at several public meetings recently held in Boston, to state some of the results of our studies and experience, and we desire here to say emphatically, that while on the one hand we yield an unqualified assent to that doctrine of universal unity which Fourier teaches, so on the other, our whole observation has shown us the truth of the practical arrangements which he deduces therefrom. The law of groups and series is, as we are convinced, the law of human nature, and when men are in true social relations their industrial organization will necessarily assume those forms. "But beside the demand for information respecting the principles of Association, there is a deeper call for action in the matter. We wish, therefore, to bring Brook Farm before the public, as a location offering at least as great advantages for a thorough experiment as can be found in the vicinity of Boston. It is situated in West Roxbury, three miles from the depot of the Dedham Branch Railroad, and about eight miles from Boston, and combines a convenient nearness to the city, with a degree of retirement and freedom from unfavorable influences, unusual even in the country. The place is one of great natural beauty, and indeed the whole landscape is so rich and various as to attract the notice even of casual visitors. The farm now owned by the Association contains two hundred and eight acres, of as good quality as any land in the neighborhood of Boston, and can be enlarged by the purchase of land adjoining, to any necessary extent. The property now in the hands of the Association is worth nearly or quite thirty thousand dollars, of which about twenty-two thousand dollars is invested either in the stock of the company, or in permanent loans at six per cent., which can remain as long as the Association may wish. "The fact that so large an amount of capital is already invested and at our service, as the basis of more extensive operations, furnishes a reason why Brook Farm should be chosen as the scene of that practical trial of Association which the public feeling calls for in this immediate vicinity, instead of forming an entirely new organization for that purpose. The completeness of our educational department is also not to be overlooked. This has hitherto received our greatest care, and in forming it we have been particularly successful. In any new Association it must be many years before so many accomplished and skillful teachers in the various branches of intellectual culture could be enlisted. Another strong reason is to be found in the degree of order our organization has already attained, by the help of which a large Association might be formed without the losses and inconveniences which would otherwise necessarily occur. The experience of nearly three years in all the misfortunes and mistakes incident to an undertaking so new and so little understood, carried on throughout by persons not entirely fitted for the duties they have been compelled to perform, has, we think, prepared us to assist in the safe conduct of an extensive and complete Association. "Such an institution, as will be plain to all, can not by any sure means be brought at once and full-grown into existence. It must, at least in the present state of society, begin with a comparatively small number of select and devoted persons, and increase by natural and gradual aggregations. With a view to an ultimate expansion into a perfect Phalanx, we desire to organize immediately the three primary departments of labor, agriculture, domestic industry and the mechanic arts. For this purpose additional capital will be needed, etc. GEORGE RIPLEY, MINOT PRATT, CHARLES A. DANA. "_Brook Farm, January 18, 1844._" Here follows the usual appeal for co-operation and investments. In October following a second edition of this constitution was issued, in the preamble of which the officers say: "The friends of the cause will be gratified to learn, that the appeal in behalf of Brook Farm, contained in the introductory statement of our constitution, has been generously answered, and that the situation of the Association is highly encouraging. In the half-year that has elapsed, our numbers have been increased by the addition of many skillful and enthusiastic laborers in various departments, and our capital has been enlarged by the subscription of about ten thousand dollars. Our organization has acquired a more systematic form, though with our comparatively small numbers we can only approximate to truly scientific arrangements. Still with the unavoidable deficiencies of our groups and series, their action is remarkable, and fully justifies our anticipations of great results from applying the principles of universal order to industry. "We have made considerable agricultural improvements; we have erected a work-shop sixty feet by twenty-eight for mechanics of several trades, some of which are already in operation; and we are now engaged in building a section one hundred and seventy-five feet by forty, of a Phalanstery or unitary dwelling. Our first object is to collect those who, from their character and convictions, are qualified to aid in the experiment we are engaged in, and to furnish them with convenient and comfortable habitations, at the smallest possible outlay. For this purpose the most careful economy is used, though we are yet able to attain many of the peculiar advantages of the Associated household. Still for transitional society, and for comparatively temporary use, a social edifice can not be made free from the defects of civilized architecture. When our Phalanx has become sufficiently large, and has in some measure accomplished its great purposes, the serial organization of labor and unitary education, we shall have it in our power to build a Phalanstery with the magnificence and permanence proper to such a structure." Whereupon the appeal for help is repeated. Finally, in May 1845 this new constitution was published in the _Phalanx_, with a new preamble. In the previous editions the society had been styled the "Brook Farm Association for Education and Industry;" but in this issue, Article 1 Section 1 declares that "the name of this Association shall be The Brook Farm Phalanx." We quote a few paragraphs from the preamble: "At the last session of the legislature of Massachusetts, our Association was incorporated under the name which it now assumes, with the right to hold real estate to the amount of one hundred thousand dollars. This confers upon us all the usual powers and privileges of chartered companies. "Nothing is now necessary to the greatest possible measure of success, but capital to furnish sufficient means to enable us to develop every department to advantage. This capital we can now apply profitably and without danger of loss. We are well aware that there must be risk in investing money in an infant Association, as well as in any other untried business; but with the labors of nearly four years we have arrived at a point where this risk hardly exists. "By that increasing number whose most ardent desire is to see the experiment of Association fairly tried, we are confident that the appeal we now make will not be received without the most generous response in their power. As far as their means and their utmost exertions can go, they will not suffer so favorable an opportunity for the realization of their fondest hopes to pass unimproved. Nor do we call upon Americans alone, but upon all persons of whatever nation, to whom the doctrines of universal unity have revealed the destiny of man. Especially to those noble men who in Europe have so long and so faithfully labored for the diffusion and propagation of these doctrines, we address what to them will be an occasion of the highest joy, an appeal for fraternal co-operation in behalf of their realization. We announce to them the dawning of that day for which they have so hopefully and so bravely waited, the upspringing of those seeds that they and their compeers have sown. To them it will seem no exaggeration to say that we, their younger brethren, invite their assistance in a movement which, however humble it may superficially appear, is the grandest both in its essential character and its consequences, that can now be proposed to man; a movement whose purpose is the elevation of humanity to its integral rights, and whose results will be the establishment of happiness and peace among the nations of the earth. "By order of the Central Council, "GEORGE RIPLEY, _President_. "_West Roxbury, May 20, 1845._" CHAPTER XL. BROOK FARM PROPAGATING FOURIERISM. Brook Farm having attained the dignity of incorporation and assumed the title of Phalanx, was ready to undertake the enterprise of propagating Fourierism. Accordingly, in the same number of the _Phalanx_ that published the appeal recited at the close of our last chapter, appeared the prospectus of a new paper to be called the _Harbinger_, with the following editorial notice: "Our subscribers will see by the prospectus that the name of the _Phalanx_ is to be changed for that of the _Harbinger_, and that the paper is to be printed in future by the Brook Farm Phalanx." From this time the main function of Brook Farm was propagandism. It published the _Harbinger_ weekly, with a zeal and ability of which our readers have seen plenty of specimens. It also instituted a missionary society and a lecturing system, of which we will now give some account. New York had hitherto been the head-quarters of Fourierism. Brisbane, Greeley and Godwin, the primary men of the cause, lived and published there; the _Phalanx_ was issued there; the National Conventions had been held there; and there was the seat of the Executive Committee that made several abortive attempts to institute a confederation of Associations and a national organization of Socialists. But after the conversion of Brook Farm, the center of operations was removed from New York to Massachusetts. As the _Harbinger_ succeeded to the subscription-list and propagandism of the _Phalanx_, so a new National Union of Socialists, having its head-quarters nominally at Boston, but really at Brook Farm, took the place of the old New York Conventions. Of this organization, William H. Channing was the chief-engineer; and his zeal and eloquence in that capacity for a short time, well entitled him to the honors of the chief Apostle of Fourierism. In fact he succeeded to the post of Brisbane. This will be seen in the following selections from the _Harbinger_: [From William H. Channing's Appeal to Associationists.] "BRETHREN: "Your prompt and earnest co-operation is requested in fulfilling the design of a society organized May 27, 1846, at Boston, Massachusetts, by a general convention of the friends of Association. This design may be learned from the following extracts from its constitution: "'I. The name of this society shall be the American Union of Associationists. "'II. Its purpose shall be the establishment of an order of society based on a system of joint-stock property; co-operative labor; association of families; equitable distribution of profits; mutual guarantees; honors according to usefulness; integral education; unity of interests: which system we believe to be in accord with the laws of divine providence and the destiny of man. "'III. Its method of operation shall be the appointment of agents, the sending out of lecturers, the issuing of publications, and the formation of a series of affiliated societies which shall be auxiliary to the parent society; in holding meetings, collecting funds, and in every way diffusing the principles of Association: and preparing for their practical application, etc.' "We have a solemn and glorious work before us: 1, To indoctrinate the whole people of the United States with the principles of associative unity; 2, To prepare for the time when the nation, like one man, shall re-organize its townships upon the basis of perfect justice. "A nobler opportunity was certainly never opened to men, than that which here and now welcomes Associationists. To us has been given the very word which this people needs as a guide in its onward destiny. This is a Christian Nation; and Association shows how human societies may be so organized in devout obedience to the will of God, as to become true brotherhoods, where the command of universal love may be fulfilled indeed. Thus it meets the present wants of Christians; who, sick of sectarian feuds and theological controversies, shocked at the inconsistencies which disgrace the religious world, at the selfishness, ostentation, and caste which pervade even our worshiping assemblies, at the indifference of man to the claims of his fellow-man throughout our communities in country and city, at the tolerance of monstrous inhumanities by professed ministers and disciples of him whose life was love, are longing for churches which may be really houses of God, glorified with an indwelling spirit of holiness, and filled to overflowing with heavenly charity. "Brethren! Can men engaged in so holy and humane a cause as this, which fulfills the good and destroys the evil in existing society throughout our age and nation, which teaches unlimited trust in Divine love, and commands perfect obedience to the laws of Divine order among all people, which heralds the near advent of the reign of heaven on earth--be timid, indifferent, sluggish? Abiding shame will rest upon us, if we put not forth our highest energies in fulfillment of the present command of Providence. Let us be up and doing with all our might. "The measures which you are now requested at once and energetically to carry out, are the three following: 1, Organize affiliated societies to act in concert with the American Union of Associationists; 2, Circulate the _Harbinger_ and other papers devoted to Association; 3, Collect funds for the purpose of defraying the expenses of lectures and tracts. It is proposed in the autumn and winter to send out lecturers, in bands and singly, as widely as possible. "Our white flag is given to the breeze. Our threefold motto, "Unity of man with man in true society, "Unity of man with God in true religion, "Unity of man with nature in creative art and industry, "Is blazoned on its folds. Let hearts, strong in the might of faith and hope and charity, rally to bear it on in triumph. We are sure to conquer. God will work with us; humanity will welcome our word of glad tidings. The future is ours. On! in the name of the Lord. WILLIAM HENRY CHANNING, "_Cor. Sec. of the Am. Un. of Associationists._ "_Brook Farm, June 6, 1846._" In connection with this appeal, an editorial announced _The Mission of Charles A. Dana._ "The operations of the 'American Union,' will be commenced without delay. Mr. Dana will shortly make a tour through the State of New York as its agent. He will lecture in the principal towns, and take every means to diffuse a knowledge of the principles of Association. Our friends are requested to use their best exertions to prepare for his labors, and give efficiency to them." A meeting of the American Union of Associationists is reported in the _Harbinger_ of June 27, at which all the speakers except Mr. Brisbane, were Brook Farmers. The session continued two days, and William H. Channing made the closing and electric speeches for both days. The editor says: "Mr. Channing closed the first day in a speech of the loftiest and purest eloquence, in which he declared the great problem and movement of this day to be that of realizing a unitary church; showed how utterly unchristian is every thing now calling itself a church, and how impossible the solution of this problem, so long as industry tends only to isolate those who would be Christians, and to make them selfish; and ended with announcing the life-long pledge into which the believers in associative unity in this country have entered, that they will not rest nor turn back until the mind of this whole nation is made to see and own the truth which there is in their doctrines. The effect upon all present was electric, and the resolution to adjourn to the next evening, was a resolution to commence then in earnest a great work." After mentioning many good things said and done on the second day, the editor says: "It was understood that the whole would be brought to a head and the main and practical business of the meeting set forth by Mr. Channing. His appeal, alike to friends and to opposers of the cause, will dwell like a remembered inspiration in all our minds. It spoke directly to the deepest religious sentiment in every one, and awakened in each a consciousness of a new energy. All the poetic wealth and imagery of the speaker's mind seemed melted over into the speech, as if he would pour out all his life to carry conviction into the hearts of others. He seemed an illustration of a splendid figure which he used, to show the present crisis in this cause. 'It was,' said he, 'nobly, powerfully begun in this country; but, there has been a pause in our movement. When Benvenuto Cellini was casting his great statue, wearied and exhausted he fell asleep. He was roused by the cries of the workmen; Master, come quick, the fires have gone down, and the metal has caked in the running! He hesitated not a moment, but rushed into the palace, seized all the gold and silver vessels, money, ornaments, which he could find, and poured them into the furnace; and whatever he could lay hands on that was combustible, he took to renew the fire. We must begin anew, said he. And the flames roared, and the metal began to run, and the Jupiter came out in complete majesty. Just so our greater work has caked in the running. We have been luke-warm; we have slept. But shall not we throw in all our gold and silver, and throw in ourselves too, since our work is to produce not a mere statue, but a harmonious life of man made perfect in the image of God? Who ever had such motive for action? The Crusaders, on their knees and upon the hilts of their swords, which formed a cross, daily dedicated their lives and their all to the pious resolution of re-conquering the sepulcher in which the dead Lord was laid. But ours is the calling, not to conquer the sepulcher of the dead Lord, but to conquer the world, and bring it in subjection to truth, love and beauty, that the living Christ may at length return and enter upon his Kingdom of Heaven on the earth.' "We by no means intend this as a report of Mr. Channing's speech. To reproduce it at all would be impossible. We only tell such few things as we easily remember. He closed with requesting all who had signed the constitution, or who were ready to co-operate with the American Union, to remain at a business meeting. "The hour was late and the business was made short. The plans of the executive committee were stated and approved. These were, 1, to send out lecturers; a beginning having been already made in the appointment of Mr. Charles A. Dana as an agent of the society, to proceed this summer upon a lecturing tour through New York, Western Pennsylvania and Ohio; 2, to support the _Harbinger_; and 3, to publish tracts." This report is followed by another stirring appeal from the Secretary, of which the following is the substance: "ACTION!--Fellow Associationists, Brethren, Sisters, each and all! You are hereby once again earnestly entreated, in the name of our cause of universal unity, at once to co-operate energetically in carrying out the proposed plans of the American Union: "1. Form societies. 2. Circulate the _Harbinger_. 3. Raise funds. We wish to find one hundred persons in the United States, who will subscribe $100 a year for three years, in permanently establishing the work of propagation; or two hundred persons who will subscribe $50. Do you know any persons in your neighborhood who will for one year, three years, five years, contribute for this end? Be instant, friends, in season and out of season, in raising a permanent fund, and an immediate fund. This whole nation must hear our gospel of glad tidings. Will you not aid? "WILLIAM H. CHANNING. "_Cor. Sec. of the Am. Un. of Associationists._" How far Mr. Dana fulfilled the missionary programme assigned to him, we have not been able to discover. But we find that the two most conspicuous lecturers sent abroad by the American Union were Messrs John Allen and John Orvis. These gentlemen made two or three tours through the northern part of New England; and in the fall of 1847 they were lecturing or trying to lecture in Utica, Syracuse, Rochester, and other parts of the state of New York, as we mentioned in our account of the Skaneateles and Sodus Bay Associations. But the harvest of Fourierism was past, and they complained sorely of the neglect they met with, in consequence of the bad odor of the defunct Associations. This is the last we hear of them. The American Union continued to advertise itself in the _Harbinger_ till that paper disappeared in February 1849; but its doings after 1846 seem to have been limited to anniversary meetings. CHAPTER XLI. BROOK FARM PROPAGATING SWEDENBORGIANISM. Our history of the career of Brook Farm in its final function of public teacher and propagandist, would not be complete without some account of its agency in the great Swedenborgian revival of modern times. In a series of articles published in the Oneida _Circular_ a year or two ago, under the title of _Swedenborgiana_, the author of this history said: "The foremost and brightest of the Associations that rose in the Fourier excitement, was that at Brook Farm. The leaders were men whose names are now high in literature and politics. Ripley, Dana, Channing, Dwight and Hawthorne, are specimens of the list. Most of them were from the Unitarian school, whose head-quarters are at Boston and Cambridge. The movement really issued as much from transcendental Unitarianism as from Fourierism. It was religious, literary and artistic, as well as social. It had a press, and at one time undertook propagandism by missionaries and lectures. Its periodical, the _Harbinger_, was ably conducted, and very charming to all enthusiasts of progress. Our Putney school, which had not then reached Communism, was among the admirers of this periodical, and undoubtedly took an impulse from its teachings. The Brook Farm Association, as the leader and speaker of the hundred others that rose with it, certainly contributed most largely to the effect of the general movement begun by Brisbane and Greeley. But the remarkable fact, for the sake of which I am calling special attention to it, is, that in its didactic function, it brought upon the public mind, not only a new socialism but a new religion, and that religion was _Swedenborgianism_. "The proof of this can be found by any one who has access to the files of the _Harbinger_. I could give many pages of extracts in point. The simple truth is that Brook Farm and the _Harbinger_ meant to propagate Fourierism, but succeeded only in propagating Swedenborgianism. The Associations that arose with them and under their influence, passed away within a few years, without exception; but the surge of Swedenborgianism which they started, swept on among their constituents, and, under the form of Spiritualism, is sweeping on to this day. "Swedenborgianism went deeper into the hearts of the people than the Socialism that introduced it, because it was a _religion_. The Bible and revivals had made men hungry for something more than social reconstruction. Swedenborg's offer of a new heaven as well as a new earth, met the demand magnificently. He suited all sorts. The scientific were charmed, because he was primarily a son of science, and seemed to reduce the universe to scientific order. The mystics were charmed, because he led them boldly into all the mysteries of intuition and invisible worlds. The Unitarians liked him, because, while he declared Christ to be Jehovah himself, he displaced the orthodox ideas of Sonship and tri-personality, and evidently meant only that Christ was an illusive representation of the Father. Even the infidels liked him, because he discarded about half the Bible, including all Paul's writings, as 'not belonging to the Word,' and made the rest a mere 'nose of wax' by means of his doctrine of the 'internal sense.' His vast imaginations and magnificent promises chimed in exactly with the spirit of the accompanying Socialisms. Fourierism was too bald a materialism to suit the higher classes of its disciples, without a religion corresponding. Swedenborgianism was a godsend to the enthusiasts of Brook Farm; and they made it the complement of Fourierism. "Swedenborg's writings had long been circulating feebly in this country, and he had sporadic disciples and even churches in our cities, before the new era of Socialism. But any thing like a general interest in his writings had never been known, till about the period when Brook Farm and the _Harbinger_ were in the ascendant. Here began a movement of the public mind toward Swedenborg, as palpable and portentous as that of Millerism or the old revivals. "But Young America could not receive an old and foreign philosophy like Swedenborg's, without reacting upon it and adapting it to its new surroundings. The old afflatus must have a new medium. In 1845 the movement which commenced at Brook Farm was in full tide. In 1847 the great American Swedenborg, Andrew Jackson Davis, appeared, and Professor Bush gave him the right hand of fellowship, and introduced him into office as the medium and representative of the 'illustrious Swede,' while the _Harbinger_ rejoiced over them both. "Here I might show by chapter and verse from Davis's and Bush's writings, exactly how the conjunction between them took place; how Davis met Swedenborg's ghost in a graveyard near Poughkeepsie in 1844, and from him received a commission to help the 'inefficient' efforts of Christ to regulate mankind; how he had another interview with the same ghost in 1846, and was directed by him to open correspondence with Bush; how Bush took him under his patronage, watched and studied him for months, and finally published his conclusion that Davis was a true medium of Swedenborg, providentially raised up to confirm his divine mission and teachings; and finally, how Bush and Davis quarreled within a year, and mutually repudiated each other's doctrines; but I must leave details and hurry on to the end. "After 1847 Swedenborgianism proper subsided, and 'Modern Spiritualism' took its place. But the character of the two systems, as well as the history of their relations to each other, proves them to be identical in essence. Spiritualism is Swedenborgianism Americanized. Andrew Jackson Davis began as a medium of Swedenborg, receiving from him his commission and inspiration, and became an independent seer and revelator, only because, as a son, he outgrew his father. The omniscient philosophies which the two have issued are identical in their main ideas about intuition, love and wisdom, familiarity of the living with the dead, classification of ghostly spheres, astronomical theology, etc. Andrew Jackson Davis is more flippant and superficial than Swedenborg, and less respectful toward the Bible and the past, and in these respects he suits his customers." We understand that some of the Brook Farmers think this view of the Swedenborgian influence of Brook Farm and the _Harbinger_ is exaggerated. It will be appropriate therefore now to set forth some of the facts and teachings which led to this view. The first notable statement of the essential dualism between Swedenborg and Fourier that we find in the writings of the Socialists, is in the last chapter of Parke Godwin's "_Popular View_," published in the beginning of 1844, a standard work on Fourierism, second in time and importance only to Brisbane's "_Concise Exposition_." Godwin says: "Thus far we have given Fourier's doctrine of Universal Analogy; but it is important to observe that he was not the first man of modern times who communicated this view. Emanuel Swedenborg, between whose revelations in the sphere of spiritual knowledge, and Fourier's discoveries in the sphere of science, there has been remarked the most exact and wonderful coïncidence, preceded him in the annunciation of the doctrine in many of its aspects, in what is termed the doctrine of correspondence. These two great minds, the greatest beyond all comparison in our later days, were the instruments of Providence in bringing to light the mysteries of His Word and Works, as they are comprehended and followed in the higher states of existence. It is no exaggeration, we think, to say, that they are the two commissioned by the Great Leader of the Christian Israel, to spy out the promised land of peace and blessedness. "But in the discovery and statement of the doctrine of Analogy, these authorities have not proceeded according to precisely the same methods. Fourier has arrived at it by strictly scientific synthesis, and Swedenborg by the study of the Scriptures aided by Divine illumination. What is the aspect in which Fourier views it we have shown; we shall next attempt to elucidate the peculiar development of Swedenborg." From this Mr. Godwin goes on to show at length the parallelism between the teachings of these "incomparable masters." It will be seen that he intimates that thinkers and writers before him had taken the same view. One of these, doubtless, was Hugh Doherty, an English Fourierist, whose writings frequently occur in the _Phalanx_ and _Harbinger_. A very long article from him, maintaining the identity of Fourierism and Swedenborgianism, appeared in the _Phalanx_ of September 7, 1844. The article itself is dated London, January 30, 1844. Among other things Mr. Doherty says: "I am a believer in the truths of the New Church, and have read nearly all the writings of Swedenborg, and I have no hesitation in saying that without Fourier's explanation of the laws of order in Scriptural interpretation, I should probably have doubted the truth of Swedenborg's illumination, from want of a ground to understand the nature of spiritual sight in contradistinction from natural sight; or if I had been able to conceive the opening of the spiritual sight, and credit Swedenborg's doctrines and affirmations, I should probably have understood them only in the same degree as most of the members of the New Church whom I have met in England, and that would seem to me, in my present state, a partial calamity of cecity. I say this in all humility and sincerity of conscience, with a view to future reference to Swedenborg himself in the spiritual world, and as a means of inducing the members of the New Church generally not to be content with a superficial or limited knowledge of their own doctrines." In another passage Mr. Doherty claims to have been "a student of Fourier fourteen years, and of Swedenborg two years." In consequence partly of the new appreciation of Swedenborg that was rising among the Fourierists, a movement commenced in England in 1845 for republishing the scientific works of "the illustrious Swede." An Association for that purpose was formed, and several of Swedenborg's bulkiest works were printed under the auspices of Wilkinson, Clissold and others. This Wilkinson was also a considerable contributor to the _Phalanx_ and _Harbinger_, as the reader will see by recurring to a list in our chapter on the Personnel of Fourierism. Following this movement, came the famous lecture of Ralph Waldo Emerson on "_Swedenborg, the Mystic_," claiming for him a lofty position as a scientific discoverer. That lecture was first published in this country in a volume entitled, "_Representative Men_," in 1849; but according to Mr. White (the biographer of Swedenborg), it was delivered in England several times in 1847; and we judge from an expression which we italicize in the following extract from it, that it was written and perhaps delivered in this country in 1845 or 1846, i.e. very soon after the republication movement in England: "The scientific works [of Swedenborg] have _just now_ been translated into English, in an excellent edition. Swedenborg printed these scientific books in the ten years from 1734 to 1744, and they remained from that time neglected; and now, after their century is complete, he has at last found a pupil in Mr. Wilkinson, in London, a philosophic critic, with a coequal vigor of understanding and imagination comparable only to Lord Bacon's, who has produced his master's buried books to the day, and transferred them, with every advantage, from their forgotten Latin into English, to go round the world in our commercial and conquering tongue. This startling reäppearance of Swedenborg, after a hundred years, in his pupil, is not the least remarkable fact in his history. Aided, it is said, by the munificence of Mr. Clissold, and also by his literary skill, this piece of poetic justice is done. The admirable preliminary discourses with which Mr. Wilkinson has enriched these volumes, throw all the cotemporary philosophy of England into shade." Emerson, it is true, was not a Brook Farmer; but he was the spiritual fertilizer of all the Transcendentalists, including the Brook Farmers. It is true also that in his lecture he severely criticised Swedenborg; but this was his vocation: to judge and disparage all religious teachers, especially seers and thaumaturgists. On the whole he gave Swedenborg a lift, just as he helped the reputation of all "ethnic Scriptures." His criticism of Swedenborg amounts to about this: "He was a very great thinker and discoverer; but his visions and theological teachings are humbugs; still they are as good as any other, and rather better." William H. Channing, another fertilizer of Brook Farm, was busy at the same time with Emerson, in the work of calling attention to Swedenborg. His conversions to Fourierism and Swedenborgianism seem to have proceeded together. The last three numbers of the _Present_ are loaded with articles extolling Swedenborg, and the editor only complains of them that they "by no means do justice to the great Swedish philosopher and seer." The very last article in the volume is an item headed, "Fourier and Swedenborg," in which Mr. Charming says: "I have great pleasure in announcing another work upon Fourier and his system, from the pen of C.J. Hempel. This book is a very curious and interesting one, from the attempt of the author to show the identity or at least the extraordinary resemblance between the views of Fourier and Swedenborg. How far Mr. Hempel has been successful I cannot pretend to judge. But this may be safely said, no one can examine with any care the writings of these two wonderful students of Providence, man and the universe, without having most sublime visions of divine order opened upon him. Their doctrine of Correspondence and Universal Unity accords with all the profoundest thought of the age." Such were the influences under which Brook Farm assumed its final task of propagandism. Let us now see how far the coupling of Fourier and Swedenborg was kept up in the _Harbinger_. The motto of the paper, displayed under its title from first to last, was selected from the writings of the Swedish seer. In the editors' inaugural address they say: "In the words of the illustrious Swedenborg, which we have selected for the motto of the _Harbinger_, 'All things, at the present day, stand provided and prepared, and await the light. The ship is in the harbor; the sails are swelling; the east wind blows; let us weigh anchor, and put forth to sea.'" In a glancing run through the five semi-annual volumes of the _Harbinger_ we find between thirty and forty articles on Swedenborg and Swedenborgian subjects, chiefly editorial reviews of books, pamphlets, etc., with a considerable amount of correspondence from Wilkinson, Doherty and other Swedenborgian Fourierists in England. The burden of all these articles is the same, viz., the unity of Swedenborgianism and Fourierism. On the one hand the Fourierists insist that Swedenborg revealed the religion that Fourier anticipated; and on the other the Swedenborgians insist that Fourier discovered the divine arrangement of society that Swedenborg foreshadowed. The reviews referred to were written chiefly by John S. Dwight and Charles A. Dana.[B] We will give a few specimens of their utterances: [From Editorials by John S. Dwight.] *** "In religion we have Swedenborg; in social economy Fourier; in music Beethoven. *** "Swedenborg we reverence for the greatness and profundity of his thought. We study him continually for the light he sheds on so many problems of human destiny, and more especially for the remarkable correspondence, as of inner with outer, which his revelations present with the discoveries of Fourier concerning social organization, or the outward forms of life. The one is the great poet and high-priest, the other the great economist, as it were, of the harmonic order, which all things are preparing. *** "Call not our praises of Swedenborg 'hollow;' if he offered us ten times as much which we could not assent to, it would not detract in the least from our reverence for the man, or our great indebtedness to his profoundly spiritual insight. *** "Deeper foundations for science have not been touched by any sounding-line as yet, than these same philosophical principles of Swedenborg. Fourier has not gone deeper; but he has shed more light on these deep foundations, taken their measurement with a more bold precision, and reared a no insignificant portion of the everlasting superstructure. But in their ground they are both one. Taken together they are the highest expression of the tendency of human thought to universal unity." [From Editorials by Charles A. Dana.] *** "We recommend the writings of Swedenborg to our readers of all denominations, as we should recommend those of any other providential teacher. We believe that his mission is of the highest importance to the human family, and shall take every fit occasion to call the attention of the public to it. *** "No man of unsophisticated mind can read Swedenborg without feeling his life elevated into a higher plane, and his intellect excited into new and more reverent action on some of the sublimest questions which the human mind can approach. Whatever may be thought of the doctrines of Swedenborg or of his visions, the spirit which breathes from his works is pure and heavenly. *** "We do not hesitate to say that the publication and study of Swedenborg's scientific writings must produce a new era in human knowledge, and thus in society. *** "Though Swedenborg and Fourier differ in the character of their minds, and the immediate end of their studies, the method they adopted was fundamentally the same; their success is thus due, not to the vastness of their genius alone, but in a measure also to the instruments they employed. The logic of Fourier is imperfectly stated in his doctrine of the Series, of Universal Analogy, and of Attractions proportional to Destinies; that of Swedenborg in the incomplete and often very obscure and difficult expositions which appear here and there in his works, of the doctrine of Forms; of Order and Degrees; of Series and Society; of Influx; of Correspondence and Representation; and of Modification. This logic appears to have existed complete in the minds of neither of these great men; but even so much of it as they have communicated, puts into the hands of the student the most invaluable assistance, and attracts him to a path of thought in which the successful explorers will receive immortal honors from a grateful race. *** "The chief characteristic of this epoch is, its tendency, everywhere apparent, to unity in universality; and the men in whom this tendency is most fully expressed are Swedenborg, Fourier and Goethe. In these three eminent persons is summed up the great movement toward unity in universality, in religion, science and art, which comprise the whole domain of human activity. In speaking of Swedenborg as the teacher of this century in religion, some of the most obvious considerations are his northern origin, his peculiar education, etc. *** "We say without hesitation, that, excepting the writings of Fourier, no scientific publications of the last fifty years are to be compared with [the Wilkinson edition of Swedenborg] in importance. To the student of philosophy, to the savan, and to the votary of social science, they are alike invaluable, almost indispensable. Whether we are inquiring for truth in the abstract, or looking beyond the aimlessness and contradictions of modern experimentalism in search of the guiding light of universal principles, or giving our constant thought to the laws of Divine Social Order, and the re-integration of the Collective Man, we can not spare the aid of this loving and beloved sage. His was a grand genius, nobly disciplined. In him, a devotion to truth almost awful, was tempered by an equal love of humanity and a supreme reverence for God. To his mind, the order of the universe and the play of its powers were never the objects of idle curiosity or of cold speculation. He entered into the retreats of nature and the occult abode of the soul, as the minister of humanity, and not as a curious explorer eager to add to his own store of wonders or to exercise his faculties in those difficult regions. No man had ever such sincerity, such absolute freedom from intellectual selfishness as he." The reader, we trust, will take our word for it, that there is a very large amount of this sort of teaching in the volumes of the _Harbinger_. Even Mr. Ripley himself wielded a vigorous cudgel on behalf of Swedenborg against certain orthodox critics, and held the usual language of his socialistic brethren about the "sublime visions of the illustrious Swedish seer," his "bold poetic revelations," his "profound, living, electric principles," the "piercing truth of his productions," etc. Vide _Harbinger_, Vol. 3, p. 317. On these and such evidences we came to the conclusion that the Brook Farmers, while they disclaimed for Fourierism all sectarian connections, did actually couple it with Swedenborgianism in their propagative labors; and as Fourierism soon failed and passed away, it turned out that their lasting work was the promulgation of Swedenborgianism; which certainly has had a great run in this country ever since. It would not perhaps be fair to call Fourierism, as taught by the _Harbinger_ writers, the stalking-horse of Swedenborgianism; but it is not too much to say that their Fourierism, if it had lived, would have had Swedenborgianism for its state-religion. This view agrees with the fact that the only sectarian Association, avowed and tolerated in the Fourier epoch, was the Swedenborgian Phalanx at Leraysville. The entire historical sequence which seems to be established by the facts now before us, may be stated thus: Unitarianism produced Transcendentalism; Transcendentalism produced Brook Farm; Brook Farm married and propagated Fourierism; Fourierism had Swedenborgianism for its religion; and Swedenborgianism led the way to Modern Spiritualism. FOOTNOTES: [B] Henry James also wrote many articles for the _Harbinger_ in the interest of Swedenborg. His subsequent career as a promulgator of the Swedenborgian philosophy, in which he has even scaled the heights of the _North American Review_, is well known; but perhaps it is not so well known that he commenced that career in the _Harbinger_. He has continued faithful to both Swedenborg and Fourier, to the present time. CHAPTER XLII. THE END OF BROOK FARM. It only remains to tell what we know of the causes that brought the Brook Farm Phalanx to its end. Within a year from the time when it assumed the task of propagating Fourierism, i.e. on the 3d of March, 1846, a disastrous fire prostrated the energies and hopes of the Association. We copy from the _Harbinger_ (March 14) the entire article reporting it: "FIRE AT BROOK FARM.--Our readers have no doubt been informed before this, of the severe calamity with which the Brook Farm Association has been visited, by the destruction of the large unitary edifice which it has been for some time erecting on its domain. Just as our last paper was going through the press, on Tuesday evening the 3d inst., the alarm of fire was given at about a quarter before nine, and it was found to proceed from the 'Phalanstery;' in a few minutes the flames were bursting through the doors and windows of the second story; the fire spread with almost incredible rapidity throughout the building; and in about an hour and a-half the whole edifice was burned to the ground. The members of the Association were on the spot in a few moments, and made some attempts to save a quantity of lumber that was in the basement story; but so rapid was the progress of the fire, that this was found to be impossible, and they succeeded only in rescuing a couple of tool-chests that had been in use by the carpenters. "The neighboring dwelling-house called the 'Eyry,' was in imminent danger while the fire was at its height, and nothing but the stillness of the night, and the vigilance and activity of those who were stationed on its roof, preserved it from destruction. The vigorous efforts of our nearest neighbors, Mr. T.J. Orange, and Messrs. Thomas and George Palmer, were of great service in protecting this building, as a part of our force were engaged in another direction, watching the work-shop, barn, and principal dwelling-house. "In a short time our neighbors from the village of West Roxbury, a mile and a-half distant, arrived in great numbers with their engine, which together with the engines from Jamaica Plain, Newton, and Brookline, rendered valuable assistance in subduing the flaming ruins, although it was impossible to check the progress of the fire, until the building was completely destroyed. We are under the deepest obligations to the fire companies which came, some of them five or six miles, through deep snow on cross roads, and did every thing in the power of skill or energy, to preserve our other buildings from ruin. Many of the engines from Boston came four or five miles from the city, but finding the fire going down, returned without reaching the spot. The engines from Dedham, we understand, made an unsuccessful attempt to come to our aid, but were obliged to turn back on account of the condition of the roads. No efforts, however, would have probably been successful in arresting the progress of the flames. The building was divided into nearly a hundred rooms in the upper stories, most of which had been lathed for several months, without plaster, and being almost as dry as tinder, the fire flashed through them with terrific rapidity. "There had been no work performed on this building during the winter months, and arrangements had just been made to complete four out of the fourteen distinct suites of apartments into which it was divided, by the first of May. It was hoped that the remainder would be finished during the summer, and that by the first of October, the edifice would be prepared for the reception of a hundred and fifty persons, with ample accommodations for families, and spacious and convenient public halls and saloons. A portion of the second story had been set apart for a church or chapel, which was to be finished, in a style of simplicity and elegance, by private subscription, and in which it was expected that religious services would be performed by our friend William H. Channing, whose presence with us, until obliged to retire on account of ill health, has been a source of unmingled satisfaction and benefit. "On the Saturday previous to the fire, a stove was put in the basement story for the accommodation of the carpenters, who were to work on the inside; a fire was kindled in it on Tuesday morning which burned till four o'clock in the afternoon; at half past eight in the evening, the building was visited by the night-watch, who found every thing apparently safe; and at a quarter before nine, a faint light was discovered in the second story, which was supposed at first to have proceeded from the lamp, but, on entering to ascertain the fact, the smoke at once showed that the interior was on fire. The alarm was immediately given, but almost before the people had time to assemble, the whole edifice was wrapped in flames. From a defect in the construction of the chimney, a spark from the stove-pipe had probably communicated with the surrounding wood-work; and from the combustible nature of the materials, the flames spread with a celerity that made every effort to arrest their violence without effect. "This edifice was commenced in the summer of 1844, and has been in progress from that time until November last, when the work was suspended for the winter, and resumed, as before stated, on the day in which it was consumed. It was built of wood, one hundred and seventy-five feet long, three stories high, with attics divided into pleasant and convenient rooms for single persons. The second and third stories were divided into fourteen houses independent of each other, with a parlor and three sleeping-rooms in each, connected by piazzas which ran the whole length of the building on both stories. The basement contained a large and commodious kitchen, a dining-hall capable of seating from three to four hundred persons, two public saloons, and a spacious hall or lecture-room. Although by no means a model for the Phalanstery or unitary edifice of a Phalanx, it was well adapted for our purposes at present, situated on a delightful eminence, which commanded a most extensive and picturesque view, and affording accommodations and conveniences in the combined order, which in many respects would gratify even a fastidious taste. The actual expenditure upon the building, including the labor performed by the Association, amounted to about $7,000; and $3,000 more, it was estimated, would be sufficient for its completion. As it was not yet in use by the Association, and until the day of its destruction, not exposed to fire, no insurance had been effected. It was built by investments in our loan-stock, and the loss falls upon the holders of partnership-stock and the members of the Association. "It is some alleviation of the great calamity which we have sustained, that it came upon us at this time rather than at a later period. The house was not endeared to us by any grateful recollections; the tender and hallowed associations of home had not yet begun to cluster around it; and although we looked upon it with joy and hope, as destined to occupy an important sphere in the social movement to which it was consecrated, its destruction does not rend asunder those sacred ties which bind us to the dwellings that have thus far been the scene of our toils and of our satisfactions. We could not part with either of the houses in which we have lived at Brook Farm, without a sadness like that which we should feel at the departure of a bosom friend. The destruction of our edifice makes no essential change in our pursuits. It leaves no family destitute of a home; it disturbs no domestic arrangements; it puts us to no immediate inconvenience. The morning after the disaster, if a stranger had not seen the smoking pile of ruins, he would not have suspected that any thing extraordinary had taken place. Our schools were attended as usual; our industry in full operation; and not a look or expression of despondency could have been perceived. The calamity is felt to be great; we do not attempt to conceal from ourselves its consequences: but it has been met with a calmness and high trust, which gives us a new proof of the power of associated life to quicken the best elements of character, and to prepare men for every emergency. "We shall be pardoned for entering into these almost personal details, for we know that the numerous friends of Association in every part of our land, will feel our misfortune as if it were a private grief of their own. We have received nothing but expressions of the most generous sympathy from every quarter, even from those who might be supposed to take the least interest in our purposes; and we are sure that our friends in the cause of social unity will share with us the affliction that has visited a branch of their own fraternity. "We have no wish to keep out of sight the magnitude of our loss. In our present infant state, it is a severe trial of our strength. We can not now calculate its ultimate effect. It may prove more than we are able to bear; or like other previous calamities, it may serve to bind us more closely to each other, and to the holy cause to which we are devoted. We await the result with calm hope, sustained by our faith in the universal Providence, whose social laws we have endeavored to ascertain and embody in our daily lives. "It may not be improper to state, as we are speaking of our own affairs more fully than we have felt at liberty to do before in the columns of our paper, that, whatever be our trials of an external character, we have every reason to rejoice in the internal condition of our Association. For the last few months it has more nearly than ever approached the idea of a true social order. The greatest harmony prevails among us; not a discordant note is heard; a spirit of friendship, of brotherly kindness, of charity, dwells with us and blesses us; our social resources have been greatly multiplied; and our devotion to the cause which has brought us together, receives new strength every day. Whatever may be in reserve for us, we have an infinite satisfaction in the true relations which have united us, and the assurance that our enterprise has sprung from a desire to obey the Divine law. We feel assured that no outward disappointment or calamity can chill our zeal for the realization of a Divine order of society, or abate our effort in the sphere which may be pointed out by our best judgment as most favorable to the cause which we have at heart." In the next number of the _Harbinger_ (March 21), an editorial addressed to the friends of Brook Farm, indicated some depression and uncertainty. The following are extracts from it: "We do not altogether agree with our friends, in the importance which they attach to the special movement at Brook Farm; we have never professed to be able to represent the idea of Association with the scanty resources at our command; nor would the discontinuance of our establishment or of any of the partial attempts which are now in progress, in the slightest degree weaken our faith in the associative system, or our conviction that it will sooner or later be adopted as the only form of society suited to the nature of man and in accordance with the Divine will. We have never attempted any thing more than to prepare the way for Association, by demonstrating some of the leading ideas on which the theory is founded; in this we have had the most gratifying success; but we have always regarded ourselves only as the humble pioneers in the work, which would be carried on by others to its magnificent consummation, and have been content to wait and toil for the development of the cause and the completion of our hope. "Still we have established a center of influence here for the associative movement, which we shall spare no effort to sustain. We are fully aware of the importance of this; and nothing but the most inexorable necessity, will withdraw the congenial spirits that are gathered in social union here, from the work which has always called forth their most earnest devotedness and enthusiasm. Since our disaster occurred, there has not been an expression or symptom of despondency among our number; all are resolute and calm; determined to stand by each other and by the cause; ready to encounter still greater sacrifices than have as yet been demanded of them; and desirous only to adopt the course which may be presented by the clearest dictates of duty. The loss which we have sustained occasions us no immediate inconvenience, does not interfere with any of our present operations; although it is a total destruction of resources on which we had confidently relied, and must inevitably derange our plans for the enlargement of the Association and the extension of our industry. We have a firm and cheerful hope, however, of being able to do much for the illustration of the cause with the materials that remain. They are far too valuable to be dispersed, or applied to any other object; and with favorable circumstances will be able to accomplish much for the realization of social unity." This fire was a disaster from which Brook Farm never recovered. The organization lingered, and the _Harbinger_ continued to be published there, till October 1847; but the hope of becoming a model Phalanx died out long before that time. The _Harbinger_ is very reticent in relation to the details of the dissolution. We can only give the reader the following scraps hinting at the end: [From the New York _Tribune_ (August, 1847), in answer to an allegation in the New York _Observer_ that "the Brook Farm Association, which was near Boston, had wound up its affairs some time since."] "The Brook Farm Association not only was, but is near Boston, and the _Harbinger_ is still published from its press. But, having been started without capital, experience or industrial capacity, without reference to or knowledge of Fourier's or any other systematic plan of Association, on a most unfavorable locality, bought at a high price, and constantly under mortgage, this Association is about to dissolve, when the paper will be removed to this city, with the master-spirits of Brook Farm as editors. The Observer will have ample opportunity to judge how far experience has modified their convictions or impaired their energies." [From a report of a Boston Convention of Associationists, in the _Harbinger_, October 23, 1847.] "The breaking up of the life at Brook Farm was frequently alluded to, especially by Mr. Ripley, who, on the eve of entering a new sphere of labor for the same great cause, appeared in all his indomitable strength and cheerfulness, triumphant amid outward failure. The owls and bats and other birds of ill omen which utter their oracles in leading political and sectarian religious journals, and which are busily croaking and screeching of the downfall of Association, had they been present at this meeting, could their weak eyes have borne so much light, would never again have coupled failure with the thought of such men, nor entertained a feeling other than of envy of experience like theirs." The next number of the _Harbinger_ (October 30, 1847) announced that that paper would in future be published in New York under the editorial charge of Parke Godwin, assisted by George Ripley and Charles A. Dana in New York, and William H. Channing and John S. Dwight in Boston. This of course implied the dispersion of the Brook Farmers, and the dissolution of the Association; and this is all we know about it. The years 1846 and 1847 were fatal to most of the Fourier experiments. Horace Greeley, under date of July 1847, wrote to the _People's Journal_ the following account of what may be called, _Fourierism reduced to a Forlorn Hope._ "As to the Associationists (by their adversaries termed 'Fourierites'), with whom I am proud to be numbered, their beginnings are yet too recent to justify me in asking for their history any considerable space in your columns. Briefly, however, the first that was heard in this country of Fourier and his views (beyond a little circle of perhaps a hundred persons in two or three of our large cities, who had picked up some notion of them in France or from French writings), was in 1840, when Albert Brisbane published his first synopsis of Fourier's theory of industrial and household Association. Since then, the subject has been considerably discussed, and several attempts of some sort have been made to actualize Fourier's ideas, generally by men destitute alike of capacity, public confidence, energy and means. In only one instance that I have heard of was the land paid for on which the enterprise commenced; not one of these vaunted 'Fourier Associations' ever had the means of erecting a proper dwelling for so many as three hundred people, even if the land had been given them. Of course, the time for paying the first installment on the mortgage covering their land has generally witnessed the dissipation of their sanguine dreams. Yet there are at least three of these embryo Associations still in existence; and, as each of these is in its third or fourth year, they may be supposed to give some promise of vitality. They are the North American Phalanx, near Leedsville, New Jersey; the Trumbull Phalanx, near Braceville, Ohio; and the Wisconsin Phalanx, Ceresco, Wisconsin. Each of these has a considerable domain nearly or wholly paid for, is improving the soil, increasing its annual products, and establishing some branches of manufactures. Each, though far enough from being a perfect Association, is animated with the hope of becoming one, as rapidly as experience, time and means will allow." Of the three Phalanxes thus mentioned as the rear-guard of Fourierism, one--the Trumbull--disappeared about four months afterward (very nearly at the time of the dispersion of Brook Farm), and another--the Wisconsin--lasted only a year longer, leaving the North American alone for the last four years of its existence. Brook Farm in its function of propagandist (which is always expensive and exhausting at the best), must have been sadly depressed by the failures that crowded upon it in its last days; and it is not to be wondered that it died with its children and kindred. If we might suggest a transcendental reason for the failure of Brook Farm, we should say that it had naturally a _delicate constitution_, that was liable to be shattered by disasters and sympathies; and the causes of this weakness must be sought for in the character of the afflatus that organized it. The transcendental afflatus, like that of Pentecost, had in it two elements, viz., Communism, and "the gift of tongues;" or in other words, the tendency to religious and social unity, represented by Channing and Ripley; and the tendency to literature, represented by Emerson and Margaret Fuller. But the proportion of these elements was different from that of Pentecost. _The tendency to utterance was the strongest._ Emerson prevailed over Channing even in Brook Farm; nay, in Channing himself, and in Ripley, Dana and all the rest of the Brook Farm leaders. In fact they went over from practical Communism to literary utterance when they assumed the propagandism of Fourierism; and utterance has been their vocation ever since. A similar phenomenon occurred in the history of the great literary trio of England, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Southey. Their original afflatus carried them to the verge of Communism; but "their gift of tongues" prevailed and spoiled them. And the tendency to literature, as represented by Emerson, is the farthest opposite of Communism, finding its _summum bonum_ in individualism and incoherent instead of organic inspiration. The end of Brook Farm was virtually the end of Fourierism. One or two Phalanxes lingered afterward, and the _Harbinger_, was continued a year or two in New York; but the enthusiasm of victory and hope was gone; and the Brook Farm leaders, as soon as a proper transition could be effected, passed into the service of the _Tribune_. During the fatal year following the fire at Brook Farm, the famous controversy between Greeley and Raymond took place, which we have mentioned as Greeley's last battle in defense of retreating Fourierism. It commenced on the 20th of November, 1846, and ended on the 20th of May, 1847, each of the combatants delivering twelve well-shotted articles in their respective papers, the _Tribune_ and the _Courier and Enquirer_, which were afterward published together in pamphlet-form by the Harpers. Parton, in his biography of Greeley, says at the beginning of his report of that discussion, "It _finished_ Fourierism in the United States;" and again at the close--"Thus ended Fourierism. Thenceforth the _Tribune_ alluded to the subject occasionally, but only in reply to those who sought to make political or personal capital by reviving it." CHAPTER XLIII. THE SPIRITUALIST COMMUNITIES. We proposed at the beginning to trace the history of the Owen and Fourier movements, as comprising the substance of American Socialisms. After reaching the terminus of this course, it is still proper to avail ourselves of the station we have reached, to take a birds-eye view of things beyond. We must not, however, wander from our subject. CO-OPERATION is the present theme of enthusiasm in the _Tribune_, and among many of the old representatives of Fourierism. But Co-operation is not Socialism. It is a very interesting subject, and doubtless will have its history; but it does not belong to our programme. Its place is among the _preparations_ of Socialism. It is not to be classed with Owenism, Fourierism and Shakerism; but with Insurance, Saving's Banks and Protective Unions. It is not even the offspring of the theoretical Socialisms, but rather a product of general common sense and experiment among the working classes. It is the application of the principle of combination to the business of buying and distributing goods; whereas Socialism proper is the application of that principle to domestic arrangements, and requires at the lowest, local gatherings and combinations of homes. If the old Socialists have turned aside or gone back to Co-operation, it is because they have lost their original faith, and like the Israelites that came out of Egypt, are wandering their forty years in the wilderness, instead of entering the promised land in three days, as they expected. We do not believe that the American people have lost sight of the great hope which Owen and Fourier set before them, or will be contented with any thing less than unity of interests carried into all the affairs of life. Co-operation as one of the preparations for this unity, is interesting them at the present time, in the absence of any promising scheme of real Socialism. But they are interested in it rather as a movement among the oppressed operatives of Europe, where nothing higher can be attempted, than as a consummation worthy of the progress that has commenced in Young America. Our present business as historians of American Socialisms, is not with Co-operation, but with experiments in actual Association which have occurred since the downfall of Fourierism. The terminus we have reached is 1847, the year of Brook Farm's decease. Since then "Modern Spiritualism" has been the great American excitation. And it is interesting to observe that all the Socialisms that we have surveyed, sent streams (if they did not altogether debouch) into this gulf. It is well known that Robert Owen in his last days was converted to Spiritualism, and transferred all he could of his socialistic stock to that interest. His successor, Robert Dale Owen, has not carried forward the communistic schemes of his father, but has been the busy patron of Spiritualism. Several other indirect but important _anastomoses_ of Owenism with Spiritualism may be traced; one, through Josiah Warren and his school of Individual Sovereignty at Modern Times, where Nichols and Andrews developed the germ of spiritualistic free-love; another (curiously enough), through Elder Evans of New Lebanon, who was originally an Owen man, and now may be said to be a common center of Shakerism, Owenism and Spiritualism. In his auto-biographical articles in the _Atlantic Monthly_ he maintained that Shakerism was the actual mother of Spiritualism, and had the first run of the "manifestations," that afterwards were called the "Rochester rappings." And lastly, Fourierism, by its marriage with Swedenborgianism at Brook Farm, and in many other ways, gave its strength to Spiritualism. It is a point of history worth noting here, that Mr. Brisbane is mentioned in the introduction to Andrew Jackson Davis's Revelations, as one of the witnesses of the _seances_ in which that work was uttered. C.W. Webber, a spiritualistic expert, in the introduction to his story of "Spiritual Vampirism," refers to this conjunction of Fourierism with Spiritualism, as follows: "No man, who has kept himself informed of the psychological history and progress of his race, can by any means fail to recognize at once, in the pretended 'revelations' of Davis, the mere _disjecta membra_ of the systems so extensively promulgated by Fourier and Swedenborg. Davis, during the whole period of his 'utterings,' was surrounded by groups, consisting of the disciples of Fourier and Swedenborg; as, for instance, the leading Fourierite of America [Mr. Brisbane] was, for a time, a constant attendant upon those mysterious meetings, at which the myths of innocent Davis were formally announced from the condition of clairvoyance, and transcribed by his keeper, for the press; while the chief exponent and minister of Swedenborgianism in New York [George Bush] was often seated side by side with him. Can it be possible that these men failed to comprehend, as thought after thought, principle after principle, was enunciated in their presence, which they had previously supposed to belong exclusively to their own schools, that the 'revelation' was merely a sympathetic reflex of their own derived systems? It was no accident; for, as often as Fourierism predominated in 'the evening lecture,' it was sure that the prime representative of Fourier was present; and when the peculiar views of Swedenborg prevailed, it was equally certain that he was forcibly represented in the conclave. Sometimes both schools were present; and on those identical occasions we have a composite system of metaphysics promulgated, which exhibited, most consistently, the doctrines of Swedenborg and Fourier, jumbled in liberal and extraordinary confusion." As might be expected, Spiritualism has taken something from each of the Socialisms which have emptied into it. It is obvious enough that it has the omnivorous marvelousness of the Shakers, combined with the infidelity of the Owenites. But probably the world knows little of the tendency to socialistic speculation and experiment which it has inherited from all three of its confluents. It has had very little success in its local attempts at Association; and this has been owing chiefly to the superior tenacity of its devotion to the great antagonist of Association, Individual Sovereignty, which devotion also it inherited specially from Owen through Warren, and generally from both the Owen and Fourier schools. In consequence of its never having been able to produce more than very short-lived abortions of Communities, its Socialisms have not attracted much attention; but it has been continually speculating and scheming about Association, and its attempts on all sorts of plans ranging between Owenism and Fourierism, with inspiration superadded, have been almost numberless. One of the first of these spiritualistic attempts, and probably a favorable specimen of the whole, was the Mountain Cove Community. Having applied in vain for information, to several persons who had the best opportunity to know about this Community, we must content ourselves with a very imperfect sketch, obtained chiefly from statements and references furnished by Macdonald, and from documents in the files of the Oneida _Circular_. All the witnesses we have found, testify that this Community was set on foot by the rapping spirits in a large circle of Spiritualists at Auburn, New York, sometime between the years 1851 and 1853. It appears to have had active constituents at Oneida, Verona, and other places in Oneida and Madison Counties. Several of the leading "New York Perfectionists" in those places were conspicuous in the preliminary proceedings, and some of them actually joined the emigration to Virginia. The first reference to the movement that we have found, is in a letter from Mr. H.N. Leet, published in the _Circular_, November 16, 1851. He says: "The 'rappings' have attracted my attention. I have scarcely known whether I should have to consider them as wholly of earth, or regard them as from Hades; or even be 'sucked in' with the other old Perfectionists. The reports I hear from abroad are wonderful, and some of them well calculated to make men exclaim, 'This is the great power of God!' But what I see and hear partakes largely of the ridiculous, if not the contemptible. They have had frequent meetings at the houses of Messrs. Warren, Foot, Gould, Stone, Mrs. Hitchcock, etc.; and 'a chiel's amang them them taking notes;' but whether he will 'prent 'em' or not, is uncertain. I have from time to time been writing out what facts have come under my observation, and do so yet. "Yesterday in their meeting, I heard extracts of letters from Mr. Hitchcock written from Virginia; in which he states that they have found the garden of Eden, the identical spot where our first parents sinned, and on which no human foot has trod since Adam and Eve were driven out; that himself, Ira S. Hitchcock, was the first who has been permitted to set his foot upon it; and further, that in all the convulsions of nature, the upheavings and depressions, this spot has remained undisturbed as it originally appeared. This is the spot that is to form the center in the redemption now at hand; and parts adjacent are, by convulsions and a reverse process, to be restored to their primeval state. This is the substance of what I heard read. The revelation was said to have been spelled out to them by raps from Paul." In a subsequent letter published in the _Circular_ December 14, 1851, Mr. Leete sent us the spiritual document which summoned the saints to Mountain Cove, introducing it as follows: "I send inclosed an authentic copy of a printed circular, said to have been received by Mr. Scott, the spiritual leader of the Virginia movement, in this manner, viz.: the words were seen in a vision, printed in space, one at a time, declared off by him, and written down by some one else." _Mountain Cove Circular._ "Go! Scarcely let time intervene. Escape the vales of death. Pass from beneath the cloud of magnetic human glory. Flee to the mountains whither I direct. Rest in their embrace, and in a place fashioned and appointed of old. There the dark cloud of magnetic death has never rested. For I, the Lord, have thus decreed, and in my purpose have I sworn, and it shall come to pass. Time waiteth for no man. "For above the power of sin a storm is gathering that shall sweep away the refuge of lies. Come out of her, O, my people! for their sun shall be darkened, and their moon turned into blood, and their stars shall fall from their heaven. The Samson of strength feeleth for the pillars of the temple. Her foundation already moveth. Her ruin stayeth for the rescue of my people. "The city of refuge is builded as a hiding place and a shelter; as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land; as an asylum for the afflicted; a safety for those fleeing from the power of sin which pursueth to destroy. In that mountain my people shall rest secure. Above it the cloud of glory descendeth. Thence it encompasseth the saints. There angels shall ascend and descend. There the soul shall feast and be satisfied. There is the bread and the water of life. 'And in this mountain shall the Lord of hosts make unto all people a feast of fat things, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wines on the lees well refined. And he will destroy in this mountain the face of the covering cast over all people, and the vail that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from off all faces; and the rebuke of his people shall he take away from off all the earth; for the Lord hath spoken it.' And I will defend Zion, for she is my chosen. There shall the redeemed descend. There shall my people be made one. There shall the glory of the Lord appear, descending from the tabernacle of the Most High. "The end is not yet. "You are the chosen. Go, bear the reproaches of my people. Go without the camp. Lead in the conquest. Vanquish the foe. As ye have been bidden, meekly obey. Paradise hath no need of the things that ye love so dearly. For earthly apparel, if obedient, ye shall have garments of righteousness and salvation. For earthly treasures, ye shall gather grapage from your Maker's throne. For tears, ye shall have jewels, as dewdrops from heaven. For sighs, notes of celestial melody. For death, ye shall have life. For sorrow, ye shall have fulness of joy. Cease, then, your earthly struggle. All ye love or value, ye shall still possess. Earth is departing. The powers and imaginations of men are rolling together like a scroll. Escape the wreck ere it leaps into the abyss of woe. Forget not each other. Bear with each other. Love each other. Go forth as lambs to the slaughter. For lo, thy King cometh, and ere thou art slain he shall defend. Kiss the rod that smites thee, and bow chastened at thy Maker's throne." Here occurs a long break in our information, extending from December 1851, to July 1853. How the Community was established and what progress it made in that interval, the reader must imagine for himself. Our leap is from the beginning to near the end. The _Spiritual Telegraph_ of July 2, 1853, contained the following: "MOUNTAIN COVE COMMUNITY.--We copy below an article from the _Journal of Progress_, published in New York. It is from the pen of Mr. Hyatt, who was for a time a member of the Community at Mountain Cove. Mr. Hyatt is a conscientious man, and is still a firm believer in a rational Spiritualism. We have never regarded the claims of Messrs. Scott and Harris with favor, though we have thought and still think, that the motives and life of the latter were always honorable and pure. There are other persons at the Mountain who are justly esteemed for their virtues; but we most sincerely believe they are deluded by the absurd pretensions of Mr. Scott." [_From the Journal of Progress._] "Most of our readers are undoubtedly aware that there is a company of Spiritualists now residing at Mountain Cove, Virginia, whose claims of spiritual intercourse are of a somewhat different nature from those usually put forth by believers in other parts of the country. "This movement grew out of a large circle of Spiritualists at Auburn, New York, nearly two years since; but the pretensions on the part of the prime movers became of a far more imposing nature than they were in Auburn, soon after their location at Mountain Cove. It is claimed that they were directed to the place which they now occupy, by God, in fulfillment of certain prophecies in Isaiah, for the purpose of redeeming all who would co-operate with them and be dictated by their counsel; and the place which they occupy is denominated 'the Holy Mountain, which was sanctified and set apart for the redemption of his people.' "The principal mediums, James L. Scott and Thomas L. Harris, profess absolute Divine inspiration, and entire infallibility; that the infinite God communicates with them directly, without intermediate agency; and that by him they are preserved from the possibility of error in any of their dictations which claim a spiritual origin. "By virtue of these assumptions, and claiming to be the words of God, all the principles and rules of practice, whether of a spiritual or temporal nature, which govern the believers in that place, are dictated by the individuals above mentioned. Among the communications thus received, which are usually in the form of arbitrary decrees, are requirements which positively forbid those who have once formed a belief in the divinity of the movement, the privilege of criticising, or in any degree reasoning upon, the orders and communications uttered; or in other words, the disciples are forbidden the privilege of having any reason or conscience at all, except that which is prescribed to them by this oracle. The most unlimited demands of the controlling intelligence must be acceded to by its followers, or they will be thrust without the pale of the claimed Divine influence, and utter and irretrievable ruin is announced as the penalty. "In keeping with such pretensions, these 'Matthiases' have claimed for God his own property; and hence men are required to yield up their stewardships: that is, relinquish their temporal possessions to the Almighty. And, in pursuance of this, there has been a large quantity of land in that vicinity deeded without reserve by conscientious believers, to the human vicegerents of God above mentioned, with the understanding that such conveyance is virtually made to the Deity! "As would inevitably be the case, this mode of operations has awakened in the minds of the more reasoning and reflective members, distrust and unbelief, which has caused some, with great pecuniary loss, to withdraw from the Community, and with others who remain, has ripened into disaffection and violent opposition; and the present condition of the 'Holy Mountain' is anything but that of divine harmony. Discord, slander and vindictiveness is the order of proceedings, in which one or both of the professed inspired mediators take an active part; and the prospect now is, that the claims of divine authority in the temporal matters of 'the Mountain,' will soon be tested, and the ruling power conceded to be absolute, or else completely dethroned." After the above, came the following counter-statement in the _Spiritual Telegraph_, August 6, 1853: _Cincinnati, July 14, 1853._ "MR. S.B. BRITTAN--Sir: A friend has handed me the _Telegraph_ of July 2, and directed my attention to an article appearing in that number, headed 'Mountain Cove Community,' which, although purporting to be from the pen of one familiar with our circumstances at the Cove, differs widely from the facts in our case. "Suffice it for the present to say, that Messrs. Scott and Harris, either jointly or individually, for themselves, or as the 'human vicegerents of God,' have and hold no deed (as the article quoted from the _Journal of Progress_ represents) of lands at the Cove. Neither have they pecuniary supporters there. Nor are men residing there required or expected to deal with them upon terms aside from the ordinary rules of business transactions. They have no claims upon men there for temporal benefits. They exact no tithes, or even any degree of compensation for public services; and, although they have preached and lectured to the people there during their sojourn in that country, they have never received for such services a penny; and, except what they have received from a few liberal friends who reside in other portions of the country, they secure their temporal means by their own industry. Moreover, for land and dwellings occupied by them, they are obligated to pay rent or lease-money; and should they at any time obtain a deed, according to present written agreement, they are to pay the full value to those who are the owners of the soil and by virtue thereof still retain their steward-ship. "I have thus briefly stated facts; facts of which I should have an unbiased knowledge, and of which I ought to be a competent judge. These facts I have ample means to authenticate, and together with a full and explicit statement of the nature of the lease, when due the public, if ever, I shall not hesitate to give. And from these the reader may determine the character of the entire expose, so liberally indorsed, as also other statements so freely trumpeted, relative to us at Mountain Cove. "From some years of the most intimate intercourse with the Rev. T.L. Harris, surrounded by circumstances calculated to try men's souls, I am prepared to bear testimony to your statements relative to his goodness and purity; and will add, that were all men of like character, earth would enjoy a saving change, and that right speedily. "Assured that your sense of right will secure for this brief statement, equal notoriety with the charges preferred against us--hence a place in the columns of the _Telegraph_; I am, &c., J.L. SCOTT." This counter-statement has the air of special pleading, and all the information that we have obtained by communication with various ex-members of the Mountain Cove Community, goes to confirm the substance of the preceding charges. The following extracts from a letter in reply to some of our questions, is a specimen: "There were indications in the acts of one or more individuals at Mountain Cove, that plainly showed their desire to get control of the possessions which other individuals had saved as the fruits of their industry and economy. Those evil designs were frustrated by those who were the intended victims of the crafty, though not without some pecuniary sacrifice to the innocent." From all this we infer that the Mountain Cove Community came to its end in the latter part of 1853, by a quarrel about property; which is all we know about it. This was the most noted of the Spiritualist Communities. The rest are not noticed by Macdonald, and, so far as we know, hardly deserve mention. CHAPTER XLIV. THE BROCTON COMMUNITY. We are forbidden to class this Association with the Spiritualist Communities, by a positive disclaimer on the part of its founders: as the reader will see further on. Otherwise we should have said that the Brocton Community is the last of the series which commenced at Mountain Cove. Thomas L. Harris, the leader at Brocton, was also one of the two leaders at Mountain Cove, and as Swedenborgianism, his present faith, is certainly a species of Spiritualism, not altogether unrelated to the more popular kind which he held in the times of Mountain Cove, we can not be far wrong in counting the Brocton Community as one of the _sequelæ_ of Fourierism, and in the true line of succession from Brook Farm. After the bad failure of non-religious Socialism in the Owen experiments, and the worse failure of semi-religious Socialism in the Fourier experiments, a lesson seems to have been learned, and a tendency has come on, to lay the foundations of socialistic architecture in some kind of Spiritualism, equivalent to religion. This tendency commenced, as we have seen, among the Brook Farmers, who promulgated Swedenborgianism almost as zealously as they did Fourierism. The same tendency is seen in the history of the Owens, father and son. Thus, it is evident that the entire Spiritualistic platform has been pushed forward by a large part of its constituency, as a hopeful basis of future Socialisms. And the Brocton Community seems to be the final product and representative of this tendency to union between Spiritualism and Socialism. As Mr. Harris and Mr. Oliphant, the two conspicuous men at Brocton, are both Englishmen, we might almost class that Community with the exotics, which do not properly come into our history. But the close connection of Brocton with the Spiritualistic movement, and the general interest it has excited in this country, on the whole entitle it to a place in the records of American Socialisms. The following account is compiled from a brilliant report in the _New York Sun_ of April 30, 1869, written by Oliver Dyer: _History and Description of the Brocton Community._ "Nine miles beyond Dunkirk, on the southerly shore of Lake Erie, in the village of Brocton, New York, is a Community which, in some respects, and especially as to the central idea around which the members gather, is probably without a parallel in the annals of mankind. "The founder of this Community is the Rev. Thomas Lake Harris, an Englishman by birth, but whose parents came to this country when he was three years old. He was for several years a noted preacher of the Universalist denomination in New York. Subsequently he went to England, where he had a noticeable career as a preacher of strange doctrines. Between five and six years ago he returned to this country, and settled in Amenia, Duchess County, where he prospered as a banker and agriculturist, until in October, 1867, he (as he claims), in obedience to the direct leadings of God's spirit, took up his abode at his present residence in Chautauqua County, on the southerly shore of Lake Erie, and founded the Brocton Community. "The tract of land owned and occupied by the Community, comprises a little over sixteen hundred acres, and is about two and a-half miles long, by one mile in breadth. One-half of this tract was purchased by Mr. Harris with his own money; the residue was purchased with the money of his associates and at their request is held by him in trust for the Community. The main building on the premises (for there are several residences) is a low, two-story edifice straggling over much ground. "A deep valley runs through the estate, and along the bed of the valley winds a copious creek, on the northerly bank of which, at a well-selected site, stands a saw-mill, [the inevitable!] which seems to have constant use for all its teeth. "The land for the most part lies warm to the sun, and its quality and position are such that it does not require under-draining, which is a great advantage. It is bountifully supplied with wood and water and is variegated in surface and in soil. "About eighty acres are in grapes, of several varieties, among which are the Concord, Isabella, Salem, Iona, Rogers's Hybrid and others. They expect much from their grapes. The intention is to strive for quality rather than quantity, and to run principally to table fruit of an excellence which will command the highest prices. "It is the intention of the Community to go extensively into the dairy business, and considerable progress has already been made in that direction. Other industrial matters are also being driven ahead with skill and vigor; but a large portion of the estate has yet to be brought under cultivation, and there is a deal of hard work to be done to make the 1,600 acres presentable, and to secure comfortable homes for the workers. "There are about sixty adult members of the Community, besides a number of children. Among the rest are five orthodox clergymen; several representatives from Japan; several American ladies of high social position and exquisite culture, etc. "But the members who attract the most attention, at least of the newspaper world, are Lady Oliphant and her son, Lawrence Oliphant, who are understood to be exiles from high places in the aristocracy of England. "All these work together on terms of entire equality, and all are very harmonious in religion, notwithstanding their previous diversity of position and faith. "This is a very religious Community. Swedenborg furnishes the original doctrinal and philosophical basis of its faith, to which Mr. Harris, as he conceives, has been led by Providence to add other and vital matters, which were unknown until they were revealed through him. They reverence the Scriptures as the very word of God. "The fundamental religious belief of the Community may be summed up in the dogma, that there is one God and only one, and that he is the Lord Jesus Christ. The religion of the Community is intensely practical, and may be stated as, faith in Christ, and a life in accordance with his commandments. "And here comes in the question, What is a life in accordance with Christ's commandments? Mr. Harris and his fellow believers hold that when a man is 'born of the Spirit,' he is inevitably drawn into communal relations with his brethren, in accordance with the declaration that 'the disciples were of one heart and one mind, and had all things in common.' "This doctrine of Communism has been held by myriads, and repeated attempts have been made, but made in vain, to embody it in actual life. It is natural, therefore, to distrust any new attempt in the same direction. Mr. Harris is aware of this general distrust, and of the reasons for it; but he claims that he has something which places his attempt beyond the vicissitudes of chance, and bases it upon immutable certainty; that hitherto there has been no palpable criterion whereby the existence of God could be tested, no tangible test whereby the indication of his will could be determined; but that such criterion and test have now been vouchsafed, and that on such criterion and test to him communicated, his Community is founded. "The pivot on which this movement turns, the foundation on which it rests, the grand secret of the whole matter, is known in the Community as 'open respiration,' also as 'divine respiration;' and the starting point of the theory is, that God created man in his own image and likeness, and breathed into him the breath of life. That the breathing into man of the breath of life was the sensible point of contact between the divine and human, between God and man. That man in his holy state was, so to speak, directly connected with God, by means of what might be likened to a spiritual respiratory umbilical chord, which ran from God to man's inmost or celestial nature, and constantly suffused him with airs from heaven, whereby his spiritual respiration or life was supported, and his entire nature, physical as well as spiritual, kept in a state of godlike purity and innocence, without, however, any infringement of man's freedom. "That after the fall of man this spiritual respiratory connection between God and man was severed, and the spiritual intercourse between the Creator and the creature brought to an end, and hence spiritual death. That the great point is to have this respiratory connection with God restored. That Mr. Harris and those who are co-operating with him have had it restored, and are in the constant enjoyment thereof. That it is by this divine respiration, and by no other means, that a human being can get irrefragable, tangible, satisfactory evidence that God is God, and that man has or can have conjunction with God. This divine respiration retains all that is of the natural respiration as its base and fulcrum, and builds upon and employs it for its service. "In the new respiration, God gives an atmosphere that is as sensitive to moral quality as the physical respiration is to natural quality; and this higher breath, whose essence is virtue, builds up the bodies of the virtuous, wars against disease, expels the virus of hereditary maladies, renews health from its foundations, and stands in the body as a sentinel against every plague. When this spiritual respiration descends and takes possession of the frame, there is thenceforth a guiding power, a positive inspiration, which selects the recipient's calling, which trains him for it, which leads him to favorable localities, and which co-ordinates affairs on a large scale. It will deal with groups as with individuals; it will re-distribute mankind; it will re-organize the village, the town, the workshop, the manufactory, the agricultural district, the pastoral region, gathering human atoms from their degradation, and crystallizing them in resplendent unities. "This primary doctrine has for its accompaniment a special theory of love and marriage, which is this: In heaven the basis of social order is marital order, and so it must be in this world. There, all the senses are completed and included in the sense of chastity; that sense of chastity is there the body for the soul of conjugal desire; there, the corporeal element of passion is excluded from the nuptial senses: there, the utterly pure alone are permitted to enter into the divine state involved in nuptial union; and so it must be here below. The 'sense of chastity' is the touchstone of conjugal fitness, and is bestowed in this wise: "When the Divine breaths have so pervaded the nervous structures that the higher attributes of sensation begin to waken from their immemorial torpor, and to react against disease, a sixth sense is as evident as hearing is to the ear, or sight to vision. It is distributed through the entire frame. So exquisitely does it pervade the hands that the slightest touch declares who are chaste and who are unchaste. And this sixth sense is the sense of chastity. It comes from God, who is the infinite chastity. "Within this sense of chastity nuptial love has its dwelling-place. So utterly hostile is it by nature to what the world understands by desire and passion, that the waftings of an atmosphere bearing these elements in its bosom affect it with loathing. This sense of chastity literally clothes every nerve. A living, sensitive garment, without spot or seam, it invests the frame of the universal sensations, and gives instant warning of the approach of impurity even in thought. "In true nuptial love, which is born of love to God, the nuptial pair, from the inmost oneness of the divine being, are embosomed each in each, as loveliness in loveliness, innocence in innocence, blessedness in blessedness. In possessing each other they possess the Lord, who prepares the two to become one heart, one mind, one soul, one love, one wisdom, one felicity. There are ladies and gentlemen in the Community who claim to have attained this sense of chastity to such a degree that they instantly detect the presence of an impure person. "It may surprise the reader to hear that what is called 'Spiritualism' finds no favor in this Community. All phases of the spirit-rapping business are abhorred. "A cardinal principle of government, as to their own affairs in the Community, is unity of conviction. The Council of Direction consists of nineteen members; and if any one of them fails to perceive the propriety of a course or plan agreed upon by the other eighteen, it is accepted as an indication of Providence that the time for carrying out the course or plan has not yet come; and they patiently wait until the entire Council becomes 'of one heart and one mind' as to the matter proposed. "They do not hunger for proselytes, nor seek public recognition. They know that the spirit is the great matter; and that an enterprise, as well as a human being, or a tree, must grow from the internal, vital principle, and not from external agglomerations. Whosoever, therefore, applies for admission to their circle is subject to crucial spiritual tests and a revealing probation. Unconditional surrender to God's will, absolute chastity not only in act but in spirit, complete self-abnegation, a full acceptance of Christ as the only and true God, are fundamental conditions even to a probationship. "Painting, sculpture, music and all the accomplishments are to have fitting development. There is no Quakerism or Puritanism in them. Man (including woman) is to be developed liberally, thoroughly, grandly, but all in the name of the Lord, and with an eye single to God's glory. Science, art, literature, languages, mechanics, philosophy, whatever will help to give back to man his lost mastership of the universe, is to be subordinated for that purpose. "Their domestic affairs, including cooking and washing, are carried on much as in the outside world. They live in many mansions, and have no unitary household. But they are alive to all the teachings of science and sociology on these topics, and intend to make machinery and organization do as much of the drudgery of the Community as possible. "They have no peculiar costume or customs. They eat, drink, dress, converse and worship God just like cultivated Christians elsewhere. They have no regular preaching at present, nor literary entertainments, but all these are to come in due season. They intend, as their numbers increase, and as the organization solidifies, to inaugurate whatever institutions may be necessary to promote their intellectual and spiritual welfare, and also to establish such industries and manufactures on the domain, as sound, economical discretion, vivified and guided by the new respiration, shall dictate. "By means of the new respiration they think that, in the lapse of time, mankind will become regenerate, and society be reconstructed, and physical disease banished from the earth, and a millennial reign inaugurated under the domination of Divine order. They especially expect great things in the East; that the doctrine of the Lord, as set forth by Swedenborg and Mr. Harris, and re-inforced by the new respiration, will by and by sweep over Asia, where the people are already beginning to be tossed on the waves of spiritual unrest, and are longing for a higher religious development." After this luminous introduction, Mr. Dana, the editor of the _Sun_, followed with the article ensuing: "WILL IT SUCCEED? "The account which we published yesterday, from the accomplished pen of Mr. Oliver Dyer, of the new Community in Chautauqua County, which Mr. Harris, Mr. Oliphant and their associates are engaged in founding, will, we think, excite attention everywhere. Considered as a religious movement alone, the enterprise merits a candid and even sympathetic attention. Its fundamental ideas are such as must promote thought and inquiry wherever they are promulgated. That they are all true, as a matter of theological doctrine, we certainly are not prepared to affirm; but that they challenge a respectful interest in the minds of all sincere inquirers after spiritual truth, can not be disputed. But it is not as a new form of Christianity, with new dogmas and new pretensions, that we have to deal with the system proclaimed at Brocton. What especially engages our observation is the social aspect of the undertaking. Is it founded upon notions that promise any considerable advance upon the present form of society? Does it contain within itself the elements of success? "As respects the first question, we are free to answer that the scheme of the Brocton philosophers is too little developed, too immature in their own minds, to allow of any dogmatic judgment respecting it. The religious phase of the Community, and the enthusiasm which belongs to it, have not yet crystallized in relations of industry, art, education and external life, sufficiently to show the precise end at which it will aim. Indeed it would seem that its founders have avoided rather than cultivated those speculations on the organization of society to which most social innovators give the first place in their thoughts. Starting from man's highest spiritual nature alone, they prefer to leave every practical problem to be solved as it rises, not by scientific theory or business shrewdness, but by the help of that supernatural inspiration which forms a vital point in their theology. But on the other hand, they are pledged to democratic equality, to perfect respect for the dignity of labor, and to brotherly justice in the distribution alike of the advantages of life and the earnings of the common toil. We may conclude, then, that despite the Communism which seems to lie at the foundation of their design, with its annihilation of individual property, and its tendency to annihilate individual character also, all persons who can adopt the religion of this Community will find a happier life within its precincts than they can look for elsewhere. But that it will initiate a new stage in the world's social progress, or exercise any perceptible influence upon the general condition of mankind, is not to be expected. "As to the probability of its lasting, that seems to us to be strong. Communities based upon peculiar religious views, have generally succeeded. The Shakers and the Oneida Community are conspicuous illustrations of this fact; while the failure of the various attempts made by the disciples of Fourier, Owen and others, who have not had the support of religious fanaticism, proves that without this great force the most brilliant social theories are of little avail. Have the Brocton people enough of it to carry them safely through? Or is their religion of too transcendental a character to form a sure and tenacious cement for their social structure? These questions only time can positively answer; but we incline to the belief that they are likely to live and prosper, to become numerous and wealthy, and to play a much more influential part in the world than either of the bodies of religious Socialists that have preceded them." The reader will perhaps expect us to say something from our stand-point, in answer to Mr. Dana's question, "Will it succeed?" and as the name of the Oneida Community is called in connection with the Shakers and the Broctonians, it seems proper that we should do what we can to help on a fair comparison of these competing Socialisms. In the first place, many of the cardinal principles reported in Mr. Dyer's account, command our highest respect and sympathy. Religion as the basis, inspiration as the guide, Providence as the insurer, reverence for the Bible, Communism of property, unanimity in action, abstinence from proselytism, self-improvement instead of preaching and publicity, liberality of culture in science, art, literature, language, mechanics, philosophy, and whatever will help to give back man his lost mastership of the universe, these and many other of the fundamentals at Brocton we recognize as old acquaintances and very dear friends. With this acknowledgment premised, we will be free to point out some things which we regard as unpromising weaknesses in the constitution of the new Socialism. The Brocton Community is evidently very religious, and so far may be regarded as strong in the first element of success. Its religion, however, is Swedenborgianism, revised and adapted to the age, but not essentially changed; and we have seen that the experiments in Socialism which Swedenborgians have heretofore made, have not been successful. The Yellow Spring Community in Owen's time, and the Leraysville Phalanx in the Fourier epoch, were avowedly Swedenborgian Associations; but they failed as speedily and utterly as their contemporaries. Notwithstanding the claim of a wonderful affinity between Swedenborgianism and Fourierism which the _Harbinger_ used to make, it seems probable that the afflatus of pure Swedenborgianism is not favorable to Communism or to close Association of any kind. Swedenborg in his personal character was not a Socialist or an organizer in any way, but a very solitary speculator; and the heavens he set before the world were only sublimated embodiments of the ordinary principle of private property, in wives and in every thing else. When we say that the Brocton Community is Swedenborgian, we do not forget that Mr. Harris professes to have made important additions to the Teutonic revelations. But we see that the fundamental doctrines reported by Mr. Dyer are essentially the same as those we have found in Swedenborg's works. Even the pivotal discovery of "internal respiration" is not original with Mr. Harris. Swedenborg had it in theory and in personal experience. He ascribes the purity of the Adamic church to this condition, and its degeneracy and destruction, to the loss of it. Thus he says: "It was shown me, that [at the time of the degeneracy of the Adamites] the internal respiration, which proceeded from the navel toward the interior region of the breast, retired toward the region of the back and toward the abdomen, thus outward and downward. Immediately before the flood scarce any internal respiration existed. At last it was annihilated in the breast, and its subjects were choked or suffocated. In those who survived, external respiration was opened. With the cessation of internal respiration, immediate intercourse with angels and the instant and instinctive perception of truth and falsehood, were lost." And Mr. White, the latest biographer of Swedenborg, says of him: "The possession by him of the power of easy transition of sense and consciousness from the lower to the upper world, arose, it would appear, from some peculiarities in his physical organization. The suspension of respiration under deep thought, common to all men, was preternaturally developed in him; and in his diary he makes a variety of observations on his case; as for instance he says: "'My respiration has been so formed by the Lord, as to enable me to breathe inwardly for a long time without the aid of the external air, my respiration being directed within, and my outward senses, as well as actions, still continuing in their vigor, which is only possible with persons who have been so formed by the Lord. I have also been instructed that my breathing was so directed, without my being aware of it, in order to enable me to be with spirits, and to speak with them.' "Again, he tells us that there are many species of respirations inducing divers introductions to the spirits and angels with whom the lungs conspire; and goes on to say, that he was at first habituated to insensible breathing in his infancy, when at morning and evening prayers, and occasionally afterward when exploring the concordance between the heart, lungs and brain, and particularly when writing his physiological works; that for a number of years, beginning with his childhood, he was introduced to internal respiration mainly by intense speculations in which breathing stops, for otherwise intense thought is impossible. When heaven was open to him, and he spoke with spirits, sometimes for nearly an hour he scarcely breathed at all. The same phenomena occurred when he was going to sleep, and he thinks that his preparation went forward during repose. So various was his breathing, so obedient did it become, that he thereby obtained the range of the higher world, and access to all its spheres." Thus it would seem that what Mr. Harris is attempting at Brocton is, to realize on a large scale the experience of Swedenborg, and reproduce the Adamic church. This "open respiration," however, must be an oracular influx not essentially different from that which guides the Shakers, the Ebenezers, and all the religious Communities. We have called it afflatus. It does not appear to be strong enough in the Brocton Community to dissolve old-fashioned familism; which we consider a bad sign, as our readers know. There is an inevitable competition between the family-spirit and the Community-spirit, which all the "internal respiration" that we have enjoyed, has never been able to harmonize in any other way than by thoroughly subordinating family interests, and making the Community the prime organization. And it is quite certain that this has been the experience of the Shakers and all the other successful Communities. Indeed this is the very revolution that is involved in real Christianity. The private family has been and is the unit of society in naturalism, i.e. in the pre-Christian, pagan state. But the Church, which is equivalent to the Association, or Community, or Phalanx, is clearly the unit of society in the Christian scheme. The Brocton philosophy of love and marriage is manifestly Swedenborgian. In some passages it seems like actual Shakerism, but the prevailing sense is that of intensified conjugality, _a la_ Swedenborg. Here again the Swedenborgian afflatus will be very unfavorable to success. Swedenborg wrote in the same vein as Mr. Harris talks, about chastity; but withal he kept mistresses at several times in his life; and he recommends mistress-keeping to those who "can not contain." Moreover he gives married men thirty-four reasons, many of them very trivial, for keeping concubines. Above all, his theory of marriage in heaven, involving the sentimentalism of predestined mating (which doubtless is retained entire in the Brocton philosophy), not only leads directly to contempt of ordinary marriage, as being an artificial system of blunders, but necessarily authorizes the "right of search" to find the true mate. The practical result of this theory is seen in the system of "free love," or experimenting for "affinities," which has prevailed among Spiritualists. It will require a very high power of "internal respiration" to steer the Brocton Community through these dangers, resulting from its affiliation with the Swedenborgian principality. Close Association is a worse place than ordinary society for working out the delicate problems of the negative theory of chastity. The Broctonians are reported as reverencing the Bible, but this can only mean that they reverence it in Swedenborg's fashion. He rejected about half of it (including all of Paul's writings) as uninspired; and worshiped the rest as full of divinity, stuffed in every letter and dot with double and triple significance, of which significance he alone had the key. Probably Mr. Harris's principal deviation from the Swedenborgian theology, is the introduction of his original faith of Universalism. Swedenborg lived and wrote before modern benevolence was developed so far as to require the elimination of future punishment; and with all his laxity on other points, he was more orthodox and uncompromising in regard to the eternity of hell-torments, and even as to their sulphuric nature, than any writer the world has ever seen before or since. Hence the Spiritualists, who generally belong to the Universalist school, either have to quarrel with Swedenborg openly, as Andrew Jackson Davis did, or modify his system on this point, as T.L. Harris has done. We were surprised, as Mr. Dyer supposes his readers might be, to learn that the Brocton Communists abhor "all phases of the rapping business;" for we remember that Mr. Harris was counted among Spiritualists in old times, and we see that he is still in pursuit of the Adamic status and other attainments that were the objective points of the Mountain Cove Community. As to externals, the Brocton Community, we fear, has got the land-mania, which ruined so many of the Owen and Fourier Associations. Sixteen hundred acres must be a dreary investment for a young and small Community. If our experience is worth any thing, and if we might offer our advice, we should say, Sell two-thirds of that domain and put the proceeds into a machine-shop. Agriculture, after all, is not a primary business. Machinery goes before it; always did and always will more and more. Plows and harrows, rakes and hoes, were the dynamics even of ancient farming; and the men that invented and made them were greater than farmers. The Oneida Community made its fortune by first sinking forty thousand dollars in training a set of young men as machinists. The business thus started has proved to be literally a high school in comparison with farming or almost any other business, not excepting that of academies and colleges. With that school always growing in strength and enthusiasm, we can make the tools for all other businesses, and the whole range of modern enterprise is open to us. If the Brocton leaders have plenty of money at interest, we see no reason why they may not live pleasantly and do well in some form of loose co-operation. But with the weaknesses we have noticed, we doubt whether their "internal respiration" will harmonize them in close Association, or enable them to get their living by amateur farming. CHAPTER XLV. THE SHAKERS. We should hardly do justice to the Shakers if we should leave them undistinguished among the obscure exotics. Their influence on American Socialisms has been so great as to set them entirely apart from the other antique religious Communities. Macdonald makes more of them than of any other single Community, devoting nearly a hundred pages to their history and peculiarities. Most of his material relating to them, however, may be found in their own current publications; and need not be reproduced here. But there is one document in his collection giving an "inside view" of their social and religious life, which we are inclined to publish for special reasons. It is, in the first place, a picture of their daily routine, as faithful as could be expected from one who appears to have been neither a friend nor an enemy to them; and its representations in this respect are verified substantially by various Shaker publications. But it is specially interesting to us as a disclosure of the historical secret which connects Shakerism with "modern Spiritualism." Elder Evans, the conspicuous man of the Shakers, in his late autobiography alludes to this secret in the following terms: "In 1837 to 1844, there was an influx from the spirit world, confirming the faith of many disciples, who had lived among believers for years, and extending throughout all the eighteen [Shaker] societies, making media by the dozen, whose various exercises, not to be suppressed even in their public meetings, rendered it imperatively necessary to close them all to the world during a period of seven years, in consequence of the then unprepared state of the world, to which the whole of the manifestations, and the meetings too, would have been as unadulterated foolishness, or as inexplicable mysteries. "The spirits then declared, again and again, that, when they had done their work among the inhabitants of Zion, they would do a work in the world, of such magnitude, that not a place nor a hamlet upon earth should remain unvisited by them. "After their mission among us was finished, we supposed that the manifestations would immediately begin in the outside world; but we were much disappointed; for we had to wait four years before the work began, as it finally did, at Rochester, New York. But the rapidity of its course throughout the nations of the earth (as also the social standing and intellectual importance of the converts), has far exceeded the predictions." --_Atlantic Monthly_, May, 1869. The narrative we are about to present relates to the period of closed doors here mentioned, and to some of the "manifestations" which had to be withdrawn from public view, lest they should be regarded as "unadulterated foolishness." It is perhaps the only testimony the world has in regard to the events which, according to Evans, were the real beginnings of modern Spiritualism. Macdonald does not give the name of the writer, but says that he was an "intimate and esteemed friend, who went among the Shakers partly to escape worldly troubles, and partly through curiosity; and that his story is evidently clear-headed and sincere." _Four Months Among the Shakers._ "Circumstances that need not be rehearsed, induced me to visit the Shaker Society at Watervliet, in the winter of 1842-3. Soon after my arrival, I was conducted to the Elder whose business it was to deal with inquirers. He was a good-looking old man, with a fine open countenance, and a well-formed head, as I could see from its being bald. I found him very intelligent, and soon made known to him my business, which was to learn something about the Shakers and their conditions of receiving members. On my observing that I had seen favorable accounts of their society in the writings of Mr. Owen, Miss Martineau, and other travelers in the United States, he replied, that 'those who wished to know the Shakers, must live with them;' and this remark proved to be true. He propounded to me at considerable length their faith, 'the daily cross' they were obliged to take up against the devil and the flesh, and the supreme virtue of a life of celibacy. When he had concluded I asked if those who wished to join the society were expected to acknowledge a belief in all the articles of their faith? To which he replied, 'that they were not, for many persons came there to join them, who had never heard their gospel preached; but they were always received, and an opportunity given them of accepting or rejecting it.' He then informed me of the conditions under which they received candidates: 'All new comers have one week's trial, to see how they like; and after that, if they wish to continue they must take up the daily cross, and commence the work of regeneration and salvation, following in the footsteps of Jesus Christ and Mother Ann.' My first cross, he informed me, would be to confess all the wicked acts I had ever committed. I asked him if he gave absolution like a Catholic priest. He replied, 'that God forgave sins and not they; but it was necessary in beginning the work of salvation, to unburden the mind of all its past sins.' I thought this confession (demanded of strangers) was a piece of good policy on their part; for it enabled the Elder who received the confession, to form a tolerable opinion of the individual to be admitted. I agreed however before confession to make a week's trial of the place, and was accordingly invited to supper; after which I was shown to the sleeping room specially set apart for new members. I was not left here more than an hour when a small bell rang, and one of the brothers entered the room and invited me to go to the family meeting; where I saw for the first time their mode of worshiping God in the dance. I thought it was an exciting exercise, and I should have been more pleased if they had had instrumental, instead of vocal music. "At first my meals were brought to me in my room, but after a few days I was invited to commence the work of regeneration and prepare for confession, that I might associate with the rest of the brothers. On making known my readiness to confess, I was taken to the private confession-room, and there recounted a brief history of my past life. This appeared rather to please the Elder, and he observed that I 'had not been very wicked.' I replied, 'No, I had not abounded in acts of crime and debauchery.' But the old man, to make sure I was not deceiving him, tried to frighten me, by telling me of individuals who had not made a full confession of their wickedness, and who could find no peace or pleasure until they came back and revealed all. He assured me moreover that no wicked person could continue there long without being found out. I was curious to know how such persons would be detected; so he took me to the window and pointed out the places where 'Mother Ann' had stationed four angels to watch over her children; and 'these angels,' he said, 'always communicated any wickedness done there, or the presence of any wicked person among them.' 'But,' he continued, 'you can not understand these things; neither can you believe them, for you have not yet got faith enough.' I replied: 'I can not see the angels!' 'No,' said he, 'I can not see them with the eye of sense; but I can see them with the eye of faith. You must labor for faith: and when any thing troubles you that you can not understand or believe, come to me, and do not express doubts to any of the brethren.' The Elder then put on my eyes a pair of spiritual golden spectacles, to make me see spiritual things. I instinctively put up my hands to feel them, which made the old gentleman half laugh, and he said, 'Oh, you can not feel them; they will not incommode you, but will help you to see spiritual things.' "After this I was permitted to eat with the family and invited to attend their love-meetings. I was informed that I had perfect liberty to leave the village whenever I chose to do so; but that I was to receive no pay for my services if I were to leave; I should be provided for, the same as if I were one of the oldest members, with food, clothing and lodgings, according to their rules. DAILY ROUTINE. "The hours of rising were five o'clock in the summer, and half-past five in the winter. The family all rose at the toll of the bell, and in less than ten minutes vacated the bed-rooms. The sisters then distributed themselves throughout the rooms, and made up all the beds, putting every thing in the most perfect order before breakfast. The brothers proceeded to their various employments, and made a commencement for the day. The cows were milked, and the horses were fed. At seven o'clock the bell rang for breakfast, but it was ten minutes after when we went to the tables. The brothers and sisters assembled each by themselves, in rooms appointed for the purpose; and at the sound of a small bell the doors of these rooms opened, and a procession of the family was formed in the hall, each individual being in his or her proper place, as they would be at table. The brothers came first, followed by the sisters, and the whole marched in solemn silence to the dining-room. The brothers and sisters took separate tables, on opposite sides of the room. All stood up until each one had arrived at his or her proper place, and then at a signal from the Elder at the head of the table, they all knelt down for about two minutes, and at another signal they all arose and commenced eating their breakfast. Each individual helped himself; which was easily done, as the tables were so arranged that between every four persons there was a supply of every article intended for the meal. At the conclusion they all arose and marched away from the tables in the same manner as they marched to them; and during the time of marching, eating, and re-marching, not one word was spoken, but the most perfect silence was preserved. "After breakfast all proceeded immediately to their respective employments, and continued industriously occupied until ten minutes to twelve o'clock, when the bell announced dinner. Farmers then left the field and mechanics their shops, all washed their hands, and formed procession again, and marched to dinner in the same way as to breakfast. Immediately after dinner they went to work again, (having no hour for resting), and continued steady at it until the bell announced supper. At supper the same routine was gone through as at the other meals, and all except the farmers went to work again. The farmers were supposed to be doing what were called 'chores,' which appeared to mean any little odd jobs in and about the stables and barns. At eight o'clock all work was ended for the day, and the family went to what they called a 'union meeting.' This meeting generally continued one hour, and then, at about nine o'clock, all retired to bed." UNION MEETINGS. "The two Elders and the two Eldresses held their meetings in the Elders' room. The three Deacons and the three Deaconesses met in one of their rooms. The rest of the family, in groups of from six to eight brothers and sisters, met in other rooms. At these meetings it was customary for the seats to be arranged in two rows about four feet apart. The sisters sat in one row, and the brothers in the other, facing each other. The meetings were rather dull, as the members had nothing to converse about save the family affairs; for those who troubled themselves about the things of the world, were not considered good Shakers. It was expected that in coming there we should leave the 'world' behind us. The principal subject of conversation was eating and drinking. One brother sometimes eulogized a sister whom he thought to be the best cook, and who could make the best 'Johnny-cake.' At one meeting that I attended, there was a lively conversation about what we had for dinner; and by this means, it might be said, we enjoyed our dinner twice over. "I have thus given the routine for one day; and each week-day throughout the year was the same. The only variation was in the evening. Besides these union meetings, every alternate evening was devoted to dancing. Sundays also had a routine of their own, which I will not detail. "During the time I was with the Shakers, I never heard one of them read the Bible or pray in public. Each one was permitted to pray or let it alone as he pleased, and I believe there was very little praying among them. Believing as they did that all 'worldly things' should be left in the 'world' behind them, they did not even read the ordinary literature of the day. Newspapers were only for the use of the Elders and Deacons. The routine I have described was continually going on; and it was their boast that they were then the same in their habits and manners as they were sixty years before. The furniture of the dwellings was of the same old-fashioned kind that the early Dutch settlers used; and every thing about them and their dwellings, I was taught, was originally designed in heaven, and the designs transmitted to them by angels. The plan of their buildings, the style of their furniture, the pattern of their coats and pants, and the cut of their hair, is all regulated according to communications received from heaven by Mother Ann. I was gravely told by the first Elder, that the inhabitants of the other world were Shakers, and that they lived in Community the same as we did, but that they were more perfect. THE DANCING MEETINGS. "At half-past seven P.M. on the dancing days, all the members retired to their separate rooms, where they sat in solemn silence, just gazing at the stove, until the silver tones of a small tea-bell gave the signal for them to assemble in the large hall. Thither they proceeded in perfect order and solemn silence. Each had on thin dancing-shoes; and on entering the door of the hall they walked on tip-toe, and took up their positions as follows: the brothers formed a rank on the right, and the sisters on the left, facing each other, about five feet apart. After all were in their proper places the chief Elder stepped into the center of the space, and gave an exhortation for about five minutes, concluding with an invitation to them all to 'go forth, old men, young men and maidens, and worship God with all their might in the dance.' Accordingly they 'went forth,' the men stripping off their coats and remaining in their shirt-sleeves. First they formed a procession and marched around the room at double-quick time, while four brothers and four sisters stood in the center singing for them. After marching in this manner until they got a little warm, they commenced dancing, and continued it until they were all pretty well tired. During the dance the sisters kept on one side, and the brothers on the other, and not a word was spoken by any of them. After they appeared to have had enough of this exercise, the Elder gave the signal to stop, when immediately each one took his or her place in an oblong circle formed around the room, and all waited to see if any one had received a 'gift,' that is, an inspiration to do something odd. Then two of the sisters would commence whirling round like a top, with their eyes shut; and continued this motion for about fifteen minutes; when they suddenly stopped and resumed their places, as steady as if they had never stirred. During the 'whirl' the members stood round like statues, looking on in solemn silence. A MESSAGE FROM MOTHER ANN. "On some occasions when a sister had stopped her whirling, she would say, 'I have a communication to make;' when the head Eldress would step to her side and receive the communication, and then make known the nature of it to the company. The first message I heard was as follows: 'Mother Ann has sent two angels to inform us that a tribe of Indians has been round here two days, and want the brothers and sisters to take them in. They are outside the building there, looking in at the windows.' I shall never forget how I looked round at the windows, expecting to see the yellow faces, when this announcement was made; but I believe some of the old folks who eyed me, bit their lips and smiled. It caused no alarm to the rest, but the first Elder exhorted the brothers 'to take in the poor spirits and assist them to get salvation.' He afterward repeated more of what the angels had said, viz., 'that the Indians were a savage tribe who had all died before Columbus discovered America, and had been wandering about ever since. Mother Ann wanted them to be received into the meeting to-morrow night.' After this we dispersed to our separate bed-rooms, with the hope of having a future entertainment from the Indians. INDIAN ORGIES. "The next dancing night we again assembled in the same manner as before, and went through the marching and dancing as usual; after which the hall doors were opened, and the Elder invited the Indians to come in. The doors were soon shut again, and one of the sisters (the same who received the original communication) informed us that she saw Indians all around and among the brothers and sisters. The Elder then urged upon the members the duty of 'taking them in.' Whereupon eight or nine sisters became possessed of the spirits of Indian squaws, and about six of the brethren became Indians. Then ensued a regular pow-wow, with whooping and yelling and strange antics, such as would require a Dickens to describe. The sisters and brothers squatted down on the floor together, Indian fashion, and the Elders and Eldresses endeavored to keep them asunder, telling the men they must be separated from the squaws, and otherwise instructing them in the rules of Shakerism. Some of the Indians then wanted some 'succotash,' which was soon brought them from the kitchen in two wooden dishes, and placed on the floor; when they commenced eating it with their fingers. These performances continued till about ten o'clock; then the chief Elder requested the Indians to go away, telling them they would find some one waiting to conduct them to the Shakers in the heavenly world. At this announcement the possessed men and women became themselves again, and all retired to rest. "The above was the first exhibition of the kind that I witnessed, but it was a very trifling affair to what I afterward saw. To enable you to understand these scenes, I must give you as near as I can, the ideas the Shakers have of the other world. As I gathered from conversations with the Elder, and from his teaching and preaching at the meetings, it is as follows: Heaven is a Shaker Community on a very large scale. Every thing in it is spiritual. Jesus Christ is the head Elder, and Mother Ann the head Eldress. The buildings are large and splendid, being all of white marble. There are large orchards with all kinds of fruit. There are also very large gardens laid out in splendid style, with beautiful rivers flowing through them; but all is spiritual. Outside of this heaven the spirits of the departed wander about on the surface of the earth (which is the Shaker hell), till they are converted to Shakerism. Spirits are sent out from the aforesaid heaven on missionary tours, to preach to the wandering ones until they profess the faith, and then they are admitted into the heavenly Community. SPIRITUAL PRESENTS. "At one of the meetings, after a due amount of marching and dancing, by which all the members had got pretty well excited, two or three sisters commenced whirling, which they continued to do for some time, and then stopped suddenly and revealed to us that Mother Ann was present at the meeting, and that she had brought a dozen baskets of spiritual fruit for her children; upon which the Elder invited all to go forth to the baskets in the center of the floor, and help themselves. Accordingly they all stepped forth and went through the various motions of taking fruit and eating it. You will wonder if I helped myself to the fruit, like the rest. No; I had not faith enough to see the baskets or the fruit; and you may think, perhaps, that I laughed at the scene; but in truth, I was so affected by the general gravity and the solemn faces I saw around me, that it was impossible for me to laugh. "Other things as well as fruit were sometimes sent as presents, such as spiritual golden spectacles. These heavenly ornaments came in the same way as the fruit, and just as much could be seen of them. The first presents of this kind that were received during my residence there, came as follows: A sister whirled for some time; then stopped and informed the Eldress as usual that Mother Ann had sent a messenger with presents for some of her most faithful children. She then went through the action of handing the articles to the Eldress, at the same time mentioning what they were, and for whom. As near as I can remember, there was a pair of golden spectacles, a large eye-glass with a chain, and a casket of love for the Elder to distribute. The Eldress went through the act of putting the spectacles and chain upon the individuals they were intended for; and the Elder in like manner opened the casket and threw out the love by handsful, while all the members stretched out their hands to receive, and then pressed them to their bosoms. All this appeared to me very childish, and I could not help so expressing myself to the Elder, at the first opportunity that offered. He replied, 'that this was what he labored for, viz., to be a simple Shaker; that the proud and worldly, the so-called great men of this world, must become as simple as they, as simple as little children, before they can enter the Kingdom of Heaven. They must suffer themselves to be called fools for the Kingdom of Heaven's sake. These were the crosses they had to bear.' "The Elder would sometimes kindly invite me to his room and ask me what I thought of the meeting last night. This was generally after those meetings at which there had been some great revelation from heaven, or some pow-wow with the spirits. I could only reply that I was much astonished, and that these things were altogether new to me. He would then tell me that I would see greater things than these. But I replied that it required more faith to believe them than I possessed. Then he would exhort me to 'labor for faith, and I would get it. He did not expect young believers to get faith all at once; although some got it faster than others.' SPIRITUAL MUSIC AND BATHING. "On the second Sunday I spent with the Shakers, there was a curious exhibition, which I saw only once. After dinner all the members assembled in the hall and sang two songs; when the Elder informed them that it was a 'gift for them to march in procession, with their golden instruments playing as they marched, to the holy fountain, and wash away all the stains that they had contracted by sinful thoughts or feelings; for Mother was pleased to see her children pure and holy.' I looked around for the musical instruments, but as they were spiritual I could not see them. The procession marched two and two, into the yard and round the square, and came to a halt in the center. During the march each one made a sound with the mouth, to please him or herself, and at the same time went through the motions of playing on some particular instrument, such as the Clarionet, French-horn, Trombone, Bass-drum, etc.; and such a noise was made, that I felt as if I had got among a band of lunatics. It appeared to me much more of a burlesque overture than any I ever heard performed by Christy's Minstrels. The yard was covered with grass, and a stick marked the center of the fountain. Another song was sung, and the Elder pointed to the spiritual fountain, at the same time observing, 'it could only be seen by those who had sufficient faith.' Most of the brethren then commenced going through the motions of washing the face and hands; but finally some of them tumbled themselves in all over; that is, they rolled on the grass, and went through many comical and fantastic capers. My room-mate, Mr. B., informed me that he had seen several such exhibitions during the time he had been living there. A SHAKER FUNERAL. "One of the sisters of a neighboring family died, and our family were notified to attend the funeral. On arriving at the place, we were shown into a room, and at a signal from a small bell, we were formed into a procession and marched to the large dancing-hall, at the entrance to which the corpse was laid out in a coffin, so as to be seen by all as they passed in. The company then formed in two grand divisions, the brothers on one side, and the sisters on the other, one division facing the other. The service commenced by singing; after which the funeral sermon was preached by the Elder. He set forth in as forcible a manner as he seemed capable of, the uncertainty of life, the character of the deceased sister, what a true and faithful child of Mother's she was, and how many excellent qualities she possessed. The head Eldress also gave her testimony of praise to the deceased, alluding to her patience and resignation while sick, and her desire to die and go to Mother. After a little more singing one of the sisters announced that the spirit of the deceased was present, and that she desired to return her thanks to the various sisters who waited upon her while she was sick; and named the different individuals who had been kindest to her. She had seen Mother Ann in heaven, and had been introduced to the brothers and sisters, and she gave a flattering account of the happiness enjoyed in the other world. Another sister joined in and corroborated these statements, and gave about the same version of the message. After another song the coffin was closed, put into a sleigh, and conveyed to the grave, and buried without further ceremony. A DAY OF SWEEPING AND SCRUBBING. "An order was received from Mother Ann that a day should be set apart for purification. I had no information of this great solemnity until the previous evening, when the Elder announced that to-morrow would be observed as a day for general purification. 'The brothers must clean their respective work-shops, by sweeping the walls, and removing every cobweb from the corners and under their work-benches, and wash the floors clean by scrubbing them with sand. By doing this they would remove all the devils and wicked spirits that might be lodging in the different buildings; for where cobwebs and dust were permitted to accumulate, there the evil spirits hide themselves. Mother had sent a message that there were evil spirits lodging about; and she wished them to be removed; and also that those members who had committed any wickedness, should confess it, and thus make both outside and inside clean.' "At early dawn next morning, the work commenced, and clean work was made in every building and room, from the grand hall down to the cow-house. At ten o'clock eight of the brothers, with the Elders at their head, commenced their journey of inspection through every field, garden, house, work-shop and pig-pen, chanting the following rhyme as they passed along: 'Awake from your slumbers, for the Lord of Hosts is going through the land! He will sweep, He will clean his Holy Sanctuary! Search ye your lamps! read and understand! For the Lord of Hosts holds the lamp in his hand!' A REVIVAL IN HADES. "During my whole stay with the Shakers a revival was going on among the spirits in the invisible world. Information of it was first received by one of the families in Ohio, through a heavenly messenger. The news of the revival soon spread from Ohio to the families in New York and New England. It was caused as follows: George Washington and most of the Revolutionary fathers had, by some means, got converted, and were sent out on a mission to preach the gospel to the spirits who were wandering in darkness. Many of the wild Indian tribes were sent by them to the different Shaker Communities, to receive instruction in the gospel. One of the tribes came to Watervliet and was 'taken in,' as I have described. "At one of the Sunday meetings, when the several families were met for worship, one of the brothers declared himself possessed of the spirit of George Washington; and made a speech informing us that Napoleon and all his Generals were present at our meeting, together with many of his own officers, who fought with him in the Revolution. These, as well as many more distinguished personages, were all Shakers in the other world, and had been sent to give information relative to the revival now going on. In a few minutes each of the persons present at the meeting, fell to representing some one of the great personages alluded to. "This revival commenced when I first went there; and during the four months I remained, much of the members' time was spent in such performances. It appeared to me, that whenever any of the brethren or sisters wanted to have some fun, they got possessed of spirits, and would go to cutting up capers; all of which were tolerated even during the hours of labor, because whatever they chose to do, was attributed to the spirits. When they became affected they were conveyed to the Elder's room; and sometimes he would have six or seven of them at once. The sisters who gave vent to their frolicsome feelings, were of course attended to by the Eldress. I might occupy great space if I were to go into the details of these spiritual performances; but there was so much similarity in them, that I must ask the reader to let the above suffice." We have omitted many paragraphs of this narrative, relating to matters generally known through Shaker publications and others, and many personal details; our principal object being to give a view of some of the Shaker manifestations which seem to have been the first stage of Modern Spiritualism. The reader will notice that the date of these manifestations--the winter of 1842-3--coïncides with the focal period of the Fourier excitement (which, as we have seen, lapsed into Swedenborgianism, as that did into Spiritualism); also that, on the larger scale, the seven years of manifestations and closed doors designated by Evans, from 1837 to 1844, coïncide with the epoch of Transcendentalism. In the times of the _Dial_ there was a noticeable liking for Shakerism among the Transcendentalists; and some of their leaders have lately shown signs of preferring Shakerism to Fourierism. We mention these coïncidences only as affording glimpses of connections and mysterious affinities, that we do not pretend to understand. Only we see that both forms of Socialism favored by the Transcendentalists--Shakerism and Fourierism--have contributed their whole volume to swell the flood of Spiritualism. CHAPTER XLVI. THE ONEIDA COMMUNITY. Last of all, we must venture a sketch of the Association in the bosom of which, this history has been written and printed. The Oneida Community belongs to the class of religious Socialisms, and, so far as we know, is the only religious Community of American origin. Its founder and most of its members are descendants of New England Puritans, and were in early life converts and laborers in the Revivals of the Congregational and Presbyterian churches. As Unitarianism ripened into Transcendentalism at Boston, and Transcendentalism produced Brook Farm, so Orthodoxy ripened into Perfectionism at New Haven, and Perfectionism produced the Oneida Community. The story of the founder and foundations of the Oneida Community, told in the fewest possible words, is this: John Humphrey Noyes was born at Brattleboro, Vermont, in 1811. The great Finney Revival found him at twenty years of age, a college graduate, studying law, and sent him to study divinity, first at Andover and afterward at New Haven. Much study of the Bible, under the instructions of Moses Stuart, Edward Robinson and Nathaniel Taylor, and under the continued and increasing influence of the Revival afflatus, soon landed him in a new experience and new views of the way of salvation, which took the name of Perfectionism. This was in February, 1834. The next twelve years he spent in studying and teaching salvation from sin; chiefly at Putney, the residence of his father and family. Gradually a little school of believers gathered around him. His first permanent associates were his mother, two sisters, and a brother. Then came the wives of himself and his brother, and the husbands of his two sisters. Then came George Cragin and his family from New York, and from time to time other families and individuals from various places. They built a chapel, and devoted much of their time to study, and much of their means to printing. So far, however, they were not in form or theory Socialists, but only Revivalists. In fact, during the whole period of the Fourier excitement, though they read the _Harbinger_ and the _Present_ and watched the movement with great interest, they kept their position as simple believers in Christianity, and steadfastly criticised Fourierism. Nevertheless during these same years they were gradually and almost unconsciously evolving their own social theory, and preparing for the trial of it. Though they rejected Fourierism, they drank copiously of the spirit of the _Harbinger_ and of the Socialists; and have always acknowledged that they received a great impulse from Brook Farm. Thus the Oneida Community really issued from a conjunction between the Revivalism of Orthodoxy and the Socialism of Unitarianism. In 1846, after the fire at Brook Farm, and when Fourierism was manifestly passing away, the little church at Putney began cautiously to experiment in Communism. In the fall of 1847, when Brook Farm was breaking up, the Putney Community was also breaking up, but in the agonies, not of death, but of birth. Putney conservatism expelled it, and a Perfectionist Community, just begun at Oneida under the influence of the Putney school, received it. The story of the Community since it thus assumed its present name and form, has been told in various Annual Reports, Hand-books, and even in the newspapers and Encyclopædias, till it is in some sense public property. In the place of repeating it here, we will endeavor to give definite information on three points that are likely to be most interesting to the intelligent reader; viz: 1, the religious theory of the Community; 2, its social theory; and 3, its material results. As the early experiences of the Community were of two kinds, religious and social, so each of these experiences produced a book. The religious book, called _The Berean_, was printed at Putney in 1847, and consisted mainly of articles published in the periodicals of the Putney school during the previous twelve years. The socialistic book, called _Bible Communism_, was published in 1848, a few months after the settlement at Oneida, and was the frankest possible disclosure of the theory of entire Communism, for which the Community was then under persecution. Both of these books have long been out of print. Our best way to give a faithful representation of the religious and social theories of the Community in the shortest form, will be, to rehearse the contents of these books. _Religious Theory._ [Table of Contents of _The Berean_ slightly expanded.] CHAPTER I. The Bible: showing that it is the accredited organ of the Kingdom of Heaven, and justifying faith in it by demonstrating, 1, that Christ endorsed the Old Testament; and 2, that the writers of the New Testament were the official representatives of Christ, so that his credit is identified with theirs. II. Infidelity among Reformers: tracing the history of the recent quarrel with the Bible in this country. III. The Moral Character of Unbelief: showing that it is voluntary and criminal. IV. The Harmony of Moses and Christ. V. The Ultimate Ground of Faith: showing that while we are at first led into believing by the teachings of men and books, we attain final solid faith only by direct spiritual insight. VI. The Guide of Interpretation: showing that the ultimate interpreter of the Bible is not the church, as the Papists hold, or the philologists, as the Protestants hold, but the Spirit of Truth promised in John 14: 26. VII. Objections of Anti-Spiritualists: a criticism of Coleridge's assertion that all pretensions to sensible experience of the Spirit are absurd. VIII. The Faith once Delivered to the Saints: showing that Bible faith is always and everywhere faith in supernatural facts and sensible communications from God. IX. The Age of Spiritualism: showing that the world is full of symptoms of the coming of a new era of spiritual discovery. X. The Spiritual Nature of Man: showing that man has an invisible organization that is as substantial as his body. XI. Animal Magnetism: showing that the phenomena of Mesmerism are as incredible as the Bible miracles. XII. The Divine Nature: showing that God is dual, and that man, as male and female, is made in the image of God. XIII. Creation: an act of God's faith. XIV. The Origin of Evil: showing that Christ's theory was that evil comes from the Devil as good comes from God. XV. The Parable of the Sower: illustrating the preceding doctrine. XVI. Parentage of Sin and Holiness: illustrating the same doctrine. XVII. The Cause and the Cure: showing that all diseases of body and soul are traceable to diabolical influence; and that all rational medication and salvation must overcome this cause. XVIII. The Atonement: showing that Christ, in the sacrifice of himself, destroyed the power of the Devil. XIX. The Cross of Christ: Continuation of the preceding. XX. Bread of Life: showing that the eucharist symbolizes actual participation in that flesh and blood of Christ "which came down from heaven." XXI. The New Covenant: showing that a dispensation of grace commenced at the manifestation of Christ, entirely different from the preceding Jewish dispensation. XXII. Salvation from Sin: showing that this was the special promise and gift of the new dispensation. XXIII. Perfectionism: defining the term as referring to God's righteousness, and not self-righteousness. XXIV. "He that Committeth Sin is of the Devil:" showing that this means what it says. XXV. Paul not Carnal: showing that he was an actual example of salvation from sin. XXVI. A Hint to Temperance Men: showing that the common interpretation of the seventh chapter of Romans, which refers the confession "When I would do good evil is present with me," etc., to Christian experience, exactly suits the drunkard, and is the greatest obstacle to all reform. XXVII. Paul's Views of Law: showing that while he was a champion of the law as a standard of righteousness, he had no faith in its power to secure its own fulfillment, but believed in the grace of Christ as the end of the law, saving men from sin, which the law could not do. XXVIII. Anti-Legality not Antinomianism: showing that the effectual government of God rules by grace and truth, and in displacing the law, fulfils the law. XXIX. Two Kinds of Antinomianism: showing that the worst kind is that which cleaves to the law of commandments, and neglects the law of the Spirit of life. XXX. The Second Birth: showing that this attainment includes salvation from sin, and was never experienced till the manifestation of Christ. XXXI. The Two-Fold Nature of the Second Birth: showing that the "water and spirit" which are the elements of it, are not material water and air, but truth and grace, or intellectual and spiritual influences. XXXII. Two Classes of Believers: showing that there were in the Primitive Church two distinct grades of experience: one that of the carnal believers, called nepioi; the other that of the regenerate, called _teleioi_. XXXIII. The Spiritual Man: showing that a stable mind, a loving heart and an unquenchable desire of progress, are the characteristics of the _teleioi_. XXXIV. Spiritual Puberty: illustrating regeneration by the change of life which takes place at natural puberty. XXXV. The Power of Christ's Resurrection: showing that regeneration, i.e. salvation from sin, comes by faith in the resurrection of Christ, communicating to the believer the same power that raised Christ from the dead. XXXVI. An Outline of all Experience: describing four grades, viz., 1, the natural state; 2, the legal state; 3, the spiritual state; 4, the glorified state. XXXVII. The Way into the Holiest: showing that the life given by Christ has opened new access to God. XXXVIII. Christian Faith: showing how it differs from Jewish faith; and how it is to be experienced. XXXIX. Settlement with the Past: showing the Judaistic character of the experiences of popular modern saints, and appealing from them to the standards and examples of the Primitive Church. XL. The Second Coming of Christ: showing that Christ predicted, and that the Primitive Church expected, this event to take place within one generation from his first coming; that all the signs of its approach which Christ foretold, actually came to pass before the close of the apostolic age; consequently that simple faith is compelled to affirm that he did come at the time appointed, and the mistake about the matter has not been in his predictions or the expectations of his disciples, but in the imaginations of the world as to the physical and public nature of the event. XLI. A Criticism of Stuart's Commentary on Romans 13: 11, and 2 Thessalonians 2: 1-8: showing that the premature excitement of the Thessalonians, instead of disproving the theory that the Second Advent was near at that time, confirms it. XLII. "The Man of Sin:" showing that the diabolical power designated by this title, was already at work when the epistle to the Thessalonians was written; that Paul himself was withstanding it; and that on his departure it was fully manifested. XLIII. A Criticism of Robinson's Commentary on the 24th and 25th chapters of Matthew: showing that the Second Coming is the theme of discourse from the 29th verse of the 24th chapter to the 31st of the 25th; and that then the prophecy passes to the subsequent reign of Christ and the general judgment. XLIV. A Criticism of the Rev. Messrs. Bush and Barnes's allegation that the Apostles were mistaken in their expectations of the Second Coming within their own lifetime. XLV. Date of the Apocalypse: showing that it was written before the destruction of Jerusalem. XLVI. Scope of the Apocalypse: showing that it relates to the same course of events as those predicted in the 24th and 25th of Matthew. XLVII. The Dispensation of the Fullness of Times: showing that, as the Second Advent with the first resurrection and judgment took place at the end of the times of the Jews, so there is to be a second resurrection and final judgment at the end of the "times of the Gentiles," or in the "dispensation of the fullness of times." XLVIII. The Millennium: showing that the period designated by this term is past. XLIX. The Two Witnesses. L. The First Resurrection. LI. A Criticism of Bush's Theory of the Resurrection. LII. The Keys of Death and Hell. LIII. Objections Answered. The two last chapters are a continuation of the controversy with Bush. LIV. Criticism of Ballou's Theory of the Resurrection. LV. Connection of Regeneration with the Resurrection: showing that regeneration or salvation from sin is the incipient stage of the resurrection. LVI. The Second Advent to the Soul: showing that there was an intermediate coming of Christ in the Holy Spirit, between his first personal coming and his second. LVII. The Throne of David: showing that Christ became king of heaven and earth _de jure_ and _de facto_ at the end of the Jewish dispensation. LVIII. The Birthright of Israel: showing that the Jews are, by God's perpetual covenant, the royal nation. LIX. The Sabbath. LX. Baptism. LXI. Marriage. LXII. Apostolical Succession: a criticism of the Oxford tracts. LXIII. Puritan Puseyism. LXIV. Unity of the kingdom of God. LXV. Peace Principles. LXVI. The Primary Reform: showing that salvation from sin is the foundation needed by all other reforms. LXVII. Leadings of the Spirit: showing that true inspiration does not make a man a fanatic or a puppet. LXVIII. The Doctrine of Disunity: aimed against a theory that prevailed among Perfectionists, similar to Warren's Individual Sovereignty. LXIX. Fiery Darts Quenched: showing that the failings and apostasies of Perfectionists are no argument against the doctrine of salvation from sin. LXX. The Love of Life: showing that the anxiety about the body that is encouraged by doctors and hygienists, is the central lust of the flesh. LXXI. Abolition of Death: to come in this world, as the last result of Christ's victory over sin and the Devil. LXXII. Condensation of Life: showing that the unity for which Christ prayed in John 17: 21-23, is to be the element of the good time coming, reconstructing all things and abolishing Death. LXXIII. Principalities and Powers: referring all our experience to the invisible hosts that are contending over us. LXXIV. Our Relations to the Primitive Church: showing that the original organization instituted by Christ and the apostles, is accessible to us, and that our main business as reformers is, to open communication with that heavenly body. _Social Theory._ [Leading propositions of _Bible Communism_ slightly condensed.] CHAPTER I.--_Showing what is properly to be anticipated concerning the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven and its institutions on earth._ PROPOSITION 1.--The Bible predicts the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. Dan. 2: 44. Isa. 25: 6-9. 2.--The administration of the will of God in his kingdom on earth, will be the same as the administration of his will in heaven. Matt. 6: 10. Eph. 1: 10. 3.--In heaven God reigns over body, soul, and estate, without interference from human governments. Dan. 2: 44. 1 Cor. 15: 24, 25. Isa. 26: 13, 14, and 33: 22. 4.--The institutions of the Kingdom of Heaven are of such a nature, that the general disclosure of them in the apostolic age would have been inconsistent with the continuance of the institutions of the world through the times of the Gentiles. They were not, therefore, brought out in detail on the surface of the Bible, but were disclosed verbally by Paul and others, to the interior part of the church. 1 Cor. 2: 6. 2 Cor. 12: 4. John 16: 12, 13. Heb. 9: 5. CHAPTER II.--_Showing that Marriage is not an institution of the Kingdom of Heaven, and must give place to Communism._ PROPOSITION 5.--In the Kingdom of Heaven, the institution of marriage, which assigns the exclusive possession of one woman to one man, does not exist. Matt. 22: 23-30. 6.--In the Kingdom of Heaven the intimate union of life and interest, which in the world is limited to pairs, extends through the whole body of believers; i.e. complex marriage takes the place of simple. John 17: 21. Christ prayed that all believers might be one, even as he and the Father are one. His unity with the Father is defined in the words, "All mine are thine, and all thine are mine." Ver. 10. This perfect community of interests, then, will be the condition of all, when his prayer is answered. The universal unity of the members of Christ, is described in the same terms that are used to describe marriage unity. Compare 1 Cor. 12: 12-27, with Gen. 2: 24. See also 1 Cor. 6: 15-17, and Eph. 5: 30-32. 7.--The effects of the effusion of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, present a practical commentary on Christ's prayer for the unity of believers, and a sample of the tendency of heavenly influences, which fully confirm the foregoing proposition. "All that believed were together and had all things common; and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all, as every man had need." "The multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul; neither said any of them that aught of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common." Acts 2: 44, 45, and 4: 32. Here is unity like that of the Father and the Son: "All mine thine, and all thine mine." 8.--Admitting that the Community principle of the day of Pentecost, in its actual operation at that time, extended only to material goods, yet we affirm that there is no intrinsic difference between property in persons and property in things; and that the same spirit which abolished exclusiveness in regard to money, would abolish, if circumstances allowed full scope to it, exclusiveness in regard to women and children. Paul expressly places property in women and property in goods in the same category, and speaks of them together, as ready to be abolished by the advent of the Kingdom of Heaven. "The time," says he, "is short; it remaineth that they that have wives be as though they had none; and they that buy as though they possessed not; for the fashion of this world passeth away." 1 Cor. 7: 29-31. 9.--The abolishment of appropriation is involved in the very nature of a true relation to Christ in the gospel. This we prove thus: The possessive feeling which expresses itself by the possessive pronoun _mine_, is the same in essence when it relates to persons, as when it relates to money or any other property. Amativeness and acquisitiveness are only different channels of one stream. They converge as we trace them to their source. Grammar will help us to ascertain their common center; for the possessive pronoun _mine_, is derived from the personal pronoun _I_; and so the possessive feeling, whether amative or acquisitive, flows from the personal feeling, that is, it is a branch of egotism. Now egotism is abolished by the gospel relation to Christ. The grand mystery of the gospel is vital union with Christ; the merging of self in his life; the extinguishment of the pronoun _I_ at the spiritual center. Thus Paul says, "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." The grand distinction between the Christian and the unbeliever, between heaven and the world, is, that in one reigns the We-spirit, and in the other the I-spirit. From _I_ comes _mine_, and from the I-spirit comes exclusive appropriation of money, women, etc. From _we_ comes _ours_, and from the We-spirit comes universal community of interests. 10.--The abolishment of exclusiveness is involved in the love-relation required between all believers by the express injunction of Christ and the apostles, and by the whole tenor of the New Testament. "The new commandment is, that we love one another," and that, not by pairs, as in the world, but _en masse_. We are required to love one another fervently. The fashion of the world forbids a man and woman who are otherwise appropriated, to love one another fervently. But if they obey Christ they must do this; and whoever would allow them to do this, and yet would forbid them (on any other ground than that of present expediency), to express their unity, would "strain at a gnat and swallow a camel;" for unity of hearts is as much more important than any external expression of it, as a camel is larger than a gnat. 11.--The abolishment of social restrictions is involved in the anti-legality of the gospel. It is incompatible with the state of perfected freedom toward which Paul's gospel of "grace without law" leads, that man should be allowed and required to love in all directions, and yet be forbidden to express love except in one direction. In fact Paul says, with direct reference to sexual intercourse--"All things are lawful for me, but all things are not expedient; all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any;" (1 Cor. 6: 12;) thus placing the restrictions which were necessary in the transition period on the basis, not of law, but of expediency and the demands of spiritual freedom, and leaving it fairly to be inferred that in the final state, when hostile surroundings and powers of bondage cease, all restrictions also will cease. 12.--The abolishment of the marriage system is involved in Paul's doctrine of the end of ordinances. Marriage is one of the "ordinances of the worldly sanctuary." This is proved by the fact that it has no place in the resurrection. Paul expressly limits it to life in the flesh. Rom. 7: 2, 3. The assumption, therefore, that believers are dead to the world by the death of Christ (which authorized the abolishment of Jewish ordinances), legitimately makes an end of marriage. Col. 2: 20. 13.--The law of marriage is the same in kind with the Jewish law concerning meats and drinks and holy days, of which Paul said that they were "contrary to us, and were taken out of the way, being nailed to the cross." Col. 2: 14. The plea in favor of the worldly social system, that it is not arbitrary, but founded in nature, will not bear investigation. All experience testifies (the theory of the novels to the contrary notwithstanding), that sexual love is not naturally restricted to pairs. Second marriages are contrary to the one-love theory, and yet are often the happiest marriages. Men and women find universally (however the fact may be concealed), that their susceptibility to love is not burnt out by one honey-moon, or satisfied by one lover. On the contrary, the secret history of the human heart will bear out the assertion that it is capable of loving any number of times and any number of persons, and that the more it loves the more it can love. This is the law of nature, thrust out of sight and condemned by common consent, and yet secretly known to all. 14.--The law of marriage "worketh wrath." 1. It provokes to secret adultery, actual or of the heart. 2. It ties together unmatched natures. 3. It sunders matched natures. 4. It gives to sexual appetite only a scanty and monotonous allowance, and so produces the natural vices of poverty, contraction of taste and stinginess or jealousy. 5. It makes no provision for the sexual appetite at the very time when that appetite is the strongest. By the custom of the world, marriage, in the average of cases, takes place at about the age of twenty-four; whereas puberty commences at the age of fourteen. For ten years, therefore, and that in the very flush of life, the sexual appetite is starved. This law of society bears hardest on females, because they have less opportunity of choosing their time of marriage than men. This discrepancy between the marriage system and nature, is one of the principal sources of the peculiar diseases of women, of prostitution, masturbation, and licentiousness in general. CHAPTER III.--_Showing that death is to be abolished, and that, to this end, there must be a restoration of true relations between the Sexes._ PROPOSITION 15.--The Kingdom of Heaven is destined to abolish death in this world. Rom. 8: 19-25. 1. Cor. 15: 24-26. Isa. 25: 8. 16.--The abolition of death is to be the last triumph of the Kingdom of Heaven; and the subjection of all other powers to Christ must go before it. 1 Cor. 15: 24-26. Isa. 33: 22-24. 17.--The restoration of true relations between the sexes is a matter second in importance only to the reconciliation of man to God. The distinction of male and female is that which makes man the image of God, i.e. the image of the Father and the Son. Gen. 1: 27. The relation of male and female was the first social relation. Gen. 2: 22. It is therefore the root of all other social relations. The derangement of this relation was the first result of the original breach with God. Gen. 3: 7; comp. 2: 25. Adam and Eve were, at the beginning, in open, fearless, spiritual fellowship, first with God, and secondly, with each other. Their transgression produced two corresponding alienations, viz., first, an alienation from God, indicated by their fear of meeting him and their hiding themselves among the trees of the garden; and secondly, an alienation from each other, indicated by their shame at their nakedness and their hiding themselves from each other by clothing. These were the two great manifestations of original sin--the only manifestations presented to notice in the record of the apostacy. The first thing then to be done, in an attempt to redeem man and reörganize society, is to bring about reconciliation with God; and the second thing is to bring about a true union of the sexes. In other words, religion is the first subject of interest, and sexual morality the second, in the great enterprise of establishing the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. 18.--We may criticise the system of the Fourierists, thus: The chain of evils which holds humanity in ruin, has four links, viz., 1st, a breach with God; (Gen. 3: 8;) 2d, a disruption of the sexes, involving a special curse on woman; (Gen. 3: 16;) 3d, the curse of oppressive labor, bearing specially on man; (Gen. 3: 17-19;) 4th, the reign of disease and death. (Gen. 3: 22-24.) These are all inextricably complicated with each other. The true scheme of redemption begins with reconciliation with God, proceeds first to a restoration of true relations between the sexes, then to a reform of the industrial system, and ends with victory over death. Fourierism has no eye to the final victory over death, defers attention to the religious question and the sexual question till some centuries hence, and confines itself to the rectifying of the industrial system. In other words, Fourierism neither begins at the beginning nor looks to the end of the chain, but fastens its whole interest on the third link, neglecting two that precede it, and ignoring that which follows it. The sin-system, the marriage-system, the work-system, and the death-system, are all one, and must be abolished together. Holiness, free-love, association in labor, and immortality, constitute the chain of redemption, and must come together in their true order. 19.--From what precedes, it is evident that any attempt to revolutionize sexual morality before settlement with God, is out of order. Holiness must go before free love. Bible Communists are not responsible for the proceedings of those who meddle with the sexual question, before they have laid the foundation of true faith and union with God. 20.--Dividing the sexual relation into two branches, the amative and propagative, the amative or love-relation is first in importance, as it is in the order of nature. God made woman because "he saw it was not good for man to be alone;" (Gen. 2: 18); i.e., for social, not primarily for propagative, purposes. Eve was called Adam's "help-meet." In the whole of the specific account of the creation of woman, she is regarded as his companion, and her maternal office is not brought into view. Gen. 2: 18-25. Amativeness was necessarily the first social affection developed in the garden of Eden. The second commandment of the eternal law of love, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," had amativeness for its first channel; for Eve was at first Adam's only neighbor. Propagation and the affections connected with it, did not commence their operation during the period of innocence. After the fall God said to the woman, "I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception;" from which it is to be inferred that in the original state, conception would have been comparatively infrequent. 21.--The amative part of the sexual relation, separate from the propagative, is eminently favorable to life. It is not a source of life (as some would make it), but it is the first and best distributive of life. Adam and Eve, in their original state, derived their life from God. Gen. 2: 7. As God is a dual being, the Father and the Son, and man was made in his image, a dual life passed from God to man. Adam was the channel specially of the life of the Father, and Eve of the life of the Son. Amativeness was the natural agency of the distribution and mutual action of these two forms of life. In this primitive position of the sexes (which is their normal position in Christ), each reflects upon the other the love of God; each excites and develops the divine action in the other. 22.--The propagative part of the sexual relation is in its nature the expensive department. 1. While amativeness keeps the capital stock of life circulating between two, propagation introduces a third partner. 2. The propagative act is a drain on the life of man, and when habitual, produces disease. 3. The infirmities and vital expenses of woman during the long period of pregnancy, waste her constitution. 4. The awful agonies of child-birth heavily tax the life of woman. 5. The cares of the nursing period bear heavily on woman. 6. The cares of both parents, through the period of the childhood of their offspring, are many and burdensome. 7. The labor of man is greatly increased by the necessity of providing for children. A portion of these expenses would undoubtedly have been curtailed, if human nature had remained in its original integrity, and will be, when it is restored. But it is still self-evident that the birth of children, viewed either as a vital or a mechanical operation, is in its nature expensive; and the fact that multiplied conception was imposed as a curse, indicates that it was so regarded by the Creator. CHAPTER IV.--_Showing how the Sexual Function is to be redeemed, and true relations between the sexes restored._ PROPOSITION 23.--The amative and propagative functions are distinct from each other, and may be separated practically. They are confounded in the world, both in the theories of physiologists and in universal practice. The amative function is regarded merely as a bait to the propagative, and is merged in it. But if amativeness is, as we have seen, the first and noblest of the social affections, and if the propagative part of the sexual relation was originally secondary, and became paramount by the subversion of order in the fall, we are bound to raise the amative office of the sexual organs into a distinct and paramount function. [Here follows a full exposition of the doctrine of self-control or Male Continence, which is an essential part of the Oneida theory, but may properly be omitted in this history.] CHAPTER V.--_Showing that Shame, instead of being one of the prime virtues, is a part of original Sin and belongs to the Apostasy._ PROPOSITION 24.--Sexual shame was the consequence of the fall, and is factitious and irrational. Gen. 2: 25; compare 3: 7. Adam and Eve, while innocent, had no shame; little children have none; other animals have none. CHAPTER VI.--_Showing the bearings of the preceding views on Socialism, Political Economy, Manners and Customs, etc._ PROPOSITION 25.--The foregoing principles concerning the sexual relation, open the way for Association. 1. They furnish motives. They apply to larger partnerships the same attractions that draw and bind together pairs in the worldly partnership of marriage. A Community home in which each is married to all, and where love is honored and cultivated, will be as much more attractive than an ordinary home, as the Community out-numbers a pair. 2. These principles remove the principal obstructions in the way of Association. There is plenty of tendency to crossing love and adultery, even in the system of isolated households. Association increases this tendency. Amalgamation of interests, frequency of interview, and companionship in labor, inevitably give activity and intensity to the social attractions in which amativeness is the strongest element. The tendency to extra-matrimonial love will be proportioned to the condensation of interests produced by any given form of Association; that is, if the ordinary principles of exclusiveness are preserved, Association will be a worse school of temptation to unlawful love than the world is, in proportion to its social advantages. Love, in the exclusive form, has jealousy for its complement; and jealousy brings on strife and division. Association, therefore, if it retains one-love exclusiveness, contains the seeds of dissolution; and those seeds will be hastened to their harvest by the warmth of associate life. An Association of States with custom-house lines around each, is sure to be quarrelsome. The further States in that situation are apart, and the more their interests are isolated, the better. The only way to prevent smuggling and strife in a confederation of contiguous States, is to abolish custom-house lines from the interior, and declare free-trade and free transit, collecting revenues and fostering home products by one custom-house line around the whole. This is the policy of the heavenly system--'that they _all_ [not two and two] may be one.' 26.--In vital society, strength will be increased and the necessity of labor diminished, till work will become sport, as it would have been in the original Eden state. Gen. 2: 15; compare 3: 17-19. Here we come to the field of the Fourierists--the third link of the chain of evil. And here we shall doubtless ultimately avail ourselves of many of the economical and industrial discoveries of Fourier. But as the fundamental principle of our system differs entirely from that of Fourier, (our foundation being his superstructure, and _vice versa_,) and as every system necessarily has its own complement of external arrangements, conformed to its own genius, we will pursue our investigations for the present independently, and with special reference to our peculiar principles.--Labor is sport or drudgery according to the proportion between strength and the work to be done. Work that overtasks a child, is easy to a man. The amount of work remaining the same, if man's strength were doubled, the result would be the same as if the amount of work were diminished one-half. To make labor sport, therefore, we must seek, first, increase of strength, and secondly, diminution of work: or, (as in the former problem relating to the curse on woman), first, enlargement of income, and secondly, diminution of expenses. Vital society secures both of these objects. It increases strength, by placing the individual in a vital organization, which is in communication with the source of life, and which distributes and circulates life with the highest activity; and at the same time, by its compound economies, it reduces the work to be done to a minimum. 27.--In vital society labor will become attractive. Loving companionship in labor, and especially the mingling of the sexes, makes labor attractive. The present division of labor between the sexes separates them entirely. The woman keeps house, and the man labors abroad. Instead of this, in vital society men and women will mingle in both of their peculiar departments of work. It will be economically as well as spiritually profitable, to marry them in-doors and out, by day as well as by night. When the partition between the sexes is taken away, and man ceases to make woman a propagative drudge, when love takes the place of shame, and fashion follows nature in dress and business, men and women will be able to mingle in all their employments, as boys and girls mingle in their sports; and then labor will be attractive. 28.--We can now see our way to victory over death. Reconciliation with God opens the way for the reconciliation of the sexes. Reconciliation of the sexes emancipates woman, and opens the way for vital society. Vital society increases strength, diminishes work, and makes labor attractive, thus removing the antecedents of death. First we abolish sin; then shame; then the curse on woman of exhausting child-bearing; then the curse on man of exhausting labor; and so we arrive regularly at the tree of life. CHAPTER VII.--_A concluding Caveat, that ought to be noted by every Reader of the foregoing Argument._ PROPOSITION 29.--The will of God is done in heaven, and of course will be done in his kingdom on earth, not merely by general obedience to constitutional principles, but by specific obedience to the administration of his Spirit. The constitution of a nation is one thing, and the living administration of government is another. Ordinary theology directs attention chiefly, and almost exclusively, to the constitutional principles of God's government; and the same may be said of Fourierism, and all schemes of reform based on the development of "natural laws." But as loyal subjects of God, we must give and call attention to his actual administration; i.e., to his will directly manifested by his Spirit and the agents of his Spirit, viz., his officers and representatives. We must look to God, not only for a Constitution, but for Presidential outlook and counsel; for a cabinet and corps of officers; for national aims and plans; for direction, not only in regard to principles to be carried out, but in regard to time and circumstance in carrying them out. In other words, the men who are called to usher in the Kingdom of God, will be guided, not merely by theoretical truth, but by the Spirit of God and specific manifestations of his will and policy, as were Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus Christ, Paul, &c. This will be called a fanatical principle, because it requires _bona fide_ communication with the heavens, and displaces the sanctified maxim that the "age of miracles and inspiration is past." But it is clearly a Bible principle; and we must place it on high, above all others, as the palladium of conservatism in the introduction of the new social order. * * * * * Two expressions occur in the foregoing summaries which need some explanation; viz., in the first, the word _Spiritualist_; and in the second, the term _Free Love_. Without explanation, the modern reader might suppose these expressions to be used in the sense commonly attached to them at the present time. But if he will consider that the articles in _The Berean_ were first published long before the birth of Modern Spiritualism, and that _Bible Communism_ was published long before the birth of Free Love among Spiritualists, he will see that these expressions do not mean in the above documents, what they mean in popular usage, and do not in any way connect the Oneida Community with Modern Spiritualists, or with their system of Free Love. The simple truth is, that the Putney school invented the term _Spiritualist_ to designate all believers in immediate communication with the spiritual world, referring at the time specially to Perfectionists and Revivalists, and marking the distinction between them and the legalists of the churches; and they invented the term _Free Love_ to designate the social state of the Kingdom of Heaven as defined in _Bible Communism_. Afterward these terms were appropriated and specialized by the followers of Andrew Jackson Davis and Thomas L. Nichols. The Oneida Communists have for many years printed and re-printed in their various publications the following protest, which may fitly close this account of their religious and social theories: FREE LOVE. [From the _Hand-Book_ of the Oneida Community.] "This terrible combination of two very good ideas--freedom and love--was first used by the writers of the Oneida Community about twenty-one years ago, and probably originated with them. It was however soon taken up by a very different class of speculators scattered about the country, and has come to be the name of a form of socialism with which we have but little affinity. Still it is sometimes applied to our Communities; and as we are certainly responsible for starting it into circulation, it seems to be our duty to tell what meaning we attach to it, and in what sense we are willing to accept it as a designation of our social system. "The obvious and essential difference between marriage and licentious connections may be stated thus: "Marriage is permanent union. Licentiousness deals in temporary flirtations. "In marriage, Communism of property goes with Communism of persons. In licentiousness, love is paid for as hired labor. "Marriage makes a man responsible for the consequences of his acts of love to a woman. In licentiousness, a man imposes on a woman the heavy burdens of maternity, ruining perhaps her reputation and her health, and then goes his way without responsibility. "Marriage provides for the maintenance and education of children. Licentiousness ignores children as nuisances, and leaves them to chance. "Now in respect to every one of these points of difference between marriage and licentiousness, _we stand with marriage_. Free Love with us does _not_ mean freedom to love to-day and leave to-morrow; nor freedom to take a woman's person and keep our property to ourselves; nor freedom to freight a woman with our offspring and send her down stream without care or help; nor freedom to beget children and leave them to the street and the poor-house. Our Communities are _families_, as distinctly bounded and separated from promiscuous society as ordinary households. The tie that binds us together is as permanent and sacred, to say the least, as that of marriage, for it is our religion. We receive no members (except by deception or mistake), who do not give heart and hand to the family interest for life and forever. Community of property extends just as far as freedom of love. Every man's care and every dollar of the common property is pledged for the maintenance and protection of the women, and the education of the children of the Community. Bastardy, in any disastrous sense of the word, is simply impossible in such a social state. Whoever will take the trouble to follow our track from the beginning, will find no forsaken women or children by the way. In this respect we claim to be in advance of marriage and common civilization. "We are not sure how far the class of socialists called 'Free Lovers' would claim for themselves any thing like the above defense from the charge of reckless and cruel freedom; but our impression is that their position, scattered as they are, without organization or definite separation from surrounding society, makes it impossible for them to follow and care for the consequences of their freedom, and thus exposes them to the just charge of licentiousness. At all events their platform is entirely different from ours, and they must answer for themselves. _We_ are not 'Free Lovers' in any sense that makes love less binding or responsible than it is in marriage."[C] _Material Results._ The concrete results of Communism at Oneida, have been made public from time to time in the _Circular_, the weekly paper of the Community. The "journal" columns of this sheet, in which are given the ups and downs of Community progress, with much of the gossip of its home life, would fill several volumes. Referring the inquisitive reader to these for details, we shall limit our present sketch to the main outlines: The Oneida Community has two hundred and two members, and two affiliated societies, one of forty members at Wallingford, Connecticut, and one of thirty-five members at Willow Place, on a detached part of the Oneida domain. This domain consists of six hundred and sixty-four acres of choice land, and three excellent water-powers. The manufacturing interest here created is valued at over $200,000. The Wallingford domain consists of two hundred and twenty-eight acres, with a water-power, a printing-office and a silk-factory. The three Community families (in all two hundred and seventy-seven persons) are financially and socially a unit. The main dwelling of the Community is a brick structure consisting of a center and two wings, the whole one hundred and eighty-seven feet in length, by seventy in breadth. It has towers at either end and irregular extensions reaching one hundred feet in the rear. This is the Community Home. It contains the chapel, library, reception-room, museum, principal drawing-rooms, and many private apartments. The other buildings of the group are the "old mansion," containing the kitchen and dining-room, the Tontine, which is a work-building, the fruit-house, the store, etc. The manufacturing buildings in connection with the water-powers are large, and mostly of brick. The organic principle of Communism in industry and domestic life, is seen in the common roof, the common table, and the daily meetings of all the members. The extent and variety of industrial operations at the Oneida Community may be seen in part by the following statistics from the report of last year, (1868.) No. of steel traps manufactured during the year, 278,000. " " packages of preserved fruits, 104,458. Amount of raw silk manufactured, 4,664 lbs. Iron cast at the foundry, 227,000 do. Lumber manufactured at saw-mill, 305,000 feet. Product of milk from the dairy, 31,143 gallons. " " hay on the domain, 300 tons. " " potatoes, 800 bushels. " " strawberries, 740 do. " " apples, 1,450 do. " " grapes, 9,631 lbs. Stock on the farm, 93 cattle and 25 horses. Amount of teaming done, valued at $6,260. In addition to these, many branches of industry necessary for the convenience of the family are pursued, such as shoemaking, tailoring, dentistry, etc. The cash business of the Community during the year, as represented by its receipts and disbursements, was about $575,000. Amount paid for hired labor $34,000. Family expenses (exclusive of domestic labor by the members, teaching, and work in the printing office), $41,533.43. The amount of labor performed by the Community members during the year, was found to be approximately as follows: Number. Amount of labor per day. Able-bodied men. 80 7 hours " women. 84 6 " 40 min. Invalid and aged men 6 3 " 40 " Boys 4 3 " 40 " Invalid and aged women 9 1 " 20 " Girls 2 1 " 20 " This is exclusive of care of children, school-teaching, printing and editing the _Circular_, and much head-work in all departments. Taking 304 days for the working year, we have, as a product of the above figures, a total of 35,568 days' work at ten hours each. Supposing this labor to be paid at the rate of $1.50 per day, the aggregate sum for the year would be $53,352.00. By comparing this with the amount of family expenses, $41,533.43, we find, at the given rate of wages, a surplus of profit amounting to $11,818.57, or 33 cents profit for each person per day. This represents the saving which ordinary unskilled labor would make by means of the mere economy of Association. Were it possible for a skillful mechanic to live in co-operation with others, so that his wife and elder children could spend some time at productive labor, and his family could secure the economies of combined households, their wages at present rates would be more than double the cost of living. Labor in the Community being principally of the higher class, is proportionately rewarded, and in fact earns much more than $1.50 per day. The entire financial history of the Community in brief is the following: It commenced business at its present location in 1848, but did not adopt the practice of taking annual inventories till 1857. Of the period between these dates we can give but a general account. The Community in the course of that period had five or six branches with common interests, scattered in several States. The "Property Register," kept from the beginning, shows that the amount of property brought in by the members of all the Communities, up to January 1, 1857, was $107,706.45. The amount held at Oneida at that date, as stated in the first regular inventory, was only $41,740. The branch Communities at Putney, Wallingford and elsewhere, at the same time had property valued at $25,532.22. So that the total assets of the associated Communities were $67,272.22, or $40,434.23 less than the amount brought in by the members. In other words between the years 1848 and 1857, the associated Communities sunk (in round numbers) $40,000. Various causes may be assigned for this, such as inexperience, lack of established business, persecutions and extortions, the burning of the Community store, the sinking of the sloop Rebecca Ford in the Hudson River, the maintenance of an expensive printing family at Brooklyn, the publication of a free paper, etc. In the course of several years previous to 1857, the Community abandoned the policy of working in scattered detachments, and concentrated its forces at Oneida and Wallingford. From the first of January 1857, when its capital was $41,740, to the present time, the progress of its money-matters is recorded in the following statistics, drawn from its annual inventories: In 1857, net earnings, $5,470.11 " 1858, " " 1,763.60 " 1859, " " 10,278.38 " 1860, " " 15,611.03 " 1861, " " 5,877.89 " 1862, " " 9,859.78 " 1863, " " 44.755.30 " 1864, " " 61,382.62 " 1865, " " 12,382.81 " 1866, " " 13,198.74 Total net earnings in ten years, $180,580.26; being a yearly average income of $18,058.02, above all expenses. The succeeding inventories show the following result: Net earnings in 1867, $21,416.02. Net earnings in 1868, $55,100.83. being an average for the last two years of over $38,000 per annum. During the year 1869 the following steps forward have been taken: 1, an entire wing has been added to the brick Mansion House, for the use of the children; 2, apparatus for heating the whole by steam has been introduced; 3, a building has been erected for an Academy, and systematic home-education has commenced; 4, silk-weaving has been introduced at Willow Place; 5, the manufacture of silk-twist has been established at Wallingford; 6, the Communities at Oneida and Wallingford have been more thoroughly consolidated than heretofore; 7, this book on _American Socialisms_ has been prepared at Oneida and printed at Wallingford. FOOTNOTES: [C] We observe that the account of the Oneida Community given in the Supplement to Chambers' Encyclopædia, begins thus: "_Perfectionists_ or _Bible Communists_; popularly known as Free Lovers or preachers of Free Love." The whole article, covering several pages, is very careless in its geographical and other details, and not altogether reliable in its statements of the doctrines and morals of the Communists. As materials that get into Encyclopædias may be presumed to be crystallizing for final history, it is to be hoped that the Messrs. Chambers will at least get this article corrected by some intelligent American, for future editions. CHAPTER XLVII. REVIEW AND RESULTS. Looking back now over the entire course of this history, we discover a remarkable similarity in the symptoms that manifested themselves in the transitory Communities, and almost entire unanimity in the witnesses who testify as to the causes of their failure. GENERAL DEPRAVITY, all say, is the villain of the whole story. In the first place Macdonald himself, after "seeing stern reality," confesses that in his previous hopes of Socialism he "had imagined mankind better than they are." Then Owen, accounting for the failure at New Harmony, says, "he wanted honesty, and he got dishonesty; he wanted temperance, and instead he was continually troubled with the intemperate; he wanted cleanliness, and he found dirt," and so on. The Yellow Spring Community, though composed of "a very superior class," found in the short space of three months, that "self-love was a spirit that would not be exorcised. Individual happiness was the law of nature, and it could not be obliterated; and before a single year had passed, this law had scattered the members of that society which had come together so earnestly and under such favorable circumstances, back into the selfish world from which they came." The trustees of the Nashoba Community, in abandoning Frances Wright's original plan of common property, acknowledge their conviction that such a system can not succeed "without the members composing it are superior beings. That which produces in the world only common-place jealousies and every-day squabbles, is sufficient to destroy a Community." The spokesman of the Haverstraw Community at first attributes their failure to the "dishonesty of the managers;" but afterward settles down into the more general complaint that they lacked "men and women of skillful industry, sober and honest, with a knowledge of themselves and a disposition to command and be commanded," and intimates that "the sole occupation of the men and women they had, was parade and talk." The historian of the Coxsackie Community says "they had many persons engaged in talking and law-making, who did not work at any useful employment. The consequences were, that after struggling on for between one and two years, the experiment came to an end. There were few good men to steer things right." Warren found that the friction that spoiled his experiments was "the want of common honesty." Ballou complained that "the timber he got together was not suitable for building a Community. The men and women that joined him were very enthusiastic and commenced with great zeal; their devotion to the cause seemed to be sincere; but they did not know themselves." At the meetings that dissolved the Northampton Community, "some spoke of the want of that harmony and brotherly feeling, which were indispensable to success; others spoke of the unwillingness to make sacrifices on the part of some of the members; also of the lack of industry and the right appropriation of time." Collins lived in a quarrel with a rival during nearly the whole life of his Community, and finally gave up the experiment from "a conviction that the theory of Communism could not be carried out in practice; that the attempt was premature, the time had not yet arrived, and the necessary conditions did not yet exist." His experience led him to the conclusion that "there is floating upon the surface of society, a body of restless, disappointed, jealous, indolent spirits, disgusted with our present social system, not because it enchains the masses to poverty, ignorance, vice, and endless servitude; but because they can not render it subservient to their private ends. Experience shows that this class stands ready to mount every new movement that promises ease, abundance, and individual freedom; and that when such an enterprise refuses to interpret license for freedom, and insists that every member shall make their strength, skill and talent, subservient to the movement, then the cry of tyranny and oppression is raised against those who advocate such industry and self-denial; then the enterprise must become a scape-goat, to bear the fickleness, indolence, selfishness, and envy of this class." The testimony in regard to the Sylvania Association is, that "young men wasted the good things at the commencement of the experiment; and besides victuals, dry-goods supplied by the Association were unequally obtained. Idle and greedy people find their way into such attempts, and soon show forth their character by burdening others with too much labor, and, in times of scarcity, supplying themselves with more than their allowance of various necessaries, instead of taking less." The failure of the One Mentian Community is attributed to "ignorance and disagreements," and that of the Social Reform Unity to "lack of wisdom and general preparation." The Leraysville Phalanx went to pieces in a grumble about the management. Of the Clarkson Association a writer in the _Phalanx_ says that they were "ignorant of Fourier's principles, and without plan or purpose, save to fly from the ills they had already experienced in civilization. Thus they assembled together such elements of discord, as naturally in a short time led to their dissolution." The Sodus Bay Socialists quarreled about religion, and when they broke up, some decamped in the night, with as much of the common property as they could lay hands on. Whereupon Macdonald sententiously remarks--"The fact that mankind do not like to have their faults and failings made public, will probably account for the difficulty in obtaining particulars of such experiments." The Bloomfield Association went to wreck in a quarrel about land-titles. Of the Jefferson County Association, Macdonald says, "After a few months, disagreements became general. Their means were totally inadequate; they were too ignorant of the principles of Association; were too much crowded together, and had too many idlers among them. There was bad management on the part of the officers, and some were suspected of dishonesty." The Moorhouse Union appears to have been almost wholly a gathering of worthless adventurers. Mr. Moore, in his _Post Mortem_ on the Marlboro Association, very delicately observes that "the failure of the experiment may be traced to the fact that the minds of its originators were not homogeneous." Macdonald, after studying the Prairie Home Community, says, "From all I saw I judged that it was too loosely put together, and that the members had not entire confidence in each other." The malcontent who gives an account of the Trumbull Phalanx says: "Some came with the idea that they could live in idleness at the expense of the purchasers of the estate, and these ideas they practically carried out; while others came with good hearts for the cause. There were one or two designing persons, who came with no other intent than to push themselves into situations in which they could impose upon their fellow members; and this, to a certain extent, they succeeded in doing." And again: "I think most persons came there for a mere shift. Their poverty and their quarreling about what they called religion (for there were many notions as to which was the right way to heaven), were great drawbacks to success." There were rival leaders in the Ohio Phalanx, and their respective parties quarreled about constitutions till they got into a lawsuit which broke them up. The member who gave the account of this Association says: "The most important causes of failure were said to be the deficiency of wealth, wisdom and goodness." The Clermont Phalanx had jealousies among its women that led to a lawsuit; and a difficulty with one of its leading members about land-titles. The story of the Alphadelphia Phalanx is briefly told thus: "The disagreement with Mr. Tubbs about a mill-race at the commencement of the experiment, threw a damper on it, from which it never recovered. All lived in clover so long as a ton of sugar or any other such luxury lasted. The officers made bad bargains. Laborers became discouraged. In the winter some of the influential members went away temporarily, and thus left the real friends of the Association in the minority; and when they returned after two or three months absence, every thing was turned up-side-down. There was a manifest lack of good management and foresight. The old settlers accused the majority of this, and were themselves elected officers; but they managed no better, and finally broke up the concern." The Wisconsin Phalanx kept its quarrels below lawsuit point, but the leading member who gives account of it, says that the habit of the members was to "scold and work, and work and scold;" and that "they had among their number a few men of leading intellect who always doubted the success of the experiment, and hence determined to accumulate property individually by any and every means called fair in competitive society. These would occasionally gain some important positions in the society, and representing it in part at home and abroad, caused much trouble. By some they were accounted the principal cause of the final failure." Mr. Daniels, a gentleman who saw the whole progress of the Wisconsin Phalanx, says that "the cause of its breaking up was speculation, the love of money and the want of love for Association. Their property becoming valuable, they sold it for the purpose of making money out of it." The North American was evidently shattered by secessions, resulting partly from religious dissensions and partly from differences about business. Brook Farm alone is reported as harmonious to the end. It should be observed that the foregoing disclosures of disintegrating infirmities were generally made reluctantly, and are necessarily very imperfect. Large departments of dangerous passion are entirely ignored. For instance, in all the memoirs of the Owen and Fourier Associations, not a word is said on the "Woman Question!" Among all the disagreements and complaints, not a hint occurs of any jealousies and quarrels about love matters. In fact women are rarely mentioned; and the terrible passions connected with distinction of sex, which the Shakers, Rappites, Oneidians, and all the rest of the religious Communities have had so much trouble with, and have taken so much pains to provide for or against, are absolutely left out of sight. Owen, it is true, named marriage as one of the trinity of man's oppressors: and it is generally understood that Owenism and Fourierism both gave considerable latitude to affinities and divorces; but this makes it all the more strange that there was no trouble worth mentioning, in any of these Communities, about crossing love-claims. Can it be, we ask ourselves, that Owen had such conflicts with whiskey-tippling, but never a fight with the love-mania? that all through the Fourier experiments, men and women, young men and maidens, by scores and hundreds were tumbled together into unitary homes, and sometimes into log-cabins seventeen feet by twenty-five, and yet no sexual jostlings of any account disturbed the domestic circle? The only conclusion we can come to is, that some of the most important experiences of the transitory Communities have not been surrendered to history. Nevertheless the troubles that do come to the surface show, as we have said, that human depravity is the dread "Dweller of the Threshold," that lies in wait at every entrance to the mysteries of Socialism. * * * * * Shall we then turn back in despair, and give it up that Association on the large scale is impossible? This seems to have been the reaction of all the leading Fourierists. Greeley sums up the wisdom he gained from his socialistic experience in the following invective: "A serious obstacle to the success of any socialistic experiment must always be confronted. I allude to the kind of persons who are naturally attracted to it. Along with many noble and lofty souls, whose impulses are purely philanthropic, and who are willing to labor and suffer reproach for any cause that promises to benefit mankind, there throng scores of whom the world is quite worthy--the conceited, the crotchety, the selfish, the headstrong, the pugnacious, the unappreciated, the played-out, the idle, and the good-for-nothing generally; who, finding themselves utterly out of place and at a discount in the world as it is, rashly conclude that they are exactly fitted for the world as it ought to be. These may have failed again and again, and been protested at every bank to which they have been presented; yet they are sure to jump into any new movement as if they had been born expressly to superintend and direct it, though they are morally certain to ruin whatever they lay their hands on. Destitute of means, of practical ability, of prudence, tact and common sense, they have such a wealth of assurance and self-confidence, that they clutch the responsible positions which the capable and worthy modestly shrink from; so responsibilities that would tax the ablest, are mistakenly devolved on the blindest and least fit. Many an experiment is thus wrecked, when, engineered by its best members, it might have succeeded." Meeker gloomily concludes that "generally men are not prepared; Association is for the future." * * * * * And yet, to contradict these disheartening persuasions and forbid our settling into despair, we have a respectable series of successes that can not be ignored. Mr. Greeley recognizes them, though he hardly knows how to dispose of them. "The fact," he says, "stares us in the face that, while hundreds of banks and factories, and thousands of mercantile concerns managed by shrewd, strong men, have gone into bankruptcy and perished, Shaker Communities, established more than sixty years ago, upon a basis of little property and less worldly wisdom, are living and prosperous to-day. And their experience has been imitated by the German Communities at Economy, Zoar, the Society of Ebenezer, etc. Theory, however plausible, must respect the facts." Let us look again at these exceptional Associations that have not succumbed to the disorganizing power of general depravity. Jacobi's record of their duration and fortunes is worth recapitulating. Assuming that they are all still in existence, their stories may be epitomized as follows: Beizel's Community has lasted one hundred and fifty-six years; was at one time very rich; has money at interest yet; some of its grand old buildings are still standing. The Shaker Community, as a whole, is ninety-five years old; consists of eighteen large societies; many of them very wealthy. Rapp's Community is sixty-five years old, and very wealthy. The Zoar Community is fifty-three years old, and wealthy. The Snowberger Community is forty-nine years old and "well off." The Ebenezer Community is twenty-three years old; and said to be the largest and richest Community in the United States. The Janson Community is twenty-three years old and wealthy. The Oneida Community (frequently quoted as belonging to this class) is twenty-one years old, and prosperous. The one feature which distinguishes these Communities from the transitory sort, is their religion; which in every case is of the earnest kind which comes by recognized afflatus, and controls all external arrangements. It seems then to be a fair induction from the facts before us that earnest religion does in some way modify human depravity so as to make continuous Association possible, and insure to it great material success. Or if it is doubted whether it does essentially change human nature, it certainly improves in some way the _conditions_ of human nature in socialistic experiments. It is to be noted that Mr. Greeley and other experts in socialism claim that there _is_ a class of "noble and lofty souls" who are prepared for close Association; but their attempts have constantly been frustrated by the throng of crotchety and selfish interlopers that jump on to their movements. Now it may be that the tests of earnest religion are just what are needed to keep a discrimination between the "noble and lofty souls" and the scamps of whom the Socialists complain. On the whole it seems probable that earnest religion does favorably modify both human depravity and its conditions, preparing some for Association by making them better, and shutting off others that would defeat the attempts of the best. Earnest men of one religious faith are more likely to be respectful to organized authority and to one another, than men of no religion or men of many religions held in indifference and mutual counteraction. And this quality of respect, predisposing to peace and subordination, however base it may be in the estimation of "Individual Sovereigns," and however worthless it may be in ordinary circumstances, is certainly the indispensable element of success in close Association. The logic of our facts may be summed up thus: The non-religious party has tried Association under the lead of Owen, and failed; the semi-religious party has tried it under the lead of Fourier, and failed; the thoroughly religious party has not yet tried it; but sporadic experiments have been made by various religious sects, and so far as they have gone, they have indicated by their success, that earnest religion may be relied upon to carry Association through to the attainment of all its hopes. The world then must wait for this final trial; and the hope of the triumph of Association can not rationally be given up, till this trial has been made. The question for the future is, Will the Revivalists go forward into Socialism; or will the Socialists go forward into Revivalism? We do not expect any further advance, till one or the other of these things shall come to pass; and we do not expect overwhelming victory and peace till both shall come to pass. The best outlook for Socialism is in the direction of the local churches. These are scattered every where, and under a powerful afflatus might easily be converted into Communities. In that case Communism would have the advantage of previous religion, previous acquaintance, and previous rudimental organizations, all assisting in the tremendous transition from the old world of selfishness, to the new world of common interest. We believe that a church that is capable of a genuine revival, could modulate into daily meetings, criticism, and all the self-denials of Communism, far more easily than any gathering by general proclamation for the sole purpose of founding a Community. If the churches can not be put into this work, we do not see how Socialism on a large scale is going to be propagated. Exceptional Associations may be formed here and there by careful selection and special good fortune; but how general society is to be resolved into Communities, without some such transformation of existing organizations, we do not pretend to foresee. Our hope is that churches of all denominations will by and by be quickened by the Pentecostal Spirit, and begin to grow and change, and finally, by a process as natural as the transformation of the chrysalis, burst forth into Communism. CHAPTER XLVIII. DEDUCTIVE AND INDUCTIVE SOCIALISMS. It is well for a theory to be subjected to the test of adverse criticism. Particularly in matters of contemporaneous history the public are interested to hear all sides. We have presented in this book our estimate of the French and English schools of Socialism; but as the reader may deem a Communist's judgment of the Phalansterian school necessarily defective, we are happy to insert here a communication from Mr. Brisbane himself, presenting a partizan's defence of Fourier. It was received and printed in the _Circular_, just as the last chapters of our history of Fourierism were preparing, "FOURIER AND THE ATTEMPTS TO REALIZE HIS THEORY. "_To the Editor of the Circular_: "Will you allow me space in your journal to say that no practical trial, and no approach to one, has as yet been made of Fourier's theory of Social Organization. A trial of a theory supposes that the practical test is made in conformity with its principles; otherwise there is no trial. Let generous minds who are working for the social redemption of their race, be just to those who have labored conscientiously for this great end. Let them be just to Fourier, who, in silence during a long life strove to solve the great problem of the organization of society on a scientific basis, neglecting every thing else--the pursuit of fortune, the avenue to which was more than once open to him--and position and reputation in society. "Fourier says: There are certain _Laws of Organisation_ in nature, which are the source of order and harmony in creation. These laws human reason must discover and apply in the organization of society, if a true social order is to be established on the earth. The moral forces in man, called sentiments, faculties, passions, etc., are framed or fashioned, and their action determined, in accordance with these laws. They tend naturally to act in conformity with them, and would do so, if not thwarted. If the Social Organization, which is the external medium in which these forces operate, is based on those laws, it will, it is evident, be adapted to the forces--to the nature of man. This will secure their true, natural and harmonious development, and with it the solution of the fundamental problem of social order and harmony. In organizing society on its true basis, begin, says Fourier, with Industry, which is the primary and material branch of the Social Organization. By the natural organization of Industry the productive labors of mankind will be _dignified and rendered attractive_; wealth will be increased ten-fold, so that abundance will be secured to all, and with abundance, the means of education and refinement, and of social equality and unity. When refinement and intelligence are rendered general, the superstructure of society will be built under the favorable circumstances which such a work requires. "Briefly stated, such is Fourier's view. In his works he describes in detail the plan of Industrial Organization. He explains the laws of organization in Nature (as he understands them), on which Industry is to be based. He takes special pains to give minute directions in relation to the subject, and warns those who may undertake the work of organization, to avoid mistakes--some of which he points out--that may easily be made, and would vitiate the undertaking. "The little Associations started in this country, of which you have given an account, had for their object the realization of Fourier's industrial system. Now, instead of avoiding the mistakes which he warned his followers against making, not one of those Associations realized _a single one of the conditions_ which he laid down. Not one of them had the tenth, nor the twentieth part of the means and resources--pecuniary and scientific--necessary to carry out the organization he proposed. In a word, no trial, and no approach to a trial of Fourier's theory has been made. I do not say that his theory is true, or would succeed, if fairly tried. I simply affirm that _no trial_ of it has been made; so that it is unjust to speak of it, as if it had been tested. With ample, that is, vast resources, and some years to prepare the domain, erect buildings, and make all necessary arrangements, so as to thoroughly prepare the field of operations before the members or operators entered, then with men of organizing capacity to test fairly the principles which he has laid down, a fair trial could be made. "I repeat, let us be just to those who have labored patiently and conscientiously for the social elevation of humanity. Fourier's was a great soul. To a powerful intellect he added nobility and goodness of heart. Clear, exact, strict and scientific in thought, he was at the same time kind and philanthropic in feeling. Impelled by noble motives, he devoted his intellect to the most important of works, to the discovery of the natural principles of social organization. Such a man deserves to be treated with profound respect. Infantile attempts to realize his ideas should not, in their failure, be charged upon him, covering him with the ridicule or folly attached to them. Let him stand on his Theory. That is his intellectual pedestal. Let those who undertake to judge him, study his Theory. When they overthrow that they will overthrow him. "I will close by stating my estimate of Fourier, which is the result of some reflection. "Social Science is a creation of the nineteenth century. It has been developed in a regular form in the present century, as was Astronomy, for example, in the sixteenth. Men have arisen almost simultaneously in different countries, who have conceived the possibility of such a science, and set themselves to work at it. Fourier took the lead. He began in 1798, and published his first work in 1806. Krause, in Germany, began to write in 1808. St. Simon, in France, in 1811. Owen, in England, at a later period still. Comte, a disciple of St Simon, began in 1824, I think. Fourier and Comte were the only minds that undertook to base Social Science on, and to deduce it from, universal laws, having their source in the infallible wisdom of the universe. Comte, after laying a broad foundation with the aid of all the known sciences; after seeking to determine the theory of each special science, and to construct a _Science of the Sciences_ by which to guide himself, abandons his scientific construction (reared in his first work--"Positive Philosophy"), when he comes to elaborate his plan of practical organization. He deduces his plan of the Social Order of the future from the historical past, and especially from the Middle Age _regime_, guided in so doing by his own personal feelings and views. His Social system is consequently a compound of historical deduction and personal sentiment. It is, I think, without practical value. His scientific demonstration of the possibility and the necessity of Social Science is of _great value_, and will secure to him unbounded respect in the future. Fourier, at the outset of his labors, conceived the necessity of discovering the laws of order and harmony in the universe--Nature's plan and theory of organization--and of deducing from them _the Science of Social Organization_. Leaving aside all secondary considerations, he set about this great work. The discovery of the laws of order and organization in creation was his great end. The deduction of a Social Order from them was an accessory work. He claims to have succeeded; and claims for his plan of social organization no value outside of its conformity to Nature's laws. "I give no theory of my own," he says in a hundred places; "I DEDUCE. If I have deduced erroneously, let others establish the true deduction." "Social Science is a vast and complex science; it can not be discovered and constituted by the aid of empirical observation and reasoning: the _Inductive method_ can not do its work here. The laws of order and organization in nature must be discovered, and from them the science must be deduced. In astronomy, in order to solve its higher and more abstruse problems, it is necessary to deduce from one of the great laws of Nature; namely, that of gravitation. It is more necessary still in the case of the involved problems of Social Science. "Now the merit of Fourier consists in having seen clearly this great truth; in having sought carefully to discover Nature's laws of organization; and in having deduced from them with the greatest patience and fidelity the organization of the Social System which he has elaborated. His organization of Industry and of Education are master-pieces of deductive thought. "If Fourier has failed, if he has not discovered the laws of natural organization, or has not deduced rightly from them, he has opened the way and pointed out the true path; he has shown _what must be done_, and furnished invaluable examples of the mode in which deduction must take place in Social organization. He has shown how the human mind is to create a Social Science, and effect the Social Reconstruction to which this science is to lead. If he went astray, and could not follow the difficult path he indicated, he has at least clearly described the ways and modes of proceeding. Others can now easily follow in his footsteps. "If we would compare the pioneers in Social Science to those in astronomy, I would say that Fourier is the Kepler of the new science. Possessing, like Kepler, a vast and bold genius, he has, by far-reaching intuition and close analytic thought, discovered some of the fundamental principles of Social Science, enough to place it on a scientific foundation, and to constitute it regularly, as did Kepler in astronomy. Auguste Comte appears to me to be the Tycho Brahe of Social Science: learned and patient, but not original, not a discoverer of new laws and principles. Other great minds will be required to complete the science. It will have its Galileo, its Newton, its Laplace, and even still more all-sided minds; for the science is far more complex and abstruse than that of astronomy; it is the crowning intellectual evolution, which human genius is to effect in its scientific career. Very truly yours, A. BRISBANE." This endeavor by a leading Phalansterian to set us right in regard to the merits of Fourier, is generous to him, and doubtless well meant for us, but not altogether necessary. The foregoing history bears witness that we have not held Fourier responsible for the American experiments made in his name, and have not treated him with ridicule or disrespect on account of their failures. In our comments on the Sylvania Association we said: "It is evident enough that this was not Fourierism. Indeed the Sylvanian who wrote the account of his Phalanx, frankly admits for himself and doubtless for his associates, that their doings had in them no semblance of Fourierism. But then the same may be said, without much modification, of all the experiments of the Fourier epoch. Fourier himself, would have utterly disowned every one of them. *** Here then arises a distinction between Fourierism as a theory propounded by Fourier, and Fourierism as a practical movement administered in this country by Brisbane.*** The value of Fourier's ideas is not determined, nor the hope of good from them foreclosed, merely by the disasters of these local experiments. And, to deal fairly all around, it must further be said, that it is not right to judge Brisbane by such experiments as that of the Sylvania Association. Let it be remembered that, with all his enthusiasm, he gave warning from time to time, in his publications, of the deficiencies and possible failures of these hybrid ventures; and was cautious enough to keep himself and his money out of them." We then proposed a distribution of criticism as follows: "1. Fourier, though not responsible for Brisbane's administration, _was_ responsible for tantalizing the world with a magnificent theory, without providing the means of translating it into practice. 2. Brisbane, though not altogether responsible for the inadequate attempts of the poor Sylvanians and the rest of the rabble volunteers, must be blamed for spending all his energy in drumming and recruiting; while, to insure success, he should have given at least half his time to drilling the soldiers and leading them in actual battle. 3. The rank and file as they were strictly volunteers, should have taken better care of themselves, and not been so ready to follow and even rush ahead of leaders, who were thus manifestly devoting themselves to theorizing and propagandism, without experience." These citations show, and a full reading of the text at page 247 and afterward, will show still more clearly, that we have not been inconsiderate in our treatment of the socialistic leaders. Mr. Brisbane concludes his letter with an analysis of Fourier's claims as a Philosopher. He does not affirm that Fourier's theory is right, but only that he has pointed out the right way to discover a right theory. This, if true, is certainly a valuable service. Fourier's way, according to Mr. Brisbane, was to work by deduction, instead of induction. He first discovered certain fundamental laws of the universe; how he discovered them we are not told; but probably by intuitive assumption, as nothing is said of induction or proof in connection with them; then from these laws he deduced his social theory, without recurrence to observation or experiment. This, according to Brisbane and Fourier, is the way that all future discoverers in Social Science must pursue. Is this the right way? The leaders of modern science say that sound theories in Astronomy and in every thing else are discovered by induction, and that deduction follows after, to apply and extend the principles established by induction. Let us hear one of them: [From the Introduction to Youmans' New Chemistry.] "The master minds of our race, by a course of toilsome research through thousands of years, gradually established the principles of mechanical force and motion. Facts were raised into generalities, and these into still higher generalizations, until at length the genius of NEWTON seized the great principle of attraction, which controls all bodies on the earth and in the heavens. He explained the mechanism and motions of the universe by the grandest induction of the human mind. "The mighty principle thus established, now became the first step of the deductive method. Leverrier, in the solitude of his study, reasoning downward from the universal law through planetary perturbation, proclaimed the existence, place and dimensions of a new and hitherto unknown planet in our solar system. He then called upon the astronomer to verify his deduction by the telescope. The observation was immediately made, the planet was discovered, and the immortal prediction of science was literally fulfilled. Thus induction discovers principles, while deduction applies them. "It is not by skillful conjecture that knowledge grows, or it would have ripened thousands of years ago. It was not till men had learned to submit their cherished speculations to the merciless and consuming ordeal of verification, that the great truths of nature began to be revealed. Kepler tells us that he made and rejected nineteen hypotheses of the motion of Mars before he established the true doctrine that it moves in an ellipse. "The ancient philosophers, disdaining nature, retired into the ideal world of pure meditation, and holding that the mind is the measure of the universe, they believed they could reason out all truths from the depths of the soul. They would not experiment: consequently they lacked the first conditions of science, observation, experiment and induction. Their mistake was perhaps natural, but it was an error that paralyzed the world. The first step of progress was impossible." If Youmans points the right way, Fourier, instead of being the Kepler of Social Science, was evidently one of the "ancient philosophers." We frankly avow that we are at issue with Mr. Brisbane on the main point that he makes for his master. We do not believe that cogitation without experiment is the right way to a true social theory. With us induction is first; deduction second; and verification by facts or the logic of events, always and everywhere the supreme check on both. For the sake of this principle we have been studying and bringing to light the lessons of American Socialisms. If Fourier and Brisbane are on the right track, we are on the wrong. Let science judge between us. But Mr. Brisbane thinks that social science is exceptional in its nature, too "vast and complex" to get help from observation and experiment. All science is vast and complex, reaching out into the unfathomable; but social science seems to us exceptional, if at all, as the field that lies nearest home and most open to observation and experiment. It is not like astronomy, looking away into the inaccessible regions of the universe, but like navigation or war, commanding us at our peril to study it in the immediate presence of its facts. Mr. Brisbane insists that Fourier's theory has not had a practical trial: and we have said the same thing before him. Yet we must now say that in another sense it has had its trial. It was brought before the world with all the advantages that the most brilliant school of modern genius could give it; and it did not win the confidence of scientific men or of capitalists, because they saw, what Mr. Brisbane now confesses for it, that it came from the closet, and not from the world of facts. This nineteenth century, which has had thrift and faith enough to lay the Atlantic cable, would have accepted and realized Fourierism, if it had been a genuine product of induction. So that the reason why it never reached the stage of practical trial was, that it failed on the previous question of its scientific legitimacy. Mr. Brisbane himself, as a capitalist, never had confidence enough in it to risk his fortune on it. And poor as the actual experiments were, _human nature_ had a trial in them, which convinced all rational observers, that if the numbers and means had been as great as Fourier required, the failures would have been swifter and worse. We insist that God's appointed way for man to seek the truth in all departments, and above all in Social Science, which is really the science of righteousness, is to combine and alternate thinking with experiment and practice, and constantly submit all theories, whether obtained by scientific investigation or by intuition and inspiration, to the consuming ordeal of practical verification. This is the law established by all the experience of modern science, and the law that every loyal disciple of inspiration will affirm and submit to. And according to this law, the Shakers and Rappites, whom Mr. Brisbane does not condescend to mention, are really the pioneers of modern Socialism, whose experiments deserve a great deal more study than all the speculations of the French schools. By way of offset to Mr. Brisbane's account of the development of sociology in the nineteenth century, we here repeat our historical theory. The great facts of modern Socialism are these: From 1776, the era of our national Revolution, the Shakers have been established in this country; first at two places in New York; then at four places in Massachusetts; at two in New Hampshire; two in Maine; one in Connecticut; and finally at two in Kentucky, and two in Ohio. In all these places prosperous religious Communism has been modestly and yet loudly preaching to the nation and to the world. New England and New York and the Great West have had actual Phalanxes before their eyes for nearly a century. And in all this time what has been acted on our American stage, has had England, France and Germany for its audience. The example of the Shakers has demonstrated, not merely that successful Communism is subjectively possible, but that this nation is free enough to let it grow. Who can doubt that this demonstration was known and watched in Germany from the beginning; and that it helped the successive experiments and emigrations of the Rappites, the Zoarites and the Ebenezers? These experiments, we have seen, were echoes of Shakerism, growing fainter and fainter, as the time-distance increased. Then the Shaker movement with its echoes was sounding also in England, when Robert Owen undertook to convert the world to Communism, and it is evident enough that he was really a far-off follower of the Rappites. France also had heard of Shakerism, before St. Simon or Fourier began to meditate and write Socialism. These men were nearly contemporaneous with Owen, and all three evidently obeyed a common impulse. That impulse was the sequel and certainly in part the effect of Shakerism. Thus it is no more than bare justice to say, that we are indebted to the Shakers more than to any or all other social architects of modern times. Their success has been the 'specie basis' that has upheld all the paper theories, and counteracted the failures, of the French and English schools. It is very doubtful whether Owenism or Fourierism would have ever existed, or if they had, whether they would have ever moved the practical American nation, if the facts of Shakerism had not existed before them and gone along with them. But to do complete justice we must go a step further. While we say that the Rappites, the Zoarites, the Ebenezers, the Owenites, and even the Fourierists are all echoes of the Shakers, we must also say that the Shakers are the far-off echoes of the PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. What then has been Fourier's function? Surely his vast labors and their results have not been useless. His main achievement has been destruction. He was a merciless critic and scolder of the old civilization. His magnificent imaginations of good things to come have also served the purpose, in the general development of sociology, of what rhetoricians call _excitation_. But his theory of positive construction is, in our opinion, as worthless as the theories of St. Simon and Compte. And so many socialist thinkers have been fuddled by it, that it is at this moment the greatest obstruction to the healthy progress of Social Science. Practically it says to the world--"The experiments of the Shakers and other religious Communities, though successful, are unscientific and worthless; the experiments of the Fourierists that failed so miserably, were illegitimate and prove nothing; inductions from these or any other facts are useless; the only thing that can be done to realize true Association, is to put together eighteen hundred human beings on a domain three miles square, with a palace and outfit to match. Then you will see the equilibrium of the passions and spontaneous order and industry, insuring infinite success." As these conditions are well known to be impossible, because nobody believes in the promised equilibrium and success, the upshot of this teaching is despair. But the nineteenth century is not sitting at the feet of despair; and it will clear Fourierism out of its way. THE INDUCTIVE SCHOOL OF SOCIALISM, instead of thus shutting the gates of mercy on mankind, says to all: The enormous economies and advantages of combination, which you see in ten thousand joint-stock companies around you, and in the wealth of the Shakers and other successful Associations, and even the blessings of magnificent and permanent HOMES, which you do _not_ see in those combinations, are prizes offered to AGREEMENT. They require no special number. If two or three of you shall agree, you can take those prizes; for by agreement and consequent success, two or three will soon become many. They require no special amount of capital. If you are poor, by combination you can become rich. Agreement can make its own fortune, and need not wait to be endowed. The blessing of heaven is upon it, and it can work its way from the lowest poverty to all the wealth that Fourier taught his disciples to beg from capitalists. Thus demanding equilibrium of the passions and harmony at the outset, instead of looking for them as the miraculous result of getting together vast assemblages, we throw to the winds the limitations and impossible conditions of Fourierism. And the harmony we ask for as condition precedent, is not chimerical, but already exists. All the facts we have, indicate that it comes by religion; and the idea is evidently growing in the public mind that religion is the _only_ bond of agreement sufficient for family Association. If any dislike this condition, we say: Seek agreement in some other way, till all doubt on this point shall be removed by abundant experiment. The lists are open. We promise nothing to non-religious attempts; but we promise all things to agreement, let it come as it may. If Paganism or infidelity or nothingarianism can produce the required agreement, they will win the prize. But on the other hand if it shall turn out in this great Olympic of the nineteenth century, that Christianity alone has the harmonizing power necessary to successful Association, then Christianity will at last get its crown. INDEX. Allen, John, 179, 212, 291, 536. Alphadelphia Phalanx, 388. Andrews, Stephen Pearl, 94, 212, 566. Association, essential requisites of, 57; its objects defined, 292. Baker, Rapp's successor, 135. Ballou, Adin, his sketch of Owen, 88; founder of Hopedale, 119; book on Socialism, 127; Vice President at Boston Convention, 514; complains of his timber, 647. Beecher, Dr., revivalist, 103. Beizel, Conrad, founder of the Ephrata Community, 133. Belding, Dr. L.C., founder of Leraysville Phalanx, 263. Bimeler, Joseph, founder of the Zoar Community, 135. Bloomfield Association, 296. Blue Springs Community, 73. Boyle, James, 277. Brisbane, Albert, introduces Fourierism, 14, 23, 161; publications, 113, 200, 450, 560; edits column in _Tribune_, 201, 230; specimen exposition, 202; establishes the monthly _Phalanx_, 206; converts Brook Farm, 209; lectures, 269; represents American Association in Europe, 216; toasts Greeley, 226; contrasted with Fourier, 249; relation to Ohio Phalanx, 356; letter to a Cincinnati Convention, 366; selects site of North American Phalanx, 452; inspires A.J. Davis, 566; responsibility, 248, 250, 665; his letter on Fourierism, 665. Brocton Community, 577; history and description of, by Oliver Dyer, 578; members of, 580; religious belief, 580; Communism, 581; Internal Respiration, 581; doctrine of Love and Marriage, 583; Sense of Chastity, 583; domestic affairs, 585; "Will it Succeed?" 586; Swedenborgianism, its religion, 589; views of Bible, 593; land-mania, 594. Brook Farm, suggested by Dr. Channing, 104; Emerson's reminiscences of, 104; its Transcendental origin, 108; its afflatus, 109; first notice of in the _Dial_, 109; original constitution, 113; conversion to Fourierism, 512; new constitution, 522; incorporation as a Phalanx, 527; propagating Fourierism, 529; under the lead of W.H. Channing, 530; propagating Swedenborgianism, 537; under the lead of John S. Dwight and Charles A. Dana, 546; its Phalanstery destroyed by fire, 551; dissolution, 559; its end virtually the end of Fourierism, 563. Brooke, Dr. A., 310, 314. Brooke, Edward, 310. Buchanan, Dr., 84. Bureau Co. Phalanx, 409. Bush, Prof., 539. Campbell, Dr. Alexander, debates with Owen, 60, 86. Channings, their connection with Socialism, 103, 516. Charming, Dr., suggests Brook Farm, 104. Channing, Wm. H., publishes the _Present_, 118; at Brook Farm, 106; speeches, 215, 225, 533; address at N.A. Phalanx, 468; letter to Cincinnati Convention, 366; expounds Fourierism in Boston, 513; opinion of Fourier, 514; succeeds Brisbane, 530; leads Brook Farm in its conversion to Fourierism, 516; religion of, 228, 562; subscribes to the Raritan Bay Union, 488; extols Swedenborg, 544. Chase, Warren, founder of Wisconsin Phalanx, 411; letters from, 414, 416, 430; on associative success, 432. Clarkson Phalanx, 278. Clermont Phalanx, 366. Columbian Phalanx, 404. Collins, John A., founder of the Skaneateles Community, 162; his report of the Sodus Bay Phalanx, 288. Confederation of Associations, 272. Co-operative Society, 73. Co-operation not Socialism, 564. Coxsackie Community, 77. Curtis, Geo. Wm., at Brook Farm, 106; writer for the _Harbinger_, 212; what he says of Brook Farm's lack of history, 108. Dana, Chas. A., agent of Am. Un. of Associationists, 535; mission of, 533; address by, 222; on Swedenborg, 547; on Brocton Community, 586. Davis, A.J., his Harmonial Brotherhood, 11; rival of Swedenborg, 94, 539; inspired by Brisbane and Bush, 566. Deductive and Inductive Socialisms, 658. _Dial_, The, history of, 105; extracts from, 109, 113, 512, 513, 517. Doherty, Hugh, writer for the _Harbinger_, 212; Swedenborgian Fourierite, 542. Draper, E.D., extinguishes Hopedale, 132. Dwight, John S., writer for the _Harbinger_, 212; on Swedenborg, 546. Ebenezer Community, 136. Edger, Henry, 94. Edwards, Jonathan, father of revivals, 29. Emerson, R.W., his reminiscences of Brook Farm, 104; attitude toward Brook Farm, 108; lecture on Swedenborg, 543; prevails over W.H. Channing, 562. Ephrata, 133. Evans, Elder, 566. Finney, C.G., revivalist, 25. Flower, Richard, sells Harmony to Owen, 33. Forrestville Community, 74. Fourier, Charles, theoretical, 185; had before him the example of the Shakers, 192; birthday celebration, 226; would disown the Phalanxes, 247; contrasted with Brisbane, 248; coupled with Swedenborg, 545; criticism of, 249, 266, 665, 670. Fourierism, introduced by Brisbane and Greeley, 14, 23; preparation for, 102; compared with Owenism, 193, 199; account keeping, 276; its dreams not confirmed by experience, 293; based on a township, 510; must be made alive by Christ, 518; co-incident with Swedenborgianism 541, 546; gave its strength to Spiritualism, 566, 613. Franks, J.J., 92. Franklin Community, 73. Fuller, Margaret, 105, 106; edits the _Dial_, 109. Fundamentals of Socialism, 193. Garden Grove Community, 409. Ginal, Rev. George, 252. Godwin, Parke, expositor of Fourierism, 181; social architects, 181; address by, 217, 226; couples Fourier and Swedenborg, 541. Goose Pond Community, 259. Grant, E.P., letter from, 214; founder and regent of Ohio Phalanx, 354, 356, 363. Gray, John, at N.A. Phalanx, 478, 484. Greeley, Horace, introduces Fourierism, 14, 201; acknowledges the success of the religious Communities, 138; treasurer of Sylvania Association, 208, 233; toasted by Brisbane, 226; his position, 229; pledges his property to the cause, 232; relation to Ohio Phalanx, 356, 358; letter to Cincinnati Convention, 366; address at N.A. Phalanx, 468; offers a loan to N.A. Phalanx, 501; controversy with Raymond, 562; pronounces the Oneida Community a trade-success, 510; summary of his socialistic experience, 653, 655. Greig, John, 271; historian of Clarkson Phalanx, 278. Harmonists, 32. Harris, T.L., leader at Mountain Cove Community, 573; Scott's estimate of, 575; career, 578; Universalist, 593; Spiritualist, 593; Swedenborgian, 577; doctrine of respiration, 590; leader at Brocton Community, 577. Haverstraw Community, 74. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, jilts Brook Farm, 107. Hempel, J.C., book on Fourier and Swedenborg, 545. Hopedale, Ballou's exposition of, 120, 127; causes of failure. Individual Sovereignty, a reaction from Owenism, 42. Integral Phalanx, 377. Iowa Pioneer Phalanx, 409. Jacobi's Synopsis, 133. James, Henry, writer for the _Harbinger_, 212; Swedenborgian, 546. Janson, Erick, founder of Bishop Hill Colony, 137. Jansonists, 137. Jefferson Co. Phalanx, 299. Johnson, Q.A., 166; opposes Collins, 168. Joint-Stockism, 195; basis of, 197. Kendal Community, 78. La Grange Phalanx, 397. Lane, Charles, on marriage, 519. Lazarus, M.E., writes for the _Harbinger_, 212; at N.A. Phalanx, 481. Lee, Ann, 134, 598, 599; communications from, 603, 604, 606, 610. Leet, H.N., his letters about the Mountain Cove Community, 568, 569. Leland, T.C., his letter on the volcanic region, 268; lectures, 271. Leraysville Phalanx, 259. Literature of Fourierism, 200. Longley, Alcander, his perseverance, 91; criticises Brisbane, 496. Loofbourrow, Wade, president of Clermont Phalanx, 366, 368. Macdonald, A.J., account of him and his collections 1-9; visits New Harmony, 31, 84; Prairie Home, 317; N.A. Phalanx, 473, 481, 485; meets Owen, 88, 90. Marlboro Association, 309. McKean Co. Association, 252. Meacham, Joseph, Shaker Elder, 152. Meeker, N.C., his letters from Trumbull Phalanx, 329, 337, 344; _post mortem_ on the N.A. Phalanx, 499. Metz, Christian, founder of the Ebenezers, 136. Miller's end of the world, 161. Mixville Association, 299. Modern Times, 99. Moorhouse Union, 304. Mormonism, origin of, 267; afflatus, 152. Mountain Cove Community, 568. Nashoba, 66. National experience, theory of, 21. Nettleton, revivalist, 25. New Harmony, 30. New Lanark, factories owned by Owen, 60. Nichols, Dr. T.L., inaugurates Free Love, 93; connects Owenism with Spiritualism, 566. North American Phalanx, 449; Sears's history of first nine years, 450; life at, 468; Ripley's visit to, 469; Neidharts' visit, 471; Macdonald's first visit, 473; second visit, 481; third visit, 485; Raritan Bay secession, 487; religious controversy, 489; burning of the mill, 495; end, 499; Meeker's _post mortem_, 499; Hamilton's visit to the remains, 508; Northampton Association, 154. Noyes, John H., founder of Oneida Community, 614 Ohio Phalanx, 354. Oneida Community, 614; religious theory, 617; social theory, 623; material results 641. One Mentian Community, 252. Ontario Union, 298. Orvis, John, 179, 212, 291, 536. Owen, Robert, his American movement, 13; extent of his labors, 22; founds New Harmony, 34; declaration of mental independence, 39; debate with Alexander Campbell, 60; a spiritualist, 57, 565; founder of Yellow Springs Community, 59; trustee of Nashoba, 69; father of American Socialism, 81, 91; success at New Lanark, 81; Texas Scheme, 87; in Washington, 87; before Albany State Convention, 89; family, 84; his scheme compared with Fourier's, 194. Owen, Robert Dale, successor to Robert Owen, 85; compares New Lanark with New Harmony, 48; trustee of Nashoba, 69; edits the _Free Enquirer_, 72; publishes "Moral Physiology," 85; career, 85; a patron of Spiritualism, 84, 86, 565. Peabody, Elizabeth P., essays in the _Dial_, 109, 113; article on Fourierism, 512, 517. Peace Union Settlement, 251. Personnel of Fourierism, 211. _Phalanx_, the, 102, 210; writers for, 212; editors, 217; succeeds the _Dial_ and _Present_, 517. Plato, as practical as Fourier, 187 Prairie Home Community, 316. Pratt, Minot, active at Brook Farm, 515. Pratt, John, his observations on Owen, 50. _Present_, the, 102, 209, 516. Rapp, George, founder of Harmony, 32. Rappites, 32, 135. Raymond, H.J., associated with Greeley, 229; controversy with Greeley, 562. Revivalism compared with Socialism, 26; an American production, 28. Ripley, George, the soul of Brook Farm, 108; at Fourier festival, 226; his description of the N.A. Phalanx, 469; active in transforming Brook Farm, 515; defends Swedenborg, 549. Roe, Daniel, Swedenborgian minister, 61; fascinated by Owen, 62. Sargant, Owen's biographer, 50, 58, 87. Schetterly, H.R., founder of Alphadelphia Phalanx, 388, 391. Sears, Charles, 477; his history of the N.A. Phalanx, 450. Shakers, their principles, 139, 141; afflatus, 151; societies, 152; close their doors, 596; precursors of Modern Spiritualism, 597, 612; their conditions of receiving members, 597; sights of spiritual things, 599; daily routine, 600; union meetings, 601; dancing, 603; whirling, 604; taking in Indian spirits, 604; Shaker hell, 606; spiritual presents, 606; spiritual music and bathing, 608; funeral 609; purification, 610; Shaker revival in Hades, 611. Skaneateles Community, 161. Smolnikar, A.B., 251. Snowbergers, 136. Social Architects, 181. Social Reform Unity, 256. Sodus Bay Phalanx, 286. Spiritualism, derived from Swedenborgianism, 538; and from various Socialisms, 565, 567, 613. Spring Farm Association, 407. Stillman, E.A., 275, 277, 296. St. Simon, 182, 192. Swedenborg, his doctrine of internal respiration, 590. Swedenborgianism, in the Owen movement, 59, 61; in the Fourier movement, 260, 262; at Brook Farm, 538; the complement of Fourierism, 539, 542; not favorable to Communism, 589, 592. Sylvania Association, 233. Time Store, 95. Transcendentalists, 105, 118. _Tribune_, New York, Fourieristic phase of, 229. Trumbull Phalanx, 328. Tubbs, his quarrel, 394. Utopia, 98. Van Amringe, H.H., his letter 214; at Trumbull Phalanx, 336, 345; at Ohio Phalanx, 358, 364; works for Wisconsin Phalanx, 437, 438. Warren, Josiah, 42, 94; on New Harmony, 49; founder of Modern Times, 93, 97, 556; time store, 95; at Clermont Phalanx, 374. Washtenaw Phalanx, 409. Watson, A.M., 275. Wattles, John O., at Prairie Home, 316; at Clermont Phalanx, 376. White, John, his letter, 214. Williams, John S., founder of Integral Phalanx, 377. Williams, Rev. Aaron, D.D., historian of Rappites, 33, 35. Wisconsin Phalanx, 411; first fiscal statement 418; second fiscal statement, 422; third fiscal statement, 434; fourth fiscal statement, 439; history by a member 440. Wright, Frances, helpmate of the Owens, 66; visits Rappites and Shakers, 67; founds Nashoba, 68; assists on _New Harmony Gazette_ and _Free Enquirer_, 71, 72; lectures, 72. Yellow Springs Community, 59. Zoarites, 135. * * * * * +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Typographical errors corrected in text: | | | | Page 26: successfuly replaced with successfully | | Page 27: famlies replaced with families | | Page 44: accomodated replaced with accommodated | | Page 53: employes replaced with employees | | Page 59: probbly replaced with probably | | Page 69: aboved-named replaced with above-named | | Page 84: enthuiasm replaced with enthusiasm | | Page 88: excusionist replaced with exclusionist | | Page 91: 'the sweets af Communism' replaced with | | 'the sweets of Communism' | | Page 101: intrests replaced with interests | | Page 118: supfiercial replaced with superficial | | Page 138: Communites replaced with Communities | | Page 173: embarassment replaced with embarrassment | | Page 191: divison replaced with division | | Page 201: peristence replaced with persistence | | Page 203: constucting replaced with constructing | | Page 221: occured replaced with occurred | | Page 235: devolopment replaced with development | | Page 253: Pensylvania replaced with Pennsylvania | | Page 274: begining replaced with beginning | | Page 283: boldy replaced with boldly | | Page 305: 'Some of the members were intelligent and moral | | people; put the majority were very inferior.' | | replaced with 'Some of the members were | | intelligent and moral people; but the majority | | were very inferior.' | | Page 326: do'nt replaced with don't | | Page 362: Madconald replaced with Macdonald | | Page 364: asssignment replaced with assignment | | Page 366: Februrary replaced with February | | Page 418: 'have alway failed' replaced with | | 'have always failed' | | Page 460: determned replaced with determined | | Page 531: affiiliated replaced with affiliated | | Page 541: proceded replaced with proceeded | | Page 554: probbly replaced with probably | | Page 564: 'We must must not, however' replaced with | | 'We must not, however,' | | Page 569: 'he will 'prent 'em' or or not' replaced with | | 'he will 'prent 'em' or not' | | Page 575: unbiassed replaced with unbiased | | Page 604: 'and not a a word was spoken' replaced with | | 'and not a word was spoken' | | Page 605: 'such as would require a Dickens a describe' | | replaced with | | 'such as would require a Dickens to describe' | | Page 627: sytem replaced with system | | Page 636: divison replaced with division | | Page 639: consequnces replaced with consequences | | Page 645: per annnm. replaced with per annum. | | | | Note that 'neat stock' (found on page 329) is a New | | England reference to dairy cattle that was commonly used | | in the 19th century. | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------+ 
41405	----	[Transcriber's notes: Inconsistent hyphenation and use of umlauts retained. Equations are surrounded by _ indicating that the variables are all italicised. If there are non-italicised alphabetic characters in the equation the variables are surrounded by _ separately. [sqrt] has been used to represent square root (radical) sign. A full list of errors that have been changed can be found at the end.] RARE MASTERPIECES OF PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE EDITED BY DR. W. STARK THE ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL PUBLISHED ON THE LOUIS STERN MEMORIAL FUND THE ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL by ROSA LUXEMBURG _translated from the German by AGNES SCHWARZSCHILD (doctor iuris)_ _With an Introduction by JOAN ROBINSON_ NEW HAVEN YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 1951 THIS TRANSLATION FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE UNITED STATES BY YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW HAVEN CONNECTICUT DESIGNED BY SEÁN JENNETT AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY BUTLER AND TANNER LTD LONDON AND FROME CONTENTS TRANSLATOR'S NOTE _page_ 7 A NOTE ON ROSA LUXEMBURG 9 INTRODUCTION 13 SECTION ONE THE PROBLEM OF REPRODUCTION I. THE OBJECT OF OUR INVESTIGATION _page_ 31 II. QUESNAY'S AND ADAM SMITH'S ANALYSES OF THE PROCESS OF REPRODUCTION 48 III. A CRITICISM OF SMITH'S ANALYSIS 64 IV. MARX'S SCHEME OF SIMPLE REPRODUCTION 76 V. THE CIRCULATION OF MONEY 93 VI. ENLARGED REPRODUCTION 107 VII. ANALYSIS OF MARX'S DIAGRAM OF ENLARGED REPRODUCTION 120 VIII. MARX'S ATTEMPT TO RESOLVE THE DIFFICULTY 139 IX. THE DIFFICULTY VIEWED FROM THE ANGLE OF THE PROCESS OF CIRCULATION 155 SECTION TWO HISTORICAL EXPOSITION OF THE PROBLEM FIRST ROUND Sismondi-Malthus _v._ Say-Ricardo, MacCulloch X. SISMONDI'S THEORY OF REPRODUCTION _page_ 173 XI. MACCULLOCH _v._ SISMONDI 191 XII. RICARDO _v._ SISMONDI 203 XIII. SAY _v._ SISMONDI 211 XIV. MALTHUS 219 SECOND ROUND The Controversy between Rodbertus and von Kirchmann XV. V. KIRCHMANN'S THEORY OF REPRODUCTION _page_ 227 XVI. RODBERTUS' CRITICISM OF THE CLASSICAL SCHOOL 238 XVII. RODBERTUS' ANALYSIS OF REPRODUCTION 252 THIRD ROUND Struve--Bulgakov--Tugan Baranovski v. Vorontsov--Nikolayon XVIII. A NEW VERSION OF THE PROBLEM _page_ 271 XIX. VORONTSOV AND HIS 'SURPLUS' 276 XX. NIKOLAYON 284 XXI. STRUVE'S 'THIRD PERSONS' AND 'THREE WORLD EMPIRES' 292 XXII. BULGAKOV AND HIS COMPLETION OF MARX'S ANALYSIS 298 XXIII. TUGAN BARANOVSKI AND HIS 'LACK OF PROPORTION' 311 XXIV. THE END OF RUSSIAN 'LEGALIST' MARXISM 324 SECTION THREE THE HISTORICAL CONDITIONS OF ACCUMULATION XXV. CONTRADICTIONS WITHIN THE DIAGRAM OF ENLARGED REPRODUCTION _page_ 329 XXVI. THE REPRODUCTION OF CAPITAL AND ITS SOCIAL SETTING 348 XXVII. THE STRUGGLE AGAINST NATURAL ECONOMY 368 XXVIII. THE INTRODUCTION OF COMMODITY ECONOMY 386 XXIX. THE STRUGGLE AGAINST PEASANT ECONOMY 395 XXX. INTERNATIONAL LOANS 419 XXXI. PROTECTIVE TARIFFS AND ACCUMULATION 446 XXXII. MILITARISM AS A PROVINCE OF ACCUMULATION 454 INDEX 469 TRANSLATOR'S NOTE This is an original translation not only of the main body of the work but also of a number of quotations from foreign authors. Page references thus usually indicate the original foreign sources. In so far as possible, however, I have availed myself of existing translations and have referred to the following standard works: Karl Marx: _Capital_, vol. i (transl. by Moore-Aveling, London, 1920); vol. ii (transl. by E. Untermann, Chicago, 1907); vol. iii (transl. by E. Untermann, Chicago, 1909) _The Poverty of Philosophy_ (translator's name not given, London, 1936). Sismondi's introduction to the second edition of _Nouveaux Principes_ is quoted from M. Mignet's translation of selected passages by Sismondi, entitled _Political Economy and the Philosophy of Government_, London, 1847. No English translation exists of Marx's _Theorien über den Mehrwert_. Unfortunately, not all the West European texts, and none of the Russian--except Engels' correspondence with Nikolayon--were accessible to me, and I regret having been unable to trace some quotations and check up on others. In such cases, the English version follows the German text and will at least bring out the point the author wanted to make. To save the reader grappling with unfamiliar concepts, I have converted foreign currencies and measures into their English equivalents, at the following rates: 20 _marks_--25 _francs_--$5--£1 (gold standard); 1 _hectare_--(roughly) 2·5 acres; 1 _kilometre_--5/8 mile. I am glad of this opportunity to express my gratitude to Dr. W. Stark and Mrs. J. Robinson for the helpful criticism and appreciation with which my work has met. AGNES SCHWARZSCHILD A NOTE ON ROSA LUXEMBURG Rosa Luxemburg was born on 5 March 1870, at Zamosc, a little town of Russian Poland, not far from the city of Lublin. She came from a fairly well-to-do family of Jewish merchants, and soon showed the two outstanding traits which were to characterise all her life and work: a high degree of intelligence, and a burning thirst for social justice which led her, while still a schoolgirl, into the revolutionary camp. Partly to escape the Russian police, partly to complete her education, she went to Zurich and studied there the sciences of law and economics. Her doctoral dissertation dealt with the industrial development of Poland and showed up the vital integration of Polish industry with the wider economic system of metropolitan Russia. It was a work not only of considerable promise, but already of solid and substantial achievement. Her doctorate won, Rosa Luxemburg looked around for a promising field of work and decided to go to Germany, whose working-class movement seemed destined to play a leading part in the future history of international socialism. She settled there in 1896, and two years later contracted a formal marriage with a German subject which secured her against the danger of forcible deportation to Russia. Now, at that moment the German Social-Democratic Party was in the throes of a serious crisis. In 1899, Eduard Bernstein published his well-known work _Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie_, which urged the party to drop its revolutionary jargon and to work henceforth for tangible social reforms within the given economic set-up, instead of trying to bring about its final and forcible overthrow. This 'reformism' or 'revisionism' seemed to Rosa Luxemburg a base as well as a foolish doctrine, and she published in the same year a pamphlet _Sozialreform oder Revolution?_ which dealt with Bernstein's ideas in no uncertain fashion. From this moment onward, she was and remained one of the acknowledged leaders of the left wing within the German working-class movement. The events of the year 1905 gave Rosa Luxemburg a welcome opportunity to demonstrate that revolution was to her more than a subject of purely academic interest. As soon as the Russian masses began to move, she hurried to Warsaw and threw herself into the fray. There followed a short span of feverish activity, half a year's imprisonment, and, finally, a return journey to Berlin. The experiences of the Warsaw rising are reflected in a book entitled _Massenstreik, Partei und Gewerkschaften_, which was published in 1906. It recommends the general strike as the most effective weapon in the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. The International Socialist Congress which met at Stuttgart in 1907 prepared and foreshadowed the sorry history of Rosa Luxemburg's later life. On that occasion she drafted, together with Lenin, a resolution which demanded that the workers of the world should make any future war an opportunity for the destruction of the capitalist system. Unlike so many others, she stuck to her resolution when, seven years later, the time of testing came. The result was that she had to spend nearly the whole of the first World War in jail, either under punishment or in protective custody. But imprisonment did not mean inactivity. In 1916, there appeared in Switzerland her book _Die Krise der Sozialdemokratie_, which assailed the leaders of the German labour party for their patriotic attitude and called the masses to revolutionary action. The foundation of the Spartacus League in 1917, the germ cell out of which the Communist Party of Germany was soon to develop, was vitally connected with the dissemination of Rosa Luxemburg's aggressive sentiments. The collapse of the _Kaiserreich_ on 11 November 1918, gave Rosa Luxemburg her freedom and an undreamt-of range of opportunities. The two months that followed must have been more crowded and more colourful than all her previous life taken together. But the end of her career was imminent. The fatal Spartacus week, an abortive rising of the Berlin workers, led on 15 January 1919, to her arrest by a government composed of former party comrades. During her removal to prison she was attacked and severely beaten by soldiers belonging to the extreme right, a treatment which she did not survive. Her body was recovered days later from a canal. A type not unlike Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg had her tender and sentimental side, which comes to the surface in her correspondence, especially in the _Briefe aus dem Gefaengnis_ printed in 1922. As a thinker she showed considerable honesty and independence of mind. _The Accumulation of Capital_, first published in 1913, which is undoubtedly her finest achievement, reveals her as that rarest of all rare phenomena--a Marxist critical of Karl Marx. W. STARK INTRODUCTION Academic economists have recently returned from the elaboration of static equilibrium to the classical search for a dynamic model of a developing economy. Rosa Luxemburg, neglected by Marxist and academic economists alike, offers a theory of the dynamic development of capitalism which is of the greatest interest. The book is one of considerable difficulty (apart from the vivid historical chapters), and to those accustomed only to academic analysis the difficulty is rendered well-nigh insurmountable by the Marxist terminology in which it is expressed. The purpose of this preface is to provide a glossary of terms, and to search for the main thread of the argument (leaving the historical illustrations to speak for themselves) and set it out in simpler language. The result is no doubt too simple. The reader must sample for himself the rich confusion in which the central core of analysis is imbedded, and must judge for himself whether the core has been mishandled in the process of digging it out.[1] Our author takes her departure from the numerical examples for simple reproduction (production with a constant stock of capital) and expanded reproduction (production with capital accumulating) set out in volume ii of Marx's _Capital_. As she points out,[2] Marx completed the model for simple reproduction, but the models for accumulation were left at his death in a chaos of notes, and they are not really fit to bear all the weight she puts on them (Heaven help us if posterity is to pore over all the backs of old envelopes on which economists have jotted down numerical examples in working out a piece of analysis). To follow her line of thought, however, it is necessary to examine her version of Marx's models closely, to see on what assumptions they are based (explicitly or unconsciously) and to search the assumptions for clues to the succeeding analysis. To begin at the beginning--gross national income (for a closed economy) for, say, a year, is written _c + v + s_; that is, constant capital, variable capital and surplus. Variable capital, _v_, is the annual wages bill. Surplus, _s_, is annual rent, interest, and net profit, so that _v + s_ represents net national income. (In this introduction surplus is used interchangeably with rent, interest and net profit.) Constant capital, _c_, represents at the same time the contribution which materials and capital equipment make to annual output, and the cost of maintaining the stock of physical capital in existence at the beginning of the year. When all commodities are selling at normal prices, these two quantities are equal (normal prices are tacitly assumed always to rule,[3] an assumption which is useful for long-period problems, though treacherous when we have to deal with slumps and crises). Gross receipts equal to _c + v + s_ pass through the hands of the capitalists during the year, of which they use an amount, _c_, to replace physical capital used up during the year, so that _c_ represents costs of raw materials and wear and tear and amortisation of plant. An amount, _v_, is paid to workers and is consumed by them (saving by workers is regarded as negligible[4]). The surplus, _s_, remains to the capitalists for their own consumption and for net saving. The professional classes (civil servants, priests, prostitutes, etc.) are treated as hangers-on of the capitalists, and their incomes do not appear, as they are not regarded as producing _value_.[5] Expenditure upon them tends to lessen the saving of capitalists, and their own expenditure and saving are treated as expenditure and saving out of surplus. In the model set out in chapter vi there is no technical progress (this is a drastic simplification made deliberately[6]) and the ratio of capital to labour is constant (as the stock of capital increases employment increases in proportion). Thus real output per worker employed is constant (hours of work per year do not vary) and real wages per man are constant. It follows that real surplus per man is also constant. So long as these assumptions are retained Marxian _value_ presents no problem. _Value_ is the product of labour-time. _Value_ created per man-year is constant because hours of work are constant. Real product per man year being constant, on the above assumptions, the _value_ of a unit of product is constant. For convenience we may assume money wages per man constant. Then, on these assumptions, both the money price of a unit of output and the _value_ of a unit of money are constant. This of course merely plasters over all the problems of measurement connected with the use of index numbers, but provided that the technique of production is unchanging, and normal prices are ruling, those problems are not serious, and we can conduct the analysis in terms of money values.[7] (Rosa Luxemburg regards it as a matter of indifference whether we calculate in money or in _value_.[8]) The assumption of constant real wages presents a difficulty which we may notice in passing. The operation of the capitalist system is presumed to depress the level of wages down to the limit set by the minimum subsistence of the worker and his family. But how large a family? It would be an extraordinary fluke if the average size of family supported by the given wage of a worker were such as to provide for a rate of growth of population exactly adjusted to the rate of accumulation of capital, and she certainly does not hold that this is the case.[9] There is a reserve army of labour standing by, ready to take employment when the capitalists offer it. While they are unemployed the workers have no source of income, but are kept alive by sharing in the consumption of the wages of friends and relations who are in work.[10] When an increase in the stock of capital takes place, more workers begin to earn wages, those formerly employed are relieved of the burden of supporting some unemployed relations, and their own consumption rises. Thus either they were living below the subsistence minimum before, or they are above it now. We may cut this knot by simply postulating that real wages per man are constant,[11] without asking why. The important point for the analysis which we are examining is that when employment increases the total consumption of the workers as a whole increases by the amount of the wages received by the additional workers.[12] We may now set out the model for simple reproduction--that is, annual national income for an economy in which the stock of capital is kept intact but not increased. All output is divided into two departments: I, producing capital equipment and raw materials, (producers' goods), and II, producing consumption goods. Then we have I: _c_{1} + v_{1} + s_{1} = c_{1} + c_{2}_ II: _c_{2} + v_{2} + s_{2} = v_{1} + v_{2} + s_{1} + s_{2}_ Thus _c_{2} = v_{1} + s_{1}_ This means that the net output of the producers' goods department is equal to the replacement of capital in the consumers' goods department. The whole surplus, as well as the whole of wages, is currently consumed. Before proceeding to the model for accumulation there is a difficulty which must be discussed. In the above model the stock of capital exists, so to speak, off stage. Rosa Luxemburg is perfectly well aware of the relationship between annual wear and tear of capital, which is part of _c_, and the stock of fixed capital,[13] but as soon as she (following Marx) discusses accumulation she equates the addition to the stock of capital made by saving out of surplus in one year to the wear and tear of capital in the next year. To make sense of this we must assume that all capital is consumed and made good once a year. She seems to slip into this assumption inadvertently at first, though later it is made explicit.[14] She also consciously postulates that _v_ represents the amount of capital which is paid out in wages in advance of receipts from sales of the commodities produced. (This, as she says, is the natural assumption to make for agricultural production, where workers this year are paid from the proceeds of last year's harvest.)[15] Thus _v_ represents at the same time the annual wages bill and the amount of capital locked up in the wages fund, while _c_ represents both the annual amortisation of capital and the total stock of capital (other than the wages fund). This is a simplification which is tiresome rather than helpful (it arises from Marx's ill-judged habit of writing _s/(c + v)_ for the rate of profit on capital), but it is no more than a simplification and does not invalidate the rest of the analysis. Another awkward assumption, which causes serious trouble later, is implicit in the argument. Savings out of the surplus accruing in each department (producers' and consumers' goods) are always invested in capital in the same department. There is no reason to imagine that one capitalist is linked to others in his own department more than to those in the other department, so the conception seems to be that each capitalist invests his savings in his own business. There is no lending by one capitalist to another and no capitalist ever shifts his sphere of operations from one department to another. This is a severe assumption to make even about the era before limited liability was introduced, and becomes absurd afterwards. Moreover it is incompatible with the postulate that the rate of profit on capital tends to equality throughout the economy,[16] for the mechanism which equalises profits is the flow of new investment, and the transfer of capital as amortisation funds are re-invested, into more profitable lines of production and away from less profitable lines.[17] The assumption that there is no lending by one capitalist to another puts limitation upon the model. Not only must the total rate of investment be equal to the total of planned saving, but investment in each department must be equal to saving in that department, and not only must the rate of increase of capital lead to an increase of total output compatible with total demand, but the increase in output of each department, dictated by the increase in capital in that department, must be divided between consumers' and producers' goods in proportions compatible with the demand for each, dictated by the consumption and the investment plans in each department. There is no difficulty, however, in choosing numbers which satisfy the requirements of the model. The numerical examples derived from Marx's jottings are cumbersome and confusing, but a clear and simple model can be constructed on the basis of the assumptions set out in chapter vii. In each department, constant capital is four times variable capital.[18] (Constant capital is the stock of raw materials which is turned over once a year; variable capital is the wages bill, which is equal to the capital represented by the wages fund.) Surplus is equal to variable capital (net income is divided equally between wages and surplus) and half of surplus is saved.[19] Savings are allotted between constant and variable capital in such a way as to preserve the 4 to 1 ratio. Thus four-fifths of savings represents a demand for producers' goods, and is added to constant capital each year, and one-fifth represents a demand for consumers' goods, and is added to the wages fund (variable capital). These ratios dictate the relationship between Department I (producers' goods) and Department II (consumers' goods).[20] It can easily be seen that the basic assumptions require that the output of Department I must stand in the ratio of 11 to 4 to the output of Department II.[21] We can now construct a much simpler model than those provided in the text. _c_ _v_ _s_ _Gross Output_ Department I 44 11 11 66 Department II 16 4 4 24 -- Total 90 In Department I, 5·5 units are saved (half of _s_) of which 4·4 are invested in constant capital and 1·1 in variable capital. In Department II 2 units are saved, 1·6 being added to constant and 0·4 to variable capital. The 66 units of producers' goods provide 44 + 4·4 constant capital for Department I and 16 + 1·6 constant capital for Department II and the 24 units of consumers' goods provide 11 + 4 wages of labour already employed, 5·5 + 2 for consumption out of surplus, and 1·1 + 0·4 addition to variable capital, which provide for an addition to employment. After the investment has been made, and the labour force increased in proportion to the wages bill, we have _c_ _v_ _s_ _Gross Output_ Department I 48·4 12·1 12·1 72·6 Department II 17·6 4·4 4·4 26·4 ----- Total 99 The two departments are now equipped to carry out another round of investment at the prescribed rate, and the process of accumulation continues. The ratios happen to have been chosen so that the total labour force, and total gross output, increase by 10 per cent per annum.[22] But all this, as Rosa Luxemburg remarks, is just arithmetic.[23] The only point of substance which she deduces from Marx's numerical examples is that it is always Department I which takes the initiative. She maintains that the capitalists in Department I decide how much producers' goods to produce, and that Department II has to arrange its affairs so as to absorb an amount of producers' goods which will fit in with their plans.[24] On the face of it, this is obviously absurd. The arithmetic is perfectly neutral between the two departments, and, as she herself shows, will serve equally well for the imagined case of a socialist society where investment is planned with a view to consumption.[25] But behind all this rigmarole lies the real problem which she is trying to formulate. Where does the demand come from which keeps accumulation going? She is not concerned with the problem, nowadays so familiar, of the balance between saving and investment. Marx himself was aware of that problem, as is seen in his analysis of disequilibrium under conditions of simple reproduction (zero net investment).[26] When new fixed capital comes into existence, part of gross receipts are set aside in amortisation funds without any actual outlay being made on renewals. Then total demand falls short of equilibrium output, and the system runs into a slump. Contrariwise, when a burst of renewals falls due, in excess of the current rate of amortisation, a boom sets in. For equilibrium it is necessary for the age composition of the stock of capital to be such that current renewals just absorb current amortisation funds. Similarly, when accumulation is taking place, current investment must absorb current net saving.[27] It is in connection with the problem of effective demand, in this sense, that Marx brings gold-mining into the analysis. When real output expands at constant money prices, the increasing total of money value of output requires an increase in the stock of money in circulation (unless the velocity of circulation rises appropriately). The capitalists therefore have to devote part of their savings to increasing their holdings of cash (for there is no borrowing). This causes a deficiency of effective demand. But the increase in the quantity of money in circulation comes from newly mined gold, and the expenditure of the gold mining industry upon the other departments just makes up the deficiency in demand.[28] Rosa Luxemburg garbles this argument considerably, and brushes it away as beside the point. And it _is_ beside the point that she is concerned with. She does not admit the savings and investment problem, for she takes it for granted that each individual act of saving out of surplus is accompanied by a corresponding amount of real investment, and that every piece of investment is financed by saving out of surplus of the same capitalist who makes it.[29] What she appears to be concerned with is rather the inducement to invest. What motive have the capitalists for enlarging their stock of real capital?[30] How do they know that there will be demand for the increased output of goods which the new capital will produce, so that they can 'capitalise' their surplus in a profitable form? (On the purely analytical plane her affinity seems to be with Hobson rather than Keynes.) Needless to say, our author does not formulate the problem of the inducement to invest in modern terminology, and the ambiguities and contradictions in her exposition have left ample scope for her critics to represent her theory as irredeemable nonsense.[31] But the most natural way to read it is also the clearest. Investment can take place in an ever-accumulating stock of capital only if the capitalists are assured of an ever-expanding market for the goods which the capital will produce. On this reading, the statement of the problem leads straightforwardly to the solution propounded in the third Section of this book. Marx has his own answer to the problem of inducement to invest, which she refers to in the first chapter.[32] The pressure of competition forces each individual capitalist to increase his capital in order to take advantage of economies of large-scale production, for if he does not his rivals will, and he will be undersold. Rosa Luxemburg does not discuss whether this mechanism provides an adequate drive to keep accumulation going, but looks for some prospective demand outside the circle of production. Here the numerical examples, as she shows, fail to help. And this is in the nature of the case, for (in modern jargon) the examples deal with _ex post_ quantities, while she is looking for _ex ante_ prospects of increased demand for commodities. If accumulation does take place, demand will absorb output, as the model shows, but what is it that makes accumulation take place? In Section II our author sets out to find what answers have been given to her problem. The analysis she has in mind is now broader than the strict confines of the arithmetical model. Technical progress is going on, and the output of an hour's labour rises as time goes by. (The concept of _value_ now becomes treacherous, for the _value_ of commodities is continuously falling.) Real wages tend to be constant in terms of commodities, thus the _value_ of labour power is falling, and the share of surplus in net income is rising (_s/v_, the rate of exploitation, is rising). The amount of saving in real terms is therefore rising (she suggests later that the proportion of surplus saved rises with surplus, in which case real savings increase all the more[33]). The problem is thus more formidable than appears in the model, for the equilibrium rate of accumulation of capital, in real terms, is greater than in the model, where the rate of exploitation is constant. At the same time the proportion of constant to variable capital is rising. She regards this not as something which is likely to happen for technical reasons, but as being necessarily bound up with the very nature of technical progress. As productivity increases, the amount of producers' goods handled per man-hour of labour increases; therefore, she says, the proportion of _c_ to _v_ must increase.[34] This is an error. It arises from thinking of constant capital in terms of goods, and contrasting it with variable capital in terms of _value_, that is, hours of labour. She forgets Marx's warning that, as progress takes place, the _value_ of the commodities making up constant capital also falls.[35] It is perfectly possible for productivity to increase without any increase in the _value_ of capital per man employed. This would occur if improvements in the productivity of labour in making producers' goods kept pace with the productivity of labour in using producers' goods to make consumers' goods (capital-saving inventions balance labour-saving inventions, so that technical progress is 'neutral'). However, we can easily get out of this difficulty by postulating that as a matter of fact technical progress is mainly labour-saving, or, a better term, capital-using, so that capital per man employed is rising through time. Rosa Luxemburg treats the authors whom she examines in Section II with a good deal of sarcasm, and dismisses them all as useless. To some of the points raised her answers seem scarcely adequate. For instance, Rodbertus sees the source of all the troubles of capitalism in the falling proportion of wages in national income.[36] He can be interpreted to refer to the proportion of wages in gross income. In that case, she is right (on the assumption of capital-using inventions) in arguing that a fall in the proportion of wages is bound up with technical progress, and that the proportion could be held constant only by stopping progress. He can also be taken to refer to the share of wages in net output, and this is the more natural reading. On this reading she argues that the fall in share of wages (or rise in rate of exploitation) is necessary to prevent a fall in the rate of profit on capital[37] (as capital per man employed rises, profit per man employed must rise if profit per unit of capital is constant). But she does not follow up the argument and inquire what rise in the rate of exploitation is necessary to keep capitalism going (actually, the statisticians tell us, the share of wages in net income has been fairly constant in modern industrial economies[38]). It is obvious that the less the rate of exploitation rises, the smaller is the rise in the rate of saving which the system has to digest, while the rise in real consumption by workers, which takes place when the rate of exploitation rises more slowly than productivity in the consumption good industries, creates an outlet for investment in productive capacity in those industries. The horrors of capitalism, and the difficulties which it creates for itself, are both exaggerated by the assumption of constant real-wage rates and, although it would be impossible to defend Rodbertus' position that a constant rate of exploitation is all that is needed to put everything right, he certainly makes a contribution to the argument which ought to be taken into account. Tugan-Baranovski also seems to be treated too lightly. His conception is that the rising proportion of constant capital in both departments (machines to make machines as well as machines to make consumers' goods) provides an outlet for accumulation, and that competition is the driving force which keeps capitalists accumulating. Rosa Luxemburg is no doubt correct in saying that his argument does not carry the analysis beyond the stage at which Marx left it,[39] but he certainly elaborates a point which she seems perversely to overlook. Her real objection to Tugan-Baranovski is that he shows how, in certain conditions, capitalist accumulation might be self-perpetuating, while she wishes to establish that the coming disintegration of the capitalist system is not merely probable on the evidence, but is a logical necessity.[40] The authors such as Sismondi, Malthus and Vorontsov, who are groping after the problem of equilibrium between saving and investment, are treated with even less sympathy (though she has a kindly feeling for Sismondi, to whom she considers that Marx gave too little recognition[41]) for she is either oblivious that there is such a problem, or regards it as trivial.[42] We leave the discussion, at the end of Section II, at the same point where we entered it, with the clue to the inducement to invest still to find. Section III is broader, more vigorous and in general more rewarding than the two preceding parts. It opens with a return to Marx's model for a capitalist system with accumulation going on. Our author then sets out a fresh model allowing for technical progress. The rate of exploitation (the ratio of surplus to wages) is rising, for real wages remain constant while output per man increases. In the model the proportion of surplus saved is assumed constant for simplicity, though in reality, she holds, it would tend to rise with the real income of the capitalists.[43] The ratio of constant to variable capital is rising for technical reasons. (The convention by which the annual wear and tear of capital is identified with the stock of capital now becomes a great impediment to clear thinking.) The arithmetical model shows the system running into an _impasse_ because the output of Department I falls short of the requirements of constant capital in the two departments taken together, while the output of Department II exceeds consumption.[44] The method of argument is by no means rigorous. Nothing follows from the fact that one particular numerical example fails to give a solution, and the example is troublesome to interpret as it is necessary to distinguish between discrepancies due to rounding off the figures from those which are intended to illustrate a point of principle.[45] But there is no need to paddle in the arithmetic to find where the difficulty lies. The model is over-determined because of the rule that the increment of capital within each department at the end of a year must equal the saving made within the same department during the year. If capitalists from Department II were permitted to lend part of their savings to Department I to be invested in its capital, a breakdown would no longer be inevitable. Suppose that total real wages are constant and that real consumption by capitalists increases slowly, so that the real output of Department II rises at a slower rate than productivity, then the amount of labour employed in it is shrinking. The ratio of capital to labour however is rising as a consequence of capital-using technical progress. The output of Department I, and its productive capacity, is growing through time. Capital invested in Department I is accumulating faster than the saving of the capitalists in Department I, and capitalists of Department II, who have no profitable outlet in their own industries for their savings, acquire titles to part of the capital in Department I by supplying the difference between investment in Department I and its own saving.[46] For any increase in the stock of capital of both departments taken together, required by technical progress and demand conditions, there is an appropriate amount of saving, and so long as the total accumulation required and total saving fit, there is no breakdown. But here we find the clue to the real contradiction. These quantities might conceivably fit, but there is no guarantee that they will. If the ratio of saving which the capitalists (taken together) choose to make exceeds the rate of accumulation dictated by technical progress, the excess savings can only be 'capitalised' if there is an outlet for investment outside the system. (The opposite case of deficient savings is also possible. Progress would then be slowed down below the technically possible maximum; but this case is not contemplated by our author, and it would be irrelevant to elaborate upon it.) Once more we can substitute for a supposed logical necessity a plausible hypothesis about the nature of the real case, and so rescue the succeeding argument. If in reality the distribution of income between workers and capitalists, and the propensity to save of capitalists, are such as to require a rate of accumulation which exceeds the rate of increase in the stock of capital appropriate to technical conditions, then there is a chronic excess of the potential supply of real capital over the demand for it and the system must fall into chronic depression. (This is the 'stagnation thesis' thrown out by Keynes and elaborated by modern American economists, notably Alvin Hansen). How then is it that capitalist expansion had not yet (in 1912) shown any sign of slackening? In chapter xxvi Rosa Luxemburg advances her central thesis--that it is the invasion of primitive economies by capitalism which keeps the system alive. There follows a scorching account of the manner in which the capitalist system, by trade, conquest and theft, swallowed up the pre-capitalist economies,--some reduced to colonies of capitalist nations, some remaining nominally independent--and fed itself upon their ruins. The thread of analysis running through the historical illustrations is not easy to pick up, but the main argument seems to be as follows: As soon as a primitive closed economy has been broken into, by force or guile, cheap mass-produced consumption goods displace the old hand production of the family or village communities, so that a market is provided for ever-increasing outputs from the industries of Department II in the old centres of capitalism, without the standard of life of the workers who consume these commodities being raised.[47] The ever-growing capacity of the export industries requires the products of Department I, thus maintaining investment at home. At the same time great capital works, such as railways, are undertaken in the new territories.[48] This investment is matched partly by savings from surplus extracted on the spot, but mainly by loans from the old capitalist countries. There is no difficulty here in accounting for the inducement to invest, for the new territories yield commodities unobtainable at home.[49] We might set out the essence of the argument as follows: Cloth from Lancashire pays for labour in America, which is used to produce wheat and cotton. These provide wages and raw materials to the Lancashire mills, while the profits acquired both on the plantations and in the mills are invested in steel rails and rolling stock, which open up fresh territories, so that the whole process is continuously expanding. Moreover, apart from profits earned on capital actually invested in the new territories, great capital gains are made simply by acquiring possession of land and other natural resources.[50] Labour to work the resources may be provided by the local dispossessed peasantry or by immigration from the centres of capitalism.[51] Investment in equipment for it to use is more profitable than in that operated by home labour, partly because the wretched condition of the colonial workers makes the rate of exploitation higher,[52] but mainly just because they are on the spot, and can turn the natural resources seized by the capitalists into means of production. No amount of investment in equipment for British labour would produce soil bearing cotton, rubber or copper. Thus investment is deflected abroad[53] and the promise of profit represented by the natural resources calls into existence, by fair means or foul, the labour and capital to make it come true. The process of building up this capital provides an outlet for the old industries and rescues them from the contradictions inherent in deficiency of demand. The analysis of militarism in the last chapter over-reaches itself by trying to prove too much. The argument is that armaments are built up out of taxes which fall entirely on wages.[54] This can be regarded as a kind of 'forced saving' imposed on the workers. These savings are extra to the saving out of surplus. They are invested in armaments, and that ends the story. On this basis the armaments, in themselves, cannot be held to provide an outlet for the investment of surplus (though the use of the armaments, as in the Opium War,[55] to break up primitive economies is a necessary condition for the colonial investment already described) and capital equipment to produce armaments is merely substituted for capital formerly producing consumers' goods. The analysis which best fits Rosa Luxemburg's own argument, and the facts, is that armaments provide an outlet for the investment of surplus (over and above any contribution there may be from forced saving out of wages), which, unlike other kinds of investment, creates no further problem by increasing productive capacity (not to mention the huge new investment opportunities created by reconstruction after the capitalist nations have turned their weapons against each other). All this is perhaps too neat an account of what our author is saying. The argument streams along bearing a welter of historical examples in its flood, and ideas emerge and disappear again bewilderingly. But something like the above seems to be intended. And something like it is now widely accepted as being true. Rosa Luxemburg, as we have seen, neglects the rise in real wages which takes place as capitalism develops, and denies the internal inducement to invest provided by technical progress, two factors which help to rescue capitalism from the difficulties which it creates for itself. She is left with only one influence (economic imperialism) to account for continuous capital accumulation, so that her analysis is incomplete. All the same, few would deny that the extension of capitalism into new territories was the mainspring of what an academic economist has called the 'vast secular boom' of the last two hundred years,[56] and many academic economists account for the uneasy condition of capitalism in the twentieth century largely by the 'closing of the frontier' all over the world.[57] But the academic economists are being wise after the event. For all its confusions and exaggerations, this book shows more prescience than any orthodox contemporary could claim. JOAN ROBINSON _Cambridge._ FOOTNOTES: [1] For a totally different interpretation see Sweezy; _The Theory of Capitalist Development_, chap. xi, Section 9. [2] See p. 166. [3] Cf. the quotation from _Capital_, vol. iii, p. 331. [4] See p. 132. [5] See p. 135. [6] See p. 130. [7] Exchanges between industries, however, must take place at 'prices of production' not at _values_. See below, p. 15, note. [8] See p. 113. [9] See p. 361. [10] See p. 134. [11] Later it is assumed that real wages can be depressed by taxation (p. 455). [12] See p. 116. [13] See p. 85. [14] See p. 355. [15] See p. 76, note 355. [16] See p. 79. [17] In the numerical example quoted in chap. vi. (p. 117) the rate of profit is much higher in Department II than in I. Marx has made the rate of exploitation equal in the two departments, and the ratio of constant to variable capital higher in Department I. This is evidently an oversight. The two departments must trade with each other at market prices, not in terms of _value_. Therefore _s_{1}_ must represent the profits accruing to Department I, not a proportion (half in the example) of the _value_ generated in Department I. _s_{1}/v_{1}_ should exceed _s_{2}/v_{2}_ to an extent corresponding to the higher organic composition of capital in Department I. The point is interesting, as it shows that when off guard Marx forgot that he could make prices proportional to _values_ only when the organic composition of capital is the same in all industries. [18] See p. 129. [19] See p. 130. [20] Since, in this model, the organic composition of capital is the same in the two departments, prices correspond to _values_. [21] Of total gross output, 2/3 is replacement of constant capital; surplus is 1/6 of gross output, and of surplus half is saved; thus savings are 1/12 of gross output; of saving 4/5 is added to constant capital; thus 1/15 of gross output is added to constant capital. The output of Department I is therefore 2/3 + 1/15 or 11/15 of total gross output. Similarly, the output of Department II is 4/15 of total gross output. [22] This model bears a strong family resemblance to Mr. Harrod's 'Warranted rate of growth'. _Towards a Dynamic Economics_, lecture III. [23] See p. 119. [24] See p. 125. [25] See p. 128. [26] See p. 91. [27] See p. 115. [28] See p. 102. The phrase '_zahlungsfähige nachfrage_', translated 'effective demand', is not the effective demand of Keynes (roughly, current expenditure) but appears often to mean demand for new capital, or, perhaps, prospective future demand for goods to be produced by new capital. [29] This assumption is made explicit later (p. 342). [30] See pp. 131 et seq. [31] See Sweezy, loc. cit. [32] See p. 40. [33] See p. 303. [34] See p. 258. [35] This point is, however, later admitted (p. 337). [36] See p. 252. [37] See p. 259. Marx himself failed to get this point clear. Cf. my _Essay on Marxian Economics_, chap. v. [38] Cf. Kalecki, _Essays in the Theory of Economic Fluctuations_, pp. 14 et seq. [39] See p. 323. [40] See p. 314. Marx did not find himself in this dilemma because he held that there is a fundamental 'contradiction' in capitalism which shows itself in a strong tendency for the rate of profit on capital to fall as technical progress takes place. But Rosa Luxemburg sees that the tendency to a falling rate of profit is automatically checked and may even be reversed if real-wage rates are constant (p. 338). [41] See p. 217, note. [42] One passage suggests that she sees the problem, but thinks it irrelevant to the real issue (p. 342). [43] See p. 338. [44] See p. 337. [45] In this model the rate of exploitation is different in the two departments. This means that the numbers represent money value, not _value_. [46] Rosa Luxemburg seems to regard this process as impossible, but for what reason is by no means clear (p. 341). [47] See p. 352. [48] See p. 352. [49] See p. 358. [50] See p. 370. [51] See p. 428. [52] See p. 435. [53] See p. 421. [54] See p. 455. [55] See p. 387. [56] Hicks, _Value and Capital_, p. 302, note. Mr. Hicks himself, however, regards the increase in population as the mainspring. [57] Cf. _A Survey of Contemporary Economics_ (ed. Ellis), p. 63. _SECTION ONE_ THE PROBLEM OF REPRODUCTION _CHAPTER I_ THE OBJECT OF OUR INVESTIGATION Karl Marx made a contribution of lasting service to the theory of economics when he drew attention to the problem of the reproduction of the entire social capital. It is significant that in the history of economics we find only two attempts at an exact exposition of this problem: one by Quesnay, the father of the Physiocrats, at its very inception; and in its final stage this attempt by Marx. In the interim, the problem was ever with bourgeois economics. Yet bourgeois economists have never been fully aware of this problem in its pure aspects, detached from related and intersecting minor problems; they have never been able to formulate it precisely, let alone solve it. Seeing that the problem is of paramount importance, their attempts may all the same help us to some understanding of the trend of scientific economics. What is it precisely that constitutes this problem of the reproduction of total capital? The literal meaning of the word 'reproduction' is repetition, renewal of the process of production. At first sight it may be difficult to see in what respect the idea of reproduction differs from that of repetition which we can all understand--why such a new and unfamiliar term should be required. But in the sort of repetition which we shall consider, in the continual recurrence of the process of production, there are certain distinctive features. First, the regular repetition of reproduction is the general _sine qua non_ of regular consumption which in its turn has been the precondition of human civilisation in every one of its historical forms. The concept of reproduction, viewed in this way, reflects an aspect of the history of civilisation. Production can never be resumed, there can be no reproduction, unless certain prerequisites such as tools, raw materials and labour have been established during the preceding period of production. However, at the most primitive level of man's civilisation, at the initial stage of man's power over nature; this possibility to re-engage in production depended more or less on chance. So long as hunting and fishing were the main foundations of social existence, frequent periods of general starvation interrupted the regular repetition of production. Some primitive peoples recognised at a very early stage that for reproduction as a regularly recurring process certain measures were essential; these they incorporated into ceremonies of a religious nature; and in this way they accepted such measures as traditional social commitments. Thus, as the thorough researches of Spencer and Gillen have taught us, the totem cult of the Australian negroes is fundamentally nothing but certain measures taken by social groups for the purpose of securing and preserving their animal and vegetable foodstuffs; these precautions had been taken year by year since time immemorial and thus they became fossilised into religious ceremonials. Yet the circle of consumption and production which forms the essence of reproduction became possible only with the invention of tillage with the hoe, with the taming of domestic animals, and with cattle-raising for the purpose of consumption. Reproduction is something more than mere repetition in so far as it presupposes a certain level of society's supremacy over nature, or, in economic terms, a certain standard of labour productivity. On the other hand, at all stages of social development, the process of production is based on the continuation of two different, though closely connected factors, the technical and social conditions--on the precise relationship between man and nature and that between men and men. Reproduction depends to the same degree on both these conditions. We have just seen how reproduction is bound up with the conditions of human working techniques, how far it is indeed solely the result of a certain level of labour productivity; but the social forms of production prevailing in each case are no less decisive. In a primitive communist agrarian community, reproduction as well as the whole plan of economic life is determined by the community of all workers and their democratic organs. The decision to re-engage in labour--the organisation of labour--the provision of raw materials, tools, and man-power as the essential preliminaries of labour--the arrangement of reproduction and the determination of its volume are all results of a planned co-operation in which everybody within the boundaries of the community takes his part. In an economic system based on slave labour or _corvée_, reproduction is enforced and regulated in all details by personal relations of domination. Here the volume of reproduction is determined by the right of disposal held by the ruling _élites_ over smaller or larger circles of other people's labour. In a society producing by capitalist methods, reproduction assumes a peculiar form, as a mere glance at certain striking phenomena will show us. In every other society known to history, reproduction recurs in a regular sequence as far as its preconditions, the existing means of production and labour power, make this possible. As a rule, only external influences such as a devastating war or a great pestilence, depopulating vast areas of former cultural life, and consequently destroying masses of labour power and of accumulated means of production, can result in a complete interruption of reproduction or in its contraction to any considerable extent for longer or shorter periods. A despotic organisation of the plan of production may on occasion lead to similar phenomena. When in ancient Egypt Pharaoh's will chained thousands of fellaheen for decades to the building of the pyramids; when in modern Egypt Ismail Pasha ordered 20,000 fellaheen to forced labour on the Suez Canal; or when, about two hundred years before Christ, the Emperor Shi Hoang Ti, founder of the Chin dynasty, allowed 400,000 people to perish of hunger and exhaustion and thus sacrificed a whole generation to his purpose of consolidating the Great Wall at China's northern frontier, the result was always that vast stretches of arable land were left fallow and that regular economic life was interrupted for long periods. In all these cases the causes of these interruptions of reproduction obviously lay in the one-sided determination of the plan of reproduction by those in power. Societies which produce according to capitalist methods present a different picture. We observe that in certain periods all the ingredients of reproduction may be available, both labour and means of production, and yet some vital needs of society for consumer goods may be left unfulfilled. We find that in spite of these resources reproduction may in part be completely suspended and in part curtailed. Here it is no despotic interference with the economic plan that is responsible for the difficulties in the process of production. Quite apart from all technical conditions, reproduction here depends on purely social considerations: only those goods are produced which can with certainty be expected to sell, and not merely to sell, but to sell at the customary profit. Thus profit becomes an end in itself, the decisive factor which determines not only production but also reproduction. Not only does it decide in each case what work is to be undertaken, how it is to be carried out, and how the products are to be distributed; what is more, profit decides, also, at the end of every working period, whether the labour process is to be resumed, and, if so, to what extent and in what direction it should be made to operate.[58] In capitalist society, therefore, the process of reproduction as a whole, constitutes a peculiar and most complicated problem, in consequence of these purely historical and social factors. There is, as we shall see, an external characteristic which shows clearly this specific historical peculiarity of the capitalist process of reproduction. Comprising not only production but also circulation (the process of exchange), it unites these two elements. Capitalist production is primarily production by innumerable private producers without any planned regulation. The only social link between these producers is the act of exchange. In taking account of social requirements reproduction has no clue to go on other than the experiences of the preceding labour period. These experiences, however, remain the private experiences of individual producers and are not integrated into a comprehensive and social form. Moreover, they do not always refer positively and directly to the needs of society. They are often rather indirect and negative, for it is only on the basis of price fluctuations that they indicate whether the aggregate of produced commodities falls short of the effective demand or exceeds it. Yet the individual private producers make recurrent use of these experiences of the preceding labour period when they re-engage in reproduction, so that glut or shortage are bound to occur again in the following period. Individual branches of production may develop independently, so that there may be a surplus in one branch and a deficiency in another. But as nearly all individual branches of production are interdependent technically, glut or shortage in some of the larger branches of production lead to the same phenomenon in most of the others. Thus the general supply of products may alternate periodically between shortage and surplus relative to the social demand. Herein lies the peculiar character of reproduction in a capitalist society, which differs from all other known forms of production. In the first place, every branch of production develops independently within certain limits, in a way that leads to periodical interruptions of production of shorter or longer duration. Secondly, the individual branches of reproduction show deviations from social requirements amounting to all-round disparity and thus resulting in a general interruption of reproduction. These features of capitalist reproduction are quite characteristic. In all other economic systems, reproduction runs its uninterrupted and regular course, apart from external disturbance by violence. Capitalist reproduction, however, to quote Sismondi's well-known dictum, can only be represented as a continuous sequence of individual spirals. Every such spiral starts with small loops which become increasingly larger and eventually very large indeed. Then they contract, and a new spiral starts again with small loops, repeating the figure up to the point of interruption. This periodical fluctuation between the largest volume of reproduction and its contraction to partial suspension, this cycle of slump, boom, and crisis, as it has been called, is the most striking peculiarity of capitalist reproduction. It is very important, however, to establish quite firmly and from the very outset that this cyclical movement of boom, slump, and crisis, does not represent the whole problem of capitalist reproduction, although it is an essential element of it. Periodical cycles and crises are specific phases of reproduction in a capitalist system of economy, but not the whole of this process. In order to demonstrate the pure implications of capitalist reproduction we must rather consider it quite apart from the periodical cycles and crises. Strange as this may appear, the method is quite rational; it is indeed the only method of inquiry that is scientifically tenable. In order to demonstrate and to solve the problem of pure value we must leave price fluctuations out of consideration. The approach of vulgar economics always attempts to solve the problem of value by reference to fluctuations in demand and supply. Classical economists, from Adam Smith to Karl Marx, attack the problem in the opposite way, pointing out that fluctuations in the mutual relation between demand and supply can explain only disparities between price and value, not value itself. In order to find the value of a commodity, we must start by assuming that demand and supply are in a state of equilibrium, that the price of a commodity and its value closely correspond to one another. Thus the scientific problem of value begins at the very point where the effect of demand and supply ceases to operate. In consequence of periodical cycles and crises capitalist reproduction fluctuates as a rule around the level of the effective total demand of society, sometimes rising above and sometimes falling below this level, contracting occasionally even to the point of almost complete interruption of reproduction. However, if we consider a longer period, a whole cycle with its alternating phases of prosperity and depression, of boom and slump, that is if we consider reproduction at its highest and lowest volume, including the stage of suspension, we can set off boom against slump and work out an average, a mean volume of reproduction for the whole cycle. This average is not only a theoretical figment of thought, it is also a real objective fact. For in spite of the sharp rises and falls in the course of a cycle, in spite of crises, the needs of society are always satisfied more or less, reproduction continues on its complicated course, and productive capacities develop progressively. How can this take place, leaving cycles and crises out of consideration? Here the real question begins. The attempt to solve the problem of reproduction in terms of the periodical character of crises is fundamentally a device of vulgar economics, just like the attempt to solve the problem of value in terms of fluctuations in demand and supply. Nevertheless, we shall see in the course of our observations that as soon as economic theory gets an inkling of the problem of reproduction, as soon as it has at least started guessing at the problem, it reveals a persistent tendency suddenly to transform the problem of reproduction into the problem of crises, thus barring its own way to the solution of the question. When we speak of capitalist reproduction in the following exposition, we shall always understand by this term a mean volume of productivity which is an average taken over the various phases of a cycle. Now, the total of capitalist reproduction is created by an unlimited and constantly changing number of private producers. They produce independently of one another; apart from the observation of price fluctuations there is no social control--no social link exists between the individual producers other than the exchange of commodities. The question arises how these innumerable disconnected operations can lead to the actual total of production. This general aspect of our problem indeed strikes us immediately as one of prime importance. But if we put it this way, we overlook the fact that such private producers are not simply producers of commodities but are essentially capitalist producers, that the total production of society is not simply production for the sake of satisfying social requirements, and equally not merely production of commodities, but essentially capitalist production. Let us examine our problem anew in the light of this fact. A producer who produces not only commodities but capital must above all create surplus value. The capitalist producer's final goal, his main incentive, is the production of surplus value. The proceeds from the commodities he has manufactured must not only recompense him for all his outlay, but in addition they must yield him a value which does not correspond with any expense on his part, and is pure gain. If we consider the process of production from the point of view of the creation of surplus value, we see that the capital advanced by the capitalist is divided into two parts: the first part represents his expenses on means of production such as premises, raw material, partly finished goods and machinery. The second part is spent on wages. This holds good, even if the capitalist producer does not know it himself, and in spite of the pious stuff about fixed and circulating capital with which he may delude himself and the world. Marx called this first part constant capital. Its value is not changed by its utilisation in the labour process--it is transferred _in toto_ to the finished product. The second part Marx calls the variable capital. This gives rise to an additional value, which materialises when the results of unpaid labour are appropriated. The various components which make up the value of every commodity produced by capitalist methods may be expressed by the formula: _c + v + s_. In this formula _c_ stands for the value of the constant capital laid out in inanimate means of production and transferred to the commodity, _v_ stands for the value of the variable capital advanced in form of wages, and _s_ stands for the surplus value, the additional value of the unpaid part of wage labour. Every type of goods shows these three components of value, whether we consider an individual commodity or the aggregate of commodities as a whole, whether we consider cotton textiles or ballet performances, cast-iron tubes or liberal newspapers. Thus for the capitalist producer the manufacture of commodities is not an end in itself, it is only a means to the appropriation of surplus value. This surplus value, however, can be of no use to the capitalist so long as it remains hidden in the commodity form of the product. Once the commodity has been produced, it must be realised, it must be converted into a form of pure value; that is, into money. All capital expenses incorporated in the commodity must shed their commodity-form and revert to the capitalist as money to make this conversion possible so that he can appropriate the surplus value in cash. The purpose of production is fulfilled only when this conversion has been successful, only when the aggregate of commodities has been sold according to its value. The proceeds of this sale of commodities, the money that has been received for them, contains the same components of value as the former aggregate of commodities and can be expressed by the same formula _c + v + s_. Part _c_ recompenses the capitalist for his advances on means of production that have been used up, part _v_ recompenses him for his advances on wages, and the last part, _s_, represents the expected surplus, the capitalist's clear profit in cash.[59] This conversion of capital from its original form, from the starting point of all capitalist production, into means of production, dead and living, such as raw materials, instruments, and labour; its further conversion into commodities by a living labour process; and its final reconversion into money, a greater amount of money indeed than at the initial stage--this transformation of capital is, however, required for more than the production and appropriation of surplus value. The aim and incentive of capitalist production is not a surplus value pure and simple, to be appropriated in any desired quantity, but a surplus value ever growing into larger quantities, surplus value _ad infinitum_. But to achieve this aim, the same magic means must be used over and over again, the means of capitalist production--the ever repeated appropriation of the proceeds of unpaid wage labour in the process of commodity manufacture, and the subsequent realisation of the commodities so produced. Thus quite a new incentive is given to constantly renewed production, to the process of reproduction as a regular phenomenon in capitalist society, an incentive unknown to any other system of production. In every other economic system known to history, reproduction is determined by the unceasing need of society for consumer goods, whether they are the needs of all the workers determined in a democratic manner as in an agrarian and communist market community, or the despotically determined needs of an antagonistic class society, as in an economy of slave labour or _corvée_ and the like. But in a capitalist system of production, it is not consideration of social needs which actuates the individual private producer who alone matters in this connection. His production is determined entirely by the effective demand, and even this is to him a mere means for the realisation of surplus value which for him is indispensable. Appropriation of surplus value is his real incentive, and production of consumer goods for the satisfaction of the effective demand is only a detour when we look to the real motive, that of appropriation of surplus value, although for the individual capitalist it is also a rule of necessity. This motive, to appropriate surplus value, also urges him to re-engage in reproduction over and over again. It is the production of surplus value which turns reproduction of social necessities into a _perpetuum mobile_. Reproduction, for its part, can obviously be only resumed when the products of the previous period, the commodities, have been realised; that is, converted into money; for capital in the form of money, in the form of pure value, must always be the starting point of reproduction in a capitalist system. The first condition of reproduction for the capitalist producer is thus seen to be a successful realisation of the commodities produced during the preceding period of production. Now we come to a second important point. Under a system of private economy, it is the individual producer who determines the volume of reproduction at his discretion. His main incentive is appropriation of surplus value, indeed an appropriation increasing as rapidly as possible. An accelerated appropriation of surplus value, however, necessitates an increased production of capital to generate this surplus value. Here a large-scale enterprise enjoys advantages over a small one in every respect. In fine, the capitalist method of production furnishes not only a permanent incentive to reproduction in general, but also a motive for its expansion, for reproduction on an ever larger scale. Nor is that all. Capitalist methods of production do more than awaken in the capitalist this thirst for surplus value whereby he is impelled to ceaseless expansion of reproduction. Expansion becomes in truth a coercive law, an economic condition of existence for the individual capitalist. Under the rule of competition, cheapness of commodities is the most important weapon of the individual capitalist in his struggle for a place in the market. Now all methods of reducing the cost of commodity production permanently amount in the end to an expansion of production; excepting those only which aim at a specific increase of the rate of surplus value by measures such as wage-cutting or lengthening the hours of work. As for these latter devices, they are as such likely to encounter many obstacles. In this respect, a large enterprise invariably enjoys advantages of every kind over a small or medium concern. They may range from a saving in premises or instruments, in the application of more efficient means of production, in extensive replacement of manual labour by machinery, down to a speedy exploitation of a favourable turn of the market so as to acquire raw materials cheaply. Within very wide limits, these advantages increase in direct proportion to the expansion of the enterprise. Thus, as soon as a few capitalist enterprises have been enlarged, competition itself forces all others to expand likewise. Expansion becomes a condition of existence. A growing tendency towards reproduction at a progressively increasing scale thus ensues, which spreads automatically like a tidal wave over ever larger surfaces of reproduction. Expanding reproduction is not a new discovery of capital. On the contrary, it had been the rule since time immemorial in every form of society that displayed economic and cultural progress. It is true, of course, that simple reproduction as a mere continuous repetition of the process of production on the same scale as before can be observed over long periods of social history. In the ancient agrarian and communist village communities, for instance, increase in population did not lead to a gradual expansion of production, but rather to the new generation being expelled and the subsequent founding of equally small and self-sufficient colonies. The old small handicraft units of India and China provide similar instances of a traditional repetition of production in the same forms and on the same scale, handed down from generation to generation. But simple reproduction is in all these cases the source and unmistakable sign of a general economic and cultural stagnation. No important forward step in production, no memorial of civilisation, such as the great waterworks of the East, the pyramids of Egypt, the military roads of Rome, the Arts and Sciences of Greece, or the development of craftsmanship and towns in the Middle Ages would have been possible without expanding reproduction; for the basis and also the social incentive for a decisive advancement of civilisation lies solely in the gradual expansion of production beyond immediate requirements, and in a continual growth of the population itself as well as of its demands. Exchange in particular, which brought about a class society, and its historical development into the capitalist form of economy, would have been unthinkable without expanding reproduction. In a capitalist society, moreover, expanding reproduction acquires certain characteristics. As we have already mentioned, it becomes right away a coercive law to the individual capitalist. Capitalist methods of production do not exclude simple or even retrogressive reproduction; indeed, this is responsible for the periodical phenomenon of crises following phases, likewise periodical, of overstrained expansion of reproduction in times of boom. But ignoring periodical fluctuations, the general trend of reproduction is ever towards expansion. For the individual capitalist, failure to keep abreast of this expansion means quitting the competitive struggle, economic death. Moreover, there are certain other aspects to be considered. The concept of expanding reproduction applies only to the quantity of products, to the aggregate of manufactured objects. So long as production rests solely or mainly upon a natural economy, consumption determines the extent and character of the individual labour process, as well as that of reproduction in general, as an end in itself: this applies to the agrarian and communist village communities of India, to the Roman _villa_ with its economy of slave labour, and to the medieval feudal farm based on _corvée_. But the picture is different in a capitalist economic system. Capitalist production is not production for the purpose of consumption, it is production for the purpose of creating value. The whole process of production as well as of reproduction is ruled by value relationships. Capitalist production is not the production of consumer goods, nor is it merely the production of commodities: it is pre-eminently the production of surplus value. Expanding reproduction, from a capitalist point of view, is expanding production of surplus value, though it takes place in the forms of commodity production and is thus in the last instance the production of consumer goods. Changes in the productivity of labour during the course of reproduction cause continual discrepancies between these two aspects. If productivity increases, the same amount of capital and surplus value may represent a progressively larger amount of consumer goods. Expanding production, understood as the creation of a greater amount of surplus value, need not therefore necessarily imply expanding reproduction in the capitalist meaning of the term. Conversely, capital may, within limits, yield a greater surplus value in consequence of a higher degree of exploitation such as is brought about by wage-cutting and the like, without actually producing a greater amount of goods. But in both cases the surplus value has a twofold aspect: it is a quantity of value as well as an aggregate of material products, and from a capitalist point of view, its elements in both instances are thus the same. As a rule, an increased production of surplus value results from an increase of capital brought about by addition of part of the appropriated surplus value to the original capital, no matter whether this capitalist surplus value is used for the expansion of an old enterprise or for founding a new one, an independent offshoot. Capitalist expanding reproduction thus acquires the specific characteristics of an increase in capital by means of a progressive capitalisation of surplus value, or, as Marx has put it, by the accumulation of capital. The general formula for enlarged reproduction under the rule of capital thus runs as follows: _c + v + s/x + s´_. Here _s/x_ stands for the capitalised part of the surplus value appropriated in an earlier period of production; _s´_ stands for the new surplus value created by the increased capital. Part of this new surplus value is capitalised again, and expanding reproduction is thus, from the capitalist point of view, a constantly flowing process of alternate appropriation and capitalisation of surplus value. So far, however, we have only arrived at a general and abstract formula for reproduction. Let us now consider more closely the concrete conditions which are necessary to apply this formula. The surplus value which has been appropriated, after it has successfully cast off its commodity-form in the market, appears as a given amount of money. This money-form is the form of its absolute value, the beginning of its career as capital. But as it is impossible to create surplus value with money, it cannot, in this form, advance beyond the threshold of its career. Capital must assume commodity-form, so that the particular portion of it which is earmarked for accumulation can be capitalised. For only in this form can it become productive capital; that is, capital begetting new surplus value. Therefore, like the original capital, it must again be divided into two parts; a constant part, comprising the inanimate means of production, and a variable part, the wages. Only then will our formula _c + v + s_ apply to it in the same way as it applied to the old capital. But the good intent of the capitalist to accumulate, his thrift and abstinence which make him use the greater part of his surplus value for production instead of squandering it on personal luxuries, is not sufficient for this purpose. On the contrary, it is essential that he should find on the commodity market the concrete forms which he intends to give his new surplus value. In the first place, he must secure the material means of production such as raw materials, machines etc. required for the branch of production he has chosen and planned, so that the particular part of the surplus value which corresponds to his constant capital may assume a productive form. Secondly, the other, variable part of his surplus value must also be convertible, and two essentials are necessary for this conversion: of first importance, the labour market must offer a sufficient quantity of additional labour, and secondly, as the workers cannot live on money alone, the commodity market, too, must offer an additional amount of provisions, which the workers newly to be employed may exchange against the variable part of the surplus value they will get from the capitalist. All these prerequisites found, the capitalist can set his capitalised surplus value to work and make it, as operating capital, beget new surplus value. But still his task is not completely done. Both the new capital and the surplus value produced still exist for the time being in the shape of an additional quantity of some commodity or other. In this form the new capital is but advanced, and the new surplus value created by it is still in a form in which it is of no use to the capitalist. The new capital as well as the surplus value which it has created must cast off their commodity-form, re-assume the form of pure value, and thus revert to the capitalist as money. Unless this process is successfully concluded, the new capital and surplus value will be wholly or partly lost, the capitalisation of surplus value will have miscarried, and there will have been no accumulation. It is absolutely essential to the accumulation of capital that a sufficient quantity of commodities created by the new capital should win a place for itself on the market and be realised. Thus we see that expanding reproduction as accumulation of capital in a capitalist system is bound up with a whole series of special conditions. Let us look at these more closely. The first condition is that production should create surplus value, for surplus value is the elementary form in which alone increased production is possible under capitalist conditions. The entire process of production must abide by this condition when determining the relations between capitalist and worker in the production of commodities. Once this first condition is given, the second is that surplus value must be realised, converted into the form of money, so that it can be appropriated for the purposes of expanding reproduction. This second condition thus leads us to the commodity market. Here, the hazards of exchange decide the further fate of the surplus value, and thus the future of reproduction. The third condition is as follows: provided that part of the realised surplus value has been added to capital for the purpose of accumulation, this new capital must first assume its productive form of labour and inanimate means of production. Moreover, that part of it which had been exchanged for labour must be converted into provisions for the workers. Thus we are led again to the markets of labour and commodities. If all these requirements have been met and enlarged reproduction of commodities has taken place, a fourth condition must be added: the additional quantity of commodities representing the new capital plus surplus value will have to be realised, that is, reconverted into money. Only if this conversion has been successful, can it be said that expanding capitalist reproduction has actually taken place. This last condition leads us back to the commodity market. Thus capitalist production and reproduction imply a constant shifting between the place of production and the commodity market, a shuttle movement from the private office and the factory where unauthorised persons are strictly excluded, where the sovereign will of the individual capitalist is the highest law, to the commodity market where nobody sets up any laws and where neither will nor reason assert themselves. But it is this very licence and anarchy of the commodity market which brings home to the individual capitalist that he is dependent upon society, upon the entirety of its producing and consuming members. The individual capitalist may need additional means of production, additional labour and provisions for these workers in order to expand reproduction, but whether he can get what he needs depends upon factors and events beyond his control, materialising, as it were, behind his back. In order to realise his increased aggregate of products, the individual capitalist requires a larger market for his goods, but he has no control whatever over the actual increase of demand in general, or of the particular demand for his special kind of good. The conditions we have enumerated here, which all give expression to the inherent contradiction between consumption and private production and their social interconnection, are nothing new, and it is not only at the stage of reproduction that they become apparent. These conditions express the general contradiction inherent in capitalist production. They involve, however, particular difficulties as regards the process of reproduction for the following reasons. With regard to reproduction, especially expanding reproduction, the capitalist method of production not only reveals its general fundamental character, but, what is more, it shows, in the various periods of production, a definite rhythm within a continuous progression--the characteristic interplay of individual wills. From this point of view, we must inquire in a general way how it is possible for every individual capitalist to find on the market the means of production and the labour he requires for the purpose of realising the commodities he has produced, although there exists no social control whatever, no plan to harmonize production and demand. This question may be answered by saying that the capitalist's greed for surplus value, enhanced by competition, and the automatic effects of capitalist exploitation, lead to the production of every kind of commodity, including means of production, and also that a growing class of proletarianised workers becomes generally available for the purposes of capital. On the other hand, the lack of a plan in this respect shows itself in the fact that the balance between demand and supply in all spheres can be achieved only by continuous deviations, by hourly fluctuations of prices, and by periodical crises and changes of the market situation. From the point of view of reproduction the question is a different one. How is it possible that the unplanned supply in the market for labour and means of production, and the unplanned and incalculable changes in demand nevertheless provide adequate quantities and qualities of means of production, labour and opportunities for selling which the individual capitalist needs in order to make a sale? How can it be assured that every one of these factors increases in the right proportion? Let us put the problem more precisely. According to our well-known formula, let the composition of the individual capitalist's production be expressed by the proportion _40c + 10v + 10s_. His constant capital is consequently four times as much as his variable capital, and the rate of exploitation is 100 per cent. The aggregate of commodities is thus represented by a value of 60. Let us now assume that the capitalist is in a position to capitalise and to add to the old capital of this given composition half of his surplus value. In this case, the formula _44c + 11v + 11s = 66_ would apply to the next period of production. Let us assume now that the capitalist can continue the annual capitalisation of half his surplus value for a number of years. For this purpose it is not sufficient that means of production, labour and markets in general should be forthcoming, but he must find these factors in a proportion that is strictly in keeping with his progress in accumulation. FOOTNOTES: [58] 'If production be capitalistic in form, so, too, will be reproduction' (_Capital_, vol. i, p. 578). [59] Surplus value in our exposition is identical with profit. This is true for production as a whole, which alone is of account in our further observations. For the time being, we shall not deal with the further division of surplus value into its component parts: profit of enterprise, interest, and rent, as this subdivision is immaterial to the problem of reproduction. _CHAPTER II_ QUESNAY'S AND ADAM SMITH'S ANALYSES OF THE PROCESS OF REPRODUCTION So far we have taken account only of the individual capitalist in our survey of reproduction; he is its typical representative, its agent, for reproduction is indeed brought about entirely by individual capitalist enterprises. This approach has already shown us that the problem involves difficulties enough. Yet these difficulties increase to an extraordinary degree and become even more complicated, when we turn our attention from the individual capitalist to the totality of capitalists. A superficial glance suffices to show that capitalist reproduction as a social whole must not be regarded simply as a mechanical summation of all the separate processes of individual capitalist reproduction. We have seen, for instance, that one of the fundamental conditions for enlarged reproduction by an individual capitalist is a corresponding increase of his opportunities to sell on the commodity market. But the individual capitalist may not always expand because of an absolute increase in the absorptive capacity of the market, but also as a result of the competitive struggle, at the cost of other individual capitalists. Thus one capitalist may win what another or many others who have been shouldered from the market must write off as a loss. This process will enable one capitalist to increase his reproduction by the amount that it compels others by losses to restrict their own. One capitalist will be able to engage in enlarged reproduction because others cannot even achieve simple reproduction. In the same way, one capitalist may enlarge his reproduction by using labour power and means of production which another's bankruptcy, that is his partial or complete retirement from reproduction, has set free. These commonplaces prove that reproduction of the social capital as a whole is not the same as the reproduction of the individual capitalist raised to the _n_th degree. They show that the reproductive activities of individual capitalists ceaselessly cut across one another and to a greater or smaller degree may cancel each other out. Therefore we must clarify our concept of reproduction of capital as a whole, before we examine the laws and mechanisms of capitalist total reproduction. We must raise the question whether it is even possible to deduce anything like total reproduction from the disorderly jumble of individual capitals in constant motion, changing from moment to moment according to uncontrollable and incalculable laws, partly running a parallel course, and partly intersecting and cancelling each other out. Can one actually talk of total social capital of society as an entity, and if so, what is the real meaning of this concept? That is the first question a scientific examination of the laws of reproduction has to consider. At the dawn of economic theory and bourgeois economics, Quesnay, the father of the Physiocrats, approached the problem with classical fearlessness and simplicity and took it for granted that total capital exists as a real and active entity. In his famous _Tableau Économique_, so intricate that no one before Marx could understand it, Quesnay demonstrated the phases of the reproduction of aggregate capital with a few figures, at the same time taking into account that it must also be considered from the aspect of commodity exchange, that is as a process of circulation.[60] Society as Quesnay sees it consists of three classes: the productive class of agriculturists; the sterile class containing all those who are active outside the sphere of agriculture--industry, commerce, and the liberal professions; and lastly the class of landowners, including the Sovereign and the collectors of tithes. The national aggregate product materialises in the hands of the productive class as an aggregate of provisions and raw materials to the value of some 5,000 million livres. Of this sum, 2,000 millions represent the annual working capital of agriculture, 1,000 millions represent the annual wear and tear of fixed capital, and 2,000 millions are the net revenue accruing to the landowners. Apart from this total produce, the agriculturists, here conceived quite in capitalist terms as tenant farmers, have 2,000 million livres cash in hand. Circulation now takes place in such a way that the tenant class pay the landowners 2,000 millions cash as rent (as the cost of the previous period of production). For this money the landowning class buy provisions from the tenants for 1,000 millions and industrial products from the sterile class for the remaining 1,000 millions. The tenants in their turn buy industrial products for the 1,000 millions handed back to them, whereupon the sterile class buy agricultural products for the 2,000 millions they have in hand: for 1,000 millions raw materials etc., to replace their annual working capital, and provisions for the remaining 1,000 millions. Thus the money has in the end returned to its starting point, the tenant class; the product is distributed among all classes so that consumption is ensured for everyone; at the same time the means of production of the sterile as well as of the productive class have been renewed and the landowning class has received its revenue. The prerequisites of reproduction are all present, the conditions of circulation have all been fulfilled, and reproduction can start again on its regular course.[61] We shall see later in the course of our investigation that this exposition, though showing flashes of genius, remains deficient and primitive. In any case, we must stress here that Quesnay, on the threshold of scientific economics, had not the slightest doubt as to the possibility of demonstrating total social capital and its reproduction. Adam Smith, on the other hand, while giving a more profound analysis of the relations of capital, laid out what seems like a maze when compared with the clear and sweeping outlines of the Physiocrat conception. By his wrong analysis of prices, Smith upset the whole foundation of the scientific demonstration of the capitalist process as a whole. This wrong analysis of prices ruled bourgeois economics for a long time; it is the theory which maintains that, although the value of a commodity represents the amount of labour spent in its production, yet the price consists of three elements only: the wage of labour, the profit of capital, and the rent. As this obviously must also apply to the aggregate of commodities, the national product, we are faced with the startling discovery that, although the value of the aggregate of commodities manufactured by capitalist methods represents all paid wages together with the profits of capital and the rents, that is the aggregate surplus value, and consequently can replace these, there is no component of value which corresponds to the constant capital used in production. According to Smith, _v + s_ is the formula expressing the value of the capitalist product as a whole. Demonstrating his view with the example of corn, Smith says as follows: These three parts (wages, profit, and rent) seem either immediately or ultimately to make up the whole price of corn. A fourth part, it may perhaps be thought, is necessary for replacing the stock of the farmer, or for compensating the wear and tear of his labouring cattle, and other instruments of husbandry. But it must be considered that the price of any instrument of husbandry, such as a labouring horse, is itself made up of the same three parts: the rent of the land upon which he is reared, the labour of tending and rearing him, and the profits of the farmer who advances both the rent of this land and the wages of this labour. Though the price of the corn, therefore, may pay the price as well as the maintenance of the horse, the whole price still resolves itself either immediately or ultimately into the same three parts of rent, of labour and profit.'[62] Sending us in this manner 'from pillar to post', as Marx has put it, Smith again and again resolved constant capital into _v + s_. However, he had occasional doubts and from time to time relapsed into the contrary opinion. He says in the second book: 'It has been shown in the first Book, that the price of the greater part of commodities resolves itself into three parts, of which one pays the wages of the labour, another the profits of the stock, and a third the rent of the land which had been employed in producing and bringing them to market.... Since this is the case ... with regard to every particular commodity, taken separately; it must be so with regard to all the commodities which compose the whole annual produce of the land and labour of every country, taken complexly. The whole price or exchangeable value of that annual produce must resolve itself into the same three parts, and be parcelled out among the different inhabitants of the country, either as the wages of their labour, the profits of their stock, or the rent of their land.'[63] Here Smith hesitates and immediately below explains: 'But though the whole value of the annual produce of the land and labour of every country is thus divided among and constitutes a revenue to its different inhabitants, yet as in the rent of a private estate we distinguish between the gross rent and the neat rent, so may we likewise in the revenue of all the inhabitants of a great country. 'The gross rent of a private estate comprehends whatever is paid by the farmer; the neat rent, what remains free to the landlord after deducting the expense of management, of repairs, and all other necessary charges; or what, without hurting his estate, he can afford to place in his stock reserved for immediate consumption, or to spend upon his table, equipage, the ornaments of his house and furniture, his private enjoyments and amusements. His real wealth is in proportion, not to his gross, but to his neat rent. 'The gross revenue of all the inhabitants of a great country comprehends the whole annual produce of their land and labour; the neat revenue, what remains free to them after deducting the expense of maintaining, first, their fixed, and secondly, their circulating capital, or what, without encroaching upon their capital, they can place in their stock reserved for immediate consumption, or spend upon their subsistence, conveniences, and amusements. Their real wealth too is in proportion, not to their gross, but to their neat revenue.'[64] Here Smith introduces a portion of value which corresponds to constant capital, only to eliminate it the very next moment by resolving it into wages, profits, and rents. And in the end, the matter rests with this explanation: 'As the machines and instruments of trade, etc. which compose the fixed capital either of an individual or of a society, make no part either of the gross or the neat revenue of either, so money, by means of which the whole revenue of the society is regularly distributed among all its different members, makes itself no part of that revenue.'[65] Constant capital, the fixed capital of Adam Smith, is thus put on the same level as money and does not enter into the total produce of society, its gross revenue. It does not exist within this total product as an element of value. You cannot get blood out of a stone, and so circulation, the mutual exchange of the total product constituted in this manner, can only lead to realisation of the wages (_v_) and of the surplus value (_s_). However, as it cannot by any means replace the constant capital, continued reproduction evidently must become impossible. Smith indeed knew quite well, and did not dream of denying, that every individual capitalist requires constant capital in addition to his wages fund, his variable capital, in order to run his enterprise. Yet the above analysis of commodity prices, when it comes to take note of capitalist production as a whole, allows constant capital to disappear without a trace in a puzzling way. Thus the problem of the reproduction of capital is completely muddled up. It is plain that if the most elementary premise of the problem, the demonstration of social capital as a whole, were on the rocks, the whole analysis was bound to fail. Ricardo, Say, Sismondi and others took up this erroneous theory of Adam Smith, and they all stumbled in their observations on the problem of reproduction over this most elementary difficulty: the demonstration of social capital. Another difficulty is mixed up with the foregoing from the very outset of scientific analysis. What is the nature of the total capital of a society? As regards the individual producer, the position is clear: his capital consists of the expenses of his enterprise. Assuming capitalist methods of production, the value of his product yields him a surplus over and above his expenses, that surplus value which does not replace his capital but constitutes his net income, which he can consume completely without encroaching upon his capital and which is thus his fund of consumption. It is true that the capitalist may save part of this net income, not consuming it himself but adding it to his capital. But that is another matter, a new step, the formation of a new capital which again must be replaced by subsequent reproduction and must again yield him a surplus. In any case, the capital of an individual always consists of what he requires for production, together with his advances on the running of his enterprise, and his income is what he himself actually consumes or may consume, his fund of consumption. If we ask a capitalist: 'What are the wages you pay your workers?' his answer will be: 'They are obviously part of my working capital.' But if we ask: 'What are these wages for the workers who have received them?'--it is impossible that he should describe them as capital, for wages received are not capital for the workers but income, their fund of consumption. Let us now take another example. A manufacturer of machinery produces machines in his factory. The annual output is a certain number of machines. In its value, however, this annual output contains the capital advanced by the manufacturer as well as the net income that has been earned. Part of the manufactured machines thus represent income for the manufacturer and are destined to realise this income in the process of circulation and exchange. But the person who buys these machines from the manufacturer does not buy them as income but in order to use them as a means of production; for him they are capital. These examples make it seem plausible that an object which is capital for one person may be income for another and _vice versa_. How can it be possible under these circumstances to construct anything in the nature of a total capital of society? Indeed almost every scientific economist up to the time of Marx concluded that there is no social capital.[66] Smith was still doubtful, undecided, vacillating about this question; so was Ricardo. But already Say declared categorically: 'It is in this way, that the total value of products is distributed amongst the members of the community; I say, the _total_ value, because such part of the whole value produced, as does not go to one of the consuming producers, is received by the rest. The clothier buys wool of the farmer, pays his workmen in every department, and sells the cloth, the result of their united exertion, at a price that reimburses all his advances, and affords himself a profit. He never reckons as profit, or as the revenue of his own industry, anything more than the _net_ surplus, after deducting all charges and outgoings; but those outgoings are merely an advance of their respective revenues to the previous producers, which are refunded by the _gross_ value of the cloth. The price paid to the farmer for his wool is the compound of the several revenues of the cultivator, the shepherd and the landlord. Although the farmer reckons as _net_ produce only the surplus remaining after payment of his landlord and his servants in husbandry, yet to them these payments are items of revenue--rent to the one and wages to the other--to the one, the revenue of the land, to the other, the revenue of his industry. The aggregate of all these is defrayed out of the value of the cloth, the whole of which forms the revenue of some one or other, and is entirely absorbed in that way.--Whence it appears that the term _net_ produce applies only to the individual revenue of each separate producer or adventurer in industry, but that the aggregate of individual revenue, the total revenue of the community, is equal to the _gross_ produce of its land, capital and industry, which entirely subverts the system of the economists of the last century, who considered nothing but the net produce of the land as farming revenue, and therefore concluded, that this net produce was all that the community had to consume; instead of closing with the obvious inference, that the whole of what had been created, may also be consumed by mankind.'[67] Say proves his theory in his own peculiar fashion. Whereas Adam Smith tried to give a proof by referring each private capital unit to its place of production in order to resolve it into a mere product of labour, but conceived of every product of labour in strictly capitalist terms as a sum of paid and unpaid labour, as _v + s_, and thus came to resolve the total product of society into _v + s_; Say, of course, is cocksure enough to 'correct' these classical errors by inflating them into common vulgarities. His argument is based upon the fact that the entrepreneur at every stage of production pays other people, the representatives of previous stages of production, for the means of production which are capital for him, and that these people in their turn put part of this payment into their own pockets as their income and partly use it to recoup themselves for expenses advanced in order to provide yet another set of people with an income. Say converts Adam Smith's endless chain of labour processes into an equally unending chain of mutual advances on income and their repayment from the proceeds of sales. The worker appears here as the absolute equal of the entrepreneur. He has his income advanced in the form of wages, paying for it in turn by the labour he performs. Thus the final value of the aggregate social product appears as the sum of a large number of advanced incomes and is spent in the process of exchange on repayment of all these advances. It is characteristic of Say's superficiality that he illustrates the social connections of capitalist reproduction by the example of watch manufacture--a branch of production which at that time and partly even to-day is pure 'manufacture' where every worker is also an entrepreneur on a small scale and the process of production of surplus value is masked by a series of successive acts of exchange typical of simple commodity production. Thus Say gives an extremely crude expression to the confusion inaugurated by Adam Smith. The aggregate of annual social produce can be completely resolved as regards its value into a sequence of various incomes. Therefore it is completely consumed every year. It remains an enigma how production can be taken up again without capital and means of production, and capitalist reproduction appears to be an insoluble problem. If we compare the varying approaches to the problem from the time of the Physiocrats to that of Adam Smith, we cannot fail to recognise partial progress as well as partial regression. The main characteristic of the economic conception of the Physiocrats was their assumption that agriculture alone creates a surplus, that is surplus value, and that agricultural labour is the only kind of labour which is productive in the capitalist sense of the term. Consequently we see in the _Tableau Économique_ that the unproductive class of industrial workers creates value only to the extent of the same 2,000 million livres which it consumes as raw materials and foodstuffs. Consequently, too, in the process of exchange, the total of manufactured products is divided into two parts, one of which goes to the tenant class and the other to the landowning class, while the manufacturing class does not consume its own products. Thus in the value of its commodities, the manufacturing class reproduces, strictly speaking, only that circulating capital which has been consumed, and no income is created for the class of entrepreneurs. The only income of society that comes into circulation in excess of all capital advances, is created in agriculture and is consumed by the landowning class in the form of rents, while even the tenant class do no more than replace their capital: to wit, 1,000 million livres interest from the fixed capital and 2,000 million circulating capital, two-thirds being raw materials and foodstuffs, and one-third industrial products. Further it is striking that it is in agriculture alone that Quesnay assumes the existence of fixed capital which he calls _avances primitives_ as distinct from _avances annuelles_. Industry, as he sees it, apparently works without any fixed capital, only with circulating capital turned over each year, and consequently does not create in its annual output of commodities any element of value for making good the wear and tear of fixed capital (such as premises, tools, and so on).[68] In contrast with this obvious defect, the English classical school shows a decisive advance above all in proclaiming every kind of labour as productive, thus revealing the creation of surplus value in manufacture as well as in agriculture. We say: the English classical school, because on this point Adam Smith himself occasionally relapses quietly into the Physiocrat point of view. It is only Ricardo who develops the theory of the value of labour as highly and logically as it could advance within the limits of the bourgeois approach. The consequence is that we must assume all capital investment to produce annual surplus value, in the manufacturing part of social production as a whole no less than in agriculture.[69] On the other hand, the discovery of the productive, value-creating property of every kind of labour, alike in agriculture and in manufacture, suggested to Smith that agricultural labour, too, must produce, apart from the rent for the landowning class, a surplus for the tenant class over and above the total of their capital expenses. Thus, in addition to the replacement of capital, an annual income of the tenant class comes into being.[70] Lastly, by a systematic elaboration of the concepts of _avances primitives_ and _avances annuelles_ introduced by Quesnay, which he calls fixed and circulating capital, Smith has made clear, among other things, that the manufacturing side of social production requires a fixed as well as a circulating capital. Thus he was well on the way to restoring to order the concepts of capital and revenue of society, and to describing them in precise terms. The following exposition represents the highest level of clarity which he achieved in this respect: 'Though the whole annual produce of the land and labour of every country is, no doubt, ultimately destined for supplying the consumption of its inhabitants and for procuring a revenue to them, yet when it first comes either from the ground or from the hands of the productive labourer, it naturally divides itself into two parts. One of them, and frequently the largest, is, in the first place, destined for replacing a capital, or for renewing the provisions, materials, and finished work, which had been withdrawn from a capital; the other for constituting a revenue either to the owner of this capital, as the profit of his stock, or to some other person, as the rent of his land.'[71] 'The gross revenue of all the inhabitants of a great country comprehends the whole annual produce of their land and labour; the neat revenue, what remains free to them after deducting the expense of maintaining, first, their fixed, and secondly, their circulating capital; or what, without encroaching upon their capital, they can place in their stock reserved for immediate consumption, or spend upon their subsistence, conveniencies, and amusements. Their real wealth too is in proportion, not to their gross, but to their neat revenue.'[72] The concepts of total capital and income appear here in a more comprehensive and stricter form than in the _Tableau Économique_. The one-sided connection of social income with agriculture is severed and social income becomes a broader concept; and a broader concept of capital in its two forms, fixed and circulating capital, is made the basis of social production as a whole. Instead of the misleading differentiation of production into two departments, agriculture and industry, other categories of real importance are here brought to the fore: the distinction between capital and income and the distinction, further, between fixed and circulating capital. Now Smith proceeds to a further analysis of the mutual relations of these categories and of how they change in the course of the social process, in production and circulation--in the reproductive process of society. He emphasises here a radical distinction between fixed and circulating capital from the point of view of the society: 'The whole expense of maintaining the fixed capital must evidently be excluded from the neat revenue of the society. Neither the materials necessary for supporting their useful machines and instruments of trade, their profitable buildings, etc., nor the produce of the labour necessary for fashioning those materials into the proper form, can ever make any part of it. The price of that labour may indeed make a part of it; as the workmen so employed may place the whole value of their wages in their stock reserved for immediate consumption. But in other sorts of labour, both the price and the produce go to this stock, the price to that of the workmen, the produce to that of other people whose subsistence, convenience and amusements are augmented by the labour of those workmen.'[73] Here Smith comes up against the important distinction between workers who produce means of production and those who produce consumer goods. With regard to the former he remarks that they create the value--destined to replace their wages and to serve as their income--in the form of means of production such as raw materials and instruments which in their natural form cannot be consumed. With regard to the latter category of workers, Smith observes that conversely the total product, or better that part of value contained in it which replaces the wages, the income of the workers together with its other remaining value, appears here in the form of consumer goods. (The real meaning latent in this conclusion, though Smith does not say so explicitly, is that the part of the product which represents the fixed capital employed in its production appears likewise in this form.) In the further course of our investigation we shall see how close Smith has here come to the vantage point from which Marx tackled the problem. The general conclusion, however, maintained by Smith without any further examination of the fundamental question, is that, in any case, whatever is destined for the preservation and renewal of the fixed capital of society cannot be added to society's net income. The position is different with regard to circulating capital. 'But though the whole expenses of maintaining the fixed capital is thus necessarily excluded from the neat revenue of the society, it is not the same case with that of maintaining the circulating capital. Of the four parts of which this latter capital is composed, money, provisions, materials and finished work, the three last, it has already been observed, are regularly withdrawn from it and placed either in the fixed capital of the society, or in their stock reserved for immediate consumption. Whatever portion of those consumable goods is not employed in maintaining the former, goes all to the latter, and makes a part of the neat revenue of the society, besides what is necessary for maintaining the fixed capital.'[74] We see that Smith here simply includes in this category of circulating capital everything but the fixed capital already employed, that is to say, foodstuffs and raw materials and in part commodities which, according to their natural form, belong to the replacement of fixed capital. Thus he has made the concept of circulating capital vague and ambiguous. But a further and most important distinction crops up and cuts right through this conception: 'The circulating capital of a society is in this respect different from that of an individual. That of an individual is totally excluded from making any part of his neat revenue, which must consist altogether in his profits. But though the circulating capital of every individual makes a part of that of the society to which he belongs, it is not upon that account totally excluded from making a part likewise of their neat revenues.'[75] In the following illustration Smith expounds what he means: 'Though the whole goods in a merchant's shop must by no means be placed in his own stock reserved for immediate consumption, they may in that of other people, who, from a revenue derived from other funds, may regularly replace their value to him, together with its profits, without occasioning any diminution either of his capital or theirs.'[76] Here Smith has established fundamental categories with regard to the reproduction and movement of circulating social capital. Fixed and circulating capital, private and social capital, private and social revenue, means of production and consumer goods, are marked out as comprehensive categories, and their real, objective interrelation is partly indicated and partly drowned in the subjective and theoretical contradictions of Smith's analysis. The concise, strict, and classically clear scheme of the Physiocrat theory is dissolved here into a disorderly jumble of concepts and relations which at first glance appears an absolute chaos. But we may already perceive new connections within the social process of reproduction, understood by Smith in a deeper, more modern and vital way than was within Quesnay's grasp, though, like Michelangelo's slave in the unhewn block of marble, they are still inchoate. This is the only illustration Smith gives of this problem. But at the same time he attacks it from another angle--by an analysis of value. This very same theory which represents an advance beyond the Physiocrats--the theory that it is an essential quality of all labour to create value; the strictly capitalist distinction between paid labour replacing wages, and unpaid labour creating surplus value; and, finally, the strict division of surplus value into its two main categories, of profit and rent--all this progress from the analysis of the Physiocrats leads Smith to the strange proposition that the price of every commodity consists of wages, plus profits, plus rent, or, in Marx's shorthand, of _v + s_. In consequence, the commodities annually produced by society as a whole can be resolved completely, as to value, into the two components: wages and surplus value. Here the category of capital has disappeared all of a sudden; society produces nothing but income, nothing but consumer goods, which it also consumes completely. Reproduction without capital becomes a paradox, and the treatment of the problem as a whole has taken an immense backward step against that of the Physiocrats. The followers of Adam Smith have tackled this twofold theory from precisely the wrong approach. Before Marx nobody concerned himself with the important beginnings of an exact exposition of the problem in Smith's second book, while most of his followers jealously preserved Smith's radically wrong analysis of prices, accepting it, like Ricardo, without question, or else, like Say, elaborating it into a trite doctrine. Where Smith raised fruitful doubts and stimulating contradictions, Say flaunted the opinionated presumption of a commonplace mind. Smith's observation that the capital of one person may be the revenue of another induced Say to proclaim every distinction between capital and income on the social scale to be absurd. The absurdity, however, that income should completely absorb the total value of annual production which is thus consumed completely, assumes in Say's treatment the character of an absolutely valid dogma. If society annually consumes its own total product completely, social reproduction without any means of production whatever must become an annual repetition of the Miracle of the Creation. In this state the problem of reproduction remained up to the time of Karl Marx. FOOTNOTES: [60] 'Quesnay's _Tableau Économique_ shows ... how the result of national production in a certain year, amounting to some definite value, is distributed by means of the circulation in such a way, that ... reproduction can take place.... The innumerable individual acts of circulation are at once viewed in their characteristic social mass movement--the circulation between great social classes distinguished by their economic function' (_Capital_, vol. ii, p. 414). [61] Cf. _Analyse du Tableau Économique_, in _Journal de l'Agriculture, du Commerce et des Finances_, by Dupont (1766), pp. 305 ff. in Oncken's edition of _OEuvres de F. Quesnay_. Quesnay remarks explicitly that circulation as he describes it is based upon two conditions: unhampered trade, and a system of taxation applying only to rent: 'Yet these facts have indispensable conditions; that the freedom of commerce sustains the sale of products at a good price, ... and moreover, that the farmer need not pay any other direct or indirect charges but this income, part of which, say two sevenths, must form the revenue of the Sovereign' (op. cit., p. 311). [62] Adam Smith, _An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations_ (ed. MacCulloch, Edinburgh London, 1828), vol. i, pp. 86-8. [63] Op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 17-18. [64] Ibid., pp. 18-19. [65] Ibid., p. 23. [66] As to the concept of 'national capital' specific to Rodbertus, see below, Section II. [67] J. B. Say, _A Treatise on Political Economy_ (transl. by C. R. Prinsep, vol. ii, London, 1821); pp. 75-7. [68] Attention must be drawn to the fact that Mirabeau in his _Explications_ on the _Tableau Économique_ explicitly mentions the fixed capital of the unproductive class: 'The primary advances of this class, for the establishment of manufactures, for instruments, machines, mills, smithies (ironworks) and other factories ... (amount to) 2,000 million livres' (_Tableau Économique avec ses Explications_, 1760, p. 82). In his confusing sketch of the _Tableau_ itself, Mirabeau, too, fails to take this fixed capital of the sterile class into account. [69] Smith accordingly arrives at this general formulation: 'The value which the workmen add to the materials, therefore, resolves itself in this case into two parts, of which the one pays their wages, the other the profits of their employer upon the whole stock of materials and wages which he advanced' (op. cit., vol. i, p. 83). Further, in Book II, chap. 8, on industrial labour in particular: 'The labour of a manufacturer adds generally to the value of the materials which he works upon, that of his own maintenance and of his master's profit. The labour of a menial servant, on the contrary, adds to the value of nothing. Though the manufacturer has his wages advanced to him by his master, he in reality costs him no expense, the value of those wages being generally restored, together with a profit, in the improved value of the subject upon which his labour is bestowed' (op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 93-4). [70] 'The labourers ... therefore, employed in agriculture, not only occasion, like the workmen in manufactures, the reproduction of a value equal to their own consumption, or to the capital which employs them, together with its owner's profit, but of a much greater value. Over and above the capital of the farmer and all its profits, they regularly occasion the reproduction of the rent of the landlord' (ibid., p. 149). [71] Ibid., pp. 97-8. Yet already in the following sentence Smith converts capital completely into wages, that is variable capital: 'That part of the annual produce of the land and labour of any country which replaces a capital, never is immediately employed to maintain any but productive hands. It pays the wages of productive labour only. That which is immediately destined for constituting a revenue, either as profit or as rent, may maintain indifferently either productive or unproductive hands' (ibid., p. 98). [72] Ibid., p. 19. [73] Smith, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 19-20. [74] Ibid., vol. i, pp. 21-2. [75] Ibid., p. 22. [76] Ibid. _CHAPTER III_ A CRITICISM OF SMITH'S ANALYSIS Let us recapitulate the conclusions to which Smith's analysis has brought us: (1) There is a fixed capital of society, no part of which enters into its net revenue. This fixed capital consists in 'the materials necessary for supporting their useful machines and instruments of trade' and 'the produce of labour necessary for fashioning those materials into the proper form'.[77] By singling out the production of such fixed capital as of a special kind, and explicitly contrasting it with the production of consumer goods, Smith in effect transformed fixed capital into what Marx calls 'constant capital'--that part of capital which consists of all material means of production, as opposed to labour power. (2) There is a circulating capital of society. After eliminating the part of fixed, or constant, capital, there remains only the category of consumer goods; these are not capital for society but net revenue, a fund of consumption. (3) Capital and net revenue of an individual do not strictly correspond with capital and net revenue of society. What is nothing but fixed, or constant capital for society as a whole cannot be capital for the individual; it must be revenue, too, a fund of consumption, comprising as it does those parts of fixed capital which represent the workers' wages and the capitalists' profits. On the other hand, the circulating capital of the individuals cannot be capital for society but must be revenue, especially in so far as it takes the form of provisions. (4) As regards the value of the total annual social product, no trace of capital remains. It can be resolved completely into the three kinds of income: wages, profits of capital, and rents. If we tried from this haphazard collection of odd ideas to build up a picture of the annual reproduction of total social capital, and of its mechanism, we should soon despair of our task. Indeed, all these observations leave us infinitely remote from the solution of the problem how social capital is annually renewed, how everybody's consumption is ensured by his income, while the individuals can nevertheless adhere to their own points of view on capital and income. Yet if we wish to appreciate fully Marx's contribution to the elucidation of this problem, we must be fully aware of all this confusion of ideas, the mass of conflicting points of view. Let us begin with Adam Smith's last thesis which alone would suffice to wreck the treatment of the problem of reproduction in classical economics. Smith's basic principle is that the total produce of society, when we consider its value, resolves itself completely into wages, profits and rents: this conception is deeply rooted in his scientific theory that value is nothing but the product of labour. All labour performed, however, is wage labour. This identification of human labour with capitalist wage labour is indeed the classical element in Smith's doctrine. The value of the aggregate product of society comprises both the recompense for wages advanced and a surplus from unpaid labour appearing as profit for the capitalist and rent for the landowner. What holds good for the individual commodity must hold good equally for the aggregate of commodities. The whole mass of commodities produced by society--taken as a quantity of value--is nothing but a product of labour, of paid as well as unpaid labour, and thus it is also to be completely resolved into wages, profits, and rents. It is of course true that raw materials, instruments, and the like, must be taken into consideration in connection with all labour. Yet is it not true also that these raw materials and instruments in their turn are equally products of labour which again may have been paid or unpaid? We may go back as far as we choose, we may twist and turn the problem as much as we like, yet we shall find no element in the value of any commodity--and therefore none in the price--which cannot be resolved purely in terms of human labour. We can distinguish, however, two parts in all labour: one part repays the wages and the other accrues to the capitalist and landlord. There seems nothing left but wages and profits--and yet, there is capital, individual and social capital. How can we overcome this blatant contradiction? The fact that Marx himself stubbornly pursued this matter for a long time without getting anywhere at first as witness his _Theories of the Surplus Value_,[78] proves that this theoretical problem is indeed extremely hard to solve. Yet the solution he eventually hit on was strikingly successful, and it is based upon his theory of value. Adam Smith was perfectly right: nothing but labour constitutes the value of the individual commodity and of the aggregate of commodities. He was equally right in saying that from a capitalist point of view all labour is either paid labour which restores the wages, or unpaid labour which, as surplus value, accrues to the various classes owning the means of production. What he forgot, however, or rather overlooked, is the fact that, apart from being able to create new value, labour can also transfer to the new commodities the old values incorporated in the means of production employed. A baker's working day of ten hours is, from the capitalist point of view, divided into paid and unpaid hours, into _v + s_. But the commodity produced in these ten hours will represent a greater value than that of ten hours' labour, for it will also contain the value of the flour, of the oven which is used, of the premises, of the fuel and so on, in short the value of all the means of production necessary for baking. Under one condition alone could the value of any one commodity be strictly equal to _v + s_; if a man were to work in mid-air, without raw materials, without tools or workshop. But since all work on materials (material labour) presupposes means of production of some sort which themselves result from preceding labour, the value of this past labour is of necessity transferred to the new product. The process in question does not only take place in capitalist production; it is the general foundation of human labour, quite independent of the historical form of society. The handling of man-made tools is a fundamental characteristic of human civilisation. The concept of past labour which precedes all new labour and prepares its basis, expresses the nexus between man and nature evolved in the history of civilisation. This is the eternal chain of closely interwoven labouring efforts of human society, the beginnings of which are lost in the grey dawn of the socialisation of mankind, and the termination of which would imply the end of the whole of civilised mankind. Therefore we have to picture all human labour as performed with the help of tools which themselves are already products of antecedent labour. Every new product thus contains not only the new labour whereby it is given its final form, but also past labour which had supplied the materials for it, the instruments of labour and so forth. In the production of value, that is commodity production into which capitalist production also enters, this phenomenon is not suspended, it only receives a particular expression. Here the labour which produces commodities assumes a twofold characteristic: it is on the one hand useful concrete labour of some kind or other, creating the useful object, the value-in-use. On the other hand, it is abstract, general, socially necessary labour and as such creates value. In its first aspect it does what labour has always done: it transfers to the new product past labour, incorporated in the means of production employed, with this distinction only, that this past labour, too, now appears as value, as old value. In its second aspect, labour creates new value which, in capitalist terms, can be reduced to paid and unpaid labour, to _v + s_. Thus the value of every commodity must contain old value which has been transferred by labour _qua_ useful concrete labour from the means of production to the commodity, as well as the new value, created by the same labour _qua_ socially necessary labour merely as this labour is expended hour by hour. This distinction was beyond Smith: he did not differentiate the twofold character of value-creating labour. Marx once claimed to have discovered the ultimate source of Smith's strange dogma--that the aggregate of produced values can be completely resolved into _v + s_--in his fundamentally erroneous theory of value.[79] Failure to differentiate between the two aspects of commodity-producing labour as concrete and useful labour on the one hand, and abstract and socially necessary labour on the other, indeed forms one of the most important characteristics of the theory of value as conceived not only by Smith but by all members of the classical school. Disregarding all social consequences, classical economics recognised that human labour alone is the factor which creates value, and it worked out this theory to that degree of clarity which we meet in Ricardo's formulation. There is a fundamental distinction, however, between Marx's theory of value and Ricardo's, a distinction which has been misunderstood not only by bourgeois economists but also in most cases by the popularisers of Marx's doctrine: Ricardo, conceiving as he did, of bourgeois economy in terms of natural law, believed also that the creation of value, too, is a natural property of human labour, of the specific and concrete labour of the individual human being. This view is even more blatantly revealed in the writings of Adam Smith who for instance declares what he calls the 'propensity to exchange' to be a quality peculiar to human nature, having looked for it in vain in animals, particularly in dogs. And although he doubted the existence of the propensity to exchange in animals, Smith attributed to animal as well as human labour the faculty of creating value, especially when he occasionally relapses into the Physiocrat doctrine: 'No equal capital puts into motion a greater quantity of productive labour than that of the farmer. Not only his labouring servants, but his labouring cattle, are productive labourers....'[80] 'The labourers and labouring cattle, therefore, employed in agriculture, not only occasion, like the workmen in manufactures, the reproduction of a value equal to their own consumption, or to the capital which employs them, together with its owner's profits, but of a much greater value. Over and above the capital of the farmer and all its profits, they regularly occasion the reproduction of the rent of the landlord.'[81] Smith's belief that the creation of value is a direct physiological property of labour, a manifestation of the animal organism in man, finds its most vivid expression here. Just as the spider produces its web from its own body, so labouring man produces value--labouring man pure and simple, every man who produces useful objects--because labouring man is by birth a producer of commodities; in the same way human society is founded by nature on the exchange of commodities, and a commodity economy is the normal form of human economy. It was left to Marx to recognise that a given value covers a definite social relationship which develops under definite historical conditions. Thus he came to discriminate between the two aspects of commodity-producing labour: concrete individual labour and socially necessary labour. When this distinction is made, the solution of the money problem becomes clear also, as though a spotlight had been turned on it. Marx had to establish a dynamic distinction in the course of history between the commodity producer and the labouring man, in order to distinguish the twin aspects of labour which appear static in bourgeois economy. He had to discover that the production of commodities is a definite historical form of social production before he could decipher the hieroglyphics of capitalist economy. In a word, Marx had to approach the problem with methods of deduction diametrically opposed to those of the classical school, he had in his approach to renounce the latter's faith in the human and normal element in bourgeois production and to recognise their historical transience: he had to reverse the metaphysical deductions of the classics into their opposite, the dialectical. On this showing Smith could not possibly have arrived at a clear distinction between the two aspects of value-creating labour, which on the one hand transfers the old value incorporated in the means of production to the new product, and on the other hand creates new value at the same time. Moreover, there seems to be yet another source of his dogma that total value can be completely resolved into _v + s_. We should be wrong to assume that Smith lost sight of the fact that every commodity produced contains not only the value created by its production, but also the values incorporated in all the means of production that had been spent upon it in the process of manufacturing it. By the very fact that he continually refers us from one stage of production to a former one--sending us, as Marx complains, from pillar to post, in order to show the complete divisibility of the aggregate value into _v + s_--Smith proves himself well aware of the point. What is strange in this connection is that he again and again resolves the old value of the means of production, too, into _v + s_, so as finally to cover the whole value contained in the commodity. 'In the price of corn, for example, one part pays the rent of the landlord, another pays the wages of maintenance of the labourers and labouring cattle employed in producing it, and the third pays the profit of the farmer. These three parts (wages, profit, and rent) seem either immediately or ultimately to make up the whole price of corn. A fourth part, it may perhaps be thought, is necessary for replacing the stock of the farmer, or for compensating the wear and tear of his labouring cattle and other instruments of husbandry. But it must be considered that the price of any instrument of husbandry, such as a labouring horse, is itself made up of the same three parts: the rent of the land upon which he is reared, the labour of tending and rearing him, and the profits of the farmer who advances both the rent of this land and the wages of this labour. Though the price of the corn, therefore, may pay the price as well as the maintenance of the horse, the whole price still resolves itself either immediately or ultimately into the same three parts of rent, of labour, and profit.'[82] Apparently Smith's confusion arose from the following premises: first, that all labour is performed with the help of means of production of some kind or other--yet what are these means of production associated with any given labour (such as raw materials and tools) if not the product of previous labour? Flour is a means of production to which the baker adds new labour. Yet flour is the result of the miller's work, and in his hands it was not a means of production but the very product, in the same way as now the bread and pastries are the product of the baker. This product, flour, again presupposes grain as a means of production, and if we go one step further back, this corn is not a means of production in the hands of the farmer but the product. It is impossible to find any means of production in which value is embodied, without it being itself the product of some previous labour. Secondly, speaking in terms of capitalism, it follows further that all capital which has been completely used up in the manufacture of any commodity, can in the end be resolved into a certain quantity of performed labour. Thirdly, the total value of the commodity, including all capital advances, can readily be resolved in this manner into a certain quantity of labour. What is true for every commodity, must go also for the aggregate of commodities produced by a society in the course of a year; its aggregate value can similarly be resolved into a quantity of performed labour. Fourthly, all labour performed under capitalist conditions is divided into two parts: paid labour which restores the wages advanced, and unpaid labour which creates profit and rent, or surplus value. All labour carried out under capitalist conditions thus corresponds to our formula _v + s_.[83] All the arguments outlined above are perfectly correct and unassailable. Smith handled them in a manner which proves his scientific analysis consistent and undeviating, and his conceptions of value and surplus value a distinct advance on the Physiocrat approach. Only occasionally, in his third thesis, he went astray in his final conclusion, saying that the aggregate value of the annually produced aggregate of commodities can be resolved into the labour of that very year, although he himself had been acute enough to admit elsewhere that the value of the commodities a nation produces in the course of one year necessarily includes the labour of former years as well, that is the labour embodied in the means of production which have been handed down. But even if the four statements enumerated are perfectly correct in themselves, the conclusion Smith draws from them--that the total value of every commodity, and equally of the annual aggregate of commodities in a society, can be resolved entirely into _v + s_--is absolutely wrong. He has the right idea that the whole value of a commodity represents nothing but social labour, yet identifies it with a false principle, that all value is nothing but _v + s_. The formula _v + s_ expresses the function of living labour under capitalism, or rather its double function, first to restore the wages, or the variable capital, and secondly, to create surplus value for the capitalist. Wage labour fulfils this function whilst it is employed by the capitalists, in virtue of the fact that the value of the commodities is realised in cash. The capitalist takes back the variable capital he had advanced in form of wages, and he pockets the surplus value as well. _v + s_ therefore expresses the relation between wage labour and capitalist, a relationship that is terminated in every instance as soon as the process of commodity production is finished. Once the commodity is sold, and the relation _v + s_ is realised for the capitalist in cash, the whole relationship is wiped out and leaves no traces on the commodity. If we examine the commodity and its value, we cannot ascertain whether it has been produced by paid or by unpaid labour, nor in what proportion these have contributed. Only one fact is beyond doubt: the commodity contains a certain quantity of socially necessary labour which is expressed in its exchange. It is completely immaterial for the act of exchange as well as for the use of the commodity whether the labour which produced it could be resolved into _v + s_ or not. In the act of exchange all that matters is that the commodity represents value, and only its concrete qualities, its usefulness, are relevant to the use we make of it. Thus the formula _v + s_ only expresses, as it were, the intimate relationship between capital and labour, the social function of wage labour, and in the actual product this is completely wiped out. It is different with the constant capital which has been advanced and invested in means of production, because every activity of labour requires certain raw materials, tools, and buildings. The capitalist character of this state of affairs is expressed by the fact that these means of production appear as capital, as _c_, the property of a person other than the labourer, divorced from labour, the property of those who themselves do not work. Secondly, the constant capital _c_, a mere advance laid out for the purpose of creating surplus value, appears here only as the foundation of _v + s_. Yet the concept of constant capital involves more than this: it expresses the function of the means of production in the process of human labour, quite independently of all its historical or social forms. Everybody must have raw materials and working tools, the means of production, be it the South Sea Islander for making his family canoe, the communist peasant community in India for the cultivation of their communal land, the Egyptian fellah for tilling his village lands or for building Pharaoh's pyramids, the Greek slave in the small workshops of Athens, the feudal serf, the master craftsman of the medieval guild, or the modern wage labourer. They all require means of production which, having resulted from human labour, express the link between human labour and natural matter, and constitute the eternal and universal prerequisites of the human process of production. _c_ in the formula _c + v + s_ stands for a certain function of the means of production which is not wiped out in the succession of the labour process. Whereas it is completely immaterial, for both the exchange and the actual use made of a commodity, whether it has been produced by paid or by unpaid labour, by wage labour, slave labour, forced labour or any other kind of labour; on the other hand, it is of decisive importance, as for using it, whether the commodity is itself a means of production or a consumer good. Whether paid or unpaid labour has been employed in the production of a machine, matters to the machinery manufacturer and to his workers, but only to them; for society, when it acquires this machine by an act of exchange, only the quality of this machine as a means of production, only its function in the process of production is of importance. Just as every producing society, since time immemorial, has had to give due regard to the important function of the means of production by arranging, in each period of production, for the manufacture of the means of production requisite for the next period, so capitalist society, too, cannot achieve its annual production of value to accord with the formula _v + s_--which indicates the exploitation of wage labour--unless there exists, as the result of the preceding period, the quantity of means of production necessary to make up the constant capital. This specific connection of each past period of production with the period following forms the universal and eternal foundation of the social process of reproduction and consists in the fact that in every period parts of the produce are destined to become the means of production for the succeeding period: but this relation remained hidden from Smith's sight. He was not interested in means of production in respect of their specific function within the process to which they are applied; he was only concerned with them in so far as they are like any other commodity, themselves the product of wage labour that has been employed in a capitalist manner. The specifically capitalist function of wage labour in the productive process completely obscured for him the eternal and universal function of the means of production within the labour process. His narrow bourgeois approach overlooked completely the general relations between man and nature underneath the specific social relations between capital and wage labour. Here, it seems, is the real source of Adam Smith's strange dogma, that the total value of the annual social product can be resolved into _v + s_. He overlooked the fact that _c_ as the first link in the formula _c + v + s_ is the essential expression of the general social foundation of exploitation of wage labour by capital. We conclude that the value of every commodity must be expressed by the formula _c + v + s_. The question now arises how far this formula applies to the aggregate of commodities within a society. Let us turn to the doubts expressed by Smith on this point, the statement that an individual's fixed and circulating capital and his revenue do not strictly correspond to the same categories from the point of view of society. (Cf. above, p. 64, no. 3.) What is circulating capital for one person is not capital for another, but revenue, as for instance capital advances for wages. This statement is based upon an error. If the capitalist pays wages to the workers, he does not abandon his variable capital and let it stray into the workers' hands, to become their income. He only exchanges the value-form of his variable capital against its natural form, labour power. The variable capital remains always in the hand of the capitalist, first as money, and then as labour power, to revert to him later together with the surplus value as the cash proceeds from the commodities. The worker, on the other hand, never gains possession of the variable capital. His labour power is never capital to him, but it is his only asset, the power to work is the only thing he possesses. Again, if he has sold it and taken a money wage, this wage is for him not capital but the price of his commodity which he has sold. Finally, the fact that the worker buys provisions with the wages he has received, has no more connection with the function this money once fulfilled as variable capital in the hands of the capitalist, than has the private use a vendor of a commodity can make of the money he has obtained by a sale. It is not the capitalist's variable capital which becomes the workers' income, but the price of the worker's commodity 'labour power' which he has sold, while the variable capital, now as ever, remains in the hands of the capitalist and fulfils its specific function. Equally erroneous is the conception that the income of the capitalist (the surplus value) which is hidden in machines--in our example of a machinery manufacturer--which has not as yet been realised, is fixed capital for another person, the buyer of the machines. It is not the machines, or parts of them, which form the income of the machinery manufacturer, but the surplus value that is hidden in them--the unpaid labour of his wage labourers. After the machine has been sold, this income simply remains as before in the hand of the machinery manufacturer; it has only changed its outward shape: it has been changed from the 'machine-form' into the 'money-form'. Conversely, the buyer of this machine has not, by its purchase, newly obtained possession of his fixed capital, for he had this fixed capital in hand even before the purchase, in the form of a certain amount of cash. By buying this machine, he has only given to his capital the adequate material form for it to become productive. The income, or surplus value, remains in the hands of the machinery manufacturer before and after the sale of the machine, and the fixed capital remains in the hands of the other person, the capitalist buyer of the machine, just as the variable capital in the first example always remained in the hands of the capitalist and the income in the hands of the worker. Smith and his followers have caused confusion because, in their investigation of capitalist exchange, they mixed up the use-form of the commodities with their relations of value. Further, they did not distinguish the individual circulations of capitals and commodities which are ever interlacing. One and the same act of exchange can be circulation of capital, when seen from one aspect, and at the same time simple commodity exchange for the purpose of consumption. The fallacy that whatever is capital for one person must be income for another, and _vice versa_, must be translated thus into the correct statement that what is circulation of capital for one person, may be simple commodity exchange for another, and _vice versa_. This only expresses the capacity of capital to undergo transformations of its character, and the interconnections of various spheres of interest in the social process of exchange. The sharply outlined existence of capital in contrast with income still stands in both its clearly defined forms of constant and variable capital. Even so, Smith comes very close to the truth when he states that capital and income of the individual are not strictly identical with the same categories from the point of view of the community. Only a few further connecting links are lacking for a clear revelation of the true relationship. FOOTNOTES: [77] _An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations_, vol. i, p. 19. [78] _Theorien über den Mehrwert_ (Stuttgart, 1905), vol. i, pp. 179-252. [79] _Capital_, vol. ii, p. 435. [80] Smith, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 148. [81] Ibid., p. 149. [82] Op. cit., vol. i, pp. 86-7. [83] In this connection, we have disregarded the contrary conception which also runs through the work of Smith. According to that, the _price_ of the commodity cannot be resolved into _v + s_, though the _value_ of commodities consists in _v + s_. This distinction, however, is more important with regard to Smith's theory of value than in the present context where we are mainly interested in his formula _v + s_. _CHAPTER IV_ MARX'S SCHEME OF SIMPLE REPRODUCTION Let us now consider the formula _c + v + s_ as the expression of the social product as a whole. Is it only a theoretical abstraction, or does it convey any real meaning when applied to social life--has the formula any objective existence in relation to society as a whole? It was left to Marx to establish the fundamental importance of _c_, the constant capital, in economic theory. Yet Adam Smith before him, working exclusively with the categories of fixed and circulating capital, in effect transformed this fixed capital into constant capital, though he was not aware of having achieved this result. This constant capital comprises not only those means of production which wear out in the course of years, but also those which are completely absorbed by production in any one year. His very dogma that the total value is resolved into _v + s_ and his arguments on this point lead Smith to distinguish between the two categories of production--living labour and inanimate means of production. On the other hand, when he tries to construe the social process of reproduction on the basis of the capitals and incomes of individuals, the fixed capital he conceives of as existing apart from these, is, in fact, constant capital. Every individual capitalist uses for the production of his commodities certain material means of production such as premises, raw materials and instruments. In order to produce the aggregate of commodities in a given society, an aggregate of all material means of production used by the individual capitalists is an obvious requisite. The existence of these means of production within the society is a real fact, though they themselves exist in the form of purely private individual capitals. This is the universal absolute condition of social production in all its historical forms.[84] The specific capitalist form manifests itself in the fact that the material means of production function as _c_, as constant capital, the property of those who do not work; it is the opposite pole to proletarianised labour power, the counterpart of wage labour. The variable capital, _v_, is the aggregate of wages actually paid in the society in the course of a year's production. This fact, too, has real objective existence, although it manifests itself in an innumerable mass of individual wages. In every society the amount of labour power actually engaged in production and the annual maintenance of the workers is a question of decisive importance. Where this factor takes the specific capitalist form of _v_, the variable capital, it follows that the means of subsistence first come to the workers in form of a wage which is the price of the labour power they have sold to another person, the owner of the material means of production who does not work himself; under this aspect, it is the latter's capitalist property. Further, _v_ is an aggregate of money, that is to say it is the means of subsistence for the workers in a form of pure value. This concept of _v_ implies that the workers are free in a double sense--free in person and free of all means of production. It also expresses the fact that in a given society the universal form of production is commodity production. Finally, _s_, the surplus value, stands for the total of all surplus values gained by the individual capitalists. Every society performs surplus labour, and even a socialist society will have to do the same. It must perform surplus labour in a threefold sense: it has to provide a quantity of labour for the maintenance of non-workers (those who are unable to work, such as children, old people, invalids, and also civil servants and the so-called liberal professions who do not take an immediate part in the satisfaction of material[85] wants), it has to provide a fund of social insurance against elementary disasters which may threaten the annual produce, such as bad harvests, forest fires and floods; and lastly it must provide a fund for the purpose of increasing production, either because of an increase in the population, or because higher standards of civilisation lead to additional wants. It is in two respects that the capitalist character manifests itself: surplus labour comes into being (1) as surplus value, i.e. in commodity-form, realisable in cash, and (2) as the property of non-workers, of those who own the means of production. Similarly, if we consider _v + s_, these two amounts taken together, we see that they represent objective quantities of universal validity: the total of living labour that has been performed within a society in the course of one year. Every human society, whatever its historical form, must take note of this datum, with reference to both the results that have been achieved, and the existing and available labour power. The division into _v + s_ is a universal phenomenon, independent of the society's particular historical form. In its capitalist form, this division shows itself not only in the qualitative peculiarities of both _v_ and _s_ as already outlined, but also in their quantitative relationship: _v_ tends to become depressed to a minimum level, just sufficient for the physiological and social existence of the worker, and _s_ tends to increase continually at the cost of, and relative to, _v_. The predominant feature of capitalist production is expressed in this last circumstance: it is the fact that the creation and appropriation of surplus value is the real purpose of, and the incentive to, production. We have examined the relations upon which the capitalist formula of the aggregate product is based, and have found them universally valid. In every planned economy they are made the object of conscious regulation on the part of society; in a communist society by the community of workers and their democratic organs, and in a society based upon class-rule by the nucleus of owners and their despotic power. In a system of capitalist production there is no such planned regulation. The aggregate of the society's capitals and the aggregate of its commodities alike consist in reality of innumerable fragments of individual capitals and individual items of merchandise, taken together. Thus the question arises whether these sums themselves mean anything more in a capitalist society than a mere statistical enumeration which is, moreover, inexact and fluid. Applying the standards of society as a whole, we perceive that the completely independent and sovereign individual existence of private enterprises is only the historically conditioned form, whereas it is social interconnections that provide the foundation. Although individual capitals act in complete independence of one another, and a social regulation is completely lacking, the movement of capitals forms a homogeneous whole. This movement, too, appears in specifically capitalist forms. In every planned system of production it is, above all, the relation between all labour, past and present, and the means of production (between _v + s_ and _c_, according to our formula), or the relation between the aggregate of necessary consumer goods (again, in the terms of our formula, _v + s_) and _c_ which are subjected to regulation. Under capitalist conditions, on the other hand, all social labour necessary for the maintenance of the inanimate means of production and also of living labour power is treated as one entity, as capital, in contrast with the surplus labour that has been performed, i.e. with the surplus value _s_. The relation between these two quantities _c_ and (_v + s_) is a palpably real, objective relationship of capitalist society: it is the average rate of profit; every capital is in fact treated only as part of a common whole, the whole of social capital, and assigned the profit to which it is entitled, according to its size, out of the surplus value wrested from society, regardless of the quantity which this particular capital has actually created. Thus social capital and its counterpart, the whole of social surplus value, are not merely real quantities, having an objective existence, but, what is more, the relation between them, the average profit, guides and directs the whole process of exchange. This it does in three ways: (1) by the mechanism of the law of value which establishes the quantitative relations of exchange between the individual kinds of commodities independently of their specific value relationship; (2) by the social division of labour, the assignment of certain portions of capital and labour to the individual spheres of production; (3) by the development of labour productivity which on the one hand stimulates individual capitals to engage in pioneering work for the purpose of securing a higher profit than the average, and on the other hand extends the progress that has been achieved by individuals over the whole field of production. By means of the average rate of profit, in a word, the total capital of society completely governs the seemingly independent motions of individual capitals. The formula _c + v + s_ thus applies to the aggregate of commodities produced in a society under capitalism no less than to the value composition of every individual commodity. It is, however, only the value-composition for which this holds good--the analogy cannot be carried further. The formula is indeed perfectly exact if we regard the total product of a capitalistically producing society as the output of one year's labour, and wish to analyse it into its respective components. The quantity _c_ shows how much of the labour of former years has been taken over towards the product of the present year in the form of means of production. Quantities _v + s_ show the value components of the product created by new labour during the last year only; the relation between _v_ and _s_ finally shows us how the annual labour programme of society is apportioned to the two tasks of maintaining the workers and maintaining those who do not work. This analysis remains valid and correct also with regard to the reproduction of individual capital, no matter what may be the material form of the product this capital has created. All three, _c_, _v_, and _s_, appear alike to a capitalist of the machinery industry in the form of machinery and its parts; to the owner of a music hall they are represented by the charms of the dancers and the skill of the acrobats. So long as the product is left undifferentiated, _c_, _v_, and _s_ differ from one another only in so far as they are _aliquot_ components of value. This is quite sufficient for the reproduction of individual capital, as such reproduction begins with the value-form of capital, a certain amount of money that has been gained by the realisation of the manufactured product. The formula _c + v + s_ then is the given basis for the division of this amount of money; one part for the purchase of the material means of production, a second part for the purchase of labour power, and a third part--in the case of simple reproduction assumed in the first instance--for the capitalist's personal consumption. In the case of expanding reproduction part three is further subdivided, only a fraction of it being devoted to the capitalist's personal consumption, the remainder to increasing his capital. In order to reproduce his capital actually, the capitalist must, of course, turn again to the commodity market with the capital he has divided in this manner, so that he can acquire the material prerequisites of production such as raw materials, instruments, and so on. It seems a matter of course to the individual capitalist as well as to his scientific ideologist, the 'vulgar economist', that he should in fact find there just those means of production and labour power he needs for his business. The position is different as regards the total production of a society. From the point of view of society as a whole, the exchange of commodities can only effect a shifting around, whereby the individual parts of the total product change hands. The material composition of the product, however, cannot be changed by this process. After this change of places, as well as before it, there can be reproduction of total capital, if, and only if, there is in the total product of the preceding period: first, a sufficient quantity of means of production, secondly, adequate provisions to maintain the same amount of labour as hitherto, and, last but not least, the goods necessary to maintain the capitalist class and its hangers-on in a manner suitable to their station. This brings us to a new plane: we are now concerned with material points of view instead of pure relations of value. It is the use-form of the total social product that matters now. What the individual capitalist considers nobody else's business becomes a matter of grave concern for the totality of capitalists. Whereas it does not make the slightest difference to the individual capitalist whether he produces machinery, sugar, artificial manure or a progressive newspaper--provided only that he can find a buyer for his commodity so that he can get back his capital plus surplus value--it matters infinitely to the 'total capitalist' that his total product should have a definite use-form. By that we mean that it must provide three essentials: the means of production to renew the labour process, simple provisions for the maintenance of the workers, and provisions of higher quality and luxury goods for the preservation of the 'total capitalist' himself. His desire in this respect is not general and vague, but determined precisely and quantitatively. If we ask what quantities of all three categories are required by the 'total capitalist', the value-composition of last year's total product gives us a definite estimate, as long, that is, as we confine ourselves to simple reproduction, which we have taken for our starting point. Hitherto we have conceived of the formula _c + v + s_ as a merely quantitative division of the total value, applicable alike to total capital and to individual capital, and representing the quantity of labour contained in the annual product of society. Now we see that the formula is also the basis of the material composition of the product. Obviously the 'total capitalist', if he is to take up reproduction to the same extent as before, must find in his new total product as many means of production as correspond to the size of _c_, as many simple provisions for the workers as correspond to the sum of wages _v_, and as many provisions of better quality for himself and his hangers-on as correspond to _s_. In this way our analysis of the value of the society's aggregate product is translated into a general recipe for this product as follows: the total _c_ of society must be re-embodied in an equal quantity of means of production, the _v_ in provisions for the workers, and the _s_ in provisions for the capitalists, in order that simple reproduction may take place. Here we come up against palpable differences between the individual capitalist and the total capitalist. The manner in which the former always reproduces his constant and variable capital as well as his surplus value is such that all three parts are contained in the same material form within his homogeneous product, that this material form, moreover, is completely irrelevant and may have different qualities in the case of each individual capitalist. The 'total capitalist', for his part, reproduces every component of the value of his annual product in a different material form, _c_ as means of production, _v_ as provisions for the workers, and _s_ as provisions for the capitalists. In the case of the reproduction of individual capitals, there is no discrepancy between relations of value and material points of view. Besides, it is quite clear that individual capital may concentrate on aspects of value, accepting material conditions as a law from heaven, as self-evident phenomena of commodity-exchange, whereas the 'total capitalist' has to reckon with material points of view. If the total _c_ of society were not reproduced annually in the form of an equal amount of means of production, every individual capitalist would be doomed to search the commodity market in vain with his _c_ realised in cash, unable to find the requisite materials for his individual reproduction. From the point of view of reproducing the total capital, the formula _c + v + s_ is inadequate. This again is proof of the fact that the concept of total capital is something real and does not merely paraphrase the concept of production. We must, however, make general distinctions in our exposition of total capital: instead of showing it as a homogeneous whole, we must demonstrate its three main categories; and we shall not vitiate our theory if, for the sake of simplicity, we consider for the present only two departments of total capital: the production of producer goods, and that of consumer goods for workers and capitalists. We have to examine each department separately, adhering to the fundamental conditions of capitalist production in each case. At the same time, we must also emphasise the mutual connections between these two departments from the point of view of reproduction. For only if each is regarded in connection with the other, do they make up the basis of the social capital as a whole. We made a start by investigating individual capital. But we must approach the demonstration of total capital and its total product in a somewhat different manner. Quantitatively, as a quantity of value, the _c_ of society consists precisely in the total of individual constant capitals, and the same applies to the other amounts, _v_ and _s_. But the outward shape of each has changed--the _c_ of constant capitals re-emerges from the process of production as an element of value with infinitely varied facets, comprising a host of variegated objects for use, but in the total product it appears, as it were, contracted into a certain quantity of means of production. Similarly with _v_ and _s_, which in the case of the individual capitalist re-emerge as items in a most colourful jumble of commodities, being provisions in adequate quantities for the workers and capitalists. Adam Smith came very close to recognising this fact when he observed that the categories of fixed and circulating capital and of revenue in relation to the individual capitalist do not coincide with these categories in the case of society. We have come to the following conclusions: (1) The formula _c + v + s_ serves to express the production of society viewed as a whole, as well as the production of individual capitalists. (2) Social production is divided into two departments, engaged in the production of producer and consumer goods respectively. (3) Both departments work according to capitalist methods, that is to say they both aim at the production of surplus value, and thus the formula _c + v + s_ will apply to each of them. (4) The two departments are interdependent, and are therefore bound to display a certain quantitative relationship, namely the one department must produce all means of production, the other all provisions for the workers and capitalists of both departments. Proceeding from this point of view, Marx devised the following diagram of capitalist reproduction: I. _4,000c + 1,000v + 1,000s = 6,000_ means of production II. _2,000c + 500v + 500s = 3,000_ articles of consumption.[86] The figures in this diagram express quantities of value, amounts of money which are chosen arbitrarily, but their ratios are exact. Each department is characterised by the use-form of the commodities produced. Their mutual circulation takes place as follows: Department I supplies the means of production for the entire productive process, for itself as well as for Department II. From this alone it follows that for the undisturbed continuance of reproduction--for we still presume simple reproduction on the old scale--the total produce of Department I (I 6,000) must have the same value as the sum of constant capitals in both departments: (I 4,000_c_ + II 2,000_c_). Similarly, Department II supplies provisions for the whole of society, for its own workers and capitalists as well as for the workers and capitalists of Department I. Hence it follows that for the undisturbed course of consumption and production and its renewal on the old scale it is necessary that the total quantity of provisions supplied by Department II should equal in value all the incomes of the employed workers and capitalists of society [here II 3,000 = I(_1,000v + 1,000s_) + II(_500v + 500s_)]. Here we have indeed expressed relationships of value which are the foundation not only of capitalist reproduction but of reproduction in every society. In every producing society, whatever its social form, in the primitive small village community of the Bakairi of Brazil, in the _oikos_ of a Timon of Athens with its slaves, or in the imperial _corvée_ farm of Charlemagne, the labour power available for society must be distributed in such a way that means of production as well as provisions are produced in adequate quantities. The former must suffice for the immediate production of provisions as well as for the future renewal of the means of production themselves, and the provisions in their turn must suffice for the maintenance of the workers occupied in the production alike of these same provisions and of the means of production, and moreover for the maintenance of all those who do not work. In its broad outline, Marx's scheme corresponds with the universal and absolute foundation of social reproduction, with only the following specifications: socially necessary labour appears here as value, the means of production as constant capital, the labour necessary for the maintenance of the workers as variable capital and that necessary for the maintenance of those who do not work as surplus value. In capitalist society, however, the connections between these two great departments depend upon exchange of commodities, on the exchange of equivalents. The workers and capitalists of Department I can only obtain as many provisions from Department II as they can deliver of their own commodities, the means of production. The demand of Department II for means of production, on the other hand, is determined by the size of its constant capital. It follows therefore that the sum of the variable capital and of the surplus value in the production of producer goods [here I(_1,000v + 1,000s_)] must equal the constant capital in the production of provisions [here II(2,000_c_)]. An important proviso remains to be added to the above scheme. The constant capital which has been spent by the two departments is in reality only part of the constant capital used by society. This constant capital is divided into two parts; the first is fixed capital--premises, tools, labouring cattle--which functions in a number of periods of production, in every one of which, however, only part of its value is absorbed by the product, according to the amount of its wear and tear. The second is circulating capital such as raw materials, auxiliary semi-finished products, fuel and lighting--its whole value is completely absorbed by the new product in every period of production. Yet only that part of the means of production is relevant for reproduction which is actually absorbed by the production of value; without becoming less correct, an exact exposition of social circulation may disregard the remaining part of the fixed capital which has not been absorbed by the product, though it should not completely forget it. This is easy to prove. Let us assume that the constant capital, 6,000_c_, in the two departments, which is in fact absorbed by the annual product of these departments, consists of 1,500_c_ fixed and 4,500_c_ circulating capital, the 1,500_c_ of fixed capital representing here the annual wear and tear of the premises, machinery and labouring cattle. This annual wear and tear equals, say, 10 per cent of the total value of the fixed capital employed. Then the total social capital would really consist of _19,500c + 1,500v_, the constant capital in both departments being 1,500_c_ of fixed and 4,500_c_ of circulating capital. Since the term of life of the aggregate fixed capital, with a 10 per cent wear and tear, is ten years _ex hypothesi_, the fixed capital needs renewal only after the lapse of ten years. Meanwhile one-tenth of its value enters into social production in every year. If all the fixed capital of a society, with the same rate of wear and tear, were of equal durability, it would, on our assumption, need complete renewal once within ten years. This, however, is not the case. Some of the various use-forms which are part of the fixed capital may last longer and others shorter, wear and tear and duration of life are quite different in the different kinds and individual representations of fixed capital. In consequence, fixed capital need not be renewed--reproduced in its concrete use-form--all at once, but parts of it are continually renewed at various stages of social production, while other parts still function in their older form. Our assumption of a fixed capital of 15,000_c_ with a 10 per cent rate of wear and tear does not mean that this must be renewed all at once every ten years, but that an annual average renewal and replacement must be effected of a part of the total fixed social capital corresponding to one-tenth of its value; that is to say, Department I which has to satisfy the needs of society for means of production must reproduce, year by year not only all its raw and partly finished materials, etc., its circulating capital to the value of 4,500, but must also reproduce the use-forms of its fixed capital--premises, machinery, and the like--to the extent of 1,500, corresponding with the annual wear and tear of fixed capital. If Department I continues in this manner to renew one-tenth of the fixed capital in its use-form every year, the result will be that every ten years the total fixed capital of society will have been replaced throughout by new items; thus it follows that the reproduction of those parts disregarded so far is also completely accounted for in the above scheme. In practice, the procedure is that every capitalist sets aside from his annual production, from the realisation of his commodities, a certain amount for the redemption of his fixed capital. These individual annual deductions must amount to a certain quantity of capital, therefore the capitalist has in fact renewed his fixed capital, that is, he has replaced it by new and more efficient items. This alternating procedure of building up annual reserves of money for the renewal of fixed capital and of the periodical employment of the accumulated amounts for the actual renewal of fixed capital varies with the individual capitalist, so that some are accumulating reserves, while others have already started their renewals. Thus every year part of the fixed capital is actually renewed. The monetary procedure here only disguises the real process which characterises the reproduction of fixed capital. On closer observation we see that this is as it should be. The whole of the fixed capital takes part in the process of production, for physically the mass of usable objects, premises, machinery, labouring cattle, are completely employed. It is their peculiarity as fixed capital, on the other hand, that only part of the value is absorbed in the production of value, since in the process of reproduction (again postulating simple reproduction), all that matters is to replace in their natural form the values which have been actually used up as means of subsistence and production during a year's production. Therefore, fixed capital need only be reproduced to the extent that it has in fact been used up in the production of commodities. The remaining portion of value, embodied in the total use-form of fixed capital, is of decisive importance for production as a labour process, but does not exist for the annual reproduction of society as a process of value-formation. Besides, this process which is here expressed by relations of value applies equally to every society, even to a community which does not produce commodities. If once upon a time, for instance, say ten years' labour of 1,000 fellaheen was required for the construction of the famous Lake Moeris and the related Nile canals--that miraculous lake, which Herodotus tells us was made by hand--and if for the maintenance of this, the most magnificent drainage system of the world, the labour of a further 100 fellaheen was annually required (the figures, of course, are chosen at random), we might say that after every hundred years the Moeris dam and the canals were reproduced anew, although in fact the entire system was not constructed as a whole in every century. This is manifestly true. When, amid the stormy incidents of political history and alien conquests, the usual crude neglect of old monuments of culture set in--as displayed, e.g. by the English in India when the reproductional needs of ancient civilisations were understood no longer--then in the course of time the whole Lake Moeris, its water, dikes and canals, the two pyramids in its midst, the colossus upon it and other marvellous erections, disappeared without a trace, as though they had never been built. Only ten lines in Herodotus, a dot on Ptolemy's map of the world, traces of old cultures, and of villages and cities bear witness that at one time rich life sprang from this magnificent irrigation system, where to-day there are only stretches of arid desert in inner Lybia, and desolate swamps along the coast. There is only one point where Marx's scheme of simple reproduction may appear unsatisfactory or incomplete in relation to constant capital, and that is when we go back to that period of production, when the total fixed capital was first created. Indeed, society possesses transformed labour amounting to more than those parts of fixed capital which are absorbed into the value of the annual product and are in turn replaced by it. In the figures of our example the total social capital does not consist of _6,000c + 1,500v_, as in the diagram, but of _19,500c + 1,500v_. Though 1,500 of the fixed capital (which, on our assumption, amounts to 15,000) are annually reproduced in the form of appropriate means of production, an equal amount is also consumed by the same production each year, though the whole of the fixed capital as a use-form, an aggregate of objects, has been renewed. After ten years, society possesses in the eleventh, just as in any other year, a fixed capital of 15,000, whereas it has annually achieved only 1,500_c_; and its constant capital as a whole is 19,500, whereas it has created only 6,000. Obviously, since it must have created this surplus of 13,500 fixed capital by its labour, it possesses more accumulated past labour than our scheme of reproduction warrants. Even at this stage, the annual labour of society must be based on some previous annual labour that has been hoarded. This question of past labour, however, as the foundation of all present labour, brings us to the very first beginning which is as meaningless with regard to the economic development of mankind as it is for the natural development of matter. The scheme of reproduction grasps the social process as perpetually in motion, as a link in the endless chain of events, it neither wants to demonstrate its initial origin, nor should it do so. The social reproductive process is always based on past labour, we may trace it back as far as we like. Social labour has no beginning, just as it has no end. Like the historical origin of Herodotus' Lake Moeris, the beginnings of the reproductive process in the history of civilisation are lost in the twilight of legend. With the progress of techniques and with cultural development, the means of production change their form, crude paleoliths are replaced by sharpened tools, stone implements by elegant bronze and iron, the artisan's tool by steam-driven machinery. Yet, though the means of production and the social organisation of the productive process continually change their form, society already possesses for its labour process a certain amount of past labour serving as the basis for annual reproduction. Under capitalist methods of production past labour of society preserved in the means of production takes the form of capital, and the question of the origin of this past labour which forms the foundation of the reproductive process becomes the question of the genesis of capital. This is much less legendary, indeed it is writ in letters of blood in modern history. The very fact, however, that we cannot think of simple reproduction unless we assume a hoard of past labour, surpassing in volume the labour annually performed for the maintenance of society, touches the sore spot of simple reproduction; and it shows that simple reproduction is a fiction not only for capitalist production but also for the progress of civilisation in general. If we merely wish to understand this fiction properly, and to reduce it to a scheme, we must presume, as its _sine qua non_, results of a past productive process which cannot possibly be restricted to simple reproduction but inexorably points towards enlarged reproduction. By way of illustration, we might compare the aggregate fixed capital of society with a railway. The durability and consequently the annual wear and tear of its various parts is very different. Parts such as viaducts and tunnels may last for centuries, steam engines for decades, but other rolling stock will be used up in a short time, in some instances in a few months. Yet it is possible to work out an average rate of wear and tear, say thirty years, so that the value of the whole is annually depreciated by one thirtieth. This loss of value is now continually made good by partial reproduction of the railway (which may count as repairs), so that a coach is renewed to-day, part of the engine to-morrow, and a section of sleepers the day after. On our assumption then, the old railway is replaced by a new one after thirty years, a similar amount of labour being performed each year by the society so that simple reproduction takes place. But the railway can only be reproduced in this manner--it cannot be so produced. In order to make it fit for use and to make good its gradual wear and tear, the railway must have been completed in the first place. Though the railway can be repaired in parts, it cannot be made fit for use piecemeal, an axle to-day and a coach to-morrow. Indeed, the very essence of fixed capital is always to enter into the productive process in its entirety, as a material use-value. In order to get this use-form ready in the first place, society must apply a more concentrated amount of labour to its manufacture. In terms of our example, the labour of thirty years that is used for repairs, must be compressed into, say, two or three years. During this period of manufacture, society must therefore expend an amount of labour far greater than the average, that is to say it must have recourse to expanding reproduction; later, when the railway is finished, it may return to simple reproduction. Though we need not visualise the aggregate fixed capital as a single coherent use-object or a conglomeration of objects which must be produced all at once, the manufacture of all the more important means of production, such as buildings, transport facilities, and agricultural structures, requires a more concentrated application of labour, and this is true for the modern railway or steamship as much as it was for the rough stone-axe and the handmill. Therefore it is only in theory that simple reproduction can be conceived as alternating with enlarged reproduction; the latter is not only a general condition of a progressive civilisation and an expanding population, but also the _sine qua non_ for the economic form of fixed capital, or those means of production which in every society correspond to the fixed capital. Marx deals with this conflict between the formation of fixed capital and simple reproduction but indirectly, in connection with fluctuations in the wear and tear of the fixed capital, more rapid in some years than in others. Here he emphasises the need for perpetual 'over-production', i.e. enlarged reproduction, since a strict policy of simple reproduction would periodically lead to reproductive losses. In short, he regards enlarged reproduction under the aspect of an insurance fund for the fixed capital of the society, rather than in the light of the actual productive process.[87] In quite a different context Marx appears to endorse the opinion expressed above. In _Theories on the Surplus Value_, vol ii, part 2, analysing the conversion of revenue into capital, he speaks of the peculiar reproduction of the fixed capital, the replacement of which in itself already provides a fund for accumulation. He draws the following conclusion: 'The point we have in mind is as follows: even if the aggregate capital employed in machine manufacture were just large enough to make good the annual wear and tear of the machines, many more machines could be annually produced than are required, since the wear and tear is in parts merely _idealiter_ and must be made good _realiter_, _in natura_, only after a certain number of years. Capital so employed supplies each year a mass of machinery which becomes available for, and anticipates new, capital investments. Let us suppose, for instance, a machine manufacturer who starts production this year. During this year, he supplies machines for £12,000. If he were merely to reproduce the machines he has manufactured, he would have to produce, during the subsequent eleven years, machines for £1,000 only, and even then, a year's production would not be consumed within the year. Still less could it be consumed, if he were to employ the whole of his capital. To keep this capital working, to keep it reproducing itself every year, a new and continuous expansion of the branches of manufacture that require these machines, is indispensable. This applies even more, if the machine manufacturer himself accumulates. In consequence, even _if the capital invested in one particular branch of production is simply being reproduced_,[88] a continuous accumulation in the other branches of production must go with it.'[89] We might take the machine manufacturer of Marx's example as illustrating the production of fixed capital. Then the inference is that if society maintains simple reproduction in this sphere, employing each year a similar amount of labour for the production of fixed capital (a procedure which is, of course, impossible in practical life), then annual production in all other spheres must expand. But if here, too, simple reproduction is to be maintained, then, if the fixed capital once created is to be merely renewed, only a small part of the labour employed in its creation can be expended. Or, to put it the other way round: if society is to provide for investment in fixed capital on a large scale, it must, even assuming simple reproduction to prevail on the whole, resort periodically to enlarged reproduction. With the advance of civilisation, there are changes not only in the form of the means of production but also in the quantity of value they represent--or better, changes in the social labour stored up in them. Apart from the labour necessary for its immediate preservation, society has increasingly more labour time and labour power to spare, and it makes use of these for the manufacture of means of production on an ever increasing scale. How does this affect the process of reproduction? How, in terms of capitalism, does society create out of its annual labour a _greater_ amount of capital than it formerly possessed? This question touches upon enlarged reproduction, and it is not yet time to deal with it. FOOTNOTES: [84] For the sake of simplicity, we shall follow general usage and speak here and in the following of annual production, though this term, strictly speaking, applies in general to agriculture only. The periods of industrial production, or of the turnover of capitals, need not coincide with calendar years. [85] The distinction between intellectual and material labour need not involve special categories of the population in a planned society, based on common ownership of the means of production. It will always find expression in the existence of a certain number of spiritual leaders who must be materially maintained. The same individuals may exercise these various functions at different times. [86] _Capital_, vol. ii, p. 459. [87] _Capital_, vol. ii, pp. 544-7. Cf. also p. 202 on the necessity of enlarged reproduction under the aspect of a reserve fund. [88] Marx's italics. [89] _Theorien über den Mehrwert_, vol. ii, part 2, p. 248. _CHAPTER V_ THE CIRCULATION OF MONEY In our study of the reproductive process we have not so far considered the circulation of money. Here we do not refer to money as a measuring rod, an embodiment of value, because all relations of social labour have been expressed, assumed and measured in terms of money. What we have to do now is to test our diagram of simple reproduction under the aspect of money as a means of exchange. Quesnay already saw that we shall only understand the social reproductive process if we assume, side by side with the means of production and consumer goods, a certain quantity of money.[90] Two questions now arise: (1) by whom should the money be owned, and (2) how much of it should there be? The answer to the first question, no doubt, is that the workers receive their wages in the form of money with which they buy consumer goods. From the point of view of society, this means merely that the workers are allocated a certain share of the fund for consumption: every society, whatever its historical form of production, makes such allocations to its workers. It is, however, an essential characteristic of the capitalist form of production that the workers do not obtain their share directly in the form of goods but by way of commodity exchange, just as it is an essential feature of the capitalist mode of production that their labour power is not applied directly, as a result of a relation of personal domination, but again by way of commodity exchange: the workers selling their labour power to the owners of the means of production, and purchasing freely their consumer goods. Variable capital in its money form is the expression and medium of both these transactions. Money, then, comes first into circulation by the payment of wages. The capitalist class must therefore set a certain quantity of money circulating in the first place, and this must be equal to the amount they pay in wages. The capitalists of Department I need 1,000 units of money, and the capitalists of Department II need 500 to meet their wages bill. Thus, according to our diagram, two quantities of money are circulating: I(1,000_v_) and II(500_v_). The workers spend the total of 1,500 on consumer goods, i.e. on the products of Department II. In this way, labour power is maintained, that is to say the variable capital of society is reproduced in its natural form, as the foundation of all other reproductions of capital. At the same time, the capitalists of Department II dispose of their aggregate product (1,500) in the following manner: their own workers receive 500 and the workers of Department I receive 1,000. This exchange gives the capitalists of Department II possession of 1,500 money units: 500 are their own variable capital which has returned to them; these may start circulating again as variable capital but for the time being they have completed their course. The other 1,000 accrue to them year by year out of the realisation of one-third of their own products. The capitalists of Department II now buy means of production from the capitalists of Department I for these 1,000 money units in order to renew the part of their own constant capital that has been used up. By means of this purchase, Department II renews in its natural form half of the constant capital II_c_ it requires. Department I now has in return 1,000 money units which are nothing more than the money originally paid to its own workers. Now, after having changed hands twice, the money has returned to Department I, to become effective later as variable capital. This completes the circulation of this quantity of money for the moment, but the circulation within society has not yet come to an end. The capitalists of Department I have not yet realised their surplus value to buy consumer goods for themselves; it is still contained in their product in a form which is of no use to them. Moreover, the capitalists of Department II have not yet renewed the second half of their constant capital. These two acts of exchange are identical both in substance and in value, for the capitalists of Department I receive their goods from Department II in exchange for the I(1,000_c_) means of production needed by the capitalists of Department II. However, a new quantity of money is required to effect this exchange. It is true that the same money which has already completed its course, might be brought into circulation again for this purpose--in theory, there could be no objection to this. In practice, however, this solution is out of the question, for the needs of the capitalists, as consumers, must be satisfied just as constantly as the needs of the workers--they run parallel to the process of production and must be mediated by specific quantities of money. Hence it follows that the capitalists of both departments--that is to say all capitalists--must have a further cash reserve in hand, in addition to the money required as variable capital, in order to realise their own surplus value in the form of consumer goods. On the other hand, before the total product is realised and during the process of its production, certain parts of the constant capital must be bought continually. These are the circulating parts of the constant capital, such as raw and auxiliary materials, semi-finished goods, lighting and the like. Therefore, not only must the capitalists of Department I have certain quantities of money in hand to satisfy their needs as consumers, but the capitalists of Department II must also have money to meet the requirements of their constant capital. The exchange of 1,000s I (the surplus value of Department I contained in the means of production) against goods is thus effected by money which is advanced partly by the capitalists of Department I in order to satisfy their needs as consumers, and partly by the capitalists of Department II in order to satisfy their needs as producers.[91] Both lots of capitalists may each advance 500 units of the money necessary for the exchange, or possibly the two departments will contribute in different proportions. At any rate, two things are certain: (_a_) the money set aside for the purpose by both departments must suffice to effect the exchange between I(1,000_s_) and II(1,000_c_); (_b_) whatever the distribution of this money between the two departments may have been, the exchange transaction completed, each department of capitalist production must again possess the same amount of money it had earlier put into circulation. This latter maxim applies quite generally to social circulation as a whole: once the process of circulation is concluded, money will always have returned to its point of origin. Thus all capitalists, after universal exchange, have achieved a twofold result: first they have exchanged products which, in their natural form, were of no use to them, against other products which, in their natural form, the capitalists require either as means of production or for their own consumption. Secondly, they have regained possession of the money which they set in circulation so as to effect these acts of exchange. This phenomenon is unintelligible from the point of view of simple commodity circulation, where commodity and money continually change places--possession of the commodity excluding the possession of money, as money constantly usurps the place which the commodity has given up, and _vice versa_. Indeed, this is perfectly true with regard to every individual act of commodity exchange which is the form of social circulation. Yet this social circulation itself is more than mere exchange of commodities: it is the circulation of capital. It is, however, an essential and characteristic feature of this kind of circulation, that it does not only return to the capitalist the value of his original capital plus an increase, the surplus value, but that it also assists social reproduction by providing the means of production and labour power in the natural form of productive capital, and by ensuring the maintenance of those who do not work. Possessing both the means of production and the money needed, the capitalists start the total social process of circulation; as soon as the social capital has completed its circuit, everything is again in their hands, apportioned to each department according to the investments made by it. The workers have only temporary possession of money during which time they convert the variable capital from its money form into its natural form. The variable capital in the capitalists' hands is nothing but the outward shape of part of their capital, and for this reason it must always revert to them. So far, we have only considered circulation as it takes place between the two large departments of production. Yet 4,000 units of the first Department's produce remain there in the form of means of production to renew its constant capital of 4,000_c_. Moreover 500 of the consumer goods produced in Department II [corresponding to the surplus value II(500_s_)] also remain in this department in the form of consumer goods for the capitalist class. Since in both departments the mode of production is capitalistic, that is unplanned, private production, each department can distribute its own products--means of production in Department I and consumer goods in Department II--amongst its own capitalists only by way of commodity exchange, i.e. by a large number of individual sale transactions between capitalists of the same department. Therefore the capitalists of both departments must have a reserve of money with which to perform these exchange transactions--to renew both the means of production in Department I and the consumer goods for the capitalist class in Department II. This part of circulation does not present any features of specific interest, as it is merely simple commodity circulation. Vendor and purchaser alike belong to the same category of agents of production, and circulation is concerned only with money and commodity changing hands within the same class and department. All the same, the money needed for this circulation must from the outset be in the hands of the capitalist class: it is part of their capital. So far, the circulation of total social capital presents no peculiarities, even if we consider the circulation of money. From the very outset it is self-evident that society must possess a certain quantity of money to make this circulation possible, and this for two reasons: first, the general form of capitalist production is that of commodity production which implies the circulation of money; secondly, the circulation of capital is based upon the continuous alternation of the three forms of capital: money capital, productive capital, and commodity capital. And as it is this very money, finally, which operates as capital--our diagram referring to capitalist production exclusively--the capitalist class must have possession of this money, as it has possession of every other form of capital; it throws it into circulation in order to regain possession as soon as the process of circulation has been completed. At first glance, only one detail might strike us: if the capitalists themselves have set in motion all the money which circulates in society, they must also advance the money needed for the realisation of their own surplus value. Thus it seems that the capitalists as a class ought to buy their own surplus value with their own money. As the capitalist class has possession of this money resulting from previous periods of production, even prior to the realisation of the product of each working period, the appropriation of surplus value at first sight does not seem to be based upon the unpaid labour of the wage labourer--as it in fact is--but merely the result of an exchange of commodities against an equivalent quantity of money both supplied by the capitalist class itself. A little reflection, however, dispels this illusion. After the general completion of circulation, the capitalists, now as before, possess their money funds which either reverted to them or remained in their hands. Further, they acquired consumer goods for the same amount which they have consumed. (Note that we are still confining ourselves to simple reproduction as the prime condition of our diagram of reproduction: the renewal of production on the old scale and the use of all surplus value produced for the personal consumption of the capitalist class.) Moreover, the illusion vanishes completely if we do not confine ourselves to one period of production but observe a number of successive periods in their mutual interconnections. The value the capitalist puts into circulation to-day in the form of money for the purpose of realising his own surplus value, is in fact nothing but his surplus value resulting from the preceding period of production in form of money. The capitalist must advance money out of his own pocket in order to buy his goods for consumption. On the one hand, the surplus value which he produces each year either exists in a natural form which renders it unfit for consumption, or, if it takes a consumable form, it is temporarily in the hands of another person. On the other hand, he (the capitalist) has regained possession of the money, and he is now making his advances by realising his surplus value from the preceding period. As soon as he has realised his new surplus value, which is still embodied in the commodity-form, this money will return to him. Consequently, in the course of several periods of production, the capitalist class draws its consumer goods from the pool, as well as the other natural forms of its capital. The quantity of money originally in its possession, however, remains unaffected by this process. Investigation of the circulation of money in society shows that the individual capitalist can never invest the whole of his money capital in production but must always keep a certain money reserve to be employed as variable capital, i.e. as wages. Further, he must keep a capital reserve for the purchase of means of production at any given period, and in addition, he must have a cash reserve for his personal consumption. The process of reproducing the total social capital thus entails the necessity of producing and reproducing the substance of money. Money is also capital, for Marx's diagram which we have discussed before, conceives of no other than capitalist production. Thus the diagram seems incomplete. We ought to add a further department, that of production of the means of exchange, to the other two large departments of social production [those of means of production (I) and of consumer goods (II)]. It is, indeed, a characteristic feature of this third department that it serves neither the purposes of production nor those of consumption, merely representing social labour in an undifferentiated commodity that cannot be used. Though money and its production, like the exchange and production of commodities, are much older than the capitalist mode of production, it was only the latter which made the circulation of money a general form of social circulation, and thus the essential element of the social reproductive process. We can only obtain a comprehensive diagram of the essential points of capitalist production if we demonstrate the original relationship between the production and reproduction of money and the two other departments of social production. Here, however, we deviate from Marx. He included the production of gold (we have reduced the total production of money to the production of gold for the sake of simplicity) in the first department of social production. 'The production of gold, like that of metals generally, belongs to department I, which occupies itself with means of production.'[92] This is correct only in so far as the production of gold is the production of metal for industrial purposes (jewellery, dental stoppings, etc.). But gold in its capacity as money is not a metal but rather an embodiment of social labour _in abstracto_. Thus it is no more a means of production than it is a consumer good. Besides, a mere glance at the diagram of reproduction itself shows what inconsistencies must result from confusing means of exchange with means of production. If we add a diagrammatic representation of the annual production of gold as the substance of money to the two departments of social production, we get the following three sets of figures: I. _4,000c + 1,000v + 1,000s = 6,000_ means of production II. _2,000c + 500v + 500s = 3,000_ means of subsistence III. _20c + 5v + 5s = 30_ means of exchange This quantity of value of 30, chosen by Marx as an example, obviously does not represent the quantity of money which circulates annually in society; it only stands for that part which is annually reproduced, the annual wear and tear of the money substance which, on the average, remains constant so long as social reproduction remains on the same level. The turnover of capital goes on in a regular manner and the realisation of commodities proceeds at an equal pace. If we consider the third line as an integral part of the first one, as Marx wants us to do, the following difficulty arises: the constant capital of the third department consists of real and concrete means of production, premises, tools, auxiliary materials, vessels, and the like, just as it does in the two other departments. Its product, however, the 30_g_ which represent money, cannot operate in its natural form as constant capital in any process of production. If we therefore include this 30_g_ as an essential part of the product of Department I (6,000 means of production) the means of production will show a social deficit of this size which will prevent Departments I and II from resuming their reproduction on the old scale. According to the previous assumption--which forms the foundation of Marx's whole diagram--reproduction as a whole starts from the product of each department in its actual use-form. The proportions of the diagram are based upon this assumption; without it, they dissolve in chaos. Thus the first fundamental relation of value is based upon the equation: I(6,000) equals I(4,000_c_) + II(2,000_c_). This cannot apply to the product III(30_g_), since neither department can use gold as a means of production [say, in the proportion of I(20_c_) + II(10_c_)]. The second fundamental relation derived from this is based upon the equation I(1,000_v_) + I(1,000_s_) = II(2,000_c_). This would mean, with regard to the production of gold, that as many consumer goods are taken from Department II as there are means of production supplied to it. But this is equally untrue. Though the production of gold removes concrete means of production from the total social product and uses them as its constant capital, though it takes concrete consumer goods for the use of its workers and capitalists, corresponding to its variable capital and surplus value, the product it supplies yet cannot operate in any branch of production as a means of production, nor is it a consumer good, fit for human consumption. To include the production of money in the activities of Department I, therefore, is to run counter to all the general proportions which express the relations of value in Marx's diagram, and to diminish the diagram's validity. The attempt by Marx to find room for the production of gold within Department I (means of production) moreover leads to dubious results. The first act of circulation between this new sub-Department (called by Marx I_g_) and Department II (consumer goods) consists as usual in the workers' purchase of consumer goods from Department II with the money obtained as wages from the capitalists. This money is not yet a product of the new period of production. It has been reserved by the capitalists of Department I_g_ out of the money contained in their product of an earlier period. This, indeed, is the normal procedure. But now Marx allows the capitalists of Department II to buy gold from I_g_ with the money they have reserved, gold as a commodity material to the value of 2. This is a leap from the production of money into the industrial production of gold which is no more to do with the problem of the production of money than with the production of boot-polish. Yet out of the 5 I_g v_ that have been reserved, 3 still remain, and as the capitalist, unable to use them as constant capital, does not know what to do with them, Marx arranges for him to add them on to his own reserve of money. Marx further finds the following way out to avoid a deficit in the constant capital of II which must be exchanged completely against the means of production (I_v_ + I_s_): 'Therefore, this money must be entirely transferred from II_c_ to II_s_, no matter whether it exists in necessities of life or articles of luxury, and vice versa, a corresponding value of commodities must be transferred from II_s_ to II_c_. Result: A portion of the surplus-value is accumulated as a hoard of money.'[93] A strange result, in all conscience! We have achieved an increase in money, a surplus of the money substance, by simply confining ourselves to the annual wear and tear of the money fund. This surplus value comes into existence, for some unknown reason, at the expense of the capitalists in the consumer goods department. They practise abstinence, not because they may want to expand their production of surplus value, let us say, but in order to secure a sufficient quantity of consumer goods for the workers engaged in the production of gold. The capitalists of Department II, however, get poor reward for this Christian virtue. In spite of their abstinence, they are not only unable to expand their reproduction, but they are no longer even in the position to resume their production on its former scale. Even if the corresponding 'commodity value' is transferred from II_g_ to II_c_, it is not only the value but its actual and concrete form which matters. As the new part of the product of I now consists of money which cannot be used as a means of production, Department II, in spite of its abstinence, cannot renew its constant material capital on the old scale. As our diagram presupposes simple reproduction, its condition are thus violated in two directions: surplus value is being hoarded, and the constant capital shows a deficit. Marx's own results, then, prove that the production of gold cannot possibly find a place in either of the two departments of his diagram; the whole diagram is upset as soon as the first act of exchange between Departments I and II has been completed. As Engels remarks in his footnote, 'the analysis of the exchange of newly produced gold within the constant capital of Department I is not contained in the MS.'[94] Besides, the inconsistency would then only have been greater. The point of view we advocate is confirmed by Marx himself when he gives an exhaustive answer to the question, as striking as it is brief: 'Money in itself is not an element of actual reproduction.'[95] There is another important reason why we should put the production of money in a third and separate department of social production as a whole: Marx's diagram of simple reproduction is valid as the starting-point and foundation of the reproductive process not only for capitalism but also, _mutatis mutandis_, for every regulated and planned economic order, for instance a socialist one. However, the production of money, just like the commodity-form of the products, becomes obsolete when private ownership of the means of production is abolished. It constitutes the 'illegitimate' liabilities, the _faux frais_ of the anarchic economy under capitalism, a peculiar burden for a society based upon private enterprise, which implies the annual expenditure of a considerable amount of labour on the manufacture of products which are neither means of production nor yet consumer goods. This peculiar expenditure of labour by a society producing under capitalism will vanish in a socially planned economy. It is most adequately demonstrated by means of a separate department within the process of reproducing social capital. It is quite immaterial in this connection whether we picture a country which produces its own gold or a country which imports gold from abroad. The same expenditure of social labour which in the first case is necessary for the direct production of gold, is required in the second case to effect the exchange transactions. These observations show that the problem of the reproduction of total capital is not so crude as it often appears to those who approach it merely from the point of view of crises. The central problem might be formulated as follows: how is it possible that, in an unplanned economy, the aggregate production of innumerable individual capitalists can satisfy all the needs of society? One answer that suggests itself points to the continual fluctuations in the level of production in accordance with the fluctuating demand, i.e. the periodical changes in the market. This point of view, which regards the aggregate product of society as an undifferentiated mass of commodities, and treats social demand in an equally absurd way, overlooks the most important element, the _differentia specifica_ of the capitalist mode of production. We have seen that the problem of capitalist reproduction contains quite a number of precisely defined relations referring to specific capitalist categories and also, _mutatis mutandis_, to the general categories of human labour. The real problem consists in their inherent tendencies towards both conflict and harmony. Marx's diagram is the scientific formulation of the problem. Inquiry must now be made into the implications of this diagram analytic of the process of production. Has it any real bearing on the problems of actual life? According to the diagram, circulation absorbs the entire social product; all consumers' needs are satisfied, and reproduction takes place without friction. The circulation of money succeeds the circulation of commodities, completing the cycle of social capital. But what is the position in real life? The relations outlined in the diagram lay down a precise first principle for the division of social labour in a planned production--always providing a system of simple reproduction, i.e. no changes in the volume of production. But no such planned organisation of the total process exists in a capitalist economy, and things do not run smoothly, along a mathematical formula, as suggested by the diagram. On the contrary, the course of reproduction shows continual deviations from the proportions of the diagram which become manifest (_a_) in the fluctuations of prices from day to day; (_b_) in the continual fluctuations of profits; (_c_) in the ceaseless flow of capital from one branch of production to another, and finally in the periodical and cyclical swings of reproduction between over-production and crisis. And yet, apart from all these deviations, the diagram presents a socially necessary average level in which all these movements must centre, to which they are always striving to return, once they have left it. That is why the fluctuating movements of the individual capitalists do not degenerate into chaos but are reduced to a certain order which ensures the prolonged existence of society in spite of its lack of a plan. In comparison, the similarities and the profound discrepancies between Marx's diagram of reproduction and Quesnay's _Tableau Économique_ strike us at once. These two diagrams, the beginning and end of the period of classical economics, are the only attempts to describe an apparent chaos in precise terms, a chaos created by the interrelated movements of capitalist production and consumption, and by the disparity of innumerable private producers and consumers. Both writers reduce this chaotic jumble of individual capitals to a few broadly conceived rules which serve, as it were, as moorings for the development of capitalist society, in spite of its chaos. They both achieve a synthesis between the two aspects which are the basis of the whole movement of social capital: that circulation is at one and the same time a capitalist process of producing and appropriating surplus value, and also a social process of producing and consuming material goods necessary to civilised human existence. Both show the circulation of commodities to act as a mediator for the social process as a whole, and both conceive of the circulation of money as a subsidiary phenomenon, an external and superficial expression of the various stages within the circulation of commodities. It is socially necessary labour which creates value. This inspired fundamental law of Marx's theory of value which provided the solution of the money problem, amongst others, further led him first to distinguish and then to integrate those two aspects in the total reproductive process: the aspect of value and that of actual material connections. Secondly, Marx's diagram is based upon the precise distinction between constant and variable capital which alone reveals the internal mechanisms of the production of surplus value and brings it, as a value-relationship, into precise relation with the two material categories of production: that of producer and consumer goods. After Quesnay, some classical economists, Adam Smith and Ricardo in particular, came fairly close to this point of view. Ricardo's contribution, his precise elaboration of the theory of value, has even been frequently confused with that of Marx. On the basis of his own theory of value, Ricardo saw that Smith's method of resolving the price of all commodities into _v + s_--a theory which wrought so much havoc in the analysis of reproduction--is wrong; but he was not much interested in Smith's mistake, nor indeed very enthusiastic about the problem of reproduction as a whole. His analysis, in fact, represents a certain decline after that of Adam Smith, just as Smith had partly retrogressed as against the Physiocrats. If Ricardo expounded the fundamental value categories of bourgeois economy--wages, surplus value and capital--much more precisely and consistently than his predecessors, he also treated them more rigidly. Adam Smith had shown infinitely more understanding for the living connections, the broad movements of the whole. In consequence he did not mind giving two, or, as in the case of the problem of value, even three or four different answers to the same question. Though he contradicts himself quite cheerfully in the various parts of his analysis, these very contradictions are ever stimulating him to renewed effort, they make him approach the problem as a whole from an ever different point of view, and so to grasp its dynamics. Ultimately, it was the limitation of their bourgeois mentalities which doomed both Smith and Ricardo to failure. A proper understanding of the fundamental categories of capitalist production, of value and surplus value as living dynamics of the social process demands the understanding of this process in its historical development and of the categories themselves as historically conditioned forms of the general relations of labour. This means that only a socialist can really solve the problem of the reproduction of capital. Between the _Tableau Économique_ and the diagram of reproduction in the second volume of _Capital_ there lies the prosperity and decline of bourgeois economics, both in time and in substance. FOOTNOTES: [90] In his seventh note to the _Tableau Économique_, following up his arguments against the mercantilist theory of money as identical with wealth, Quesnay says: 'The bulk of money in a nation cannot increase unless this reproduction itself increases; otherwise, an increase in the bulk of money would inevitably be prejudicial to the annual production of wealth.... Therefore we must not judge the opulence of states on the basis of a greater or smaller quantity of money: thus a stock of money, equal to the income of the landowners, is deemed much more than enough for an agricultural nation where the circulation proceeds in a regular manner, and where commerce takes place in confidence and full liberty' (_Analyse du Tableau Économique_, ed. Oncken, pp. 324-5). [91] Marx (_Capital_, vol. ii, p. 482) takes the money spent directly by the capitalists of Department II as the starting point of this act of exchange. As Engels rightly says in his footnote, this does not affect the final result of circulation, but the assumption is not the correct condition of circulation within society. Marx himself has given a better exposition in _Capital_, vol. ii, pp. 461-2. [92] _Capital_, vol. ii, p. 548. [93] _Capital_, vol. ii, p. 550. [94] Ibid., p. 551. [95] Ibid., p. 572. _CHAPTER VI_ ENLARGED REPRODUCTION The shortcomings of the diagram of simple reproduction are obvious: it explains the laws of a form of reproduction which is possible only as an occasional exception in a capitalist economy. It is not simple but enlarged reproduction which is the rule in every capitalist economic system, even more so than in any other.[96] Nevertheless, this diagram is of real scientific importance in two respects. In practice, even under conditions of enlarged reproduction, the greater part of the social product can be looked on as simple reproduction, which forms the broad basis upon which production in every case expands beyond its former limits. In theory, the analysis of simple reproduction also provides the necessary starting point for all scientific exposition of enlarged reproduction. The diagram of simple reproduction of the aggregate social capital therefore inevitably introduces the further problem of the enlarged reproduction of the total capital. We already know the historical peculiarity of enlarged reproduction on a capitalist basis. It must represent itself as accumulation of capital, which is both its specific form and its specific condition. That is to say, social production as a whole--which on a capitalist basis is the production of surplus value--can in every case be expanded only in so far as the social capital that has been previously active is now augmented by surplus value of its own creation. This use of part of the surplus value (and in particular the use of an increasing part of it) for the purpose of production instead of personal consumption by the capitalist class, or else the increase of reserves, is the basis of enlarged reproduction under capitalist conditions of production. The characteristic feature of enlarged reproduction of the aggregate social capital--just as in our previous assumption of simple reproduction--is the reproduction of individual capitals, since production as a whole, whether regarded as simple or as enlarged production, can in fact only occur in the form of innumerable independent movements of reproduction performed by private individual capitals. The first comprehensive analysis of the accumulation of individual capitals is given in volume i of Marx's _Capital_, section 7, chapters 22, 23. Here Marx treats of (_a_) the division of the surplus value into capital and revenue; (_b_) the circumstances which determine the accumulation of capital apart from this division, such as the degree of exploitation of labour power and labour productivity; (_c_) the growth of fixed capital relative to the circulating capital as a factor of accumulation; and (_d_) the increasing development of an industrial reserve army which is at the same time both a consequence and a prerequisite of the process of accumulation. In the course of this discussion, Marx deals with two inspired notions of bourgeois economists with regard to accumulation: the 'theory of abstinence' as held by the more vulgar economists, who proclaim that the division of surplus value into capital, and thus accumulation itself, is an ethical and heroic act of the capitalists; and the fallacy of the classical economists, their doctrine that the entire capitalised part of the surplus value is used solely for consumption by the productive workers, that is to say spent altogether on wages for the workers employed year by year. This erroneous assumption, which completely overlooks the fact that every increase of production must manifest itself not only in the increased number of employed workers but also in the increase of the material means of production (premises, tools, and, certainly, raw materials) is obviously rooted in that 'dogma' of Adam Smith which we have already discussed. Moreover, the assumption that the expenditure of a greater amount of capital on wages is sufficient to expand production, also results from the mistaken idea that the prices of all commodities are completely resolved into wages and surplus value, so that the constant capital is disregarded altogether. Strangely enough, even Ricardo who was, at any rate occasionally, aware of this element of error in Smith's doctrine, subscribes most emphatically to its ultimate inferences, mistaken though they were: 'It must be understood, that all the productions of a country are consumed; but it makes the greatest difference imaginable whether they are consumed by those who reproduce, or by those who do not reproduce another value. When we say that revenue is saved, and added to capital, what we mean is, that the portion of revenue, so said to be added to capital, is consumed by productive, instead of unproductive labourers.'[97] If all the goods produced are thus swallowed up by human consumption, there can clearly be no room to spare in the total social product for such unconsumable means of production as tools and machinery, new materials and buildings, and consequently enlarged reproduction, too, will have to take a peculiar course. What happens--according to this odd conception--is simply that staple foodstuffs for new workers will be produced to the amount of the capitalised part of surplus value instead of the choice delicacies previously provided for the capitalist class. The classical theory of enlarged reproduction does not admit of any variations other than those connected with the production of consumer goods. After our previous observations it is not surprising that Marx could easily dispose of this elementary mistake of both Ricardo and Smith. Just as simple reproduction requires a regulated renewal of the constant capital, the material means of production, quite apart from the production of consumer goods in the necessary quantity for labourer and capitalist, equally so in the case of expanding production must part of the new additional capital be used to enlarge the constant capital, that is to add to the material means of production. Another law, Marx discovered, must also be applied here. The constant capital, continually overlooked by the classical economists, increases relative to the variable capital that is spent on wages. This is merely the capitalist expression of the general effects of increasing labour productivity. With technical progress, human labour is able to set in motion ever larger masses of means of production and to convert them into goods. In capitalist terms, this means a progressive decrease in expenses for living labour, in wages, relative to the expenses for inanimate means of production. Contrary to the assumption of Adam Smith and Ricardo, enlarged reproduction must not only start with the division of the capitalised part of the surplus value into constant and variable capital, but, as the technique of production advances, it is bound to allocate in this division ever increasing portions to the constant, and ever diminishing portions to the variable capital. This continuous qualitative change in the composition of capital is the specific manifestation of the accumulation of capital, that is to say of enlarged reproduction on the basis of capitalism.[98] The other side of this picture of continual changes in the relation between the portions of constant and variable capital is the formation of a relative surplus population, as Marx called it, that is to say that part of the working population which exceeds the average needs of capital, and thus becomes redundant. This reserve of unemployable industrial labour (taken here in a broader sense, and including a proletariat that is dominated by merchant capital) is always present. It forms a necessary prerequisite of the sudden expansion of production in times of boom, and is another specific condition of capitalist accumulation.[99] From the accumulation of individual capitals we can therefore deduce the following four characteristic phenomena of enlarged reproduction: (1) The volume of enlarged reproduction is independent, within certain limits, of the growth of capital, and can transcend it. The necessary methods for achieving this are: increased exploitation of labour and natural forces, and increased labour productivity (including increased efficiency of the fixed capital). (2) All real accumulation starts with that part of the surplus value which is intended for capitalisation being divided into constant and variable capital. (3) Accumulation as a social process is accompanied by continuous changes in the relation between constant and variable capital, whereby that portion of capital which is invested in inanimate means of production continually increases as compared with that expended on wages. (4) Concomitant with the accumulative process, and as a condition of the latter, there develops an industrial reserve army. These characteristics, derived from the reproductive process as it is performed by the individual capitals, represent an enormous step forward as compared with the analyses of bourgeois economists. Now, however, our problem is to demonstrate the accumulation of the aggregate capital which originates from these movements of individual capitals, and on the basis of the diagram of simple reproduction to establish the precise relations between the aspects of value prevalent in the production of surplus value and the material considerations in the production of consumer and producer goods, with a view to accumulation. The essential difference between enlarged reproduction and simple reproduction consists in the fact that in the latter the capitalist class and its hangers-on consume the entire surplus value, whereas in the former a part of the surplus value is set aside from the personal consumption of its owners, not for the purpose of hoarding, but in order to increase the active capital, i.e. for capitalisation. To make this possible, the new additional capital must also find the material prerequisites for its activity forthcoming. Here the concrete composition of the aggregate social product becomes important. Marx says already in volume i, when he considers the accumulation of individual capitals: 'The annual production must in the first place furnish all those objects (use-values) from which the material components of capital, used up in the course of the year, have to be replaced. Deducting these there remains the net or surplus-product, in which the surplus-value lies. And of what does this surplus-product consist? Only of things destined to satisfy the wants and desires of the capitalist class, things which, consequently, enter into the consumption fund of the capitalists? Were that the case, the cup of surplus-value would be drained to the very dregs, and nothing but simple reproduction would ever take place.--To accumulate it is necessary to convert a portion of the surplus-product into capital. But we cannot, except by a miracle, convert into capital anything but such articles as can be employed in the labour-process (i.e. means of production), and such further articles as are suitable for the sustenance of the labourer, (i.e. means of subsistence). Consequently, a part of the annual surplus-labour must have been applied to the production of additional means of production and subsistence, over and above the quantity of these things required to replace the capital advanced. In one word, surplus-value is convertible into capital solely because the surplus-product, whose value it is, already comprises the material elements of new capital.'[100] Additional means of production, however, and additional consumer goods for the workers alone are not sufficient; to get enlarged reproduction really going, additional labour is also required. Marx now finds a specific difficulty in this last condition: 'For this the mechanism of capitalist production provides beforehand, by converting the working class into a class dependent on wages, a class whose ordinary wages suffice, not only for its maintenance, but for its increase. It is only necessary for capital to incorporate this additional labour-power, annually supplied by the working class in the shape of labourers of all ages, with the surplus means of production comprised in the annual produce, and the conversion of surplus-value into capital is complete.'[101] This is the first solution which Marx gave to the problem of the accumulation of the aggregate capital. Having dwelt on this aspect of the question already in volume i of _Capital_, Marx returns to the problem at the end of the second volume of his main work whose concluding 21st chapter is devoted to accumulation and enlarged reproduction of the aggregate capital. Let us examine Marx's diagrammatic exposition of accumulation more closely. On the model of the diagram of simple reproduction with which we are already familiar, he devised a diagram for enlarged reproduction, the difference appearing most clearly if we compare the two. Assuming that society's annual aggregate product can be represented by an amount to the value of 9,000 (denoting millions of working hours, or, in capitalist monetary terms, any arbitrary amount of money), the aggregate product is to be distributed as follows: I. _4,000c + 1,000v + 1,000s = 6,000_ II. _2,000c + 500v + 500s = 3,000_ ----- Total: 9,000 Department I represents means of production, Department II consumer goods. One glance at the proportion of the figures shows that in this case simple reproduction alone is possible. The means of production made in Department I equal the total of the means of production actually used by the two departments. If these are merely renewed, production can be repeated only on its previous scale. On the other hand, the aggregate product of Department II equals the total of wages and surplus value in both departments. This shows that the consumer goods available permit only the employment of just as many workers as were previously employed, and that the entire surplus value is similarly spent on consumer goods, i.e. the personal consumption of the capitalist class. Now let us take the same aggregate product of 9,000 in the following equation: I. _4,000c + 1,000v + 1,000s = 6,000_ II. _1,500c + 750v + 750s = 3,000_ ----- Total: 9,000 Here a double disproportion confronts us: 6,000 means of production are created--more than those which are actually used by the society, i.e. _4,000c + 1,500c_, leaving a surplus of 500. Similarly, less consumer goods (3,000) are produced than the sum of what is paid out in wages (i.e. _1,000v + 750v_, the requirement of the workers), plus the aggregate of surplus value that has been produced (_1,000s + 750s_). This results in a deficit of 500. Since our premises do not allow us to decrease the number of workers employed, the consequence must be that the capitalist class cannot consume the entire surplus value it has pocketed. This proves fully consistent with the two material preconditions of enlarged reproduction on a capitalist basis: part of the appropriated surplus value is not to be consumed but is used for the purposes of production; and more means of production must be produced so as to ensure the use of the capitalised surplus value for the actual expansion of reproduction. In considering the diagram of simple reproduction, we saw that its fundamental social conditions are contained in the following equation: the aggregate of means of production (the product of Department I) must be equivalent to the constant capital of both departments, but the aggregate of consumer goods (the product of Department II) must equal the sum of variable capitals _and_ surplus values of the two departments. As regards enlarged reproduction, we must now infer a precise inverse double ratio. The general precondition of enlarged reproduction is that the product of Department I must be greater in value than the constant capital of both departments taken together, and that of Department II must be so much less than the sum total of both the variable capital and the surplus value in the two departments. This, however, by no means completes the analysis of enlarged reproduction; rather has it led us merely to the threshold of the question. Having deduced the proportions of the diagram, we must now pursue their further activities, the flow of circulation and the continuity of reproduction. Just as simple reproduction may be compared to an unchanging circle, to be repeated time and again, so enlarged reproduction, to quote Sismondi, is comparable to a spiral with ever expanding loops. Let us begin by examining the loops of this spiral. The first general question arising in this connection is how actual accumulation proceeds in the two departments under the conditions now known to us, i.e. how the capitalists may capitalise part of their surplus value, and at the same time acquire the material prerequisites necessary for enlarged reproduction. Marx expounds the question in the following way: Let us assume that half the surplus value of Department I is being accumulated. The capitalists, then, use 500 for their consumption but augment their capital by another 500. In order to become active, this additional capital of 500 must be divided, as we now know, into constant and variable capital. Assuming the ratio of 4 to 1 remains what it was for the original capital, the capitalists of Department I will divide their additional capital of 500 thus: they will buy new means of production for 400 and new labour for 100. This does not present any difficulties, since we know that Department I has already produced a surplus of 500 means of production. Yet the corresponding enlargement of the variable capital by 100 units of money is not enough, since the new additional labour power must also find adequate consumer goods which can only be supplied by Department II. Now the circulation between the two large departments is shifting. Formerly, under conditions of simple reproduction, Department I acquired 1,000 consumer goods for its own workers, and now it must find another 100 for its new workers. Department I therefore engages in enlarged reproduction as follows: _4,400c + 1,100v_. Department II, in turn, after selling these consumer goods to the value of 100, is now in a position to acquire additional means of production to the same amount from Department I. And in fact, Department I still has precisely one hundred of its surplus product left over which now find their way into Department II, enabling the latter to expand its own reproduction as well. Yet here, too, the additional means of production alone are not much use; to make them operate, additional labour power is needed. Assuming again that the previous composition of capital has been maintained, with a ratio of 2 to 1 as regards constant and variable capital, additional labour to the tune of 50 is required to work the additional 100 means of production. This additional labour, however, needs additional consumer goods to the amount of its wages, which are in fact supplied by Department II itself. This department must therefore produce, in addition to the 100 additional consumer goods for the new workers of Department I and the goods for the consumption of its own workers, a further amount of consumer goods to the tune of 50 as part of its aggregate product. Department II therefore starts on enlarged reproduction at a rate of _1,600c + 800v_. Now the aggregate product of Department I (6,000) has been absorbed completely. 5,500 were necessary for renewing the old and used-up means of production in both departments, and the remaining 500 for the expansion of production: 400 in Department I and 100 in Department II. As regards the aggregate product of Department II (3,000), 1,900 have been used for the increased labour force in the two departments, and the 1,100 consumer goods which remain serve the capitalists for their personal consumption, the consumption of their surplus value. 500 are consumed in Department I, and 600 in Department II where, out of a surplus value of 700, only 150 had been capitalised (100 being expended on means of production and 50 on wages). Enlarged reproduction can now proceed on its course. If we maintain our rate of exploitation at 100 per cent, as in the case of the original capital, the next period will give the following results: I. _4,400c + 1,100v + 1,100s = 6,600_ II. _1,600c + 800v + 800s = 3,200_ ----- Total: 9,800 The aggregate product of society has grown from 9,000 to 9,800, the surplus value of Department I from 1,000 to 1,100, and of Department II from 750 to 800. The object of the capitalist expansion of production, the increased production of surplus value, has been gained. At the same time, the material composition of the aggregate social product again shows a surplus of 600 as regards the means of production (6,600) over and above those which are actually needed (4,400 + 1,600), and also a deficit in consumer goods as against the sum total made up by the wages previously paid (_1,100v + 800v_) and the surplus value that has been created (_1,100s + 800s_). And thus we again have the material possibility as well as the necessity to use part of the surplus value, not for consumption by the capitalist class, but for a new expansion of production. The second enlargement of production, and increased production of surplus value, thus follows from the first as a matter of course and with mathematical precision. The accumulation of capital, once it has started, automatically leads farther and farther beyond itself. The circle has become a spiral which winds itself higher and higher as if compelled by a natural law in the guise of mathematical terms. Assuming that in the following years there is always capitalisation of half the surplus value, while the composition of the capital and the rate of exploitation remain unchanged, the reproduction of capital will result in the following progression: _2nd year:_ I. _4,840c + 1,210v + 1,210s = 7,260_ II. _1,760c + 880v + 880s = 3,520_ ------ Total: 10,780 _3rd year:_ I. _5,324c + 1,331v + 1,331s = 7,986_ II. _1,936c + 968v + 968s = 3,872_ ------ Total: 11,858 _4th year:_ I. _5,856c + 1,464v + 1,464s = 8,784_ II. _2,129c + 1,065v + 1,065s = 4,259_ ------ Total: 13,043 _5th year:_ I. _6,442c + 1,610v + 1,610s = 9,662_ II. _2,342c + 1,172v + 1,172s = 4,686_ ------ Total: 14,348 Thus, after five years of accumulation, the aggregate social product is found to have grown from 9,000 to 14,348, the social aggregate capital from (_5,500c + 1,750v = 7,250_) to (_8,784c + 2,782v = 11,566_) and the surplus value from (_1,000s + 500s = 1,500_) to (_1,464s + 1,065s = 2,529_), whereby the surplus value for personal consumption, being 1,500 at the beginning of accumulation, has grown to 732 + 958 = 1,690 in the last year.[102] The capitalist class, then, has capitalised more, it has practised greater abstinence, and yet it has been able to live better. Society, in a material respect, has become richer, richer in means of production, richer in consumer goods, and it has equally become richer in the capitalist sense of the term since it produces more surplus value. The social product circulates _in toto_ in society. Partly it serves to enlarge reproduction and partly it serves consumption. The requirements of capitalist accumulation correspond to the material composition of the aggregate social product. What Marx said in volume i of _Capital_ is true: the increased surplus value can be added on to capital because the social surplus product comes into the world from the very first in the material form of means of production, in a form incapable of utilisation except in the productive process. At the same time reproduction expands in strict conformity with the laws of circulation: the mutual supply of the two departments of production with additional means of production and consumer goods proceeds as an exchange of equivalents. It is an exchange of commodities in the course of which the very accumulation of one department is the condition of accumulation in the other and makes this possible. The complicated problem of accumulation is thus converted into a diagrammatic progression of surprising simplicity. We may continue the above chain of equations _ad infinitum_ so long as we observe this simple principle: that a certain increase in the constant capital of Department I always necessitates a certain increase in its variable capital, which predetermines beforehand the extent of the increase in Department II, with which again a corresponding increase in the variable capital must be co-ordinated. Finally, it depends on the extent of increase in the variable capital in both departments, how much of the total may remain for personal consumption by the capitalist class. The extent of this increase will also show that this amount of consumer goods which remains for private consumption by the capitalist is exactly equivalent to that part of the surplus value which has not been capitalised in either department. There are no limits to the continuation of this diagrammatic development of accumulation in accordance with the few easy rules we have demonstrated. But now it is time to take care lest we should only have achieved these surprisingly smooth results through simply working out certain fool-proof mathematical exercises in addition and subtraction, and we must further inquire whether it is not merely because mathematical equations are easily put on paper that accumulation will continue _ad infinitum_ without any friction. In other words: the time has come to look for the concrete social conditions of accumulation. FOOTNOTES: [96] 'The premise of simple reproduction, that I(_v + s_) is equal to II_c_, is irreconcilable with capitalist production, although this does not exclude the possibility that a certain year in an industrial cycle of ten or eleven years may not show a smaller total production than the preceding year, so that there would not have been even a simple reproduction, compared to the preceding year. Indeed, considering the natural growth of population per year, simple reproduction could take place only in so far as a correspondingly larger number of unproductive servants would partake of the 1,500 representing the aggregate surplus-product. But accumulation of capital, actual capitalist production, would be impossible under such circumstances' (_Capital_, vol. ii, p. 608). [97] Ricardo, _Principles_, chap. viii, 'On Taxes'. MacCulloch's edition of Ricardo's Works, p. 87, note. (Reference not given in original.) [98] 'The specifically capitalist mode of production, the development of the productive power of labour corresponding to it, and the change thence resulting in the organic composition of capital, do not merely keep pace with the advance of accumulation, or with the growth of social wealth. They develop at a much quicker rate, because mere accumulation, the absolute increase of the total social capital, is accompanied by the centralisation of the individual capitals of which that total is made up; and because the change in the technological composition of the additional capital goes hand in hand with a similar change in the technological composition of the original capital. With the advance of accumulation, therefore, the proportion of constant to variable capital changes. If it was originally say 1 : 1, it now becomes successively 2 : 1, 3 : 1, 4 : 1, 5 : 1, 7 : 1, etc., so that, as the capital increases, instead of 1/2 of its total value, only 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6, 1/8, etc., is transformed into labour-power, and, on the other hand, 2/3, 3/4, 4/5, 5/6, 7/8 into means of production. Since the demand for labour is determined not by the amount of capital as a whole, but by its variable constituent alone, that demand falls progressively with the increase of the total capital, instead of, as previously assumed, rising in proportion to it. It falls relatively to the magnitude of the total capital, and at an accelerated rate, as this magnitude increases. With the growth of the total capital, its variable constituent or the labour incorporated in it, also does increase, but in a constantly diminishing proportion. The intermediate pauses are shortened, in which accumulation works as simple extension of production, on a given technical basis. It is not merely that an accelerated accumulation of total capital, accelerated in a constantly growing progression, is needed to absorb an additional number of labourers, or even, on account of the constant metamorphosis of old capital, to keep employed those already functioning. In its turn, this increasing accumulation and centralisation becomes a source of new changes in the composition of capital, of a more accelerated diminution of its variable, as compared with its constant constituent' (_Capital_, vol. i, pp. 642-3). [99] 'The course characteristic of modern industry, viz., a decennial cycle (interrupted by smaller oscillations), of periods of average activity, production at high pressure, crisis and stagnation, depends on the constant formation, the greater or less absorption, and the re-formation of the industrial reserve army or surplus population. In their turn, the varying phases of the industrial cycle recruit the surplus population, and become one of the most energetic agents of its reproduction' (ibid., pp. 646-7). [100] _Capital_, vol. i. pp. 593-4. [101] Ibid., p. 594. [102] Op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 596-601. _CHAPTER VII_ ANALYSIS OF MARX'S DIAGRAM OF ENLARGED REPRODUCTION The first enlargement of reproduction gave the following picture: I. _4,400c + 1,100v + 1,100s = 6,600_ II. _1,600c + 800v + 800s = 3,200_ ----- Total: 9,800 This already clearly expresses the interdependence of the two departments--but it is a dependence of a peculiar kind. Accumulation here originates in Department I, and Department II merely follows suit. Thus it is Department I alone that determines the volume of accumulation. Marx effects accumulation here by allowing Department I to capitalise one-half of its surplus value; Department II, however, may capitalise only as much as is necessary to assure the production and accumulation of Department I. He makes the capitalists of Department II consume 600_s_ as against the consumption of only 500_s_ by the capitalists of Department I who have appropriated twice the amount of value and far more surplus value. In the next year, he assumes the capitalists of Department I again to capitalise half their surplus value, this time making the capitalists of Department II capitalise more than in the previous year--summarily fixing the amount to tally exactly with the needs of Department I. 500_s_ now remain for the consumption of the capitalists of Department II--less than the year before--surely a rather queer result of accumulation on any showing. Marx now describes the process as follows: 'Then let Department I continue accumulation at the same ratio, so that 550_s_ are spent as revenue, and 55_s_ accumulated. In that case, 1,100 I_v_ are first replaced by 1,100 I_c_, and 550 I_s_ must be realised in an equal amount of commodities of II, making a total of 1,650 I(_v + s_). But the constant capital of II, which is to be replaced, amounts only to 1,600, and the remaining 50 must be made up out of 800 II_s_. Leaving aside the money aspect of the matter, we have as a result of this transaction: 'I. _4,400c + 550s_ (to be capitalised); furthermore, realised in commodities of II for the fund for consumption of the capitalists and labourers of I, 1,650 (_v + s_). 'II. _1,650c + 825v + 725s_. 'In Department I, 550_s_ must be capitalised. If the former proportion is maintained, 440 of this amount form constant capital, and 110 variable capital. These 110 must be eventually taken out of 725 II_s_, that is to say, articles of consumption to the value of 110 are consumed by the labourers of I instead of the capitalists of II, so that the latter are compelled to capitalise these 110_s_ which they cannot consume. This leaves 615 II_s_ of the 725 II_s_. But if II thus converts these 110 into additional constant capital, it requires an additional variable capital of 55. This again must be taken out of its surplus value. Subtracting this amount from 615 II_s_, we find that only 560 II_s_ remain for the consumption of the capitalists of II, and we obtain the following values of capital after accomplishing all actual and potential transfers: I. _(4,400c+440c) + (1,100v+110v) = 4,840c + 1,210v = 6,050_ II. _(1,600c+50c+110c) + (800v+25v+55v) = 1,760c + 88v = 2,640_ ----- Total: 8,690'[103] This quotation is given at length since it shows very clearly how Marx here effects accumulation in Department I at the expense of Department II. In the years that follow, the capitalists of the provisions department get just as rough a deal. Following the same rules, Marx allows them in the third year to accumulate 264_s_--a larger amount this time than in the two preceding years. In the fourth year they are allowed to capitalise 290_s_ and to consume 678_s_, and in the fifth year they accumulate 320_s_ and consume 745_s_. Marx even says: 'If things are to proceed normally, accumulation in II must take place more rapidly than in I, because that portion of I(_v + s_) which must be converted into commodities of II_c_, would otherwise grow more rapidly than II_c_, for which it can alone be exchanged.'[104] Yet the figures we have quoted fail to show a quicker accumulation in Department II, and in fact show it to fluctuate. Here the principle seems to be as follows: Marx enables accumulation to continue by broadening the basis of production in Department I. Accumulation in Department II appears only as a condition and consequence of accumulation in Department I: absorbing, in the first place, the other's surplus means of production and supplying it, secondly, with the necessary surplus of consumer goods for its additional labour. Department I retains the initiative all the time, Department II being merely a passive follower. Thus the capitalists of Department II are only allowed to accumulate just as much as, and are made to consume no less than, is needed for the accumulation of Department I. While in Department I half the surplus value is capitalised every time, and the other half consumed, so that there is an orderly expansion both of production and of personal consumption by the capitalists, the twofold process in Department II takes the following erratic course: 1st year: 150 are capitalised, 600 consumed 2nd 240 660 3rd 254 626 4th 290 678 5th 320 745 Here there is no rule in evidence for accumulation and consumption to follow; both are wholly subservient to the requirements of accumulation in Department I. Needless to say, the absolute figures of the diagram are arbitrary in every equation, but that does not detract from their scientific value. It is the _quantitative ratios_ which are relevant, since they are supposed to express strictly determinate relationships. Those precise logical rules that lay down the relations of accumulation in Department I, seem to have been gained at the cost of any kind of principle in construing these relations for Department II; and this circumstance calls for a revision of the immanent connections revealed by the analysis. It might, however, be permissible to assume the defect to lie in a rather unhappy choice of example. Marx himself, dissatisfied with the diagram quoted above, proceeded forthwith to give a second example in order to elucidate the movements of accumulation, where the figures of the equation run in the following order: I. _5,000c + 1,000v + 1,000s = 7,000_ II. _1,430c + 285v + 285s = 2,000_ ----- Total: 9,000 In contrast to the previous example, the capital of both departments is here seen to have the same composition, i.e. constant and variable capital are in a ratio of 5 to 1. This already presupposes a considerable development of capitalist production, and accordingly of social labour productivity--a considerable preliminary expansion of the scale of production, and finally, a development of all the circumstances which bring about a relatively redundant surplus population in the working class. We are no longer introduced to enlarged reproduction, as in the first example, at the stage of the original transition from simple to enlarged reproduction--the only point of that is in any case for the sake of abstract theory. This time, we are brought face to face with the process of accumulation as it goes on at a definite and rather advanced stage of development. It is perfectly legitimate to assume these conditions, and they in no way distort the principles we must employ in order to work out the individual loops of the reproductive spiral. Here again Marx takes for a starting point the capitalisation of half the surplus value in Department I. 'Now take it that the capitalist class of I consumes one-half of the surplus-value, or 500, and accumulates the other half. In that case (_1,000v + 500s_) I, or 1,500, must be converted into 1,500 II_c_. Since II_c_ amounts to only 1,430, it is necessary to take 70 from the surplus-value. Subtracting this sum from 285_s_ leaves 215 II_s_. Then we have: 'I. _5,000c + 500s_ (to be capitalised) + 1,500(_v + s_) in the fund set aside for consumption by capitalists and labourers. 'II. _1,430c + 70s_ (to be capitalised) + _285v + 215s_. As 70 II_s_ are directly annexed by II_c_, a variable capital of 70 : 5, or 14, is required to set this additional constant capital in motion. These 14 must come out of the 215_s_, so that only 201 remain, and we have: 'II _(1,430) + 70c + (285v + 14v) + 201s_.'[105] After these preliminary arrangements, capitalisation can now proceed. This is done as follows: In Department I the 500_s_ which have been capitalised are divided into five-sixths (417_c_) + one-sixth (83_v_). These 83_v_ withdraw a corresponding amount from II_s_ which serves to buy units of constant capital and thus accrues to II_c_. An increase of II_c_ by 83 involves the necessity of an increase in II_v_ by 17 (one-fifth of 83). After the completion of this turnover we therefore have: I. _(5,000c + 417s) + (1,000v + 83s)v = 5,417c + 1,083v = 6,500_ II. _(1,500c + 83s) + (299v + 17s) = 1,538c + 316v = 1,899_ ----- Total: 8,399 The capital of Department I has grown from 6,000 to 6,500, i.e. by one-twelfth; in Department II it has grown from 1,715 to 1,899, i.e. by just over one-ninth. At the end of the next year, the results of reproduction on this basis are: I. _5,417c + 1,083v + 1,083s = 7,583_ II. _1,583c + 316v + 316s = 2,215_ ----- Total: 9,798 If the same ratio is maintained in the continuance of accumulation, the result at the end of the second year is as follows: I. _5,869c + 1,173v + 1,173s = 8,215_ II. _1,715c + 342v + 342s = 2,399_ ------ Total: 10,614 And at the end of the third year: I. _6,358c + 1,271v + 1,271s = 8,900_ II. _1,858c + 371v + 371s = 2,600_ ------ Total: 11,500 In the course of three years, the total social capital has increased from I.6,000 + II.1,715 = 7,715 to I.7,629 + II.2,229 = 9,858, and the total product from 9,000 to 11,500. Accumulation in both departments here proceeds uniformly, in marked difference from the first example. From the second year onwards, both departments capitalise half their surplus value and consume the other half. A bad choice of figures in the first example thus seems to be responsible for its arbitrary appearance. But we must check up to make sure that it is not only a mathematical manipulation with cleverly chosen figures which this time ensures the smooth progress of accumulation. In the first as well as in the second example, we are continually struck by a seemingly general rule of accumulation: to make any accumulation possible, Department II must always enlarge its constant capital by precisely the amount by which Department I increases (_a_) the proportion of surplus value for consumption and (_b_) its variable capital. If we take the example of the first year as an illustration, the constant capital of Department II must be increased by 70. And why? because this capital was only 1,430 before. But if the capitalists of Department I wish to accumulate half their surplus value (1,000) and to consume the other half, they need consumer goods for themselves and for their workers to the tune of 1,500 units which they can obtain only from Department II in exchange for their own products--means of production. Since Department II has already satisfied its own demand for producer goods to the extent of its own constant capital (1,430), this exchange is only possible if Department II decides to enlarge its own constant capital by 70. This means that it must enlarge its own production--and it can do so only by capitalising a corresponding part of its surplus value. If this surplus value amounts to 285 in Department II, 70 of it must be added to the constant capital. The first step towards expansion of production in Department II is thus demonstrated to be at the same time the condition for, and the consequence of, increased consumption by the capitalists of Department I. But to proceed. Hitherto, the capitalists of Department I could only spend one-half of their surplus value (500) on personal consumption. To capitalise the other half, they must redistribute these 500_s_ in such a way as to maintain at least the previous ratio of composition, i.e. they must increase the constant capital by 417 and the variable capital by 83. The first operation presents no difficulties: the surplus value of 500 belonging to the capitalists of Department I is contained in a natural form in their own product, the means of production, and is fit straightway to enter into the process of production; Department I can therefore enlarge its constant capital with the appropriate quantity of its own product. But the remaining 83 can only be used as variable capital if there is a corresponding quantity of consumer goods for the newly employed workers. Here it becomes evident for the second time that accumulation in Department I is dependent upon Department II: Department I must receive for its workers 83 more consumer goods than before from Department II. As this is again possible only by way of commodity exchange, Department I can satisfy its demands only on condition that Department II is prepared for its part to take up products of Department I, producer goods, to the tune of 83. Since Department II has no use for the means of production except to employ them in the process of production, it becomes not only possible but even necessary that Department II should increase its own constant capital by these very 83 which will now be used for capitalisation and are thus again withdrawn from the consumable surplus value of this department. The increase in the variable capital of Department I thus entails the second step in the enlargement of production in Department II. All material prerequisites of accumulation in Department I are now present and enlarged reproduction can proceed. Department II, however, has so far made only two increases in its constant capital. The result of this enlargement is that if the newly acquired means of production are indeed to be used, the quantity of labour power must be increased correspondingly. Maintaining the previous ratio, the new constant capital of 153 requires a new variable capital of 31. This implies the necessity to capitalise a corresponding further amount of the surplus value. Thus the fund for the capitalists' personal consumption in Department II comes to be what remains of the surplus value (285_s_) after deduction of the amounts used for twice enlarging the constant capital (70 + 83) and a commensurate increase in the variable capital (31)--a fund of 101, after deducting a total of 184. Similar operations in the second year of accumulation result for Department II in its surplus value being divided into 158 for capitalisation and 158 for the consumption of its capitalists, and in the third year, the figures become 172 and 170 respectively. We have studied this process so closely, tracing it step by step, because it shows clearly that the accumulation of Department II is completely determined and dominated by the accumulation of Department I. Though this dependence is no longer expressed, as in Marx's first example, by arbitrary changes in the distribution of the surplus value, it does not do away with the fact itself, even if now the surplus value is always neatly halved by each department, one-half for capitalisation and the other for personal consumption. Though there is nothing to choose between the capitalists of the two departments as far as the figures are concerned, it is quite obvious that Department I has taken the initiative and actively carries out the whole process of accumulation, while Department II is merely a passive appendage. This dependence is also expressed in the following precise rule: accumulation must proceed simultaneously in both departments, and it can do so only on condition that the provisions-department increases its constant capital by the precise amount by which the capitalists of the means-of-production-department increase both their variable capital and their fund for personal consumption. This equation (increase II_c_ = increase I_v_ + increase I_s.c_.)[106] is the mathematical cornerstone of Marx's diagram of accumulation, no matter what figures we may choose for its concrete application. But now we must see whether capitalist accumulation does in actual fact conform to this hard and fast rule. Let us first return to simple reproduction. Marx's diagram, it will be remembered, was as follows: I. _4,000c + 1,000v + 1,000s = 6,000_ means of production II. _2,000c + 500v + 500s = 3,000_ means of consumption ----- 9,000 total production Here, too, we established certain equations which form the foundation of simple reproduction; they were: (_a_) The product of Department I equals in value the sum of the two constant capitals in Departments I and II. (_b_) The constant capital of Department II equals the sum of variable capital and surplus value in Department I--a necessary consequence of (_a_). (_c_) The product of Department II equals the sum of variable capital and surplus value in both departments--a necessary consequence of (_a_) and (_b_). These equations correspond to the conditions of capitalist commodity production (at the restricted level of simple reproduction, however). Equation (_b_), for instance, is a result of the production of commodities, entailed by the fact, in other words, that the entrepreneurs of either department can only obtain the products of the other by an exchange of equivalents. Variable capital and surplus value in Department I together represent the demand of this department for consumer goods. The product of Department II must provide for the satisfaction of this demand, but consumer goods can only be obtained in exchange for an equivalent part of the product of Department I, the means of production. These equivalents, useless to Department II in their natural form if not employed as constant capital in the process of production, will thus determine how much constant capital there is to be in Department II. If this proportion were not adhered to, if, e.g., the constant capital of Department II (as a quantity of value) were larger than I(_v + s_), then it could not be completely transformed into means of production, since the demand of Department I for consumer goods would be too small; if the constant capital (II) were smaller than I(_v + s.c_), either the previous quantity of labour power could not be employed in this department, or the capitalists could not consume the whole of their surplus value. In all these cases, the premises of simple reproduction would be violated. These equations, however, are not just an exercise in mathematics, nor do they merely result from the system of commodity production. To convince us of this fact, there is a simple means at hand. Let us imagine for a moment that, instead of a capitalist method of production, we have a socialist, i.e. a planned society in which the social division of labour has come to replace exchange. This society also will divide its labour power into producers of means of production and producers of means of consumption. Let us further imagine the technical development of labour to be such that two-thirds of social labour are employed in the manufacture of producer goods and one-third in the manufacture of consumer goods. Suppose that under these conditions 1,500 units (reckoned on a daily, monthly, or yearly basis) suffice to maintain the whole working population of the society, one thousand of these being employed, according to our premise, in Department soc. I (making means of production), and five hundred in Department soc. II (making consumer goods), and that the means of production dating from previous labour periods and used up during one year's labour, represent 3,000 labour units. This labour programme, however, would not be adequate for the society, since considerably more labour will be needed to maintain all those of its members who do not work in the material, the productive sense of the term: the child, the old and sick, the civil servant, the artist and the scientist. Moreover, every society needs certain reserves against a rainy day, as a protection against natural calamities. Taking it that precisely the same quantity of labour and, similarly, of means of production as that required for the workers' own maintenance is needed to maintain all the non-workers and to build up the reserves, then, from the figures previously assumed, we should get the following diagram for a regulated production: I. _4,000c + 1,000v + 1,000s = 6,000_ means of production II. _2,000c + 500v + 500s = 3,000_ means of consumption Here _c_ stands for the material means of production that have been used, expressed in terms of social labour time; _v_ stands for the social labour time necessary to maintain the workers themselves and _s_ for that needed to maintain those who do not work and to build up the reserves. If we check up on the proportions of this diagram, we obtain the following result: there is neither commodity production nor exchange, but in truth a social division of labour. The products of Department I are assigned to the workers of Department II in the requisite quantities, and the products of Department II are apportioned to everyone, worker or no, in both departments, and also to the reserve-fund; all this being the outcome not of an exchange of equivalents but of a social organisation that plans and directs the process as a whole--because existing demands must be satisfied and production knows no other end but to satisfy the demands of society. Yet all that does not detract from the validity of the equations. The product of Department I must equal I_c_ + II_c_: this means simply that Department I must annually renew all the means of production which society has used up during one year's labour. The product of Department II must equal the sum of I(_v + s_) + II(_v + s_): this means that society must each year produce as many consumer goods as are required by all its members, whether they work or not, plus a quota for the reserve fund. The proportions of the diagram are as natural and as inevitable for a planned economy as they are for a capitalist economy based upon anarchy and the exchange of commodities. This proves the diagram to have objective social validity, even if, just because it concerns _simple_ reproduction, it has hardly more than theoretical interest for either a capitalist or a planned economy, finding practical application only in the rarest of cases. The same sort of scrutiny must now be turned on the diagram of enlarged reproduction. Taking Marx's second example as the basis for our test, let us again imagine a socialist society. From the point of view of a regulated society we shall, of course, have to start with Department II, not with Department I. Assuming this society to grow rapidly, the result will be an increasing demand for provisions by its members, whether they work or not. This demand is growing so quickly that a constantly increasing quantity of labour--disregarding for the moment the progress of labour productivity--will be needed for the production of consumer goods. The quantities required, expressed in terms of social labour incorporated in them, increase from year to year in a progression of, say, 2,000 : 2,215 : 2,399 : 2,600 and so on. Let us further assume that technical conditions demand an increasing amount of means of production for producing this growing quantity of provisions, which, again measured in terms of social labour, mounts from year to year in the following progression: 7,000 : 7,583 : 8,215 : 8,900 and so on. To achieve this enlargement of production, we must further have a growth in the labour performed _per annum_ according to the following progression: 2,570 : 2,798 : 3,030 : 3,284. [The figures correspond to the respective amounts of I(_v + s_) + II(_v + s_).] Finally, the labour performed annually must be so distributed that one-half is always used for maintaining the workers themselves, a quarter for maintaining those who do not work, and the last quarter for the purpose of enlarging production in the following year. Thus we obtain the proportions of Marx's second diagram of enlarged reproduction for a socialist society. In fact, three conditions are indispensable if production is to be enlarged in any society, even in a planned economy: (1) the society must have an increasing quantity of labour power at its disposal; (2) in every working period, the immediate needs of society must not claim the whole of its working time, so that part of the time can be devoted to making provision for the future and its growing demands; (3) means of production must be turned out year after year in sufficiently growing quantities--without which production cannot be enlarged on a rising scale. In respect of all these general points, Marx's diagram of enlarged reproduction has objective validity--_mutatis mutandis_--for a planned society. It remains to test whether it is also valid for a capitalist economy. Here we must ask first of all: what is the starting point of accumulation? That is the approach on which we have to investigate the mutual dependence of the accumulative process in the two departments of production. There can be no doubt that under capitalist conditions Department II is dependent upon Department I in so far as its accumulation is determined by the additional means of production available. Conversely, the accumulation in Department I depends upon a corresponding quantity of additional consumer goods being available for its additional labour power. It does not follow, however, that so long as both these conditions are observed, accumulation in both departments is bound, as Marx's diagram makes it appear, to go on automatically year after year. The conditions of accumulation we have enumerated are no more than those without which there can be no accumulation. There may even be a desire to accumulate in both departments, yet the desire to accumulate plus the technical prerequisites of accumulation is not enough in a capitalist economy of commodity production. A further condition is required to ensure that accumulation can in fact proceed and production expand: the effective demand for commodities must also increase. Where is this continually increasing demand to come from, which in Marx's diagram forms the basis of reproduction on an ever rising scale? It cannot possibly come from the capitalists of Departments I and II themselves--so much is certain right away--it cannot arise out of their personal consumption. On the contrary, it is the very essence of accumulation that the capitalists refrain from consuming a part of their surplus value which must be ever increasing--at least as far as absolute figures are concerned--that they use it instead to make goods for the use of other people. It is true that with accumulation the personal consumption of the capitalist class will grow and that there may even be an increase in the total value consumed; nevertheless it will still be no more than a part of the surplus value that is used for the capitalists' consumption. That indeed is the foundation of accumulation: the capitalists' abstention from consuming the whole of their surplus value. But what of the remaining surplus value, the part that is accumulated? For whom can it be destined? According to Marx's diagram, Department I has the initiative: the process starts with the production of producer goods. And who requires these additional means of production? The diagram answers that Department II needs them in order to produce means of consumption in increased quantities. Well then, who requires these additional consumer goods? Department I, of course--replies the diagram--because it now employs a greater number of workers. We are plainly running in circles. From the capitalist point of view it is absurd to produce more consumer goods merely in order to maintain more workers, and to turn out more means of production merely to keep this surplus of workers occupied. Admittedly, as far as the individual capitalist is concerned, the worker is just as good a consumer, i.e. purchaser of his commodity, as another capitalist or anyone else, provided that he can pay. Every individual capitalist realises his surplus value in the price of his commodity, whether he sells it to the worker or to some other buyer. But this does not hold true from the point of view of the capitalist class as a whole. The working class in general receives from the capitalist class no more than an assignment to a determinate part of the social product, precisely to the extent of the variable capital. The workers buying consumer goods therefore merely refund to the capitalist class the amount of the wages they have received, their assignment to the extent of the variable capital. They cannot return a groat more than that; and if they are in a position to save in order to make themselves independent as small entrepreneurs, they may even return less, though this is the exception. Part of the surplus value is consumed by the capitalist class itself in form of consumer goods, the money exchanged for these being retained in the capitalists' pockets. But who can buy the products incorporating the other, the capitalised part of the surplus value? Partly the capitalists themselves--the diagram answers--who need new means of production for the purpose of expanding production, and partly the new workers who will be needed to work these new means of production. But that implies a previous capitalist incentive to enlarge production; if new workers are set to work with new means of production, there must have been a new demand for the products which are to be turned out. Perhaps the answer is that the natural increase of the population creates this growing demand. In fact, the growth of the population and its needs provided the starting point for our examination of enlarged reproduction in an hypothetical socialist society. There the requirements of society could serve as an adequate basis, since the only purpose of production was the satisfaction of wants. In a capitalist society, however, the matter is rather different. What kind of people are we thinking of when we speak of an increase in the population? There are only two classes of the population according to Marx's diagram, the capitalists and the workers. The natural increase of the former is already catered for by that part of the surplus value which is consumed inasmuch as it increases in absolute quantity. In any case, it cannot be the capitalists who consume the remainder, since capitalist consumption of the entire surplus value would mean a reversion to simple reproduction. That leaves the workers, their class also growing by natural increase. Yet a capitalist economy is not interested in this increase for its own sake, as a starting point of growing needs. The production of consumer goods for I_v_ and II_v_ is not an end in itself, as it would be in a society where the economic system is shaped for the workers and the satisfaction of their wants. In a capitalist system, Department II does not produce means of consumption in large quantities simply to keep the workers of Departments I and II. Quite the contrary: a certain number of workers in Departments I and II can support themselves in every case because their labour power is useful under the obtaining conditions of supply and demand. This means that the starting point of capitalist production is not a given number of workers and their demands, but that these factors themselves are constantly fluctuating, 'dependent variables' of the capitalist expectations of profit. The question is therefore whether the natural increase of the working class also entails a growing effective demand over and above the variable capital. And that is quite impossible. The only source of money for the working class in our diagram is the variable capital which must therefore provide in advance for the natural increase of the workers. One way or the other: either the older generation must earn enough to keep their offspring--who cannot, then, count as additional consumers; or, failing that, the next generation, the young workers, must turn to work in order to obtain wages and means of subsistence for themselves--in which case the new working generation is already included in the number of workers employed. On this count, the process of accumulation in Marx's diagram cannot be explained by the natural increase of the population. But wait! Even under the sway of capitalism, society does not consist exclusively of capitalists and wage labourers. Apart from these two classes, there are a host of other people: the landowners, the salaried employees, the liberal professions such as doctors, lawyers, artists and scientists. Moreover, there is the Church and its servants, the Clergy, and finally the State with its officials and armed forces. All these strata of the population can be counted, strictly speaking, neither among the capitalist nor among the working class. Yet society has to feed and support them. Perhaps it is they, these strata apart from the capitalists and wage labourers, who call forth enlarged reproduction by their demand. But this seeming solution cannot stand up to a closer scrutiny. The landowners must as consumers of rent, i.e. of part of the surplus value, quite obviously be numbered among the capitalist class; since we are here concerned with the surplus value in its undivided, primary form, their consumption is already allowed for in the consumption of the capitalist class. The liberal professions in most cases obtain their money, i.e. the assignment to part of the social product, directly or indirectly from the capitalist class who pay them with bits of their own surplus value. And the same applies to the Clergy, with the difference only that its members also obtain their purchasing power in part from the workers, i.e. from wages. The upkeep of the State, lastly, with its officers and armed forces is borne by the rates and taxes, which are in their turn levied upon either the surplus value or the wages. Within the limits of Marx's diagram there are in fact only the two sources of income in a society: the labourers' wages and the surplus value. All the strata of the population we have mentioned as apart from the capitalists and the workers, are thus to be taken only for joint consumers of these two kinds of income. Marx himself rejects any suggestion that these 'third persons' are more than a subterfuge: 'All members of society not directly engaged in reproduction, with or without labour, can obtain their share of the annual produce of commodities--in other words, their articles of consumption ... only out of the hands of those classes who are the first to handle the product, that is to say, productive labourers, industrial capitalists, and real estate owners. To that extent their revenues are substantially derived from wages (of the productive labourers), profit and ground rent, and appear as indirect derivations when compared to these primary sources of revenue. But, on the other hand, the recipients of these revenues, thus indirectly derived, draw them by grace of their social functions, for instance that of a king, priest, professor, prostitute, soldier, etc., and they may regard these functions as the primary sources of their revenue.'[107] And about the consumers of interest and ground rent as buyers, Marx says: 'Now, if that portion of the surplus-value of commodities, which the industrial capitalist yields in the form of ground rent or interest to other shareholders in the surplus-value, cannot be in the long run converted into money by the sale of the commodities, then there is an end to the payment of rent and interest, and the landowners or recipients of interest can no longer serve in the role of miraculous interlopers, who convert aliquot portions of the annual reproduction into money by spending their revenue. The same is true of the expenditure of all so-called unproductive labourers, State officials, physicians, lawyers, etc., and others who serve economists as an excuse for explaining inexplicable things, in the role of the 'general public'.[108] Seeing that we cannot discover within capitalist society any buyers whatever for the commodities in which the accumulated part of the surplus value is embodied, only one thing is left: foreign trade. But there are a great many objections to a method that conceives of foreign trade as a convenient dumping ground for commodities which cannot be found any proper place in the reproductive process. Recourse to foreign trade really begs the question: the difficulties implicit in the analysis are simply shifted--quite unresolved--from one country to another. Yet if the analysis of the reproductive process actually intends not any single capitalist country but the capitalist world market, there can be no foreign trade: all countries are 'home'. This point is made by Marx already in the first volume of _Capital_, in connection with accumulation: 'We here take no account of export trade, by means of which a nation can change articles of luxury either into means of production or means of subsistence, and _vice versa_. In order to examine the object of our investigation in its integrity, free from all disturbing subsidiary circumstances, we must treat the whole world as one nation and assume that capitalist production is everywhere established and has possessed itself of every branch of industry.'[109] The same difficulty presents itself if we consider the matter from yet another aspect. In Marx's diagram of accumulation we assumed that the portion of the social surplus value intended for accumulation exists from the first in a natural form which demands it to be used for capitalisation. 'In one word, surplus-value is convertible into capital solely because the surplus-product, whose value it is, already comprises the material elements of new capital.'[110] In the figures of our diagram: I. _5,000c + 1,000v + 1,000s = 7,000_ means of production II. _1,430c + 285v + 285s = 2,000_ means of consumption Here, a surplus value of 570_s_ can be capitalised because from the very outset it consists in means of production. To this quantity of producer goods there correspond besides additional consumer goods to the amount of 114_s_ so that 684_s_ can be capitalised in all. But the process here assumed of simply transferring means of production to constant capital on the one hand, consumer goods to variable capital on the other, in commensurate quantities, is in contradiction with the very structure of capitalist commodity production. Whatever natural form the surplus value may have, there can be no immediate transfer to the place of production for the purpose of accumulation. It must first be realised, it must be turned into hard cash.[111] Of the surplus value in Department I, 500 are fit to be capitalised, but not until they have first been realised; the surplus value has to shed its natural form and assume the form of pure value before it can be added to productive capital. This is true for each individual capitalist and also for the 'aggregate capitalist' of society, it being a prime condition for capitalist production that the surplus value must be realised in the form of pure value. Accordingly, regarding reproduction from the point of view of society as a whole-- 'We must not follow the manner copied by Proudhon from bourgeois economy, which looks upon this matter as though a society with a capitalist mode of production would lose its specific historical and economic characteristics by being taken as a unit. Not at all. We have, in that case, to deal with the aggregate capitalist.'[112] The surplus value must therefore shed its form as surplus product before it can re-assume it for the purpose of accumulation; by some means or other it must first pass through the money stage. So the surplus product of Departments I and II must be bought--by whom? On the above showing, there will have to be an effective demand outside I and II, merely in order to realise the surplus value of the two departments, just so that the surplus product can be turned to cash. Even then, we should only have got to the stage where the surplus value has become money. If this realised surplus value is further to be employed in the process of enlarging reproduction, in accumulation, an even larger demand must be expected for the future, a demand which is again to come from outside the two departments. Either the demand for the surplus product will therefore have to increase annually in accordance with the rate of increase of the accumulated surplus value, or--_vice versa_--accumulation can only proceed precisely in so far as the demand outside I and II is rising. FOOTNOTES: [103] _Capital_, vol. ii, pp. 598-9. [104] Ibid., p. 599. [105] _Capital_, vol. ii, pp. 600-1. [106] Surplus consumption. [107] _Capital_, vol. ii, p. 429. [108] Ibid., pp. 531-2. [109] Op. cit., vol. i, p. 594, note 1. [110] Ibid., p. 594. [111] Here we can leave out of account instances of products capable in part of entering the process of production without any exchange, such as coal in the mines. Within capitalist production as a whole such cases are rare (cf. Marx, _Theorien_ ..., vol. ii, part 2, pp. 255 ff.). [112] _Capital_, vol. ii, p. 503. _CHAPTER VIII_ MARX'S ATTEMPT TO RESOLVE THE DIFFICULTY Complete abstraction from the circulation of money, though making the process of accumulation so smooth and simple in the diagram of enlarged reproduction, has great disadvantages of its own, we see. There was much to be said for this method in the analysis of simple reproduction, where consumption is the be-all and end-all of production. Money there had an ephemeral part, mediating the distribution of the social product among the various groups of consumers--the agent for the renewal of capital. In the process of accumulation, however, the money form has an essential function: it no longer serves as a mere agent in the circulation of commodities--here it has come to be a feature of capital itself, an element in the circulation of capital. Even if the transformation of the surplus value is not essential to real reproduction, it is the economic _sine qua non_ of capitalist accumulation. In the transition from production to reproduction, the surplus product is thus subjected to two metamorphoses: first it casts off its use-form and then it assumes a natural form which is fit for the purpose of accumulation. The point here is not that the different cycles of production are counted off in units of years. It would be just as well to take the month; for that matter, the successive transformation of individual portions of the surplus value in Departments I and II may even intersect in time. Series of years here do not mean units of time but really intend the sequence of economic transformations. What matters is that this sequence must be observed if accumulation is to keep its capitalist character, whether it extends over a longer or a shorter period of time. This brings us back to the old question: How, and by whom, is the accumulated surplus value to be realised? Marx was well aware that his seemingly water-tight scheme of accumulation did not cover this point adequately, and he himself kept reviewing the problem from various angles. What he says is this: 'It has been shown in volume i, how accumulation works in the case of the individual capitalist. By the conversion of the commodity-capital into money, the surplus-product, in which the surplus-value is incorporated, is also monetised. The capitalist reconverts the surplus-value thus monetised into additional natural elements of his productive capital. In the next cycle of production the increased capital furnishes an increased product. But what happens in the case of the individual capital, must also show in the annual reproduction of society as a whole, just as we have seen it does in the case of reproduction on a simple scale, where the successive precipitation of the depreciated elements of fixed capital in the form of money, accumulated as a hoard, also makes itself felt in the annual reproduction of society.'[113] He examines the mechanism of accumulation further from this very point of view, focusing on the fact that surplus value must pass through the money stage before it is accumulated. 'For instance, capitalist A, who sells during one year, or during a number of successive years, certain quantities of commodities produced by him, thereby converts that portion of the commodities, which bears surplus-value, the surplus-product, or, in other words, the surplus-value produced by himself, successively into money, accumulates it gradually, and thus makes for himself a new potential money-capital. It is potential money-capital on account of its capacity and destination of being converted into the elements of productive capital. But practically he merely accumulates a simple hoard, which is not an element of actual production. His activity for the time being consists only in withdrawing circulating money out of circulation. Of course, it is not impossible that the circulating money thus laid away by him was itself, before it entered into circulation, a portion of some other hoard.'[114] 'Money is withdrawn from circulation and accumulated as a hoard by the sale of commodities without a subsequent purchase. If this operation is conceived as one taking place universally, then it seems inexplicable where the buyers are to come from, since in that case everybody would want to sell in order to hoard, and no one would want to buy. And it must be so conceived, since every individual capital may be in process of accumulation. 'If we were to conceive of the process of circulation as one taking place in a straight line between the various divisions of annual reproduction--which would be incorrect as it consists with a few exceptions of mutually retroactive movements--then we should have to start out from the producer of gold (or silver) who buys without selling, and to assume that all others sell to him. In that case, the entire social surplus-product of the current year would pass into his hands, representing the entire surplus-value of the year, and all the other capitalists would distribute among themselves their relative shares in his surplus-product, which consists naturally of money, gold being the natural form of his surplus-value. For that portion of the product of the gold producer, which has to make good his active capital, is already tied up and disposed of. The surplus-value of the gold producer, in the form of gold, would then be the only fund from which all other capitalists would have to derive the material for the conversion of their annual surplus-product into gold. The magnitude of its value would then have to be equal to the entire annual surplus-value of society, which must first assume the guise of a hoard. Absurd as this assumption would be, it would accomplish nothing more than to explain the possibility of a universal formation of a hoard at the same period. It would not further reproduction itself, except on the part of the gold producer, by one single step. 'Before we solve this _seeming difficulty_, we must distinguish....'[115] The obstacle in the way of realising the surplus value which Marx here calls a 'seeming difficulty' nevertheless is important enough for the whole further discussion in _Capital_, volume ii, to be concentrated on overcoming it. As a first attempt, Marx proffers the solution of a hoard which, owing to the separation of the different individual constant capitals in the process of circulation, will inevitably be formed in a capitalist system of production. Inasmuch as different capital investments have different spans of life, and there is always an interval before the parts of a plant are due for renewal, at any given moment we may find that one individual capitalist is already busy renewing his plant, while another is still building up reserves from the proceeds yielded by the sale of his commodities against the day when he will have enough to renew his fixed capital. 'For instance, let A sell 600, representing _400c + 100v + 100s_ to B, who may represent more than one buyer. A sells 600 in commodities for 600 in money, of which 100 are surplus-value which he withdraws from circulation and hoards in the form of money. But these 100 in money are but the money-form of the surplus-product in which a value of 100 was incorporated.'[116] In order to comprehend the problem in complete purity, Marx here assumes the whole of the surplus value to be capitalised, for which reason he ignores altogether that part of the surplus value is used for the capitalists' personal consumption; in addition, A´, A´´ and A´´´ as well as B´, B´´ and B´´´ here belong to Department I. 'The formation of a hoard, then, is not a production, nor is it an increment of production. The action of the capitalist consists merely in withdrawing from circulation 100 obtained by the sale of his surplus-product, in holding and hoarding this amount. This operation is carried on, not alone on the part of A, but at numerous points of the periphery of circulation by other capitalists named A´, A´´, A´´´.... However, A accomplishes the formation of a hoard only to the extent that he acts as a seller, so far as his surplus-product is concerned, not as a buyer. His successive production of surplus-products, the bearers of his surplus-value convertible into money, is therefore a premise for the formation of his hoard. In the present case, where we are dealing only with the circulation within Department I, the natural form of the surplus-product, and of the total product of which it is a part, is that of an element of constant capital of I, that is to say it belongs to the category of a means of production creating means of production. We shall see presently what becomes of it, what function it performs, in the hands of the buyers such as B, B´, B´´, etc. 'It must particularly be noted at this point that A, while withdrawing money from circulation and hoarding it, on the other hand throws commodities into it without withdrawing other commodities in return. The capitalists, B, B´, B´´, etc., are thereby enabled to throw only money into it and withdraw only commodities from it. In the present case, these commodities, according to their natural form and destination, become a fixed or circulating element of the constant capital of B, B´, etc.'[117] There is nothing new about this whole process. Marx had already described it extensively in connection with simple reproduction, since it alone can explain how a society is able to renew constant capital under conditions of capitalist reproduction. How this process can lay the besetting problem of our analysis of enlarged reproduction is far from self-evident. The difficulty had been that for the purpose of accumulation, part of the surplus value is not consumed by the capitalists but added to capital in order to expand production, giving rise to the question of buyers for this additional product. The capitalists do not want to consume it and the workers are not able to do so, their entire consumption being covered in every case by the available variable capital. Whence the demand for the accumulated surplus value? or, as Marx would have it: Whence the money to pay for the accumulated surplus value? If, by way of answer, we are referred to the process of hoarding attendant upon the gradual renewal of the constant capital by the individual capitalists at various times, the connection between these two points remains obscure. As long as B, B´ and B´´, etc., buy producer goods from their colleagues A, A´ and A´´ in order to renew their constant capital that has in fact been used up, the limits of simple reproduction are not transcended, and the whole thing has nothing to do with our problem. The moment the producer goods purchased by B, B´, B´´, etc., serve to increase their constant capital, however, for purposes of accumulation, a number of new questions clamour for attention. First and foremost where do the B's get the cash to buy an additional product from the A's? The only way they could have made their money is by sale of their own surplus product. Before they can acquire new means of production for expanding their enterprises, before they appear as buyers, that is to say, of the surplus product that is to be accumulated, they must first have disposed of their own surplus product--in a word, B, B´, B´´, etc., must have been vendors themselves. But who could have bought their surplus product? It is obvious that the difficulty is simply shifted from the A's to the B's without having been mastered. At one stage of the analysis it really does seem for a time as if a solution were found at last. After a short digression, Marx returns to the main line of his investigation in the following words: 'In the present case, this surplus-product consists at the outset of means of production used in the creation of means of production. It is not until it reaches the hands of B, B´, B´´, etc., (I), that this surplus-product serves as an additional constant capital. But it is virtually that even in the hands of the accumulators of hoards, the capitalists A, A´, A´´, (I), before it is sold. If we consider merely the volume of values of the reproduction on the part of I, then we are still moving within the limits of simple reproduction, for no additional capital has been set in motion for the purpose of creating this virtual additional capital (the surplus-product), nor has any greater amount of surplus-labour been performed than that done on the basis of simple reproduction. The difference is here only one of the form of the surplus-labour performed, of the concrete nature of its particularly useful service. It is expended in means of production for Department I_c_ instead of II_c_, in means of production of means of production instead of means of production of articles of consumption. In the case of simple reproduction it had been assumed that the entire surplus-value was spent as revenue in the commodities of II. Hence it consisted only of such means of production as restore the constant capital of II_c_ in its natural form. In order that the transition from simple to expanded reproduction may take place, the production in Department I must be enabled to create fewer elements for the constant capital of II and more for that of I.... Considering the matter merely from the point of view of the volume of values, it follows, then, that the material requirements of expanded reproduction are produced within simple reproduction. It is simply a question of the expenditure of the surplus-labour of the working class of I for the production of means of production, the creation of virtual additional capital of I. The virtual additional money-capital, created on the part of A, A´, A´´, by the successive sale of their surplus-product, which was formed without any capitalist expenditure of money, is in this case simply the money-form of the additional means of production made by I.'[118] On this interpretation, the difficulty seems to dissolve into thin air at our touch. Accumulation requires no new sources of money at all. Before, when the capitalists themselves consumed their surplus value, they had to have a corresponding money reserve in hand, the analysis of simple reproduction already having proved that the capitalist class must itself put into circulation the money needed for the realisation of their surplus value. Now, instead of consumer goods, the capitalist class, or rather B, B´, and B´´, buy an equivalent amount of means of production in order to expand their production. In this way, money to the same value is accumulated in the hands of the other capitalist group, viz. A, A´, A´´, etc. 'This hoarding ... does not in any way imply an addition to the wealth in precious metals, but only a change of function on the part of money previously circulating. A while ago it served as a medium of circulation, now it serves as a hoard, as a virtual additional money-capital in process of formation.'[119] And that is that! Yet this way out of the difficulty is open to us only on one condition, and that is not far to seek: Marx here takes accumulation in its first rudiments, _in statu nascendi_, as it begins to evolve from simple reproduction. In respect of the amount of value, production is not yet enlarged, it has only been rearranged so that its material elements are grouped in a different way. That the sources of money also seem adequate is therefore not surprising. This solution, however, is only true for one specific moment, the period of transition from simple reproduction to enlarged reproduction--in short, a moment that has no reference to reality and can only be conceived speculatively. Once accumulation has been established for some time, when increasing amounts of value are thrown upon the market in every period of production, buyers for these additional values cannot fail to become a problem. And on this point the proffered solution breaks down. For that matter, it was never more than a seeming solution, _not a real one_. On closer scrutiny, it fails us even at the precise instant it appears to have smoothed the way for us. For if we take accumulation just at the very moment of its emergence from simple reproduction, the prime condition it demands is a decrease in the consumption of the capitalist class. No sooner have we discovered a way to expand reproduction with the means of circulation already at hand, than we find previous consumers trickling away at the same rate. What, then, is the good of expanding production; who is there able to buy from B, B´ and B´´ this increased amount of products which they could turn out only by denying themselves the money they need for buying new means of production from A, A´ and A´´? That solution, we see, was a mere illusion--the difficulty still persists. Marx himself at once re-opens the question where B, B´ and B´´ get the money to buy the surplus product of A, A´ and A´´. 'To the extent that the products created by B, B´, B´´, etc., (I) re-enter in their natural form into their own process, it goes without saying that a corresponding portion of their own surplus-product is transferred directly (without any intervention of circulation) to their productive capital and becomes an element of additional constant capital. To the same extent they do not help to convert any surplus-product of A, A´, A´´ etc., (I) into money. Aside from this, where does the money come from? We know that they have formed their hoard in the same way as A, A´, etc., by the sale of their respective surplus-products. Now they have arrived at the point where their accumulated hoard of virtual money-capital is to enter effectually upon its function as additional money-capital. But this is merely turning around in a circle. The question still remains: Where does the money come from, which the various B's (I) withdrew from the circulation and accumulated?'[120] His prompt reply again seems surprisingly simple: 'Now we know from the analysis of simple reproduction, that the capitalists of I and II must have a certain amount of ready money in their hands, in order to be able to dispose of their surplus-products. In that case, the money which served only for the spending of revenue in articles of consumption returned to the capitalists in the same measure in which they advanced it for the purpose of disposing of their commodities. Here the same money reappears, but in a different function. The A's and B's supply one another alternately with the money for converting their surplus-product into virtual additional capital, and throw the newly formed money-capital alternately into circulation as a medium of purchase.'[121] That is harking back to simple reproduction all over again. It is quite true, of course, that the capitalists A and the capitalists B are constantly accumulating a hoard of money bit by bit so as to be able to renew their constant (fixed) capital from time to time, and in this way they really are assisting one another in realising their products. Yet this accumulating hoard does not drop from the clouds--it is simply a natural precipitation of the fixed capital that is (in terms of value) continually being transferred in instalments to the products which are then one by one realised in the process of sale. Owing to its very nature, the accumulated hoard can only cover the renewal of the old capital; there cannot possibly be enough to serve further for purchasing additional constant capital. That means that we are still within the limits of simple reproduction. Perhaps, though, that part of the medium of circulation which hitherto served the capitalists for their personal consumption, and is now to be capitalised, becomes a new source of additional money? For that to be true, however, we should have to be back at the unique and fleeting moment that has no more than theoretical existence--the period of transition from simple to enlarged reproduction. Beyond this gap accumulation cannot proceed--we are in truth going round in circles. So the capitalist hoarding will not do as a way out of our difficulties. This conclusion should not come as a surprise, since the very exposition of the difficulty was misleading. It is not the source of money that constitutes the problem of accumulation, but the source of the demand for the additional goods produced by the capitalised surplus value; not a technical hitch in the circulation of money but an economic problem pertaining to the reproduction of the total social capital. Quite apart from the question which had claimed Marx's entire attention so far, namely where B, B´, etc., (I), get the money to buy additional means of production from A, A´, etc., (I), successful accumulation will inevitably have to face a far more serious problem: to whom can B, B´, etc., now sell their increased surplus-product? Marx finally makes them sell their products to one another: 'It may be that the different B, B´, B´´, etc., (I), whose virtual new capital enters upon its active function, are compelled to buy from one another their product (portions of their surplus-product) or to sell it to one another. In that case, the money advanced by them for the circulation of their surplus-product flows back under normal conditions to the different B's in the same proportion in which they advanced it for the circulation of their respective commodities.'[122] 'In that case'--the problem simply has not been solved, for after all B, B´, and B´´ have not cut down on their consumption and expanded their production just so as to buy each other's increased product, i.e. means of production. Even that, incidentally, would only be possible to a very limited extent. Marx assumes a certain division of labour in Department I itself: the A's turn out means of production for making producer goods and the B's means of production for making consumer goods, which is as much as to say that, though the product of A, A´, etc., need never leave Department I, the product of B, B´, etc., is by its natural form predestined from the first for Department II. Already the accumulation of B, B´, etc., it follows, must lead us to circulation between Departments I and II. Thus Marx's analysis itself confirms that, if Department I is to accumulate, the department for means of consumption must, in the last resort, increase its immediate or mediate demand for means of production, and so it is to Department II and its capitalists that we must look for buyers for the additional product turned out by Department I. Sure enough, Marx's second attack on the problem takes up from there: the demand of capitalists in Department II for additional means of production. Such a demand inevitably implies that the constant capital II_c_ is in process of expanding. This is where the difficulty becomes truly formidable: 'Take it now that A(I) converts his surplus-product into gold by selling it to a capitalist B in Department II. This can be done only by the sale of means of production on the part of A(I) to B(II) without a subsequent purchase of articles of consumption, in other words, only by a one-sided sale on A's part. Now we have seen that II_c_ cannot be converted into the natural form of productive constant capital unless not only I_v_ but also at least a portion of I_s_, is exchanged for a portion of II_c_, which II_c_ exists in the form of articles of consumption. But now that A has converted his I_s_ into gold by making this exchange impossible and withdrawing the money obtained from II_c_ out of circulation, instead of spending it for articles of consumption of II_c_, there is indeed on the part of A(I) a formation of additional virtual money-capital, but on the other hand there is a corresponding portion of the value of the constant capital B(II) held in the form of commodity-capital, unable to transform itself into natural productive constant capital. In other words, a portion of the commodities of B(II), and at that a portion which must be sold if he wishes to reconvert his entire constant capital into its productive form, has become unsaleable. To that extent, there is an over-production which clogs reproduction, even on the same scale.'[123] Department I's efforts to accumulate by selling its additional product to Department II have met with an unlooked-for result: a deficit for the capitalists of Department II serious enough to prevent even simple reproduction on the old scale. Having got to this crucial point, Marx seeks to lay bare the root of the problem by a careful and detailed exposition: 'Let us now take a closer look at the accumulation in Department II. The first difficulty with reference to II_c_, that is to say the conversion of an element of the commodity-capital of II into the natural form of constant capital of II, concerns simple reproduction. Let us take the formula previously used. (_1,000v + 1,000s_) I are exchanged for 2,000 II_c_. Now, if one half of the surplus-product of I, or 500_s_, is reincorporated in Department I as constant capital, then this portion, being detained in Department I, cannot take the place of any portion of II_c_. Instead of being converted into articles of consumption, it is made to serve as an additional means of production in Department I itself.... It cannot perform this function simultaneously in I and II. The capitalist cannot spend the value of his surplus-product for articles of consumption, and at the same time consume the surplus-product itself productively, by incorporating it in his productive capital. Instead of 2,000 I(_v + s_), only 1,500 are exchangeable for 2,000 II_c_, namely _1,000v + 500s_ of I. But 500 I_c_ cannot, be reconverted from the form of commodities into productive constant capital of II.'[124] By now, hardly anybody could fail to be convinced that the difficulty is real, but we have not taken a single step nearer a solution. This, incidentally, is where Marx has to do penance for his ill-advised continual recourse in an earlier over-simplification, to a fictitious moment of transition--in order in elucidate the problem of accumulation--from simple reproduction to enlarged reproduction, making his major premise accumulation at its very inception, in its feeble infancy instead its vigorous stride. There was something to be said, at least, for this fiction, so long as it was just a question of accumulation within Department I. The capitalists of Department I, who denied themselves part of what they had been wont to consume, at once had a new hoard of money in hand with which they could start capitalisation. But when it comes to Department II, the same fiction only piles on the difficulties. The 'abstinence' of the capitalists in Department I here finds expression in a painful loss of consumers for whose expected demand production had largely been calculated. Since the capitalists of Department II, on whom we tried the experiment whether they might not possibly be the long-sought buyers of the additional product of accumulation in Department I, are themselves in sore straits--not knowing as yet where to go with their own unsold product--they are even less likely to be of any help to us. There is no shutting our eyes to the fact that an attempt to make one group of capitalists accumulate at the expense of the other is bound to get involved in glaring inconsistencies. Yet another attempt to get round the difficulty is subsequently mentioned by Marx who at once rejects it as a subterfuge. The unmarketable surplus value in Department II that is the result of accumulation in Department I might be considered a reserve of commodities the society is going to need in the course of the following year. This interpretation Marx counters with his usual thoroughness: '(1) ... the forming of such supplies and the necessity for it applies to all capitalists, those of I as well as of II. Considering them in their capacity as sellers of commodities, they differ only by the fact that they sell different kinds of commodities. A supply of commodities of II implies a previous supply of commodities of I. If we neglect this supply on the one side, we must also do so on the other. But if we count them in on both sides, the problem is not altered in any way. (2) Just as this year closes on the side of II with a supply of commodities for the next year, so it was opened by a supply of commodities on the same side, taken over from last year. In the analysis of annual reproduction, reduced to its abstract form, we must therefore strike it out at both ends. By leaving this year in possession of its entire production, including the supply held for next year, we take from it the supply of commodities transferred from last year, and thus we have actually to deal with the aggregate product of an average year as the object of our analysis. (3) The simple circumstance that the difficulty which must be overcome did not show itself in the analysis of simple reproduction proves that it is a specific phenomenon due merely to the different arrangement of the elements of Department I with a view to reproduction, an arrangement without which reproduction on an expanded scale cannot take place at all.'[125] The last remark, be it noted, is equally damaging to his own earlier attempt at resolving the specific difficulties of accumulation by moments pertaining to simple reproduction, viz. the formation of a hoard consequent upon the gradual turnover of the fixed capital in the hands of the capitalists which was previously adduced as the explanation of accumulation in Department I. Marx then proceeds to set out enlarged reproduction in the form of diagrams. But no sooner does he begin to analyse his diagram, than the same difficulty crops up anew in a slightly different guise. Assuming that the capitalists of Department II must for their part convert 140_s_ into constant capital so as to make accumulation possible for the others, he asks: 'Therefore Department II must buy 140_s_ for cash without recovering this money by a subsequent sale of its commodities to I. And this is a process which is continually repeated in every new annual production, so far as it is reproduction on an enlarged scale. Where does II get the money for this?'[126] In the following, Marx tries out various approaches in order to discover this source. First the expenditure on variable capital by the capitalists in Department II is closely scrutinised. True, it exists in the form of money; but its proper function is the purchase of labour power, and it cannot possibly be withdrawn and made to serve, maybe, for purchasing additional means of production. 'This continually repeated departure from and return to the starting point, the pocket of the capitalist, does not add in any way to the money moving in this cycle. This, then, is not a source of the accumulation of money.'[127] Marx then considers all conceivable dodges, only to show them up as evading the issue. 'But stop!' he exclaims. 'Isn't there a chance to make a little profit?'[127] He considers whether the capitalists could not manage to save a little of the variable capital by depressing the wages of the workers below the normal average and thus to tap a new source of money for accumulation. A mere flick of his fingers, of course, disposes of this notion: 'But it must not be forgotten that the wages actually paid (which determine the magnitude of the variable capital under normal conditions) do not depend on the benevolence of the capitalists, but must be paid under certain conditions. This does away with this expedient as a source of additional money.'[127] He even explores what hidden methods there may be of 'saving' on the variable capital, such as the truck system, frauds, etc., only to comment finally: 'This is the same operation as under (1), only disguised and carried out by a detour. Therefore it must likewise be rejected as an explanation of the present problem.'[128] All efforts to make the variable capital yield a new source of money for the purpose of accumulation are thus unrewarded: 'In short, we cannot accomplish anything with 376 II_v_ for the solution of this question.'[128] Marx next turns to the cash reserves which the capitalists in Department II keep for the circulation of their own consumption and investigates whether none of this money can be diverted to the purposes of capitalisation. Yet this, he allows, is 'still more impossible'. 'Here the capitalists of the same department are standing face to face, heavily buying and selling their articles of consumption. The money required for these transactions serves only as a medium of circulation and must flow back to the interested parties in the normal course of things, to the extent that they have advanced it to the circulation, in order to pass again and again over the same course.'[129] The next attempt to follow belongs, as was to have been expected, to the category of those 'subterfuges' which Marx ruthlessly refutes: the attempt to explain that money-capital can be formed in the hands of one capitalist group in Department II by defrauding the other capitalists within the same department--viz. in the process of the mutual selling of consumer goods. No time need be wasted on this little effort. Then comes a more sober proposition: 'Or, a certain portion of II_s_, represented by necessities of life, might be directly converted into new variable capital of Department II.'[130] It is not quite clear how this can help us over the hurdle, help to get accumulation going. For one thing, the formation of additional variable capital in Department II is not much use if we have no additional constant capital for this department, being in fact engaged on the task of finding it. For another thing, our present concern is to see if we can find in Department II a source of money for the purchase of additional means of production from I, and Department II's problem how to place its own additional product in some way or other in the process of production is beside the point. Further, is the implication that the respective consumer goods should be used 'direct', i.e. without the mediation of money, in the production of Department II, so that the corresponding amount of money can be diverted from variable capital to the purpose of accumulation? If so, we could not accept the solution. Under normal conditions of capitalist production, the remuneration of the workers by consumer goods direct is precluded, one of the corner-stones of capitalist economy being the money-form of the variable capital, the independent transaction between the worker as buyer of commodities and producer of consumer goods. Marx himself stresses this point in another context: 'We know that the actual variable capital consists of labour-power, and therefore the additional must consist of the same thing. It is not the capitalist of I who among other things buys from II a supply of necessities of life for his labourers, or accumulates them for this purpose, as the slave holder had to do. It is the labourers themselves who trade with II.'[131] And that goes for the capitalists of Department II just as much as for those of Department I, thus disposing of Marx's last effort. Marx ends up by referring us to the last part of _Capital_, volume ii, chapter 21, the 'Concluding Remarks _sub iv_', as Engels has called them. Here we find the curt explanation: 'The original source for the money of II is _v + s_ of the gold producers in Department I, exchanged for a portion of II_c_. Only to the extent that the gold producer accumulates surplus-value or converts it into means of production of I, in other words, to the extent that he expands his production, does his _v + s_ stay out of Department II. On the other hand, to the extent that the accumulation of gold on the part of the gold producer himself leads ultimately to an expansion of production, a portion of the surplus-value of gold production not spent as revenue passes into Department II as additional variable capital of the gold producers, promotes the accumulation of new hoards in II and supplies it with means by which to buy from I without having to sell to it immediately.'[132] After the breakdown of all conceivable attempts at explaining accumulation, therefore, after chasing from pillar to post, from A I to B I, and from B I to A II, we are made to fall back in the end on the very gold producer, recourse to whom Marx had at the outset of his analysis branded as 'absurd'. The analysis of the reproductive process, and the second volume of _Capital_ finally comes to a close without having provided the long sought-for solution to our difficulty. FOOTNOTES: [113] _Capital_, vol. ii, p. 571. [114] Ibid., p. 572. [115] Ibid., pp. 573-4. [116] _Capital_, vol. ii, p. 375. [117] Ibid., pp. 575-6. [118] _Capital_, vol. ii, pp. 579-81. [119] Ibid., p. 581. [120] _Capital_, vol. ii, pp. 583-4. [121] Ibid., p. 584. [122] _Capital_, vol. ii, p. 585. [123] Ibid., pp. 586-7. [124] Ibid., pp. 588-9. [125] _Capital_, vol. ii, pp. 590-1. [126] Ibid., p. 593. [127] _Capital_, vol. ii, p. 594. [128] Ibid., p. 595. [129] Ibid., p. 595. [130] Ibid., p. 596. [131] Ibid., p. 601. [132] _Capital_, vol. ii, p. 610. _CHAPTER IX_ THE DIFFICULTY VIEWED FROM THE ANGLE OF THE PROCESS OF CIRCULATION The flaw in Marx's analysis is, in our opinion, the misguided formulation of the problem as a mere question of 'the sources of money', whereas the real issue is the effective demand, the use made of goods, not the source of the money which is paid for them. As to money as a means of circulation: when considering the reproductive process as a whole, we must assume that capitalist society must always dispose of money, or a substitute, in just that quantity that is needed for its process of circulation. What has to be explained is the great social transaction of exchange, caused by real economic needs. While it is important to remember that capitalist surplus value must invariably pass through the money stage before it can be accumulated, we must nevertheless try to track down the economic demand for the surplus product, quite apart from the puzzle where the money comes from. As Marx himself says in another passage: 'The money on one side in that case calls forth expanded reproduction on the other, because the possibility for it exists without the money. For money in itself is not an element of actual reproduction.'[133] And in a different context, Marx actually shows the question about the 'sources of money' to be a completely barren formulation of the problem of accumulation. In fact, he had come up against this difficulty once before when examining the process of circulation. Still dealing with simple reproduction, he had asked, in connection with the circulation of the surplus value: 'But the commodity capital must be monetised before its conversion into productive capital, or before the surplus-value contained in it can be spent. Where does the money for this purpose come from? This question seems difficult at the first glance, and neither Tooke nor anyone else has answered it so far.'[134] And he was then quite uncompromising about getting to the root of the matter: 'The circulating capital of 500 p.st. advanced in the form of money-capital, whatever may be its period of turn-over, may now stand for the total capital of society, that is to say, of the capitalist class. Let the surplus-value be 100 p.st. How can the entire capitalist class manage to draw continually 600 p.st. out of the circulation, when they continually throw only 500 p.st. into it?'[135] All that, mind you, refers to simple reproduction, where the entire surplus value is used for the personal consumption of the capitalist class. The question should therefore from the outset have been put more precisely in this form: how can the capitalists secure for themselves consumer goods to the amount of £100 surplus value on top of putting £500 into circulation for constant and variable capital? It is immediately obvious that those £500 which, in form of capital, always serve to buy means of production and to pay the workers, cannot simultaneously defray the expense of the capitalists' personal consumption. Where, then, does the additional money come from?--the £100 the capitalists need to realise their own surplus value? Thus all theoretical dodges one might devise for this point are summarily disposed of by Marx right away: 'It should not be attempted to avoid this difficulty by plausible subterfuges. 'For instance: So far as the constant circulating capital is concerned, it is obvious that not all invest it simultaneously. While the capitalist A sells his commodities so that his advanced capital assumes the form of money, there is on the other hand, the available money-capital of the buyer B which assumes the form of his means of production which A is just producing. The same transaction, which restores that of B to its productive form, transforms it from money into materials of production and labour-power; the same amount of money serves in the two-sided process as in every simple purchase C-M. On the other hand, when A reconverts his money into means of production, he buys from C, and this man pays B with it, etc., and thus the transaction would be explained. 'But none of the laws referring to the quantity of the circulating money, which have been analysed in the circulation of commodities (vol. i, chap, iii), are in any way changed by the capitalist character of the process of production. 'Hence, when we have said that the circulating capital of society, to be advanced in the form of money, amounts to 500 p.st., we have already accounted for the fact that this is on the one hand the sum simultaneously advanced, and that, on the other hand, it sets in motion more productive capital than 500 p.st., because it serves alternately as the money fund of different productive capitals. This mode of explanation, then, assumes that money as existing whose existence it is called upon to explain. 'It may be furthermore said: Capitalist A produces articles which capitalist B consumes unproductively, individually. The money of B therefore monetises the commodity-capital of A, and thus the same amount serves for the monetisation of the surplus-value of B and the circulating constant capital of A. But in that case, the solution of the question to be solved is still more directly assumed, the question: Whence does B get the money for the payment of his revenue? How does he himself monetise this surplus-portion of his product? 'It might also be answered that that portion of the circulating variable capital, which A continually advances to his labourers, flows back to him continually from the circulation, and only an alternating part stays continually tied up for the payment of wages. But a certain time elapses between the expenditure and the reflux, and meanwhile the money paid out for wages might, among other uses, serve for the monetisation of surplus-value. But we know, in the first place, that, the greater the time, the greater must be the supply of money which the capitalist A must keep continually in reserve. In the second place, the labourer spends the money, buys commodities for it, and thus monetises to that extent the surplus-value contained in them. Without penetrating any further into the question at this point, it is sufficient to say that the consumption of the entire capitalist class, and of the unproductive persons dependent upon it, keeps step with that of the labouring class; so that, simultaneously with the money thrown into circulation by the labouring class, the capitalists must throw money into it, in order to spend their surplus-value as revenue. Hence money must be withdrawn from circulation for it. This explanation would merely reduce the quantity of money required, but not do away with it. 'Finally it might be said: A large amount of money is continually thrown into circulation when fixed capital is first invested, and it is not recovered from the circulation until after the lapse of years, by him who threw it into circulation. May not this sum suffice to monetise the surplus-value? The answer to this is that the employment as fixed capital, if not by him who threw it into circulation, then by some one else, is probably implied in the sum of 500 p.st. (which includes the formation of a hoard for needed reserve funds). Besides, it is already assumed in the amount expended for the purchase of products serving as fixed capital, that the surplus-value contained in them is also paid, and the question is precisely, where the money for this purpose came from.'[136] This parting shot, by the way, is particularly noteworthy in that Marx here expressly repudiates the attempt to explain realisation of the surplus value, even in the case of simple reproduction, by means of a hoard formed for the periodical renewal of fixed capital. Later on, with a view to realising the surplus value under the much more difficult conditions of accumulation, he makes more than one tentative effort to substantiate an explanation of this type which he himself dismissed as a 'plausible subterfuge'. Then follows a solution which has a somewhat disconcerting ring: 'The general reply has already been given: When a mass of commodities valued at _x_ times 1,000 p.st. has to circulate, it changes absolutely nothing in the quantity of the money required for this circulation, whether this mass of commodities contains any surplus-value or not, and whether this mass of commodities has been produced capitalistically or not. In other words, _the problem itself does not exist_. All other conditions being given, such as velocity of circulation of money, etc., a definite sum of money is required in order to circulate the value of commodities worth _x_ times 1,000 p.st., quite independently of the fact how much or how little of this value falls to the share of the direct producers of these commodities. So far as any problem exists here, it coincides with the general problem: Where does all the money required for the circulation of the commodities of a certain country come from?'[137] The argument is quite sound. The answer to the general question about the origin of the money for putting a certain quantity of commodities into circulation within a country will also tell us where the money for circulating the surplus value comes from. The division of the bulk of value contained in these commodities into constant and variable capital, and surplus value, does not exist from the angle of the circulation of money--in this connection, it is quite meaningless. But it is only from the angle of the circulation of money, or of a simple commodity circulation, that the problem has no existence. Under the aspect of social reproduction as a whole, it is very real indeed; but it should not, of course, be put in that misleading form that brings us back to simple commodity circulation, where it has no meaning. We should not ask, accordingly: Where does the money required for realising the surplus value come from? but: Where are the consumers for this surplus value? It is they, for sure, who must have this money in hand in order to throw it into circulation. Thus, Marx himself, although he just now denied the problem to exist, keeps coming back to it time and again: 'Now, there are only two points of departure: The capitalist and the labourer. All third classes of persons must either receive money for their services from these two classes, or, to the extent that they receive it without any equivalent services, they are joint owners of the surplus-value in the form of rent, interest, etc. The fact that the surplus-value does not all stay in the pocket of the industrial capitalist, but must be shared by him with other persons, has nothing to do with the present question. The question is: How does he maintain his surplus-value, not, how does he divide the money later after he has secured it? For the present case, the capitalist may as well be regarded as the sole owner of his surplus-value. As for the labourer it has already been said that he is but the secondary point of departure, while the capitalist is the primary starting point of the money thrown by the labourer into circulation. The money first advanced as variable capital is going through its second circulation, when the labourer spends it for the payment of means of subsistence. 'The capitalist class, then, remains the sole point of departure of the circulation of money. If they need 400 p.st. for the payment of means of production, and 100 p.st. for the payment of labour-power, they throw 500 p.st. into circulation. But the surplus-value incorporated in the product, with a rate of surplus-value of 100 per cent, is equal to the value of 100 p.st. How can they continually draw 600 p.st. out of circulation, when they continually throw only 500 p.st. into it? From nothing comes nothing. The capitalist class as a whole cannot draw out of circulation what was not previously in it.'[138] Marx further explodes another device which might conceivably be thought adequate to the problem, i.e. a more rapid turnover of money enabling a larger amount of value to circulate by means of a smaller amount of money. The dodge will not work, of course, since the velocity of money in circulation is already taken into account by equating the aggregate bulk of commodities with a certain number of pounds sterling. But then at last we seem in sight of a proper solution: 'Indeed, paradoxical as it may appear at first sight, it is the capitalist class itself that throws the money into circulation which serves for the realisation of the surplus-value incorporated in the commodities. But, mark well, it is not thrown into circulation as advanced money, not as capital. The capitalist class spends it for their individual consumption. The money is not advanced by them, although they are the point of departure of its circulation.'[139] This lucid and comprehensive account is the best evidence that the problem is not just imaginary but very real. It provides a solution, not by disclosing a new 'source of money' for the realisation of the surplus value, but by pointing out at last the consumers of this surplus value. We are still, on Marx's assumption, within the bounds of simple reproduction; the capitalist class, that is to say, use the whole of their surplus value for personal consumption. Since the capitalists are the consumers of surplus value, it is not so much a paradox as a truism that they must, in the nature of things, possess the money for appropriating the objects of consumption, the natural form of this surplus value. The circulatory transaction of exchange is the necessary consequence of the fact that the individual capitalist cannot immediately consume his individual surplus value, and accordingly the individual surplus product, as could, for instance, the employer of slave labour. As a rule the natural material form of the surplus product tends to preclude such use. The aggregate surplus value of the capitalists in general is, however, contained in the total social product--as long as there is simple reproduction--as expressed by a corresponding quantity of consumer goods for the capitalist class, just as the sum total of variable capital has its corresponding equivalent in the quantity of consumer goods for the working class, and as the constant capital of all individual capitalists taken together is represented by material means of production in an equivalent quantity. In order to exchange the unconsumable individual surplus values for a corresponding amount of consumer goods, a double transaction of commodity exchange is needed: first, the sale of one's own surplus product and then the purchase of consumer goods out of the surplus product of society. These two transactions can only take place among members of the capitalist class, among individual capitalists, which means that their agent, the money, thereby merely changes hands as between one capitalist and another without ever being alienated from the capitalist class in general. Since simple reproduction inevitably implies the exchange of equivalents, one and the same amount of money can serve year by year for the circulation of the surplus value, and only an excess of zeal will inspire the further query: where does the money which mediates the capitalists' own consumption come from in the first place? This, question, however, reduces to a more general one: how did money capital initially come into the hands of the capitalists, that money capital of which they always retain a certain part for their personal consumption, apart from what they use for productive investment? Put in this way, however, the question belongs in the chapter of so-called 'primitive accumulation', i.e. the historical genesis of capital, going beyond the framework of an analysis of the process of circulation as well as of reproduction. Thus the fact is clear and unequivocal--so long as we remain within the bounds of simple reproduction. Here the problem is solved by the premises themselves; in fact, the solution is already anticipated by the very concept of simple reproduction which indeed is based on the entire surplus value being consumed by the capitalist class. This implies that it must also be the latter who buy it, that is to say, individual capitalists must buy it from each other. 'In the present case', Marx says himself, 'we had assumed, that the sum of money which the capitalist throws into circulation until the first surplus-value flows back to him, is exactly equal to the surplus-value which he is going to produce and monetise. This is obviously an arbitrary assumption, so far as, the individual capitalist is concerned. But it must be correct when applied to the entire capitalist class, when simple reproduction is assumed. It expresses the same thing that this assumption does, namely, that the entire surplus-value is consumed unproductively, but it only, not any portion of the original capital stock.'[140] But simple reproduction on a capitalist basis is after all an imaginary quantity in economic theory: no more and no less legitimate, and quite as unavoidable as [sqrt](-1) in mathematics. What is worse, it cannot offer any help at all with the problem of realising the surplus value in real life, i.e. with regard to enlarged reproduction or accumulation. Marx himself says so for a second time in the further development of his analysis. Where does the money for realising the surplus value come from if there is accumulation, i.e. not consumption but capitalisation of part of the surplus value? Marx's first answer is as follows: 'In the first place, the additional money-capital required for the function of the increasing productive capital is supplied by that portion of the realised surplus-value which is thrown into circulation by the capitalists as money-capital, not as the money form of their revenue. The money is already present in the hands of the capitalists. Only its employment is different.'[141] Our investigation of the reproductive process has already made us familiar with this explanation, and we are equally familiar with its defects; for one thing, the answer rests on the moment of the first transition from simple reproduction to accumulation. The capitalists only yesterday consumed their entire surplus value, and thus had in hand an appropriate amount of money for their circulation. To-day they decide to 'save' part of the surplus value and to invest it productively instead of squandering it. Provided that material means of production were manufactured instead of luxury goods, they need only put part of their personal money fund to a different use. But the transition from simple reproduction to expanded reproduction is no less a theoretical fiction than simple reproduction of capital itself, for which reason Marx immediately goes on to say: 'Now, by means of the additional productive capital, its product, an additional quantity of commodities, is thrown into circulation. Together with this additional quantity of commodities, a portion of the additional money required for its circulation is thrown into circulation, so far as the value of this mass of commodities is equal to that of the productive capital consumed in their production. This additional quantity of money has precisely been advanced as an additional money-capital, and therefore it flows back to the capitalist through the turn-over of his capital. Here the same question reappears, which we met previously. Where does the additional money come from, by which the additional surplus-value now contained in the form of commodities is to be realised?'[142] The problem could not be put more precisely. But instead of a solution, there follows the surprising conclusion: 'The general reply is again the same. The sum total of the prices of the commodities has been increased, not because the prices of a given quantity of commodities have risen, but because the mass of the commodities now circulating is greater than that of the previously circulating commodities, and because this increase has not been offset by a fall in prices. The additional money required for the circulation of this greater quantity of commodities of greater value must be secured, either by greater economy in the circulating quantity of money--whether by means of balancing payments, etc., or by some measure which accelerates the circulation of the same coins,--or by the transformation of money from the form of a hoard into that of a circulating medium.'[143] All this amounts to an exposition along these lines: under conditions of developing and growing accumulation, capitalist reproduction dumps ever larger masses of commodity values on the market. To put this commodity mass of a continually increasing value into circulation requires an ever larger amount of money. This increasing amount of money must be found somehow or other. All this is, no doubt, plausible and correct as far as it goes, but our problem is not solved, it is merely wished away. One thing or the other! Either we regard the aggregate social product in a capitalist economy simply as a mass, a conglomeration of commodities of a certain value, seeing under conditions of accumulation, a mere increase in this undifferentiated mass of commodities and in the bulk of its value. Then all we need say is that a corresponding quantity of money is required for circulating this bulk of value, that with an increasing bulk of value the quantity of money must also increase, unless this growth of value is offset by acceleration of, and economy in, the traffic. And the final question, where does all money originally come from, could then be answered on Marx's recipe: from the gold mines. This, of course, is one way of looking at things, that of simple commodity circulation. But in that case there is no need to drag in concepts such as constant and variable capital, or surplus value, which have no place in simple commodity circulation, belonging essentially to the circulation of capitals and to social reproduction; nor is there need to inquire for sources of money for the realisation of the social surplus value under conditions of first simple, and then enlarged, reproduction. Under the aspect of simple commodity circulation puzzles of this kind are without meaning or content. But once these questions have been raised, once the course has been set for an investigation into the circulation of capitals and social reproduction, there can be no appealing to the sphere of simple commodity circulation, where there is no such problem at all, and consequently no solution to it. There can be no looking for the answer there, and then saying triumphantly that the problem has long been solved and in fact never really existed. All this time, it appears, Marx has been tackling the problem from a wrong approach. No intelligent purpose can be served by asking for the source of the money needed to realise the surplus value. The question is rather where the demand can arise--to find an effective demand for the surplus value. If the problem had been put in this way at the start, no such long-winded detours would have been needed to show whether it can be solved or not. On the basis of simple reproduction, the matter is easy enough: since all surplus value is consumed by the capitalists, they themselves are the buyers and provide the full demand for the social surplus value, and by the same token they must also have the requisite cash in hand for circulation of the surplus value. But in this showing it is quite evident that under conditions of accumulation, i.e. of capitalisation of part of the surplus value, it cannot, _ex hypothesi_, be the capitalists themselves who buy the entire surplus value, that they cannot possibly realise it. True, if the capitalised surplus value is to be realised at all, money must be forthcoming in adequate quantities for its realisation. But it is quite impossible that this money should come from the purse of the capitalist class itself. Just because accumulation is postulated, the capitalists cannot buy their surplus value themselves, even though they might, _in abstracto_, have the money to do so. But who else could provide the demand for the commodities incorporating the capitalised surplus value? 'Apart from this class (the capitalists), there is, according to our assumption--the general and exclusive domination of capitalist production--no other class but the working class. All that the working class buys is equal to the sum total of its wages, equal to the sum total of the variable capital advanced by the entire capitalist class.'[144] The workers, then, are even less able than the capitalist class to realise the capitalised surplus value. Somebody must buy it, if the capitalists are still to be able to recover the capital they have accumulated and advanced; and yet--we cannot think of any buyers other than capitalists and workers. 'How can the entire capitalist class accumulate money under such circumstances?'[144] Realisation of the surplus value outside the only two existing classes of society appears as indispensable as it looks impossible. The accumulation of capital has been caught in a vicious circle. At any rate, the second volume of _Capital_ offers no way out. If we should now ask why Marx's _Capital_ affords no solution to this important problem of the accumulation of capital, we must bear in mind above all that this second volume is not a finished whole but a manuscript that stops short half way through. The external form of its last chapters in particular proves them to be in the nature of notes, intended to clear the author's own mind, rather than final conclusions ready for the reader's enlightenment. This fact is amply authenticated by the man best in the position to know: Friedrich Engels, who edited the second volume. In his introduction to the second volume he reports in detail on the conditions of the preliminary studies and the manuscripts Marx had left, which were to form the basis of this volume: 'The mere enumeration of the manuscripts left by Marx as a basis for Volume II proves the unparalleled conscientiousness and strict self-criticism which he practised in his endeavour to fully elaborate his great economic discoveries before he published them. This self-criticism rarely permitted him to adapt his presentation of the subject, in content as well as in form, to his ever widening horizon, which he enlarged by incessant study. 'The material ... consists of the following parts: First, a manuscript entitled "A contribution to the Critique of Political Economy", containing 1,472 quarto pages in 23 divisions, written in the time from August, 1861, to June, 1863. It is a continuation of the work of the same title, the first volume of which appeared in Berlin, in 1859.... This manuscript, valuable though it is, could not be used in the present edition of Volume II. 'The manuscript next following in the order of time is that of Volume III.... 'The period after the publication of Volume I, which is next in order, is represented by a collection of four manuscripts for Volume II, marked I-IV by Marx himself. Manuscript I (150 pages) presumably written in 1865 or 1867, is the first independent, but more or less fragmentary, elaboration of the questions now contained in Volume II. This manuscript is likewise unsuited for this edition. Manuscript III is partly a compilation of quotations and references to the manuscripts containing Marx's extracts and comments, most of them relating to the first section of Volume II, partly an elaboration of special points, particularly a critique of Adam Smith's statements as to fixed and circulating capital and the source of profits; furthermore, a discussion of the relations of the rate of surplus-value to the rate of profit, which belongs in Volume III. The references furnished little that was new, while the elaborations for Volumes II and III were rendered valueless through subsequent revisions and had to be ruled out for the greater part. Manuscript IV is an elaboration, ready for printing, of the first section and the first chapters of the second section of Volume II, and has been used in its proper place. Although it was found that this manuscript had been written earlier than Manuscript II, yet it was far more finished in form and could be used with advantage for the corresponding part of this volume. I had to add only a few supplementary parts of Manuscript II. This last manuscript is the only fairly completed elaboration of Volume II and dates from the year 1870. The notes for the final revision, which I shall mention immediately, say explicitly: "The second elaboration must be used as a basis." 'There is another interruption after 1870, due mainly to ill health. Marx employed this time in his customary way, that is to say he studied agronomics, agricultural conditions in America and especially Russia, the money market and banking institutions, and finally natural sciences, such as geology and physiology. Independent mathematical studies also form a large part of the numerous manuscripts of this period. In the beginning of 1877, Marx had recovered sufficiently to resume once more his chosen life's work. The beginning of 1877 is marked by references and notes from the above named four manuscripts intended for a new elaboration of Volume II, the beginning of which is represented by Manuscript V (56 pages in folio). It comprises the first four chapters and is not very fully worked out. Essential points are treated in footnotes. The material is rather collected than sifted, but it is the last complete presentation of this most important first section. A preliminary attempt to prepare this part for the printer was made in Manuscript VI (after October, 1877, and before July, 1878), embracing 17 quarto pages, the greater part of the first chapter. A second and last attempt was made in Manuscript VII, dated July 2, 1878, and consisting of 7 pages in folio. 'About this time Marx seems to have realised that he would never be able to complete the second and third volume in a manner satisfactory to himself, unless a complete revolution in his health took place. Manuscripts V-VIII show traces of hard struggles against depressing physical conditions far too frequently to be ignored. The most difficult part of the first section had been worked over in Manuscript V. The remainder of the first, and the entire second section, with the exception of Chapter 17, presented no great theoretical difficulties. But the third section, dealing with the reproduction and circulation of social capital, seemed to be very much in need of revision. Manuscript II, it must be pointed out, had first treated of this reproduction without regard to the circulation which is instrumental in effecting it, and then taken up the same question with regard to circulation. It was the intention of Marx to eliminate this section and to reconstruct it in such a way that it would conform to his wider grasp of the subject. This gave rise to Manuscript VIII, containing only 70 pages in quarto. A comparison with Section III, as printed after deducting the paragraphs inserted out of Manuscript II, shows the amount of matter compressed by Marx into this space. 'Manuscript VIII is likewise merely a preliminary presentation of the subject, and its main object was to ascertain and develop the new points of view not set forth in Manuscript II, while those points were ignored about which there was nothing new to say. An essential part of Chapter 17, Section II, which is more or less relevant to Section III, was at the same time drawn into this discussion and expanded. The logical sequence was frequently interrupted, the treatment of the subject was incomplete in various places, and especially the conclusion was very fragmentary. But Marx expressed as nearly as possible what he intended to say on the subject. 'This is the material for Volume II, out of which I was supposed "to make something", as Marx said to his daughter Eleanor shortly before his death.'[145] We cannot but admire this 'something' which Engels managed to 'make' from material of such a kind. As far as our present problem is concerned, however, this detailed report makes it clear that no more than the first two of the three sections that make up volume ii were anything like ready for print in the manuscripts Marx left: the section 'On the Circulation of Money and Commodity Capital' and on 'The Causes of Circulation and the Turnover of Capital'. The third section which treats of the reproduction of total capital is merely a collection of fragments which Marx himself considered to be 'very much in need of revision.' Yet it is the last part of this section, i.e. chapter 21, 'On Accumulation and Enlarged Reproduction', which is of primary importance in the present context, and of the whole book this is the most incomplete. It comprises thirty-five pages of print in all and breaks off right in the middle of the analysis. Besides this extraneous circumstance, we would suggest another point of great influence. Marx's investigation of the social reproductive process starts off, as we have seen, from the analysis of Adam Smith which came to grief, among other reasons, because of the erroneous doctrine that the price of all commodities is composed of _v + s_. Polemics against this dogma dominated Marx's entire analysis of the reproductive process. He devoted all his attention to proving that the total capital of society must serve, not only for consumption to the full amount of the various sources of revenue, but also for renewal of the constant capital. And inasmuch as the purest theoretical form for this line of reasoning is given, not by enlarged reproduction, but by simple reproduction, Marx tends to consider reproduction mainly from a point of view that is the very opposite of accumulation, from the assumption that the entire surplus value is consumed by the capitalists. How greatly these polemics influenced his analysis is proved by his returning time and again in the course of his work to the attack on Adam Smith from the most various angles. So already in volume i, the following pages are devoted to it: vol. i, sect. 7, chap. 24, (2), pp. 588-602, and in vol. ii, pp. 417-56, p. 473, pp. 504-8, and pp. 554 f. Marx again takes up the question of total reproduction in volume iii but from the start becomes once more involved with the problem set by Smith to which he devotes the whole of his 49th chapter and most of chapter 50 (pp. 968-92 and 992-1022). Finally, in _Theorien ueber den Mehrwert_, we again find detailed polemics against Smith's dogma: pp. 164-253 in vol. i, and pp. 92, 95, 126, 233, and 262 in vol. ii, part 2. Marx repeatedly stressed and emphasised the fact that he considered replacement of the constant capital from the aggregate social product the most difficult and important problem of reproduction.[146] The other problem, that of accumulation, i.e. realisation of the surplus value for the purpose of capitalisation, was thus pushed into the background, so that in the end Marx hardly touched upon it. This problem being of such paramount importance for capitalist economy, it is not surprising that bourgeois economists have dealt with it again and again. Attempts to grapple with this vital question for capitalist economy, with the question whether capital accumulation is possible in practice, come up time and again in the history of economic theory. To these historical attempts, before and after Marx, at solving this problem we shall now turn. FOOTNOTES: [133] _Capital_, vol. ii, p. 572. [134] _Capital_, vol. ii, pp. 380-1. [135] Ibid., p. 381. [136] _Capital_, vol. ii, pp. 381-3. [137] Ibid., p. 383. [138] _Capital_, vol. ii, pp. 384-5. [139] Ibid., p. 385. [140] _Capital_, vol. ii, p. 387. [141] Ibid., p. 397. [142] Ibid., p. 397. [143] Ibid., pp. 397-8. [144] _Capital_, vol. ii, p. 401. [145] _Capital_, vol. ii, pp. 8 ff. [146] Cf. e.g. _Capital_, vol. ii, pp. 430, 522, and 529. _SECTION TWO_ HISTORICAL EXPOSITION OF THE PROBLEM FIRST ROUND SISMONDI-MALTHUS _v._ SAY-RICARDO--MACCULLOCH _CHAPTER_ X SISMONDI'S THEORY OF REPRODUCTION The first grave doubts as to the divine character of the capitalist order came to bourgeois economists under the immediate impact of the first crises of 1815 and 1818-19 in England. Even then it had still been external circumstances which led up to these crises, and they appeared to be ephemeral. Napoleon's blockade of the Continent which for a time had cut off England from her European markets and had favoured a considerable development of home industries in some of the continental countries, was partly responsible; for the rest the material exhaustion of the Continent, owing to the long period of war, made for a smaller demand for English products than had been expected when the blockade was lifted. Still, these early crises were enough to reveal to the contemporary world the sinister aspects of this best of all social orders. Glutted markets, shops filled with goods nobody could buy, frequent bankruptcies--and on the other hand the glaring poverty of the toiling masses--for the first time all this starkly met the eyes of theorists who had preached the gospel of the beautiful harmonies of bourgeois _laissez-faire_ and had sung its praises in all keys. All contemporary trade reports, periodicals and travellers' notes told of the losses sustained by English merchants. In Italy, Germany, Russia, and Brazil, the English disposed of their commodity stocks at a loss of anything between 25 per cent and 33 1/3 per cent. People at the Cape of Good Hope in 1818 complained that all the shops were flooded with European goods offered at lower prices than in Europe and still unmarketable. From Calcutta there came similar complaints. From New Holland whole cargoes returned to England. In the United States, a contemporary traveller reports, 'there was no town nor hamlet from one end to the other of this immense and prosperous continent where the amount of commodities displayed for sale did not considerably exceed the means of the purchasers, although the vendors tried to attract custom by long-term credits, all sorts of facilities for payment, payment by instalments and acceptance of payment in kind'. At the same time, England was hearing the desperate outcry of her workers. The _Edinburgh Review_ of 1820[147] quotes an address by the Nottingham frame-work knitters which contained the following statements: 'After working from 14 to 16 hours a day, we only earn from 4_s._ to 7_s._ a week, to maintain our wives and families upon; and we farther state, that although we have substituted bread and water, or potatoes and salt, for that more wholesome food an Englishman's table used to abound with, we have repeatedly retired, after a heavy day's labour, and have been under the necessity of putting our children supperless to bed, to stifle the cries of hunger. We can most solemnly declare, that for the last eighteen months we have scarcely known what it was to be free from the pangs of hunger.'[148] Then Owen in England, and Sismondi in France, almost simultaneously raised their voices in a weighty indictment of capitalist society. Owen, as a hard-headed Englishman and citizen of the leading industrial state, constituted himself spokesman for a generous social reform, whereas the petty-bourgeois Swiss rather lost himself in sweeping denunciations of the imperfections of the existing social order and of classical economics. And yet, by so doing, Sismondi gave bourgeois economics a much harder nut to crack than Owen, whose fertile practical activities were directly applied to the proletariat. Sismondi explained in some detail that the impetus for his social criticism came from England, and especially her first crisis. In the second edition of his _Nouveaux Principes d'Économie Politique Ou De La Richesse Dans Ses Rapports Avec La Population_,[149] eight years after the publication of the first edition in 1819, he writes as follows: 'It was in England that I performed the task of preparing the new edition. England has given birth to the most celebrated Political Economists: the science is cultivated even at this time with increased ardour.... Universal competition or the effort always to produce more and always cheaper, has long been the system in England, a system which I have attacked as dangerous. This system has used production by manufacture to advance with gigantic steps, but it has from time to time precipitated the manufacturers into frightful distress. It was in presence of these convulsions of wealth that I thought I ought to place myself, to review my reasonings and compare them with facts.--The study of England has confirmed me in my "New Principles". In this astonishing country, which seems to be subject to a great experiment for the instruction of the rest of the world, I have seen production increasing, whilst enjoyments were diminishing. The mass of the nation here, no less than philosophers, seems to forget that the increase of wealth is not the end in political economy, but its instrument in procuring the happiness of all. I sought for this happiness in every class, and I could nowhere find it. The high English aristocracy has indeed arrived to a degree of wealth and luxury which surpasses all that can be seen in other nations; nevertheless it does not itself enjoy the opulence which it seems to have acquired at the expense of the other classes; security is wanting and in every family most of the individuals experience privation rather than abundance.... Below this titled and not titled aristocracy, I see commerce occupy a distinguished rank; its enterprises embrace the whole world, its agents brave the ices of the poles, and the heats of the equator, whilst every one of its leading men, meeting on Exchange, can dispose of thousands. At the same time, in the streets of London, and in those of the other great towns of England, the shops display goods sufficient for the consumption of the world.--But have riches secured to the English merchant the kind of happiness which they ought to secure him? No: in no country are failures so frequent, nowhere are those colossal fortunes, sufficient in themselves to supply a public loan to uphold an Empire, or a republic, overthrown with as much rapidity. All complain that business is scarce, difficult, not remunerative. Twice, within an interval of a few years, a terrible crisis has ruined part of the bankers, and spread desolation among all the English manufacturers. At the same time another crisis has ruined the farmers, and been felt in its rebound by retail dealers. On the other hand, commerce, in spite of its immense extent, has ceased to call for young men who have their fortunes to make; every place is occupied, in the superior ranks of society no less than in the inferior; the greater number offer their labour in vain, without being able to obtain remuneration.--Has, then, this national opulence, whose material progress strikes every eye, nevertheless tended to the advantage of the poor? Not so. The people of England are destitute of comfort now, and of security for the future. There are no longer yeomen, they have been obliged to become day labourers. In the towns there are scarcely any longer artisans, or independent heads of a small business, but only manufacturers. The operative, to employ a word which the system has created, does not know what it is to have a station; he only gains wages, and as these wages cannot suffice for all seasons, he is almost every year reduced to ask alms from the poor-rates.--This opulent nation has found it more economical to sell all the gold and silver which she possessed, to do without coin, and to depend entirely on a paper circulation; she has thus voluntarily deprived herself of the most valuable of all the advantages of coin: stability of value. The holders of the notes of the provincial banks run the risk every day of being ruined by frequent and, as it were, epidemic failures of the bankers; and the whole state is exposed to a convulsion in the fortune of every individual, if an invasion or a revolution should shake the credit of the national bank. The English nation has found it more economical to give up those modes of cultivation which require much hand-labour, and she has dismissed half the cultivators who lived in the fields. She has found it more economical to supersede workmen by steam-engines; she has dismissed ... the operatives in towns, and weavers giving place to power-looms, are now sinking under famine; she has found it more economical to reduce all working people to the lowest possible wages on which they can subsist, and these working people being no longer anything but a rabble, have not feared plunging into still deeper misery by the addition of an increasing family. She has found it more economical to feed the Irish with potatoes, and clothe them in rags; and now every packet brings legions of Irish, who, working for less than the English, drive them from every employment. What is the fruit of this immense accumulation of wealth? Have they had any other effect than to make every class partake of care, privation and the danger of complete ruin? Has not England, by forgetting men for things, sacrificed the end to the means?'[150] This mirror, held up to capitalist society almost a century before the time of writing, is clear and comprehensive enough in all conscience. Sismondi put his finger on every one of the sore spots of bourgeois economics: the ruin of small enterprise; the drift from the country; the proletarisation of the middle classes; the impoverishment of the workers; the displacement of the worker by the machine; unemployment; the dangers of the credit system; social antagonisms; the insecurity of existence; crises and anarchy. His harsh, emphatic scepticism struck a specially shrill discord with the complacent optimism, the idle worship of harmony as preached by vulgar economics which, in the person of MacCulloch in England and of Say in France, was becoming the fashion in both countries. It is easy to imagine what a deep and painful impression remarks like the following were bound to make: 'There can only be luxury if it is bought with another's labour; only those will work hard and untiringly who have to do so in order to get not the frills but the very necessities of life.'[151] 'Although the invention of the machine which increases man's capacity, is a blessing for mankind, it is made into a scourge for the poor by the unjust distribution we make of its benefits.'[152] 'The gain of an employer of labour is sometimes nothing if not despoiling the worker he employs; he does not benefit because his enterprise produces much more than it costs, but because he does not pay all the costs, because he does not accord the labourer a remuneration equal to his work. Such an industry is a social evil, for it reduces those who perform the work to utmost poverty, assuring to those who direct it but the ordinary profits on capital.'[153] 'Amongst those who share in the national income, one group acquires new rights each year by new labours, the other have previously acquired permanent rights by reason of a primary effort which makes a year's labour more advantageous.'[154] 'Nothing can prevent that every new discovery in applied mechanics should diminish the working population by that much. To this danger it is constantly exposed, and society provides no remedy for it.'[155] 'A time will come, no doubt, when our descendants will condemn us as barbarians because we have left the working classes without security, just as we already condemn, as they also will, as barbarian the nations who reduced those same classes to slavery.'[156] Sismondi's criticism thus goes right to the root of the matter; for him there can be no compromise or evasion which might try to gloss over the dark aspects of capitalist enrichment he exposed, as merely temporary shortcomings of a transition period. He concludes his investigation with the following rejoinder to Say: 'For seven years I have indicated this malady of the social organism, and for seven years it has continuously increased. I cannot regard such prolonged suffering as the mere frictions which always accompany a change. Going back to the origin of income, I believe to have shown the ills we experience to be the consequence of a flaw in our organisation, to have shown that they are not likely to come to an end.'[157] The disproportion between capitalist production and the distribution of incomes determined by the former appears to him the source of all evil. This is the point from which he comes to the problem of accumulation with which we are now concerned. The main thread of his criticism against classical economics is this: capitalist production is encouraged to expand indefinitely without any regard to consumption; consumption, however, is determined by income. 'All the modern economists, in fact, have allowed that the fortune of the public, being only the aggregation of private fortunes, has its origin, is augmented, distributed and destroyed by the same means as the fortune of each individual. They all know perfectly well, that in a private fortune, the most important fact to consider is the income, and that by the income must be regulated consumption or expenditure, or the capital will be destroyed. But as, in the fortune of the public, the capital of one becomes the income of another, they have been perplexed to decide what was capital, and what income, and they have therefore found it more simple to leave the latter entirely out of their calculations. By neglecting a quality so essential to be determined, Say and Ricardo have arrived at the conclusion, that consumption is an unlimited power, or at least having no limits but those of production, whilst it is in fact limited by income.... They announced that whatever abundance might be produced, it would always find consumers, and they have encouraged the producers to cause that glut in the markets, which at this time occasions the distress of the civilised world; whereas they should have forewarned the producers that they could only reckon on those consumers who possessed income.'[158] Sismondi thus grounds his views in a theory of income. What is income, and what is capital? He pays the greatest attention to this distinction which he calls 'the most abstract and difficult question of political economics'. The fourth chapter of his second book is devoted to this problem. As usual, Sismondi starts his investigation with Robinson Crusoe. For such a one, the distinction between capital and income was still 'confused'; it becomes 'essential' only in society. Yet in society, too, this distinction is very difficult, largely on account of the already familiar myth of bourgeois economics, according to which 'the capital of one becomes the income of another', and _vice versa_. Adam Smith was responsible for this confusion which was then elevated to an axiom by Say in justification of mental inertia and superficiality. It was loyally accepted by Sismondi. 'The nature of capital and of income are always confused by the mind; we see that what is income for one becomes capital for another, and the same object, in passing from hand to hand, successively acquires different denominations; the value which becomes detached from an object that has been consumed, appears as a metaphysical quantity which one expends and the other exchanges, which for one perishes together with the object itself and which for the other renews itself and lasts for the time of circulation.'[159] After this promising introduction, Sismondi dives right into the difficult problem and declares: all wealth is a product of labour; income is part of wealth, and must therefore have the same origin. However, it is 'customary' to recognise three kinds of income, called rent, profit and wage respectively, which spring from the three sources of 'land, accumulated capital and labour'. As to the first thesis, he is obviously on the wrong tack. As the wealth of a society, i.e. as the aggregate of useful objects, of use-values, wealth is not merely a product of labour but also of nature who both supplies raw materials and provides the means to support human labour. Income, on the other hand, is a concept of value. It indicates the amount to which an individual or individuals can dispose over part of the wealth of society or of the aggregate social product. In view of Sismondi's insistence that social income is part of social wealth, we might assume him to understand by social income the actual annual fund for consumption. The remaining part of wealth that has not been consumed, then, is the capital of society. Thus we obtain at least a vague outline of the required distinction between capital and income on a social basis. At the very next moment, however, Sismondi accepts the 'customary' distinction between three kinds of income, only one of which derives exclusively from 'accumulated capital' while in the other two 'land' or 'labour' are conjoined with capital. The concept of capital thus at once becomes hazy again. However, let us see what Sismondi has to say about the origin of these three kinds of income which betray a rift in the foundations of society. He is right to take a certain development of labour productivity as his point of departure. 'By reason of the advances both in industry and science, by which man has subjugated the forces of nature, every worker can produce more, far more, in a day than he needs to consume.'[160] Sismondi thus rightly stresses the fact that the productivity of labour is an indispensable condition for the historical foundation of exploitation. Yet he goes on to explain the actual origin of exploitation in a way typical of bourgeois economics: 'But even though his labour produces wealth, this wealth, if he is called upon to enjoy it, will make him less and less fit for work. Besides, wealth hardly ever remains in the possession of the man who must live by the work of his hands.'[160] Thus he makes exploitation and class antagonism the necessary spur to production, quite in accord with the followers of Ricardo and Malthus. But now he comes to the real cause of exploitation, the divorce of labour power from the means of production. 'The worker cannot, as a rule, keep the land as his own; land, however, has a productive capacity which human labour but directs to the uses of man. The master of the land on which labour is performed, reserves a share in the fruits of labour to which his land has contributed, as his remuneration for the benefits afforded by this productive capacity.'[161] This is called rent. And further: 'In our state of civilisation, the worker can no longer call his own an adequate fund of objects for his consumption, enough to live while he performs the labours he has undertaken--until he has found a buyer. He no longer owns the raw materials, often coming from far away, on which he must exercise his industry. Even less does he possess that complicated and costly machinery which facilitates his work and makes it infinitely more productive. The rich man who possesses his consumption goods, his raw materials and his machines, need not work himself, for by supplying the worker with all these, he becomes in a sense the master of his work. As reward for the advantages he has put at the worker's disposal, he takes outright the greater part of the fruits of his labour.'[162] This is called capital profits. What remains of wealth, after the cream has been taken off twice, by landlord and capitalist, is the wage of labour, the income of the worker. And Sismondi adds: 'He can consume it without reproduction.'[163] Thus, Sismondi makes the fact of non-reproduction the criterion of income as distinct from capital for wages as well as for rent. In this, however, he is only right with regard to rent and the consumed part of capital profits; as for the part of the social product which is consumed in form of wages, it certainly does reproduce itself; it becomes the labour power of the wage labourer, for him a commodity by whose sale he lives, which he can bring to market again and again; for society it becomes the material form of variable capital which must reappear time and again in the aggregate reproduction of a year, if there is to be no loss. So far so good. Hitherto we have only learned two facts: the productivity of labour permits of the exploitation of the workers by those who do not work themselves, and exploitation becomes the actual foundation of the distribution of income owing to the divorce of the worker from his means of production. But we still do not know what is capital and what income, and Sismondi proceeds to clarify this point, starting as usual with Robinson Crusoe: 'In the eyes of the individual all wealth was nothing but a provision prepared beforehand for the time of need. Even so, he already distinguished two elements in this provision ... one part which he budgets to have at hand for immediate or almost immediate use, and the other which he will not need until it is to afford him new production. Thus one part of his corn must feed him until the next harvest, another part, reserved for sowing, is to bear fruit the following year. The formation of society and the introduction of exchange, permit to increase this seed, this fertile part of accumulated wealth, almost indefinitely, and this is what is called capital.'[164] Balderdash would be a better name for all this. In using the analogy of seed, Sismondi here identifies means of production and capital, and this is wrong for two reasons. First, means of production are capital not intrinsically, but only under quite definite historical conditions; secondly, the concept of capital covers more than just the means of production. In capitalist society--with all the conditions Sismondi ignores--the means of production are only a part of capital, i.e. they are constant capital. Sismondi here lost his thread plainly because he tried to establish a connection between the capital concept and the material aspects of social reproduction. Earlier, so long as he was concerned with the individual capitalist, he listed means of subsistence for the workers together with means of production as component parts of capital--again a mistake in view of the material aspects of the reproduction of individual capitals. Yet as soon as he tries to focus the material foundations of social reproduction and sets out to make the correct distinction between consumer goods and means of production, the concept of capital dissolves in his hands. However, Sismondi well knows that the means of production are not the sole requisites for production and exploitation; indeed, he has the proper instinct that the core of the relation of exploitation is the very fact of exchange with living labour. Having just reduced capital to constant capital, he now immediately reduces it exclusively to variable capital: 'When the farmer has put in reserve all the corn he expects to need till the next harvest, he will find a good use for the surplus corn: he will feed what he has left over to other people who are going to work for him, till his land, spin and weave his hemp and wool, etc.... By this procedure, the farmer converts a part of his income into capital, and in fact, this is the way in which new capital is always formed.... The corn he has reaped over and above what he must eat while he is working, and over and above what he will have to sow in order to maintain the same level of exploitation, is wealth which he can give away, squander and consume in idleness without becoming any poorer; it was income, but as soon as he uses it to feed producers, as soon as he exchanges it for labour, or for the fruits to come from the work of his labourers, his weavers, his miners, it is a permanent value that multiplies and will no longer perish; it is capital.'[165] Here there is some grain mixed up with quite a lot of chaff. Constant capital seems still required to maintain production on the old scale, although it is strangely reduced to circulating capital, and although the reproduction of fixed capital is completely ignored. Circulating capital apparently is also superfluous for the expansion of reproduction, for accumulation: the whole capitalised part of the surplus value is converted into wages for new workers who evidently labour in mid-air, without material means of production. The same view is expressed even more clearly elsewhere: 'When the rich man cuts down his income in order to add to his capital, he is thus conferring a benefit on the poor, because he himself shares out the annual product; and whatever he calls income, he will keep for his own consumption; whatever he calls capital, he gives to the poor man to constitute an income for him.'[166] Yet at the same time Sismondi gives due weight to the 'secret of profit-making' and the origin of capital. Surplus value arises from the exchange of capital for labour, from variable capital, and capital arises from the accumulation of surplus value. With all this, however, we have not made much progress towards a distinction between capital and income. Sismondi now attempts to represent the various elements of production and income in terms of the appropriate parts of the aggregate social product. 'The employer of labour, as also the labourer, does not use all his productive wealth for the sowing; he devotes part of it to buildings, mills and tools which render the work easier and more productive, just as a share of the labourer's wealth had been devoted to the permanent work of making the soil more fertile. Thus we see how the different kinds of wealth successively come into being and become distinct. One part of the wealth accumulated by society is devoted by every one who possesses it to render labour more profitable by slow consumption, and make the blind forces of nature execute the work of man; this part is called _fixed capital_ and comprises reclaiming, irrigation, factories, the tools of trade, and mechanical contrivances of every description. A second part of wealth is destined for immediate consumption, to reproduce itself in the work it gets done, to change its form, though not its value, without cease. This part is called _circulating capital_ and it comprises seed, raw materials for manufacture, and wages. Finally, a third part of wealth becomes distinguishable from the second: it is the value by which the finished job exceeds the advances which had to be made: this part is called _income_ on capitals and is destined to be consumed without reproduction.'[167] After this laborious attempt to achieve a division of the aggregate social production according to incommensurable categories, fixed capital, circulating capital, and surplus value, Sismondi soon shows unmistakable signs that he means constant capital when he speaks of fixed capital, and variable capital when he speaks of circulating capital. For 'all that is created', is destined for human consumption, though fixed capital is consumed 'mediately' while the circulating capital 'passes into the consumption fund of the worker whose wage it forms'.[168] Thus we are a little nearer to the division of the social product into constant capital (means of production), variable capital (provisions for the workers) and surplus value (provisions for the capitalists). But so far Sismondi's explanations are not particularly illuminating on the subject which he himself describes as 'fundamental'. In this welter of confusion, at any rate, we cannot see any progress beyond Adam Smith's 'massive thought'. Sismondi feels this himself and would clarify the problem 'by the simplest of all methods', sighing that 'this movement of wealth is so abstract and requires such great power of concentration to grasp it properly'.[168] Thus again we put on blinkers with a focus on Robinson [Crusoe], who in the meantime has changed to the extent that he has produced a family and is now a pioneer of colonial policy: 'A solitary farmer in a distant colony on the border of the desert has reaped 100 sacks of corn this year; there is no market where to bring them; this corn, in any case, must be consumed within the year, else it will be of no value to the farmer; yet the farmer and his family eat only 30 sacks of it; this will be his expenditure, constituting the exchange of his income; it is not reproduced for anybody whatever. Then he will call for workers, he will make them clear woods, and drain swamps in his neighbourhood and put part of the desert under the plough. These workers will eat another 30 sacks of corn: this will be their expenditure; they will be in a position to afford this expenditure at the price of their revenue, that is to say their labour; for the farmer it will be an exchange: he will have converted his 30 sacks into fixed capital. In the end, he is left with 40 sacks. He will sow them that year, instead of the 20 he had sown the previous year; this constitutes his circulating capital which he will have doubled. Thus the 100 sacks will have been consumed, but of these 100 sacks 70 are a real investment for him, which will reappear with great increase, some of them at the very next harvest, and the others in all subsequent harvests.--The very isolation of the farmer we have just assumed gives us a better feeling for the limitations of such an operation. If he has only found consumers for 60 of the 100 sacks harvested in that year, who is going to eat the 200 sacks produced the following year by the increase in his sowing? His family, you might say, which will increase. No doubt; but human generations do not multiply as quickly as subsistence. If our farmer had hands available to repeat this assumed process each year, his corn harvest will be doubled every year, and his family could at the most be doubled once in 25 years.'[169] Though the example is naïve, the vital question stands out clearly in the end: where are the buyers for the surplus value that has been capitalised? The accumulation of capital can indefinitely increase the production of the society. But what about the consumption of society? This is determined by the various kinds of income. Sismondi explains this important subject in chapter v of book ii, 'The Distribution of the National Income Among the Various Classes of Citizens', in a resumed effort to describe the components of the social product. 'Under this aspect, the national income is composed of two parts and no more; the one consists in annual production ... the profit arising from wealth. The second is the capacity for work which springs from life. This time we understand by wealth both territorial possessions and capital, and by profit the net income accruing to the owners as well as the profit of the capitalist.'[170] Thus all the means of production are separated from the national income as 'wealth', and this income is divided into surplus value and labour power, or better, its equivalent, the variable capital. This, then, though still far too vague, is our division into constant capital, variable capital and surplus value. But 'national income', it soon transpires, means for Sismondi the annual aggregate product of society: 'Similarly, annual production, or the result of all the nation's work in the course of a year, is composed of two parts: one we have just discussed--the profit resulting from wealth; the other is the capacity for work, which is assumed to equal the part of wealth for which it is exchanged, or the subsistence of the workers.'[171] The aggregate social product is thus resolved, in terms of value, into two parts: variable capital and surplus value--constant capital has disappeared. We have arrived at Smith's dogma that the commodity price is resolved into _v + s_ (or is composed of _v + s_)--in other words, the aggregate product consists solely of consumer goods for workers and capitalists. Sismondi then goes on to the problem of realising the aggregate product. On the one hand, the sum total of incomes in a society consists of wages, capital profits and rents, and is thus represented by _v + s_; on the other hand, the aggregate social product, in terms of value, is equally resolved into _v + s_ 'so that national income and annual production balance each other (and appear as equal quantities)', i.e. so that they must be equal in value. 'Annual production is consumed altogether during the year, but in part by the workers who, by exchanging their labour for it, convert it into capital and reproduce it; in part by the capitalists who, exchanging their income for it, annihilate it. The whole of the annual income is destined to be exchanged for the whole of annual production.'[172] This is the basis on which, in the sixth chapter of book ii, 'On Reciprocal Determination of Production and Consumption', Sismondi finally sets up the following precise law of reproduction: 'It is the income of the past year which must pay for the production of the present year.'[173] If this is true, how can there be any accumulation of capital? If the aggregate product must be completely consumed by the workers and capitalists, we obviously remain within the bounds of simple reproduction, and there can be no solution to the problem of accumulation. Sismondi's theory in fact amounts to a denial of the possibility of accumulation. The aggregate social demand being the bulk of wages given to the workers and the previous consumption of the capitalists, who will be left to buy the surplus product if reproduction expands? On this count, Sismondi argues that accumulation is objectively impossible, as follows: 'What happens after all is always that we exchange the whole of production for the whole production of the previous year. Besides, if production gradually increases, the exchange, at the same time as it improves future conditions, must entail a small loss every year.'[174] In other words, when the aggregate product is realised, accumulation is bound each year to create a surplus that cannot be sold. Sismondi, however, is afraid of drawing this final conclusion, and prefers a 'middle course', necessitating a somewhat obscure subterfuge: 'If this loss is not heavy, and evenly distributed, everyone will bear with it without complaining about his income. This is what constitutes the national economy, and the series of such small sacrifices increases capital and common wealth.'[174] If, on the other hand, there is ruthless accumulation, this surplus residue becomes a public calamity, and the result is a crisis. Thus a petty-bourgeois subterfuge becomes the solution of Sismondi: putting the dampers on accumulation. He constantly polemises against the classical school which advocates unrestricted development of the productive forces and expansion of production; and his whole work is a warning against the fatal consequences of giving full rein to the desire to accumulate. Sismondi's exposition proves that he was unable to grasp the reproductive process as a whole. Quite apart from his unsuccessful attempt to distinguish between the categories of capital and income from the point of view of society, his theory of reproduction suffers from the fundamental error he took over from Adam Smith: the idea that personal consumption absorbs the entire annual product, without leaving any part of the value for the renewal of society's constant capital, and also, that accumulation consists merely of the transformation of capitalised surplus value into variable capital. Yet, if later critics of Sismondi, e.g. the Russian Marxist Ilyin,[175] think that pointing out this fundamental error in the analysis of the aggregate product can justify a cavalier dismissal of Sismondi's entire theory of accumulation as inadequate, as 'nonsense', they merely demonstrate their own obtuseness in respect of Sismondi's real concern, his ultimate problem. The analysis of Marx at a later date, showing up the crude mistakes of Adam Smith for the first time, is the best proof that the problem of accumulation is far from solved just by attending to the equivalent of the constant capital in the aggregate product. This is proved even more strikingly in the actual development of Sismondi's theory: his views involved him in bitter controversy with the exponents and popularisers of the classical school, with Ricardo, Say and MacCulloch. The two parties to the conflict represent diametrically opposed points of view: Sismondi stands for the sheer impossibility, the others for the unrestricted possibility, of accumulation. Sismondi and his opponents alike disregard constant capital in their exposition of reproduction, and it was Say in particular who presumed to perpetuate Adam Smith's confused concept of the aggregate product as _v + s_ as an unassailable dogma. The knowledge we owe to Marx that the aggregate product must, apart from consumer goods for the workers and capitalists (_v + s_), also contain means of production to renew what has been used, that accumulation accordingly consists not merely in the enlargement of variable but also of constant capital, is not enough, as amply demonstrated by this entertaining turn of events, to solve the problem of accumulation. Later we shall see how this stress on the share of constant capital in the reproductive process gave rise to new fallacies in the theory of accumulation. At present it will suffice to put on record that the deference to Smith's error about the reproduction of aggregate capital is not a weakness unique to Sismondi's position but is rather the common ground on which the first controversy about the problem of accumulation was fought out. Scientific research, not only in this sphere, proceeds in devious ways; it often tackles the upper storeys of the edifice, as it were, without making sure of the foundations; and so this conflict only resulted in that bourgeois economics took on the further complicated problem of accumulation without even having assimilated the elementary problem of simple reproduction. At all events, Sismondi, in his critique of accumulation, had indubitably given bourgeois economics a hard nut to crack--seeing that in spite of his transparently feeble and awkward deductions, Sismondi's opponents were still unable to get the better of him. FOOTNOTES: [147] In the review of an essay on _Observations on the injurious Consequences of the Restrictions upon Foreign Commerce, by a Member of the late Parliament, London, 1820_ (_Edinburgh Review_, vol. lxvi, pp. 331 ff.). This interesting document, from which the following extracts are taken, an essay with a Free Trade bias, paints the general position of the workers in England in the most dismal colours. It gives the facts as follows: 'The manufacturing classes in Great Britain ... have been suddenly reduced from affluence and prosperity to the extreme of poverty and misery. In one of the debates in the late Session of Parliament, it was stated that the wages of weavers of Glasgow and its vicinity which, when highest, had averaged about 25_s._ or 27_s._ a week, had been reduced in 1816 to 10_s._; and in 1819 to the wretched pittance of 5-6_s._ or 6_s._ They have not since been materially augmented.' In Lancashire, according to the same evidence, the direct weekly wage of the weavers was from 6_s._ to 12_s._ a week for 15 hours' labour a day, whilst half-starved children worked 12 to 16 hours a day for 2_s._ or 3_s._ a week. Distress in Yorkshire was, if possible, even greater. As to the address by the frame-work knitters of Nottingham, the author says that he himself investigated conditions and had come to the conclusion that the declarations of the workers 'were not in the slightest degree exaggerated'. [148] Ibid., p. 334. [149] Paris, 1827. [150] Preface to the second edition. Translation by M. Mignet, in _Political Economy and the Philosophy of Government_ (London, 1847), pp. 114 ff. [151] _Nouveaux Principes_ ... (2nd ed.), vol. i, p. 79. [152] _Nouveaux Principes_ ... (2nd ed.), vol. i, p. xv. [153] Ibid., p. 92. [154] Ibid., pp. 111-12. [155] Ibid., p. 335. [156] Op. cit., vol. ii, p. 435. [157] Ibid., p. 463. [158] Op. cit., vol. i, p. xiii (pp. 120-1 of Mignet's translation). [159] _Nouveaux Principes_ ... (2nd ed.), vol. i, p. 84. [160] Ibid., p. 85. [161] Ibid., p. 86. [162] Ibid., pp. 86-7. [163] _Nouveaux Principes_ ..., vol. i, p. 87. [164] Ibid., pp. 87-8. [165] Ibid., pp. 88-9. [166] _Nouveaux Principes_ ..., vol. i, pp. 108-9. [167] Ibid., pp. 93-4. [168] Ibid., p. 95. [169] _Nouveaux Principes_ ..., vol. i, pp. 95-6. [170] Ibid., pp. 104-5. [171] Ibid., p. 105. [172] Ibid., pp. 105-6. [173] Ibid., pp. 113, 120. [174] _Nouveaux Principes_ ..., vol. i, p. 121. [175] Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin], _Economic Studies and Essays_, _St. Petersburg_, 1899. _CHAPTER XI_ MACCULLOCH _v._ SISMONDI Sismondi's emphatic warnings against the ruthless ascendancy of capital in Europe called forth severe opposition on three sides: in England the school of Ricardo, in France J. B. Say, the commonplace vulgariser of Adam Smith, and the St. Simonians. While Owen in England, profoundly aware of the dark aspects of the industrial system and of the crises in particular, saw eye to eye with Sismondi in many respects, the school of that other great European, St. Simon, who had stressed the world-embracing conception of large industrial expansion, the unlimited unfolding of the productive forces of human labour, felt perturbed by Sismondi's alarms. Here, however, we are interested in the controversy between Sismondi and the Ricardians which proved the most fruitful from the theoretical point of view. In the name of Ricardo, and, it seemed, with Ricardo's personal approval, MacCulloch anonymously published a polemical article[176] against Sismondi in the _Edinburgh Review_ in October 1819, i.e. immediately after the publication of the _Nouveaux Principes_. In 1820, Sismondi replied in Rossi's _Annales de Jurisprudence_ with an essay entitled: 'Does the Power of Consuming Necessarily Increase with the Power to Produce? An Enquiry.'[177] In his reply Sismondi[178] himself states that his polemics were conceived under the impact of the commercial crisis: 'This truth we are both looking for, is of utmost importance under present conditions. It may be considered as fundamental for economics. Universal distress is in evidence in the trade, in industry and, in many countries certainly, even in agriculture. Such prolonged and extraordinary suffering has brought misfortune to countless families and insecurity and despondency to all, until it threatens the very bases of the social order. Two contrasting explanations have been advanced for the distress that has caused such a stir. Some say: we have produced too much, and others: we have not produced enough. "There will be no equilibrium," say the former, "no peace and no prosperity until we consume the entire commodity surplus which remains unsold on the market, until we organise production for the future in accordance with the buyers' demand."--"There will be a new equilibrium," say the latter, "if only we double our efforts to accumulate as well as to produce. It is a mistake to believe that there is a glut on the market; no more than half our warehouses are full; let us fill the other half, too, and the mutual exchange of these new riches will revive our trade."'[179] In this supremely lucid way, Sismondi sets out and underlines the real crux of the dispute. MacCulloch's whole position in truth stands or falls with the statement that exchange is actually an interchange of commodities; every commodity accordingly represents not only supply but demand. The dialogue then continues as follows: 'Demand and supply are truly correlative and convertible terms. The supply of one set of commodities constitutes the demand for another. Thus, there is a demand for a given quantity of agricultural produce, when a quantity of wrought goods equal thereto in productive cost is offered in exchange for it; and conversely, there is an effectual demand for this quantity of wrought goods, when the supply of agricultural produce which it required the same expense to raise, is presented as its equivalent.'[180] The Ricardian's dodge is obvious: he has chosen to ignore the circulation of money and to pretend that commodities are immediately bought and paid for by commodities. From the conditions of highly developed capitalist production, we are thus suddenly taken to a stage of primitive barter such as we might find still flourishing at present in Central Africa. There is a distant element of truth in this trick since money, in a simple circulation of commodities, plays merely the part of an agent. But of course, it is just the intervention of an agent which separates the two transactions of circulation, sale and purchase, and makes them independent of one another in respect of both time and place. That is why a further purchase need not follow hard upon a sale for one thing; and secondly, sale and purchase are by no means bound up with the same people: in fact, they will involve the same performers only in rare and exceptional cases. MacCulloch, however, makes just this baseless assumption by confronting, as buyer and seller, industry on the one hand and agriculture on the other. The universality of these categories, _qua_ total categories of exchange, obscures the actual splitting up of this social division of labour which results in innumerable private exchange transactions where the sale and purchase of two commodities rarely come to the same thing. MacCulloch's simplified conception of commodity exchange in general which immediately turns the commodity into money and pretends that it can be directly exchanged, makes it impossible to understand the economic significance of money, its historical appearance. Sismondi's answer to this is regrettably clumsy. In order to show that MacCulloch's explanation of commodity exchange has no application for capitalist production, he takes recourse to the Leipsic Book Fair.[181] 'At the Book Fair of Leipsic, booksellers from all over Germany arrive, each with four or five publications of his own in some 40 or 50 dozen copies; these are exchanged for others and every seller takes home 200 dozen books, just as he has brought 200 dozen, with the sole difference, that he brought four different works and takes home 200. This is the demand and the production which, according to M. Ricardo's disciple, are correlative and convertible; one buys the other, one pays for the other, one is the consequence of the other. But as far as we are concerned, for the bookseller and for the general public, demand and consumption have not even begun. For all that it has changed hands at Leipsic, a bad book will still be just as unsold (a bad mistake of Sismondi's, this!), it will still clutter up the merchants' shops, either because nobody wants it, or because everyone has a copy already. The books exchanged at Leipsic will only sell if the booksellers can find individuals who not only want them but are also prepared to make sacrifices in order to withdraw them from circulation. They alone constitute an effective demand.'[182] Although this example is rather crude, it shows clearly that Sismondi was not side-tracked by his opponent's trick, that he knows after all what he is talking about. MacCulloch then attempts to turn the examination from abstract commodity exchange to concrete social conditions: 'Supposing, for the sake of illustration, that a cultivator advanced food and clothing for 100 labourers, who raised for him _food_ for 200; while a master-manufacturer also advanced food and clothing for 100, who fabricated for him _clothing_ for 200. Then the farmer, besides replacing the food of his own labourers, would have food for 100 to dispose of; while the manufacturer, after replacing the clothing of his own labourers, would have clothing for 100 to bring to market. In this case, the two articles would be exchanged against each other, the supply of food constituting the demand for the clothing, and that of the clothing the demand for the food.'[183] What are we to admire more in this hypothesis: the absurdity of the set-up which reverses all actual relations, or the effrontery which simply takes for granted in the premises all that is later claimed proved? In order to prove that it is always possible to create an unlimited demand for all kinds of goods, MacCulloch chooses for his example two commodities which pertain to the most urgent and elementary wants of every human being: food and clothing. In order to prove that commodities may be exchanged at any time, and without regard to the needs of society, he chooses for his example two products in quantities which are right from the start in strict conformity with these needs, and which therefore contain no surplus as far as society is concerned. And yet he calls this quantity needed by society a surplus--_viz._ as measured against the producer's personal requirements for his own product, and is consequently able to demonstrate brilliantly that any amount of commodity 'surplus' can be exchanged for a corresponding 'surplus' of other commodities. Finally, in order to prove that different privately produced commodities can yet be exchanged, although their quantity, production costs and social importance must of course be different, he chooses for his example commodities whose quantity, production cost and general social necessity are precisely the same right from the start. In short, MacCulloch posits a planned, strictly regulated production without any over-production in order to prove that no crisis is possible in an unplanned private economy. The principal joke of canny Mac, however, lies elsewhere. What is at issue is the problem of accumulation. Sismondi was worried by, and worried Ricardo and his followers with, the following question: if part of the surplus value is capitalised, i.e. used to expand production over and above the income of society, instead of being privately consumed by the capitalists, where are we to find buyers for the commodity surplus? What will become of the capitalised surplus value? Who will buy the commodities in which it is hidden? Thus Sismondi. And the flower of Ricardo's school, its official representative on the Chair of London University, the authority for the then English Ministers of the Liberal Party and for the City of London, the great Mr. MacCulloch replies--by constructing an example in which no surplus value whatever is produced. His 'capitalists' slave away in agriculture and industry in the name of charity, and all the time the entire social product, including the 'surplus', is only enough for the needs of the workers, for the wages, while the 'farmer' and 'manufacturer' see to production and exchange without food and clothing. Sismondi, justly impatient, now exclaims: 'The moment we want to find out what is to constitute the surplus of production over consumption of the workers, it will not do to abstract from that surplus which forms the due profit of labour and the due share of the master.'[184] MacCulloch's only reaction is to multiply his silly argument by a thousand. He asks the reader to assume '1,000 farmers', and 'also 1,000 master-manufacturers' all acting as ingenuously as the individuals. The exchange, then, proceeds as smoothly as can be desired. Finally, he exactly doubles labour productivity 'in consequence of more skilful application of labour and of the introduction of machinery--thus that every one of the 1,000 farmers, by advancing food and clothing for 100 labourers, obtains a return consisting of ordinary food for 200 together with sugar, grapes and tobacco equal in production cost to that food', while every manufacturer obtains, by an analogous procedure, in addition to the previous quantity of clothing for all workers, 'ribbands, cambrics and lace, equal in productive cost, and therefore in exchangeable value, to that clothing'.[185] After such complete reversal of the chronological order, the assumption, that is, of first the existence of private property with wage labour, and then, at a later stage, such level of labour productivity as makes exploitation possible at all, he now assumes labour productivity to progress with equal speed in all spheres, the surplus product to contain precisely the same amount of value in all branches of industry, and to be divided among precisely the same number of people. When these various surplus products are then exchanged against one another, is it any wonder that the exchange proceeds smoothly and completely to everybody's satisfaction? It is only another of his many absurdities that MacCulloch makes the capitalists who had hitherto lived on air and exercised their profession in their birthday suits, now live exclusively on sugar, tobacco and wine, and array themselves only in ribbons, cambrics and lace. The most ridiculous performance, however, is the _volte-face_ by which he evades the real problem. The question had been what happens to the capitalist surplus, that surplus which is used not for the capitalist's own consumption but for the expansion of production. MacCulloch solves it on the one hand by ignoring the production of surplus value altogether, and on the other, by using all surplus value in the production of luxury goods. What buyers, then, does he advance for this new luxury production? The capitalists, evidently; the farmers and manufacturers, since, apart from these, there are only workers in MacCulloch's model. Thus the entire surplus value is consumed for the personal satisfaction of the capitalists, that is to say, simple reproduction takes place. The answer to the problem of the capitalisation of surplus value is, according to MacCulloch, either to ignore surplus value altogether, or to assume simple reproduction instead of accumulation as soon as surplus value comes into being. He still _pretends_ to speak of expanding reproduction, but again, as before when he pretended to deal with the 'surplus', he uses a trick, _viz._ first setting out an impossible species of capitalist production without any surplus value, and then persuading the reader that the subsequent _début_ of the surplus value constitutes an expansion of production. Sismondi is not quite up to these Scottish acrobatics. He had up to now succeeded in pinning his Mac down, proving him to be 'obviously absurd'. But now he himself becomes confused with regard to the crucial point at issue. On the above rantings of his opponent, he should have declared coldly: Sir, with all respect for the flexibility of your mind, you are dodging the issue. I keep on asking, who will buy the surplus product, if the capitalists use it for the purpose of accumulation, i.e. to expand production, instead of squandering it altogether? And you reply: Oh well, they will expand their production of luxury goods, which they will, of course, eat up themselves. But this is a conjuring trick, seeing that the capitalists consume the surplus value in so far as they spend it on their luxuries--they do not accumulate at all. My question is about the possibility of accumulation, not whether the personal luxuries of the capitalists are possible. Answer this clearly, if you can, or else go play with your wine and tobacco, or go to blazes for all I care. But Sismondi, instead of putting the screws on the vulgariser, suddenly begins to moralise with pathos and social conscience. He exclaims: 'Whose demand? Whose satisfaction? The masters or the workers in town or country? On this new conception [of Mac's] there is a surplus of products, an advantage from labour--to whom will it accrue?'[186] and gives his own answer in the following impassioned words: 'But we know full well, and the history of the commercial world teaches us all too thoroughly, that it is not the worker who profits from the increase in products and labour; his pay is not in the least swelled by it. M. Ricardo himself said formerly that it ought not to be, unless you want the social wealth to stop growing. On the contrary, sorry experience teaches us that wages nearly always contract by very reason of this increase. Where, then, does the accumulation of wealth make itself felt as a public benefit? Our author assumes 1,000 farmers who profit, while 100,000 workers toil; 1,000 entrepreneurs who wax rich, while 100,000 artisans are kept under their orders. Whatever good may result from the accumulation of the frivolous enjoyment of luxuries is only felt by a 100th part of the nation. And will this 100th part, called upon to consume the entire surplus product of the whole working class, be adequate to a production that may grow without let or hindrance, owing to progress of machinery and capitals? In the assumption made by the author, every time the national product is doubled, the master of the farm or of the factory must increase his consumption a hundredfold; if the national wealth to-day, thanks to the invention of so many machines, is a hundred times what it was when it only covered the cost of production, every employer would to-day have to consume enough products to support 10,000 workers.'[187] At this point Sismondi again believes himself to have a firm grasp on how crises begin to arise: 'We might imagine, if put to it, that a rich man can consume the goods manufactured by 10,000 workers, this being the fate of the ribbons, lace and cambrics whose origin the author has shown us. But a single individual would not know how to consume agricultural product to the same tune, the wines, sugar and spices which M. Ricardo [whom Sismondi evidently suspected of having written the article since he only got to know 'Anonymous' of the _Edinburgh Review_ at a later date] conjures up in exchange, are too much for the table of one man. They will not sell, or else the strict proportion between agricultural and industrial products, apparently the basis of his whole system, cannot be maintained.'[188] Sismondi, we see, has thus fallen into MacCulloch's trap. Instead of waiving an answer to the problem of accumulation which refers to the production of luxuries, he pursues his opponent into this field without noticing that the ground under his feet has shifted. Here he finds two causes for complaint. For one thing, he has moral objections to MacCulloch's allowing the capitalists instead of the workers to benefit by the surplus value, and is side-tracked into polemising against distribution under capitalism. From this digression, he unexpectedly reverts to the original problem which he now formulates as follows: the capitalists, then, consume the entire surplus value in luxuries. Let it be so. But could anyone increase his consumption as rapidly and indefinitely as the progress of labour productivity makes the surplus value increase? And in this second instance, Sismondi himself abandons his own problem. Instead of perceiving that it is the lack of consumers other than workers and capitalists which accounts for the difficulty in capitalist accumulation, he discovers a snag in simple reproduction because the capitalists' capacity to consume has physical limits. Since the absorptive capacity of the capitalists for luxuries cannot keep up with labour productivity, that is to say with the increase in surplus value, there must be crises and over-production. We have encountered this line of thought once before in the _Nouveaux Principes_--so Sismondi himself was manifestly not quite clear about the problem at all times. And that is hardly surprising, since one can really come to grips with the whole problem of accumulation only when one has fully grasped the problem of simple reproduction, and we have seen how much Sismondi was at fault in this respect. Yet in spite of all this, the first time that Sismondi crossed swords with the heirs of the classical school, he proved himself by no means the weaker party. On the contrary, in the end he routed his opponent. If Sismondi misunderstood the most elementary principles of social reproduction and ignored constant capital, quite in keeping with Adam Smith's dogma, he was in this respect no worse at any rate than his opponent. Constant capital does not exist for MacCulloch either, his farmers and manufacturers 'advance' merely food and clothing to their workers, and food and clothing between them make up the aggregate product of society. If there is, then, nothing to choose between the two as far as this elementary blunder is concerned, Sismondi towers heads above Mac because of his intuitive understanding of the contradictions in the capitalist mode of production. In the end, the Ricardian was at a loss to answer Sismondi's scepticism concerning the possibility of realising the surplus value. Sismondi also shows himself more penetrating in that he throws the Nottingham proletarians' cry of distress in the teeth of the apostles and apologists of harmony with their smug complacency, of those who deny 'any surplus of production over demand, any congestion of the market, any suffering', when he proves that the introduction of the machine must of necessity create a 'superabundant population', and particularly in the end, when he underlines the tendency of the capitalist world market in general with its inherent contradictions. MacCulloch denies outright that general over-production is possible. He has a specific for every partial over-production up his sleeve: 'It may be objected, perhaps, that on the principle that the demand for commodities increases in the same ratio as their supply, there is no accounting for the gluts and stagnation produced by overtrading. We answer very easily--A glut is an increase in the supply of a particular class of commodities, unaccompanied by a corresponding increase in the supply of those other commodities which should serve as their equivalents. While our 1,000 farmers and 1,000 master-manufacturers are exchanging their respective surplus products, and reciprocally affording a market to each other, if 1,000 new capitalists were to join their society, employing each 100 labourers in tillage, there would be an immediate glut in agricultural produce ... because in this case there would be no contemporaneous increase in the supply of the manufactured articles which should purchase it. But let one half of the new capitalists become manufacturers, and equivalents in the form of wrought goods will be created for the new produce raised by the other half: the equilibrium will be restored, and the 1,500 farmers and 1,500 master-manufacturers will exchange their respective surplus products with exactly the same facility with which the 1,000 farmers and 1,000 manufacturers formerly exchanged theirs.'[189] Sismondi answers this buffoonery which 'very easily' pokes about in a fog, by pointing to the real changes and revolutions which take place before his own eyes. 'It was possible to put barbarous countries under the plough, and political revolutions, changes in the financial system, and peace, at once brought cargoes to the ports of the old agricultural countries which almost equalled their entire harvest. The recent Russian conquest of the vast provinces on the Black Sea, the change in the system of government in Egypt, and the outlawing of piracy in High Barbary, have suddenly poured the granaries of Odessa, Alexandria and Tunis into the Italian ports and have put such an abundance of corn on the markets that all along the coasts the farmer's trade is fighting a losing battle. Nor is the remainder of Europe safe from a similar revolution, caused by the simultaneous ploughing under of immense expanses of new land on the banks of the Mississippi, which export all their agricultural produce. Even the influence of New Holland may one day be the ruin of English industry, if not in the price of foodstuffs, which are too expensive to transport, at least in respect of wool and other agricultural products which are easier to transport.'[190] What would MacCulloch have to advise in view of such an agrarian crisis in Southern Europe? That half the new farmers should turn manufacturer. Whereupon Sismondi counters: 'Such counsel cannot seriously apply to the Tartars of the Crimea or to the fellaheen of Egypt.' And he adds: 'The time is not yet ripe to set up new industries in the regions oversea or in New Holland.'[191] Sismondi's acuity recognised that industrialisation of the lands overseas was only a matter of time. He was equally aware of the fact that the expansion of the world market would not bring with it the solution to the difficulty but would only reproduce it in a higher degree, in yet more potent crises. His prediction for the expansive tendency of capitalism is that it will reveal an aspect of fiercer and fiercer competition, of mounting anarchy within production itself. Indeed, he puts his finger on the fundamental causes of crises in a passage where he states the trend of capitalist production precisely as surpassing all limits of the market. At the end of his reply to MacCulloch he says: 'Time and again it has been proclaimed that the equilibrium will re-establish itself, that work will start again, but a single demand each time provides an impetus in excess of the real needs of trade, and this new activity must soon be followed by a yet more painful glut.'[192] To such a profound grasp of the real contradictions in the movements of capital, the _vulgarus_ on the Chair of London University with his harmony cant and his country-dance of 1,000 beribboned farmers and 1,000 bibulous manufacturers could find no effective answer. FOOTNOTES: [176] The article in the _Edinburgh Review_ was really directed against Owen, sharply attacking on 24 pages of print the latter's four treatises: (1) 'A New View of Society, or Essays on the formation of Human Character', (2) 'Observations on the Effects of the Manufacturing System', (3) 'Two Memorials on Behalf of the Working Classes, Presented to the Governments of America and Europe', and finally (4) 'Three Tracts' and 'An Account of Public Proceedings relative to the Employment of the Poor'. 'Anonymous' here attempts a detailed proof that Owen's reformist ideas by no means get down to the real causes of the misery of the English proletariat, these causes being: the transition to the cultivation of barren land (Ricardo's theory of ground rent!), the corn laws and high taxation pressing upon farmer and manufacturer alike. Free trade and _laissez-faire_ thus is his alpha and omega. Given unrestricted accumulation, all increase in production will create for itself an increase in demand. Owen is accused of 'profound ignorance' as regards Say and James Mill.--'In his reasonings, as well as in his plans, Mr. Owen shows himself profoundly ignorant of all the laws which regulate the production and distribution of wealth.'--From Owen, the author proceeds to Sismondi and formulates the point of contention as follows: 'He [Owen] conceives that when competition is unchecked by any artificial regulations, and industry permitted to flow in its natural channels, the use of machinery may increase the supply of the several articles of wealth beyond the demand for them, and by creating an excess of all commodities, throw the working classes out of employment. This is the position which we hold to be fundamentally erroneous; and as it is strongly insisted on by the celebrated M. de Sismondi in his _Nouveaux Principes d'Économie Politique_, we must entreat the indulgence of our readers while we endeavour to point out its fallacy, and to demonstrate, that the power of consuming necessarily increases with every increase in the power of producing' (_Edinburgh Review_, Oct. 1819, p. 470). [177] The original title is: _Examen de cette question: Le pouvoir de consommer s'accroît-il toujours dans la société avec le pouvoir de produire?_ We have not been able to obtain a copy of Rossi's _Annales_, but the essay as a whole was incorporated by Sismondi in the second edition of his _Nouveaux Principes_. [178] At the time of writing, Sismondi was still in the dark as to the identity of 'Anonymous' in the _Edinburgh Review_. [179] Sismondi, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 376-8. [180] MacCulloch, loc. cit., p. 470. [181] Incidentally, Sismondi's Leipsic Book Fair, as a microcosm of the capitalist world, has staged a come-back after 55 years--in Eugen Duehring's 'system'. Engels, in his devastating criticism of that unfortunate 'universal genius' adduces this idea as proof that Duehring, by attempting to elucidate a real industrial crisis by means of an imaginary one on the Leipsic Book Fair, a storm at sea by a storm in a teacup, has shown himself a 'real German _literatus_'. But, as in many other instances exposed by Engels, the great thinker has simply borrowed here from someone else on the sly. [182] Sismondi, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 381-2. [183] MacCulloch, loc. cit., p. 470. [184] Sismondi, op. cit, vol. ii, p. 384. [185] MacCulloch, loc. cit., p. 471. [186] Sismondi, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 394-5. [187] Ibid., pp. 396-7. [188] Ibid., pp. 397-8. [189] MacCulloch, loc. cit., pp. 471-2. [190] Sismondi, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 400-1. [191] Sismondi, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 401. [192] Ibid., pp. 405-6. _CHAPTER XII_ RICARDO _v._ SISMONDI MacCulloch's reply to Sismondi's theoretical objections evidently did not settle the matter to Ricardo's own satisfaction. Unlike that shrewd 'Scottish arch-humbug', as Marx calls him, Ricardo really wanted to discover the truth and throughout retained the genuine modesty of a great mind.[193] That Sismondi's polemics against him and his pupil had made a deep impression is proved by Ricardo's revised approach to the question of the effects of the machine, that being the point on which Sismondi, to his eternal credit, had confronted the classical school of harmony with the sinister aspects of capitalism. Ricardo's followers had enlarged upon the doctrine that the machine can always create as many or even more opportunities for the wage labourers as it takes away by displacing living labour. This so-called theory of compensation was subjected to a stern attack by Sismondi in the chapter 'On the Division of Labour and Machinery'[194] and in another chapter significantly entitled: 'Machinery Creates a Surplus Population',[195] both published in the _Nouveaux Principes_ of 1819, two years later than Ricardo's main work. In 1821, after the MacCulloch-Sismondi controversy, Ricardo inserted a new chapter in the third edition of his _Principles_, where he frankly confesses to his error and says in the strain of Sismondi: 'That the opinion entertained by the labouring classes, that the employment of machinery is frequently detrimental to their interests, is not founded on prejudice and error, but is conformable to the correct principles of political economy.'[196] He, like Sismondi, had to defend himself against the suspicion that he is opposing technical progress, but, less ruthless, he compromises with the evasion that the evil emerges only gradually. 'To elucidate the principle, I have been supposing, that improved machinery is _suddenly_ discovered, and extensively used; but the truth is, that these discoveries are gradual, and rather operate in determining the employment of the capital which is saved and accumulated, than in diverting capital from its actual employment.'[197] Yet the problem of crises and accumulation continued to worry Ricardo also. In 1823, the last year of his life, he spent some days in Geneva in order to talk the problem over face to face with Sismondi. The result of these talks is Sismondi's essay 'On the Balance Between Consumption and Production', published in the _Revue Encyclopédique_ of May 1824.[198] In his _Principles_, Ricardo had at the crucial points completely accepted Say's trite doctrine of harmony in the relations between production and consumption. In chapter xxi he had declared: 'M. Say has, however, most satisfactorily shown, that there is no amount of capital which may not be employed in a country, because demand is only limited by production. No man produces, but with a view to consume or sell, and he never sells, but with an intention to purchase some other commodity, which may be immediately useful to him, or which may contribute to future production. By producing, then, he necessarily becomes either the consumer of his own goods, or the purchaser and consumer of the goods of some other person.'[199] To this conception of Ricardo's, Sismondi's _Nouveaux Principes_ were a powerful challenge, and the dispute as a whole turned also on this point. Ricardo could not deny the fact of crises which had but recently passed over England and other countries. What was at issue was the explanation for them. Right at the outset of their debate, Sismondi and Ricardo had agreed on a remarkably lucid and precise formulation of the problem, excluding the question of foreign commerce altogether. Sismondi grasped the significance and necessity of foreign trade for capitalist production, its need for expansion, well enough; in this line he was quite in step with Ricardo's Free Traders, whom he considerably excelled in his dialectical conception of the expansionist needs of capital. He fully admitted that industry 'is increasingly led to look for its vents on foreign markets where it is threatened by greater revolutions'.[200] He forecast, as we have seen, the rise of a dangerous competition for European industry in the overseas countries. This was after all a creditable achievement in the year 1820, and one which reveals Sismondi's deep insight into the relations of capitalist world economy. But even so, Sismondi was in fact far from conceiving the problem of realising the surplus value, the problem of accumulation, to depend on foreign commerce as its only means of salvation, a view attributed to him by later critics. On the contrary, Sismondi was quite explicit in the sixth chapter of volume i:[201] 'In order to make these calculations with greater certainty and to simplify these questions, we have hitherto made complete abstraction from foreign trade and supposed an isolated nation; this isolated nation is human society itself, and what is true for a nation without foreign commerce, is equally true for mankind.' In other words: in considering the entire world market as one society producing exclusively by capitalist methods, Sismondi grounds his problem in the same premises as Marx was to do after him. That was also the basis on which he came to terms with Ricardo. 'From the question that troubled us, we had each of us dismissed the instance of a nation that sold more abroad than it needed to buy there, that could command a growing external market for its growing internal production. In any case, it is not for us to decide whether fortunes of war or politics could perhaps bring forth new consumers for a nation--what is needed is proof that a nation can create these for itself simply by increasing its production.'[202] This is how Sismondi formulated the problem of realising the surplus value in all precision, just as it confronts us throughout the ensuing era in economics, in contrast with Ricardo who actually maintains along with Say, as we are already aware and shall show in further detail, that production creates its own demand. Ricardo's thesis in the controversy with Sismondi takes the following form: 'Supposing that 100 workers produce 1,000 sacks of corn, and 100 weavers 1,000 yards woollen fabric. Let us disregard all other products useful to man and all intermediaries between them, and consider them alone in the world. They exchange their 1,000 yards against the 1,000 sacks. Supposing that the productive power of labour has increased by a tenth owing to a successive progress of industry, the same people will exchange 1,100 yards against 1,100 sacks, and each will be better clothed and fed; new progress will make them exchange 1,200 yards for 1,200 sacks, and so on. The increase in products always only increases the enjoyment of those who produce.'[203] The great Ricardo's standards of reasoning, it must regretfully be stated, are if anything even lower than those of the Scottish arch-humbug, MacCulloch. Once again we are invited to witness a harmonious and graceful country-dance of sacks and yards--the very proportion which is to be proved, is again taken for granted. What is more, all relevant premises for the problem are simply left out. The real problem--you will recollect--the object of the controversy had been the question: who are the buyers and consumers of the surplus product that comes into being if the capitalists produce more goods than are needed for their own and their workers' consumption; if, that is to say, they capitalise part of their surplus value and use it to expand production, to increase their capital? Ricardo answers it by completely ignoring the capital increase. The picture he paints of the various stages of production is merely that of a gradually increasing productivity of labour. According to his assumptions, the same amount of labour first produces 1,000 sacks and 1,000 yards textiles, then 1,100 sacks and 1,100 yards, further 1,200 sacks and 1,200 yards, and so on, in a gracefully ascending curve. Not only that the image of a marshalled uniform progression on both sides, of conformity even in the number of objects brought to exchange, is wearisome, the expansion of capital is nowhere as much as mentioned in the model. Here we have no enlarged but simple reproduction with a greater bulk of use-values indeed, but without any increase in the value of the aggregate social product. Since only the amount of value, not the number of use-values is relevant to the exchange transaction, and this amount remains constant in the example, Ricardo makes no real advances, even though he seems to analyse the progressive expansion of production. Finally, he is quite oblivious of the relevant categories of reproduction. MacCulloch had begun by making the capitalists produce without any surplus value and live on air, but at least he recognised the existence of the workers, making provision for their consumption. Ricardo, however, does not even mention the workers; for him the distinction between variable capital and surplus value does not exist at all. Besides this major omission, it is of small account that he, just like his disciple, takes no notice of constant capital. He wants to solve the problem of realising the surplus value and expanding capital without positing more than the existence of a certain quantity of commodities which are mutually exchanged. Sismondi was blind to the fact that the venue has been changed altogether. Yet he tried faithfully to bring the fantasies of his famous guest and opponent down to earth and to analyse their invisible contradictions, plaintively saying that these assumptions, 'just like German metaphysics, abstract from time and space'.[204] He grafts Ricardo's hypothesis on to 'society in its real organisation, with unpropertied workers whose wage is fixed by competition and who can be dismissed the moment their master has no further need of their work ... for'--remarks Sismondi, as acute as he is modest--'it is just this social organisation to which our objection refers'.[205] He lays bare the many difficulties and conflicts bound up with the progress of labour productivity under capitalism, and shows that Ricardo's postulated changes in the technique of labour, from the point of view of society, lead to the following alternative: Either a number of workers corresponding to the increase in labour productivity will have to be dismissed outright--then there will be a surplus of products on the one hand, and on the other unemployment and misery--a faithful picture of present-day society. Or the surplus product will be used for the maintenance of the workers in a new field of production, the production of luxury goods. Here Sismondi undoubtedly proves himself superior: he suddenly remembers the existence of the constant capital, and now it is he who subjects the English classic to a frontal attack: 'For setting up a new industry for manufacturing luxuries, new capital is also needed; machines will have to be built, raw materials procured, and distant commerce brought into activity; for the wealthy are rarely content with enjoying what is immediately in front of them. Where, then, could we find this new capital which may perhaps be much more considerable than that required by agriculture?... Our luxury workers are still a long way from eating our labourers' grain, from wearing the clothes from our common factories; they are not yet made into workers, they may not even have been born yet, their trade does not exist, the materials on which they are to work have not arrived from India. All those among whom the former should distribute their bread, wait for it in vain.'[206] Sismondi now takes constant capital into account, not only in the production of luxuries, but also in agriculture, and further raises the following objection against Ricardo: 'We must abstract from time, if we make the assumption that the cultivator, whom a mechanical discovery or an invention of rural industry enables to treble the productive power of his workers, will also find sufficient capital to treble his exploitation, his agricultural implements, his equipment, his livestock, his granaries: to treble the circulating capital which must serve him while waiting for his harvest.'[207] In this way Sismondi breaks with the superstition of the classical school that with capital expanding all additional capital would be exclusively spent on wages, on the variable capital. He clearly dissents from Ricardo's doctrine--which did not, however, prevent his allowing all the errors arising out of this doctrine three years later again to creep into the second edition of his _Nouveaux Principes_. In opposition to Ricardo's facile doctrine of harmony, Sismondi underlines two decisive points: on the one hand, the objective difficulties of the process of enlarged reproduction which works by no means so smoothly in capitalist reality as it does in Ricardo's absurd hypothesis; on the other hand, the fact that all technical progress in social labour productivity is always achieved under capitalism at the expense of the working class, bought with their suffering. Sismondi shows himself superior to Ricardo in yet a third point: he represents the broad horizon of the dialectical approach as against Ricardo's blunt narrow-mindedness with its incapacity to conceive of any forms of society other than those of bourgeois economics: 'Our eyes,' he exclaims, 'are so accustomed to this new organisation of society, this universal competition, degenerating into hostility between the rich and the working class, that we no longer conceive of any mode of existence other than that whose ruins surround us on all sides. They believe to prove me absurd by confronting me with the vices of preceding systems. Indeed, as regards the organisation of the lower classes, two or three systems have succeeded one another; yet, since they are not to be regretted, since, after first doing some good, they then imposed terrible disasters on mankind, may we conclude from this that we have now entered the true one? May we conclude that we shall not discover the besetting vice of the system of wage labour as we have discovered that of slavery, of vassalage, and of the guilds? A time will come, no doubt, when our descendants will condemn us as barbarians because we have left the working classes without security, just as we already condemn, as they also will, as barbarian the nations who have reduced those same classes to slavery.'[208] Sismondi's statement, putting in a nutshell the vital differences between the parts played by the proletariat in a modern society and in the society of ancient Rome, shows his profound insight into historical connections. He shows no less discernment, in his polemics against Ricardo, when analysing the specific economic character of the slave-system and of feudal economy as well as their relative historical significance, and finally when emphasising, as the dominant universal tendency of bourgeois economy, 'that it severs completely all kind of property from every kind of labour'. The second round, no more than the first, between Sismondi and the classical school, brought little glory for Sismondi's opponents.[209] FOOTNOTES: [193] It is typical that on his election to Parliament in 1819, when he already enjoyed the highest reputation on account of his economic writings, Ricardo wrote to a friend: 'You will have seen that I have taken my seat in the House of Commons. I fear I shall be of little use there. I have twice attempted to speak but I proceeded in the most embarrassed manner, and I have no hope of conquering the alarm with which I am assailed the moment I hear the sound of my own voice' (_Letters of D. Ricardo to J. R. MacCulloch_, N.Y., 1895, pp. 23-4). Such diffidence was quite unknown to the gasbag MacCulloch. [194] _Nouveaux Principes_ ..., book iv, chap. vii. [195] Ibid., book vii, chap. vii. [196] D. Ricardo, _On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation_ (3rd edition, London, 1821), p. 474. [197] Ibid., p. 478. [198] This essay, _Sur la Balance des Consommations avec les Productions_, is reprinted in the second edition of _Nouveaux Principes_, vol. ii, pp. 408 ff. Sismondi tells us about this discussion: 'M. Ricardo, whose recent death has been a profound bereavement not only to his friends and family but to all those whom he enlightened by his brilliance, all those whom he inspired by his lofty sentiments, stayed for some days in Geneva in the last year of his life. We discussed in two or three sessions this fundamental question on which we disagreed. To this enquiry he brought the urbanity, the good faith, the love of truth which distinguished him, and a clarity which his disciples themselves had not heard, accustomed as they were to the efforts of abstract thought he demanded in the lecture room.' [199] Ricardo, op. cit., p. 339. [200] Sismondi, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 361. [201] _Nouveaux Principes_ ..., book iv, chap, iv: 'Comment la Richesse commerciale suit l'Accroissement du Revenu' (vol. i, p. 115). [202] Sismondi, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 412. [203] Ibid., p. 416. [204] Ibid., p. 424. [205] Ibid., p. 417. [206] Sismondi, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 425-6. [207] Ibid., p. 429. [208] Ibid., pp. 434-5. [209] Thus, if Tugan Baranovski, championing Say-Ricardo's views, tells us about the controversy between Sismondi and Ricardo (_Studies on the Theory and History of Commercial Crises in England_, p. 176), that Sismondi was compelled 'to acknowledge as correct the doctrine he had attacked and to concede his opponent all that is necessary'; that Sismondi himself 'had abandoned his own theory which still finds so many adherents', and that 'the victory in this controversy lies with Ricardo', this shows a lack of discrimination--to put it mildly--such as is practically unheard-of in a work of serious scientific pretensions. _CHAPTER XIII_ SAY _v_. SISMONDI Sismondi's essay against Ricardo in the _Revue Encyclopédique_ of May 1824, was the final challenge for J. B. Say, at that time the acknowledged 'prince of economic science' (_prince de la science économique_), the so-called representative, heir and populariser of the school of Adam Smith on the Continent. Say, who had already advanced some arguments against Sismondi in his letters to Malthus, countered the following July with an essay on 'The Balance Between Consumption and Production' in the _Revue Encyclopédique_, to which Sismondi in turn published a short reply. The chronology of Sismondi's polemical engagements was thus inverse to the sequence of the opposing theories, for it had been Say who first communicated his doctrine of a divinely established balance between production and consumption to Ricardo who had in turn handed it down to MacCulloch. In fact, as early as 1803, Say, in his _Traité d'Économie Politique_, book i, chapter xii, had coined the following peremptory statement: 'Products are paid for with other products. It follows that if a nation has too many goods of one kind, the means of selling them would be to create goods of a different kind.'[210] Here we meet again the all too familiar conjuring recipe which was accepted alike by Ricardo's school and by the 'vulgar economists' as the corner-stone of the doctrine of harmony.[211] Essentially, Sismondi's principal work constitutes a sustained polemic against this thesis. At this stage Say charges to the attack in the _Revue Encyclopédique_ with a complete _volte-face_, as follows: 'Objection may be made that, because of man's intelligence, because of the advantage he can draw from the means provided by nature and artifice, every human society can produce _all_ the things fit to satisfy its needs and increase its enjoyment in far larger quantities than it can itself consume. But there I would ask how it is possible that we know of no nation that is supplied with everything. Even in what rank as prospering nations seven-eighths of the population are lacking in a multitude of things considered necessities in ... I will not say a wealthy family, but in a modest establishment. The village I live in at present lies in one of the richest parts of France; yet in 19 out of 20 houses I enter here, I see but the coarsest fare and nothing that makes for the well-being of the people, none of the things the English call comforts.'[212] There is something to admire about the effrontery of the excellent Say. It was he who had maintained that in a capitalist economy there could be no difficulties, no surplus, no crises and no misery; since goods can be bought one for the other, we need only go on producing more and more and everything in the garden will be lovely. It was in Say's hands that this postulate had become a tenet of the doctrine of harmony, that doctrine so typical of vulgar economics, which had evoked a sharp protest from Sismondi who proved this view untenable. The latter had shown that goods cannot be sold in any quantity you like, but that a limit is set to the realisation of goods by the income of society in each case, by _v + s_; inasmuch as the wages of the workers are depressed to a mere subsistence level, and inasmuch as there is also a natural limit to the consumptive capacity of the capitalist class, an expansion of production, Sismondi says, must inevitably lead to slumps, crises and ever greater misery for the great masses. Say's come-back to this is masterly in its ingenuity: If you will insist that over-production is possible, how can it happen that there are so many people in our society who are naked, hungry and in want? Pray, explain this contradiction if you can. Say, whose own position excels by contriving blithely to shrug off the circulation of money altogether by operating with a system of barter, now censures his critic for speaking of an over-abundance of products in relation not only to purchasing power but to the real needs of society, and that although Sismondi had left no doubt at all about this very salient point of his deductions. 'Even if there is a very great number of badly fed, badly clothed and badly housed people in a society, the society can only sell what it buys, and, as we have seen, it can only buy with its income.'[213] A little further on, Say concedes this point but alleges that his opponent has made a new mistake: 'It is not consumers, then, in which the nation is lacking,' he says, 'but purchasing power. Sismondi believes that this will be more extensive, when the products are rare, when consequently they are dearer and their production procures ampler pay for the workers.'[214] That is how Say attempts to degrade, in his own trite method of thought, or better, method of canting, Sismondi's theory which attacked the very foundations of capitalist organisation and its mode of distribution. He burlesques the _Nouveaux Principes_, turning them into a plea for 'rare' goods and high prices, and holds up to them the mirror of an artfully flattered capitalist accumulation at its peak. If production becomes more vigorous, he argues, labour grows in numbers and the volume of production expands, the nations will be better and more universally provided for, and he extols the conditions in countries where industrial development is at its highest, as against the misery of the Middle Ages. Sismondi's maxims he declares subversive to capitalist society: 'Why does he call for an inquiry into the laws which might oblige the entrepreneur to guarantee a living for the worker he employs? Such an inquiry would paralyse the spirit of enterprise. Merely the fear that the authorities might interfere with private contracts is a scourge and harmful to the wealth of a nation.'[215] Not to be diverted from his purpose by this indiscriminate apologia of Say's, Sismondi once more turns the discussion on the fundamental issue: 'Surely I have never denied that since the time of Louis XIV France has been able to double her population and to quadruple her consumption, as he contends. I have only claimed that the increase of products is a good if it is desired, paid for and consumed; that, on the other hand, it is an evil if, there being no demand, the only hope of the producer is to entice the consumers of a rival industry's products. I have tried to show that the natural course of the nations is progressive increase of their property, an increase consequent upon their demand for new products and their means to pay for them, but that in consequence of our institutions, of our legislation having robbed the working class of all property and every security, they have also been spurred to a disorderly labour quite out of touch with the demand and with purchasing power, which accordingly only aggravates poverty.'[216] And he winds up the debate by inviting the preacher of harmony to reflect upon the circumstance that, though a nation may be rich, public misery no less than material wealth is constantly on the increase, the class which produces everything being daily brought nearer to a position where it may consume nothing. On this shrill discordant note of capitalist contradictions closes the first clash about the problem of accumulation. Summing up the general direction of this first battle of wits, we must note two points: (1) In spite of all the confusion in Sismondi's analysis, his superiority to both Ricardo and his followers and to the self-styled heir to the mantle of Adam Smith is quite unmistakable. Sismondi, in taking things from the angle of reproduction, looks for concepts of value (capital and income) and for factual elements (producer and consumer goods) as best he can, in order to grasp how they are interrelated within the total social process. In this he is nearest to Adam Smith, with the difference only that the contradictions there appearing as merely subjective and speculative, are deliberately stressed as the keynote of Sismondi's analysis where the problem of capital accumulation is treated as the crucial point and principal difficulty. Sismondi has therefore made obvious advances on Adam Smith, while Ricardo and his followers as well as Say throughout the debate think solely in terms of simple commodity production. They only see the formula C--M--C, even reducing everything to barter, and believe that such barren wisdom can cover all the problems specific to the process of reproduction and accumulation. This is a regress even on Smith, and over such myopic vision, Sismondi scores most decisively. He, the social critic, evinces much more understanding for the categories of bourgeois economics than their staunchest champions--just as, at a later date, the socialist Marx was to grasp infinitely more keenly than all bourgeois economists together the _differentia specifica_ of the mechanism of capitalist economy. If Sismondi exclaims in the face of Ricardo's doctrine: 'What, is wealth to be all, and man a mere nothing?'[217] it is indicative not only of the vulnerable moral strain in his petty-bourgeois approach compared to the stern, classical impartiality of Ricardo, but also of a critical perception, sharpened by social sensibilities for the living social connections of economy; an eye, that is, for intrinsic contradictions and difficulties as against the rigid, hidebound and abstract views of Ricardo and his school. The controversy had only shown up the fact that Ricardo, just like the followers of Adam Smith, was not even able to grasp, let alone solve the puzzle of accumulation put by Sismondi. (2) The clue to the problem, however, was already impossible of discovery, because the whole argument had been side-tracked and concentrated upon the problem of crises. It is only natural that the outbreak of the first crisis should dominate the discussion, but no less natural that this effectively prevented either side from recognising that crises are far from constituting _the_ problem of accumulation, being no more than its characteristic phenomenon: one element in the cyclical form of capitalist reproduction. Consequently, the debate could only result in a twofold _quid pro quo_: one party deducing from crises that accumulation is impossible, and the other from barter that crises are impossible. Subsequent developments of capitalism were to give the lie to both conclusions alike. And yet, Sismondi's criticism sounds the first alarm of economic theory at the domination of capital, and for this reason its historical importance is both great and lasting. It paves the way for the disintegration of a classical economics unable to cope with the problem of its own making. But for all Sismondi's terror of the consequences attendant upon capitalism triumphant, he was certainly no reactionary in the sense of yearning for pre-capitalistic conditions, even if on occasion he delights in extolling the patriarchal forms of production in agriculture and handicrafts in comparison with the domination of capital. He repeatedly and most vigorously protests against such an interpretation as e.g. in his polemic against Ricardo in the _Revue Encyclopédique_: 'I can already hear the outcry that I jib at improvements in agriculture and craftsmanship and at every progress man could make; that I doubtless prefer a state of barbarism to a state of civilisation, since the plough is a tool, the spade an even older one, and that, according to my system, man ought no doubt to work the soil with his bare hands. 'I never said anything of the kind, and I crave indulgence to protest once for all against all conclusions imputed to my system such as I myself have never drawn. Neither those who attack me nor those who defend me have really understood me, and more than once I have been put to shame by my allies as much as by my opponents.'--'I beg you to realise that it is not the machine, new discoveries and inventions, not civilisation to which I object, but the modern organisation of society, an organisation which despoils the man who works of all property other than his arms, and denies him the least security in a reckless over-bidding that makes for his harm and to which he is bound to fall a prey.'[218] There can be no question that the interests of the proletariat were at the core of Sismondi's criticism, and he is making no false claims when he formulates his main tendency as follows: 'I am only working for means to secure the fruits of labour to those who do the work, to make the machine benefit the man who puts it in motion.'[219] When pressed for a closer definition of the social organisation towards which he aspires, it is true he hedges and confesses himself unable to do so: 'But what remains to be done is of infinite difficulty, and I certainly do not intend to deal with it to-day. I should like to convince the economists as completely as I am convinced myself that their science is going off on a wrong tack. But I cannot trust myself to be able to show them the true course; it is a supreme effort--the most my mind will run to--to form a conception even of the actual organisation of society. Yet who would have the power to conceive of an organisation that does not even exist so far, to see the future, since we are already hard put to it to see the present?'[220] Surely it was no disgrace to admit oneself frankly powerless to envisage a future beyond capitalism in the year 1820--at a time when capitalism had only just begun to establish its domination over the big industries, and when the idea of socialism was only possible in a most Utopian form. But, as Sismondi could neither advance beyond capitalism nor go back to a previous stage, the only course open to his criticism was a petty-bourgeois compromise. Sceptical of the possibility of developing fully both capitalism and the productive forces, he found himself under necessity to clamour for some moderation of accumulation, for some slowing down of the triumphant march of capitalism. That is the reactionary aspect of his criticism.[221] FOOTNOTES: [210] 'L'argent ne remplit qu'un office passager dans ce double échange. Les échanges terminés, il se trouve qu'on a payé des produits avec des produits. En conséquence, quand une nation a trop de produits dans un genre, le moyen de les écouler est d'en créer d'un autre genre' (J. B. Say, _Traité d'Économie Politique_, Paris, 1803, vol. i, p. 154). [211] In fact, here again, Say's only achievement lies in having given a pompous and dogmatic form to an idea that others had expressed before him. As Bergmann points out, in his _Theory of Crises_ (Stuttgart, 1895), the work of Josiah Tucker (1752), Turgot's annotations to the French pamphlets, the writings of Quesnay, Dupont de Nemours, and of others contain quite similar observations on a natural balance, or even identity, between demand and supply. Yet the miserable Say, as Marx once called him, claims credit as the evangelist of harmony for the great discovery of the '_théorie des débouchés_', modestly comparing his own work to the discovery of the principles of thermo-dynamics, of the lever, and of the inclined plane. In the preface and table of contents, e.g. to the 6th edition of his _Traité_ (1841, pp. 51, 616) he says: 'The theory of exchange and of vents, such as it is developed in this work, will transform world politics.' The same point of view is also expounded by James Mill in his 'Commerce Defended' of 1808, and it is he whom Marx calls the real father of the doctrine of a natural equilibrium between production and demand. [212] Say in _Revue Encyclopédique_, vol. 23, July 1824, pp. 20 f. [213] _Nouveaux Principes_ ..., vol. i, p. 117. [214] Say, loc. cit., p. 21. [215] Say, loc. cit., p. 29. Say indicts Sismondi as the arch-enemy of bourgeois society in the following ranting peroration: 'It is against the modern organisation of society, an organisation which, by despoiling the working man of all property save his hands, gives him no security in the face of a competition directed towards his detriment. What! Society despoils the working man because it ensures to every kind of entrepreneur free disposition over his capital, that is to say his property! I repeat: there is nothing more dangerous than views conducive to a regulation of the employment of property' for 'hands and faculties ... are also property' (ibid., p. 30). [216] Sismondi, op. cit., pp. 462-3. [217] Ibid., p. 331. [218] Sismondi, op. cit., p. 432-3. [219] Ibid., p. 449. [220] Ibid., p. 448. [221] Marx, in his history of the opposition to Ricardo's school and its dissolution, makes only brief mention of Sismondi, explaining: 'I leave Sismondi out of this historical account, because the criticism of his views belongs to a part with which I can deal only after this treatise, the actual movement of capital (competition and credit)' (_Theorien über den Mehrwert_, vol. iii, p. 52). Later on, however, in connection with Malthus, he also deals with Sismondi in a passage that, on the whole, is comprehensive: 'Sismondi is profoundly aware of the self-contradiction of capitalist production; he feels that its forms, its productive conditions, spur on an untrammelled development of the productive forces and of wealth on the one hand, yet that these conditions, on the other, are only relative; that their contradictions of value-in-use and value-in-exchange, of commodity and money, of sale and purchase, of production and consumption, of capital and wage-labour, and so on, take on ever larger dimensions, along with the forward strides of the productive forces. In particular, he feels the fundamental conflict: here the untrammelled development of productive power and of a wealth which, at the same time, consists in commodities, must be monetised; and there the basis--restriction of the mass of producers to the necessary means of subsistence. He therefore does not, like Ricardo, conceive of the crises as merely incidental, but as essential, as eruptions of the immanent conflicts on ever grander scale and at determinate periods. Which faces him with the dilemma: is the state to put restrictions on the _productive forces_ to adapt them to the productive conditions, or upon the _productive conditions_ to adapt them to the _productive forces_? Frequently he has recourse to the past, becomes _laudator temporis acti_, and seeks to master the contradictions by a different regulation of income relative to capital, or of distribution relative to production, quite failing to grasp that the relations of distribution are nothing but the relations of production _sub alia specie_. He has a perfect picture of the contradictions immanent in bourgeois production, yet he does not understand them, and therefore fails also to understand the process of their disintegration. (And indeed, how could he, seeing this production was still in the making?--R.L.) And yet, his view is in fact grounded in the premonition that _new_ forms of appropriating wealth must answer to the productive forces, developed in the womb of capitalist production, to the material and social conditions of creating this wealth; that the bourgeois forms of appropriation are but transitory and contradictory, wealth existing always with contrary aspects and presenting itself at once as its opposite. Wealth is ever based on the premises of poverty, and can develop only by developing poverty' (ibid., p. 55). In _The Poverty of Philosophy_, Marx opposes Sismondi to Proudhon in sundry passages, yet about the man himself he only remarks tersely: 'Those, who, like Sismondi, wish to return to the true proportions of production, while preserving the present basis of society, are reactionary, since, to be consistent, they must also wish to bring back all the other conditions of industry of former times' (_The Poverty of Philosophy_, London, 1936, p. 57). Two short references to Sismondi are in _On the Critique of Political Economy_: once he is ranked, as the last classic of bourgeois economics in France, with Ricard in England; in another passage emphasis is laid on the fact that Sismondi, contrary to Ricardo, underlined the specifically social character of labour that creates value.--In the _Communist Manifesto_, finally, Sismondi is mentioned as the head of the petty-bourgeois school. _CHAPTER XIV_ MALTHUS At the same time as Sismondi, Malthus also waged war against some of the teachings of Ricardo. Sismondi, in the second edition of his work as well as in his polemics, repeatedly referred to Malthus as an authority on his side. Thus he formulated the common aims of his campaign against Ricardo in the _Revue Encyclopédique_: 'Mr. Malthus, on the other hand, has maintained in England, as I have tried to do on the Continent, that consumption is not the necessary consequence of production, that the needs and desires of man, though they are truly without limits, are only satisfied by consumption in so far as means of exchange go with them. We have affirmed that it is not enough to create these means of exchange, to make them circulate among those who have these desires and wants; that it can even happen frequently that the means of exchange increase in society together with a decrease in the demand for labour, or wages, so that the desires and wants of one part of the population cannot be satisfied and consumption also decreases. Finally, we have claimed that the unmistakable sign of prosperity in a society is not an increasing production of wealth, but an increasing demand for labour, or the offer of more and more wages in compensation for this labour. Messrs. Ricardo and Say, though not denying that an increasing demand for labour is a symptom of prosperity, maintained that it inevitably results from an increase of production. As for Mr. Malthus and myself, we regard these two increases as resulting from independent causes which may at times even be in opposition. According to our view, if the demand for labour has not preceded and determined production, the market will be flooded, and then new production becomes a cause of ruin, not of enjoyment.'[222] These remarks suggest far-reaching agreement, a brotherhood in arms of Sismondi and Malthus, at least in their opposition against Ricardo and his school. Marx considers the _Principles of Political Economy_, which Malthus published in 1820, an outright plagiarism of the _Nouveaux Principes_ which had been published the year before. Yet Sismondi and Malthus are frequently at odds regarding the problem with which we are here concerned. Sismondi is critical of capitalist production, he attacks it sharply, even denounces it, while Malthus stands for the defence. This does not mean that he denies its inherent contradictions, as Say or MacCulloch had done. On the contrary he raises them quite unmercifully to the status of a natural law and asserts their absolute sanctity. Sismondi's guiding principle is the interests of the workers. He aspires, though rather generally and vaguely, towards a thoroughgoing reform of distribution in favour of the proletariat. Malthus provides the ideology for those strata who are the parasites of capitalist exploitation, who live on ground rent and draw upon the common wealth, and advocates the allocation of the greatest possible portion of the surplus value to these 'unproductive consumers'. Sismondi's general approach is predominantly ethical, it is the approach of the social reformer. Improving upon the classics, he stresses, in opposition to them, that 'consumption is the only end of accumulation', and pleads for restricted accumulation. Malthus, on the contrary, bluntly declares that production has no other purpose than accumulation and advocates unlimited accumulation by the capitalists, to be supplemented and assured by the unlimited consumption of their parasites. Finally, Sismondi starts off with a critical analysis of the reproductive process, of the relation between capital and income from the point of view of society; while Malthus, opposing Ricardo, begins with an absurd theory of value from which he derives an equally absurd theory of surplus value, attempting to explain capitalist profits as an addition to the price over and above the value of commodities.[223] Malthus opposes the postulate that supply and demand are identical with a detailed critique in chapter vi of his _Definitions in Political Economy_.[224] In his _Elements of Political Economy_, James Mill had declared: 'What is it that is necessarily meant, when we say that the supply and the demand are accommodated to one another? It is this: that goods which have been produced by a certain quantity of labour, exchange for goods which have been produced by an equal quantity of labour. Let this proposition be duly attended to, and all the rest is clear.--Thus, if a pair of shoes is produced with an equal quantity of labour as a hat, so long as a hat exchanges for a pair of shoes, so long the supply and demand are accommodated to one another. If it should so happen, that shoes fell in value, as compared with hats, which is the same thing as hats rising in value compared with shoes, this would simply imply that more shoes had been brought to market, as compared with hats. Shoes would then be in more than the due abundance. Why? Because in them the produce of a certain quantity of labour would not exchange for the produce of an equal quantity. But for the very same reason hats would be in less than the due abundance, because the produce of a certain quantity of labour in them would exchange for the produce of more than an equal quantity in shoes.'[225] Against such trite tautologies, Malthus marshals a twofold argument. He first draws Mill's attention to the fact that he is building without solid foundations. In fact, he argues, even without an alteration in the ratio of exchange between hats and shoes, there may yet be too great a quantity of _both_ in relation to the demand. This will result in both being sold at less than the cost of production plus an appropriate profit. 'But can it be said on this account', he asks, 'that the supply of hats is suited to the demand for hats, or the supply of shoes suited to the demand for shoes, when they are both so abundant that neither of them will exchange for what will fulfil the conditions of their continued supply?'[226] In other words, Malthus confronts Mill with the possibility of general over-production: '... when they are compared with the costs of production ... it is evident that ... they may all fall or rise at the same time'.[227] Secondly, he protests against the way in which Mill, Ricardo and company are wont to model their postulates on a system of barter: 'The hop planter who takes a hundred bags of hops to Weyhill fair, thinks little more about the supply of hats and shoes than he does about the spots in the sun. What does he think about, then? and what does he want to exchange his hops for? Mr. Mill seems to be of opinion that it would show great ignorance of political economy, to say that what he wants is money; yet, notwithstanding the probable imputation of this great ignorance, I have no hesitation in distinctly asserting, that it really is money which he wants....'[228] For the rest, Malthus is content to describe the machinery by which an excessive supply can depress prices below the cost of production and so automatically bring about a restriction of production, and _vice versa_. 'But this tendency, in the natural course of things, to cure a glut or a scarcity, is no ... proof that such evils have never existed.'[229] It is clear that in spite of his contrary views on the question of crises, Malthus thinks along the same lines as Ricardo, Mill, Say, and MacCulloch. For him, too, everything can be reduced to barter. The social reproductive process with its large categories and interrelations which claimed the whole of Sismondi's attention, is here completely ignored. In view of so many contradictions within the fundamental approach, the criticism of Sismondi and Malthus have only a few points in common: (1) Contrary to Say and the followers of Ricardo, they both deny the hypothesis of a pre-established balance of consumption and production. (2) They both maintain that not only partial but also universal crises are possible. But here their agreement ends. If Sismondi seeks the cause of crises in the low level of wages and the capitalists' limited capacity for consumption, Malthus, on the other hand, transforms the fact of low wages into a natural law of population movements; for the capitalists' limited capacity for consumption, however, he finds a substitute in the consumption of the parasites on surplus value such as the landed gentry and the clergy with their unlimited capacity for wealth and luxury. 'The church with a capacious maw is blest.' Both Malthus and Sismondi look for a category of consumers who buy without selling, in order to redeem capitalist accumulation and save it from a precarious position. But Sismondi needs them to get rid of the surplus product of society over and above the consumption of the workers and capitalists, that is to say, to get rid of the capitalised part of the surplus value. Malthus wants them as 'producers' of profit in general. It remains entirely his secret, of course, how the _rentiers_ and the incumbents of the state can assist the capitalists in appropriating their profits by buying commodities at an increased price, since they themselves obtain their purchasing power mainly from these capitalists. In view of these profound contrasts, the alliance between Malthus and Sismondi does not go very deep. And if Malthus, as Marx has it, distorts Sismondi's _Nouveaux Principes_ into a Malthusian caricature, Sismondi in turn stresses only what is common to them both and quotes Malthus in support, giving the latter's critique of Ricardo a somewhat Sismondian cast. On occasion, no doubt, Sismondi actually succumbs to the influence of Malthus; for instance, he takes over the latter's theory of reckless state expenditure as an emergency measure in aid of accumulation and so becomes involved in contradictions with his own initial assumptions. On the whole, Malthus neither rendered an original contribution to the problem of reproduction, nor even grasped it fully. In his controversy with the followers of Ricardo, he operated with the concepts of simple commodity circulation, just as they did in their controversy with Sismondi. His quarrel with that school turns on the 'unproductive consumption' by the parasites of the surplus value; it is not a quarrel about the social foundations of capitalist reproduction. Malthus' edifice tumbles to the ground as soon as the absurd mistakes in his theory of profits are uncovered. Sismondi's criticism remains valid, and his problems remain unsolved even if we accept Ricardo's theory of value with all its consequences. FOOTNOTES: [222] _Nouveaux Principes_ ..., vol. ii, p. 409. [223] Cf. Marx, _Theorien über den Mehrwert_, vol. iii, pp. 1-29, which gives a detailed analysis of Malthus' theory of value and profits. [224] Dedicated to James Mill and published in 1827. [225] James Mill, _Elements of Political Economy_ (3rd edition, London, 1826), pp. 239-40. [226] Malthus. _Definitions in Political Economy_ (London, 1827), p. 51. [227] Ibid., p. 64. [228] Malthus, _Definitions in Political Economy_ (London, 1827), pp. 53-4. [229] Ibid., pp. 62-3. _SECTION TWO_ HISTORICAL EXPOSITION OF THE PROBLEM SECOND ROUND THE CONTROVERSY BETWEEN RODBERTUS AND VON KIRCHMANN _CHAPTER XV_ v. KIRCHMANN'S THEORY OF REPRODUCTION The second theoretical polemics about the problem of accumulation was also started by current events. If the first English crisis and its attendant misery of the working class had stimulated Sismondi's opposition against the classical school, it was the revolutionary working-class movement arisen since which, almost twenty-five years later, provided the incentive for Rodbertus' critique of capitalist production. The risings of the Lyons silk weavers and the Chartist movement in England were vastly different from the shadowy spectres raised by the first crisis, and the ears of the bourgeoisie were made to ring with their criticism of the most wonderful of all forms of society. The first socio-economic work of Rodbertus, probably written for the _Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung_ in the late thirties but not published by that paper, bears the significant title, _The Demands of the Working Classes_,[230] and begins as follows: 'What do the working classes want? Will the others be able to keep it from them? Will what they want be the grave of modern civilisation? Thoughtful people have long realised that a time must come when history would put this question with great urgency. Now, the man in the street has learned it too, from the Chartist meetings and the Birmingham scenes.' During the forties, the leaven of revolutionary ideas was most vigorously at work in France in the formation of the various secret societies and socialist schools of the followers of Proudhon, Blanqui, Cabet, Louis Blanc, etc. The February revolution and the June proclamation of the 'right to work' led to a first head-on clash between the two worlds of capitalist society--an epoch-making eruption of the contradictions latent in capitalism. As regards the other, visible form of those contradictions--the crises--the available data for observation at the time of the second controversy were far more comprehensive than in the early twenties of the century. The dispute between Rodbertus and v. Kirchmann took place under the immediate impact of the crises in 1837, 1839, 1847, and even of the first world crisis in 1857--Rodbertus writing his interesting pamphlet _On Commercial Crises and the Mortgage Problem of the Landowners_[231] in 1858. Thus the inherent contradictions of capitalist society meeting his eyes were in strident discord with the doctrine of harmony held by the English classics and their vulgarisers both in England and on the Continent, quite unlike any critique in the times when Sismondi had raised his voice in warning. Incidentally, a quotation from Sismondi in Rodbertus' first writing proves that the former's strictures immediately influenced Rodbertus. He was thus familiar with contemporary French writings against the classical school, though perhaps less so with the far more numerous English literature. There is no more than this flimsy support for the myth of the German professors about the so-called 'priority' of Rodbertus over Marx in the 'foundation of socialism'. Accordingly, Professor Diehl writes in his article on Rodbertus in _Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften_: 'Rodbertus must be considered the real founder of scientific socialism in Germany, since in his writings between 1839 and 1842, even before Marx and Lassalle, he provided a comprehensive socialist system, a critique of Adam Smith's doctrine, new theoretical foundations and proposals for social reform.' This piece of god-fearing, pious righteousness comes from the second edition of 1901, after all that had been written by Engels, Kautsky and Mehring to destroy this learned legend, and in spite of it. Quite inevitably, of course, and proof against any evidence to the contrary, however weighty, it was only right in the eyes of all the learned German economists that the palm of 'priority' should be wrested from Marx, the revolutionary anarchist, by Rodbertus, the 'socialist' with monarchist, Prussian and nationalist leanings, the man who believed in communism five hundred years from now, but for the present supported a steady exploitation rate of 200 per cent. However, we are interested in another aspect of Rodbertus' analysis. The same Professor Diehl continues his eulogy as follows: 'Rodbertus was not only a pioneer of socialism; political economy as a whole owes much stimulation and furtherance to him; economic theory in particular is indebted to him for the critique of classical economics, for the new theory of the distribution of income, for the distinction between the logical and historical categories of capital, and so on.' Here we shall deal with these latter achievements of Rodbertus, especially with the 'and so on'. Rodbertus' decisive treatise, _Towards the Understanding of Our Politico-Economic Conditions_[232] of 1842, set the ball rolling. v. Kirchmann replied in _Demokratische Blätter_ with two essays--_On the Social Aspects of Ground Rent_[233] and _The Society of Barter_[234]--and Rodbertus parried in 1850 with his _Letters on Social Problems_.[235] Thus the discussion entered the same theoretical arena where Malthus-Sismondi and Say-Ricardo-MacCulloch had fought out their differences thirty years earlier. In his earliest writings, Rodbertus had already expressed the thought that the wages of labour present an ever diminishing part of the national product in modern society where the productivity of labour is increasing. He claimed this to be an original idea, and from that moment until his death thirty years later he did nothing but reiterate it and formulate it in various ways. This 'declining wage rate' is for him the root of all evils to be found in modern society, in particular of pauperism and the crises, whose combination he calls 'the social problem of our times'. v. Kirchmann does not agree with this explanation. He traces pauperism back to the effects of a rising ground rent; crises, on the other hand, to a lack of markets. About the latter especially he says: 'The greatest part of social ills is caused not by defects of production but by a lack of markets for the products ... the more a country can produce, the more means it has for satisfying every need, the more it is exposed to the danger of misery and want.'--The labour-problem is here included as well, for 'the notorious right to work ultimately reduces to the question of markets'. 'We see', he concludes, 'that the social problem is almost identical with the problem of markets. Even the ills of much-abused competition will vanish, once markets are secure; its advantages alone will remain. There will remain a spirit of rivalry to supply good and cheap commodities, but the life-and-death struggle will disappear which is caused only by insufficient markets.'[236] The difference between the points of view of Rodbertus and v. Kirchmann is evident. Rodbertus sees the root of the evil in a faulty distribution of the national product, and v. Kirchmann in the limitations of the markets for capitalist production. Notwithstanding all the confusion in his expositions, especially in his idealist vision of a capitalist competition content with a laudable rivalry for better and cheaper commodities, and also in his conception of the 'notorious right to work' as a problem of markets, v. Kirchmann up to a point still shows more understanding for the sore spot of capitalist production, i.e. the limitations of its market, than Rodbertus who clings to distribution. Thus it is v. Kirchmann who now takes up the problem which Sismondi had originally put on the agenda. Nevertheless, he by no means agrees with Sismondi's elucidation and solution of the problem, siding rather with the opponents of the latter. Not only does he accept Ricardo's theory of ground rent, and Adam Smith's dogma that 'the price of the commodity is composed of two parts only, of the interests on capital and the wages of labour' (v. Kirchmann transforms the surplus value into 'interest on capital'); he also subscribes to the thesis of Say and Ricardo that products are only bought with other products and that production creates its own demand, so that if one side appears to have produced too much, it only means there was not enough production on the other. v. Kirchmann, we see, faithfully follows the classics, if in a somewhat 'German edition'. He begins by arguing, e.g., that Say's law of a natural balance between production and demand 'still does not give a comprehensive picture of reality', and adds: 'Commerce involves yet further hidden laws which prevent this postulated order from obtaining in complete purity. They must be discovered if we are to explain the present flooding of the market, and their discovery might perhaps also show us the way to avoid this great evil. We believe that there are three relations in the modern system of society which cause these conflicts between Say's indubitable law and reality.' These relations are (1) 'too inequitable a distribution of the products'--here, as we see, v. Kirchmann somewhat approximates to Sismondi's point of view; (2) the difficulties which nature puts in the way of human labour engaged in production; and (3) finally, the defects of commerce as a mediator between production and consumption. Disregarding the last two obstacles to Say's law, we shall now consider v. Kirchmann's reasoning of his first point. 'The first relation', he explains, 'can be put more briefly as too low a wage of labour, which is thus the cause of a slump. Those who know that the price of commodities is composed of two parts only, of the interest on capital and the wage of labour, might consider this a startling statement; if the wage of labour is low, prices are low as well, and if one is high, so is the other.' (We see v. Kirchmann accepts Smith's dogma even in its most misleading form: the price is not _resolved_ into wage of labour and surplus value, but is _composed_ of them as a mere sum--a view in which Adam Smith strayed furthest from his own theory of the value of labour.) 'Wage and price thus are directly related, they balance each other. England only abolished her corn laws, her tariffs on meat and other victuals, in order to cause wages to fall and thus to enable her manufacturers to oust all other competitors from the world markets by means of still cheaper commodities. This, however, only holds good up to a point and does not affect the ratio in which the product is distributed among the workers and the capitalists. Too inequitable a distribution among these two is the primary and most important cause why Say's law is not fulfilled in real life, why the markets are flooded although there is production in all branches.' v. Kirchmann gives a detailed illustration of this statement. Using the classical method, he takes us, of course, to an imaginary isolated society which makes an unresisting, if thankless, object for the experiments of political economy. v. Kirchmann suggests we should imagine a place (_Ort_) which comprises 903 inhabitants, no more, no less, _viz._ three entrepreneurs with 300 workers each. _Ort_ is to be able to satisfy all needs by its own production--in three establishments, that is to say, one for clothing, a second for food, lighting, fuel and raw materials, and a third for housing, furniture and tools. In each of these three departments, the 'capital together with the raw materials' is to be provided by the entrepreneur, and the remuneration of the workers is to be so arranged that the workers obtain as their wage one half of the annual produce, the entrepreneur retaining the other half 'as interest on capital and profits of the enterprise'. Every business is to produce just enough to satisfy all the needs of the 903 inhabitants. _Ort_ accordingly has 'all the conditions necessary for general well-being', and everybody can therefore tackle his work with courage and vigour. After a few days, however, joy and delight turn into a universal misery and gnashing of teeth: something has happened on v. Kirchmann's Island of the Blessed which was no more to be expected than for the skies to fall: an industrial and commercial crisis according to all modern specifications has broken out! Only the most essential clothing, food and housing for the 900 workers has been produced, yet the warehouses of the three entrepreneurs are full of clothes and raw materials, and their houses stand empty: they complain of a lack of demand, while the workers in turn complain that their wants are not fully satisfied. What has gone wrong? Could it be that there is too much of one kind of produce and too little of another, as Say and Ricardo would have it? Not at all, answers v. Kirchmann. Everything available in _Ort_ in well-balanced quantities, just enough to satisfy all the wants of the community. What, then, has thrown a spanner into the works, why the crisis? The obstruction caused by distribution alone--but this must be savoured in v. Kirchmann's own words: 'The obstacle, why nevertheless no smooth exchange takes place, lies solely and exclusively in the distribution of these products. They are not distributed equitably among all, but the entrepreneurs retain half of them for themselves as interest and profit, and only give half to the workers. It is clear that the worker in the clothing department can exchange, against half of his product, only half of the food, lodging, etc., that has been produced, and it is clear that the entrepreneur cannot get rid of the other half since no worker has any more products to give in exchange. The entrepreneurs do not know what to do with their stocks, the workers do not know what to do for hunger and nakedness.' Nor does the reader, we might add, know what to do with v. Kirchmann's constructions. His model is so childish that every advance leads deeper into the maze. First of all, there seems to be no reason whatever why, and to what purpose, v. Kirchmann should devise this splitting-up of production into three parts. If analogous examples by Ricardo and MacCulloch usually confront tenant farmers and manufacturers, that is presumably only inspired by the antiquated Physiocrat conception of social reproduction which Ricardo had adopted, although his own theory of value as against the Physiocrats deprived it of all meaning, and although Adam Smith had already made a good start in considering the real material foundations of the social reproductive process. Still, we have seen that the tradition of distinguishing between agriculture and industry as the foundation of reproduction was kept up in economic theory until Marx introduced his epoch-making distinction of the two productive departments in society for producer and consumer goods. v. Kirchmann's three departments, however, have no real significance at all. Obviously, no material consideration of reproduction can have been responsible for this supremely arbitrary division which jumbles up tools and furniture, raw materials and food, but makes clothing a department in its own right. One might as well postulate one department for food, clothing and housing, another for medicines and a third for tooth brushes. v. Kirchmann's primary concern, no doubt, is with the social division of labour; hence the assumption of as nearly equal quantities of products as possible in the transactions of exchange. Yet this exchange, on which the argument turns, plays no part at all in v. Kirchmann's example since it is not the value which is distributed but the quantities of products, the bulk of use-values as such. In this intriguing _Ort_ of v. Kirchmann's imagining, again, the products are distributed first, and only afterwards, when the distribution is accomplished, is there to be universal exchange, whereas on the solid ground of capitalist production it is, as we know, the exchange which inaugurates the distribution of the product and serves as its agent. Besides, the queerest things happen in v. Kirchmann's distributive system: 'As we all know', the prices of the products, i.e. the price of the aggregate product of society, consist of _v + s_, of wage and capital interest alone--so that the aggregate product must be distributed entirely among workers and entrepreneurs; but then unhappily v. Kirchmann dimly remembers the fact that production needs things like raw materials and tools. So _Ort_ is provided with raw materials furtively introduced among the food, and with tools among the furniture. But now the question arises: who is to get these indigestible items in the course of general distribution? the workers as wages, or the capitalists as profits of enterprise? They could hardly expect a warm welcome from either. And on such feeble premises the star turn of the performance is to take place: the exchange between workers and entrepreneurs. The fundamental transaction of exchange in capitalist production, the exchange between workers and capitalists, is transformed by v. Kirchmann from an exchange between living labour and capital into an exchange of products. Not the first act, that of exchanging labour power for variable capital, but the second, the realisation of the wage received from the variable capital is put at the centre of the whole machinery, the entire commodity exchange of capitalist society being in turn reduced to this realisation of the labour-wage. And the crowning glory is that this exchange between workers and entrepreneurs, the king-pin of all economic life, dissolves into nothing on a closer scrutiny--it does not take place at all. For as soon as all workers have received their natural wages in the form of half their product, an exchange will be possible only among the workers themselves; every worker will only keep one-third of his wage consisting exclusively of either clothing, food or furniture, as the case may be, and realise the remainder to equal parts in the two other product-groups. The entrepreneurs no longer come into this at all; the three of them are left high and dry with their surplus value: half the clothing, furniture and food that has been produced by the society; and they have no idea what to do with the stuff. In this calamity of v. Kirchmann's creation, even the most generous distribution of the product would be of no use. On the contrary, if larger quantities of the social product were allotted to the workers, they would have even less to do with the entrepreneurs in this transaction: all that would happen is that the exchange of the workers among themselves would increase in volume. The surplus product which the entrepreneurs have on their hands would then contract, it is true, though not indeed because the exchange of the surplus product would be facilitated, but merely because there would be less surplus value altogether. Now as before, an exchange of the social product between workers and entrepreneurs is out of the question. One must confess that the puerile and absurd economics here crammed into comparatively little space exceed the bounds even of what might be put up with from a Prussian Public Prosecutor--such having been v. Kirchmann's profession, though he must be credited with having incurred disciplinary censure on two occasions. Nevertheless, after these unpromising preliminaries, v. Kirchmann goes right to the root of the matter. He admits that his assuming the surplus product in a concrete use-form is the reason why the surplus value cannot be usefully employed. As a remedy he now allows the entrepreneurs to devote half of the social labour appropriated as surplus value to the production not of common goods but of luxuries. The 'essence of luxury-goods being that they enable the consumer to use up more capital and labour power than in the case of ordinary goods', the three entrepreneurs manage to consume by themselves in the form of laces, fashionable carriages and the like, their entire half-share in all the labour performed by the society. Now nothing unsaleable is left, and the crisis is happily avoided; over-production is made impossible once and for all, capitalists and workers alike are safe; the name of v. Kirchmann's magic cure which has brought all these benefits to pass, and which re-establishes the balance between production and consumption, being: luxury. In other words, the capitalists who do not know what to do with their surplus value which they cannot realise, are advised by the dear fellow--to eat it up! As it happens, luxury is in fact an old familiar invention of capitalist society, and still there are recurrent crises. Why is this? v. Kirchmann enlightens us: 'The answer can only be that in real life sluggish markets are entirely due to the fact that there are still _not enough_ luxuries, or, in other words, that the capitalists, i.e. those who can afford to consume, still consume too little.' This misguided abstinence of the capitalists, however, results from a bad habit which political economists have been ill-advised to encourage: the desire to save for purposes of 'productive consumption'. In other words: crises are caused by accumulation. This is v. Kirchmann's principal thesis. He proves it again by means of a touchingly simple example: 'Let us assume conditions which economists praise as more favourable,' he says, 'where the entrepreneurs say: we do not want to spend our income to the last penny in splendour and luxury, but will re-invest it productively. What does this mean? Nothing but the setting-up of all sorts of productive enterprises for delivering new goods of such a kind that their sale can yield interest (v. Kirchmann means profits) on a capital saved and invested by the three entrepreneurs from their unconsumed revenues. Accordingly, the three entrepreneurs decide to consume only the produce of a hundred workers, that is to say to restrict their luxury considerably, and to employ the labour power of the remaining 350 workers together with the capital they use for setting up new productive enterprises. The question now arises in what kind of productive enterprises these funds are to be used.' Since, according to v. Kirchmann's assumption, constant capital is not reproduced, and the entire social product consists entirely of consumer goods, 'the three entrepreneurs can only choose again between enterprises for the manufacture of ordinary goods or for that of luxuries'. In this way, however, the three entrepreneurs will be faced with the already familiar dilemma: if they turn out 'common goods', there will be a crisis, since the workers lack means to purchase these additional provisions, having been bought off with half the value of their produce. If they go in for luxuries, they will have to consume them alone. There is no other possibility. The dilemma is not even affected by foreign trade which would 'only increase the range of commodities on the home market' or increase productivity. 'These foreign commodities are therefore either common goods--then the capitalist will not, and the worker, lacking the means, cannot buy them, or they are luxuries, in which case the worker, of course, is even less able to buy them, and the capitalist will not want them either because of his efforts to save.' This argument, however primitive, yet shows quite nicely and clearly the fundamental conception of v. Kirchmann and the nightmare of all economic theory: in a society consisting exclusively of workers and capitalists, accumulation will be impossible. v. Kirchmann is therefore frankly hostile to accumulation, 'saving', 'productive consumption' of the surplus value, and strongly attacks these errors advocated by classical economics. His gospel is increasing luxury together with the productivity of labour as the specific against crises. We see that v. Kirchmann, if he grotesquely aped Ricardo and Say in his theoretical assumptions, is a caricature of Sismondi in his final conclusions. Yet it is imperative to get v. Kirchmann's approach to the problem perfectly clear, if we are to understand the import of Rodbertus' criticism and the outcome of the whole controversy. FOOTNOTES: [230] _Die Forderungen der arbeitenden Klassen._ [231] _Die Handelskrisen und die Hypothekennot der Grundbesitzer._ [232] _Zur Erkenntnis unserer staatswirtschaftlichen Zustände._ [233] _Über die Grundrente in sozialer Beziehung._ [234] _Die Tauschgesellschaft._ [235] _Soziale Briefe._ [236] Rodbertus quotes v. Kirchmann's arguments explicitly and in great detail. But according to his editors, no complete copy of _Demokratische Blätter_ with the original essay is obtainable. _CHAPTER XVI_ RODBERTUS' CRITICISM OF THE CLASSICAL SCHOOL Rodbertus digs deeper than v. Kirchmann. He looks for the roots of evil in the very foundations of social organisation and declares bitter war on the predominant Free Trade school--not against a system of unrestricted commodity circulation or the freedom of trade which he fully accepts, but against the Manchester doctrine of _laissez-faire_ within the internal social relations of economy. At that time, after the period of storm and stress of classical economics, a system of unscrupulous apologetics was already in full sway which found its most perfect expression in the 'doctrine of harmony' of M. Frédéric Bastiat, the famous vulgarian and idol of all Philistines, and quite soon the various Schultzes were to flourish as commonplace, German imitations of the French prophet of harmony. Rodbertus' strictures are aimed at these unscrupulous 'peddlers of free trade'. In his first _Letter on Social Problems_[237] he exclaims: 'Because of their paltry incomes, five-sixths of the population are not only deprived of most of the benefits of civilisation, but are in constant danger of the most terrible outbreaks of real distress to which they sometimes succumb. Yet they are the creators of all the wealth of the society. Their labours begin at dawn and end at dusk, continuing even after night has fallen--but no exertion can change this fate; they cannot raise their income, and only lose that little leisure which ought to remain nowadays for the improvement of their minds. Hitherto it might have seemed as if all this suffering were necessary to the progress of civilisation, but now that a series of the most wonderful discoveries and inventions have increased human labour power more than a hundredfold, new prospects of changing these grim conditions are suddenly revealed. As a result, the wealth and assets of a nation increase at a growing rate as compared with the population. Could anything be more natural, I ask, or more justly demanded, than that this increase should also somehow benefit the creators of this old and new wealth? that their incomes should be raised or their working-hours shortened, or that they might join in increasing numbers the ranks of the lucky ones, privileged to reap the fruits of labour? Yet state economy, or better, national economy has only achieved the opposite result. Increasing poverty of these classes goes together with increasing wealth of the nation, there is even need of special legislation, lest the working day become longer, and finally, the working classes swell in number out of proportion with the others. Even that is not enough! The hundredfold increase of labour efficiency which was powerless to relieve five-sixths of the population, even threatens periodically the remaining sixth of the nation and thus society as a whole.' 'What contradictions in the economic sphere in particular! And what contradictions in the social sphere in general! The wealth of society is growing, and this growth is accompanied by a growth of poverty.--The creative efficiency of the means of production is increasing, and the consequence is that they are scrapped. Social conditions demand that the material position of the working classes should be raised to the level of their political status, and economic conditions, by way of answer, depress them further. Society needs the unrestricted growth of wealth, and contemporary leaders of production must create restrictions, in order to discourage poverty. In a single respect alone is there harmony: just as wrong as the conditions is the authoritative section of the society with its inclination to look for the root of the evil everywhere except in the right place. This egotism, which only too often dons the scholar's gown, also accuses the vices of the workers of being the cause of poverty. The responsibility for the crimes committed against them by all-powerful facts is ascribed to their alleged discontent and shiftlessness, and where even such egotism cannot close its eyes to their innocence, it makes an elaborate dogma of the "necessity of poverty". Unremittingly, it exhorts the workers only to work and to pray, impresses upon them the duty of abstinence and economy, and at best infringes upon their rights by the institution of compulsory saving, adding to the misery of the workers. It does not see that a blind force of commerce has transformed the prayer for work into the curse of enforced unemployment, that ... abstinence is impossible or cruel, and that, lastly, morals always remain ineffective if commended by those of whom the poet says that they drink wine in secret but preach water in public.'[238] Thirty years after Sismondi and Owen, twenty years after the indictment made by the English socialists, the followers of Ricardo, and last but not least, after the publication of the Communist Manifesto, such bold words alone cannot claim to break new ground. What matters above all now is the theoretical foundation of this indictment. Rodbertus here proposed a complete system which can be reduced to the following simple statements. Owing to the laws of an economy left to its own devices, the high level of labour productivity achieved by history, together with the institutions of positive law, that is to say the right of private ownership, a whole series of wrong and unethical phenomena had emerged: (1) In the place of 'normal', 'constituted' value we have exchange value, and accordingly coined money instead of a proper 'paper' or 'labour' currency which would genuinely correspond to the concept of money. The first principle is that all economic goods are products of labour, or, as we might put it, that labour alone is creative. This statement, however, does not imply that the value of the product must always equal the cost of labour, or that, in other words, value is even now measured in terms of labour. The truth is rather 'that this still has not become a _fact_, but is only an _idea_ of political economy'.[239] 'If the value could be constituted in accordance with the labour expended on the product, we might imagine a kind of money which would be, as it were, a leaf torn from the public account-book, a receipt written on the most rubbishy material, on rags, which everyone would receive for the value he has produced, and which he would realise as a voucher for an equivalent part of the national product subsequently under distribution.... If, however, for some reason or another, it is _impossible_ or _not yet possible_ to establish this value, money as such must still retain the value it is designed to liquidate; made of an intrinsically valuable commodity like gold or silver, it has to represent a pledge or pawn of the same value.'[240] 'As soon as capitalist commodity production has come into existence, everything is turned upside down: there can no longer be a constituted value, since it can only be exchange value',[241] and, 'since the value cannot be constituted, money cannot be _purely_ money, it cannot fully conform to its concept'.[242] In an equitable exchange, the exchange value of the products would have to equal the quantity of labour needed for producing them, and an exchange of products would always mean an exchange of equal quantities of labour. Even assuming, however, that everybody produced just those use-values which another person requires, yet, 'since we are here concerned with human discernment and human volition, there must always be for a start a correct calculation, adjustment and allocation of the labour quantities contained in the products for exchange, there must be a _law_ to which the facts will conform'.[243] It is well-known that Rodbertus, in his discovery of 'constituted value', laid great stress on his priority to Proudhon which we shall gladly concede him. Marx, in his _Poverty of Philosophy_, and Engels in his preface to it, have comprehensively shown that this 'concept' is a mere phantom, still used in theory but in practice buried already in England well before Rodbertus' time, that it is but a Utopian distortion of Ricardo's doctrine of value. We therefore need not deal further with this 'music of the future, performed on a toy trumpet'. (2) The 'economy of exchange' resulted in the 'degradation' of labour to a commodity, the labour wage being determined as an item of expenditure (_Eichmann's der Arbeit_) instead of representing a fixed rate of the national product. By a daring jump in history, Rodbertus derives his wages law indirectly from slavery and regards the specific traits which a capitalist production of commodities imposes on exploitation as no more than a lying deception against which he fulminates from a moral point of view. 'So long as the producers themselves remained the property of those who were not producing, so long as slavery was in existence, it was the advantage of the "masters" alone which unilaterally determined the volume of this share (of the workers). With the producers attaining full liberty of person, if nothing more as yet, both parties agree on the wage in advance. The wage, in modern terminology, is the object of a "free contract", that is to say, an object of competition. Labour is therefore as a matter of course subjected to the same laws of exchange as its products: labour itself acquires exchange value; the size of the wage depends on the effects of supply and demand.' Rodbertus, after having thus turned everything upside down, after deriving the exchange value of labour from competition, now immediately derives its value from its exchange value. 'Under the laws of exchange value, labour, like produced goods, comes to have a kind of "cost value" which exercises some magnetic effects upon its exchange value, the amount of the labour wage. It is that particular amount of payment which is necessary for the "maintenance" of labour, in other words, which enables labour to continue, if only in the persons of its progeny--it is the so-called "minimum of subsistence".' For Rodbertus, however, this is not a statement of objective economic laws, but merely an object for moral indignation. He calls the thesis of the classical school, that labour is worth no more than the wages it can command, a 'cynical' statement, and he is determined to expose the 'string of lies' leading to this 'crude and unethical' conclusion.[244] 'It was a degrading view to estimate the wages of labour in accordance with the "necessary subsistence", like so many machines to be kept in repair. Now that labour, the fountainhead of all commodities, has itself become a commodity of exchange, it is no less degrading to speak of its "natural price", of its "costs", just as we speak of the natural price and costs of its product, and to include this natural price, these costs, in the amount of goods that is necessary to call forth a continuous flow of labour on the market.' This commodity character of labour power, however, and the corresponding determination of its value, are nothing but a malicious misrepresentation of the Free Trade school. Like the good Prussian he was, Rodbertus put capitalist commodity production as a whole in the dock, as offending against the obtaining constitutional law, instead of pointing out its inherent contradiction, the conflict between determining the value of labour and determining the value _created by_ labour, as the English disciples of Ricardo had done. 'Stupid beyond words', he exclaims, 'is the dualist conception of those economists who would have the workers, as far as their legal status is concerned, join in deciding the fate of society, and would for all that, have these same workers from an economic point of view, always treated as mere commodities!'[245] Now it only remains to find out why the workers put up with such stupid and blatant injustice--an objection which Hermann for instance raised against Ricardo's theory of value. Rodbertus is ready with this answer: 'What were the workers to do after their emancipation other than to agree to these regulations? Imagine their position: when the workers were freed, they were naked or in rags, they had nothing but their labour power. The abolition of slavery or serfdom, moreover, rescinded the master's legal or moral obligation to feed them and care for their needs. Yet these needs remained, they still had to live. How, then, could their labour power provide them with a living? Were they simply to grab some of the capital existing in the society for their maintenance? The capital of society was already in the hands of other people, and the organs of the "law" would not have tolerated such a step. What, then, could the workers have done? Only these alternatives were before them: either to overthrow the law of society or to return, under roughly the same conditions as before, to their former masters, the owners of the land and of capital, and to receive as wages what was formerly doled out to them to keep them fed.'[246] It was fortunate for mankind and the Prussian state that the workers were 'wise' enough not to overthrow civilisation and preferred to submit to the 'base demands' of their 'former masters'. This, then, is the origin of the capitalist wage system, of the wages law as 'a kind of slavery' resulting from an abuse of power on the part of the capitalists, and from the precarious position and the meek acquiescence on the part of the proletariat--if we are to believe the highly original explanations of that very Rodbertus whose theories Marx is reputed to have 'plagiarised'. Let Rodbertus claim 'priority' in this particular theory of value without challenge, seeing that English socialists and other social critics had already given far less crude and primitive analyses of the wage-system. The singular point about it all is that Rodbertus' display of moral indignation about the origin and the economic laws of the wages system does not lead up to the demand for doing away with this abominable injustice, the 'dualism stupid beyond words'. Far from it! He frequently reassures his fellow-men that he does not really mean anything very serious by roaring--he is no lion fell, only one Snug the joiner. Indeed, an ethical theory of the wages law is necessary only to achieve a further conclusion: (3) Since the 'laws of exchange value' determine the wage, an advance in labour productivity must bring about an ever declining share in the product for the workers. Here we have arrived at the Archimedean fulcrum of Rodbertus' system. This 'declining wage rate' is his most important 'original' discovery on which he harps from his first writings on social problems (probably in 1839) until his death, and which he 'claims' as his very own. This conception, for all that, was but a simple corollary of Ricardo's theory of value and is contained implicit in the wages fund theory which dominated bourgeois economics up to the publication of Marx's _Capital_. Rodbertus nevertheless believed that this 'discovery' made him a kind of Galileo in economics, and he refers to his 'declining wage rate' as explaining every evil and contradiction in capitalist economy. Above all, he derives from the declining wage rate the phenomenon of pauperism which, together with the crises, in his opinion constitutes the social question. It would be as well to draw the attention of contemporaries, 'out for Marx's blood', to the fact that it was not Marx but Rodbertus, a man much nearer their own heart, who set up a whole theory of progressive poverty in a very crude form, and that he, unlike Marx, made it the very pivot, not just a symptom, of the entire social problem. Compare for instance his argument in his first _Letter on Social Problems_ to v. Kirchmann on the absolute impoverishment of the working class. The 'declining wage rate' must serve in addition to explain the other fundamental phenomena of the social problem--the crises. In this connection Rodbertus tackles the problem of balancing consumption with production, touching upon the whole lot of cognate controversial issues which had already been fought out between the schools of Sismondi and Ricardo. Rodbertus' knowledge of crises was of course based upon far more material evidence than that of Sismondi. In his first _Letter on Social Problems_ he already gives a detailed description of the four crises in 1818-19, 1825, 1837-9 and 1847. Since his observations covered a much longer period, Rodbertus could by and large gain a much deeper insight into the essential character of crises than his predecessors. As early as 1850 he formulated the periodical character of the crises which recur at ever shorter intervals and at the same time with ever increasing severity: 'Time after time, these crises have become more terrible in proportion with the increase in wealth, engulfing an ever greater number of victims. The crisis of 1818-19, although even this caused panic in commerce and inspired misgivings in economics, was of small importance compared to that of 1825-6. The first crisis had made such inroads on the capital assets of England that the most famous economists doubted whether complete recovery could ever be made. Yet it was eclipsed by the crisis of 1836-7. The crises of 1839-40 and 1846-7 wrought even greater havoc than previous ones.'--'According to recent experiences, however, the crises recur at ever shorter intervals. There was a lapse of 18 years between the first and the third crisis, of 14 years between the second and the fourth, and of only 12 years between the third and the fifth. Already the signs are multiplying that a new disaster is imminent, though no doubt the events of 1848 put off the catastrophe.'[247] Rodbertus remarks that an extraordinary boom in production and great progress in industrial technique always are the heralds of a crisis. 'Every one of them [of the crises] followed upon a period of outstanding industrial prosperity.'[248] From the crises in history he demonstrates that 'they occur only after a considerable increase of productivity'.[249] Rodbertus opposes what he terms the vulgar view which conceives of crises as mere disturbances in the monetary and credit system, and he criticises the whole of Peel's currency legislation as an error of judgment, arguing the point in detail in his essay _On Commercial Crises and the Mortgage Problem_. There he makes the following comment among others: 'We would therefore deceive ourselves if we were to regard commercial crises merely as crises of the monetary, banking, or credit system. This is only their outer semblance when they first emerge.'[250] Rodbertus also shows a remarkably acute grasp of the part played by foreign trade in the problem of crises. Just like Sismondi, he states the necessity of expansion for capitalist production, but he simultaneously emphasises the fact that the periodical crises are bound to grow in volume. 'Foreign trade', he says, 'is related to slumps only as charity is related to poverty. They ultimately only enhance one another.'[251] And further: 'The only possible means of warding off further outbreaks of crises is the application of the two-edged knife of expanding foreign markets. The violent urge towards such expansion is largely no more but a morbid irritation caused by a sickly organ. Since one factor on the home market, productivity, is ever increasing, and the other factor, purchasing power, remains constant for the overwhelming majority of the population, commerce must endeavour to conjure up a similarly unlimited amount of purchasing power on the foreign market.'[252] In this way, the irritation may be soothed to some extent so that at least there will not be a new outbreak of the calamity right away. Every foreign market opened defers the social problem in a like manner. Colonisation of primitive countries would have similar effects: Europe rears a market for herself in places where none had been before. Yet such a medicine would essentially do no more than appease the ill. As soon as the new markets are supplied, the problem will revert to its former state--a conflict between the two factors: limited purchasing power versus unlimited productivity. The new attack would be warded off the small market only to re-appear, in even wider dimensions and with even more violent incidents, on a larger one. And since the earth is finite and the acquisition of new markets must some time come to an end, the time will come when the question can no longer be simply adjourned. Sooner or later, a definite solution will have to be found.'[253] Rodbertus also recognises the anarchical character of capitalist private enterprise to be conducive to crises, but only as one factor among many, seeing it as the source of a particular type of crises, not as the real cause of crises in general. About the crises at v. Kirchmann's _Ort_, e.g., he says: 'I maintain that a slump of this kind does not occur in real life. The market of to-day is large, there are countless wants and many branches of production, productivity is considerable and the data of commerce are obscure and misleading. The individual entrepreneur does not know how much others are producing, and so it may easily happen that he over-estimates the demand for a certain commodity with which he will then overstock the market.' Rodbertus says outright that the only remedy for these crises is the 'complete reversal' of contemporary property-relations or a planned economy, concentrating all means of production 'in the hands of a single social authority'. To set troubled minds at rest, however, he is quick to add that he reserves judgment as to whether there can actually be such a state of affairs--'yet this would be the only possible way to prevent slumps of this kind'. Thus he expressly regards anarchy in the modern mode of production as responsible for only a specific and partial manifestation of crises. Rodbertus scornfully rejects Say-Ricardo's axiom of a natural equilibrium between consumption and production; just like Sismondi, he emphasises that everything turns on the purchasing power of society, and also takes it to be dependent upon the distribution of income. All the same, he does not endorse Sismondi's theory of crises and disagrees sharply with the conclusions drawn from it. If Sismondi saw the source of all evil in the unlimited expansion of production without regard to the limitations of incomes, and advocated a restriction of production, Rodbertus, quite on the contrary, champions the most powerful and unrestricted expansion of production, of wealth and of the productive forces, believing this to be a social necessity. Whoever rejects the wealth of society, rejects at the same time its power, its progress, and, with its progress, its virtues. Whoever stands in the way of growing wealth, stands in the way of all social progress whatever. Every increase in knowledge, resolve and capacity is conceived as bound up with an increase in wealth.[254] From this point of view, Rodbertus is strongly in favour of issuing houses which he regards as the indispensable foundations for a rapid and unrestricted expansion of company promoting. Both his essay of 1859 on the mortgage problem and the treatise on the _Financial Crisis in Prussia_[255] are devoted to this plea. He even polemises outright against the Sismondian type of _caveat_, as usual broaching the matter first from his peculiar Utopian ethics. 'The entrepreneurs', he holds forth, 'are essentially civil servants of economy. By the institution of property, they are once and for all entrusted with the nation's means of production. If they set them to work and strain all their energies in the process, they do but their duty, since capital--let me repeat--exists entirely for the sake of production.' And a further, factual argument: 'Or would you have them (the entrepreneurs) turn acute attacks of suffering into a chronic state by working persistently and from the first with fewer forces than are given by the means of production; are they to pay for a less severe form of the evil with its permanent duration? Even if we were silly enough to give them this advice, they would not be able to follow it. How could the entrepreneurs of the world recognise the limits beyond which the market would cease to be healthy? They engage in production without knowing the one of the other, they are producing in the most distant corners of the earth for a market hundreds of miles away, they produce with such vast forces that a month's production may already overstep the limit. How could production--so divided and yet so powerful--conceivably estimate in good time what will be enough? Where, for instance, are the organisations, the up-to-date statistical bureaux and the like to help them in this task? What is worse, the price alone, its rise and fall, indicates the position of the market, and this is not like a barometer which predicts the temperature of the market, but more like a thermometer which only registers it. If the price falls, the limit has been passed already, and the evil is with us.'[256] These thrusts, obviously aimed at Sismondi, exhibit quite fundamental differences between the two opponents. If Engels then says in his _Anti-Duehring_ that Sismondi first explained the crises as resulting from under-consumption, and that Rodbertus borrowed this view from him, he is not strictly accurate. All that Rodbertus and Sismondi have in common is their opposition against the classical school and the general explanation of crises as the result of the distribution of incomes. Even in this connection Rodbertus mounts his own particular hobby horse: over-production is not caused by the low level of working class incomes, nor yet, as Sismondi maintains, by the capitalists' limited capacity for consumption, but solely by the fact that with a growing productivity of labour, the workers' income, in terms of value, represents an ever smaller share of the product. Rodbertus takes pains to convince the opposition that it is not the small volume of the workers' share which causes the crises. 'Just imagine', he goes on to lecture v. Kirchmann, 'these shares to be so small as to ensure only a bare subsistence for those who are entitled to them. As long as you establish them as representing a proportion of the national product, you will have a constant "vessel for value" which can absorb ever increasing contents, and an ever increasing prosperity of the working classes as well.... And now imagine on the contrary as large a share for the working classes as you please, and let it become an ever smaller fraction of the national product that grows with increasing productivity. Then, provided it is not reduced to the present pittance, this share will still protect the workers from undue privations since the amount of products it represents will still be considerably greater than it is to-day. Once this share begins to decline, however, there will be spreading discontent, culminating in a commercial crisis for which the capitalists are not to blame inasmuch as they did no more than their duty in laying down the volume of production according to the given magnitude of these shares.' That is why the 'declining wage rate' is the real cause of crises. It can only be counteracted by legal measures to ensure that the workers' share represents a stable and unchanging rate of the national product. This grotesque notion takes some understanding if we are to do justice to its economic implications. FOOTNOTES: [237] To v. Kirchmann, in 1880. [238] Dr. Carl Rodbertus-Jagetzow, _Schriften_ (Berlin, 1899), vol. iii, pp. 172-4, 184. [239] Op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 104 f. [240] Op. cit., vol. i, p. 99. [241] Ibid., p. 173. [242] Ibid., p. 176. [243] Op. cit., vol. ii, p. 65. [244] _Schriften_, vol. i, pp. 182-4. [245] Ibid., pp. 182-4. [246] Ibid., p. 72. [247] _Schriften_, vol. iii, pp. 110-11. [248] Ibid., p. 108. [249] Op. cit., vol. i, p. 62. [250] _Schriften_, vol. iv, p. 226. [251] In _Towards the Understanding of Our Politico-Economic Conditions_, part ii, n. 1. [252] In _On Commercial Crises and the Mortgage Problem of the Landowners_, quoted above (op. cit., vol. iii, p. 186). [253] Op. cit., vol. iv, p. 233. It is interesting to note in this connection how Rodbertus appears in practice as an extremely sober and realistically-minded prophet of capitalist colonial policy, in the manner of the present-day 'Pan-Germans', his moral ranting about the unhappy fate of the working classes notwithstanding. In a footnote to the above quotation, he writes: 'We can go on to glance briefly at the importance of the opening up of Asia, in particular of China and Japan, the richest markets in the world, and also of the maintenance of English rule in India. It is to defer the solution of the social problem.' (The eloquent avenger of the exploited ingenuously discloses the means by which the profiteering exploiters can continue 'their stupid and criminal error', their 'flagrant injustice' for as long as possible.) 'For the solution of this problem, the present lacks in unselfishness and moral resolution no less than in intelligence.' (Rodbertus' philosophical resignation is unparalleled!) 'Economic advantage cannot, admittedly, constitute a legal title to intervention by force, but on the other hand, a strict application of modern natural and international law to all the nations of the world, whatever their state of civilisation, is quite impracticable.' (A comparison with Dorine's words in Molière's _Tartuffe_ is irresistible: 'Le ciel défend, de vraie, certains contentements, mais il y a avec lui des accommodements.')--'Our international law has grown from a civilisation of _Christian_ ethics, and since all law is based upon reciprocity, it can only provide the standard for relations between nations of the same civilisation. If it is applied beyond these limits, it is sentiment rather than natural and international law and the Indian atrocities should have cured us of it. Christian Europe should rather partake of the spirit which made the Greeks and the Romans regard all the other peoples of the world as barbarians. The younger European nations might then regain the drive for making world history which impelled the Ancients to spread their native civilisation over the countries of the globe. They would reconquer Asia for world history by _joint action_. Such common purpose and action would in turn stimulate the greatest social progress, a firm foundation of peace in Europe, a reduction of armies, a colonisation of Asia in the ancient Roman style--in other words, a genuine solidarity of interests in all walks of social life.' The vision of capitalist colonial expansion inspires the prophet of the exploited and oppressed to almost poetical flights, all the more remarkable for coming at a time when a civilisation of Christian ethics accomplished such glorious exploits as the Opium Wars against China and the Indian atrocities--that is to say, the atrocities committed by the British in their bloody suppression of the Indian Mutiny.--In his second _Letter on Social Problems_, in 1850, Rodbertus had expressed the conviction that if society lacks the 'moral resolution' necessary to solve the social question, in other words, to change the distribution of wealth, history would be forced to 'use the whip of revolution against it' (op. cit., vol. ii, p. 83). Eight years later, however, the stalwart Prussian prefers to crack the whip of a colonial policy of Christian ethics over the natives of the colonial countries. It is, of course, what one might expect of the 'original founder of scientific socialism in Germany' that he should also be a warm supporter of militarism, and his phrase about the 'reduction of armies' is but poetic licence in his verbal fireworks. In his essay _On the Understanding of the Social Question_ he explains that the 'entire national tax burden is perpetually gravitating towards the bottom, sometimes in form of higher prices for wage goods, and sometimes in form of lower money wages'. In this connection, he considers conscription 'under the aspect of a charge on the state', explaining that 'as far as the working classes are concerned, it is nothing like a tax but rather a confiscation of their entire income for many years'. He adds immediately: 'To avoid misunderstanding I would point out that I am a staunch supporter of our present military constitution (i.e. the military constitution of counter-revolutionary Prussia)--although it may be oppressive to the working classes and demand great financial sacrifices from the propertied classes' (op. cit., vol. iii, p. 34). That does not even sound like a lion's roar! [254] _Schriften_, vol. iii, p. 182. [255] Published already in 1845. [256] _Schriften_, vol. iv, p. 231. _CHAPTER XVII_ RODBERTUS' ANALYSIS OF REPRODUCTION To begin with, what does it mean that a decrease in the workers' share is bound immediately to engender over-production and commercial crises? Such a view can only make sense provided Rodbertus takes the 'national product' to consist of two parts, _vide_ the shares of the workers and of the capitalists, in short of _v + s_, one share being exchangeable for the other. And that is more or less what he actually seems to say on occasions, e.g. in his first _Letter on Social Problems_: 'The poverty of the working classes precludes their income from giving scope to increasing production. The additional amount of products from the entrepreneurs' point of view lowers the value of the aggregate product so far as to bar production on the former scale, leaving the workers at best to their accustomed straits, though, if it could be made available to the workers, it would not only improve their lot but would further act as a counterweight by increasing the value of what is retained by the capitalists (and so enable the latter to keep their enterprises at the same level).'[257] The 'counterweight' which in the hand of the workers increases the 'value' of 'what is retained' by the entrepreneurs, can in this context only be the demand. Once again, we have landed happily at the familiar _Ort_ of v. Kirchmann's where workers and capitalists exchange their incomes for the surplus product, and where the crises arise because variable capital is small and the surplus value large. This peculiar notion has already been dealt with above. There are other occasions, however, when Rodbertus advances a somewhat different conception. The interpretation of his theory in the fourth _Letter on Social Problems_ is that the continual shifts in the relations of demand, evident in the share of the working class and caused by the share of the capitalist class, must result in a chronic disproportion between production and consumption. 'What if the entrepreneurs endeavour to keep always within the limits of those shares, yet the shares themselves are all the time on the decline for the great majority of the society, the workers, decreasing gradually, unnoticeably, but with relentless force?--What if the share of these classes is continually decreasing to the same extent as their productivity is increasing?'--'Is it not really the fact that the capitalists of necessity organise production in accordance with the present volume of shares in order to make wealth universal, and that yet they always produce over and above this volume (of previous shares), thereby perpetuating dissatisfaction which culminates in this stagnation of trade?'[258] On this showing, the explanation of crises should be as follows: the national product consists of a number of 'common goods', as v. Kirchmann puts it, for the workers, and of superior goods for the capitalists. The wages represent the quantity of the former, and aggregate surplus value that of the latter. If the capitalists organise their production on this footing, and if at the same time there is progressive productivity, a lack of proportion will immediately ensue. For the share of the workers to-day is no longer that of yesterday, but less. If the demand for 'common goods' had involved, say, six-sevenths of the national product yesterday, then to-day it involves only five-sevenths, and the entrepreneurs, having provided for six-sevenths of 'common goods', will find to their painful surprise that they over-produced by one-seventh. Now, wiser by this experience, they try to organise to-morrow's output of 'common goods' to a mere five-sevenths of the total value of the national product, but they have a new disappointment coming to them, since the share of the national product falling to wages to-morrow is bound to be only four-sevenths, and so on. In this ingenious theory there are quite a few points to make us wonder. If our commercial crises are entirely due to the fact that the workers' 'wage rate', the variable capital, represents a constantly diminishing portion of the total value of the national product, then this unfortunate law brings with it the cure for the evil it has caused, since it must be an ever smaller part of the aggregate product for which there is over-production. Although Rodbertus delights in such terms as 'an overwhelming majority', 'the large popular masses' of consumers, it is not the number of heads that make up the demand, but the value they represent which is relevant. This value, if Rodbertus is to be believed, forms a more and more trifling part of the aggregate product. Crises are thus made to rest on an ever narrowing economic basis, and all that remains to discover is how in spite of it all it can still happen that the crises are universal and increasingly severe besides, as Rodbertus is fully aware. The purchasing power lost by the working classes should be gained by the capitalist class; if _v_ decreases, _s_ must grow larger to make up for it. On this crude scheme, the purchasing power of society as a whole cannot change, as Rodbertus says in so many words: 'I know very well that what is taken from the workers' share goes ultimately to swell that of the "rentiers" (rent and surplus value are used as synonyms, _R.L._), and that purchasing power remains constant on the whole and in the long run. But as far as the product on the market is concerned, the crisis always sets in before this increase can make itself felt.'[259] In short, the most it can amount to is that there is 'too much' of 'common goods' and 'too little' of superior goods for the capitalists. Quite unawares, and by devious ways, Rodbertus here falls in with the Say-Ricardian theory he so ardently contested, the theory that over-production on one side always corresponds to under-production on the other. Seeing that the ratio of the two shares is persistently shifting to the advantage of the capitalists, our commercial crises might be expected on the whole to take on increasingly the character of periodical under- instead of over-production! Enough of this exercise in logic. The upshot of it all is that Rodbertus conceives the national product in respect of its value as made up of two parts only, of _s_ and _v_, thus wholly subscribing to the views and traditions of the classical school he is fighting tooth and nail, and even adding his own flourish that the capitalists consume the entire surplus value. That is why he repeatedly says without mincing his words, as in the fourth _Letter on Social Problems_: 'Accordingly, we must abstract from the reasons which cause the division of rent in general into rent proper and capital rent, to find the basic principle underlying the division of rent (surplus value) in general, the principle underlying _the division of the labour product into wage and rent_.'[260] And, in the third _Letter_: 'Ground rent, capital profit and the wage of labour are, let me repeat, revenue. By this means landlords, capitalists and workers must live, must satisfy, that is to say, their immediate human necessities. They must therefore draw their income in the form of goods suitable for this purpose.'[261] The misrepresentation of capitalist economy has never been formulated more crudely, and there is no doubt that Rodbertus claims the palm of 'priority'--not so much over Marx as over all popular economists--with full justification. To leave the reader in no doubt about the utter muddle he has made, he goes on, in the same letter, to rank capitalist surplus value as an economic category on the same level as the revenue of the ancient slave-owner: 'The first state (that of slavery) goes with the most primitive natural economy: that portion of the labour product which is withheld from the income of workers or slaves and forms the master's or owner's property, will undividedly accrue to the one man who owns the land, the capital, the worker and the labour product; there is not even a distinction of thought between rent and capital profits.--The second state entails the most complicated money economy: that portion of the labour product, withheld from the income of the now emancipated workers, and accruing to the respective owners of land, and capital, will be further divided among the owners of the raw material and the manufactured product respectively; the one rent of the former state will be split up into ground rent and capital profits, and will have to be differentiated accordingly.'[262] Rodbertus regards the splitting-up of the surplus value 'withheld' from the workers' 'income' as the most striking difference between exploitation by slavery and modern capitalist exploitation. It is not the specific historical form of sharing out newly created value among labour and capital, but the distribution of the surplus value among the various people it benefits, which, irrelevant to the productive process, is yet the decisive fact in the capitalist mode of production. In all other respects, capitalist surplus value remains just the same as the old 'single rent' of the slave-owner: a private fund for the exploiter's own consumption! Yet Rodbertus again contradicts himself in other places, remembering all of a sudden the constant capital and the necessity for its renewal in the reproductive process. Thus, instead of bisecting the aggregate product into _v_ and _s_, he posits a triple division: _c_, _v_, and _s_. In his third _Letter on Social Problems_ he argues on the forms of reproduction in a slave-economy: 'Since the master will see to it that part of the slave labour is employed in maintaining or even improving the fields, herds, agricultural and manufacturing tools, there will be "capital replacement", to use a modern term, in which part of the national economic product is immediately used for the upkeep of the estate, without any mediation by exchange or even by exchange value.'[263] And, passing on to capitalist reproduction, he continues: 'Now, in terms of value, one portion of the labour product, is used or set aside for the maintenance of the estate, for "capital replacement", another, for the workers' subsistence as their money wage; and the owners of the land, of capital, and of the labour product retain the last as their revenue or rent.'[264] This, then, is an explicit expression of the triple division into constant capital, variable capital, and surplus value. Again, in this third _Letter_, he formulates the peculiarity of his 'new' theory with equal precision: 'On this theory, then, and under conditions of adequate labour productivity, the portion of the product which remains for wages after the replacement of capital, will be distributed among workers and owners as wages and rent, on the basis of the ownership in land and capital.'[265] It does seem now as if Rodbertus' analysis of the value of the aggregate product represents a distinct advance over the classical school. Even Adam Smith's 'dogma' is openly criticised a little further on, and it is really surprising that Rodbertus' learned admirers, Messrs. Wagner, Dietzel, Diehl & Co. failed to claim their white-headed boy's 'priority' over Marx on such an important point of economic theory. As a matter of fact, in this respect no less than in the general theory of value, Rodbertus' priority is of a somewhat dubious character. If he seems on occasion to gain true insight, it immediately turns out to be a misunderstanding, or at best a wrong approach. His criticism of Adam Smith's dogma affords a supreme example of his failure to cope with the triple division of the national product towards which he had groped his way. He says literally: 'You know that all economists since Adam Smith already divided the value of the product into wage of labour, rent, and capital profit, that it is therefore not a new idea to ground the incomes of the various classes, and especially the various items of the rent, in a division of the product. But the economists at once go off the track. All of them, not even excepting Ricardo's school, make the mistake, first, not to recognise that the aggregate product, the finished good, the national product as a whole, is an entity in which workers, landowners, and capitalists all share, but conceiving the division of the unfinished product to be of one kind shared among three partners, and that of the manufactured product as of another kind again, shared between only two partners. For these theories both the unfinished product and the manufactured product constitute as such separate items of revenue. Secondly,--though both Sismondi and Ricardo are free from this particular error--they regard the natural fact that labour cannot produce goods without material help, i.e. without the land, as an economic fact, and take the social fact for a primary datum that capital as understood to-day is required by the division of labour. Thus they set up the fiction of a fundamental economic relationship on which they base also for the shares of the various owners, ground rent springing from the contribution of the land lent by the owner to production, capital profits from the contribution of capital employed by the capitalist to this end, and the wages finally from labour's contribution, seeing that there are separate owners of land, capital, and labour in the society. Say's school, elaborating on this mistake with much ingenuity, even invented the concept of productive service of land, capital, and labour in conformity with the shares in the product of their respective owners, so as to explain these shares as the result of productive service.--Thirdly, they are caught up in the ultimate folly of deriving the wage of labour and the items of rent from the value of the product, the value of the product in turn being derived from the wage of labour and the items of rent, so that the one is made to depend on the other and _vice versa_. This absurdity is quite unmistakable when some of these authors attempt to expound "The Influence of Rent Upon Production Prices" and "The Influence of Production Prices Upon Rent" in two consecutive chapters.'[266] Yet for all these excellent critical comments--the last, particularly acute, actually does to some extent anticipate Marx's criticism of this point in _Capital_, volume ii--Rodbertus calmly falls in with the fundamental blunder of the classical school and its vulgar followers: to ignore altogether that part of the value of the aggregate product which is needed to replace the constant capital of the society. This way it was easier for him to keep up the singular fight against the 'declining wage rate'. Under capitalist forms of production, the value of the aggregate social product is divided into three parts: one corresponding to the value of the constant capital, the second to the wage total, i.e. the variable capital, and the third to the aggregate surplus value of the capitalist class. In this composition, the portion corresponding to the variable capital is relatively on the decline, and this for two reasons. To begin with, the relation of _c_ to (_v + s_) within _c + v + s_ changes all the time in the direction of a relative increase of _c_ and a relative decrease of _v + s_. This is the simple law for a progressive efficiency of human labour, valid for all societies of economic progress, independently of their historical forms, a formula which only states that living labour is increasingly able to convert more means of production into objects for use in an ever shorter time. And if (_v + s_) decreases as a whole, so must _v_, as its part, decrease in relation to the total value of the product. To kick against this, to try and stop the decrease, would be tantamount to contending against the general effects of a growing labour productivity. Further, there is within (_v + s_) as well a change in the direction of a relative decrease in _v_ and a relative increase in _s_, that is to say, an ever smaller part of the newly created value is spent on wages and an ever greater part is appropriated as surplus value. This is the specifically capitalist formula of progressive labour productivity which, under capitalist conditions of production, is no less valid than the general law. To use the power of the state to prevent a decrease of _v_ as against _s_ would mean that the fundamental commodity of labour power is debarred from this progress which decreases production costs for all commodities; it would mean the exemption of this one commodity from the economic effects of technical progress. More than that: the 'declining wage rate' is only another expression of the rising rate of surplus value which forms the most powerful and effective means of checking a decline of the profit rate, and which therefore represents the prime incentive for capitalist production in general, and for technical progress within this system of production in particular. Doing away with the 'declining wage rate' by way of legislation would be as much as to do away with the _raison d'être_ of capitalist society, to deal a crippling blow to its entire system. Let us face the facts: the individual capitalist, just like capitalist society as a whole, has no glimmering that the value of the product is made up from the sum total of labour necessary in the society, and this is actually beyond his grasp. Value, as the capitalist understands it, is the derivative form, reversed by competition as production costs. While in truth the value of the product is broken down into the values of its component fragments _c_, _v_ and _s_, the capitalist mind conceives of it as the summation of _c_, _v_ and _s_. These, in addition, also appear to him from a distorted perspective and in a secondary form, as (1) the wear and tear of his fixed capital, (2) his advances on circulating capital, including workers' wages, and (3) the current profits, i.e. the average rate of profit on his entire capital. How, then, is the capitalist to be compelled by a law, say of the kind envisaged by Rodbertus, to maintain a 'fixed wage rate' in the face of the aggregate value of the product? It would be quite as brilliant to stipulate by law for exactly one-third, no more, no less, of the total price of the product to be payable for the raw materials employed in the manufacture of any commodity. Obviously, Rodbertus' supreme notion, of which he was so proud, on which he built as if it were a new Archimedean discovery, which was to be the specific for all the ills of capitalist production, is arrant nonsense from all aspects of the capitalist mode of production. It could only result from the muddle in the theory of value which is brought to a head in Rodbertus' inimitable phrase: that 'now, in a capitalist society, the product must have value-in-exchange just as it had to have value-in-use in ancient economy'.[267] People in ancient society had to eat bread and meat in order to live, but we of to-day are already satisfied with knowing the price of bread and of meat. The most obvious inference from Rodbertus' monomania about a 'fixed wage rate' is that he is quite incapable of understanding capitalist accumulation. Previous quotations have already shown that Rodbertus thinks solely of simple commodity production, quite in keeping with his mistaken doctrine that the purpose of capitalist production is the manufacture of consumer goods for the satisfaction of 'human wants'. For he always talks of 'capital replacements', of the need to enable the capitalists to 'continue their enterprise on the previous scale'. His principal argument, however, is directly opposed to the accumulation of capital. To fix the rate of the surplus value, to prevent its growth, is tantamount to paralysing the accumulation of capital. Both Sismondi and v. Kirchmann had recognised the problem of balancing production and consumption to be indeed a problem of accumulation, that is to say of enlarged capitalist reproduction. Both traced the disturbances in the equilibrium of reproduction to accumulative tendencies denying the possibility of accumulation, with the only difference that the one recommended a damper on the productive forces as a remedy, while the other favoured their increasing employment to produce luxuries, the entire surplus value to be consumed. In this field, too, Rodbertus follows his own solitary path. The others might try with more or less success to comprehend the _fact_ of capitalist accumulation, but Rodbertus prefers to fight the very concept. 'Economists since Adam Smith have one after the other echoed the principle, setting it up as a universal and absolute truth, that capital could only come about by saving and accumulating.'[268] Rodbertus is up in arms against this 'deluded judgment'. Over sixty pages of print he sets out in detail that (_a_) it is not saving which is the source of capital but labour, that (_b_) the economists' 'delusion' about 'saving' hails from the extravagant view that capital is itself productive, and that (_c_) this delusion is ultimately due to another: the error that capital is--capital. v. Kirchmann for his part understood quite well what is at the bottom of capitalist 'savings'. He had the pretty argument: 'Everyone knows that the accumulation of capital is not a mere hoarding of reserves, an amassing of metal and monies to remain idle in the owners' vaults. Those who want to save do it for the sake of re-employing their savings either personally or through the agency of others as capital, in order to yield them revenue. That is only possible if these capitals are used in new enterprises which can produce so as to provide the required interest. One may build a ship, another a barn, a third may reclaim a desolate swamp, a fourth may order a new spinning frame, while a fifth, in order to enlarge his shoe-making business, would buy more leather and employ more hands--and so on. Only if the capital that has been saved is employed in this way, can it yield interest (meaning profit), and the latter is the ultimate object of all saving.'[269] That is how v. Kirchmann described somewhat clumsily, but on the whole correctly, what is in fact the capitalisation of surplus value, the process of capitalist accumulation, which constitutes the whole significance of saving, advocated by classical economists 'since Adam Smith' with unerring instinct. Declaring war on saving and accumulation was quite in keeping with v. Kirchmann's premises, considering that he, like Sismondi, saw the immediate cause of the crises in accumulation. Here, too, Rodbertus is more 'thorough'. Having learned from Ricardo's theory of value that labour is the source of all value, and consequently of capital, too, he is completely blinded by this elementary piece of knowledge to the entire complexity of capitalist production and capital movements. Since capital is generated by labour, both the accumulation of capital, i.e. 'saving', and the capitalisation of the surplus value are nothing but eyewash. In order to untangle this intricate network of errors by 'economists since Adam Smith', he takes, as we might expect, the example of the 'isolated husbandman' and proves all that he needs by a long-drawn vivisection of the unhappy creature. Here already he discovers 'capital', that is to say, of course, that famous 'original stick' with which 'economists since Adam Smith' have hooked the fruits of a theory of capital from the tree of knowledge. 'Would saving be able to produce this stick?' is his query. And since every normal person will understand that 'saving' cannot produce any stick, that Robinson [Crusoe] must have made it of wood, we have already proved that the 'savings' theory is quite mistaken. Presently, the 'isolated husbandman' hooks a fruit from the tree with the stick, and this fruit is his 'income'. 'If capital were the source of income, already this most elementary and primitive event would have to give evidence of this relation. Would it be true to say, then, without doing violence to facts and concepts, that the stick is a _source_ of income or of part of the income consisting in the fruit brought down? can we trace income, wholly or in part, back to the stick as its _cause_, may we consider it, wholly or in parts, as a _product_ of the stick?'[270] Surely not. And since the fruit is the product, not of the stick which brought it down, but of the tree which grew it, Rodbertus has already proved that all 'economists since Adam Smith' are grossly mistaken if they maintain that income derives from capital. After a clear exposition of all fundamental concepts of economics on the example of Robinson [Crusoe]'s 'economy', Rodbertus transfers the knowledge thus acquired first to a fictitious society 'without ownership in capital or land', that is to say to a society with a communist mode of possession, and then to a society 'with ownership in capital and land', that is to say contemporary society, and, lo and behold--all the laws of Robinson [Crusoe]'s economy apply point for point to these two forms of society as well. Rodbertus contrives here a theory of capital and income which is the very crown of his Utopian imagination. Since he has discovered that Robinson [Crusoe]'s 'capital' is the means of production pure and simple, he identifies capital with the means of production in capitalist economy as well. Thus reducing capital, with a wave of his hand, to constant capital, he protests in the name of justice and morality against the fact that the wages, the workers' means of subsistence, are also considered capital. He contends furiously against the _concept_ of variable capital, seeing in it the cause of every disaster. 'If only', he grieves, 'economists would pay attention to what I say, if only they would examine without prejudice whether they are right or I. This is the focal point of all errors about capital in the ruling system, this is the ultimate source of injustice against the working classes, in theory and practice alike.'[271] For 'justice' demands that the goods constituting the 'real wages' of the workers be counted, not as part of capital, but as belonging to the category of income. Though Rodbertus knows very well that the capitalist must regard the wages he has 'advanced' as part of his capital, just like the other part laid out on immediate means of production, yet in his opinion this applies only to individual capitals. As soon as it is a question of the social aggregate product, of reproduction as a whole, he declares the capitalist categories of production an illusion, a malicious lie and a 'wrong'. 'Capital _per se_ (properly so-called), the items which make up capital, capital from the nation's point of view, is something quite different from private capital, capital _assets_, capital _property_, all that "capital" in the modern use of the term usually stands for.'[272] An individual capitalist produces by capitalist methods, but society as a whole must produce like Robinson [Crusoe], as a collective owner employing communist methods. 'It makes no difference from this general and national point of view that greater or smaller parts of the aggregate national product are now owned in all the various phases of production by private persons who must not be numbered among the producers proper, and that the latter always manufacture this national aggregate product as servants--without sharing in the ownership of their own product--of these few owners.' Certain peculiarities of the relations within the society as a whole no doubt result from this, namely (1) the institution of 'exchange' as an intermediary, and (2) the inequality in the distribution of the product. 'Yet all these consequences do not affect the movements of national production and the shaping of the national product which are always the same, now as ever (under the rule of communism), no more than they alter in any respect, as far as the _national point of view_ is concerned, the contrast between capital and income so far established.' Sismondi had laboured in the sweat of his brow, as had Smith and many others, to disentangle the concepts of capital and income from the contradictions of capitalist production. Rodbertus has a simpler method and abstracts from the specific forms determined by capitalist production for society as a whole; he simply calls the means of production 'capital' and the article of consumption 'revenue' and leaves it at that. 'The essential influence of ownership in land and capital applies only to individuals having traffic with one another. If the nation is taken as a unit, the effects of such ownership upon the individuals completely disappear.'[273] We see that as soon as Rodbertus comes up against the real problem, the capitalist aggregate product and its movements, he exhibits the Utopian's characteristic obtuseness in respect of the historical peculiarities of production. Marx's comment on Proudhon, that 'speaking of society as a whole, he pretends that this society is no longer capitalist' therefore fits him like a glove. The case of Rodbertus again exemplifies how every economist before Marx had been at a loss when it came to harmonising the concrete aspects of the labour process with the perspective of capitalist production which regards everything in terms of value, to mediating between the forms of movement performed by individual capitals and the movement of social capital. Such efforts as a rule vacillate from one extreme to another: the shallow approach of Say and MacCulloch, recognising only the conceptions of individual capital, and the Utopian approach of Proudhon and Rodbertus who recognise only those of the process of labour. That is the context in which Marx's penetration appears in its true light. His diagram of simple reproduction illuminates the entire problem by gathering up all these perspectives in their harmony and their contradictions, and so resolves the hopeless obscurities of innumerable tomes into two rows of figures of striking simplicity. On the strength of such views on capital and income as these, capitalist appropriation is clearly quite impossible to understand. Indeed, Rodbertus simply brands it as 'robbery' and indicts it before the forum of the rights of property it so blatantly violates. 'This personal freedom of the workers which ought legally to involve ownership in the value of the labour product, leads in practice to their renunciation of the proprietary claims extorted under pressure of ownership in land and capital; but the owners do not admit to this great and universal wrong, almost as though they were instinctively afraid that history might follow its own stern and inexorable logic.'[274] Rodbertus' 'theory in all its details is therefore conclusive proof that those who praise present-day relations of ownership without being able at the same time to ground ownership in anything but labour, completely contradict their own principle. It proves that the property relations of to-day are in fact founded on a universal violation of this principle, that the great individual fortunes being amassed in society nowadays are the result of cumulative robbery mounting up in society with every new-born worker since time immemorial.'[275] Since surplus value is thus branded as 'robbery', an increasing rate of surplus value must appear 'as a strange error of present-day economic organisation'. Brissot's crude paradox with its revolutionary ring--'property is theft'--had been the starting point for Proudhon's first pamphlet, but Rodbertus' thesis is quite another matter, arguing that capital is theft perpetrated on property. It need only be set side by side with Marx's chapter on the transformation of the laws of ownership into the laws of capitalist appropriation--this triumph of historical dialectics in vol. i of Marx's _Capital_--in order to show up Rodbertus' 'priority'. By ranting against capitalist appropriation under the aspect of the 'right of property', Rodbertus closed his mind to capital as the source of surplus value just as effectively as he had previously been prevented by his tirades against 'saving' from seeing the surplus value as a source of capital. He is thus in an even worse position than v. Kirchmann, lacking all qualifications for understanding capitalist accumulation. What it amounts to is that Rodbertus wants unrestricted expansion of production without saving, that is to say without capitalist accumulation! He wants an unlimited growth of the productive forces, and at the same time a rate of surplus value stabilised by an act of law. In short, he shows himself quite unable to grasp the real foundations of capitalist production he wishes to reform, and to understand the most important results of the classical economics he criticises so adversely. It is no more than to be expected, therefore, that Prof. Diehl should declare Rodbertus a pioneer of economic theory on the strength of his 'new theory of income' and of the distinction between the logical and the historical categories of capital (capital properly so-called in contrast to individual capital), that Prof. Adolf Wagner should call him the 'Ricardo of economic socialism', proving himself ignorant at once of Ricardo, Rodbertus and socialism alike. Lexis even judges that Rodbertus is at least the equal of 'his British rival' in power of abstract thinking, and by far his superior in 'virtuosity to lay bare the phenomena in their ultimate connections', in 'imaginative vitality', and above all in his 'ethical approach to economic life'. Rodbertus' real achievements in economic theory however, other than his critique of Ricardo's ground rent, his at times quite clear-cut distinction between surplus value and profit, his treatment of the surplus value as a whole in deliberate contrast with its partial manifestations, his critique of Smith's dogma concerning the analysis of commodities in terms of value, his precise formulation of the periodical character of the crises and his analysis of their manifestations--all these attempts to carry the investigation beyond Smith, Ricardo and Say, promising as such, though doomed to failure because of the confused basic concepts, are rather above the heads of Rodbertus' official admirers. As Franz Mehring already pointed out, it was Rodbertus' strange fortune to be lauded to heaven for his alleged prowess in economics by the same people who called him to task for his real merits in politics. This contrast between economic and political achievements, however, does not concern us here: in the realm of economic theory, his admirers built him a grand memorial on the barren field he had dug with the hopeless zeal of the visionary, while the modest beds where he had sown a few fertile seeds, were allowed to be smothered with weeds and forgotten.[276] It cannot be said that the problem of accumulation had on the whole been much advanced beyond the first controversy by this Prusso-Pomeranian treatment. If in the interim the economic theory of harmony had dropped from the level of Ricardo to that of a Bastiat-Schultze, social criticism had correspondingly declined from Sismondi to Rodbertus. Sismondi's critique of 1819 had been an historical event, but Rodbertus' ideas of reform, even on their first appearance, were a miserable regression--still more so on their subsequent reiteration. In the controversy between Sismondi on the one hand and Say and Ricardo on the other, one party proved that accumulation was impossible because of the crises, and therefore warned against full development of the productive forces. The other party proved that crises were impossible and advocated an unlimited development of accumulation. Though all argued from wrong premises, each was logically consistent. v. Kirchmann and Rodbertus both started, were bound to start, from the fact of crises. Here the problem of enlarged reproduction of aggregate capital, the problem of accumulation, was completely identified with the problem of crises and side-tracked in an attempt to find a remedy for the crises, although the historical experience of fifty years had shown all too clearly that crises, as witnessed by their periodical recurrence, are a necessary phase in capitalist reproduction. One side now sees the remedy in the complete consumption of the surplus value by the capitalist, that is to say in refraining from accumulation, the other in stabilisation of the rate of surplus value by legislative measures which comes to the same thing, i.e. renouncing accumulation altogether. This special fad of Rodbertus' sprang from his fervent and explicit belief in an unlimited capitalist expansion of the productive forces and of wealth, without accumulation of capital. At a time when capitalist production was developed to a degree which was soon to enable Marx to make his fundamental analysis, the last attempt of bourgeois economics to cope with the problem of reproduction degenerated into absurd and puerile Utopianism. FOOTNOTES: [257] _Schriften_, vol. iii, p. 176. [258] Op. cit., vol. i, pp. 53, 57. [259] _Schriften_, vol. i, p. 206. [260] Ibid., vol. i, p. 19. [261] Op. cit., vol. ii, p. 110. [262] Ibid., p. 144. [263] _Schriften_, vol. ii, p. 146. [264] Ibid., p. 155. [265] Ibid., p. 223. [266] _Schriften_, vol. ii, p. 226. [267] Ibid., p. 156. [268] _Schriften_, vol. i, p. 40. [269] Op. cit., vol. ii, p. 25. [270] _Schriften_, vol. i, p. 250. [271] Ibid., p. 295. Rodbertus reiterates during a lifetime the ideas he had evolved as early as 1842 in his _Towards the Understanding of Our Politico-Economic Conditions_. 'Under present conditions, we have, however, gone so far as to consider not only the wage of labour part of the costs of the goods, but also rents and capital profits. We must therefore refute this opinion in detail. It has a twofold foundation: (_a_) a wrong conception of capital which counts the wage of labour as part of the capital just like materials and tools, while it is on the same level as rent and profit; (_b_) a confusion of the costs of the commodity and the advances of the entrepreneur or the costs of the enterprise' (_Towards the Understanding of Our Politico-Economic Conditions_, Neubrandenburg & Friedland, G. Barnovitz, 1842, p. 14). [272] _Schriften_, vol. i, p. 304. Just so already in _Towards the Understanding of Our Politico-Economic Conditions_, 'We must distinguish between capital in its narrow or proper sense, and the fund of enterprise, or capital in a wider sense. The former comprises the actual reserves in tools and materials, the latter the fund necessary for running an enterprise under present conditions of division of labour. The former is capital absolutely necessary to production, and the latter achieves such relative necessity only by force of present conditions. Hence only the former is capital in the strict and proper meaning of the term; this alone is completely congruent with the concept of national capital' (ibid., pp. 23-4). [273] _Schriften_, vol. i, p. 292. [274] Op. cit., vol. ii, p. 136. [275] Ibid., p. 225. [276] A memorial of the worst kind, by the way, was that of the editors who published his works after his death. These learned gentlemen, Messrs. Wagner, Kozak, Moritz Wuertz & Co., quarrelled in the prefaces to his posthumous writings like a rough crowd of ill-mannered servants in an antechamber, fighting out publicly their petty personal feuds and jealousies, and slanging one another. They did not even bother in common decency to establish the dates for the individual manuscripts they had found. To take an instance, it needed Mehring to observe that the oldest manuscript of Rodbertus that had been found was not published in 1837, as laid down autocratically by Prof. Wagner, but in 1839 at the earliest, since it refers in its opening paragraphs to historical events connected with the Chartist movement belonging, as a professor of economics really ought to know, in the year 1839. In Professor Wagner's introduction to Rodbertus we are constantly bored by his pomposity, his harping on the 'excessive demands on his time'; in any case Wagner addresses himself solely to his learned colleagues and talks above the heads of the common crowd; he passes over in silence, as befits a great man, Mehring's elegant correction before the assembled experts. Just as silently, Professor Diehl altered the date of 1837 to 1839 in the _Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften_, without a word to say when and by whom he had been thus enlightened. But the final touch is provided by the 'popular', 'new and inexpensive' edition of Puttkamer and Muehlbrecht (1899). Some of the quarrelling editors collaborated on it but still continue their disputes in the introductions. Wagner's former vol. ii has become vol. i in this edition, yet Wagner still refers to vol. ii in the introduction to vol. i. The first _Letter on Social Problems_ is placed in vol. iii, the second and third in vol. ii and the fourth in vol. i. The order of the _Letters on Social Problems_, of the _Controversies_, of the parts of _Towards the Understanding_ ..., chronological and logical sequence, the dates of publication and of writing are hopelessly mixed up, making a chaos more impenetrable than the stratification of the soil after repeated volcanic eruptions. 1837 is maintained as the date of Rodbertus' earliest MS., probably out of respect to Professor Wagner--and this in 1899, although Mehring's rectification had been made in 1894. If we compare this with Marx's literary heritage in Mehring's and Kautsky's edition, published by Dietz, we see how such apparently superficial matters but reflect deeper connections: one kind of care for the scientific heritage of the authority of the class-conscious proletariat, and quite another in which the official experts of the bourgeoisie squander the heritage of a man who, in their own self-interested legends, had been a first-rate genius. _Suum cuique_--had this not been the motto of Rodbertus? _SECTION TWO_ HISTORICAL EXPOSITION OF THE PROBLEM THIRD ROUND STRUVE-BULGAKOV-TUGAN BARANOVSKI _v._ VORONTSOV-NIKOLAYON _CHAPTER XVIII_ A NEW VERSION OF THE PROBLEM The third controversy about capitalist accumulation takes place in an historical setting quite different from that of the two earlier ones. The time now is the period from the beginning of the eighties to the middle of the nineties, the scene Russia. In Western Europe, capitalism had already attained maturity. The rose-coloured classical view of Smith and Ricardo in a budding bourgeois economy had long since vanished ... the self-interested optimism of the vulgarian Manchester doctrine of harmony had been silenced by the devastating impact of the world collapse in the seventies, and under the heavy blows of a violent class struggle that blazed up in all capitalist countries after the sixties. Even that harmony patched up with social reformism which had its hey-day after the early eighties, especially in Germany, soon ended in a hangover. The trial of twelve years' special legislation against the Social Democratic Party had brought about bitter disillusionment, and ultimately destroyed all the veils of harmony, revealing the cruel capitalist contradictions in their naked reality. Since then, optimism had only been possible in the camp of the rising working class and its theorists. This was admittedly not optimism about a natural, or artificially established equilibrium of capitalist economy, or about the eternal duration of capitalism, but rather the conviction that capitalism, by mightily furthering the development of the productive forces, and in virtue of its inherent contradictions, would provide an excellent soil for the historical progress of society towards new economic and social forms. The negative, depressing tendency of the first stage of capitalism, at one time realised by Sismondi alone and still observed by Rodbertus as late as the forties and fifties, is compensated by a tendency towards elation: the hopeful and victorious striving of the workers for ascendancy in their trade-union movement and by political action. Such was the setting in Western Europe. In the Russia of that time, however, the picture was different indeed. Here, the seventies and eighties represent in every respect a period of transition, a period of internal crises with all its agonies. Big industry only now staged its real entry, fostered by the period of high protective tariffs. In particular, the introduction of a tariff on gold at the Western frontier in 1877 was a special landmark in the absolutist government's new policy of forcing the growth of capitalism. 'Primitive accumulation' of capital flourished splendidly in Russia, encouraged by all kinds of state subsidies, guarantees, premiums and government orders. It earned profits which would already seem legendary to the West. Yet the picture of internal conditions in contemporary Russia was anything but attractive and auspicious. On the plains, the decline and disintegration of rural economy under the pressure of exploitation by the Exchequer and the monetary system caused terrible conditions, periodical famines and peasant risings. In the towns, again, the factory proletariat had not yet been consolidated, either socially or mentally, into a modern working class. For the greater part, it was still closely connected with agriculture, and remained semi-rural, particularly in the large industrial parts of Moscow-Vladimir, the most important centre of the Russian textile industry. Accordingly, primitive forms of exploitation were countered by primitive measures of defence. Not until the early eighties did the spontaneous factory revolts in the Moscow district with their smashing up of machines provide the impetus for the first rudiments of factory legislation in the Czarist Empire. If the economic aspect of Russian public life showed at every step the harsh discords of a period of transition, there was a corresponding crisis in intellectual life. 'Populism', the indigenous brand of Russian socialism, theoretically grounded in the peculiarities of the Russian agrarian constitution, was politically finished with the failure of the terrorist party of 'Narodnaya Volya', its extreme revolutionary exponent. The first writings of George Plekhanov, on the other hand, which were to pave the way in Russia for Marxist trains of thought, had only been published in 1883 and 1885, and for about a decade they seemed to have little influence. During the eighties and up to the nineties the mental life of the Russian, and in particular of the socialist intelligentsia with their tendency towards opposition, was dominated by a peculiar mixture of 'indigenous' 'populist' remnants and random elements of theoretical Marxism. The most remarkable feature of this mixture was scepticism as to the possibility of capitalist development in Russia. At an early date, the Russian intelligentsia had been preoccupied with the question whether Russia should follow the example of Western Europe and embark on capitalist development. At first, they noticed only the bleak aspects of capitalism in the West, its disintegrating effects upon the traditional patriarchal forms of production and upon the prosperity and assured livelihood for the broad masses of the population. As against that, the Russian rural communal ownership in land, the famous _obshchina_, seemed to offer a short-cut to the blessed land of socialism, a lead direct to a higher social development of Russia, without the capitalist phase and its attendant misery as experienced in Western Europe. Would it be right to fling away this fortunate and exceptional position, this unique historical opportunity, and forcibly transplant capitalist production to Russia with the help of the state? Would it be right to destroy the system of rural holdings and production, and open the doors wide to proletarisation, to misery and insecurity of existence for the toiling masses? The Russian intelligentsia was preoccupied with this fundamental problem ever since the Agrarian Reform, and even earlier, since Hertzen, and especially since Chernishevski. This was the wholly unique world view of 'populism' in a nutshell. An enormous literature was created in Russia by this intellectual tendency ranging from the avowedly reactionary doctrines of the Slavophiles to the revolutionary theory of the terrorist party. On the one hand, it encouraged the collection of vast material by separate inquiries into the economic forms of Russian life, into 'national production' and its singular aspects, into agriculture as practised by the peasant communes, into the domestic industries of the peasants, the _artel_, and also into the mental life of the peasants, the sects and similar phenomena. On the other hand, a peculiar type of _belles lettres_ sprang up as the artistic reflection of the contradictory social conditions, the struggle between old and new ways which beset the mind at every step with difficult problems. Finally, in the seventies and eighties, a peculiarly stuffy philosophy of history sprang up from the same root and found its champions in Peter Lavrov, Nicolai Mikhailovski, Professor Kareyev and V. Vorontsov. It was the 'subjective method in sociology' which declared 'critical thought' to be the decisive factor in social development, or which, more precisely, sought to make a down-at-heel intelligentsia the agent of historical progress. Here we are interested only in one aspect of this wide field with its many ramifications, _viz_: the struggle of opinions regarding the chances of capitalist development, and even then only in so far as these were based upon general reflections on the social conditions of the capitalist mode of production, since these latter were also to play a big part in the Russian controversial literature of the eighties and nineties. The point at issue was to begin with Russian capitalism and its prospects, but this, of course, led further afield to the whole problem of capitalist development. The example and the experiences of the West were adduced as vital evidence in this debate. One fact was of decisive importance for the theoretical content of the discussion that followed: not only was Marx's analysis of capitalist production as laid down in the first volume of _Capital_ already common property of educated Russia, but the second volume, too, with its analysis of the reproduction of capital as a whole had already been published in 1885. This gave a fundamentally new twist to the discussion. No more did the problem of crises obscure the real crux of the problem: for the first time, the argument centred purely in the reproduction of capital as a whole, in accumulation. Nor was the analysis bogged any longer by an aimless fumbling for the concepts of income and of individual and aggregate capital. Marx's diagram of social reproduction had provided a firm foothold. Finally, the issue was no longer between _laissez-faire_ and social reform, but between two varieties of socialism. The petty-bourgeois and somewhat muddled 'populist' brand of Russian socialists stood for scepticism regarding the possibility of capitalist development, much in the spirit of Sismondi and, in part, of Rodbertus, though they themselves frequently cited Marx as their authority. Optimism, on the other hand, was represented by the Marxist school in Russia. Thus the setting of the stage had been shifted completely. One of the two champions of the 'populist' movement, Vorontsov, known in Russia mainly under the _nom de plume_ V. V., (his initials), was an odd customer. His economics were completely muddled, and as an expert on theory he cannot be taken seriously at all. The other, Nikolayon (Danielson), however, was a man of wide education, and thoroughly conversant with Marxism. He had edited the Russian translation of the first volume of _Capital_ and was a personal friend of Marx and Engels, with both of whom he kept up a lively correspondence (published in the Russian language in 1908). Nevertheless it was Vorontsov who influenced public opinion among the Russian intelligentsia in the eighties, and Marxists in Russia had to fight him above all. As for our problem: the general prospects of capitalist development, a new generation of Russian Marxists, who had learned from the historical experience and knowledge of Western Europe, joined forces with George Plekhanov in opposition to the above-mentioned two representatives of scepticism in the nineties. They were amongst others Professor Kablukov, Professor Manuilov, Professor Issayev, Professor Skvortsov, Vladimir Ilyin, Peter v. Struve, Bulgakov, and Professor Tugan Baranovski. In the further course of our investigation we shall, however, confine ourselves to the last three of these, since every one of them furnished a more or less finished critique of this theory on the point with which we are here concerned. This battle of wits, brilliant in parts, which kept the socialist intelligentsia spellbound in the nineties and was only brought to an end by the walkover of the Marxist school, officially inaugurated the infiltration into Russian thought of Marxism as an economico-historical theory. 'Legalist' Marxism at that time publicly took possession of the Universities, the Reviews and the economic book market in Russia--with all the disadvantages of such a position. Ten years later, when the revolutionary risings of the proletariat demonstrated in the streets the darker side of this optimism about capitalist development, none of this Pleïad of Marxist optimists, with but a single exception, was to be found in the camp of the proletariat. _CHAPTER XIX_ VORONTSOV AND HIS 'SURPLUS' The representatives of Russian 'populism' were convinced that capitalism had no future in Russia, and this conviction brought them to the problem of capitalist reproduction. V. V. laid down his theories on this point in a series of articles in the review _Patriotic Memoirs_ and in other periodicals which were collected and published in 1882 under the title _The Destiny of Capitalism in Russia_. He further dealt with the problem in 'The Commodity Surplus in the Supply of the Market',[277] 'Militarism and Capitalism',[278] _Our Trends_,[279] and finally in _Outlines of Economic Theory_.[280] It is not easy to determine Vorontsov's attitude towards capitalist development in Russia. He sided neither with the purely slavophil theory which deduced the perversity and perniciousness of capitalism for Russia from the 'peculiarities' of the Russian economic structure and a specifically Russian 'national character', nor with the Marxists who saw in capitalist development an unavoidable historical stage which is needed to clear the way towards social progress for Russian society, too. Vorontsov for his part simply asserts that denunciation and acclamation of capitalism are equally futile because, having no roots in Russia, capitalism is just impossible there and can have no future. The essential conditions of capitalist development are lacking in Russia, and love's labour's lost if the state tries to promote it artificially--one might as well spare these efforts together with the heavy sacrifices they entail. But if we look into the matter more closely, Vorontsov's thesis is not nearly so uncompromising. For if we pay attention to the fact that capitalism does not mean only the accumulation of capital wealth but also that the small producer is reduced to the proletarian level, that the labourer's livelihood is not assured and that there are periodical crises, then Vorontsov would by no means deny that all these phenomena exist in Russia. On the contrary, he explicitly says in his preface to _The Destiny of Capitalism in Russia_: 'Whilst I dispute the possibility of capitalism as a form of production in Russia, I do not intend to commit myself in any way as to its future as a form or degree of exploiting the national resources.' Vorontsov consequently is of the opinion that capitalism in Russia merely cannot attain the same degree of maturity as in the West, whereas the severance of the immediate producer from the means of production might well be expected under Russian conditions. Vorontsov goes even further: he does not dispute at all that a development of the capitalist mode of production is quite possible in various branches of production, and even allows for capitalist exports from Russia to foreign markets. Indeed he says in his essay on 'The Commodity Surplus in the Supply of the Market' that 'in several branches of industry, capitalist production develops very quickly'[281] [in the Russian meaning of the term, of course--R. L.]. 'It is most probable that Russia, just like any other country, enjoys certain natural advantages which enable her to act as a supplier of certain kinds of commodities on foreign markets. It is extremely possible that capital can profit by this fact and lay hands upon the branches of production concerned--that is to say the (inter)national division of labour will make it easy for our capitalists to gain a foothold in certain branches. This, however, is not the point. We do not speak of a merely incidental participation of capital in the industrial organisation of the country, but ask whether it is likely that the entire production of Russia can be put on a capitalist basis.'[282] Put in this form, Vorontsov's scepticism looks quite different from what might have been expected at first. He doubts whether the capitalist mode of production could ever gain possession of the entire production in Russia; but then, capitalism has not so far accomplished this feat in any country of the world, not even in England. Such a brand of scepticism as to the future of capitalism appears at a glance quite international in outlook. And indeed, Vorontsov's theory here amounts to a quite general reflection on the nature and the essential conditions of capitalism; it is based upon a general theoretical approach to the reproductive process of social capital as a whole. Vorontsov gives the following very clear formulation of the specific relations between the capitalist mode of production and the problem of markets: 'The (inter)national division of labour, the distribution of all branches of industry among the countries taking part in international commerce, is quite independent of capitalism. 'The market which thus comes into being, the demand for the products of different countries resulting from such a division of labour among the nations, has intrinsically nothing in common with the market required by the capitalist mode of production.... The products of capitalist industry come on the market for another purpose; the question whether all the needs of the country are satisfied is irrelevant to them, and the entrepreneur does not necessarily receive in their stead another material product which may be consumed. Their main purpose is to realise the surplus value they contain. What, then, is this surplus value that it should interest the capitalist for its own sake? From our point of view, it is the surplus of production over consumption inside the country. Every worker produces more than he himself can consume, and all these surplus items accumulate in a few hands; their owners themselves consume them, exchanging them for the purpose against the most variegated kinds of necessities and luxuries. Yet eat, drink and dance as much as they like--they will not be able to squander the whole of the surplus value: a considerable remnant will be left over, of which they have to dispose somehow even though they cannot exchange it for other products. They must convert it into money, since it would otherwise just go bad. Since there is no one inside the country on whom the capitalists could foist this remnant, it must be exported abroad, and that is why foreign markets are indispensable to countries embarking on the capitalist venture.'[283] The above is a literal translation, showing all the peculiarities of Vorontsov's diction, so that the reader may have a taste of this brilliant Russian theorist with whom one can spend moments of sheer delight. Later, in 1895, Vorontsov summarised the same views in his book _Outlines of Economic Theory_ now claiming our attention. Here he takes a stand against the views of Say and Ricardo, and in particular also against John Stuart Mill who denied the possibility of general over-production. In the course of his argument he discovers something no one had known before: he has laid bare the source of all errors the classical school made about the problem of crises. This mistake lies in a fallacious theory of the costs of production to which bourgeois economists are addicted. No doubt, from the aspect of the costs of production (which according to Vorontsov's equally unheard-of assumption do not comprise profits), both profit and crises are unthinkable and inexplicable. But we can only appreciate this original thought to the full in the author's own words: 'According to the doctrine of bourgeois economists, the value of a product is determined by the labour employed in its manufacture. Yet bourgeois economists, once they have given this determination of value, immediately forget it and base their subsequent explanation of the exchange phenomena upon a different theory which substitutes "costs of production" for labour. Thus two products are mutually exchanged in such quantities that the costs of production are equal on both sides. Such a view of the process of exchange indeed leaves no room for a commodity surplus inside the country. Any product of a worker's annual labour must, from this point of view, represent a certain quantity of material of which it is made, of tools which have been used in its manufacture, and of the products which served to maintain the workers during the period of production. It [presumably the product--R. L.] appears on the market in order to change its use-form, to reconvert itself into objects, into products for the workers and the value necessary for renewing the tools. As soon as it is split up into its component parts, the process of reassembling, the productive process, will begin, in the course of which all the values listed above will be consumed. In their stead, a new product will come into being which is the connecting link between past and future consumption.' From this perfectly unique attempt to demonstrate social reproduction as a continuous process in the light of the costs of production, the following conclusion is promptly drawn: Considering thus the aggregate bulk of a country's products, we shall find no commodity surplus at all over and above the demand of society; an unmarketable surplus is therefore impossible from the point of view of a bourgeois economic theory of value.' Yet, after having eliminated capitalist profit from the costs of production by an extremely autocratic manhandling of the bourgeois theory of value, Vorontsov immediately presents this deficiency as a great discovery: 'The above analysis, however, reveals yet another feature in the theory of value prevalent of late: it becomes evident that this theory leaves no room for capitalist profits.' The argument that follows is striking in its brevity and simplicity: 'Indeed, if I exchange my own product, representing a cost of production of 5 roubles, for another product of equal value, I receive only so much as will be sufficient to cover my expense, but for my abstinence [literally so--R. L.] I shall get nothing.' And now Vorontsov really comes to grips with the root of the problem: 'Thus it is proved on a strictly logical development of the ideas held by bourgeois economists that the destiny of the commodity surplus on the market and that of capitalist profit is identical. This circumstance justifies the conclusion that both phenomena are interdependent, that the existence of one is a condition of the other, and indeed, so long as there is no profit, there is no commodity surplus.... It is different if the profit comes into being inside the country. Such profit is not originally related to production; it is a phenomenon which is connected with the latter not by technical and natural conditions but by an extraneous social form. Production requires for its continuation ... only material, tools, and means of subsistence for the workers, therefore as such it consumes only the corresponding part of the products: other consumers must be found for the surplus which makes up the profit, and for which there is no room in the permanent structure of industrial life, in production--consumers, namely, who are not organically connected with production, who are fortuitous to a certain extent. The necessary number of such consumers may or may not be forthcoming, and in the latter case there will be a commodity surplus on the market.'[284] Well content with the 'simple' enlightenment, by which he has turned the surplus product into an invention of capital and the capitalist into a 'fortuitous' consumer who is 'not organically connected with capitalist production', Vorontsov now turns to the crises. On the basis of Marx's 'logical' theory of the value of labour which he claims to 'employ' in his later works, he expounds them as an immediate result of the surplus value, as follows: 'If the working part of the population consumes what enters into the costs of production in form of the wages for labour, the capitalists themselves must destroy [literally so--R. L.] the surplus value, excepting that part of it which the market requires for expansion. If the capitalists are in a position to do so and act accordingly, there can be no commodity surplus; if not, over-production, industrial crises, displacement of the workers from the factories and other evils will result.' According to Vorontsov, however, it is '_the inadequate elasticity of the human organism_ which cannot enlarge its capacity to consume as rapidly as the surplus value is increasing', which is in the end responsible for these evils. He repeatedly expresses this ingenious thought as follows: 'The Achilles heel of capitalist industrial organisation thus lies in the incapacity of the entrepreneurs to consume the whole of their income.' Having thus 'employed' Marx's 'logical' version of Ricardo's theory of value, Vorontsov arrives at Sismondi's theory of crises which he adopts in as crude and simplified a form as possible. He believes, of course, that he is adopting the views of Rodbertus in reproducing those of Sismondi. 'The inductive method of research', he declares triumphantly, 'has resulted in the very same theory of crises and of pauperism which had been objectively stated by Rodbertus.'[285] It is not quite clear what Vorontsov means by an 'inductive method of research' which he contrasts with the objective method--since all things are possible to Vorontsov, he may conceivably mean Marx's theory. Yet Rodbertus, too, was not to emerge unimproved from the hands of the original Russian thinker. Vorontsov corrects Rodbertus' theory merely in so far as he eliminates the stabilisation of the wage rate in accordance with the value of the aggregate product which, to Rodbertus, had been the pivot of his whole system. According to Vorontsov, this measure against crises is a mere palliative, since 'the immediate cause of the above phenomena (over-production, unemployment, etc.) is not that the working classes receive too small a share of the national income, but that the capitalist class cannot possibly consume all the products which every year fall to their share.'[286] Yet, as soon as he has refuted Rodbertus' reform of the distribution of incomes, Vorontsov, with that 'strictly logical' consistency so peculiar to him, ultimately arrives at the following forecast for the future destiny of capitalism: 'If industrial organisation which prevails in W. Europe is to prosper and flourish further still, it can only do so provided that some means will be found to destroy [_verbatim_--R. L.] that portion of the national income which falls to the capitalists' share over and above their capacity to consume. The simplest solution of this problem will be an appropriate change in the distribution of the aggregate income among those who take part in production. If the entrepreneurs would retain for themselves only so much of all increase of the national income as they need to satisfy all their whims and fancies, leaving the remainder to the working class, the mass of the people, then the régime of capitalism would be assured for a long time to come.'[287] The hash of Ricardo, Marx, Sismondi and Rodbertus thus is topped with the discovery that capitalist production could be radically cured of over-production, that it could 'prosper and flourish' in all eternity, if the capitalists would refrain from capitalising their surplus value and would make a free gift to the working class of the corresponding part of the surplus value. Meanwhile the capitalists, until they have become sensible enough to accept Vorontsov's good advice, employ other means for the annual destruction of a part of their surplus value. Modern militarism, amongst others, is one of these appropriate measures--and this precisely to the extent to which the bills of militarism are footed by the capitalists' income--for Vorontsov can be counted upon to turn things upside down--and not by the working masses. A primary remedy for capitalism, however, is foreign trade which again is a sore spot in Russian capitalism. As the last to arrive at the table of the world market, Russian capitalism fares worst in the competition with older capitalist countries and thus lacks both prospects as to foreign markets and the most vital conditions of existence. Russia remains the 'country of peasants', a country of 'populist' production. 'If all this is correct,' Vorontsov concludes his essay on 'The Commodity Surplus in the Supply of the Market', 'then capitalism can play only a limited part in Russia. It must resign from the direction of agriculture, and its development in the industrial sphere must not inflict too many injuries upon the domestic industries which under our economic conditions are indispensable to the welfare of the majority of the population. If the reader would comment that capitalism might not accept such a compromise, our answer will be: so much the worse for capitalism.' Thus Vorontsov ultimately washes his hands of the whole thing, declining for his part all responsibility for the further fortunes of economic development in Russia. FOOTNOTES: [277] An essay in _Patriotic Memoirs_, May 1883. [278] An essay in the review _Russian Thought_, September 1889. [279] A book published in 1893. [280] A book published in 1895. [281] _Patriotic Memoirs_, vol. v: 'A Contemporary Survey', p. 4. [282] Ibid., p. 10. [283] _Patriotic Memoirs_, vol. v: 'A Contemporary Survey', p. 14. [284] _Outlines of Economic Theory_ (St. Petersburg, 1895), pp. 157 ff. [285] 'Militarism and Capitalism' in _Russian Thought_ (1889), vol. ix, p. 78. [286] 'Militarism and Capitalism' in _Russian Thought_ (1889), vol. ix, p. 80. [287] Ibid., p. 83. Cf. _Outlines_, p. 196. _CHAPTER XX_ NIKOLAYON The second theorist of populist criticism, Nikolayon, brings quite a different economic training and knowledge to his work. One of the best-informed experts on Russian economic relations, he had already in 1880 attracted attention by his treatise on the capitalisation of agricultural incomes, which was published in the review _Slovo_. Thirteen years later, spurred on by the great Russian famine of 1891, he pursued his inquiries further in a book entitled _Outlines of Our Social Economy Since the Reform_. Here he gives a detailed exposition, fully documented by facts and figures, of how capitalism developed in Russia, and on this evidence proceeds to show that this development is the source of all evil, and so of the famine, also, so far as the Russian people are concerned. His views about the destiny of capitalism in Russia are grounded in a definite theory about the conditions of the development of capitalist production in general, and it is this with which we must now deal. Since the market is of decisive importance for the capitalist mode of economy, every capitalist nation tries to make sure of as large a market as possible. In the first place, of course, it relies on its home market. But at a certain level of development, the home market is no longer sufficient for a capitalist nation, and this for the following reasons: all that social labour newly produces in one year can be divided into two parts--the share received by the workers in the form of wages, and that which is appropriated by the capitalists. Of the first part, only so many means of subsistence as correspond, in value, to the sum total of the wages paid within the country can be withdrawn from circulation. Yet capitalist economy decidedly tends to depress this part more and more. Its methods are a longer working day, stepping up the intensity of labour, and increasing output by technical improvements which enable the substitution of female and juvenile for male labour and in some cases displace adult labour altogether. Even if the wages of the workers still employed are rising, such increase can never equal the savings of the capitalists resulting from these changes. The result of all this is that the working class must play an ever smaller part as buyers on the home market. At the same time, there is a further change: capitalist production gradually takes over even the trades which provided additional employment to an agricultural people; thus it deprives the peasants of their resources by degrees, so that the rural population can afford to buy fewer and fewer industrial products. This is a further reason for the continual contraction of the home market. As for the capitalist class, we see that this latter is also unable to realise the entire newly created product, though for the opposite reason. However large the requirements of this class, the capitalists will not be able to consume the entire surplus product in person. First, because part of it is needed to enlarge production, for technical improvements which, to the individual entrepreneur, will be a necessary condition of existence in a competitive society. Secondly, because an expanding capitalist production implies an expansion in those branches of industry which produce means of production (e.g. the mining industry, the machine industry and so forth) and whose products from the very beginning take a use-form that is incapable of personal consumption and can only function as capital. Thirdly and lastly, the higher labour productivity and capital savings that can be achieved by mass production of cheap commodities increasingly impel society towards mass production of commodities which cannot all be consumed by a mere handful of capitalists. Although one capitalist can realise his surplus value in the surplus product of another capitalist and _vice versa_, this is only true for products of a certain branch, for consumer goods. However, the incentive of capitalist production is not the satisfaction of personal wants, and this is further shown by the progressive decline in the production of consumer as compared to that of producer goods. 'Thus we see that the aggregate product of a capitalist nation must greatly exceed the requirements of the whole industrial population employed, in the same way as each individual factory produces vastly in excess of the requirements of both its workers and the entrepreneur, and this is entirely due to the fact that the nation is a capitalist nation, because the distribution of resources within the society does not aim to satisfy the real wants of the population but only the effective demand. Just as an individual factory-owner could not maintain himself as a capitalist even for a day if his market were confined to the requirements of his workers and his own, so the home market of a developed capitalist nation must also be insufficient.' At a certain level, capitalist development thus has the tendency to impede its own progress. These obstacles are ultimately due to the fact that progressive labour productivity, involving the severance of the immediate producer from the means of production, does not benefit society as a whole, but only the individual entrepreneur; and the mass of labour power and men-hours which has been 'set free' by this process becomes redundant and thus is not only lost to society but will become a burden to it. The real wants of the masses can only be satisfied more fully in so far as there can be an ascendancy of a 'populist' mode of production based upon the union between the producer and his means of production. It is the aim of capitalism, however, to gain possession of just these spheres of production, and to destroy in the process the main factor which makes for its own prosperity. The periodical famines in India, for instance, recurring at intervals of ten or eleven years, were thus among the causes of periodical industrial crises in England. Any nation that sets out on capitalist development will sooner or later come up against these contradictions inherent in this mode of production. And the later a nation embarks on the capitalist venture, the more strongly will these contradictions make themselves felt, since, once the home market has been saturated, no substitute can be found, the outside market having already been conquered by the older competing countries. The upshot of it all is that the limits of capitalism are set by the increasing poverty born of its own development, by the increasing number of redundant workers deficient in all purchasing power. Increasing labour productivity which can rapidly satisfy every effective demand of society corresponds to the increasing incapacity of ever broader masses of the population to satisfy their most vital needs; on the one hand, a glut of goods that cannot be sold--and on the other, large masses who lack the bare necessities. These are Nikolayon's general views.[288] He knows his Marx, we see, and has turned the two first volumes of _Capital_ to excellent use. And still, the whole trend of his argument is genuinely Sismondian. It is capitalism itself which brings about a shrinking home market since it impoverishes the masses; every calamity of modern society is due to the destruction of the 'populist' mode of production, that is to say the destruction of small-scale enterprise. That is his main theme. More openly even than Sismondi, Nikolayon sets the tenor of his critique by an apotheosis of small-scale enterprise, this sole approach to grace.[289] The aggregate capitalist product cannot, in the end, be realised within the society, this can only be done with recourse to outside markets. Nikolayon here comes to the same conclusion as Vorontsov, in spite of a quite different theoretical point of departure. Applied to Russia, it is the economic scientific ground for a sceptical attitude towards capitalism. Capitalist development in Russia has been without access to foreign markets from the first, it could only show its worst aspects--it has impoverished the masses of the people. In consequence, it was a 'fatal mistake' to promote capitalism in Russia. On this point, Nikolayon fulminates like a prophet of the Old Testament: 'Instead of keeping to the tradition of centuries, instead of developing our old inherited principle of a close connection between the immediate producer and his means of production, instead of usefully applying the scientific achievements of W. Europe to their forms of production based on the peasants' ownership of their means of production, instead of increasing their productivity by concentrating the means of production in their hands, instead of benefiting, not by the forms of production in W. Europe, but by its organisation, its powerful co-operation, its division of labour, its machinery, etc., etc.--instead of developing the fundamental principle of a landowning peasantry and applying it to the cultivation of the land by the peasants, instead of making science and its application widely accessible to the peasants--instead of all this, we have taken the opposite turning. We have failed to prevent the development of capitalist forms of production, although they are based on the expropriation of the peasants; on the contrary, we have promoted with all our might the upsetting of our entire economic life which resulted in the famine of 1891.' Though the evil is much advanced, it is not too late even now to retrace our steps. On the contrary, a complete reform of economic policy is just as urgently needed for Russia in view of the threatening proletarisation and collapse, as Alexander's reforms after the Crimean war were necessary in their time. Now a social reform as advocated by Nikolayon is completely Utopian. His attitude exhibits an even more blatant petty-bourgeois and reactionary bias than Sismondi's ever did, considering that the Russian 'populist' writes after a lapse of seventy years. For in his opinion, the old _obshchina_, the rural community founded on the communal ownership of the soil, is the raft to deliver Russia from the flood of capitalism. On it, the discoveries of modern big industry and scientific technique are to be grafted by measures which remain his own secret--so that it can serve as the basis of a 'socialised' higher form of production. Russia can choose no other alternative: either she turns her back upon capitalist development, or she must resign herself to death and decay.[290] After a crushing criticism of capitalism Nikolayon thus ends up with the same old 'populist' panacea which had as early as the fifties, though at that time with greater justification, been hailed as the 'peculiarly Russian' guarantee of a higher social development, although its reactionary character as a lifeless relic of ancient institutions had been exposed in Engels' _Fluechtlingsliteratur_ in _Volksstaat_ (1875). Engels wrote at the time: 'A further development of Russia on bourgeois lines would gradually destroy communal property there too, quite apart from any interference of the Russian government "with the knout and with bayonets" (as the revolutionary populists imagined). Under the pressure of taxes and usury, communal landownership is no longer a privilege, it becomes an irksome chain. The peasants frequently run away from it, either with or without their families, to seek their living as itinerant labourers, and leave the land behind. We see that communal ownership in Russia has long since passed its flower and there is every indication that its decay is approaching.' With these words, Engels hits right on the target of the _obshchina_ problem--eighteen years before the publication of Nikolayon's principal work. If Nikolayon subsequently with renewed courage again conjured up the ghost of the _obshchina_, it was a bad historical anachronism inasmuch as about a decade later the _obshchina_ was given an official burial by the state. The absolutist government which had for financial reasons tried during half a century artificially to keep the machinery of the rural community going was compelled to give up this thankless task on its own accord. The agrarian problem soon made it clear how far the old 'populist' delusion was lagging behind the actual course of economic events, and conversely, how powerfully capitalist development in Russia, mourned and cursed as still-born, could demonstrate with lightning and thunder its capacity to live and to multiply. Once again, and for the last time, this turn of events demonstrates in quite a different historical setting how a social critique of capitalism, which begins by doubting its capacity for development, must by a deadly logic lead to a reactionary Utopianism--both in the France of 1819 and in the Russia of 1893.[291] FOOTNOTES: [288] Cf. _Outlines of Our Social Economy_, in particular pp. 202-5, 338-41. [289] Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin] has given detailed proof of the striking similarity between the position of the Russian 'populists' and the views of Sismondi in his essay _On the Characteristics of Economic Romanticism_ (1897). [290] _Outlines of Our Social Economy_, p. 322. Friedrich Engels appraises the Russian situation differently. He repeatedly tries to convince Nikolayon that Russia cannot avoid a high industrial development, and that her sufferings are nothing but the typical capitalist contradictions. Thus he writes on September 22, 1892: 'I therefore hold that at present industrial production necessarily implies big industry, making use of steam power, electricity, mechanical looms and frames, and lastly the manufacture of the machines themselves by mechanical means. From the moment that railways are introduced in Russia, recourse to all these extremely modern means of production becomes inevitable. It is necessary that you should be able to mend and repair your engines, coaches, railways and the like, but to do this cheaply, you must also be in a position to make at home the things needing repair. As soon as the technique of war has become a branch of industry (armour-plated cruisers, modern artillery, machine guns, steel bullets, smokeless gun powder, etc.) a big industry that is indispensable for the production of such items has become a political necessity for you as well. All these items cannot be made without a highly developed metal industry which on its part cannot develop unless there is a corresponding development of all other branches of production, textiles in particular' (Marx-Engels to Nikolayon, St. Petersburg, 1908, p. 75). And further in the same letter: 'So long as Russian industry depends on the home market alone, it can only satisfy the internal demand. The latter, however, can grow but slowly, and it seems to me that under present conditions of life in Russia it is even bound to decrease, since it is one of the unavoidable consequences of high industrial development that it destroys its own home market by the same process which served to create it: by destroying the bases of the peasants' domestic industry. Yet peasants cannot live without such a domestic industry. They are ruined as peasants, their purchasing power is reduced to a minimum, and unless they grow new roots in new conditions of life, unless they become proletarians, they will only represent a very small market for the newly arising plants and factories. 'Capitalist production is a phase of economic transition, full of inherent contradictions which only develop and become visible to the extent that capitalist production develops. The tendency of simultaneously creating and destroying a market is just one of these contradictions. Another is the hopeless situation that will ensue, all the sooner in a country like Russia which lacks external markets than in countries more or less fit to compete in the open world market. These latter can find some means of relief in this seemingly hopeless situation by heroic measures of commercial policy, that is to say by forcibly opening up new markets. China is the most recent market to be opened up for English commerce, and it proved adequate for a temporary revival of prosperity. That is why English capital is so insistent on railroad building in China. Yet railways in China mean the destruction of the entire foundation of China's small rural enterprises and her domestic industry. In this case, there is not even a native big industry developed to compensate for this evil to some extent, and hundreds of millions will consequently find it impossible to make a living at all. The result will be mass emigration, such as the world has never yet seen, and America, Asia and Europe will be flooded with the detested Chinese. This new competitor on the labour market will compete with American, Australian and European labour at the level of what the Chinese consider a satisfactory standard of living, which is well known to be the lowest in the whole world. Well then, if the whole system of production in Europe has not been revolutionised by then, that will be the time to start this revolution' (ibid., p. 79). Engels, though he followed Russian developments with attention and keen interest, persistently refused to take an active part in the Russian dispute. In his letter of November 24, 1894, i.e. shortly before his death, he expressed himself as follows: 'My Russian friends almost daily and weekly bombard me with requests to come forward with my objections to Russian books and reviews which not only misinterpret but even misquote the sayings of our author (Marx). My friends assure me that my intervention would suffice to put matters right. Yet I invariably and firmly refuse all such proposals because I cannot afford to become involved with a dispute held in a foreign country, in a tongue which I, at least, cannot read as easily and freely as the more familiar W. European languages, and in a literature which is at best accessible to me only in fortuitous glimpses of some fragments, and which I cannot pursue anything like systematically enough in all its stages and details without neglecting my real and serious work. There are people everywhere who, once they have taken up a certain stand, are not ashamed to have recourse to misinterpreting the thoughts of others and to all kinds of dishonest manipulations for their own ends, and if that is what has happened to our author, I am afraid they will not deal more kindly with me, so that in the end I shall be compelled to interfere in the dispute, first to defend others, and then in my own defence' (ibid., p. 90). [291] We might mention that the surviving champions of 'populist' pessimism, and Vorontsov in particular, to the last remained loyal to their views, in spite of all that happened in Russia--a fact that does more credit to their character than to their intelligence. Referring to the 1900 and 1902 crises, Vorontsov wrote in 1902: 'The doctrinaire dogma of the Neo-Marxists rapidly loses its power over people's minds. That the newest successes of the individualists are ephemeral has obviously dawned even on their official advocates.... In the first decade of the twentieth century, we come back to the same views about economic development in Russia that had been the legacy of the 1870's' (Cf. the review _Political Economics_, October 1902, quoted by A. Finn Yenotayevski in _The Contemporary Economy of Russia 1890-1910_, St. Petersburg, 1911, p. 2.) Even to-day, then, this last of the 'populist' Mohicans deduces the 'ephemeral character', not of his own theory, but of economic reality. What of the saying of Barrère: 'Il n'y a que les morts qui ne reviennent pas'. _CHAPTER XXI_ STRUVE'S 'THIRD PERSONS' AND 'THREE WORLD EMPIRES' We now turn to the criticism of the above opinions as given by the Russian Marxists. In 1894, Peter v. Struve who had already given a detailed appraisal of Nikolayon's book in an essay 'On Capitalist Development in Russia',[292] published a book in Russian,[293] criticising the theories of 'populism' from various aspects. In respect of our present problem, however, he mainly confines himself to proving, against both Vorontsov and Nikolayon, that capitalism does not cause a contraction of the home market but, on the contrary, an expansion. There can be no doubt that Nikolayon has made a blunder--the same that Sismondi had made. They each describe only a single aspect of the destructive process, performed by capitalism on the traditional forms of production by small enterprise. They saw only the resulting depression of general welfare, the impoverishment of broad strata of the population, and failed to notice that economic aspect of the process which entails the abolition of natural economy and the substitution of a commodity economy in rural districts. And this is as much as to say that, by absorbing further and further sections of formerly independent and self-sufficient producers into its own sphere, capitalism continuously transforms into commodity buyers ever new strata of people who had not before bought its commodities. In fact, the course of capitalist development is just the opposite of that pictured by the 'populists' on the model of Sismondi. Capitalism, far from ruining the home market, really sets about creating it, precisely by means of a spreading money economy. Struve in particular refutes the theory that the surplus value cannot possibly be realised on the home market. He argues as follows: The conviction that a mature capitalist society consists exclusively of entrepreneurs and workers forms the basis of Vorontsov's theory, and Nikolayon himself operates with this concept throughout. From this point of view, of course, the realisation of the capitalist aggregate product seems incomprehensible. And Vorontsov's theory is correct in so far as it states the fact that neither the capitalists' nor the workers' consumption can realise the surplus value, so that the existence of 'third persons' must be presumed.[294] But then, is it not beyond any doubt that some such 'third persons' exist in every capitalist society? The idea of Vorontsov and Nikolayon is pure fiction 'which cannot advance our understanding of any historical process whatever by a hair's breadth'.[295] There is no actual capitalist society, however highly developed, composed exclusively of capitalists and workers. 'Even in England and Wales, out of a thousand self-supporting inhabitants, 543 are engaged in industry, 172 in commerce, 140 in agriculture, 81 in casual wage labour, and 62 in the Civil Service, the liberal professions and the like.' Even in England, then, there are large numbers of 'third persons', and it is they who, by their consumption, help to realise the surplus value in so far as it is not consumed by the capitalists. Struve leaves it open whether these 'third persons' consume enough to realise all surplus value--however that may be, 'the contrary would have to be proved'.[296] This cannot be done, he claims, for Russia, that vast country with an immense population. She, in fact, is in the fortunate position to be able to dispense with foreign markets. In this--and here Struve dips into the intellectual treasures of Professors Wagner, Schaeffle, and Schmoller--she enjoys the same privileges as the United States of America. 'If the example of the N. American Union stands for anything, it is proof of the fact that under certain circumstances capitalist industry can attain a very high level of development almost entirely on the basis of the home market.'[297] The negligible amount of industrial exports from the U.S.A. in 1882 is mentioned in support of this statement which Struve formulates as a general doctrine: 'The vaster the territory, and the larger the population of a country, the less does that country require foreign markets for its capitalist development.' He infers from this, in direct opposition to the 'populists', 'a more brilliant future (for Russia) than for the other countries'. On the basis of commodity production, the progressive development of agriculture is bound to create a market wide enough to support the development of Russian industrial capitalism. This market would be capable of unlimited expansion, in step with the economic and cultural progress of the country, and together with the substitution of a monetary for a natural economy. 'In this respect, capitalism enjoys more favourable conditions in Russia than in other countries.'[298] Struve paints a detailed and highly coloured picture of the new markets which, thanks to the Trans-Siberian Railway, are opening up in Siberia, Central Asia, Asia Minor, Persia and the Balkans. But his prophetic zeal blinds him to the fact that he is no longer talking about the 'indefinitely expanding' home market but about specific foreign markets. In later years, he was to throw in his lot, in politics too, with this optimistic Russian capitalism and its liberal programme of imperialist expansion, for which he had laid the theoretical foundations when still a 'Marxist'. Indeed, the tenor of Struve's argument is a fervent belief in the unlimited capacity for expansion of capitalist production, but the economic foundation of this optimism is rather weak. He is somewhat reticent as to what he means by the 'third persons' whom he considers the mainstay of accumulation, but his references to English occupational statistics indicate that he has in mind the various private and public servants, the liberal professions, in short the notorious _grand public_ so dear to bourgeois economists when they are completely at a loss. It is this 'great public' of which Marx said that it serves as the explanation for things which the economist cannot explain. It is obvious that, if we categorically refer to consumption by the capitalists and the workers, we do not speak of the entrepreneur as an individual, but of the capitalist class as a whole, including their hangers-on--employees, Civil Servants, liberal professions, and the like. All such 'third persons' who are certainly not lacking in any capitalist society are, as far as economics is concerned, joint consumers of the surplus value for the greater part, in so far, namely, as they are not also joint consumers of the wages of labour. These groups can only derive their purchasing power either from the wage of the proletariat or from the surplus value, if not from both; but on the whole, they are to be regarded as joint consumers of the surplus value. It follows that their consumption is already included in the consumption of the capitalist class, and if Struve tries to reintroduce them to the capitalists by sleight-of-hand as 'third persons' to save the situation and help to realise the surplus value, the shrewd profiteer will not be taken in. He will see at once that this great public is nothing but his old familiar retinue of parasites who buy his commodities with money of his own providing. No, no, indeed! Struve's 'third persons' will not do at all. Struve's theory of foreign markets and their significance for capitalist production is equally untenable. In this, he defers to the mechanist approach of the 'populists' who, along with the professors' textbooks, hold that a capitalist (European) country will first exploit the home market to the limit, and will only look to foreign markets when this is almost or completely exhausted. Then, following in the footsteps of Wagner, Schaeffle and Schmoller, Struve arrives at the absurd conclusion that a country with vast territories and a large population can make its capitalist production a 'self-contained whole' and rely indefinitely on the home market alone.[299] In actual fact, capitalist production is by nature production on a universal scale. Quite contrary to the bookish decrees issued by German scholars, it is producing for a world market already from the word _go_. The various pioneering branches of capitalist production in England, such as the textile, iron and coal industries, cast about for markets in all countries and continents, long before the process of destroying peasants' property, the decline of handicraft and of the old domestic industries within the country had come to an end. And again, is it likely that the German chemical or electrotechnical industries would be grateful for the sober advice not to work for five continents, as they have done from the beginning, but to confine themselves to the German home market which, being largely supplied from abroad, is evidently far from exhausted in respect of a whole lot of other German industries? Or that one should explain to the German machine industry, it should not venture yet upon foreign markets, since German import statistics are visible proof that a good deal of the demand in Germany for products of this branch is satisfied by foreign supplies? No, this schematic conception of 'foreign trade' does not help us at all to grasp the complexity of the world market with its uncounted ramifications and different shades in the division of labour. The industrial development of the U.S.A. who have already at the time of writing become a dangerous rival to Britain both on the world market and even in England herself, just as they have beaten German competition, e.g. in the sphere of electrotechnics, both in the world market and in Germany herself, has given the lie to Struve's inferences, already out-of-date when they were put on paper. Struve also shares the crude view of the Russian 'populists' who saw hardly more than a merchant's sordid concern for his market in the international connections of capitalist economy, and its historical tendency to create a homogeneous living organism based on social division of labour as well as the countless variety of natural wealth and productive conditions of the globe. Moreover he accepts the Three Empire fiction of Wagner and Schmoller (the self-contained Empires of Great Britain, Russia and the U.S.A.) which completely ignores or artificially minimises the vital part played by an unlimited supply of means of subsistence, of raw and auxiliary materials and of labour power which is just as necessary for a capitalist industry computed in terms of a world market as the demand for finished products. Alone the history of the English cotton industry, a reflection in miniature of the history of capitalism in general, spreading over five continents throughout the nineteenth century, makes a mockery of the professors' childish pretensions which have only one real significance: to provide the theoretical justification for the system of protective tariffs. FOOTNOTES: [292] Published in _Sozialdemokratisches Zentralblatt_, vol. iii, No. 1. [293] _Critical Comments on the Problem of Economic Development in Russia._ [294] Op. cit., p. 251. [295] Ibid., p. 255. [296] Ibid., p. 252. [297] Ibid., p. 260. 'There can be no doubt that Struve's attempt to refute what he calls the pessimist outlook on the analogy of the U.S.A. is fallacious. He says that Russia can overcome the evil consequences of the most recent capitalism just as easily as the U.S.A. But what he forgets is that the U.S.A. from the first represent a new bourgeois state, that they were founded by a petty bourgeoisie and by peasants who had fled from European feudalism to set up a purely bourgeois society. In Russia, on the other hand, we have a primitive communist foundation, a society of _gentes_, as it were, in the pre-civilised stage which, though it is already disintegrating, still serves as a material basis upon which the capitalist revolution (for it is in fact a social revolution) can take place and become effective. In America, a monetary economy had been stabilised more than a century ago, whereas a natural economy had until recently prevailed in Russia. It should be obvious therefore that this revolution in Russia is bound to be much more ruthless and violent, and accompanied by immensely more suffering than in America' (Engels to Nikolayon, October 17, 1893, _Letters_ ..., p. 85). [298] _Critical Comments_ ..., p. 284. [299] Professor Schmoller, amongst others, clearly reveals the reactionary aspect of the 'Three Empire Theory' (viz. Great Britain, Russia and the U.S.A.) evolved by the German professors. In his handbook of commercial policy (_Handelspolitische Säkularbetrachtung_), the venerable scholar dolefully frowns upon 'neo-mercantilism', that is to say upon the imperialist designs of the three arch-villains. 'In the interests of a higher intellectual, moral and aesthetic civilisation and social progress' he demands a strong German navy and a European Customs Union. 'Out of the economic tension of the world there arises the prime duty for Germany to create for herself a strong navy, so as to be prepared for battle in the case of need, and to be desirable as an ally to the World Powers'--which latter, however, Professor Schmoller says elsewhere, he does not wish to blame for again taking the path of large-scale colonial expansion. 'She neither can nor ought to pursue a policy of conquest like the Three World Powers, but she must be able, if necessary, to break a foreign blockade of the North Sea in order to protect her own colonies and her vast commerce, and she must be able to offer the same security to the states with whom she forms an alliance. It is the task of the Three-Partite Union (Germany, Austro-Hungary, and Italy) to co-operate with France towards imposing some restraint, desirable for the preservation of all other states, on the over-aggressive policy of the Three World Powers which constitutes a threat to all smaller states, and to ensure moderation in conquests, in colonial acquisitions, in the immoderate and unilateral policy of protective tariffs, in the exploitation and maltreatment of all weaker elements. The objectives of all higher intellectual, moral and aesthetic civilisation and of social progress depend on the fact that the globe should not be divided up among Three World Empires in the twentieth century, that these Three Empires should not establish a brutal neo-mercantilism' (_Die Wandlungen der Europäischen Handelspolitik des 19. Jahrhunderts_, 'Changes in the European Commercial Policy During the 19th Century', in _Jahrb. für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft_, vol. xxiv, p. 381). _CHAPTER XXII_ BULGAKOV AND HIS COMPLETION OF MARX'S ANALYSIS The second critic of 'populist' scepticism, S. Bulgakov, is no respecter of Struve's 'third persons' and at once denies that they form the sheet-anchor for capitalist accumulation. 'The majority of economists before Marx', he declares, 'solved the problem by saying that some sort of "third person" is needed, as a _deus ex machina_, to cut the Gordian knot, i.e. to consume the surplus value. This part is played by luxury-loving landowners (as with Malthus), or by indulgent capitalists, or yet by militarism and the like. There can be no demand for the surplus value without some such extraordinary mediators; a deadlock will be reached on the markets and the result will be over-production and crises.'[300] 'Struve thus assumes that capitalist production in its development, too, may find its ultimate mainstay in the consumption of some fantastic sort of "third person". But if this great public is essentially characterised as consuming the surplus value, whence does it obtain the means to buy?'[301] For his part, Bulgakov centres the whole problem from the first in the analysis of the social aggregate product and its reproduction as given by Marx in the second volume of _Capital_. He has a thorough grasp of the fact that he must start with simple reproduction and must fully understand its working in order to solve the question of accumulation. In this context, he says, it is of particular importance to obtain a clear picture of the consumption of surplus value and wages in such branches of production as do not turn out goods for consumption, and further, to understand fully the circulation of that portion of the social aggregate product which represents used-up constant capital. This, he argues, is a completely new problem of which economists had not even been aware before Marx brought it up. 'In order to solve this problem, Marx divides all capitalistically produced commodities into two great and fundamentally different categories: the production of producer and consumer goods. There is more theoretical importance in this division than in all previous squabbles on the theory of markets.'[302] Bulgakov, we see, is an outspoken and enthusiastic supporter of Marx's theory. The object of his study, as he puts it, is thus a critique of the doctrine that capitalism cannot exist without external markets. 'For this purpose, the author has made use of the most valuable analysis of social reproduction given by Marx in volume ii of _Capital_ which for reasons unknown has scarcely been utilised in economic theory. Though this analysis cannot be taken as fully completed, we are yet of opinion that even in its present fragmentary shape it offers an adequate foundation for a solution of the market problem that differs from that adopted by Messrs. Nikolayon, V. V. and others, and which they claim to have found in Marx.'[303] Bulgakov gives the following formulation of his solution which he has deduced from Marx himself: 'In certain conditions, capitalism may exist solely by virtue of an internal market. It is not an inherent necessity peculiar to the capitalist mode of production that the outside market be able to absorb the surplus of capitalist production. The author has arrived at this conclusion in consequence of his study of the above-mentioned analysis of social reproduction.' And now we are eager to hear the arguments Bulgakov has based on the above thesis. At first sight, they prove surprisingly simple: Bulgakov faithfully reproduces Marx's well-known diagram of simple reproduction, adding comments which do credit to his insight. He further cites Marx's equally familiar diagram of enlarged reproduction--and this indeed is the proof we have been so anxious to find. 'Consequent upon what we have said, it will not be difficult now to determine the very essence of accumulation. The means-of-production department I must produce additional means of production necessary for enlarging both its own production and that of Department II. II, in its turn, will have to supply additional consumption goods to enlarge the variable capital in both departments. Disregarding the circulation of money, the expansion of production is reduced to an exchange of additional products of I needed by II against additional products of II needed by I.' Loyally following Marx's deductions, Bulgakov does not notice that so far his entire thesis is nothing but words. He believes that these mathematical _formulæ_ solve the problem of accumulation. No doubt we can easily imagine proportions such as those he has copied from Marx, and _if there is expanding production_, these _formulæ_ will apply. Yet Bulgakov overlooks the principal problem: who exactly is to profit by an expansion such as that whose mechanism he examines? Is it explained just because we can put the mathematical proportions of accumulation on paper? Hardly, because just as soon as Bulgakov has declared the matter settled and goes on to introduce the circulation of money into the analysis, he right away comes up against the question: where are I and II to get the money for the purchase of additional products? When we dealt with Marx, time and again the weak point in his analysis, the question really of consumers in enlarged reproduction, cropped up in a perverted form as the question of additional money sources. Here Bulgakov quite slavishly follows Marx's approach, accepting his misleading formulation of the problem without noticing that it is not straightforward, although he knows perfectly well that 'Marx himself did not answer this question in the drafts which were used to compile the second volume of _Capital_'. It should be all the more interesting to see what answer Marx's Russian pupil attempted to work out on his own. 'The following solution', Bulgakov says, 'seems to us to correspond best to Marx's doctrine as a whole: The new variable capital in money-form supplied by II for both departments has its commodity equivalent in surplus value II. With reference to simple reproduction, we have already seen that the capitalists themselves must throw money into circulation to realise their surplus value, money which ultimately reverts to the pocket of the very capitalist it came from. The quantity of money required for the circulation of the surplus value is determined in accordance with the general law of commodity circulation by the value of the commodities that contained it, divided by the average amount of money turnover. This same law must apply here; the capitalists of Department II must dispose of a certain amount of money for the circulation of their surplus value, and must consequently possess certain money reserves. These reserves must be ample enough for the circulation both of that portion of the surplus value which represents the consumption fund and of that which is to be accumulated as capital.' Bulgakov further argues that it is immaterial to the question how much money is required to circulate a certain amount of commodities inside a country, whether or not some of these commodities contain any surplus value. 'In answer to the general question as to money sources inside the country, however, our solution is that the money is supplied by the producer of gold.'[304] If a country requires more money consequent upon an 'expansion of production', the production of gold will have to be increased accordingly. So here we are again: the producer of gold is again the _deus ex machina_, just as he had been for Marx. In fact, Bulgakov has sadly disappointed us in the high hopes we had of his new solution. His 'solution' of the problem does not go a step beyond Marx's own analysis. It can be reduced to three extremely simple statements as follows: (1) Question: How much money do we need for the realisation of capitalised surplus value? Answer: Just as much as is required in accordance with the general law of commodity circulation. (2) Q.: Where do the capitalists get the money for the realisation of capitalised surplus value? A.: They are supposed to have it. (3) Q.: How did the money come into the country in the first place? A.: It is provided by the producer of gold. The extreme simplicity of this method of explanation is suspicious rather than attractive. We need not trouble, however, to refute this theory which makes the gold producer the _deus ex machina_ of capitalist accumulation. Bulgakov has done it himself quite adequately. Eighty pages on, he returns to the gold producer in quite a different context, in the course of a lengthy argument against the theory of the wages fund in which he got involved for some mysterious reason. Here he suddenly displays a keen grasp of the problem: 'We know already that there is a gold producer amongst other producers. Even under conditions of simple reproduction, he increases, on the one hand, the absolute quantity of money circulating inside the country, and on the other, he buys producer and consumer goods without, in his turn, selling commodities, paying with his own product, i.e. with the general exchange equivalent, for the goods he buys. The gold producer now might perhaps render the service of buying the whole accumulated surplus value from II and pay for it in gold which II can then use to buy means of production from I and to increase its variable capital needed to pay for additional labour power so that the gold producer now appears as the real external market. 'This assumption, however, is quite absurd. To accept it would mean to make the expansion of social production dependent upon the expansion of gold production. (Hear, hear!) This in turn presupposes an increase in gold production which is quite unreal. If the gold producer were obliged to buy all the accumulated surplus value from II for his own workers, his own variable capital would have to grow by the day and indeed by the hour. Yet his constant capital as well as his surplus value should also grow in proportion, and gold production as a whole would consequently have to take on immense dimensions. (Hear, hear!) Instead of submitting this sophistical presumption to statistical tests--which in any case would hardly be possible--a single fact can be adduced which would alone refute this presupposition: it is the development of the institution of credit which accompanies the development of capitalist economy. (Hear, hear!) Credit has the tendency to diminish the amount of money in circulation (this decrease being, of course, only relative, not absolute); it is the necessary complement of a developing economy of exchange which would otherwise soon find itself hampered by a lack of coined money. I think we need not give figures in this context to prove that the rôle of money in exchange-transactions is now very small. The hypothesis is thus proved in immediate and evident disagreement with the facts and must be confuted.'[305] Bravo! Bravissimo! This is really excellent! Bulgakov, however, thus 'confutes' also his former explanation of the question, in what way and by whom capitalised surplus value is realised. Moreover, in refuting his own statements, Bulgakov has only explained in somewhat greater detail what Marx expressed in a single word when he called the hypothesis of a gold producer swallowing up the entire surplus value of society--'absurd'. Admittedly, Bulgakov's real solution and that of Russian Marxists in general who deal extensively with the problem must be sought elsewhere. Just like Tugan Baranovski and Ilyin [Lenin], Bulgakov underlines the fact that the opposing sceptics made a capital error with respect to the possibility of accumulation in analysing the value of the aggregate product. They, especially Vorontsov, assumed that the aggregate social product consists in consumer goods, and they all started from the false premise that consumption is indeed the object of capitalist production. This, as the Marxists now explain, is the source of the entire misunderstanding--of all the imaginary difficulties connected with the realisation of the surplus value, with which the sceptics racked their brains. 'This school created non-existent difficulties because of this mistaken conception. Since the normal conditions of capitalist production presuppose that the capitalists' consumption fund is only a part of the surplus value, and the smaller part at that, the larger being set aside for the expansion of production, it is obvious that the difficulties imagined by this (the _populist_) school do not really exist.'[306] The unconcern with which Bulgakov here ignores the real problem is striking. Apparently it has not dawned on him that the question as to the ultimate beneficiaries, quite irrelevant so long as personal consumption of the entire surplus value is assumed, only becomes acute on the assumption of enlarged reproduction. All these 'imaginary difficulties' vanish, thanks to two discoveries of Marx's which his Russian pupils untiringly quote against their opponents. The first is the fact that, in terms of value, the social product is composed, not of _v + s_, but of _c + v + s_. Secondly, the ratio of _c_ to _v_ in this sum continually increases with the progress of capitalist production, and at the same time, the capitalised part of the surplus value as against that part of it that is consumed, is ever growing. On this basis, Bulgakov establishes a complete theory of the relations between production and consumption in a capitalist society. As this theory plays such an important part for the Russian Marxists in general, and Bulgakov in particular, it will be necessary to get better acquainted with it. 'Consumption,' Bulgakov says, 'the satisfaction of social needs, is but an incidental moment in the circulation of capital. The volume of production is determined by the volume of capital, and not by the amount of social requirements. Not alone that the development of production is unaccompanied by a growth in consumption--the two are mutually antagonistic. Capitalist production knows no other than effective consumption, but only such persons who draw either surplus value or labour wages can be effective consumers, and their purchasing power strictly corresponds to the amount of those revenues. Yet we have seen that the fundamental evolutionary laws of capitalist production tend, despite the absolute increase, to diminish the relative size of variable capital as well as of the capitalists' consumption fund. We can say, then, _that the development of production diminishes consumption_.[307] The conditions of production and of consumption are thus in conflict. Production cannot and does not expand to further consumption. Expansion, however, is an inherent fundamental law of capitalist production and confronts every individual capitalist in the form of a stern command to compete. This contradiction is negligible in view of the fact that expanding production as such represents a market for additional products. "Inherent contradictions are resolved by an extension of the outlying fields of production."'[308] (Bulgakov here quotes a saying of Marx which he has thoroughly misunderstood; we shall later have occasion to deal with it once more.) 'It has just been shown how this is possible.' (A reference to the analysis of the diagram of enlarged reproduction.) 'Evidently, the greater share of the expansion is apportioned to Department I, to the production, that is to say, of constant capital, and only a (relatively) smaller part to Department II which produces commodities for immediate consumption. This change in the relations of the two departments shows well enough what part is played by consumption in a capitalist society, and it indicates where we should expect to find the most important demand for capitalist commodities.'[309] 'Even within the narrow limits of the profit motive and the crises, even on this strait and narrow path, capitalist production is capable of unlimited expansion, irrespective of, and even despite, a decrease in consumption. The Russian literature frequently points out that in view of diminishing consumption a considerable increase of capitalist production is impossible without external markets, but this is due to a wrong evaluation of the part played by consumption in a capitalist society, the failure to appreciate that consumption is not the ultimate end of capitalist production. Capitalist production does not exist by the grace of an increase in consumption but because of an extension of the outlying fields of production which in fact constitute the market for capitalist products. A whole progression of Malthusian investigators, discontented with the superficial harmony doctrine of the school of Say and Ricardo, have slaved away at a solution of the hopeless undertaking: to find means of increasing consumption which the capitalist mode of production is bound to decrease. Marx was the only one to analyse the real connections: he has shown that the growth of consumption is fatally lagging behind that of production, and must do so whatever "third persons" one might invent. Consumption and its volume then should by no means be considered as establishing the immediate limits to the expansion of production. Capitalist production atones by the crises for deviating from the true purpose of production, but it is independent of consumption. The expansion of production is alone limited by, and dependent upon, the volume of capital.'[310] The theory of Bulgakov and Tugan Baranovski is here directly attributed to Marx. In the eyes of the Russian Marxists, it is on the whole the direct consequence of Marx's doctrine, of which it forms an organic part. On another occasion Bulgakov says even more clearly that it is a faithful interpretation of Marx's diagram of enlarged reproduction. Once a country has embraced capitalist production, its internal movement develops along the following lines: 'The production of constant capital makes up the Department I of social reproduction, thereby instituting an independent demand for consumption goods to the extent of both its own variable capital and the consumption fund of its capitalists. Department II in its turn starts the demand for the products of Department I. _Thus a closed circle is already formed at the initial stage of capitalist production, in which it depends on no external market but is self-sufficient and can grow, of itself, as it were, by means of accumulation._'[311] In the hands of the Russian Marxists this theory becomes the favourite stick with which to beat their opponents, the 'populist' sceptics, in the question of markets. We can only appreciate its daring to the full when we look at its amazing discrepancy with everyday practice, with all the known facts of capitalist economy. A thesis pronounced so triumphantly as the purest Marxist gospel is even more deserving of our admiration when we consider that it is grounded in an extremely simple confusion. We shall have further occasion to deal with this confusion when we come to the doctrine of Tugan Baranovski. Bulgakov further develops a completely erroneous theory of foreign commerce, based upon his misapprehension of the relations between consumption and production in capitalist economy. A picture of reproduction like the above in fact has no room for foreign commerce. If capitalism forms a 'closed circle' in every country from the very beginning, if, chasing its tail like a puppy and in complete 'self-sufficiency', it is able of itself to create an unlimited market for its products and can spur itself on to ever greater expansion, then every capitalist country as such must also be a closed and self-sufficient economic whole. In but a single respect would foreign commerce appear reasonable: to compensate, by imports from abroad, for certain deficiencies due to the soil and the climate, i.e. the import of raw materials or foodstuffs from sheer necessity. Completely upsetting the thesis of the 'populists', Bulgakov in fact advances a theory of international commerce among capitalist states which gives pride of place to the import of agricultural products, with industrial exports merely providing the requisite funds. International traffic in commodities does not here seem to flow from the character of the mode of production but from the natural conditions of the countries concerned. This theory at any rate has not been borrowed from Marx but from the economic experts of the German bourgeoisie. Just as Struve took over from Wagner and Schaeffle his Three Empire Theory, so Bulgakov adopts from the late List (_R.I.P._) the division of states on the basis of 'agriculture' and 'mixed agriculture and manufacture', or rather adapts it, in deference to the times, to the categories of 'manufacture' and 'mixed manufacture and agriculture'. Nature has afflicted the first category with a deficiency in raw materials and foodstuffs, making it thus dependent upon foreign commerce. The second category has been liberally endowed with all it needs; here foreign trade is of no account. The prototype of the first category is England, of the second--the U.S.A. The stoppage of foreign commerce would mean the economic death-blow to England, but only a temporary crisis in the U.S.A. with a guarantee of full recovery. 'Production there is capable of unlimited expansion on the basis of the internal market.'[312] This theory, a hoary relic of German economics even now, has obviously not the least grasp of the interrelations obtaining in an international capitalist economy. It conceives of modern international trade in terms that may have been appropriate to the times of the Phoenicians. Just listen to the lecture of Professor Buecher: 'Although the liberalist era has greatly facilitated international traffic, it would be a mistake to infer from this that the period of a national economy is nearing its end, to be replaced by a period of international economy.... Granted that we see in Europe to-day a number of small countries that are not independent nations in respect of their commodity supply, being compelled to import substantial amounts of their foodstuffs and luxuries, while their industrial productivity is in excess of the national needs and creates a permanent surplus for which employment must be found in alien spheres of consumption. Yet although countries of industrial production and those producing raw materials exist side by side and depend upon one another, such "international division of labour" should not be regarded as a sign that mankind is about to attain to a higher stage of development which it would be proper to contrast, under the label of world economy, with the ... previous stages. No stage of economic development has ever permanently guaranteed full autonomy in the satisfaction of wants. Every one of them has left certain gaps which had to be filled in by some means or other. So-called "international economy", on the other hand, has not, at any rate so far, engendered any phenomena which are essentially different from those of national economy, and we very much doubt that such phenomena will appear in the near future.'[313] As far as Bulgakov is concerned, this conception at any rate results in an unexpected conclusion: his theory of the unlimited capacity for development of capitalism is confined to certain countries with favourable natural conditions. Capitalism in England is foredoomed because the world market will be exhausted before long. In the U.S.A., India and Russia it can look forward to an unlimited development because these countries are 'self-sufficient'. Apart from these obvious peculiarities, Bulgakov's arguments about foreign commerce again imply a fundamental misconception. Against the sceptics, from Sismondi to Nikolayon, who believed that they had to take recourse to outside markets for the realisation of capitalist surplus value, he chiefly argues as follows: 'These experts obviously consider external commerce as a "bottomless pit" to swallow up in all eternity the surplus value which cannot be got rid of inside the country.' Bulgakov for his part triumphantly points out that foreign commerce is indeed not a pit and certainly not a bottomless one, but rather appears as a double-edged sword, that exports always belong with imports, and that the two usually counterbalance one another. Thus, whatever is pushed out over one border, will be brought back, in a changed use-form, over another. 'We must find room for the commodities that have been imported as an equivalent of those exported, within the bounds of the given market, and as this is impossible, _ex hypothesi_, it would only generate new difficulties to have recourse to an external demand.'[314] On another occasion he says that the way to realise the surplus value found by the Russian 'populists', viz. external markets, 'is much less favourable than that discovered by Malthus, v. Kirchmann and Vorontsov himself when he wrote the essay _On Militarism and Capitalism_'.[315] Although Bulgakov fervently copies Marx's diagram of reproduction, he here exhibits no grasp whatever of the real problem towards which the sceptics from Sismondi to Nikolayon were groping their way. He denies that foreign commerce solves the difficulty as pretended, since it again brings the surplus value that has been disposed of into the country, although in a 'changed form'. In conformity with the crude picture of v. Kirchmann and Vorontsov, he thus believes the problem to be that of destroying a certain quantity of the surplus value, of wiping it from the face of the earth. It simply does not occur to him that the real problem is the realisation of the surplus value, the metamorphosis of commodities, in fact the 'changed form' of the surplus value. Bulgakov thus finally arrives at the same goal as Struve, though by a different route. He preaches the self-sufficiency of capitalist accumulation which swallows up its own product as Kronos swallows up his children, and breeds ever more vigorously without help from outside. Now only one further step is needed for Marxism to revert to bourgeois economics, and this, as luck would have it, was taken by Tugan Baranovski. FOOTNOTES: [300] S. Bulgakov, _On the Markets of Capitalist Production. A Study in Theory_ (Moscow, 1897), p. 15. [301] Ibid., p. 32, footnote. [302] Ibid., p. 27. [303] Ibid., pp. 2-3. [304] _On the Markets of Capitalist Production_, pp. 50, 55. [305] _On the Markets of Capitalist Production_, p. 132 ff. [306] Ibid., p. 20. [307] Bulgakov's italics. [308] _Capital_, vol. iii, p. 387. [309] Bulgakov, op. cit., p. 161. [310] Ibid., p. 167. [311] Bulgakov, op. cit., p. 210 (our italics). [312] Ibid., p. 199. [313] K. Buecher; The Rise of National Economy (_Die Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft_), 5th edition, p. 147. Professor Sombart's theory is the most recent contribution in this field. He argues that we are not moving towards an international economy but rather farther and farther away from it. 'I maintain, on the contrary, that commercial relations to-day do not form a stronger but rather a weaker link between the civilised nations, in relation to their economy as a whole. Individual economy takes not more but rather less account of the world market than it did a hundred or fifty years ago. At least ... it would be wrong to assume that the relative importance of international relations with regard to modern political economy is increasing. The opposite is the case.' Sombart scornfully rejects the assumption of a progressive international division of labour, of a growing need for outside markets owing to an inelastic home demand. He in his turn is convinced that 'the individual national economies will develop into ever more perfect microcosms and that the importance of the home market will increasingly surpass that of the world market for all branches of industry' (_Die Deutsche Volkswirtschaft im 19. Jahrhundert_, 2nd edition, 1909, pp. 399-420). This devastating discovery admittedly hinges on a full acceptance of the Professor's peculiar conception which, for some reasons, only considers those as 'exporting countries' who pay for their imports with a surplus of agricultural products over and above their own needs, who pay 'with the soil'. In this scheme Russia, Rumania, the U.S.A. and the Argentine are, but Germany, England and Belgium are not, 'exporting countries'. Since capitalist development will sooner or later also claim the surplus of agricultural products for the home demand in Russia and the U.S.A., it is evident that there will be fewer and fewer 'exporting countries' in the world--international economy will vanish.--Another of Sombart's discoveries is that great capitalist 'non-exporting' countries increasingly obtain 'free' imports in form of interest on exported capital--but the capital exports as well as exports of industrial commodities are of absolutely no account to Professor Sombart. 'In the course of time we shall probably get to a point where we import without exporting' (p. 422). Modern, sensational, and precious! [314] Bulgakov, op. cit., p. 132. [315] Ibid., p. 236. A quite uncompromising version of the same view is given by V. Ilyin [Lenin]: 'The romanticists (as he calls the sceptics) argue as follows: the capitalists cannot consume the surplus value; therefore they must dispose of it abroad. I ask: Do the capitalists perhaps give away their products to foreigners for nothing, throw it into the sea, maybe? If they sell it, it means that they obtain an equivalent. If they export certain goods, it means that they import others' (_Economic Studies and Essays_, p. 2). As a matter of fact, his explanation of the part played by external commerce in capitalist production is far more correct than that of Struve and Bulgakov. _CHAPTER XXIII_ TUGAN BARANOVSKI AND HIS 'LACK OF PROPORTION' We have left this theorist to the end, although he already developed his views in Russian in 1894, i.e. before Struve and Bulgakov, partly because he only gave his theories their mature form in German at a later date,[316] and also because the conclusions he draws from the premises of the Marxist critics are the most far-reaching in their implications. Like Bulgakov, Tugan Baranovski starts from Marx's analysis of social reproduction which gave him the clue to this bewildering maze of problems. But while Bulgakov, the enthusiastic disciple of Marx, only sought to follow him faithfully and simply attributed his own conclusions to the master, Tugan Baranovski, on the other hand, lays down the law to Marx who, in his opinion, did not know how to turn his brilliant exposition of the reproductive process to good account. Tugan Baranovski's most important general conclusion from Marx's principles, the pivot of his whole theory, is that, contrary to the assumptions of the sceptics, capitalist accumulation is not only possible under the capitalist forms of revenue and consumption, but is, in fact, completely independent of both. It is not consumption, he says, but production itself which makes for the best market. Production and the market are therefore the same, and since the expansion of production is unlimited in itself, the market, the capacity to absorb its products, has no limits either. 'The diagram quoted', he says, 'was to prove conclusively a postulate which, though simple enough, might easily give rise to objections, unless the process be adequately understood--the postulate, namely, that capitalist production creates a market for itself. So long as it is possible to expand social production, if the productive forces are adequate for this purpose, the proportionate division of social production must also bring about a corresponding expansion of the demand inasmuch as under such conditions all newly produced goods represent a newly created purchasing power for the acquisition of other goods. Comparing simple reproduction of the social capital with its reproduction on a rising scale, we arrive at the most important conclusion that in capitalist economy the demand for commodities is in a sense independent of the total volume of social consumption. Absurd as it may seem to "common-sense", it is yet possible that the volume of social consumption as a whole goes down while at the same time the aggregate social demand for commodities grows.'[317] And again further on: 'Arising from the abstract analysis of the reproductive process of social capital we have formed the conclusion that nothing will be left over of the social product in view of the proportionate division of the social capital.'[318] Accordingly Tugan Baranovski subjects Marx's theory of crises to a revision which he claims to have developed from Sismondi's 'over-consumption'. 'Marx is in substantial agreement with the general view that the poverty of the workers, i.e. of the great majority of the population, makes it impossible to realise the products of an ever expanding capitalist production, since it causes a decline in demand. This opinion is definitely mistaken. We have seen that capitalist production creates its own market--consumption being only one of the moments of capitalist production. In a planned social production if the leaders of production were equipped with all _information_ about the demand and with the _power_ to transfer labour and capital freely from one branch of production to another, then, however low the level of social consumption, the supply of commodities would not exceed the demand.'[319] The only circumstance which periodically causes the market to be flooded is a lack of proportion in the enlargement of production. On this assumption, therefore, Tugan Baranovski describes the course of capitalist accumulation as follows: 'What would the workers ... produce if production were organised on proportionate lines? Obviously their own means of subsistence and production. With what object? To expand production in the second year. The production of what products? Again of means of production and subsistence for the workers--and so on _ad infinitum_.'[320] This game of question and answer, mind you, is not a form of self-mockery, it is meant in all seriousness. 'If the expansion of production has no practical limits, then we must assume that the expansion of markets is equally unlimited, for _if social production is proportionately organised, there is no limit to the expansion of the market other than the productive forces available_.'[321] Since production thus creates its own demand, foreign commerce of capitalist states is also assigned that peculiar mechanistic function we have already met in Bulgakov. A foreign market, for instance, is an absolute necessity for England. 'Does not this prove that capitalist production creates a surplus product for which there is no room on the internal market? Why, come to that, does England require an external market? The answer is not difficult: because a considerable part of England's purchasing power is expended on obtaining foreign commodities. The import of foreign commodities for the English home market also makes it essential to export English commodities abroad. Since England cannot manage without importing from abroad, exports are a vital condition for that country, since without them she would not be able to pay for her imports.'[322] Here again agricultural imports are described as a stimulating and decisive factor, quite in accordance with the scheme of the German professors. What, then, is the general line of reasoning on which Tugan Baranovski supports his daring solution of the problem of accumulation, the new revelation on the problem of crises and a whole lot of others? Hard to believe, but quite incontrovertible for all that, Tugan Baranovski's proof consists exclusively and entirely--in Marx's diagram of enlarged reproduction, no more no less. Although he repeatedly refers rather pompously to his 'abstract analysis of the reproductive process of social capital', to the 'conclusive logic' of his analysis, this entire analysis is nothing but a copy of Marx's diagram of enlarged reproduction, with a different set of figures. Nowhere in the entire works of Tugan Baranovski shall we find a trace of any other argument. In Marx's diagram, admittedly, accumulation, production, realisation and exchange run smoothly with clockwork precision, and no doubt this kind of 'accumulation' can continue _ad infinitum_, just as long, that is to say, as ink and paper do not run out. And it is this harmless written exercise with mathematical equations which Tugan Baranovski quite seriously considers a _demonstration_ of such a course in real events. 'The diagrams we have adduced are bound to prove conclusively that....' On another occasion he counters Hobson, who is convinced that accumulation is impossible, with the following words: 'Diagram No. 2 of the reproduction of social capital on a rising scale corresponds to the case of capital accumulation Hobson has in mind. But does this diagram show a surplus product to come into being? Far from it.'[323] Hobson is refuted and the matter settled because 'in the diagram' no surplus product comes into being. Admittedly, Tugan Baranovski knows quite well that in hard fact things do not work out so smoothly. There are continual fluctuations in the exchange relations and periodical crises. But these crises happen only because in the expansion of production the proper proportions are not maintained, because, that is to say, the proportions of 'diagram No. 2' are not observed in the first place. If they were, there would be no crisis, and capitalist production could get along as nicely as it does on paper, in every detail. Tugan Baranovski is committed to the view that we can ignore the crises if we consider the reproductive process as a continuous process. Although the 'proportion' may be upset at any moment, yet on average it will always be re-established by different deviations, by price-fluctuations from day to day, and in the long run by periodical crises. That on the whole this 'proportion' is more or less maintained is proved by the fact that capitalist economy is still going strong--otherwise it would long ago have ended in chaos and collapse. In the long run, then, Tugan Baranovski's 'proportion' is observed by and large, and we must conclude that reality obeys 'diagram No. 2'. And since this diagram can be indefinitely extended, it follows that capitalist accumulation can also proceed _ad infinitum_. What is striking in all this is not Tugan Baranovski's conclusion that the diagram corresponds to the actual course of events--as we have seen, Bulgakov also shared this belief; the really startling fact is that Tugan Baranovski sees no necessity for as much as _inquiring_ whether the diagram is correct, that, instead of proving the diagram, he considers this, the arithmetical exercise on paper, as proof of the actual state of affairs. Bulgakov honestly tried to project Marx's diagram on the real concrete relations of capitalist economy and of capitalist exchange; he endeavoured to overcome the difficulties resulting from it, though without success, it is true, remaining to the last involved with Marx's analysis, which he himself recognised to be incomplete and fragmentary. But Tugan Baranovski does not need any proof, he does not greatly exercise his brains: since the arithmetical sums come out satisfactorily, and may be continued _ad lib._, this is to him proof that capitalist accumulation can also proceed without let or hindrance--provided the said 'proportion' obtains, which it will have to do by hook or by crook, as he himself would not dream of denying. Tugan Baranovski, however, has one indirect proof that the diagram with its strange results corresponds to, and truly reflects, reality. This is the fact that capitalist production, quite in accordance with Marx's diagram, puts human consumption second to production, that it conceives of the former as a means and of the latter as an end in itself, just as it puts human labour, the 'worker', on a par with the machine. 'Technical progress is expressed by the fact that the means of labour, the machine, increases more and more in importance as compared to living labour, to the worker himself. Means of production play an ever growing part in the productive process and on the commodity market. Compared to the machine, the worker recedes further into the background and the demand resulting from the consumption of the workers is also put into the shade by that which results from productive consumption by the means of production. The entire workings of capitalist economy take on the character of a mechanism existing on its own, as it were, in which human consumption appears as a simple moment of the reproductive process and the circulation of capitals.'[324] Tugan Baranovski considers this discovery as a fundamental law of the capitalist mode of production, which is confirmed by a quite tangible phenomenon: with the progress of capitalist development Department I goes on growing relatively to, and at the expense of, Department II. It was Marx himself who, as we all know, set up this law in which he grounded the schematic exposition of reproduction, though in the further development of his diagram he ignored subsequent alterations for simplicity's sake. This, the automatic growth of the producer goods as compared with the consumer goods department affords Tugan Baranovski the only objective proof of his theory: that in capitalist society human consumption becomes increasingly unimportant, and production more and more an end in itself. This thesis forms the corner-stone of his entire theoretical edifice. 'In all the industrial countries', he proclaims, 'we are confronted with the same type of development--the development of national economy everywhere follows the same fundamental law. The mining industry which creates the means of production for modern industry comes more and more to the fore. The relative decrease in the export of immediately consumable manufactured goods from Britain is thus also an expression of the fundamental law governing capitalist development. The further technical progress advances, the more do consumer goods recede as compared with producer goods. Human consumption plays an ever decreasing part as against the productive consumption of the means of production.'[325] Although this 'fundamental law' like all his other 'fundamental' laws, in so far as they mean anything at all, is borrowed ready-made from Marx, Baranovski does not rest content with this and immediately proceeds to preach the Marxist gospel to Marx himself. Scrabbling about like a blind hen, Marx has turned up another pearl--Tugan will give him that--only he does not know what to do with it. It needed a Tugan Baranovski to know how to make it useful to science, and in his hand the newly discovered law suddenly throws a new light on the whole workings of capitalist economy. This law of the expansion in the department of producer goods at the cost of that of consumer goods reveals clearly, concisely, exactly, and in measurable terms, that capitalist society attaches progressively less importance to human consumption, putting man on the same level as the means of production, and that Marx was therefore completely wrong both in assuming that man alone, not the machine, too, can be the creator of surplus value, and in saying, further, that human consumption represents a limit for capitalist production which is bound to cause periodical crises in the present, and the collapse and terrible end of capitalist economy in the near future. In short, the 'fundamental law' governing the increase of producer as compared to consumer goods reflects the singular nature of capitalist society as a whole which Marx had not understood and which to interpret happily fell to the lot of Tugan Baranovski. We have seen above the decisive part played by the 'fundamental law' of capital in the controversy between the Russian Marxists and the sceptics. Bulgakov's remarks we already know; another Marxist already referred to, Vladimir Ilyin, expresses himself in similar terms in his polemics against the 'populists': 'It is well known that the law of capitalist production consists in the fact that the constant capital grows more rapidly than the variable capital, that is to say an ever increasing part of the newly formed capital falls to the department of social production which creates producer goods. In consequence, this department is absolutely bound to grow more rapidly than the department creating consumer goods, that is to say, the very thing happens which Sismondi declared to be "impossible", "dangerous", etc. In consequence, consumer goods make up a smaller and smaller share of the total bulk of capitalist production, and this is entirely in accordance with the historical "mission" of capitalism and its specific social structure: the former in fact consists in the development of the productive forces of society (production as an end in itself), and the latter prevents that the mass of the population should turn them to use.'[326] In this respect, of course, Tugan Baranovski goes even farther. With his love of paradox he actually permits himself the joke of submitting a mathematical proof that accumulation of capital and expansion of production are possible even if the absolute volume of production decreases. In this connection, Karl Kautsky has pointed out, he had recourse to a somewhat dubious scientific subterfuge, namely that he shaped his daring deductions exclusively for a specific moment: the transition from simple to enlarged reproduction--a moment which is exceptional even in theory, but certainly of no practical significance whatever.[327] As to Tugan Baranovski's 'fundamental law', Kautsky declares it to be a mere illusion due to the fact that Tugan Baranovski considered the organisation of production only in the old countries of capitalist big industry. 'It is correct', Kautsky says, 'that with a progressive division of labour, there will be comparatively fewer and fewer factories etc. for the production of goods direct for personal consumption, together with a relative increase in the number of those which supply both the former and one another with tools, machines, raw materials, transport facilities and so on. While in original peasant economy an enterprise that cultivated the flax also made the linen with its own tools and got it ready for human consumption, nowadays hundreds of enterprises may share in the manufacture of a single shirt, by producing raw cotton, iron rails, steam engines and railway trucks that bring it to port, and so on. With international division of labour it will happen that some countries--the old industrial countries--can only slowly expand their production for personal consumption, while making large strides in their production of producer goods which is much more decisive for the heartbeat of economic life than the production of consumer goods. From the point of view of the nation concerned, we might easily form the opinion that producer goods can be turned out on a constantly rising scale with a more rapid rate of increase than in the production of consumer goods, and that their production is not bound up with that of the latter.' The opinion, that producer goods can be produced independent of consumption, is of course a mirage of Tugan Baranovski's, typical of vulgar economics. Not so the fact cited in support of this fallacy: the quicker growth of Department I as compared with Department II is beyond dispute, not only in old industrial countries but wherever technical progress plays a decisive part in production. It is the foundation also of Marx's fundamental law that the rate of profit tends to fall. Yet in spite of it all, or rather precisely for this reason, it is a howler if Bulgakov, Ilyin and Tugan Baranovski imagine to have discovered in this law the essential nature of capitalist economy as an economic system in which production is an end in itself and human consumption merely incidental. The growth of the constant at the expense of the variable capital is only the capitalist expression of the general effects of increasing labour productivity. The formula _c_ greater than _v_ (_c > v_), translated from the language of capitalism into that of the social labour process, means only that the higher the productivity of human labour, the shorter the time needed to change a given quantity of means of production into finished products.[328] This is a universal law of human labour. It has been valid in all pre-capitalist forms of production and will also be valid in the future in a socialist order of society. In terms of the material use-form of society's aggregate product, this law must manifest itself by more and more social labour time being employed in the manufacture of producer than of consumer goods. In a planned and controlled social economy, organised on socialist lines, this transformation would in fact be more rapid even than it is in contemporary capitalist economy. In the first place, rational scientific techniques can only be applied on the largest scale when the barriers of private ownership in land are abolished. This will result in an immense revolution in vast provinces of production which will ultimately amount to a replacement of living labour by machine labour, and which will enable us to tackle technical jobs on a scale quite impossible under present day conditions. Secondly, the general use of machinery in the productive process will be put on a new economic basis. At present the machine does not compete with living labour but only with that part of it that is paid. The cost of the labour power which is replaced by the machine represents the lowest limit of the applicability of the machine. Which means that the capitalist becomes interested in a machine only when the costs of its production--assuming the same level of performance--amount to less than the wages of the workers it replaces. From the point of view of the social labour process which is the only one to matter in a socialist society, the machine competes not with the labour that is necessary to maintain the worker but with the labour he actually performs. In other words, in a society that is not governed by the profit motive but aims at saving human labour, the use of machinery is economically indicated just as soon as it can save more human labour than is necessary for making it, not to mention the many cases where the use of machinery is desirable even if it does not answer this economic minimum--for reasons of health and similar considerations, in the interest of the workers themselves. However that may be, the tension between the respective economic usefulness of the machine in (_a_) a capitalist, and (_b_) a socialist society is at least equal to the difference between labour and that part of it that is paid; it is, in other words, the precise equivalent of the whole capitalist surplus value. Consequently, if the capitalist profit motive is abolished and a social organisation of labour introduced, the marginal use of the machine will suddenly be increased by the whole extent of the capitalist surplus value, so that an enormous field, not to be gauged as yet, will be open to the triumphal march of the machine. This would be tangible proof that the capitalist mode of production, alleged to spur on to the optimum technical development, in fact sets large social limits to technical progress, in form of the profit motive on which it is based. It would show that as soon as these limits are abolished, technical progress will develop such a powerful drive that the technical marvels of capitalist production will be child's play in comparison. In terms of the composition of the social product, this technical transformation can only mean that, compared to the production of consumer goods, the production of producer goods--measured in units of labour time--must increase more rapidly in a socialist society than it does even to-day. Thus the relation between the two departments of social production which the Russian Marxists took to reveal typical capitalist baseness, the neglect of man's need to consume, rather proves to be the precise manifestation of the progressive subjection of nature to social labour, which will become even more striking when production is organised solely with a view to human needs. The only objective proof for Tugan Baranovski's 'fundamental law' thus collapses as a 'fundamental' confusion. His whole construction, including his 'new theory of crises', together with the 'lack of proportion', is reduced to its foundations on paper: a slavish copy of Marx's diagram of enlarged reproduction. FOOTNOTES: [316] _Studies on the Theory and History of Commercial Crises in England_ (Jena, 1901) and _Theoretical Foundations of Marxism_ (1905). [317] _Studies on the Theory and History_ ..., p. 23. [318] Ibid., p. 34. [319] Ibid., p. 333. [320] Ibid., p. 191. [321] Ibid., p. 231, italics in the original. [322] Ibid., p. 305. [323] _Studies on the Theory and History_ ..., p. 191 [324] Ibid., p. 27. [325] _Studies on the Theory and History_ ..., p. 58. [326] V. Ilyin [Lenin] 'Studies and Essays in Economics' (_Oekonomische Studien und Artikel. Zur Charakterisierung des ökonomischen Romantizismus_, St. Petersburg, 1899), p. 20.--Incidentally, the same author is responsible for the statement that enlarged reproduction begins only with capitalism. It quite escapes him that under conditions of simple reproduction, which he takes to be the rule for all pre-capitalist modes of production, we should probably never have advanced beyond the stage of the paleolithic scraper. [327] _Die Neue Zeit_, vol. xx, part 2, _Krisentheorien_, p. 116. Kautsky's mathematical demonstration to Tugan Baranovski that consumption is bound to grow, and 'in the precise ratio as the bulk of producer goods in terms of value', calls for two comments: first, like Marx, Kautsky paid no attention to the progress in the productivity of labour so that consumption appears to have a relatively larger volume than it would in fact have. Secondly, the increase in consumption to which Kautsky here refers is only a consequence, a result of enlarged reproduction, it is neither its basis nor its aim; it is mainly due to the growth of the variable capital, the continual employment of additional workers. The upkeep of these workers, however, neither is nor ought to be the object of the expansion of reproduction--no more, for that matter, than the increasing personal consumption of the capitalist class. Kautsky's argument no doubt refutes Tugan Baranovski's pet notion: the whimsy to construe enlarged reproduction with an absolute decrease in consumption. But for all that, he does not get anywhere near the fundamental problem, the relations between production and consumption under the aspect of the reproductive process, though we are told in another passage of the same work: 'With the capitalists growing richer, and the workers they exploit increasing in numbers, they constitute between them a market for the consumer goods produced by capitalist big industry which expands continually, yet it does not grow as rapidly as the accumulation of capital and the productivity of labour, and must therefore remain inadequate.' An additional market is required for these consumer goods, a market outside their own province, among those occupational groups and nations whose mode of production is not yet capitalistic. This market is found and also widens increasingly, but the expansion is again too slow, since the additional market is not nearly so elastic and capable of expansion as the capitalist productive process. As soon as capitalist production has developed to the big industry stage, as in England already in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, it is capable of expanding by leaps and bounds so as soon to out-distance all expansions of the market. Every period of prosperity subsequent to a considerable extension of the market is thus from the outset doomed to an early end--the inevitable crisis. This, in brief, is the theory of crises established by Marx, and, as far as we can see, generally accepted by the "orthodox" Marxists' (ibid., p. 80). Kautsky, however, is not interested in harmonising this conception of the realisation of the aggregate product with Marx's diagram of enlarged reproduction, perhaps because, as our quotation also shows, he deals with the problem solely from the aspect of crises, regarding, in other words, the social product as a more or less homogeneous bulk of goods and ignoring the fact that it is differentiated in the reproductive process. L. Bouding seems to come closer to the crucial point. In his brilliant review on Tugan Baranovski he gives the following formulation: 'With a single exception to be considered below, the existence of a surplus product in capitalist countries does not put a spoke in the wheel of production, not because production will be distributed more efficiently among the various spheres, or because the manufacture of machinery will replace that of cotton goods. The reason is rather that, capitalist development having begun sooner in some countries than in others, and because even to-day there are still some countries that have no developed capitalism, the capitalist countries in truth have at their disposal an outside market in which they can get rid of their products which they cannot consume themselves, no matter whether these are cotton or iron goods. We would by no means deny that it is significant if iron goods replace cotton goods as the main products of the principal capitalist countries. On the contrary, this change is of paramount importance, but its implications are rather different from those ascribed to it by Tugan Baranovski. It indicates the beginning of the end of capitalism. So long as the capitalist countries exported commodities for the purpose of consumption, there was still a hope for capitalism in these countries, and the question did not arise how much and how long the non-capitalist outside world would be able to absorb capitalist commodities. The growing share of machinery at the cost of consumer goods in what is exported from the main capitalist countries shows that areas which were formerly free of capitalism, and therefore served as a dumping-ground for its surplus products, are now drawn into the whirlpool of capitalism. It shows that, since they are developing a capitalism of their own, they can by themselves produce the consumer goods they need. At present they still require machinery produced by capitalist methods since they are only in the initial stages of capitalist development. But all too soon they will need them no longer. Just as they now make their own cotton and other consumer goods, they will in future produce their own iron ware. Then they will not only cease to absorb the surplus produce of the essentially capitalist countries, but they will themselves produce surplus products which they can place only with difficulty' (_Die Neue Zeit_, vol. xxv, part 1, _Mathematische Formeln gegen Karl Marx_, p. 604). Bouding here broaches an important aspect of the general relations pertaining to the development of international capitalism. Further, as a logical consequence, he comes to the question of imperialism but unfortunately he finally puts the wrong kind of edge on his acute analysis by considering the whole of militarist production together with the system of exporting international capital to non-capitalist countries under the heading of 'reckless expenditure'.--We must say in parenthesis that Bouding, just like Kautsky, holds that the law of a quicker growth in the means-of-production department relative to the means-of-subsistence department is a delusion of Tugan Baranovski's. [328] 'Apart from natural conditions, such as fertility of the soil, etc., and from the skill of independent and isolated producers (shown rather qualitatively in the genus than quantitatively in the mass of their products), the degree of productivity of labour, in a capitalist society, is expressed in the relative extent of the means of production that one labourer, during a given time, with the same tension of labour-power, turns into products. The mass of means of production which he thus transforms, increases with the productiveness of his labour. But those means of production play a double part. The increase of some is a consequence, that of the others a condition of the increasing productivity of labour. E.g., with the division of labour in manufacture, and with the use of machinery, more raw material is worked up in the same time and, therefore, a greater mass of raw material and auxiliary substances enter into the labour-process. That is the consequence of the increasing productivity of labour. On the other hand, the mass of machinery, beasts of burden, mineral manures, drainpipes, etc., is a condition of the increasing productivity of labour. So also is it with the means of production concentrated in buildings, furnaces, means of transport, etc. But whether condition or consequence, the growing extent of the means of production, as compared with the labour-power incorporated with them, is an expression of the growing productiveness of labour. The increase of the latter appears, therefore, in the diminution of the mass of labour in proportion to the mass of means of production moved by it, or in the diminution of the subjective factor of the labour-process as compared with the objective factor' (_Capital_, vol. i, pp. 635-6). And yet another passage: 'We have seen previously, that with the development of the productivity of labour, and therefore with the development of the capitalist mode of production, which develops the socially productive power of labour more than all previous modes of production, there is a steady increase of the mass of means of production, which are permanently embodied in the productive process as instruments of labour and perform their function in it for a longer or shorter time at repeated intervals (buildings, machinery, etc.); also, that this increase is at the same time the premise and result of the development of the productivity of social labour. It is especially capitalist production, which is characterised by relative as well as absolute growth of this sort of wealth' (_Capital_, vol. i, chap. xxiii, 2). 'The material forms of existence of constant capital, the means of production, do not consist merely of such instruments of labour, but also of raw material in various stages of finished and of auxiliary substances. With the enlargement of the scale of production and the increase in the productivity of labour by co-operation, division of labour, machinery, etc., the mass of raw materials and auxiliary substances used in the daily process of reproduction, grows likewise' (_Capital_, vol. ii, p. 160). _CHAPTER XXIV_ THE END OF RUSSIAN 'LEGALIST' MARXISM The Russian 'legalist' Marxists, and Tugan Baranovski above all, can claim the credit, in their struggle against the doubters of capitalist accumulation, of having enriched economic theory by an application of Marx's analysis of the social reproductive process and its schematic representation in the second volume of _Capital_. But in view of the fact that this same Tugan Baranovski quite wrongly regarded said diagram as the solution to the problem instead of its formulation, his conclusions were bound to reverse the basic order of Marx's doctrine. Tugan Baranovski's approach, according to which capitalist production can create unlimited markets and is independent of consumption, leads him straight on to the thesis of Say-Ricardo, i.e. a natural balance between production and consumption, between supply and demand. The difference is simply that those two only thought in terms of simple commodity circulation, whilst Tugan Baranovski applies the same doctrine to the circulation of capital. His theory of crises being caused by a 'lack of proportion' is in effect just a paraphrase of Say's old trite absurdity: the over-production of any one commodity only goes to show under-production of another; and Tugan Baranovski simply translates this nonsense into the terminology used in Marx's analysis of the reproductive process. Even though he declares that, Say notwithstanding, general over-production is quite possible in the light of the circulation of money which the former had entirely neglected, yet it is in fact this very same neglect, the besetting sin of Say and Ricardo in their dealings with the problem of crises which is the condition for his delightful manipulations with Marx's diagram. As soon as it is applied to the circulation of money, 'diagram No. 2' begins to bristle with spikes and barbs. Bulgakov was caught in these spikes when he attempted to follow up Marx's interrupted analysis to a logical conclusion. This compound of forms of thought borrowed from Marx with contents derived from Say and Ricardo is what Tugan Baranovski modestly calls his 'attempt at a synthesis between Marx's theory and classical economics'. After almost a century, the theory of optimism which holds, in the face of petty-bourgeois doubts, that capitalist production is capable of development, returns, by way of Marx's doctrine and its 'legalist' champions, to its point of departure, to Say and Ricardo. The three 'Marxists' join forces with the bourgeois 'harmonists' of the Golden Age shortly before the Fall when bourgeois economics was expelled from the Garden of Innocence--the circle is closed. There can be no doubt that the 'legalist' Russian Marxists achieved a victory over their opponents, the 'populists', but that victory was rather too thorough. In the heat of battle, all three--Struve, Bulgakov and Tugan Baranovski--overstated their case. The question was whether capitalism in general, and Russian capitalism in particular, is capable of development; these Marxists, however, proved this capacity to the extent of even offering theoretical proof that capitalism can go on for ever. Assuming the accumulation of capital to be without limits, one has obviously proved the unlimited capacity of capitalism to survive! Accumulation is the specifically capitalist method of expanding production, of furthering labour productivity, of developing the productive forces, of economic progress. If the capitalist mode of production can ensure boundless expansion of the productive forces, of economic progress, it is invincible indeed. The most important objective argument in support of socialist theory breaks down; socialist political action and the ideological import of the proletarian class struggle cease to reflect economic events, and socialism no longer appears an historical necessity. Setting out to show that capitalism is possible, this trend of reasoning ends up by showing that socialism is impossible. The three Russian Marxists were fully aware that in the course of the dispute they had made an about-turn, though Struve, in his enthusiasm for the cultural mission of capitalism, does not worry about giving up a useful warrant.[329] Bulgakov tried to stop the gaps now made in socialist theory with another fragment of the same theory as best he could: he hoped that capitalist society might yet perish, in spite of the immanent balance between production and consumption, because of the declining profit rate. But it was he himself who finally cut away the ground from under this somewhat precarious comfort. Forgetting the straw he had offered for the salvation of socialism, he turned on Tugan Baranovski with the teaching that, in the case of large capitals, the relative decline in the profit rate is compensated by the absolute growth of capital.[330] More consistent than the others, Tugan Baranovski finally with the crude joy of a barbarian destroys all objective economic arguments in support of socialism, thus building in his own spirit 'a more beautiful world' on an ethical foundation. 'The individual protests against an economic order which transforms the end (man) into a means (production) and the means (production) into an end.'[331] Our three Marxists demonstrated in person that the new foundations of socialism had been frail and jerry-built. They had hardly laid down the new basis for socialism before they turned their backs on it. When the masses of Russia were staking their lives in the fight for the ideals of a social order to come, which would put the end (man) before the means (production), the 'individual' went into retreat, to find philosophical and ethical solace with Kant. In actual fact, the 'legalist' bourgeois Marxists ended up just where we should expect them to from their theoretical position--in the camp of bourgeois harmonies. FOOTNOTES: [329] Struve says in the preface to the collection of his Russian essays (published in 1901): 'In 1894, when the author published his "Critical Comments on the Problem of Economic Development in Russia", he inclined in philosophy towards positivism, in sociology and economics towards outspoken, though by no means orthodox, Marxism. Since then, the author no longer sees the whole truth in positivism and Marxism which is grounded in it (!), they no longer fully determine his view of the world. Malignant dogmatism which not only browbeats those who think differently, but spies upon their morals and psychology, regards such work as a mere "Epicurean instability of mind". It cannot understand that criticism in its own right is to the living and thinking individual one of the most valuable rights. The author does not intend to renounce this right, though he might constantly be in danger of being indicted for "instability"' (_Miscellany_, St. Petersburg, 1901). [330] Bulgakov, op. cit., p. 252. [331] Tugan Baranovski, _Studies on the Theory and History_ ..., p. 229. _SECTION THREE_ THE HISTORICAL CONDITIONS OF ACCUMULATION _CHAPTER XXV_ CONTRADICTIONS WITHIN THE DIAGRAM OF ENLARGED REPRODUCTION In the first section, we ascertained that Marx's diagram of accumulation does not solve the question of who is to benefit in the end by enlarged reproduction. If we take the diagram literally as it is set out at the end of volume ii, it appears that capitalist production would itself realise its entire surplus value, and that it would use the capitalised surplus value exclusively for its own needs. This impression is confirmed by Marx's analysis of the diagram where he attempts to reduce the circulation within the diagram altogether to terms of money, that is to say to the effective demand of capitalists and workers--an attempt which in the end leads him to introduce the 'producer of money' as a _deus ex machina_. In addition, there is that most important passage in _Capital_, volume i, which must be interpreted to mean the same. 'The annual production must in the first place furnish all those objects (use-values) from which the material components of capital, used up in the course of the year, have to be replaced. Deducting these there remains the net or surplus-product, in which the surplus-value lies. And of what does this surplus-value consist? Only of things destined to satisfy the wants and desires of the capitalist class, things which, consequently, enter into the consumption fund of the capitalists? Were that the case, the cup of surplus-value would be drained to the very dregs, and nothing but simple reproduction would ever take place. 'To accumulate it is necessary to convert a portion of the surplus-product into capital. But we cannot, except by a miracle, convert into capital anything but such articles as can be employed in the labour-process (i.e. means of production), and such further articles as are suitable for the sustenance of the labourer (i.e. means of subsistence). Consequently, a part of the annual surplus-labour must have been applied to the production of additional means of production and subsistence, over and above the quantity of these things required to replace the capital advanced. In one word, surplus-value is convertible into capital solely because the surplus-product, whose value it is, already comprises the material elements of new capital.'[332] The following conditions of accumulation are here laid down: (1) The surplus value to be capitalised first comes into being in the natural form of capital (as additional means of production and additional means of subsistence for the workers). (2) The expansion of capitalist production is achieved exclusively by means of capitalist products, i.e. its own means of production and subsistence. (3) The limits of this expansion are each time determined in advance by the amount of surplus value which is to be capitalised in any given case; they cannot be extended, since they depend on the amount of the means of production and subsistence which make up the surplus product; neither can they be reduced, since a part of the surplus value could not then be employed in its natural form. Deviations in either direction (above and below) may give rise to periodical fluctuations and crises--in this context, however, these may be ignored, because in general the surplus product to be capitalised must be equal to actual accumulation. (4) Since capitalist production buys up its entire surplus product, there is no limit to the accumulation of capital. Marx's diagram of enlarged reproduction adheres to these conditions. Accumulation here takes its course, but it is not in the least indicated who is to benefit by it, who are the new consumers for whose sake production is ever more enlarged. The diagram assumes, say, the following course of events: the coal industry is expanded in order to expand the iron industry in order to expand the machine industry in order to expand the production of consumer goods. This last, in turn, is expanded to maintain both its own workers and the growing army of coal, iron and machine operatives. And so on _ad infinitum_. We are running in circles, quite in accordance with the theory of Tugan Baranovski. Considered in isolation, Marx's diagram does indeed permit of such an interpretation since he himself explicitly states time and again that he aims at presenting the process of accumulation of the aggregate capital in a society consisting solely of capitalists and workers. Passages to this effect can be found in every volume of _Capital_. In volume i, in the very chapter on 'The Conversion of Surplus-Value into Capital', he says: 'In order to examine the object of our investigation in its integrity, free from all disturbing subsidiary circumstances, we must treat the whole world as one nation, and assume that capitalist production is everywhere established and has possessed itself of every branch of industry.'[333] In volume ii, the assumption repeatedly returns; thus in chapter 17 on 'The Circulation of Surplus-Value': 'Now, there are only two points of departure: The capitalist and the labourer. All third classes of persons must either receive money for their services from these two classes, or, to the extent that they receive it without any equivalent services, they are joint owners of the surplus-value in the form of rent, interest, etc.... The capitalist class, then, remains the sole point of departure of the circulation of money.'[334] Further, in the same chapter 'On the Circulation of Money in Particular under Assumption of Accumulation': 'But the difficulty arises when we assume, not a partial, but a general accumulation of money-capital on the part of the capitalist class. Apart from this class, there is, according to our assumption--the general and exclusive domination of capitalist production--no other class but the working class.'[335] And again in chapter 20: '... there are only two classes in this case, the working class disposing of their labour-power, and the capitalist class owning the social means of production and the money.'[336] In volume iii, Marx says quite explicitly, when demonstrating the process of capitalist production as a whole: 'Let us suppose that the whole society is composed only of industrial capitalists and wage workers. Let us furthermore make exceptions of fluctuations of prices which prevent large portions of the total capital from reproducing themselves under average conditions and which, owing to the general interrelations of the entire process of reproduction, such as are developed particularly by credit, must always call forth general stoppages of a transient nature. Let us also make abstraction of the bogus transactions and speculations, which the credit system favours. In that case, a crisis could be explained only by a disproportion of production in various branches, and by a disproportion of the consumption of the capitalists and the accumulation of their capitals. But as matters stand, the reproduction of the capitals invested in production depends largely upon the consuming power of the non-producing classes; while the consuming power of the labourers is handicapped partly by the laws of wages, partly by the fact that it can be exerted only so long as the labourers can be employed at a profit for the capitalist class.'[337] This last quotation refers to the question of crises with which we are not here concerned. It can leave no doubt, however, that the movement of the total capital, 'as matters stand', depends in Marx's view on three categories of consumers only: the capitalists, the workers and the 'non-productive classes', i.e. the hangers-on of the capitalist class (king, parson, professor, prostitute, mercenary), of whom he quite rightly disposes in volume ii as the mere representatives of a derivative purchasing power, and thus the parasitic joint consumers of the surplus value or of the wage of labour. Finally, in _Theories of Surplus Value_,[338] Marx formulates his general presuppositions with regard to accumulation as follows: 'Here we have only to consider the forms through which capital passes during the various stages of its development. Thus we do not set out the actual conditions of the real process of production, but always assume that the commodity is sold for what it is worth. We ignore the competition of capitalists and the credit system; we also leave out of account the actual constitution of society which never consists exclusively of the classes of workers and industrial capitalists, and where there is accordingly no strict division between producers and consumers. The first category (of consumers, whose revenues are partly of a secondary, not a primitive nature, derived from profits and the wage of labour) is much wider than the second category (of producers). Therefore the manner in which it spends its income, and the extent of such income, effects very large modifications in the economic household, and especially so in the process of circulation and reproduction of capital.' Speaking of the 'actual constitution of society', Marx here also considers merely the parasitic joint consumers of surplus value and of the wage of labour, i.e. only the hangers-on of the principal categories of capitalist production. There can be no doubt, therefore, that Marx wanted to demonstrate the process of accumulation in a society consisting exclusively of workers and capitalists, under the universal and exclusive domination of the capitalist mode of production. On this assumption, however, his diagram does not permit of any other interpretation than that of production for production's sake. Let us recall the second example of Marx's diagram of enlarged reproduction: 1st year: I. _5,000c + 1,000v + 1,000s = 7,000_ means of production II. _1,430c + 285v + 285s = 2,000_ means of subsistence ----- 9,000 2nd year: I. _5,417c + 1,083v + 1,083s = 7,583_ means of production II. _1,583c + 316v + 316s = 2,215_ means of subsistence ----- 9,798 3rd year: I. _5,869c + 1,173v + 1,173s = 8,215_ means of production II. _1,715c + 342v + 342s = 2,399_ means of subsistence ------ 10,614 4th year: I. _6,358c + 1,271v + 1,271s = 8,900_ means of production II. _1,858c + 371v + 371s = 2,600_ means of subsistence ------ 11,500 Here accumulation continues year after year without interruption, the capitalists in each case consuming half of the surplus value they have gained and capitalising the other half. In the process of capitalisation, the same technical foundation, that is to say the same organic composition or division into constant and variable capital and also the same rate of exploitation (always amounting to 100 per cent) is consecutively maintained for the additional capital as it was for the original capital. In accordance with Marx's assumption in volume i of _Capital_, the capitalised part of the surplus value first comes into being as additional means of production and as means of subsistence for the workers, both serving the purpose of an ever expanding production in the two departments. It cannot be discovered from the assumptions of Marx's diagram for whose sake production is progressively expanded. Admittedly, production and consumption increase simultaneously in a society. The consumption of the capitalists increases (in terms of value, in the first year it amounts to 500 + 142, in the second year to 542 + 158, in the third year to 586 + 171, and in the fourth year to 635 + 185); the consumption of the workers increases as well; the variable capital increasing year after year in both departments precisely indicates this growth in terms of value. And yet, the growing consumption of the capitalists can certainly not be regarded as the ultimate purpose of accumulation; on the contrary, there is no accumulation inasmuch as this consumption takes place and increases; personal consumption of the capitalists must be regarded as simple reproduction. Rather, the question is: if, and in so far as, the capitalists do not themselves consume their products but 'practise abstinence', i.e. accumulate, for whose sake do they produce? Even less can the maintenance of an ever larger army of workers be the ultimate purpose of continuous accumulation of capital. From the capitalist's point of view, the consumption of the workers is a consequence of accumulation, it is never its object or its condition, unless the principles (foundations) of capitalist production are to be turned upside down. And in any case, the workers can only consume that part of the product which corresponds to the variable capital, not a jot more. Who, then, realises the permanently increasing surplus value? The diagram answers: the capitalists themselves and they alone.--And what do they do with this increasing surplus value?--The diagram replies: They use it for an ever greater expansion of their production. These capitalists are thus fanatical supporters of an expansion of production for production's sake. They see to it that ever more machines are built for the sake of building--with their help--ever more new machines. Yet the upshot of all this is not accumulation of capital but an increasing production of producer goods to no purpose whatever. Indeed, one must be as reckless as Tugan Baranovski, and rejoice as much in paradoxical statements, to assume that this untiring merry-go-round in thin air could be a faithful reflection in theory of capitalist reality, a true deduction from Marx's doctrine.[339] Besides the analysis of enlarged reproduction roughed out in _Capital_, volume ii, the whole of Marx's work, volume ii in particular, contains a most elaborate and lucid exposition of his general views regarding the typical course of capitalist accumulation. If we once fully understand this interpretation, the deficiencies of the diagram at the end of volume ii are immediately evident. If we examine critically the diagram of enlarged reproduction in the light of Marx's theory, we find various contradictions between the two. To begin with, the diagram completely disregards the increasing productivity of labour. For it assumes that the composition of capital is the same in every year, that is to say, the technical basis of the productive process is not affected by accumulation. This procedure would be quite permissible in itself in order to simplify the analysis, but when we come to examine the concrete conditions for the realisation of the aggregate product, and for reproduction, then at least we must take into account, and make allowance for, changes in technique which are bound up with the process of capital accumulation. Yet if we allow for improved productivity of labour, the material aggregate of the social product--both producer and consumer goods--will in consequence show a much more rapid increase in volume than is set forth in the diagram. This increase in the aggregate of use-values, moreover, indicates also a change in the value relationships. As Marx argues so convincingly, basing his whole theory on this axiom, the progressive development of labour productivity reacts on both the composition of accumulating capital and the rate of surplus value so that they cannot remain constant under conditions of increasing accumulation of capital, as was assumed by the diagram. Rather, if accumulation continues, _c_, the constant capital of both departments, must increase not only absolutely but also relatively to _v + c_ or the total new value (the social aspect of labour productivity); at the same time, constant capital and similarly the surplus value must increase relatively to the variable capital--in short, the rate of surplus value, i.e. the ratio between surplus value and variable capital, must similarly increase (the capitalist aspect of labour productivity). These changes need not, of course, occur annually, just as the terms of first, second and third year in Marx's diagram do not necessarily refer to calendar years but may stand for any given period. Finally, we may choose to assume that these alterations, both in the composition of capital and in the rate of surplus value, take place either in the first, third, fifth, seventh year, etc., or in the second, sixth and ninth year, etc. The important thing is only that they are allowed for somewhere and taken into account as periodical phenomena. If the diagram is amended accordingly, the result of this method of accumulation will be an increasing annual surplus in the consumer at the expense of producer goods. It is true that Tugan Baranovski conquers all difficulties on paper: he simply constructs a diagram with different proportions where year by year the variable capital decreases by 25 per cent. And since this arithmetical exercise is successful enough on paper, Tugan triumphantly claims to have 'proved' that accumulation runs smoothly like clockwork, even if the absolute volume of consumption decreases. Even he must admit in the end, however, that his assumption of such an absolute decrease of the variable capital is in striking contrast to reality. Variable capital is in point of fact a growing quantity in all capitalist countries; only in relation to the even more rapid growth of constant capital can it be said to decrease. On the basis of what is actually happening, namely a greater yearly increase of constant capital as against that of variable capital, as well as a growing rate of surplus value, discrepancies must arise between the material composition of the social product and the composition of capital in terms of value. If, instead of the unchanging proportion of 5 to 1 between constant and variable capital, proposed by Marx's diagram, we assume for instance that this increase of capital is accompanied by a progressive readjustment of its composition, the proportion between constant and variable in the second year being 6 to 1, in the third year 7 to 1, and in the fourth year 8 to 1--if we further assume that the rate of surplus value also increases progressively in accordance with the higher productivity of labour so that, in each case, we have the same amounts as those of the diagram, although, because of the relatively decreasing variable capital, the rate of surplus value does not remain constant at the original 100 per cent--and if finally we assume that one-half of the appropriated surplus value is capitalised in each case (excepting Department II where capitalisation exceeds 50 per cent, 184 out of 285 being capitalised during the first year), the result will be as follows: 1st year: I. _5,000c + 1,000v + 1,000s = 7,000_ means of production II. _1,430c + 285v + 285s = 2,000_ means of subsistence 2nd year: I. _(5,428 4/7)c + (1,071 3/7)v + 1,083s = 7,583_ means of production II. _(1,587 5/7)c + (311 2/7)v + 316s = 2,215_ means of subsistence 3rd year: I. _5,903c + 1,139v + 1,173s = 8,215_ means of production II. _1,726c + 331v + 342s = 2,399_ means of subsistence 4th year: I. _6,424c + 1,205v + 1,271s = 8,900_ means of production II. _1,879c + 350v + 371s = 2,600_ means of subsistence If this were a true picture of the accumulative process, the means of production (constant capital) would show a deficit of 16 in the second year, of 45 in the third year and of 88 in the fourth year; similarly, the means of subsistence would show a surplus of 16 in the second year, of 45 in the third year and of 88 in the fourth year. This negative balance for the means of production may be only imaginary in part. The increasing productivity of labour ensures that the means of production grow faster in bulk than in value, in other words: means of production become cheaper. As it is use value, i.e. the material elements of capital, which is relevant for technical improvements of production, we may assume that the quantity of means of production, in spite of their lower value, will suffice for progressive accumulation up to a certain point. This phenomenon amongst others also checks the actual decline of the rate of profit and modifies it to a mere tendency, though our example shows that the decline of the profit rate would not only be retarded but rather completely arrested. On the other hand, the same fact indicates a much larger surplus of unsaleable means of subsistence than is suggested by the amount of this surplus in terms of value. In that case, we should have to compel the capitalists of Department II to consume this surplus themselves, which Marx makes them do on other occasions; in which case, and in so far as those capitalists are concerned, there would again be no accumulation but rather simple reproduction. Alternatively, we should have to pronounce this whole surplus unsaleable. Yet would it not be very easy to make good this loss in means of production which results from our example? We need only assume that the capitalists of Department I capitalise their surplus value to a greater extent. Indeed, there is no valid reason to suppose, as Marx did, that the capitalists in each case add only half their surplus value to their capital. Advances in labour productivity may well lead to progressively increasing capitalisation of surplus value. This assumption is the more permissible in that the cheapening of consumer goods for the capitalist class, too, is one of the consequences of technological progress. The relative decrease in the value of consumable income (as compared with the capitalised part) may then permit of the same or even a higher standard of living for this class. We might for instance make good the deficit in producer goods by transferring a corresponding part of surplus value I to the constant capital of this department, a part which would otherwise be consumed, since this surplus value, like all other products of the department, originally takes the form of producer goods; 11 4/7 would then be transferred in the second year, 34 in the third year and 66 in the fourth year.[340] The solution of one difficulty, however, only adds to another. It goes without saying that if the capitalists of Department I relatively restrict their consumption for purposes of accumulation, there will be a proportionately greater unsaleable residue of consumer goods in Department II; and thus it becomes more and more impossible to enlarge the constant capital even on its previous technological basis. If the capitalists in Department I relatively restrict their consumption, the capitalists of Department II must relatively expand their personal consumption in proportion. The assumption of accelerated accumulation in Department I would then have to be supplemented by that of retarded accumulation in Department II, technical progress in one department by regression in the other. These results are not due to mere chance. The adjustments we have tried out on Marx's diagram are merely meant to illustrate that technical progress, as he himself admits, must be accompanied by a relative growth of constant as against variable capital. Hence the necessity for a continuous revision of the ratio in which capitalised surplus value should be allotted to _c_ and _v_ respectively. In Marx's diagram, however, the capitalists are in no position to make these allocations at will, since the material form of their surplus value predetermines the forms of capitalisation. Since, according to Marx's assumption, all expansion of production proceeds exclusively by means of its own, capitalistically produced means of production and subsistence,--since there are here no other places and forms of production and equally no other consumers than the two departments with their capitalists and workers,--and since, on the other hand, the smooth working of the accumulative process depends on that circulation should wholly absorb the aggregate product of both departments, the technological shape of enlarged reproduction is in consequence strictly prescribed by the material form of the surplus product. In other words: according to Marx's diagram, the technical organisation of expanded production can and must be such as to make use of the aggregate surplus value produced in Departments I and II. In this connection we must bear in mind also that both departments can obtain their respective elements of production only by means of mutual exchange. Thus the allocation to constant or variable capital of the surplus value earmarked for capitalisation, as well as the allotment of the additional means of production and subsistence (for the workers) to Departments I and II is given in advance and determined by the relations between the two departments of the diagram--both in material and in terms of value. These relations themselves, however, reflect a quite determinate technical organisation of production. This implies that, on the assumptions of Marx's diagram, the techniques of production given in each case predetermine the techniques of the subsequent periods of enlarged reproduction, if accumulation continues. Assuming, that is to say, in accordance with Marx's diagram, that the expansion of capitalist production is always performed by means of the surplus value originally produced in form of capital, and further--or rather, conversely--that accumulation in one department is strictly dependent on accumulation in the other, then no change in the technical organisation of production can be possible in so far as the relation of _c_ to _v_ is concerned. We may put our point in yet another way: it is clear that a quicker growth of constant as compared with variable capital, i.e. the progressive metamorphosis of the organic composition of capital, must take the material form of faster expansion of production in Department I as against production in Department II. Yet Marx's diagram, where strict conformity of the two departments is axiomatic, precludes any such fluctuations in the rate of accumulation in either department. It is quite legitimate to suppose that under the technical conditions of progressive accumulation, society would invest ever increasing portions of the surplus value earmarked for accumulation in Department I rather than in Department II. Both departments being only branches of the same social production--supplementary enterprises, if you like, of the 'aggregate capitalist',--such a progressive transfer, for technical reasons, from one department to the other of a part of the accumulated surplus value would be wholly feasible, especially as it corresponds to the actual practice of capital. Yet this assumption is possible only so long as we envisage the surplus value earmarked for capitalisation purely in terms of value. The diagram, however, implies that this part of the surplus value appears in a definite material form which prescribes its capitalisation. Thus the surplus value of Department II exists as means of subsistence, and since it is as such to be only realised by Department I, this intended transfer of part of the capitalised surplus value from Department II to Department I is ruled out, first because the material form of this surplus value is obviously useless to Department I, and secondly because of the relations of exchange between the two departments which would in turn necessitate an equivalent transfer of the products of Department I into Department II. It is therefore downright impossible to achieve a faster expansion of Department I as against Department II within the limits of Marx's diagram. However we may regard the technological alterations of the mode of production in the course of accumulation, they cannot be accomplished without upsetting the fundamental relations of Marx's diagram. And further: according to Marx's diagram, the capitalised surplus value is in each case immediately and completely absorbed by the productive process of the following period, for, apart from the portion earmarked for consumption, it has a natural form which allows of only one particular kind of employment. The diagram precludes the cashing and hoarding of surplus value in monetary form, as capital waiting to be invested. The free monetary forms of private capital, in Marx's view, are first the money deposited gradually against the wear and tear of the fixed capital, for its eventual renewal; and secondly those amounts of money which represent realised surplus value but are still too small for investment. From the point of view of the aggregate capital, both these sources of free money capital are negligible. For if we assume that even a portion of the social surplus value is realised in monetary form for purposes of future investment, then at once the question arises: who has bought the material items of this surplus value, and who has provided the money? If the answer is: other capitalists, of course,--then, seeing that the capitalist class is represented in the diagram by the two departments, this portion of the surplus value must also be regarded as invested _de facto_, as employed in the productive process. And so we are back at immediate and complete investment of the surplus value. Or does the freezing of one part of the surplus value in monetary form in the hands of certain capitalists mean that other capitalists will be left with a corresponding part of that surplus product in its material form? does the hoarding of realised surplus value by some imply that others are no longer able to realise their surplus value, since the capitalists are the only buyers of surplus value? This would mean, however, that the smooth course of reproduction and similarly of accumulation as described in the diagram would be interrupted. The result would be a crisis, due not to over-production but to a mere intention to accumulate, the kind of crisis envisaged by Sismondi. In one passage of his _Theories_,[341] Marx explains in so many words that he 'is not at all concerned in this connection with an accumulation of capital greater than can be used in the productive process and might lie idle in the banks in monetary form, with the consequence of lending abroad'. Marx refers these phenomena to the section on competition. Yet it is important to establish that his diagram veritably precludes the formation of such additional capital. Competition, however wide we may make the concept, obviously cannot create values, nor can it create capitals which are not themselves the result of the reproductive process. The diagram thus precludes the expansion of production by leaps and bounds. It only allows of a gradual expansion which keeps strictly in step with the formation of the surplus value and is based upon the identity between realisation and capitalisation of the surplus value. For the same reason, the diagram presumes an accumulation which affects both departments equally and therefore all branches of capitalist production. It precludes expansion of the demand by leaps and bounds just as much as it prevents a one-sided or precocious development of individual branches of capitalist production. Thus the diagram assumes a movement of the aggregate capital which flies in the face of the actual course of capitalist development. At first sight, two facts are typical for the history of the capitalist mode of production: on the one hand the periodical expansion of the whole field of production by leaps and bounds, and on the other an extremely unequal development of the different branches of production. The history of the English cotton industry from the first quarter of the eighteenth to the seventies of the nineteenth century, the most characteristic chapter in the history of the capitalist mode of production, appears quite inexplicable from the point of view of Marx's diagram. Finally, the diagram contradicts the conception of the capitalist total process and its course as laid down by Marx in _Capital_, volume iii. This conception is based on the inherent contradiction between the unlimited expansive capacity of the productive forces and the limited expansive capacity of social consumption under conditions of capitalist distribution. Let us see how Marx describes this contradiction in detail in chapter 15 on 'Unravelling the Internal Contradictions of the Law' (of the declining profit rate): 'The creation of surplus-value, assuming the necessary means of production, or sufficient accumulation of capital, to be existing, finds no other limit but the labouring population, when the rate of surplus-value, that is, the intensity of exploitation, is given; and no other limit but the intensity of exploitation, when the labouring population is given. And the capitalist process of production consists essentially of the production of surplus-value, materialised in the surplus-product, which is that aliquot portion of the produced commodities, in which unpaid labour is materialised. It must never be forgotten, that the production of this surplus-value--and the re-conversion of a portion of it into capital, or accumulation, forms an indispensable part of this production of surplus-value--is the immediate purpose and the compelling motive of capitalist production. It will not do to represent capitalist production as something which it is not, that is to say, as a production having for its immediate purpose the consumption of goods, or the production of means of enjoyment for the capitalists. (And, of course, even less for the worker. R. L.) This would be overlooking the specific character of capitalist production, which reveals itself in its innermost essence. The creation of this surplus-value is the object of the direct process of production, and this process has no other limits than those mentioned above. As soon as the available quantity of surplus-value has been materialised in commodities, surplus-value has been produced. But this production of surplus-value is but the first act of the capitalist process of production, it merely terminates the act of direct production. Capital has absorbed so much unpaid labour. With the development of the process, which expresses itself through a falling tendency of the rate of profit, the mass of surplus-value thus produced is swelled to immense dimensions. Now comes the second act of the process. The entire mass of commodities, the total product, which contains a portion which is to reproduce the constant and variable capital as well as a portion representing surplus-value, must be sold. If this is not done, or only partly accomplished, or only at prices which are below the prices of production, the labourer has been none the less exploited, but his exploitation does not realise as much for the capitalist. It may yield no surplus-value at all for him, or only realise a portion of the produced surplus-value, or it may even mean a partial or complete loss of his capital. The conditions of direct exploitation and those of the realisation of surplus-value are not identical. They are separated logically as well as by time and space. The first are only limited by the productive power of society, the last by the proportional relations of the various lines of production and by the consuming power of society. This last-named power is not determined either by the absolute productive power or by the absolute consuming power, but by the consuming power based on antagonistic conditions of distribution, which reduces the consumption of the great mass of the population to a variable minimum within more or less narrow limits. The consuming power is furthermore restricted by the tendency to accumulate, the greed for an expansion of capital and a production of surplus-value on an enlarged scale. This is a law of capitalist production imposed by incessant revolutions in the methods of production themselves, the resulting depreciation of existing capital, the general competitive struggle and the necessity of improving the product and expanding the scale of production, for the sake of self-preservation and on penalty of failure. The market must, therefore, be continually extended, so that its interrelations and the conditions regulating them assume more and more the form of a natural law independent of the producers and become ever more uncontrollable. This eternal contradiction seeks to balance itself by an expansion of the outlying fields of production. But to the extent that the productive power develops, it finds itself at variance with the narrow basis on which the conditions of consumption rest. On this self-contradictory basis it is no contradiction at all that there should be an excess of capital simultaneously with an excess of population. For while a combination of these two would indeed increase the mass of the produced surplus-value, it would at the same time intensify the contradiction between the conditions under which this surplus-value is produced and those under which it is realised.'[342] If we compare this description with the diagram of enlarged reproduction, the two are by no means in conformity. According to the diagram, there is no inherent contradiction between the production of the surplus value and its realisation, rather, the two are identical. The surplus value here from the very beginning comes into being in a natural form exclusively designed for the requirements of accumulation. In fact it leaves the place of production in the very form of additional capital, that is to say it is capable of realisation in the capitalist process of accumulation. The capitalists, as a class, see to it in advance that the surplus value they appropriate is produced entirely in that material form which will permit and ensure its employment for purposes of further accumulation. Realisation and accumulation of the surplus value here are both aspects of the same process, they are logically identical. Therefore according to the presentation of the reproductive process in the diagram, society's capacity to consume does not put a limit to production. Here production automatically expands year by year, although the capacity of society for consumption has not gone beyond its 'antagonistic conditions of distribution'. This automatic continuation of expansion, of accumulation, truly is the 'law of capitalist production ... on penalty of failure'. Yet according to the analysis in volume iii, 'the market must, therefore, be continually extended', 'the market' obviously transcending the consumption of capitalists and workers. And if Tugan Baranovski interprets the following passage 'this eternal contradiction seeks to balance itself by an expansion of the outlying fields of production' as if Marx had meant production itself by 'outlying fields of production', he violates not only the spirit of the language but also Marx's clear train of thought. The 'outlying fields of production' are clearly and unequivocally not production itself but consumption which 'must be continually extended'. The following passage in _Theorien über den Mehrwert_, amongst others, sufficiently shows that Marx had this in mind and nothing else: 'Ricardo therefore consistently denies the necessity for an _expansion of the market_ to accompany the expansion of production and the growth of capital. The entire capital existing within a country can also be profitably used in that country. He therefore argues against Adam Smith who had set up his (Ricardo's) opinion on the one hand but also contradicted it with his usual sure instinct.'[343] In yet another passage, Marx clearly shows that Tugan Baranovski's notion of production for production's sake is wholly alien to him: 'Besides, we have seen in volume ii part iii that a continuous circulation takes place between constant capital and constant capital (even without considering any accelerated accumulation), which is in so far independent of individual consumption, as it never enters into such consumption, but which is nevertheless definitely limited by it, because the production of constant capital never takes place for its own sake, but solely because more of this capital is needed in those spheres of production whose products pass into individual consumption.'[344] Admittedly, in the diagram in volume ii, Tugan Baranovski's sole support, market and production coincide--they are one and the same. Expansion of the market here means extended production, since production is said to be its own exclusive market--the consumption of the workers being an element of production, i.e. the reproduction of variable capital. Therefore the limit for both the expansion of production and the extension of the market is one and the same: it is given by the volume of the social capital, or the stage of accumulation already attained. The greater the quantity of surplus value that has been extracted in the natural form of capital, the more can be accumulated; and the greater the volume of accumulation, the more surplus value can be invested in its material form of capital, i.e. the more can be realised. Thus the diagram does not admit the contradiction outlined in the analysis of volume iii. In the process described by the diagram there is no need for a continual extension of the market beyond the consumption of capitalists and workers, nor is the limited social capacity for consumption an obstacle to the smooth course of production and its unlimited capacity for expansion. The diagram does indeed permit of crises but only because of a lack of proportion within production, because of a defective social control over the productive process. It precludes, however, the deep and fundamental antagonism between the capacity to consume and the capacity to produce in a capitalist society, a conflict resulting from the very accumulation of capital which periodically bursts out in crises and spurs capital on to a continual extension of the market. FOOTNOTES: [332] _Capital_, vol. i, pp. 593-4. [333] Ibid., p. 594, note 1. [334] Op. cit., vol. ii, p. 384. [335] Ibid., pp. 400-1. [336] Ibid., p. 488. [337] _Capital_, vol. iii, p. 568. [338] _Theorien_ ..., vol. ii, part 2, 'The Accumulation of Capital and Crises', p. 263. [339] 'It is never the original thinkers who draw the absurd conclusions. They leave that to the Says and MacCullochs' (_Capital_, vol. ii, p. 451).--And--we might add--to the Tugan Baranovskis. [340] The figures result from the difference between the amounts of constant capital in Department I under conditions of technical progress, and under Marx's stable conditions. [341] _Theorien über den Mehrwert_, vol. ii, part 2, p. 252. [342] _Capital_, vol. iii, p. 285 ff. [343] _Theorien_ ..., vol. ii, part 2, p. 305. [344] _Capital_, vol. iii, p. 359. _CHAPTER XXVI_ THE REPRODUCTION OF CAPITAL AND ITS SOCIAL SETTING Marx's diagram of enlarged reproduction cannot explain the actual and historical process of accumulation. And why? Because of the very premises of the diagram. The diagram sets out to describe the accumulative process on the assumption that the capitalists and workers are the sole agents of capitalist consumption. We have seen that Marx consistently and deliberately assumes the universal and exclusive domination of the capitalist mode of production as a theoretical premise of his analysis in all three volumes of _Capital_. Under these conditions, there can admittedly be no other classes of society than capitalists and workers; as the diagram has it, all 'third persons' of capitalist society--civil servants, the liberal professions, the clergy, etc.--must, as consumers, be counted in with these two classes, and preferably with the capitalist class. This axiom, however, is a theoretical contrivance--real life has never known a self-sufficient capitalist society under the exclusive domination of the capitalist mode of production. This theoretical device is perfectly admissible so long as it merely helps to demonstrate the problem in its integrity and does not interfere with its very conditions. A case in point is the analysis of simple reproduction of the aggregate social capital, where the problem itself rests upon a fiction: in a society producing by capitalist methods, i.e. a society which creates surplus value, the whole of the latter is taken to be consumed by the capitalists who appropriate it. The object is to present the forms of social production and reproduction under these given conditions. Here the very formulation of the problem implies that production knows no other consumers than capitalists and workers and thus strictly conforms to Marx's premise: universal and exclusive domination of the capitalist mode of production. The implications of both fictions are the same. Similarly, it is quite legitimate to postulate absolute dominance of capital in an analysis of the accumulation of individual capitals, such as is given in _Capital_, volume i. The reproduction of individual capitals is an element in total social reproduction but one which follows an independent course, contrary to the movements of the other elements. In consequence it will not do simply to take together the individual movements of the respective capitals in order to arrive at the total movement of social capital, since the latter is essentially different. The natural conditions of reproducing individual capitals therefore neither conform with one another, nor do they conform to the relations of the total capital. Under normal conditions of circulation, every individual capital engages in the process of circulation and of accumulation entirely on its own account, depending upon others only in so far, of course, as it is compelled to find a market for its product and must find available the means of production it requires for its specific activities. Whether the strata who afford this market and provide the necessary means of production are themselves capitalist producers or not is completely immaterial for the individual capital, although, in theory, the most favourable premise for analysing the accumulation of individual capital is the assumption that capitalist production has attained universal and exclusive domination and is the sole setting of this process.[345] Now, however, the question arises whether the assumptions which were decisive in the case of individual capital, are also legitimate for the consideration of aggregate capital. 'We must now put the problem in this form: _given universal accumulation_, that is to say provided that in all branches of production there is greater or less accumulation of capital--which in fact is a condition of capitalist production, and which is just as natural to the capitalist _qua_ capitalist as it is natural to the miser to amass money (but which is also necessary for the perpetuation of capitalist production)--what are the _conditions_ of this universal accumulation, to what elements can it be reduced?' And the answer: '_The conditions for the accumulation of capital are precisely those which rule its original production and reproduction in general_: these conditions being that one part of the money buys labour and the other commodities (raw materials, machinery, etc.) ... Accumulation of new capital can only proceed therefore under the same conditions under which already existing capital is reproduced.'[346] In real life the actual conditions for the accumulation of the aggregate capital are quite different from those prevailing for individual capitals and for simple reproduction. The problem amounts to this: If an increasing part of the surplus value is not consumed by the capitalists but employed in the expansion of production, what, then, are the forms of social reproduction? What is left of the social product after deductions for the replacement of the constant capital cannot, _ex hypothesi_, be absorbed by the consumption of the workers and capitalists--this being the main aspect of the problem--nor can the workers and capitalists themselves realise the aggregate product. They can always only realise the variable capital, that part of the constant capital which will be used up, and the part of the surplus value which will be consumed, but in this way they merely ensure that production can be renewed on its previous scale. The workers and capitalists themselves cannot possibly realise that part of the surplus value which is to be capitalised. Therefore, the realisation of the surplus value for the purposes of accumulation is an impossible task for a society which consists solely of workers and capitalists. Strangely enough, all theorists who analysed the problem of accumulation, from Ricardo and Sismondi to Marx, started with the very assumption which makes their problem insoluble. A sure instinct that realisation of the surplus value requires 'third persons', that is to say consumers other than the immediate agents of capitalist production (i.e. workers and capitalists) led to all kinds of subterfuges: 'unproductive consumption' as presented by Malthus in the person of the feudal landowner, by Vorontsov in militarism, by Struve in the 'liberal professions' and other hangers-on of the capitalist class; or else foreign trade is brought into play which proved a useful safety valve to all those who regarded accumulation with scepticism, from Sismondi to Nicolayon. Because of these insoluble difficulties, others like v. Kirchmann and Rodbertus tried to do without accumulation altogether, or, like Sismondi and his Russian 'populist' followers, stressed the need for at least putting the dampers on accumulation as much as possible. The salient feature of the problem of accumulation, and the vulnerable point of earlier attempts to solve it, has only been shown up by Marx's more profound analysis, his precise diagrammatic demonstration of the total reproductive process, and especially his inspired exposition of the problem of simple reproduction. Yet he could not supply immediately a finished solution either, partly because he broke off his analysis almost as soon as he had begun it, and partly because he was then preoccupied, as we have shown, with denouncing the analysis of Adam Smith and thus rather lost sight of the main problem. In fact, he made the solution even more difficult by assuming the capitalist mode of production to prevail universally. Nevertheless, a solution of the problem of accumulation, in harmony both with other parts of Marx's doctrine and with the historical experience and daily practice of capitalism, is implied in Marx's complete analysis of simple reproduction and his characterisation of the capitalist process as a whole which shows up its immanent contradictions and their development (in _Capital_, vol. iii). In the light of this, the deficiencies of the diagram can be corrected. All the relations being, as it were, incomplete, a closer study of the diagram of enlarged reproduction will reveal that it points to some sort of organisation more advanced than purely capitalist production and accumulation. Up to now we have only considered one aspect of enlarged reproduction, the problem of realising the surplus value, whose difficulties hitherto had claimed the sceptics' whole attention. Realisation of the surplus value is doubtless a vital question of capitalist accumulation. It requires as its prime condition--ignoring, for simplicity's sake, the capitalists' fund of consumption altogether--that there should be strata of buyers outside capitalist society. Buyers, it should be noted, not consumers, since the material form of the surplus value is quite irrelevant to its realisation. The decisive fact is that the surplus value cannot be realised by sale either to workers or to capitalists, but only if it is sold to such social organisations or strata whose own mode of production is not capitalistic. Here we can conceive of two different cases: (1) Capitalist production supplies consumer goods over and above its own requirements, the demand of its workers and capitalists, which are bought by non-capitalist strata and countries. The English cotton industry, for instance, during the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, and to some extent even now, has been supplying cotton textiles to the peasants and petty-bourgeois townspeople of the European continent, and to the peasants of India, America, Africa and so on. The enormous expansion of the English cotton industry was thus founded on consumption by non-capitalist strata and countries.[347] In England herself, this flourishing cotton industry called forth large-scale development in the production of industrial machinery (bobbins and weaving-looms), and further in the metal and coal industries and so on. In this instance, Department II realised its products to an increasing extent by sale to non-capitalist social strata, and by its own accumulation it created on its part an increasing demand for the home produce of Department I, thus helping the latter to realise its surplus value and to increase its own accumulation. (2) Conversely, capitalist production supplies means of production in excess of its own demand and finds buyers in non-capitalist countries. English industry, for instance, in the first half of the nineteenth century supplied materials for the construction of railroads in the American and Australian states. (The building of railways cannot in itself be taken as evidence for the domination of capitalist production in a country. As a matter of fact, the railways in this case provided only one of the first conditions for the inauguration of capitalist production.) Another example would be the German chemical industry which supplies means of production such as dyes in great quantities to Asiatic, African and other countries whose own production is not capitalistic.[348] Here Department I realises its products in extra-capitalist circles. The resulting progressive expansion of Department I gives rise to a corresponding expansion of Department II in the same (capitalistically producing) country in order to supply the means of subsistence for the growing army of workers in Department I. Each of these cases differs from Marx's diagram. In one case, the product of Department II exceeds the needs of both departments, measured by the variable capital and the consumed part of the surplus value. In the second case, the product of Department I exceeds the volume of constant capital in both departments, enlarged though it is for the purpose of expanding production. In both cases, the surplus value does not come into being in that natural form which would make its capitalisation in either department possible and necessary. These two prototypes continually overlap in real life, supplement each other and merge. In this contest, one point seems still obscure. The surplus of consumer goods, say cotton fabrics, which is sold to non-capitalist countries, does not exclusively represent surplus value, but, as a capitalist commodity, it embodies also constant and variable capital. It seems quite arbitrary to assume that just those commodities which are sold outside the capitalist strata of society should represent nothing but surplus value. On the other hand, Department I clearly can in this case not only realise its surplus value but also accumulate, and that without requiring another market for its product than the two departments of capitalist production. Yet both these objections are only apparent. All we need remember is that each component of the aggregate product represents a proportion of the total value, that under conditions of capitalist production not only the aggregate product but every single commodity contains surplus value; which consideration does not prevent the individual capitalist, however, from computing that the sale of his specific commodities must first reimburse him for his outlay on constant capital and secondly replace his variable capital (or, rather loosely, but in accordance with actual practice: it must first replace his fixed, and then his circulating capital); what then remains will go down as profit. Similarly, we can divide the aggregate social product into three proportionate parts which, in terms of value, correspond to (1) the constant capital that has been used up in society, (2) the variable capital, and (3) the extracted surplus value. In the case of simple reproduction these proportions are also reflected in the material shape of the aggregate product: the constant capital materialises as means of production, the variable capital as means of subsistence for the workers, and the surplus value as means of subsistence for the capitalist. Yet as we know, the concept of simple reproduction with consumption of the entire surplus value by the capitalists is a mere fiction. As for enlarged reproduction or accumulation, in Marx's diagram the composition of the social product in terms of value is also strictly in proportion to its material form: the surplus value, or rather that part of it which is earmarked for capitalisation, has from the very beginning the form of material means of production and means of subsistence for the workers in a ratio appropriate to the expansion of production on a given technical basis. As we have seen, this conception, which is based upon the self-sufficiency and isolation of capitalist production, falls down as soon as we consider the realisation of the surplus value. If we assume, however, that the surplus value is realised outside the sphere of capitalist production, then its material form is independent of the requirements of capitalist production itself. Its material form conforms to the requirements of those non-capitalist circles who help to realise it, that is to say, capitalist surplus value can take the form of consumer goods, e.g. cotton fabrics, or of means of production, e.g. materials for railway construction, as the case may be. If one department realises its surplus value by exporting its products, and with the ensuing expansion of production helps the other department to realise its surplus value on the home market, then the fact still remains that the _social_ surplus value must yet be taken as realised outside the two departments, either mediately or immediately. Similar considerations enable the individual capitalist to realise his surplus value, even if the whole of his commodities can only replace either the variable or the constant capital of another capitalist. Nor is the realisation of the surplus value the only vital aspect of reproduction. Given that Department I has disposed of its surplus value outside, thereby starting the process of accumulation, and further, that it can expect a new increase in the demand in non-capitalist circles, these two conditions add up to only half of what is required for accumulation. There is many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip. The second requirement of accumulation is access to material elements necessary for expanding reproduction. Seeing that we have just turned the surplus product of Department I into money by getting rid of the surplus means of production to non-capitalist circles, from where are these material elements then to come? The transaction which is the portal for realising the surplus value is also, as it were, a backdoor out of which flies all possibility of converting this realised surplus value into productive capital--one leads to the nether regions and the other to the deep sea. Let us take a closer look. Here we use _c_ in both Departments I and II as if it were the entire constant capital in production. Yet this we know is wrong. Only for the sake of simplifying the diagram have we disregarded that the _c_ which figures in Departments I and II of the diagram is only part of the aggregate constant capital of society, that is to say that part which, circulating during one year, is used up and embodied in the products of one period of production. Yet it would be perfectly absurd if capitalist production--or any other--would use up its entire constant capital and create it anew in every period of production. On the contrary, we assume that the whole mass of means of production, for the periodical total renewal of which the diagram provides in annual instalments--renewal of the used-up part--lies at the back of production as presented in the diagram. With progressing labour productivity and an expanding volume of production, this mass increases not only absolutely but also relatively to the part which is consumed in production in every case, together with a corresponding increase in the efficiency of the constant capital. It is the more intensive exploitation of this part of the constant capital, irrespective of its increase in value, which is of paramount importance for the expansion of production. 'In the extractive industries, mines, etc., the raw materials form no part of the capital advanced. The subject of labour is in this case not a product of previous labour, but is furnished by Nature gratis, as in the case of metals, minerals, coal, stone, etc. In these cases the constant capital consists almost exclusively of instruments of labour, which can very well absorb an increased quantity of labour (day and night shifts of labourers, e.g.). All other things being equal, the mass and value of the product will rise in direct proportion to the labour expended. As on the first day of production, the original produce-formers, now turned into the creators of the material elements of capital--man and Nature--still work together. Thanks to the elasticity of labour-power, the domain of accumulation has extended without any previous enlargement of constant capital.--In agriculture the land under cultivation cannot be increased without the advance of more seed and manure. But this advance once made, the purely mechanical working of the soil itself produces a marvellous effect on the amount of the product. A greater quantity of labour, done by the same number of labourers as before, thus increases the fertility, without requiring any new advance in the instruments of labour. It is once again the direct action of man on Nature which becomes an immediate source of greater accumulation, without the intervention of any new capital. Finally, in what is called manufacturing industry, every additional expenditure of labour presupposes a corresponding additional expenditure of raw materials, but not necessarily of instruments of labour. And as extractive industry and agriculture supply manufacturing industry with its raw materials and those of its instruments of labour, the additional product the former have created without additional advance of capital, tells also in favour of the latter.--General result: by incorporating with itself the two primary creators of wealth, labour-power and the land, capital acquires a power of expansion that permits it to augment the elements of its accumulation beyond the limits apparently fixed by its own magnitude, or by the value and the mass of the means of production, already produced, in which it has its being.'[349] In addition, there is no obvious reason why means of production and consumer goods should be produced by capitalist methods alone. This assumption, for all Marx used it as the corner-stone of his thesis, is in conformity neither with the daily practice, and the history, of capital, nor with the specific character of this mode of production. In the first half of the nineteenth century, a great part of the surplus value in England was produced in form of cotton fabrics. Yet the material elements for the capitalisation of this surplus value, although they certainly represented a surplus product, still were by no means all capitalist surplus value, to mention only raw cotton from the slave states of the American Union, or grain (a means of subsistence for the English workers) from the fields of serf-owning Russia. How much capitalist accumulation depends upon means of production which are not produced by capitalist methods is shown for example by the cotton crisis in England during the American War of Secession, when the cultivation of the plantations came to a standstill, or by the crisis of European linen-weaving during the war in the East, when flax could not be imported from serf-owning Russia. We need only recall that imports of corn raised by peasants--i.e. not produced by capitalist methods--played a vital part in the feeding of industrial labour, as an element, that is to say, of variable capital, for a further illustration of the close ties between non-capitalist strata and the material elements necessary to the accumulation of capital. Moreover, capitalist production, by its very nature, cannot be restricted to such means of production as are produced by capitalist methods. Cheap elements of constant capital are essential to the individual capitalist who strives to increase his rate of profit. In addition, the very condition of continuous improvements in labour productivity as the most important method of increasing the rate of surplus value, is unrestricted utilisation of all substances and facilities afforded by nature and soil. To tolerate any restriction in this respect would be contrary to the very essence of capital, its whole mode of existence. After many centuries of development, the capitalist mode of production still constitutes only a fragment of total world production. Even in the small Continent of Europe, where it now chiefly prevails, it has not yet succeeded in dominating entire branches of production, such as peasant agriculture and the independent handicrafts; the same holds true, further, for large parts of North America and for a number of regions in the other continents. In general, capitalist production has hitherto been confined mainly to the countries in the temperate zone, whilst it made comparatively little progress in the East, for instance, and the South. Thus, if it were dependent exclusively on elements of production obtainable within such narrow limits, its present level and indeed its development in general would have been impossible. From the very beginning, the forms and laws of capitalist production aim to comprise the entire globe as a store of productive forces. Capital, impelled to appropriate productive forces for purposes of exploitation, ransacks the whole world, it procures its means of production from all corners of the earth, seizing them, if necessary by force, from all levels of civilisation and from all forms of society. The problem of the material elements of capitalist accumulation, far from being solved by the material form of the surplus value that has been produced, takes on quite a different aspect. It becomes necessary for capital progressively to dispose ever more fully of the whole globe, to acquire an unlimited choice of means of production, with regard to both quality and quantity, so as to find productive employment for the surplus value it has realised. The process of accumulation, elastic and spasmodic as it is, requires inevitably free access to ever new areas of raw materials in case of need, both when imports from old sources fail or when social demand suddenly increases. When the War of Secession interfered with the import of American cotton, causing the notorious 'cotton famine' in the Lancashire district, new and immense cotton plantations sprang up in Egypt almost at once, as if by magic. Here it was Oriental despotism, combined with an ancient system of bondage, which had created a sphere of activity for European capital. Only capital with its technical resources can effect such a miraculous change in so short a time--but only on the pre-capitalist soil of more primitive social conditions can it develop the ascendancy necessary to achieve such miracles. Another example of the same kind is the enormous increase in the world consumption of rubber which at present (1912) necessitates a supply of latex to the value of £50,000,000 _per annum_. The economic basis for the production of raw materials is a primitive system of exploitation practised by European capital in the African colonies and in America, where the institutions of slavery and bondage are combined in various forms.[350] Between the production of surplus value, then, and the subsequent period of accumulation, two separate transactions take place--that of realising the surplus value, i.e. of converting it into pure value, and that of transforming this pure value into productive capital. They are both dealings between capitalist production and the surrounding non-capitalist world. From the aspect both of realising the surplus value and of procuring the material elements of constant capital, international trade is a prime necessity for the historical existence of capitalism--an international trade which under actual conditions is essentially an exchange between capitalistic and non-capitalistic modes of production. Hitherto we have considered accumulation solely with regard to surplus value and constant capital. The third element of accumulation is variable capital which increases with progressive accumulation. In Marx's diagram, the social product contains ever more means of subsistence for the workers as the material form proper to this variable capital. The variable capital, however, is not really the means of subsistence for the workers but is in fact living labour for whose reproduction these means of subsistence are necessary. One of the fundamental conditions of accumulation is therefore a supply of living labour which can be mobilised by capital to meet its demands. This supply can be increased under favourable conditions--but only up to a certain point--by longer hours and more intensive work. Both these methods of increasing the supply, however, do not enlarge the variable capital, or do so only to a small extent (e.g. payment for overtime). Moreover, they are confined to definite and rather narrow limits which they cannot exceed owing to both natural and social causes. The increasing growth of variable capital which accompanies accumulation must therefore become manifest in ever greater numbers of employed labour. Where can this additional labour be found? In his analysis of the accumulation of individual capital, Marx gives the following answer: 'Now in order to allow of these elements actually functioning as capital, the capitalist class requires additional labour. If the exploitation of the labourers already employed does not increase, either extensively or intensively, then additional labour-power must be found. For this the mechanism of capitalist production provides beforehand, by converting the working class into a class dependent on wages, a class whose ordinary wages suffice, not only for its maintenance, but for its increase. It is only necessary for capital to incorporate this additional labour-power, annually supplied by the working class in the shape of labourers of all ages, with the surplus means of production comprised in the annual produce, and the conversion of surplus-value into capital is complete.'[351] Thus the increase in the variable capital is directly and exclusively attributed to the natural physical increase of a working class already dominated by capital. This is in strict conformity with the diagram of enlarged reproduction which recognises only the social classes of capitalists and workers, and regards the capitalist mode of production as exclusive and absolute. On these assumptions, the natural increase of the working class is the only source of extending the labour supply commanded by capital. This view, however, is contrary to the laws governing the process of accumulation. The natural propagation of the workers and the requirements of accumulating capital are not correlative in respect of time or quantity. Marx himself has most brilliantly shown that natural propagation cannot keep up with the sudden expansive needs of capital. If natural propagation were the only foundation for the development of capital, accumulation, in its periodical swings from overstrain to exhaustion, could not continue, nor could the productive sphere expand by leaps and bounds, and accumulation itself would become impossible. The latter requires an unlimited freedom of movement in respect of the growth of variable capital equal to that which it enjoys with regard to the elements of constant capital--that is to say it must needs dispose over the supply of labour power without restriction. Marx considers that this can be achieved by an 'industrial reserve army of workers'. His diagram of simple reproduction admittedly does not recognise such an army, nor could it have room for it, since the natural propagation of the capitalist wage proletariat cannot provide an industrial reserve army. Labour for this army is recruited from social reservoirs outside the dominion of capital--it is drawn into the wage proletariat only if need arises. Only the existence of non-capitalist groups and countries can guarantee such a supply of additional labour power for capitalist production. Yet in his analysis of the industrial reserve army[352] Marx only allows for (_a_) the displacement of older workers by machinery, (_b_) an influx of rural workers into the towns in consequence of the ascendancy of capitalist production in agriculture, (_c_) occasional labour that has dropped out of industry, and (_d_) finally the lowest residue of relative over-population, the paupers. All these categories are cast off by the capitalist system of production in some form or other, they constitute a wage proletariat that is worn out and made redundant one way or another. Marx, obviously influenced by English conditions involving a high level of capitalist development, held that the rural workers who continually migrate to the towns belong to the wage proletariat, since they were formerly dominated by agricultural capital and now become subject to industrial capital. He ignores, however, the problem which is of paramount importance for conditions on the continent of Europe, namely the sources from which this urban and rural proletariat is recruited: the continual process by which the rural and urban middle strata become proletarian with the decay of peasant economy and of small artisan enterprises, the very process, that is to say, of incessant transition from non-capitalist to capitalist conditions of a labour power that is cast off by pre-capitalist, not capitalist, modes of production in their progressive breakdown and disintegration. Besides the decay of European peasants and artisans we must here also mention the disintegration of the most varied primitive forms of production and of social organisation in non-European countries. Since capitalist production can develop fully only with complete access to all territories and climes, it can no more confine itself to the natural resources and productive forces of the temperate zone than it can manage with white labour alone. Capital needs other races to exploit territories where the white man cannot work. It must be able to mobilise world labour power without restriction in order to utilise all productive forces of the globe--up to the limits imposed by a system of producing surplus value. This labour power, however, is in most cases rigidly bound by the traditional pre-capitalist organisation of production. It must first be 'set free' in order to be enrolled in the active army of capital. The emancipation of labour power from primitive social conditions and its absorption by the capitalist wage system is one of the indispensable historical bases of capitalism. For the first genuinely capitalist branch of production, the English cotton industry, not only the cotton of the Southern states of the American Union was essential, but also the millions of African Negroes who were shipped to America to provide the labour power for the plantations, and who later, as a free proletariat, were incorporated in the class of wage labourers in a capitalist system.[353] Obtaining the necessary labour power from non-capitalist societies, the so-called 'labour-problem', is ever more important for capital in the colonies. All possible methods of 'gentle compulsion' are applied to solving this problem, to transfer labour from former social systems to the command of capital. This endeavour leads to the most peculiar combinations between the modern wage system and primitive authority in the colonial countries.[354] This is a concrete example of the fact that capitalist production cannot manage without labour power from other social organisations. Admittedly, Marx dealt in detail with the process of appropriating non-capitalist means of production as well as with the transformation of the peasants into a capitalist proletariat. Chapter xxiv of _Capital_, vol. i, is devoted to describing the origin of the English proletariat, of the capitalistic agricultural tenant class and of industrial capital, with particular emphasis on the looting of colonial countries by European capital. Yet we must bear in mind that all this is treated solely with a view to so-called primitive accumulation. For Marx, these processes are incidental, illustrating merely the genesis of capital, its first appearance in the world; they are, as it were, travails by which the capitalist mode of production emerges from a feudal society. As soon as he comes to analyse the capitalist process of production and circulation, he reaffirms the universal and exclusive domination of capitalist production. Yet, as we have seen, capitalism in its full maturity also depends in all respects on non-capitalist strata and social organisations existing side by side with it. It is not merely a question of a market for the additional product, as Sismondi and the later critics and doubters of capitalist accumulation would have it. The interrelations of accumulating capital and non-capitalist forms of production extend over values as well as over material conditions, for constant capital, variable capital and surplus value alike. The non-capitalist mode of production is the given historical setting for this process. Since the accumulation of capital becomes impossible in all points without non-capitalist surroundings, we cannot gain a true picture of it by assuming the exclusive and absolute domination of the capitalist mode of production. Sismondi and his school, when they attributed their difficulties entirely to the problem of realising the surplus value, indeed revealed a proper sense for the conditions vital to accumulation. Yet the conditions for augmenting the material elements of constant and variable capital are quite a different matter from those which govern the realisation of surplus value. Capital needs the means of production and the labour power of the whole globe for untrammelled accumulation; it cannot manage without the natural resources and the labour power of all territories. Seeing that the overwhelming majority of resources and labour power is in fact still in the orbit of pre-capitalist production--this being the historical _milieu_ of accumulation--capital must go all out to obtain ascendancy over these territories and social organisations. There is no _a priori_ reason why rubber plantations, say, run on capitalist lines, such as have been laid out in India, might not serve the ends of capitalist production just as well. Yet if the countries of those branches of production are predominantly non-capitalist, capital will endeavour to establish domination over these countries and societies. And in fact, primitive conditions allow of a greater drive and of far more ruthless measures than could be tolerated under purely capitalist social conditions. It is quite different with the realisation of the surplus value. Here outside consumers _qua_ other-than-capitalist are really essential. Thus the immediate and vital conditions for capital and its accumulation is the existence of non-capitalist buyers of the surplus value, which is decisive to this extent for the problem of capitalist accumulation. Whatever the theoretical aspects, the accumulation of capital, as an historical process, depends in every respect upon non-capitalist social strata and forms of social organisation. The solution to this problem which for almost a century has been the bone of contention in economic theory thus lies between the two extremes of the petty-bourgeois scepticism preached by Sismondi, v. Kirchmann, Vorontsov and Nicolayon, who flatly denied accumulation, and the crude optimism advocated by Ricardo, Say and Tugan Baranovski who believed in capital's unlimited capacity for parthenogenesis, with the logical corollary of capitalism-in-perpetuity. The solution envisaged by Marx lies in the dialectical conflict that capitalism needs non-capitalist social organisations as the setting for its development, that it proceeds by assimilating the very conditions which alone can ensure its own existence. At this point we should revise the conceptions of internal and external markets which were so important in the controversy about accumulation. They are both vital to capitalist development and yet fundamentally different, though they must be conceived in terms of social economy rather than of political geography. In this light, the internal market is the capitalist market, production itself buying its own products and supplying its own elements of production. The external market is the non-capitalist social environment which absorbs the products of capitalism and supplies producer goods and labour power for capitalist production. Thus, from the point of view of economics, Germany and England traffic in commodities chiefly on an internal, capitalist market, whilst the give and take between German industry and German peasants is transacted on an external market as far as German capital is concerned. These concepts are strict and precise, as can be seen from the diagram of reproduction. Internal capitalist trade can at best realise only certain quantities of value contained in the social product: the constant capital that has been used up, the variable capital, and the consumed part of the surplus value. That part of the surplus value, however, which is earmarked for capitalisation, must be realised elsewhere. If capitalisation of surplus value is the real motive force and aim of production, it must yet proceed within the limits given by the renewal of constant and variable capital (and also of the consumed part of the surplus value). Further, with the international development of capitalism the capitalisation of surplus value becomes ever more urgent and precarious, and the substratum of constant and variable capital becomes an ever-growing mass--both absolutely and in relation to the surplus value. Hence the contradictory phenomena that the old capitalist countries provide ever larger markets for, and become increasingly dependent upon, one another, yet on the other hand compete ever more ruthlessly for trade relations with non-capitalist countries.[355] The conditions for the capitalisation of surplus value clash increasingly with the conditions for the renewal of the aggregate capital--a conflict which, incidentally, is merely a counterpart of the contradictions implied in the law of a declining profit rate. FOOTNOTES: [345] 'If capital and the productivity of labour advance and the standard of capitalist production in general is on a higher level of development, then there is a correspondingly greater mass of commodities passing through the market from production to individual and industrial consumption, greater certainty that each particular capital will find the conditions for its reproduction available in the market' (_Theorien_ ..., vol. ii, part 2, p. 251). [346] _Theorien_ ..., vol. ii, part 2, p. 250: _Akkumulation von Kapital und Krisen_. (The Accumulation of Capital and the Crises.) Marx's italics. [347] The following figures plainly show the importance of the cotton industry for English exports: In 1893, cotton exports to the amount of £64,000,000 made up 23 per cent, and iron and other metal exports not quite 17 per cent, of the total export of manufactured goods, amounting to £277,000,000 in all. In 1898, cotton exports to the amount of £65,000,000 made up 28 per cent, and metal exports 22 per cent, of the total export of manufactured goods, amounting to £233,400,000 in all. In comparison, the figures for the German Empire show the following result: In 1898, cotton exports to the amount of £11,595,000 made up 5·75 per cent of the total exports, amounting to £200,500,000. 5,250,000,000 yards of cotton bales were exported in 1898, 2,250,000,000 of them to India (E. Jaffé: _Die englische Baumwollindustrie und die Organisation des Exporthandels_. Schmoller's Jahrbücher, vol. xxiv, p. 1033). In 1908, British exports of cotton yarn alone amounted to £13,100,000 (_Statist. Jahrb. für das Deutsche Reich_, 1910). [348] One-fifth of German aniline dyes, and one-half of her indigo, goes to countries such as China, Japan, British India, Egypt, Asiatic Turkey, Brazil, and Mexico. [349] _Capital_, vol. i, pp. 615-16. [350] The English Blue Book on the practices of the Peruvian Amazon Company, Ltd., in Putumayo, has recently revealed that in the free republic of Peru and without the political form of colonial supremacy, international capital can, to all intents and purposes, enslave the natives, so that it may appropriate the means of production of the primitive countries by exploitation on the greatest scale. Since 1900, this company, financed by English and foreign capitalists, has thrown upon the London market approximately 4,000 tons of Putumayo rubber. During this time, 30,000 natives were killed and most of the 10,000 survivors were crippled by beatings. [351] _Capital_, vol. i, p. 594. Similarly in another passage: 'One part of the surplus value, of the surplus means of subsistence produced, must then be converted into variable capital for the purpose of purchasing new labour. This can only be done if the number of workers grows or if their working time is prolonged.... This, however, cannot be considered a ready measure for accumulation. The working population can increase if formerly unproductive workers are transformed into productive ones, or if parts of the population who previously performed no work, such as women, children and paupers, are drawn into the process of production. Here, however, we shall ignore this aspect. Lastly, the working population can increase through an absolute increase in population. If accumulation is to proceed steadily and continuously, it must be grounded in an absolute growth of the population, though this may decline in comparison with the capital employed. An expanding population appears as the basis of accumulation conceived as a steady process. An indispensable condition for this is an average wage which is adequate not only to the reproduction of the working population but permits its continual increase' (_Theorien über den Mehrwert_, vol. ii, part 2, in the chapter on 'Transformation of Revenue Into Capital' (_Verwandlung von Revenue in Kapital_), p. 243). [352] _Capital_, vol. i, pp. 642 ff. [353] A table published in the United States shortly before the War of Secession contained the following data about the value of the annual production of the Slave States and the number of slaves employed--for the greatest part on cotton plantations: _Year_ _Cotton: _Slaves_ Dollars_ 1800 5,200,000 893,041 1810 15,000,000 1,191,364 1820 26,300,000 1,543,688 1830 34,100,000 2,009,053 1840 74,600,000 2,487,255 1850 101,800,000 3,197,509 1851 137,300,000 3,200,000 (Simons, 'Class Struggles in American History'. Supplement to _Neue Zeit_ (_Klassenkämpfe in der Geschichte Amerikas._ _Ergänzungsheft der 'Neuen Zeit'_), Nr. 7, p. 39.) [354] Bryce, a former English Minister, describes a model pattern of such hybrid forms in the South African diamond mines: 'The most striking sight at Kimberley, and one unique in the world, is furnished by the two so-called "compounds" in which the natives who work in the mines are housed and confined. They are huge inclosures, unroofed, but covered with a wire netting to prevent anything from being thrown out of them over the walls, and with a subterranean entrance to the adjoining mine. The mine is worked on the system of three eight-hour shifts, so that the workman is never more than eight hours together underground. Round the interior of the wall are built sheds or huts in which the natives live and sleep when not working. A hospital is also provided within the inclosure, as well as a school where the work-people can spend their leisure in learning to read and write. No spirits are sold.... Every entrance is strictly guarded, and no visitors, white or native, are permitted, all supplies being obtained from the store within, kept by the company. The De Beers mine compound contained at the time of my visit 2,600 natives, belonging to a great variety of tribes, so that here one could see specimens of the different native types from Natal and Pondoland, in the south, to the shores of Lake Tanganyika in the far north. They come from every quarter, attracted by the high wages, usually eighteen to thirty shillings a week, and remain for three months or more, and occasionally even for longer periods.... In the vast oblong compound one sees Zulus from Natal, Fingos, Pondos, Tembus, Basutos, Bechuanas, Gungunhana's subjects from the Portuguese territories, some few Matabili and Makalaka; and plenty of Zambesi boys from the tribes on both sides of that great river, a living ethnological collection such as can be examined nowhere else in South Africa. Even Bushmen, or at least natives with some Bushman blood in them, are not wanting. They live peaceably together, and amuse themselves in their several ways during their leisure hours. Besides games of chance, we saw a game resembling "fox and geese" played with pebbles on a board; and music was being discoursed on two rude native instruments, the so-called "Kaffir piano" made of pieces of iron of unequal length fastened side by side in a frame, and a still ruder contrivance of hard bits of wood, also of unequal size, which when struck by a stick emit different notes, the first beginning of a tune. A very few were reading or writing letters, the rest busy with their cooking or talking to one another. Some tribes are incessant talkers, and in this strange mixing-pot of black men one may hear a dozen languages spoken as one passes from group to group' (James Bryce, _Impressions of South Africa_, London, 1897, pp. 242 ff.). After several months of work, the negro as a rule leaves the mine with the wages he has saved up. He returns to his tribe, buying a wife with his money, and lives again his traditional life. Cf. also in the same book the most lively description of the methods used in South Africa to solve the 'labour-problem'. Here we are told that the negroes are compelled to work in the mines and plantations of Kimberley, Witwatersrand, Natal, Matabeleland, by stripping them of all land and cattle, i.e. depriving them of their means of existence, by making them into proletarians and also demoralising them with alcohol. (Later, when they are already within the 'enclosure' of capital, spirits, to which they have just been accustomed, are strictly prohibited--the object of exploitation must be kept fit for use.) Finally, they are simply pressed into the wage system of capital by force, by imprisonment, and flogging. [355] The relations between Germany and England provide a typical example. _CHAPTER XXVII_ THE STRUGGLE AGAINST NATURAL ECONOMY Capitalism arises and develops historically amidst a non-capitalist society. In Western Europe it is found at first in a feudal environment from which it in fact sprang--the system of bondage in rural areas and the guild system in the towns--and later, after having swallowed up the feudal system, it exists mainly in an environment of peasants and artisans, that is to say in a system of simple commodity production both in agriculture and trade. European capitalism is further surrounded by vast territories of non-European civilisation ranging over all levels of development, from the primitive communist hordes of nomad herdsmen, hunters and gatherers to commodity production by peasants and artisans. This is the setting for the accumulation of capital. We must distinguish three phases: the struggle of capital against natural economy, the struggle against commodity economy, and the competitive struggle of capital on the international stage for the remaining conditions of accumulation. The existence and development of capitalism requires an environment of non-capitalist forms of production, but not every one of these forms will serve its ends. Capitalism needs non-capitalist social strata as a market for its surplus value, as a source of supply for its means of production and as a reservoir of labour power for its wage system. For all these purposes, forms of production based upon a natural economy are of no use to capital. In all social organisations where natural economy prevails, where there are primitive peasant communities with common ownership of the land, a feudal system of bondage or anything of this nature, economic organisation is essentially in response to the internal demand; and therefore there is no demand, or very little, for foreign goods, and also, as a rule, no surplus production, or at least no urgent need to dispose of surplus products. What is most important, however, is that, in any natural economy, production only goes on because both means of production and labour power are bound in one form or another. The communist peasant community no less than the feudal _corvée_ farm and similar institutions maintain their economic organisation by subjecting the labour power, and the most important means of production, the land, to the rule of law and custom. A natural economy thus confronts the requirements of capitalism at every turn with rigid barriers. Capitalism must therefore always and everywhere fight a battle of annihilation against every historical form of natural economy that it encounters, whether this is slave economy, feudalism, primitive communism, or patriarchal peasant economy. The principal methods in this struggle are political force (revolution, war), oppressive taxation by the state, and cheap goods; they are partly applied simultaneously, and partly they succeed and complement one another. In Europe, force assumed revolutionary forms in the fight against feudalism (this is the ultimate explanation of the bourgeois revolutions in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries); in the non-European countries, where it fights more primitive social organisations, it assumes the forms of colonial policy. These methods, together with the systems of taxation applied in such cases, and commercial relations also, particularly with primitive communities, form an alliance in which political power and economic factors go hand in hand. In detail, capital in its struggle against societies with a natural economy pursues the following ends: (1) To gain immediate possession of important sources of productive forces such as land, game in primeval forests, minerals, precious stones and ores, products of exotic flora such as rubber, etc. (2) To 'liberate' labour power and to coerce it into service. (3) To introduce a commodity economy. (4) To separate trade and agriculture. At the time of primitive accumulation, i.e. at the end of the Middle Ages, when the history of capitalism in Europe began, and right into the nineteenth century, dispossessing the peasants in England and on the Continent was the most striking weapon in the large-scale transformation of means of production and labour power into capital. Yet capital in power performs the same task even to-day, and on an even more important scale--by modern colonial policy. It is an illusion to hope that capitalism will ever be content with the means of production which it can acquire by way of commodity exchange. In this respect already, capital is faced with difficulties because vast tracts of the globe's surface are in the possession of social organisations that have no desire for commodity exchange or cannot, because of the entire social structure and the forms of ownership, offer for sale the productive forces in which capital is primarily interested. The most important of these productive forces is of course the land, its hidden mineral treasure, and its meadows, woods and water, and further the flocks of the primitive shepherd tribes. If capital were here to rely on the process of slow internal disintegration, it might take centuries. To wait patiently until the most important means of production could be alienated by trading in consequence of this process were tantamount to renouncing the productive forces of those territories altogether. Hence derives the vital necessity for capitalism in its relations with colonial countries to appropriate the most important means of production. Since the primitive associations of the natives are the strongest protection for their social organisations and for their material bases of existence, capital must begin by planning for the systematic destruction and annihilation of all the non-capitalist social units which obstruct its development. With that we have passed beyond the stage of primitive accumulation; this process is still going on. Each new colonial expansion is accompanied, as a matter of course, by a relentless battle of capital against the social and economic ties of the natives, who are also forcibly robbed of their means of production and labour power. Any hope to restrict the accumulation of capital exclusively to 'peaceful competition', i.e. to regular commodity exchange such as takes place between capitalist producer-countries, rests on the pious belief that capital can accumulate without mediation of the productive forces and without the demand of more primitive organisations, and that it can rely upon the slow internal process of a disintegrating natural economy. Accumulation, with its spasmodic expansion, can no more wait for, and be content with, a natural internal disintegration of non-capitalist formations and their transition to commodity economy, than it can wait for, and be content with, the natural increase of the working population. Force is the only solution open to capital; the accumulation of capital, seen as an historical process, employs force as a permanent weapon, not only at its genesis, but further on down to the present day. From the point of view of the primitive societies involved, it is a matter of life or death; for them there can be no other attitude than opposition and fight to the finish--complete exhaustion and extinction. Hence permanent occupation of the colonies by the military, native risings and punitive expeditions are the order of the day for any colonial regime. The method of violence, then, is the immediate consequence of the clash between capitalism and the organisations of a natural economy which would restrict accumulation. Their means of production and their labour power no less than their demand for surplus products is necessary to capitalism. Yet the latter is fully determined to undermine their independence as social units, in order to gain possession of their means of production and labour power and to convert them into commodity buyers. This method is the most profitable and gets the quickest results, and so it is also the most expedient for capital. In fact, it is invariably accompanied by a growing militarism whose importance for accumulation will be demonstrated below in another connection. British policy in India and French policy in Algeria are the classical examples of the application of these methods by capitalism. The ancient economic organisations of the Indians--the communist village community--had been preserved in their various forms throughout thousands of years, in spite of all the political disturbances during their long history. In the sixth century B.C. the Persians invaded the Indus basin and subjected part of the country. Two centuries later the Greeks entered and left behind them colonies, founded by Alexander on the pattern of a completely alien civilisation. Then the savage Scythians invaded the country, and for centuries India remained under Arab rule. Later, the Afghans swooped down from the Iran mountains, until they, too, were expelled by the ruthless onslaught of Tartar hordes. The Mongols' path was marked by terror and destruction, by the massacre of entire villages--the peaceful countryside with the tender shoots of rice made crimson with blood. And still the Indian village community survived. For none of the successive Mahometan conquerors had ultimately violated the internal social life of the peasant masses and its traditional structure. They only set up their own governors in the provinces to supervise military organisation and to collect taxes from the population. All conquerors pursued the aim of dominating and exploiting the country, but none was interested in robbing the people of their productive forces and in destroying their social organisation. In the Moghul Empire, the peasant had to pay his annual tribute in kind to the foreign ruler, but he could live undisturbed in his village and could cultivate his rice on his _sholgura_ as his father had done before him. Then came the British--and the blight of capitalist civilisation succeeded in disrupting the entire social organisation of the people; it achieved in a short time what thousands of years, what the sword of the Nogaians, had failed to accomplish. The ultimate purpose of British capital was to possess itself of the very basis of existence of the Indian community: the land. This end was served above all by the fiction, always popular with European colonisers, that all the land of a colony belongs to the political ruler. In retrospect, the British endowed the Moghul and his governors with private ownership of the whole of India, in order to 'legalise' their succession. Economic experts of the highest repute, such as James Mill, duly supported this fiction with 'scientific' arguments, so in particular with the famous conclusion given below.[356] As early as 1793, the British in Bengal gave landed property to all the _zemindars_ (Mahometan tax collectors) or hereditary market superintendents they had found in their district so as to win native support for the campaign against the peasant masses. Later they adopted the same policy for their new conquests in the Agram province, in Oudh, and in the Central Provinces. Turbulent peasant risings followed in their wake, in the course of which tax collectors were frequently driven out. In the resulting confusion and anarchy British capitalists successfully appropriated a considerable portion of the land. The burden of taxation, moreover, was so ruthlessly increased that it swallowed up nearly all the fruits of the people's labour. This went to such an extreme in the Delhi and Allahabad districts that, according to the official evidence of the British tax authorities in 1854, the peasants found it convenient to lease or pledge their shares in land for the bare amount of the tax levied. Under the auspices of this taxation, usury came to the Indian village, to stay and eat up the social organisation from within like a canker.[357] In order to accelerate this process, the British passed a law that flew in the face of every tradition and justice known to the village community: compulsory alienation of village land for tax arrears. In vain did the old family associations try to protect themselves by options on their hereditary land and that of their kindred. There was no stopping the rot. Every day another plot of land fell under the hammer; individual members withdrew from the family unit, and the peasants got into debt and lost their land. The British, with their wonted colonial stratagems, tried to make it appear as if their power policy, which had in fact undermined the traditional forms of landownership and brought about the collapse of the Hindu peasant economy, had been dictated by the need to protect the peasants against native oppression and exploitation and served to safeguard their own interests.[358] Britain artificially created a landed aristocracy at the expense of the ancient property-rights of the peasant communities, and then proceeded to 'protect' the peasants against these alleged oppressors, and to bring this illegally usurped land into the possession of British capitalists. Thus large estates developed in India in a short time, while over large areas the peasants in their masses were turned into impoverished small tenants with a short-term lease. Lastly, one more striking fact shows the typically capitalist method of colonisation. The British were the first conquerors of India who showed gross indifference to public utilities. Arabs, Afghans and Mongols had organised and maintained magnificent works of canalisation in India, they had given the country a network of roads, spanned the rivers with bridges and seen to the sinking of wells. Timur or Tamerlane, the founder of the Mongol dynasty in India, had a care for the cultivation of the soil, for irrigation, for the safety of the roads and the provision of food for travellers.[359] The primitive Indian Rajahs, the Afghan or Mongol conquerors, at any rate, in spite of occasional cruelty against individuals, made their mark with the marvellous constructions we can find to-day at every step and which seem to be the work of a giant race. 'The (East India) Company which ruled India until 1858 did not make one spring accessible, did not sink a single well, nor build a bridge for the benefit of the Indians.'[360] Another witness, the Englishman James Wilson, says: 'In the Madras Province, no-one can help being impressed by the magnificent ancient irrigation systems, traces of which have been preserved until our time. Locks and weirs dam the rivers into great lakes, from which canals distribute the water for an area of 60 or 70 miles around. On the large rivers, there are 30 to 40 of such weirs.... The rain water from the mountains was collected in artificial ponds, many of which still remain and boast circumferences of between 15 and 25 miles. Nearly all these gigantic constructions were completed before the year 1750. During the war between the Company and the Mongol rulers--and, be it said, _during the entire period of our rule in India_--they have sadly decayed.'[361] No wonder! British capital had no object in giving the Indian communities economic support or helping them to survive. Quite the reverse, it aimed to destroy them and to deprive them of their productive forces. The unbridled greed, the acquisitive instinct of accumulation must by its very nature take every advantage of the 'conditions of the market' and can have no thought for the morrow. It is incapable of seeing far enough to recognise the value of the economic monuments of an older civilisation. (Recently British engineers in Egypt feverishly tried to discover traces of an ancient irrigation system rather like the one a stupid lack of vision had allowed to decay in India, when they were charged with damming the Nile on a grand scale in furtherance of capitalist enterprise.) Not until 1867 was England able to appreciate the results of her noble efforts in this respect. In the terrible famine of that year a million people were killed in the Orissa district alone; and Parliament was shocked into investigating the causes of the emergency. The British government has now introduced administrative measures in an attempt to save the peasant from usury. The Punjab Alienation Act of 1900 made it illegal to sell or mortgage peasant lands to persons other than of the peasant caste, though exceptions can be made in individual cases, subject to the tax collector's approval.[362] Having deliberately disrupted the protecting ties of the ancient Hindu social associations, after having nurtured a system of usury where nothing is thought of a 15 per cent charge of interest, the British now entrust the ruined Indian peasant to the tender care of the Exchequer and its officials, under the 'protection', that is to say, of those draining him of his livelihood. Next to tormented British India, Algeria under French rule claims pride of place in the annals of capitalist colonisation. When the French conquered Algeria, ancient social and economic institutions prevailed among the Arab-Kabyle population. These had been preserved until the nineteenth century, and in spite of the long and turbulent history of the country they survive in part even to the present day. Private property may have existed no doubt in the towns, among the Moors and Jews, among merchants, artisans and usurers. Large rural areas may have been seized by the State under Turkish suzerainty--yet nearly half of the productive land is jointly held by Arab and Kabyle tribes who still keep up the ancient patriarchal customs. Many Arab families led the same kind of nomad life in the nineteenth century as they had done since time immemorial, an existence that appears restless and irregular only to the superficial observer, but one that is in fact strictly regulated and extremely monotonous. In summer they were wont, man, woman and child, to take their herds and tents and migrate to the sea-swept shores of the Tell district; and in the winter they would move back again to the protective warmth of the desert. They travelled along definite routes, and the summer and winter stations were fixed for every tribe and family. The fields of those Arabs who had settled on the land were in most cases the joint property of the clans, and the great Kabyle family associations also lived according to old traditional rules under the patriarchal guidance of their elected heads. The women would take turns for household duties; a matriarch, again elected by the family, being in complete charge of the clan's domestic affairs, or else the women taking turns of duty. This organisation of the Kabyle clans on the fringe of the African desert bears a startling resemblance to that of the famous Southern Slavonic _Zadruga_--not only the fields but all the tools, weapons and monies, all that the members acquire or need for their work, are communal property of the clan. Personal property is confined to one suit of clothing, and in the case of a woman to the dresses and ornaments of her dowry. More valuable attire and jewels, however, are considered common property, and individuals were allowed to use them only if the whole family approved. If the clan was not too numerous, meals were taken at a common table; the women took it in turns to cook, but the eldest were entrusted with the dishing out. If a family circle was too large, the head of the family would each month ration out strictly proportionate quantities of uncooked food to the individual families who then prepared them. These communities were bound together by close ties of kinship, mutual assistance and equality, and a patriarch would implore his sons on his deathbed to remain faithful to the family.[363] These social relations were already seriously impaired by the rule of the Turks, established in Algeria in the sixteenth century. Yet the Turkish exchequer had by no means confiscated all the land. That is a legend invented by the French at a much later date. Indeed, only a European mind is capable of such a flight of fancy which is contrary to the entire economic foundation of Islam both in theory and practice. In truth, the facts were quite different. The Turks did not touch the communal fields of the village communities. They merely confiscated a great part of uncultivated land from the clans and converted it into crownland under Turkish local administrators (_Beyliks_). The state worked these lands in part with native labour, and in part they were leased out on rent or against payment in kind. Further the Turks took advantage of every revolt of the subjected families and of every disturbance in the country to add to their possessions by large-scale confiscation of land, either for military establishments or for public auction, when most of it went to Turkish or other usurers. To escape from the burden of taxation and confiscation, many peasants placed themselves under the protection of the Church, just as they had done in medieval Germany. Hence considerable areas became Church-property. All these changes finally resulted in the following distribution of Algerian land at the time of the French conquest: crownlands occupied nearly 3,750,000 acres, and a further 7,500,000 acres of uncultivated land as common property of All the Faithful (_Bled-el-Islam_). 7,500,000 acres had been privately owned by the Berbers since Roman times, and under Turkish rule a further 3,750,000 acres had come into private ownership, a mere 12,500,000 acres remaining communal property of individual Arab clans. In the Sahara, some of the 7,500,000 acres fertile land near the Sahara Oases was communally owned by the clans and some belonged to private owners. The remaining 57,000,000 acres were mainly waste land. With their conquest of Algeria, the French made a great ado about their work of civilisation, since the country, having shaken off the Turkish yoke at the beginning of the eighteenth century, was harbouring the pirates who infested the Mediterranean and trafficked in Christian slaves. Spain and the North American Union in particular, themselves at that time slave traders on no mean scale, declared relentless war on this Moslem iniquity. France, in the very throes of the Great Revolution, proclaimed a crusade against Algerian anarchy. Her subjection of that country was carried through under the slogans of 'combating slavery' and 'instituting orderly and civilised conditions'. Yet practice was soon to show what was at the bottom of it all. It is common knowledge that in the forty years following the subjection of Algeria, no European state suffered so many changes in its political system as France: the restoration of the monarchy was followed by the July Revolution and the reign of the 'Citizen King', and this was succeeded by the February Revolution, the Second Republic, the Second Empire, and finally, after the disaster of 1870, by the Third Republic. In turn, the aristocracy, high finance, petty bourgeoisie and the large middle classes in general gained political ascendancy. Yet French policy in Algeria remained undeflected by this succession of events; it pursued a single aim from beginning to end; at the fringe of the African desert, it demonstrated plainly that all the political revolutions in nineteenth-century France centred in a single basic interest: the rule of a capitalist bourgeoisie and its institutions of ownership. 'The bill submitted for your consideration', said Deputy Humbert on June 30, 1873, in the Session of the French National Assembly as spokesman for the Commission for Regulating Agrarian Conditions in Algeria, 'is but the crowning touch to an edifice well-founded on a whole series of ordinances, edicts, laws and decrees of the Senate which together and severally have as the same object: the establishment of private property among the Arabs.' In spite of the ups and downs of internal French politics French colonial policy persevered for fifty years in its systematic and deliberate efforts to destroy and disrupt communal property. It served two distinct purposes: The break-up of communal property was primarily intended to smash the social power of the Arab family associations and to quell their stubborn resistance against the French yoke, in the course of which there were innumerable risings so that, in spite of France's military superiority, the country was in a continual state of war.[364] Secondly, communal property had to be disrupted in order to gain the economic assets of the conquered country; the Arabs, that is to say, had to be deprived of the land they had owned for a thousand years, so that French capitalists could get it. Once again the fiction we know so well, that under Moslem law all land belongs to the ruler, was brought into play. Just as the English had done in British India, so Louis Philippe's governors in Algeria declared the existence of communal property owned by the clan to be 'impossible'. This fiction served as an excuse to claim for the state most of the uncultivated areas, and especially the commons, woods and meadows, and to use them for purposes of colonisation. A complete system of settlement developed, the so-called _cantonments_ which settled French colonists on the clan land and herded the tribes into a small area. Under the decrees of 1830, 1831, 1840, 1844, 1845 and 1846 these thefts of Arab family land were legalised. Yet this system of settlement did not actually further colonisation; it only bred wild speculation and usury. In most instances the Arabs managed to buy back the land that had been taken from them, although they were thus incurring heavy debts. French methods of oppressive taxation had the same tendency, in particular the law of June 16, 1851, proclaiming all forests to be state property, which robbed the natives of 6,000,000 acres of pasture and brushwood, and took away the prime essential for animal husbandry. This spate of laws, ordinances and regulations wrought havoc with the ownership of land in the country. Under the prevailing condition of feverish speculation in land, many natives sold their estates to the French in the hope of ultimately recovering them. Quite often they sold the same plot to two or three buyers at a time, and what is more, it was quite often inalienable family land and did not even belong to them. A company of speculators from Rouen, e.g., believed that they had bought 50,000 acres, but in fact they had only acquired a disputed title to 3,425 acres. There followed an infinite number of lawsuits in which the French courts supported on principle all partitions and claims of the buyers. In these uncertain conditions, speculation, usury and anarchy were rife. But although the introduction of French colonists in large numbers among the Arab population had aimed at securing support for the French government, this scheme failed miserably. Thus, under the Second Empire, French policy tried another tack. The government, with its European lack of vision, had stubbornly denied the existence of communal property for thirty years, but it had learned better at last. By a single stroke of the pen, joint family property was officially recognised and condemned to be broken up. This is the double significance of the decree of the Senate dated April 22, 1864. General Allard declared in the Senate: 'The government does not lose sight of the fact that the general aim of its policy is to weaken the influence of the tribal chieftains and to dissolve the family associations. By this means, it will sweep away the last remnants of feudalism [_sic!_] defended by the opponents of the government bill.... The surest method of accelerating the process of dissolving the family associations will be to institute private property and to settle European colonists among the Arab families.'[365] The law of 1863 created special Commissions for cutting up the landed estates, consisting of the Chairman, either a Brigadier-General or Colonel, one _sous-préfet_, one representative of the Arab military authorities and an official bailiff. These natural experts on African economics and social conditions were faced with the threefold task, first of determining the precise boundaries of the great family estates, secondly to distribute the estates of each clan among its various branches, and finally to break up this family land into separate private allotments. This expedition of the Brigadiers into the interior of Africa duly took place. The Commissions proceeded to their destinations. They were to combine the office of judge in all land disputes with that of surveyor and land distributor, the final decision resting with the Governor-General of Algeria. Ten years' valiant efforts by the Commissions yielded the following result: between 1863 and 1873, of 700 hereditary estates, 400 were shared out among the branches of each clan, and the foundations for future inequalities between great landed estates and small allotments were thus laid. One family, in fact, might receive between 2·5 and 10 acres, while another might get as much as 250 or even 450 acres, depending on the size of the estate and the number of collaterals within the clan. Partition, however, stopped at that point. Arab customs presented unsurmountable difficulties to a further division of family land. In spite of Colonels and Brigadiers, French policy had again failed in its object to create private property for transfer to the French. But the Third Republic, an undisguised regime of the bourgeoisie, had the courage and the cynicism to go straight for its goal and to attack the problem from the other end, disdaining the preliminaries of the Second Empire. In 1873, the National Assembly worked out a law with the avowed intention immediately to split up the entire estates of all the 700 Arab clans, and forcibly to institute private property in the shortest possible time. Desperate conditions in the colony were the pretext for this measure. It had taken the great Indian famine of 1866 to awaken the British public to the marvellous exploits of British colonial policy and to call for a parliamentary investigation; and similarly, Europe was alarmed at the end of the sixties by the crying needs of Algeria where more than forty years of French rule culminated in wide-spread famine and a disastrous mortality rate among the Arabs. A commission of inquiry was set up to recommend new legislation with which to bless the Arabs: it was unanimously resolved that there was only one life-buoy for them--the institution of private property; that alone could save the Arab from destitution, since he would then always be able to sell or mortgage his land. It was decided therefore, that the only means of alleviating the distress of the Arabs, deeply involved in debts as they were because of the French land robberies and oppressive taxation, was to deliver them completely into the hands of the usurers. This farce was expounded in all seriousness before the National Assembly and was accepted with equal gravity by that worthy body. The 'victors' of the Paris Commune flaunted their brazenness. In the National Assembly, two arguments in particular served to support the new law: those in favour of the bill emphasised over and over again that the Arabs themselves urgently desired the introduction of private property. And so they did, or rather the Algerian land speculators and usurers did, since they were vitally interested in 'liberating' their victims from the protection of the family ties. As long as Moslem law prevailed in Algeria, hereditary clan and family lands were inalienable, which laid insuperable difficulties in the way of anyone who wished to mortgage his land. The law of 1863 had merely made a breach in these obstacles, and the issue now at stake was their complete abolition so as to give a free hand to the usurers. The second argument was 'scientific', part of the same intellectual equipment from which that worthy, James Mill, had drawn for his abstruse conclusions regarding Indian relations of ownership: English classical economics. Thoroughly versed in their masters' teachings, the disciples of Smith and Ricardo impressively declaimed that private property is indispensable for the prevention of famines in Algeria, for more intensive and better cultivation of the land, since obviously no one would be prepared to invest capital or intensive labour in a piece of land which does not belong to him and whose produce is not his own to enjoy. But the facts spoke a different language. They proved that the French speculators employed the private property they had created in Algeria for anything but the more intensive and improved cultivation of the soil. In 1873, 1,000,000 acres were French property. But the capitalist companies, the Algerian and Setif Company which owned 300,000 acres, did not cultivate the land at all but leased it to the natives who tilled it in the traditional manner, nor were 25 per cent of the other French owners engaged in agriculture. It was simply impossible to conjure up capitalist investments and intensive agriculture overnight, just as capitalist conditions in general could not be created out of nothing. They existed only in the imagination of profit-seeking French speculators, and in the benighted doctrinaire visions of their scientific economists. The essential point, shorn of all pretexts and flourishes which seem to justify the law of 1873, was simply the desire to deprive the Arabs of their land, their livelihood. And although these arguments had worn threadbare and were evidently insincere, this law which was to put paid to the Algerian population and their material prosperity, was passed unanimously on July 26, 1873. But even this master-stroke soon proved a failure. The policy of the Third Republic miscarried because of the difficulties in substituting at one stroke bourgeois private property for the ancient clan communism, just as the policy of the Second Empire had come to grief over the same issue. In 1890, when the law of July 26, 1873, supplemented by a second law on April 28, 1887, had been in force for seventeen years, 14,000,000 francs had been spent on dealing with 40,000,000 acres. It was estimated that the process would not be completed before 1950 and would require a further 60,000,000 francs. And still abolition of clan communism, the ultimate purpose, had not been accomplished. What had really been attained was all too evident: reckless speculation in land, thriving usury and the economic ruin of the natives. Since it had been impossible to institute private property by force, a new experiment was undertaken. The laws of 1873 and 1887 had been condemned by a commission appointed for their revision by the Algerian government in 1890. It was another seven years before the legislators on the Seine made the effort to consider reforms for the ruined country. The new decree of the Senate refrained in principle from instituting private property by compulsion or administrative measures. The laws of February 2, 1897, and the edict of the Governor-General of Algeria (March 3, 1898) both provided chiefly for the introduction of private property following a voluntary application by the prospective purchaser or owner.[366] But there were clauses to permit a single owner, without the consent of the others, to claim private property; further, such a 'voluntary' application can be extorted at any convenient moment if the owner is in debt and the usurer exerts pressure. And so the new law left the doors wide open for French and native capitalists further to disrupt and exploit the hereditary and clan lands. Of recent years, this mutilation of Algeria which had been going on for eight decades meets with even less opposition, since the Arabs, surrounded as they are by French capital following the subjection of Tunisia (1881) and the recent conquest of Morocco, have been rendered more and more helpless. The latest result of the French regime in Algeria is an Arab exodus into Turkey.[367] FOOTNOTES: [356] Mill, in his _History of British India_, substantiates the thesis that under primitive conditions the land belongs always and everywhere to the sovereign, on evidence collected at random and quite indiscriminately from the most varied sources (Mungo Park, Herodotus, Volney, Acosta, Garcilasso de la Vega, Abbé Grosier, Barrow, Diodorus, Strabo and others). Applying this thesis to India, he goes on to say: 'From these facts only one conclusion can be drawn, that the property of the soil resided in the sovereign; for if it did not reside in him, it will be impossible to show to whom it belonged' (James Mill, _History of British India_ (4th edition, 1840), vol. i, p. 311). Mill's editor, H. H. Wilson who, as Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford University, was thoroughly versed in the legal relations of Ancient India, gives an interesting commentary to this classical deduction. Already in his preface he characterises the author as a partisan who has juggled with the whole history of British India in order to justify the theories of Mr. Bentham and who, with this end, has used the most dubious means for his portrait of the Hindus which in no way resembles the original and almost outrages humanity. He appends the following footnote to our quotation: 'The greater part of the text and of the notes here is wholly irrelevant. The illustrations drawn from the Mahometan practice, supposing them to be correct, have nothing to do with the laws and rights of the Hindus. They are not, however, even accurate and Mr. Mill's guides have misled him.' Wilson then contests outright the theory of the sovereign's right of ownership in land, especially with reference to India. (Ibid., p. 305, footnote.) Henry Maine, too, is of the opinion that the British attempted to derive their claim to Indian land from the Mahometans in the first place, and he recognises this claim to be completely unjustified. 'The assumption which the English first made was one which they inherited from their Mahometan predecessors. It was that all the soil belonged in absolute property to the sovereign,--and that all private property in land existed by his sufferance. The Mahometan theory and the corresponding Mahometan practice had put out of sight the ancient view of the sovereign's rights which, though it assigned to him a far larger share of the produce of the land than any Western ruler has ever claimed, yet in nowise denied the existence of private property in land' (_Village Communities in the East and West_ (5th edition, vol. 2, 1890), p. 104). Maxim Kovalevski, on the other hand, has proved thoroughly that this alleged 'Mahometan theory and practice' is an exclusively British legend. (Cf. his excellent study, written in Russian, _On the Causes, the Development and the Consequences of the Disintegration of Communal Ownership of Land_ (Moscow, 1879), part i.) Incidentally, British experts and their French colleagues at the time of writing maintain an analogous legend about China, for example, asserting that all the land there had been the Emperor's property. (Cf. the refutation of this legend by Dr. O. Franke, _Die Rechtsverhältnisse am Grundeigentum in China_, 1903.) [357] 'The partitions of inheritances and execution for debt levied on land are destroying the communities--this is the formula heard nowadays everywhere in India' (Henry Maine, op. cit., p. 113). [358] This view of British colonial policy, expounded e.g. by Lord Roberts of Kandahar (for many years a representative of British power in India) is typical. He can give no other explanation for the Sepoy Mutiny than mere 'misunderstandings' of the paternal intentions of the British rulers. '... the alleged unfairness of what was known in India as the land settlement, under which system the right and title of each landholder to his property was examined, and the amount of revenue to be paid by him to the paramount Power, as owner of the soil, was regulated ... as peace and order were established, the system of land revenue, which had been enforced in an extremely oppressive and corrupt manner under successive Native Rulers and dynasties, had to be investigated and revised. With this object in view, surveys were made, and inquiries instituted into the rights of ownership and occupancy, the result being that in many cases it was found that families of position and influence had either appropriated the property of their humbler neighbours, or evaded an assessment proportionate to the value of their estates. Although these inquiries were carried out with the best intentions, they were extremely distasteful to the higher classes, while they failed to conciliate the masses. The ruling families deeply resented our endeavours to introduce an equitable determination of rights and assessment of land revenue.... On the other hand, although the agricultural population greatly benefited by our rule, they could not realise the benevolent intentions of a Government which tried to elevate their position and improve their prospects' (_Forty One Years in India_, London, 1901, p. 233). [359] In his _Maxims on Government_ (translated from the Persian into English in 1783), Timur says: 'And I commanded that they should build places of worship, and monasteries in every city; and that they should erect structures for the reception of travellers on the high roads, and that they should make bridges across the rivers. 'And I commanded that the ruined bridges should be repaired; and that bridges should be constructed over the rivulets, and over the rivers; and that on the roads, at the distance of one stage from each other, Kauruwansarai should be erected; and that guards and watchmen should be stationed on the road, and that in every Kauruwansarai people should be appointed to reside.... 'And I ordained, whoever undertook the cultivation of waste lands, or built an aqueduct, or made a canal, or planted a grove, or restored to culture a deserted district, that in the first year nothing should be taken from him, and that in the second year, whatever the subject voluntarily offered should be received, and that in the third year, duties should be collected according to the regulation' (James Mill, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 493, 498). [360] Count Warren, _De l'État moral de la population indigène_. Quoted by Kovalevski, op. cit., p. 164. [361] _Historical and Descriptive Account of British India_ from the most remote period to the conclusion of the Afghan war by Hugh Murray, James Wilson, Greville, Professor Jameson, William Wallace and Captain Dalrymple (Edinburgh, 4th edition, 1843), vol. ii, p. 427. Quoted by Kovalevski, op. cit. [362] Victor v. Leyden, _Agrarverfassung und Grundsteuer in Britisch Ostindien. Jahrb. f. Ges., Verw. u. Volksw._, vol. xxxvi, no. 4, p. 1855. [363] 'When dying, the father of the family nearly always advises his children to live in unity, according to the example of their elders. This is his last exhortation, his dearest wish' (A. Hanotaux et A. Letournaux, _La Kabylie et les Coûtumes Kabyles_, vol. ii, 1873, 'Droit Civil', pp. 468-73). The authors, by the way, appraised this impressive description of communism in the clan with this peculiar sentence: 'Within the industrious fold of the family association, all are united in a common purpose, all work for the general interest--but no one gives up his freedom or renounces his hereditary rights. In no other nation does the organisation approach so closely to equality, being yet so far removed from communism.' [364] 'We must lose no time in dissolving the family associations, since they are the lever of all opposition against our rule' (Deputy Didier in the National Assembly of 1851). [365] Quoted by Kovalevski, op. cit., p. 217. Since the Great Revolution, of course, it had become the fashion in France to dub all opposition to the government an open or covert defence of feudalism. [366] G. Anton, _Neuere Agrarpolitik in Algerien und Tunesien. Jahrb. f. Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft_ (1900), pp. 1341 ff. [367] On June 20, 1912, M. Albin Rozet, on behalf of the Commission for the Reform of the 'Indigenat' (Administrative Justice) in Algeria, stated in his speech to the French Chamber of Deputies that thousands of Algerians were migrating from the Setif district, and that 1,200 natives had emigrated from Tlemcen during the last year, their destination being Syria. One immigrant wrote from his new home: 'I have now settled in Damascus and am perfectly happy. There are many Algerians here in Syria who, like me, have emigrated. The government has given us land and facilities to cultivate it.' The Algerian government combats this exodus--by denying passports to prospective emigrants. (Cf. _Journal Officiel_, June 21, 1912, pp. 1594 ff.) _CHAPTER XXVIII_ THE INTRODUCTION OF COMMODITY ECONOMY The second condition of importance for acquiring means of production and realising the surplus value is that commodity exchange and commodity economy should be introduced in societies based on natural economy as soon as their independence has been abrogated, or rather in the course of this disruptive process. Capital requires to buy the products of, and sell its commodities to, all non-capitalist strata and societies. Here at last we seem to find the beginnings of that 'peace' and 'equality', the _do ut des_, mutual interest, 'peaceful competition' and the 'influences of civilisation'. For capital can indeed deprive alien social associations of their means of production by force, it can compel the workers to submit to capitalist exploitation, but it cannot force them to buy its commodities or to realise its surplus value. In districts where natural economy formerly prevailed, the introduction of means of transport--railways, navigation, canals--is vital for the spreading of commodity economy, a further hopeful sign. The triumphant march of commodity economy thus begins in most cases with magnificent constructions of modern transport, such as railway lines which cross primeval forests and tunnel through the mountains, telegraph wires which bridge the deserts, and ocean liners which call at the most outlying ports. But it is a mere illusion that these are peaceful changes. Under the standard of commerce, the relations between the East India Company and the spice-producing countries were quite as piratical, extortionate and blatantly fraudulent as present-day relations between American capitalists and the Red Indians of Canada whose furs they buy, or between German merchants and the Negroes of Africa. Modern China presents a classical example of the 'gentle', 'peace-loving' practices of commodity exchange with backward countries. Throughout the nineteenth century, beginning with the early forties, her history has been punctuated by wars with the object of opening her up to trade by brute force. Missionaries provoked persecutions of Christians, Europeans instigated risings, and in periodical massacres a completely helpless and peaceful agrarian population was forced to match arms with the most modern capitalist military technique of all the Great Powers of Europe. Heavy war contributions necessitated a public debt, China taking up European loans, resulting in European control over her finances and occupation of her fortifications; the opening of free ports was enforced, railway concessions to European capitalists extorted. By all these measures commodity exchange was fostered in China, from the early thirties of the last century until the beginning of the Chinese revolution. European civilisation, that is to say commodity exchange with European capital, made its first impact on China with the Opium Wars when she was compelled to buy the drug from Indian plantations in order to make money for British capitalists. In the seventeenth century, the East India Company had introduced the cultivation of poppies in Bengal; the use of the drug was disseminated in China by its Canton branch. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, opium fell so considerably in price that it rapidly became the 'luxury of the people'. In 1821, 4,628 chests of opium were imported to China at an average price of £265; then the price fell by 50 per cent, and Chinese imports rose to 9,621 chests in 1825, and to 26,670 chests in 1830.[368] The deadly effects of the drug, especially of the cheaper kinds used by the poorer population, became a public calamity and made it necessary for China to lay an embargo on imports, as an emergency measure. Already in 1828, the viceroy of Canton had prohibited imports of opium, only to deflect the trade to other ports. One of the Peking censors commanded to investigate the question gave the following report: 'I have learnt that people who smoke opium have developed such a craving for this noxious drug that they make every effort to obtain this gratification. If they do not get their opium at the usual hour, their limbs begin to tremble, they break out in sweat, and they cannot perform the slightest tasks. But as soon as they are given the pipe, they inhale a few puffs and are cured immediately. 'Opium has therefore become a necessity for all who smoke it, and it is not surprising that under cross-examination by the local authorities they will submit to every punishment rather than reveal the names of their suppliers. Local authorities are also in some cases given presents to tolerate the evil or to delay any investigation already under way. Most merchants who bring goods for sale into Canton also deal in smuggled opium. 'I am of the opinion that opium is by far a greater evil than gambling, and that opium smokers should therefore be punished no less than gamblers.' The censor suggested that every convicted opium smoker should be sentenced to eighty strokes of the bamboo, and anybody refusing to give the name of his supplier to a hundred strokes and three years of exile. The pigtailed Cato of Peking concludes his report with a frankness staggering to any European official: 'Apparently opium is mostly introduced from abroad by dishonest officials in connivance with profit-seeking merchants who transport it into the interior of the country. Then the first to indulge are people of good family, wealthy private persons and merchants, but ultimately the drug habit spreads among the common people. I have learnt that in all provinces opium is smoked not only in the civil service but also in the army. The officials of the various districts indeed enjoin the legal prohibition of sale by special edicts. But at the same time, their parents, families, dependants and servants simply go on smoking opium, and the merchants profit from the ban by increased prices. Even the police have been won over; they buy the stuff instead of helping to suppress it, and this is an additional reason for the disregard in which all prohibitions and ordinances are held.'[369] Consequently, a stricter law was passed in 1833 which made every opium smoker liable to a hundred strokes and two months in the stocks, and provincial governors were ordered to report annually on their progress in the battle against opium. But there were two sequels to this campaign: on the one hand large-scale poppy plantations sprang up in the interior, particularly in the Honan, Setchuan, and Kueitchan provinces, and on the other, England declared war on China to get her to lift the embargo. These were the splendid beginnings of 'opening China' to European civilisation--by the opium pipe. Canton was the first objective. The fortifications of the town at the main arm of the Perl estuary could not have been more primitive. Every day at sunset a barrier of iron chains was attached to wooden rafts anchored at various distances, and this was the main defence. Moreover, the Chinese guns could only fire at a certain angle and were therefore completely ineffectual. With such primitive defences, just adequate to prevent a few merchant ships from landing, did the Chinese meet the British attack. A couple of British cruisers, then, sufficed to effect an entry on September 7, 1839. The sixteen battle-junks and thirteen fire-ships which the Chinese put up for resistance were shot up or dispersed in a matter of forty-five minutes. After this initial victory, the British renewed the attack in the beginning of 1841 with a considerably reinforced fleet. This time the fleet, consisting in a number of battle-junks, and the forts were attacked simultaneously. The first incendiary rocket that was fired penetrated through the armour casing of a junk into the powder chamber and blew the ship with the entire crew sky-high. In a short time eleven junks, including the flag-ship, were destroyed, and the remainder precipitately made for safety. The action on land took a little longer. Since the Chinese guns were quite useless, the British walked right through the fortifications, climbed to a strategic position--which was not even guarded--and proceeded to slaughter the helpless Chinese from above. The casualty list of the battle was: for the Chinese 600 dead, and for the British, 1 dead and 30 wounded, more than half of the latter having been injured by the accidental explosion of a powder magazine. A few weeks later, there followed another British exploit. The forts of Anung-Hoy and North Wantong were to be taken. No less than twelve fully equipped cruisers were available for this task. What is more, the Chinese, once again forgetful of the most important thing, had omitted to fortify the island of South Wantong. Thus the British calmly landed a battery of howitzers to bombard the fort from one side, the cruisers shelling it from the other. After that, the Chinese were driven from the forts in a matter of minutes, and the landing met with no resistance. The ensuing display of inhumanity--an English report says--will be for ever deeply deplored by the British staff. The Chinese, trying to escape from the barricades, had fallen into a moat which was soon literally filled to the brim with helpless soldiers begging for mercy. Into this mass of prostrate human bodies, the sepoys--acting against orders, it is claimed--fired again and again. This is the way in which Canton was made receptive to commodity exchange. Nor did the other ports fare better. On July 4, 1841, three British cruisers with 120 cannon appeared off the islands in the entrance to the town of Ningpo. More cruisers arrived the following day. In the evening the British admiral sent a message to the Chinese governor, demanding the capitulation of the island. The governor explained that he had no power to resist but could not surrender without orders from Peking. He therefore asked for a delay. This was refused, and at half-past two in the morning the British stormed the defenceless island. Within eight minutes, the fort and the houses on the shore were reduced to smouldering rubble. Having landed on the deserted coast littered with broken spears, sabres, shields, rifles and a few dead bodies, the troops advanced on the walls of the island town of Tinghai. With daybreak, reinforced by the crews of other ships which had meanwhile arrived, they proceeded to put scaling-ladders to the scarcely defended ramparts. A few more minutes gave them mastery of the town. This splendid victory was announced with becoming modesty in an Order of the Day: 'Fate has decreed that the morning of July 5, 1841, should be the historic date on which Her Majesty's flag was first raised over the most beautiful island of the Celestial Empire, the first European flag to fly triumphantly above this lovely countryside.'[370] On August 25, 1841, the British approached the town of Amoy, whose forts were armed with a hundred of the heaviest Chinese guns. These guns being almost useless, and the commanders lacking in resource, the capture of the harbour was child's play. Under cover of a heavy barrage, British ships drew near the walls of Kulangau, landed their marines, and after a short stand the Chinese troops were driven out. The twenty-six battle-junks with 128 guns in the harbour were also captured, their crews having fled. One battery, manned by Tartars, heroically held out against the combined fire of three British ships, but a British landing was effected in their rear and the post wiped out. This was the finale of the notorious Opium War. By the peace treaty of August 27, 1842, the island of Hongkong was ceded to Britain. In addition, the towns of Canton, Amoy, Futchou, Ningpo and Shanghai were to open their ports to foreign commerce. But within fifteen years, there was a further war against China. This time, Britain had joined forces with the French. In 1857, the allied navies captured Canton with a heroism equal to that of the first war. By the peace of Tientsin (1858), the opium traffic, European commerce and Christian missions were admitted into the interior. Already in 1859, however, the British resumed hostilities and attempted to destroy the Chinese fortifications on the Peiho river, but were driven off after a fierce battle in which 464 people were wounded or killed.[371] After that, Britain and France again joined forces. At the end of August 1860, 12,600 English and 7,500 French troops under General Cousin-Montauban first captured the Taku forts without a single shot having been fired. Then they proceeded towards Tientsin and on towards Peking. A bloody battle was joined at Palikao, and Peking fell to the European Powers. Entering the almost depopulated and completely undefended city, the victors began by pillaging the Imperial Palace, manfully helped by General Cousin himself, who was later to become field marshal and Count of Palikao. Then the Palace went up in flames, fired on Lord Elgin's order as an imposed penance.[372] The European Powers now obtained concessions to set up embassies in Peking, and to start trading with Tientsin and other towns. The Tchi-fu Convention of 1876 guaranteed full facilities for importing opium into China--at a time when the Anti-Opium League in England agitated against the spreading of the drug habit in London, Manchester and other industrial districts, when a parliamentary commission declared the consumption of opium to be harmful in the extreme. By all treaties made at that time between China and the Great Powers any European, whether merchant or missionary, was guaranteed the right to acquire land, to which end the legitimate arguments were ably supported by deliberate fraud. First and foremost the ambiguity of the treaty texts made a convenient excuse for European capital to encroach beyond the Treaty Ports. It used every loophole in the wording of the treaties to begin with, and subsequently blackmailed the Chinese government into permitting the missions to acquire land not alone in the Treaty Ports but in all the provinces of the realm. Their claim was based upon the notorious bare-faced distortion of the Chinese original in Abbé Delamarre's official translation of the supplementary convention with France. French diplomacy, and the Protestant missions in particular, unanimously condemned the crafty swindle of the Catholic padre, but nevertheless they were firm that the rights of French missions obtained by this fraud should be explicitly extended to the Protestant missions as well.[373] China's entry into commodity exchange, having begun with the Opium Wars, was finally accomplished with a series of 'leases' and the China campaign of 1900, when the commercial interests of European capital sank to a brazen international dogfight over Chinese land. The description of the Dowager Empress, who wrote to Queen Victoria after the capture of the Taku forts, subtly underlines this contrast between the initial theory and the ultimate practice of the 'agents of European civilisation': 'To your Majesty, greeting!--In all the dealings of England with the Empire of China, since first relations were established between us, there has never been any idea of territorial aggrandisement on the part of Great Britain, but only a keen desire to promote the interests of her trade. Reflecting upon the fact that our country is now plunged into a dreadful condition of warfare, we bear in mind that a large proportion of China's trade, seventy or eighty per cent, is done with England; moreover, your Customs duties are the lightest in the world, and few restrictions are made at your sea-ports in the matter of foreign importations; for these reasons our amiable relations with British merchants at our Treaty Ports have continued unbroken for the last half century, to our mutual benefit.--But a sudden change has now occurred and general suspicion has been created against us. We would therefore ask you now to consider that if, by any conceivable combination of circumstances, the independence of our Empire should be lost, and the Powers unite to carry out their long-plotted schemes to possess themselves of our territory'--(in a simultaneous message to the Emperor of Japan, the impulsive Tzu Hsi openly refers to 'The earth-hungry Powers of the West, whose tigerish eyes of greed are fixed in our direction'[374])--'the results to your country's interests would be disastrous and fatal to your trade. At this moment our Empire is striving to the utmost to raise an army and funds sufficient for its protection; in the meanwhile we rely on your good services to act as mediator, and now anxiously await your decision.'[375] Both during the wars and in the interim periods, European civilisation was busy looting and thieving on a grand scale in the Chinese Imperial Palaces, in the public buildings and in the monuments of ancient civilisation, not only in 1860, when the French pillaged the Emperor's Palace with its legendary treasures, or in 1900, 'when all the nations vied with each other to steal public and private property'. Every European advance was marked not only with the progress of commodity exchange, but by the smouldering ruins of the largest and most venerable towns, by the decay of agriculture over large rural areas, and by intolerably oppressive taxation for war contributions. There are more than 40 Chinese Treaty Ports--and every one of them has been paid for with streams of blood, with massacre and ruin. FOOTNOTES: [368] 77,379 chests were imported in 1854. Later, the imports somewhat declined, owing to increased home production. Nevertheless, China remained the chief buyer. India produced just under 6,400,000 tons of opium in 1873/4, of which 6,100,000 tons were sold to the Chinese. To-day [1912] India still exports 4,800,000 tons, value £7,500,000,000, almost exclusively to China and the Malay Archipelago. [369] Quoted by J. Scheibert, _Der Krieg in China_ (1903), vol. 2, p. 179. [370] Scheibert, op. cit., p. 207. [371] An Imperial Edict issued on the third day of the eighth moon in the tenth year of Hsien-Feng (6/9/1860) said amongst other things: 'We have never forbidden England and France to trade with China, and for long years there has been peace between them and us. But three years ago the English, for no good cause, invaded our city of Canton, and carried off our officials into captivity. We refrained at that time from taking any retaliatory measures, because we were compelled to recognise that the obstinacy of the Viceroy Yeh had been in some measure a cause of the hostilities. Two years ago, the barbarian Commander Elgin came north and we then commanded the Viceroy of Chihli, T'an Ting-hsiang, to look into matters preparatory to negotiations. But the barbarian took advantage of our unreadiness, attacking the Taku forts and pressing on to Tientsin. Being anxious to spare our people the horrors of war, we again refrained from retaliation and ordered Kuei Liang to discuss terms of peace. Notwithstanding the outrageous nature of the barbarians' demands we subsequently ordered Kuei Liang to proceed to Shanghai in connection with the proposed Treaty of Commerce and even permitted its ratification as earnest of our good faith. 'In spite of all this, the barbarian leader Bruce again displayed intractability of the most unreasonable kind, and once more appeared off Taku with a squadron of warships in the eighth Moon. Seng Ko Lin Ch'in thereupon attacked him fiercely and compelled him to make a rapid retreat. From all these facts it is clear that China has committed no breach of faith and that the barbarians have been in the wrong. During the present year the barbarian leaders Elgin and Gros have again appeared off our coasts, but China, unwilling to resort to extreme measures, agreed to their landing and permitted them to come to Peking for the ratification of the Treaty. 'Who could have believed that all this time the barbarians have been darkly plotting, and that they had brought with them an army of soldiers and artillery with which they attacked the Taku forts from the rear, and, having driven out our forces, advanced upon Tientsin!' (I. O. Bland and E. T. Blackhouse, _China under the Empress Dowager_ (London, 1910), pp. 24-5. Cf. also in this work the entire chapter, 'The Flight to Yehol'.) [372] These European exploits to make China receptive to commodity exchange, provide the setting for a charming episode of China's internal history: Straight from looting the Manchu Emperor's Summer Palace, the 'Gordon of China' went on a campaign against the rebels of Taiping. In 1863 he even took over command of the Imperial fighting forces. In fact, the suppression of the revolt was the work of the British army. But while a considerable number of Europeans, among them a French admiral, gave their lives to preserve China for the Manchu dynasty, the representatives of European commerce were eagerly grasping this opportunity to make capital out of these fights, supplying arms both to their own champions and to the rebels who went to war against them. 'Moreover, the worthy merchant was tempted, by the opportunity for making some money, to supply both armies with arms and munitions, and since the rebels had greater difficulties in obtaining supplies than the Emperor's men and were therefore compelled and prepared to pay higher prices, they were given priority and could thus resist not only the troops of their own government, but also those of England and France' (M. v. Brandt, _33 Jahre in Ostasien, 1911, vol. iii, China_, p. 11). [373] Dr. O. Franke, _Die Rechtsverhältnisse am Grundeigentum in China_ (Leipzig, 1903), p. 82. [374] Bland and Blackhouse, op. cit., p. 338. [375] Ibid., p. 337. _CHAPTER XXIX_ THE STRUGGLE AGAINST PEASANT ECONOMY An important final phase in the campaign against natural economy is to separate industry from agriculture, to eradicate rural industries altogether from peasant economy. Handicraft in its historical beginnings was a subsidiary occupation, a mere appendage to agriculture in civilised and settled societies. In medieval Europe it became gradually independent of the _corvée_ farm and agriculture, it developed into specialised occupations, i.e. production of commodities by urban guilds. In industrial districts, production had progressed from home craft by way of primitive manufacture to the capitalist factory of the staple industries, but in the rural areas, under peasant economy, home crafts persisted as an intrinsic part of agriculture. Every hour that could be spared from cultivating the soil was devoted to handicrafts which, as an auxiliary domestic industry, played an important part in providing for personal needs.[376] It is a recurrent phenomenon in the development of capitalist production that one branch of industry after the other is singled out, isolated from agriculture and concentrated in factories for mass production. The textile industry provides the textbook example, but the same thing has happened, though less obviously, in the case of other rural industries. Capital must get the peasants to buy its commodities and will therefore begin by restricting peasant economy to a single sphere--that of agriculture--which will not immediately and, under European conditions of ownership, only with great difficulty submit to capitalist domination.[377] To all outward appearance, this process is quite peaceful. It is scarcely noticeable and seemingly caused by purely economic factors. There can be no doubt that mass production in the factories is technically superior to primitive peasant industry, owing to a higher degree of specialisation, scientific analysis and management of the productive process, improved machinery and access to international resources of raw materials. In reality, however, the process of separating agriculture and industry is determined by factors such as oppressive taxation, war, or squandering and monopolisation of the nation's land, and thus belongs to the spheres of political power and criminal law no less than with economics. Nowhere has this process been brought to such perfection as in the United States. In the wake of the railways, financed by European and in particular British capital, the American farmer crossed the Union from East to West and in his progress over vast areas killed off the Red Indians with fire-arms and blood-hounds, liquor and venereal disease, pushing the survivors to the West, in order to appropriate the land they had 'vacated', to clear it and bring it under the plough. The American farmer, the 'backwoodsman' of the good old times before the War of Secession, was very different indeed from his modern counterpart. There was hardly anything he could not do, and he led a practically self-sufficient life on his isolated farm. In the beginning of the nineties, one of the leaders of the Farmers' Alliance, Senator Peffer, wrote as follows: 'The American farmer of to-day is altogether a different sort of man from his ancestor of fifty or a hundred years ago. A great many men and women now living remember when farmers were largely manufacturers; that is to say, they made a great many implements for their own use. Every farmer had an assortment of tools with which he made wooden implements, as forks and rakes, handles for his hoes and ploughs, spokes for his wagon, and various other implements made wholly out of wood. Then the farmer produced flax and hemp and wool and cotton. These fibres were prepared upon the farm; they were spun into yarn, woven into cloth, made into garments, and worn at home. Every farm had upon it a little shop for wood and iron work, and in the dwelling were cards and looms; carpets were woven, bed-clothing of different sorts was prepared; upon every farm geese were kept, their feathers used for supplying the home demand with beds and pillows, the surplus being disposed of at the nearest market town. During the winter season wheat and flour and corn meal were carried in large wagons drawn by teams of six to eight horses a hundred or two hundred miles to market, and traded for farm supplies for the next year--groceries and dry goods. Besides this, mechanics were scattered among the farmers. The farm wagon was in process of building a year or two; the material was found near the shop; the character of the timber to be used was stated in the contract; it had to be procured in a certain season and kept in the drying process a length of time specified, so that when the material was brought together in proper form and the wagon made, both parties to the contract knew where every stick of it came from, and how long it had been in seasoning. During winter time the neighbourhood carpenter prepared sashes and blinds and doors and moulding and cornices for the next season's building. When the frosts of autumn came the shoemaker repaired to the dwellings of the farmers and there, in a corner set apart to him, he made up shoes for the family during the winter. All these things were done among the farmers, and a large part of the expense was paid with products of the farm. When winter approached, the butchering season was at hand; meat for family use during the next year was prepared and preserved in the smoke house. The orchards supplied fruit for cider, for apple butter, and for preserves of different kinds, amply sufficient to supply the wants of the family during the year, with some to spare. Wheat was threshed, a little at a time, just enough to supply the needs of the family for ready money, and not enough to make it necessary to waste one stalk of straw. Everything was saved and put to use. One of the results of that sort of economy was that comparatively a very small amount of money was required to conduct the business of farming. A hundred dollars average probably was as much as the largest farmers of that day needed in the way of cash to meet the demands of their farm work, paying for hired help, repairs of tools, and all other incidental expenses.'[378] This Arcadian life was to come to a sudden end after the War of Secession. The war had burdened the Union with an enormous National Debt, amounting to £1,200,000, and in consequence the taxes were considerably increased. On the other hand, a feverish development of modern traffic and industry, machine-building in particular, was encouraged by the imposition of higher protective tariffs. The railway companies were endowed with public lands on an imposing scale, in order to promote railroad construction and farm-settlements: in 1867 alone, they were given more than 192,500,000 acres, and so the permanent way grew at an unprecedented rate. In 1860 it amounted to less than 31,000 miles, in 1870 it had grown to more than 53,000 miles and in 1880 to more than 93,000 miles. (During the same period--1870-1880--the permanent way in Europe had grown from 80,000 miles to 100,000 miles.) The railways and speculations in land made for mass emigration from Europe to the United States, and more than 4 1/2 million people immigrated in the twenty-three years from 1869 to 1892. In this way, the Union gradually became emancipated from European, and in particular from British, industry; factories were set up in the States and home industries developed for the production of textiles, iron, steel and machinery. The process of revolutionary transformation was most rapid in agriculture. The emancipation of the slaves had compelled the Southern planters to introduce the steam plough shortly after the Civil War, and new farms had sprung up in the West in the wake of the railways, which from the very beginning employed the most modern machinery and technique. 'The improvements are rapidly revolutionising the agriculture of the West, and reducing to the lowest minimum ever attained, the proportion of manual labour employed in its operations.... Coincident with this application of mechanics to agriculture, systematic and enlarged business aptitudes have also sought alliance with this noble art. Farms of thousands of acres have been managed with greater skill, a more economical adaptation of means to ends, and with a larger margin of real profit than many others of 80 acres.'[379] During this time, direct and indirect taxation had increased enormously. On June 30, 1864, during the Civil War, a new finance bill was passed which is the basis of the present system of taxation, and which raised taxes on consumption and income to a staggering degree. This heavy war levy served as a pretext for a real orgy of protective tariffs in order to offset the tax on home production by customs duties.[380] Messrs. Morrill, Stevens and the other gentlemen who advanced the war as a lever for enforcing their protectionist programme, initiated the practice of wielding the implement of a customs policy quite openly and cynically to further private profiteering interests of all descriptions. Any home producer who appeared before the legislative assembly with a request for any kind of special tariff to fill his own pocket saw his demands readily granted, and the tariff rates were made as high as any interested party might wish. 'The war', writes the American Taussig, 'had in many ways a bracing and ennobling influence on our national life; but its immediate effect on business affairs, and on all legislation affecting moneyed interests, was demoralising. The line between public duty and private interests was often lost sight of by legislators. Great fortunes were made by changes in legislation urged and brought about by those who were benefited by them, and the country has seen with sorrow that the honour and honesty of public men did not remain undefiled.'[381] This customs bill which completely revolutionised the country's economic life, and remained in force unchanged for twenty years, was literally pushed through Congress in three days, and through the Senate in two, without criticism, without debate, without any opposition whatever.[382] Down to the present day it forms the basis of U.S. customs legislation. This shift in U.S. fiscal policy ushered in an era of the most brazen parliamentary log-rolling and of undisguised and unrestrained corruption of elections, of the legislature and the press to satisfy the greed of Big Business. '_Enrichissez-vous_' became the catchword of public life after the 'noble war' to liberate mankind from the 'blot of slavery'. On the stock exchange, the Yankee negro-liberator sought his fortunes in orgies of speculation; in Congress, he endowed himself with public lands, enriched himself by customs and taxes, by monopolies, fraudulent shares and theft of public funds. Industry prospered. Gone were the times when the small or medium farmer required hardly any money, when he could thresh and turn into cash his wheat reserves as the need arose. Now he was chronically in need of money, a lot of money, to pay his taxes. Soon he was forced to sell all his produce and to buy his requirements from the manufacturers in the form of ready-made goods. As Peffer puts it: 'Coming from that time to the present, we find that everything nearly has been changed. All over the West particularly the farmer threshes his wheat all at one time, he disposes of it all at one time, and in a great many instances the straw is wasted. He sells his hogs, and buys bacon and pork; he sells his cattle, and buys fresh beef and canned beef or corned beef, as the case may be; he sells his fruit, and buys it back in cans. If he raises flax at all, instead of putting it into yarn and making gowns for his children, as he did fifty years or more ago, he threshes his flax, sells the seed, and burns the straw. Not more than one farmer in fifty now keeps sheep at all; he relies upon the large sheep farmer for the wool, which is put into cloth or clothing ready for his use. Instead of having clothing made up on the farm in his own house or by a neighbour woman or country tailor a mile away, he either purchases his clothing ready made at the nearest town, or he buys the cloth and has a city tailor make it up for him. Instead of making implements which he uses about the farm--forks, rakes, etc.--he goes to town to purchase even a handle for his axe or his mallet; he purchases twine and rope and all sorts of needed material made of fibres; he buys his cloth and his clothing; he buys his canned fruit and preserved fruit; he buys hams and shoulders and mess pork and mess beef; indeed, he buys nearly everything now that he produced at one time himself, and these things all cost money. Besides all this, and what seems stranger than anything else, whereas in the earlier time the American home was a free home, unencumbered, not one case in a thousand where a home was mortgaged to secure the payment of borrowed money, and whereas but a small amount of money was then needed for actual use in conducting the business of farming, there was always enough of it among the farmers to supply the demand. Now, when at least ten times as much is needed, there is little or none to be obtained, nearly half the farms are mortgaged for as much as they are worth, and interest rates are exorbitant. As to the cause of such wonderful changes ... the manufacturer came with his woollen mill, his carding mill, his broom factory, his rope factory, his wooden-ware factory, his cotton factory, his pork-packing establishment, his canning factory and fruit preserving houses; the little shop on the farm has given place to the large shop in town; the wagon-maker's shop in the neighbourhood has given way to the large establishment in the city where ... a hundred or two hundred wagons are made in a week; the shoemaker's shop has given way to large establishments in the cities where most of the work is done by machines.'[383] Finally, the agricultural labour of the farmer himself has become machine work: 'He ploughs and sows and reaps with machines. A machine cuts his wheat and puts it in a sheaf, and steam drives his threshers. He may read the morning paper while he ploughs and sit under an awning while he reaps.'[384] Sering estimated in the middle eighties that the necessary cash 'for a very modest beginning' of the smallest farm in the North West is £240 to £280.[385] This revolution of American agriculture after the 'Great War' was not the end. It was only the beginning of the whirlpool in which the farmer was caught. His history brings us automatically to the second phase of the development of capitalist accumulation of which it is an excellent illustration.--Natural economy, the production for personal needs and the close connection between industry and agriculture must be ousted and a simple commodity economy substituted for them. Capitalism needs the medium of commodity production for its development, as a market for its surplus value. But as soon as simple commodity production has superseded natural economy, capital must turn against it. No sooner has capital called it to life, than the two must compete for means of production, labour power, and markets. The first aim of capitalism is to isolate the producer, to sever the community ties which protect him, and the next task is to take the means of production away from the small manufacturer. In the American Union, as we have seen, the 'Great War' inaugurated an era of large-scale seizure of public lands by monopolist capitalist companies and individual speculators. Feverish railroad building and ever more speculation in railway shares led to a mad gamble in land, where individual soldiers of fortune and companies netted immense fortunes and even entire counties. In addition a veritable swarm of agents lured the vast flow of emigrants from Europe to the U.S.A. by blatant and unscrupulous advertising, deceptions and pretences of every description. These immigrants first settled in the Eastern States along the Atlantic seaboard, and, with the growth of industry in these states, agriculture was driven westward. The 'wheat centre' which had been near Columbus, Ohio, in 1850, in the course of the subsequent fifty years shifted to a position 99 miles further North and 680 miles further West. Whereas in 1850 51·4 per cent of the total wheat crop had been supplied by the Eastern States, in 1880 they produced only 13·6 per cent, 71·7 per cent being supplied by the Northern Central and 9 per cent by the Western States. In 1825, the Congress of the Union under Monroe had decided to transplant the Red Indians from the East to the West of the Mississippi. The redskins put up a desperate resistance; but all who survived the slaughter of forty Red Indian campaigns were swept away like so much rubbish and driven like cattle to the West to be folded in reservations like so many sheep. The Red Indian had been forced to make room for the farmer--and now the farmer in his turn was driven beyond the Mississippi to make way for capital. Following the railway tracks, the American farmer moved West and North-West into the land of promise which the great land speculators' agents had painted for him in glowing colours. Yet the most fertile and most favourably situated lands were retained by the companies who farmed them extensively on completely capitalistic lines. All around the farmer who had been exiled into the wilderness, a dangerous competitor and deadly enemy sprang up--the 'bonanza farms', the great capitalist agricultural concerns which neither the Old World nor the New had known before. Here surplus value was produced with the application of all the resources known to modern science and technology. 'As the foremost representative of financial agriculture we may consider Oliver Dalrymple, whose name is to-day known on both sides of the Atlantic. Since 1874 he has simultaneously managed a line of steamers on the Red River and six farms owned by a company of financiers and comprising some 75,000 acres. Each one is divided into departments of 2,000 acres, and every department is again subdivided into three sections of 667 acres which are run by foremen and gangleaders. Barracks to shelter 50 men and stable as many horses and mules, are built on each section, and similarly kitchens, machine sheds and workshops for blacksmiths and locksmiths. Each section is completely equipped with 20 pairs of horses, 8 double ploughs, 12 horse-drawn drill-ploughs, 12 steel-toothed harrows, 12 cutters and binders, 2 threshers and 16 wagons. Everything is done to ensure that the machines and the living labour (men, horses and mules) are in good condition and able to do the greatest possible amount of work. There is a telephone line connecting all sections and the central management. 'The six farms of 75,000 acres are cultivated by an army of 600 workers, organised on military lines. During the harvest, the management hires another 500 to 600 auxiliary workers, assigning them to the various sections. After the work is completed in the fall, the workers are dismissed with the exception of the foreman and 10 men per section. In some farms in Dakota and Minnesota, horses and mules do not spend the winter at the place of work. As soon as the stubble has been ploughed in, they are driven in teams of a hundred or two hundred pairs 900 miles to the South, to return only the following spring. 'Mechanics on horseback follow the ploughing, sowing and harvesting machines when they are at work. If anything goes wrong, they gallop to the machine in question, repair it and get it moving again without delay. The harvested corn is carried to the threshing machines which work day and night without interruption. They are stoked with bundles of straw fed into the stokehold through pipes of sheet-iron. The corn is threshed, winnowed, weighed and filled into sacks by machinery, then it is put into railway trucks which run alongside the farm, and goes to Duluth or Buffalo. Every year, Dalrymple increases his land under seed by 5,800 acres. In 1880 it amounted to 25,000 acres.[386] In the late seventies, there were already individual capitalists and companies who owned 35,000-45,000 acres of wheat land. Since the time of Lafargue's writing, extensive capitalist agriculture in America has made great strides in technique and the employment of machinery.[387] The American farmer could not successfully compete with such capitalist enterprises. At a time when the general revolution in the conditions of finance, production and transport compelled him to give up production for personal needs and to produce exclusively for the market, the great spreading of agriculture caused a heavy fall in the prices of agricultural products. And at the precise moment when farming became dependent on the market, the agricultural market of the Union was suddenly turned from a local one into a world market, and became a prey to the wild speculations of a few capitalist mammoth concerns. In 1879, a notable year for the history of agricultural conditions in Europe as well as in America, there began the mass export of wheat from the U.S.A. to Europe.[388] Big Business was of course the only one to profit from this expanding market. The small farmer was crushed by the competition of an increasing number of extensive farms and became the prey of speculators who bought up his corn to exert pressure on the world market. Helpless in the face of the immense capitalist powers, the farmer got into debt--a phenomenon typical for a declining peasant economy. In 1890, Secretary Rusk of the U.S. Department of Agriculture sent out a circular letter with reference to the desperate position of the farmers, saying: 'The burden of mortgages upon farms, homes, and land, is unquestionably discouraging in the extreme, and while in some cases no doubt this load may have been too readily assumed, still in the majority of cases the mortgage has been the result of necessity.... These mortgages ... drawing high rates of interest ... have to-day, in the face of continued depression of the prices of staple products, become very irksome, and in many cases threaten the farmer with loss of home and land. It is a question of grave difficulty to all those who seek to remedy the ills from which our farmers are suffering. At present prices the farmer finds that it takes more of his products to get a dollar wherewith to buy back the dollar which he borrowed than it did when he borrowed it. The interest accumulates, while the payment of the principal seems utterly hopeless, and the very depression which we are discussing makes the renewal of the mortgage most difficult.'[389] According to the census of May 29, 1891, 2·5 million farms were deep in debt; two-thirds of them were managed by the owners whose obligations amounted to nearly £440,000. 'The situation is this: farmers are passing through the "valley and shadow of death"; farming as a business is profitless; values of farm products have fallen 50 per cent since the great war, and farm values have depreciated 25 to 50 per cent during the last ten years; farmers are overwhelmed with debts secured by mortgages on their homes, unable in many instances to pay even the interest as it falls due, and unable to renew the loans because securities are weakening by reason of the general depression; many farmers are losing their homes under this dreadful blight, and the mortgage mill still grinds. We are in the hands of a merciless power; the people's homes are at stake.'[390] Encumbered with debts and close to ruin, the farmer had no option but to supplement his earnings by working for a wage, or else to abandon his farm altogether. Provided it had not yet fallen into the clutches of his creditors like so many thousands of farms, he could shake from off his feet the dust of the 'land of promise' that had become an inferno for him. In the middle eighties, abandoned and decaying farms could be seen everywhere. In 1887, Sering wrote: 'If the farmer cannot pay his debts to date, the interest he has to pay is increased to 12, 15 or even 20 per cent. He is pressed by the banker, the machine salesman and the grocer who rob him of the fruits of his hard work.... He can either remain on the farm as a tenant or move further West, to try his fortunes elsewhere. Nowhere in North America have I found so many indebted, disappointed and depressed farmers as in the wheat regions of the North Western prairies. I have not spoken to a single farmer in Dakota who would not have been prepared to sell his farm.[391] 'The Commissioner of Agriculture of Vermont in 1889 reported a wide-spread desertion of farm-lands of that state. He wrote: "... there appears to be no doubt about there being in this state large tracts of tillable unoccupied lands, which can be bought at a price approximating the price of Western lands, situated near school and church, and not far from railroad facilities. The Commissioner has not visited all of the counties in the State where these lands are reported, but he has visited enough to satisfy him that, while much of the unoccupied and formerly cultivated land is now practically worthless for cultivation, yet very much of it can be made to yield a liberal reward to intelligent labour."'[392] The Commissioner of the State of New Hampshire issued a pamphlet in 1890, devoting 67 pages to the description of farms for sale at the lowest figures. He describes 1442 farms with tenantable buildings, abandoned only recently. The same has happened in other districts. Thousands of acres once raising corn and wheat are left untilled and run to brush and wood. In order to resettle the deserted land, speculators engaged in advertising campaigns and attracted crowds of new immigrants--new victims who were to suffer their predecessors' fate even more speedily. A private letter says: 'In the neighbourhood of railroads and markets, there remains no common land. It is all in the hands of the speculators. A settler takes over vacant land and counts for a farmer; but the management of his farm hardly assures his livelihood, and he cannot possibly compete with the big farmer. He tills as much of his land as the law compels him to do, but to make a comfortable living, he must look for additional sources of income outside agriculture. In Oregon, for instance, I have met a settler who owned 160 acres for five years, but every summer, until the end of July, he worked twelve hours a day for a dollar a day at road-making. This man, of course, also counts as one of the five million farmers in the 1890 census. Again, in the County of Eldorado, I saw many farmers who cultivated their land only to feed their cattle and themselves. There would have been no profit in producing for the market, and their chief income derives from gold-digging, the felling and selling of timber, etc. These people are prosperous, but it is not agriculture which makes them so. Two years ago, we worked in Long Cañon, Eldorado County, living in a cabin on an allotment. The owner of this allotment came home only once a year for a couple of days, and worked the rest of the time on the railway in Sacramento. Some years ago, a small part of the allotment was cultivated, to comply with the law, but now it is left completely untilled. A few acres are fenced off with wire, and there is a log cabin and a shed. But during the last years all this stands empty; a neighbour has the key and he made us free of the hut. In the course of our journey, we saw many deserted allotments, where attempts at farming had been made. Three years ago I was offered a farm with dwelling house for a hundred dollars, but in a short time the unoccupied house collapsed under the snow. In Oregon, we saw many derelict farms with small dwelling houses and vegetable gardens. One we visited was beautifully made: a sturdy block house, fashioned by a master-builder, and some equipment; but the farmer had abandoned it all. You were welcome to take it all without charge.'[393] Where could the ruined American farmer turn? He set out on a pilgrimage to follow the wheat centre and the railways. The former had shifted in the main to Canada, the Saskatchewan and the Mackenzie River where wheat can still thrive on the 62nd parallel. A number of American farmers followed--and after some time in Canada, they suffered the old fate.[394] During recent years, Canada has entered the world market as a wheat-exporting country, but her agriculture is dominated to an even greater extent by big capital than elsewhere.[395] In Canada, public lands were lavished upon private capitalist companies on an even more monstrous scale than in the United States. Under the Charter of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company with its grant of land, private capital perpetrated an unprecedented act of robbing the public. Not only that the company was guaranteed a twenty years' monopoly of railway-building, not only that it got a building site of about 713 miles free of charge, not only that it got a 100 years' state guarantee of the 3 per cent interest on the share capital of £m. 20--to crown it all, the company was given the choice of 25 million acres out of the most fertile and favourably situated lands, not necessarily in the immediate vicinity of the permanent way, as a free gift. All future settlers on this vast area were thus at the mercy of railway capital from the very outset. The railway company, in its turn, immediately proceeded to sell off 5 million acres for ready cash to the North-West Land Company, an association of British capitalists under the chairmanship of the Duke of Manchester. The second group of capitalists which was liberally endowed with public lands was the Hudson Bay Company, which was given a title to no less than one-twentieth of all the lands between Lake Winnipeg, the U.S. border, the Rocky Mountains, and Northern Saskatchewan, for renouncing their privileges in the North-West. Between them, these two capitalist groups had gained possession of five-ninths of all the land that could be settled. A considerable part of the other lands was assigned by the State to 26 capitalist 'colonising companies'.[396] Thus the Canadian farmer was practically everywhere ensnared by capital and capitalist speculation. And still mass immigration continued--not only from Europe, but also from the United States! These are the characteristics of capitalist domination on an international scale. Having evicted the peasant from his soil, it drives him from England to the East of the United States, and from there to the West, and on the ruins of the Red Indians' economy it transforms him back into a small commodity producer. Then, when he is ruined once more, he is driven from the West to the North. With the railways in the van, and ruin in the rear--capital leads the way, its passage is marked with universal destruction. The great fall of prices in the nineties is again succeeded by higher prices for agricultural products, but this is of no more avail to the small American farmer than to the European peasant. Yet the numbers of farmers are constantly swelling. In the last decade of the nineteenth century they had grown from 4,600,000 to 5,700,000, and the following ten years still saw an absolute increase. The aggregate value of farms had during the same period risen from £150,240,000 to £330,360,000.[397] We might have expected the general increase in the price of farm produce to have helped the farmer to come into his own. But that is not so; we see that the growing numbers of tenant farmers outstrip the increase in the farming population as a whole. In 1880, the proportion of tenant farmers amounted to 25·5 per cent of the total number of farmers in the Union, in 1890 it was 28·4 per cent, in 1900 35·3 per cent, and in 1910 37·2 per cent. Though prices for farm produce were rising, the tenant farmer was more and more rapidly stepping into the shoes of the independent farmer. And although much more than one-third of all farmers in the Union are now tenant farmers, their social status in the United States is that of the agricultural labourer in Europe. Constantly fluctuating, they are indeed wage-slaves of capital; they work very hard to create wealth for capital, getting nothing in return but a miserable and precarious existence. In quite a different historical setting, in South Africa, the same process shows up even more clearly the 'peaceful methods' by which capital competes with the small commodity producer. In the Cape Colony and the Boer Republics, pure peasant economy prevailed until the sixties of the last century. For a long time the Boers had led the life of animal-tending nomads; they had killed off or driven out the Hottentots and Kaffirs with a will in order to deprive them of their most valuable pastures. In the eighteenth century they were given invaluable assistance by the plague, imported by ships of the East India Company, which frequently did away with entire Hottentot tribes whose lands then fell to the Dutch immigrants. When the Boers spread further East, they came in conflict with the Bantu tribes and initiated the long period of the terrible Kaffir wars. These god-fearing Dutchmen regarded themselves as the Chosen People and took no small pride in their old-fashioned Puritan morals and their intimate knowledge of the Old Testament; yet, not content with robbing the natives of their land, they built their peasant economy like parasites on the backs of the Negroes, compelling them to do slave-labour for them and corrupting and enervating them deliberately and systematically. Liquor played such an important part in this process, that the prohibition of spirits in the Cape Colony could not be carried through by the English government because of Puritan opposition. There were no railways until 1859, and Boer economy in general and on the whole remained patriarchal and based on natural economy until the sixties. But their patriarchal attitude did not deter the Boers from extreme brutality and harshness. It is well known that Livingstone complained much more about the Boers than about the Kaffirs. The Boers considered the Negroes an object, destined by God and Nature to slave for them, and as such an indispensable foundation of their peasant economy. So much so that their answer to the abolition of slavery in the English colonies in 1836 was the 'Great Trek', although there the owners had been compensated with £3,000,000. By way of the Orange River and Vaal, the Boers emigrated from the Cape Colony, and in the process they drove the Matabele to the North, across the Limpopo, setting them against the Makalakas. Just as the American farmer had driven the Red Indian West before him under the impact of capitalist economy, so the Boer drove the Negro to the North. The 'Free Republics' between the Orange River and the Limpopo thus were created as a protest against the designs of the English bourgeoisie on the sacred right of slavery. The tiny peasant republics were in constant guerilla warfare against the Bantu Negroes. And it was on the backs of the Negroes that the battle between the Boers and the English government, which went on for decades, was fought. The Negro question, i.e. the emancipation of the Negroes, ostensibly aimed at by the English bourgeoisie, served as a pretext for the conflict between England and the republics. In fact, peasant economy and great capitalist colonial policy were here competing for the Hottentots and Kaffirs, that is to say for their land and their labour power. Both competitors had precisely the same aim: to subject, expel or destroy the coloured peoples, to appropriate their land and press them into service by the abolition of their social organisations. Only their methods of exploitation were fundamentally different. While the Boers stood for out-dated slavery on a petty scale, on which their patriarchal peasant economy was founded, the British bourgeoisie represented modern large-scale capitalist exploitation of the land and the natives. The Constitution of the Transvaal (South African) Republic declared with crude prejudice: 'The People shall not permit any equality of coloured persons with white inhabitants, neither in the Church nor in the State.'[398] In the Orange Free State and in the Transvaal no Negro was allowed to own land, to travel without papers or to walk abroad after sunset. Bryce tells us of a case where a farmer, an Englishman as it happened, in the Eastern Cape Colony had flogged his Kaffir slave to death. When he was acquitted in open court, his neighbours escorted him home to the strains of music. The white man frequently maltreated his free native labourers after they had done their work--to such an extent that they would take to flight, thus saving the master their wages. The British government employed precisely the opposite tactics. For a long time it appeared as protector of the natives; flattering the chieftains in particular, it supported their authority and tried to make them claim a right of disposal over their land. Wherever it was possible, it gave them ownership of tribal land, according to well-tried methods, although this flew in the face of tradition and of the actual social organisation of the Negroes. All tribes in fact held their land communally, and even the most cruel and despotic rulers such as the Matabele Chieftain Lobengula merely had the right as well as the duty to allot every family a piece of land which they could only retain so long as they cultivated it. The ultimate purpose of the British government was clear: long in advance it was preparing for land robbery on a grand scale, using the native chieftains themselves as tools. But in the beginning it was content with the 'pacification' of the Negroes by extensive military actions. Up to 1879 were fought 9 bloody Kaffir wars to break the resistance of the Bantus. British capital revealed its real intentions only after two important events had taken place: the discovery of the Kimberley diamond fields in 1869-70, and the discovery of the gold mines in the Transvaal in 1882-5, which initiated a new epoch in the history of South Africa. Then the British South Africa Company, that is to say Cecil Rhodes, went into action. Public opinion in England rapidly swung over, and the greed for the treasures of South Africa urged the British government on to drastic measures. South Africa was suddenly flooded with immigrants who had hitherto only appeared in small numbers--immigration having been deflected to the United States. But with the discovery of the diamond and gold fields, the numbers of white people in the South African colonies grew by leaps and bounds: between 1885 and 1895, 100,000 British had immigrated into Witwatersrand alone. The modest peasant economy was forthwith pushed into the background--the mines, and thus the mining capital, coming to the fore. The policy of the British government veered round abruptly. Great Britain had recognised the Boer Republics by the Sand River Agreement and the Treaty of Bloemfontein in the fifties. Now her political might advanced upon the tiny republics from every side, occupying all neighbouring districts and cutting off all possibility of expansion. At the same time the Negroes, no longer protected favourites, were sacrificed. British capital was steadily forging ahead. In 1868, Britain took over the rule of Basutoland--only, of course, because the natives had 'repeatedly implored' her to do so.[399] In 1871, the Witwatersrand diamond fields, or West Griqualand, were seized from the Orange Free State and turned into a Crown Colony. In 1879, Zululand was subjected, later to become part of the Natal Colony; in 1885 followed the subjection of Bechuanaland, to be joined to the Cape Colony. In 1888 Britain took over Matabele and Mashonaland, and in 1889 the British South Africa Company was given a Charter for both these districts, again, of course, only to oblige the natives and at their request.[400] Between 1884 and 1887, Britain annexed St. Lucia Bay and the entire East Coast as far as the Portuguese possessions. In 1894, she subjected Tongaland. With their last strength, the Matabele and Mashona fought one more desperate battle, but the Company, with Rhodes at the head, first liquidated the rising in blood and at once proceeded to the well-tried measure for civilising and pacifying the natives: two large railways were built in the rebellious district. The Boer Republics were feeling increasingly uncomfortable in this sudden stranglehold, and their internal affairs as well were becoming completely disorganised. The overwhelming influx of immigrants and the rising tides of the frenzied new capitalist economy now threatened to burst the barriers of the small peasant states. There was indeed a blatant conflict between agricultural and political peasant economy on the one hand, and the demands and requirements of the accumulation of capital on the other. In all respects, the republics were quite unable to cope with these new problems. The constant danger from the Kaffirs, no doubt regarded favourably by the British, the unwieldy, primitive administration, the gradual corruption of the _volksraad_ in which the great capitalists got their way by bribery, lack of a police force to keep the undisciplined crowds of adventurers in some semblance of order, the absence of labour legislation for regulating and securing the exploitation of the Negroes in the mines, lack of water supplies and transport to provide for the colony of 100,000 immigrants that had suddenly sprung up, high protective tariffs which increased the cost of labour for the capitalists, and high freights for coal--all these factors combined towards the sudden and stunning bankruptcy of the peasant republics. They tried, obstinately and unimaginatively, to defend themselves against the sudden eruption of capitalism which engulfed them, with an incredibly crude measure, such as only a stubborn and hide-bound peasant brain could have devised: they denied all civic rights to the _uitlanders_ who outnumbered them by far and who stood for capital, power, and the trend of the time. In those critical times it was an ill-omened trick. The mismanagement of the peasant republics caused a considerable reduction of dividends, on no account to be put up with. Mining capital had come to the end of its tether. The British South Africa Company built railroads, put down the Kaffirs, organised revolts of the _uitlanders_ and finally provoked the Boer War. The bell had tolled for peasant economy. In the United States, the economic revolution had begun with a war, in South Africa war put the period to this chapter. Yet in both instances, the outcome was the same: capital triumphed over the small peasant economy which had in its turn come into being on the ruins of natural economy, represented by the natives' primitive organisations. The domination of capital was a foregone conclusion, and it was just as hopeless for the Boer Republics to resist as it had been for the American farmer. Capital officially took over the reins in the new South African Union which replaced the small peasant republics by a great modern state, as envisaged by Cecil Rhodes' imperialist programme. The new conflict between capital and labour had superseded the old one between British and Dutch. One million white exploiters of both nations sealed their touching fraternal alliance within the Union with the civil and political disfranchisement of five million coloured workers. Not only the Negroes of the Boer Republics came away empty-handed, but the natives of the Cape Colony, whom the British government had at one time granted political equality, were also deprived of some of their rights. And this noble work, culminating under the imperialist policy of the Conservatives in open oppression, was actually to be finished by the Liberal Party itself, amid frenzied applause from the 'liberal cretins of Europe' who with sentimental pride took as proof of the still continuing creative vigour and greatness of English liberalism the fact that Britain had granted complete self-government and freedom to a handful of whites in South Africa. The ruin of independent craftsmanship by capitalist competition, no less painful for being soft-pedalled, deserves by rights a chapter to itself. The most sinister part of such a chapter would be out-work under capitalism;--but we need not dwell on these phenomena here. The general result of the struggle between capitalism and simple commodity production is this: after substituting commodity economy for natural economy, capital takes the place of simple commodity economy. Non-capitalist organisations provide a fertile soil for capitalism; more strictly: capital feeds on the ruins of such organisations, and although this non-capitalist _milieu_ is indispensable for accumulation, the latter proceeds at the cost of this medium nevertheless, by eating it up. Historically, the accumulation of capital is a kind of metabolism between capitalist economy and those pre-capitalist methods of production without which it cannot go on and which, in this light, it corrodes and assimilates. Thus capital cannot accumulate without the aid of non-capitalist organisations, nor, on the other hand, can it tolerate their continued existence side by side with itself. Only the continuous and progressive disintegration of non-capitalist organisations makes accumulation of capital possible. The premises which are postulated in Marx's diagram of accumulation accordingly represent no more than the historical tendency of the movement of accumulation and its logical conclusion. The accumulative process endeavours everywhere to substitute simple commodity economy for natural economy. Its ultimate aim, that is to say, is to establish the exclusive and universal domination of capitalist production in all countries and for all branches of industry. Yet this argument does not lead anywhere. As soon as this final result is achieved--in theory, of course, because it can never actually happen--accumulation must come to a stop. The realisation and capitalisation of surplus value become impossible to accomplish. Just as soon as reality begins to correspond to Marx's diagram of enlarged reproduction, the end of accumulation is in sight, it has reached its limits, and capitalist production is _in extremis_. For capital, the standstill of accumulation means that the development of the productive forces is arrested, and the collapse of capitalism follows inevitably, as an objective historical necessity. This is the reason for the contradictory behaviour of capitalism in the final stage of its historical career: imperialism. Marx's diagram of enlarged reproduction thus does not conform to the conditions of an accumulation in actual progress. Progressive accumulation cannot be reduced to static interrelations and interdependence between the two great departments of social production (the departments of producer and consumer goods), as the diagram would have it. Accumulation is more than an internal relationship between the branches of capitalist economy; it is primarily a relationship between capital and a non-capitalist environment, where the two great departments of production sometimes perform the accumulative process on their own, independently of each other, but even then at every step the movements overlap and intersect. From this we get most complicated relations, divergencies in the speed and direction of accumulation for the two departments, different relations with non-capitalist modes of production as regards both material elements and elements of value, which we cannot possibly lay down in rigid formulæ. Marx's diagram of accumulation is only the theoretical reflection of the precise moment when the domination of capital has reached its limits, and thus it is no less a fiction than his diagram of simple reproduction, which gives the theoretical formulation for the point of departure of capitalist accumulation. The precise definition of capitalist accumulation and its laws lies somewhere in between these two fictions. FOOTNOTES: [376] Until recently, in China the domestic industries were widely practised even by the bourgeoisie and in such large and ancient towns as Ningpo with its 300,000 inhabitants. 'Only a generation ago, the family's shoes, hats, shirts, etc., were made by the women themselves. At that time, it was practically unheard-of for a young woman to buy from a merchant what she could have made with the labour of her own hands' (Dr. Nyok-Ching Tsur, 'Forms of Industry in the Town of Ningpo' (_Die gewerblichen Betriebsformen der Stadt Ningpo_), Tuebingen, 1909, p. 51). [377] Admittedly, this relation is reversed in the last stages of the history of peasant economy when capitalist production has made its full impact. Once the small peasants are ruined, the entire work of farming frequently devolves on the women, old people and children, while the men are made to work for their living for capitalist entrepreneurs in the domestic industries or as wage-slaves in the factories. A typical instance is the small peasant in Wuerttemberg. [378] W. A. Peffer, _The Farmer's Side. His Troubles and Their Remedy_ (New York, 1891), Part ii, 'How We Got Here', chap. i, 'Changed Conditions of the Farmer', pp. 56-7. Cf. also A. M. Simmons, _The American Farmer_ (2nd edition, Chicago, 1906), pp. 74 ff. [379] Report of the U.S.A. Commissioner of Agriculture for the year 1867 (Washington, 1868). Quoted by Lafargue: _Getreidebau und Getreidehandel in den Vereinigten Staaten_ in _Die Neue Zeit_ (1885), p. 344. This essay on grain cultivation and the grain trade in the U.S.A. was first published in a Russian periodical in 1883. [380] 'The three Revenue Acts of June 30, 1864, practically formed one measure, and that probably the greatest measure of taxation which the world has seen.... The Internal Revenue Act was arranged, as Mr. David A. Wells has said, on the principle of the Irishman at Donnybrook Fair: "whenever you see a head, hit it, whenever you see a commodity, tax it"' (F. W. Taussig, _The Tariff History of the United States_ (New York-London, 1888), pp. 163-4). [381] Ibid., pp. 166-7. [382] 'The necessity of the situation, the critical state of the country, the urgent need of revenue, may have justified this haste, which, it is safe to say, is unexampled in the history of civilised countries' (Taussig, op. cit., p. 168). [383] Peffer, op. cit., pp. 58 ff. [384] Ibid., p. 6. [385] 'Agricultural Competition in North America' (_Die landwirtschaftliche Konkurrenz Nordamerikas_) Leipzig, 1887, p. 431. [386] Lafargue, op. cit., p. 345. [387] The Thirteenth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labour (Washington, 1899) tables the advantages of machinery methods over hand methods so far achieved as follows: ---------------------------------------------------------------- | _Labour time per unit_ |--------------------------- _Type of work_ | _Machine_ | _Hand_ |-------------+------------- |_hrs._|_min._|_hrs._|_min._ ------------------------------------+------+------+------+------ Planting small corn | -- | 32·7 | 10 | 55 Harvesting and threshing small corn | 1 | -- | 46 | 40 Planting corn | -- | 37·5 | 6 | 15 Cutting corn | 3 | 4·5 | 5 | -- Shelling corn | -- | 3·6 | 66 | 40 Planting cotton | 1 | 3 | 8 | 48 Cultivating cotton | 12 | 5 | 60 | -- Mowing grass (scythe _v._ mower) | 1 | 0·6 | 7 | 20 Harvesting and baling hay | 11 | 3·4 | 35 | 30 anting potatoes | 1 | 2·5 | 15 | -- anting tomatoes | 1 | 4 | 10 | -- Cultivating and harvesting tomatoes | 134 | 5·2 | 324 | 20 ---------------------------------------------------------------- [388] Wheat exports from the Union to Europe: _Year_ _Million bushels_ _Year_ _Million bushels_ 1868-9 17·9 1885-6 57·7 1874-5 71·8 1890-1 55·1 1879-80 153·2 1899-1900 101·9 (Juraschek's _Uebersichten der Weltwirtschaft_, vol. vii, part i, p. 32). Simultaneously, the price per bushel wheat _loco_ farm (in cents) declined as follows: 1870-9 105 1896 73 1880-9 83 1897 81 1895 51 1898 58 Since 1899, when it had reached the low level of 58 cents per bushel, the price is moving up again: 1900 62 1903 78 1901 62 1904 92 1902 63 (Ibid., p. 18). According to the 'Monthly Returns on External Trade' (_Monatliche Nachweise über den Auswärtigen Handel_), the price (in marks) per 1,000 _kg._, was in June 1912: Berlin 227·82 London 170·96 New York 178·08 Odessa 173·94 Mannheim 247·93 Paris 243·69 [389] Peffer, op. cit., part i, 'Where We Are', chap, ii, 'Progress of Agriculture', pp. 30-1. [390] Ibid., p. 4. [391] Sering, op. cit., p. 433. [392] Peffer, op. cit., pp. 34 f. [393] Quoted by Nikolayon, op. cit., p. 224. [394] 49,199 people immigrated to Canada in 1902. In 1912, the number of immigrants was more than 400,000--138,000 of them British, and 134,000 American. According to a report from Montreal, the influx of American farmers continued into the spring of the present year [1912]. [395] 'Travelling in the West of Canada, I have visited only one farm of less than a thousand acres. According to the census of the Dominion of Canada, in 1881, when the census was taken, no more than 9,077 farmers occupied 2,384,337 acres of land between them; accordingly, the share of an individual (farmer) amounted to no less than 2,047 acres--in no state of the Union is the average anywhere near that' (Sering, op. cit., p. 376). In the early eighties, farming on a large scale was admittedly not very widely spread in Canada. But already in 1887, Sering describes the 'Bell Farm', owned by a limited company, which comprised no fewer than 56,700 acres, and was obviously modelled on the pattern of the Dalrymple farm. In the eighties, Sering, who regarded the prospects of Canadian competition with some scepticism, put the 'fertile belt' of Western Canada at three-fifths of the entire acreage of Germany, and estimated that actually only 38,400,000 acres of this were arable land, and no more than 15,000,000 acres at best were prospective wheat land (Sering, op. cit., pp. 337-8). The _Manitoba Free Press_ in June 1912, worked out that in summer, 1912, 11,200,000 acres were sown with spring wheat in Canada, as against 19,200,000 acres under spring wheat in the United States. (Cf. _Berliner Tageblatt, Handelszeitung_, No. 305, June 18, 1912.) [396] Sering, op. cit., pp. 361 ff. [397] Ernst Schultze, '_Das Wirtschaftsleben der Vereinigten Staaten_', _Jahrb. f. Gesetzg., Verw. u. Volkswirtschaft 1912_, no. 17, p. 1724. [398] Article 9. [399] 'Moshesh, the great Basuto leader, to whose courage and statesmanship the Basutos owed their very existence as a people, was still alive at the time, but constant war with the Boers of the Orange Free State had brought him and his followers to the last stage of distress. Two thousand Basuto warriors had been killed, cattle had been carried off, native homes had been broken up and crops destroyed. The tribe was reduced to the position of starving refugees, and nothing could save them but the protection of the British government which they had repeatedly implored' (C. P. Lucas, _A Historical Geography of the British Colonies_, part ii, vol. iv (Geography of South and East Africa), Oxford, 1904, p. 39). [400] 'The Eastern section of the territory is Mashonaland where, with the permission of King Lobengula, who claimed it, the British South Africa Company first established themselves' (ibid., p. 72). _CHAPTER XXX_ INTERNATIONAL LOANS The imperialist phase of capitalist accumulation which implies universal competition comprises the industrialisation and capitalist emancipation of the _hinterland_ where capital formerly realised its surplus value. Characteristic of this phase are: lending abroad, railroad constructions, revolutions, and wars. The last decade, from 1900 to 1910, shows in particular the world-wide movement of capital, especially in Asia and neighbouring Europe: in Russia, Turkey, Persia, India, Japan, China, and also in North Africa. Just as the substitution of commodity economy for a natural economy and that of capitalist production for a simple commodity production was achieved by wars, social crises and the destruction of entire social systems, so at present the achievement of capitalist autonomy in the _hinterland_ and backward colonies is attained amidst wars and revolutions. Revolution is an essential for the process of capitalist emancipation. The backward communities must shed their obsolete political organisations, relics of natural and simple commodity economy, and create a modern state machinery adapted to the purposes of capitalist production. The revolutions in Turkey, Russia, and China fall under this heading. The last two, in particular, do not exclusively serve the immediate political requirements of capitalism; to some extent they carry over outmoded pre-capitalist claims while on the other hand they already embody new conflicts which run counter to the domination of capital. These factors account for their immense drive, but at the same time impede and delay the ultimate victory of the revolutionary forces. A young state will usually sever the leading strings of older capitalist states by wars, which temper and test the modern state's capitalist independence in a baptism by fire. That is why military together with financial reforms invariably herald the bid for economic independence. The forward-thrusts of capital are approximately reflected in the development of the railway network. The permanent way grew most quickly in Europe during the forties, in America in the fifties, in Asia in the sixties, in Australia during the seventies and eighties, and during the nineties in Africa.[401] Public loans for railroad building and armaments accompany all stages of the accumulation of capital: the introduction of commodity economy, industrialisation of countries, capitalist revolutionisation of agriculture as well as the emancipation of young capitalist states. For the accumulation of capital, the loan has various functions: (_a_) it serves to convert the money of non-capitalist groups into capital, i.e. money both as a commodity equivalent (lower middle-class savings) and as fund of consumption for the hangers-on of the capitalist class; (_b_) it serves to transform money capital into productive capital by means of state enterprise--railroad building and military supplies; (_c_) it serves to divert accumulated capital from the old capitalist countries to young ones. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the loan transferred capital from the Italian cities to England, in the eighteenth century from Holland to England, in the nineteenth century from England to the American Republics and Australia, from France, Germany and Belgium to Russia, and at the present time [1912] from Germany to Turkey, from England, Germany and France to China, and, via Russia, to Persia. In the Imperialist Era, the foreign loan played an outstanding part as a means for young capitalist states to acquire independence. The contradictions inherent in the modern system of foreign loans are the concrete expression of those which characterise the imperialist phase. Though foreign loans are indispensable for the emancipation of the rising capitalist states, they are yet the surest ties by which the old capitalist states maintain their influence, exercise financial control and exert pressure on the customs, foreign and commercial policy of the young capitalist states. Pre-eminently channels for the investment in new spheres of capital accumulated in the old countries, such loans widen the scope for the accumulation of capital; but at the same time they restrict it by creating new competition for the investing countries. These inherent conflicts of the international loan system are a classic example of spatio-temporal divergencies between the conditions for the realisation of surplus value and the capitalisation thereof. While realisation of the surplus value requires only the general spreading of commodity production, its capitalisation demands the progressive supercession of simple commodity production by capitalist economy, with the corollary that the limits to both the realisation and the capitalisation of surplus value keep contracting ever more. Employment of international capital in the construction of the international railway network reflects this disparity. Between the thirties and the sixties of the nineteenth century, railway building and the loans necessary for it mainly served to oust natural economy, and to spread commodity economy--as in the case of the Russian railway loans in the sixties, or in that of the American railways which were built with European capital. Railway construction in Africa and Asia during the last twenty years, on the other hand, almost exclusively served the purposes of an imperialist policy, of economic monopolisation and economic subjugation of the backward communities. As regards Russia's railroad construction in Eastern Asia, for instance, it is common knowledge that Russia had paved the way for the military occupation of Manchuria by sending troops to protect her engineers working on the Manchurian railway. With the same object in view, Russia obtained railway concessions in Persia, Germany in Asia Minor and Mesopotamia, and Britain and Germany in Africa. In this connection, we must deal with a misunderstanding concerning the capital investments in foreign countries and the demand of these countries for capital imports. Already in the early twenties of the last century, the export of British capital to America played an important part, being largely responsible for the first genuine industrial and commercial crises in England in 1825. Since 1824, the London stock exchange had been flooded with South American stocks and shares. During the following year, the newly created states of South and Central America raised loans in London alone for more than £20,000,000, and in addition, enormous quantities of South American industrial shares and similar bonds were sold. This sudden prosperity and the opening up of the South American markets in their turn called forth greatly increased exports of British commodities to the Latin Americas. British commodity exports to these countries amounted to £2,900,000 in 1821 which had risen to £6,400,000 by 1825. Cotton textiles formed the most important item of these exports; this powerful demand was the impetus for a rapid expansion of British cotton production, and many new factories were opened. In 1821, raw cotton to the value of £m. 129 was made up in England, and in 1826 the amount had risen to £m. 167. The situation was thus fraught with the elements of a crisis. Tugan Baranovski raises the question: 'But from where did the South American countries take the means to buy twice as many commodities in 1825 as in 1821? The British themselves supplied these means. The loans floated on the London stock exchange served as payment for imported goods. Deceived by the demand they had themselves created, the British factory-owners were soon brought to realise by their own experience that their high expectations had been unfounded.'[402] He thus characterises as 'deceptive', as an unhealthy, abnormal economic phenomenon the fact that the South American demand for English goods had been brought about by British capital. Thus uncritically he took over the doctrine of an expert with whose other theories he wished to have nothing in common. The opinion had been advanced already during the English crisis of 1825 that it could be explained by the 'singular' development of the relations between British capital and South American demand. None other than Sismondi had raised the same question as Tugan Baranovski and given a most accurate description of events in the second edition of his _Nouveaux Principes_: 'The opening up of the immense market afforded by Spanish America to industrial producers seemed to offer a good opportunity to relieve British manufacture. The British government were of that opinion, and in the seven years following the crisis of 1818, displayed unheard-of activity to carry English commerce to penetrate the remotest districts of Mexico, Columbia, Brazil, Rio de la Plata, Chile and Peru. Before the government decided to recognise these new states, it had to protect English commerce by frequent calls of battleships whose captains had a diplomatic rather than a military mission. In consequence, it had defied the clamours of the Holy Alliance and recognised the new republics at a moment when the whole of Europe, on the contrary, was plotting their ruin. But however big the demand afforded by free America, yet it would not have been enough to absorb all the goods England had produced over and above the needs of consumption, had not their means for buying English merchandise been suddenly increased beyond all bounds by the loans to the new republics. Every American state borrowed from England an amount sufficient to consolidate its government. Although they were capital loans, they were immediately spent in the course of the year like income, that is to say they were used up entirely to buy English goods on behalf of the treasury, or to pay for those which had been dispatched on private orders. At the same time, numerous companies with immense capitals were formed to exploit all the American mines, but all the money they spent found its way back to England, either to pay for the machinery which they immediately used, or else for the goods sent to the localities where they were to work. As long as this singular commerce lasted, in which the English only asked the Americans to be kind enough to buy English merchandise with English capital, and to consume them for their sake, the prosperity of English manufacture appeared dazzling. It was no more income but rather English capital which was used to push on consumption: the English themselves bought and paid for their own goods which they sent to America, and thereby merely forwent the pleasure of using these goods.'[403] From this Sismondi drew the characteristic conclusion that the real limits to the capitalist market are set by income, i.e. by personal consumption alone, and he used this example as one more warning against accumulation. Down to the present day, the events which preceded the crisis of 1825 have remained typical for a period of boom and expansion of capital, and such 'singular commerce' is in fact one of the most important foundations of the accumulation of capital. Particularly in the history of British capital, it occurs regularly before every crisis, as Tugan Baranovski himself showed by the following facts and figures: the immediate cause of the 1836 crisis was the flooding of the American market with British goods, again financed by British money. In 1834, U.S. commodity imports exceeded exports by £m. 1·2 but at the same time their imports of precious metal exceeded exports by nearly £m. 3·2. Even in 1836, the year of the crisis itself, their surplus of imported commodities amounted to £m. 10·4, and still the excess of bullion imported was £m. 1. This influx of money, no less than the stream of goods, came chiefly from England, where U.S. railway shares were bought in bulk. 1835/6 saw the opening in the United States of sixty-one new banks with a capital of £m. 10·4, predominantly British. Again, the English paid for their exports themselves. The unprecedented industrial boom in the Northern States of the Union, eventually leading to the Civil War, was likewise financed by British capital, which again created an expanding market for British industry in the United States. And not only British capital--other European capitals also made every possible effort to take part in this 'singular commerce'. To quote Schaeffle, in the five years between 1849 and 1854, at least £m. 100 were invested in American shares on the various stock exchanges of Europe. The simultaneous revival of world industry attained such dimensions that it culminated in the world crash of 1857.--In the sixties, British capital lost no time in creating similar conditions in Asia as well as the United States. An unending stream was diverted to Asia Minor and East India, where it financed the most magnificent railroad projects. The permanent way of British India amounted in 1860 to 844 miles, in 1870 to 4,802 miles, in 1880 to 9,361 miles and in 1890 to 16,875 miles. This at once increased the demand for British commodities. No sooner had the War of Secession come to a close, than British capital again flowed into the United States. It again paid for the greater part of the enormous railroad constructions in the Union during the sixties and seventies, the permanent way amounting in 1850 to 8,844 miles, in 1860 to 30,807 miles, in 1870 to 53,212 miles, in 1880 to 94,198 miles, and in 1890 to 179,005 miles. Materials for these railways were also being supplied by England--one of the main causes for the rapid development of the British coal and iron industries and the reasons why these industries were so seriously affected by the American crises of 1866, 1873 and 1884. What Sismondi considered sheer lunacy was in this instance literally true: the British with their own materials, their own iron etc., had built railroads in the United States, they had paid for the railways with their own capital and only forwent their 'use'. In spite of all periodical crises, however, European capital had acquired such a taste for this madness, that the London stock exchange was seized by a veritable epidemic of foreign loans in the middle of the seventies. Between 1870 and 1875, loans of this kind, amounting to £m. 260, were raised in London. The immediate consequence was a rapid increase in the overseas export of British merchandise. Although the foreign countries concerned went periodically bankrupt, masses of capital continued to flow in. Turkey, Egypt, Greece, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Honduras, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, St. Domingo, Uruguay, and Venezuela completely or partially suspended their payments of interest in the late seventies. Yet undeterred by this, the fever for exotic state loans burst out again at the end of the eighties--the South American states and South African colonies were lent immense quantities of European capital. In 1874, for instance, the Argentine Republic borrowed as much as £m. 10 and the loan had risen to £m. 59 by 1890. England built railways with her own iron and coal in all these countries as well, paying for them with her own capital. In 1885, the Argentine permanent way had been 1,952 miles, in 1893 it was 8,557 miles. Exports from England were rising accordingly: ---------------------------- | 1886 | 1890 ----------+--------+-------- | £m. | £m. Iron | 21·8 | 31·6 Machinery | 10 | 16·4 Coal | 9 | 19 ---------------------------- British total exports (mainly to the Argentine) amounted to £m. 4·7 in 1885 and to £m. 10·7 a mere four years later. At the same time, British capital flowed into Australia in the form of state loans. At the end of the eighties the loans to the three colonies Victoria, New South Wales and Tasmania amounted to £m. 112, £m. 81 of which were invested in railway construction. The permanent way of Australia extended over 4,900 miles in 1880, and over 15,600 miles in 1895. Britain, supplying capital and materials for these railways, was also embroiled in the crises of 1890 in the Argentine, Transvaal, Mexico, Uruguay, and in that of 1893 in Australia. The following two decades made a difference only in so far as German, French and Belgian capital largely participated with British capital in foreign investments, while railway construction in Asia Minor had been financed entirely by British capital from the fifties to the late eighties. From then on, German capital took over and put into execution the tremendous project of the Anatolian railway. German capital investments in Turkey gave rise to an increased export of German goods to that country. In 1896, German exports to Turkey amounted to £m. 1·4, in 1911 to £m. 5·65. To Asiatic Turkey, in particular, goods were exported in 1901 to the value of £m. 0·6 and in 1911 to the value of £m. 1·85. In this case, German capital was used to a considerable extent to pay for German goods, the Germans forgoing, to use Sismondi's term, only the pleasure of using their own products. Let us examine the position more closely: Realised surplus value, which cannot be capitalised and lies idle in England or Germany, is invested in railway construction, water works, etc. in the Argentine, Australia, the Cape Colony or Mesopotamia. Machinery, materials and the like are supplied by the country where the capital has originated, and the same capital pays for them. Actually, this process characterises capitalist conditions everywhere, even at home. Capital must purchase the elements of production and thus become productive capital before it can operate. Admittedly, the products are then used within the country, while in the former case they are used by foreigners. But then capitalist production does not aim at its products being enjoyed, but at the accumulation of surplus value. There had been no demand for the surplus product within the country, so capital had lain idle without the possibility of accumulating. But abroad, where capitalist production has not yet developed, there has come about, voluntarily or by force, a new demand of the non-capitalist strata. The consumption of the capitalist and working classes at home is irrelevant for the purposes of accumulation, and what matters to capital is the very fact that its products are 'used' by _others_. The new consumers must indeed realise the products, pay for their use, and for this they need money. They can obtain some of it by the exchange of commodities which begins at this point, a brisk traffic in goods following hard on the heels of railway construction and mining (gold mines, etc.). Thus the capital advanced for railroad building and mining, together with an additional surplus value, is gradually realised. It is immaterial to the situation as a whole whether this exported capital becomes share capital in new independent enterprises, or whether, as a government loan, it uses the mediation of a foreign state to find new scope for operation in industry and traffic, nor does it matter if in the first case some of the companies are fraudulent and fail in due course, or if in the second case the borrowing state finally goes bankrupt, i.e. if the owners sometimes lose part of their capital in one way or another. Even the country of origin is not immune, and individual capitals frequently get lost in crises. The important point is that capital accumulated in the old country should find elsewhere new opportunities to beget and realise surplus value, so that accumulation can proceed. In the new countries, large regions of natural economy are open to conversion into commodity economy, or existing commodity economy can be ousted by capital. Railroad construction and mining, gold mining in particular, are typical for the investment of capitals from old capitalist countries in new ones. They are pre-eminently qualified to stimulate a brisk traffic in goods under conditions hitherto determined by natural economy and both are significant in economic history as mile-stones along the route of rapid dissolution of old economic organisations, of social crises and of the development of modern conditions, that is to say of the development of commodity economy to begin with, and further of the production of capital. For this reason, the part played by lending abroad as well as by capital investments in foreign railway and mining shares is a fine sample of the deficiencies in Marx's diagram of accumulation. In these instances, enlarged reproduction of capital capitalises a surplus value that has already been realised (in so far as the loans or foreign investments are not financed by the savings of the petty bourgeoisie or the semi-proletariat). It is quite irrelevant to the present field of accumulation, when, where and how the capital of the old countries has been realised so that it may flow into the new country. British capital which finds an outlet in Argentine railway construction might well in the past have been realised in China in the form of Indian opium. Further, the British capital which builds railways in the Argentine, is of English origin not only in its pure value-form, as money capital, but also in its material form, as iron, coal and machinery; the use-form of the surplus value, that is to say, has also come into being from the very beginning in the use-form suitable for the purposes of accumulation. The actual use-form of the variable capital, however, labour power, is mainly foreign: it is the native labour of the new countries which is made a new object of exploitation by the capital of the old countries. If we want to keep our investigation all on one plane, we may even assume that the labour power, too, has the same country of origin as the capital. In point of fact new discoveries, of gold mines for instance, tend to call forth mass emigration from the old countries, especially in the first stages, and are largely worked by labour from those countries. It might well be, then, that in a new country capital, labour power and means of production all come from the same capitalist country, say England. So it is really in England that all the material conditions for accumulation exist--a realised surplus value as money capital, a surplus product in productive form, and lastly labour reserves. Yet accumulation cannot proceed here: England and her old buyers require neither railways nor an expanded industry. Enlarged reproduction, i.e. accumulation, is possible only if new districts with a non-capitalist civilisation, extending over large areas, appear on the scene and augment the number of consumers. But then, who are these new consumers actually; who is it that realises the surplus value of capitalist enterprises which are started with foreign loans; and who, in the final analysis, pays for these loans? The international loans in Egypt provide a classical answer. The internal history of Egypt in the second half of the nineteenth century is characterised by the interplay of three phenomena: large-scale capitalist enterprise, a rapidly growing public debt, and the collapse of peasant economy. Until quite recently, _corvée_ prevailed in Egypt, and the Wali and later the Khedive freely pursued their own power policy with regard to the condition of landownership. These primitive conditions precisely offered an incomparably fertile soil for the operations of European capital. Economically speaking, the conditions for a monetary economy had to be established to begin with, and the state created them by direct compulsion. Until the thirties, Mehemet Ali, the founder of Modern Egypt, here applied a method of patriarchal simplicity: every year, he 'bought up' the fellaheen's entire harvest for the public exchequer, and allowed them to buy back, at a higher price, a minimum for subsistence and seed. In addition he imported cotton from East India, sugar cane from America, indigo and pepper, and issued the fellaheen with official directions what to plant and how much of it. The government again claimed the monopoly for cotton and indigo, reserving to itself the exclusive right of buying and selling these goods. By such methods was commodity exchange introduced in Egypt. Admittedly, Mehemet Ali also did something towards raising labour productivity. He arranged for dredging of the ancient canalisation, and above all he started the work of the great Kaliub Nile dams which initiated the series of great capitalist enterprises in Egypt. These were to comprise four great fields: (1) irrigation systems, in which the Kaliub works built between 1845 and 1853 take first place--quite apart from unpaid forced labour, they swallowed up £m. 2·5 and incidentally proved quite useless at first; (2) routes for traffic--the most important construction which proved ultimately detrimental to Egypt being the Suez Canal; (3) the cultivation of cotton, and (4) the production of sugar cane. With the building of the Suez Canal, Egypt became caught up in the web of European capitalism, never again to get free of it. French capital led the way with British capital hard on its heels. In the twenty years that followed, the internal disturbances in Egypt were coloured by the competitive struggle between these two capitals. French capital was perhaps the most peculiar exponent of the European methods of capital accumulation at the expense of primitive conditions. Its operations were responsible for the useless Nile dams as well as for the Suez Canal. Egypt first contracted to supply the labour of 20,000 serfs free of charge for a number of years, and secondly to take up shares in the Suez Company to the tune of £m. 3·5, i.e. 40 per cent of the company's total capital. All this for the sake of breaking through a canal which would deflect the entire trade between Europe and Asia from Egypt and would painfully affect her part in this trade. These £m. 3·5 formed the nucleus for Egypt's immense national debt which was to bring about her military occupation by Britain twenty years later. In the irrigation system, sudden transformations were initiated: the ancient _sakias_, i.e. bullock-driven water-wheels, of which 50,000 had been busy for 7 months in the year in the Nile delta alone, were partially replaced by steam pumps. Modern steamers now plied on the Nile between Cairo and Assuan. But the most profound change in the economic conditions of Egypt was brought about by the cultivation of cotton. This became almost epidemic in Egypt when, owing to the American War of Secession and the English cotton famine, the price per short ton rose from something between £30 and £40 to £200-£250. Everybody was planting cotton, and foremost among all, the Viceroy and his family. His estates grew fat, what with large-scale land robbery, confiscations, forced 'sale' or plain theft. He suddenly appropriated villages by the score though without any legal excuse. Within an incredibly short time, this vast demesne was brought under cotton, with the result that the entire technique of Egyptian traditional agriculture was revolutionised. Dams were thrown up everywhere to protect the cotton fields from the seasonal flooding of the Nile, and a comprehensive system of artificial irrigation was introduced. These waterworks together with continuous deep ploughing--a novel departure for the fellah who had until then merely scratched his soil with a plough dating back to the Pharaohs--and finally the intensive labours of the harvest made between them enormous demands on Egypt's labour power. This was throughout the same forced peasant labour over which the state claimed to have an unrestricted right of disposal; and thousands had already been employed on the Kaliub dams and the Suez Canal and now the irrigation and plantation work to be done on the viceregal estates clamoured for this forced labour. The 20,000 serfs who had been put at the disposal of the Suez Canal Company were now required by the Khedive himself, and this brought about the first clash with French capital. The company was adjudged a compensation of £m. 3·35 by the arbitration of Napoleon III, a settlement to which the Khedive could all the more readily agree, since the very fellaheen whose labour power was the bone of contention were ultimately to be mulcted of this sum. The work of irrigation was immediately put in hand. Centrifugal machines, steam and traction engines were therefore ordered from England and France. In their hundreds, they were carried by steamers from England to Alexandria and then further. Steam ploughs were needed for cultivating the soil, especially since the rinderpest of 1864 had killed off all the cattle, England again being the chief supplier of these machines. The Fowler works were expanded enormously of a sudden to meet the requirements of the Viceroy for which Egypt had to pay.[404] But now Egypt required yet a third type of machine, cotton gins and presses for packing. Dozens of these gins were set up in the Delta towns. Like English industrial towns, Sagasis, Tanta, Samanud and other towns were covered by palls of smoke and great fortunes circulated in the banks of Alexandria and Cairo. But already in the year that followed, this cotton speculation collapsed with the cotton prices which fell in a couple of days from 27_d._ per pound to 15_d._, 12_d._, and finally 6_d._ after the cessation of hostilities in the American Union. The following year, Ismail Pasha ventured on a new speculation, the production of cane sugar. The forced labour of the fellaheen was to compete with the Southern States of the Union where slavery had been abolished. For the second time, Egyptian agriculture was turned upside down. French and British capitalists found a new field for rapid accumulation. 18 giant sugar factories were put on order in 1868-9 with an estimated daily output of 200 short tons of sugar, that is to say four times as much as that of the greatest then existing plant. Six of them were ordered from England, and twelve from France, but England eventually delivered the lion's share, because of the Franco-German war. These factories were to be built along the Nile at intervals of 6·2 miles (10 _km._), as centres of cane plantations of an area comprising 10 sq. _km._ Working to full capacity, each factory required a daily supply of 2,000 tons of sugar cane. Fellaheen were driven to forced labour on the sugar plantations in their thousands, while further thousands of their number built the Ibrahimya Canal. The stick and _kourbash_ were unstintingly applied. Transport soon became a problem. A railway network had to be built round every factory to haul the masses of cane inside, rolling stock, funiculars, etc., had to be obtained as quickly as possible. Again these enormous orders were placed with English capital. The first giant factory was opened in 1872, 4,000 camels providing makeshift transport. But it proved to be simply impossible to supply cane in the quantities required by the undertaking. The working staff was completely inadequate, since the fellah, accustomed to forced labour on the land, could not be transformed overnight into a modern industrial worker by the lash of the whip. The venture collapsed, even before many of the imported machines had been installed. This sugar speculation concluded the period of gigantic capitalist enterprise in Egypt in 1873. What had provided the capital for these enterprises? International loans. One year before his death in 1863, Said Pasha had raised the first loan at a nominal value of £m. 3·3 which came to £m. 2·5 in cash after deduction of commissions, discounts, etc. He left to Ismail Pasha the legacy of this debt and the contract with the Suez Canal Company, which was to burden Egypt with a debt of £m. 17. Ismail Pasha in turn raised his first loan in 1864 with a nominal value of £m. 5·7 at 7 per cent and a cash value of £m. 4·85 at 8 1/4 per cent. What remained of it, after £m. 3·35 had been paid to the Suez Canal Company as compensation, was spent within the year, swallowed up for the greater part by the cotton gamble. In 1865, the first so-called Daira-loan was floated by the Anglo-Egyptian Bank, on the security of the Khedive's private estates. The nominal value of this loan was £m. 3·4 at 9 per cent, and its real value £m. 2·5 at 12 per cent. In 1866, _Fruehling & Goschen_ floated a new loan at a nominal value of £m. 3 and a cash value of £m. 2. The Ottoman Bank floated another in 1867 of nominally £m. 2, really £m. 1·7. The floating debt at that time amounted to £m. 30. The Banking House _Oppenheim & Neffen_ floated a great loan in 1868 to consolidate part of this debt. Its nominal value was £m. 11·9 at 7 per cent, though Ismail could actually lay hands only on £m. 7·1 at 13 1/2 per cent. This money made it possible, however, to pay for the pompous celebrations on the opening of the Suez Canal, in presence of the leading figures in the Courts of Europe, in finance and in the _demi-monde_, for a madly lavish display, and further, to grease the palm of the Turkish Overlord, the Sultan, with a new baksheesh of £m. 1. The sugar gamble necessitated another loan in 1870. Floated by the firm of _Bischoffsheim & Goldschmidt_, it had a nominal value of £m. 7·1 at 7 per cent, and its cash value was £m. 5. In 1872/3 _Oppenheim's_ floated two further loans, a modest one amounting to £m. 4 at 14 per cent and a large one of £m. 32 at 8 per cent which reduced the floating debt by one-half, but which actually came only to £m. 11 in cash, since the European banking houses paid it in part by bills of exchange they had discounted. In 1874, a further attempt was made to raise a national loan of £m. 50 at an annual charge of 9 per cent, but it yielded no more than £m. 3·4. Egyptian securities were quoted at 54 per cent of their face value. Within the thirteen years after Said Pasha's death, Egypt's total public debt had grown from £m. 3·293 to £m. 94·110,[405] and collapse was imminent. These operations of capital, at first sight, seem to reach the height of madness. One loan followed hard on the other, the interest on old loans was defrayed by new loans, and capital borrowed from the British and French paid for the large orders placed with British and French industrial capital. While the whole of Europe sighed and shrugged its shoulders at Ismail's crazy economy, European capital was in fact doing business in Egypt on a unique and fantastic scale--an incredible modern version of the biblical legend about the fat kine which remains unparalleled in capitalist history. In the first place, there was an element of usury in every loan, anything between one-fifth and one-third of the money ostensibly lent sticking to the fingers of the European bankers. Ultimately, the exorbitant interest had to be paid somehow, but how--where were the means to come from? Egypt herself was to supply them; their source was the Egyptian fellah--peasant economy providing in the final analysis all the most important elements for large-scale capitalist enterprise. He provided the land since the so-called private estates of the Khedive were quickly growing to vast dimensions by robbery and blackmail of innumerable villages; and these estates were the foundations of the irrigation projects and the speculation in cotton and sugar cane. As forced labour, the fellah also provided the labour power and, what is more, he was exploited without payment and even had to provide his own means of subsistence while he was at work. The marvels of technique which European engineers and European machines performed in the sphere of Egyptian irrigation, transport, agriculture and industry were due to this peasant economy with its fellaheen serfs. On the Kaliub Nile dams and on the Suez Canal, in the cotton plantations and in the sugar plants, untold masses of peasants were put to work; they were switched over from one job to the next as the need arose, and they were exploited to the limit of endurance and beyond. Although it became evident at every step that there were technical limits to the employment of forced labour for the purposes of modern capital, yet this was amply compensated by capital's unrestricted power of command over the pool of labour power, how long and under what conditions men were to work, live and be exploited. But not alone that it supplied land and labour power, peasant economy also provided the money. Under the influence of capitalist economy, the screws were put on the fellaheen by taxation. The tax on peasant holdings was persistently increased. In the late sixties, it amounted to £2 5_s._ per _hectare_, but not a farthing was levied on the enormous private estates of the royal family. In addition, ever more special rates were devised. Contributions of 2_s._ 6_d._ per _hectare_ had to be paid for the maintenance of the irrigation system which almost exclusively benefited the royal estates, and the fellah had to pay 1_s._ 4_d._ for every date tree felled, 9_d._ for every clay hovel in which he lived. In addition, every male over 10 years of age was liable to a head tax of 6_s._ 6_d._ The total paid by the fellaheen was £m. 2·5 under Mehemet Ali, £m. 5 under Said Pasha, and £m. 8·15 under Ismail Pasha. The greater the debt to European capital became, the more had to be extorted from the peasants.[406] In 1869 all taxes were put up by 10 per cent and the taxes for the coming year collected in advance. In 1870, a supplementary land tax of 8_s._ per _hectare_ was levied. All over Upper Egypt people were leaving the villages, demolished their dwellings and no longer tilled their land--only to avoid payment of taxes. In 1876, the tax on date palms was increased by 6_d._ Whole villages went out to fell their date palms and had to be prevented by rifle volleys. North of Siut, 10,000 fellaheen are said to have starved in 1879 because they could no longer raise the irrigation tax for their fields and had killed their cattle to avoid paying tax on it.[407] Now the fellah had been drained of his last drop of blood. Used as a leech by European capital, the Egyptian state had accomplished its function and was no longer needed. Ismail, the Khedive, was given his _congé_; capital could begin winding up operations. Egypt had still to pay 394,000 Egyptian pounds as interest on the Suez Canal shares for £m. 4 which England had bought in 1875. Now British commissions to 'regulate' the finances of Egypt went into action. Strangely enough, European capital was not at all deterred by the desperate state of the insolvent country and offered again and again to grant immense loans for the salvation of Egypt. Cowe and Stokes proposed a loan of £m. 76 at 9 per cent for the conversion of the total debt, Rivers Wilson thought no less than £m. 103 would be necessary. The _Crédit Foncier_ bought up floating bills of exchange by the million, attempting, though without success, to consolidate the total debt by a loan of £m. 91. With the financial position growing hopelessly desperate, the time drew near when the country and all her productive forces was to become the prey of European capital. October 1878 saw the representatives of the European creditors landing in Alexandria. British and French capital established dual control of finances and devised new taxes; the peasants were beaten and oppressed, so that payment of interest, temporarily suspended in 1876, could be resumed in 1877.[408] Now the claims of European capital became the pivot of economic life and the sole consideration of the financial system. In 1878, a new commission and ministry were set up, both with a staff in which Europeans made up one half. In 1879, the finances of Egypt were brought under permanent control of European capital, exercised by the _Commission de la Dette Publique Égyptienne_ in Cairo. In 1878, the Tshifliks, estates of the viceregal family, which comprised 431,100 acres, were converted into crown land and pledged to the European capitalists as collateral for the public debt, and the same happened to the Daira lands, the private estates of the Khedive, comprising 485,131 acres, mainly in Upper Egypt; this was, at a later date, sold to a syndicate. The other estates for the greatest part fell to capitalist companies, the Suez Canal Company in particular. To cover the cost of occupation, England requisitioned ecclesiastical lands of the mosques and schools. An opportune pretext for the final blow was provided by a mutiny in the Egyptian army, starved under European financial control while European officials were drawing excellent salaries, and by a revolt engineered among the Alexandrian masses who had been bled white. The British military occupied Egypt in 1882, as a result of twenty years' operations of Big Business, never to leave again. This was the ultimate and final step in the process of liquidating peasant economy in Egypt by and for European capital.[409] It should now be clear that the transactions between European loan capital and European industrial capital are based upon relations which are extremely rational and 'sound' for the accumulation of capital, although they appear absurd to the casual observer because this loan capital pays for the orders from Egypt and the interest on one loan is paid out of a new loan. Stripped of all obscuring connecting links, these relations consist in the simple fact that European capital has largely swallowed up the Egyptian peasant economy. Enormous tracts of land, labour, and labour products without number, accruing to the state as taxes, have ultimately been converted into European capital and have been accumulated. Evidently, only by use of the _kourbash_ could the historical development which would normally take centuries be compressed into two or three decades, and it was just the primitive nature of Egyptian conditions which proved such fertile soil for the accumulation of capital. As against the fantastic increase of capital on the one hand, the other economic result is the ruin of peasant economy together with the growth of commodity exchange which is rooted in the supreme exertion of the country's productive forces. Under Ismail's rule, the arable and reclaimed land of Egypt grew from 5 to 6·75 million acres, the canal system from 45,625 to 54,375 miles and the permanent way from 256·25 to 1,638 miles. Docks were built in Siut and Alexandria, magnificent dockyards in Alexandria, a steamer-service for pilgrims to Mecca was introduced on the Red Sea and along the coast of Syria and Asia Minor. Egypt's exports which in 1861 had amounted to £4,450,000 rose to £m. 14·4 in 1864; her imports which under Said Pasha amounted to £m 1·2 rose under Ismail to between £m. 5 and £m. 5·5. Trade which recovered only in the eighties from the opening up of the Suez Canal amounted to £m. 8·15 worth of imports and £m. 12·45 worth of exports in 1890, but in 1900 the figures were £m. 144 for imports and £m. 12·25 for exports, and in 1911--£m. 27·85 for imports and £m. 26·85 for exports. Thanks to this development of commodity economy which expanded by leaps and bounds with the assistance of European capital, Egypt herself had fallen a prey to the latter. The case of Egypt, just as that of China and, more recently, Morocco, shows militarism as the executor of the accumulation of capital, lurking behind international loans, railroad building, irrigation systems, and similar works of civilisation. The Oriental states cannot develop from natural to commodity economy and further to capitalist economy fast enough and are swallowed up by international capital, since they cannot perform these transformations without selling their souls to capital. Their feverish metamorphoses are tantamount to their absorption by international capital. Another good recent example is the deal made by German capital in Asiatic Turkey. European capital, British capital in particular, had already at an early date attempted to gain possession of this area which marches with the ancient trade route between Europe and Asia.[410] In the fifties and sixties, British capital built the railway lines Smyrna-Aydin-Diner and Smyrna-Kassaba-Alasehir, obtained the concession to extend the line to Afyon Karahisar and also leased the first tract for the Anatolian railway Ada-Bazar-Izmid. French capital gradually came to acquire influence over part of the railway building during this time. In 1888, German capital appeared on the scene. It took up 60 per cent of the shares in the new merger of international interests, negotiated principally with the French capitalist group represented by the _Banque Ottomane_. International capital took up the remaining 40 per cent.[411] The Anatolian Railway Company, a Turkish company, was founded on the 14th Redsheb of the year 1306 (March 4, 1889) with the _Deutsche Bank_ for principal backer, to take over the railway lines between Ada-Bazar and Izmid, running since the early seventies, as also the concession for the Izmid-Eskisehir-Angora line (525 miles). It was further entitled to complete the Ada-Bazar-Scutari line and branch lines to Brussa, in addition to building the supplementary network Eskisehir-Konya (278 miles) on the basis of the 1893 concession, and finally to run a service from Angora to Kaisari (264 miles). The Turkish government gave the company a state guarantee of annual gross earnings amounting to £412 per km. on the Ada-Bazar line and of £600 per km. on the Izmid-Angora lines. For this purpose it wrote over to the _Administration de la Dette Publique Ottomane_ the revenue from tithes in the _sandshaks_ of Izmid, Ertoghrul, Kutalia and Angora, with which to make up the gross earnings guaranteed by the government. For the Angora-Kaisari line the government guaranteed annual gross earnings of 775 Turkish pounds, i.e. £712 per km., and 604 Turkish pounds, i.e. approximately £550, provided, in the latter case, that the supplementary grant per km. did not exceed 219 Turkish pounds (£200 a year). The government was to receive a quarter of the eventual surplus of gross earnings over the guaranteed amount. The _Administration de la Dette Publique Ottomane_ as executor of the government guarantee collected the tithes of the _sandshaks_ Trebizonde and Gumuchhane direct and paid the railway company out of a common fund which was formed of all the tithes set aside for this purpose. In 1898, the Eskisehir-Konya maximum grant was raised from 218 to 296 Turkish pounds. In 1899, the company obtained concessions to build and run a dockyard at Ada-Bazar, to issue writs, to build corn-elevators and storerooms for goods of every description, further the right to employ its own staff for loading and unloading and, finally, in the sphere of customs policy, the creation of a kind of free port. In 1901, the company acquired a concession for the Baghdad railway Konya-Baghdad-Bazra-Gulf of Persia (1,500 miles) which connects with the Anatolian line by the Konya-Aregli-Bulgurlu line. For taking up this concession, a new limited company was founded which placed the order of constructing the line, at first to Bulgurlu, with a Building Company registered in Frankfort-on-the-Main. Between 1893 and 1910, the Turkish government gave additional grants--£1,948,000 for the Ada-Bazar-Angora line and 1,800,000 Turkish pounds for the Eskisehir-Konya line--a total of £3,632,000.[412] Finally, by the concession of 1907, the company was empowered to drain the Karavirar Lake and to irrigate the Konya plain, these works to be executed within six years at government expense. In this instance, the company advanced the government the necessary capital up to £780,000 at 5 per cent interest, repayable within thirty-six years. In return the Turkish government pledged as securities: (1) an annual sum of 25,000 Turkish pounds, payable from the surplus of the tithes' fund assigned to the _Administration de la Dette Publique Ottomane_ to cover the railway grants and other obligations; (2) the residual tithes over the last 5 years in the newly irrigated regions; (3) the net proceeds from the working of the irrigation systems, and (4) the price of all reclaimed or irrigated land that was sold. For the execution of this work, the Frankfort company had formed a subsidiary company 'for the irrigation of the Konya plain' with a capital of £m. 5·4 to take this work in hand. In 1908 the company obtained the concession for extending the Konya railway as far as Baghdad and the Gulf of Persia, again with inclusion of a guaranteed revenue. To pay for this railway grant, a German Baghdad railway loan was taken up in three instalments of £m. 2·16, £m. 4·32 and £m. 4·76 respectively, on the security of the aggregate tithes for the _vilayets_ Aydin, Baghdad, Mossul, Diarbekir, Ursa and Aleppo, and the sheep-tax in the _vilayets_ Konya, Adana, Aleppo, etc.[413] The foundation of accumulation here becomes quite clear. German capital builds railways, ports and irrigation works in Asiatic Turkey; in all these enterprises it extorts new surplus value from the Asiatics whom it employs as labour power. But this surplus value must be realised together with the means of production from Germany (railway materials, machinery, etc.). How is it done? In part by commodity exchange which is brought about by the railways, the dockyards, etc., and nurtured in Asia Minor under conditions of natural economy. In part, i.e. in so far as commodity exchange does not grow quickly enough for the needs of capital, by using force, the machinery of the state, to convert the national real income into commodities; these are turned into cash in order to realise capital plus surplus value. That is the true object of the revenue grants for independent enterprises run by foreign capital, and of the collateral in the case of loans. In both instances so-called tithes (_ueshur_), pledged in different ways, are paid in kind by the Turkish peasant and these were gradually increased from about 12 to 12 1/2 per cent. The peasant in the Asiatic _vilayet_ must pay up or else his tithe would simply be confiscated by the police and the central and local authorities. These tithes, themselves a manifestation of ancient Asiatic despotism based on natural economy, are not collected by the Turkish government direct, but by tax-farmers not unlike the tax-collectors of the _ancien régime_; that is to say the expected returns from the levy in each _vilayet_ are separately auctioned by the state to tax-farmers. They are bought by individual speculators or syndicates who sell the tithes of each _sandshak_ (district) to other speculators and these resell their shares to a whole number of smaller agents. All these middlemen want to cover their expenses and make the greatest possible profit, and thus, by the time they are actually collected, the peasants' contributions have swollen to enormous dimensions. The tax-farmer will try to recoup himself for any mistake in his calculations at the expense of the peasant, and the latter, nearly always in debt, is impatient for the moment when he can sell his harvest. But often, after cutting his corn, he cannot start threshing for weeks, until indeed the tax-farmer deigns to take his due. His entire harvest is about to rot in the fields, and the tax-farmer, usually a grain merchant himself, takes advantage of this fact and compels him to sell at a low price. These tax-collectors know how to enlist the support of the officials, especially the Muktars, the local headmen, against complaining malcontents.[414] Along with the taxes on salt, tobacco, spirits, the excise on silk, the fishing dues, etc., the tithes are pledged with the _Conseil de l'Administration de la Dette Publique Ottomane_ to serve as security for the railway grant and the loans. In every case the _Conseil_ reserves to itself the right to vet the tax-farmers' contracts and stipulates for the proceeds of the tithe to be paid directly into the coffers of its regional offices. If no tax-farmer can be found, the tithes are stored in kind by the Turkish government; the warehouse keys are deposited with the _Conseil_ which then can sell the tithes on its own account. Thus the economic metabolism between the peasants of Asia Minor, Syria and Mesopotamia on the one hand and German capital on the other proceeds in the following way: in the _vilayets_ Konya, Baghdad, Bazra, etc., the grain comes into being as a simple use-product of primitive peasant economy. It immediately falls to the tithe-farmer as a state levy. Only then, in the hands of this latter, does it become a commodity, and, as such, money which falls to the state. This money is nothing but converted peasant grain; it was not even produced as a commodity. But now, as a state guarantee, it serves towards paying for the construction and operation of railways, i.e. to realise both the value of the means of production and the surplus value extorted from the Asiatic peasants and proletariat in the building and running of the railway. In this process further means of production of German origin are used, and so the peasant grain of Asia, converted into money, also serves to turn into cash the surplus value that has been extorted from the German workers. In the performance of these functions, the money rolls from the hands of the Turkish government into the coffers of the _Deutsche Bank_, and here it accumulates, as capitalist surplus value, in the form of promoters' profits, royalties, dividends and interests in the accounts of Messrs. Gwinner, Siemens, Stinnes and their fellow directors, of the shareholders and clients of the _Deutsche Bank_ and the whole intricate system of its subsidiary companies. If there is no tax-farmer, as provided in the concessions, then the complicated metamorphoses are reduced to their most simple and obvious terms: the peasant grain passes immediately to the _Administration de la Dette Publique Ottomane_, i.e. to the representatives of European capital, and becomes already in its natural form a revenue for German and other foreign capital: it realises capitalist surplus value even before it has shed its use-form for the Asiatic peasant, even before it has become a commodity and its own value has been realised. This is a coarse and straightforward metabolism between European capital and Asiatic peasant economy, with the Turkish state reduced to its real rôle, that of a political machinery for exploiting peasant economy for capitalist purposes,--the real function, this, of all Oriental states in the period of capitalist imperialism. This business of paying for German goods with German capital in Asia is not the absurd circle it seems at first, with the kind Germans allowing the shrewd Turks merely the 'use' of their great works of civilisation--it is at bottom an exchange between German capital and Asiatic peasant economy, an exchange performed under state compulsion. On the one hand it makes for progressive accumulation and expanding 'spheres of interest' as a pretext for further political and economic expansion of German capital in Turkey. Railroad building and commodity exchange, on the other hand, are fostered by the state on the basis of a rapid disintegration, ruin and exploitation of Asiatic peasant economy in the course of which the Turkish state becomes more and more dependent on European capital, politically as well as financially.[415] FOOTNOTES: [401] The Permanent Way (in kilometres). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- _Year_ | _Europe_ | _America_ | _Asia_ | _Africa_ |_Australia_ ----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+----------- 1840 | 2,925 | 4,754 | -- | -- | -- 1850 | 23,405 | 16,064 | -- | -- | -- 1860 | 51,862 | 53,955 | 1,393 | 455 | 376 1870 | 104,914 | 93,193 | 8,185 | 1,786 | 1,765 1880 | 168,983 | 174,666 | 16,287 | 4,646 | 7,847 1890 | 223,869 | 331,417 | 33,724 | 9,386 | 18,889 1900 | 283,878 | 402,171 | 60,301 | 20,114 | 24,014 1910 | 333,848 | 526,382 | 101,916 | 36,854 | 31,014 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Accordingly, the increase was as follows: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- | % | % | % | % | % 1840/50 | 710 | 215 | -- | -- | -- 1860/70 | 102 | 73 | 486 | 350 | 350 1870/80 | 61 | 88 | 99 | 156 | 333 1880/90 | 32 | 89 | 107 | 104 | 142 1890/1900 | 27 | 21 | 79 | 114 | 27 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [402] Tugan Baranovski, _Studies on the Theory and History of Commercial Crises in England_, p. 74. [403] Sismondi, _Nouveaux Principes_ ..., vol. i, book iv, chap. iv: 'Commercial Wealth Follows the Growth of Income', pp. 368-70. [404] Engineer Eyth, a representative of Fowler's, tells us: 'Now there was a feverish exchange of telegrams between Cairo, London and Leeds.--"When can Fowler's deliver 150 steam ploughs?"--Answer: "Working to capacity, within one year."--"Not good enough. Expect unloading Alexandria by spring 150 steam ploughs."--A.: "Impossible."--The works at that time were barely big enough to turn out 3 steam ploughs per week. N.B. a machine of this type costs £2,500 so that the order involved £m. 3·75. Ismail Pasha's next wire: "Quote cost immediate factory expansion. Viceroy willing foot bill."--You can imagine that Leeds made hay while the sun shone. And in addition, other factories in England and France as well were made to supply steam ploughs. The Alexandria warehouses, where goods destined for the vice-regal estates were unloaded, were crammed to the roof with boilers, wheels, drums, wire-rope and all sorts of chests and boxes. The second-rate hostelries of Cairo swarmed with newly qualified steam ploughmen, promoted in a hurry from anvil or share-plough, young hopefuls, fit for anything and nothing, since every steam plough must be manned by at least one expert pioneer of civilisation. Wagonloads of this assorted cargo were sent into the interior, just so that the next ship could unload. You cannot imagine in what condition they arrived at their destination, or rather anywhere but their destination. Ten boilers were lying on the banks of the Nile, and the machine to which they belonged was ten miles further. Here was a little heap of wire-rope, but you had to travel another 20 hours to find the appropriate pulleys. In one place an Englishman who was to set up the machines squatted desolate and hungry on a pile of French crates, and in another place his mate had taken to native liquor in his despair. Effendis and Katibs, invoking the help of Allah, rushed to and fro between Siut and Alexandria and compiled endless lists of items the names of which they did not even know. And yet, in the end, some of this apparatus was set in motion. In Upper Egypt, the ploughs belched steam--civilisation and progress had made another step forward' (_Lebendige Kräfte, 7 Vorträge aus dem Gebiete der Technik_, Berlin, 1908, p. 21). [405] Cf. Evelyn Baring, Earl of Cromer, _Egypt Today_ (London, 1908), vol. i, p. 11. [406] Incidentally, the money wrested from the Egyptian fellah further fell, by way of Turkey, to European capital. The Turkish loans of 1854, 1855, 1871, 1877 and 1886 were based on the contributions from Egypt which were increased several times and paid direct into the Bank of England. [407] 'It is stated by residents in the Delta', reports _The Times_ of March 31, 1879, 'that the third quarter of the year's taxation is now collected, and the old methods of collection applied. This sounds strangely by the side of the news that people are starving by the roadside, that great tracts of country are uncultivated, because of the physical burdens, and that the farmers have sold their cattle, the women their finery, and that the usurers are filling the mortgage offices with their bonds, and the courts with their suits of foreclosure' (quoted by Th. Rothstein, _Egypt's Ruin_, 1910, pp. 69-70). [408] 'This produce', wrote the correspondent of _The Times_ from Alexandria, 'consists wholly of taxes paid by the peasants in kind, and when one thinks of the poverty-stricken, overdriven, under-paid fellaheen in their miserable hovels, working late and early to fill the pockets of the creditors, the punctual payment of the coupon ceases to be wholly a subject of gratification' (quoted by Rothstein, op. cit., p. 49). [409] Eyth, an outstanding exponent of capitalist civilisation in the primitive countries, characteristically concludes his masterly sketch on Egypt, from which we have taken the main data, with the following imperialist articles of faith: 'What we have learnt from the past also holds true for the future. Europe must and will lay firm hands upon those countries which can no longer keep up with modern conditions on their own, though this will not be possible without all kinds of struggle, when the difference between right and wrong will become blurred, when political and historical justice will often enough mean disaster for millions and their salvation depend upon what is politically wrong. All the world over, the strongest hand will make an end to confusion, and so it will even on the banks of the Nile' (op. cit., p. 247). Rothstein has made it clear enough what kind of 'order' the British created 'on the banks of the Nile'. [410] Already in the early twenties of the last century, the Anglo-Indian government commissioned Colonel Chesney to investigate the navigability of the River Euphrates in order to establish the shortest possible connection between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, resp. India. After detailed preparations and a preliminary reconnaissance in winter 1831, the expedition proper set out in 1835/7. In due course, British staff and officials investigated and surveyed a wider area in Eastern Mesopotamia. These efforts dragged on until 1866 without any useful results for the British government. But at a later date Great Britain returned to the plan of connecting the Mediterranean with India by way of the Gulf of Persia, though in a different form, i.e. the Tigris railway project. In 1879, Cameron travelled through Mesopotamia for the British government to study the lie of the land for the projected railway (Max Freiherr v. Oppenheim, _Vom Mittelmeer zum Persischen Golf durch den Hauran, die Syrische Wüste und Mesopotamien_, vol. ii, pp. 5 and 36). [411] S. Schneider, _Die Deutsche Bagdadbahn_ (1900), p. 3. [412] Saling, _Börsenjahrbuch 1911/12_, p. 2211. [413] Saling, op. cit., pp. 360-1. Engineer Pressel of Wuerttemberg, who as assistant to Baron v. Hirsch was actively engaged in these transactions in European Turkey, neatly accounts for the total grants towards railway-building in Turkey which European capital wrested from the Turkish government: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- | _Length | _Paid guarantee | in km._ | in francs_ -------------------------------------------+---------+---------------- 3 lines in European Turkey | 1888·8 | 33,099,352 | | Turkish permanent way in Asia completed | | before 1900 | 2313·2 | 53,811,538 | | Commissions and other costs connected with | | the guaranteed railway grants paid to the | | A.D.P.O. | | 9,351,209 -------------------------------------------+---------+---------------- Total | | 96,262,099 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- All this refers only to the period before 1899; not until that date were the revenue grants paid in part. The tithes of no less than 28 out of the 74 _sandshaks_ in Asiatic Turkey had been pledged for the revenue grants, and with these grants, between 1856 and 1900, a grand total of 1,576 miles of rails had been laid down in Asiatic Turkey. Pressel, the expert, by the way gives an instance of the underhand methods employed by the railway company at Turkish expense; he states that under the 1893 agreement the Anatolian company promised to run the railway to Baghdad via Angora, but later decided that this plan of theirs would not work and, having qualified for the guarantee, left the line to its fate and got busy with another route via Konya. 'No sooner have the companies succeeded in acquiring the Smyrna-Aydin-Diner line, than they will demand the extension of this line to Konya, and the moment these branch lines are completed, the companies will move heaven and earth to force the goods traffic to use these new routes for which there are no guarantees, and which, more important still, need never share their takings, whereas the other lines must pay part of their surplus to the government, once their gross revenue exceeds a certain amount. In consequence, the government will gain nothing by the Aydin line, and the companies will make millions. The government will foot the bill for practically the entire revenue guarantee for the Kassaba-Angora line, and can never hope to profit by its contracted 25 per cent share in the surplus above £600 gross takings' (W. V. Pressel, _Les Chemins de Fer en Turquie d'Asie_ (Zurich, 1900), p. 7). [414] Charles Moravitz, _Die Türkei im Spiegel ihrer Finanzen_ (1903), p. 84. [415] 'Incidentally, in this country everything is difficult and complicated. If the government wishes to create a monopoly in cigarette paper or playing cards, France and Austro-Hungary immediately are on the spot to veto the project in the interest of their trade. If the issue is oil, Russia will raise objections, and even the Powers who are least concerned will make their agreement dependent on some other agreement. Turkey's fate is that of Sancho Panza and his dinner: as soon as the minister of finance wishes to do anything, some diplomat gets up, interrupts him and throws a veto in his teeth' (Moravitz, op. cit., p. 70). _CHAPTER XXXI_ PROTECTIVE TARIFFS AND ACCUMULATION Imperialism is the political expression of the accumulation of capital in its competitive struggle for what remains still open of the non-capitalist environment. Still the largest part of the world in terms of geography, this remaining field for the expansion of capital is yet insignificant as against the high level of development already attained by the productive forces of capital; witness the immense masses of capital accumulated in the old countries which seek an outlet for their surplus product and strive to capitalise their surplus value, and the rapid change-over to capitalism of the pre-capitalist civilisations. On the international stage, then, capital must take appropriate measures. With the high development of the capitalist countries and their increasingly severe competition in acquiring non-capitalist areas, imperialism grows in lawlessness and violence, both in aggression against the non-capitalist world and in ever more serious conflicts among the competing capitalist countries. But the more violently, ruthlessly and thoroughly imperialism brings about the decline of non-capitalist civilisations, the more rapidly it cuts the very ground from under the feet of capitalist accumulation. Though imperialism is the historical method for prolonging the career of capitalism, it is also a sure means of bringing it to a swift conclusion. This is not to say that capitalist development must be actually driven to this extreme: the mere tendency towards imperialism of itself takes forms which make the final phase of capitalism a period of catastrophe. Classical economics, in its period of storm and stress, had had high hopes of a peaceful development of the accumulation of capital and of a trade and industry which can only prosper in times of peace, evolving the orthodox Manchester ideology of the harmony of interests among the world's commercial nations on the one hand, and between capital and labour on the other. These hopes were apparently justified in Europe by the short period of Free Trade in the sixties and seventies, which was based upon the mistaken doctrine of the English Free Traders that the only theoretical and practical condition for the accumulation of capital is commodity exchange, that the two are identical. As we have seen, Ricardo and his whole school identified accumulation and its reproductive conditions with simple commodity production and the conditions of simple commodity circulation. This was soon to become even more obvious in the practices of the common Free Trader. The special interests of the exporting Lancashire cotton manufacturers in Manchester determined the entire line of argument of the Cobden League. Their principal object was to get markets, and it became an article of faith: 'Buy from foreign countries and thus in turn sell our industrial product, our cotton goods, on the new markets.' Cobden and Bright demanded Free Trade and cheaper foodstuffs in particular in the interest of consumption; but the consumer was not the worker who eats the bread, but the capitalist who consumes labour power. This teaching never expressed the interests of capitalist accumulation as a whole. In England herself it was given the lie already in the forties, when the harmony of interests of the commercial nations in the East were proclaimed to the sound of gunfire in the Opium Wars which ultimately, by the annexation of Hongkong, brought about the very opposite of such harmony, a system of 'spheres of interest'.[416] On the European Continent, Free Trade in the sixties did not represent the interests of industrial capital, because the foremost Free Trade countries of the Continent were still predominantly agrarian with a comparatively feeble development of industry. Rather, the policy of Free Trade was implemented as a means for the political reconstruction of the Central European states. In Germany, under Bismarck and Manteuffel, it was a peculiarly Prussian lever for ousting Austria from the _Bund_ and the _Zollverein_ and to set up the new German Empire under Prussian leadership. Economically speaking, the mainstays of Free Trade were in this case the interests both of commercial capital, especially in the Hansa towns to whom international trade was vital, and of agrarian consumers; among industry proper, it was otherwise. The iron industry was won over only with difficulty and in exchange for the abolition of the Rhine tolls. But the cotton industry in Southern Germany remained irreconcilable and clung to protective tariffs. In France, 'most favoured nations' clause' agreements, the basis of the Free Trade system all over Europe, were concluded by Napoleon III without the consent, and even against the will, of parliament, industrialists and agrarians, who constituted an absolute majority, being in favour of protective tariffs. The government of the Second Empire only took the course of commercial treaties as an emergency measure--Britain accepted it as such--in order to get round political opposition in France and to establish Free Trade behind the back of the legislature by international action. The first principal treaty between England and France simply rode rough-shod over public opinion in France.[417] Two imperial decrees abolished the old system of French protective tariffs which had been in force from 1853 to 1862. With scant observance of the formalities they were 'ratified' in 1863. In Italy, Free Trade was a prop of Cavour's policy, depending as it did on French support. Under pressure of public opinion, an inquiry was made in 1870 which revealed that those most intimately concerned were hostile to the policy of Free Trade. In Russia, finally, the tendency towards Free Trade in the sixties was but the first step towards creating a broad basis for commodity economy and industry on a large scale, coming at the same time as the abolition of serfdom and the construction of a railway network.[418] Thus the very inception of an international system of Free Trade shows it to be just a passing phase in the history of capitalist accumulation, and it shows up the fallacy of attributing the general reversion to protective tariffs after the seventies simply to a defensive reaction against English Free Trade.[419] Such an explanation is vitiated by the fact that both in Germany and France the leaders in the reversion to protective tariffs were the agrarian interests, that the measures were directed not against British but against American competition, and that not England but Germany constituted the chief danger to the rising home industry in Russia, and France to that in Italy. Nor was Britain's monopoly the cause for the world-wide depression which prevailed since the seventies and induced the desire for protective tariffs. We must look deeper for the reasons responsible for the change of front on the question of protective tariffs. The doctrine of Free Trade with its delusion about the harmony of interests on the world market corresponded with an outlook which conceived of everything in terms of commodity exchange. It was abandoned just as soon as big industrial capital had become sufficiently established in the principal countries of the European Continent to look to the conditions for its accumulation. As against the mutual interests of capitalist countries, these latter bring to the fore the antagonism engendered by the competitive struggle for the non-capitalist environment. When the Free Trade era opened, Eastern Asia was only just being made accessible by the Chinese wars, and European capital had but begun to make headway in Egypt. In the eighties the policy of expansion became ever stronger, together with a policy of protective tariffs. There was an uninterrupted succession of events during the eighties: the British occupation of Egypt, Germany's colonial conquests in Africa, the French occupation of Tunisia together with the Tonkin expedition, Italy's advances in Assab and Massawa, the Abyssinian war and the creation of a separate Eritrea, and the English conquests in South Africa. The clash between Italy and France over the Tunisian sphere of interest was the characteristic prelude to the Franco-Italian tariff war seven years later, by which drastic epilogue an end was made to the Free Trade harmony of interests on the European Continent. To monopolise the non-capitalist areas at home and abroad became the war-cry of capital, while the free-trade policy of the 'open door' specifically represented the peculiar helplessness of non-capitalist countries in the face of international capital and the natural equilibrium which was aimed at by its competition in the preliminary stage of the partial or total occupation of these areas as colonies or spheres of interest. As the oldest capitalist Empire, England alone could so far remain loyal to Free Trade, primarily because she had long had immense possessions of non-capitalist areas as a basis for operations which afforded her almost unlimited opportunities for capitalist accumulation. Until recently, she had thus in fact been beyond the competition of other capitalist countries. These, in turn, universally strove to become self-sufficient behind a barrier of protective tariffs; yet they buy one another's commodities and come to depend ever more one upon another for replenishing their material conditions of reproduction. Indeed, protective tariffs have by now completely lost their use for technical development of the productive forces, all too often being the instrument for the artificial conservation of obsolete productive methods. The inherent contradictions of an international policy of protective tariffs, exactly like the dual character of the international loan system, are just a reflection of the historical antagonism which has developed between the dual interests of accumulation: expansion, the realisation and capitalisation of surplus value on the one hand, and, on the other, an outlook which conceives of everything purely in terms of commodity exchange. This fact is evidenced particularly in that the modern system of high protective tariffs, required by colonial expansion and the increasing inner tension of the capitalist medium, was also instituted with a view to increasing armaments. The reversion to protective tariffs was carried through in Germany as well as in France, Italy, and Russia, together with, and in the interests of, an expansion of the armed services, as the basis for the European competition in armaments which was developing at that time, first on land, and then also at sea. European Free Trade, with its attendant continental system of infantry, had been superseded by protective tariffs as the foundation and supplement of an imperialist system with a strong bias towards naval power. Thus capitalist accumulation as a whole, as an actual historical process, has two different aspects. One concerns the commodity market and the place where surplus value is produced--the factory, the mine, the agricultural estate. Regarded in this light, accumulation is a purely economic process, with its most important phase a transaction between the capitalist and wage labourer. In both its phases, however, it is confined to the exchange of equivalents and remains within the limits of commodity exchange. Here, in form at any rate, peace, property and equality prevail, and the keen dialectics of scientific analysis were required to reveal how the right of ownership changes in the course of accumulation into appropriation of other people's property, how commodity exchange turns into exploitation and equality becomes class-rule. The other aspect of the accumulation of capital concerns the relations between capitalism and the non-capitalist modes of production which start making their appearance on the international stage. Its predominant methods are colonial policy, an international loan system--a policy of spheres of interest--and war. Force, fraud, oppression, looting are openly displayed without any attempt at concealment, and it requires an effort to discover within this tangle of political violence and contests of power the stern laws of the economic process. Bourgeois liberal theory takes into account only the former aspect: the realm of 'peaceful competition', the marvels of technology and pure commodity exchange; it separates it strictly from the other aspect: the realm of capital's blustering violence which is regarded as more or less incidental to foreign policy and quite independent of the economic sphere of capital. In reality, political power is nothing but a vehicle for the economic process. The conditions for the reproduction of capital provide the organic link between these two aspects of the accumulation of capital. The historical career of capitalism can only be appreciated by taking them together. 'Sweating blood and filth with every pore from head to toe' characterises not only the birth of capital but also its progress in the world at every step, and thus capitalism prepares its own downfall under ever more violent contortions and convulsions. FOOTNOTES: [416] And not only in England. 'Even in 1859, a pamphlet, ascribed to Diergardt of Viersen, a factory owner, was disseminated all over Germany, urging that country to make sure of the East-Asiatic markets in good time. It advocated the display of military force as the only means for getting commercial advantages from the Japanese and the Eastern Asiatic nations in general. A German fleet, built with the people's small savings, had been a youthful dream, long since brought under the hammer by Hannibal Fischer. Though Prussia had a few ships, her naval power was not impressive. But in order to enter into commercial negotiations with Eastern Asia, it was decided to equip a ship. Graf zu Eulenburg, one of the ablest and most prudent Prussian statesmen, was appointed chief of this mission which also had scientific objects. Under most difficult conditions he carried out his commission with great skill, and though the plan for simultaneous negotiations with the Hawaiian islands had to be given up, the mission was otherwise successful. Though the Berlin press of that time knew better, declaring whenever a new difficulty was reported, that it was only to be expected, and denouncing all expenditure on naval demonstrations as a waste of the taxpayers' money, the ministry of the new era remained steadfast, and the harvest of success was reaped by the ministry that followed' (W. Lotz, _Die Ideen der deutschen Handelspolitik_, p. 80). [417] Following on the preliminary discussion between Michel Chevalier and Richard Cobden on behalf of the French and English governments, 'official negotiations were shortly entered upon and were conducted with the greatest secrecy. On January 1, 1860, Napoleon III announced his intentions in a memorandum addressed to M. Fould, the Minister of State. This declaration came like a bolt from the blue. After the events of the past year, the general belief was that no attempt would be made to modify the tariff system before 1861. Feelings ran high, but all the same the treaty was signed on January 23' (Auguste Devers, _La politique commerciale de la France depuis 1860. Schriften des Vereins für Sozialpolitik_, vol. 51, p. 136). [418] Between 1857 and 1868, the revision along liberal lines of the Russian tariffs and the ultimate writing-off of the insane system of _kantrin_ with regard to protective tariffs were a manifestation and corollary of the progressive reforms which the disastrous Crimean wars had made inevitable. But the reduction of customs duties reflected the concern of the landowning gentry who, both as consumers of foreign goods and as producers of grain for export, were interested in unrestricted commerce between Russia and Western Europe. The champion of agrarian interests, the 'Free Economic Association' stated: 'During the last sixty years, between 1822 and 1882, agriculture, Russia's largest producer, was brought to a precarious position owing to four great setbacks. These could in every case be directly attributed to excessive tariffs. On the other hand, the thirty-two years between 1845 and 1877 when tariffs were moderate went by without any such emergency, in spite of three foreign wars and one civil war [meaning the Polish insurrection of 1863--_R. L._], every one of which proved a greater or less strain on the financial resources of the state' (_Memorandum of the Imperial Free Economic Association on Revising Russian Tariffs_ (St. Petersburg, 1890), p. 148). As late as the nineties, then, the scientific spokesman of the Free Trade Movement, the said 'Free Economic Association', had to agitate against protective tariffs as a 'contrivance to transplant' capitalist industry to Russia. In a reactionary 'populist' spirit, it denounced capitalism as a breeding ground for the modern proletariat, 'those masses of shiftless people without home or property who have nothing to lose and have long been in ill repute' (p. 191). This is proof enough that until most recent times the Russian champions of Free Trade, or at least of moderate tariffs, did not to any appreciable extent represent the interests of industrial capital. Cf. also K. Lodyshenski: _The History of the Russian Tariffs_ (St. Petersburg, 1886), pp. 239-58. [419] This is also the opinion of F. Engels. In one of his letters to Nikolayon, on June 18, 1892, he writes: 'English authors, blinded by their patriotic interests, completely fail to grasp why the whole world so stubbornly rejects England's example of free trade and adopts in its place the principle of protective tariffs. Of course, they simply dare not admit even to themselves that the system of protective tariffs, by now almost universal, is merely a defensive measure against English free trade which was instrumental in perfecting England's industrial monopoly. Such a defence policy may be more or less reasonable--in some cases it is downright stupid, as for instance in Germany who under the system of free trade had become a great industrial power and now imposes protective tariffs on agricultural products and raw materials, thus increasing the cost of her industrial production. In my view this universal reversion to protective tariffs is not a mere accident but the reaction against England's intolerable industrial monopoly. The form which this reaction takes, as I said before, may be wrong, inadequate and even worse, but its historical necessity seems to me quite clear and obvious' (_Letters_ of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels to Nikolayon (St. Petersburg, 1908), p. 71). _CHAPTER XXXII_ MILITARISM AS A PROVINCE OF ACCUMULATION Militarism fulfils a quite definite function in the history of capital, accompanying as it does every historical phase of accumulation. It plays a decisive part in the first stages of European capitalism, in the period of the so-called 'primitive accumulation', as a means of conquering the New World and the spice-producing countries of India. Later, it is employed to subject the modern colonies, to destroy the social organisations of primitive societies so that their means of production may be appropriated, forcibly to introduce commodity trade in countries where the social structure had been unfavourable to it, and to turn the natives into a proletariat by compelling them to work for wages in the colonies. It is responsible for the creation and expansion of spheres of interest for European capital in non-European regions, for extorting railway concessions in backward countries, and for enforcing the claims of European capital as international lender. Finally, militarism is a weapon in the competitive struggle between capitalist countries for areas of non-capitalist civilisation. In addition, militarism has yet another important function. From the purely economic point of view, it is a pre-eminent means for the realisation of surplus value; it is in itself a province of accumulation. In examining the question who should count as a buyer for the mass of products containing the capitalised surplus value, we have again and again refused to consider the state and its organs as consumers. Since their income is derivative, they were all taken to belong to the special category of those who live on the surplus value (or partly on the wage of labour), together with the liberal professions and the various parasites of present-day society ('king, professor, prostitute, mercenary'). But this interpretation will only do on two assumptions: first, if we take it, in accordance with Marx's diagram, that the state has no other sources of taxation than capitalist surplus value and wages,[420] and secondly, if we regard the state and its organs as consumers pure and simple. If the issue turns on the personal consumption of the state organs (as also of the 'mercenary') the point is that consumption is partly transferred from the working class to the hangers-on of the capitalist class, in so far as the workers foot the bill. Let us assume for a moment that the indirect taxes extorted from the workers, which mean a curtailment of their consumption, are used entirely to pay the salaries of the state officials and to provision the regular army. There will then be no change in the reproduction of social capital as a whole. Both Departments II and I remain constant because society as a whole still demands the same kind of products and in the same quantities. Only _v_ as the commodity of 'labour power' has changed in value in relation to the products of Department II, i.e. in relation to the means of subsistence. This _v_, the same amount of money representing labour power, is now exchanged for a smaller amount of means of subsistence. What happens to the products of Department II which are then left over? Instead of the workers, the state officials and the regular army now receive them. The organs of the capitalist state take over the workers' consumption on the same scale exactly. Although the conditions of reproduction have remained stable, there has been a redistribution of the total product. Part of the products of Department II, originally intended entirely for the consumption of the workers as equivalent for _v_, is now allocated to the hangers-on of the capitalist class for consumption. From the point of view of social reproduction, it is as if the relative surplus value had in the first place been larger by a certain amount which is added on to the consumption of the capitalist class and its hangers-on. So far the crude exploitation, by the mechanism of indirect taxation, of the working class for the support of the capitalist state's officials amounts merely to an increase of the surplus value, of that part of it, that is to say, which is consumed. The difference is that this further splitting off of surplus value from variable capital only comes later, after the exchange between capital and labour has been accomplished. But the consumption by the organs of the capitalist state has no bearing on the realisation of _capitalised_ surplus value, because the additional surplus value for this consumption--even though it comes about at the workers' expense--is created afterwards. On the other hand, if the workers did not pay for the greater part of the state officials' upkeep, the capitalists themselves would have to bear the entire cost of it. A corresponding portion of their surplus value would have to be assigned directly to keeping the organs of their class-rule, either at the expense of production which would have to be curtailed accordingly, or, which is more probable, it would come from the surplus value intended for their consumption. The capitalists would have to capitalise on a smaller scale because of having to contribute more towards the immediate preservation of their own class. In so far as they shift onto the working class (and also the representatives of simple commodity production, such as peasants and artisans) the principal charge of their hangers-on, the capitalists have a larger portion of surplus value available for capitalisation. But as yet _no opportunities for such capitalisation_ have come into being, no new market, that is to say, for the surplus value that has become available, in which it could produce and realise new commodities. But when the monies concentrated in the exchequer by taxation are used for the production of armaments, the picture is changed. With indirect taxation and high protective tariffs, the bill of militarism is footed mainly by the working class and the peasants. The two kinds of taxation must be considered separately. From an economic point of view, it amounts to the following, as far as the working class is concerned: provided that wages are not raised to make up for the higher price of foodstuffs--which is at present the fate of the greatest part of the working class, including even the minority that is organised in trade unions, owing to the pressure of cartels and employers' organisations[421]--indirect taxation means that part of the purchasing power of the working class is transferred to the state. Now as before the variable capital, as a fixed amount of money, will put in motion an appropriate quantity of living labour, that is to say it serves to employ the appropriate quantity of constant capital in production and to produce the corresponding amount of surplus value. As soon as capital has completed this cycle, it is divided between the working class and the state: the workers surrender the state part of the money they received as wages. Capital has wholly appropriated the former variable capital in its material form, as labour power, but the working class retains only part of the variable capital in the form of money, the state claiming the rest. And this invariably happens after capital has run its cycle between capitalist and worker; it takes place, as it were, behind the back of capital, at no point impinging direct on the vital stages of the circulation of capital and the production of surplus value, so that it is no immediate concern of the latter. But all the same it does affect the conditions for the reproduction of capital as a whole. The transfer of some of the purchasing power from the working class to the state entails a proportionate decrease in the consumption of means of subsistence by the working class. For capital as a whole, it means producing a smaller quantity of consumer goods for the working class, provided that both variable capital (in the form of money and as labour power) and the mass of appropriated surplus value remain constant, so that the workers get a smaller share of the aggregate product. In the process of reproduction of the entire capital, then, means of subsistence will be produced in amounts smaller than the value of the variable capital, because of the shift in the ratio between the value of the variable capital and the quantity of means of subsistence in which it is realised, with the money wages of labour remaining constant, according to our premise, or at any rate not rising sufficiently to offset the increase in the price of foodstuffs. This increase represents the level of indirect taxation. How will the material relations of reproduction be adjusted? When fewer means of subsistence are needed for the renewal of labour power, a corresponding amount of constant capital and living labour becomes available which can now be used for producing other commodities in response to a new effective demand arising within society. It arises from the side of the state which has appropriated, by way of tax legislation, the part wanting of the workers' purchasing power. This time, however, the state does not demand means of subsistence (after all that has already been said under the heading of 'third persons', we shall here ignore the demand for means of subsistence for state officials which is also satisfied out of taxes) but it requires a special kind of product, namely the militarist weapons of war on land and at sea. Again we take Marx's second diagram of accumulation as the basis for investigating the ensuing changes in social reproduction: I. _5,000c + 1,000v + 1,000s = 7,000_ means of production II. _1,430c + 285v + 285s = 2,000_ means of subsistence Now let us suppose that, owing to indirect taxation and the consequent increase in the price of means of subsistence, the working class as a whole reduces consumption by, say, a 100 value units of the real wages. As before, the workers receive _1,000v + 285v = 1,285v_ in money, but for this money they only get means of subsistence to the value of 1185. The 100 units which represent the tax increase in the price of foodstuffs go to the state which receives in addition military taxes from the peasants, etc., to the value of 150 units, bringing the total up to 250. This total constitutes a new demand--the demand for armaments. At present, however, we are only interested in the 100 units taken from the workers' wages. This demand for armaments to the value of 100 must be satisfied by the creation of an appropriate branch of production which requires a constant capital of 71·5 and a variable capital of 14·25, assuming the average organic composition outlined in Marx's diagram. _71·5c + 14·25v + 14·25s = 100_ weapons of war This new branch of production further requires that 71·5 means of production be produced and about 13 means of subsistence, because, of course, the real wages of the workers are also less by about one-thirteenth. You could counter by saying that the profit accruing to capital from this new expansion of demand is merely on paper, because the cut in the actual consumption of the working class will inevitably result in a corresponding curtailment of the means of subsistence produced. It will take the following form for Department II: _71·5c + 14·25v + 14·25s = 100_ In addition, Department I will also have to contract accordingly, so that, owing to the decreasing consumption of the working class, the equations for both departments will be: I. _4,949c + 989·75v + 989·75s = 6,928·5_ II. _1,358·5c + 270·75v + 270·75s = 1,900_ If, by the mediation of the state, the same 100 units now call forth armament production of an equal volume with a corresponding fillip to the production of producer goods, this is at first sight only an extraneous change in the material forms of social production: instead of a quantity of means of subsistence a quantity of armaments is now being produced. Capital has won with the left hand only what it has lost with the right. Or we might say that the large number of capitalists producing means of subsistence have lost the effective demand in favour of a small group of big armament manufacturers. But this picture is only valid for individual capital. Here it makes no difference indeed whether production engages in one sphere of activity or another. As far as the individual capitalist is concerned, there are no departments of total production such as the diagram distinguishes. There are only commodities and buyers, and it is completely immaterial to him whether he produces instruments of life or instruments of death, corned beef or armour plating. Opponents of militarism frequently appeal to this point of view to show that military supplies as an economic investment for capital merely put profit taken from one capitalist into the pocket of another.[422] On the other hand, capital and its advocates try to overpersuade the working class to this point of view by talking them into the belief that indirect taxes and the demand of the state would only bring about a change in the material form of reproduction; instead of other commodities cruisers and guns would be produced which would give the workers as good a living, if not a better one. One glance at the diagram shows how little truth there is in this argument as far as the workers are concerned. To make comparison easier, we will suppose the armament factories to employ just as many workers as were employed before in the production of means of subsistence for the working class. 1,285 units will then be paid out as wages, but now they will only buy 1,185's worth of means of subsistence. All this looks different from the perspective of capital as a whole. For this the 100 at the disposal of the state, which represent the demand for armaments, constitute a new market. Originally this money was variable capital and as such it has done its job, it has been exchanged for living labour which produced the surplus value. But then the circulation of the variable capital was stopped short, this money was split off, and it now appears as a new purchasing power in the possession of the state. It has been created by sleight of hand, as it were, but still it has the same effects as a newly opened market. Of course for the time being capital is debarred from selling 100 units of consumer goods for the working class, and the individual capitalist considers the worker just as good a consumer and buyer of commodities as anyone else, another capitalist, the state, the peasant, foreign countries, etc. But let us not forget that for capital as a whole the upkeep of the working class is only a necessary evil, only a means towards the real end of production: the creation and realisation of surplus value. If it were possible to extort surplus value without giving labour an equal measure of means of subsistence, it would be all the better for business. To begin with indirect taxation has the same effects as if--the price of foodstuffs remaining constant--the capitalists had succeeded in depressing wages by a hundred units without detracting from the work performed, seeing that a lower output of consumer goods is equally the inevitable result of continuous wage cuts. If wages are cut heavily, capital does not worry about having to produce fewer means of subsistence for the workers, in fact it delights in this practice at every opportunity; similarly, capital as a whole does not mind if the effective demand of the working class for means of subsistence is curtailed because of indirect taxation which is not compensated by a rise in wages. This may seem strange because in the latter case the balance of the variable capital goes to the exchequer, while with a direct wage cut it remains in the capitalists' pockets and--commodity prices remaining equal--increases the relative surplus value. But a continuous and universal reduction of money wages can only be carried through on rare occasions, especially if trade union organisation is highly developed. There are strong social and political barriers to this fond aspiration of capital. Depression of the real wage by means of indirect taxation, on the other hand, can be carried through promptly, smoothly and universally, and it usually takes time for protests to be heard; and besides, the opposition is confined to the political field and has no immediate economic repercussions. The subsequent restriction in the production of means of subsistence does not represent a loss of markets for capital as a whole but rather a saving in the costs of producing surplus value. Surplus value is never realised by producing means of subsistence for the workers--however necessary this may be, as the reproduction of living labour, for the production of surplus value. But to come back to our example: I. _5,000c + 1,000v + 1,000s = 7,000_ means of production II. _1,430c + 285v + 285s = 2,000_ means of subsistence At first it looks as if Department II were also creating and realising surplus value in the process of producing means of subsistence for the workers, and Department I by producing the requisite means of production. But if we take the social product as a whole, the illusion disappears. The equation is in that case: _6,430c + 1,285v + 1,285s = 9,000_ Now, if the means of subsistence for the workers are cut by 100 units, the corresponding contraction of both departments will give us the following equations: I. _4,949c + 989·75v + 989·75s = 6,928·5_ II. _1,358·5c + 270·75v + 270·75s = 1,900_ and for the social product as a whole: _6,307·5c + 1,260·5v + 1,260·5s = 8,828·5_ This looks like a general decrease in both the total volume of production and in the production of surplus value--but only if we contemplate just the abstract quantities of value in the composition of the total product; it does not hold good for the material composition thereof. Looking closer, we find that nothing but the upkeep of labour is in effect decreased. Fewer means of subsistence and production are now being made, no doubt, but then, they had had no other function save to maintain workers. The social product is smaller and less capital is now employed--but then, the object of capitalist production is not simply to employ as much capital as possible, but to produce as much surplus value as possible. Capital has only decreased because a smaller amount is sufficient for maintaining the workers. If the total cost of maintaining the workers employed in the society came to 1,285 units in the first instance, the present decrease of the social product by 171·5--the difference of (9,000-8,828·5)--comes off this maintenance charge, and there is a consequent change in the composition of the social product: _6,430c + 1,113·5v + 1,285s = 8,828·5_ Constant capital and surplus value remain unchanged, and only the variable capital, paid labour, has diminished. Or--in case there are doubts about constant capital being unaffected--we may further allow for the event that, as would happen in actual practice, concomitant with the decrease in means of subsistence for the workers there will be a corresponding cut in the constant capital. The equation for the social product as a whole would then be: _6,307·5c + 1,236v + 1,285s = 8,828·5_ In spite of the smaller social product, there is no change in the surplus value in either case, and it is only the cost of maintaining the workers that has fallen. Put it this way: the value of the aggregate social product may be defined as consisting of three parts, the total constant capital of the society, its total variable capital, and its total surplus value, of which the first set of products contains no additional labour, and the second and third no means of production. As regards their material form, all these products come into being in the given period of production--though in point of value the constant capital had been produced in a previous period and is merely being transferred to new products. On this basis, we can also divide all the workers employed into three mutually exclusive categories: those who produce the aggregate constant capital of the society, those who provide the upkeep for all the workers, and finally those who create the entire surplus value for the capitalist class. If, then, the workers' consumption is curtailed, only workers in the second category will lose their jobs. _Ex hypothesi_, these workers had never created surplus value for capital, and in consequence their dismissal is therefore no loss from the capitalist's point of view but a gain, since it decreases the cost of producing surplus value. The demand of the state which arises at the same time has the lure of a new and attractive sphere for realising the surplus value. Some of the money circulating as variable capital breaks free of this cycle and in the state treasury it represents a new demand. For the technique of taxation, of course, the order of events is rather different, since the amount of the indirect taxes is actually advanced to the state by capital and is merely being refunded to the capitalists by the sale of their commodities, as part of their price. But economically speaking, it makes no difference. The crucial point is that the quantity of money with the function of variable capital should first mediate the exchange between capital and labour power. Later, when there is an exchange between workers and capitalists as buyers and sellers of commodities respectively, this money will change hands and accrue to the state as taxes. This money, which capital has set circulating, first fulfils its primary function in the exchange with labour power, but subsequently, by mediation of the state, it begins an entirely new career. As a new purchasing power, belonging with neither labour nor capital, it becomes interested in new products, in a special branch of production which does not cater for either the capitalists or the working class, and thus it offers capital new opportunities for creating and realising surplus value. When we were formerly taking it for granted that the indirect taxes extorted from the workers are used for paying the officials and for provisioning the army, we found the 'saving' in the consumption of the working class to mean that the workers rather than the capitalists were made to pay for the personal consumption of the hangers-on of the capitalist class and the tools of their class-rule. This charge devolved from the surplus value to the variable capital, and a corresponding amount of the surplus value became available for purposes of capitalisation. Now we see how the taxes extorted from the workers afford capital a new opportunity for accumulation when they are used for armament manufacture. On the basis of indirect taxation, militarism in practice works both ways. By lowering the normal standard of living for the working class, it ensures both that capital should be able to maintain a regular army, the organ of capitalist rule, and that it may tap an impressive field for further accumulation.[423] We have still to examine the second source of the state's purchasing power referred to in our example, the 150 units out of the total 250 invested in armaments. They differ essentially from the hundred units considered above in that they are not supplied by the workers but by the petty bourgeoisie, i.e. the artisans and peasants. (In this connection, we can ignore the comparatively small tax-contribution of the capitalist class itself.) The money accruing to the state as taxes from the peasant masses--as our generic term for all non-proletarian consumers--was not originally advanced by capital and has not split off from capital in circulation. In the hand of the peasant it is the equivalent of goods that have been realised, the exchange value of simple commodity production. The state now gets part of the purchasing power of the non-capitalist consumers, purchasing power, that is to say, which is already free to realise the surplus value for capitalist accumulation. Now the question arises, whether economic changes will result for capital, and if so, of what nature, from diverting the purchasing power of such strata to the state for militarist purposes. It almost looks as if we had come up against yet another shift in the material form of reproduction. Capital will now produce an equivalent of war materials for the state instead of producing large quantities of means of production and subsistence for peasant consumers. But in fact the changes go deeper. First and foremost, the state can use the mechanism of taxation to mobilise much larger amounts of purchasing power from the non-capitalist consumers than they would ordinarily spend on their own consumption. Indeed the modern system of taxation itself is largely responsible for forcing commodity economy on the peasants. Under pressure of taxes, the peasant must turn more and more of his produce into commodities, and at the same time he must buy more and more. Taxation presses the produce of peasant economy into circulation and compels the peasants to become buyers of capitalist products. Finally, on a basis of commodity production in the peasant style, the system of taxation lures more purchasing power from peasant economy than would otherwise become active. What would normally have been hoarded by the peasants and the lower middle classes until it has grown big enough to invest in savings banks and other banks is now set free to constitute an effective demand and an opportunity for investment. Further the multitude of individual and insignificant demands for a whole range of commodities, which will become effective at different times and which might often be met just as well by simple commodity production, is now replaced by a comprehensive and homogeneous demand of the state. And the satisfaction of this demand presupposes a big industry of the highest order. It requires the most favourable conditions for the production of surplus value and for accumulation. In the form of government contracts for army supplies the scattered purchasing power of the consumers is concentrated in large quantities and, free of the vagaries and subjective fluctuations of personal consumption, it achieves an almost automatic regularity and rhythmic growth. Capital itself ultimately controls this automatic and rhythmic movement of militarist production through the legislature and a press whose function is to mould so-called 'public opinion'. That is why this particular province of capitalist accumulation at first seems capable of infinite expansion. All other attempts to expand markets and set up operational bases for capital largely depend on historical, social and political factors beyond the control of capital, whereas production for militarism represents a province whose regular and progressive expansion seems primarily determined by capital itself. In this way capital turns historical necessity into a virtue: the ever fiercer competition in the capitalist world itself provides a field for accumulation of the first magnitude. Capital increasingly employs militarism for implementing a foreign and colonial policy to get hold of the means of production and labour power of non-capitalist countries and societies. This same militarism works in a like manner in the capitalist countries to divert purchasing power away from the non-capitalist strata. The representatives of simple commodity production and the working class are affected alike in this way. At their expense, the accumulation of capital is raised to the highest power, by robbing the one of their productive forces and by depressing the other's standard of living. Needless to say, after a certain stage the conditions for the accumulation of capital both at home and abroad turn into their very opposite--they become conditions for the decline of capitalism. The more ruthlessly capital sets about the destruction of non-capitalist strata at home and in the outside world, the more it lowers the standard of living for the workers as a whole, the greater also is the change in the day-to-day history of capital. It becomes a string of political and social disasters and convulsions, and under these conditions, punctuated by periodical economic catastrophes or crises, accumulation can go on no longer. But even before this natural economic impasse of capital's own creating is properly reached it becomes a necessity for the international working class to revolt against the rule of capital. Capitalism is the first mode of economy with the weapon of propaganda, a mode which tends to engulf the entire globe and to stamp out all other economies, tolerating no rival at its side. Yet at the same time it is also the first mode of economy which is unable to exist by itself, which needs other economic systems as a medium and soil. Although it strives to become universal, and, indeed, on account of this its tendency, it must break down--because it is immanently incapable of becoming a universal form of production. In its living history it is a contradiction in itself, and its movement of accumulation provides a solution to the conflict and aggravates it at the same time. At a certain stage of development there will be no other way out than the application of socialist principles. The aim of socialism is not accumulation but the satisfaction of toiling humanity's wants by developing the productive forces of the entire globe. And so we find that socialism is by its very nature an harmonious and universal system of economy. FOOTNOTES: [420] Dr. Renner indeed makes this assumption the basis of his treatise on taxation. 'Every particle of value created in the course of one year is made up of these four parts: profit, interest, rent, and wages; and annual taxation, then, can only be levied upon these' (_Das arbeitende Volk und die Steuern_, Vienna, 1909). Though Renner immediately goes on to mention peasants, he cursorily dismisses them in a single sentence: 'A peasant e.g. is simultaneously entrepreneur, worker, and landowner, his agricultural proceeds yield him wage, profit, and rent, _all in one_.' Obviously, it is an empty abstraction to apply simultaneously all the categories of capitalist production to the peasantry, to conceive of the peasant as entrepreneur, wage labourer and landlord all in one person. If, like Renner, we want to put the peasant into a single category, his peculiarity for economics lies in the very fact that he belongs neither to the class of capitalist entrepreneurs nor to that of the wage proletariat, that he is not a representative of capitalism at all but of simple commodity production. [421] It would go beyond the scope of the present treatise to deal with cartels and trusts as specific phenomena of the imperialist phase. They are due to the internal competitive struggle between individual capitalist groups for a monopoly of the existing spheres for accumulation and for the distribution of profits. [422] In a reply to Vorontsov, Professor Manuilov, for example, wrote what was then greatly praised by the Russian Marxists: 'In this context, we must distinguish strictly between a group of entrepreneurs producing weapons of war and the capitalist class as a whole. For the manufacturers of guns, rifles and other war materials, the existence of militarism is no doubt profitable and indispensable. It is indeed quite possible that the abolition of the system of armed peace would spell ruin for Krupp. The point at issue, however, is not a special group of entrepreneurs but the capitalists as a class, capitalist production as a whole.' In this connection, however, it should be noted that 'if the burden of taxation falls chiefly on the working population, every increase of this burden diminishes the purchasing power of the population and hence the demand for commodities'. This fact is taken as proof that militarism, under the aspect of armament production, does indeed 'enrich one group of capitalists, but at the same time it injures all others, spelling gain on the one hand but loss on the other' (_Vesnik Prava_, Journal of the Law Society (St. Petersburg, 1890), no. 1, 'Militarism and Capitalism'). [423] Ultimately, the deterioration of the normal conditions under which labour power is renewed will bring about a deterioration of labour itself, it will diminish the average efficiency and productivity of labour, and thus jeopardise the conditions for the production of surplus value. But capital will not feel these results for a long time, and so they do not immediately enter into its economic calculations, except in so far as they bring about more drastic defensive measures of the wage labourers in general. INDEX Abstinence, 43, 102, 108, 118, 150, 235, 240, 280, 334 Accumulation, its impossibility respective unrestricted possibility _23_, 188f., 198ff., 216, 237, 268, 303, 311, 325 -- primitive, 161, 272, 364, 369f., 454 Africa, 352, 363f., 382, 386; South, 411ff., 420, 451 Algeria, under French rule, 371, 377ff.; under Turkish rule, 378 Allard, General, 381 America, 290, 352, 420, 422, 428; United States of, 173, 293ff., 297, 307f., 357f., 362f., 379, 396, 398, 402, 404f., 409ff., 424ff., 432; States of South, 420, 422ff. American Civil War (War of Secession), 357f., 363, 396, 398f., 402, 424f., 430 Anton, G., 385 Arabs, 377, 380, 382ff. Asia, 247, 290, 420ff., 443ff., 450 Australia, 420, 426f. Baring, E., Earl of Cromer, 434 Barter, 213, 215f., 222, 229 Bastiat-Schultze, F., 238, 268 Bentham, J., 372 Bergmann, 211 Bismarck, 448 Blackhouse, E. T., 392, 394 Blanc, L., 227 Bland, L. O., 392, 394 Blanqui, 227 Boer Republics, 411, 414ff. -- War, 415 Bouding, 319f. Brandt, M. V., 392 Bright, 447 Brissot, 265 Bruce, General, 391 Bryce, J., 363, 412 Buecher, Prof., 307f. Bulgakov, 275, 298-310, 311, 313, 315, 317, 320, 324ff. Cabet, 227 Cameron, 439 Canada, 408f. Capital and income (Marx), 108; (Rodbertus), 262ff.; (Say), 56; (Sismondi), 179ff., 215, 423; (Adam Smith), 53f., 58ff., 74ff., 83 -- circulating, 37, 57ff., 64, 74ff., 83, 85f., 156f., 166, 183ff., 259, 354 -- constant, _13_f., _18_f., _22_f., 38, 44, 51, 53, 64, 72f., 83, 85f., 88, 94f., 97, 100ff., 109ff., 123ff., 137, 141, 143, 147, 149, 153, 156ff., 187ff., 200, 208, 236, 256, 258, 298f., 302, 304f., 336f., 339, 344, 354ff., 359, 361, 365f., 458, 463 -- -- definition of, 37, 72, 76f. -- fixed, _19_, 50, 53, 57ff., 74ff., 83, 85ff., 111, 140, 147, 158, 166, 184ff., 259, 341, 354 -- national (_per se_), 54, 263 -- productive, 43f., 97, 140, 148f., 157, 163, 420 -- total social, 31, 49f., 53f., 59, 65, 79, 83, 86, 88, 96f., 101, 103, 107f., 110, 118, 147, 156, 169, 180, 341, 349f. -- variable, _14_, _18_f., _22_, 38, 44, 74f., 85, 94ff., 99, 101, 105, 109ff., 114ff., 123, 125ff., 134, 137, 151ff., 156, 159, 161, 182f., 185ff., 207, 209, 234, 253, 256, 258, 302, 306, 334, 336, 344, 346, 350, 354f., 357, 359ff., 365f., 428, 457f., 460, 463f.; definition, 37, 77; in relation to surplus value, 252, 258, 337; in relation to constant capital, 111, 303, 317, 321, 337, 339f. Cavour, 449 Chartist movement, 227, 267 Chernishevski, 273 Chesney, Colonel, 439 Chevalier, M., 448 China, 41, 247, 289, 353, 373, 386ff., 419, 428; Dowager Empress of, 392ff. Class antagonism, 181 -- rule, 78, 452, 456, 464 -- society, 41 Cobden, R., 447f. Colonial policy, 185, 247, 363f., 369ff., 419, 425, 451f., 454, 466 -- -- English in India, 88, 247, 371, 374f., 383 -- -- French in North Africa, 371, 380, 382 Commodity economy, _see_ Economy -- Exchange, 81f., 85, 93f., 97ff., 118, 129f., 193f., 233, 270, 386, 428, 438, 443, 452, 454 -- surplus, 195ff., 276-83 Communism, 263, 369, 378, 384 Compensation, theory of, 203 Competition, _21_, _23_, 40, 46, 48, 191, 202, 205, 207, 209, 230, 242, 259, 283, 297, 332, 342, 344, 368, 416, 419, 446, 450, 457, 466; 'peaceful --', 386, 452 Contradictions latent in capitalism, 202, 218, 227f., 239, 271, 286ff. Corn Laws, 231 _Corvée_, 33, 39, 42, 84, 369, 395 Crises, _14_, 35f., 41, 46, 103f., 173, 176f., 191, 194, 199, 201ff., 211, 213, 216, 218, 222, 227f., 232, 235ff., 244ff., 261, 268, 272, 274, 281f., 286, 298, 305, 312ff., 318f., 323f., 332, 342, 346f., 419, 422, 424, 426, 428, 467 Crusoe, Robinson, 179, 182, 185, 261ff. Dalrymple, Oliver, 403f., 409 Declining wage rate, _20_f., 229, 241, 244, 250f., 253, 258f. Delamarre, Abbé, 393 Demand and supply (production), 36, 46, 133, 192f., 195, 200, 206, 212, 220ff., 230f., 242, 248, 324 -- effective, _20_, 34, 39, 131, 134, 155, 164f., 193f., 286, 329, 458, 461, 465f. Devers, A., 448 Dialectical approach, 69, 205, 209, 265, 366 Diehl, Prof., 228f., 256, 266f. Division of Labour, 79, 104, 128f., 148, 193, 233, 278, 297, 307f., 319, 321f. Duehring, 194 East India Company, 375f., 386f., 411 Economics, bourgeois, 31, 49, 51, 68f., 106, 108, 112, 137, 170, 173f., 177, 179, 181, 189f., 209, 215, 218, 244, 268, 271, 279f., 295, 310, 325f.; classical, 35, 57, 65, 67ff., 105, 108f., 179, 188f., 200, 203, 208, 210, 216, 227ff., 237, 238-252, 254, 256, 258, 266, 279, 325, 383, 446; vulgar, 35f., 81, 108, 177, 211f., 320 Economy, commodity, 368ff., 386-394, 402, 417, 419f., 427f., 449, 465 -- natural, 42, 255, 293, 368-385, 386, 402, 415, 417, 419, 427, 443 -- peasant, handicrafts and domestic industries, 41, 289, 296, 358, 369, 374, 395-418, 435, 438, 444f., 465 -- rural, 272 Egypt, 41, 201f., 353, 358, 425, 429ff., 450f. Elgin, Lord, 391f. Engels, Friedrich, 95, 102, 154, 166, 168, 194, 228, 241, 250, 275, 288ff., 294, 449f. England, 173ff., 191, 218f., 227ff., 241, 245, 277, 286, 293, 297, 307f., 313, 316, 318, 352, 357, 366f., 391, 393, 410, 412, 420ff., 447ff. English cotton industry, 297, 342, 352, 357f., 362, 422 Exploitation, _17_, _21_ff., 46, 73f., 108, 116, 181ff., 196, 220, 228, 241, 247, 255, 334, 343f., 358ff., 364, 374, 386, 428, 445, 451, 456 Eyth, Engineer, 431, 437 Family Associations, 374, 377, 380f. Feudal system, 210, 293, 365, 368f., 381f. Foreign trade, 136, 205f., 236, 246, 282, 297, 306, 309, 313, 350; _see also_ market Fowler's Works, 431 France, 174, 177, 191, 214, 218, 227, 291, 296, 379, 391, 393, 420f., 431f., 445, 448ff. Franke, O., 373, 393 Free Trade, 205, 238, 242, 447ff. General public (_grand public_), 135, 295, 298 Germany, 173, 271, 296f., 308, 366f., 420ff., 427, 442, 448ff. Gold, production of, 99ff., 141, 154, 301f. Great Britain, _see_ England Gros, 392 Hangers-on of the capitalist class, cf. also Third persons, _14_, 81f., 112, 134f., 222f., 295, 332f., 350, 420, 454ff., 464 Hanotaux, A., 378 Hansen, _26_ Harmony, doctrine of, 173, 177, 200, 203f., 211ff., 228f., 238, 271, 305, 325f., 446f. Harrod, _19_ Hermann, 243 Herodotus, 88f., 372 Hertzen, 273 Hicks, _28_ Hobson, _21_, 314 Ilyin, V., 189, 275, 287, 303, 309, 317, 320 Imperialism, _28_, 320, 368, 416ff., 421, 445f., 452 India, 41f., 72, 88, 247, 286, 308, 352f., 365, 371ff., 380, 387, 425, 428, 454 Indian famine, 376, 382 -- mutiny, 247, 374 Industrial reserve army, _15_, 108, 111, 361 Intelligentsia, 273ff. Ismail Pasha, 33, 431ff., 438 Issayev, Prof., 275 Italy, 173, 449ff. Japan, 247, 353 Kablukov, Prof., 275 Kaffir, 411ff. -- Wars, 411, 413 Kalecki, _23_ Kant, I., 326 Kareyev, 274 Kautsky, K., 228, 267, 318ff. Keynes, Lord, _20_f., _26_ Kirchmann, v., 227-37, 238, 244, 248, 250, 252f., 260f., 266, 268, 309f., 351, 366 Kovalevski, M., 373, 375f., 384 Labour, abstract and concrete, 67ff., 72, 105 -- intellectual and material, 77 -- paid and unpaid, 37ff., 55, 62, 65ff., 71, 73, 75, 98, 322f., 343 -- past and present, 66f., 70, 75, 80, 88f. -- problem, 363f. Labour, progressive productivity of, its capitalist and general social expression, 258, 321f., 335f., 349, 357 Lafargue, 399, 404 _Laissez-faire_, 173, 238, 274 Lassalle, F., 228 Lavrov, P., 274 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, _see_ Ilyin Letournaux, A., 378 Lexis, 266 Leyden, V. v., 377 List, F., 307 Livingstone, Dr., 411 Loans, international, 387, 419-45, 451f. Lodyshenski, K., 449 Lotz, W., 448 Lucas, C. P., 414 Luxury goods, 81, 102, 163, 197ff., 208, 235ff., 260, 277 MacCulloch, J. R., 177, 189, 191-202, 203, 206f., 211, 220, 222, 229, 233, 264, 335 Maine, Sir Henry, 373f. Malthus, _24_, 181, 211, 217, 219-23, 229, 298, 305, 309, 350 Manuilov, Prof., 275, 460 Market, internal and external, 236, 246, 277f., 283ff., 292, 294f., 299, 306ff., 316 -- concept revised, 366 -- problem of, 229f., 235, 277, 284, 289, 312ff., 345ff. Marx, K., _13_f., _16_ff., 31, 36f., 43, 49, 51, 54, 60, 62ff., 76-92, 95, 99ff., 120-38, 139-54, 155ff., 189, 203, 205, 212, 215, 217f., 220, 223, 228, 233, 241, 243f., 255f., 258, 264, 268, 274f., 281f., 287, 295, 298-310, 311f., 316ff., 320, 324f., 329ff., 348, 350f., 357, 359ff., 417; his diagram of capitalist reproduction, 84, 97, 99ff., 104, 113, 118f., 127, 274, 298-310, 311, 417, 428, 455; his diagram of enlarged reproduction, 120-138, 304f., 313ff., 318, 323f., 329-47, 348, 353f., 359, 361, 417, 458ff.; his diagram of simple reproduction, 76, 92, 103, 107, 112, 114, 173, 264, 299, 351, 361, 418 Marxism, 272ff., 310, 326; 'legalist', 275, 292, 294, 303, 305f., 317, 323, 324-6, 460; 'orthodox', 318 Mehemet Ali, 429, 435 Mehring, F., 228, 266f. Mikhailovski, Prof., 274 Militarism, _27_, 248, 276, 282, 298, 309, 350, 371, 439, 454-67 Mill, James, 191, 212, 220ff., 372f., 375, 383 Mill, John Stuart, 279 Money, as form of pure value, 38f., 43f., 76, 140 -- circulation, _20_, 50, 93-106, 139ff., 148, 193, 213, 300ff., 324 -- sources, 144ff., 151ff., 156, 158ff., 300ff. Monroe, President, 402 Moravitz, C., 443, 445 Most Favoured Nations Clause, 448 Napoleon Bonaparte, 173 Napoleon III, 431, 448 Negroes, 362ff., 411ff. Neo-Marxists, 291 Neo-Mercantilism, 296 Nikolayon, 275, 284-91, 292f., 299, 309, 351, 366, 408 Non-capitalist strata necessary for accumulation, 319f., 351ff., 357, 359, 361ff., 368, 386, 416, 427, 429, 446, 450, 452, 466 Nyok Ching Tsur, Dr., 395 _Obshchina_, 273, 288, 290 Opium Wars, _27_, 247, 387, 391, 393, 447 Oppenheim, M. v., 439 _Ort_, 231f., 248, 252 Over-production, 91, 104, 149, 195, 199f., 213, 221, 235, 250, 252, 254, 279, 281f., 298, 324, 342 Owen, Robert, 174f., 191, 240 Palikao, Count, 392 Pan-Germans, 247 Peasantry, _27_; their expropriation, 288, 296, 362, 364, 369, 374f. Peel, Sir Robert, 245 Peffer, Senator, 396, 398, 400f., 406f. Physiocrats, 31, 49, 51, 56f., 62, 68, 71, 106, 233 Planned economy, 78f., 103f., 128ff., 195, 248, 312, 323 Plekhanov, Prof., 272, 275 Population increase, _15_, 41, 78, 91, 107, 133f., 239, 360f., 371 Populism, 272ff., 283, 286ff., 303, 306, 309, 317, 325, 351 Positivism, 326 Pressel, Engineer, 441f. Primitive social organisations, 32, 39, 41f., 72, 362, 368ff., 377, 415, 428, 454 Private enterprise, 79, 103, 248 Production, and consumption, 45f., 204, 211, 218, 244, 253, 260, 304f., 324, 326, 343, 349 -- for social requirements, 37, 42, 129, 133, 139, 220, 260, 285, 304f., 316 -- its two departments, _16_, _18_f., _23_, _25_, 83ff., 95ff., 99, 102, 114ff., 123ff., 127ff., 137, 233, 299, 323, 334, 336, 339ff., 353, 355, 417, 434 -- capitalist, as creation of surplus value, 37ff., 42, 78, 84, 107, 343, 367, 427 -- -- as end in itself, 311, 316f., 320, 333, 346 -- -- its universal domination, 216f., 331, 333, 348, 351, 353, 361, 365, 410, 417, 467 Productive consumption, 236f., 316 Profit, of enterprise, 38, 232, 234 -- motive, 34, 305, 322f. Profit, rate, _17_, _23_f., 79f., 167; (declining) 259, 320, 326, 338, 343f., 367 Progress, _28_, 79, 89, 130f., 204, 216, 245, 249, 258f., 274, 296, 320, 323, 339 Property, ownership, 214, 248f., 265, 380f., 413 -- communal, 77, 248, 289, 379, 381 -- in land, 256, 262, 264f., 370 -- -- vested in Sovereign, 372f., 380f. -- private, 196, 240, 322, 378, 380, 382ff. Proudhon, 137, 227, 241, 264f. Punjab Alienation Act, 376 Quesnay, 31, 48ff., 57, 62, 104f., 211 Railway construction, 289, 353, 398, 402, 409, 419ff., 425ff., 439, 445 Renner, K., 455 Rent, 38, 50ff., 57ff., 64, 68, 135, 181, 254f., 257, 266 _Rentier_, 223, 254 Reproduction, enlarged, _13_, 40ff., 80, 89ff., 102, 107-19, 151, 155, 169, 184, 197, 209, 268, 300, 303, 312, 317f., 329, 335, 339f., 351, 353, 355, 429 -- simple, _13_, _15_, _19_, 41, 48, 98, 102, 104, 107f., 112f., 115, 127f., 130, 139, 143ff., 155f., 160ff., 165, 169, 187, 190, 197, 199f., 298, 300, 302, 312, 317, 329, 334, 338, 348, 351, 354 -- transition from simple to enlarged, 123, 144f., 147, 150, 162f., 318; _see also_ Marx Rhodes, Cecil, 413f., 416 Ricardo, D., 53f., 57, 62, 67f., 105f., 109f., 179, 181, 189, 191, 194ff., 203-10, 211, 215ff., 229f., 232f., 237, 240f., 243ff., 248, 254, 257, 261, 266, 268, 271, 279ff., 305, 324f., 345f., 350, 366, 383, 447 'Right to Work', 227, 229f. Roberts of Kandahar, Lord, 374 Rodbertus, _22_f., 54, 227ff., 237, 238-51, 252-68, 271, 274, 281f., 351 Rothstein, Th., 436ff. Rozet, A., 385 Rusk, Secretary, 406 Russia, 167, 173, 271f., 275ff., 283f., 287ff., 297, 308, 326, 357, 419ff., 445, 449f., 452 St. Simon, 191 Said Pasha, 433ff. Saling, 441 Saving, _17_f., _20_ff., _22_f., _27_, 163, 236f., 239, 260f., 265f. Say, J. B., 53ff., 62f., 177ff., 189, 191, 204, 206, 210, 211-18, 219f., 222, 229ff., 237, 248, 254, 257, 264, 266, 268, 279, 305, 324f., 335, 366 Schaeffle, Prof., 293, 295, 307, 424 Scheibert, J., 388, 390 Schmoller, Prof., 293, 295ff. Schneider, S., 440 Schultze, E., 410 Sering, 401, 407, 409f. Severance of labour power from the means of production, 181, 210, 402 -- of agriculture and trade (industry), 369, 395f. Simmons, A. M., 398 Simons, 363 Sismondi, _24_, 35, 53, 115, 173-90, 191-202, 203-10, 211-18, 219f., 222f., 227ff., 237, 240, 245, 248ff., 256, 260, 264, 268, 271, 274, 281f., 287f., 292, 309, 312, 317, 342, 350ff., 365f., 423ff. Skvortsov, Prof., 275 Slavery, 33, 39, 72f., 84, 161, 209f., 241, 243, 255f., 359, 363, 369, 379, 400, 412, 432 Slavophiles, 273, 276 Smith, Adam, 36, 48, 50ff., 83, 105f., 108ff., 166, 169, 180, 185, 187ff., 191, 210f., 215, 228, 230f., 233, 256f., 260ff., 264, 266, 271, 346, 351, 383 Socialism, 228f., 266, 274, 325f., 467; English, 244; Utopian, 217; and Marx's analysis, 131 Sombart, Prof., 308 Spheres of interest, 445, 447, 452 State as consumer, 223, 454ff., 458, 460, 463, 466 Struve, Peter v., 275, 292-97, 298, 307, 309ff., 325f., 350 Suez Canal, 33, 430f., 433, 435ff. Surplus value, _14_, _18_f., 38, 62, 78, 109ff., 128, 135, 139, 141, 185ff., 199, 207, 220, 234f., 253, 255ff., 265ff., 298, 301f., 310, 317, 332ff., 342f., 350, 353f., 357f., 365ff., 454, 456, 463, 466; its capitalisation, 108, 112ff., 132, 136, 140, 142, 146f., 151f., 163, 165, 170, 184, 188, 196, 198, 237, 330f., 338, 340f., 345, 355, 357, 359f., 367, 417, 421, 428, 446, 451, 456, 464; its consumption, 159ff., 169, 197, 254, 298, 303, 348, 354; 'destruction', 281f., 310, 344; definition, 37f., 77; realisation, 98ff., 132, 139, 142, 155ff., 165, 170, 200, 205ff., 278, 292f., 300, 303, 309f., 329, 341f., 346, 351, 355, 359, 365, 386, 417, 419, 421, 426, 428f., 442, 444, 451, 454, 461f.; contradiction between its production and realisation, 345, 365 Sweezy, _13_, 21 Tariffs, protective, 231, 297, 399, 446-53, 456 Taussig, 399f. Taxation, 369, 373f., 379, 381, 383, 394, 396, 399, 435ff., 443, 455, 458, 464f.; indirect, 455ff., 460f., 463f. Tax collector, 372f., 443f. 'Third Persons', 135, 159, 292-7, 298, 305, 348, 350, 458 'Three World Empires', 292-7 Timur (Tamerlane), 375 Tooke, 156 Trade Unions, 271, 461 Tucker, Josiah, 211 Tugan Baranovski, Prof., _23_, 210, 275, 303, 305f., 310, 311-23, 324ff., 330, 335f., 346, 366, 422ff. Turkey, 353, 385, 419, 425f., 436, 439, 442, 445 Unemployment, 177, 208, 240, 282 Usury, 373, 377, 381, 383f. Utopianism, 249, 262, 264, 268, 288, 291 Value, problem of pure, 35f. -- Marx's theory of, 66, 68, 105, 281 -- Ricardo's theory of, 68, 105 -- Rodbertus' theory of, 240ff., 256, 259 Value, Adam Smith's theory of, 62, 64ff., 105f. -- relationships and material points of view, 81f., 105, 112, 264, 336, 354, 417 Victoria, Queen, 393 Violence, 371, 446, 452 Vorontsov, V., _24_, 274f., 276-83, 287, 291ff., 299, 303, 309f., 350, 366, 460 Wagner, Prof., 256, 266f., 293, 295, 297, 307 Warren, Count, 375 Wilson, H. H., 372f. Wilson, James, 376 World (international) Commerce, 205, 307f., 359 World Market, 200, 202, 205, 296f., 308 _Zadruga_, 378 [Transcriber's notes: List of errors: Page 20 "stook" changed to "stock" ("requires an increase in the stock") Page 31 "Quesney" changed to "Quesnay" ("of this problem: one by Quesney,") Page 121 missing "(" added ("(_800v + 25v + 55v_)") Pages 175 and 192 "E" replaced with "É" ("_Nouveaux Principes d'Économie Politique_") Page 220 Footnote reference to 224 altered from original 9, assumed to be 2 Page 227 "simulated" changed to "stimulated" ("the working class had stimulated Sismondi's opposition") Page 255 "irelevant" changed to "irrelevant" ("irrelevant to the productive process,") Page 275 "." changed to "," ("One of the two champions of the 'populist' movement,") Page 275 second "." added as in "V. V." ("Vorontsov, known in Russia mainly under the _nom de plume_ V. V.,") Page 293 "'" added ("open whether these 'third persons'") Page 293 """ changed to "'" ("entirely on the basis of the home market.'") Page 300 Two instances of "formulae" changed to "formulæ" Page 340 space added to betweenthe ("determined by the relations between the two departments") Page 354 "producduction" changed to "production" ("the sphere of capitalist production,") page 379 "57,500,000,000 acres" changed to "57,000,000 acres" [based on the German text "23.000.000 Hektar" converted to acres and rounded] Page 381 "assocations" changed to "associations" ("of accelerating the process of dissolving the family associations") Page 434 "." removed after "per cent" ("an annual charge of 9 per cent") Page 441 "Alleppo" changed to "Aleppo" ("_vilayets_ Aydin, Baghdad, Mossul, Diarbekir, Ursa and Aleppo") Page 474 "," changed to ";" ("443, 455, 458, 464f.;") Footnote 180 missing "." added to "470." ("MacCulloch, loc. cit., p. 470.") Footnote 213 "Noveaux" changed to "Nouveaux" ("_Nouveaux Principes_ ..., vol. i, p. 117.") Footnote 233 "socialer" changed to "sozialer" ("_Über die Grundrente in sozialer Beziehung._") Footnote 239 "f," changed to "f." ("Op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 104 f.") Footnote 260 missing "." added to "Ibid.," ("Ibid., vol. i, p. 19.")] 
37351	----	CONTEMPORARY SOCIALISM BY JOHN RAE, M.A. _SECOND EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED_ New York CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1891 PREFACE. In the present edition the original work has not only been carefully revised, but very considerably enlarged. The chapters on "The Progress and Present Position of Socialism" and "Russian Nihilism" contain a few sentences retained from the first edition, but otherwise they are entirely new--the former necessarily so on account of the nature of its subject, and the latter on account of the importance of the fresh materials that have been recently given to the world. A new chapter has been added on "Anarchism," and another, of considerable extent, on "State Socialism." No apology is required for the length of the latter, for though State socialism is only a growth of yesterday, it has already spread everywhere, and if it is not superseding socialism proper, it is certainly eclipsing it in practical importance, and to some extent even modifying it in character. Revolutionary socialism, growing more opportunist of late years, seems losing much of its old phrenzy, and getting domesticated into a shifty State socialism, fighting a parliamentary battle for minor, though still probably mischievous, changes within the lines of existing society, instead of the old war _à l'outrance_ against existing society in whatever shape or form. Anyhow the socialistic controversy in the immediate future will evidently be fought along the lines of State socialism. It is there the hostile parties meet, and it is well therefore to get, if we can, some more exact knowledge of the ground. Some of the other chapters in the work have been altered here and there for the purpose of bringing their matter, where necessary, down to date, or embodying fresh illustrative evidence, or occasionally of making the exposition itself more lucid and effective; but it is unnecessary to specify these alterations in detail. _April, 1891._ CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. Revival of Socialism, 1--Extinction of Old Types, 2--Main Surviving Type, Social Democracy, 3--Its Two Varieties, Socialist and Anarchist, 4--Its Relations to Political Democracy, 4--Definition of Socialism, 5--Cairnes on Mill's Profession of Socialism, 6--Ruling Characteristic common to Old and New Socialism, 9--State Socialism, 11--Conservative Socialism, 13--The Minimum of Socialism, 14--First Rise of Social Democracy, 15--Rousseau, 16--Baboeuf, 17--Connection of Socialism with Democracy, 18--The Danger to Free Institutions, 24--Necessity and Probability of Wider Diffusion of Property, 25. CHAPTER II. THE PROGRESS AND PRESENT POSITION OF SOCIALISM. National Conditions Favourable to Socialism, 30--Germany, 30--Progress of Socialist Vote, 33--Action of Socialist Party in Reichstag, 34--Party Programme, 38--Halle Congress of 1891, 40--France, 45--Anarchists, 47--Socialist Revolutionary Party, 48--Possibilists, 50--Blanquists, 53--The Socialist Group in the Chamber, 53--Austria, 54--Italy, 57--Spain, 60--Portugal, 65--Norway and Sweden, 66--Denmark, 67--Belgium, 70--Holland, 72--Switzerland, 73--United States, 77--Boston Anarchists, 77--Mr. Henry George, 78--Mr. Bellamy's Nationalism, 79--Anarchists, 80--Socialistic Labour Party, 81--Knights of Labor, 82--England, 83--Social Democrats, 84--Anarchists, 86--Christian Socialists, 87--Fabians, 88--Land Nationalization, 89--Scotland, 90--Australia, 90. CHAPTER III. FERDINAND LASSALLE. German Socialists before Lassalle, 93--Favourable Conditions for Socialist Agitation in Germany, 94--Character of Lassalle, 96--The Hatzfeldt Case, 99--Theft of the _Cassette_, 100--Trial for Sedition, 101--Literary Activity, 102--Letter to Leipzig Working Men, 103--Foundation of General Working Men's Association, 105--Lassalle's Agitation, 105--His Death, 106--Funeral, 108--Political Views, 109--Idea and Position of the Working Class, 109--Functions of the State, 111--Economic Doctrines, 113--Anarchic Socialism of the present Industrial _Régime_, 117--Ricardo's "Iron Law" of Wages, 119--A National, not an International Socialist, 124--Internationally not Peculiar to Socialist Parties, 126--Reason of Socialist Condemnation of Patriotism, 127. CHAPTER IV. KARL MARX. Reception of his Work on Capital, 128--The Young Hegelians, 130--Feuerbach's Humanism, 131--"Young Germany," 136--Weitling and Albrecht, 137--Early Socialistic Leanings of Marx, 139--Marx in Paris, 141--in Brussels, 142--The Communist League, 142--Communist Manifesto of 1847, 144--_New Rhenish Gazette_, 146--Marx in London, 147--The International, its Rise and Fall, 149--Tendency to Division in Revolutionary Parties, 152--"Das Capital," 155--Historical Rise of Capitalism, 156--Origin of Surplus Value, 157--Theory of Value, 160--Price, 163--Criticism of his Theory of Value, 165--Wages, 166--Normal Day of Labour, 168--Machinery, 170--Piecework, 172--Relative Over-population, 174. CHAPTER V. THE FEDERALISM OF CARL MARLO. Rodbertus, 179--Professor Winkelblech (Marlo), 180--His Awakening to Social Misery, 180--Application to Economic Study for Solution, 181--View of Social Problem, 182--Heathen Idea of Right (Monopolism) to be replaced by Christian Idea of Right (Panpolism), 183--Liberalism and Communism both Utopias, 184--Federalism alone realizes Christian Idea of Right, 188--Natural Right of all to Property, 189--Right to Labour and to Fruits of Labour, 191--Necessity of Controlling Increase of Population, 192--Of Suppressing Unproductive Acquisition, 193--Collectivization of Land and Productive Capital, 193. CHAPTER VI. THE SOCIALISTS OF THE CHAIR. The Name, 195--Held's Vindication of it, 196--Objections to it, 197--Founders of the Historical School, 200--Their Departure from Manchester Party, 202--Eisenach Congress, 202--The Historical Method, 204--The Historical School a Realist School, 205--An Ethical School, 209--Their Theory of the State, 211--The Social Question, 212--Von Scheel, 215--Brentano, 215. CHAPTER VII. THE CHRISTIAN SOCIALISTS. Socialism and Christianity, 218--Views of St. Simon and Cabet, 218--Irreligious Character of Contemporary Socialism, 219--The Christian Socialists of England in 1850, 220--Those of Germany now, 223--The Catholic Group, 223--Ketteler, 224--Moufang, 230--Protestant Group, 233--Stöcker, Todt, 234--Christian Social Working Men's Party, 239--The Social Monarchical Union, 241--The Evangelical Social Congress of 1890, 241--Is there a Specific Christian Social Politics? 242--Christian Socialism in Austria, 242--In France, 243--International Catholic Social Congress of 1890 at Liège, 243--The Pope's Encyclical, 245. CHAPTER VIII. ANARCHISM. Recent Activity of Anarchists, 247--Individualist Anarchists and Communist Anarchists, 248--Latter are Ultra-Socialist, 249--Ultra-Democratic, 250--Proudhon's Anarchic Government, 250--No Representative Institutions, 251--Prince Krapotkin's Plan for Housing the Poor, 252--The Russian _Mir_ the Anarchist Model of Government, 252--Anarchism Atheistic, 254--Ultra-revolutionary, 255--Propaganda of Deed, 256--Disunity and Weakness of Anarchism, 257. CHAPTER IX. RUSSIAN NIHILISM. Haxthausen's Opinion of Russia's Safety from Socialism, 259--Successive Phases of Nihilism, 260--Origin of Nihilism, 261--Influence of the Rural Commune on Revolutionary Thought, 262--Decabrist Conspiracy of 1825, 263--Extreme Opinions at Russian Universities in Reign of Nicholas, 264--Ascension of Alexander II., 264--Alexander Herzen, 265--Turgenieff and the word Nihilist, 266--Koscheleff and Fircks's Accounts of Nihilism, 267--Causes of it, 268--Nihilist Sunday Schools, Tchernycheffsky, 269--Effect of Emancipation of Serfs, 270--Ruined Landlords, 270--Jews, 271--Heretics, 272--Bakunin, 273--Herzen's Recantation of Revolutionism, 273--Bakunin in London, 274--His "Amorphism," 274--His Picture of the Good Revolutionist, 275--Netchaïeff founds Branches of the International in Russia, 276--The first Attempt on the Czar, 276--Reversion to Arbitrary and Despotic Government, 276--Bakunin and Lavroff at Zurich, 278--"Going into the People," 279--Secret Societies, 280--Nihilist Arrests and Trials, 281--Terrorism, 282--Assassination of Czar, 283--Present Socialist Parties, 283--The Black Division Party, 283--Alarming Growth of a Proletariat in Russia, 284--Impoverishment of Peasantry, 286--Break up of Communistic System, 288--Dissolution of House Communities, 289--The Black Division, 292--The Labour Emancipation League, 295. CHAPTER X. SOCIALISM AND THE SOCIAL QUESTION. A Social Question recognised by Contemporary Economists, 297--Mr. Cairnes on the Situation, 297--Socialist Indictment of Existing _Régime_, 299--1st, the "Iron Law of Wages," 300--Alleged Deterioration of Wage-Labourers' Position Unfounded, 301--Their Standard of Living Better, 302--Their Individual Share in the National Wealth more, 304--The "Iron Law" Misunderstood by Socialists, 305--The "Iron Law" Itself Unsound, 307--The Rate of Wages really Depends on the _per capita_ Production, 307--Prospects of Increasing _per capita_ Production, 312--Piecework, 314--Shorter Day of Labour, 318--2nd, Alleged Multiplication of Vicissitudes, 323--Effects of Machinery, 323--Temporary Redundancies, 324--Serious Redundancies Lessening, 324--Value of Good System of Commercial Statistics, 325--3rd, Alleged Expropriation of the Value of the Labourer's Work, 327--How Value is Constituted, 327--Justice of Interest, 329--Social Importance of Work of Capitalist Employer, 330--Public Value of Private Property, 333--Value of Freedom, 334--_Laissez-faire_, 336--Necessity for Opportunities of Investment, 338--Co-operative Production, 338--Advantage of Interlacing of Classes, 340--Reason of exceptionally good House Accommodation among Working Classes of Sheffield, 341. CHAPTER XI. STATE SOCIALISM. _1. State Socialism and English Economics._ M. Léon Say on State Socialism, 345--State Property and State Industries in Germany, 345--Mr. Goschen and others on Change in English Opinion regarding State Intervention, 346--Their Views Exaggerated and undiscriminating, 347--Little done in England in Nationalizing Industries, 348--Much done in enlarging Popular Rights, 349--English Thinkers never Believers in _Laissez-faire_, 351--Except Mr. H. Spencer, 352--Adam Smith's "Simple and Obvious System of Natural Liberty," 353--His Theory of Social Politics, 356--Ricardo's Views, 359--McCulloch's, 360--On the Manufacturing System, 362--On Crises, 363--On Irish Pauper Labour, 364--On Factory Legislation, 366--On Housing the Poor, 366--On the Poor Law, 368--The So-called Manchester School, 372--The English Theory of Social Politics, 373. _2. The Nature and Principle of State Socialism._ Different Definitions of Socialism, 374--Origin and Meaning of State Socialism, 379--The Social Monarchists, 380--Rodbertus, 380--His Theory of Social Politics, 381--M. de Laveleye and Establishment of Equality of Conditions, 384--Alleged Disinheritance of the People from the Primitive Economic Rights, 385--Mr. Chamberlain's Doctrine of "Ransom," 386--Professor A. Wagner's State Socialism, 387. _3. State Socialism and Social Reform._ Cobden's Praise of the Prussian Government for its Social Work, 393--Property, a Requisite of Progress, not of Freedom, 394--Limits of Legitimate Intervention, 395--Short Definition of State Socialism, 399--Error of Plea for State Socialism as Extinguisher of Chance, 399--As Saving the Waste from Competition, 400--Wastefulness of Socialism, 401--As shown in Samoa, 401--In England under Old Poor Law, 402--In Brook Farm, 402--Idleness the Destroyer of the American Owenite and Fourierist Communities, 403--Idleness, the Great Difficulty in the Shaker and Rappist Communities, 405--"Old Slug," 406--Contentment with Squalid Conditions, 407--Special Liability to Mismanagement, 408. _4. State Socialism and State Management._ Natural Qualities and Defects of State as Industrial Manager, 409--Post Office, 410--Dockyards, 410--Forestry, 412--Mint and other Forms of Attesting, 412--Monopolies, 413--Municipal Management of Gas and Water Supply, 413--Land Nationalization, 414--State Railways, 415--State Insurance in New Zealand, 417--Results of Joint-Stock Management and Private Management in Massachusetts, 417. _5. State Socialism and Popular Right._ Why Impracticable Legislation is Socialistic, 418--Rule of Intervention for Realizing Rights, 419--Right to Existence, 421--Right to Superannuation, 421--Right to Labour, 423--Problem of the Unemployed, 425--Free Education, Libraries, Parks, 427--Where Stop? 427--Legal Fixing of Prices, as in Fares and Rates, 428--Of Fair Rent, 429--Of Fair Wages, 430--Compulsory Arbitration, 430--Legal Minimum Wages, 431--Sweating System and Starvation Wages, 432--International Compulsory Eight Hours Day, 434. CHAPTER XII. THE AGRARIAN SOCIALISM OF HENRY GEORGE. Mr. George Predicts that his Book would find Apostles, 441--Fulfilment of the Prediction, 441--Sisyphism, 442--Loses His Religious Belief through Perception of Poverty, 443--Recovers it again, 445--1st, His Problem, 445--Its unverified Assumption, 445--Evidence of Facts against it, 448--Average Scale of Living has Risen, 449--Proportion of Paupers, unable to obtain it, has Declined, 449--Special Decline of Able-bodied Pauperism, 450--Increase of Length of Life, 452--Mr. George Changes his Problem from one of Quantity to one of Proportion, 453--Rent really no larger Proportion of National Wealth or even of Agricultural Produce than before, 454--Wages no Smaller Proportion, 456--Indications of Increasing Distribution of Wealth, 457--2nd, Mr. George's Explanation, 461--Alleged Tendency of Wages to a Minimum that gives but a Bare Living, 462--The Wages Fund and Population Theories, 464--Mr. George's New Population Theory, 465--His New Wages Fund Theory, 468--His Explanation of the Distribution of Wealth without taking Profits into Account, 474--Views on Rent, 476--on Interest, 483--Wages, 484--Margin of Cultivation, 484--Absurdities of his Explanation, 485--3rd, Mr. George's Remedy, 487--Land Nationalization Movement in England, 488--Futility of Mr. George's Remedy, 489--Confiscation, 490--Difference of Mr. George's Proposal from Mr. Mill's, 491--Agricultural Land as truly the Fruit of Labour as other Commodities, 492--Real Distinction between Land and other Property, 494--Social Claim on all Property, 495--Is Private Property the best Guarantee for the most Productive use of Land? 496--Land Nationalization no Assistance to the Reforms that are Needed, 498. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. It was a common topic of congratulation at the Exhibition of 1862 that the political atmosphere of Europe was then entirely free from the revolutionary alarms which overclouded the first Exhibition in 1851; but in that very year the old clouds began to gather once more at different quarters of the horizon. It was in 1862 that Lassalle delivered to a club of working men in Berlin his address on "The Present Epoch of the World, and the Idea of the Working Class," which was published shortly afterwards under the title of "The Working Man's Programme," and which has been called by his friends "The Wittenberg Theses" of the new socialist movement; and it was at the Exhibition itself that those relations were established between the delegates of English and French trade societies which issued eventually in the organization of the International. The double train thus laid has put in motion a propaganda of social revolution more vigorous, widespread, and dangerous than any which has preceded it. But though the reappearance of socialism was not immediately looked for at the time, it could cause no serious surprise to any one who considered how nearly the socialist theory is allied with some of the ruling ideas of modern times, and how many points of attraction it presents at once to the impatient philanthropy of enthusiasts, to the passions of the multitude, and to the narrow but insistent logic of the numerous class of minds that make little account of the complexity of life. Socialism will probably never keep long away during the present transitional period of society, and there is therefore less interest in the mere fact of its reappearance than in marking the particular form in which, after a prolonged retirement, it has actually returned; for this may perhaps be reasonably taken to be its most vital and enduring type, and consequently that with which we shall mainly have to reckon in the future. Now the present movement is, before all, political and revolutionary. The philanthropic and experimental forms of socialism, which played a conspicuous _rôle_ before 1848, perished then in the wreck of the Revolution, and have never risen to life again. The old schools have dispersed. Their doctrines, their works, their very hopes have gone. The theories of man's entire dependence on circumstances, of the rehabilitation of the flesh, of the passional attraction, once in everybody's mouth, have sunk into oblivion. The communities of Owenites, St. Simonians, Fourierists, Icarians, which multiplied for a time on both sides of the Atlantic, are extinct. The socialists of the present day have discarded all belief in the possibility of effecting any social regeneration except by means of political authority, and the first object of their endeavours is therefore the conquest of the powers of the State. There are some exceptions, but these are very unimportant. The communistic societies of the United States, for instance, are mostly organizations of eccentric religious sects which have no part or influence in the life of the century. The Colinsian Collectivists, followers of the Belgian socialist Colins, are a mere handful; and the Familistère of Guise in France--a remarkable institution, founded since 1848 by an old disciple of Fourier, though not on Fourier's plan--stands quite alone, and has no imitators. Non-political socialism may accordingly be said to have practically disappeared. Not only so, but out of the several sorts and varieties of political socialism, only one has revived in any strength, and that is the extremest and most revolutionary. It is the democratic communism of the Young Hegelians, and it scouts the very suggestion of State-help, and will content itself with nothing short of State-transformation. Schemes such as were popular and noisy thirty years ago--schemes, involving indeed organic changes, but organic changes of only a partial character--have gone to their rest. Louis Blanc, for example, was then a name of some power; but, remarkably enough, though Louis Blanc was but the other year buried with great honour, his Organization of Labour seems to be as completely forgotten as the Circulus of Leroux. M. G. de Molinari writes an interesting account of the debates that took place in the working men's clubs of Paris in the year 1868-9--the first year they were granted liberty of meeting after the establishment of the Second Empire--and he states that while Fourier and Cabet were still quoted by old disciples, though without any idea of their systems being of practical moment, Louis Blanc's name was not even mentioned. Proudhon's gospel of a State bank of mutual credit for furnishing labourers with capital, by issuing inconvertible notes without money and without price, has still a sprinkling of faithful believers, who call themselves Mutualists; but they are extremely few, and, as a rule, the socialists of France at the present day, like those of Germany, put their faith in iron rather than paper. What they want is a democracy of labour, to use one of their own phrases--that is, a State in which power and property shall be based on labour; where citizenship shall depend on a labour qualification, instead of a qualification of birth or of property; where there shall be no citizen who enjoys without labouring, and no citizen who labours without enjoying; where every one who is able to work shall have employment, and every one who has wrought shall retain the whole produce of his labour; and where accordingly, as the indispensable prerequisite of the whole scheme, the land of the country and all other instruments of production shall be made the joint property of the community, and the conduct of all industrial operations be placed under the direct administration of the State. Furthermore, all this is contended for as a matter of simple right and justice to the labouring classes, on the ground that the wealth of the nation belongs to the hands that made it; it is contended for as an obligation of the State, because the State is held to be merely the organized will of the people, and the people is the labouring class; and it is contended for as an object of immediate accomplishment--if possible, by ordinary constitutional means; but, if not, by revolution. This is the form in which socialism has reappeared, and it may be described in three words as Revolutionary Socialist Democracy. The movement is divided into two main branches--socialism proper, or collectivism, as it is sometimes called, and anarchism. There are anarchists who are not socialists, but hold strongly by an individualist constitution of property. They are very few, however, and the great mass of the party known by that name in our day, including the Russian Nihilists, are as ardent believers in the economic socialism of Karl Marx as the Social Democrats of Germany themselves. They diverge from the latter on a question of future government; but the differences between the two are only such as the same movement might be expected to exhibit in passing through different media, personal or national. Modern democrats have been long divided into Centralists and Federalists--the one party seeking to give to the democratic republic they contemplate a strongly centralized form of government, and the other preferring to leave the local communes comparatively independent and sovereign, and free, if they choose, to unite themselves in convenient federations. The federal republic has always been the favourite ideal of the Democrats of Spain and of the Communards of Paris, and there is generally a tendency among Federalists, in their impatience of all central authority, to drop the element of federation out of their ideal altogether, and to advocate the form of opinion known as "anarchy"--that is, the abolition of all superior government. It was very natural that this ancient feud among the democrats should appear in the ranks of socialist democracy, and it was equally natural that the Russian Radicals, hating the autocracy of their country and idealizing its rural communes, should become the chief adherents of the federalist and even the anarchic tradition. This is the only point of principle that separates anarchism from socialism. In other respects anarchism may be said to be but an extremer phase of socialism. It indulges in more violent methods, and in a more omnivorous spirit of destruction. Its fury takes a wider sweep; it attacks all current beliefs and all existing institutions; it puts its hopes in universal chaos. I shall endeavour in a future chapter to explain, from peculiarities of the national character and culture, why this gospel of chaos should find so much acceptance in Russia; but it is no exclusively Russian product. It was preached with singular coolness, as will be subsequently shown, by some of the young Hegelians of Germany before 1848, and it obtains among the more volatile members of most socialist organizations still. Attacks on religion, patriotism, the family, are very usual accessories of their practical agitations everywhere. As institutions and beliefs are seen to lend strength to each other, teeth set on edge against one are easily brought to gnash at all. A sharp check from the public authority generally brings out to the front this extremer element in German socialism. After the repressive legislation of 1878 the German socialists struck the restriction of proceeding "by legal methods" out of their programme, and the wilder spirits among them would be content with nothing short of a policy of general destruction, and, being expelled from the party, started an organization of their own on thoroughly anarchist lines. Under these influences, the word socialism has come to contract a new meaning, and is now generally defined in a way that would exclude the very theories it was originally invented to denote. Its political element--its demand on the public power in behalf of the labouring class--is taken to be the pith and essence of the system. Mr. Cairnes, for example, says that the circumstance which distinguishes socialism from all other modes of social speculation is its invocation of the powers of the State, and he finds fault with Mr. Mill for describing himself in his "Autobiography" as a socialist, merely because his ideal of ultimate improvement had more in common with the ideal of socialistic reformers than with the views of those who in contradistinction would be called orthodox. The passage from the "Autobiography" runs as follows:--"While we repudiated with the greatest energy that tyranny of society over the individual which most socialistic systems are supposed to involve, we yet looked forward to a time when society will no longer be divided into the idle and the industrious; when the rule that they who do not work shall not eat will be applied, not to paupers only, but impartially to all; when the division of the produce of labour, instead of depending, as in so great a degree it now does, on the accident of birth, will be made by concert on an acknowledged principle of justice; and when it will no longer either be, or be thought to be, impossible for human beings to exert themselves strenuously in procuring benefits which are not to be exclusively their own, but to be shared with the society they belong to." ("Autobiography," pp. 231-232). On this passage Mr. Cairnes observes:--"If to look forward to such a state of things as an ideal to be striven for is socialism, I at once acknowledge myself a socialist; but it seems to me that the idea which 'socialism' conveys to most minds is not that of any particular form of society to be realized at a future time when the character of human beings and the conditions of human life are widely different from what they now are, but rather certain modes of action, more especially the employment of the powers of the State for the instant accomplishment of ideal schemes, which is the invariable attribute of all projects generally regarded as socialistic. So entirely is this the case that it is common to hear any proposal which is thought to involve an undue extension of the power of the State branded as socialistic, whatever be the object it may seek to accomplish. After all, the question is one of nomenclature merely; but people are so greatly governed by words that I cannot but regret that a philosophy of social life with which I so deeply sympathize should be prejudiced by verbal associations fitted, as it seems to me, only to mislead." ("Leading Principles of Political Economy," p. 316.) Mr. Cairnes's objection is just; for a reformer's position ought to be determined, not by the distant ideal he may think best, if the conditions were ripe for its realization, but by the policy which he counts to be of present importance under the conditions that exist. He may cherish, as many orthodox economists do, the socialist hope. He may look for a time when comfort and civilization shall be more universally and securely diffused; when heads and hands in the world of labour shall work together in amity; when competition and exclusive private property and self-interest shall be swallowed up in love and common labour. But he knows that the transformation must be gradual, and that the material conditions of it must never be pushed on in advance of the intellectual and moral. And this cuts him off by a whole diameter, from those who are now known as socialists. In every question of the day he will be found in an opposite camp from them. For he makes the ideal what it is and ought to be--the goal of his action; they make it their starting-point, and the peculiarity of the case is that with their view of the situation they cannot make it anything else. For to their mind the struggle they are engaged in is not a struggle for amelioration, but for plain and elementary right. It is not a question of providing greater happiness for the greatest number; it is a question of doing them bare justice, of giving them their own, of protecting them against a disguised but very real expropriation. They declare that, under the present industrial arrangements, the labouring classes are in effect robbed of most of the value of the work of their hands, and of course the suppression of systematic robbery is an immediate obligation of the present. Justice is a basis to start from now, if possible, and not a dream to await hereafter. First let the labouring man have his rights, they cry, and then, and then only, shall you have the way clear for any further parley about his future. It is true that he is not the victim of individual rapacity so much as of the system, and that he cannot get his rights till the system is completely changed; but the system, they argue, can never be completely changed except by the power of the State, and why then not change it at once? Now, it is obvious how, to people who take this view of the matter, there should seem no other alternative but an instant reconstruction of industrial society at the hands of the State. For if it is justice that has to be done, then it appears only natural to conclude that it falls upon the State, as the organ of justice, to do it, and that it cannot do it too soon. The demand for the immediate accomplishment of their scheme by public authority is thus no accidental accessory of it merely, but is really inseparable from the ideas on which the scheme is founded. It is, in fact, so much, if I may use the word, the _note_ of socialism wherever socialism makes itself heard in the world now, that it can only produce confusion to give the name of socialist to persons who hold this note in abhorrence, and virtually desire no more than the gradual triumph of co-operation. It may be answered that the latter, like the former, aim not at a mere reform of the present industrial system, but at an essential change in its fundamental principles--at an eventual suppression of exclusive property and unrestricted competition--and that it is therefore only proper to classify them with those who seek the like important end, however they may differ from the latter as to the means and seasons of action. This might be right, perhaps, if our only consideration were to furnish a philosophical classification of opinions; but we have to deal with a living and agitating party whose name and work are much canvassed, and there is at any rate great practical inconvenience in extending the current designation of that party so as to include persons who object strongly to its whole immediate work. The inconvenience has doubled since Mill's time, because socialism has now become a much more definite programme of a much more definite party. Even in the old romantic schools the ruling characteristic of socialism was always its effort to realize some wrong view of distributive justice. It was more than merely an impracticable plan for the extinction of poverty, or the more equable diffusion of wealth, or the correction of excessive inequalities, although that seems to be so prevailing an impression that persons who have what they conceive more feasible proposals to offer for these purposes put them forward under the name of Practicable Socialism. But so far as these purposes go, they are common to almost all schools of social reformers, even the most individualist. If socialism meant only feeling earnestly about those inequalities, or desiring earnestly their redress, or even strongly resenting their inconsistency with an ideal of justice, then Mr. Herbert Spencer is as much a socialist as either Marx or Lassalle. "The fates of the great majority," says he, "have ever been, and doubtless still are, so sad that it is painful to think of them. Unquestionably the existing type of social organization is one which none who care for their kind can contemplate with satisfaction; and unquestionably men's activities accompanying this type are far from being admirable. The strong divisions of rank and the immense inequalities of means are at variance with that ideal of human relations on which the sympathetic imagination likes to dwell; and the average conduct, under the pressure and excitement of social life as at present carried on, is in sundry respects repulsive." ("A Plea for Liberty," p. 4.) Socialists are far from being the only persons whose sense of justice is offended by much in the existing _régime_, and many very moderate politicians have held that the policy of the law should always favour the diffusion of wealth rather than its concentration; that it should always favour the active business interest rather than the idle interest; that it should always favour the weaker and more unprotected interest rather than the more powerful and the more contumelious. The socialism comes in not with the condemnation of the existing order of things, but with the policy recommended for its correction. There is no socialism in recognising the plain fact that the gifts of fortune, whether riches or talents, are not distributed in the world according to merit. There is no socialism in declaring that the rich, by reason of their riches, have responsibilities towards the poor; or that the poor, by reason of their poverty, have claims upon the rich. Nor is there any socialism in holding that the State has responsibilities towards the poor, and that the law ought, when necessary, to assert the reasonable claims of poverty, or enforce the reasonable duties and obligations of wealth. All that merely says that justice and humanity ought to govern in economic affairs, as they ought to govern in all other affairs of life; and this is an axiomatic position which nobody in the world denies. Only, axiomatic though it is, it seems to dawn on many minds like a revelation late in life, and they feel they are no longer as other men, and that they must henceforth call themselves socialists. This awakening to the injustice or inhumanity of things is not socialism, though socialism may often proceed out of it. Socialism is always some scheme for the removal of one injustice by the infliction of a greater--some scheme which, by mistaking the rights and wrongs of the actual situation, or the natural operation of its own provisions, or any other cause, would leave things more inequitable and more offensive to a sound sense of justice than it found them. The rich idler, for example, is always a great offence to the socialist, because, according to the socialist sense of justice, no man ought to be rich without working for his riches; and many other people will possibly agree with the socialist in that. But then the socialist proposes to abolish the rich idler by a scheme which would breed the poor idler in overwhelming abundance, and for the sake of equalizing poverty and wealth, would really equalize indolence and industry--at once a more fatal and a more offensive form of injustice than that which it was designed to redress. Socialists find fault with the present order of things because the many workers support the few idlers; but most of the old socialist communities of France and America failed because of the opposite and greater injustice, that the few workers found themselves supporting the many idlers, and the consequence was a more harrowing sense of unfairness and a more universal impoverishment than prevailed under the old system. The rich idler who merely lives on what he has inherited may not belong to an ideal state of society; but the poor idler, who shirks and dawdles and malingers, because an indulgent community relieves him of the necessity of harder exertion, is equally unideal, and he is much more hurtful in the reality. But the socialists, in their mistaken ideas of justice, do not stop at the rich idler. The rich idler is, in their view, a robber; but the rich worker is a greater robber still. It is characteristic of socialist thought to hold the accumulations of the rich to be in some sort of way unjustly acquired by spoiling the poor. The poor are always represented as the disinherited; their property is declared to have been taken from them perforce by bad laws and bad economic arrangements and delivered without lien into the hands of the capitalists. This view lived and moved in the old socialism, but it has been worked into a reasoned and professedly scientific argument as a basis and justification for the new. The old socialism usually exclaimed against the justice of interest, rent, property, and all forms of labourless income; but the new socialism pretends to prove the charge by economic principles. It alleges that all these forms of income are so many different forms of plundering the working classes, who are the real producers of wealth, and it sets up a claim on behalf of those classes to the whole value of the things they produce without any deductions for rent, interest, or profit--the right, as they call it, of the labourer to the whole produce of his labour. Now this is a very distinct and definite claim of right and justice, and the whole final object of the socialist organizations of the present day is to get it realized, and realized at once, as claims of right and justice ought, and must, by the powers of the State. I shall have better opportunities at a later part of this work of proving how absolutely unfounded and unjust is this claim; but I mention it here merely to show that the essence of modern socialism is more and more unmistakably revealing itself as an effort to realize some false ideal of social or distributive justice. This is the deepest and most ruling feature of socialism, and it really necessitated the advance of the movement from the philanthropic to the political stage. The Owenites were content with the idea of a voluntary equality of wealth; but that is now dismissed as the mere children's dream, for popular rights are things to be enforced by law, and questions of justice are for the State. The political character of the movement has only brought forward into stronger relief the distorted ideal of justice which gave it being; and it has therefore become much more confusing than it formerly was for one to call himself a socialist merely because he dreams of better things to come, or because he would like to extinguish poverty, or to diffuse property, or to extend the principle of progressive taxation, or promote co-operation or profit-sharing, or any other just or useful measures of practical social reform. That is shown very well by a simple little tidemark. In the old days it was still possible, though it never was a happy choice, for Maurice and the promoters of the new co-operation movement to assume the designation of Christian Socialists; but although Schultze-Delitzsch was working on the same lines with even greater _éclat_ at the time when the present socialistic movement began in Germany, he was left so far behind that he was thought the great anti-socialist, and the people to whom it was now considered appropriate to transfer the name of socialists were a set of university professors and others who advocated a more extended use of the powers of the State for the solution of the social question and the satisfaction of working-class claims. The Socialists of the Chair and the Christian Socialists of Germany contemplate nothing beyond correctives and palliatives of existing evils; but then they ask the State to administer them. They ask the State to inspect factories, or to legalize trades unions, or to organize working-class insurance, or to fix fair wages. Their requests may be wise or foolish, but none of them, nor all of them together, would either subvert or transform the existing industrial system; and those who propound them are called socialists merely because they make it part of the State's business to deal with social questions, or perhaps more particularly because they make it the State's business to deal with social questions in the interest of the working class. This idea of socialism seems largely to govern the current employment of the term. We often hear any fresh extension of the functions of the State condemned as socialistic even when the extension is not supposed to be made in the interests of the working class, or to be conducive to them. The purchase of the telegraphs was socialistic; the proposal to purchase the railways is socialistic; a national system of education is socialistic; and an ecclesiastical establishment, if it were now brought forward as a new suggestion, would be pronounced socialistic too. Since, in a socialistic community, all power is assigned to the State, any measure which now increases the power of the State gets easily represented as an approach to socialism, especially in the want--and it is one of our chief wants at present--of a rational and discriminating theory of the proper limits and sphere of public authority. But in the prevailing use of the word, there is generally the idea that the intervention of authority to which it is applied is undertaken to promote the well-being of the less fortunate classes of society. Since socialism seeks to construct what may be called a working class State, where the material welfare of each shall be the great object of the organization of all, it is common to represent as socialistic any proposal that asks the State to do something for the material well-being of the working class, and to describe any group of such proposals, or any theory that favours them, by the name of socialism. The so-called State-socialism of Prince Bismarck, for example, is only, as he has himself declared, a following-out of the traditions of the House of Hohenzollern, the princes of that dynasty having always counted it one of their first duties as rulers to exercise a special protection and solicitude over the poorer classes of their subjects. The old ideas of feudal protection and paternal government have charms for many minds that deplore the democratic spirit of modern society. In Germany they have been maintained by the feudal classes, the court, and the clergy; their presence in the general intellectual atmosphere there has probably facilitated the diffusion of socialistic views; and they have certainly led to the curious phenomenon of a Conservative socialism, in which the most obstinately Conservative interests in the country go to meet the Social Democrats half way, and promise to do everything to get them better wages if they will but come to church again and pray for the Kaiser. The days of feudal protection and paternal government are gone; as idealized by Carlyle, they perhaps never existed; at any rate, in an age of equality they are no longer possible, but their modern counterparts are precisely the ideas of social protection and fraternal government which find their home among socialists. On the strength of this analogy, Prince Bismarck and the German Emperor are sometimes spoken of as socialists, because they believe, like the latter, that the State should exercise a general or even a particular providence over the industrial classes. But socialism is more than such a belief. It is not only a theory of the State's action, but a theory of the State's action founded on a theory of the labourer's right. It is at bottom, as I have said, a mistaken demand for social justice. It tells us that an enlargement of social justice was made when it was declared that every man shall be free--or, in other words, that every man shall possess completely his own powers of labour; and it claims that a new enlargement of social justice shall be made now, to declare that every man shall possess the whole produce of his labour. Now those who are known as Conservative Socialists, in patronizing the working people, do not dream of countenancing any such claim, or even of admitting in the least that there is anything positively unjust in the present industrial system. None of them would go further than to say that the economic position of the labourer is insufficient to satisfy his legitimate aspirations in a civilized community; few of them would go so far. It is therefore highly confusing to class them among socialists. M. Limousin, again, speaks of a "minimum of socialism." He would call no man a socialist who does not hold this minimum, and he would call every man a socialist who does hold it. And the minimum of socialism, in his opinion, is this, that the State owes a special duty of protection to labourers because they are poor, and that this duty consists in securing to them a more equitable part in the product of general labour. The latter clause might have been better expressed in less general terms, but that may pass. The definition recognises at any rate that the paternal or the fraternal theory of government does not of itself constitute socialism, and that this must be combined with the demand for a new distribution of wealth, on supposed grounds of justice or equity, before we have even the minimum of socialism. But it would have been more correct if it had recognised that the demand for a better distribution must be made not merely on _supposed_, but on _erroneous_ grounds of justice or equity. If the proposed distribution is really just and equitable, nothing can surely be more proper than to ask the State to do its best to realize it and any practicable intervention for that purpose is only a matter of the ordinary expansion of the law. What is law, what is right, but a protection of the weak? and all legal reform is a transition from a less equitable to a more equitable system of arrangements. The equitable requirements of the poor are the natural concern of the State on the narrowest theory of its functions, and M. Limousin's definition would really include all rational social reformers under the name of socialist. If we are in this way to stretch the word socialism first to the one side, till it takes in J. S. Mill and Maurice and the co-operators, who repudiate authority and State help, and then on the other side, till it takes in Prince Bismarck, and our own aristocratic Conservative Young England Party, and all social reformers who want the State to do its ordinary duty of supplying the working classes with better securities for the essentials of all humane living, how can there be any rational and intelligible use of the word at all? Mill holds a more or less socialistic idea of what a just society would be; Bismarck holds a more or less socialistic view of the functions of the State; but neither of these ideas separately make up the minimum of socialism; and it would therefore be misleading to call either of them by that name, while to call both by it would be hopeless confusion, since the one politician holds exactly what the other rejects, and no more. But, after all, it is of less importance to define socialism in the abstract than to describe the actual concrete socialism that has organization and life, especially as the name is only transferred in common speech to all these varying shades of opinion, because they are thought to resemble that concrete socialism in one feature or another. Having now ascertained the general nature of the contemporary socialistic movement, we shall be in a better position to judge of its bearings and importance. We have seen that the only form of socialism which has come to life again since 1848 is the political and revolutionary phase of Social Democracy. Now, this was also the original form in which socialism first appeared in modern Europe at the time of the earlier Revolution of 1789. The tradition it represents is consequently one of apparently vigorous vitality. It has kept its place in European opinion for a hundred years, it seems to have grown with the growth of the democratic spirit, and it has in our own day broken out simultaneously in most of the countries of the Continent, and in some of them with remarkable energy. A movement like this, which seems to have taken a continuous and extensive hold of the popular mind, and which moreover has a consciousness of right, a passion for social justice, however mistaken, at the heart of it, cannot be treated lightly as a political force; but at the same time its consequence is apt to be greatly overrated both by the hopes of sanguine adherents and by the apprehensions of opponents. Socialists are incessantly telling us that their system is the last word of the Revolution, that the current which broke loose over Europe in 1789 is setting, as it could not help setting, in their direction, and that it can only find its final level of repose in a democratic communism. Conservative Cassandras tell us the same thing, for the Extreme Right takes the same view as the Extreme Left does of the logical tendency of measures. They feel things about them moving everywhere towards equality, they feel themselves helpless to resist the movement, and they are sure they shall waken one morning in a social revolution. Stahl, for example, thought democracy necessarily conducted to socialism, and that wherever democracy entered, socialism was already at the door. A few words will therefore be still necessary towards explaining, first, the historical origin of modern socialism; second, the relations of socialism to democracy, and, finally, the extent and character of the spread of the present movement. Respecting the first of these three points, modern socialism was generated out of the notions about property and the State which appeared towards the close of last century in the course of the speculations then in vogue on the origin and objects of civil society, and which were proclaimed about the same time by many different writers--by Brissot, by Mably, by Morelly, and above all by Rousseau. Their great idea was to restore what they called the state of nature, when primitive equality still reigned, and the earth belonged to none, and the fruits to all. They taught that there was no foundation for property but need. He who needed a thing had a right to it, and he who had more than he needed was a thief. Rousseau said every man had naturally a right to whatever he needed; and Brissot, anticipating the famous words of Proudhon, declared that in a state of nature "exclusive property was theft." It was so in a state of nature, but it was so also in a state of society, for society was built on a social contract, "the clauses of which reduce themselves to one, viz., the total transfer of each associate, with all his rights, to the community." The individual is thus nothing; the State is all in all. Property is only so much of the national estate conditionally conceded to the individual. He has the right to use it, because the State permits him, while the State permits him, and how the State permits him. So with every other right; he is to think, speak, train his children, or even beget them, as the State directs and allows, in the interest of the common good. These ideas circulated in a diffuse state till 1793. They formed as yet neither system nor party. But when Joseph Baboeuf, discarding his Christian name of Joseph (because, as he said, he had no wish for Joseph's virtues, and so saw no good in having him for his patron saint), and taking instead the ominous name of Caius Gracchus, organized the conspiracy of the _Egaux_ in that year, then modern socialism began, and it began in the form in which it still survives. Baboeuf's ambition was to found what he called a true democratic republic, and by a true democratic republic he meant one in which all inequalities, whether of right or of fact, should be abolished, and every citizen should have enough and none too much. It was vain, he held, to dream of making an end of privilege or oppression until all property came into the hands of the Government, and was statedly distributed by the Government to the citizens on a principle of scrupulous equality. Misled by the name Caius Gracchus, people thought he wanted an agrarian law and equal division. But he told them an agrarian law was folly, and equal division would not last a twelvemonth, if the participants got the property to themselves. What he wanted, he said, was something much more sublime--it was community of goods. Equality could only be made enduring through the abolition of private property. The State must be sole proprietor and sole employer, and dispense to every man his work according to his particular skill, and his subsistence in honourable sufficiency according to his wants. An individual who monopolized anything over and above such a sufficiency committed a social theft. Appropriation was to be strictly limited to and by personal need. Baboeuf saw no difficulty in working the scheme; was it not practised every day in the army, with 1,200,000 men? If it were said, the soil of France is too small to sustain its population in the standard of sufficiency contemplated, then so much the worse for the superfluous population; let the greater landlords first, and then as many sansculottes as were redundant, be put out of the way for their country's good. He actually ascribed this intention to Robespierre, and spoke of the Terror as if it were an excellent anticipation of Malthusianism. Did any one say that, without inequalities, progress would cease and arts and civilization decay, Baboeuf was equally prepared to take the consequences. "Perish the arts," said a manifesto discovered with him at his apprehension, "but let us have real equality." "All evils," he said in his newspaper, "are on their trial. Let them all be confounded. Let everything return to chaos, and from chaos let there rise a new and regenerated world." We have here just the revolutionary socialist democracy that is still rampant over Europe. Socialists now, indeed, generally make light of the difficulty of over-population which Baboeuf solved so glibly with the guillotine, and they contend that their system would humanize civilization instead of destroying it. They follow, too, a different tradition from Baboeuf regarding the right of property. While he built that right on need, they build it on labour. He said the man who has more than he needs is a thief; they say the man who has more than he wrought for is a thief. He would have the State to give every man an honourable sufficiency right off, according to his need; they ask the State to give every man according to his work, or, if unfit for work, according to his need, and they hold that this rule would afford every one an honourable sufficiency. But these differences are only refinements on Baboeuf's plan, and its main features remain--equality of conditions, nationalization of property, democratic tyranny, a uniform medium fatal to progress, an omnipresent mandarin control crushing out of the people that energy of character which W. von Humboldt said was the first and only virtue of man, because it was the root of all other excellence and advancement. In short, socialists now seek, like Baboeuf, to establish a democratic republic--a society built on the equal manhood of every citizen--and, like Baboeuf, they think a true democratic republic is necessarily a socialistic one. This brings me to the next point I mentioned, the interesting problem of the true relations of socialism to democracy. Is socialism, as Stahl and others represent, an inevitable corollary of democracy? If so, our interest in it is very real and very immediate. For democracy is already here, and is at present engaged in every country of Europe in the very work of reorganizing the social system into harmony with democratic requirements. Its hammer may make little sound in some places, but the work proceeds none the less effectually for the silence, and it will proceed, slowly or more rapidly, until all the institutions of the country have been renovated by the democratic spirit. Will the social system, which will result from the process, be socialism? "The gradual development of the principle of equality," says De Tocqueville, "is a providential fact. It has all the characteristics of such a fact. It is universal; it is durable; it constantly eludes all human interference; and all events, as well as all men, contribute to its progress. Would it be wise to imagine that a social movement, the causes of which lie so far back, can be checked by the efforts of one generation? Can it be believed that the democracy which has overthrown the feudal system and vanquished kings will retreat before tradesmen and capitalists? Will it stop now that it has grown so strong, and its adversaries so weak?" If, then, the natural tendency of democracy is to socialism, to socialism we must eventually go. But the natural tendency of democracy is not to socialism. A single plain but remarkable fact suffices to establish that. Democracy has been in full bloom in America for more than a century, and there are no traces of socialism there except among some German immigrants of yesterday; for, of course, the communism of the eccentric religious sects of America proceeds from religious ideals, and has no bearing one way or other on the social tendency of democracy. The labouring class is politically everything in that country--everything, at least, that electoral power can make them in an elective republic; and they have never shown any desire to use their political power to become socially everything or to interfere with the freedom of property. Had this been in any way the necessary effect of democratic institutions, it must have by this time made its appearance in the United States. De Tocqueville, indeed, maintains that so far from there being any natural solidarity between democracy and socialism, they are absolutely contrary the one to the other. "Democracy," he said in a speech in the Republican Parliament of France in 1849, "extends the sphere of individual independence; socialism contracts it. Democracy gives every individual man his utmost possible value; socialism makes every man an agent, an instrument, a cipher. Democracy and socialism coincide only in the single word equality, but observe the difference: democracy desires equality in liberty; socialism seeks equality in compulsion and servitude." That is so far substantially true, but it cannot be received altogether without qualification. We have had experience in modern times of two different forms of democracy, which may be called the American and the Continental. In America equality came as it were by nature, without strife and without so much as observation; the colonists started equal. But freedom was only won by sacrifice; the first pilgrims bought it by exile; the founders of the Republic bought it a second time by blood. Liberty therefore was their treasure, their ark, their passion; and having been long trained in habits of self-government, they acquired in the daily exercise of their liberty that strong sense of its practical value, and that subtle instinct of its just limits, which always constitute its surest bulwarks. With them the State was nothing more than an association for mutual protection--an association, like any other, having its own definite work to do and no more, and receiving from its members the precise powers needed for that work and no more; and they looked with a jealousy, warm from their history and life, on any extension of the State's functions or powers beyond those primary requirements of public safety or utility which they laid upon it. In the United States property is widely diffused; liberty has been long enjoyed by the people as a fact, as well as loved by them as an ideal; the central authority has ever been held in comparative check; and individual rights are so general a possession that any encroachment upon them in the name of the majority would always tread on interests numerous and strong enough to raise an effectual resistance. Democracy has in America, accordingly, a soil most favourable to its healthy growth; the history, the training, and the circumstances of the people all concur to support liberty. But on the Continent democracy sprang from very different antecedents, and possesses a very different character. Equality was introduced into France by convulsion, and has engrossed an undue share of her attention since. Freedom, on the other hand, has been really less desired than power. The Revolution found the affairs of that country administered by a strong centralized organization, with its hand everywhere and on everything, and the Revolution left them so. Revolution has succeeded revolution; dynasties and constitutions have come and gone; almost every part of the political and social system has suffered change; the form of government has been republic, empire, monarchy, empire and republic again; but the authority of government, its sphere, its attributes, have remained throughout the same. Each party in succession has seized the power of the State, but none has sought to curb its range. On the contrary, their temptation lay the other way; they have been always so bent on using the authority and mechanism of government to impair or suppress the influence of their adversaries, whom they regarded as at the same time the adversaries of the State, that they could only wish that authority to be larger and that mechanism more perfect than they already were. Even the more popular parties are content to accept the existing over-government as the normal state of affairs, and always strive to gain the control of it rather than to restrain its action. And so it has come about that, while they sought liberty for themselves, they were afraid to grant it to their opponents, for fear their opponents should be able to get the authority of this too powerful administration into their hands and serve them in the same way. The struggle for freedom has thus been corrupted into a struggle for power. That is the secret of the pathetic story of modern France. That is why, with all her marvellous efforts for liberty, she has never fully possessed it, and that is why she seems condemned to instability. A growing minority of the democratic party in France is indeed opposed to this unfortunate over-government, but the democratic party in general has always countenanced it, perhaps more than any other party, because to their minds government represents the will of the people, and the people cannot be supposed to have any reason to restrain its own will. Besides, they are still dominated by the doctrines of Rousseau and the other revolutionary writers who looked with the utmost contempt on the American idea of the State being a kind of joint-stock association organized for a circumscribed purpose and with limited powers, and who held the State, on the contrary, to be the organ of society in all its interests, desires, and needs, and to be invested with all the powers and rights of all the individuals that compose it. Under the social contract, by which they conceived the State to be constituted, individuals gave up all their rights and possessions to the community, and got them back immediately afterwards as mere State concessions, which there could be no injustice in withdrawing again next day for the greater good of the community. Instead of enjoying equal freedom as men, the great object was to make them enjoy equal completeness as citizens. From historical conditions like these there has sprung up on the Continent--in Germany as well as France--a quite different type of democracy from the American, and this type of democracy, while it may not be the best, the truest, or the healthiest type of it, has a tendency only too natural towards socialism. It contains in its very build and temperament organic conditions that predispose it to socialism as to its peculiarly besetting disease. It evinced this tendency very early in the history of the Revolution. As Ledru-Rollin reminded De Tocqueville, in replying to his speech, the right to labour on the part of the strong and the right to assistance on the part of the weak were already acknowledged by the Convention of 1793. Claims like these constitute the very A B C of socialism, and they have always moved with more or less energy in the democratic tradition of the Continent. Democracy, guided by the spirit of freedom, will resist socialism; but authoritative democracy, such as finds favour abroad, leans strongly towards it. A democratic despotism is obviously more dangerous to property than any other, inasmuch as the despot is, in this case, more insatiable, and his rapacity is so easily hid and even sanctified under the general considerations of humanity that always mingle with it. It is therefore manifest that the question whether political democracy must end in social, is one that cannot be answered out of hand by deduction from the idea. The development will differ in different countries, for it depends on historical conditions, of which the most important is that I have now touched on, whether the national character and circumstances are calculated to guide that development into the form of democratic liberty, or into the form of democratic tyranny. A second condition is scarcely less important, viz., whether the laws and economic situation of the country have conduced to a dispersion or to a concentration of property. For even in the freest democracy individual property can only be permanently sustained by diffusion, and, if existing conditions have isolated it into the hands of the few, the many will lie under a constant, and, in emergencies, an irresistible temptation to take freedom in their hand and force the distribution of property by law, or nationalize it entirely by a socialistic reconstruction. It used to be a maxim in former days that power must be distributed in some proportion to property, but with the advent of democracy the maxim must be converted, and the rule of health will now be found in having property distributed in some proportion to power. That is the natural price of stability under a democratic _régime_. A penniless omnipotence is an insupportable presence. When supreme power is vested in a majority of the people, property cannot sit securely till it becomes so general a possession that a majority of the people has a stake in its defence, and this point will not be reached until at least a large minority of them are actually owners, and the rest enjoy a reasonable prospect of becoming so by the exercise of care and diligence in their ordinary avocations. The belief of Marx and modern socialists, that the large system of production, with its centralized capital and its aggregation of workpeople in large centres, must, by necessary historical evolution, end in the socialist State, is, as Professor A. Menger has pointed out, not justified by history. The latifundia and slavery of the decline of the Roman empire were not succeeded by any system of common property, but by the institutions of mediæval law which made the rights of private property more absolute and exclusive. And in our own time the tendency to concentration of property in the hands of a few great capitalists is being corrected by the newer tendency to joint stock management, _i.e._, to the union and multiplication of small capitalists; and this is of course a tendency back from, and not on towards, the social revolution Marx conceived to be imminent. But though the modern concentration of wealth may not for the moment be increasing, and if it were, may not on that account necessarily spell socialism, it certainly spells social peril; and the future, therefore, stands before us with a solemn choice: either property must contrive to get widely diffused peacefully, or it will be diffused by acts of popular confiscation, or perhaps be nationalized altogether; and the fate of free institutions hangs upon the dilemma. For in a democratic community the peril is always near. De Tocqueville may be right in saying that such communities, if left to themselves, naturally love liberty; but there are other things they love more, and this profound political philosopher has himself pointed out with what exceptional vigour they nourish two powerful passions, either of which, if it got the mastery, would prove fatal to freedom. One is the love of equality. "I think," says he, "that democratic communities have a natural taste for freedom; left to themselves they will seek to cherish it, and view every privation of it with regret. But for equality their passion is ardent, insatiable, insistent, invincible; they call for equality in freedom, and if they cannot obtain that, they still call for equality in slavery. They will endure poverty, servitude, pauperism, but they will not endure aristocracy." The other is the unreined love of material gratification. By this De Tocqueville does not mean sensual corruption of manners, for he believes that sensuality will be more moderate in a democracy than in other forms of society. He means the passion for material comfort above all other things, which he describes as the peculiar passion of the middle classes; the complete absorption in the pursuit of material well-being and the means of material well-being, to the disparagement and disregard of every ideal consideration and interest, as if the chief end and whole dignity of man lay in gaining a conventional standard of comfort. When a passion like this spreads from the classes whose vanity it feeds to the classes whose envy it excites, social revolution is at the gates, and this is one of De Tocqueville's gravest apprehensions in contemplating the advance of democracy. For he says that the passion for material well-being has no check in a democratic community except religion, and if religion were to decline--and the pursuit of comfort undoubtedly impairs it--then liberty would perish. "For my part," he declares, "I doubt whether man can ever support at once complete religious independence and entire public freedom; and I am inclined to think that if faith be wanting in him he must serve, and if he be free he must believe." It is impossible, therefore, in an age when the democratic spirit has grown so strong and victorious, to avoid taking some reasonable concern for the future of liberty, more especially as at the same time the sphere and power of government are being everywhere continually extended, the devotion to material well-being, and what is called material civilization, is ever increasing, and religious faith, particularly among the educated and the working classes, is on the decline. This is exactly the rock ahead of the modern State, of which we have been long warned by keen eyes aloft, and which seems now to stand out plainly enough to ordinary observers on the deck. Free institutions run continual risk of shipwreck when power is the possession of the many, but property--from whatever cause--the enjoyment of the few. With the advance of democracy a diffusion of wealth becomes almost a necessity of State. And the difficulty only begins when the necessity is perceived. For the State cannot accomplish any lasting or effective change in the matter without impairing or imperilling the freedom which its intervention is meant to protect--without, in short, becoming socialist, for fear of socialism; and when it has done its best, it finds that the solution is still subject to moral and economic conditions which it has no power to control. In trade and manufactures which occupy such vast and increasing proportions of the population of modern countries, the range of the State's beneficial or even possible action is very little; and in these branches the natural conditions at present strongly favour concentration or aggregation of capital. The small masters have simply been worsted in ordinary competition with the large producers, and so long as the large system of production continues the cheapest system of production, no other result can be expected. The social problem, therefore, so far as these branches are concerned, is to discover some form of co-operative arrangement which shall reconcile the large system of production with the interests of the labouring class, unless, indeed--what is far from impossible--the large system of production is itself to be superseded in the further advance of industrial development. The economic superiority of that system depends greatly on the circumstance that the power now in use--water or steam--necessitates the concentration of machinery at one spot. Mr. Babbage predicted fifty years ago that if a new power were to be discovered that could be generated in a central place in quantities sufficient for the requirements of a whole community, and then distributed, as gas is, wherever it was wanted, the age of domestic manufactures would return. Every little community might then find it cheaper, by saving carriage, and availing itself of cheaper local labour, to manufacture for itself many of the articles now made for it at the large mills; and the small factory or workshop, so suitable, among other advantages, for co-operative enterprise, would multiply everywhere. Now, have we such a power in electricity? If so, not the least important effect of the new agent will be its influence on the diffusion of wealth, and its aid towards the solution of the social problem of the nineteenth century. With land and agriculture the situation is somewhat different. The distribution of landed property has always depended largely on legal conditions; and since these conditions have--in this country at least--wrought for two centuries in favour of the aggregation of estates, their relaxation may reasonably be expected to operate to some extent in the contrary direction. Too much must not be built on this expectation, however, for the natural conditions are at present, at least, as partial to the large property as the legal. The abolition of entail and primogeniture, by emancipating the living proprietor from the preposterous tyranny of the dead, and by bringing to the burdened the privilege of sale, must necessarily throw greater quantities of land into the market than reach it now, but the redistribution of that land will as necessarily conform to the existing social and economic circumstances of the country; and England will never cease to be characterized by the large property, so long as its social system lends exceptional consideration to the possession of land, and its commercial system is continually creating an exceptional number of large fortunes. The market for the large estate is among the wealthy, who buy land as an instrument of enjoyment, of power, of social ambition; and what with the wealth made at home and the wealth made in the colonies, the number of this class is ever on the increase; the natural market for the small estate, on the other hand, is among the farming class, to whom land is a commercial investment, and the farmers of England, unlike those of other countries, unlike those of our own country in former days, are as a rule positively indisposed to purchase land, finding it more profitable to rent it. This aversion, however, is much more influential with large farmers than with small ones. It is commonly argued as if a small farmer who has saved money will be certain to employ it in taking a more extensive holding, but that is not so. On the contrary, he more usually leaves it in the bank; in some parts of Scotland many small farmers have deposits of from £500 to £1000 lying there at interest; they studiously conceal the fact, lest their landlords should hear of it, and raise their rent, and they submit to much inconvenience rather than withdraw any portion of it, once it is deposited. Their ruling object is security and not aggrandisement, and consequently if land were in the market in lots to suit them, they would be almost certain to become purchasers of land. In forecasting the possibility of the rise of a peasant proprietary in this country, it is often forgotten that, whether land is a profitable investment for the farmer or not, the class of farmers from whom such a proprietary would be generated is less anxious for a profitable investment than for a safe one, and that to many of them, as of other classes, independence will always possess much more than a commercial value. But, however this may be, land is distributed by holdings as well as by estates, and in connection with our present subject the distribution by holdings is perhaps the more important thing of the two. "The magic of property" is no exclusive prerogative of the soil; ownership in stock will carry the same political effects as ownership in anything else; and a satisfactory system of tenant right may yield all the social and economic advantages of a peasant proprietary. In fact, tenant right, so far as it goes, is proprietorship, and it has before now developed into proprietorship even in name. The old lamented yeomanry of England were, the great majority of them, copyholders, and a copyholder was simply a tenant-at-will whose tenant right was consolidated by custom into a perpetual and hereditary property; and if the soil of England will ever again become distributed among as numerous a body of owners as held it in former ages, it will most likely occur through a similar process of consolidation of tenant right. But as it is--and though this is a truism, it is often overlooked in discussions on the subject--the tenants are owners as well as the landlords; their interests enlist them on the side of stability; they have a stake in the defence of property; and even though the prevailing tendency to the accumulation of estates continues unchecked, its peril to the State may be mitigated by the preservation and multiplication of small and comfortable holdings, which shall nourish a substantial and independent peasantry, and supply a hope and ambition to the rural labourers. This is so far well. We know that it is an axiom with Continental socialists that a revolution has no chance of success, however well supported it may be by the artisans of the towns, if the peasantry are contented and take no part in it; and the most serious feature in more than one of the great countries of Europe at this moment is the miserable condition into which their agricultural labourers have been suffered to fall, and their practical exclusion from all opportunities of raising themselves out of it. The stability of Europe may be said to rest on the number of its comfortable peasantry; the dam of the Revolution is the small farm. This is not less true of England than of the Continent, for although the agricultural population is vastly outnumbered by the industrial in this country, that consideration really increases rather than diminishes the political value of sustaining and multiplying a contented tenantry. Now England is the classical country of the large farm as well as of the large estate. Its holdings have always been larger than those of other nations; they were so when half of them were owned by their occupiers, they are so still when they are rented from great landlords. The large farms have grown larger; a holding of 200 acres was counted a very large farm in the time of the Commonwealth; it would be considered a very moderate one in most English counties now. But yet the small farm has not gone the way of the small estate. The effects of consolidation have been balanced to such a degree by a simultaneous extension of the area of cultivation that the number of holdings in England is probably more considerable than it ever was before. If we may trust Gregory King's estimate, there were, 200 years ago, 310,000 occupiers of holdings in England, 160,000 owners, and 150,000 tenants; in 1880 there were, exclusive of allotments, which are now numerous, 295,313 holdings of 50 acres and under, and 414,804 holdings altogether. Moreover, the future of the small farm is much more hopeful than the future of the small estate or the small factory. All admit the small holding to be preferable to the large for dairy farming and market gardening; and dairy farms and market gardens are two classes of holdings that must continue to multiply with the growth of the great towns. But even with respect to corn crops, it is now coming to be well understood that the existing conditions of high farming would be better satisfied by a smaller size of holding than has been in most favour with agricultural reformers hitherto; because then, and then only, can the farmer be expected to bestow upon every rood of his ground that generous expenditure of capital, and that sedulous and minute care which are now necessary to make his business profitable. Without entering on the disputed question of the comparative productiveness of large and small farms, it ought to be remembered, in the first place, that the economic advantage of the large farm--the reason why the large farmer has been able to offer a higher rent than the smaller--is not so much because he produces more, as because he can afford to produce less; and, in the next place, that the small farmer has heretofore wrought, not only with worse appliances than the large--which perhaps he must always do--but also with less knowledge of the theory of his art, and worse conditions of tenure--in both of which respects we may look for improvement in the immediate future. Even as it is, we find small farmers equalling the highest production of the country. In the evidence before the Duke of Richmond's Commission, there is a case of a farmer of three acres producing 45 bushels per acre, or about twice the average of the season in those bad years that impoverished the larger farmers. The same body of evidence seems to prove that the small farmer has more staying power--a better capacity of weathering an agricultural crisis--than the large; for he has much less frequently petitioned for a reduction of rent--an advantage which landlords may be expected not to overlook. He enjoys, too, a monopoly of the superior efficiency of interested labour, and as the personal efficiency of the labourer--his skill, his knowledge, his watchfulness, his care--are becoming not less, but more important with the growth of scientific farming, whether in corn raising or cattle rearing, the small farm system will probably continue to hold, if not to enlarge, its place in modern agriculture; and if it is able to do so, it will constitute one of the best buttresses against the social revolution. It remains to mark the spread of socialism in the various countries of Europe and America, and to describe its present position; but this I shall reserve for next chapter. CHAPTER II. THE PROGRESS AND PRESENT POSITION OF SOCIALISM. Socialism being now revolutionary social democracy, we should expect to find it most widely and most acutely developed in those countries where, 1st, the social condition of the lower classes is most precarious, or, in other words, where property and comfort are ill distributed; 2nd, where political democracy is already a matter of popular agitation; and, 3rd, where previous revolutions have left behind them an unquiet and revolutionary spirit--a "valetudinary habit," as Burke calls it, "of making the extreme medicine of the State its daily bread." That is very much what we do find. All these conditions are present in Germany--the country in which socialism has made the most remarkable and rapid advance. Dr. Engel, head of the Statistical Bureau of Prussia, states that in 1875 six million persons, representing, with their families, more than half the population of that State, had an income less than £21 a year each; and only 140,000 persons had incomes above £150. The number of landed proprietors is indeed comparatively large. In 1861 there were more than two millions of them out of a population of 23,000,000; and in a country where half the people are engaged in agriculture this would, at first sight, seem to offer some assurance of general comfort. But then the estates of most of them are much too small to keep them in regular employment or to furnish them with adequate maintenance. More than a million hold estates of less than three acres each, and averaging little over an acre, and the soil is poor. The consequence is that the small proprietor is almost always over head and ears in debt. His property can hardly be called his own, and he pays to the usurer a much larger sum annually as interest than he could rent the same land for in the open market. More than half of these small estates lie in the Rhine provinces alone, and the distressed condition of the peasantry there has been lately brought again before the attention of the legislature. But while thus in the west the agricultural population suffers seriously from the excessive subdivision of landed property, they are straitened in the eastern and northern provinces by their exclusion from it. Prince Bismarck, speaking of the spread of socialism in a purely agricultural district like Lauenburg, which had excited surprise, said that this would not seem remarkable to any one who reflected that, from the land legislation in that part of the country, the labourers could never hope to acquire the smallest spot of ground as their own possession, and were kept in a state of dependence on the gentry and the peasant proprietors. Half the land of Prussia is held by 31,000 persons; and emigration, which used to come chiefly from the eastern provinces, where subdivision had produced a large class of indigent proprietors, proceeds now predominantly from the quarters where large estates abound. The diminution of emigration from the Rhine provinces is indeed one cause of the increase of distress among the peasant proprietary; but why emigration has ceased, when there seems more motive for it, is not so clear. As yet, however, socialism has taken comparatively slight hold of the rural population of Germany, because they are too scattered in most parts to combine; but there exists in that country, as in others, a general conviction that the condition of the agricultural labourers is really a graver social question than the condition of the other industrial classes, and must be faced in most countries before long. Socialism has naturally made most way among the factory operatives of Germany, who enjoy greatest facilities for combination and mutual fermentation, and who besides, while better off in respect to wages than various other sections of workpeople, are yet the most improvident and discontented class in the community. Then, in considering the circumstances of the labouring classes in Germany, it must be remembered that, through customs and indirect taxation of different kinds, they pay a larger share of the public burdens than they do in some countries, and that the obligation of military service is felt to be so great a hardship that more than a third of the extensive emigration which now takes place every year from the German Empire is prompted by a desire to escape it. Before the establishment of the Empire, only about a tenth part of the emigrants left the country without an official permit; but the proportion has been rising every year since then, and sometimes comes to nearly a half. Under these circumstances neither the strength nor the progress of the Social Democratic party in that country affords occasion for surprise. At the last general election, in February, 1890, this party polled more votes than any other single party in the Empire, and returned to the Imperial Diet a body of representatives strong enough, by skilful alliances, to exercise an effective influence on the course of affairs. The advance of the party may be seen in the increase of the socialist vote at the successive elections since the creation of the Empire. In 1871 it was 101,927. " 1874 " 351,670. " 1877 " 493,447. " 1878 " 437,438. " 1881 " 311,961. " 1884 " 549,000. " 1887 " 774,128. " 1890 " 1,427,000. The effect of the coercive laws of 1878, as shown by these figures, is very noteworthy. In consequence of the successive attempts made in that year on the life of the Emperor William by two socialists, Hoedel and Nobiling, Prince Bismarck determined to stamp out the whole agitation with which the two criminals were connected by obtaining from the Diet exceptional and temporary powers of repression. The first effect of these measures was, as was natural, to disorganize the socialist party for the time. Hundreds of its leaders were expelled from the country; hundreds were thrown into prison or placed under police restriction; its clubs and newspapers were suppressed; it was not allowed to hold meetings, to make speeches, or to circulate literature of any kind. In the course of the twelve years during which this exceptional legislation has subsisted, it was stated at the recent Socialist Congress at Halle, that 155 socialist journals and 1200 books or pamphlets had been prohibited; 900 members of the party had been banished without trial; 1500 had been apprehended and 300 punished for contraventions of the Anti-Socialist Laws. These measures paralyzed the old organization sufficiently to reduce the Socialist vote at the next election in 1881 by thirty per cent.; but the party presently recovered its ground. It adapted itself to the new conditions, and established a secret propaganda which was manifestly quite as effective for its purposes as the old, and charged with more danger to the State. Its vote increased immensely at each successive election thereafter; and now, as Rodbertus prophesied, the social question has really proved "the Russian campaign of Bismarck's fame," for his policy of repression has ended in tripling the strength of the party it was designed to crush, and placing it in possession of one-fifth of the whole voting power of the nation. It was high time, therefore, to abandon so ineffectual a policy, and the socialist coercive laws expired on the 30th September, 1890, and the socialists inaugurated a new epoch of open and constitutional agitation by a general congress at Halle in the beginning of October. The strength of the party in Parliament has never corresponded with its strength at the polls. In 1871 it returned only 1 member to the Diet; in 1874, 9; in 1877, 12; in 1878, 9; in 1881, 12; in 1884, 24; in 1887, 11; and in 1890, with an electoral vote which, under a system of proportional representation, would have secured for it 80 members, it has carried only 37. The party has no leaders now, in Parliament or out of it, of the intellectual rank of Lassalle or Marx; but it is very efficiently led. Its two chiefs, Liebknecht and Bebel, are well skilled both in debate and in management, and have for many years maintained their authority in a party peculiarly subject to jealousy and intrigue, and have consolidated its organization under very adverse conditions. Liebknecht, who is a journalist of most respectable talents, character, and acquirements, is now the veteran of the movement, having been out in the '48 and passed twelve years of political exile in London in constant intercourse with Karl Marx. Bebel, a turner in Leipzig, is a much younger man, and, indeed, is one of Liebknecht's converts, for he opposed the movement when it was first started in Leipzig by Lassalle; but he has fought so long and so stout a battle for his cause that he too seems now one of its veterans. The other parliamentary leaders of the party are for the most part still under thirty. Von Volmar, a military officer who has left the service for agitation and journalism, seems to be the older leaders' chief lieutenant; and Frohme, a young _littérateur_ of repute, may be mentioned because he heads a tendency to more moderate policy. Owing to the paucity of its representatives, the party has hitherto made little attempt to initiate legislation. No bill can be introduced into the German Diet unless it is backed by fifteen members; and, except in the Parliament of 1884-7, the Socialist party never had fifteen members until last February. The work of its parliamentary representatives, therefore, has consisted mainly of criticism and opposition, and seizing every suitable occasion for the ventilation of their general ideas; but after the election of 1884, when they returned to the Diet twenty-four strong, they introduced first a bill for the prohibition of Sunday labour, which was stoutly opposed by Prince Bismarck, and defeated; and second, a Labourer's Protection Bill, proposing to create an elaborate organization for securing the general wellbeing of the working class. It was to create, first, a new Labour Department of State; second, a series of Workmen's Chambers, one for every district of 200,000 or 400,000 inhabitants, with the necessary number of local auxiliaries; third, Local Courts of Conciliation for the settlement of differences between labourers and employers, from whose decision there should be an appeal to the Workmen's Chamber of the District. Both the Court of Conciliation and the Workmen's Chamber were to be composed of an equal number of employers and employed. The connection between the Workmen's Chambers of the District and the Minister of Labour would be through District Councils of Labour, the members of which were to be chosen by the minister out of a list presented by the Workmen's Chamber of the District, and containing twice the number of names required to fill the places. It was to be the duty of these Councils of Labour to send a report every year to the Labour Department in Berlin on the condition of labour in their respective districts after an annual inspection of all the factories, workshops, and industrial establishments of any kind located there. The Workmen's Chambers were to have a wide _rôle_, and were the keystone of the system. Besides being the courts of final appeal in labour disputes, they were to bring to the knowledge of the competent authorities the existence of any disorders or grievances that occurred in industrial life; to give advice on the best laws and regulations for industry; to undertake inquiries into all matters affecting the conditions of labour, treaties of commerce, taxes, rates of wages, technical education, housing, prices of subsistence, etc. In introducing the bill, its promoters said a chief object of the whole organization was to obtain for working men higher wages for a shorter day's work, and they proposed the immediate reduction of the day of labour to eight hours for miners and ten hours for all other trades, together with some further limitations on the work of women and children, the abolition of prison work at ordinary trades, and of Sunday work, and the requirement of the payment of wages weekly, and their payment in money. The bill was referred to a committee of the House, and rejected, after that committee brought up an unfavourable report in February, 1886, and nothing further has been done in the matter since; but the Minister of the Interior was so much struck with the unexpectedly moderate and practical character of its proposals that he said if these proposals expressed the whole mind of the members who proposed them, then those members might as well sit on the right side of the House as on the left. The effect of the bill, as far as it was workable, would merely be to give the working class a real and systematic, but not unequal, voice in settling the conditions of their own labour; and its rejection is to some extent an example of the way the socialist agitation impedes the cause of labour by creating in the public mind an unnecessary distrust even of reasonable reforms. There are some questions of general policy on which the socialist deputies take up a position of their own. They always oppose the military budget, because, like socialists everywhere, they are opposed to all war and armaments. Wars are merely quarrels of rulers, for peoples would make for peace, and armaments only drain the people's pockets in order to perpetuate the people's oppression. Then they are opposed to national debts, because national debts enable rulers to carry on war. They are opposed to the new colonization policy of the Empire, because in their opinion it is a policy of aggrandisement and conquest undertaken under hypocritical pretences. They are opposed to protective duties, because they dislike indirect taxation, as bearing always unjustly on the labouring class. They are strong supporters of popular education, but they opposed the new insurance laws because they feared these laws would place people too much under the power of the Government, for their jealousy of the Government that exists corrects their general partiality for Government control, and tends to keep them back even from some of the minor excesses of State-socialism. The moderate and apparently temporizing policy of the deputies is a constant source of dissatisfaction to the wilder and more inexperienced members of the party, who complain, as they did at the recent Halle Congress, that trying to improve the present system of things is not the best way of subverting it, and who will either have socialism _cum_ revolution, or they will have nothing at all. But the older heads merely smile, and tell them the hour for socialism and revolution is not yet, that no man knows when it shall be, and that in the meantime it would be mere folly for socialists to refuse the real comforts they can get because they think they have ideally a right to a great deal more. "Why," said Bebel, when he was charged at Halle with countenancing armaments in violation of socialist principles by voting for a better uniform to the soldiers,--"why, there are numbers of Social Democrats in the Reserve, and was I to let them die through inadequate clothing merely because I object to armaments as a general principle?" They of course think of this policy of accommodation as only a temporary necessity, till they become strong enough to be thoroughgoing; but there is perhaps better reason to believe it to be an abiding and growing necessity of their position, for they are finding themselves more and more obliged, if they are to become stronger at all, or even to keep the strength they have, to bid for the support of aggrieved classes by working for the immediate removal of their grievances, and thus to keep on reducing day by day as it rises the volume of that social discontent which is to turn the wheel of revolution. It is not unlikely that the socialist party, now that it is sufficiently powerful to do something in the legislature, but not sufficiently powerful to think of final social transformation, will occupy themselves much more completely with those miscellaneous social reforms in the immediate future; that they will thereby become every day better acquainted with the real conditions on which social improvement depends; that they will find more and more satisfying employment in the exercise of their power of securing palpable, practical benefits, than in agitating uncertain theoretical schemes; and, in short, that they will settle permanently into what they are for the present to some extent temporarily, a moderate labour party, working for the real remedy of real grievances by the means best adapted, under real conditions, national or political, for effecting the purpose. The programme of the party, which was adopted at the Gotha Congress of 1875, after the union of the Marxist socialists and the Lassalleans, and has remained unaltered ever since, has always consisted of a deferred part and an actual. It contains, in fact, three programmes--the programme for to-day, the programme for to-morrow, and the programme for the day after to-morrow. The last is of course the socialist State of the future, at present beyond our horizon altogether. Before it appears there is to be a more or less prolonged period in which individual management of industry is to be gradually superseded by co-operative societies founded on State credit; but this intermediate state was only made an article of the programme to conciliate the Lassalleans, and one hears less of productive associations to-day from the German socialists than from the French. The Germans would apparently prefer to go from private property to public property direct rather than go _viâ_ corporate property; but in any case their programme leaves the creation of productive societies to a future period, and their task for the present is to secure for working men factory and sanitary legislation, constitutional liberties, and an easier and more equitable system of taxation. The programme is as follows:-- "I. Labour is the source of all wealth and civilization, and since productive labour as a whole is made possible only in and through society, the entire produce of labour belongs to society, that is, it belongs by an equal right to all its members, each according to his reasonable needs, upon condition of a universal obligation to labour. "In existing society the instruments of labour are the monopoly of the capitalist class; the dependence of the labouring class which results therefrom is the cause of misery and servitude in all forms. "The emancipation of labour requires the conversion of the instruments of labour into the common property of society, and the management of labour by association, and the application of the product with a view to the general good and an equitable distribution. "The emancipation of labour must be the work of the labouring class, in relation to which all other classes are only a reactionary mass. "II. Starting from these principles, the Socialistic Labour Party of Germany seeks by all lawful means to establish a free State and a socialistic society, to break asunder the iron law of wages by the abolition of the system of wage-labour, the suppression of every form of exploitation, and the correction of all political and social inequality. "The Socialistic Labour Party of Germany, although at first working within national limits, is sensible of the international character of the labour movement, and resolved to fulfil all the duties thereby laid on working men, in order to realize the brotherhood of all men. "The Socialistic Labour Party of Germany demands, in order to pave the way for the solution of the social question, the establishment by State help of socialistic productive associations under the democratic control of the workpeople. Productive associations for industry and agriculture should be created to such an extent that the socialistic organization of all labour may arise out of them. "The Socialistic Labour Party of Germany demands, as the basis of the State, (1) Universal, equal, and direct suffrage, together with secret and obligatory voting, for all citizens over twenty years of age, in all elections in State and commune. The election day must be a Sunday or holiday. (2) Direct legislation by the people. Decision on peace or war by the people. (3) Universal liability to military service. Militia instead of standing army. (4) Abolition of all exceptional laws, especially laws interfering with liberty of the press, of association, and of meeting; in general, all laws restricting free expression of opinion, free thought, and free inquiry. (5) Administration of justice by the people. Gratuitous justice. (6) Universal, compulsory, gratuitous, and equal education of the people by the State. Religion to be declared a private affair. "The Socialistic Labour Party of Germany demands within the conditions of existing society (1) The utmost possible extension of political rights and liberties in the sense of the above demands. (2) The replacement of all existing taxes, and especially of indirect taxes, which peculiarly burden the people, by a single progressive income tax for State and commune. (3) Unrestricted right of combination. (4) A normal working day corresponding to the needs of society. Prohibition of Sunday labour. (5) Prohibition of the labour of children, and of all labour for women that is injurious to health and morality. (6) Laws for protection of the life and health of workmen. Sanitary control of workmen's dwellings. Inspection of mines, factories, workshops, and home industry by officers chosen by working men. An effective employers' liability act. (7) Regulation of prison labour. (8) Entire freedom of management for all funds for the assistance and support of working men." A committee was appointed at the recent Halle Congress to revise this programme and report to the Congress of 1891; but as the revision is merely intended to place the programme in greater conformity with the needs of the time, and keep it as it were up to date, only minor modifications may be expected, and those probably in the direction of a more practical and effectual dealing with existing grievances. Five years ago the party thought a ten hours' day corresponded with the needs of the time; they now ask for an eight hours' one. Instead of the prohibition of Sunday labour, they now prefer to demand, as a more workable equivalent, a period of thirty-six hours' continuous and uninterrupted rest every week, irrespective of any particular day; and they have sometimes taken up new working-class questions not especially mentioned in their programme, or included directly under any of its heads, like the abolition of payment of wages in kind. The whole spirit of the late Congress leads us to look for the contemplated modifications in this direction of meeting more effectually immediate working-class wants. Many eyes were upon that Congress; for it was the first the German socialists had held since they had recovered their freedom and proved their strength. They were now clearly stronger than any socialist party the world had yet seen, and much stronger than most revolutionary parties who have made successful revolution. Would then the word now be revolution? people asked. It was not: the word was caution. The first effect of the victory in February had been otherwise, and in June, Herr Bebel was still calling, Steady. "The majority of his party colleagues," he said at a public meeting in Berlin on the 20th of that month, "had been intoxicated by the result of the elections of February 20th, and believed they could do what they liked with the middle class, as it was already on the point of going under." But before October steadier counsels prevailed, and the spirit of the Congress was moderation itself. Although the Congress did not agree to the motion to restore to the party programme the phrase "by lawful means," which had been deleted from the opening paragraph of the second part of it by the Wyden Congress of 1880, in consequence of the Anti-Socialist Laws no longer giving them any choice except recourse to unlawful means, the general and decided feeling of the Congress certainly was that only lawful means could now answer their purposes. The controversy was repeatedly raised by an extreme section of the party from Berlin, who complained that the work of their parliamentary representatives had hitherto entirely ignored the real aims of social democracy, and that a return should now be made to its socialism and its revolution. But the voice of the meeting was invariably against this Berlin movement. There was a time, said M. Fleischman--and his speech was applauded--when it was counted the right thing in the party to make revolutionary speeches, and point to the coming day of account when mankind were to be emancipated at one blow; but that was not a road they could make any progress by. And as for boycotting, which had been spoken of, he declared he was all for boycotting; but it was the boycotting of the military in such a way as to give them no occasion for the use of their weapons. Liebknecht, the chief leader of the party, followed, and was quite as emphatic in the same line. People spoke of revolution, he said; but they should remember that roast pigeons don't fly into one's mouth by themselves. It was easy enough to make bitter speeches, and any fool and donkey could throw bombs; but the misadventures of the anarchists showed plainly enough that nothing could be done in that way. The socialists had now 20 per cent. of the population; but what could 20 per cent. do against 80 per cent. by the use of force? No, it was not force; it was reason they must use if they would succeed. What, then, he asked, was the Social Democracy to do? They must avoid divisions among themselves, and go out and convert the still indifferent masses. The electoral suffrage was their best weapon of agitation, and their surest means of increasing the party. Prince Bismarck had been represented in a popular book as practising peasant-fishery and elector-fishery. "Peasant-fishery and elector-fishery--" said Liebknecht, amid much applause, "that is the word for the Social Democrats to-day." Another suggestion of the extreme section was that the party should now assail the Church and religion, as socialist and revolutionary parties have so generally done; but this bit of their old traditional policy received scant regard from the Halle Congress. A strong feeling was expressed that the party had damaged itself in the past by its assaults on the Church, and that its present policy ought, in self-preservation, to be one of religious neutrality and toleration. "Instead," said Liebknecht, "of squandering our strength in a struggle with the Church and sacerdotalism, let us go to the root of the matter. We desire to overthrow the State of the classes. When we have done that, the Church and sacerdotalism will fall with it, and in this respect we are much more radical and much more definite in purpose than our opponents, for we like neither the priests nor the anti-priests." The old revolutionary policy of stirring up hatred against all existing institutions is thus relegated from the present to the distant future, after the present class-State is overthrown and the working-class or socialist State established in its place. "Well, then," suggested another old-world socialist, "let us, at any rate, issue a pamphlet describing the glories of this socialist State, and get the people prepared to flock into it"; but this suggestion was also frowned down. "For," said Liebknecht, "who could say what the _Zukunft Staat_--the socialist State of the future--is to be? Who could foresee so much as the development of the existing German State for a single year?" In other words--I think I am not misinterpreting their meaning--the State of the future is the concern of the future; the business of a living party is within the needs and within the lines of the living present. What, then, is to be the business of this formidable Social Democratic party? Peasant-catching is the word. The elections showed that while the party was very strong in the large towns, it was very weak in the rural districts, and among special populations like the Poles and Alsatians; and although previous revolutionists thought everything was gained if the large towns were gained, the Social Democrats generally admit that the social revolution is impossible without the adherence of the peasantry. The peasants, therefore, must be won over to the party. Once in the party, they may learn socialism and revolution, but they must first be brought in, and for that purpose there must be started a special peasants' cry--a cry, that is, for the redress of some immediate grievance of that class; and one suggestion made at the Congress was, that the cry for the peasantry should be the abolition of the German _Gesinde_ (farm-servant) system. In the same spirit the Congress recommended the parliamentary party to take up the question of seamen's rights, and agitate for better regulations for securing the wellbeing of that class. The advance towards practicality is even more evident in their determination upon strikes. Hitherto, for the most part, socialists have either looked on strikes with lofty disdain as poor attempts to get a petty rise in wages instead of abolishing the present wages system altogether, or they have thrown themselves into strikes for the mere purpose of fomenting labour troubles, and breaking perchance the power of the large capitalist class; and this latter view was not unrepresented at the Halle Congress. The resolution of the Congress, however, declared (1st) that strikes and boycotting were often useful means of improving the social position of the labouring class; but (2nd) that they were to be resorted to even for that purpose with great circumspection. "Whereas, however, strikes and boycotting are double-edged weapons which, when used in unsuitable places and at an inopportune moment, are calculated to do more harm than good to the interests of the working class, this Congress recommends German working men carefully to weigh the circumstances under which they purpose to make use of those weapons." The revolutionary ideal seems thus to be retreating--perhaps insensibly--in the socialistic mind into an eschatological decoration, into a kind of future Advent which is to come and to be believed in; but the practical concerns of the present must be more and more treated in their own practical way. Since the Congress, the party has issued a manifesto to the peasantry, in which, after promising a new and happy day that is coming for them, which is to restore to them the beautiful earth and the poetry of life, they declare against the patriarchal system, and the increase of brandy distilling; and then, confessing that few socialists know anything about agricultural questions, invite information and discussion for the enlightenment of the party. Here again they forget that they have a theory which is as applicable to agriculture as to manufactures, and they want to make practical investigations with a view to practical solutions. Of course the movement will always generate revolutionary elements as occasions arise, and these sometimes of the wildest character. Most and Hasselman, and their following, who were expelled at the Congress of Wyden in 1880, were anarchists of a violent type, and Mosts and Hasselmans may arise again. But at present anarchism hardly exists in Germany, and the Social Democratic party is peacefully trying to make people as comfortable as possible till the fulness of time arrives. It may be added that the present income of the party, as stated at the last Congress, is £19,525, and that since February, 1890, they have established nineteen daily newspapers and forty weekly, with a total circulation of 254,000. The socialist movement in other countries may be disposed of much more briefly, for in no other country has it worn anything like the same importance, except in Russia, and of the Russian agitation I shall treat more fully in a subsequent chapter on "Russian Nihilism." I may observe here, however, that the Russian agitation has not been without its influence on the nations of Western Europe. It was Bakunin who first kindled the socialist movements of Spain, Italy, Belgium, and Holland, and the anarchist fermentations of the last six years have been due in no inconsiderable measure to the new leaven of Russian ideas introduced by men like Prince Krapotkin and the two hundred other Russian refugees that are scattered abroad in the free countries of Europe. In France there is much animated socialist agitation, but no solid and coherent socialist party such as exists in Germany. The movement is disunited and fragmentary, and confined almost entirely to the large towns, where many circumstances conspire to favour its growth. The French working class are born to revolutionary traditions. The better portion of them, moreover, though they long since gave up all belief in the old native forms of socialism, never ceased to be imbued with socialist ideas and aspirations; and M. de Molinari said in 1869, from his experience of French working men's clubs, that out of every ten French working men who had any interest beyond eating and drinking, nine were Socialists. Then there is in France a larger proportion of the working class than in most countries, who are kept in constant poverty and discontent and commotion by their own improvident habits. A pamphlet called "Le Sublime," which attracted considerable attention some years ago, stated that only forty per cent. of the working men of Paris were out of debt; and Mr. Malet reported to the English Foreign Office that they were, as a body, so dissipated that none of them had grandchildren or grandfathers. But, on the other hand, France enjoys a solid security against the successful advance of socialism in her peasant proprietors. Half the French population belong to that class, and their industry, thrift, and comfort have long been held up to our admiration by economists. According to M. de Lavergne, they are not so well fed, so well clad, or so well lodged as the farm labourers of England; but, living in a different climate, they have fewer wants, and are undoubtedly more contented. Among people like these, passing their days in frugal comfort and fruitful industry, and looking with quiet hope and confidence to the future, socialism finds, of course, no open door. On the contrary, every man of them feels he has something to lose and nothing to gain by social revolution; the fear of socialism is, indeed, one of the chief influences guiding their political action; and as they are as numerous as all the other classes in the community put together, their worldly contentment is a bulwark of enormous value to the existing order of things. The impression of their substantial independence is so marked that even the Frenchmen who were members of the International Working Men's Association would not assent to the abolition of a peasant proprietary, but always insisted, contrary to the principles of the Association, on the continued maintenance of that system as a necessary counterpoise to the power of the Government. The present socialist groups and sects of France are all believers in the so-called scientific socialism of Marx and Lassalle, and the most important of them work for a programme substantially identical with that of Gotha. Marx's ideas were introduced among the French by the International, and they were adopted by a section of the Revolutionary Committee of the Paris Commune, 1871; but after the suppression of the Commune, they made so little stir for some years that Thiers declared, in his last manifesto as President of the Republic, that socialism, which was then busy in Germany, was absolutely dead in France. Its recrudescence was chiefly due to the activity of the Communards. Some of them had escaped to London, where they got into closer communion with Marx and his friends; and in 1874, thirty-four of these refugees, all military or administrative officers of the Commune, and most of them not professed socialists before, issued a manifesto pronouncing entirely for socialism, and describing the Commune as "the militant form of the social revolution"; but it was not till after the amnesty of the Communards, and their return from New Caledonia and elsewhere in 1880, that the first sensible ripple of socialist agitation was felt in France since the downfall of the second Republic. Numbers of socialist journals began to appear, and a general congress of working men, held at Havre in 1880, adopted a programme modelled on the lines of that of the German Social Democrats, and made preparations for an active propaganda and organization. The adoption of the socialistic programme, however, rent the Congress in three, and the two opposite wings, the Co-operationists and the Anarchists, withdrew and established separate organizations of their own. The co-operationists, believing that the amelioration of the working class would only come by the gradual execution of practicable and suitable measures, and that these could only be successfully carried by means of skilful alliances with existing political parties, declared the Havre programme to be a programme for the year 2000, and that the true policy of the working-class now was a policy of possibilities. This last word is said to supply the origin of the term Possibilist, which has now come to be applied not to this co-operationist party, but to one of the two divisions into which the third or centre party of the Havre Congress--the socialists--shortly afterwards split up. The co-operationists formed themselves into a body known as the Republican Socialist Alliance, which, as the name indicates, aims at social reforms under the existing republican form of State. They have held several congresses, their membership includes many well-known and even eminent Radical politicians--M. Clemenceau, for example--and they were supported by leading Radical journals, like _Le Justice_ and _L'Intransigeant_; but their activity and their numbers have both dwindled away, probably because their work was done sufficiently well already by other political or working-class organizations. The anarchists set up not a single organization, but a number of little independent clubs, which agree with one another mainly in their dislike of all constituted authority. They want to have all things in common, somehow or other; but for master or superior of any sort they will have none, be it king or committee. Their ideas find ready favour in France, because they are near allied with the theory of the Revolutionary Commune cherished among the Communards; and although there is no means of calculating their numbers exactly, they are believed to be pretty strong--at least, in the South of France. At the time of the Lyons Anarchist trial, at which Prince Krapotkin was convicted, they claimed themselves to have 8,000 adherents in Lyons alone. In 1886 the authorities knew of twenty little anarchist clubs in Paris, which had between them, however, only a membership of 1,500; and of these a considerable proportion were foreign immigrants, especially Austrians and Russians, with a few Spaniards. Some of these clubs are mainly convivial, with a dash of treason for pungency; but others have an almost devouring passion for "deeds," and are ever concerting some new method of waging their strange guerilla against "princes, proprietors, and parsons." When a new method is discovered, a new club is sometimes formed to carry it out. For instance, the _Anti-propriétaires_, which is said to be one of the best organized of the anarchist clubs, bind their members (1) to pay no house-rent,--rent, of course, being theft, and theft being really restitution; and (2) if the landlord at length resorts to law against any of them for this default, to come to their brother's help and remove his furniture to safer quarters before the moment of execution. The group _La Panthère_, to which Louise Michel belongs, and which has 500 members, and the group _Experimental Chemie_, as their names indicate, prefer less jocular methods. The best known of the anarchists are old Communards like Louise Michel herself and Élisée Reclus, the geographer. The third section of the Havre Congress contained the majority of the 119 delegates, and they formed themselves into the Socialist Revolutionary Party of France, with the programme already mentioned, which was carried on the motion of M. Jules Guesde. This programme sets out with the declaration that all instruments of production must be transferred to the possession of the community, and that this can only result from an act of revolution on the part of the working class organized as an independent political party, and then it goes on to say that one of the best means of promoting this end at present was to take part in the elections with the following platform:-- A. _Political._ 1. Abolition of all laws restricting freedom of the press, of association, or of meeting, and particularly the law against the International Working Men's Association. Abolition of "work-books." 2. Abolition of the budget of public worship, and secularization of ecclesiastical property. 3. Abolition of national debt. 4. Universal military service on the part of the people. 5. Communal independence in police and local affairs. B. _Economic._ 1. One day of rest in the week under legal regulation. Limitation of working day to eight hours for adults. Prohibition of the labour of children under fourteen, and limitation of work hours to six for young persons between fourteen and sixteen. 2. Legal fixing of minimum wages every year in accordance with the price of provisions. 3. Equality of wages of male and female labour. 4. Scientific and technical training for all children, as well as their support at the expense of society as represented by the State and the Communes. 5. Support of the aged and infirm by society. 6. Prohibition of all interference on the part of employers with the management of the relief and sustentation funds of the working classes, to whom the sole control of these funds should be left. 7. Employers' liability guaranteed by deposit by employers proportioned to number of workmen. 8. Participation of the workmen in drawing up factory regulations. Abolition of employer's claim to punish the labourer by fines and stoppages (according to resolution of the Commune of 27th April, 1871). 9. Revision of all agreements by which public property has been alienated (banks, railways, mines, etc.). The management of all State factories to be committed to the workmen employed in them. 10. Abolition of all indirect taxes, and change of all direct ones into a progressive income tax on all incomes above 3,000 francs. 11. Abolition of the right of inheritance, except in the line of direct descent, and of the latter in the case of fortunes above 20,000 francs. At the congress of the party held at St. Etienne two years after this programme was adopted, M. Brousse, a medical practitioner in Paris, and a member of the Town Council, who had already shown signs of disputing the leadership of M. Guesde, carried by a vote of thirty-six to twenty-seven a motion for introducing some modifications, and the minority seceded and set up a separate organization. In spite of repeated efforts at reconciliation, the two sections of the French socialists have never united again or been able even to work together temporarily at an election. Besides personal jealousies, there are most important differences of tendency keeping them apart. The Guesdists accept the policy of Karl Marx as well as his economic doctrine: the universal revolution, and the centralized socialist State, as well as the theory of surplus value and the right to the full product of labour. The Broussists, on the other hand, believe in decentralization, and would prefer municipalizing industries to nationalizing them. They are for giving the commune control of its own police, its own soldiers, its own civil administration, its own judiciary; and they think the _régime_ of collective property can be best brought in and best carried on by local bodies. They would have the towns take over their own gas, light, and water supply, their omnibus and tramway traffic; but they would have them take over also many of the common industries which never tend towards monopoly or even call for any special control. They would municipalize, for example, the bakehouses and the mealshops and the granaries, apparently as supplying the necessaries of life, and they would have various other branches of industry undertaken by the towns to a certain limited extent, in order to provide suitable work for the unemployed. Then in 1887 they added a fresh plank to their platform, and asked for the establishment by municipalities, on public money or credit, of productive associations to be owned--not, like the other undertakings, by the municipality, but--by the working men employed in them. This is a reappearance of the old policy of Lassalle, with the difference that the productive associations are to be founded on municipal and not on State credit; and the reappearance is not surprising in France, because co-operative production has, on the whole, been more successful in that country than in any other. Then another of their demands is, that all public contracts should be subjected to such conditions as to wages and hours of labour as the workmen's syndicates approve; and in Paris they have already succeeded in obtaining this concession from the Town Council so far as municipal contracts are concerned. These workmen's syndicates are trade unions, which aim only at bettering the position of their members without theoretical prepossessions, but are quite as bold in their demands on the public powers as the socialists, and apparently more successful. In 1885 their claims included, not only an eight hours' day and a normal rate of fair wages, but the fixing of all salaries under 500 francs, a credit to themselves of 500,000,000 francs, and the gratuitous use of empty houses by their members; and in 1886 they obtained from the Town Council of Paris a furnished room, with free lighting and firing, and a subvention of 20,000 francs, for the establishment of a Labour Bureau, to be a centre for all working-class deliberations and intelligence, and a registry for the unemployed. The socialism of the Broussists is thus practically a municipal socialism: municipal industries, municipal credit for working men's productive associations, municipal concessions to trade unions; but all this seems to the Guesdists to be mere tinkering, to be no better than the possibilities of the Republican Socialist Alliance, and they have for that reason given their rivals the name of Possibilists, which for distinction's sake they still commonly bear. Neither section had any representative in the Chamber of Deputies till 1889, when the Broussists succeeded in returning M. Joffrin; but the Broussists have nine in the Town Council of Paris. The Guesdists have more men of culture among them; Guesde himself and Lafargue, Karl Marx's son-in-law, are both men of ability and public position; but they have a smaller following, and what they have is on the decline. Their sympathy with the principles of German Socialism, their alliance with the German Socialist party is against them, for the French working men have a very honest hatred of the Germans, both from recollections of the war and from the pressure of German industrial competition; and the feeling seems to be returned by the Germans, for it appeared even among the socialists at the recent congress at Halle, international and non-patriotic as socialists often claim to be. One of the personal accusations that disturbed the sittings of that congress was, that the leaders of the party had been discovered in secret conference with the delegates of the French socialists, MM. Guesde and Ferroul, who had been sent to greet their German comrades. The Possibilists have no very eminent members, the most leading persons among them being Brousse himself and MM. Allemane and Joffrin. But they are not inconsiderable in number, and they are growing. They have 400 Circles of Social Studies all over the country, organized into six regions, each with its regular regional congress, and all working under a national executive committee and a general national congress, meeting once a year. The future of French socialism seems to be with the Possibilists rather than the Guesdists; and the future of the Possibilists, like the future of the German socialists, seems to lie in the direction of releasing their limbs from the dead clothes of socialist theory, in order to take freer and more practical action for the positive wellbeing of the working class. At the recent congress of the Possibilists at Châtellèrault in October, 1890, the chief questions discussed were the reform the system of poor relief and the eight hours' day. They want an international eight hours' day, but they would be willing to allow other four hours' overtime, to be paid for by double wages. In 1885 the two divisions of socialists combined for electioneering purposes with one another and with a third revolutionary body called the Blanquists, and they actually formed together an organization known as the Revolutionary Union; but the three parties quarrelled again before the election, and the union was dissolved. The Blanquists are disciples of the veteran conspirator Blanqui, and include some well-known men, such as General Eudes, and MM. Vaillant and Roche. They are revolutionists pure and simple, and in some respects stand near the anarchists; only, being old birds, they move about more cautiously, and indeed are sometimes for that reason--and because they act as intermediaries between other revolutionaries--called the "diplomatists of lawlessness." With all their love for revolution, however, they have more than the usual democratic aversion to war, and their chief work at present is in connection with the league they have founded against permanent armies. Although revolutionary socialism is so ill represented in the French Legislature, there is a special parliamentary party, known as the Socialist Group, which was founded by nineteen deputies in 1887, and returned thirty candidates to the Chamber at the election of 1889. They are for communal autonomy; for the transformation of industrial monopolies into public services, to be directed by the respective companies under the control of the public administration; and for the progressive nationalization of property, so as to make the individual employment of it accessible to free labourers; and they have no lack of other planks in their platform: international federation and arbitration; abolition of standing armies; abolition of capital punishment; universal suffrage; minority representation; sexual equality; free education, primary, secondary, and technical; suppression of the budget of public worship; separation of Church and State; absolute liberty to think, speak, write, meet, associate, and contract; abolition of indirect taxes and customs, and introduction of a progressive income tax, and a progressive succession duty; public _crêches_; establishment of superannuation, sick and accident insurance at public expense. Among the deputies who signed the programme in 1887 were the two Boulangists, MM. Laisant and Laur, and MM. Clovis Hughes, Basley, Bower, etc. The idea of the party seems to be what M. Laisant recommends in his "L'Anarchie Bourgeoise," published in the same year 1887, a Republican Socialist party, which, accepting the good works of socialism, without caring for its political or economic theory, shall do its best to abolish misery by any means open to it under the existing republican form of government. Republican socialism corresponds therefore to what is called State socialism in Germany--the abolition of poverty by means of the power of the present State; and the question between socialists and other reformers is narrowing in France, as elsewhere, into a question of the justice and the suitability of the individual measures proposed. There is also a body of Christian Socialists in France, of whom, however, I shall have more to say in a subsequent chapter on the Christian Socialists. Socialism crossed very early from Prussia into Austria and took quick root among the German-speaking population, but has never to this day made much way among any of the other nationalities in the Empire. The Magyars are, on the whole, fairly comfortable and contented in their worldly circumstances, and they have a strong national aversion to anything German, even a German utopia; so that they lent no ear to the socialist agitation till 1880, when a socialist congress of 119 delegates was held at Buda Pest and founded the Hungarian Labour Party. The agitation, however, has not assumed any important dimensions. The Poles of Austria, like the Poles of Russia and the Poles of Prussia, have all along been a source of much disappointment to socialist leaders, who expected they would leap into the arms of any revolutionary scheme, but find them too pre-occupied with their own nationalist cause to care for any other. The same observation applies to the Czechs. They are Czechs and Federalists first, and a social system under which they would cease to be Czechs and Federalists, and become mere atoms under a powerful centralized government, led possibly by Germans, is naturally not much to their fancy. But in the German-speaking part of the monarchy socialism has found a ready and general welcome, and has latterly grown most popular in the anarchist form. This development is due to various causes. The federalist ideas prevalent in the country would be a bridge to the general principles of anarchism, while the coercive laws in force since 1870 would naturally provoke a recourse to revolutionary methods and an impatience with the sober and Fabian policy of the Austrian Social Democrats. The Social Democrats of Austria were advised from the first by Von Schweitzer and Liebknecht, the leaders of German socialism at the time, to adopt this temporizing policy, as being on the whole the best for the party in the circumstances existing in their country. They were advised to give a general support at the elections to the Liberal party, because nothing could be done for socialism in Austria till the priestly and feudal ascendancy was abolished, and that could only be done by strengthening the hands of the Liberals. They have continued to observe this moderate course. Unlike their German comrades, they looked with favourable eyes on the labour legislation introduced by Government for improving the condition of the working classes; and though they have suffered from coercive legislation much longer and sometimes quite as severely, they have never struck the qualification "by legal means" out of their principles, but, on the contrary, have declared, when they were permitted to hold a meeting--as for example at Brünn in 1884--that they adhered entirely and exclusively to peaceful methods, and repudiated the deeds of the anarchists. But then they are apparently not prospering in number, while the anarchists are. For one thing they have never had good leaders, and though they sometimes invite Liebknecht or one of the German socialist leaders to come and rouse them, Government has always refused liberty for such addresses to be delivered in Austria. The anarchists, on the other hand, had an energetic and eloquent leader in Peukert, a house-painter, who is now a chief personage in anarchist circles in London, and from here no doubt still carries on relations with his old friends; and their propaganda seems to be spreading, if we judge from the political trials, and from the fresh measures of repression directed against it in 1884, when Vienna was put under siege, and again in the latter part of 1888. They have nine or ten newspapers, and the socialists six or seven. Neither faction has any representative in Parliament. Both parties direct their chief attention to the peasantry, especially where any germ of an agrarian movement happens already to prevail. The Galician agitation against great landlords in 1886 was fomented by anarchist emissaries, and we occasionally hear of anarchist operations among the people of Northern Bohemia or Styria as well as in Upper Austria, where rural discontent has long been more or less acute. Austria is mainly an agricultural country; but greater part of the land is held in very large estates by the clergy and nobility, and the evils of the old feudal _régime_ are only now being gradually removed. There are, it is true, as many as 1,700,000 peasant proprietors in the Cisleithanian half of the Empire alone; but then their properties are seriously encumbered by the debt of their redemption from feudal servitudes and by the severity of the public taxation. The land tax amounts to 26 per cent. of the proprietor's income, and the indirect taxes on articles of consumption are numerous and burdensome. But three-fourths of the rural population are merely farm servants or day labourers, and are worse off even than the same class elsewhere. The social question in Austria is largely agrarian, but the spontaneous movements of the Austrian peasantry seem rather unlikely to run in harness with social democracy. Unions of free peasants for example have sprung up of recent years in various provinces. Their great aim is to procure a reduction in the taxes paid by the peasantry; but then they add to their programme the principle of State-help to labour, the abolition of all feudal privileges and all rights of birth, gratuitous education, and cessation of the policy of contracting national debt, and they speak vaguely about instituting a peasant State, and requiring every minister and responsible official to serve an apprenticeship to peasant labour as a qualification for office, in order that he may understand the necessities and capacities of the peasantry. This idea of the peasant State is analogous to the idea of the labour State of the Social Democrats; but of course this is agreement which is really conflict. It is like the harmony between Sforza and Charles VIII.: "I and my cousin Charles are wonderfully at one; we both seek the same thing--Milan." The class interest of the landed peasant is contrary to the class interest of the working man, and would be invaded by social democracy. The peasantry are simply fighting for their own land, and as their votes are courted by both political parties they will probably be able to secure some mitigation of their grievances. Distress is certainly serious among them when, as happened a few years ago, in a parish of 135 houses as many as 35 executions were made in one day for failure to pay taxes, and in another of 250 houses as many as 72; but on the whole there seems to be little of that hopeless indigence which appears among the peasant proprietary in countries where the practice of unrestricted or compulsory subdivision of holdings exists, or has recently existed, to any considerable extent. There is an influential Catholic Socialist movement in Austria, led by the clergy and nobility, and dealing in an earnest spirit with the social question as it appears in that country. Socialism was introduced into Italy in 1868 by Bakunin, who, in spite of the opposition of Mazzini, gained wide acceptance for his ideas wherever he went, and founded many branches of the International in the country, which survived the extinction of the parent society, and continued to bear its name. They were, like Bakunin himself, anarchist in their social and political views, and were marked by an especial violence in their attacks on Church and State and family. They published a great number of journals of various sorts, and kept up an incessant and very successful propaganda; but no heed was paid them by the authorities till 1878, when an attempt on the life of the king led to a thorough examination being instituted into the whole agitation. The dimensions and ramifications of the movement were found to be so much more extensive than any one in power had anticipated, that it was determined to set a close watch thereafter on all its operations, and its meetings and congresses were then from time to time proclaimed. But after the passing of the Franchise Act of 1882, a new socialist movement came into being which looked to constitutional methods alone. The franchise was not reduced very low: it only gave a vote to one person in every fourteen, while in England one in six has a vote; but the reduction was accompanied with _scrutin de liste_ and the ballot, and it was felt that something could now be done. Accordingly a new Socialist Labour Party was formed on the usual Marxist lines, under the leadership of a very capable man, an orator and a good organizer, Andrea Costa, who was formerly an anarchist. This party obtained 50,000 votes at the first subsequent election, and returned two candidates to the Legislature, one of them being Costa. In 1883 it formed a working alliance with the Italian Democratic Society--an active working-class body of which Costa was a leading member; and in 1884 it entered into an incorporating union with another working-class body, the Lombardy Labour Federation, which had a large number of local branches. With their help it had become, in 1886, an organization of 133 branches, and Government resolved to suppress it. Most of the branches in the north of Italy were dissolved, and their funds, flags, and libraries confiscated. But the party is still active over the country. They returned three members at the late election in November, 1890. The growth of this party was even more displeasing to the anarchists than to the Government, and in 1882 they called back Maletesta, one of their old leaders, from abroad, to conduct a regular campaign over the whole kingdom against Costa, and to denounce every man for a traitor to the socialist cause who should take any manner of part in parliamentary elections, or show the smallest sign of reconciliation to the existing order of things. His campaign ended in his arrest in May, 1883, and the condemnation of himself and 53 comrades to several years' imprisonment for inciting to disturbance of the public peace. Besides their contentions with the Socialist Labour Party, the Italian anarchists are much given to contending among themselves, and split up, even beyond other parties of the kind, upon trifles of doctrine or procedure. But however divided they may be, socialists and anarchists in Italy are all united in opposing the new social legislation of the Government. When the Employers' Liability Bill was introduced, Costa declared that legislation of that kind was utterly useless so long as the people were denied electoral rights, because till the franchise was reduced far enough to give the people a real voice in public affairs, there could be no security for the loyal and faithful execution of the provisions of such an act. The Italian socialists and anarchists have always had a lively brood of journals, which, however, are generally shorter lived than even socialist organs elsewhere; but when one dies for want of funds to-day, another comes out in its place to-morrow. This remarkable fertility in journals seems to be due to the large literary proletariat that exists in Italy--the unemployed educated class who could live by their pen if they only had a paper to use it in. Through their presence among the socialists new journals are pushed forward without sufficient funds to carry them on, and as the people are too poor to subscribe to them, and the party too poor to subsidize them, they soon come to a natural termination. The development of socialism in Italy is no matter of surprise. Though there is no great industry in the country, the whole population seems a proletariat. There is a distressed nobility, a distressed peasantry, a distressed working class, a distressed body of university men. Mr. Gallenga says that for six months of the year Italy is a national workshop; everybody is out of employment, and has to get work from the State; and he states as the reason for this, that the employing class wants enterprise and ability, and are apt to look to the Government for any profitable undertakings. The Government, however, are no better financiers than the rest, and the state of the public finances is one of the chief evils of the country. Taxation is very heavy, and yet property and life are not secure. "The peasants," says M. de Laveleye, "are reduced to extreme misery by rent and taxation, both alike excessive. Wages are completely inadequate. Agricultural labourers live huddled in bourgades, and obtain only intermittent employment. There is thus a rural proletariat more wretched than the industrial. Excluded from property by _latifundia_, it becomes the enemy of a social order that crushes it." The situation is scarcely better in parts of the country which are free from _latifundia_. In Sicily most of the agricultural population live on farms owned by themselves; but then these farms are too small to support them adequately, and their occupiers scorn the idea of working for hire. There are as many nobles in Sicily as in England, and Mr. Dawes (from whose report on Sicily to the Foreign Office in 1872 I draw these particulars states) that 25 per cent. of the lower orders are what he terms drones--idlers who are maintained by their wives and children. In Italy there is little working-class opinion distinct from the agricultural. There are few factories, and the artisans who work in towns have the habit of living in their native villages near by, and going and coming every day to their work. Two-thirds of the persons engaged in manufactures do so, or at least go to their rural homes from Saturday till Monday. Their habits and ways of thinking are those of agriculturists, and the social question of Italy is substantially the agricultural labourers' question. The students at the universities, too, are everywhere leavened with socialism. The advanced men among them seem to have ceased to cry for a republic, and to place their hope now in socialism. They have no desire to overturn a king who is as patriotic as the best president, and they count the form of government of minor importance as compared with the reconstitution of property. Bakunin thought Italy the most revolutionary country of Europe except Spain, because of its exceptionally numerous body of enthusiastic young men without career or prospects; and certainly revolutionary elements abound in the peninsula, but, as M. de Laveleye shrewdly remarks, a revolution is perhaps next to impossible for want of a revolutionary metropolis. "The malaria," he says, "which makes Rome uninhabitable for part of the year will long preserve her from the danger of becoming the seat of a new commune." In Spain, as in Italy, socialism made its first appearance in 1868 through the agency of the International, and found an immediate and warm response among the people. In 1873 the International had an extensive Spanish organization with 300,000 members and 674 branches planted over the whole length and breadth of the country, from industrial centres like Barcelona to remote rural districts like the island of Majorca. M. de Laveleye was present at several sittings of these socialist clubs when he visited Spain in 1869, and he says: "They were usually held in churches erected for worship. From the pulpit the orators attacked all that had previously been exalted there--God, religion, the priests, the rich. The speeches were white hot, but the audience remained calm. Many women were seated on the ground, working, nursing their babes, and listening attentively as to a sermon. It was the very image of '93." He adds that their journals wrote with unparalleled violence, especially against religion and the Church. On the division of the International in 1872 the Spanish members sided with Bakunin, supporting the anarchist view of the government of the future. This was natural for Spaniards, among whom their own central government had been long thoroughly detested, and their own communal organization regarded with general satisfaction. The Spanish people, even the humblest of them, are imbued beyond others with those sentiments of personal dignity and mutual equality which are at the bottom of democratic aspirations; and in their local communes, where every inhabitant who can read and write has a voice in public council, they have for ages been accustomed to manage their own affairs with harmony and advantage. The revolutionary tradition of Spain has accordingly always favoured communal autonomy, and the Federal rather than the Central Republic. Castelar declares the Federal Republic to be the most perfect form of State, though he thinks it for the present impracticable; and the revolution of 1873, in which the International played an active part, was excited for the purpose of establishing it. The Federal Republicans are not all socialists. Many of them are for making the agricultural labourers peasant proprietors, and even for dividing the communal property among them; but in a country like Spain, where communal property exists already to a large extent, the idea of making all other property communal property lies ever at hand as a ready resource of reformers. Nor, again, are all Spanish socialists federalists. There is a Social Democratic Labour party in Spain which broke off from the anarchists in 1882, and published a programme more on Marxist lines, demanding (1) the acquisition of political power; (2) the transformation of all private and corporate into the common property of the nation; and (3) the reorganization of society on the basis of industrial associations. This body is not very numerous, but at one of its recent congresses it had delegates from 152 different branches, and it has for the last four years had a party organ, _El Socialista_, in Madrid. The bulk of Spanish socialism still belongs, however, to the anarchist wing. Little has been heard of the anarchists in Spain since the revolution of 1873 and the fall of the International. They have usually been blamed for the attempts on the life of the king in 1878, but they have certainly never resorted to those promiscuous outrages which have formed so much of the recent policy of the anarchists of other countries; and except for participation in a few demonstrations of the unemployed, they have maintained a surprisingly quiet and unobtrusive existence. In 1881 they reconstituted themselves as the Spanish Federation of the International Working Men's Association, which is said by the author of "Socialismus und Anarchismus, 1883-86," apparently on their own authority, to have 70,000 members in all Spain, who are distributed in 800 branches, and hold regular district and national congresses, but always under cover of secrecy. They have two journals in Madrid, and others in the larger towns elsewhere. They are sorely divided into parties and schools on very petty points, and fierce strife rages between the tweedledums and tweedledees. One party has broken away altogether and established a society of its own, under the name of the Autonomists. The anarchists are in close alliance with an agrarian organization called the Rural Labourers' Union, which has agitated since 1879 for the abolition of _latifundia_ in Andalusia, but they always disclaim all connection with the more notorious Andalusian society, the Black Hand, which committed so many outrages in 1881 and 1882, and is often identified with the anarchists. The Black Hand is a separate organization from the anarchists, and has, it is said, 40,000 members, mostly peasants, in Andalusia and the neighbouring provinces; but their principles are undoubtedly socialistic. Their views are confined to the subject of land; but they declare that land, like all other property, has been made by labour, that it therefore cannot in right belong to the idle and rich class who at present own it, and that any means may be legitimately employed to deprive this class of usurpers of their possessions--the sword, fire, slander, perjury. In Spain, unlike most other countries, the artisans of the towns show less inclination to socialistic views than the rural labourers. They have an active and even powerful labour movement of their own, carried on through an extensive organization of trade unions which has risen up rapidly within the last few years, especially in Catalonia, and they put their whole trust in combination, co-operation, and peaceful agitation for gradual reform under the present order of things, and will have nothing to say to socialism or anarchism; so much so, that they manifested the greatest reluctance to join in the eight hour demonstrations of May-day, 1890, because they did not wish to be confounded or in any way identified with the more extreme faction who were getting those demonstrations up; and they actually held a rival demonstration of their own on Sunday, the 4th of May, "in favour," as they stated in the public announcement of it, "of State socialism and of State legislation, both domestic and international, to improve the general condition of the working classes without any revolutionary or sudden change that could alarm the Sovereign and the governing classes." Spain made a beginning in factory legislation in 1873, when an act was passed restricting the labour of children and young people; but the act remained dead-letter till 1884, when the renewal of agitation on the social question by the various parties led the cabinet to issue an order to have this law carried into effect, and a little later in the same year to appoint a royal commission to institute a thorough inquiry into the whole circumstances of the labouring classes, and the conditions of their improvement. This commission, which received nothing but abuse from the anarchists, who said the labour problem must be settled from below and not from above, was welcomed very heartily by the trade unionists, and with favour rather than otherwise even by the Social Democrats; but it has as yet had little or no result, and men who know the country express their opinion very freely that it will never lead to anything but an act or two that will remain dead-letter like their predecessors. The suffrage is high, only one person in seventeen having a vote; and working-class legislation will continue lukewarm till the working class acquires more real political power. A leading Spanish statesman said lately: "The day for social questions has not yet come in Spain, and we can afford to look on and see other countries make experiments which may be of use some day when our politicians and thinkers can find time to devote attention to these twentieth century problems." There seems much truth in the view that socialism, spite of the alarm its spread caused to the Spanish Government in 1872, is really a disease of a more advanced stage of industrial development than yet exists in Spain, and therefore unlikely to grow immediately into anything very formidable there. The country has few large industrial centres. Two-thirds of the people are still engaged in agriculture; and though it is among the agricultural classes socialism has broken out, the outbreak has been local, and confined to provinces where the conditions of agricultural labour are decidedly bad. But these conditions vary much from province to province. In the southern provinces the cereal plains and also the lower pasturages are generally possessed by large proprietors, who work them by farmers on the _metayer_ principle, with the help of bands of migratory labourers in harvest time; but in the mountainous parts of these provinces the estates belong for the most part to the communes. They are usually large, and as every member of the commune has an undivided right of using them, he is able to obtain from them the main part of his living without rent. Many of the inhabitants of such districts engage in the carrying trade, to which they conjoin a little cattle-dealing as opportunities offer; and as they are sober and industrious, they are usually comparatively well off. In the northern provinces the situation is in some respects better. Land is much subdivided, and though the condition of the labouring class is not as a rule unembarrassed, that result is due more to their own improvidence and indolence than to anything else. A man of frugal and industrious habits can always rise without much difficulty from the position of day labourer to that of _metayer_ tenant, and from tenancy to proprietorship, and some of the small proprietors are able to amass a considerable competency. Besides, even the improvident are saved from the worst by the communal organization. They have always a right of pasturage on the commons, and a right to wood for fire, house and furniture, and they get their children's education and medical attendance in sickness gratuitously on condition of giving six days' labour at the roads of the commune. The most active and saving part of the population, north and south, is the class of migratory workmen, who stay at home only during seed-time and harvest, and go for the rest of the year to work in Castile, Andalusia, or Portugal, as masons or carpenters, or waiters, and always come back with a store of money. Sometimes they remain abroad for a year or two, and sometimes they go to Cuba or Mexico for twenty years, and return to settle on a property of their own in their native village. This class forms the _personnel_ of the small property in Spain, and they give by their presence a healthy stimulus to the neighbourhoods they reside in. The small property is in Spain, as elsewhere, too often turned from a blessing to a curse by its subdivision, on the death of the proprietor, among the members of his family, who in Spain are usually numerous, though it is interesting to learn that in some of the Pyrenean valleys it has been preserved for five hundred years by the habit of integral transmission to the eldest child--son or daughter--coupled with the habit of voluntary celibacy on the part of many of the other children. The economic situation of Spain, then, is not free from defects; but there always exists a wide margin of hope in a country where, as Frere said, "God Almighty has so much of the land in His own holding," and its economic situation would not of itself be likely to precipitate social revolution. From Spain, socialism passed into Portugal; but from the first it has worked very quietly there. Its adherents formed themselves into an association in 1872, and held congresses, published newspapers, started candidates, and actively promoted their views in every legitimate way. Their programme was anarchism, like that of their Spanish allies; but, unlike anarchists elsewhere, they repudiated all resort to violence, for, as M. de Laveleye says, they are naturally "less violent than the Spaniards, the economic situation of the country is better, and liberty being very great, prevents the explosion of popular fury, which is worse when exasperated by repression." Portugal is an agricultural country in a good climate, where the people have few wants, and find it easy to satisfy them fairly well. In the absence of any manner of acute discontent, socialism could never have been much better than an abstract speculation; and Portuguese socialism, if we may trust the complaints made by the party elsewhere, seems now to have lost even the savour it had. In March, 1888, one of the socialist newspapers of London reported that the Portuguese working men's movement had, in the course of the preceding ten years, given up the straightforward socialist character it once had; that its leaders had entered into compromises with other political parties, and threw themselves too much into experiments in co-operation; that the party press was very lukewarm in its socialism, and inclined more to mere Radicalism; and that one or two attempts that had been made to start more extreme journals had completely failed; but it announced with satisfaction, that at last, in January, 1888, a frankly anarchist paper was published at Oporto--_A Revoluzao Social_. About the same time the editor of a journal which had made some hostile remarks on anarchism was shot, and anarchists were blamed and arrested for the deed. There was a Socialist Congress at Lisbon in 1882, composed of twelve delegates representing eight societies, all in Lisbon or Oporto. While the socialist cause has been thus rather retreating in the south of Europe, it has been making some advances in the north. Of the three Scandinavian countries, Denmark alone gave any early response to the socialist agitation; but there are now socialist organizations in Sweden and Norway, and the movement in Denmark has assumed considerable dimensions. Attempts were made to introduce socialism into Norway as far back as 1873 by Danish emissaries, and the International also founded a small society of thirty-seven members in Christiania; but the society seems to have died, and nothing more was heard of socialism there till the commotion in favour of a Republic in 1883. A Social Democratic Club was then established in Christiania, and a Social Democratic Congress was held at Arendal in 1887; but even yet Norwegian social democracy is of so mild a character that it would be counted conservatism by Social Democrats elsewhere, for this Congress issued a programme for a new labour party without a word of socialism in it, and merely asking for a normal working day, for factory legislation and reform of taxation. In Sweden there is more appearance of agitation, because there is one very active agitator in the country, Palm, a tailor, who keeps socialism _en evidence_ by making stump speeches, or getting up street processions with the usual red flags, and sometimes--such was the easy indifference of the Government to his work at first--with a military band in full uniform at the head of them. The Swedish socialists had four newspapers in 1888, but three of them were confiscated by the Government in December of that year, and their editors arrested for offences against religion and the throne. In May, 1890, they held their first Congress at Stockholm, when delegates appeared from twenty-nine unions; but the movement is very unimportant in Sweden and Norway, and the chief conditions of success seem wanting to it in those countries. There is no class of labourers there without property; no town residuum, and no rural cottagers. There being few great manufacturers in the kingdom, only fifteen per cent. of the people altogether live in towns. The rest are spread sparsely over the rural districts on farms belonging to themselves, and in the absence of roads are obliged to make at home many of the ordinary articles of consumption. What with the produce of their small properties and their own general handiness, they are unusually independent and comfortable. M. de Laveleye considers them the happiest people in Europe. The circumstances of Denmark are different. The operatives of the town are badly off. Mr. Strachey tells us in his report to the Foreign Office in 1870 that every fourth inhabitant of Copenhagen was in receipt of parochial relief in 1867, and he says that while the Danish operatives are sober, and well educated, they fail in industry and thrift. "No fact in my report," he states, "is more certain than that the Dane has yet to learn the meaning of the word _work_; of entireness and thoroughness he has seldom any adequate notion. This is why the Swedish artisan can so often take the bread from his mouth." In the rural districts, too, the economic situation, though in some respects highly favourable, is attended by a shadow. The land is, indeed, widely diffused. There are in all 280,000 families in the rural districts of Denmark, and of these 170,000 occupy independent freeholds, 30,000 farm hired land, and only 26,000 are agricultural labourers pure and simple. Seven-eighths of the whole country is held by peasant proprietors, and as a rule no class in Europe has improved more during the last half century than the Danish peasant or Bonde. Mr. Strachey says: "The Danish landlord was till recent times the scourge of the peasantry. Under his paternal care the Danish Bonde was a mere hewer of wood and drawer of water; his lot was no better than that of the most miserable ryot of Bengal. The Bonde is now the freest, the most politically wise, the best educated of European yeomen." But there is another side to the picture. In Denmark, as in other places where the small property abounds, the property is often too small for the proprietor's necessities, and there thus arises a kind of proprietor-proletariat, unwilling to part with their land and unable to extract a living out of it. This class, along with the rural labourers who have no property, constitute a sort of fourth estate in the country, and there as elsewhere their condition is preparing a serious social question for the future. Then, among the influences favourable to the acceptance of socialism in Denmark, must be counted the fact that one of the two great political parties of the country is democratic. Curiously enough that party consists of the peasantry, and the Conservatives of Denmark are the commercial classes of the towns, with the artisans in their wake, their Conservatism, however, being substantially identical with the Liberalism of the same classes in other countries. This democratic party seeks to make everything in the State conduce to the interests of the peasantry, and keeps alive in the country the idea that the State exists by the will of the people, and for their good alone. The International was introduced into this exclusively Protestant country by two militant Roman Catholics--Pio, a retired military officer, who came to Denmark as religious tutor to a baroness who had joined the Church of Rome, and Geleff, who wrote for an Ultramontane journal. They pursued their new mission with great zeal and success. They opened branches of the association in most of the towns, started a party newspaper, held open-air meetings, were sent to imprisonment for sedition in 1873, and on their release in 1877 absconded to America with the whole of the party funds, and disputed bitterly there over the spoil. While they were in prison, the International was suppressed in Denmark; but the members merely reconstituted the organization under the name of the Socialist Labour Party, and the place of leader was taken for a time by an authoress, Jacquette Lilyenkrantz, for, as in other countries, women are in Denmark among the most active propagandists of socialism. They kept up communications with the socialist leaders in Germany, and the meeting of the German Socialist Congress at Copenhagen in 1883 gave the movement a new impetus. They were able to return two deputies, Holm and Hördun, to the Volkething in 1884, and they took part, 80,000 strong, in the Copenhagen procession of 1886, in commemoration of the fundamental law of the State. Their chief party organ, the _Social Demokraten_, has a circulation of 26,000 daily, one of the largest newspaper circulations in Denmark; and there are other four socialist journals in the kingdom. They belong to the moderate wing of social democracy, being opposed to revolution and terrorism, and placing their confidence in constitutional agitation. Their programme is substantially that of Gotha--the right of the labourers to the full product of labour, State management of all industry, free education, universal suffrage, normal working day, abolition of class inequalities, single chamber in legislature, free justice, no standing army, State provision for sick and aged, religions to be a private affair. They turn their propaganda with most hope to the land proletariat; and a recent writer, P. Schmidt, in an interesting paper in the _Arbeiterfreund_ for 1889, says they are succeeding in their mission, and that socialism is spreading more and more every day among the rural labourers. At their last Congress, held at Copenhagen, in June, 1890, and attended by seventy-one delegates from fifty-four different branches, their attention was chiefly occupied with questions about the land; provision of more land for the people by compulsory acquisition of ecclesiastical property and uncultivated ground; State advances of capital to agricultural labourers; agricultural schools; better housing for farm servants, etc. In 1887 they held a socialist exhibition in Copenhagen--an international exhibition of socialist pamphlets, newspapers, books, magazines, and pictures; and in 1890 they returned two members to the Landthing--the first time they secured representatives in the Upper Chamber. Belgium has many of the conditions of soil most favourable for socialism--a dense population, large towns, an advanced productive system, and an industrial class at once very numerous, very ill paid, and very open, through their education, to new social ideas. For a time, accordingly, socialism spread remarkably in that country. The International had eight federations of branches in 1869, with 60,000 members and several newspapers. In the dispute between Marx and Bakunin, the Belgian Internationalists seem to have sided as a body with Bakunin; but they presently fell out among themselves, and, in spite of many repeated efforts at reconciliation, they have never since succeeded in composing their differences. The German socialist leaders tried to reorganize them in 1879 at a special Congress at Brussels, under the name of the Socialist Labour Party of Belgium, and with the Gotha programme; but they were rent again in 1881 by a division which had then entered into German socialism itself. The majority of the party adhered to Liebknecht and Bebel; but an active minority, composed chiefly of Walloons, followed the anarchist views of Most and Hasselman, withdrew from the party, and founded another called the Revolutionary Union. The anarchists have one journal--_Ni Dieu, Ni Maître_--violent, as the name indicates, but obscure and unimportant; but they believe most in the less intellectual propaganda of deed, and make themselves conspicuous from time to time by dynamite explosions and street fights with the police or the military, or their own socialist rivals. The Belgian socialists, on the other hand, look more to constitutional and parliamentary action, and usually work with the Liberals at the elections; but the Belgian voting qualification is high, and they have never succeeded in returning a candidate of their own. In 1887 their candidate for Brussels got 1,000 votes, while his successful rival had 3,000. They took an active part in the Republican agitation which was raised by the School Law in 1884. They have capable leaders, and they publish two journals, which, however, for want of funds, appear only at distant and uncertain intervals. They have lately begun to hold many open-air meetings, which the authorities had long forbidden, and they held an International Socialist Exhibition at Ghent in 1887 like that held in the same year at Copenhagen. On the whole socialism, after twenty years' work, is making no way in Belgium, notwithstanding the favourable character of the soil, because the labour movement is choosing other directions and forms of organization. Trade unions and co-operative societies have been multiplying much during these twenty years, and in 1885 a strong Belgian Labour Party was formed, with 120 branches and 100,000 members, which aims at promoting the practical wellbeing of the working class by remedial legislation--by in some cases vicious State-socialistic legislation, it may be--but has no word of the right to the full product of labour, of the nationalization of all industry, or of the social revolution. One of the items of the programme is worded "collective property"; but whether it contemplates the universal State-property of collectivism or the corporate property of co-operation does not appear. The other items are universal suffrage, direct legislation by the people (presumably the _referendum_), free undenominational education, abolition of standing army, abolition of budget of worship, normal work day, normal wages, regulation of work of women and children, factory inspection, employers' liability, workmen's chambers, courts of conciliation, repeal of taxes on means of subsistence, increased income tax, international labour legislation. M. de Laveleye attributes the ill success of socialism in Belgium, and no doubt rightly, to the influence of discussion and free institutions. Government has left it to stand or fall on its own merits before public opinion. The socialists enjoy full liberty of the platform and press; they can hold meetings and congresses and form clubs in any town they please, and the result is that though the movement, like all new movements, made a certain impression and advance for a time at first, it got checked under the influence of discussion and the application of solid practical judgment. Then, though the Belgian Legislature has not yet done what it can and ought for ameliorating the condition of the labourers, philanthropy has been very active and useful in a number of ways in that kingdom. The Catholic Church has always intervened to keep up a high ideal of employers' responsibility--the old ideal of a patriarchal care; and there is a strong organization in Belgium of Catholic Working Men's Clubs, which were formed into one body in 1867, which were united with the Catholic Working Men's Clubs of Germany in 1869, and with those of France in 1870, and which now constitute with these the International Catholic Working Men's Association. It ought perhaps to be mentioned that there is an old but small party of Land Nationalizers in Belgium, the Colinsian Socialists, whose principles have been warmly endorsed by Mr. Ruskin as "forming the most complete system of social and political reform yet put forward." They want the State to own all the soil, and let it out by auction; but they are opposed to nationalizing any of the other instruments of production. In Holland, wealth is very unequally divided, wages are low, and taxation, being largely indirect, falls heavily on the working class; but the people are phlegmatic, domestic, religious, and contrive on small means to maintain a general appearance of comfort and decency. Above all, they enjoy free institutions; and, under freedom, socialism has run the same course in Holland as in Belgium. The International made rapid advances in 1869, founded branches in all the towns, and carried on, after the Paris Commune, so active and successful an agitation that the _bourgeoisie_ took alarm, and Government imposed some restrictions on the disaffected press. But a general rise in wages happened about the time, a strong co-operative movement was promoted under the lead of the orthodox divines, a lively polemic against socialism broke out among the working men themselves, and all interest in the social revolution seemed to have died away, when, in 1878, it was revived again by D. Niewenhuis, a retired Protestant minister, a man of capacity and zeal, who has been unwearied in his advocacy of the cause ever since. He started in that year a journal, _Recht Voor Allen_, which is still, I believe, the only socialist organ in Holland, and appears now three times a week; and he founded the Social Democratic Union in 1884, which is strongest in the Hague and Amsterdam, but has branches in most of the other towns, and a membership by no means inconsiderable, though much below the old numbers of the Dutch International. After being imprisoned in 1887 for political reasons, Niewenhuis was returned to the Legislature in 1888--the first socialist who has sat there. The Dutch Socialists, to increase their numbers, enrol a class of "secret" members, timid spirits who will only come to them "by night, for fear of the Jews." There is also a handful of anarchists in Holland, who have a newspaper in Amsterdam, and are said to live harmoniously with the socialists, and, according to the reports of the American consuls, nobody in the country thinks any harm of either. Switzerland has swarmed for a century with conspirators of all hues and nations; but the Swiss--thanks again to free institutions--have been steel against revolution. The "Young Germanys" and "Young Italys" whom she sheltered in the past sought only, it is true, to win for their own countries the political freedom which Switzerland already enjoyed; but the socialist and anarchist refugees of the last twenty years have had social principles to preach which were as new and as good for the Swiss as for their own countrymen; and, speaking as they did the languages of the Confederation, they have never ceased making active efforts for the conversion of the Swiss. The old Jurassian Federation of the International, still continues to exist in French-speaking Switzerland, and to bear witness for the extremest kind of anarchist communism--no force or authority whatever, and a collective consumption of products as well as a collective production; but this body is not increasing, and though Guesde, the French socialist, made a lecturing tour through that division of Switzerland in 1885, he had quite as little success for his branch of the revolutionary cause. There are numbers of Social Democratic Clubs in the German-speaking cantons, but they consist mainly of German refugees, and contain few native Swiss members. After the Anti-Socialist Laws of 1879, the German socialists settled largely in Switzerland. They transferred to Zurich their party organ, the _Social Democrat_, and along with it, to use their own phrase, the entire Olympus of the party, the body of writers and managers who moved the shuttle of its operations. These propagandists naturally did not neglect the country of their adoption, but used every opportunity to forward their agitation by addresses and even by extended missionary journeys, and a separate Swiss Social Democratic party was actually founded, with a separate organ, the _Arbeiterstimme_; but it collapsed in 1884 from internal dissensions. No attempt was made to revive it till 1888, when the action of the Federal Council in May against the foreign socialists resident in the Confederation led to the organization of a Swiss socialist party in October. The Federal Government had already, in 1884 and 1885, taken measures against the political refugees, especially the anarchists, who were thought to have abused the hospitality they received by planning and preparing in Switzerland the series of crimes which shocked all Europe in 1884, and even by trying to explode the Federal Palace at Berne itself. The Government instituted an inquiry, and finding the country absolutely riddled with anarchist clubs, determined to keep the eye of the police on them, and in the meantime expelled thirty or forty of their leading members from Switzerland altogether. These were almost without exception either Austrians or Germans, and included Neve, now a leading anarchist in London. The Russian anarchists were apparently not thought so dangerous, their great occupation being to invent new ways and means of smuggling newspapers into Russia; but they disliked the police supervision to which they were subjected, and very generally quitted Switzerland of their own accord for London or Paris. The anarchist organ, the _Revolté_, was removed at the same time to Paris, but its place in Geneva was taken by a new paper--_L'Egalitaire_. In 1888 the police were ordered to report all socialist meetings held in the country, and all arrivals or departures of "foreigners whose means of subsistence was unknown, and whose presence might, for other reasons, become dangerous to the safety of the country"; and as this further turn of the screw was believed to be made on the instigation of Germany, it provoked considerable opposition, one result of which was the formation of the new Swiss socialist party. This party, however, is not an affair of any magnitude, and does not appear very likely to become so; for the working men of Switzerland have the public power in their own hands already, and they have their own organizations besides to look after their interests; and while they are by no means averse to the use of the powers of the State, they are disposed to move with inquiry and caution, and to see every step of their way before running into speculative schemes of foreign origin. Their political position satisfies them, because they know they are too strong for Government to neglect their wishes, because some labour laws have already been passed for their protection, and because the authorities always show themselves ready to entertain any new proposals for the same object, as, for example, they did in May, 1890, by summoning an International Congress at Berne to discuss the length of the working day and other conditions of labour. Their economic position, moreover, is also comparatively satisfactory for various reasons, among which Mr. Bonar, in his report to the Foreign Office in 1870, gives a chief place to the general working of democratic institutions and the prevalence of benevolent and charitable associations. "In enumerating," he says, "the favourable circumstances in which the Swiss working man is placed, prominence must be given to the immense extension of the principle of democracy, which, whatever, may be its defects and dangers from a political point of view when pushed to extremes, serves in Switzerland in its economical effects to advance the cause of the operative by removing the barriers dividing class from class, and to establish among all grades the bonds of mutual sympathy and goodwill, further strengthened by a widely-spread network of associations organized with the object of securing the common interests and welfare of the people." Masters and workmen are socially more equal than in most European countries; they sit side by side at the board of the Communal Council, they belong to the same choral societies, they refresh themselves at the same _cafés_. In most cantons, too, operatives are either owners of, or hold from the communes, small pieces of land which they cultivate in their leisure hours, and which thus serve them when work gets slack or fails altogether. The favourable rural economy of the country is well known; its peasant proprietors rival those of France. The Swiss societies of beneficence are remarkable, and almost suggest the hope that the voluntary socialism of a more enlarged and widely organized system of charity may be found to furnish a substantial solution of the social question. Every canton of Switzerland has its society of public utility, whose aims take an extensive range; it gives the start to projects of improvement of every description, infant schools, schools of design, savings banks, schemes for the poor, the sick, the dumb, singing classes, halls for Sunday recreation, popular lectures, workmen's houses, protection of animals, even industrial undertakings which promise to be ultimately beneficial, though they may not pay at first. The society of Basle has 900 members and a capital of £6,000, and the Swiss Society of Public Utility is an organization for the whole Republic, which holds an annual congress at Zurich, and general meetings in the different cantons by turns. These meetings pass off with every mark of enthusiasm, and gather together men of all religious and political opinions in a common concern for the progress and prosperity of the masses. One of the institutions which these societies have largely promoted is what they call a hall of industry, or a bazaar, where loans may be received by workmen on the security of their wages, or of goods they may deposit. A labourer who has made any article which he cannot get immediately sold, may deposit it at one of these bazaars, and obtain an advance equal to a fixed proportion of its value, and if the article is sold at the bazaar, the proceeds are accounted for to the depositor, less the sum advanced and a small charge for expenses. These institutions, Mr. Bonar says, have had excellent effects, though he admits that the facilities of borrowing have led the working men in some places into debt; but they are at any rate a vast improvement on the pawnbroking system in vogue elsewhere. The condition of Switzerland shows us clearly enough that democracy under a _régime_ of freedom lends no ear to socialism, but sets its face in entirely different directions. The United States of America have done more for experimental socialism than any other country. Owenites, Fourierists, Icarians have all established communities there, but these communities have failed long ago, except one of the Icarian, and the only other socialist experiments now existing in America are seventy or eighty religious communities, Shakers and Rappists, whose success has been due to their religious discipline and their celibacy, and whose members amount to no more than 5,000 souls all told. There is indeed a Russian Commune in California, but it remains a solitary Russian Commune still, the "new formula of civilization," as Russian reformers used to call it, showing no sign of further adoption. Nor has the new or political socialism found any better success in the States. There are various indigenous forms of it--such as the agrarian socialism of Mr. Henry George, and the nationalism of Mr. E. Bellamy--but in point of following they are of little importance, and the socialism of the American socialist and revolutionary parties is a mere German import, with as yet a purely German consumption. It has been pushed vigorously in the American market for twenty years, but taken singularly little hold of the American taste. There is one revolutionary socialist body composed chiefly of English-speaking members, the International Workmen's Association, which was founded in 1881 in one of the western states; but Mr. Ely says its membership would be generously estimated at 15,000, and it considers the great work of the present should be popular education, so as to prepare the people for the revolution when it comes. The Boston Anarchists, perhaps, ought not, strictly speaking, to be included in any account of socialism, for, unlike most contemporary anarchists, they are not socialist, but extremely individualist; but historically, it is worth noting, Boston Anarchism is the doctrine of a disenchanted socialist, Josiah Warren, who had lived with Robert Owen at New Harmony, and came to the conclusion that that experiment failed because the individual had been too much sunk in the community, and no room was left for the play of individual interests, individual rights, and individual responsibilities. From Owen's communism, Warren ran to the opposite extreme, and thought it impossible to individualize things too much. He would abolish the State, and have the work of police and defence done by private enterprise, like any other service. He issued some books, tried to carry out his views by practical experiment, and, though they failed, he has still a small band of believing disciples at Boston, who publish a newspaper called _Liberty_, but have no organization and no importance. Henry George and his followers, too, perhaps ought not in strictness to be classified among socialists. He would certainly repudiate such a classification himself, and the United Labour Party, which he founded in 1886 to promote his views by political action, expelled the socialists from membership in 1887. His actual practical proposal is nothing more than a narrow and illusory plan of taxation; but he puts it forward so expressly as the keystone of a new social system, as the remedy prescribed by economic science itself for the complete regeneration of society and the simultaneous removal of all existing social evils, that he is not improperly placed among Utopian socialists. Does he not promise us a new heaven and a new earth? And if he believes the State can call the new heaven and the new earth into being by a mere turn in the incidence of taxation, while most other contemporary socialists think the State must first pull down all that now is and reconstruct the whole on a new plan, is he, on account of this greater credulity of his, to be considered a more, and not rather a less, sober and rational speculator than they? He wants to abolish landlordism, while they want to abolish landlordism and all other capitalism besides; and his views may fairly be called partial or agrarian socialism. The United Labour Party was founded mainly to promote Mr. George's panacea of the single tax on such land values as arise from the growth of society apart from individual exertion; but it includes other articles in its programme--the municipalization of the supply of water, light, and heat; the nationalization of all money, note issue, post, telegraphs, railways, and savings banks; reduction of the hours of labour, prohibition of child labour, suppression of the competition of prison labour with honest labour; sanitary inspection of houses, factories, and mines; simplification of legal procedure; secret ballot; payment of election expenses. The United Labour Party is not strong. When Mr. George stood for the Mayoralty of New York, he had 68,000 votes to his opponent's 90,000; but he had on that occasion the assistance of the Socialistic Labour Party, who are said by Mr. Ely to number about 25,000 in New York, and who certainly constituted a very considerable element in the United Labour Party, for they were expelled at the Party Convention only by a vote of 94 to 54. On the other hand, Mr. Ely's estimate of the strength of the socialists is possibly too high, for they ran a candidate for the Mayoralty of New York themselves in 1888, a leading man of the party, one Jones, and he only secured 2,000 votes. However that may be, the United Labour Party was certainly much weakened by the loss of the socialists, and they were disabled entirely in the following year by a division on the question of Free Trade and the secession of Father McGlynn and the Protectionist members. Nationalism is the name of a new movement, the fruit of the remarkable and very popular novel of Mr. Edward Bellamy, "Looking Backward," which may be said to be the latest description of Utopia as it now stands with all the most modern improvements. Mr. Bellamy would have all industry organized and conducted by the nation on the basis of a common obligation of work and a general guarantee of livelihood, all men to get exactly the same wages, and to do exactly the same quantity of work, due allowance being made for differences in severity, and the State to enlarge indefinitely its free public provision of the means of common enjoyment and culture. Mr. Bellamy's charming pictures of the new country naturally engendered a general wish to be there, and many little societies have been established to hasten the hour; but as the movement has not been more than a year in being, little account can yet be given of its success. The Nationalists have quite recently issued an organ, _The New Nation_, which announces its programme to be (1) the nationalization of post, telegraphs, telephone, railways and coal mines; (2) municipalization of gas and water supply, and the like; and (3) the equalization of educational opportunities as between rich and poor, and the promotion of all reforms tending towards humaner, more fraternal, and more equal conditions. Nationalism out of Utopia, therefore, means merely a little State-socialism. The strongest socialist organizations in the United States are the Socialistic Labour Party, corresponding to the Social Democrats of Europe, and the International Working People's Association, corresponding to the anarchists; but both are composed almost exclusively of Germans. There are more Germans in the North American Republic than in any State of Germany except Prussia; and as many of them have fled from their own country for political reasons--to escape the conscription, or to escape prosecution for sedition--they bear no goodwill to the old system of government, and harbour revolutionary ideas almost from the nature of things. A socialist propaganda began among them so far back as 1848, when Weitling, of whom more will be said presently, published a socialist newspaper; and a Socialist Gymnastic Union was established in New York in 1850, which succeeded in forming a kind of federal alliance, apparently for socialistic purposes, with a number of other local German gymnastic societies throughout the States; but though these societies still exist, they seem to have dropped their socialism. It was taken up again, however, in 1869, by the International, which transferred its General Council to New York in 1872, held congresses from time to time in the country, and eventually, at the Newark Convention of 1877, adopted the name of the Socialistic Labour Party, with a programme formed after the Gotha lines. The numbers of the party were strengthened in the years immediately following by the arrival of German refugees, expelled from their own land by the Socialist Laws; but the new members brought with them elements of dissension which speedily came to a head after the arrival of the incendiary spirit, John Most, in 1882, and led, in 1883, to the entire separation of the Anarchists from the Social Democrats. The latter held a separate Congress at Baltimore in the latter year, attended by 16 delegates, representing 23 branches and 10,000 members, and it reported that altogether 38 branches adhered to them. The anarchists held a Congress at Pittsburg, and formed themselves into the International Working People's Association, with the following principles:-- "What we would achieve is therefore plainly and simply-- "1st. Destruction of the existing class rule by all means; _i.e._, by energetic, relentless, revolutionary, and international action. "2nd. Establishment of a free society based upon co-operative organization of production. "3rd. Free exchange of equivalent products by and between the productive organizations without commerce and profit-mongery. "4th. Organization of education on a secular, scientific, and equal basis for both sexes. "5th. Equal rights for all without distinction of sex or race. "6th. Regulation of all public affairs by free contracts between the autonomous (independent) communes and associations resting on a federalistic basis." (Ely's "Labour Movement in America," p. 231.) They differ from the Socialistic Labour Party, as this programme shows, in their exclusive devotion to revolution, and their opposition to all central government. The Socialistic Labour Party has several newspapers, the principal being the _Sozialist_ and the _Neu Yorker Volkszeitung_ of New York, and the _Tageblatt_ of Philadelphia; and the anarchists have more, the best known being Most's notorious _Freiheit_. Mr. Ely mentions sixteen socialist newspapers and ten sympathizing with socialism, and says that the majority of these support the anarchist side. The anarchists, moreover, have one journal in English--the _Alarm_; the Socialistic Labour Party started one in 1883, but it died. With that exception the press of both parties is entirely German, and neither party seems to have done almost anything in the way of an English propaganda from the platform. Dr. and Mrs. Aveling state that before they made their lecturing tour on the subject through the States in 1886, the American public had never heard socialism preached to them in their own tongue; yet books like Mr. Gronlund's "Co-operative Commonwealth," giving a very effective exposition of socialism, had already appeared from the American press. Dr. and Mrs. Aveling say, moreover, they met with more hostility to their mission from the anarchists than from any other source in America. The American people, while firmly stamping out the dynamite policy of the anarchists, have naturally nothing to say against an academic propaganda of any system of doctrine. The trend of the labour movement in America seems away from socialism. That movement is in many respects more powerful there than in any European country. There are some five hundred labour newspapers in the United States, and an immense number of trade organizations of all kinds. Political power, moreover, both in the States and in the Union, is in the hands of the working class; and that class has now very nearly the same grievances there as it has in Europe, and the same aspirations after a better order of things. But their tendencies are not nearer socialism, but further from it. They simply cannot understand people who tell them they have no power to work out their own salvation under the system that is, and that nothing can be done, as Marx assures them, until every capital in Europe is ready for a simultaneous revolution with New York and Chicago. The trade unions accordingly ignore socialism. The Knights of Labour expressly repudiate it, and in the course of a very long programme they hardly make a demand which has a taint even of State-socialism. This "Noble Order of the Knights of Labour" is a general association of working men to promote the cause of labour, partly by their own efforts and partly through the Government. By their own efforts they are to promote co-operation till, if possible, it supersedes the present wages system entirely; equality of wages for men and women for equal work; a general eight hours day through a general strike; and a system of arbitration in trade quarrels. From the Union Legislature they want merely a few general reforms, none bearing directly on the situation of labour, except the abolition of foreign contract labour. The others are, reform of the currency, nationalization of telegraphs and railways, and the institution of banking facilities of various kinds in connection with the Post Office. From the State Legislatures they ask the reservation of public lands to actual settlers, the simplification of the administration of justice, factory legislation, graduated income tax, and the following provisions for labour: weekly payment of wages in money, mechanic's lien on the product of his labour for his wages, compulsory arbitration in trade disputes, prohibition of labour of children under fifteen. In 1886 they were 702,884 strong, but they have declined sorely since then. Their great weapon was to be an extension of strikes and boycotting beyond what was possible to single trades; but it was found that this policy was double-edged, and caused more hurt to some sections of the working class than any good it could do to others; and people lost faith in the principle of such huge miscellaneous organizations. Dr. Aveling contends that the Knights of Labour, in spite of Mr. Powderly's disclaimer, are really, though it may be unconsciously, socialists, because they want to supersede the wages system, if they can, by establishing co-operative institutions without State aid; and this, he holds, "is pure and unadulterated socialism." Indeed! then where is the man who is not a pure and unadulterated socialist? and what need for any mission to the States to preach the socialist message to the Americans for the first time in their own tongue? England was the country last reached by the present wave of revolutionary socialism, although the system has been largely conceived upon a study of English circumstances, and is claimed to be peculiarly adapted to them. England is alternately the hope and the despair of Continental socialists. Every requisite of revolution is there, and yet the people will not rise. The yeomanry are gone. The land has come into the hands of a few. Industry is carried on by great centralized capital. The large system of production has almost finished its work. The mass of the people is a proletariat; they are thronged in large towns; every tenth person is a pauper; and the great mansions of the rich cast an evil shadow into the crowded dens of the wretched. "The English," says Eugène Dupont, a leading member of the old International, "possess all the materials necessary for the social revolution; but they lack the generalizing spirit and the revolutionary passion." Any proletariat movement in which the English proletariat takes no part, said Karl Marx, is "no better than a storm in a glass of water"; yet, though Marx himself resided in England for most of his life, no organized attempt was made to gain over the English proletariat to socialism till 1883--the year he died. There was before that, indeed, a small English section in a foreign socialist club in Soho; and, after the fall of the Paris Commune, hopes were for a time entertained of starting a serious socialist movement in our larger towns; but these hopes proved so delusive that Karl Marx said more than once to Mr. Hyndman, as we are told by the latter, that he despaired "of any great movement in England, unless in response to some violent impetus from without." But in 1883 a socialist movement seemed to break out spontaneously in England, the air hummed for a season with a multifarious social agitation, and we soon had a fairly complete equipment of socialist organizations--social democratic, anarchist, dilettante--which have ever since kept up a busy movement with newspapers, lectures, debates, speeches, and demonstrations in the streets. In 1883 the Democratic Federation, which had been established two years before to promote measures of Radical reform, including, among other things, the nationalization of the land, adopted the socialistic principles of Karl Marx, and changed its name to the Social Democratic Federation. Its programme is long, and includes, besides the nationalization of land and all means of production, direct legislation by the people, direct election of all functionaries by adult suffrage, gratuitous justice, gratuitous, compulsory, and equal education, abolition of standing armies, Home Rule for Ireland, an eight hours day, State erection of workmen's dwellings, to be let at bare cost, progressive income tax, proportional representation, abolition of House of Lords, separation of Church and State, etc. Its principal founders were Mr. William Morris, an artist, a great poet, and a manufacturer exceptionally excellent in his arrangements with his workpeople; Mr. H. M. Hyndman, a journalist of standing and ability; Mr. J. Stuart Glennie, and Mr. Belfort Bax, both authors of repute; Dr. Aveling, a popular lecturer on science, and son-in-law of Karl Marx; Miss Helen Taylor, step-daughter of John Stuart Mill; and the Rev. Stewart Headlam. In January, 1884, they started a weekly newspaper, _Justice_, and a monthly magazine, _To-Day_, both of which still appear, and began the active work of lecturing and founding branches. But before the year was out, the old enemy of socialists, the spirit of division, entered among them, and Mr. Morris, with Dr. Aveling and Mr. Bax, seceded and set up an independent organization called the Socialist League, with a separate weekly organ, _The Commonweal_. The difference seems to have arisen out of the common socialist trouble about the propriety of mixing in current politics. The same disruptive tendency has persisted in the two parts, and in the end of 1890, Mr. William Morris seceded from the Socialist League with his local following at Hammersmith. Neither of these revolutionary bodies has a complete organization like those of continental countries. They have never held a Congress, either national or provincial. They consist of a central committee in London, and detached local groups in the provinces, and their membership is not accurately known, but it is not extensive. It is in both cases declining, and it has always been variable, young men joining for a year or two, and then leaving. Their chief success has been among the miners of the North of England, and they have returned three members to the School Board of Newcastle. There is one socialist member in Parliament, Mr. Cunningham Graham, but he has not been returned on socialist principles or by a socialist vote; and hitherto the party has failed to obtain any serious support at the elections. At the election of 1885, Mr. John Burns, socialist candidate for Nottingham, had only 598 votes out of a total poll of 11,064, and Mr. J. Williams, the socialist candidate for Hampstead, had only 27 out of a total of 4,722. Mr. Burns, however, has since been returned to the London County Council, and will not improbably succeed in being returned to Parliament at next election. He is a working engineer, but is much the strongest leader English socialism has produced, an orator of great power, an excellent organizer, and the head and representative of a new labour movement which is likely to play a considerable part in the immediate future, and which is certainly fermented with a good measure of socialistic leaven. The New Unionism, as this movement is sometimes called, represents mainly the opinion of the new trade unions of unskilled labour--dockers and others--which have sprung into existence recently, and it was strong enough at the Trade Union Congress in 1890 to carry the day against the old unionism of the skilled trades by a considerable majority in favour of the compulsory and universal eight hours day. But, as Mr. T. Burt, M.P., the miners' parliamentary representative, said in his speech to the Eighty Club two months afterwards, the New Unionism is, after all, only the young and inexperienced unionism, and must needs run now through the same kind of errors which the older trade unions have gone through before, but will, like the older unions, learn, by discussion and experiment, to keep within the lines of practicable and beneficial action. However that may be, for the moment, at any rate, the fortunes of English socialism seem to lie with Mr. John Burns and his labour movement, and not with the two socialist organizations which appear to have already reached their height, and to be now on the decline. A well-informed German writer lately warned us that anarchism had brought its headquarters to London, that it was coming into relations with the English population through its clubs and newspapers, and he ventured to prophesy that we should certainly have soon an anarchist fire to extinguish on our own hearth much more serious than Germany or Austria has had to encounter. So far, however, there is little to support such a prophecy. There are four small anarchist clubs in London--three of them German clubs, which live at strife with one another, and the fourth a Russian or Polish club, whose members have few or no dealings with the Germans. The German anarchists publish two weekly newspapers in German, which it is their great business to smuggle into the Fatherland, and the Russian or Polish anarchists publish one in Yedish--the German-Hebrew _patois_ of the Polish Jews--which is printed for the entertainment of the Polish tailors of the East End. Some of the principal anarchist leaders, it is true, live amongst us--for example, Prince Krapotkin and Victor Dave--and under their influence a group of English anarchists has grown up during the last few years; but this group has already, after the manner of modern revolutionists, split on a point of doctrine into two opposite camps, which,--if we may judge from their respective organs, _The Anarchist_ and _Freedom_--expend a considerable share of their destructive energies upon one another. The English anarchists have no permanent organization of any kind, and the one group are for socialist anarchism, and the other for individualist anarchism. On the whole the conversion of the English by the anarchist refugees is not an idea worthy of serious consideration; a better and more likely result would be that they would themselves, like Alexander Herzen, the leading anarchist of the past generation, be converted in England to more rational ideas of politics. Our safety lies, however, not so much in the practical character of our people, as in their habits of free and open discussion. What is called practicality is no safeguard against delusive ideas outside one's own immediate field of activity, and there is perhaps no country, except the still more practical country of America, where more favour is shown than here to fanaticism of any kind, if there seems to be heart in it. Besides, when we hear it said, We have indeed an enormous proletariat, but they are too practical to think of insurrection, we ought to reflect that, to the miserable, the practical test of a scheme will not be, Shall we be any the better for the change? but Shall we be any the worse for it? But under free institutions grievances always come to be ventilated; ventilation leads to more or less remedial measures, and discontent is removed altogether, or, at any rate, appeased for the time; and although under free institutions ill-considered schemes which inflate that discontent with delusive hopes may raise for a season a boom of earnest discussion, the discussion eventually kills them. So it seems to be with the fortunes of revolutionary socialism in England to-day. It has been much discussed for six years, but the height of the tide has been reached already, and the movement is now apparently on the ebb. Besides these manifestations of revolutionary socialism, we have various societies representing an amateur and appreciative interest in socialism. There is the Christian Socialist Society, a small body of less than 150 adherents, including many clergymen and other members of the learned professions. They must not be confounded with the Christian Socialists of forty years ago, Maurice, Kingsley, and their allies, for the survivors of this earlier movement, such as Judge Thomas Hughes, Mr. Vansittart Neale, and Mr. J. M. Ludlow, do not belong to the present Christian Socialist Society, and would repudiate its principles. They wanted to promote co-operation without State interference, and they take a leading part in the co-operative movement still; but the Christian Socialist Society of the present day is all for State interference, and the articles of its organ, the _Christian Socialist_, strongly support the doctrines of Karl Marx, and declare that "the command, 'Thou shalt not steal,' if impartially applied, must absolutely prohibit the capitalist, as such, from deriving any revenue whatever from the labourer's toil." But with all their will to believe with the Marxists, the latter are not sure of them, and the socialist organs, _Justice_ and _To-Day_, twit them one day for not being Christians, and the next for not being socialists. They are not men of the same mark as the earlier body of English Christian socialists, Canon Shuttleworth and Mr. Stewart Headlam being the two best known of them. The Guild of St. Matthew, which is composed to some extent of the same _personnel_ as the Christian Socialist Society, has published a compendium of Christian socialism, and strives, among other branches of its activity, to cultivate good relations between socialists and the Church. The Fabian Society, again, is a debating club of mixed socialism. It contains socialists of all feathers--revolutionary socialists and philosophical socialists, Christian socialists and un-Christian socialists--who meet together under its auspices and exchange their views, without having any recognised end beyond the discussion. They intervened lately, however, in the eight hours day controversy, and drafted a bill for a compulsory measure on the subject which attracted some public attention. Among the principal members are Mr. Sidney Webb, a well-known writer and lecturer on economic subjects, Mr. G. Bernard Shaw, journalist, Mrs. Besant, and Mr. W. Clarke. They have published a volume of Fabian Essays, which has had a large sale. No account of English socialism would be complete that made no mention of the writings of Mr. Ruskin, which have probably done more than any other single influence to imbue English minds with sentiments and principles of a socialistic character. But they have produced nothing in the nature of a school or party more than perhaps some detached local group; such, for example, as the Sheffield Socialists, a small body formed under Ruskinian inspiration, and the leadership of Mr. E. Carpenter. The outburst of socialist agitation in England in 1883 and 1884 was immediately preceded by a revival of popular interest in an old and favourite subject of English speculation, the nationalization of the land. Mr. Henry George had published his "Progress and Poverty" in 1881, and in the same year the Democratic Federation was established in London with land nationalization for one of its principles, and Mr. A. R. Wallace, the eminent naturalist, founded the Land Nationalization Society. In 1882, Mr. Wallace contributed still further to awaken discussion of the question by publishing his work on "Land Nationalization," and the discussion was spread everywhere in 1883 by the appearance of a sixpenny edition of Mr. George's remarkable work. Land nationalization in the hands of Mr. Wallace has little in common with any form of contemporary socialism. He does not contemplate any interference with the present system of agricultural production; that is still to be conducted by capitalists and hired labourers, as it is now. He merely proposes to abolish what is called landlordism by the compulsory conversion of the present tenant farmers into a body of yeomanry or occupying owners, and his scheme differs from the more ordinary proposals for the creation of peasant proprietors merely in two points: 1st--which is a very good proposal--that he would leave part of the price of the property to be paid in the form of a permanent annual quitrent to the State; and 2nd--which is a more doubtful proposal--that this part should represent, as nearly as it is possible now to calculate it, the original value of the soil apart from improvements of any kind--or, in other words, the unearned part of the present value of the property--and that it should be subject to periodical revision, with a view to recovering from the holder any further unearned increments of value that may accrue to his holding from time to time. Mr. Wallace, like Mr. George, has very utopian expectations from his scheme; but he would honestly buy up the rights of the existing landlords, while Mr. George would merely confiscate them by exceptional taxation. This difference broke up the Land Nationalization Society in 1883, and the partisans of Mr. George's view seceded and formed themselves into the English Land Restoration League, which has established branches in most of the larger towns, and has now probably a more numerous membership than the original society. It is especially strong in Scotland, and ran three candidates for Glasgow at the last general election; but the three only got 2,222 votes between them, out of a total of 23,800 polled in the three divisions they contested. The ideas of the League have a certain vogue among the Highland crofters, where they blend very readily with the universal peasant doctrines that the earth is the Lord's, and that all other lords should be abolished. In Scotland there are a good many branches of the two regular socialist organizations. The Scottish Emancipation League joined the Social Democratic Federation, and the Scottish Land and Labour League joined the Socialist League; but it is remarkable that there is no socialism in Ireland, except in a small branch of the Socialist League in Dublin, called the Dublin Socialist Club, although it seems a miracle for a country seething for centuries with political and economic discontent to escape such a visitation. Probably, as with the Poles, the minds of the discontented are already too much pre-occupied with other political and social solutions. The land nationalization views of Mr. George are, of course, spread widely through the influence of Mr. Michael Davitt in the agrarian movement of Ireland. But while the recent wave of socialism has passed over discontented Ireland, and left it, like Gideon's fleece, quite dry, much more susceptibility has been shown by those parts of the Empire where the lot of labour is, perhaps in all the world, the happiest--the Australian colonies. Here, too, the susceptibility has been created to some extent by the land questions of the country. Mr. George, in his recent lecturing tour through these colonies, met with a warm welcome in almost all the towns he visited, made many converts to his ideas, and gave rise to a considerable agitation. In South Australia three of his disciples were returned to the Legislature in 1887, and their views are supported by several newspapers in Adelaide. In a new colony the argument for keeping the land in the hands of the State has in some respects more point and force than in an old. Mr. George's disciples in Sydney publish a paper called the _Land Nationalizer_, and his views are advocated by one of the most influential papers in the colony, the _Bulletin_ of Sydney. In New Zealand a bill has actually been brought in for the purpose of nationalizing the land. But apart from Mr. George altogether, there is a flourishing Australian Socialist League in Sydney, established in 1887, and with a membership of 7,000 in 1888. It has a journal called the _Radical_, and keeps up a busy agitation with lectures and discussions. As a method of temporary policy it promotes associations of labourers for the purpose of undertaking Government and municipal contracts. In Melbourne, again, people are more advanced. They have no socialist organization, but they have an anarchist club, established in 1886 for the purpose of aiding social reform on the lines of liberty, equality, and fraternity. It circulates the works of Proudhon, Tucker, the Boston anarchist, Bakunin, and Mr. Auberon Herbert; and it publishes a newspaper called _Honesty_, which appeared at first once a month, and latterly once in two months. The ideas of the party are not easy to ascertain exactly from the pages of their journal. The State is, of course, the enemy, and land monopoly is one of the State's worst creations; but some of the writers advocate land nationalization, while others propound a scheme of what they call "constructive anarchy," under which every man is to own the land he occupies. They have started a new form of co-operative store, a kind of mutual production society, whose members bind themselves to produce for one another, and exchange their products for the bare cost of production; and they have started a co-operative home, in which the members get better and cheaper accommodation through their combination. Melbourne anarchism, however, has no harm in it: it is a mere spark of eccentric speculation. The working class of Melbourne is probably the most powerful and the best organized working class in the world. In their Trades Hall they have had for thirty years a workmen's chamber of their own creating like what German socialists are vainly asking from the State, and much more effective, because more independent. They have secured the eight hours day to fifty-two different trades without receiving a finger's help from the law, and without losing a shilling of wages. They have, moreover, the voting power in their own hands. In fact, they are, as nearly as any working class can be, in the precise condition socialists require for revolutionary action. They are entirely dependent on a handful of capitalists for their employment, and they have the whole power of the State substantially under their own control; so that they might, if they chose, march to the Parliament House with a red flag, and instal the socialist State to-morrow. But they do not choose. They propose no change in the present industrial system, and make surprisingly few demands of any sort upon the State. The world goes very well with them as it is, and they will not risk the comforts they really enjoy to try any sweeping and problematical solutions. While the socialist movement, in the countries where it is most advanced and powerful, seems settling into a practical labour movement, the labour movement, in the countries where it is most advanced and powerful, is steering furthest and clearest from socialism. CHAPTER III. FERDINAND LASSALLE. German socialism is--it is hardly too much to say--the creation of Ferdinand Lassalle. Of course there were socialists in Germany before Lassalle. There are socialists everywhere. A certain rudimentary socialism is always in latent circulation in what may be called the "natural heart" of society. The secret clubs of China--"the fraternal leagues of heaven and earth"--who argue that the world is iniquitously arranged, that the rich are too rich, and the poor too poor, and that the wealth of the great has all accrued from the sweat of the masses, only give a formal expression to ideas that are probably never far from any one of us who have to work hard and earn little, and they merely formulate them less systematically than Marx and his disciples do in their theories of the exploitation of labour by capital. Socialism is thus so much in the common air we all breathe, that there is force in the view that the thing to account for is not so much the presence of socialism, at any time, as its absence. Accordingly it had frequently appeared in Germany under various forms before Lassalle. Fichte--to go no farther back--had taught it from the standpoint of the speculative philosopher and philanthropist. Schleiermacher, it may be remembered, was brought up in a religious community that practised it. Weitling, with some allies, preached it in a pithless and hazy way as a gospel to the poor, and, finding little encouragement, went to America, to work it out experimentally there. The Young Hegelians made it part of their philosophic creed. The Silesian weavers, superseded by machinery, and perishing for want of work, raised it as a wild inarticulate cry for bread, and dignified it with the sanction of tears and blood. And Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in 1848, summoned the proletariat of the whole world to make it the aim and instrument of a universal revolution. But it was Lassalle who first really brought it from the clouds and made it a living historical force in the common politics of the day. The late eminent Professor Lorenz von Stein, of Vienna, said, in 1842, in his acute and thoughtful work on French Communism, that Germany, unlike France, and particularly England, had nothing to fear from socialism, because Germany had no proletariat to speak of. Yet, in twenty years, we find Germany become suddenly the theatre of the most important and formidable embodiment of socialism that has anywhere appeared. Important and formidable, for two reasons: it founds its doctrines, as socialism has never done before, on a thoroughly scientific investigation of the facts, and criticism of the principles, of the present industrial _régime_, and it seeks to carry them out by means of a political organization, growing singularly in strength, and based on the class interests of the great majority of the people. There were, of course, predisposing conditions for this outburst. A German proletariat had come into being since Stein wrote, and though still much smaller, in the aggregate, than the English, it was perhaps really at this time the more plethoric and distressed of the two. For the condition of the English working-classes had been greatly relieved by emigration, by factory legislation, by trades unions, whereas in some of these directions nothing at all, and in others only the faintest beginnings, had as yet been effected in Germany. Then, the stir of big political movement and anticipation was on men's minds. The future of the German nation, its unity, its freedom, its development, were practical questions of the hour. The nationality principle is essentially democratic, and the aspirations for German unity carried with them in every one of the States strong movements for the extension of popular freedom and power. This long spasmodic battle for liberty in Germany, which began with the century, and remains still unsettled, this long series of revolts and concessions and overridings, and hopes flattered and again deferred, this long uncertain babble of _Gross-Deutsch_ and _Klein-Deutsch_, and Centralist and Federalist and Particularist, of "Gotha ideas" and "new eras" and "blood and iron," had prepared the public ear for bold political solutions, and has entered from the first as an active and not unimportant factor in the socialist agitation. Then again, the general political habits and training of the people must be taken into account. Socialistic ideas would find a readier vogue in Germany than in this country, because the people are less rigidly practical, because they have been less used to the sifting exercise of free discussion, and because they have always seen the State doing a great deal for them which they could do better for themselves, and are consequently apt to visit the State with blame and claims for which it ought not to be made responsible. Then the decline of religious belief in Germany, which the Church herself did much to produce when she was rationalistic, without being able to undo it since she has become orthodox, must certainly have impaired the patience with which the poor endured the miseries of their lot, when they still entertained the hope of exchanging it in a few short years for a happier and an everlasting one hereafter. All these circumstances undoubtedly favoured the success of the socialistic agitation at the period it started; but, when everything is said, it is still doubtful whether German socialism would ever have come into being but for Lassalle. Its fermenting principle has been less want than positive ideas. This is shown by the fact that it was at first received among the German working classes with an apathy that almost disheartened Lassalle; and that it is now zealously propagated by them as a cause, as an evangel, even after they have emigrated to America, where their circumstances are comparatively comfortable. The ideas it contains Lassalle found for the most part ready to his hand. The germs of them may be discovered in the writings of Proudhon, in the projects of Louis Blanc. Some of them he acknowledges he owes to Rodbertus, others to Karl Marx, but it was in passing through his mind they first acquired the stamp and ring that made them current coin. Contentions about the priority of publishing this bit or that bit of an idea, especially if the idea be false, need not concern us; and indeed Lassalle makes no claim to originality in the economical field. He was not so much an inventive as a critical thinker, and a critical thinker of almost the first rank, with a dialectic power, and a clear, vivid exposition that have seldom been excelled. Any originality that is claimed for him lies in the region of interpretation of previous thought, and that in the departments of metaphysics and jurisprudence, not of economics. The peculiarity of his mind was that it hungered with almost equal intensity for profound study and for exciting action, and that he had the gifts as well as the impulses for both. As he said of Heraclitus the Dark, whom he spent some of his best years in expounding, "there was storm in his nature." Heine, who knew and loved him well as a young man in Paris, and indeed found his society so delightful during his last years of haggard suffering, that he said, "No one has ever done so much for me, and when I receive letters from you, courage rises in me, and I feel better,"--Heine characterizes him very truly in a letter to Varnhagen von Ense. He says he was struck with astonishment at the combination of qualities Lassalle displayed--the union of so much intellectual power, deep learning, rich exposition on the one hand, with so much energy of will and capacity for action on the other. With all this admiration, however, he seems unable to regard him without misgiving, for his audacious confidence, checked by no thought of renunciation or tremor of modesty, amazed him as much as his ability. In this respect he says Lassalle is a genuine son of the modern time, to which Varnhagen and himself had acted in a way as the midwives, but on which they could only look like the hen that hatched duck's eggs and shuddered to see how her brood took to the water and swam about delighted. Heine here puts his finger on the secret of his young friend's failure. Lassalle would have been a great man if he had more of the ordinary restraining perceptions, but he had neither fear nor awe, nor even--in spite of his vein of satire--a wholesome sense of the ridiculous,--in this last respect resembling, if we believe Carlyle, all Jews. Chivalrous, susceptible, with a genuine feeling for the poor man's case, and a genuine enthusiasm for social reform, a warm friend, a vindictive enemy, full of ambition both of the nobler and the more vulgar type, beset with an importunate vanity and given to primitive lusts; generous qualities and churlish throve and strove in him side by side, and governed or misgoverned a will to which opposition was almost a native and necessary element, and which yet--or perhaps rather, therefore--brooked no check. "Ferdinand Lassalle, thinker and fighter," is the simple epitaph Professor Boeckh put on his tomb. Thinking and fighting were the craving of his nature; thinking and fighting were the warp and woof of his actual career, mingled indeed with threads of more spurious fibre. The philosophical thinker and the political agitator are parts rarely combined in one person, but to these Lassalle added yet a third, which seems to agree with neither. He was a fashionable dandy, noted for his dress, for his dinners, and, it must be added, for his addiction to pleasure--a man apparently with little of that solidarity in his own being which he sought to introduce into society at large, and yet his public career possesses an undoubted unity. It is a mistake to represent him, as Mr. L. Montefiore has done, as a _savan_ who turned politician as if by accident and against his will, for the stir of politics was as essential to him as the absorption of study. It is a greater mistake, though a more common one, to represent him as having become a revolutionary agitator because no other political career was open to him. He felt himself, it is said, like a Cæsar out of employ, disqualified for all legitimate politics by his previous life, and he determined, if he could not bend the gods, that he would move Acheron. But so early as 1848, when yet but a lad of twenty-three, he was tried for sedition, and he then declared boldly in his defence that he was a socialist democrat, and that he was "revolutionary on principle." This he remained throughout. He laughs at those who cannot hear the word revolution without a shudder. "Revolution," he says, "means merely transformation, and is accomplished when an entirely new principle is--either with force or without it--put in the place of an existing state of things. Reform, on the other hand, is when the principle of the existing state of things is continued, and only developed to more logical or just consequences. The means do not signify. A reform may be carried out by bloodshed, and a revolution in the profoundest tranquillity. The Peasants' War was an attempt to introduce reform by arms, the invention of the spinning-jenny wrought a peaceful revolution." In this sense he was "revolutionary on principle." His thought was revolutionary, and it was the lessons he learnt as a philosopher that he applied and pled for an agitator. His thinking and his fighting belonged together like powder and shot. His Hegelianism, which he adopted as a youth at college, is from first to last the continuous source both of impetus and direction over his public career. Young Germany was Hegelian and revolutionary at the time he went to the University (1842), and with the impressionable Lassalle, then a youth of seventeen, Hegelianism became a passion. He wrote articles on it in University magazines, preached it right and left in the _cafés_ and taverns, and resolved to make philosophy his profession and establish himself as a _privat Docent_ at Berlin University. It was the first sovereign intellectual influence he came under, and it ruled his spirit to the end. In adopting it, his intellectual manhood may be said to have opened with a revolution, for his family were strict Jews, and he was brought up in their religion. Lassalle was born in 1825 at Breslau, where his father was a wholesale dealer. He was educated at the Universities of Breslau and Berlin, and at the latter city saw, through the Mendelssohns, a good deal of the best literary society there, and made the acquaintance, among others, of Alexander von Humboldt, who used to call him a _Wunderkind_. On finishing his curriculum, he went for a time to Paris, and formed there a close friendship with H. Heine, who was an old acquaintance of his family. He meant to qualify himself as _privat Docent_ when he returned, but was diverted from his purpose by the task of redressing a woman's wrongs, into which he flew with the romantic enterprise of a knight-errant, and which he carried, through years of patient and zealous labour, to a successful issue. The Countess Hatzfeldt had been married when a girl of sixteen to a cousin of her own, one of the great nobles of Germany; but the marriage turned out most unhappily after a few years, and she was obliged, on account of the maltreatment she suffered, to live apart from her husband. His persecution followed her into her separation. He took child after child from her, and was now seeking to take the last she had left, her youngest son. He allowed her very scanty and irregular support, while he lavished his money on mistresses, and was, at this very moment, settling on one of them an annuity of £1,000. This state of things had continued for twenty years, and the Countess's own relations had, for family reasons, always declined to take up her case. Lassalle, who had made her acquaintance in Berlin, was profoundly touched by her story, and felt that she was suffering an intolerable wrong, which society permitted only because she was a woman, and her husband a lord. Though not a lawyer, he resolved to undertake her case, and after carrying the suit before thirty-six different courts, during a period of eight years, he at length procured for her a divorce in 1851, and a princely fortune in 1854, from which she rewarded him with a considerable annuity for his exertions. Lassalle's connection with this case not unnaturally gave rise to sinister construction. It was supposed he must have been in love with the Countess, and wanted to marry her, but this was disproved by the event. Darker insinuations were made, but had there been truth in them, it could not have escaped the spies the Count sent to watch him, and the servants the Count bribed to inform on him. Chivalry, vanity, and temerity at the season of life when all three qualities are at their height, account sufficiently for his whole conduct, and I see no reason to doubt the explanation he himself gives of it. "Her family," he states, "were silent, but it is said when men keep silence the stones will speak. When every human right is violated, when even the voice of blood is mute, and helpless man is forsaken by his born protectors, there then rises with right man's first and last relation--man. You have all read with emotion the monstrous history of the unhappy Duchess of Praslin. Who is there among you that would not have gone to the death to defend her? Well, gentlemen, I said to myself, here is Praslin ten times over. What is the sharp death-agony of an hour compared with the pangs of death protracted over twenty years? What are the wounds a knife inflicts compared with the slow murder dispensed with refined cruelty throughout a being's whole existence? What are they compared with the immense woe of this woman, every right of whose life has been trampled under foot, day after day, for twenty years, and whom they have first tried to cover with contempt, that they might then the more securely overwhelm her with punishment?... The difficulties, the sacrifices, the dangers did not deter me. I determined to meet false appearances with the truth, to meet rank with right, to meet the power of money with the power of mind. But if I had known what infamous calumnies I should have to encounter, how people turned the purest motives into their contraries, and what ready credence they gave to the most wretched lies--well, I hope my purpose would not have been changed, but it would have cost me a severe and bitter struggle." There seems almost something unmodern in the whole circumstances of this case, both in the oppression the victim endured, and in the manner of her rescue. In the course of this suit occurred the robbery of Baroness von Meyerdorff's _cassette_, on which so much has been said. The Baroness was the person already mentioned on whom Count Hatzfeldt bestowed the annuity of £1,000. The Countess, on hearing of this settlement, went straight to her husband, accompanied by a clergyman, and insisted upon him cancelling it, in justice to his youngest son, whom it would have impoverished. The Count at first promised to do so, but after her departure, refused, and the Baroness set out for Aix to get her bond effectually secured. Lassalle suspected the object of her journey, and said to the Countess, in the presence of two young friends, Could we not obtain possession of this bond? No sooner said than done. The two young men started for Cologne, and one of them stole the Baroness's _cassette_, containing the veritable deed, in her hotel, and gave it to the other. They and Lassalle were all three successively tried for their part in this crime. Oppenheim, who actually stole the _cassette_, was acquitted; Mendelssohn, who only received it, was sent to prison; and Lassalle, who certainly suggested the deed, was found guilty by the jury, but acquitted by the judges. Moral complicity of some sort was clear, but it did not amount to a legal crime. Our interest with the transaction is merely to discover the light it reflects on the character of the man. It was a rash, foolish, and lawless freak, but of course the ordinary motives of the robber were absent. The theft of the _cassette_, however, was a transaction which his enemies never suffered to be forgotten. The theft of the _cassette_ occurred in 1846; Lassalle was tried for it in 1848, and was no sooner released than he fell into the hands of justice on a much more serious charge. The dissolution of the first Prussian National Assembly in 1848, and the gift of a Constitution by direct royal decree, had excited bitter disappointment and opposition over the whole country. There was a general agitation for combining to stop supplies by refusing to pay taxes, in order thus "to meet force with force," and this agitation was particularly active in the Rhine provinces, where democratic views had found much favour. Lassalle even planned an insurrection, and urged the citizens of Dusseldorf to armed resistance; but the Prussian Government promptly intervened, placed the town under a state of siege, and threw Lassalle into jail. He was tried in 1849 for treason, and acquitted by the jury, but was immediately afterwards brought before a correctional tribunal on the minor charge of resisting officers of the police, and sent to prison for six months. It was in his speech at the former of these trials that he declared himself a partisan of the Socialist Democratic Republic, and claimed for every citizen the right and duty of active resistance to the State when necessary. He had nothing but scorn to pour on the passive resistance policy of the Parliament. "Passive resistance is a contradiction in itself. It is like Lichtenberg's knife, without blade, and without handle, or like the fleece which one must wash without wetting. It is mere inward ill-will without the outward deed. The Crown confiscates the people's freedom; and the Prussian National Assembly, for the people's protection, declares ill-will; it would be unintelligible how the commonest logic should have allowed a legislative assembly to cover itself with such incomparable ridicule if it were not too intelligible." These are bold words. He felt himself standing on a principle and representing a cause; and so he went into prison, he tells us, with as light a heart as he would have gone to a ball; and when he heard that his sister had petitioned for his pardon, he wrote instantly and publicly disclaimed her letter. All these trials had brought Lassalle into considerable notoriety, not unmingled with a due recognition of his undoubted _verve_, eloquence, and brilliancy. One effect of them was that he was forbidden to come to Berlin. This prohibition was founded, of course, on his seditious work at Dusseldorf, but is believed to have been instigated and kept up by the influence of the Hatzfeldt family. Lassalle felt it a sore privation, for his ambitions and hopes all centred in Berlin. After various ineffectual attempts to obtain permission, he arrived in the capital one day in 1857 disguised as a waggoner, and through the personal intercession of Alexander von Humboldt with the king, was at length suffered to remain. His "Heraclitus" had just appeared, and at once secured him a position in literary circles. One of his first productions after his return to Berlin was a pamphlet on "The Italian War and the Mission of Prussia; a Voice from the Democracy," which shows that his political prosecutions had not soured him against Prussia. His argument is that freedom and democracy must in Germany, as in Italy, be first preceded by unity, and that the only power capable of giving unity to Germany was Prussia, as to Italy, Piedmont. He had more of the political mind than most revolutionaries and doctrinaires, and knew that the better might be made the enemy of the good, and that ideals could only be carried out gradually, and by temporary compromises. He was monarchical for the present, therefore, no doubt because he thought the monarchy to be for the time the best and shortest road to the democratic republic. His friend Rodbertus said there was an esoteric and an exoteric Lassalle. That may be said of all politicians. Compromise is of the essence of their work. During the next few years Lassalle's literary activity was considerable. Besides a tragedy of no merit ("Franz von Sickingen," 1859) and various pamphlets or lectures on Fichte, on Lessing, on the Constitution, on Might and Right, he published in 1861 the most important work he has left us, his "System of Acquired Rights," and in 1862 a satirical commentary on Julian Schmidt's "History of German Literature," which excited much attention and amusement at the time. His "System of Acquired Rights" already contains the germs of his socialist views, and his pamphlet on the Constitution, which appeared when the "new era" ended and the era of Bismarck began, is written to disparage the Constitutionalism of modern Liberals. A paper constitution was a thing of no consequence; it was merely declarative, not creative; the thing of real account was the distribution of power as it existed in actual fact. The king and army were powers, the court and nobility were powers, the populace was a power. Society was governed by the relative strength of these powers, as it existed in reality and not by the paper constitution that merely chronicled it. Right is regarded as merely declarative of might. It is thus easy to see why he should have more sympathy with the policy of Bismarck than with the Liberals; and later in the same year he expounded his own political position very completely in a lecture he delivered to a Working Men's Society in Berlin, on "The Connection between the Present Epoch of History and the Idea of the Working Class." This lecture, to which I shall again revert, was an epoch in his own career. It led to a second Government prosecution, and a second imprisonment for political reasons; and it and the prosecution together led to his receiving an invitation to address a General Working Men's Congress at Leipzig, in February, 1863, to which he responded by a letter, sketching the political programme of the working class, which was certainly the first step in the socialist movement. Attention was already being engaged on the work of industrial amelioration. The Progressist party, then including the present National Liberals, had, under the lead of Schultze-Delitzsch, been promoting trades unions and co-operation in an experimental way, and the working classes themselves were beginning to think of taking more concerted action for their own improvement. The Leipzig Congress was projected by a circle of working men, who considered the Schultze-Delitzsch schemes inadequate to meet the case. This was exactly Lassalle's view. He begins his letter by telling the working men that if all they wanted was to mitigate some of the positive evils of their lot, then the Schultze-Delitzsch unions, savings banks, and sick funds were quite sufficient, and there was no need of thinking of anything more. But if their aim was to elevate the _normal_ condition of their class, then more drastic remedies were requisite; and, in the first instance, a political agitation was indispensable. The Leipzig working men had discussed the question of their relation to politics at a previous congress a few months before, and had been divided between abstaining from politics altogether, and supporting the Progressist party. Lassalle disapproved of both these courses. They could never achieve the elevation they desired till they got universal suffrage, and they would never get universal suffrage by backing the Progressists who were opposed to it. He then explains to them how their normal condition is permanently depressed at present by the essential laws of the existing economic _régime_, especially by "the iron and cruel law of necessary wages." The only real cure was co-operative production, the substitution of associated labour for wage labour; for it was only so the operation of this tyrannical law of wages could be escaped. Now co-operative production, to be of any effective extent, must be introduced by State help and on State credit. The State gave advances to start railways, to develop agriculture, to promote manufactures, and nobody called it socialism to do so. Why, then, should people cry socialism if the State did a similar service to the great working class, who were, in fact, not a class, but the State itself. 96½ per cent. of the population were ground down by "the iron law," and could not possibly lift themselves above it by their own power. They must ask the State to help them, for they were themselves the State, and the help of the State was no more a superseding of their own self-help than reaching a man a ladder superseded his own climbing. State help was but self-help's means. Now these State advances could not be expected till the working class acquired political power by universal suffrage. Their first duty was therefore to organize themselves and agitate for universal suffrage; for universal suffrage was a question of the stomach. The reception his letter met with at first was most discouraging. The newspapers with one consent condemned it, except a Feudalist organ here and there who saw in it an instrument for damaging the Liberals. What seemed more ominous was the opposition of the working men themselves. The Leipzig Committee to whom it was addressed did indeed approve of it, and individual voices were raised in its favour elsewhere, but in Berlin the working men's clubs rejected it with decided warmth, and all over the country one working men's club after another declared against it. Leipzig was the only place in which his words seemed to find any echo, and he went there two months later and addressed a meeting at which only 7 out of 1,300 voted against him. With this encouragement he resolved to go forward, and founded, on the 23rd of May, 1863, the General Working Men's Association for the promotion of universal suffrage by peaceful agitation, after the model of the English Anti-Corn Law League. He immediately threw himself with unsparing energy into the development of this organization. He passed from place to place, delivering speeches, establishing branches; he started newspapers, wrote pamphlets, and even larger works, published tracts by Rodbertus, songs by Herwegh, romances by Von Schweitzer. But it was uphill work. South Germany was evidently dead to his ideas, and even among those who followed him in the North there were but few who really understood his doctrines or concurred in his methods. Some were for more "heroic" procedure, for raising fighting corps to free Poland, to free Schleswig-Holstein, to free oppressed nationalities anywhere. Many were perfectly impracticable persons who knew neither why exactly they had come together, nor where exactly they would like to go. There were constant quarrels and rivalries and jealousies among them, and he is said to have shown remarkable tact and patience, and a genuine governing faculty in dealing with them. Lassalle's hope was to obtain a membership of 100,000: with a smaller number nothing could be done, but with 100,000 the movement would be a power. In August, 1863, he had only enrolled 1,000 after three months' energetic labour, which, he said, "would have produced colossal results among a people like the French." He was intensely disappointed, and asked, "When will this foolish people cast aside their lethargy?" but meanwhile repelled the suggestion of the secretary of the organization that it should be at once dissolved. In August, 1864, another year's strenuous work had raised their numbers only to 4,610, and Lassalle was completely disenchanted, and wrote Countess Hatzfeldt from Switzerland, shortly before his death, that he was continuing President of the Association much against his will, for he was now tired of politics, which was mere child's play if one had not power. He seems to have been convinced that the movement was a failure, and would never become a force in the State. Yet he was wrong; his words had really taken fire among the working classes, and kindled a movement which, in its curious history, has shown the remarkable power of spreading faster with the checks it encounters. It seems to have profited, not merely from political measures of repression, but even from the internal dissensions and divisions of its own adherents, and some persons tell us that it was first stimulated into decided vigour by the fatal event which might have been expected to crush it--the sudden and tragical death of its chief. In the end of July, 1864, Lassalle went to Switzerland ostensibly for the Righi whey cure, but really to make the acquaintance of Herr von Dönnigsen, Bavarian Envoy at Berne, whose daughter he had known in Berlin, and wished to obtain in marriage. It is one of the fatalities that entangled this man's life in strange contradictions, that exactly he, a _persona ingratissima_ to Court circles, their very arch-enemy, as they believed, should have become bound by deep mutual attachment with the daughter of exactly a German diplomatist, the courtliest of the courtly, a Conservative seven times refined. They certainly cherished for one another a sincere, and latterly a passionate affection, and they seem to have been well fitted for each other. Helena von Dönnigsen was a bright, keen-witted, eccentric, adventurous young woman of twenty-five, and so like Lassalle, even in appearance, that when she was acting a man's part, years afterwards (in 1874), in some amateur performance in the theatre of Breslau, Lassalle's native town, many of the audience said, here was Lassalle again as he was when a boy. Learning from a common friend in Berlin that Lassalle was at the Righi, she made a visit to some friends in Berne, and soon after accompanied them on an excursion to that "popular" mountain. She inquired for Lassalle at the hotel, and he joined the party to the summit. She knew her parents would be opposed to the match, but felt certain that her lover, with his gifts and charms, would be able to win them over, and it was accordingly agreed that when she returned to Geneva, Lassalle should go there too, and press his suit in person. The parents, however, were inexorable, and refused to see him; and the young lady in despair fled from her father's house to her lover's lodging, and urged him to elope with her. Lassalle calmly led her back to her father's roof, with a control which some writers think quite inexplicable in him, but which was probably due to his still believing that he would be able to talk the parents round if he got the chance, and to his desire to try constitutional means before resorting to revolutionary. Helena was locked in her room for days alone with her excited brain and panting heart. For days, father, mother, sister, brother, all came and laid before her what ruin she was bringing on the family for a mere selfish whim of her own. If she married a man so objectionable to people in power, her father would be obliged to resign his post, her brother could never look for one, and her sister, who had just been engaged to a Count, would, of course, have to give up her engagement. She was in despair, but ultimately submitted passively to write to Lassalle, desiring him to consider the matter ended, and submitted equally passively (for she informs us herself) to accept the hand of Herr von Racowitza, a young Wallachian Boyar, whom she had indeed been previously engaged to, and sincerely liked and respected, without in the eminent sense loving him. Lassalle had meanwhile wrought himself into a fury of excitement. Enraged by her parents' opposition, enraged still more by their refusal even to treat with him, enraged above all by his belief that their daughter was being illegitimately constrained, he wrote here, wrote there, tried to get the foreign minister at Munich to interfere, to get Bishop Ketteler to use his influence, promised even to turn Catholic to please the Dönnigsens, forgetting that they were Protestants. All in vain. At last two of his friends waited by appointment on Herr von Dönnigsen, and heard from Helena's own lips that she was to be married to the Boyar, and wished the subject no more mentioned. She now tells us that she did this in sheer weariness of mind, and with a confused hope that somehow or other the present storm would blow past, and she might have her Lassalle after all. Lassalle, however, was overcome with chagrin; and though he always held that a democrat should not fight duels, and had got Robespierre's stick, which he usually carried, as a present for having declined one, he now sent a challenge both to the father and the bridegroom. The latter accepted. The duel was fought. Lassalle was fatally wounded, and died two days after, on the 31st August, 1864, at the age of 39. Helena married Herr von Racowitza shortly afterwards, but he was already seized with consumption, and she says she found great comfort, after the tumult and excitement of the Lassalle episode, in nursing him during the few months he lived after their marriage. The body was sent back to Germany, after funeral orations from revolutionists of all countries and colours, and the Countess Hatzfeldt had made arrangements for similar funeral celebrations at every halting place along the route to Berlin, where she meant it to be buried, but at Cologne it was intercepted by the police on behalf of the Lassalle family, and carried quietly to Breslau, where, after life's fitful fever, he was laid silently with his fathers in the Jewish burying-ground of his native place. Fate, however, had not even yet done with him. It followed him beyond the tomb to throw one more element of the bizarre into his strangely compounded history. Lest the death of the leader should prove fatal to the cause, the Committee of the General Working Men's Association determined to turn it, if possible, into a source of strength, as B. Becker, his successor in the president's chair, informs us, "by carrying it into the domain of faith." Lassalle was not dead, but only translated to a higher and surer leadership. A Lassalle _cultus_ was instituted, and Becker says that many a German working man believed that he died for them, and that he was yet to come again to save them. This singular apotheosis, which is neither creditable to the honesty of the leaders of the socialist movement, nor to the intelligence of its rank and file, was kept up by periodical celebrations among those of the German socialists who are generally known as the orthodox Lassalleans, down, at least, to the time of the Anti-Socialist Law of 1878. Lassalle's doctrines are mainly contained in his lecture on "The Present Age and the Idea of the Working Class," which he delivered in 1862, and published in 1863, under the title of the "Working Men's Programme," and in his "Herr Bastiat-Schultze von Delitzsch, der Oekonomische Julian; oder Capital und Arbeit," Berlin, 1864. In the "Working Men's Programme," the question of the emancipation of the working class is approached and contemplated from the standpoint of the Hegelian philosophy of history. There are, it declares, three successive stages of evolution in modern history. First, the period before 1789, the feudal period, when all public power was vested in, exercised by, and employed for the benefit of, the landed class. It was a period of privileges and exemptions, which were enjoyed by the landed interests exclusively, and there prevailed a strong social contempt for all labour and employment not connected with the land. Second, the period 1789-1848, the _bourgeois_ period, in which personal estate received equal rights and recognition with real, but in which political power was still based on property qualifications, and legislation was governed by the interests of the _bourgeoisie_. Third, the period since 1848, the age of the working class, which is, however, only yet struggling to the birth and to legal recognition. The characteristic of this new period is, that it will for the first time give labour its rights, and that it will be dominated by the ideas, aspirations, and interests of the great labouring class. Their time has already come, and the _bourgeois_ age is already past in fact, though it still lingers in law. It is always so. The feudal period had in reality come to an end before the Revolution. A revolution is always declarative and never creative. It takes place first in the heart of society, and is only sealed and ratified by the outbreak. "It is impossible to make a revolution, it is possible only to give external legal sanction and effect to a revolution already contained in the actual circumstances of society.... To seek to make a revolution is the folly of immature men who have no consideration for the laws of history; and for the same reason it is immature and puerile to try to stem a revolution that has already completed itself in the interior of society. If a revolution exists in fact, it cannot possibly be prevented from ultimately existing in law." It is idle, too, to reproach those who desire to effect this transition with being revolutionary. They are merely midwives who assist in bringing to the birth a future with which society is already pregnant. Now, it is this midwife service that Lassalle believed the working class at present required. He says of the fourth estate what Sieyès said of the third, What is the fourth estate? Nothing? What ought the fourth estate to be? Everything. And it ought to be so in law, because it is so already in fact. The _bourgeoisie_, in overthrowing the privileges of the feudal class, had almost immediately become a privileged class itself. At so early a period of the revolution as the 3rd of September, 1791, a distinction was introduced between active and passive citizens. The active citizen was the citizen who paid direct taxes, and had therefore a right to vote; the passive citizen was he who paid no direct taxes, and had no right to vote. The effect of this distinction was to exclude the whole labouring classes from the franchise; and under the July Monarchy, while the real nation consisted of some thirty millions, the legal nation (_pays légal_), the people legally possessed of political rights, amounted to no more than 200,000, whom the Government found it only too easy to manage and corrupt. The revolution of 1848 was simply a revolt against this injustice. It was a revolt of the fourth estate against the privileges of the third, as the first revolution was a revolt of the third against the privileges of the other two. Nor were the privileges which the _bourgeoisie_ had contrived to acquire confined to political rights alone; they included also fiscal exemptions. According to the latest statistical returns, it appeared that five-sixths of the revenue of Prussia came from indirect taxation, and indirect taxes were always taken disproportionately out of the pockets of the working class. A man might be twenty times richer than another, but he did not therefore consume twenty times the amount of bread, salt, or beer. Taxation ought to be in ratio of means, and indirect taxation--so much favoured by the _bourgeoisie_--was simply an expedient for saving the rich at the expense of the poor. Now, the revolution of 1848 was a fight for the emancipation of the working class from this unequal distribution of political rights and burdens. The working class was really not a class at all, but was the nation; and the aim of the State should be their amelioration. "What is the State?" asks Lassalle. "You are the State," he replies. "You are ninety-six per cent. of the population. All political power ought to be of you, and through you, and for you; and your good and amelioration ought to be the aim of the State. It ought to be so, because your good is not a class interest, but is the national interest." The fourth estate differs from the feudal interest, and differs from the _bourgeoisie_, not merely in that it is not a privileged class, but in that it cannot possibly become one. It cannot degenerate, as the _bourgeoisie_ had done, into a privileged and exclusive caste; because, consisting as it does of the great body of the people, its class interest and the common good are identical, or at least harmonious. "Your affair is the affair of mankind; your personal interest moves and beats with the pulse of history, with the living principle of moral development." Such then is the idea of the working class, which is, or is destined to be, the ruling principle of society in the present era of the world. Its supremacy will have important consequences, both ethical and political. Ethically, the working class is less selfish than the classes above it, simply because it has no exclusive privileges to maintain. The necessity of maintaining privileges always develops an assertion of personal interest in exact proportion to the amount of privilege to be defended, and that is why the selfishness of a class constantly exceeds the individual selfishness of the members that compose it. Now under the happier _régime_ of the idea of labour, there would be no exclusive interests or privileges, and therefore less selfishness. Adam would delve and Eve would spin, and, consciously or unconsciously, each would work more for the whole, and the whole would work more for each. Politically, too, the change would be remarkable and beneficial. The working class has a quite different idea of the State and its aim from the _bourgeoisie_. The latter see no other use in the State but to protect personal freedom and property. The State is a mere night-watchman, and, if there were no thieves and robbers, would be a superfluity; its occupation would be gone. Its whole duty is exhausted when it guarantees to every individual the unimpeded exercise of his activity as far as consistent with the like right of his neighbours. Even from its own point of view this _bourgeois_ theory of the State fails to effect its purpose. Instead of securing equality of freedom, it only secures equality of right to freedom. If all men were equal in fact, this might answer well enough, but since they are not, the result is simply to place the weak at the mercy of the powerful. Now the working class have an entirely different view of the State's mission from this. They say the protection of an equality of right to freedom is an insufficient aim for the State in a morally ordered community. It ought to be supplemented by the securing of solidarity of interests and community and reciprocity of development. History all along is an incessant struggle with Nature, a victory over misery, ignorance, poverty, powerlessness--_i.e._, over unfreedom, thraldom, restrictions of all kinds. The perpetual conquest over these restrictions is the development of freedom, is the growth of culture. Now this is never effected by each man for himself. It is the function of the State to do it. The State is the union of individuals into a moral whole which multiplies a millionfold the aggregate of the powers of each. The end and function of the State is not merely to guard freedom, but to develop it; to put the individuals who compose it in a position to attain and maintain such objects, such levels of existence, such stages of culture, power, and freedom, as they would have been incapable of reaching by their own individual efforts alone. The State is the great agency for guiding and training the human race to positive and progressive development; in other words, for bringing human destiny (_i.e._, the culture of which man as man is susceptible) to real shape and form in actual existence. Not freedom, but development is now the keynote. The State must take a positive part, proportioned to its immense capacity, in the great work which, as he has said, constitutes history, and must forward man's progressive conquest over misery, ignorance, poverty, and restrictions of every sort. This is the purpose, the essence, the moral nature of the State, which she can never entirely abrogate, without ceasing to be, and which she has indeed always been obliged, by the very force of things, more or less to fulfil, often without her conscious consent, and sometimes in spite of the opposition of her leaders. In a word, the State must, by the union of all, help each to his full development. This was the earnest and noble idea of 1848. It is the idea of the new age, the age of labour, and it cannot fail to have a most important and beneficial bearing on the course of politics and legislation whenever it is permitted to have free operation in that sphere by means of universal and direct suffrage. This exposition of Lassalle's teaching in his "Working Men's Programme" already furnishes us with the transition to his economic views. Every age of the world, he held, has its own ruling idea. The idea of the working class is the ruling idea of the new epoch we have now entered on, and that idea implies that every man is entitled to a _menschenwürdiges Dasein_, to an existence worthy of his moral destiny, and that the State is bound to make this a governing consideration in its legislative and executive work. Man's destiny is to progressive civilization, and a condition of society which makes progressive civilization the exclusive property of the few, and practically debars the vast mass of the people from participation in it, stands in the present age self-condemned. It no longer corresponds to its own idea. Society has long since declared no man shall be enslaved; society has more recently declared no man shall be ignorant; society now declares no man shall be without property. He cannot be really free without property any more than he can be really free without knowledge. He has been released successively from a state of legal dependence and from a state of intellectual dependence; he must now be released from a state of economic dependence. This is his final emancipation, which is necessary to enable him to reap any fruits from the other two, and it cannot take place without a complete transformation of present industrial arrangements. It is a common mistake, he said, to think that socialists take their stand on equality. They really take their stand on freedom. They argue that the positive side of freedom is development, and if every man has a right to freedom, then every man has a right to the possibility of development. From this right, however, they allege the existing industrial system absolutely excludes the great majority. The freeman cannot realize his freedom, the individual cannot realize his individuality, without a certain external economic basis of work and enjoyment, and the best way to furnish him with this is to clothe him in various ways with collective property. Lassalle's argument, however, is still more specific than this. In the beginning of his "Herr Bastiat-Schultze," he quotes a passage from his previous work on "The System of Acquired Rights," which he informs us he had intended to expand into a systematic treatise on "The Principles of Scientific National Economy." This intention he was actually preparing to fulfil when the Leipzig invitation and letter diverted him at once into practical agitation. He regrets that circumstances had thus not permitted the practical agitation to be preceded by the theoretical codex which should be the basis for it, but adds that the substance of his theory is contained in this polemic against Schultze-Delitzsch, though the form of its exposition is considerably modified by his plan of following the ideas of Schultze's "Working Men's Catechism," and by his purpose of answering Schultze's misplaced taunt of "half knowledge" by trying to extinguish the economic pretensions of the latter as completely as he had done the literary pretensions of Julian Schmidt. "Every line I write," says Lassalle, with a characteristic finality of self-confidence, "I write armed with the whole culture of my century"; and at any rate Schultze-Delitzsch was far his inferior in economic as in other knowledge. In the passage to which I have referred, Lassalle says, "The world is now face to face with a new social question, the question whether, since there is no longer any property in the immediate use of another man, there should still exist property in his mediate exploitation--_i.e._, whether the free realization and development of one's power and labour should be the exclusive private property of the owner of the instruments and advances necessary for labour--_i.e._, of capital; and whether the employer as such, and apart from the remuneration of his own intellectual labour of management, should be permitted to have property in the value of other people's labour--_i.e._, whether he ought to receive what is known as the premium or profit of capital, consisting of the difference between the selling price of the product and the sum of the wages and salaries of all kinds of labour, manual and mental, that have contributed to its production." His standing-point here, again, as always, belongs to the philosophy of history--to the idea of historical evolution with which his Hegelianism had early penetrated him. The course of legal history has been one of gradual but steady contraction of the sphere of private property in the interests of personal freedom and development. The ancient system of slavery, under which the labourer was the absolute and complete property of his master, was followed by the feudal system of servitudes, under which he was still only partially proprietor of himself, but was bound by law to a particular lord by one or more of a most manifold series of specific services. These systems have been successively abolished. There is no longer property in man or in the use of man. No man can now be either inherited or sold in whole or in part. He is his own, and his power of labour is his own. But he is still far from being in full possession of himself or of his labour. He cannot work without materials to work on and instruments to work with, and for these the modern labourer is more dependent than ever labourer was before on the private owners in whose hands they have accumulated. And the consequence is that under existing industrial arrangements the modern labourer has no more individual property in his labour than the ancient slave had. He is obliged to part with the whole value of his labour, and content himself with bare subsistence in return. It is in this sense that socialist writers maintain property to be theft--not that subjectively the proprietors are thieves, but that objectively, under the exigencies of a system of competition, they cannot help offering workmen, and workmen cannot help accepting, wages far under the true value of their labour. Labour is the source of all wealth, for the value of anything--that which makes it wealth--is, on the economists' own showing, only another name for the amount of labour put into the making of it; and labour is the only ground on which modern opponents of socialism--Thiers and Bastiat, for example--think the right of individual property can be established. Yet on the methods of distribution of wealth that now exist, individual property is not founded on this its only justifiable basis, and the aim of socialists is to emancipate the system of distribution from the influence of certain unconscious forces which, as they allege, at present disturb it, and to bring back individual property for the first time to its natural and rightful foundation--labour. Their aim is not to abolish private property, but to purify it, by means of some systematic social regulation which shall give each man a share more conformable with his personal merit and contribution. Even if no question is raised about the past, it is plain that labour is every day engaged in making more new property. Millions of labouring men are, day after day, converting their own brain, muscle, and sinew into useful commodities, into value, into wealth. Now, the problem of the age, according to Lassalle, is this, whether this unmade property of the future should not become genuine labour property, and its value remain greatly more than at present in the hands that actually produced it. This, he holds, can only be done by a fundamental reconstruction of the present industrial system, and by new methods of determining the remuneration of the labouring class. For there is a profound contradiction in the present system. It is unprecedentedly communistic in production, and unprecedentedly individualistic in distribution. Now there ought to be as real a joint participation in the product, as there is already a joint participation in the work. Capital must become the servant of labour instead of its master, profits must disappear, industry must be conducted more on the mutual instead of the proprietary principle, and the instruments of production be taken out of private hands and turned into collective or even, it may be, national property. In the old epoch, before 1789, industrial society was governed by the principle of solidarity without freedom; in the period since 1789, by freedom without solidarity, which has been even worse; in the epoch now opening, the principle must be solidarity in freedom. Partisans of the present system object to any social interference with the distribution of wealth, but they forget how much--how entirely--that distribution is even now effected by social methods. The present arrangement of property, says Lassalle, is, in fact, nothing but an anarchic and unjust socialism. How do you define socialism? he asks. Socialism is a distribution of property by social channels. Now this is the condition of things that exists to-day. There exists, under the guise of individual production, a distribution of property by means of purely objective movements of society. For there is a certain natural solidarity in things as they are, only being under no rational control, it operates as a wild natural force, as a kind of fate destroying all rational freedom and all rational responsibility in economic affairs. In a sense, there never was more solidarity than there is now; there never was so much interdependence. Under the large system of production, masses of workmen are simply so many component parts of a single great machine driven by the judgment or recklessness of an individual capitalist. With modern facilities of inter-communication, too, the trade of the world is one and indivisible. A deficient cotton harvest in America carries distress into thousands of households in Lyons, in Elberfeld, in Manchester. A discovery of gold in Australia raises all prices in Europe. A simple telegram stating that rape prospects are good in Holland instantly deprives the oilworkers of Prussia of half their wages. So far from there being any truth in the contention of Schultze-Delitzsch, that the existing system is the only sound one, because it is founded on the principle of making every man responsible for his own doings, the very opposite is the case. The present system makes every man responsible for what he does not do. In consequence of the unprecedented interconnection of modern industry, the sum of conditions needed to be known for its successful guidance have so immensely increased that rational calculation is scarcely possible, and men are enriched without any merit, and impoverished without any fault. According to Lassalle, in the absence as yet of an adequate system of commercial statistics, the number of known conditions is always much smaller than the number of unknown, and the consequence is, that trade is very much a game of chance. Everything in modern industrial economy is ruled by social connections, by favourable or unfavourable situations and opportunities. _Conjunctur_ is its great Orphic chain. Chance is its Providence--Chance and his sole and equally blind counsellor, Speculation. Every age and condition of society, says Lassalle, tends to develop some phenomenon that more particularly expresses its type and spirit, and the purest type of capitalistic society is the financial speculator. Capital, he maintains, is a historical and not a logical category, and the capitalist is a modern product. He is the development, not of the ancient Croesus or the mediæval lord, but of the usurer, who has taken their place, but was in their lifetime hardly a respectable person. Croesus was a very rich man, but he was not a capitalist, for he could do anything with his wealth except capitalize it. The idea of money making money and of capital being self-productive, which Lassalle takes to be the governing idea of the present order of things, was, he says, quite foreign to earlier periods. Industry is now entirely under the control of capitalists speculating for profit. No one now makes things first of all for his own use--as mythologizing economists relate--and then exchanges what is over for the like redundant work of his neighbours. Men make everything first of all, and last of all, for other people's use, and they make it at the direction and expense of a capitalist who is speculating for money, and, in the absence of systematic statistics, is speculating in the dark. Chance and social connections make him rich, chance and social connections bring him to ruin. Capital is not the result of saving, it is the result of _Conjunctur_; and so are the vicissitudes and crises that have so immensely increased in modern times. What you have now, therefore, says Lassalle, is a system of socialism; wealth is at present distributed by social means, and by nothing else; and all he contends for is, as he says, to substitute a regulated and rational socialism for this anarchic and natural socialism that now exists. His charge against the present system, however, is more than that it is anarchic; he maintains it to be unjust--organically and hopelessly unjust. The labourer's back is the green table on which the whole game is played, and all losses are in the end sustained by him. A slightly unfavourable turn of things sends him at once into want, while even a considerably favourable one brings him no corresponding advantage, for, according to all economists, wages are always the last thing to rise with a reviving trade. The present system is, in fact, incapable of doing the labourer justice, and would not suffer employers to do so even if they wished. Injustice is bred in its very bone and blood. In this contention Lassalle builds his whole argument on premises drawn from the accepted economic authorities. Socialist economics, he says, is nothing but a battle against Ricardo, whom he describes as the last and most representative development of _bourgeois_ economics; and it fights the battle with Ricardo's own weapons, and on Ricardo's own ground. There are two principles in particular of which it makes much use--Ricardo's law of value and Ricardo's law of natural or necessary wages. Ricardo's law of value is that the value of a commodity, or the quantity of any other commodity for which it will exchange, depends on the relative quantity of labour which is necessary for its production, and not on the greater or less compensation which is paid for that labour. Value is thus resolved into so much labour, or what is the same thing, so much time consumed in labour, mental and manual, upon the commodity. This reduction of value to quantity of time is reckoned by Lassalle the one great merit of Ricardo and the English economists. Ricardo, however, strictly limited his law to commodities that admitted of indefinite multiplication, the value of other commodities being, he held, regulated by their scarcity; and he confined it to the normal value of the commodities only, the fluctuations of their market-price depending on other considerations. But Lassalle seeks to make it cover these cases also by means of a distinction he draws between individual time of labour, and socially necessary time of labour. According to this distinction, what constitutes the value of a product is not the time actually taken or required by the person who made it; for he may have been indolent or slow, or may not have used the means and appliances which the age he lived in afforded him. What constitutes value is the average time of labour socially necessary, the time required by labour of average efficiency using the methods the age supplies. If the commodity can be produced in an hour, an hour's work will be its value, though you have taken ten to produce it by slower methods. So far there is nothing very remarkable, but Lassalle goes on to argue that you may waste your time not merely by using methods that society has superseded, but by producing commodities that society no longer wants. You go on making shoe-buckles after they have gone out of fashion, and you can get nothing for them. They have no value. And why? Because, while they indeed represent labour, they do not represent socially necessary labour. So again with over-production: you may produce a greater amount of a commodity than society requires at the time. The value of the commodity falls. Why? Because while it has cost as much actual labour as before, it has not cost so much socially necessary labour. In fact, the labour it has taken has been socially unnecessary, for there was no demand for the product. On the other hand--and we are entitled to make this expansion of Lassalle's argument--take the case of under-production, of deficient supply. Prices rise. What is usually known as a scarcity value is conferred on commodities. But this scarcity value Lassalle converts into a labour value; the commodity is produced by the same individual labour, but the labour is more socially necessary. In plain English, there is more demand for the product. Lassalle's distinction is thus an ingenious invention for expressing rarity value in terms of labour value. It has no theoretical importance, but is of some practical service in the socialistic argument. That argument is not that value is constituted by labour pure and simple, but by labour modified by certain general conditions of society; only it holds that these conditions--conditions of productivity, of rarity, of demand--have been created by nobody in particular, that, therefore, nobody in particular should profit by them, and that so far as the problem of the distribution of value goes, the one factor in the constitution of value which needs to be taken into account in settling that problem, is labour. All value comes from labour, represents so much time of labour, is, in fact, so much "labour-jelly," so much preserved labour. While one accepted economic law thus declares that all value is conferred by the labourer, and is simply his sweat, brain, and sinew incorporated in the product, another economic law declares that he gains no advantage from the productivity of his own work, and that whatever value he produces, he earns only the same wages--bare customary subsistence. In that lies the alleged injustice of the present system. Von Thuenen, the famous Feudalist landowner and economic experimentalist, said, many years ago, that when the modern working class once began to ask the question, What is natural wages? a revolution might arise which would reduce Europe to barbarism. This is the question Lassalle asked, and by which mainly he stirred up socialism. The effect of the previous argument was to raise the question, What is the labourer entitled to get? and to suggest the answer, he is entitled to get everything. The next question is, What, then, does the labourer actually get? and the answer is, that on the economists' own showing, he gets just enough to keep soul and body together, and on the present system can never get any more. Ricardo, in common with other economists, had taught that the value of labour, like the value of everything else, was determined by the cost of its production, and that the cost of the production of labour meant the cost of the labourer's subsistence according to the standard of living customary among his class at the time. Wages might rise for a season above this level, or fall for a season below it, but they always tended to return to it again, and would not permanently settle anywhere else. When they rose higher, the labouring class were encouraged by their increased prosperity to marry, and eventually their numbers were thus multiplied to such a degree that by the force of ordinary competition the rate of wages was brought down again; when they fell lower, marriages diminished and mortality increased among the working class, and the result was such a reduction of their numbers as to raise the rate of wages again to its old level. This is the economic law of natural or necessary wages--"the iron and cruel law" which Lassalle declared absolutely precluded the wage-labourers--_i.e._, 96 per cent. of the population--from all possibility of ever improving their condition or benefiting in the least from the growing productivity of their own work. This law converted industrial freedom into an aggravated slavery. The labourer was unmanned, taken out of a relationship which, with all its faults, was still a human and personal one, put under an impersonal and remorseless economic law, sent like a commodity to be bought in the cheapest market, and there dispossessed by main force of competition of the value of the property which his own hands had made. _Das Eigenthum ist Fremdthum geworden._ It is no wonder that teaching like this should move the minds of working men to an intolerable sense of despair and wrong. Nor was there any possibility of hope except in a revolution. For the injustice complained of lay in the essence of the existing economic system, and could not be removed, except with the complete abolition of the system. The only solution of the question, therefore, was a socialistic reconstruction which should make the instruments of production collective property, and subordinate capital to labour, but such a solution would of course be the work of generations, and meanwhile, the easiest method of transition from the old order of things to the new, lay in establishing productive associations of working men on State credit. These would form the living seed-corn of the new era. This was just Louis Blanc's scheme, with two differences--viz., that the associations were to be formed gradually, and that they were to be formed voluntarily. The State was not asked to introduce a new organization of labour by force all at once, but merely to lend capital at interest to one sound and likely association after another, as they successively claimed its aid. This loan was not to be gratuitous, as the French socialists used to demand in 1848, and since there would be eventually only one association of the same trade in each town, and since, besides, they would also establish a system of mutual assurance against loss, trade by trade, the State, it was urged, would really incur no risk. Lassalle, speaking of State help, said he did not want a hand from the State, but only a little finger, and he actually sought, in the first instance at least, no more than Mr. Gladstone gave in the Irish Land Act. The scheme was mainly urged, of course, in the interests of a sounder distribution of wealth; but Lassalle contended that it would also increase production; and it is important to remember that he says it would not otherwise be economically justifiable, because "an increase of production is an indispensable condition of every improvement of our social state." This increase would be effected by a saving of cost, in abolishing local competition, doing away with middle-men and private capitalists, and adapting production better to needs. The business books of the association would form the basis of a sound and trustworthy system of commercial statistics, so much required for the purpose of avoiding over-production. The change would, he thought, also introduce favourable alterations in consumption, and in the direction of production; inasmuch as the taste of the working class for the substantial and the beautiful, would more and more supplant the taste of the _bourgeoisie_ for the cheap and nasty. After the death of Lassalle, the movement he began departed somewhat from the lines on which he launched it. 1st, His plan of replacing capitalistic industry by productive associations of labourers, founded on State credit, had always seemed a mockery, or, at least, a makeshift, to many of the socialists of Germany. It would not destroy competition, for one association would still of necessity compete with another; and it would not secure to every man the right to the full product of his labour, for the members of the stronger productive associations would be able to exploit the members of the weaker as the ordinary result of their inter-competition. In other words, Lassalle's plan would not in their eyes realize the socialist claim, as that claim had been taught to them by Marx. Their claim could only be realized by the conversion of all industrial instruments into public property, and the systematic conduct of all industry by the public authority; and why not aim straight for that result, they asked, instead of first bringing in a merely transitional period of productive associations, which would, on Lassalle's own calculations, take two hundred years to create, and which might not prove transitional to the socialist state after all? Rodbertus even had gone against Lassalle on this point, because he wanted to see individual property converted into national property, and thought converting it first into joint stock property was really to prevent rather than promote the main end he had in view. Then, 2nd, Lassalle was a national, not an international socialist. He held that every country should solve its own social question for itself, and that the working-class movement was not, and should not be made, cosmopolitan. He was even--as Prince Bismarck said in Parliament, when taxed with having personal relations with him--patriotic. At least he was an intense believer in Prussia; less, however, because he was a Prussian than because Prussia was a strong State, and because he thought that strong States alone could do the world's work in Germany or elsewhere. By nationality in itself he set but little store; a nationality had a right to separate existence if it could assert it, but if it were weak and struggling, its only duty was to submit with thankfulness to annexation by a stronger power. He wished his followers, therefore, to keep aloof from the doings of other nations, and to concentrate their whole exertions upon victory at the elections in their own country and the gradual development of productive associations on national loans. This restriction of the range of the movement had from the first dissatisfied some of its adherents, especially a certain active section who hated Prussia as much as Lassalle believed in her, and after the influence of the International began to make itself felt upon the agitation in Germany, this difference of opinion gathered gradually to a head. In 1868 a motion was brought before the general meeting of the League in favour of establishing relations with the International and accepting its programme. The chief promoters of this motion were the two present leaders of the Social Democratic party in the Reichstag, Liebknecht and Bebel, and it was strongly opposed by the president of the League, Dr. von Schweitzer, an advocate in Frankfort, and a strong champion of Prussia, who was elected to the presidency in 1866, just at the time the extension of the suffrage gave a fresh impetus to the movement, and whose energy and gifts of management contributed greatly to the development of the organization. The motion was carried by a substantial majority, but before next year Von Schweitzer had succeeded in turning the tables on his opponents, and at the general meeting in 1869, Liebknecht and Bebel were expelled from the League, as traitors to the labourers' cause. After their expulsion they called together in the same year a congress of working men at Eisenach, which was attended mainly by delegates from Austria and South Germany, and founded an independent organization on the principles of the International, and under the name of the Social Democratic Labour Party of Germany. The two organizations existed side by side till 1874, when a union was effected between them at a general meeting at Gotha, and they became henceforth the Socialist Labour Party. This was the burial of the national socialism of Lassalle, for though in deference to his followers, the new programme promised in the meantime to work within national limits, it expressly recognised that the labourers' movement was international, and that the great aim to be striven after was a state of society in which every man should be obliged to share in the general labour according to his powers, and have a right to receive from the aggregate product of labour according to what was termed his rational requirements. Some "orthodox Lassalleans," as they called themselves, held aloof from this compromise, but they are too few to be of any importance. They still remain apart from the main body of German socialism, and live in such good odour with the Government, whether on account of their unimportance or of their supposed loyalty, that they were never molested by any application of the Socialist Laws which were enforced for twelve years strenuously against all other socialists. Among the causes which brought the others to so much unanimity was undoubtedly the establishment of the German Empire in 1871, which was viewed with universal aversion by socialists of every shade. On the outbreak of the war, Schweitzer and the members of the original League gave their sympathies warmly to the arms of their country, and the Social Democratic party was nearly equally divided on the subject; but after the foundation of the French Republic, they all with one consent declared that the war ought now to cease, and the socialist deputies, no matter which organization they belonged to, voted without exception against granting supplies for its continuance. They were likewise opposed to the recognition of the title of Emperor and to the constitution of the Empire, and indeed as republicans they could not be anything else. From a recollection mainly of these votes Prince Bismarck considered the movement to be unpatriotic and hostile to the Empire, and accordingly suppressed its propaganda in 1878, when its growth seemed likely to prove a serious danger to an Empire whose stability was still far from being assured by any experience of its advantages. The socialists retorted upon this policy at their congress at Wyden, Switzerland, in 1880, by striking out of their programme the limitation of proceeding by legal means, on the ground that the action of the Government having made legal means impracticable, no resource was left but to meet force by force. They thus threw aside the last shred of the practical policy of Lassalle, and stood out thenceforth as a party of international revolution. The movement could, however, hardly help becoming international; not, as some allege, because this is a peculiarity of revolutionary parties; on the contrary, other parties may also exhibit it. What, for example, was the Holy Alliance but an international league of the monarchical and aristocratic parties against the advance of popular rights? Nor is it a peculiarity of the present time only. No doubt the increased inter-communication and inter-dependence between countries now facilitates its development. There are no longer nations in Europe, said Heine, but only parties. But in reality it has always been nearly as much so as now. Any party founded on a definite general principle or interest may in any age become international, and even what may seem unpatriotic. The Protestants of France in the 16th century sought help from England, and the Jacobites of England in the 18th sought help from France; just as the German socialists of 1870 sided with the French after Sedan, and the French communists of 1871 preferred to see their country occupied by the Germans rather than governed by the "Versaillais." In all these cases the party principles were naturally international, and the party bias overcame the patriotic. Besides, the socialist is, almost by necessity of his position and principles, predisposed to discourage and condemn patriotism. Others, indeed, condemn it as well as he. Most of the great writers who revived German literature towards the beginning of this century--Lessing, Herder, Wieland, Goethe--have all disparaged it. They looked on it as a narrow and obsolete virtue, useful enough perhaps in rude times, but a hindrance to rational progress now; the modern virtue was humanity, the idea of which had just freshly burst upon their age like a new power. This consideration may no doubt to some extent weigh with socialists also, for their whole thinking is leavened with the notion of humanity, but their most immediate objection to patriotism is one of a practical nature. Their complaint used always to be that the proletarian had no country, because he was excluded from political rights. He was not a citizen, and why should he have the feelings of one? But now he has got political rights, and they still complain. He is in the country, they say, but not yet of it. He is practically excluded from its civilization, from all that makes the country worth living or fighting for. He has no country, for he is denied a man's share in the life that is going in any. Edmund Ludlow wrote over his door in exile-- "Every land is my fatherland, For all lands are my Father's." The modern socialist says, No land is my fatherland, for in none am I a son. He believes himself to be equally neglected in all, and that is precisely the severest strain that can try the patriotic sentiment. The proletarian is taught that in every country he is a slave, and that patriotism and religion only reconcile him to remaining so. Moreover, as Rodbertus has remarked, the social question itself is, in a sense, international because it is social. CHAPTER IV. KARL MARX. In opening the present chapter in the previous edition of this book, I said it was not a little remarkable that the works of Karl Marx, which had then excited considerable commotion in other European countries, were still absolutely unknown in England, though England was the country where they were written, and to whose circumstances they were, in their author's judgment, pre-eminently applicable. His principal work, "Das Kapital," is a criticism of modern industrial development as explained by English economists and exemplified in English society. It shows a rare knowledge of English economic literature, even of the most obscure writers; it goes very fully into the conditions of English labour as described in our parliamentary reports; and out of four hundred odd books it quotes, more than three hundred are English books. Its illustrations are drawn from English industrial life, and its very money allusions are stated in terms of English coin. Its chief doctrine, moreover, was an old English doctrine, familiar among the disciples of Owen; and to crown all, if the author's belief was true, England was the country ripest for its reception, for the socialist revolution, he thought, would inevitably come when the working class sunk into the condition of a proletariat, and the working class of England had been a proletariat for many years already. Yet Marx's work was not at that time (1884) translated into English, though it had been into most other European languages, and had enjoyed a very large sale even in Russia, to whose circumstances it had admittedly very little adaptation. An English translation appeared at length, however, in 1887, twenty years after the publication of the original, and a considerable edition was disposed of within a year, though the price was high. We have therefore grown more familiar of late with the name and importance of Karl Marx. Born at Trèves in 1818, the son of a Christian Jew who had a high post in the civil service, Marx was sent to the University of Bonn, towards the end of the '30s, won a considerable reputation there in philosophy and jurisprudence, determined, like Lassalle, to devote himself to the academic profession, and seemed destined for an eminently successful career, in which his subsequent marriage with the sister of the Prussian Minister of State, Von Westphalen, would certainly have facilitated his advancement. But at the University he came under the spell of Hegel, and passed, step by step, with the Extreme Left of the Hegelian school, into the philosophical, religious, and political Radicalism which finally concentrated into the Humanism of Feuerbach. Just as he had finished his curriculum, the accession of Frederick William IV. in 1840 stirred a rustle of most misplaced expectation among the Liberals of Germany, who thought the day of freedom was at length to break, and who rose with generous eagerness to the tasks to which it was to summon them. Under the influence of these hopes and feelings, Marx abandoned the professorial for an editorial life, and committed himself at the very outset of his days to a political position which compromised him hopelessly with German governments, and forced him, step by step, into a long career of revolutionary agitation and organization. He joined the staff of the _Rhenish Gazette_, which was founded at that time in Cologne by the leading Liberals of the Rhine country, including Camphausen and Hansemann, and which was the organ of the Young Hegelian, or Philosophical Radical Party, and he made so great an impression by his bold and vigorous criticism of the proceedings of the Rhenish Landtag that he was appointed editor of the newspaper in 1842. In this post he continued his attacks on the Government, and they were at once so effective and so carefully worded that a special censor was sent from Berlin to Cologne to take supervision of his articles, and when this agency proved ineffectual, the journal was suppressed by order of the Prussian Ministry in 1843. From Cologne Marx went to Paris to be a joint editor of the _Deutsche Französische Jahrbücher_ with Arnold Ruge, a leader of the Hegelian Extreme Left, who had been deprived of his professorship at the University of Halle by the Prussian Government, and whose magazine, the _Deutsche Jahrbücher_, published latterly at Leipzig to escape the Prussian authority, had just been suppressed by the Saxon. The _Deutsche Französische Jahrbücher_ were published by the well-known Julius Froebel, who had some time before given up his professorship at Zürich to edit a democratic newspaper, and open a shop for the sale of democratic literature; who professed himself a communist in Switzerland, and had written some able works, with very radical and socialistic leanings, but who seems to have gone on a different tack at the time of the Lassallean movement, for he was--as Meding shows us in his "Memoiren zur Zeitgeschichte"--the prime promoter of the ill-fated Congress of Princes at Frankfort in 1865. The new magazine was intended to be a continuation of the suppressed _Deutsche Jahrbücher_, on a more extended plan, embracing French as well as German contributors, and supplying in some sort a means of uniting the Extreme Left of both nations; but no French contribution ever appeared in it, and it ceased altogether in a year's time, probably for commercial reasons, though there is no unlikelihood in the allegation sometimes made, that it was stopped in consequence of a difference between the editors as to the treatment of the question of communism. The Young Hegelians had already begun to take the keenest interest in that question, but were, for a time, curiously perplexed as to the attitude they should assume towards it. They seem to have been fascinated and repelled by turns by the system, and to have been equally unable to cast it aside or to commit themselves fairly to it. Karl Grün, himself a Young Hegelian, says that at first they feared socialism, and points, for striking evidence of this, to the fact that the _Rhenish Gazette_ bestowed an enthusiastic welcome on Stein's book on French communism, although that book condemned the system from a theologically orthodox and politically reactionary point of view. But he adds that the Young Hegelians contributed to the spread of socialism against their will, that it was through the interest they took in its speculations and experiments that socialism acquired credit and support in public opinion in Germany, and that the earliest traces of avowed socialism are to be found in the _Rhenish Gazette_. If we may judge by the extracts from some of Marx's articles in that journal which are given in Bruno Bauer's "Vollständige Geschichte der Parthei-Kämpfe in Deutschland während der Jahre 1842-46," we should say that Marx was even at this early period a decided socialist, for he often complains of the great wrong "the poor dumb millions" suffer in being excluded by their poverty from the possibility of a free development of their powers, "and from any participation in the fruits of civilization," and maintains that the State had far other duty towards them than to come in contact with them only through the police. When Ruge visited Cabet in Paris, he said that he and his friends (meaning, he explained, the philosophical and political opposition) stood so far aloof from the question of communism that they had never yet so much as raised it, and that, while there were communists in Germany, there was no communistic party. This statement is probably equivalent to saying that he and his school took as yet a purely theoretical and Platonic interest in socialism, and had not come to adopt it as part of their practical programme. Most of them were already communists by conviction, and the others felt their general philosophical and political principles forcing them towards communism, and the reason of their hesitation in accepting it is probably expressed by Ruge, when he says (in an article in Heinzen's "Die Opposition," p. 103), that the element of truth in communism was its sense of the necessity of political emancipation, but that there was a great danger of communists forgetting the political question in their zeal for the social. It was chiefly under the influence of the Humanism into which Feuerbach had transformed the Idealism of Hegel, that the Hegelian Left passed into communism. Humanist and communist became nearly convertible terms. Friedrich Engels mentions in his book on the condition of the English working classes, published in 1845, that all the German communists of that day were followers of Feuerbach, and most of the followers of Feuerbach in Germany (Ruge seems to have remained an exception) were communists. Lassalle was one of Feuerbach's correspondents, and after he started the present socialist movement in Germany, he wrote Feuerbach on 21st October, 1863, saying that the Progressists were political rationalists of the feeblest type, and that it was the same battle which Feuerbach was waging in the theological, and he himself now in the political and economic sphere. Stein attributed French socialism greatly to the prevailing sensualistic character of French philosophy, which conceived enjoyment to be man's only good, and never rose to what he calls the great German conception, the logical conception of the Ego, the idea of knowing for the sake of knowing. The inference this contrast suggests is that the metaphysics of Germany had been her protector, her national guard, against socialism, but as we see, at the very time he was writing the guard was turning traitor, and a native socialism was springing up by natural generation out of the idealistic philosophy. The fact, however, rather confirms the force of Stein's remark, for the Hegelian idealism first bred the more sensualistic system of humanism, and then humanism bred socialism. Hegel had transformed the transcendental world of current opinion, with its personal Deity and personal immortality, into a world of reason; and Feuerbach went a step further, and abolished what he counted the transcendency of reason itself. Heaven and God, he entirely admitted, were nothing but subjective illusions, fantastic projections of man's own being and his own real world into external spheres. But mind, an abstract entity, and reason, a universal and single principle, were, in his opinion, illusions too. There was nothing real but man--the concrete flesh and blood man who thinks and feels. "God," says Feuerbach, speaking of his mental development, "was my first thought, Reason my second, Man my third and last." He passed, as Lange points out, through Comte's three epochs. Theology was swept away, and then metaphysics, and in its room came a positive and materialistic anthropology which declared that the senses were the sole sources of real knowledge, that the body was not only part of man's being, but its totality and essence, and, in short, that man is what he eats--_Der Mensch ist was er isst_. Man, therefore, had no other God before man, and the promotion of man's happiness and culture in this earthly life--which was his only life--was the sole natural object of his political or religious interest. This system was popularized by Feuerbach's brother Friedrich, in a little work called the "Religion of the Future," which enjoyed a high authority among the German communists, and formed a kind of lectionary they read and commented on at their stated meetings. The object of the new religion is thus described in it:--"Man alone is our God, our father, our judge, our redeemer, our true home, our law and rule, the alpha and omega of our political, moral, public, and domestic life and work. There is no salvation but by man." And the cardinal articles of the faith are that human nature is holy, that the impulse to pleasure is holy, that everything which gratifies it is holy, that every man is destined and entitled to be happy, and for the attainment of this end has the right to claim the greatest possible assistance from others, and the duty to afford the same to them in turn. Now the tendency of this metaphysical and moral teaching was strongly democratic and socialistic. There was said to be in the existing political system a false transcendency identical with that of the current religious system. King and council hovered high and away above the real life of society in a world of their own, looking on political power as a kind of private property, and careless of mankind, from whom it sprang, to whom it belonged, and by whom and for whom it should be administered. "The princes are gods," says Feuerbach, "and they must share the same fate. The dissolution of theology into anthropology in the field of thought is the dissolution of monarchy into republic in the field of politics. Dualism, separation is the essence of theology; dualism, separation is the essence of monarchy. There we have the antithesis of God and world; here we have the antithesis of State and people." This dualism must be abolished. The State must be _humanized_--must be made an instrument in the hands of all for the welfare of all; and its inhabitants must be _politized_, for they, all of them, constitute the _polis_. Man must no longer be a means, but must be everywhere and always an end. There was nobody above man; there was neither superhuman person, nor consecrated, person; neither deity, nor divine right. And, on the other hand, as there is no person who in being or right is more than man, so there must be no person who is less. There must be no _unmenschen_, no slaves, no heretics, no outcasts, no outlaws, but every being who wears human flesh must be placed in the enjoyment of the full rights and privileges of man. The will of man be done, hallowed be his name. These principles already bring us to the threshold of socialism, and now Feuerbach's peculiar ethical principle carries us into its courts. That principle has been well termed Tuism, to distinguish it from Egoism. The human unit is not the individual, but man in converse with man, the sensual Ego with the sensual Tu. The isolated man is incomplete, both as a moral and as a thinking being. "The nature of man is contained only in the community, in the unity of man with man. Isolation is finitude and limitation, community is freedom and infinity. Man by himself is but man; man with man, the unity of I and Thou, is God." Feuerbach personally never became a communist, for he says his principle was neither egoism nor communism, but the combination of both. They were equally true, for they were inseparable, and to condemn self-love would be, he declared, to condemn love to others at the same time, for love to others was nothing but a recognition that their self-love was justifiable. But it is easy to perceive the natural tendency of the teaching that the social man was the true human unit and essence, and was to the individual as a God. With most of his disciples Humanism meant making the individual disappear in the community, making egoism disappear in love, and making private property disappear in collective. Hess flatly declared that "the species was the end, and the individuals were only means." Ruge disputed this doctrine, and contended that the empirical individual was the true human unit and the true end; but even he said that socialism was the humanism of common life. Grün passes into socialism by simply applying to property Feuerbach's method of dealing with theology and monarchy. He argues that if the true essence of man is the social man, then, just as theology is anthropology, so is anthropology socialism, for property is at present entirely alienated, externalized from the social man. There is a false transcendency in it, like that of divinity and monarchy. "Deal, therefore," he says, "with the practical God, money, as Feuerbach dealt with the theoretical"; humanize it. Make property an inalienable possession of manhood, of every man as man. For property is a necessary material for his social activity, and therefore ought to belong as inalienably and essentially to him as everything which he otherwise possesses of means or materials for his activity in life; as inalienably, for example, as his body or his personal acquirements. If man is the social man, some social possession is then necessary to his manhood, and might be called an essential part of it; but existing property is something outside, as separate from him as heaven or the sovereign power. Grün accordingly says that Feuerbach's "Essence of Christianity" supplies the theoretical basis for Proudhon's social system, because the latter only applies to practical life the principles which the former applied to religion and metaphysics, but he admits that neither Feuerbach nor Proudhon would acknowledge the connection. We thus see how theoretical humanism--a philosophy and a religion--led easily over into the two important articles of practical humanism, a democratic transformation of the State and a communistic transformation of society. This was the ideal of the humanists, and it contains ample and wide-reaching positive features; but when it came to practical action they preferred for the present to take up an attitude of simple but implacable negation to the existing order of things. No doubt variety of opinion existed among them; but if they are to be judged by what seemed their dominant interest, they were revolutionaries and nothing else. They repudiated with one consent the socialist utopias of France, and refrained on principle from committing themselves to, or even discussing, any positive scheme of reconstruction whatsoever. They held it premature to think of positive proposals, which would, moreover, be sure to sow divisions among themselves. Their first great business was not to build up, but to destroy, and their work in the meantime was therefore to develop the revolutionary spirit to its utmost possible energy, by exciting hatred against all existing institutions; in short, to create an immense reservoir of revolutionary energy which might be turned to account when its opportunity arrived. Their position is singularly like the phase of Russian nihilism described by Baron Fircks, and presented to us in Turgenieff's novels. It is expressed very plainly by W. Marr, himself an active humanist, who carried Feuerbach's "Essence of Christianity" as his constant companion, and founded a secret society for promoting humanistic views. In his interesting book on Secret Societies in Switzerland, he says, "The masses can only be gathered under the flag of negation. When you present detailed plans, you excite controversies and sow divisions; you repeat the mistake of the French socialists, who have scattered their redoubtable forces because they tried to carry formulated systems. We are content to lay down the foundation of the revolution. We shall have deserved well of it if we stir hatred and contempt against all existing institutions. We make war against all prevailing ideas, of religion, of the State, of country, of patriotism. The idea of God is the keystone of a perverted civilization. It must be destroyed. The true root of liberty, of equality, of culture, is Atheism. Nothing must restrain the spontaneity of the human mind." All this work of annihilation could neither be done by reform, nor by conspiracy, but only by revolution, and "a revolution is never made; it makes itself." While the revolution was making, Marr founded an association in Switzerland, "Young Germany," which should prepare society for taking effective action when the hour came. There was a "Young Germany" in Switzerland when he arrived there; part of a federation of secret societies established by Mazzini in 1834, under the general name of "Young Europe," and comprising three series of societies:--"Young Italy," composed of Italians; "Young Poland," of Poles; and "Young Germany," of Germans. But this organization was not at all to Marr's mind, because it concerned itself with nothing but politics, and because its method was conspiracy. "Great transformations," he said, "are never prepared by conspiracies," and it was a very great transformation indeed that he contemplated. He therefore formed a "Young Germany" of his own. His plan was to plant a lodge, or "family," wherever there existed a German working men's association. The members of this family became members of the association, and formed a leaven which influenced all around them, and, through the wandering habits of the German working class, was carried to much wider circles. The family met for political discussion once a week, read Friedrich Feuerbach together on the Sundays with fresh recruits, who, when they had mastered him, were said to have put off the old man; and their very password was _humanity_, a brother being recognised by using the half-word _human_--? interrogatively, and the other replying by the remaining half--_ität_. The members were all ardent democrats, but, as a rule, so national in their sympathies that the leaders made it one great object of their _disciplina arcani_ to stifle the sentiment of patriotism by subjecting it to constant ridicule. Their relations to communism are not quite easy to determine. Marr himself sometimes expresses disapproval of the system. He says, "Communism is the expression of impotence of will. The communists lack confidence in themselves. They suffer under social oppression, and look around for consolation instead of seeking for weapons to emancipate themselves with. It is only a world-weariness desiring illusion as the condition of its life." He says the belief in the absolute dependence of man on matter is the shortest and most pregnant definition of communism, and that it starts from the principle that man is a slave and incapable of emancipating himself. But, on the other hand, he complains that the members of "Young Germany" did not sufficiently appreciate the social question, being disgusted with the fanaticism of the communists. By the communists, he here means the followers of Weitling and Albrecht, who were at that time creating a party movement in Switzerland. The prophet Albrecht, as he is called, was simply a crazy mystic with proclivities to sedition which brought him at length to prison for six years, and which took there an eschatological turn from his having, it is said, nothing to read but the Bible, so that on his release he went about prophesying that Jehovah had prepared a way in the desert, which was Switzerland, for bringing into Europe a reign of peace, in which people should hold all things in common and enjoy complete sensuous happiness, sitting under their common vine and fig-tree, with neither king nor priest to make them any more afraid. Weitling was not quite so unimportant, but the attention he excited at the time is certainly not justified by any of the writings he has left us. He was a tailor from Magdeburg, who was above his work, believing himself to be a poet and a man of letters, condemned by hard fate and iniquitous social arrangements to a dull and cruel lot. Having gone to Paris when socialism was the rage there, he eagerly embraced that new gospel, and went to Switzerland to carry its message of hope to his own German countrymen. There he forsook the needle altogether, and lived as the paid apostle of the dignity of manual labour, for which he had himself little mind. His ideas are crude, confused, and arbitrary. His ideal of society was a community of labourers, with no State, no Church, no individual property, no distinction of rank or position, no nationality, no fatherland. All were to have equal rights and duties, and each was to be put in a position to develop his capacity and gratify his bents as far as possible. He was moved more by the desire for abstract equality than German socialists of the humanist or contemporary type, for they do not build on the justice of a more equal distribution of wealth so much as on the necessity of the possession of property for the free development of the human personality. He is entirely German, however, in his idea of the government of the new society. It was to be governed by the three greatest philosophers of the age, assisted by a board of trade, a board of health, and a board of education. In Switzerland he founded, to promote his views, a secret society, the "Alliance of the Just," which had branches in most of the Swiss towns. Its members were chiefly Germans from Germany, for very few of the communists in Switzerland were born Swiss, and according to Marr, who was present at some of their meetings, they were three-fourths of them tailors. "I felt," says Marr, "when I entered one of these clubs, that I was with the mother of tailors. The tailor sitting and chatting at his work is always extreme in his opinions. Tailor and communist are synonymous terms." It was to some of the leaders of this alliance that Weitling unfolded his wild scheme of a proletariat raid, according to which an army of 20,000 brigands was to be raised among the proletariat of the large towns, to go with torch and sword into all the countries of Europe, and terrify the _bourgeoisie_ into a recognition of universal community of goods. It is only fair to add that his proposal met with no favour. Letters were found in his possession, and subsequently published in Bluntschli's official report, which show that some of Weitling's correspondents regarded his scheme with horror, and others treated it with ridicule. One of them said it was trying to found the kingdom of heaven with the furies of hell. The relations between "Young Germany" and Weitling's allies were apparently not cordial, though they had so much in common that, on the one hand, Weitling's correspondents urge him to keep on good terms with "Young Germany," and, on the other, Marr says he actually tried to get a common standing ground with the communists, and thought he had found it in the negation of the present system of things--the negation of religion, the negation of patriotism, the negation of subjection to authority. Now the importance of this excursus on the Young Hegelians lies in the fact that Karl Marx was a humanist, and looked on humanism as the vital and creative principle in the renovation of political and industrial society. In the _Deutsche Französische Jahrbücher_ he published an article on the Hegelian Philosophy of Right, in which he says: "The new revolution will be introduced by philosophy. The revolutionary tradition of Germany is theoretical. The Reformation was the work of a monk; the Revolution will be the work of a philosopher." The particular philosophy that was to do the work is that of the German critics, whose critique of religion had ended in the dogma that man is the highest being for man, and in the categorical imperative, "to destroy everything in the present order of things that makes a man a degraded, insulted, forsaken, and despised being." But philosophy cannot work a revolution without material weapons; and it will find its material weapon in the proletariat, which he owns, however, was at the time he wrote only beginning to be formed in Germany. But when it rises in its strength, it will be irresistible, and the revolution which it will accomplish will be the only one known to history that is not utopian. Other revolutions have been partial, wrought by a class in the interests of a class; but this one will be a universal and uniform revolution, effected in the name of all society, for the proletariat is a class which possesses a universal character because it dissolves all other separate classes into itself. It is the only class that takes its stand on a human and not a historical title. Its very sorrows and grievances have nothing special or relative in them; they are the broad sorrows and grievances of humanity. And its claims are like them; for it asks no special privileges or special prerogatives; it asks nothing but what all the world will share along with it. The history of the world is the judgment of the world, and the duration of an order of things founded on the ascendancy of a limited class possessing money and culture, is practically condemned and foredoomed by the rapid multiplication of a large class outside which possess neither. The growth of this latter body not merely tends to produce, but actually _is_, the dissolution of the existing system of things. For the existing system is founded on the assertion of private property, but the proletariat is forced by society to take the opposite principle of the negation of private property for the principle of its own life, and will naturally carry that principle into all society when it gains the power, as it is rapidly and inevitably doing. Marx sums up: "The only practical emancipation for Germany is an emancipation proceeding from the standpoint of the theory which explains man to be the highest being for man. In Germany the emancipation from the middle ages is only possible as at the same time an emancipation from the partial conquests of the middle ages. In Germany one kind of bond cannot be broken without all other bonds being broken too. Germany is by nature too thorough to be able to revolutionize without revolutionizing from a fundamental principle, and following that principle to its utmost limits; and therefore the emancipation of Germany will be the emancipation of man. The head of this emancipation is philosophy; its heart is the proletariat." He adds that when things are ripe, "when all the inner conditions have been completed, the German resurrection day will be heralded by the crowing of the Gallic cock." In this essay we mark already Marx's overmastering belief in natural historical evolution, which he had learnt from Hegel, and which prevented him from having any sympathy with the utopian projects of the French socialists. They vainly imagined, he held, that they could create a new world right off, whereas it was only possible to do so by observing a rigorous conformity to the laws of the development already in progress, by making use of the forces already at work, and proceeding in the direction towards which the stream of things was itself slowly but mightily moving. Hegel sought the principle of organic development in the State, but Marx sought it rather in civil society, and believed he had discovered it in that most mighty though unconscious product of the large system of industry, the modern proletariat, which was born to revolution as the sparks fly upward; and in the simultaneous decline of the middle classes, that is, of the conservative element which could resist the change. The process which was, as he held, now converting society into an aggregate of beggars and millionaires was bound eventually to overleap itself and land in a communism. I shall not discuss the truth of this conception at present, but it contributes, along with the sentiments of justice and humanity that animate--rightly or wrongly--the ideal of the socialists, to lend something of a religious force to their movement, for they feel that they are fellow-workers with the nature of things. We left Marx in Paris, and on returning to him, we find him engaged--as indeed we usually do when his history comes into notice--in a threefold warfare. Besides his general war against the arrangements of modern society, he is always carrying on a bitter and implacable war against the Prussian Government, and is often engaged in controversy--sometimes very personal--with foes of his own philosophical or revolutionary household. After the cessation of the _Deutsche Französische Jahrbücher_, Marx edited a paper called _Vorwärts_, and in this and other journals open to him, he attacked the Prussian administration so strongly that that administration complained to Guizot, who gave him orders to quit France. His more personal controversy at this time arose out of one of the schisms of the Young Hegelians, and he and his friend Friedrich Engels wrote a pamphlet--"Die Heilige Familie"--against the Hegelian Idealism, and especially against Bruno Bauer, who had offended him--says Erdmann, in his "History of Philosophy"--at once as Jew, as Radical, and as journalist. When expelled from France, he went to Brussels, where he was allowed to continue his war upon the Prussian Government without interference, till the revolution of 1848. During this period he devoted his attention more particularly than hitherto to commercial subjects, and published in 1846 his "Discours sur le Libre-échange," and in 1847 his "Misère de la Philosophie," a reply to Proudhon's "Philosophie de la Misère"--both in French. While in Brussels, Marx received an invitation from the London Central Committee of the Communist League to join that society. This league had been founded in Paris in 1836, for the purpose of propagating communist opinions among the working men of Germany. Its organization was analogous to that of the International and other societies of the same kind. A certain number of members constituted a _Gemeinde_, the several _Gemeinden_ in the same town constituted a _Kreis_, a number of _Kreise_ were grouped into a leading _Kreis_, and at the head of the whole was the Central Committee, which was chosen at a general congress of deputies from all the _Kreise_, and which had since 1840 had its seat in London. The method of the league was to establish, as a sphere of operation, German working men's improvement associations everywhere. The travelling custom of German working men greatly facilitated this work, and numbers of these associations were soon founded in Switzerland, England, Belgium, and the United States. The reason its committee applied to Marx was that he had just published a series of pamphlets in Brussels, in which, as he tells us, he "submitted to a merciless criticism the medley of French-English socialism and communism and of German philosophy, which then constituted the secret doctrine of the League," and insisted that "their work could have no tenable theoretical basis except that of a scientific insight into the economic structure of society, and that this ought to be put into a popular form, not with the view of carrying out any utopian system, but of promoting among the working classes and other classes a self-conscious participation in the process of historical transformation of society that was taking place under their eyes." This is always with Marx the distinctive and ruling feature of his system. The French schemes were impracticable utopias, because they ignored the laws of history and the real structure of economic society; and he claims that his own proposals are not only practicable but inevitable, because they strictly observe the line of the actual industrial evolution, and are thus, at worst, plans for accelerating the day after to-morrow. But, besides this difference of principle, Marx thought the League should also change its method and tactics. Its work, being that of social revolution, was different from the work of the old political conspirators and secret societies, and therefore needed different weapons; the times, too, were changed, and offered new instruments. Street insurrections, surprises, intrigues, _pronunciamentos_ might overturn a dynasty, or oust a government, or bring them to reason, but were of no avail in the world for introducing collective property or abolishing wage labour. People would just begin again the day after to work for hire and rent their farms as they did before. A social revolution needed other and larger preparation; it needed to have the whole population first thoroughly leavened with its principles; nay, it needed to possess an international character, depending not on detached local outbreaks, but on steady concert in revolutionary action on the part of the labouring classes everywhere. The cause was not political, or even national, but social; and society--which was indeed already pregnant with the change--must be aroused to a conscious consent to the delivery. What was first to be done, therefore, was to educate and move public opinion, and in this work the ordinary secret society went but a little way. A secret propaganda might still be carried on, but a public and open propaganda was more effectual and more suitable to the times. There never existed greater facilities for such a movement, and they ought to make use of all the abundant means of popular agitation and intercommunication which modern society allowed. No more secret societies in holes and corners, no more small risings and petty plots, but a great broad organization working in open day, and working restlessly by tongue and pen to stir the masses of all European countries to a common international revolution. Marx sought, in short, to introduce the large system of production into the art of conspiracy. Finding his views well received by the Central Committee of the Communist League, he acceded to their request to attend their General Congress at London in 1847, and then, after several weeks of keen discussion, he prevailed upon the Congress to adopt "the Manifesto of the Communist party," which was composed by himself and Engels, and which was afterwards translated from the German into English, French, Danish, and Italian, and sown broadcast everywhere just before the Revolution of 1848. This Communist League may be said to be the first organization--and this Communist Manifesto the first public declaration--of the International Socialist Democracy that now is. The Manifesto begins by describing the revolutionary situation into which the course of industrial development has brought modern society. Classes were dying out; the yeomanry, the nobility, the small tradesmen, would soon be no more; and society was drawn up in two widely separated hostile camps, the large capitalist class or _bourgeoisie_, who had all the property and power in the country, and the labouring class, the proletariat, who had nothing of either. The _bourgeoisie_ had played a most revolutionary part in history. They had overturned feudalism, and now they had created proletarianism, which would soon swamp themselves. They had collected the masses in great towns; they had kept the course of industry in perpetual flux and insecurity by rapid successive transformations of the instruments and processes of production, and by continual recurrences of commercial crises; and while they had reduced all other classes to a proletariat, they had made the life of the proletariat one of privation, of uncertainty, of discontent, of incipient revolution. They exploited the labourer of political power; they exploited him of property, for they treated him as a ware, buying him in the cheapest market for the cost of his production, that is to say, the cost of his living, and taking from him the whole surplus of his work, after deducting the value of his subsistence. Under the system of wage labour, it could not be otherwise. Wages could never, by economic laws, rise above subsistence. While wage labour created property, it created it always for the capitalist, and never for the labourer; and, in fact, the latter only lived at all, so far as it was for the interests of the governing class, the _bourgeoisie_, to permit him. Class rule and wage labour must be swept away, for they were radically unjust, and a new reign must be inaugurated which would be politically democratic and socially communistic, and in which the free development of each should be the condition for the free development of all. The Manifesto went on to say that communism was not the subversion of existing principles, but their universalization. Communism did not seek to abolish the State, but only the _bourgeois_ State, in which the _bourgeois_ exclusively hold and wield political power. Communism did not seek to abolish property, but only the _bourgeois_ system of property, under which private property is really already abolished for nine-tenths of society, and maintained merely for one-tenth. Communism did not seek to abolish marriage and the family, but only the _bourgeois_ system of things under which marriage and the family, in any true sense of those terms, were virtually class institutions, for the proletariat could not have any family life worthy of the name, so long as their wages were so low that they were forced to huddle up their whole family regardless of all decency, in a single room, so long as their wives and daughters were victims of the seduction of the _bourgeoisie_, and so long as their children were taken away prematurely to labour in mills for _bourgeois_ manufacturers, who yet held up their hands in horror at the thought of any violation of the institution of the family. Communism did not tend to abolish fatherland and nationality--that was abolished already for the proletariat, and was being abolished for the _bourgeoisie_, too, by the extensions of their trade. As to the way of emancipation, the proletariat must strive to obtain political power, and use it to deprive the _bourgeoisie_ of all capital and means of production, and to place them in the hands of the State, _i.e._, of the proletariat itself organized as a governing body. Now, for this, immediate and various measures interfering with property, and condemned by our current economics, were requisite. Those measures would naturally be different for different countries, but for the most advanced countries the following were demanded: (1) Expropriation of landed property and application of rent to State expenditure; (2) abolition of inheritance; (3) confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels; (4) centralization of credit in the hands of the State by means of a national bank, with State capital and exclusive monopoly; (5) centralization of all means of transport in hands of State; (6) institution of national factories, and improvement of lands on a common plan; (7) compulsory obligation of labour upon all equally, and establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture; (8) joint prosecution of agriculture and mechanical arts, and gradual abolition of the distinction of town and country; (9) public and gratuitous education for all children, abolition of children's labour in factories, etc. The Manifesto ends by saying:--"The communists do not seek to conceal their views and aims. They declare openly that their purpose can only be obtained by a violent overthrow of all existing arrangements of society. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution. The proletariat have nothing to lose in it but their chains; they have a world to win. Proletarians of all countries, unite!" When the French Revolution of February, 1848, broke out, Marx was expelled without circumstance from Brussels, and received an invitation from the Provisional Government of Paris to return to France. He accepted this invitation, but was only a few weeks in Paris when the German revolution of March occurred, and he hastened to the theatre of affairs. With his friends, Freiligrath, Wolff, Engels, and others, he established on June 1st in Cologne the _New Rhenish Gazette_, which was the soul of the Rhenish revolutionary movement, the most important one of the year in Germany, and that in which, as we have seen, the young Lassalle first emerged on the troubled surface of revolutionary politics. After the _coup d'état_ of November, dissolving the Prussian Parliament, the _New Rhenish Gazette_ strongly urged the people to stop paying their taxes, and thus meet force by force. It inserted an admonition to that effect in a prominent place in every successive number, and Marx was twice tried for sedition on account of this admonition, but each time acquitted. The newspaper, however, was finally suppressed by civil authority after the Dresden insurrection of May, 1849, its last number appearing on June 19th in red type, and containing Freiligrath's well-known "Farewell of the _New Rhenish Gazette_"--spiritedly translated for us by Ernest Jones--which declared that the journal went down with "rebellion" on its lips, but would reappear when the last of the German Crowns was overturned. Farewell, but not for ever farewell! They cannot kill the spirit, my brother; In thunder I'll rise on the field where I fell, More boldly to fight out another. When the last of Crowns, like glass, shall break On the scene our sorrows have haunted, And the people its last dread "Guilty" shall speak, By your side you shall find me undaunted. On Rhine or on Danube, in war and deed, You shall witness, true to his vow, On the wrecks of thrones, in the midst of the field, The rebel who greets you now. This vow is no mere Parthian flourish of poetical defiance. Freiligrath and his friends undoubtedly believed at this time that the political movements of 1848 and 1849 were but preliminary ripples, and would be presently succeeded by a great flood-wave of revolution which they heard already sounding along in their dangerously expectant ear. His poem on the Revolution remains as evidence to us that in 1850 he still clung to that hope, and it would not have been out of tune with his sanguine beliefs of the year before if he promised, not merely that the spirit of the journal would rise again, but that its next number would be published, after the Deluge. Meanwhile Marx went to London, where he remained for the rest of his life. Finding that the revolutionary spirit did not revive, and that historical societies, which have not lost their moral and economic vitality, had a greater readjusting power against political disturbance than he previously believed, he gave up for the next ten or twelve years the active work of revolutionizing. The Communist League, which had got disorganized in the revolutionary year, and was rent in two by a bitter schism in 1850, was, with his concurrence, dissolved in 1852, on the ground that its propaganda was no longer opportune; and the story of the Brimstone League, with its iron discipline and ogrish desires, of which Mehring says Marx was, during his London residence, the head-centre, is simply a fairy tale of Karl Vogt's, whose baselessness Marx has himself completely exposed. Before leaving the Communist League, two circumstances may be mentioned, because they repeat themselves constantly in this revolutionary history. The one is that this schism took place not on a point of doctrine, but of opportunity; the extremer members thought the conflict in Germany on the Hessian question offered a good chance for a fresh revolutionary outbreak, and they left the League because their views were not adopted. The other is that in one of its last reports (quoted by Mehring) the League definitely justifies, and even recommends, assassination and incendiarism--"the so-called excesses, the inflictions of popular vengeance on hated individuals, or on public buildings which revive hateful associations." For the next ten years Marx lived quietly in London, writing for the _New York Tribune_ and other journals, and studying modern industry on this its "classical soil." He read much in the British Museum Library, gaining his remarkable acquaintance with the English economic writers, and it was probably in this period he elaborated his famous doctrine of surplus value, with its corollary of the right of the labourer to the full product of his labour. There can be no doubt that the original suggestion of this doctrine came from English sources, for it was taught more than a generation before among the English socialists, notably by William Thompson in his "Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth," which was published as early as 1824, and is actually quoted by Marx in his work on Capital. Marx built up the doctrine, however, into a more systematic form, and it is through him and not through the Owenites it has come into the present socialist movement in which it plays so conspicuous a part. During this period of reading and rumination, Marx published a pamphlet against Louis Napoleon; another against Lord Palmerston, which was widely circulated by David Urquhart; a third of a personal and bitter character against his fellow-socialist, Karl Vogt; and a more solid and important work, the "Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie" (1859), the first fruits of his new economic studies. But a revolutionist never permanently gives up revolutionizing, and after his prolonged abstinence from that excitement, Marx returned to it again in 1864, on the foundation of the famous International Working Men's Association. The International was simply the Communist League raised again from the dead. Their principles were the same; their constitution was the same; and Marx began his inaugural address to the International in 1864 with the very words that concluded his Communistic Manifesto of 1847, "Proletarians of all nations, unite!" When the representatives of the English working men first suggested the formation of an international working men's association, in the address they presented in the Freemasons' Tavern to the French working men who were sent over at the instance of Napoleon III. to the London Exhibition of 1862, they certainly never dreamt of founding an organization of revolutionary socialist democracy which in a few years to come was to wear a name at which the world turned pale. Their address was most moderate and sensible. They said that some permanent medium of interchanging thoughts and observations between the working men of different countries was likely to throw light on the economic secrets of societies, and to help onwards the solution of the great labour problem. For they declared that that solution had not yet been discovered, and that the socialist systems which had hitherto professed to propound it were nothing but magnificent dreams. Moreover, if the system of competition were to continue, then some arrangement of concord between employer and labourer must be devised, and in order to assert the views of the labouring class effectively in that arrangement, a firm and organized union must be established among working men, not merely in each country, but in all countries, for their interests, both as citizens and as labourers, were everywhere identical. Those ideas would constitute the basis of a very rational and moderate programme. But when, in the following year, after a meeting in favour of the Polish insurrection, which was held in St. Martin's Hall under the presidency of Professor Beesly, and at which some of the French delegates of 1862 were present, a committee was appointed to follow up the suggestion, this committee asked Marx to prepare a programme and statutes for the proposed association, and he impressed upon it at its birth the stamp of his own revolutionary socialism. He never had a higher official position in the International than corresponding secretary for Germany, for it was determined, probably with the view of securing a better hold of the great English working class and their extensive trade organizations, that the president and secretary should be English working men, and then, after a time, the office of president was abolished altogether because it had a monarchical savour. But Marx had the ablest, the best informed, and probably the most made-up mind in the council; he governed without reigning; and, with his faithful German following, he exercised an almost paramount influence on its action from first to last, in spite of occasional revolts and intrigues against an authority which democratic jealousy resented as dictatorial, or--worse still--monarchical. The statutes of the association, which were adopted at the Geneva Congress of 1866, declared that "the economic subjection of the labourer to the possessor of the means of labour, _i.e._ of the sources of life, is the first cause of his political, moral, and material servitude, and that the economic emancipation of labour is consequently the great aim to which every political movement ought to be subordinated." Now no doubt the "economic emancipation of labour" meant different things to different sections of the Association's members. To the English trades unionists it meant practically better wages; to the Russian nihilists it meant the downfall of the Czar and of all central political authority, and leaving the socialistic communal organization of their country to manage itself without interference from above; to some of the French members (as appeared at the Lausanne Congress in 1867) it meant the nationalization of credit and all land except that held by peasant proprietors, a class which it was necessary to maintain as a counterpoise to the State; while, to the German socialists, it meant the abolition of wages, the nationalization of land and the instruments of production, the assumption by the State of a supreme direction of all trade, commerce, finance, and agriculture, and the distribution by the State of land, tools, and materials to guilds and productive associations as the actual industrial executive. There were thus very different elements in the composition of the International, but a _modus vivendi_ was found for some years by nursing an ultimate ideal, which was desirable, and meanwhile practically working for a proximate and much narrower ideal, which was more immediately feasible or necessary. The association could thus hold that nothing could benefit the working class but an abolition of wages, and could yet, as it sometimes did, help and encourage strikes which wanted only to raise wages. At its Congress in Brussels in 1868 it declared that a strike was not a means of completely emancipating the labourers, but was often a necessity in the present situation of labour and capital. Most of the other practical measures to which the association addressed itself--the eight hours normal day of labour, gratuitous education, gratuitous justice, universal suffrage, abolition of standing armies, abolition of indirect taxes, prohibition of children's labour, State credit for productive associations--contemplated modifications of the existing system of things, but always contemplated them as aids to and instalments of the coming transformation of that system. The consciousness was constantly preserved that a revolution was impending, and that, as Lassalle said, it was bound to come and could not be checked, whether it approached by sober advances from concession to concession, or flew, with streaming hair and shod with steel, right into the central stronghold. This was very much the keynote struck by Marx in his inaugural address. That address was simply a review of the situation since 1848, and an encouragement of his forces to a renewal of the combat. Wealth had enormously increased in the interval; colonies had been opened, new inventions discovered, free trade introduced; but misery was not a whit the less; class contrasts were even deeper marked, property was more than ever in the hands of the few; in England the number of landowners had diminished eleven per cent. in the preceding ten years; and if this rate were to continue, the country would be rapidly ripe for revolution. While the old order of things was thus hastening to its doom, the new order of things had made some advances. The Ten Hours Act was "not merely a great practical result, but was the victory of a principle. For the first time the political economy of the _bourgeoisie_ had been in clear broad day put in subjection to the political economy of the working class." Then, again, the experiment of co-operation had now been sufficiently tried to show that it was possible to carry on industry without the intervention of an employing class, and had spread abroad the hope that wage labour was, like slavery and feudal servitude, only a transitory and subordinate form, which was destined to be superseded by associated labour. The International had for its aim to promote this associated labour; only it sought to do so, not piecemeal and sporadically, but systematically, on a national scale, and by State means. And for this end the labouring class must first acquire political power, so as to obtain possession of the means of production; and to acquire political power, they must unite. The International, though, as we have seen, possessing no real solidarity in its composition, held together till the outbreak of the Franco-German war, and of the revolution of the Paris Commune. It was, of course, strongly opposed to the war, as it was to all war; and strongly in favour of the revolution, as it was of all revolution. Its precise complicity in the work of the Commune is not easy to determine, but there can be no doubt that its importance has been greatly exaggerated, both by the fears of his enemies and the vanity of its members. Some of the latter were certainly among those who sat in the Hôtel de Ville, but none of them were leading minds there; and, as for the Association itself, it never had a real membership, or ramifications, of any formidable extent. For example, the English trades unions were in connection with it, and their members might be, in a sense, counted among its members, but it is certain they never recognised it as an authority over them, and they probably subscribed to it mainly as to a useful auxiliary in a strike. The leaders of the International, however, were, undoubtedly, heart and soul with the Commune, and approved probably both of its aims and methods, and Marx, at the Congress of the International, at the Hague, in 1872, drew, from its failure the lesson, that "revolution must be solidary" in order to succeed. A revolution in one capital of Europe must be supported by simultaneous revolutions in the rest. But, while there is little ground for the common belief that the International had any important influence in creating the insurrection of the Commune, it is certain that the insurrection of the Commune killed the International. The English members dropped off from it and never returned, and at its first Congress after the revolution (the Hague, 1872), the Association itself was rent by a fatal schism arising from differences of opinion on a question as to the government of the society of the future, which would probably not have become a subject of such keen present interest at the time but for the Paris Commune. The question concerned the maintenance or abolition of the State, of the supreme central political authority, and the discussion brought to light that the socialists of the International were divided into two distinct and irreconcilable camps--the Centralist Democratic Socialists, headed by Marx, and the Anarchist Socialists, headed by Michael Bakunin, the Russian revolutionist. The Marxists insisted that the socialist _régime_ of collective property and systematic co-operative production could not possibly be introduced, maintained, or regulated, except by means of an omnipotent and centralized political authority--call it the State, call it the collectivity, call it what you like--which should have the final disposal of everything. The Bakunists held that this was just bringing back the old tyranny and slavery in a more excessive and intolerable form. They took up the tradition of Proudhon, who said that "the true form of the State is anarchy," meaning by anarchy, of course, not positive disorder, but the absence of any supreme ruler, whether king or convention. They would have property possessed and industry pursued on a communistic principle by groups or associations of workmen, but these groups must form themselves freely and voluntarily, without any social or political compulsion. The Marxists declared that this was simply a retention of the system of free competition in an aggravated form, that it would only lead to confusion worse confounded, and that the Bakunists, even in trying to abolish the evils of _laissez-faire_, were still foolishly supposing that the world could go of itself. This division of opinion--really a broader one than that which parts socialist from orthodox economist--rent the already enfeebled International into two separate organizations, which languished for a year or two and passed away. And so, with high thoughts of spreading a reign of fraternity over the earth, the International Working Men's Association perished, because, being only human, it could not maintain fraternity in its own narrow borders. This is a history that repeats itself again and again in socialist movements. As W. Marr said in the remark quoted above, revolutionists will only unite on a negation; the moment they begin to ask what they will put in its place they differ and dispute and come to nought. Apprehend them, close their meetings, banish their leaders, and you but knit them by common suffering to common resistance. You supply them with a negation of engrossing interest, you preoccupy their minds with a negative programme which keeps them united, and so you prevent them from raising the fatal question--What next? which they never discuss without breaking up into rival sects and factions, fraternal often in nothing but their hatred. "It is the shades that hate one another, not the colours." Such disruptions and secessions may--as they did in Germany--by emulation increase for a time the efficiency of the organization as a propagandist agency, but they certainly diminish its danger as a possible instrument of insurrection. A socialist organization seems always to contain two elements of internal disintegration. One is the prevalence of a singular and almost pathetic mistrust of their leaders, and of one another. The law of suspects is always in force among themselves. At meetings of the German Socialists, Liebknecht denounces Schweitzer as an agent of the Prussian Government, Schweitzer accuses Liebknecht of being an Austrian spy, and the frequent hints at bribery, and open charges of treason against the labourers' cause, disclose to us now duller and now more acute phases of that unhappy state of mutual suspicion, in which the one supreme, superhuman virtue, worthy to be worshipped, if haply it could anywhere be discovered, is the virtue men honoured even in Robespierre--the incorruptible. The other source of disintegration is the tendency to intestine divisions on points of doctrine. A reconstruction of society is necessarily a most extensive programme, and allows room for the utmost variety of opinion and plan. The longer it is discussed, the more certainly do differences arise, and the movement becomes a strife of schools in no way formidable to the government. All this only furnishes another reason for the conclusion that in dealing with socialist agitations, a government's safest as well as justest policy is, as much as may be, to leave them alone. Their danger lies in the cloudiness of their ideas, and that can only be dispersed in the free breezes of popular discussion. The sword is an idle method of reasoning with an idea; an idea will eventually yield to nothing but argument. Repression, too, is absolutely impossible with modern facilities of inter-communication, and can at best but drive the offensive elements for a time into subterranean channels, where they gather like a dangerous choke-damp that may occasion at any moment a serious explosion. After the fall of the International, Marx took no further part in public movements, but occupied his time in completing his work _Das Capital_, under frequent interruption from ill-health, and he died in Paris in the spring of 1883, leaving that work still unfinished. The _Das Capital_ of Marx may be said to be the sacred book of contemporary socialism, and though, like other sacred books, it is probably a sealed one to the body of the faithful, for it is extremely stiff reading, it is the great source from which socialist agitators draw their inspiration and arguments. Apart from the representative authority with which it is thus invested, it must be at once acknowledged to be an able, learned, and important work, founded on diligent research, evincing careful elaboration of materials, much acuteness of logical analysis, and so much solicitude for precision that a special terminology has been invented to secure it. The author's taste for logical distinctions, however, as he has actually applied it, serves rather to darken than to elucidate his exposition. He overloads with analysis secondary points of his argument which are clear enough without it, and he assumes without analysis primary positions which it is most essential for him to make plain. His style and method carries us back to the ecclesiastical schoolmen. His superabounding love of scholastic formalities is unmodern; and one may be permitted to hope that the odium more than theological with which he speaks of opponents has become unmodern too. Marx's argument takes the form of an inquiry into the origin and social effects of capital; understanding the word capital, however, in a peculiar sense. Capital, according to the elementary teaching of political economy, always means the portion of wealth which is saved from immediate consumption to be devoted to productive uses, and it matters not whether it is so saved and devoted by the labourer who is to use it, or by some other person who lends it to the labourer at interest or employs the labourer to work with it at a fixed rate of wages. A fisherman's boat is capital as much as a Cunard Company's steamer, although the boat is owned by the person who sails it and the steamer by persons who may never have seen it. The fisherman is labourer and capitalist in one, but in the case of the steamer the capital is supplied by one set of people and the labour undertaken by another. Now Marx speaks of capital only after this division of functions has taken place. It is, he says, not a logical but a historical category. In former times men all wrought for the supply of their own wants, the seed and stock they received was saved and owned by themselves, capital was an instrument in the hands of labour. But in modern times, especially since the rise of foreign commerce in the 16th century, this situation has been gradually reversed. Industry is now conducted by speculators, who advance the stock and pay the labourer's wages, in order to make gain out of the excess of the product over the advances, and labour is a mere instrument in the hands of capital. The capitalist is one who, without being personally a producer, advances money to producers to provide them with materials and tools, in the hope of getting a larger sum of money in return, and capital is the money so advanced. With this representation of capital as money, so long as it is but a popular form of speech, no fault need be found, but Marx soon after falls into a common fallacy and positively identifies capital with money, declaring them to be only the same thing circulating in a different way. Money as money, he says, being a mere medium of exchange, is a middle term between two commodities which it helps to barter, and the order of circulation is C--M--C, i.e. _commodity_ is converted into _money_ and _money_ is reconverted into _commodity_. On the other hand, money as capital stands at the two extremes, and commodity is a middle term, a medium of converting one sum of money into another and greater; the order of circulation being expressed as M--C--M. Of course capital, like other wealth, may be expressed in terms of money, but to identify capital with money in this way is only to introduce confusion, and the real confusion is none the less pernicious that it presents itself under an affectation of mathematical precision. Capital, then, as Marx understands it, may be said to be independent wealth employed or its own increase, and in "societies in which the capitalistic method of production prevails" all wealth bears distinctively this character. In more primitive days, wealth was a store of means of life produced and preserved for the supply of the producer's future wants, but now it "appears as a huge collection of wares," made for other people's wants, made for sale in the market, made for its own increase. What Marx wants to discover is how all this independent wealth has come to accumulate in hands that do not produce it, and in particular from whence comes the increase expected from its use, because it is this increase that enables it to accumulate. What he endeavours to show is that this increase of value cannot take place anywhere except in the process of production, that in that process it cannot come from the dead materials, but only from the living creative power of labour that works upon them, and that it is accordingly virtually stolen from the labourers who made it by the superior economic force of the owners of the dead materials, without which indeed it could not be made, but whose service is entitled to a much more limited reward. No increase of value, he contends, can occur in the process of exchange, for an exchange is a mere transposition of things of equal value. In one sense both parties in the transaction are gainers, for each gets a thing he wants for a thing he does not want. The usefulness of the two commodities is thus increased by the exchange, but their value is not. An exchange simply means that each party gives to the other equal value for equal value, and even if it were possible for one of them to make a gain in value to-day--to get a more valuable thing for a less valuable thing--still, as all the world is buyer and seller in turn, they would lose to-morrow as buyers what they gained to-day as sellers, and the old level of value would be restored. No increase whatever would be effected. There is indeed a class of people whom he describes as always buying and never selling--the unproducing class who live on their money, and who, he says, receive by legal titles or by force wealth made by producers without giving anything in exchange for it. And it may be supposed that perhaps value is created by selling things to this class of persons, or by selling things to them above their true value, but that is not so; you would have brought no new value into the world by such a transaction, and even if you got more for your goods than their worth, you would only be cheating back from these rich people part of the money that they had previously received for nothing. Another supposition remains. Perhaps new value is created in the process of exchange when one dealer takes advantage of another--when Peter, say, contrives to induce Paul to take £40 worth of wine for £50 worth of iron. But in this case there has been no increase of value; the value has merely changed hands; Peter has £10 more than he had before, and Paul £10 less. The commodities have between them after the transaction, as they had before it, a total value of £90, and that total cannot be increased by a mere change of possessor. Having thus established to his satisfaction that commerce, being only a series of exchanges, cannot produce any increase of value, or what he terms surplus value, Marx says that that only makes the problem of the origin of surplus value more enigmatical than ever. For we are thus left in presence of an apparent contradiction: surplus value cannot spring up in the circulation of commodities because circulation is nothing but an exchange of equivalents; and yet surplus value cannot spring up anywhere except in circulation, because the class of persons who receive it and live by it do not produce. Here, then, is a riddle, and Marx sets himself to rede it. True, he says, value is not created directly in the market, but a commodity is purchased in the market which has the remarkable property of creating value. That commodity is the human powers of labour. The very use of these powers, their consumption, their expenditure, is the creation of value. But marvellous as they are, their possessor is obliged to sell them, because while they are yielding their product he must meanwhile live, and he sells a day's use of them for a day's means of living. They create in a day far more than the value of the wages for which they are bought. This excess is surplus value, and is the secret and fountainhead of all accumulations of capital. Powers which can create six shillings worth in a day may be procured in the market for three shillings, because three shillings will pay for their necessary maintenance. Surplus value is the difference between the value of the labourer's necessary maintenance and the value of the labourer's production, and it is in the present system entirely appropriated by the dealer who advances him his wages. Marx thus bases his argument on two principles which he borrows from current economic writers, without, however, observing the limitations under which those writers taught them, and introducing besides important modifications of his own. The one principle is that value comes from labour, or as economists stated their law, that the natural value of commodities is determined by the cost of their production. The second is only a special application of the first; that the natural wages of labour are determined by the cost of its production, and that the cost of the production of labour is the cost of the labourer's subsistence. The fault he finds with the present system is accordingly this, that while labour creates all value it is paid only by its stated living, no matter how much value it creates; and he then goes over the phenomena of modern industrial life to show how each arrangement is invented so as to extract more and more value out of the labourer by prolonging his hours of work or enhancing its speed without giving him any advantage whatever from the increase of value so obtained. We shall get a fair view of Marx's argument, therefore, if we follow it through the successive heads: 1st, Value; 2nd, Wages; 3rd, Normal day of labour; 4th, Machinery; 5th, Piecework; 6th, Relative over-population. 1st. _Value._ Marx holds that all capital--all industrial advances except wages--is absolutely unproductive of value, and therefore not entitled to the acknowledgment known as interest. The original value of all such capital--the purchase price of the materials, together with a certain allowance made for tear and wear of machinery--is carried forward into the value of the product, and preserved in it, and even that could not be done except by labour. The old value is preserved by labour, and all new value is conferred by it, and therefore interest is a consideration entirely out of the question. It is obvious to object that labour by itself is as unproductive as capital by itself, but Marx would reply that while labour and capital are equally indispensable to produce new commodities, it is labour alone that produces new value, for value is only so much labour preserved, it is merely a register of so many hours of work. His whole argument thus turns upon his doctrine of the nature of value, and that doctrine must therefore be closely attended to. What, then, is value? Marx considers that most errors on this subject have arisen from confusing value with utility on the one hand or with price on the other, and he regards his discrimination of value from these two ideas as his most important contribution to political economy. He takes his start from the distinction current since the days of Adam Smith between value in use and value in exchange, and of course agrees with Smith in making the value of a commodity in exchange to be independent of its value in use. Water had great value in use and none in exchange, and diamonds had great value in exchange and little in use. Value in use is therefore not value strictly so called, it is utility; but strictly speaking value in exchange, according to Marx, is not value either, but only the form under which in our state of society value manifests itself. There was no exchange in primitive society when every family produced things to supply its own wants, and there would be no exchange in a communism, for in an exchange the transacting parties stand to one another equally as private proprietors of the goods they barter. And where there was no exchange there could of course be no exchange value. No doubt there was value for all that in primitive times, and there would be value under a communism, though it would manifest itself in a different form. But as we live in an exchanging society, where everything is made for the purpose of being exchanged, it is in exchange alone that we have any experience of value, and it is only from an examination of the phenomena of exchange that we can learn its nature. What, then, is value in exchange? It is the ratio in which one kind of useful commodity exchanges against another kind of useful commodity. This ratio, says Marx, does not in the least depend on the usefulness of the respective commodities, or their capacity of gratifying any particular want. For, first, that is a matter of quality, whereas value is a ratio between quantities; and second, two different kinds of utility cannot be compared, for they have no common measure; but value, being a ratio, implies comparison, and comparison implies a common measure. A fiddle charms the musical taste, a loaf satisfies hunger, but who can calculate how much musical gratification is equivalent to so much satisfaction of hunger. The loaf and the fiddle may be compared in value, but not by means of their several uses. Third, there are many commodities which are useful and yet have no value in exchange: air, for example, water, and, he adds, virgin soil. In seeking what in the exchange the value depends on, we must therefore leave the utility of the commodities exchanged entirely out of account; and if we do so, there is only one other attribute they all possess in common, and it must be on that attribute that their value rests. That attribute is that they are all products of labour. While we looked to the utility of commodities, they were infinite in their variety, but now they are all reduced to one sober characteristic they are so many different quantities of the same material, labour. Diversity vanishes; there are no longer tables and chairs and houses, there is only this much and that much and the next amount of preserved human labour. And this labour itself is not discriminated. It is not joiner work, mason work, or weaver work; it is merely human labour in the abstract, incorporated, absorbed, congealed in exchangeable commodities. In an exchange commodities are quantities of labour jelly, and they exchange in the ratio of the amount of labour they have taken in. Value, then, is quantity of abstract labour, and now what is quantity of labour? How is it to be ascertained? Labour is the exertion or use of man's natural powers of labour, and the quantity of labour is measured by the duration of the exertion. Quantity of labour is thus reduced to time of labour, and is measured by hours and days and weeks. Marx accordingly defines value to be an immanent relation of a commodity to time of labour, and the secret of exchange is that "a day's labour of given length always turns out a product of the same value." Value is thus something inherent in commodities before they are brought to market, and is independent of the circumstances of the market. Marx has no sooner reduced value to the single uniform element of time of labour, and excluded from its constitution all considerations of utility and the state of the market, than he reintroduces those considerations under a disguised form. In the first place, if a day's labour of given length always produces the same value, it is obvious to ask whether then an indolent and unskilful tailor who takes a week to make a coat has produced as much value as the more expert hand who turns out six in this time, or, with the help of a machine, perhaps twenty? Marx answers, Certainly not, for the time of labour which determines value is not the time actually taken, but the time required in existing social conditions to produce that particular kind of commodity--the time taken by labour of average efficiency, using the means which the age affords--in short, what he calls the socially necessary time of labour. Value is an immanent relation to socially necessary time of labour. Marx's standard is thus, after all, not one of quantity of labour pure and simple; it takes into account, besides, the average productive power of labour in different branches of industry. "The value of a commodity," says he, "changes directly as the quantity, and inversely as the productive power, of the labour which realizes itself in that commodity." Before we know the value of a commodity we must therefore know not only the quantity of labour that has gone into it, but the productive power of that labour. We gather the quantity from the duration of exertion, but how is average productive power to be ascertained? By simply ascertaining the total product of all the labour engaged in a particular trade, and then striking the average for each labourer. Diamonds occur rarely in the crust of the earth, and therefore many seekers spend days and weeks without finding one. Hits and misses must be taken together; the productive power of the diamond seeker is low; or, in other words, the time of labour socially necessary to procure a diamond is high, and its value corresponds. In a good year the same labour will produce twice as much wheat as in a bad; its productive power is greater; the time socially necessary to produce wheat is less, and the price of the bushel falls. The value of a commodity is therefore influenced by its comparative abundance, whether that be due to nature, or to machinery, or to personal skill. But, in the next place, if value is simply so much labour, it would seem to follow, on the one hand, that nothing could have value which cost no labour, and, on the other, that nothing could be devoid of value which cost labour. Marx's method of dealing with these two objections deserves close attention, because it is here that the fundamental fallacy of his argument is brought most clearly out. He answers the first of them by drawing a distinction between _value_ and _price_, which he and his followers count of the highest consequence. Things which cost no labour may have a _price_, but they have no _value_, and, as we have seen, he mentions among such things conscience and virgin soil. No labour has touched those things; they have no immanent relation to socially necessary time of labour; they have not, and cannot have, any value, as Marx understands value. But then, he says, they command a price. Virgin soil is actually sold in the market; it may procure things that have value though it has none itself. Now, this distinction between value and price has no bearing on the matter at all, for the simple reason that, as Marx himself admits, price is only a particular form of value. Price, he says, is "the money form of value"; it is value expressed in money; it is the exchange value of a commodity for money. To say that uncultivated land may have a price but not a value is, on Marx's own showing, to say that it has an exchange value which can be definitely measured in money, and has yet no value. But he has started from the phenomena of exchange; he has told us that exchange value is the only form in which we experience value now; and he thus arrives at a theory of value which will not explain the facts. If he argued that a thing had value, but no exchange value, his position might be false, but he says that a thing may have exchange value but no value, and so his position is contradictory. Moreover, he describes money accurately enough as a measure of value, and says that it could not serve this function except it were itself valuable, _i.e._, unless it possessed the quality that makes all objects commensurable, the quality of being a product of labour. Yet here we find him admitting that virgin soil, which, _ex hypothesi_, does not possess that quality, and ought therefore to be incommensurable with anything that possesses it, is yet measured with money every day. Such are some of the absurdities to which Marx is reduced by refusing to admit that utility can confer value independently of labour. Let us see now how he deals with the other objection. If labour is just value-forming substance, and if value is just preserved labour, then nothing which has cost labour should be destitute of value. But Marx frankly admits that there are such things which have yet got no value; and they have no value, he explains, because they have no utility. "Nothing can have value without being useful. If it is useless, the work contained in it is useless, and therefore has no value." He goes further; he says that a thing may be both useful and the product of labour and yet have no value. "He who by the produce of his labour satisfies wants of his own produces utility but not value. To produce a ware, _i.e._, a thing which has not merely value in use, but value in exchange, he must produce something which is not only useful to himself, but useful to others," _i.e._, socially useful. A product of labour which is useless to the producer and everybody else has no value of any sort; a product of labour which, while useful to the producer, is useless to any one else, has no exchange value. It satisfies no want of others. This would seem to cover the case of over-production, when commodities lose their value for a time because nobody wants them. Lassalle explained this depreciation of value by saying that the time of labour socially necessary to produce the articles in question had diminished. Marx explains it by saying that the labour is less socially useful or not socially useful at all. And why is the labour not socially useful? Simply because the product is not so. The social utility or inutility of the labour is a mere inference from the social utility or inutility of the product, and it is therefore the latter consideration that influences value. Marx tries in vain to exclude the influence of that consideration, or to explain it as a mere subsidiary qualification of labour. Labour and social utility both enter equally into the constitution of value, and Marx's radical error lies in defining value in terms of labour only, ignoring utility. For what, after all, is value? Is Marx's definition of it in the least correct? No. Value is not an inherent relation (whatever that may mean) of a commodity to labour; it is essentially a social estimate of the relative importance of commodities to the society that forms the estimate. It is not an immanent property of an object at all; it is a social opinion expressed upon an object in comparison with others. This social opinion is at present collected in an informal but effective way, through a certain subtle tact acquired in the market, by dealers representing groups of customers on the one hand, and manufacturers representing groups of producers on the other; and it may be said to be pronounced in the verdict of exchange, _i.e._, according to Mill's definition of value, in the quantity of one commodity given in exchange for a given quantity of another. Now, on what does this social estimate of the relative importance of commodities turn? In other words, by what is value and difference in value determined? Value is constituted in every object by its possession of two characteristics: 1st, that it is socially useful; 2nd, that it costs some labour or trouble to procure it. No commodity lacks value which possesses both of these characteristics; and no commodity has value which lacks either of them. Now there are two kinds of commodities. Some may be produced to an indefinite amount by means of labour, and since all who desire them can obtain them at any time for the labour they cost, their social desirableness, their social utility, has no influence on their value, which, therefore, always stands in the ratio of their cost of production alone. Other classes of commodities cannot be in this way indefinitely multiplied by labour; their quantity is strictly limited by natural or other causes; those who desire them cannot get them for the mere labour of producing them; and the value of commodities of this sort will consequently always stand in excess of their relative cost of production, and will be really determined by their relative social utility. In fact, so far from the labour required for their production being any guide to their value, it is their value that will determine the amount of labour which will be ventured in their production. A single word may be added in explanation of the conception of social utility. Of course a commodity which is of no use to any one but its owner has no economic value, unless it happens to get lost, and, in any case, it is of no consequence in the present question. The social utility of a commodity is its capacity to satisfy the wants of others than the possessor, and it turns on two considerations: 1st, the importance of the want the commodity satisfies, and, 2nd, the number of persons who share the want. All commodities which derive a value from their rarity or their special excellence belong to this latter class, and the vice of Marx's theory of value is simply this, that he takes a law which is true of the first class of commodities only to be true of all classes of them. 2. _Wages._ Having concluded by the vicious argument now explained that all value is the creation of the personal labour of the workman--is but the registered duration of exertion of his labouring powers--Marx next proceeds to show that, as things at present exist, the value of these labouring powers themselves is fixed not by what they create but by what is necessary to create or at least renovate them. The rate of wages, economists have taught, is determined by the cost of the production of labouring powers, and that is identical with the cost of maintaining the labourer in working vigour. Marx accepts the usual explanations of the elasticity of this standard of cost of subsistence. It includes, of course, the maintenance of the labourer's family as well as his own, because he will die some day, and the permanent reproduction of powers of labour requires the birth of fresh hands to succeed him. It must also cover the expenses of training and apprenticeship, and Marx would probably agree to add, though he does not actually do so, a superannuation allowance for old age. It contains, too, a variable historical element, differs with climate and country, and is, in fact, just the customary standard of living among free labourers of the time and place. The value of a commodity is the time of labour required to deliver it in _normal goodness_, and to preserve the powers of labour in normal goodness a definite quantity of provisions and comforts is necessary according to time, country, and customs. The part of the labouring day required to produce this definite quantity of provisions and comforts for the use of the day may be called the _necessary time of labour_--the time during which the workman produces what is necessary for keeping him in existence--and the value created in this season may be called _necessary value_. But the workman's physical powers may hold on labouring longer than this, and the rest of his working day may accordingly be called _surplus time of labour_, and the value created in it _surplus value_. This surplus value may be created or increased in two ways: either by reducing or cheapening the labourer's subsistence, _i.e._, by shortening the term of necessary labour; or by prolonging the length of the working day, _i.e._, by increasing the term of surplus labour. There are limits indeed within which this kind of action must stop. The quantity of means of life cannot be reduced below the minimum that is physically indispensable to sustain the labourer for the day, and the term of labour cannot be stretched beyond the labourer's capacity of physical endurance. But within these limits may be played an important _rôle_, and the secret of surplus value lies in the simple plan of giving the labourer as little as he is able to live on, and working him as long as he is able to stand. A labourer works 12 hours a day because he cannot work longer and work permanently and well, and he gets three shillings a day of wages, because three shillings will buy him the necessities he requires. In six hours' labour he will create three shillings' worth of value, and he works the other six hours for nothing, creating three shillings' worth of surplus value for the master who advances him his wages. It is from these causes that we come on the present system of things to the singular result that powers of labour which create six shillings a day are themselves worth only three shillings a day. This absurd conclusion, says Marx, could never have held ground for an hour, had it not been hid and disguised by the practice of paying wages in money. This makes it seem as if the labourer were paid for the whole day when he is only paid for the half. Under the old system of feudal servitude there were no such disguises. The labourer wrought for his master one day, and for himself the other five, and there was no make-believe as if he were working for himself all the time. But the wages system gives to surplus labour that is really unpaid the false appearance of being paid. That is the mystery of iniquity of the whole system, the source of all prevailing legal conceptions of the relation of employer and employed, and of all the illusions about industrial freedom. The wages system is the lever of the labourer's exploitation, because it enables the capitalist to appropriate the entire surplus value created by the labourer--_i.e._, the value he creates over and above what is necessary to recruit his labouring powers withal. Now surplus value, as we have seen, is of two kinds, absolute and relative. Absolute surplus value is got by lengthening the term of surplus labour; relative surplus value by shortening the term of necessary labour, which is chiefly done by inventions that cheapen the necessaries of life. The consideration of the first of these points leads Marx into a discussion of the normal length of the day of labour; and the consideration of the second into a discussion of the effects of inventions and machinery on the condition of the working classes. We shall follow him on these points in their order. 3. _Normal day of labour._ There is a normal length of the day of labour, and it ought to be ascertained and fixed by law. Some bounds are set to it by nature. There is a minimum length, for example, beneath which it cannot fall; that minimal limit is the time required to create an equivalent to the labourer's living; but as under the capitalistic system the capitalist has also to be supported out of it, it can never be actually shortened to this minimum. There is also a maximum length above which it cannot rise, and this upper limit is fixed by two sorts of considerations, one physical, the other moral. 1st. _Physical limits._ These are set by the physical endurance of the labourer. The day of labour cannot be protracted beyond the term within which the labourer can go on from day to day in normal working condition to the end of his normal labouring career. This is always looked to with respect to a horse. He cannot be wrought more than eight hours a day regularly without injury. 2nd. _Moral limits._ The labourer needs time (which the horse does not, or he would perhaps get it) for political, intellectual, and social wants, according to the degree required by society at the time. Between the maximum and minimum limit there is, however, considerable play-room, and therefore we find labouring days prevailing of very different length, 8 hours, 10, 12, 14, 16, and even 18 hours. There is no principle in the existing industrial economy which fixes the length of the day; it must be fixed by law on a sound view of the requirements of the case. Marx pitches upon 8 hours as the best limit, because it affords a security for the permanent physical efficiency of the labourer, and gives him leisure for satisfying those intellectual and social wants which are becoming every day more largely imperative. He makes no use of the reason often urged for the 8 hours day, that the increased intelligence it would tend to cultivate in the working class would in many ways conduce to such an increase of production as would justify the shorter term of work. But he is very strong for the necessity of having it fixed by law, and points out that even then employers will need to be carefully watched or they will find ways and means of extending the day in spite of the law. When the day was fixed in England at 10 hours in some branches of industry, some masters gained an extra quarter or half-hour by taking five minutes off each meal time, and the profit made in these five minutes was often very considerable. He mentions a manufacturer who said to him, "If you allow me ten minutes extra time every day, you put £1,000 a year into my pocket," and he says that is a good demonstration of the origin of surplus value, for how much of this £1,000 would be given to the man whose extra ten minutes' labour had made it? Marx enters very fully into the history of English factory legislation, acknowledges the great benefit it has conferred both upon the labouring class and the manufacturers, and says that since the Act of 1850 the cotton industry has become the model industry of the country. As might be expected, he thinks the gradual course taken by English legislation on the subject much inferior, as a matter of principle, to the more revolutionary method taken by France in 1848, when a twelve hours Act was introduced simultaneously as a matter of principle for every trade in the whole country; but he admits that the results were more permanent in England. 4. _Effects of machinery, and the growth of fixed capital on the working classes._ The whole progress of industrial improvements is a history of fresh creations of relative surplus value, and always for the benefit of the capitalist who advances the money. Everything that economizes labour or that adds positively to its productivity, contracts the labourer's own part of the working day and prolongs the master's. Division and subdivision of labour, combination, co-operation, organization, inventions, machinery, are all "on the one hand elements of historical progress and development in the economic civilization of society, but on the other are all means of civilized and refined exploitation of the labourer." They not only increase social wealth at his expense, but in many cases they do him positive injury. These improvements have cost capitalists nothing, though capitalists derive the whole advantage from them. Subdivision, combination, organization, are simply natural resources of social labour, and natural resources of any kind are not produced by the capitalist. Inventions, again, are the work of science, and science costs the capitalist nothing. Labour, association, science--these are the sources of the increase; capital is nowhere, yet it sits and seizes the whole. Machinery, of course, is capital, but then Marx will not admit that it creates any value, and contends that it merely transfers to the product the value it loses by tear and wear in the process of production. The general effect of industrial improvements, according to Marx, is--1st, to reduce wages; 2nd, to prolong the day of labour; 3rd, to overwork one-half of the working class; 4th, to throw the rest out of employ; and, 5th, to concentrate the whole surplus return in the hands of a few capitalists who make their gains by exploiting the labourers, and increase them by exploiting one another. This last point we need not further explain, and the third and fourth we shall unfold under the separate heads of Piecework and Relative Over-population. The remaining two I shall take up now, and state Marx's views about a little more fully. (_a_). Industrial improvements tend to reduce wages. They do so, says Marx, through first mutilating the labourer intellectually and corporeally. As a result of subdivision of labour, workmen are rapidly becoming mere one-sided specialists. Headwork is being separated more and more from handwork in the labourer's occupation, and this differentiation of function leads to a hierarchy of wages which affords great opportunity for exploiting the labourer. Muscular power is more easily dispensed with than formerly, and so the cheaper labour of women and children is largely superseding the dearer labour of men. If this goes on much further, the manufacturer will get the labour of a whole family for the wages he used to pay to its head alone, and the labourer will be converted into a slave-dealer who sells his wife and children instead of his own labour. That this kind of slavery will find no sort of resistance from either master or labourer, is to Marx's mind placed beyond doubt by the fact that though the labour of children under 13 years of age is restricted in English factories, advertisements appear in public prints for "children that can pass for 13." (_b_). Industrial improvements tend to lengthen the day of labour. Machinery can go on for ever, and it is the interest of the capitalist to make it do so. He finds, moreover, a ready and specious pretext in the greater lightness of the work as compared with hand labour, for keeping the labourer employed beyond the normal limits of human endurance. Capitalists always complain that long hours are a necessity in consequence of the increasing extent of fixed capital which cannot otherwise be made to pay. But this is a mistake on their part, says Marx. For, according to the factory inspector's reports, shortening the day of labour to 10 hours has increased production and not diminished it, and the explanation is that the men can work harder while they are at it, if the duration of their labour is shortened. Shortening the day of labour has not only increased production, but actually increased wages. Mr. Redgrave, in his Report for 1860, says that during the period 1839-1859 wages rose in the branches of industry that adopted the ten hours' principle, and fell in trades where men wrought 14 and 15 hours a day. Small wages and long hours are always found to go together, because the same causes which enable the employer to reduce wages enable him to lengthen the labouring day. 5. _Piecework._ Industrial improvements tend, Marx maintains, to overwork, to undue intensification of labour, for machinery can go at almost any rate all day and all night, and labourers are compelled by various expedients to work up to it. Among these expedients none is more strongly condemned by Marx than piecework, as encouraging over-exertion and overtime. He says that though known so early as the 14th century, piecework only came into vogue with the large system of production, to which he thinks it the most suitable form of payment. He states (though this is not quite accurate) that it is the only form of payment in use in workshops that are under the factory acts, because in these workshops the day of labour cannot be lengthened, and the capitalist has no other way open to him of exploiting the labourer but by increasing the intensity of the labour. He ridicules the idea of a writer who thought "the system of piecework marked an epoch in the history of the working man, because it stood halfway between the position of a mere wage labourer depending on the will of the capitalist and the position of the co-operative artisan who in the not distant future promises to combine the artisan and the capitalist in his own person." Better far, he holds, for the labourer to stick to day's wages, for he can be much more easily and extensively exploited by the piece system. He contends that experience has proved this in trades like the compositors and ship carpenters, in which both systems of payment are in operation side by side, and he cites from the factory inspectors' reports of 1860 the case of a factory employing 400 hands, 200 paid by the piece and 200 by the day. The piece hands had an interest in working overtime, and the day hands were obliged to follow suit without receiving a farthing extra for the additional hour or half-hour. This might be stopped by further legislation, but then Marx holds that the system of piece payment is so prone to abuse that when one door of exploitation shuts another only opens, and legislation will always remain ineffectual. Every peculiarity of the system furnishes opportunity either for reducing wages or increasing work. On the piece system the worth of labour is determined by the worth of the work it does, and unless the work possess average excellence the stipulated price is withheld. There is thus always a specious pretext ready to the employer's hand for making deductions from wages on the ground that the work done did not come up to the stipulated standard. Then again, it furnishes the employer with a definite measure for the intensity of labour. He judges from the results of piecework how much time it generally takes to produce a particular piece, and labourers who do not possess the average productivity are turned off on the ground that they are unable to do a minimum day's work. Even those who are kept on get lower average wages than they would on the day system. The superior workman earns indeed better pay working by the piece, but the general body do not. The superior workman can afford to take a smaller price per piece than the others, because he turns out a greater number of pieces in the same time, and the employer fixes, from the case of the superior workman, a standard of payment which is injurious to the rest. In the end a change from day's wages to piece wages will thus be found to have merely resulted in the average labourer working harder for the same money. Marx, however, admits that when a definite scale of prices has been in long use and has become fixed as a custom, there are so many difficulties to its reduction that employers are obliged, when they seek to reduce it, to resort to violent methods of transforming it into time wages again. He gives an example of this from the strike of the Coventry ribbon-weavers in 1860, in resistance to a transformation of this kind. These are only some of the evils Marx lays at the door of piecework; he has many more charges. From rendering the superintendence of labour unnecessary, it leads to abuses like the sub-contracts known in this country as "the sweating system," or what is a variety of the same, to contracts of the employer with his manager, whereby the latter becomes responsible for the whole work, and employs and pays the men. From making it the pecuniary interest of the labourer to work overtime, piecework induces him to overstrain his powers, and both to transgress the legal or normal limits of the day of labour, and to raise or exceed the normal degree of the intensity of labour. Marx, quoting from Dunning, says that it was customary in the engineering trade in London for employers to engage a foreman of exceptional physical powers, and pay him an extra salary per quarter to keep the men up to his own pace; an expedient which, he adds, is actually recommended to farmers by Morton in his "Agricultural Encyclopædia." He attributes to piecework, especially in its operation on women and children, the degeneration of the labouring class in the potteries, which is shown in the Report of the Commission on the Employment of Children. But while Marx thus objects to piecework because it leads to overwork, he objects to it also because it leads to underwork. It enables employers to engage more hands than they require, when they entertain perhaps only an imaginary expectation of work, for they know they run no risk, since paying by the piece they pay only for what is done. The men are thus imperfectly employed and insufficiently paid. 6. _Relative Over-population._ One of the worst features of modern industrial development is the vast number of labourers whom it constantly leaves out of employ. This Marx calls relative over-population. Of absolute over-population he has no fear. He is not a Malthusian. He holds that there is no population law applicable to all countries and times alike. Social organisms differ from one another as do animals and plants; they have different laws and conditions. Every country and age has its own law of population. A constant and increasing over-population is a characteristic of the present age; it is a necessary consequence of the existing method of carrying on industry; but it is nothing in the nature of an absolute over-growth; it is only, to Marx's thinking, a relative superfluity. There is plenty of work for all, more than plenty. If those who have employment were not allowed to be overwrought, and if work were to-morrow to be limited to its due amount for every one according to age and sex, the existing working population would be quite insufficient to carry on the national production to its present extent. Even in England, where the technical means of saving labour are enormous, this could not be done except by converting most of our present "unproductive" labourers into productive. There is therefore, Marx conceives, no reason why any one should be out of work; but at present, what with the introduction of new machinery, the industrial cycles, the commercial crises, the changes of fashion, the transitions of every kind, we have always, besides the industrial army in actual service, a vast industrial reserve who are either entirely out of employment or very inadequately employed. This relative over-population is an inevitable consequence of the capitalistic management of industry, which first compels one-half of the labouring community to do the work of all, and then makes use of the redundancy of labour so created to compel the working half to take less pay. Low wages spring from the excessive competition among labourers caused by this relative over-population. "Rises and falls in the rate of wages are universally regulated by extensions and contractions in the industrial reserve army which correspond with changes in the industrial cycle. They are not determined by changes in the absolute number of the labouring population, but through changes in the relative distribution of the working class into active army and reserve army--through increase or decrease in the relative numbers of the surplus population--through the degree in which it is at one time absorbed and at another dismissed." The fluctuations in the rate of wages are thus traced to expansions or contractions of capital, and not to variation in the state of population. Marx ridicules the theory of these fluctuations given by political economists, that high wages lead to their own fall by encouraging marriages, and so in the end increasing the supply of labour, and that low wages lead to their own rise by discouraging marriages and reducing the supply of labour. That, says Marx, is very fine, but before high wages could have produced a redundant population (which would take eighteen years to grow up), wages would, with modern industrial cycles, have been up, down, and up again through ordinary fluctuations of trade. Relative over-population is of three kinds: current, latent, and stagnant. Current over-population is what comes from incidental causes, the ordinary changes that take place in the every-day course of industry. A trade is slack this season and brisk the next, has perhaps its own seasons, like house-painting in spring, posting in summer. Or one trade may from temporary reasons be busy, while others are depressed. In the last half year of 1860 there were 90,000 labourers in London out of employment, and yet the factory inspectors report that at that very time much machinery was standing idle for want of hands. This comes from the labourer being mutilated--that is, specialized--under modern subdivision of labour, and fit for only a single narrow craft. Another current cause of over-population is that under the stress of modern labour the workman is old before his years, and while still in middle life becomes unfit for full work, and passes into the reserve. Marx says this is the real reason for the prevalence of early marriages among the working class. They are generally condemned for being improvident, but they are really resorted to from considerations of providence, for working men foresee that they will be prematurely disabled for work, and desire, when that day comes, to have grown-up children about them who shall be able to support them. Other current causes are new inventions and new fashions, which always throw numbers out of work. Latent over-population is what springs from causes whose operation is long and slow. The best example of it is the case of the agricultural labourers. They are being gradually superseded by machinery, and as they lose work in the country they gather to the towns to swell the reserve army there. A great part of the farm servants are always in this process of transition, a few here, and a few there, and a few everywhere. The constancy of this flow indicates a latent over-population in the rural districts, and that is the cause of the low wages of agricultural labourers. By stagnant over-population Marx means that which is shown in certain branches of industry, where none of the workmen are thrown back entirely into the reserve, but none get full regular employment. CHAPTER V. THE FEDERALISM OF CARL MARLO. Marlo and Rodbertus are sometimes spoken of as the precursors of German socialism. This, however, is a mistake. The socialism which now exists appeared in Germany among the Young Hegelians forty years ago, before the writings of either of these economists were published, and their writings have had very little influence on the present movement. Rodbertus, it is true, communicated a decided impulse to Lassalle, both by his published letter to Von Kirchmann in 1853, and by personal correspondence subsequently. He was a landed proprietor of strongly liberal opinions, who was appointed Minister of Agriculture in Prussia in 1848, but after a brief period of office retired to his estates, and devoted himself to economic and historical study. He took a very decided view of the defects of the existing industrial system, and held in particular that, in accordance with Ricardo's law of necessary wages, the labourer's income could never rise permanently above the level of supplying him with a bare subsistence, and consequently that, while his labour was always increasing in productivity, through mechanical inventions and other means, the share which he obtained of the product was always decreasing. What was required was simply to get this tendency counteracted, and to devise arrangements by which the labourer's share in the product might increase proportionally with the product itself, for otherwise the whole working population would be left behind by the general advancement of society. The remedy, he conceives, must lie in the line of a fresh contraction of the sphere of private property. That sphere had been again and again contracted in the interests of personal development, and it must be so once more. And the contraction that was now necessary was to leave nothing whatever in the nature of private property except income. This proposal is substantially identical with the scheme of the socialists; it is just the nationalization of all permanent stock; but then he holds that it could not be satisfactorily carried out in less than five hundred years. Rodbertus's writings have never been widely known, but they attracted some attention among the German working class, and he was invited, along with Lassalle and Lothar Bucher, to address the Working Men's Congress in Leipzig in 1863. He promised to come and speak on the law of necessary wages, but the Congress was never held in consequence of the action of Lassalle in precipitating his own movement, and from that movement Rodbertus held entirely aloof. He agreed with Lassalle's complaints against the present order of things, but he disapproved of his plan of reform. He did not think the scheme of founding productive associations on State credit either feasible or desirable, and he would still retain the system of wages, though with certain improvements introduced by law. He thought, moreover, that Lassalle erred gravely in making the socialists a political party, and that they should have remained a purely economic one. Besides, he looked on it as mere folly to expect, with Lassalle, the accomplishment in thirty years of changes which, as we have seen, he believed five centuries little enough time to evolve. Rodbertus may thus be said to have had some relations with the present movement, but Marlo stands completely apart from it: and his large and important work, "Untersuchungen über die Organization der Arbeit, oder System der Weltökonomie," published at Kassel in 1850-5--though original, learned, and lucid--remained so absolutely unknown that none of the lexicons mention his name, and even an economist like Schaeffle--who was the first to draw public attention to it, and has evidently been considerably influenced by it himself--had never read it till he was writing his own work on socialism (1870). But though Marlo cannot be said to have contributed in any respect to the present socialistic movement, his work deserves attentive consideration as a plea for fundamental social reform, advanced by a detached and independent thinker, who has given years of patient study to the phenomena of modern economic life, and holds them to indicate the presence of a deep-seated and widespread social disease. Carl Marlo is the _nom de plume_ of a German professor of chemistry named Winkelblech, and he gives us in the preface to his second volume a touching account of how he came to apply himself to social questions. In 1843 he made a tour of investigation through Northern Europe in connection with a technological work he was engaged in writing, and visited among other places the blue factory of Modum, in Norway, where he remained some days, charmed with the scenery, which he thought equal to that of the finest valleys of the Alps. One morning he went up to a neighbouring height, whence he could see the whole valley, and was calmly enjoying the view when a German artisan came to ask him to undertake some commission to friends in the fatherland. They engaged in conversation. The artisan went over his experiences, and repeated all the privations he and his fellows had to endure. His tale of sorrow, so alien apparently to the ravishing beauty around, made a profound impression on Winkelblech, and altered the purpose and work of his life. "What is the reason," he asked himself, "that the paradise before my eyes conceals so much misery? Is nature the source of all this suffering, or is it man that is to blame for it? I had before, like so many men of science, looked, while in workshops, only on the forges and the machinery, not on the men--on the products of human industry, and not on the producers, and I was quite a stranger to this great empire of misery that lies at the foundation of our boasted civilization. The touching words of the artisan made me feel the nullity of my scientific work and life in its whole extent, and from that moment I resolved to make the sufferings of our race, with their causes and remedies, the subject of my studies." He pursued these studies with the greatest industry for several years, and found the extent of men's sufferings to be greatly beyond his expectation. Poverty prevailed everywhere--among labourers and among employers, too--with peoples of the highest industrial development, and with peoples of the lowest--in luxurious cities, and in the huts of villagers--in the rich plains of Lombardy, no less than the sterile wilds of Scandinavia. He arrived at the conclusion that the causes of all this lay not in nature, but in the fact that human institutions rested on false economic foundations, and he held the only possible remedy to consist in improving these institutions. He became convinced that technical perfection of production, however great, would never be able to extinguish poverty or lead to the diffusion of general comfort, and that civilization was now come to a stage in its development at which further progress depended entirely on the advancement of political economy. Political economy was, therefore, for our time the most important of all sciences, and Winkelblech now determined to give himself thoroughly to its study. Hitherto he had not done so. "During the progress of my investigations," he says, "the doctrines of economists, as well as the theories of socialists, remained almost unknown to me except in name, for I intentionally abstained from seeking any knowledge of either, in order that I might keep myself as free as possible from extraneous influences. It was only after I arrived at the results described that I set myself to a study of economic literature, and came to perceive that the substance of my thoughts, though many of them were not new, and stood in need of correction, departed completely from the accepted principles of the science." He reached the conclusion that there prevailed everywhere the symptoms of a universal social disease, and that political economy was the only physician that could cure it; but that the prevailing system of economy was quite incompetent for that task, and that a new system was urgently and indispensably required. To set forth such a system is the aim of his book. He derides Proudhon's idea of social reforms coming of themselves without design, and argues strongly that no reform worthy the name can ever be expected except as the fruit of economic researches. He agrees with the Socialists in so far as they seek to devise a new economic system, but he thinks they make a defective diagnosis of the disease, and propose an utterly inadequate remedy. He counts them entirely mistaken in attributing all existing evils to the unequal distribution of wealth, a deficiency of production being, in his opinion, a much more important source of misery than any error of distribution. In fact, his fundamental objection to the existing distribution is that it is not the distribution which conduces to the highest production, or to the most fruitful use of the natural resources at the command of society. He differs from the German socialists in always looking at the question from the standpoint of society in general, rather than from that of the proletariat alone, and he maintains that a new organization of labour is even more necessary for the interest of the capitalists than for that of the labourers, because he believes the present system will infallibly lead, unless amended, to the overthrow of the capitalist class, and the introduction of communism. His point of view is moreover purely economic and scientific, entirely free from all partizan admixture, and while he declares himself to be a zealous member of the republican party, he says that he purposely abstains from intervention in politics because he regards the political question as one of very minor rank, and holds that, with sound social arrangements, people could live more happily under the Russian autocracy than, with unsound ones, they could do under the French republic. The organization of labour is, in his opinion, something quite independent of the form of the State, and its final aim ought to be to produce the amount of wealth necessary to diffuse universal comfort among the whole population without robbing the middle classes. These characteristics sufficiently separate him from the socialist democrats of the present day. His book was published gradually in parts, sometimes after long intervals, between 1848 and 1856, and it was finally interrupted by his death in 1865. A second edition appeared in 1885, containing some additions from his manuscripts, but the work remains incomplete. It was to have consisted of three parts; 1st, a historical part, containing an exposition and estimate of the various economic systems; 2nd, an elementary or doctrinal part, containing an exposition of the principles of economic science; and, 3rd, a practical part, explaining his plan for the organization of labour. The first two parts are all we possess; the third, and most important, never appeared, which must be regretted by all who recognise the evidences of original power and singular candour that the other parts present. Marlo's account of the social problem is that it arises from the fact that our present industrial organization is not in correspondence with the idea of right which is recognised by the public opinion of the time. That idea of right is the Christian one, which takes its stand on the dignity of manhood, and declares that all men, simply because they are men, have equal rights to the greatest possible happiness. Up till the French Revolution, the idea of right that prevailed was the heathen one, which might be called the divine right of the stronger. The weak might be made a slave without wrong. He might be treated as a thing and not as a person or an equal, who had the same right with his master or his feudal superior to the greatest possible enjoyment. Nature belonged to the conqueror, and his dominion was transmitted by privilege. Inequality of right was therefore the characteristic of this period; Marlo calls it monopolism. But at the French Revolution the Christian idea of right rose to its due ascendancy over opinion, and the sentiments of love and justice began to assume a control over public arrangements. Do as you would be done by, became a rule for politics as well as for private life, and the weak were supported against the strong. Equality of right was the mark of the new period; Marlo calls it panpolism. This idea could not be realized before the present day, because it had never before taken possession of the public mind, but it has done this now so thoroughly that it cannot be expected to rest till it has realized itself in every direction in all the practical applications of which it is susceptible. The final arbiter of institutions is always the conception of right prevailing at the time; contemporary industrial arrangements are out of harmony with the contemporary conception of right; and stability cannot be looked for until this disturbance is completely adjusted. Now the first attempts that society made to effect this adjustment were not unnaturally attended with imperfection. In the warmth of their recoil from the evils of monopolism, men ran into extreme and distorted embodiments of the opposite principle, and they ran contrary ways. These contrary ways are Liberalism and Communism. Liberalism fixed its attention mainly on the artificial restrictions, the privileges, the services, the legal bonds by which monopoly and inequality were kept up, and it thought a perfect state of society would be brought about if only every chain were snapped and every fetter stripped away. It conceived the road to the greatest possible happiness for every man was the greatest possible freedom; it idolized the principle of abstract liberty, and it fancied if evil did not disappear, it was always because something still remained that needed emancipation. Communism, on the other hand, kept its eyes on the inequalities of monopolistic society; imagined the true road to the greatest possible happiness was the greatest possible equality; that all ills would vanish as soon as things were levelled enough; in short, it idolized the principle of abstract equality. Modern Liberalism and modern Communism are therefore of equal birth; they have the same historical origin in the triumph of the principle of equality of right in 1789; they are only different modes of attempting to reduce that principle to practice; and Liberalism happens to be the more widely disseminated of the two, not because it represents that principle better, but merely because being more purely negative than the other, it was easier of introduction, and so got the start of Communism in the struggle of existence. According to Marlo, they are both equally bad representatives of the principle, and their chief good lies in their mutual criticism, by means of which they prepare the way for the true system, the system of Federalism, which will be presently explained. The history of revolution, he says, begins in the victory of Liberalism and Communism together over Monopolism; it proceeds by the conflict of the victors with one another, and it ends in the final triumph of Federalism over both. Marlo next criticises the two systems of Liberalism and Communism with considerable acuteness. Both the one and the other are utopias; they are absorbed in realizing an abstract principle, and they, as a matter of fact, produce exactly the opposite of what they aim at. Communism seeks to reach the greatest possible happiness by introducing first the greatest possible equality. But what is equality? Is it equality when each man gets a coat of the same size, or is it not rather when each man gets a coat that fits him? Some communists would accept the former alternative. They would measure off the same length to the dwarf and the giant, to the ploughman and the judge, to the family of three and the family of thirteen. But this would be clearly not equality, but only inequality of a more vicious and vexatious kind. Most communists, however, prefer the second alternative, and assign to every man according to his needs, to every man the coat that fits him. But then we must first have the cloth, and that is only got by labour, and every labourer ought if possible to produce his own coat. The motive to labour, however, is weakened on the communistic system; and if those who work less are to be treated exactly like those who work more, then that would be no abolition of monopoly, but merely the invention of a new monopoly, the monopoly of indolence and incapacity. The skilful and industrious would be exploited by the stupid and lazy. Besides, production would for the same reason, insufficient inducement to labour, be diminished, progress would be stopped, and therefore the average of human happiness would decline. Communism thus conducts to the opposite of everything it seeks. It seeks equality, it ends in inequality; it seeks the abolition of monopoly, it creates a new monopoly; it seeks to increase happiness, it actually diminishes it. It is a pure utopia, and why? Because it misunderstands its own principle. Equality does not mean giving equal things to every man; it means merely affording the greatest possible playroom for the development of every personality, and that is exactly the principle of freedom. The greatest possible equality and the greatest possible freedom can only be realized together; they must spring out of the same conditions, and a system of right which shall adjust these conditions is just what is now wanted. Liberalism is a failure from like causes. It seeks to realize happiness by freedom; it realizes neither. For it mistakes the nature of freedom, as the Communists mistake the nature of equality. It takes freedom to be the power of doing what one likes, instead of being the power of doing what is right. Its whole bent is to exempt as much as possible of life from authoritative restraint, and to give as much scope as exigencies will allow to the play of individuality. It is based on no positive conception of right whatever, and looks on the State as an alien whose interference is something exceptional, only justified on occasional grounds of public necessity or general utility. It fails to see that there are really no affairs in a community which are out of relation to the general wellbeing, and destitute of political significance. Nothing demonstrates the error of this better than the effects of the Liberal _régime_ itself. For half a century the industrial concerns of the people have been treated as matters of purely private interest, and this policy has resulted in a political as well as economical revolution. Industrial freedom, which has produced capitalism in the economic field, has resulted in political life in the ascendancy of a new class, a plutocracy, "the worst masters," said De Tocqueville, "the world has yet seen, though their reign will be short." The change which was effected by the legislation of the Revolution was not a development of a fourth estate, as is sometimes said; it was really nothing more than the creation of a money aristocracy, and the putting of them in the place of the old hereditary nobility. The system of industrial right that happens to prevail, therefore, so far from being, as Liberals fancy, outside the sphere of political interest, is in truth the very element on which the distribution of political power, in the last analysis, depends. Nothing is more political than the social question. Liberals think slight of that question, but it is, says Marlo, the real question of the day, and it is neither more nor less than the question of the existence or abolition of Liberalism, the question of the maintenance or subversion of the principle of industrial freedom, the question of the ascendancy or overthrow of a money aristocracy. The fight of our age is a fight against a plutocracy bred of Liberalism. It is not, as some represent it, a struggle of labourers against employers; it is a joint struggle of labourers and lower _bourgeoisie_ against the higher _bourgeoisie_, a struggle of those who work and produce against those who luxuriate idly on the fruits of others' labour. As compared with this question, constitutional questions are of very minor importance, for no matter whether the State be monarchy or republic, if the system of industrial right that prevails in it be the system of industrial freedom, the real power of the country will be in the hands of the capitalist class. He who fails to see this, says Marlo, fails to understand the spirit of his time. It is always the national idea of right that governs both in social and political relations, and as long as the national idea of right is that of Liberalism, we shall continue to have capitalism and a plutocracy. It is the mind that builds the body up, and it is only when a new system of right has taken as complete possession of the national consciousness as Liberalism did in 1789, that the present social conflict will cease and a better order of things come in. From want of such a system of right--from want even of seeing the necessity for it, Liberalism has defeated its own purpose. It sought to abolish monopoly; it has only substituted for the old monopoly of birth the more grievous monopoly of wealth. It sought to establish freedom; it has only established plutocratic tyranny. It has erred because it took for freedom an abstraction of its own and tried to realize that, just as Communism erred by taking for equality an abstraction of its own and trying to realize that. The most perfect state of freedom is not reached when every man has the power of doing what he likes, any more than the most perfect state of equality is reached when every man has equal things with every other; but the greatest possible freedom is attained in a condition of society where every man has the greatest possible play-room for the development of his personality, and the greatest possible equality is attained in exactly the same state of things. Real freedom and real equality are in fact identical. Every right contains from the first a social element as well as an individual element, and it cannot be realized in the actual world without observing a due adjustment between these two elements. Such an adjustment can only be discovered by a critical examination of the economic constitution of society, and must then be expressed in a distinct system of industrial right, which imposes on individual action its just limits. True liberty is liberty within these limits; and the true right of property is a right of property under the same conditions. The fundamental fault of Liberalism, the cause of its failure, is simply that it goes to work without a sound theory of right, or rather perhaps without any clear theory at all, and merely aims at letting every one do as he likes, with the understanding that the State can always be called in to correct accidents and excesses. This defect is what Federalism claims to supply. It claims to be the only theory that abandons abstractions and keeps closely to the nature of things, and therefore to be the only theory that is able to realize even approximately the Christian principle of equality of right. The name furnishes no very precise clue to the conclusion it designates, and it has no reference to the federative form of State, for which Marlo expressly disavows having any partiality. He has chosen the word merely to indicate the fact that society is an organic confederation of many different kinds of associations--families, churches, academies, mercantile companies, and so on; that association is not only a natural form, but the natural form in which man's activity tends to be carried on; and that in any sound system of industrial right this must be recognised by an extension of the collective form of property and the co-operative form of production. Communism, says Marlo, is mechanical, Liberalism is atomistic, but Federalism is organic. When he distinguishes his theory from communism, it must be remembered that it is from the communism which he has criticised, and which he would prefer to denominate Equalism; it is from the communism of Baboeuf, which would out of hand give every man according to his needs, and would consequently, through impairing the motives to industry, leave those needs themselves in the long run less satisfactorily provided for than they are now. But his system is nearly identical with the communism of the Young Hegelians of his own time--that is, with the German socialism of the present day--although he arrived at it in entire independence of their agitations, and builds it on deductions peculiar to himself. Like them, he asks for the compulsory transformation of land and the instruments of production from private property into collective property; like them, he asks for this on grounds of social justice, as the necessary mechanism for giving effect to positive rights that are set aside under the present system; and he says himself, "If you ask the question, how is the democratic social republic related to Federalism, the most suitable answer is, as the riddle to its solution." He starts from the position that all men have equally the right to property. Not merely in the sense, which is commonly acknowledged, that they have the right to property if they have the opportunity of acquiring it; but in the further significance, that they have a right to the opportunity. They are in fact born proprietors--_de jure_ at least, and they are so for two reasons. First, God has made them persons, and not things, and they have, therefore, all equally a natural right to their amplest personal development. If society interferes with this liberty of personal development--if it suffers any of its members to become the slaves of others, for example--it robs them of original rights which belong to them by the mere fact of their manhood. But, secondly, property, resources of some sort, being indispensable means of personal development, God, who has imposed the end, has supplied the means. He has given nature, the earth and the lower creation, into the dominion of man, not of this or that man, or class of men, but of mankind, and consequently every man has, equally with every other, a right to participate in the dominion of nature, a right to use its bounty to the extent required for his personal development. No appropriation of nature can be just which excludes this possibility and robs any man of this natural right. It is, therefore, wrong to allow to any single person, or to any limited number of persons, an absolute dominion over natural resources in which everybody else has, by nature, a right to some extent to share. He who should have complete and exclusive lordship over all nature, would be lord and master of all his fellow-men, and in a period after natural agents are all appropriated the system of complete and absolute property leaves the new-comers at the mercy of those who are already in possession. They can only work if the latter give them the productive instruments; they can only reap from their work so much of its fruits as the latter are pleased to leave with them; and they must perish altogether unless the latter employ them. They are slaves, they are beggars; and yet they came into the world with the rights of a proprietor, of which they can never be divested. Nature laid covers for them as well as for the rest, and a system of property is essentially unjust which ousts them from their seat at her table. The common theory of property starts from the premiss, that all men have the right to property, and draws the conclusion, that, therefore, some men have the right to monopolize it. As usually understood, the proprietary right is as much a right of robbery as a right of property, and Proudhon would have been quite correct in describing property as theft, if no better system of property could be devised than the present. But such a system can be devised; one under which the right of new-comers may be respected without disturbing those of possessors. This can only be done by putting entirely aside the complete and absolute form of property which is in so much favour with Liberalism, and by making the right of property in any actual possession a strictly limited and circumscribed right from the first--the right not to an arbitrary control over a thing, but to a just control over it. So long as property is always thought of as an arbitrary and absolute dominion over a thing, the proprietary right cannot possibly be explained in a way that does not make it a right given to some to rob others. Why not, therefore, define property from the beginning as subject to limitations, and contrive a new form or system of it, in which these limitations shall for ever receive due recognition, and no man be thereafter denied the opportunity of acquiring as much of the bounty of nature as is necessary for him to carry out his personal development? That is Marlo's task, and it would have been an easy one, if all goods, if everything that satisfies a human want, had been supplied directly by nature, as air is supplied, without the need of industry to procure it or the power of industry to multiply it. Then the problem would be solved very simply as the earlier communists desired to solve it. Every member of society would be entitled to partake of nature's supplies, as he now does of air, in the measure of his need, and when those supplies ran exhausted, just as when the air became vitiated, society would be entitled, nay obliged, to suppress further propagation. But the question is far from being so simple. Nature only yields her bounties to us after labour; they are only converted into means of life by labour; and they are capable of being vastly multiplied by labour. This element of labour changes the situation of things considerably, and must be allowed a leading _rôle_ in determining a just right and system of property. The only case where a proprietary right can be recognised which is unmodified by this consideration, is the case of those who are unable to labour. They fall back on their original right to a share in the bounty of nature in the measure that their personal development requires; in other words, according to their needs. Their share does not lie waste, though they are unable to work it themselves, and their share belongs to them immediately because they are persons, and not because they may afterwards become labourers. Marlo recognises, therefore, antecedently to labour the right to existence, and this right he proposes to realize for the weak and disabled by means of a compulsory system of national insurance. The other natural proprietary rights are consequent in one way or another upon labour. First, there is the right to labour. If every man has a right to a share in the dominion of nature, then every man who is able to labour has a right to obtain the natural resources that are necessary to give him employment according to capacity and trade. No private appropriation of these resources can divest him of his title to get access to them, and if he cannot find work himself, the State is bound to provide it for him in public workshops. Second, every man has a right to the most profitable possible application of labour to natural resources. He has an interest in seeing the common stock put to the best account, and he is wronged in this interest when waste is permitted, when inferior methods are resorted to, or when the distribution of work and materials is ill arranged. Now the best arrangement is when each man is equipped according to the measure and quality of his powers. Nature will be then best worked, and man's personal development will then be best furthered. If such an arrangement cannot be effected on the system of property now in vogue, while it may be under another, it is every man's right to have the former system supplanted by the latter. The most economical form of property is the most just. Third, the next right is a right to an almost unlimited control over the fruits of one's own labour. Not over the means of labour; these can only be justly or economically held by a circumscribed control; but over the fruits of labour. These ought to be retained as exclusive property, for the simple reason that the natural resources will be so turned to the best account. On any other system of payment the motive to labour is impaired, and the amount of its produce diminished. Distribution by need defeats its own end; the very needs of the community would be less amply satisfied after it than before it. Distribution according to work is the sound economic principle, and therefore the just one. Marlo here leaves room for the play of the hereditary principle and of competition to some extent, and he allows the free choice of occupation on similar grounds. Men will work best in lines their own tastes and powers lead them to. Everything is determined by economic utility, and economic utility is supposed to be at its height when the natural resources of a country are distributed among its inhabitants according to the requirements of their labouring powers. This condition of things can only be realized, first, if population is regulated; second, if unproductive labour is suppressed; and third, if the means of labour are made common property. The necessity for regulating population comes, of course, from the limitation of the natural resources at society's command. In any community there is a certain normal limit of population--the limit at which all the natural resources are distributed among all the inhabitants according to their powers--and the community will learn when this limit is reached from the number of workmen who are unable to obtain private employment, and are obliged to seek work from the State. Then it can regulate population by various expedients. It may require the possession of a certain amount of fortune as a preliminary condition to marriage, and raise this amount according to necessity. It may encourage emigration. It may forbid marriages under a fixed age, and to prevent illegitimacy, it might give natural children the same rights as legitimate ones. But Marlo trusts most to the strong preventive check that would be supplied by the power imparted to working men under the Federal _régime_ of improving their position. The same necessity that makes it legitimate, and, indeed, imperative to regulate population, makes it legitimate and imperative also to suppress what Marlo calls unproductive acquisition, _i.e._, the acquisition by persons who are able to work of any other property than they earn as the fruit of their work; and to suppress likewise all waste of the means of life and enjoyment, such, for example, as is involved in the maintenance of unnecessary horses, dogs, or other animals that only eat up the products of the soil. The obligation to labour and the curtailment of luxury would come into exercise before the restrictions on population, and be more and more rigorously enforced as the normal limit of population was approximated. But the most important and the most necessary innovation is the conversion of land and the instruments of production into the form of collective property. The form in which property should be held ought to be strictly determined by considerations of economic utility. From such considerations the Liberals themselves have introduced important changes into the system of property; they have abolished fiefs, hereditary tenancies, entail, servitudes, church and village lands, all the peculiarities of monopolistic society, because, as they said, they wished to substitute a good form of property for a bad; and they at least have no right, Marlo thinks, to turn round now on Communists or Federalists for proposing to supersede this good form of property by a better. They have themselves transformed property by law, and they have transformed it on grounds of economic advantage; they have owned that the economic superiority of a particular form of property imposes a public obligation for its compulsory introduction. They asserted the competency of the State against the monopolists, and they cannot now deny it against the socialists. If the private form of property is best, then let the State maintain it; but if the collective form is best, then the State is bound, even on the principles of Liberals themselves, to introduce it. The question can only be determined by experience of the comparative economic utility of the two. Without offering any detailed proof of his proposition from experience Marlo then affirms that the most advantageous form of property is reached when the instruments of production are the collective property of associations, and the instruments of enjoyment (except wells, bridges, and the like) are the property of individuals. Each man's house would still be his castle; his house and the fulness thereof would still belong to him; but outside of it he could acquire no individual possessions. Of land and the means of labour, he should be joint-proprietor with others, or rather joint-tenant with them under the Crown. Industrial property would be held in common by the associations that worked it, and these associations would be organized by authority with distinct charters of powers and functions. Marlo thus arrives at the same practical scheme as Marx, though by a slightly different road. Marx builds his claim on Ricardo's theory of value and Ricardo's law of necessary wages. Marlo builds his on man's natural right, as a sharer in the dominion of nature, to the most advantageous exercise of that dominion. CHAPTER VI. THE SOCIALISTS OF THE CHAIR. The Socialists of the Chair have done themselves injustice and sown their course with embarrassing misconceptions by adopting too hastily an infelicitous name. It is more descriptive than most political nicknames, and therefore more liable to mislead. It was first used in 1872 in a pamphlet by Oppenheim, then one of the leaders of the National Liberals, to ridicule a group of young professors of political economy who had begun to show a certain undefined sympathy with the socialist agitations of Lassalle and Von Schweitzer, and to write of the wrongs of the labouring classes and the evils of the existing industrial system with a flow of emotion which was thought to befit their years better than their position. A few months later these young professors called together at Eisenach a Congress of all who shared their general attitude towards that class of questions. In opening this Congress--which was attended by almost every economist of note in Germany, and by a number of the weightiest and most distinguished Liberal politicians--Professor Schmoller employed the name "Socialists of the Chair" to describe himself and those present, without adding a single qualifying remark, just as if it had been their natural and chosen designation. The nickname was no doubt accepted so readily, partly from a desire to take the edge off the sneer it was meant to convey, but partly also from the nobler feeling which makes men stand by a truth that is out of favour. Not that they approved of the contentions of social democracy out and out, but they believed there was more basis of truth in them than persons in authority were inclined to allow, and besides that the truth they contained was of special and even pressing importance. They held, as Schmoller said, that "Social Democracy was itself a consequence of the sins of modern Liberalism." They went entirely with the Social Democrats in maintaining both that a grave social crisis had arisen, and that it had been largely brought about by an irrational devotion on the part of the Liberals to the economic doctrine of _laissez-faire_. But they went further with them. They believed that the salvation of modern society was to come, not indeed from the particular scheme of reconstruction advocated by the Social Democrats, but still from applications in one form or another of their fundamental principle, the principle of association. And it was for that reason--it was for the purpose of marking the value they set upon the associative principle as the chief source of healing for the existing ills of the nations--that they chose to risk misunderstanding and obloquy by accepting the nickname put upon them by their adversaries. The late Professor Held, who claims as a merit that he was the first to do so, explains very clearly what he meant by calling himself a socialist. Socialism may signify many different things, but, as he uses the word, it denotes not any definite system of opinions or any particular plan of social reform, but only a general method which may guide various systems, and may be employed more or less according to circumstances in directing many different reforms. He is a socialist because he would give much more place than obtains at present to the associative principle in the arrangements of economic life, and because he cannot share in the admiration many economists express for the purely individualistic basis on which these arrangements have come to stand. A socialist is simply the opposite of an individualist. The individualist considers that the perfection of an industrial economy consists in giving to the principles of self-interest, private property, and free competition, on which the present order of things is founded, the amplest scope they are capable of receiving, and that all existing economic evils are due, not to the operation of these principles, but only to their obstruction, and will gradually disappear when self-interest comes to be better understood, when competition is facilitated by easier inter-communication, and when the law has ceased from troubling and left industry at rest. The socialist, in Held's sense, is, on the other hand, one who rejects the comfortable theory of the natural harmony of individual interests, and instead of deploring the obstructions which embarrass the operations of the principles of competition, self-interest, and private property, thinks that it is precisely in consequence of these obstructions that industrial society contrives to exist at all. Strip these principles, he argues, of the restraints put upon them now by custom, by conscience, by public opinion, by a sense of fairness and kind feeling, and the inequalities of wealth would be immensely aggravated, and the labouring classes would be unavoidably ground to misery. Industrial society would fall into general anarchy, into a _bellum omnium contra omnes_, in which they that have would have more abundantly, and they that have not would lose even what they have. Held declines to join in the admiration bestowed by many scientific economists upon this state of war, in which the battle is always to the rich. He counts it neither the state of nature, nor the state of perfection, of economic society, but simply an unhappy play of selfish and opposing forces, which it ought to be one of the distinct aims of political economy to mitigate and counteract. Individualism has already had too free a course, and especially in the immediate past has enjoyed too sovereign a reign. The work of the world cannot be carried on by a fortuitous concourse of hostile atoms, moving continually in a strained state of suspended social war, and therefore, for the very safety of industrial society, we must needs now change our tack, give up our individualism, and sail in the line of the more positive and constructive tendencies of socialism. To Held's thinking accordingly, socialism and individualism are merely two contrary general principles, ideals, or methods, which may be employed to regulate the constitution of economic society, and he declares himself a socialist because he believes that society suffers at present from an excessive application of the individualistic principle, and can only be cured by an extensive employment of the socialistic one. This is all clear enough, but it is simply giving to the word socialism another new meaning, and creating a fresh source of ambiguity. That term has already contracted definite associations which it is impossible to dispel by mere word of mouth, and which constitute a refracting medium through which the principles of the Socialists of the Chair cannot fail to be presented in a very misleading form. These writers assume a special position in two relations--first, as theoretical economists; and, second, as practical politicians or social reformers; and in both respects alike the term socialism is peculiarly inappropriate to describe their views. In regard to the first point, by adopting that name they have done what they could to "Nicodemus" themselves into a sect, whereas they might have claimed, if they chose, to be better exponents of the catholic tradition of the science than those who found fault with them. This is a claim, however, which they would be shocked indeed to think of presenting. With a natural partiality for their own opinions, they exaggerated immensely the extent and also the value of their divergence from the traditional or, as it is sometimes called, the classical economics. In the energy of their recoil from the dogmatism which had for a generation usurped an excessive sway over economic science, they were carried too far in the opposite direction, but they had in their own minds the sensation that they were carried a great deal farther than they really were. They liked to think of their historical method as constituting a new epoch, and effecting a complete revolution in political economy, but, as will subsequently appear, that method, when reduced to its real worth, amounts to no more than an application, with somewhat distincter purpose and wider reach, of the method which Smith himself followed. Of this they are in some degree conscious. Brentano, who belongs to the extreme right of the school, says that Smith would have been a Socialist of the Chair to-day if he were alive; and Samter, who belongs to the extreme left, though he is doubtful regarding Smith, has no hesitation in claiming Mill, whom he looks upon as standing more outside than inside the school of Smith. Their position is, therefore, not the new departure which many of them would fain represent it to be. They are really as natural and as legitimate a line of descent from Adam Smith as their adversaries the German Manchester Party who claimed the authority of his name. Perhaps they are even more so, for in science the true succession lies with those who carry the principles of the master to a more fruitful development, and not with those who embalm them as sacred but sterile simulacra. But it is as practical reformers that the Socialists of the Chair suffer most injustice from their name. Since the word socialism was first used by Reybaud fifty years ago, it has always been connected with utopian or revolutionary ideas. Now the Socialists of the Chair are the very opposite of revolutionaries both by creed and practice. None of the various parties which occupy themselves with the social problem in Germany is so eminently and advisedly practical. Their very historical method, apart from anything else, makes them so. It gives them a special aversion to political and social experiments, for it requires as the first essential of any project of reform that it shall issue naturally and easily out of--or at least be harmonious with--the historical conditions of the time and place to which it is to be applied. Roscher, who may be regarded as the founder of the school, says that reformers ought to take for their model Time, whose reforms are the surest and most irresistible of all, but yet so gradual that they cannot be observed at any given moment. They make, therefore, on the whole a very sparing use of the socialistic principle they invoke. Certainly the world, in their eyes, is largely out of joint, but its restoration is to proceed gently, like Solomon's temple, without sound of hammer. Some of them of course go farther than others, but they would all still leave us rent, wages, and profits, the three main stems of individualism. They struck the idea of taxing speculative profits out of their programme, and so far from having any socialistic thought of abolishing inheritance, none of them except Von Scheel would even tax it exceptionally. Samter stands alone in urging the nationalization of the land; and Wagner stands alone in desiring the abolition of private property in ground-rents in towns; the other members cannot agree even about the expediency of nationalizing the railways. They work of set purpose for a better distribution of wealth--for what Schmoller calls a progressive equalization of the excessive and even dangerous differences of culture that exist at present--but they recoil from all suggestion of schemes of repartition, and they have no fault to find with inequality in itself. On the contrary they regard inequality as being not merely an unavoidable result of men's natural endowments, but an indispensable instrument of their progress and civilization. Schmoller explains that their political principles are those of Radical Toryism, as portrayed in Lord Beaconsfield's novels; and he means that they rest on the same active sympathy with the ripening aspirations of the labouring classes, and the same zealous confidence in the authority of the State, and in these respects are distinguished from modern Liberalism, whose governing sympathies are with the interests and ideas of the _bourgeoisie_, and which entertains a positive jealousy of the action of the State. The actual reforms which the Socialists of the Chair have hitherto promoted have been in the main copied from our own English legislation--our Factory Acts, our legalization of Trade Unions, our Savings Banks, our registration of Friendly Societies, our sanitary legislation, etc., etc.--measures which have been passed, with the concurrence of men of opposite shades of opinion, out of no social theory but from a plain regard to the obvious necessities of the hour. So that we have been simply Socialists of the Chair for a generation without knowing it, doing from a happy political instinct the works which they deduce out of an elaborate theory of economic politics. Part of their theory, however, is, that in practical questions they are not to go by theory, and the consequence is that while they sometimes lay down general principles in which communism might steal a shelter, they control these principles so much in their application by considerations of expediency, that the measures they end in proposing differ little from such as commend themselves to the common sense and public spirit of middle-class Englishmen. Their general theory had been taught in Germany for twenty years before it was forced into importance by the policy it suggested and the controversies it excited in connection with the socialist movement which began in 1863. Wilhelm Roscher, the lately deceased professor of economics in Leipzig, first propounded the historical method in his "Grundriss zu Vorlesungen über die Staatswirthschaft nach geschichtlicher Methode," published in 1843, though it deserves to be noticed that in this work he spoke of the historical method as being the ordinary inductive method of scientific economists, and distinguished it from the idealistic method proceeding by deduction from preconceived ideas, which he said was the method of the socialists. He had no thought as yet of representing his method as diverging from that of his predecessors, even in detail, much less as being essentially different in principle. Then the late Bruno Hildebrand, professor of political science at Jena, in his work on the "National Economy of the Present and the Future," published in 1847, proclaimed the historical method as the harbinger and instrument of a new era in the science, but he speaks of it only as a restoration of the method of diligent observation which Adam Smith practised, but which his disciples deserted for pure abstractions. In 1853, a more elaborate defence and exposition of the historical method appeared in a work on "Political Economy from the Standpoint of the Historical Method," by Carl G. A. Knies, professor of national economics at Heidelberg. But it was never dreamt that the ideas broached in these works had spread beyond the few solitary thinkers who issued them. The Free Traders were still seen ruling everything in the high places of the land in the name of political economy, and they were everywhere apparently accepted as authorized interpreters of the mysteries of that, to the ordinary public, somewhat occult science. They preached the freedom of exchange like a religion which contained at once all they were required to believe in economic matters, and all they were required to do. There was ground for Lassalle's well-known taunt: "Get a starling, Herr Schultze, teach it to pronounce the word 'exchange,' 'exchange,' 'exchange,' and you have produced a very good modern economist." The German Manchester Party certainly gave to the principle of _laissez-faire, laissez-aller_, a much more unconditional and universal application than any party in this country thought of according to it. They looked on it as a kind of orthodoxy which it had come to be almost impious to challenge. It had been hallowed by the consensus of the primitive fathers of the science, and it seemed now to be confirmed beyond question experimentally by the success of the practical legislation in which it had been exemplified during the previous quarter of a century. The adherents of the new school never raised a murmur against all this up till the eventful time of the socialist agitation and the formation of the new German Empire, and the reason is very plain. On the economic questions which came up before that period, they were entirely at one with the Free Traders, and gave a hearty support to their energetic lead. They were, for example, as strenuously opposed to protective duties and to restrictions upon liberty of migration, settlement, and trading, as Manchester itself. But with the socialist agitation of 1863, a new class of economic questions came to the front--questions respecting the condition of the working classes, the relations of capital and labour, the distribution of national wealth, and the like--and on these new questions they could not join the Free Traders in saying "Hands off!" They did not believe with the Manchester school that the existing distribution of wealth was the best of all possible distributions, because it was the distribution which Nature herself produced. They thought, on the contrary, that Nature had little to do with the matter; but even if it had more, there was only too good cause for applying strong corrections by art. They said it was vain for the Manchester party to deny that a social question existed, and to maintain that the working classes were as well off as it was practical for economic arrangements to make them. They declared there was much truth in the charges which socialists were bringing against the existing order of things, and that there was a decided call upon all the powers of society, and, among others, especially upon the State, to intervene with some remedial measures. A good opportunity for concerted and successful action seemed to be afforded when the German Empire was established, and this led to the convening of the Eisenach Congress in 1872, and the organization of the Society for Social Politics in the following year. Men of all shades of opinion were invited to that Congress, provided they agreed on two points, which were expressly mentioned in the invitation: 1st, in entertaining an earnest sense of the gravity of the social crisis which existed; and 2nd, in renouncing the principle of _laissez-faire_ and all its works. The Congress was attended by 150 members, including many leading politicians and most of the professors of political economy at the Universities. Roscher, Knies, and Hildebrand were there, with their younger disciples Schmoller, professor at Strasburg and author of the "History of the Small Industries"; Lujo Brentano, professor at Breslau, well known in this country by his book on "English Gilds" and his larger work on "English Trade Unions"; Professors A. Wagner of Berlin and Schönberg of Tübingen. Then there were men like Max Hirsch and Duncker the publisher, both members of the Imperial Diet, and the founders of the Hirsch-Duncker Trade Unions; Dr. Engel, director of the statistical bureau at Berlin; Professor von Holtzendorff, the criminal jurist; and Professor Gneist, historian of the English Constitution, who was chosen to preside. After an opening address by Schmoller, three papers were read and amply discussed, one on Factory Legislation by Brentano, a second on trade Unions and Strikes by Schmoller, and a third on Labourers' Dwellings by Engel. This Congress first gave the German public an idea of the strength of the new movement; and the Free Trade party were completely, and somewhat bitterly, disenchanted, when they found themselves deserted, not as they fancied merely by a few effusive young men, but by almost every economist of established reputation in the country. A sharp controversy ensued. The newspapers, with scarcely an exception, attacked the Socialists of the Chair tooth and nail, and leading members of the Manchester party, such as Treitschke the historian, Bamberger the Liberal politician, and others, rushed eagerly into the fray. They were met with spirit by Schmoller, Held, Von Scheel, Brentano, and other spokesmen of the Eisenach position, and one result of the polemic is, that some of the misunderstandings which naturally enough clouded that position at the beginning have been cleared away, and it is now admitted by both sides that they are really much nearer one another than either at first supposed. The Socialists of the Chair did not confine their labours to controversial pamphlets. They published newspapers, periodicals, elaborate works of economic investigation; they held meetings, promoted trade unions, insurance societies, savings banks; they brought the hours of labour, the workmen's houses, the effects of speculation and crises, all within the sphere of legislative consideration. The moderation of their proposals of change has conciliated to a great extent their Manchester opponents. Even Oppenheim, the inventor of their nickname, laid aside his scoffing, and seconded some of their measures energetically. Indeed, their chief adversaries are now the socialists, who cannot forgive them for going one mile with them and yet refusing to go twain--for adopting their diagnosis and yet rejecting their prescription. Brentano, who is one of the most moderate, as well as one of the ablest of them, takes nearly as grave a view of the state of modern industrial society as the socialists themselves do; and he says that if the evils from which it suffers could not be removed otherwise, it would be impossible to avoid much longer a socialistic experiment. But then he maintains that they can be removed otherwise, and one of the chief motives of himself and his allies in their practical work is to put an end to socialistic agitation by curing the ills which have excited it. The key to the position of the Socialists of the Chair lies in their historical method. This method has nothing to do with the question sometimes discussed whether the proper method of political economy is the inductive or the deductive. On that question the historical school of economists are entirely agreed with the classical school. Roscher, for example, adopts Mill's description of political economy as a concrete deductive science, whose _à priori_ conclusions, based on laws of human nature, must be tested by experience, and says that an economic fact can be said to have received a scientific explanation only when its inductive and deductive explanations have met and agreed. He makes, indeed, two qualifying remarks. One is, that it ought to be remembered that even the deductive explanation is based on observation, on the self-observation of the person who offers it. This will be admitted by all. The other is, that every explanation is only provisional, and liable to be superseded in the course of the progress of knowledge, and of the historical growth of social and economic structure. This will also be admitted, and it is no peculiarity of political economy. There is no science whose conclusions are not modified by the advance of knowledge; and there are many sciences besides political economy whose phenomena change their type in lapse of time. Roscher's proviso, therefore, amounts to nothing more than a caution to economic investigators to build their explanations scrupulously on the facts, the whole facts, and nothing but the facts, and to be specially on their guard against applying to the circumstances of one period or nation explanations and recommendations which are only just regarding another. The same disease may have different symptoms in a child from what it has in a man, and a somewhat different type at the present day from what it had some centuries ago; and it may therefore require a quite different treatment. That is a very sound principle and a very self-evident one, and it contains the whole essence of the historical method, which, so far as it is a method of investigation at all, is simply that of other economists applied under a more dominating sense of the complexity and diversity of the phenomena which are subjected to it. There is consequently with the historical school more rigour of observation and less rigour of theory, and this peculiarity leads to practical results of considerable importance, but it has no just pretensions to assume the dignity of a new economic method, and it is made to appear much bigger than it is by looming through the scholastic distinctions in which it is usually set forth. The historical school sometimes call their method the _realistic_ and _ethical_ method, to distinguish it from what they are pleased to term the _idealistic_, and _selfish_ or _materialistic_ method of the earlier economists. They are _realists_ because they cannot agree with the majority of economists who have gone before them in believing there is one, and only one, ideal of the best economic system. There are, says Roscher, as many different ideals as there are different types of peoples, and he completely casts aside the notion, which had generally prevailed before him, that there is a single normal system of economic arrangements, which is built on the natural laws of economic life, and to which all nations may at all times with advantage conform. It is against this notion that the historical school has revolted with so much energy that they wish to make their opposition to it the flag and symbol of a schism. They deny that there are any natural laws in political economy; they deny that there is any economic solution absolutely valid, or capable of answering in one economic situation because it has answered in another. Roscher, Knies, and the older members of the school make most of the latter point; but Hildebrand, Schönberg, Schmoller, Brentano, and the younger spirits among them, direct against the former some of their keenest attacks. They declare it to be a survival from the exploded metaphysics of the much-abused _Aufklärung_ of last century. They argue that just as the economists of that period took self-interest to be the only economic motive, because the then dominant psychology--that of the selfish or sensual school--represented it as the only real motive of human action, of which the other motives were merely modifications; so did they come to count the reciprocal action and reaction of the self-interest of different individuals to be a system of natural forces, working according to natural laws, because they found the whole intellectual air they breathed at the time filled with the idea that all error in poetry, art, ethics, and therefore also economics, had come through departing from nature, and that the true course in everything lay in giving the supremacy to the nature of things. We need not stop to discuss this historical question as to the origin of the idea; it is enough here to say that the Socialists of the Chair maintain that in economic affairs it is impossible to make any such distinction between what is natural and what is not so. Everything results from nature, and everything results from positive institution too. There is in economics either no nature at all, or there is nothing else. Human will effects or affects all; and human will is itself influenced, of course, by human nature and human condition. Roscher says that it is a mistake to speak of industry being forced into "unnatural" courses by priests or tyrants, for the priests and tyrants are part and parcel of the people themselves, deriving all their resources from the people, and in no respect Archimedeses standing outside of their own world. The action of the State in economic affairs is just as natural as the action of the farmer or the manufacturer; and the latter is as much matter of positive institution as the former. But while Roscher condemns this distinction, he does not go the length his disciples have gone, and reject the whole idea of natural law in the sphere of political economy. On the contrary, he actually makes use of the expression, "the natural laws of political economy," and asserts that, when they are once sufficiently known, all that is then needed to guide economic politics is to obtain exact and reliable statistics of the situation to which they are to be applied. Now that statement is exactly the position of the classical school on the subject. Economic politics is, of course, like all other politics, an affair of times and nations; but economic science belongs to mankind, and contains principles which may be accurately enough termed, as Roscher terms them, natural laws, and which may be applied, as he would apply them, to the improvement of particular economic situations, on condition that sufficiently complete and correct statistics are obtained beforehand of the whole actual circumstances. Economic laws are, of course, of the nature of ethical laws, and not of physical; but they are none the less on that account natural laws, and the polemic instituted by the Socialists of the Chair to expel the notion of natural law from the entire territory of political economy is unjustifiable. Phenomena which are the result of human action will always exhibit regularities while human character remains the same; and, moreover, they often exhibit undesigned regularities which, not being imposed upon them by man, must be imposed upon them by Nature. While, therefore, the Socialists of the Chair have made a certain point against the older economists by showing the futility and mischief of distinguishing between what is natural in economics and what is not, they have erred in seeking to convert that point into an argument against the validity of economic principles and the existence of economic laws. At the same time their position constitutes a wholesome protest against the tendency to exaggerate the completeness or finality of current doctrines, and gives economic investigation a beneficial direction by setting it upon a more thorough and all-sided observation of facts. But when they complain of the earlier economists being so wedded to abstractions, the fault they chiefly mean to censure is the habit of solving practical economic problems by the unconditional application of certain abstract principles. It is the "absolutism of solutions" they condemn. They think economists were used to act like doctors who had learnt the principles of medicine by rote and applied them without the least discrimination of the peculiarities of individual constitutions. With them the individual peculiarities are everything, and the principles are too much thrown into the shade. Economic phenomena, they hold, constitute only one phase of the general life of the particular nations in which they appear. They are part and parcel of a special concrete social organism. They are influenced--they are to a great extent made what they are--by the whole _ethos_ of the people they pertain to, by their national character, their state of culture, their habits, customs, laws. Economic problems are consequently always of necessity problems of the time, and can only be solved for the period that raises them. Their very nature alters under other skies and in other ages. They neither appear everywhere in the same shape, nor admit everywhere of the same answer. They must therefore be treated historically and empirically, and political economy is always an affair for the nation and never for the world. The historical school inveigh against the _cosmopolitanism_ of the current economic theories, and declare warmly in favour of _nationalism_; according to which every nation has its own political economy just as it has its own constitution and its own character. Now here they are right in what they affirm, wrong in what they deny. They are right in affirming that economic politics is national, wrong in denying that economic science is cosmopolitan. In German the word economy denotes the concrete industrial system as well as the abstract science of industrial systems, and one therefore readily falls into the error of applying to the latter what is only true of the former. There may be general principles of engineering, though every particular project can only be successfully accomplished by a close regard to its particular conditions. In claiming a cosmopolitan validity for their principles, economists do not overlook their essential relativity. On the contrary, they describe their economic laws as being in reality nothing more than tendencies, which are not even strictly true as scientific explanations, and are never for a moment contemplated as unconditional solutions for practical situations. Moreover Roscher, in defining his task as an economist, virtually takes up the cosmopolitan standpoint and virtually rejects the national. He says a political economist has to explain what is or has been, and not to show what ought to be; he quotes the saying of Dunoyer, _Je n'impose rien, je ne propose même rien, j'expose_; and states that what he has to do is to unfold the anatomy and physiology of social and national economy. He is a scientific man, and not an economic politician, and naturally assumes the position of science, which is cosmopolitan, and not that of politics, which is national and even opportunist. I pass now to a perhaps more important point, from which it will be seen that the Socialists of the Chair are far from thinking that political economy has nothing to do with what ought to be. Next to the _realistic_ school, the name they prefer to describe themselves by is the _ethical_ school. By this they mean two things, and some of them lay the stress on the one and some on the other. They mean, first, to repudiate the idea of self-interest being the sole economic motive or force. They do not deny it to be a leading motive in industrial transactions, and they do not, like some of the earlier socialists, aim at its extinction or replacement by a social or generous principle of action. But they maintain that the course of industry never has been and never will be left to its guidance alone. Many other social forces, national character, ideas, customs--the whole inherited _ethos_ of the people--individual peculiarities, love of power, sense of fair dealing, public opinion, conscience, local ties, family connections, civil legislation--all exercise upon industrial affairs as real an influence as personal interest, and, furthermore, they exercise an influence of precisely the same kind. They all operate ethically, through human will, judgment, motives, and in this respect one of them has no advantage over another. It cannot be said, except in a very limited sense, that self-interest is an essential and abiding economic force and the others only accidental and passing. For while customs perish, custom remains; opinions come and go, but opinion abides; and though any particular act of the State's intervention may be abolished, State intervention itself cannot possibly be dispensed with. It is all a matter of more or less, of here or there. The State is not the intruder in industry it is represented to be. It is planted in the heart of the industrial organism from the beginning, and constitutes in fact part of the nature of things from which it is sought to distinguish it. It is not unnatural for us to wear clothes because we happen to be born naked, for Nature has given us a principle which guides us to adapt our dress to our climate and circumstances. Reason is as natural as passion, and the economists who repel the State's intrusion and think they are thus leaving industry to take its natural course, commit the same absurdity as the moralist who recommends men to live according to Nature, and explains living according to Nature to mean the gratification as much as possible of his desires, and his abandonment as much as possible of rational and, as he conceives, artificial plan. The State cannot observe an absolute neutrality if it would. Non-intervention is only a particular kind of intervention. There must be laws of property, succession, and the like, and the influence of these spreads over the whole industrial system, and affects both the character of its production and the incidence of its distribution of wealth. But, second, by calling their method the _ethical_ method, the historical school desire to repudiate the idea that in dealing with economic phenomena they are dealing with things which are morally indifferent, like the phenomena of physics, and that science has nothing to do with them but to explain them. They have certainly reason to complain that the operation of the laws of political economy is sometimes represented as if it were morally as neutral as the operation of the law of gravitation, and it is in this conception that they think the materialism of the dominant economic school to be practically most offensively exhibited. Economic phenomena are not morally indifferent; they are ethical in their very being, and ought to be treated as such. Take, for example, the labour contract. To treat it as a simple exchange between equals is absurd. The labourer must sell his labour or starve, and may be obliged to take such terms for it as leave him without the means of enjoying the rights which society awards him, and discharging the duties which society claims from him. Look on him as a ware, if you will, but remember he is a ware that has life, that has connections, responsibilities, expectations, domestic, social, political. To get his bread he might sell his freedom, but society will not permit him; he may sell his health, he may sell his character, for society permits that; he may go to sea in rotten ships, and be sent to work in unwholesome workshops; he may be herded in farm bothies where the commonest decencies of life cannot be observed; and he may suck the strength out of posterity by putting his children to premature toil to eke out his precarious living. Transactions which have such direct bearings on freedom, on health, on morals, on the permanent well-being of the nation, can never be morally indifferent. They are necessarily within the sphere of ends and ideals. Their ethical side is one of their most important ones, and the science that deals with them is therefore ethical. For the same reason they come within the province of the State, which is the normal guardian of the general and permanent interests, moral and economic, of the community. The State does not stand to industry like a watchman who guards from the outside property in which he has himself no personal concern. It has a positive industrial office. It is, says Schmoller, the great educational institute of the human race, and there is no sense in suspiciously seeking to reduce its action in industrial affairs to a minimum. His theory of the State is that of the _Cultur-Staat_, in distinction from the _Polizei-Staat_, and the _Rechts-Staat_. The State can no longer be regarded as merely an omnipotent instrument for the maintenance of tranquillity and order in the name of Heaven; nor even as a constitutional organ of the collective national authority for securing to all individuals and classes in the nation, without exception, the rights and privileges which they are legally recognised to possess; but it must be henceforth looked upon as a positive agency for the spread of universal culture within its geographical territory. With these views, the Socialists of the Chair could not fail to take an active concern with the class of topics thrown up by the socialist movement, and exciting still so much attention in Germany under the name of the social question. They neither state that question nor answer it like the socialists, but their first offence, and the fountain of all their subsequent offending, in the judgment of their Manchester antagonists, consisted in their acknowledgment that there was a social question at all. Not that the Manchester party denied the existence of evils in the present state of industry, but they looked upon these evils as resulting from obstructions to the freedom of competition which time, and time alone, would eventually remove, and from moral causes with which economists had no proper business. The Socialists of the Chair, however, could not dismiss their responsibility for those evils so easily. They owned at once that a social crisis had arisen or was near at hand. The effect of the general adoption of the large system of production had been to diminish the numbers of the middle classes, to reduce the great bulk of the lower classes permanently to the position of wage-labourers, and to introduce some grave elements of peril and distress into the condition of the wage-labourers themselves. They are doubtless better fed, better lodged, better clad, than they were say in the middle and end of last century, when not one in a hundred of them had shoes to his feet, when seven out of eight on the Continent were still bondsmen, and when three out of every four in England had to eke out their wages by parochial relief. But, in spite of these advantages, their life has now less hope and less security than it had then. Industry on the great scale has multiplied the vicissitudes of trade, and rendered the labourer much more liable to be thrown out of work. It has diminished the avenues to comparative independence and dignity which were open to the journeyman under the _régime_ of the small industries. And while thus condemned to live by wages alone all his days, he could entertain no reasonable hope--at least before the formation of trade unions--that his wages could be kept up within reach of the measure of his wants, as these wants were being progressively expanded by the general advance of culture. Moreover, the twinge of the case lies here, that while the course which industrial development is taking seems to be banishing hope and security more and more from the labourer's life, the progress of general civilization is making these benefits more and more imperatively demanded. The working classes have been growing steadily in the scale of moral being. They have acquired complete personal freedom, legal equality, political rights, general education, a class consciousness; and they have come to cherish a very natural and legitimate aspiration that they shall go on progressively sharing in the increasing blessings of civilization. Brentano says that modern public opinion concedes this claim of the working man as a right to which he is entitled, but that modern industrial conditions have been unable as yet to secure him in the possession of it; hence the Social Question. Now some persons may be ready enough to admit this claim as a thing which it is eminently desirable to see realized, who will yet demur to the representation of it as a right, which puts society under a corresponding obligation. But this idea is a peculiarity belonging to the whole way of thinking of the Socialists of the Chair upon these subjects. Some of them indeed take even higher ground. Schmoller, for example, declares that the working classes suffer positive wrong in the present distribution of national wealth, considered from the standpoint of distributive justice; but his associates as a rule do not agree with him in applying this abstract standard to the case. Wagner also stands somewhat out of the ranks of his fellows by throwing the responsibility of the existing evils directly and definitely upon the State. According to his view, there can never be anything which may be legitimately called a Social Question, unless the evils complained of are clearly the consequences of existing legislation, but he holds that that is so in the present case. He considers that a mischievous turn has been given to the distribution of wealth by legalizing industrial freedom without at the same time imposing certain restrictions upon private property, the rate of interest, and the speculations of the Stock Exchange. The State has, therefore, caused the Social Question; and the State is bound to settle it. The other Socialists of the Chair, however, do not bring the obligation so dead home to the civil authority alone. The duty rests on society, and, of course, so far on the State also, which is the chief organ of society; but it is not to State-help alone, nor to self-help alone, that the Socialists of the Chair ask working men to look; but it is to what they term the self-help of society. Society has granted to the labouring classes the rights of freedom and equality, and has, therefore, come bound to give them, as far as it legitimately can, the amplest facilities for practically enjoying these rights. To give a man an estate mortgaged above its rental is only to mock him; to confer the status of freedom upon working men merely to leave them overwhelmed in an unequal struggle with capital is to make their freedom a dead letter. Personal and civil independence require, as their indispensable accompaniment, a certain measure of economic independence likewise, and consequently to bestow the former as an inalienable right, and yet take no concern to make the latter a possibility, is only to discharge one-half of an obligation voluntarily undertaken, and to deceive expectations reasonably entertained. No doubt this independence is a thing which working men must in the main win for themselves, and day after day, by labour, by providence, by association; but it is nevertheless an important point to remember, with Brentano, that it forms an essential part of an ideal which society has already acknowledged to be legitimate, and which it is therefore bound to second every effort to realize. The Social Question, conceived in the light of these considerations, may accordingly be said to arise from the fact that a certain material or economic independence has become more necessary for the working man, and less possible. It is more necessary, because, with the sanction of modern opinion, he has awoke to a new sense of personal dignity, and it is less possible, in consequence of circumstances already mentioned, attendant upon the development of modern industry. It is not, as Lord Macaulay maintained, that the evils of man's life are the same now as formerly, and that nothing has changed but the intelligence which has become conscious of them. The new time has brought new evils and less right or disposition to submit to them. It is the conflict of these two tendencies which, in the thinking of the Socialists of the Chair, constitutes the social crisis of the present day. Some of them, indeed, describe it in somewhat too abstract formulæ, which exercise an embarrassing influence on their speculations. For example, Von Scheel says the Social Question is the effect of the felt contradiction between the ideal of personal freedom and equality which hangs before the present age, and the increasing inequality of wealth which results from existing economic arrangements; and he proposes as the general principle of solution, that men should now abandon the exclusive devotion which modern Liberalism has paid to the principle of freedom, and substitute in its room an adhesion to freedom _plus_ equality. But then equality may mean a great many different things, and Von Scheel leaves us with no precise clue to the particular scope he would give his principle in its application. He certainly seems to desire more than a mere equality of right, and to aim at some sort or degree of equality of fact, but what or how he informs us not; just as Schmoller, while propounding the dogma of distributive justice, condemns the communistic principle of distribution of wealth as being a purely animal principle, and offers us no other incorporation of his dogma. In spite of their antipathy to abstractions, many of the Socialists of the Chair indulge considerably in barren generalities, which could serve them nothing in practice, even if they did not make it a point to square their practice by the historical conditions of the hour. Brentano strikes on the whole the most practical keynote, both in his conception of what the social question is and of how it is to be met. What is needed, he thinks, very much is to give to modern industry an organization as suitable to it as the old guilds were to the industry of earlier times, and this is to be done in great part by adaptations of that model. He makes comparatively little demand on the power of the State, while of course agreeing with the rest of his school in the latitude they give to the lawfulness of its intervention in industrial matters. He would ask it to bestow a legal status on trade unions and friendly societies, to appoint courts of conciliation, to regulate the hours of labour, to institute factory inspection, and to take action of some sort on the daily more urgent subject of labourers' dwellings. But the elevation of the labouring classes must be wrought mainly by their own well-guided and long-continued efforts, and the first step is gained when they have resolved earnestly to begin. The pith of the problem turns on the matter of wages, and, so far at any rate, it has already been solved almost as well as is practicable by the English trade unions, which have proved to the world that they are always able to convert the question of wages from the question how little the labourer can afford to take, into the question how much the employer is able to give--_i.e._, from the minimum to the maximum which the state of the market allows. That is, of course, a very important change, and it is interesting to know that F. A. Lange, the able and distinguished historian of Materialism, who had written on the labour question with strong socialist sympathies, stated to Brentano that his account of the English trade unions had converted him entirely from his belief that a socialistic experiment was necessary. Brentano admits that the effect of trade unions is partial only; that they really divide the labouring class into two different strata--those who belong to the trade unions being raised to a higher platform, and those who do not being left as they were in the gall of bitterness. But then, he observes, great gain has been made when at least a large section of the working class has been brought more securely within the pale of advancing culture, and it is only in this gradual way--section by section--that the elevation of the whole body can be eventually accomplished. The trade union has imported into the life of the working man something of the element of hope which it wanted, and a systematic scheme of working-class insurance is now needed to introduce the element of security. Brentano has published an excellent little work on that subject; and here again he asks no material help from the State. The working class must insure themselves against all the risks of their life by association, just as they must keep up the rate of their wages by association; and for the same reasons--first, because they are able to do so under existing economic conditions, and second, because it is only so the end can be gained consistently with the modern moral conditions of their life--_i.e._, with the maintenance of their personal freedom, equality, and independence. Brentano thinks that the sound principle of working-class insurance is that every trade union ought to become the insurance society for its trade, because every trade has its own special risks and therefore requires its own insurance premium, and because malingering, feigned sickness, claims for loss of employment through personal fault, and the like, cannot possibly be checked except by the fund being administered by the local lodges of the trade to which the subscribers belong. The insurance fund might be kept separate from the other funds of the union, but he sees no reason why it should not be combined with them, as it would only constitute a new obstacle to ill-considered strikes, and as striking in itself will, he expects, in course of time, give way to some system of arbitration. Brentano makes no suggestion regarding the mass of the working class who belong to no trade union. They cannot be dealt with in the same way, or so effectively. But this is quite in keeping with the general principle of the Socialists of the Chair--in which they differ _toto cælo_ from the socialists--that society is not to be ameliorated by rigidly applying to every bit of it the same plan, but only by a thousand modifications and remedies adapted to its thousand varieties of circumstances and situations. CHAPTER VII. THE CHRISTIAN SOCIALISTS. The idea that a radical affinity exists between Christianity and socialism in their general aim, in their essential principles, in their pervading spirit, has strong attractions for a certain by no means inferior order of mind, and we find it frequently maintained in the course of history by representatives of both systems. Some of the principal socialists of the earlier part of this century used to declare that socialism was only Christianity more logically carried out and more faithfully practised; or, at any rate, that socialism would be an idle superfluity, if ordinary Christian principles were really to be acted upon honestly and without reserve. St. Simon published his views under the title of the "Nouveau Christianisme," and asserted that the prevailing forms of Christianity were one gigantic heresy; that both the Catholic and the Protestant Churches had now lost their power, simply because they had neglected their great temporal mission of raising the poor, and because their clergy had given themselves up to barren discussions of theology, and remained absolutely ignorant of the living social questions of the time; and that the true Christian _régime_ which he was to introduce was one which should be founded on the Christian principle that all men are brothers; which should be governed by the Christian law, "Have ye love one to another," and in which all the forces of society should be mainly consecrated to the amelioration of the most numerous and poorest class. Cabet was not less explicit. He said that "if Christianity had been interpreted and applied in the spirit of Jesus Christ, if it were rightfully understood and faithfully obeyed by the numerous sections of Christians who are really filled with a sincere piety, and need only to know the truth to follow it, then Christianity would have sufficed, and would still suffice, to establish a perfect social and political organization, and to deliver mankind from all its ills." The same belief, that Christianity is essentially socialistic, has at various times appeared in the Church itself. The socialism of the only other period in modern history besides our own century, in which socialistic ideas have prevailed to any considerable extent, was, in fact, a direct outcome of Christian conviction, and was realized among Christian sects. The socialism of the Anabaptists of the Reformation epoch was certainly mingled with political ideas of class emancipation, and contributed to stir the insurrection of the German peasantry; but its real origin lay in the religious fervour which was abroad at the time, and which buoyed sanguine and mystical minds on dreams of a reign of God. When men feel a new and better power arising strongly about them, they are forward to throw themselves into harmony with it, and there were people, touched by the religious revival of the Reformation, who sought to anticipate its progress, as it were, by living together like brothers. Fraternity is undoubtedly a Christian idea, come into the world with Christ, spread abroad in it by Christian agencies, and belonging to the ideal that hovers perpetually over Christian society. It has already produced social changes of immense consequence, and has force in it, we cannot doubt, to produce many more in the future; and it is therefore in nowise strange that in times of religious zeal or of social distress, this idea of fraternity should appeal to some eager natures with so urgent an authority, both of condemnation and of promise, that they would fain take it at once by force and make it king. The socialism of the present day is not of a religious origin. On the contrary, there is some truth in the remark of a distinguished economist, M. Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, that the prevalence of socialistic ideas is largely due to the decline of religious faith among the working classes. If there is only the one life, they feel they must realize their ideal here and realize it quickly, or they will never realize it at all. However this may be, the fact is certain that most contemporary socialists have turned their backs on religion. They sometimes speak of it with a kind of suppressed and settled bitterness as of a friend that has proved faithless: "We are not atheists: we have simply done with God." They seem to feel that if there be a God, He is, at any rate, no God for them, that He is the God of the rich, and cares nothing for the poor, and there is a vein of most touching, though most illogical, reproach in their hostility towards a Deity whom they yet declare to have no existence. They say in their heart, There is no God, or only one whom they decline to serve, for He is no friend to the labouring man, and has never all these centuries done anything for him. This atheism seems as much matter of class antipathy as of free-thought; and the semi-political element in it lends a peculiar bitterness to the socialistic attacks on religion and the Church, which are regarded as main pillars of the established order of things, and irreconcileable obstructives to all socialist dreams. The Church has, therefore, as a rule looked upon the whole movement with a natural and justifiable suspicion, and has, for the most part, dispensed to it an indiscriminate condemnation. Some Churchmen, however, scruple to assume this attitude; they recognise a soul of good in the agitation, if it could be stripped of the revolutionary and atheistic elements of its propaganda, which they hold to be, after all, merely accidental accompaniments of the system, at once foreign to its essence and pernicious to its purpose. It is in substance, they say, an economic movement, both in its origin and its objects, and so far as it stands on this ground they have no hesitation in declaring that in their judgment there is a great deal more Christianity in socialism than in the existing industrial _régime_. Those who take this view, generally find a strong bond of union with socialists in their common revolt against the mammonism of the church-going middle classes, and against some current economic doctrines, which seem almost to canonize what they count the heartless and un-Christian principles of self-interest and competition. Such, for example, was the position maintained by the Christian Socialists of England thirty years ago--a band of noble patriotic men who strove hard, by word and deed, to bring all classes of the community to a knowledge of their duties, as well as their interests, and to supersede, as far as might be, the system of unlimited competition by a system of universal co-operation. They inveighed against the Manchester creed, then in the flush of success, as if it were the special Antichrist of the nineteenth century. Lassalle himself has not used harder, more passionate, or more unjust words of it. Maurice said he dreaded above everything "that horrible catastrophe of a Manchester ascendancy, which I believe in my soul would be fatal to intellect, morality, and freedom"; and Kingsley declared that "of all narrow, conceited, hypocritical, anarchic, and atheistic schemes of the universe, the Cobden and Bright one was exactly the worst." They agreed entirely with the socialists in condemning the reigning industrial system: it was founded on unrighteousness; its principles were not only un-Christian, but anti-Christian; and in spite of its apparent commercial victories, it would inevitably end in ruin and disaster. Some of them had been in Paris and witnessed the Revolution of 1848, and had brought back with them two firm convictions--one, that a purely materialistic civilization, like that of the July Monarchy, must sooner or later lead to a like fate; and the other, that the socialist idea of co-operation contained the fertilizing germ for developing a really enduring and Christian civilization. Mr. J. M. Ludlow mentioned the matter to Maurice, and eventually a Society was formed, with Maurice as president, for the purpose of promoting co-operation and education among the working classes. It is beyond the scope of the present work to give any fuller account of this interesting and not unfruitful movement here; but it is to the purpose to mark two peculiarities which distinguish it from other phases of socialism. One is, that they insisted strongly upon the futility of mere external changes of condition, unattended by corresponding changes of inner character and life. "There is no fraternity," said Maurice, finely, "without a common Father." Just as it is impossible to maintain free institutions among a people who want the virtues of freemen, so it is impossible to realize fraternity in the general arrangements of society, unless men possess a sufficient measure of the industrial and social virtues. Hence the stress the Christian Socialists of England laid on the education of the working classes. The other peculiarity is, that they did not seek in any way whatever to interfere with private property, or to invoke the assistance of the State. They believed self-help to be a sounder principle, both morally and politically, and they believed it to be sufficient. They held it to be sufficient, not merely in course of time, but immediately even, to effect a change in the face of society. For they loved and believed in their cause with a generous and touching enthusiasm, and were so sincerely and absolutely persuaded of its truth themselves, that they hardly entertained the idea of other minds resisting it. "I certainly thought," says Mr. I. Hughes, "(and for that matter have never altered my opinion to this day) that here we had found the solution to the great labour question; but I was also convinced that we had nothing to do but just to announce it, and found an association or two, in order to convert all England, and usher in the millennium at once, so plain did the whole thing seem to me. I will not undertake to answer for the rest of the council, but I doubt whether I was at all more sanguine than the majority." Seventeen co-operative associations in London, and twenty-four in the provinces (which were all they had established when they ceased to publish their Journal), may seem a poor result, but their work is not to be estimated by that alone. The Christian Socialists undoubtedly gave a very important impetus to the whole movement of co-operation, and to the general cause of the amelioration of the labouring classes. The general position of Maurice and his allies (though with important differences, as will appear) has been taken up again by two groups in Germany at the present day--one Catholic, the other Protestant--in dealing with the social question which has for many years agitated that country. In one respect the Christian Socialists of England were more fortunate than their German brethren. Nobody ever ventured to question the purity of their motives. The intervention of the clergy in politics is generally unpopular: they are thought, rightly or wrongly, to be Churchmen first, and patriots afterwards; but it was impossible to suspect Maurice and his friends of being influenced in their efforts at reform by considerations of ecclesiastical or electoral interest, or of having any object at heart but the social good of the nation. It is otherwise with the Christian Socialists of Germany. Neither of the two German groups affects to conceal that one great aim of its work is to restore and extend the influence of the Church among the labouring classes; and it is unlikely that the Clerical party in Germany were insensible to the political advantage of having organizations of working men under ecclesiastical control, though it ought to be acknowledged that these organizations were contemplated before the introduction of universal suffrage. But even though ecclesiastical considerations mingled with the motives of the Christian Socialists, we see no reason to doubt the genuineness of their interest in the amelioration of the masses, or the sincerity of their conviction of the economic soundness of their programme. The Catholic group deserves to be considered first, because it intervened in the discussion much sooner than the Evangelical, and because it originated a much more important movement--larger in its dimensions than the other, and invested with additional consequence from the circumstance that being promoted under the countenance of dignitaries, it must be presumed to have received the sanction of the Roman Curia, and may therefore afford an index to the general attitude which the Catholic Church is disposed to assume towards Continental socialism. The socialist agitation had no sooner broken out, in 1863, than Dr. Döllinger, then a pillar of the Church of Rome, strongly recommended the Catholic clubs of Germany to take the question up. These clubs are societies for mutual improvement, recreation, and benefit, and are composed mainly of working men. Father Kölping, himself at the time a working man, had, in 1847, founded an extensive organization of Catholic journeymen, which, in 1872, had a total membership of 70,000, and consisted of an affiliation of small journeyman clubs, with a membership of from 50 to 400 each, in the various towns of Germany. Then there were also Catholic apprentice clubs--in many cases in alliance with those of the journeymen; there were Catholic master clubs, Catholic peasant clubs, Catholic benefit clubs, Catholic young men's clubs, Catholic credit clubs, Catholic book clubs, etc., etc. These clubs naturally afforded an organization ready to hand for any general purpose the members might share in common, and being composed of working men, they seemed reasonably calculated to be of effective service in forwarding the cause of social amelioration. Early in 1864, accordingly, Bishop Ketteler, of Mayence, warmly seconded Döllinger's idea, and at the same time published a remarkable pamphlet on "The Labour Question and Christianity," in which he unfolded his views of the causes and the cure of the existing evils. William Immanuel, Baron von Ketteler, had been for twenty years a powerful and impressive figure in the public life of Germany. His high rank, social and ecclesiastical, his immense energy, his weight of character, his personal disinterestedness of purpose, and his intellectual vigour and acuteness, had combined to give him great importance both in Church and State. Born in 1811, of an ancient Westphalian family, he was trained in law and politics for the public service, and actually entered upon it, but resigned his post in 1838, in consequence of the dispute about the Cologne bishopric, and resolved to give himself to the work of the Church. After studying theology at Munich and Münster, he was ordained priest in 1844, and became soon afterwards pastor at Hopster, in Westphalia. Being sent as member for Langerich to the German National Assembly at Frankfort in 1848, he at once made his mark by the vigour with which he strove for the spiritual independence of the Church, by the lectures and sermons he delivered on questions of the day, and especially by a bold and generous oration he pronounced at the grave of the assassinated deputy, Prince Lichnowsky. This oration excited sensation all over Germany, and Ketteler was promoted, in 1849, to the Hedwigsburg Church, in Berlin, and in 1850 to the Bishopric of Mayence. In this position he found scope for all his powers. He founded a theological seminary at Mayence, erected orphan-houses and reformatories, introduced various religious orders and congregationist schools, and entering energetically into the disputes in Baden regarding the place and rights of the Catholic Church, he succeeded in establishing an understanding whereby the State gave up much of its patronage, its supervision of theological seminaries, its veto on ecclesiastical arrangements, restored episcopal courts, and assigned the Church extensive influence over popular education. He was one of the bishops who authorized the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854, but he belonged to the opposition at the Vatican Council of 1870. He wrote a pamphlet strongly deprecating the promulgation of the dogma of infallibility, and went, even at the last moment, to the Pope personally, and implored him to abandon the idea of promulgating it; but as his objection respected its opportuneness and not its truth, he did not secede with Döllinger when his opposition failed, but accepted the dogma himself and demanded the submission of his clergy to it. Bishop Ketteler was returned to the German Imperial Diet in 1871, and led the Clerical Faction in opposing the ecclesiastical policy of the Government. He died at Binghausen, in Bavaria, in 1877, and is buried in Mayence Cathedral. Ketteler had always been penetrated with the ambition of making the Catholic Church a factor of practical importance in the political and social life of Germany, and with the conviction that the clergy ought to make themselves masters of social and political science so as to be able to exercise a leading and effective influence over public opinion on questions of social amelioration. He has himself written much, though nothing of permanent value, on these subjects, and did not approach them with unwashed hands when he published his pamphlet in 1864. In this pamphlet, he says the labour question is one which it is his business, both as a Christian and as a bishop, to deal with: as a Christian, because Christ, as Saviour of the world, seeks not only to redeem men's souls, but to heal their sorrows and soften their condition; and as a bishop, because the Church had, according to her ancient custom, imposed upon him, as one of his consecration vows, that he would, "in the name of the Lord, be kind and merciful to the poor and the stranger, and to all that are in any kind of distress." He considers the labour question of the present day to be the very serious and plain question, how the great bulk of the working classes are to get the bread and clothing necessary to sustain them in life. Things have come to this pass in consequence of two important economic changes--which he incorrectly ascribes to the political revolution at the end of last century, merely because they have taken place mostly since that date--the spread of industrial freedom, and the ascendancy of the large capitalists. In consequence of these changes the labourer is now treated as a commodity, and the rate of his wages settled by the same law that determines the price of every other commodity--the cost of its production; and the employer is always able to press wages down to the least figure which the labourer will take rather than starve. Ketteler accepts entirely Lassalle's teaching about "the iron and cruel law," and holds it to have been so conclusively proved in the course of the controversy that it is no longer possible to dispute it without a deliberate intention of deceiving the people. Now there is no doubt that Ricardo's law of value is neither so iron nor so cruel as Lassalle took it to be; and that when Lassalle alleged that in consequence of this law 96 per cent. of the population of Germany had to support their families on less than ten shillings a week, and were therefore in a state of chronic starvation, he based his statement on a calculation of Dieterici's, which was purely conjectural, and which, besides, disregarded the fact that in working-class families there were usually more breadwinners than one. Ketteler, however, adopts this whole statement of the case implicitly, and says the social problem of our day is simply how to emancipate the labouring class from the operation of this economic law. "It is no longer possible to doubt that the whole material existence of almost the entire labouring population--_i.e._, of much the greatest part of men in modern states, and of their families--that the daily question about the necessary bread for man, wife, and children, is exposed to all the fluctuations of the market and of the price of commodities. I know nothing more deplorable than this fact. What sensations must it cause in those poor men who, with all they hold dear, are day after day at the mercy of the accidents of market price? That is the slave market of our Liberal Europe, fashioned after the model of our humanist, rationalistic, anti-Christian Liberalism, and freemasonry." The bishop never spares an opportunity of attacking "heathen humanist Liberalism," which he says has pushed the labouring man into the water, and now stands on the bank spinning fine theories about his freedom, but calmly seeing him drown. After this it might be expected that Ketteler would be all for abolishing industrial freedom, and for restoring a _régime_ of compulsory guilds and corporations; but he is not. He acknowledges that the old system of guilds had its advantages; it was a kind of assured understanding between the workman and society, according to which the former adjusted his work and the latter his wages. But it was the abuses of the compulsory powers of the guilds that led to industrial freedom; and, on the other hand, industrial freedom has great countervailing advantages of its own which he scruples to give up. It has immensely increased production and cheapened commodities, and so enabled the lower classes to enjoy means of life and enjoyment they had not before. Nor does Ketteler approve of Lassalle's scheme of establishing productive associations of working men upon capital supplied by the State. Not that he objects to productive associations; on the contrary, he declares them to be a glorious idea, and thinks them the true solution of the problem. But he objects to supplying their capital by the State, as involving a direct violation of the law of property. The Catholic Church, he says, has never maintained an absolute right of property. Her divines have unanimously taught that the right of property cannot avail against a neighbour who is in extreme need, because God alone is absolute proprietor, and no man is more than a limited vassal, holding under God, and on the conditions which He imposes; and one of these conditions is that any man in extremities is entitled to satisfy his necessity where and how he pleases.[1] In such a case, according to Catholic doctrine, it is not the man in distress that is the thief, but the proprietor who would gainsay and stop him. The distressed have a positive right to succour, and the State may therefore, without violating any of the rights of property, tax the parishes, or the proprietors, for the relief of the poor. But beyond this the State has no title to go. It may legitimately tax people for the purpose of saving working men from extremities, but not for the purpose of bettering their normal position. But where the civil authority ends the Christian authority comes in, and the rich have only escaped the obligation of compulsory legal enactment, to find themselves under the more far-reaching obligations of moral duty and Christian love. The Church declares that the man who does not give alms where he ought to give it stands in the same category as a thief; and there is no limit to this obligation but his power of giving help, and his belief that it would be more hurtful to give than to keep it. Ketteler's plan, accordingly, is that the capital for the productive associations should be raised by voluntary subscriptions on the part of Christian people. He thinks he has made out a strong case for establishing this as a Christian obligation. He has shown that a perilous crisis prevails, that this crisis can only be removed by productive associations, that productive associations cannot be started without capital, and he says it is a vain dream of Huber's to think of getting the capital from the savings of working men themselves, for most of the working men are in a distressed condition, and if a few are better off, their savings could only establish associations so few in number and so small in scale, as to be little better than trifling with the evil. He sees no remedy but making productive associations a scheme of the Church, and appealing to that Christian philanthropy and sense of duty which had already done great service of a like nature--as, for example, in producing capital to emancipate slaves in Italy and elsewhere. This remarkable proposal of the bishop seems to have fallen dead. Though he wrote and laboured much in connection with the labour question afterwards, he never reverted to it again; and when a Christian Socialist party was formed, under his countenance, they adopted a programme which made large demands not only on the intervention, but on the pecuniary help of the State. It was not till 1868 that any steps were taken towards the actual organization of such a party. In June of that year three Catholic clubs met together at Crefeld, and, after discussing the social question, agreed to publish a journal (the _Christliche Sociale Blätter_) to promote their views. In September of the following year the whole subject of the relations of the Church to the labour question was discussed at a conference of the Catholic bishops of Germany, held at Fulda, and attended by Ketteler among others. This conference strongly recommended the clergy to make themselves thoroughly acquainted with that and other economic questions, to interest themselves generally in the condition of the working class they moved among, and even to travel in foreign countries to see the state of the labourers there and the effects of the institutions established for their amelioration. The conference also approved of the formation of Catholic Labourers' Associations, for the promotion of the general elevation of their own class, but held that the Church had no call, directly or officially, to take the initiative in founding them. This duty was undertaken, however, later in the same month, by a general meeting of the Catholic Clubs of Germany, which appointed a special committee, including Professor Schulte and Baron Schorlemer-Abst, for the express purpose of founding and organizing Christian social clubs, which should strive for the economic and moral amelioration of the labouring classes. This committee set itself immediately to work, and the result was the Christian Social Associations, or, as they are sometimes called from their patron saint, the St. Joseph Associations. They were composed of, and managed by, working men, though they liked to have some man of eminence--never a clergyman--at the head of them, and though they allowed persons, of property, clergymen, and especially employers of labour, to be honorary members. They met every Sunday evening to discuss social questions, and politics were excluded, except questions affecting the Church, and on these a decided partisanship was encouraged. The principles of this party--or what may be called their programme--is explained in a speech delivered by Canon Moufang to his constituents in Mayence, in February, 1871, and published with warm approbation, in the _Christliche Sociale Blätter_ in March. Christoph Moufang is, like Ketteler, a leader of the German Clerical party, and entitled to the highest esteem for his character, his intellectual parts, and his public career. Born in 1817, he was first destined for the medical profession, and studied physic at Bonn; but he soon abandoned this intention, and betook himself to theology. After studying at Bonn and Munich, he was ordained priest in 1839. He was appointed in 1851 professor of moral and pastoral theology in the new theological seminary which Bishop Ketteler had founded at Mayence, and in 1854 was made canon of the cathedral. Moufang entered the First Hessian Chamber in 1862 as representative of the bishop, and made a name as a powerful champion of High Church views and of the general ecclesiastical policy of Bishop Ketteler. In 1868 he was chosen one of the committee to make preparations for the Vatican Council; but at the Council he belonged to the opponents of the dogma of infallibility, and left Rome before the dogma was promulgated. He submitted afterwards, however, and worked sedulously in its sense. Moufang sat in the Imperial Diet from 1871 to 1877, was a leading member of the Centre, and stoutly resisted the Falk legislation. He is joint-editor of the _Katholik_, and is author of various polemical writings, and of a work on the history of the Jesuits in Germany. Moufang takes a different view of the present duty of the Church in relation to the social question from that which we saw to have been taken by Ketteler. He asks for no pecuniary help from the Church, nor for any special and novel kind of activity whatever. The problem cannot, in his opinion, be effectively and permanently solved without her co-operation, but then the whole service she is able and required to render is contained in the course of her ordinary ministrations in diffusing a spirit of love and justice and fairness among the various classes of society, in maintaining her charities for the poor and helpless in dispensing comfort and distress, and in offering to the weary the hope of a future life. Moufang makes much more demand on the State than on the Church, in this also disagreeing with Bishop Ketteler's pamphlet. He says the State can and must help the poorer classes in four different ways:-- 1st. By giving legislative protection. Just as the landlord and the money-lender are legally protected in their rights by the State, so the labourer ought to be legally protected in his property, which are his powers and time of labour. The State ought to give him legal security against being robbed of these, his only property, by the operation of free competition. With this view, Moufang demands the legalization of working men's associations of various kinds, the prohibition of Sunday labour, the legal fixing of a normal day of labour, legal restriction of labour of women and children, legal provision against unwholesome workshops, appointment of factory inspectors, and direct legal fixing of the rate of wages. The last point is an important peculiarity in the position of the Catholic Socialists. Moufang contends that competition is a sound enough principle for regulating the price of commodities, but that it is a very unsound one, and a very unsafe one, for determining the price of labour, because he holds that labour is not a commodity. Labour is a man's powers of life; it is the man himself, and the law must see to its protection. The law protects the capitalist in his right to his interest, and surely the labouring man's powers of life are entitled to the same consideration. If an employer says to a capitalist from whom he has borrowed money: "A crisis has come, a depression in trade, and I am no longer able to pay such high interest; I will pay you two-thirds or one-third of the previous rate," what does the capitalist say? He refuses to take it, and why? Simply because he knows that the law will sustain him in his claim. But if the employer says to his labourer: "A depression of trade has come, and I cannot afford you more than two-thirds or one-third of your present wages," what can the labourer do? He has no alternative. He must take the wages offered him or go, and to go means to starve. Why should not the law stand at the labourer's back, as it does at the capitalist's, in enforcing what is right and just? There is no more infraction of freedom in the one case than in the other. Moufang's argument here is based on an illusive analogy; for in the contract for the use of capital the employer agrees to pay a fixed rate of interest so long as he retains the principal, and he can only avail himself of subsequent falls in the money market by returning the principal and opening a fresh contract; whereas in the contract for the use of labour the employer engages by the week or the day, returning the principal, as it were, at the end of that term, and making a new arrangement. The point to be noted, however, is that Moufang's object, like Ketteler's, is to deliver working men from their hand-to-mouth dependence on the current fluctuations of the market; that he thinks there is something not merely pernicious but radically unjust in their treatment under the present system; and that he calls upon the State to institute some regular machinery--a board with compulsory powers, and composed of labourers and magistrates--for fixing everywhere and in every trade a fair day's wages for a fair day's work. 2nd. The State ought to give pecuniary help. It advances money on easy terms to railway schemes; why should it not offer working men cheap loans for sound co-operative enterprises? Of course it ought to make a keen preliminary examination of the projects proposed, and keep a sharp look-out against swindling or ill-considered schemes; but if the project is sound and likely, it should be ready to lend the requisite capital at a low interest. This proposal of starting productive associations on State credit is an important divergence from Ketteler, who, in his pamphlet, condemns it as a violation of the rights of property. 3rd. The State ought to reduce the taxes and military burdens of the labouring classes. 4th. The State ought to fetter the domination of the money power, and especially to check excesses of speculation, and control the operations of the Stock Exchange. From this programme it appears that the Catholic movement goes a long way with the socialists in their cries of wrong, but only a short way in their plans of redress. Moufang's proposals may be wise or unwise, but they contemplate only corrections of the present industrial system, and not its reconstruction. Many Liberals are disposed to favour the idea of establishing courts of conciliation with compulsory powers, and Bismarck himself once said, before the socialists showed themselves unpatriotic at the time of the French war, that he saw no reason why the State, which gave large sums for agricultural experiments, should not spend something in giving co-operative production a fair trial. The plans of labour courts and of State credit to approved co-operative undertakings are far from the socialist schemes of the abolition of private property in the instruments of production, and the systematic regulation of all industry by the State; and they afford no fair ground for the fear, which many persons of ability entertain, of "an alliance"--to use Bismarck's phrase--"between the black International and the red." Bishop Martensen holds Catholicism to be essentially socialistic, because it suppresses all individual rights and freedom in the intellectual sphere, as socialism does in the economic. But men may detest private judgment without taking the least offence at private property. A bigot need not be a socialist, any more than a socialist a bigot, though each stifles the principle of individuality in one department of things. If there is to be any alliance between the Church and socialism, it will be not because the former has been trained, under an iron organization, to cherish a horror of individuality and a passion for an economic organization as rigid as its own ecclesiastical one, but it will be because the Church happens to have a distinct political interest at the time in cultivating good relations with a new political force. How far Moufang and his associates have been influenced by this kind of consideration we cannot pretend to judge, but the sympathy they show is not so much with the socialists as with the labouring classes generally, and their movement is meant so far to take the wind from socialism, whether with the mere view of filling their own sails with it or no. No voice was raised in the Protestant Churches in Germany on the social question till 1878. They suffer from their absolute dependence on the State, and have become churches of doctors and professors, without effective practical interest or initiative, and without that strong popular sympathy of a certain kind which almost necessarily pervades the atmosphere of a Church like the Catholic, which pits itself against States, and knows that its power of doing so rests, in the last analysis, on its hold over the hearts of the people. The Home Missionary Society indeed discussed the question from time to time, but chiefly in connection with the effects of the socialist propaganda on the religious condition of the country; and it was this aspect of the subject that eventually stirred a section of the orthodox Evangelical clergy to take practical action. They asked themselves how it was that the working classes were so largely adopting the desolate atheistic opinions which were found associated with the socialist movement, when the Church offered to gather them under her wing, and brighten their life with the comforts and encouragements of Christian faith and hope. They felt strongly that they must take more interest in the temporal welfare of the working classes than they had hitherto done, and must apply the ethical and social principles of Christianity to the solution of economic problems and the promotion of social reform. In short, they sought to present Christianity as the labourer's friend. The leaders of this movement were men of much inferior calibre to those of the corresponding Catholic movement. The principal of them were Rudolph Todt, a pastor at Barentheim in Old Preignitz, who published in 1878 a book on "Radical German Socialism and Christian Society," which created considerable sensation; and Dr. Stöcker, then one of the Court preachers at Berlin, a member of the Prussian Diet, and an ardent promoter of reactionary policy in various directions. He is a warm advocate of denominational education, and of extending the power of the Crown, of the State, and of the landed class; and he was a prime mover in the Jew-baiting movement which excited Germany a few years ago. This antipathy to the Jews has been for many years a cardinal tendency of the "Agrarians," a small political group mainly of nobles and great landed proprietors, with whom Stöcker frequently allies himself, and who profess to treat all political questions from a strictly Christian standpoint, but work almost exclusively to assert the interests of the landowners against the growing ascendancy of the commercial and financial classes, among whom Jews occupy an eminent place. We mention this anti-Jewish agitation here to point out that, while no doubt fed by other passions also, one of its chief ingredients is that same antagonism to the _bourgeoisie_--compounded of envy of their success, contempt for their money-seeking spirit, and anger at their supposed expropriation of the rest of society--which animates all forms of continental socialism, and has already proved a very dangerous political force in the French Revolution of 1848. Todt's work is designed to set forth the social principles and mission of Christianity on the basis of a critical investigation of the New Testament, which he believes to be an authoritative guide on economic as well as moral and dogmatic questions. He says that to solve the social problem, we must take political economy in the one hand, the scientific literature of socialism in the other, and keep the New Testament before us. As the result of his examination, he condemns the existing industrial _régime_ as being decidedly unchristian, and declares the general principles of socialism, and even its main concrete proposals, to be directly prescribed and countenanced by Holy Writ. Like all who assume the name of socialist, he cherishes a marked repugnance to the economic doctrines of modern Liberalism, the leaven of the _bourgeoisie_; and much of his work is devoted to show the inner affinity of Christianity and socialism, and the inner antagonism between Christianity and Manchesterdom. He goes so far as to say that every active Christian who makes conscience of his faith has a socialistic vein in him, and that every socialist, however hostile he may be to the Christian religion, has an unconscious Christianity in his heart; whereas, on the other hand, the merely nominal Christian, who has never really got out of his natural state, is always a spiritual Manchestrist, worshipping _laissez faire, laissez aller_, with his whole soul, and that a Manchestrist is never in reality a true and sound Christian, however much he may usurp the name. Christianity and socialism are engaged in a common work, trying to make the reality of things correspond better with an ideal state; and in doing their work they rely on the same ethical principle, the love of our neighbour, and they repudiate the Manchester idolatry of self-interest. The socialist ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity are part and parcel of the Christian system; and the socialist ideas of solidarity of interests, of co-operative production, and of democracy have all a direct Biblical foundation, in the constitution and customs of the Church, and in the apostolic teaching regarding it. Radical socialism, according to Todt, consists of three elements: first, in economics, communism; second, in politics, republicanism; third, in religion, atheism. Under the last head, of course, there is no analogy, but direct contradiction, between Socialism and Christianity; but Todt deplores the atheism that prevails among the socialists as not merely an error, but a fatal inconsistency. If socialism would but base its demands on the Gospel, he says, it would be resistless, and all labourers would flow to it; but atheistic socialism can never fulfil its own promises, and issues a draft which Christianity alone has the power to meet. It is hopeless to think of founding an enduring democratic State on the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, unless these principles are always sustained and reinvigorated by the Divine fraternal love that flows from faith in Jesus Christ. As to the second principle of socialism, Todt says, that while Holy Scripture contains no direct prescription on the point, it may be inferentially established that a republic is the form of government that is most harmonious with the Christian ideal. His deduction of this is peculiar. The Divine government of the world, he owns, is monarchical, but then it is a government which cannot be copied by sinful men, and therefore cannot have been meant as a pattern for them. But God, he says, has established His Church on earth as a visible type of His own invisible providential government, and the Church is a "republic under an eternal President, sitting by free choice of the people, Jesus Christ." This is both fanciful and false, for Christ is an absolute ruler, and no mere minister of the popular will; and there is not the remotest ground for founding a system of Biblical politics on the constitution of the Church. But it shows the length Todt is disposed to go to conciliate the favour of the socialists. But the most important element of socialism is its third or economic principle--communism; and this he represents to be entirely in harmony with the economic ideal of the New Testament. He describes the communistic idea as consisting of two parts: first, the general principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, which he finds directly involved in the Scriptural doctrines of moral responsibility, of men's common origin and redemption, and of the law of love; and second, the transformation of all private property in the instruments of production into common property, which includes three points: (_a_) the abolition of the present wages system; (_b_) giving the labourer the full product of his labour; and (_c_) associated labour. As to the first two of these points, Todt pronounces the present wages system to be thoroughly unjust, because it robs the labourer of the full product of his labour; and because unjust, it is unchristian. He accepts the ordinary socialist teaching about "the iron and cruel law." He accepts, too, Marx's theory of value, and declares it to be unanswerable; and he therefore finds no difficulty in saying that Christianity condemns a system which in his opinion grinds the faces of the labouring classes with incessant toil, filches from them the just reward of their work, and leaves them to hover hopelessly on the margin of destitution. If there is any scheme that promises effectually to cure this condition of things, Christianity will also approve of that scheme; and such a scheme he discovers in the socialist proposal of collective property and associated labour. This proposal, however, derives direct countenance, he maintains, from the New Testament. It is supported by the texts which describe the Church as an organism under the figure of a body with many members, by the example of the common bag of the twelve, and by the communism of the primitive Church of Jerusalem. But the texts about the Church as an organism have no real bearing on the subject at all; for the Church is not meant to be an authoritative pattern either for political or for economic organization; and besides, the figure of the body and its members would apply better to Bastiat's theory of the natural harmony of interests than to the socialist idea of the solidarity of interests. Then the common bag of the disciples did not prevent them from having boats and other instruments of production of their own individual property; and we know that the communism of the primitive Church of Jerusalem (which was a decided economic failure, for the poverty of that Church had to be repeatedly relieved by collections in other parts of Christendom) was not a community of property, but, what is a higher thing, a community of use, and that it was not compulsory but spontaneous. Todt, however, after seeming thus to commit himself and Christianity without reserve to socialism, suddenly shrinks from his own boldness, and draws back. Collective property may be countenanced by Scripture, but he finds private property to be as much or even more so; and he cannot on any consideration consent to the abolition of private property by force. It was right enough to abolish slavery by force, for slavery is an unchristian institution. But though private property is certainly founded on selfishness, there are so many examples of it presented before us in the New Testament without condemnation, that Todt shrinks from pronouncing it to be an unchristian institution. Collective property may be better, but private property will never disappear till selfishness is swallowed up of love; and a triumph of socialism at present, while its disciples are unbelievers and have not Christ, the fount of love, in their hearts, would involve society in much more serious evils than those which it seeks to remove. Todt's socialism, therefore, is not a thing of the present, but an ideal of the distant future, to be realized after Christian proprietors have come of their own accord to give up their estates, and socialists have all been converted to Christianity. For the present, in spite of his stern view of the great wrong and injustice the working classes suffer, Todt has no remedy to suggest, except that things would be better if proprietors learnt more to regard their wealth as a trust of which they were only stewards, and if employers treated their workmen with the personal consideration due to Christian brothers; and he thinks the cultivation of this spirit ought to be more expressly aimed at in the work of the Church. This is probably, after all, the sum of what Christianity has to say on the subject; but it seems a poor result of so much figuring and flourishing, to end in a general truth which can give no offence even in Manchester. Soon after the publication of Todt's book, Stöcker and some Evangelical friends founded two associations, for the purpose of dealing with the social question from a Christian point of view, and established a newspaper, the _Staats-Socialist_, to advocate their opinions. Of the two associations, one, the Central Union for Social Reform, was composed of persons belonging to the educated classes--professors, manufacturers, landowners, and clergymen; and the other, the Christian Social Working Men's Party, consisted of working men alone. This movement was received on all sides with unqualified disapprobation. The press, Liberal and Conservative alike, spoke with contemptuous dislike of this _Mucker-Socialismus_, and said they preferred the socialists in blouse to the socialists in surplice. The Social Democrats rose against it with virulence, and held meetings, both of men and of women, at which they glorified atheism and bitterly attacked the clergy and religion. Even the higher dignitaries of the Church held coldly aloof or were even openly hostile. Stöcker met all this opposition with unflinching spirit, convened public meetings in Berlin to promote his cause, and confronted the socialist leaders on the platform. The movement gave promise of fair success. In a few months seven hundred pastors, besides many from other professions, including Dr. Koegel, Court preacher, and Dr. Buchsel, a German Superintendent, had enrolled themselves in the Central Union for Social Reform; and the Christian Social Working Men's Party had seventeen hundred members in Berlin, and a considerable number throughout the provinces. But its progress was interrupted by the Anti-Socialist Law, passed soon after the same year, which put an end to meetings of socialists; and since this measure was supported, though hesitatingly, by Stöcker and his leading allies, that impaired their influence with the labouring classes. The principles of this party, as stated in their programme, may be said generally to be that a decided social question exists, in the increasing gulf between rich and poor, and the increasing want of economic security in the labourer's life; that this question cannot possibly be solved by social democracy, because social democracy is unpractical, unchristian, and unpatriotic; and that it can only be solved by means of an extensive intervention on the part of a strong and monarchical State, aided by the religious factors in the national life. The State ought to provide by statute a regular organization of the working classes according to their trades, authorizing the trades unions to represent the labourers as against their employers, rendering these unions legally liable for the contracts entered into by their members, assuming a control of their funds, regulating the apprentice system, creating compulsory insurance funds, etc. Then it ought to protect the labourers by prohibiting Sunday labour, by fixing a normal day of labour, and by insisting on the sound sanitary condition of workshops. Further, it ought to manage the State and communal property in a spirit favourable to the working class, and to introduce high luxury taxes, a progressive income-tax, and a progressive legacy duty, both according to extent of bequest and distance of relationship. These very comprehensive reforms are, however, held to be inadequate without the spread of a Christian spirit of mutual consideration into the relations of master and workman, and of Christian faith, hope, and love into family life. Moreover they are not to be expected from a parliamentary government in which the commercial classes have excessive influence, and hence the Christian Socialists lay great stress on the monarchical element, and would give the monarch absolute power to introduce social reforms without parliamentary co-operation and even in face of parliamentary opposition. We have seen that Todt was disposed to favour a republican form of government, but probably, like the Czar Nicholas, he has no positive objection to any other save the constitutional. His party has certainly adopted a very Radical social programme, but it is above all a Conservative group, seeking to resist the revolutionary and materialistic tendencies of socialism, and to rally the great German working class once more round the standard of God, King, and Fatherland. Dr. Stöcker has during the past year resuscitated his Christian Socialist organization under the name of the Social Monarchical Union, but without any prospect of much success; for its founder, as the result of his twelve years' bustling in the troubled waters of politics, has fallen out of favour alike with court, Church, and people. He has lost his place as royal chaplain, he is bitterly distrusted by the working classes, and his socialist opinions are a great rock of offence to his ecclesiastical brethren. A congress under Church auspices was held at Berlin on May 28th and 29th, 1890, and it was called the Evangelical Social Congress, as was explained by Professor A. Wagner, the economist, in his inaugural speech, to avoid being connected with the Christian Socialists. Dr. Stöcker read a paper at it on social democracy, which raised a storm of dissension, mainly for its attack upon the Jews. This congress, it may be noted, asked nothing from Government but a little attention to the housing of the poor, and its chief recommendations were (1) that every parish be organized under the social-political as well as spiritual supervision of the clergy; (2) that Evangelical Working Men's Unions be established in all industrial centres; (3) that benevolent or friendly societies be organized for all trades, such as exist now in mining; (4) that since social democracy threatened the Divine and human order of society, and could only be successfully opposed by the power of the gospel, a responsible mission lay upon the Church to combat and counteract it. This mission was to be accomplished in two ways: first, by awakening in all Evangelical circles the conviction that the present social crisis was due to a universal national guilt, the guilt of materialistic learning and living; and, second, by awakening masters to a sense of their duty to their men, as morally their equals, and by awakening the men to a sense of the moral vocation of the masters. In other words, the social mission of the Church, according to the dominant opinion at this congress, was just to do its ordinary work of preaching repentance, faith, and love, and was much better represented by Dr. Stöcker's Home Missionary Society than by his Social Monarchical Union. On this question of the duty of the Church with regard to the social amelioration of the people, there are everywhere two opposite tendencies of opinion. One says there is no specific Christian social politics, and that the Church can never have a specific social-political programme. Slavery is undoubtedly inconsistent with the moral spirit of the gospel, but St. Paul was not an emancipationist in practical life. He neither raises the question of emancipation as a matter of political agitation, nor does he bid, or beg, his friend Philemon to set Onesimus at liberty, but to receive him as a brother beloved; just as any of St. Paul's successors might enjoin a Christian master to treat his Christian servant. Christianity is an inspiration, and may be expected to change the character of social relations as it changes the character of men; but political programmes are always things of opportunity and temporary compromise, and it would be very unadvisable to run at any moment a Christian political party, because it would necessarily make Christianity responsible for imperfections incident to party politics, and lessen rather than help the weight of its testimony in the world. Then, on the other hand, there are those who hold that there is a specific Christian social politics; that there is a distinct social and political system, either directly enjoined by Holy Writ, or inferentially resulting from it, so as to be truly a system of Divine right. That is the claim put forward by Dr. Stöcker for his system of social monarchy, and it is the position of sundry other groups of socialists, who base their policy on the agrarian ordinances of Moses, or the communism of the primitive Churches, or the general spirit of the teaching of Jesus Christ. But Christian Socialism, in any of these forms, is evidently at a discount in the Evangelical Church in Germany; and the representative men in that Church, whatever they may do as private citizens, would seem to refrain, perhaps too jealously, from formulating in the name of religion any demands for the action of the State in the social question. Indeed, among Protestants, what is called Christian Socialism is little more than a vagrant opinion in any country; but among Catholics it has grown into a considerable international movement, and has in several States--especially in Austria--left its mark on legislation. The movement was started in Austria by a Protestant, Herr Rudolph Meyer, the well-known author of the "Emancipationskampf des Arbeit" and other works; but he was influentially and effectively seconded by Prince von Liechtenstein, Counts Blome and Kuefstein, and Herr von Vogelsang, who is now editor of the special organ of the movement, the _Vaterland_, of Vienna. In France there had long been a school of Catholic social reformers, the disciples of the Economist Le Play, and they are still associated in the Society of Social Peace, and advocate their views in the periodical _La Réforme Sociale_. They are believers in liberty, however, and would not be called socialists. But there are now two newer schools of Catholic social reformers, who declare their aim to be the re-establishment of Christian principles in the world of labour, but are divided on the point of State intervention. The school who believe in State intervention are the more numerous; they are led by Count Albert de Mun and the Marquis de la Tour de Pin Chambly, have a separate organ, _L'Association Catholique_, and are supported by a large organization of Catholic workmen's clubs, founded by Count de Mun. There were 450 of these clubs in 1880, and they combine the functions of a religious club, a co-operative store, and a friendly society. The school who uphold the principle of liberty also publish an organ, _L'Union Economique_, edited by the Franciscan Father le Basse, and their best known leaders are two Jesuit priests, Fathers Forbes and Caudron. There is likewise a Catholic Socialist movement in Switzerland and Belgium, in both cases strongly in favour of State intervention; and, indeed, Italy is the only Catholic country in which the Church holds aloof from the social movement, forgetting the unusual miseries of the people in an ignoble sulk over the loss of the Pope's temporal power. The friends of this movement have now held three international congresses at Liège. The third was held in September, 1890, under the presidency of the bishop of the diocese, and was attended by 1500 delegates, including eight or ten bishops and many Catholic statesmen and peers from all countries. Lord Ashburnham and the Bishops of Salford and Nottingham represented England, and there were representatives from Germany, Poland, Austria, Spain, and France, but none from Italy. The Pope himself sent a special envoy with an address, and among letters from eminent Catholic leaders who were unable to be present in person was one from Cardinal Manning, which made a little sensation, but was received with decided sympathy, though the Pope afterwards disavowed it to some extent. The Cardinal expressed strong approval of trade unions, and of State intervention to fix the hours of labour to eight hours for miners and ten hours for less arduous trades, and he declared his conviction that no pacific solution of the conflict between capital and labour was possible till the State regulated profits and wages according to some fixed scale which should be subject to revision every three or four years, and by which all free contracts between employers and employed should be adjusted. The Congress went over the whole gamut of social questions, and exhibited the usual conflict of opinion between the party of liberty and the party of authority; but the party of authority, the "Statolaters" as they are called, had evidently the great majority of the assembly. The party of liberty were chiefly Frenchmen and Belgians, men like Fathers Forbes and Caudron, already mentioned, or M. Woeste, the leader of the Catholic party in Belgium, who said he believed in moral suasion only, and that he feared the State and hated Cæsarism. The party of authority were German and English. But whatever they thought of State intervention, all parties were one about the necessity of Church intervention. Without the Catholic Church there could be no solution of the social question. Cardinal Manning said, a few days before the Congress, that the labour question now raised everywhere must go on till it was solved somehow, and that the only universal influence that could guide it was the presence and prudence of the Catholic Church. The Congress passed recommendations about technical education, better homes for working people, shorter hours, intemperance, strikes, prison labour, international factory legislation. It proposed the institution of trade unions, comprising both employers and employed, as the best means of promoting working-class improvement. In the towns these unions might have distinct sections for the different trades; but in the country this subdivision was not requisite. Every parish should have its trade union, and the whole should be united in a federation, like the Boerenbond, or Peasants' League, lately established in some parts of Belgium, and which the Congress recommended to the attention of Catholics. It recommended also the establishment of a pension fund for aged labourers under State guarantee, but without any compulsory exaction of premiums, and without any special State subsidy; and it received with favour a proposal by the Spanish divine, Professor Rodriguez de Cegrada, of Valencia, for papal arbitration in international labour questions. This Catholic Socialist movement shows no disposition to coquet with revolutionary socialism; on the contrary, its leaders often say one of their express objects is to counteract that agitation--to produce the counter-revolution, as they sometimes put it. They are under no mistake about the nature or bearing of socialist doctrines. Our Christian Socialists in London accept the doctrines of Marx, and hold the labourer's right to the full product of his labour to be a requirement of Christian ethics, and the orators at English Church Congresses often speak of socialism as if it were a higher perfection of Christianity. But Catholic Socialists understand their Christianity and their socialism better than to make any such identifications, and regard the doctrines and organizations of revolutionary socialism in the spirit of the firm judgment expressed in the Pope's encyclical of 28th December, 1878, which said that "so great is the difference between their (the socialists') wicked dogmas and the pure doctrine of Christ that there can be no greater; for what participation has justice with injustice, or what communion has light with darkness?" This plain, gruff renunciation is on the whole much truer than the amiable patronage of a very distinguished Irish bishop at the Church Congress of 1887, who said socialism was only a product of Christian countries, (what of the socialism of savage tribes, or of the Mahdi, or of the Chinese?) that the sentiment and aspiration of socialism were distinctly Christian, and that every Christian is a bit of a socialist, and every socialist a bit of a Christian. Socialism may proceed from an aspiration after social justice, but a mistaken view of social justice is, I presume, really injustice; and, as the Pope says, what communion can there practically be between justice and injustice? Idolatry is a mistaken view of Divine things--a distortion of the religious sentiment; but who would on that account call it Christian? The socialist may be at heart a lover of justice; he may love it, if you will, above his fellows; but what matters the presence of the sentiment if the system he would realize it by is ruled essentially by a principle of injustice? Justice, the greatest and rarest of the virtues, is also the most difficult and the most easily perverted. It needs a balance of mind, and in its application to complicated and wide-reaching social arrangements, an exactitude of knowledge and clearness of understanding which are ill replaced by sentimentalism, or even by honest feeling; and the fault of the current talk about Christian Socialism and the identity of socialism with Christianity is that it does not conduce to this clearness of understanding, which is the first requisite for any useful dealing with such questions. If socialism is just, it is Christian--that seems the sum of the matter. But do socializing bishops believe it to be just? Do they believe, as all socialists believe, that it is unjust for one man to be paid five thousand pounds a year, while his neighbours, with far harder and more drudging work, cannot make forty pounds? or do they believe it wrong for a man to live on interest, or rents, or profits? or would they have the law lay its hands on property and manufactures, in order to correct this wrong and give every man the income to which he would be entitled on socialist principles? It is good, no doubt, to have more equality and simplicity and security of living; but these aspirations are neither peculiar to Christianity nor to socialism. FOOTNOTE: [1] The bishop draws this conclusion from the principle that God has directed all men to nature to obtain from it the satisfaction of their necessary wants, and that this original right of the needy cannot be superseded by the subsequent institution of private property. No doubt, he admits, that institution is also of God. It is the appointed way by which man's dominion over nature is to be realized, because it is the way in which nature is best utilized for the higher civilization of man. But this purpose is secondary and subordinate to the other. And, therefore, concludes the bishop, "firmly as theology upholds the right of private property, it asserts at the same time that the higher right by which all men are directed to nature's supplies dare not be infringed, and that, consequently, any one who finds himself in extreme need is justified, when other means fail, in satisfying this extreme need where and how he may (wo und wie er es vermag)."--_Die Arbeiter-frage und das Christenthum_ (p. 78). CHAPTER VIII. ANARCHISM. The latest offspring of revolutionary opinion--and the most misshapen--is anarchism. Seven or eight years ago the word was scarcely known; but then, as if on a sudden, rumours of the anarchists and their horrid "propaganda of deed" echoed in, one upon another, from almost every country in the old world and the new. To-day they were haranguing mobs of unemployed in Lyons and Brussels under a black flag--the black flag of hunger, which, they explained, knows no law. To-morrow they were goading the peasants of Lombardy or Naples to attack the country houses of the gentry, and lay the vineyards waste. Presently they were found attempting to assassinate the German Emperor at Niederwald, or laying dynamite against the Federal Palace at Bern; or a troop of them had set off over Europe on a quixotic expedition of miscellaneous revenge on powers that be, and were reported successively as having killed a _gendarme_ in Strasburg, a policeman in Vienna, and a head of the constabulary in Frankfort. Before these reports had time to die in our ears, fresh tales would arrive of anarchists pillaging the bakers' shops in Paris, or exulting over the murder of a mining manager at Decazeville, or flinging bombs among the police of Chicago; and it seemed as if a new party of disorder had broke loose upon the world, busier and more barbarous than any that went before it. It is no new party, however; it is merely the extremer element in the modern socialist movement. Mr. Hyndman and other socialists would fain disclaim the anarchists altogether, and are fond of declaring that they are the very opposite of socialists--that they are individualists of the boldest stamp. But this contention will not stand. There are individualist anarchists, no doubt. The anarchists of Boston, in America, are individualists; one of the two groups of English anarchists in London is individualist; but these individualist anarchists are very few in number anywhere, and the mass of the party whose deeds made a stir on both sides of the Atlantic is undoubtedly more socialist than the socialists themselves. I have said in a previous chapter that the socialism of the present day may be correctly described in three words as Revolutionary Socialist Democracy, and in every one of these three characteristics the anarchists go beyond other socialists, instead of falling short of them. They are really more socialist, more democratic, and more revolutionary than the rest of their comrades. They are more socialist, because they are disposed to want not only common property and common production, but common enjoyment of products as well. They are more democratic, because they will have no government of any kind over the people except the people themselves--no king or committee, no representative institutions, either imperial or local, but merely every little industrial group of people managing its public affairs as it will manage its industrial work. And they are more revolutionary, for they have no faith, even temporarily, in constitutional procedure, and think making a little trouble is always the best way of bringing on a big revolution. Other socialists prepare the way for revolution by a propaganda of word; but the anarchists believe they can hasten the day best by the propaganda of deed. Like the violent sections of all other parties, they injure and discredit the party they belong to, and they often attack the more moderate section with greater bitterness than their common enemy; but they certainly belong to socialism, both in origin and in principle. There were anarchists among the Young Hegelian socialists of Germany fifty years ago. The Anti-socialist Laws bred a swarm of anarchists among the German socialists in 1880, who left under Most and Hasselmann, and carried to America the seed which led to the outrages of Chicago. The Russian nihilists were anarchists from the beginning; they broke up the International with their anarchism twenty years ago, and they are among the chief disseminators of anarchism in England and France to-day, because to the Russians anarchism is only the socialism and the democracy of the rural communes in which they were born. Socialists themselves are often obliged to admit the embarrassing affinity. Dr. and Mrs. Aveling complain, in their "Labour Movement in America," that while "the Chicago capitalist wanted us to be hanged after we had landed, Herr Most's paper, _Die Freiheit_, was for shooting us at sight"; that "anarchism ruined the International movement, threw back the Spanish, Italian, and French movements for many years, has proved a hindrance in America, and so much or so little of it as exists in England is found by the revolutionary socialist party a decided nuisance"; but they admit that "well nigh every word spoken by the chief defendants at the Chicago trial could be endorsed by socialists, for they then preached not anarchism, but socialism. Indeed," they add, "he that will compare the fine speech by Parsons in 1886 with that of Liebknecht at the high treason trial at Leipzig will find the two practically identical." So far, then, as their socialism goes, there is admittedly no real difference between Parsons, the Chicago anarchist, and Liebknecht, the leader of the German socialists. Indeed, as I have said, the anarchists seem to show a tendency even to outbid the socialists in their socialism. Socialists generally say that, while committing all production to the public authority, they have no idea of interfering with liberty of consumption. Their opponents argue, in reply, that they would find an interference with consumption to be an inevitable result of their systematic regulation of production; but they themselves always repudiate that conclusion. They would make all the instruments of production common property, but leave all the materials of enjoyment individual property still. Ground rents, for example, would belong to the public; but every man would own his own house and furniture, at least for life, if he had built it by his own labour, or bought it from his own savings, because a dwelling house is not an instrument of production, but an article of enjoyment or consumption. But some of the more representative spokesmen of the anarchists would not leave this last remnant of private property standing, and strongly contend for the old primitive plan, still in use among savage tribes, of giving those who are in want of anything a claim--a right--to share the enjoyment of it with those who happen to have it. They would municipalize the houses as well as the ground rents, and no one should be allowed a right to a spare bed or a disengaged sofa so long as one of the least of his brethren huddled on straw in a garret in the slums, or slept out on a bench in Trafalgar Square. In a recent number of _Freedom_, for example, Prince Krapotkin announces that "the first task of the Revolution will be to arrange things so as to share the accommodation of available houses according to the needs of the inhabitants of the city, to clear out the slums and fully occupy the villas and mansions." Anarchist opinions are no doubt capricious and variable. There are as many anarchisms as there are anarchists, it has been said. But this tendency to go further than other socialists, in superseding individual by common property, has repeatedly appeared in some of their most representative utterances. The Jurassian Federation of the International adopted a resolution at their Congress in 1880, in which they say: "We desire collectivism, with all its logical consequences, not only in the sense of the collective appropriation of instruments of production, but also of the collective enjoyment and consumption of products. Anarchist communism will in this way be the necessary and inevitable consequence of the social revolution, and the expression of the new civilization which that revolution will inaugurate." Their principal difference with the other branch of the socialists, however,--and that from which they derive their name--is upon the government of the socialistic society. Anarchy as a principle of political philosophy was first advocated by Proudhon, and he meant by it, not of course a state of chaos or disorder, but merely a state without separate political or civil institutions,--"a state of order without a set government." "The expression, anarchic government," he says, "implies a sort of contradiction. The thing seems impossible, and the idea absurd; but there is really nothing at fault here but the language. The idea of anarchy in politics is quite as rational and positive as any other. It consists in this,--that the political function be re-absorbed in the industrial, and in that case social order would ensue spontaneously out of the simple operation of transactions and exchanges. Every man might then be justly called autocrat of himself, which is the extreme reverse of monarchical absolutism" ("Die Princip Federatif," p. 29). He distinguishes anarchy from democracy and from communistic government, though his distinctions are not easy to apprehend exactly. Communism, he says, is the government of all by all; democracy, the government of all by each; and anarchy, the government of each by each. Anarchy is, in his opinion, the only real form of self-government. People would manage their own public affairs together like partners in a business, and no one would be subject to the authority of another. Government is considered a mere detail of industrial management; and the industrial management is considered to be in the hands of all who co-operate in the industry. The specific preference of anarchism, therefore, seems to be for some form of direct government by the people, in place of any form of central, superior, or representative government; and naturally its political communities must be small in size, though they may be left to league together, if they choose, in free and somewhat loose federations. The anarchists are accordingly more democratic in their political theory than the socialists more strictly so called, inasmuch as they would give the people more hand in the work of government, though of course they preposterously underrate the need and difficulty of that work. On some minor points they contradict one another, and quite as often contradict themselves. Proudhon, for example, would still, even in anarchist society, retain the local policeman and magistrate; but anarchists of a stricter doctrine would either have every man carry his own pistol and provide for his own security, or, as the Boston anarchists prefer, apparently, would have public security supplied like any other commodity by an ordinary mercantile association--in Proudhon's words, "by the simple operation of transactions and exchanges." Emerson said the day was coming when the world would do without the paraphernalia of courts and parliaments, and a man who liked the profession would merely put a sign over his door, "John Smith, King." This is too much division of function however for anarchists generally, and they would have every industrial group do its government as it did its business by general co-operation. Just as in Russia every rural commune has its own trade, and the inhabitants of one are all shoemakers, while the inhabitants of another are all tailors, so in anarchist society, according to the more advanced doctrine, every separate group would have its own separate industry, because, in fact, the separate industry makes it a separate group. And it would be managed by all its members together, not by anything in the nature of a board, for it is important to recollect that anarchists of the purest water entertain as much objection to the domination of a vestry or a town council as to that of a king or a cabinet. Some who side with them, especially old supporters of the French Revolutionary Commune, have still a certain belief in a municipal council; but the Russian anarchists, at any rate, look upon this as a piece of faithless accommodation. Prince Krapotkin, I have already mentioned, thinks the first business of the contemplated revolution must be to redistribute the dwelling houses, so as to thin the slums and quarter their surplus population in the incompletely occupied villas or mansions of the West End. That is a very large task, which it will seem, to an ordinary mind, obviously impossible for the vast population of a great city like London to execute in their own proper persons at an enormous town meeting; yet, if I understand Prince Krapotkin, it is this preposterous proposal he is actually offering as a serious contribution to a more perfect system of government. "For," says he, "sixty elected persons sitting round a table and calling themselves a Municipal Council cannot arrange the matter on paper. It must be arranged by the people themselves, freely uniting to settle the question for each block of houses, each street, and proceeding by agreement from the single to the compound, from the parts to the whole; all having their voice in the arrangements, and putting in their claims with those of their fellow-citizens; just as the Russian peasants settle the periodical repartition of the communal lands." And how do the Russian peasants settle the periodical repartition of the communal lands? Stepniak gives us a very interesting description of a meeting of a Russian _mir_ in his "Russia Under the Tsars" (vol. i. p. 2). "The meetings of the village communes, like those of the _Landesgemeinde_ of the primitive Swiss cantons, are held under the vault of heaven, before the Starosta's house, before a tavern, or at any other convenient place. The thing that most strikes a person who is present for the first time at one of these meetings is the utter confusion which seems to characterize its proceedings. Chairman there is none. The debates are scenes of the wildest disorder. After the convener has explained his reasons for calling the meeting, everybody rushes in to express his opinion, and for a while the debate resembles a free fight of pugilists. The right of speaking belongs to him who can command attention. If an orator pleases his audience, interrupters are promptly silenced; but if he says nothing worth hearing, nobody heeds him, and he is shut up. When the question is somewhat of a burning one, and the meeting begins to grow warm, all speak at once, and none listen. On these occasions the assembly breaks up into groups, each of which discusses the subject on its own account. Everybody shouts his arguments at the top of his voice. Charges and objurgations, words of contumely and derision, are heard on every hand, and a wild uproar goes on from which it does not seem possible that any good can result. "But this apparent confusion is of no moment. It is a necessary means to a certain end. In our village assemblies voting is unknown. Controversies are never decided by a majority of voices; every question must be settled unanimously. Hence the general debate, as well as private discussions, must be continued until a proposal is brought forward which conciliates all interests, and wins the suffrage of the entire _mir_. It is, moreover, evident that to reach this consummation the debates must be thorough and the subject well threshed out; and in order to overcome isolated opposition, it is essential for the advocates of conflicting views to be brought face to face, and compelled to fight out their differences in single combat." But beneath all this tough and apparently acrimonious strife a singular spirit of forbearance reigns. The majority will not force on a premature decision. Debate may rage fast and furious day after day, but at last the din dies. A common understanding is somehow attained, and the _mir_ pronounces its deliverance, which is accepted, in the rude belief of the peasants, as the decree of God Himself. In this way tens of thousands of Russian villages have been, no doubt, managing their own petty business with reasonable amity and success for centuries, and the political philosophy of Russian writers like Bakunin and Prince Krapotkin, who have propagated anarchism in the west of Europe, is merely the naïve suggestion that the form of government which answers not intolerably for the few trivial concerns of a primitive Russian village would answer best for the whole complex business of a great developed modern society. The anarchists carry their dislike to authority into other fields besides the political and industrial. They will have no invisible master or ruler any more than visible. They renounce both God and the devil, and generally with an energy beyond all other revolutionists. Some of the older socialists were believers; St. Simon, Fourier, Leroux and Louis Blanc were all theists; but it is rare to find one among the socialists of the present generation, and with the anarchists an aggressive atheism seems an essential part of their way of thinking. They will own no superior power or authority of any kind--employer, ruler, deity, or law. The Anarchist Congress of Geneva in 1882 issued a manifesto, which began thus:-- "Our enemy, it is our master. Anarchists--that is to say, men without chiefs--we fight against all who are invested or wish to invest themselves with any kind of power whatsoever. Our enemy is the landlord who owns the soil and makes the peasant drudge for his profit. Our enemy is the employer who owns the workshop, and has filled it with wage-serfs. Our enemy is the State, monarchical, oligarchic, democratic, working class, with its functionaries and its services of officers, magistrates, and police. Our enemy is every abstract authority, whether called Devil or Good God, in the name of which priests have so long governed good souls. Our enemy is the law, always made for the oppression of the weak by the strong, and for the justification and consecration of crime." Among other restraints, they entertain often a speculative opposition to the restraint of the legal family, and sometimes advocate a return to aboriginal promiscuity and relationship by mothers; but this is only an occasional element in their agitation. It is plain, however, that when law is believed to be oppression, crime and lawlessness come to be humanity. I have now shown that the anarchists, so far from representing an opposite movement to revolutionary social democracy, are really ultra-socialist and ultra-democratic, and it seems hardly necessary to show that they are ultra-revolutionary. All social democrats contemplate an eventual revolution, but some see no objection meanwhile to take part in current politics; while others, a more witnessing generation, practise an ostentatious abstention, and call themselves political abstentionists. Some, again, think and desire that the revolution will come by peaceful and lawful means; others trust to violence alone. The anarchists outrun all. They refuse to have anything to do with any politics but revolution, and with any revolution but a violent one, and they think the one means of producing revolution now or at any future time is simply to keep exciting disorder and class hatred, assassinating State officers, setting fire to buildings, and paralyzing the _bourgeoisie_ with fear. All anarchists are not of this sanguinary mind, and it is interesting to remember that Proudhon himself wrote Karl Marx in 1846, warning him against "making a St. Bartholomew of the proprietors," and opposed resort to revolutionary action of any kind as a means of promoting social reform. "Perhaps," he says, "we think no reform is possible without a _coup de main_, without what used to be called a revolution, and which is only a shake. I understand that decision and excuse it, for I held it for a long time myself, but I confess my latest studies have completely taken it away from me. I believe we have no need of any such thing in order to succeed, and that consequently we ought not to postulate revolutionary action as a means of social reform, because that pretended means is nothing more nor less than an appeal to force, to arbitrary power, and is therefore a contradiction. I state the problem thus: to restore to society, by an economic combination, the wealth which has been taken from society by another economic combination." ("Proudhon's Correspondence," ii. 198.) But whatever individual anarchists may hold or renounce, the general view of the party is as I have stated. A meeting of 600 anarchists--chiefly Germans and Austrians, but including also some Russians, Spaniards, and Frenchmen--was held at Paris on the 20th April, 1884, and passed a resolution urgently recommending the extirpation of princes, capitalists, and parsons, by means of "the propaganda of deed."[2] The Congress held at London in 1881, which sought to re-establish the International on purely anarchist lines, adopted a declaration of principles, containing, among other things, the following: "It is matter of strict necessity to make all possible efforts to propagate by deeds the revolutionary idea and the spirit of revolt among that great section of the mass of the people which as yet takes no part in the movement, and entertains illusions about the morality and efficacy of legal means. In quitting the legal ground on which we have generally remained hitherto, in order to carry our action into the domain of illegality which is the only way leading to revolution, it is necessary to have recourse to means which are in conformity with that end.... The Congress recommends organizations and individuals constituting part of the International Working Men's Association to give great weight to the study of the technical and chemical sciences as a means of defence and attack."[3] In the first French revolution Lavoisier and other seven and twenty chemists were put to the guillotine together, on the express pretence, "We have no need of _savants_"; but now "Technology" is a standing heading in the anarchist journals; a revolutionary organization has its chemical department as well as its press department; and anarchist tracts often end with the standing exhortation, "Learn the use of dynamite," as socialist tracts end with the old admonition of 1848, "Proletarians of all nations, unite." The object of this policy of violence is partly, as we see from the above quotations, to inflame the spirit of revolt and disorder in the working classes; and it is partly to terrorize the _bourgeoisie_, so that they may yield in pure panic all they possess. But for its expressly violent policy, anarchism would be the least formidable or offensive manifestation of contemporary socialism. For, in the first place, its specific doctrine is one which it is really difficult to get the most ordinary common sense puzzled into accepting. Men in their better mind may be ready enough to listen to specious, or even not very specious, schemes of reform that hold out a promise of extirpating misery, and in their worse mind they may be quite as prone to think that if everybody had his own, there would be fewer rich; but they are not likely to believe we can get on without law or government of any sort. Even the vainest will feel that however superfluous these institutions may be for themselves, they are still unhappily indispensable for some of their neighbours. Then in the next place this doctrine of the anarchists is as great a stumbling-block to themselves as it is to other people, for they carry their objection to government into their own movement, and can consequently never acquire that concentration and unity of organization which is necessary for any effectual conspiracy. They are always found constituted in very small groups very loosely held together, and small as the several groups may be, they are always much more likely to subdivide than to consolidate. Even the few anarchist refugees in London who might be expected to be knit into indissoluble friendship by their common adversity have broken into separate clubs, and the "Autonomic" and the "Morgenrothe"--though they have hardly more than a hundred members between them, and all belong to the same socialist variety of anarchist doctrine--remain as the Jews and the Samaritans. It is said to be a subject of speculative discussion among anarchists whether two members are sufficient to constitute an anarchist club. This laxity of organization is a natural result of the dislike to authority which the anarchists cultivate as a cardinal principle. Subjection to an executive committee is as offensive to their feelings and as contrary to their principles as subjection to a monarch. The dread of subjection keeps them disunited and weak. As Machiavelli says, the many ruin a revolutionary society, and the few are not enough. A small group may concoct an isolated crime, but it can do little towards the social revolution. The anarchist policy--the propaganda of deed--consists, however, exactly in this concoction of isolated crimes and outrages. Some of the continental powers are conferring at this moment on the propriety of taking international efforts against the anarchists, and the question may at least be reasonably raised before our own Government, whether a policy of promiscuous outrage like this should continue to be included among political offences, securing protection against extradition, and whether the propaganda of deed and the use of dynamite should not rather be declared outside the limits of fair and legitimate revolution, as, by the Geneva Convention, explosive bullets are put outside the limits of fair or legitimate war. FOOTNOTES: [2] Much interesting information on this subject is given from official sources in a recent anonymous work, "Socialismus und Anarchismus in Europa und Nordamerika während der Jahre 1883 bis 1886." [3] Garin, "L'Anarchie et les Anarchistes," p. 48. CHAPTER IX. RUSSIAN NIHILISM. Haxthausen pronounced a confident opinion in 1847, when most of the continental nations were agitated with rumours of revolution, that Russia at any rate was safe from the danger, inasmuch as she enjoyed an absolute protection against all such revolutionary agitation in her communistic rural institutions. There was no proletariat in Russia, every man in the country being born to a share in the land of the township he belonged to; and without a proletariat, concluded the learned professor, there was neither motive nor material for social revolt. This belief became generally accepted, and passed, indeed, for years as a political commonplace; but perhaps never has a political prognostication so entirely reasonable proved on experience so utterly fallacious. Instead of sparing or avoiding Russia, revolutionary agitation has grown positively endemic in that country; it is more virulent in its type, and apparently more deepseated than elsewhere; and, stranger still, not the least of its exciting causes has been that very communistic agrarian system which was thought to be the surest preservation against it. In its earlier period, before the emancipation of the serfs, the Russian revolutionary movement was largely inspired by an extravagant idealization of the perfections of the rural commune, and now since the emancipation it is fed far more formidably by an actual experience of the commune's defects. The truth is that the communistic land system of Russia, so far from preventing the birth of a proletariat, is now of itself begetting the most numerous and the most helpless proletariat in the world. The emancipation dues would have been a serious burden under any social arrangements, but they have proved so much heavier under the communistic system of Russia than they would have been elsewhere that the system itself is beginning to give way. With an unlimited stock of good land, all is plain sailing under any social institutions; but when land is limited in extent and every new-comer has the right to cut in and get an equal share with those already in possession, excessive subdivision is inevitable, and the point is soon reached where any fresh impost or outgoing destroys the profitableness of cultivation, and converts the right to the land from an asset into a liability. This is what is now happening in Russia. It appears there are already more paupers in St. Petersburg proportionally to population than in any other European capital, and as many as a third of the inhabitants of the provinces are either entirely landless, or, more unhappy still, find their land, instead of a benefit, to be only a grievous burden of which they cannot shake themselves clear. I shall have occasion later on to recur to this new economic development in rural Russia, which is very interesting to the student of socialism on its own account, but which will concern us in the present chapter more particularly in its bearing on the operations and prospects of the revolutionary party in that country. The revolutionary or nihilist movement in Russia has passed through several successive phases; but there is no good reason for denying its continuity, nor any impropriety, as is sometimes alleged, in the retention of the name of Nihilism, which it bore when it first engaged the attention of Western Europe, although it may be quite true that the word is more descriptive of the earlier developments of the movement than of the later. In its first stage, before the Emancipation Act, it was scarce more than an intellectual fermentation--an intellectual revolt all round, if you will--shaping more and more in its political ideas towards democratic socialism, but as yet entirely unorganized, and content to expend its force in violent opinions without recourse to action. Then, second, the Emancipation Act gave it organization, purpose, malignity, and made it, in short, the nihilism we know, converting it into the engine of the bitter discontent of the landed classes, who were seriously straitened and many of them ruined by the operation of that great reform. Third, while the impoverishment of thousands of landed families was the first result of the Emancipation Act, its slower but more serious result has been the impoverishment of the peasantry, and nihilism is now assuming a more agrarian character, and promoting the social revolution under the old Russian cry for "the black division." For the origin of nihilism we must go back half a century to a little company of gifted young men, most of whom rose to great distinction, who used at that time to meet together at the house of a rich merchant in Moscow, for the discussion of philosophy and politics and religion. They were of the most various views. Some of them became Liberal leaders, and wanted Russia to follow the constitutional development of the Western nations; others became founders of the new Slavophil party, contending that Russia should be no imitator, but develop her own native institutions in her own way; and there were at least two among them--Alexander Herzen and Michael Bakunin--who were to be prominent exponents of revolutionary socialism. But they all owned at this period one common master--Hegel. Their host was an ardent Hegelian, and his young friends threw themselves into the study of Hegel with the greatest zeal. Herzen himself tells us in his autobiography how assiduously they read everything that came from his pen, how they devoted nights and weeks to clearing up the meaning of single passages in his writings, and how greedily they devoured every new pamphlet that issued from the German press on any part of his system. From Hegel, Herzen and Bakunin were led, exactly like Marx and the German Young Hegelians, to Feuerbach, and from Feuerbach to socialism. Bakunin, when he retired from the army, rather than be the instrument of oppressing the Poles among whom he was stationed, went for some years to Germany, where he lived among the Young Hegelians and wrote for their organ, the _Hallische Jahrbücher_; but before either he or Herzen ever had any personal intercommunication with the members of that school of thought, they had passed through precisely the same development. Herzen speaks of socialism almost in the very phrases of the Young Hegelians, as being the new "terrestrial religion," in which there was to be neither God nor heaven; as a new system of society which would dispense with an authoritative government, human or Divine, and which should be at once the completion of Christianity and the realization of the Revolution. "Christianity," he said, "made the slave a son of man; the Revolution has emancipated him into a citizen. Socialism would make him a _man_." This tendency of thought was strongly supported in the Russian mind by Haxthausen's discovery and laudation of the rural commune of Russia. The Russian State was the most arbitrary, oppressive, and corrupt in Europe, and the Russian Church was the most ignorant and superstitious; but here at last was a Russian institution which was regarded with envy even by wise men of the west, and was really a practical anticipation of that very social system which was the last work of European philosophy. It was with no small pride, therefore, that Alexander Herzen declared that the Muscovite peasant in his dirty sheepskin had solved the social problem of the nineteenth century, and that for Russia, with this great problem already solved, the Revolution was obviously a comparatively simple operation. You had but to remove the Czardom, the services, and the priesthood, and the great mass of the people would still remain organized in fifty thousand complete little self-governing communities living on their common land and ruling their common affairs as they had been doing long before the Czardom came into being. And what, after all, was the latest dream of philosophical socialism but a world of communities like these? The new formula of civilization had merely come back to the old Russian _mir_. All Russian writers draw a kindly and charming picture of the _mir_, the rude village council, in which the heads of families have for ages managed their common land, distributed their taxes, and settled all the burning problems of the hamlet with remarkable freedom, fairness, and mutual respect. They meet together on some open space--perhaps in front of the tavern, which is itself one of their common possessions; they beat out their question there till they are unanimous; for the _mir_ will know nothing of decision by majorities--the will of the _mir_ is believed to be the will of God Himself, and it must be no divided counsel. They argue sometimes long and keenly, and, as their interest waxes, they will raise many voices at once, or perhaps break up into separate groups, each discussing the subject apart; but presently, out of all the apparent disorder, the acceptable decision is somehow found, and peace reigns again in the village street. In these meetings they have the deepest feeling and habit of freedom; and even when a political question arises affecting their interests--a question of taxes or of administration--they make no scruple to speak in the plainest terms of the Government and the officials, and they are never interfered with. "Nobody but God," they say, "dare judge the _mir_," and the Czar, at any rate, respects the tradition. That rude assembly is the only free institution in Russia. Even revolutionary manifestoes have been publicly read at its meetings, and socialist addresses publicly delivered. And this instinctive spirit of freedom is attended there with the instinctive spirit of equality. A recent Russian writer observes that a Russian peasant would be quite unable to understand the sort of respect the English labourer shows to a gentleman. With its freedom, its equality, its strong family sentiment, its common property, its self-government, the _mir_ is really the social democratic republic political philosophers have projected, and a Russian who dislikes the State and loves the _mir_ is, without more ado, a social revolutionist of the anarchist type. The favourite ideal among Russian revolutionists for the last fifty years has accordingly all along been the anarchist ideal of a free federation of local industrial communities without any separate political organization; for the anarchist ideal is natural to the Russian situation. Revolutionary opinions were very rife in Russia during the reign of Nicholas; but under his iron rule they were never suffered to be spoken above the breath. His ascension to the throne in 1825 had been greeted by a revolution--a very abortive one, it is true, but unfortunately sufficient to set every fibre of the young Czar's strong nature inflexibly against all the liberal tendencies encouraged by his father, and to stop the political development of the country for a generation. A handful of constitutional reformers--united three years before in a secret society to promote peasant emancipation, the common civil liberties, and stable instead of arbitrary law--gathered a crowd to a public place in the capital, and shouted for "the Archduke Constantine and a Constitution." Most part of the crowd had so little idea why they had come together that they thought Constitution was the name of the Archduke Constantine's wife; and the most distinguished man among the conspirators--Pestel, the poet--said, as he was going to execution, "I wished to reap the harvest before sowing the seed." He had done worse--he really kept the seed from being sown for thirty years to come. All freedom of opinion was ruthlessly suppressed; every means of influencing the public mind was stopped; there was no liberty of printing, speaking, or meeting; there was no saving grace but ignorance, for people of reading and intelligence lived under perpetual liability to most unreasonable suspicion. Alexander Herzen, for example, was banished to the Asiatic frontier while still a very young man, merely because he happened to make the casual remark in a private letter to his father, which was opened in the post, that a policeman had a few days before killed a man in the streets of St. Petersburg. But this system of lawless and unrighteous repression nursed a deep spirit of revolt against constituted authority in the heart of the people, and among the younger minds a kind of passion for the most extreme and forbidden doctrines. All the wildest phases of nihilist opinion in the sixties were already raging in Russia in the forties. Haxthausen says he was astounded, when he visited the Russian universities and schools, to find the students at every one of them given over, as he says, to political and religious notions of the most all-destructive description. "It is a miasma," he says. And although the only political outbreak of Nicholas's reign, the Petracheffsky conspiracy of 1849, was little more than a petty street riot, a storm of serious revolt against the tyranny of the Czar was long gathering, which would have burst upon his head after the disasters to his army in the Crimea, had he survived them. He saw it thickening, however, and on his death-bed said to his son, the noble and unfortunate Alexander II., "I fear you will find the burden too heavy." The son found it eventually heavy enough, but in the meantime he wisely bent before the storm, relaxed the restraints the father had imposed, and gave pledges of the most liberal reforms in every department of State--judicial administration, local government, popular education, serf emancipation. People believed completely in the young Czar's sincerity, awaited with great expectations the measures he would propose, and meanwhile indulged to the top of their bent in the practical liberties they were already provisionally allowed to enjoy, and gave themselves up to a restless fervour for liberty and reform. An independent press was not among the liberties conceded, but Russian opinion at this period found a most effective voice in a newspaper started in London by Alexander Herzen, called the _Kolokol_ (Bell), which for a number of years made a great impression in Russia by the accuracy of its information on Russian affairs, by the boldness of its criticisms of the Government, and by the ease with which it got smuggled into universal circulation. When Herzen was sent to the Urals as a dangerous person, he was appointed, very anomalously--perhaps it was to keep him there--to an administrative and judicial post, in which he would have apparently to sentence others while under sentence himself; but he grew weary of his banishment, and was permitted to exchange it for the more complete, but much more agreeable, banishment from Russia altogether. After visiting Germany and France, and after witnessing, with deep interest and deeper disappointment, some of the revolutions of 1848, and writing that they had failed because their promoters were not prepared to follow them up with a positive social programme, as if, he says, the mere destruction of a Bastile were a revolution, he settled in England, and learnt there, as his son assures us, that revolution itself was but a vain expedient, and that gradual reform was the only effectual method of lasting social amelioration. It was probably while he was learning this lesson--it was certainly entirely in this spirit--that he began his political agitation on the accession of Alexander II. The moment the new Czar ascended the throne, Herzen addressed to him a famous letter, demanding amends for the ills his father, Czar Nicholas, had done the people, a complete breach with the old system, and the introduction of thoroughgoing Liberal reforms, and more especially the emancipation of the serfs. It was in the same spirit he conducted his agitation in the _Kolokol_. Without neglecting to ventilate his socialist and philosophical views, he welcomed the contemplated reforms as being in themselves true remedies for popular grievances, and intended in perfect good faith by the Czar to be so; and his chief care in all his criticisms always was to secure that these reforms should be real and thorough, that the judicial body should be independent, the educational arrangements efficient; above all, that the peasants should not be deprived, in the emancipation arrangements, of a foot of the land they then possessed, or made to pay terms for their emancipation which would be too heavy for them to meet. And perhaps the most popular and stirring part of his paper was always his exposure of existing abuses, and his criticism of the conduct of officials. The journal was written with wit, vigour, and accurate knowledge; and, as it spoke what most men thought, but few would as yet venture to say, it was greedily read and distributed, and was for some years a remarkable power in the country. Herzen was the hero of the young. Herzenism, we are told, became the rage, and Herzenism appears to have meant, before all, a free handling of everything in Church or State which was previously thought too sacred to be touched. This iconoclastic spirit grew more and more characteristic of Russian society at this period, and presently, under its influence, Herzenism fell into the shade, and nihilism occupied the scene. We possess various accounts of the meaning and nature of nihilism, and they all agree substantially in their description of it. The word was first employed by Turgenieff in his novel "Fathers and Sons," where Arcadi Petrovitch surprises his father and uncle by describing his friend Bazaroff as a nihilist. "A nihilist," said Nicholas Petrovitch. "This word must come from the Latin _nihil_, nothing, as far as I can judge, and consequently it signifies a man who recognises nothing." "Or rather who respects nothing," said Paul Petrovitch. "A man who looks at everything from a critical point of view," said Arcadi. "Does not that come to the same thing?" asked his uncle. "No, not at all. A nihilist is a man who bows before no authority, who accepts no principle without examination, no matter what credit the principle has."... "Yes, before we had Hegelians; now we have nihilists. We shall see what you will do to exist in nothingness, in a vacuum, as if under an air pump." Koscheleff, writing in 1874, gives a similar explanation of nihilism. "Our disease is a disease of character, and the most dangerous possible. We suffer from a fatal unbelief in everything. We have ceased to believe in this or in that, not because we have studied the subject thoroughly and become convinced of the untenability of our views, but only because some author or another in Germany or England holds this or that doctrine to be unfounded. Our nihilism is a thing of a quite peculiar character. It is not, as in the West, the result of long falsely directed philosophical studies and ways of thinking, nor is it the fruit of an imperfect social organization. It is an entirely different thing from that. The wind has blown it to us, and the wind will blow it from us again. Our nihilists are simply Radicals. Their loud speeches, their fault-finding, their strong assertions, are grounded on nothing. They borrow negative views from foreign authors, and repeat them and magnify them _ad nauseam_, and treat persons of another way of thinking as absurd and antiquated people who continue to cherish exploded ideas and customs. The chief cause of the spread of this (I will not say doctrine, for I cannot honour it with such a name, but) sect is this, that it imparts its communications in secret conversations, so that, for one thing, it cannot be publicly criticised and refuted, and, for another, it charms by the fascination of the forbidden." The same view precisely is given by Baron Fircks ("Schedo Ferroti") in his very elaborate and thoughtful account of nihilism in his _L'Avenir de la Russie_. It was merely, he said, the critical spirit--the spirit of intellectual revolt--carried to an extreme and running amuck against all accepted principles in religion, in politics, in domestic and social life. It was a common infirmity of contemporary society, and was in no way peculiar to Russia; but while that may be true, it has undoubtedly--as perhaps the Baron would admit--been carried into more extravagant manifestations in Russia than elsewhere. Nor are the reasons of this extravagance far to seek. First, the Russians are, in national character, singularly impressionable, volatile, and predisposed to run to extremes. Diderot says they were rotten before they were ripe. Second, they are mere children in political experience, and even in intellectual training. Their education is in general shallow, and they are liable to the vagaries of the half educated. Third, both Baron Fircks and Koscheleff think nihilism was largely due to the arbitrary government of the country. The Czar and the bureaucracy have themselves had much to do with destroying respect for law and authority by their capricious habits of administration. Laws were proclaimed to-day and repealed to-morrow, or even broken by the very officials engaged in administering them. Even in the days of Nicholas, Herzen complained bitterly of this constant inconstancy of the law; he said the Russian Government was "infatuated with innovation," that "nothing was allowed to remain as it was," that "everything was always being changed," that "a new ministry invariably began its work by upsetting that of its predecessors." Russia being a Functionary State, not a Law State, to employ a useful German distinction, the decrees of officials take the place elsewhere filled by fixed laws established by legislative authority; and where these decrees are continually changing, reverence for the law is impossible. But in all this there was no practical political disaffection before the Emancipation Act. The nihilists had as yet a vague belief in the Czar and the coming reforms; they felt that the Russian people were at last to have a chance of showing the rich genius that lay in them, and their whole anxiety was to have the people adequately trained for this great destiny. It was the common talk that the future belonged to Russia; and that she was already beginning to outshine all other nations in literature, in art, in science, in music. "Some young people among us," says Turgenieff, "have discovered even a Russian arithmetic. Two and two do make four with us as well as elsewhere, but more pompously, it would seem. All this is nothing but the stammering of men who are just awaking." Under these influences the energies of the nihilists took a different outlet than plotting. Instead of founding secret societies, they founded Sunday schools. For to their mind the first need of the time, above even political liberty, was popular education. As to liberty, the measure they practically enjoyed at the gracious pleasure of the Czar for the present contented them, inasmuch as it seemed an earnest of the better securities that were expected to follow; but they could not with any satisfaction look round them and see the Russian people, for whom they were prophesying such a great career, still lying in almost aboriginal ignorance. The stuff was indeed there which should yet astonish the world, but it must first be made. To "make the people," as they phrased it, was the task the nihilists now undertook, and they threw themselves into it with the zeal of apostles. They put on shabby clothes to avoid any offensive superiority to their poorer neighbours, and they wore green spectacles to correct the even more intolerable inequality of personal beauty, for, as they were fond of saying, they had put off the old man and were now new men created again by Büchner and Feuerbach in the gospel of humanity; but with all their extravagances they carried on for some years a most active and no doubt useful work in the Sunday schools and reading circles which they rapidly established everywhere. Although this movement fell eventually under the suspicion of the Government, as in despotic countries any movement will, it seems to have had no political, or what the authorities call "ill-intentioned" purpose. It was pervaded with patriotic and humanitarian feeling, and though no doubt many of the nihilists who took part in it held as extreme opinions in politics as they did in everything else, yet these opinions were mere matters of speculation. It is certain that democratic and revolutionary socialism was a very popular doctrine among the nihilists, even at that earliest period of their history, for their most representative man during that period was Tchernycheffsky, the editor of the _Contemporary_ magazine, and a political economist of some note in his day; and Tchernycheffsky was undoubtedly a democratic and revolutionary socialist. He belonged to a younger generation than Herzen and Bakunin, but, like them, he had been led to socialism through Hegel and Feuerbach, and he expounded his ideas in a famous romance entitled, "What is to be done?" which the Government allowed him to write, and even to publish, while in prison for sedition in 1862, though they suppressed the book sternly when they saw it beginning to make a sensation. But although revolutionary and socialistic principles may have been very considerably entertained by the nihilists from the first, there was no practical revolutionary or socialistic organization before the emancipation of the serfs. Up till then nihilism may be said to have been a benignant growth, if I may use a medical expression, and it was that great historical measure that converted it into the malignant and deadly trouble which we best know. The Russian Radicals, including the socialists, were strongly disappointed with that measure from the outset, because they thought it inflicted serious injustice on the peasantry. It deprived them, they said, of much of the land they had hitherto enjoyed as a right, and which was necessary for their comfortable subsistence, while it imposed on them for what they got excessive dues which their holdings would never be able to bear; and so the first Land and Liberty League was founded in 1863. But it was not the peasants, or the peasants' friends--it was the small landed gentry who were the first to feel the effects of the Emancipation Act, and to raise the standard of revolt. The Act made a serious change in their fortunes. Although the landlords were allowed most liberal terms of compensation for the enforced emancipation of their serfs, few of them actually received a kopeck, because they were almost all of them already deeply indebted to Government, and Government applied the compensation money to cancel their old debts, and gave up the policy of granting any more mortgages in the future. Then a great part of the land which was formerly cultivated by means of the serfs was now found to be too poor to afford the expense of paid labour; the landlords had neither stock nor implements to work it, if it were more fertile, the peasantry having in the old days tilled the field for them with their own horses and ploughs; nor had they any means of raising the stock on credit, and, besides, most of them were complete absentees, engaged as Government or railway officials, or in other professional work, and knew nothing whatever about the business of agriculture. The smaller landlords have therefore been compelled to sell their estates to the larger, or to leave much of their ground entirely uncultivated. In Moscow there were 633 separate estates in 1861, before the emancipation, but only 422 in 1877, and not more than one-fifth of the land that was cultivated in that province in 1861 continued in cultivation in 1877. Many of the sons of the smaller proprietors were at the universities studying for one of the professions, and had either to give up their studies altogether for want of means, or were put on shorter allowances, which was scarcely less annoying, and was indeed a great cause of revolutionary opinions at the universities. Many more of the sons of the gentry were in the army, and the pay of a Russian officer being extremely small, they had been accustomed to receive allowances from home, without which, indeed, they could hardly live; and now in the altered circumstances of the family these allowances were perforce suddenly stopped. Much of the revolutionary discontent that exists in the Russian army to such a serious extent that 200 arrests were made in March, 1885, and Government appointed a special commission of inquiry into the subject, has come from the source, and is practically a revolt against insufficient pay. But what happened at the universities and in the army happened in other departments of Russian life; the Emancipation Act had left on every shore some wreckage of the gentry, an upper-class and educated proletariat, whose distress might be due originally to their own improvidence or ignorance, but was undoubtedly first driven into an acute state by an act of Government, and therefore clamoured for vengeance on the Government that produced it. The clamour of the victims of the Emancipation Act naturally woke up all the earlier discontents of the country. The Poles and the dissenting sects, with all their ancient wrongs, seem to have contributed but a small contingent to the nihilist ranks; but the Jews, subject to a barbarous and often very acute persecution, have filled the secret societies from the beginning with many of their most determined members, and have supplied a great part of the "Nihilistesses"; and even though the Revolutionary Executive Committee has latterly issued a proclamation against the Jews, mainly on the ground of the extortion practised by Jewish money-lenders on the peasantry, there are still, as appears very abundantly from the nihilist trials of 1890, many Jews among the revolutionists. Then there are thirteen millions of native heretics in Russia, sects of various sorts springing up like the early Quakers from the bosom of the people, and filled with a rude spirit of freedom and a tendency towards socialistic ideas in their condemnation of luxury and accumulation, their hatred of war and military government, and their belief in fraternity and mutual assistance. Some writers allege that these sects are an important factor in the revolutionary movement; but though they certainly have suffered many wrongs from Government, they do not seem to have furnished any great quota to the revolutionary ranks. They are the freethinkers of the unlettered classes, however, and their ideas no doubt have some influence in preparing these classes for socialist principles. But there is another class very numerous in Russia, who are the natural allies of revolution--the "illegal men" who, for various reasons, go about on false passports, and are thus living in revolt already. And to all these diverse sources of disaffection must be added the aggravation arising at the moment from the tyrannical and arbitrary measures to which the Government resorted on the first outburst of complaints. In 1862, perceiving the discontent raised by the Emancipation Act, Government took alarm, and withdrew or curtailed the liberties it had for a few years allowed the people to enjoy. It stopped some newspapers and warned a number more; it prohibited the Sunday schools and reading clubs altogether; it banished many persons on mere suspicion to remote provinces; and for a greater example it cast the eminent writer Tchernycheffsky into prison on a charge of exciting the peasantry to revolt, and after leaving him there without trial for nearly two years, brought him out at length to a public square in St. Petersburg, read out to him a sentence of transportation, broke a sword over his head, and sent him to the Siberian mines for the rest of his life. There he still remains, broken now both in mind and body, but probably doing more harm to the Government by his wrongs than he could ever have done by his pen, for nihilists have for twenty-seven years been constantly exciting popular sympathy by descriptions of his martyrdom and demands for his release. It was while this alienation against the Government was thickening that Michael Bakunin escaped from Siberia, and it was by emissaries sent by Bakunin to Russia that the first successful attempt was made to incite and organize all these revolutionary materials into a revolutionary movement. When Bakunin came back in 1862 and joined Herzen in London, the two old friends found their ideas had parted far asunder during their long separation. Herzen had, from his twelve years' observation of affairs, broadened from revolutionist to statesman, and had no patience now for the extravagance of the young Russian patriots who visited him in London. "Our black earth," he would say, "needs a deal of draining." And there is a remarkable letter which he wrote shortly before his death, and apparently to Bakunin himself, in which he says:-- "I will own that one day, surrounded by dead bodies, by houses destroyed with balls and bullets, and listening feverishly as prisoners were being shot down, I called with my whole heart and intelligence upon the savage force of vengeance to destroy the old criminal world, without thinking much of what was to come in its place. Since that time twenty years have gone by; the vengeance has come, but it has come from the other side, and it is the people who have borne it, because they comprehended nothing either then or since. A long and painful interval has given time for passions to calm, for thoughts to deepen; it has given the necessary time for reflection and observation. Neither you nor I have betrayed our convictions; but we see the question now from a different point of view. You rush ahead, as you did before, with a passion of destruction, which you take for a creative passion; you crush every obstacle; you respect history only in the future. As for me, on the contrary, I have no faith in the old revolutionary methods, and I try to comprehend the march of men in the past and in the present, to know how to advance with them without falling behind, but without going on so far before as you, for they would not follow me--they could not follow me!" Herzen gradually lost hold over the wilder forces in Russia, he was even openly denounced as a reactionary by the revolutionist Dolgourouki; and when he alienated the more moderate parties likewise by his support of the Polish insurrection of 1863, his spell vanished, and during the remaining seven years of his life his influence was of little account. Bakunin was more in unison with the troubled spirit of the times. While Herzen had been ripening in political wisdom under the ampler intellectual life to which his exile introduced him, Bakunin's twelve years' confinement had maddened him into a fanatic, and instead of curing him of revolutionary propensities, only fixed the idea of revolution in his mind like a mania. When he came to London a huge, haggard man, always excited, always talking, he used to speak of himself as a Prometheus unbound, and he was to live henceforth for the undoing of the powers and systems that were. He was never found without a group of conspirators and refugees of all shades and nationalities about him. With some reminiscences of socialistic philosophy remaining in the background of his mind, his only real interest now was revolution, and he seemed always thenceforth to look on his socialism as a means of revolution rather than on revolution as a means to socialism. His socialism itself had grown less sane--it was no longer the anarchism of the old days: it was what he called "amorphism"--society not merely without governmental institutions, but without institutions of any kind; and he was domineered by the thought of a universal revolution, in which all States and Churches and all institutions religious, political, judicial, financial, academical, and social should perish in a common destruction. "Amorphism" and "Pan-destruction" are not articles of a rational creed, but they were propagated with almost preternatural energy by Bakunin. The work of exciting revolution and disorder of any kind was the main business of his life till he died in 1876. Others might play a waiting game, but for him the work of the revolutionist was revolution; and he ought to be incessantly promoting it, not by word only, but by deed, by an unremitting terrorism, by shooting a policeman when you can't reach a king, and destroying a Bastile if you cannot overturn an empire. In his "Revolutionary Catechism," written in cipher, but read by the public prosecutor at a Russian nihilist trial in 1871, he says (I quote the passage from M. de Laveleye):-- "The revolutionist is a man under a vow. He ought to have no personal interests, no business, no sentiments, no property. He ought to occupy himself entirely with one exclusive interest, with one thought and one passion: the Revolution.... He has only one aim, one science: destruction. For that and nothing but that he studied mechanics, physics, chemistry, and medicine. He observes with the same object, the men, the characters, the positions and all the conditions of the social order. He despises and hates existing morality. For him everything is moral that favours the triumph of the Revolution. Everything is immoral and criminal that hinders it.... Between him and society there is war to the death, incessant, irreconcilable. He ought to be prepared to die, to bear torture, and to kill with his own hands all who obstruct the revolution. So much the worse for him if he has in this world any ties of parentage, friendship, or love! He is not a true revolutionist if these attachments stay his arm. In the meantime he ought to live in the middle of society, feigning to be what he is not. He ought to penetrate everywhere, among high and low alike; into the merchant's office, into the church, into the Government bureaux, into the army, into the literary world, into the secret police, and even into the Imperial Palace.... He must make a list of those who are condemned to death, and expedite their sentence according to the order of their relative iniquities.... A new member can only be received into the association by a unanimous vote, and after giving proofs of his merit not in word but in action. Every 'companion' ought to have under his hand several revolutionists of the second or third degree, not entirely initiated. He ought to consider them part of the revolutionary capital placed at his disposal, and he ought to use them economically, and so as to extract the greatest possible profit out of them.... The most precious element of all are women, completely initiated, and accepting our entire programme. Without their help we can do nothing." Bakunin naturally turned his first attention to his own country, and the subsequent development of Russian affairs show sufficiently distinct signs of his ideas and influence. In 1865 he sent a young medical student named Netchaïeff to Moscow, to work among the students there, and Netchaïeff had, by 1869, established a number of secret societies, which he linked together under the name of the Russian Branch of the International Working Men's Association. This organization was not very numerous--no Russian secret society is--but in 1873 as many as eighty-seven persons were brought to trial for connection with it, and in 1866 one of its members, a working man called Karakasoff, who was suffering from an incurable disease, made the first attempt on the life of the Czar--an event which had most important effects on the course of Russian politics. It rang out the era of reform, and rang in the era of reaction. The popular concessions which the Czar had already given he now began to withdraw. The people had never got, as they expected, an independent judiciary--perhaps in an autocratic country a judiciary independent of the executive is hardly possible--but they had enjoyed some pretence of public trial, and now that pretence was done away, and Karakasoff and his companions were not brought before the court at all, but tried and condemned by an extraordinary commission, with a military officer of approved ferocity at its head. Administrative trial and administrative condemnation became again the regular rule in Russia; and though these things were borne in the days of Nicholas as almost matters of course, they were now deeply resented as fresh invasions of right and direct breaches of imperial promises. Then the bodies to which a certain amount of the local government of the country, the management of roads, schools, poor, health, etc., had been entrusted, were obstructed in the exercise of their powers, or gradually deprived of their powers altogether, and forced into complete dependence on the imperial executive. The students at the universities began to be interfered with in their sick and benefit societies and their reading circles; their studies in the class-rooms were restricted to what was thought a safe routine; and even their private lives and motions were watched with an exasperating espionage. People felt the hand of the despot pressing back upon them everywhere, and they felt it with a most natural and righteous recoil. This reactionary policy, which has continued ever since--this return to the hated old methods of arbitrary and repressive rule--produced, as was inevitable, deep and general discontent at the very moment when the great historical measure of serf emancipation was desolating the families of the landed gentry, province after province; and when the execution of the Emancipation Act was completed in 1870, Russian society was already quivering with dangerous elements of revolt. From that time evidences of an active revolutionary propaganda multiplied rapidly every year. In 1871 and 1872 the writings of the German socialists were translated and ran into great favour. Even of Marx's far from popular work, "Capital," a large edition was eagerly bought up, and ladies of position baptized their children in the name of Lassalle. Secret societies were discovered both north and south. From 1873 to 1877 nihilist arrests, nihilist prosecutions, nihilist conflicts with the police, were the order of the day, till at length, in 1878, the young girl, Vera Sassulitch, fired the shot at the head of the Russian police which began that long vendetta between the revolutionists and the executive, in which so many officials perished, and eventually, in 1881, after many unsuccessful attempts, the Czar himself was so cruelly assassinated. The ardent youth of Russia, who, in 1861, were still giving themselves to the work of Sunday schools and reading circles, were, in 1871, throwing their careers away to go out, like the first apostles, without scrip or two coats, and propagate among the rude people of the provinces the doctrines of modern revolutionary socialism, and by 1881 had become absorbed in sheer terrorism, in avenging the official murder of comrades without trial by the revolutionary murder of officials, in contriving infernal plots and explosions, and trying vainly to cast out devils by the prince of devils. Stepniak attributes the impetus which the socialist agitation received in 1871 to the impression produced in Russia by the Paris Commune; but it would perhaps be more correct simply to ascribe it to the exertions of two active Russian revolutionists, who were themselves associated with the Communard movement, and who happened to enjoy at this period unusual facilities of communication with the younger mind of Russia. One was Bakunin, who had himself organized an insurrection at Lyons on the principles of the Commune six months before the outbreak at Paris in March, 1871; and the other was Peter Lavroff, the present Nestor of Russian nihilism, who actually took part in the Paris Commune itself. Lavroff, who had been a colonel in the Russian army, and professor in the military college of St. Petersburg, was compromised in the attempt of Karakasoff in 1866 and administratively banished to Archangel; but, as happens so singularly often in Russia, he escaped in 1869, and lived to edit a revolutionary journal in Zurich, and play for a time no inconsiderable part in making trouble in Russia. At present, communications between the active revolutionists who are at work in Russia and their predecessors who have withdrawn to Western Europe are entirely interrupted; but they were still abundant twenty years ago. Partly in consequence of the reactionary educational policy of the Government, young Russians flocked at that time to Switzerland for their education, and were there conveniently indoctrinated into the new gospel of the International. Bakunin and Lavroff were both in Zurich, and in the year 1872 there were 239 Russian students, male and female, in Zurich alone. These young people were, of course, in continual intercourse with the older refugees. Bakunin and Lavroff both held stated and formal lectures on socialism and revolution, which were always succeeded by open and animated discussions of the subject treated in them. A little later there were, according to Professor Thun, four distinct groups among the Russian revolutionists in Zurich, some of them caused by personal quarrels. But from the first there were always two, one of whom swore by Bakunin, and the other by Lavroff. Bakunin was an anarchist--an "amorphist" even, as we have seen--and he believed in the propaganda of deeds. Every little village, he thought, should make its own revolution; and if it could not make a revolution, it might always be making a riot, or an explosion, or a fire, or an assassination of some official, or something else to raise panic or confusion. All this seemed to Lavroff and his friends to be unmitigated folly. They too believed in revolution; but in their view revolution, to be successful, must be organized and simultaneous; it must, above all, first have the peasantry on its side; and therefore, instead of the mad and premature propaganda of deed, the true policy for the present was manifestly "going into the people," as they termed it--that is, an itinerant mission to indoctrinate the people into the faith of the coming revolution. Then, again, Lavroff, though, like almost all Russian revolutionists, an anarchist, was not, like most of them, prepared to dispense all at once with the State. He thought the new society would eventually be able to do without any central authority, but not at first, nor for a considerable time, the length of which could not now be more precisely determined. In this Lavroff and his party stood much nearer the Social Democrats of Germany than other Russian nihilists, and they have come nearer still since then. They have cast off the Russian commune, of which the early nihilists made so great an idol. They see that it is an old-world institution doomed to dissolution, and rapidly undergoing the process. The two tendencies--diverging both in principle and in tactics--appeared in Russia as well as Zurich. At first the more peaceful method prevailed. Lavroff's idea of "going into the people" was the enthusiasm of the hour, and brought upon the scene the typical nihilist missionary--the young man of good birth who laid down station and prospects, learnt a manual trade, browned his hands with tar and his face by smearing it with butter and lying in the sun, put on the peasant's sheepskin, and then, with a forged pass, procured at the secret nihilist pass factory, and a few forbidden books in his wallet, set off "without road" to be a peasant with peasants, if by any means he could win them over to the cause; and the still more remarkable young woman who went through a marriage ceremony to obtain the right of independent action, and the moment the ceremony was over, left father and mother and husband and all in order to work among the peasants of the Volga as a teacher or nurse, and live on milk and groats according to Tchernycheffsky's prescription in "What is to be Done?". Stepniak justly remarks that "the type of propagandist of the first lustre of 1870-80 was religious rather than revolutionary. His hope was socialism, his God the people. Notwithstanding all the evidence to the contrary, he firmly believed that from one day to the other the revolution was about to break out, as in the middle ages people believed at certain periods in the approach of the day of judgment." ("Underground Russia," p. 30.) For some years these ascetic devotees might be found in every corner of broad Russia, working as shoemakers or joiners most of them (why these were the favourite trades does not appear), or as hawkers of images or tea, or, perhaps, like Prince Krapotkin, as painters. Some of them went as horse-dealers, from a dreamy idea that the horses might prove useful in the day of revolution. They all belonged to one or other of the secret societies which, as we have seen, began to spring up about 1863, and grew numerous in the next ten or fifteen years. None of these societies, however, was of any great importance. Professor Thun mentions four varieties of them. First, the Malikowsy, a handful of apparently harmless and amiable enthusiasts--a kind of Russian Quakers--who believed in one Malikov, and called themselves "God-men," because they held every man had a "divine spark" in him, and was therefore every other man's equal and brother. Second, the Bakunists, who adopted Bakunin's programme of "deeds," but did not, till 1875, think of putting it to practice. Third, the Lavrists, who sent the money to print Lavroff's newspaper in Zurich, the _En Avant_, and who seem to have gradually imbibed German socialism to the extent of thinking the Russian commune a reactionary and decaying institution not worth stirring a finger to preserve, and who called for the nationalization of land and capital. And fourth,--much the most important society,--the Tchaikowskists, founded in 1869 by one Tchaikowski, who is now a teacher in London, but was then a student at St. Petersburg. Prince Krapotkin belonged to this society, and so did Sophia Perowskaia. It was at first a convivial and mutual improvement club, but from discussing forbidden subjects and circulating among its members forbidden books it grew into natural antagonism to Government, and became a focus of revolutionary agitation. Most of the 193 socialists who were tried in 1874-7 belonged to it, and that protracted trial killed the society and put an end to the mission "into the people." Government had marked the new propaganda with great jealousy. In Russia, no propaganda among the peasants can remain unobserved. When a stranger arrives at a Russian village, he is immediately the common talk, whatever he says passes from mouth to mouth, and he may even be invited to state his views publicly in the _mir_. A mission conducted under these conditions soon attracted the notice of the authorities, who, in 1874, discovered it in thirty-seven different provinces of Russia, and arrested as many as 774 of the propagandists. Some of these were at once banished administratively to Siberia, and of the rest, 193 were, four years afterwards, brought up for trial and condemned. With these apprehensions the nihilist movement collapsed for the moment. Thun states that Lavroff's newspaper during that period adopted a tone of despair, and the revolutionists who escaped arrest recognised very clearly that their scheme of "going into the people" was a complete mistake, and that some safer and more effective system of tactics must be concocted. They fell upon two different expedients. The first was the plan of nihilist colonization. To avoid detection by the authorities, a band of revolutionists settled down in a given district in a body, got personally acquainted with the peasantry about them, and then, after acquiring a sufficient knowledge of their characters, proceeded with due prudence to impart their ideas to those who seemed most trustworthy, hoping in this way to be able, unobserved, eventually to leaven the whole lump. The other plan they now resorted to was an approach to the tactics of Bakunin, and in the very year, 1876, in which that old revolutionist died, they began a series of socialist demonstrations at Odessa, Kasan, and elsewhere, which made a little local sensation at the time. This was the very opposite kind of tactics to the cautious system of colonization that was pursued simultaneously with it, but there is always in revolutionary organization only a step between reticence and rashness. Open demonstrations like those practised at that period were simply suicidal folly in Russia, where the forces of the Government were so immeasurably superior to the forces of the demonstrationists. In 1878 they changed tactics again, inaugurating that system of terrorism by which they are best known in the West, and which has given them a name there at which the world turns pale. The determination to adopt this system of tactics sprang from an accidental circumstance. The day after the trial of the 193 ended, one of their comrades, the young woman Vera Sassulitch, called on General Trepoff, the head of the St. Petersburg police, on pretence of business, and while he was reading her papers, shot him with a revolver, flung her weapon on the ground, and allowed herself to be quietly arrested; and when she was brought up for trial, pled justification on the ground that her act was merely retaliation on the General for having subjected a friend of hers, a young medical student, to a brutal and causeless flogging while in prison on a political charge. The court having acquitted her, she was received by the public with every demonstration of enthusiasm, and it was this remarkable public sympathy that made the revolutionaries terrorists. They resolved to take up V. Sassulitch's idea of retaliation, and apply it on a great scale. The whole public of Russia was at that time considerably flushed with indignation against the imperial Government. The war in Turkey had revealed, as wars always do, a great deal of rottenness in the public administration; it had brought nothing but humiliation and debt upon the country, and it had exacted cruel sacrifices from the people merely to confer on the Bulgarians the political and constitutional liberty which was still denied to the Russians themselves. For the moment the old cry for a constitution rose again in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and there was a deep feeling far beyond the circles of the revolutionists that an end should be put to the autocratic _régime_. The revolutionists found powerful encouragement in all this outbreak of displeasure. Stepniak, who was himself one of the most active of them at that period, says their real strength lay, not in their numbers--which he admits to have been few--but in the general sympathy they received from what he calls the revolutionary nation around them. They had however special wrongs of their own to avenge; hundreds of their friends had been transported without trial; and in the case of the 193, whose trial was just over, the few who had been acquitted were nevertheless denied their liberty by the Czar, and banished administratively to Siberia after all; so that while Russian society was clamouring on public grounds for the downfall of the autocratic system, the revolutionists, for revenge, determined upon the death of the autocrat himself. The various secret societies had united into a single body, called first the "Troglodytes," and then "Land and Liberty," for the better prosecution of the nihilist colonization scheme; but in 1879 they broke again into two parties, one of which, the Will of the People party, adopted terrorism as its exclusive business for the time, issued, through its famous executive committee, sentences of death on the Czar and the State officials; and after making ten attempts on high officials, five of them fatal, and four attempts on the Czar himself, finally succeeded in their fifth on the 13th of March, 1881. With this party the political side of their programme overshadowed the socialistic, and their first demand from the new Czar was for a constitution. The other party--the party of the Black Division--is an agrarian party, living on the growing discontent of the peasantry, and nursing their cry for what in Russia is known as the Black Division. It is an old belief among the Russian people that when the land possessed at any time by the communes should become too small for the increasing population of the communes, there would be a new division of all the land of the country, including, of course, the great estates now owned by the _noblesse_, so that every inhabitant might be once more accommodated with his proper share of the soil. This great secular redistribution is the black division, and it belongs as naturally to the Russian peasants' system of agrarian ideas as the little local and periodical divisions that take place within the communes themselves. The Black Division section of the revolutionists are terrorist in their methods like the other section, but they care nothing about a constitution, which they say is only a demand of the _bourgeoisie_, but of no interest or good to the peasant at all. They have the old aversion to centralized government, which we have seen to be almost the tradition of Russian revolutionists; they are all for strengthening the communes, and for a light federal connection; and of all phases of the Russian revolutionary movement under the reign of the present Czar theirs is the most important, because it is founding itself on real and deepening rural discontent, and becoming substantially a peasants' cry for more land and less rent and taxes. I have already referred to the astonishing growth of a Russian proletariat since the Emancipation Act. Professor Janson, an eminent Russian statistician, calculated that as many as a fourth of the people of St. Petersburg--229,000 out of 876,000--got public relief in the year 1884. Stepniak, in his recent work on the Russian peasantry, asserts that a third of the rural population, or 20,000,000 souls in all, are in the condition of absolute proletarians, and his account of the situation is entirely supported by the descriptions of a competent and unprejudiced German economist, Professor Alphonse Thun, who speaks partly from the results of official inquiries instituted by the Russian Government into the subject, and partly from his own personal observation during a continuous residence of two years in the country. As the subject is of importance to the student of socialistic institutions as well as of the nihilist movement, I shall make no apology for devoting some observations to its explanation. In the first place, though it has never been well understood in Western Europe, some ten per cent. of the Russian rural population have no legal claim to a share of the land at all; these are old men who are past working, widows with children too young to be able to work, and men who at the time of the Emancipation were personal servants of the great landowners, and consequently not members of any village commune. Men of this last class may reside in a village, and may keep a shop or practise a trade there; but not being born villagers, they possess no right to participate in the distribution of the village land. They are as much outside the communistic system as the nobles or the foreign residents. Russian citizenship alone is not enough to give a right to the land; local birth in a commune is also an essential pre-requisite, and ability to work is another. A family gets one share for every able-bodied member it contains; the share is therefore called a "soul" of land; and although between one distribution and another the widow may still retain the "soul" that belonged to her husband, and hire a hand to work it, yet on the next redistribution she must give it up unless she has a son who in the meantime has grown to man's estate. The landless widow and orphan must have been an occasional incident of the Russian village system from all times; but the incursion of dismissed domestic menials with no birthright in the commune has arisen only in recent years, when, in consequence of a conspiracy of causes, so many of the nobility have been obliged to reduce their establishments. In the next place, a communistic tenure which gives every new-comer a right to share in the land of his native village on an equal footing with those who are already in possession could hardly fail to lead to excessive subdivision, and in Russia at this moment scarce one family in a hundred has land enough to furnish its maintenance for half the year. The usual size of holding is ten acres, of which--cultivated as they are on the old three-field system--one third is always fallow, and the remainder, in consequence of the rude method of agriculture that prevails, yields only two, or at most three, returns of the seed. They have no pasture, because at the time of the emancipation they preferred to take out their whole claim in arable; and, having no pasture, they cannot keep cattle as they formerly did because they cannot get manure. According to the information of Professor Thun, in 1872 8 per cent. of the families had no cow, and 4 per cent. no horse; and Stepniak says the inventory of horses taken for military purposes in 1882 showed that one-fourth of the peasant families had then no horse. Russia is, in fact, a vast continent of crofters, practising primitive husbandry on mere "cat's-plots" of land, and depending for the greater part of their subsistence on some auxiliary trade. In one respect they have the advantage over our Scotch crofters; they practise, in many cases, skilled trades. Of course they work as ploughmen or fishermen when that sort of work is wanted, or they will hire a piece of waste land from a neighbouring owner and bring it into rude cultivation; but every variety of craft is to be found among them. They are weavers, hatters, cabinet-makers, workers in metals; they make shoes, or images, or candles, or musical instruments, or grindstones; they dress furs, they knit lace, they train singing-birds. According to the official inquiry, most of the goods of some of the best commercial houses of Moscow, trading in Parisian silk hats and Viennese furniture, are manufactured by these peasants in their rural villages. A curious and very remarkable characteristic is mentioned by Thun: not only has every Russian his bye-industry, but every village has a different bye-industry from its neighbour. One is a village of coopers--a very thriving trade, it appears; another a village of tailors--a declining one, in consequence of the competition of ready-made stuff from the towns; another--and there are several such--may be a village of beggars, with mendicity for their second staff; and another a village of seamen, going in a body in spring to the Baltic or the Volga, and leaving only their women and children to tend the farm till their return in the autumn. The Russians always work in artels whether at home or abroad, and to work in artels they must of course follow the same industry. Their individual earnings in their auxiliary occupations are comparatively good; they make three-fourths of their annual income from that source; but it seems every trade is now overcrowded, and there is some difficulty in obtaining constant employment. Then the burdens of the peasantry are very heavy. In Russia the superior classes enjoy many exemptions from taxation, and the public revenue is taken mainly from the peasant classes. The annual redemption money they have to pay to the State for their land is a most serious obligation, and between one thing and another the burdens on the land in a vast number of cases exceed its net return very considerably. Professor Thun states, that in 2,009 cases of letting holdings which had occurred in the province of Moscow at the time he wrote, the average rent received was only 3 roubles 56 kopecks per "soul" (land-share), while the average taxation was 10 roubles 30 kopecks. Stepniak says that in the thirty-seven provinces of European Russia the class who were formerly State peasants pay in taxes of every description no less than 92.75 per cent. of the average net produce of their land; and that the class who were formerly serfs of private owners pay as much as 192.25 per cent. of the net produce of theirs. Landowning on these terms is manifestly a questionable privilege, and the _moujik_ pays his land taxes as the Scotch crofter has sometimes to pay his rent, not out of the produce of his holding, but out of the wages of his auxiliary labour; but the Scotch crofter, under his system of individual tenure, has one great resource which is wanting to the other: he can always cut the knot of his troubles by throwing up his holding, if he chooses, and emigrating. To the Russian peasant emigration brings no relief. He is born a proprietor, and cannot escape the obligation of his position wherever he may go. He may try to let his ground--and in many cases he does--but, as we see, he cannot often get enough rent to meet the dues. He may leave his village, if he will, but his village liabilities travel with him wherever he may settle. He cannot obtain work anywhere in Russia without showing his pass from his own commune; and since, under the principle of joint liability that rules in the communistic system, the members of the commune who remain at home would have to pay the emigrant's arrears if he failed to pay them himself, they are not likely to renew the pass to a defaulter. The Russian peasants are thus nearly as much _adstricti glebæ_ as they ever were; they are now under the power of the commune as completely as they were before under the power of their masters; and their difficulty is still how they can possibly obtain emancipation. Sometimes they will defy the commune, forego the advantage of a lawful pass, crowd the ranks of that large body in Russia who are known as the "illegal men," and sometimes, we are assured by Professor Thun, a whole village, every man and every family, will secretly disappear in a body and seek refuge from the tax-collector by settling in the steppes. The natural right of every man to the land is thus, in the principal country where any attempt is made to realize it, nothing but a harassing pecuniary debt. Now this class of worse than landless emigrants--men who carry their land as a perpetual burden on their back from which they can get no respite--is already very numerous in Russia. Thun says there are millions of them. As far back as 1872, nearly half the town population of Moscow and more than a fifth of the population of the landward district were strangers, who were inscribed members of rural communes elsewhere; and in many purely country districts some 14 per cent. of the people have no houses because they are not living in the villages they belong to. Sir Robert Morier says in his report to the Foreign Office in September, 1887, on Pauperism in Russia (p. 2): "It is officially stated that in each of the larger provinces, such as Kursk, Tambow, Kostroma, etc., over 100,000 peasants have abandoned the plot of ground granted to them (8 acres) on one pretext or another in order to seek means of subsistence elsewhere. (This probably means flocking to the larger towns.) The number of beggars in 71 Governments was stated to be 300,000, of which 182,000 were peasant proprietors. This number is, however, far below the mark." But, as we learn from Stepniak, the bulk of the landless peasants, _i.e._ those who no longer cultivate their holdings, do not leave their native villages, but seek employment as hirelings in the village itself or in its neighbourhood, and wander as day labourers from one master to another. Their families continue to live in their old cottage in the village, and the father returns to it when out of employment. Their land is generally taken by a class of small usurers (_koulaks_) who have grown up in every Russian village since the emancipation. These koulaks are in most cases fellow-peasants who have saved some money, but they are frequently strangers who have come and opened a store in the place, and have no right of their own to a share in the land and in the councils of the village. Stepniak mentions one province where as much as from 24 to 36 per cent. of the land is concentrated into the hands of these rich usurers. Even the peasants who still retain their land in their own hands are often deeply indebted to them, and in some cases part with bits of their land without parting with all; and the general tendency of the present economic situation is to divide the peasantry of every village into a class of comparatively rich peasants, on the one hand, holding and cultivating most of the land, and a larger class of rural proletarians, without land and having nothing to live by but their manual trade. The tendency, in short, is towards the break-up of the communal tenure, and instead of the Russian Commune invading Europe, as Cavour once said there was fear it would do, we are likely to see the individual tenure of Western Europe invading Russia and superseding primitive rural institutions in that country, as it has already superseded them in others. "It is quite evident," says Stepniak, "that Russia is marching in this direction. If nothing happens to check or hinder the process of interior disintegration in our villages, in another generation we shall have on one side an agricultural proletariat of sixty or seventy millions, and on the other a few thousand landlords, mostly former koulaks and mir-eaters, in possession of all the land." It is legally permissible at present for a Russian commune, if it so choose, to abolish its communal system of property and adopt individual property instead of it; and although this has been very seldom done as yet, we are told by Thun that the rich peasants and the very poor peasants are both strongly in favour of the step, because it would give the one permanent ownership of the land and the other permanent relief from its burdens. When a commune gets divided in this way into a rich class of members and a poor class, the old brotherliness and mutual helpfulness of the Russian village are said by the same authority always to disappear and a more selfish spirit to take their place; but then it should be remembered how much easier it is to assist a neighbour out of a little difficulty of the way than to meet the unremitting claims of a class that have sunk into permanent poverty. Anyhow, the temptation is equally strong on both parties to escape from the worries of their present situation through the rich buying out the poor. Another tendency working in the same direction is the rapid dissolution of the old system of large house-communities that prevailed before the emancipation. The average household has been reduced from seven and a half to five souls, the married children setting up houses of their own instead of dwelling under one roof with their father and grandfather. The house is a mere hut, with no furniture but a table and a wooden bench used by night for a bed, but still the separate _ménage_ has increased to an embarrassing extent the expenses of the peasant's living at the very time that other circumstances have reduced his resources. The reason for the break-up of the house-communities has been the desire to escape partly from the tyranny of the head of the household, but chiefly from the incessant quarrels that prevailed between the several members about the amount they each contributed to the common funds as compared with the amount they ate and drank out of them. One of the brothers goes to St. Petersburg during the winter months as a cabman and brings back a hundred roubles, while another gets work as a forester near home, and earns no more than twenty-five. Now, according to an author quoted by Stepniak, who is describing a family among whom he has lived, the question always is: "Why should he (the forester) consume with such avidity the tea and sugar dearly purchased with the cabman's money? And in general, why should this tea be absorbed with such greediness by all the numerous members of the household--by the elder brother, for instance, who alone drank something like eighty cups a day (the whole family consumed about nine hundred cups per diem) whilst he did not move a finger towards earning all this tea and sugar? Whilst the cabman was freezing in the cold night air, or busying himself with some drunken passenger, or was being abused and beaten by a policeman on duty near some theatre, this elder brother was comfortably stretched upon his belly, on the warm family oven, pouring out some nonsense about twenty-seven bears whom he had seen rambling through the country with their whelps in search of new land for settlement." And so the quarrel goes round; always the old difficulty of _meum_ and _tuum_, so hard to reconcile except under a _régime_ of individual property. In fact, the shifts to which the Russian peasantry, like other peasantries elsewhere, have been reduced to solve this difficulty in the management of their common land constitute one main cause of their agricultural backwardness and their consequent poverty. Elisée Reclus calculates that if the Russian fields were cultivated like those of Great Britain, Russia could produce, instead of six hundred and fifty million hectolitres of corn annually, about five milliards, which would be sufficient to feed a population of five hundred million souls. A few lessons in good husbandry will do much more for the comfort of a people than many changes of social organization; but good husbandry is virtually impossible under a system of unstable tenure, which turns a man necessarily out of his holding every few years for the purpose of a new distribution of the land, and which compels him to take his holding, when he gets it, in some thirty or forty scattered plots. Redistributions, it is true, do not occur so very frequently as we might suppose. As Russian land is all cultivated on a three years' rotation, one might be apt to look for a new distribution every three years, but that almost never occurs. Thun states that in the province of Moscow during the twenty years 1858-1878 the average interval of distribution was 12½ years, four rotations; that 49 per cent. of the communes had a distribution only once in 15 years, and 37 per cent. only once in 20 years. The dislike to frequent distributions is growing, on the obvious and very reasonable ground that they either discourage a man from doing well by his land, or they inflict on him the grave injustice of depriving him of the ground he has himself improved before he has reaped from it the due reward of his labour. The tendency towards individual property is therefore strongly at work here, and as this system of periodical redistribution is established merely to give every man that natural right by virtue of his birth to a share in the land, which is now in so many cases such a delusive irony, the resistance to the new tendency cannot be expected to be very resolute. The _runrig_ system of cultivation, which prevails in Russia in the same form as it did in the Highlands of Scotland, does not give any similar appearance of decay. Stepniak says the peasants still prefer that arrangement because it allows room for perfect fairness--perfect reconciliation of the _meum_ and _tuum_--in the distribution of their most precious commodity, the land, which always presents great variety as to quality of soil and situation with respect to roads, water, the village, etc. Under a communal system with many members this method of arrangement is almost indispensable to avoid quarrels and prevent the indolent from shirking their proper share of the work, but its agricultural disadvantages are so great that it never long resists an improving husbandry. Although an owner, the Russian peasant, in consequence of the shifting nature of his subject, is said by Stepniak to have none of that passionate feeling of ownership and that profound delight in his land which are characteristic of the peasant proprietors of the West, but he has--what is really the same thing--a deep sense of personal dignity from its possession, and he feels himself to have lost caste if he is forced to give up his holding and become a mere _batrak_, or wage labourer. All the pride of ownership is already there, and in the changes of the immediate future it will have plenty of opportunity for asserting its place. Under the pressure of this singular economic movement, the nihilist agitation is now developing largely into a peasants' cry for more land and less rent and taxes. As I have said, the Russian peasantry look for the great black division once in an age. The "Old Believers" mix this idea up with their dreams of a great millennial reign, and keep on thinking that the day after to-morrow is to bring in the happy period before the end of the world, when truth is to prevail and the land is to be equally divided among all; and a feeling easily gets about among the peasantry generally that the "black division" is at last coming. Such a feeling was very widespread during the reign of the late Czar, and, indeed, is still so. Rumours fly every now and then from hamlet to hamlet like wildfire, no one knows whence or how, that the division is to be made in a month, or a week, or a year; that the Czar has decreed it, and when it does not come, that the Czar's wishes have for the time been thwarted, as they had so often been thwarted before, by the selfish machinations of the nobility. For the peasant has a profound and touching belief in his Czar. There may be agrarian socialism in his creed, but it is not the agrarian socialism of the schools. The first article of his faith--and it would appear to be the natural faith of the peasant all the world over--is that the earth is the Lord's and not the nobility's; but his second is that the Czar is the Lord's steward, sent for the very purpose of dividing the land justly among his people. If the peasant hopes for the black division, he hopes for it from the Czar. The Emancipation Act has been far from giving him the land or the liberty he looked for, but he believes--and nothing will shake him out of the belief--that the Emancipation Law which the Czar actually decreed was a righteous law that would have met all the people's wishes and claims, but that this law has been altered seriously to their disadvantage, under the influence of the nobility, in the process of carrying it into execution. But his confidence always is that the Czar will still interfere and put everything to rights. And when, only a few years ago, the revolutionist Stephanovitch stirred up some disturbances in Southern Russia, which were commonly dignified at the time with the name of a peasants' insurrection, he was only able to succeed in doing what he did by first going to St. Petersburg with a petition from the peasants of the district to the Czar, and then issuing on his return a false proclamation in the Czar's name, commanding the people to rise against the nobility, who were declared to be persistently obstructing and defeating his Majesty's good and just intentions for his loyal people's welfare. If an imperial proclamation were issued to the contrary effect--a proclamation condemning or repudiating the operations of the peasants--the latter would refuse to believe it to be genuine. That occurs again and again about this very idea of the black division, which has obtained possession of the brains of the rural population. It often happens that in a season of excitement, like the time of the Russo-Turkish war, or of famine, like the winter of 1880-81, the rumours and expectations of the black division become especially definite and lively, and lead to meetings and discussions and disturbances which the Government think it prudent to stop. In 1879 the Minister of the Interior, with this object in view, issued a circular contradicting the rumours that were spread abroad, which was read in all the villages and affixed to the public buildings. It stated, as plainly as it was possible to state anything, that there would be no redistribution, and that the landlords would retain their property; but it produced no effect. Professor Engelhardt wrote one of his published "Letters from a Village" at that very moment, and states that the _moujiks_ would not understand the circular to mean anything more than a request that they would for a time abstain from gossiping at random about the coming redistribution. One of their reasons for making this odd misinterpretation is curious. The circular warned the people against "evil-intentioned" persons who disseminated false reports, and gave instructions to the authorities to apprehend them. These evil-intentioned persons were, of course, the nihilist agitators, who were making use of these reports to foment an agrarian insurrection; but the peasants took these enemies of the Government to be the landlords and others who had, they believed, set themselves against the redistribution movement and prevented the benevolence and righteous purposes of the Czar from descending upon his people. In some parts of Russia there has sprung up since 1870 a group of peasantry known as "the medalmen," who have persuaded themselves that the Czar not only wants to give them more land, but has long since decreed their exemption from all taxation except the poll tax. They say, moreover, that he struck a medal to commemorate this gracious design of his, which has been, as usual, so wickedly frustrated by his subordinates; and that even, as things are, one has but to get hold of one of these medals and show it to the collector, and the collector is bound to give the holder the exemption he wants. The medals to which so much virtue is ascribed are merely the medals struck to commemorate the Emancipation of the Serfs; but the "medalmen," who are generally men that have parted with their land, sold their houses, and settled at the mines, pay very high prices for one of these medals, wear it constantly about their necks, and think it will secure them a genuine respite from the burden of taxation they have to bear. The nihilist propagandists think--and the idea seems very remarkable--that this childish and ignorant confidence in the Czar will not be able to stand much longer the strain of the increasing difficulties of the rural situation. The propagandists make it their business to keep alive the idea of the black division in the hearts of the _moujiks_, and make use of every successive disappointment at its continued delay as an instrument of alienating the affections of the people from the throne. A peasantry are very slow to throw over old sentiments, and will suffer long before breaking with the past, but they take a sure grip of their own interest, and they will turn sometimes very decisively and very gregariously to new deliverers. The Russian peasants see themselves settled on plots of ground too small to work with profit, and overburdened with taxes; they have to pay sixty per cent. of all their earnings in dues of all kinds on their land; and they cast their eyes abroad and see two-thirds of the country still unpossessed by the people, one-half still owned by the State, and one-sixth by the greater landowners; and with the communistic ideas in which they have been nursed, they feel that it is time for a new division of the greater order to take place. A gigantic crofter question is impending, and this agrarian agitation for more land is likely enough to make nihilism a more formidable thing in the future than it has been in the past. Hitherto it has taken little hold of the peasantry. At first it was a movement of educated young Russia merely, and might be counted with the ordinary intellectual excesses of youth. It only became a serious political force after the Emancipation Act; but it was still a movement of the upper classes, and in spite of immense exertions it has remained so. The situation, however, is rapidly changing, and with the rise--so remarkable in many ways--of a numerous rural proletariat in the country that was supposed to enjoy special protection against it, with the growing distress and discontent of the peasantry, with the louder and more persistent cries for the black division, which their hereditary conception of agrarian justice suggests to them as the only solution of their troubles, who will say what to-morrow may bring forth? Meanwhile the Will of the People party has continued its activity. We still hear occasionally of murders, and demonstrations, and arrests, and discoveries of nihilist plots on the life of the Czar or of high servants of the Crown, and of alarming discoveries of the hold the movement was taking in the army. But, according to one of the most recent writers on the subject, the author of "Socialismus und Anarchismus, 1883-1886," who admits, however, that it is very difficult to obtain authentic information about it under the rigorous system of repression at present practised by the Russian authorities, a small section of this party, whom he calls the followers of Peter Lavroff, have been developing more in line with German Social Democracy, and have organized themselves into a society called the Labour Emancipation League, which prefers peaceful means of agitation, and in March, 1885, published its programme, demanding (1) a constitution, (2) the nationalization of land, (3) the handing over of factories to the possession of societies of productive labourers, (4) free education, (5) abolition of a standing army, and (6) full liberty of association and meeting. The same writer states, however, that this socialist group are not numerous, and that the various robberies, murders, plots against the Czar's life, incitements of peasant disturbances, seizures of weapons and printing presses that keep on occurring, show that the nihilists, as the others still appear to be called, are much the most active and the most important section of the revolutionary party. He mentions also that in 1884 considerable sensation was produced by the discovery of an anarchist secret society in Warsaw, with several magistrates at its head, which aimed at creating a revolution in Poland,--Prussian and Austrian Poland, as well as Russian,--and rebuilding the Polish nation on a socialist basis. On the apprehension of its leaders it dissolved, but sprang to life again almost immediately in two separate organizations--one directly allied with the Russian Terrorists, and the other, under the influence of a Jew named Mendelssohn, suppressing its Polish nationalism for the present, and linking itself with the Russian socialists--presumably the followers of Lavroff just mentioned. CHAPTER X. SOCIALISM AND THE SOCIAL QUESTION. The renewal of the socialist agitation has not been unproductive of advantage, for it has led to a general recognition that the economic position of the people is far from satisfactory and is not free from peril, and that industrial development, on the lines on which it has hitherto been running, offers much less prospect than was at one time believed of effecting any substantial, steady, and progressive improvement in their condition. It is only too manifest that the immense increase of wealth which has marked the present century has been attended with surprisingly little amelioration in the general lot of the people, and it is in no way remarkable that this fact should tend to dishearten the labouring classes, and fill reflecting minds with serious concern. Under the influence of this experience economists of the present day meet socialism in a very different way from Bastiat and the economists of 1848. They entertain no longer the same absolute confidence in the purely beneficent character of the operation of the principles at present guiding the process of industrial evolution, or in the sovereign virtue of competition, unassisted and unconnected, as an agency for the distribution as well as the production of wealth; and they no longer declare that there is not and cannot possibly be a social question. On the contrary, some of them take almost as unfavourable a view of the road we are on as the socialists themselves. Mr. Cairnes, one of the very ablest of them, says: "The fund available for those who live by labour tends, in the progress of society, while growing actually larger, to become a constantly smaller fraction of the entire national wealth. If, then, the means of any one class of society are to be permanently limited to this fund, it is evident, assuming that the progress of its members keeps pace with that of other classes, that its material condition in relation to theirs cannot but decline. Now, as it would be futile to expect, on the part of the poorest and most ignorant of the population, self-denial and prudence greater than that actually practised by the classes above them, the circumstances of whose life are so much more favourable than theirs for the cultivation of these virtues, the conclusion to which I am brought is this, that unequal as is the distribution of wealth already in this country, the tendency of industrial progress--on the supposition that the present separation between industrial classes is maintained--is towards an inequality greater still. The rich will be growing richer; and the poor, at least relatively, poorer. It seems to me, apart altogether from the question of the labourer's interest, that these are not conditions which furnish a solid basis for a progressive social state; but having regard to that interest, I think the considerations adduced show that the first and indispensable step towards any serious amendment of the labourer's lot is that he should be, in one way or other, lifted out of the groove in which he at present works, and placed in a position compatible with his becoming a sharer in equal proportion with others in the general advantages arising from industrial progress." ("Leading Principles," p. 340.) He thinks it beyond question that the condition of the labouring population is not so linked to the progress of industrial improvements that we may count on it rising _pari passu_ with that progress; because, in the first place, the labourer can only benefit from industrial inventions which cheapen commodities that enter into his expenditure, and the bulk of his expenditure is on agricultural products, which are prevented from being cheapened by the increase of population always increasing the demand for them; and, second, the labourer is practically more and more divorced from the control of capital, and reduced to the position of a recipient of wages, and there is no tendency in wages to grow _pari passu_ with the growth of wealth, because the demand for labour, on which, in the last analysis, the rate of wages depends, is always in an increasing degree supplied by inventions which dispense with labour. He is thus debarred from participating in the advantages of industrial progress either as consumer or as producer: as consumer, by over-population; as producer, by his divorce from capital. Mr. Cairnes, like most economists, differs from socialists in thinking that the first requisite for any material improvement in the condition of the labouring classes lies in effective restraints on population, but he says that "even a very great change in the habits of the labouring classes as bearing upon the increase of population--a change far greater than there seems any solid ground for expecting--would be ineffectual, so long as the labourer remains a mere receiver of wages, to accomplish any great improvement in his state; any improvement at all commensurate with what has taken place and may be expected hereafter to take place in the lot of those who derive their livelihood from the profits of capital" (p. 335). Here he is entirely at one with socialists in believing that the only surety for a sound industrial progress lies in checking the further growth of capitalism by the encouragement of co-operative production, which, by furnishing the labouring classes with a share in the one fund that grows with the growth of wealth, the fund of capital, offers them "the sole means of escape from a harsh and hopeless destiny" (p. 338). Mr. Cairnes, then, agrees with the socialists in declaring that the position of the wage-labourer is becoming less and less securely linked with the progressive improvement of society, and that the only hope of the labourer's future lies in his becoming a capitalist by virtue of co-operation; only, of course, he is completely at issue with them in regard to the means by which this change is to be effected, believing that its introduction by the direct intervention of the State would be unnecessary, ineffectual, and pernicious. I am disposed to think that Mr. Cairnes takes too despondent a view of the possibilities of progress that are comprised in the position of the wage-labourer, but it is precisely that view that has lent force to the socialist criticism of the present order of things, and to the socialist calls for a radical transformation by State agency. The main charges brought by socialists against the existing economy are the three following, all of which, they allege, are consequences of the capitalistic management of industry and unregulated competition:--1st, that it tends to reduce wages to the minimum required to give the labourer his daily bread, and that it tends to prevent them from rising above that minimum; 2nd, that it has subjected the labourer's life to innumerable vicissitudes, made trade insecure, mutable and oscillatory, and created relative over-population; and, 3rd, that it enables and even forces the capitalist to rob the labourer of the whole increase of value which is the fruit of his labour. These are the three great heads of their philippic against modern society: the hopeless oppression of the "iron and cruel law" of necessary wages, the mischief of incessant crises and changes and of the chaotic _régime_ of chance, and the iniquity of capital in the light of their doctrine of value. Let us examine them in their order. I. Socialists found their first charge partly on their interpretation of the actual historical tendency of things, and partly on the teaching of Ricardo and other economists on natural wages. Now, to begin with the question of historical fact, the effect which has been produced by the large system of production on the distribution of wealth and the general condition of the working class is greatly misconceived by them. So far as the distribution of wealth is concerned, the principal difference that has occurred may be described as the decadence of the lower middle classes, a decline both in the number of persons in proportion to population who enjoy intermediate incomes, and also in the relative amount of the average income they enjoy. Their individual income may be higher than that of the corresponding class 150 or 200 years ago, but it bears a less ratio to the average income of the nation. The reason of this decline is, of course, obvious. The yeomanry, once a seventh of our population, and the small masters in trade have gradually given way before the economic superiority of the large capital or other causes, and modern industry has as yet produced no other class that can, by position and numbers, fill their room; for though, no doubt, the great industries call into being auxiliary industries of various kinds, which are still best managed on the small scale by independent tradesmen, the number of middling incomes which the greater industries have thus contributed to create has been far short of the number they have extinguished. The same causes have, of course, exercised very important effects on the economic condition of the working class. They have reduced them more and more to the permanent position of wage-labourers, and have left them relatively fewer openings than they once possessed for investing their savings in their own line, and fewer opportunities for the abler and more intelligent of them to rise to a competency. This want may perhaps be ultimately supplied under existing industrial conditions by the modern system of co-operation, which combines some of the advantages of the small capital with some of the advantages of the large, though it lacks one of the chief advantages of both, the energetic, uncontrolled initiative of the individual capitalist. But at present, at any rate, it is premature to expect this, and as things stand, many of the old pathways that linked class with class are now closed without being replaced by modern substitutes, and working men are more purely and permanently wage-labourers than they used to be. But while the wage-labourer has perhaps less chance than before of becoming anything else, it is a mistake to suppose, as is sometimes done, that he is worse off, or even, as is perhaps invariably imagined, that he has a less share in the wealth of the country than he had when the wealth of the country was less. On the contrary, the position of the wage-labourer is really better than it has been for three hundred years. If we turn to the period of the English Revolution, we find that the income which the labourer and his family together were able to earn was habitually insufficient to maintain them in the way they were accustomed to live. Sir M. Hale, in his "Discourse Touching the Poor," published in 1683, says the family of a working man, consisting of husband, wife, and four children, could not be supported in meat, drink, clothing, and house-rent on less than 10s. a week, and that he might possibly be able to make that amount, if he got constant employment, and if two of his children, as well as their mother, could earn something by their labour too. Gregory King classifies the whole labouring population of the country in his time, except a few thousand skilled artisans, among the classes who decrease the wealth of the country, because, not earning enough to keep them, they had to obtain occasional allowances from public funds. We do well to grieve over the pauperism that exists now in England. A few years ago, one person in every twenty received parochial support, and one in thirty does so yet. These figures, of course, refer to those in receipt of relief at one time, and not to all who received relief during a year. But for Scotland we have statistics of both, and the latter come as nearly as possible to twice as many as the former. If the same proportion rules in England, then every fifteenth person receives relief in the course of the year.[4] But in King's time, out of a population of five millions and a half, 600,000 were in receipt of alms, _i.e._, more than one in ten; and if their children under 16 years of age were included, their number would amount to 900,000, or one in six. Now, while the labourers' wages were then, as a rule, unequal to maintain them in the way they lived, we know that their scale of living was much below that which is common among their class to-day. The only thing which was much cheaper then than now was butcher meat, mutton being only 2d. a lb., and beef, 1¼d.; but half the population had meat only twice a week, and a fourth only once. The labourer lived chiefly on bread and beer, and bread was as dear as it is now. Potatoes had not come into general use. Butter and milk were cheaper than now, but were not used to the same extent. Fuel, light, and clothing were all much dearer, and salt was so much so as to form an appreciable element in the weekly bill. When so many of the staple necessaries of life were high in price, the labourer's wages naturally could not afford a meat diet. Nothing can furnish a more decisive proof of the rise in the real remuneration of the wage-labourer since the Revolution than the fact that the wages of that period were insufficient to maintain the lower standard of comfort prevalent then, without parochial aid, while the wages of the same classes to-day are generally able to maintain their higher standard of comfort without such supplementary assistance. Then the hours of labour were, on the whole, longer; the death rate in London was 1 in 27, in place of 1 in 40 now; and all those general advantages of advancing civilization, which are the heritage of all, were either absent or much inferior. These facts sufficiently show that if the rich have got richer since the Revolution, the poor have not got poorer, and that the circumstances of the labouring class have substantially improved with the growth of national wealth. As far as their mere money income is concerned there is some reason for thinking that the improvement has been as near as may be proportional with the increase of wealth. The general impression is the reverse of this. It is usual to hear it said that while the labourers' circumstances have undoubtedly improved absolutely, they have not improved relatively, as compared with the progress in the wealth of the country and the share of it which other classes have succeeded in obtaining. But this impression must be qualified, if not entirely rejected, on closer examination. Data exist by which it can be to some extent tested, and these data show that while considerable alterations have been made in the distribution of wealth since the rise of the great industries, these alterations have not been unfavourable to the labouring classes, but that the proportion of the wealth of the country which falls to the working man to-day is very much the same--is indeed rather better than worse--than the proportion which fell to his share two hundred years ago. Gregory King made an estimate of the distribution of wealth among the various classes of society in England in 1688, founded partly on the poll-books, hearth-books, and other official statistical records, and partly on personal observation and inquiry in the several towns and counties of England; and Dr. C. Davenant, who says he had carefully examined King's statistics himself, checking them by calculations of his own and by the schemes of other persons, pronounces them to be "very accurate and more perhaps to be relied on than anything that has been ever done of a like kind." Now, a comparison of King's figures with the estimate of the distribution of the national income made by Mr. Dudley Baxter from the returns of 1867, will afford some sort of idea--though of course only approximately, and perhaps not very closely so--of the changes that have actually occurred. King takes the family income as the unit of his calculations. Baxter, on the other hand, specifies all bread-winners separately--men, women, and children; but to furnish a basis of comparison, let us take the men as representing a family each, and if so, that would give us 4,006,260 working-class families in the country in 1867. This is certainly a high estimate of their number, because in 1871 there were only five million of families in England; and according to the calculations of Professor Leone Levi, the working class comprises no more than two-thirds of the population, and would consequently consist in 1871 of no more than 3,300,000 families. If we were to take this figure as the ground of our calculations, the result would be still more striking; but let us take the number of working-class families to have been four millions in 1867. The average income of a working-class family in King's time was £12 12s. (including his artisan and handicraft families along with the other labourers); the average income of a working class family now is £81. The average income of English families generally in King's time was £32; the average income of English families generally now is £162. The average income of the country has thus increased five-fold, while the average income of the working class has increased six and a half times. The ratio of the working class income to the general income stood in King's time as 1:2½, and now as 1:2. In 1688, 74 per cent. of the whole population belonged to the working class, and they earned collectively 26 per cent. of the entire income of the country; in 1867--according to the basis we have adopted, though the proportion is doubtless really less--80 per cent. of the whole population belonged to the working class, and they earned collectively 40 per cent. of the entire income of the country. Their share of the population has increased 6 per cent.; their share of the income 14 per cent. Now, I am far from adducing these considerations with the view of suggesting that the present condition of the working classes or the present distribution of wealth is even approximately satisfactory, but I think they ought to be sufficient to disperse the gloomy apprehensions which trouble many minds as if, with all our national prosperity, the condition of the poorer classes were growing ever worse and could not possibly, under existing industrial conditions, grow any better; to prevent us from prematurely condemning a system of society, whose possibilities for answering the legitimate aspirations of the working class are so far from being exhausted, that it may rather be said that a real beginning has hardly as yet been made to accomplish them; and to give ground for the hope that the existing economy, which all admit to be a most efficient instrument for the production of wealth, may, by wise correction and management, be made a not inadequate agency for its distribution. The socialists are not more fortunate in their argument from the teaching of economists than in their account of the actual facts and tendency of history. The "iron and cruel law" of necessary wages is, as expounded by economists, neither so iron nor so cruel as Lassalle represented it to be. They taught that the price of labour, like the price of everything else, tended to settle at the level of the relative cost of its production, and that the cost of its production meant the cost of producing the subsistence required to maintain the labourer in working vigour and to rear his family to continue the work of society after his day; but they always represented this as a minimum below which wages would not permanently settle, but above which they might from other causes remain for a continuity considerably elevated, and which, even as a minimum, was in an essential way ruled by the consent of the labouring classes themselves, and dependent on the standard of living they chose habitually to adopt. If the rate of wages were forced down below the amount necessary to maintain that customary standard of living, the marriage rate of the labouring classes would tend to fall and the rate of mortality to rise till the supply of labour diminished sufficiently to restore the rate of wages to its old level. And conversely, if the price of labour rose above that limit, the marriage rate among the labouring class would tend to rise and the rate of mortality to fall, till the numbers of the working population increased to such an extent as to bring it down again. But the rate of marriage depended on the will and consent of the labouring class, and their consent was supposed to be given or withheld according as they themselves considered the current wages sufficient or insufficient to support a family upon. The amount of the labourer's "necessary" subsistence was never thought to be a hard and fast limit inflexibly fixed by physical conditions. It was not a bare living; it was the living which had become customary or was considered necessary by the labourer. Its amount might be permanently raised, if in consequence of a durable rise of wages a higher standard of comfort came to be habitual and to be counted essential, and the addition so made to it would then become as real an element of natural or necessary wages in the economic sense as the rest. Its amount might also permanently fall, if the labourers ceased to think it necessary and contentedly accommodated their habits to the reduced standard, and there might thus ensue a permanent degradation of the labourer, such as took place in Ireland in the present century, when the labouring class adjusted themselves to reduction after reduction till their lower standard of living served, in the first place, to operate as an inducement to marriage instead of a check on it, because marriage could not make things worse, and at least lightened the burdens of life by the sympathy that shared them; and served, in the second place, to impair the industrial efficiency of the labourer till he was hardly worth better wages if he could have got them. So far then was the doctrine of economists from involving any "iron or cruel" limit that they always drew from it the lesson that it was in the power of the labouring classes to elevate themselves by the pleasant, if somewhat paradoxical, expedient of first enlarging their scale of expenditure. "Pitch your standard of comfort high, and your income will look after itself," is scarcely an unfair description of the rule of prudent imprudence they inculcated on working people. They believed that the chief danger to which that class was exposed was their own excessive and too rapid multiplication, and they considered the best protection against this danger to lie in the powerful preventive of a high scale of habitual requirements. Moreover, Ricardo distinctly maintained that though the natural rate of wages was determined as he had explained, yet the operation of that natural law might be practically suspended in a progressive community for an indefinite period, and that the rate of wages actually given might even keep on advancing the whole time, because capital was capable of increasing much more rapidly than population. The price of labour, he taught, would in that case be always settled by the demand for it which was created by the accumulation of capital, and the sole condition of the accumulation of capital was the productive power of labour. The rate of wages in a progressive community might therefore almost never be in actual fact determined by this "iron and cruel law" at all, and so there is not the smallest ground for representing economists as teaching that the present system compels the rate of wages or the labourer's remuneration to hover to and fro over the margin of indigence. Lassalle, then, built his agitation on a combination of errors. He was wrong in his interpretation of the tendency of actual historical development; he was wrong in his interpretation of the doctrine of economists; and now, to complete the confusion, that doctrine is itself wrong. If we are at all to distinguish a natural or normal rate of wages from the fluctuating rates of the market, that natural or normal rate will be found really to depend, not on the cost of producing subsistence, but on the amount or rate of general production, or the amount of production _per capita_ in the community, or, in other words, on the average productivity of labour. It is manifest that this would be so in a primitive condition of society in which industry was as yet conducted without the intervention of a special employing class, for then the wages of labour would consist of its product, and be, in fact, as Smith says, only another name for it. It would depend, however, not exclusively on the individual labourer's own efficiency, but also on the fertility of the soil and the general efficiency of the rest of the labouring community. While according to his own efficiency he would possess a greater or smaller stock of articles, which, after providing for his own wants, he might exchange for other articles produced by his neighbours; the quantity he would get in exchange for them would be great or small according to the degree of his neighbour's efficiency. The average real remuneration of labour, or the average rate of wages, in such a community would therefore correspond with the average productivity of its labour. But the same principle holds good in the more complex organization of industrial society that now exists, though its operation is more difficult to trace. The price of labour is now determined by a struggle between the labourer and the employer, and the fortunes of the struggle move between two very real, if not very definitely marked, limits, the lower of which is constituted by the smallest amount which the labourer can afford to take, and the higher by the largest amount which the employer can afford to give. The former is determined by the amount necessary to support life, and the latter by the amount necessary to secure an adequate profit. Now the space between these two limits will be always great or small in proportion to the general productivity of labour in the community. The general productivity of labour acts upon the rate of wages in two ways, immediately and mediately. Immediately, because, as is manifest, efficient labour is worth more to the employer than inefficient; and mediately, as I shall presently show, because it conduces to a greater diversion of wealth for productive purposes, and so increases the general demand for labour. In modern society, as in primitive, the labourer not only obtains a higher remuneration if he is efficient himself, but gathers a higher remuneration from the efficiency of his neighbours. This will be obvious at once to any one who reflects on the improved remuneration of the common unskilled labourers. The man who works with pick and shovel makes, according to Mr. Mulhall's estimate, £30 a year now, while he only made £12 a year in 1800, when bread was about twice as dear, and yet he probably did quite as good a day's work then as he does now, except so far as his better wages have themselves helped his powers of labour, through affording him a more liberal diet, and in that case the same question is raised, How did he come to get these better wages? It was not on account of an increase in his own production, for that was the effect, not the cause; it was on account of the general increase in the productivity of all labour round about him. The great improvement in industrial processes have brought in more plentiful times, and he shares in the general plenty, though he may not have directly contributed to its production. He gets more for the same work, not merely because people in general, with their larger surplus, can afford to give him more, but because, having more to devote to industrial investment, they increase the demand for labour till they are obliged to give him more. The proximate demand for labour is, of course, capital, but the amount of capital which a community tends to possess--in other words, the amount of wealth it tends to detach for industrial investment--bears a constant relation to the amount of its general production. There is a disposition among economists to speak of the quantity of a nation's savings, as if it was something given and complete that springs up independently of industrial conditions, and as irrespectively of the purpose to which it is to be applied as the number of eggs a fowl lays or the amount of fruit a tree bears. But, in reality, it is not so. The amount of a nation's savings is no affair of chance; it is governed much more by commercial reasons than is sometimes supposed. It is no sufficient account of the matter to say that men save because they have a disposition to save, because there is a strong cumulative propensity in the national character. They save because they think to get a profit by saving, and the point at which the nation stops saving is the point at which this expectation ceases to be gratified, the point at which enough has been accumulated to occupy the entire field of profitable investment which the community offers at the time. Some part of a nation's savings will always have originated in a desire to provide security for the future, but, as this part is less subject to fluctuation, it exercises less influence in determining the extent of the whole than the more variable part, which is only saved when there is sufficient hope of gain from investing it. There may be said to be a natural amount of capital in a country, in at least as true a sense as there is a natural price of labour, or a natural price of commodities. Capital has its bounds in the general industrial conditions and stature of the community, but it moves and answers these conditions with much more elasticity than the wage-fund theory used to acknowledge. It is, as Hermann said, a mere medium of conveyance between consumer and consumer, and has its size decreed for it by the quantities it has to convey. The general demand for commodities is a demand for capital. It creates the expectation of profit which capital is diverted from expenditure to gratify, and since it is itself in another aspect the general supply of commodities, it furnishes the possibilities for meeting the demand for capital which it creates. This whole argument may seem to be reasoning in a circle or wheeling round a pivot, and so in a sense it may be, for the wheel of industry is circular. The rate of wages depends on the demand for labour; the demand for labour depends on the amount of capital; the amount of capital depends on the aggregate production of and demand for commodities; and the amount of aggregate production depends on the average productivity of labour. It is but a more circuitous way of saying the same thing as the older economists said, when they declared the rate of wages to depend on the supply of capital, as compared with population; but it shows that the supply of capital is a more elastic element than they conceived, that it adjusts and re-adjusts itself more easily and sensitively to industrial conditions, including perhaps even those of population, and that it is governed in a very real way by the great primary factor that determines the whole size and scale of the industrial system in all its parts, the general productivity of labour. Taking one country with another, the rate of wages will be found to observe a certain proportion to the amount of production _per capita_ in the community. This view will be confirmed by a comparison of the actual rate of wages prevalent in different countries. Lord Brassey has published an important body of positive evidence tending to show that the cost of labour is the same all over the world, that for the same wages you get everywhere the same work, and that the higher price of labour in some countries than in others is simply due to its higher efficiency. Mr. Cairnes, who did not accept this conclusion unconditionally, had, however, himself previously estimated that a day's labour in America produced as much as a day and a third's in Great Britain, to a day and a half's in Belgium, a day and three-fourths' or two days' in France and Germany, and to five days' labour in India. Now, when due regard is had for the influence of special historical circumstances, it will be found that the rate of wages observes very similar proportions in these several countries. In America it is higher than the relative productivity of the country would explain, because a new country with boundless natural resources creates a permanently exceptional demand for labour; because the facilities with which land can be acquired and wrought, even by men without previous agricultural training, affords a ready correction to temporary redundancies of labour; and because the labour itself is more mobile, versatile, and energetic in a nation largely composed of immigrants. Other modifying influences also interfere to preclude the possibility of a precise correspondence between national rates of wages and national amounts of production _per capita_, for different countries vary much in the extent of the fixed capital they employ to economize personal labour. But enough has been said to show that, if a natural rate of wages is to be sought at all, it must be looked for, not in the cost of the production of subsistence, but in the rate of the production of commodities; and while the standard of living and the price of labour tend to some extent to keep one another up, the higher standard of living prevalent among labourers in some countries is a consequence much more than a condition of the higher rate of wages, which the higher productivity of labour in those countries occasions. There is therefore no ground for Lassalle's representation that the law of necessary wages condemns ninety-six persons in every hundred to an existence of hopeless misery to enable the other four to ride in luxury. The principles that govern the rate of wages are much more flexible than he supposed, and the experience of trade unions has sufficiently demonstrated that it is within the power of the wage-labourers themselves to effect by combination a material increase in the price of their labour. Trade unions have taken away the shadow of despondency that lay over the hired labourer's lot. Their margin of effective operation is strictly limited; still such a margin exists, and they have turned it to account. They have put the labourer in a position to hold out for his price; they have converted the question of wages from the question, how little the labourer can afford to take, into the question, how much the employer can afford to give. They have been able, in trades not subject to foreign competition, to effect a permanent rise in wages at the expense of prices, and they can probably, in all trades, succeed in keeping the rate of wages well up to its superior limit, viz., to the point at which, while the skilful employers might still afford to give more, the unskilful could not do so without ceasing to conduct a profitable business and being driven out of the field altogether. For unskilful management tells as ill on wages as inefficient labour. On the other hand, high wages, like many other difficult conditions, undoubtedly tend to develop skilful management. The employer is put on his mettle, and all his administrative resource is called into action and keen play. They who, like socialists, inveigh against this modern despot, ought to reflect how much less possible it would have been for wages to have risen, if industry had been in the hands of hired managers who were not put to their mettle, because they had no personal stake in the result. It must not be forgotten, however, that while trade unions are able to keep the rate of wages up to its superior limit, they have no power to raise that limit itself. This can only be done by an increase in the general productivity of labour, and, in fact, the action of trade unions could not have been so effective as it has been, unless the high production of the country afforded them the conditions for success. And since, in consequence of their action and vigilance, the rate of wages in the trades they represent may be now taken as usually standing close to its superior limit, the chief hope of any further substantial improvement in the future must now be placed in the possibility of raising that limit by an increased productivity. Of this the prospect is really considerable and promising. Of course labourers will never benefit to the full from improvements in the productive arts, until by some arrangement, or by many arrangements, they are made sharers in industrial capital; but they will benefit from these improvements, though in less measure, even as pure wage-labourers. Their unions will be on the watch to prevent the whole advantage of the improvement from going towards a reduction of the price of the commodity they produce, and such reduction in the price of the commodity as actually takes place will enable its consumers to spend so much the more of their means on commodities made by other labourers, and to that extent to increase the demand for the labour of the latter. But the field from which I expect the most direct and extensive harvest to the working class is the development of their own personal efficiency. At present neither employers nor labourers seem fully alive to the resources which this field is capable of yielding, if it were wisely and fairly cultivated. Both classes are often so bent on immediate advantage that they lose sight of their real and enduring interest. It is doubtful whether employers are more slow to see how much inadequate remuneration and uncomfortable circumstances impair efficiency and retard production, or labourers to perceive how much limiting the general rate of production tends to reduce the general rate of wages. In labour requiring mainly physical strength, contractors sufficiently appreciate the fact that their navvies must be well fed if they are to stand to their work, and that an extra shilling a day makes a material difference in the output. But in all forms of skilled labour, likewise, analogous conditions prevail. Just as slave-labour is inefficient because it is reluctantly given, and is wanting in the versatility and resourcefulness that comes from general intelligence, so is free labour less efficient or more efficient in exact proportion to its fertility of resource and to the hopefulness and cheerfulness with which it is exerted; and both conditions are developed in the working class in precise ratio with their general comfort. The intelligent workman takes less time to learn his trade, needs less superintendence at his work, and is less wasteful of materials; and the cheerful workman, besides these merits, expends more energy with less exhaustion. But men can have no hope in their work while they live purely from hand to mouth, and you cannot spread habits of intelligence among the labouring class, if their means are too poor or their leisure too short to enable them to participate in the culture that is going on around them. But if employers are apt to take too narrow a view of the worth of good wages as a positive source of high production, labourers are apt to take equally narrow views of the worth of high production as a source of good wages. The policy of limiting production is expressly countenanced by a few of their trade unions, with the concurrence, I fear, of a considerable body of working-class opinion. This is shown in their idea of "making work," in their prohibition of "chasing"--_i.e._, of a workman exceeding a given average standard of production--and in their prejudice against piecework. Their notion of making work is irrational. They think they can make work by simply not doing it, by spinning it out, by going half speed, under the impression that they are in this way leaving the more over to constitute a demand for their labour to-morrow. And so, in the immediate case in hand and for the particular time, it may sometimes be. But if this practice were to be turned into a law universal among working men, if all labourers were to act upon it everywhere, then the general production of the country would be immediately reduced, and the general demand for labour, and the rate of wages, would inevitably fall in a corresponding degree. Instead of making work, they would have unmade half the work there used to be, and have brought their whole class to comparative poverty by contracting the ultimate sources from which wages come. The true way to make work for to-morrow is to do as much as one can to-day. For the produce of one man's labour is the demand for the produce of another man's. There is nothing more difficult for any class than to reach an enlightened perception of its own general interest. The objection usually made to "chasing" and piecework is that they always end in enabling employers to extract more work out of the men without giving them any more pay, and that they conduce to overstraining. Now piecework, without a fixed list of prices, is of course liable to the abuse which, it is alleged, masters have made of it. But with a fixed list of prices the labourers ought, with the aid of their unions, to be as able to hold their own against the encroachments of the masters under piecework as under day work, and piecework is so decidedly advantageous, both to masters and to men, that it would be foolish for the former to refuse the reasonable concession of a fixed list of prices; and it would be equally foolish for the latter to oppose the system under the delusive fear of a danger which it is amply in their own power to meet. There is a good deal of force in the view of Mr. William Denny, that piecework will prove the best and most natural transition from the present system to a _régime_ of co-operative production, because it furnishes many kinds of actual opportunities for practising co-operation; but whatever may be the promise of piecework for the age that is to come, there is no question about its promise for the life that now is. Mr. Denny, speaking from experience in his own extensive shipbuilding works at Dumbarton, says that "a workman under piecework generally increases his output in the long run--partly by working hard, but principally by exercising more intelligence and arranging his work better--by about 75 per cent., while the total amount of his wages increases by about 50 per cent., making a distinct saving in the wages portion of the cost of a given article of about 14 per cent." ("The Worth of Wages," p. 19.)[5] Similar testimony is given by Goltz, Boehmert, and a writer in Engels' _Zeitschrift_ for 1868, as to the effect of the introduction of piecework into continental industries, and Roscher ascribes much of the industrial superiority of England to the prevalence of piecework here. According to Mr. Howell, more than seventy per cent. of the work of this country is done at present by the piece, and the Trades' Union Commission found it the accepted rule in the majority of the industries that came under their investigation; in fact, in all except engineering, ironfounding, and some of the building trades. The engineers entertain a strong objection to it, and their union has sometimes expelled members who have persisted in taking it. But the system works smoothly enough when an established price-list has become a recognised practice of the trade. The objection that the piece system leads to careless, scamped and inferior work, call hardly be considered a genuine working-class objection. That is the look-out of the masters, and they find it easier to check quality than to check quantity. Another reason sometimes given against piecework is that under it some men get more than their share in the common stock of work, but there lurks in this reason the same fallacy which lies in the notion of "making work," the fallacy of seeking to raise the level of wages by limiting production, and so diminishing the common stock of work of society. Labourers seem sometimes to harbour an impression as if they were losing something when their neighbours were making more than themselves. Work appears to them--no doubt in consequence of the fluctuations and intermittent activity of modern trade--to come in bursts and windfalls, nobody knows whence or how, and they are sometimes uneasy to see the harvest being apparently disproportionately appropriated by more active and efficient hands. But in the end, and as a steady general rule, they are gainers and not losers by the efficiency of the more expert workmen, because productivity, so far from drying up the sources of work, is the very thing that sets them loose. A more important objection is the danger of overstraining, against which of course the working class are wise to exercise a most jealous vigilance. But, in the first place, it is easy to exaggerate this danger. It is not really from any deepened drain on the physical powers of the workmen, so much as from a quickening of his mental life in his work, that increase in his productivity is to be expected. Mr. Denny, it will be observed, attributes the additional output under piecework not nearly so much to harder labour as to the exercise of more intelligence and to a better arrangement of the work. But, in the next place, to my mind the great advantage of piecework is that it affords a sound economic reason for shortening the day of labour. The work being intenser, demands a shorter day, and being more productive, justifies it. If the figures I have quoted from Mr. Denny are at all representative, then a labourer, working by the piece, can turn out 40 per cent. more in eight hours than working by the day he can do in ten. Differences may be expected to obtain in this respect in different trades and kinds of work, so that there possibly cannot be any normal day of labour for all trades alike, and each must adjust the term of its labour to its own circumstances. But wherever piecework can increase the rate of production to the extent mentioned by Mr. Denny, the day of labour may be shortened with advantage, and it can apparently do so in the very trades that most strongly object to it. A fact mentioned by Mr. Nasmyth, in his remarkable evidence before the Trades Union Commission, opens a striking view of the possibilities of increasing production through developing the personal efficiency of the labouring class, and of doing so without requiring any severe strain. "When I have been watching men in my own work," he says, "I have noticed that at least two-thirds of their time, even in the case of the most careful workmen, is spent, not in work, but in criticising with the square or straight-edge what they have been working, so as to say whether it is right or wrong." And he adds--"I have observed that wherever you meet with a dexterous workman, you will find that he is a man that need not apply in one case in ten to his straight-edge or square." And why are not all dexterous, or, at least, why are they not much more dexterous than they now are? Mr. Nasmyth's answer is, because the faculty of comparison by the eye is undeveloped in them, and he contends that this faculty is capable of being educated in every one to a very much higher degree than exists at present, and that its development ought to be made a primary object of direct training at school. "If you get a boy," he says, "to be able to lay a pea in the middle of two other peas, and in a straight line with these two, that boy is a vast way on in the arts." He has gone through a most valuable industrial apprenticeship before he has entered a workshop at all. If, through training the eye, workmen can save two-thirds of their time, it is manifest that there is abundant scope for increasing productivity and shortening the day of labour at the same time. Industrial efficiency is much more a thing of mind than of muscle. _Jeder Arbeiter ist auch Kopfarbeiter._ All work is also head work. Skill is but a primary labour-saving apparatus engrafted by mind on eye and limb, and it is in developing the mental faculties of the labourers by well-directed training, both general and technical, that the chief conditions for their further improvement lie. Their progress in intelligence may therefore be expected to increase their productivity so as to justify a shortening of their day of labour, and the leisure so acquired may be expected to be used so as to increase their intelligence. Any advance men really make in the scale of moral and mental being tends in this way to create the conditions necessary for its maintenance. We sometimes hear the same pessimist prophecy about shorter hours as we have heard for centuries about better wages, that they will only seduce the working class to increased dissipation. But experience is against this view. Of course more leisure and more pay are merely means which the labourer may according to his habits use for his destruction as easily as for his salvation. But the increase in the number of apprehensions for drunkenness that frequently accompanies a rise in wages proves neither one thing nor another as to the general effect of the rise on the whole class of labourers who have obtained it; it proves only that the more dissipated among them are able to get oftener drunk. Nor can the singular manifestations which the full hand sometimes takes with the less instructed sections of the working class, especially when it has been suddenly acquired, furnish any valid inference as to the way it would be used by the working class in general, particularly if it were their permanent possession. The evidence laid before the House of Lords Committee on Intemperance shows that the skilled labourers of this country are becoming less drunken as their wages and general position are improving; and Porter, in his "Progress of the Nation," adduces some striking cases of a steady rise of wages making a manifest change for the better in the habits of unskilled labourers. He mentions, on the authority of a gentleman who had the chief direction of the work, that "the formation of a canal in the North of Ireland for some time afforded steady employment to a portion of the peasantry, who before that time were suffering all the evils so common in that country which result from precariousness of employment. Such work as they could previously get came at uncertain intervals, and was sought by so many competitors that the remuneration was of the scantiest amount. In this condition the men were improvident to recklessness. Their wages, insufficient for the comfortable maintenance of their families, were wasted in procuring for themselves a temporary forgetfulness of their misery at the whisky shop, and the men appeared to be sunk into a state of hopeless degradation. From the moment, however, that work was offered to them which was constant in its nature and certain in its duration, and on which their weekly earnings would be sufficient to provide for their comfortable support, men who had been idle and dissolute were converted into sober, hardworking labourers, and proved themselves kind and careful husbands and fathers; and it is stated as a fact that, notwithstanding the distribution of several hundred pounds weekly in wages, the whole of which, would be considered as so much additional money placed in their hands, the consumption of whisky was absolutely and permanently diminished in the district. During the comparatively short period in which the construction of this canal was in progress, some of the most careful labourers--men who most probably before then never knew what it was to possess five shillings at any one time--saved sufficient money to enable them to emigrate to Canada, where they are now labouring in independence for the improvement of their own land" (p. 451). It may be difficult to extirpate drunkenness in our climate even with good wages, but it is certainly impossible with bad, for bad wages mean insufficient nourishment, comfortless house accommodation, and a want of that elasticity after work which enables men to find pleasure in any other form of enjoyment. As with better wages, so with shorter hours. The leisure gained may be misused, especially at first; but it is nevertheless a necessary lever for the social amelioration of the labouring class, and it will more and more serve this purpose as it becomes one of their permanent acquisitions. There can be no question that long hours and hard work are powerful predisposing causes to drunkenness. Studnitz mentions that several manufacturers in America had informed him that they had invariably remarked, that with solitary exceptions here and there, the men who wrought for the longest number of hours were most prone to dissipation, and that the others were more intelligent, and formed on the whole a better class. Part of the prejudice entertained by working men against piecework comes from the fact that it is very often accompanied with overtime, and when that is the case, it generally exerts an unfavourable effect on the habits of the workman. Mr. Applegarth said, in his evidence before the Trades Union Commission, that nothing degraded the labourer like piecework and overtime. Mr. George Potter stated, in his evidence before the Select Committee on Masters and Operatives in 1860, that it was a common saying among working people with regard to a man who works hard by piecework and overtime, that such a man is generally a drunkard. He ascribed much of the intemperance of the labouring class to the practice of working "spells"--_i.e._, heats of work at high pressure on the piece and overtime system--instead of steadily; and he says--"When I was at work at the bench, I worked to a firm where there was much overtime and piecework, and I found that the men at piecework were men who generally spent five or six times more money in intoxicating drink, for the purpose of keeping up their physical strength, than the men at day work. I find, on close observation, that the men working at piecework are generally a worse class of men in every way, both in intelligence and education, and in pecuniary matters." Now, the ill effects which issue from piecework combined with overtime could not accrue from piecework combined with shorter hours. Besides, in a case of this kind it is sometimes difficult to say which is cause and which effect, or how much the one acts and reacts on the other. For both Mr. Potter and the manufacturers mentioned by Studnitz represent the men who wrought longest as being not only more drunken, but less intelligent and educated, and, in fact, as being every way inferior; and we can easily understand how men of unsteady habits should prefer to work "spells," and try to make up by excessive work three days in the week, for excessive drinking the other three. Dissipation and overtime generally go together, but neither of them is a necessary accompaniment of piecework. The best check to both is probably the spread of general education among the working class, for the better educated workmen are even at present usually found against them; and the spread of general education--I do not speak here of technical--among the working class is more fruitful than even piecework itself in opening up fresh reserves of industrial efficiency in our labouring manhood. Roscher has pointed out how a stimulant like piecework produces in a fairly well-educated district twice the result it produces in a comparatively illiterate one. Taking the figures of Goltz on rural labour in different German States, he shows that while the earnings of pieceworkers were only 11 per cent. higher than the earnings of day-workers in Osnabruck, they were as much as 23 per cent. higher in Hesse. Mr. Peshine Smith mentions that the Board of Education in Massachusetts procured from overseers of factories in that State a return of the different amounts of wages paid and the degree of education of those who received them. Most of the work was done by the piece, and it was found that the wages earned rose in exact ratio with the degree of education, from the foreigners at the bottom who made their mark as the signature of their weekly receipts to the girls at the top who did school in winter and worked in factories in summer. In some branches of industry many new improvements remain unused because the workpeople are too ignorant to work them properly. Moreover, for the supreme quality of resourcefulness, education is like hands and feet, and if we may judge from the number of useful labour-saving inventions which working men give us even now, we cannot set limits to the number they will give when the whole labouring class will have got the use of their mind by an adequate measure of general education, and when, as we may hope, they will have got leisure to use it in through a shortening of the day of labour. The possibilities of this last source are very well illustrated by an experiment of Messrs. Denny. In 1880 they established in their ship-building yard at Dumbarton an award scheme for recompensing inventions made by their workmen for improving existing machinery or applying it to a new class of work, or introducing new machinery in place of hand labour, or discovering any new method of arranging or securing work that either improved its quality or economized its cost. Mr. William Denny stated, after the scheme had been nearly seven years in operation, that in that time as many as 196 awards had been given for inventions which were thought useful to adopt, that three times that number had been submitted for consideration, and that besides being beneficial in causing so many useful improvements to be made, the scheme had the effect of making the workmen of all departments into active thinking and planning beings instead of mere flesh and blood machines. I cannot, therefore, take so dark a view as is sometimes entertained of the futurity of the wage-labourer, even if he were compelled to remain purely and permanently such. His position has substantially improved in the past, and contains considerable capabilities for continued improvement in the future. Of course the action of trade unions, besides being confined to the limits I have described, is subject to the further restriction, that it can only avail for the labourers who belong to them, and is indeed founded on the exclusion or diminution of the competition of others. They impose limitations on the number of apprentices, and prescribe a certain standard of efficiency, loosely ascertained, as a condition of membership. There can be no manner of objection to the latter measure, nor does the former, though it is manifestly liable to abuse and is sometimes vexatious in its operation, seem to be practically worked so as to diminish the labour in any particular industry beneath the due requirements of trade, or to create an unhealthy monopoly. Then, though the trade unionists gather their gains by keeping off the competition of others, it cannot be said that these others are necessarily in any worse position than they would have occupied if trade unions had never come into existence. It may even be that through the operation of custom, which will always have an influence in settling the price of labour, a certain benefit may be reflected upon them from a rise in the usual price effected by trade union agency. But in any case, it is no sound objection to an agency of social amelioration that its efficiency is only partial, for it is not so much to any single panacea, as to the application of a multitude of partial remedies, that we can most wisely trust for the accomplishment of our great aim. II. The second main count in the socialist indictment of the present industrial system is that it has multiplied the vicissitudes of trade, and so imposed an incurable and distressing insecurity upon the labourer's lot. The rapidity of technical transformation and the frequency of commercial crises create, it is alleged, a perpetual over-population, driving ever-increasing proportions of the labourers out of active employment into what Marx calls the industrial reserve, the hungry battalions of the half-employed or the altogether unemployed. In regard to technical transformation, the effects of machinery on the working class are now tolerably well understood. Individuals suffer in the first instance, but the class, as a whole, is eventually a great gainer. Machinery has always been the means of employing far more hands than it superseded, when it did supersede any (for it has by no means invariably done so). There is no way of "making work" like producing wealth. The increased production due to machinery cheapens the particular commodities produced by it, and thus enables the purchasers of these commodities to spend more of their income on other things, and so practically to make work for other labourers. But even in the trades into which the machinery has been imported, the effect of its introduction has been to multiply, instead of curtailing, employment. Take the textile trades--much the most important of the machine industries. Mr. Mulhall, in his "Dictionary of Statistics" (p. 338), gives the following statistics of the textile operatives in the United Kingdom at various dates:-- Year. Men. Women. Children. Total. 1835 82,000 167,000 104,000 353,000 1850 158,000 329,000 109,000 596,000 1880 232,000 543,000 201,000 976,000 Marx and others dwell much on the fact, that machinery leads frequently to the substitution of female for male labour; but the preceding table shows that while female labour has been largely multiplied, male labour has been scarcely less so, and besides, a more extensive engagement of women is in itself no public disadvantage. For half the question of our pauperism is really the question of employment for women, it being so much more difficult to find work for unemployed women than for unemployed men; and if the course of industrial transformation opens up new occupations that are suitable for them, it is so far entirely a social gain, and no loss. No doubt, though the good accruing from industrial transformation far outweighs the evil, yet evil does accrue from it, and evil of the kind alleged, the tendency to develop local or temporary redundancies of labour. But then that is an evil with which we have never yet tried to cope, and it may probably be dealt with as effectively on the present system as on any other. Socialism would stop it by stopping the progress which it happens to accompany, and would therefore envelop society in much more serious distress than it sought to remove. In Marx's remarkable survey of English industrial history almost every conquest of modern civilization is viewed with regret; but it is manifestly idle to think of forcing society back now to a state in which there should be no producing for profit, but only for private use, no subdivision of labour, no machinery, no steam, for these are the very means without which it would be impossible for our vastly increased population to exist at all. What may be done to meet the redundancies of labour that are always with us is a difficult but pressing question which I cannot enter upon here. State provision of work--even in producing commodities which are imported from abroad, and which might therefore be produced in State workshops without hurting home producers--has many drawbacks, but the problem is one that ought to be faced, and something more must be provided for the case than workhouse and prison. In regard to commercial crises, they are rather lessening than increasing. They may be more numerous, for trade is more extensive and ramified, but they are manifestly less violent than they used to be. The commercial and financial crises of the present century have been moderate in their effects as compared with the Darien scheme, Law's speculations in France, or the Tulip mania in the Low Countries, and under the influence of the beneficial expansion of international commerce and the equally beneficial principle of free trade, we enjoy now an absolute immunity from the great periodical visitation of famine which was so terrible a scourge to our ancestors. Facts like these are particularly reassuring for this reason, that they are the result, partly of better acquaintance with the principles of sound commercial and financial success, and partly of the equalizing effect of international ramifications of trade, and that these are causes from which even greater things may be expected in the future, because they are themselves progressive. There is no social system that can absolutely abolish vicissitudes, because many of them depend on causes over which man has no possible control, such as the harvests of the world, and others on causes over which no single society of men has any control, such as wars; and, besides, it is possible to do a great deal more under the existing system than is at present done, to mitigate and neutralize some of their worst effects. To provide the labouring population with the security of existence, which is one of their pressing needs, a sound system of working class insurance must be devised, which shall indemnify them against all the accidents and reverses of life, including temporary loss of work as well as sickness and age, and it is not too much to hope, from the amount of attention which the subject is at present attracting, that such a system will be obtained. As far as yet appears, the scheme proposed by Professor Lujo Brentano, to which I have already referred, is, on the whole, the soundest and most satisfactory in its general principles that has been advanced. Again, much of the instability of trade arises from the want of commercial statistics, and the consequent ignorance and darkness in which it must be conducted. More light would lessen at once the mistakes of well-meaning manufacturers and the opportunities of illegitimate and designing speculation. Socialists count all speculation illegitimate, because they fail to see that speculation, conducted in good faith, exercises a moderating influence upon the oscillations of prices, preventing them from falling so low, or rising so high, as they would otherwise do. Speculation has thus a legitimate and beneficial work to perform in the industrial system, and if it performed its work rightly, it ought to have the opposite effect from that ascribed to it by socialists, and to conduce to the stability of trade, instead of shaking it. But unhappily an unscrupulous and fraudulent spirit too often presides over this work. Schaeffle, who is not only an eminent political economist, but has been Minister of Commerce to one of the great powers of Europe, says that when he got acquainted with the bourse, he gave up believing any longer in the economic harmonies, and declared theft to be the principle of modern European commerce. Socialists always take the bourse to be the type of capitalistic society, and the fraudulent speculator to be the type of the bourse, and however they may err in this, there is one point at any rate which it is almost impossible for them to exaggerate, and that is the mischief accruing to the whole community--and, as is usual with all general evils, to the working class more than any other--from the prevalence of unsound trading and inflated speculation. Confidence is the very quick of modern trade. The least vibration of distrust paralyzes some of its movements and depresses its circulation. Enterprise in opening new investments is indeed more and more indispensable to the vitality of modern industry, but the mischiefs of misdirected enterprise are as great as the benefits of well-directed. Illegitimate speculation is very difficult to deal with. It can never be reached by a public opinion which worships success and bows to wealth with questionless devotion. Nor is it practicable for the State to put it down by direct measures. But the State may perhaps mitigate it somewhat by helping to procure a good system of commercial statistics, for unsound speculation thrives in ignorance, and may be to some extent prevented by better knowledge. The socialist demand for commercial statistics is therefore to be approved. They would benefit everybody but the dishonest dealer. They would not only be a corrective against unsound speculation, but they would tend to smooth the conflicts between capital and labour about the rate of wages, and the working class in America press the demand on the ground of their experience of the benefits they have already derived from the Labour Statistical Bureaux established in certain of the States there. Some of our own most weighty economic authorities are strongly in favour of a measure of this kind. Mr. Jevons, for example, says: "So essential is a knowledge of the real state of supply and demand to the smooth procedure of trade, and the real good of the community, that I conceive it would be quite legitimate to compel the publication of requisite statistics. Secrecy can only conduce to the profit of speculators who gain from great fluctuations of prices. Speculation is advantageous to the public only so far as it tends to equalize prices, and it is therefore against the public good to allow speculators to foster artificially the inequalities of prices by which they profit. The welfare of millions, both of consumers and producers, depends on an accurate knowledge of the stocks of cattle and corn, and it would therefore be no unwarrantable interference with the liberty of the subject to require any information as to the stock in hand. In Billingsgate fish-market it has been a regulation that salesmen shall fix up in a conspicuous place every morning a statement of the kind and amount of their stock; and such a regulation, whenever it could be enforced on other markets, would always be to the advantage of every one except a few traders." ("Theory of Political Economy," p. 88.) III. The next principal charge brought by socialists against the present order of things is that it commits a signal injustice against the labouring class, by suffering the capitalists who employ them to appropriate the whole increase of value which results from the process of production, and which, as is alleged, is contributed entirely by the labour of the artizans engaged in the process. I have already exposed the fallacy of the theory of value on which this claim is founded, and I need not repeat here what for convenience sake has been stated in another place. (See chap. iii. pp. 160-6). Value is not constituted by time of labour alone, except in the case of commodities admitting of indefinite multiplication; it is constituted in all other cases by social utility; and the importance of this distinction is especially manifest in treating of the very point that comes before us here--the value of labour. Why is one kind of labour paid dearer than another? Why is an organizer of manual labour better paid than the manual labourer himself? Why is the railway chairman better paid than the railway porter? Or why has the judge a better salary than the policeman? Is it because he exerts more labour, more socially necessary time of labour? No; the porter works as long as the chairman, and the policeman as long as the judge. Is it because more time of labour has been expended in the preparation and apprenticeship of the higher paid functionaries? No; because the railway chairman may have undergone no special training that thousands of persons with much poorer incomes have not also undergone, and the education of the judge cost no more than the education of other barristers who do not earn a twentieth part of his salary. The explanation of differences of remuneration like these is not to be found in different quantities of labour, but in different qualities of labour. One man's work is higher, rarer, more excellent, possesses, in short, more social utility than another's, and for that reason is more valuable, as value is at present constituted. It is thus manifest that the theory which declares value to be nothing but quantity of labour, nothing but time of labour, is inconsistent with some of the most obvious and important phenomena of the value of different kinds of labour. Many forms of labour are much more remunerative than others, nay, much more remunerative than many applications of capital, and the difference of remuneration is in no way whatever connected with the quantity of labour or the time of labour undergone in earning it. Socialists may perhaps answer that this _ought not_ to be so; that if things were as they should be, the railway chairman, the station-master, the inspector, the guard, and the porter would be paid by the same simple standard of the duration of their labour in the service of the line--a standard which would probably reverse the present gradation of their respective salaries; but if they make that answer, they change their ground; they no longer base their claim for justice to the labourer on value _as it is constituted_, but on value _as they think it ought to be constituted_. Their theory of value would in that case not be what it pretends to be, a scientific theory of the actual constitution of value, but a utopian theory of its proper and just constitution. It would be tantamount to saying, Every man, according to our ideas of of justice, ought to be paid according to the value of his work, and the value of his work, according to our ideas of justice, ought to be measured by the time--the socially necessary time--it occupied. But this whole argument is manifestly based on nothing better than their own arbitrary conceptions of justice, and it needs no great perspicacity to perceive that these conceptions of justice are entirely wrong. In fact, the common sense of men everywhere would unhesitatingly pronounce it unjust to requite the manager who contrives, organizes, directs, with only the same salary as the labourer who executes under his direction, because, while both may spend the same time of labour, the service rendered by the one is much more _valuable_ than the service rendered by the other. Let every man have according to his work, if you will; but then, in measuring work, the true standard of its value is not its duration but its social utility, the social importance of the service it is calculated to render. This criterion of social utility is the principle that ought to guide us in answering the question that is really raised by the particular socialist charge now under consideration, the question of the justice of interest on capital. Interest is just because capital is socially useful, and because the owner of capital, in applying it to productive purposes, renders a service to society which is valuable in the measure of its social utility. Of course the State might perform this service itself. It might compulsorily abstract from the produce of each year a sufficient portion to constitute the raw materials and instruments of future production; but, as a matter of fact, the State does not do so. It leaves the service to be rendered spontaneously by private persons out of their private means. The service rendered by these persons to production is as indispensable as the service rendered by the labourers, and the justice of interest stands on exactly the same ground as the justice of wages. The labourer cannot produce by labour alone, without materials and implements, any more than the capitalist can produce by materials and implements alone, without labour; and the possessor of capital needs a reward to induce him to advance materials and implements just as much as the labourer needs a reward to induce him to labour. Nobody will set aside a portion of his property to provide for future production if he is to reap no advantage from doing so, and if the produce will be distributed in exactly the same way whether he sets it apart or not. It would be as unjust as it would be suicidal to withhold the recompense to which this service is entitled, and without which nobody would do it. The real question for socialists to answer is, not whether it is just to pay private capitalists for the service society accepts at their hands, but whether society can perform this service better, or more economically, without them; whether, in short, the abolition of interest would conduce to any real saving in the end? This practical question, crucial though it be, is one, however, to which they seldom address themselves--they prefer expatiating in cloudier regions. The question may not, with our present experience, admit of a definitive and authoritative answer; but the probabilities all point to the conclusion that capitalistic management of production, costly as it may seem to be, is really cheaper than that by which socialism would supersede it. Capitalistic management is proverbially unrivalled for two qualities in which bureaucratic management is as proverbially deficient--economy and enterprise. Socialists complain much of the hosts of middlemen who are nourished on the present system, the heartless parasites who eat the bread of society without doing a hand's turn of real good; but their own plan would multiply vastly the number of unnecessary intermediaries depending on industry. Under the _régime_ of the capitalist there are, we may feel sure, no useless clerks or overseers, for he has the strongest personal interest in working his business as economically as possible. But with the socialist mandarinate, the interest lies the other way, and the tendency of the head officials would be to multiply their subordinates and assistants, so that by abolishing the capitalist, society would not by any means have got rid of middlemen and parasites. There would be as much waste of labour as before. Lord Brassey is certainly right in attributing the industrial superiority of Great Britain as much to the administrative skill and economy of her employers as to the efficiency of her labourers. Individual capitalists are more enterprising, as well as more economical managers, than boards. Their keenly interested eyes and ears are ever on the watch for opportunities, for improvements, for new openings; and having to consult nothing but their own judgment, they are much quicker in adapting themselves to situations and taking advantage of turns of trade. They will undertake risks that a board would not agree to, and they will have entered the field and established a footing long before a manager can get his directors to stir a finger. Now this habit of being always on the alert for new extensions, and new processes, and new investments, is of the utmost value to a progressive community, and it cannot be found to such purpose anywhere as with the capitalistic despot the socialists denounce, whose zeal and judgment are alike sharpened by his hope of personal gain and risk of personal loss. Studnitz informs us that in 1878 he found the mills of New York standing idle, but those of Philadelphia all going, and his explanation is that the former were under joint-stock management and the latter belonged to private owners. The present tendency towards a multiplication of joint-stock companies is a perfectly good one, because, for one thing, it helps to a better distribution of wealth; but society would suffer if this tendency were to be carried so far as to supersede independent private enterprise altogether, and if joint-stock companies were to become the only form of conducting business. And if private enterprise is more advantageous than joint-stock management, because it has more initiative and adaptability, so joint-stock management is for the same reason more advantageous than the official centralized management of all industry.[6] If there is any force in these considerations, it seems likely that we should make a bad bargain, if we dismissed our capitalists and private employers, in the expectation that we could do the work more cheaply by our own public administration. And the mistake would be especially disappointing for this reason, that in the ordinary progress of society in wealth and security the rate of interest always tends to fall, and that various forces are already in operation that may not unreasonably be expected to reduce the rate of profits as well. Profits, as distinguished from interest, are the earnings of management, and the minimum which employers will be content to take is at present largely determined by the entirely wrong principle that their amount ought to bear a direct proportion to the amount of capital invested in the business. In spite of competition, customary standards of this kind are very influential in the adjustment of such matters; they are the usual criteria of what are called fair profits and fair wages; they always carry with them strong persuasives to acquiescence; and then, from their very nature, they are very dependent on public opinion. I am not sanguine enough to believe with the American economist, President F. A. Walker, that employers will ever come to be content with no other reward than the gratification of power in the management of a great industrial undertaking; but there is nothing extravagant in expecting that, through the influence of public opinion and the constant pressure of trade unions, a fairer standard of profits may be generally adopted, with the natural consequence of allowing a rise of wages. But whether these expectations are well grounded or no, one thing is plain,--the only thing really material to the precise issue at present before us,--and that is, that while interest and profits may be both unfair in amount, just as rent may be, or wages, or judicial penalties, neither of them is unjust in essence, because they are merely particular forms of remunerating particular services, which are now actually performed by the persons who receive the remuneration, and which, under the socialist scheme, would have to be performed--and in all probability neither so well nor so cheaply--by salaried functionaries. With these remarks, we may dismiss the specific charge of injustice brought by socialists against the present order of things, and the specific claim of right for the labouring class which they prefer. Let us now submit their proposals to a more practical and decisive test--will they or will they not realize the legitimate aspirations, the ideal of the working class? Does socialism offer a better guarantee for the realization of that ideal than the existing economy? I believe it does not. What is the ideal of the working class? It may be said to be that they shall share _pari passu_ in the progressive conquests of civilization, and grow in comfort and refinement of life as other classes of the community have done. Now this involves two things--first, progress; second, diffusion of progress; and socialism is so intent on the second that it fails to see how completely it would cut the springs of the first. Some of its adherents do assert that production would be increased and progress accelerated under a socialistic economy, but they offer nothing in support of the assertion, and certainly our past experience of human nature would lead us to expect precisely the opposite result. The incentives and energy of production would be relaxed. I have already spoken of the loss that would probably be sustained in exchanging the interested zeal and keen eye of the responsible capitalist employer for the perfunctory administration of a State officer. A like loss would be suffered from lightening the responsibility of the labourers and lessening their power of acquisition. Under a socialist _régime_ they cannot by any merit acquire more property than they enjoy in daily use, and they cannot by any fault fail to possess that. Now socialist labourers are not supposed, any more than socialist officials, to be angels from heaven; they are to carry on the work of society with the ordinary human nature which we at present possess; and in circumstances like those just described, unstirred either by hope or fear, our ordinary human nature would undoubtedly take its ease and bask contentedly in the kind providence of the State which relieved it of all necessity for taking thought or pains. The inevitable result would be a great diminution of production, which, with a rapidly increasing population (and socialism generally scouts the idea of restraining it), would soon prove seriously embarrassing, and could only be obviated by a resort to the lash; in a word, by a return to industrial slavery. Now, with a lessening production, progress is clearly impossible, and the more evenly the produce was distributed, the more certain would be the general decline. Socialists ignore the civilizing value of private property and inheritance, because they think of property only as a means of immediate enjoyment, and not as a means of progress and moral development. They would allow private property only in what is sometimes termed consumers' wealth. You might still own your clothes, or even purchase your house and garden. But producers' wealth, they hold, should be common property, and neither be owned nor inherited by individuals. If this theory were to be enforced, it would be fatal to progress. Private property has all along been a great factor in civilization, but the private property that has been so has been much more producers' than consumers'. Consumers' wealth is a limited instrument of enjoyment; producers' is a power of immense capability in the hands of the competent. Socialists are really more individualistic than their opponents in the view they take of the function of property. They look upon it purely as a means for gratifying the desires of individuals, and ignore the immense social value it possesses as a nurse of the industrial virtues and an agency in the progressive development of society from generation to generation. There is still another and even more important spring of progress that would be stifled by socialism--freedom. Freedom is, of course, a direct and integral element in any worthy human ideal, for it is an indispensable condition for individual development, but here it comes into consideration as an equally indispensable condition of social progress. Political philosophers, like W. von Humboldt and J. S. Mill, who have pled strongly for the widest possible extension of individual freedom, have made their plea in the interests of society itself. They looked on individuality as the living seed of progress; without individuality no variation of type or differentiation of function would be possible; and without freedom there could be no individuality. Under a _régime_ of socialism freedom would be choked. Take, for example, a point of great importance both for personal and for social development, the choice of occupations. Socialism promises a free choice of occupations; but that is vain, for the relative numbers that are now required in any particular occupation are necessarily determined by the demands of consumers for the particular commodity the occupation in question sets itself to supply. Freedom of choice is, therefore, limited at present by natural conditions, which cause no murmuring; but these natural conditions would still exist under the socialist _régime_, and yet they would perforce appear in the guise of legal and artificial restrictions. It would be the choice of the State that would determine who should enter the more desirable occupations, and not the choice of the individuals themselves. The accepted would seem favourites; the rejected would complain of tyranny and wrong. Selection could not be made by competitive examination without treason against the principles of a socialist state, nor by lot without a sacrifice of efficiency. The same difficulties would attend the distribution of the fertile and the poor soils. Even consumption would not escape State inquisition and guidance, for an economy that pretended to do away with commercial vicissitudes must take care that a change of fashion does not extinguish a particular industry by superseding the articles it produces. Socialism would introduce, indeed, the most vexatious and all-encompassing absolutist government ever invented. It would impose on its central executive functions that would require omniscience for their discharge, and an authority so excessive that E. von Hartmann is probably right in thinking that obedience could only be secured by fabricating for it the illusion of a Divine origin and reinforcing loyalty by superstition. The extensive centralized authority given to government in France has undoubtedly been one of the main causes of the instability of the political system of that State, and a socialist rule, with its vastly greater prerogatives, could only maintain its ascendancy by being fabulously hedged with the divinity of a Grand Lama. A military despotism would be at least more consistent with modern conditions; but a military despotism socialists abjure, and yet believe that they can exact from free and equal citizens an almost animal submission to an authority they elect themselves. Progress is only possible on the basis of industrial freedom and private property; and in the socialist controversy there is no question about the necessity of progress. That is an assumption common to both sides; socialists of the present day acknowledge it as implicitly as the general opinion of the time. They are no sharers in Mill's admiration for the stationary state; they utterly ridicule his Malthusian horror of a progressive population; and, profoundly impressed as they are with the vital need for a better distribution of wealth, they hesitate to sacrifice for it an increasing production. On the contrary, they claim for their system that it would stimulate progress, as well as spread its blessings, better than the system that exists, and Lassalle at all events frankly declared that unless socialism increased production, it would not be economically justifiable. But tried by this test, we have seen reason to find it wanting. The problem to which it addresses itself, the institution of a sound and healthy distribution of wealth, is probably the greatest social problem of the time; but socialism fails to solve it, because no distribution can be sound and healthy which destroys the conditions of further progress. The true solution must adhere to the lines of the present industrial system, the lines of industrial freedom and private property. It is one thing, however, to say that the principles of industrial freedom and private property are essential to a healthy distribution, and it is quite another thing to hold that the distribution is then healthiest and most perfect when these principles enjoy the most absolute and unconditional operation. If socialism errs by suppressing them, _laissez-faire_ runs into the opposite error of giving them unlimited authority. _Laissez-faire_ is perhaps hardly any longer a living faith. But even when men still believed in the economic harmonies, they always taught that the best and justest distribution of wealth was that which issued out of the free competition of individuals, and that if this distribution ever turned out to be really faulty or partial, it was only because the competition was not free or perfect enough; because some of the competitors were not sufficiently enlightened as compared with others, or not sufficiently mobile with their labour or capital; in other words, because the competition was not conducted on equal terms. This theory manifestly makes the justice of the distribution effected by free competition to depend on the false assumption of the natural equality of the competitors, and therefore as manifestly implies that unless men are equal in talents and opportunities, the system of unlimited freedom may produce a distribution that is seriously unjust. _Laissez-faire_ thus had a germ of socialism in its being, and even when its ascendancy seemed to be highest, it was already being practically replaced by a larger and more energetic theory of social politics which imposed on the State the duty of correcting many of the evils of the present distribution of wealth, and promoting, if not equality of all conditions, yet certainly amelioration of the inferior conditions. Instead of maintaining equal freedom for weak and strong, the State was to take the part of the weak against the strong, in order to secure to all citizens a real participation in progressive civilization. It is said truly enough that the effect of such interferences is not to destroy liberty, but to fulfil it, because, apart from them, the labour contract is no more a free contract for labourers living from hand to mouth than the capitulation of a beleaguered garrison when their provisions have run down is a free capitulation, and the legal intervention is necessary in order to make the men first really free. Legal freedom is no more an end in itself than legal intervention; both are merely means of giving men real freedom and enabling them effectually to work out their complete and normal vocation as human beings. I shall treat more fully of the true theory of social politics in a subsequent chapter on State Socialism; but here, in connection with its relation to industrial freedom, it will be enough to say that the restraints it proposes are neither meant nor calculated to impair real freedom, and that it is separated from socialism by its constant care to develop rather than supersede individual responsibility, to facilitate the spread of private property rather than suppress it, and to remove obstacles that are making men's own efforts a nullity rather than to substitute for those efforts the providence of the State. If, then, there is any truth in these considerations--if the general acquisition of private property, and not its universal abolition, is the demand of the working-class ideal--then the business of social reform at present ought to be to facilitate the acquisition of private property; to multiply the opportunities of industrial investment open to the labouring classes, and to devise means for credit, for saving, for insurance, and the like. While, for reasons already explained, I have been unable to agree with Mr. Cairnes' despondent view of the economic position of the wage-paid labourers, I am entirely at one with him in conceiving the surest means to their progressive amelioration to lie in participation, by one means or another, in industrial capital. Much good may be done by a wider extension of trade unions, and a better organization of working class insurance; but the labourers must not rest content till they have found their way, under the new conditions of modern trade, to become capitalists as well as labourers. Co-operative production seems the most obvious solution of this problem; but it is a mischievous, though a common mistake, to regard it as the only solution. The fortunes of the working class are not all embarked in one bottom, and their salvation may be expected to fulfil itself in many ways. I cannot share in the lamentation sometimes made because some of the earlier productive associations have departed from the strict and original form of co-operation, under which all the shareholders in the business were labourers and all the labourers shareholders. In the present situation of affairs, variety of experiment is desirable, for only out of many various experiments can we eventually discover which are most suitable to the conditions and fittest to survive. Co-operative production would perhaps have been further advanced to-day, if co-operators had not been so faithful in their idolatry of their original ideal, and had fostered instead of discouraging variations of type, which may yet justify their superiority by persisting and multiplying. As it is, co-operative production has not been such a complete failure as it is sometimes represented; it can show at least a few very signal tokens of success and great promise. It is often declared to be inapplicable to the great industries, because they require more capital and better management than co-operative working men are usually able to furnish. But in the town and neighbourhood of Oldham there are 100 co-operative spinning mills, with a capital of close on £8,000,000. They are managed entirely by working men, their capital is contributed in £5 shares by working men, and they have during the last ten years paid dividends varying from 10 to 45 per cent. These are joint-stock companies rather than co-operative societies in the stricter sense; but they are joint-stock companies of working men, and they furnish to working men in an effective and successful way that participation in the industrial capital of the country which is really what is wanted. The Oldham workman prefers to hold shares in a different mill from that he works in, because he feels himself more free to exercise his voice as a shareholder there, and he prefers to carry his labour to the mill where he gets the best wages and the best treatment, without being obliged to change his investment when he changes his workshop. The advantage of the Oldham system over the stricter co-operative type is therefore the old advantage of freedom. It suits the English character better, and the only wonder is why it is still, after more than sixteen years' successful experience, confined exclusively to a single locality. It has been stated that there are a thousand operatives working at these mills who are worth £1000 to £2000, and besides the mills, there are co-operative stores, building societies, and other working-class companies in Oldham, with a combined capital of £3,500,000. In all these ways the zone of participators in property broadens, and hope and stimulus are introduced into the labourer's life. The truth seems to be that the great need of the working man is not so much money to invest as opportunity and motive for investment. The amount lodged in savings banks, the amount raised by trade unions, the amount wasted in drink, the amount wasted in inefficient household economy, which might be much lessened by better instruction in the arts of cookery and household management--all show that large numbers of the working class possess means at their disposal to constitute at least the beginnings of their emancipation, if good opportunities were open to them of using it advantageously in productive enterprise. Co-operation and profit-sharing are not the only means by which this might be realized. Private firms might initiate a practice of reserving a certain amount of their capital to constitute a kind of stock for their workmen to invest their savings in, under--if that were legalized--limited liability. One advantage of this plan over the ordinary industrial partnership would be, that while, like it, it would enhance the workmen's zeal in their work, it could not possibly have the effect of reducing wages, because the stock would be a free investment, and would probably not be taken up by all or by more than a majority of the workmen. Again, with a reform of our land laws, small investments in land will certainly be facilitated, especially among the agricultural class. Socialists would no doubt condemn all such investments for the same reason as they generally condemn the co-operative movement, because they would tend to create "a new class with one foot in the camp of the _bourgeoisie_ and the other in the camp of the proletariat." But that is precisely one of their chief advantages, and in making this objection socialists only betray how completely they ignore the operation of those portions of human nature that are the real forces and factors of social progress. It is only by linking a lower class to a higher that you can raise the level of the whole, and every pathway the working class makes into a comfortable equality with the lower _bourgeoisie_ will constitute at once an opportunity and a spur for others to follow them, which will exercise an elevating effect upon the entire body. If it were generally open to all the labouring classes to begin by being wage-labourers and end by sharing in some degree in the industrial capital of the country, this would raise the level of the whole--of those who after all remained wage-labourers still, as well as of those who succeeded in gaining a better competency. It would give them all something to keep looking forward to during their working life, something to save for and strive after, and a higher standard of comfort would get diffused and considered necessary in the class generally through the example of the better off. For the more comfortably situated working men--whether they have won their comfort by co-operation or otherwise--have not passed out of their class. They have, as is alleged, one foot in the camp of the proletariat still. They live and move and have their being among working people, and constitute by their presence and social connections a stimulating and elevating agency. It is through connections like these that the ideas of comfort and culture that prevail among an upper class permeate through to a lower, and thus elevate the general standard of living upon which the level of wages so much depends. Even the minor inequalities in the ranks of the working class are not without their use in quickening their exertions to maintain the standard of respectability which they have won or inherited. Economists were not wrong in ascribing so much influence as they always have done to men's tenacity in adhering to their customary standard of life. Many striking illustrations of its beneficial operation might be mentioned. I select one, because it concerns an aspect of the condition of the labouring classes of this country that is at present attracting much attention--their house accommodation. In all our large cities, the house accommodation of the working class has hitherto been about as bad as bad could be, but there is one singular exception--it is Sheffield. Porter drew attention to the fact many years ago. "The town itself," he says, "is ill built and dirty beyond the usual condition of English towns, but it is the custom for each family among the labouring population to occupy a separate dwelling, the rooms of which are furnished in a very comfortable manner. The floors are carpeted, and the tables are usually of mahogany. Chests of drawers of the same material are commonly seen, and so in many cases is a clock also, the possession of which article of furniture has often been pointed out as the certain indication of prosperity and of personal responsibility on the part of the working man." ("Progress of the Nation," p. 523.) The same condition of things still prevails, for at the meeting of the British Association in Sheffield in 1879 Dr. Hime read a paper on the vital statistics of the town, in which he says:--"Although handsome public buildings are not a prominent feature in the town, still there are few towns in England where the great bulk of the population is so well provided for in the way of domestic architecture. Overcrowding is very rare; cellar dwellings are unknown; and almost every family has an entire house, a most important agent in securing physical as well as moral health." (Transactions of British Association, 1879.) Now this is a fact of the highest interest, and we naturally ask what peculiarity there is in the trade or circumstances of Sheffield, in the first place, to create such an exceptional excellence in the standard of working class house accommodation, and, in the next place, to maintain it. One thing is certain: it is not due to better wages. There are trades in Sheffield very highly paid, but the labourers belonging to them are described by the anonymous author of "An Inquiry into the Moral, Social, and Intellectual Condition of the Industrious Classes of Sheffield" (London, 1839), as being much less comfortable in their circumstances than the others. This writer speaks of some trades in which "the workmen are steady, intelligent, and orderly, seldom the recipients of charity or parochial relief. They depend on their own exertions for the respectable maintenance of their families, and when trade is depressed they strive to live on diminished wages, or fall back on resources secured by industry and economy. This healthy and vigorous condition is not attributable to high wages. The workmen in the edge-tool trade are extravagantly remunerated, and yet, as a body, they are perhaps as irregular and dissipated in their habits as any in the town. Their families, in time of good trade, feel few of the advantages of prosperity, and when labour is little in demand, they are the first to need the aid of charity. These differences are familiar to the most superficial observer of the social and moral condition of the workmen in the several branches" (p. 14). But the same writer mentions a peculiarity in the trade of Sheffield which, he says, marks it off from every other manufacturing town, and that peculiarity may serve to provide us with the explanation we are seeking. "With us," he says, "the distinctions between masters and men are not always well marked. Persons are to a great extent both. The transition from the one to the other is easy and frequent in those branches where the tools are few and simple, and the capital required extremely small, which applies to the whole of the cutlery department." "The facility with which men become masters causes extraordinary competition, and its inevitable result, insufficient remuneration." "Here merchants and manufacturers cannot become princes.... There is not sufficient play for large fortunes. The making of fortunes is with us a slow process. It is, however, far from being partial.... The longer period required in the making of them allows the mind time to adapt itself to its improved circumstances, not merely the speculative and money-getting part of the understanding, but the whole of its social, moral, and intellectual powers, without which means are a questionable good. Wealth and intelligence are accordingly with us more generally associated than in towns where immense fortunes are rapidly made. In the latter case, there is no time for adaptation, nor is it deemed necessary or at all important, where money is the measure by which all things are estimated. Another evil dependent on this sudden elevation in life is the great distance which is immediately placed between employer and employed" (p. 15). Class and class are thus better knit together in Sheffield than elsewhere. The exceptional facility of becoming masters seems to be the particular instrumentality which has brought down the ideas and habits of comfort of the _bourgeoisie_ and spread them among the working class, and which has always prevented the great mass of the latter from sinking contentedly into a lower general standard of life. It introduced among them that social ambition, which is the most effective spur to progress, and the best preservative against decline. The fact that the exceptionally good house accommodation which prevails among the labouring population of Sheffield is not owing to exceptional, or even at all superior, wages, is one of much hope and encouragement. What is possible in Sheffield cannot be impossible elsewhere; and what is possible in the matter of house accommodation cannot be hopeless in other branches of consumption. I shall be told that in all this I am only repeating the foolish idea of the French princess, who heard the people complain they could not get bread, and asked why then they did not buy cake. Where combinations are possible, it will be said, investments may be also possible; but the great majority of the working class are not in a position to combine, and it is mere mockery to tell people to save and invest who can hardly contrive to cover their backs. To this I reply, that there is no reason to assume that trade unions have reached the utmost extension of which they are susceptible, or to despair of their introduction into the hitherto unorganized trades. It was only lately common to deny the possibility of combination among agricultural labourers, and yet, scattered as they are, they have shown themselves not only able to combine, but to raise wages effectively by means of their combinations. We have now very powerful unions of unskilled day labourers, and a beginning has been made of an efficient organization even among needlewomen. It is true that, even when organization has spoken its last word, much of the distressing poverty that now exists would probably still remain, because we must not disguise from ourselves the fact that much of that poverty is the direct fruit of vice, disease, or indolence. But socialism could not cope with this mass of misery any better than the present system, for men don't drink and loaf and enter into improvident marriages or illicit alliances because they happen to be paid for their labour by contract with a capitalist instead of valuation by a State officer, and they certainly would not cease doing any of these things because an indulgent State undertook to save them from the natural penalties of doing them. FOOTNOTES: [4] The proportion in England for 1857, according to official figures, was 3½ times the number for one day, but whether that proportion continues still we have no means of knowing. [5] Mr. Denny was led by subsequent experience to a much less favourable view of the efficacy of piecework as an instrument of working-class progress. He wrote me in June, 1886 (ten years after the publication of the pamphlet I have quoted above) an interesting and valuable letter on this subject, which is published in full in Dr. Bruce's biography of him ("Life of William Denny," p. 113). A larger experience of piecework, he said, had convinced him that, excepting in cases where rates can be fixed and made a matter of agreement between the whole body of the men in any works and their employers, piecework prices have not a self-regulating power, and are liable, under the pressure of competition, to be depressed below what he would consider a proper level. And this was chiefly, if not, indeed, exclusively, the case with those lump jobs which were undertaken by little copartneries of workmen, and afforded the occasions for practising co-operation from which he had drawn the hopes I have mentioned above. He came to see that in all kinds of work for which it was difficult to fix regular rates, the beneficial operation of payment by the piece on wages was much more uncertain than he previously supposed, except in the hands of a good master, who was not an absentee. But for ordinary work, I think he still adhered to his favourable opinion of the effect of the piece system in increasing the worker's earnings. He said he had nothing to modify about the figures adduced in his pamphlet, and I understood him to continue to count them representative of the general operation of pieceworking. [6] More will be found on this subject in the chapter on "State Socialism," under the sub-heading "State Socialism and State Management." CHAPTER XI. STATE SOCIALISM. I. _State Socialism and English Economics._ State socialism has been described by M. Léon Say as a German philosophy which was natural enough to a people with the political history and habits of the Germans, but which, in his opinion, was ill calculated to cross the French frontier, and was contrary to the very nature of the Anglo-Saxons. Sovereign and trader may be incompatible occupations, as Adam Smith asserts, but in Germany, at least, they have never seemed so. There, Governments have always been accustomed to enter very considerably into trade and manufactures, partly to provide the public revenue, partly to supply deficiencies of private enterprise, and partly, within more recent times, for reasons of a so-called "strategic" order, connected with the defence or consolidation of the new Empire. The German States possess, every one of them, more Crown lands and forests, in proportion to their size, than any other countries in Europe, some of them, indeed, being able to meet half their public expenditure from this source alone; and besides their territorial domain, most of them have an even more extensive industrial domain of State mines, or State breweries, or State banks, or State foundries, or State potteries, or State railways, and their rulers are still projecting fresh conquests in the same direction by means of brandy and tobacco monopolies. But in England things stand far otherwise. She has sold off most of her Crown lands, and is slowly parting with, rather than adding to, the remainder. She abolished State monopolies in the days of the Stuarts, as instruments of political oppression, and she has abandoned State bounties more recently as nurses of commercial incompetency. She owes her whole industrial greatness, her manufactures, her banks, her shipping, her railways, to some extent her very colonial possessions, to the unassisted energy of her private citizens. England has been reared on the principle of freedom, and could never be brought, M. Say might not unreasonably conclude, to espouse the opposite principle of State socialism, unless the national character underwent a radical change. And yet, while he was still writing, he was confounded to see signs, as he thought, of this alien philosophy obtaining, not simply an asylum, but really an ascendancy in this country. It appeared to M. Say to be striking every whit as strong a root in our soil and climate as it had done in its native habitat, and he is disposed to join in the alarm, then recently sounded at Edinburgh by Mr. Goschen, that the soil and climate had changed, that the whole policy, opinion, and feeling of the English people with respect to the intervention of the public authority had undergone a revolution. Mr. Goschen had, in raising the alarm, shown some perplexity how far to condemn the change and how far to praise it, but he was quite clear upon its reality, and was possessed by a most anxious sense of its magnitude and gravity. "We cannot," said he, "see universal State action enthroned as a principle of government without misgiving." Mr. Herbert Spencer took up the cry with more vehemence, declaring that the age of British freedom was gone, and warning us to prepare for "the coming slavery." M. de Laveleye, who is unquestionably one of the most careful and competent foreign observers of our affairs, followed Mr. Spencer, and although, being himself a State socialist, he welcomed this alleged new era as much as Mr. Spencer deprecated it, he gave substantially the same description of the facts; he said, England, once so jealous for liberty, was now running ahead of all other nations on the career of State socialism. And that seems to have become an established impression both at home and abroad. The French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences has devoted several successive sittings to the subject; the eminent German economist, Professor Nasse, has discussed it--and with much excellent discrimination--in an article on the decline of economic individualism in England; and it is now the current assumption of the journals and of popular conversation in this country, that a profound change has come over the spirit of English politics in the course of the present generation--a change from the old trust in liberty to a new trust in State regulation, and from the French doctrine of _laissez-faire_ to the German doctrine of State socialism. But this assumption, notwithstanding the currency it has obtained and the distinguished authorities by whom it is supported, is in reality exaggerated and undiscriminating. While marking the growing frequency of Government interventions, it makes no attempt to distinguish between interventions of one kind and interventions of another kind, and it utterly fails to recognise that English opinion--whether exhibited in legislative work or economic writings--was not dominated by the principle of _laissez-faire_ in the past any more than in the present, but that it really has all along obeyed a fairly well-defined positive doctrine of social politics, which gave the State a considerable concurrent _rôle_ in the social and industrial development of the community. The increasing frequency of Government interventions is in itself a simple and unavoidable concomitant of the growth of society. With the rapid transformations of modern industrial life, the increase and concentration of population, and the general spread of enlightenment, we cannot expect to retain the political or legislative inactivity of stationary ages. As Mr. Hearn remarks, "All the volumes of the statutes, from their beginning under Henry III. to the close of the reign of George II., do not equal the quantity of legislative work done in a decade of any subsequent reign." ("Theory of Legal Duties and Rights," p. 21.) The process has been continuous and progressive, and it suffered no interruption in the period which is usually supposed to have been peculiarly sacred to _laissez-faire_. On the contrary, that period will be found to exceed the period that went before it in legislative activity, exactly as it has in turn been itself exceeded by our own time. On any theory of the State's functions, an increase in the number of laws and regulations was inevitable; it was only part and portion of the natural growth of things; but such an increase affords no evidence, not even a presumption, of any change in the principles by which legislation is governed, or in the purposes or functions for which the power of the State is habitually invoked. A mere growth of work is not a multiplication of functions; to get a result, we must first analyze the work done and discriminate this from that. Now, in the first place, when compared with other nations, England has been doing singularly little in the direction--the distinctively socialistic direction--of multiplying State industries and enlarging the public property in the means of production. Municipalities, indeed, have widened their industrial domain considerably; it has become common for them to take into their own hands things like the gas and water supply of the community which would in any case be monopolies, and their management, being exposed to an extremely effective local opinion, is generally very advantageous. But while local authorities have done so much, the central Government has held back. Many new industries have come into being during the present reign, but we have nationalized none of them except the telegraphs. We have added to the Post-Office the departments of the Savings Bank and the Parcels Post; we have, for purely military reasons, extended our national dockyards and arms factories since the Crimean war, but without thereby enhancing national confidence in Government management; we have, for diplomatic purposes, bought shares in the Suez Canal; we have undertaken a few small jobs of testing and stamping, such as the branding of herrings; but we are now the only European nation that has no State railway; we have refrained from nationalizing the telephones, though legally entitled to do so; and we very rarely give subventions to private enterprises. This is much less the effect of deliberate political conviction than the natural fruit of the character and circumstances of the people, of their powerful private resources and those habits of commercial association which M. Chevalier speaks of with so much friendly envy, complaining that his own countrymen could never be a great industrial nation because they had no taste for acquiring them. In the English colonies, where capital is more scarce, Government is required to do very much more; most of them have State railways, and some--New Zealand, for instance--State insurance offices for fire and life. These colonial experiments will have great weight with the English public in settling the problem of Government management under a democracy, and if they prove successful, will undoubtedly influence opinion at home to follow their example; but as things are at present, there is no appearance of any great body of English opinion moving in that direction. But while England has lagged behind other nations in this particular class of Government intervention, there is another class in which she has undoubtedly run far before them all. If we have not been multiplying State industries, we have been very active in extending and establishing popular rights, by means of new laws, new administrative regulations, or new systems of industrial police. In fact, the greater part of our recent social legislation has been of this order, and it is of that legislation M. de Laveleye is thinking when he says England is taking the lead of the nations in the career of State socialism. But that is nothing new; if we are in advance of other nations in establishing popular rights to-day, we have been in advance of them in that work for centuries already. That peculiarity also has its roots in our national history and character, and is no upstart fashion of the hour. Now, without raising the question whether the rights which our recent social legislation has seen fit to establish, are in all cases and respects rights that ought to have been established, it is sufficient for our present purpose to observe that at least this is obviously a very different class of intervention from the last, because if it does not belong to, it is certainly closely allied with, those primary duties which are everywhere included among the necessary functions of all government, the protection of the citizen from force and fraud. To protect a right, you must first establish it; you must first recognise it, define its scope, and invest it with the sanction of authority. With the progress of society fresh perils emerge and fresh protections must be devised; the old legal right needs to be reconstructed to meet the new situation, or a new right must be created hitherto unknown perhaps, unless by analogy, to the law. But even here the novelty lies, not in the principle--for all right is a protection of the weak, or ought to be so--but in the situation alone; in the rise of the factory system, which called for the Factory Acts; in the growth of large towns, which called for Health and Dwellings Acts; in the extension of joint-stock companies, which called for the Limited Liability Acts; in the monopoly of railway transportation, which called for the regulation of rates; or in the spread of scientific agriculture, which required the constitution of a new sort of property, the property of a tenant-farmer in his own unexhausted improvements. This peculiarity of the industrial and social legislation of England has not escaped the acute intelligence of Mr. Goschen. Mistrustful as he is of Government intervention, Mr. Goschen observes with satisfaction that the great majority of recent Government interventions in England have been undertaken for moral rather than economic ends. After quoting Mr. Thorold Rogers' remark, that these interventions generally had the good economic aim of preventing the waste of national resources, he says: "But I believe that certainly in the case of the Factory Acts, and to a great extent in the case of the Education Acts, it was a moral rather than an economic influence--the conscientious feeling of what was right rather than the intellectual feeling of ultimate material gain--it was the public imagination touched by obligations of our higher nature--which supplied the tremendous motive-power for passing laws which put the State and its inspectors in the place of father or mother as guardians of a child's education, labour, and health." ("Addresses," p. 62.) The State interfered not because the child had a certain capital value as an instrument of future production which it would be imprudent to lose, but because the child had certain rights--certain broad moral claims--as a human being which the parents' natural authority must not be suffered to violate or endanger, and which the State, as the supreme protector of all rights, really lay under a simple moral obligation to secure. Reforms of this character are naturally inspired by moral influences, by sentiments of justice or of humanity, by a feeling that wrong is being done to a class of the community who are placed in a situation of comparative weakness, inasmuch as they are deprived--whether through the force of circumstances or the selfish neglect of their superiors--of what public opinion recognises to be essential conditions of normal human existence. Now, most of the legislation which has led Mr. Goschen to declare that universal State action is now enthroned in England has belonged to this order. It has been guided by ethical and not by economic considerations. It has been employed mainly in readjusting rights, in establishing fresh securities for just dealing and humane living; but it has been very chary of following Continental countries in nationalizing industries. When therefore Mr. Spencer tells M. de Laveleye that the reason why England is extending the functions of her Government so much more than other nations "is obviously because there is great scope for the further extension of them here, while abroad there is little scope for the further extension of them," his explanation is singularly inappropriate. England has not been extending the functions of Government all round, but she has moved in the direction where she had less scope to move, and has stood still in the direction where she had more scope to move than other countries. And it is important to keep this distinction in mind when we hear it so often stated in too general terms that we have discarded our old belief in individual liberty and set up "universal State action" in its place. But those who complain of England having broken off from her old moorings, not only exaggerate her leanings to authority in the present, but they also ignore her concessions to authority in the past. English statesmen and economists have never entertained the rigid aversion to Government interference that is vulgarly attributed to them, but with all their profound belief in individual liberty they have always reserved for the Government a concurrent sphere of social and economic activity--what may even be designated a specific social and economic mission. A few words may be usefully devoted to this English doctrine of social politics here, not merely because they may serve to dispel a prevailing error, but because they will furnish a good vantage-ground for seizing and judging of a principle of government which is to-day in every mouth, but unfortunately bears in every mouth a different meaning--the principle of State socialism. It is commonly believed that the English doctrine of social politics is the doctrine of _laissez-faire_, and our economists are continually reviled as if they sought to leave the world to the play of self-interest and competition, unchecked by any ideas of social justice or individual human right. But in truth the doctrine of _laissez-faire_ has never been held by any English thinker, unless, perhaps, Mr. Herbert Spencer. Mr. Spencer's first work, "Social Statics," was an exposition of the theory that the end of all government was the liberty of the individual, the realization for every citizen of the greatest amount of liberty it was possible for him to enjoy without interfering with the corresponding claims of his fellow-citizens. The individual had only one right--the right to equal freedom with everybody else, and the State had only one duty--the duty of protecting that right against violence and fraud. It could not stir beyond that task without treading on the right of some one, and therefore it ought not to stir at all. It had nothing to do with health, or religion, or morals, or education, or relief of distress, or public convenience of any sort, except to leave them sternly alone. It must, of course, renounce the thought of bounties and protective duties, but it must also give up marking plate, minting coin, and stamping butter; it must take no part in building harbours or lighthouses or roads or canals; and even a town council cannot without offence undertake to pave or clean or light the streets under its jurisdiction. It is only fair to say that Mr. Spencer refuses to be bound now by every detail of his youthful theory, but he has repeated the substance of it in his recent work, "The Man _versus_ The State," which is written to prove that the only thing we want from the State is protection, and that the protection we want most of late is protection against our protector. This theory is certainly about as extreme a development of individualism as could well be entertained; and though it has been even distanced in one or two points by Wilhelm von Humboldt--who objected, for example, to marriage laws[7]--no important English writer has ventured near it. The description of the State's business as the business of protecting the citizens from force and fraud, has indeed been familiar in our literature since the days of Locke, and isolated passages may be cited from the works of various political thinkers, which, if taken by themselves, would seem to deny to the State any right to act except for purposes of self-protection. John Stuart Mill himself speaks sometimes in that way, although we know, from the chapter he devotes to the subject of Government interference in his "Principles of Political Economy," that he really assigned to the State much wider functions. When we examine the writings of English economists and statesmen, and the principles they employ in the discussion of the social and industrial questions of their time, it seems truly strange how they ever came to be credited with any scruple on ground of principle to invoke the power of the State for the solution of such questions when that seemed to them likely to prove of effectual assistance. The social doctrine which has prevailed in England for the last century is "the simple and obvious system of natural liberty" taught by Adam Smith; but the simple and obvious system of natural liberty is a very different thing from the system of _laissez-faire_ with which it is so commonly confounded. Its main principle, it is true, is this: "Every man," says Smith, "as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man or order of men. The Sovereign is completely discharged from a duty, in the attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and for the proper performance of which no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient: the duty of superintending the industry of private people and of directing it towards the employments most suitable to the interests of the society." ("Wealth of Nations," book iv., chap. ix.) But while the Sovereign is discharged from an industrial duty which he is incapable of performing satisfactorily, he is far from being discharged from all industrial responsibility whatsoever, for Smith immediately proceeds to map out the limits of his functions as follows: "According to the system of natural liberty, the Sovereign has only three duties to attend to--three duties of great importance, indeed, but plain and intelligible to common understandings: first, the duty of protecting the society from the violence or invasion of other independent societies; second, the duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of the society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice; and thirdly, the duty of erecting and maintaining certain works and certain public institutions which it can never be for the interest of any individual or small number of individuals to erect and maintain; because the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society." The State is required to protect us from other evils besides the evils of force and fraud--infectious diseases, for example, are in the context mentioned expressly--and to supply us with many other advantages besides the advantage of protection. Some of these advantages are of a material or economic order, and others of an intellectual or moral. The material advantages consist for the most part of provisions for facilitating the general commerce of the country--such things as roads, canals, harbours, the post, the mint--or provisions for facilitating particular branches of commerce; and among these he instances the incorporation of joint-stock companies endowed by charter with exclusive trading privileges; and the reason which, according to Smith, entitles the State to intervene in this class of cases, and which at the same time prescribes the length to which its intervention may legitimately go, is that individuals are unable to do the work satisfactorily themselves, or that the State has from its nature superior qualifications for the task. The intellectual or moral advantages which Smith asks from the State are mostly provisions for sustaining the national manhood and character, such as a system of compulsory military training or a system of compulsory--and if not gratuitous, still cheap--education; and it is important to mark that he asks for these measures, not on the ground of their political or military expediency, but on the broad ground that cowardice and ignorance are in themselves public evils, from which the State is as much bound, if it can, to save the people, as it is bound to save them from violence or fraud. Of military training he observes: "To prevent that sort of mental mutilation, deformity, and wretchedness which cowardice necessarily involves in it from spreading themselves through the great body of the people, would deserve the serious attention of Government, in the same manner as it would deserve its most serious attention to prevent a leprosy or any other loathsome and offensive disease, though neither mortal nor dangerous, from spreading itself among them, though perhaps no other public good might result from such attention besides the prevention of so great a public evil." ("Wealth of Nations," book v., chap. i.) And he proceeds to speak of education: "The same thing may be said of the gross ignorance and stupidity which in a civilized society seems so frequently to benumb the understanding of all the inferior ranks of people. A man without the proper use of the intellectual faculties of a man is, if possible, more contemptible than even a coward, and seems to be mutilated and deformed in a still more essential part of the character of human nature. Though the State was to derive no advantage from the instruction of the inferior ranks of people, it would still deserve its attention that they should not be altogether uninstructed." Compulsory military training and a system of national education would no doubt be conducive to the stricter ends of all government; the one would strengthen the defences of the nation against foreign enemies and the other would tend to the diminution of crime at home; but Smith, it will be seen, explicitly refuses to take that ground. The State's duty in the case would be the same, though no such results were to follow, for the State has other duties to perform besides the maintenance of peace and the repression of crime. It would probably be admitted, he thinks, that it was as incumbent on the State to take steps to arrest the progress of a "mortal and dangerous" disease as it was to stop a foreign invasion; but he goes further, and contends that it was equally incumbent on the State to arrest the progress of a merely "loathsome and offensive" disease, for the simple reason that such a disease was a mutilation or deformity of our physical manhood. And just as the State ought to prevent the mutilation and deformity of our physical manhood, so the State ought to prevent the mutilation and deformity of our moral and intellectual manhood, and was bound accordingly to provide a system of military training and a system of popular education, to prevent people growing up ignorant and cowardly, because the ignorant man and the coward were men without the proper use of the faculties of a man, and were mutilated and deformed in essential parts of the character of human nature. At bottom Smith's principle is this--that men have an original claim--a claim as original as the claim to safety of life and property--to all the essential conditions of an unmutilated and undeformed manhood, and that is really only another expression for the principle that lies at the foundation of all civil and human right, that men have a right to the essential conditions of a normal humanity, to the presuppositions of all humane living, to the indispensable securities for the proper realization of our common vocation as human beings. The right to personal liberty--to the power of working for ends of our own prescribing, and the right to property--to the power of retaining what we have made, to be the instrument of further activities for the ends we have prescribed for ourselves--rest really on no other ground than that the privileges claimed are essential conditions of a normal, an unmutilated and undeformed manhood, and it is on this broad ground that Adam Smith justifies the State's intervention to stop disease and supply education. Smith held but a poor opinion of the capacities of Government management, and especially of English Government management, which, he asserted, was characterized in times of peace by "the slothful and negligent profusion that was natural to monarchies," and in times of war by "all the thoughtless extravagance" that was peculiar to democracies; but nevertheless he had no hesitation in asking Government to undertake a considerable number of industrial enterprises, because he believed that these were enterprises which Government with all its faults was better fitted to conduct successfully than private adventurers were. On the other hand, Smith entertained the highest possible belief in individual liberty, but he had never any scruple about sacrificing liberty of contract where the sacrifice was demanded by the great moral end of Government--the maintenance of just and humane dealing between man and man. For example, the suppression of the truck system, which is sometimes condemned as an undue interference with freedom of contract, was strongly supported by Smith, who declared it to be "quite just and equitable," inasmuch as it merely secured to the workmen the pay they were entitled to receive and "imposed no real hardship on the masters--it only obliged them to pay that value in money which they pretended to pay, but did not really pay, in goods." It was only a just and necessary protection of the weaker party to a contract against an oppressive exaction to which, like the apothecary in "Romeo and Juliet," his poverty might have consented, but not his will. Precisely analogous is Smith's position concerning usury laws. Usury laws are seldom defended now; for one thing, money has become so abundant that the competition of lender with lender may be trusted to as a better security for fair and reasonable treatment of borrowers than a Government enactment could provide. But Smith in his day was strongly in favour of fixing a legal rate of interest, because he thought it was necessary to prevent the practice of extortion by unscrupulous dealers on necessitous clients. His views on truck and usury show that he had no sympathy with those who contend that the State must on no account interfere with grown-up people in the bargains they may make, inasmuch as grown-up people may be expected to be quite capable of looking effectively after their own interest. Smith recognised that grown-up people were often in natural circumstances where it was practically impossible for them to assert effectively not their interests merely, but even their essential claims as fellow-citizens; and that therefore it was the State's duty to come to the aid of those whose own economic position was weak, and to force upon the strong certain responsibilities--or at least secure for the weak certain broad, positive conditions--which just and humane dealing might demand. Now, in these ideas about truck and usury, as in the proposals previously touched upon for checking the growth of disease or cowardice or ignorance, is not the principle of social politics that is applied by Smith precisely the principle that runs through our whole recent social legislation--factory, sanitary, and educational--the principle of the State's obligation to secure the people in the essential conditions of all normal manhood? German writers often take Smith for an exponent, if not for the founder, of what they call the _Rechtstaat_ theory--the theory that the State is mainly the protector of right; but in reality Smith's doctrine corresponded pretty closely with their own _Kultur-und-Wohlfahrtstaat_ theory--the theory that the State is a promoter of culture and welfare; and if further proof were wanted, it might be found in the fact that in his doctrine of taxation he departs altogether from the economic principle, which is popularly associated with the _Rechtstaat_ idea, and is supposed to be a corollary of it, that a tax is a _quid pro quo_, a price paid for a service rendered, and ought therefore to be imposed on individuals in proportion to the service they respectively receive from the State; and instead of this economic principle he lays down the broad ethical one, that a tax is a public obligation which individuals ought to be called upon to discharge in proportion to their respective abilities. The rich cannot fairly be said to _get_ more good from the State than the poor; they probably get less, because they are better capable of providing for their own defence; but the rich are able to _do_ more good to the State than the poor, and because they are able, they are bound. Such is the social doctrine of Adam Smith, and it is manifestly no doctrine of rigid individualism, calling out for freedom at any price, or banning all interference with the natural play of self-interest and competition. The natural liberty for which the great English economist contended was not the mere ghost of liberty worshipped by Mr. Spencer. An ignorant man might be free, as an imprisoned man was free, within limits, but he was not free within normal human limits. He had not the use of his mind; he was wanting in an essential part of his manhood. First make him a man--a whole, complete, competent man, fit for man's vocation--then make him free. There is a common metaphysical distinction between the formal freedom of the will and the material freedom of the will. The drunkard, the lunatic, is formally free, for he exerts his choice, but he is materially enslaved. The difference between liberty according to Mr. Spencer and liberty according to Adam Smith is something analogous. The liberty Smith desires is a substantial liberty; it is clothed with a body--a definite body of universal human rights--which the State is bound to realize as it would realize liberty itself. The reason of his difference from the _laissez-faire_ theory of Mr. Spencer, which is so often erroneously attributed to him, is that he takes a much broader and more practical view of the original moral rights of individuals than such ultra-individualists are accustomed to do. While they hold that the State is there only to secure to individuals reality and equality of freedom, he holds it is there to secure them reality and equality of all moral rights. He would supply all alike, therefore, with certain material securities--the material conditions necessary to secure their moral rights with equal completeness,--and he would protect them in the enjoyment of those conditions against the assaults of poverty and misfortune no less than the assaults of murderers and thieves. But beyond this line he would refuse to go; if he stands clearly out in advance of the _laissez-faire_ position of equality of legal freedom, he stands equally clearly far short of the socialistic position of equality of material conditions. Now this doctrine of the great founder of English political economy has been substantially the doctrine of his successors as well. It would be beyond my present scope to trace the history of the doctrine of social politics through the writings of the whole succession of English economists, nor is it necessary. I shall choose a representative economist from the group who are generally reckoned the most narrow and unsympathetic, who are accused of having shifted political economy off the broader lines on which it had been launched by Smith, who are counted the great idolaters of self-interest and natural law, and the scientific associates of the much-abused Manchester school--viz., the disciples of Ricardo. Ricardo himself touches only incidentally on the functions of the State, but he then does so to defend interventions, such as minting money, marking plate, testing drugs, examining medical candidates, and the like, which are meant to guard people against deceptions they are themselves incompetent to detect. Moreover, he was a strong advocate for at least one important extension of the State's industrial _rôle_--he would establish a National Bank of issue with exclusive privileges; and it is not uninteresting to remember that in his place in Parliament he brought forward the suggestion of a system of Government annuities for the accommodation of working men, which was introduced by Mr. Gladstone half a century later, and has been denounced in certain quarters as that statesman's first step in socialism, and that he was one of a very small minority who voted for a Parliamentary inquiry into the social system of Robert Owen. But if Ricardo is comparatively silent on the subject, we fortunately possess a very ample discussion of it by one of his leading disciples, J. E. McCulloch. When Ricardo died, James Mill wrote to McCulloch, "As you and I are his two and only genuine disciples, his memory must be a point of connection between us;" and it was on McCulloch that the mantle of the master descended. His "Principles of Political Economy," which may be said to be an exposition of the system of economics according to Ricardo, was for many years the principal textbook of the science, and will still be admitted to be the best and most complete statement of what, in the cant of the present day, is called orthodox political economy. McCulloch, indeed, is more than merely the expositor of that system; he is really one of its founders, the author of one of its most famous dogmas, at least in its current form, the now exploded doctrine of the Wages fund; and of all the adherents of this orthodox tradition, McCulloch is commonly considered the hardest and most narrow. There are economists who are supposed to show a native generous warmth which all the severities of their science are unable to quell. John Stuart Mill is known to have come under St. Simonian influences in his younger days, and to have been fond ever afterwards of calling himself a socialist; and Professor Sidgwick, in our own day, is often credited--and not unjustly--with a like breadth of heart, and in publishing his views of Government interference, he gives them the name of "Economic Socialism." But in selecting McCulloch, I select an economist the rigour of whose principles has never been suspected, and yet so striking is the uniformity of the English tradition on this subject, that in reality neither Mill nor Mr. Sidgwick professes a broader doctrine of social politics, or goes a step further, or more heartily on the road to socialism than that accredited champion of individualism, John Ramsay McCulloch. McCulloch's "Principles" contains--from the second edition in 1830 onward to the last author's edition in 1849--a special chapter on the limits of Government interference; and the chapter starts with an explicit repudiation of the doctrine of _laissez-faire_, which was then apparently only beginning to come into vogue in England. "An idea," says McCulloch, "seems however to have been recently gaining ground that the duty of the Government with regard to the domestic policy of the country is almost entirely of a negative kind, and that it has merely to maintain the security of property and the freedom of industry. But its duty is by no means so simple and easily defined as those who support this opinion would have us to believe. It is certainly true that its interference with the pursuits of individuals has been, in very many instances, exerted in a wrong direction, and carried to a ruinous excess. Still, however, it is easy to see that we should fall into a very great error if we supposed that it might be entirely dispensed with. Freedom is not, as some appear to think, the end of government; the advancement of the public prosperity and happiness is its end; and freedom is valuable in so far only as it contributes to bring it about. In laying it down, for example, that individuals should be permitted, without let or hindrance, to engage in any business or profession they may prefer, the condition that it is not injurious to others is always understood. No one doubts the propriety of a Government interfering to suppress what is or might otherwise become a public nuisance; nor does any one doubt that it may advantageously interfere to give facilities to commerce by negotiating treaties with foreign powers, and by removing such obstacles as cannot be removed by individuals. But the interference of Government cannot be limited to cases of this sort. However disinclined, it is obliged to interfere in an infinite variety of ways and for an infinite variety of purposes. It must, to notice only one or two of the _classes_ of objects requiring its interference, decide as to the species of contract to which it will lend its sanction, and the means to be adopted to enforce true performance; it must decide in regard to the distribution of the property of those who die intestate, and the effect to be given to the directions in wills and testaments; and it must frequently engage itself, or authorize individuals or associations to engage, in various sorts of undertakings deeply affecting the rights and interests of others and of society. The furnishing of elementary instruction in the ordinary branches of education for all classes of persons and the establishment of a compulsory provision for the support of the destitute poor are generally also included, and apparently with the greatest propriety, among the duties incumbent on administration" (p. 262). He allows State ownership and State management of industrial works, wherever State ownership and management are more efficient for the purpose than private enterprise--in other words, where they are more economical--as in the cases of the coinage, roads, harbours, postal communication, etc. He would expropriate land for railway purposes, grant a monopoly to the railway company, and then subject it to Government control in the public interest; he would impose many sorts of restrictions on freedom of contract, freedom of industry, freedom of trade, freedom of property, and freedom of bequest; and, what is more important, he recognises clearly that with the growth of society fresh interferences of a serious character will be constantly called for, which may in some cases involve the application of entirely new principles, or throw on the Government work of an entirely new character. For example, he is profoundly impressed with the dangers of the manufacturing system, which he saw growing and multiplying all around him, and so far from dreaming that the course of industry should remain uncontrolled, he even ventures, in a remarkable passage, to express the doubt whether it may not "in the end be found that it was unwise to allow the manufacturing system to gain so great an ascendancy as it has done in this country, and that measures should have been early adopted to check and moderate its growth" (p. 191). He admits that a decisive answer to this question could only be given by the economists of a future generation, after a longer experience of the system than was possible when he wrote, but he cannot conceal the gravest apprehension at the preponderance which manufactures were rapidly gaining in our industrial economy. And his reasons are worthy of attention. The first is the destruction of the old moral ties that knit masters and men together. "But we doubt whether any country, how wealthy soever, should be looked upon as in a healthy, sound state, where the leading interest consists of a small number of great capitalists, and of vast numbers of workpeople in their employment, but unconnected with them by any ties of gratitude, sympathy, or affection. This estrangement is occasioned by the great scale on which labour is now carried on in most businesses; and by the consequent impossibility of the masters becoming acquainted, even if they desired it, with the great bulk of their workpeople.... The kindlier feelings have no share in an intercourse of this sort; speaking generally, everything is regulated on both sides by the narrowest and most selfish views and considerations; a man and a machine being treated with about the same sympathy and regard" (p. 193). The second reason is the suppression of the facilities of advancement enjoyed by labourers under the previous _régime_. "Owing to the greater scale on which employments are now mostly carried on, workmen have less chance than formerly of advancing themselves or their families to any higher situation, or of exchanging the character of labourers for that of masters" (p. 188). For the majority of the working-class to be thus, as he expresses it, "condemned as it were to perpetual helotism," is not conducive to the health of a nation. The third reason is the comparative instability of manufacturing business. It becomes a matter of the most serious concern for a State, "when a very large proportion of the population has been, through their agency, rendered dependent on foreign demand, and on the caprices and mutations of fashion" (p. 192). That also is a state of things fraught with danger to the health of a community. McCulloch always treats political economy as if he defined it--and the definition would be better than his own--as the science of the working of industrial society in health and disease; and he always throws on the State a considerable responsibility in the business of social hygiene; going so far, we have seen in the passages just quoted, as to suggest whether a legal check ought not to have been imposed on the free growth of the factory system, on account of its bad effects on the economic position of the labouring class. We had suffered the system to advance too far to impose that check now, but there were other measures which, in his opinion, the Legislature might judiciously take in the same interest. It is of course impossible, by Act of Parliament, to infuse higher views of duty or warmer feelings of ordinary human regard into the relations between manufacturers and their workmen; but the State might, according to McCulloch, do something to mitigate the modern plague of commercial crises, by a policy of free trade, by adopting a sound monetary system, by securing a continuance of peace, and by "such a scheme of public charity as might fully relieve the distresses without insulting the feelings or lessening the industry of the labouring classes" (p. 192). As with commercial crises, so with other features of the modern industrial system; wherever they tend to the deterioration of the labouring class, McCulloch always holds the State bound to intervene, if it can, to prevent such a result. He would stop the immigration of what is sometimes called pauper labour--of bodies of workpeople brought up in an inferior standard of life--because their example and their competition tend to pull down the native population to their own level. The example he chooses is not the Jewish element in the East End of London, but the much more important case of the Irish immigration into Liverpool and Glasgow; and while he would prefer to see Government taking steps to improve the Irish people in Ireland itself, he declares that, if that is not practicable, then "justice to our own people requires that measures should be adopted to hinder Great Britain from being overrun with the outpourings of this _officina pauperum_, to hinder Ireland from dragging us down to the same hopeless abyss of pauperism and wretchedness in which she is sunk" (p. 422). This policy may be wise, or it may not, but it shows very plainly--what appears so often in his writings--how deeply McCulloch's mind was penetrated with the conviction that one of the greatest of all the dangers from which the State ought to do what it well can to preserve the people, was the danger of falling to a lower standard of tastes and requirements, and thereby losing ambition and industry, and the very possibility of rising again. "This lowering of the opinions of the labouring class with respect to the mode in which they should live is perhaps the most serious of all the evils that can befall them.... The example of such individuals or bodies of individuals as submit quietly to have their wages reduced, and who are content if they get only mere necessaries, should never be held up for public imitation. On the contrary, everything should be done to make such apathy be esteemed discreditable. The best interests of society require that the rate of wages should be elevated as high as possible--that a taste for comforts and enjoyments should be widely diffused, and, if possible, interwoven with national habits and prejudices. Very low wages, by rendering it impossible for increased exertions to obtain any considerable increase of advantages, effectually hinder them from being made, and are of all others the most powerful cause of that idleness and apathy that contents itself with what can barely continue animal existence" (p. 415). And he goes on to refute the idea of Benjamin Franklin, that high wages breed indolent and dissipated habits, and to contend that they not only improve the character and efficiency of the labourer, but are in the end a source of gain, instead of loss, to the employer. But, although the maintenance of a high rate of wages is so great an object of public solicitude, it was an object which it was, in McCulloch's judgment, outside the State's province, simply because it was outside its power, to do anything directly to promote, because while authority could fix a price for labour, it could never compel employers to engage labour at that price; and consequently its interference in such a way would only end in injury to the class it sought to befriend, as well as to the trade of the country in general. Still, McCulloch is far from wishing to repel the State's offices or the offices of public opinion in connection with the business altogether. In the passage just quoted he expressly makes an appeal to public opinion for an active interference in a direction where, he believes, its interference might be useful; and as for the action of the State, he approves, for one thing, of the legalization of trades unions, and, for another, of the special instruction of the public, at the national expense, in the principles on which a high rate of wages depend. In regard to the Factory Acts, while he would have the hours of labour in the case of grown-up men settled by the parties themselves, because he thought them the only persons competent to settle them satisfactorily, he strongly supported the interference of the Legislature, on grounds of ordinary humanity, to limit the working day of children and women, because "the former are naturally, and the latter have been rendered, through custom and the institutions of society, unable to protect themselves" (p. 426); and he seconded all Lord Shaftesbury's labours down to the Ten Hours Act of 1847, to which he objected on the ground that it involved a practical interference with all adult factory labour. On the other hand, he was in favour of the principle of employers' liability for accidents in mines and workshops, because there seemed no other way of saving the labourers from their own carelessness, except by making the masters responsible for the enforcement of the necessary regulations (p. 307). But McCulloch's general position on this class of questions is still better exemplified in the view he takes of the State's duty on a matter of great present interest, the housing of the poor. Here he has no hesitation in throwing the principal blame for the bad accommodation of the working-classes of that day, for the underground cellar dwellings of Liverpool and Manchester, the overcrowded lodging-houses of London, and the streets of cottages unsupplied with water or drainage, on "the culpable inattention of the authorities." Mr. Goschen vindicates the legitimacy of Government interference with the housing of the people, on the ground that it is the business of Government to see justice done between man and man. When a man hired a house, Government had a right to see that he got a house, and a house meant a dwelling fit for human habitation. The inspection of houses is, according to this idea, only a case of necessary protection against fraud, like the institution of medical examinations, the assaying of metals, or the testing of drugs; and protection against fraud is admitted everywhere to be the proper business of Government. McCulloch bases his justification of the intervention on much broader grounds. Government needs no other warrant for condemning a house that is unfit for human habitation but the simple fact that the house is unfit for human habitation, and it makes no difference whether the tenant is cheated into taking the bad house, or takes it openly because he prefers it. In fact, the strongest reason, in McCulloch's opinion, for invoking Government interference in the case at all, is precisely the circumstance that so many people actually prefer unwholesome houses from motives of economy. "Such cottages," he says, "being cheap, are always sure to find occupiers. Nothing, however, can be more obvious than that it is the duty of Government to take measures for the prevention and repair of an abuse of this sort. Its injurious influence is not confined to the occupiers of the houses referred to, though if it were, that would be no good reason for declining to introduce a better system. But the diseases engendered in these unhealthy abodes frequently extend their ravages through all classes of the community, so that the best interests of the middle and higher orders, as well as of the lowest, are involved in this question. And, on the same principle that we adopt measures to guard against the plague, we should endeavour to secure ourselves against typhus, and against the brutalizing influence, over any considerable portion of the population, of a residence amid filth and disease" (p. 308). The last clause is remarkable. The State is required to protect the people from degrading influences, to prevent them from being brutalized through the avarice or apathy of others, and to prevent them being brutalized through the avarice or apathy of themselves. It is not what many persons would expect, but here we have political economy, and the most "orthodox" political economy, forcing people to go to a dearer market for their houses, in order to satisfy a sentiment of humanity, and imposing on the State a social mission of a broad positive character--the mission of extirpating brutalizing influences. Yet, expected or not, this is really the ordinary tradition of English economists--it is the principle laid down by Smith of obliging the State to secure for the people an unmutilated and undeformed manhood, to provide for them by public means the fundamental conditions of a humane existence. McCulloch's position comes out more clearly still in the reasons he gives for advocating a compulsory provision for the able-bodied poor, and a national system of popular education. With regard to the impotent poor, he is content with saying that it would be inhumanity to deny them support, and injustice to throw their support exclusively on the benevolent. A poor-rate is sometimes defended on what are professed to be strictly economical grounds, by showing that it is both less mischievous and less expensive than mendicity; but what strikes McCulloch is not so much the wastefulness of private charity in the hands of the benevolent as the injustice of suffering the avaricious to escape their natural obligations. Few, however, have much difficulty in finding one good reason or another for making a public provision for the impotent poor; the crux of the question of public assistance is the case of the able-bodied poor. A provision for the able-bodied poor is practically a recognition in a particular form of "the right to labour," and the right to labour resounds with many revolutionary terrors in our English ears, although it has, as a matter of fact, been practised quietly, and most of the time in one of its most pernicious forms, in every parish of England for nearly three hundred years. Now on this question McCulloch was a convert. He confessed to the Committee on the State of the Poor in Ireland, in 1830, that he had changed his views on the subject entirely since his previous evidence in 1825. He had formerly been, he said, "too much imbued with mere theory, with the opinions of Malthus and Townsend"; but he had become a firm believer in the necessity and the public advantage of a legal provision for the able-bodied poor, and he strongly recommended the introduction of such a system into Ireland, in the first instance as an instrument of individual relief, but also as an effectual engine of social improvement. He gives the reasons for his conversion partly in his evidence, and partly in a more systematic form in his "Principles of Political Economy." First, Malthus had attributed to the Poor Law itself effects which really sprang from certain bad arrangements that had been engrafted on the English system of relief, but were not essential to it--viz., the allowance system, and the law known as Gilbert's Act, which deprived parishes of the right to refuse relief except in workhouses, and forced them to provide work for paupers, if paupers desired it, at or near their own houses. These two arrangements, in McCulloch's opinion, converted the English provision for the able-bodied poor from what we may term a wise and conditional right of labour into an unwise and dangerous one. In the second place, he had come to see that a legal provision for the poor, instead of having, as was alleged, a necessary tendency to multiply pauperism, had in reality a natural tendency to prevent its growth, because it gave the landlords and influential ratepayers a strong pecuniary as well as moral interest in producing that result. Its effect was thus to establish in every parish a new local stimulus to social improvement, and it was on account of this effect of a Poor Law that McCulloch thought it would be specially beneficial to Ireland, because there was nothing Ireland needed more than just such a local stimulus. In the third place, he had become more and more profoundly impressed with the increasing gravity of the vicissitudes and fluctuations of employment to which English labourers were subject since England became mainly a manufacturing country, and that unhappy feature of manufacturing industry was his principal reason for invoking legislative assistance. A purely agricultural country, he thought, might be able to do without a Poor Law, because agricultural employment was comparatively steady; but in a manufacturing country a Poor Law was indispensable, on account of the long periods of depression or privation which were normal incidents in the life of labour in such a country, and on account of the pernicious effect which these periods of privation would, if unchecked, be certain to exercise upon the character and habits of the labouring classes, through "lowering their estimate of what is required for their comfortable and decent subsistence." ("Political Economy," p. 448.) "During these periods of extraordinary privation the labourer, if not effectually relieved, would imperceptibly lose that taste for order, decency, and cleanliness which had been gradually formed and accumulated in better times by the insensible operation of habit and example, and no strength of argument, no force of authority, could again instil into the minds of a new generation, growing up under more prosperous circumstances, the sentiments and tastes thus uprooted and destroyed by the cold breath of penury. Every return of temporary distress would therefore vitiate the feelings and lower the sensibilities of the labouring classes" (p. 449). McCulloch quotes these words from Barton, but he quotes them to express his own view, and their teaching is very explicit on the duty of Government to the unemployed in seasons of commercial distress. In such seasons of "extraordinary privation" the State is called upon to take "effectual" measures--extraordinary measures, we may infer, if extraordinary measures were necessary--for the relief of the unemployed, not merely to save them from starvation, but to prevent them from losing established habits of "order, decency, and cleanliness"; from getting their feelings vitiated, their sensibilities impaired, so that they were in danger of remaining content with a worse standard of living, and sinking to a lower scale in the dignity of social and civilized being. In a word, it is held to be the duty of the State to prevent, if it can, the temporary reverses of the labouring class from resulting in its permanent moral decadence; and as the object of the State's intervention is to preserve the dignity, the self-respect, the moral independence and energy of the labouring class, the manner of the intervention, the choice of actual means and steps for administering the relief, must, of course, be governed by the same considerations. "The true secret of assisting the poor," says McCulloch, borrowing the words of Archbishop Sumner, "is to make them agents in bettering their own condition, and to supply them, not with a temporary stimulus, but with a permanent energy" (p. 475). The same principles come out even more strongly in McCulloch's remarks on national education. He says, "the providing of elementary instruction for all classes is one of the most pressing duties of Government" (p. 473); and the elementary instruction he would provide would not stop at reading and writing, but would include even a knowledge of so much political economy as would explain "the circumstances which elevate and depress the rate of wages" (p. 474). It was the duty of Government to extirpate ignorance, because, "of all obstacles to improvement, ignorance was the most formidable"; and it was its duty to establish Government schools for the purpose, because charity schools impaired the self-respect and sense of independence which were themselves first essentials of all social improvement. "No extension of the system of charity and subscription schools can ever fully compensate for the want of a statutory provision for the education of the public. Something of degradation always attaches to the fact of one's having been brought up in a charity school. The parents who send children to such an institution, and even the children, know that they have been received only because they are paupers unable to pay for their education; and this consciousness has a tendency to weaken that state of independence and self-respect, for the want of which the best education may be but an imperfect substitute. But no such feeling could operate on the pupils of schools established by the State" (p. 476). There is no question with McCulloch about the right of the State to take steps to forward the moral progress, or to prevent the moral decadence, of the community--or any part of the community--under its care; that is simply its plain and primary duty, though there may be question with the State, as with other agencies, whether particular measures proposed for the purpose are really calculated to effect it. After this long, and I fear tedious, account of the opinions of McCulloch, it would be needless to call more witnesses to refute those who so commonly accuse English economists of teaching an extreme individualism. For McCulloch may be said to be their own witness; they hold him up as the hardest and narrowest of a hard and narrow school; one of the ablest of them, Mr. J. K. Ingram, who writes McCulloch's memoir in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, going so far as to accuse him of exhibiting "a habitual deadness in the study of social questions to all but material considerations." We have adduced enough to disprove that statement. The reader of McCulloch's writings is constantly struck to observe how habitually his judgment of a social question is governed by ethical rather than economic considerations, and how his supreme concern always seems to be to guard the labouring poor from falling into any sort of permanent decadence, and to place them securely on the lines of progressive elevation. But perhaps a word may be required about the Manchester school. Mr. Ingram states--and again his statement probably agrees with current prepossessions--that McCulloch occupied "substantially the same theoretic position as was occupied at a somewhat later period by the Manchester school" (_Encyc. Brit._, art. "Political Economy"). We have seen what McCulloch's theoretic position really was, and it is certainly not the Manchester doctrine of popular anathema; it is not the _Manchesterismus_ of the German schools. But the Manchester men can scarcely be said to have properly had anything in the nature of a general theoretic position. They were not a school of political philosophy--they were a band of practical politicians leagued to promote particular reforms, especially two reforms in international policy which involved large curtailments of the _rôle_ of Government--viz., free trade with other countries, and nonintervention in their internal affairs; but they were far from thinking that, because it would be well for the State to abstain from certain specific interferences, it would be well for it to abstain from all; or that if the State had no civilizing mission towards the people of other countries, it had therefore no civilizing mission towards its own. Cobden, for example--to go no farther--was a lifelong advocate of a national system of education; he was a friend of factory legislation for women and children, and, with respect to the poor, he taught in one of his speeches the semi-socialistic doctrine that the poor had the first right to maintenance from the land--that they are, as it were, the first mortgagees. The Manchester school is really nothing but a stage convention, a convenient polemical device for marking off a particular theoretical extreme regarding the task of the State; but the persons in actual life who were presumed to compose the school were no more, all of them, adherents of that theory than Scotchmen, off the stage, have all short kilts and red hair. And as for that theory itself, the theory of _laissez-faire_, it has never in England been really anything more than it is now, the plea of alarmed vested interests stealing an unwarranted, and I believe an unwelcome, shelter under the ægis of economic science. English economists, from Smith to McCulloch, from McCulloch to Mr. Sidgwick, have adhered with a truly remarkable steadiness to a social doctrine of a precisely contrary character--a social doctrine which, instead of exhibiting any unreasonable aversion to Government interference, expressly assigns to Government a just and proper place in promoting the social and industrial development of the community. In the first place, in the department of production, they freely allow that just as there are many industrial enterprises in the conduct of which individual initiative must, for want of resources or other reasons, yield to joint-stock companies, so there are others for which individuals and companies alike must give place to the State, because the State is by nature or circumstances better fitted than either to conduct them satisfactorily; and in the next place, in the department of distribution, while rating the moral or personal independence of the individual as a supreme blessing and claim, they have no scruple in calling on the State to interfere with the natural liberty of contract between man and man, wherever such interference seems requisite to secure just and equitable dealing, to guard that personal independence itself from being sapped, or to establish the people better in any of the other elementary conditions of all humane living. We sometimes take pride at the present day in professing a distrust for doctrinaire or metaphysical politics, and we are no doubt right; but that reproach cannot justly be levelled against the English economists. They were not Dutch gardeners trying to dress the world after an artificial scheme; that is more distinctive of the social systems they opposed. Their own system indeed was to study Nature, to discover the principles of sound natural social growth, and to follow them; but they had no idea on that account of leaving things to grow merely as they would, or of renouncing the help of good husbandry. They had, as we have seen, a positive doctrine of social politics, which required from the State much more than the protection of liberty and the repression of crime; they asked the State to undertake such industrial work as it was naturally better fitted to perform than individuals or associations of individuals, and they asked the State to secure to the body of the citizens the essential conditions of a normal and progressive manhood. Now this doctrine--which may be called the English doctrine of social politics--seems to furnish a basis of considerable practical value for discriminating between a wholesome and effective participation by Government in the work of social reform, on the one hand, and those pernicious and dangerous forms of intervention on the other, which may be correctly known by the name of State socialism. II. _The Nature and Principle of State Socialism._ Few words are at present more wantonly abused than the words socialism and State socialism. They are tossed about at random, as if their meaning, as was said of the spelling of former generations, was a mere affair of private judgment. There is, in truth, a great deal of socialism in the employment of the word; little respect is paid to the previous appropriation of it; and especially since it has become, as has been said, _hoffähig_, men press forward from the most unlikely quarters, claim kindred with the socialists, and strive for the honour of being called by their name. Many excellent persons, for example, have no better pretext to advance for their claim than that they also feel a warm sentiment of interest in the cause of the poor. Churchmen whose duties bring them among the poor are very naturally touched with a sense of the miseries they observe, and certain of them, who may perhaps without offence be said to love the cause well more than wisely, come to public platforms and declare themselves socialists--socialists, they will sometimes explain, of an older and purer confession than the Social Democratic Federation, but still good and genuine socialists--merely because the religion they preach is a gospel of moral equality before God, and of fraternal responsibility among men, whose very test in the end is the test of human kindness--"Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these My brethren, ye did it not to Me." But socialism is not a feeling for the poor, nor yet for the responsibilities of society in connection with their poverty; it is neither what is called humanitarianism, nor what is called altruism; it is not an affair of feeling at all, but of organization, and the feeling it breathes may not be altruistic. The revolutionary socialists of the Continent, for instance, are animated by as vigorous a spirit of self-interest and an even more bitter class antagonism than a trade union or a land league. They fight for a particular claim of right--the utterly unjustifiable claim to the whole product of labour--and they propose to turn the world upside down by a vast scheme of social reconstruction in order to get their unjust, delusive, and mischievous idea realized. The gauge of their socialism, therefore, must, after all, be looked for in their claim and their remedy, and not in the vague sympathies of a benevolent spectator who, without scrutinizing either the one or the other, thinks he will call himself a socialist because he feels that there is much in the lot of the poor man that might be mended, and that the rich might be very properly and reasonably asked to make some sacrifices for their brethren's sake out of their abundance. The philanthropic spectator suffers from no scarcity of words to express his particular attitude if he desires to do so; why then should he not leave socialists the enjoyment of their vocable? There is often at the bottom of this sentimental patronage of socialism the not unchivalrous but mistaken idea that the ordinary self-interest of the world has been glorified by economists into a sacred and all-sufficing principle which it would be interfering with the designs of Providence to restrict, and that therefore it is only right to side with socialism as a protest against the position taken by the apologists of the present system of things, without being understood to commit one's self thereby to the particular system which socialism may propose to put in its place. But while the economists think very rightly that self-interest must always be regarded as the ordinary guide of life, and that the world cannot be reasonably expected to become either better, or better off, if everybody were to look after other people's interests (which he knows nothing about) instead of looking after his own (of which he at least knows something), they are far from showing any indifference to the danger of self-interest running into selfishness. On the contrary, they have constantly insisted--as the evidence I have already produced abundantly proves--that where the self-interest of the strongly placed failed to subject itself spontaneously to the restraints of social justice and the responsibilities of our common humanity, it was for society to step in and impose the restraints that were just and requisite, and to do so either by public opinion or by public authority in the way most likely to be practicable and effectual. Another thing our sentimental friends forget is that the socialists of the present day have no thought of substituting any other general economic motive in the room of self-interest. If they had their schemes realized to-morrow, men would still be paid according to the amount of their individual work, and each would work so far for his own hand. His daily motive would be his individual interest, though his scope of achievement would be severely limited by law with the view of securing a better general level of happiness in the community. The question between economists and socialists is not whether the claims of social justice are entitled to be respected, but whether the claims which one or other of them make really are claims of social justice or no. Still, so firm is the hold taken by the notion that the socialists are the special champions of social justice, that one of our most respected prelates has actually defined socialism in that sense. The Bishop of Rochester (now of Winchester), in his Pastoral Letter to his Clergy at the new year of 1888, takes occasion, while warning the younger brethren against the too headlong philanthropy which "scouts what is known as the science of political economy," to describe socialism as "the science of maintaining the right proportion of equity and kindness while adjudicating the various claims which individuals and society mutually make upon each other." In reality, socialism would be better defined as a system that outsteps the right proportion of equity and kindness, and sets up for the masses claims that are devoid of proportion and measure of any kind, and whose injustice and peril often arise from that very circumstance. If bishops carry the term off to one quarter, philosophers carry it to another. Some identify socialism with the associative principle generally, and see it manifested in the growth of one form of organization as much as in the growth of another, or at most they may limit it to the intervention of the associative principle in things industrial, and in that event they would consider a joint-stock company, or a co-operative store, or perhaps a building like Queen Anne's Mansions, or the common-stair system of Scotland, to be as genuine exhibitions of socialism as the collectivism or anarchism of the Continental factions or the State monopolies of Prince Bismarck. But a joint-stock company is no departure from--it is rather an extension of--the present _régime_ of private property, free competition, and self-interest; and why should it be described by the same name as a system whose chief pretension is to supersede that _régime_ by a better? Another very common definition of socialism--perhaps the most common of all, and the last to which I shall refer here--is that socialism is the general principle of giving society the greatest possible control over the life of the individual, in contradistinction to the opposite principle of individualism, which is taken to be the principle of giving the individual the greatest possible immunity from the control of society. Any extension of the authority of the State, any fresh regulation of the transactions of individual citizens, is often pronounced to be socialistic without asking what the object or nature of the regulations may be. Socialism is identified with any enlargement, and individualism with any contraction, of the functions of government. But the world has not been made on this socialist principle alone, nor on this individualist principle alone, and it can neither be explained nor amended by means of the one without the other. Abstractions of that order afford us little practical guidance. The socialists of real life are not men who are bent on increasing Government control for the mere sake of increasing Government control. There are broad tracts of the individual's life they would leave free from social control; they would give him, for example, full property in his house and furniture during his lifetime, and the right to spend his income, once he had earned it, in his own way. Their scheme, if carried out, might be found to compel them to restrict this latter right, but their own desire and belief undoubtedly is that the individual would have more freedom of the kind then than he has now. They seek to extend Government control only because, and only so far as, they believe Government control to be necessary and fitted to realize certain theories of right and well-being which they think it incumbent on organized society to realize; and consequently the thing that properly characterizes their position is not so much the degree of their confidence in the powers of the State as the nature of the theories of right for which they invoke its intervention. And just as socialists do not enlarge the bounds of authority from the mere love of authority, so their opponents do not resist the enlargement from the mere hatred of authority. They raise no controversy about the abstract legitimacy of Government encroachments on the sphere of private capital or of legal enlargements of the rights or privileges of labour. There is no socialism in that; the socialism only comes in when the encroachments are made on a field where Government administration is unlikely to answer, and where the rights conferred are rights to which labour can present no just and reasonable claim. It will be objected that this is to reduce socialism to a mere matter of more or less. The English economists, it will be said, practised a little socialism, because they allowed the use of State means to elevate the condition of the working classes, or to provide for the wants of the general community; and the Continental Social Democrats only practise a little more socialism when they cry for a working-class State or for the progressive nationalization of all industries. But in practical life the measure is everything. So many grains of opium will cure; so many more will kill. The important thing for adjusting claims must always be to get the right measure, and the objection to socialistic schemes is precisely this, that they take up a theory of distributive justice which is an absolutely wrong measure, or else some vague theory of disinheritance which contains no measure at all. They would nationalize industries without paying any respect to their suitability for Government management, simply because they want to see all industries nationalized; and they would grant all manner of compensating advantages to the working class as instalments of some vague claim, either of economic right from which they are alleged to have been ousted by the system of capitalism, or of aboriginal natural right from which they are said to have been disinherited by the general arrangements of society itself. What distinguishes their position and makes it socialism is therefore precisely this absence of measure or of the right measure, and one great advantage of the English doctrine of social politics which I have expounded, is that it is able to supply this indispensable criterion. That doctrine would limit the industrial undertakings of the State to such as it possessed natural advantages for conducting successfully, and the State's part in social reform to securing for the people the essential conditions of all humane living, of all normal and progressive manhood. It would interfere, indeed, as little as possible with liberty of speculation, because it recognises that the best way of promoting social progress and prosperity is to multiply the opportunities, and with the opportunities the incentives, of talent and capital; but, while giving the strong their head, in the belief that they will carry on the world so far after them, it would insist on the public authority taking sharp heed that no large section of the common people be suffered to fall permanently behind in the race, to lose the very conditions of further progress, and to lapse into ways of living which the opinion of the time thinks unworthy of our common humanity. Now State socialism disregards these limits, straying generally far beyond them, and it may not improperly be defined as the system which requires the State to do work it is unfit to do in order to invest the working classes with privileges they have no right to get. The term State socialism originated in Germany a few years ago to express the antithesis not of free, voluntary, or Christian socialism, as seems frequently to be imagined here, but of revolutionary socialism, which is always considered to be socialism proper, because it is the only form of the system that is of any serious moment at the present day. State socialism has the same general aims as socialism proper, only it would carry out its plans gradually by means of the existing State, instead of first overturning the existing State by revolution and establishing in its place a new political organization for the purpose, the Social Democratic Republic. There are socialists who fancy they have but at any moment to choose a government and issue a decree, as Napoleon once did--"Let misery be abolished this day fortnight"--and misery would be abolished that day fortnight. But the State socialists are unable to share this simple faith. They are State socialists not because they have more confidence in the State than other socialists, but because they have less. They consider it utterly futile to expect a democratic community ever to be able to create a political executive that should be powerful enough to carry through the entire socialistic programme. Like the Social Conservatives of all countries, like our own Young England party, for example, or the Tory Democrats of the present generation, they combine a warm zeal for popular amelioration with a profound distrust of popular government; but when compared with other socialists, they take a very sober view of the capacity of government of any kind; and although they believe implicitly in the "Social Monarchy of the Hohenzollerns," they doubt whether the strongest monarchy the world has ever seen would be strong enough to effect a socialistic reconstruction of the industrial system without retaining the existence for many centuries to come of the ancient institutions of private property and inheritance. All that is at least very frankly acknowledged by Rodbertus, the remarkable but overrated thinker whom the State socialists of Germany have chosen for their father. Rodbertus was always regarded as a great oracle by Lassalle, the originator of the present socialist agitation, and his authority is constantly quoted by the most eminent luminary among the State socialists of those latter days, Professor Adolph Wagner, who says it was Rodbertus that first shed on him "the Damascus light that tore from his eyes the scales of economic individualism." Rodbertus had lived for a quarter of a century in a political sulk against the Hohenzollerns. Though he had served as a Minister of State, he threw up his political career rather than accept a constitution as a mere royal favour; he refused to work under it or recognise it by so much as a vote at the polls. But when the power of the Hohenzollerns became established by the victories of Königgrätz and Sedan, and when they embarked on their new policy of State socialism, Rodbertus developed into one of their most ardent worshippers. Their new social policy, it is true, was avowedly adopted as a corrective of socialism, as a kind of inoculation with a milder type of the disease in order to procure immunity from a more malignant; but Bismarck contended at the same time that it was nothing but the old traditional policy of the House of Prussia, who had long before placed the right of existence and the right of labour in the statute-book of the country, and whose most illustrious member, Frederick the Great, used to be fond of calling himself "the beggars' king." Under these circumstances Rodbertus came to place the whole hope of the future in the "Social Monarchy of the Hohenzollerns," and ventured to prophesy that a socialist emperor would yet be born to that House who would rule possibly with a rod of iron, but would always rule for the greatest good of the labouring class. Still, even under a dynasty of socialist emperors Rodbertus gave five hundred years for the completion of the economic revolution he contemplated, because he acknowledged it would take all that time for society to acquire the moral principle and habitual firmness of will which would alone enable it to dispense with the institutions of private property and inheritance without suffering serious injury. In theory Rodbertus was a believer in the modern social democratic doctrine of the labourer's right to the full product of his labour--the doctrine which gives itself out as "scientific socialism," because it is got by combining a misunderstanding of Ricardo's theory of wages with a misunderstanding of the same economist's theory of value--and which would abolish rent, interest, profit, and all forms of "labourless income," and give the entire gross product to the labourer, because by that union of scientific blunders it is made to appear that the labourer has produced the whole product himself. Rodbertus, in fact, claimed to be the author of that doctrine, and fought for the priority with Marx, though in reality the English socialists had drawn the same conclusions from the same blunders long before either of them; but author or no author of it, his sole reason for touching the work of social reform at all was to get that particular claim of right recognised. Yet for five hundred years Rodbertus will not wrong the labourers by granting them their full rights. He admits that without the assistance of the private capitalist during that interval labourers would not produce so much work, and therefore could not earn so much wages as they do now; and consequently, in spite of his theories, he declines to suppress rent and interest in the meantime, and practically tells the labourers they must wait for the full product of labour till the time comes when they can produce the full product themselves. That is virtually to confess that while the claim may be just then, it is unjust now; and although Rodbertus never makes that acknowledgment, he is content to leave the claim in abeyance and to put forward in its place, as a provisional ideal of just distribution more conformable to the present situation of things, the claim of the labourer to a progressive share, step for step with the capitalist, in the results of the increasing productivity given to labour by inventions and machinery. He thought that at present, so far from getting the whole product of labour, the labourer was getting a less and less share of its products every day, and though this can be easily shown to be a delusive fear, Rodbertus's State socialism was devised to counteract it. For this purpose the first requisite was the systematic management of all industries by the State. The final goal was to be State property as well as State management, but for the greater part of five centuries the system would be private property and State management. Sir Rowland Hill and the English railway nationalizers proposed that the State should own the lines, but that the companies should continue to work them; Rodbertus's idea, on the contrary, is that the State should work, but not own. But then the State should manage everything and everywhere. Co-operation and joint-stock management were as objectionable to him as individual management. He thought it a mere delusion to suppose, as some socialists did, that the growth of joint-stock companies and co-operative societies is a step in historical evolution towards a socialist _régime_. It was just the opposite; it was individual property in a worse form, and he always told his friend Lassalle that it was a hopeless dream to expect to bring in the reign of justice and brotherhood by his plan of founding productive associations on State credit, because productive societies really led the other way, and created batches of joint-stock property, which he said would make itself a thousand times more bitterly hated than the individual property of to-day. One association would compete with another, and the group on a rich mine would use their advantage over the group on a poor one as mercilessly as private capitalists do now. Nothing would answer the end but State property, and nothing would conduce to State property but State management. The object of all this intervention, as we have said, is to realize a certain ideal or standard of fair wages--the standard according to which a fair wage is one that grows step by step with the productive capacity of the country; and the plan Rodbertus proposes to realize it by is practically a scheme of compulsory profit-sharing. He would convert all land and capital into an irredeemable national stock, of which the present owners would be constituted the first or original holders, which they might sell or transfer at pleasure but not call up, and on which they should receive, not a fixed rent or rate of interest, but an annual dividend varying with the produce or profits of the year. The produce of the year was to be divided into three parts: one for the landowners, to be shared according to the amount of stock they respectively held; a second for the capitalists, to be shared in the same way; and the third for the labourers, to be shared by them according to the quantity of work they did, measured by the time occupied and the relative strain of their several trades. This division was necessarily very arbitrary in its nature; there was no principle whatever to decide how much should go to the landowners, and how much to capitalists, and how much to labourers; and although there was a rule for settling the price of labour in one trade as compared with the price of labour in another, it is a rule that would afford very little practical guidance if one came to apply it in actual life. At all events, Rodbertus himself toiled for years at a working plan for his scheme of wages, but though he always gave out that he had succeeded in preparing one, he steadily refused to disclose it even to trusted admirers like Lassalle and Rudolph Meyer, on the singular pretext that the world knew too little political economy as yet to receive it, and at his death nothing of the sort seems to have been discovered among his papers. Is it doing him any injustice to infer that he had never been able to arrive at a plan that satisfied his own mind as to its being neither arbitrary nor impracticable? Now this is a good specimen of State socialism, because it is so complete and brings out so decisively the broad characteristics of the system. In the first place, it desires a progressive and indiscriminate nationalization of all industries, not because it thinks they will be more efficiently or more economically managed in consequence of the change, but merely as a preliminary step towards a particular scheme of social reform; in the next place, that scheme of social reform is an ideal of equitable distribution which is demonstrably false, and is admittedly incapable of immediate realization; in the third place, a provisional policy is adopted in the meanwhile by pitching arbitrarily on a certain measure of privileges and advantages that are to be guaranteed to the labouring classes by law as partial instalments of rights deferred or compensations for rights alleged to be taken away. It may be that not many State socialists are so thoroughgoing as Rodbertus. Few of them possibly accept his theory of the labourer's right--which is virtually that the labourer has a right to everything, all existing wealth being considered merely an accumulation of unpaid labour--and few of them may throw so heavy a burden on the State as the whole production and the whole distribution of the country. But they all start from some theory of right that is just as false, and they all impose work on the State which the State cannot creditably perform. They all think of the mass of mankind as being disinherited in one way or another by the present social system, perhaps through the permission of private property at all, perhaps through permission of its inequalities. M. de Laveleye, indeed, goes a step further back still. In an article he has contributed on this subject to the _Contemporary Review_, he uses as his motto the saying of M. Renan that Nature is injustice itself, and he would have society to correct not merely the inequalities which society may have itself had a share in establishing, but also the inequalities of talent or opportunity which are Nature's own work. Accordingly, M. de Laveleye describes himself as a State socialist, because he thinks "the State ought to make use of its legitimate powers for the establishment of the equality of conditions among men in proportion to their personal merit." Equality of conditions and personal merit are inconsistent standards, but if they were harmonious, it would be beyond the power of the State to realize them for want of an effective calculus of either. Few State socialists, however, profess the purpose of correcting the differences of native endowment; for the most part, when they found their policy on any theoretic idea at all, they found it on some idea of historical reparation. In this country, socialist notions always crop up out of the land. German socialists direct their attack mainly on capital, but English socialism fastens very naturally on property in land, which in England is concentrated into unnaturally few hands: and a claim is very commonly advanced for more or less indefinite compensation to the labouring class on account of their alleged disinheritance, through the institution of private property, from their aboriginal or natural rights to the use of the earth, the common possession of the race. That is the ground, for example, which Mr. Spencer takes for advocating land nationalization, and Mr. Chamberlain for his various claims for "ransom." The last-comer is held to have as good a right to the free use of the earth as the first occupant; and if society deprives him of that right for purposes of its own, he is maintained to be entitled to receive some equivalent, as if society does not already give the new-comer vastly more than it took away. His chances of obtaining a decent living in the world, instead of being reduced, have been immensely multiplied through the social system that has resulted from the private appropriation of land. The primitive economic rights whose loss socialists make the subject of so much lamentation are generally considered to be these four: (1) the right to hunt; (2) the right to fish; (3) the right to gather nuts and berries; and (4) the right to feed a cow or sheep on the waste land. Fourier added a fifth--which was certainly a right much utilized in early times--the right of theft from people over the border of the territory of one's own tribe. Let that right be thrown in with the rest; then the claim with which every English child is alleged to be born, and for which compensation is asked, is the claim to a thirty-millionth part of the value of these five aboriginal uses of the soil of England; and what is that worth? Why, if the "prairie value" of the soil is estimated at the high figure of a shilling the acre per annum, it would only give every inhabitant something under half a crown, and when compensation is demanded for the loss of this ridiculous pittance, one calls to mind what immensely greater compensations the modern child is born to. Civilization is itself a social property, a common fund, a people's heritage, accumulating from one generation to another, and opening to the new-comer economic opportunities and careers incomparably better and more numerous than the ancient liberties of fishing in the stream or nutting in the forest. The things actually demanded for the poor in liquidation of this alleged claim may often be admissible on other grounds altogether, but to ask them in the name of compensation for the loss of those primitive economic rights--even though it was done by Spencer or Cobden--is certainly State socialism. Mr. Chamberlain's famous "ransom" speeches are an example of that. There was nothing socialist about the substance of his proposals. He expressly disclaimed all sympathy with the idea of equality of conditions; he hesitated about applying the graduated taxation principle to anything but legacies; he explicitly said he would do nothing to discourage the cumulative principle in the rich, or the habit of industry in the poor; he asked mainly for free schools, free libraries, free parks, and other things of a like character; but then he asked for them as a penalty for wrong-doing, instead of an obligation of ability--as a ransom to be paid by the rich, or by society generally, for having ousted the poor out of their aboriginal rights. Mr. Chamberlain merely pled for useful social reforms in a socialistic spirit. The favourite theory on which the German State socialists proceed seems to be that men are entitled to an equalization of opportunities, to an immunity, as far as human power can secure it, from the interposition of chance and change. That at least is the view of Professor Adolph Wagner, whose position on the subject is of considerable consequence, because he is the economist-in-ordinary to the German Government, and has been Prince Bismarck's principal adviser in connection with all his recent social legislation. Professor Wagner may be taken as the most eminent and most authoritative exponent of the theory of State socialism, and he recently developed his views on the subject afresh in some articles in the Tübingen _Zeitschrift für die Gesammten Staatswissenschaften_ for 1887, on "Finanz-politik und Staatsozialismus." According to Wagner, the chief aim of the State at present--in taxation and in every other form of its activity--ought to be to alter the national distribution of wealth to the advantage of the working class. All politics must become social politics; the State must turn workman's friend. For we have arrived at a new historical period; and just as the feudal period gave way to the absolutist period, and the absolutist period to the constitutional, so now the constitutional period is merging in what ought to be called the social period, because social ideas are very properly coming more and more to influence and control everything, alike in the region of production, in the region of distribution, and in the region of consumption. Now, according to Wagner, the business of the State socialist is simply to facilitate the development of this change--to work out the transition from the constitutional to the social epoch in the best, wisest, and most wholesome way for all parties concerned. He rejects the so-called "scientific socialism" of Marx and Rodbertus and Lassalle, and the practical policy of the social democratic agitation; and he will not believe either that a false theory like theirs can obtain a lasting influence, or that a party that builds itself on such a theory can ever become a real power. But, at the same time, he cannot set down the socialistic theory as a mere philosophical speculation, or the socialistic movement as merely an artificial product of agitation. The evils of both lie in the actual situation of things; they are products--necessary products, he says--of our modern social development; and they will never be effectually quieted till that development is put on more salutary lines. They have a soul of truth in them, and that soul of truth in the doctrines and demands of radical socialism is what State socialism seeks to disengage, to formulate, to realize. It is quite true, for example, that the present distribution of wealth, with its startling inequalities of accumulation and want, is historically the effect, first, of class legislation and class administration of law; and second, of mere blind chance operating on a legal _régime_ of private property and industrial freedom, and a state of the arts which gave the large scale of production decided technical advantages. In one of his former writings, Professor Wagner contended that German peasants lived to this day in mean thatched huts, simply because their ancestors had been impoverished by feudal exactions and ruined by wars which they had no voice in declaring; and he seems to be now as profoundly impressed with the belief that the present liberty allowed to unscrupulous speculators to utilize the chances and opportunities of trade at the cost of others is producing evils in no way less serious, which ought to be checked effectively while there is yet time. So long as such tendencies are left at work, he says it is idle trying to treat socialism with any cunning admixture of cakes and blows, or charging State socialists with heating the oven of social democracy. State socialists, he continues, comprehend the disease which Radical socialists only feel wildly and call down fire to cure, and they are as much opposed to the purely working-class State of the latter, as they are to the purely constitutional State of our modern _Liberalismus vulgaris_, as Wagner calls it. The true Social State lies, in his opinion, between the two. What the new social era demands--the era which is already, he thinks, well in course of development, but which it is the business of State socialism to help Providence to develop aright--is the effective participation of poor and rich alike in the civilization which the increased productive resources of society afford the means of enjoying; and this is to be brought about in two ways: first, by a systematic education of the whole people according to a well-planned ideal of culture, and second, by a better distribution of the income of society among the masses. Now, to carry out these requirements, the idea of liberty proper to the constitutional era must naturally be finally discarded, and a very large hand must be allowed to the public authority in every department of human activity, whether relating to the production, distribution, or consumption of wealth. In the first place, in order to destroy the effect of chance and of the utilization of chances in creating the present accumulations in private hands, it is necessary to divert into the public treasury as far as possible the whole of that part of the national income which goes now, in the form of rent, interest, or profit, into the pockets of the owners of land and capital, and the conductors of business enterprises. Wagner would accordingly nationalize (or municipalize) gradually so much of the land, capital, and industrial undertakings of the country as could be efficiently managed as public property or public enterprises, and that would include all undertakings which tend to become monopolies even in private hands, or which, being conducted best on the large scale, are already managed under a form of organization which, in his opinion, has most of the faults and most of the merits of State management--viz., the form of joint-stock companies. He would in this way throw on the Government all the great means of communication and transport, railways and canals, telegraphs and post, and all banking and insurance; and on the municipalities all such things as the gas, light, and water supply. Although he recognises the suitability of Government management as a consideration to be weighed in nationalizing an industry, he states explicitly that the reason for the change he proposes is not in the least the fiscal or economic one that the industry can be more advantageously conducted by the Government, but is a theory of social politics which requires that the whole economic work of the people ought to be more and more converted from the form of private into the form of public organization, so that every working man might be a public servant and enjoy the same assured existence that other public servants at present possess. In the next place, since many industries must remain in private hands, the State is bound to see the existence of the labourers engaged in private works guaranteed as securely as those engaged in public works. It must take steps to provide them with both an absolute and a relative increase of wages by instituting a compulsory system of paying wages as a percentage of the gross produce; it must guarantee them a certain continuity of employment; must limit the hours of their labour to the length prescribed by the present state of the arts in the several trades; and supply a system of public insurance against accidents, sickness, infirmity, and age, together with a provision for widows and orphans. In the third place, all public works are to be managed on the socialistic principle of supplying manual labourers with commodities at a cheaper rate than their social superiors. They are to have advantages in the matters of gas and water supply, railway fares, school fees, and everything else that is provided by the public authority. In the fourth place, taxation is to be employed directly to mitigate the inequalities of wealth resulting from the present commercial system, and to save and even increase the labourer's income at the expense of the income of other classes. This is to be done by the progressive income-tax, and by the application of the product of indirect taxation on certain articles of working-class consumption to special working-class ends. For example, he thinks Prince Bismarck's proposed tobacco monopoly might be made "the patrimony of the disinherited." In the fifth place, the State ought to take measures to wean the people not only from noxious forms of expenditure, like the expenditure on strong drink, but from useless and wasteful expenditure, and to guide them into a more economic, far-going, and beneficial employment of the earnings they make. Now for all this work, involving as it does so large an amount of interference with the natural liberty of things, Wagner not unreasonably thinks that a strong Government is absolutely indispensable--a Government that knows its own mind, and has the power and the will to carry it out; a Government whose authority is established on the history and opinion of the nation, and stands high above all the contending political factions of the hour. And in Germany, such an executive can only be found in the present Empire, which is merely following "Frederician and Josephine traditions" in coming forward, as it did in the Imperial message of November, 1881, as a genuine "social monarchy." In this doctrine of Professor Wagner we find the same general features we have already seen in the doctrine of Rodbertus. It is true he would not nationalize all industries whatsoever; he would only nationalize such industries as the State is really fit to manage successfully. He admits that uneconomic management can never contribute to the public good, and so far he accepts a very sound principle of limitation. But then he applies the principle with too great laxity. He has an excessive idea of the State's capacities. He thinks that every business now conducted by a joint-stock company could be just as well conducted by the Government, and ought therefore to be nationalized; but experience shows--railway experience, for example--that joint-stock management, when it is good, is better than Government management at its best. Then Professor Wagner thinks every industry which has a natural tendency to become in any case a practical monopoly would be better in the hands of the Government; but Government might interfere enough to restrain the mischiefs of monopoly--as it does in the case of railways in this country, for example--without incurring the liabilities of complete management. Professor Wagner would in these ways throw a great deal of work on Government which Government is not very fit to accomplish successfully, and he would like to throw everything on it, if he could overcome his scruples about its capabilities, because he thinks industrial nationalization would facilitate the realization of his particular views of the equitable distribution of wealth. It is true, again, that Wagner's theory of equitable distribution is not the theory of Rodbertus--he rejects the right of labour to the whole product; but his theory, if less definite, is not less unjustifiable. It is virtually the theory of equality of conditions which considers all inequalities of fortune wrong, because they are held to come either from chance, or--what is worse--from an unjust utilization of chance, and which, on that account, takes comparative poverty to constitute of itself a righteous claim for compensation as against comparative wealth. Now, a state of enforced equality of conditions would probably be found neither possible nor desirable, but it is in its very conception unjust. It may be well, as far as it can be done, to check refined methods of deceit, or cruel utilizations of an advantageous position, but it can never be right to deprive energy, talent, and character of the natural reward and incentive of their exertions. The world would soon be poor if it discouraged the skill of the skilful, as it would soon cease to be virtuous if it ostracized those who were pre-eminently honest or just. The idea of equality has been a great factor in human progress, but it requires no such outcome as this. Equality is but the respect we owe to human dignity, and that very respect for human dignity demands security for the fruits of industry to the successful, and security against the loss of the spirit of personal independence in the mass of the people. But while that is so, there is one broad requirement of that same fundamental respect for human dignity which must be admitted to be wholly just and reasonable--the requirement which we have seen to have been recognised by the English economists--that the citizens be, as far as possible, secured, if necessary by public compulsion and public money, in the elementary conditions of all humane living. The State might not be right if it gave the aged a comfortable superannuation allowance, or the unemployed agreeable work at good wages; but it is only doing its duty when, with the English law, it gives them enough to keep them, without taking away from the one the motives for making a voluntary provision against age, or from the other the spur to look out for work for themselves. It will be said that this is a standard that is subject to a certain variability; that a house may be considered unfit for habitation now that our fathers would have been fain to occupy; that shoes seem an indispensable element of humane living now, though, as Adam Smith informs us, they were still only an optional decency in some parts of Scotland in his time. But differences of this nature lead to no practical difficulty, and the standard is fixity of measure itself when compared with the indefinite claims that may be made in the name of historical compensation, or wild theories of distributive justice, and it makes a wholesome appeal to recognised obligations of humanity instead of feeding a violent sense of unbounded hereditary wrong. At all events, it presents the true equality--equality of moral rights--over against the false equality of State socialism--equality of material conditions; and it is able to present a better face against that system, because it recognises a certain measure of material conditions among the original moral rights. For this reason the English theory of social politics is the best practical criterion for discriminating between socialistic legislation and wholesome social reforms. The State socialistic position cannot be advantageously attacked from the ground of Mr. Spencer and the adherents of _laissez-faire_, who merely say, Let misfortune and poverty alone; whether remediable or irremediable, they are not the State's affairs. The two theories nowhere come within range; but the English theory meets State socialism at every point, almost hand to hand, for it admits the State's competency to deal with poverty and misfortune, and to alter men's material conditions to the extent needed for the practical realization of their full moral rights. III. _State Socialism and Social Reform._ On this English theory of social politics, the State, though not socialist, is very frankly social reformer, and those schools of opinion, which are usually thought to have been most averse to Government intervention, have been among the most earnest in pressing that _rôle_ upon the State. Cobden, I presume, may be taken as a fair representative of the Manchester school, and Cobden, with all his love of liberty, loved progress more, and thought the best Government was the Government that did most for social reform. When he visited Prussia in 1838, he was struck with admiration at the paternal but improving rule he found in operation there. "I very much suspect," he said, "that at present for the great mass of the people Prussia possesses the best Government in Europe. I would gladly give up my taste for talking politics, to secure such a state of things in England. Had our people such a simple and economical Government, so deeply imbued with justice to all, and aiming so constantly to elevate mentally and morally its population, how much better would it be for the twelve or fifteen millions in the British Empire, who, while they possess no electoral rights, are yet persuaded they are freemen!" So far from thinking, as the Manchester man of polemics is always made to think, that the State goes far enough when it secures to every man liberty to pursue his own interest his own way, as long as he does not interfere with the corresponding right of his neighbours, the Manchester man of reality takes the State severely to task for neglecting to promote the mental and moral elevation of the people; the chief end of Government being to establish not liberty alone, but every other necessary security for rational progress. The theory of _laissez-faire_ would of course permit measures required for the public safety, but what Cobden calls for are measures of social amelioration. Provisions for the better protection of person and property, as they exist, against violence or fraud, make up but a small part of legitimate State duty, compared with provisions for their better development, for enlarging the powers of the national manhood, or the product of the national resources. The institution of property itself is a provision for progress, and could never have originated under the system of _laissez-faire_, which now makes it a main branch of State work to defend it. In the form of permanent and exclusive possession, it is undoubtedly a contravention of the equal freedom of all to the use of their common inheritance, committed for the purpose of securing their more productive use of it. It interferes with their access to the land, and with the equality of their opportunities, but then it enhances and concentrates the energies of the occupants, and it doubles the yield of the soil. It promotes two objects, which are quite as paramount concerns of the State as liberty itself--it improves the industrial manhood of the nation, and it increases the productivity of the natural resources; and institutions that conduce to such results are not really infractions of liberty, but rather complements of it, because they give people an ampler use of their own powers, and create, by means of the increase of production they work, more and better opportunities than those they take away. Now the lines of legitimate intervention prescribed by the necessities of progress, and already followed in the original institution of property, will naturally, when extended through our complicated civilization, include a very considerable and varied field of social and industrial activity, and this has been all along recognised by the English economists and statesmen. While opposed to the State doing anything either moral or material for individuals, which individuals could do better, or with better results, for themselves, they agreed in requiring the State, first, to undertake any industrial work it had superior natural advantages for conducting successfully; and second, to protect the weaker classes effectively in the essentials of all rational and humane living--in what Adam Smith calls "an undeformed and unmutilated manhood"--not only against the ravages of violence or fear or insecurity, but against those of ignorance, disease, and want. Smith, we know, would even save them from cowardice by a system of military training, and from fanaticism by an established Church, because, he said, cowardice and fanaticism were as great deformities of manhood as ignorance or disease, and prevented a man from having command of himself and his own powers quite as effectually as violence or oppression. Laws which give every man better command and use of his own energies are in manifest harmony with liberty, and for the State to do such industrial work as it has special natural advantages for doing is conformable with the principle of free-trade itself, which has always prescribed to men and nations as the best rule for their prosperity, that they should concentrate their strength on the branches of industry they possess natural advantages for cultivating, and give up wasting their labour on less productive employment. Mr. Chamberlain is certainly wrong in thinking over-government an extinct danger under democratic institutions, a mere survival from times of oppression which haunts the people still, though they are their own masters, with foolish fears of over-governing themselves. In reality, the danger has much more probably increased, as John Stuart Mill believed, for if we cannot over-govern ourselves, we can very easily and cheerfully over-govern one another, and a majority may impose its brute will with even less scruple than a monarch; but however that may be, those who tremble most sincerely for the ark of liberty cannot see any undue contraction of the field of individual action in an extension of authority for either of the two purposes here specified, for the purpose of undertaking industrial work which private initiative cannot prosecute so advantageously, or of making more secure to the weaker citizens those primary conditions of normal humanity, which are really their natural right. The first of these purposes is quite consistent with the principles of men like W. von Humboldt, who contend that the best means of national prosperity is the cultivation to the utmost of the individual energy of the people, and who are opposed to Government interference because it represses or supplants that energy. They welcome everything that tends to economize and develop energy, to place things in the hands of those that can do them best, and generally to increase the productive capacity of the whole community. They believe that machinery, division of labour, factory systems, keenest conditions of competition, however they may at first seem to contract men's opportunities of employment, always end in multiplying them, and, because they increase or economize the productive powers of those actually employed, really expand the field of employment for all. Now Government management would of course have a like operation wherever Government management effected a like economy or increase in the productive powers of society, and would really expand the field of individual initiative which it appeared to contract; and those who believe most in individual energy and its power of seeking out for itself the most advantageous new outlets, will find least to complain of in an intervention of authority which releases men from work ill-suited to their powers to do, and sends them into work where their powers can be more fruitfully occupied. The second purpose of legitimate intervention seems even less open to objection from that side. The State is asked to go in social reform only as far as it goes in judicial administration--it is asked to secure for every man as effectively as it can those essentials of all rational and humane living which are really every man's right, because without them he would be something less than man, his manhood would be wanting, maimed, mutilated, deformed, incapable of fulfilling the ends of its being. Those original requirements of humane existence are dues of the common nature we wear, which, we cannot see extinguished in others without an injury to our own self-respect, and the State is bound to provide adequate securities for one of them as much as for another. The same reason which justified the State at first in protecting person and property against violence, justified it yesterday in abolishing slavery, justifies it to-day in abolishing ignorance, and will justify it to-morrow in abolishing other degrading conditions of life. The public sense of human dignity may grow from age to age and be offended to-morrow by what it tolerates to-day, but the principle of sound intervention is all through the same--that the proposed measure is necessary to enable men to live the true life of a man and fulfil the proper ends of rational being. A thoughtful French writer defends State intervention for the purpose of social amelioration as being a mere duty of what he calls reparative justice. Popular misery and decadence, he would say, is always very largely the result of bad laws and other bad civil conditions, as we see it plainly to have been in the case of the Irish cottiers, the Scotch crofters, and the rural labourers of England, and when the community has really inflicted the injury, the community is bound in the merest justice to repair it. And the obligation would not be exhausted with the repeal of bad laws; it would require the positive restoration to the declining populations of the conditions of real prosperity from which they fell. But though this is a specific ground which may occasionally quicken the State's remedial action with something of the energy of remorse, it is no extension of its natural and legitimate sphere of intervention, and the State might properly take every measure necessary for the effectual restoration of a declining section of the population to conditions of real prosperity on the broad and simple principle already laid down, that the measure is necessary to put those people in a position to fulfil their vocation as human beings. Hopeless conditions of labour are as contrary to sound nature, and as fatal to any proper use of man's energies, as slavery itself, and their mere existence constitutes a sufficient cause for the State's intervention, apart from any special responsibility the State may bear for their historical origin. Even the measure of the required intervention is no way less, for if its purpose is to preserve some essential of full normal manhood, its only limit is that of being effectual to serve the purpose. The original natural obligation of the State needs no expansion then from historical responsibilities to cover any effectual form of remedial action against the social decadence of particular classes of the population, whether it be the constitution of a new right like the right to a fair rent, the adoption of administrative measures like the migration of redundant inhabitants, or the provision of wise facilities for the rest by the loan of public money. It is plain, therefore, that we have here within the lines of accepted and even "orthodox" English theory a doctrine of social politics which gives the Government an ample and perfectly adequate place in the promotion of all necessary social reform; and if we are all socialists now, as is so often said, it is not because we have undergone any change of principles on social legislation, but only a public awakening to our social miseries. The Churches, for example, while they left Lord Shaftesbury to fight his battles for the helpless alone, have now shared in this social awakening, and show not only a general ardour to agitate social questions, but even some pains to understand them; but the Churches did not neglect Lord Shaftesbury fifty years ago, because they thought his Factory Bills proceeded from unsound views of the State's functions, but merely because their interest was not then sufficiently aroused in the temporal welfare of the poor, and with all their individual charities they responded little to the grievances of social classes. We are all socialists now, only in feeling as much interest in these grievances as the socialists are in the habit of doing, but we have not departed from our old lines of social policy, and there is no need we should, for they are broad enough to satisfy every claim of sound social reform. It is only when these lines are transgressed that, strictly speaking, socialism begins; and though it is hopeless to think of confining the vulgar use of the word to its strict signification, it is at least essential to do so if we desire any clear or firm grasp of principle. The socialism of the present time extends the State's intervention from those industrial undertakings it is fitted to manage well to all industrial undertakings whatever, and from establishing securities for the full use of men's energies to attempting to equalize in some way the results of their use of them. It may be shortly described as aiming at the progressive nationalization of industries with a view to the progressive equalization of incomes. The common pleas for this policy are, first, the necessity of introducing a distribution of wealth more in accordance with personal merit by neutralizing the effects of chance, which at present throw some into opulence without any co-operation from their own labour, and press thousands into penury in spite of their most honest exertions; and second, the advantage society would reap from the mere economy of the resources at present wasted in unnecessary competition. Both pleas are, however delusive; it is neither good nor possible to suppress chance, and if competition involves some loss, it yields a much more abounding gain. A sense of the blind play of chance in all things human lies indeed beneath all work of social relief. "Hodie mihi, cras tibi," wrote the good Regent Murray over his lintel to avert the grudge of envy, and the same feeling of the uncertainty of fortune quickens the thought of pity. Men reflect how much of their own comfort they owe to good circumstances rather than good deserts, and how much more bad circumstances have often to do with poverty than bad guiding. To change these bad conditions so far as to preserve for every man intact the essentials of common progressive manhood is a proper object of social work. But while mitigating the operation of chance to that extent is well, to try and suppress its operation altogether would be injurious, even if it were possible. For there is no pursuit under the sun in which chance has not its part as well as skill, and skill itself is often nothing but a quick grasp of happy chance. To discourage the alert from seizing good opportunities on the wing, by confiscating the results and distributing them among the languid and inactive, is the same thing as to discourage them by like means from exerting all their industry in any other way. It violates their individual right with no better effect than to cripple the national production. They are entitled to the best conditions for the successful use of their individual energies, and the best conditions for the use of individual energies are the true securities for national progress. The sound policy is not the greater equalization of opportunities, but their greater utilization. It may be right to make ships seaworthy and their masters competent navigators, but if one of them gets delayed in a calm or disabled by a storm, while another has caught a fair wind and is carried on to port, it would answer no good purpose to equalize their gains for the mere correction of the inequality in their opportunities. It would relax in both masters alike the supreme essentials of all successful labour--activity, vigilance, enterprise. State action with respect to the quips and arrows of fortune ought to go as far but no farther than State action with respect to the crimes and hostilities of men, or with respect to evil forces of nature like those of infectious diseases--it ought to content itself with effectually protecting the primary conditions of sound manhood against their outrages. It may do what it can, not merely to relieve the unfortunate in their extremity, but to prevent their coming to extremity, to arrest, if possible, their decline, to check or soften the trade fluctuations that often swamp them, and to facilitate their self-recovery; but, when it goes on to suppress or equalize the operation of fortune, it destroys the good with the evil, and even if it removed the tares, would find it had only spoiled the harvest of wheat. The present industrial system has its defects, but it certainly has one immense advantage which would be forfeited under socialism--it tends to elicit to their utmost the talents and energies alike of employers and employed. The languor of the "Government stroke" and the slow mechanism of a State department are unfavourable to an abundant production. The general slackening of industry, and the extinction of those innumerable sources of active initiative which at present are so busy pushing out new and fruitful developments, are too great a price to pay for the suppression of the evils of competition. To effect some economies in the use of capital, we damage or destroy the forces by which capital is produced, and really lose the pound to save the penny. Even from the standing-point of a good distribution of wealth, if by a good distribution we mean, not an equal distribution of the produce, however small the individual share, but, what is surely much better, a high general level of comfort, though considerable inequalities may remain, then an abundant production is still the most indispensable thing, for it is the most certain of all means to that high general level of comfort. Even in those agricultural countries where this result is promoted by a land system favouring peasant properties, the result is largely due to the fact that occupying ownership is itself the best condition for high production; and if we compare the principal modern industrial nations, we shall find labour enjoying the best real remuneration in those where the rate of production is highest, where employers are most competent, machinery most perfected, and labour itself personally most efficient. And, on the other hand, while the general level of comfort rises under a policy that develops productivity even at the risk of widening inequality, the general level of comfort always sinks under the contrary policy which sacrifices productivity to socialistic ideas and claims. We have practical experience of the working of socialism in various forms, and under the most opposite conditions of culture, and the experience is everywhere the same. Custom in Samoa, for example, gives a man a pretty strict right to go to his neighbour and requisition what he wants, or even to quarter himself in the house without payment, as long as he pleases. No one dares to refuse, for fear of losing credit and suffering reproach. Originating as a well-meant refuge for the distressed, the system has become still more a subterfuge for the lazy, and Dr. Turner sums up his account of it by saying, "This communistic system is a sad hindrance to the industrious, and eats like a canker-worm at the roots of individual and national progress." The disheartening of the industrious has an even worse effect than the encouragement of the indolent; the more they make, the more subject they are to the imposition. The English agricultural labourers belong to a very different state of society from the savages of Samoa. They are of an energetic race, which if it does not positively love work, has probably as little aversion to it as any nation in the world, and seems often really to delight in the hardest exertion; but in England the effect of giving the poor a similar socialistic right was precisely the same as in Samoa. While we are supposed to have been advancing in socialism with our Factory Acts, we were really retreating from it in our Poor Law. The old English laws which for centuries first fixed labourers' wages, and then made up the deficiencies of the wages, if such occurred, out of the poor rates, were certainly socialistic, and the commission that inquired into their working sixty years ago reported that their worst effect had been to make the labourers such poor workers that they were hardly worth the wages they got. The men were by law unable to earn more if they worked more, or to lose anything if they worked less, and so their very working powers drooped and withered. As most modern socialists put their trust entirely in the old motive of self-interest, and propose to pay every man according to his work, their only resource against such a result would be a stern system of poor-law administration, like the English, and that would of course involve a departure from their favourite ideal of furnishing the dependent poor with as decent and comfortable a living as the independent poor gain for themselves by their work. The change from Samoa to rural England is probably not so great as the change from rural England to Brook Farm and the other experimental communities of the United States, companies of cultivated and earnest people, coming from one of the best civilized stocks, and settling under the favourable material conditions of a new country for the very purpose of working out a socialist ideal. Yet in these American communities, socialistic institutions led to precisely the same results as they did in England and in Samoa, a slackening of industry, and a deterioration of the general level of comfort. No doubt, as Horace Greeley said, who knew these communities well, and lived for a time in more than one of them, there came to them along with the lofty souls, who are willing to labour and endure, "scores of whom the world is quite worthy, the conceited, the crotchety, the selfish, the headstrong, the pugnacious, the unappreciated, the played-out, the idle, the good-for-nothing generally, who, finding themselves utterly out of place, and at a discount in the world as it is, rashly conclude that they are exactly fitted for the world as it ought to be." But the proportion of difficult subjects would not be larger in Brook Farm or New Harmony than it is in the ordinary world outside, and in these communities they would be under the constant influence of leaders of the highest character and an almost religious enthusiasm. If the new and better economic motives, which romantic socialists like Mr. Bellamy always assure us are to carry us to such great things as soon as the suppression of the present pecuniary motive allows them to rise into operation--if the love of work for its own sake, the sense of public duty, the desire of public appreciation, could be expected to prevail anywhere to any purpose, it would be among the gifted and noble spirits who founded the community of Brook Farm. But the late W. H. Channing, who was a member of the community and looked back upon it with the tenderest feelings, explains its failure by saying: "The great evil, the radical, practical danger, seemed to be a willingness to do work half thorough, to rest in poor results, to be content amidst comparatively squalid conditions, and to form habits of indolence."[8] The idleness of the idle was one of the chief standing troubles in all the socialistic experiments of the United States. Mr. Noyes gives us an account of forty-seven communistic experiments which had been made under modern socialist influences in the United States and had failed, while Mr. Nordhoff, on the other hand, furnishes a like account of seventy-two communities, established mainly under religious influences (fifty-eight of them belonging to the Shakers alone), which have been not merely social but economic successes, some of them for more than a hundred years; and one is struck with the degree in which the idler difficulty has contributed to the failure of the forty-seven, and in which the continual and comparatively successful conflict with that difficulty by means of their peculiar system of religious discipline has aided in the success of the other seventy-two. Mr. Noyes is himself founder of the Oneida community, and bases his descriptions of the rest on information supplied by men who were members of the communities he describes, or on the materials collected by Mr. Macdonald, a Scotch Owenite, who visited most of the American communities for the purpose of describing them. No causes of failure are more often mentioned by him than "too many idlers" and "bad management." Not that industry was relaxed all round. On the contrary, it seems to have been a peculiarity of the Owenite and Fourierist communities, that the industrious wrought much harder (and in most of them for much poorer fare) than labourers of ordinary life. Macdonald was surprised at the marvellous industry he saw as he watched them, and would say to himself: "If you fail, I will give it up, for never did I see men work so well and so brotherly with each other." But then a little way off he would come on people who "merely crawled about, probably sick (he charitably suggests), just looking on like myself at anything which fell in their way." A very common feeling among members of these communities seems to have been that they were far more troubled with idlers than the rest of the world, because their system itself presented special attractions to that unwelcome class. "Men came," says one of the Trumbull Phalanx, "with the idea that they could live in idleness at the expense of the purchasers of the estate, and their ideas were practically carried out, while others came with good heart for the work." The same testimony is given about the Sylvania Association. "Idle and greedy people," says the writer of this testimony, "find their way into such attempts, and soon show forth their character by burdening others with too much labour, and in times of scarcity supplying themselves with more than their allowance of various necessaries, instead of taking less." Idle and greedy people, no doubt, did get into these communities, but these idle and greedy people constitute, I fear, a very large proportion of mankind, and the point is that socialistic institutions unfortunately offer them encouragement and opportunity. The experience of American communism directly contradicts John Stuart Mill's opinion, that men are not more likely to evade their fair share of the work under a socialistic system than they are now. That difficulty in one form or another was their constant vexation. The members of Owen's community at Yellow Springs belonged in general to a superior class; but one of them, in stating the causes of the failure of that community, says: "The industrious, the skilful, and the strong saw the products of their labour enjoyed by the indolent, and the unskilled, and the improvident, and self-love rose against benevolence. A band of musicians insisted that their brassy harmony was as necessary to the common happiness as bread and meat, and declined to enter the harvest field or the workshop. A lecturer upon Natural Science insisted upon talking only while others worked. Mechanics whose day's labour brought two dollars into the common stock insisted that they should in justice work only half as long as the agriculturist, whose day's work brought only one." The same evil, according to R. D. Owen, contributed to the fall of New Harmony; "there was not disinterested industry," he says, "there was not mutual confidence." A lady who was a member of the Marlboro' Association in Ohio, a socialistic experiment that lasted four years and then failed, attributes the failure to "the complicated state of the business concerns, the amount of debt contracted, and the feeling that each would work with more energy, for a time at least, if thrown upon his own resources, with plenty of elbow-room, and nothing to distract his attention." The magnitude of this difficulty only appears the greater when we turn from the forty-seven socialistic experiments which have failed to the seventy-two which have thriven. The Shakers and Rappists are undoubtedly very industrious people, who, by producing a good article, have won and kept for years a firm hold of the American market, and being, in consequence of their institution of celibacy, a community of adult workers exclusively, every man and every woman being a productive labourer, the wonder is they are not wealthier and more prosperous even than they are. Their economic prosperity is based, as economic prosperity always is and must be, on their general habits of industry, and the natural tendency of socialistic arrangements to relax these habits is in their case effectually, though not without difficulty, counteracted by their religious discipline. Idleness is a sin; next to disobedience to the elders, no other sin is more reprobated among them, because no other sin is at once so besetting and so dangerous there, and the conquest and suppression of idleness is a continual object of their vigilance, and of their ordinary devotional practice. Mr. Nordhoff publishes a few of their most popular hymns, and one is struck with the space the cultivation of personal industry seems to occupy in their thoughts. "Old Slug," as they delight to nickname the idler, is the "Old Adam" of the Shakers, and a public sentiment of hatred and contempt for the indolent man is sedulously fostered by them. As they not only work, but also live under one another's constant supervision, and within earshot of one another's criticism, they more than replace the eye of the master by the keener and more sleepless eye of moral and social police. And if all this discipline fails, they have the last resource of expulsion. They easily make the idler too uncomfortable to remain. "They have," says Mr. Nordhoff, "no difficulty in sloughing off persons who come with bad or low motives." They exercise, in short, the power of dismissal, the last sanction in ordinary use in the old state of society. Not that they make any virtue of strenuous labour. They work moderately, and avoid anything like fatigue or exhaustion. They frankly acknowledged to Mr. Nordhoff, once and again, that three hired men taken in from the ordinary world would do as much work as five or six of their members. Their wants are few and simple, and they are satisfied with the moderate exertion that suffices to supply them; but they will tolerate no shirking of that in any shape or form, and this alone saves them from disaster. The experiences of these successful Shaker and Rappist communities serve, therefore, to show, even better than the experiences of the unsuccessful Owenite and Fourierist communities, the gravity that the idleness difficulty would assume in a general socialistic _régime_, which possessed nothing in the nature of the power of dismissal, and in which we could not calculate either on the formation of an effective public opinion against idleness, or on its effective application if it were formed. The men who founded the unsuccessful communities were far superior to the Shakers in business ability and education, and they had more money to begin their experiments with, but where they failed the Shakers have succeeded through the indirect economic effects of their rigorous religious discipline. But the evidence is as plain in the one case as in the other as to the natural, and even powerful, effect of socialistic arrangements in relaxing the industry of many sorts and conditions of men. The same sources of evidence prove with equal clearness the development under socialistic institutions of two other concurrent causes of decline. I have already quoted Mr. Channing's statement that the Brook Farm community showed a disposition to be content with comparatively squalid conditions of life. Mr. Nordhoff would probably not use the word squalid of anything he saw in the Shaker and Rappist communities he describes, except perhaps in certain instances of the state of the public streets; and in some points, such as the scrupulous cleanness of the interior of their houses, he would set them far above their neighbours--you could eat your dinner, he says, off their floors. Still the people he found everywhere content, if not exactly with squalid, certainly with poor and dull and rough conditions of life, much poorer, duller, and rougher than they might easily be. They enjoyed equality, security from harassing anxiety for the morrow, abundance even for their limited wants, independence from subjection to a master, but they were weak in the ordinary springs of progress. The spirit of material improvement was not much abroad among them. Give me the stationary state of society and contentment, you may exclaim; but then even this stationary state is only maintained in these sequestered communities by the constant play of peculiar religious influences which cannot be counted on everywhere, and it would soon change into a declining state in the great seething world outside if it were not effectively counter-worked by the most powerful incentives to progress. Now the same equalizing social arrangements which destroy one of the most essential of these incentives by guaranteeing men the results of industry without its exertion, enfeeble a second by predisposing them to rest content with the lower conditions of life to which they are reduced. A third cause of decline to which the American experience shows socialistic institutions to be incident is a certain weakness in the management, produced sometimes by divided counsels, sometimes by the delay involved in getting the sanction of a Board to every little detail of business, and sometimes by a difficulty which we find also shattering similar experiments in France, that men were raised to the Committee by their gifts of persuasion rather than their gifts of administration. Well-meaning persons, with a great itch for managing things, and a great turn for bungling them, for whom there is, under the present order of society, a considerable safety-valve in philanthropy, contrive in a socialistic community to get appointed on the Council of Industry, and play sad havoc with the common good. While they preached and wasted, the really practical men who, with better power of talk, might have confounded them, could only sulk and grumble, and eventually lost heart in their work, and all interest and confidence in the concern. This had much to do, according to Mr. Meeker, an old Fourierist, with the ruin of the North American Phalanx, one of the most important of the transatlantic experiments, and it was the main cause apparently of the downfall of the community of Coxsackie--"They had many persons engaged in talking and law-making who did not work at any useful employment; the consequences were that after struggling on for between one and two years the experiment came to an end." A socialist State would probably have as many difficulties with this bustling but unsatisfactory class of persons as a socialist Phalanx, nor would the evils of divided counsels and departmental delays be a whit milder; and the extension of State management to branches of work for which it had not otherwise some sort of special natural qualification would have the same kind of ruinous operation. In spirit and effect, therefore, as may be palpably seen from these actual experiments, the equalizing institutions of socialism stand quite apart from the very restricted use of State management and the remedial or invigorating legislation that a sound social policy prescribes. When England is accused of heading the nations in the race of State socialism, because England has nationalized the post and telegraph service, and passed a series of factory and agrarian Acts for the protection of the weaker classes of the people, the accusation is made without proper discrimination. It is not the frequency of the intervention, but its purpose and consequences that make it socialistic. If the post is better managed by the State than by private initiative, if the factory and agrarian laws merely reinstate weaker classes in the conditions essential for a normal human life, and neither seek nor produce that equalization of the differences of fortune or skill which is fatal to any high and progressive general level of comfort, then there is no State socialism in it at all. State management is not pushed beyond the limit of efficiency, nor popular rights beyond the positive claims of social justice. Let us go a little further into detail. IV. _State Socialism and State Management._ What are the conditions of efficient State administration? The State possesses several natural characteristics which give it a decided advantage as an industrial manager, some for one branch of work, some for another. It has stability, it has permanency, and it has--what is perhaps its principal industrial superiority--unrivalled power of securing unity of administration, since it is the only agency that can use force for the purpose. On the other hand, it has one great natural defect, its want of a personal stake in the produce of the business it conducts, its want of that keen check on waste and that pushing incentive to exertion which private undertakings enjoy in the eye and energy of the master. This is the great taproot from which all the usual faults of Government management spring--its routine, red-tape spirit, its sluggishness in noting changes in the market, in adapting itself to changes in the public taste, and in introducing improved methods of production. Government servants may very generally be men of a higher stamp and training than the servants of a private company, but they are proverbial, on the one hand, for a certain lofty disdain of the humble but valuable virtue of parsimony, and, on the other, for an unprogressive, unenterprising, uninventive administration of business. Now the branches of industry which the State is fitted to carry on are of course those in which its great fault happens to have small scope for play, and in which its great merit or merits have great scope for play; those, for example, which gain largely in efficiency or economy by a centralized administration, and suffer little harm comparatively from a routine one. That is the reason Governments always manage the postal service well. In post-office work the specific industrial superiority of Government carries its maximum of advantage, and its specific industrial defect does its minimum of injury. The carrying and delivery of letters from one part of the empire to another require, for efficiency, a single co-ordinated system, and, on the other hand, those operations themselves are of so unvariable and routine a character that little harm is done by their being carried on in a routine spirit; they involve so little capital expenditure--the entire capital of the department in England is only £80,000--that the opportunity for waste and corruption is slight; and being conducted much more largely under the public eye than the affairs of other departments of State, they are consequently subject to the constant and interested criticism of the people whose wants they are meant to satisfy. The same reason explains why Government dockyards and arms factories are always managed so unsatisfactorily. There is, on the one hand, no need in them for any higher unity of administration than is wanted in any ordinary single business establishment; but, on the other, progressiveness and adaptability are of the first moment, routine and obstruction to improvement being indeed among their worst dangers. Then the risk of prodigality and corruption is high, for their capital expenditure is great, and the check of public criticism very distant and ineffectual. So exceptional a business is the post, that the telegraphs, though managed by the same department, have never been managed with the same success. They were bought at first at a ransom, they have involved an increasing loss nearly ever since, and the public have to pay practically as much for their telegrams--perhaps more--than the public of the United States pay to their telegraph companies. Even in the postal department, Government administration shows the usual official slowness in adopting much-needed and even lucrative reforms. Of this, a good example occurred only the other day. It was not until a Boys' Messenger Company was already in the field and doing the work, that the Postmaster-General was brought to recognise, as he said, "the desirability of providing a more rapid means of transmitting single letters for short distances and under special circumstances than at present exists." It ought of course to be acknowledged that State management in England is tried under the very worst possible conditions, inasmuch as it is tied to the fortunes and exigencies of political party. No business could be expected to thrive where the supreme control is placed in the hands of a good parliamentary debater, who knows nothing about the special work of the department he undertakes; where, even at that, this inexperienced hand is changed for another inexperienced hand every three or four years; where policy shifts without continuity, to dodge the popular breeze of to-day, or to catch the popular breeze of to-morrow; and where the actual incumbent of office, is always able to evade censure by throwing the responsibility on his predecessors, who are out of office. Well may a sagacious man like Mr. Samuel Laing, with large experience of administration both in the affairs of State and of private companies, exclaim: "I often think what the result would be if the railway companies managed their affairs on the same principles as the nation applies to its naval and military expenditure. Suppose the Brighton Board were turned out every three years, and a new Board came in with new views and a new policy, and new men at the head of the locomotive, traffic, and other spending departments, how long would it be before expenses went up and dividends down?" If State management is to succeed--if it is to have fair play--it must be entirely divorced from party fortunes, while subject, of course, to the criticism of Parliament, under some system like that adopted in Victoria for the management of the railways. In such circumstances the question of the advisability of Government assuming the management of any industry, is a question of balancing the probable gains from the greater unity of the administration against the probable losses from its greater inertia. There are some exceptional branches of industry in which Government does better than private persons, because private persons have too little interest to do the work well, or even to do it at all, and there are others in which the State's very want of personal interest is its advantage instead of its drawback. Forestry is the best example of the first sort. One generation must plant, and another cut down, so that the present owner is often unwilling to incur the expense of a speculation of which he is unlikely to live to reap the fruits; but the natural permanence of the State leads it to do more justice to this important branch of production, and experience everywhere shows that State forests are more productive than private ones. In Prussia and Belgium they are nearly twice as productive. The average annual produce of all forests in Prussia (including State forests) is 0.36 thaler per Morgen, but the produce of State forests alone is 0.66 thaler per Morgen. In Belgium the produce of all forests is 19.33 francs per hectare, and of State forests 34.42 francs.[9] The erection of lighthouses is also a public service, which falls to the State because of individual inability; it cannot be undertaken in any way to make it remunerative to private adventurers. The best example of an industrial work for which the State's want of personal interest is its advantage is the Mint. Nobody would trust the stamp of a private assayer as he trusts the stamp of the Government, because the private assayer could never succeed in placing his personal disinterestedness so absolutely above the suspicion of fraud. The policy of the official attestation of the quality of commodities is often disputed on the ground that it discourages improvement above the pass standard, but it is never doubted that if a brand is wanted, the brand to command most confidence is the brand of the Crown. Our own Government, out of the infinity of commodities offered for sale, attests none but six--butter, herrings, plate, gun barrels, chains, and anchors--articles in which the dangers of deterioration probably exceed the chances of improvement, and in the case of some of these six there is a strong feeling abroad that the State's intervention is doing more harm than good. Scotch herrings have suffered lately in the German markets, because they were worse cured than the Norwegian, and the herring brand was blamed for the unprogressiveness of the cure. This class of interventions, therefore, is neither numerous now, nor likely to become very numerous in the future. A more important class of undertakings in which the State's industrial advantage lies in its superiority to the temptations of self-interest, is that of industries which naturally assume something of the character of a monopoly, and in which self-interest lacks both the check on its rapacity, and the spur to its activity supplied by effective competition. It is true of more things than railways that when combination is possible, competition is impossible, and the growth of syndicates, trusts and pooling arrangements at the present day has led to considerable agitation for State interference, especially in the case of commodities like salt and coal, which are necessaries of life. Our experience of these things is as yet limited, but so far as it has gone it seems to show that the public dangers dreaded from them are apt to be exaggerated. The combinations fear to raise the price to the public so high as to provoke competition, and in most cases in America have not raised it at all, drawing their advantage rather from the reduction in expense of management, and the saving of capital; and the State would not be likely to manage industries producing for the markets any better than, or even so well as, the more keenly interested board of private directors. But if the balance of evidence seems against public management in this class of monopolies, it stands, I think, decidedly in favour of public management in another and not unimportant class. The gas and water supply of towns is a monopoly, and though the point is not undisputed, it appears to answer better on the whole in public than in private hands, because the management has no interest to serve except the interest of the public. Experience has not been everywhere the same, but usually it has been that under municipal control the quality of the gas has been improved and the price reduced. But this is municipal management of course, not State management, and the difference is material, inasmuch as municipal management, in the case of gas and water supply, is the management of the production of things of general consumption under the direct control of the very people who consume them, so that it is constantly exposed to effective public criticism, perhaps as good a substitute as things admit of for the eye of the master. The natural defect of public management is so mitigated by this circumstance, that probably of all forms of public management, municipal management is the best, and when applied to branches of production that tend to become monopolies at any rate, it answers well. The question is entirely different with proposals that are sometimes made for converting into municipal monopolies branches of production--such, for example, as the bread supply of the community--which are carried on by individual management under effective competition. To do as well as joint-stock management uncontrolled by competition is one thing; to do as well as individual management subject to competition is another; and so long as public management replaces nothing but the former class of enterprises, which are in any case a sort of natural monopolies, it will never contract the vast field of individual enterprise to any very serious extent. When we pass from municipal monopolies to State monopolies, the problem becomes more grave. The two largest current proposals of this kind are those of land nationalization and railway nationalization. The former proposal, though much more noisily advocated than the other, has incomparably the weaker case. For apart altogether from the mischief of making every rent settlement a political question, and looking at the matter merely in its economic aspect, land, of all things, is that which is least suited for centralized administration, and yields its best results under the minute concentrated supervision of individual and occupying ownership. The magic of property is now a proverbial phrase; it is truer of land than anything else, and it merely means that for land interested administration is everything, comprehensive administration nothing, that the zeal of the resident owner to improve his own land knows no limit, whereas the obstructive forces of routine and official inertia have nowhere more power to blight than in land management. In Adam Smith's time, as he mentions in the "Wealth of Nations," the Crown lands were everywhere the least productive lands in their respective countries, and the experience is the same still. It is so even in Prussia, in spite of its economical and skilled bureaucracy. Professor Roscher says it is a common remark in Germany that Crown lands sell for a greater number of years' purchase than other lands, because they are known to be less improved, and are therefore expected to yield better results to the energy of the purchaser, and he quotes official figures for 1857, showing that the domain land of Prussia had not risen in value so much as the other land in the country. Great expectations are often entertained from the unearned increment, though there is not likely to be much of that in agricultural land for years to come; but what is a much more important consideration for the community is the earned increment, and under State management the earned increment would infallibly decline. Of course, this does not exclude the necessity of strict State control, so far as required by justice, humanity, and the growth and comfort of the general community. Under land nationalization here I have not considered schemes which do not give the State any real ownership in the land more than it at present enjoys, or, at any rate, place no real management of the land in its hands. The rival schemes of Mr. A. R. Wallace and Mr. Henry George are really only more or less objectionable methods of increasing the land-tax. The question of a State railway is not so easily determined. There are certainly few branches of business where unity of administration is more advantageous, or where the public would benefit more from affairs being conducted from the public point of view of developing the greatest amount of gross traffic, instead of from the private point of view of making the greatest amount of net profit. A railway differs from other enterprises, because it affects all others very seriously for good or ill; it may for the sake of more profit give preferences that are hurtful to industrial development, or deny facilities that are essential to it. A private company may find it more profitable to carry a less quantity at a high rate than a greater quantity at a low, and it cannot be expected to run a line that does not pay, though the general community might benefit greatly more by the increase of traffic which the line creates than covers the loss incurred by running it. Now it is impossible to exaggerate the importance of having a public work like a railway, which can help or hinder every trade in the land, conducted from a public point of view instead of a private, and the present discussion in this country on rates and fares points to the desirability of changes to which private companies are not likely to resort of their own accord, nor the railway commission to be able to compel them. But, on the other hand, it is equally impossible to exaggerate the risks of the undertaking. The post office, with its capital of £80,000, is a plaything to the railways with their capital of £800,000,000, and their revenue little short of that of the State itself. The operations are of a most varied nature, and only some of them could be exposed to effective criticism. The mere transaction of purchase excites in many minds a not unreasonable fear. If Government made a bad bargain with the telegraph companies, it would be sure to make a worse with the railway companies, who are fifty times more powerful; and besides, it would very likely have to borrow its money at a higher figure, for though it could borrow two millions at 3 per cent., it could not therefore borrow eight hundred millions, for the simple reason that the number of people who want 3 per cent. is limited, most holders of stock preferring investments which, though more risky, offer a prospect of more gain. If in trying to balance these weighty _pros_ and equally weighty _cons_ one turns to the experience of State railways, he will find that as yet it affords few very sure or decisive data, because it varies in the different countries and times, and has been very differently interpreted. Of the Continental State railways, those of Belgium and Germany are usually counted the most favourable examples. But Mr. Hadley, in his excellent work on Railway Transportation, shows that the State lines of Belgium were conducted in an extremely slovenly, perfunctory way until 1853, when private lines began to increase and compete with them, and that though the low rates which this competition was the means of introducing still remain after the private lines have been largely bought out, there has been, on the other hand, latterly a decline in the profits of the State system, an increasing tendency to slackness and inertia in the management, and growing complaints of creating posts to reward political services, and manipulating accounts to suit Government exigencies. In Germany the rates are certainly low and the management economical, but complaints are made that less is done for the encouragement of the national resources, and unprofitable traffic is more severely declined than by the private railways. On the whole, probably the best State railway system is that of Victoria; charging low rates, self-supporting, offering every encouragement to industrial development; and the opinion of England will probably be largely determined by further observation of that experiment. The sister colony of New Zealand has made a successful experiment in another department of industrial enterprise, life insurance, for which Government management indeed is highly adapted, because, in the first place, it is a business in which absolute security is of the last consequence, and there is no security like Government guarantee; and in the second, it is a business in which the calculations of the whole administration are virtually matters of mechanical routine. The Government office was only opened in 1871, under the influence of a widespread distrust of private offices, caused by recent bankruptcies, and it now transacts one-third of the life insurance business of the colony; it has probably tended to encourage life insurance, for while there are only 26 policies per 1000 of population in the United Kingdom, there are 80 per 1000 in New Zealand, and its management is much cheaper than that of any other insurance company in the colony, except the Australian United. The proportion of expenses to revenue in the Australian United is 13.66 per cent., in the Government Office 17.23, and in none of the other companies (whose gross business, however, is much smaller) is it under 43.02. Adam Smith thought there were only four branches of enterprise which were fitted to be profitably conducted by a joint-stock company. We have seen in our day almost every branch of industry conducted by such companies, and an idea is often expressed that whatever a joint-stock company can do, Government can do at least quite as well, because the defect of both is the same. The defect is the same, but Government has it in larger measure. Joint-stock management is certainly much less productive in most industries than private management. The Report of the Massachusetts Labour Bureau for 1878 contains some curious statistics on the subject. There were then in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 10,395 private manufacturing establishments, employing in all 166,588 persons, and 520 joint-stock manufacturing establishments, employing 101,337 persons, and the private establishments, while they paid a much higher average rate of wages than the joint-stock, produced at the same time not far from twice as much for the capital invested. The average wages per head in the private establishments was 474.37 dollars a year, and in the joint-stock was 383.47 dollars a year; while the produce per dollar of capital was 2.58 dollars' worth in the private, and 1.37 dollars' worth in the joint-stock, and though part of this difference is attributed to the circumstance that private manufacturers sometimes hire their factories and companies do not, the substance of it is believed to be due to the inferiority of the joint-stock management. Anyhow, that circumstance could have no influence in producing the very marked difference in the wages given by the two classes of enterprise, and the higher wages would not, and could not, be given unless the production was higher. If all the industries of the country, then, were put under joint-stock management, the result would be (1) a general reduction in the amount produced, and (2) a consequent reduction in the general remuneration of the working classes, and the general level of natural comfort; and the result would be still worse under universal Government management. One of the labourer's greatest interests is efficient management, and if he suffers from the replacement of individual employers by joint-stock companies, he would suffer much more by the replacement of both by the State, excepting only in those few departments of business for which the State happens to possess peculiar advantages and aptitude. V. _State Socialism and Popular Right._ The limits of the legitimate intervention of the public authority with respect to the moral development of the community are prescribed by a different rule from those with respect to its material development. Efficiency is still, indeed, a governing consideration, for perhaps more measures for popular improvement fail from sheer ineffectuality than from any other reason. The history of social reform is strewn thick with these dead-letter measures. There is a cry and a lamentation, and a feeling that something must be done; and an Act of Parliament is passed containing injunctions which no Act of Parliament can enforce, or which address themselves to mere accidental circumstances, and leave the real causes of the evil entirely unaffected. And there would be no impropriety in describing impracticable or ill-directed legislation of this kind as being socialistic, for, besides the old association of socialism with impracticable schemes, impracticable legislation is always unjust legislation, and unjust legislation for behoof of the labouring class is essentially socialistic. Every State interference necessarily involves a certain restriction of the liberty or other general rights of some class of persons; and although this restriction would be perfectly justifiable if it actually secured the prior or more urgent right of another and perhaps much more numerous class of persons, it is injustice, and nothing but injustice, when it merely hurts the former class without doing any good to the latter. It may hurt both classes even--well-meaning meddling often does; but what I desire to bring out here is that labour legislation, which may have been entirely just and free from socialism in its intention, may be unjust and full of socialism in its result. We may therefore, without any fault, include under the head of State socialism that common sort of proposal which, without urging any wrong claim, merely asks the State to do the wrong thing--to do either something it cannot do at all, or something that will not answer the purpose intended. It is socialistic not because it is impracticable, but because it is unjust. Since well-meant legislation may thus become urgent, and therefore socialistic for want of result, it is plain that the efficiency of the intervention is a very important consideration in determining the State's duty with respect to popular rights. But the primary consideration here is the extent of the moral claim which the individual, by reason of his weakness, has upon the resources of society, and it is upon that consideration that the division of conflicting political theories on the subject turns. All the several theories are agreed that the enlargement of popular rights, when the enlargement is required by a just popular claim, is entirely within the proper and natural province of the State; where they differ, and differ seriously, is partly in their views of the justice of particular elements in the popular claim of the time being, but more especially in their whole conception of the nature and extent of the popular claim in general. There are still some persons to be found contending that there are no such things as natural rights, and there are plenty who cannot hear the words without a sensation of alarm. But it is now generally admitted, even by those who adopt the narrowest political theories, that legal rights are merely the ratification of moral rights already existing, and that the creation of new legal rights for securing the just aspirations of ill-protected classes of the people belongs to the ordinary daily duties of all civil government. Mr. Spencer very readily admits that some of the latest constituted rights in this country--the new seamen's right of the Merchant Shipping Act, and the new women's right of the Married Women's Property Act--are perfectly justifiable for the prevention in the one case of seamen being fraudulently betrayed into unseaworthy ships, and in the other of women being robbed of their own personal earnings. But then the new rights which he would most condemn--the right to public assistance, the right to education, the right to a habitable dwelling, the right to a fair rent--are quite as susceptible of justification on the ground of natural justice as either the right to a seaworthy ship or the right to one's own earnings. Mr. Spencer's theory errs by unduly contracting men's natural claim. They have a right to more than equal freedom; they have a right, to use Smith's phrase, to an undeformed and unmutilated humanity, to that original basis of human dignity which it is the business of organized society to defend for its weaker members against the assaults of fortune as well as the assaults of men. That is what I have called, for the sake of distinction, the English theory of social politics. On the other hand, socialism unduly extends this claim. The right to fair wages is one thing; the State could not realize it, but it at least represents no unjust aspiration; but the right to an equal dividend of the national income, claimed by utopian socialists, including Mr. Bellamy at the present day, and the right to the full produce of labour claimed by the revolutionary socialists, and meaning, as explained by them, the right to the entire product of labour and capital together, are really rights to unfair wages, and the whole objection to them is that they are at variance with social justice. If we keep these distinctions in view, we shall be able to discriminate between interventions of authority which are innocent, and interventions which are tainted with State socialism. Take an illustration or two, 1st, of interventions for settling the claims of the poor in society in general, and 2nd, of interventions for adjusting the differences between one class and another, between employer and labourer, between landlord and tenant, and the like. 1. Under the first head, the most important question is the question of public assistance. Prince Bismarck created a considerable European sensation when he first announced his new social policy in 1884, by declaring in favour of the three claims of labour, which have been so commonly regarded as the very alpha and omega of social revolution--the right to existence for the infirm, the right to labour for the able-bodied, and the right to superannuation for the aged. "Give the labourer," he said, "the right to labour when he is able-bodied; give him the right to relief when he is sick; give him the right to maintenance when he is old; and if you do so--if you do not shrink from the sacrifice, and do not cry out about State socialism whenever the State does anything for the labourer in the way of Christian charity--then I believe you will destroy the charm of the Wyden (_i.e._, Social Democratic) programme." These three rights are really two, the right of relief when one is sick and of maintenance when one is old being only different phases of the right to existence. Now the right to existence and the right to labour are in themselves both perfectly just claims, but the construction Prince Bismarck gave them passed decidedly over into State socialism. The right to existence is seldom called in question. Malthus, it is true, said a man had a right to live only as he had a right to live a hundred years--_if he could_. He might as well have argued that a man had a right to escape murder only as he had a right to escape murder for a hundred years--_if he could_. It is really because he cannot that he has the right--it is because he cannot protect himself against violence that he has a right to protection from the State, and because, and as far as, he cannot protect himself against starvation that he has a just claim upon the State for food. And his claim is obviously bounded in the one case as in the other by the ability of society. If society cannot protect him, it is of course absurd to talk of any right to its protection, but if society can, society ought. To suffer a fellow-citizen to die of hunger is felt by a civilized community to be at least as just a disgrace to its government as it would be to leave him a prey to the knife of the assassin, or to the incursions of marauders from over the enemy's border. But as the State furnishes protection against human violence by its courts of justice, and against disease by its sanitary laws, so it furnishes protection against famine and indigence by its legal provision of relief. The claim of the perishing stands on the same footing as any other claim which is an admitted right of man to-day; it is a claim to an essential condition of normal manhood--to existence itself. But then, if the right to existence must be admitted, it can only be admitted where the individual is, for whatever reason, unable to make provision for himself, and it can only be admitted in such measure and form as will not discourage other individuals from trying to make independent provision for themselves before their day of disability comes, because that, in turn, is the way prescribed by normal manhood and true human dignity. What State socialists claim, however, is not the right to existence, but the right to decent and comfortable existence--the right to the style of living which is customary among the independent poor. The labourer ought, in their eyes, to be treated as a public servant, and his sick pay and his pension ought both to be commensurate with the claims and dignity of honest labour. Now it is of course impossible not to sympathize much with this view, but the difficulty is that if you make assisted labour as good as independent labour, you shall soon have more assisted labour than you can manage, you shall have weakened the push, energy, and forethought of your labouring class, you shall have really done much to destroy that very dignity of labour which you desire to establish. The State may probably, with great advantage, do more for working-class insurance than it at present does. It could conduct the business of the burial benefit and the superannuation benefit better than any private company or friendly society, because it could offer a surer guarantee and the business is routine; Mr. Gladstone's excellent annuity scheme has remained sterile only because it has not been pushed, and the canvasser and collector are indispensable in working-class insurance. But the socialist proposal is that the State ought to give every man a pension after a certain age, irrespectively altogether of his own contributions. Mr. Webb is one of its most recent advocates, and, according to the useful figures he has taken the trouble to obtain, there are in the United Kingdom 1,700,000 persons over sixty-five years of age, of whom 1,300,000 contrive to pension themselves, either by their own savings or the assistance of their families, while the remaining 400,000 are supported by the rates at an average cost of ten guineas a year. Mr. Webb's proposal is that in order to save the feelings of the 400,000 dependants you are to make the other 1,300,000 persons dependants along with them, and give ten guineas a year all round. But you cannot make a public dole a pension by merely calling it a pension. A pension is a payment made by one's actual employer for work done--it is wages, and the man who has earned his own pension, or has provided it by his own saving, feels himself and is an independent man. It is right to maintain the 400,000--whether out of national or parochial funds is a detail--but sound policy would rather aim at raising the 400,000 to be as the 1,300,000, than at lowering the 1,300,000 to the level of the 400,000. With Mr. Webb it is not a question of giving the 400,000 better allowances than they receive at present--which might be most reasonably entertained--but it is a mere question of not suffering them to be looked down on by the 1,300,000 who have fought their own way, and that is not possible, nor, with all respect for them, is it, from a public point of view, desirable. It is right to support those who cannot support themselves, but it is neither right nor wise to remove all distinction between the dependent poor and the independent. But the line between State socialism and sound social politics in the matter of public assistance may perhaps be better shown in another branch of Poor Law administration--the right to labour for the able-bodied. The socialist right to labour is the right of the unemployed to get labour in their own trades and at good or current rates of wages. That is the right which Bismarck substantially admitted in his famous speech. He said there was a crowd of suitable undertakings which the State could establish to furnish the unemployed with a fair day's wage for a fair day's work. It is also practically the right which prevailed in England between 1782, when Gilbert's Act abolished the old workhouse test, and 1835, when the new Poor Law restored it. Gilbert's Act gave the able-bodied poor the right (1) to obtain from the guardians work near their own residence and suited to their respective strength and capacity; (2) to receive for their labour all the money earned by it; and (3) if that sum fell short of their requirements, to have the difference made up out of the parochial funds. The effect of that, as we know, was, that public relief became too desirable, the dependants on it multiplied, the poor rate rose, the wages of labour fell, the very efficiency of the labourer himself withered, and the new Poor Law reverted to the workhouse test, which, harsh though it was considered to be, was in reality a necessary defence of the character and comfort of the labouring class from further decadence. To provide the unemployed with work in their own trades is only to increase the evil you wish to remedy, for the very existence of the unemployed shows that those particular trades are slack at the time, that there is no demand for the articles they produce, and consequently any attempt by the State to throw fresh supplies of these articles on the already over-stocked market can have no other effect than to increase the depression and turn out of employ the men that are still at work. Paying relief work at the common market rate of wages is attended with the same objection. The remedy only aggravates the disease, and what ought to be merely the labourer's temporary resource against adversity tends to grow into his regular staff of life. Relief wages, while sufficient for the family's support, should remain below the current rates so as to give the labourer an effective inducement to seek better employment as soon as better employment can possibly be obtained. The true and natural defence against misfortune is the man's own personal exertion and provision, and the purpose of the public intervention is to stimulate and assist, not to supplant, that _vis medicatrix naturæ_. But under these limitations a right to labour is a just claim of the unfortunate. It is admitted in the English Poor Law, and it is admitted in the Scotch parochial practice, which constructively considers want of employment a form of sickness or accident, and it requires in both countries to be better realized than it is. 1st: although it is unadvisable to give every man work at his own trade, and although the choice of trades for relief purposes is attended with as much difficulty as the choice of those for prison labour is found to be, yet certainly the circle of relief trades ought to be extended beyond stone-breaking and oakum-picking. Socialists themselves are among the foremost in complaining of the competition of prison labour with honest labour, although they fail to see that precisely the same objection attends the competition of relieved labor in public workshops with unrelieved labour in regular private employment. The kind of work most free from objection on this score would probably be the production of articles now imported from abroad, and there are a great many trades in which, while we make most of their products at home, we import particular articles or sorts of articles for one reason or another. Some of these might be found suitable for the purpose in view. Or the men in the public workshops might be employed in making a variety of things used in public offices, imperial or local. 2nd: what is even more important, a distinction ought to be made between the industrious poor and that residuum of confirmed failures for whom the stoneyard test is really intended, and the former ought not to be made to feel themselves any way degraded in their work, their small remuneration being trusted to act as a sufficient preventive against their permanent dependence on the public for employment. 3rd: then a third and most important requisite is to supplement the public provision of work with a public provision of information about the demand for labour over the country from day to day, so as not merely to support the men in adversity, but to facilitate their restoration to their normal condition of prosperity. For we ought to recognise that though the problem of the unemployed is not, as many persons imagine, one of increasing gravity in our time--although, on the contrary, if we go back thirty years, sixty years, or a hundred years, we always find worse complaints and more distressing sufferings from that cause than at present, yet it is certainly a constant problem. The unemployed we have always with us, and even their numbers vary less from time to time than we are apt to suppose. Trades dependent on fine weather are, of course, slack in winter, but then trades dependent on fashion are slack in summer, while there are some large trades--such as the shoemakers--that are made brisk by bad weather. Even a general commercial crisis which throws the workpeople of many trades idle, makes those of others busy. The building trades are always busy in bad times, because money and labour are then cheap, and the opportunity is seized of building or extending factories, and laying down plant of every description. It was so to a very remarkable extent during the Lancashire cotton distress of 1862; it was so all over England in the depression of 1877-78, and the same fact was observed again in Scotland, and commented upon by the factory inspector in 1886. Other trades are brisker in a crisis for less happy causes, _e.g._, the bakers for the melancholy reason that the working classes are more generally driven from meat to bread. These natural corrections or compensations elicited by the depression itself prevent the numbers of the unemployed from growing so very much larger in a crisis than in ordinary times that their case would not be overtaken satisfactorily by the general systematic provision of relief work, if that were once established. The excess is met now so effectually by a few special local efforts, that we have sometimes far fewer able-bodied paupers in bad years than in good. The number of able-bodied paupers was very much less in the bad years 1876-1878 than in the good years immediately after them, or in the still better years immediately before them. The problem being, then, so largely constant from season to season, and from cycle to cycle, ought clearly to be solved by a permanent and systematic provision. The same principle which governs this right to labour--the principle of preventing degradation and facilitating self-recovery--governs other social legislation for the unfortunate besides the Poor Law. It lies at the bottom of the homestead exemptions of America, and our own prohibition of arrestment of tools and wages for debt, and our occasional measures for cancelling arrears. It is the principle laid down by Pitt when he said that no temporary occasion should be suffered to force a British subject to part with his last shilling. He had a right to his last shilling, because he had a right to an undegraded humanity. The last shilling stopped his fall, and perhaps helped him to rise again. Many persons will admit the right to public assistance, because it seems limited to saving men from extremities, who will see nothing but socialism of a perilous sort in other public provisions, for which popular claims are advanced. Schools, museums, libraries, parks, open spaces, footpaths, baths, are certainly means of intellectual and physical life, which keep the manhood of a community in normal vigour; but, it will be asked, if the State once begins to supply such things, where is it to stop? Is free education to go beyond the primary branches? What length are you to go? is the question Mr. Spencer always raises as a bar to your going at all. But the same question of degree can be raised about everything, about the duties Mr. Spencer himself imposes upon the State as really as about those he refuses to sanction. In the matter of protection, for instance, how many policemen are we required to detail to a district? Or how great an army and navy are we to maintain? During the excitement about the Jack the Ripper murders there was much clamour about the police being too few, and we are subject to periodical panics as to our imperial defences, in the course of which no two persons agree in answering the question, what length are we to go? The question can only be settled of course by measuring the length of our necessities with the length of our purse, and the same class of considerations rules in the other case, the importance and cost of the given provision to a community of such education and culture, together with the impossibility of getting it adequately supplied without public agency. The opinion of the time may vary as to what is essential for a whole and wholesome manhood, and its resources may vary as to what may be easily borne to supply it; but the same variation takes place with respect to the duties of national defence, or the administration of justice. The objection is therefore nothing more or less than the very ancient and famous logical fallacy with which the Greek sophists used to nonplus their antagonists. As in other affairs, the problem so far will settle itself practically as it goes along, and the important distinction to bear in mind is that to give every man the essential conditions of all humane living is a very different kind of aim from giving every man the same share in the national production, or a lien on his neighbour's luck or industry or alertness. 2. From rights realizing general claims of the unfortunate on society at large, let us now pass to rights realizing special claims of certain weaker classes of society against certain stronger classes. The most typical examples of this sort of legislation are the intervention of the State between buyer and seller, between landlord and tenant, between employer and labourer, for the judicial determination of a fair price, a fair rent, or fair wages, or for the regulation of the conditions of labour, and tenure of land. Professor Sidgwick declares the Irish and Scotch Land Acts, which provide for the judicial determination of a fair rent, to be the most distinctively socialistic measures the English Legislature has yet passed; but in reality these Land Acts are not a bit more socialistic than the laws which fix a fair price for railway rates and fares, and much less socialistic than the old usury Acts which sought to determine fair interest. Such interferences with freedom of contract as these are, of course, only justifiable when the absence of effective competition places the real power of settlement of terms practically in the hands of one side alone, and conduces, therefore, inevitably to the serious injury and oppression of the other. Parliament controls railway charges because the railway companies enjoy a monopoly of most important business, and might use their monopoly to wrong the public, and when Parliament is asked, as it sometimes is, to discourage corners, rings, syndicates, or pooling combinations, it is on the ground that these various agencies are attempts, more or less successful, to exclude competition for the purpose of exacting from the public more than a fair price. On the other hand, the reason why we have given up fixing fair interest now is because we have come to see that competition, being very effective among money-lenders, fixes it far better for us without the intervention of the law, and, of course, an unnecessary interference with freedom of contract is nothing but pernicious. But, although for ordinary commercial loans the competition of lenders is a sufficient security for the fair treatment of borrowers, it affords no protection against extortion to the very necessitous man, who must accept any terms or starve. His poverty leaves him no proper freedom to make a contract, and the law still condemns oppressive rates of usury, to which, as the Apothecary says in "Romeo and Juliet," the poor man's poverty, but not his will, consents. In such a case, accordingly, an authoritative prescription of fair interest is only a necessary requirement of justice and humanity. The public determination of fair rent stands on precisely the same ground. The rent of large farms, like the interest on ordinary commercial loans, may be safely left to be settled by commercial competition, because large farms are taken by men of capital as a business speculation, and landlords cannot exact more rent than the farms will bear without driving capital out of agriculture into other branches of production, and so reducing the demand for that class of farms to an extent that will bring the rent down to its proper level again. But the rent of small holdings, like the interest on loans to persons in extremity, is ruled by other considerations. Cottier tenants, between their numbers and their necessities, are continually driven into offering rents the land can never be made to pay, and thereby incurring for the rest of their days the burden of a lengthening chain of arrears little better than Oriental debt-slavery. Other work is hard to find; the land being limited in supply is a natural monopoly; and the State merely steps in to save the tenantry from the injurious effects of their own over-competition for an essential instrument of their labour, and, through their labour, of their very existence. The interference, therefore, is perfectly justifiable if the machinery it institutes can carry out the purpose efficiently, and there is this difference between a court for fixing rent and a court for fixing the price of bread, or beer, or labour, that it is only doing work which in the natural course of things is very usually done by periodical and independent valuation, instead of by the ordinary higgling of the market. It has always been the custom on many large estates to call in a valuator from the outside for the revision of the rents, and a valuator appointed by the Crown cannot be expected to do the work any less effectively than a valuator appointed by the landlord. Moreover, the tendency of opinion seems to be towards the simplication of the process by some self-working scheme, a sliding scale for apportioning an annual rent to the annual production. State intervention in the determination of the rate of wages is often proposed either for the purpose of settling trade disputes on the subject, or for the purpose of suppressing what is called starvation wages and fixing a legal minimum rate. As for arbitration in trade disputes, the object is, of course, in no way socialistic, for it is strictly allied with the ordinary judicial work of the State, and a public and permanent tribunal would probably answer the purpose much better than a private and merely occasional one; for even although it might not be able to enforce its judgments in all cases by compulsion on the parties, it would be more likely than the other to command their confidence and secure by its moral authority their voluntary submission, and this authority would increase with the experience of the court. In certain cases compulsory arbitration seems to be required. There are trades in which the public interest may require strikes to be prohibited, in order to prevent a whole community suffering grave privations, perhaps being starved of its supply of a necessary of life. The Trades Union Act imposes express restrictions on combinations among the labourers at gas and water works, and the recent railway strike in Scotland, which not only paralyzed trade for a time, but stopped the supply of coal to whole districts in the middle of the severest winter of the last part of the century, suggested to many minds the propriety of similar interference in railway disputes. But if the State interfered to stop the strike, the State must needs in equity interfere to decide upon the cause of quarrel. And happily these are the very cases which are best fitted for compulsory arbitration, because the trades concerned are not subject to the market fluctuations to which other trades are liable, and are therefore better suited for fixed settlements of definite and considerable duration. But what socialists claim is a universal determination of normal wages, so as to give every man the full product of his labour, as the full product of his labour is understood upon their theory. For the present, however, they are content to ask for at least the establishment of a legal minimum rate of wages; in fact, an international minimum rate of wages and an international eight hours working day are the two demands on which their agitation is in the meantime most strenuously concentrated. In their recent policy they have reverted to the kind of remedies they used to speak of with such lofty disdain as mere palliatives, and have only preserved their separate identity from other reformers by asking for these palliatives in their least practicable form. An international compulsory minimum wage is impossible, for even a national one is so, and that is the only objection, but a very sufficient one, to the proposal. If you could wipe out starvation wages by passing an Act of Parliament, let the Act be passed to-morrow, for starvation wages is surely the worst and most exasperating of all the enemies of humane living. To starve for want of power to work is bad; to starve for want of work is worse; but to work and yet starve, to work a long, long day without obtaining the bread that should be its natural reward, is a third and worst degree of misfortune, for it mocks the fitness and equity of things, and seizes the mind like a wrong. If it is right to suppress starvation by law, it would seem more right still to suppress starvation wages; and if the socialist contention were in the least true, that in consequence of the "iron and cruel law" all wages are starvation wages, and all work sweaters' work, that work and starve is the inevitable rule under the present system of things, there would be no good answer to their demand for the abolition of the present system of things. But as a matter of fact working and starving is the condition of only exceptional groups of workpeople, and the right to a minimum wage, in the sense of a wage above starvation point, would have no bearing on the great majority of the labouring classes, inasmuch as they stand already on a considerably higher level of remuneration. Ought the State, however, to fix a legal minimum of wages for the protection of the exceptional groups of workpeople to whose situation such a measure might have relation? The objection to this course comes less from want of justice in the claim than from want of power in the State to realize it. The fixing of a legal minimum rate of wages is a task which it is beyond the State's power to accomplish, except by paying up the minimum out of its own funds; for, though the law fixed a minimum to-morrow, it could not compel employers to engage workmen at that minimum; and if employers found it unprofitable to do so, the only effect of the legislation would be to throw numbers of men out of work, and make their maintenance at the legal minimum an obligation of the public treasury. Of the results of paying wages out of the rates we have had plenty of experience. To suppress starvation wages in this way by direct statute is merely impossible, however, and there would be no taint of socialism in it, if it could be done. Much less can the like objection be made against any milder remedies. The only danger is that they would not prove effectual, and would address themselves to false causes. Take the sweating system of the East End of London, in which, bad conditions of labour always going together, we find starvation wages combined with long hours and unwholesome work-rooms. Two of the favourite remedies are the abolition of sub-contracting and the prohibition of pauper Jewish immigration; but neither of these things is the cause of sweating. The sweating contractor of the East End is not a sub-contractor at all; he is the only contractor in the business, and even if he were a sub-contractor, we know that sub-contractors often pay far better wages than the chief contractor can, because they know their men better, and get better work out of them. A temporary increase in the Jewish immigration may occasion a temporary aggravation of the difficulty, but the permanent causes lie elsewhere, and even in the way of aggravation a matter of a thousand Jews more, or a thousand Jews less, cannot play an all-important part in a system affecting some hundred thousand workpeople. Sweating is no more incident to Jewish labour than to English labour. The cheap clothing trade of Birmingham is certainly in the hands of Jews, yet sweating is--or at least was when the factory inspector reported in 1879--absolutely unknown. The wages, he said, were good, the hours were not long, and there were no overcrowded dens. On the other hand, sweating has not only been for years endemic in the East End of London, but has even appeared in a very acute form, apart from any alien influence, in the tailoring trade in Melbourne, the paradise of working people, as it is sometimes not unjustly denominated. The sweating there was conducted largely by ladies who took in bands of learners, and, according to the evidence before the Shopkeepers' Commission, of 1883, every second house in some of the suburbs was a shop of that kind. There was an excessive influx of labour into that trade, because little other work could be found for women who entertained, as they do generally in that colony, a prejudice against both factory labour and domestic service. On the other hand, this overflow was diverted in Birmingham into other channels by the comparative abundance of light employments the district afforded. But apart from temporary or local circumstances that serve to aggravate things or alleviate them, the tailor trade is everywhere naturally subject beyond all others to over-competition: (1) because the work can be done at home; (2) because it can be learnt in a few weeks or months well enough to earn starvation wages in a long day at some sorts of work; (3) because it needs as little capital for the contractor to start business as it needs training for the operatives; and (4) because the operatives being scattered about in their own homes, or in small workshops here and there, have a natural difficulty in coming to any concerted action that might otherwise mitigate the effects of the over-competition, and if there is any general remedy for sweating, it must deal with these causes. To replace homework by common work in wholesome workshops, as far as that can be done, might interfere with what some poor persons found a convenient resource, but would do no harm to the working class generally. The work it was less convenient for some to do would be done by others. The change would remove at once one of the evils of sweating--the unhealthy work-places--and it would contribute to remove the others, first by facilitating combination, and second by improving the personal efficiency of the labourer and the amount of his production. Dr. Watts, of Manchester, speaking from long experience, tells us in his "Facts of the Cotton Famine" (p. 44) that "men often care more about being employed in a good mill (_i.e._, a mill with plenty of room, air, and light) than about the exact price per pound for spinning, or per piece for weaving, for they know practically what is the effect of these conditions upon the weekly wages." Various measures have been suggested which have some such end in view--the compulsory registration of the contractor's workrooms and his outworkers, the requiring him to provide workshops for all his hands, the joint liability of the clothier with him for the wholesomeness of the workplaces, the erection of public workshops where workpeople may be accommodated for hire; they may be open to various objections--and there is no space to indicate or discuss them here--but if they are effectual for the purpose contemplated, that purpose saves them at least from the reproach of socialism. The international compulsory eight hours day is attended with like difficulty. The eight hours day is no necessary plank of socialism, though socialists have at present united to demand it. Rodbertus, the most learned and scientific of modern socialists, always contended that the normal working-day ought not to be of uniform length, but should vary inversely with the relative strain of the several trades, and Mr. Bellamy, under his system of absolute equality of income, makes differences in the hours of labour answer the purpose of regulating the choice of occupation, and preventing too many persons running into the easier trades, and too few into the harder. Nor, indeed, apart from the element of universal compulsion, has the eight hours day anything of socialism in it at all. In some trades it is probably a simple necessity for protecting the workpeople in normal conditions of health; but above all its sanitary benefits it would confer upon the workpeople of every trade alike the much grander blessing of admitting them to a reasonable share of the intellectual, social, domestic, religious, and political life of their time. If the State could bestow upon them this sovereign blessing without forcing them to accept a reduction of wages, which might deprive them of things even more essential for their elevation, and which would only breed among them an intolerable discontent, by all means let the State declare the glad decree. But experience shows that in matters of this kind the State--and especially the democratic State--is a very limited agent, and cannot successfully enforce its decrees upon unwilling trades. In certain special cases, when the short day is demanded for the purpose of averting admitted dangers to health, as with the miners, or for the safety of the public, as with the railway service, there is a recognised stringency of obligation which is exceptional; but in the great run of trades the question is virtually one of mere preference between an hour's leisure and an hour's pay, and in these circumstances a law has too little moral authority behind it to be practically enforceable by penalties in the absence of decided working-class opinion in its favour in the affected trades. In Victoria more than fifty separate trades have obtained the eight hours day without any parliamentary assistance, and almost the only remaining trades which do not yet enjoy it are the very trades which have been protected by an eight hours Factory Act since 1874. As soon as the Act was passed, the operatives, men and women both, petitioned the Chief Secretary for its suspension, and it has remained in suspended animation to this day. A democratic government cannot risk incurring the discontent of a body of the people merely to prevent them from working an hour more when they want to earn a little more. California has had an Eight Hours Act on the statute-book for even a longer period, but it has remained a mere dead letter, because employers began to pay wages by the hour or the piece, and the men found they did not earn so much in the short day as they used to earn in the long. The same thing has happened in others of the American States, and the friends of the eight hours movement in that country are beginning to think that the reason their long and often hot struggle has hitherto been so fruitless is because they have been wasting their strength in political agitation when they ought to have been cultivating and organizing opinion among the working class themselves trade by trade. The weakness of statutory eight hours movements has generally flowed from two sources. One is that what their promoters really wanted was not shorter hours, but more wages. Numbers of them sought only to shorten regular time in order to lengthen overtime, and numbers more got themselves persuaded that a general reduction of hours was the grand means of effecting a general rise of wages, either by removing the competition of the unemployed, or in some other way; and it has often been only the few--always the very _élite_ of labour--who fought for the eight hours day because they valued the leisure enough to make, if necessary, some little sacrifice for so noble a boon. When, therefore, wages, instead of rising, begin to get reduced, general disappointment is inevitable, and they get reduced--and reduced lower than they otherwise might be--through the second weakness of such movements, which is simply this, that a trades union which is not strong enough to get an eight hours day by their own unaided efforts, without the assistance of the law, is not strong enough to prevent their wages from sinking, and in this matter the law can do nothing to help them. The eight hours day can only be an abiding possession if it come through the successive growth of opinion and organization in one trade after another. The history of the movement in Victoria is the history of such successive triumphs of opinion and organization; as soon as a trade has come to want the eight hours day earnestly enough to be willing to sacrifice something for it, the trade has always got it. In the result they have had to sacrifice very little; scarce one of them suffered a fall of wages by the change, for the simple reason that there was no serious fall in their daily production. The difference between the ten hours day and the eight hours day in Victoria was not two hours, but only three-quarters of an hour, for--at least in the important trades--the old day was ten hours, with an hour and a quarter off for meals; and in eight hours with only one break the men probably did near as much as they did before in the eight hours and three-quarters with a double break. Still, most of the trades took twenty or five-and-twenty years before they ventured to join the movement; and though no country in the world is so much under the control of working-class opinion as Victoria, the proposal of a general legal eight hours day which has repeatedly come before the Legislature has never been carried into law. In one sense the eight hours day is the least socialistic of all reforms proposed in the interest of the working class, for it is impossible to make the other classes of society pay for the boon. It may not, perhaps, be quite certain that there will be anything to pay for it at all, for many people assure us production will suffer nothing by the change, and some promise us it will be even increased. But one thing at least is certain: if there is anything to pay, it is the working classes themselves who in the end will and must pay it. The reduction can make no great difference to employers, except on running contracts, or where for any reason they refuse to keep their plant in use by an extra shift, for in the matter of wages they will do under an eight hours system exactly what they do now--pay the men for the amount of work they get out of them and no more; and as they thus produce their goods at the old cost, they can export them at the old price. It need not, therefore, have any permanent effect worth speaking of on the general trade of the country. But if the men do less, their wages will be less too,[10] and nothing can long keep them what they were. This wages question is the eight hours question; and while it is a question for the men more than for the masters, it is essential they should keep clear of all misconception in deciding it. There is no way of getting ten hours' pay for eight hours' work except by doing the work of ten hours in the eight. An Eight Hours Act would give working men no new power to raise the rate of wages; and if they cannot by combination get twelve hours' pay for ten hours' work to-day, they cannot by combination get ten hours' pay for eight hours' work to-morrow. It is, indeed, a very current delusion, that a restriction of production must increase wages by necessitating the employment of the unemployed, whose competition tends at present to prevent wages from rising. But that effect could only occur if the same demand for commodities remained, and although that might be the case if the restriction were confined to a single branch of industry, while all the rest continued to produce as much as before, it would not be so if the restriction were carried out simultaneously all round. The various trades are one another's customers; the commodities one supplies constitute the demand for the labour of the others; and if the supply is reduced all round, the demand will be reduced all round. To say there is at any moment a fixed amount of work that has to be done whatever the produce of the labour, is, as Professor Marshall very happily observes, to set up a Work Fund Dogma exactly analogous to the old Wages Fund Doctrine of the schools, and, he might have added, a dogma even more dangerous to the prosperity of the working-man. Yet the idea is abroad; it appears in the trade-union policy of "making work"--that is, making work for to-morrow by not doing it to-day; it is a kind of mercantilist delusion of the present century, by which each trade is to cut some advantage for itself out of the sides of the others until they all come to practise the trick in turn and fall to mysterious ruin together. If the eight hours day is to raise wages, it will not be by limiting production, but by improving it. That the productivity of labour is capable of improving--nay, that it is certain to improve to such an extent as to earn by-and-by more wages in an eight hours day than it now does in a ten--is scarce matter of doubt. Apart from the influence of machinery and invention, there is a great reserve of personal efficiency, especially in English labour, still capable of development. Mr. Nasmyth, the inventor of the steam-hammer, said that he noticed when watching his men at work, that most of them spent at least two-thirds of their time, not in working, but in criticising their work with the square and the straight-edge, which the few dexterous workmen among them almost never required to use. An increase of dexterity might, therefore, make up for a reduction of the day in these trades even to four hours. But the present question is about the probable effect of the reduction itself upon the efficiency of labour, and experience certainly does not justify those who declare that it would increase the daily product. The effect of a reduction from ten hours or nine to eight is, of course, an entirely different question from the effect of a reduction from twelve or thirteen to ten, because the last two hours' labour in a very long and exhausting day may bear little comparison with the last two hours of a shorter day; and of the exact effect of the particular reduction from ten to eight we possess but scanty evidence, though much might easily be obtained, one would think, from establishments that run, as many do, ten hours in summer and eight hours in winter, or ten hours in busy times and eight hours in slack. We have some American evidence of this sort, but it is very contradictory, a few employers saying that quite as much work was done in the eight hours as in the ten, and others that as much would have been done had the men made a better use of their leisure, while several more complained that the men really did less, and that their energies were positively slackened under the short hours--this also perhaps being a result of the use they made of their leisure. In Victoria the production seems to have been reduced a little, but really so little as to have no very perceptible results, and the leisure is used so well that the working class have made a distinct rise in the scale of being, and have developed a remarkable love of outdoor sports, and spare energy enough to produce some of the most famous cricketers and scullers in the world. There are some trades in which it is possible for production to diminish and yet wages to remain the same, because the difference can be thrown into the price of the product. These are trades supplying a commodity in general and necessary demand of which the consumers will stand a very considerable rise in the price before they will seriously shorten their purchases. Coal is a good example of such a commodity, and the miners are therefore very happily situated for the adoption of an eight hours day. They are more able than most other trades to prevent such a measure from resulting in any fall of wages, and consequently a legal enactment on the subject is less likely with them to create subsequent disappointment, and remain dead letter. They need State help in the matter less than most trades, for they are strong and well organized; but an Eight Hours Act would be more easily enforced among them. Very few trades, however, are in this exceptional position. On the whole, the risk of material loss incurred by the reduction is slight compared with the certainty and greatness of the moral gain; the material loss will, in any case, be soon made up by industrial improvements, if things progress as they are doing; and if the reduction is more likely to come through the union and organization of the trades themselves rather than by either national or international action, the trades at least need have no serious fear to make the venture. The idea of settling questions of this kind by international action, which was started at first from the side of the employers as a convenient obstructive, but has since been taken up with great zeal by the young German Emperor and the socialists, is obviously delusive. It ignores the possibilities of the case, for who, in the first place, is to adjust the complicated details of this international handicap, and if they were adjusted, who is to enforce them? No country is likely to be very strict in enforcing those parts of the settlement by which it lost some point of advantage, and those are the only parts for which any such settlement was wanted at all. Besides, international labour treaties are quite unnecessary. Experience all over the world shows that a short-hour State suffers nothing in the competition with a long-hour State. When Massachusetts became a ten-hour State, her manufacturers never found themselves at any disadvantage in competing with those of the neighbouring eleven-hour States of New England, and they would have still less to fear from rivals who employed, not the same Anglo-Saxon labour as they did themselves, but the less efficient labour of Germany or France. The ten-hour day was its own reward. It improved the efficiency of the workpeople to the degree where, in concert with improvements in the management, also due to the shortening of the day, the product of ten hours in Massachusetts was equal to the product of eleven elsewhere. If the same result were to follow the adoption of an eight hours day, which, however, has still to be tested by experiment, there is of course no more reason why one country should wait for another in adopting the eight hours day than in adopting the policy of free trade. FOOTNOTES: [7] It is only fair to this eminent man to remember that his mature opinions must not be looked for in his essay, "Ideen zu einem Versuch die Gränzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats zu bestimmen," which was written in his early youth, and never published until after its author's death. Although in this work he condemns all State education, he lived to be a famous Minister of Education himself, and to take a great part in establishing the Prussian system of public instruction. [8] Frothingham's "W. H. Channing: a Memoir," p. 18. [9] Roscher's "Finanz-Wissenschaft," p. 63. [10] For proof of the position that the rate of wages is determined by the amount of production, see pp. 307-11. CHAPTER XII. THE AGRARIAN SOCIALISM OF HENRY GEORGE. Mr. George sent his "Progress and Poverty" into the world with the remarkable prediction that it would find not only readers but apostles. "Whatever be its fate," he says, "it will be read by some who in their heart of hearts have taken the cross of a new crusade.... The truth I have tried to make clear will not find easy acceptance. If that could be, it would have been accepted long ago. If that could be, it would never have been obscured. But it will find friends--those who will toil for it, suffer for it: if need be, die for it. This is the power of the truth" (p. 393). Mr. George's prediction is not more remarkable than its fulfilment. His work has had an unusually extensive sale; a hundred editions in America, and an edition of 60,000 copies in this country are sufficient evidences of that; but the most striking feature in its reception is precisely that which its author foretold; it created an army of apostles, and was enthusiastically circulated, like the testament of a new dispensation. Societies were formed, journals were devised to propagate its saving doctrines, and little companies of the faithful held stated meetings for its reading and exposition. It was carried as a message of consolation to the homes of labour. The author was hailed as a new and better Adam Smith, as at once a reformer of science and a renovator of society. Smith unfolded "The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations," but to Mr. George, we were told, was reserved the greater part of unravelling "the nature and causes of the poverty of nations," and if the obsolete science of wealth had served to make England rich, the young science of poverty was at length to make her people happy with the money. Justice and Liberty were to begin their reign, and our eyes were to see--to quote Mr. George's own words--"the City of God on earth, with its walls of jasper and its gates of pearl" (p. 392). The fervour of this first reception may--as was perhaps only natural--have suffered some abatement since, but it affords a striking proof how largely modern society is disquieted by the results of our vaunted industrial civilization. Even those amongst us who are most unwilling to disparage the improvement that has really taken place during the last hundred years in the circumstances of the people, still cannot help feeling that the improvement has fallen far short of what might have been reasonably expected from the contemporaneous growth of resources and productive power. But numbers of people will not allow that any improvement has occurred at all, and deliver themselves to an unhappy and unwarranted pessimism on the whole subject. Because industrial progress has not extinguished poverty, they conclude that it has not even lessened it; that it has no power to lessen it; nay, that its real tendency is to aggravate it, that it increases wealth with the one hand, but increases want with the other, so that civilization has developed into a purely upper-class feast, where the rich are grossly overfilled with good things, and the poor are sent always emptier and emptier away. Invention, they tell us, has followed invention; machinery has multiplied the labourer's productivity at least tenfold; new colonies have been founded, new markets and channels of commerce opened in every quarter of the globe; gold-fields have been discovered, free trade has been introduced, railways and ocean steamers have shortened time and space themselves in our service. Each and all of these things have excited hopes of introducing an era of popular improvement, and each and all of them have left these hopes unfulfilled. They think, therefore, they now do well to despair, and they fortify themselves in their gloom by citing the opinion of Mr. Mill, that "it is questionable whether all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being," without observing that Mr. Mill immediately follows up that opinion by expressing the confident assurance that it was "in the nature and the futurity" of these inventions to effect that improvement. These gloomy views have in France received the name of _Sisyphism_, because they represent the working class under the present industrial system as being struck with a curse like that of Sisyphus, always encouraged by fresh technical advantages to renewed expectations, and always doomed to see their expectations perish for ever. Now, it was upon these despondent and burdened souls that Mr. George counted so confidently, and, as time has shown, so correctly, for his apostles and martyrs; and he counted so confidently upon them because he had himself borne their sorrows, and drunk of their despair, and because he now believed most entirely that his discoveries would bring "inexpressible cheer" to their minds, as, in the same circumstances, they had already brought inexpressible cheer to his own. "When I first realized," he says, "the squalid misery of a great city"--that is, of the latest and most characteristic product of industrial development--"it appalled and tormented me, and would not let me rest for thinking of what caused it and how it could be cured" (p. 395). Poverty seemed to him to be most abounding and most intense in precisely the most advanced countries in the world. "Where the conditions to which material progress everywhere tends are most fully realized--that is to say, where population is densest, wealth greatest, and the machinery of production and exchange most highly developed--we find the deepest poverty, the sharpest struggle for existence, and the most enforced idleness" (p. 4). Nay, poverty, he thought, seemed "to take a darker aspect" in every community at the very moment when it might be reasonably expected to brighten--at the moment when the community made a distinct advance in material civilization, when "closer settlements and a more intimate connection with the rest of the world and greater utilization of labour-saving machinery make possible greater economies in production and exchange, and wealth increases in consequence, not merely in the aggregate, but in proportion to population" (p. 4). This process of impoverishment might, he says, escape observation in an old country, because such a country has generally contained from time immemorial a completely impoverished class, who could not be further impoverished without going out of existence altogether, but in a new settlement like California, where he resided, poverty might be seen almost in the act of being produced by progress before one's very eyes. While the colony had nothing better than log cabins or cloth shanties, "there was no destitution," though there might be no luxury. But "the tramp comes with the locomotive, and alm-houses and prisons are as surely the marks of 'material progress' as are costly dwellings, rich warehouses, and magnificent churches" (p. 4). "In the United States it is clear that squalor and misery, and the vices and crimes that spring from them everywhere, increase as the village grows to the city, and the march of development brings the advantages of improved methods of production and exchange. It is in the older and richer sections of the Union that pauperism and distress are becoming most painfully apparent. If there is less deep poverty in San Francisco than in New York, it is not because San Francisco is yet behind New York in all that both cities are striving for? When San Francisco reaches the point where New York now is, who can doubt that there will also be ragged and barefooted children in her streets?" (p. 6). The prospect alarmed and agitated him profoundly. It deprived him, as it has deprived so many of the continental socialists, of all religious belief, for if the real order of things make an ever-deepening poverty to be the only destiny of the mass of mankind, it seemed vain to dream of a controlling Providence or an immortal life. "It is difficult," says he, "to reconcile the idea of human immortality with the idea that nature wastes men by constantly bringing them into being where there is no room for them. It is impossible to reconcile the idea of an intelligent and beneficent Creator with the belief that the wretchedness and degradation, which are the lot of such a large proportion of human kind, result from His enactments; while the idea that man mentally and physically is the result of slow modifications perpetuated by heredity, irresistibly suggests the idea that it is the race life, not the individual life, which is the object of human existence. Thus has vanished with many of us, and is still vanishing with more of us, that belief which in the battles and ills of life affords the strongest support and deepest consolation" (p. 396). The inquiry Mr. George undertook was consequently one of the most vital personal concern to himself, and we are glad to think that it has been the means of restoring to him the faith and hope he prizes so much. "Out of this inquiry," he tells us, "has come to me something I did not think to find, and a faith that was dead revives" (p. 395). It may be ungracious to disturb a peace won so sorely and offered so sincerely to others, but the truth is, Mr. George has simply lost his faith by one illusion and recovered it again by another. He first tormented his brain with imaginary facts, and has then restored it with erroneous theories. His argument is really little better than a prolonged and, we will own, athletic beating of the air; but since both the imaginary facts and the erroneous theories of which it is composed have obtained considerable vogue, it is well to subject it to a critical examination. I shall therefore take up successively, first, his problem; second, his scientific explanation; and third, his practical remedy. I. _Mr. George's Problem._ He states his problem thus:--"I propose to seek the law which associates poverty with progress and increases want with advancing wealth" (p. 8). The first rule of scientific investigation is to prove one's fact before proceeding to explain it. "There are more false facts than false theories in the world," and a short examination whether a phenomenon actually exists may often relieve us from a long search after its law. Mr. George, however, does not observe this rule. He seeks for the law of a phenomenon without first verifying the phenomenon itself--nay, apparently without so much as suspecting that it ought to be verified. He assumes a particular view of the social situation to be correct, because he assumes it. But his assumption is a purely subjective and, as will presently be shown, delusive impression. We imagine our train to be going back when a parallel train is going faster forward, and we are apt to take the general condition of mankind to be retrograding when we fix our eyes exclusively on the rapid and remarkable enrichment of the fortunate few. What Mr. George calls "the great enigma of our time" is just the enigma of the apparently receding train, and he proceeds to solve it by coiling himself in a corner and working out an elaborate explanation from his own inner consciousness "by the methods of political economy," instead of taking the simple and obvious precaution of looking out of the opposite carriage-window and testing, by hard facts, whether his impression was correct. Had he taken this precaution, had he resorted to an examination of the actual state of the facts, he would have found good reason to change his impression; he would have found that on the whole poverty is not increasing, that in proportion to population it is considerably less in the more advanced industrial countries than in the less advanced ones, and that he had simply mistaken unequal rates of progress for simultaneous movements of progress and decline. His impression, it must be admitted, is a prejudice of considerable currency; there are many who tell us, as he does, that want is growing _pari passu_ with wealth, and even gaining on it; that if the rich are getting richer, the poor are at the same time getting poorer; but it is a question of fact, and yet no one has ever seriously tried to prove the assertion by an appeal to fact. That Mr. George should have neglected to submit it to such a test is the more remarkable, because he was, as he has told us, "tormented" in mind by it, and because he acknowledges that it is a "paradox"--_i.e._, against the reason of the case, and that it is also, to some extent at least, against appearances. He owns, for example, that "the average of comfort, leisure, and refinement has been raised," and that though the lowest class may not share in these gains, yet even they have in some ways improved. "I do not mean," he says, "that the condition of the lowest class has nowhere nor in anything been improved, but that there is nowhere any improvement which can be credited to increased productive power. I mean that the tendency of what we call material progress is in no wise to improve the condition of the lowest class in the essentials of healthy, happy human life. Nay, more, that it is to still further depress the condition of the lowest class. The new forces, elevating in their nature though they be, do not act upon the social fabric from underneath, as was for a long time hoped and believed, but strike it at a point intermediate between top and bottom. It is as though an immense wedge were being forced, not underneath society, but through society. Those who are above the point of separation are elevated, but those who are below are crushed down" (p. 5). From this passage it would appear that, according to Mr. George, the condition of all except the lowest class has improved _in consequence of_ material progress, and that the condition of the lowest class has improved _in spite of_ it. He does not undertake, it seems, to affirm of any class that it has, as a matter of actual fact, become impoverished in the course of social development, but only that there is a tendency in the increase of productive power--in "the new productive forces"--in "material progress"--to impoverish the lower strata of society. But then he contends that these forces are practising exactly the same tendency on some of the highest strata, on classes that we know have been growing richer and richer every day. For he tells us that these new forces, entering our social system like a wedge, depress all who happen to be on the wrong side; and we shall presently discover that this unhappy company on the wrong side of the wedge embraces many groups of persons who will be excessively astonished to learn that they are there. It includes, not only the poor labourers who live on wages, but the great capitalists who live on profits; the great cotton spinners, ironmasters, brewers, bankers, contractors; the very men, in short, of all the world, whom the new productive forces have most conspicuously and enormously enriched. I shall revert to this preposterous conclusion later on, but at present it is enough to say that a tide, which so many have swum against and swum to fortune, cannot be very formidable, and at all events can furnish no clue whatever to the possible condition of those who are exposed to it. For that we have only one resort. It is a plain question of fact--is poverty really increasing? Are the poor really getting poorer? And this can only be competently decided by the ordinary inductive evidence of facts. The data of this kind which we possess for settling the question may not be so exact as would be desirable, but there is no higher tribunal to which we can appeal. The question must be answered by them, or not answered at all. Now any data we have all conduct to the conclusion that poverty is not increasing. If poverty were increasing with the increase of wealth, it would show itself either in an increase of pauperism, or in a decline in the general standard of living among the labouring classes, or in a fall in the average duration of life, and these symptoms would be most acute in the countries that are most wealthy and progressive. Now, let us take England as a crucial case of a country in a very advanced stage of industrial development. Is English pauperism greater now than it was before the "new productive forces" entered the country? Is the general standard of living among the labouring classes lower? Is the average duration of life less? Are poverty and the various symptoms of poverty more acute in England than in more backward countries? In a foot-note to the passage last quoted from his book, Mr. George explains that the improvement he recognises in the lot of the lowest class does not consist in greater ability to obtain the necessaries of life. Does he mean, because more things are now reckoned among the necessaries of life? If so, we fear there is no chance of that difficulty being removed, nor indeed is there any reason for desiring it to be so. Men's wants will always increase with their incomes, and the struggle to make both ends meet may in that case indefinitely continue. But the fact remains that they have more wants satisfied than before, that they realize a higher standard of life, and that is the mark, and indeed the substance, of a more diffused comfort and civilization. It is true that as the general standard of living rises, people feel the pinch of poverty at a higher level than before, and become pauperized for the want of comforts that are now necessary, but which formerly few ever dreamt of possessing. To have no shoes is a mark of extreme indigence to-day; it was the common lot a century ago. People may be growing in general comfort, and yet their ability to obtain necessaries remain stationary, because their customary circle of necessaries may be always widening. The real sign of an advancing poverty is when the circle of recognised necessaries is getting narrow, and yet men have more difficulty in obtaining them than before; in other words, 1st, when the average scale of living falls; and 2nd, when a larger proportion of the people are unable to obtain it, reduced though it be. Now, in England, the contrary has happened; the general standard of living has risen, and the proportion of those who are unable to obtain it has declined. In a preceding chapter I adduced evidence to show how greatly improved the working-class standard of living now is from what it was two hundred years ago, in the good old times socialist writers like to sing of, when men had not yet sought out many inventions and the world was not oppressed by the large system of production. But let us tap the line between then and now at what point we may, and we find the same result; the tendency is always to a better style of living. Mr. Giffen, for example, in his address, as President of the Statistical Society, on 20th November, 1883, compares the condition of the working classes to-day with their condition half a century since, and concludes from official returns that while the sovereign goes as far as it did then in the purchase of commodities, money wages have increased from 30 to 100 per cent., and, at the same time, the hours of labour have been reduced some 20 per cent. Except butcher-meat and house-rent, every other element of the working man's expenditure is cheaper, and butcher-meat was fifty years ago hardly an element of his expenditure at all, and the kind of house he then occupied was much inferior, as a rule, to what he occupies now, bad as the latter may in many cases be. But while the general standard of comfort has been rising, the proportion of the population who are unable to obtain it has been diminishing. I have already stated that King estimated the number of persons in receipt of relief in England and Wales in 1688 at 900,000. Now in 1882 the average number in receipt of relief at one and the same time was, according to official returns, 803,719; and if we are right in doubling that figure to find the whole number of paupers relieved in the course of the year (that being the proportion borne in Scotland), then we may conclude that there are some 1,600,000 paupers in England and Wales at the present day. That is to say, with nearly five times the population, we have less than twice the pauperism. The result is far from being entirely gratifying; a million and a half of paupers (with more than half as many again in Ireland and Scotland) constitute a very grave problem, or rather ganglion of problems; but the fact supplies a decisive enough refutation of the pessimist idea that the actual movement of pauperism has been one of increase instead of one of decrease. During these two hundred years there is no period in which wealth and productive power multiplied more rapidly than the last thirty years, and, therefore, if Mr. George's ideas were correct, there is no period that should show such a marked increase of pauperism. What do we find? We find that pauperism has steadily declined in England during that period. The decrease has been gradual and attended with no such striking interruptions as were frequently exhibited in former times. But the most remarkable feature about it is that the number of able-bodied paupers has diminished by nearly a half; from 201,644 in 1849 to 106,280 in 1882. That is the very class of paupers whom Mr. George represents it to be the special effect of increasing productive power to multiply, and yet, though wealth and productive power have made almost unexampled progress, and though the population has also considerably risen in the interval, we have not more than half as many of this class of paupers now as we had thirty years ago. No doubt this result is due in part to a better system of administering relief, just as it is due in part to the growth of trade unions and friendly societies, to the extension of savings banks, and to other agencies. But if Mr. George's principle is true, could such a result have taken place at all? If "material progress" has a tendency to multiply "tramps" or able-bodied paupers, the tendency must be weak, indeed, when a little judicious management on the part of public bodies, or of working men themselves, would not only counteract it, but turn the current so strongly the other way. But the truth is that the "tramp" has never been so little of a care in this country as at the present hour, and that it is to material progress we owe his disappearance. He was a very serious problem to our ancestors for centuries and centuries. The whole history of our social legislation is a history of ineffectual attempts to deal with vagrants and sturdy beggars, and we are less troubled with them now mainly because industrial progress has given them immensely more opportunities of making an honest and regular living. Industrial progress has all along been creating work and annihilating tramps, but it has all along been followed by absurd and perverse complaints like Mr. George's, that it was only creating tramps and annihilating opportunities of work. Mr. George says the tramp comes with the locomotive, but a writer in 1673 (quoted by Sir F. Eden, "State of the Poor," I., 190) declared that he came with the stage-coach. He pictures the happy age before stage-coaches, when (as Mr. George says of California) there might be no luxury, but there was no destitution, when every man kept one horse for himself and another for his groom. But with the introduction of the stage-coach the scene was changed. People got anywhere for a few shillings, and ceased to keep horses. They were so much the richer themselves, but their grooms were ruined and thrown upon the world without horse or home. Now class privations like these are incidental to industrial transformations, and in an age of unusual industrial transitions like ours, they may be expected to be unusually numerous. But the effect of material progress on the whole is to prevent such privations rather than cause them. It multiplies temporary redundancies of labour, but it multiplies still more the opportunities for permanently relieving them. Why are we now free from the old scourges of famine and famine prices? Partly because of free trade, but mainly because of improved communications, because of the steamer and the locomotive. Even commercial crises are getting less severe in their effects. The distress among our labouring classes during the American Civil War was nothing compared with the suffering under the complete paralysis of industry that followed the close of the great continental war in 1815. Miss Martineau tells us of that time:--"The poor abandoned their residences, whole parishes were deserted, and crowds of paupers, increasing in numbers as they went from parish to parish, spread wider and wider this awful desolation." (History of England, I. 39.) No such severe redundancy of labour has taken place since then, and the redundancies that attend changes of fashion or of mechanical agency, though they undoubtedly constitute a serious difficulty, are yet lightened and not aggravated by the various and complex ramifications of modern industry. Except a new colony, there is no place where new-comers are so easily taken on as in a highly developed industrial country. There are more poor in Norway than in England, and they are increasing; yet in Norway there is no rent and no great cities. Mr. George may say, and in fact he does say, that in old countries the number of paupers is reduced by simple starvation; but if that were so, the death-rate would be increasing. But in England the death-rate is really diminishing. Let us again quote from Mr. Giffen's address:--"Mr. Humphreys, in his able paper on 'The Recent Decline in the English Death-Rate,' showed conclusively that the decline in the death-rate in the last five years, 1876-80, as compared with the rates on which Dr. Farr's English Life Table was based--rates obtained in the years 1841-45--amounted to from 28 to 32 per cent. in males at each quinquennial of the 20 years, 5-25, and in females at each quinquennial from 5-25, to between 24 and 35 per cent.; and that the effect of this decline in the death-rate was to raise the mean duration of life among males from 39.9 to 41.9 years, a gain of two years in the average duration of life. Mr. Humphreys also showed that by far the larger proportion of the increased duration of human life in England was lived at useful ages, and not at the dependent ages of either childhood or old age. No such change could have taken place without a great increase in the vitality of the people. Not only had fewer died, but the masses who had lived must have been healthier and suffered less from sickness than they did. From the nature of the figures also the improvement must also have been among the masses, and not among a select class whose figures threw up the average. The improvement, too, actually recorded obviously related to a transition stage. Many of the improvements in the condition of the working classes had only taken place quite recently. They had not, therefore, affected all through their existence any but the youngest lives. When the improvements had been in existence for a longer period, so that the lives of all who are living had been affected from birth by the changed conditions, we might infer that even a greater gain in the mean duration of life will be shown. As it was the gain was enormous. Whether it was due to better and more abundant food and clothing, to better sanitation, to better knowledge of medicine, or to these and other causes combined, improvement had beyond all question occurred." The decline of pauperism in this country then is not due to any increasing mortality in the classes from which the majority of the paupers come; but it is one among many other proofs that these classes have profited, like their neighbours, by the course of material progress. They may not have profited in the same degree as some others, or in the degree we think desirable and believe to be yet possible for themselves. But they have profited. The situation is really, as we have said, one of unequal rates of progress, and not one of simultaneous progress and decline. And this Mr. George seems, at a later stage of his argument, freely to admit. For when he comes to state "the law which associates poverty with progress and increases want with advancing wealth," he explains that he does not contend that poverty is associated with progress at all, but only that a lessening proportion of the gross produce of society falls to some classes; that want may possibly not in the least increase with advancing wealth; that all classes may be the wealthier for the growth of wealth; and practically, that the only evidence of the poverty of the poor is the greater richness of the rich. It seems he is not explaining in any wise why the poor are getting poorer, but only why they are not getting rich so fast as some of their neighbours. We must quote chapter and verse for this extraordinary vacillation about the very problem he wants to solve. "Perhaps," he says, in the last paragraph of Book III., chapter vi. (p. 154), "it may be well to remind the reader, before closing this chapter, of what has been before stated--that I am using the word wages, not in the sense of a quantity, but in the sense of a proportion. When I say that wages fall as rent rises, I do not mean that the quantity of wealth obtained by labourers as wages is necessarily less, but that the proportion which it bears to the whole produce is necessarily less. The proportion may diminish while the quantity remains the same, or even increases. If the margin of cultivation descends from the productive point, which we will call twenty-five, to the productive point we will call twenty, the rent of all lands that before paid rent will increase by this difference, and the proportion of the whole produce which goes to labourers as wages will to the same extent diminish; but if in the meantime the advance of the arts or economies that become possible with greater population have so increased the productive power of labour that at twenty the same exertion will produce as much wealth as before at twenty-five, labourers will get as wages as great a quantity as before, and the relative fall of wages will not be noticeable in any diminution of the necessaries or comforts of the labourer, but only in the increased value of land and the greater comforts and more lavish expenditure of the rent-receiving class." It thus turns out that the alleged impoverishment of the labouring classes through the increasing wealth of society--the sad and desolating spectacle that "tormented" Mr. George, "so that he could not rest"--the cruel mystery that robbed him even of his religious faith, and moved him to write his powerful but inconclusive book--this was no real impoverishment at all, but only an apparent one. It is not so much as "noticeable" in "any diminution of the necessaries or comforts of the labourer"; it is noticeable only in "the greater comforts and more lavish expenditure of the rent-receiving class." The poverty of the labourer consists in the greater wealth of the landlord. The poor are not poorer; they only seem poorer, because certain of the rich have got so much richer. The problem is thus, on Mr. George's own showing, just the mock problem of the apparently receding train. But let us take up this new issue. Mr. George's assertion now is that wages are a less proportion of the gross produce of the country than they were, because rent absorbs a correspondingly larger proportion than it did. Is that so? Mr. George does not think of showing that it is: he assumes it, without apparently having the smallest pretence of fact for his assertion. His assumption is entirely wrong. Rent is a much smaller proportion of the gross produce of the country than it was, and wages are not only in their aggregate a larger proportion of the aggregate produce of the country, but in their average a larger proportion of the _per capita_ production. There is no need to rest in random assumptions on the matter. The gross annual produce of the United Kingdom is reckoned at present at twelve hundred millions sterling, and the rent of the land at less than seventy millions, or about one seventeenth of the whole. In the time of King and Davenant, 200 years ago or so, the annual produce of England and Wales was forty-three millions, and the rent of land ten millions--little less than one-fourth. (Davenant's Works, iv., 71.) It is hardly worth while, however, making a formal assertion of so self-evident a proposition as that rent constitutes a much smaller fraction of the national income now that wealth is invested so vastly in trade and manufactures, than it did when agriculture was the one great business of life: but it is perhaps better worth showing that rent does not absorb a greater proportion even of the agricultural produce of the country than it used to do. Rent has risen nearly 200 per cent. in the course of the last hundred years, but it does not take one whit a larger share of the gross produce of the land than it took then. According to the calculations of Davenant and King, the gross produce of agriculture amounted, at the time of the Revolution, to four rents, or, allowing for tithes, to three rents; but this was only on the arable. The produce of other land, natural pasture and forest land and the like, came to less than two rents; so that while the rent of arable was not more than a third of the produce (or, to state it exactly, 27 per cent.), the rent of land generally was more nearly a half. The figures are-- Gross Produce. Rent. Arable Land £9,079,000 £2,480,000 Other Land 12,000,000 7,000,000 ----------- ---------- Total £21,079,000 £9,480,000 (Davenant's Works, iv., 70.) Arthur Young, a century later, declares that the doctrine of three rents was already exploded, and that farmers had begun to expend so much on high cultivation that they would be very ill content if they produced no more than three rents. In fact, he declares that even in former times rent could never have amounted to a third of the produce, except on lands of the very first quality, and that a fourth was more probably the average proportion. In his "Political Arithmetic," published in 1779 (Part II., pp. 27, 31), he estimated the gross agricultural produce of England (exclusive of Wales) at £72,826,827, and the gross agricultural rental at £19,200,000, or 26 per cent.,--very nearly one-fourth of the produce. To come down nearer our own time, M'Culloch estimated the gross agricultural produce of England and Wales in 1842-3 to have been £141,606,857, and the gross agricultural rental £37,795,906, or 26 per cent. of the produce. ("Statistical Account of the British Empire," 3rd Edition, p. 553.) The gross, agricultural produce of the United Kingdom is now 270 millions sterling, and the gross agricultural rental 70 millions. Mr. Mulhall, indeed, estimates it at only 58 millions; but at 70 millions it would be, as nearly as possible, 26 per cent.,--curiously enough the same figure exactly as in 1843 and in 1779, and almost the same as in 1689. So far of rent; now as to wages. I have already, in a former chapter (p. 301), produced some evidence to show that the average labourer's wages bears a higher proportion to the average income of the country than it did in former times, or, in other words, that the labourer enjoys a higher _per capita_ share of the gross annual produce of the country as measured in money, and I need not repeat that evidence here. Mr. Mulhall has made some calculations which confirm the conclusions there drawn. ("Dictionary of Statistics," p. 246.) He compares the income of the people of the United Kingdom at the three epochs of 1688, 1800, and 1883. He divides the people into classes and numbers them by families, stating the total income of each class and the total number of families among whom it was divided. I select the two columns containing the results for the whole population and the results for the working class. (1) Number of Families:-- A.D. 1688. A.D. 1800. A.D. 1883. Whole Nation 1,200,000 1,780,000 6,575,000 Working Class 759,000 1,117,000 4,629,000 (2) Earnings:-- A.D. 1688. A.D. 1880. A.D. 1883. Whole } Nation} £45,000,000 £230,000,000 £1,265,000,000 Working} Class } 11,000,000 78,000,000 447,000,000 A single glance at these tables will show that the aggregate wages of the country constitutes a slightly better proportion of its aggregate annual income at present than in 1800, and a decidedly better proportion than in 1688. But if we look, not to the aggregate income of the class, but to the average income of the individual families it contains, the result is in nowise more favourable to Mr. George's assumption. The following table will show that:-- (3) Average Income of Families:-- A.D. 1688. A.D. 1880. A.D. 1883. Whole Nation £37 £129 £189 Working Class 14 69 96 The average working-class income was thus 37 per cent. of the average income of the country in 1688; 53 per cent. of it in 1800; and 51 per cent. of it in 1883. The difference between the last two epochs is so indecisive that we may count them practically identical. The real position of affairs then as to the proportion of wages to national produce is this, that wages enjoy a considerably larger share of that produce now than they did at the end of the seventeenth century, and about the same proportion as they enjoyed at the end of the eighteenth. If, accordingly, Mr. George resolves to stick by the point of proportion, he would therefore have no more solid ground to stand on than on the point of quantity. Rent, as a proportion of the entire wealth of the country, has enormously declined, and even as a proportion, of agricultural wealth has not increased. Wages as a proportion have not declined, but rather risen. These, among other things, are indications that we have been concluding too hastily that concentration of wealth is the characteristic tendency of the time, and ignoring the existence of many minor and less conspicuous forces which have been working in the contrary direction. The real prospect at present is towards diffusion. The enormous accumulations that have marked the last hundred and fifty years have owed their existence largely to causes that cannot be expected to endure; in the case of land, to vicious laws directly favouring aggregations; and in the case of trade, to the unparalleled rapidity of the transformations and extensions industry has undergone during the period. Great inequalities are natural to such a time. Huge fortunes are made by pioneers, and will not be easily made by their successors. Railway contracting will never produce again a millionaire like Mr. Brassey, but it will continue to furnish the means of many moderate fortunes and competencies. So with every other new branch of industry, or new field of investment. The lucky person who is the first to occupy it may rise to great riches, but his successors will divide the custom, and instead of one large fortune, there will be a considerable number of small ones. Mr. George himself admits that the opportunities of making large fortunes are growing more limited, but oddly enough he considers the fact to be a signal evidence of "the march of concentration." In his "Social Problems" (p. 59) he writes: "An English friend, a wealthy retired Manchester manufacturer, once told me the story of his life. How he went to work at eight years of age, helping to make twine, when twine was made entirely by hand. How, when a young man, he walked to Manchester, and having got credit for a bale of flax, made it into twine and sold it. How, building up a little trade, he got others to work for him. How, when machinery began to be invented, and steam was introduced, he took advantage of them, until he had a big factory and made a fortune, when he withdrew to spend the rest of his days at ease, leaving his business to his son. 'Supposing you were a young man now,' said I, 'could you walk into Manchester and do that again?' 'No,' replied he, 'no one could. I couldn't with fifty thousand pounds in place of my five shillings.'" The true moral of this little story is of course that it is more difficult to amass a huge fortune in that particular line now than when machinery was young, and that a man with £50,000 to start with must now content himself with a much poorer figure than Mr. George's lucky friend made out of nothing. Would Mr. George compute what limit could be set to the sum his friend might have amassed, had he started in those golden days with £50,000 instead of five shillings? Even as things stood, his solitary success did not distribute the wealth of Manchester any the better among his fellow-spinners who were not fortunate enough to get credit for a bale of flax, or pushing enough to ask for it, and were not in a position to take advantage of the first introduction of a new power, and rise with it to great wealth. That the stream of things is now making for more moderate fortunes, and more of them, is confirmed by the testamentary statistics of the previous ten years published some time ago by the _Spectator_ newspaper. These figures show that the number of fortunes of the first rank left during that period has been very much less than it was in the preceding ten years, but that the number of moderate fortunes has been very much larger. What the future may hide in it I shall not venture to divine. It will no doubt bring upon industry fresh transformations, but we can hardly expect them to be so numerous or so rapid as in the brilliant era of industrial progress and colonial development we have passed through, and some at least of the changes that are in store for us point, as I have shown in the introductory chapter of this book, to a greater diffusion rather than a greater concentration in the future. Mr. George says: "All the currents of the time run to concentration. To successfully resist it we must throttle steam and discharge electricity from human service" (p. 232). Now steam has undoubtedly been a great concentrator, but electricity, which is likely to take its place in the future, will to all appearance be as great a distributor. Mr. George is equally mistaken regarding the real effect of the other "currents of the time." "That concentration is the order of development," says he, "there can be no mistaking--the concentration of people in large cities, the concentration of handicrafts in large factories, the concentration of transportation by railroad and steamship lines, and of agricultural operations in large fields. The most trivial businesses are being concentrated in the same way--errands are run and carpet sacks are carried by corporations" (p. 232). The concentration of people in cities is not the same thing as the concentration of the wealth of those cities in the hands of a few individuals. The centralization of labour in cities has assisted the birth of the trade union and the co-operative society, which are among the best agencies for diffusing wealth; and the growth of joint-stock companies is a strange proof of a tendency to greater concentration of wealth, for the joint-stock company is really an instrument of the small capital, enabling it by combination to compete successfully with the larger; and as to agriculture, the real tendency, in this country at any rate, seems to be to lesser holdings. When we complain of the inequalities of our time--and I am far from desiring to underrate their extent or to palliate their mischievousness--we are apt to forget how largely the real and natural process of evolution is after all one of distribution, how much the most conspicuous of the inequalities have been incidental to a transition period, and due to causes of a temporary nature, and how many indications we possess that they are not unlikely to be corrected and moderated in the future course of social development. Some of the official returns made in connection with the income tax show that the immense increase of wealth of the last thirty years has been far from being reaped by any single class, but has been shared pretty evenly by all the classes included in those returns. We possess detailed accounts of the number of persons paying income tax in each grade of income under Schedule D, from the year 1849, and if we compare the figures of that year with those of 1879, we shall obtain a fair index to the movement of distribution during those thirty years. Schedule D, it is true, includes only incomes derived from trades and professions, but these incomes may fairly enough be taken as sufficiently characteristic to afford a trustworthy indication of the general movement. While population increased in the thirty years by 22 per cent., the number of incomes liable to income-tax increased by 161 per cent., and of these, the incomes that have increased in much the largest proportion are precisely those middling or lower middling incomes which I have before shown to have unfortunately declined since 1688. While the number of incomes over £1,000 a year has increased by 165 per cent., the number of incomes between £150 and £400 a year has increased by 256 per cent. Mr. Goschen, in his inaugural address as President of the Royal Statistical Society in December, 1887, produced later evidence showing the continuance, and even growth of the same tendency. He showed from the Income Tax Returns that, in spite of the increase of population between 1877 and 1886, the number of incomes over £1,000 a year had decreased by 2.40 per cent., and the number of incomes between £500 and £1,000 had remained the same, while the number of incomes between £150 and £500 had increased 21.4 per cent. He showed from the statistics of certain selected public companies, that in the ten years from 1876 to 1886 the number of their shareholders had increased by 72 per cent., while the average capital per shareholder had decreased from £443 to £323. He drew similar conclusions from the probate and inhabited house duty figures, and from several other sources. (See _Journal of Statistical Society_, December, 1887.) These figures prove that the tendency of things, so far as it concerns the classes above the labourers, is not to further and exclusive concentration, but rather towards a wider and beneficial diffusion; and in regard to the labouring classes, it is admitted by all--even by the extremest social pessimists--that the upper and middle strata of them have participated in the progress of wealth equally with their neighbours. There remains only the lowest class of all, and their emancipation is the serious task of social reform in the immediate future; but that class is even now not increasing in the ratio of population; its misery comes from many causes, most of them moral and physical rather than economic; and though it presents difficult and trying problems, there is no reason for renouncing the hope which alone can sustain social reformers to success. II. _Mr. George's Explanation._ If there is any force in the foregoing observations, it is plain that there is no such problem as Mr. George has undertaken to explain, and we are therefore exempted from all necessity of examining his explanation. But to Mr. George's own mind his explanation of the appearance that troubled him really constitutes the demonstration of it; at any rate, he offers no other. The question of the increase of poverty is of course a question of fact, that cannot be settled by a _priori_ deduction alone; but Mr. George seems to think otherwise. He is too bent on proving it to be _necessary_ to think of asking whether it is _actual_, and even a man of science like Mr. A. R. Wallace, while regretting that Mr. George had not chosen to build his proposals on ground of fact, declares that he adopted an equally legitimate method in deducing his results "from the admitted principles and data of political economy." ("Land Nationalization," p. 19.) Moreover, most of the social pessimism of the present time draws its chief support, exactly like Mr. George's, from the supposed bearing of certain received economic doctrines; and our task would therefore be incomplete if we did not follow Mr. George on this "high _priori_ road" on which he so boldly fares forth, and performs, as will presently be seen, many a remarkable feat. Before beginning his explanation, he throws the problem itself into what he conceives to be a more suitable scientific form. "The cause," says he, "which produces poverty in the midst of advancing wealth is evidently the cause which exhibits itself in the tendency everywhere recognised of wages to a minimum. Let us therefore put our inquiry into this compact form: Why, in spite of increase in productive power, do wages tend to a minimum which will give but a bare living?" (p. 10). The problem, as thus restated, is clearly, be it observed, one of quantity, not of proportion. A bare living is not a relative share, but a definite amount, of produce. But the tendency in wages to such a minimum, which he asserts to be everywhere recognised, is really not recognised at all. In alleging that it is so, Mr. George evidently alludes to the doctrine of wages taught by Ricardo and his school; but what they recognised in wages was a tendency, not to a minimum that would give but a bare living, but to a minimum that would give a customary living; in other words, that would sustain the labourers in the standard of comfort customary among their own class. The economic minimum is not the absolute minimum of a bare living; it is, as Mr. George himself elsewhere puts it, "the lowest amount on which labourers will consent to live and reproduce,"--that is, not the lowest amount on which any individual labourer will do so, but the lowest amount which labouring people in general consider it necessary to earn before they will undertake the responsibility of marriage. If they were to get less than this, it was contended, they would refrain from marrying to an extent that would tell sufficiently on the supply of labour to force wages up again to their old level. This level was the minimum to which wages constantly tended, but then it was always higher than a bare living; it was determined by the standard of requirements current among the labouring class at the time; and it was recognised to be capable of rising if that standard rose. True, Ricardo and the economists of his generation entertained very poor hopes of any such rise, because the working classes of their time, being without the intelligence, the ideas of comfort, the higher wants that are powerfully operative among the working classes of our day, were generally seen to "take out" their better wages when they chanced to get them in nothing but earlier marriages, which in the end brought their wages down again. We have happily now to do with a more aspiring and a less uniformly composed working class. It is perhaps more aspiring in some measure because it is less uniformly composed. It contains many ranks and inequalities and standards of social refinement and comfort, and the presence of these side by side develops a more active tendency upward, which, by supplying a stronger check than before on improvident marriages, will enable the labourers, class after class of them, to appropriate securely more and more of the common domain of advancing civilization. We have had abundant experience of a rise in the standard of life, and a rise in the rate of wages, both remaining as permanent possessions of sections of the labouring class. But if Ricardo and his school had less faith than they reasonably might have had in the possibility of a permanent upward tendency in wages, they certainly never dreamt of believing in any permanent downward tendency. According to their doctrine the rate of wages moved up and down within certain limits, but always tended to come back to a particular figure--the amount necessary to give the labourer the living customary among his class. This figure was really no more a minimum than it was a maximum; wages were supposed to fall sometimes below it, as they were supposed to rise sometimes above it; and to speak of it as a minimum that would give but a bare living is completely to misrepresent its nature. The assumption from which Mr. George starts is thus in no wise an admitted principle of political economy, and would therefore not answer the test of legitimacy laid down by Mr. Wallace. It has no ground outside of Mr. George's own imagination. Economists would solve his problem, "why in spite of increased productive power wages tend to a minimum that will give but a bare living?" by simply denying his fact, and having done with it. But Mr. George persuades himself that they would answer it otherwise, and devotes the next section of his book to an elaborate confutation of the false answers he supposes they would return to it. They would either explain it, he thinks, by their theory of the wages fund, or they would explain it by their theory of population; and so before confiding to us his own explanation, he considers it necessary to stop and clear these two venerable theories out of his way. I am not concerned to defend these theories; their truth would not make Mr. George's own view any the falser, nor their falsehood make it any the truer. One of them indeed was dead and buried before Mr. George attacked it, though I am bound to say it would never have fallen before the particular line of attack he directs against it. The wages fund doctrine, which played a considerable _rôle_ both in its original form as taught by Senior, and in its subsequent form as modified by M'Culloch, was refuted by Mr. Thornton in 1869, was almost instantly abandoned by the candid mind of Mr. Mill, and is now rarely met with as a living economic doctrine. The wages fund is still regarded of course as having its limit in capital, and in the conditions which generate capital, but since these conditions include among other things the number and efficiency of the labourers, the amount of the wages fund is no longer represented as at any given moment a fixed and predetermined quantity susceptible of no possible alteration to meet the exigencies of the labour market, and when once this characteristic was given up, the wages fund doctrine was seen to have degenerated into little more than a stately truism. The Malthusian theory of population is not in the same way discredited, but it likewise is now generally stated with some reserve. It has become well understood that the earlier economists assigned it too absolute and universal a validity, and that it is not, as they thought, a law for all ages, and especially and happily not a law for our own. It is true of an era of progressive population and diminishing return from agriculture, but for our day it has been robbed of its terrors by free trade and steam navigation, which have connected our markets with continents of virgin soil, and carried us virtually into an era of increasing return of indefinite duration. The population question was one of serious practical import for our fathers, and as they saw people marrying and giving in marriage, while every fresh bushel of food was extracted with increasing difficulty from an exhaustible soil, they looked with a reasonable dread to the future, and saw no way of hope except in the practice of a heroic continence. But we live in another time. We find population increasing and yet bread cheapening, simply because the locomotive which alarmed Mr. George by taking the tramp to California has brought back plenty to the rest of the world. It is due to the material progress he preaches against that we are the first generation who can afford to make light of the population question, and leave our remote posterity to deal with the peril when it shall actually arrive. Mr. George, however, is not content with disputing these doctrines; he insists on replacing them with others exactly opposite to them in purport, and for which he claims a like universal validity. He propounds a new population theory, and a new wages fund theory of his own. The more population abounds, the more will subsistence superabound, is his comfortable counter-proposition to Malthusianism. "I assert," says he, "that in any given state of civilization a greater number of people can collectively be better provided for than a smaller.... I assert that the new mouths which an increasing population calls into existence, require no more food than the old ones, while the hands they bring with them can in the natural order of things produce more. I assert that, other things being equal, the greater the population, the greater the comfort which an equitable distribution of wealth would give to each individual" (p. 99). In a word, his teaching is that "other things being equal" over-population is a ridiculous impossibility. What may be all concealed under the reservation, "other things being equal," he does not enlighten us, but it avowedly contains at least one presupposition of decisive importance to the question, the presupposition of the unlimited productiveness of the soil. Mr. George denies the law of diminishing return. We shall presently find him, in his doctrine about rent, basing his whole book on the operation of this law. But here in his doctrine about population it suits him to deny it, and he does so on singularly fantastical grounds (p. 93). He denies it on the ground that "matter is eternal, and force must for ever continue to act," as if the indestructibility of matter was the same thing as its infinite productiveness. "As the water that we take from the ocean must again return to the ocean, so the food we take from the reservoirs of nature is, from the moment we take it, on its way back to those reservoirs. What we draw from a limited extent of land may temporarily reduce the productiveness of that land, because the return may be to other land or may be divided between that land and other land, or perhaps all land; but this possibility lessens with increasing area, and ceases when the whole globe is considered. That the earth could maintain a thousand billions of people as easily as a thousand millions is a necessary deduction from the manifest truths that at least, as far as our agency is concerned, matter is eternal and force must for ever continue to act.... And from this it follows that the limit to the population of the globe can only be the limit of space. Now this limitation of space--this danger that the human race may increase beyond the possibility of finding elbow-room--is so far off as to have for us no more practical interest than the recurrence of the glacial period or the final extinguishment of the sun" (p. 94-5). If this passage means anything, it means that the race may go on multiplying as long as it finds room to stand on, and that even when that limit is reached it can only be squeezed to death and not starved. It can in no case apparently be starved. Subsistence cannot possibly run short, for the inherent powers of the soil are not permanently destructible. But he might as well argue that man must be omnipotent because he is immortal. The question is not one of the durability of the productive powers of the earth--it is one of their limited or unlimited productive capacity. Up to a certain point they may yield the same return at the same cost year after year in _sæcula sæculorum_, but will they yield more? Manifestly not. Every bushel they give after that is got at continuously increasing cost. Now of course wherever population increases so much, compared with the land at its disposal, that this increasing cost must be incurred in order to find them food, the epoch of diminishing return in agriculture has arrived, and the peril of over-population is already present. Happily, as we have said, that time is not yet, but it will come long, long before the human race fails to find elbow-room in this planet. Mr. George himself admits that in a country of inconsiderable extent, or in a small island, such as Pitcairn's Island, over-population is quite possible before elbow-room is near exhausted--(p. 74)--and in making the admission he virtually surrenders his case. He admits in detail what he denies in gross. For is not the soil of a small island or an inconsiderable country as eternal as the soil of a continent? The only difference is that it is not so extensive, and therefore comes to the epoch of diminishing return sooner. That is all. The reason why he makes an exception of such an island is because its inhabitants "are cut off from communication with the rest of the world, and consequently from the exchanges which are necessary to the improved modes of production resorted to as population becomes dense" (p. 74). But if density of population is such a sure improver of production as Mr. George represents it to be elsewhere, why should it fail here? And if it fail anywhere, how can he argue that it must succeed everywhere? Once he admits, as he does in this passage, that subsistence has a definite limit in the modes of production that happen to be known in any age and country, and that population has a definite limit for such age and country in the amount of subsistence which the known modes of production are capable of extracting from the soil, he really admits all that Malthusians generally contend for, and coming to curse, he has really blessed them altogether. The limit of subsistence which he here recognises--the limit imposed by the state of the arts--is far within the limit which he has just been denying, the natural limit to the inherent fertility of the soil, on which economists base their law of diminishing return. The former point is far sooner reached than the latter. Men will starve because they don't know how to make the best use of nature long before they will starve because nature is used up; and it is exactly that earlier limit on which Malthusians lay stress. But except for this inconsistent admission in the case of a petty isolated island, Mr. George persistently refuses to recognise any kind of limit to subsistence, either in the productive capacity of the soil or in the state of the arts. He seems to fancy that land will go on yielding larger and larger harvests _ad infinitum_ to accommodate an increasing population, and that even if it failed to do so, new inventions or improved processes of production would be constantly discovered when they were needed, and keep the supply of food always equal to the demand. With these crude assumptions in his head, he arrives very easily at his own peculiar theory, which is, that subsistence tends to increase faster than population, because the growth of population itself affords the means of such economies and organization of labour as multiply immensely the productive capacity of each individual labourer. A hundred labourers, he is fond of arguing, will produce much more than a hundred times the amount that one will, and it is therefore clear folly to think of population as capable of encroaching on subsistence. On the contrary, it seems almost fitter to speak of it as a means of positively economizing subsistence. Mr. George's mistake arises from ignoring the fact that subsistence depends on the productive capacity of land as well as on the productive capacity of labour, and the productive capacity of land is not indefinitely progressive. Mr. George's new wages fund theory is based on a precisely analogous misconception of the real conditions of the case, and is just as much in the air as his population theory. "Wages," he says, "cannot be diminished by the increase of labourers, but on the contrary, as the efficiency of labour manifestly increases with the number of labourers, the more labourers, other things being equal, the higher wages should be" (p. 62). Just as he has already argued that food can never run short before an advancing population, because the new hands can produce much more than the new mouths can consume, as if the hands span it out of their own finger nails; so he now argues that wages can never decline for want of capital to employ labourers, because the capital that employs them is made by the labourers themselves. They are paid, he declares, not out of the capital of their employers, but out of the product of their own labour. Mr. F. A. Walker, the eminent American economist, had already taught a similar doctrine, but with the reservation that while wages were really paid out of the produce of the labour they remunerated, they were usually advanced out of the employer's capital. But Mr. George throws aside this reservation, and declares boldly that wages are neither paid nor advanced out of capital, and that if any advance is made in the transaction at all, it is the labourer who makes it to the employer, not the employer to the labourer. "In performing his labour, he (the labourer) is advancing in exchange; when he gets his wages, the exchange is completed. During the time he is earning the wages, he is advancing capital to his employer; but at no time, unless wages are paid before work is done, is the employer advancing capital to him" (p. 49). In this contention Mr. George relies much on the analogy of the "self-employing" labour of primitive society. When men live by gathering eggs, he tells us, the eggs they gather are their wages. No doubt; but in our complicated civilization we don't live by gathering eggs from day to day, but by sowing the seed in spring which is to yield us food only in harvest--by preparing work for the market which may take weeks, months, even years before it is marketable. The energetic Sir John Sinclair is said to have once danced at a ball in the evening dressed in a suit the wool of which was still growing on the sheep's back in the morning; but rapidity like that is naturally foreign to ordinary commerce. The successive operations of clipping, fulling, teasing, spinning, dying, weaving, cutting, sewing, occupy considerable time. So with other things. Houses, ships, railways, are not built in a day, or by a single workman. The product of a single workman's work for a day at any of these things has no value apart from the product of the other workmen's work, nor has the work of them all any value unless the work is, or is to be, completed. The wages paid during the period of construction, therefore, cannot possibly have come out of the work for which they were paid, but must have been advanced otherwise. Who advances them? Clearly not the labourer himself, for he receives them. And yet that is what Mr. George unhesitatingly asserts, and his argument is as courageous as it is ingenious. He does not shrink from applying it to the extremest case you like to suggest--the Great Eastern, the Gothard Tunnel, the Suez Canal; even in these cases the labourers, who spent months and years in doing the work, were paid out of the work itself, out of the Great Eastern, out of the Gothard Tunnel, out of the Suez Canal. "For," says Mr. George, "a work that is incomplete is not valueless, it is not unexchangeable; money may be raised on it by mortgage or otherwise, and as this money is raised on the product of the labourer's work, the wages it is employed to pay are really paid out of that product." But this only shifts the question a little: it does not answer it. Where does this lent money come from? Certainly not from the work it is lent on. Perhaps not, Mr. George will rejoin, again shifting his ground, but it comes from the product of the contemporaneous work of other labourers. "It is not necessary to the production of things that cannot be used as subsistence or cannot be immediately utilized that there should have been a previous production of the wealth required for the maintenance of the labourers while the production is going on. It is only necessary that there should be, somewhere within the circle of exchange, a contemporaneous production of subsistence for the labourers, and a willingness to exchange this subsistence for the thing on which the labour is being bestowed" (p. 51). But this is only passing round the dilemma. For this contemporaneous production has itself the same difficulty to face; it has to sustain its labourers during the time taken to complete their work; and it can only do so, according to Mr. George's explanation, by raising the means through a mortgage on the unfinished work. It borrows to pay its own wages, but is apparently able to lend to pay other people's. Mr. George has a happy method of carrying on the affairs of society by mutual accommodation. Peter is a shoemaker who wants money to buy leather to make shoes and food to maintain him till the shoes are made. Paul is a carpenter who is in a like case, and wants money to buy food and timber. Peter borrows the money he needs from Paul on mortgage, and then Paul in turn borrows what he needs from Peter, on the same terms. Utopia is a pleasanter world than ours, and an IOU probably goes a long way in it; but here on this hard earth Peter would certainly make no shoes nor Paul any chairs, unless he had either himself saved enough to purchase the materials, or found a neighbour who had done so and was ready to make him an advance. Except for this neighbour he could not work at all, and could not therefore "create any wages," and the amount of work he got and wages he earned would manifestly depend greatly on the amount of capital this stranger possessed and was disposed to invest in such an enterprise. It is true that the wages of labour will be guided in amount by the quantity of the product, but they are not on that account actually paid out of the product. And it is true that the labourer gives value for his wages--certainly he would not otherwise be employed--but that value is not usually marketable until some time, in many cases years, after the wages have been enjoyed, and therefore cannot have been the source whence these wages came. The wages were paid out of the saved results of previous labour--that is, out of capital--and Mr. George has absolutely no conception of the amount of capital that is necessary to carry on the work of industry. He says we live from hand to mouth, and so in a sense we do. Our capital is being constantly consumed and constantly reproduced again, and economists are fond of showing, from the speedy recovery of a civilized state after a devastating war, how short a time it would really take to replace it entirely. But until it is replaced every inhabitant undergoes considerable privations, which simply means that the rate of wages has fallen for want of it. There are some trades, like the baker's, where the product is actually sold before the wages are paid; and there are many, like the whaler's mentioned by Mr. George, where the labourers can afford to wait long terms for part at least of their remuneration (no great sign, by the way, of the minimum of a bare living); but even in these much capital must be set aside before a single hand is engaged. The whalers, for example, must be furnished with a ship to start with, and be provisioned for the voyage; and if these requisites are not forthcoming, they must go without work and wages altogether, or take work at inferior terms in a market glutted by their own arrival in it. Mr. George speaks lightly of the labourers who excavated the Suez Canal advancing value to the company who employed them, and yet before a single pick or spade was stuck into the sand of the Isthmus the company had laid out, in preliminary expenses and machinery, as much as six millions sterling--more than a third of the whole cost of the Canal. They had then to pay other five or six millions in wages before the work fetched a single fee; and yet Mr. George will have us believe that those five or six millions actually came out of the profits, merely because the projectors hoped and believed they might eventually come out of them. Labourers give an equivalent to the capitalists for their wages, but their wages are really paid out of the capital which their employers have saved for the purpose of purchasing that equivalent. I may have bought a cow in the hope of recouping myself by selling her milk, but I did not therefore pay her price out of the milk money--for nobody would have sold her to me if he had to wait for that; I bought her out of money I had previously saved, and from the same source exactly, and no other, do capitalists buy labour. But, objects Mr. George, that cannot be; wages cannot be paid out of capital, because they are often lowest when, as shown by the low rate of interest, capital is most abundant. But Mr. George here confounds existent capital with employed capital. It is only the capital actually employed that tells on wages; the low rate of interest merely shows that there has been an increase in unemployed capital, and since that is generally a correlative of a diminution of employed capital, it is but natural that low interest should be attended by low wages. Low wages are a consequence of unemployed labour, unemployed labour a consequence of unemployed capital, and unemployed capital a consequence of unfavourable industrial conditions which labour, either with capital or without it, cannot evade or reverse. So far then of Mr. George's views on population and the wages fund, for which much value, as well as originality, has been claimed. The chapters in which he states them are certainly among the most impressive and characteristic in his book. Nowhere else does he display more strikingly his remarkable acuteness, fertility, and literary power, and nowhere else are these high qualities employed more fruitlessly from sheer want of grasp of the elements of the problems he discusses. These chapters are after all, however, something of a digression from the main business of the book, and they have perhaps detained us too long from Mr. George's own explanation of the supposed growth of poverty. His explanation is this: "The reason why, in spite of the increase of productive power, wages constantly tend to a minimum which will give but a bare living is that with increase in productive power, rent tends to even greater increase" (p. 199). "Rent swallows up the whole gain, and pauperism accompanies progress" (p. 158). "The magic of property," it seems, has an unsuspected malignancy; but, in the present case, its spell is really exercised only over Mr. George's own vision. For who, with his eyes open, would believe for a moment what Mr. George so gravely asserts, that of the whole gain won by our multiplied productive power, none whatever has gone to the great bankers, and brewers, and cotton spinners, and ironmasters, and corn factors, and shipbuilders, and stockbrokers, and railway contractors; that our Rothschilds, and Brasseys, and Barings, and Bairds, the great plutocrats of the time, the possessors of the largest fortunes in the country, the very men and classes who have been most conspicuously enriched through the material progress of the nation, have all the while been conducting a hard struggle against a fatal tendency in their incomes to sink to a bare living, and had to feed, exactly like the manual labourers, from the crumbs that fall from the landowners' table. The assertion is too violent and preposterous to merit serious refutation. Everybody knows that the greatest part of the wealth of modern society is not concentrated in the hands of the landlords at all, that it has not accrued from rent and that it would not be a farthing the less though private property in land were abolished to-morrow. But violent and preposterous as Mr. George's conclusion is, it has not been arrived at without the exercise of much perverse ingenuity. Having been brought by his examination of the wages fund and population theories to the conviction that the key to his riddle was not to be discovered in the conditions that regulated production, he concludes that it must, therefore, be sought in the conditions that regulate distribution. His problem is thus one in the distribution of wealth, and it must be explained, if it is to be explained at all, by the laws of distribution. To investigate these laws, therefore, becomes now his object, and the first step he takes is a truly amazing one. At the very outset he throws the most important class of participators in the distribution--the class that appropriates the largest share--out of court altogether, and he proceeds to settle the whole question as if they never got a penny, and as if the entire spoil were divided among their neighbours. People who live on profits, it seems, have no _locus standi_ in a question of distribution, and the case must be considered as if the parties exclusively concerned were the people who live on wages, the people who live on interest, and the people who live on rent. "With profits," he says, "this inquiry has manifestly nothing to do. We want to find what it is that determines the division of their joint produce between land, labour, and capital, and profits is not a term that refers exclusively to any one of these three divisions. Of the three parts into which profits are divided by political economists, namely compensation for risk, wages of superintendence, and returns for the use of capital, the latter falls under the term interest, which includes all the returns for the use of capital and excludes everything else; wages of superintendence falls under the term wages, which includes all returns for human exertions and excludes everything else; and compensation for risk has no place whatever, as risk is eliminated when all the transactions of a community are taken together" (pp. 113-4). Now we have to do here with no mere difference of terminology. Profits may be employers' wages, if you like to call them so; but it is a fatal confusion to suppose that, because you have called them employers' wages, you are therefore entitled to treat them as if they were governed by the same laws and conditions as labourers' wages. The truth is that they are governed by opposite conditions, and that the pith of the labour question is just the conflict between these two kinds of wages for the better share in the distribution. The battle of labour is not against the employer receiving fair interest on his capital in proportion to its quantity, but against the amount of additional profit which the employer claims as wages of superintendence, and which he also rates in proportion to capital invested instead of rating it in proportion to his own trouble or efficiency. One of the chief hopes of the workman resides in the possibility of breaking down this erroneous criterion of fair remuneration for superintendence, and so getting the employers to content themselves with smaller profits than they have been in the habit of considering indispensable. Profits and wages have thus opposite and conflicting interests in the distribution, but Mr. George, having once disguised the one in the garb of the other, is imposed on by the disguise himself, and treats them in his subsequent speculations as if they were the same thing, or at any rate--what in the present connection is equally pernicious in its effects--as if their respective shares in the distribution were determined by precisely the same conditions. The result is, as might be expected, a series of singular _contretemps_ springing from mistaken identity, like those we are familiar with on the comic stage. The manufacturing millionaire appears before us as the victim of the same harsh destiny as the penniless crossing-sweeper, and the banker of Lombard Street is overshadowed by the same blighting poverty as the lumper of Wapping. Proudhon, in a powerful passage, describes pauperism as invading modern society at both extremes; it invaded the poor in the positive form of natural hunger; it invaded the rich in the unnatural but more devouring form of insatiable voracity. The burden of Mr. George's prophetic vision contains no such refinements. He sees a huge wedge driven through the middle of society; and on the underside of that enchanted wedge he sees the merchant princes of the world eating the bread of poverty with their lowest dependents. Mr. George's classification of profits under wages therefore involves much more than a mere change of nomenclature, for it has led him to pass off this absurd vision as a literal description of things as they are. By that classification he has really put out of his own sight the most important factor in the settlement of the question he is discussing, and so he begins playing Hamlet by leaving the part of Hamlet out. Having simplified matters by throwing profits out of the cast, Mr. George's next step is to assign the leading _rôle_ to rent. In the whole drama of the modern distribution of wealth, no part is more striking or more often misunderstood than the part played by rent. Wages never cease to cost much and to be worth little, but rent seems to have the property of going on growing while the landlords themselves sleep or play. This fact has impressed Mr. George so profoundly that, losing sight of things in their true connection and proportions, he declares that the growth of rent is the key to the whole situation, and that neither wages nor any other kind of income, not derived from land, can ever draw any advantage from the increase of prosperity, because rent always steps in before them and runs off with the spoil. He professes to found this conclusion on Ricardo's theory of rent, which he accepts, not only as being absolutely true, but as being too self-evident to need discussion. Indeed, he seems disposed, like some others, to have his fling at Mill for calling it the _pons asinorum_ of political economy; but we shall presently discover various grounds for suspecting that he has not crossed the bridge successfully himself, and that here, as elsewhere, he has been led seriously astray by looking at things through the mist of doctrines he has only imperfectly mastered. Anyhow, he offers his theory as a deduction from Ricardo's law of rent, and this deduction claims particular attention because it is the corner-stone of his speculations, and constitutes what he would consider his most original and important contribution to economic science. He says that the law of rent itself "has ever since the time of Ricardo ... been clearly apprehended and fully recognised. But not so its corollaries. Plain as they are, the accepted doctrine of wages ... has hitherto prevented their recognition. Yet, is it not as plain as the simplest geometrical demonstration that the corollary of the law of rent is the law of wages, when the division of the produce is simply between rent and wages; or the law of wages and interest together, when the division is into rent, wages, and interest" (p. 120). It is really plainer. It is a mere truism. In any simple division, if you know how much one of the factors gets, you know how much is left for the others, and if you like to dignify your conclusion by the name of corollary, you are free to do so. But the real point is this, whether the share obtained by rent is fixed irrespectively of the share obtained by wages and interest, or whether, on the contrary, it does not presuppose the previous determination of the latter. There is no doubt, at any rate, as to how Ricardo--Mr. George's own authority--regarded the matter. According to his celebrated theory, wages and interest are satisfied first, and then rent is just what is over. Rent is simply surplus profit. In hiring land, the farmer hires a productive machine, and under the influence of competition gives, for the use of that productive machine for a year, the whole amount of its annual produce which remains as a surplus after paying the wages of his labourers, and allowing interest on his capital, and what he considers a fair profit for his own work of superintendence. A certain current rate of wages and a certain current rate of profit are presupposed, and after these demands are met, then if the land has yielded anything more, that surplus is what is paid as rent. Ricardo always presumes that land that cannot produce enough to meet these demands will not be cultivated at all, and that the poorest land actually under cultivation is land that meets them and does no more; in other words, that leaves nothing over for rent. Let us take Ricardo's law as it is stated by Mr. George himself (p. 118): "The rent of land is determined by the excess of its produce over that which the same application can secure from the least productive land in use." The standard by which, according to this law, the amount of rent is supposed to be determined, is the produce of the least productive land in use. Now, what is the least productive land in use? It is land that produces just enough to pay the wages the labourers upon it are content to work for, and the profits the farmer of it is content to farm for. How that rate of wages and that rate of profits are fixed is no matter here; but one thing is clear--and it is enough for our present purpose--that they cannot be determined, as Mr. George represents them as being, by a law of rent which presumes and is conditioned by their operation. Ricardo's law virtually explains rent in terms of wages and profits, and it would therefore be the height of absurdity to re-explain wages and profits in terms of rent. And if that is so, the circumstance which excites Mr. George's surprise, that economists have always so clearly apprehended the law of rent itself, and yet failed so completely to recognise the corollaries which he plumes himself on being the first to deduce from it, admits of a very simple explanation: the economists understood the law they expounded, and were better reasoners than to employ it as a demonstration of its own postulates. This will become still plainer, if we look more closely at the fact which has struck Mr. George so much--the constant rise of rent in modern society. He attributes that rise to many causes; in fact, there are few things that will not, in his opinion, raise rent. Progress of population will do so; but if population is stationary, it will be done all the same by progress in the arts; the spread of education will do it; retrenchment of public expenditure will do it; extending the margin of cultivation will do it; and so will artificial contraction of that margin by speculation. In short, he is so haunted by the idea, that he seems to believe that so long as rent is suffered to survive at all, whatever we do will only conduce to its increase. Every step of progress we take extends its evil reign, and if progress were to reach perfection, rent would drive wages and interest completely off the field and appropriate "the whole produce" (p. 179). These fears are not sober, but they could never have risen had Mr. George first mastered the theory of rent he founds them on. For rent, being the price paid by producers for the use of a productive machine, cannot rise unless the price of the product rises first (or its quantity, if so be that it does not increase so much as to reduce its price), for unless the price of agricultural produce rises, the farmer cannot afford to pay a higher rent for the land than he paid before. No part of Ricardo's theory is more elementary or more unchallenged than this, that the rent of land constitutes no part of the price of bread, and that high rent is not the cause of dear bread, but dear bread the cause of high rent. Rent cannot rise further or faster than the price of bread (or meat, of course) will allow it, and the price of bread is beyond the landowner's control. He cannot raise it, but once it rises, he can easily raise rent in a corresponding degree. If a rise of rent depends on a rise in the price of bread, what does a rise in the price of bread depend on? On two things which Mr. George ignores or misunderstands--the progress of population and the diminishing return in agricultural production. The growth of population increases the demand for food so much as to raise its price, and renders it profitable to resort to more difficult soils or more expensive methods for additional supplies. The price will then remain at the figure fixed by the cost of the costliest portion that is brought to market. Now Mr. George laughs at the idea of increase of population causing any difficulty about the supply of food--population, which he is never tired of telling us, is the very thing most wanted to multiply that supply, and possesses a power of multiplying it in even a progressive ratio to its numbers. "The labour of 100 men," he says, "other things being equal, will produce much more than one hundred times as much as the labour of one man" (p. 163). And he laughs in the same way at the idea of a diminishing return in agriculture, as if, says he, matter were not eternal, and as if an increasing population did not of itself increase the productive capacity of the land through increasing the productive capacity of the labour upon it. These two misunderstandings lie at the bottom of all Mr. George's vagaries about rent, and they are perhaps natural to a speculator, resident in a rich new colony, which, as he describes it himself, "with greater natural resources than France, has not yet a million people." No doubt in a country at that particular stage of its historical development, increase of population may involve an increase, and even a more than proportional increase, of food as well as of other commodities; but that particular stage is a temporary and fleeting one, and the world in general is very differently situated from the State of California thirty years ago. Where there is plenty of good land, the increase of population occasions no increase in the cost of producing food, because there is no need to resort to poorer land for the purpose; and while food is got as cheaply as before, other things are got much more easily and abundantly in consequence of the economies of labour and the many mutual services which result from the increased numbers of the community. But that state of matters only continues so long as there remains no occasion to resort to poorer soils for the production of food, and that time is long past in most countries of the world. Mr. George no doubt contends that in all countries it is just the same as in California, because even though it may have become more difficult in some places to produce food, it has become everywhere much easier to produce other commodities, and (so he argues) the production of any kind of commodity is practically equivalent to the production of food, for it can always be exchanged for food. So it can, if food is there to exchange for it; but the very question is whether food is there, or is there in the same relative quantity. If I say it is more difficult to get food, it is no answer to tell me that it is much easier to get other things. And because other things may be multiplied indefinitely at the same cost, that is no reason for denying that food can only be multiplied indefinitely at increasing cost. Yet Mr. George reasons as if it were. This confusion is repeated again and again in the course of his book, and has evidently had much influence on his whole speculations. He describes the advantages which the colonist derives from the arrival of other settlers. "His land yields no more wheat or potatoes than before, but it does yield far more of all the necessaries and comforts of life. His labour upon it will bring no heavier crops, and we will suppose no more valuable crops, but it will bring far more of all the other things for which men work" (p. 168). That is true, but it is not to the purpose. The new settler required a market, and population brought it; but although population up to a certain point is beneficial, you cannot for that reason declare that beyond that point it cannot possibly become embarrassing; for on Mr. George's own hypothesis the ground yields no more wheat and potatoes than before, and the limit to convenient population is prescribed by the amount of food the ground yields, and not by the quantity of other commodities which skilled labour can produce. If population were to exceed what that stock of food would adequately serve, then new-comers would find little comfort in Mr. George's rhetorical commonplace that they had two hands and only one mouth. His simple confidence, that they never can be at a loss, because they can get food by exchange as well as by direct production, is a mere dream, because he forgets that the people they are to exchange with are in the same case as themselves. They can only give food in exchange for other things so long as they raise more food than serves their own numbers, and when their numbers increase beyond that point, they will have no food to sell. The limit to subsistence is not the productive capacity of labour, but the productive capacity of land. Mr. George's argument rests on another very curious fallacy. He builds his whole theory of distribution on the fact of the extension of the margin of cultivation from better to worse soils, but in the same breath he denies the existence of the very conditions that alone make that fact possible. Nobody would resort to worse land unless the better were unable to furnish indefinite supplies at the old cost, _i.e._, unless the principle of diminishing return prevailed in agriculture. Nor would any one resort to worse land until it paid him to do so, _i.e._, until the produce of this worse land became, through a rise in its price or through improvements in the art of agriculture, equal in net value to the produce previously yielded by the worst land then in cultivation. Mr. George denies the principle of diminishing return. He denies "that the recourse to lower points of production involves a smaller aggregate of produce in proportion to the labour expended." He denies this, "even where there is no advance in the arts and the recourse to lower points of production is clearly the result of the increased demand of an increased population. For," says he, "increased population of itself, and without any advance of the arts, implies an increase in the productive power of labour" (p. 163). But the question is, does it imply any increase in the productive power of the soil? Mr. George contends that it does, but only on the superior soils, not on the inferior. Increasing population, in his opinion, renders all labour so much more effective that "the gain in the superior qualities of land will more than compensate for the diminished production on the land last brought in" (p. 165). Now to all this there is one simple answer: why then resort to inferior soils at all? If crowding on the superior soils can make those soils indefinitely productive, why go farther and fare worse? There can be no reason for having recourse to worse land, but that the better has ceased to yield enough at the old cost. Organization and economy of labour are excellent things, but they cannot press from the udder more milk than it contains, or rear on the meadow more sheep than it will carry, or grow on a limited area available for cultivation more than a definite store of food. But while Mr. George denies that there is anything to force people to poorer soils, he supposes at the same time that they go freely in order to get a less profit. He holds the amount of return obtained from cultivating the least productive land in use to be the lowest rate of return for which anybody will invest his capital, and therefore to serve in some sense as a standard rate of remuneration for all applications of capital and labour. Nobody, he declares, will work for less than he can make on land that pays no rent. But will any one work such land for less than he can make in other industries? That is what Mr. George supposes to be done every day, although he laughs at the idea of there being any necessity for doing it. It need not be said that men are not such lunatics. They are really forced to go to worse soils because the better cannot increase their yield indefinitely at the same cost, and they never go till they possess a reasonable expectation of making as much out of the worse land as they did before out of the better. From all these remarkable misconceptions of the working of rent, and of the theory of Ricardo on the subject, which he professes to follow, he draws his first law of distribution, which is nevertheless, so far as it goes, undoubtedly correct: "Rent depends on the margin of cultivation, rising as it falls and falling as it rises" (p. 155). To find the law of rent, he has told us, is to find at the same time its correlatives, the laws of wages and interest, and these laws accordingly he states thus: "Wages depend on the margin of cultivation, falling as it falls and rising as it rises. Interest (its ratio with wages being fixed by the net power of increase which attaches to capital) depends on the margin of cultivation, falling as it falls and rising as it rises" (p. 156). He is not content, however, with merely inferring these two laws as corollaries from the law of rent, but thinks it necessary to construct for wages and interest a certain independent connection with the movement of the margin of cultivation. To do so, he first reduces interest, as he had already reduced profits, to a form of wages; he then erects all the different forms of wages (_i.e._, every form of income except rent) into a single hierarchical system, in which there are many different rates of remuneration, occasioned by the necessity of compensating different risks and exertions, but all moving up and down concurrently with a certain general rate of wages at the bottom of the scale; and he finally connects this general or standard rate of wages with the margin of cultivation, by saying that no one would work at anything else for less than he can make on land open to him free of rent, and that therefore the income made by cultivating such land must be the lowest going. Mr. George's view of the nature of interest is peculiar. He considers it to be the natural increase of capital, the fruit of inherent reproductive powers, like the increase of a calf into a cow, or of a hen into a hen and chickens; and because interest comes in this way freely from nature, he believes the private appropriation of it to be thoroughly just, although he presently gives precisely the same reason for declaring rent to be theft. It is unnecessary to discuss either the truth or the consistency of this doctrine here, and I refer to it now merely to explain that although Mr. George thus justifies interest as being the price of a natural force, he introduces it into his theory of the origin of poverty, as the price of human labour. "The primary division of wealth," he says, "is dual, not tripartite. Capital is but a form of labour, and its distinction from labour is in reality but a subdivision, just as the division of labour into skilled and unskilled would be. In our examination we have reached the same point as would have been attained had we simply treated capital as a form of labour, and sought the law which divides the produce between rent and wages; that is to say between the possessors of the two factors, natural substance and powers and human exertion--which two factors, by their union, produce all wealth" (p. 144). The difference between interest and wages is but as the difference between the wages of skilled labour and the wages of unskilled; the wages of skilled labour is only the wages of unskilled, _plus_ some consideration for the skill, or for the time spent in training, or for drawbacks of various kinds; and the wages of unskilled labour is fixed by the amount that can be made on land that pays no rent. Profits, salaries, stipends, fees are, in the same way as interest, declared to be modes of wages. The £50,000 a year of the merchant prince, it seems, is just the £50 of the day-labourer, with £49,950 added to compensate him for the additional perils or drawbacks or discomforts of his life. All incomes, except the landowner's, row in the same boat, and the day-labourer's sets the stroke. When the margin of cultivation descends, he is the first to suffer, and then all the rest suffer with him. If he loses £10 a year, they successively lose £10 too; the doctor or bank-agent will have £490, instead of £500; the railway chairman, £4,990, instead of £5,000; the merchant prince, £49,990, instead of £50,000; and their loss is the landlord's gain. Here then we see the whole mystery of iniquity as Mr. George professes to unravel it. "The wealth produced in every community is divided into two parts by what may be termed the rent line, which is fixed by the margin of cultivation, or the return which labour and capital could obtain from such natural opportunities as are free to them without payment of rent. From the part of produce below this line, wages and interest must be paid. All that is above goes to the owners of land" (p. 121). Mr. George here confounds the margin of cultivation with the margin of appropriation. When economists speak of an extension of the margin of cultivation, they mean a resort to less productive land, and that is always accompanied by a rise of rent; but an extension of the margin of appropriation may be a resort to more productive land, and may occasion a fall of rent, as has been done in Europe to-day through appropriation in America. But what in reality he builds his argument on is neither the movement of the margin of cultivation, nor the movement of the margin of appropriation, but simply the existence of abundance of unappropriated land. Where that exists, rent will, of course, be low, and wages will be high, for nobody will give much for land when he can get plenty for nothing at a little distance off, and nobody will work at anything else for less than he can make on land that he may have for nothing. For such land supplies labourers with an alternative. It is not the best of alternatives, for it needs capital before one can make use of it, and it takes time before any return is made from it. A diversity of national industries, for example, is better, and raises wages more effectively. Agricultural wages are higher in the manufacturing counties of England than in the purely agricultural; and they are higher in the manufacturing Eastern States of Mr. George's own country than in the purely agricultural States of the West, which possess the largest amount of unappropriated land. The reason of this is twofold: other industries increase the competition for labour generally, and create, at the same time, a better market for farm produce. Unoccupied land would act--though less effectually--in the same way as an alternative; but few countries are fortunate enough to possess much of it, and as Mr. George does not propose to interfere with the occupation of land, but only to tax the occupiers, he has no scheme for showing how countries that have it not are to get it. It is easy, of course, to call it from the vasty deep. "Put to any one capable of thought," says Mr. George, "this question: 'Suppose there should arise from the English Channel or the German Ocean a Noman's land on which common labour to an unlimited amount should be able to make ten shillings a day, and which would remain unappropriated and of free access like the commons which once comprised so large a part of English soil. What would be the effect upon wages in England?' He would at once tell you that common wages throughout England must soon increase to ten shillings a day" (p. 207). Perhaps so; but a little more thought would teach him that "a Noman's land on which common labour to an _unlimited_ amount should be able to make ten shillings a day" must be itself unlimited in extent, and could not be accommodated in the English Channel. Apart from preternatural conditions, it could not afford remunerative employment to more than a definite number of occupants and cultivators, and when it came to be entirely occupied, England would stand exactly as it does at present. If the millennium of the working class is to depend on the discovery of a Noman's land of infinite expansibility, it must be indefinitely postponed. But supposing such an alternative existed and did influence the amount employers pay their workmen, how is it to influence in the same direction the amount they reserve to themselves? It is true, as a matter of fact, that wages and interest generally rise and fall together, for the simple reason that they are generally subject to the same influences. When capital is busily employed, so is necessarily labour, and then both wages and interest are high; when capital is largely unemployed, so is naturally labour also, and then both wages and interest are low. But an influence like that which is now adduced by Mr. George does not act on labourer and employer alike. It supplies the labourer with an alternative which strengthens his hands in his battle for wages with employers. Does it then at the same time strengthen the employer in his battle with the labourer? Does it first raise wages at the expense of profits, and then raise profits at the expense of wages? It clearly cannot. To argue as if the existence of alternative work which benefits the labourer, must benefit the employer in the same degree, and as if the want of it must injure the employer because it injures the labourer, is simply to misunderstand the very elements of the case. One might as well argue that because the heights of Alma were a decided strategical advantage to the Russians, who were posted on them, they were therefore an equal advantage to the Allies, who had to scale them. Laws of distribution, which are founded on a series of such arbitrary absurdities as those which I have successively exposed, are manifestly incapable of throwing any rational light on the causes of poverty, or giving any practical guidance to its amelioration. But, absurd as they may be, they are at least propounded with considerable parade, and we are therefore quite unprepared for the strange turn Mr. George next chooses to take. It will be remembered that the only reason why he undertook to search for these laws at all was, that by means of them he might explain why wages tended to sink to a minimum that would give but a bare living; but now that he has discovered those laws, he declines to apply them to the solution of this problem. He will not draw the very conclusion he has laid down all his apparatus to establish. He will not solve the problem he has promised us to solve; in fact, he tells us he never meant to solve it; he never thought or said wages tended to sink to a minimum that would give a bare living; he never said they tended to sink at all; all he meant to assert was that if they increased, they did not increase so fast as the national wealth generally. He used "the word wages not in the sense of a quantity, but in the sense of a proportion" (p. 154). He will not therefore, after all, show us why the poor are getting poorer; but he will read for us, if we like, another riddle, why they are not growing rich so fast as some of their neighbours. In the name of the patient reader, I may be permitted to lodge a humble but firm protest against this eccentric and sudden change of front. Mr. George ought really to have decided what problem he was to write about before he began to write at all, and we may therefore for the present dismiss both his problem and his explanation till he makes up his mind. III. _Mr. George's Remedy._ After our experience of his problem and his explanation, we cannot indulge expectations of finding any serious or genuine worth in the practical remedy Mr. George has to prescribe; and we hear, without a thought of incongruity, the lofty terms in which, like other medicines we know of, it is advertised to the world by its inventor as a panacea for every disease society is heir to. "What I propose," he says, "as the simple yet sovereign remedy which will raise wages, increase the earnings of capital, extirpate pauperism, abolish poverty, give remunerative employment to whoever wishes it, afford free scope to human powers, lessen crimes, elevate morals and taste and intelligence, purify government, and carry civilization to yet nobler heights, is--to appropriate rent by taxation" (p. 288). And the direction for applying the remedy is equally simple: it is to "abolish all taxation save that upon land values" (_ibid._). This remedy is currently described as the nationalization of land; but nationalization of land is a phrase which stands for several very different and even conflicting ideas. With the usual fatality of revolutionary parties, the English land nationalizers are already broken into three separate organizations, and represent at least three mutually incompatible schemes of opinion. There is first the socialist idea of abolishing both individual ownership and individual occupation of land, and cultivating the soil of the country by means of productive associations or rural communes. Then there is the exactly opposite principle of Mr. A. R. Wallace and his friends, who are so much in love with both individual ownership and individual occupation that their whole aim is to compel us all by law to become occupying owners of land, whether we have any mind to be so or no. And, finally, we have the scheme of Mr. George, which must be carefully distinguished from the others, because he would destroy individual ownership but leave individual occupation perfectly intact. His non-interference with individual occupation is remarkable, because, as we have seen, he declares the cause of poverty to be the exclusion of unemployed labour from the opportunity of cultivating land, and because that exclusion is chiefly due to the prior occupation of the land by earlier settlers. Mr. George, however, thinks he can provide a plentiful supply of unoccupied land, at a nominal price, for an indefinite number of new-comers without disturbing any prior occupant. He would do it by merely abolishing the private owner and asking the occupant to pay his rent to the State instead of to a landlord, and he explains to us how it is that this simple expedient is to effect the purpose he desires. "The selling price of land would fall; land speculation would receive its death-blow; land monopolization would no longer pay. Millions and millions of acres, from which settlers are now shut out by high prices, would be abandoned by their present owners, or sold to settlers upon nominal terms. And this not merely on the frontiers, but within what are now considered profitable districts.... And even in densely populated England would such a policy throw open to cultivation many hundreds of thousands of acres now held as private parks, deer preserves, and shooting grounds. For this simple device of placing all taxes on the value of land would be in effect putting up the land at auction to whoever would pay the highest rent to the State. The demand for land fixes its value, and hence if taxes were placed so as to very nearly consume that value, the man who wished to hold land without using it would have to pay very nearly what it would be worth to any one who wanted to use it." (p. 309). Putting up land to auction will not secure cheap or nominally rented farms to an indefinite number of new-comers, unless there is an indefinite supply of land to divide into farms, but in the present world that is not so; and when the existing stock of agricultural land is exhausted, and every man has his farm, but there is no more for any new-comer, what is Mr. George's remedy then? Abolition of property in land will of course abolish all trading in such property; but trading in landed property does not restrict its occupation. The land speculator, while he holds the land, of course keeps out another competitor from the ownership, but he keeps nobody from its occupation and cultivation. He is surely as ready as anybody else to make money, if money is to be made, by letting it, even by putting it up to auction, if Mr. George prefers that mode of letting. The transfer of the power of letting to the State will not secure a tenant any faster. And as to the private parks, deer forests and shootings of England, Mr. George forgets that they are, most of them, at present rented, and not, as he seems to fancy, owned by their occupants, and that it would not make a straw of difference to them whether they paid their rents to the Crown factor or to the landlord's agent. Since Mr. George does not prohibit the making of fortunes, he cannot prevent commercial kings from America or great brewers from England hiring forests in the Scotch Highlands. And since, in spite of his celebrated declaration, that "to the landed estates of the Duke of Westminster the poorest child that is born in London to-day has as much right as has his eldest son," he would still leave the Duke a princely income from the rents of the buildings upon his estates, and would suffer him to enjoy it without paying a single tax or rate on it all (p. 320), why should the Duke give up his forest in Assynt, merely because the Crown is to draw the rent instead of the Duke of Sutherland? Mr. George accordingly proposes a remedy that would remedy nothing, but leave things just as they are. Deer forests and the like may not be the best use of the land, but the particular change Mr. George suggests would not suppress them or even in the slightest degree check their spread, and would not throw the ground now occupied by them into the ordinary market for cultivation. And, besides, even if it did, the land so provided for new-comers would necessarily soon come to an end, and with it Mr. George's "simple and sovereign remedy," at least in its specific operation. But it is noteworthy that in his lectures in this country in 1884, Mr. George made little account of the specific operation of his remedy as a means of furnishing unemployed labourers with a practicable alternative in agricultural production, to which they might continue indefinitely to resort, and that he preferred for the most part drawing his cure for poverty from the public revenue which the confiscation of rent would place at the disposal of the community. Now as to this aspect of his remedy, it is surely one of the oddest of his delusions to dream of curing pauperism by multiplying the recipients of poor relief, and taking away from it, as he claims credit for doing, through the countenance of numbers, that reproach which has hitherto been the strongest preventive against it. Besides, he and his friends greatly exaggerate the amount of the fund the country would derive from the rent of its ground. It would really fall far short of paying the whole of our present taxation, not to speak of leaving anything over for wild schemes of speculative beneficence. The rural rent of the country is only seventy millions, and that sum includes the rent of buildings, which Mr. George does not propose to touch, and which would probably in the aggregate balance the ground rent of towns, which he includes in his confiscation project. Now our local taxation alone comes very near that figure, and certainly the people generally can scarcely be expected to rise from a condition of alleged poverty to one of substantial wealth, or even comfort, through merely having their local rates paid for them. The result would therefore be poor, even if no compensation were to be made to the present receivers of the rent; but with the compensation price to pay, it would be really too ridiculously small to throw a whole nation into labour and disorder for. Much may be done--much must be done--to make the land of the country more available and more profitable for the wants of the body of the people, but not one jot of what is required would be done by mere nationalization of the ownership, or even done better on such a basis than on that which exists. The things that are requisite and necessary would remain still to be done, though land were nationalized to-morrow, and they can be equally well done without introducing that cumbrous innovation at all. With compensation the scheme is futile; without it, it is repugnant to a healthy moral sense. Mr. George indeed regards confiscation as an article of faith. It is of the essence of the message he keeps on preaching with so much conviction and courage and fervour. Private property in land, he tells us, is robbery, and rent is theft, and the reason he offers for these strong assertions is that nothing can rightly be private property which is not the fruit of human labour, and that land is not the fruit of human labour, but the gift of God. As the gift of God, it was, he believes, intended for all men alike, and therefore its private appropriation seems to him unjust. Under these circumstances he considers it as preposterous to compensate landowners for the loss of their land, as it would be to compensate thieves for the restitution of their spoil. To confiscate land is only to take one's own, Mr. George has no difficulty about the sound of the word, nor is he troubled by any subtleties as to the length it is proper to go in the work. Mr. Mill, whose writings probably put Mr. George first on this track, proposed to intercept for national purposes only the future unearned increase of the rent of land, only that portion of the future increase of rent which should not be due to the expenditure of labour and capital on the soil. Mr. George would appropriate the entire rent, the earned increase as well as the unearned, the past as well as the future; with this exception, that interest on such improvements as are the fruit of human exertion, and are clearly distinguishable from the land itself, would be allowed for a moderate period. He says in one place, "But it will be said: These are improvements which in time become indistinguishable from the land itself! Very well; then the title to the improvements becomes blended with the title to the land; the individual right is lost in the common right. It is the greater that swallows up the less, not the less that swallows up the greater. Nature does not proceed from man, but man from nature, and it is into the bosom of nature that he and all his works must return again" (p. 242). And in another place, speaking of the separation of the value of the land from the value of the improvements, he says: "In the oldest country in the world no difficulty whatever can attend the separation, if all that be attempted is to separate the value of the clearly distinguishable improvements made within a moderate period, from the value of the land, should they be destroyed. This manifestly is all that justice or policy requires. Absolute accuracy is impossible in any system, and to attempt to separate all the human race has done from what nature originally provided would be as absurd as impracticable. A swamp drained, or a hill terraced by the Romans, constitutes now as much a part of the natural advantages of the British Isles as though the work had been done by earthquake or glacier. The fact that after a certain lapse of time the value of such permanent improvements would be considered as having lapsed into that of the land, and would be taxed accordingly, could have no deterrent effect on such improvements, for such works are frequently undertaken upon leases for years" (p. 302). The sum of this teaching seems to be that Mr. George would recognise no separate value in any improvements except buildings, and would be disposed to appropriate even them after such lapse of time as would make it not absolutely unprofitable to erect them. What Mr. George fails to perceive is that agricultural land is in no sense more a gift of God, and in no sense less an artificial product of human labour, than other commodities--than gold, for example, or cattle, or furniture, in which he owns private property to be indisputably just. Some of the richest land in England lies in the fen country, and that land is as much the product of engineering skill and prolonged labour as Portland Harbour or Menai Bridge. Before the days of Sir Cornelius Vermuyden it was part of the bottom of the sea, and its inhabitants, as they are described by Camden, trode about on stilts, and lived by snaring waterfowl. Some of the best land in Belgium was barren sand-heaps a hundred years ago, and has been made what it is only by the continuous and untiring labour of its small proprietors. "God made the sea, man made the dry land," is a proverb among the Dutch, who have certainly made their own country as much as Mr. George has made his book. In these cases the labour and the results of the labour are obvious, but no cultivated land exists anywhere that is not the product of much labour--certainly much more labour than Mr. George seems to have any idea of. In the evidence taken before the recent Crofters' Commission, Mr. Greig, who conducted the Duke of Sutherland's improvements in the Strath of Kildonan, stated that the cost of reclaiming 1,300 acres of land there, and furnishing them with the requisite buildings for nine variously sized farms, was £46,000. Apart from the buildings, the mere work of reclamation alone is generally estimated to have cost £20 an acre, and in another part of the same estates an equally extensive piece of reclamation is said to have cost £30 an acre. By means of this great expenditure of capital and labour, land that would hardly fetch a rent of a shilling an acre before was worth twenty or thirty shillings an acre after. Not the buildings only, but the land itself has been made what it is by labour. It has been adapted to a useful office by human skill as really as the clay is by the potter, or the timber by the wright. Deduct from the rent of these reclaimed acres the value contributed by human labour, and how much would remain to represent the gift of God? And would it be greater or less than would remain after a like process applied, say, to a sovereign or to a nugget of gold? Mr. George has no scruple about the justice of private property and inheritance in the nugget, and indeed in all kinds of movable wealth. "The pen with which I am writing," he says, for example, "is justly mine. No other human being can rightfully lay claim to it, for in me is the title of the original producers who made it" (p. 236). The original producer of the nugget appropriated what was surely a gift of God as much as the clays or loams of husbandry; and if he, as Mr. George admits, has "a clear and indefeasible title to the exclusive possession and enjoyment" of his nugget, and may transmit that title by bequest or sale unimpaired for an unrestricted period of time, why is the original producer of agricultural land to be held up as more than half a thief, and the present possessor as one entirely? And if a proprietor has spent £20,000 in buildings, and £26,000 in reclamations, in order to convert the surface of the earth into useful arable soil, why is he to be allowed rent on the £20,000, and denied it on the £26,000? So far as the distinction between gifts of nature and products of labour goes, movable wealth and immovable stand on precisely the same footing. Both are alike gifts of nature, and both are alike products of labour. In thinking otherwise Mr. George is certainly supported by the high authority of Mr. Mill, who has also failed to recognise how far arable land was really an artificial product. He says: "The land is not of man's creation, and for a person to appropriate to himself a mere gift of nature, not made to him in particular, but which belonged to all others until he took possession of it, is _prima facie_ an injustice to all the rest" (Dissert. iv., 289). But what is of man's creation? He finds his materials already created, and he merely appropriates them, and adapts them to his own uses by labour, exactly as he does with the soil that in his hands becomes fruitful fields. Land is as much a creation of man as anything else is, and everything is as much a gift of God as land. That distinction is therefore of no possible help to us. The true ground for observing a difference between the right of property in land and the right of property in other things must be sought for elsewhere. It is not because land is a gift of nature, while other things are products of labour, but because land is at once limited in quantity, and essential to the production of the general necessaries of life. These are the characteristics that make land a unique and exceptional commodity, and require the right of property in it to be subject to different conditions from the right of property in other products of labour. The justification of the restriction of that right in the case of land accordingly rests neither on theological dogma nor on metaphysical distinction, but on a plain practical social necessity. Where land is still abundant, where population is yet scanty as compared with the land it occupies, there is no occasion for interference; the proprietor might enjoy as absolute a title as Mr. George claims over his pen, without any public inconvenience, but, on the contrary, with all the public benefit that belongs to absolute ownership in other things. But as soon as population has increased so much as to compel recourse to inferior soils for its subsistence, it becomes the duty of society to see that the most productive use possible is being made of its land, and to introduce such a mode of tenure as seems most likely effectually to secure that end. Under these circumstances private property in land requires an additional justification, besides that which is sufficient for other things; it must be conducive to the best use of the land. Society has become obliged to husband its resources; if it will do so most efficiently by means of private property, private property will stand; if not, then it must fall. Of course land is not the only kind of property that is subject to this social claim. All property is so held, but in the case of other things the claim seldom comes into open view, because it is only on exceptional occasions that it is necessary to call it into active operation. Provisions are among the things Mr. George considers not gifts of God but products of labour, but in a siege private property in provisions would absolutely cease, and the social right would be all in all. These products of labour would be nationalized at that time because in the circumstances the general interests of the community required them to be so, and the reason why they are not nationalized at other times is at bottom really this, that the general interest of the community is better served by leaving them as they are. In some parts of the world all products of labour actually are nationalized; in Samoa, for example, a man who wants anything has a latent but recognised claim to obtain it from any man who has it; but Dr. Turner explains that the result is most pernicious, because while it has extinguished absolute destitution, it has lowered the level of prosperity and prevented all progress, no man caring to labour when he cannot retain the fruits of his labour. Civilized communities, however, have always perceived the immense public advantage of the institution of private property, and the right to such property, of whatever kind, really rests in the last analysis on a social justification, and is held subject to a social claim, if any reason occurred to exert it. In this respect there is nothing peculiar about land. The only peculiarity about land is that a necessity exists for the practical exercise of the claim, because landed property involves the control of the national food supply, and of other primary and essential needs of the community. The growth of population forces more and more imperatively upon us the necessity of making the most of our land, and consequently raises the question how far private property in such a subject is conducive to that end. Now, in regard to capital invested in trade or manufactures, it has always been justly considered that the private interest of its possessor constitutes the best guarantee for its most productive use, because the trader or manufacturer is animated by the purely commercial motive of gaining the greatest possible increase out of the employment of his capital. But it must be admitted that the private interest of the landlord does not supply us with so sure a guarantee. He desires wealth no doubt as well as the trader, but he is not so purely influenced by that desire in his use of his property. He is apt to sacrifice the most productive use of land--or, in other words, his purely pecuniary interest--to considerations of ease or pleasure, or social importance, or political influence. He may consolidate farms, to the distress of the small tenants and the injury of the country generally, merely because there is less trouble in managing a few large farmers than a number of small; or he may refuse to give his tenants those conditions of tenure that are essential to efficient cultivation of the land, merely to keep them more dependent on himself in political conflicts. Mr. George, however, has a strong conviction that even the purely pecuniary interest of the private owner tends to keep land out of cultivation, but he builds his conclusion on the special experiences of land speculation rather than on the general facts of land-owning. Of course if there were no land-owning, there would be no land speculation; but to abolish land-owning merely to cure the evils of land speculation is, if I may borrow an illustration of his own, tantamount to burning a house to roast a joint. Besides, all that is alleged is that speculation keeps a certain amount of land in America out of the market. In other countries it suffers from a contrary reproach. The evil of the _bandes noires_ of France and the _Landmetzger_ of Germany is their excessive activity in bringing land into the market, by which they have aggravated the pernicious subdivision of estates that exist. In America the effect of speculation may be different, but at any rate keeping land out of the market is one thing, keeping it out of cultivation is another; and it is hard to see how speculation should prevent the extension of cultivation, because cultivation may be as well undertaken by tenant as proprietor, and why should a speculator, who buys land to sell it in a few years at a high profit, object to taking an annual rent in the interval from any one who thought it would pay him to hire the land? It would not be fair to condemn the landlord for the sins of the land speculator, even if the latter were all that Mr. George's curious horror of him represents him to be, and if he exercised any of the irrationally extravagant effects which Mr. George ascribes to his influence over the economy of things; but as a matter of fact a sober judgment can discover no possible reason why the private interest of a land speculator as such should stand in the way of the cultivation of the soil he happens to hold. What concerns us here, however, is not the private interest of the speculator, but the private interest of the landlord, whether a speculative purchaser or not. Now, much land lies waste at present through the operation of the Game Laws, which establish an artificial protection of sport as an alternative industry against agriculture, but then the general institution of private property in land must not be credited with the specific effects of the Game Laws, and need not be suppressed in order to get rid of them. The abolition of these laws would place the culture of wild animals and the culture of domestic animals on more equal terms in the commercial competition, and would probably restore the balance of the landlord's pecuniary advantage in favour of the latter. Besides, it is not a question of ownership but of occupation of land that is really involved. If the land were nationalized to-morrow, the State would have to decide whether it would let as much land as had hitherto been let to sporting tenants; and of course it can decide that, if it chooses, now. So far as I am able to judge, there is only one respect in which the pecuniary interest of the landlord appears to be unfavourable to an extension of cultivation. There is probably a considerable quantity of land that might be cultivated with advantage to the community generally by labourers who expected nothing from it but the equivalent of ordinary wages, and which is at present suffered to lie waste, because its produce would be insufficient to yield anything more than wages, and would afford nothing to the capitalist farmer as profit or to the landlord as rent. How far this operates I have, of course, no means of knowing; but here again one may deal with waste ground if it were judged requisite to do so, without resorting to any revolutionary schemes of general land nationalization. Of course much land is kept in an inferior condition, or perhaps absolutely waste, through want of capital on the part of its owners, but the same result would happen under the nationalization plan, through want of capital on the part of the tenants. Mr. George does not propose to supply any of the necessary capital out of public funds, but trusts to the enterprise and ability of the tenants themselves to furnish it; so that the occupier would be no better situated under the State than he would be under an embarrassed landlord, if he enjoyed compensation for his improvements. In either case he would improve as far as his own means allowed, and he would improve no further. But if by nationalization of land we get rid of the embarrassed landlord, we lose at the same time the wealthy one, and the tenants of the latter would be decidedly worse off under the State, which only drew rents, but laid out no expenses. The community, too, and the general cultivation of the country would be greatly the losers. Mr. George has probably little conception of the amount of money an improving landlord thinks it necessary to invest in maintaining or increasing the productive capacity of his land. A convenient illustration of it is furnished by the evidence of Sir Arnold Kemball, commissioner of the Duke of Sutherland, before the recent Crofters' Commission. Sir Arnold gave in an abstract of the revenue and expenditure on the Sutherland estates for the thirty years 1853-1882, and it appears that the total revenue for that period was £1,039,748, and the total expenditure (exclusive of the expenses of the ducal establishment in Sutherland) was £1,285,122, or a quarter of a million more than the entire rental. Here, then, is a dilemma for Mr. George: With equally liberal management of the land on the part of the State, how is he to endow widows and pay the taxes of the _bourgeoisie_ out of the rents? And without such liberal management how is he to promote the spread of cultivation better than the present owners? The production of food, however, is only one of those uses of the land in which the public have a necessary and growing interest. They require sites for houses, for churches, for means of communication, for a thousand purposes, and the landlord often refuses to grant such altogether, or charges an exorbitant price for the privilege. He has refused sites to churches from sectarian reasons; for labourers' cottages in rural districts for fear of increasing the poor-rate; in small towns with a growing trade from purely sentimental objections to their growth; he has refused rights of way to people in search of pure air, for fear they disturbed his game, and he has enclosed ancient paths and commons which had been the enjoyment of all from immemorial time. I do not speak of the ground rent in large cities where owners are numerous, because that, though a question of great magnitude, involves peculiarities that separate it from the allied question of rural ground-rent, and make it more advantageously treated on its own basis. But in country districts where owners are few, and the possession of land therefore confers on one man power of many sorts over the growth and comfort of a whole community, that power ought certainly to be closely controlled by the State. Its tyrannical exercise has probably done more than anything else to excite popular hostility against landlordism, and to lend strength to the present crusade for the total abolition of private property in land. But here again the cure is far too drastic for the disease. What is needed is merely the prevention of abuses in the management of land, and that will be accomplished better by regulations in the interest of the community than by any scheme of complete nationalization. A sound land reform must--in this country at least--set its face in precisely the contrary direction. It must aim at multiplying, instead of extirpating, the private owners of land, and at nursing by all wise and legitimate means the growth of a numerous occupying proprietary. State ownership by itself is no better guarantee than private ownership by itself for the most productive possible use of the land; indeed, if we judge from the experience of countries where it is practised, it is a much worse one; but by universal consent the best and surest of all guarantees for the highest utilization of the land is private ownership, coupled with occupation by the owner. INDEX. A. Agriculture, Russian, 291. Albrecht, the Prophet, 137. Alexander II., Czar, 264, 265; death, 283. Alliance, Republican Socialist, 47. Amorphism, 274. Anabaptist Socialism, 219. Anarchism, 4; in France, 47; Austria, 55; Italy, 58; Spain, 62; Portugal, 66; Belgium, 70; Holland, 73; Switzerland, 74; Boston, 77, 248; United States, 80; London, 86; Melbourne, 91; ultra-socialistic, 249; ultra-democratic, 250; ultra-revolutionary, 255; anti-religious, 254; Warsaw, 296. _Anarchist, The_, 86. Anarchists, Congress at Geneva, 254. Applegarth, Mr., 320. Arbitration, Papal, 245; courts of, 431. Arendal Congress, 66. Ashburnham, Lord, 243. Austria, Socialism in, 54; condition of people in, 56. Aveling, Dr. and Mrs., on America, 81; on Knights of Labor, 84; on Anarchists, 249. B. Babbage, C., 26. Baboeuf, C. G., 17, 188. Bakunin, M., in Italy, 57; Hegelian, 261; with German Hegelians, 261; escape, 273; in London, 274; Amorphism, 274; Lyons insurrection, 278; in Zurich, 278. Bamberger, M., 203. Barton, Mr., 370. Bastiat, M., 297. Bax, Belfort, 84. Baxter, Dudley, 303. Beaconsfield, Lord, 210. Bebel, A., 34; on armaments, 37, 41, 125. Becker, B., 108. Beesley, Professor, 149. Beggars in Russia, 286. Belgium, Socialism, 45, 70; forests, 412; railways, 416. Bellamy, E., 79, 403, 434. Besant, Mrs., 88. Bismarck, Prince, State Socialism, 12; Rodbertus on, 34; peasant-catching, 52; right to labour, 421. Black Division Party, The, 283. Black Division, The, 292. Black Hand, The, 62. Blanc, Louis, 2, 3, 95, 122; theist, 254. Blanquists, 53. Boeckh, Professor, 97. Boehmert, V., 315. Boerenbond, The, 245. Bonar, Mr., quoted, 75. Boston Anarchists, 77. Boycotting, 42. Birmingham, 433. Brassey, Lord, 310, 330. Brentano, Professor L., on A. Smith, 198; on condition of people, 204; working-class claims, 213; trade unions, 216; working class insurance, 216. Brimstone League, 148. Brissot, M., 16. Brook Farm, 402. Brousse, M., 50. Broussists, 51, 52. Buchsel, Dr., 239. Buda Pest Congress, 54. Burns, John, 85. Burt, T., M.P., 86. C. Cabet, 3. Cairnes, Professor, on Mill, 5; on working-class prospects, 297; cost of labour, 310. California, 435. Carpenter, E., 89. Castelar, E., 61. Catholic Church on employer's responsibility, 72. Catholic Socialists, 223. Catholic Workmen's Clubs, 223, 229; in France, 243. Caudron, Father, 243, 244. Cavour, Count, 288. Chamberlain, Rt. Hon. J., M.P., ransom, 385, 386; overgovernment, 395. Channing, W. H., 403. Chevalier, Michel, 348. China, Socialist Clubs, 92. Christian Socialism in England, 87, 220; Germany, 223; Austria, 242; France, 243. Christian Social Association, 229. Christian Social Politics, 242. Church, Primitive Communism of, 237. Clemenceau, M., 47. Coaches, Stage, 451. Cobden, R., 221; on Government intervention, 372; on Prussian Government, 393. Colins, M., 2. Colinsian Socialists, 2, 72. Colonization, Nihilist, 281. Companies, Joint Stock, 417. Communards, 46. Commune, Paris, 277; Russian, 259, 289. Communist League, 142, 144. Conciliation Courts, 35. Congress at Halle, 33, 37; Gotha, 88; Havre, 47, 48; Wyden, 44, 126, 421; Zurich, 76; Eisenach, 202; D'Etienne, 50; Buda Pest, 54; Lisbon, 66; Arendal, 86; Stockholm, 67; Copenhagen, 69; Newark, U.S.A., 80; Leipzig, 103, 179; Geneva, 150. Co-operative production, 338, 339. Copenhagen Congress, 59. Costa, A., 58. Councils of Labour, 35. Crises, Commercial, 323, 451. D. Dave, V., 86. Davenant, Dr., 303, 455. Davitt, Michael, 90. Dawes, Mr., quoted, 60. Day of labour, Normal, 240, 434. Day of labour, Eight hours, 36, 52; Cardinal Manning on, 244; international compulsory, 434; in Victoria, 435; California, 435. Death-rate, 452. Delitzsch. _See_ Schultze-Delitzsch. Democracy, relation to socialism, 16, 18; American and Continental, 20. Denmark, socialism, 67. Denny, William, 315, 322. Distribution of incomes, 456. Dockyards, English, 410. Dolgourouki, the revolutionist, 274. Döllinger, Dr. von, 223. Dönnigsen, Helena von, 106. Dynamite, 256. E. _Egaux_, Conspiracy of, 17. Eight Hour Day. _See_ Day of labour. Eisenach Congress, 202. Ely, Professor, 77, 80. Emancipation of serfs, 270, 284, 286. Engel, Dr., 31, 203. Engelhardt, Professor, 293. Engels, F., 93, 131, 142, 146. England, Socialism in, 83. Equality, Love of, 24. Equality of conditions, 385. Ethical School of Economics, 209. Eudes, General, 53. F. Fabian Society, 88. Familistère of Guise, 2. Farmer, Small, 27, 28, 30. Federalism of C. Marlo, 178. Ferroti (Schedo), 267. Ferroul, M., 52. Feuerbach, Friedrich, 133. Feuerbach, L., 131, 132. Fleischmann, M., 42. Fluctuations, Commercial, 323. Forbes, Father, 243. Forestry, 412. Fourier, 23, 254. France, Liberty in, 21; socialism, 45; municipal socialism, 50. Franklin, B., 13; on high wages, 365. Fraternity, 269. Freiligrath, F., 146. Froebel, F., 130. Frohme, M., 35. Fulda Conference, 229. G. Gallenga, A., on unemployed in Italy, 59. Game Laws, 497. Geneva Congress, 150. George, Henry, United Labour Party, 78; a semi-socialist, 78; Mayoralty of New York, 79; in Australia, 90; "Progress and Poverty," 440; his problem, 445; his explanation, 461; theory of population, 464; of wages, 465; profits, 474; rent, 476; his remedy, 486; land nationalization, 485. Germany, Socialism in, 33; Crown lands and industries, 345. Giffen, R., 449, 452. Gilbert's Act, 424. Glennie, J. S., 34. Gneist, Professor, 203. Goethe, 127. Goltz, T. von der, on piecework, 315. Goschen, Right Hon. G. J., State intervention, 346; rationale of Factory Acts, 350; distribution of wealth, 460. Gotha Congress, 38. Gotha Programme, 38, 40. Graham, Mr. Cunninghame, M.P., 85. Greig, George, 490. Greeley, Horace, on socialist communities, 402. Gronlund, L., 81. Guesde, J., 48, 50, 73. Guesdists, 51, 52. H. Hadley, Professor, 416. Hale, Sir M., 301. Halle Congress, 33, 37, 41. Hartmann, E. von, 355. Hasselmann, 45, 72. Havre Congress, 47. Haxthausen, Professor, 259, 262. Headlam, Rev. S., 84, 88. Hearn, Professor, 347. Hegel, 131, 261. Hegelians, Young, 3, 5, 130, 139. Heine, H., on Lassalle, 96, 98; on parties, 126. Held, Professor, 196. Herder, 127. Hermann, 309. Herring brand, 412. Herzen, Alexander, 261, 262, 264, 265; letter renouncing revolutionism, 273, 274. Herzenism, 266. Hildebrand, Professor B., 201, 203. Hill, Sir R., 382. Hime, Dr., Sheffield, quoted, 341. Hirsch, Max, 203. Hoedel, 33. Holland, Socialism in, 72. House Communities of Russia, Dissolution of, 289. Housing of poor, in Sheffield, 341; McCulloch's view, 367. Howell, G., M.P., on piecework, 315. Hughes, Thomas, 222. Humboldt, A. von, 98, 102. Humboldt, W. von, on freedom, 334; on marriage, 353; on energy, 396. Humphreys, Mr., 482. Hyndman, H. M., 84. I. Icarians, 2, 77. "Illegal Men," 257. Incomes, Distribution of, 486. Increment, Unearned, 488. Ingram, Dr. J. K., 371. Insurance, National, 423; in New Zealand, 417. International Working Men's Association, in France, 46; Italy, 57; Spain, 60, 62; Denmark, 68; Belgium, 70; Holland, 70; Jurassian Federation, 73; origin, 147; Paris Commune, 152; disruption, 153; in Russia, 276. International Working People's Association, U.S.A., 80. Internationality, 126. Ireland, Poor Law, 385. Irish labour, 365. "Iron and Cruel Law," view of Lassalle, 121; of Ketteler, 226; of Todt, 237; refuted, 300. Italy, Socialism in, 57. J. Jacobites, 126. Janson, Professor, pauperism in St. Petersburg, 284. Jevons, Professor W. Stanley, commercial statistics, 327. Jews become Nihilists, 271, 296. Jurassian Federation, 73, 250. _Justice_, 84. K. Karakasoff's attempt, 276. Kemball, Sir Arnold, 495. Ketteler, Bishop, 224; iron and cruel law, 226; right of property, 227; part of Church in Social Question, 228. Kildonan Strath improvements, 490. King, Gregory, occupiers of land, 29; classes of population, 301; distribution of wealth, 303; rent of land, 454. Kingsley, Charles, 221. Knies, Professor, 201. Knights of Labor, 82. Koegel, Dr., 139. Kölping, Father, 223. Koscheleff, 267. Krapotkin, Prince, 45; Lyons anarchist, 48; English anarchism, 86; housing the poor, 250; the Municipal Councils, 252; painter, 280. L. Labour, Cost of, in different countries, 310. Labour Department of State, 35. Labour Emancipation League of Russia, 295. Labouring class prospects, 297, 312. Labour, Knights of, 82. Labour Party of Belgium, 71. Labour Statistical Bureaux, 326. Lafargue, P., 52. "Land and Liberty" Society, 283. Land, diminishing return, 467; an artificial product, 489; Mill on, 491: speculation in, 493; reform, 496. _Landmetzger_, 484. Land Nationalization in Belgium, 72; in England, 89. Land Restoration League, 90. Laing, Samuel, 411. Laisant, M., 64. _Laissez-faire_, 336, 352; repudiated by McCulloch, 361; never adopted in England, 373; and property, 394. Lange, F. A., 216. Laveleye, E. de, on Italian peasantry, 59; no revolutionary Metropolis in Italy, 60; Spanish socialist clubs, 61; the Portuguese, 65; the Scandinavians, 67; Belgian socialism, 71; State Socialism in England, 346; professes State Socialism, 384. Lavergne, M. de, on French and English rural population, 46. Lavrists, 280. Lavroff, P., 278; his principles, 279; followers, 295. Lassalle, F., 92; Heine, 96; character, 96; epitaph, 97; a revolution, 97; Humboldt, 98; Countess Hatzfeldt's defence, 99; theft of _cassette_, 100; conviction for treason, 101; literary work, 102; "Working Men's Programme," 103; summary of, 109; General Working Men's Association, 105; progress of propaganda, 105; Helena von Dönnigsen, 106; death, 108; apotheosis, 108; reply to Schultze-Delitzsch, 114; new socialistic constitution of property, 116; anarchic socialism of existing _régime_, 117; Ricardo's doctrine of value, 119; "iron and cruel law," 121; productive societies, 122; a national socialist, 124; letter to Feuerbach, 172; on the modern economists, 201; popularity in Russia, 277; on increase of production, 336. Le Basse, Father, 243. Ledru-Rollin, quoted, 22. Leipzig Congress, 103, 179. Leo XIII., 243; encyclical, 245. Le Play, 284. Leroux, P., 3. Leroy-Beaulieu, Paul, 219. Lessing, 127. Levi, Professor Leone, 304. Liberalism, Marlo on, 185. Liberty in America, 20; in France, 21; under democracy, 24. Lichtenstein, Prince, 243. Liebknecht, W., 34; on revolution, 42; peasant catching, 42; religion, 42; future socialist State, 43; expulsion from General Working Men's Association of Germany, 125; foundation of Social Democratic Labour Party, 125; speech at Leipzig, 249. Liège, Congress, 243. Lilyenkrantz, Jacquette, 69. Limitation of production, 313. Limousin, M., minimum of socialism, 14. Lisbon Congress, 66. Locke, John, 353. London, death-rate, 302. Ludlow, Edmund, 127. Ludlow, J. M., 221. M. Mably, 161. Macaulay, Lord, quoted, 214. Macdonald, Mr., Owenite, 403. Machiavelli, secret societies, 257. Malet, Mr., 45. Malikowsy, 280. Malthus, T. R., 369, 421. Malthusianism, 17. Manchester Party of Germany, 201, 212. Manchester School, view of Maurice, 221; of Kingsley, 221; of Todt, 235; their real doctrine, 372. Manning, Cardinal, Liège letter, 244. Marlboro' Association, 405. Marlo, Carl, 178. Marr, W., 136, 137. Marshall, Professor A., 437. Martensen, Bishop, Catholicism and socialism, 233. Marx, Karl, historical necessity of socialism, 23; social revolution impossible without English participation, 83; despair of English participation, 84; reception of _Das Kapital_, 127; life, 129; Young Hegelian, 130; early views, 139; Communist League, 142; communist manifesto, 144; International, 149; inaugural address to, 151; summary of _Das Kapital_, 156; value, 160; wages, 161; normal workday, 161; machinery, 170; piecework, 172; over-population, 174; letter from Proudhon, 255; popularity in Russia, 277. Massachusetts, Joint Stock management in, 417. Maurice, F. D., 11, 221. McCulloch, J. R., disciple of Ricardo, 360; Wages fund, 360; _laissez-faire_, 361; State management, 362; factory system, 363; pauper labour, 364; factory legislation, 366; housing the poor, 366; poor law, 368; agricultural produce, 456. "Medalmen," 294. Meeker, Mr., Fourierist, 408. Melbourne anarchists, 91. Menger, Prof. A., historical necessity of socialism, 23. Meyer, Rudolph, 242, 383. Michel, Louise, 48. Mill, James, 360. Mill, John Stuart, profession of socialism, 5; liberty, 334; province of Government, 353; over-government in democracy, 395; industrial habits under socialism, 404; unearned increment, 488; land, 472. Ministry of Labour, 35. Mint, The, 412. _Mir_, The, 252, 262. Molinari, G. de, 3, 45. Montefiore, L., 97. Morelly, 16. Morier, Sir R., 288. Morris, William, 84, 85. Most, John, 44, 80, 248. Moufang, Canon, 230, 231. Mulhall, M., wages, 308; textile workers, 323; agricultural rent, 456. Mun, Count A., de, 243. Municipal management, 413. Municipal socialism in France, 51. Mutualists, 3. N. Napoleon I., 380. Nasmyth, James, manual dexterity, 317, 440. Nasse, Professor E., economic individualism in England, 346. Neale, E. Vansittart, 87. Netchaïeff, 276. Newark Congress, 80. New Zealand, State insurance, 348. Nicholas, Czar, 263, 264. Niewenhuis, D., 72. Nihilism, Russian, 45, 259; name, 266. Nobiling, 33. No Man's land, 482. Nordhoff, Mr., 403. North American Phalanx, 408. Norway, Socialism in, 66; the poor, 452. Noyes, Mr., 403. O. Oldham, co-operative mills, 338. Old Believers, 292. Oppenheim, M., 195. Overtime, 320. Owen, R. D., 405. Owen, Robert, 77, 360. Owenites, 2, 11, 77, 148; in America, 404. P. Palm, 67. Pan-destruction, 274. Parsons, 249. Patriotism, disparaged by socialists, 126; by great writers, 127. Paul, St., slave emancipation, 242. Pauperism, St. Petersburg, 260; aged, 423; England, 449; able-bodied, 450; Norway, 452. Peasant proprietary, prospects, 27; in the International, 46. Peasants' League in Belgium, 245. Pensions, National, 423. Perowskaia, Sophia, 280. Pestel, 264. Peukert, 55. Piecework, 314. Pio, 68. Poles, The, 271. Poor Law, England, 402; McCulloch, 368; S. Webb, 423. Population theory, 464. Porter, G. R., good wages and temperance, 318; working class houses in Sheffield, 341. Portugal, Socialism in, 65. Possibilists, 50, 51. Post-office management, 410. Potter, George, piecework, 320. Production, Limitation of, 313. Productive associations, 79. Profit-sharing, 339. Propaganda of Deed, 256. Property, diffusion, 23; advantages of institution, 333. Proudhon, anarchy, 250; letter to Marx, 255; pauperism, 475. Prussia, socialism, 31; condition of people, 31; occupation of land, 32; forests, 42. R. Railways, State, 416. Rappists, 405. Realistic School of Economics, 205. Reclus, Elisée, anarchist, 48; on Russian agriculture, 290. Renan, E., 384. Rent, Fair, 429; agricultural, 456; H. George, 476. Republican Socialist Alliance in France, 54. Revolutionist, The complete, 275. Reybaud, M., 179. Ricardo, D., law of value, 226; "iron law of wages," 300; real theory of wages, 306; province of Government, 359; National Bank, 360; working class annuities, 360; rent, 477. Right to existence, 421. Right to labour, in Convention of 1793, 22; Bismarck on, 421; in English Poor Law, 424. Rights, Natural, 420; Primitive economic, 385. Rodbertus on Bismarck's social policy, 34; differences from Lassalle, 123; social question, 127; relation to socialist movement, 178; converts Wagner, 380; acknowledges Hohenzollerns, 381; views, 381. Rodriguez de Capada, Professor, 245. Rogers, Professor Thorold, 350. Roscher, Professor W., time as reformer, 199; historical method, 200, 204; Eisenach Congress, 203; economic ideal, 205; task as economist, 207; piecework, 321. Rousseau, J. J., 16. Ruge, Arnold, 131. Ruskin, John, 88. Russia, Nihilism in, 259. Russo-Turkish war, 282. S. St. Etienne Congress, 50. St. Joseph associations, 229. St. Petersburg pauperism, 260. St. Simon, 218, 254. Samoa, Socialist customs in, 401, 492. Samter, V., on Mill, 198. Sassulitch, Vera, 277, 282. Say, Leon, State Socialism, 345. Schæffle, Professor, 326. Scheel, Professor von., social question, 215. Schmoller, Professor, 195; on Socialists of Chair, 200; Eisenach Congress, 203; Province of Government, 211; distributive justice, 213 Schönberg, Professor, 203, 213. Schorlemer-Abst, Baron, 229. Schulte, Professor, 229. Schultze-Delitzsch, 4; co-operative societies, 103; Lassalle's reply, 114. Schweitzer, Dr. von, 124. Self-interest, 375. Senior, N. W., 464. Shakers, 405. Shaw, G., Bernard, 88. Sheffield, socialists, 89; housing of working-class, 341. Shuttleworth, Canon, 88. Sidgwick, Professor, 360, 428. Sinclair, Sir John, 469. Sisyphism, 443. Smith, Adam, as viewed by Socialists of the Chair, 198; on Government trading, 345; his theory of social politics, 353; national education, 354; military training, 355; English Government management, 356; truck, 357; usury, 357; corporate management, 417. Smith, E. Peshine, effect of education on wages, 321. Social Democratic Party in Germany, 33; in Reichstag, 34; France, 48; programme, 49; Italy, 58; Spain, 61; Norway, 66; Denmark, 69; Belgium, 70; Holland, 73; Switzerland, 74; U.S.A., 80; England, 84; Scotland, 90; Sydney, 91. Social Monarchical Union, 241. Social Politics, English theory, 373; Christian, 242. Social Reform, Central Union for, 239. Socialism, before 1848, 2; contemporary, 3; labourers' claim of right, 7; variable use of word, 8; inequitableness its ruling characteristic, 9; old and new, 10; minimum of, 14; relation to democracy, 15; Christian, 224; State, 345; meanings of word, 374. Socialist Laws of Germany, 33. Socialists of the Chair, 195. Society of Public Utility in Switzerland, 76. Society of Social Peace, 243. Spain, Socialism in, 60; anarchism, 62; condition of people, 64. _Spectator, The_, testamentary statistics, 459. Speculation, 493. Spencer, Herbert, believes in socialist ideal of society, 8; the coming slavery, 346; functions of Government, 351, 352; land nationalization, 385; natural rights, 420. Stahl, quoted, 16. State management, 409. State railways, 415. State Socialism, 345; in Germany, 379 State, The, 211. Statistics, Commercial, 326. Stein, Professor L. von, 94, 132. Stephanovitch, 293. Stepniak, on _mir_, 252; Paris Commune, 277; Russian proletariat, 284; Russian peasantry, 285, 286, 288; break-up of the Russian Commune, 289; Russian agriculture, 291. Stöcker, Dr., 234, 236, 241, 242. Stockholm Congress, 67. Strachey, Mr., 68. Strikes, 44. Studnitz, A., 320, 331. Suez Canal, 348. Sumner, Archbishop, 370. Sunday Schools, Nihilist, 269, 272. Surplus Value, Marx's doctrine, 167. Sweating System, 432. Sweden, Socialism in, 66. Switzerland, Socialism in, 73; Society of Public Utility, 76; secret societies, 136. Sylvania Association, 404. T. Taylor, Helen, 84. Tchaikowsky, 280. Tchernycheffsky, 269, 272. Telegraphs, State management of, 410. Thompson, William, anticipation of Marx's doctrine, 148. Thornton, W. T., 464. Thuenen, J. von, natural wages, 121. Thun, Professor A., 278, 281, 284, 285, 287. Tocqueville, A. de, socialism and democracy, 19; democratic passion for equality, 24; middle-class materialization, 24; political necessity of religion, 25; the plutocracy, 186. Todt, R., 234. Trade Unions, 311. Tramps, 450. Treitschke, H., 203. Trepoff, Assassination of General, 282. Trial of the, 193, 280. Troglodytes, Secret Society, 283. Trumbull Phalanx, 404. Tucker, B. R., 91. Turgenieff, 266. Turner, Dr., Samoa, 401, 492. U. Unemployed, 424. Unionism, The New, 85, 86. United States, Liberty in, 20; socialism, 77; nationalism, 79; anarchism, 80. V. Vaillant, M., 53. Value, Marx's doctrine, 160; true theory, 327. "Versaillais," The, 126. Victoria, State railways, 411, 417; eight hours day, 436. Volmar, Herr von, 35. Vogt, K., 148. W. Wages Fund, 464, 465. Wages, "iron law," 226, 237, 300; rise since English Revolution, 301; Ricardo's theory, 306; true theory, 307; fair, 430; minimum, 431. Wagner, Professor A., ground-rents, 199; State and the social question, 213; Evangelical Social Congress, 241; converted by Rodbertus, 380; his State Socialism, 387. Walker, President F. A., 332, 469. Wallace, A. R., 89, 485. Warren, Josiah, 77. Watts, Dr. J., 434. Webb, Sidney, 88; State pensions for the aged, 423. Weitling, W., 80, 137. Westminster, Duke of, 486. Wieland, 127. Will of the People Party, 283, 295. Winchester, Bishop of, definition of socialism, 376. Winkelblech, Professor, 180. Woeste, M., 244. Working classes, prospects, 297, 312; habits, 318; legitimate aspirations, 333. Workmen's Chambers, 35. Wyden Congress, 44, 126. Y. Yellow Springs, 404. Young, Arthur, 455. Young England Party, 380. Z. Zurich Congress, 76. * * * * * OPINIONS OF THE PRESS ON THE FIRST EDITION. "A work of commanding ability and great practical value. 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7303	----	[Illustration: EDWARD BELLAMY.] EQUALITY by EDWARD BELLAMY Author of Looking Backward, Dr. Heidenhoff's Process, Miss Ludington's Sister, etc. * * * * * Second Edition * * * * * PREFACE. Looking Backward was a small book, and I was not able to get into it all I wished to say on the subject. Since it was published what was left out of it has loomed up as so much more important than what it contained that I have been constrained to write another book. I have taken the date of Looking Backward, the year 2000, as that of Equality, and have utilized the framework of the former story as a starting point for this which I now offer. In order that those who have not read Looking Backward may be at no disadvantage, an outline of the essential features of that story is subjoined: In the year 1887 Julian West was a rich young man living in Boston. He was soon to be married to a young lady of wealthy family named Edith Bartlett, and meanwhile lived alone with his man-servant Sawyer in the family mansion. Being a sufferer from insomnia, he had caused a chamber to be built of stone beneath the foundation of the house, which he used for a sleeping room. When even the silence and seclusion of this retreat failed to bring slumber, he sometimes called in a professional mesmerizer to put him into a hypnotic sleep, from which Sawyer knew how to arouse him at a fixed time. This habit, as well as the existence of the underground chamber, were secrets known only to Sawyer and the hypnotist who rendered his services. On the night of May 30, 1887, West sent for the latter, and was put to sleep as usual. The hypnotist had previously informed his patron that he was intending to leave the city permanently the same evening, and referred him to other practitioners. That night the house of Julian West took fire and was wholly destroyed. Remains identified as those of Sawyer were found and, though no vestige of West appeared, it was assumed that he of course had also perished. One hundred and thirteen years later, in September, A. D. 2000, Dr. Leete, a physician of Boston, on the retired list, was conducting excavations in his garden for the foundations of a private laboratory, when the workers came on a mass of masonry covered with ashes and charcoal. On opening it, a vault, luxuriously fitted up in the style of a nineteenth-century bedchamber, was found, and on the bed the body of a young man looking as if he had just lain down to sleep. Although great trees had been growing above the vault, the unaccountable preservation of the youth's body tempted Dr. Leete to attempt resuscitation, and to his own astonishment his efforts proved successful. The sleeper returned to life, and after a short time to the full vigor of youth which his appearance had indicated. His shock on learning what had befallen him was so great as to have endangered his sanity but for the medical skill of Dr. Leete, and the not less sympathetic ministrations of the other members of the household, the doctor's wife, and Edith the beautiful daughter. Presently, however, the young man forgot to wonder at what had happened to himself in his astonishment on learning of the social transformation through which the world had passed while he lay sleeping. Step by step, almost as to a child, his hosts explained to him, who had known no other way of living except the struggle for existence, what were the simple principles of national co-operation for the promotion of the general welfare on which the new civilization rested. He learned that there were no longer any who were or could be richer or poorer than others, but that all were economic equals. He learned that no one any longer worked for another, either by compulsion or for hire, but that all alike were in the service of the nation working for the common fund, which all equally shared, and that even necessary personal attendance, as of the physician, was rendered as to the state like that of the military surgeon. All these wonders, it was explained, had very simply come about as the results of replacing private capitalism by public capitalism, and organizing the machinery of production and distribution, like the political government, as business of general concern to be carried on for the public benefit instead of private gain. But, though it was not long before the young stranger's first astonishment at the institutions of the new world had passed into enthusiastic admiration and he was ready to admit that the race had for the first time learned how to live, he presently began to repine at a fate which had introduced him to the new world, only to leave him oppressed by a sense of hopeless loneliness which all the kindness of his new friends could not relieve, feeling, as he must, that it was dictated by pity only. Then it was that he first learned that his experience had been a yet more marvelous one than he had supposed. Edith Leete was no other than the great-granddaughter of Edith Bartlett, his betrothed, who, after long mourning her lost lover, had at last allowed herself to be consoled. The story of the tragical bereavement which had shadowed her early life was a family tradition, and among the family heirlooms were letters from Julian West, together with a photograph which represented so handsome a youth that Edith was illogically inclined to quarrel with her great-grandmother for ever marrying anybody else. As for the young man's picture, she kept it on her dressing table. Of course, it followed that the identity of the tenant of the subterranean chamber had been fully known to his rescuers from the moment of the discovery; but Edith, for reasons of her own, had insisted that he should not know who she was till she saw fit to tell him. When, at the proper time, she had seen fit to do this, there was no further question of loneliness for the young man, for how could destiny more unmistakably have indicated that two persons were meant for each other? His cup of happiness now being full, he had an experience in which it seemed to be dashed from his lips. As he lay on his bed in Dr. Leete's house he was oppressed by a hideous nightmare. It seemed to him that he opened his eyes to find himself on his bed in the underground chamber where the mesmerizer had put him to sleep. Sawyer was just completing the passes used to break the hypnotic influence. He called for the morning paper, and read on the date line May 31, 1887. Then he knew that all this wonderful matter about the year 2000, its happy, care-free world of brothers and the fair girl he had met there were but fragments of a dream. His brain in a whirl, he went forth into the city. He saw everything with new eyes, contrasting it with what he had seen in the Boston of the year 2000. The frenzied folly of the competitive industrial system, the inhuman contrasts of luxury and woe--pride and abjectness--the boundless squalor, wretchedness, and madness of the whole scheme of things which met his eye at every turn, outraged his reason and made his heart sick. He felt like a sane man shut up by accident in a madhouse. After a day of this wandering he found himself at nightfall in a company of his former companions, who rallied him on his distraught appearance. He told them of his dream and what it had taught him of the possibilities of a juster, nobler, wiser social system. He reasoned with them, showing how easy it would be, laying aside the suicidal folly of competition, by means of fraternal co-operation, to make the actual world as blessed as that he had dreamed of. At first they derided him, but, seeing his earnestness, grew angry, and denounced him as a pestilent fellow, an anarchist, an enemy of society, and drove him from them. Then it was that, in an agony of weeping, he awoke, this time awaking really, not falsely, and found himself in his bed in Dr. Leete's house, with the morning sun of the twentieth century shining in his eyes. Looking from the window of his room, he saw Edith in the garden gathering flowers for the breakfast table, and hastened to descend to her and relate his experience. At this point we will leave him to continue the narrative for himself. * * * * * CONTENTS. CHAPTER I.--A SHARP CROSS-EXAMINER II.--WHY THE REVOLUTION DID NOT COME EARLIER III.--I ACQUIRE A STAKE IN THE COUNTRY IV.--A TWENTIETH-CENTURY BANK PARLOR V.--I EXPERIENCE A NEW SENSATION VI.--HONI SOIT QUI MAL Y PENSE VII.--A STRING OF SURPRISES VIII.--THE GREATEST WONDER YET--FASHION DETHRONED IX.--SOMETHING THAT HAD NOT CHANGED X.--A MIDNIGHT PLUNGE XI.--LIFE THE BASIS OF THE RIGHT OF PROPERTY XII.--HOW INEQUALITY OF WEALTH DESTROYS LIBERTY XIII.--PRIVATE CAPITAL STOLEN FROM THE SOCIAL FUND XIV.--WE LOOK OVER MY COLLECTION OF HARNESSES XV.--WHAT WE WERE COMING TO BUT FOR THE REVOLUTION XVI.--AN EXCUSE THAT CONDEMNED XVII.--THE REVOLUTION SAVES PRIVATE PROPERTY FROM MONOPOLY XVIII.--AN ECHO OF THE PAST XIX.--"CAN A MAID FORGET HER ORNAMENTS?" XX.--WHAT THE REVOLUTION DID FOR WOMEN XXI.--AT THE GYMNASIUM XXII.--ECONOMIC SUICIDE OF THE PROFIT SYSTEM XXIII.--"THE PARABLE OF THE WATER TANK" XXIV.--I AM SHOWN ALL THE KINGDOMS OF THE EARTH XXV.--THE STRIKERS XXVI.--FOREIGN COMMERCE UNDER PROFITS; PROTECTION AND FREE TRADE, OR BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP SEA XXVII.--HOSTILITY OF A SYSTEM OF VESTED INTERESTS TO IMPROVEMENT XXVIII.--HOW THE PROFIT SYSTEM NULLIFIED THE BENEFIT OF INVENTIONS XXIX.--I RECEIVE AN OVATION XXX.--WHAT UNIVERSAL CULTURE MEANS XXXI.--"NEITHER IN THIS MOUNTAIN NOR AT JERUSALEM" XXXII.--ERITIS SICUT DEUS XXXIII.--SEVERAL IMPORTANT MATTERS OVERLOOKED XXXIV.--WHAT STARTED THE REVOLUTION XXXV.--WHY THE REVOLUTION WENT SLOW AT FIRST BUT FAST AT LAST XXXVI.--THEATER-GOING IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY XXXVII.--THE TRANSITION PERIOD XXXVIII.--THE BOOK OF THE BLIND * * * * * EQUALITY. * * * * * CHAPTER I. A SHARP CROSS-EXAMINER. With many expressions of sympathy and interest Edith listened to the story of my dream. When, finally, I had made an end, she remained musing. "What are you thinking about?" I said. "I was thinking," she answered, "how it would have been if your dream had been true." "True!" I exclaimed. "How could it have been true?" "I mean," she said, "if it had all been a dream, as you supposed it was in your nightmare, and you had never really seen our Republic of the Golden Rule or me, but had only slept a night and dreamed the whole thing about us. And suppose you had gone forth just as you did in your dream, and had passed up and down telling men of the terrible folly and wickedness of their way of life and how much nobler and happier a way there was. Just think what good you might have done, how you might have helped people in those days when they needed help so much. It seems to me you must be almost sorry you came back to us." "You look as if you were almost sorry yourself," I said, for her wistful expression seemed susceptible of that interpretation. "Oh, no," she answered, smiling. "It was only on your own account. As for me, I have very good reasons for being glad that you came back." "I should say so, indeed. Have you reflected that if I had dreamed it all you would have had no existence save as a figment in the brain of a sleeping man a hundred years ago?" "I had not thought of that part of it," she said smiling and still half serious; "yet if I could have been more useful to humanity as a fiction than as a reality, I ought not to have minded the--the inconvenience." But I replied that I greatly feared no amount of opportunity to help mankind in general would have reconciled me to life anywhere or under any conditions after leaving her behind in a dream--a confession of shameless selfishness which she was pleased to pass over without special rebuke, in consideration, no doubt, of my unfortunate bringing up. "Besides," I resumed, being willing a little further to vindicate myself, "it would not have done any good. I have just told you how in my nightmare last night, when I tried to tell my contemporaries and even my best friends about the nobler way men might live together, they derided me as a fool and madman. That is exactly what they would have done in reality had the dream been true and I had gone about preaching as in the case you supposed." "Perhaps a few might at first have acted as you dreamed they did," she replied. "Perhaps they would not at once have liked the idea of economic equality, fearing that it might mean a leveling down for them, and not understanding that it would presently mean a leveling up of all together to a vastly higher plane of life and happiness, of material welfare and moral dignity than the most fortunate had ever enjoyed. But even if the rich had at first mistaken you for an enemy to their class, the poor, the great masses of the poor, the real nation, they surely from the first would have listened as for their lives, for to them your story would have meant glad tidings of great joy." "I do not wonder that you think so," I answered, "but, though I am still learning the A B C of this new world, I knew my contemporaries, and I know that it would not have been as you fancy. The poor would have listened no better than the rich, for, though poor and rich in my day were at bitter odds in everything else, they were agreed in believing that there must always be rich and poor, and that a condition of material equality was impossible. It used to be commonly said, and it often seemed true, that the social reformer who tried to better the condition of the people found a more discouraging obstacle in the hopelessness of the masses he would raise than in the active resistance of the few, whose superiority was threatened. And indeed, Edith, to be fair to my own class, I am bound to say that with the best of the rich it was often as much this same hopelessness as deliberate selfishness that made them what we used to call conservative. So you see, it would have done no good even if I had gone to preaching as you fancied. The poor would have regarded my talk about the possibility of an equality of wealth as a fairy tale, not worth a laboring man's time to listen to. Of the rich, the baser sort would have mocked and the better sort would have sighed, but none would have given ear seriously." But Edith smiled serenely. "It seems very audacious for me to try to correct your impressions of your own contemporaries and of what they might be expected to think and do, but you see the peculiar circumstances give me a rather unfair advantage. Your knowledge of your times necessarily stops short with 1887, when you became oblivious of the course of events. I, on the other hand, having gone to school in the twentieth century, and been obliged, much against my will, to study nineteenth-century history, naturally know what happened after the date at which your knowledge ceased. I know, impossible as it may seem to you, that you had scarcely fallen into that long sleep before the American people began to be deeply and widely stirred with aspirations for an equal order such as we enjoy, and that very soon the political movement arose which, after various mutations, resulted early in the twentieth century in overthrowing the old system and setting up the present one." This was indeed interesting information to me, but when I began to question Edith further, she sighed and shook her head. "Having tried to show my superior knowledge, I must now confess my ignorance. All I know is the bare fact that the revolutionary movement began, as I said, very soon after you fell asleep. Father must tell you the rest. I might as well admit while I am about it, for you would soon find it out, that I know almost nothing either as to the Revolution or nineteenth-century matters generally. You have no idea how hard I have been trying to post myself on the subject so as to be able to talk intelligently with you, but I fear it is of no use. I could not understand it in school and can not seem to understand it any better now. More than ever this morning I am sure that I never shall. Since you have been telling me how the old world appeared to you in that dream, your talk has brought those days so terribly near that I can almost see them, and yet I can not say that they seem a bit more intelligible than before." "Things were bad enough and black enough certainly," I said; "but I don't see what there was particularly unintelligible about them. What is the difficulty?" "The main difficulty comes from the complete lack of agreement between the pretensions of your contemporaries about the way their society was organized and the actual facts as given in the histories." "For example?" I queried. "I don't suppose there is much use in trying to explain my trouble," she said. "You will only think me stupid for my pains, but I'll try to make you see what I mean. You ought to be able to clear up the matter if anybody can. You have just been telling me about the shockingly unequal conditions of the people, the contrasts of waste and want, the pride and power of the rich, the abjectness and servitude of the poor, and all the rest of the dreadful story." "Yes." "It appears that these contrasts were almost as great as at any previous period of history." "It is doubtful," I replied, "if there was ever a greater disparity between the conditions of different classes than you would find in a half hour's walk in Boston, New York, Chicago, or any other great city of America in the last quarter of the nineteenth century." "And yet," said Edith, "it appears from all the books that meanwhile the Americans' great boast was that they differed from all other and former nations in that they were free and equal. One is constantly coming upon this phrase in the literature of the day. Now, you have made it clear that they were neither free nor equal in any ordinary sense of the word, but were divided as mankind had always been before into rich and poor, masters and servants. Won't you please tell me, then, what they meant by calling themselves free and equal?" "It was meant, I suppose, that they were all equal before the law." "That means in the courts. And were the rich and poor equal in the courts? Did they receive the same treatment?" "I am bound to say," I replied, "that they were nowhere else more unequal. The law applied in terms to all alike, but not in fact. There was more difference in the position of the rich and the poor man before the law than in any other respect. The rich were practically above the law, the poor under its wheels." "In what respect, then, were the rich and poor equal?" "They were said to be equal in opportunities." "Opportunities for what?" "For bettering themselves, for getting rich, for getting ahead of others in the struggle for wealth." "It seems to me that only meant, if it were true, not that all were equal, but that all had an equal chance to make themselves unequal. But was it true that all had equal opportunities for getting rich and bettering themselves?" "It may have been so to some extent at one time when the country was new," I replied, "but it was no more so in my day. Capital had practically monopolized all economic opportunities by that time; there was no opening in business enterprise for those without large capital save by some extraordinary fortune." "But surely," said Edith, "there must have been, in order to give at least a color to all this boasting about equality, some one respect in which the people were really equal?" "Yes, there was. They were political equals. They all had one vote alike, and the majority was the supreme lawgiver." "So the books say, but that only makes the actual condition of things more absolutely unaccountable." "Why so?" "Why, because if these people all had an equal voice in the government--these toiling, starving, freezing, wretched masses of the poor--why did they not without a moment's delay put an end to the inequalities from which they suffered?" "Very likely," she added, as I did not at once reply, "I am only showing how stupid I am by saying this. Doubtless I am overlooking some important fact, but did you not say that all the people, at least all the men, had a voice in the government?" "Certainly; by the latter part of the nineteenth century manhood suffrage had become practically universal in America." "That is to say, the people through their chosen agents made all the laws. Is that what you mean?" "Certainly." "But I remember you had Constitutions of the nation and of the States. Perhaps they prevented the people from doing quite what they wished." "No; the Constitutions were only a little more fundamental sort of laws. The majority made and altered them at will. The people were the sole and supreme final power, and their will was absolute." "If, then, the majority did not like any existing arrangement, or think it to their advantage, they could change it as radically as they wished?" "Certainly; the popular majority could do anything if it was large and determined enough." "And the majority, I understand, were the poor, not the rich--the ones who had the wrong side of the inequalities that prevailed?" "Emphatically so; the rich were but a handful comparatively." "Then there was nothing whatever to prevent the people at any time, if they just willed it, from making an end of their sufferings and organizing a system like ours which would guarantee their equality and prosperity?" "Nothing whatever." "Then once more I ask you to kindly tell me why, in the name of common sense, they didn't do it at once and be happy instead of making a spectacle of themselves so woeful that even a hundred years after it makes us cry?" "Because," I replied, "they were taught and believed that the regulation of industry and commerce and the production and distribution of wealth was something wholly outside of the proper province of government." "But, dear me, Julian, life itself and everything that meanwhile makes life worth living, from the satisfaction of the most primary physical needs to the gratification of the most refined tastes, all that belongs to the development of mind as well as body, depend first, last, and always on the manner in which the production and distribution of wealth is regulated. Surely that must have been as true in your day as ours." "Of course." "And yet you tell me, Julian, that the people, after having abolished the rule of kings and taken the supreme power of regulating their affairs into their own hands, deliberately consented to exclude from their jurisdiction the control of the most important, and indeed the only really important, class of their interests." "Do not the histories say so?" "They do say so, and that is precisely why I could never believe them. The thing seemed so incomprehensible I thought there must be some way of explaining it. But tell me, Julian, seeing the people did not think that they could trust themselves to regulate their own industry and the distribution of the product, to whom did they leave the responsibility?" "To the capitalists." "And did the people elect the capitalists?" "Nobody elected them." "By whom, then, were they appointed?" "Nobody appointed them." "What a singular system! Well, if nobody elected or appointed them, yet surely they must have been accountable to somebody for the manner in which they exercised powers on which the welfare and very existence of everybody depended." "On the contrary, they were accountable to nobody and nothing but their own consciences." "Their consciences! Ah, I see! You mean that they were so benevolent, so unselfish, so devoted to the public good, that people tolerated their usurpation out of gratitude. The people nowadays would not endure the irresponsible rule even of demigods, but probably it was different in your day." "As an ex-capitalist myself, I should be pleased to confirm your surmise, but nothing could really be further from the fact. As to any benevolent interest in the conduct of industry and commerce, the capitalists expressly disavowed it. Their only object was to secure the greatest possible gain for themselves without any regard whatever to the welfare of the public." "Dear me! Dear me! Why you make out these capitalists to have been even worse than the kings, for the kings at least professed to govern for the welfare of their people, as fathers acting for children, and the good ones did try to. But the capitalists, you say, did not even pretend to feel any responsibility for the welfare of their subjects?" "None whatever." "And, if I understand," pursued Edith, "this government of the capitalists was not only without moral sanction of any sort or plea of benevolent intentions, but was practically an economic failure--that is, it did not secure the prosperity of the people." "What I saw in my dream last night," I replied, "and have tried to tell you this morning, gives but a faint suggestion of the misery of the world under capitalist rule." Edith meditated in silence for some moments. Finally she said: "Your contemporaries were not madmen nor fools; surely there is something you have not told me; there must be some explanation or at least color of excuse why the people not only abdicated the power of controling their most vital and important interests, but turned them over to a class which did not even pretend any interest in their welfare, and whose government completely failed to secure it." "Oh, yes," I said, "there was an explanation, and a very fine-sounding one. It was in the name of individual liberty, industrial freedom, and individual initiative that the economic government of the country was surrendered to the capitalists." "Do you mean that a form of government which seems to have been the most irresponsible and despotic possible was defended in the name of liberty?" "Certainly; the liberty of economic initiative by the individual." "But did you not just tell me that economic initiative and business opportunity in your day were practically monopolized by the capitalists themselves?" "Certainly. It was admitted that there was no opening for any but capitalists in business, and it was rapidly becoming so that only the greatest of the capitalists themselves had any power of initiative." "And yet you say that the reason given for abandoning industry to capitalist government was the promotion of industrial freedom and individual initiative among the people at large." "Certainly. The people were taught that they would individually enjoy greater liberty and freedom of action in industrial matters under the dominion of the capitalists than if they collectively conducted the industrial system for their own benefit; that the capitalists would, moreover, look out for their welfare more wisely and kindly than they could possibly do it themselves, so that they would be able to provide for themselves more bountifully out of such portion of their product as the capitalists might be disposed to give them than they possibly could do if they became their own employers and divided the whole product among themselves." "But that was mere mockery; it was adding insult to injury." "It sounds so, doesn't it? But I assure you it was considered the soundest sort of political economy in my time. Those who questioned it were set down as dangerous visionaries." "But I suppose the people's government, the government they voted for, must have done something. There must have been some odds and ends of things which the capitalists left the political government to attend to." "Oh, yes, indeed. It had its hands full keeping the peace among the people. That was the main part of the business of political governments in my day." "Why did the peace require such a great amount of keeping? Why didn't it keep itself, as it does now?" "On account of the inequality of conditions which prevailed. The strife for wealth and desperation of want kept in quenchless blaze a hell of greed and envy, fear, lust, hate, revenge, and every foul passion of the pit. To keep this general frenzy in some restraint, so that the entire social system should not resolve itself into a general massacre, required an army of soldiers, police, judges, and jailers, and endless law-making to settle the quarrels. Add to these elements of discord a horde of outcasts degraded and desperate, made enemies of society by their sufferings and requiring to be kept in check, and you will readily admit there was enough for the people's government to do." "So far as I can see," said Edith, "the main business of the people's government was to struggle with the social chaos which resulted from its failure to take hold of the economic system and regulate it on a basis of justice." "That is exactly so. You could not state the whole case more adequately if you wrote a book." "Beyond protecting the capitalist system from its own effects, did the political government do absolutely nothing?" "Oh, yes, it appointed postmasters and tidewaiters, maintained an army and navy, and picked quarrels with foreign countries." "I should say that the right of a citizen to have a voice in a government limited to the range of functions you have mentioned would scarcely have seemed to him of much value." "I believe the average price of votes in close elections in America in my time was about two dollars." "Dear me, so much as that!" said Edith. "I don't know exactly what the value of money was in your day, but I should say the price was rather extortionate." "I think you are right," I answered. "I used to give in to the talk about the pricelessness of the right of suffrage, and the denunciation of those whom any stress of poverty could induce to sell it for money, but from the point of view to which you have brought me this morning I am inclined to think that the fellows who sold their votes had a far clearer idea of the sham of our so-called popular government, as limited to the class of functions I have described, than any of the rest of us did, and that if they were wrong it was, as you suggest, in asking too high a price." "But who paid for the votes?" "You are a merciless cross-examiner," I said. "The classes which had an interest in controling the government--that is, the capitalists and the office-seekers--did the buying. The capitalists advanced the money necessary to procure the election of the office-seekers on the understanding that when elected the latter should do what the capitalists wanted. But I ought not to give you the impression that the bulk of the votes were bought outright. That would have been too open a confession of the sham of popular government as well as too expensive. The money contributed by the capitalists to procure the election of the office-seekers was mainly expended to influence the people by indirect means. Immense sums under the name of campaign funds were raised for this purpose and used in innumerable devices, such as fireworks, oratory, processions, brass bands, barbecues, and all sorts of devices, the object of which was to galvanize the people to a sufficient degree of interest in the election to go through the motion of voting. Nobody who has not actually witnessed a nineteenth-century American election could even begin to imagine the grotesqueness of the spectacle." "It seems, then," said Edith, "that the capitalists not only carried on the economic government as their special province, but also practically managed the machinery of the political government as well." "Oh, yes, the capitalists could not have got along at all without control of the political government. Congress, the Legislatures, and the city councils were quite necessary as instruments for putting through their schemes. Moreover, in order to protect themselves and their property against popular outbreaks, it was highly needful that they should have the police, the courts, and the soldiers devoted to their interests, and the President, Governors, and mayors at their beck." "But I thought the President, the Governors, and Legislatures represented the people who voted for them." "Bless your heart! no, why should they? It was to the capitalists and not to the people that they owed the opportunity of officeholding. The people who voted had little choice for whom they should vote. That question was determined by the political party organizations, which were beggars to the capitalists for pecuniary support. No man who was opposed to capitalist interests was permitted the opportunity as a candidate to appeal to the people. For a public official to support the people's interest as against that of the capitalists would be a sure way of sacrificing his career. You must remember, if you would understand how absolutely the capitalists controled the Government, that a President, Governor, or mayor, or member of the municipal, State, or national council, was only temporarily a servant of the people or dependent on their favour. His public position he held only from election to election, and rarely long. His permanent, lifelong, and all-controling interest, like that of us all, was his livelihood, and that was dependent, not on the applause of the people, but the favor and patronage of capital, and this he could not afford to imperil in the pursuit of the bubbles of popularity. These circumstances, even if there had been no instances of direct bribery, sufficiently explained why our politicians and officeholders with few exceptions were vassals and tools of the capitalists. The lawyers, who, on account of the complexities of our system, were almost the only class competent for public business, were especially and directly dependent upon the patronage of the great capitalistic interests for their living." "But why did not the people elect officials and representatives of their own class, who would look out for the interests of the masses?" "There was no assurance that they would be more faithful. Their very poverty would make them the more liable to money temptation; and the poor, you must remember, although so much more pitiable, were not morally any better than the rich. Then, too--and that was the most important reason why the masses of the people, who were poor, did not send men of their class to represent them--poverty as a rule implied ignorance, and therefore practical inability, even where the intention was good. As soon as the poor man developed intelligence he had every temptation to desert his class and seek the patronage of capital." Edith remained silent and thoughtful for some moments. "Really," she said, finally, "it seems that the reason I could not understand the so-called popular system of government in your day is that I was trying to find out what part the people had in it, and it appears that they had no part at all." "You are getting on famously," I exclaimed. "Undoubtedly the confusion of terms in our political system is rather calculated to puzzle one at first, but if you only grasp firmly the vital point that the rule of the rich, the supremacy of capital and its interests, as against those of the people at large, was the central principle of our system, to which every other interest was made subservient, you will have the key that clears up every mystery." CHAPTER II. WHY THE REVOLUTION DID NOT COME EARLIER. Absorbed in our talk, we had not heard the steps of Dr. Leete as he approached. "I have been watching you for ten minutes from the house," he said, "until, in fact, I could no longer resist the desire to know what you find so interesting." "Your daughter," said I, "has been proving herself a mistress of the Socratic method. Under a plausible pretext of gross ignorance, she has been asking me a series of easy questions, with the result that I see as I never imagined it before the colossal sham of our pretended popular government in America. As one of the rich I knew, of course, that we had a great deal of power in the state, but I did not before realize how absolutely the people were without influence in their own government." "Aha!" exclaimed the doctor in great glee, "so my daughter gets up early in the morning with the design of supplanting her father in his position of historical instructor?" Edith had risen from the garden bench on which we had been seated and was arranging her flowers to take into the house. She shook her head rather gravely in reply to her father's challenge. "You need not be at all apprehensive," she said; "Julian has quite cured me this morning of any wish I might have had to inquire further into the condition of our ancestors. I have always been dreadfully sorry for the poor people of that day on account of the misery they endured from poverty and the oppression of the rich. Henceforth, however, I wash my hands of them and shall reserve my sympathy for more deserving objects." "Dear me!" said the doctor, "what has so suddenly dried up the fountains of your pity? What has Julian been telling you?" "Nothing, really, I suppose, that I had not read before and ought to have known, but the story always seemed so unreasonable and incredible that I never quite believed it until now. I thought there must be some modifying facts not set down in the histories." "But what is this that he has been telling you?" "It seems," said Edith, "that these very people, these very masses of the poor, had all the time the supreme control of the Government and were able, if determined and united, to put an end at any moment to all the inequalities and oppressions of which they complained and to equalize things as we have done. Not only did they not do this, but they gave as a reason for enduring their bondage that their liberties would be endangered unless they had irresponsible masters to manage their interests, and that to take charge of their own affairs would imperil their freedom. I feel that I have been cheated out of all the tears I have shed over the sufferings of such people. Those who tamely endure wrongs which they have the power to end deserve not compassion but contempt. I have felt a little badly that Julian should have been one of the oppressor class, one of the rich. Now that I really understand the matter, I am glad. I fear that, had he been one of the poor, one of the mass of real masters, who with supreme power in their hands consented to be bondsmen, I should have despised him." Having thus served formal notice on my contemporaries that they must expect no more sympathy from her, Edith went into the house, leaving me with a vivid impression that if the men of the twentieth century should prove incapable of preserving their liberties, the women might be trusted to do so. "Really, doctor," I said, "you ought to be greatly obliged to your daughter. She has saved you lots of time and effort." "How so, precisely?" "By rendering it unnecessary for you to trouble yourself to explain to me any further how and why you came to set up your nationalized industrial system and your economic equality. If you have ever seen a desert or sea mirage, you remember that, while the picture in the sky is very clear and distinct in itself, its unreality is betrayed by a lack of detail, a sort of blur, where it blends with the foreground on which you are standing. Do you know that this new social order of which I have so strangely become a witness has hitherto had something of this mirage effect? In itself it is a scheme precise, orderly, and very reasonable, but I could see no way by which it could have naturally grown out of the utterly different conditions of the nineteenth century. I could only imagine that this world transformation must have been the result of new ideas and forces that had come into action since my day. I had a volume of questions all ready to ask you on the subject, but now we shall be able to use the time in talking of other things, for Edith has shown me in ten minutes' time that the only wonderful thing about your organization of the industrial system as public business is not that it has taken place, but that it waited so long before taking place, that a nation of rational beings consented to remain economic serfs of irresponsible masters for more than a century after coming into possession of absolute power to change at pleasure all social institutions which inconvenienced them." "Really," said the doctor, "Edith has shown herself a very efficient teacher, if an involuntary one. She has succeeded at one stroke in giving you the modern point of view as to your period. As we look at it, the immortal preamble of the American Declaration of Independence, away back in 1776, logically contained the entire statement of the doctrine of universal economic equality guaranteed by the nation collectively to its members individually. You remember how the words run: "'We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal, with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these rights it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and institute a new government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as may seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.' "Is it possible, Julian, to imagine any governmental system less adequate than ours which could possibly realize this great ideal of what a true people's government should be? The corner stone of our state is economic equality, and is not that the obvious, necessary, and only adequate pledge of these three birthrights--life, liberty, and happiness? What is life without its material basis, and what is an equal right to life but a right to an equal material basis for it? What is liberty? How can men be free who must ask the right to labor and to live from their fellow-men and seek their bread from the hands of others? How else can any government guarantee liberty to men save by providing them a means of labor and of life coupled with independence; and how could that be done unless the government conducted the economic system upon which employment and maintenance depend? Finally, what is implied in the equal right of all to the pursuit of happiness? What form of happiness, so far as it depends at all on material facts, is not bound up with economic conditions; and how shall an equal opportunity for the pursuit of happiness be guaranteed to all save by a guarantee of economic equality?" "Yes," I said, "it is indeed all there, but why were we so long in seeing it?" "Let us make ourselves comfortable on this bench," said the doctor, "and I will tell you what is the modern answer to the very interesting question you raise. At first glance, certainly the delay of the world in general, and especially of the American people, to realize that democracy logically meant the substitution of popular government for the rule of the rich in regulating the production and distribution of wealth seems incomprehensible, not only because it was so plain an inference from the idea of popular government, but also because it was one which the masses of the people were so directly interested in carrying out. Edith's conclusion that people who were not capable of so simple a process of reasoning as that did not deserve much sympathy for the afflictions they might so easily have remedied, is a very natural first impression. "On reflection, however, I think we shall conclude that the time taken by the world in general and the Americans in particular in finding out the full meaning of democracy as an economic as well as a political proposition was not greater than might have been expected, considering the vastness of the conclusions involved. It is the democratic idea that all human beings are peers in rights and dignity, and that the sole just excuse and end of human governments is, therefore, the maintenance and furtherance of the common welfare on equal terms. This idea was the greatest social conception that the human mind had up to that time ever formed. It contained, when first conceived, the promise and potency of a complete transformation of all then existing social institutions, one and all of which had hitherto been based and formed on the principle of personal and class privilege and authority and the domination and selfish use of the many by the few. But it was simply inconsistent with the limitations of the human intellect that the implications of an idea so prodigious should at once have been taken in. The idea must absolutely have time to grow. The entire present order of economic democracy and equality was indeed logically bound up in the first full statement of the democratic idea, but only as the full-grown tree is in the seed: in the one case, as in the other, time was an essential element in the evolution of the result. "We divide the history of the evolution of the democratic idea into two broadly contrasted phases. The first of these we call the phase of negative democracy. To understand it we must consider how the democratic idea originated. Ideas are born of previous ideas and are long in outgrowing the characteristics and limitations impressed on them by the circumstances under which they came into existence. The idea of popular government, in the case of America as in previous republican experiments in general, was a protest against royal government and its abuses. Nothing is more certain than that the signers of the immortal Declaration had no idea that democracy necessarily meant anything more than a device for getting along without kings. They conceived of it as a change in the forms of government only, and not at all in the principles and purposes of government. "They were not, indeed, wholly without misgivings lest it might some time occur to the sovereign people that, being sovereign, it would be a good idea to use their sovereignty to improve their own condition. In fact, they seem to have given some serious thought to that possibility, but so little were they yet able to appreciate the logic and force of the democratic idea that they believed it possible by ingenious clauses in paper Constitutions to prevent the people from using their power to help themselves even if they should wish to. "This first phase of the evolution of democracy, during which it was conceived of solely as a substitute for royalty, includes all the so-called republican experiments up to the beginning of the twentieth century, of which, of course, the American Republic was the most important. During this period the democratic idea remained a mere protest against a previous form of government, absolutely without any new positive or vital principle of its own. Although the people had deposed the king as driver of the social chariot, and taken the reins into their own hands, they did not think as yet of anything but keeping the vehicle in the old ruts and naturally the passengers scarcely noticed the change. "The second phase in the evolution of the democratic idea began with the awakening of the people to the perception that the deposing of kings, instead of being the main end and mission of democracy, was merely preliminary to its real programme, which was the use of the collective social machinery for the indefinite promotion of the welfare of the people at large. "It is an interesting fact that the people began to think of applying their political power to the improvement of their material condition in Europe earlier than in America, although democratic forms had found much less acceptance there. This was, of course, on account of the perennial economic distress of the masses in the old countries, which prompted them to think first about the bearing any new idea might have on the question of livelihood. On the other hand, the general prosperity of the masses in America and the comparative ease of making a living up to the beginning of the last quarter of the nineteenth century account for the fact that it was not till then that the American people began to think seriously of improving their economic condition by collective action. "During the negative phase of democracy it had been considered as differing from monarchy only as two machines might differ, the general use and purpose of which were the same. With the evolution of the democratic idea into the second or positive phase, it was recognized that the transfer of the supreme power from king and nobles to people meant not merely a change in the forms of government, but a fundamental revolution in the whole idea of government, its motives, purposes, and functions--a revolution equivalent to a reversal of polarity of the entire social system, carrying, so to speak, the entire compass card with it, and making north south, and east west. Then was seen what seems so plain to us that it is hard to understand why it was not always seen, that instead of its being proper for the sovereign people to confine themselves to the functions which the kings and classes had discharged when they were in power, the presumption was, on the contrary, since the interest of kings and classes had always been exactly opposed to those of the people, that whatever the previous governments had done, the people as rulers ought not to do, and whatever the previous governments had not done, it would be presumably for the interest of the people to do; and that the main use and function of popular government was properly one which no previous government had ever paid any attention to, namely, the use of the power of the social organization to raise the material and moral welfare of the whole body of the sovereign people to the highest possible point at which the same degree of welfare could be secured to all--that is to say, an equal level. The democracy of the second or positive phase triumphed in the great Revolution, and has since been the only form of government known in the world." "Which amounts to saying," I observed, "that there never was a democratic government properly so called before the twentieth century." "Just so," assented the doctor. "The so-called republics of the first phase we class as pseudo-republics or negative democracies. They were not, of course, in any sense, truly popular governments at all, but merely masks for plutocracy, under which the rich were the real though irresponsible rulers! You will readily see that they could have been nothing else. The masses from the beginning of the world had been the subjects and servants of the rich, but the kings had been above the rich, and constituted a check on their dominion. The overthrow of the kings left no check at all on the power of the rich, which became supreme. The people, indeed, nominally were sovereigns; but as these sovereigns were individually and as a class the economic serfs of the rich, and lived at their mercy, the so-called popular government became the mere stalking-horse of the capitalists. "Regarded as necessary steps in the evolution of society from pure monarchy to pure democracy, these republics of the negative phase mark a stage of progress; but if regarded as finalities they were a type far less admirable on the whole than decent monarchies. In respect especially to their susceptibility to corruption and plutocratic subversion they were the worst kind of government possible. The nineteenth century, during which this crop of pseudo-democracies ripened for the sickle of the great Revolution, seems to the modern view nothing but a dreary interregnum of nondescript, _faineant_ government intervening between the decadence of virile monarchy in the eighteenth century and the rise of positive democracy in the twentieth. The period may be compared to that of the minority of a king, during which the royal power is abused by wicked stewards. The people had been proclaimed as sovereign, but they had not yet assumed the sceptre." "And yet," said I, "during the latter part of the nineteenth century, when, as you say, the world had not yet seen a single specimen of popular government, our wise men were telling us that the democratic system had been fully tested and was ready to be judged on its results. Not a few of them, indeed, went so far as to say that the democratic experiment had proved a failure when, in point of fact, it seems that no experiment in democracy, properly understood, had as yet ever been so much as attempted." The doctor shrugged his shoulders. "It is a very sympathetic task," he said, "to explain the slowness of the masses in feeling their way to a comprehension of all that the democratic idea meant for them, but it is one equally difficult and thankless to account for the blank failure of the philosophers, historians, and statesmen of your day to arrive at an intelligent estimate of the logical content of democracy and to forecast its outcome. Surely the very smallness of the practical results thus far achieved by the democratic movement as compared with the magnitude of its proposition and the forces behind it ought to have suggested to them that its evolution was yet but in the first stage. How could intelligent men delude themselves with the notion that the most portentous and revolutionary idea of all time had exhausted its influence and fulfilled its mission in changing the title of the executive of a nation from king to President, and the name of the national Legislature from Parliament to Congress? If your pedagogues, college professors and presidents, and others who were responsible for your education, had been worth their salt, you would have found nothing in the present order of economic equality that would in the least have surprised you. You would have said at once that it was just what you had been taught must necessarily be the next phase in the inevitable evolution of the democratic idea." Edith beckoned from the door and we rose from our seat. "The revolutionary party in the great Revolution," said the doctor, as we sauntered toward the house, "carried on the work of agitation and propaganda under various names more or less grotesque and ill-fitting as political party names were apt to be, but the one word democracy, with its various equivalents and derivatives, more accurately and completely expressed, explained, and justified their method, reason, and purpose than a library of books could do. The American people fancied that they had set up a popular government when they separated from England, but they were deluded. In conquering the political power formerly exercised by the king, the people had but taken the outworks of the fortress of tyranny. The economic system which was the citadel and commanded every part of the social structure remained in possession of private and irresponsible rulers, and so long as it was so held, the possession of the outworks was of no use to the people, and only retained by the sufferance of the garrison of the citadel. The Revolution came when the people saw that they must either take the citadel or evacuate the outworks. They must either complete the work of establishing popular government which had been barely begun by their fathers, or abandon all that their fathers had accomplished." CHAPTER III. I ACQUIRE A STAKE IN THE COUNTRY. On going into breakfast the ladies met us with a highly interesting piece of intelligence which they had found in the morning's news. It was, in fact, nothing less than an announcement of action taken by the United States Congress in relation to myself. A resolution had, it appeared, been unanimously passed which, after reciting the facts of my extraordinary return to life, proceeded to clear up any conceivable question that might arise as to my legal status by declaring me an American citizen in full standing and entitled to all a citizen's rights and immunities, but at the same time a guest of the nation, and as such free of the duties and services incumbent upon citizens in general except as I might choose to assume them. Secluded as I had been hitherto in the Leete household, this was almost the first intimation I had the public in my case. That interest, I was now informed, had passed beyond my personality and was already producing a general revival of the study of nineteenth-century literature and politics, and especially of the history and philosophy of the transition period, when the old order passed into the new. "The fact is," said the doctor, "the nation has only discharged a debt of gratitude in making you its guest, for you have already done more for our educational interests by promoting historical study than a regiment of instructors could achieve in a lifetime." Recurring to the topic of the congressional resolution, the doctor said that, in his opinion, it was superfluous, for though I had certainly slept on my rights as a citizen rather an extraordinary length of time, there was no ground on which I could be argued to have forfeited any of them. However that might be, seeing the resolution left no doubt as to my status, he suggested that the first thing we did after breakfast should be to go down to the National Bank and open my citizen's account. "Of course," I said, as we left the house, "I am glad to be relieved of the necessity of being a pensioner on you any longer, but I confess I feel a little cheap about accepting as a gift this generous provision of the nation." "My dear Julian," replied the doctor, "it is sometimes a little difficult for me to quite get your point of view of our institutions." "I should think it ought to be easy enough in this case. I feel as if I were an object of public charity." "Ah!" said the doctor, "you feel that the nation has done you a favor, laid you under an obligation. You must excuse my obtuseness, but the fact is we look at this matter of the economic provision for citizens from an entirely different standpoint. It seems to us that in claiming and accepting your citizen's maintenance you perform a civic duty, whereby you put the nation--that is, the general body of your fellow-citizens--under rather more obligation than you incur." I turned to see if the doctor were not jesting, but he was evidently quite serious. "I ought by this time to be used to finding that everything goes by contraries in these days," I said, "but really, by what inversion of common sense, as it was understood in the nineteenth century, do you make out that by accepting a pecuniary provision from the nation I oblige it more than it obliges me?" "I think it will be easy to make you see that," replied the doctor, "without requiring you to do any violence to the methods of reasoning to which your contemporaries were accustomed. You used to have, I believe, a system of gratuitous public education maintained by the state." "Yes." "What was the idea of it?" "That a citizen was not a safe voter without education." "Precisely so. The state therefore at great expense provided free education for the people. It was greatly for the advantage of the citizen to accept this education just as it is for you to accept this provision, but it was still more for the interest of the state that the citizen should accept it. Do you see the point?" "I can see that it is the interest of the state that I should accept an education, but not exactly why it is for the state's interest that I should accept a share of the public wealth." "Nevertheless it is the same reason, namely, the public interest in good government. We hold it to be a self-evident principle that every one who exercises the suffrage should not only be educated, but should have a stake in the country, in order that self-interest may be identified with public interest. As the power exercised by every citizen through the suffrage is the same, the economic stake should be the same, and so you see we come to the reason why the public safety requires that you should loyally accept your equal stake in the country quite apart from the personal advantage you derive by doing so." "Do you know," I said, "that this idea of yours, that every one who votes should have an economic stake in the country, is one which our rankest Tories were very fond of insisting on, but the practical conclusion they drew from it was diametrically opposed to that which you draw? They would have agreed with you on the axiom that political power and economic stake in the country should go together, but the practical application they made of it was negative instead of positive. You argue that because an economic interest in the country should go with the suffrage, all who have the suffrage should have that interest guaranteed them. They argued, on the contrary, that from all who had not the economic stake the suffrage should be taken away. There were not a few of my friends who maintained that some such limitation of the suffrage was needed to save the democratic experiment from failure." "That is to say," observed the doctor, "it was proposed to save the democratic experiment by abandoning it. It was an ingenious thought, but it so happened that democracy was not an experiment which could be abandoned, but an evolution which must be fulfilled. In what a striking manner does that talk of your contemporaries about limiting the suffrage to correspond with the economic position of citizens illustrate the failure of even the most intelligent classes in your time to grasp the full significance of the democratic faith which they professed! The primal principle of democracy is the worth and dignity of the individual. That dignity, consisting in the quality of human nature, is essentially the same in all individuals, and therefore equality is the vital principle of democracy. To this intrinsic and equal dignity of the individual all material conditions must be made subservient, and personal accidents and attributes subordinated. The raising up of the human being without respect of persons is the constant and only rational motive of the democratic policy. Contrast with this conception that precious notion of your contemporaries as to restricting suffrage. Recognizing the material disparities in the circumstances of individuals, they proposed to conform the rights and dignities of the individual to his material circumstances instead of conforming the material circumstances to the essential and equal dignity of the man." "In short," said I, "while under our system we conformed men to things, you think it more reasonable to conform things to men?" "That is, indeed," replied the doctor, "the vital difference between the old and the new orders." We walked in silence for some moments. Presently the doctor said: "I was trying to recall an expression you just used which suggested a wide difference between the sense in which the same phrase was understood in your day and now is. I was saying that we thought everybody who voted ought to have a property stake in the country, and you observed that some people had the same idea in your time, but according to our view of what a stake in the country is no one had it or could have it under your economic system." "Why not?" I demanded. "Did not men who owned property in a country--a millionaire, for instance, like myself--have a stake in it?" "In the sense that his property was geographically located in the country it might be perhaps called a stake within the country but not a stake in the country. It was the exclusive ownership of a piece of the country or a portion of the wealth in the country, and all it prompted the owner to was devotion to and care for that specific portion without regard to the rest. Such a separate stake or the ambition to obtain it, far from making its owner or seeker a citizen devoted to the common weal, was quite as likely to make him a dangerous one, for his selfish interest was to aggrandize his separate stake at the expense of his fellow-citizens and of the public interest. Your millionaires--with no personal reflection upon yourself, of course--appear to have been the most dangerous class of citizens you had, and that is just what might be expected from their having what you called but what we should not call a stake in the country. Wealth owned in that way could only be a divisive and antisocial influence. "What we mean by a stake in the country is something which nobody could possibly have until economic solidarity had replaced the private ownership of capital. Every one, of course, has his own house and piece of land if he or she desires them, and always his or her own income to use at pleasure; but these are allotments for use only, and, being always equal, can furnish no ground for dissension. The capital of the nation, the source of all this consumption, is indivisibly held by all in common, and it is impossible that there should be any dispute on selfish grounds as to the administration of this common interest on which all private interests depend, whatever differences of judgment there may be. The citizen's share in this common fund is a sort of stake in the country that makes it impossible to hurt another's interest without hurting one's own, or to help one's own interest without promoting equally all other interests. As to its economic bearings it may be said that it makes the Golden Rule an automatic principle of government. What we would do for ourselves we must of necessity do also for others. Until economic solidarity made it possible to carry out in this sense the idea that every citizen ought to have a stake in the country, the democratic system never had a chance to develop its genius." "It seems," I said, "that your foundation principle of economic equality which I supposed was mainly suggested and intended in the interest of the material well-being of the people, is quite as much a principle of political policy for safeguarding the stability and wise ordering of government." "Most assuredly," replied the doctor. "Our economic system is a measure of statesmanship quite as much as of humanity. You see, the first condition of efficiency or stability in any government is that the governing power should have a direct, constant, and supreme interest in the general welfare--that is, in the prosperity of the whole state as distinguished from any part of it. It had been the strong point of monarchy that the king, for selfish reasons as proprietor of the country, felt this interest. The autocratic form of government, solely on that account, had always a certain rough sort of efficiency. It had been, on the other hand, the fatal weakness of democracy, during its negative phase previous to the great Revolution, that the people, who were the rulers, had individually only an indirect and sentimental interest in the state as a whole, or its machinery--their real, main, constant, and direct interest being concentrated upon their personal fortunes, their private stakes, distinct from and adverse to the general stake. In moments of enthusiasm they might rally to the support of the commonwealth, but for the most part that had no custodian, but was at the mercy of designing men and factions who sought to plunder the commonwealth and use the machinery of government for personal or class ends. This was the structural weakness of democracies, by the effect of which, after passing their first youth, they became invariably, as the inequality of wealth developed, the most corrupt and worthless of all forms of government and the most susceptible to misuse and perversion for selfish, personal, and class purposes. It was a weakness incurable so long as the capital of the country, its economic interests, remained in private hands, and one that could be remedied only by the radical abolition of private capitalism and the unification of the nation's capital under collective control. This done, the same economic motive--which, while the capital remained in private hands, was a divisive influence tending to destroy that public spirit which is the breath of life in a democracy--became the most powerful of cohesive forces, making popular government not only ideally the most just but practically the most successful and efficient of political systems. The citizen, who before had been the champion of a part against the rest, became by this change a guardian of the whole." CHAPTER IV. A TWENTIETH-CENTURY BANK PARLOR. The formalities at the bank proved to be very simple. Dr. Leete introduced me to the superintendent, and the rest followed as a matter of course, the whole process not taking three minutes. I was informed that the annual credit of the adult citizen for that year was $4,000, and that the portion due me for the remainder of the year, it being the latter part of September, was $1,075.41. Taking vouchers to the amount of $300, I left the rest on deposit precisely as I should have done at one of the nineteenth-century banks in drawing money for present use. The transaction concluded, Mr. Chapin, the superintendent, invited me into his office. "How does our banking system strike you as compared with that of your day?" he asked. "It has one manifest advantage from the point of view of a penniless _revenant_ like myself," I said--"namely, that one receives a credit without having made a deposit; otherwise I scarcely know enough of it to give an opinion." "When you come to be more familiar with our banking methods," said the superintendent. "I think you will be struck with their similarity to your own. Of course, we have no money and nothing answering to money, but the whole science of banking from its inception was preparing the way for the abolition of money. The only way, really, in which our system differs from yours is that every one starts the year with the same balance to his credit and that this credit is not transferable. As to requiring deposits before accounts are opened, we are necessarily quite as strict as your bankers were, only in our case the people, collectively, make the deposit for all at once. This collective deposit is made up of such provisions of different commodities and such installations for the various public services as are expected to be necessary. Prices or cost estimates are put on these commodities and services, and the aggregate sum of the prices being divided by the population gives the amount of the citizen's personal credit, which is simply his aliquot share of the commodities and services available for the year. No doubt, however, Dr. Leete has told you all about this." "But I was not here to be included in the estimate of the year," I said. "I hope that my credit is not taken out of other people's." "You need feel no concern," replied the superintendent. "While it is astonishing how variations in demand balance one another when great populations are concerned, yet it would be impossible to conduct so big a business as ours without large margins. It is the aim in the production of perishable things, and those in which fancy often changes, to keep as little ahead of the demand as possible, but in all the important staples such great surpluses are constantly carried that a two years' drought would not affect the price of non-perishable produce, while an unexpected addition of several millions to the population could be taken care of at any time without disturbance." "Dr. Leete has told me," I said, "that any part of the credit not used by a citizen during the year is canceled, not being good for the next year. I suppose that is to prevent the possibility of hoarding, by which the equality of your economic condition might be undermined." "It would have the effect to prevent such hoarding, certainly," said the superintendent, "but it is otherwise needful to simplify the national bookkeeping and prevent confusion. The annual credit is an order on a specific provision available during a certain year. For the next year a new calculation with somewhat different elements has to be made, and to make it the books must be balanced and all orders canceled that have not been presented, so that we may know just where we stand." "What, on the other hand, will happen if I run through my credit before the year is out?" The superintendent smiled. "I have read," he said, "that the spendthrift evil was quite a serious one in your day. Our system has the advantage over yours that the most incorrigible spendthrift can not trench on his principal, which consists in his indivisible equal share in the capital of the nation. All he can at most do is to waste the annual dividend. Should you do this, I have no doubt your friends will take care of you, and if they do not you may be sure the nation will, for we have not the strong stomachs that enabled our forefathers to enjoy plenty with hungry people about them. The fact is, we are so squeamish that the knowledge that a single individual in the nation was in want would keep us all awake nights. If you insisted on being in need, you would have to hide away for the purpose. "Have you any idea," I asked, "how much this credit of $4,000 would have been equal to in purchasing power in 1887?" "Somewhere about $6,000 or $7,000, I should say," replied Mr. Chapin. "In estimating the economic position of the citizen you must consider that a great variety of services and commodities are now supplied gratuitously on public account, which formerly individuals had to pay for, as, for example, water, light, music, news, the theatre and opera, all sorts of postal and electrical communications, transportation, and other things too numerous to detail." "Since you furnish so much on public or common account, why not furnish everything in that way? It would simplify matters, I should say." "We think, on the contrary, that it would complicate the administration, and certainly it would not suit the people as well. You see, while we insist on equality we detest uniformity, and seek to provide free play to the greatest possible variety of tastes in our expenditure." Thinking I might be interested in looking them over, the superintendent had brought into the office some of the books of the bank. Without having been at all expert in nineteenth-century methods of bookkeeping, I was much impressed with the extreme simplicity of these accounts compared with any I had been familiar with. Speaking of this, I added that it impressed me the more, as I had received an impression that, great as were the superiorities of the national co-operative system over our way of doing business, it must involve a great increase in the amount of bookkeeping as compared with what was necessary under the old system. The superintendent and Dr. Leete looked at each other and smiled. "Do you know, Mr. West," said the former, "it strikes us as very odd that you should have that idea? We estimate that under our system one accountant serves where dozens were needed in your day." "But," said I, "the nation has now a separate account with or for every man, woman, and child in the country." "Of course," replied the superintendent, "but did it not have the same in your day? How else could it have assessed and collected taxes or exacted a dozen other duties from citizens? For example, your tax system alone with its inquisitions, appraisements, machinery of collection and penalties was vastly more complex than the accounts in these books before you, which consist, as you see, in giving to every person the same credit at the beginning of the year, and afterward simply recording the withdrawals without calculations of interest or other incidents whatever. In fact, Mr. West, so simple and invariable are the conditions that the accounts are kept automatically by a machine, the accountant merely playing on a keyboard." "But I understand that every citizen has a record kept also of his services as the basis of grading and regrading." "Certainly, and a most minute one, with most careful guards against error or unfairness. But it is a record having none of the complications of one of your money or wages accounts for work done, but is rather like the simple honor records of your educational institutions by which the ranking of the students was determined." "But the citizen also has relations with the public stores from which he supplies his needs?" "Certainly, but not a relation of account. As your people would have said, all purchases are for cash only--that is, on the credit card." "There remains," I persisted, "the accounting for goods and services between the stores and the productive departments and between the several departments." "Certainly; but the whole system being under one head and all the parts working together with no friction and no motive for any indirection, such accounting is child's work compared with the adjustment of dealings between the mutually suspicious private capitalists, who divided among themselves the field of business in your day, and sat up nights devising tricks to deceive, defeat, and overreach one another." "But how about the elaborate statistics on which you base the calculations that guide production? There at least is need of a good deal of figuring." "Your national and State governments," replied Mr. Chapin, "published annually great masses of similar statistics, which, while often very inaccurate, must have cost far more trouble to accumulate, seeing that they involved an unwelcome inquisition into the affairs of private persons instead of a mere collection of reports from the books of different departments of one great business. Forecasts of probable consumption every manufacturer, merchant, and storekeeper had to make in your day, and mistakes meant ruin. Nevertheless, he could but guess, because he had no sufficient data. Given the complete data that we have, and a forecast is as much increased in certainty as it is simplified in difficulty." "Kindly spare me any further demonstration of the stupidity of my criticism." "Dear me, Mr. West, there is no question of stupidity. A wholly new system of things always impresses the mind at first sight with an effect of complexity, although it may be found on examination to be simplicity itself. But please do not stop me just yet, for I have told you only one side of the matter. I have shown you how few and simple are the accounts we keep compared with those in corresponding relations kept by you; but the biggest part of the subject is the accounts you had to keep which we do not keep at all. Debit and credit are no longer known; interest, rents, profits, and all the calculations based on them no more have any place in human affairs. In your day everybody, besides his account with the state, was involved in a network of accounts with all about him. Even the humblest wage-earner was on the books of half a dozen tradesmen, while a man of substance might be down in scores or hundreds, and this without speaking of men not engaged in commerce. A fairly nimble dollar had to be set down so many times in so many places, as it went from hand to hand, that we calculate in about five years it must have cost itself in ink, paper, pens, and clerk hire, let alone fret and worry. All these forms of private and business accounts have now been done away with. Nobody owes anybody, or is owed by anybody, or has any contract with anybody, or any account of any sort with anybody, but is simply beholden to everybody for such kindly regard as his virtues may attract." CHAPTER V. I EXPERIENCE A NEW SENSATION. "Doctor," said I as we came out of the bank, "I have a most extraordinary feeling." "What sort of a feeling?" "It is a sensation which I never had anything like before," I said, "and never expected to have. I feel as if I wanted to go to work. Yes, Julian West, millionaire, loafer by profession, who never did anything useful in his life and never wanted to, finds himself seized with an overmastering desire to roll up his sleeves and do something toward rendering an equivalent for his living." "But," said the doctor, "Congress has declared you the guest of the nation, and expressly exempted you from the duty of rendering any sort of public service." "That is all very well, and I take it kindly, but I begin to feel that I should not enjoy knowing that I was living on other people." "What do you suppose it is," said the doctor, smiling, "that has given you this sensitiveness about living on others which, as you say, you never felt before?" "I have never been much given to self-analysis," I replied, "but the change of feeling is very easily explained in this case. I find myself surrounded by a community every member of which not physically disqualified is doing his or her own part toward providing the material prosperity which I share. A person must be of remarkably tough sensibilities who would not feel ashamed under such circumstances if he did not take hold with the rest and do his part. Why didn't I feel that way about the duty of working in the nineteenth century? Why, simply because there was no such system then for sharing work, or indeed any system at all. For the reason that there was no fair play or suggestion of justice in the distribution of work, everybody shirked it who could, and those who could not shirk it cursed the luckier ones and got even by doing as bad work as they could. Suppose a rich young fellow like myself had a feeling that he would like to do his part. How was he going to go about it? There was absolutely no social organization by which labor could be shared on any principle of justice. There was no possibility of co-operation. We had to choose between taking advantage of the economic system to live on other people or have them take advantage of it to live on us. We had to climb on their backs as the only way of preventing them from climbing on our backs. We had the alternative of profiting by an unjust system or being its victims. There being no more moral satisfaction in the one alternative than the other, we naturally preferred the first. By glimpses all the more decent of us realized the ineffable meanness of sponging our living out of the toilers, but our consciences were completely bedeviled by an economic system which seemed a hopeless muddle that nobody could see through or set right or do right under. I will undertake to say that there was not a man of my set, certainly not of my friends, who, placed just as I am this morning in presence of an absolutely simple, just, and equal system for distributing the industrial burden, would not feel just as I do the impulse to roll up his sleeves and take hold." "I am quite sure of it," said the doctor. "Your experience strikingly confirms the chapter of revolutionary history which tells us that when the present economic order was established those who had been under the old system the most irreclaimable loafers and vagabonds, responding to the absolute justice and fairness of the new arrangements, rallied to the service of the state with enthusiasm. But talking of what you are to do, why was not my former suggestion a good one, that you should tell our people in lectures about the nineteenth century?" "I thought at first that it would be a good idea," I replied, "but our talk in the garden this morning has about convinced me that the very last people who had any intelligent idea of the nineteenth century, what it meant, and what it was leading to, were just myself and my contemporaries of that time. After I have been with you a few years I may learn enough about my own period to discuss it intelligently." "There is something in that," replied the doctor. "Meanwhile, you see that great building with the dome just across the square? That is our local Industrial Exchange. Perhaps, seeing that we are talking of what you are to do to make yourself useful, you may be interested in learning a little of the method by which our people choose their occupations." I readily assented, and we crossed the square to the exchange. "I have given you thus far," said the doctor, "only a general outline of our system of universal industrial service. You know that every one of either sex, unless for some reason temporarily or permanently exempt, enters the public industrial service in the twenty-first year, and after three years of a sort of general apprenticeship in the unclassified grades elects a special occupation, unless he prefers to study further for one of the scientific professions. As there are a million youth, more or less, who thus annually elect their occupations, you may imagine that it must be a complex task to find a place for each in which his or her own taste shall be suited as well as the needs of the public service." I assured the doctor that I had indeed made this reflection. "A very few moments will suffice," he said, "to disabuse your mind of that notion and to show you how wonderfully a little rational system has simplified the task of finding a fitting vocation in life which used to be so difficult a matter in your day and so rarely was accomplished in a satisfactory manner." Finding a comfortable corner for us near one of the windows of the central hall, the doctor presently brought a lot of sample blanks and schedules and proceeded to explain them to me. First he showed me the annual statement of exigencies by the General Government, specifying in what proportion the force of workers that was to become available that year ought to be distributed among the several occupations in order to carry on the industrial service. That was the side of the subject which represented the necessities of the public service that must be met. Next he showed me the volunteering or preference blank, on which every youth that year graduating from the unclassified service indicated, if he chose to, the order of his preference as to the various occupations making up the public service, it being inferred, if he did not fill out the blank, that he or she was willing to be assigned for the convenience of the service. "But," said I, "locality of residence is often quite as important as the kind of one's occupation. For example, one might not wish to be separated from parents, and certainly would not wish to be from a sweetheart, however agreeable the occupation assigned might be in other respects." "Very true," said the doctor. "If, indeed, our industrial system undertook to separate lovers and friends, husbands and wives, parents and children, without regard to their wishes, it certainly would not last long. You see this column of localities. If you make your cross against Boston in that column, it becomes imperative upon the administration to provide you employment somewhere in this district. It is one of the rights of every citizen to demand employment within his home district. Otherwise, as you say, ties of love and friendship might be rudely broken. But, of course, one can not have his cake and eat it too; if you make work in the home district imperative, you may have to take an occupation to which you would have preferred some other that might have been open to you had you been willing to leave home. However, it is not common that one needs to sacrifice a chosen career to the ties of affection. The country is divided into industrial districts or circles, in each of which there is intended to be as nearly as possible a complete system of industry, wherein all the important arts and occupations are represented. It is in this way made possible for most of us to find an opportunity in a chosen occupation without separation from friends. This is the more simply done, as the modern means of communication have so far abolished distance that the man who lives in Boston and works in Springfield, one hundred miles away, is quite as near his place of business as was the average workingman of your day. One who, living in Boston, should work two hundred miles away (in Albany), would be far better situated than the average suburbanite doing business in Boston a century ago. But while a great number desire to find occupations at home, there are also many who from love of change much prefer to leave the scenes of their childhood. These, too, indicate their preferences by marking the number of the district to which they prefer to be assigned. Second or third preferences may likewise be indicated, so that it would go hard indeed if one could not obtain a location in at least the part of the country he desired, though the locality preference is imperative only when the person desires to stay in the home district. Otherwise it is consulted so far as consistent with conflicting claims. The volunteer having thus filled out his preference blank, takes it to the proper registrar and has his ranking officially stamped upon it." "What is the ranking?" I asked. "It is the figure which indicates his previous standing in the schools and during his service as an unclassified worker, and is supposed to give the best attainable criterion thus far of his relative intelligence, efficiency, and devotion to duty. Where there are more volunteers for particular occupations than there is room for, the lowest in ranking have to be content with a second or third preference. The preference blanks are finally handed in at the local exchange, and are collated at the central office of the industrial district. All who have made home work imperative are first provided for in accordance with rank. The blanks of those preferring work in other districts are forwarded to the national bureau and there collated with those from other districts, so that the volunteers may be provided for as nearly as may be according to their wishes, subject, where conflict of claim arises, to their relative ranking right. It has always been observed that the personal eccentricities of individuals in great bodies have a wonderful tendency to balance and mutually complement one another, and this principle is strikingly illustrated in our system of choice of occupation and locality. The preference blanks are filled out in June, and by the first of August everybody knows just where he or she is to report for service in October. "However, if any one has received an assignment which is decidedly unwelcome either as to location or occupation, it is not even then, or indeed at any time, too late to endeavor to find another. The administration has done its best to adjust the individual aptitude and wishes of each worker to the needs of the public service, but its machinery is at his service for any further attempts he may wish to make to suit himself better." And then the doctor took me to the Transfer Department and showed me how persons who were dissatisfied either with their assignment of occupation or locality could put themselves in communication with all others in any part of the country who were similarly dissatisfied, and arrange, subject to liberal regulations, such exchanges as might be mutually agreeable. "If a person is not absolutely unwilling to do anything at all," he said, "and does not object to all parts of the country equally, he ought to be able sooner or later to provide himself both with pretty nearly the occupation and locality he desires. And if, after all, there should be any one so dull that he can not hope to succeed in his occupation or make a better exchange with another, yet there is no occupation now tolerated by the state which would not have been as to its conditions a godsend to the most fortunately situated workman of your day. There is none in which peril to life or health is not reduced to a minimum, and the dignity and rights of the worker absolutely guaranteed. It is a constant study of the administration so to bait the less attractive occupations with special advantages as to leisure and otherwise always to keep the balance of preference between them as nearly true as possible; and if, finally, there were any occupation which, after all, remained so distasteful as to attract no volunteers, and yet was necessary, its duties would be performed by all in rotation." "As, for example," I said, "the work of repairing and cleansing the sewers." "If that sort of work were as offensive as it must have been in your day, I dare say it might have to be done by a rotation in which all would take their turn," replied the doctor, "but our sewers are as clean as our streets. They convey only water which has been chemically purified and deodorized before it enters them by an apparatus connected with every dwelling. By the same apparatus all solid sewage is electrically cremated, and removed in the form of ashes. This improvement in the sewer system, which followed the great Revolution very closely, might have waited a hundred years before introduction but for the Revolution, although the necessary scientific knowledge and appliances had long been available. The case furnishes merely one instance out of a thousand of the devices for avoiding repulsive and perilous sorts of work which, while simple enough, the world would never have troubled itself to adopt so long as the rich had in the poor a race of uncomplaining economic serfs on which to lay all their burdens. The effect of economic equality was to make it equally the interest of all to avoid, so far as possible, the more unpleasant tasks, since henceforth they must be shared by all. In this way, wholly apart from the moral aspects of the matter, the progress of chemical, sanitary, and mechanical science owes an incalculable debt to the Revolution." "Probably," I said, "you have sometimes eccentric persons--'crooked sticks' we used to call them--who refuse to adapt themselves to the social order on any terms or admit any such thing as social duty. If such a person should flatly refuse to render any sort of industrial or useful service on any terms, what would be done with him? No doubt there is a compulsory side to your system for dealing with such persons?" "Not at all," replied the doctor. "If our system can not stand on its merits as the best possible arrangement for promoting the highest welfare of all, let it fall. As to the matter of industrial service, the law is simply that if any one shall refuse to do his or her part toward the maintenance of the social order he shall not be allowed to partake of its benefits. It would obviously not be fair to the rest that he should do so. But as to compelling him to work against his will by force, such an idea would be abhorrent to our people. The service of society is, above all, a service of honor, and all its associations are what you used to call chivalrous. Even as in your day soldiers would not serve with skulkers, but drummed cowards out of the camp, so would our workers refuse the companionship of persons openly seeking to evade their civic duty." "But what do you do with such persons?" "If an adult, being neither criminal nor insane, should deliberately and fixedly refuse to render his quota of service in any way, either in a chosen occupation or, on failure to choose, in an assigned one, he would be furnished with such a collection of seeds and tools as he might choose and turned loose on a reservation expressly prepared for such persons, corresponding a little perhaps with the reservations set apart for such Indians in your day as were unwilling to accept civilization. There he would be left to work out a better solution of the problem of existence than our society offers, if he could do so. We think we have the best possible social system, but if there is a better we want to know it, so that we may adopt it. We encourage the spirit of experiment." "And are there really cases," I said, "of individuals who thus voluntarily abandon society in preference to fulfilling their social duty?" "There have been such cases, though I do not know that there are any at the present time. But the provision for them exists." CHAPTER VI. HONI SOIT QUI MAL Y PENSE. When we reached the house the doctor said: "I am going to leave you to Edith this morning. The fact is, my duties as mentor, while extremely to my taste, are not quite a sinecure. The questions raised in our talks frequently suggest the necessity of refreshing my general knowledge of the contrasts between your day and this by looking up the historical authorities. The conversation this morning has indicated lines of research which will keep me busy in the library the rest of the day." I found Edith in the garden, and received her congratulations upon my fully fledged citizenship. She did not seem at all surprised on learning my intention promptly to find a place in the industrial service. "Of course you will want to enter the service as soon as you can," she said. "I knew you would. It is the only way to get in touch with the people and feel really one of the nation. It is the great event we all look forward to from childhood." "Talking of industrial service," I said, "reminds me of a question it has a dozen times occurred to me to ask you. I understand that everyone who is able to do so, women as well as men, serves the nation from twenty-one to forty-five years of age in some useful occupation; but so far as I have seen, although you are the picture of health and vigor, you have no employment, but are quite like young ladies of elegant leisure in my day, who spent their time sitting in the parlor and looking handsome. Of course, it is highly agreeable to me that you should be so free, but how, exactly, is so much leisure on your part squared with the universal obligation of service?" Edith was greatly amused. "And so you thought I was shirking? Had it not occurred to you that there might probably be such things as vacations or furloughs in the industrial service, and that the rather unusual and interesting guest in our household might furnish a natural occasion for me to take an outing if I could get it?" "And can you take your vacation when you please?" "We can take a portion of it when we please, always subject, of course, to the needs of the service." "But what do you do when you are at work--teach school, paint china, keep books for the Government, stand behind a counter in the public stores, or operate a typewriter or telegraph wire?" "Does that list exhaust the number of women's occupations in your day?" "Oh, no; those were only some of their lighter and pleasanter occupations. Women were also the scrubbers, the washers, the servants of all work. The most repulsive and humiliating kinds of drudgery were put off upon the women of the poorer class; but I suppose, of course, you do not do any such work." "You may be sure that I do my part of whatever unpleasant things there are to do, and so does every one in the nation; but, indeed, we have long ago arranged affairs so that there is very little such work to do. But, tell me, were there no women in your day who were machinists, farmers, engineers, carpenters, iron workers, builders, engine drivers, or members of the other great crafts?" "There were no women in such occupations. They were followed by men only." "I suppose I knew that," she said; "I have read as much; but it is strange to talk with a man of the nineteenth century who is so much like a man of to-day and realize that the women were so different as to seem like another order of beings." "But, really," said I, "I don't understand how in these respects the women can do very differently now unless they are physically much stronger. Most of these occupations you have just mentioned were too heavy for their strength, and for that reason, largely, were limited to men, as I should suppose they must still be." "There is not a trade or occupation in the whole list," replied Edith, "in which women do not take part. It is partly because we are physically much more vigorous than the poor creatures of your time that we do the sorts of work that were too heavy for them, but it is still more an account of the perfection of machinery. As we have grown stronger, all sorts of work have grown lighter. Almost no heavy work is done directly now; machines do all, and we only need to guide them, and the lighter the hand that guides, the better the work done. So you see that nowadays physical qualities have much less to do than mental with the choice of occupations. The mind is constantly getting nearer to the work, and father says some day we may be able to work by sheer will power directly and have no need of hands at all. It is said that there are actually more women than men in great machine works. My mother was first lieutenant in a great iron works. Some have a theory that the sense of power which one has in controlling giant engines appeals to women's sensibilities even more than to men's. But really it is not quite fair to make you guess what my occupation is, for I have not fully decided on it." "But you said you were already at work." "Oh, yes, but you know that before we choose our life occupation we are three years in the unclassified or miscellaneous class of workers. I am in my second year in that class." "What do you do?" "A little of everything and nothing long. The idea is to give us during that period a little practical experience in all the main departments of work, so that we may know better how and what to choose as an occupation. We are supposed to have got through with the schools before we enter this class, but really I have learned more since I have been at work than in twice the time spent in school. You can not imagine how perfectly delightful this grade of work is. I don't wonder some people prefer to stay in it all their lives for the sake of the constant change in tasks, rather than elect a regular occupation. Just now I am among the agricultural workers on the great farm near Lexington. It is delightful, and I have about made up my mind to choose farm work as an occupation. That is what I had in mind when I asked you to guess my trade. Do you think you would ever have guessed that?" "I don't think I ever should, and unless the conditions of farm work have greatly changed since my day I can not imagine how you could manage it in a woman's costume." Edith regarded me for a moment with an expression of simple surprise, her eyes growing large. Then her glance fell to her dress, and when she again looked up her expression had changed to one which was at once meditative, humorous, and wholly inscrutable. Presently she said: "Have you not observed, my dear Julian, that the dress of the women you see on the streets is different from that which women wore in the nineteenth century?" "I have noticed, of course, that they generally wear no skirts, but you and your mother dress as women did in my day." "And has it not occurred to you to wonder why our dress was not like theirs--why we wear skirts and they do not?" "Possibly that has occurred to me among the thousand other questions that every day arise in my mind, only to be driven out by a thousand others before I can ask them; but I think in this case I should have rather wondered why these other women did not dress as you do instead of why you did not dress as they do, for your costume, being the one I was accustomed to, naturally struck me as the normal type, and this other style as a variation for some special or local reason which I should later learn about. You must not think me altogether stupid. To tell the truth, these other women have as yet scarcely impressed me as being very real. You were at first the only person about whose reality I felt entirely sure. All the others seemed merely parts of a fantastic farrago of wonders, more or less possible, which is only just beginning to become intelligible and coherent. In time I should doubtless have awakened to the fact that there were other women in the world besides yourself and begun to make inquiries about them." As I spoke of the absoluteness with which I had depended on her during those first bewildering days for the assurance even of my own identity the quick tears rushed to my companion's eyes, and--well, for a space the other women were more completely forgotten than ever. Presently she said: "What were we talking about? Oh, yes, I remember--about those other women. I have a confession to make. I have been guilty toward you all this time of a sort of fraud, or at least of a flagrant suppression of the truth, which ought not to be kept up a moment longer. I sincerely hope you will forgive me, in consideration of my motive, and not----" "Not what?" "Not be too much startled." "You make me very curious," I said. "What is this mystery? I think I can stand the disclosure." "Listen, then," she said. "That wonderful night when we saw you first, of course our great thought was to avoid agitating you when you should recover full consciousness by any more evidence of the amazing things that had happened since your day than it was necessary you should see. We knew that in your time the use of long skirts by women was universal, and we reflected that to see mother and me in the modern dress would no doubt strike you very strangely. Now, you see, although skirtless costumes are the general--indeed, almost universal--wear for most occasions, all possible costumes, ancient and modern, of all races, ages, and civilizations, are either provided or to be obtained on the shortest possible notice at the stores. It was therefore very easy for us to furnish ourselves with the old-style dress before father introduced you to us. He said people had in your day such strange ideas of feminine modesty and propriety that it would be the best way to do. Can you forgive us, Julian, for taking such an advantage of your ignorance?" "Edith," I said, "there were a great many institutions of the nineteenth century which we tolerated because we did not know how to get rid of them, without, however, having a bit better opinion of them than you have, and one of them was the costume by means of which our women used to disguise and cripple themselves." "I am delighted!" exclaimed Edith. "I perfectly detest these horrible bags, and will not wear them a moment longer!" And bidding me wait where I was, she ran into the house. Five minutes, perhaps, I waited there in the arbor, where we had been sitting, and then, at a light step on the grass, looked up to see Edith with eyes of smiling challenge standing before me in modern dress. I have seen her in a hundred varieties of that costume since then, and have grown familiar with the exhaustless diversity of its adaptations, but I defy the imagination of the greatest artist to devise a scheme of color and fabric that would again produce upon me the effect of enchanting surprise which I received from that quite simple and hasty toilet. I don't know how long I stood looking at her without a thought of words, my eyes meanwhile no doubt testifying eloquently enough how adorable I found her. She seemed, however, to divine more than that in my expression, for presently she exclaimed: "I would give anything to know what you are thinking down in the bottom of your mind! It must be something awfully funny. What are you turning so red for?" "I am blushing for myself," I said, and that is all I would tell her, much as she teased me. Now, at this distance of time I may tell the truth. My first sentiment, apart from overwhelming admiration, had been a slight astonishment at her absolute ease and composure of bearing under my gaze. This is a confession that may well seem incomprehensible to twentieth-century readers, and God forbid that they should ever catch the point of view which would enable them to understand it better! A woman of my day, unless professionally accustomed to use this sort of costume, would have seemed embarrassed and ill at ease, at least for a time, under a gaze so intent as mine, even though it were a brother's or a father's. I, it seems, had been prepared for at least some slight appearance of discomposure on Edith's part, and was consciously surprised at a manner which simply expressed an ingenuous gratification at my admiration. I refer to this momentary experience because it has always seemed to me to illustrate in a particularly vivid way the change that has taken place not only in the customs but in the mental attitude of the sexes as to each other since my former life. In justice to myself I must hasten to add that this first feeling of surprise vanished even as it arose, in a moment, between two heart-beats. I caught from her clear, serene eyes the view point of the modern man as to woman, never again to lose it. Then it was that I flushed red with shame for myself. Wild horses could not have dragged from me the secret of that blush at the time, though I have told her long ago. "I was thinking," I said, and I was thinking so, too, "that we ought to be greatly obliged to twentieth-century women for revealing for the first time the artistic possibilities of the masculine dress." "The masculine dress," she repeated, as if not quite comprehending my meaning. "Do you mean my dress?" "Why, yes; it is a man's dress I suppose, is it not?" "Why any more than a woman's?" she answered rather blankly. "Ah, yes, I actually forgot for a moment whom I was talking to. I see; so it was considered a man's dress in your day, when the women masqueraded as mermaids. You may think me stupid not to catch your idea more quickly, but I told you I was dull at history. It is now two full generations since women as well as men have worn this dress, and the idea of associating it with men more than women would occur to no one but a professor of history. It strikes us merely as the only natural and convenient solution of the dress necessity, which is essentially the same for both sexes, since their bodily conformation is on the same general lines." CHAPTER VII. A STRING OF SURPRISES. The extremely delicate tints of Edith's costume led me to remark that the color effects of the modern dress seemed to be in general very light as compared with those which prevailed in my day. "The result," I said, "is extremely pleasing, but if you will excuse a rather prosaic suggestion, it occurs to me that with the whole nation given over to wearing these delicate schemes of color, the accounts for washing must be pretty large. I should suppose they would swamp the national treasury if laundry bills are anything like what they used to be." This remark, which I thought a very sensible one, set Edith to laughing. "Doubtless we could not do much else if we washed our clothes," she said; "but you see we do not wash them." "Not wash them!--why not?" "Because we don't think it nice to wear clothes again after they have been so much soiled as to need washing." "Well, I won't say that I am surprised," I replied; "in fact, I think I am no longer capable of being surprised at anything; but perhaps you will kindly tell me what you do with a dress when it becomes soiled." "We throw it away--that is, it goes back to the mills to be made into something else." "Indeed! To my nineteenth-century intellect, throwing away clothing would seem even more expensive than washing it." "Oh, no, much less so. What do you suppose, now, this costume of mine cost?" "I don't know, I am sure. I never had a wife to pay dressmaker's bills for, but I should say certainly it cost a great deal of money." "Such costumes cost from ten to twenty cents," said Edith. "What do you suppose it is made of?" I took the edge of her mantle between my fingers. "I thought it was silk or fine linen," I replied, "but I see it is not. Doubtless it is some new fiber." "We have discovered many new fibers, but it is rather a question of process than material that I had in mind. This is not a textile fabric at all, but paper. That is the most common material for garments nowadays." "But--but," I exclaimed, "what if it should come on to rain on these paper clothes? Would they not melt, and at a little strain would they not part?" "A costume such as this," said Edith, "is not meant for stormy weather, and yet it would by no means melt in a rainstorm, however severe. For storm-garments we have a paper that is absolutely impervious to moisture on the outer surface. As to toughness, I think you would find it as hard to tear this paper as any ordinary cloth. The fabric is so strengthened with fiber as to hold together very stoutly." "But in winter, at least, when you need warmth, you must have to fall back on our old friend the sheep." "You mean garments made of sheep's hair? Oh, no, there is no modern use for them. Porous paper makes a garment quite as warm as woolen could, and vastly lighter than the clothes you had. Nothing but eider down could have been at once so warm and light as our winter coats of paper." "And cotton!--linen! Don't tell me that they have been given up, like wool?" "Oh, no; we weave fabrics of these and other vegetable products, and they are nearly as cheap as paper, but paper is so much lighter and more easily fashioned into all shapes that it is generally preferred for garments. But, at any rate, we should consider no material fit for garments which could not be thrown away after being soiled. The idea of washing and cleaning articles of bodily use and using them over and over again would be quite intolerable. For this reason, while we want beautiful garments, we distinctly do not want durable ones. In your day, it seems, even worse than the practice of washing garments to be used again you were in the habit of keeping your outer garments without washing at all, not only day after day, but week after week, year after year, sometimes whole lifetimes, when they were specially valuable, and finally, perhaps, giving them away to others. It seems that women sometimes kept their wedding dresses long enough for their daughters to wear at their weddings. That would seem shocking to us, and yet, even your fine ladies did such things. As for what the poor had to do in the way of keeping and wearing their old clothes till they went to rags, that is something which won't bear thinking of." "It is rather startling," I said, "to find the problem of clean clothing solved by the abolition of the wash tub, although I perceive that that was the only radical solution. 'Warranted to wear and wash' used to be the advertisement of our clothing merchants, but now it seems, if you would sell clothing, you must warrant the goods neither to wear nor to wash." "As for wearing," said Edith, "our clothing never gets the chance to show how it would wear before we throw it away, any more than the other fabrics, such as carpets, bedding, and hangings that we use about our houses." "You don't mean that they are paper-made also!" I exclaimed. "Not always made of paper, but always of some fabric so cheap that they can be rejected after the briefest period of using. When you would have swept a carpet we put in a new one. Where you would wash or air bedding we renew it, and so with all the hangings about our houses so far as we use them at all. We upholster with air or water instead of feathers. It is more than I can understand how you ever endured your musty, fusty, dusty rooms with the filth and disease germs of whole generations stored in the woolen and hair fabrics that furnished them. When we clean out a room we turn the hose on ceiling, walls, and floor. There is nothing to harm--nothing but tiled or other hard-finished surfaces. Our hygienists say that the change in customs in these matters relating to the purity of our clothing and dwellings, has done more than all our other improvements to eradicate the germs of contagious and other diseases and relegate epidemics to ancient history. "Talking of paper," said Edith, extending a very trim foot by way of attracting attention to its gear, "what do you think of our modern shoes?" "Do you mean that they also are made of paper?" I exclaimed. "Of course." "I noticed the shoes your father gave me were very light as compared with anything I had ever worn before. Really that is a great idea, for lightness in foot wear is the first necessity. Scamp shoemakers used to put paper soles in shoes in my day. It is evident that instead of prosecuting them for rascals we should have revered them as unconscious prophets. But, for that matter, how do you prepare soles of paper that will last?" "There are plenty of solutions which will make paper as hard as iron." "And do not these shoes leak in winter?" "We have different kinds for different weathers. All are seamless, and the wet-weather sort are coated outside with a lacquer impervious to moisture." "That means, I suppose, that rubbers too as articles of wear have been sent to the museum?" "We use rubber, but not for wear. Our waterproof paper is much lighter and better every way." "After all this it is easy to believe that your hats and caps are also paper-made." "And so they are to a great extent," said Edith; "the heavy headgear that made your men bald ours would not endure. We want as little as possible on our heads, and that as light as may be." "Go on!" I exclaimed. "I suppose I am next to be told that the delicious but mysterious articles of food which come by the pneumatic carrier from the restaurant or are served there are likewise made out of paper. Proceed--I am prepared to believe it!" "Not quite so bad as that," laughed my companion, "but really the next thing to it, for the dishes you eat them from are made of paper. The crash of crockery and glass, which seems to have been a sort of running accompaniment to housekeeping in your day, is no more heard in the land. Our dishes and kettles for eating or cooking, when they need cleaning are thrown away, or rather, as in the case of all these rejected materials I have spoken of, sent back to the factories to be reduced again to pulp and made over into other forms." "But you certainly do not use paper kettles? Fire will still burn, I fancy, although you seem to have changed most of the other rules we went by." "Fire will still burn, indeed, but the electrical heat has been adopted for cooking as well as for all other purposes. We no longer heat our vessels from without but from within, and the consequence is that we do our cooking in paper vessels on wooden stoves, even as the savages used to do it in birch-bark vessels with hot stones, for, so the philosophers say, history repeats itself in an ever-ascending spiral." And now Edith began to laugh at my perplexed expression. She declared that it was clear my credulity had been taxed with these accounts of modern novelties about as far as it would be prudent to try it without furnishing some further evidence of the truth of the statements she had made. She proposed accordingly, for the balance of the morning, a visit to some of the great paper-process factories. CHAPTER VIII. THE GREATEST WONDER YET--FASHION DETHRONED. "You surely can not form the slightest idea of the bodily ecstasy it gives me to have done with that horrible masquerade in mummy clothes," exclaimed my companion as we left the house. "To think this is the first time we have actually been walking together!" "Surely you forget," I replied; "we have been out together several times." "Out together, yes, but not walking," she answered; "at least I was not walking. I don't know what would be the proper zoological term to describe the way I got over the ground inside of those bags, but it certainly was not walking. The women of your day, you see, were trained from childhood in that mode of progression, and no doubt acquired some skill in it; but I never had skirts on in my life except once, in some theatricals. It was the hardest thing I ever tried, and I doubt if I ever again give you so strong a proof of my regard. I am astonished that you did not seem to notice what a distressful time I was having." But if, being accustomed, as I had been, to the gait of women hampered by draperies, I had not observed anything unusual in Edith's walk when we had been out on previous occasions, the buoyant grace of her carriage and the elastic vigor of her step as she strode now by my side was a revelation of the possibilities of an athletic companionship which was not a little intoxicating. To describe in detail what I saw in my tour that day through the paper-process factories would be to tell an old story to twentieth-century readers; but what far more impressed me than all the ingenuity and variety of mechanical adaptations was the workers themselves and the conditions of their labor. I need not tell my readers what the great mills are in these days--lofty, airy halls, walled with beautiful designs in tiles and metal, furnished like palaces, with every convenience, the machinery running almost noiselessly, and every incident of the work that might be offensive to any sense reduced by ingenious devices to the minimum. Neither need I describe to you the princely workers in these palaces of industry, the strong and splendid men and women, with their refined and cultured faces, prosecuting with the enthusiasm of artists their self-chosen tasks of combining use and beauty. You all know what your factories are to-day; no doubt you find them none too pleasant or convenient, having been used to such things all your lives. No doubt you even criticise them in various ways as falling short of what they might be, for such is human nature; but if you would understand how they seem to me, shut your eyes a moment and try to conceive in fancy what our cotton and woolen and paper mills were like a hundred years ago. Picture low rooms roofed with rough and grimy timbers and walled with bare or whitewashed brick. Imagine the floor so crammed with machinery for economy of space as to allow bare room for the workers to writhe about among the flying arms and jaws of steel, a false motion meaning death or mutilation. Imagine the air space above filled, instead of air, with a mixture of stenches of oil and filth, unwashed human bodies, and foul clothing. Conceive a perpetual clang and clash of machinery like the screech of a tornado. But these were only the material conditions of the scene. Shut your eyes once more, that you may see what I would fain forget I had ever seen--the interminable rows of women, pallid, hollow-cheeked, with faces vacant and stolid but for the accent of misery, their clothing tattered, faded, and foul; and not women only, but multitudes of little children, weazen-faced and ragged--children whose mother's milk was barely out of their blood, their bones yet in the gristle. * * * * * Edith introduced me to the superintendent of one of the factories, a handsome woman of perhaps forty years. She very kindly showed us about and explained matters to me, and was much interested in turn to know what I thought of the modern factories and their points of contrast with those of former days. Naturally, I told her that I had been impressed, far more than by anything in the new mechanical appliances, with the transformation in the condition of the workers themselves. "Ah, yes," she said, "of course you would say so; that must indeed be the great contrast, though the present ways seem so entirely a matter of course to us that we forget it was not always so. When the workers settle how the work shall be done, it is not wonderful that the conditions should be the pleasantest possible. On the other hand, when, as in your day, a class like your private capitalists, who did not share the work, nevertheless settled how it should be done it is not surprising that the conditions of industry should have been as barbarous as they were, especially when the operation of the competitive system compelled the capitalists to get the most work possible out of the workers on the cheapest terms." "Do I understand." I asked, "that the workers in each trade regulate for themselves the conditions of their particular occupation?" "By no means. The unitary character of our industrial administration is the vital idea of it, without which it would instantly become impracticable. If the members of each trade controlled its conditions, they would presently be tempted to conduct it selfishly and adversely to the general interest of the community, seeking, as your private capitalists did, to get as much and give as little as possible. And not only would every distinctive class of workers be tempted to act in this manner, but every subdivision of workers in the same trade would presently be pursuing the same policy, until the whole industrial system would become disintegrated, and we should have to call the capitalists from their graves to save us. When I said that the workers regulated the conditions of work, I meant the workers as a whole--that is, the people at large, all of whom are nowadays workers, you know. The regulation and mutual adjustment of the conditions of the several branches of the industrial system are wholly done by the General Government. At the same time, however, the regulation of the conditions of work in any occupation is effectively, though indirectly, controlled by the workers in it through the right we all have to choose and change our occupations. Nobody would choose an occupation the conditions of which were not satisfactory, so they have to be made and kept satisfactory." * * * * * While we were at the factory the noon hour came, and I asked the superintendent and Edith to go out to lunch with me. In fact, I wanted to ascertain whether my newly acquired credit card was really good for anything or not. "There is one point about your modern costumes," I said, as we sat at our table in the dining hall, "about which I am rather curious. Will you tell me who or what sets the fashions?" "The Creator sets the only fashion which is now generally followed," Edith answered. "And what is that?" "The fashion of our bodies," she answered. "Ah, yes, very good," I replied, "and very true, too, of your costumes, as it certainly was not of ours; but my question still remains. Allowing that you have a general theory of dress, there are a thousand differences in details, with possible variations of style, shape, color, material, and what not. Now, the making of garments is carried on, I suppose, like all your other industries, as public business, under collective management, is it not?" "Certainly. People, of course, can make their own clothes if they wish to, just as they can make anything else, but it would be a great waste of time and energy." "Very well. The garments turned out by the factories have to be made up on some particular design or designs. In my day the question of designs of garments was settled by society leaders, fashion journals, edicts from Paris, or the Lord knows how; but at any rate the question was settled for us, and we had nothing to do but to obey. I don't say it was a good way; on the contrary, it was detestable; but what I want to know is, What system have you instead, for I suppose you have now no society leaders, fashion journals, or Paris edicts? Who settles the question what you shall wear?" "We do," replied the superintendent. "You mean, I suppose, that you determine it collectively by democratic methods. Now, when I look around me in this dining hall and see the variety and beauty of the costumes, I am bound to say that the result of your system seems satisfactory, and yet I think it would strike even the strongest believer in the principle of democracy that the rule of the majority ought scarcely to extend to dress. I admit that the yoke of fashion which we bowed to was very onerous, and yet it was true that if we were brave enough, as few indeed were, we might defy it; but with the style of dress determined by the administration, and only certain styles made, you must either follow the taste of the majority or lie abed. Why do you laugh? Is it not so?" "We were smiling," replied the superintendent, "on account of a slight misapprehension on your part. When I said that we regulated questions of dress, I meant that we regulated them not collectively, by majority, but individually, each for himself or herself." "But I don't see how you can," I persisted. "The business of producing fabrics and of making them into garments is carried on by the Government. Does not that imply, practically, a governmental control or initiative in fashions of dress?" "Dear me, no!" exclaimed the superintendent. "It is evident, Mr. West, as indeed the histories say, that governmental action carried with it in your day an arbitrary implication which it does not now. The Government is actually now what it nominally was in the America of your day--the servant, tool, and instrument by which the people give effect to their will, itself being without will. The popular will is expressed in two ways, which are quite distinct and relate to different provinces: First, collectively, by majority, in regard to blended, mutually involved interests, such as the large economic and political concerns of the community; second, personally, by each individual for himself or herself in the furtherance of private and self-regarding matters. The Government is not more absolutely the servant of the collective will in regard to the blended interests of the community than it is of the individual convenience in personal matters. It is at once the august representative of all in general concerns, and everybody's agent, errand boy, and factotum for all private ends. Nothing is too high or too low, too great or too little, for it to do for us. "The dressmaking department holds its vast provision of fabrics and machinery at the absolute disposition of the whims of every man or woman in the nation. You can go to one of the stores and order any costume of which a historical description exists, from the days of Eve to yesterday, or you can furnish a design of your own invention for a brand-new costume, designating any material at present existing, and it will be sent home to you in less time than any nineteenth-century dressmaker ever even promised to fill an order. Really, talking of this, I want you to see our garment-making machines in operation. Our paper garments, of course, are seamless, and made wholly by machinery. The apparatus being adjustable to any measure, you can have a costume turned out for you complete while you are looking over the machine. There are, of course, some general styles and shapes that are usually popular, and the stores keep a supply of them on hand, but that is for the convenience of the people, not of the department, which holds itself always ready to follow the initiative of any citizen and provide anything ordered in the least possible time." "Then anybody can set the fashion?" I said. "Anybody can set it, but whether it is followed depends on whether it is a good one, and really has some new point in respect of convenience or beauty; otherwise it certainly will not become a fashion. Its vogue will be precisely proportioned to the merit the popular taste recognizes in it, just as if it were an invention in mechanics. If a new idea in dress has any merit in it, it is taken up with great promptness, for our people are extremely interested in enhancing personal beauty by costume, and the absence of any arbitrary standards of style such as fashion set for you leaves us on the alert for attractions and novelties in shape and color. It is in variety of effect that our mode of dressing seems indeed to differ most from yours. Your styles were constantly being varied by the edicts of fashion, but as only one style was tolerated at a time, you had only a successive and not a simultaneous variety, such as we have. I should imagine that this uniformity of style, extending, as I understand it often did, to fabric, color, and shape alike, must have caused your great assemblages to present a depressing effect of sameness. "That was a fact fully admitted in my day," I replied. "The artists were the enemies of fashion, as indeed all sensible people were, but resistance was in vain. Do you know, if I were to return to the nineteenth century, there is perhaps nothing else I could tell my contemporaries of the changes you have made that would so deeply impress them as the information that you had broken the scepter of fashion, that there were no longer any arbitrary standards in dress recognized, and that no style had any other vogue that might be given it by individual recognition of its merits. That most of the other yokes humanity wore might some day be broken, the more hopeful of us believed, but the yoke of fashion we never expected to be freed from, unless perhaps in heaven." "The reign of fashion, as the history books call it, always seemed to me one of the most utterly incomprehensible things about the old order," said Edith. "It would seem that it must have had some great force behind it to compel such abject submission to a rule so tyrannical. And yet there seems to have been no force at all used. Do tell us what the secret was, Julian?" "Don't ask me," I protested. "It seemed to be some fell enchantment that we were subject to--that is all I know. Nobody professed to understand why we did as we did. Can't you tell us," I added, turning to the superintendent--"how do you moderns diagnose the fashion mania that made our lives such a burden to us?" "Since you appeal to me," replied our companion, "I may say that the historians explain the dominion of fashion in your age as the natural result of a disparity of economic conditions prevailing in a community in which rigid distinctions of caste had ceased to exist. It resulted from two factors: the desire of the common herd to imitate the superior class, and the desire of the superior class to protect themselves from that imitation and preserve distinction of appearance. In times and countries where class was caste, and fixed by law or iron custom, each caste had its distinctive dress, to imitate which was not allowed to another class. Consequently fashions were stationary. With the rise of democracy, the legal protection of class distinctions was abolished, while the actual disparity in social ranks still existed, owing to the persistence of economic inequalities. It was now free for all to imitate the superior class, and thus seem at least to be as good as it, and no kind of imitation was so natural and easy as dress. First, the socially ambitious led off in this imitation; then presently the less pretentious were constrained to follow their example, to avoid an apparent confession of social inferiority; till, finally, even the philosophers had to follow the herd and conform to the fashion, to avoid being conspicuous by an exceptional appearance." "I can see," said Edith, "how social emulation should make the masses imitate the richer and superior class, and how the fashions should in this way be set; but why were they changed so often, when it must have been so terribly expensive and troublesome to make the changes?" "For the reason," answered the superintendent, "that the only way the superior class could escape their imitators and preserve their distinction in dress was by adopting constantly new fashions, only to drop them for still newer ones as soon as they were imitated.--Does it seem to you, Mr. West, that this explanation corresponds with the facts as you observed them?" "Entirely so," I replied. "It might be added, too, that the changes in fashions were greatly fomented and assisted by the self-interest of vast industrial and commercial interests engaged in purveying the materials of dress and personal belongings. Every change, by creating a demand for new materials and rendering those in use obsolete, was what we called good for trade, though if tradesmen were unlucky enough to be caught by a sudden change of fashion with a lot of goods on hand it meant ruin to them. Great losses of this sort, indeed, attended every change in fashion." "But we read that there were fashions in many things besides dress," said Edith. "Certainly," said the superintendent. "Dress was the stronghold and main province of fashion because imitation was easiest and most effective through dress, but in nearly everything that pertained to the habits of living, eating, drinking, recreation, to houses, furniture, horses and carriages, and servants, to the manner of bowing even, and shaking hands, to the mode of eating food and taking tea, and I don't know what else--there were fashions which must be followed, and were changed as soon as they were followed. It was indeed a sad, fantastic race, and, Mr. West's contemporaries appear to have fully realized it; but as long as society was made up of unequals with no caste barriers to prevent imitation, the inferiors were bound to ape the superiors, and the superiors were bound to baffle imitation, so far as possible, by seeking ever-fresh devices for expressing their superiority." "In short," I said, "our tedious sameness in dress and manners appears to you to have been the logical result of our lack of equality in conditions." "Precisely so," answered the superintendent. "Because you were not equal, you made yourself miserable and ugly in the attempt to seem so. The aesthetic equivalent of the moral wrong of inequality was the artistic abomination of uniformity. On the other hand, equality creates an atmosphere which kills imitation, and is pregnant with originality, for every one acts out himself, having nothing to gain by imitating any one else." CHAPTER IX. SOMETHING THAT HAD NOT CHANGED. When we parted with the superintendent of the paper-process factory I said to Edith that I had taken in since that morning about all the new impressions and new philosophies I could for the time mentally digest, and felt great need of resting my mind for a space in the contemplation of something--if indeed there were anything--which had not changed or been improved in the last century. After a moment's consideration Edith exclaimed: "I have it! Ask no questions, but just come with me." Presently, as we were making our way along the route she had taken, she touched my arm, saying, "Let us hurry a little." Now, hurrying was the regulation gait of the nineteenth century. "Hurry up!" was about the most threadbare phrase in the English language, and rather than "_E pluribus unum_" should especially have been the motto of the American people, but it was the first time the note of haste had impressed my consciousness since I had been living twentieth-century days. This fact, together with the touch of my companion upon my arm as she sought to quicken my pace, caused me to look around, and in so doing to pause abruptly. "What is this?" I exclaimed. "It is too bad!" said my companion. "I tried to get you past without seeing it." But indeed, though I had asked what was this building we stood in presence of, nobody could know so well as I what it was. The mystery was how it had come to be there for in the midst of this splendid city of equals, where poverty was an unknown word, I found myself face to face with a typical nineteenth-century tenement house of the worst sort--one of the rookeries, in fact, that used to abound in the North End and other parts of the city. The environment was indeed in strong enough contrast with that of such buildings in my time, shut in as they generally were by a labyrinth of noisome alleys and dark, damp courtyards which were reeking reservoirs of foetid odors, kept in by lofty, light-excluding walls. This building stood by itself, in the midst of an open square, as if it had been a palace or other show place. But all the more, indeed, by this fine setting was the dismal squalor of the grimy structure emphasized. It seemed to exhale an atmosphere of gloom and chill which all the bright sunshine of the breezy September afternoon was unable to dominate. One would not have been surprised, even at noonday, to see ghosts at the black windows. There was an inscription over the door, and I went across the square to read it, Edith reluctantly following me. These words I read, above the central doorway: "THIS HABITATION OF CRUELTY IS PRESERVED AS A MEMENTO TO COMING GENERATIONS OF THE RULE OF THE RICH." "This is one of the ghost buildings," said Edith, "kept to scare the people with, so that they may never risk anything that looks like bringing back the old order of things by allowing any one on any plea to obtain an economic advantage over another. I think they had much better be torn down, for there is no more danger of the world's going back to the old order than there is of the globe reversing its rotation." A band of children, accompanied by a young woman, came across the square as we stood before the building, and filed into the doorway and up the black and narrow stairway. The faces of the little ones were very serious, and they spoke in whispers. "They are school children." said Edith. "We are all taken through this building, or some other like it, when we are in the schools, and the teacher explains what manner of things used to be done and endured there. I remember well when I was taken through this building as a child. It was long afterward before I quite recovered from the terrible impression I received. Really, I don't think it is a good idea to bring young children here, but it is a custom that became settled in the period after the Revolution, when the horror of the bondage they had escaped from was yet fresh in the minds of the people, and their great fear was that by some lack of vigilance the rule of the rich might be restored. "Of course," she continued, "this building and the others like it, which were reserved for warnings when the rest were razed to the ground, have been thoroughly cleaned and strengthened and made sanitary and safe every way, but our artists have very cunningly counterfeited all the old effects of filth and squalor, so that the appearance of everything is just as it was. Tablets in the rooms describe how many human beings used to be crowded into them, and the horrible conditions of their lives. The worst about it is that the facts are all taken from historical records, and are absolutely true. There are some of these places in which the inhabitants of the buildings as they used to swarm in them are reproduced in wax or plaster with every detail of garments, furniture, and all the other features based on actual records or pictures of the time. There is something indescribably dreadful in going through the buildings fitted out in that way. The dumb figures seem to appeal to you to help them. It was so long ago, and yet it makes one feel conscience-stricken not to be able to do anything." "But, Julian, come away. It was just a stupid accident my bringing you past here. When I undertook to show you something that had not changed since your day, I did not mean to mock you." Thanks to modern rapid transit, ten minutes later we stood on the ocean shore, with the waves of the Atlantic breaking noisily at our feet and its blue floor extending unbroken to the horizon. Here indeed was something that had not been changed--a mighty existence, to which a thousand years were as one day and one day as a thousand years. There could be no tonic for my case like the inspiration of this great presence, this unchanging witness of all earth's mutations. How petty seemed the little trick of time that had been played on me as I stood in the presence of this symbol of everlastingness which made past, present, and future terms of little meaning! In accompanying Edith to the part of the beach where we stood I had taken no note of directions, but now, as I began to study the shore, I observed with lively emotion that she had unwittingly brought me to the site of my old seaside place at Nahant. The buildings were indeed gone, and the growth of trees had quite changed the aspect of the landscape, but the shore line remained unaltered, and I knew it at once. Bidding her follow me, I led the way around a point to a little strip of beach between the sea and a wall of rock which shut off all sight or sound of the land behind. In my former life the spot had been a favorite resort when I visited the shore. Here in that life so long ago, and yet recalled as if of yesterday, I had been used from a lad to go to do my day dreaming. Every feature of the little nook was as familiar to me as my bedroom and all was quite unchanged. The sea in front, the sky above, the islands and the blue headlands of the distant coast--all, indeed, that filled the view was the same in every detail. I threw myself upon the warm sand by the margin of the sea, as I had been wont to do, and in a moment the flood of familiar associations had so completely carried me back to my old life that all the marvels that had happened to me, when presently I began to recall them, seemed merely as a day dream that had come to me like so many others before it in that spot by the shore. But what a dream it had been, that vision of the world to be; surely of all the dreams that had come to me there by the sea the weirdest! There had been a girl in the dream, a maiden much to be desired. It had been ill if I had lost her; but I had not, for this was she, the girl in this strange and graceful garb, standing by my side and smiling down at me. I had by some great hap brought her back from dreamland, holding her by the very strength of my love when all else of the vision had dissolved at the opening of the eyes. Why not? What youth has not often been visited in his dreams by maidenly ideals fairer than walk on earth, whom, waking, he has sighed for and for days been followed by the haunting beauty of their half-remembered faces? I, more fortunate than they, had baffled the jealous warder at the gates of sleep and brought my queen of dreamland through. When I proceeded to state to Edith this theory to account for her presence, she professed to find it highly reasonable, and we proceeded at much length to develop the idea. Falling into the conceit that she was an anticipation of the twentieth-century woman instead of my being an excavated relic of the nineteenth-century man, we speculated what we should do for the summer. We decided to visit the great pleasure resorts, where, no doubt, she would under the circumstances excite much curiosity and at the same time have an opportunity of studying what to her twentieth-century mind would seem even more astonishing types of humanity than she would seem to them--namely, people who, surrounded by a needy and anguished world, could get their own consent to be happy in a frivolous and wasteful idleness. Afterward we would go to Europe and inspect such things there as might naturally be curiosities to a girl out of the year 2000, such as a Rothschild, an emperor, and a few specimens of human beings, some of which were at that time still extant in Germany, Austria, and Russia, who honestly believed that God had given to certain fellow-beings a divine title to reign over them. CHAPTER X. A MIDNIGHT PLUNGE. It was after dark when we reached home, and several hours later before we had made an end of telling our adventures. Indeed, my hosts seemed at all times unable to hear too much of my impressions of modern things, appearing to be as much interested in what I thought of them as I was in the things themselves. "It is really, you see," Edith's mother had said, "the manifestation of vanity on our part. You are a sort of looking-glass to us, in which we can see how we appear from a different point of view from our own. If it were not for you, we should never have realized what remarkable people we are, for to one another, I assure you, we seem very ordinary." To which I replied that in talking with them I got the same looking-glass effect as to myself and my contemporaries, but that it was one which by no means ministered to my vanity. When, as we talked, the globe of the color clock turning white announced that it was midnight, some one spoke of bed, but the doctor had another scheme. "I propose," said he, "by way of preparing a good night's rest for us all, that we go over to the natatorium and take a plunge." "Are there any public baths open so late as this?" I said. "In my day everything was shut up long before now." Then and there the doctor gave me the information which, matter of course as it is to twentieth-century readers, was surprising enough to me, that no public service or convenience is ever suspended at the present day, whether by day or night, the year round; and that, although the service provided varies in extent, according to the demand, it never varies in quality. "It seems to us," said the doctor, "that among the minor inconveniences of life in your day none could have been more vexing than the recurrent interruption of all, or of the larger part of all, public services every night. Most of the people, of course, are asleep then, but always a portion of them have occasion to be awake and about, and all of us sometimes, and we should consider it a very lame public service that did not provide for the night workers as good a service as for the day workers. Of course, you could not do it, lacking any unitary industrial organization, but it is very easy with us. We have day and night shifts for all the public services--the latter, of course, much the smaller." "How about public holidays; have you abandoned them?" "Pretty generally. The occasional public holidays in your time were prized by the people, as giving them much-needed breathing spaces. Nowadays, when the working day is so short and the working year so interspersed with ample vacations, the old-fashioned holiday has ceased to serve any purpose, and would be regarded as a nuisance. We prefer to choose and use our leisure time as we please." It was to the Leander Natatorium that we had directed our steps. As I need not remind Bostonians, this is one of the older baths, and considered quite inferior to the modern structures. To me, however, it was a vastly impressive spectacle. The lofty interior glowing with light, the immense swimming tank, the four great fountains filling the air with diamond-dazzle and the noise of falling water, together with the throng of gayly dressed and laughing bathers, made an exhilarating and magnificent scene, which was a very effective introduction to the athletic side of the modern life. The loveliest thing of all was the great expanse of water made translucent by the light reflected from the white tiled bottom, so that the swimmers, their whole bodies visible, seemed as if floating on a pale emerald cloud, with an effect of buoyancy and weightlessness that was as startling as charming. Edith was quick to tell me, however, that this was as nothing to the beauty of some of the new and larger baths, where, by varying the colors of the tiling at the bottom, the water is made to shade through all the tints of the rainbow while preserving the same translucent appearance. I had formed an impression that the water would be fresh, but the green hue, of course, showed it to be from the sea. "We have a poor opinion of fresh water for swimming when we can get salt," said the doctor. "This water came in on the last tide from the Atlantic." "But how do you get it up to this level?" "We make it carry itself up," laughed the doctor; "it would be a pity if the tidal force that raises the whole harbor fully seven feet, could not raise what little we want a bit higher. Don't look at it so suspiciously," he added. "I know that Boston Harbor water was far from being clean enough for bathing in your day, but all that is changed. Your sewerage systems, remember, are forgotten abominations, and nothing that can defile is allowed to reach sea or river nowadays. For that reason we can and do use sea water, not only for all the public baths, but provide it as a distinct service for our home baths and also for all the public fountains, which, thus inexhaustibly supplied, can be kept always playing. But let us go in." "Certainly, if you say so," said I, with a shiver, "but are you sure that it is not a trifle cool? Ocean water was thought by us to be chilly for bathing in late September." "Did you think we were going to give you your death?" said the doctor. "Of course, the water is warmed to a comfortable temperature; these baths are open all winter." "But, dear me! how can you possibly warm such great bodies of water, which are so constantly renewed, especially in winter?" "Oh, we have no conscience at all about what we make the tides do for us," replied the doctor. "We not only make them lift the water up here, but heat it, too. Why, Julian, cold or hot are terms without real meaning, mere coquettish airs which Nature puts on, indicating that she wants to be wooed a little. She would just as soon warm you as freeze you, if you will approach her rightly. The blizzards which used to freeze your generation might just as well have taken the place of your coal mines. You look incredulous, but let me tell you now, as a first step toward the understanding of modern conditions, that power, with all its applications of light, heat, and energy, is to-day practically exhaustless and costless, and scarcely enters as an element into mechanical calculation. The uses of the tides, winds, and waterfalls are indeed but crude methods of drawing on Nature's resources of strength compared with others that are employed by which boundless power is developed from natural inequalities of temperature." A few moments later I was enjoying the most delicious sea bath that ever up to that time had fallen to my lot; the pleasure of the pelting under the fountains was to me a new sensation in life. "You'll make a first-rate twentieth-century Bostonian," said the doctor, laughing at my delight. "It is said that a marked feature of our modern civilization is that we are tending to revert to the amphibious type of our remote ancestry; evidently you will not object to drifting with the tide." It was one o'clock when we reached home. "I suppose," said Edith, as I bade her good-night, "that in ten minutes you will be back among your friends of the nineteenth century if you dream as you did last night. What would I not give to take the journey with you and see for myself what the world was like!" "And I would give as much to be spared a repetition of the experience," I said, "unless it were in your company." "Do you mean that you really are afraid you will dream of the old times again?" "So much afraid," I replied, "that I have a good mind to sit up all night to avoid the possibility of another such nightmare." "Dear me! you need not do that," she said. "If you wish me to, I will see that you are troubled no more in that way." "Are you, then, a magician?" "If I tell you not to dream of any particular matter, you will not," she said. "You are easily the mistress of my waking thoughts," I said; "but can you rule my sleeping mind as well?" "You shall see," she said, and, fixing her eyes upon mine, she said quietly, "Remember, you are not to dream of anything to-night which belonged to your old life!" and, as she spoke, I knew in my mind that it would be as she said. CHAPTER XI. LIFE THE BASIS OF THE RIGHT OF PROPERTY. Among the pieces of furniture in the subterranean bedchamber where Dr. Leete had found me sleeping was one of the strong boxes of iron cunningly locked which in my time were used for the storage of money and valuables. The location of this chamber so far underground, its solid stone construction and heavy doors, had not only made it impervious to noise but equally proof against thieves, and its very existence being, moreover, a secret, I had thought that no place could be safer for keeping the evidences of my wealth. Edith had been very curious about the safe, which was the name we gave to these strong boxes, and several times when we were visiting the vault had expressed a lively desire to see what was inside. I had proposed to open it for her, but she had suggested that, as her father and mother would be as much interested in the process as herself, it would be best to postpone the treat till all should be present. As we sat at breakfast the day after the experiences narrated in the previous chapters, she asked why that morning would not be a good time to show the inside of the safe, and everybody agreed that there could be no better. "What is in the safe?" asked Edith's mother. "When I last locked it in the year 1887," I replied, "there were in it securities and evidences of value of various sorts representing something like a million dollars. When we open it this morning we shall find, thanks to the great Revolution, a fine collection of waste paper.--I wonder, by the way, doctor, just what your judges would say if I were to take those securities to them and make a formal demand to be reinstated in the possessions which they represented? Suppose I said: 'Your Honors, these properties were once mine and I have never voluntarily parted with them. Why are they not mine now, and why should they not be returned to me?' You understand, of course, that I have no desire to start a revolt against the present order, which I am very ready to admit is much better than the old arrangements, but I am quite curious to know just what the judges would reply to such a demand, provided they consented to entertain it seriously. I suppose they would laugh me out of court. Still, I think I might argue with some plausibility that, seeing I was not present when the Revolution divested us capitalists of our wealth, I am at least entitled to a courteous explanation of the grounds on which that course was justified at the time. I do not want my million back, even if it were possible to return it, but as a matter of rational satisfaction I should like to know on just what plea it was appropriated and is retained by the community." "Really Julian," said the doctor, "it would be an excellent idea if you were to do just what you have suggested--that is, bring a formal suit against the nation for reinstatement in your former property. It would arouse the liveliest popular interest and stimulate a discussion of the ethical basis of our economic equality that would be of great educational value to the community. You see the present order has been so long established that it does not often occur to anybody except historians that there ever was any other. It would be a good thing for the people to have their minds stirred up on the subject and be compelled to do some fundamental thinking as to the merits of the differences between the old and the new order and the reasons for the present system. Confronting the court with those securities in your hand, you would make a fine dramatic situation. It would be the nineteenth century challenging the twentieth, the old civilization, demanding an accounting of the new. The judges, you may be sure, would treat you with the greatest consideration. They would at once admit your rights under the peculiar circumstances to have the whole question of wealth distribution and the rights of property reopened from the beginning, and be ready to discuss it in the broadest spirit." "No doubt," I answered, "but it is just an illustration, I suppose, of the lack of unselfish public spirit among my contemporaries that I do not feel disposed to make myself a spectacle even in the cause of education. Besides, what is the need? You can tell me as well as the judges could what the answer would be, and as it is the answer I want and not the property that will do just as well." "No doubt," said the doctor, "I could give you the general line of reasoning they would follow." "Very well. Let us suppose, then, that you are the court. On what ground would you refuse to return me my million, for I assume that you would refuse?" "Of course it would be the same ground," replied the doctor, "that the nation proceeded upon in nationalizing the property which that same million represented at the time of the great Revolution." "I suppose so; that is what I want to get at. What is that ground?" "The court would say that to allow any person to withdraw or withhold from the public administration for the common use any larger portion of capital than the equal portion allotted to all for personal use and consumption would in so far impair the ability of society to perform its first duty to its members." "What is this first duty of society to its members, which would be interfered with by allowing particular citizens to appropriate more than an equal proportion of the capital of the country?" "The duty of safeguarding the first and highest right of its members--the right of life." "But how is the duty of society to safeguard the lives of its members interfered with when one person, has more capital than another?" "Simply," answered the doctor, "because people have to eat in order to live, also to be clothed and to consume a mass of necessary and desirable things, the sum of which constitutes what we call wealth or capital. Now, if the supply of these things was always unlimited, as is the air we need to breathe, it would not be necessary to see that each one had his share, but the supply of wealth being, in fact, at any one time limited, it follows that if some have a disproportionate share, the rest will not have enough and may be left with nothing, as was indeed the case of millions all over the world until the great Revolution established economic equality. If, then, the first right of the citizen is protection to life and the first duty of society is to furnish it, the state must evidently see to it that the means of life are not unduly appropriated by particular individuals, but are distributed so as to meet the needs of all. Moreover, in order to secure the means of life to all, it is not merely necessary that the state should see that the wealth available for consumption is properly distributed at any given time; for, although all might in that case fare well for to-day, tomorrow all might starve unless, meanwhile, new wealth were being produced. The duty of society to guarantee the life of the citizen implies, therefore, not merely the equal distribution of wealth for consumption, but its employment as capital to the best possible advantage for all in the production of more wealth. In both ways, therefore, you will readily see that society would fail in its first and greatest function in proportion as it were to permit individuals beyond the equal allotment to withdraw wealth, whether for consumption or employment as capital, from the public administration in the common interest." "The modern ethics of ownership is rather startlingly simple to a representative of the nineteenth century," I observed. "Would not the judges even ask me by what right or title of ownership I claimed my wealth?" "Certainly not. It is impossible that you or any one could have so strong a title to material things as the least of your fellow-citizens have to their lives, or could make so strong a plea for the use of the collective power to enforce your right to things as they could make that the collective power should enforce their right to life against your right to things at whatever point the two claims might directly or indirectly conflict. The effect of the disproportionate possession of the wealth of a community by some of its members to curtail and threaten the living of the rest is not in any way affected by the means by which that wealth was obtained. The means may have constituted, as in past times they often did by their iniquity, an added injury to the community; but the fact of the disproportion, however resulting, was a continuing injury, without regard to its beginnings. Our ethics of wealth is indeed, as you say, extremely simple. It consists merely in the law of self-preservation, asserted in the name of all against the encroachments of any. It rests upon a principle which a child can understand as well as a philosopher, and which no philosopher ever attempted to refute--namely, the supreme right of all to live, and consequently to insist that society shall be so organized as to secure that right. "But, after all," said the doctor, "what is there in our economic application of this principle which need impress a man of your time with any other sensation than one of surprise that it was not earlier made? Since what you were wont to call modern civilization existed, it has been a principle subscribed to by all governments and peoples that it is the first and supreme duty of the state to protect the lives of the citizens. For the purpose of doing this the police, the courts, the army, and the greater part of the machinery of governments has existed. You went so far as to hold that a state which did not at any cost and to the utmost of its resources safeguard the lives of its citizens forfeited all claim to their allegiance. "But while professing this principle so broadly in words, you completely ignored in practice half and vastly the greater half of its meaning. You wholly overlooked and disregarded the peril to which life is exposed on the economic side--the hunger, cold, and thirst side. You went on the theory that it was only by club, knife, bullet, poison, or some other form of physical violence that life could be endangered, as if hunger, cold, and thirst--in a word, economic want--were not a far more constant and more deadly foe to existence than all the forms of violence together. You overlooked the plain fact that anybody who by any means, however indirect or remote, took away or curtailed one's means of subsistence attacked his life quite as dangerously as it could be done with knife or bullet--more so, indeed, seeing that against direct attack he would have a better chance of defending himself. You failed to consider that no amount of police, judicial, and military protection would prevent one from perishing miserably if he had not enough to eat and wear." "We went on the theory," I said, "that it was not well for the state to intervene to do for the individual or to help him to do what he was able to do for himself. We held that the collective organization should only be appealed to when the power of the individual was manifestly unequal to the task of self-defense." "It was not so bad a theory if you had lived up to it," said the doctor, "although the modern theory is far more rational that whatever can be done better by collective than individual action ought to be so undertaken, even if it could, after a more imperfect fashion, be individually accomplished. But don't you think that under the economic conditions which prevailed in America at the end of the nineteenth century, not to speak of Europe, the average man armed with a good revolver would have found the task of protecting himself and family against violence a far easier one than that of protecting them against want? Were not the odds against him far greater in the latter struggle than they could have been, if he were a tolerably good shot, in the former? Why, then, according to your own maxim, was the collective force of society devoted without stint to safeguarding him against violence, which he could have done for himself fairly well, while he was left to struggle against hopeless odds for the means of a decent existence? What hour, of what day of what year ever passed in which the number of deaths, and the physical and moral anguish resulting from the anarchy of the economic struggle and the crushing odds against the poor, did not outweigh as a hundred to one that same hour's record of death or suffering resulting from violence? Far better would society have fulfilled its recognized duty of safeguarding the lives of its members if, repealing every criminal law and dismissing every judge and policeman, it had left men to protect themselves as best they might against physical violence, while establishing in place of the machinery of criminal justice a system of economic administration whereby all would have been guaranteed against want. If, indeed, it had but substituted this collective economic organization for the criminal and judicial system it presently would have had as little need of the latter as we do, for most of the crimes that plagued you were direct or indirect consequences of your unjust economic conditions, and would have disappeared with them. "But excuse my vehemence. Remember that I am arraigning your civilization and not you. What I wanted to bring out is that the principle that the first duty of society is to safeguard the lives of its members was as fully admitted by your world as by ours, and that in failing to give the principle an economic as well as police, judicial, and military interpretation, your world convicted itself of an inconsistency as glaring in logic as it was cruel in consequences. We, on the other hand, in assuming as a nation the responsibility of safeguarding the lives of the people on the economic side, have merely, for the first time, honestly carried out a principle as old as the civilized state." "That is clear enough," I said. "Any one, on the mere statement of the case, would of course be bound to admit that the recognized duty of the state to guarantee the life of the citizen against the action of his fellows does logically involve responsibility to protect him from influences attacking the economic basis of life quite as much as from direct forcible assaults. The more advanced governments of my day, by their poor laws and pauper systems, in a dim way admitted this responsibility, although the kind of provision they made for the economically unfortunate was so meager and accompanied with such conditions of ignominy that men would ordinarily rather die than accept it. But grant that the sort of recognition we gave of the right of the citizen to be guaranteed a subsistence was a mockery more brutal than its total denial would have been, and that a far larger interpretation of its duty in this respect was incumbent on the state, yet how does it logically follow that society is bound to guarantee or the citizen to demand an absolute economic equality?" "It is very true, as you say," answered the doctor, "that the duty of society to guarantee every member the economic basis of his life might be after some fashion discharged short of establishing economic equality. Just so in your day might the duty of the state to safeguard the lives of citizens from physical violence have been discharged after a nominal fashion if it had contented itself with preventing outright murders, while leaving the people to suffer from one another's wantonness all manner of violence not directly deadly; but tell me, Julian, were governments in your day content with so construing the limit of their duty to protect citizens from violence, or would the citizens have been content with such a limitation?" "Of course not." "A government which in your day," continued the doctor, "had limited its undertaking to protect citizens from violence to merely preventing murders would not have lasted a day. There were no people so barbarous as to have tolerated it. In fact, not only did all civilized governments undertake to protect citizens from assaults against their lives, but from any and every sort of physical assault and offense, however petty. Not only might not a man so much as lay a finger on another in anger, but if he only wagged his tongue against him maliciously he was laid by the heels in jail. The law undertook to protect men in their dignity as well as in their mere bodily integrity, rightly recognizing that to be insulted or spit upon is as great a grievance as any assault upon life itself. "Now, in undertaking to secure the citizen in his right to life on the economic side, we do but studiously follow your precedents in safeguarding him from direct assault. If we did but secure his economic basis so far as to avert death by direct effect of hunger and cold as your pauper laws made a pretense of doing, we should be like a State in your day which forbade outright murder but permitted every kind of assault that fell short of it. Distress and deprivation resulting from economic want falling short of actual starvation precisely correspond to the acts of minor violence against which your State protected citizens as carefully as against murder. The right of the citizen to have his life secured him on the economic side can not therefore be satisfied by any provision for bare subsistence, or by anything less than the means for the fullest supply of every need which it is in the power of the nation by the thriftiest stewardship of the national resources to provide for all. "That is to say, in extending the reign of law and public justice to the protection and security of men's interests on the economic side, we have merely followed, as we were reasonably bound to follow, your much-vaunted maxim of 'equality before the law.' That maxim meant that in so far as society collectively undertook any governmental function, it must act absolutely without respect of persons for the equal benefit of all. Unless, therefore, we were to reject the principle of 'equality before the law,' it was impossible that society, having assumed charge of the production and distribution of wealth as a collective function, could discharge it on any other principle than equality." "If the court please," I said, "I should like to be permitted at this point to discontinue and withdraw my suit for the restoration of my former property. In my day we used to hold on to all we had and fight for all we could get with a good stomach, for our rivals were as selfish as we, and represented no higher right or larger view. But this modern social system with its public stewardship of all capital for the general welfare quite changes the situation. It puts the man who demands more than his share in the light of a person attacking the livelihood and seeking to impair the welfare of everybody else in the nation. To enjoy that attitude anybody must be a good deal better convinced of the justice of his title than I ever was even in the old days." CHAPTER XII. HOW INEQUALITY OF WEALTH DESTROYS LIBERTY. "Nevertheless," said the doctor, "I have stated only half the reason the judges would give wherefore they could not, by returning your wealth, permit the impairment of our collective economic system and the beginnings of economic inequality in the nation. There is another great and equal right of all men which, though strictly included under the right of life, is by generous minds set even above it: I mean the right of liberty--that is to say, the right not only to live, but to live in personal independence of one's fellows, owning only those common social obligations resting on all alike. "Now, the duty of the state to safeguard the liberty of citizens was recognized in your day just as was its duty to safeguard their lives, but with the same limitation, namely, that the safeguard should apply only to protect from attacks by violence. If it were attempted to kidnap a citizen and reduce him by force to slavery, the state would interfere, but not otherwise. Nevertheless, it was true in your day of liberty and personal independence, as of life, that the perils to which they were chiefly exposed were not from force or violence, but resulted from economic causes, the necessary consequences of inequalities of wealth. Because the state absolutely ignored this side, which was incomparably the largest side of the liberty question, its pretense of defending the liberties of citizens was as gross a mockery as that of guaranteeing their lives. Nay, it was a yet more absolute mockery and on a far vaster scale. "For, although I have spoken of the monopolization of wealth and of the productive machinery by a portion of the people as being first of all a threat to the lives of the rest of the community and to be resisted as such, nevertheless the main practical effect of the system was not to deprive the masses of mankind of life outright, but to force them, through want, to buy their lives by the surrender of their liberties. That is to say, they accepted servitude to the possessing class and became their serfs on condition of receiving the means of subsistence. Although multitudes were always perishing from lack of subsistence, yet it was not the deliberate policy of the possessing class that they should do so. The rich had no use for dead men; on the other hand, they had endless use for human beings as servants, not only to produce more wealth, but as the instruments of their pleasure and luxury. "As I need not remind you who were familiar with it, the industrial system of the world before the great Revolution was wholly based upon the compulsory servitude of the mass of mankind to the possessing class, enforced by the coercion of economic need." "Undoubtedly," I said, "the poor as a class were in the economic service of the rich, or, as we used to say, labor was dependent on capital for employment, but this service and employment had become in the nineteenth century an entirely voluntary relation on the part of the servant or employee. The rich had no power to compel the poor to be their servants. They only took such as came voluntarily to ask to be taken into service, and even begged to be, with tears. Surely a service so sought after could scarcely be called compulsory." "Tell us, Julian," said the doctor, "did the rich go to one another and ask the privilege of being one another's servants or employees?" "Of course not." "But why not?" "Because, naturally, no one could wish to be another's servant or subject to his orders who could get along without it." "I should suppose so, but why, then, did the poor so eagerly seek to serve the rich when the rich refused with scorn to serve one another? Was it because the poor so loved the rich?" "Scarcely." "Why then?" "It was, of course, for the reason that it was the only way the poor could get a living." "You mean that it was only the pressure of want or the fear of it that drove the poor to the point of becoming the servants of the rich?" "That is about it." "And would you call that voluntary service? The distinction between forced service and such service as that would seem quite imperceptible to us. If a man may be said to do voluntarily that which only the pressure of bitter necessity compels him to elect to do, there has never been any such thing as slavery, for all the acts of a slave are at the last the acceptance of a less evil for fear of a worse. Suppose, Julian, you or a few of you owned the main water supply, or food supply, clothing supply, land supply, or main industrial opportunities in a community and could maintain your ownership, that fact alone would make the rest of the people your slaves, would it not, and that, too, without any direct compulsion on your part whatever?" "No doubt." "Suppose somebody should charge you with holding the people under compulsory servitude, and you should answer that you laid no hand on them but that they willingly resorted to you and kissed your hands for the privilege of being allowed to serve you in exchange for water, food, or clothing, would not that be a very transparent evasion on your part of the charge of slaveholding?" "No doubt it would be." "Well, and was not that precisely the relation the capitalists or employers as a class held toward the rest of the community through their monopolization of wealth and the machinery of production?" "I must say that it was." "There was a great deal said by the economists of your day," the doctor went on, "about the freedom of contract--the voluntary, unconstrained agreement of the laborer with the employer as to the terms of his employment. What hypocrisy could have been so brazen as that pretense when, as a matter of fact, every contract made between the capitalist who had bread and could keep it and the laborer who must have it or die would have been declared void, if fairly judged, even under your laws as a contract made under duress of hunger, cold, and nakedness, nothing less than the threat of death! If you own the things men must have, you own the men who must have them." "But the compulsion of want," said I, "meaning hunger and cold, is a compulsion of Nature. In that sense we are all under compulsory servitude to Nature." "Yes, but not to one another. That is the whole difference between slavery and freedom. To-day no man serves another, but all the common good in which we equally share. Under your system the compulsion of Nature through the appropriation by the rich of the means of supplying Nature's demands was turned into a club by which the rich made the poor pay Nature's debt of labor not only for themselves but for the rich also, with a vast overcharge besides for the needless waste of the system." "You make out our system to have been little better than slavery. That is a hard word." "It is a very hard word, and we want above all things to be fair. Let us look at the question. Slavery exists where there is a compulsory using of men by other men for the benefit of the users. I think we are quite agreed that the poor man in your day worked for the rich only because his necessities compelled him to. That compulsion varied in force according to the degree of want the worker was in. Those who had a little economic means would only render the lighter kinds of service on more or less easy and honorable conditions, while those who had less means or no means at all would do anything on any terms however painful or degrading. With the mass of the workers the compulsion of necessity was of the sharpest kind. The chattel slave had the choice between working for his master and the lash. The wage-earner chose between laboring for an employer or starving. In the older, cruder forms of slavery the masters had to be watching constantly to prevent the escape of their slaves, and were troubled with the charge of providing for them. Your system was more convenient, in that it made Nature your taskmaster, and depended on her to keep your servants to the task. It was a difference between the direct exercise of coercion, in which the slave was always on the point of rebellion, and an indirect coercion by which the same industrial result was obtained, while the slave, instead of rebelling against his master's authority, was grateful for the opportunity of serving him." "But," said I, "the wage-earner received wages and the slave received nothing." "I beg your pardon. The slave received subsistence--clothing and shelter--and the wage-earner who could get more than these out of his wages was rarely fortunate. The rate of wages, except in new countries and under special conditions and for skilled workers, kept at about the subsistence point, quite as often dropping below as rising above. The main difference was that the master expended the subsistence wage of the chattel slave for him while the earner expended it for himself. This was better for the worker in some ways; in others less desirable, for the master out of self-interest usually saw that the chattel, children had enough; while the employer, having no stake in the life or health of the wage-earner, did not concern himself as to whether he lived or died. There were never any slave quarters so vile as the tenement houses of the city slums where the wage-earners were housed." "But at least," said I, "there was this radical difference between the wage-earner of my day and the chattel slave: the former could leave his employer at will, the latter could not." "Yes, that is a difference, but one surely that told not so much in favor of as against the wage-earner. In all save temporarily fortunate countries with sparse population the laborer would have been glad indeed to exchange the right to leave his employer for a guarantee that he would not be discharged by him. Fear of losing his opportunity to work--his job, as you called it--was the nightmare of the laborer's life as it was reflected in the literature of your period. Was it not so?" I had to admit that it was even so. "The privilege of leaving one employer for another," pursued the doctor, "even if it had not been more than balanced by the liability to discharge, was of very little worth to the worker, in view of the fact that the rate of wages was at about the same point wherever he might go, and the change would be merely a choice between the personal dispositions of different masters, and that difference was slight enough, for business rules controlled the relations of masters and men." I rallied once more. "One point of real superiority at least you must admit the wage-earner had over the chattel slave. He could by merit rise out of his condition and become himself an employer, a rich man." "Surely, Julian, you forget that there has rarely been a slave system under which the more energetic, intelligent, and thrifty slaves could and did not buy their freedom or have it given them by their masters. The freedmen in ancient Rome rose to places of importance and power quite as frequently as did the born proletarian of Europe or America get out of his condition." I did not think of anything to reply at the moment, and the doctor, having compassion on me, pursued: "It is an old illustration of the different view points of the centuries that precisely this point which you make of the possibility of the wage-earner rising, although it was getting to be a vanishing point in your day, seems to us the most truly diabolical feature of the whole system. The prospect of rising as a motive to reconcile the wage-earner or the poor man in general to his subjection, what did it amount to? It was but saying to him, 'Be a good slave, and you, too, shall have slaves of your own.' By this wedge did you separate the cleverer of the wage-workers from the mass of them and dignify treason to humanity by the name of ambition. No true man should wish to rise save to raise others with him." "One point of difference, however, you must at least admit," I said. "In chattel slavery the master had a power over the persons of his slaves which the employer did not have over even the poorest of his employees: he could not lay his hand upon them in violence." "Again, Julian," said the doctor, "you have mentioned a point of difference that tells in favor of chattel slavery as a more humane industrial method than the wage system. If here and there the anger of the chattel slave owner made him forget his self-restraint so far as to cripple or maim his slaves, yet such cases were on the whole rare, and such masters were held to an account by public opinion if not by law; but under the wage system the employer had no motive of self-restraint to spare life or limb of his employees, and he escaped responsibility by the fact of the consent and even eagerness of the needy people to undertake the most perilous and painful tasks for the sake of bread. We read that in the United States every year at least two hundred thousand men, women, and children were done to death or maimed in the performance of their industrial duties, nearly forty thousand alone in the single branch of the steam railroad service. No estimate seems to have ever been attempted of the many times greater number who perished more indirectly through the injurious effects of bad industrial conditions. What chattel-slave system ever made a record of such wastefulness of human life, as that? "Nay, more, the chattel-slave owner, if he smote his slave, did it in anger and, as likely as not, with some provocation; but these wholesale slaughters of wage-earners that made your land red were done in sheer cold-bloodedness, without any other motive on the part of the capitalists, who were responsible, save gain. "Still again, one of the more revolting features of chattel slavery has always been considered the subjection of the slave women to the lust of their masters. How was it in this respect under the rule of the rich? We read in our histories that great armies of women in your day were forced by poverty to make a business of submitting their bodies to those who had the means of furnishing them a little bread. The books say that these armies amounted in your great cities to bodies of thirty or forty thousand women. Tales come down to us of the magnitude of the maiden tribute levied upon the poorer classes for the gratification of the lusts of those who could pay, which the annals of antiquity could scarcely match for horror. Am I saying too much, Julian?" "You have mentioned nothing but facts which stared me in the face all my life," I replied, "and yet it appears I have had to wait for a man of another century to tell me what they meant." "It was precisely because they stared you and your contemporaries so constantly in the face, and always had done so, that you lost the faculty of judging their meaning. They were, as we might say, too near the eyes to be seen aright. You are far enough away from the facts now to begin to see them clearly and to realize their significance. As you shall continue to occupy this modern view point, you will more and more completely come to see with us that the most revolting aspect of the human condition before the great Revolution was not the suffering from physical privation or even the outright starvation of multitudes which directly resulted from the unequal distribution of wealth, but the indirect effect of that inequality to reduce almost the total human race to a state of degrading bondage to their fellows. As it seems to us, the offense of the old order against liberty was even greater than the offense to life; and even if it were conceivable that it could have satisfied the right of life by guaranteeing abundance to all, it must just the same have been destroyed, for, although the collective administration of the economic system had been unnecessary to guarantee life, there could be no such thing as liberty so long as by the effect of inequalities of wealth and the private control of the means of production the opportunity of men to obtain the means of subsistence depended on the will of other men." CHAPTER XIII. PRIVATE CAPITAL STOLEN FROM THE SOCIAL FUND. "I observe," pursued the doctor, "that Edith is getting very impatient with these dry disquisitions, and thinks it high time we passed from wealth in the abstract to wealth in the concrete, as illustrated by the contents of your safe. I will delay the company only while I say a very few words more; but really this question of the restoration of your million, raised half in jest as it was, so vitally touches the central and fundamental principle of our social order that I want to give you at least an outline idea of the modern ethics of wealth distribution. "The essential difference between the new and the old point of view you fully possess by this time. The old ethics conceived of the question of what a man might rightfully possess as one which began and ended with the relation of individuals to things. Things have no rights as against moral beings, and there was no reason, therefore, in the nature of the case as thus stated, why individuals should not acquire an unlimited ownership of things so far as their abilities permitted. But this view absolutely ignored the social consequences which result from an unequal distribution of material things in a world where everybody absolutely depends for life and all its uses on their share of those things. That is to say, the old so-called ethics of property absolutely overlooked the whole ethical side of the subject--namely, its bearing on human relations. It is precisely this consideration which furnishes the whole basis of the modern ethics of property. All human beings are equal in rights and dignity, and only such a system of wealth distribution can therefore be defensible as respects and secures those equalities. But while this is the principle which you will hear most generally stated as the moral ground of our economic equality, there is another quite sufficient and wholly different ground on which, even if the rights of life and liberty were not involved, we should yet maintain that equal sharing of the total product of industry was the only just plan, and that any other was robbery. "The main factor in the production of wealth among civilized men is the social organism, the machinery of associated labor and exchange by which hundreds of millions of individuals provide the demand for one another's product and mutually complement one another's labors, thereby making the productive and distributive systems of a nation and of the world one great machine. This was true even under private capitalism, despite the prodigious waste and friction of its methods; but of course it is a far more important truth now when the machinery of co-operation runs with absolute smoothness and every ounce of energy is utilized to the utmost effect. The element in the total industrial product which is due to the social organism is represented by the difference between the value of what one man produces as a worker in connection with the social organization and what he could produce in a condition of isolation. Working in concert with his fellows by aid of the social organism, he and they produce enough to support all in the highest luxury and refinement. Toiling in isolation, human experience has proved that he would be fortunate if he could at the utmost produce enough to keep himself alive. It is estimated, I believe, that the average daily product of a worker in America to-day is some fifty dollars. The product of the same man working in isolation would probably be highly estimated on the same basis of calculation if put at a quarter of a dollar. Now tell me, Julian, to whom belongs the social organism, this vast machinery of human association, which enhances some two hundredfold the product of every one's labor?" "Manifestly," I replied, "it can belong to no one in particular, but to nothing less than society collectively. Society collectively can be the only heir to the social inheritance of intellect and discovery, and it is society collectively which furnishes the continuous daily concourse by which alone that inheritance is made effective." "Exactly so. The social organism, with all that it is and all it makes possible, is the indivisible inheritance of all in common. To whom, then, properly belongs that two hundredfold enhancement of the value of every one's labor which is owing to the social organism?" "Manifestly to society collectively--to the general fund." "Previous to the great Revolution," pursued the doctor. "Although there seems to have been a vague idea of some such social fund as this, which belonged to society collectively, there was no clear conception of its vastness, and no custodian of it, or possible provision to see that it was collected and applied for the common use. A public organization of industry, a nationalized economic system, was necessary before the social fund could be properly protected and administered. Until then it must needs be the subject of universal plunder and embezzlement. The social machinery was seized upon by adventurers and made a means of enriching themselves by collecting tribute from the people to whom it belonged and whom it should have enriched. It would be one way of describing the effect of the Revolution to say that it was only the taking possession by the people collectively of the social machinery which had always belonged to them, thenceforth to be conducted as a public plant, the returns of which were to go to the owners as the equal proprietors and no longer to buccaneers. "You will readily see," the doctor went on, "how this analysis of the product of industry must needs tend to minimize the importance of the personal equation of performance as between individual workers. If the modern man, by aid of the social machinery, can produce fifty dollars' worth of product where he could produce not over a quarter of a dollar's worth without society, then forty-nine dollars and three quarters out of every fifty dollars must be credited to the social fund to be equally distributed. The industrial efficiency of two men working without society might have differed as two to one--that is, while one man was able to produce a full quarter dollar's worth of work a day, the other could produce only twelve and a half cents' worth. This was a very great difference under those circumstances, but twelve and a half cents is so slight a proportion of fifty dollars as not to be worth mentioning. That is to say, the difference in individual endowments between the two men would remain the same, but that difference would be reduced to relative unimportance by the prodigious equal addition made to the product of both alike by the social organism. Or again, before gunpowder was invented one man might easily be worth two as a warrior. The difference between the men as individuals remained what it was; yet the overwhelming factor added to the power of both alike by the gun practically equalized them as fighters. Speaking of guns, take a still better illustration--the relation of the individual soldiers in a square of infantry to the formation. There might be large differences in the fighting power of the individual soldiers singly outside the ranks. Once in the ranks, however, the formation added to the fighting efficiency of every soldier equally an element so overwhelming as to dwarf the difference between the individual efficiency of different men. Say, for instance, that the formation added ten to the fighting force of every member, then the man who outside the ranks was as two to one in power compared with his comrade would, when they both stood in the ranks, compare with him only as twelve to eleven--an inconsiderable difference. "I need scarcely point out to you, Julian, the bearing of the principle of the social fund on economic equality when the industrial system was nationalized. It made it obvious that even if it were possible to figure out in a satisfactory manner the difference in the industrial products which in an accounting with the social fund could be respectively credited to differences in individual performance, the result would not be worth the trouble. Even the worker of special ability, who might hope to gain most by it, could not hope to gain so much as he would lose in common with others by sacrificing the increased efficiency of the industrial machinery that would result from the sentiment of solidarity and public spirit among the workers arising from a feeling of complete unity of interest." "Doctor," I exclaimed, "I like that idea of the social fund immensely! It makes me understand, among other things, the completeness with which you seem to have outgrown the wages notion, which in one form or other was fundamental to all economic thought in my day. It is because you are accustomed to regarding the social capital rather than your day-to-day specific exertions as the main source of your wealth. It is, in a word, the difference between the attitude of the capitalist and the proletarian." "Even so," said the doctor. "The Revolution made us all capitalists, and the idea of the dividend has driven out that of the stipend. We take wages only in honor. From our point of view as to the collective ownership of the economic machinery of the social system, and the absolute claim of society collectively to its product, there is something amusing in the laborious disputations by which your contemporaries used to try to settle just how much or little wages or compensation for services this or that individual or group was entitled to. Why, dear me, Julian, if the cleverest worker were limited to his own product, strictly separated and distinguished from the elements by which the use of the social machinery had multiplied it, he would fare no better than a half-starved savage. Everybody is entitled not only to his own product, but to vastly more--namely, to his share of the product of the social organism, in addition to his personal product, but he is entitled to this share not on the grab-as-grab-can plan of your day, by which some made themselves millionaires and others were left beggars, but on equal terms with all his fellow-capitalists." "The idea of an unearned increment given to private properties by the social organism was talked of in my day," I said, "but only, as I remember, with reference to land values. There were reformers who held that society had the right to take in taxes all increase in value of land that resulted from social factors, such as increased population or public improvements, but they seemed to think the doctrine applicable to land only." "Yes," said the doctor, "and it is rather odd that, having hold of the clew, they did not follow it up." CHAPTER XIV. WE LOOK OVER MY COLLECTION OF HARNESSES. Wires for light and heat had been put into the vault, and it was as warm and bright and habitable a place as it had been a century before, when it was my sleeping chamber. Kneeling before the door of the safe, I at once addressed myself to manipulating the dial, my companions meanwhile leaning over me in attitudes of eager interest. It had been one hundred years since I locked the safe the last time, and under ordinary circumstances that would have been long enough for me to forget the combination several times over, but it was as fresh in my mind as if I had devised it a fortnight before, that being, in fact, the entire length of the intervening period so far as my conscious life was concerned. "You observe," I said, "that I turn this dial until the letter 'K' comes opposite the letter 'R.' Then I move this other dial till the number '9' comes opposite the same point. Now the safe is practically unlocked. All I have to do to open it is to turn this knob, which moves the bolts, and then swing the door open, as you see." But they did not see just then, for the knob would not turn, the lock remaining fast. I knew that I had made no mistake about the combination. Some of the tumblers in the lock had failed to fall. I tried it over again several times and thumped the dial and the door, but it was of no use. The lock remained stubborn. One might have said that its memory was not as good as mine. It had forgotten the combination. A materialistic explanation somewhat more probable was that the oil in the lock had been hardened by time so as to offer a slight resistance. The lock could not have rusted, for the atmosphere of the room had been absolutely dry. Otherwise I should not have survived. "I am sorry to disappoint you," I said, "but we shall have to send to the headquarters of the safe manufacturers for a locksmith. I used to know just where in Sudbury Street to go, but I suppose the safe business has moved since then." "It has not merely moved," said the doctor, "it has disappeared; there are safes like this at the historical museum, but I never knew how they were opened until now. It is really very ingenious." "And do you mean to say that there are actually no locksmiths to-day who could open this safe?" "Any machinist can cut the steel like cardboard," replied the doctor; "but really I don't believe there is a man in the world who could pick the lock. We have, of course, simple locks to insure privacy and keep children out of mischief, but nothing calculated to offer serious resistance either to force or cunning. The craft of the locksmith is extinct." At this Edith, who was impatient to see the safe opened, exclaimed that the twentieth century had nothing to boast of if it could not solve a puzzle which any clever burglar of the nineteenth century was equal to. "From the point of view of an impatient young woman it may seem so," said the doctor. "But we must remember that lost arts often are monuments of human progress, indicating outgrown limitations and necessities, to which they ministered. It is because we have no more thieves that we have no more locksmiths. Poor Julian had to go to all this pains to protect the papers in that safe, because if he lost them he would be left a beggar, and, from being one of the masters of the many, would have become one of the servants of the few, and perhaps be tempted to turn burglar himself. No wonder locksmiths were in demand in those days. But now you see, even supposing any one in a community enjoying universal and equal wealth could wish to steal anything, there is nothing that he could steal with a view to selling it again. Our wealth consists in the guarantee of an equal share in the capital and income of the nation--a guarantee that is personal and can not be taken from us nor given away, being vested in each one at birth, and divested only by death. So you see the locksmith and safe-maker would be very useless persons." As we talked, I had continued to work the dial in the hope that the obstinate tumbler might be coaxed to act, and presently a faint click rewarded my efforts and I swung the door open. "Faugh!" exclaimed Edith at the musty gust of confined air which followed. "I am sorry for your people if that is a fair sample of what you had to breathe." "It is probably about the only sample left, at any rate," observed the doctor. "Dear me! what a ridiculous little box it turns out to be for such a pretentious outside!" exclaimed Edith's mother. "Yes," said I. "The thick walls are to make the contents fireproof as well as burglar-proof--and, by the way, I should think you would need fireproof safes still." "We have no fires, except in the old structures," replied the doctor. "Since building was undertaken by the people collectively, you see we could not afford to have them, for destruction of property means to the nation a dead loss, while under private capitalism the loss might be shuffled off on others in all sorts of ways. They could get insured, but the nation has to insure itself." Opening the inner door of the safe, I took out several drawers full of securities of all sorts, and emptied them on the table in the room. "Are these stuffy-looking papers what you used to call wealth?" said Edith, with evident disappointment. "Not the papers in themselves," I said, "but what they represented." "And what was that?" she asked. "The ownership of land, houses, mills, ships, railroads, and all manner of other things," I replied, and went on as best I could to explain to her mother and herself about rents, profits, interest, dividends, etc. But it was evident, from the blank expression of their countenances, that I was not making much headway. Presently the doctor looked up from the papers which he was devouring with the zeal of an antiquarian, and chuckled. "I am afraid, Julian, you are on the wrong tack. You see economic science in your day was a science of things; in our day it is a science of human beings. We have nothing at all answering to your rent, interest, profits, or other financial devices, and the terms expressing them have no meaning now except to students. If you wish Edith and her mother to understand you, you must translate these money terms into terms of men and women and children, and the plain facts of their relations as affected by your system. Shall you consider it impertinent if I try to make the matter a little clearer to them?" "I shall be much obliged to you," I said; "and perhaps you will at the same time make it clearer to me." "I think," said the doctor, "that we shall all understand the nature and value of these documents much better if, instead of speaking of them as titles of ownership in farms, factories, mines, railroads, etc., we state plainly that they were evidences that their possessors were the masters of various groups of men, women, and children in different parts of the country. Of course, as Julian says, the documents nominally state his title to things only, and say nothing about men and women. But it is the men and women who went with the lands, the machines, and various other things, and were bound to them by their bodily necessities, which gave all the value to the possession of the things. "But for the implication that there were men who, because they must have the use of the land, would submit to labor for the owner of it in return for permission to occupy it, these deeds and mortgages would have been of no value. So of these factory shares. They speak only of water power and looms, but they would be valueless but for the thousands of human workers bound to the machines by bodily necessities as fixedly as if they were chained there. So of these coal-mine shares. But for the multitude of wretched beings condemned by want to labor in living graves, of what value would have been these shares which yet make no mention of them? And see again how significant is the fact that it was deemed needless to make mention of and to enumerate by name these serfs of the field, of the loom, of the mine! Under systems of chattel slavery, such as had formerly prevailed, it was necessary to name and identify each chattel, that he might be recovered in case of escape, and an account made of the loss in case of death. But there was no danger of loss by the escape or the death of the serfs transferred by these documents. They would not run away, for there was nothing better to run to or any escape from the world-wide economic system which enthralled them; and if they died, that involved no loss to their owners, for there were always plenty more to take their places. Decidedly, it would have been a waste of paper to enumerate them. "Just now at the breakfast table," continued the doctor, "I was explaining the modern view of the economic system of private capitalism as one based on the compulsory servitude of the masses to the capitalists, a servitude which the latter enforced by monopolizing the bulk of the world's resources and machinery, leaving the pressure of want to compel the masses to accept their yoke, the police and soldiers meanwhile defending them in their monopolies. These documents turn up in a very timely way to illustrate the ingenious and effectual methods by which the different sorts of workers were organized for the service of the capitalists. To use a plain illustration, these various sorts of so-called securities may be described as so many kinds of human harness by which the masses, broken and tamed by the pressure of want, were yoked and strapped to the chariots of the capitalists. "For instance, here is a bundle of farm mortgages on Kansas farms. Very good; by virtue of the operation of this security certain Kansas farmers worked for the owner of it, and though they might never know who he was nor he who they were, yet they were as securely and certainly his thralls as if he had stood over them with a whip instead of sitting in his parlor at Boston, New York, or London. This mortgage harness was generally used to hitch in the agricultural class of the population. Most of the farmers of the West were pulling in it toward the end of the nineteenth century.--Was it not so, Julian? Correct me if I am wrong." "You are stating the facts very accurately," I answered. "I am beginning to understand more clearly the nature of my former property." "Now let us see what this bundle is," pursued the doctor. "Ah! yes; these are shares in New England cotton factories. This sort of harness was chiefly used for women and children, the sizes ranging away down so as to fit girls and boys of eleven and twelve. It used to be said that it was only the margin of profit furnished by the almost costless labor of the little children that made these factories paying properties. The population of New England was largely broken in at a very tender age to work in this style of harness. "Here, now, is a little different sort. These are railroad, gas, and water-works shares. They were a sort of comprehensive harness, by which not only a particular class of workers but whole communities were hitched in and made to work for the owner of the security. "And, finally, we have here the strongest harness of all, the Government bond. This document, you sec, is a bond of the United States Government. By it seventy million people--the whole nation, in fact--were harnessed to the coach of the owner of this bond; and, what was more, the driver in this case was the Government itself, against which the team would find it hard to kick. There was a great deal of kicking and balking in the other sorts of harness, and the capitalists were often inconvenienced and temporarily deprived of the labor of the men they had bought and paid for with good money. Naturally, therefore, the Government bond was greatly prized by them as an investment. They used every possible effort to induce the various governments to put more and more of this sort of harness on the people, and the governments, being carried on by the agents of the capitalists, of course kept on doing so, up to the very eve of the great Revolution, which was to turn the bonds and all the other harnesses into waste paper." "As a representative of the nineteenth century," I said, "I can not deny the substantial correctness of your rather startling way of describing our system of investments. Still, you will admit that, bad as the system was and bitter as was the condition of the masses under it, the function performed by the capitalists in organizing and directing such industry as we had was a service to the world of some value." "Certainly, certainly," replied the doctor. "The same plea might be urged, and has been, in defense of every system by which men have ever made other men their servants from the beginning. There was always some service, generally valuable and indispensable, which the oppressors could urge and did urge as the ground and excuse of the servitude they enforced. As men grew wiser they observed that they were paying a ruinous price for the services thus rendered. So at first they said to the kings: 'To be sure, you help defend the state from foreigners and hang thieves, but it is too much to ask us to be your serfs in exchange; we can do better.' And so they established republics. So also, presently, the people said to the priests: 'You have done something for us, but you have charged too much for your services in asking us to submit our minds to you; we can do better.' And so they established religious liberty. "And likewise, in this last matter we are speaking of, the people finally said to the capitalists: 'Yes, you have organized our industry, but at the price of enslaving us. We can do better.' And substituting national co-operation for capitalism, they established the industrial republic based on economic democracy. If it were true, Julian, that any consideration of service rendered to others, however valuable, could excuse the benefactors for making bondmen of the benefited, then there never was a despotism or slave system which could not excuse itself." "Haven't you some real money to show us," said Edith, "something besides these papers--some gold and silver such as they have at the museum?" It was not customary in the nineteenth century for people to keep large supplies of ready money in their houses, but for emergencies I had a little stock of it in my safe, and in response to Edith's request I took out a drawer containing several hundred dollars in gold and emptied it on the table. "How pretty they are!" exclaimed Edith, thrusting her hands in the pile of yellow coins and clinking them together. "And is it really true that if you only had enough of these things, no matter how or where you got them, men and women would submit themselves to you and let you make what use you pleased of them?" "Not only would they let you use them as you pleased, but they would be extremely grateful to you for being so good as to use them instead of others. The poor fought each other for the privilege of being the servants and underlings of those who had the money." "Now I see," said Edith, "what the Masters of the Bread meant." "What is that about Masters of the Bread?" I asked. "Who were they?" "It was a name given to the capitalists in the revolutionary period," replied the doctor. "This thing Edith speaks of is a scrap of the literature of that time, when the people first began to fully wake up to the fact that class monopoly of the machinery of production meant slavery for the mass." "Let me see if I can recall it," said Edith. "It begins this way: 'Everywhere men, women, and children stood in the market-place crying to the Masters of the Bread to take them to be their servants, that they might have bread. The strong men said: "O Lords of the Bread, feel our thews and sinews, our arms and our legs; see how strong we are. Take us and use us. Let us dig for you. Let us hew for you. Let us go down in the mine and delve for you. Let us freeze and starve in the forecastles of your ships. Send us into the hells of your steamship stokeholes. Do what you will with us, but let us serve you, that we may eat and not die!" "'Then spoke up also the learned men, the scribes and the lawyers, whose strength was in their brains and not in their bodies: "O Masters of the Bread," they said, "take us to be your servants and to do your will. See how fine is our wit, how great our knowledge; our minds are stored with the treasures of learning and the subtlety of all the philosophies. To us has been given clearer vision than to others, and the power of persuasion that we should be leaders of the people, voices to the voiceless, and eyes to the blind. But the people whom we should serve have no bread to give us. Therefore, Masters of the Bread, give us to eat, and we will betray the people to you, for we must live. We will plead for you in the courts against the widow and the fatherless. We will speak and write in your praise, and with cunning words confound those who speak against you and your power and state. And nothing that you require of us shall seem too much. But because we sell not only our bodies, but our souls also, give us more bread than these laborers receive, who sell their bodies only." "'And the priests and Levites also cried out as the Lords of the Bread passed through the market-place: "Take us, Masters, to be your servants and to do your will, for we also must eat, and you only have the bread. We are the guardians of the sacred oracles, and the people hearken unto us and reply not, for our voice to them is as the voice of God. But we must have bread to eat like others. Give us therefore plentifully of your bread, and we will speak to the people, that they be still and trouble you not with their murmurings because of hunger. In the name of God the Father will we forbid them to claim the rights of brothers, and in the name of the Prince of Peace will we preach your law of competition." "'And above all the clamor of the men were heard the voices of a multitude of women crying to the Masters of the Bread: "Pass us not by, for we must also eat. The men are stronger than we, but they eat much bread while we eat little, so that though we be not so strong yet in the end you shall not lose if you take us to be your servants instead of them. And if you will not take us for our labor's sake, yet look upon us: we are women, and should be fair in your eyes. Take us and do with us according to your pleasure, for we must eat." "'And above all the chaffering of the market, the hoarse voices of the men, and the shrill voices of the women, rose the piping treble of the little children, crying: "Take us to be your servants, for the breasts of our mothers are dry and our fathers have no bread for us, and we hunger. We are weak, indeed, but we ask so little, so very little, that at last we shall be cheaper to you than the men, our fathers, who eat so much, and the women, our mothers, who eat more than we." "'And the Masters of the Bread, having taken for their use or pleasure such of the men, the women, and the little ones as they saw fit, passed by. And there was left a great multitude in the market-place for whom there was no bread.'" "Ah!" said the doctor, breaking the silence which followed the ceasing of Edith's voice, "it was indeed the last refinement of indignity put upon human nature by your economic system that it compelled men to seek the sale of themselves. Voluntary in a real sense the sale was not, of course, for want or the fear of it left no choice as to the necessity of selling themselves to somebody, but as to the particular transaction there was choice enough to make it shameful. They had to seek those to whom to offer themselves and actively to procure their own purchase. In this respect the submission of men to other men through the relation of hire was more abject than under a slavery resting directly on force. In that case the slave might be compelled to yield to physical duress, but he could still keep a mind free and resentful toward his master; but in the relation of hire men sought for their masters and begged as a favor that they would use them, body and mind, for their profit or pleasure. To the view of us moderns, therefore, the chattel slave was a more dignified and heroic figure than the hireling of your day who called himself a free worker. "It was possible for the slave to rise in soul above his circumstances and be a philosopher in bondage like Epictetus, but the hireling could not scorn the bonds he sought. The abjectness of his position was not merely physical but mental. In selling himself he had necessarily sold his independence of mind also. Your whole industrial system seems in this point of view best and most fitly described by a word which you oddly enough reserved to designate a particular phase of self-selling practiced by women. "Labor for others in the name of love and kindness, and labor with others for a common end in which all are mutually interested, and labor for its own joy, are alike honorable, but the hiring out of our faculties to the selfish uses of others, which was the form labor generally took in your day, is unworthy of human nature. The Revolution for the first time in history made labor truly honorable by putting it on the basis of fraternal co-operation for a common and equally shared result. Until then it was at best but a shameful necessity." Presently I said: "When you have satisfied your curiosity as to these papers I suppose we might as well make a bonfire of them, for they seem to have no more value now than a collection of heathen fetiches after the former worshipers have embraced Christianity." "Well, and has not such a collection a value to the student of history?" said the doctor. "Of course, these documents are scarcely now valuable in the sense they were, but in another they have much value. I see among them several varieties which are quite scarce in the historical collections, and if you feel disposed to present the whole lot to our museum I am sure the gift will be much appreciated. The fact is, the great bonfire our grandfathers made, while a very natural and excusable expression of jubilation over broken bondage, is much to be regretted from an archaeological point of view." "What do you mean by the great bonfire?" I inquired. "It was a rather dramatic incident at the close of the great Revolution. When the long struggle was ended and economic equality, guaranteed by the public administration of capital, had been established, the people got together from all parts of the land enormous collections of what you used to call the evidences of value, which, while purporting to be certificates of property in things, had been really certificates of the ownership of men, deriving, as we have seen, their whole value from the serfs attached to the things by the constraint of bodily necessities. These it pleased the people--exalted, as you may well imagine, by the afflatus of liberty--to collect in a vast mass on the site of the New York Stock Exchange, the great altar of Plutus, whereon millions of human beings had been sacrificed to him, and there to make a bonfire of them. A great pillar stands on the spot to-day, and from its summit a mighty torch of electric flame is always streaming, in commemoration of that event and as a testimony forever to the ending of the parchment bondage that was heavier than the scepters of kings. It is estimated that certificates of ownership in human beings, or, as you called them, titles to property, to the value of forty billion dollars, together with hundreds of millions of paper money, went up in that great blaze, which we devoutly consider must have been, of all the innumerable burnt sacrifices which have been offered up to God from the beginning, the one that pleased him best. "Now, if I had been there, I can easily imagine that I should have rejoiced over that conflagration as much as did the most exultant of those who danced about it; but from the calmer point of view of the present I regret the destruction of a mass of historic material. So you see that your bonds and deeds and mortgages and shares of stock are really valuable still." CHAPTER XV. WHAT WE WERE COMING TO BUT FOR THE REVOLUTION. "We read in the histories," said Edith's mother, "much about the amazing extent to which particular individuals and families succeeded in concentrating in their own hands the natural resources, industrial machinery, and products of the several countries. Julian had only a million dollars, but many individuals or families had, we are told, wealth amounting to fifty, a hundred, and even two or three hundred millions. We read of infants who in the cradle were heirs of hundreds of millions. Now, something I never saw mentioned in the books was the limit, for there must have been some limit fixed, to which one individual might appropriate the earth's surface and resources, the means of production, and the products of labor." "There was no limit," I replied. "Do you mean," exclaimed Edith, "that if a man were only clever and unscrupulous enough he might appropriate, say, the entire territory of a country and leave the people actually nothing to stand on unless by his consent?" "Certainly," I replied. "In fact, in many countries of the Old World individuals owned whole provinces, and in the United States even vaster tracts had passed and were passing into private and corporate hands. There was no limit whatever to the extent of land which one person might own, and of course this ownership implied the right to evict every human being from the territory unless the owner chose to let individuals remain on payment of tribute." "And how about other things besides land?" asked Edith. "It was the same," I said. "There was no limit to the extent to which an individual might acquire the exclusive ownership of all the factories, shops, mines, and means of industry, and commerce of every sort, so that no person could find an opportunity to earn a living except as the servant of the owner and on his terms." "If we are correctly informed," said the doctor, "the concentration of the ownership of the machinery of production and distribution, trade and industry, had already, before you fell asleep, been carried to a point in the United States through trusts and syndicates which excited general alarm." "Certainly," I replied. "It was then already in the power of a score of men in New York city to stop at will every car-wheel in the United States, and the combined action of a few other groups of capitalists would have sufficed practically to arrest the industries and commerce of the entire country, forbid employment to everybody, and starve the entire population. The self-interest of these capitalists in keeping business going on was the only ground of assurance the rest of the people had for their livelihood from day to day. Indeed, when the capitalists desired to compel the people to vote as they wished, it was their regular custom to threaten to stop the industries of the country and produce a business crisis if the election did not go to suit them." "Suppose, Julian, an individual or family or group of capitalists, having become sole owners of all the land and machinery of one nation, should wish to go on and acquire the sole ownership of all the land and economic means and machinery of the whole earth, would that have been inconsistent with your law of property?" "Not at all. If one individual, as you suggest, through the effect of cunning and skill combined with inheritances, should obtain a legal title to the whole globe, it would be his to do what he pleased with as absolutely as if it were a garden patch, according to our law of property. Nor is your supposition about one person or family becoming owner of the whole earth a wholly fanciful one. There was, when I fell asleep, one family of European bankers whose world-wide power and resources were so vast and increasing at such a prodigious and accelerating rate that they had already an influence over the destinies of nations wider than perhaps any monarch ever exercised." "And if I understand your system, if they had gone on and attained the ownership of the globe to the lowest inch of standing room at low tide, it would have been the legal right of that family or single individual, in the name of the sacred right of property, to give the people of the human race legal notice to move off the earth, and in case of their failure to comply with the requirement of the notice, to call upon them in the name of the law to form themselves into sheriffs' _posses_ and evict themselves from the earth's surface?" "Unquestionably." "O father," exclaimed Edith, "you and Julian are trying to make fun of us. You must think we will believe anything if you only keep straight faces. But you are going too far." "I do not wonder you think so," said the doctor. "But you can easily satisfy yourself from the books that we have in no way exaggerated the possibilities of the old system of property. What was called under that system the right of property meant the unlimited right of anybody who was clever enough to deprive everybody else of any property whatever." "It would seem, then," said Edith, "that the dream of world conquest by an individual, if ever realized, was more likely under the old _regime _ to be realized by economic than by military means." "Very true," said the doctor. "Alexander and Napoleon mistook their trade; they should have been bankers, not soldiers. But, indeed, the time was not in their day ripe for a world-wide money dynasty, such as we have been speaking of. Kings had a rude way of interfering with the so-called rights of property when they conflicted with royal prestige or produced dangerous popular discontent. Tyrants themselves, they did not willingly brook rival tyrants in their dominions. It was not till the kings had been shorn of power and the interregnum of sham democracy had set in, leaving no virile force in the state or the world to resist the money power, that the opportunity for a world-wide plutocratic despotism arrived. Then, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, when international trade and financial relations had broken down national barriers and the world had become one field of economic enterprise, did the idea of a universally dominant and centralized money power become not only possible, but, as Julian has said, had already so far materialized itself as to cast its shadow before. If the Revolution had not come when it did, we can not doubt that something like this universal plutocratic dynasty or some highly centered oligarchy, based upon the complete monopoly of all property by a small body, would long before this time have become the government of the world. But of course the Revolution must have come when it did, so we need not talk of what would have happened if it had not come." CHAPTER XVI. AN EXCUSE THAT CONDEMNED. "I have read," said Edith, "that there never was a system of oppression so bad that those who benefited by it did not recognize the moral sense so far as to make some excuse for themselves. Was the old system of property distribution, by which the few held the many in servitude through fear of starvation, an exception to this rule? Surely the rich could not have looked the poor in the face unless they had some excuse to offer, some color of reason to give for the cruel contrast between their conditions." "Thanks for reminding us of that point," said the doctor. "As you say, there never was a system so bad that it did not make an excuse for itself. It would not be strictly fair to the old system to dismiss it without considering the excuse made for it, although, on the other hand, it would really be kinder not to mention it, for it was an excuse that, far from excusing, furnished an additional ground of condemnation for the system which it undertook to justify." "What was the excuse?" asked Edith. "It was the claim that, as a matter of justice, every one is entitled to the effect of his qualities--that is to say, the result of his abilities, the fruit of his efforts. The qualities, abilities, and efforts of different persons being different, they would naturally acquire advantages over others in wealth seeking as in other ways; but as this was according to Nature, it was urged that it must be right, and nobody had any business to complain, unless of the Creator. "Now, in the first place, the theory that a person has a right in dealing with his fellows to take advantage of his superior abilities is nothing other than a slightly more roundabout expression of the doctrine that might is right. It was precisely to prevent their doing this that the policeman stood on the corner, the judge sat on the bench, and the hangman drew his fees. The whole end and amount of civilization had indeed been to substitute for the natural law of superior might an artificial equality by force of statute, whereby, in disregard of their natural differences, the weak and simple were made equal to the strong and cunning by means of the collective force lent them. "But while the nineteenth-century moralists denied as sharply as we do men's right to take advantage of their superiorities in direct dealings by physical force, they held that they might rightly do so when the dealings were indirect and carried on through the medium of things. That is to say, a man might not so much as jostle another while drinking a cup of water lest he should spill it, but he might acquire the spring of water on which the community solely depended and make the people pay a dollar a drop for water or go without. Or if he filled up the spring so as to deprive the population of water on any terms, he was held to be acting within his right. He might not by force take away a bone from a beggar's dog, but he might corner the grain supply of a nation and reduce millions to starvation. "If you touch a man's living you touch him, would seem to be about as plain a truth as could be put in words; but our ancestors had not the least difficulty in getting around it. 'Of course,' they said, 'you must not touch the man; to lay a finger on him would be an assault punishable by law. But his living is quite a different thing. That depends on bread, meat, clothing, land, houses, and other material things, which you have an unlimited right to appropriate and dispose of as you please without the slightest regard to whether anything is left for the rest of the world.' "I think I scarcely need dwell on the entire lack of any moral justification for the different rule which our ancestors followed in determining what use you might rightly make of your superior powers in dealing with your neighbor directly by physical force and indirectly by economic duress. No one can have any more or other right to take away another's living by superior economic skill or financial cunning than if he used a club, simply because no one has any right to take advantage of any one else or to deal with him otherwise than justly by any means whatever. The end itself being immoral, the means employed could not possibly make any difference. Moralists at a pinch used to argue that a good end might justify bad means, but none, I think, went so far as to claim that good means justified a bad end; yet this was precisely what the defenders of the old property system did in fact claim when they argued that it was right for a man to take away the living of others and make them his servants, if only his triumph resulted from superior talent or more diligent devotion to the acquisition of material things. "But indeed the theory that the monopoly of wealth could be justified by superior economic ability, even if morally sound, would not at all have fitted the old property system, for of all conceivable plans for distributing property, none could have more absolutely defied every notion of desert based on economic effort. None could have been more utterly wrong if it were true that wealth ought to be distributed according to the ability and industry displayed by individuals." "All this talk started with the discussion of Julian's fortune. Now tell us, Julian, was your million dollars the result of your economic ability, the fruit of your industry?" "Of course not," I replied. "Every cent of it was inherited. As I have often told you, I never lifted a finger in a useful way in my life." "And were you the only person whose property came to him by descent without effort of his own?" "On the contrary, title by descent was the basis and backbone of the whole property system. All land, except in the newest countries, together with the bulk of the more stable kinds of property, was held by that title." "Precisely so. We hear what Julian says. While the moralists and the clergy solemnly justified the inequalities of wealth and reproved the discontent of the poor on the ground that those inequalities were justified by natural differences in ability and diligence, they knew all the time, and everybody knew who listened to them, that the foundation principle of the whole property system was not ability, effort, or desert of any kind whatever, but merely the accident of birth, than which no possible claim could more completely mock at ethics." "But, Julian," exclaimed Edith, "you must surely have had some way of excusing yourself to your conscience for retaining in the presence of a needy world such an excess of good things as you had!" "I am afraid," I said, "that you can not easily imagine how callous was the cuticle of the nineteenth-century conscience. There may have been some of my class on the intellectual plane of little Jack Horner in Mother Goose, who concluded he must be a good boy because he pulled out a plum, but I did not at least belong to that grade. I never gave much thought to the subject of my right to an abundance which I had done nothing to earn in the midst of a starving world of toilers, but occasionally, when I did think of it, I felt like craving pardon of the beggar who asked alms for being in a position to give to him." "It is impossible to get up any sort of a quarrel with Julian," said the doctor; "but there were others of his class less rational. Cornered as to their moral claim to their possessions, they fell back on that of their ancestors. They argued that these ancestors, assuming them to have had a right by merit to their possessions, had as an incident of that merit the right to give them to others. Here, of course, they absolutely confused the ideas of legal and moral right. The law might indeed give a person power to transfer a legal title to property in any way that suited the lawmakers, but the meritorious right to the property, resting as it did on personal desert, could not in the nature of moral things be transferred or ascribed to any one else. The cleverest lawyer would never have pretended that he could draw up a document that would carry over the smallest tittle of merit from one person to another, however close the tie of blood. "In ancient times it was customary to hold children responsible for the debts of their fathers and sell them into slavery to make satisfaction. The people of Julian's day found it unjust thus to inflict upon innocent offspring the penalty of their ancestors' faults. But if these children did not deserve the consequences of their ancestors' sloth, no more had they any title to the product of their ancestors' industry. The barbarians who insisted on both sorts of inheritance were more logical than Julian's contemporaries, who, rejecting one sort of inheritance, retained the other. Will it be said that at least the later theory of inheritance was more humane, although one-sided? Upon that point you should have been able to get the opinion of the disinherited masses who, by reason of the monopolizing of the earth and its resources from generation to generation by the possessors of inherited property, were left no place to stand on and no way to live except by permission of the inheriting class." "Doctor," I said, "I have nothing to offer against all that. We who inherited our wealth had no moral title to it, and that we knew as well as everybody else did, although it was not considered polite to refer to the fact in our presence. But if I am going to stand up here in the pillory as a representative of the inheriting class, there are others who ought to stand beside me. We were not the only ones who had no right to our money. Are you not going to say anything about the money makers, the rascals who raked together great fortunes in a few years by wholesale fraud and extortion?" "Pardon me, I was just coming to them," said the doctor. "You ladies must remember," he continued, "that the rich, who in Julian's day possessed nearly everything of value in every country, leaving the masses mere scraps and crumbs, were of two sorts: those who had inherited their wealth, and those who, as the saying was, had made it. We have seen how far the inheriting class were justified in their holdings by the principle which the nineteenth century asserted to be the excuse for wealth--namely, that individuals were entitled to the fruit of their labors. Let us next inquire how far the same principle justified the possessions of these others whom Julian refers to, who claimed that they had made their money themselves, and showed in proof lives absolutely devoted from childhood to age without rest or respite to the piling up of gains. Now, of course, labor in itself, however arduous, does not imply moral desert. It may be a criminal activity. Let us see if these men who claimed that they made their money had any better title to it than Julian's class by the rule put forward as the excuse for unequal wealth, that every one has a right to the product of his labor. The most complete statement of the principle of the right of property, as based on economic effort, which has come down to us, is this maxim: 'Every man is entitled to his own product, his whole product, and nothing but his product.' Now, this maxim had a double edge, a negative as well as a positive, and the negative edge is very sharp. If everybody was entitled to his own product, nobody else was entitled to any part of it, and if any one's accumulation was found to contain any product not strictly his own, he stood condemned as a thief by the law he had invoked. If in the great fortunes of the stockjobbers, the railroad kings, the bankers, the great landlords, and the other moneyed lords who boasted that they had begun life with a shilling--if in these great fortunes of mushroom rapidity of growth there was anything that was properly the product of the efforts of any one but the owner, it was not his, and his possession of it condemned him as a thief. If he would be justified, he must not be more careful to obtain all that was his own product than to avoid taking anything that was not his product. If he insisted upon the pound of flesh awarded him by the letter of the law, he must stick to the letter, observing the warning of Portia to Shylock: Nor cut thou less nor more But just a pound of flesh; if thou tak'st more Or less than a just pound, be it so much As makes light or heavy in the substance, Or the division of the twentieth part Of one poor scruple; nay, if the scale do turn But in the estimation of a hair, Thou diest, and thy goods are confiscate. How many of the great fortunes heaped up by the self-made men of your day, Julian, would have stood that test?" "It is safe to say," I replied, "that there was not one of the lot whose lawyer would not have advised him to do as Shylock did, and resign his claim rather than try to push it at the risk of the penalty. Why, dear me, there never would have been any possibility of making a great fortune in a lifetime if the maker had confined himself to his own product. The whole acknowledged art of wealth-making on a large scale consisted in devices for getting possession of other people's product without too open breach of the law. It was a current and a true saying of the times that nobody could honestly acquire a million dollars. Everybody knew that it was only by extortion, speculation, stock gambling, or some other form of plunder under pretext of law that such a feat could be accomplished. You yourselves can not condemn the human cormorants who piled up these heaps of ill-gotten gains more bitterly than did the public opinion of their own time. The execration and contempt of the community followed the great money-getters to their graves, and with the best of reason. I have had nothing to say in defense of my own class, who inherited our wealth, but actually the people seemed to have more respect for us than for these others who claimed to have made their money. For if we inheritors had confessedly no moral right to the wealth we had done nothing to produce or acquire, yet we had committed no positive wrong to obtain it." "You see," said the doctor, "what a pity it would have been if we had forgotten to compare the excuse offered by the nineteenth century for the unequal distribution of wealth with the actual facts of that distribution. Ethical standards advance from age to age, and it is not always fair to judge the systems of one age by the moral standards of a later one. But we have seen that the property system of the nineteenth century would have gained nothing by way of a milder verdict by appealing from the moral standards of the twentieth to those of the nineteenth century. It was not necessary, in order to justify its condemnation, to invoke the modern ethics of wealth which deduce the rights of property from the rights of man. It was only necessary to apply to the actual realities of the system the ethical plea put forth in its defense--namely, that everybody was entitled to the fruit of his own labor, and was not entitled to the fruit of anybody's else--to leave not one stone upon another of the whole fabric." "But was there, then, absolutely no class under your system," said Edith's mother, "which even by the standards of your time could claim an ethical as well as a legal title to their possessions?" "Oh, yes," I replied, "we have been speaking of the rich. You may set it down as a rule that the rich, the possessors of great wealth, had no moral right to it as based upon desert, for either their fortunes belonged to the class of inherited wealth, or else, when accumulated in a lifetime, necessarily represented chiefly the product of others, more or less forcibly or fraudulently obtained. There were, however, a great number of modest competencies, which were recognized by public opinion as being no more than a fair measure of the service rendered by their possessors to the community. Below these there was the vast mass of well-nigh wholly penniless toilers, the real people. Here there was indeed abundance of ethical title to property, for these were the producers of all; but beyond the shabby clothing they wore, they had little or no property." "It would seem," said Edith, "that, speaking generally, the class which chiefly had the property had little or no right to it, even according to the ideas of your day, while the masses which had the right had little or no property." "Substantially that was the case," I replied. "That is to say, if you took the aggregate of property held by the merely legal title of inheritance, and added to it all that had been obtained by means which public opinion held to be speculative, extortionate, fraudulent, or representing results in excess of services rendered, there would be little property left, and certainly none at all in considerable amounts." "From the preaching of the clergy in Julian's time," said the doctor, "you would have thought the corner stone of Christianity was the right of property, and the supreme crime was the wrongful appropriation of property. But if stealing meant only taking that from another to which he had a sound ethical title, it must have been one of the most difficult of all crimes to commit for lack of the requisite material. When one took away the possessions of the poor it was reasonably certain that he was stealing, but then they had nothing to take away." "The thing that seems to me the most utterly incredible about all this terrible story," said Edith, "is that a system which was such a disastrous failure in its effects on the general welfare, which, by disinheriting the great mass of the people, had made them its bitter foes, and which finally even people like Julian, who were its beneficiaries, did not attempt to defend as having any ground of fairness, could have maintained itself a day." "No wonder it seems incomprehensible to you, as now, indeed, it seems to me as I look back," I replied. "But you can not possibly imagine, as I myself am fast losing the power to do, in my new environment, how benumbing to the mind was the prestige belonging to the immemorial antiquity of the property system as we knew it and of the rule of the rich based on it. No other institution, no other fabric of power ever known to man, could be compared with it as to duration. No different economic order could really be said ever to have been known. There had been changes and fashions in all other human institutions, but no radical change in the system of property. The procession of political, social, and religious systems, the royal, imperial, priestly, democratic epochs, and all other great phases of human affairs, had been as passing cloud shadows, mere fashions of a day, compared with the hoary antiquity of the rule of the rich. Consider how profound and how widely ramified a root in human prejudices such a system must have had, how overwhelming the presumption must have been with the mass of minds against the possibility of making an end of an order that had never been known to have a beginning! What need for excuses or defenders had a system so deeply based in usage and antiquity as this? It is not too much to say that to the mass of mankind in my day the division of the race into rich and poor, and the subjection of the latter to the former, seemed almost as much a law of Nature as the succession of the seasons--something that might not be agreeable, but was certainly unchangeable. And just here, I can well understand, must have come the hardest as well as, necessarily, the first task of the revolutionary leaders--that is, of overcoming the enormous dead weight of immemorial inherited prejudice against the possibility of getting rid of abuses which had lasted so long, and opening people's eyes to the fact that the system of wealth distribution was merely a human institution like others, and that if there is any truth in human progress, the longer an institution had endured unchanged, the more completely it was likely to have become out of joint with the world's progress, and the more radical the change must be which, should bring it into correspondence with other lines of social evolution." "That is quite the modern view of the subject," said the doctor. "I shall be understood in talking with a representative of the century which invented poker if I say that when the revolutionists attacked the fundamental justice of the old property system, its defenders were able on account of its antiquity to meet them with a tremendous bluff--one which it is no wonder should have been for a time almost paralyzing. But behind the bluff there was absolutely nothing. The moment public opinion could be nerved up to the point of calling it, the game was up. The principle of inheritance, the backbone of the whole property system, at the first challenge of serious criticism abandoned all ethical defense and shriveled into a mere convention established by law, and as rightfully to be disestablished by it in the name of anything fairer. As for the buccaneers, the great money-getters, when the light was once turned on their methods, the question was not so much of saving their booty as their bacon. "There is historically a marked difference," the doctor went on, "between the decline and fall of the systems of royal and priestly power and the passing of the rule of the rich. The former systems were rooted deeply in sentiment and romance, and for ages after their overthrow retained a strong hold on the hearts and imaginations of men. Our generous race has remembered without rancor all the oppressions it has endured save only the rule of the rich. The dominion of the money power had always been devoid of moral basis or dignity, and from the moment its material supports were destroyed, it not only perished, but seemed to sink away at once into a state of putrescence that made the world hurry to bury it forever out of sight and memory." CHAPTER XVII. THE REVOLUTION SAVES PRIVATE PROPERTY FROM MONOPOLY. "Really," said her mother, "Edith touched the match to quite a large discussion when she suggested that you should open the safe for us." To which I added that I had learned more that morning about the moral basis of economic equality and the grounds for the abolition of private property than in my entire previous experience as a citizen of the twentieth century. "The abolition of private property!" exclaimed the doctor. "What is that you say?" "Of course," I said, "I am quite ready to admit that you have something--very much better in its place, but private property you have certainly abolished--have you not? Is not that what we have been talking about?" The doctor turned as if for sympathy to the ladies. "And this young man," he said, "who thinks that we have abolished private property has at this moment in his pocket a card of credit representing a private annual income, for strictly personal use, of four thousand dollars, based upon a share of stock in the wealthiest and soundest corporation in the world, the value of his share, calculating the income on a four-per-cent basis, coming to one hundred thousand dollars." I felt a little silly at being convicted so palpably of making a thoughtless observation, but the doctor hastened to say that he understood perfectly what had been in my mind. I had, no doubt, heard it a hundred times asserted by the wise men of my day that the equalization of human conditions as to wealth would necessitate destroying the institution of private property, and, without having given special thought to the subject, had naturally assumed that the equalization of wealth having been effected, private property must have been abolished, according to the prediction. "Thanks," I said; "that is it exactly." "The Revolution," said the doctor, "abolished private capitalism--that is to say, it put an end to the direction of the industries and commerce of the people by irresponsible persons for their own benefit and transferred that function to the people collectively to be carried on by responsible agents for the common benefit. The change created an entirely new system of property holding, but did not either directly or indirectly involve any denial of the right of private property. Quite on the contrary, the change in system placed the private and personal property rights of every citizen upon a basis incomparably more solid and secure and extensive than they ever before had or could have had while private capitalism lasted. Let us analyze the effects of the change of systems and see if it was not so." "Suppose you and a number of other men of your time, all having separate claims in a mining region, formed a corporation to carry on as one mine your consolidated properties, would you have any less private property than you had when you owned your claims separately? You would have changed the mode and tenure of your property, but if the arrangement were a wise one that would be wholly to your advantage, would it not?" "No doubt." "Of course, you could no longer exercise the personal and complete control over the consolidated mine which you exercised over your separate claim. You would have, with your fellow-corporators, to intrust the management of the combined property to a board of directors chosen by yourselves, but you would not think that meant a sacrifice of your private property, would you?" "Certainly not. That was the form under which a very large part, if not the largest part, of private property in my day was invested and controlled." "It appears, then," said the doctor, "that it is not necessary to the full possession and enjoyment of private property that it should be in a separate parcel or that the owner should exercise a direct and personal control over it. Now, let us further suppose that instead of intrusting the management of your consolidated property to private directors more or less rascally, who would be constantly trying to cheat the stockholders, the nation undertook to manage the business for you by agents chosen by and responsible to you; would that be an attack on your property interests?" "On the contrary, it would greatly enhance the value of the property. It would be as if a government guarantee were obtained for private bonds." "Well, that is what the people in the Revolution did with private property. They simply consolidated the property in the country previously held in separate parcels and put the management of the business into the hands of a national agency charged with paying over the dividends to the stockholders for their individual use. So far, surely, it must be admitted the Revolution did not involve any abolition of private property." "That is true," said I, "except in one particular. It is or used to be a usual incident to the ownership of property that it may be disposed of at will by the owner. The owner of stock in a mine or mill could not indeed sell a piece of the mine or mill, but he could sell his stock in it; but the citizen now can not dispose of his share in the national concern. He can only dispose of the dividend." "Certainly," replied the doctor; "but while the power of alienating the principal of one's property was a usual incident of ownership in your time, it was very far from being a necessary incident or one which was beneficial to the owner, for the right of disposing of property involved the risk of being dispossessed of it by others. I think there were few property owners in your day who would not very gladly have relinquished the right to alienate their property if they could have had it guaranteed indefeasibly to them and their children. So to tie up property by trusts that the beneficiary could not touch the principal was the study of rich people who desired best to protect their heirs. Take the case of entailed estates as another illustration of this idea. Under that mode of holding property the possessor could not sell it, yet it was considered the most desirable sort of property on account of that very fact. The fact you refer to--that the citizen can not alienate his share in the national corporation which forms the basis of his income--tends in the same way to make it a more and not a less valuable sort of property. Certainly its quality as a strictly personal and private sort of property is intensified by the very indefeasibleness with which it is attached to the individual. It might be said that the reorganization of the property system which we are speaking of amounted to making the United States an entailed estate for the equal benefit of the citizens thereof and their descendants forever." "You have not yet mentioned" I said, "the most drastic measure of all by which the Revolution affected private property, namely, the absolute equalizing of the amount of property to be held by each. Here was not perhaps any denial of the principle itself of private property, but it was certainly a prodigious interference with property holders." "The distinction is well made. It is of vital importance to a correct apprehension of this subject. History has been full of just such wholesale readjustments of property interests by spoliation, conquest, or confiscation. They have been more or less justifiable, but when least so they were never thought to involve any denial of the idea of private property in itself, for they went right on to reassert it under a different form. Less than any previous readjustment of property relations could the general equalizing of property in the Revolution be called a denial of the right of property. On the precise contrary it was an assertion and vindication of that right on a scale never before dreamed of. Before the Revolution very few of the people had any property at all and no economic provision save from day to day. By the new system all were assured of a large, equal, and fixed share in the total national principal and income. Before the Revolution even those who had secured a property were likely to have it taken from them or to slip from them by a thousand accidents. Even the millionaire had no assurance that his grandson might not become a homeless vagabond or his granddaughter be forced to a life of shame. Under the new system the title of every citizen to his individual fortune became indefeasible, and he could lose it only when the nation became bankrupt. The Revolution, that is to say, instead of denying or abolishing the institution of private property, affirmed it in an incomparably more positive, beneficial, permanent, and general form than had ever been known before. "Of course, Julian, it was in the way of human nature quite a matter of course that your contemporaries should have cried out against the idea of a universal right of property as an attack on the principle of property. There was never a prophet or reformer who raised his voice for a purer, more spiritual, and perfect idea of religion whom his contemporaries did not accuse of seeking to abolish religion; nor ever in political affairs did any party proclaim a juster, larger, wiser ideal of government without being accused of seeking to abolish government. So it was quite according to precedent that those who taught the right of all to property should be accused of attacking the right of property. But who, think you, were the true friends and champions of private property? those who advocated a system under which one man if clever enough could monopolize the earth--and a very small number were fast monopolizing it--turning the rest of the race into proletarians, or, on the other hand, those who demanded a system by which all should become property holders on equal terms?" "It strikes me," I said, "that as soon as the revolutionary leaders succeeded in opening the eyes of the people to this view of the matter, my old friends the capitalists must have found their cry about 'the sacred right of property' turned into a most dangerous sort of boomerang." "So they did. Nothing could have better served the ends of the Revolution, as we have seen, than to raise the issue of the right of property. Nothing was so desirable as that the people at large should be led to give a little serious consideration on rational and moral grounds to what that right was as compared with what it ought to be. It was very soon, then, that the cry of 'the sacred right of property,' first raised by the rich in the name of the few, was re-echoed with overwhelming effect by the disinherited millions in the name of all." CHAPTER XVIII. AN ECHO OF THE PAST. "Ah!" exclaimed Edith, who with her mother had been rummaging the drawers of the safe as the doctor and I talked, "here are some letters, if I am not mistaken. It seems, then, you used safes for something besides money." It was, in fact, as I noted with quite indescribable emotion, a packet of letters and notes from Edith Bartlett, written on various occasions during our relation as lovers, that Edith, her great-granddaughter, held in her hand. I took them from her, and opening one, found it to be a note dated May 30, 1887, the very day on which I parted with her forever. In it she asked me to join her family in their Decoration-day visit to the grave at Mount Auburn where her brother lay, who had fallen in the civil war. "I do not expect, Julian," she had written, "that you will adopt all my relations as your own because you marry me--that would be too much--but my hero brother I want you to take for yours, and that is why I would like you to go with us to-day." The gold and parchments, once so priceless, now carelessly scattered about the chamber, had lost their value, but these tokens of love had not parted with their potency through lapse of time. As by a magic power they called up in a moment a mist of memories which shut me up in a world of my own--a world in which the present had no part. I do not know for how long I sat thus tranced and oblivious of the silent, sympathizing group around me. It was by a deep involuntary sigh from my own lips that I was at last roused from my abstraction, and returned from the dream world of the past to a consciousness of my present environment and its conditions. "These are letters," I said, "from the other Edith--Edith Bartlett, your great-grandmother. Perhaps you would be interested in looking them over. I don't know who has a nearer or better claim to them after myself than you and your mother." Edith took the letters and began to examine them with reverent curiosity. "They will be very interesting," said her mother, "but I am afraid, Julian, we shall have to ask you to read them for us." My countenance no doubt expressed the surprise I felt at this confession of illiteracy on the part of such highly cultivated persons. "Am I to understand," I finally inquired, "that handwriting, and the reading of it, like lock-making, is a lost art?" "I am afraid it is about so," replied the doctor, "although the explanation here is not, as in the other case, economic equality so much as the progress of invention. Our children are still taught to write and to read writing, but they have so little practice in after-life that they usually forget their acquirements pretty soon after leaving school; but really Edith ought still to be able to make out a nineteenth-century letter.--My dear, I am a little ashamed of you." "Oh, I can read this, papa," she exclaimed, looking up, with brows still corrugated, from a page she had been studying. "Don't you remember I studied out those old letters of Julian's to Edith Bartlett, which mother had?--though that was years ago, and I have grown rusty since. But I have read nearly two lines of this already. It is really quite plain. I am going to work it all out without any help from anybody except mother." "Dear me, dear me!" said I, "don't you write letters any more?" "Well, no," replied the doctor, "practically speaking, handwriting has gone out of use. For correspondence, when we do not telephone, we send phonographs, and use the latter, indeed, for all purposes for which you employed handwriting. It has been so now so long that it scarcely occurs to us that people ever did anything else. But surely this is an evolution that need surprise you little: you had the phonograph, and its possibilities were patent enough from the first. For our important records we still largely use types, of course, but the printed matter is transcribed from phonographic copy, so that really, except in emergencies, there is little use for handwriting. Curious, isn't it, when one comes to think of it, that the riper civilization has grown, the more perishable its records have become? The Chaldeans and Egyptians used bricks, and the Greeks and Romans made more or less use of stone and bronze, for writing. If the race were destroyed to-day and the earth should be visited, say, from Mars, five hundred years later or even less, our books would have perished, and the Roman Empire be accounted the latest and highest stage of human civilization." CHAPTER XIX. "CAN A MAID FORGET HER ORNAMENTS?" Presently Edith and her mother went into the house to study out the letters, and the doctor being so delightfully absorbed with the stocks and bonds that it would have been unkind not to leave him alone, it struck me that the occasion was favorable for the execution of a private project for which opportunity had hitherto been lacking. From the moment of receiving my credit card I had contemplated a particular purchase which I desired to make on the first opportunity. This was a betrothal ring for Edith. Gifts in general, it was evident, had lost their value in this age when everybody had everything he wanted, but this was one which, for sentiment's sake, I was sure would still seem as desirable to a woman as ever. Taking advantage, therefore, of the unusual absorption of my hosts in special interests, I made my way to the great store Edith had taken me to on a former occasion, the only one I had thus far entered. Not seeing the class of goods which I desired indicated by any of the placards over the alcoves, I presently asked one of the young women attendants to direct me to the jewelry department. "I beg your pardon," she said, raising her eyebrows a little, "what did I understand you to ask for?" "The jewelry department," I repeated. "I want to look at some rings." "Rings," she repeated, regarding me with a rather blank expression. "May I ask what kind of rings, for what sort of use?" "Finger rings," I repeated, feeling that the young woman could not be so intelligent as she looked. At the word she glanced at my left hand, on one of the fingers of which I wore a seal ring after a fashion of my day. Her countenance took on an expression at once of intelligence and the keenest interest. "I beg your pardon a thousand times!" she exclaimed. "I ought to have understood before. You are Julian West?" I was beginning to be a little nettled with so much mystery about so simple a matter. "I certainly am Julian West," I said; "but pardon me if I do not see the relevancy of that fact to the question I asked you." "Oh, you must really excuse me," she said, "but it is most relevant. Nobody in America but just yourself would ask for finger rings. You see they have not been used for so long a period that we have quite ceased to keep them in stock; but if you would like one made to order you have only to leave a description of what you want and it will be at once manufactured." I thanked her, but concluded that I would not prosecute the undertaking any further until I had looked over the ground a little more thoroughly. I said nothing about my adventure at home, not caring to be laughed at more than was necessary; but when after dinner I found the doctor alone in his favorite outdoor study on the housetop, I cautiously sounded him on the subject. Remarking, as if quite in a casual way, that I had not noticed so much as a finger ring worn by any one, I asked him whether the wearing of jewelry had been disused, and, if so, what was the explanation of the abandonment of the custom? The doctor said that it certainly was a fact that the wearing of jewelry had been virtually an obsolete custom for a couple of generations if not more. "As for the reasons for the fact," he continued, "they really go rather deeply into the direct and indirect consequences of our present economic system. Speaking broadly, I suppose the main and sufficient reason why gold and silver and precious stones have ceased to be prized as ornaments is that they entirely lost their commercial value when the nation organized wealth distribution on the basis of the indefeasible economic equality of all citizens. As you know, a ton of gold or a bushel of diamonds would not secure a loaf of bread at the public stores, nothing availing there except or in addition to the citizen's credit, which depends solely on his citizenship, and is always equal to that of every other citizen. Consequently nothing is worth anything to anybody nowadays save for the use or pleasure he can personally derive from it. The main reason why gems and the precious metals were formerly used as ornaments seems to have been the great convertible value belonging to them, which made them symbols of wealth and importance, and consequently a favorite means of social ostentation. The fact that they have entirely lost this quality would account, I think, largely for their disuse as ornaments, even if ostentation itself had not been deprived of its motive by the law of equality." "Undoubtedly," I said; "yet there were those who thought them pretty quite apart from their value." "Well, possibly," replied the doctor. "Yes, I suppose savage races honestly thought so, but, being honest, they did not distinguish between precious stones and glass beads so long as both were equally shiny. As to the pretension of civilized persons to admire gems or gold for their intrinsic beauty apart from their value, I suspect that was a more or less unconscious sham. Suppose, by any sudden abundance, diamonds of the first water had gone down to the value of bottle glass, how much longer do you think they would have been worn by anybody in your day?" I was constrained to admit that undoubtedly they would have disappeared from view promptly and permanently. "I imagine," said the doctor, "that good taste, which we understand even in your day rather frowned on the use of such ornaments, came to the aid of the economic influence in promoting their disuse when once the new order of things had been established. The loss by the gems and precious metals of the glamour that belonged to them as forms of concentrated wealth left the taste free to judge of the real aesthetic value of ornamental effects obtained by hanging bits of shining stones and plates and chains and rings of metal about the face and neck and fingers, and the view seems to have been soon generally acquiesced in that such combinations were barbaric and not really beautiful at all." "But what has become of all the diamonds and rubies and emeralds, and gold and silver jewels?" I exclaimed. "The metals, of course--silver and gold--kept their uses, mechanical and artistic. They are always beautiful in their proper places, and are as much used for decorative purposes as ever, but those purposes are architectural, not personal, as formerly. Because we do not follow the ancient practice of using paints on our faces and bodies, we use them not the less in what we consider their proper places, and it is just so with gold and silver. As for the precious stones, some of them have found use in mechanical applications, and there are, of course, collections of them in museums here and there. Probably there never were more than a few hundred bushels of precious stones in existence, and it is easy to account for the disappearance and speedy loss of so small a quantity of such minute objects after they had ceased to be prized." "The reasons you give for the passing of jewelry," I said, "certainly account for the fact, and yet you can scarcely imagine what a surprise I find in it. The degradation of the diamond to the rank of the glass bead, save for its mechanical uses, expresses and typifies as no other one fact to me the completeness of the revolution which at the present time has subordinated things to humanity. It would not be so difficult, of course, to understand that men might readily have dispensed with jewel-wearing, which indeed was never considered in the best of taste as a masculine practice except in barbarous countries, but it would have staggered the prophet Jeremiah to have his query 'Can a maid forget her ornaments?' answered in the affirmative." The doctor laughed. "Jeremiah was a very wise man," he said, "and if his attention had been drawn to the subject of economic equality and its effect upon the relation of the sexes, I am sure he would have foreseen as one of its logical results the growth of a sentiment of quite as much philosophy concerning personal ornamentation on the part of women as men have ever displayed. He would not have been surprised to learn that one effect of that equality as between men and women had been to revolutionize women's attitude on the whole question of dress so completely that the most bilious of misogynists--if indeed any were left--would no longer be able to accuse them of being more absorbed in that interest than are men." "Doctor, doctor, do not ask me to believe that the desire to make herself attractive has ceased to move woman!" "Excuse me, I did not mean to say anything of the sort," replied the doctor. "I spoke of the disproportionate development of that desire which tends to defeat its own end by over-ornament and excess of artifice. If we may judge from the records of your time, this was quite generally the result of the excessive devotion to dress on the part of your women; was it not so?" "Undoubtedly. Overdressing, overexertion to be attractive, was the greatest drawback to the real attractiveness of women in my day." "And how was it with the men?" "That could not be said of any men worth calling men. There were, of course, the dandies, but most men paid too little attention to their appearance rather than too much." "That is to say, one sex paid too much attention to dress and the other too little?" "That was it." "Very well; the effect of economic equality of the sexes and the consequent independence of women at all times as to maintenance upon men is that women give much less thought to dress than in your day and men considerably more. No one would indeed think of suggesting that either sex is nowadays more absorbed in setting off its personal attractions than the other. Individuals differ as to their interest in this matter, but the difference is not along the line of sex." "But why do you attribute this miracle," I exclaimed, "for miracle it seems, to the effect of economic equality on the relation of men and women?" "Because from the moment that equality became established between them it ceased to be a whit more the interest of women to make themselves attractive and desirable to men than for men to produce the same impression upon women." "Meaning thereby that previous to the establishment of economic equality between men and women it was decidedly more the interest of the women to make themselves personally attractive than of the men." "Assuredly," said the doctor. "Tell me to what motive did men in your day ascribe the excessive devotion of the other sex to matters of dress as compared with men's comparative neglect of the subject?" "Well, I don't think we did much clear thinking on the subject. In fact, anything which had any sexual suggestion about it was scarcely ever treated in any other than a sentimental or jesting tone." "That is indeed," said the doctor, "a striking trait of your age, though explainable enough in view of the utter hypocrisy underlying the entire relation of the sexes, the pretended chivalric deference to women on the one hand, coupled with their practical suppression on the other, but you must have had some theory to account for women's excessive devotion to personal adornment." "The theory, I think, was that handed down from the ancients--namely, that women were naturally vainer than men. But they did not like to hear that said: so the polite way of accounting for the obvious fact that they cared so much more for dress than did men was that they were more sensitive to beauty, more unselfishly desirous of pleasing, and other agreeable phrases." "And did it not occur to you that the real reason why woman gave so much thought to devices for enhancing her beauty was simply that, owing to her economic dependence on man's favor, a woman's face was her fortune, and that the reason men were so careless for the most part as to their personal appearance was that their fortune in no way depended on their beauty; and that even when it came to commending themselves to the favor of the other sex their economic position told more potently in their favor than any question of personal advantages? Surely this obvious consideration fully explained woman's greater devotion to personal adornment, without assuming any difference whatever in the natural endowment of the sexes as to vanity." "And consequently," I put in, "when women ceased any more to depend for their economic welfare upon men's favor, it ceased to be their main aim in life to make themselves attractive to men's eyes?" "Precisely so, to their unspeakable gain in comfort, dignity, and freedom of mind for more important interests." "But to the diminution, I suspect, of the picturesqueness of the social panorama?" "Not at all, but most decidedly to its notable advantage. So far as we can judge, what claim the women of your period had to be regarded as attractive was achieved distinctly in spite of their efforts to make themselves so. Let us recall that we are talking about that excessive concern of women for the enhancement of their charms which led to a mad race after effect that for the most part defeated the end sought. Take away the economic motive which made women's attractiveness to men a means of getting on in life, and there remained Nature's impulse to attract the admiration of the other sex, a motive quite strong enough for beauty's end, and the more effective for not being too strong." "It is easy enough to see," I said, "why the economic independence of women should have had the effect of moderating to a reasonable measure their interest in personal adornment; but why should it have operated in the opposite direction upon men, in making them more attentive to dress and personal appearance than before?" "For the simple reason that their economic superiority to women having disappeared, they must henceforth depend wholly upon personal attractiveness if they would either win the favor of women or retain it when won." CHAPTER XX. WHAT THE REVOLUTION DID FOR WOMEN. "It occurs to me, doctor," I said, "that it would have been even better worth the while of a woman of my day to have slept over till now than for me, seeing that the establishment of economic equality seems to have meant for more for women than for men." "Edith would perhaps not have been pleased with the substitution," said the doctor; "but really there is much in what you say, for the establishment of economic equality did in fact mean incomparably more for women than for men. In your day the condition of the mass of men was abject as compared with their present state, but the lot of women was abject as compared with that of the men. The most of men were indeed the servants of the rich, but the woman was subject to the man whether he were rich or poor, and in the latter and more common case was thus the servant of a servant. However low down in poverty a man might be, he had one or more lower even than he in the persons of the women dependent on him and subject to his will. At the very bottom of the social heap, bearing the accumulated burden of the whole mass, was woman. All the tyrannies of soul and mind and body which the race endured, weighed at last with cumulative force upon her. So far beneath even the mean estate of man was that of woman that it would have been a mighty uplift for her could she have only attained his level. But the great Revolution not merely lifted her to an equality with man but raised them both with the same mighty upthrust to a plane of moral dignity and material welfare as much above the former state of man as his former state had been above that of woman. If men then owe gratitude to the Revolution, how much greater must women esteem their debt to it! If to the men the voice of the Revolution was a call to a higher and nobler plane of living, to woman it was as the voice of God calling her to a new creation." "Undoubtedly," I said, "the women of the poor had a pretty abject time of it, but the women of the rich certainly were not oppressed." "The women of the rich," replied the doctor, "were numerically too insignificant a proportion of the mass of women to be worth considering in a general statement of woman's condition in your day. Nor, for that matter, do we consider their lot preferable to that of their poorer sisters. It is true that they did not endure physical hardship, but were, on the contrary, petted and spoiled by their men protectors like over-indulged children; but that seems to us not a sort of life to be desired. So far as we can learn from contemporary accounts and social pictures, the women of the rich lived in a hothouse atmosphere of adulation and affectation, altogether less favorable to moral or mental development than the harder conditions of the women of the poor. A woman of to-day, if she were doomed to go back to live in your world, would beg at least to be reincarnated as a scrub woman rather than as a wealthy woman of fashion. The latter rather than the former seems to us the sort of woman which most completely typified the degradation of the sex in your age." As the same thought had occurred to me, even in my former life, I did not argue the point. "The so-called woman movement, the beginning of the great transformation in her condition," continued the doctor, "was already making quite a stir in your day. You must have heard and seen much of it, and may have even known some of the noble women who were the early leaders." "Oh, yes." I replied. "There was a great stir about women's rights, but the programme then announced was by no means revolutionary. It only aimed at securing the right to vote, together with various changes in the laws about property-holding by women, the custody of children in divorces, and such details. I assure you that the women no more than the men had at that time any notion of revolutionizing the economic system." "So we understand," replied the doctor. "In that respect the women's struggle for independence resembled revolutionary movements in general, which, in their earlier stages, go blundering and stumbling along in such a seemingly erratic and illogical way that it takes a philosopher to calculate what outcome to expect. The calculation as to the ultimate outcome of the women's movement was, however, as simple as was the same calculation in the case of what you called the labor movement. What the women were after was independence of men and equality with them, while the workingmen's desire was to put an end to their vassalage to capitalists. Now, the key to the fetters the women wore was the same that locked the shackles of the workers. It was the economic key, the control of the means of subsistence. Men, as a sex, held that power over women, and the rich as a class held it over the working masses. The secret of the sexual bondage and of the industrial bondage was the same--namely, the unequal distribution of the wealth power, and the change which was necessary to put an end to both forms of bondage must obviously be economic equalization, which in the sexual as in the industrial relation would at once insure the substitution of co-operation for coercion. "The first leaders of the women's revolt were unable to see beyond the ends of their noses, and consequently ascribed their subject condition and the abuses they endured to the wickedness of man, and appeared to believe that the only remedy necessary was a moral reform on his part. This was the period during which such expressions as the 'tyrant man' and 'man the monster' were watchwords of the agitation. The champions of the women fell into precisely the same mistake committed by a large proportion of the early leaders of the workingmen, who wasted good breath and wore out their tempers in denouncing the capitalists as the willful authors of all the ills of the proletarian. This was worse than idle rant; it was misleading and blinding. The men were essentially no worse than the women they oppressed nor the capitalists than the workmen they exploited. Put workingmen in the places of the capitalists and they would have done just as the capitalists were doing. In fact, whenever workingmen did become capitalists they were commonly said to make the hardest sort of masters. So, also, if women could have changed places with the men, they would undoubtedly have dealt with the men precisely as the men had dealt with them. It was the system which permitted human beings to come into relations of superiority and inferiority to one another which was the cause of the whole evil. Power over others is necessarily demoralizing to the master and degrading to the subject. Equality is the only moral relation between human beings. Any reform which should result in remedying the abuse of women by men, or workingmen by capitalists, must therefore be addressed to equalizing their economic condition. Not till the women, as well as the workingmen, gave over the folly of attacking the consequences of economic inequality and attacked the inequality itself, was there any hope for the enfranchisement of either class. "The utterly inadequate idea which the early leaders of the women had of the great salvation they must have, and how it must come, are curiously illustrated by their enthusiasm for the various so-called temperance agitations of the period for the purpose of checking drunkenness among men. The special interest of the women as a class in this reform in men's manners--for women as a rule did not drink intoxicants--consisted in the calculation that if the men drank less they would be less likely to abuse them, and would provide more liberally for their maintenance; that is to say, their highest aspirations were limited to the hope that, by reforming the morals of their masters, they might secure a little better treatment for themselves. The idea of abolishing the mastership had not yet occurred to them as a possibility. "This point, by the way, as to the efforts of women in your day to reform men's drinking habits by law rather strikingly suggests the difference between the position of women then and now in their relation to men. If nowadays men were addicted to any practice which made them seriously and generally offensive to women, it would not occur to the latter to attempt to curb it by law. Our spirit of personal sovereignty and the rightful independence of the individual in all matters mainly self-regarding would indeed not tolerate any of the legal interferences with the private practices of individuals so common in your day. But the women would not find force necessary to correct the manners of the men. Their absolute economic independence, whether in or out of marriage, would enable them to use a more potent influence. It would presently be found that the men who made themselves offensive to women's susceptibilities would sue for their favor in vain. But it was practically impossible for women of your day to protect themselves or assert their wills by assuming that attitude. It was economically a necessity for a woman to marry, or at least of so great advantage to her that she could not well dictate terms to her suitors, unless very fortunately situated, and once married it was the practical understanding that in return for her maintenance by her husband she must hold herself at his disposal." "It sounds horribly," I said, "at this distance of time, but I beg you to believe that it was not always quite as bad as it sounds. The better men exercised their power with consideration, and with persons of refinement the wife virtually retained her self-control, and for that matter in many families the woman was practically the head of the house." "No doubt, no doubt," replied the doctor. "So it has always been under every form of servitude. However absolute the power of a master, it has been exercised with a fair degree of humanity in a large proportion of instances, and in many cases the nominal slave, when of strong character, has in reality exercised a controlling influence over the master. This observed fact is not, however, considered a valid argument for subjecting human beings to the arbitrary will of others. Speaking generally, it is undoubtedly true that both the condition of women when subjected to men, as well as that of the poor in subjection to the rich, were in fact far less intolerable than it seems to us they possibly could have been. As the physical life of man can be maintained and often thrive in any climate from the poles to the equator, so his moral nature has shown its power to live and even put forth fragrant flowers under the most terrible social conditions." "In order to realize the prodigious debt of woman to the great Revolution," resumed the doctor, "we must remember that the bondage from which it delivered her was incomparably more complete and abject than any to which men had ever been subjected by their fellow-men. It was enforced not by a single but by a triple yoke. The first yoke was the subjection to the personal and class rule of the rich, which the mass of women bore in common with the mass of men. The other two yokes were peculiar to her. One of them was her personal subjection not only in the sexual relation, but in all her behavior to the particular man on whom she depended for subsistence. The third yoke was an intellectual and moral one, and consisted in the slavish conformity exacted of her in all her thinking, speaking, and acting to a set of traditions and conventional standards calculated to repress all that was spontaneous and individual, and impose an artificial uniformity upon both the inner and outer life. "The last was the heaviest yoke of the three, and most disastrous in its effects both upon women directly and indirectly upon mankind through the degradation of the mothers of the race. Upon the woman herself the effect was so soul-stifling and mind-stunting as to be made a plausible excuse for treating her as a natural inferior by men not philosophical enough to see that what they would make an excuse for her subjection was itself the result of that subjection. The explanation of woman's submission in thought and action to what was practically a slave code--a code peculiar to her sex and scorned and derided by men--was the fact that the main hope of a comfortable life for every woman consisted in attracting the favorable attention of some man who could provide for her. Now, under your economic system it was very desirable for a man who sought employment to think and talk as his employer did if he was to get on in life. Yet a certain degree of independence of mind and conduct was conceded to men by their economic superiors under most circumstances, so long as they were not actually offensive, for, after all, what was mainly wanted of them was their labor. But the relation of a woman to the man who supported her was of a very different and much closer character. She must be to him _persona grata_, as your diplomats used to say. To attract him she must be personally pleasing to him, must not offend his tastes or prejudices by her opinions or conduct. Otherwise he would be likely to prefer some one else. It followed from this fact that while a boy's training looked toward fitting him to earn a living, a girl was educated with a chief end to making her, if not pleasing, at least not displeasing to men. "Now, if particular women had been especially trained to suit particular men's tastes--trained to order, so to speak--while that would have been offensive enough to any idea of feminine dignity, yet it would have been far less disastrous, for many men would have vastly preferred women of independent minds and original and natural opinions. But as it was not known beforehand what particular men would support particular women, the only safe way was to train girls with a view to a negative rather than a positive attractiveness, so that at least they might not offend average masculine prejudices. This ideal was most likely to be secured by educating a girl to conform herself to the customary traditional and fashionable habits of thinking, talking, and behaving--in a word, to the conventional standards prevailing at the time. She must above all things avoid as a contagion any new or original ideas or lines of conduct in any important respect, especially in religious, political, and social matters. Her mind, that is to say, like her body, must be trained and dressed according to the current fashion plates. By all her hopes of married comfort she must not be known to have any peculiar or unusual or positive notions on any subject more important than embroidery or parlor decoration. Conventionality in the essentials having been thus secured, the brighter and more piquant she could be in small ways and frivolous matters the better for her chances. Have I erred in describing the working of your system in this particular, Julian?" "No doubt," I replied, "you have described to the life the correct and fashionable ideal of feminine education in my time, but there were, you must understand, a great many women who were persons of entirely original and serious minds, who dared to think and speak for themselves." "Of course there were. They were the prototypes of the universal woman of to-day. They represented the coming woman, who to-day has come. They had broken for themselves the conventional trammels of their sex, and proved to the world the potential equality of women with men in every field of thought and action. But while great minds master their circumstances, the mass of minds are mastered by them and formed by them. It is when we think of the bearing of the system upon this vast majority of women, and how the virus of moral and mental slavery through their veins entered into the blood of the race, that we realize how tremendous is the indictment of humanity against your economic arrangements on account of woman, and how vast a benefit to mankind was the Revolution that gave free mothers to the race-free not merely from physical but from moral and intellectual fetters. "I referred a moment ago," pursued the doctor, "to the close parallelism existing in your time between the industrial and the sexual situation, between the relations of the working masses to the capitalists, and those of the women to men. It is strikingly illustrated in yet another way. "The subjection of the workingmen to the owners of capital was insured by the existence at all times of a large class of the unemployed ready to underbid the workers and eager to get employment at any price and on any terms. This was the club with which the capitalist kept down the workers. In like manner it was the existence of a body of unappropriated women which riveted the yoke of women's subjection to men. When maintenance was the difficult problem it was in your day there were many men who could not maintain themselves, and a vast number who could not maintain women in addition to themselves. The failure of a man to marry might cost him happiness, but in the case of women it not only involved loss of happiness, but, as a rule, exposed them to the pressure or peril of poverty, for it was a much more difficult thing for women than for men to secure an adequate support by their own efforts. The result was one of the most shocking spectacles the world has ever known--nothing less, in fact, than a state of rivalry and competition among women for the opportunity of marriage. To realize how helpless were women in your day, to assume toward men an attitude of physical, mental, or moral dignity and independence, it is enough to remember their terrible disadvantage in what your contemporaries called with brutal plainness the marriage market. "And still woman's cup of humiliation was not full. There was yet another and more dreadful form of competition by her own sex to which she was exposed. Not only was there a constant vast surplus of unmarried women desirous of securing the economic support which marriage implied, but beneath these there were hordes of wretched women, hopeless of obtaining the support of men on honorable terms, and eager to sell themselves for a crust. Julian, do you wonder that, of all the aspects of the horrible mess you called civilization in the nineteenth century, the sexual relation reeks worst?" "Our philanthropists were greatly disturbed over what we called the social evil," said I--"that is, the existence of this great multitude of outcast women--but it was not common to diagnose it as a part of the economic problem. It was regarded rather as a moral evil resulting from the depravity of the human heart, to be properly dealt with by moral and religious influences." "Yes, yes, I know. No one in your day, of course, was allowed to intimate that the economic system was radically wicked, and consequently it was customary to lay off all its hideous consequences upon poor human nature. Yes, I know there were, people who agreed that it might be possible by preaching to lessen the horrors of the social evil while yet the land contained millions of women in desperate need, who had no other means of getting bread save by catering to the desires of men. I am a bit of a phrenologist, and have often wished for the chance of examining the cranial developments of a nineteenth-century philanthropist who honestly believed this, if indeed any of them honestly did." "By the way," I said, "high-spirited women, even in my day, objected to the custom that required them to take their husbands' names on marriage. How do you manage that now?" "Women's names are no more affected by marriage than men's." "But how about the children?" "Girls take the mother's last name with the father's as a middle name, while with boys it is just the reverse." * * * * * "It occurs to me," I said, "that it would be surprising if a fact so profoundly affecting woman's relations with man as her achievement of economic independence, had not modified the previous conventional standards of sexual morality in some respects." "Say rather," replied the doctor, "that the economic equalization of men and women for the first time made it possible to establish their relations on a moral basis. The first condition of ethical action in any relation is the freedom of the actor. So long as women's economic dependence upon men prevented them from being free agents in the sexual relation, there could be no ethics of that relation. A proper ethics of sexual conduct was first made possible when women became capable of independent action through the attainment of economic equality." "It would have startled the moralists of my day," I said, "to be told that we had no sexual ethics. We certainly had a very strict and elaborate system of 'thou shalt nots.'" "Of course, of course," replied my companion. "Let us understand each other exactly at this point, for the subject is highly important. You had, as you say, a set of very rigid rules and regulations as to the conduct of the sexes--that is, especially as to women--but the basis of it, for the most part, was not ethical but prudential, the object being the safeguarding of the economic interests of women in their relations with men. Nothing could have been more important to the protection of women on the whole, although so often bearing cruelly upon them individually, than these rules. They were the only method by which, so long as woman remained an economically helpless and dependent person, she and her children could be even partially guarded from masculine abuse and neglect. Do not imagine for a moment that I would speak lightly of the value of this social code to the race during the time it was necessary. But because it was entirely based upon considerations not suggested by the natural sanctities of the sexual relation in itself, but wholly upon prudential considerations affecting economic results, it would be an inexact use of terms to call it a system of ethics. It would be more accurately described as a code of sexual economics--that is to say, a set of laws and customs providing for the economic protection of women and children in the sexual and family relation. "The marriage contract was embellished by a rich embroidery of sentimental and religious fancies, but I need not remind you that its essence in the eyes of the law and of society was its character as a contract, a strictly economic _quid-pro-quo_ transaction. It was a legal undertaking by the man to maintain the woman and future family in consideration of her surrender of herself to his exclusive disposal--that is to say, on condition of obtaining a lien on his property, she became a part of it. The only point which the law or the social censor looked to as fixing the morality or immorality, purity or impurity, of any sexual act was simply the question whether this bargain had been previously executed in accordance with legal forms. That point properly attended to, everything that formerly had been regarded as wrong and impure for the parties became rightful and chaste. They might have been persons unfit to marry or to be parents; they might have been drawn together by the basest and most sordid motives; the bride may have been constrained by need to accept a man she loathed; youth may have been sacrificed to decrepitude, and every natural propriety outraged; but according to your standard, if the contract had been legally executed, all that followed was white and beautiful. On the other hand, if the contract had been neglected, and a woman had accepted a lover without it, then, however great their love, however fit their union in every natural way, the woman was cast out as unchaste, impure, and abandoned, and consigned to the living death of social ignominy. Now let me repeat that we fully recognize the excuse for this social law under your atrocious system as the only possible way of protecting the economic interests of women and children, but to speak of it as ethical or moral in its view of the sex relation is certainly about as absurd a misuse of words as could be committed. On the contrary, we must say that it was a law which, in order to protect women's material interests, was obliged deliberately to disregard all the laws that are written on the heart touching such matters. "It seems from the records that there was much talk in your day about the scandalous fact that there were two distinct moral codes in sexual matters, one for men and another for women--men refusing to be bound by the law imposed on women, and society not even attempting to enforce it against them. It was claimed by the advocates of one code for both sexes that what was wrong or right for woman was so for man, and that there should be one standard of right and wrong, purity and impurity, morality and immorality, for both. That was obviously the correct view of the matter; but what moral gain would there have been for the race even if men could have been induced to accept the women's code--a code so utterly unworthy in its central idea of the ethics of the sexual relation? Nothing but the bitter duress of their economic bondage had forced women to accept a law against which the blood of ten thousand stainless Marguerites, and the ruined lives of a countless multitude of women, whose only fault had been too tender loving, cried to God perpetually. Yes, there should doubtless be one standard of conduct for both men and women as there is now, but it was not to be the slave code, with its sordid basis, imposed upon the women by their necessities. The common and higher code for men and women which the conscience of the race demanded would first become possible, and at once thereafter would become assured when men and women stood over against each other in the sexual relation, as in all others, in attitudes of absolute equality and mutual independence." "After all, doctor," I said, "although at first it startled me a little to hear you say that we had no sexual ethics, yet you really say no more, nor use stronger words, than did our poets and satirists in treating the same theme. The complete divergence between our conventional sexual morality and the instinctive morality of love was a commonplace with us, and furnished, as doubtless you well know, the motive of a large part of our romantic and dramatic literature." "Yes," replied the doctor, "nothing could be added to the force and feeling with which your writers exposed the cruelty and injustice of the iron law of society as to these matters--a law made doubly cruel and unjust by the fact that it bore almost exclusively on women. But their denunciations were wasted, and the plentiful emotions they evoked were barren of result, for the reason that they failed entirely to point out the basic fact that was responsible for the law they attacked, and must be abolished if the law were ever to be replaced by a just ethics. That fact, as we have seen, was the system of wealth distribution, by which woman's only hope of comfort and security was made to depend on her success in obtaining a legal guarantee of support from some man as the price of her person." "It seems to me," I observed, "that when the women, once fairly opened their eyes to what the revolutionary programme meant for their sex by its demand of economic equality for all, self-interest must have made them more ardent devotees of the cause than even the men." "It did indeed," replied the doctor. "Of course the blinding, binding influence of conventionality, tradition, and prejudice, as well as the timidity bred of immemorial servitude, for a long while prevented the mass of women from understanding the greatness of the deliverance which was offered them; but when once they did understand it they threw themselves into the revolutionary movement with a unanimity and enthusiasm that had a decisive effect upon the struggle. Men might regard economic equality with favor or disfavor, according to their economic positions, but every woman, simply because she was a woman, was bound to be for it as soon as she got it through her head what it meant for her half of the race." CHAPTER XXI. AT THE GYMNASIUM. Edith had come up on the house top in time to hear the last of our talk, and now she said to her father: "Considering what you have been telling Julian about women nowadays as compared with the old days, I wonder if he would not be interested in visiting the gymnasium this afternoon and seeing something of how we train ourselves? There are going to be some foot races and air races, and a number of other tests. It is the afternoon when our year has the grounds, and I ought to be there anyway." To this suggestion, which was eagerly accepted, I owe one of the most interesting and instructive experiences of those early days during which I was forming the acquaintance of the twentieth-century civilization. At the door of the gymnasium Edith left us to join her class in the amphitheater. "Is she to compete in anything?" I asked. "All her year--that is, all of her age--in this ward will be entered in more or less events." "What is Edith's specialty?" I asked. "As to specialties," replied the doctor, "our people do not greatly cultivate them. Of course, privately they do what they please, but the object of our public training is not so much to develop athletic specialties as to produce an all-around and well-proportioned physical development. We aim first of all to secure a certain standard of strength and measurement for legs, thighs, arms, loins, chest, shoulders, neck, etc. This is not the highest point of perfection either of physique or performance. It is the necessary minimum. All who attain it may be regarded as sound and proper men and women. It is then left to them as they please individually to develop themselves beyond that point in special directions. "How long does this public gymnastic education last?" "It is as obligatory as any part of the educational course until the body is set, which we put at the age of twenty-four; but it is practically kept up through life, although, of course, that is according to just how one feels." "Do you mean that you take regular exercise in a gymnasium?" "Why should I not? It is no less of an object to me to be well at sixty than it was at twenty." "Doctor," said I, "if I seem surprised you must remember that in my day it was an adage that no man over forty-five ought to allow himself to run for a car, and as for women, they stopped running at fifteen, when their bodies were put in a vise, their legs in bags, their toes in thumbscrews, and they bade farewell to health." "You do indeed seem to have disagreed terribly with your bodies," said the doctor. "The women ignored theirs altogether, and as for the men, so far as I can make out, up to forty they abused their bodies, and after forty their bodies abused them, which, after all, was only fair. The vast mass of physical misery caused by weakness and sickness, resulting from wholly preventable causes, seems to us, next to the moral aspect of the subject, to be one of the largest single items chargeable to your system of economic inequality, for to that primal cause nearly every feature of the account appears directly or indirectly traceable. Neither souls nor bodies could be considered by your men in their mad struggle for a living, and for a grip on the livelihood of others, while the complicated system of bondage under which the women were held perverted mind and body alike, till it was a wonder if there were any health left in them." On entering the amphitheater we saw gathered at one end of the arena some two or three hundred young men and women talking and lounging. These, the doctor told me, were Edith's companions of the class of 1978, being all those of twenty-two years of age, born in that ward or since coming there to live. I viewed with admiration the figures of these young men and women, all strong and beautiful as the gods and goddesses of Olympus. "Am I to understand," I asked, "that this is a fair sample of your youth, and not a picked assembly of the more athletic?" "Certainly," he replied; "all the youth in their twenty-third year who live in this ward are here to-day, with perhaps two or three exceptions on account of some special reason." "But where are the cripples, the deformed, the feeble, the consumptive?" "Do you see that young man yonder in the chair with so many of the others about him?" asked the doctor. "Ah! there is then at least one invalid?" "Yes," replied my companion: "he met with an accident, and will never be vigorous. He is the only sickly one of the class, and you see how much the others make of him. Your cripples and sickly were so many that pity itself grew weary and spent of tears, and compassion callous with use; but with us they are so few as to be our pets and darlings." At that moment a bugle sounded, and some scores of young men and women dashed by us in a foot race. While they ran, the bugle continued to sound a nerve-bracing strain. The thing that astonished me was the evenness of the finish, in view of the fact that the contestants were not specially trained for racing, but were merely the group which in the round of tests had that day come to the running test. In a race of similarly unselected competitors in my day, they would have been strung along the track from the finish to the half, and the most of them nearest that. "Edith, I see, was third in," said the doctor, reading from the signals. "She will be pleased to have done so well, seeing you were here." The next event was a surprise. I had noticed a group of youths on a lofty platform at the far end of the amphitheater making some sort of preparations, and wondered what they were going to do. Now suddenly, at the sound of a trumpet, I saw them leap forward over the edge of the platform. I gave an involuntary cry of horror, for it was a deadly distance to the ground below. "It's all right," laughed the doctor, and the next moment I was staring up at a score of young men and women charging through the air fifty feet above the race course. Then followed contests in ball-throwing and putting the shot. "It is plain where your women get their splendid chests and shoulders," said I. "You have noticed that, then!" exclaimed the doctor. "I have certainly noticed," was my answer, "that your modern women seem generally to possess a vigorous development and appearance of power above the waist which were only occasionally seen in our day." "You will be interested, no doubt," said the doctor, "to have your impression corroborated by positive evidence. Suppose we leave the amphitheater for a few minutes and step into the anatomical rooms. It is indeed a rare fortune for an anatomical enthusiast like myself to have a pupil so well qualified to be appreciative, to whom to point out the effect our principle of social equality, and the best opportunities of culture for all, have had in modifying toward perfection the human form in general, and especially the female figure. I say especially the female figure, for that had been most perverted in your day by the influences which denied woman a full life. Here are a group of plaster statues, based on the lines handed down to us by the anthropometric experts of the last decades of the nineteenth century, to whom we are vastly indebted. You will observe, as your remark just now indicated that you had observed, that the tendency was to a spindling and inadequate development above the waist and an excessive development below. The figure seemed a little as if it had softened and run down like a sugar cast in warm weather. See, the front breadth flat measurement of the hips is actually greater than across the shoulders, whereas it ought to be an inch or two less, and the bulbous effect must have been exaggerated by the bulging mass of draperies your women accumulated about the waist." At his words I raised my eyes to the stony face of the woman figure, the charms of which he had thus disparaged, and it seemed to me that the sightless eyes rested on mine with an expression of reproach, of which my heart instantly confessed the justice. I had been the contemporary of this type of women, and had been indebted to the light of their eyes for all that made life worth living. Complete or not, as might be their beauty by modern standards, through them I had learned to know the stress of the ever-womanly, and been made an initiate of Nature's sacred mysteries. Well might these stony eyes reproach me for consenting by my silence to the disparagement of charms to which I owed so much, by a man of another age. "Hush, doctor, hush!" I exclaimed. "No doubt you are right, but it is not for me to hear these words." I could not find the language to explain what was in my mind, but it was not necessary. The doctor understood, and his keen gray eyes glistened as he laid his hand on my shoulder. "Right, my boy, quite right! That is the thing for you to say, and Edith would like you the better for your words, for women nowadays are jealous for one another's honor, as I judge they were not in your day. But, on the other hand, if there were present in this room disembodied shades of those women of your day, they would rejoice more than any others could at the fairer, ampler temples liberty has built for their daughters' souls to dwell in. "Look!" he added, pointing to another figure; "this is the typical woman of to-day, the lines not ideal, but based on an average of measurements for the purpose of scientific comparison. First, you will observe that the figure is over two inches taller than the other. Note the shoulders! They have gained two inches in width relatively to the hips, as compared with the figure we have been examining. On the other hand, the girth at the hips is greater, showing more powerful muscular development. The chest is an inch and a half deeper, while the abdominal measure is fully two inches deeper. These increased developments are all over and above what the mere increase in stature would call for. As to the general development of the muscular system, you will see there is simply no comparison. "Now, what is the explanation? Simply the effect upon woman of the full, free, untrammeled physical life to which her economic independence opened the way. To develop the shoulders, arms, chest, loins, legs, and body generally, exercise is needed--not mild and gentle, but vigorous, continuous exertion, undertaken not spasmodically but regularly. There is no dispensation of Providence that will or ever would give a woman physical development on any other terms than those by which men have acquired their development. But your women had recourse to no such means. Their work had been confined for countless ages to a multiplicity of petty tasks--hand work and finger work--tasks wearing to body and mind in the extreme, but of a sort wholly failing to provoke that reaction of the vital forces which builds up and develops the parts exercised. From time immemorial the boy had gone out to dig and hunt with his father, or contend for the mastery with other youths while the girl stayed at home to spin and bake. Up to fifteen she might share with her brother a few of his more insipid sports, but with the beginnings of womanhood came the end of all participation in active physical outdoor life. What could be expected save what resulted--a dwarfed and enfeebled physique and a semi-invalid existence? The only wonder is that, after so long a period of bodily repression and perversion, the feminine physique should have responded, by so great an improvement in so brief a period, to the free life opened up to woman within the last century." "We had very many beautiful women; physically perfect they seemed at least to us," I said. "Of course you did, and no doubt they were the perfect types you deemed them," replied the doctor. "They showed you what Nature meant the whole sex to be. But am I wrong in assuming that ill health was a general condition among your women? Certainly the records tell us so. If we may believe them, four fifths of the practice of doctors was among women, and it seemed to do them mighty little good either, although perhaps I ought not to reflect on my own profession. The fact is, they could not do anything, and probably knew they couldn't, so long as the social customs governing women remained unchanged." "Of course you are right enough as to the general fact," I replied. "Indeed, a great writer had given currency to a generally accepted maxim when he said that invalidism was the normal condition of woman." "I remember that expression. What a confession it was of the abject failure of your civilization to solve the most fundamental proposition of happiness for half the race! Woman's invalidism was one of the great tragedies of your civilization, and her physical rehabilitation is one of the greatest single elements in the total increment of happiness which economic equality has brought the human race. Consider what is implied in the transformation of the woman's world of sighs and tears and suffering, as you know it, into the woman's world of to-day, with its atmosphere of cheer and joy and overflowing vigor and vitality!" "But," said I, "one thing is not quite clear to me. Without being a physician, or knowing more of such matters than a young man might be supposed to, I have yet understood in a general way that the weakness and delicacy of women's physical condition had their causes in certain natural disabilities of the sex." "Yes, I know it was the general notion in your day that woman's physical constitution doomed her by its necessary effect to be sick, wretched, and unhappy, and that at most her condition could not be rendered more than tolerable in a physical sense. A more blighting blasphemy against Nature never found expression. No natural function ought to cause constant suffering or disease; and if it does, the rational inference is that something is wrong in the circumstances. The Orientals invented the myth of Eve and the apple, and the curse pronounced upon her, to explain the sorrows and infirmities of the sex, which were, in fact, a consequence, not of God's wrath, but of man-made conditions and customs. If you once admit that these sorrows and infirmities are inseparable from woman's natural constitution, why, then there is no logical explanation but to accept that myth as a matter of history. There were, however, plentiful illustrations already in your day of the great differences in the physical conditions of women under different circumstances and different social environments to convince unprejudiced minds that thoroughly healthful conditions which should be maintained a sufficiently long period would lead to a physical rehabilitation for woman that would quite redeem from its undeserved obloquy the reputation of her Creator." "Am I to understand that maternity now is unattended with risk or suffering?" "It is not nowadays an experience which is considered at all critical either in its actual occurrence or consequences. As to the other supposed natural disabilities which your wise men used to make so much of as excuses for keeping women in economic subjection, they have ceased to involve any physical disturbance whatever. "And the end of this physical rebuilding of the feminine physique is not yet in view. While men still retain superiority in certain lines of athletics, we believe the sexes will yet stand on a plane of entire physical equality, with differences only as between individuals." "There is one question," said I, "which this wonderful physical rebirth of woman suggests. You say that she is already the physical equal of man, and that your physiologists anticipate in a few generations more her evolution to a complete equality with him. That amounts to saying, does it not, that normally and potentially she always has been man's physical equal and that nothing but adverse circumstances and conditions have ever made her seem less than his equal?" "Certainly." "How, then, do you account for the fact that she has in all ages and countries since the dawn of history, with perhaps a few doubtful and transient exceptions, been his physical subject and thrall? If she ever was his equal, why did she cease to become so, and by a rule so universal? If her inferiority since historic times may be ascribed to unfavorable man-made conditions, why, if she was his equal, did she permit those conditions to be imposed upon her? A philosophical theory as to how a condition is to cease should contain a rational suggestion as to how it arose." "Very true indeed," replied the doctor. "Your question is practical. The theory of those who hold that woman will yet be man's full equal in physical vigor necessarily implies, as you suggest, that she must probably once have been his actual equal, and calls for an explanation of the loss of that equality. Suppose man and woman actual physical equals at some point of the past. There remains a radical difference in their relation as sexes--namely, that man can passionally appropriate woman against her will if he can overpower her, while woman can not, even if disposed, so appropriate man without his full volition, however great her superiority of force. I have often speculated as to the reason of this radical difference, lying as it does at the root of all the sex tyranny of the past, now happily for evermore replaced by mutuality. It has sometimes seemed to me that it was Nature's provision to keep the race alive in periods of its evolution when life was not worth living save for a far-off posterity's sake. This end, we may say, she shrewdly secured by vesting the aggressive and appropriating power in the sex relation in that sex which had to bear the least part of the consequences resultant on its exercise. We may call the device a rather mean one on Nature's part, but it was well calculated to effect the purpose. But for it, owing to the natural and rational reluctance of the child-bearing sex to assume a burden so bitter and so seemingly profitless, the race might easily have been exposed to the risk of ceasing utterly during the darker periods of its upward evolution. "But let us come back to the specific question we were talking about. Suppose man and woman in some former age to have been, on the whole, physically equal, sex for sex. Nevertheless, there would be many individual variations. Some of each sex would be stronger than others of their own sex. Some men would be stronger than some women, and as many women be stronger than some men. Very good; we know that well within historic times the savage method of taking wives has been by forcible capture. Much more may we suppose force to have been used wherever possible in more primitive periods. Now, a strong woman would have no object to gain in making captive a weaker man for any sexual purpose, and would not therefore pursue him. Conversely, however, strong men would have an object in making captive and keeping as their wives women weaker than themselves. In seeking to capture wives, men would naturally avoid the stronger women, whom they might have difficulty in dominating, and prefer as mates the weaker individuals, who would be less able to resist their will. On the other hand, the weaker of the men would find it relatively difficult to capture any mates at all, and would be consequently less likely to leave progeny. Do you see the inference?" "It is plain enough," I replied. "You mean that the stronger women and the weaker men would both be discriminated against, and that the types which survived would be the stronger of the men and the weaker of the women." "Precisely so. Now, suppose a difference in the physical strength of the sexes to have become well established through this process in prehistoric times, before the dawn of civilization, the rest of the story follows very simply. The now confessedly dominant sex would, of course, seek to retain and increase its domination and the now fully subordinated sex would in time come to regard the inferiority to which it was born as natural, inevitable, and Heaven-ordained. And so it would go on as it did go on, until the world's awakening, at the end of the last century, to the necessity and possibility of a reorganization of human society on a moral basis, the first principle of which must be the equal liberty and dignity of all human beings. Since then women have been reconquering, as they will later fully reconquer, their pristine physical equality with men." "A rather alarming notion occurs to me," said I. "What if woman should in the end not only equal but excel man in physical and mental powers, as he has her in the past, and what if she should take as mean an advantage of that superiority as he did?" The doctor laughed. "I think you need not be apprehensive that such a superiority, even if attained, would be abused. Not that women, as such, are any more safely to be trusted with irresponsible power than men, but for the reason that the race is rising fast toward the plane already in part attained in which spiritual forces will fully dominate all things, and questions of physical power will cease to be of any importance in human relations. The control and leading of humanity go already largely, and are plainly destined soon to go wholly, to those who have the largest souls--that is to say, to those who partake most of the Spirit of the Greater Self; and that condition is one which in itself is the most absolute guarantee against the misuse of that power for selfish ends, seeing that with such misuse it would cease to be a power." "The Greater Self--what does that mean?" I asked. "It is one of our names for the soul and for God," replied the doctor, "but that is too great a theme to enter on now." CHAPTER XXII. ECONOMIC SUICIDE OF THE PROFIT SYSTEM. The morning following, Edith received a call to report at her post of duty for some special occasion. After she had gone, I sought out the doctor in the library and began to ply him with questions, of which, as usual, a store had accumulated in my mind overnight. "If you desire to continue your historical studies this morning," he said presently, "I am going to propose a change of teachers." "I am very well satisfied with the one whom Providence assigned to me," I answered, "but it is quite natural you should want a little relief from such persistent cross-questioning." "It is not that at all," replied the doctor. "I am sure no one could conceivably have a more inspiring task than mine has been, nor have I any idea of giving it up as yet. But it occurred to me that a little change in the method and medium of instruction this morning might be agreeable." "Who is to be the new teacher?" I asked. "There are to be a number of them, and they are not teachers at all, but pupils." "Come, doctor," I protested, "don't you think a man in my position has enough riddles to guess, without making them up for him?" "It sounds like a riddle, doesn't it? But it is not. However, I will hasten to explain. As one of those citizens to whom for supposed public services the people have voted the blue ribbon, I have various honorary functions as to public matters, and especially educational affairs. This morning I have notice of an examination at ten o'clock of the ninth grade in the Arlington School. They have been studying the history of the period before the great Revolution, and are going to give their general impressions of it. I thought that perhaps, by way of a change, you might be interested in listening to them, especially in view of the special topic they are going to discuss." I assured the doctor that no programme could promise more entertainment. "What is the topic they discuss?" I inquired. "The profit system as a method of economic suicide is their theme," replied the doctor. "In our talks hitherto we have chiefly touched on the moral wrongfulness of the old economic order. In the discussion we shall listen to this morning there will be no reference unless incidentally to moral considerations. The young people will endeavor to show us that there were certain inherent and fatal defects in private capitalism as a machine for producing wealth which, quite apart from its ethical character, made its abolition necessary if the race was ever to get out of the mire of poverty." "That is a very different doctrine from the preaching I used to hear," I said. "The clergy and moralists in general assured us that there were no social evils for which moral and religious medicine was not adequate. Poverty, they said, was in the end the result of human depravity, and would disappear if everybody would only be good." "So we read," said the doctor. "How far the clergy and the moralists preached this doctrine with a professional motive as calculated to enhance the importance of their services as moral instructors, how far they merely echoed it as an excuse for mental indolence, and how far they may really have been sincere, we can not judge at this distance, but certainly more injurious nonsense was never taught. The industrial and commercial system by which the labor of a great population is organized and directed constitutes a complex machine. If the machine is constructed unscientifically, it will result in loss and disaster, without the slightest regard to whether the managers are the rarest of saints or the worst of sinners. The world always has had and will have need of all the virtue and true religion that men can be induced to practice; but to tell farmers that personal religion will take the place of a scientific agriculture, or the master of an unseaworthy ship that the practice of good morals will bring his craft to shore, would be no greater childishness than the priests and moralists of your day committed in assuring a world beggared by a crazy economic system that the secret of plenty was good works and personal piety. History gives a bitter chapter to these blind guides, who, during the revolutionary period, did far more harm than those who openly defended the old order, because, while the brutal frankness of the latter repelled good men, the former misled them and long diverted from the guilty system the indignation which otherwise would have sooner destroyed it. "And just here let me say, Julian, as a most important point for you to remember in the history of the great Revolution, that it was not until the people had outgrown this childish teaching and saw the causes of the world's want and misery, not primarily in human depravity, but in the economic madness of the profit system on which private capitalism depended, that the Revolution began to go forward in earnest." Now, although the doctor had said that the school we were to visit was in Arlington, which I knew to be some distance out of the city, and that the examination would take place at ten o'clock, he continued to sit comfortably in his chair, though the time was five minutes of ten. "Is this Arlington the same town that was a suburb of the city in my time?" I presently ventured to inquire. "Certainly." "It was then ten or twelve miles from the city," I said. "It has not been moved, I assure you," said the doctor. "Then if not, and if the examination is to begin in five minutes, are we not likely to be late?" I mildly observed. "Oh, no," replied the doctor, "there are three or four minutes left yet." "Doctor," said I, "I have been introduced within the last few days to many new and speedy modes of locomotion, but I can't see how you are going to get me to Arlington from here in time for the examination that begins three minutes hence, unless you reduce me to an electrified solution, send me by wire, and have me precipitated back to my shape at the other end of the line; and even in that case I should suppose we had no time to waste." "We shouldn't have, certainly, if we were intending to go to Arlington even by that process. It did not occur to me that you would care to go, or we might just as well have started earlier. It is too bad!" "I did not care about visiting Arlington." I replied, "but I assumed that it would be rather necessary to do so if I were to attend an examination at that place. I see my mistake. I ought to have learned by this time not to take for granted that any of what we used to consider the laws of Nature are still in force." "The laws of Nature are all right," laughed the doctor. "But is it possible that Edith has not shown you the electroscope?" "What is that?" I asked. "It does for vision what the telephone does for hearing," replied the doctor, and, leading the way to the music room, he showed me the apparatus. "It is ten o'clock," he said, "and we have no time for explanations now. Take this chair and adjust the instrument as you see me do. Now!" Instantly, without warning, or the faintest preparation for what was coming, I found myself looking into the interior of a large room. Some twenty boys and girls, thirteen to fourteen years of age, occupied a double row of chairs arranged in the form of a semicircle about a desk at which a young man was seated with his back to us. The rows of students were facing us, apparently not twenty feet away. The rustling of their garments and every change of expression in their mobile faces were as distinct to my eyes and ears as if we had been directly behind the teacher, as indeed we seemed to be. At the moment the scene had flashed upon me I was in the act of making some remark to the doctor. As I checked myself, he laughed. "You need not be afraid of interrupting them," he said. "They don't see or hear us, though we both see and hear them so well. They are a dozen miles away." "Good heavens!" I whispered--for, in spite of his assurance, I could not realize that they did not hear me--"are we here or there?" "We are here certainly," replied the doctor, "but our eyes and ears are there. This is the electroscope and telephone combined. We could have heard the examination just as well without the electroscope, but I thought you would be better entertained if you could both see and hear. Fine-looking young people, are they not? We shall see now whether they are as intelligent as they are handsome." HOW PROFITS CUT DOWN CONSUMPTION. "Our subject this morning," said the teacher briskly, "is 'The Economic Suicide of Production for Profit,' or 'The Hopelessness of the Economic Outlook of the Race under Private Capitalism.'--Now, Frank, will you tell us exactly what this proposition means?" At these words one of the boys of the class rose to his feet. "It means," he said, "that communities which depended--as they had to depend, so long as private capitalism lasted--upon the motive of profit making for the production of the things by which they lived, must always suffer poverty, because the profit system, by its necessary nature, operated to stop limit and cripple production at the point where it began to be efficient." "By what is the possible production of wealth limited?" "By its consumption." "May not production fall short of possible consumption? May not the demand for consumption exceed the resources of production?" "Theoretically it may, but not practically--that is, speaking of demand as limited to rational desires, and not extending to merely fanciful objects. Since the division of labor was introduced, and especially since the great inventions multiplied indefinitely the powers of man, production has been practically limited only by the demand created by consumption." "Was this so before the great Revolution?" "Certainly. It was a truism among economists that either England, Germany, or the United States alone could easily have supplied the world's whole consumption of manufactured goods. No country began to produce up to its capacity in any line." "Why not?" "On account of the necessary law of the profit system, by which it operated to limit production." "In what way did this law operate?" "By creating a gap between the producing and consuming power of the community, the result of which was that the people were not able to consume as much as they could produce." "Please tell us just how the profit system led to this result." "There being under the old order of things," replied the boy Frank, "no collective agency to undertake the organization of labor and exchange, that function naturally fell into the hands of enterprising individuals who, because the undertaking called for much capital, had to be capitalists. They were of two general classes--the capitalist who organized labor for production; and the traders, the middlemen, and storekeepers, who organized distribution, and having collected all the varieties of products in the market, sold them again to the general public for consumption. The great mass of the people--nine, perhaps, out of ten--were wage-earners who sold their labor to the producing capitalists; or small first-hand producers, who sold their personal product to the middlemen. The farmers were of the latter class. With the money the wage-earners and farmers received in wages, or as the price of their produce, they afterward went into the market, where the products of all sorts were assembled, and bought back as much as they could for consumption. Now, of course, the capitalists, whether engaged in organizing production or distribution, had to have some inducement for risking their capital and spending their time in this work. That inducement was profit." "Tell us how the profits were collected." "The manufacturing or employing capitalists paid the people who worked for them, and the merchants paid the farmers for their products in tokens called money, which were good to buy back the blended products of all in the market. But the capitalists gave neither the wage-earner nor the farmer enough of these money tokens to buy back the equivalent of the product of his labor. The difference which the capitalists kept back for themselves was their profit. It was collected by putting a higher price on the products when sold in the stores than the cost of the product had been to the capitalists." "Give us an example." "We will take then, first, the manufacturing capitalist, who employed labor. Suppose he manufactured shoes. Suppose for each pair of shoes he paid ten cents to the tanner for leather, twenty cents for the labor of putting, the shoe together, and ten cents for all other labor in any way entering into the making of the shoe, so that the pair cost him in actual outlay forty cents. He sold the shoes to a middleman for, say, seventy-five cents. The middleman sold them to the retailer for a dollar, and the retailer sold them over his counter to the consumer for a dollar and a half. Take next the case of the farmer, who sold not merely his labor like the wage-earner, but his labor blended with his material. Suppose he sold his wheat to the grain merchant for forty cents a bushel. The grain merchant, in selling it to the flouring mill, would ask, say, sixty cents a bushel. The flouring mill would sell it to the wholesale flour merchant for a price over and above the labor cost of milling at a figure which would include a handsome profit for him. The wholesale flour merchant would add another profit in selling to the retail grocer, and the last yet another in selling to the consumer. So that finally the equivalent of the bushel of wheat in finished flour as bought back by the original farmer for consumption would cost him, on account of profit charges alone, over and above the actual labor cost of intermediate processes, perhaps twice what he received for it from the grain merchant." "Very well," said the teacher. "Now for the practical effect of this system." "The practical effect," replied the boy, "was necessarily to create a gap between the producing and consuming power of those engaged in the production of the things upon which profits were charged. Their ability to consume would be measured by the value of the money tokens they received for producing the goods, which by the statement was less than the value put upon those goods in the stores. That difference would represent a gap between what they could produce and what they could consume." MARGARET TELLS ABOUT THE DEADLY GAP. "Margaret," said the teacher, "you may now take up the subject where Frank leaves it, and tell us what would be the effect upon the economic system of a people of such a gap between its consuming and producing power as Frank shows us was caused by profit taking." "The effect," said the girl who answered to the name of Margaret, "would depend on two factors: first, on how numerous a body were the wage-earners and first producers, on whose products the profits were charged; and, second, how large was the rate of profit charged, and the consequent discrepancy between the producing and consuming power of each individual of the working body. If the producers on whose product a profit was charged were but a handful of the people, the total effect of their inability to buy back and consume more than a part of their product would create but a slight gap between the producing and consuming power of the community as a whole. If, on the other hand, they constituted a large proportion of the whole population, the gap would be correspondingly great, and the reactive effect to check production would be disastrous in proportion." "And what was the actual proportion of the total population made up by the wage-earners and original producers, who by the profit system were prevented from consuming as much as they produced?" "It constituted, as Frank has said, at least nine tenths of the whole people, probably more. The profit takers, whether they were organizers of production or of distribution, were a group numerically insignificant, while those on whose product the profits were charged constituted the bulk of the community." "Very well. We will now consider the other factor on which the size of the gap between the producing and consuming power of the community created by the profit system was dependent--namely, the rate of profits charged. Tell us, then, what was the rule followed by the capitalists in charging profits. No doubt, as rational men who realized the effect of high profits to prevent consumption, they made a point of making their profits as low as possible." "On the contrary, the capitalists made their profits as high as possible. Their maxim was, 'Tax the traffic all it will bear.'" "Do you mean that instead of trying to minimize the effect of profit charging to diminish consumption, they deliberately sought to magnify it to the greatest possible degree?" "I mean that precisely," replied Margaret. "The golden rule of the profit system, the great motto of the capitalists, was, 'Buy in the Cheapest Market, and sell in the Dearest.'" "What did that mean?" "It meant that the capitalist ought to pay the least possible to those who worked for him or sold him their produce, and on the other hand should charge the highest possible price for their product when he offered it for sale to the general public in the market." "That general public," observed the teacher, "being chiefly composed of the workers to whom he and his fellow-capitalists had just been paying as nearly nothing as possible for creating the product which they were now expected to buy back at the highest possible price." "Certainly." "Well, let us try to realize the full economic wisdom of this rule as applied to the business of a nation. It means, doesn't it, Get something for nothing, or as near nothing as you can. Well, then, if you can get it for absolutely nothing, you are carrying out the maxim to perfection. For example, if a manufacturer could hypnotize his workmen so as to get them to work for him for no wages at all, he would be realizing the full meaning of the maxim, would he not?" "Certainly; a manufacturer who could do that, and then put the product of his unpaid workmen on the market at the usual price, would have become rich in a very short time." "And the same would be true, I suppose, of a grain merchant who was able to take such advantage of the farmers as to obtain their grain for nothing, afterward selling it at the top price." "Certainly. He would become a millionaire at once." "Well, now, suppose the secret of this hypnotizing process should get abroad among the capitalists engaged in production and exchange, and should be generally applied by them so that all of them were able to get workmen without wages, and buy produce without paying anything for it, then doubtless all the capitalists at once would become fabulously rich." "Not at all." "Dear me! why not?" "Because if the whole body of wage-earners failed to receive any wages for their work, and the farmers received nothing for their produce, there would be nobody to buy anything, and the market would collapse entirely. There would be no demand for any goods except what little the capitalists themselves and their friends could consume. The working people would then presently starve, and the capitalists be left to do their own work." "Then it appears that what would be good for the particular capitalist, if he alone did it, would be ruinous to him and everybody else if all the capitalists did it. Why was this?" "Because the particular capitalist, in expecting to get rich by underpaying his employees, would calculate on selling his produce, not to the particular group of workmen he had cheated, but to the community at large, consisting of the employees of other capitalists not so successful in cheating their workmen, who therefore would have something to buy with. The success of his trick depended on the presumption that his fellow-capitalists would not succeed in practicing the same trick. If that presumption failed, and all the capitalists succeeded at once in dealing with their employees, as all were trying to do, the result would be to stop the whole industrial system outright." "It appears, then, that in the profit system we have an economic method, of which the working rule only needed to be applied thoroughly enough in order to bring the system to a complete standstill and that all which kept the system going was the difficulty found in fully carrying out the working rule. "That was precisely so," replied the girl; "the individual capitalist grew rich fastest who succeeded best in beggaring those whose labor or produce he bought; but obviously it was only necessary for enough capitalists to succeed in so doing in order to involve capitalists and people alike in general ruin. To make the sharpest possible bargain with the employer or producer, to give him the least possible return for his labor or product, was the ideal every capitalist must constantly keep before him, and yet it was mathematically certain that every such sharp bargain tended to undermine the whole business fabric, and that it was only necessary that enough capitalists should succeed in making enough such sharp bargains to topple the fabric over." "One question more. The bad effects of a bad system are always aggravated by the willfulness of men who take advantage of it, and so, no doubt, the profit system was made by selfish men to work worse than it might have done. Now, suppose the capitalists had all been fair-minded men and not extortioners, and had made their charges for their services as small as was consistent with reasonable gains and self-protection, would that course have involved such a reduction of profit charges as would have greatly helped the people to consume their products and thus to promote production?" "It would not," replied the girl. "The antagonism of the profit system to effective wealth production arose from causes inherent in and inseparable from private capitalism; and so long as private capitalism was retained, those causes must have made the profit system inconsistent with any economic improvement in the condition of the people, even if the capitalists had been, angels. The root of the evil was not moral, but strictly economic." "But would not the rate of profits have been much reduced in the case supposed?" "In some instances temporarily no doubt, but not generally, and in no case permanently. It is doubtful if profits, on the whole, were higher than they had to be to encourage capitalists to undertake production and trade." "Tell us why the profits had to be so large for this purpose." "Legitimate profits under private capitalism," replied the girl Margaret--"that is, such profits as men going into production or trade must in self-protection calculate upon, however well disposed toward the public--consisted of three elements, all growing out of conditions inseparable from private capitalism, none of which longer exist. First, the capitalist must calculate on at least as large a return on the capital he was to put into the venture as he could obtain by lending it on good security--that is to say, the ruling rate of interest. If he were not sure of that, he would prefer to lend his capital. But that was not enough. In going into business he risked the entire loss of his capital, as he would not if it were lent on good security. Therefore, in addition to the ruling rate of interest on capital, his profits must cover the cost of insurance on the capital risked--that is, there must be a prospect of gains large enough in case the venture succeeded to cover the risk of loss of capital in case of failure. If the chances of failure, for instance, were even, he must calculate on more than a hundred per cent profit in case of success. In point of fact, the chances of failure in business and loss of capital in those days were often far more than even. Business was indeed little more than a speculative risk, a lottery in which the blanks greatly outnumbered the prizes. The prizes to tempt investment must therefore be large. Moreover, if a capitalist were personally to take charge of the business in which he invested his capital, he would reasonably have expected adequate wages of superintendence--compensation, in other words, for his skill and judgment in navigating the venture through the stormy waters of the business sea, compared with which, as it was in that day, the North Atlantic in midwinter is a mill pond. For this service he would be considered justified in making a large addition to the margin of profit charged." "Then you conclude, Margaret, that, even if disposed to be fair toward the community, a capitalist of those days would not have been able safely to reduce his rate of profits sufficiently to bring the people much nearer the point of being able to consume their products than they were." "Precisely so. The root of the evil lay in the tremendous difficulties, complexities, mistakes, risks, and wastes with which private capitalism necessarily involved the processes of production and distribution, which under public capitalism have become so entirely simple, expeditious, and certain." "Then it seems it is not necessary to consider our capitalist ancestors moral monsters in order to account for the tragical outcome of their economic methods." "By no means. The capitalists were no doubt good and bad, like other people, but probably stood up as well as any people could against the depraving influences of a system which in fifty years would have turned heaven itself into hell." MARION EXPLAINS OVER-PRODUCTION. "That will do, Margaret," said the teacher. "We will next ask you, Marion, to assist us in further elucidating the subject. If the profit system worked according to the description we have listened to, we shall be prepared to learn that the economic situation was marked by the existence of large stores of consumable goods in the hands of the profit takers which they would be glad to sell, and, on the other hand, by a great population composed of the original producers of the goods, who were in sharp need of the goods but unable to purchase them. How does this theory agree with the facts stated in the histories?" "So well," replied Marion, "that one might almost think you had been reading them." At which the class smiled, and so did I. "Describe, without unnecessary infusion of humor--for the subject was not humorous to our ancestors--the condition of things to which you refer. Did our great-grandfathers recognize in this excess of goods over buyers a cause of economic disturbance?" "They recognized it as the great and constant cause of such disturbance. The perpetual burden of their complaints was dull times, stagnant trade, glut of products. Occasionally they had brief periods of what they called good times, resulting from a little brisker buying, but in the best of what they called good times the condition of the mass of the people was what we should call abjectly wretched." "What was the term by which they most commonly described the presence in the market of more products than could be sold?" "Overproduction." "Was it meant by this expression that there had been actually more food, clothing, and other good things produced than the people could use?" "Not at all. The mass of the people were in great need always, and in more bitter need than ever precisely at the times when the business machine was clogged by what they called overproduction. The people, if they could have obtained access to the overproduced goods, would at any time have consumed them in a moment and loudly called for more. The trouble was, as has been said, that the profits charged by the capitalist manufacturers and traders had put them out of the power of the original producers to buy back with the price they had received for their labor or products." "To what have our historians been wont to compare the condition of the community under the profit system?" "To that of a victim of the disease of chronic dyspepsia so prevalent among our ancestors." "Please develop the parallel." "In dyspepsia the patient suffered from inability to assimilate food. With abundance of dainties at hand he wasted away from the lack of power to absorb nutriment. Although unable to eat enough to support life, he was constantly suffering the pangs of indigestion, and while actually starving for want of nourishment, was tormented by the sensation of an overloaded stomach. Now, the economic condition of a community under the profit system afforded a striking analogy to the plight of such a dyspeptic. The masses of the people were always in bitter need of all things, and were abundantly able by their industry to provide for all their needs, but the profit system would not permit them to consume even what they produced, much less produce what they could. No sooner did they take the first edge off of their appetite than the commercial system was seized with the pangs of acute indigestion and all the symptoms of an overloaded system, which nothing but a course of starvation would relieve, after which the experience would be repeated with the same result, and so on indefinitely." "Can you explain why such an extraordinary misnomer as overproduction, should be applied to a situation that would better be described as famine; why a condition should be said to result from glut when it was obviously the consequence of enforced abstinence? Surely, the mistake was equivalent to diagnosing a case of starvation as one of gluttony." "It was because the economists and the learned classes, who alone had a voice, regarded the economic question entirely from the side of the capitalists and ignored the interest of the people. From the point of view of the capitalist it was a case of overproduction when he had charged profits on products which took them beyond the power of the people to buy, and so the economist writing in his interest called it. From the point of view of the capitalist, and consequently of the economist, the only question was the condition of the market, not of the people. They did not concern themselves whether the people were famished or glutted; the only question was the condition of the market. Their maxim that demand governed supply, and supply would always meet demand, referred in no way to the demand representing human need, but wholly to an artificial thing called the market, itself the product of the profit system." "What was the market?" "The market was the number of those who had money to buy with. Those who had no money were non-existent so far as the market was concerned, and in proportion as people had little money they were a small part of the market. The needs of the market were the needs of those who had the money to supply their needs with. The rest, who had needs in plenty but no money, were not counted, though they were as a hundred to one of the moneyed. The market was supplied when those who could buy had enough, though the most of the people had little and many had nothing. The market was glutted when the well-to-do were satisfied, though starving and naked mobs might riot in the streets." "Would such a thing be possible nowadays as full storehouses and a hungry and naked people existing at the same time?" "Of course not. Until every one was satisfied there could be no such thing as overproduct now. Our system is so arranged that there can be too little nowhere so long as there is too much anywhere. But the old system had no circulation of the blood." "What name did our ancestors give to the various economic disturbances which they ascribed to overproduction?" "They called them commercial crises. That is to say, there was a chronic state of glut which might be called a chronic crisis, but every now and then the arrears resulting from the constant discrepancy between consumption and production accumulated to such a degree as to nearly block business. When this happened they called it, in distinction from the chronic glut, a crisis or panic, on account of the blind terror which it caused." "To what cause did they ascribe the crises?" "To almost everything besides the perfectly plain reason. An extensive literature seems to have been devoted to the subject. There are shelves of it up at the museum which I have been trying to go through, or at least to skim over, in connection with this study. If the books were not so dull in style they would be very amusing, just on account of the extraordinary ingenuity the writers display in avoiding the natural and obvious explanation of the facts they discuss. They even go into astronomy." "What do you mean?" "I suppose the class will think I am romancing, but it is a fact that one of the most famous of the theories by which our ancestors accounted for the periodical breakdowns of business resulting from the profit system was the so-called 'sun-spot theory.' During the first half of the nineteenth century it so happened that there were severe crises at periods about ten or eleven years apart. Now, it happened that sun spots were at a maximum about every ten years, and a certain eminent English economist concluded that these sun spots caused the panics. Later on it seems this theory was found unsatisfactory, and gave place to the lack-of-confidence explanation." "And what was that?" "I could not exactly make out, but it seemed reasonable to suppose that there must have developed a considerable lack of confidence in an economic system which turned out such results." "Marion, I fear you do not bring a spirit of sympathy to the study of the ways of our forefathers, and without sympathy we can not understand others." "I am afraid they are a little too other, for me to understand." The class tittered, and Marion was allowed to take her seat. JOHN TELLS ABOUT COMPETITION. "Now, John," said the teacher, "we will ask you a few questions. We have seen by what process a chronic glut of goods in the market resulted from the operation of the profit system to put products out of reach of the purchasing power of the people at large. Now, what notable characteristic and main feature of the business system of our forefathers resulted from the glut thus produced?" "I suppose you refer to competition?" said the boy. "Yes. What was competition and what caused it, referring especially to the competition between capitalists?" "It resulted, as you intimate, from the insufficient consuming power of the public at large, which in turn resulted from the profit system. If the wage-earners and first-hand producers had received purchasing power sufficient to enable them to take up their numerical proportion of the total product offered in the market, it would have been cleared of goods without any effort on the part of sellers, for the buyers would have sought the sellers and been enough to buy all. But the purchasing power of the masses, owing to the profits charged on their products, being left wholly inadequate to take those products out of the market, there naturally followed a great struggle between the capitalists engaged in production and distribution to divert the most possible of the all too scanty buying each in his own direction. The total buying could not of course be increased a dollar without relatively, or absolutely increasing the purchasing power in the people's hands, but it was possible by effort to alter the particular directions in which it should be expended, and this was the sole aim and effect of competition. Our forefathers thought it a wonderfully fine thing. They called it the life of trade, but, as we have seen, it was merely a symptom of the effect of the profit system to cripple consumption." "What were the methods which the capitalists engaged in production and exchange made use of to bring trade their way, as they used to say?" "First was direct solicitation of buyers and a shameless vaunting of every one's wares by himself and his hired mouthpieces, coupled with a boundless depreciation of rival sellers and the wares they offered. Unscrupulous and unbounded misrepresentation was so universally the rule in business that even when here and there a dealer told the truth he commanded no credence. History indicates that lying has always been more or less common, but it remained for the competitive system as fully developed in the nineteenth century to make it the means of livelihood of the whole world. According to our grandfathers--and they certainly ought to have known--the only lubricant which was adapted to the machinery of the profit system was falsehood, and the demand for it was unlimited." "And all this ocean of lying, you say, did not and could not increase the total of goods consumed by a dollar's worth." "Of course not. Nothing, as I said, could increase that save an increase in the purchasing power of the people. The system of solicitation or advertising, as it was called, far from increasing the total sale, tended powerfully to decrease it." "How so?" "Because it was prodigiously expensive and the expense had to be added to the price of the goods and paid by the consumer, who therefore could buy just so much less than if he had been left in peace and the price of the goods had been reduced by the saving in advertising." "You say that the only way by which consumption could have been increased was by increasing the purchasing power in the hands of the people relatively to the goods to be bought. Now, our forefathers claimed that this was just what competition did. They claimed that it was a potent means of reducing prices and cutting down the rate of profits, thereby relatively increasing the purchasing power of the masses. Was this claim well based?" "The rivalry of the capitalists among themselves," replied the lad, "to tempt the buyers' custom certainly prompted them to undersell one another by nominal reductions of prices, but it was rarely that these nominal reductions, though often in appearance very large, really represented in the long run any economic benefit to the people at large, for they were generally effected by means which nullified their practical value." "Please make that clear." "Well, naturally, the capitalist would prefer to reduce the prices of his goods in such a way, if possible, as not to reduce his profits, and that would be his study. There were numerous devices which he employed to this end. The first was that of reducing the quality and real worth of the goods on which the price was nominally cut down. This was done by adulteration and scamped work, and the practice extended in the nineteenth century to every branch of industry and commerce and affected pretty nearly all articles of human consumption. It came to that point, as the histories tell us, that no one could ever depend on anything he purchased being what it appeared or was represented. The whole atmosphere of trade was mephitic with chicane. It became the policy of the capitalists engaged in the most important lines of manufacture to turn out goods expressly made with a view to wearing as short a time as possible, so as to need the speedier renewal. They taught their very machines to be dishonest, and corrupted steel and brass. Even the purblind people of that day recognized the vanity of the pretended reductions in price by the epithet 'cheap and nasty,' with which they characterized cheapened goods. All this class of reductions, it is plain, cost the consumer two dollars for every one it professed to save him. As a single illustration of the utterly deceptive character of reductions in price under the profit system, it may be recalled that toward the close of the nineteenth century in America, after almost magical inventions for reducing the cost of shoemaking, it was a common saying that although the price of shoes was considerably lower than fifty years before, when they were made by hand, yet that later-made shoes were so much poorer in quality as to be really quite as expensive as the earlier." "Were adulteration and scamped work the only devices by which sham reductions of prices was effected?" "There were two other ways. The first was where the capitalist saved his profits while reducing the price of goods by taking the reduction out of the wages he had paid his employees. This was the method by which the reductions in price were very generally brought about. Of course, the process was one which crippled the purchasing power of the community by the amount of the lowered wages. By this means the particular group of capitalists cutting down wages might quicken their sales for a time until other capitalists likewise cut wages. In the end nobody was helped, not even the capitalist. Then there was the third of the three main kinds of reductions in price to be credited to competition--namely, that made on account of labor-saving machinery or other inventions which enabled the capitalist to discharge his laborers. The reduction in price on the goods was here based, as in the former case, on the reduced amount of wages paid out, and consequently meant a reduced purchasing power on the part of the community, which, in the total effect, usually nullified the advantage of reduced price, and often more than nullified it." "You have shown," said the teacher, "that most of the reductions of price effected by competition were reductions at the expense of the original producers or of the final consumers, and not reductions in profits. Do you mean to say that the competition of capitalists for trade never operated to reduce profits?" "Undoubtedly it did so operate in countries where from the long operation of the profit system surplus capital had accumulated so as to compete under great pressure for investment; but under such circumstances reductions in prices, even though they might come from sacrifices of profits, usually came too late to increase the consumption of the people." "How too late?" "Because the capitalist had naturally refrained from sacrificing his profits in order to reduce prices so long as he could take the cost of the reduction out of the wages of his workmen or out of the first-hand producer. That is to say, it was only when the working masses had been reduced to pretty near the minimum subsistence point that the capitalist would decide to sacrifice a portion of his profits. By that time it was too late for the people to take advantage of the reduction. When a population had reached that point, it had no buying power left to be stimulated. Nothing short of giving commodities away freely could help it. Accordingly, we observe that in the nineteenth century it was always in the countries where the populations were most hopelessly poor that the prices were lowest. It was in this sense a bad sign for the economic condition of a community when the capitalist found it necessary to make a real sacrifice of profits, for it was a clear indication that the working masses had been squeezed until they could be squeezed no longer." "Then, on the whole, competition was not a palliative of the profit system?" "I think that it has been made apparent that it was a grievous aggravation of it. The desperate rivalry of the capitalists for a share in the scanty market which their own profit taking had beggared drove them to the practice of deception and brutality, and compelled a hard-heartedness such as we are bound to believe human beings would not under a less pressure have been guilty of." "What was the general economic effect of competition?" "It operated in all fields of industry, and in the long run for all classes, the capitalists as well as the non-capitalists, as a steady downward pull as irresistible and universal as gravitation. Those felt it first who had least capital, the wage-earners who had none, and the farmer proprietors who, having next to none, were under almost the same pressure to find a prompt market at any sacrifice of their product, as were the wage-earners to find prompt buyers for their labor. These classes were the first victims of the competition to sell in the glutted markets of things and of men. Next came the turn of the smaller capitalists, till finally only the largest were left, and these found it necessary for self-preservation to protect themselves against the process of competitive decimation by the consolidation of their interests. One of the signs of the times in the period preceding the Revolution was this tendency among the great capitalists to seek refuge from the destructive efforts of competition through the pooling of their undertakings in great trusts and syndicates." "Suppose the Revolution had not come to interrupt that process, would a system under which capital and the control of all business had been consolidated in a few hands have been worse for the public interest than the effect of competition?" "Such a consolidated system would, of course, have been an intolerable despotism, the yoke of which, once assumed, the race might never have been able to break. In that respect private capitalism under a consolidated plutocracy, such as impended at the time of the Revolution, would have been a worse threat to the world's future than the competitive system; but as to the immediate bearings of the two systems on human welfare, private capital in the consolidated form might have had some points of advantage. Being an autocracy, it would have at least given some chance to a benevolent despot to be better than the system and to ameliorate a little the conditions of the people, and that was something competition did not allow the capitalists to do." "What do you mean?" "I mean that under competition there was no free play whatever allowed for the capitalist's better feelings even if he had any. He could not be better than the system. If he tried to be, the system would crush him. He had to follow the pace set by his competitors or fail in business. Whatever rascality or cruelty his rivals might devise, he must imitate or drop out of the struggle. The very wickedest, meanest, and most rascally of the competitors, the one who ground his employees lowest, adulterated his goods most shamefully, and lied about them most skillfully, set the pace for all the rest." "Evidently, John, if you had lived in the early part of the revolutionary agitation you would have had scant sympathy with those early reformers whose fear was lest the great monopolies would put an end to competition." "I can't say whether I should have been wiser than my contemporaries in that case," replied the lad, "but I think my gratitude to the monopolists for destroying competition would have been only equaled by my eagerness to destroy the monopolists to make way for public capitalism." ROBERT TELLS ABOUT THE GLUT OF MEN. "Now, Robert," said the teacher, "John has told us how the glut of products resulting from the profit system caused a competition among capitalists to sell goods and what its consequences were. There was, however, another sort of glut besides that of goods which resulted from the profit system. What was that?" "A glut of men," replied the boy Robert. "Lack of buying power on the part of the people, whether from lack of employment or lowered wages, meant less demand for products, and that meant less work for producers. Clogged storehouses meant closed factories and idle populations of workers who could get no work--that is to say, the glut in the goods market caused a corresponding glut in the labor or man market. And as the glut in the goods market stimulated competition among the capitalists to sell their goods, so likewise did the glut in the labor market stimulate an equally desperate competition among the workers to sell their labor. The capitalists who could not find buyers for their goods lost their money indeed, but those who had nothing to sell but their strength and skill, and could find none to buy, must perish. The capitalist, unless his goods were perishable, could wait for a market, but the workingman must find a buyer for his labor at once or die. And in respect to this inability to wait for a market, the farmer, while technically a capitalist, was little better off than the wage-earner, being, on account of the smallness of his capital, almost as unable to withhold his product as the workingman his labor. The pressing necessity of the wage-earner to sell his labor at once on any terms and of the small capitalist to dispose of his product was the means by which the great capitalists were able steadily to force down the rate of wages and the prices paid for their product to the first producers." "And was it only among the wage-earners and the small producers that this glut of men existed?" "On the contrary, every trade, every occupation, every art, and every profession, including the most learned ones, was similarly overcrowded, and those in the ranks of each regarded every fresh recruit with jealous eyes, seeing in him one more rival in the struggle for life, making it just so much more difficult than it had been before. It would seem that in those days no man could have had any satisfaction in his labor, however self-denying and arduous, for he must always have been haunted by the feeling that it would have been kinder to have stood aside and let another do the work and take the pay, seeing that there was not work and pay for all." "Tell us, Robert, did not our ancestors recognize the facts of the situation you have described? Did they not see that this glut of men indicated something out of order in the social arrangements?" "Certainly. They professed to be much distressed over it. A large literature was devoted to discussing why there was not enough work to go around in a world in which so much more work evidently needed to be done as indicated by its general poverty. The Congresses and Legislatures were constantly appointing commissions of learned men to investigate and report on the subject." "And did these learned men ascribe it to its obvious cause as the necessary effect of the profit system to maintain and constantly increase a gap between the consuming and producing power of the community?" "Dear me, no! To have criticised the profit system would have been flat blasphemy. The learned men called it a problem--the problem of the unemployed--and gave it up as a conundrum. It was a favorite way our ancestors had of dodging questions which they could not answer without attacking vested interests to call them problems and give them up as insolvable mysteries of Divine Providence." "There was one philosopher, Robert--an Englishman--who went to the bottom of this difficulty of the glut of men resulting from the profit system. He stated the only way possible to avoid the glut, provided the profit system was retained. Do you remember his name?" "You mean Malthus, I suppose." "Yes. What was his plan?" "He advised poor people, as the only way to avoid starvation, not to get born--that is, I mean he advised poor people not to have children. This old fellow, as you say, was the only one of the lot who went to the root of the profit system, and saw that there was not room for it and for mankind on the earth. Regarding the profit system as a God-ordained necessity, there could be no doubt in his mind that it was mankind which must, under the circumstances, get off the earth. People called Malthus a cold-blooded philosopher. Perhaps he was, but certainly it was only common humanity that, so long as the profit system lasted, a red flag should be hung out on the planet, warning souls not to land except at their own risk." EMILY SHOWS THE NECESSITY OF WASTE PIPES. "I quite agree with you, Robert," said the teacher, "and now, Emily, we will ask you to take us in charge as we pursue a little further this interesting, if not very edifying theme. The economic system of production and distribution by which a nation lives may fitly be compared to a cistern with a supply pipe, representing production, by which water is pumped in; and an escape pipe, representing consumption, by which the product is disposed of. When the cistern is scientifically constructed the supply pipe and escape pipe correspond in capacity, so that the water may be drawn off as fast as supplied, and none be wasted by overflow. Under the profit system of our ancestors, however, the arrangement was different. Instead of corresponding in capacity with the supply pipe representing production, the outlet representing consumption was half or two thirds shut off by the water-gate of profits, so that it was not able to carry off more than, say, a half or a third of the supply that was pumped into the cistern through the feed pipe of production. Now, Emily, what would be the natural effect of such a lack of correspondence between the inlet and the outlet capacity of the cistern?" "Obviously," replied the girl who answered to the name of Emily, "the effect would be to clog the cistern, and compel the pumps to slow down to half or one third of their capacity--namely, to the capacity of the escape pipe." "But," said the teacher, "suppose that in the case of the cistern used by our ancestors the effect of slowing down the pump of production was to diminish still further the capacity of the escape pipe of consumption, already much too small, by depriving the working masses of even the small purchasing power they had before possessed in the form of wages for labor or prices for produce." "Why, in that case," replied the girl, "it is evident that since slowing down production only checked instead of hastening relief by consumption, there would be no way to avoid a stoppage of the whole service except to relieve the pressure in the cistern by opening waste pipes." "Precisely so. Well, now, we are in a position to appreciate how necessary a part the waste pipes played in the economic system of our forefathers. We have seen that under that system the bulk of the people sold their labor or produce to the capitalists, but were unable to buy back and consume but a small part of the result of that labor or produce in the market, the rest remaining in the hands of the capitalists as profits. Now, the capitalists, being a very small body numerically, could consume upon their necessities but a petty part of these accumulated profits, and yet, if they did not get rid of them somehow, production would stop, for the capitalists absolutely controlled the initiative in production, and would have no motive to increase accumulations they could not dispose of. In proportion, moreover, as the capitalists from lack of use for more profits should slacken production, the mass of the people, finding none to hire them, or buy their produce to sell again, would lose what little consuming power they had before, and a still larger accumulation of products be left on the capitalists' hands. The question then is, How did the capitalists, after consuming all they could of their profits upon their own necessities, dispose of the surplus, so as to make room for more production?" "Of course," said the girl Emily, "if the surplus products were to be so expended as to relieve the glut, the first point was that they must be expended in such ways that there should be no return, for them. They must be absolutely wasted--like water poured into the sea. This was accomplished by the use of the surplus products in the support of bodies of workers employed in unproductive kinds of labor. This waste labor was of two sorts--the first was that employed in wasteful industrial and commercial competition; the second was that employed in the means and services of luxury." "Tell us about the wasteful expenditure of labor in competition." "That was through the undertaking of industrial and commercial enterprises which were not called for by any increase in consumption, their object being merely the displacement of the enterprises of one capitalist by those of another." "And was this a very large cause of waste?" "Its magnitude may be inferred from the saying current at the time that ninety-five per cent of industrial and commercial enterprises failed, which merely meant that in this proportion of instances capitalists wasted their investments in trying to fill a demand which either did not exist or was supplied already. If that estimate were even a remote suggestion of the truth, it would serve to give an idea of the enormous amounts of accumulated profits which were absolutely wasted in competitive expenditure. And it must be remembered also that when a capitalist succeeded in displacing another and getting away his business the total waste of capital was just as great as if he failed, only in the one case it was the capital of the previous investor that was destroyed instead of the capital of the newcomer. In every country which had attained any degree of economic development there were many times more business enterprises in every line than there was business for, and many times as much capital already invested as there was a return for. The only way in which new capital could be put into business was by forcing out and destroying old capital already invested. The ever-mounting aggregation of profits seeking part of a market that was prevented from increasing by the effect of those very profits, created a pressure of competition among capitalists which, by all accounts that come down to us, must have been like a conflagration in its consuming effects upon capital. "Now tell us something about the other great waste of profits by which the pressure in the cistern was sufficiently relieved to permit production to go on--that is to say, the expenditure of profits for the employment of labor in the service of luxury. What was luxury?" "The term luxury, in referring to the state of society before the Revolution, meant the lavish expenditure of wealth by the rich to gratify a refined sensualism, while the masses of the people were suffering lack of the primary necessities." "What were some of the modes of luxurious expenditure indulged in by the capitalists?" "They were unlimited in variety, as, for example, the construction of costly palaces for residence and their decoration in royal style, the support of great retinues of servants, costly supplies for the table, rich equipages, pleasure ships, and all manner of boundless expenditure in fine raiment and precious stones. Ingenuity was exhausted in contriving devices by which the rich might waste the abundance the people were dying for. A vast army of laborers was constantly engaged in manufacturing an infinite variety of articles and appliances of elegance and ostentation which mocked the unsatisfied primary necessities of those who toiled to produce them." "What have you to say of the moral aspect of this expenditure for luxury?" "If the entire community had arrived at that stage of economic prosperity which would enable all alike to enjoy the luxuries equally," replied the girl, "indulgence in them would have been merely a question of taste. But this waste of wealth by the rich in the presence of a vast population suffering lack of the bare necessaries of life was an illustration of inhumanity that would seem incredible on the part of civilized people were not the facts so well substantiated. Imagine a company of persons sitting down with enjoyment to a banquet, while on the floors and all about the corners of the banquet hall were groups of fellow-beings dying with want and following with hungry eyes every morsel the feasters lifted to their mouths. And yet that precisely describes the way in which the rich used to spend their profits in the great cities of America, France, England, and Germany before the Revolution, the one difference being that the needy and the hungry, instead of being in the banquet room itself, were just outside on the street." "It was claimed, was it not, by the apologists of the luxurious expenditure of the capitalists that they thus gave employment to many who would otherwise have lacked it?" "And why would they have lacked employment? Why were the people glad to find employment in catering to the luxurious pleasures and indulgences of the capitalists, selling themselves to the most frivolous and degrading uses? It was simply because the profit taking of these same capitalists, by reducing the consuming power of the people to a fraction of its producing power, had correspondingly limited the field of productive employment, in which under a rational system there must always have been work for every hand until all needs were satisfied, even as there is now. In excusing their luxurious expenditure on the ground you have mentioned, the capitalists pleaded the results of one wrong to justify the commission of another." "The moralists of all ages," said the teacher, "condemned the luxury of the rich. Why did their censures effect no change?" "Because they did not understand the economics of the subject. They failed to see that under the profit system the absolute waste of the excess of profits in unproductive expenditure was an economic necessity, if production was to proceed, as you showed in comparing it with the cistern. The waste of profits in luxury was an economic necessity, to use another figure, precisely as a running sore is a necessary vent in some cases for the impurities of a diseased body. Under our system of equal sharing, the wealth of a community is freely and equally distributed among its members as is the blood in a healthy body. But when, as under the old system, that wealth was concentrated in the hands of a portion of the community, it lost its vitalizing quality, as does the blood when congested in particular organs, and like that becomes an active poison, to be got rid of at any cost. Luxury in this way might be called an ulcer, which must be kept open if the profit system was to continue on any terms." "You say," said the teacher, "that in order that production should go on it was absolutely necessary to get the excess of profits wasted in some sort of unproductive expenditure. But might not the profit takers have devised some way of getting rid of the surplus more intelligent than mere competition to displace one another, and more consistent with humane feeling than wasting wealth upon refinements of sensual indulgence in the presence of a needy multitude?" "Certainly. If the capitalists had cared at all about the humane aspect of the matter, they could have taken a much less demoralizing method in getting rid of the obstructive surplus. They could have periodically made a bonfire of it as a burnt sacrifice to the god Profit, or, if they preferred, it might have been carried out in scows beyond soundings and dumped there." "It is easy to see," said the teacher, "that from a moral point of view such a periodical bonfire or dump would have been vastly more edifying to gods and men than was the actual practice of expending it in luxuries which mocked the bitter want of the mass. But how about the economic operation of this plan?" "It would have been as advantageous economically as morally. The process of wasting the surplus profits in competition and luxury was slow and protracted, and meanwhile productive industry languished and the workers waited in idleness and want for the surplus to be so far reduced as to make room for more production. But if the surplus at once, on being ascertained, were destroyed, productive industry would go right on." "But how about the workmen employed by the capitalists in ministering to their luxuries? Would they not have been thrown out of work if luxury had been given up?" "On the contrary, under the bonfire system there would have been a constant demand for them in productive employment to provide material for the blaze, and that surely would have been a far more worthy occupation than helping the capitalists to consume in folly the product of their brethren employed in productive industry. But the greatest advantage of all which would have resulted from the substitution of the bonfire for luxury remains to be mentioned. By the time the nation had made a few such annual burnt offerings to the principle of profit, perhaps even after the first one, it is likely they would begin to question, in the light of such vivid object lessons, whether the moral beauties of the profit system were sufficient compensation for so large an economic sacrifice." CHARLES REMOVES AN APPREHENSION. "Now, Charles," said the teacher, "you shall help us a little on a point of conscience. We have, one and another, told a very bad story about the profit system, both in its moral and its economic aspects. Now, is it not possible that we have done it injustice? Have we not painted too black a picture? From an ethical point of view we could indeed scarcely have done so, for there are no words strong enough to justly characterize the mock it made of all the humanities. But have we not possibly asserted too strongly its economic imbecility and the hopelessness of the world's outlook for material welfare so long as it should be tolerated? Can you reassure us on this point?" "Easily," replied the lad Charles. "No more conclusive testimony to the hopelessness of the economic outlook under private capitalism could be desired than is abundantly given by the nineteenth-century economists themselves. While they seemed quite incapable of imagining anything different from private capitalism as the basis of an economic system, they cherished no illusions as to its operation. Far from trying to comfort mankind by promising that if present ills were bravely borne matters would grow better, they expressly taught that the profit system must inevitably result at some time not far ahead in the arrest of industrial progress and a stationary condition of production." "How did they make that out?" "They recognized, as we do, the tendency under private capitalism of rents, interest, and profits to accumulate as capital in the hands of the capitalist class, while, on the other hand, the consuming power of the masses did not increase, but either decreased or remained practically stationary. From this lack of equilibrium between production and consumption it followed that the difficulty of profitably employing capital in productive industry must increase as the accumulations of capital so disposable should grow. The home market having been first, glutted with products and afterward the foreign market, the competition of the capitalists to find productive employment for their capital would lead them, after having reduced wages to the lowest possible point, to bid for what was left of the market by reducing their own profits to the minimum point at which it was worth while to risk capital. Below this point more capital would not be invested in business. Thus the rate of wealth production would cease to advance, and become stationary." "This, you say, is what the nineteenth-century economists themselves taught concerning the outcome of the profit system?" "Certainly. I could, quote from their standard books any number of passages foretelling this condition of things, which, indeed, it required no prophet to foretell." "How near was the world--that is, of course, the nations whose industrial evolution had gone farthest--to this condition when the Revolution came?" "They were apparently on its verge. The more economically advanced countries had generally exhausted their home markets and were struggling desperately for what was left of foreign markets. The rate of interest, which indicated the degree to which capital had become glutted, had fallen in England to two per cent and in America within thirty years had sunk from seven and six to five and three and four per cent, and was falling year by year. Productive industry had become generally clogged, and proceeded by fits and starts. In America the wage-earners were becoming proletarians, and the farmers fast sinking into the state of a tenantry. It was indeed the popular discontent caused by these conditions, coupled with apprehension of worse to come, which finally roused the people at the close of the nineteenth century to the necessity of destroying private capitalism for good and all." "And do I understand, then, that this stationary condition, after which no increase in the rate of wealth production could be looked for, was setting in while yet the primary needs of the masses remained unprovided for?" "Certainly. The satisfaction of the needs of the masses, as we have abundantly seen, was in no way recognized as a motive for production under the profit system. As production approached the stationary point the misery of the people would, in fact, increase as a direct result of the competition among capitalists to invest their glut of capital in business. In order to do so, as has already been shown, they sought to reduce the prices of products, and that meant the reduction of wages to wage-earners and prices to first producers to the lowest possible point before any reduction in the profits of the capitalist was considered. What the old economists called the stationary condition of production meant, therefore, the perpetuation indefinitely of the maximum degree of hardship endurable by the people at large." "That will do, Charles; you have said enough to relieve any apprehension that possibly we were doing injustice to the profit system. Evidently that could not be done to a system of which its own champions foretold such an outcome as you have described. What, indeed, could be added to the description they give of it in these predictions of the stationary condition as a programme of industry confessing itself at the end of its resources in the midst of a naked and starving race? This was the good time coming, with the hope of which the nineteenth-century economists cheered the cold and hungry world of toilers--a time when, being worse off than ever, they must abandon forever even the hope of improvement. No wonder our forefathers described their so-called political economy as a dismal science, for never was there a pessimism blacker, a hopelessness more hopeless than it preached. Ill indeed had it been for humanity if it had been truly a science. ESTHER COUNTS THE COST OF THE PROFIT SYSTEM. "Now, Esther," the teacher pursued, "I am going to ask you to do a little estimating as to about how much the privilege of retaining the profit system cost our forefathers. Emily has given us an idea of the magnitude of the two great wastes of profits--the waste of competition and the waste of luxury. Now, did the capital wasted in these two ways represent all that the profit system cost the people?" "It did not give a faint idea of it, much less represent it," replied the girl Esther. "The aggregate wealth wasted respectively in competition and luxury, could it have been distributed equally for consumption among the people, would undoubtedly have considerably raised the general level of comfort. In the cost of the profit system to a community, the wealth wasted by the capitalists was, however, an insignificant item. The bulk of that cost consisted in the effect of the profit system to prevent wealth from being produced, in holding back and tying down the almost boundless wealth-producing power of man. Imagine the mass of the population, instead of being sunk in poverty and a large part of them in bitter want, to have received sufficient to satisfy all their needs and give them ample, comfortable lives, and estimate the amount of additional wealth which it would have been necessary to produce to meet this standard of consumption. That will give you a basis for calculating the amount of wealth which the American people or any people of those days might and would have produced but for the profit system. You may estimate that this would have meant a fivefold, sevenfold, or tenfold increase of production, as you please to guess. "But tell us this: Would it have been possible for the people of America, say, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, to have multiplied their production at such a rate if consumption had demanded it?" "Nothing is more certain than that they could easily have done so. The progress of invention had been so great in the nineteenth century as to multiply from twentyfold to many hundredfold the productive power of industry. There was no time during the last quarter of the century in America or in any of the advanced countries when the existing productive plants could not have produced enough in six months to have supplied the total annual consumption as it actually was. And those plants could have been multiplied indefinitely. In like manner the agricultural product of the country was always kept far within its possibility, for a plentiful crop under the profit system meant ruinous prices to the farmers. As has been said, it was an admitted proposition of the old economists that there was no visible limit to production if only sufficient demand for consumption could be secured." "Can you recall any instance in history in which it can be argued that a people paid so large a price in delayed and prevented development for the privilege of retaining any other tyranny as they did for keeping the profit system?" "I am sure there never was such another instance, and I will tell you why I think so. Human progress has been delayed at various stages by oppressive institutions, and the world has leaped forward at their overthrow. But there was never before a time when the conditions had been so long ready and waiting for so great and so instantaneous a forward movement all along the line of social improvement as in the period preceding the Revolution. The mechanical and industrial forces, held in check by the profit system, only required to be unleashed to transform the economic condition of the race as by magic. So much for the material cost of the profit system to our forefathers; but, vast as that was, it is not worth considering for a moment in comparison with its cost in human happiness. I mean the moral cost in wrong and tears and black negations and stifled moral possibilities which the world paid for every day's retention of private capitalism: there are no words adequate to express the sum of that." NO POLITICAL ECONOMY BEFORE THE REVOLUTION. "That will do, Esther.--Now, George, I want you to tell us just a little about a particular body among the learned class of the nineteenth century, which, according to the professions of its members, ought to have known and to have taught the people all that we have so easily perceived as to the suicidal character of the profit system and the economic perdition it meant for mankind so long as it should be tolerated. I refer to the political economists." "There were no political economists before the Revolution," replied the lad. "But there certainly was a large class of learned men who called themselves political economists." "Oh, yes; but they labeled themselves wrongly." "How do you make that out?" "Because there was not, until the Revolution--except, of course, among those who sought to bring it to pass--any conception whatever of what political economy is." "What is it?" "Economy," replied the lad, "means the wise husbandry of wealth in production and distribution. Individual economy is the science of this husbandry when conducted in the interest of the individual without regard to any others. Family economy is this husbandry carried on for the advantage of a family group without regard to other groups. Political economy, however, can only mean the husbandry of wealth for the greatest advantage of the political or social body, the whole number of the citizens constituting the political organization. This sort of husbandry necessarily implies a public or political regulation of economic affairs for the general interest. But before the Revolution there was no conception of such an economy, nor any organization to carry it out. All systems and doctrines of economy previous to that time were distinctly and exclusively private and individual in their whole theory and practice. While in other respects our forefathers did in various ways and degrees recognize a social solidarity and a political unity with proportionate rights and duties, their theory and practice as to all matters touching the getting and sharing of wealth were aggressively and brutally individualistic, antisocial, and unpolitical." "Have you ever looked over any of the treatises which our forefathers called political economies, at the Historical Library?" "I confess," the boy answered, "that the title of the leading work under that head was enough for me. It was called The Wealth of Nations. That would be an admirable title for a political economy nowadays, when the production and distribution of wealth are conducted altogether by and for the people collectively; but what meaning could it conceivably have had as applied to a book written nearly a hundred years before such a thing as a national economic organization was thought of, with the sole view of instructing capitalists how to get rich at the cost of, or at least in total disregard of, the welfare of their fellow-citizens? I noticed too that quite a common subtitle used for these so-called works on political economy was the phrase 'The Science of Wealth.' Now what could an apologist of private capitalism and the profit system possibly have to say about the science of wealth? The A B C of any science of wealth production is the necessity of co-ordination and concert of effort; whereas competition, conflict, and endless cross-purposes were the sum and substance of the economic methods set forth by these writers." "And yet," said the teacher, "the only real fault of these so-called books on Political Economy consists in the absurdity of the title. Correct that, and their value as documents of the times at once becomes evident. For example, we might call them 'Examinations into the Economic and Social Consequences of trying to get along without any Political Economy.' A title scarcely less fit would perhaps be 'Studies into the Natural Course of Economic Affairs when left to Anarchy by the Lack of any Regulation in the General Interest.' It is, when regarded in this light, as painstaking and conclusive expositions of the ruinous effects of private capitalism upon the welfare of communities, that we perceive the true use and value of these works. Taking up in detail the various phenomena of the industrial and commercial world of that day, with their reactions upon the social status, their authors show how the results could not have been other than they were, owing to the laws of private capitalism, and that it was nothing but weak sentimentalism to suppose that while those laws continued in operation any different results could be obtained, however good men's intentions. Although somewhat heavy in style for popular reading, I have often thought that during the revolutionary period no documents could have been better calculated to convince rational men who could be induced to read them, that it was absolutely necessary to put an end to private capitalism if humanity were ever to get forward. "The fatal and quite incomprehensible mistake of their authors was that they did not themselves see this, conclusion and preach it. Instead of that they committed the incredible blunder of accepting a set of conditions that were manifestly mere barbaric survivals as the basis of a social science when they ought easily to have seen that the very idea of a scientific social order suggested the abolition of those conditions as the first step toward its realization. "Meanwhile, as to the present lesson, there are two or three points to clear up before leaving it. We have been talking altogether of profit taking, but this was only one of the three main methods by which the capitalists collected the tribute from the toiling world by which their power was acquired and maintained. What were the other two?" "Rent and interest." "What was rent?" "In those days," replied George, "the right to a reasonable and equal allotment of land for private uses did not belong as a matter of course to every person as it does now. No one was admitted to have any natural right to land at all. On the other hand, there was no limit to the extent of land, though it were a whole province, which any one might not legally possess if he could get hold of it. By natural consequence of this arrangement the strong and cunning had acquired most of the land, while the majority of the people were left with none at all. Now, the owner of the land had the right to drive any one off his land and have him punished for entering on it. Nevertheless, the people who owned n required to have it and to use it and must needs go to the capitalists for it. Rent was the price charged by capitalists for not driving people off their land." "Did this rent represent any economic service of any sort rendered to the community by the rent receiver?" "So far as regards the charge for the use of the land itself apart from improvements it represented no service of any sort, nothing but the waiver for a price of the owner's legal right of ejecting the occupant. It was not a charge for doing anything, but for not doing something." "Now tell us about interest; what was that?" "Interest was the price paid for the use of money. Nowadays the collective administration directs the industrial forces of the nation for the general welfare, but in those days all economic enterprises were for private profit, and their projectors had to hire the labor they needed with money. Naturally, the loan of so indispensable a means as this commanded a high price; that price was interest." "And did interest represent any economic service to the community on the part of the interest taker in lending his money?" "None whatever. On the contrary, it was by the very nature of the transaction, a waiver on the part of the lender of the power of action in favor of the borrower. It was a price charged for letting some one else do what the lender might have done but chose not to. It was a tribute levied by inaction upon action." "If all the landlords and money lenders had died over night, would it have made any difference to the world?" "None whatever, so long as they left the land and the money behind. Their economic role was a passive one, and in strong contrast with that of the profit-seeking capitalists, which, for good or bad, was at least active." "What was the general effect of rent and interest upon the consumption and consequently the production of wealth by the community?" "It operated to reduce both." "How?" "In the same way that profit taking did. Those who received rent were very few, those who paid it were nearly all. Those who received interest were few, and those who paid it many. Rent and interest meant, therefore, like profits, a constant drawing away of the purchasing power of the community at large and its concentration in the hands of a small part of it." "What have you to say of these three processes as to their comparative effect in destroying the consuming power of the masses, and consequently the demand for production?" "That differed in different ages and countries according to the stage of their economic development. Private capitalism has been compared to a three-horned bull, the horns being rent, profit, and interest, differing in comparative length and strength according to the age of the animal. In the United States, at the time covered by our lesson, profits were still the longest of the three horns, though the others were growing terribly fast." "We have seen, George," said his teacher, "that from a period long before the great Revolution it was as true as it is now that the only limit to the production of wealth in society was its consumption. We have seen that what kept the world in poverty under private capitalism was the effect of profits, aided by rent and interest to reduce consumption and thus cripple production, by concentrating the purchasing power of the people in the hands of a few. Now, that was the wrong way of doing things. Before leaving the subject I want you to tell us in a word what is the right way. Seeing that production is limited by consumption, what rule must be followed in distributing the results of production to be consumed in order to develop consumption to the highest possible point, and thereby in turn to create the greatest possible demand for production." "For that purpose the results of production must be distributed equally among all the members of the producing community." "Show why that is so." "It is a self-evident mathematical proposition. The more people a loaf of bread or any given thing is divided among, and the more equally it is divided, the sooner it will be consumed and more bread be called for. To put it in a more formal way, the needs of human beings result from the same natural constitution and are substantially the same. An equal distribution of the things needed by them is therefore that general plan by which the consumption of such things will be at once enlarged to the greatest possible extent and continued on that scale without interruption to the point of complete satisfaction for all. It follows that the equal distribution of products is the rule by which the largest possible consumption can be secured, and thus in turn the largest production be stimulated." "What, on the other hand, would be the effect on consumption of an unequal division of consumable products?" "If the division were unequal, the result would be that some would have more than they could consume in a given time, and others would have less than they could have consumed in the same time, the result meaning a reduction of total consumption below what it would have been for that time with an equal division of products. If a million dollars were equally divided among one thousand men, it would presently be wholly expended in the consumption of needed things, creating a demand for the production of as much more; but if concentrated in one man's hands, not a hundredth part of it, however great his luxury, would be likely to be so expended in the same period. The fundamental general law in the science of social wealth is, therefore, that the efficiency of a given amount of purchasing power to promote consumption is in exact proportion to its wide distribution, and is most efficient when equally distributed among the whole body of consumers because that is the widest possible distribution." "You have not called attention to the fact that the formula of the greatest wealth production--namely, equal sharing of the product among the community--is also that application of the product which will cause the greatest sum of human happiness." "I spoke strictly of the economic side of the subject." "Would it not have startled the old economists to hear that the secret of the most efficient system of wealth production was conformity on a national scale to the ethical idea of equal treatment for all embodied by Jesus Christ in the golden rule?" "No doubt, for they falsely taught that there were two kinds of science dealing with human conduct--one moral, the other economic; and two lines of reasoning as to conduct--the economic, and the ethical; both right in different ways. We know better. There can be but one science of human conduct in whatever field, and that is ethical. Any economic proposition which can not be stated in ethical terms is false. Nothing can be in the long run or on a large scale sound economics which is not sound ethics. It is not, therefore, a mere coincidence, but a logical necessity, that the supreme word of both ethics and economics should be one and the same--equality. The golden rule in its social application is as truly the secret of plenty as of peace." CHAPTER XXIII. "THE PARABLE OF THE WATER TANK." "That will do, George. We will close the session here. Our discussion, I find, has taken a broader range than I expected, and to complete the subject we shall need to have a brief session this afternoon.--And now, by way of concluding the morning, I propose to offer a little contribution of my own. The other day, at the museum, I was delving among the relics of literature of the great Revolution, with a view to finding something that might illustrate our theme. I came across a little pamphlet of the period, yellow and almost undecipherable, which, on examination, I found to be a rather amusing skit or satirical take-off on the profit system. It struck me that probably our lesson might prepare us to appreciate it, and I made a copy. It is entitled "The Parable of the Water Tank," and runs this way: "'There was a certain very dry land, the people whereof were in sore need of water. And they did nothing but to seek after water from morning until night, and many perished because they could not find it. "'Howbeit, there were certain men in that land who were more crafty and diligent than the rest, and these had gathered stores of water where others could find none, and the name of these men was called capitalists. And it came to pass that the people of the land came unto the capitalists and prayed them that they would give them of the water they had gathered that they might drink, for their need was sore. But the capitalists answered them and said: "'"Go to, ye silly people! why should we give you of the water which we have gathered, for then we should become even as ye are, and perish with you? But behold what we will do unto you. Be ye our servants and ye shall have water." "'And the people said, "Only give us to drink and we will be your servants, we and our children." And it was so. "'Now, the capitalists were men of understanding, and wise in their generation. They ordered the people who were their servants in bands with captains and officers, and some they put at the springs to dip, and others did they make to carry the water, and others did they cause to seek for new springs. And all the water was brought together in one place, and there did the capitalists make a great tank for to hold it, and the tank was called the Market, for it was there that the people, even the servants of the capitalists, came to get water. And the capitalists said unto the people: "'"For every bucket of water that ye bring to us, that we may pour it into the tank, which is the Market, behold! we will give you a penny, but for every bucket that we shall draw forth to give unto you that ye may drink of it, ye and your wives and your children, ye shall give to us two pennies, and the difference shall be our profit, seeing that if it were not for this profit we would not do this thing for you, but ye should all perish." "'And it was good in the people's eyes, for they were dull of understanding, and they diligently brought water unto the tank for many days, and for every bucket which they did bring the capitalists gave them every man a penny; but for every bucket that the capitalists drew forth from the tank to give again unto the people, behold! the people rendered to the capitalists two pennies. "'And after many days the water tank, which was the Market, overflowed at the top, seeing that for every bucket the people poured in they received only so much as would buy again half of a bucket. And because of the excess that was left of every bucket, did the tank overflow, for the people were many, but the capitalists were few, and could drink no more than others. Therefore did the tank overflow. "'And when the capitalists saw that the water overflowed, they said to the people: "'"See ye not the tank, which is the Market, doth overflow? Sit ye down, therefore and be patient, for ye shall bring us no more water till the tank be empty." "'But when the people no more received the pennies of the capitalists for the water they brought, they could buy no more water from the capitalists, having naught wherewith to buy. And when the capitalists saw that they had no more profit because no man bought water of them, they were troubled. And they sent forth men in the highways, the byways, and the hedges, crying, "If any thirst let him come to the tank and buy water of us, for it doth overflow." For they said among themselves, "Behold, the times are dull; we must advertise." "'But the people answered, saying: "How can we buy unless ye hire us, for how else shall we have wherewithal to buy? Hire ye us, therefore, as before, and we will gladly buy water, for we thirst, and ye will have no need to advertise." But the capitalists said to the people: "Shall we hire you to bring water when the tank, which is the Market, doth already overflow? Buy ye, therefore, first water, and when the tank is empty, through your buying, will we hire you again." And so it was because the capitalists hired them no more to bring water that the people could not buy the water they had brought already, and because the people could not buy the water they had brought already, the capitalists no more hired them to bring water. And the saying went abroad, "It is a crisis." "'And the thirst of the people was great, for it was not now as it had been in the days of their fathers, when the land was open before them, for every one to seek water for himself, seeing that the capitalists had taken all the springs, and the wells, and the water wheels, and the vessels and the buckets, so that no man might come by water save from the tank, which was the Market. And the people murmured against the capitalists and said: "Behold, the tank runneth over, and we die of thirst. Give us, therefore, of the water, that we perish not." "'But the capitalists answered: "Not so. The water is ours. Ye shall not drink thereof unless ye buy it of us with pennies." And they confirmed it with an oath, saying, after their manner, "Business is business." "'But the capitalists were disquieted that the people bought no more water, whereby they had no more any profits, and they spake one to another, saying: "It seemeth that our profits have stopped our profits, and by reason of the profits we have made, we can make no more profits. How is it that our profits are become unprofitable to us, and our gains do make us poor? Let us therefore send for the soothsayers, that they may interpret this thing unto us," and they sent for them. "'Now, the soothsayers were men learned in dark sayings, who joined themselves to the capitalists by reason of the water of the capitalists, that they might have thereof and live, they and their children. And they spake for the capitalists unto the people, and did their embassies for them, seeing that the capitalists were not a folk quick of understanding neither ready of speech. "'And the capitalists demanded of the soothsayers that they should interpret this thing unto them, wherefore it was that the people bought no more water of them, although the tank was full. And certain of the soothsayers answered and said, "It is by reason of overproduction," and some said, "It is glut"; but the signification of the two words is the same. And others said, "Nay, but this thing is by reason of the spots on the sun." And yet others answered, saying, "It is neither by reason of glut, nor yet of spots on the sun that this evil hath come to pass, but because of lack of confidence." "'And while the soothsayers contended among themselves, according to their manner, the men of profit did slumber and sleep, and when they awoke they said to the soothsayers: "It is enough. Ye have spoken comfortably unto us. Now go ye forth and speak comfortably likewise unto this people, so that they be at rest and leave us also in peace." "'But the soothsayers, even the men of the dismal science--for so they were named of some--were loath to go forth to the people lest they should be stoned, for the people loved them not. And they said to the capitalists: "'"Masters, it is a mystery of our craft that if men be full and thirst not but be at rest, then shall they find comfort in our speech even as ye. Yet if they thirst and be empty, find they no comfort therein but rather mock us, for it seemeth that unless a man be full our wisdom appeareth unto him but emptiness." But the capitalists said: "Go ye forth. Are ye not our men to do our embassies?" "'And the soothsayers went forth to the people and expounded to them the mystery of overproduction, and how it was that they must needs perish of thirst because there was overmuch water, and how there could not be enough because there was too much. And likewise spoke they unto the people concerning the sun spots, and also wherefore it was that these things had come upon them by reason of lack of confidence. And it was even as the soothsayers had said, for to the people their wisdom seemed emptiness. And the people reviled them, saying: "Go up, ye bald-heads! Will ye mock us? Doth plenty breed famine? Doth nothing come out of much?" And they took up stones to stone them. "'And when the capitalists saw that the people still murmured and would not give ear to the soothsayers, and because also they feared lest they should come upon the tank and take of the water by force, they brought forth to them certain holy men (but they were false priests), who spake unto the people that they should be quiet and trouble not the capitalists because they thirsted. And these holy men, who were false priests, testified to the people that this affliction was sent to them of God for the healing of their souls, and that if they should bear it in patience and lust not after the water, neither trouble the capitalists, it would come to pass that after they had given up the ghost they would come to a country where there should be no capitalists but an abundance of water. Howbeit, there were certain true prophets of God also, and these had compassion on the people and would not prophesy for the capitalists, but rather spake constantly against them. "'Now, when the capitalists saw that the people still murmured and would not be still, neither for the words of the soothsayers nor of the false priests, they came forth themselves unto them and put the ends of their fingers in the water that overflowed in the tank and wet the tips thereof, and they scattered the drops from the tips of their fingers abroad upon the people who thronged the tank, and the name of the drops of water was charity, and they were exceeding bitter. "'And when the capitalists saw yet again that neither for the words of the soothsayers, nor of the holy men who were false priests, nor yet for the drops that were called charity, would the people be still, but raged the more, and crowded upon the tank as if they would take it by force, then took they counsel together and sent men privily forth among the people. And these men sought out the mightiest among the people and all who had skill in war, and took them apart and spake craftily with them, saying: "'"Come, now, why cast ye not your lot in with the capitalists? If ye will be their men and serve them against the people, that they break not in upon the tank, then shall ye have abundance of water, that ye perish not, ye and your children." "'And the mighty men and they who were skilled in war hearkened unto this speech and suffered themselves to be persuaded, for their thirst constrained them, and they went within unto the capitalists and became their men, and staves and swords were put in their hands and they became a defense unto the capitalists and smote the people when they thronged upon the tank. "'And after many days the water was low in the tank, for the capitalists did make fountains and fish ponds of the water thereof, and did bathe therein, they and their wives and their children, and did waste the water for their pleasure. "'And when the capitalists saw that the tank was empty, they said, "The crisis is ended"; and they sent forth and hired the people that they should bring water to fill it again. And for the water that the people brought to the tank they received for every bucket a penny, but for the water which the capitalists drew forth from the tank to give again to the people they received two pennies, that they might have their profit. And after a time did the tank again overflow even as before. "'And now, when many times the people had filled the tank until it overflowed and had thirsted till the water therein had been wasted by the capitalists, it came to pass that there arose in the land certain men who were called agitators, for that they did stir up the people. And they spake to the people, saying that they should associate, and then would they have no need to be servants of the capitalists and should thirst no more for water. And in the eyes of the capitalists were the agitators pestilent fellows, and they would fain have crucified them, but durst not for fear of the people. "'And the words of the agitators which they spake to the people were on this wise: "'"Ye foolish people, how long will ye be deceived by a lie and believe to your hurt that which is not? for behold all these things that have been said unto you by the capitalists and by the soothsayers are cunningly devised fables. And likewise the holy men, who say that it is the will of God that ye should always be poor and miserable and athirst, behold! they do blaspheme God and are liars, whom he will bitterly judge though he forgive all others. How cometh it that ye may not come by the water in the tank? Is it not because ye have no money? And why have ye no money? Is it not because ye receive but one penny for every bucket that ye bring to the tank, which is the Market, but must render two pennies for every bucket ye take out, so that the capitalists may have their profit? See ye not how by this means the tank must overflow, being filled by that ye lack and made to abound out of your emptiness? See ye not also that the harder ye toil and the more diligently ye seek and bring the water, the worse and not the better it shall be for you by reason of the profit, and that forever?" "'After this manner spake the agitators for many days unto the people, and none heeded them, but it was so that after a time the people hearkened. And they answered and said unto the agitators: "'"Ye say truth. It is because of the capitalists and of their profits that we want, seeing that by reason of them and their profits we may by no means come by the fruit of our labor, so that our labor is in vain, and the more we toil to fill the tank the sooner doth it overflow, and we may receive nothing because there is too much, according to the words of the soothsayers. But behold, the capitalists are hard men and their tender mercies are cruel. Tell us if ye know any way whereby we may deliver ourselves out of our bondage unto them. But if ye know of no certain way of deliverance we beseech you to hold your peace and let us alone, that we may forget our misery." "'And the agitators answered and said, "We know a way." "'And the people said: "Deceive us not, for this thing hath been from the beginning, and none hath found a way of deliverance until now, though many have sought it carefully with tears. But if ye know a way, speak unto us quickly." "'Then the agitators spake unto the people of the way. And they said: "'"Behold, what need have ye at all of these capitalists, that ye should yield them profits upon your labor? What great thing do they wherefore ye render them this tribute? Lo! it is only because they do order you in bands and lead you out and in and set your tasks and afterward give you a little of the water yourselves have brought and not they. Now, behold the way out of this bondage! Do ye for yourselves that which is done by the capitalists--namely, the ordering of your labor, and the marshaling of your bands, and the dividing of your tasks. So shall ye have no need at all of the capitalists and no more yield to them any profit, but all the fruit of your labor shall ye share as brethren, every one having the same; and so shall the tank never overflow until every man is full, and would not wag the tongue for more, and afterward shall ye with the overflow make pleasant fountains and fish ponds to delight yourselves withal even as did the capitalists; but these shall be for the delight of all." "'And the people answered, "How shall we go about to do this thing, for it seemeth good to us?" "'And the agitators answered: "Choose ye discreet men to go in and out before you and to marshal your bands and order your labor, and these men shall be as the capitalists were; but, behold, they shall not be your masters as the capitalists are, but your brethren and officers who do your will, and they shall not take any profits, but every man his share like the others, that there may be no more masters and servants among you, but brethren only. And from time to time, as ye see fit, ye shall choose other discreet men in place of the first to order the labor." "'And the people hearkened, and the thing was very good to them. Likewise seemed it not a hard thing. And with one voice they cried out, "So let it be as ye have said, for we will do it!" "'And the capitalists heard the noise of the shouting and what the people said, and the soothsayers heard it also, and likewise the false priests and the mighty men of war, who were a defense unto the capitalists; and when they heard they trembled exceedingly, so that their knees smote together, and they said one to another, "It is the end of us!" "'Howbeit, there were certain true priests of the living God who would not prophesy for the capitalists, but had compassion on the people; and when they heard the shouting of the people and what they said, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy, and gave thanks to God because of the deliverance. "'And the people went and did all the things that were told them of the agitators to do. And it came to pass as the agitators had said, even according to all their words. And there was no more any thirst in that land, neither any that was ahungered, nor naked, nor cold, nor in any manner of want; and every man said unto his fellow, "My brother," and every woman said unto her companion, "My sister," for so were they with one another as brethren and sisters which do dwell together in unity. And the blessing of God rested upon that land forever.'" CHAPTER XXIV. I AM SHOWN ALL THE KINGDOMS OF THE EARTH. The boys and girls of the political-economy class rose to their feet at the teacher's word of dismissal, and in the twinkling of an eye the scene which had been absorbing my attention disappeared, and I found myself staring at Dr. Leete's smiling countenance and endeavoring to imagine how I had come to be where I was. During the greater part and all the latter part of the session of the class so absolute had been the illusion of being actually present in the schoolroom, and so absorbing the interest of the theme, that I had quite forgotten the extraordinary device by which I was enabled to see and hear the proceedings. Now, as I recalled it, my mind reverted with an impulse of boundless curiosity to the electroscope and the processes by which it performed its miracles. Having given me some explanation of the mechanical operation of the apparatus and the way in which it served the purpose of a prolonged optic nerve, the doctor went on to exhibit its powers on a large scale. During the following hour, without leaving my chair, I made the tour of the earth, and learned by the testimony of my senses that the transformation which had come over Boston since my former life was but a sample of that which the whole world of men had undergone. I had but to name a great city or a famous locality in any country to be at once present there so far as sight and hearing were concerned. I looked down on modern New York, then upon Chicago, upon San Francisco, and upon New Orleans, finding each of these cities quite unrecognizable but for the natural features which constituted their setting. I visited London. I heard the Parisians talk French and the Berlinese talk German, and from St. Petersburg went to Cairo by way of Delhi. One city would be bathed in the noonday sun; over the next I visited, the moon, perhaps, was rising and the stars coming out; while over the third the silence of midnight brooded. In Paris, I remember, it was raining hard, and in London fog reigned supreme. In St. Petersburg there was a snow squall. Turning from the contemplation of the changing world of men to the changeless face of Nature, I renewed my old-time acquaintance with the natural wonders of the earth--the thundering cataracts, the stormy ocean shores, the lonely mountain tops, the great rivers, the glittering splendors of the polar regions, and the desolate places of the deserts. Meanwhile the doctor explained to me that not only the telephone and electroscope were always connected with a great number of regular stations commanding all scenes of special interest, but that whenever in any part of the world there occurred a spectacle or accident of particular interest, special connections were instantly made, so that all mankind could at once see what the situation was for themselves without need of actual or alleged special artists on the spot. With all my conceptions of time and space reduced to chaos, and well-nigh drunk with wonder, I exclaimed at last: "I can stand no more of this just now! I am beginning to doubt seriously whether I am in or out of the body." As a practical way of settling that question the doctor proposed a brisk walk, for we had not been out of the house that morning. "Have we had enough of economics for the day?" he asked as we left the house, "or would you like to attend the afternoon session the teacher spoke of?" I replied that I wished to attend it by all means. "Very good," said the doctor; "it will doubtless be very short, and what do you say to attending it this time in person? We shall have plenty of time for our walk and can easily get to the school before the hour by taking a car from any point. Seeing this is the first time you have used the electroscope, and have no assurance except its testimony that any such school or pupils really exist, perhaps it would help to confirm any impressions you may have received to visit the spot in the body." CHAPTER XXV. THE STRIKERS. Presently, as we were crossing Boston Common, absorbed in conversation, a shadow fell athwart the way, and looking up, I saw towering above us a sculptured group of heroic size. "Who are these?" I exclaimed. "You ought to know if any one," said the doctor. "They are contemporaries of yours who were making a good deal of disturbance in your day." But, indeed, it had only been as an involuntary expression of surprise that I had questioned what the figures stood for. Let me tell you, readers of the twentieth century, what I saw up there on the pedestal, and you will recognize the world-famous group. Shoulder to shoulder, as if rallied to resist assault, were three figures of men in the garb of the laboring class of my time. They were bareheaded, and their coarse-textured shirts, rolled above the elbow and open at the breast, showed the sinewy arms and chest. Before them, on the ground, lay a pair of shovels and a pickaxe. The central figure, with the right hand extended, palm outward, was pointing to the discarded tools. The arms of the other two were folded on their breasts. The faces were coarse and hard in outline and bristled with unkempt beards. Their expression was one of dogged defiance, and their gaze was fixed with such scowling intensity upon the void space before them that I involuntarily glanced behind me to see what they were looking at. There were two women also in the group, as coarse of dress and features as the men. One was kneeling before the figure on the right, holding up to him with one arm an emaciated, half-clad infant, while with the other she indicated the implements at his feet with an imploring gesture. The second of the women was plucking by the sleeve the man on the left as if to draw him back, while with the other hand she covered her eyes. But the men heeded the women not at all, or seemed, in their bitter wrath, to know that they were there. "Why," I exclaimed, "these are strikers!" "Yes," said the doctor, "this is The Strikers, Huntington's masterpiece, considered the greatest group of statuary in the city and one of the greatest in the country." "Those people are alive!" I said. "That is expert testimony," replied the doctor. "It is a pity Huntington died too soon to hear it. He would have been pleased." Now, I, in common with the wealthy and cultured class generally, of my day, had always held strikers in contempt and abhorrence, as blundering, dangerous marplots, as ignorant of their own best interests as they were reckless of other people's, and generally as pestilent fellows, whose demonstrations, so long as they were not violent, could not unfortunately be repressed by force, but ought always to be condemned, and promptly put down with an iron hand the moment there was an excuse for police interference. There was more or less tolerance among the well-to-do, for social reformers, who, by book or voice, advocated even very radical economic changes so long as they observed the conventionalities of speech, but for the striker there were few apologists. Of course, the capitalists emptied on him the vials of their wrath and contempt, and even people who thought they sympathized with the working class shook their heads at the mention of strikes, regarding them as calculated rather to hinder than help the emancipation of labor. Bred as I was in these prejudices, it may not seem strange that I was taken aback at finding such unpromising subjects selected for the highest place in the city. "There is no doubt as to the excellence of the artist's work," I said, "but what was there about the strikers that has made you pick them out of our generation as objects of veneration?" "We see in them," replied the doctor, "the pioneers in the revolt against private capitalism which brought in the present civilization. We honor them as those who, like Winkelried, 'made way for liberty, and died.' We revere in them the protomartyrs of co-operative industry and economic equality." "But I can assure you, doctor, that these fellows, at least in my day, had not the slightest idea of revolting against private capitalism as a system. They were very ignorant and quite incapable of grasping so large a conception. They had no notion of getting along without capitalists. All they imagined as possible or desirable was a little better treatment by their employers, a few cents more an hour, a few minutes less working time a day, or maybe merely the discharge of an unpopular foreman. The most they aimed at was some petty improvement in their condition, to attain which they did not hesitate to throw the whole industrial machine into disorder." "All which we moderns know quite well," replied the doctor. "Look at those faces. Has the sculptor idealized them? Are they the faces of philosophers? Do they not bear out your statement that the strikers, like the working-men generally, were, as a rule, ignorant, narrow-minded men, with no grasp of large questions, and incapable of so great an idea as the overthrow of an immemorial economic order? It is quite true that until some years after you fell asleep they did not realize that their quarrel was with private capitalism and not with individual capitalists. In this slowness of awakening to the full meaning of their revolt they were precisely on a par with the pioneers of all the great liberty revolutions. The minutemen at Concord and Lexington, in 1775, did not realize that they were pointing their guns at the monarchical idea. As little did the third estate of France, when it entered the Convention in 1789, realize that its road lay over the ruins of the throne. As little did the pioneers of English freedom, when they began to resist the will of Charles I, foresee that they would be compelled, before they got through, to take his head. In none of these instances, however, has posterity considered that the limited foresight of the pioneers as to the full consequences of their action lessened the world's debt to the crude initiative, without which the fuller triumph would never have come. The logic of the strike meant the overthrow of the irresponsible conduct of industry, whether the strikers knew it or not, and we can not rejoice in the consequences of that overthrow without honoring them in a way which very likely, as you intimate, would surprise them, could they know of it, as much as it does you. Let me try to give you the modern point of view as to the part played by their originals." We sat down upon one of the benches before the statue, and the doctor went on: "My dear Julian, who was it, pray, that first roused the world of your day to the fact that there was an industrial question, and by their pathetic demonstrations of passive resistance to wrong for fifty years kept the public attention fixed on that question till it was settled? Was it your statesmen, perchance your economists, your scholars, or any other of your so-called wise men? No. It was just those despised, ridiculed, cursed, and hooted fellows up there on that pedestal who with their perpetual strikes would not let the world rest till their wrong, which was also the whole world's wrong, was righted. Once more had God chosen the foolish things of this world to confound the wise, the weak things to confound the mighty. "In order to realize how powerfully these strikes operated to impress upon the people the intolerable wickedness and folly of private capitalism, you must remember that events are what teach men, that deeds have a far more potent educating influence than any amount of doctrine, and especially so in an age like yours, when the masses had almost no culture or ability to reason. There were not lacking in the revolutionary period many cultured men and women, who, with voice and pen, espoused the workers' cause, and showed them the way out; but their words might well have availed little but for the tremendous emphasis with which they were confirmed by the men up there, who starved to prove them true. Those rough-looking fellows, who probably could not have constructed a grammatical sentence, by their combined efforts, were demonstrating the necessity of a radically new industrial system by a more convincing argument than any rhetorician's skill could frame. When men take their lives in their hands to resist oppression, as those men did, other men are compelled to give heed to them. We have inscribed on the pedestal yonder, where you see the lettering, the words, which the action of the group above seems to voice: "'We can bear no more. It is better to starve than live on the terms you give us. Our lives, the lives of our wives and of our children, we set against your gains. If you put your foot upon our neck, we will bite your heel!' "This was the cry," pursued the doctor, "of men made desperate by oppression, to whom existence through suffering had become of no value. It was the same cry that in varied form but in one sense has been the watchword of every revolution that has marked an advance of the race--'Give us liberty, or give us death!' and never did it ring out with a cause so adequate, or wake the world to an issue so mighty, as in the mouths of these first rebels against the folly and the tyranny of private capital. "In your age, I know, Julian," the doctor went on in a gentler tone, "it was customary to associate valor with the clang of arms and the pomp and circumstance of war. But the echo of the fife and drum comes very faintly up to us, and moves us not at all. The soldier has had his day, and passed away forever with the ideal of manhood which he illustrated. But that group yonder stands for a type of self-devotion that appeals to us profoundly. Those men risked their lives when they flung down the tools of their trade, as truly as any soldiers going into battle, and took odds as desperate, and not only for themselves, but for their families, which no grateful country would care for in case of casualty to them. The soldier went forth cheered with music, and supported by the enthusiasm of the country, but these others were covered with ignominy and public contempt, and their failures and defeats were hailed with general acclamation. And yet they sought not the lives of others, but only that they might barely live; and though they had first thought of the welfare of themselves, and those nearest them, yet not the less were they fighting the fight of humanity and posterity in striking in the only way they could, and while yet no one else dared strike at all, against the economic system that had the world by the throat, and would never relax its grip by dint of soft words, or anything less than disabling blows. The clergy, the economists and the pedagogues, having left these ignorant men to seek as they might the solution of the social problem, while they themselves sat at ease and denied that there was any problem, were very voluble in their criticisms of the mistakes of the workingmen, as if it were possible to make any mistake in seeking a way out of the social chaos, which could be so fatuous or so criminal as the mistake of not trying to seek any. No doubt, Julian, I have put finer words in the mouths of those men up there than their originals might have even understood, but if the meaning was not in their words it was in their deeds. And it is for what they did, not for what they said, that we honor them as protomartyrs of the industrial republic of to-day, and bring our children, that they may kiss in gratitude the rough-shod feet of those who made the way for us." My experiences since I waked up in this year 2000 might be said to have consisted of a succession of instantaneous mental readjustments of a revolutionary character, in which what had formerly seemed evil to me had become good, and what had seemed wisdom had become foolishness. Had this conversation about the strikers taken place anywhere else, the entirely new impression I had received of the part played by them in the great social revolution of which I shared the benefit would simply have been one more of these readjustments, and the process entirely a mental one. But the presence of this wondrous group, the lifelikeness of the figures growing on my gaze as I listened to the doctor's words, imparted a peculiar personal quality--if I may use the term--to the revulsion of feeling that I experienced. Moved by an irresistible impulse, I rose to my feet, and, removing my hat, saluted the grim forms whose living originals I had joined my contemporaries in reviling. The doctor smiled gravely. "Do you know, my boy," he said, "it is not often that the whirligig of Time brings round his revenges in quite so dramatic a way as this?" CHAPTER XXVI. FOREIGN COMMERCE UNDER PROFITS; PROTECTION AND FREE TRADE, OR BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP SEA. We arrived at the Arlington School some time before the beginning of the recitation which we were to attend, and the doctor took the opportunity to introduce me to the teacher. He was extremely interested to learn that I had attended the morning session, and very desirous to know something of my impressions. As to the forthcoming recitation, he suggested that if the members of the class were aware that they had so distinguished an auditor, it would be likely to embarrass them, and he should therefore say nothing about my presence until the close of the session, when he should crave the privilege of presenting his pupils to me personally. He hoped I would permit this, as it would be for them the event of a lifetime which their grandchildren would never tire of hearing them describe. The entrance of the class interrupted our conversation, and the doctor and myself, having taken our seats in a gallery, where we could hear and see without being seen, the session at once began. "This morning," said the teacher, "we confined ourselves for the sake of clearness to the effects of the profit system upon a nation or community considered as if it were alone in the world and without relations to other communities. There is no way in which such outside relations operated to negative any of the laws of profit which were brought out this morning, but they did operate to extend the effect of those laws in many interesting ways, and without some reference to foreign commerce our review of the profit system would be incomplete. "In the so-called political economies of our forefathers we read a vast deal about the advantages to a country of having an international trade. It was supposed to be one of the great secrets of national prosperity, and a chief study of the nineteenth-century statesmen seems to have been to establish and extend foreign commerce.--Now, Paul, will you tell us the economic theory as to the advantages of foreign commerce?" "It is based on the fact," said the lad Paul, "that countries differ in climate, natural resources, and other conditions, so that in some it is wholly impossible or very difficult to produce certain needful things, while it is very easy to produce certain other things in greater abundance than is needed. In former times also there were marked differences in the grade of civilization and the condition of the arts in different countries, which still further modified their respective powers in the production of wealth. This being so, it might obviously be for the mutual advantage of countries to exchange with one another what they could produce against what they could not produce at all or only with difficulty, and not merely thus secure many things which otherwise they must go without, but also greatly increase the total effectiveness of their industry by applying it to the sorts of production best fitted to their conditions. In order, however, that the people of the respective countries should actually derive this advantage or any advantage from foreign exchange, it would be necessary that the exchanges should be carried on in the general interest for the purpose of giving the people at large the benefit of them, as is done at the present day, when foreign commerce, like other economic undertakings, is carried on by the governments of the several countries. But there was, of course, no national agency to carry on foreign commerce in that day. The foreign trade, just like the internal processes of production and distribution, was conducted by the capitalists on the profit system. The result was that all the benefits of this fair sounding theory of foreign commerce were either totally nullified or turned into curses, and the international trade relations of the countries constituted merely a larger field for illustrating the baneful effects of the profit system and its power to turn good to evil and 'shut the gates of mercy on mankind.'" HOW PROFITS NULLIFIED THE BENEFIT OF COMMERCE. "Illustrate, please, the operation of the profit system in international trade." "Let us suppose," said the boy Paul, "that America could produce grain and other food stuffs with great cheapness and in greater quantities than the people needed. Suppose, on the contrary, that England could produce food stuffs only with difficulty and in small quantities. Suppose, however, that England, on account of various conditions, could produce clothing and hardware much more cheaply and abundantly than America. In such a case it would seem that both countries would be gainers if Americans exchanged the food stuffs which it was so easy for them to produce for the clothing and hardware which it was so easy for the English to produce. The result would appear to promise a clear and equal gain for both people. But this, of course, is on the supposition that the exchange should be negotiated by a public agency for the benefit of the respective populations at large. But when, as in those days, the exchange was negotiated wholly by private capitalists competing for private profits at the expense of the communities, the result was totally different. "The American grain merchant who exported grain to the English would be impelled, by the competition of other American grain merchants, to put his price to the English as low as possible, and to do that he would beat down to the lowest possible figure the American farmer who produced the grain. And not only must the American merchant sell as low as his American rivals, but he must also undersell the grain merchants of other grain-producing countries, such as Russia, Egypt, and India. And now let us see how much benefit the English people received from the cheap American grain. We will say that, owing to the foreign food supply, the cost of living declined one half or a third in England. Here would seem a great gain surely; but look at the other side of it. The English must pay for their grain by supplying the Americans with cloth and hardware. The English manufacturers of these things were rivals just as the American grain merchants were--each one desirous of capturing as large a part of the American market as he could. He must therefore, if possible, undersell his home rivals. Moreover, like the American grain merchant, the English manufacturer must contend with foreign rivals. Belgium and Germany made hardware and cloth very cheaply, and the Americans would exchange their grain for these commodities with the Belgians and the Germans unless the English sold cheaper. Now, the main element in the cost of making cloth and hardware was the wages paid for labor. A pressure was accordingly sure to be brought to bear by every English manufacturer upon his workmen to compel them to accept lower wages so that he might undersell his English rivals, and also cut under the German and Belgian manufacturers, who were trying to get the American trade. Now can the English workman live on less wages than before? Plainly he can, for his food supply has been greatly cheapened. Presently, therefore, he finds his wages forced down by as much as the cheaper food supply has cheapened his living, and so finds himself just where he was to start with before the American trade began. And now look again at the American farmer. He is now getting his imported clothing and tools much cheaper than before, and consequently the lowest living price at which he can afford to sell grain is considerably lower than before the English trade began--lower by so much, in fact, as he has saved on his tools and clothing. Of this, the grain merchant, of course, took prompt advantage, for unless he put his grain into the English market lower than other grain merchants, he would lose his trade, and Russia, Egypt, and India stood ready to flood England with grain if the Americans could not bid below them, and then farewell to cheap cloth and tools! So down presently went the price the American farmer received for his grain, until the reduction absorbed all that he had gained by the cheaper imported fabrics and hardware, and he, like his fellow-victim across the sea--the English iron worker or factory operative--was no better off than he was before English trade had been suggested. "But was he as well off? Was either the American or the English worker as well off as before this interchange of products began, which, if rightly conducted, would have been so greatly beneficial to both? On the contrary, both alike were in important ways distinctly worse off. Each had indeed done badly enough before, but the industrial system on which they depended, being limited by the national borders, was comparatively simple and uncomplex, self-sustaining, and liable only to local and transient disturbances, the effect of which could be to some extent estimated, possibly remedied. Now, however, the English operatives and the American farmer had alike become dependent upon the delicate balance of a complex set of international adjustments liable at any moment to derangements that might take away their livelihood, without leaving them even the small satisfaction of understanding what hurt them. The prices of their labor or their produce were no longer dependent as before upon established local customs and national standards of living, but had become subject to determination by the pitiless necessities of a world-wide competition in which the American farmer and the English artisan were forced into rivalship with the Indian ryot, the Egyptian fellah, the half-starved Belgian miner, or the German weaver. In former ages, before international trade had become general, when one nation was down another was up, and there was always hope in looking over seas; but the prospect which the unlimited development of international commerce upon the profit system was opening to mankind the latter part of the nineteenth century was that of a world-wide standard of living fixed by the rate at which life could be supported by the worst-used races. International trade was already showing itself to be the instrumentality by which the world-wide plutocracy would soon have established its sway if the great Revolution had tarried." "In the case of the supposed reciprocal trade between England and America, which you have used as an illustration," said the teacher, "you have assumed that the trade relation was an exchange of commodities on equal terms. In such a case it appears that the effect of the profit system was to leave the masses of both countries somewhat worse off than they would have been without foreign trade, the gain on both the American and English side inuring wholly to the manufacturing and trading capitalists. But in fact both countries in a trade relation were not usually on equal terms. The capitalists of one were often far more powerful than those of another, and had a stronger or older economic organization at their service. In that case what was the result?" "The overwhelming competition of the capitalists of the stronger country crushed out the enterprises of the capitalists of the weaker country, the people of which consequently became wholly dependent upon the foreign capitalists for many productions which otherwise would have been produced at home to the profit of home capitalists, and in proportion as the capitalists of the dependent country were thus rendered economically incapable of resistance the capitalists of the stronger country regulated at their pleasure the terms of trade. The American colonies, in 1776, were driven to revolt against England by the oppression resulting from such a relation. The object of founding colonies, which was one of the main ends of seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century statesmanship, was to bring new communities into this relation of economic vassalage to the home capitalists, who, having beggared the home market by their profit, saw no prospect of making more except by fastening their suckers upon outside communities. Great Britain, whose capitalists were strongest of all, was naturally the leader in this policy, and the main end of her wars and her diplomacy for many centuries before the great Revolution was to obtain such colonies, and to secure from weaker nations trade concessions and openings--peaceably if possible, at the mouth of the cannon if necessary." "How about the condition of the masses in a country thus reduced to commercial vassalage to the capitalists of another country? Was it necessarily worse than the condition of the masses of the superior country?" "That did not follow at all. We must constantly keep in mind that the interests of the capitalists and of the people were not identical. The prosperity of the capitalists of a country by no means implied prosperity on the part of the population, nor the reverse. If the masses of the dependent country had not been exploited by foreign capitalists, they would have been by domestic capitalists. Both they and the working masses of the superior country were equally the tools and slaves of the capitalists, who did not treat workingmen any better on account of being their fellow countrymen than if they had been foreigners. It was the capitalists of the dependent country rather than the masses who suffered by the suppression of independent business enterprises." BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP SEA. "That will do, Paul.--We will now ask some information from you, Helen, as to a point which Paul's last words have suggested. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a bitter controversy raged among our ancestors between two parties in opinion and politics, calling themselves, respectively, the Protectionists and the Free Traders, the former of whom held that it was well to shut out the competition of foreign capitalists in the market of a country by a tariff upon imports, while the latter held that no impediment should be allowed to the entirely free course of trade. What have you to say as to the merits of this controversy?" "Merely," replied the girl called Helen, "that the difference between the two policies, so far as it affected the people at large, reduced itself to the question whether they preferred being fleeced by home or foreign capitalists. Free trade was the cry of the capitalists who felt themselves able to crush those of rival nations if allowed the opportunity to compete with them. Protection was the cry of the capitalists who felt themselves weaker than those of other nations, and feared that their enterprises would be crushed and their profits taken away if free competition were allowed. The Free Traders were like a man who, seeing his antagonist is no match for him, boldly calls for a free fight and no favor, while the Protectionist was the man who, seeing himself overmatched, called for the police. The Free Trader held that the natural, God-given right of the capitalist to shear the people anywhere he found them was superior to considerations of race, nationality, or boundary lines. The Protectionist, on the contrary, maintained the patriotic right of the capitalist to the exclusive shearing of his own fellow-countrymen without interference of foreign capitalists. As to the mass of the people, the nation at large, it was, as Paul has just said, a matter of indifference whether they were fleeced by the capitalists of their own country under protection or the capitalists of foreign countries under free trade. The literature of the controversy between Protectionists and Free Traders makes this very clear. Whatever else the Protectionists failed to prove, they were able to demonstrate that the condition of the people in free-trade countries was quite as bad as anywhere else, and, on the other hand, the Free Traders were equally conclusive in the proofs they presented that the people in protected countries, other things being equal, were no better off than those in free-trade lands. The question of Protection or Free Trade interested the capitalists only. For the people, it was the choice between the devil and the deep sea." "Let us have a concrete illustration." said the teacher. "Take the case of England. She was beyond comparison the country of all others in the nineteenth century which had most foreign trade and commanded most foreign markets. If a large volume of foreign trade under conditions practically dictated by its capitalists was under the profit system a source of national prosperity to a country, we should expect to see the mass of the British people at the end of the nineteenth century enjoying an altogether extraordinary felicity and general welfare as compared with that of other peoples or any former people, for never before did a nation develop so vast a foreign commerce. What were the facts?" "It was common," replied the girl, "for our ancestors in the vague and foggy way in which they used the terms 'nation' and 'national' to speak of Great Britain as rich. But it was only her capitalists, some scores of thousands of individuals among some forty million people, who were rich. These indeed had incredible accumulations, but the remainder of the forty millions--the whole people, in fact, save an infinitesimal fraction--were sunk in poverty. It is said that England had a larger and more hopeless pauper problem than any other civilized nation. The condition of her working masses was not only more wretched than that of many contemporary people, but was worse, as proved by the most careful economic comparisons, than it had been in the fifteenth century, before foreign trade was thought of. People do not emigrate from a land where they are well off, but the British people, driven out by want, had found the frozen Canadas and the torrid zone more hospitable than their native land. As an illustration of the fact that the welfare of the working masses was in no way improved when the capitalists of a country commanded foreign markets, it is interesting to note the fact that the British emigrant was able to make a better living in English colonies whose markets were wholly dominated by English capitalists than he had been at home as the employee of those capitalists. We shall remember also that Malthus, with his doctrine that it was the best thing that could happen to a workingman not to be born, was an Englishman, and based his conclusions very logically upon his observation of the conditions of life for the masses in that country which had been more successful than any other in any age in monopolizing the foreign markets of the world by its commerce. "Or," the lad went on, "take Belgium, that old Flemish land of merchants, where foreign trade had been longer and more steadily used than in any other European country. In the latter part of the nineteenth century the mass of the Belgian people, the hardest-worked population in the world, was said to have been, as a rule, without adequate food--to be undergoing, in short, a process of slow starvation. They, like the people of England and the people of Germany, are proved, by statistical calculations upon the subject that have come down to us, to have been economically very much better off during the fifteenth and early part of the sixteenth century, when foreign trade was hardly known, than they were in the nineteenth. There was a possibility before foreign trade for profit began that a population might obtain some share of the richness of a bountiful land just from the lack of any outlet for it. But with the beginning of foreign commerce, under the profit system, that possibility vanished. Thenceforth everything good or desirable, above what might serve for the barest subsistence of labor, was systematically and exhaustively gathered up by the capitalists, to be exchanged in foreign lands for gold and gems, silks, velvets, and ostrich plumes for the rich. As Goldsmith had it: "Around the world each needful product flies For all the luxuries the world supplies." "To what has the struggle of the nations for foreign markets in the nineteenth century been aptly compared?" "To a contest between galleys manned by slaves, whose owners were racing for a prize." "In such a race, which crew was likely to fare worse, that of the winning or the losing galley?" "That of the winning galley, by all means," replied the girl, "for the supposition is that, other conditions being equal, it was the more sorely scourged." "Just so," said the teacher, "and on the same principle, when the capitalists of two countries contended for the supplying of a foreign market it was the workers subject to the successful group of capitalists who were most to be pitied, for, other conditions being equal, they were likely to be those whose wages had been cut lowest and whose general condition was most degraded." "But tell us," said the teacher, "were there not instances of a general poverty in countries having no foreign trade as great as prevailed in the countries you have mentioned?" "Dear me, yes!" replied the girl. "I have not meant to convey any impression that because the tender mercies of the foreign capitalists were cruel, those of the domestic capitalist were any less so. The comparison is merely between the operation of the profit system on a larger or smaller scale. So long as the profit system was retained, it would be all one in the end, whether you built a wall around a country and left the people to be exploited exclusively by home capitalists, or threw the wall down and let in the foreigners." CHAPTER XXVII. HOSTILITY OF A SYSTEM OF VESTED INTERESTS TO IMPROVEMENT. "Now, Florence," said the teacher, "with your assistance we will take up the closing topic in our consideration of the economic system of our fathers--namely, its hostility to invention and improvement. It has been our painful duty to point out numerous respects in which our respected ancestors were strangely blind to the true character and effects of their economic institutions, but no instance perhaps is more striking than this. Far from seeing the necessary antagonism between private capitalism and the march of improvement which is so plain to us, they appear to have sincerely believed that their system was peculiarly favorable to the progress of invention, and that its advantage in this respect was so great as to be an important set-off to its admitted ethical defects. Here there is decidedly a broad difference in opinion, but fortunately the facts are so well authenticated that we shall have no difficulty in concluding which view is correct. "The subject divides itself into two branches: First, the natural antagonism of the old system to economic changes; and, second, the effect of the profit principle to minimize if not wholly to nullify the benefit of such economic improvements as were able to overcome that antagonism so far as to get themselves introduced.--Now, Florence, tell us what there was about the old economic system, the system of private capitalism, which made it constitutionally opposed to changes in methods." "It was," replied the girl, "the fact that it consisted of independent vested interests without any principle of coordination or combination, the result being that the economic welfare of every individual or group was wholly dependent upon his or its particular vested interest without regard to others or to the welfare of the whole body." "Please bring out your meaning by comparing our modern system in the respect you speak of with private capitalism." "Our system is a strictly integrated one--that is to say, no one has any economic interest in any part or function of the economic organization which is distinct from his interest in every other part and function. His only interest is in the greatest possible output of the whole. We have our several occupations, but only that we may work the more efficiently for the common fund. We may become very enthusiastic about our special pursuit, but as a matter of sentiment only, for our economic interests are no more dependent upon our special occupation than upon any other. We share equally in the total product, whatever it is." "How does the integrated character of the economic system affect our attitude toward improvements or inventions of any sort in economic processes?" "We welcome them with eagerness. Why should we not? Any improvement of this sort must necessarily redound to the advantage of every one in the nation and to every one's advantage equally. If the occupation affected by the invention happens to be our particular employment we lose nothing, though it should make that occupation wholly superfluous. We might in that case feel a little sentimental regret over the passing away of old habits, but that is all. No one's substantial interests are in any way more identified with one pursuit than another. All are in the service of the nation, and it is the business and interest of the nation to see that every one is provided with other work as soon as his former occupation becomes unnecessary to the general weal, and under no circumstances is his rate of maintenance affected. From its first production every improvement in economic processes is therefore an unalloyed blessing to all. The inventor comes bringing a gift of greater wealth or leisure in his hand for every one on earth, and it is no wonder that the people's gratitude makes his reward the most enviable to be won by a public benefactor." "Now, Florence, tell us in what way the multitude of distinct vested interests which made up private capitalism operated to produce an antagonism toward economic inventions and improvements." HOW PROGRESS ANTAGONIZED VESTED INTERESTS. "As I have said," replied the girl, "everybody's interest was wholly confined to and bound up with the particular occupation he was engaged in. If he was a capitalist, his capital was embarked in it; if he was an artisan, his capital was the knowledge of some particular craft or part of a craft, and he depended for his livelihood on the demand for the sort of work he had learned how to do. Neither as capitalist or artisan, as employer or employee, had he any economic interest or dependence outside of or larger than his special business. Now, the effect of any new idea, invention, or discovery for economic application is to dispense more or less completely with the process formerly used in that department, and so far to destroy the economic basis of the occupations connected with that business. Under our system, as I have said, that means no loss to anybody, but simply a shifting of workers, with a net gain in wealth or leisure to all; but then it meant ruin to those involved in the change. The capitalist lost his capital, his plant, his investments more or less totally, and the workingmen lost their means of livelihood and were thrown on what you well called the cold charity of the world--a charity usually well below zero; and this loss without any rebate or compensation whatever from the public at large on account of any general benefit that might be received from the invention. It was complete. Consequently, the most beneficent of inventions was cruel as death to those who had been dependent for living or for profit on the particular occupations it affected. The capitalists grew gray from fear of discoveries which in a day might turn their costly plants to old iron fit only for the junkshop, and the nightmare of the artisan was some machine which should take bread from his children's mouths by enabling his employer to dispense with his services. "Owing to this division of the economic field into a set of vested personal and group interests wholly without coherency or integrating idea, each standing or falling by and for itself, every step in the advance of the arts and sciences was gained only at the cost of an amount of loss and ruin to particular portions of the community such as would be wrought by a blight or pestilence. The march of invention was white with the bleaching bones of innumerable hecatombs of victims. The spinning jenny replaced the spinning wheel, and famine stalked through English villages. The railroad supplanted the stagecoach, and a thousand hill towns died while as many sprang up in the valleys, and the farmers of the East were pauperized by the new agriculture of the West. Petroleum succeeded whale-oil, and a hundred seaports withered. Coal and iron were found in the South, and the grass grew in the streets of the Northern centers of iron-making. Electricity succeeded steam, and billions of railroad property were wiped out. But what is the use of lengthening a list which might be made interminable? The rule was always the same: every important invention brought uncompensated disaster to some portion of the people. Armies of bankrupts, hosts of workers forced into vagabondage, a sea of suffering of every sort, made up the price which our ancestors paid for every step of progress. "Afterward, when the victims had been buried or put out of the way, it was customary with our fathers to celebrate these industrial triumphs, and on such occasions a common quotation in the mouths of the orators was a line of verse to the effect that-- "Peace hath her victories not less renowned than those of war. The orators were not wont to dwell on the fact that these victories of what they so oddly called peace were usually purchased at a cost in human life and suffering quite as great as--yes, often greater than--those of so-called war. We have all read of Tamerlane's pyramid at Damascus made of seventy thousand skulls of his victims. It may be said that if the victims of the various inventions connected with the introduction of steam had consented to contribute their skulls to a monument in honor of Stevenson or Arkwright it would dwarf Tamerlane's into insignificance. Tamerlane was a beast, and Arkwright was a genius sent to help men, yet the hideous juggle of the old-time economic system made the benefactor the cause of as much human suffering as the brutal conqueror. It was bad enough when men stoned and crucified those who came to help them, but private capitalism did them a worse outrage still in turning the gifts they brought into curses." "And did the workers and the capitalists whose interests were threatened by the progress of invention take practical means of resisting that progress and suppressing the inventions and the inventors?" "They did all they could in that way. If the working-men had been strong enough they would have put an absolute veto on inventions of any sort tending to diminish the demand for crude hand labor in their respective crafts. As it was, they did all it was possible for them to accomplish in that direction by trades-union dictation and mob violence; nor can any one blame the poor fellows for resisting to the utmost improvements which improved them out of the means of livelihood. A machine gun would have been scarcely more deadly if turned upon the workingmen of that day than a labor-saving machine. In those bitter times a man thrown out of the employment he had fitted himself for might about as well have been shot, and if he were not able to get any other work, as so many were not, he would have been altogether better off had he been killed in battle with the drum and fife to cheer him and the hope of a pension for his family. Only, of course, it was the system of private capitalism and not the labor-saving machine which the workingmen should have attacked, for with a rational economic system the machine would have been wholly beneficent." "How did the capitalists resist inventions?" "Chiefly by negative means, though much more effective ones than the mob violence which the workingmen used. The initiative in everything belonged to the capitalists. No inventor could introduce an invention, however excellent, unless he could get capitalists to take it up, and this usually they would not do unless the inventor relinquished to them most of his hopes of profit from the discovery. A much more important hindrance to the introduction of inventions resulted from the fact that those who would be interested in taking them up were those already carrying on the business the invention applied to, and their interest was in most cases to suppress an innovation which threatened to make obsolete the machinery and methods in which their capital was invested. The capitalist had to be fully assured not only that the invention was a good one in itself, but that it would be so profitable to himself personally as to make up for all the damage to his existing capital before he would touch it. When inventions wholly did away with processes which had been the basis of profit-charging it was often suicidal for the capitalist to adopt them. If they could not suppress such inventions in any other way, it was their custom to buy them up and pigeonhole them. After the Revolution there were found enough of these patents which had been bought up and pigeonholed in self-protection by the capitalists to have kept the world in novelties for ten years if nothing more had been discovered. One of the most tragical chapters in the history of the old order is made up of the difficulties, rebuffs, and lifelong disappointments which inventors had to contend with before they could get their discoveries introduced, and the frauds by which in most cases they were swindled out of the profits of them by the capitalists through whom their introduction was obtained. These stories seem, indeed, well-nigh incredible nowadays, when the nation is alert and eager to foster and encourage every stirring of the inventive spirit, and every one with any sort of new idea can command the offices of the administration without cost to safeguard his claim to priority and to furnish him all possible facilities of information, material, and appliances to perfect his conception." "Considering," said the teacher, "that these facts as to the resistance offered by vested interests to the march of improvement must have been even more obvious to our ancestors than to us, how do you account for the belief they seem to have sincerely held that private capitalism as a system was favorable to invention?" "Doubtless," replied the girl, "it was because they saw that whenever an invention was introduced it was under the patronage of capitalists. This was, of course, necessarily so because all economic initiative was confined to the capitalists. Our forefathers, observing that inventions when introduced at all were introduced through the machinery of private capitalism, overlooked the fact that usually it was only after exhausting its power as an obstruction to invention that capital lent itself to its advancement. They were in this respect like children who, seeing the water pouring over the edge of a dam and coming over nowhere else, should conclude that the dam was an agency for aiding the flow of the river instead of being an obstruction which let it over only when it could be kept back no longer." * * * * * "Our lesson," said the teacher, "relates in strictness only to the economic results of the old order, but at times the theme suggests aspects of former social conditions too important to pass without mention. We have seen how obstructive was the system of vested interests which underlaid private capitalism to the introduction of improvements and inventions in the economic field. But there was another field in which the same influence was exerted with effects really far more important and disastrous.--Tell us, Florence, something of the manner in which the vested interest system tended to resist the advance of new ideas in the field of thought, of morals, science, and religion." "Previous to the great Revolution," the girl replied, "the highest education not being universal as with us, but limited to a small body, the members of this body, known as the learned and professional classes, necessarily became the moral and intellectual teachers and leaders of the nation. They molded the thoughts of the people, set them their standards, and through the control of their minds dominated their material interests and determined the course of civilization. No such power is now monopolized by any class, because the high level of general education would make it impossible for any class of mere men to lead the people blindly. Seeing, however, that such a power was exercised in that day and limited to so small a class, it was a most vital point that this class should be qualified to discharge so responsible a duty in a spirit of devotion to the general weal unbiased by distracting motives. But under the system of private capitalism, which made every person and group economically dependent upon and exclusively concerned in the prosperity of the occupation followed by himself and his group, this ideal was impossible of attainment. The learned class, the teachers, the preachers, writers, and professional men were only tradesmen after all, just like the shoemakers and the carpenters, and their welfare was absolutely bound up with the demand for the particular sets of ideas and doctrines they represented and the particular sorts of professional services they got their living by rendering. Each man's line of teaching or preaching was his vested interest--the means of his livelihood. That being so, the members of the learned and professional class were bound to be affected by innovations in their departments precisely as shoemakers or carpenters by inventions affecting their trades. It necessarily followed that when any new idea was suggested in religion, in medicine, in science, in economics, in sociology, and indeed in almost any field of thought, the first question which the learned body having charge of that field and making a living out of it would ask itself was not whether the idea was good and true and would tend to the general welfare, but how it would immediately and directly affect the set of doctrines, traditions, and institutions, with the prestige of which their own personal interests were identified. If it was a new religious conception that had been suggested, the clergyman considered, first of all, how it would affect his sect and his personal standing in it. If it were a new medical idea, the doctor asked first how it would affect the practice of the school he was identified with. If it was a new economic or social theory, then all those whose professional capital was their reputation as teachers in that branch questioned first how the new idea agreed with the doctrines and traditions constituting their stock in trade. Now, as any new idea, almost as a matter of course, must operate to discredit previous ideas in the same field, it followed that the economic self-interest of the learned classes would instinctively and almost invariably be opposed to reform or advance of thought in their fields. "Being human, they were scarcely more to be blamed for involuntarily regarding new ideas in their specialties with aversion than the weaver or the brickmaker for resisting the introduction of inventions calculated to take the bread out of his mouth. And yet consider what a tremendous, almost insurmountable, obstacle to human progress was presented by the fact that the intellectual leaders of the nations and the molders of the people's thoughts, by their economic dependence upon vested interests in established ideas, were biased against progress by the strongest motives of self-interest. When we give due thought to the significance of this fact, we shall find ourselves wondering no longer at the slow rate of human advance in the past, but rather that there should have been any advance at all." CHAPTER XXVIII. HOW THE PROFIT SYSTEM NULLIFIED THE BENEFIT OF INVENTIONS. "The general subject of the hostility of private capitalism to progress," pursued the teacher, "divides itself, as I said, into two branches. First, the constitutional antagonism between a system of distinct and separate vested interests and all unsettling changes which, whatever their ultimate effect, must be directly damaging to those interests. We will now ask you, Harold, to take up the second branch of the subject--namely, the effect of the profit principle to minimize, if not wholly to nullify, the benefit to the community of such inventions and improvements as were able to overcome the antagonism of vested interests so far as to get themselves introduced. The nineteenth century, including the last quarter of the eighteenth, was marked by an astonishing and absolutely unprecedented number of great inventions in economic processes. To what was this outburst of inventive genius due?" "To the same cause," replied the boy, "which accounts for the rise of the democratic movement and the idea of human equality during the same period--that is to say, the diffusion of intelligence among the masses, which, for the first time becoming somewhat general, multiplied ten-thousandfold the thinking force of mankind, and, in the political aspect of the matter, changed the purpose of that thinking from the interest of the few to that of the many." "Our ancestors," said the teacher, "seeing that this outburst of invention took place under private capitalism, assumed that there must be something in that system peculiarly favorable to the genius of invention. Have you anything to say on that point beyond what has been said?" "Nothing," replied the boy, "except that by the same rule we ought to give credit to the institutions of royalty, nobility, and plutocracy for the democratic idea which under their fostering influence during the same period grew to flowering in the great Revolution." "I think that will do on that point," answered the teacher. "We will now ask you to tell us something more particularly of this great period of invention which began in the latter part of the eighteenth century." HAROLD STATES THE FACTS. "From the times of antiquity up to the last quarter of the eighteenth century," said the lad, "there had been almost no progress in the mechanical sciences save as to shipbuilding and arms. From 1780, or thereabouts, dates the beginning of a series of discoveries of sources of power, and their application by machinery to economic purposes, which, during the century following, completely revolutionized the conditions of industry and commerce. Steam and coal meant a multiplication of human energy in the production of wealth which was almost incalculable. For industrial purposes it is not too much to say that they transformed man from a pygmy to a Titan. These were, of course, only the greatest factors in a countless variety of discoveries by which prodigious economies of labor were effected in every detail of the arts by which human life is maintained and ministered to. In agriculture, where Nature, which can not be too much hurried, is a large partner, and wherein, therefore, man's part is less controlling than in other industries, it might be expected that the increase of productive energy through human invention would be least. Yet here it was estimated that agricultural machinery, as most perfectly developed in America, had multiplied some fifteenfold the product of the individual worker. In most sorts of production less directly dependent upon Nature, invention during this period had multiplied the efficiency of labor in a much greater degree, ranging from fifty and a hundred-fold to several thousand-fold, one man being able to accomplish as much as a small army in all previous ages." "That is to say," said the teacher, "it would seem that while the needs of the human race had not increased, its power to supply those needs had been indefinitely multiplied. This prodigious increase in the potency of labor was a clear net economic gain for the world, such as the previous history of the race furnished nothing comparable to. It was as if God had given to man his power of attorney in full, to command all the forces of the universe to serve him. Now, Harold, suppose you had merely been told as much as you have told us concerning the hundredfold multiplication of the wealth-producing power of the race which took place at this period, and were left, without further information, to infer for yourself how great a change for the better in the condition of mankind would naturally follow, what would it seem reasonable to suppose?" "It would seem safe to take for granted at the least," replied the boy, "that every form of human unhappiness or imperfection resulting directly or indirectly from economic want would be absolutely banished from the earth. That the very meaning of the word poverty would have been forgotten would seem to be a matter-of-course assumption to begin with. Beyond that we might go on and fancy almost anything in the way of universal diffusion of luxury that we pleased. The facts given as the basis of the speculation would justify the wildest day-dreams of universal happiness, so far as material abundance could directly or indirectly minister to it." "Very good, Harold. We know now what to expect when you shall go on to tell us what the historical facts are as to the degree of improvement in the economic condition of the mass of the race, which actually did result from the great inventions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Take the condition of the mass of the people in the advanced countries at the close of the nineteenth century, after they had been enjoying the benefits of coal and steam, and the most of the other great inventions for a century, more or less, and comparing it with their condition, say, in 1780, give us some idea of the change for the better which had taken place in their economic welfare. Doubtless it was something marvelous." "It was a subject of much nice debate and close figuring," replied the boy, "whether in the most advanced countries there had been, taking one class with another, and disregarding mere changes in fashions, any real improvement at all in the economic basis of the great majority of the people." "Is it possible that the improvement had been so small that there could be a question raised whether there had been any at all?" "Precisely so. As to the English people in the nineteenth century, Florence has given us the facts in speaking of the effects of foreign commerce. The English had not only a greater foreign commerce than any other nation, but had also made earlier and fuller use of the great inventions than any other. She has told us that the sociologists of the time had no difficulty in proving that the economic condition of the English people was more wretched in the latter part of the nineteenth century than it had been centuries previous, before steam had been thought of, and that this was equally true of the peoples of the Low Countries, and the masses of Germany. As to the working masses of Italy and Spain, they had been in much better economic condition during periods of the Roman Empire than they were in the nineteenth century. If the French were a little better off in the nineteenth than in the eighteenth century, it was owing wholly to the distribution of land effected by the French Revolution, and in no way to the great inventions." "How was it in the United States?" "If America," replied the lad, "had shown a notable improvement in the condition of the people, it would not be necessary to ascribe it to the progress of invention, for the wonderful economic opportunities of a new country had given them a vast though necessarily temporary advantage over other nations. It does not appear, however, that there was any more agreement of testimony as to whether the condition of the masses had on the whole improved in America than in the Old World. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, with a view to allaying the discontent of the wage-earners and the farmers, which was then beginning to swell to revolutionary volume, agents of the United States Government published elaborate comparisons of wages and prices, in which they argued out a small percentage of gain on the whole in the economic condition of the American artisans during the century. At this distance we can not, of course, criticise these calculations in detail, but we may base a reasonable doubt of the conclusion that the condition of the masses had very greatly improved upon the existence of the popular discontent which they were published in the vain hope of moderating. It seems safe to assume that the people were better acquainted with their own condition than the sociologists, and it is certain that it was the growing conviction of the American masses during the closing decades of the nineteenth century that they were losing ground economically and in danger of sinking into the degraded condition of the proletariat and peasantry of the ancient and contemporary European world. Against the laborious tabulations of the apologists of capitalism we may adduce, as far superior and more convincing evidence of the economic tendency of the American people during the latter part of the nineteenth century, such signs of the times as the growth of beggary and vagabondage to Old World proportions, the embittered revolts of the wage-earners which kept up a constant industrial war, and finally the condition of bankruptcy into which the farming population was sinking." "That will do as to that point," said the teacher. "In such a comparison as this small margins and nice points of difference are impertinent. It is enough that if the indefinite multiplication of man's wealth-producing power by inventive progress had been developed and distributed with any degree of intelligence for the general interest, poverty would have disappeared and comfort if not luxury have become the universal condition. This being a fact as plain and large as the sun, it is needless to consider the hairsplitting debates of the economists as to whether the condition of this or that class of the masses in this or that country was a grain better or two grains worse than it had been. It is enough for the purpose of the argument that nobody anywhere in any country pretended that there had been an improvement noticeable enough to make even a beginning toward that complete transformation in the human condition for the better, of which the great inventions by universal admission had contained the full and immediate promise and potency. "And now tell us, Harold, what our ancestors had to say as to this astonishing fact--a fact more marvelous than the great inventions themselves, namely, their failure to prove of any considerable benefit to mankind. Surely a phenomenon at once so amazing in itself and involving so prodigious a defeat to the hopes of human happiness must have set a world of rational beings to speculating in a very impassioned way as to what the explanation might be. One would suppose that the facts of this failure with which our ancestors were confronted would have been enough to convince them that there must be something radically and horribly wrong about any economic system which was responsible for it or had permitted it, and that no further argument would have been wanted to induce them to make a radical change in it." "One would think so, certainly," said the boy, "but it did not seem to occur to our great-grandfathers to hold their economic system to any responsibility for the result. As we have seen, they recognized, however they might dispute as to percentages, that the great inventions had failed to make any notable improvement in the human condition, but they never seemed to get so far as to inquire seriously why this was so. In the voluminous works of the economists of the period we find no discussions, much less any attempt to explain, a fact which to our view absolutely overshadows all the other features of the economic situation before the Revolution. And the strangest thing about it all is that their failure to derive any benefit worth speaking of from the progress of invention in no way seemed to dampen the enthusiasm of our ancestors about the inventions. They seemed fairly intoxicated with the pride of their achievements, barren of benefit as they had been, and their day dreams were of further discoveries that to a yet more amazing degree should put the forces of the universe at their disposal. None of them apparently paused to reflect that though God might empty his treasure house for their benefit of its every secret of use and of power, the race would not be a whit the better off for it unless they devised some economic machinery by which these discoveries might be made to serve the general welfare more effectually than they had done before. They do not seem to have realized that so long as poverty remained, every new invention which multiplied the power of wealth production was but one more charge in the indictment against their economic system as guilty of an imbecility as great as its iniquity. They appear to have wholly overlooked the fact that until their mighty engines should be devoted to increasing human welfare they were and would continue mere curious scientific toys of no more real worth or utility to the race than so many particularly ingenious jumping-jacks. This craze for more and more and ever greater and wider inventions for economic purposes, coupled with apparent complete indifference as to whether mankind derived any ultimate benefit from them or not, can only be understood by regarding it as one of those strange epidemics of insane excitement which have been known to affect whole populations at certain periods, especially of the middle ages. Rational explanation it has none." "You may well say so," exclaimed the teacher. "Of what use indeed was it that coal had been discovered, when there were still as many fireless homes as ever? Of what use was the machinery by which one man could weave as much cloth as a thousand a century before when there were as many ragged, shivering human beings as ever? Of what use was the machinery by which the American farmer could produce a dozen times as much food as his grandfather when there were more cases of starvation and a larger proportion of half-fed and badly fed people in the country than ever before, and hordes of homeless, desperate vagabonds traversed the land, begging for bread at every door? They had invented steamships, these ancestors of ours, that were miracles, but their main business was transporting paupers from lands where they had been beggared in spite of labor-saving machinery to newer lands where, after a short space, they would inevitably be beggared again. About the middle of the nineteenth century the world went wild over the invention of the sewing-machine and the burden it was to lift from the shoulders of the race. Yet, fifty years after, the business of garment-making, which it had been expected to revolutionize for the better, had become a slavery both in America and Europe which, under the name of the 'sweating system,' scandalized even that tough generation. They had lucifer matches instead of flint and steel, kerosene and electricity instead of candles and whale-oil, but the spectacles of squalor, misery, and degradation upon which the improved light shone were the same and only looked the worse for it. What few beggars there had been in America in the first quarter of the nineteenth century went afoot, while in the last quarter they stole their transportation on trains drawn by steam engines, but there were fifty times as many beggars. The world traveled sixty miles an hour instead of five or ten at the beginning of the century, but it had not gained an inch on poverty, which clung to it as the shadow to the racer." HELEN GIVES THE EXPLANATION OF THE FACTS. "Now, Helen," pursued the teacher, "we want you to explain the facts that Harold has so clearly brought out. We want you to tell us why it was that the economic condition of humanity derived but a barely perceptible advantage at most, if indeed any at all, from an inventive progress which by its indefinite multiplication of productive energy should by every rule of reason have completely transformed for the better the economic condition of the race and wholly banished want from earth. What was there about the old system of private capitalism to account for a _fiasco_ so tremendous?" "It was the operation of the profit principle," replied the girl Helen. "Please proceed with the explanation." "The great economic inventions which Harold has been talking about," said the girl, "were of the class of what were called labor-saving machines and devices--that is to say, they enabled one man to produce more than before with the same labor, or to produce the same as before with less labor. Under a collective administration of industry in the equal general interest like ours, the effect of any such invention would be to increase the total output to be shared equally among all, or, if the people preferred and so voted, the output would remain what it was, and the saving of labor be appropriated as a dividend of leisure to be equally enjoyed by all. But under the old system there was, of course, no collective administration. Capitalists were the administrators, being the only persons who were able to carry on extensive operations or take the initiative in economic enterprises, and in what they did or did not do they had no regard to the public interest or the general gain, but to their own profit only. The only motive which could induce a capitalist to adopt an invention was the idea of increasing his profits either by getting a larger product at the same labor cost, or else getting the same product at a reduced labor cost. We will take the first case. Suppose a capitalist in adopting labor-saving machinery calculated to keep all his former employees and make his profit by getting a larger product with the same labor cost. Now, when a capitalist proposed to increase his output without the aid of a machine he had to hire more workers, who must be paid wages to be afterward expended in purchasing products in the market. In this case, for every increase of product there was some increase, although not at all an equal one, in the buying power of the community. But when the capitalist increased his output by the aid of machinery, with no increase in the number of workers employed, there was no corresponding increase of purchasing power on the part of the community to set off against the increased product. A certain amount of purchasing power went, indeed, in wages to the mechanics who constructed the labor-saving machines, but it was small in comparison with the increase in the output which the capitalist expected to make by means of the machinery, otherwise it would have been no object to him to buy the machine. The increased product would therefore tend directly to glut yet more the always glutted market; and if any considerable number of capitalists should introduce machinery in the same way, the glut would become intensified into a crisis and general stoppage of production. "In order to avert or minimize such a disaster, the capitalists could take one or two courses. They could, if they chose, reduce the price of their increased machine product so that the purchasing power of the community, which had remained stationary, could take it up at least as nearly as it had taken up the lesser quantity of higher-priced product before the machinery was introduced. But if the capitalists did this, they would derive no additional profit whatever from the adoption of the machinery, the whole benefit going to the community. It is scarcely necessary to say that this was not what the capitalists were in business for. The other course before them was to keep their product where it was before introducing the machine, and to realize their profit by discharging the workers, thus saving on the labor cost of the output. This was the course most commonly taken, because the glut of goods was generally so threatening that, except when inventions opened up wholly new fields, capitalists were careful not greatly to increase outputs. For example, if the machine enabled one man to do two men's work, the capitalist would discharge half of his force, put the saving in labor cost in his pocket, and still produce as many goods as ever. Moreover, there was another advantage about this plan. The discharged workers swelled the numbers of the unemployed, who were underbidding one another for the opportunity to work. The increased desperation of this competition made it possible presently for the capitalist to reduce the wages of the half of his former force which he still retained. That was the usual result of the introduction of labor-saving machinery: First, the discharge of workers, then, after more or less time, reduced wages for those who were retained." "If I understand you, then," said the teacher, "the effect of labor-saving inventions was either to increase the product without any corresponding increase in the purchasing power of the community, thereby aggravating the glut of goods, or else to positively decrease the purchasing power of the community, through discharges and wage reductions, while the product remained the same as before. That is to say, the net result of labor-saving machinery was to increase the difference between the production and consumption of the community which remained in the hands of the capitalists as profit." "Precisely so. The only motive of the capitalist in introducing labor-saving machinery was to retain as profit a larger share of the product than before by cutting down the share of labor--that is to say, labor-saving machinery which should have banished poverty from the world became the means under the profit system of impoverishing the masses more rapidly than ever." "But did not the competition among the capitalists compel them to sacrifice a part of these increased profits in reductions of prices in order to get rid of their goods?" "Undoubtedly; but such reductions in price would not increase the consuming power of the people except when taken out of profits, and, as John explained to us this morning, when capitalists were forced by competition to reduce their prices they saved their profits as long as possible by making up for the reductions in price by debasing the quality of the goods or cutting down wages until the public and the wage-earners could be cheated and squeezed no longer. Then only did they begin to sacrifice profits, and it was then too late for the impoverished consumers to respond by increasing consumption. It was always, as John told us, in the countries where the people were poorest that the prices were lowest, but without benefit to the people." THE AMERICAN FARMER AND MACHINERY. "And now," said the teacher, "I want to ask you something about the effect of labor-saving inventions upon a class of so-called capitalists who made up the greater half of the American people--I mean the farmers. In so far as they owned their farms and tools, however encumbered by debts and mortgages, they were technically capitalists, although themselves quite as pitiable victims of the capitalists as were the proletarian artisans. The agricultural labor-saving inventions of the nineteenth century in America were something simply marvelous, enabling, as we have been told, one man to do the work of fifteen a century before. Nevertheless, the American farmer was going straight to the dogs all the while these inventions were being introduced. Now, how do you account for that? Why did not the farmer, as a sort of capitalist, pile up his profits on labor-saving machinery like the other capitalists?" "As I have said," replied the girl, "the profits made by labor-saving machinery resulted from the increased productiveness of the labor employed, thus enabling the capitalist either to turn out a greater product with the same labor cost or an equal product with a less labor cost, the workers supplanted by the machine being discharged. The amount of profits made was therefore dependent on the scale of the business carried on--that is, the number of workers employed and the consequent figure which labor cost made in the business. When farming was carried on upon a very large scale, as were the so-called bonanza farms in the United States of that period, consisting of twenty to thirty thousand acres of land, the capitalists conducting them did for a time make great profits, which were directly owing to the labor-saving agricultural machines, and would have been impossible without them. These machines enabled them to put a greatly increased product on the market with small increase of labor cost or else the same product at a great decrease of labor cost. But the mass of the American farmers operated on a small scale only and employed very little labor, doing largely their own work. They could therefore make little profit, if any, out of labor-saving machinery by discharging employees. The only way they could utilize it was not by cutting down the expense of their output but by increasing the amount of the output through the increased efficiency of their own labor. But seeing that there had been no increase meanwhile in the purchasing power of the community at large, there was no more money demand for their products than before, and consequently if the general body of farmers through labor-saving machinery increased their output, they could dispose of the greater aggregate only at a reduced price, so that in the end they would get no more for the greater output than for the less. Indeed, they would not get so much, for the effect of even a small surplus when held by weak capitalists who could not keep it back, but must press for sale, had an effect to reduce the market price quite out of proportion to the amount of the surplus. In the United States the mass of these small farmers was so great and their pressure to sell so desperate that in the latter part of the century they destroyed the market not only for themselves but finally even for the great capitalists who conducted the great farms." "The conclusion is, then, Helen," said the teacher, "that the net effect of labor-saving machinery upon the mass of small farmers in the United States was ruinous." "Undoubtedly," replied the girl. "This is a case in which the historical facts absolutely confirm the rational theory. Thanks to the profit system, inventions which multiplied the productive power of the farmer fifteenfold made a bankrupt of him, and so long as the profit system was retained there was no help for him." "Were farmers the only class of small capitalists who were injured rather than helped by labor-saving machinery?" "The rule was the same for all small capitalists whatever business they were engaged in. Its basis, as I have said, was the fact that the advantage to be gained by the capitalists from introducing labor-saving machinery was in proportion to the amount of labor which the machinery enabled them to dispense with--that is to say, was dependent upon the scale of their business. If the scale of the capitalist's operations was so small that he could not make a large saving in reduced labor cost by introducing machinery, then the introduction of such machinery put him at a crushing disadvantage as compared with larger capitalists. Labor-saving machinery was in this way one of the most potent of the influences which toward the close of the nineteenth century made it impossible for the small capitalists in any field to compete with the great ones, and helped to concentrate the economic dominion of the world in few and ever fewer hands." "Suppose, Helen, that the Revolution had not come, that labor-saving machinery had continued to be invented as fast as ever, and that the consolidation of the great capitalists' interests, already foreshadowed, had been completed, so that the waste of profits in competition among themselves had ceased, what would have been the result?" "In that case," replied the girl, "all the wealth that had been wasted in commercial rivalry would have been expended in luxury in addition to what had been formerly so expended. The new machinery year by year would have gone on making it possible for a smaller and ever smaller fraction of the population to produce all the necessaries for the support of mankind, and the rest of the world, including the great mass of the workers, would have found employment in unproductive labor to provide the materials of luxury for the rich or in personal services to them. The world would thus come to be divided into three classes: a master caste, very limited in numbers; a vast body of unproductive workers employed in ministering to the luxury and pomp of the master caste; and a small body of strictly productive workers, which, owing to the perfection of machinery, would be able to provide for the needs of all. It is needless to say that all save the masters would be at the minimum point as to means of subsistence. Decaying empires in ancient times have often presented such spectacles of imperial and aristocratic splendor, to the supply and maintenance of which the labor of starving nations was devoted. But no such spectacle ever presented in the past would have been comparable to that which the twentieth century would have witnessed if the great Revolution had permitted private capitalism to complete its evolution. In former ages the great mass of the population has been necessarily employed in productive labor to supply the needs of the world, so that the portion of the working force available for the service of the pomp and pleasures of the masters as unproductive laborers has always been relatively small. But in the plutocratic empire we are imagining, the genius of invention, through labor-saving machinery, would have enabled the masters to devote a greater proportion of the subject population to the direct service of their state and luxury than had been possible under any of the historic despotisms. The abhorrent spectacles of men enthroned as gods above abject and worshiping masses, which Assyria, Egypt, Persia, and Rome exhibited in their day, would have been eclipsed." "That will do, Helen," said the teacher. "With your testimony we will wind up our review of the economic system of private capitalism which the great Revolution abolished forever. There are of course a multitude of other aspects and branches of the subject which we might take up, but the study would be as unprofitable as depressing. We have, I think, covered the essential points. If you understand why and how profits, rent, and interest operated to limit the consuming power of most of the community to a fractional part of its productive power, thereby in turn correspondingly crippling the latter, you have the open secret of the poverty of the world before the Revolution, and of the impossibility of any important or lasting improvement from any source whatever in the economic circumstances of mankind, until and unless private capitalism, of which the profit system with rent and interest were necessary and inseparable parts, should be put an end to." CHAPTER XXIX. I RECEIVE AN OVATION. "And now," the teacher went on, glancing at the gallery where the doctor and I had been sitting unseen, "I have a great surprise for you. Among those who have listened to your recitation to-day, both in the forenoon and afternoon, has been a certain personage whose identity you ought to be able to infer when I say that, of all persons now on earth, he is absolutely the one best able, and the only one fully able, to judge how accurate your portrayal of nineteenth-century conditions has been. Lest the knowledge should disturb your equanimity, I have refrained from telling you, until the present moment, that we have present with us this afternoon a no less distinguished visitor than Julian West, and that with great kindness he has consented to permit me to present you to him." I had assented, rather reluctantly, to the teacher's request, not being desirous of exposing myself unnecessarily to curious staring. But I had yet to make the acquaintance of twentieth-century boys and girls. When they came around me it was easy to see in the wistful eyes of the girls and the moved faces of the boys how deeply their imaginations were stirred by the suggestions of my presence among them, and how far their sentiment was from one of common or frivolous curiosity. The interest they showed in me was so wholly and delicately sympathetic that it could not have offended the most sensitive temperament. This had indeed been the attitude of all the persons of mature years whom I had met, but I had scarcely expected the same considerateness from school children. I had not, it seemed, sufficiently allowed for the influence upon manners of the atmosphere of refinement which surrounds the child of to-day from the cradle. These young people had never seen coarseness, rudeness, or brusqueness on the part of any one. Their confidence had never been abused, their sympathy wounded, or their suspicion excited. Having never imagined such a thing as a person socially superior or inferior to themselves, they had never learned but one sort of manners. Having never had any occasion to create a false or deceitful impression or to accomplish anything by indirection, it was natural that they should not know what affectation was. Truly, it is these secondary consequences, these moral and social reactions of economic equality to create a noble atmosphere of human intercourse, that, after all, have been the greatest contribution which the principle has made to human happiness. At once I found myself talking and jesting with the young people as easily as if I had always known them, and what with their interest in what I told them of the old-time schools, and my delight in their naive comments, an hour slipped away unnoticed. Youth is always inspiring, and the atmosphere of these fresh, beautiful, ingenuous lives was like a wine bath. Florence! Esther! Helen! Marion! Margaret! George! Robert! Harold! Paul!--Never shall I forget that group of star-eyed girls and splendid lads, in whom I first made acquaintance with the boys and girls of the twentieth century. Can it be that God sends sweeter souls to earth now that the world is so much fitter for them? CHAPTER XXX. WHAT UNIVERSAL CULTURE MEANS. It was one of those Indian summer afternoons when it seems sinful waste of opportunity to spend a needless hour within. Being in no sort of hurry, the doctor and I chartered a motor-carriage for two at the next station, and set forth in the general direction of home, indulging ourselves in as many deviations from the route as pleased our fancy. Presently, as we rolled noiselessly over the smooth streets, leaf-strewn from the bordering colonnades of trees, I began to exclaim about the precocity of school children who at the age of thirteen or fourteen were able to handle themes usually reserved in my day for the college and university. This, however, the doctor made light of. "Political economy," he said, "from the time the world adopted the plan of equal sharing of labor and its results, became a science so simple that any child who knows the proper way to divide an apple with his little brothers has mastered the secret of it. Of course, to point out the fallacies of a false political economy is a very simple matter also, when one has only to compare it with the true one. "As to intellectual precocity in general," pursued the doctor, "I do not think it is particularly noticeable in our children as compared with those of your day. We certainly make no effort to develop it. A bright school child of twelve in the nineteenth century would probably not compare badly as to acquirements with the average twelve-year-old in our schools. It would be as you compared them ten years later that the difference in the educational systems would show its effect. At twenty-one or twenty-two the average youth would probably in your day have been little more advanced in education than at fourteen, having probably left school for the factory or farm at about that age or a couple of years later unless perhaps he happened to be one of the children of the rich minority. The corresponding child under our system would have continued his or her education without break, and at twenty-one have acquired what you used to call a college education." "The extension of the educational machinery necessary to provide the higher education for all must have been enormous," I said. "Our primary-school system provided the rudiments for nearly all children, but not one in twenty went as far as the grammar school, not one in a hundred as far as the high school, and not one in a thousand ever saw a college. The great universities of my day--Harvard, Yale, and the rest--must have become small cities in order to receive the students flocking to them." "They would need to be very large cities certainly," replied the doctor, "if it were a question of their undertaking the higher education of our youth, for every year we graduate not the thousands or tens of thousands that made up your annual grist of college graduates, but millions. For that very reason--that is, the numbers to be dealt with--we can have no centers of the higher education any more than you had of the primary education. Every community has its university just as formerly its common schools, and has in it more students from the vicinage than one of your great universities could collect with its drag net from the ends of the earth." "But does not the reputation of particular teachers attract students to special universities?" "That is a matter easily provided for," replied the doctor. "The perfection of our telephone and electroscope systems makes it possible to enjoy at any distance the instruction of any teacher. One of much popularity lectures to a million pupils in a whisper, if he happens to be hoarse, much easier than one of your professors could talk to a class of fifty when in good voice." "Really, doctor," said I, "there is no fact about your civilization that seems to open so many vistas of possibility and solve beforehand so many possible difficulties in the arrangement and operation of your social system as this universality of culture. I am bound to say that nothing that is rational seems impossible in the way of social adjustments when once you assume the existence of that condition. My own contemporaries fully recognized in theory, as you know, the importance of popular education to secure good government in a democracy; but our system, which barely at best taught the masses to spell, was a farce indeed compared with the popular education of to-day." "Necessarily so," replied the doctor. "The basis of education is economic, requiring as it does the maintenance of the pupil without economic return during the educational period. If the education is to amount to anything, that period must cover the years of childhood and adolescence to the age of at least twenty. That involves a very large expenditure, which not one parent in a thousand was able to support in your day. The state might have assumed it, of course, but that would have amounted to the rich supporting the children of the poor, and naturally they would not hear to that, at least beyond the primary grades of education. And even if there had been no money question, the rich, if they hoped to retain their power, would have been crazy to provide for the masses destined to do their dirty work--a culture which would have made them social rebels. For these two reasons your economic system was incompatible with any popular education worthy of the name. On the other hand, the first effect of economic equality was to provide equal educational advantages for all and the best the community could afford. One of the most interesting chapters in the history of the Revolution is that which tells how at once after the new order was established the young men and women under twenty-one years of age who had been working in fields or factories, perhaps since childhood, left their work and poured back into the schools and colleges as fast as room could be made for them, so that they might as far as possible repair their early loss. All alike recognized, now that education had been made economically possible for all, that it was the greatest boon the new order had brought. It recorded also in the books that not only the youth, but the men and women, and even the elderly who had been without educational advantages, devoted all the leisure left from their industrial duties to making up, so far as possible, for their lack of earlier advantages, that they might not be too much ashamed in the presence of a rising generation to be composed altogether of college graduates. "In speaking of our educational system as it is at present," the doctor went on, "I should guard you against the possible mistake of supposing that the course which ends at twenty-one completes the educational curriculum of the average individual. On the contrary, it is only the required minimum of culture which society insists that all youth shall receive during their minority to make them barely fit for citizenship. We should consider it a very meager education indeed that ended there. As we look at it, the graduation from the schools at the attainment of majority means merely that the graduate has reached an age at which he can be presumed to be competent and has the right as an adult to carry on his further education without the guidance or compulsion of the state. To provide means for this end the nation maintains a vast system of what you would call elective post-graduate courses of study in every branch of science, and these are open freely to every one to the end of life to be pursued as long or as briefly, as constantly or as intermittently, as profoundly or superficially, as desired. "The mind is really not fit for many most important branches of knowledge, the taste for them does not awake, and the intellect is not able to grasp them, until mature life, when a month of application will give a comprehension of a subject which years would have been wasted in trying to impart to a youth. It is our idea, so far as possible, to postpone the serious study of such branches to the post-graduate schools. Young people must get a smattering of things in general, but really theirs is not the time of life for ardent and effective study. If you would see enthusiastic students to whom the pursuit of knowledge is the greatest joy of life you must seek them among the middle-aged fathers and mothers in the post-graduate schools. "For the proper use of these opportunities for the lifelong pursuit of knowledge we find the leisure of our lives, which seems to you so ample, all too small. And yet that leisure, vast as it is, with half of every day and half of every year and the whole latter half of life sacred to personal uses--even the aggregate of these great spaces, growing greater with every labor-saving invention, which are reserved for the higher uses of life, would seem to us of little value for intellectual culture, but for a condition commanded by almost none in your day but secured to all by our institutions. I mean the moral atmosphere of serenity resulting from an absolute freedom of mind from disturbing anxieties and carking cares concerning our material welfare or that of those dear to us. Our economic system puts us in a position where we can follow Christ's maxim, so impossible for you, to 'take no thought for the morrow.' You must not understand, of course, that all our people are students or philosophers, but you may understand that we are more or less assiduous and systematic students and school-goers all our lives." "Really, doctor," I said, "I do not remember that you have ever told me anything that has suggested a more complete and striking contrast between your age and mine than this about the persistent and growing development of the purely intellectual interests through life. In my day there was, after all, only six or eight years' difference in the duration of the intellectual life of the poor man's son drafted into the factory at fourteen and the more fortunate youth's who went to college. If that of the one stopped at fourteen, that of the other ceased about as completely at twenty-one or twenty-two. Instead of being in a position to begin his real education on graduating from college, that event meant the close of it for the average student, and was the high-water mark of his life, so far as concerned the culture and knowledge of the sciences and humanities. In these respects the average college man never afterward knew so much as on his graduation day. For immediately thereafter, unless of the richest class, he must needs plunge into the turmoil and strife of business life and engage in the struggle for the material means of existence. Whether he failed or succeeded, made little difference as to the effect to stunt and wither his intellectual life. He had no time and could command no thought for anything else. If he failed, or barely avoided failure, perpetual anxiety ate out his heart; and if he succeeded, his success usually made him a grosser and more hopelessly self-satisfied materialist than if he had failed. There was no hope for his mind or soul either way. If at the end of life his efforts had won him a little breathing space, it could be of no high use to him, for the spiritual and intellectual parts had become atrophied from disuse, and were no longer capable of responding to opportunity. "And this apology for an existence," said the doctor, "was the life of those whom you counted most fortunate and most successful--of those who were reckoned to have won the prizes of life. Can you be surprised that we look back to the great Revolution as a sort of second creation of man, inasmuch as it added the conditions of an adequate mind and soul life to the bare physical existence under more or less agreeable conditions, which was about all the life the most of human being's, rich or poor, had up to that time known? The effect of the struggle for existence in arresting, with its engrossments, the intellectual development at the very threshold of adult life would have been disastrous enough had the character of the struggle been morally unobjectionable. It is when we come to consider that the struggle was one which not only prevented mental culture, but was utterly withering to the moral life, that we fully realize the unfortunate condition of the race before the Revolution. Youth is visited with noble aspirations and high dreams of duty and perfection. It sees the world as it should be, not as it is; and it is well for the race if the institutions of society are such as do not offend these moral enthusiasms, but rather tend to conserve and develop them through life. This, I think, we may fully claim the modern social order does. Thanks to an economic system which illustrates the highest ethical idea in all its workings, the youth going forth into the world finds it a practice school for all the moralities. He finds full room and scope in its duties and occupations for every generous enthusiasm, every unselfish aspiration he ever cherished. He can not possibly have formed a moral idea higher or completer than that which dominates our industrial and commercial order. "Youth was as noble in your day as now, and dreamed the same great dreams of life's possibilities. But when the young man went forth into the world of practical life it was to find his dreams mocked and his ideals derided at every turn. He found himself compelled, whether he would or not, to take part in a fight for life, in which the first condition of success was to put his ethics on the shelf and cut the acquaintance of his conscience. You had various terms with which to describe the process whereby the young man, reluctantly laying aside his ideals, accepted the conditions of the sordid struggle. You described it as a 'learning to take the world as it is,' 'getting over romantic notions,' 'becoming practical,' and all that. In fact, it was nothing more nor less than the debauching of a soul. Is that too much to say? "It is no more than the truth, and we all knew it," I answered. "Thank God, that day is over forever! The father need now no longer instruct the son in cynicism lest he should fail in life, nor the mother her daughter in worldly wisdom as a protection from generous instinct. The parents are worthy of their children and fit to associate with them, as it seems to us they were not and could not be in your day. Life is all the way through as spacious and noble as it seems to the ardent child standing on the threshold. The ideals of perfection, the enthusiasms of self-devotion, honor, love, and duty, which thrill the boy and girl, no longer yield with advancing years to baser motives, but continue to animate life to the end. You remember what Wordsworth said: "Heaven lies about us in our infancy. Shades of the prison house begin to close Upon the growing boy. I think if he were a partaker of our life he would not have been moved to extol childhood at the expense of maturity, for life grows ever wider and higher to the last." CHAPTER XXXI. "NEITHER IN THIS MOUNTAIN NOR AT JERUSALEM." The next morning, it being again necessary for Edith to report at her post of duty, I accompanied her to the railway station. While we stood waiting for the train my attention was drawn to a distinguished-looking man who alighted from an incoming car. He appeared by nineteenth-century standards about sixty years old, and was therefore presumably eighty or ninety, that being about the rate of allowance I have found it necessary to make in estimating the ages of my new contemporaries, owing to the slower advent of signs of age in these times. On speaking to Edith of this person I was much interested when she informed me that he was no other than Mr. Barton, whose sermon by telephone had so impressed me on the first Sunday of my new life, as set forth in Looking Backward. Edith had just time to introduce me before taking the train. As we left the station together I said to my companion that if he would excuse the inquiry I should be interested to know what particular sect or religious body he represented. "My dear Mr. West," was the reply, "your question suggests that my friend Dr. Leete has not probably said much to you about the modern way of regarding religious matters." "Our conversation has turned but little on that subject," I answered, "but it will not surprise me to learn that your ideas and practices are quite different from those of my day. Indeed, religious ideas and ecclesiastical institutions were already at that time undergoing such rapid and radical decomposition that it was safe to predict if religion were to survive another century it would be under very different forms from any the past had known." "You have suggested a topic," said my companion, "of the greatest possible interest to me. If you have nothing else to do, and would like to talk a little about it, nothing would give me more pleasure." Upon receiving the assurance that I had absolutely no occupation except to pick up information about the twentieth century, Mr. Barton said: "Let us then go into this old church, which you will no doubt have already recognized as a relic of your time. There we can sit comfortably while we talk, amid surroundings well fitted to our theme." I then perceived that we stood before one of the last-century church buildings which have been preserved as historical monuments, and, moreover, as it oddly enough fell out, that this particular church was no other than the one my family had always attended, and I as well--that is, whenever I attended any church, which was not often. "What an extraordinary coincidence!" exclaimed Mr. Barton, when I told him this; "who would have expected it? Naturally, when you revisit a spot so fraught with affecting associations, you will wish to be alone. You must pardon my involuntary indiscretion in proposing to turn in here." "Really," I replied, "the coincidence is interesting merely, not at all affecting. Young men of my day did not, as a rule, take their church relations very seriously. I shall be interested to see how the old place looks. Let us go in, by all means." The interior proved to be quite unchanged in essential particulars since the last time I had been within its walls, more than a century before. That last occasion, I well remembered, had been an Easter service, to which I had escorted some pretty country cousins who wanted to hear the music and see the flowers. No doubt the processes of decay had rendered necessary many restorations, but they had been carried out so as to preserve completely the original effects. Leading the way down the main aisle, I paused in front of the family pew. "This, Mr. Barton," I said, "is, or was, my pew. It is true that I am a little in arrears on pew rent, but I think I may venture to invite you to sit with me." I had truly told Mr. Barton that there was very little sentiment connected with such church relations as I had maintained. They were indeed merely a matter of family tradition and social propriety. But in another way I found myself not a little moved, as, dropping into my accustomed place at the head of the pew, I looked about the dim and silent interior. As my eye roved from pew to pew, my imagination called back to life the men and women, the young men and maidens, who had been wont of a Sunday, a hundred years before, to sit in those places. As I recalled their various activities, ambitions, hopes, fears, envies, and intrigues, all dominated, as they had been, by the idea of money possessed, lost, or lusted after, I was impressed not so much with the personal death which had come to these my old acquaintances as by the thought of the completeness with which the whole social scheme in which they had lived and moved and had their being had passed away. Not only were they gone, but their world was gone, and its place knew it no more. How strange, how artificial, how grotesque that world had been!--and yet to them and to me, while I was one of them, it had seemed the only possible mode of existence. Mr. Barton, with delicate respect for my absorption, waited for me to break the silence. "No doubt," I said, "since you preserve our churches as curiosities, you must have better ones of your own for use?" "In point of fact," my companion replied, "we have little or no use for churches at all." "Ah, yes! I had forgotten for the moment that it was by telephone I heard your sermon. The telephone, in its present perfection, must indeed have quite dispensed with the necessity of the church as an audience room." "In other words," replied Mr. Barton, "when we assemble now we need no longer bring our bodies with us. It is a curious paradox that while the telephone and electroscope, by abolishing distance as a hindrance to sight and hearing, have brought mankind into a closeness of sympathetic and intellectual rapport never before imagined, they have at the same time enabled individuals, although keeping in closest touch with everything going on in the world, to enjoy, if they choose, a physical privacy, such as one had to be a hermit to command in your day. Our advantages in this respect have so far spoiled us that being in a crowd, which was the matter-of-course penalty you had to pay for seeing or hearing anything interesting, would seem too dear a price to pay for almost any enjoyment." "I can imagine," I said, "that ecclesiastical institutions must have been affected in other ways besides the disuse of church buildings, by the general adaptation of the telephone system to religious teaching. In my day, the fact that no speaker could reach by voice more than a small group of hearers made it necessary to have a veritable army of preachers--some fifty thousand, say, in the United States alone--in order to instruct the population. Of these, not one in many hundreds was a person who had anything to utter really worth hearing. For example, we will say that fifty thousand clergymen preached every Sunday as many sermons to as many congregations. Four fifths of these sermons were poor, half of the rest perhaps fair, some of the others good, and a few score, possibly, out of the whole really of a fine class. Now, nobody, of course, would hear a poor discourse on any subject when he could just as easily hear a fine one, and if we had perfected the telephone system to the point you have, the result would have been, the first Sunday after its introduction, that everybody who wanted to hear a sermon would have connected with the lecture rooms or churches of the few widely celebrated preachers, and the rest would have had no hearers at all, and presently have been obliged to seek new occupations." Mr. Barton was amused. "You have, in fact, hit," he said, "upon the mechanical side of one of the most important contrasts between your times and ours--namely, the modern suppression of mediocrity in teaching, whether intellectual or religious. Being able to pick from the choicest intellects, and most inspired moralists and seers of the generation, everybody of course agrees in regarding it a waste of time to listen to any who have less weighty messages to deliver. When you consider that all are thus able to obtain the best inspiration the greatest minds can give, and couple this with the fact that, thanks to the universality of the higher education, all are at least pretty good judges of what is best, you have the secret of what might be called at once the strongest safeguard of the degree of civilization we have attained, and the surest pledge of the highest possible rate of progress toward ever better conditions--namely, the leadership of moral and intellectual genius. To one like you, educated according to the ideas of the nineteenth century as to what democracy meant, it may seem like a paradox that the equalizing of economic and educational conditions, which has perfected democracy, should have resulted in the most perfect aristocracy, or government by the best, that could be conceived; yet what result could be more matter-of-course? The people of to-day, too intelligent to be misled or abused for selfish ends even by demigods, are ready, on the other hand, to comprehend and to follow with enthusiasm every better leading. The result is, that our greatest men and women wield to-day an unselfish empire, more absolute than your czars dreamed of, and of an extent to make Alexander's conquests seem provincial. There are men in the world who when they choose to appeal to their fellow-men, by the bare announcement are able to command the simultaneous attention of one to five or eight hundred millions of people. In fact, if the occasion be a great one, and the speaker worthy of it, a world-wide silence reigns as in their various places, some beneath the sun and others under the stars, some by the light of dawn and others at sunset, all hang on the lips of the teacher. Such power would have seemed, perhaps, in your day dangerous, but when you consider that its tenure is conditional on the wisdom and unselfishness of its exercise, and would fail with the first false note, you may judge that it is a dominion as safe as God's." "Dr. Leete," I said, "has told me something of the way in which the universality of culture, combined with your scientific appliances, has made physically possible this leadership of the best; but, I beg your pardon, how could a speaker address numbers so vast as you speak of unless the pentecostal miracle were repeated? Surely the audience must be limited at least by the number of those understanding one language." "Is it possible that Dr. Leete has not told you of our universal language?" "I have heard no language but English." "Of course, everybody talks the language of his own country with his countrymen, but with the rest of the world he talks the general language--that is to say, we have nowadays to acquire but two languages to talk to all peoples--our own, and the universal. We may learn as many more as we please, and we usually please to learn many, but these two are alone needful to go all over the world or to speak across it without an interpreter. A number of the smaller nations have wholly abandoned their national tongue and talk only the general language. The greater nations, which have fine literature embalmed in their languages, have been more reluctant to abandon them, and in this way the smaller folks have actually had a certain sort of advantage over the greater. The tendency, however, to cultivate but one language as a living tongue and to treat all the others as dead or moribund is increasing at such a rate that if you had slept through another generation you might have found none but philological experts able to talk with you." "But even with the universal telephone and the universal language," I said, "there still remains the ceremonial and ritual side of religion to be considered. For the practice of that I should suppose the piously inclined would still need churches to assemble in, however able to dispense with them for purposes of instruction." "If any feel that need, there is no reason why they should not have as many churches as they wish and assemble as often as they see fit. I do not know but there are still those who do so. But with a high grade of intelligence become universal the world was bound to outgrow the ceremonial side of religion, which with its forms and symbols, its holy times and places, its sacrifices, feasts, fasts, and new moons, meant so much in the child-time of the race. The time has now fully come which Christ foretold in that talk with the woman by the well of Samaria when the idea of the Temple and all it stood for would give place to the wholly spiritual religion, without respect of times or places, which he declared most pleasing to God. "With the ritual and ceremonial side of religion outgrown," said I, "with church attendance become superfluous for purposes of instruction, and everybody selecting his own preacher on personal grounds, I should say that sectarian lines must have pretty nearly disappeared." "Ah, yes!" said Mr. Barton, "that reminds me that our talk began with your inquiry as to what religious sect I belonged to. It is a very long time since it has been customary for people to divide themselves into sects and classify themselves under different names on account of variations of opinion as to matters of religion." "Is it possible," I exclaimed, "that you mean to say people no longer quarrel over religion? Do you actually tell me that human beings have become capable of entertaining different opinions about the next world without becoming enemies in this? Dr. Leete has compelled me to believe a good many miracles, but this is too much." "I do not wonder that it seems rather a startling proposition, at first statement, to a man of the nineteenth century," replied Mr. Barton. "But, after all, who was it who started and kept up the quarreling over religion in former days?" "It was, of course, the ecclesiastical bodies--the priests and preachers." "But they were not many. How were they able to make so much trouble?" "On account of the masses of the people who, being densely ignorant, were correspondingly superstitious and bigoted, and were tools in the hands of the ecclesiastics." "But there was a minority of the cultured. Were they bigoted also? Were they tools of the ecclesiastics?" "On the contrary, they always held a calm and tolerant attitude on religious questions and were independent of the priesthoods. If they deferred to ecclesiastical influence at all, it was because they held it needful for the purpose of controlling the ignorant populace." "Very good. You have explained your miracle. There is no ignorant populace now for whose sake it is necessary for the more intelligent to make any compromises with truth. Your cultured class, with their tolerant and philosophical view of religious differences, and the criminal folly of quarreling about them, has become the only class there is." "How long is it since people ceased to call themselves Catholics, Protestants, Baptists, Methodists, and so on?" "That kind of classification may be said to have received a fatal shock at the time of the great Revolution, when sectarian demarcations and doctrinal differences, already fallen into a good deal of disregard, were completely swept away and forgotten in the passionate impulse of brotherly love which brought men together for the founding of a nobler social order. The old habit might possibly have revived in time had it not been for the new culture, which, during the first generation subsequent to the Revolution, destroyed the soil of ignorance and superstition which had supported ecclesiastical influence, and made its recrudescence impossible for evermore. "Although, of course," continued my companion, "the universalizing of intellectual culture is the only cause that needs to be considered in accounting for the total disappearance of religious sectarianism, yet it will give you a more vivid realization of the gulf fixed between the ancient and the modern usages as to religion if you consider certain economic conditions, now wholly passed away, which in your time buttressed the power of ecclesiastical institutions in very substantial ways. Of course, in the first place, church buildings were needful to preach in, and equally so for the ritual and ceremonial side of religion. Moreover, the sanction of religious teaching, depending chiefly on the authority of tradition instead of its own reasonableness, made it necessary for any preacher who would command hearers to enter the service of some of the established sectarian organizations. Religion, in a word, like industry and politics, was capitalized by greater or smaller corporations which exclusively controlled the plant and machinery, and conducted it for the prestige and power of the firms. As all those who desired to engage in politics or industry were obliged to do so in subjection to the individuals and corporations controlling the machinery, so was it in religious matters likewise. Persons desirous of entering on the occupation of religious teaching could do so only by conforming to the conditions of some of the organizations controlling the machinery, plant, and good will of the business--that is to say, of some one of the great ecclesiastical corporations. To teach religion outside of these corporations, when not positively illegal, was a most difficult undertaking, however great the ability of the teacher--as difficult, indeed, as it was to get on in politics without wearing a party badge, or to succeed in business in opposition to the great capitalists. The would-be religious teacher had to attach himself, therefore, to some one or other of the sectarian organizations, whose mouthpiece he must consent to be, as the condition of obtaining any hearing at all. The organization might be hierarchical, in which case he took his instructions from above, or it might be congregational, in which case he took his orders from below. The one method was monarchical, the other democratic, but one as inconsistent as the other with the office of the religious teacher, the first condition of which, as we look at it, should be absolute spontaneity of feeling and liberty of utterance. "It may be said that the old ecclesiastical system depended on a double bondage: first, the intellectual subjection of the masses through ignorance to their spiritual directors; and, secondly, the bondage of the directors themselves to the sectarian organizations, which as spiritual capitalists monopolized the opportunities of teaching. As the bondage was twofold, so also was the enfranchisement--a deliverance alike of the people and of their teachers, who, under the guise of leaders, had been themselves but puppets. Nowadays preaching is as free as hearing, and as open to all. The man who feels a special calling to talk to his fellows upon religious themes has no need of any other capital than something worth saying. Given this, without need of any further machinery than the free telephone, he is able to command an audience limited only by the force and fitness of what he has to say. He now does not live by his preaching. His business is not a distinct profession. He does not belong to a class apart from other citizens, either by education or occupation. It is not needful for any purpose that he should do so. The higher education which he shares with all others furnishes ample intellectual equipment, while the abundant leisure for personal pursuits with which our life is interfused, and the entire exemption from public duty after forty-five, give abundant opportunity for the exercise of his vocation. In a word, the modern religious teacher is a prophet, not a priest. The sanction of his words lies not in any human ordination or ecclesiastical _exequatur,_ but, even as it was with the prophets of old, in such response as his words may have power to evoke from human hearts." "If people," I suggested, "still retaining a taste for the old-time ritual and ceremonial observances and face-to-face preaching, should desire to have churches and clergy for their special service, is there anything to prevent it?" "No, indeed. Liberty is the first and last word of our civilization. It is perfectly consistent with our economic system for a group of individuals, by contributing out of their incomes, not only to rent buildings for group purposes, but by indemnifying the nation for the loss of an individual's public service to secure him as their special minister. Though the state will enforce no private contracts of any sort, it does not forbid them. The old ecclesiastical system was, for a time after the Revolution, kept up by remnants in this way, and might be until now if anybody had wished. But the contempt into which the hireling relation had fallen at once after the Revolution soon made the position of such hired clergymen intolerable, and presently there were none who would demean themselves by entering upon so despised a relation, and none, indeed, who would have spiritual service, of all others, on such terms." "As you tell the story," I said, "it seems very plain how it all came about, and could not have been otherwise; but you can perhaps hardly imagine how a man of the nineteenth century, accustomed to the vast place occupied by the ecclesiastical edifice and influence in human affairs, is affected by the idea of a world getting on without anything of the sort." "I can imagine something of your sensation," replied my companion, "though doubtless not adequately. And yet I must say that no change in the social order seems to us to have been more distinctly foreshadowed by the signs of the times in your day than precisely this passing away of the ecclesiastical system. As you yourself observed, just before we came into this church, there was then going on a general deliquescence of dogmatism which made your contemporaries wonder what was going to be left. The influence and authority of the clergy were rapidly disappearing, the sectarian lines were being obliterated, the creeds were falling into contempt, and the authority of tradition was being repudiated. Surely if anything could be safely predicted it was that the religious ideas and institutions of the world were approaching some great change." "Doubtless," said I, "if the ecclesiastics of my day had regarded the result as merely depending on the drift of opinion among men, they would have been inclined to give up all hope of retaining their influence, but there was another element in the case which gave them courage." "And what was that?" "The women. They were in my day called the religious sex. The clergy generally were ready to admit that so far as the interest of the cultured class of men, and indeed of the men generally, in the churches went, they were in a bad way, but they had faith that the devotion of the women would save the cause. Woman was the sheet anchor of the Church. Not only were women the chief attendants at religious functions, but it was largely through their influence on the men that the latter tolerated, even so far as they did, the ecclesiastical pretensions. Now, were not our clergymen justified in counting on the continued support of women, whatever the men might do?" "Certainly they would have been if woman's position was to remain unchanged, but, as you are doubtless by this time well aware, the elevation and enlargement of woman's sphere in all directions was perhaps the most notable single aspect of the Revolution. When women were called the religious sex it would have been indeed a high ascription if it had been meant that they were the more spiritually minded, but that was not at all what the phrase signified to those who used it; it was merely intended to put in a complimentary way the fact that women in your day were the docile sex. Less educated, as a rule, than men, unaccustomed to responsibility, and trained in habits of subordination and self-distrust, they leaned in all things upon precedent and authority. Naturally, therefore, they still held to the principle of authoritative teaching in religion long after men had generally rejected it. All that was changed with the Revolution, and indeed began to change long before it. Since the Revolution there has been no difference in the education of the sexes nor in the independence of their economic and social position, in the exercise of responsibility or experience in the practical conduct of affairs. As you might naturally infer, they are no longer, as formerly, a peculiarly docile class, nor have they any more toleration for authority, whether in religion, politics, or economics, than their brethren. In every pursuit of life they join with men on equal terms, including the most important and engrossing of all our pursuits--the search after knowledge concerning the nature and destiny of man and his relation to the spiritual and material infinity of which he is a part." CHAPTER XXXII. ERITIS SICUT DEUS. "I infer, then," I said, "that the disappearance of religious divisions and the priestly caste has not operated to lessen the general interest in religion." "Should you have supposed that it would so operate?" "I don't know. I never gave much thought to such matters. The ecclesiastical class represented that they were very essential to the conservation of religion, and the rest of us took it for granted that it was so." "Every social institution which has existed for a considerable time," replied Mr. Barton, "has doubtless performed some function which was at the time more or less useful and necessary. Kings, ecclesiastics, and capitalists--all of them, for that matter, merely different sorts of capitalists--have, no doubt, in their proper periods, performed functions which, however badly discharged, were necessary and could not then have been discharged in any better manner. But just as the abolition of royalty was the beginning of decent government, just as the abolition of private capitalism was the beginning of effective wealth production, so the disappearance of church organization and machinery, or ecclesiastical capitalism, was the beginning of a world-awakening of impassioned interest in the vast concerns covered by the word religion. "Necessary as may have been the subjection of the race to priestly authority in the course of human evolution, it was the form of tutelage which, of all others, was most calculated to benumb and deaden the faculties affected by it, and the collapse of ecclesiasticism presently prepared the way for an enthusiasm of interest in the great problems of human nature and destiny which would have been scarcely conceivable by the worthy ecclesiastics of your day who with such painful efforts and small results sought to awake their flocks to spiritual concerns. The lack of general interest in these questions in your time was the natural result of their monopoly as the special province of the priestly class whose members stood as interpreters between man and the mystery about him, undertaking to guarantee the spiritual welfare of all who would trust them. The decay of priestly authority left every soul face to face with that mystery, with the responsibility of its interpretation upon himself. The collapse of the traditional theologies relieved the whole subject of man's relation with the infinite from the oppressive effect of the false finalities of dogma which had till then made the most boundless of sciences the most cramped and narrow. Instead of the mind-paralyzing worship of the past and the bondage of the present to that which is written, the conviction took hold on men that there was no limit to what they might know concerning their nature and destiny and no limit to that destiny. The priestly idea that the past was diviner than the present, that God was behind the race, gave place to the belief that we should look forward and not backward for inspiration, and that the present and the future promised a fuller and more certain knowledge concerning the soul and God than any the past had attained." "Has this belief," I asked, "been thus far practically confirmed by any progress actually made in the assurance of what is true as to these things? Do you consider that you really know more about them than we did, or that you know more positively the things which we merely tried to believe?" Mr. Barton paused a moment before replying. "You remarked a little while ago," he said, "that your talks with Dr. Leete had as yet turned little on religious matters. In introducing you to the modern world it was entirely right and logical that he should dwell at first mainly upon the change in economic systems, for that has, of course, furnished the necessary material basis for all the other changes that have taken place. But I am sure that you will never meet any one who, being asked in what direction the progress of the race during the past century has tended most to increase human happiness, would not reply that it had been in the science of the soul and its relation to the Eternal and Infinite. "This progress has been the result not merely of a more rational conception of the subject and complete intellectual freedom in its study, but largely also of social conditions which have set us almost wholly free from material engrossments. We have now for nearly a century enjoyed an economic welfare which has left nothing to be wished for in the way of physical satisfactions, especially as in proportion to the increase of this abundance there has been through culture a development of simplicity in taste which rejects excess and surfeit and ever makes less and less of the material side of life and more of the mental and moral. Thanks to this co-operation of the material with the moral evolution, the more we have the less we need. Long ago it came to be recognized that on the material side the race had reached the goal of its evolution. We have practically lost ambition for further progress in that direction. The natural result has been that for a long period the main energies of the intellect have been concentrated upon the possibilities of the spiritual evolution of mankind for which the completion of its material evolution has but prepared the beginning. What we have so far learned we are convinced is but the first faint inkling of the knowledge we shall attain to; and yet if the limitations of this earthly state were such that we might never hope here to know more than now we should not repine, for the knowledge we have has sufficed to turn the shadow of death into a bow of promise and distill the saltness out of human tears. You will observe, as you shall come to know more of our literature, that one respect in which it differs from yours is the total lack of the tragic note. This has very naturally followed, from a conception of our real life, as having an inaccessible security, 'hid in God,' as Paul said, whereby the accidents and vicissitudes of the personality are reduced to relative triviality. "Your seers and poets in exalted moments had seen that death was but a step in life, but this seemed to most of you to have been a hard saying. Nowadays, as life advances toward its close, instead of being shadowed by gloom, it is marked by an access of impassioned expectancy which would cause the young to envy the old, but for the knowledge that in a little while the same door will be opened to them. In your day the undertone of life seems to have been one of unutterable sadness, which, like the moaning of the sea to those who live near the ocean, made itself audible whenever for a moment the noise and bustle of petty engrossments ceased. Now this undertone is so exultant that we are still to hear it." "If men go on," I said, "growing at this rate in the knowledge of divine things and the sharing of the divine life, what will they yet come to?" Mr. Barton smiled. "Said not the serpent in the old story, 'If you eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge you shall be as gods'? The promise was true in words, but apparently there was some mistake about the tree. Perhaps it was the tree of selfish knowledge, or else the fruit was not ripe. The story is obscure. Christ later said the same thing when he told men that they might be the sons of God. But he made no mistake as to the tree he showed them, and the fruit was ripe. It was the fruit of love, for universal love is at once the seed and fruit, cause and effect, of the highest and completest knowledge. Through boundless love man becomes a god, for thereby is he made conscious of his oneness with God, and all things are put under his feet. It has been only since the great Revolution brought in the era of human brotherhood that mankind has been able to eat abundantly of this fruit of the true tree of knowledge, and thereby grow more and more into the consciousness of the divine soul as the essential self and the true hiding of our lives. Yes, indeed, we shall be gods. The motto of the modern civilization is '_Eritis sicut Deus_.'" "You speak of Christ. Do I understand that this modern religion is considered by you to be the same doctrine Christ taught?" "Most certainly. It has been taught from the beginning of history and doubtless earlier, but Christ's teaching is that which has most fully and clearly come down to us. It was the doctrine that he taught, but the world could not then receive it save a few, nor indeed has it ever been possible for the world in general to receive it or even to understand it until this present century." "Why could not the world receive earlier the revelation it seems to find so easy of comprehension now?" "Because," replied Mr. Barton, "the prophet and revealer of the soul and of God, which are the same, is love, and until these latter days the world refused to hear love, but crucified him. The religion of Christ, depending as it did upon the experience and intuitions of the unselfish enthusiasms, could not possibly be accepted or understood generally by a world which tolerated a social system based upon fratricidal struggle as the condition of existence. Prophets, messiahs, seers, and saints might indeed for themselves see God face to face, but it was impossible that there should be any general apprehension of God as Christ saw him until social justice had brought in brotherly love. Man must be revealed to man as brother before God could be revealed to him as father. Nominally, the clergy professed to accept and repeat Christ's teaching that God is a loving father, but of course it was simply impossible that any such idea should actually germinate and take root in hearts as cold and hard as stone toward their fellow-beings and sodden with hate and suspicion of them. 'If a man love not his brother whom he hath seen, how shall he love God whom he hath not seen?' The priests deafened their flocks with appeals to love God, to give their hearts to him. They should have rather taught them, as Christ did, to love their fellow-men and give their hearts to them. Hearts so given the love of God would presently enkindle, even as, according to the ancients, fire from heaven might be depended on to ignite a sacrifice fitly prepared and laid. "From the pulpit yonder, Mr. West, doubtless you have many times heard these words and many like them repeated: 'If we love one another God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us.' 'He that loveth his brother dwelleth in the light.' 'If any man say I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar.' 'He that loveth not his brother, abideth in death.' 'God is love and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God.' 'Every one that loveth knoweth God.' 'He that loveth not knoweth not God.' "Here is the very distillation of Christ's teaching as to the conditions of entering on the divine life. In this we find the sufficient explanation why the revelation which came to Christ so long ago and to other illumined souls could not possibly be received by mankind in general so long as an inhuman social order made a wall between man and God, and why, the moment that wall was cast down, the revelation flooded the earth like a sunburst. "'If we love one another God dwelleth in us,' and mark how the words were made good in the way by which at last the race found God! It was not, remember, by directly, purposely, or consciously seeking God. The great enthusiasm of humanity which overthrew the old order and brought in the fraternal society was not primarily or consciously a godward aspiration at all. It was essentially a humane movement. It was a melting and flowing forth of men's hearts toward one another, a rush of contrite, repentant tenderness, an impassioned impulse of mutual love and self-devotion to the common weal. But 'if we love one another God dwelleth in us,' and so men found it. It appears that there came a moment, the most transcendent moment in the history of the race of man, when with the fraternal glow of this world of new-found embracing brothers there seems to have mingled the ineffable thrill of a divine participation, as if the hand of God were clasped over the joined hands of men. And so it has continued to this day and shall for evermore." CHAPTER XXXIII. SEVERAL IMPORTANT MATTERS OVERLOOKED. After dinner the doctor said that he had an excursion to suggest for the afternoon. "It has often occurred to me," he went on, "that when you shall go out into the world and become familiar with its features by your own observation, you will, in looking back on these preparatory lessons I have tried to give you, form a very poor impression of my talent as a pedagogue. I am very much dissatisfied myself with the method in which I have developed the subject, which, instead of having been philosophically conceived as a plan of instruction, has been merely a series of random talks, guided rather by your own curiosity than any scheme on my part." "I am very thankful, my dear friend and teacher," I replied, "that you have spared me the philosophical method. Without boasting that I have acquired so soon a complete understanding of your modern system, I am very sure that I know a good deal more about it than I otherwise should, for the very reason that you have so good-naturedly followed the lead of my curiosity instead of tying me to the tailboard of a method." "I should certainly like to believe," said the doctor, "that our talks have been as instructive to you as they have been delightful to me, and if I have made mistakes it should be remembered that perhaps no instructor ever had or is likely to have a task quite so large as mine, or one so unexpectedly thrust upon him, or, finally, one which, being so large, the natural curiosity of his pupil compelled him to cover in so short a time." "But you were speaking of an excursion for this afternoon." "Yes," said the doctor. "It is a suggestion in the line of an attempt to remedy some few of my too probable omissions of important things in trying to acquaint you with how we live now. What do you say to chartering an air car this afternoon for the purpose of taking a bird's-eye view of the city and environs, and seeing what its various aspects may suggest in the way of features of present-day civilization which we have not touched upon?" The idea struck me as admirable, and we at once proceeded to put it in execution. * * * * * In these brief and fragmentary reminiscences of my first experiences in the modern world it is, of course, impossible that I should refer to one in a hundred of the startling things which happened to me. Still, even with that limitation, it may seem strange to my readers that I have not had more to say of the wonder excited in my mind by the number and character of the great mechanical inventions and applications unknown in my day, which contribute to the material fabric and actuate the mechanism of your civilization. For example, although this was very far from being my first air trip, I do not think that I have before referred to a sort of experience which, to a representative of the last century, must naturally have been nothing less than astounding. I can only say, by way of explanation of this seeming indifference to the mechanical wonders of this age, that had they been ten times more marvelous, they would still have impressed me with infinitely less astonishment than the moral revolution illustrated by your new social order. This, I am sure, is what would be the experience of any man of my time under my circumstances. The march of scientific discovery and mechanical invention during the last half of the nineteenth century had already been so great and was proceeding so rapidly that we were prepared to expect almost any amount of development in the same lines in the future. Your submarine shipping we had distinctly anticipated and even partially realized. The discovery of the electrical powers had made almost any mechanical conception seem possible. As to navigation of the air, we fully expected that would be somehow successfully solved by our grandchildren if not by our children. If, indeed, I had not found men sailing the air I should have been distinctly disappointed. But while we were prepared to expect well-nigh anything of man's intellectual development and the perfecting of his mastery over the material world, we were utterly skeptical as to the possibility of any large moral improvement on his part. As a moral being, we believed that he had got his growth, as the saying was, and would never in this world at least attain to a nobler stature. As a philosophical proposition, we recognized as fully as you do that the golden rule would afford the basis of a social life in which every one would be infinitely happier than anybody was in our world, and that the true interest of all would be furthered by establishing such a social order; but we held at the same time that the moral baseness and self-blinding selfishness of man would forever prevent him from realizing such an ideal. In vain, had he been endowed with a godlike intellect; it would not avail him for any of the higher uses of life, for an ineradicable moral perverseness would always hinder him from doing as well as he knew and hold him in hopeless subjection to the basest and most suicidal impulses of his nature. "Impossible; it is against human nature!" was the cry which met and for the most part overbore and silenced every prophet or teacher who sought to rouse the world to discontent with the reign of chaos and awaken faith in the possibility of a kingdom of God on earth. Is it any wonder, then, that one like me, bred in that atmosphere of moral despair, should pass over with comparatively little attention the miraculous material achievements of this age, to study with ever-growing awe and wonder the secret of your just and joyous living? As I look back I see now how truly this base view of human nature was the greatest infidelity to God and man which the human race ever fell into, but, alas! it was not the infidelity which the churches condemned, but rather a sort which their teachings of man's hopeless depravity were calculated to implant and confirm. This very matter of air navigation of which I was speaking suggests a striking illustration of the strange combination on the part of my contemporaries of unlimited faith in man's material progress with total unbelief in his moral possibilities. As I have said, we fully expected that posterity would achieve air navigation, but the application of the art most discussed was its use in war to drop dynamite bombs in the midst of crowded cities. Try to realize that if you can. Even Tennyson, in his vision of the future, saw nothing more. You remember how he Heard the heavens fill with shouting, And there rained a ghastly dew From the nations airy navies, Grappling in the central blue. HOW THE PEOPLE HOLD THE REINS. "And now," said the doctor, as he checked the rise of our car at an altitude of about one thousand feet, "let us attend to our lesson. What do you see down there to suggest a question?" "Well, to begin with," I said, as the dome of the Statehouse caught my eye, "what on earth have you stuck up there? It looks for all the world like one of those self-steering windmills the farmers in my day used to pump up water with. Surely that is an odd sort of ornament for a public building." "It is not intended as an ornament, but a symbol," replied the doctor. "It represents the modern ideal of a proper system of government. The mill stands for the machinery of administration, the wind that drives it symbolizes the public will, and the rudder that always keeps the vane of the mill before the wind, however suddenly or completely the wind may change, stands for the method by which the administration is kept at all times responsive and obedient to every mandate of the people, though it be but a breath. "I have talked to you so much on that subject that I need enlarge no further on the impossibility of having any popular government worthy of the name which is not based upon the economic equality of the citizens with its implications and consequences. No constitutional devices or cleverness of parliamentary machinery could have possibly made popular government anything but a farce, so long as the private economic interest of the citizen was distinct from and opposed to the public interest, and the so-called sovereign people ate their bread from the hand of capitalists. Given, on the other hand, economic unity of private interests with public interest, the complete independence of every individual on every other, and universal culture to cap all, and no imperfection of administrative machinery could prevent the government from being a good one. Nevertheless, we have improved the machinery as much as we have the motive force. You used to vote once a year, or in two years, or in six years, as the case might be, for those who were to rule over you till the next election, and those rulers, from the moment of their election to the term of their offices, were as irresponsible as czars. They were far more so, indeed, for the czar at least had a supreme motive to leave his inheritance unimpaired to his son, while these elected tyrants had no interest except in making the most they could out of their power while they held it. "It appears to us that it is an axiom of democratic government that power should never be delegated irrevocably for an hour, but should always be subject to recall by the delegating power. Public officials are nowadays chosen for a term as a matter of convenience, but it is not a term positive. They are liable to have their powers revoked at any moment by the vote of their principals; neither is any measure of more than merely routine character ever passed by a representative body without reference back to the people. The vote of no delegate upon any important measure can stand until his principals--or constituents, as you used to call them--have had the opportunity to cancel it. An elected agent of the people who offended the sentiment of the electors would be displaced, and his act repudiated the next day. You may infer that under this system the agent is solicitous to keep in contact with his principals. Not only do these precautions exist against irresponsible legislation, but the original proposition of measures comes from the people more often than from their representatives. "So complete through our telephone system has the most complicated sort of voting become, that the entire nation is organized so as to be able to proceed almost like one parliament if needful. Our representative bodies, corresponding to your former Congresses, Legislatures, and Parliaments, are under this system reduced to the exercise of the functions of what you used to call congressional committees. The people not only nominally but actually govern. We have a democracy in fact. "We take pains to exercise this direct and constant supervision of our affairs not because we suspect or fear our elected agents. Under our system of indefeasible, unchangeable, economic equality there is no motive or opportunity for venality. There is no motive for doing evil that could be for a moment set against the overwhelming motive of deserving the public esteem, which is indeed the only possible object that nowadays could induce any one to accept office. All our vital interests are secured beyond disturbance by the very framework of society. We could safely turn over to a selected body of citizens the management of the public affairs for their lifetime. The reason we do not is that we enjoy the exhilaration of conducting the government of affairs directly. You might compare us to a wealthy man of your day who, though having in his service any number of expert coachmen, preferred to handle the reins himself for the pleasure of it. You used to vote perhaps once a year, taking five minutes for it, and grudging the time at that as lost from your private business, the pursuit of which you called, I believe, 'the main chance.' Our private business is the public business, and we have no other of importance. Our 'main chance' is the public welfare, and we have no other chance. We vote a hundred times perhaps in a year, on all manner of questions, from the temperature of the public baths or the plan to be selected for a public building, to the greatest questions of the world union, and find the exercise at once as exhilarating as it is in the highest sense educational. "And now, Julian, look down again and see if you do not find some other feature of the scene to hang a question on." THE LITTLE WARS AND THE GREAT WAR. "I observe," I said, "that the harbor forts are still there. I suppose you retain them, like the specimen tenement houses, as historical evidences of the barbarism of your ancestors, my contemporaries." "You must not be offended," said the doctor, "if I say that we really have to keep a full assortment of such exhibits, for fear the children should flatly refuse to believe the accounts the books give of the unaccountable antics of their great-grandfathers." "The guarantee of international peace which the world union has brought," I said, "must surely be regarded by your people as one of the most signal achievements of the new order, and yet it strikes me I have heard you say very little about it." "Of course," said the doctor, "it is a great thing in itself, but so incomparably less important than the abolition of the economic war between man and man that we regard it as merely incidental to the latter. Nothing is much more astonishing about the mental operations of your contemporaries than the fuss they made about the cruelty of your occasional international wars while seemingly oblivious to the horrors of the battle for existence in which you all were perpetually involved. From our point of view, your wars, while of course very foolish, were comparatively humane and altogether petty exhibitions as contrasted with the fratricidal economic struggle. In the wars only men took part--strong, selected men, comprising but a very small part of the total population. There were no women, no children, no old people, no cripples allowed to go to war. The wounded were carefully looked after, whether by friends or foes, and nursed back to health. The rules of war forbade unnecessary cruelty, and at any time an honorable surrender, with good treatment, was open to the beaten. The battles generally took place on the frontiers, out of sight and sound of the masses. Wars were also very rare, often not one in a generation. Finally, the sentiments appealed to in international conflicts were, as a rule, those of courage and self-devotion. Often, indeed generally, the causes of the wars were unworthy of the sentiments of self-devotion which the fighting called out, but the sentiments themselves belonged to the noblest order. "Compare with warfare of this character the conditions of the economic struggle for existence. That was a war in which not merely small selected bodies of combatants took part, but one in which the entire population of every country, excepting the inconsiderable groups of the rich, were forcibly enlisted and compelled to serve. Not only did women, children, the aged and crippled have to participate in it, but the weaker the combatants the harder the conditions under which they must contend. It was a war in which there was no help for the wounded, no quarter for the vanquished. It was a war not on far frontiers, but in every city, every street, and every house, and its wounded, broken, and dying victims lay underfoot everywhere and shocked the eye in every direction that it might glance with some new form of misery. The ear could not escape the lamentations of the stricken and their vain cries for pity. And this war came not once or twice in a century, lasting for a few red weeks or months or years, and giving way again to peace, as did the battles of the soldiers, but was perennial and perpetual, truceless, lifelong. Finally, it was a war which neither appealed to nor developed any noble, any generous, any honorable sentiment, but, on the contrary, set a constant premium on the meanest, falsest, and most cruel propensities of human nature. "As we look back upon your era, the sort of fighting those old forts down there stood for seems almost noble and barely tragical at all, as compared with the awful spectacle of the struggle for existence. "We even are able to sympathize with the declaration of some of the professional soldiers of your age that occasional wars, with their appeals, however false, to the generous and self-devoting passions, were absolutely necessary to prevent your society, otherwise so utterly sordid and selfish in its ideals, from dissolving into absolute putrescence." "It is to be feared," I was moved to observe, "that posterity has not built so high a monument to the promoters of the universal peace societies of my day as they expected." "They were well meaning enough so far as they saw, no doubt," said the doctor, "but seem to have been a dreadfully short-sighted and purblind set of people. Their efforts to stop wars between nations, while tranquilly ignoring the world-wide economic struggle for existence which cost more lives and suffering in any one month than did the international wars of a generation, was a most striking case of straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel. "As to the gain to humanity which has come from the abolition of all war or possibility of war between nations of to-day, it seems to us to consist not so much in the mere prevention of actual bloodshed as in the dying out of the old jealousies and rancors which used to embitter peoples against one another almost as much in peace as in war, and the growth in their stead of a fraternal sympathy and mutual good will, unconscious of any barrier of race or country." THE OLD PATRIOTISM AND THE NEW. As the doctor was speaking, the waving folds of a flag floating far below caught my eye. It was the Star-Spangled Banner. My heart leaped at the sight and my eyes grew moist. "Ah!" I exclaimed, "it is Old Glory!" for so it had been a custom to call the flag in the days of the civil war and after. "Yes," replied my companion, as his eyes followed my gaze, "but it wears a new glory now, because nowhere in the land it floats over is there found a human being oppressed or suffering any want that human aid can relieve. "The Americans of your day," he continued, "were extremely patriotic after their fashion, but the difference between the old and the new patriotism is so great that it scarcely seems like the same sentiment. In your day and ever before, the emotions and associations of the flag were chiefly of the martial sort. Self-devotion to the nation in war with other nations was the idea most commonly conveyed by the word 'patriotism' and its derivatives. Of course, that must be so in ages when the nations had constantly to stand ready to fight one another for their existence. But the result was that the sentiment of national solidarity was arrayed against the sentiment of human solidarity. A lesser social enthusiasm was set in opposition to a greater, and the result was necessarily full of moral contradictions. Too often what was called love of country might better have been described as hate and jealousy of other countries, for no better reason than that there were other, and bigoted prejudices against foreign ideas and institutions--often far better than domestic ones--for no other reason than that they were foreign. This sort of patriotism was a most potent hindrance for countless ages to the progress of civilization, opposing to the spread of new ideas barriers higher than mountains, broader than rivers, deeper than seas. "The new patriotism is the natural outcome of the new social and international conditions which date from the great Revolution. Wars, which were already growing infrequent in your day, were made impossible by the rise of the world union, and for generations have now been unknown. The old blood-stained frontiers of the nations have become scarcely more than delimitations of territory for administrative convenience, like the State lines in the American Union. Under these circumstances international jealousies, suspicions, animosities, and apprehensions have died a natural death. The anniversaries of battles and triumphs over other nations, by which the antique patriotism was kept burning, have been long ago forgotten. In a word, patriotism is no longer a martial sentiment and is quite without warlike associations. As the flag has lost its former significance as an emblem of outward defiance, it has gained a new meaning as the supreme symbol of internal concord and mutuality; it has become the visible sign of the social solidarity in which the welfare of all is equally and impregnably secured. The American, as he now lifts his eyes to the ensign of the nation, is not reminded of its military prowess as compared with other nations, of its past triumphs in battle and possible future victories. To him the waving folds convey no such suggestions. They recall rather the compact of brotherhood in which he stands pledged with all his countrymen mutually to safeguard the equal dignity and welfare of each by the might of all. "The idea of the old-time patriots was that foreigners were the only people at whose hands the flag could suffer dishonor, and the report of any lack of etiquette toward it on their part used to excite the people to a patriotic frenzy. That sort of feeling would be simply incomprehensible now. As we look at it, foreigners have no power to insult the flag, for they have nothing to do with it, nor with what it stands for. Its honor or dishonor must depend upon the people whose plighted faith one to another it represents, to maintain the social contract. To the old-time patriot there was nothing incongruous in the spectacle of the symbol of the national unity floating over cities reeking with foulest oppressions, full of prostitution, beggary, and dens of nameless misery. According to the modern view, the existence of a single instance in any corner of the land where a citizen had been deprived of the full enjoyment of equality would turn the flag into a flaunting lie, and the people would demand with indignation that it should be hauled down and not raised again till the wrong was remedied." "Truly," I said, "the new glory which Old Glory wears is a greater than the old glory." MORE FOREIGN TRAVEL BUT LESS FOREIGN TRADE. As we had talked, the doctor had allowed our car to drift before the westerly breeze till now we were over the harbor, and I was moved to exclaim at the scanty array of shipping it contained. "It does not seem to me," I said, "that there are more vessels here than in my day, much less the great fleets one might expect to see after a century's development in population and resources." "In point of fact," said the doctor, "the new order has tended to decrease the volume of foreign trade, though on the other hand there is a thousandfold more foreign travel for instruction and pleasure." "In just what way," I asked, "did the new order tend to decrease exchanges with foreign countries?" "In two ways," replied the doctor. "In the first place, as you know, the profit idea is now abolished in foreign trade as well as in domestic distribution. The International Council supervises all exchanges between nations, and the price of any product exported by one nation to another must not be more than that at which the exporting nation provides its own people with the same. Consequently there is no reason why a nation should care to produce goods for export unless and in so far as it needs for actual consumption products of another country which it can not itself so well produce. "Another yet more potent effect of the new order in limiting foreign exchange is the general equalization of all nations which has long ago come about as to intelligence and the knowledge and practice of sciences and arts. A nation of to-day would be humiliated to have to import any commodity which insuperable natural conditions did not prevent the production of at home. It is consequently to such productions that commerce is now limited, and the list of them grows ever shorter as with the progress of invention man's conquest of Nature proceeds. As to the old advantage of coal-producing countries in manufacturing, that disappeared nearly a century ago with the great discoveries which made the unlimited development of electrical power practically costless. "But you should understand that it is not merely on economic grounds or for self-esteem's sake that the various peoples desire to do everything possible for themselves rather than depend on people at a distance. It is quite as much for the education and mind-awakening influence of a diversified industrial system within a small space. It is our policy, so far as it can be economically carried out in the grouping of industries, not only to make the system of each nation complete, but so to group the various industries within each particular country that every considerable district shall present within its own limits a sort of microcosm of the industrial world. We were speaking of that, you may remember, the other morning, in the Labor Exchange." THE MODERN DOCTOR'S EASY TASK. The doctor had some time before reversed our course, and we were now moving westward over the city. "What is that building which we are just passing over that has so much glass about it?" I asked. "That is one of the sanitariums," replied the doctor, "which people go to who are in bad health and do not wish to change their climate, as we think persons in serious chronic ill health ought to do and as all can now do if they desire. In these buildings everything is as absolutely adapted to the condition of the patient as if he were for the time being in a world in which his disease were the normal type." "Doubtless there have been great improvements in all matters relating to your profession--medicine, hygiene, surgery, and the rest--since my day." "Yes," replied the doctor, "there have been great improvements in two ways--negative and positive--and the more important of the two is perhaps the negative way, consisting in the disappearance of conditions inimical to health, which physicians formerly had to combat with little chance of success in many cases. For example, it is now two full generations since the guarantee of equal maintenance for all placed women in a position of economic independence and consequent complete control of their relations to men. You will readily understand how, as one result of this, the taint of syphilis has been long since eliminated from the blood of the race. The universal prevalence now for three generations of the most cleanly and refined conditions of housing, clothing, heating, and living generally, with the best treatment available for all in case of sickness, have practically--indeed I may say completely--put an end to the zymotic and other contagious diseases. To complete the story, add to these improvements in the hygienic conditions of the people the systematic and universal physical culture which is a part of the training of youth, and then as a crowning consideration think of the effect of the physical rehabilitation--you might almost call it the second creation of woman in a bodily sense--which has purified and energized the stream of life at its source." "Really, doctor, I should say that, without going further, you have fairly reasoned your profession out of its occupation." "You may well say so," replied the doctor. "The progress of invention and improvement since your day has several times over improved the doctors out of their former occupations, just as it has every other sort of workers, but only to open new and higher fields of finer work. "Perhaps," my companion resumed, "a more important negative factor in the improvement in medical and hygienic conditions than any I have mentioned is the fact that people are no longer in the state of ignorance as to their own bodies that they seem formerly to have been. The progress of knowledge in that respect has kept pace with the march of universal culture. It is evident from what we read that even the cultured classes in your day thought it no shame to be wholly uninformed as to physiology and the ordinary conditions of health and disease. They appear to have left their physical interests to the doctors, with much the same spirit of cynical resignation with which they turned over their souls to the care of the clergy. Nowadays a system of education would be thought farcical which did not impart a sufficient knowledge of the general principles of physiology, hygiene, and medicine to enable a person to treat any ordinary physical disturbance without recourse to a physician. It is perhaps not too much to say that everybody nowadays knows as much about the treatment of disease as a large proportion of the members of the medical profession did in your time. As you may readily suppose, this is a situation which, even apart from the general improvement in health, would enable the people to get on with one physician where a score formerly found business. We doctors are merely specialists and experts on subjects that everybody is supposed to be well grounded in. When we are called in, it is really only in consultation, to use a phrase of the profession in your day, the other parties being the patient and his friends. "But of all the factors in the advance of medical science, one of the most important has been the disappearance of sectarianism, resulting largely from the same causes, moral and economic, which banished it from religion. You will scarcely need to be reminded that in your day medicine, next to theology, suffered most of all branches of knowledge from the benumbing influence of dogmatic schools. There seems to have been well-nigh as much bigotry as to the science of curing the body as the soul, and its influence to discourage original thought and retard progress was much the same in one field as the other. "There are really no conditions to limit the course of physicians. The medical education is the fullest possible, but the methods of practice are left to the doctor and patient. It is assumed that people as cultured as ours are as competent to elect the treatment for their bodies as to choose that for their souls. The progress in medical science which has resulted from this complete independence and freedom of initiative on the part of the physician, stimulated by the criticism and applause of a people well able to judge of results, has been unprecedented. Not only in the specific application of the preserving and healing arts have innumerable achievements been made and radically new principles discovered, but we have made advances toward a knowledge of the central mystery of life which in your day it would have been deemed almost sacrilegious to dream of. As to pain, we permit it only for its symptomatic indications, and so far only as we need its guidance in diagnosis." "I take it, however, that you have not abolished death." "I assure you," laughed the doctor, "that if perchance any one should find out the secret of that, the people would mob him and burn up his formula. Do you suppose we want to be shut up here forever?" "HOW COULD WE INDEED?" Applying myself again to the study of the moving panorama below us, I presently remarked to the doctor that we must be pretty nearly over what was formerly called Brighton, a suburb of the city at which the live stock for the food supply of the city had mainly been delivered. "I see the old cattle-sheds are gone," I said. "Doubtless you have much better arrangements. By the way, now that everybody is well-to-do, and can afford the best cuts of beef, I imagine the problem of providing a big city with fresh meats must be much more difficult than in my day, when the poor were able to consume little flesh food, and that of the poorest sort." The doctor looked over the side of the car for some moments before answering. "I take it," he said, "that you have not spoken to any one before on this point." "Why, I think not. It has not before occurred to me." "It is just as well," said the doctor. "You see, Julian, in the transformation in customs and habits of thought and standards of fitness since your day, it could scarcely have happened but that in some cases the changes should have been attended with a decided revulsion in sentiment against the former practices. I hardly know how to express myself, but I am rather glad that you first spoke of this matter to me." A light dawned on me, and suddenly brought out the significance of numerous half-digested observations which I had previously made. "Ah!" I exclaimed, "you mean you don't eat the flesh of animals any more." "Is it possible you have not guessed that? Had you not noticed that you were offered no such food?" "The fact is," I replied, "the cooking is so different in all respects from that of my day that I have given up all attempt to identify anything. But I have certainly missed no flavor to which I have been accustomed, though I have been delighted by a great many novel ones." "Yes," said the doctor, "instead of the one or two rude processes inherited from primitive men by which you used to prepare food and elicit its qualities, we have a great number and variety. I doubt if there was any flavor you had which we do not reproduce, besides the great number of new ones discovered since your time." "But when was the use of animals for food discontinued?" "Soon after the great Revolution." "What caused the change? Was it a conviction that health would be favored by avoiding flesh?" "It does not seem to have been that motive which chiefly led to the change. Undoubtedly the abandonment of the custom of eating animals, by which we inherited all their diseases, has had something to do with the great physical improvement of the race, but people did not apparently give up eating animals mainly for health's sake any more than cannibals in more ancient times abandoned eating their fellow-men on that account. It was, of course, a very long time ago, and there was perhaps no practice of the former order of which the people, immediately after giving it up, seem to have become so much ashamed. This is doubtless why we find such meager information in the histories of the period as to the circumstances of the change. There appears, however, to be no doubt that the abandonment of the custom was chiefly an effect of the great wave of humane feeling, the passion of pity and compunction for all suffering--in a word, the impulse of tender-heartedness--which was really the great moral power behind the Revolution. As might be expected, this outburst did not affect merely the relations of men with men, but likewise their relations with the whole sentient world. The sentiment of brotherhood, the feeling of solidarity, asserted itself not merely toward men and women, but likewise toward the humbler companions of our life on earth and sharers of its fortunes, the animals. The new and vivid light thrown on the rights and duties of men to one another brought also into view and recognition the rights of the lower orders of being. A sentiment against cruelty to animals of every kind had long been growing in civilized lands, and formed a distinct feature of the general softening of manners which led up to the Revolution. This sentiment now became an enthusiasm. The new conception of our relation to the animals appealed to the heart and captivated the imagination of mankind. Instead of sacrificing the weaker races to our use or pleasure, with no thought for their welfare, it began to be seen that we should rather, as elder brothers in the great family of Nature, be, so far as possible, guardians and helpers to the weaker orders whose fate is in our hands and to which we are as gods. Do you not see, Julian, how the prevalence of this new view might soon have led people to regard the eating of their fellow-animals as a revolting practice, almost akin to cannibalism?" "That is, of course, very easily understood. Indeed, doctor, you must not suppose that my contemporaries were wholly without feeling on this subject. Long before the Revolution was dreamed of there were a great many persons of my acquaintance who owned to serious qualms over flesh-eating, and perhaps the greater part of refined persons were not without pangs of conscience at various times over the practice. The trouble was, there really seemed nothing else to do. It was just like our economic system. Humane persons generally admitted that it was very bad and brutal, and yet very few could distinctly see what the world was going to replace it with. You people seem to have succeeded in perfecting a _cuisine_ without using flesh, and I admit it is every way more satisfactory than ours was, but you can not imagine how absolutely impossible the idea of getting on without the use of animal food looked in my day, when as yet nothing definite had been suggested to take its place which offered any reasonable amount of gratification to the palate, even if it provided the means of aliment." "I can imagine the difficulty to some extent. It was, as you say, like that which so long hindered the change of economic systems. People could not clearly realize what was to take its place. While one's mouth is full of one flavor it is difficult to imagine another. That lack of constructive imagination on the part of the mass is the obstacle that has stood in the way of removing every ancient evil, and made necessary a wave of revolutionary force to do the work. Such a wave of feeling as I have described was needful in this case to do away with the immemorial habit of flesh-eating. As soon as the new attitude of men's minds took away their taste for flesh, and there was a demand that had to be satisfied for some other and adequate sort of food, it seems to have been very promptly met." "From what source?" "Of course," replied the doctor, "chiefly from the vegetable world, though by no means wholly. There had never been any serious attempt before to ascertain what its provisions for food actually were, still less what might be made of them by scientific treatment. Nor, as long as there was no objection to killing some animal and appropriating without trouble the benefit of its experiments, was there likely to be. The rich lived chiefly on flesh. As for the working masses, which had always drawn their vigor mainly from vegetables, nobody of the influential classes cared to make their lot more agreeable. Now, however, all with one consent set about inquiring what sort of a table Nature might provide for men who had forsworn murder. "Just as the crude and simple method of slavery, first chattel slavery and afterward wage slavery, had, so long as it prevailed, prevented men from seeking to replace its crude convenience by a scientific industrial system, so in like manner the coarse convenience of flesh for food had hitherto prevented men from making a serious perquisition of Nature's edible resources. The delay in this respect is further accounted for by the fact that the preparation of food, on account of the manner of its conduct as an industry, had been the least progressive of all the arts of life." "What is that?" I said. "The least progressive of arts? Why so?" "Because it had always been carried on as an isolated household industry, and as such chiefly left to servants or women, who in former times were the most conservative and habit-bound class in the communities. The rules of the art of cookery had been handed down little changed in essentials since the wife of the Aryan cowherd dressed her husband's food for him. "Now, it must remain very doubtful how immediately successful the revolt against animal food would have proved if the average family cook, whether wife or hireling, had been left each for herself in her private kitchen to grapple with the problem of providing for the table a satisfactory substitute for flesh. But, thanks to the many-sided character of the great Revolution, the juncture of time at which the growth of humane feeling created a revolt against animal food coincided with the complete breakdown of domestic service and the demand of women for a wider life, facts which compelled the placing of the business of providing and preparing food on a co-operative basis, and the making of it a branch of the public service. So it was that as soon as men, losing appetite for their fellow-creatures, began to ask earnestly what else could be eaten, there was already being organized a great governmental department commanding all the scientific talent of the nation, and backed by the resources of the country, for the purpose of solving the question. And it is easy to believe that none of the new departments was stimulated in its efforts by a keener public interest than this which had in charge the preparation of the new national bill of fare. These were the conditions for which alimentation had waited from the beginnings of the race to become a science. "In the first place, the food materials and methods of preparing them actually extant, and used in the different nations, were, for the first time in history, collected and collated. In presence of the cosmopolitan variety and extent of the international _menu_ thus presented, every national _cuisine_ was convicted of having until then run in a rut. It was apparent that in nothing had the nations been more provincial, more stupidly prejudiced against learning from one another, than in matters of food and cooking. It was discovered, as observing travelers had always been aware, that every nation and country, often every province, had half a dozen gastronomic secrets that had never crossed the border, or at best on very brief excursions. "It is well enough to mention, in passing, that the collation of this international bill of fare was only one illustration of the innumerable ways in which the nations, as soon as the new order put an end to the old prejudices, began right and left to borrow and adopt the best of one another's ideas and institutions, to the great general enrichment. "But the organization of a scientific system of alimentation did not cease with utilizing the materials and methods already existing. The botanist and the chemist next set about finding new food materials and new methods of preparing them. At once it was discovered that of the natural products capable of being used as food by man, but a petty proportion had ever been utilized; only those, and a small part even of that class, which readily lent themselves to the single primitive process whereby the race hitherto had attempted to prepare food--namely, the application of dry or wet heat. To this, manifold other processes suggested by chemistry were now added, with effects that our ancestors found as delightful as novel. It had hitherto been with the science of cooking as with metallurgy when simple fire remained its only method. "It is written that the children of Israel, when practicing an enforced vegetarian diet in the wilderness, yearned after the flesh-pots of Egypt, and probably with good reason. The experience of our ancestors appears to have been in this respect quite different. It would seem that the sentiments with which, after a very short period had elapsed, they looked back upon the flesh-pots they had left behind were charged with a feeling quite the reverse of regret. There is an amusing cartoon of the period, which suggests how brief a time it took for them to discover what a good thing they had done for themselves in resolving to spare the animals. The cartoon, as I remember it, is in two parts. The first shows Humanity, typified by a feminine figure regarding a group of animals consisting of the ox, the sheep, and the hog. Her face expresses the deepest compunction, while she tearfully exclaims, 'Poor things! How could we ever bring ourselves to eat you?' The second part reproduces the same group, with the heading 'Five Years After.' But here the countenance of Humanity as she regards the animals expresses not contrition or self-reproach, but disgust and loathing, while she exclaims in nearly identical terms, but very different emphasis, 'How could we, indeed?'" WHAT BECAME OF THE GREAT CITIES. Continuing to move westward toward the interior, we had now gradually left behind the more thickly settled portions of the city, if indeed any portion of these modern cities, in which every home stands in its own inclosure, can be called thickly settled. The groves and meadows and larger woods had become numerous, and villages occurred at frequent intervals. We were out in the country. "Doctor," said I, "it has so happened, you will remember, that what I have seen of twentieth-century life has been mainly its city side. If country life has changed since my day as much as city life, it will be very interesting to make its acquaintance again. Tell me something about it." "There are few respects, I suppose," replied the doctor, "in which the effect of the nationalization of production and distribution on the basis of economic equality has worked a greater transformation than in the relations of city and country, and it is odd we should not have chanced to speak of this before now." "When I was last in the world of living people," I said, "the city was fast devouring the country. Has that process gone on, or has it possibly been reversed?" "Decidedly the latter," replied the doctor, "as indeed you will at once see must have been the case when you consider that the enormous growth of the great cities of the past was entirely an economic consequence of the system of private capitalism, with its necessary dependence upon individual initiative, and the competitive system." "That is a new idea to me," I said. "I think you will find it a very obvious one upon reflection," replied the doctor. "Under private capitalism, you see, there was no public or governmental system for organizing productive effort and distributing its results. There was no general and unfailing machinery for bringing producers and consumers together. Everybody had to seek his own occupation and maintenance on his own account, and success depended on his finding an opportunity to exchange his labor or possessions for the possessions or labor of others. For this purpose the best place, of course, was where there were many people who likewise wanted to buy or sell their labor or goods. Consequently, when, owing either to accident or calculation, a mass of people were drawn together, others flocked to them, for every such aggregation made a market place where, owing simply to the number of persons desiring to buy and sell, better opportunities for exchange were to be found than where fewer people were, and the greater the number of people the larger and better the facilities for exchange. The city having thus taken a start, the larger it became, the faster it was likely to grow by the same logic that accounted for its first rise. The laborer went there to find the largest and steadiest market for his muscle, and the capitalist--who, being a conductor of production, desired the largest and steadiest labor market--went there also. The capitalist trader went there to find the greatest group of consumers of his goods within least space. "Although at first the cities rose and grew, mainly because of the facilities for exchange among their own citizens, yet presently the result of the superior organization of exchange facilities made them centers of exchange for the produce of the surrounding country. In this way those who lived in the cities had not only great opportunities to grow rich by supplying the needs of the dense resident population, but were able also to levy a tribute upon the products of the people in the country round about by compelling those products to pass through their hands on the way to the consumers, even though the consumers, like the producers, lived in the country, and might be next door neighbors. "In due course," pursued the doctor, "this concentration of material wealth in the cities led to a concentration there of all the superior, the refined, the pleasant, and the luxurious ministrations of life. Not only did the manual laborers flock to the cities as the market where they could best exchange their labor for the money of the capitalists, but the professional and learned class resorted thither for the same purpose. The lawyers, the pedagogues, the doctors, the rhetoricians, and men of special skill in every branch, went there as the best place to find the richest and most numerous employers of their talents, and to make their careers. "And in like manner all who had pleasure to sell--the artists, the players, the singers, yes, and the courtesans also--flocked to the cities for the same reasons. And those who desired pleasure and had wealth to buy it, those who wished to enjoy life, either as to its coarse or refined gratifications, followed the pleasure-givers. And, finally, the thieves and robbers, and those pre-eminent in the wicked arts of living on their fellow-men, followed the throng to the cities, as offering them also the best field for their talents. And so the cities became great whirlpools, which drew to themselves all that was richest and best, and also everything that was vilest, in the whole land. "Such, Julian, was the law of the genesis and growth of the cities, and it was by necessary consequence the law of the shrinkage, decay, and death of the country and country life. It was only necessary that the era of private capitalism in America should last long enough for the rural districts to have been reduced to what they were in the days of the Roman Empire, and of every empire which achieved full development--namely, regions whence all who could escape had gone to seek their fortune in the cities, leaving only a population of serfs and overseers. "To do your contemporaries justice, they seemed themselves to realize that the swallowing up of the country by the city boded no good to civilization, and would apparently have been glad to find a cure for it, but they failed entirely to observe that, as it was a necessary effect of private capitalism, it could only be remedied by abolishing that." "Just how," said I, "did the abolition of private capitalism and the substitution of a nationalized economic system operate to stop the growth of the cities?" "By abolishing the need of markets for the exchange of labor and commodities," replied the doctor. "The facilities of exchange organized in the cities under the private capitalists were rendered wholly superfluous and impertinent by the national organization of production and distribution. The produce of the country was no longer handled by or distributed through the cities, except so far as produced or consumed there. The quality of goods furnished in all localities, and the measure of industrial service required of all, was the same. Economic equality having done away with rich and poor, the city ceased to be a place where greater luxury could be enjoyed or displayed than the country. The provision of employment and of maintenance on equal terms to all took away the advantages of locality as helps to livelihood. In a word, there was no longer any motive to lead a person to prefer city to country life, who did not like crowds for the sake of being crowded. Under these circumstances you will not find it strange that the growth of the cities ceased, and their depopulation began from the moment the effects of the Revolution became apparent." "But you have cities yet!" I exclaimed. "Certainly--that is, we have localities where population still remains denser than in other places. None of the great cities of your day have become extinct, but their populations are but small fractions of what they were." "But Boston is certainly a far finer-looking city than in my day." "All the modern cities are far finer and fairer in every way than their predecessors and infinitely fitter for human habitation, but in order to make them so it was necessary to get rid of their surplus population. There are in Boston to-day perhaps a quarter as many people as lived in the same limits in the Boston of your day, and that is simply because there were four times as many people within those limits as could be housed and furnished with environments consistent with the modern idea of healthful and agreeable living. New York, having been far worse crowded than Boston, has lost a still larger proportion of its former population. Were you to visit Manhattan Island I fancy your first impression would be that the Central Park of your day had been extended all the way from the Battery to Harlem River, though in fact the place is rather thickly built up according to modern notions, some two hundred and fifty thousand people living there among the groves and fountains." "And you say this amazing depopulation took place at once after the Revolution?" "It began then. The only way in which the vast populations of the old cities could be crowded into spaces so small was by packing them like sardines in tenement houses. As soon as it was settled that everybody must be provided with really and equally good habitations, it followed that the cities must lose the greater part of their population. These had to be provided with dwellings in the country. Of course, so vast a work could not be accomplished instantly, but it proceeded with all possible speed. In addition to the exodus of people from the cities because there was no room for them to live decently, there was also a great outflow of others who, now there had ceased to be any economic advantages in city life, were attracted by the natural charms of the country; so that you may easily see that it was one of the great tasks of the first decade after the Revolution to provide homes elsewhere for those who desired to leave the cities. The tendency countryward continued until the cities having been emptied of their excess of people, it was possible to make radical changes in their arrangements. A large proportion of the old buildings and all the unsightly, lofty, and inartistic ones were cleared away and replaced with structures of the low, broad, roomy style adapted to the new ways of living. Parks, gardens, and roomy spaces were multiplied on every hand and the system of transit so modified as to get rid of the noise and dust, and finally, in a word, the city of your day was changed into the modern city. Having thus been made as pleasant places to live in as was the country itself, the outflow of population from the cities ceased and an equilibrium became established." "It strikes me," I observed, "that under any circumstances cities must still, on account of their greater concentration of people, have certain better public services than small villages, for naturally such conveniences are least expensive where a dense population is to be supplied." "As to that," replied the doctor, "if a person desires to live in some remote spot far away from neighbors he will have to put up with some inconveniences. He will have to bring his supplies from the nearest public store and dispense with various public services enjoyed by those who live nearer together; but in order to be really out of reach of these services he must go a good way off. You must remember that nowadays the problems of communication and transportation both by public and private means have been so entirely solved that conditions of space which were prohibitive in your day are unimportant now. Villages five and ten miles apart are as near together for purposes of social intercourse and economic administration as the adjoining wards of your cities. Either on their own account or by group combinations with other communities dwellers in the smallest villages enjoy installations of all sorts of public services as complete as exist in the cities. All have public stores and kitchens with telephone and delivery systems, public baths, libraries, and institutions of the highest education. As to the quality of the services and commodities provided, they are of absolutely equal excellence wherever furnished. Finally, by telephone and electroscope the dwellers in any part of the country, however deeply secluded among the forests or the mountains, may enjoy the theater, the concert, and the orator quite as advantageously as the residents of the largest cities." THE REFORESTING. Still we swept on mile after mile, league after league, toward the interior, and still the surface below presented the same parklike aspect that had marked the immediate environs of the city. Every natural feature appeared to have been idealized and all its latent meaning brought out by the loving skill of some consummate landscape artist, the works of man blending with the face of Nature in perfect harmony. Such arrangements of scenery had not been uncommon in my day, when great cities prepared costly pleasure grounds, but I had never imagined anything on a scale like this. "How far does this park extend?" I demanded at last. "There seems no end to it." "It extends to the Pacific Ocean," said the doctor. "Do you mean that the whole United States is laid out in this way?" "Not precisely in this way by any means, but in a hundred different ways according to the natural suggestions of the face of the country and the most effective way of co-operating with them. In this region, for instance, where there are few bold natural features, the best effect to be obtained was that of a smiling, peaceful landscape with as much diversification in detail as possible. In the mountainous regions, on the contrary, where Nature has furnished effects which man's art could not strengthen, the method has been to leave everything absolutely as Nature left it, only providing the utmost facilities for travel and observation. When you visit the White Mountains or the Berkshire Hills you will find, I fancy, their slopes shaggier, the torrents wilder, the forests loftier and more gloomy than they were a hundred years ago. The only evidences of man's handiwork to be found there are the roadways which traverse every gorge and top every summit, carrying the traveler within reach of all the wild, rugged, or beautiful bits of Nature." "As far as forests go, it will not be necessary for me to visit the mountains in order to perceive that the trees are not only a great deal loftier as a rule, but that there are vastly more of them than formerly." "Yes," said the doctor, "it would be odd if you did not notice that difference in the landscape. There are said to be five or ten trees nowadays where there was one in your day, and a good part of those you see down there are from seventy-five to a hundred years old, dating from the reforesting." "What was the reforesting?" I asked. "It was the restoration of the forests after the Revolution. Under private capitalism the greed or need of individuals had led to so general a wasting of the woods that the streams were greatly reduced and the land was constantly plagued with droughts. It was found after the Revolution that one of the things most urgent to be done was to reforest the country. Of course, it has taken a long time for the new plantings to come to maturity, but I believe it is now some twenty-five years since the forest plan reached its full development and the last vestiges of the former ravages disappeared." "Do you know," I said presently, "that one feature which is missing from the landscape impresses me quite as much as any that it presents?" "What is it that is missing?" "The hayfield." "Ah! yes, no wonder you miss it," said the doctor. "I understand that in your day hay was the main crop of New England?" "Altogether so," I replied, "and now I suppose you have no use for hay at all. Dear me, in what a multitude of important ways the passing of the animals out of use both for food and work must have affected human occupations and interests!" "Yes, indeed," said the doctor, "and always to the notable improvement of the social condition, though it may sound ungrateful to say so. Take the case of the horse, for example. With the passing of that long-suffering servant of man to his well earned reward, smooth, permanent, and clean roadways first became possible; dust, dirt, danger, and discomfort ceased to be necessary incidents of travel. "Thanks to the passing of the horse, it was possible to reduce the breadth of roadways by half or a third, to construct them of smooth concrete from grass to grass, leaving no soil to be disturbed by wind or water, and such ways once built, last like Roman roads, and can never be overgrown by vegetation. These paths, penetrating every nook and corner of the land, have, together with the electric motors, made travel such a luxury that as a rule we make all short journeys, and when time does not press even very long ones, by private conveyance. Had land travel remained in the condition it was in when it depended on the horse, the invention of the air-car would have strongly tempted humanity to treat the earth as the birds do--merely as a place to alight on between flights. As it is, we consider the question an even one whether it is pleasanter to swim through the air or to glide over the ground, the motion being well-nigh as swift, noiseless, and easy in one case as in the other." "Even before 1887," I said, "the bicycle was coming into such favor and the possibilities of electricity were beginning so to loom up that prophetic people began to talk about the day of the horse as almost over. But it was believed that, although dispensed with for road purposes, he must always remain a necessity for the multifarious purposes of farm work, and so I should have supposed. How is it about that?" TWENTIETH-CENTURY FARMING. "Wait a moment," replied the doctor; "when we have descended a little I will give you a practical answer." After we had dropped from an altitude of perhaps a thousand feet to a couple of hundred, the doctor said: "Look down there to the right." I did so, and saw a large field from which the crops had been cut. Over its surface was moving a row of great machines, behind which the earth surged up in brown and rigid billows. On each machine stood or sat in easy attitude a young man or woman with quite the air of persons on a pleasure excursion. "Evidently," I said, "these are plows, but what drives them?" "They are electric plows," replied the doctor. "Do you see that snakelike cord trailing away over the broken ground behind each machine? That is the cable by which the force is supplied. Observe those posts at regular intervals about the field. It is only necessary to attach one of those cables to a post to have a power which, connected with any sort of agricultural machine, furnishes energy graduated from a man's strength to that of a hundred horses, and requiring for its guidance no other force than the fingers of a child can supply." And not only this, but it was further explained to me that by this system of flexible cables of all sizes the electric power was applied not only to all the heavy tasks formerly done by animals, but also to the hand instruments--the spade, the shovel, and the fork--which the farmer in my time must bend his own back to, however well supplied he might be with horse power. There was, indeed, no tool, however small, the doctor explained, whether used in agriculture or any other art, to which this motor was not applicable, leaving to the worker only the adjustment and guiding of the instrument. "With one of our shovels," said the doctor, "an intelligent boy can excavate a trench or dig a mile of potatoes quicker than a gang of men in your day, and with no more effort than he would use in wheeling a barrow." I had been told several times that at the present day farm work was considered quite as desirable as any other occupation, but, with my impressions as to the peculiar arduousness of the earth worker's task, I had not been able to realize how this could really be so. It began to seem possible. The doctor suggested that perhaps I would like to land and inspect some of the arrangements of a modern farm, and I gladly assented. But first he took advantage of our elevated position to point out the network of railways by which all the farm transportation was done and whereby the crops when gathered could, if desirable, be shipped directly, without further handling, to any point in the country. Having alighted from our car, we crossed the field toward the nearest of the great plows, the rider of which was a dark-haired young woman daintily costumed, such a figure certainly as no nineteenth-century farm field ever saw. As she sat gracefully upon the back of the shining metal monster which, as it advanced, tore up the earth with terrible horns, I could but be reminded of Europa on her bull. If her prototype was as charming as this young woman, Jupiter certainly was excusable for running away with her. As we approached, she stopped the plow and pleasantly returned our greeting. It was evident that she recognized me at the first glance, as, thanks doubtless to the diffusion of my portrait, everybody seemed to do. The interest with which she regarded me would have been more flattering had I not been aware that I owed it entirely to my character as a freak of Nature and not at all to my personality. When I asked her what sort of a crop they were expecting to plant at this season, she replied that this was merely one of the many annual plowings given to all soil to keep it in condition. "We use, of course, abundant fertilizers," she said, "but consider the soil its own best fertilizer if kept moving." "Doubtless," said I, "labor is the best fertilizer of the soil. So old an authority as Aesop taught us that in his fable of 'The Buried Treasure,' but it was a terribly expensive sort of fertilizer in my day when it had to come out of the muscles of men and beasts. One plowing a year was all our farmers could manage, and that nearly broke their backs." "Yes," she said, "I have read of those poor men. Now you see it is different. So long as the tides rise and fall twice a day, let alone the winds and waterfalls, there is no reason why we should not plow every day if it were desirable. I believe it is estimated that about ten times the amount of power is nowadays given to the working of every acre of land that it was possible to apply in former times." We spent some time inspecting the farm. The doctor explained the drainage and pumping systems by which both excess and deficiency of rain are guarded against, and gave me opportunity to examine in detail some of the wonderful tools he had described, which make practically no requisition on the muscle of the worker, only needing a mind behind them. Connected with the farm was one of the systems of great greenhouse establishments upon which the people depend for fresh vegetables in the winter, and this, too, we visited. The wonders of intensive culture which I saw in that great structure would of course astonish none of my readers, but to me the revelation of what could be done with plants when all the conditions of light, heat, moisture, and soil ingredients were absolutely to be commanded, was a never-to-be-forgotten experience. It seemed to me that I had stolen into the very laboratory of the Creator, and found him at the task of fashioning with invisible hands the dust of the earth and the viewless air into forms of life. I had never seen plants actually grow before and had deemed the Indian juggler's trick an imposture. But here I saw them lifting their heads, putting forth their buds, and opening their flowers by movements which the eye could follow. I confess that I fairly listened to hear them whisper. "In my day, greenhouse culture of vegetables out of season had been carried on only to an extent to meet the demands of a small class of very rich. The idea of providing such supplies at moderate prices for the entire community, according to the modern practice, was of course quite undreamed of." When we left the greenhouse the afternoon had worn away and the sun was setting. Rising swiftly to a height where its rays still warmed us, we set out homeward. Strongest of all the impressions of that to me so wonderful afternoon there lingered most firmly fixed in my mind the latest--namely, the object lesson I had received of the transformation in the conditions of agriculture, the great staple human occupation from the beginning, and the basis of every industrial system. Presently I said: "Since you have so successfully done away with the first of the two main drawbacks of the agricultural occupation as known in my day--namely, its excessive laboriousness--you have no doubt also known how to eliminate the other, which was the isolation, the loneliness, the lack of social intercourse and opportunity of social culture which were incident to the farmer's life." "Nobody would certainly do farm work," replied the doctor, "if it had continued to be either more lonesome or more laborious than other sorts of work. As regards the social surroundings of the agriculturist, he is in no way differently situated from the artisan or any other class of workers. He, like the others, lives where he pleases, and is carried to and fro just as they are between the place of his residence and occupation by the lines of swift transit with which the country is threaded. Work on a farm no longer implies life on a farm, unless for those who like it." "One of the conditions of the farmer's life, owing to the variations of the season," I said, "has always been the alternation of slack work and periods of special exigency, such as planting and harvesting, when the sudden need of a multiplied labor force has necessitated the severest strain of effort for a time. This alternation of too little with too much work, I should suppose, would still continue to distinguish agriculture from other occupations." "No doubt," replied the doctor, "but this alternation, far from involving either a wasteful relaxation of effort or an excessive strain on the worker, furnishes occasions of recreation which add a special attraction to the agricultural occupation. The seasons of planting and harvesting are of course slightly or largely different in the several districts of a country so extensive as this. The fact makes it possible successively to concentrate in each district as large an extra contingent of workers drawn from other districts as is needed. It is not uncommon on a few days' notice to throw a hundred thousand extra workers into a region where there is a special temporary demand for labor. The inspiration of these great mass movements is remarkable, and must be something like that which attended in your day the mobilizing and marching of armies to war." We drifted on for a space in silence through the darkening sky. "Truly, Julian," said the doctor at length, "no industrial transformation since your day has been so complete, and none surely has affected so great a proportion of the people, as that which has come over agriculture. The poets from Virgil up and down have recognized in rural pursuits and the cultivation of the earth the conditions most favorable to a serene and happy life. Their fancies in this respect have, however, until the present time, been mocked by the actual conditions of agriculture, which have combined to make the lot of the farmer, the sustainer of all the world, the saddest, most difficult, and most hopeless endured by any class of men. From the beginning of the world until the last century the tiller of the soil has been the most pathetic figure in history. In the ages of slavery his was the lowest class of slaves. After slavery disappeared his remained the most anxious, arduous, and despairing of occupations. He endured more than the poverty of the wage-earner without his freedom from care, and all the anxiety of the capitalist without his hope of compensating profits. On the one side he was dependent for his product, as was no other class, upon the caprices of Nature, while on the other in disposing of it he was more completely at the mercy of the middleman than any other producer. Well might he wonder whether man or Nature were the more heartless. If the crops failed, the farmer perished; if they prospered, the middleman took the profit. Standing as a buffer between the elemental forces and human society, he was smitten by the one only to be thrust back by the other. Bound to the soil, he fell into a commercial serfdom to the cities well-nigh as complete as the feudal bondage had been. By reason of his isolated and unsocial life he was uncouth, unlettered, out of touch with culture, without opportunities for self-improvement, even if his bitter toil had left him energy or time for it. For this reason the dwellers in the towns looked down upon him as one belonging to an inferior race. In all lands, in all ages, the countryman has been considered a proper butt by the most loutish townsman. The starving proletarian of the city pavement scoffed at the farmer as a boor. Voiceless, there was none to speak for him, and his rude, inarticulate complaints were met with jeers. Baalam was not more astonished when the ass he was riding rebuked him than the ruling classes of America seem to have been when the farmers, toward the close of the last century, undertook to have something to say about the government of the country. "From time to time in the progress of history the condition of the farmer has for brief periods been tolerable. The yeoman of England was once for a little while one who looked nobles in the face. Again, the American farmer, up to the middle of the nineteenth century, enjoyed the golden age of agriculture. Then for a space, producing chiefly for use and not for sale to middlemen, he was the most independent of men and enjoyed a rude abundance. But before the nineteenth century had reached its last third, American agriculture had passed through its brief idyllic period, and, by the inevitable operation of private capitalism, the farmer began to go down hill toward the condition of serfdom, which in all ages before had been his normal state, and must be for evermore, so long as the economic exploitation of men by men should continue. While in one sense economic equality brought an equal blessing to all, two classes had especial reason to hail it as bringing to them a greater elevation from a deeper degradation than to any others. One of these classes was the women, the other the farmers." CHAPTER XXXIV. WHAT STARTED THE REVOLUTION. What did I say to the theater for that evening? was the question with which Edith met me when we reached home. It seemed that a celebrated historical drama of the great Revolution was to be given in Honolulu that afternoon, and she had thought I might like to see it. "Really you ought to attend," she said, "for the presentation of the play is a sort of compliment to you, seeing that it is revived in response to the popular interest in revolutionary history which your presence has aroused." No way of spending the evening could have been more agreeable to me, and it was agreed that we should make up a family theater party. "The only trouble," I said, as we sat around the tea table, "is that I don't know enough yet about the Revolution to follow the play very intelligently. Of course, I have heard revolutionary events referred to frequently, but I have no connected idea of the Revolution as a whole." "That will not matter," said Edith. "There is plenty of time before the play for father to tell you what is necessary. The matinee does not begin till three in the afternoon at Honolulu, and as it is only six now the difference in time will give us a good hour before the curtain rises." "That's rather a short time, as well as a short notice, for so big a task as explaining the great Revolution," the doctor mildly protested, "but under the circumstances I suppose I shall have to do the best I can." "Beginnings are always misty," he said, when I straightway opened at him with the question when the great Revolution began. "Perhaps St. John disposed of that point in the simplest way when he said that 'in the beginning was God.' To come down nearer, it might be said that Jesus Christ stated the doctrinal basis and practical purpose of the great Revolution when he declared that the golden rule of equal and the best treatment for all was the only right principle on which people could live together. To speak, however, in the language of historians, the great Revolution, like all important events, had two sets of causes--first, the general, necessary, and fundamental cause which must have brought it about in the end, whatever the minor circumstances had been; and, second, the proximate or provoking causes which, within certain limits, determined when it actually did take place, together with the incidental features. These immediate or provoking causes were, of course, different in different countries, but the general, necessary, and fundamental cause was the same in all countries, the great Revolution being, as you know, world-wide and nearly simultaneous, as regards the more advanced nations. "That cause, as I have often intimated in our talks, was the growth of intelligence and diffusion of knowledge among the masses, which, beginning with the introduction of printing, spread slowly through the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, and much more rapidly during the nineteenth, when, in the more favored countries, it began, to be something like general. Previous to the beginning of this process of enlightenment the condition of the mass of mankind as to intelligence, from the most ancient times, had been practically stationary at a point little above the level of the brutes. With no more thought or will of their own than clay in the hands of the potter, they were unresistingly molded to the uses of the more intelligent and powerful individuals and groups of their kind. So it went on for innumerable ages, and nobody dreamed of anything else until at last the conditions were ripe for the inbreathing of an intellectual life into these inert and senseless clods. The process by which this awakening took place was silent, gradual, imperceptible, but no previous event or series of events in the history of the race had been comparable to it in the effect it was to have upon human destiny. It meant that the interest of the many instead of the few, the welfare of the whole instead of that of a part, were henceforth to be the paramount purpose of the social order and the goal of its evolution. "Dimly your nineteenth-century philosophers seem to have perceived that the general diffusion of intelligence was a new and large fact, and that it introduced a very important force into the social evolution, but they were wall-eyed in their failure to see the certainty with which it foreshadowed a complete revolution of the economic basis of society in the interest of the whole body of the people as opposed to class interest or partial interest of every sort. Its first effect was the democratic movement by which personal and class rule in political matters was overthrown in the name of the supreme interest and authority of the people. It is astonishing that there should have been any intelligent persons among you who did not perceive that political democracy was but the pioneer corps and advance guard of economic democracy, clearing the way and providing the instrumentality for the substantial part of the programme--namely, the equalization of the distribution of work and wealth. So much for the main, general, and necessary cause and explanation of the great Revolution--namely, the progressive diffusion of intelligence among the masses from the sixteenth to the end of the nineteenth centuries. Given this force in operation, and the revolution of the economic basis of society must sooner or later have been its outcome everywhere: whether a little sooner or later and in just what way and with just what circumstances, the differing conditions of different countries determined. "In the case of America, the period of revolutionary agitation which resulted in the establishment of the present order began almost at once upon the close of the civil war. Some historians date the beginning of the Revolution from 1873." "Eighteen seventy-three!" I exclaimed; "why, that was more than a dozen years before I fell asleep! It seems, then, that I was a contemporary and witness of at least a part of the Revolution, and yet I saw no Revolution. It is true that we recognized the highly serious condition of industrial confusion and popular discontent, but we did not realize that a Revolution was on." "It was to have been expected that you would not," replied the doctor. "It is very rarely that the contemporaries of great revolutionary movements have understood their nature until they have nearly run their course. Following generations always think that they would have been wiser in reading the signs of the times, but that is not likely." "But what was there," I said, "about 1873 which has led historians to take it as the date from which to reckon the beginning of the Revolution?" "Simply the fact that it marked in a rather distinct way the beginning of a period of economic distress among the American people, which continued, with temporary and partial alleviations, until the overthrow of private capitalism. The popular discontent resulting from this experience was the provoking cause of the Revolution. It awoke Americans from their self-complacent dream that the social problem had been solved or could be solved by a system of democracy limited to merely political forms, and set them to seeking the true solution. "The economic distress beginning at the last third of the century, which was the direct provocation of the Revolution, was very slight compared with that which had been the constant lot and ancient heritage of other nations. It represented merely the first turn or two of the screw by which capitalism in due time squeezed dry the masses always and everywhere. The unexampled space and richness of their new land had given Americans a century's respite from the universal fate. Those advantages had passed, the respite was ended, and the time had come when the people must adapt their necks to the yoke all peoples before had worn. But having grown high-spirited from so long an experience of comparative welfare, the Americans resisted the imposition, and, finding mere resistance vain, ended by making a revolution. That in brief is the whole story of the way the great Revolution came on in America. But while this might satisfy a languid twentieth-century curiosity as to a matter so remote in time, you will naturally want a little more detail. There is a particular chapter in Storiot's History of the Revolution explaining just how and why the growth of the power of capital provoked the great uprising, which deeply impressed me in my school days, and I don't think I can make a better use of a part of our short time than by reading a few paragraphs from it." And Edith having brought the book from the library--for we still sat at the tea table--the doctor read: "'With reference to the evolution of the system of private capitalism to the point where it provoked the Revolution by threatening the lives and liberties of the people, historians divide the history of the American Republic, from its foundation in 1787 to the great Revolution which made it a true republic, into three periods. "'The first comprises the decades from the foundation of the republic to about the end of the first third of the nineteenth century--say, up to the thirties or forties. This was the period during which the power of capital in private hands had not as yet shown itself seriously aggressive. The moneyed class was small and the accumulations of capital petty. The vastness of the natural resources of the virgin country defied as yet the lust of greed. The ample lands to be had for the taking guaranteed independence to all at the price of labor. With this resource no man needed to call another master. This may be considered the idyllic period of the republic, the time when De Tocqueville saw and admired it, though not without prescience of the doom that awaited it. The seed of death was in the state in the principle of private capitalism, and was sure in time to grow and ripen, but as yet the conditions were not favorable to its development. All seemed to go well, and it is not strange that the American people indulged in the hope that their republic had indeed solved the social question. "'From about 1830 or 1840, speaking of course in a general way as to date, we consider the republic to have entered on its second phase--namely, that in which the growth and concentration of capital began to be rapid. The moneyed class now grew powerful, and began to reach out and absorb the natural resources of the country and to organize for its profit the labor of the people. In a word, the growth of the plutocracy became vigorous. The event which gave the great impulse to this movement, and fixed the time of the transition from the first to the second period in the history of the nation, was of course the general application of steam to commerce and industry. The transition may indeed be said to have begun somewhat earlier, with the introduction of the factory system. Of course, if neither steam nor the inventions which made the factory system possible had ever been introduced, it would have been merely a question of a longer time before the capitalist class, proceeding in this case by landlordism and usury, would have reduced the masses to vassalage, and overthrown democracy even as in the ancient republics, but the great inventions amazingly accelerated the plutocratic conquest. For the first time in history the capitalist in the subjugation of his fellows had machinery for his ally, and a most potent one it was. This was the mighty factor which, by multiplying the power of capital and relatively dwarfing the importance of the workingman, accounts for the extraordinary rapidity with which, during the second and third periods the conquest of the republic by the plutocracy was carried out. "'It is a fact creditable to Americans that they appear to have begun to realize as early as the forties that new and dangerous tendencies were affecting the republic and threatening to falsify its promise of a wide diffusion of welfare. That decade is notable in American history for the popular interest taken in the discussion of the possibility of a better social order, and for the numerous experiments undertaken to test the feasibility of dispensing with the private capitalist by co-operative industry. Already the more intelligent and public-spirited citizens were beginning to observe that their so-called popular government did not seem to interfere in the slightest degree with the rule of the rich and the subjection of the masses to economic masters, and to wonder, if that were to continue to be so, of exactly how much value the so-called republican institutions were on which they had so prided themselves. "'This nascent agitation of the social question on radical lines was, however, for the time destined to prove abortive by force of a condition peculiar to America--namely, the existence on a vast scale of African chattel slavery in the country. It was fitting in the evolution of complete human liberty that this form of bondage, cruder and more brutal, if not on the whole more cruel, than wage slavery, should first be put out of the way. But for this necessity and the conditions that produced it, we may believe that the great Revolution would have occurred in America twenty-five years earlier. From the period of 1840 to 1870 the slavery issue, involving as it did a conflict of stupendous forces, absorbed all the moral and mental as well as physical energies of the nation. "'During the thirty or forty years from the serious beginning of the antislavery movement till the war was ended and its issues disposed of, the nation had no thought to spare for any other interests. During this period the concentration of capital in few hands, already alarming to the far-sighted in the forties, had time, almost unobserved and quite unresisted, to push its conquest of the country and the people. Under cover of the civil war, with its preceding and succeeding periods of agitation over the issues of the war, the capitalists may be said to have stolen a march upon the nation and intrenched themselves in a commanding position. "'Eighteen seventy-three is the point, as near as any date, at which the country, delivered at last from the distracting ethical, and sectional issues of slavery, first began to open its eyes to the irrepressible conflict which the growth of capitalism had forced--a conflict between the power of wealth and the democratic idea of the equal right of all to life, liberty, and happiness. From about this time we date, therefore, the beginning of the final or revolutionary period of the pseudo-American Republic which resulted in the establishment of the present system. "'History had furnished abundant previous illustrations of the overthrow of republican societies by the growth and concentration of private wealth, but never before had it recorded a revolution in the economic basis of a great nation at once so complete and so swiftly effected. In America before the war, as we have seen, wealth had been distributed with a general effect of evenness never previously known in a large community. There had been few rich men and very few considerable fortunes. It had been in the power neither of individuals nor a class, through the possession of overwhelming capital, to exercise oppression upon the rest of the community. In the short space of twenty-five to thirty years these economic conditions had been so completely reversed as to give America in the seventies and eighties the name of the land of millionaires, and make it famous to the ends of the earth as the country of all others where the vastest private accumulations of wealth existed. The consequences of this amazing concentration of wealth formerly so equally diffused, as it had affected the industrial, the social, and the political interests of the people, could not have been other than revolutionary. "'Free competition in business had ceased to exist. Personal initiative in industrial enterprises, which formerly had been open to all, was restricted to the capitalists, and to the larger capitalists at that. Formerly known all over the world as the land of opportunities, America had in the time of a generation become equally celebrated as the land of monopolies. A man no longer counted chiefly for what he was, but for what he had. Brains and industry, if coupled with civility, might indeed win an upper servant's place in the employ of capital, but no longer could command a career. "'The concentration of the economic administration of the country in the hands of a comparatively small body of great capitalists had necessarily consolidated and centralized in a corresponding manner all the functions of production and distribution. Single great concerns, backed by enormous aggregations of capital, had appropriated tracts of the business field formerly occupied by innumerable smaller concerns. In this process, as a matter of course, swarms of small businesses were crushed like flies, and their former independent proprietors were fortunate to find places as underlings in the great establishments which had supplanted them. Straight through the seventies and eighties, every month, every week, every day saw some fresh province of the economic state, some new branch of industry or commerce formerly open to the enterprise of all, captured by a combination of capitalists and turned into an intrenched camp of monopoly. The words _syndicate_ and _trust_ were coined to describe these monstrous growths, for which the former language of the business world had no name. "'Of the two great divisions of the working masses it would be hard to say whether the wage-earner or the farmer had suffered most by the changed order. The old personal relationship and kindly feeling between employee and employer had passed away. The great aggregations of capital which had taken the place of the former employers were impersonal forces, which knew the worker no longer as a man, but as a unit of force. He was merely a tool in the employ of a machine, the managers of which regarded him as a necessary nuisance, who must unfortunately be retained at the least possible expense, until he could be invented wholly out of existence by some new mechanical contrivance. "'The economic function and possibilities of the farmer had similarly been dwarfed or cut off as a result of the concentration of the business system of the country in the hands of a few. The railroads and the grain market had, between them, absorbed the former profits of farming, and left the farmer only the wages of a day laborer in case of a good crop, and a mortgage debt in case of a bad one; and all this, moreover, coupled with the responsibilities of a capitalist whose money was invested in his farm. This latter responsibility, however, did not long continue to trouble the farmer, for, as naturally might be supposed, the only way he could exist from year to year under such conditions was by contracting debts without the slightest prospect of paying them, which presently led to the foreclosure of his land, and his reduction from the once proud estate of an American farmer to that of a tenant on his way to become a peasant. "'From 1873 to 1896 the histories quote some six distinct business crises. The periods of rallying between them were, however, so brief that we may say a continuous crisis existed during a large part of that period. Now, business crises had been numerous and disastrous in the early and middle epoch of the republic, but the business system, resting at that time on a widely extended popular initiative, had shown itself quickly and strongly elastic, and the rallies that promptly followed the crashes had always led to a greater prosperity than that before enjoyed. But this elasticity, with the cause of it, was now gone. There was little or slow reaction after the crises of the seventies, eighties, and early nineties, but, on the contrary, a scarcely interrupted decline of prices, wages, and the general prosperity and content of the farming and wage-earning masses. "'There could not be a more striking proof of the downward tendency in the welfare of the wage-earner and the farmer than the deteriorating quality and dwindling volume of foreign immigration which marked the period. The rush of European emigrants to the United States as the land of promise for the poor, since its beginning half a century before, had continued with increasing volume, and drawn to us a great population from the best stocks of the Old World. Soon after the war the character of the immigration began to change, and during the eighties and nineties came to be almost entirely made up of the lowest, most wretched, and barbarous races of Europe--the very scum of the continent. Even to secure these wretched recruits the agents of the transatlantic steamers and the American land syndicates had to send their agents all over the worst districts of Europe and flood the countries with lying circulars. Matters had come to the point that no European peasant or workingman, who was yet above the estate of a beggar or an exile, could any longer afford to share the lot of the American workingman and farmer, so little time before the envy of the toiling world. "'While the politicians sought, especially about election time, to cheer the workingman with the assurance of better times just ahead, the more serious economic writers seem to have frankly admitted that the superiority formerly enjoyed by American workingmen over those of other countries could not be expected to last longer, that the tendency henceforward was to be toward a world-wide level of prices and wages--namely, the level of the country where they were lowest. In keeping with this prediction we note that for the first time, about the beginning of the nineties, the American employer began to find himself, through the reduced cost of production in which wages were the main element, in a position to undersell in foreign markets the products of the slave gangs of British, Belgian, French, and German capitalists. "'It was during this period, when the economic distress of the masses was creating industrial war and making revolutionists of the most contented and previously prosperous agricultural population in history, that the vastest private fortunes in the history of the world were being accumulated. The millionaire, who had been unknown before the war and was still an unusual and portentous figure in the early seventies, was presently succeeded by the multimillionaire, and above the multimillionaires towered yet a new race of economic Titans, the hundred millionaires, and already the coming of the billionaire was being discussed. It is not difficult, nor did the people of the time find it so, to see, in view of this comparison, where the wealth went which the masses were losing. Tens of thousands of modest competencies disappeared, to reappear in colossal fortunes in single hands. Visibly as the body of the spider swells as he sucks the juices of his victims, had these vast aggregations grown in measure as the welfare of the once prosperous people had shrunk away. "'The social consequences of so complete an overthrow of the former economic equilibrium as had taken place could not have been less than revolutionary. In America, before the war, the accumulations of wealth were usually the result of the personal efforts of the possessor and were consequently small and correspondingly precarious. It was a saying of the time that there were usually but three generations from shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves--meaning that if a man accumulated a little wealth, his son generally lost it, and the grandson was again a manual laborer. Under these circumstances the economic disparities, slight at most and constantly fluctuating, entirely failed to furnish a basis for class distinctions. There were recognized no laboring class as such, no leisure class, no fixed classes of rich and poor. Riches or poverty, the condition of being at leisure or obliged to work were considered merely temporary accidents of fortune and not permanent conditions. All this was now changed. The great fortunes of the new order of things by their very magnitude were stable acquisitions, not easily liable to be lost, capable of being handed down from generation to generation with almost as much security as a title of nobility. On the other hand, the monopolization of all the valuable economic opportunities in the country by the great capitalists made it correspondingly impossible for those not of the capitalist class to attain wealth. The hope of becoming rich some day, which before the war every energetic American had cherished, was now practically beyond the horizon of the man born to poverty. Between rich and poor the door was henceforth shut. The way up, hitherto the social safety valve, had been closed, and the bar weighted with money bags. "'A natural reflex of the changed social conditions of the country is seen in the new class terminology, borrowed from the Old World, which soon after the war crept into use in the United States. It had been the boast of the former American that everybody in this country was a workingman; but now that term we find more and more frankly employed to distinguish the poor from the well-to-do. For the first time in American literature we begin to read of the lower classes, the upper classes, and the middle classes--terms which would have been meaningless in America before the war, but now corresponded so closely with the real facts of the situation that those who detested them most could not avoid their use. "'A prodigious display of luxury such as Europe could not rival had begun to characterize the manner of life of the possessors of the new and unexampled fortunes. Spectacles of gilded splendor, of royal pomp and boundless prodigality mocked the popular discontent and brought out in dazzling light the width and depth of the gulf that was being fixed between the masters and the masses. "'Meanwhile the money kings took no pains to disguise the fullness of their conviction that the day of democracy was passing and the dream of equality nearly at an end. As the popular feeling in America had grown bitter against them they had responded with frank indications of their dislike of the country and disgust with its democratic institutions. The leading American millionaires had become international personages, spending the greater part of their time and their revenue in European countries, sending their children there for education and in some instances carrying their preference for the Old World to the extent of becoming subjects of foreign powers. The disposition on the part of the greater American capitalists to turn their backs upon democracy and ally themselves with European and monarchical institutions was emphasized in a striking manner by the long list of marriages arranged during this period between great American heiresses and foreign noblemen. It seemed to be considered that the fitting destiny for the daughter of an American multimillionaire was such a union. These great capitalists were very shrewd in money matters, and their investments of vast sums in the purchase of titles for their posterity was the strongest evidence they could give of a sincere conviction that the future of the world, like its past, belonged not to the people but to class and privilege. "'The influence exercised over the political government by the moneyed class under the convenient euphemism of "the business interests," which merely meant the interests of the rich, had always been considerable, and at times caused grave scandals. In measure as the wealth of the country had become concentrated and allied, its influence in the government had naturally increased, and during the seventies, eighties, and nineties it became a scarcely veiled dictatorship. Lest the nominal representatives of the people should go astray in doing the will of the capitalists, the latter were represented by bodies of picked agents at all the places of government. These agents closely followed the conduct of all public officials, and wherever there was any wavering in their fidelity to the capitalists, were able to bring to bear influences of intimidation or bribery which were rarely unsuccessful. These bodies of agents had a recognized semi-legal place in the political system of the day under the name of lobbyists. "'The history of government contains few more shameful chapters than that which records how during this period the Legislatures--municipal, State, and national--seconded by the Executives and the courts, vied with each other by wholesale grants of land, privileges, franchises, and monopolies of all kinds, in turning over the country, its resources, and its people to the domination of the capitalists, their heirs and assigns forever. The public lands, which a few decades before had promised a boundless inheritance to future generations, were ceded in vast domains to syndicates and individual capitalists, to be held against the people as the basis of a future territorial aristocracy with tributary populations of peasants. Not only had the material substance of the national patrimony been thus surrendered to a handful of the people, but in the fields of commerce and of industry all the valuable economic opportunities had been secured by franchises to monopolies, precluding future generations from opportunity of livelihood or employment, save as the dependents and liegemen of a hereditary capitalist class. In the chronicles of royal misdoings there have been many dark chapters recording how besotted or imbecile monarchs have sold their people into bondage and sapped the welfare of their realms to enrich licentious favorites, but the darkest of those chapters is bright beside that which records the sale of the heritage and hopes of the American people to the highest bidder by the so-called democratic State, national, and local governments during the period of which we are speaking. "'Especially necessary had it become for the plutocracy to be able to use the powers of government at will, on account of the embittered and desperate temper of the working masses. "'The labor strikes often resulted in disturbances too extensive to be dealt with by the police, and it became the common practice of the capitalists, in case of serious strikes, to call on the State and national governments to furnish troops to protect their property interest. The principal function of the militia of the States had become the suppression of strikes with bullet or bayonet, or the standing guard over the plants of the capitalists, till hunger compelled the insurgent workmen to surrender. "'During the eighties the State governments entered upon a general policy of preparing the militia for this new and ever-enlarging field of usefulness. The National Guard was turned into a Capitalist Guard. The force was generally reorganized, increased in numbers, improved in discipline, and trained with especial reference to the business of shooting riotous workingmen. The drill in street firing--a quite new feature in the training of the American militiaman, and a most ominous one--became the prominent test of efficiency. Stone and brick armories, fortified against attack, loopholed for musketry and mounted with guns to sweep the streets, were erected at the strategic points of the large cities. In some instances the militia, which, after all, was pretty near the people, had, however, shown such unwillingness to fire on strikers and such symptoms of sympathy for their grievances, that the capitalists did not trust them fully, but in serious cases preferred to depend on the pitiless professional soldiers of the General Government, the regulars. Consequently, the Government, upon request of the capitalists, adopted the policy of establishing fortified camps near the great cities, and posting heavy garrisons in them. The Indian wars were ceasing at about this time, and the troops that had been stationed on the Western plains to protect the white settlements from the Indians were brought East to protect the capitalists from the white settlements. Such was the evolution of private capitalism. "'The extent and practical character of the use to which the capitalists intended to put the military arm of the Government in their controversy with the workingmen may be judged from the fact that in single years of the early nineties armies of eight and ten thousand men were on the march, in New York and Pennsylvania, to suppress strikes. In 1892 the militia of five States, aided by the regulars, were under arms against strikers simultaneously, the aggregate force of troops probably making a larger body than General Washington ever commanded. Here surely was civil war already. "'Americans of the former days had laughed scornfully at the bayonet-propped monarchies of Europe, saying rightly that a government which needed to be defended by force from its own people was a self-confessed failure. To this pass, however, the industrial system of the United States was fast coming--it was becoming a government by bayonets. "'Thus briefly, and without attempt at detail, may be recapitulated some of the main aspects of the transformation in the condition of the American people, resulting from the concentration of the wealth of the country, which first began to excite serious alarm at the close of the civil war. "'It might almost be said that the citizen armies of the North had returned from saving the republic from open foes, to find that it had been stolen from them by more stealthy but far more dangerous enemies whom they had left at home. While they had been putting down caste rule based on race at the South, class rule based on wealth had been set up at the North, to be in time extended over South and North alike. While the armies of the people had been shedding rivers of blood in the effort to preserve the political unity of the nation, its social unity, upon which the very life of a republic depends, had been attacked by the beginnings of class divisions, which could only end by splitting the once coherent nation into mutually suspicious and inimical bodies of citizens, requiring the iron bands of despotism to hold them together in a political organization. Four million negroes had indeed been freed from chattel slavery, but meanwhile a nation of white men had passed under the yoke of an economic and social vassalage which, though the common fate of European peoples and of the ancient world, the founders of the republic had been proudly confident their posterity would never wear.'" * * * * * The doctor closed the book from which he had been reading and laid it down. "Julian," he said, "this story of the subversion of the American Republic by the plutocracy is an astounding one. You were a witness of the situation it describes, and are able to judge whether the statements are exaggerated." "On the contrary," I replied, "I should think you had been reading aloud from a collection of newspapers of the period. All the political, social, and business facts and symptoms to which the writer has referred were matters of public discussion and common notoriety. If they did not impress me as they do now, it is simply because I imagine I never heard them grouped and marshaled with the purpose of bringing out their significance." Once more the doctor asked Edith to bring him a book from the library. Turning the pages until he had found the desired place, he said: "Lest you should fancy that the force of Storiot's statement of the economic situation in the United States during the last third of the nineteenth century owes anything to the rhetorical arrangement, I want to give you just a few hard, cold statistics as to the actual distribution of property during that period, showing the extent to which its ownership had been concentrated. Here is a volume made up of information on this subject based upon analyses of census reports, tax assessments, the files of probate courts, and other official documents. I will give you three sets of calculations, each prepared by a separate authority and based upon a distinct line of investigation, and all agreeing with a closeness which, considering the magnitude of the calculation, is astounding, and leaves no room to doubt the substantial accuracy of the conclusions. "From the first set of tables, which was prepared in 1893 by a census official from the returns of the United States census, we find it estimated that out of sixty-two billions of wealth in the country a group of millionaires and multimillionaires, representing three one-hundredths of one per cent of the population, owned twelve billions, or one fifth. Thirty-three billions of the rest was owned by a little less than nine per cent of the American people, being the rich and well-to-do class less than millionaires. That is, the millionaires, rich, and well-to-do, making altogether but nine per cent of the whole nation, owned forty-five billions of the total national valuation of sixty-two billions. The remaining ninety-one per cent of the whole nation, constituting the bulk of the people, were classed as the poor, and divided among themselves the remaining seventeen million dollars. "A second table, published in 1894 and based upon the surrogates' records of estates in the great State of New York, estimates that one per cent of the people, one one-hundredth of the nation, possessed over half, or fifty-five per cent, of its total wealth. It finds that a further fraction of the population, including the well-to-do, and amounting to eleven per cent, owned over thirty-two per cent of the total wealth, so that twelve per cent of the whole nation, including the very rich and the well-to-do, monopolized eighty-seven per cent of the total wealth of the country, leaving but thirteen per cent of that wealth to be shared among the remaining eighty-eight per cent of the nation. This eighty-eight per cent of the nation was subdivided into the poor and the very poor. The last, constituting fifty per cent out of the eighty-eight, or half the entire nation, had too little wealth to be estimated at all, apparently living a hand-to-mouth existence. "The estimates of a third computator whom I shall quote, although taken from quite different data, agree remarkably with the others, representing as they do about the same period. These last estimates, which were published in 1889 and 1891, and like the others produced a strong impression, divide the nation into three classes--the rich, the middle, and the working class. The rich, being one and four tenths per cent of the population, are credited with seventy per cent of the total wealth. The middle class, representing nine and two tenths per cent of the population, is credited with twelve per cent of the total wealth, the rich and middle classes, together, representing ten and six tenths per cent of the population, having therefore eighty-two per cent of the total wealth, leaving to the working class, which constituted eighty-nine and four tenths of the nation, but eighteen per cent of the wealth, to share among them." "Doctor," I exclaimed, "I knew things were pretty unequally divided in my day, but figures like these are overwhelming. You need not take the trouble to tell me anything further by way of explaining why the people revolted against private capitalism. These figures were enough to turn the very stones into revolutionists." "I thought you would say so," replied the doctor. "And please remember also that these tremendous figures represent only the progress made toward the concentration of wealth mainly within the period of a single generation. Well might Americans say to themselves 'If such things are done in the green tree, what shall be done in the dry?' If private capitalism, dealing with a community in which had previously existed a degree of economic equality never before known, could within a period of some thirty years make such a prodigious stride toward the complete expropriation of the rest of the nation for the enrichment of a class, what was likely to be left to the people at the end of a century? What was to be left even to the next generation?" CHAPTER XXXV. WHY THE REVOLUTION WENT SLOW AT FIRST BUT FAST AT LAST. "So much for the causes of the Revolution in America, both the general fundamental cause, consisting in the factor newly introduced into social evolution by the enlightenment of the masses and irresistibly tending to equality, and the immediate local causes peculiar to America, which account for the Revolution having come at the particular time it did and for its taking the particular course it did. Now, briefly as to that course: "The pinching of the economic shoe resulting from the concentration of wealth was naturally first felt by the class with least reserves, the wage-earners, and the Revolution may be said to have begun with their revolt. In 1869 the first great labor organization in America was formed to resist the power of capital. Previous to the war the number of strikes that had taken place in the country could be counted on the fingers. Before the sixties were out they were counted by hundreds, during the seventies by thousands, and during the eighties the labor reports enumerate nearly ten thousand, involving two or three million workers. Many of these strikes were of continental scope, shaking the whole commercial fabric and causing general panics. "Close after the revolt of the wage earners came that of the farmers--less turbulent in methods but more serious and abiding in results. This took the form of secret leagues and open political parties devoted to resisting what was called the money power. Already in the seventies these organizations threw State and national politics into confusion, and later became the nucleus of the revolutionary party. "Your contemporaries of the thinking classes can not be taxed with indifference to these signs and portents. The public discussion and literature of the time reflect the confusion and anxiety with which the unprecedented manifestations of popular discontent had affected all serious persons. The old-fashioned Fourth-of-July boastings had ceased to be heard in the land. All agreed that somehow republican forms of government had not fulfilled their promise as guarantees of the popular welfare, but were showing themselves impotent to prevent the recrudescence in the New World of all the Old World's evils, especially those of class and caste, which it had been supposed could never exist in the atmosphere of a republic. It was recognized on all sides that the old order was changing for the worse, and that the republic and all it had been thought to stand for was in danger. It was the universal cry that something must be done to check the ruinous tendency. Reform was the word in everybody's mouth, and the rallying cry, whether in sincerity or pretense, of every party. But indeed, Julian, I need waste no time describing this state of affairs to you, for you were a witness of it till 1887." "It was all quite as you describe it, the industrial and political warfare and turmoil, the general sense that the country was going wrong, and the universal cry for some sort of reform. But, as I said before, the agitation, while alarming enough, was too confused and purposeless to seem revolutionary. All agreed that something ailed the country, but no two agreed what it was or how to cure it." "Just so," said the doctor. "Our historians divide the entire revolutionary epoch--from the close of the war, or the beginning of the seventies, to the establishment of the present order early in the twentieth century--into two periods, the incoherent and the rational. The first of these is the period of which we have been talking, and with which Storiot deals with in the paragraphs I have read--the period with which you were, for the most part, contemporary. As we have seen, and you know better than we can, it was a time of terror and tumult, of confused and purposeless agitation, and a Babel of contradictory clamor. The people were blindly kicking in the dark against the pricks of capitalism, without any clear idea of what they were kicking against. "The two great divisions of the toilers, the wage-earners and the farmers, were equally far from seeing clear and whole the nature of the situation and the forces of which they were the victims. The wage-earners' only idea was that by organizing the artisans and manual workers their wages could be forced up and maintained indefinitely. They seem to have had absolutely no more knowledge than children of the effect of the profit system always and inevitably to keep the consuming power of the community indefinitely below its producing power and thus to maintain a constant state of more or less aggravated glut in the goods and labor markets, and that nothing could possibly prevent the constant presence of these conditions so long as the profit system was tolerated, or their effect finally to reduce the wage-earner to the subsistence point or below as profits tended downward. Until the wage-earners saw this and no longer wasted their strength in hopeless or trivial strikes against individual capitalists which could not possibly affect the general result, and united to overthrow the profit system, the Revolution must wait, and the capitalists had no reason to disturb themselves. "As for the farmers, as they were not wage-earners, they took no interest in the plans of the latter, which aimed merely to benefit the wage-earning class, but devoted themselves to equally futile schemes for their class, in which, for the same reason that they were merely class remedies, the wage-earners took no interest. Their aim was to obtain aid from the Government to improve their condition as petty capitalists oppressed by the greater capitalists who controlled the traffic and markets of the country; as if any conceivable device, so long as private capitalism should be tolerated, would prevent its natural evolution, which was the crushing of the smaller capitalists by the larger. "Their main idea seems to have been that their troubles as farmers were chiefly if not wholly to be accounted for by certain vicious acts of financial legislation, the effect of which they held had been to make money scarce and dear. What they demanded as the sufficient cure of the existing evils was the repeal of the vicious legislation and a larger issue of currency. This they believed would be especially beneficial to the farming class by reducing the interest on their debts and raising the price of their product. "Undoubtedly the currency and the coinage and the governmental financial system in general had been shamelessly abused by the capitalists to corner the wealth of the nation in their hands, but their misuse of this part of the economic machinery had been no worse than their manipulation of the other portions of the system. Their trickery with the currency had only helped them to monopolize the wealth of the people a little faster than they would have done it had they depended for their enrichment on what were called the legitimate operations of rent, interest, and profits. While a part of their general policy of economic subjugation of the people, the manipulation of the currency had not been essential to that policy, which would have succeeded just as certainly had it been left out. The capitalists were under no necessity to juggle with the coinage had they been content to make a little more leisurely process of devouring the lands and effects of the people. For that result no particular form of currency system was necessary, and no conceivable monetary system would have prevented it. Gold, silver, paper, dear money, cheap money, hard money, bad money, good money--every form of token from cowries to guineas--had all answered equally well in different times and countries for the designs of the capitalist, the details of the game being only slightly modified according to the conditions. "To have convinced himself of the folly of ascribing the economic distress to which his class as well as the people at large had been reduced, to an act of Congress relating to the currency, the American farmer need only have looked abroad to foreign lands, where he would have seen that the agricultural class everywhere was plunged in a misery greater than his own, and that, too, without the slightest regard to the nature of the various monetary systems in use. "Was it indeed a new or strange phenomenon in human affairs that the agriculturists were going to the wall, that the American farmer should seek to account for the fact by some new and peculiarly American policy? On the contrary, this had been the fate of the agricultural class in all ages, and what was now threatening the American tiller of the soil was nothing other than the doom which had befallen his kind in every previous generation and in every part of the world. Manifestly, then, he should seek the explanation not in any particular or local conjunction of circumstances, but in some general and always operative cause. This general cause, operative in all lands and times and among all races, he would presently see when he should interrogate history, was the irresistible tendency by which the capitalist class in the evolution of any society through rent, interest, and profits absorbs to itself the whole wealth of the country, and thus reduces the masses of the people to economic, social, and political subjection, the most abject class of all being invariably the tillers of the soil. For a time the American population, including the farmers, had been enabled, thanks to the vast bounty of a virgin and empty continent, to evade the operation of this universal law, but the common fate was now about to overtake them, and nothing would avail to avert it save the overthrow of the system of private capitalism of which it always had been and always must be the necessary effect. "Time would fail even to mention the innumerable reform nostrums offered for the cure of the nation by smaller bodies of reformers. They ranged from the theory of the prohibitionists that the chief cause of the economic distress--from which the teetotal farmers of the West were the worst sufferers--was the use of intoxicants, to that of the party which agreed that the nation was being divinely chastised because there was no formal recognition of the Trinity in the Constitution. Of course, these were extravagant persons, but even those who recognized the concentration of wealth as the cause of the whole trouble quite failed to see that this concentration was itself the natural evolution of private capitalism, and that it was not possible to prevent it or any of its consequences unless and until private capitalism itself should be put an end to. "As might be expected, efforts at resistance so ill calculated as these demonstrations of the wage-earners and farmers, not to speak of the host of petty sects of so-called reformers during the first phase of the Revolution, were ineffectual. The great labor organizations which had sprung up shortly after the war as soon as the wage-earners felt the necessity of banding themselves to resist the yoke of concentrated capital, after twenty-five years of fighting, had demonstrated their utter inability to maintain, much less to improve, the condition of the workingman. During this period ten or fifteen thousand recorded strikes and lock-outs had taken place, but the net result of the industrial civil war, protracted through so long a period, had been to prove to the dullest of workingmen the hopelessness of securing any considerable amelioration of their lot by class action or organization, or indeed of even maintaining it against encroachments. After all this unexampled suffering and fighting, the wage-earners found themselves worse off than ever. Nor had the farmers, the other great division of the insurgent masses, been any more successful in resisting the money power. Their leagues, although controlling votes by the million, had proved even more impotent if possible than the wage-earners' organizations to help their members. Even where they had been apparently successful and succeeded in capturing the political control of states, they found the money power still able by a thousand indirect influences to balk their efforts and turn their seeming victories into apples of Sodom, which became ashes in the hands of those who would pluck them. "Of the vast, anxious, and anguished volume of public discussion as to what should be done, what after twenty-five years had been the practical outcome? Absolutely nothing. If here and there petty reforms had been introduced, on the whole the power of the evils against which those reforms were directed had vastly increased. If the power of the plutocracy in 1873 had been as the little finger of a man, in 1895 it was thicker than his loins. Certainly, so far as superficial and material indications went, it looked as if the battle had been going thus far steadily, swiftly, and hopelessly against the people, and that the American capitalists who expended their millions in buying titles of nobility for their children were wiser in their generation than the children of light and better judges of the future. "Nevertheless, no conclusion could possibly have been more mistaken. During these decades of apparently unvaried failure and disaster the revolutionary movement for the complete overthrow of private capitalism had made a progress which to rational minds should have presaged its complete triumph in the near future." "Where had the progress been?" I said; "I don't see any." "In the development among, the masses of the people of the necessary revolutionary temper," replied the doctor; "in the preparation of the popular mind by the only process that could have prepared it, to accept the programme of a radical reorganization of the economic system from the ground up. A great revolution, you must remember, which is to profoundly change a form of society, must accumulate a tremendous moral force, an overwhelming weight of justification, so to speak, behind it before it can start. The processes by which and the period during which this accumulation of impulse is effected are by no means so spectacular as the events of the subsequent period when the revolutionary movement, having obtained an irresistible momentum, sweeps away like straws the obstacles that so long held it back only to swell its force and volume at last. But to the student the period of preparation is the more truly interesting and critical field of study. It was absolutely necessary that the American people, before they would seriously think of undertaking so tremendous a reformation as was implied in the substitution of public for private capitalism, should be fully convinced not by argument only, but by abundant bitter experience and convincing object lessons, that no remedy for the evils of the time less complete or radical would suffice. They must become convinced by numerous experiments that private capitalism had evolved to a point where it was impossible to amend it before they would listen to the proposition to end it. This painful but necessary experience the people were gaining during the earlier decades of the struggle. In this way the innumerable defeats, disappointments, and fiascoes which met their every effort at curbing and reforming the money power during the seventies, eighties, and early nineties, contributed far more than as many victories would have done to the magnitude and completeness of the final triumph of the people. It was indeed necessary that all these things should come to pass to make the Revolution possible. It was necessary that the system of private and class tyranny called private capitalism should fill up the measure of its iniquities and reveal all it was capable of, as the irreconcilable enemy of democracy, the foe of life and liberty and human happiness, in order to insure that degree of momentum to the coming uprising against it which was necessary to guarantee its complete and final overthrow. Revolutions which start too soon stop too soon, and the welfare of the race demanded that this revolution should not cease, nor pause, until the last vestige of the system by which men usurped power over the lives and liberties of their fellows through economic means was destroyed. Therefore not one outrage, not one act of oppression, not one exhibition of conscienceless rapacity, not one prostitution of power on the part of Executive, Legislature, or judiciary, not one tear of patriotic shame over the degradation of the national name, not one blow of the policeman's bludgeon, not a single bullet or bayonet thrust of the soldiery, could have been spared. Nothing but just this discipline of failure, disappointment, and defeat on the part of the earlier reformers could have educated the people to the necessity of attacking the system of private capitalism in its existence instead of merely in its particular manifestations. "We reckon the beginning of the second part of the revolutionary movement to which we give the name of the coherent or rational phase, from the time when there became apparent a clear conception, on the part of at least a considerable body of the people, of the true nature of the issue as one between the rights of man and the principle of irresponsible power embodied in private capitalism, and the realization that its outcome, if the people were to triumph, must be the establishment of a wholly new economic system which should be based upon the public control in the public interest of the system of production and distribution hitherto left to private management." "At about what date," I asked, "do you consider that the revolutionary movement began to pass from the incoherent into the logical phase?" "Of course," replied the doctor, "it was not the case of an immediate outright change of character, but only of the beginning of a new spirit and intelligence. The confusion and incoherence and short-sightedness of the first period long overlapped the time when the infusion of a more rational spirit and adequate ideal began to appear, but from about the beginning of the nineties we date the first appearance of an intelligent purpose in the revolutionary movement and the beginning of its development from a mere formless revolt against intolerable conditions into a logical and self-conscious evolution toward the order of to-day." "It seems I barely missed it." "Yes," replied the doctor, "if you had been able to keep awake only a year or two longer you would not have been so wholly surprised by our industrial system, and especially by the economic equality for and by which it exists, for within a couple of years after your supposed demise the possibility that such a social order might be the outcome of the existing crisis was being discussed from one end of America to the other. "Of course," the doctor went on, "the idea of an integrated economic system co-ordinating the efforts of all for the common welfare, which is the basis of the modern state, is as old as philosophy. As a theory it dates back to Plato at least, and nobody knows how much further, for it is a conception of the most natural and obvious order. Not, however, until popular government had been made possible by the diffusion of intelligence was the world ripe for the realization of such a form of society. Until that time the idea, like the soul waiting for a fit incarnation, must remain without social embodiment. Selfish rulers thought of the masses only as instruments for their own aggrandizement, and if they had interested themselves in a more exact organization of industry it would only have been with a view of making that organization the means of a more complete tyranny. Not till the masses themselves became competent to rule was a serious agitation possible or desirable for an economic organization on a co-operative basis. With the first stirrings of the democratic spirit in Europe had come the beginning of earnest discussion as to the feasibility of such a social order. Already, by the middle of the century, this agitation in the Old World had become, to discerning eyes, one of the signs of the times, but as yet America, if we except the brief and abortive social experiments in the forties, had remained wholly unresponsive to the European movement. "I need not repeat that the reason, of course, was the fact that the economic conditions in America had been more satisfactory to the masses than ever before, or anywhere else in the world. The individualistic method of making a living, every man for himself, had answered the purpose on the whole so well that the people did not care to discuss other methods. The powerful motive necessary to rouse the sluggish and habit-bound minds of the masses and interest them in a new and revolutionary set of ideas was lacking. Even during the early stage of the revolutionary period it had been found impossible to obtain any hearing for the notions of a new economic order which were already agitating Europe. It was not till the close of the eighties that the total and ridiculous failure of twenty years of desperate efforts to reform the abuses of private capitalism had prepared the American people to give serious attention to the idea of dispensing with the capitalist altogether by a public organization of industry to be administered like other common affairs in the common interest. "The two great points of the revolutionary programme--the principle of economic equality and a nationalized industrial system as its means and pledge--the American people were peculiarly adapted to understand and appreciate. The lawyers had made a Constitution of the United States, but the true American constitution--the one written on the people's hearts--had always remained the immortal Declaration with its assertion of the inalienable equality of all men. As to the nationalization of industry, while it involved a set of consequences which would completely transform society, the principle on which the proposition was based, and to which it appealed for justification, was not new to Americans in any sense, but, on the contrary, was merely a logical development of the idea of popular self-government on which the American system was founded. The application of this principle to the regulation of the economic administration was indeed a use of it which was historically new, but it was one so absolutely and obviously implied in the content of the idea that, as soon as it was proposed, it was impossible that any sincere democrat should not be astonished that so plain and common-sense a corollary of popular government had waited so long for recognition. The apostles of a collective administration of the economic system in the common interest had in Europe a twofold task: first, to teach the general doctrine of the absolute right of the people to govern, and then to show the economic application of that right. To Americans, however, it was only necessary to point out an obvious although hitherto overlooked application of a principle already fully accepted as an axiom. "The acceptance of the new ideal did not imply merely a change in specific programmes, but a total facing about of the revolutionary movement. It had thus far been an attempt to resist the new economic conditions being imposed by the capitalists by bringing back the former economic conditions through the restoration of free competition as it had existed before the war. This was an effort of necessity hopeless, seeing that the economic changes which had taken place were merely the necessary evolution of any system of private capitalism, and could not be successfully resisted while the system was retained. "'Face about!' was the new word of command. 'Fight forward, not backward! March with the course of economic evolution, not against it. The competitive system can never be restored, neither is it worthy of restoration, having been at best an immoral, wasteful, brutal scramble for existence. New issues demand new answers. It is in vain to pit the moribund system of competition against the young giant of private monopoly; it must rather be opposed by the greater giant of public monopoly. The consolidation of business in private interests must be met with greater consolidation in the public interest, the trust and the syndicate with the city, State, and nation, capitalism with nationalism. The capitalists have destroyed the competitive system. Do not try to restore it, but rather thank them for the work, if not the motive, and set about, not to rebuild the old village of hovels, but to rear on the cleared place the temple humanity so long has waited for.' "By the light of the new teaching the people began to recognize that the strait place into which the republic had come was but the narrow and frowning portal of a future of universal welfare and happiness such as only the Hebrew prophets had colors strong enough to paint. "By the new philosophy the issue which had arisen between the people and the plutocracy was seen not to be a strange and unaccountable or deplorable event, but a necessary phase in the evolution of a democratic society in passing from a lower to an incomparably higher plane, an issue therefore to be welcomed not shunned, to be forced not evaded, seeing that its outcome in the existing state of human enlightenment and world-wide democratic sentiment could not be doubtful. By the road by which every republic had toiled upward from the barren lowlands of early hardship and poverty, just at the point where the steepness of the hill had been overcome and a prospect opened of pleasant uplands of wealth and prosperity, a sphinx had ever stood, propounding the riddle, 'How shall a state combine the preservation of democratic equality with the increase of wealth?' Simple indeed had been the answer, for it was only needful that the people should so order their system of economy that wealth should be equally shared as it increased, in order that, however great the increase, it should in no way interfere with the equalities of the people; for the great justice of equality is the well of political life everlasting for peoples, whereof if a nation drink it may live forever. Nevertheless, no republic before had been able to answer the riddle, and therefore their bones whitened the hilltop, and not one had ever survived to enter on the pleasant land in view. But the time had now come in the evolution of human intelligence when the riddle so often asked and never answered was to be answered aright, the sphinx made an end of, and the road freed forever for all the nations. "It was this note of perfect assurance, of confident and boundless hope, which distinguished the new propaganda, and was the more commanding and uplifting from its contrast with the blank pessimism on the one side of the capitalist party, and the petty aims, class interests, short vision, and timid spirit of the reformers who had hitherto opposed them. "With a doctrine to preach of so compelling force and beauty, promising such good things to men in so great want of them, it might seem that it would require but a brief time to rally the whole people to its support. And so it would doubtless have been if the machinery of public information and direction had been in the hands of the reformers or in any hands that were impartial, instead of being, as it was, almost wholly in those of the capitalists. In previous periods the newspapers had not represented large investments of capital, having been quite crude affairs. For this very reason, however, they were more likely to represent the popular feeling. In the latter part of the nineteenth century a great newspaper with large circulation necessarily required a vast investment of capital, and consequently the important newspapers of the country were owned by capitalists and of course carried on in the owners' interests. Except when the capitalists in control chanced to be men of high principle, the great papers were therefore upon the side of the existing order of things and against the revolutionary movement. These papers monopolized the facilities of gathering and disseminating public intelligence and thereby exercised a censorship, almost as effective as that prevailing at the same time in Russia or Turkey, over the greater part of the information which reached the people. "Not only the press but the religious instruction of the people was under the control of the capitalists. The churches were the pensioners of the rich and well-to-do tenth of the people, and abjectly dependent on them for the means of carrying on and extending their work. The universities and institutions of higher learning were in like manner harnessed to the plutocratic chariot by golden chains. Like the churches, they were dependent for support and prosperity upon the benefactions of the rich, and to offend them would have been suicidal. Moreover, the rich and well-to-do tenth of the population was the only class which could afford to send children to institutions of the secondary education, and they naturally preferred schools teaching a doctrine comfortable to the possessing class. "If the reformers had been put in possession of press, pulpit, and university, which the capitalists controlled, whereby to set home their doctrine to the heart and mind and conscience of the nation, they would have converted and carried the country in a month. "Feeling how quickly the day would be theirs if they could but reach the people, it was natural that they should chafe bitterly at the delay, confronted as they were by the spectacle of humanity daily crucified afresh and enduring an illimitable anguish which they knew was needless. Who indeed would not have been impatient in their place, and cried as they did, 'How long, O Lord, how long?' To men so situated, each day's postponement of the great deliverance might well have seemed like a century. Involved as they were in the din and dust of innumerable petty combats, it was as difficult for them as for soldiers in the midst of a battle to obtain an idea of the general course of the conflict and the operation of the forces which would determine its issue. To us, however, as we look back, the rapidity of the process by which during the nineties the American people were won over to the revolutionary programme seems almost miraculous, while as to the ultimate result there was, of course, at no time the slightest ground of question. "From about the beginning of the second phase of the revolutionary movement, the literature of the times begins to reflect in the most extraordinary manner a wholly new spirit of radical protest against the injustices of the social order. Not only in the serious journals and books of public discussion, but in fiction and in belles-lettres, the subject of social reform becomes prominent and almost commanding. The figures that have come down to us of the amazing circulation of some of the books devoted to the advocacy of a radical social reorganization are almost enough in themselves to explain the revolution. The antislavery movement had one Uncle Tom's Cabin; the anticapitalist movement had many. "A particularly significant fact was the extraordinary unanimity and enthusiasm with which the purely agricultural communities of the far West welcomed the new gospel of a new and equal economic system. In the past, governments had always been prepared for revolutionary agitation among the proletarian wage-earners of the cities, and had always counted on the stolid conservatism of the agricultural class for the force to keep the inflammable artisans down. But in this revolution it was the agriculturists who were in the van. This fact alone should have sufficiently foreshadowed the swift course and certain issue of the struggle. At the beginning of the battle the capitalists had lost their reserves. "At about the beginning of the nineties the revolutionary movement first prominently appears in the political field. For twenty years after the close of the civil war the surviving animosities between North and South mainly determined party lines, and this fact, together with the lack of agreement on a definite policy, had hitherto prevented the forces of industrial discontent from making any striking political demonstration. But toward the close of the eighties the diminished bitterness of feeling between North and South left the people free to align themselves on the new issue, which had been steadily looming up ever since the war, as the irrepressible conflict of the near future--the struggle to the death between democracy and plutocracy, between the rights of man and the tyranny of capital in irresponsible hands. "Although the idea of the public conduct of economic enterprises by public agencies had never previously attracted attention or favor in America, yet already in 1890, almost as soon as it began to be talked about, political parties favoring its application to important branches of business had polled heavy votes. In 1892 a party, organized in nearly every State in the Union, cast a million votes in favor of nationalizing at least the railroads, telegraphs, banking system, and other monopolized businesses. Two years later the same party showed large gains, and in 1896 its platform was substantially adopted by one of the great historic parties of the country, and the nation divided nearly equally on the issue. "The terror which this demonstration of the strength of the party of social discontent caused among the possessing class seems at this distance rather remarkable, seeing that its demands, while attacking many important capitalist abuses, did not as yet directly assail the principle of the private control of capital as the root of the whole social evil. No doubt, what alarmed the capitalists even more than the specific propositions of the social insurgents were the signs of a settled popular exasperation against them and all their works, which indicated that what was now called for was but the beginning of what would be demanded later. The antislavery party had not begun with demanding the abolition of slavery, but merely its limitation. The slaveholders were not, however, deceived as to the significance of the new political portent, and the capitalists would have been less wise in their generation than their predecessors had they not seen in the political situation the beginning of a confrontation of the people and the capitalists--the masses and the classes, as the expression of the day was--which threatened an economic and social revolution in the near future." "It seems to me," I said, "that by this stage of the revolutionary movement American capitalists capable of a dispassionate view of the situation ought to have seen the necessity of making concessions if they were to preserve any part of their advantages." "If they had," replied the doctor, "they would have been the first beneficiaries of a tyranny who in presence of a rising flood of revolution ever realized its force or thought of making concessions until it was hopelessly too late. You see, tyrants are always materialists, while the forces behind great revolutions are moral. That is why the tyrants never foresee their fate till it is too late to avert it." "We ought to be in our chairs pretty soon," said Edith. "I don't want Julian to miss the opening scene." "There are a few minutes yet," said the doctor, "and seeing that I have been rather unintentionally led into giving this sort of outline sketch of the course of the Revolution, I want to say a word about the extraordinary access of popular enthusiasm which made a short story of its later stages, especially as it is that period with which the play deals that we are to attend. "There had been many, you must know, Julian, who, while admitting that a system of co-operation, must eventually take the place of private capitalism in America and everywhere, had expected that the process would be a slow and gradual one, extending over several decades, perhaps half a century, or even more. Probably that was the more general opinion. But those who held it failed to take account of the popular enthusiasm which would certainly take possession of the movement and drive it irresistibly forward from the moment that the prospect of its success became fairly clear to the masses. Undoubtedly, when the plan of a nationalized industrial system, and an equal sharing of results, with its promise of the abolition of poverty and the reign of universal comfort, was first presented to the people, the very greatness of the salvation it offered operated to hinder its acceptance. It seemed too good to be true. With difficulty the masses, sodden in misery and inured to hopelessness, had been able to believe that in heaven there would be no poor, but that it was possible here and now in this everyday America to establish such an earthly paradise was too much to believe. "But gradually, as the revolutionary propaganda diffused a knowledge of the clear and unquestionable grounds on which this great assurance rested, and as the growing majorities of the revolutionary party convinced the most doubtful that the hour of its triumph was at hand, the hope of the multitude grew into confidence, and confidence flamed into a resistless enthusiasm. By the very magnitude of the promise which at first appalled them they were now transported. An impassioned eagerness seized upon them to enter into the delectable land, so that they found every day's, every hour's delay intolerable. The young said, 'Let us make haste, and go in to the promised land while we are young, that we may know what living is': and the old said, 'Let us go in ere we die, that we may close our eyes in peace, knowing that it will be well with our children after us.' The leaders and pioneers of the Revolution, after having for so many years exhorted and appealed to a people for the most part indifferent or incredulous, now found themselves caught up and borne onward by a mighty wave of enthusiasm which it was impossible for them to check, and difficult for them to guide, had not the way been so plain. "Then, to cap the climax, as if the popular mind were not already in a sufficiently exalted frame, came 'The Great Revival,' touching this enthusiasm with religious emotion." "We used to have what were called revivals of religion in my day," I said, "sometimes quite extensive ones. Was this of the same nature?" "Scarcely," replied the doctor. "The Great Revival was a tide of enthusiasm for the social, not the personal, salvation, and for the establishment in brotherly love of the kingdom of God on earth which Christ bade men hope and work for. It was the general awakening of the people of America in the closing years of the last century to the profoundly ethical and truly religious character and claims of the movement for an industrial system which should guarantee the economic equality of all the people. "Nothing, surely, could be more self-evident than the strictly Christian inspiration of the idea of this guarantee. It contemplated nothing less than a literal fulfillment, on a complete social scale, of Christ's inculcation that all should feel the same solicitude and make the same effort for the welfare of others as for their own. The first effect of such a solicitude must needs be to prompt effort to bring about an equal material provision for all, as the primary condition of welfare. One would certainly think that a nominally Christian people having some familiarity with the New Testament would have needed no one to tell them these things, but that they would have recognized on its first statement that the programme of the revolutionists was simply a paraphrase of the golden rule expressed in economic and political terms. One would have said that whatever other members of the community might do, the Christian believers would at once have flocked to the support of such a movement with their whole heart, soul, mind, and might. That they were so slow to do so must be ascribed to the wrong teaching and non-teaching of a class of persons whose express duty, above all other persons and classes, was to prompt them to that action--namely, the Christian clergy. "For many ages--almost, indeed, from the beginning of the Christian era--the churches had turned their backs on Christ's ideal of a kingdom of God to be realized on earth by the adoption of the law of mutual helpfulness and fraternal love. Giving up the regeneration of human society in this world as a hopeless undertaking, the clergy, in the name of the author of the Lord's Prayer, had taught the people not to expect God's will to be done on earth. Directly reversing the attitude of Christ toward society as an evil and perverse order of things needing to be made over, they had made themselves the bulwarks and defenses of existing social and political institutions, and exerted their whole influence to discourage popular aspirations for a more just and equal order. In the Old World they had been the champions and apologists of power and privilege and vested rights against every movement for freedom and equality. In resisting the upward strivings of their people, the kings and emperors had always found the clergy more useful servants than the soldiers and the police. In the New World, when royalty, in the act of abdication, had passed the scepter behind its back to capitalism, the ecclesiastical bodies had transferred their allegiance to the money power, and as formerly they had preached the divine right of kings to rule their fellow-men, now preached the divine right of ruling and using others which inhered in the possession of accumulated or inherited wealth, and the duty of the people to submit without murmuring to the exclusive appropriation of all good things by the rich. "The historical attitude of the churches as the champions and apologists of power and privilege in every controversy with the rights of man and the idea of equality had always been a prodigious scandal, and in every revolutionary crisis had not failed to cost them great losses in public respect and popular following. Inasmuch as the now impending crisis between the full assertion of human equality and the existence of private capitalism was incomparably the most radical issue of the sort that had ever arisen, the attitude of the churches was likely to have a critical effect upon their future. Should they make the mistake of placing themselves upon the unpopular side in this tremendous controversy, it would be for them a colossal if not a fatal mistake--one that would threaten the loss of their last hold as organizations on the hearts and minds of the people. On the other hand, had the leaders of the churches been able to discern the full significance of the great turning of the world's heart toward Christ's ideal of human society, which marked the closing of the nineteenth century, they might have hoped by taking the right side to rehabilitate the churches in the esteem and respect of the world, as, after all, despite so many mistakes, the faithful representatives of the spirit and doctrine of Christianity. Some there were indeed--yes, many, in the aggregate--among the clergy who did see this and sought desperately to show it to their fellows, but, blinded by clouds of vain traditions, and bent before the tremendous pressure of capitalism, the ecclesiastical bodies in general did not, with these noble exceptions, awake to their great opportunity until it had passed by. Other bodies of learned men there were which equally failed to discern the irresistible force and divine sanction of the tidal wave of humane enthusiasm that was sweeping over the earth, and to see that it was destined to leave behind it a transformed and regenerated world. But the failure of these others, however lamentable, to discern the nature of the crisis, was not like the failure of the Christian clergy, for it was their express calling and business to preach and teach the application to human relations of the Golden Rule of equal treatment for all which the Revolution came to establish, and to watch for the coming of this very kingdom of brotherly love, whose advent they met with anathemas. "The reformers of that time were most bitter against the clergy for their double treason to humanity and Christianity, in opposing instead of supporting the Revolution; but time has tempered harsh judgments of every sort, and it is rather with deep pity than with indignation that we look back on these unfortunate men, who will ever retain the tragic distinction of having missed the grandest opportunity of leadership ever offered to men. Why add reproach to the burden of such a failure as that? "While the influence of ecclesiastical authority in America, on account of the growth of intelligence, had at this time greatly shrunken from former proportions, the generally unfavorable or negative attitude of the churches toward the programme of equality had told heavily to hold back the popular support which the movement might reasonably have expected from professedly Christian people. It was, however, only a question of time, and the educating influence of public discussion, when the people would become acquainted for themselves with the merits of the subject. 'The Great Revival' followed, when, in the course of this process of education, the masses of the nation reached the conviction that the revolution against which the clergy had warned them as unchristian was, in fact, the most essentially and intensely Christian movement that had ever appealed to men since Christ called his disciples, and as such imperatively commanded the strongest support of every believer or admirer of Christ's doctrine. "The American people appear to have been, on the whole, the most intelligently religious of the large populations of the world--as religion was understood at that time--and the most generally influenced by the sentiment of Christianity. When the people came to recognize that the ideal of a world of equal welfare, which had been represented to them by the clergy as a dangerous delusion, was no other than the very dream of Christ; when they realized that the hope which led on the advocates of the new order was no baleful _ignis fatuus_, as the churches had taught, but nothing less nor other than the Star of Bethlehem, it is not to be wondered at that the impulse which the revolutionary movement received should have been overwhelming. From that time on it assumes more and more the character of a crusade, the first of the many so-called crusades of history which had a valid and adequate title to that name and right to make the cross its emblem. As the conviction took hold on the always religious masses that the plan of an equalized human welfare was nothing less than the divine design, and that in seeking their own highest happiness by its adoption they were also fulfilling God's purpose for the race, the spirit of the Revolution became a religious enthusiasm. As to the preaching of Peter the Hermit, so now once more the masses responded to the preaching of the reformers with the exultant cry, 'God wills it!' and none doubted any longer that the vision would come to pass. So it was that the Revolution, which had begun its course under the ban of the churches, was carried to its consummation upon a wave of moral and religious emotion." "But what became of the churches and the clergy when the people found out what blind guides they had been?" I asked. "No doubt," replied the doctor, "it must have seemed to them something like the Judgment Day when their flocks challenged them with open Bibles and demanded why they had hid the Gospel all these ages and falsified the oracles of God which they had claimed to interpret. But so far as appears, the joyous exultation of the people over the great discovery that liberty, equality, and fraternity were nothing less than the practical meaning and content of Christ's religion seems to have left no room in their heart for bitterness toward any class. The world had received a crowning demonstration that was to remain conclusive to all time of the untrustworthiness of ecclesiastical guidance; that was all. The clergy who had failed in their office of guides had not done so, it is needless to say, because they were not as good as other men, but on account of the hopeless falsity of their position as the economic dependents of those they assumed to lead. As soon as the great revival had fairly begun they threw themselves into it as eagerly as any of the people, but not now with any pretensions of leadership. They followed the people whom they might have led. "From the great revival we date the beginning of the era of modern religion--a religion which has dispensed with the rites and ceremonies, creeds and dogmas, and banished from this life fear and concern for the meaner self; a religion of life and conduct dominated by an impassioned sense of the solidarity of humanity and of man with God; the religion of a race that knows itself divine and fears no evil, either now or hereafter." "I need not ask," I said, "as to any subsequent stages of the Revolution, for I fancy its consummation did not tarry long after 'The Great Revival.'" "That was indeed the culminating impulse," replied the doctor; "but while it lent a momentum to the movement for the immediate realization of an equality of welfare which no obstacle could have resisted, it did its work, in fact, not so much by breaking down opposition as by melting it away. The capitalists, as you who were one of them scarcely need to be told, were not persons of a more depraved disposition than other people, but merely, like other classes, what the economic system had made them. Having like passions and sensibilities with other men, they were as incapable of standing out against the contagion of the enthusiasm of humanity, the passion of pity, and the compulsion of humane tenderness which The Great Revival had aroused, as any other class of people. From the time that the sense of the people came generally to recognize that the fight of the existing order to prevent the new order was nothing more nor less than a controversy between the almighty dollar and the Almighty God, there was substantially but one side to it. A bitter minority of the capitalist party and its supporters seems indeed to have continued its outcry against the Revolution till the end, but it was of little importance. The greater and all the better part of the capitalists joined with the people in completing the installation of the new order which all had now come to see was to redound to the benefit of all alike." "And there was no war?" "War! Of course not. Who was there to fight on the other side? It is odd how many of the early reformers seem to have anticipated a war before private capitalism could be overthrown. They were constantly referring to the civil war in the United States and to the French Revolution as precedents which justified their fear, but really those were not analogous cases. In the controversy over slavery, two geographical sections, mutually impenetrable to each other's ideas were opposed and war was inevitable. In the French Revolution there would have been no bloodshed in France but for the interference of the neighboring nations with their brutal kings and brutish populations. The peaceful outcome of the great Revolution in America was, moreover, potently favored by the lack as yet of deep class distinctions, and consequently of rooted class hatred. Their growth was indeed beginning to proceed at an alarming rate, but the process had not yet gone far or deep and was ineffectual to resist the glow of social enthusiasm which in the culminating years of the Revolution blended the whole nation in a common faith and purpose. "You must not fail to bear in mind that the great Revolution, as it came in America, was not a revolution at all in the political sense in which all former revolutions in the popular interest had been. In all these instances the people, after making up their minds what they wanted changed, had to overthrow the Government and seize the power in order to change it. But in a democratic state like America the Revolution was practically done when the people had made up their minds that it was for their interest. There was no one to dispute their power and right to do their will when once resolved on it. The Revolution as regards America and in other countries, in proportion as their governments were popular, was more like the trial of a case in court than a revolution of the traditional blood-and-thunder sort. The court was the people, and the only way that either contestant could win was by convincing the court, from which there was no appeal. "So far as the stage properties of the traditional revolution were concerned, plots, conspiracies, powder-smoke, blood and thunder, any one of the ten thousand squabbles in the mediaeval, Italian, and Flemish towns, furnishes far more material to the romancer or playwright than did the great Revolution in America." "Am I to understand that there was actually no violent doings in connection with this great transformation?" "There were a great number of minor disturbances and collisions, involving in the aggregate a considerable amount of violence and bloodshed, but there was nothing like the war with pitched lines which the early reformers looked for. Many a petty dispute, causeless and resultless, between nameless kings in the past, too small for historical mention, has cost far more violence and bloodshed than, so far as America is concerned, did the greatest of all revolutions." "And did the European nations fare as well when they passed through the same crisis?" "The conditions of none of them were so favorable to peaceful social revolution as were those of the United States, and the experience of most was longer and harder, but it may be said that in the case of none of the European peoples were the direful apprehensions of blood and slaughter justified which the earlier reformers seem to have entertained. All over the world the Revolution was, as to its main factors, a triumph of moral forces." CHAPTER XXXVI. THEATER-GOING IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. "I am sorry to interrupt," said Edith, "but it wants only five minutes of the time for the rising of the curtain, and Julian ought not to miss the first scene." On this notice we at once betook ourselves to the music room, where four easy chairs had been cozily arranged for our convenience. While the doctor was adjusting the telephone and electroscope connections for our use, I expatiated to my companion upon the contrasts between the conditions of theater-going in the nineteenth and in the twentieth centuries--contrasts which the happy denizens of the present world can scarcely, by any effort of imagination, appreciate. "In my time, only the residents of the larger cities, or visitors to them, were ever able to enjoy good plays or operas, pleasures which were by necessary consequence forbidden and unknown to the mass of the people. But even those who as to locality might enjoy these recreations were obliged, in order to do so, to undergo and endure such prodigious fuss, crowding, expense, and general derangement of comfort that for the most part they preferred to stay at home. As for enjoying the great artists of other countries, one had to travel to do so or wait for the artists to travel. To-day, I need not tell you how it is: you stay at home and send your eyes and ears abroad to see and hear for you. Wherever the electric connection is carried--and there need be no human habitation however remote from social centers, be it the mid-air balloon or mid-ocean float of the weather watchman, or the ice-crusted hut of the polar observer, where it may not reach--it is possible in slippers and dressing gown for the dweller to take his choice of the public entertainments given that day in every city of the earth. And remember, too, although you can not understand it, who have never seen bad acting or heard bad singing, how this ability of one troupe to play or sing to the whole earth at once has operated to take away the occupation of mediocre artists, seeing that everybody, being able to see and hear the best, will hear them and see them only." "There goes the bell for the curtain," said the doctor, and in another moment I had forgotten all else in the scene upon the stage. I need not sketch the action of a play so familiar as "The Knights of the Golden Rule." It is enough for this purpose to recall the fact that the costumes and setting were of the last days of the nineteenth century, little different from what they had been when I looked last on the world of that day. There were a few anachronisms and inaccuracies in the setting which the theatrical administration has since done me the honor to solicit my assistance in correcting, but the best tribute to the general correctness of the scheme was its effect to make me from the first moment oblivious of my actual surroundings. I found myself in presence of a group of living contemporaries of my former life, men and women dressed as I had seen them dressed, talking and acting, as till within a few weeks I had always seen people talk and act; persons, in short, of like passions, prejudices, and manners to my own, even to minute mannerisms ingeniously introduced by the playwright, which even more than the larger traits of resemblance affected my imagination. The only feeling that hindered my full acceptance of the idea that I was attending a nineteenth-century show was a puzzled wonder why I should seem to know so much more than the actors appeared to about the outcome of the social revolution they were alluding to as in progress. When the curtain fell on the first scene, and I looked about and saw Edith, her mother and father, sitting about me in the music room, the realization of my actual situation came with a shock that earlier in my twentieth-century career would have set my brain swimming. But I was too firm on my new feet now for anything of that sort, and for the rest of the play the constant sense of the tremendous experience which had made me at once a contemporary of two ages so widely apart, contributed an indescribable intensity to my enjoyment of the play. After the curtain fell, we sat talking of the drama, and everything else, till the globe of the color clock, turning from bottle-green to white, warned us of midnight, when the ladies left the doctor and myself to our own devices. CHAPTER XXXVII. THE TRANSITION PERIOD. "It is pretty late," I said, "but I want very much to ask you just a few more questions about the Revolution. All that I have learned leaves me quite as puzzled as ever to imagine any set of practical measures by which the substitution of public for private capitalism could have been effected without a prodigious shock. We had in our day engineers clever enough to move great buildings from one site to another, keeping them meanwhile so steady and upright as not to interfere with the dwellers in them, or to cause an interruption of the domestic operations. A problem something like this, but a millionfold greater and more complex, must have been raised when it came to changing the entire basis of production and distribution and revolutionizing the conditions of everybody's employment and maintenance, and doing it, moreover, without meanwhile seriously interrupting the ongoing of the various parts of the economic machinery on which the livelihood of the people from day to day depended. I should be greatly interested to have you tell me something about how this was done." "Your question," replied the doctor, "reflects a feeling which had no little influence during the revolutionary period to prolong the toleration extended by the people to private capitalism despite the mounting indignation against its enormities. A complete change of economic systems seemed to them, as it does to you, such a colossal and complicated undertaking that even many who ardently desired the new order and fully believed in its feasibility when once established, shrank back from what they apprehended would be the vast confusion and difficulty of the transition process. Of course, the capitalists, and champions of things as they were, made the most of this feeling, and apparently bothered the reformers not a little by calling on them to name the specific measures by which they would, if they had the power, proceed to substitute for the existing system a nationalized plan of industry managed in the equal interest of all. "One school of revolutionists declined to formulate or suggest any definite programme whatever for the consummating or constructive stage of the Revolution. They said that the crisis would suggest the method for dealing with it, and it would be foolish and fanciful to discuss the emergency before it arose. But a good general makes plans which provide in advance for all the main eventualities of his campaign. His plans are, of course, subject to radical modifications or complete abandonment, according to circumstances, but a provisional plan he ought to have. The reply of this school of revolutionists was not, therefore, satisfactory, and, so long as no better one could be made, a timid and conservative community inclined to look askance at the revolutionary programme. "Realizing the need of something more positive as a plan of campaign, various schools of reformers suggested more or less definite schemes. One there was which argued that the trades unions might develop strength enough to control the great trades, and put their own elected officers in place of the capitalists, thus organizing a sort of federation of trades unions. This, if practicable, would have brought in a system of group capitalism as divisive and antisocial, in the large sense, as private capitalism itself, and far more dangerous to civil order. This idea was later heard little of, as it became evident that the possible growth and functions of trade unionism were very limited. "There was another school which held that the solution was to be found by the establishment of great numbers of voluntary colonies, organized on co-operative principles, which by their success would lead to the formation of more and yet more, and that, finally, when most of the population had joined such groups they would simply coalesce and form one. Many noble and enthusiastic souls devoted themselves to this line of effort, and the numerous colonies that were organized in the United States during the revolutionary period were a striking indication of the general turning of men's hearts toward a better social order. Otherwise such experiments led, and could lead, to nothing. Economically weak, held together by a sentimental motive, generally composed of eccentric though worthy persons, and surrounded by a hostile environment which had the whole use and advantage of the social and economic machinery, it was scarcely possible that such enterprises should come to anything practical unless under exceptional leadership or circumstances. "There was another school still which held that the better order was to evolve gradually out of the old as the result of an indefinite series of humane legislation, consisting of factory acts, short-hour laws, pensions for the old, improved tenement houses, abolition of slums, and I don't know how many other poultices for particular evils resultant from the system of private capitalism. These good people argued that when at some indefinitely remote time all the evil consequences of capitalism had been abolished, it would be time enough and then comparatively easy to abolish capitalism itself--that is to say, after all the rotten fruit of the evil tree had been picked by hand, one at a time, off the branches, it would be time enough to cut down the tree. Of course, an obvious objection to this plan was that, so long as the tree remained standing, the evil fruit would be likely to grow as fast as it was plucked. The various reform measures, and many others urged by these reformers, were wholly humane and excellent, and only to be criticised when put forward as a sufficient method of overthrowing capitalism. They did not even tend toward such a result, but were quite as likely to help capitalism to obtain a longer lease of life by making it a little less abhorrent. There was really a time after the revolutionary movement had gained considerable headway when judicious leaders felt considerable apprehension lest it might be diverted from its real aim, and its force wasted in this programme of piecemeal reforms. "But you have asked me what was the plan of operation by which the revolutionists, when they finally came into power, actually overthrew private capitalism. It was really as pretty an illustration of the military manoeuvre that used to be called flanking as the history of war contains. Now, a flanking operation is one by which an army, instead of attacking its antagonist directly in front, moves round one of his flanks in such a way that without striking a blow it forces the enemy to leave his position. That is just the strategy the revolutionists used in the final issue with capitalism. "The capitalists had taken for granted that they were to be directly assaulted by wholesale forcible seizure and confiscation of their properties. Not a bit of it. Although in the end, of course, collective ownership was wholly substituted for the private ownership of capital, yet that was not done until after the whole system of private capitalism had broken down and fallen to pieces, and not as a means of throwing it down. To recur to the military illustration, the revolutionary army did not directly attack the fortress of capitalism at all, but so manoeuvred as to make it untenable, and to compel its evacuation. "Of course, you will understand that this policy was not suggested by any consideration for the rights of the capitalists. Long before this time the people had been educated to see in private capitalism the source and sum of all villainies, convicting mankind of deadly sin every day that it was tolerated. The policy of indirect attack pursued by the revolutionists was wholly dictated by the interest of the people at large, which demanded that serious derangements of the economic system should be, so far as possible, avoided during the transition from the old order to the new. "And now, dropping figures of speech, let me tell you plainly what was done--that is, so far as I remember the story. I have made no special study of the period since my college days, and very likely when you come to read the histories you will find that I have made many mistakes as to the details of the process. I am just trying to give you a general idea of the main course of events, to the best of my remembrance. I have already explained that the first step in the programme of political action adopted by the opponents of private capitalism had been to induce the people to municipalize and nationalize various quasi-public services, such as waterworks, lighting plants, ferries, local railroads, the telegraph and telephone systems, the general railroad system, the coal mines and petroleum production, and the traffic in intoxicating liquors. These being a class of enterprises partly or wholly non-competitive and monopolistic in character, the assumption of public control over them did not directly attack the system of production and distribution in general, and even the timid and conservative viewed the step with little apprehension. This whole class of natural or legal monopolies might indeed have been taken under public management without logically involving an assault on the system of private capitalism as a whole. Not only was this so, but even if this entire class of businesses was made public and run at cost, the cheapening in the cost of living to the community thus effected would presently be swallowed up by reductions of wages and prices, resulting from the remorseless operation of the competitive profit system. "It was therefore chiefly as a means to an ulterior end that the opponent of capitalism favored the public operation of these businesses. One part of that ulterior end was to prove to the people the superior simplicity, efficiency, and humanity of public over private management of economic undertakings. But the principal use which this partial process of nationalization served was to prepare a body of public employees sufficiently large to furnish a nucleus of consumers when the Government should undertake the establishment of a general system of production and distribution on a non-profit basis. The employees of the nationalized railroads alone numbered nearly a million, and with their dependent women and children represented some 4,000,000 people. The employees in the coal mines, iron mines, and other businesses taken charge of by the Government as subsidiary to the railroads, together with the telegraph and telephone workers, also in the public service, made some hundreds of thousands more persons with their dependents. Previous to these additions there had been in the regular civil service of the Government nearly 250,000 persons, and the army and navy made some 50,000 more. These groups with their dependents amounted probably to a million more persons, who, added to the railroad, mining, telegraph, and other employees, made an aggregate of something like 5,000,000 persons dependent on the national employment. Besides these were the various bodies of State and municipal employees in all grades, from the Governors of States down to the street-cleaners. THE PUBLIC-SERVICE STORES. "The first step of the revolutionary party when it came to power, with the mandate of a popular majority to bring in the new order, was to establish in all important centers public-service stores, where public employees could procure at cost all provisions of necessity or luxury previously bought at private stores. The idea was the less startling for not being wholly new. It had been the custom of various governments to provide for certain of the needs of their soldiers and sailors by establishing service stores at which everything was of absolutely guaranteed quality and sold strictly at cost. The articles thus furnished were proverbial for their cheapness and quality compared with anything that could be bought elsewhere, and the soldier's privilege of obtaining such goods was envied by the civilian, left to the tender mercies of the adulterating and profit-gorging retailer. The public stores now set up by the Government were, however, on a scale of completeness quite beyond any previous undertakings, intended as they were to supply all the consumption of a population large enough for a small-sized nation. "At first the goods in these stores were of necessity bought by the Government of the private capitalists, producers, or importers. On these the public employee saved all the middlemen's and retailers' profits, getting them at perhaps half or two thirds of what they must have paid at private stores, with the guarantee, moreover, of a careful Government inspection as to quality. But these substantial advantages were but a foretaste of the prosperity he enjoyed when the Government added the function of production to that of distribution, and proceeded as rapidly as possible to manufacture products, instead of buying them of capitalists. "To this end great food and cotton farms were established in all sections of the country and innumerable shops and factories started, so that presently the Government had in public employ not only the original 5,000,000, but as many more--farmers, artisans, and laborers of all sorts. These, of course, also had the right to be provided for at the public stores, and the system had to be extended correspondingly. The buyers in the public stores now saved not only the profits of the middleman and the retailer, but those as well of the manufacturer, the producer, and the importer. "Still further, not only did the public stores furnish the public employees with every kind of goods for consumption, but the Government likewise organized all sorts of needful services, such as cooking, laundry work, housework agencies, etc., for the exclusive benefit of public employees--all, of course, conducted absolutely at cost. The result was that the public employee was able to be supplied at home or in restaurants with food prepared by the best skill out of the best material and in the greatest possible variety, and more cheaply than he had ever been able to provide himself with even the coarsest provisions." "How did the Government acquire the lands and manufacturing plants it needed?" I inquired. "Did it buy them of the owners, or as to the plants did it build them?" "It co erected them without affecting the success of the programme, but that was generally needless. As to land, the farmers by millions were only too glad to turn over their farms to the Government and accept employment on them, with the security of livelihood which that implied for them and theirs. The Government, moreover, took for cultivation all unoccupied lands that were convenient for the purpose, remitting the taxes for compensation. "It was much the same with the factories and shops which the national system called for. They were standing idle by thousands in all parts of the country, in the midst of starving populations of the unemployed. When these plants were suited to the Government requirements they were taken possession of, put in operation, and the former workers provided with employment. In most instances former superintendents and foremen as well as the main body of operatives were glad to keep their old places, with the nation as employer. The owners of such plants, if I remember rightly, received some allowance, equal to a very low rate of interest, for the use of their property until such time as the complete establishment of the new order should make the equal maintenance of all citizens the subject of a national guarantee. That this was to be the speedy and certain outcome of the course of events was now no longer doubted, and pending that result the owners of idle plants were only too glad to get anything at all for their use. "The manufacturing plants were not the only form of idle capital which the Government on similar terms made use of. Considerable quantities of foreign imports were required to supply the public stores; and to avoid the payment of profits to capitalists on these, the Government took possession of idle shipping, building what it further needed, and went into foreign trade, exporting products of the public industries, and bringing home in exchange the needed foreign goods. Fishing fleets flying the national flag also brought home the harvest of the seas. These peace fleets soon far outnumbered the war ships which up to that time exclusively had borne the national commission. On these fleets the sailor was no more a slave. HOW MONEY LOST ITS VALUE. "And now consider the effect of another feature of the public-store system, namely, the disuse of money in its operations. Ordinary money was not received in the public stores, but a sort of scrip canceled on use and good for a limited time only. The public employee had the right of exchanging the money he received for wages, at par, into this scrip. While the Government issued it only to public employees, it was accepted at the public stores from any who presented it, the Government being only careful that the total amount did not exceed the wages exchanged into such scrip by the public employees. It thus became a currency which commanded three, four, and five hundred per cent premium over money which would only buy the high-priced and adulterated goods for sale in the remaining stores of the capitalists. The gain of the premium went, of course, to the public employees. Gold, which had been worshiped by the capitalists as the supreme and eternal type of money, was no more receivable than silver, copper, or paper currency at the public stores, and people who desired the best goods were fortunate to find a public employee foolish enough to accept three or four dollars in gold for one in scrip. "The effect to make money a drug in the market, of this sweeping reduction in its purchasing utility, was greatly increased by its practically complete disuse by the large and ever-enlarging proportion of the people in the public service. The demand for money was still further lessened by the fact that nobody wanted to borrow it now for use in extending business, seeing that the field of enterprise open to private capital was shrinking every hour, and evidently destined presently to disappear. Neither did any one desire money to hoard it, for it was more evident every day that it would soon become worthless. I have spoken of the public-store scrip commanding several hundred per cent premium over money, but that was in the earlier stages of the transition period. Toward the last the premium mounted to ever-dizzier altitudes, until the value of money quite disappeared, it being literally good for nothing as money. "If you would imagine the complete collapse of the entire monetary and financial system with all its standards and influences upon human relations and conditions, you have only to fancy what the effect would have been upon the same interests and relations in your day if positive and unquestioned information had become general that the world was to be destroyed within a few weeks or months, or at longest within a year. In this case indeed the world was not to be destroyed, but to be rejuvenated and to enter on an incomparably higher and happier and more vigorous phase of evolution; but the effect on the monetary system and all dependent on it was quite the same as if the world were to come to an end, for the new world would have no use for money, nor recognize any human rights or relations as measured by it." "It strikes me," said I, "that as money grew valueless the public taxes must have failed to bring in anything to support the Government." "Taxes," replied the doctor, "were an incident of private capitalism and were to pass away with it. Their use had been to give the Government a means of commanding labor under the money system. In proportion as the nation collectively organized and directly applied the whole labor of the people as the public welfare required it, had no need and could make no use of taxes any more than of money in other respects. Taxation went to pieces in the culminating stage of the Revolution, in measure as the organization of the capital and labor of the people for public purposes put an end to its functions." HOW THE REST OF THE PEOPLE CAME IN. "It seems to me that about this time, if not before, the mass of the people outside of the public service must have begun to insist pretty loudly upon being let in to share these good things." "Of course they did," replied the doctor; "and of course that was just what they were expected to do and what it had been arranged they should do as soon as the nationalized system of production and distribution was in full running order. The previously existing body of public employees had merely been utilized as furnishing a convenient nucleus of consumers to start with, which might be supplied without deranging meantime any more than necessary the outside wage or commodity markets. As soon as the system was in working order the Government undertook to receive into the public service not merely selected bodies of workers, but all who applied. From that time the industrial army received its recruits by tens and fifties of thousands a day till within a brief time the people as a whole were in the public service. "Of course, everybody who had an occupation or trade was kept right on at it at the place where he had formerly been employed, and the labor exchanges, already in full use, managed the rest. Later on, when all was going smoothly, would be time enough for the changings and shiftings about that would seem desirable." "Naturally," I said, "under the operation of the public employment programme, the working people must have been those first brought into the system, and the rich and well-to-do must probably have remained outside longest, and come in, so to speak, all in a batch, when they did." "Evidently so," replied the doctor. "Of course, the original nucleus of public employees, for whom the public stores were first opened, were all working people, and so were the bodies of people successively taken into the public service, as farmers, artisans, and tradesmen of all sorts. There was nothing to prevent a capitalist from joining the service, but he could do so only as a worker on a par with the others. He could buy in the public stores only to the extent of his pay as a worker. His other money would not be good there. There were many men and women of the rich who, in the humane enthusiasm of the closing days of the Revolution, abandoned their lands and mills to the Government and volunteered in the public service at anything that could be given them to do; but on the whole, as might be expected, the idea of going to work for a living on an economic equality with their former servants was not one that the rich welcomed, and they did not come to it till they had to." "And were they then, at last, enlisted by force?" I asked. "By force!" exclaimed the doctor; "dear me! no. There was no sort of constraint brought to bear upon them any more than upon anybody else, save that created by the growing difficulty and final impossibility of hiring persons for private employment, or obtaining the necessities of life except from the public stores with the new scrip. Before the Government entered on the policy of receiving into the public service every one who applied, the unemployed had thronged upon the capitalists, seeking to be hired. But immediately afterward the rich began to find it impossible to obtain men and women to serve them in field, factory, or kitchen. They could offer no inducements in the depreciated money which alone they possessed that were enough to counterbalance the advantages of the public service. Everybody knew also that there was no future for the wealthy class, and nothing to be gained through their favor. "Moreover, as you may imagine, there was already a strong popular feeling of contempt for those who would abase themselves to serve others for hire when they might serve the nation of which they were citizens; and, as you may well imagine, this growing sentiment made the position of a private servant or employee of any sort intolerable. And not only did the unfortunate capitalists find it impossible to induce people to cook for them, wash for them, to black their boots, to sweep their rooms, or drive their coaches, but they were put to straits to obtain in the dwindling private markets, where alone their money was good, the bare necessities of life, and presently found even that impossible. For a while, it would seem, they struggled against a relentless fate, sullenly supporting life on crusts in the corners of their lonesome palaces; but at last, of course, they all had to follow their former servants into the new nation, for there was no way of living save by connection with the national economic organization. Thus strikingly was illustrated, in the final exit of the capitalists from the human stage, how absolute was and always had been the dependence of capital upon the labor it despised and tyrannized over." "And do I understand that there was no compulsion upon anybody to join the public service?" "None but what was inherent in the circumstances I have named," replied the doctor. "The new order had no need or use for unwilling recruits. In fact, it needed no one, but every one needed it. If any one did not wish to enter the public service and could live outside of it without stealing or begging, he was quite welcome to. The books say that the woods were full of self-exiled hermits for a while, but one by one they tired of it and came into the new social house. Some isolated communities, however, remained outside for years." "The mill seems, indeed, to have been calculated to grind to an exceeding fineness all opposition to the new order," I observed, "and yet it must have had its own difficulties, too, in the natural refractoriness of the materials it had to make grist of. Take, for example, my own class of the idle rich, the men and women whose only business had been the pursuit of pleasure. What useful work could have been got out of such people as we were, however well disposed we might have become to render service? Where could we have been fitted into any sort of industrial service without being more hindrance than help?" "The problem might have been serious if the idle rich of whom you speak had been a very large proportion of the population, but, of course, though very much in evidence, they were in numbers insignificant compared with the mass of useful workers. So far as they were educated persons--and quite generally they had some smattering of knowledge--there was an ample demand for their services as teachers. Of course, they were not trained teachers, or capable of good pedagogical work; but directly after the Revolution, when the children and youth of the former poor were turned back by millions from the field and factories to the schools, and when the adults also of the working classes passionately demanded some degree of education to correspond with the improved conditions of life they had entered on, there was unlimited call for the services as instructors of everybody who was able to teach anything, even one of the primary branches, spelling, writing, geography, or arithmetic in the rudiments. The women of the former wealthy class, being mostly well educated, found in this task of teaching the children of the masses, the new heirs of the world, an employment in which I fancy they must have tasted more real happiness in the feeling of being useful to their kind than all their former frivolous existences could have given them. Few, indeed, were there of any class who did not prove to have some physical or mental quality by which they might with pleasure to themselves be serviceable to their kind." WHAT WAS DONE WITH THE VICIOUS AND CRIMINAL. "There was another class of my contemporaries," I said, "which I fancy must have given the new order more trouble to make anything out of than the rich, and those were the vicious and criminal idle. The rich were at least intelligent and fairly well behaved, and knew enough to adapt themselves to a new state of things and make the best of the inevitable, but these others must have been harder to deal with. There was a great floating population of vagabond criminals, loafers, and vicious of every class, male and female, in my day, as doubtless you well know. Admit that our vicious form of society was responsible for them; nevertheless, there they were, for the new society to deal with. To all intents and purposes they were dehumanized, and as dangerous as wild beasts. They were barely kept in some sort of restraint by an army of police and the weapons of criminal law, and constituted a permanent menace to law and order. At times of unusual agitation, and especially at all revolutionary crises, they were wont to muster in alarming force and become aggressive. At the crisis you are describing they must doubtless have made themselves extremely turbulent. What did the new order do with them? Its just and humane propositions would scarcely appeal to the members of the criminal class. They were not reasonable beings; they preferred to live by lawless violence, rather than by orderly industry, on terms however just. Surely the new nation must have found this class of citizens a very tough morsel for its digestion." "Not nearly so tough," replied the doctor, "as the former society had found it. In the first place, the former society, being itself based on injustice, was wholly without moral prestige or ethical authority in dealing with the criminal and lawless classes. Society itself stood condemned in their presence for the injustice which had been the provocation and excuse of their revolt. This was a fact which made the whole machinery of so-called criminal justice in your day a mockery. Every intelligent man knew in his heart that the criminal and vicious were, for the most part, what they were on account of neglect and injustice, and an environment of depraving influences for which a defective social order was responsible, and that if righteousness were done, society, instead of judging them, ought to stand with them in the dock before a higher justice, and take upon itself the heavier condemnation. This the criminals themselves felt in the bottom of their hearts, and that feeling forbade them to respect the law they feared. They felt that the society which bade them reform was itself in yet greater need of reformation. The new order, on the other hand, held forth to the outcasts hands purged of guilt toward them. Admitting the wrong that they had suffered in the past, it invited them to a new life under new conditions, offering them, on just and equal terms, their share in the social heritage. Do you suppose that there ever was a human heart so base that it did not at least know the difference between justice and injustice, and to some extent respond to it? "A surprising number of the cases you speak of, who had been given up as failures by your civilization, while in fact they had been proofs of its failure, responded with alacrity to the first fair opportunity to be decent men and women which had ever come to them. There was, of course, a large residuum too hopelessly perverted, too congenitally deformed, to have the power of leading a good life, however assisted. Toward these the new society, strong in the perfect justice of its attitude, proceeded with merciful firmness. The new society was not to tolerate, as the old had done, a criminal class in its midst any more than a destitute class. The old society never had any moral right to forbid stealing or to punish robbers, for the whole economic system was based on the appropriation, by force or fraud on the part of a few, of the earth and its resources and the fruit of the toil of the poor. Still less had it any right to forbid beggary or to punish violence, seeing that the economic system which it maintained and defended necessarily operated to make beggars and to provoke violence. But the new order, guaranteeing an equality of plenty to all, left no plea for the thief and robber, no excuse for the beggar, no provocation for the violent. By preferring their evil courses to the fair and honorable life offered them, such persons would henceforth pronounce sentence on themselves as unfit for human intercourse. With a good conscience, therefore, the new society proceeded to deal with all vicious and criminal persons as morally insane, and to segregate them in places of confinement, there to spend their lives--not, indeed, under punishment, or enduring hardships of any sort beyond enough labor for self-support, but wholly secluded from the world--and absolutely prevented from continuing their kind. By this means the race, in the first generation after the Revolution, was able to leave behind itself forever a load of inherited depravity and base congenital instincts, and so ever since it has gone on from generation to generation, purging itself of its uncleanness." THE COLORED RACE AND THE NEW ORDER. "In my day," I said, "a peculiar complication of the social problem in America was the existence in the Southern States of many millions of recently freed negro slaves, but partially as yet equal to the responsibility of freedom. I should be interested to know just how the new order adapted itself to the condition of the colored race in the South." "It proved," replied the doctor, "the prompt solution of a problem which otherwise might have continued indefinitely to plague the American people. The population of recent slaves was in need of some sort of industrial regimen, at once firm and benevolent, administered under conditions which should meanwhile tend to educate, refine, and elevate its members. These conditions the new order met with ideal perfection. The centralized discipline of the national industrial army, depending for its enforcement not so much on force as on the inability of any one to subsist outside of the system of which it was a part, furnished just the sort of a control--gentle yet resistless--which was needed by the recently emancipated bondsman. On the other hand, the universal education and the refinements and amenities of life which came with the economic welfare presently brought to all alike by the new order, meant for the colored race even more as a civilizing agent than it did to the white population which relatively had been further advanced." "There would have been in some parts," I remarked, "a strong prejudice on the part of the white population against any system which compelled a closer commingling of the races." "So we read, but there was absolutely nothing in the new system to offend that prejudice. It related entirely to economic organization, and had nothing more to do then than it has now with social relations. Even for industrial purposes the new system involved no more commingling of races than the old had done. It was perfectly consistent with any degree of race separation in industry which the most bigoted local prejudices might demand." HOW THE TRANSITION MIGHT HAVE BEEN HASTENED. "There is just one point about the transition stage that I want to go back to," I said. "In the actual case, as you have stated it, it seems that the capitalists held on to their capital and continued to conduct business as long as they could induce anybody to work for them or buy of them. I suppose that was human nature--capitalist human nature anyway; but it was also convenient for the Revolution, for this course gave time to get the new economic system perfected as a framework before the strain of providing for the whole people was thrown on it. But it was just possible, I suppose, that the capitalists might have taken a different course. For example, suppose, from the moment the popular majority gave control of the national Government to the revolutionists the capitalists had with one accord abandoned their functions and refused to do business of any kind. This, mind you, would have been before the Government had any time to organize even the beginnings of the new system. That would have made a more difficult problem to deal with, would it not?" "I do not think that the problem would have been more difficult," replied the doctor, "though it would have called for more prompt and summary action. The Government would have had two things to do and to do at once: on the one hand, to take up and carry on the machinery of productive industry abandoned by the capitalists, and simultaneously to provide maintenance for the people pending the time when the new product should become available. I suppose that as to the matter of providing for the maintenance of the people the action taken would be like that usually followed by a government when by flood, famine, siege, or other sudden emergency the livelihood of a whole community has been endangered. No doubt the first step would have been to requisition, for public use all stores of grain, clothing, shoes, and commodities in general throughout the country, excepting of course reasonable stocks in strictly private use. There was always in any civilized country a supply ahead of these necessities sufficient for several months or a year which would be many times more than would be needful to bridge over the gap between the stoppage of the wheels of production under private management and their getting into full motion under public administration. Orders on the public stores for food and clothing would have been issued to all citizens making application and enrolling themselves in the public industrial service. Meanwhile the Government would have immediately resumed the operation of the various productive enterprises abandoned by the capitalists. Everybody previously employed in them would simply have kept on, and employment would have been as rapidly as possible provided for those who had formerly been without it. The new product, as fast as made, would be turned into the public stores and the process would, in fact, have been just the same as that I have described, save that it would have gone through in much quicker time. If it did not go quite so smoothly on account of the necessary haste, on the other hand it would have been done with sooner, and at most we can hardly imagine that the inconvenience and hardship to the people would have been greater than resulted from even a mild specimen of the business crises which your contemporaries thought necessary every seven years, and toward the last of the old order became perpetual. HOW CAPITALIST COERCION OF EMPLOYEES WAS MET. "Your question, however," continued the doctor, "reminds me of another point which I had forgotten to mention--namely, the provisional methods of furnishing employment for the unemployed before the organization of the complete national system of industry. What your contemporaries were pleased to call 'the problem of the unemployed'--namely, the necessary effect of the profit system to create and perpetuate an unemployed class--had been increasing in magnitude from the beginning of the revolutionary period, and toward the close of the century the involuntary idlers were numbered by millions. While this state of things on the one hand furnished a powerful argument for the revolutionary propaganda by the object lesson it furnished of the incompetence of private capitalism to solve the problem of national maintenance, on the other hand, in proportion as employment became hard to get, the hold of the employers over the actual and would-be employees became strengthened. Those who had employment and feared to lose it, and those who had it not but hoped to get it, became, through fear and hope, very puppets in the hands of the employing class and cast their votes at their bidding. Election after election was carried in this way by the capitalists through their power to compel the workingman to vote the capitalist ticket against his own convictions, from the fear of losing or hope of obtaining an opportunity to work. "This was the situation which made it necessary previous to the conquest of the General Government by the revolutionary party, in order that the workingmen should be made free to vote for their own deliverance, that at least a provisional system of employment should be established whereby the wage-earner might be insured a livelihood when unable to find a private employer. "In different States of the Union, as the revolutionary party came into power, slightly different methods were adopted for meeting this emergency. The crude and wasteful makeshift of indiscriminate employment on public works, which had been previously adopted by governments in dealing with similar emergencies, would not stand the criticism of the new economic science. A more intelligent method was necessary and easily found. The usual plan, though varied in different localities, was for the State to guarantee to every citizen who applied therefor the means of maintenance, to be paid for in his or her labor, and to be taken in the form of commodities and lodgings, these commodities and lodgings being themselves produced and maintained by the sum of the labor of those, past and present, who shared them. The necessary imported commodities or raw materials were obtained by the sale of the excess of product at market rates, a special market being also found in the consumption of the State prisons, asylums, etc. This system, whereby the State enabled the otherwise unemployed mutually to maintain themselves by merely furnishing the machinery and superintendence, came very largely into use to meet the emergencies of the transition period, and played an important part in preparing the people for the new order, of which it was in an imperfect way a sort of anticipation. In some of these State establishments for the unemployed the circle of industries was remarkably complete, and the whole product of their labor above expenses being shared among the workers, they enjoyed far better fare than when in private employment, together with a sense of security then impossible. The employer's power to control his workmen by the threat of discharge was broken from the time these co-operative systems began to be established, and when, later, the national industrial organization was ready to absorb them, they merely melted into it." HOW ABOUT THE WOMEN? "How about the women?" I said. "Do I understand that, from the first organization of the industrial public service on a complete scale, the women were expected, like the men, if physically able, to take their places in the ranks?" "Where women were sufficiently employed already in housework in their own families," replied the doctor, "they were recognized as rendering public service until the new co-operative housekeeping was sufficiently systematized to do away with the necessity of separate kitchens and other elaborate domestic machinery for each family. Otherwise, except as occasions for exemption existed, women took their place from the beginning of the new order as units in the industrial state on the same basis with men. "If the Revolution had come a hundred years before, when as yet women had no other vocation but housework, the change in customs might have been a striking one, but already at that time women had made themselves a place in the industrial and business world, and by the time the Revolution came it was rather exceptional when unmarried women not of the rich and idle class did not have some regular occupation outside the home. In recognizing women as equally eligible and liable to public service with men, the new order simply confirmed to the women workers the independence they had already won." "But how about the married women?" "Of course," replied the doctor, "there would be considerable periods during which married women and mothers would naturally be wholly exempt from the performance of any public duty. But except at such times there seems to be nothing in the nature of the sexual relation constituting a reason why a married woman should lead a more secluded and useless life than a man. In this matter of the place of women under the new order, you must understand that it was the women themselves, rather than the men, who insisted that they must share in full the duties as well as the privileges of citizenship. The men would not have demanded it of them. In this respect you must remember that during its whole course the Revolution had been contemporary with a movement for the enlargement and greater freedom of women's lives, and their equalization as to rights and duties with men. The women, married as well as unmarried, had become thoroughly tired of being effaced, and were in full revolt against the headship of man. If the Revolution had not guaranteed the equality and comradeship with him which she was fast conquering under the old order, it could never have counted on her support." "But how about the care of children, of the home, etc.?" "Certainly the mothers could have been trusted to see that nothing interfered with the welfare of their children, nor was there anything in the public service expected of them that need do so. There is nothing in the maternal function which establishes such a relation between mother and child as need permanently interfere with her performance of social and public duties, nor indeed does it appear that it was allowed to do so in your day by women of sufficient economic means to command needed assistance. The fact that women of the masses so often found it necessary to abandon an independent existence, and cease to live any more for themselves the moment they had children, was simply a mark of the imperfection of your social arrangements, and not a natural or moral necessity. So, too, as to what you call caring for a home. As soon as co-operative methods were applied to housekeeping, and its various departments were systematized as branches of the public service, the former housewife had perforce to find another vocation in order to keep herself busy." THE LODGINGS QUESTION. "Talking about housework," I said, "how did they manage about houses? There were, of course, not enough good lodgings to go around, now that all were economic equals. How was it settled who should have the good houses and who the poor?" "As I have said," replied the doctor, "the controlling idea of the revolutionary policy at the climax of the Revolution was not to complicate the general readjustment by making any changes at that time not necessary to its main purpose. For the vast number of the badly housed the building of better houses was one of the first and greatest tasks of the nation. As to the habitable houses, they were all assessed at a graduated rental according to size and desirability, which their former occupants, if they desired to keep them, were expected to pay out of their new incomes as citizens. For a modest house the rent was nominal, but for a great house--one of the palaces of the millionaires, for instance--the rent was so large that no individual could pay it, and indeed no individual without a host of servants would be able to occupy it, and these, of course, he had no means of employing. Such buildings had to be used as hotels, apartment houses, or for public purposes. It would appear that nobody changed dwellings except the very poor, whose houses were unfit for habitation, and the very rich, who could make no use of their former habitation under the changed condition of things." WHEN ECONOMIC EQUALITY WAS FULLY REALIZED. "There is one point not quite clear in my mind," I said, "and that is just when the guarantee of equal maintenance for all citizens went into effect." "I suppose," replied the doctor, "that it must have been when, after the final collapse of what was left of private capitalism, the nation assumed the responsibility of providing for all the people. Until then the organization of the public service had been on the wage basis, which indeed was the only practicable way of initiating the plan of universal public employment while yet the mass of business was conducted by the capitalists, and the new and rising system had to be accommodated at so many points to the existing order of things. The tremendous rate at which the membership of the national industrial army was growing from week to week during the transition period would have made it impossible to find any basis of equal distribution that would hold good for a fortnight. The policy of the Government had, however, been to prepare the workers for equal sharing by establishing, as far as possible, a level wage for all kinds of public employees. This it was possible to do, owing to the cheapening of all sorts of commodities by the abolition of profits, without reducing any one's income. "For example, suppose one workman had received two dollars a day, and another a dollar and a half. Owing to the cheapening of goods in the public stores, these wages presently purchased twice as much as before. But, instead of permitting the virtual increase of wages to operate by multiplication, so as to double the original discrepancy between the pay of the two, it was applied by equal additions to the account of each. While both alike were better off than before, the disproportion in their welfare was thus reduced. Nor could the one previously more highly paid object to this as unfair, because the increased value of his wages was not the result of his own efforts, but of the new public organization, from which he could only ask an equal benefit with all others. Thus by the time the nation was ready for equal sharing, a substantially level wage, secured by leveling up, not leveling down, had already been established. As to the high salaries of special employees, out of all proportion to workmen's wages, which obtained under private capitalism, they were ruthlessly cut down in the public service from the inception of the revolutionary policy. "But of course the most radical innovation in establishing universal economic equality was not the establishment of a level wage as between the workers, but the admission of the entire population, both of workers and of those unable to work or past the working age, to an equal share in the national product. During the transition period the Government had of necessity proceeded like a capitalist in respect to recognizing and dealing only with effective workers. It took no more cognizance of the existence of the women, except when workers, or the children, or the old, or the infirm, crippled, or sick, or other dependents on the workers than the capitalists had been in the habit of doing. But when the nation gathered into its hands the entire economic resources of the country it proceeded to administer them on the principle--proclaimed, indeed, in the great Declaration, but practically mocked by the former republic--that all human beings have an equal right to liberty, life, and happiness, and that governments rightfully exist only for the purpose of making good that right--a principle of which the first practical consequence ought to be the guarantee to all on equal terms of the economic basis. Thenceforth all adult persons who could render any useful service to the nation were required to do so if they desired to enjoy the benefits of the economic system; but all who acknowledged the new order, whether they were able or unable to render any economic service, received an equal share with all others of the national product, and such provision was made for the needs of children as should absolutely safeguard their interests from the neglect or caprice of selfish parents. "Of course, the immediate effect must have been that the active workers received a less income than when they had been the only sharers; but if they had been good men and distributed their wages as they ought among those dependent on them, they still had for their personal use quite as much as before. Only those wage-earners who had formerly had none dependent on them or had neglected them suffered any curtailment of income, and they deserved to. But indeed there was no question of curtailment for more than a very short time for any; for, as soon as the now completed economic organization was fairly in motion, everybody was kept too busy devising ways to expend his or her own allowance to give any thought to that of others. Of course, the equalizing of the economic maintenance of all on the basis of citizenship put a final end to the employment of private servants, even if the practice had lasted till then, which is doubtful; for if any one desired a personal servant he must henceforth pay him as much as he could receive in the public service, which would be equivalent to the whole income of the would-be employer, leaving him nothing for himself." THE FINAL SETTLEMENT WITH THE CAPITALISTS. "There is one point," I said, "on which I should like to be a little more clearly informed. When the nation finally took possession absolutely in perpetuity of all the lands, machinery, and capital after the final collapse of private capitalism, there must have been doubtless some sort of final settling and balancing of accounts between the people and the capitalists whose former properties had been nationalized. How was that managed? What was the basis of final settlement?" "The people waived a settlement," replied the doctor. "The guillotine, the gallows, and the firing platoon played no part in the consummation of the great Revolution. During the previous phases of the revolutionary agitation there had indeed been much bitter talk of the reckoning which the people in the hour of their triumph would demand of the capitalists for the cruel past; but when the hour of triumph came, the enthusiasm of humanity which glorified it extinguished the fires of hate and took away all desire of barren vengeance. No, there was no settlement demanded; the people forgave the past." "Doctor," I said, "you have sufficiently--in fact, overwhelmingly--answered my question, and all the more so because you did not catch my meaning. Remember that I represent the mental and moral condition of the average American capitalist in 1887. What I meant was to inquire what compensation the people made to the capitalists for nationalizing what had been their property. Evidently, however, from the twentieth-century point of view, if there were to be any final settlement between the people and the capitalists it was the former who had the bill to present." "I rather pride myself," replied the doctor, "in keeping track of your point of view and distinguishing it from ours, but I confess that time I fairly missed the cue. You see, as we look back upon the Revolution, one of its most impressive features seems to be the vast magnanimity of the people at the moment of their complete triumph in according a free quittance to their former oppressors. "Do you not see that if private capitalism was right, then the Revolution was wrong; but, on the other hand, if the Revolution was right, then private capitalism was wrong, and the greatest wrong that ever existed; and in that case it was the capitalists who owed reparation to the people they had wronged, rather than the people who owed compensation to the capitalists for taking from them the means of that wrong? For the people to have consented on any terms to buy their freedom from their former masters would have been to admit the justice of their former bondage. When insurgent slaves triumph, they are not in the habit of paying their former masters the price of the shackles and fetters they have broken; the masters usually consider themselves fortunate if they do not have their heads broken with them. Had the question of compensating the capitalists been raised at the time we are speaking of, it would have been an unfortunate issue for them. To their question, Who was to pay them for what the people had taken from them? the response would have been, Who was to pay the people for what the capitalist system had taken from them and their ancestors, the light of life and liberty and happiness which it had shut off from unnumbered generations? That was an accounting which would have gone so deep and reached back so far that the debtors might well be glad to waive it. In taking possession of the earth and all the works of man that stood upon it, the people were but reclaiming their own heritage and the work of their own hands, kept back from them by fraud. When the rightful heirs come to their own, the unjust stewards who kept them out of their inheritance may deem themselves mercifully dealt with if the new masters are willing to let bygones be bygones. "But while the idea of compensating the capitalists for putting an end to their oppression would have been ethically absurd, you will scarcely get a full conception of the situation without considering that any such compensation was in the nature of the case impossible. To have compensated the capitalists in any practical way--that is, any way which would have preserved to them under the new order any economic equivalent for their former holdings--would have necessarily been to set up private capitalism over again in the very act of destroying it, thus defeating and stultifying the Revolution in the moment of its triumph. "You see that this last and greatest of revolutions in the nature of the case absolutely differed from all former ones in the finality and completeness of its work. In all previous instances in which governments had abolished or converted to public use forms of property in the hands of citizens it had been possible to compensate them in some other kind of property through which their former economic advantage should be perpetuated under a different form. For example, in condemning lands it was possible to pay for them in money, and in abolishing property in men it was possible to pay for the slaves, so that the previous superiority or privilege held by the property owner was not destroyed outright, but merely translated, so to speak, into other terms. But the great Revolution, aiming as it did at the final destruction of all forms of advantage, dominion, or privilege among men, left no guise or mode possible under which the capitalist could continue to exercise his former superiority. All the modes under which in past time men had exercised dominion over their fellows had been by one revolution after another reduced to the single form of economic superiority, and now that this last incarnation of the spirit of selfish dominion was to perish there was no further refuge for it. The ultimate mask torn off, it was left to wither in the face of the sun." "Your explanation leaves me nothing further to ask as to the matter of a final settling between the people and the capitalists," I said. "Still, I have understood that in the first steps toward the substitution of public business management for private capitalism, consisting in the nationalizing or municipalizing of quasi-public services, such as gas works, railroads, telegraphs, etc., some theory of compensation was followed. Public opinion, at that stage not having accepted the whole revolutionary programme, must probably have insisted upon this practice. Just when was it discontinued?' "You will readily perceive," replied the doctor, "that in measure as it became generally recognized that economic equality was at hand, it began to seem farcical to pay the capitalists for their possessions in forms of wealth which must presently, as all knew, become valueless. So it was that, as the Revolution approached its consummation, the idea of buying the capitalists out gave place to plans for safeguarding them from unnecessary hardships pending the transition period. All the businesses of the class you speak of which were taken over by the people in the early stages of the revolutionary agitation, were paid for in money or bonds, and usually at prices most favorable to the capitalists. As to the greater plants, which were taken over later, such as railroads and the mines, a different course was followed. By the time public opinion was ripe for these steps, it began to be recognized by the dullest that it was possible, even if not probable, that the revolutionary programme would go completely through, and all forms of monetary value or obligation become waste paper. With this prospect the capitalists owning the properties were naturally not particularly desirous of taking national bonds for them which would have been the natural form of compensation had they been bought outright. Even if the capitalists had been willing to take the bonds, the people would never have consented to increase the public debt by the five or six billions of bonds that would have been necessary to carry out the purchase. Neither the railroads nor the mines were therefore purchased at all. It was their management, not their ownership, which had excited the public indignation and created the demand for their nationalization. It was their management, therefore, which was nationalized, their ownership remaining undisturbed. "That is to say, the Government, on the high ground of public policy and for the correction of grievances that had become intolerable, assumed the exclusive and perpetual management and operation of the railroad lines. An honest valuation of the plants having been made, the earnings, if any, up to a reasonable percentage, were paid over to the security holders. This arrangement answered the purpose of delivering the people and the security holders alike from the extortions and mismanagement of the former private operators, and at the same time brought a million railroad employees into the public service and the enjoyment of all its benefits quite as effectively as if the lines had been bought outright. A similar plan was followed with the coal and other mines. This combination of private ownership with public management continued until, the Revolution having been consummated, all the capital of the country was nationalized by comprehensive enactment. "The general principle which governed the revolutionary policy in dealing with property owners of all sorts was that while the distribution of property was essentially unjust and existing property rights morally invalid, and as soon as possible a wholly new system should be established, yet that, until the new system of property could as a whole replace the existing one, the legal rights of property owners ought to be respected, and when overruled in the public interest proper provision should be made to prevent hardship. The means of private maintenance should not, that is to say, be taken away from any one until the guarantee of maintenance from public sources could take its place. The application of this principle by the revolutionists seems to have been extremely logical, clean cut, and positive. The old law of property, bad as it was, they did not aim to abolish in the name of license, spoliation, and confusion, but in the name of a stricter and more logical as well as more righteous law. In the most nourishing days of capitalism, stealing, so called, was never repressed more sternly than up to the very eve of the complete introduction of the new system. "To sum up the case in a word," I suggested, "it seems that in passing from the old order into the new it necessarily fared with the rich as it did when they passed out of this world into the next. In one case, as in the other, they just absolutely had to leave their money behind them." "The illustration is really very apt," laughed the doctor, "except in one important particular. It has been rumored that the change which Dives made from this world to the next was an unhappy one for him; but within half a dozen years after the new economic system had been in operation there was not an ex-millionaire of the lot who was not ready to admit that life had been made as much better worth living for him and his class as for the rest of the community." "Did the new order get into full running condition so quickly as that?" I asked. "Of course, it could not get into perfect order as you see it now for many years. The _personnel_ of any community is the prime factor in its economic efficiency, and not until the first generation born under the new order had come to maturity--a generation of which every member had received the highest intellectual and industrial training--did the economic order fully show what it was capable of. But not ten nor two years had elapsed from the time when the national Government took all the people into employment on the basis of equal sharing in the product before the system showed results which overwhelmed the world with amazement. The partial system of public industries and public stores which the Government had already undertaken had given the people some intimation of the cheapening of products and improvement in their quality which might follow from the abolition of profits even under a wage system, but not until the entire economic system had been nationalized and all co-operated for a common weal was it possible completely to pool the product and share it equally. No previous experience had therefore prepared the public for the prodigious efficiency of the new economic enginery. The people had thought the reformers made rather large promises as to what the new system would do in the way of wealth-making, but now they charged them of keeping back the truth. And yet the result was one that need not have surprised any one who had taken the trouble to calculate the economic effect of the change in systems. The incalculable increase of wealth which but for the profit system the great inventions of the century would long before have brought the world, was being reaped in a long-postponed but overwhelming harvest. "The difficulty under the profit system had been to avoid producing too much; the difficulty under the equal sharing system was how to produce enough. The smallness of demand had before limited supply, but supply had now set to it an unlimited task. Under private capitalism demand had been a dwarf and lame at that, and yet this cripple had been pace-maker for the giant production. National cooperation had put wings on the dwarf and shod the cripple with Mercury's sandals. Henceforth the giant would need all his strength, all his thews of steel and sinews of brass even, to keep him in sight as he flitted on before. "It would be difficult to give you an idea of the tremendous burst of industrial energy with which the rejuvenated nation on the morrow of the Revolution threw itself into the task of uplifting the welfare of all classes to a level where the former rich man might find in sharing the common lot nothing to regret. Nothing like the Titanic achievement by which this result was effected had ever before been known in human history, and nothing like it seems likely ever to occur again. In the past there had not been work enough for the people. Millions, some rich, some poor, some willingly, some unwillingly, had always been idle, and not only that, but half the work that was done was wasted in competition or in producing luxuries to gratify the secondary wants of the few, while yet the primary wants of the mass remained unsatisfied. Idle machinery equal to the power of other millions of men, idle land, idle capital of every sort, mocked the need of the people. Now, all at once there were not hands enough in the country, wheels enough in the machinery, power enough in steam and electricity, hours enough in the day, days enough in the week, for the vast task of preparing the basis of a comfortable existence for all. For not until all were well-to-do, well housed, well clothed, well fed, might any be so under the new order of things. "It is said that in the first full year after the new order was established the total product of the country was tripled, and in the second the first year's product was doubled, and every bit of it consumed. "While, of course, the improvement in the material welfare of the nation was the most notable feature in the first years after the Revolution, simply because it was the place at which any improvement must begin, yet the ennobling and softening of manners and the growth of geniality in social intercourse are said to have been changes scarcely less notable. While the class differences inherited from the former order in point of habits, education, and culture must, of course, continue to mark and in a measure separate the members of the generation then on the stage, yet the certain knowledge that the basis of these differences had passed away forever, and that the children of all would mingle not only upon terms of economic equality, but of moral, intellectual, and social sympathy, and entire community of interest, seems to have had a strong anticipatory influence in bringing together in a sentiment of essential brotherhood those who were too far on in life to expect to see the full promise of the Revolution realized. "One other matter is worth speaking of, and that is the effect almost at once of the universal and abounding material prosperity which the nation had entered on to make the people forget all about the importance they had so lately attached to petty differences in pay and wages and salary. In the old days of general poverty, when a sufficiency was so hard to come by, a difference in wages of fifty cents or a dollar had seemed so great to the artisan that it was hard for him to accept the idea of an economic equality in which such important distinctions should disappear. It was quite natural that it should be so. Men fight for crusts when they are starving, but they do not quarrel over bread at a banquet table. Somewhat so it befell when in the years after the Revolution material abundance and all the comforts of life came to be a matter of course for every one, and storing for the future was needless. Then it was that the hunger motive died out of human nature and covetousness as to material things, mocked to death by abundance, perished by atrophy, and the motives of the modern worker, the love of honor, the joy of beneficence, the delight of achievement, and the enthusiasm of humanity, became the impulses of the economic world. Labor was glorified, and the cringing wage-slave of the nineteenth century stood forth transfigured as the knight of humanity." CHAPTER XXXVIII. THE BOOK OF THE BLIND. If the reader were to judge merely from what has been set down in these pages he would be likely to infer that my most absorbing interest during these days I am endeavoring to recall was the study of the political economy and social philosophy of the modern world, which I was pursuing under the direction of Dr. Leete. That, however, would be a great mistake. Full of wonder and fascination as was that occupation, it was prosaic business compared with the interest of a certain old story which his daughter and I were going over together, whereof but slight mention has been made, because it is a story which all know or ought to know for themselves. The dear doctor, being aware of the usual course of such stories, no doubt realized that this one might be expected presently to reach a stage of interest where it would be likely, for a time at least, wholly to distract my attention from other themes. No doubt he had been governed by this consideration in trying to give to our talks a range which should result in furnishing me with a view of the institutions of the modern world and their rational basis that would be as symmetrical and rounded out as was at all consistent with the vastness of the subject and the shortness of the time. It was some days after he had told me the story of the transition period before we had an opportunity for another long talk, and the turn he gave to our discourse on that occasion seemed to indicate that he intended it as a sort of conclusion of the series, as indeed it proved to be. Edith and I had come home rather late that evening, and when she left me I turned into the library, where a light showed that the doctor was still sitting. As I entered he was turning over the leaves of a very old and yellow-looking volume, the title of which, by its oddity, caught my eye. "Kenloe's Book of the Blind," I said. "That is an odd title." "It is the title of an odd book," replied the doctor. "The Book of the Blind is nearly a hundred years old, having been compiled soon after the triumph of the Revolution. Everybody was happy, and the people in their joy were willing to forgive and forget the bitter opposition of the capitalists and the learned class, which had so long held back the blessed change. The preachers who had preached, the teachers who had taught, and the writers who had written against the Revolution, were now the loudest in its praise, and desired nothing so much as to have their previous utterances forgotten. But Kenloe, moved by a certain crabbed sense of justice, was bound that they should not be forgotten. Accordingly, he took the pains to compile, with great care as to authenticity, names, dates, and places, a mass of excerpts from speeches, books, sermons, and newspapers, in which the apologists of private capitalism had defended that system and assailed the advocates of economic equality during the long period of revolutionary agitation. Thus he proposed to pillory for all time the blind guides who had done their best to lead the nation and the world into the ditch. The time would come, he foresaw, as it has come, when it would seem incredible to posterity that rational men and, above all, learned men should have opposed in the name of reason a measure which, like economic equality obviously meant nothing more nor less than the general diffusion of happiness. Against that time he prepared this book to serve as a perpetual testimony. It was dreadfully hard on the men, all alive at the time and desiring the past to be forgotten, on whom he conferred this most undesirable immortality. One can imagine how they must have anathematized him when the book came out. Nevertheless it must be said that if men ever deserved to endure perpetual obloquy those fellows did. "When I came across this old volume on the top shelf of the library the other day it occurred to me that it might be helpful to complete your impression of the great Revolution by giving you an idea of the other side of the controversy--the side of your own class, the capitalists, and what sort of reasons they were able to give against the proposition to equalize the basis of human welfare." I assured the doctor that nothing would interest me more. Indeed, I had become so thoroughly naturalized as a twentieth-century American that there was something decidedly piquant in the idea of having my former point of view as a nineteenth-century capitalist recalled to me. "Anticipating that you would take that view," said the doctor, "I have prepared a little list of the main heads of objection from Kenloe's collection, and we will go over them, if you like, this evening. Of course, there are many more than I shall quote, but the others are mainly variations of these, or else relate to points which have been covered in our talks." I made myself comfortable, and the doctor proceeded: THE PULPIT OBJECTION. "The clergy in your day assumed to be the leaders of the people, and it is but respectful to their pretensions to take up first what seems to have been the main pulpit argument against the proposed system of economic equality collectively guaranteed. It appears to have been rather in the nature of an excuse for not espousing the new social ideal than a direct attack on it, which indeed it would have been rather difficult for nominal Christians to make, seeing that it was merely the proposal to carry out the golden rule. "The clergy reasoned that the fundamental cause of social misery was human sin and depravity, and that it was vain to expect any great improvement in the social condition through mere improvements in social forms and institutions unless there was a corresponding moral improvement in men. Until that improvement took place it was therefore of no use to introduce improved social systems, for they would work as badly as the old ones if those who were to operate them were not themselves better men and women. "The element of truth in this argument is the admitted fact that the use which individuals or communities are able to make of any idea, instrument, or institution depends on the degree to which they have been educated up to the point of understanding and appreciating it. "On the other hand, however, it is equally true, as the clergy must at once have admitted, that from the time a people begins to be morally and intellectually educated up to the point of understanding and appreciating better institutions, their adoption is likely to be of the greatest benefit to them. Take, for example, the ideas of religious liberty and of democracy. There was a time when the race could not understand or fitly use either, and their adoption as formal institutions would have done no good. Afterward there came a time when the world was ready for the ideas, and then their realization by means of new social institutions constituted great forward steps in civilization. "That is to say, if, on the one hand, it is of no use to introduce an improved institution before people begin to be ready for it, on the other hand great loss results if there be a delay or refusal to adopt the better institution as soon as the readiness begins to manifest itself. "This being the general law of progress, the practical question is, How are we to determine as to any particular proposed improvement in institutions whether the world is yet ready to make a good use of it or whether it is premature? "The testimony of history is that the only test of the fitness of people at any time for a new institution is the volume and earnestness of the popular demand for the change. When the peoples began in earnest to cry out for religious liberty and freedom of conscience, it was evident that they were ready for them. When nations began strongly to demand popular government, it was proof that they were ready for that. It did not follow that they were entirely able at once to make the best possible use of the new institution; that they could only learn to do by experience, and the further development which they would attain through the use of the better institution and could not otherwise attain at all. What was certain was that after the people had reached this state of mind the old institution had ceased to be serviceable, and that however badly for a time the new one might work, the interest of the race demanded its adoption, and resistance to the change was resistance to progress. "Applying this test to the situation toward the close of the nineteenth century, what evidence was there that the world was beginning to be ready for a radically different and more humane set of social institutions? The evidence was the volume, earnestness, and persistence of the popular demand for it which at that period had come to be the most widespread, profound, and powerful movement going on in the civilized world. This was the tremendous fact which should have warned the clergy who withstood the people's demand for better things to beware lest haply they be found fighting even against God. What more convincing proof could be asked that the world had morally and intellectually outgrown the old economic order than the detestation and denunciation of its cruelties and fatuities which had become the universal voice? What stronger evidence could there be that the race was ready at least to attempt the experiment of social life on a nobler plane than the marvelous development during this period of the humanitarian and philanthropic spirit, the passionate acceptance by the masses of the new idea of social solidarity and the universal brotherhood of man? "If the clergymen who objected to the Revolution on the ground that better institutions would be of no utility without a better spirit had been sincere in that objection, they would have found in a survey of the state and tendencies of popular feeling the most striking proof of the presence of the very conditions in extraordinary measure which they demanded as necessary to insure the success of the experiment. "But indeed it is to be greatly feared that they were not sincere. They pretended to hold Christ's doctrine that hatred of the old life and a desire to lead a better one is the only vocation necessary to enter upon such a life. If they had been sincere in professing this doctrine, they would have hailed with exultation the appeal of the masses to be delivered from their bondage to a wicked social order and to be permitted to live together on better, kinder, juster terms. But what they actually said to the people was in substance this: It is true, as you complain, that the present social and economic system is morally abominable and thoroughly antichristian, and that it destroys men's souls and bodies. Nevertheless, you must not think of trying to change it for a better system, because you are not yet good enough to try to be better. It is necessary that you should wait until you are more righteous before you attempt to leave off doing evil. You must go on stealing and fighting until you shall become fully sanctified. "How would the clergy have been scandalized to hear that a Christian minister had in like terms attempted to discourage an individual penitent who professed loathing for his former life and a desire to lead a better! What language shall we find then that is strong enough fitly to characterize the attitude of these so-called ministers of Christ, who in his name rebuked and derided the aspirations of a world weary of social wrong and seeking for a better way?" THE LACK OF INCENTIVE OBJECTION. "But, after all," pursued the doctor, turning the pages of Kenloe, "let us not be too hard on these unfortunate clergymen, as if they were more blinded or bigoted in their opposition to progress than were other classes of the learned men of the day, as, for example, the economists. One of the main arguments--perhaps the leading one--of the nineteenth-century economists against the programme of economic equality under a nationalized economic system was that the people would not prove efficient workers owing to the lack of sufficiently sharp personal incentives to diligence. "Now, let us look at this objection. Under the old system there were two main incentives to economic exertion: the one chiefly operative on the masses, who lived from hand to mouth, with no hope of more than a bare subsistence; the other operating to stimulate the well-to-do and rich to continue their efforts to accumulate wealth. The first of these motives, the lash that drove the masses to their tasks, was the actual pressure or imminent fear of want. The second of the motives, that which spurred the already rich, was the desire to be ever richer, a passion which we know increased with what it fed on. Under the new system every one on easy conditions would be sure of as good a maintenance as any one else and be quite relieved from the pressure or fear of want. No one, on the other hand, by any amount of effort, could hope to become the economic superior of another. Moreover, it was said, since every one looked to his share in the general result rather than to his personal product, the nerve of zeal would be cut. It was argued that the result would be that everybody would do as little as he could and keep within the minimum requirement of the law, and that therefore, while the system might barely support itself, it could never be an economic success." "That sounds very natural," I said. "I imagine it is just the sort of argument that I should have thought very powerful." "So your friends the capitalists seem to have regarded it, and yet the very statement of the argument contains a confession of the economic imbecility of private capitalism which really leaves nothing to be desired as to completeness. Consider, Julian, what is implied as to an economic system by the admission that under it the people never escape the actual pressure of want or the immediate dread of it. What more could the worst enemy of private capitalism allege against it, or what stronger reason could he give for demanding that some radically new system be at least given a trial, than the fact which its defenders stated in this argument for retaining it--namely, that under it the masses were always hungry? Surely no possible new system could work any worse than one which confessedly depended upon the perpetual famine of the people to keep it going." "It was a pretty bad giving away of their case," I said, "when you come to think of it that way. And yet at first statement it really had a formidable sound." "Manifestly," said the doctor, "the incentives to wealth-production under a system confessedly resulting in perpetual famine must be ineffectual, and we really need consider them no further; but your economists praised so highly the ambition to get rich as an economic motive and objected so strongly to economic equality because it would shut it off, that a word may be well as to the real value of the lust of wealth as an economic motive. Did the individual pursuit of riches under your system necessarily tend to increase the aggregate wealth of the community? The answer is significant. It tended to increase the aggregate wealth only when it prompted the production of new wealth. When, on the other hand, it merely prompted individuals to get possession of wealth already produced and in the hands of others, it tended only to change the distribution without at all increasing the total of wealth. Not only, indeed, did the pursuit of wealth by acquisition, as distinguished from production, not tend to increase the total, but greatly to decrease it by wasteful strife. Now, I will leave it to you, Julian, whether the successful pursuers of wealth, those who illustrated most strikingly the force of this motive of accumulation, usually sought their wealth by themselves producing it or by getting hold of what other people had produced or supplanting other people's enterprises and reaping the field others had sown." "By the latter processes, of course," I replied. "Production was slow and hard work. Great wealth could not be gained that way, and everybody knew it. The acquisition of other people's product and the supplanting of their enterprises were the easy and speedy and royal ways to riches for those who were clever enough, and were the basis of all large and rapid accumulations." "So we read," said the doctor; "but the desire of getting rich also stimulated capitalists to more or less productive activity which was the source of what little wealth you had. This was called production for profit, but the political-economy class the other morning showed us that production for profit was economic suicide, tending inevitably, by limiting the consuming power of a community, to a fractional part of its productive power to cripple production in turn, and so to keep the mass of mankind in perpetual poverty. And surely this is enough to say about the incentives to wealth-making which the world lost in abandoning private capitalism, first general poverty, and second the profit system, which caused that poverty. Decidedly we can dispense with those incentives. "Under the modern system it is indeed true that no one ever imagined such a thing as coming to want unless he deliberately chose to, but we think that fear is on the whole the weakest as well as certainly the cruelest of incentives. We would not have it on any terms were it merely for gain's sake. Even in your day your capitalists knew that the best man was not he who was working for his next dinner, but he who was so well off that no immediate concern for his living affected his mind. Self-respect and pride in achievement made him a far better workman than he who was thinking of his day's pay. But if those motives were as strong then, think how much more powerful they are now! In your day when two men worked side by side for an employer it was no concern of the one, however the other might cheat or loaf. It was not his loss, but the employer's. But now that all work for the common fund, the one who evades or scamps his work robs every one of his fellows. A man had better hang himself nowadays than get the reputation of a shirk. "As to the notion of these objectors that economic equality would cut the nerve of zeal by denying the individual the reward of his personal achievements, it was a complete misconception of the effects of the system. The assumption that there would be no incentives to impel individuals to excel one another in industry merely because these incentives would not take a money form was absurd. Every one is as directly and far more certainly the beneficiary of his own merits as in your day, save only that the reward is not in what you called 'cash.' As you know, the whole system of social and official rank and headship, together with the special honors of the state, are determined by the relative value of the economic and other services of individuals to the community. Compared with the emulation aroused by this system of nobility by merit, the incentives to effort offered under the old order of things must have been slight indeed. "The whole of this subject of incentive taken by your contemporaries seems, in fact, to have been based upon the crude and childish theory that the main factor in diligence or execution of any kind is external, whereas it is wholly internal. A person is congenitally slothful or energetic. In the one case no opportunity and no incentive can make him work beyond a certain minimum of efficiency, while in the other case he will make his opportunity and find his incentives, and nothing but superior force can prevent his doing the utmost possible. If the motive force is not in the man to start with, it can not be supplied from without, and there is no substitute for it. If a man's mainspring is not wound up when he is born, it never can be wound up afterward. The most that any industrial system can do to promote diligence is to establish such absolutely fair conditions as shall promise sure recognition for all merit in its measure. This fairness, which your system, utterly unjust in all respects, wholly failed to secure, ours absolutely provides. As to the unfortunates who are born lazy, our system has certainly no miraculous power to make them energetic, but it does see to it with absolute certainty that every able-bodied person who receives economic maintenance of the nation shall render at least the minimum of service. The laziest is sure to pay his cost. In your day, on the other hand, society supported millions of able-bodied loafers in idleness, a dead weight on the world's industry. From the hour of the consummation of the great Revolution, this burden ceased to be borne." "Doctor," I said, "I am sure my old friends could do better than that. Let us have another of their objections." AFRAID THAT EQUALITY WOULD MAKE EVERYBODY ALIKE. "Here, then, is one which they seem to have thought a great deal of. They argued that the effect of economic equality would be to make everybody just alike, as if they had been sawed off to one measure, and that consequently life would become so monotonous that people would all hang themselves at the end of a month. This objection is beautifully typical of an age when everything and everybody had been reduced to a money valuation. It having been proposed to equalize everybody's supply of money, it was at once assumed, as a matter of course, that there would be left no points of difference between individuals that would be worth considering. How perfectly does this conclusion express the philosophy of life held by a generation in which it was the custom to sum up men as respectively 'worth' so many thousands, hundred thousands, or millions of dollars! Naturally enough, to such people it seemed that human beings would become well-nigh indistinguishable if their bank accounts were the same. "But let us be entirely fair to your contemporaries. Possibly those who used this argument against economic equality would have felt aggrieved to have it made out the baldly sordid proposition it seems to be. They appear, to judge from the excerpts collected in this book, to have had a vague but sincere apprehension that in some quite undefined way economic equality would really tend to make people monotonously alike, tediously similar, not merely as to bank accounts, but as to qualities in general, with the result of obscuring the differences in natural endowments, the interaction of which lends all the zest to social intercourse. It seems almost incredible that the obvious and necessary effect of economic equality could be apprehended in a sense so absolutely opposed to the truth. How could your contemporaries look about them without seeing that it is always inequality which prompts the suppression of individuality by putting a premium on servile imitation of superiors, and, on the other hand, that it is always among equals that one finds independence? Suppose, Julian, you had a squad of recruits and wanted to ascertain at a glance their difference in height, what sort of ground would you select to line them up on?" "The levelest piece I could find, of course." "Evidently; and no doubt these very objectors would have done the same in a like case, and yet they wholly failed to see that this was precisely what economic equality would mean for the community at large. Economic equality with the equalities of education and opportunity implied in it was the level standing ground, the even floor, on which the new order proposed to range all alike, that they might be known for what they were, and all their natural inequalities be brought fully out. The charge of abolishing and obscuring the natural differences between men lay justly not against the new order, but against the old, which, by a thousand artificial conditions and opportunities arising from economic inequality, made it impossible to know how far the apparent differences in individuals were natural, and how far they were the result of artificial conditions. Those who voiced the objection to economic equality as tending to make men all alike were fond of calling it a leveling process. So it was, but it was not men whom the process leveled, but the ground they stood on. From its introduction dates the first full and clear revelation of the natural and inherent varieties in human endowments. Economic equality, with all it implies, is the first condition of any true anthropometric or man-measuring system." "Really," I said, "all these objections seem to be of the boomerang pattern, doing more damage to the side that used them than to the enemy." "For that matter," replied the doctor, "the revolutionists would have been well off for ammunition if they had used only that furnished by their opponents' arguments. Take, for example, another specimen, which we may call the aesthetic objection to economic equality, and might regard as a development of the one just considered. It was asserted that the picturesqueness and amusement of the human spectacle would suffer without the contrast of conditions between the rich and poor. The question first suggested by this statement is: To whom, to what class did these contrasts tend to make life more amusing? Certainly not to the poor, who made up the mass of the race. To them they must have been maddening. It was then in the interest of the mere handful of rich and fortunate that this argument for retaining poverty was urged. Indeed this appears to have been quite a fine ladies' argument. Kenloe puts it in the mouths of leaders of polite society. As coolly as if it had been a question of parlor decoration, they appear to have argued that the black background of the general misery was a desirable foil to set off the pomp of the rich. But, after all, this objection was not more brutal than it was stupid. If here and there might be found some perverted being who relished his luxuries the more keenly for the sight of others' want, yet the general and universal rule is that happiness is stimulated by the sight of the happiness of others. As a matter of fact, far from desiring to see or be even reminded of squalor and poverty, the rich seem to have tried to get as far as possible from sight or sound of them, and to wish to forget their existence. "A great part of the objections to economic equality in this book seems to have been based on such complete misapprehensions of what the plan implied as to have no sort of relevancy to it. Some of these I have passed over. One of them, by way of illustration, was based on the assumption that the new social order would in some way operate to enforce, by law, relations of social intimacy of all with all, without regard to personal tastes or affinities. Quite a number of Kenloe's subjects worked themselves up to a frenzy, protesting against the intolerable effects of such a requirement. Of course, they were fighting imaginary foes. There was nothing under the old social order which compelled men to associate merely because their bank accounts or incomes were the same, and there was nothing under the new order that would any more do so. While the universality of culture and refinement vastly widens the circle from which one may choose congenial associates, there is nothing to prevent anybody from living a life as absolutely unsocial as the veriest cynic of the old time could have desired. OBJECTION THAT EQUALITY WOULD END THE COMPETITIVE SYSTEM. "The theory of Kenloe," continued the doctor, "that unless he carefully recorded and authenticated these objections to economic equality, posterity would refuse to believe that they had ever been seriously offered, is specially justified by the next one on the list. This is an argument against the new order because it would abolish the competitive system and put an end to the struggle for existence. According to the objectors, this would be to destroy an invaluable school of character and testing process for the weeding out of inferiority, and the development and survival as leaders of the best types of humanity. Now, if your contemporaries had excused themselves for tolerating the competitive system on the ground that, bad and cruel as it was, the world was not ripe for any other, the attitude would have been intelligible, if not rational; but that they should defend it as a desirable institution in itself, on account of its moral results, and therefore not to be dispensed with even if it could be, seems hard to believe. For what was the competitive system but a pitiless, all-involving combat for the means of life, the whole zest of which depended on the fact that there was not enough to go round, and the losers must perish or purchase bare existence by becoming the bondmen of the successful? Between a fight for the necessary means of life like this and a fight for life itself with sword and gun, it is impossible to make any real distinction. However, let us give the objection a fair hearing. "In the first place, let us admit that, however dreadful were the incidents of the fight for the means of life called competition, yet, if it were such a school of character and testing process for developing the best types of the race as these objectors claimed, there would be something to have been said in favor of its retention. But the first condition of any competition or test, the results of which are to command respect or possess any value, is the fairness and equality of the struggle. Did this first and essential condition of any true competitive struggle characterize the competitive system of your day?" "On the contrary," I replied, "the vast majority of the contestants were hopelessly handicapped at the start by ignorance and lack of early advantages, and never had even the ghost of a chance from the word go. Differences in economic advantages and backing, moreover, gave half the race at the beginning to some, leaving the others at a distance which only extraordinary endowments might overcome. Finally, in the race for wealth all the greatest prizes were not subject to competition at all, but were awarded without any contest according to the accident of birth." "On the whole, then, it would appear," resumed the doctor, "that of all the utterly unequal, unfair, fraudulent, sham contests, whether in sport or earnest, that were ever engaged in, the so-called competitive system was the ghastliest farce. It was called the competitive system apparently for no other reason than that there was not a particle of genuine competition in it, nothing but brutal and cowardly slaughter of the unarmed and overmatched by bullies in armor; for, although we have compared the competitive struggle to a foot race, it was no such harmless sport as that, but a struggle to the death for life and liberty, which, mind you, the contestants did not even choose to risk, but were forced to undertake, whatever their chances. The old Romans used to enjoy the spectacle of seeing men fight for their lives, but they at least were careful to pair their gladiators as nearly as possible. The most hardened attendants at the Coliseum would have hissed from the arena a performance in which the combatants were matched with such utter disregard of fairness as were those who fought for their lives in the so-called competitive struggle of your day." "Even you, doctor," I said, "though you know these things so well through the written record, can not realize how terribly true your words are." "Very good. Now tell me what it would have been necessary to do by way of equalizing the conditions of the competitive struggle in order that it might be called, without mockery, a fair test of the qualities of the contestants." "It would have been necessary, at least," I said, "to equalize their educational equipment, early advantages, and economic or money backing." "Precisely so; and that is just what economic equality proposed to do. Your extraordinary contemporaries objected to economic equality because it would destroy the competitive system, when, in fact, it promised the world the first and only genuine competitive system it ever had." "This objection seems the biggest boomerang yet," I said. "It is a double-ended one," said the doctor, "and we have yet observed but one end. We have seen that the so-called competitive system under private capitalism was not a competitive system at all, and that nothing but economic equality could make a truly competitive system possible. Grant, however, for the sake of the argument, that the old system was honestly competitive, and that the prizes went to the most proficient under the requirements of the competition; the question would remain whether the qualities the competition tended to develop were desirable ones. A training school in the art of lying, for example, or burglary, or slander, or fraud, might be efficient in its method and the prizes might be fairly distributed to the most proficient pupils, and yet it would scarcely be argued that the maintenance of the school was in the public interest. The objection we are considering assumes that the qualities encouraged and rewarded under the competitive system were desirable qualities, and such as it was for the public policy to develop. Now, if this was so, we may confidently expect to find that the prize-winners in the competitive struggle, the great money-makers of your age, were admitted to be intellectually and morally the finest types of the race at the time. How was that?" "Don't be sarcastic, doctor." "No, I will not be sarcastic, however great the temptation, but just talk straight on. What did the world, as a rule, think of the great fortune-makers of your time? What sort of human types did they represent? As to intellectual culture, it was held as an axiom that a college education was a drawback to success in business, and naturally so, for any knowledge of the humanities would in so far have unmanned men for the sordid and pitiless conditions of the fight for wealth. We find the great prize takers in the competitive struggle to have generally been men who made it a boast that they had never had any mental education beyond the rudiments. As a rule, the children and grandchildren, who gladly inherited their wealth, were ashamed of their appearance and manners as too gross for refined surroundings. "So much for the intellectual qualities that marked the victors in the race for wealth under the miscalled competitive system; what of the moral? What were the qualities and practices which the successful seeker after great wealth must systematically cultivate and follow? A lifelong habit of calculating upon and taking advantage of the weaknesses, necessities, and mistakes of others, a pitiless insistence upon making the most of every advantage which one might gain over another, whether by skill or accident, the constant habit of undervaluing and depreciating what one would buy, and overvaluing what one would sell; finally, such a lifelong study to regulate every thought and act with sole reference to the pole star of self-interest in its narrowest conception as must needs presently render the man incapable of every generous or self-forgetting impulse. That was the condition of mind and soul which the competitive pursuit of wealth in your day tended to develop, and which was naturally most brilliantly exemplified in the cases of those who carried away the great prizes of the struggle. "But, of course, these winners of the great prizes were few, and had the demoralizing influence of the struggle been limited to them it would have involved the moral ruin of a small number. To realize how wide and deadly was the depraving influence of the struggle for existence, we must remember that it was not confined to its effect upon the characters of the few who succeeded, but demoralized equally the millions who failed, not on account of a virtue superior to that of the few winners, or any unwillingness to adopt their methods, but merely through lack of the requisite ability or fortune. Though not one in ten thousand might succeed largely in the pursuit of wealth, yet the rules of the contest must be followed as closely to make a bare living as to gain a fortune, in bargaining for a bag of old rags as in buying a railroad. So it was that the necessity equally upon all of seeking their living, however humble, by the methods of competition, forbade the solace of a good conscience as effectually to the poor man as to the rich, to the many losers at the game as to the few winners. You remember the familiar legend which represents the devil as bargaining with people for their souls, with the promise of worldly success as the price. The bargain was in a manner fair as set forth in the old story. The man always received the price agreed on. But the competitive system was a fraudulent devil, which, while requiring everybody to forfeit their souls, gave in return worldly success to but one in a thousand. "And now, Julian, just let us glance at the contrast between what winning meant under the old false competitive system and what it means under the new and true competitive system, both to the winner and to the others. The winners then were those who had been most successful in getting away the wealth of others. They had not even pretended to seek the good of the community or to advance its interest, and if they had done so, that result had been quite incidental. More often than otherwise their wealth represented the loss of others. What wonder that their riches became a badge of ignominy and their victory their shame? The winners in the competition of to-day are those who have done most to increase the general wealth and welfare. The losers, those who have failed to win the prizes, are not the victims of the winners, but those whose interest, together with the general interest, has been served by them better than they themselves could have served it. They are actually better off because a higher ability than theirs was developed in the race, seeing that this ability redounded wholly to the common interest. The badges of honor and rewards of rank and office which are the tangible evidence of success won in the modern competitive struggle are but expressions of the love and gratitude of the people to those who have proved themselves their most devoted and efficient servants and benefactors." "It strikes me," I said, "so far as you have gone, that if some one had been employed to draw up a list of the worst and weakest aspects of private capitalism, he could not have done better than to select the features of the system on which its champions seem to have based their objections to a change." OBJECTION THAT EQUALITY WOULD DISCOURAGE INDEPENDENCE AND ORIGINALITY. "That is an impression," said the doctor, "which you will find confirmed as we take up the next of the arguments on our list against economic equality. It was asserted that to have an economic maintenance on simple and easy terms guaranteed to all by the nation would tend to discourage originality and independence of thought and conduct on the part of the people, and hinder the development of character and individuality. This objection might be regarded as a branch of the former one that economic equality would make everybody just alike, or it might be considered a corollary of the argument we have just disposed of about the value of competition as a school of character. But so much seems to have been made of it by the opponents of the Revolution that I have set it down separately. "The objection is one which, by the very terms necessary to state it, seems to answer itself, for it amounts to saying that a person will be in danger of losing independence of feeling by gaining independence of position. If I were to ask you what economic condition was regarded as most favorable to moral and intellectual independence in your day, and most likely to encourage a man to act out himself without fear or favor, what would you say?" "I should say, of course, that a secure and independent basis of livelihood was that condition." "Of course. Now, what the new order promised to give and guarantee everybody was precisely this absolute independence and security of livelihood. And yet it was argued that the arrangement would be objectionable, as tending to discourage independence of character. It seems to us that if there is any one particular in which the influence upon humanity of economic equality has been more beneficent than any other, it has been the effect which security of economic position has had to make every one absolute lord of himself and answerable for his opinions, speech, and conduct to his own conscience only. "That is perhaps enough to say in answer to an objection which, as I remarked, really confutes itself, but the monumental audacity of the defenders of private capitalism in arguing that any other possible system could be more unfavorable than itself to human dignity and independence tempts a little comment, especially as this is an aspect of the old order on which I do not remember that we have had much talk. As it seems to us, perhaps the most offensive feature of private capitalism, if one may select among so many offensive features, was its effect to make cowardly, time-serving, abject creatures of human beings, as a consequence of the dependence for a living, of pretty nearly everybody upon some individual or group. "Let us just glance at the spectacle which the old order presented in this respect. Take the women in the first place, half the human race. Because they stood almost universally in a relation of economic dependence, first upon men in general and next upon some man in particular, they were all their lives in a state of subjection both to the personal dictation of some individual man, and to a set of irksome and mind-benumbing conventions representing traditional standards of opinion as to their proper conduct fixed in accordance with the masculine sentiment. But if the women had no independence at all, the men were not so very much better off. Of the masculine half of the world, the greater part were hirelings dependent for their living upon the favor of employers and having the most direct interest to conform so far as possible in opinions and conduct to the prejudices of their masters, and, when they could not conform, to be silent. Look at your secret ballot laws. You thought them absolutely necessary in order to enable workingmen to vote freely. What a confession is that fact of the universal intimidation of the employed by the employer! Next there were the business men, who held themselves above the workingmen. I mean the tradesmen, who sought a living by persuading the people to buy of them. But here our quest of independence is even more hopeless than among the workingmen, for, in order to be successful in attracting the custom of those whom they cringingly styled their patrons, it was necessary for the merchant to be all things to all men, and to make an art of obsequiousness. "Let us look yet higher. We may surely expect to find independence of thought and speech among the learned classes in the so-called liberal professions if nowhere else. Let us see how our inquiry fares there. Take the clerical profession first--that of the religious ministers and teachers. We find that they were economic servants and hirelings either of hierarchies or congregations, and paid to voice the opinions of their employers and no others. Every word that dropped from their lips was carefully weighed lest it should indicate a trace of independent thinking, and if it were found, the clergyman risked his living. Take the higher branches of secular teaching in the colleges and professions. There seems to have been some freedom allowed in teaching the dead languages; but let the instructor take up some living issue and handle it in a manner inconsistent with the capitalist interest, and you know well enough what became of him. Finally, take the editorial profession, the writers for the press, who on the whole represented the most influential branch of the learned class. The great nineteenth-century newspaper was a capitalistic enterprise as purely commercial in its principle as a woolen factory, and the editors were no more allowed to write their own opinions than the weavers to choose the patterns they wove. They were employed to advocate the opinions and interests of the capitalists owning the paper and no others. The only respect in which the journalists seem to have differed from the clergy was in the fact that the creeds which the latter were employed to preach were more or less fixed traditions, while those which the editors must preach changed with the ownership of the paper. This, Julian, is the truly exhilarating spectacle of abounding and unfettered originality, of sturdy moral and intellectual independence and rugged individuality, which it was feared by your contemporaries might be endangered by any change in the economic system. We may agree with them that it would have been indeed a pity if any influence should operate to make independence any rarer than it was, but they need not have been apprehensive; it could not be." "Judging from these examples of the sort of argumentative opposition which the revolutionists had to meet," I observed, "it strikes me that they must have had a mighty easy time of it." "So far as rational argument was concerned," replied the doctor, "no great revolutionary movement ever had to contend with so little opposition. The cause of the capitalists was so utterly bad, either from the point of view of ethics, politics, or economic science, that there was literally nothing that could be said for it that could not be turned against it with greater effect. Silence was the only safe policy for the capitalists, and they would have been glad enough to follow it if the people had not insisted that they should make some sort of a plea to the indictment against them. But because the argumentative opposition which the revolutionists had to meet was contemptible in quality, it did not follow that their work was an easy one. Their real task--and it was one for giants--was not to dispose of the arguments against their cause, but to overcome the moral and intellectual inertia of the masses and rouse them to do just a little clear thinking for themselves. POLITICAL CORRUPTION AS AN OBJECTION TO NATIONALIZING INDUSTRY. "The next objection--there are only two or three more worth mentioning--is directed not so much against economic equality in itself as against the fitness of the machinery by which the new industrial system was to be carried on. The extension of popular government over industry and commerce involved of course the substitution of public and political administration on a large scale for the previous irresponsible control of private capitalists. Now, as I need not tell you, the Government of the United States--municipal, State, and national--in the last third of the nineteenth century had become very corrupt. It was argued that to intrust any additional functions to governments so corrupt would be nothing short of madness." "Ah!" I exclaimed, "that is perhaps the rational objection we have been waiting for. I am sure it is one that would have weighed heavily with me, for the corruption of our governmental system smelled to heaven." "There is no doubt," said the doctor, "that there was a great deal of political corruption and that it was a very bad thing, but we must look a little deeper than these objectors did to see the true bearing of this fact on the propriety of nationalizing industry. "An instance of political corruption was one where the public servant abused his trust by using the administration under his control for purposes of private gain instead of solely for the public interest--that is to say, he managed his public trust just as if it were his private business and tried to make a profit out of it. A great outcry was made, and very properly, when any such conduct was suspected; and therefore the corrupt officers operated under great difficulties, and were in constant danger of detection and punishment. Consequently, even in the worst governments of your period the mass of business was honestly conducted, as it professed to be, in the public interest, comparatively few and occasional transactions being affected by corrupt influences. "On the other hand, what were the theory and practice pursued by the capitalists in carrying on the economic machinery which were under their control? They did not profess to act in the public interest or to have any regard for it. The avowed object of their whole policy was so to use the machinery of their position as to make the greatest personal gains possible for themselves out of the community. That is to say, the use of his control of the public machinery for his personal gain--which on the part of the public official was denounced and punished as a crime, and for the greater part prevented by public vigilance--was the avowed policy of the capitalist. It was the pride of the public official that he left office as poor as when he entered it, but it was the boast of the capitalist that he made a fortune out of the opportunities of his position. In the case of the capitalist these gains were not called corrupt, as they were when made by public officials in the discharge of public business. They were called profits, and regarded as legitimate; but the practical point to consider as to the results of the two systems was that these profits cost the people they came out of just as much as if they had been called political plunder. "And yet these wise men in Kenloe's collection taught the people, and somebody must have listened to them, that because in some instances public officials succeeded in spite of all precautions in using the public administration for their own gain, it would not be safe to put any more public interests under public administration, but would be safer to leave them to private capitalists, who frankly proposed as their regular policy just what the public officials were punished whenever caught doing--namely, taking advantage of the opportunities of their position to enrich themselves at public expense. It was precisely as if the owner of an estate, finding it difficult to secure stewards who were perfectly faithful, should be counseled to protect himself by putting his affairs in the hands of professional thieves." "You mean," I said, "that political corruption merely meant the occasional application to the public administration of the profit-seeking principle on which all private business was conducted." "Certainly. A case of corruption in office was simply a case where the public official forgot his oath and for the occasion took a businesslike view of the opportunities of his position--that is to say, when the public official fell from grace he only fell to the normal level on which all private business was admittedly conducted. It is simply astonishing, Julian, how completely your contemporaries overlooked this obvious fact. Of course, it was highly proper that they should be extremely critical of the conduct of their public officials; but it is unaccountable that they should fail to see that the profits of private capitalists came out of the community's pockets just as certainly as did the stealings of dishonest officials, and that even in the most corrupt public departments the stealings represented a far less percentage than would have been taken as profits if the same business were done for the public by capitalists. "So much for the precious argument that, because some officials sometimes took profits of the people, it would be more economical to leave their business in the hands of those who would systematically do so! But, of course, although the public conduct of business, even if it were marked with a certain amount of corruption, would still be more economical for the community than leaving it under the profit system, yet no self-respecting community would wish to tolerate any public corruption at all, and need not, if only the people would exercise vigilance. Now, what will compel the people to exercise vigilance as to the public administration? The closeness with which we follow the course of an agent depends on the importance of the interests put in his hands. Corruption has always thrived in political departments in which the mass of the people have felt little direct concern. Place under public administration vital concerns of the community touching their welfare daily at many points, and there will be no further lack of vigilance. Had they been wiser, the people who objected to the governmental assumption of new economic functions on account of existing political corruption would have advocated precisely that policy as the specific cure for the evil. "A reason why these objectors seem to have been especially short-sighted is the fact that by all odds the most serious form which political corruption took in America at that day was the bribery of legislators by private capitalists and corporations in order to obtain franchises and privileges. In comparison with this abuse, peculation or bribery of crude direct sorts were of little extent or importance. Now, the immediate and express effect of the governmental assumption of economic businesses would be, so far as it went, to dry up this source of corruption, for it was precisely this class of capitalist undertakings which the revolutionists proposed first to bring under public control. "Of course, this objection was directed only against the new order while in process of introduction. With its complete establishment the very possibility of corruption, would disappear with the law of absolute uniformity governing all incomes. "Worse and worse," I exclaimed. "What is the use of going further?" "Patience," said the doctor. "Let us complete the subject while we are on it. There are only a couple more of the objections that have shape enough to admit of being stated." OBJECTION THAT A NATIONALIZED INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM WOULD THREATEN LIBERTY. "The first of them," pursued the doctor, "was the argument that such an extension of the functions of public administration as nationalized industries involved would lodge a power in the hands of the Government, even though it were the people's own government, that would be dangerous to their liberties. "All the plausibility there was to this objection rested on the tacit assumption that the people in their industrial relations had under private capitalism been free and unconstrained and subject to no form of authority. But what assumption could have been more regardless of facts than this? Under private capitalism the entire scheme of industry and commerce, involving the employment and livelihood of everybody, was subject to the despotic and irresponsible government of private masters. The very demand for nationalizing industry has resulted wholly from the sufferings of the people under the yoke of the capitalists. "In 1776 the Americans overthrew the British royal government in the colonies and established their own in its place. Suppose at that time the king had sent an embassy to warn the American people that by assuming these new functions of government which formerly had been performed for them by him they were endangering their liberty. Such an embassy would, of course, have been laughed at. If any reply had been thought needful, it would have been pointed out that the Americans were not establishing over themselves any new government, but were substituting a government of their own, acting in their own interests, for the government of others conducted in an indifferent or hostile interest. Now, that was precisely what nationalizing industry meant. The question was, Given the necessity of some sort of regulation and direction of the industrial system, whether it would tend more to liberty for the people to leave that power to irresponsible persons with hostile interests, or to exercise it themselves through responsible agents? Could there conceivably be but one answer to that question? "And yet it seems that a noted philosopher of the period, in a tract which has come down to us, undertook to demonstrate that if the people perfected the democratic system by assuming control of industry in the public interest, they would presently fall into a state of slavery which would cause them to sigh for the days of Nero and Caligula. I wish we had that philosopher here, that we might ask him how, in accordance with any observed laws of human nature, slavery was going to come about as the result of a system aiming to establish and perpetuate a more perfect degree of equality, intellectual as well as material, than had ever been known. Did he fancy that the people would deliberately and maliciously impose a yoke upon themselves, or did he apprehend that some usurper would get hold of the social machinery and use it to reduce the people to servitude? But what usurper from the beginning ever essayed a task so hopeless as the subversion of a state in which there were no classes or interests to set against one another, a state in which there was no aristocracy and no populace, a state the stability of which represented the equal and entire stake in life of every human being in it? Truly it would seem that people who conceived the subversion of such a republic possible ought to have lost no time in chaining down the Pyramids, lest they, too, defying ordinary laws of Nature, should incontinently turn upon their tops. "But let us leave the dead to bury their dead, and consider how the nationalization of industry actually did affect the bearing of government upon the people. If the amount of governmental machinery--that is, the amount of regulating, controlling, assigning, and directing under the public management of industry--had continued to be just the same it was under the private administration of the capitalists, the fact that it was now the people's government, managing everything in the people's interest under responsibility to the people, instead of an irresponsible tyranny seeking its own interest, would of course make an absolute difference in the whole character and effect of the system and make it vastly more tolerable. But not merely did the nationalization of industry give a wholly new character and purpose to the economic administration, but it also greatly diminished the net amount of governing necessary to carry it on. This resulted naturally from the unity of system with the consequent co-ordination and interworking of all the parts which took the place of the former thousand-headed management following as many different and conflicting lines of interest, each a law to itself. To the workers the difference was as if they had passed out from under the capricious personal domination of innumerable petty despots to a government of laws and principles so simple and systematic that the sense of being subject to personal authority was gone. "But to fully realize how strongly this argument of too much government directed against the system of nationalized industry partook of the boomerang quality of the previous objections, we must look on to the later effects which the social justice of the new order would naturally have to render superfluous well-nigh the whole machinery of government as previously conducted. The main, often almost sole, business of governments in your day was the protection of property and person against criminals, a system involving a vast amount of interference with the innocent. This function of the state has now become almost obsolete. There are no more any disputes about property, any thefts of property, or any need of protecting property. Everybody has all he needs and as much as anybody else. In former ages a great number of crimes have resulted from the passions of love and jealousy. They were consequences of the idea derived from immemorial barbarism that men and women might acquire sexual proprietorship in one another, to be maintained and asserted against the will of the person. Such crimes ceased to be known after the first generation had grown up under the absolute sexual autonomy and independence which followed from economic equality. There being no lower classes now which upper classes feel it their duty to bring up in the way they should go, in spite of themselves, all sorts of attempts to regulate personal behavior in self-regarding matters by sumptuary legislation have long ago ceased. A government in the sense of a coordinating directory of our associated industries we shall always need, but that is practically all the government we have now. It used to be a dream of philosophers that the world would some time enjoy such a reign of reason and justice that men would be able to live together without laws. That condition, so far as concerns punitive and coercive regulations, we have practically attained. As to compulsory laws, we might be said to live almost in a state of anarchy. "There is, as I explained to you in the Labor Exchange the other morning, no compulsion, in the end, even as to the performance of the universal duty of public service. We only insist that those who finally refuse to do their part toward maintaining the social welfare shall not be partakers of it, but shall resort by themselves and provide for themselves. THE MALTHUSIAN OBJECTION. "And now we come to the last objection on my list. It is entirely different in character from any of the others. It does not deny that economic equality would be practicable or desirable, or assert that the machinery would work badly. It admits that the system would prove a triumphant success in raising human welfare to an unprecedented point and making the world an incomparably more agreeable place to live in. It was indeed the conceded success of the plan which was made the basis of this objection to it." "That must be a curious sort of objection," I said. "Let us hear about it." "The objectors put it in this way: 'Let us suppose,' they said, 'that poverty and all the baneful influences upon life and health that follow in its train are abolished and all live out their natural span of life. Everybody being assured of maintenance for self and children, no motive of prudence would be operative to restrict the number of offspring. Other things being equal, these conditions would mean a much faster increase of population than ever before known, and ultimately an overcrowding of the earth and a pressure on the food supply, unless indeed we suppose new and indefinite food sources to be found?'" "I do not see why it might not be reasonable to anticipate such a result," I observed, "other things being equal." "Other things being equal," replied the doctor, "such a result might be anticipated. But other things would not be equal, but so different that their influence could be depended on to prevent any such result." "What are the other things that would not be equal?" "Well, the first would be the diffusion of education, culture, and general refinement. Tell me, were the families of the well-to-do and cultured class in the America of your day, as a whole, large?" "Quite the contrary. They did not, as a rule, more than replace themselves." "Still, they were not prevented by any motive of prudence from increasing their numbers. They occupied in this respect as independent a position as families do under the present order of economic equality and guaranteed maintenance. Did it never occur to you why the families of the well-to-do and cultured in your day were not larger?" "Doubtless," I said, "it was on account of the fact that in proportion as culture and refinement opened intellectual and aesthetic fields of interest, the impulses of crude animalism played less important parts in life. Then, too, in proportion as families were refined the woman ceased to be the mere sexual slave of the husband, and her wishes as to such matters were considered." "Quite so. The reflection you have suggested is enough to indicate the fallacy of the whole Malthusian theory of the increase of population on which this objection to better social conditions was founded. Malthus, as you know, held that population tended to increase faster than means of subsistence, and therefore that poverty and the tremendous wastes of life it stood for were absolutely necessary in order to prevent the world from starving to death by overcrowding. Of course, this doctrine was enormously popular with the rich and learned class, who were responsible for the world's misery. They naturally were delighted to be assured that their indifference to the woes of the poor, and even their positive agency in multiplying those woes, were providentially overruled for good, so as to be really rather praiseworthy than otherwise. The Malthus doctrine also was very convenient as a means of turning the tables on reformers who proposed to abolish poverty by proving that, instead of benefiting mankind, their reforms would only make matters worse in the end by overcrowding the earth and starving everybody. By means of the Malthus doctrine, the meanest man who ever ground the face of the poor had no difficulty in showing that he was really a slightly disguised benefactor of the race, while the philanthropist was an injurious fellow. "This prodigious convenience of Malthusianism has an excuse for things as they were, furnishes the explanation for the otherwise incomprehensible vogue of so absurd a theory. That absurdity consists in the fact that, while laying such stress on the direct effects of poverty and all the ills it stands for to destroy life, it utterly failed to allow for the far greater influence which the brutalizing circumstances of poverty exerted to promote the reckless multiplication of the species. Poverty, with all its deadly consequences, slew its millions, but only after having, by means of its brutalizing conditions, promoted the reckless reproduction of tens of millions--that is to say, the Malthus doctrine recognized only the secondary effects of misery and degradation in reducing population, and wholly overlooked their far more important primary effect in multiplying it. That was its fatal fallacy. "It was a fallacy the more inexcusable because Malthus and all his followers were surrounded by a society the conditions of which absolutely refuted their theory. They had only to open then eyes to see that wherever the poverty and squalor chiefly abounded, which they vaunted as such valuable checks to population, humankind multiplied like rabbits, while in proportion as the economic level of a class was raised its proliferousness declined. What corollary from this fact of universal observation could be more obvious than that the way to prevent reckless overpopulation was to raise, not to depress, the economic status of the mass, with all the general improvement in well-being which that implied? How long do you suppose such an absurdly fundamental fallacy as underlay the Malthus theory would have remained unexposed if Malthus had been a revolutionist instead of a champion and defender of capitalism? "But let Malthus go. While the low birth-rate among the cultured classes--whose condition was the prototype of the general condition under economic equality--was refutation enough of the overpopulation objection, yet there is another and far more conclusive answer, the full force of which remains to be brought out. You said a few moments ago that one reason why the birth-rate was so moderate among the cultured classes was the fact that in that class the wishes of women were more considered than in the lower classes. The necessary effect of economic equality between the sexes would mean, however, that, instead of being more or less considered, the wishes of women in all matters touching the subject we are discussing would be final and absolute. Previous to the establishment of economic equality by the great Revolution the non-child-bearing sex was the sex which determined the question of child-bearing, and the natural consequence was the possibility of a Malthus and his doctrine. Nature has provided in the distress and inconvenience of the maternal function a sufficient check upon its abuse, just as she has in regard to all the other natural functions. But, in order that Nature's check should be properly operative, it is necessary that the women through whose wills it must operate, if at all, should be absolutely free agents in the disposition of themselves, and the necessary condition of that free agency is economic independence. That secured, while we may be sure that the maternal instinct will forever prevent the race from dying out, the world will be equally little in danger of being recklessly overcrowded." THE END.